Trans/plant/portation

I’ve devolved as a news-watcher over the last 25 years. If I waited until the evening to get the news, during dinner with my parents in the late 1980s, I hardly ever see broadcast news now. The promise of American 24-hour news channels never came to pass, in my opinion; instead of thorough coverage from news desks around the world, it’s mind-numbing commentary from uninformed talking heads who seem much more interested in their own product placement contracts than in communicating about our global goings on. Those news syndicates and news desks in other countries have dried up, but what was their other option after years of little funding or support from the channel executives? Now big name news outlets like CNN use amateur video–even solicit it openly–to serve as content providers. So it is that people’s backyards were frequent film footage sources during every large snow of the winter last year.

The GOP primary race has put me over the edge, though. On top of the sensationalized headlines, anemic interest stories, vapid policy analysis, and over-reliance on technology gimmicks (I’m looking at you, hologram interview), now there are countless stupid sound bites from what looks like little more than well funded bigots running to disassemble the Office of the President. Read More…

By now, chances are you’ve seen the news that the Susan G. Komen Foundation defunded its support of Planned Parenthood, which it had established in 2005. Pressure for the foundation to stop the support began almost immediately, and the national Susan G. Komen board resisted this pressure until yesterday. I spoke with Gina Popovic, Executive Vice President of the Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, who stressed that Komen is not the bad actor in all of this, the anti-choice activists are.

“We don’t want a pink on pink war,” said Ms. Popovic.

One of the first thoughts to cross my mind when I read the headline on the Washington Post about Komen’s PP defunding was the completely inaccurate statement that Senator John Kyl made last April:

Everybody goes to clinics, to hospitals, to doctors, and so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does. Read More…

I couldn’t bring myself to title this post “Everything I Know I Learned from My Sex Change,” because I’m not a fan of Jackson Browne, but it is true that I’ve gleaned some stellar lessons through the gender transition experience, many of them “scalable” to life more generally. Here are but a few of those pointers.

When someone tells you they’ve made a major, life-changing decision, don’t poo-poo them but offer your support instead. Yes, deciding to move across the country for a new love/job/crisis/etc. is hard to hear, and yet a smile is all that is needed from you, the recipient of the news. Read More…

I was in graduate school in snowy Syracuse, New York when the word “queer” came onto the scene as a self-identifier for LGBT people. One colleague whispered her horror to me, saying that “queer” always was and always would be a terrible word. Yet the wave swept over a large segment of the LGBT community and the collective decision, at least in my generation, was to “reclaim” the word for ourselves. We were out, loud, and proud, and we had just discovered that we could co-opt Roy G. Biv for our political purposes and move past the pink and black triangles of our elders. Queer Nation was here.

Fast forward into the age of the information superhighway, and conversations roiled online about the use of “tranny” among LGBT people. We’ve arrived in a different place with this epithet, and it doesn’t include any kind of reclamation. Whereas people in the LGBT umbrella felt that they themselves could use “queer” as an in-community term, that has not been the conversation with the t-word. Even Kate Bornstein, the author of Gender Outlaw, was told in no uncertain terms that her trans sisters were hurt whenever they heard her use it, and they wanted her to erase it from her vocabulary. She went public with her feelings of conflict.

If trans women are walking away from using “tranny” en masse, then the rest of us should, too. Read More…

Setting: Pajama party, 1985, East Windsor, New Jersey, in the suburbs. About six or seven teenage girls are hanging out in a family room, watching racy movies and nibbling at chocolate chip cookies and potato chips. It is something like 1AM. The movie ends and conversation starts up, mostly about who’s dating whom, which teachers at school are the worst, nothing terribly unexpected as topics go. And then someone arrives at the bright idea of playing truth or dare. Dares are written down on scraps of paper and tossed into a hat, should a game participant select dare over truth for their turn. Dares seem to be winning out as the choice of the night, and quickly all of the dares are exhausted.

I figure that we’ve gone through the worst of them, so when it’s my turn, I pick dare and consider myself the cleverest person of the evening. It only takes about five seconds to reconsider handing over my mantle.

