Moving Through (And, Hopefully,Beyond) The Ruins

It was bound to happen, I guess.

A new friend of mine lives in the same neighborhood as Dominick.  On Saturday, I rode out there.  Really, unless I ride around the world and enter the back door (which is a temptation), there isn't another way to get there from my place.  Besides, if he could "pass through" my neighborhood and call to say, "I'm coming over now"--as he did several times before I took him to court--I can pass through his neighborhood if I'm minding my own business.

Anyway, you can probably guess what happened next.  I was a couple of blocks from the friend's house when a red SUV pulled up behind me.  A voice taunted me through the window, "Are you coming to visit me?"

Has he learned anything?  I could tell, just from the tone of his voice, that he is as arrogant, presumptuous, disrespectful and abusive as he ever was.  In other words, he's the same thug--coward--that he was when he slandered me to my employer, co-workers and other people, and when he called and texted me 11,518 times in two years after I said I didn't want him around me anymore.

After the things he did, there's simply no way I can have him anywhere near me.  Perhaps I'm supposed to be more forgiving, but I can't be.  I take that back:  I don't want to be.  He takes forgiveness, or anything that isn't retaliation, as a license to escalate his harassment and abuse. 

In short, I not only don't believe he's changed; I don't believe that he ever will change.  As long as he can continue living in the house in which he's lived since the day he was born, he'll have no reason to take responsibility for himself.  In his mind, no matter how he behaves, other people are wrong in the ways they respond to him.  Anyone who tries to hold him accountable for his words and actions is being "unfair"; anybody who tries more than once is an enemy who must be retaliated against.

In short, he hasn't grown up, and probably never will.  So, when he made his mock-invitation from his grandmother's van, I ignored him.  All I can do is to move through--and, hopefully, beyond--the wreckage he left in my life.

Labels Are For Soup Cans

I think Andy Warhol would approve:

From The Rising Hollywood

Army Chipping Away At Transgender Ban

Could it be that a tide is eroding discriminatory laws and policies?  

(If it is, what were those laws and policies made of?)

While transgenders aren't allowed--yet--to serve in any branch of the US Armed Forces, the day we are allowed in might be in sight.

Last month, the Army approved of hormone treatments for Chelsea Manning, the transgender soldier charged with divulging classified documents to WikiLeaks.  Around the same time Air Force Secretary Deborah James said that she favors lifting the ban against letting transgenders serve.  And Ashton Carter, the new Defense Secretary, said he is "open minded" about transgender troops, adding that whether or not a person can serve should be based on nothing more than his or her ability to serve.  According to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, President Obama endorsed Carter's comments.

Now the Army has issued a directive saying to protect transgender soldiers from being dismissed by mid-level officers. Instead, the decision to discharge is placed in the hands of the service's top civilian for personnel matters.

In essence, it means that any officer would have to explain his or her decision to discharge a transgender soldier to a high-ranking civilian leader.  Most officers would be reluctant to do that, as it can be damaging to their careers.   
What's interesting is that the Army is doing essentially the same thing the Pentagon did when it was backing away from "Don't Ask, Don't Tell":  It required a review, by the Department of Defense's top lawyer and service secretaries, of decisions to discharge gay and lesbian soldiers.  As a result, no more gay and lesbian soldiers were dismissed and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was overturned.

The times, they are a-changing.

I'm Sure She Would Approve

In the immortal words of Cyndi Lauper, "girls just wanna have fun"!

From Equality Network

To this, she would also say--as only she can--"gotta love it!"

Related By Blood?

We've all heard the "nature vs. nurture" arguments.  In other words, some people believe we're born to be what we are, but others believe that our environment and other factors make us.

I'm old enough to remember when otherwise wise and erudite people believed that LGBT people chose to be what they are and that someone could "turn" someone else--usually younger--gay.  Some had the notion that gay men were made through molestation (Trust me, it ain't so!)  but I never heard that claim made about lesbians.  I did hear, though, that predatory dykes "raped" the innocent wives of upstanding men and, as a result, the wives no longer wanted the men.  What such a story says about the men, or anyone else, is something I won't get into in this post.  Maybe some other time.

