Lifting The Ban: Will It Fly?

The day when transgenders can serve in the US Armed Forces seems to be drawing closer.  Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James says as much.  The ban on transgender people in the military "is likely to come under review in the next year or so," she says.  "Times change."

When asked whether dropping the ban will affect military readiness, she had this to say:  "From my point of view, anyone who is capable of accomplishing the job should be able to serve."

While lesbians, gays and bisexuals were able to "fly under the radar" (pun intended) during the days of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", transgenders did not have such an option.  Even those who'd already had the surgery and were living full-time in the gender of their minds and spirits are not allowed to enlist; the military could find such information easily enough even if would-be enlistees did not disclose it themselves.  And, of course, declaring one's self trans and starting a gender transition while in uniform is grounds for being discharged, most likely dishonorably.

Somehow I'm not surprised that Ms. James is the first secretary of a branch of the Armed Forces to voice support for transgenders joining the military.  For one thing, of the twenty-three people who have held her current position, she is only the second woman.    She is also the only female secretary of any branch of the armed forces.




Also, I think her statements might be motivated by the possibility that, of all of the branches of the Armed Forces, the Air Force could benefit most from allowing transgenders to join.  We (I mean transgenders) are a community of extremes:  We have the highest levels of kids who drop out of school because they were bullied--and the unemployment and homelessness that too often result from it-- but a higher percentage of us than of the general population earn college degrees.  The Air Force was probably the first of all branches to recruit significant numbers of people with bachelor's or higher degrees; if I'm not mistaken, one has to have a college degree in order to fly.  And, contrary to some commonly-held stereotypes, many trans people have training, or work, in technical and scientific fields.  It just happens that the AF is more dependent on people with scientific and technological skill than any other branch of service.

Whether or not that was her motivation, I applaud Ms. James for making her statement.  Although I don't generally encourage people to join the military, it is a part of our world and offers one of the few opportunities for stable employment and advancement to many young people from less-than-privileged backgrounds.  And there are trans people, just as there are other people, who want to serve their country and believe that joining the military is the best way to do so.

Now You Don't Need Surgery To Change Your Birth Certificate (At Least, Here In NYC)

I have some good news today:  Here in New York City, a person won't need to have gender-reassignment surgery to have the gender changed on his or her birth certificate.

Yesterday, the City Council voted 39-5 (with three abstensions) to pass a bill which does away with the requirement for surgery.  Now, all a trans person needs is for one of a long list of health- and social-service providers to certify that he or she identifies with a gender other than the one on his or her birth certificate.  This policy is said to be one of the most liberal in the United States.

What makes this particularly good news here in NYC is that we have a large (or, at least, larger than just about anywhere else) population of poor and homeless trans people, especially youths, who need the services provided by city and state agencies, not to mention medical care.  Too often, they can't access those services because their IDs (which usually indicate the same gender and name as their birth certificates) don't match up with what is seen by the receptionist, clerk or other person to whom that ID is presented.  Or, too often, such trans folk (again, especially youths) don't have ID at all.

Also, most people don't realize that our ID dilemma makes us more vulnerable to identity theft and other kinds of fraud committed in our name.  Nobody seems to have statistics on this matter, but I would venture that it happens to us more often than most people realize--and, contrary to a common perception, far more often than we commit fraud to get ID with our true genders and the names by which we identify ourselves.

I think most of us knew that, sooner or later, the surgery requirement would be scrapped.  What made the process perhaps a bit longer and more arduous than it is in some other places is that here in NYC, birth certificates are issued by the Department of Health and Mental Hygeine.  It's a bit more difficult to pass legislation that mandates their policies than it is to tell a court or department of vital records (the entities that issue birth certificates in most places) what to do.

Don't Talk To Me About "Bulding Bridges" With The Police

Now that thug, I mean NYPD Officer,Daniel Pantaleo got away with murder, I mean was acquitted by a grand jury, I don't want to hear anything more about improving the transgender (or lesbian or gay or any other) community's relations with police.  It's simply not possible. 

