Calling MTF CUNY Faculty Members!

Last night, I had dinner with a friend who's in a late stage of her transition.  She teaches in the City University of New York (CUNY), as I do.  Although our situations are somewhat different, we have faced many of the same challenges in navigating university system.  

Aside from transphobia and pure-and-simple pettiness (and, to be fair, gestures of support) from unexpected as well as anticipated sources, we both have had to deal with administrators who didn't know or understand policies--or, in a few cases, chose to ignore them--in matters ranging from changing our names on our records to time off.  

My friend has said she learned a few things from my experiences, and that she hopes things will go more smoothly for the next faculty member who transitions on the job.  I said that we need to communicate with, not only those who are about to transition, but those who have already done so, while working in CUNY.

The problem, she said, is finding those other faculty members.  CUNY consists of eleven four-year colleges, six community colleges, The Graduate Center and a few other schools, scattered across a few hundred square miles.  

She thinks we should have an association of male-to-female transsexual/transgender faculty and staff members in the CUNY system.  I think it's a great idea, whether we are an informal association that meets for tea and discusses our experiences, or morph into a more formal organization sponsored or chartered by CUNY.  

Consider this post the first announcement of our intention to form such a group.  If you are an MTF faculty or staff member in any CUNY school and are interested, please let me know.  Also, if you know such a faculty or staff member, please feel free to pass this announcement on to her.  

The only real restriction we want to place on the group is that its members are actually in, or have completed, their transitions:  This is not a group for those who are questioning whether or not they are really trans. (There are such groups at the LGBT Community Center and other places here in New York.)  So, my friend and I thought that it would be best to limit membership to those who are, at minimum, taking hormones and have at least the intention of continuing their transitions.  We are not trying to be exclusionary; we simply want the group (in whatever form it takes) to be focused on some of the experiences shared by those of us who are transitioning, or have transitioned, while teaching in CUNY schools.

Please Help Kate

Today I'm going to ask you to help one of my heroines.

  

At the very beginning of my transition--just as I was about to start living full-time as a woman--I met Kate Bornstein, albeit briefly.

I was working on a media project at the LGBT Community Center in New York.  At the time, I was just learning about LGBT culture and some of its luminaries.

Meeting her was like seeing a supernova just as you've risen beyond the cloud cover.  All right, I can't tell you exactly what that's like, as I've risen beyond the clouds but have never seen such a bright celestial object.

However, Kate not only lit up the room; she filled the people in it--including me--with light.  In a way, she's what I imagine Ellen DeGeneres would be if she were a trans woman--only better.  Like Ellen, she is literate and funny but uses neither of those traits to demean or bully others.  What makes Kate even better, though, is that she is one of the few--perhaps the only--person I've ever met who can be tender, corny and ironic all at the same time.

I realized, then, that if she could keep such a perspective after making her transition, and having her surgery, in an environment even less hospitable than what I imagined I would face, I would be all right.  Things wouldn't be easy, I knew.  But somehow, meeting Kate helped me to realize I would, or at least could, make it.

And now I hope she makes it through her cancer.  The doctors say she can, but she'll, of course, need treatment.  

You can donate through the site her friend Laura Vogel has set up.      

Same-Sex Marriage And The Economy

I'm not entirely a fan of Obama, though I am glad he defeated Mitt Romney in the most recent election.

Now I'll defend Obama in a more specific way: In at least one area, he's doing exactly what he should be doing.  That is to say, he is endorsing gay marriage. 

(N.B.:  I don't think a government should have any say at all in marriage.  All couples should get the equivalent of a domestic partnership agreement and, if they want to marry in a church or wherever, let them.  But marriage in a religious institution should not confer tax and other benefits married heterosexual couples currently enjoy.)

Now, some people wonder why he's mentioning such an issue--or LGBT equality when we're experiencing the worst economy we've had since the Great Depression.  Well, if this isn't one of his reasons, it should be:  Allowing same-sex marriages makes economic sense.  Isn't that how he should be making most of his decisions?

Take a look at this infographic from Unicorn Booty:

Who Does This Pope Represent, Anyway?

I know this question has been asked before.  But I'll ask it anyway:  How can someone talk about the love of Jesus Christ and discriminate against people in the same breath?

I know it's done every day, inside and outside the Catholic Church.  Hey, I've known atheists and agnostics who talked about peace and cooperation with all --except for those they disliked, for whatever reasons, or with whom they disagreed.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this new pope--who calls himself Francis, after the patron saint of animals and the environment--should do the same.  To be fair, he has done a lot of work with the poor in his home country of Argentina, and he has eschewed many of the trappings of the offices he's held.  Plus, he seems to have a more democratic, if not demagogic, style.  The people gathered in St. Peter's square talked about feeling a "connection" and were happy that he addressed them in Italian instead of the Latin Benedict used in his initial address eight years ago.  

Although I'm far from being a practicing Catholic, I am glad to see that someone who is so dedicated to working with the poor, and who takes the vows of poverty seriously, has ascended to the Papacy.  On the other hand, I'm not so sure that he's a representative of Latin America, per se.  Yes, he was born and raised in Argentina.  However, many other Latin Americans will tell you that Argentinians do not really see themselves as Latin Americans; rather, they feel more like Europeans who just happen to live at the end of the South American continent.  Many people--including some Argentinians themselves--will argue that they are just that.  After all, of all South and Central American countries, Argentina is probably the one in which the European immigrants and their descendants--who come from Italy, Germany, France, Spain and other European countries--have mingled the least with the native peoples.  It is also the Latin American country whose culture probably most resembles those of European societies.  Reading the country's most famous writer, Jorge Luis Borges, and contrasting him with, say, Mario Vargas Llosa--let alone poets such as Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Silvina Ocampo--could lead you to a similar conclusion.