Well, if we're born gay or trans (as I think most of us on the "spectrum" are), some say, perhaps we'll be able to know whether the kid about to be born will be gay, just as we can know his or her gender beforehand.

Hmm...Maybe phlebotomists can perform the test:












This button was created by JRollendz.

Who Built The Better Ark? A Woman, Of Course: Kea Tawana

I saw The Ark in my youth.

No, I'm not talking about a drug-addled experience.  Nor am I referring to any sort of religious or supernatural vision.  I actually saw The Ark.

Moreover, I saw it in Newark, New Jersey.  Yes, that Newark, New Jersey.

I know it's not a city mentioned in the Bible.  But The Ark was really there, circa 1985.

To be exact, it stood in the parking lot of the Humanity Baptist Church in the city's Central Ward, not far from the Newark Museum and New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Because it was perched on a hill, even in its skeletonic state, it cast an austere kind of majesty to the immediate area.

Like the Biblical ark, it was an attempt to salvage from a land rendered into ruins.  The creator of The Ark began salvaging materials from abandoned and burned-out buildings shortly after the city's devastating 1967 riots.  For more than a decade, the self-taught artist and artisan accumulated wood, metals and other materials and finally began to build the 30 meter (100 foot) long ship in 1982.

The ark's builder, who never went to school beyond the sixth grade, believed that life on land was becoming untenable.  Many other people have felt the same way and have gone to sea in houseboats or yachts.  However, the builder I'm mentioning wanted to have the ability to defend the ship and its crew as well as to be capable of supporting the lives of those on it for six months or more at sea.  

Given what much of Newark was like in those days, it's not hard to understand why someone would be disenchanted with life on dry land.  But the builder also wanted to go to Japan in that boat to lay wreaths on ancestral graves.  

Construction of The Ark continued for several years.  As one might imagine, it polarized people:  Some saw it as a symbol of Newark's fight to save itself, while others saw it as an intrusion, a fire hazard and worse.  Whatever it was, it was illegal.  Its builder, a church caretaker who lived in a self-made shelter on the grounds where The Ark stood, fought for more than a year against attempts to raze it, even signing an agreement to dismantle  and relocate it if a suitable location could be found.  But, of course, the city never found such a location.  Finally, conceding that there was nothing that could be done to keep The Ark standing, the builder destroyed it in the summer of 1988.

(To tell you the truth, I have always thought the city officials' attempts to destroy the ark had more to do with image and politics than fire safety codes.  I think those officials, and much of the public, wanted to forget the riots.  Building something from the rubble--two decades later--was a reminder of that the city hadn't recovered.)

Now, after reading this story, I want you to tell me what you would surmise about the builder. 

I would bet that a lot of you, as enlightened as you are, would say this person had to be a man.   And, in fact, the very first article I read about the Ark--around 1983 and, if I recall correctly, in the Star-Ledger--identified the builder as a man.

Kea Tawana, with her cat, during the time she was building her ark.

But Kea Tawana was born, according to her own accounts, around 1935 in Japan to Japanese mother and an American father who had been working there as an engineer.  According to Tawana, her mother and sister were killed in a bombing raid late in World War II.  After the war ended, she, her father and her brother were brought to "a camp with barbed wire around it" near San Diego, CA.  

She says her father was killed when camp guards fired into a crowd to break up a disturbance.  She and her brother were placed in an orphanage, from which they taken in by a foster mother in Flagstaff, Arizona.  She was bullied in school for being half-Japanese, she says, though I wouldn't be surprised if her masculine appearance had something to do with her difficulties.  Plus, if even half of what she says is true, she and her brother must have been suffering terribly with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  That probably would have made things very difficult for the foster mother, who sent them back to the orphanage from which she ran away when she was twelve.  She never saw her brother again.  

She carried clothes in a burlap bag, ate from farmers' fields and hopped trains across the Southwest and South, and by 1953 found her way to Newark where, she said, she "heard there were a lot of jobs".

