The Double Bind

This morning, before going for a bike ride, I went to the store.  Along the way, I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen in a while.  She recently completed her Master of Fine Arts degree.  For her thesis, she made multi-media collages that celebrated women’s sexuality.  While she was working on it and taking her classes, she had a job in the same institution where she earned her degree.

She talked about the shame and guilt she had to overcome to do her creative work.  It occurred to me then that women still have to get past the notions that we are tainted and damned simply because we are women and have sexual desires, whatever they may be.  And people denounce us whether or not we express who we are.  Those who tell us that we’re being too conservative or dowdy are the first ones to condemn us for wearing anything that even hints at our sexuality, and those who denounce us for being “too sexy” are the ones who complain that we’re “too boring” when we “tone it down.”

I’m thinking now about Segolene Royal, who lost the French Presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.  She’s been voted “the best-dressed politician in Europe and, while not provocative, does not play down her physical attractiveness.  In response to those who criticized her for that, she’s said, “Who says politicians have to be ugly and boring?”

It occurs to me now that this is one of the dilemmas trans people face all the time.  Those of us who identify as women experience everything I’ve just described and, because we have lived as males, we are probably even less prepared for it than people who’ve lived their entire lives as female.  It even happens to someone like Caitlyn Jenner:  There has been the sort of praise and damnation we’ve come to expect, from the people we’ve come to expect.  But there are also people who’ve criticized her for being too glamorous or, as one female celebrity said only half in jest, “Who does she think she is, looking better than I look?”

Now I realize that this bind women, and trans people in particular, face is one of the things that exacerbated the plight of the Lost Generation of Transgenders to which I’ve alluded in other posts. After gaining some visibility—and even a little support—during the 1960’s and 1970’s, trans people were rendered visible, at best, and vilified, at worst.  As I’ve mentioned,  the more extreme aspects of Second-Wave Feminism—sparked by Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire and by other writers, scholars and activists like Mary Daly and Germaine Greer—helped to undo the small gains we made during the previous two decades. 

During the time when we—all right, I’ll say it—were moving with the moment of the nascent Gay Rights movement—trans people were taught to efface all signs of the gender they were assigned at birth and to, in essence, re-invent their pasts.  In brief, we got by (to the degree we did) through induced amnesia and denial.  That, of course, was not a healthy way to live, but it was better than simply being denied and negated altogether.

However, around the same time as Raymond, Daly and their ilk were saying that we were simply men who wanted to take jobs in Women’s Studies departments, there was a “conservative backlash” against whatever gains women, including trans women, made.  Ronald Reagan had been elected; while he is by no means the only cause of the backlash, he at the very least galvanized it.  Although women were becoming lawyers, professors and corporate executives, they were always “under the microscope”:  criticized when they tried to look professional and vilified when they tried to express any kind of personal style.  This actually dovetailed very neatly with Second Wave feminism:  Phyllis Schlafly and Germaine Greer were both saying that womanhood existed only within a very rigid set of boundaries.  What neither Schlafly’s Evangelical Christian conservatives nor Germaine Greer and the Second Wavers never acknowledged, however—or perhaps didn’t realize—is that they were defining womanhood in terms that were set by men long before they or their mothers or grandmothers were born.

The few (at least in comparison to the numbers who came before and after) trans people who decided to live as the people they are during that time were therefore doubly damned.  In addition, the Gay Rights movement focused its attention on the newly-developing HIV/AIDS pandemic—as they should have.  As most of those afflicted at the time were men, HIV/AIDS activism—and, with it, the gay rights movement—became  almost wholly male-centered.  Even lesbians had to subsume their interests and needs; there was almost no room, it seemed, for trans women to simply exist, let alone define ourselves, as a group and individually, and flourish. 

Thus, I think it will be some time before trans women—and women generally—will be able simply to express who we are, sexually and otherwise, and reap the fruits of our labor and talents.  In the meantime, we’re going to be damned—by some people, anyway—whether are or aren’t, can or can’t, will or won’t, do or don’t.

Still Learning What It Means

Early in my transition, people would sometimes say, “Oh, it must be so difficult.”  By “it”, they meant my transition and the things it entailed.  While I admit that some parts of it were strange, awkward or simply a pain in the ass (Try going through a second puberty in your forties!), I would point out that, for me, the real difficulty was having to live up to society’s, and some individual peoples’, expectations while pretending to be someone I wasn’t. 

