Trans/plant/portation

I’ve never let this much time elapse between blog posts since I started Trans/Plant/Portation more than four years ago. Even when Emile was born, I’d planned ahead and lined up several friends to write articles that were scheduled to pop up every couple of days. A few spirited times since August 2008 I’ve even posted more than once in a day, although regrettably one time it stemmed from a former online colleague deleting all of my writing from the I Fry Mine in Butter blog, and I was grabbing whatever I could off of Internet caches in a reposting fury.

It’s not that I haven’t anything to write — far from it — but that I’ve been embroiled in revisions to a novel in progress, communications to set up the publication process for another book, writing a new series to appear in the next couple of weeks for a well known site, and a smattering of submissions of some short work to various literary journals. I’ve also just applied to a writing residency and hammered out details for a speaking engagement in LA next month, and oh, I have a wonderful pen pal, fulfilling one of my goals for 2013. There are thick streams of words pouring out of my brain, I promise. Something has had to give.

Now then, it’s a shame that the blog has taken this hit, immediately after I topped 100,000 views from readers. But maybe it’s a good time to ask a few questions:

• Why don’t my posts inspire more comments from those readers?
• Which topics (LGBT civil rights, writing, popular culture, raising a baby in a nontraditional family, politics, zombies, humor, travel & food, Walla Walla living) are readers most interested in? Which topics bring readers back for more?
• What else would people like to read at T/P/P that I don’t discuss?
• Is anybody out there?

Today the sun is out, haze-free, making anyone outside squint in the brightness. I love days like this, even when it seems they’re inextricably bonded with a chill in the air. Anything is possible on a day like today. So tell me — what would you like to see around here this spring?

Meanwhile, here’s an interview I did this week. Enjoy!

This post is filled with triggering stuff about sexual assault.

Okay, so there’s this guy. He’s about my age, from my home town, and in 1984, the summer before I started high school, he was up in my bedroom while we goofed around listening to Pink Floyd and wondering what to do. The upshot here is that our long friendship collapsed in a sexual assault and after he left to walk home, I was left wondering what the hell had just happened.

I took a very long shower. I told nobody about it, but that fall, some part of me asked the guidance counselor if I could join the women’s group therapy meeting. She didn’t ask me why, just said yes, and there I was, holding my uniform skirt to my knees and listening to the awful things in the lives of my peers, wondering why I was there. Repression is a strange thing. I’d blocked out most of what had occurred in my bed the summer before, but close friends asked if everything was okay. I’d picked a high school (I was in the parochial system, not in public school) that most of my friends hadn’t selected, so it was up to me to make new pals and to keep in touch with my besties from eighth grade. As with other people my age in the mid-80s, the phone was my constant companion. I had a cord that stretched down the hall, and luxuriously enough, I had my own number and a phone in my own room (thank you, elder sisters, for paving the way for me).

The story of what happened to me (as opposed to the reality of what happened to me) warped inside my mind, as objects will when submitted to extreme pressure and stress. I told people I’d lost my virginity willingly, I used food to cover up my fear and anguish, and believed that adding another 20 or 30 pounds would limit my appeal to other people. Instead many boys figured I’d be the easy play, so I became more choosy about which after school clubs I should participate in, and which friends would be safe. (Read: Not many men made the cut.) Read More…

I remember the 1990s well–ATMs were a novelty, all the cool kids had neon-colored pagers, and Friday nights were spent playing an X-Files drinking game.* 1992, the year I graduated college, was an election year, and there were all kinds of debates within and about the queer community, some of which made the mainstream news–also known as “the evening news.” Which was watched on television, not on the Internet.

These debates included:

• Whether bisexuals should be included in the umbrella of “queer”
• Whether we should try to reclaim the term, “queer”
• Whether gays should be able to marry
• Whether queer civil rights should be about liberation or assimilation
• How best to advocate for more/better access to health care (mostly in light of the AIDS crisis)
• Whether lesbians should date bisexuals, and what that would mean about their lesbianism
• Whether gay men occupied too much of the priority list at the top of LGB civil rights
• Whether butch/femme or androgyny should be the preferred goal for lesbians

Twenty-one years later, we haven’t moved far from these debates, if at all.  Read More…

Personally, I’m not complaining about 2012. I published a book and one of my short stories was selected for the first transgender anthology in the US, and I’ve spent all kinds of wonderful moments with my baby, who is fast approaching the Defiant Toddler Years. 2012 was really pretty great for me, in that my candidate won another term as President, there are three more states with marriage equality on the board, and I got to go to some great cities, meet impressive people, run into Angela Davis and Alice Walker (sorry my stroller bag was in your way!), and read my writing to more than 500 people. But for many other reasons 2012 has been a terrible awful tragic year, and I lived through the trials, too. We all listened to that drawn-out, nasty election, filled with one sour sound bite after another, we saw the return of voting laws designed to stifle the electorate, and we watched a relentless attack on reproductive rights. The last two years have been nasty, with self-described conservatives vying for the attention of the most extreme right-wing ideals, their comments filling up the 24-hour news stations like a frothy volcano in a science experiment gone wildly wrong (which I suppose isn’t far from what their comments were). It’s hard to be inundated with incendiary rhetoric and news of the awful and still think we live in a great place. Forget best. We’re not the best country, we arguably never were, and I really don’t know why my fellow Americans keep insisting on this exceptionalism concept. But maybe if we can put our folly aside, we could carve out a renewed sense of community and “we’re in it together”ness that we sorely need these days. Here are 10 simple things we could do:

