When Girl Meets Girl

When you're a performer of any sort, someone in your audience is going to have a crush on you.  Anyone who's a singer or musician knows that.  So do actors and dancers.  Also, I've discovered, it's equally true for professors or teachers as it is for preachers and politicians.


Now, if that has happened to me both as Nick and as Justine, I know it can happen to anyone who teaches!


Anyway...One of my students, it seems, just can't stop looking at me--with a longing, winsome smile.  It's funny that, even though this is not the first such experience I've had, it seems even stranger--yet, in some odd way, more gratifying--than any student crush I've experienced before.  


Not to boast, but I am one of the few faculty members I know who has been the object of longings from both male and female students.  So no such attention should seem out of the ordinary by now.  So why am I talking about this particular student?


I'll call her Matilda.  She was born in Venezuela and came here as a teenager. In one of her papers, she described the day she realized she had sexual feelings for women.  She mentioned it in relation to something we'd read in class,  and she's older than the "traditional" college-age student (though she's very youthful-looking).  So I didn't regard it as a "coming out."  In fact, I somehow felt that her sexual self-identity was normal, perhaps even routine, to her.  I daresay that the way I relate to my own gender and sexual identity is probably newer for me than hers is for her.


In another assignment, she said (again, in relation to something we'd read in class) that she never has never been with a man, and never had interest (at least sexually) in them.   Before she realized she had feelings for women, she said, the other girls in her class had boyfriends and she tried to believe what her family told her: that her "turn" hadn't come yet.  


Now, when you teach a work of literature, your students (at least some of them) are sure to relate something or another about it to some experience or another in their own lives.  I do not discourage that, for that is often the "gateway" for students.  Some have told me some very personal stories.  So, in a sense, what Matilda did wasn't so unusual, at least to me.  Still, I somehow felt that she was revealing even more of herself to me than students normally do.


Then I started to think--especially after I noticed her gaze and her smile--that she was trying to tell me something more than the connection she found between her experience and the reading.


Of course, I have no intention of pursuing a relationship with her.  Certainly, I would never do it while she was my student.  But I wouldn't go on a date with her even after she has completed the course with me.  For one thing, if she's still in school after that, it would definitely lead to some awkward moments.  And, for another, I realize that my allure (such as it is) would probably be gone once I'm not her prof any more.  The fact that we are in the same class (albeit in different roles) might be the only thing we have in common.


But, even so, I find her attraction to me even more affirming than the first time a man was attracted to me after I started living as Justine. (At least, he was the first one that I noticed.)  He was a Puerto Rican artist, whom I'll call Dario,  about a decade or so older than me.  When I "confessed" who I really was to him, he said he was willing to stay with me until my operation--which, at that point, was still well into the future--and beyond.  In fact, he said, he wanted me as a woman.


Dario also insisted that, sexually, he was interested only in women.  I had my doubts then, which were later confirmed.  That wasn't the reason I didn't go out with him, though.  I just didn't sense that we were terribly compatible in other ways.


On the other hand, I am sure Matilda has never been interested in men.  I wouldn't care if anyone I dated had relations with both genders, as long as he or she were honest and disease-free.  But I know--or, at least, I've surmised from what I've seen--that she isn't interested in any manifestation of my Y chromosome.  I've run into a few women who seemed to want me to be a boyfriend, only better.  That's not what I'm sensing in Matilda.


So, as strange as this attraction is, I'm enjoying it.  We probably will never see each other again once the course is over.  Perhaps one or both of us will have come to know ourselves better as a result of this.

The Look

I can tell them from a mile away.  They're the ones who want to take you aside to talk to you.  They think they're doing something wrong, and they're waiting for--and fearing--your reaction.  And that's exactly the reason why they talk to you, and hope that you don't react the way others have screamed at, scolded or even beat them.


I first noticed that look--They're looking to you even when they can't look into your eyes, and they won't look into you--in a woman I dated a long time ago.  I was about 24; it was not long after I returned from France and my grandmother had died, and not long before an uncle would die and a friend would commit suicide.  She was a dozen years older than I was, and had divorced a few years earlier. For me, that was an eon:  I was still in high school when her alcoholic husband was beating her.  


We got into an argument about something I've long since forgotten.  Having almost no coping skills for such situations, I suggested that it might be better if I left.  "No," she insisted.  "At least you didn't beat me."


"Well, that just makes me a human being."


"That's not true.  Besides, you don't use sex on or over me.  You don't use sex, period."


I didn't quite understand what she meant.  I take that back: I knew full well what she meant, but I was sure that I couldn't have learned it in the same way she did.


Or did I?


Over the years, before and since I became sober, before and since my transition, females have come to me with that same look.  One was eight years old; another was seventy-nine and others were ages in between.  Of the in-betweens, I dated a few and had long-term relationships with two.  In the words of one, "My brothers used me for sex."  A student who talked me today said the same thing about her father.  Somehow, I knew, before she opened her mouth.  Another student, who did a tour of duty in Iraq before taking a class with me last semester, had that same look and confided a similarly appalling and terrifying story.  She and the student with whom I talked today spent time in foster care as a result of their sexual abuse and, in their new homes, were subject to more and new kinds of sexual violation.


I was spared the foster-care experience; my family was actually  stable, though it had its tough times.  And I was not abused by any family member.  However, I was molested by a close family friend.  Even when I wasn't consciously thinking of it--which was most of the time, for many years--the echoes of it still muttered like thunder through my sleep.   I can think of no other reason why other females wanted to talk about their experiences with me long before I was conscious of my own, and my own experience.  It seemed that wherever I looked, I saw their look.

