Stonewall National Monument
#weareorlando
If you’re waking up today and wondering why you can’t stop crying, that’s the shock of it wearing off. Now comes the sadness, the grief, and somewhere in there, the fear will happen too.
For straight people everywhere: please try to make some room for your LGBTQ colleagues, friends, and family. We are all a wreck, some of us barely keeping it together. I hate to say this, but we really don’t want to hear your opinions right now. We know this is about gun control and Islamophobia and all the rest, too, but this minute? It’s hard to be reminded in such a brutal, violent way that some people hate us very, very much, and that we live in a world, still, that debates our very existence, our rights, our humanity.
And maybe if young men didn’t grow up so steeped in homophobia promulgated to the left and to the right, every single damn minute, there wouldn’t be this much violence against us.
Also, fuck you to every politician who is telling people to pray but do nothing otherwise, to every talking head who has tolerated a conversation about who should pee where, to anyone who doesn’t shut down jokes about us.
Oh, right, and then there’s the anger.
Take care of yourself, readers. Reach out if you’re hurting too much. Hang out with animals. Step away from the computer. Listen to music. Do what you need to do to give yourself time for all of the emotions.
And then, hey, let’s go after gun control laws the same way we went after marriage.
Orlando
Yesterday I saw students graduate who have been out and proud for most of their young lives; others are still shy around their families of origin but also full of pride in their own queer selves; some I did a small tutorial with this past Spring on pre Stonewall identity where we learned how important bars have always been – as safe space, as community, as political rallying cry. I am happy to know they are armed with that little piece of history that might help make some sense of this. I say that as if there is any to be made.
Another student who is a deep thinker, big hearted and logical, wrote to ask if I thought maybe at least this violence would be pivotal.
I had to say I didn’t know. I do know that somewhere a parent has just called their queer kid to tell them they love them for the very first time in a long time. I also know there are people whose hate burns so hot that they are happy one of these shooters finally found “a worthy target”.
I know that that hate, and that love, may appear in equal measure.
For those of us who live and work and love on the trans end of things, this news is not as shocking as it should be. We are too used to violence, fatigued by it.
I do know that the love and art and community we will create around this wound will knock our socks off; it’s how gay people live; it’s how we have lived through so much. As Solomon Georgio tweeted: the gay agenda has always been “enjoy every moment you can before a hateful person takes it away” and that is only more true today.
Take some joy in some small thing. Cry. Keep finding beauty and joy in places others don’t look. Find each other, at vigils and rallies and, yes, in bars. Dance. Give someone else safe harbor, a hug, a thought.
I keep thinking about Esqualita and the abuelitas who would come to see their queer grand kids walk and I know there is no consoling them and there shouldn’t be. We should live in a world where they are safer.
Love to all of you today. I am so, so tired of crying.
WI Trans Employment Survey
This just in:
Volunteers needed for online survey-must be employed in Wisconsin and be transgender.
Please forward to those who may wish to participate. This anonymous online survey focuses on the job satisfaction of transgender employees in the workplace. It takes about 6 minutes to complete. Participants must be: 18 years or older; employed but not self-employed; working for a Wisconsin-based employer; individuals who identity somewhere on the transgender spectrum.
Stacie Christian is conducting the research. A summary of dissertation results will be posted on Stacie Christian’s Facebook page and available at organizations who posted this flyer (IRB approval #05-25-16-0318253).
Casting Call
I’ve just received this interesting casting call for a trans female actress to play a trans woman. Here’s the description:
EVE POOLE – 30-40. an exceptional transgender female jazz pianist. She is centered, even keeled and attentive. She is beautiful and captivates a room. Eve used to be a musicology professor but now is a performance jazz pianist. She has trouble communicating and too often is more altruistic than serving her own needs. She eventually realizes that there is dishonesty in silence. (Actors submitting do not need to play the piano.)
Learn more about the film at: www.evethemovie.com
contact: evethemovie2016@gmail.com
So if you know someone who might fit the bill, feel free to contact the filmmakers directly.
“Calm Down or Suck It Up.”
Here’s a really great piece on bathrooms, Title VII and Title IX, and the “Dear Colleague” letter the DOE published. It explains clearly what the issues are, such as:
So is the Obama administration making a rule that trans people must be permitted to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, or is it interpreting an existing rule?
With respect to Title IX, the DOE issued a “Dear Colleague” letter—which it says is simply a guidance document, not a new rule. The regulations permitting separate bathrooms for boys and girls were unclear about where trans students fit, and the administration decided to let them decide for themselves based on their gender identity.
and they answer other questions such as:
- What is Title VII?