1. Turn off the pointed, partisan “news” shows—Most of us know that FoxNews isn’t either fair nor balanced, but MSNBC isn’t, either. It may feel good listening to talking heads from “your side” telling you what you want to hear, but it’s often inaccurate, and the skewed perspective only reinforces an “us/them” mentality that keeps us too distanced to listen to each other. I hate to use the word “old-fashioned” when talking about media outlets, but the old-fashioned, “objective” news rooms who fact-check every statement provides better reporting and has not set up its business model on the idea of partisanship. Who are these news outlets? That’s up to each of us to identify, frankly, because managements shift and reporters move around, but AP and UPI reporting are pretty steady, NPR has a mandate to be objective, and there are many foreign news organizations who are not beholden to US interests and so they tell it like it is. But please, shut off the Rush Limbaugh and the Chris Matthews. Go for a walk or something. Read More…

The Transgender Day of Remembrance came around last week, and to commemorate the day several web sites ran articles about transgender people, but not necessarily with regard to the individuals who died due to violence or suicide. The Huffington Post, for one, ran a list of photos of “transgender pioneers” which for many people in the trans community, myself included, seemed an odd way to memorialize murdered people. Was the intent to offer our most stellar examples of humanity for the nontrans masses so that they could learn more about us? To contextualize the extremely stark statistics about hate crimes? Or did the list of 50 “pioneers” distract from a more helpful conversation about marginalization and the media’s avoidance of these stories and lives?

So I offer instead a better list of outstanding transgender and transsexual and genderqueer individuals. While there were some in the list on Huff Post (and why, by the way, is the column called “Gay Voices” when it encompasses LGBT-spectrum topics?) who are known for being inspirational, or who really did pave the way for others, there are several people included who are really only known for being media hogs, or who have a history of problematic behavior or comments. If we’re going to celebrate people in the transgender community why not make a list of people engaged in social justice work, progressive arts and publishing, and health care? Read More…

A couple of years ago I wrote that I wanted to move on from the remembering our dead and feeling like I was always mourning as a transgender person. I wasn’t attempting to ignore death or suffering, or our collective pain, but I wondered aloud about the consequences of having our most notable event be our public grief. There are specific deaths that haunt me, like the violent ends of Tyra Hunter in Washington, DC, and Gwen Araujo in California, where my sadness crops up again and again whenever I start thinking about the ease with which people murder my trans sisters. Perhaps however it’s the aggregate of shortened lives, the headlines in alternative media that declare that in 2012, 265 transsexuals–mostly trans women–have died. Or maybe it’s when my brain starts a painful calculation of how many more of us were lost to drug addiction, or medical negligence, or due to homelessness, maybe that’s when I consider screaming. In a culture that so often vaunts itself as “pro-life,” transgender people are cleanly marked as less than. Otherwise, where is our national outrage? Even young gay men have their celebrity champion against bullying and the damage bullies wreak.

It feels like too much, a lot of the time. But in my next breath I need to acknowledge my middle class status, privilege of whiteness, and the reality that I am mostly safe and definitely supported by the community at large where I live, despite my openness as a trans man. If I am ready to push past the Transgender Day of Remembrance, I’m leaving it to those more vulnerable than me to keep the mantle held high. Yes, I’ve mourned the losses of my chosen family since I came out as queer in 1991–to AIDS, to self-loathing, to fear, to violence, to chemical dependence–but I can’t walk away from bringing these atrocities to light, to larger audiences. Read More…

If only writing were just about writing. If only the time we could dedicate to delicious production would fall into our laps and procreate making oodles of more writing time that we could carry around like a jar of marbles. But barriers to our own prolificacy are real, and grotesque, and numerous. They’re sneaky buggers, shutting us down even when we’ve established a groove, or are in mad love with our story, or if this is the only day of the week where we can carve a new canal into the manuscript. There be monsters here, in the world, with the best of intentions of a writer’s project their preferred fare. To defend oneself I have cobbled a list of such wickedness in the hopes that we all can identify them more quickly and banish them back to their lairs.

General self-doubt–Ah, the pernicious beast, this one! It loves to creep up at the worst hours, especially as writers are sitting down to their keyboards. You can’t do this, it whispers. You’re not good enough. Leave the writing to the “real” writers. What a mean message, because it has the power to unravel confidence in many areas beyond writing talent itself. The best defense against this monster is to find distractions, a.k.a. do something that makes you feel good. Your favorite music to set the writing mood, enough sleep each night, a quick walk to generate endorphins, anything. In the case of last defense, tell the monster to go away. Seriously. I am evidence that this can work. I suggested a long, around-the-world vacation for my inner critic, and it really did go away. Read More…

Aleisha says it all.