The following article is from a small GLBT community publication in Nashville, and I thought it made a nice bookend to the speech I gave in Albany.
***
“They just aren’t like us.â€
I remember those words of several years ago, spoken about the transgender community.
“Like†and “us†both just beg to be defined. How “like†does someone have to be in order to be welcomed into the world of “us� Who gets to define “us,†anyway? Whether by gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, age, “expendable income,†or such perennial favorites as “cute†or “hot†criteria—some make the cut, some don’t. We divide ourselves up into little “us†and “them†nooks and cranny’s, some self-selected, others imposed.
Last week Tim Toonen, CSFP publisher, and I were happy to be guests on WRFN’s “Gender Talk,†hosted by Roxie. It’s a program, she says, for which one primary purpose is to make it easier for individuals to come out. It’s also a way to help us get to know one another. As we were ending the conversation, she asked for a concluding thought. “Listen to each other,†I said, which is not exactly earth shattering or even remotely original. But I do believe we could do a better job of it.
I had a variety of chances, beyond the usual, to “listen†in the next few days. The Artrageous Pre-Party gathering was one opportunity. Another was the Queer Talk Saturday radio show I do with DJ Ron on WRVU, as Dwayne Jenkins came to talk about this weekend’s Nashville Black Pride celebration. Then there was Sunday night’s dinner for the Tennessee Transgender Political Action Committee.
I think one reason this whole “listen to each other†thing is ringing bells is because of a commentary piece I read a few weeks ago, one that feels very much like an example of not listening. Chris Crain’s column, in the Washington Blade, was headlined, “‘Trans or bust’ is still a bust.’†He uses the term, which I find offensive, “trans-jacking.†His argument is that it is wrong for the transgender community and “gay†supporters to insist that legislative efforts in the area of workplace rights include protection based on “gender identity†as well as “sexual orientation.†He writes that, “…the placement of gender identity on par with sexual orientation in many of our organizations has crippled needed activism against the ‘swishy fag’ and ‘diesel dyke’ stereotypes that still permeate the entertainment media and society generally.†“Swishy fag†and “diesel dyke†typecasting is the fault of the trans community?
Obviously I don’t know who Crain listened to, as he came to this conclusion, one he’s voiced in at least one earlier commentary. But as I’ve listened and learned over the years, what I’ve heard from those who are transgender, and those who support them, sounds nothing like “trans-jacking.†What it has sounded like are voices insisting they are as deserving of equal rights as any one else. It took a lot of work for some of the organizations Crain criticizes to get beyond a view similar to his. As it took years of efforts for lesbians to be considered an equal part of the “gay†organizers. As it took the (ongoing) hard work of the bisexual community. Listening to those who do the work, what you hear is an insistence that they be included in efforts to insure full civil rights. Will it be more complicated, to be inclusive rather than exclusive? Sure it will.
But that doesn’t mean it’s right to pick out those who may have the best chance of winning a round in the legislature, and tell the “others†they have to wait. That’s like a wink and a nod with the legislator, and the other insiders—hey, we’ll get ours first. In the meantime, we’ll also be quite happy to take any of the benefits that might come our way because of the work of those “others.†We’ll even use the whole GLBT alphabet (probably not the “Q†and “I,†though), when it suits our purposes. But for now, you others, you can come to the party. Just wait over there, quietly, until we let you know that you can also have a seat at the table.
When our listening is confined to the safety and comfort of “us,†we do to “others†what we rightfully argue shouldn’t be done to “usâ€â€”like being ignored and avoided; like being left out of conversations and decisions that vitally impact our lives. We really do need to listen to each other. Be warned, though, that once you do, “they†stop being “other,†and become a person, like “us.â€
Copyright Joyce Arnold and Church Street Freedom Press.
Thank You, Rosa
She was always one of my favorite models for activism – not someone out to change the world, not someone out for the power & the glory, just a woman who’d had enough.
Thank you, Rosa.
