Anna Grodzka: World's First Transgender Parlimentarian

In earlier posts, I've commented on how countries that had been very conservative and Catholic have led the way on LGBT equality.   Examples include the legalization of same-sex marriage in Spain and an Argentinian law, passed last year, that essentially says that any person over the age of 18 can live in the gender of his or her choice.

Now we have, in the land of Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa (who wears a pin of the Virgin Mary in his lapel and is a staunch opponent of abortion) an elected official who's transgender.  Anna Grodzka, elected in 2011, is the only transgender member of any parliament in the world.  Recently, she had the chance to be the deputy speaker for her left-wing party.  However, last Friday, lawmakers voted to keep the incumbent in that post.

Still, the mere presence of Grodzka is seen as emblematic of the changes that are taking place in Poland. The rights of gays, lesbians and transgenders was in issue suppressed during the Communist regime.  The fall of the Berlin Wall did little, if anything, to change that:  In fact, some argue that it made, until recently, an even more oppressive atmosphere for LGBT people as many Poles--including Walesa himself--saw the Church as a powerful ally in the fight against Communism.

It's often been said that Poles' relation to their church is much like that of people in another country that was, until recently, conservative:  Ireland.  There, people saw their Catholicism as one of the few forms of identity they were able to keep (if in secret) during centuries of British occupation.  While the situation for gays has improved in Eire, it's still very, very difficult to be trans on the Emerald Isle.

The optimist in me says that things could improve for Irish trans people.  I am certain that better days for trans people are coming in Poland, if for no other reason than Ms. Grodzka's indomitable spirit in the face of the backlash she's incurred.  "I am above all trying to be a normal politician, like any other person, maybe even better", she explains.

Brendon Ayanbadejo Gets It--Almost

Kelli Busey's Planet Transgender has become one of my favorite transgender-related blog.  Actually, it achieved that distinction not long after I discovered it.  She's usually on the right track and on point, and manages to be both assertive and gentle.

She shows all of those qualities in her most recent post.  In it, she mentions the support  Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo's attempt to express his support for transgender rights, as he understands them.  The only problem is that he understands them in the same way too many other well-meaning but misinformed people understand them:

If a woman wants to wear a man's clothes or if a man wants to wear a woman's clothes or you feel like you're a woman on the inside and you're really a man. Who cares? Let's just treat everyone equally. Let's move on. Let's evolve as a culture, as a people.”

My impulse is to be charitable with him. Some of us who are members of the gender-variant community, and some who spend a lot of time around folks like us, would excoriate him for showing that he seems not to understand the difference between a cross-dresser and a transgendered person.  Perhaps he doesn't understand such a distinction:  Somehow I don't think he doesn't know a lot of trans people or cross-dressers and doesn't spend a lot of time around people who are familiar with us.  That's all right:  Most people probably don't know any trans people, either--or, at least, they don't know that they know us.

Plus, I somehow get the impression that his heart is at least in the right place.  Basically, he's saying that we should try to get along and to realize that we're all in the same world, in the same struggle, together, and that we can and must move forward.

I don't go to Facebook very often.  However, I'm going to post a comment on his fan page.  In it, I will praise him for saying that we should treat everyone equally and "evolve as a culture", while pointing out the difference between transgenders and cross-dressers.

Why I Am Not Passing Now

I am not boasting when I say that it's been a while since I've had to think about "passing".  Any time I meet someone, whether a tourist asking for directions, a store clerk or guests at someone's dinner party, I am addressed by female salutations and pronouns.

In a way, it's ironic.  The reason I say that, is not that I was born in a male body and lived the first 45 years of my life as a boy/man.  Rather, I say that because I have less anxiety about some "secret" of mine being discovered than I did when I was living as male.

Perhaps even more important, I felt more like I was trying to "pass" as male--or, at least, the idea of male that most people seemed to have--than I have felt that I was trying to "convince" someone that I'm a woman.

What's even more ironic is that I felt less like I was trying to "pass" even at the very beginning of my transition.  Even during the time I was working as male and doing almost everything else in my life as female,  I didn't feel as much anxiety about being "read" as I felt when I was living as male and worrying that someone would realize that I wasn't male after all and that there would be a terrible price to pay for it.

Don't get me wrong:  I've lost friends, relatives and other things in my life because of my transition.  When I started my transition, I knew those were possible consequences.  The only surprises, really, were that some of the people I lost weren't the ones I expected.  On the other hand, people from whom I didn't expect support gave it to me, and gave me types of support I never expected.

Somehow it was easier to imagine those things than it was for me to envision the consequences of someone finding out that I wasn't that masculine (almost hyper-masculine) guy I was presenting to the world.  I guess I was still thinking of how I was "exposed" as a "sissy" when I was a kid, and the seemingly-endless grief I got as a result.  I could imagine only an adult version of those things.  Otherwise, I couldn't foresee what would or could happen to me as a result of being "exposed". 