No Move, At Least Not Now

I've decided that I'm not moving in with her after all.  She did a couple of things that confirmed a couple of things I'd suspected about her--and can't live with, for health and other reasons.


She'd asked me to come and talk with her.  But she, knowing full well that I don't drink, swallowed five martinis as I was eating.  And we hardly talked at all.  

And that was the least objectionable thing she's done lately.


On top of what I can't live with for health and logistical reasons, I noticed something else about her:  That she wanted me in her apartment, and in her life, because she liked the idea of having someone as exotic as I am around her and her friends.  


Just what I need, right?

Finding Out About Lola

Today I heard the Kinks' Lola on the radio.  That, in itself, is not so unusual:  "oldies" and "classic rock" stations play it all the time.  


I heard it over the PA system in a cafe where I stopped for a cup of tea on my way to my part-time gig.  Two young guys were working behind the counter.  One of them nudged the other:  "Yo, ya hear this song?"


"Yeah, so?"


"It's about a cross-dresser!"


His nomenclature may or may not be accurate.  Some think that "Lola" is a pre-op trans woman.  How would we know, just listening to the song?


But I couldn't help but to wonder how many times that young man heard the song before it occured to him that it's about a guy's encounter with a girl who turns out to be a guy.  I've heard other people say they heard the song for years before they actually listened to the lyrics.  They can be forgiven:  The song has a catchy tune and opens with some pretty good guitar work.


What's interesting about the song is that, near the end, the narrator says "But when I looked in her eyes, I almost fell for my Lola."  But, in the end, he avers, "Well I'm not the world's most masculine man/But I know what I am and I'm a glad I'm a man/And so is Lola."


Given that the song was released in 1970, it's amazing that there's anything at all about a cross-dresser or a trans woman.  Still, it's hard not to notice that the narrator goes, in the space of a stanza, from an almost-tolerant attitude to   one who doth protest too much, perhaps.  

Turning Sepia or Chiaroscuro

"Sophia" had an interesting response to my post "Giving Up What I Never Had."

On her blog, she describes "A Life Turned Sepia."  Her account of her relationship to her past resonates with me.  She explains it by talking about how she "could recall finding the Dr. Who series new and exciting" when she was a child, but how or why she was, or at what particularly, is "back somewhere in the mist."  On the other hand, she says when she saw The Prisoner during her adolescence, she was "relating to the allegory, to the style, to the place it attained in the culture around me and all the feelings associated with these."  So she has a clearer, or at least more accessible, memory of it because of the repertoire of memory and emotion that she'd developed by the time she saw it, and which she didn't have very early in her life.  Likewise, early relationships and other experiences are less accessible than more recent ones.  


And so I concur with her when she says "I don't have much motivation to distance myself from my male past."  The truth is, as she points out, we don't need motivation to do that:  It happens by the same sort of process that makes Dr. Who less accessible than The Prisoner in her memory.  A result of it is that,for her, "40 years of memories have turned sepia."


My experience dovetails with hers except on the last detail. My memory doesn't seem sepia so much as it's like one of those black-and-white photographs that seems almost chiaroscuro in its composition.  Photographs or stills of actors and actresses from the 30's and 40's--and sometimes the 50's--have that look.  The details are sharp and clear, but they are remote from me--both in those photos and in my recollections of long-ago experiences.  Actually, some of them weren't that long ago:  When you get to be my age, seven or eight years seems like little more than a blink.   


Just as my life experience is so different from those of the actors and actresses in those old films and photos, so does the way I experience things differ from how I experienced them before my transition.  It's really as if a different person experienced those things.  And so, I have no desire to distance myself from that past because it's becoming distant from me in any case.   So much of it was no more mine than the lives of those actors and actresses in those old studio shots.

What Do I Do Now?

Yesterday I was actually starting to like the idea of moving.  Well, I wasn't thinking so much of moving as I was of being in an apartment with more windows and light than what I have in mine.  And I do like the woman with whom I'd be sharing the place.


I just hate having to move.  I've done it a few times before, but it's never easy or fun.  And when I'm moved in, I'm so slow to unpack and arrange things.  I guess I still get overwhelmed by all of the tasks involved.  


Plus, I haven't lived with anyone since Tammy and I split up. That was eight and a half years ago.  And, if I recall correctly, the last time I lived with anyone before Tammy, I was with Eva, and about a decade before I met Tammy.


At least the woman with whom I'd be living is not someone with whom I am, or have ever been, in a romantic relationship. And I don't anticipate that we'll become one.  However, she has expressed interest in shopping and eating with  me.  So I also don't anticipate that we'll be merely two people who split the rent.


Oh, and Charlie and Max like her. 

Sean Avery Speaks (Up) For Us

It's been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows.


Well, let me tell you, I've had some pretty strange bedfellows.  And I've never been (and don't intend to be) in politics.  


But I digress.  I can think of something else that makes for some really strange, or at least unexpected, alliances:  the issue of LGBT rights.  Barry Goldwater, that bastion of conservatism, supported them.  A couple of years ago, Dick Cheyney came out in favor of allowing gay marriage.  


Now a hockey player who once described his ex-girlfriend as "sloppy seconds" says he's willing to support any player who's gay and is worried about the consequences of "coming out." 


