Transgender Employee of Desperate Housewife's Restaurant Attacked

Eva Longoria may one day have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  For now, she has a restaurant--Beso--along the Boulevard.

Vivian Diego was a barista in Beso.  Around 2:15 am on 31 May, she was leaving the restaurant when four men attacked her.  One of them, Nicol Shaknazaryan (Note the last five letters of his surname!) has been arrested.  The others are still at large.  At least the attack was caught on a surveillance tape:




Ms. Diego is transgendered, so the attack is being investigated as a hate crime.  

Now, even if none of the attackers yelled anti-trans slurs or say that they were motivated by the fact she's trans, I'd still say it's a hate crime.  After all, when four men attack a woman--trans or otherwise--what is it but hate against women, or against anybody?

Whatever happens to them, I hope Ms. Diego recovers from her wounds, both physical and psychological.  Of course, the latter ones will take much longer to heal.

Protections In The Blue Hen State

Delaware's license plates refer to it as "The First State".

It was indeed the first to ratify the Constitution, on 7 December 1787.  

Lately, it hasn't been first at many things.  However, it's ahead of most other states on two issues that matter.

Not long ago, it became the 11th state to legalize same-sex marriage. Now Governor Jack Markell has signed legislation that would outlaw discrimination based on gender identity in housing, employment, insurance and public accommodations.  The Blue Hen State thus became the 17th state to pass such legislation.

The State's Senate passed the bill, but the House didn't until the bill was amended.  After language specifying how a person could establish his or her gender identity, and to prevent people from using "gender identity" as an excuse to enter an opposite-sex changing area for an "improper purpose", 11 of 21 House members voted for the bill Governor Markell signed.

Now we have just 33 more to go!

   

Faux Humor About Trans People

Almost everyone I know whose politics are anywhere to the left of David Duke's complains about, or scoffs at, Faux News.

If you've been reading this blog, you know that Faux News is known to most of the world as Fox News.  Most of my work colleagues, friends and acquaintances abhor its sensationalism as well as its to-the-right-of-Genghis-Khan political views.  

But us trans-folk have all the more reason to dislike Faux:  It doesn't like us.  Or, more precisely, it foments hate against us. 

In the last thirty years or so, no other news outlet anywhere in the US could have gotten away with making such mean-spirited and bullying comments as Faux commentators make about trans people.  Perhaps the worst part is that their crass, mean-spirited jokes about us are spontaneous and unscripted, which reveals the level of hate folks like Brian Kilmeade, Steve Doocy and Gretchen Carlson actually harbor:


   

There's plenty more hate where that came from.  You can find a few samples here.

Trans Man Runs For New York City Council

Could Mel Wymore become the next City Council representative from the Upper West Side?

He seems to have the credentials to be elected, or at least to ensure a good run:  He's a very well-respected member of his community board who's active in a number of other community affairs.  And, he's a well-educated, successful professional.

Oh, and one other thing:  He used to be named Melanie.

Yes, he lived as a woman and lived through the narratives many of us had to endure, all in the hope of reconciling ourselves.  He worked at an aerospace company in Arizona but moved to New York for a relationship that became a marriage.  However, at age 35, he realized something was "missing" and came out as a lesbian.  A decade later, in spite of his reluctance to go through another "famliy-disrupting, life-changing transition", he began surgical and other changes to live as a man.

While most of his colleagues and family accepted his transition, there were some alienating or simply awkward moments.  They made him, he said, more determined to fight for the disabled and other people who are excluded.

Of course, I am happy that Mel has chosen to run in his district's Democratic Party primary for the City Council seat.  However, I have to wonder how his story might have been different if the orders of "Melanie" and "Mel", and "F" and "M" had been reversed in his life.

Half Are Without A Home

Chances are, you've heard of Covenant House. It operates shelters in 22 cities (including New York, where I live) that aim not only to get and keep teenagers off the streets, but to help them overcome some of the things that render them homeless.  Those things include, of course, drug addiction and mental health problems. But, as the folks at CH have recognized, those problems are usually just the symptoms: The kids run away from home because they've been bullied or experience abuse or other kinds of violence at home.   Or, they are kicked out of their homes for "coming out".  And, of course, such young people--with no credentials or marketable skills, or any means of support--too often turn to drugs and sex work, among other things.