I did, however, have a more specific fear:  that my gender-queerness (as much as I hate the term, I don't have a better one) would be construed as an extreme form of homosexuality.  As a matter of fact, some people took me for a gay man, even if they had never seen me with another man.  Although I had been living as a heterosexual man, I knew very well how virulent and misdirected homophobia could be:  Part of my "defense" consisted of homophobia and some gay-baiting.

In other words, I feared that I would be harassed, beaten or even killed for something I wasn't.  It's bad enough to incur someone's bile or wrath for something you actually are, but I could imagine few things worse than dying over a case of mistaken identity.  I imagine that once you're dead, it doesn't much matter how you died, but I still think I'd rather not die an unjust death.

But now I am living as the woman that I am; if someone commits any sort of violence (physical, mental, spirtual or otherwise) against me because he or she finds out about my past, at least it's based on something that's at least factually true.  It doesn't make any violence committed against me more just, but at least I know that I have been true to myself and I have not denied my past.  In fact, I have not had to deny anything at all.  

That last sentence might sum up the reasons why I have not felt like I am "passing" or even have to try to do such a thing.  The effort to "pass" as someone else's idea of a man or a woman invariably involves denial; simply living as the man or woman (or member of some other gender) that you are is, as one person admiringly told me, the essence of integrity.

Well, living as the woman I am--as opposed to someone else's idea of a woman-- is as much integrity as I am capable of living.  It's the truth as I understand it, and I really don't have anything else (aside from, perhaps, a belief in a greater power) that I can use as a principle for living my life.  As a result, I may not pass perfectly, but I seem to pass well enough--and better than I ever did as the man I was trying to be.

India's Response To The Death Of A Woman Who Was Gang-Raped

In much of the world--including, at times, my hometown of New York--rape is still treated as "just" a sexual offense rather than the violent crime it is.

What that means is that sentences are relatively light.  For example, in India, rapists faced seven to ten years in prison.  Granted, I wouldn't want to spend that much time incarcerated.  However, compared to other violent offenses, rape wasn't punished harshly.

That may change.  Unfortunately, it took the death of a 23-year-old woman who was brutally gang-raped for this change to come about.

Because of a "gag" order, the victim and her family cannot be identified.  However, Indian media has reported that she was a physiotherapy student who was attacked by six men on a bus.  She died in Singapore hospital, where she was sent for treatment, nearly two weeks after the attack.

In response to this awful crime, President Pranab Mukherjee assented to new laws proposed by cabinet ministers.  According to the new ordinances, the sentences for gang rape or rapes committed by police officers or other persons in authority will be doubled and can be extended to life without parole.   The law also includes a new set of offenses, including voyerism and stalking.  

There has even been discussion of the death penalty for the young woman's attackers.  Although Indian law provides for capital punishment, officials say that it is used "only in the rarest of rare cases". Three months ago, the last surviving gunman of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks was hanged.  It was the first state execution in eight years.

While the new laws, if passed (even without a provision for the death penalty), will punish some rapists more severely than perpetrators of similar crimes have been penalized in the past, women's rights advocates still don't think it goes far enough.  They say that, while the provisions for longer sentences are welcome, the law still doesn't have the teeth to fight sex crimes against women.  Others criticized the government for not holding a public debate or hearing on the law.

According to a defense lawyer, the court will start hearing evidence from witnesses next Tuesday and that verdicts will be handed down "very soon" on five of the perpetrators.  The sixth is being tried in a juvenile court.

A Thorn In The Side Of The Rose City T-Girls

One thing any trans person can tell you is that there are some things that even the most trans-friendly communities and the strongest anti-discrimination laws can't prevent.

They include, among other things, plain-and-simple bigotry.  Such is the case in Portland, Oregon.  

The Beaver State passed its Equality Act, designed to protect the rights of LGBT people, in 2007.  This week, the State's Labor Commissioner, Brad Avakian, filed the first complaint submitted under the law.

The complaint alleges that Chris Penner, the owner of the Twilight Room Annex (formerly known as the P Club), asked the Rose City T-Girls, a group of transgender patrons, to stop patronizing his establishment.  According to them, he said he didn't want his place to be known as a "tranny bar."

Penner described himself as "shocked and baffled", saying that he's not "against gay or transgender people" and has LGBT employees.  He also says his bar has even hosted same-sex weddings and Pride events.

However, he claimed that that the Rose City T-Girls were driving patrons away on Friday nights, when the T-Girls were congregating there, because they left the stall doors open and toilet seats up in the women's rest rooms.

Investigators reported that they could find no evidence that the T-Girls were "disrupting business", as he claimed, and concluded that he did not talk to them about their behavior before barring them.

A hearing is set for 19 March.