So you think I'm being extremist and incendiary.  Well a report from Al-Jezeera---Yes, Al-Jazeera--provides confirmation of something I've been saying for years:  The cops profile trans people.  I'm sure the NYPD has a file on me as I write this.  And I'm sure they put something in it that said I was complicit in the abuse I reported to them two years ago, or at the time I was stopped-and-frisked.


Andrea Ritchie, an attorney specializing in police misconduct says, "I think most people are familiar with racial profiling.  But I think people are less familiar with how gender is really central to policing in the United States."   It's based, she elaborates, on expectations of "how women are supposed to look, how men are supposed to look, how women are supposed to act and how men are supposed to look".  

When people don't conform to those expectations, the police "often read that as disorder and perceive that person as already disorderly, already suspicious and already prone to violence," she says.

In other words, cops expect us to be criminals.  And, as I discovered, they simply can't deal with it when they realize one of us isn't.  

What exacerbates the gender profiling is that poverty and homelessness are considered criminal acts, rather than states into which too many of trans people fall because of bigotry or because they ran away from home rather than endure more beatings and other abuse from classmates and family members and thus didn't get the education or skills necessary for the workplace.

Sometimes simply being in the path of the cops means that you will get harassed, arrested, beaten or worse.  As Dean Spade, an attorney and one of the founders of the Sylvia Rivera Law Projects put it, being trans means "you're more likely to be poor and on the street, which puts you in the path of police."

A black man I know was explaining to me that he learned, at an early age, that if he's pulled over, he should turn on the light inside the car and put his hands on the steering wheel--and make sure his license is on the dashboard.  "The light is so they can see that no one is in the back seat," he explained "and that my hands are on the dashboard.  And the license is where they can see it, so they don't get anxious about me reaching into the glove compartment."

He insists that such actions are necessary to ensure that worse things don't happen.  But law-abiding young black men have been doing such things for a long time, and it seems that the police only continue and amplify their harassment.  And he, whether he realizes it or not, has internalized the notion that he is a criminal until he proves himself otherwise.

I don't want to see things come to that for trans people.  If I am not doing anything criminal or even merely offensive,I should be left alone.  And if I am being victimized, I should be helped. My expereinces with the police have shown me that they seem to think otherwise and that, if anything, they are turning the fact that I do, mostly, what most people do every day and the fact that I went to them for help as reasons why I am a potential criminal.  I cannot count such people as allies, as people with whom I--or any LGBT person--should cooperate.

Eric Garner's Killer Not Indicted; Why I Am Upset But Not Surprised

As you've probably heard by now, a grand jury in Staten Island decided not indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.

Almost anyone who's seen the video of the incident can't understand how the jury came to such a conclusion.  If you know anything about Staten Island, it's the most suburban of New York City's boroughs. Among the island's 472,621 residents (out of 8.406 million in all of New York City) are many NYPD officers. Even if none were uniformed men or women, there was probably more sympathy for the police in that jury than there would be in a group of jurors in, say, the Bronx.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the middle-class and affluent white residents, whether or not they are members of the NYPD, come into little or no contact with the island's black and Hispanic residents, almost all of whom live in a couple of neighborhoods between the Bayonne Bridge and the former Naval Station in Stapleton.  Standards of political correctness seem to fall precipitously as one disembarks from the Ferry in St. George or descends from the arc of the Bayonne, Verrazano or Goethals Bridge. 


To put it bluntly, white residents do not see non-whites as human being; they see people of color as a plague that, if unchecked, will spread across their island.  The people of color, penned up in the projects, see police officers as members of an occupying army employed, commanded--and, to a large degree, staffed by whites, and therefore do not trust them.