In a news conference, Sean Avery, whose behavior has caused a couple of teams to trade him in spite of his talents as a player, said, “If there’s a kid in Canada or wherever, who is playing and really loves the game and wants to keep playing but he’s worried about coming out, I’d tell him to pick up the phone and call (NHLPA executive director) Donald Fehr and tell him to book me a (plane) ticket.”


Now, if he's sincere--and somehow I suspect he is, believe it or not--I think that it's an example of what will really propel acceptance and rights for LGBT people.  When a macho-guy hockey player like Avery is willing to stand beside a gay player, that just might influence others to do the same.  We need him for the same reasons why we need the support of conservatives and of what is sometimes called "Middle America."  When some churchgoing parent accepts his or her--or someone else's--gay kid, that example resonates more powerfully for most people than it does when it comes from some former ACT-UP member.  


Of course, I don't mean to say that we don't need the support of our more traditional allies.  But when the Sean Averys and Dick Cheyneys of the world put in a word for us, they're not preaching to the choir.

Giving Up What I Never Had

The other day I was talking--about what, I don't recall-- with another faculty member.  All I know is that it had to do with things we were teaching because she related a story about something that happened to her in a class once.  And I mentioned--I forget why--that once, when I was conferring with a student about her paper, she blurted, "When you were teaching A Doll's House, you were teaching about yourself, weren't you?"


I hadn't mentioned it to anyone in a long time.  I also hadn't mentioned that I had that conference with that student during my last year of living as Nick.  In fact, not much more than a week after that conference, I took my first dose of hormones.  


All of that meant, of course, that the answer to that student's question was an emphatic "Yes!," even though I hadn't realized it until the student asked.  Just four months before I had that conversation, my life was different:  I had to leave it in order to do what I needed to do.  I had to give up relationships, a cozy living situation and a lot of other things in order to make my changes.


But as I was talking to that faculty member the other day, I had a really odd sensation.  I felt, not that what I gave up was insignificant now, or is less than what it seemed to be at the time.  Rather, it felt as if I never actually had the things I gave up.  


Perhaps I never had any of it.  At least, I never had--among other things--the love of certain people.  I lived under the illusion I did; so did they.  However, whatever relationships I had with them was built on a false pretense because I never was the person they thought I was.  And, ultimately, I never could be that person.

Protesting Undercover in Egpt

According to Scott Long, the LGBT coordinator for Human Rights Watch, "a large number of LGBT Egyptians have joined the protesters who want to end Mubarak's rule in their country.


Long was quick to point out that they weren't marching and demonstrating as lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgenders.  Indeed, they aren't marching under a rainbow flag, or much of anything else that would identify them by their sexual orientation or gender identity and expression.  That's not surprising because Egypt, like most countries in that reason, isn't exactly known (at least not officially, anyway) as a bastion of tolerance for LGBT people. 


So, while they are taking part in the protests and are often welcomed by the protesters and their supporters, they aren't doing so because they are LGBT people.  At least, the would never state publicly that they are.  But I can't see how an LGBT person can fight for human rights without making his or her identity or expression a part of it.  After all, if you're working for human rights, you're working for everybody, including LGBT people.  And we are affected as much as anyone by those rights we have and which are taken away from us.


But that's not the reason for my admiration of their courage or ambivalence about their role in the protest.  Nearly all are anti-Mubarak.  As well they should be:  Not only does he have a terrible (though not the worst) human rights record, he is basically a puppet of this country.  And this country's de facto colonialization of the country and the region are not going to win him any friends, particularly among the young.


What happens if or when those young people, like so many of their peers in other countries of that region, express their anger and disdain for "The Great Satan" of America by joining groups like the Muslim Brotherhood or immersing themselves in the more fundamentalist or militant sects of Islam?  Or, if they become so radicalized if only because they're young and have nothing to lose?  (Egypt has the highest percentage of unemployed college graduates of any country in the world.) Just as Communism can be very appealing to hungry people, so can any doctrine that posits itself as the foe of that which is destroying young people's dreams.


Remember, Egypt is in the heart of that part of the world where people believe that the enemy of your enemy is your friend.  So they'll work with the Muslim Brotherhood or some other such organization if only for their opposition to the US.   


And if groups like those gain power, where does that leave LGBT people?

Backlash Against Whom And What?

What I said yesterday about the un-funny Saturday Night Live sketch brings to mind a conversation I had with a colleague.


She remarked that she sees more violence against women in the media as well as in the real world.  While I could say that I'm simply noticing those things more, I would have to say I agree with her.  And, according to her, pornography has also grown more violent against women.  I'll take her word on it, if for no other reason that it makes sense.


Some would call the violence a "backlash."  Against what and whom?  I guess some people (mostly men but, surprisingly, some women as well) think that women who assert themselves and do the things they want to do are somehow transgressive.  Transgressive against?--I could insert the usual suspects here:  the established order, the boys' club or any number of other manifestations of the same thing.  But, also, it violates some ideas some people still hold, however covertly, about family structure and roles.  


Calling it a "backlash" implies somehow that the women who chose to become engineers and lawyers are in the wrong.  It certainly is a reaction--almost a Newtonian one, really.  It's true that any time someone tries to push forward, someone else pulls back.  Beatniks and hippies came to be during the repressive social and political atmosphere of the 1950's, and the first feminist movement came to be during the Victorian era.  And the Tea Party gained steam, if not traction, as the first black President and Hispanic female Supreme Court justice were being sworn in.