(I couldn't help but to notice this irony: The bar owner shares the same last name with an award-winning sportswriter who came out as trans, lived and worked as female, then quietly returned to living as male and committed suicide.)

Words That Are Transphobic And Why

On Rebloggy, I found this useful infographic (and others):

A New Harlem Renaissance?

If you ask almost anyone living in New York City to name a "gay neighborhood", you will probably hear "Chelsea" or "Jackson Heights".  Those who are LGBT, or have ties to the community, will probably mention Astoria (where I now live), Woodside and possibly Bushwick.

If you ask someone my age or older, or someone who studies LGBT history, he or she will probably mention "The Village", Park Slope (where I lived before I moved to Astoria), Brooklyn Heights--and Harlem.

Most people don't realize that at the same time the area around Christopher Street was turning into a "gay ghetto," Harlem was also developing its own LGBT community.  It can be argued that queer people--lesbians and bisexuals in particular--did much to make the Harlem Renaissance possible. 

Another thing most people realize--and many people don't want to admit--is that LGBT people have never left Harlem.  More precisely, there have always been a lot of gays,lesbians and transgender people living there.  

One reason for that is that Harlem has long been home to people of color from every social and economic class, and from the entire spectrum of human endeavor.  Even in its worst times, the neighborhood could claim to be the residence of artists, entrepreneurs, entertainers, scholars and other creative and educated people, as well as every other type of worker imaginable.  With such diversity, it's not surprising that there would be a gay presence there.  

And, another reason why so many LGBT people, mainly of color, call  Harlem (as well as other uptown Manhattan neighborhoods, and the Bronx) home is that neighborhoods like The Village, Park Slope and Chelsea have gentrified, so many people of color simply cannot afford to live in them.  There is also a reason people in those neighborhoods and Caucasian LGBT people will almost never talk about:  People of color feel, or sometimes aren't, welcome in those neighborhoods.

Finally, even when LGBT people of color meet sympathetic white people, there are some things they simply couldn't talk about, even if both sides were willing.  I can empathise, at least to some degree, with anybody who has experienced prejudice; I've been told that I'm "not like other white people".  If only that last statement were true!  The fact is that whatever prejudice I've experienced is, in some ways, different from what someone experiences on account of the color of his or her skin.  And I simply can't imagine what it's like to experience that at the same time one is incurring hate over his or her sexuality or gender identity and expression.

As much as I appreciate The Center and Callen Lorde (They were my lifelines as I was looking into, and started, transitioning.), I have long argued that Harlem and the Bronx need equivalents to them.   Not surprisingly, Carmen Neely, the president of Harlem Pride, feels the same way.  

So, she and her group have started an online petition to garner support for the creation of what she calls "The Community Pride Center."  Although she's spearheading the drive for a center, the center itself will not be a project of Harlem Pride.  She says the center will be the effort of collaborative work between several LGBT groups and leaders.  They hope to have the center open by 2015.

"Our time is now," she says.  "It's needed in this community.  It's been way too long."


 

Maryland Bill To Outlaw Trans Discrimination

New Year's Day was the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

So, it seems appropriate that just over the border from where President Lincoln made one of the most important speeches in the history of this country, a bill has been introduced to ban discrimination against transgenders.

Maryland State Senator Rich Madaleno, who is gay, and his fellow Senator (and Democrat) Jaime Raskin are the ones who introduced the bill to the Terrapin State's legislative body.  

The good news is that Maladeno and Raskin have twenty co-sponsors, including Republican Allan Kittleman.

The bad news is that the proposal for it died in committee last year.  Senate President Thomas V. "Mike" Miller, a Democrat, reportedly blocked a vote on it.  But now he's on board with Madaleno, Raskin and Kittleman.

Because of their diligence, Dana Beyer, who is Excecutive Director of Gender Rights Maryland, says the trans community "should be very hopeful this is the year."

Her optimism is not baseless.  Maryland, like neighboring Washington, DC, has banned discrimination based on sexual orientation, and DC also has laws barring discrimination against transgenders.

Valentina Verbal Runs For Chilean Congress

Last year, Argentina passed a law that said, in essence, any Argentinian aged 18 or over can be whichever gender he or she chooses.  No surgery is required, and for those who want it, the government will provide it free of charge.

Now neighboring Chile may go where neither the US nor any of the other countries seen as avatars of human rights has gone:  It may elect its first transgender member of Congress.

Valentina Verbal has just announced her candidacy for election to the position in November.  She realizes she has an uphill battle in a country where "If you're male, you have to be masculine. If you're female, you have to be feminine.  If you're not, it's weird."  

One of the things she wants to do, if she's elected, is to change the country's gender-identity laws.  "When a person has a card or national identity card that doesn't reflect their social sex, in practice it means they are undocumented", she says.  "We have to change the law so that it recognizes the identity of transgender people without the state obligating them to have an actual sex change."  Changing the law is necessary, she says, because when an identity card says one sex, but the person appears as another, "it can be difficult to find employers who don't see it as a problem".  This makes it difficult for such a person to find work, which she calls "a basic human right".