From the time I first started my counseling, therapy and hormones until the day I had my operation, a bit more than six years had passed.  Now it’s been almost six years since my operation.  Along the way, some of my expectations have changed.  I have found friends and allies in people I didn’t expect to be on my side, or whom I simply never could have anticipated meeting.  On the other hand, I have lost relationships with people whom I thought would walk with me, or at least lend some sort of emotional support and spiritual sustenance, on my journey. 

Probably every trans person can say such things.  Also, nearly every one of us (or, at least, the trans people I know) would agree that the sorts of people we become, and envision ourselves becoming, are at least somewhat different from what we’d anticipated when we were still living our former lives or when we started our transitions.  A few might be disappointed, but I think more—I include myself—feel the pressure of, and are ostracized for not,  living up to a new set of expectations.  Some expected that I would be more sexual and attractive, at least by the standards of this culture.  Physical attractiveness and sexuality (at least in a hetero way) are seen as the hallmarks of femininity and femaleness.  (I think it’s the other way around, frankly.)  Others thought they’d find cute boyfriends or girlfriends, or husbands or wives who could “treat them right”.  Still others are trying to live up to other sorts of expectations, whether self-imposed or transmitted by the culture. 

Me, I’m not looking for a romantic or sexual relationship right now.  I don’t feel I need it; I can live just fine with myself, thank you.  Living alone, with a couple of cats, is certainly better than abuse or the demands some put on people in relationships. And while I’m going to try (again) to lose some weight, I rather like what I see in the mirror. Sure, I’m aging a bit quicker than I would have liked, but I think I also see an emotional honesty and vulnerability I never before saw. Perhaps others have seen it, too:  These days, people I meet talk to me because, nearly all of them say, “You look like someone I can talk to.”

Those same people tell me they knew, looking at me, that I’d survived a thing or two.  If I do say so myself, I have.  And, while I may not be the deepest person in the world, I don’t think people—whatever else they might say about me—accuse me of being shallow.  Plus, they all know that I mean whatever I’m telling them but I’m not saying any of it to be mean.

In short, I am starting to understand, not only what’s changed, but what I’ve gained in my transition.  Although some things are still very difficult, I still have hope that things will get better—or, more precisely, I will be better able to navigate them.  I’m also realizing now that the things and people I’ve lost probably would have been lost whether or not I’d transitioned or had my operation.  We change, sometimes incrementally, sometimes dramatically. But change we do, as long as we’re living.  I have to remember that a dozen years have passed since I started my counseling and, as I mentioned, almost six since my operation.  In such time frames—and in shorter ones—things changed, whether in my expectations or perception of myself and others. I didn’t want to be the same person at 24 as I did at 18, or the same person at 36 as at 30.  So why shouldn’t the kind of woman I want to be change as well.  After all, let’s face it:  I couldn’t be, at my age, the kind of woman I envisioned when I was younger, even if I wanted to.

Here’s some advice I’d give to someone—especially a young person—starting a transition:  You’ll change, but not necessarily as a result of your transition or surgery (if you decide to undergo it). And sometimes your change is of a kind you hadn’t expected.  Understanding those things, from what I’ve experienced, a way to prevent regrets and disappointments, neither of which I have about my transition or surgery.  

My Life With Charlies

About four weeks ago, I wrote about the first anniversary of Charlie's death.

He was sweet, adorable and smart, and accompanied me through some of most intense and, sometimes, wonderful times in my life.  

Charlie came into my life on this date in 2006.  My friend Mildred rescued him a few months earlier from an area of metal fabrication shops.  There are a few houses among them; still, the area is usually deserted after dark.  That's why people--and I use that term quite loosely--dump animals there.

Millie told me that as soon as Charlie saw her, he scampered toward her.   That meant, of course, that he was not a feral cat; he must have had a home only recently.  The vet said as much, and determined that he was about six to seven years old.  

She wanted to keep him, but she had other cats in her house and yard.  I said I would take him as soon as I was ready.  She didn't rush me; she understood why I couldn't take him right away.

He is the reason why.  You might be thinking that he looks like Charlie.  In fact, he is Charlie--just not the same one I've been talking about.

