Trans/plant/portation

A few days ago a trans woman was attacked just outside of a women’s rest room at a Baltimore area McDonald’s. Two nontrans women, one of them a minor, beat her until she was curled into a fetal position on the floor, and then kicked her in her back, head, and neck. The terrible video, captured by a McDonald’s employee who did nothing to aid or defend her, was quickly posted on YouTube, whereupon some ignoble comments were added to the physical injuries already sustained. The violence lasted around 3 minutes, and the Internet erupted, all over again, with vitriol, calls for quick arrests and/or vengeance, and a whole lot of assumptions about transfolk, people of color, and the McDonald’s anti-discrimination policy.

It is, as is the case so often, a lot to sort through. Read More…

After all of the insider politics and hurt feelings, Maryland’s House Bill 235 was sent back to committee yesterday, an ignoble death at the end of their legislative session. Trouble had begun with the public accommodations clause of the bill was removed, leaving employment, education, and housing protections, but not covering transgender people in some of the most vulnerable situations they may face. Activists put pressure on Equality Maryland, one of the main organizations lobbying for the bill, and the sponsoring Delegate, Ms. Pena-Melnyk, and surprisingly, the activists were quickly dismissed as adversaries, and when they posted comments on Equality Maryland’s Web site and Facebook page, their comments were deleted, their accounts banned from future posting.

This development, unsurprisingly, did not go over well. Read More…

Originally, I was going to leave this alone. Enough other intelligent people were covering the recent events in Maryland’s push toward same-sex marriage and transgender civil rights that I didn’t think I’d be adding anything new to the conversation. I pulled back and used a broader lens to ask some questions about where we are as a queer community, thinking that this regional dispute was part of a larger debate and tension among the L, G, B, and T in le grande coalition.

And then this photo popped up on Equality Maryland’s Facebook fan page and a scant few hours later, it was gone, zapped into the nethersphere, along with whatever affronted comments had joined it temporarily. Fortunately I grabbed the photo before it had been cast out. Read More…

A joke made its way around the interwebs a couple of weeks ago:

A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across, takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier, and says, “Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.”

It was worth a chuckle, I suppose, but I found it tough to laugh, because this wrangling over scraps is too commonplace in our trying times. I wish it were only about credit default swaps, mortgages, and job opportunities, but it isn’t. The battle for scarce resources is also taking place on the civil rights front. Read More…

Those of us who’ve spent time honing our language use and craft have inevitably stumbled across the occasional comment or question about whether we could donate our skills to writing something for them or someone they know. A newsletter needs one last article, or someone read a call for essays on fishing, or have we ever thought about ghostwriting, because it seems like there’s always work for ghostwriters. (Hint: ask an actual ghostwriter and one may receive a different impression.) It’s as if any writer can write about any subject, in any form, and within any genre. We practically poop letters.

Gratefully, it does not work that way. Read More…

Way back in June 2003 I had a dream that began a long string of nervous decisionmaking to embark on this whole gender transition journey of mine. As I progressed, I gained confidence, but I was making everything up as I went along. Somehow my culture hadn’t already identified a ready to wear outfit for having a sex change. I plunged into the Internet, which at the time was All About Messageboards, and somewhere beyond the thick soup of hyperspace were actual people. Some of them were newbies, like myself, asking questions, others were at the intermediate level, as it were, and still more folks had set themselves up as mini-gurus on the topic.

To say that in the midst of these personalities, there was some conflict would count as something of a stunning understatement. Read More…

I saw Kate Bornstein speak in Seattle last week at a book signing, and even though probably two-thirds of us had heard her story before, she told it to us. And once again I was subject to a familiar-sounding tale: that of confronting one’s demons, at the precipice of life itself.

I’m making it sound dramatic because in the final analysis, it is. I’ve spoken to dozens of people in the years before, during, and after my own transition, and in those stories, there are loads of differences. We come from divergent backgrounds, understand our identity in a multitude of ways, prioritize this aspect or that over others, and have created strategies for transition or for not transitioning (or for de-transitioning) that reflect ourselves. We resist the notion that there is a “Transgender Narrative,” namely, that we are all our chosen sex in the wrong body. Postulated decades ago in order to explain to non-trans people why we feel so strongly about our decisions to buck the gender binary, the “girl in a boy’s body” trope has pigeonholed the transsexual experience, and among the people I’ve spoken with, we hate its place in our community’s mythos.

But there is common thread I’ve noticed. In every single story I’ve heard, including Kate’s, we have contemplated suicide. Read More…

Many of us who had the fortune to attend college, or who lived in a tight-knit community can relate to the concept of venturing out around campus and its nearby neighborhoods and running into lots of people they knew. In Syracuse, an acknowledgment or short conversation seemed to happen every 6.3 yards. With my move to Washington, DC, after nine years in snowy Central New York, I was suddenly anonymous. And in that urban landscape, hardly anybody cared if they saw a masculine woman in a tweed jacket, so I was initially pleased that I’d gotten some degree of quiet in my subway/walking commute to work. But quickly, I realized that I missed the little, often pithy small talk from New York. What I missed was that degree of community. Read More…

I was 21 years old and everyone had forgotten my birthday. I’d come out one month earlier and promptly broken my ankle in three places—which makes a hell of a terrible sound, for those unfortunate enough to hear it—and was at the tail end of a friendship that soon wouldn’t survive my coming out process. Full of angst and sadness, and not especially mobile, I slowly crutched a half a block from my upstairs apartment onto Westcott Street in Syracuse, New York, where I was about to start graduate school in English literature. Woe was me. I figured if I focused on a simple goal of sitting down and having a two-egg lunch at the corner greasy spoon, I could just get through another moment in what I was sure would be my worst birthday ever. Read More…

Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a moment to reflect on the lives lost among transgender women and men, no matter their specific gender identities or expressions. So I would like to expand the category of “transgender” even as I believe firmly that people along the trans spectrum are all too often ignored, even in the face of the at long last media attention on LGB/t suicide. Read More…