Her platform is not limited to identity cards or other issues of concern to transgender people.  She wants to help create "a more citizen-based democracy, not just a democracy run by political parties of so-called 'professionals'".

While she has received support within her party, she still has to defeat two multi-term incumbents in order to receive her party's nomination.  Then, of course, there is the general election.  She acknowledges she is "taking a risk" but vows to "try anyway."

You can read an inerview with her here.  

A Date With Jazz

In case you missed Barbara Walters' latest interview with "Jazz", an 11-year-old transgender girl whose story Ms. Walter has been following for the past five years, here it is:

 


I think most of us who are transgendered can identify with Jazz's "awkward moment".  How do you tell that person to whom you are attracted, or who is attracted to you, about your history?

She mentions the heartbreak she experiences every time she looks below her waist:  She was born with a boy's body, but she knows she's a girl.  That is indeed a source of great sadness and anger.   Having surgery ends at least some of those feelings.  However, those of us who transition in our 40's and 50's still feel sad and, at times, frustrated that we could not have lived our entire lives in our true genders.

I applaud both "Jazz" and Ms. Walters for continuing to share this story with the public.  And I hope "Jazz" gets the boy of her dreams!

How Much Is A Transgender Woman's Life Worth?

If you fire shots into a car with three transgender women, what kind of a sentence you should expect?

Depends.

If you're a police officer in Washington, DC, you can expect to get--are you ready?--three years of supervised probation, 100 hours of community service and a $150 fine.

So, a transgender woman's life is worth one year of probation, 33.3 hours of community service and $50.  The next time I go to DC, I'll be very happy to know that I'm such a valuable commodity.

Actually, our lives are worth even less than that:  Those transgender women were accompanied by friends.

Officer Kenneth Furr received the sentence I mentioned for shooting into the car in August 2011. While drunk, he approached a transgender prostitute for sex.  When she refused, he followed her into a CVS store and pointed a gun at her outside the store. After Furr drove away, the woman and her friends followed him until he stopped and fired his gun at them.

Furr claims he was acting in "self defense".  Right.  Just like Matthew Shepard's killers acted out of "gay panic".   


At least Furr has been suspended without pay.  Even if that hadn't happened, Furr would have a harsher sentence than others who have committed similar crimes against transgender people.

Why Is The Catholic Church Fighting Gay Marriage?

I'm sure you've read--or heard-- Queen Gertrude's observation in Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." 

It's often misquited:  People often move "methinks" from the end to the beginning of that line.  But more important, most people misuse the quote. "Protest", in Shakespeare's time, meant "avow" or "affirm" rather than "object" or "deny".  

Whether it's used as intended or misused, the quote is apt for at least one current situation. Once again, the Catholic Church is spending lots of money and other resources to oppose same-sex marriage.   In fact, earlier this month, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago launched a last-ditch effort to convince the lame-duck Illinois legislature not to legalize unions between people of the same gender. Whether or not his efforts were a factor, the vote in the Land of Lincoln has been delayed and the bill will be re-introduced after the new legislature is seated.

Why do you think the Church is so adamant in its opposition to gay marriage? Well, some will say that it's a matter of Church doctrine.  As it's hardly an area of my expertise--and because I'm sure that my reading of the Bible is very different from that of any member of the College of Cardinals--I'm not going to discuss that.  Those anti-gay priests may well be motivated by what they believe to be divinely-inspired tenets of the faith.

Being a, shall we say, very lapsed Catholic, my view is a bit different.  You might say it's more cynical.  Here goes:  Much of the Church's opposition to same-sex unions is, I believe, a smokescreen.  They have far, far more serious problems to consider right now, including the elephant in the Vatican chambers:  pedophile priests.  

The damage they've done is incalculable.  You begin to realize that when you hear people talking--for the first time--about they experienced two and three decades earlier. When you're a small child, you simply don't have the language or frame of reference to tell anybody about such an ordeal.  I know this from my own life:  I was well into my thirties before I talked about the sexual molestation I experienced as a child.  

For most children--especially altar boys--being sexually abused by a priest  has to be even more devastating than molestation by anyone else because many kids are taught to trust men of the collar even more than they trust any other adult, save perhaps for their own parents.  Even if nobody tells them they should hold priests in such esteem, a lot of kids learn to do so through implication and osmosis.  That is to be expected when you realize that young children are capable of believing and trusting more completely in God or anyone who is supposed to represent Him.