The cat in the photo--let's call him Charlie I--had been in my life for nearly fifteen years, from the time he was a kitten.  Only members of my family and a few friends have had, or had, more years with me.  

In addition to being adorable and sweet, he was smart and, it seemed, prescient.  You know he's intelligent from that photo:  He's in front of an Oxford English Dictionary.  Some people might believe that he read more of it than I did!

Another way I knew he was smart was the way he looked the camera.  He seemed to realize that I was photographing him, but he also seemed to know that it was simply impossible for anyone--even  yours truly!--to take a bad photo of him.

When I first met him, he was with the other kittens in his litter.  He half-walked, half-waddled to me on his little legs and looked into my eyes.  Somehow, he seemed to know all about me, and that he was going home with me.  I didn't even have to make the decision.

What's even more interesting, though, is that he preferred women to men and girls to boys.  Whenever I talked with a woman on the phone, he was at my side.  When a woman came into my apartment, he simply had to meet her.  And he and Tammy got along famously.

Someone suggested that he acted as he did the first time I met him because he knew that I'm a woman, even though I was still deep into my boy-drag phase!  For a few months, around the time Charlie I was a year old, I shared my apartment with a fellow graduate student.  Late one afternoon, Charlie I made a beeline for the door as I turned the key.  My roommate joked, "Charlie, Mommy's home!"

So, Charlie I was with me for that part of my life, through graduate school and a few jobs, in five different apartments (including the one in which I lived with Tammy) and, most important of all, through my last, desperate attempts to live as a man and the beginning of my life as Justine.

Now, you may be wondering why I named Charlie II Charlie.  The truth is, he was already so named when I brought him home.  Millie had given him that name and I didn't want to change it.  And, even though Charle II had a slightly different personality from Charlie I, he was sweet and loving. He was, not a clone of, or replacement for, Charlie I, but a continuation of him.  Sometimes I think it's exactly what I needed.

A Generation of Elders Who Are Novitiates

Writing about the Lost Generation of Transgenders, as I did yesterday and in a few earlier posts, got me to thinking about my own situation.  Although I have had my surgery and I rarely have to talk about having lived as a man (although sometimes I still do so by choice), I consider myself to be part of that generation.  That's because I missed living decades of my life as a woman; others never had the chance--or had only a very brief time--to live their lives whole.  Some, of course, never transitioned; others lived in a ghetto (which was mental and spiritual as well as physical) of substance abuse, violence and AIDS that cut their lives short.  

On the other hand, my history has left me in a position in which very few people find themselves:  As a transsexual person, I am still fairly new or, at least, young. After all, I began my transition a decade ago, began to live as Justine a year after that and had my surgery three and a half years ago.  Chronologically, my current life is only as long as that of a child who has yet to reach puberty.  But I am also an elder, if you will.  Many people my age have grandchildren; a few even have great children.  And many of us reach the apogee of our careers or other trajectories in our lives.  If nothing else, we come to an understanding of ourselves and others and some--like me--start to feel we don't have the time, energy or patience for cant, hypocrisy and evasion.

So, even though my time of living as a woman is relatively brief, I am indeed one.  I am a woman who happens to be a good bit older than all of those young people who are transitioning  and even some of the later-in-life transitioners.  What that means is that when I'm talking to a younger trans person, an older one who's doing what I did a couple of years ago, or someone who isn't trans but wants to learn more, I am--for lack of a better way of describing this--teaching what I learned only recently.  That includes a sense of what we've come from and where we've been.  Many transgender and transsexual people who could have taught those things died along the way or ended up too broken to teach themselves, let alone others.  

So the burdens--and joys--of passing on what this community has learned, collectively as well as from and among individuals--fall to those of us who are surviving members of the Lost Generation of Transgenders.

The City Of Ladies

Here is another excerpt from the work of fiction I've been writing. In this piece, a trans woman who's about to have surgery has to return to her old neighborhood, which she hasn't seen in many years, for a funeral.  Remember that this is a work of fiction, so I don't want you to try to infer too much from it.

(If you want to read some other excerpts, check out What We Become, Fatigue, At The Beginning and The End  and Stories of Men and Women.)