Anyway, what I find most striking about the elevation of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the throne of St. Peter is that he comes from a country that is noteworthy for three events in its recent history.  One is the economic crisis of about a decade ago, which impoverished many formerly middle-class and even affluent Argentinians and kept the now-Pope Francis very busy, to say the least.  

That episode of Argentina's recent history is sandwiched between two seemingly-opposing events.  The first is the brutal military dictatorship that carried out a "dirty war" of murders and kidnappings between 1976 and 1983.  Jacobo Timerman, the author of Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number, as well as other journalists, scholars and everyday citizens, have documented the collaboration between Catholic Church authorities and the ruling junta of that time.  That, of course, has to lead one to wonder what, exactly, Father Bergoglio's role (if indeed he had any) was during that time.

The other side of recent Argentine history is playing out now.  Some now argue that Argentine LGBT people are the freest in the world. Same-sex sexual activity, in private, has been legal in Argentina since 1887; the age of consent is fifteen, as it is for heterosexuals. Still, it took about another century to pass laws that protected the rights of LGBT people.  The country legalized same-sex marriage in 2010; two years later, it passed a law that says, in essence, any person over the age of 18 can choose his or her gender, and mandates that state-funded hospitals perform gender-reassignment surgery free of charge.  The country has also done a lot to make counseling, psychotherapy and hormones available to poor transgender Argentinians. 

Pope Francis, like most other Catholic priests, is on record as opposing gay marriage.  I'm guessing that he wasn't too happy when the gender identity law was passed.  Not surprisingly, he has been a very outspoken critic of  President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, and her predecessor (and late husband) Nestor Kirchner.  In spite of opposition from Cardinal Bergoglio and other Catholic officials, polls show that most Argentines support gay marriage and the majority favor the gender-identity laws.

Given his opposition to LGBT equality and his possible collaboration with (or having done nothing against) a regime that most people are glad to be rid of, one has to--or, at least I have to--wonder just how much he actually "represents" the people of his country. And, because of what I've said about Argentina, I have to question how representative he is of Latin America, his work with the region's poor notwithstanding.

J'Accuse

Here is another part of the work of fiction I've been writing:  

J’Accuse

One thing I’ve noticed since I left this block:  all of the sentences that began with “You aren’t…,”  “You can’t…” or “You are not to..” have been replaced with ones that begin, “Why do you want to…”

I’m thinking of Vivian again.  Maybe she wouldn’t recognize me now:  it’s been... how long?  Last I heard, she wasn’t living far from here.  Not that she ever did, or would do otherwise.

Near here.  With or without a man.  Or a woman, perhaps. Then I probably wouldn’t recognize her.  No, she wouldn’t recognize her as she was when she drove me through her old seaside town, not so far from here.  Or as she or I was on the morning when I first woke with her, when for the first time since early in my childhood I wasn’t thinking about a cup of coffee, a drink or breakfast. Or any other drug, for that matter.

Until that moment, my body’d never caught up to my mind, or at least the rages, fears and other waves that swirled behind my eyes and ears.  The spirit had been ready, so to speak, but not the flesh.  But on the morning, my body craved, for the first time I remember, the touch of another.  My pores had opened, throbbing like buds after the first April rainstorm.

And her gaze:  It stunned me, even blinded me temporarily.  Twinges of needles, glancing without piercing—and I wanted more, because she could open me, if only for a moment, without rending.

For the first time, I felt—or at least relished the illusion—that someone’d taken from me exactly what I’d taken from her:  whatever we could absorb through our mouths, through our skins.  Of course we began and ended through our orifices; one of us, as it turned out, sweeter than the other, more bitter than the other.  She, always a woman, on my tongue; I, becoming a woman—or so I thought—between her lips.

And through those hours, those days of chatting before that first night; the hours that followed; the days when I loved, when she loved:  her supple touch.  I, the supple touch, like the steady wind against her curtains:  I turned to waves as cool as her linens against my skin.

No man could’ve loved me that way, I thought: no man could be loved so.  That word I’d always swirled around, like sand around those mounds where boys believed they’d built castles, all dissipated in waves and wind.  Boys rise, men fall; Vivian and I lay facing each other, her eyes opening to my gaze.

I knew I wasn’t going to die and go to heaven.  I’d always known that.  There was always another day, whether I wanted it or not.  After what, it didn’t matter; there was always the day, the night, they year after.  No way out of it, no way to fight—but on that day there was no need to fight, at least some things. Later she’d tell me it was the first gentle night she spent with a man.  Was that the same as telling me I was the first gentle man she’d met?  I know that’s something I’d’ve never been, not for her or anybody else. 

On that night, I merely did what I’d done ever since a man—another one who disappeared from this block—pushed his pants down from his waist and pulled my face toward his crotch.  There was no way out of the moment, which lasted an eternity; there was only the moment; there would never be any other. There was only him; there was only her; there would be this moment, consisting of women.  And no way to leave it, even if I’d wanted to.

There was one major difference between that moment with Vivian and the others that preceded it: I’d had no urge to resist, to flee or even to protest. I could only accept her, in that particle of time, in the others that flew away from it:  only me, only her, and no other force in the universe.

If she’d understood that I simply acted as I always had up to that moment, would she’ve declared that I was the first, the only, man for her even as I wrapped my body—at that moment clad in a black lace bra and panties—in her kimono and shuffled into the kitchen where I boiled water for coffee and the sun flooded the window?  Well, if I was savoring an illusion, who’s to say that she wasn’t, too?

So, her question—her plea, her accusation—“How could you…” when I started taking hormones, when I talked about surgery, seems inevitable now, even—especially—had she seen me, or I her.