I don't know how many children have been so damaged by priests, but I'm sure that for every one we hear about, there are many, many more.  I don't think the Church will ever die out completely, but I wouldn't be surprised to see dioceses in the United States (and, possibly other countries) go bankrupt and parishes close because of lawsuits on behalf of the victims.  Plus, the church is in trouble in other ways:  It's in decline in much of Europe because the populations of such predominantly-Catholic countries as Spain, France and Italy aren't growing--or, if there is growth, it's in non-Catholic populations.  Plus, people in those countries and the US aren't attending church, or sending their kids to Catholic schools, nearly as much as they have even in the recent past.

And the Church is spending its spending its money to fight gay marriage?

You know what they say about gay marriage:  If you don't believe in it, don't marry a gay person.  Likewise, all the Church has to do is what it's done for 2000 years. More precisely, it doesn't have to start doing what it hasn't done in that time:  perform gay marriages.  Let Illinois and Rhode Island and other states join New York, Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont and the other states that have legalized gay marriage.  As those states are still part of the United States, they still have (at least in law) a separation between Church and State.  So, no matter what laws are passed in those or any other states, no Catholic priest is going to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies--not in the confines of a consecrated church building, anyway.

What We Experience

For a decade, I've been getting my healthcare and referrals from the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center.  At times, they can be maddeningly disorganized.  But every health care provider and other staff member I've encountered there has made great efforts to be helpful.   Plus, Richie Tran is the kind of doctor I always wished I could find before my transition.  Well, maybe such doctors were out there, but I wasn't ready to talk to any of them, even if they could have heard what I wanted to say.

It seems that Callen Lorde's equivalent in Boston is Fenway Health.  They do a lot of outreach--at least, every time I do a web search for anything related to LGBT health care, I come across something or another they've posted.  And it's all been useful.

They really seem to like infographics.  That's probably a good thing:  Not everyone likes to read, or has the patience to do so, I guess.  Fenway's stuff is eye-catching, and often appealing.  If nothing else, they get their point across, as they do in this one:

If you can enlarge the infographic, look at the row of statistics to the left of the US map:  Discrimination In Public Accomodations.  Thirty-seven percent of us report having been harassed or disrespected in retail stores; three percent of us have been assaulted.  For hotels and restaurants, those statistics are very similar:  35 and 2 percent.  

I am one of the 29 percent of trans people who's been harassed or disrepected by the police, and the 29 percent who've had such experiences in health care settings.  Fortunately for me, I haven't been assaulted by police officers or in health care settings, though two and six percent, respectively, of trans people have had such experiences.

And other trans people have had it worse.  Much worse. 

Passing Into The Lost Generation

In yesterday's post, I started to describe some of the ways in which spending so much time and effort on "passing" has harmed trans people individually, and as a community.  I talked mainly about the ways in which it has held us back from gains other people, such as African-Americans, cis women and gay men, realized from the Civil Rights movement.  

Now I want to mention some of the ways in which society's demand to pass (which is also turned against us) helped to create a Lost Generation of Transgender People.

When I was younger I, of course, read everything I could find about Christine Jorgensen.  At that time, she was one of only two transgenders (the other being Renee Richards) of whom I'd even heard.  In my reading, I stumbled over the newspaper headlines and stories about her.  "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty", screamed the New York Daily News headline.  Others were more salacious, or simply more vicious.  They all, however, seemed to focus on her resemblance to Marilyn Monroe and other blonde movie stars of the time.  

What I have said, and will say about Ms. Jorgensen and her role in the history of transgender people is in no way meant to disparage her.  She was indeed a beautiful woman.  More to the point, though, she was also a very intelligent, talented woman who took great pains to educate herself, and always exuded dignity and class. On the other hand, she fit into every notion of womanhood that prevailed in 1950's America.  It was a time, of course, when the standards of beauty and glamor were almost always blonde and blue-eyed.  They also had hourglass figures with impossibly small waists.  Jorgensen fit that image to a "T".

What's more, though, she declared herself as attracted only to men--and, in fact, married one.  And, although she worked as a photographer before her surgery, she wanted to settle into a quiet life as a housewife.  Perversely, the very same sorts of people who would have demanded that she, or any other woman, lead such a life were the same people who "outed" her and kept her story in the public eye, to the point that she almost had to become the entertainer she would be for much of her adult life.

In other words, people accepted, or at least tolerated, Christine Jorgensen--who was probably the first transsexual of whom most of them had even heard--in wholly heterosexist terms. Some of those people may have been perfectly well-meaning; they may have "wanted to do the right thing" but had little to no understanding of what it meant to be transgendered or transsexual.  However, their understanding--and the way Ms. Jorgensen had to conform to it, whether or not she waned to--gave people a very limited way of understanding, not only transgender people, but of their own gender and sexuality.  

As I write this, I finally realize why the alliance--however tense and strained it may be--between trans people and lesbians and gays is not only beneficial, but necessary.  Trans people will never have equal rights, let aloneopportunities,  as long as there is so much pressure to confirm to traditional roles of one gender or the other.  