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I'm sure that if I stay on this block after her funeral, after her burial, and someone were to realize who I am, someone'll blame me for mother's death.  People'll say that my absence, through all these years, put too much strain on her heart, her spirit.  (The one is a physical organ, so their accusations would make no sense.  As for the other:  What is it, anyway?)  I'd be accused of selfishness.  I suppose that, in a way, that would be right, if not fair.

I haven't been here for a long time because I've been worried about my own safety, and how mother'd react to me.  Even though she could sense that I'd changed--sometimes she said as much when we talked over the phone--I'd had no idea of how she'd react to my hair, the nails, the new clothes, the changing shape of my body.  And, even though sh'd told me, "Everybody's gone" time and time again, I still wondered whether I'd get off this block alive if I came back.  Until recently, I wasn't entirely confident about my transformation.  When you're not among the community of which you've become a part, whether by birth or choice, whatever image you try to project has to be created and transmitted even more seamlessly than when you're among your own.  When you're not in one of those neighborhoods where people in transition congregate, or are at least accepted or tolerated, it's all the more important to pass--in other words, to be unnoticed.  So, I wondered how I'd navigate the wake, the funeral, the burial. 

I must say that until today, it had been a while since anyone had given me a second glance or stared.  Now only the operation to give me the genitals I should've always had separates me from the next stage of my life, whatever that may hold. Older men--and sometimes younger ones--hold doors open for me and let me pass in front of them.  But once they let you through "their" space, they insist on standing or walking closer to me than they did before I started my transition.  So you've no choice but to walk into them, or to walk away from them.  Either way, you run that they will accuse you of "sending mixed signals" or of inciting their aggression.

In one sense, I'm lucky:  At the end of the day--which, sometimes, is really the end of the morning--I don't have to navigate them.  When I go home--or, more precisely, when I get to wherever I'm going to lay my head for the next few hours--I am alone; I don't have to navigate their hostility.

Most women aren't so fortunate.  Just last week, the woman who's shaped my hair as I've grown it slid the hem of her skirt up her thigh, revealing a scar and two bruises the father of her three-year-old daughter left.  She knew what I was about to tell her.  "As long as I don't set him off, he'll get better,"  she sighed.  

After I was gone a while from this block, mother'd begun to tell me about the brutality of the men there. Although I was well aware of it, I listened as if she were giving me the latest news.  She never mentioned names, but I knew that one of them had to be my father.  All the more reason to find him, to find out about him.  He left her bitter and angry: spent, even though she had to--or, at least, felt that she had to--continue living and working for my sake.  A man hit her, pushed her head against a wall.  And she never could recall what she did next, but the next thing she remembered was seeing him, doubled over with his hands gripping his crotch.  She doesn't know how she could have kicked or punched him after he knocked the wind, and very nearly the light, out of her.  At that moment, she was thinking of me, she said:  She wasn't going to let him to do me what he did to a baby girl--hers?--who supposedly was a "crib death", whatever that is.

I remembered those conversations, and our days in the kitchen with other women, no men anywhere in sight.  And the things mother used to say as if she were instructing me rather than answering a question or making a point.  Mother never wore--in fact, as far as I know, never even owned--any polo or T-shirts, sneakers or any other shoes or articles of clothing she was brought up to believe were men's.  Pants were the exception:  She almost always wore them, long, and only with completely enclosed shoes.  No sleeveless tops, always a jacket, even on warm days.  Only her house slippers had open toes and backs, and sometimes she'd wear something that looked like a cross between a housedress and a smock if she didn't have somewhere to go.  

But one day she put on a black silk dress that skimmed her breasts and curves down to her knees.  I didn't know she owned it, or the black pumps on she slid into.  Though the dress and shoes were out of style--actually, nobody on the block is ever in style; some of the women are simply en vogue--she seemed elegant, even pretty, if a bit severe.  I didn't have to ask.  "A lady wears a dress to a funeral," she intoned.

That was all I needed to know for today.  The fact that I don't have a dark men's suit or even a sportcoat is beside the point.  For that matter, I no longer own any ties, or anything that resembles men's dress shoes.