Something else I hadn’t realized then:  the moment someone exclaims, “How could you!” it’s a sure sign you’ve survived, or at least progressed in some way, however small.  The moment you’re not a subject—which is not necessarily the moment you cease to submit, if you ever do—someone somewhere feels betrayed.  Actually, it takes only a moment of happiness, or at least equanimity, to make someone believe you’ve taken it from him or her.  Look at all those parents who resent, overtly or covertly, their children’s success—which for most children, for most people, means nothing more than getting what they want.  The son dreams of moving to a penthouse in the city; the father wants him to take over the family’s hardware store and father his grandchildren. And girls inspire jealousy in mothers who’ve stopped sleeping in the same beds with their husbands but have no desire to sleep with any other man.   They’d sit shiva; they’ll schedule exorcisms (or psychotherapy, which is usually the same thing) for daughters who realize they’ll find love, in all its glory and cruelty, only inside the curtains of another woman.

Contrary to what some churches teach every day and others teach on Sundays, love is not forgiving, and it can only lead people to seek it by whatever means and for whatever ends. 

A Journey

Just recently, I came across this e-mail I sent a few friends.  I couldn't believe I still had it in an old e-mail account I now use for school.


18 november 2006

Hi Everybody:

 No urgent messages here. This'll be more like a blog, I guess, or a journal entry. Read on at your own peril! ;-)

 Today I went for a bike ride with Barbara and Sue, who have become sometime riding buddies during the past couple of years. It was chilly, overcast and fairly breezy, but actually not a bad day to ride.  We may not see any better for a while, so we went.

 We started on the Queens side of the 59th Street Bridge, with no particular destination in mind. I don't know which, if any, of us was leading the way, but we found ourselves headed toward water: Jamaica Bay and the ocean. It was as if currents of the sky, gray and rippled by white crests of clouds, pulled us there.

 Our bikes zigged and jagged along boards that clunked and chattered underneath us on the Rockaway Boardwalk. Sky and ocean grew grayer, bluer and steelier all at once as foamy white ripples thickened.

 We crossed the bridge into Atlantic Beach, Nassau County, where both the fresh-faced and the weathered people wore down parkas with swim trunks and flip-flops. Sand swirled on the road toward Point Lookout--on the other side of the bay from Jones Beach--where we had a picnic lunch.

 Since we all did errands this morning, we didn't meet for our ride until well after noon. Of course, we didn't take into account how the days are growing shorter, so by the time we got to Point Lookout, we saw rays of a sun that was about to set peeking through furtive openings in the clouds.

 And everything grew darker as we rode back along the southern Atlantic shores of Nassau County, the Rockaways section of Queens, Sheepshead Bay and ultimately to Coney Island. The point at which the sea and sky disappear into each other grew closer and the tides amplified their echoes as their foam crests grew whiter like advancing glaciers.

 There was a time in my life--actually, most of my life--when a scene like this was my only solace. The day returned to the sea; the night spread across it, punctuated by the pulse of waves that reflected flashes from the moon and stars. I often went to the sea, alone, in the darkness. Sometimes I hoped not to come back; other times I had some vague, if entirely implausible, hope that fluidity and darkness would wash away what I was trying to leave and change.

 Somehow, though, it didn't seem so odd to be at the darkening sea with a couple of friends. In a sense, I was never actually alone, even in the days when I was traveling solo. When I first started my gender transition, I used to believe that for all those years, the boy and young man I had been was carrying the person I'm becoming within him, all the while hoping nobody would notice. I suppose that is what would sometimes cause me to sometimes grieve about Nick when I first began to live as Justine. I used to think that he'd been carrying me all this time, and somehow it wasn't fair that I was able to experience the joy that he never could.

 But now I realize that in some way, I, Justine, had been guiding and protecting him. And I was again today. Today I would show that scared, confused, angry teenaged boy and young man named Nick--whom I learned to love only by becoming Justine--that what we were seeing today was not all there is to life, that we were continuing on a journey and that it would be all right and neither of us would have to be alone.

 Of course I didn't tell any of this to Sue or Barbara, for I am just realizing it now. But I did tell them what a joy it is to ride with them, and apologized for not being in the kind of shape I was once in and for being something of a chatterbox.  Don't worry, they said. It's all fine.

 Yes, Justine, it's all fine. And it's going to be all right. For you, too, Nick.

 OK. I apologize if this is a bit of a ramble. I know you're all busy, and I appreciate you, whether or not you've read this far.

 Good night.
 

 Love and best,

Justine

Why Imperialism and LGBT Equality Don't Mix, Even If Obama's Stirring The Drink

In an essay he wrote during the time of the Civil Rights movement, James Baldwin recounted how some of the “agitators” were accused of being Communists, or at least puppets of them.  As Baldwin pointed out, it was an incredibly stupid allegation because, to many poor and oppressed people in the world, it made the Kremlin seem like a supporter of human rights—which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the McCarthyites wanted Americans to believe.

History is irony when it’s not tragedy.  At  times—like now—it’s both:  Someone who has fashioned himself as a champion of peace and human rights has done more damage to both than any of the past few predecessors in his office.

I am talking about the current US President, Barack Obama.  Like many other LGBT people, I am glad that he has done more to bring us—especially transgender people—closer to equality with hetero and cis people than, perhaps, all of his predecessors combined.  Of course, he had to be prodded into some of his actions—most notably by his second-in-command, Joe Biden, into supporting same-sex marriage.

Still, I can’t help but to wonder whether he’s actually demonizing the cause of LGBT equality in the rest of the world, save for a few European and a couple of Latin American countries.  While we can celebrate, and push for more change, in the majority of the world, we’re not even deemed fit to exist, let alone marry or go into the same professions and occupations as other people.  A Jamican lesbian I know tells me she can’t go home: “I’d be killed as soon as I got off the plane in Kingston.”  A Pakistani and a Chinese gay man of my acquaintance have expressed similar anxieties. 