In some people, this understanding of gender and sexuality, as well as their expectation that trans women would conform to "traditional" female roles, were really just very thinly-veiled homophobia.  

So, three decades after Christine Jorgensen became a "blonde beauty", the pressure to "pass" was even greater than it was at the time she started her transition.  The AIDS epidemic had, by that time, exploded in Castro, The Village and other gay communities throughout the United States.  During that time, right-wing talk radio and other media grew exponentially in popularity. They famously advocated quarantining gay men, or even killing them:  One commentator went so far as to compare gay men to the rats that carried the fleas that caused the Black Death.   

In such an atmosphere, the pressure to "pass" must have greatly intensified. Who would want anyone else to know that he or she had  been, at any time in her life, a man--let alone a gay one.  

Having such heterosexist (and,I might add, Eurocentric) ideas about gender meant that only trans people who looked like Barbie dolls would be approved for hormones or the surgery.  It also meant that only those who met such standards would have any hope of affording it--or of marrying someone who could support her after she became a "traditional" housewife.

The conditions I've described had much to do with the Lost Generation of Transgender people, and how people (including cis ones) continued to hold onto their notions of gender and sexuality,and teach them.  So, during my first year of living as a woman, a prof who knew I was going through my transformation said I was "the last person she expected" to be trans because I had expressed interest in women--including her.

I wonder how many trans people gave up on their dream of transitioning as a result of what I've  described---or, how many people delayed their dream, or simply gave up on it altogether. And I wonder how many were beaten, killed or simply demonized because they were thought to be one of the vectors of disease--or because they simply didn't fit into feminist organization, let alone the white heterosexual organizations they represstn.

"Passing" Does Not Mean "Equal"

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, previous generations of transsexuals tried to go "stealth" as much as they could.  That meant, not only looking and acting as if they were members of their "new" genders, but also erasing their pasts, often to the point of creating wholly fictitious histories (Is that an oxymoron?) for themselves.

I've pointed out some of the fallacies and pitfalls of doing so.  For one thing, amnesia is not healthy; self-imposed amnesia can only be worse.  Also, as Victoria Brownworth says, a person who "passes" is trapped:  He or she believes the lie or is caught in it.  Yet, as long as we're not caught, society will reward, and even demand, such fabrications.

We see one of the major problems in "going stealth" or "passing" when we look at the law.  I used to believe that if I were to "pass" well enough, I would never have to worry about transgender equality:  If I had to throw my (all-too-considerable) weight behind a movement, it would be feminism.

Well, I still tell anyone who knows about my history that there's nothing like becoming a woman to turn you into a feminist.   While I may not have to worry about daycare (unless, of course, I adopt), I still have to think about other women's workplace and lifestyle issues because they affect me.  

One of those issues is discrimination. While a prospective employer may know nothing of my history from seeing me, and nothing of my experience of life from my resume and cover letter, he or she could always find out about those things without searching very long.  Even if I never wrote this blog, or any of my articles or essays about transitioning or living as a woman, a prospective employer could do a simple background check.

So, for that matter, could a health insurer, or any health-care provider.  Or prospective landlord or lender.  Even trans people whom other people simply cannot imagine in their birth genders run into discrimination and other difficulties as a result of having had to live their previous lives.

Those are reasons why I now realize that I simply cannot ignore the issue of LGBT rights, or think that including protections for transgenders in civil rights laws is not as important as some other issues.  Simply distancing myself from my old life will not insulate me from it.  I made my transition and had my surgery so I could live as the woman I am, but there is no point in denying that some of my experiences are different from those of other women.  More to the point, my body has a different history from those of other women:  Even if I am no longer at risk for, say, prostate cancer, I may still need treatment for some residual condition.  (Trans men encounter this when they need screening for cervical or breast cancer.)  On top of that--as I learned early in my transition--there are some medical care providers who won't treat you, give you inappropriate treatments or will harass and humiliate you because of who you are.

Those are just some of the reasons why, no matter how good we are at "passing" and how little semblance our current lives bear to our former ones, we still need to work for equality, whether it's by getting language added to the 1964 Civil Rights Act or our employers to adopt fair and equitable policies.  As someone who's spent more than her share of time in classrooms, I can tell you that simply passing doesn't mean that you're equal to anyone else.  At least, you haven't gotten there yet.

MLK And LGBT People

Sometimes President Obama seems to think he's channeling Martin Luther King Jr. when he doesn't think he's a reincarnation of President Lincoln.  I guess he can do worse for role models although, aside from his being black and his stated belief in civil rights, I don't see much connection between Barack and MLK.  The latter was a visionary, a prophet.  Whatever his merits, Obama is a politician.  That means MLK adopted views that aligned with what he perceived and exprienced; Obama is thinking about votes and donations.

I don't mean this as a condemnation of Obama.  After all, he did change his position on gay marriage.  However, it's hard not to notice that he opposed it during his first campaign for the Presidency; he finally came out in support of it after Vice-President Biden expressed his.  

