Trans/plant/portation

I was very fortunate to get a chunk of time from trans humorist and author S. Bear Bergman about ze’s project for young readers, Flamingo Rampant, which got some support through Kickstarter earlier this spring. With two books due to be released on June 1, Bergman answered some questions about these trans-themed picture books for kids, and what ze read as a youngster.

EM: You’ve written for LGBT audiences for years—what brings you to books for young readers?

SBB: This particular project came about because a couple of years ago, I was contacted by the kids’ camp director for the Gender Odyssey conference, Tanner, who asked me if I thought I could come up with a children’s story or two to read the kids. They wanted them to be gender-themed, but entertaining and fun—I have the clearest memory of Tanner saying to me “some of the things in camp should be abut gender, but I don’t want it to be “Welcome to camp! Let’s sing songs about our genitals!”

I said I would give it a try. And in a couple of months, I had produced these two stories.

EM: Tell me about your project—what’s the story, who are the characters? What kinds of books are these? Read More…

My writing has been a struggle for the last two months, what with my office needing significant chunks of my time, and an active baby who requires I chase him around the house giggling for hours at a stretch.  Sometimes when I sit down to type–much less write–I wind up staring at the keyboard through two old episodes of Law & Order, and then I need to get started on something else like dinner or another round of The Baby Chase. Lately my sleep number has been out of whack, putting another limitation on my writing time, as I contort myself to find a position that doesn’t sting my hip socket.

And yet there is a light at the end of the tunnel. This Friday we will no longer be understaffed at work. Emile is sleeping better through the night, and I have hope that balance will stop by for a long visit in my routine. I will be faced with a decision of which writing project to ramp back up for headway-making.

• There’s the YA novel about time travel with LGBT themes that has come close to representation twice now but that needs some work in the transitions (sic) between eras.
• There’s the YA novel about parallel universes with trans themes that is in the first draft. I’ve done all the work on plotting and characters, but I could stand to push both of these efforts deeper. And I’m at 18,000 words, so I’ve barely cracked past the beginning of the story.
• There are two novels for adults that I’ve plotted out and finished the back story but that haven’t seen me start writing. Those are probably going to stay back-burner until next winter, in all probability.
• There’s the sequel to Bumbling that my publisher would like to see me start, but other than this blog I’ve done no writing on it, nor have I mapped out the scenes or characters. Read More…

This is my second head cold in a month, so I’ve dipped into our hard-to-acquire stash of Sudafed, which I know from Breaking Bad is the item purchased by “smurfs” to make crystal meth. Thank you, AMC, for expanding my culture reference set. Based on when my left tonsil puffed up like a blowfish, I figure I was exposed to whatever virus this is on one of the three plane rides over to the East Coast. It could have been the 3-year-old two rows behind me who practiced his raspberries for 45 minutes. Or the lanky guy who slept next to me for 4 hours and insisted on sticking his feet under the seat in front of me (I thought I was the fat space hog). Maybe a flight attendant passed it to me along with my half-ounce of cracker party mix, who knows? But if I could relive the experience that day, I would do the following, and I’ll note right here that I did know these things before May 17, 2012.

1. Bring hand sanitizer with you. You may not have time to wash up in the airport rest room between flights, and you’ll probably need it more frequently than every three hours, especially if it’s during flu season. You may even be tempted to splash some on your neck, like cologne. This is not necessarily a bad idea. Read More…

I’ve got one hour until boarding time for my flight to Chicago. Flying in and out of O’Hare is always a little nerve-wracking because it’s an airport that can kick you in the teeth if you haven’t planned well or aren’t on the top of your game. I shushed my friend Barbara when she assured me everything would go well today, because I hate tempting fate. Excuse me, I mean Fate. With a capitol F.

I might as well admit to my other big airplane flying superstition: I hold my feet off the floor when we land so I can have good luck for the next flight. I guess I can’t call it “paying it forward” if it’s for my own benefit, but I will point out here I’m not completely selfish because supposedly all the other people on the flight with me would receive my good fortune as well. And I know I’m being completely ridiculous, but the little kid me heard my grandpa tell me to do it when crossing railroad tracks and landing in a plane, and now I can’t shake it for planes. I keep my feet where they are when going over tracks because 1: it makes it too hard to keep driving if I lift them up, and 2: Walla Walla has a ton of railroad crossings in and around town.

This has been a great trip, save my pangs of missingness for the wee one and Susanne. She’s been kind enough to send me pictures of him throughout the day with a video here and there so I can listen to him babble. And thank modern technology for FaceTime on the iPhone–he smiles at me across 3,000 miles and my heart leaps just as hard as when we’re together. Read More…

Humor and Civil Rights

Keynote Address to 2012 DC Trans Pride

Everett Maroon

Two great tastes that go great together –Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups marketing staff.