Jake Finney, the anti-violence project manager at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, is very familiar with his city's Covenant House.  Take a guess at how many of its residents are transgendered.

All right, I'll tell you:  Half.  Yes, fifty percent.  One in two.

Now, what percentage of the US population is transgender?  Depending on whom you believe, it's anywhere from 0.3 to one percent of the population:  In other words, anywhere from one in a hundred to one in three hundred thirty. 

To put it another way, a resident of Covenant House-Los Angeles is fifty to a hundred sixty times more likely to be transgendered than someone in the larger population.  

Of course, we all know that it's difficult to get accurate numbers for anything pertaining to transgender people. Part of that has to do with how trans people are defined, but equally important is the fact that many of us live (as I did) in our birth genders for much or all of our lives.  Also, many trans people--such as the ones who become homeless--"fall off the grid."

Documenting Us

Nearly all of us who are gender-variant have faced, at one time or another, this dilemma.

We apply for a job, to school or for benefits.  We have been taking hormones, living by the gender of our minds and spirits and have, in various ways, changed our appearance, style of dress and demeanor to reflect that gender.  And we've changed our names.

So we have driver's licences, passports and other IDs with our new names and photos of ourselves.  But there's one problem:  the "M" or "F" box still reflects what we presented to the world before our changes.

If we're lucky, the person who asked for our documents is confused.  If we're not, we face ridicule, discrimination and even violence. Either way, we've been "outed" and are forced to explain our stories to audiences that can be none-too-sympathetic.

A cisgender person does not have to so explain him or herself to go to school, get a job or benefits or even to rent or test-drive a car.  So why should we be expected to do that?

At least the author of this article seemed to understand, to some degree, our dilemma.  But the comments were full of people trying to sound snarky but who ended up looking stupid and/or hateful. I mean, who changes his or her gender to commit identity fraud, hijack planes or commit other crimes.  Because there is a "paper trail" (or, perhaps, digital footprint) of our transition, we would be easier to track than most other people.

Some states and municipalities--including, thankfully, the ones in which I live--have come to understand what I've just said, and have changed policies accordingly.  But there are still three states--Idaho, Tennessee and Ohio--that won't change the gender on a birth certificate, even after a person has had gender reassignment surgery. 

I can see that progress has been made even during the time of my own transition.  But, as I can also see, there is still much to be done.    

Google Searches That Dare Not Speak Their Names

Long, long ago, and far away, I took Psychology.   I know I've forgotten much of it, but I can tell you at least one of its basic principles:  When you forbid something, people want it--or are at least curious about it.  That, of course, makes it profitable for someone.

How is it that the "soldiers", if you will, in the War On Drugs don't understand something so basic?  Most of them have college degrees and, I would assume, took Psych 101:  Probably the only course more college students take is English Composition, as nearly every college requires it.

But I digress.  Once you are aware of the basic psychological principle I've just mentioned, a news story I saw today makes perfect sense.

Here it is:  According to studies--and nearly every human rights organization--Nigeria and Pakistan rate at or near the top of the list of homophobic countries.  At any rate, they have some of the most draconian legislation against same-sex relationships and against people living in, or even expressing the characteristics of, the gender to which they were not assigned at birth.  

Yet Pakistan is "by volume the world leader for Google searches for the terms "shemale sex," "teen anal sex" and "man fucking man", according to a Google Trends report.   I find it interesting, to say the least, that "shemale" comes up so often in searches from Pakistan.

Both Pakistan and Nigeria rate in the top five for searches of "anal sex pics" and "gay sex pics".  Kenya, another notoriously anti-gay nation, rates first in  both categories.

The Huffington Post article in which I first encountered the story attributed such high volumes of LGBT-related searches in those countries to the fact that in those countries, most LGBT people are--not surprisingly--in the closet.  Also, the article alluded to the fact that because homosexuality is not discussed or is denied in the countries I've mentioned, many men have sex with other men--and seek out gay porn on the Internet--without considering themselves gay. That phenomenon seems like a mirror-image of the "down low" in the African-American community.