Substitute "transgender" wherever I've used the word "woman," and you'll understand why, although there is greater and broader acceptance of transgenders than there was in my youth (one reason why I'm glad I made my changes during the past few years rather than in my youth), there also is, or seems to be, more violence against us.  And we're being ridiculed more and more in the media as well as in person-to-person encounters.  Some would argue that it's a good thing if for no other reason that it means we're more visible.


Yes, we're more visible.  But too many don't see us as people; we're still seen as trans or, worse, guys in dresses or women in overalls and flannel shirts.  So, in that sense, we're as invisible as the man in Ralph Ellison's novel.  That's how the SNL producers make things like that sketch I talked about.

What You Don't Have To Prove

One of the wonderful things about getting older (Notice that I didn't say "old"!) is that confessions don't seem as self-conscious as they do when they're made earlier in one's life.  That may be the reason why they seem more organic, and simply truer, and why people who know you well aren't surprised--or, at least, aren't taken aback--when you make them.


And so it was when I talked to my mother today.  I said that some people--actually, two in particular--seem annoying, if not spiritually and intellectually vexatious to me now.  At one time, I was grateful for them--at least, that's what I told myself and others--because they at least talked to me and seemed to be making efforts at maintaining relationships with me when others fled.  But when I talk to those two people, I hear the same things over and over again.  Whenever I talk to either of them, they seem to have the need to show me how easily they can spot gay people and that they "have nothing against them" although they will adamantly insist that they themselves are straight.


About their claims:  I really don't care.  If they are straight, gay or whatever, it simply doesn't matter to me:  I'm beyond, or at least past, caring about that.  


Now, if either of them wanted to tell me he is gay (and, yes, I have my suspicions), I would be willing to listen and to give advice, if he wants it.  I've had students and other people "come out" to me, or simply confide what others may have already known about them.  One thing I've learned is that when someone like that confesses his or her deepest desires to me, he or she is looking for, or looking to me as, someone who will not be judgmental and who will simply accept what they say.  On the other hand, people like the two I mentioned aren't looking for anything like that:  Instead, they're trying to prove something they wouldn't have to prove to me if it were true.  No one has to prove that he or she accepts someone else; he or she simply accepts that person, or doesn't.  


Perhaps I am being harsh or cruel in thinking that the two people I mentioned--both of whom are known to everyone in my family--are annoying and, worse, willfully unaware of themselves, when they did, in fact, spend time with me early in my current life when other people abandoned me.  Perhaps I am being ungrateful for the small acts of kindness, or at least courtesy, they performed on my behalf.  But now I realize that not only are they annoyances; they can't be trusted.  Their behavior shows a lack of emotional, if not spiritual, integrity.    Being around them could actually be dangerous for me.


My mother told me not to feel guilty.  "You have a few really good friends," she  said.  "And you could make others, if you want to."


Maybe that's what I want.  I feel ready to make a few changes in my life.  My therapist suggested and my social worker (who is a trans man) said that a year or two (or three) after my surgery, I might experience something like what I've just described.  I know that in going through my transition and surgery, I have had to know myself in ways that most people don't have to know themselves.  Others have tried to tell me not to trust my perceptions; they--at least some of them--are the only things that don't fail me, ever. 


Someone told me that I have a kind of integrity that no one else in her life has.  Perhaps.  What I do know is that having had to ask myself some of the questions only I could answer makes the person I once was seem foolish to now.  And, having had to question absolutely everything in my life--and give up much of it--made me realize that the only thing that actually matters in life is life.  That is exactly the reason why I can't see living in any way but one that's true to who and what I am.  


As far as I can tell, the best definition of courage is a willingness to take a stand on one's own life.  I mean, if you won't stand up for that, what else will you stand up for?  I've also learned that truly courageous people don't have to prove their courage to those who have it, and don't expect it of other people.  Instead, it's something one lives by.  I guess I'm just losing my patience with those who won't.  That's the real reason why I find the two people I mentioned so annoying.

Unemployed and Homeless LGBTs: How Many?

The weather forecast is calling for the coldest night in six years.  

I can recall that cold spell.  It was like that winter:  It was brutal and seemed endless.  As I recall, the spring was just a brief respite--a truce, almost--between the cold and snow that seemed to blitz us every day, for longer than they should have,  and the blasts of  heat that came only a few weeks later.  

Back then, I was co-facilitating a group for young LGBT people.  What struck me then was how many of them had no place to go after that group.  A few went to the shelters; others wouldn't because of the violence that, when it didn't erupt in screams and blows, seemed to murmur in rumbles like fighting just on the other side of the line.  Almost no one chooses to go into a line of fire; no one should be foreced to do so.

Unfortunately, for some of those young people, the only alternative was another battle-zone:  the streets. Some spent the nights on them--under highway overpasses or in doorways, until they were chased out. At least three (that I knew of) went home--with whoever paid them, however little, for their bodies.  And one didn't even get paid:  All she got was to lie in a bed but not to sleep in it.  

Except for the times I've gone into a shelter, I never saw as many homeless people in one room as I did during those group sessions.  And, I certainly never saw so many young people who were so desperate.

I won't try to extrapolate what percentage of transgender youth are homeless or what percentage are unemployed, or whatever.  After all, nobody has an accurate count of how many of us there are.  Lots of us--like some members of that group--drop out of school and run away from home because of the beatings they got at school--or on the streets, or even at home.  They are known as boys or girls when they disappear from view of their peers and elders in their communities; they are not classified as transgender (or, for that matter, gay, lesbian or bisexual) in any of their identifying documentation.  They "fall between the cracks" of society's various systems.  

