Trans/plant/portation

1. Hey, did you see that article in the newspaper about that transgendered couple?
2. Hey, do you know the transsexual couple in the paper today?
3. Oh my God, was that you in the paper today about being trans?
4. Hey, there’s a high school student/college student/totally grown adult who is starting to transition. Could you talk to them? I mean, I haven’t talked to them yet to find out if they’d like you to do that, but you know, could you do that?
5. I’m a great ally, but I’m not really out about being an ally. So please don’t go telling people I think it’s okay to be trans, all right?
6. That’s a nice idea and all, but you know this isn’t DC, right?
7. You sure talk about being trans a lot. Like, aren’t you happy just being a man?
8. You might have a hard time finding a job here, because you’re overqualified. You know, that happens to men.
9. What was your old name?
10. Do you know the pregnant man?
11. Hey, did you hear the pregnant man is getting divorced?
12. Did you make that baby with Susanne?
13. Does it bother you that your baby isn’t related to you?
14. Why do all trans men have such crazy facial hair?
15. Do you mourn the old you?
16. Do you ever think about going back to being a woman?
17. I was just wondering, do you have phantom breast sensations?
18. Hey, do you know <<INSERT FAMOUS TRANS PERSON’S NAME HERE>>?
19. Does it feel weird to take your shirt off in the pool?
20. I understand how hard it is to find a doctor in town. My mom had <<INSERT DISEASE HERE>> and she had to drive to Seattle to find a specialist.
21. Is it like, totally weird living in a small town?
22. Are you interested in giving the newspaper an interview about being trans in Walla Walla?

Responses tomorrow.

Walla Walla’s Washington State Senator, Mike Hewitt, is not known in progressive circles for being a friend to the queers. Trans people aren’t even on his radar. His office caused a ruckus in the blogosphere (a.k.a. The Huffington Post in this case) when some as-yet-unnamed staffer told an angry caller that gays should “grow their own food” if, under his co-sponsored bill, any business owner decided to deny service to LGBT people because of “a sincerely held belief.” The “grow their own food” was apparently an option if any LGBT person living in a rural area with few grocery stores (as is actually the case in large swaths of Washington State) was denied as a customer by store owners.

Of course this was an angry caller from Seattle, not Hewitt’s district. Of course this was a stupid off-the-cuff remark from the staff member, not the Senator himself. And to further contextualize things, this Senate Bill 5927 is in response to a florist from a nearby city who refused to serve a couple looking to get gay married. She is now being sued. But that’s the point of anti-discrimination statutes. A florist is not a church. And flowers seem unimportant–as in, they’re not food–but even small moments of ignorance and bigotry cast wide ripples. For SB 5927 doesn’t limit lawsuits, it opens the floodgates for any individual with a product or service to refuse access, solely on the basis of dislike. It’s a total negation of including sexual orientation as a protected category in the state, setting up a hierarchy of communities based on which ones have unstoppered protection and which ones fall under this proposed law’s exception.

Certainly this isn’t the first time some sort of “philosophical” exception has made its way into the laws of the land. Extreme right-wing organizations actively recruit close-minded people into medicine and pharmacy now in order to have more “soldiers” on the front lines of the battle over reproductive rights in order to use their “sincerely held beliefs” to say they won’t supply Plan B to women, or offer pregnancy termination when it’s requested (or hey, needed). There is now so much room around these moral objections that the very notion that any of us in the general public finds these exceptions problematic is itself an assault on religious freedom. Read More…

At first I wasn’t sure that what I was hearing existed in the outside world. It could have been an echo of a dream, or a misinterpretation of a real sound by a sleepy, 5AM brain.

And then it happened again. And again. I strained to figure out the identity of the sound. My mind compared it, I suppose, to every other sound that came in striking distance of this one. It was a rap. No. It was a wham. No. The sound, skipping like a record player but slower, was somehow tamped down. It had multiple parts that chimed at once–it was like a sharp thud. What the hell is a sharp thud? How could anything sound like that?