Given my own experience with the police, I can understand that distrust very, very well.  Having been harassed and bullied by cops on the street and in a precinct house (the latter when I went to report the abuse I was experiencing from Dominick), I know that the men (and, sadly, women) in uniform will not do anything to ensure my safety, let alone my rights.  I know that none would hesitate to use force against me, whether or not I violated any laws, never mind whether I'm threat to anyone's safety.  

In brief, I cannot see the police as part of a system that defends or ensures justice--at least not for me.  They are little more than the bodyguards of the wealthy and powerful, the bouncers hired to push me out of sight whether or not I was intruding or in anyone's way.  In such a system, I and other trans people are always in danger, whether or not we "pass".  Being in danger destroys your ability to trust, especially those who are entrusted with force that can be turned against you for no reason.

Nothing On Top

When I was "cross-dressing"--which is to say, when I was dressing for the gender of my mind and spirit, the one in which I now live my life--I experimented with all kinds of clothing, shoes and accessories. 

But, to use a familiar (and possibly trite) metaphor in its completely literal sense, I didn't try on very many hats.  Actually, I hardly ever wore hats at all, and rarely wear them today.  For that matter, I almost never wore hats while I lived as male.

I guess I'm a product of my place and time:  Hats have never been an important fashion accessory during my lifetime.  In fact, I have a hard time wrapping my head around (pun intended) the notion that a proper gentleman or lady did not leave his or her home without some item of millinery adorning his or her head.

In other words, I wasn't around to see something like this:

This photo appeared today on another one of my favorite non-bike blogs: Old Picture of the Day.

So Funny I Forgot To Laugh

But It's Not A Same Sex Marriage....

"Gay lovebirds Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza on Saturday when they spiced their festive season with an engagement ceremony (chinkhoswe), the first recorded public activity for homosexuals in the country."

The country in question was Malawi, one of 38 African nations in which homosexuality is illegal.  In such an environment, the story about the "gay lovebirds" could amount to a death warrant.  People rushed out to see the ceremony--or, more precisely, to gawk and jeer at Chimbalanga, who lives as a woman and was, at the time, a cook and cleaner at the Mankhoma Lodge.

That was nearly five years ago.  The lodge was owned by a prominent local politician, Jean Kamphale, who offered it as a venue for the ceremony.  Although people gossiped about Chimbalanga, Kamphale defended her as diligent and hardworking.  Later, Kamphale offered her and Monjeza a small house behind the lodge to live in and a loan for their festivities.  The pastor of a local Pentecostal church where Chimbalanga was a chorister agreed to preside.  But, two days later, she and Monjeza were arrested for "carnal knowledge against the order of nature", a remnant of the old British penal code.  For their offense, they were sentenced to 14 years of hard labor.

During the trial, both Kamphale and the pastor testified that Chimbalanga had deceived them:  She explained away her male features by saying she'd been born a girl but had been bewitched as a child.  When you think about it, such an explanation is close to what many of us feel until we "come out".

Amnesty International--one of the few organizations I wholeheartedly endorse--took up Chimbalanga's case, calling her a "prisoner of conscience.  As a result Bingu wa Mutharika, who was then Malawi's president, pardoned her and Monjeza.  Then, Amnesty International brought Chimbalanga to South Africa, where she now lives.

While she is in the best African country for LGBT equality, life is still far from easy for her.  Her Amnesty International grant will soon run out and, in spite of lessons, she still doesn't speak English well enough to get work.   And, as we all know, enlightened laws do not guarantee enlightened people:  She still endures taunts and other kinds of abuse.   But the attention her case has received sheds a lot of light on the dire situation so many LGB's--and especially T's--face in much of the world.

What Was That About Bathrooms?

As I've mentioned in other posts--as well as a piece I wrote in The Huffington Post--it seems that every time a city, state, country or workplace is about to enact (or even talk about) a law or policy that would allow us the same rights and protections everyone else enjoys, someone brings up bathrooms.  Such a person expresses his or her transphobia by whipping up fears that guys will dress like girls so they can go into women's bathrooms and peek at our privates.

