After Their Traumas

(I know there are now thousands of women in the US Armed Forces.  However, for the purposes of this post, I'll use male pronouns in referring to soldiers.)

A soldier returns home from combat duty.  He's among family and friends, in places that were familiar to him before he went off to fight the war. 

Yet he is still angry, confused, scared or simply anxious.  Although his brain tells him that the family car isn't booby-trapped with explosives, his nerves are still programmed to expect the car to blow up if he opens the door.  Or some smell that he once associated with pleasant experiences--of breakfast, of a walk through the woods--reminds him of the way he lost one of his buddies. 

Or he simply cannot be close to the people who always knew him; he cannot touch his wife or girlfriend.  And his children can be decoys, or victims of a roadside bomb.

As far-fetched as these scenarios might seem to some people, I have heard or read of ones like them.   Just as a wound is still open, or at least present, even as the person with it is in the best hospital in the world, so are the psychic scars of those expereinces with the soldier even as he's among those who have always loved him.

Most of you will recognise what I have described as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.  It is common, not only to members of the military who have served in combat, but also to others who have suffered physically or emotionally traumatic expereinces.  I am talking, of course, about people who have been in abusive relationships or dysfunctional homes, have been the victims of violent crimes or who have survived some sort of terrible accident or natural disaster.

However, I have come across some literature and websites that have referred to PTSD and transgender people.  It doesn't surprise me that the incidence of PTSD is higher among trans people, as well as L's and G's, or people who are simply perceived as such.  We have, after all, experience violence and discrimination directed against us more than most other people.  And many of us who were perceived as incongruent with the expectations of the gender to which we were assigned at birth, or to people's ideas of heterosexuality, also incurred bullying and, sometimes, physical, sexual or emotional abuse as children.

But there are those of us who cry or simply sulk over those past traumas even after we have successfully transitioned into lives in our spiritual and psychological genders, or found the kind of love we have always wanted and needed.  Someone who had her surgery around the same time as I had mine was talking about that just recently.  Yes, she is happy about the life she has now, and wishes only that she'd begun her transition sooner.   However, no matter how good our new lives are, we never quite forget about our old ones.

In Christine Jorgensen's time--and, until not very long before I began my own transition-- doctors and therapists recommended, not only abandoning one's past, but re-inventing it, making up an entirely fictitious personal history.  Doing so, of course, complicated whatever issues those transsexuals may have had. 

Now I can understand why it's entirely useless to tell someone who's been traumatized to "just get over" their pasts.  I don't care whether that person suffered abuse from his or her family or spouse (current or former), or whether that person carries the residual effects of being called "Nigger!" or seeing her uncle hanging from a tree.  (A student of mine, who returned to school at age 58, related such an expereince to me.)  There are some things you just don't get over.  And maybe you need not to "get over" them if you want to move forward and create the kind of life you envisioned for yourself.

Palm Sunday During Wartime

Yesterday I took a walk "around the block" that turned into an eight-mile trek.  I started out late in the afternoon, knowing that there were still a few hours of daylight remaining and the possibility of more rain looming.  But the rain held out until I was literally around the corner from my apartment, and then the soft cascade turned into a torrent literally as I entered the doorway to my building.


Some girls have all the luck, eh?  


My walk took me through past the quiet facades of brick houses.  Inside many of them, families--some consisting of two or three people who may or may not have been related to each other by blood, others that were, in essence, miniature villages--were eating those Sunday meals that are neither lunch nor dinner because they encompass and eclipse both.  Nobody partakes in such a repast if he or she is living alone, and not many young couples or roommates do it.  In other words, it's not for those who "do brunch." The sort of Sunday meal I mean is, almost by definition, a family affair. And, as often as not, it follows said family returning from mass or some other religious gathering--especially one of a Sunday like yesterday, which happened to be Palm Sunday.


Even when the bustle spilled out of doors, the streets were still enveloped in that silence--proscribed and followed as if by some unseen, unheard command--that has sealed the people inside those houses away from the cries that, perhaps, they don't or can't see.  Or, by now those voices may be, as far as most people are concerned, mere background noise, like the shows that blare from their televisions during their meals.   


I first noticed that silence--that of damp Sunday afternoons--some time during my childhood.  It seemed to grow more intense, somehow, a year or so into the USA's invasion of Iraq.  By that time, armed Americans had been plying the valleys of Afghanistan for a few years, though it and the Iraq invasion seemed to have endured for far, far longer.  


Some of the funerals that resulted from those imperialist misadventures have, I'm sure, taken place in some along some of those streets I walked.  I saw more than a few flags and banners--and bumper stickers on the parked cars--that read "Support Our Troops" or "Semper Fi."  