While "love that dare not speak its name" probably has much to do with the high level of gay and transsexual porn searches on Google in Pakistan, Kenya and Nigeria, I somehow don't think that it explains all of the searches, as the article seems to imply.  As I mentioned, whenever something is forbidden, the people to whom it is forbidden will often develop a fascination, even an obsession, with it.  I think now of the news dealer in Park Slope, where I used to live, who sold porn videos.  Although a lot of lesbians were living in the neighborhood back then (the 1990's), he couldn't recall one buying lesbian porn. "The men--the straight ones, I think--buy it all." 

When I thought about it, it made perfect sense.  Probably nothing is more "off-limits" to a straight man than two women having sex.  Most straight men will never see it, so it is left to the realm of their fantasies.  And, to admit a fascination with it to anyone but another straight man was--and, to some degree still is--a cultural taboo.  

To be so obsessed with such a sexual fantasy ultimately renders the object of obsession as a lurid fascination.  The people involved in such a fantasy, whether they are lesbians, transsexuals or cross-dressers, become freaks--and, thus, all the more an object of obsession--in the mind of the one holding the fantasy.

When you think of it, pornography is a culture's freak show, one that contains whatever is forbidden in the families, communities or societies of the people who look at it.  If I were to meet that newsdealer today, I might tell him that lesbian porn really isn't porn at all for lesbians--or, at any rate, it's nothing more than men's fantasies about what women do when they enter a room and close the door.  And, what can pornography be for straight people but other people--whether they're straight, gay or bi; cis- or trans-gender--doing whatever they can't or won't do in their relationships?

Really, finding out that there are so many LGBT-related Google searches in Pakistan, Nigeria and Kenya is no more surprising than having a woman whom men used to pay for S&M tell me that some of her most frequent customers were clergymen and other men who were considered "pillars" of their communities and had to keep up squeaky-clean reputations. 

William Blake put it best in his "Songs of Experience":

Prisons are built from stones of law,
Brothels from bricks of religion. 

  
 

Trans-Positive Images From The Lost Generation

After yesterday's post, I thought today's should be something more positive and hopeful.

It just happens that someone passed along something I never even would have imagined:  something trans-positive from the era of the Lost Generation of Transgenders.

Even more interesting, it's anime.  

I love the way it ends.

Who Hates The Sin But Loves The Sinner?

Zack Ford posed the Question of the Year (or Pride Month, anyway) in his recent Think Progress article.

Actually, he didn't so much pose a question as he juxtaposed two different responses to the same sort of crime.

Back in August, a security guard was shot at the Family Research Council.  Floyd Corkins II has been convicted and will be sentenced in July.  

Of course, nearly everyone who paid attention was outraged.  Among the leaders in condemning the crime a coalition of LGBT organizations, including GLAAD and SAGE.  They strongly condemned the violence and wished a full recovery to the victim.

On the other hand, last month someone claiming to be the Newtown gunman hurled homophobic slurs at Mark Carson and chased him to the Papaya King restaurant on West 8th Street and Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village.  There, the gunman shot Carson point-blank in his face.  At Beth Israel Hospital, Mark Carson was pronounced dead on arrival.

Two weeks ago, I volunteered in the Anti-Violence Project's outreach in front of that very restaurant.  People who live in or frequent the neighborhood seemed shell-shocked; I and my outreach partner were explaining to tourists and others who don't spend a lot of time in the Village that, in some ways, the neighborhood is less safe than others for LGBT people.  Just as hunters go to the swamp or woods or wherever they can expect to find whatever they're hunting, haters--often fueled by volatile combinations of testosterone and alcohol (Trust me, I know of whence I speak!)--go to the Village and Chelse and other places where they know they'll find LGBT people to harass, beat or kill.

All the time my partner and I were handing out flyers and collecting signatures and e-mail addresses, I was bracing myself for someone to make a comment or hurl an object.  I guess nobody "read" me or my partner, a lesbian who readily "passes" as straight, because neither of us encountered any bigotry.  (And, oh, my partner in "crime" is black.)  