Plus, almost no one, it seems, agrees on who should be classified as LGBT.  If we count only the self-identified, we will miss many more because, if for no other reason,  so many fall "off the radar"--as some members of that group did--and therefore cannot be reached by researchers.  

From what I've just said, such statistics as the unemployment rates of LGBT people cannot be accurately measured  because young people who leave school and home have probably never worked, and therefore cannot be counted as unemployed.  Still others are, like a few members of that group, sex workers of one kind or another.  That's the only work some of them have ever done; tragically, it's the only work that some of them ever have the opportunity to do anything else.  Of course, anyone doing that kind, or any other illegal, work is, as they say, "off the books."

It's widely known that the US Census misses a lot of people.  Many others don't comply with it, and still others give only the barest minimum of information on the Census questionnaires.  So if one of the largest and best-funded operations of its kind can't even find all taxpaying citizens, how can anyone hope to do an accurate count people who never had the opportunity to participate in the legal economy?

So, no one may ever have an accurate count of us, never mind how many of us are homeless, unemployed or victims of crime, including murder.  I am almost entirely certain, however, that we are overrepresented in those categories.  

Third, Or Not Specified

Lately I've read a couple of interesting gender-related stories.  One comes from Nepal, the other from Australia.


In the conservative Himalayan nation, which was a monarchy less than three years ago, this year's census will include a "third gender" category. This action came as a result of an order from that country's Supreme Court  mandating that the government encact laws to protect transgender people.


I think it's interesting that such things should happen in such a conservative country.  Then again, Spain, which was considered one of the most conservative and staunchly Catholic countries in Europe, if not the world, legalized gay marriage a few years ago.  So, a couple of years ago,  did Iowa, which--depending on whose definition you accept--is at least partially in the Bible Belt.


So why would jurisdictions not known for being avant garde do something that sanctions what many of its citizens oppose, at least in theory?


I think that answer can be found at least in part in something a Nepalese official said about being able to count and locate transgender people.  Governments everywhere like to keep tabs on people. And conservatives like order, or at least the appearance of it.  I am reminded of something that a Dutch minister once said about his country:  Its "liberal" policies, like the legality of marijuana, are actually rooted in the deeply bourgeois Calvinism that defined the country for centuries.  Nobody, he explained, likes order more than a Calvinist, or someone who's been influenced by Calvinism.  So, he said, by legalizing marijuana and prostitution, providers and customers are no longer criminals and are instead citizens who are bound by the responsibilities of, and entitled to the protections of, Dutch civil law.  In other words, the government can keep some kind of control over them.


That, by the way, one reason (along with having a gay daughter) why Dick Cheney has voiced his support for gay marriage, while Barack has not.


Speaking of control:  How much of it can anyone have over someone who's gender is "not specified?"  That's the case of  Norrie, a 49-year-old Australian who was born male and had gender reassignment surgery twenty years ago.   Norrie, who goes by only one name, was "ecstatic" about surgery but frustrated over having to take hormones and over dating men who, when they "found out I was a trannie, told me I wasn't female."  Some of them threatened violence.


Finally, Norrie decided "Nobody can define me as male, and nobody can define me as female."  Two doctors agreed and, as a result, Norrie now has papers that say "Sex Not Specified."    


In one sense, I'm happy to see this.  I have long felt that there are more than two genders.  While I am female in my mind and spirit, I know that some things about me are, and will always be, male.  Some have to do with my experiences, but I think that others have to do with innate characteristics.  I am content, and in many ways comfortable, in living as what most people would see as a straight woman (even if I am, in fact, bisexual).  I claim my right to so live; at the same time, I support the right of people to be more androgynous or to live by whatever else their gender identity and sexuality might be.


On the other hand, the ruling puts Norrie in a bind:  Her gender identity, while unbound from the gender binary, is still defined by the government, which could (at least in theory) change Norrie's status as it sees fit.  Keeping Norrie and other people dependent on a government to define who they are can't be anything but limiting.  Under those circumstances, how does one travel, particulary to a place that rigidly enforces the gender binary and still outlaws all forms of sex that don't involve a man getting on top of a woman.  


Still, I think that the Australian Government's issuing documents in your name without the gender distinction is one the better things that could have happened for a lot of people.Some day, perhaps (though probably not in my lifetime) people will have the liberty as well as the means to live by whatever they think is right for them. 

He Had No Future; I Have No Past

Not long ago, in the course of a conversation, I recalled something I hadn't thought about in a long time.  During my senior year in high school, I was on the committee that planned and arranged our class's senior prom.  I think I got involved with it because the faculty advisor taught a course in which I needed a grade I couldn't earn otherwise.  

That class wasn't required for graduation.  However, doing well in it might have helped me to get into a few schools and programs other people wanted me to get into.  I had no other reason to take that class or, truth be told, to be on that committee or to do almost anything else I did that year.  

I knew full well that once I graduated, I probably wouldn't be back.  My guidance counselor, who might not have been useless if he hadn't tried to drown sorrows that could swim, said as much.  It probably was the one useful or relevant, let alone prescient, thing he said to me.

What I also knew, somehow, was that I wasn't going to the prom that I was helping to plan.  Of course, I didn't tell anyone that; it wouldn't have made any more sense to them than it did to me.  If nothing else, I was learning one of the most important lessons of my life:  What makes sense and what's true are not always the same thing.