Five Questions With… Dallas Denny
Dallas Denny, M.A., is founder and was for ten years Executive Director of the American Educational Gender Information Service, Inc. (AEGIS), a national clearinghouse on transsexual and transgender issues. She is currently on the board of Gender Education & Advocacy, Inc., AEGIS’ successor organization, which lives at www.gender.org. She is Director of Fantasia Fair and editor of Transgender Tapestry magazine and was editor and publisher of the late Chrysalis: The Journal of Transgressive Gender Identities. Dallas is a prolific writer with hundreds of articles and three books to her credit. She recently decided to retire her license to practice psychology in Tennessee, since she seems to have found a permanent home in Pine Lake, Georgia, pop. 650, the world’s smallest municipality with a transgender nondiscrimination ordinance.
1) You’ve been a trans educator/activist for a long time now: what do you see as the biggest development in terms of trans politics since you’ve been doing this?
When I began my activism in 1989, the community was almost entirely about education– outreach to the general public and information to other transpeople. There wasn’t much information available, and much of that wasn’t very good or was outdated– and even the bad information could be almost impossible to find. The rapid growth of the community in the 1990s and especially the explosion of the internet made information much easier to find.
Somewhere around 1993, the community had reached a point at which political activism had become possible. Of course, some of us had always been doing that, but it hadn’t been a prime focus of the community, and what had been done had been sporadic and short-lived, often was done by a single individual or a small group, and tended to happen in places like San Francisco and New York City. This activism did give us some political gains– most notably in Minnesota, which adopted state-wide protections as early as, I believe, the early 1970s, but around 1993 there was a growing political consciousness in the community, and things just began to take off.
I can identify some important events of the 1990s– when Nancy Burkholder, a post-op transsexual woman, was kicked out of the Michigan Womyn’s conference, when people began to come together in Texas at Phyllis Randolph Frye’s ICTLEP law conference, when the March on Washington turned out to be non-transinclusive, when a bunch of us got together to form GenderPac (an organization which was promptly hijacked by the Executive Director)– but there were two biggies, in my opinion. The first was the first transgender lobbying, which was done by Phyllis Frye and Jane Fee. They couldn’t believe they had actually done it, then wondered why they hadn’t done it before. When HRCF (as it was then called) promptly went behind their backs and removed the transgender inclusions Phyllis and Jane had convinced lawmakers to put into the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, there was a sense of outrage. The news broke when Sarah DePalma got an e-mail.at the law conference. It happened to be the only ICTLEP I attended. We had a coule of strategy sessions and went back home and the next week did actions at at least six Pride events, including Atlanta, which I coordinated. You should have seen the jaws drop when I handed leaflets to the folks at the HRCF booth. The organization has, of course, done a complete turnaround since then, or so we hope.
The other big event was the muder of Brandon Teena; in the aftermath, we began to get media coverage that concentrated on our political issues and not just our individual psychologies or transition histories.
After that, things just exploded. Today many of us– as many as one in three– have some sort of legal protections– anti-discrimination, hate crimes, or both. My little town of Pine Lake, Georgia, population 650, even has trans protections– and I didn’t even have to ask for them. They were already in place when I moved here in the late 1990s.
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Five Questions With… Mariette Pathy Allen
Mariette Pathy Allen is the award-winning photographer and author of the books Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them and The Gender Frontier. She has been photographing the trans community for 25 years now, and is unofficially referred to as the “official photographer of the transgendered.”
Transformations was personally an important book for me (the only one about CDs that included wives’ words) and The Gender Frontier won this year’s Lambda Lit Award in the Transgender category, and she also took the cover photo of Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man (which was a Lammy finalist as well). We had the great pleasure of being photographed by her last year at Fantasia Fair, and it was lovely to get to “catch up” with her. Her most recent news, which came down the pike after this interview took place, is that she will soon be the proud grandmother of twins!
< I took this photo of Mariette Pathy Allen with her camera at the 2004 IFGE Conference. And yes, that is Virginia Prince in the background.