On the other hand, he did voice his support.  Plus, even though he could have been more proactive, he's done more to support transgender people than all of the presidents before him did.  Then again, the best of his predecessors did nothing; the others did what they could to make our lives more difficult.

But, as I said, Obama deserves some credit.  And, perhaps, he can claim MLK's mantel after all.  Nobody knows for sure whether King would have supported LGBT equality, as he was slain more than a year before the Stonewall Rebellion.  But we do know that he never said anything negative about queer people, and didn't countenance a "literal" or "fundamentalist" reading of the Bible that interprets Leviticus and other books of the Bible as injunctions against loving people of one's own sex.

Furthermore, King allowed Bayard Rustin, a friend who happened to be openly gay, to serve as one of his closest advisors.  Plus, he when he wrote an advice column for Ebony magazine, he responded in a sensitive (though, not surprisingly, pastoral) way to a letter from a boy who confessed his feelings toward other boys.  Given the time--1958--it was a very tolerant and forward-thinking response.

Still, some insist that King would not have considered LGBT rights the next logical step in the civil rights movement.  One of them is his own daughter, Rev. Bernice King.  In 2005, she led a march her father's grave while calling for a Constitutional ban on gay marriage. During a speech at a church meeting in New Zealand, she said her father "did not take a bullet for gay marriage."

But King's widow, Coretta Scott King, vocally supported gay rights.  One of her closest aides was gay.  (Are you seeing a pattern here?)  Furthermore, the FBI tapped his telephone conversations, and he was one of the most surveilled people on the planet.  Yet no one could find a conversation, sermon, speech, lecture or letter of his that expressed any sort of anti-gay sentiment.

Given what I've seen and read, I think that if MLK had lived longer, he would have made LGBT equality part of his civil-rights platform.  After all, he didn't turn away anyone else whose rights were denied or trampled.  I suspect that, being a preacher from the South in the time in which he lived, he simply didn't think much about LGBT people because, well, they hadn't made it onto his radar yet.  The same could be said for any number of other people of good will from that time.

When You Can Get Away With Murder

Kudos to Kelly Busey of Planet Transgender (one of my "must read" blogs) for posting this story about Fernanda Carrico da Silva, a transvestite who was murdered in Brazil.  

Even though police officers witnessed her killing, no suspect has been captured.

I was able, from my knowledge of Spanish, French and Italian, to understand (more or less) the article in the original Portuguese.  However, I don't think you need to know any of those languages to get the message of its fourth paragraph, which I will render here:

When a parent of a heterosexual family dies, people notice.  When a rich man dies, people rally around him.  For the death of a gay person who has money or is "high society," people weep and gnash their teeth to decry homophobia.

But when a transvestite, a hustler dies, it is no more important than the death of a cockroach.

People sometimes wonder why such things happen in Brazil, a country with the most celebrated transgender or "womanless" beauty pageants. I've never been to Brazil, but I have talked with a few Brazilians.  From what they tell me, Brazilians have a well-earned reputation for partying and celebrating sexuality precisely because it is still, mostly, a conservative Catholic country. Extravagant shows of cross-dressing, ostentatious displays of sexuality and the seeming celebration of the beauty of trans women is, along with the fetishization of drag, confined to a few tightly-defined areas and time frames, such as certain beaches and during Carnival.  From what my Brazilian acquaintances tell me, expressions of sexuality and gender identity that differ from societal norms are not welcome outside those places and times.  

What makes this situation even more precarious for male-to-female transvestites or transsexuals are the prevailing attitudes toward violence men commit against women.  To put it bluntly, men literally get away with murdering women.  In fact, until 1991, it was not even considered a crime when a man killed his wife.  To this day, men who kill their wives still escape prison time or worse by claiming that the wives were unfaithful.  

When such violence is tolerated, you can be sure that people are allowed to do--and get away with--worse against trans women or transvestites.  

The State Of My Commute

From Bike Commuters

This post is a response to a comment Kiyomi made on "The States of Bicycle Commuting", a post on my other blog (Midlife Cycling). 

About ten years ago, I would have turned my nose up at any bike with upright bars.  In fact, about the only kind of bike I'd ride without dropped bars  (like the ones on road-racing bikes) was a mountain bike: I was a fairly active off-road rider and sometimes commuted on off-road bikes.  

I also wouldn't have been caught dead on a bike with an internally geared or coaster brake hub, a steel frame that wasn't chrome-moly (i.e., Tange, Ishiwata or Columbus) or maganese-moly (Reynolds or Vitus) tubing.  And I certainly would not have tainted any of my bikes with--gasp!--a kickstand.