I now have a theory as to why we lucked out:  Haters are almost always cowards. And, for better or worse, most aren't as tone-deaf as those who called Newtown residents to enroll members and solicit donations weeks after the mass shooting there.

Instead, the haters expressed themselves through their silence.  Not one conservative organization--including any that claims to be "Christian"--denounced Mark Carson's murder.  At least, they were silent about it until Daily Kos blogger Mark Wooledge produced an image critical of anti-gay movements and it went viral. 

When conservatives finally commented on Carson's killing, they watered down their condemnations, as Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage did,  by saying that it wasn't connected to the debate about "redefining" marriage--which, of course, caused some people to associate the two. He also took pains to say that opponents of same-sex marriage are "equally persecuted."  Or else, in their condemnations, they compared Carson's death to the Newtown tragedy. The only connection between the two is that a gun was used; the motives of the shooters were entirely different.  What happened in Newtown is indeed a tragedy, but it cannot be usefully compared to Carson's death any more than the Holocaust can be compared to the Third Passage.

In other words, the conservative groups who finally condemned the violence did so only to advance their own views about marriage and the family.  Other conservative groups and commentators--that is, the ones who bothered to say anything--were less charitable.  A few even praised the shooter for getting rid of another "abomination".

In contrast, the LGBT groups who condemned the shooting at the Family Research Council made no mention of the group's views--some of which include outright homophobia--and attempts to stop the "redefinition" of marriage.  I'm not here to suggest that LGBT people are better than than the religious (or simply far) right:  Why would I do a thing like that?  

Seriously, I think the difference in responses can be explained this way:  At least some members of LGBT organizations have been the victims of hate crimes, some of them violent.  And, most of us have, at one time or another, experienced discrimination in employment, housing, education or other areas, or have simply experienced bigotry and hatred (as with people who want nothing more to do with us when they learn that we are L, G, B or T).  On the other hand, I think it's pretty safe to say that almost no conservative has been the victim of a hate crime--at least, not a crime motivated by someone's hatred of his or her conservativism.  I also think we can pretty fairly assume that many have never experienced any sort of discrimination against them as a result of their political and social views.  Higher education (at least in certain segments) might be one of the few areas in which being a conservative could hurt their chances of hiring or promotion--and then only if they express their views openly.

I Don't Have Any Problem With Ultrasound

"I don't have any problem with ultrasound."

Of course you wouldn't, Scott Walker.

After all, your office lends you authority on a whole variety of topics.  Being the Governor of Wisconsin, you have responsibility for the well-being of 2,864,586 women and girls.  Surely, you have learned everything one can about what is medically necessary--or just plain good--for them.  So, of course, you support a bill that would require women seeking abortions to undergo ultrasound.  

With all due respect, I would like to know how you came upon such knowledge.  Did you read medical journals?  Or did you do some--how can I say this?--field research?

If you did, you realize that for some women, mostly those in their first trimester of pregnancy--which, of course, is when women usually seek abortions--a transvaginal probe is necessary in order to perform the ultrasound.

Being a man, I suppose you could be forgiven for not knowing that--or what it's like to have anything harder than human flesh thrust into you.  Sometimes even flesh hurts, so you can only imagine what metal or hard plastic are like.

That's the thing, Mr. Governor:  You can only imagine.  Again, I do not want to excoriate you for that:  After all, it has to do with the way you're put together.    But since you can imagine, I'm asking you to do so.  If you can't imagine how it feels, imagine such an object stuck into your wife, your daughter, your mother.  

You don't want to imagine that?  I understand.  All the more reason to re-think your position on the bill.  Now, I know that you're a conservative, so I can understand (but not agree with) your desire to close one of your state's last remaining abortion clinics.  But, please, don't confuse conservativism--a perfectly respectable philosophy--with misogyny.  

And please, whatever you do, learn as much as you can about medical issues before passing laws on them.  Even if your mother, wife or daughter have never had--and never will have--an abortion, think about the transvaginal probe.  Better yet, try to imagine how it would feel.