1. You won the Lambda Literary Award for best TG book this year – how does that feel?
I wasn’t expecting to win-in fact, I thought I had it all figured out: the odds were so unlikely that I didn’t even have a speech ready. When I heard “The Gender Frontier” announced as the winner, I thought I would faint! Getting to the stage seemed to take forever: I was in the middle of the row, near the back of the auditorium. When I finally got to the stage, I realized that I was thrilled, and that this was as close to getting an Academy Award as I am likely to get!
Last year, Bailey’s book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen” was a finalist. It caused a furor among tg activists, and controversy at Lambda, finally leading to its removal from the list. This year, the selection of books in the transgender/genderqueer category was excellent-any one of the five deserved to win, and there was no drama.
I had the feeling that most of the audience had no idea what “The Gender Frontier” was about and that this was the time to tell them. I mentioned that it was a long time in the making because it chronicled events and people over the past decade, that my intention was to represent the range and variety of people who need to live fulltime as the gender in which they identify. and that the book divides into sections on youth, political activism, portraits, and stories. I can’t remember what else I said, but I know my last word was “gender variant”, and I hope the audience understood.
Out of all the LGBT prizes offered, it is odd that there’s only one for the “transgender/genderqueer” category. We have illustrated books, memoires, essay collections, science, and science fiction, enough books to be included in the range of GLB awards, or to add to our own category. I think we need at least three categories next year: “transgender/genderqueer fiction, non-fiction, and illustrated books”.
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Five Questions With… Rosalyne Blumenstein
Rosalyne Blumenstein is the former
directer of the Gender Identity Project at the GLBT Center in Manhattan, and is the author of Branded T.
1. You emphasize the non-inclusion of bisexual and transpeople in your book Branded T by writing it “GLbt.” Do you think this still holds true – are bisexuals and Ts still left out of the majority of “gay activism”?
I currently live in LA. In June they have their Pride Weekend. It is called Gay Pride, need I say more? …Well I will anyway.
I think we have gone backwards just like the larger system. I believe there to be a parallel process going on with the way in which government is running things and the way in which our social movements are following. Here’s the deal and my swing on it. (Not that I know anything… opinions are like assholes – everyone has one, well mostly everyone has one).
Again this is only my opinion.
I believe everyone should be able to live they way they want, experience some semblance of freedom, love, be loved, feel fulfilled, dream, and be on a journey. However, within the gay agenda it is all about mimicking a Christian heterosexist mentality. Mind you, take this apart there is nothing wrong with Christian…having a certain belief system and having faith which is grand and extremely helpful in life…
And as far as Heterosexuality is concerned, there is nothing wrong with someone who identifies as male loving someone who identifies as female. I for one would love to be in another relationship with a man. Right now I would love to be in a relationship with someone breathing let alone what damn gender they identify as.
But from my understanding of a sexual minority movement it‘s about many different kinds of loves, not just the sanctity of marriage. It’s about not buying into just the white picket fence and the 2.3 kids.
So the Gay Agenda has become about wanting the same things everybody else wants which is not a bad thing but is not the voice of the whole queer movement. In fact most voices that are silenced within the movement are those
- that are either getting their ass kicked on the streets because they don’t blend
- or those with little power within the political system
- or those that care less about identity politics, they just want to be, live, have great sex, explore, be.
So the gay agenda doesn’t give voice to all concerned. Well maybe these groupings get some quality TV time during Pride since that is what media wants to show and that is what the larger gay movement does want to be viewed as. I think it is all about oppression and many times the oppressed (gay community) become the oppressors (the rest of us that don’t identify as gay).
So in answer to your question my dear I think B and T folk within the gay movement have the opportunity to participate within the movement but in the larger scheme of things and what is portrayed to the Universe is Gay= LGBT.
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Five Questions With… Loren Krywanczyk
Loren Krywanczyk is an undergraduate at Yale where he first organized Trans Issues Week in 2004, as a sophomore. The 2nd Annual Trans Issues Week took place in 2005, and Krywanczyk is currently planning the 3rd in the series.
< Loren (left) with his partner Vera
1) What encouraged you to start Trans Issues week at Yale?