A lady:  the only kind of person who could attend her funeral.  Mrs. Marland, the woman who seemed not to talk to anybody besides my mother, and the woman whose name I never knew--when my mother talked about them, the were "ladies".  So were other females of a certain age.  As in, "the lady up the street" or "the lady with the black dog".  They were the only ones she talked to, who talked to each other, about each other.  The ladies:  The Crossing Guard Lady, The Redheaded Lady .  "Go to the lady at the newsstand and get  change for this $5 bill."  All my life, as a kid, I was always directed from one lady to another by my mother or some other lady.

So who else could come to see her at the end of her life but other ladies?

Two Members Of The Lost Generation Do Lunch

Yesterday I had a late lunch/early dinner with a friend who's just passed a significant milestone in her transition.  

She is a few years older than I am, and came from what are, on the surface, very different circumstances than mine.  However, for both of us, growing up meant inhabiting a world that isolated both of us, save for when our peers bullied or otherwise abused us.  Her parents were openly hostile to non-heterosexual, non-gender-conforming, people, while my parents' understanding was merely a reflection of what most people understood, or misunderstood, when I was growing up.  That is not to denigrate my parents: Neither they nor I had the knowledge or the language to understand what I was going through.  Still, in my own way, I spent my childhood and most of my adult life as isolated, emotionally and spiritually, as my friend spent hers.

After we parted, I realized that our isolation was such that we could not have known each other.  We might have recognized each other on some subconscious, intuitive level that I would not have acknowledged and, in fact, would have tried to suppress.  But I don't think we could--or, at least I would--have based our friendship, if we had one, on an understanding of a basic truth about ourselves.  It then goes without saying that we could not have offered each other advice, encouragement or support--or, at least, the kind either of us needed.

But, as my friend pointed out, that isolation may have kept us alive.  Had we started our transitions in our early 20's instead of our mid 40's or early 50's, we probably would have ended up as sex workers, or under even worse circumstances.  As I've mentioned in other posts, few other lines of work expose its practitioners to the prospect of incurring violence that could be fatal.  If we hadn't been beaten or shot to death in some back alley, or succumbed to an overdose or drugs or alcohol, being sex workers would have broken us mentally and spiritually.  At least, I know that would have happened to me.

We are indeed part of the Lost Generation of Transgenders I've described in a few previous posts.  During the two decades or so that followed the onslaught of Second Wave Feminism (and the concurrent conservative religious and political movements that had more in common with it than most people realize), people like me and my friend lived our lives, as best we knew how, as members of the gender indicated on our birth certificates.  We may have been reading the works of Second-Wave feminists and other writings that have become part of the canons of Women's Studies, Gender Studies and Queer Studies. (Please don't construe my use of the latter term as an endorsement of it:  I'm simply using the term the field's practitioners use!)  And some of us "cross-dressed" or occasionally interacted with the underground world of cross-gender entertainment and such.  But we did so in isolation, and were therefore unable to learn many of the lessons we could have gotten from the transsexuals and other gender-variant people (few though they were in number) who were around at that time.  We could have better understood how to navigate the world we would face--and that, in spite of the bigotry we might sometimes face, it hadn't changed, at least not fundamentally.  Although some of us would get educations (or, at any rate, credentials) and careers or vocations, we would fully understand what was, and wasn't, important and useful about them only after we began our transitions.  We'd learn the ways in which we had to educate ourselves, and each other, because those normally charged with instructing and directing us couldn't do so, sometimes because they didn't know how.  

Because we had to learn those lessons for ourselves--without the mentors and role models we might have had if we could have transitioned ealier in our lives--there is not a continuity between us and our ancestors, if you will (most of whom are dead) and the ones who transition while they are in college, or even high school.  I think now of the student of mine who said he couldn't understand why someone would "go through all the trouble of changing their sex, only to become a sex worker" and of the young trans people who think that if you don't have surgery by the time you're 25, you're not really a transsexual. They remind me of a young woman who remarked that she doesn't care about the debates over Roe v Wade or other "women's" issues; in her words, "Taxes affect my life every day; those things, almost never."

As much as I love history, it is not the only reason why I lament the fact that there had to be a "lost generation" of transgender people, and that people like me and my friend had to be among its survivors in order to transition in these times.  The fact that a generation had to be "lost" had tragic consequences.  I think now of someone I've called Corey in this blog.  I was with her on the last night of her life.  She was reaching out to me; she had recognized something in me that I was doing everything I could not to acknowledge.  Given where we were--geographically as well as historically--I might have been the closest thing to, if not a mentor, then at least a sympathiser, that she could find.  She, too, might be alive today--and, I would hope, living as the female she truly was--had I or someone been able to give her the understanding, if not the support, she needed.  