They all come from conservative—and, in the case of the Pakistani and Jamaican, religious—societies in which any deviance from cisgenderism and heterosexuality are crimes that could be punished by death.  Subtract religion from the equation and you have China, where the law allows the state to execute someone who loves someone of his or her own gender.

And, of course, the situation is probably even more dire for LGBT people in some Middle Eastern countries, particularly ones like Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Even in Turkey, I didn’t have the sense that a gay man or lesbian was particularly safe, and I knew that my own well-being had much to do with the degree to which my gender identity wasn’t in question.

In addition to ingrained homophobia and transphobia, those countries and others share resentment, if not outright hatred, of the United States—or, at any rate of its foreign policy.  More precisely, those countries have histories of economic and cultural —and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jamaica, political and military—colonialism and young people know it.  So, naturally, they detest our invasion of Iraq and our attempt to subjugate Afghanistan.  And, I imagine, they aren’t too happy about the fact that we have military bases in over two-thirds of the world’s nations—or that we’ve conducted drone surveillance and strikes.

Ah, yes, the drones.  Some argue that they’re better than putting young Americans in harm’s way.  However, that argument misses the point:  the drones aren’t meant to replace “boots on the ground”.  Rather, they’re meant to go above and beyond (in military terms, anyway) what live human beings can do to gather information and strike targets.   Also, if they’re meant to replace soldiers and sailors and airmen, why was a drone sighted at  JFK International Airport?

In the first two months of his administration, Obama ordered six times as many drone strikes in Pakistan during his first term as George W. Bush did during both of his terms.  (Of course, GWB started the drone program.  Still, the facts speak for themselves.)  He also did something that wasn’t part of Bush’s, or even Dick Cheney’s, wildest dreams:  He, in essence, gave himself the right to order the murders extrajudicial killings of US citizens anywhere in the world simply by deciding they are "enemy combatants".   I don’t think that even Humphrey and Nixon claimed such rights when they were invading Southeast Asian countries, and I don’t think George W's father even thought of such a thing when he invaded Grenada and conducted what was essentially a drug bust against Manuel Noriega. 

Now, as Jody Williams has wondered, how can a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize—and still thinks of himself as a champion of world peace and who has expressed his admiration for Martin Luther King Jr.—do such things?  At best, it makes him blind to his own contradictions.  At worst, it makes him a rank hypocrite.  How can the rest of the world see him as a torch-bearer for liberty and justice?

Moreover, I can’t help but to wonder how countries and peoples who have been subjected to his version of “peace” see his support of women’s and LGBT rights and equality.  If other countries can see our universities, our culture and our economy—not to mention our militarism—as manifestations of “The Great Satan”, how can they see our (or, more specifically, Obama’s) expression of support for LGBT equality?   How can our leaders talk to Ahmadinejad about his country’s treatment of women and gays (or denial that the latter even exist in his country) or his revisionist views of history when our own foreign policy is killing innocent people all around him?  And, what’s going to make him, or the leader of any conservative Muslim country or military dictatorship, believe that LGBT people simply should have the right to live, let alone love and marry the people they love, when a President who supports such things is killing innocent people who just happen to live in countries deemed to be our enemies?

A Passing

Here is something I wrote early in my transition:

Passing

A path of fire ripples

roiling from the opposite shore.

Rays of sunsets descend

through mirrors.  Long boats are crossing

reflections too bright to be seen

leaving the sun behind them.

Clouds curl like smoke.  Ripples

reflect breezes across this river.

A wide boat is turning.

Paths of fire are flickering away.

A barge’s wake spreads the twilight.

                                                       

                                                           2 June 2005

This Fox Is A Fighter

I never thought that I would ever mention Mixed Martial Arts on this blog.  It's not that I have anything against them, or anyone who participates or even competes in them.  They're just not something I think about very often.

Well, there's a first time for everything, right?  So here goes:  Fallon Fox's MMA licenses are under review.

You see, the 37-year-old Ms. Fox had gender-reassignment surgery seven years ago.  (It's a great way to turn 30, isn't it?)  And, of course, she took hormones before, and has taken them since, then.

That means the 145-pound Ms. Fox would not have any advantage over another woman of her size.  The hormones reduce the mass and density of bone and muscle and, in some male-to-female transgenders, lessen endurance.  Before her surgery, she would have been taking an anti-androgen, which also would have reduced her muscles and bone mass and endurance.  After the surgery, the glands that produce testosterone are gone, which would also take away any physical advantage she might have enjoyed as a man.

Still, in spite of these facts, she has won all five of her bouts, and all of those victories have come in the first round.

Apparently, there was some confusion about licensing procedures:  She thought her application for a license in California had been approved, and she used it to obtain another license in Florida.  She used the license she thought she'd gotten from the Golden State to get its counterpart in the Sunshine State and says she 

Ms. Fox's next match was scheduled for 20 April as part of the semifinals in an eight-woman tournament.  Her promoter, the Championship Fighting Alliance, has canceled the event in a show of support.

Why Did The Pope Resign?

When Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI resigned three weeks ago, many people and nearly every media commentator reacted with surprise.  After all, no Pope had done so since Gregory XII in 1415 (on 4 July!).  

However, as we all know, people have 20/20 hindsight.  So, some have suggested that "the signs were there all along" that Benedict XVI would not hold his office for the rest of his life.  In his first encyclical, he wrote, "It is God who governs the world, not we.  We offer him service only to the extent that we can, for as long as He grants us the strength."  Five years later, in his book, he made his views on service even more explicit:  "If a pope realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign."

Other "signs" that he would resign have been cited, such as naming his closest aide as head of the papal household and elevating him to an archbishop in December.  This essentially guaranteed his future after Benedict was no longer Pope.  Whether the Pope did that, or other things, with the plan of abdicating his position may never be known.  