And the most essential truth--or so it seemed-- about me made absolutely no sense to me at that time.  I'm referring, of course, to my gender identity.  Nearly every day, I had to play that mental game of ping-pong:  "Your'e a man.  No I'm not.  You have a penis.  It's really a big clitoris.  You like girls.  Yes, but not only in that way.   You're an athlete.  Just like how many other women?

My understanding of gender and sexuality was so primitive--though not any less advanced than that of most people in that place and time--that I simply could not even think of showing up at the prom with another girl.  No girl in that milieu would have done that.  And I couldn't have gone with a boy, either:   No boy, no matter his identity and orientation, would have gone with another boy, even if he was really a girl who just happened to have a boy's body.

That, by the way, is the main  reason I didn't date when I was in high school, in spite of my father's and other adults' efforts to hook me up with someone or another's daughter.  My status as dateless became my ostensible reason for not attending the prom I helped to plan.  In addition, I told myself that it was silly to spend lots of money and energy over people and a place I would never, and had no wish to, see again.

I am just starting to realize how that experience affected me.  It's a reason why there are so many things to which I woulfddn't commit myself: I so often feel as if my efforts were for things of which I could never partake, and that I was always serving people who were living lives completely different form any I could, or wanted to, live.  

Every LGBT person has felt, at some time or another,  something like what I've described.  We are paying for, and in other ways serving, a society and economy that supports institutions--including marriage, as the law and most people define it--in which we cannot participate.  And I have often felt that my job as an educator is to prepare people to live in that sort of familial and societal arrangement.  

It's difficult to be involved in organizations and institutions when you know that you cannot benefit from the fruits of the labor you put into it.  It's impossible to have any enthusiasm for more than a relatively short period of time when you don't even have the right to be yourself as you're helping others to realize their dreams.  And it's none too encouraging when you can't get the people with and for whom you're working that they are operating from, and their expectations of you are therefore based upon, privilege and a sense of entitlement that they very often don't even realize they have.


I'm thinking about all of this now after learning that someone with whom I spent some time--a friend of an ex--died recently.  He was smarter, and far more creative, than I or almost anyone else could ever hope to be.  Yet he never went to college, in spite of offers of full-ride scholarships from very respected institutions.  He did well financially, and in other ways, and he wasn't boasting when he said he succeeded without much planning.  In fact, very little in his life was premeditated.  


The reason, he once told me, is that he knew that, for one thing, as a gay man, he wouldn't be able to live the sort of life for which schools and other institutions would have prepared him.  (That, interestingly enough, is the only way in which I ever heard him talk about his sexual orientation.)  And, for  another, he knew--not expected, knew--that he wasn't going to live to be fifty.  All of the men in his family had a congenital heart condition that killed them before they finished their fifth decade.  That condition is one of the few things, along with bloodlines, that he shared with them.  


So he knew that he wasn't going to be part of a nuclear family and collect Social Security in addition to a pension.  You can imagine how he must have felt about paying into that system, especially because he always was a business proprietor or an independent contractor of some sort.  


Why should I prepare for a future I won't have?, he asked.  Had I been more aware and articulate, I would have been asked that same question.  Why am I helping to plan a prom I won't attend?  


The difference, of course, is that I did have a future.  It just wasn't the one anyone was planning for me, or preparing me for.  Some of what I did to prepare that future has been useful to me; so much else wasn't.   But I can say that I do have a future of some sort, even if it isn't a very long one or one that nobody can predict.  Now, in some way, what I don't have is the past--or, specifically, my past.  Preparing for someone else's life, of course, meant that I was living someone else's life.  And there's never any future in that.

Jay and Janine

Perhaps it's not a coincidence--at least for me, anyway--that Janine died during the workshop I co-led at the Graduate Center on Friday.  


Jay Toole co-led that workship with me.  She was really the first person to whom I "came out", when she was an intake counselor at Center Care.  She was also the first friend I made in the LGBT community in what was, in essence, my new life.  Actually, I sometimes think that my new life started with my "coming out," with her.  


Janine had absolutely nothing in common with Jay save for a determination that can border on, or become, stubborness.  Not much could get between either of them and anything they wanted to accomplish.  But, in her own way, Janine had a role in my entering the life I am now living.  


Just as I was starting to live full-time as Justine, Janine came to town with Marie-Jeanne and Michelle.  They, Diana and I went to Brighton Beach--on a collective whim-- on a bright, breezy late August day.  The night before, they saw me for the first time as Justine when we went, with Diana's husband, to a performance of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.  She later confessed, "That night, as we were waiting for you, I said to Janine, 'I hope she's pretty.'  And she said, 'Ne t'inquietes pas, ella sera ca.'  And you were, even more than I expected!"


Now, coming from someone who looks as she does and hangs around with women who are at least equally attractive (In my next life, I'm going to have Marie-Jeanne's legs!), that was very generous!


Anyway, we took the train to the beach and, as it turned out, they were all wearing bathing suits under their clothes.  I wasn't:  I didn't even own a women's bathing suit.  Michelle just happened to have a one-piece suit that, with more than a little stretching, fit me. The only problem was that we weren't in France, I reminded them, so there was no way I could change clothes on the beach.  


What followed was a bit of inventiveness that only women could come up with.  They'd brought a blanket with them and surrounded me with it.  They stood, holding it, as I pulled down my long Indian print skirt, pulled off my jewel-neck T-shirt and bra, and pulled on the bathing suit.  For the rest of that afternoon, I was one of a bunch of middle-aged women who were having fun.