Folks who teach about public speaking often say that you need to relay your main message to the audience three times—you tell them what you’re going to tell them, you tell them, and then you tell them what you told them. This ties in nicely to comedy writing, because threes are often the standard set up for jokes. Creative writing instructors, on the other hand, insist on a minimum of telling and a maximum of showing, usually through dialogue and character interaction. Perhaps a keynote address isn’t exactly creative writing, but old habits die hard, so I’ll try to do my telling via showing, and I’ll do it at least three times so I keep all of the public speaker people I know happy. You don’t want to piss off the Toastmasters, trust me.

So I’m going to talk about humor and civil rights in our movement. I will, after this introduction, explain what every thing in that sentence means. Well, let me define humor, civil rights, and our, right now.  By “humor,” I mean something that makes us laugh. By “our,” I mean the transsexual/transgender/trans-asterisk/genderqueer/gender non-conforming bunch of us. And by “civil rights,” I mean all the stuff that we deserve and don’t currently have, and yes, after this intro—this is still the introduction—I’ll list out what those things are, but I probably won’t exhaust everything that should be on the list because as we’ll see, I have but one perspective to bring to the movement, and as you’ll see by way of some lovely anecdotes, we need as many voices as we can scrabble together. Along the way I’ll read a few stories to satisfy the minimal showing requirement of this talk, and then I’ll finish with a self-deprecating comment to tell you what I told you. You’ll applaud, possibly because the words I strung together today were helpful and/or amusing, but more likely because I traveled more than 3,000 miles to get here and you feel pity for me that this is all I came up with in the way of a keynote. But let me thank you in advance for your excellent manners. Read More…

Let’s say you stepped away from a project for a while–anywhere from 2 months to a year, or thereabouts–and now you’re ready to dive back in. How do you do it? It’s an intimidating prospect. The names of the characters are fuzzy, or you can’t remember which was the daughter of the failed violinist, and which has the secret dream of finding her long-lost brother. Or you’re ready to deal with and extend the main story arc, but there are two subplots that annoy you. It could be that you’re no longer in the head space to continue the original tone of the piece for that matter, but whatever the issue, the story is haunting you enough that you’re ready to sit back down and give it another chance. If the pressures of real life have made you step away and you love each and every inch of the manuscript, it’s still cumbers0me to get back into the groove. Here are some of the things I do to re-start the engine on a languishing project: Read More…

When Susanne and I were still trying to get pregnant, we made an appointment to see a fertility specialist in Seattle, and were told that there was new paperwork to sign because the Federal rules had changed about informed consent and patient monitoring in light of the eight pregnancies Nadya Suleman had carried to term in California. Ms. Suleman was known more popularly as “Octomom,” and derided in the media as a bad mother even before the birth of the eight children, because she wanted to birth all of them (she did also have other children at that time, but this wasn’t mentioned, in what I read back then, as the reason for questioning her parental fitness). Eight embryos didn’t magically appear in her uterus–some health practitioner had to put them there (and in fact, 12 were transferred into her). Thus while the question of malpractice or medical negligence was brought up by some of the talking heads, most of the attention was focused solely on why a woman would even want to carry and care for that many children. And although the medical board in California investigated the practitioner and subsequently revoked his license, it wasn’t he who came away with a derisive nickname.

In context, the TLC show, Jon & Kate Plus Eight was getting great ratings and later, a reality show about the Duggers, who have 19 children in Arkansas, also started on the cable channel. Yes, Ms. Suleman has courted some of this attention, gracing the cover of Star Magazine to show off her body and dole out exercise advice. But that shouldn’t absolve people from mocking her every move. Read More…

Now that I’ve settled down from most of my anger (trust me, there’s a lot still in here because her situation is so completely unjust), several other thoughts about what we can do as a community of gender non-conforming people have occurred to me. To paraphrase Leslie Feinberg from earlier this week, it is outstanding to see so many of us organized to support CeCe even against such massive institutions like criminal jurisprudence and the prison complex. For years now I’ve seen a small but growing voice articulating its concern about the annual Day of Remembrance–and it asks how we can come together to do proactive work in addition to mourning the violent losses of trans women and other trans-identified people. While we are outraged about CeCe’s forced “choice” to take a plea deal, we should also acknowledge that we’ve shown some measure of grassroots-created power against these corrupt systems. With collective power in mind, I humbly offer the following:

1. In your local community, organize a letter writing campaign for CeCe. Yes, people are writing letters to her now en masse. At some point in the next weeks or months, these will slow down to more of a trickle, in all likelihood. So schedule the letters among your group, so she is receiving mail not just this May but when autumn is approaching, through the holiday season, and at the anniversaries of her trial and sentencing. If we say we won’t forget CeCe, let’s set ourselves up for success on that promise. Next week I’m going to visit an LGBT youth group and I’ll bring along 50 blank cards and stamps. And markers. Dang, I love markers. Black and Pink has a list of LGBT prisoners who would love to have pen pals! Read More…

I know there’s a space between us, sometimes in the realm of sliver, and other times a reaching chasm, but it persists no matter its degree in any one moment. You have questions for me, even if you read my memoir which attempted to answer most of them. Or maybe it feels like fascination because changing your gender is “just” something you can’t get your head around.