I founded Trans Issues Week through my capacity as Special Events Coordinator of the Yale Women’s Center my sophomore year, a job that entailed putting together a speaker series during the spring semester. I was at the time purely woman-identified, and yet for some reason which I am still not entirely sure of I decided that it would be a good idea to devote the week to an exploration of intersections and tensions between feminism and trans/gender issues. I met with Jonathan D. Katz of the Larry Kramer Initiative for some direction in potential speakers, since I had very little knowledge of trans/gender issues or theory, let alone key visible figures in the field. Through contacting speakers and getting closer with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale, I received a one-month crash course in gender while throwing together what became the first annual Trans Issues Week at Yale. The week itself inspired me personally as well as academically, and shortly after the series my sophomore year I began incorporating genderqueerness and fludity into my own everyday life and intellectual pursuits. I guess you could say that a personal interest and activist/education-buildling initiative sparked my organization of the series, but even so I don’t know exactly where that personal interest stemmed from at the time.
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Five Questions With… Gwen Smith
Gwen Smith, Transmissions columnist and originator of the Remembering Our Dead project, answers five questions. Thanks, Gwen, for being willing.
1) Since you’re famous for having created the TG Day of Remembrance, what do you think is the best thing to come out of this holiday?
When I began the Remembering Our Dead Project, out of which the Transgender Day of Remembrance was born, I did it with the full knowledge that I was but one voice crying out in what seemed to be a wilderness.
I’ve long been pleasantly surprised to have been proven wrong about that, and to see the event has become as big as it has. Last year there were 212 events that I know of. There was an event in the small town I live in, that I had no direct hand in: it sprung up on its own. I simply never expected it to grow like it has.
As such, I’d have to say that the best thing to come out of this is a moment where we are all together, showing our strength, and that our community can truly be as one.
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Gwen Smith”
Parents and Children
My parents are moving to Florida.
Despite the fact that I only see them a few times a year when they live only forty minutes away, I’m upset that I may not see them much once they move.
I really dislike Florida. It’s muggy and commercial and the home of Disney. To me, it’s the worst of suburban sprawl, and I think the alligators (and the Seminoles) should have been left alone.
Plus, I don’t like planes. I didn’t like them before 9/11, and I like them a hell of a lot less now.
Betty has a regular, 9-5 kind of job, and we take a lot of three- and four-day weekends to do outreach, when we can. As a result, we’ve kind of nickel’d and dimed her vacation time to almost nothing this year, and that without actually going on an actual vacation, so making time to visit them won’t be easy.
I know for most Americans it’s normal to have close relatives living far away. My family is a little more 19th Century: my parents grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island, where I was born, and raised, and which I left the minute I could – for Brooklyn. We’ve tracked each other around NYC like we’ve been trying to catch a Heffalump. Most of the rest of my family stayed put: some stayed married and others got divorced, but still, they had children, and houses, on Long Island. I’ve been blessed (and cursed) with having a huge Catholic family – five siblings, various siblings-in-law, two parents, seven nieces, and two nephews – right nearby.
That my parents are leaving seems incomprehensible. They were the ones who chose Long Island in the first place, and they’ve lived there 43 years. They leave not only their family, but their parish, their neighbors, their friends. But living in New York is too expensive for a couple in their 70s whose medical bills are only increasing. My mother can’t walk on ice or snow (she has what I refer to as a bionic knee) and I think my father has done his lifetime of shoveling the stuff. It makes perfect sense for them to go where they’ll have a pool in their complex, and where my dad will be a short hop from the Mets’ training grounds: heaven itself to a Brooklyn Dodgers fan.
I don’t doubt they’ll be happy. But I’m not. I keep having this feeling that there’s something I’m forgetting to do.
The way I see it, even though none of us trusts it, life has familiar patterns, slow cycles of eras. Dutiful daughter becomes rebellious teenager becomes young adult. You make your own life. With any luck, you start to appreciate your parents as friends and adults and not just as parents.