I also wonder whether I could have helped someone else who committed suicide, in part over his gender identity, when I was a little more than a year into my transition.  He was the same age as my friend is now and, not long before he OD'd, he told me of his gender identity conflict and how he admired my "courage."  I realize now that the unease I felt in hearing that came from understanding that his praise was really a cry for help, or at least a lament for what could have been.  All I can do now is to remember him in his true gender, as I remember Corey in hers.

National Coming Out Day

Today is the 25th National Coming Out Day.

When the first such day was held, "coming out", even for white lesbians and gay men and lesbians who were secure in their jobs and lives, was a risky proposition.  The so-called "Gay Liberation" of the 1970's boomeranged into a conservative backlash during the 1980s.  (I apologize for the mixed metaphors.)  

One reason was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Of course, the election didn't happen in a vacuum:  There was a counter-revolution to the Gay Rights movement, just as there was for the Women's and Civil Rights movements.  That counter-revolution was not always visible or audible:  Most of the time, it was more like a series of tremors that one only felt when one happened to be in its path.  Those tremors culminated in the earthquake of Reagan's election.

Perhaps even more important, though, was the outbreak of HIV/AIDs.  In the early years of the epidemic, all of its known (or, at any rate, recorded) victims were believed to be gay men, intravenous drug users, Haitians or West Africans.  The last three groups I've mentioned were near the bottom of the American socio-economic ladder; the early path of the epidemic caused many Americans to lump gay men with them.  Naturally, that only helped to inflame existing prejudices against gay men.

Another reason, I believe, why "coming out" was difficult during the 1980's was that many people associated lesbians with the most shrill and hateful kinds of feminists (or pseudo-scholars who called themselves feminists, anyway).  The conservatives and religious hatemongers who were spouting anti-gay rhetoric tended to look none too kindly on feminists anyway; the association those conservatives made between feminists and lesbians surely made things worse for both.

If it was difficult for gays and lesbians to come out in 1988, you can only imagine how much worse things were for trans people.  Of the trans people I've met (which include everything from those who haven't yet begun-- or who have chosen not to-- to transition, to post-ops), it seems that there are, chronologically, two groups: the ones who transitioned during or before the early 1980's, and the ones who transitioned during or after the early 1990's.  

If my observations in any way reflect what has happened throughout the trans community, there is a "lost generation" of trans people--the ones who didn't transition during the decade or so between the two groups I've mentioned.  That period almost perfectly coincides with the conservative backlash I've mentioned against gays and lesbians, and that "lost generation" includes many who took their own lives or who died slower deaths from drug and alcohol abuse, as well as those who simply didn't transition and those--including yours truly--who transitioned later in their lives than they might have otherwise.

So, even though we have a long way to go, things are certainly better for us, in many ways, than they were in 1988.  National Coming Out Day is one reason for that.

A Sad Anniversary: My Grandmother and Gwen Araujo

This date, 3 October, has been a sad one for many years, at least for me.

On this date in 1981, my maternal grandmother died.  As weakened as she was from her illnesses, she fought death until the end.  With her dying breaths, she called out the name of my grandfather, who predeceased her by fifteen years.

I was twenty-three at the time she died.  She was my last living grandparent. But that is not the only reason why her death affected me as much as it did. Probably the only person in this world who knew me better was, and is, my mother.  She died at a time in my life when I was angry, confused and scared.  I simply felt that I could not bear the prospect of any life that seemed available to me at the time:  I didn't want the careers, family structures or lifestyles that, it seemed, other people wanted me to want.  That strained some of the relationships in my life, including those with some of my relations.

My grandmother offered me a lot of emotional support, and sometimes advice.  The latter, I didn't follow most of the time, mainly because I almost never followed anybody's advice. (Some might say I'm still guilty of that.)  But she did listen, and sometimes helped me to see situations with my family and other people that, really, I otherwise couldn't at that time in my life.

Twenty-one years later, on this date, there was a death that has affected me ever since.  It was very different from my grandmother's, which came in a hospital room with my mother and other family members around her.  This other death was brutal, violent and spurred by anger and hate.  