Over the years, she taught herself everything from woodworking and electrical systems to how to make stained glass windows and use a gun.  She gained a reputation as a reliable and meticulous, if eccentric, craftsperson.  A few questioned her gender identity, but more often than not, she was taken for a man.

After The Ark was razed, I never heard about Tawana again.  I thought about The Ark for the first time in years after passing through Newark on a bike ride in November.  After that, I began to look for more information about Kea's Ark, as she dubbed her creation, and Kea herself.  I found a few articles about the boat, but nothing about Kea's life after she demolished it.  I hope she's still alive and doing well:  I admire her as much for living in her own gender identity (She said she didn't mind when people identified her as a man) as her attempt to create a new ark in Newark.

If I Knew Then...

If I knew then what I know now....

From Deviant Art

Ash Haffner: Transgender Teen Commits Suicide

As if it wasn't bad enough that transgender women are being murdered simply for being who they are, transgender teenagers are taking their own lives for the same reason.

More precisely, they are killing themselves because of the bullying, harassment and other mistreatment they incur because others don't accept them.  And trans women are being murdered by people who hate them.  It's almost as if their killers are those schoolyard bullies, a bit older and with more brute strength and lethal weapons.

The difference is, of course, that the trans women I mentioned were killed by someone else, while the trans teens--including the one I'm going to tell you about--killed themselves.

Ash Haffner stepped into oncoming traffic near his North Carolina home this past Friday. That, of course, is the way Leelah Alcorn killed herself in Ohio.  Like her, 16-year-old Ash left a suicide note.

However, their messages were very different.  This is what Ash left on his iPad:

'Please be WHO YOU ARE... Do it for yourself. Do it for your happiness. That's what matters in YOUR life. You don't need approval on who you are. Don't let people or society change who you are just because they're not satisfied with your image.' 

I wish he could have continued to live by his own advice.  But, I have long reckoned that any human being can only take so much.  And, as we know, it's harder for a 16-year-old to believe "It Gets Better" --which, of course, is the reason why Dan Savage does everything he can to bring that message to young people.  The bullying, intense as it was, got worse after he cut his hair and asked to be referred to as "he".

According to the report I read, his mother supported his transition but continued to use the pronoun "she".  Some may say she didn't help his self-esteem.  But I know, from experience, that when someone has known you all of your life in the gender and by the names you were given at birth, it's difficult for that person to switch names and pronouns. Sometimes that person will "slip up" even long after the rest of the world sees you as being of the gender in which you're living.  Somehow I think Ash understood this and had no intention of implicating his mother or family.

But at least Ash's message is some attempt to give others the hope he lost.  That is in marked contrast to what Leelah, a year older, wrote in the last post of her blog, which her family deleted:


If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue.

Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better. The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender. I could go into detail explaining why I feel that way, but this note is probably going to be lengthy enough as it is. To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4. I never knew there was a word for that feeling, nor was it possible for a boy to become a girl, so I never told anyone and I just continued to do traditionally “boyish” things to try to fit in.

When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.

My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.

When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart. The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition. I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.

I formed a sort of a “fuck you” attitude towards my parents and came out as gay at school, thinking that maybe if I eased into coming out as trans it would be less of a shock. Although the reaction from my friends was positive, my parents were pissed. They felt like I was attacking their image, and that I was an embarrassment to them. They wanted me to be their perfect little straight christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.

So they took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends. This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.

At the end of the school year, my parents finally came around and gave me my phone and let me back on social media. I was excited, I finally had my friends back. They were extremely excited to see me and talk to me, but only at first. Eventually they realized they didn’t actually give a shit about me, and I felt even lonelier than I did before. The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.

After a summer of having almost no friends plus the weight of having to think about college, save money for moving out, keep my grades up, go to church each week and feel like shit because everyone there is against everything I live for, I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.

That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. As for my will, I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money (plus my money in the bank) to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups, I don’t give a shit which one. The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.