I've actually asked such people whether they know of any instance in which such a thing happened.  They change the subject or get angry, as if I'm advocating rape.  But I have yet to hear of any incident like the ones they fear.   In my experience cross-dressers--let alone trans people--are in bathrooms for the same reasons most people use them:  We take care of business and, perhaps, fix our hair, makeup or clothing.  And, if we enter with someone we know, we might chat or gossip.

On the other hand, plenty of trans women--and men--have been assaulted in bathrooms.  A trans woman in Washington DC is one of the latest victims.   She was attacked in a restaurant in Dupont Circle, in the northwestern part of the city.

 

Post #1500. Thank You For Reading

Today this blog reaches another milestone:  Post #1500.  

When I started this blog, a year before my surgery, I had no idea of how many posts I would write or how long I would keep this site later.  Now I'm here, more than six years after my first post, and five after my surgery.  And my other blog, Midlife Cycling, is, in a way, a spin-off of this one.

I have thought about winding this blog down. But I told someone about it last week, and she exhorted me to keep it going.  I will: I just don't know how often I'll post.  But I don't think I'll run out of material, whether from my own life and from the world of transgender--as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and otherwise gender-variant--life, politics, art, literature, health care, education and other areas.

Thank you for reading!

FDA Panel To Discuss Lifting Ban On Blood Donations

One interesting irony in my transition came about two years into it.  There was a blood drive in the college in which I was teaching at the time.  I'd donated at other drives in other workplaces, so I had no qualms about doing so again.  Besides, colleagues were also giving theirs.

I knew there was a ban against gay men donating, but I didn't know what, if any, rules were in place for trans women on hormones.  The screening nurse didn't get that far:  One of the first questions she asked was whether I'd traveled abroad within, if I recall correctly, the previous year. 

I nodded, and she shook her head.  "I'm sorry, you can't donate.  She even showed me the relevant passage in the policy about donors.  

Oh well, I thought.  I haven't tried to donate since then; maybe I will one day, if I'm allowed.

What got me to thinking about that was hearing that a panel of FDA advisors is meeting next week to consider lifting the ban on blood donations from gay men.  The prohibition was enacted more than three decades ago, as AIDS outbreaks were rapidly turning into a worldwide epidemic.

The American Red Cross and America's Blood Centers, the organizations that sponsor most blood drives in the US, say that the ban has no scientific or medical rationale. 

The FDA is not required to follow the advisors' recommendations, and those in the know say that the ban probably won't be lifted.  However, the word on the street in Washington says that current policy would be amended so men could donate only if they haven't had sex with other men within the past year. 

A Rainbow Hand Turkey?

If you grew up in the US, you probably made "hand turkeys" for Thanksgiving.  If you still make them, don't worry:  I'll keep our secret! ;-)

If you grew up in my generation, you probably were in the closet at the age when you were making "hand turkeys"--and possibly long after that.  So you did things the way your straight cisgender classmates, friends, family members and teachers did them.

If you'd been "out", would your "hand turkey" have been different?  Hmm....

From Gay In The Berkshires

Or maybe it would've looked like this:

From Affirmation

Happy Thanksgiving!

On Immigration, Obama Helps Everyone But Us

We've all heard that "politics make strange bedfellows."

Well, even with that in mind, it's really strange to see the TEA party and LGBT people upset with President Obama over the same issue: specifically, the immigration plan he announced last week.

Of course, our objections are not the same as those of Mitch McConnell and his acolytes.  They think Obama said "Let 'em all in!" In contrast, some of us--or those we love--could be kept from entering or returning to the US, or from living without fear of losing our jobs, places of residence and the communities we've joined or made for ourselves.

One part of Obama's plan calls for granting short-term deferred action and working rights to parents of US citizens and legal permanent residents who have been in this country for at least five years.  While that is laudable, it also fails to take into account that undocumented LGBT immigrants are far less likely, due to marriage and adoption laws, to have children who are US citizens.  Moreover, many LGBT people have close, and even critical, relationships with nieces, nephews and other extended family members who are not considered in the plan.