Yes, it was the murder of a transgender girl:  Gwen Araujo.  Ten years have passed since she was beaten and strangled at a party in the working-class San Francisco Bay-area community of Newark.  Her killers then dumped her body in a shallow grave about three hours' drive away, in the Sierras.

While not as widely publicized as the killings of Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena, it did start some discussion of the frequency and intensity of assaults on, and killings of, trans people.  Now it's fairly common knowledge that such crimes against trans people tend to be particularly brutal and even grisly:  Those who investigate them say as much.  Also, you could see the "learning curve" about transgender people reflected in media coverage. Most initial reports identified her as a boy who liked to wear girl's clothes; as more became known about her, some changed their portrayals of her.  (What that meant, of course, is that many of those reporters, editors and commentators were starting to learn that transgenders and cross-dressers are not necessarily the same people.)  

But one reason why her death affected me is that it came just when I was about to embark on my transition.  Tammy and I had split up, and I moved to a neighborhood where I knew no-one, only a few weeks earlier.  I was attending support groups as well as going for therapy sessions and medical evaluations.  On Christmas Eve of that year, I would begin taking hormones.

What happened to Gwen Araujo did scare me, at least somewhat.  I was going to work as Nick, and the friends and acquaintances I knew from my previous life still knew me as him. I was not "out" to any of my family. But I was going to various events, and roaming about during some of the free time I had, "as" Justine.  Sometimes I worried about people who knew me as Justine finding out about Nick, and vice-versa.  And, truthfully, I wasn't yet sure--even a little--about how anyone would react.

But I knew I had to do what I was doing.  Gwen knew she had to live as the girl she really was, or not at all.  Knowing about her life and death thus gave me a kind of hope, or at least the knowledge that I couldn't be anybody but who I am, and do anything but what I needed to do.  


My grandmother told me something like that.  I never discussed my gender identity issues with her. (Then again, I hadn't discussed them with anyone else.)   But the encouragement she gave me about other things, and her advice that, in essence, bad situations don't have to last but good people can, and do, has been about as good a legacy as anyone could have left for me.

Post-Post Op; After An Ex

I suppose it was inevitable that I would stop the practice of posting daily (or nearly daily) I developed during the weeks and months leading up to, and immediately following, my transition. 


But I don't think I ever envisioned going weeks without posting.  Now that I think about it, I never could have predicted the state of mind in which I now find myself.  That is not to say I'm unhappy about it, for it is, I believe, a sign that my life has gone in a direction I'd hoped it would take.


Although once in a while I mention to someone or another that I'm transsexual, and I often encounter people who witnessed parts of my transition or read about it on this blog, I don't think of myself as post-operational anymore.  In fact, I hardly think about the surgery.  I haven't made any effort to forget about it, or my transition--or, for that matter, my life that preceded it.  Rather, I just see them fading into the background, and myself moving onward.  I am a woman living mainly among women, although I am different in many ways--especially in some of my past experiences--from those women.  Although my face and body have feminized to some degree, I look different from them, if for no other reasons than I'm taller and bigger.  


And, although I have become more friendly with the prof I mentioned in a previous post, I don't feel it's entirely a result of my experience as a transwoman.  Yes, I can empathise with her as her body is changing along with some of the ways she deals with her past.  I have great admiration for her partner, who is not only standing by her, but helping her in various ways, through her transition.  Nevertheless, I find myself becoming friendlier with this prof mainly because I am drawn to her intelligence, integrity and generosity of spirit.  And, of course, we can talk about the college and various experiences we've had in it.  Oddly enough, that makes me even less conscious of my trans background.


I also have another reason why I haven't been posting much:  Someone with whom I'd had a relationship is now stalking me electronically.  This person has managed to find out work-related and other information that was supposed to be confidential, and has tracked down the identity of the prof I mentioned.  This ex has threatened to make false accusations against that prof, as he made against me.  I'm talking about the sort of stuff that gets people run out of jobs and homes, and subjects them to violence, whether or not the accusations are in any way factual. 


To that ex, I say, I know you're reading this, and you know that I'm talking about you, and if you don't leave me and that prof alone, I'll reveal your identity on this blog.

