The Current State Of Transgender Health Care

The folks at Fenway Health have given us a useful infographic that provides disturbing--though, sadly, not surprising--information about the state of transgender health care.

One of the most startling facts it presents is that a transgender person is more than four times as likely as anyone else to be HIV-infected, while a black trans person is more than six times as likely.

One of the facts that most resonated with me is this : 62 percent of trans people have experienced depression.  And, among the 41 percent who have attempted suicide are several trans people I know, including two who took their lives over their gender identity issues.

Finally, I am among the 25 percent who have been harassed by the police and 29 percent who have received disrespectful treatment in health care settings.

And I'm one of the lucky ones.

Coloring My World

We're often advised to "stop and smell the roses."

Well, I stopped for flowers of some sort, but they weren't exactly roses.  I didn't mind:  They were flowers I'd never seen before.

I've seen other plants with buds that were bigger than those flowers.  Still, I assure you that they are indeed flowers, petals and all.

My cell phone camera didn't quite capture what I saw:  a kind of pointillist scrim of purple in the garden of St. Luke in the Fields.  I have no idea of what they're called, but whatever their name, they made me happier today.

Ira Steven Beatty Knows What We Need

Perhaps I don't pay enough attention to celebrities.  I hadn't heard much less about Warren Beatty or Annette Bening in a while.  So it wouldn't surprise you to know that I didn't know about their son Ira Steven, ne Kathlyn.

I only learned about the Beatty/Bening boy because of a new public-service announcement in which he appears.



In that video, he opposes a New York State Medicaid regulation that keeps trans people from accessing the health care they need.

The last six words of the previous sentence, by the way, are not mine:  They are in a New York Daily News article.  While not as Neanderthal as the Post, the Daily News has never been known as a progressive voice.  So I was a bit surprised to find such language in one of their articles.  Maybe the folks there are "getting it".

Other people will, too, if publications like the Daily News continue to report such facts and folks like Ira Stephen Beatty make PSAs.  I think even more people will realize that trangender health care needs are as legitimate as any other health care need when folks like his famous parents speak up on the issue, which they haven't done yet.

A Geography Of Same-Sex Households

Now that Hawaii is about to become the 15th state to legalize same-sex marriage, I thought it would be interesting to post a map of same-sex households in the US:

 

From Christine Jorgensen To Jan Morris

It's been a while since I wrote about the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  In this post, I'm going to talk about something related:  Specifically, two of the world's best-known male-to-female transsexuals. One of them was at the vanguard of the first generation of transsexuals, while the other was its rearguard or, perhaps, on the front line of the following generation.

I am speaking of Christine Jorgensen and Jan Morris.  In reading an article about the latter, I found out that she's 87 years old and, interestingly, was born only five months after Ms. Jorgensen.  

The reason why those facts are interesting (at least to me) is that Jorgensen, being one of the first trans women to become publicly known, conformed completely (perhaps even more so than most cisgender women) to the gender norms of her time, while Jan Morris was able to define her own womanhood and femaleness to a much greater degree than Jorgensen could or would have.

Although they were born in the same year, they underwent their surgeries two decades apart.  The fact that gender roles had changed between 1952 and 1972 cannot be overstated.  What's even more important, though, is the way the generational difference affected Jorgensen's and Morris' paths to living as women.

Jorgensen began her transition just after World War II, in which she served as a soldier. She had even fewer precedents than Morris had, let alone than I or transsexuals of my generation had.  And, because the Internet was decades away, accessing information about hormones and surgery, and accounts of transgender people, was even more laborious than it would later be. 

That may be a reason why she modeled herself after the ideals of femaleness--or, more precisely, femininity--that prevailed in the immediate postwar years.  She studied to be a nurse because that was one of the few career options available to women of that time. Her mannerisms, dress and lifestyle were in line with what was considered "ladylike."  While she may have had the natural physical features to become the Marilyn Monroe-like blonde bombshell she would become, it's hard not to think she also did everything she could to enhance and maintain that image, especially after she found herself working as an entertainer.  Finally, she married a man and followed him in moves to suburban Long Island and southern California.

Morris, on the other hand, did not begin her transition until 1964.  By then, treatments--and, some would argue, societal notions about womanhood--were more advanced. Perhaps even more important, she had already established herself as an historian and travel writer, and had been married fifteen years, when she began her transition.  In fact, she went to Morocco for her surgery, which Dr. George Bourou performed, because in her native England she would not be allowed to have her surgery unless she divorced her wife, something she wasn't prepared to do at the time.  They eventually did divorce, but remained in contact and reunited in a civil union in 2008.

Christine Jorgensen died nearly two decades before that union was consummated. She was just three weeks short of 63 years old.  Somehow I have the feeling that the lurid jokes and other ridicule and ostracism directed at her shortened her life.  That's not to say Morris had an easy time, but even she has admitted that she didn't have to endure what Jorgensen and other early transsexuals experienced.

I don't know how much longer Morris has in this world.  Whatever the amount of time, I hope young trans people learn more about her, and the way she was a bridge between two generations of trans people who made their lives and mine possible.

Veterans' Day

To me, this day--Veteran's Day--is one of the most important.  I honestly would give up Christmas to celebrate this day.

Mind you, I think the most important thing the human race could do is to end war.  A good part of our income inequalities and problems with environmental degradation have to do with preparation for, not to mention the fighting of, wars.  And the culture of violence, I believe, contributes to the oppression of (and, naturally, violence against) women and men who don't fit into this culture's concept of masculinity.

That said, this country should honor its veterans--but not in that chest-thumping, rah-rah kind of way we see in parades and exhibitions of military might.  Such celebrations are all predicated on a mythology about this country's military history:  that all of our wars were just, and we never lost any of them. (Korea was a "stalemate" and we got out of Vietnam before the Vietcong could claim victory over American forces.)  But, I believe the veterans should be honored, not celebrated, for their sacrifices--including, in some cases, their lives--for conflicts to which they were conscripted or in which they joined without realizing how misguided (or simply mendacious) the motives were of those who led us into war.

At the same time, we need to remember that even though "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has been repealed, transgender people still cannot serve in the Armed Forces.