Now, the latter accessory simply couldn't have fit on some of the racing bikes I've had.  But even on the bikes I've had with more relaxed geometry (my off-road, touring and cyclo-cross bikes), there would have been a practical reason not to have a kickstand:  It might not have been a good idea to clamp one onto such bikes, which tend to have thinner tubing than more utilitarian machines.

But, over the past decade or so, my life changed in a few ways.  Some of them had to do, of course, with my gender transition.  When I started, I wanted a women's or mixte bike because, well, they were "women's" bikes.  (At no point, though, did I consider giving up my diamond-framed, a.k.a., "men's" bikes.) Also, I wanted to continue riding to work. In the old days, I used to ride in bike shorts or tights and jerseys/jackets because I didn't want to ride in anything else.  Sometimes I would ride in a pair of khaki or corduroy trousers, depending on the weather, and a button-down shirt to which I could add a tie, vest or jacket (I used to keep those things at work) as needed. I also used to keep a pair of shoes, in case I was too lazy to carry, or forgot, a pair into which I could change from my bike shoes.  

When I started living and working as female, though, I found that I had to be better-dressed than I was when I worked as a male.  (Truthfully, I also wanted to dress better:  In those days, I was still experimenting with different looks).  That meant more time to get dressed.  Also, I'd begun to wear make-up, and I was starting to take more care of my hair.  So, making myself "presentable" for work was taking me at least twice as long as it did when I was working as Nick.

Also, in those days, I would sometimes shower and change in the men's locker room before starting work. Of course, once I started my transition, that was not an option.  I wouldn't have wanted to do that, anyway--I never liked being naked (and vulnerable) in a men's environment.  

As buoyant as I felt when I started my transition, I still wasn't quite ready to change in a women's locker room. I take that back:  If anything, I wanted to shower and get dressed among other women.  But I hadn't yet had my surgery--it would be several years away--and I wasn't ready to deal with the possible repercussions of being met by campus security officers if someone who objected to my being there called them.  

So, I wanted to ride in more or less the same clothes in which I worked.  I was willing to bring a change of shoes, and maybe an accessory or two as well as a couple of cosmetic items. But I didn't want to go through the intricacies of having to, essentially, make myself over once I got to work.

It was around that time that women's and mixte frames started to appeal to me. Some of the commuters I rode in days past were equipped with fenders, usually because I added them.  So fenders were nothing new to me; however, they had more appeal to me when I stared to ride in skirts or even women's pants (which, I found, were more delicate and soiled more easily than men's pants).  I also started to appreciate chainguards.


I also rode a couple of bikes with internally-geared hubs.  Even though I had a three-speed in my pre-adolescent years, I couldn't quite cotton to one--or to a five- or seven-speed internally geared hub. They felt clumsy and inefficient compared to hubs with cassettes, freewheels or fixed cogs.  Plus, at least one never quite shifted right, in spite of the efforts of three mechanics whose work I've always trusted.  

So now I'm commuting on Vera, a Mercian mixte with a lively, pleasant ride. Just for the heck of it, I've ridden her in shorts and enjoyed it, but I can wear just about anything short of a wedding gown (which I don't plan on wearing) and not have to worry about ruining my clothes or being constricted.  

I had been riding her with an upright bar that's a bit like a flipped-over North Road bar. But over the past few months, I've been riding her with a Velo Orange Porteur bar, on which I'm not quite as bent over as I am with my dropped bars, but not quite as upright as on, say, a Raleigh three-speed.  

If you're used to riding lightweight bikes with dropped bars, or even mountain bikes with flat bars, the best way to get a commuter, I think, is to find a bike that has a geometry and ride that's at least somewhat like a bike you currently ride and to change the handlebars and seat, unless the geometry of the bike is such that it will not ride well with those changes.  

Enough about the bikes.  The whole point is to ride--or at least to continue with your journey, wherever and on whatever vehicle it takes. you.

Over Time: A Transformation

In researching something on the Web, I came across a time-lapse video of an Australian's transgender's change from male to female:

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No More Forced Sterilizations In Sweden

Almost a year ago, I wrote about the Swedish law requiring transgender people to be sterilized before changing sexes.

Well, that forty-year-old law was repealed last week.

One result of that law was that many transgender Swedes delayed their sex changes, waiting until they already had children.  Another is that while some people are celebrating the change, others are preparing for a legal battle.

Now, if what I've just described were in the United States, you'd expect me to say that some right-wing religious fundamentalists were going to fight to keep the law on the books, or to outlaw sex changes altogether.  However, the ones who are preparing for the lawsuit are working on behalf of 90 transsexuals who underwent sterilization from 1972, when the law was enacted, until 2011.  During that time, 865 Swedes sought a legal sex change.

Ulrika Westerlund, who heads the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (RFSL) said she is hoping that lawmakers will pass a law outlining damages and prevent a costly and painful legal fight.  She says the RFSL is ready to accept 200,000 Swedish Kronas (about 30,700 USD) for each person who files as a "fair" settlement.