Coming Out From The Cold

Last night, I went out for a cup of tea with a York College prof.  I hadn't done that--or, for that matter, gone to lunch or dinner with a faculty member or any other co-worker from York--in a long time.  What is even more remarkable is the circumstance that led me to the cafe with that prof.


We have been greeting each other in passing practically since the day I started teaching there.  At first, I couldn't understand how someone who was a full professor with tenure, and has been with the college for decades, would want to talk to me.  But I quickly came to suspect that he wanted to offer me something, or needed something from me.  Actually, what he was offering and what he needed were exactly the same thing, which is the reason why I didn't make an effort to build a friendship with him.  


Plus, when I first started working at York, I tried to keep an upbeat attitude and tried not to upset anybody.  I actually succeeded, at least to some degree, at both for the first three years I worked there.  I was labelled the "queen" or "angel" of the department in which I was teaching; people liked me because I was about as close as I've ever been to being inoffensive to almost everybody.  Furthermore, I didn't hang out with any of the "wrong" people.  Somehow I sensed that, in spite of that prof's stature and apparent influence, being seen with him--at least too often or for too long--might not be a good thing for me. He had developed the sort of cynicism I was trying to avoid but, as I've learned, is a means of survival (though at what price!) for a faculty member at York.


Mind you, I rather liked him.  He was clearly more intelligent than most of the other people there (including yours truly!) and I sensed that he was one of those tough people who would use his combat skills, if you will, only for defensive purposes.  Which is to say, of course, that underneath the armor a real, honest heart was beating.


You may have guessed where this story is going.   I quickly realized that he was transitioning from male to female.  During the summer, he sent me e-mails in which he told me that he has been taking hormones and has had hair implants.  He is also making plans for his operation; his female partner has been supporting his transition.  


I am referring to him by male pronouns only because, for the moment, he is still presenting as male and working under his male name.  However, he revealed him nom de femme to me and, between us, I will always refer to him by that name and female pronouns.  He is not adamant about my doing so; it's simply something I want to do for him.


Last night, we greeted each other and parted in exactly the same way:  an embrace.  I did not want to let go; at one point, I sensed that he didn't want me to.  He is, in many ways, stronger--or, at least, tougher-- than I was when I first started my transition.  Plus, he is more knowledgeable about the ways of his workplace and the unspoken prejudices of some of the people in it than I was.  Part of the reason for that, of course, is that he has been there for much longer than I've been.  But, ironically, I think it also has to do with the fact that my parents have been supportive of me in ways that his aren't:  One is dead and he hasn't spoken with the other in about ten years, he says.  Of course, I wouldn't trade the relationship I have with my parents for what he has.  But what he has--essentially, no hope that anyone in the college's administration, not to mention many faculty members, are capable of or willing to have more wisdom or integrity than they have--has undoubtedly helped him to navigate the psychological minefield of that college.


After that opening embrace last night, I felt exactly the same thing as I did the first time I "came out" to anybody: an enormous sense of relief, as if I was finally being honest with somebody.  It's a bit like finding yourself in a tunnel but also finding, at the same moment, your way through, if not out, and knowing that the tunnel is the route to wherever you need to go next.  So you have a sense that, if nothing else, you're going to get there, if not out.


Having talked with that prof last night doesn't make me feel better about the college.  We agreed that the students are fine, that the most homo- and trans-phobic, and all-around-bigoted, people are found in the college's administration and among some sectors of the faculty. We have almost exactly the same impressions of various faculty members and administrators there, and the ones each of us trusts are the same.  (They include, among others, a longtime History prof and, interestingly, most of the Foreign Language faculty.) But we also know just how treacherous and simply mean-spirited some of the others are, and can be.  So, the college is not a safer or better place for me now than it was before, but at least I now know that someone understands, and I understand her.


He and I made tentative plans to get together with his partner next weekend.    In the meantime, there's someone else I'd like to talk with.  I've seen him in the hallways at York, but I don't know whether he's seen me.  From what I can see, he's a student--and in the early or middle stages of transitioning to female.  Every time I've seen him, he's been with other students who seem to be friends, or friendly acquaintances.  I hope that his path at the college, for however long he remains there (Only one of the gay or lesbian students I've had in my classes stayed in the college for more than one year!) , is smoother than what the other prof or I have experienced.