In other words, this part of the plan devalues LGBT family relationships, whether or not that is Obama's intention.

Another part of the plan that doesn't take such relationships into consideration is the one calling for provisional waivers of unlawful presence to include the spouses, sons and daughters of lawful permanent residents and the sons and daughters of US citizens.

Aside from its failure to consider LGBT family relationships, the plan also doesn't acknowledge that some LGBT asylum-seekers are fleeing persecution, violence and even the threat of death in their native countries.  It also doesn't take into account that LGBT immigrants are fifteen times as likely as other immigrants to be sexually assaulted in detention centers.

Many LGBT people heard Obama's promise to champion our causes and voted for him.  At times, he has lived up to that pledge.  But this time, he's dropped the ball--and I'm not talking about the one on the court.

Aggravated Homophobia

Even by the standards of a region not known for its hospitability to LGBT people, Gambia stands out for its official homophobia.

Last month, the West African nation's president approved a law mandating life imprisonment for some homosexual acts. 

The US State Department, among other organizations, has condemned President Yahya Jammeh's action. They also "expressed concern" about the arrests of four men, nine women and a 17-year-old boy. According to Amnesty International, Gambian forces beat the suspects and threatened them with rape if they didn't confess. . 

Upon reading that, I couldn't help but to wonder whether male soldiers were threatening the male suspects with rape. Now that's an interesting way to get them to confess to homosexual acts, don't you think?

Before the law was passed, homosexual acts by men or women were punishable by up to 14 years in prison. In a perverse way, Gambia can be said to be a paragon of gender equality in that part of the world: In some neighboring countries, as well as some in other parts of the world, male homosexual acts are punished, but sexual acts between two women are not. ? And, President Jammeh might even claim that his country is protecting the vulnerable. Some of the acts punishable by life imprisonment are classified as "aggravated homosexuality". They include acts of homosexuality with people who are disabled, drugged or under 18. The term also applies to suspects who are parents, guardians or other authority figures over the person with whom he or she engages in same-sex practices.?

I'd love to know whether there is such a provision for people who have sex with members of the opposite gender who are disabled, drugged, under 18 or who are wards of the accused.

The term and definition of "aggravated homosexuality" was adopted from Ugandan law. Is there a "race to the bottom" in the human rights sweepstakes of Africa, or something?

A Female Cop Who Started To Live As A Man

Even though it's right in the middle--the capital, no less--of one of the most Republican states in the US, Austin is often described as one of the most "progressive" cities in the United States.  I have never been there, so I only know what I've heard and read about it--which includes claims that it's also the most segregated city in Texas.  That doesn't surprise me, as the skin colors in "progressive" or "liberal" enclaves tend to run from Golden Neutral to Alabaster.

Whatever the truth about Austin's community mindset, the city should be lauded for this:  It now has its first transgender police officer.  Greg Abbnik joined the force ten years ago.  For most of those ten years, Greg was known to fellow officers, and the community, as Emily.  

Others may hate it, but I just loved this sentence from the KXAN report:  "Joining as a woman, it wasn't until this year that he says he really started living".  

The italics in that sentence.  But my congratulations to Senior Officer Abbnik are.

Buried In The Wrong Gender

Ask any transgender person what his or her greatest fears are in this life, and you will probably hear about being slandered, harrassed, beaten, fired or evicted--and of losing longtime relationships with family members, friends and colleagues-- simply for being who he or she is.  

I have experienced all of those things.  So have many other trans people.  I am fortunate in that I am alive to tell about them.

Which leads me to another great fear many trans people have:  What will be done with, or to, us in death.  Even if we have been stripped of all of your dignity when we are alive, we can be deprived of whatever is accorded to other people in death.  At least, that is what can happen in most states if we change our names, take hormones and live and work in the gender of our mind and spirits but, for whatever reasons, don't undergo the surgery that makes us members of that gender in the eyes of most people and the law of most places.