When deconstructing a sound, there is complexity. The start of the sound, the middle (this is optional) and the finish. Every sound pushes against air, creates something from nothing and then travels out in all available directions until a fraction of that creation reaches our ears, where it is funneled down to our eardrums. And then when our tiniest bones rattle our experienced brains quickly sort through our dendrite-supported memory and label those sound waves. A dog barking. Glass shattering. A soda can opening. There may be individual differences among those canines, windows, and pops, but they’re similar enough that it doesn’t take us very long to assess and categorize what we hear. All things being equal, of course.

But here I was, the clock relaying the early hour to me, and the sound. The sound. The sound.

It’s unusual for someone in their 40s to hear a completely brand new wave. (Ha. I wrote new wave.) And yet, I couldn’t place this on listening alone. So I got up–clad in boxers and a faded t-shirt. My hair was pillow-conformed. I forgot my eyeglasses on the bedside table, so I wasn’t great at seeing anything in front of me, either. (Rookie mistake.) I stood in the dining room, swaying a little, waiting for the next eruption. Read More…

Let’s pretend violence is incomprehensible. Let’s pretend that the problem with guns isn’t about a lack of background checks or the extreme availability of weapons but with crazed madmen and an unabridged desire to kill people. Let’s pretend there is no relationship between NRA public relations and gun lobbying on Capitol Hill and the fact that Congress refuses to change gun laws even though 92 percent of Americans want to see universal background checks.

Let’s pretend that bombing the finish line of a marathon is a great time to check to make sure that Tagg Romney is okay. Let’s pretend that the well funded news machine isn’t in competition with people’s photos posted on Twitter and Instagram. Let’s pretend that it’s okay to put out any garbage about the calamity still happening in Beantown and call it news–unchecked, unverified, unconnected with any journalistic integrity. Let’s pretend that social media doesn’t morph into one huge trigger for the survivors of 9/11, Newtown, Aurora, the London Underground, or the Madrid bombings. Let’s pretend though that the sight of blood on the sidewalk in those Twitter photos is even more gruesome to American viewers because our regular news is so sanitized, while bombings are a near-daily occurrence in places all over the world.

Let’s pretend that we’re not about to descend into politicized name-calling from both parties about Patriot Day and intelligence failures and President Obama’s failures as a leader. Let’s pretend that there won’t be spotlighted Senate hearings at taxpayer expense to examine how bombs could go off on US soil while we were celebrating achievement and American exceptionalism. Let’s pretend we’ll have a helpful conversation about violence and what fuels such anger among some people that they would take to calculating explosions at a sporting event. Let’s pretend those conversations will get us anywhere better as a people.

Let’s pretend this will never happen again. Let’s pretend we can avoid telling our kids about what happened today, lest their worlds be interrupted by bombs and selfishness and dismemberment and bloody shards of glass. Let’s pretend we have some hope of healing and not descending into finger-pointing and a series of cruel memes on the Internet.

Let’s pretend it’s yesterday, or the day before PanAm 103 exploded in the air over Scotland. Let’s pretend we can stay in the 5 minutes after we woke up this morning where all we were thinking about was our first cup of coffee and the lovely feeling of hot water streaming out of the shower. Let’s pretend we can turn off news of this tragedy and just look out at the spring day and the tulips across the street even if all we can muster is a weak smile.

Let’s pretend these families will find solace and recovery and strength from their communities, and when they lobby their elected leaders to improve the lives of the rest of us, that we listen to them because they earned their position of advocacy in the hardest way.

Let’s pretend to be a country with interest in each other.

And maybe then we can move on to someplace new.

Last winter, after a 2-year analysis of whether they should lift their policy excluding gay scouts and scout leaders, the Boy Scouts organization declared that the ban would stay in place, and then backtracked a little to take up the issue again in the summer of 2013. Sorry, boy scouts in America, your leaders are more invested in protecting your parents’ archaic judgmental attitudes about sexual orientation, at the expense of your potential future happiness and self-worth.

Worse, I would argue it’s going to leave you more vulnerable in the case of a zombie attack. Here’s why.

1. Their promises–Both groups have similar core mission statements that they make, though the Boy Scouts call it an “oath” and the Girl Scouts a “promise.” Boy Scouts also swear to be “morally straight,” meaning they’ll have strong character and live their lives with honesty. Go Girl Scouts, who won’t waste energy ensuring they’re justified in defending themselves, can just orchestrate a response to a mass invasion and get on with it.