I admit it: on a day like today, I don’t care if you can’t find a way to understand my identity, or life, or choices. On a day like today I’m enraged.

Forget rose-colored glasses. I’m wearing goggles of red, and I’ve glued them to my face.

CeCe McDonald took a plea today–41 months in prison for stabbing a drugged up, Neo-Nazi with a documented history of violence, who was chasing her down the street after she’d been assaulted by him and several of his friends. During her statement to change her plea, in which she had to recount the events of that night in June, the judge explained condescendingly how it was unlawful of her to endanger the life of her attacker.

Now there’s a concept I have trouble understanding. I fail to comprehend what the legal course of action would have been.

Bumbling into Body Hair is dedicated to two people–a young trans man I’ve mentored and Tyra Hunter, a trans woman of color who was hit by a car in DC in 1995. When the EMTs arrived on the scene, they tended to her until they realized she was a preoperative transsexual. And then they laughed at her and made jokes instead of delivering care. She died at the scene.

What has society learned since Tyra’s death? What do we do differently?

Just this week a trans woman was cited and fined for using the women’s room. Certainly peeing in the street would have also been illegal. What are her options? I have been chased out of rest rooms (men’s and women’s), yelled at, and instructed not to use them. How? I can’t will away my bladder.

Why are we okay with making transsexual people illegal? Why is this so-called Christian nation so at ease with its incessant judgment about so many people? Do I blame the Puritans? Fox News? Grover Norquist? Planned Parenthood’s eugenics roots? I can’t shake my fists in enough places.

I’m tired of being agreeable, of playing the diplomat. I’m on my reserve tank of patience for this completely unhelpful argument between transsexual separatists and people who use “transgender” as an umbrella term for all gender non-conforming people. While we squabble with each other, CeCe sits in jail for defending her very existence. Does it matter to her trial or sentence how she personally identifies? Is the injustice she faces any more palatable if she calls herself one label or another?

The bigots are winning. Our representatives argue on Capitol Hill about who should receive tax cuts and which programs for poor people they should eliminate next. And our progressive front in those hallowed halls lets those conversations continue. When Republicans take to the opinion pages to say that they themselves are the problem for the bad sentiment and gridlock in Congress, I take notice.

Billionaires feel entitled to expand their already overwhelming fortunes, in the nastiest ways possible, to boot–Koch brothers destroy unions, multi-state lobbying groups like ALEC (funded in large part from those brothers) go after voting rights and public safety regulations; rich people behind NOM spend money across the country to fuel homophobia in the guise of “protecting” marriage. And the conversation about reproductive rights has spiraled down into anger at any woman who for any reason even wants to take the Pill.

It’s not surprising to me that such rampant misogyny against nontrans women includes more misogyny against trans women. But there are other intersections of hate at play that we haven’t even begun to unpack, and judging from the Tyra Hunter and CeCe McDonald cases (not to mention the scores of other people I could mention), those intersections have dire, disastrous consequences. We are so far past the point where we need to be pushing back against these hate mongers.

I do not believe that all conversations are equal. The pro-choice and anti-choice sides are not equal. The pro-gay marriage and anti-gay marriage sides are not equal. Pushing to extend civil rights and pushing to withhold them are not equal and opposing standards. Positions have substance, and substantively, positions have material effects. We can downplay them all we want, but they persist and contribute to a national mean-spiritedness, even within our own LGBT ranks.

I do not believe that Dan Savage should have a soap box he can stand on where he gets to call Bible-thumpers “pansy asses,” and tells people that it’s the blacks who brought about Prop 8 in California when he knows it not to be true, and tells people that the very conservative Attorney General in Washington State is really a female-to-male transsexual, and OMG that’s a reason for removing him from office. We must demand principled leadership of a civil rights agenda that is not geared for assimilating us into the institutions that hate us. We must look for coalitions with our sisters and brothers in other marginalized communities—for they also have queer and trans individuals, and we as LGBT people are diverse in every way possible.

I want to ask where we go from here, how we can best help CeCe, how we respond to the death upon death of trans women and men across America, and how we can work against the stereotypes that plague us (of men in dresses and girls pretending to be men, and all the confused people “in between”). When do we get our non-discrimination act? When do we get appropriate health care and insurance? When do we get more than lip service that we are deserving of civil rights?

When do we get enough respect from society that people will stop asking us invasive questions?

When do we get to just live our lives?

All my best thoughts to you, CeCe.