However, others have suggested that there were darker reasons for his resignation.  Naturally, when any powerful person does something that no one else in his or her position had done in centuries, the conspiracy theorists start to work overtime.  And it just happens that the Italian press has more than its share of such folks.  However, some of the speculation has come from this side of the Atlantic, too.  Some have said that the Pope quit over a report that alleges gay prelates were being blackmailed by a string of male prostitutes in and around Rome.  

Speaking of sex scandals...Yes, there are rumors that he's resigning because he was accused of not doing enough to help resolve, or of helping to cover up, the problem of pedophile priests.  It's been suggested that the still-unfolding scandals would reveal wrongdoing in his home diocese in Germany. I also found this interesting story about the founder of the Legion of Christ and his relationship, not only to Benedict XVI, but also to John Paul II.

Whatever his reasons for resigning, it's hard not to think that there's trouble brewing and that Benedict's successor, whomever he may be, will have his work cut out for him.  I don't expect him to reverse the Vatican's stance on same-sex marriage or transgender people, but one should hope that he will have the courage and integrity to deal with the problem of sexually exploitative clergymen.

As for transgenders:  Papal law says that any baptized male is eligible to become Pope.  Since the Church doesn't recognize sex changes, does that mean I am also qualified to be Pope?  Not that I want the job...

If A Trans Woman Is Beaten And Nobody Hears About It...

If you've ever been a journalist, as I've been, or simply follow the news, you start to realize the prejudices that shape what we see in the media.


The media outlets in which a crime is mentioned--or, indeed, whether or not it is covered at all--has much to do with its victim.  If something happens to a celebrity, of course, it's on the front page and in all of the TV programs that cover entertainment.  The whiter and richer the victim is, the more likely he or she is to get sympathetic reporting--or any reporting at all.  One example of what I'm talking about is Lacy Peterson who, as I've mentioned in an earlier post, made international headlines when she disappeared from her home in an upscale San Francisco suburb and her husband, Scott, was convicted of murder.  A few months earlier a poor Salvadorean immigrant named Evelyn Hernandez was the victim of a remarkably similar crime on the other side of San Francisco Bay.  My blog is one of the few places in which she has ever been mentioned.  

So, should I be surprised that when a transgender woman is beaten by at least three young men in a midtown hotel, none of New York's daily newspapers or television network affiliates mentioned it?  The closest thing I've seen to local coverage was in Newsday, which is published in Long Island.  

(About twenty years ago, Newsday had a New York City edition, which covered many stories the Times, Daily News and Post neglected.  They also published the columns of Sydney Schanberg, whom the Times fired after his editorials criticized some real estate developers who just happened to be major advertisers in the newspaper.)

In addition to Newsday, I'll give credit to DNA Info and several weekly community newspapers for publishing stories about the crime.  While some details are still in dispute, it seems that the basic story goes something like this:  A 27-year-old trans woman advertised online.  One young man responded. They met in the Holiday Inn near Columbus Circle.  He was unhappy with the price.  They argued; she kicked him out.  He returned with his buddies and they beat her while one of them brandished a gun and threatened to kill her if she didn't stop screaming.

It seems that the woman wasn't seriously hurt.  Still, she's relatively lucky:  Too many of us are beaten much worse, or even killed, even when neither sex nor money is involved.  At least there are surveillance photos of at least two of the men and the woman provided some detailed descriptions. 

Newsday and DNA Info published those photos, and accounts of the crime.  That's more than any of New York City's three daily newspapers did.

He's Their Brother

I frankly hated college as much as I hated high school.  Actually, I hated it even more:  Even though I knew a few gay and lesbian students and was friendly with them in private, I would not be seen publicly with them.  Homophobia was rampant on campus, perhaps even more than it was in my high school.  And I knew no trans people. At least, I didn't know that I knew trans people.  Moreover, I didn't think I could be one because I subscribed to all of the conventional "wisdom" about transsexuals, which really hadn't changed in the quarter century that had passed since Christine Jorgensen's surgery made headlines.

Given the way I felt about college, it probably wouldn't surprise you to know that I didn't participate in many aspects of campus life.  To the extent that I expressed my feelings, I mocked and reviled the notion of "school spirit".  And, you also would probably would not be surprised to know that I was even more contemptuous of fraternities.  

I haven't thought about fraternities or sororities for a long time.  After all, I didn't set foot on any campus--save for the occasional poetry reading or play--for eleven years after I got my bachelor's degree.  When I finally went to graduate school it was, of course, very different for a number of reasons: I was in my thirties and had worked and, of course, I wasn't expected to--and didn't--participate in much of the social life, such as it was, on campus.  Also, fraternities and sororities, while they existed where I went to graduate school, weren't as prominent as they were in my undergraduate school.

Also, the colleges in which I've taught had little or none of the sort of campus life I saw as an undergraduate.  Even at New York University (where I taught for one semester) and Long Island University's Brooklyn campus, both of which   had dorms, there wasn't the same kind of campus experience one could find at Rutgers when I was there.  If anything, NYU students mocked the whole idea of "school spirit" in ways that even I couldn't have imagined when I was at Rutgers.  At both NYU or LIU, fraternities didn't play the kind of role on campus that they did at the college from which I graduated.  Students in those schools probably cared less about frats and sororities than I ever could have.

But now I may have to change the way I see them.  Or, it may mean that the fraternity--or the college--I'm about to mention are different from the others.

From accounts I've read, the brothers of Emerson College' Phi Alpha Tau chapter "embraced" Donnie Collins when he rushed them last year.  Not only did they include him; they raised money to help him pay for a surgery his insurance wouldn't cover.