2. The Girl Scouts’ Inclusivity–Beyond the feel-goodness of multiculturalism, there is the strength in having a diversity of experience on the table when a community needs to take action or set policy. If social positionality affects our lived reality, and if we are capable of learning from our experiences, then the Girl Scouts’ history helps them here. Admitting girls (and scout leaders) of all racial and ethnic heritages, sexual orientations, and gender identities ensures they’ll have a broader base of experience to bring to moments of crisis. And in a zombie apocalypse, they’ll need all the help they can get. Read More…

My older sister Kathy has always loved the “It’s a Small World After All” ride at Disney World. Every time we’ve gone to the theme park she gets giddy while she’s standing in line for the ride, gesticulating with gusto, talking in between squealing giggles like she’s transported her emotional self back to age 11. When we’re locked into our slow-moving seats the waterworks starts for her, somewhere between the smiling children from Holland and the colorful children from Africa. For me the ride is three notches above the moldy animatronics of Chuck E. Cheese, but for Kathy, it’s a gateway to our connectedness on Planet Earth. Every. Single. Time. For one quadriplegic rider at DisneyLand, however, getting stuck on the ride for eight hours was enough to sue the company. I don’t think even my dear Kathy would want to be subjected to the ear worm for eight hours straight. Everyone else got off of the broken ride, but Disney had no evacuation procedures in place for individuals with mobility issues. And whoever thought that sending Mickey and Minnie Mouse over to him to perform while he was stuck has lost their sense of perspective.

I find life like a broken, singing roller coaster a lot of the time, these days anyway. Is my family in town this week? Are we hosting a guest? Do I have a deadline to meet? Has the baby discovered a new activity that could destroy our house? Is the car still working? Fortunately for us there’s not a single simple tune playing in the background through all of this, nor a series of wooden Stepfordesque children smiling an endless smile in our general direction. Read More…

I’m in airports a lot these days. A lot a lot. Getting anywhere from Eastern Washington, in the age of regional carriers means lots of legs to get to my final destination, making air travel something of an airport crawl without the really good beer. I’ve been stuck in Salt Lake Airport on Christmas, stranded in Minneapolis multiple times due to weather or mechanical trouble, on the tarmac in Spokane waiting for an overbooked deicer to get to our plane, and of course there was that time in San Francisco when we were told we’d missed our flight even though it was an hour until takeoff. I continue to stand by my United boycott after that bull hockey. Still, as the 14-hour drive home from SFO pointed out, flying is faster than ground travel. And because I often have faraway places to go (I mean, seriously, everything is far from Walla Walla), I wind up spending copious hours of time in airports. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the more time I spend in airports, the greater the opportunity for unusual things to happen to me while I’m there. Read More…

Arizona, the state that brought us a ban on Ethnic Studies and some of the most extreme anti-immigrant laws in the nation, now has crafted a bill that would make using the “wrong” restroom–read, one that does not comport with the letter on one’s birth certificate–a misdemeanor, punishable by a multi-thousand dollar fine and up to six months in jail. The language in the bill reads almost opposite as the non-discriminatory language found in jursidictions around the country that protect trans-identified and gender nonconforming people from harassment when accessing public facilities:

All entities covered under the Act, as amended, shall allow individuals the right to use gender-specific restrooms and other gender-specific facilities such as dressing rooms, homeless shelters, and group homes that are consistent with their gender identity or expression (Washington, DC Office of Human Rights, District of Columbia Municipal Regulations (DCMR) entitled “Compliance Rules and Regulations Regarding Gender Identity or Expression.” Title 4, Chapter 8, amended October 26, 2006)

Instead, Arizona’s proposed language requires people to use the bathroom that comports with the sex marker on their birth certificate. This is troubling for many reasons, including in no particular order:

1. Arizona has no legislative control over other states’ departments of vital statistics, the organizations that generally are in charge of granting and validating birth and death certificates. Some states, like New Jersey, grant new birth certificates with a letter of sex-reassignment surgery, while others only amend previously created birth certificates. It’s unclear if this proposed law would “accept” such amendments over the original certificate. And then some states, like Ohio, never amend or re-release birth certificates for any reason. So any trans individual from Ohio needing to urinate in Arizona should what, cross the state line first? Ask a kind neighbor for use of their private bathroom? Read More…

A guilty verdict was handed down by Justice Thomas Lipps today, for both defendants in the Steubenville, Ohio rape case that has caught the attention of the nation. As the verdict was read, reality descended on the two young men charged with raping a drunk and unconscious young woman at a party last August. Multiple reports about the incident noted that before and during that party, young men on the high school football team were used to behaving however they saw fit with no boundaries enforced by the adults in their lives, and that their coach, Reno Saccocchia, was considered a frequent aid in cleaning or covering up the antics of his football players. The trial highlighted accounts by several witnesses and text messages that rather than one awful moment in which Trent Mays and Ma’Lik Richmond had a terrible, hurtful lapse in judgment, this rape behavior was more about an accumulation of unaccountability by the young men, their coach, their friends, and their parents.

The trial itself was not free of misogyny. As I’ve written about during other publicized sexual assault investigations, questions swirled around regarding the ability of the young woman to give consent to her treatment. Even though there were concerns that she’d been drugged by the defendants or their teammates, even though many witnesses attested that she was drunk–which ought to have answered the question of consent right there–and even though the assailants and others said in various media that she was unconscious, “not participating,” or passed out, the defense still saw an avenue to drag her reputation and prior behavior into the testimony at trial. Decades old questions regarding the (in)ability of men to acknowledge or notice a lack or removal of consent were brought to bear as valid discussion once again. In what some analysts called a re-victimization of the young woman, texts, photos, and video of the assault were circulated among other football team members, high school students, and the Internet at large. And of course the trial called up many of those humiliating moments after the fact as part of the prosecution as well as the defense’s case. Read More…

Hypothetically speaking, what if the lunch fare at one’s weekly meeting of philanthropists often left diners with a sense of . . . intestinal turmoil? What if many a Thursday–not all of them, certainly–included clutching at one’s midsection, hoping that none of the fellow meeting goers can see one’s distress as one drives out of the parking lot on the way toward one’s office across town? Would one necessarily become masterful at just smiling through the pain while waiting for it to pass? I suppose one would begin fantasizing about relief in one’s office rest room, before recalling that in that building, rooms are only separated by paper-thin walls, acting more like amplifiers than mufflers of decible-laden noise. At that point perhaps one recalculates one’s options, noting that there is also a family rest room in the first floor hallway.

Of course, at this point one may walk in, sphincter at red alert, and come to a disturbing scene in which some other human has decided to smear his or her excrement on the vinyl walls of the room. In all likelihood one would then back away in horror, nervously twitching and holding one’s nose in a vain attempt to shut out the wicked smell of decomposing stool. Oh, the humanity! Surely one would avoid coming into contact with any foreign substance, ducking into their own section of the building and smearing alcohol gel all over their topmost limbs up to their elbows, and over every inch of skin that had been exposed to the noxious air.

Maybe, just maybe, one would forget one’s own indigestion and simply cower at one’s desk, hoping the substantive content of one’s job was adequate for moving on from the terror of the previous 75 minutes. Perhaps one could find an Internet animated gif of a kitten jumping straight up and could move on emotionally to a better reality. And just say that at some point it would be time for one to head home to one’s toddler, who would pant at one through the living room window, calling out one’s name with a smile on his face, as if all was right with the world.

So in our hypothetical situation, say an entire week elapsed and one forgot the trauma of the previous Thursday, until such time that one came face-to-face with the same buffet, and what if it wasn’t until one was standing next to the “Spinach Chicken Cannolini” that one remembered the danger? Wouldn’t it look suspicious to one’s friends if one did not serve oneself, but acted as if one was better than the lunch presented? And then one would continue on with eating the meal and acting as if every internal organ agreed with the food consumption? And afterward one would smile again as one drove away, through gritted teeth and just enough taste of bile in the back of one’s mouth to set one into a real sense of urgency?

Wouldn’t that make a great short story?