Afterward, we went shopping along Brighton Beach Avenue, underneath the elevated train, where many of the stores have signs only in Russian.  It was my first time there as Justine, and men were noticing us.  Janine and Marie-Jeanne pointed out that the men were looking at me.  "Oh no," I thought, "They know about me!"  But, as I would learn on later trips there, I am often taken for a Russian or East European woman.  That was confirmed when one came up to me and asked me if "the beautiful Russian lady"--meaning me--wanted "to have a good time."


Some would argue that it wasn't a real "girl's outing," because none of them were jealous of me.  At least, they didn't seem to be.  Later, Diana would say, "You go, girl"  And Janine gave me one of the best hugs I ever got.


Now she's gone.  I suppose that means I am, whether I want to or not, entering another stage in my life.  I also had that feeling after that workshop I co-led with Jay.  Somehow I believe that my role in the LGBT community (if I indeed had a discernible one) is changing, and so is my relationship to the female world.  Soon I'm going to find out how, I think.

Weekend Forum, Coming Up

On Friday I'm going to co-lead a forum on aging in the transgender community.  I guess I'm qualified to lead it:  After all, I am transgender and I am, well, aging.


The forum is going to be held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.   The following day, a larger meeting will be held as part of a conference at the Graduate Center.  


I'm looking forward to it, as it will allow me to see some people I haven't seen in a while, including Jay, the very first person to whom I "came out."  When you become an aging tranny (or an aging anything else), you are amazed at how much time has passed, so quickly, between various landmarks in your life.  However, when I see people like Jay or Tom (the director of SAGE), I feel as if whole eras have passed.  It seems that between encounters with them, I change in some way or another.  And, I feel as if they, too, change.  For me, the reasons are clear:  I am still in an early stage of my new life, only a year and four months removed from my surgery.  But I feel as if Jay, Tom, Pauline and some of the others are also changing.  

More (!) About the Elections

Much ink has been spilt (and much digital space taken up) talking about the Republican "takeover" or the Tea Party "coup."  The so-called GOP indeed took, by a fairly wide margin, control of the House of Representative. Their candidates also were elected to governorships and other relatively high offices.


Now, I am with the Tea Party in its desire to limit government.  However, supporting them on that basis is a bit like supporting Pat Buchanan because he opposed the invasion of Iraq and opposes other imperialist interventions.   They are right on those issues, but if you go much further with them, you find yourself in a thicket of bigotry.


I'd like to believe that there are other people who feel the same way.  Or, at least, those who oppose what the TP purport to represent, and what the GOP has become, have become more assertive.  Either or both of those possibilities were on display in the results of some local elections which resulted in, among other things, the election of an openly transgendered judge in the San Francisco Bay Area.


Now, of course, most people would say, "Well, that's San Francisco."  Indeed it is.  But, at one time, lots of people thought that gays lived only in San Fran, the Village and a couple of other places.  Now characters on prime-time TV are gay.


Still, Victoria Kowlakowski's victory should no more be seen as a sign that we have "arrived" than Obama's election was a sign that racial equality had been achieved.


At least Kowlakowski seems well-qualified for the position.  That in itself would make her election a positive step, I hope.

Ending With Daylight Savings: R.I.P Roni

Daylight Savings Time ended today.  It really made the day go by quicker than I expected.  Too quickly, in fact. The coming days will go by even more quickly, at least in the way that something goes by quickly when it's going by you.  That will be the case for the next few weeks, as the days grow shorter.


Some people grow very depressed at this time of year.  A few years ago, I learned of something called Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Unfortunately for me--and someone else--I didn't learn about it from reading.  

Right around the end of Daylight Savings Time six years ago, Roni overdosed on pills.  Millie told me that she suffered from SAD (what an appropriate acronym!).  I also knew, from talking to Roni herself, that she was not a happy person.  She had no living relatives, or at least none with whom she was still in contact.  And, it seemed to me, her life was full of all sorts of other regrets.


I found out about one of her deepest regrets when I started living full-time as Justine.  At first, she denigrated and taunted me for it and spread rumors about me.  For months after that, I wouldn't acknowledge her on the street.  But, one day, she approached me and apologized.  "I acted as I did because I envy you," she said.


"What do you mean?"


She explained that she felt that she was a man in mind and spirit, but had to live in the body of a woman--in other words, the inverse of me. Making a transition, she said, was out of the question for her because of various medical problems, some of which were induced by her drug and alcohol abuse.  She was sober and had not abused prescription, or used non-prescription, drugs for several years when she met me, but she was still on anti-depressants and painkillers mandated by her doctors.  


Even if she hadn't had such a history, she said  "there's no point to starting a transition now" at her age--about fifteen years older than I was.  In fact, she killed herself just after turning sixty.


Although I can't say that her despair over her gender identity was the sole or main reason for her despondency--or the thing that pushed her over the edge-- I can't help but to think that it was a factor.  And it would loom larger in the chiaroscuro of the lengthening nights of this time of year.

Moving On At The End Of Daylight Savings Time

Tonight--or, more precisely, at two o'clock tomorrow morning--Daylight Savings Time ends.  That means the clocks are turned back an hour.


That is particularly ironic for me.  As I have described in earlier posts, various parts of my life are moving forward, whether or not as a result of my doing.  And, as I have also described, I do not have the option of going back, even if I wanted to do such a thing.