Since you're reading this blog, you've probably guessed where this is going.  Yes, Donnie Collins is a trans man.  The surgery in question is the removal of his breasts.  His Phi Alpha Tau brothers made a fundrasing video and posted it on IndieGogo.com.  

Their efforts, so far, have brought in twice as much money as Donnie needs for the surgery.  So, he has asked that it be donated to the Jim Collins Foundation, which provides financial assistance for sex-reassignment surgeries.  (Donnie is not related to Jim)  The organization was co-founded by Tony Ferraiolo, who led a transgender youth group to which Donnie belonged when he was in high school.

It's great that the Phi Alpha Tau brothers raised the necessary funds, and more. But I think their more lasting contribution is their acceptance of Donnie Collins.  

Her Integrity Excludes Her

How many of you went to your high school prom?

I didn't go to mine, even though I was on the committee that planned it.  When fellow committee members and our faculty advisor realized I wasn't going, I told them I had broken up with my girlfriend and didn't have a date.

Truth was, I didn't have a girlfriend to break up with.  Or a boyfriend, for that matter.  I simply didn't date anybody in high school, and well into my college years.   Now, if I had been dating another boy, I couldn't have brought him to the prom.  But even if I'd had a girlfriend, I'm not sure that I would have gone.

But, in a way, those issues were academic (pun intended).  I didn't want to date anybody.  I take that back:  I'm not sure that I could have dated anybody.  Whether I was with a boy or girl, I would have been dating as a boy.  And I hated and feared that prospect.

I later dated--and had a couple of long-term relationships--as a "man."  I never felt right about that, because I never felt quite like a man.  Still, I continued in those relationships in the hope that, through love, I would find my maleness, if not my manhood.

Because of what I've just mentioned, I am happy that there are young trans people who--in some places, anyway--can attend their proms in the gender in which they identify.

The Spring Independent School District in Texas is not one of those places.  In fact, as Lone Star State native Kelli Busey (of Planet Transgender) says, trans people there are "discriminated against in all phases of transition."  Although nothing in the Spring ISD student conduct and dress code specifically mentions transgender people, it still leaves a lot to the discretion of the principal.  

That means Tony Zamazal cannot wear a dress to her prom.  What's really sad about that is that she'd just recently come to terms with her gender identity and was beginning to express it, or as we like to say, live as her true self.

So, instead of becoming a celebration of a major milestone in her young life, her high school's prom is something from which she will be excluded for living as the person she truly is.  What kind of a message is that to send to a young person?

Who, Exactly, Is Committing Fraud?

I should look up the definitions of "fraud" and "deception" and, perhaps, do a post on them.  I could discuss the common, linguistic, legal and other definitions of those words.  More awareness of them is certainly necessary.

I say that because it seems, at times, that being transgendered means being rewarded for committing fraud and concealing our identities.

Before we "come out", we live the lie of the "M" or "F" on our birth certificates and other documents assigned to us.  Many of us know that our very survival, let alone anything like acceptance from peers, families, other authority figures and communities, depends upon presenting ourselves as someone we know, within ourselves, to be untrue.  I know that presenting myself as a masculine and fairly athletic guy saved me from a pretty fair amount of harassment and abuse--and, later, discrimination.  That's not to say I didn't experience those things:  I simply didn't endure as much of them as I might have otherwise.

When we finally do "come out" and live as the people we actually are, much of our ability to survive, let alone be accepted, depends on the degree to which we conform to other people's ideas about the gender in which we're living.  In the past, many trans people--especially male-to-females--took those notions to the extreme, sometimes with the encouragement of their therapists and others who were guiding them through their transitions.  It's no accident that, for example, Christine Jorgensen's beauty  was often compared to Marilyn Monroe's:   While they naturally had some similarities in their features, I can't help but to think that Ms. Jorgensen tried to emulate her.  But, at the same time, she didn't seek Monroe's celebrity status, and settled--to the degree she could--into the quiet life of a suburban housewife, which conformed to another trope about womanhood and femininity common in her time.

On the other hand, when someone who had been unaware of our transgender history learns of it, we are accused of fraud and deception for presenting ourselves as the people we actually are.  

That is what happened to Domaine Javier.  In August of 2011, California Baptist University expelled her after she revealed, on MTV's "True Life", that she is biologically male.  When she applied to the university, she indicated her gender as "female", as she should have, on her form.  She has identified as our gender since she was a toddler, she said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the private religious university doesn't see her her way.  Their documents say she was expelled for "fraud, or concealing identity".       

Now Javier is suing the university, and the California Superior Court is seeking $500,000 in damages for breach of contract and violation of the state's anti-discrimination laws.  Paul Southwick, the attorney representing Javier, maligned her name by making the accusation.  

While some laws don't apply to private institutions, Southwick argues that because Cal Baptist is open to people of all faiths and most of the degrees it rewards are in secular fields (like nursing, which Javier was studying), it's really a business establishment offering services to the general public and is therefore not the same as a seminary or private Bible college.

Whatever the legal interpretation of their institution, I hope that the administration of  learns what fraud and deception, and who its perpetrators, actually are.

The Genderbread Person

Some of you may have already seen it.  I came across it for the first time just recently:  The Genderbread Person:

Aside from its cuteness, one thing I love about it is that it doesn't posit male and female, gay and straight or trans- and cis-gender as polar opposites, as many other models do.  Although I know women and men are different in many ways, we also have many (perhaps many more) similarities, and are not necessarily from "Venus" or "Mars".  Likewise, I realize that gay and straight are different, and so are trans and cis, but they are also not opposite poles in the world of sexuality and gender identity.

Instead, the model depicted seems to go from less sexuality to more, and from less gender-ness, if you will, to more.

It may not be the "right" model, but I think it makes more sense than the binaries about gender and sexuality we've been taught and that too many scholars, educators, and other often well-meaning people propogate, sometimes unwittingly.