That is what happened to Idaho trans woman Jennifer Gable.  Last month, she suddenly died from an aneurysm.  That was shocking enough to those who loved her, but what happened next was even more stunning:  In her open casket, she was presented with short hair and in a suit, as a man. 

Her paid obituary gave her name as Geoffrey Charles Gable and mentioned the details of her birth, baptism, membership in a church, marriage (which ended in divorce) and work for Wells Fargo Bank.  There was not a word about the way, or the name under which, she lived the last few years of her life.  

As appalled as I am, I am not surprised:  Idaho is still one of four US states (Kansas, Ohio and Tennessee are the others) that will not change the gender on a person's birth certificate even if he or she has gender reassignment surgery.  Knowing that, I suppose it's a victory of sorts that her death certificate lists her as "Geoffrey AKA Jennifer Gable". 

The Worst US Cities for LGBT Rights

I normally don't praise much about USA Today.  But they have an interesting article in today's edition in which they show how, although the tide is turning in favor of LGBT rights, there are still places in this country where  gays, lesbians, transgenders and others in the "spectrum" have been left high and dry--or, if you prefer, stranded on desert islands.

According to the article, of the five worst US cities for LGBT rights, the worst is in Mississippi (Southaven), the next three are in Texas (Irving, Lubbock and Mesquite) and Great Falls, Montana rounds out the list.

How long will those cities and states be stubborn, er, hold out?

What We Fear

From UNAIDS

Transgender Day Of Remembrance 2014

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.

If you've been following this blog for some time, you know that I commemorate this day every year, with a blog post and by participating in an event that memorializes those of us who were killed simply for being who we are--and for those who were killed because someone thought he or she was one of us.

A typical TDOR event includes a reading of victims' names and hometowns, if they are known. (Too many of us lack homes and documentation.)  I still recall reading the name of Brian McGlothlin, shot in the head with a semi-automatic rifle on a Cincinnati street by someone who hated him for wearing women's clothes.  

On the night I read his name, my gender-reassignment surgery was a little more than eight months in my future. I remember feeling that I had navigated some treacherous currents in my journey from living as a man to life as a woman, but knowing that there still could be all sorts of storms and other dangers ahead. (I didn't even know the half of it!) Even if I'd lived and worked in an environment where no one knew about--or had reason to suspect--my past, my life could still be endangered by someone who "outed" me.

I also couldn't help but to think about an old friend of mine, Corey,who committed suicide because she (I have chosen to remember her as the female she was in mind and spirit) simply could not bear the burden of having to carry herself in a man's body.  I do not mean to trivialize people like Rita Hester --whose murder in the Boston suburb of Allston in 1998 led to the first TDOR the following year--or Shelley Hiilard, Islan Nettles, Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar or Gwen Araujo when I say that I have always thought of Corey as the victim of a murder, of a hate crime. What else but the hate and hostility she encountered and feared could have driven her to hang herself from the rafters of the drafty building in which she lived?

So, while I plan to commemorate those of us who were shot, stabbbed, beaten, run over by trucks, immolated--or some or all of the above--because someone couldn't bear the thought of us being who are, I also will remember those who simply couldn't bear the hostility, the discrimination we've faced. Whether the bullets, the slashes, the beatings were inflicted by a random stranger, a date or the victim's own hand, we need to remember every one who was killed by hate and the cowardice that allows it, not only to exist, but to be directed against some of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society:  those who do not follow their culture's dictates about what a person must, or must not, be because of the "M" or "F" on their birth certificates.

LGBT Rights Around The World

R.I.P. Leslie Feinberg

Sad news:  Leslie Feinberg has died.

Of course, she is best known as the author of Stone Butch Blues, the first coming-of-age story about an LGBT person many of us read.  But she also became the sort of scholar I admire most:  an independent one.  While her writings on gender identity and gender politics (Her last words were: "Remember me as a revolutionary communist!") are widely cited in academic circles, she herself was never affiliated with any university.  In fact, she stopped attending school around the 10th grade, but would still receive her high school diploma.