Killer of Trans College Student Gets 30 Years

Every Transgender Day of Remembrance event I've attended has included a reading of the names of people who were killed for their gender identity or expression.  Usually, there is a procession to a lectern or microphone, and each person reads the name of one victim, the way he or she was killed (or where his or her body was found) and, sometimes, whether or not the perpetrator was caught.

No matter how many times I participate in those readings, I'm always shocked at just how brutal hate-fueled murders of transgender people are.  I remember reading the name of one victim who was shot and stabbed multiple times.  And then her body was burned.  

But, along with the shock I experience on relaying the brutality of their murders, I feel anger over how too many of those murders are treated.  The killer of the victim I mentioned received, if I recall correctly, a one-year susupended sentence.  Still, that's more justice than a lot of other murdered trans people get:  I've heard of too many cases in which the authorities didn't bother to investigate at all, or simply dismissed the killing as the result of a "lover's quarrel" or as a suicide.

So, it actually seems something like justice when the killer of a young trans person gets a 30-year sentence and is required to serve 80 percent of that sentence before becoming eligible for release.  

That was the sentence meted out to Virgin Islands native Sama Quinland for killing transgender college student DeAndre N. Fulton-Smith in South Carolina. Quinland stabbed her 22 times and shot her twice in the head. 

As awful as that killing was, it's not even close to being the most brutal murder of a trans person.  On the other hand, as I mentioned, Quinland got a longer prison sentence than most killers of trans people.  Both facts are simply outrageous.

What Nobody Planned

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

ROBINSON HALL

CAMBRIDGE 33, MASSACHUSETTS

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN DEPARTMENT OF CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING

June 21, 1961

Mrs. Alvin Richman

3055 16th Street, NW.

Washington 11, D. C.

Dear Mrs. Richman:

Although we have not yet received your official transcript from Brandeis, on the basis of your letters of recommendation there would seem to be a possibility of your admission to the Department of City and Regional Planning even at this date.

However -- to speak directly -- our experience, even with brilliant students, has been that married women find it difficult to carry out careers in planning, and hence tend to have some feeling of waste about the time and effort spent in professonal education. (This is, of course, true of almost all graduate professional studies.)

Therefore, for your own benefit, and to aid us in coming to a final decision, could you kindly write us a page or two at your earliest convenience indicating specifically how you might plan to combine a professional life in city planning with your responsibilities to your husband and a possible future family?

Sincerely yours,

William A. Doebele, Jr.

Assistant Professor 

 for the Department

*******************************************

 

"Mrs. Alvin" is, in fact, Phyllis.  She was the Washington Post's restaurant critic from 1976 until 2000.  

Ms. Richman also managed to write books about food--including "food mysteries" as well as numerous articles on other topics for other publications.  And, oh yeah, she raised three kids, who are successful professional who report fulfilling lives.

But, as you can see, that was not what she envisioned in 1961.  She wanted a career in urban planning. A few years later, she would follow her husband when he got a job teaching political science at Purdue University.  She thought about enrolling in that school's urban planning program, but it was part of the engineering school.  Thus, the program emphasized things like land use and architecture. But Ms. Richman opted against it because she was more interested in people and the impact that urban planning has on our lives. 

She would, like many ambitious, intelligent women of her time, fashion a career around the "duties" to which Professor Doebele alluded in his letter.  

Fifty-two years after receiving that letter, she wrote back to Professor Doebele, who taught at Havard until 1997.  And he responded to her.  To be fair, he said he wouldn't write such a letter today, though he defended having written it.

I chose to write about Ms. Richman's story because, while interesting in its own right, it's also relevant now, as more states and countries are legalizing same-sex marriage and passing laws (or amending laws currently on the books) to ban discrimination based on gender identity, expression, history or appearance.  These things simply would not be happening were it not for the gains that women have made in the workplace, education and other areas of life.  While, as Professor Doebele says, things are "far from perfect," they are better.  And the fact that women are still fighting and making gains offers us lessons in the struggle for LGBT--and especially transgender--equality.

(You can see a copy of the original letter here.)