What's interesting is that in those working-class Queens neighborhoods--home to many immigrants, some of whom are Muslims--one doesn't find the more overtly aggressive and violent messages (e.g., the bumper sticker that's a "license" to hunt terrorists and features a photo of Bin Laden with a target drawn over it) one finds in other areas.  Instead, people in the areas I saw today seem to have the idea that by "supporting" the troops (whatever that means) or "remembering" 9/11, they are showing that they are loyal Americans.  Given the political and social climate--and what it could become if the economy worsens--I can understand why they'd feel the need to do that.


So why am I talking about the wars or immigrants now?  I don't know.  I just got there somehow, just as I somehow ended up four miles from home on my walk yesterday.


Well, all right:  I think about those wars a lot.  The invasion of Iraq started not long after I'd begun to take hormones and was preparing myself to live full-time as Justine.  I recall understanding, for the first time in my life, that invading another country--especially if no citizen of said country has ever done anything to harm any member of the invading country--cannot be anything but an expression, on the part of the invaders, of profound disrespect for people who just happen to be different from themselves.  I understood, for the first time, that up to that point in my life, I had been part of the very structure--even if I were at the bottom-most rung of its ladder and owned almost nothing of its spoils--that not only carries out such invasions, but doesn't see them as such.


Of course, I wasn't thinking that during my walk--at least, not consciously.  There were only the silence of those streets, the dampness of the air and the rhythm of my steps, all of which somehow kept me walking.

The War President And His Peace Prize

So we have a President who, in accepting a Nobel Peace Prize, talks about a "just war" that just happens to be the one to which he committed thousands of new troops.

I know I'm not the only one who sees the "disconnect." Even the producers of Faux, I mean Fox, News could see it, even if only because it gave them another way to pick at Obama. "War President Accepts Peace Prize." That's what emblazoned the screens of those who watched their so-called news program. I saw it in a diner in which I'd stopped on my way to work.

He said something to the effect that sometimes you have to make war in order to get peace. Well, there may be silver lining to his making a statement like that: At least I will never, ever have to explain 1984 again. My students can now see it happening before their eyes.

Let's see: You have to make war to make peace. You have to get fat to get skinny. You have to kill in order to give birth. You have to become poor to get rich. You have to ignore in order to learn. Hmm...This is an interesting line of logic, to say the least. Could repression be expression? Maybe Dr. Joyce Brothers (When was the last time you thought about her?) was right, in a way, after all! Maybe Obama should hire her as an advisor.

One more step of that kind of logic, and we come to this conclusion: You have to support repressive thugs in order to bring about democracy. You have to colonize in order to liberate. And, finally, you have to fail at invading a country like Afghanistan--as the Ottomans, British and Russians did--and have your empire fall as a result, in order to secure your place as one of the great powers in the history of nations.

All right. Obama may be ignorant of history. In that regard, he's not alone among Presidents. Nor does the fact that his speech was full of Newspeak make him terribly different from other rulers we've had. But there is one thing that sets him apart from even George W, who was easily the worst President of my lifetime: At least Bush the Younger had an exit strategy, however flawed, for the American invasion of Iraq. On the other hand, Obama is saying that we'll be out of Afghanistan within 18 months, but he's sending in more troops. Say what?

One other area in which he has out-Bushed Bush is in his declaration that people can be held indefinitely and without charge or trial, not only on the suspicion that they've committed crimes (Bush's decision), but just in case they may commit a crime.

The truth of the matter is that we can almost never predict whether or not someone will commit a crime. The most seemingly law-abiding citizen might find him or her self in dire circumstances; at that point, he or she may or may not "cross the line." And, there are plenty of people who would like to see the US destroyed but will not take any action to make it happen.

So, Obama is not only a "war president;" he is more of a foe of civil liberties than Bush the Younger, or any other President of my lifetime, could have dreamed of being.

And for that, he gets a Nobel Peace Prize? No wonder some people don't believe in God!

An Execution of the Eve of Veterans' Day

In a very, very dark sense, it's fitting that John Allen Muhammad was executed on the eve of Veteran's Day. I unequivocally oppose the death penalty--yes, even for someone like Muhammad--and war, for any reason. For one thing, I figure that if a man who won a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star in World War II (but who wrote, ahem, Thank God for the Atom Bomb) could tell me, "There is simply no way to justify one human being to kill another," what argument is there for any war or the death penalty? For another, I have come to understand that the only people who benefit from either one are the men (and, yes, almost all of them are men) who are the powers behind the social, economic and political systems in which both are conducted. There is never any justice for the loved ones of the victims of either monstrosity; there is no such thing as "closure" after such a loss. And revenge is not justice.