- What is Title IX?
- But why do they think “sex” includes gender identity?
- But didn’t these agencies just decide that “sex” in Title VII and Title IX includes gender identity? Can they do that? Isn’t that something Congress should do?
But it’s the advice at the end that made me laugh:
You’re now well-equipped to argue, with the law as your weapon, that the Obama administration did a good and legal thing when it decided to recognize the dignity of trans students, and you can tell everyone who is gripped by the bathroom panic to either calm down or suck it up.
Indeed.
Eleanor Kramer, 1930 – 2016
When Winning Feels Like Losing #IllGoWithYou
For a lot of us who are cis and allied to the trans community, and who understand the bathroom argument is nearly over, and that trans people won, it’s easy to forget how much hurt is out there right now: so many outright anti trans bigots, and worse, so many people won over by the “feminist” concern about women and girls’ safety.
It’s easy to dismiss for those of us who know better. The trans people in our lives know, maybe intellectually, that they are about to win this one, especially considering the recent support from the White House.
But in the meantime, there is a lot of hateful rhetoric out there.
It doesn’t seem too bad if you’re not a trans person because so much of it is so, so stupid, or so, so obviously bigoted, but even the smartest, snarkiest, strongest trans people I know are feeling the weight of it.
So check in, if you can. Ask. Let the trans people you know rant if they need to. Do something good for them if you can. Keep arguing with the haters: as people who aren’t trans, we can take it moreso and they shouldn’t always have to do the heavy lifting.
It really does make a difference. And if internet arguments wear you down, you can try coming up with one line – “I am more than happy to share a bathroom with a trans person” – and just type it and go. The trans people reading will see it and see that not everyone is an asshole, it doesn’t affirm only gender-conforming trans people, and it doesn’t get lost in the weeds of the arguments. It just affirms that you, one person, understand that trans people need to pee and you know there is no threat in that for any reason whatsoever.
Another thing to do is make sure is to just post a quick link to #IllGoWithYou as a show of support.
Trans readers: stay strong. Take a break from social media. Do good things for yourself, whatever they are. & Try to remind yourself that the majority of people are on your side. We are.
What You Can’t Know
I don’t know how to do this. I keep reminding myself that nobody does but I have decisions to make: when to go home, for starters. My 47th birthday is Friday; my great niece isn’t born yet. Everyone wants to know when, Dr. Perl said, but no one can tell you that. So how long do you stay in a room watching her snore, oblivious to your presence? How long is dutiful, how long to repay her for your own life? I put her folded laundry away, wash my own socks and underwear in the sink.
I read.
I try to decide.
I talk to my wife about what to do.
I try to concoct a plan to get my hair dyed blue.
I respond to emails from students: yes, you can have an extension on your paper.
Suddenly there are 24 hundred hours in the day, all of them weighing too heavily.
It’s not when I’ve done what’s right. It’s not even when I’ve done what’s right by me, or for her. It’s more – how do I wait? More, how do I do this with grace? It’s more: could I ever be okay with leaving knowing I might not see her again? It’s knowing I will most likely get the call once I’m back in Wisconsin, based on what odds there are.
It will never feel right to go now, no matter when now is. There is no way to be there when she chooses to slip away. I may just be washing my hands, or typing this thing.
There are no guarantees of anything at all but this forward-moving, inexorable time, all the time, and the living going on living and the dying going on dying. Death is a giant fuck you to control freaks like me.
There is no easy way to do this. There is a way to do this, but it’s wrong. Every way sucks. I am offended by death for being so much, so terrible, but also nothing more than the passage from one minute to the next. I told people after my father’s death that the colors of the world changed. Now, I worry they will blanch, fade, disappear altogether. There is still no way to imagine a world without him in it and yet here I am, in this unimaginable world. It is spring in New York. It is spring in Wisconsin. Somewhere in the light of my mom’s eyes it is still the spring of her own life. Somewhere in there she has just met my father. Somewhere in there they have just conceived me; somewhere in there she is watching them fold the flag in tribute to his service to his country.
And that’s what goes: another link in the long chain of human memory, another lifetime further away from the first person who heard recorded sound or who walked across the Brooklyn Bridge or rode a train or heard a violin played the very first time, a not endless but exhaustively long line of links that lead to the start of things.
There is no way to do this. I’ll do this, with grace or inelegantly, with composure or keening or denial. Joe Heller once said he felt better about dying once he realized people dumber than him had done it. The same is true for mourning, I guess.
I still don’t know when to go or how to go; I still don’t know how to do this.
Here we go.
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