Goodbye,
(Leelah) Josh Alcorn

More than anything, her message reflects the lack of whatever support Ash had.  Leelah ends her message about what needs to be done in society, but has resigned herself to not seeing it. Still, her blog post, like Ash's note, is an example of what Miguel de Unamuno meant by "Hombre muere de frio, no de oscuridad" (Man dies of cold, not of darkness.)  Both teens killed themselves because they were left out in the cold.  All we can do is take them in, take in their spirits and take in those who are left.

Transgender Doctor Leaves Selma For Seattle

In some ways, I've been luckier than other trans people.  I lost relationships, but am making new friends.  And my parents have been supportive.

Folks like Jennifer Burnett don't have it so good. After announcing her intention to transition, she lost her house, spouse and job within less than 24 hours.  That, after putting off her transition for 19 years so that she could gain custody of the children she had by her first marriage.  She'd begun hormones and electrolysis when, she said, "God told" her to put her transition on hold for the sake of her children.  

Then, after her second child moved out, she met a woman who married her, knowing of her plans to transition.  But when she started, Wife #2 bailed on her.

Now she offers the kind of support she didn't have.  And, just as important, she provides something trans people to often have difficulty in finding, or never find at all:  medical care from a person who understands their needs and feelings.

That is especially powerful when you realize that she has lived and practiced in Selma, CA, a town near Fresno.  It's about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, in the San Joaquin Valley (often called "The Inland Valley".)  That trans people from both metropoli would take the trip to Selma says something about her.  And the fact that she's been practicing there surely offered hope to LGBT people who were living in the area which, according to a native of the Valley, "produces more raisins and queer-bashers than anyplace else."

I'm sure that acquaintance of mine was being at least somewhat hyperbolic. Still, you have to wonder what sorts of trials Dr. Burnett have experienced.

Could that be a reason why she's leaving?  She says she's moving to Seattle to be closer to her children, which I don't doubt.  Still, it's not hard to think that she'll be in a more welcoming atmosphere than she's in now.  It's a loss for the folks in the Valley (She is also a general practitioner.) but surely a gain for trans people in Seattle.

Snowbound

According to the National Weather Service, we’ve just had the coldest February since 1934.  I haven’t spent much time on my bike during the month; in fact, only once did I take a ride that wasn’t a commute or an errand.

Mounds of varying combinations of snow, slush and ice, all tinged with soot, line curbs and rim building entrances.   Some cars and bikes still haven’t been dug out.  Everything and everyone, it seems, has been frozen into place, like this plant in front of an apartment building on the corner of my block:

The Bravest Among Us

Now that listings for poetry readings, concerts and apartments for rent are available online, I rarely pick up a copy of the Village Voice, even though it’s free.  For that matter, I don’t look at the Voice online.  The number of pages in any print edition is maybe a third of the number one would find, say, thirty years ago.  And the amount of sustenance in any issue has fallen even more.

But this week, something on the front cover caught my eye.  There was a photo of a tall, rawboned trans woman with the headline, “New York’s Bravest”.  That’s the nickname of this city’s Fire Department. (The police are known as “New York’s Finest”.)  On the left-hand side of the cover was this caption:

FDNY

Firefighters

By Gender

Males: 10,000+

Females: 44

Trans:  1                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Now, whenever someone categorizes gender in that way, it upsets me even more than someone trying to squeeze everybody into the “M” or “F” box.  Most of the time, when I see categorizations like the one on the front cover of the Voice, I think the categorizer could just as well have called us “it”:  Such a person thinks we’re not really one or the other, or anything human at all.

 

So, of course, I picked up a copy.  Actually, I might have anyway, as the cover story recounted the saga of Brooke Guinan, the city’s first known trans firefighter. You might say that she has taken up the family trade:  Her father is a current FDNY captain and her grandfather retired as a lieutenant.  Had she become a firefighter as a male, she would have been like thousands of other firefighters who followed their fathers, grandfathers, uncles or other relatives into the department.

Ironically, I liked the article more than I expected, and for a reason its writer (Irene Chidinma Nwoye) probably didn’t intend:  Ms. Nwoye covered, however briefly, Brooke’s struggle to come to terms with who she is. 