Also: No one has ever corrected or prevented a crime by committing the same sort of crime. The "war to end all wars" indeed! Finally, I simply cannot stomach the idea of a state, no matter how benevolent, having the power of life and death over any human being. Now, I know someone is going to say, "Well, would you rather that John Allen Muhammad have the power of life and death over someone else?" Of course I wouldn't. But he didn't have such power once he was captured.

As for war: What in the world are American troops doing in Afghanistan? What were they doing in Iraq--under Bush I or Bush II? And what, pray tell, were we doing in the Balkans region under the Clinton regime? How can anyone who has any respect at all for life put another person in a country where he's hated just because he's there by people who did nothing to harm him or the country he hails from?

Even if you accept the premise that American invlovement in, say, World War II was justified, how can you have so little respect for what your sons, fathers or neighbors accomplished and sacrificed in such a war that you would so cavalierly put them in some place where they face danger for no useful purpose?

I am thinking again about the story "Gunnar Berg" posted on his blog. How many people would refuse to fight, or set their "enemies" free if they could see the common humanity they share: That the desires and dreams of their enemies aren't so different from their own, and that perhaps their adversaries' children are, in some ways, like their own. Then perhaps they would understand the truism that war is between brothers. And that is the reason why nobody wins, ever.

Plus, in killing someone, you place him and whatever he represents above all else. Muhammad, as a result of his execution, will have had more attention paid to him than any of his victims ever had. And in a war, so much effort and materiel go into tracking down and killing "ememies" that those enemies take precedence over everything else--whether it's the economy, education or one's own loved ones

On The Eve: Bastille Day

Tomorrow I'm going home. As nice as this place is, I'm looking forward to going home.

Danny, the very sweet (and handsome!) trans man from Alaska, left this morning. And Marilynne and her daughter are not here now, either: They had to go to a hotel because one of the secretaries in Doctor Bowers' office messed up their reservation.

As much as I like the other people who are staying here, I miss Marilynne and her daughter, and Danny. Then again, I look forward to seeing Marilynne and her daughter again for a "girls' weekend." They brought up the possibility of coming to New York in October or November, after her daughter and I have sufficiently recovered and while the weather is still nice in my hometown. I'd really love to spend Thanksgiving weekend with them because that's when New York starts to deck itself out for Christmas. But I don't think they'd want to leave their family, and I would probably spend that time with my family or with Millie's.

I'd really like to see Joyce and her partner, Becky, again. That might be an excuse for me to take a trip to West Texas. I've been to Texas once, and I went only to Houston, which, in some people's minds, doesn't count. I don't particularly want to go to Houston again, but it might be fun to go to Lubbock, which Joyce described as "a college town in the middle of nowhere."

And/or I could go to Alaska and see Danny. Now that's definitely not a weekend--long or otherwise--trip. Also, I wonder how his wife would feel about that.

Hmm...Is this where I start expanding my horizons--into my own country?

Is that what revolutions are all about? Well, at least the French one was about that. I mean, some guys thought that maybe didn't need monarchies and droits du seigneur and all those other things that were making French people--some of them, anyway--unhappy.

They had the right idea, although it took them a while to make it work. I think, though, that the next revolution shouldn't be within a country. I think the human race needs this one: getting rid of war and all other forms of hate and exploitation. If the human race has any hope of becoming more enlightened, I think that is what we need to do.

Someone once told me that I'm a revolutionary. I almost want to say "If only...," except that I'm not sure that I'd actually want to be one. It's like I was telling Mom tonight: I never really wanted to cause anybody any trouble, or to be difficult in any other way. Things just turn out that way sometimes. I am who I am, and that in and of itself is very difficult for some people, at least at certain times.

The thing is, I have made life difficult, if only for a moment, for everyone I've ever loved and who has ever loved me. You can only imagine what it was like for Mom to raise a kid who was feeling something almost no one knew about, much less understood. Bruce and I have fought and argued; I'm sure there must have been moments when I've made Millie cringe.

And they are the ones whom I feel ready to see again. Marilynne and her daughter are part of the experience I am bringing back, which is a resource that will enable me to continue my life in the way I want it. So are Danny and Joyce and Becky. And that couple from Montana and their kids. Carol, the manager of The Morning After House, too. And, of course, Nurse Phyllis and the staff of Dr. Bowers' office: Robin, Janet and Ann.

Of course, the bridge from the days before this experience to tomorrow is Dr. Bowers. The friends to whom I will return tomorrow, the family members I hope to see in the days and weeks after and the colleagues with whom I will work again in a few weeks know who I am. Now I'll be more able to live as that person.