Keeping Honest People Honest

"Locks keep honest people out."

I forget who said that.  That person certainly had the right idea.  Also, I think he or she could have substituted the word "Laws" for "locks" and "honest" for "out".

That's what I find myself thinking every time I hear about a trans person who loses a job or, worse, applies for a job only to be told that it's already filled, yet the employer keeps the job listing posted.  Or, we experience something nearly every educated African-American or white person from a working-class background has encountered:  would-be employers who say we wouldn't "fit in with the culture" of the organizations in which we're applying for jobs.  The academic world loves to use that excuse.

Those sorts of things happen in places where there are gender identity and expression are covered in human rights laws.  In places where no such protection exists, interviewers laugh in the faces of trans people.

I was reminded of what I've just described by Diana, who has experienced her own troubles in getting a job.  She also posted a link to an insightful (at least to the readers of CNN Money) article by Blake Ellis.  It describes what we already know:  that we're far more likely than anyone else to be unemployed, homeless, engaging in sex work or to live in homeless shelters or with relatives (if they haven't disowned us).  But it at least gives some specific stories that illustrate--and, more important, humanize the phenomena described.

All of them are heartbreaking or infuriating, depending on who you are and your temperament. Jennifer Chavez has 40 years of experience in the auto industry, yet she has been blackballed by all of the auto dealerships in the Atlanta area, where she lives, as word about her transition got around.  Her former co-workers stopped talking to her and her former employer told her that a would-be employee turned down a position because of her.  Finally, after 300 applications, she got a commission-based job as a technician with Pep Boys, where she has the potential to make, at best, half of what she made on her old job. She's just barely holding on to her home.

What's really terrible is that her story is far from the worst case, even of the ones described in that article.  And, in addition to employment, medical expenses are a problem because almost no employer-provided health insurance covers the costs of transitioning (therapy, hormones and such), let alone surgery.

Victor Imperatus, Lost Classics And Transgenders' Lost Generation

One of my students, who is very articulate and rather feisty, brought up the subject of bias in history.  "No matter where you go to school, the history they teach you is completely slanted", he averred.

He cited some examples from wars.  "What German kids learn about World War II is completely different from what we learn", he explained.  "And what French kids, Japanese kids and British kids learn is all different, too."

I told him that, while I haven't read enough history books from other countries to know, I suspected that what he said is true.  That, I suppose, was the Properly Professorial Thing To Say.  However, I know--intuitively as well as experientially--that the principle behind what he said is one of the truest things ever expressed.

He's the sort of bright student we sometimes see in City University schools:  very smart, literate and verbal, and from a home where there are probably few, if any, books and a family of few, if any, educated people.  He's the sort of student who mispronounces words he reads in books because those books are the only places in which he sees those words:  He has never used them in a conversation.

I was something like him.  Sometimes I feel I'm still like him:  I mispronounce words or use ideas out of context (or, at least, in ways they aren't normally used) because I've encountered them on my own, in isolation, rather than in bull sessions with people who seem to have spent their entire lives around holders of advanced degrees.

Anyway, I mentioned the phrase Victor Imperatus and explained that it's not the name of one of my neighbors in Astoria, but rather the notion that history is written by the winners--or, at least, those who have power and privilege.  To illustrate what I meant, I described my own experience as an undergraduate just over three decades ago:  None of the histories I read were written by women or African-Americans.

Or transgenders.

I didn't mention the lack of trans history simply because I didn't mention my gender identity at all, and don't know whether I will.  (It's still early in the semester.)  But I know that there's very little, if any, history--or, for that matter, much of anything else--written by trans people that's in print.  I don't think it's because we don't write (Just look at this blog); if anything, we might write more, per person, than other people.  However, much of what we've written was published before we transitioned or was written by people who were trans but, for whatever reasons, lived in the gender to which they were assigned at birth.  I'd bet that some writers were never published or read again after they started to live in their true genders, and that some continued to publish under the names they received at birth, or under pseudonyms.

One result of what I've just described is that, save for a few books and other works we've written about our experiences, there is very little--in literature, history, science or any other area--written with a transgender perspective.

When you're part of a privileged group, you don't have to think about a perspective or point of view.  "History" is about you and your people; "African-American", "Women's", "Hispanic" or "LGBT" History are about other people, who are not considered "mainstream".  When I was in school, we did not read books (whether histories or works of fiction or poetry) by any of the people I've just mentioned; I would later learn that some works, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" were out of print and forgotten for decades.  After such works were rediscovered, they were ghettoized into "Women's Studies" (or, later, "Gender Studies), "African American Studies" or whatever.   

I don't know whether there are transgender "lost classics" waiting to be rediscovered.  I somehow believe that they are.  Until we find them and start writing more stories of our own, the "lost generation" I've described in previous posts won't be our only one.

Two Women In Love And A Man Who Understands Journalism

I don't remember voting on straight marriage.  So why is gay marriage an issue?

Ah, there's the Question of the Week.  In a nutshell, it tells you everything you need to know about straight and cisgender privilege:  If you are both, and you are over 18 years old (in most state's, anyway), you don't need anyone else's permission to get married.  However, if you are over 18 and not hetero (and, in some cases, if you're not cis), whether or not you can get married to the one you love depends on whether or not the honorable legislators of your state are magnanimous enough to allow you such a right.

The person who uttered the two sentences that opened this post obviously understands.  So does the editor of the newspaper in which they appeared.

So, where do you think you would find such people?  You might, understandably, come to my home town or look in some of the circles of people with whom I associate.  You wouldn't expect to find people like the one who didn't vote on straight marriage or the news reporter who quoted her almost anywhere south of the Potomac, would you? 

Among those states, the only question is:  Which will be the last one to legalize same-sex unions?  Some of you might pick Mississippi.  Some of you might say that it's the last state in which you would expect to find the woman who posed the Question of the Week, or the reporter who quoted her, much less the editor who published the story.