Her life and work gave us important lessons on how we can, and how we must, evolve in our sexual identities and gender expressions.  Though she, for years, lived  as a "butch" lesbian, she later identified as a trans person, though not as a trans man. Near the end of her life, she said she had "never been in search of a common umbrella identity, or even an umbrella term, that brings together people of oppressed sexes, gender identities and sexualities".  Instead, she believed in the right to self-determination for members of oppressed individuals, groups, communities and nations.

Her philosophy was encapsulated in her use of she/zie and her/her for herself.  As far as I know, she did not try to convince other people that they should use the same pronouns, though which ones they use are important.  Still, she pointed out, "people have been disrespectful of me with the right pronoun and respectful with the wrong one".  

I find such comments particularly interesting because when I first read Stone Butch Blues, years before I began my own transition, I was struggling, as I had been for a long time, to find a language and other means to express my own gender identity and sexual inclinations.  They didn't fit into the terms I'd been given--boy/girl, man/woman, marriage, even love--because such terms could only be hetero-centric because they were taught to me, however unwittingly, in hetero-centric ways.  As Jess, the lead character (and, some would say, a stand-in for Leslie Feinberg herself) in SBB says, "I need 'butch' words to describe my 'butch' life".  Jess's girlfriend, Theresa, understood as much but needed to hear it from Jess, who has shut herself down emotionally because of the brutality and violence she's experienced.  To Jess, like others in the lesbian subculture of the time (early 1960's), that lack of emotion is her butch identity and what gets her "props" in that world.  But it also led to the breakdown of her relationship with Theresa.

Even if you don't identify on the "spectrum", the book is interesting in all sorts of other ways.  For example, the story begins in Buffalo, where--at the time Jess "comes out"--there were still many blue-collar jobs to be had, and butches like Jess worked in some of them.  Jess would leave that city and move to the other end of New York State, to my hometown.   Later, when she returned to Buffalo, she found that her lesbian friends had died, moved away or married men.  There was no more blue-collar work; instead, her old friends were working as store clerks or night managers, or not at all.  

Aside from the history lesson, SBB taught me (and many other readers) much else.  When I read Christine Jorgensen's autobiography as a teenager, I was interested in, but not absorbed by it.  Part of the reason was (what I felt) her very mannered way of telling her story.  But more important, aside from feeling that I was male only in my genitalia (which I hated), I found little in common between me and her.  Most important of all, I didn't get the sense of Ms. Jorgensen's evolution, much as I hate to use that term.  I never had a real sense of how she came to see herself as the female she was, let alone how she explained it to herself or anyone else.  What I couldn't articulate then was that she eschewing one proscribed role (that of a man of her times) and taking on another (a woman of the 1950's).  Of course, it wasn't her job to instruct me or anyone else on how to perceive and express our self-identity.  But I would not find any insight on how I could define, let alone express, what I knew to be true,--or intellectual or spiritual sustenance for the journey of becoming myself.  Ironically, one of the first places in which I found such things was in SBB, the story of a butch lesbian who later comes to understand her own version of her trangender identity.

Then again, Leslie Feinberg and I were more alike than I ever could have realized.  After all, we are both transgenders who are attracted mainly (actually, in Feinberg's case, entirely) to women.  She identified as a transgender lesbian; I think of myself as a trangender bisexual with lesbian tendencies, though my lesbian tendencies are decidedly of Feinberg's butch variety.

And I'll admit that the one and only time I ever met her, I felt attracted to her.  Yes, in that way.  I mean, why wouldn't I be?  She was smart:  my first requirement.  And she was--at least when I saw her--disarmingly warm.  Perhaps her warmth disarmed me only because I was expecting to see the "stone" character she portrayed in her book.  And, finally, I will never forget the way her face lit up I told her my name:  One of her characters is also named Justine.