“Put this chip clip on your boob.” She held it out to me. It was all bright yellow and innocent-looking. Read More…

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Erm, maybe not happy. We are, after all, thinking about a civil rights leader who was assassinated. But hey, it’s a great day for a furniture sale! Or a quick trip to KMart to see what’s been price-slashed.

I mean, we’re post-race in this country, right? So there’s nothing race-related about calling the First Lady “Mrs. YoMama.” There’s no race in any of the billboards that have popped up across the nation of President Obama in a turban, or in the incessant, it’s-been-proven-wrong notion that he was not born in the USA. There’s no racism in saying that black city kids should become janitors so that they can learn a work ethic. Of course Rick Santorum wasn’t racist when he went on the stump and said he didn’t want to give black people taxpayers’ money. They were “blah people,” he said in a correction. Read More…

Several years ago, Cookie Monster himself declared that cookies were a “sometimes food.” What a disappointment. After a childhood of thinking the way to eat a cookie was to mash it into my felty mouth, now I was supposed to eat apples and celery?

At least we had the annual Girl Scout cookie drive, the largest fundraising activity for the Girl Scout organization. There’s a proper emphasis on cookies. Who doesn’t like buying a couple of boxes of these to help support one of the biggest woman-run organizations in the US?

Taylor, a teenage Scout from California, that’s who. In her YouTube video, she calls for a boycott on Girl Scout cookies because a troop in Colorado let in a trans girl as a Scout. Taylor thinks this 7-year-old is a danger to the other Scouts, and unravels the entire “for girls” mantra in the organization. Read More…

Xena bless Gwendolyn Ann Smith for starting the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, to focus on the losses our chosen family incurs from bigotry and hatred. But there is a kind of bleakness in the event—we’re certainly not celebrating as we come together, and I for one have to stave off the blues the week afterward because the names of the dead float around in my head. And trust me, I already think about those who haven’t made it on a regular, frequent basis.

Still, I won’t let the day pass without some reflection; it’s a time to re-commit myself to mentoring others, to putting myself out there so I can be a resource in times of trouble, in agitating my local community to push past their stereotyped notions of who trans people are, and in doing work that materially benefits the “T” part of LGBT, since it is so often carelessly forgotten. We want to stop future deaths from violence, but all we have to work with are ourselves and our sense of mission to cobble together a response to that violence. I try to focus on proactive work—call it violence prevention if you will—but I’m supportive of others who take different paths. A variety of responses gives us a better movement, if those responses are in concert with each other and not in opposition. Read More…

In the ominous news of the week last week, the Michigan Senate attached an exception to an anti-bullying law that was working its way through the state legislature. That’s right, an exception for bullying youth. The text of the exception read:

This section does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil and parent or guardian.

To clarify, the state senators wanted to exempt any individual who stated they were using their “sincerely held” religious or moral belief to bully others. This represents nothing less than another over-the-line moment of an increasingly strict fundamentalist, conservative few attempting to dictate its values to the rest of the country. In context with the attempt to redefine personhood in Mississippi (which failed on election day), destroy collective bargaining rights, and undermine the federal budget with still more tax cuts for corporations, the ability of state senators to validate harassment against children is a fine example of just how off the rails the GOP has ventured.  Read More…

Let me begin with a disclaimer: I don’t put the fight for same-sex marriage at the top of my LGBT civil rights to do list. It’s not my priority, as much as I think the US is living in the Dark Ages with regard to marriage rights for all of its residents, not just some of them. I roll my eyes at President Obama’s unwillingness to fully support same-sex marriage, and I think it’s crystal clear at this point that the front lines against equal marriage rights are really about hatred and anger at gay people, and not anything else.

Perhaps it’s because fighting tends to polarize debate, especially in our modern reductivist climate, but it’s easy to chuck a principled stance by the wayside in favor of low blows, bumper sticker sloganizing, and arguments that don’t work, ultimately, in anyone’s favor.

Take, for example, Kim Kardashian’s ill-fated marriage to whatshisname. Read More…