When you get married, you are simultaneously welcomed back into the family, and sent on your way to forming your own. My mom and I have talked about marriage a lot; she knew about Betty before some of my friends did, and always reassured me that if it weren’t trans stuff, it’d be something else, because it always is. We got to talk as mother and daughter, but also as wives, and as women.
With them moving, I’ve finally figured out where my pattern unraveled, like a piece of knitting left on the needle in an old woman’s lap: I’m not having their grandchildren.
Not having their grandchildren means I will never connect with my mother as grandmother and mother. Betty and I decided a long time ago that we wouldn’t have children; neither of us had any urge for kids, and crazy us – we figured our opinions were the only ones that counted. Believe me, that’s not the way other people saw it: we were asked regularly when we’d be having kids. And when we said we don’t want kids we heard about ticking clocks and what great parents we would be, so much so we eventually changed our standard response to we’re not planning on having children right now. The ticking never got louder, and we only became more convinced that people who don’t want children do not make good parents.
Yet there’s this sense of incompleteness, this void, of what to put in its place. Can anything possibly replace grandchildren? Probably not. But there’s still this urge in me, to do something for them, to say thanks, to tell them I love them in some more-than-verbal way. But all I have is words.
So thanks, mom and dad, for the house, and the yard, the food and the arguments, and even for the various neuroses I’m sure are your fault. But mostly, thank you for having enough children to have your grandchildren so that I don’t have to.
To the Lady Minna
I got the news this past weekend that one of the SOs (half of one of the couples) I interviewed for the book passed away this past Sunday, May 15th, after two years of battling breast cancer. She was 40 years old, only, and is survived by her husband (Heather) and two daughters.
I’ve been thinking and mourning for Minna, in some obvious ways, like just sitting here crying, reading old emails from/to her, but also in maybe atypical ways: by toasting her at our birthday party Friday night.
Minna was a gem. She was enthusiastic and willing to help with the book, and did her own kind of outreach – within the BDSM scene she & Heather belonged to.
So I thought, in her memory, I’d reprint her words here, because no one could explain Minna – except maybe herself.
I wish you could walk a mile in my shoes. See what I see the way I see it. See what I know and experience it. Taste what I taste and see how I enjoy it. My life is not the same as yours. My husband is a crossdresser. I am a dominantrix. I am a mother, a wife, a lover and a sadist. I am Republican. I am Wiccan. I am not the average person and thank the Goddess I am not.
You walk by me everyday and do not know any of this. I don’t stand out in a crowd. Well, yes I suppose my bright red hair does and the way I walk does, but I don’t look threatening. I look like an average woman with 2 kids.
You do not know what my double life entails. The frustration of not being able to let my husband walk out of our house dressed because we are a military family on a military post and that’s grounds for him being discharged from the service to his country that he loves. My kids can’t know about dad because my son is from a previous marriage and my ex-husband would take him from me in an instant if he knew.
I worry every time my husband goes out dressed without me that he will be hurt. It’s why I usually don’t allow it. Not because I don’t trust him, but because I don’t trust you.
I hear what others think about crossdressing and I really want to take interviewers like Jerry Springer out back and get a switch. The average crossdresser is not the one you see on TV talk shows. They are normal men and women who have a need to dress in the clothing of another gender.
My husband is not a child molester, a rapist, or some sick perverse serial killer. He isn’t morally loose and sleeping around with everyone and everything. He is a man whose internal gender does not match his external gender totally. That is the definition of a Transsexual, but he doesn’t want to be a woman full time either. It’s more complex than him just wanting to be a woman; he wants to be a man too. It’s not some sexual fetish either; he doesn’t need to dress in order to get sexually aroused.
I wish you could walk a mile in my shoes. In my friends’ shoes. In my husband’s shoes. See what we go through every day.
Maybe you’d be a bit more tolerant of those different than yourself.
Donate, SVP
If you can, please donate to help offset the costs of maintaing the site, our outreach, and my time.
Thanks to all who have before, and thanks in advance to all who will this month.