My working life, if nothing else, is making that abundantly clear.  I am teaching in two places where nobody --at least, nobody who had any authority to interview or schedule me--knew me.  And, save for one prof at the technical institute who knew me from long ago, I have not talked about my past with anyone.  And I didn't talk about my transition with him:  He seemed to know more or less what I did, and he has only a vague memory of the person who once shared a desk with him at John Jay College, where I taught just after I finished graduate school.  So much has passed since then!


Meanwhile, something even stranger is happening at my main job.  It's as if people are moving forward in my life--my previous life, that is--without me in it.  What's even stranger is that I'm not upset with them because, really, I don't have the choice--no, the luxury--of doing so.   Yes, I did suggest that the college could use an LGBT organization (The college is part of a university that includes twenty other colleges and is the only college among them that doesn't have an LGBT organization.)  and volunteered to do the work to organize, and enlist support, for it.  The college's administration thought it "too controversial" (What city are we in?  What century?) and not only nixed the idea, but cast aspersions on me for suggesting it.  Now they're willing to support other profs in doing it, and I really am not interested in it now.  I don't know what I'd say if those profs approached me to work with them on it.  


It's not a matter of "sour grapes."  Rather, I have come to realize that the college is so decidedly un-progressive in its attitude toward LGBT people, and much else.  So, I have to wonder just how much the college administration is willing to support those profs who are talking about starting an organization.  And, quite frankly, my interests and energies are moving in other directions.  I'm finding that there's not much, if anything, I can do about that.


The same holds true about a hip-hop institute I suggested while I was teaching a course in the poetics and rhetoric of that art-form.  Other profs are probably going to run with it; they can have it because, even though I suggested it, I feel that the idea is not mine anymore.  Or, at least, I don't feel as if I have a place in it.


On the other hand, at the technical institute and at the other college, I really don't feel any compulsion--for now, anyway--to do more than to teach and be a supportive presence for whoever may need or want it.  I don't yet know whether there are any "in" or "out" groups in either place, and if there are, I may not need to know, at least not yet.  In contrast, I now realize that at my main job, even though I have been involved in two committees and a number of other activities, and gained respect for my teaching, I was never one of the "cool kids," if you will.  And, what I learned is that it's the sort of place in which that's exactly what you have to be, or become.  You know whether or not that has happened if you are part of a clique.  I'm not, and that's why I actually feel more like an outsider at that college than I did on the day I started there almost six years ago.


As I describe all of those things, they already feel like part of the past and are unchangeable in the same way. You don't grow up by trying to change your childhood; you use what you can from it to help you move forward.  There are times when that college feels like as much a part of my past as junior high school, to which I have compared the college.  (I've also compared it to a juvenile detention center, as the power relationships operate in almost exactly the same way as those among detained adolescents.)  Some people there are proceeding without me; I am moving in the direction in which I need to move.


They say the fall is a time of change.  Indeed it is.  The end of Daylight Savings Time is part of it.

Halloween: Not In Costume

Happy Halloween!


It's odd for me to say that.  Halloween doesn't seem like one of those holidays on which you wish someone happiness, as you would on, say, Christmas or Hanukkah.  It's more of a day for just having fun, if your idea of fun consists of what people do on this day.


I'm not saying it's not fun, or that one should treat this as "just another day."  I enjoy, as much as anyone does, seeing kids--and adults--in costume, and I don't get annoyed, as I once did, over kids (or adults) yelling "Trick or Treat!" in my face.  


But I don't partake of the festivities.  Sometimes people who know that I'm trans  will assume that I'm going to the parade in some outrageous or clever costume.  The irony is that I marched (Can you march when you're dressed like a ballerina, as I once was?) down Sixth Avenue in the Village on several All Hallows' Eves--before my transition.


The first time I marched was my second Halloween after moving back to New York.  That was when I went as a ballerina:  I saw the tutu in the window of an old, pre-gentrification, Lower East Side store.  Surprisingly, it fit me well.  Perhaps even more surprisingly, that store had a pair of pink ballet slippers that fit me and matched the tutu. 


After marching, I went bar-hopping in the Village with a couple of marchers.  On Seventh Avenue, a couple of doors from the old Vanguard, I came face-to-face with a Rutgers classmate whom I hadn't seen since our graduation four years earlier, if I remember correctly.


Fortunately for me, he and his buddies were drinking at least as much as the marchers and I.  Even more fortunately, neither he nor his mates were violent drunks.  "Hey Nick," he howled mirthfully.  

"Uh-hello."


"Don't worry.  Tonight's about having fun," he yelled.  Then, he introduced me to his friends--about whom I cannot recall their names, or much else--and slurred, "Nick here, he's cool."  He wrapped his arm around my shoulder. "I know.  I love him like my son. I raised him!"


"And look how I turned out."


His friends laughed.  He squeezed me.  "You're great.  I admire you."


Until tonight, I hadn't thought about that night.  Twenty-six years have passed since then.  That's how many years I'd lived up to that night.  


I have no idea of where he is now, or what he'd think of me--or I of him--if we were to meet again.  All I know is that it would be the first time he'd be seeing me when I wasn't in costume.  


There are lots of people who only knew me in costume.  I'm not talking only about vestments, of course.  But Halloween celebrations are about them--about "dressing up," as some people say.


I like to wear nice clothes.  Some days I really try to look good.  But it all feels authentic to me, so I don't feel as if I'm "dressing up."  And I certainly am not putting on a costume, or have any desire to do so.  That is the reason why I don't celebrate Halloween as some other people do.  Perhaps some year I will join in the festivities.  But, right now, wearing a costume doesn't interest me: My own skin is just beginning to fit me.