Being tall and burly isn’t the only way she doesn’t fit the stereotype of a trans woman.  As a child, she loved her dolls, but she loved comic books just as much.  In fact, she was drawn to one particular genre: that of superheroes, her favorite being Marvel’s X-Men.  Not surprisingly, her mother thinks that being a firefighter is, for Brooke, like being a superhero. 

But in other ways, she was the effeminate boy who got picked on by other kids.  And—here’s something I could really relate to—for years she identified herself as gay because she wasn’t like the boys but was told by many people that she never could become a woman.  She was effeminate, yes (and, not surprisingly, got picked on for it) but, in the eyes of others, not feminine because of her appearance and voice, among other things.

Attempts to get her involved in sports failed almost comically.  However, she was very drawn to theatre and performing.   In fact, she went to college as a theatre major but switched to sociology and gender studies. One of her professors, impressed by her communication and other interpersonal skills, tried to encourage her to get advanced degrees in gender studies and become a professor.  Her mother saw her as a teacher.   When she and her husband couldn’t dissuade Brooke from signing up for the FDNY, they tried to convince her to “butch up” on the job. (By that time, she had gone back, briefly, to living as a gay male.)  But, she was determined to go into the Fire Department on her own terms. 

She’s been there for seven years now.  She won’t talk about the medical aspects of her transition or her relationship status.  I can understand that.  However, being on her journey has inspired her to help other trans people with theirs. “I can’t enjoy my life if there’s all kinds of other problems that other people like me are facing,” she says.  “I can’t live with the guilt of ignoring that.”

Spoken like a true super-hero!                                

Signs That It Gets Better

For a young LGBT person, the road ahead can seem long, winding and arduous.  We are always looking for signs that things will indeed get better.

From Student Affairs Women Talk Tech

Perhaps Senator Plett Should Move To Florida

I have long thought that Canadians are more sensible people than we (well, some of us, anyway) are in the US.  They legalized same-sex marriage and got rid of slavery before we did.  And, while I'm sure there's bigotry north of our border, it didn't seem to taint social policy or civil discourse--not to mention politics--as often as it does in my home country.

But, it seems, they're not completely immune to our insanity.  

Yesterday, the Canadian Senate passed Bill C-279, which adds gender identity to Canada's Human Rights Act.  Here in the US, there are still states in which someone can be fired from a job or evicted from housing simply for being  transgender (or, for that matter, lesbian or gay).  Ironically, in some of those states, same-sex marriage is legal--at least technically, for the moment, due to statutes against the practice being declared unconstitutional by Federal judges.  So, in such an environment, it's not much of a surprise that no one has even introduced a bill to protect the rights of trans people nationwide.

So, given what I've said, the fact that C-279 passed the Senate makes Canada look like a progressive country, doesn't it?  Well, there's a catch:  Just before the vote, Conservative Senator Donald Plett added an amendment mandating that people can use only those public facilities (like washrooms and crisis centers) designated for their "biological" gender.

He claims that his amendment is a "public safety issue".  He explains his rationale for his amendment thusly:  "The issue I have is that many elements of society are separated based on sex and not on gender — shelters, change rooms, bathrooms, even sports teams. They are not separated based on internal feelings but on sex, physiological and anatomical differences".  (Italics mine)

Hmm...You have to use facilities designated by your biological sex.  And which facilities you should use should be determined by anatomy.  Where have you heard that self-contradicting argument before?

Well, if you read the Huffington Post, you might have seen an article I wrote.  In it, I show how Frank Artiles, a Republican in the Florida House of Representatives, makes the same arguments, almost verbatim, to introduce a bill that would do, essentially, the same things as the amendment to C-279.  He, like Senator Plett, introduced legislation saying that people must use public facilities according to their birth (They both use the word "biological" instead, probably because it sounds more scientific or is simply longer.) sex.  Then they say that anatomy should determine where we pee.  And they claim that their legislation is intended for "public safety".

As best as I can tell, about the only difference between Plett and Artiles is that the latter claims that his actions are motivated by his Christian faith, while Plett doesn't mention his religious beliefs, whether or not he has any.

I know that lots of Canadians have moved to Florida.  Perhaps Plett should, too.