However, it did indeed happen in The Magnolia State. Better yet, the woman quoted--one Jessica Powell--actually married her longtime lover, Crystal Craven (You've got to love a name like that!), who has been battling brain cancer.  Their families and friends, and Craven's doctors attended the ceremony, held in a town called Laurel.

Mississippi, not surprisingly, doesn't even recognize domestic partnerships,let alone same-sex marriages.  So, as best as I can tell, there are no material benefits to their union:  If Ms. Powell has health insurance, her policy wouldn't cover her wife.  Plus, there are a whole bunch of other benefits afforded to heterosexual married couples that will not be available to Ms. Craven and Ms. Powell.  As best as I can tell, they married for the one and only reason I can see for anyone--straight or gay, cis- or trans-gendered, to get married:  They want to be together for life.


Whether or not Jim Ciegelski, the owner of the Laurel Leader-Call supports same-sex marriage in principle, he at least seems to respect Powell and Craven's decision to tie the knot.  Even more to the point--for the purposes of this story--he seems to understand what real journalism is.  (The same, sadly, cannot be said for many other who purport to practice it.)  And he has the courage, not only to allow it in his newspaper, but to defend reporter Cassidi Bush  in the face of many hateful criticisms, subscription cancellations  and even threats they received via mail, phone, e-mail and on Facebook.

The best thing about Mr. Ciegelski is that he did not publish the story because of his views on gay marriage, which he doesn't divulge.  Rather, he sees it as his job to publish something about an historic event (at least for Jones County), just as Ms. Bush saw it as her job to write the story as she did, her views notwithstanding.

In his editorial defending his decision to cover the story, he wrote:  

Most of the complaints seem to revolve around our headline, "Historic Wedding," and the fact that we chose to put the story on the front page.  You don't have to like something for it to be historic.  The holocaust, bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Black Sox scandal are all historic.  I'm in no way comparing the wedding of two females to any of these events (even though some of you made it quite clear that you think gay marriage is much worse).

Even though we're talking about Mississippi here, I still believe (or at least hope) that one day, it won't be necessary for reporters like Cassidi Bush to write stories about same-sex weddings as if they were historic events, or for publishers like Jim Ciegelski to print them.  Then they will have to find history elsewhere. Somehow, I don't think that will be a problem for them.


 

Waking Max From His Dream?

As you may have noticed, I've written fewer posts during the past week or so.  You see, I've been under the weather. I thought I was coming down with the flu, and I expected the doctor to chastise me for not getting a flu shot. Turns out, I didn't have the flu:  It was a low-grade upper respiratory infections.  As its origins are viral, he couldn't give me an antibiotic.  

I'm not coughing as much as I was a few days ago, but I've been feeling very tired.  Good thing I have company:

It seems that when I made my bed this morning, I didn't notice that Max had crawled under the cover.  As I was leaving, I found him lying where you see him now.  He'd dozed off, and taking his picture woke him up.

When I go to bed, I think it will take a lot more than that to wake me up!

Why Should A 100-Year-Old Art Show Matter To Transgenders?

I believe that one reason why so many transgender people are involved with, or at least interested in, the arts is that envisioning and re-envisioning ourselves is not merely an intellectual exercise: it is an act of survival.

Through the years that we spend living in the "wrong" bodies, in whichever sex is indicated our birth certificates, we keep ourselves together with the hopes and dreams of the people we know ourselves to be, no matter how much they're buried in the costumes we don to get through our days.  Those visions might change over time, especially for those of us who do not begin our transitions until our fourth, fifth or sixth decades.  It's one thing to imagine yourself as a woman who looks like Rihanna when you're in your twenties; such a fantasy is silly or worse after we mature and encounter new definitions and images of womanhood.

In other words, we start to understand the essence or life force of the gender in which we want to live.  The great artists, I think, have always seen people in terms of such forces.  That is the reason why, I believe, photographic "realism" is not always the best depiction of a human being:  You might say that I'm one of those people who believes that an artist's job is to reveal, not to depict or represent.

Such notions have made one art show in particular controversial, even one hundred years and a day after it opened.  When the works of some 1200 artists--most of whom are familiar to us today, but of whom few Americans had heard up to that time--exhibited in the 69th Armory Regiment on Lexington Avenue in New York City, spectators were confronted with depictions of the human body that some thought shocking or even obscene.  And it had nothing to do with nudity.

You see, at the Armory Show, as it's now called, people were confronted with such works as Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending A Staircase", Henri Matisse's "Blue Nude" and Pablo Picasso's "Head of A Woman."  None of these works reflected, in any way, classical depictions of the human body seen in the Renaissance (or, of course, ancient Greece and Rome) or the more symbolic representations seen in, say, medieval art. Instead, artists like the ones I've mentioned and sculptors like Rodin were more interested in the ways human bodies move and change across time and space, and how certain energies possessed by the people who inhabited those bodies changed, or didn't.

In other words, the people in those artists' works weren't static, in the spiritual as well as the physical sense.  They were moving toward something or another; they were in a state of becoming--or, if you like, evolving.  And, really, what better describes the process of transitioning from a life in one gender to living in another?

I'll end this post with an interesting historical note:  World War I broke out the year after this show.  The US got involved in it three years later, and the Versailles Treaty was signed a year later.  Mustard gas and other chemical weapons were used for the first time, which led to some never-before-seen neurological as well as physical disorders. (In the years after the war, medical journals were full of references to "shell shock," which is more or less what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.)  These developments led to a lot of research in neurology and endocrinology, which were new sciences at the outbreak of the war. One of the researchers who started to work in those nascent fields around that time is someone you've all heard of:  Dr. Harry Benjamin.