(Part three of a series on trans advocacy. Part one spoke about changing the narrative used to describe trans people, and part two looked at expectations.)
In order to be an advocate for any group that you are not a member of and that you don’t have the intimate knowledge of from life experience, a person really has to understand the damage caused by the colonial mentality in order to start seeing where the boundaries are.
In other words they can’t make it easier to get your documents fixed, to allow Intersex kids to define themselves, to throw out unneccessary sex markers on documents with all the harm they do in all facets of peoples lives because it may make it harder to prevent marriage equality? That does seem to be what he said.
And the reaction to the case that’s mentioned next of a Trans Man’s cyst being denied state medical coverage because he wasn’t classed as a woman anymore but the condition is classed as a womens condition is far from adequate.
Both major parties have ruled out marriage-equality.
Even though the Prime Minister is an unmarried Atheist and her party has a Lesbian Minister for Climate-change and a senator who is in a relationship with a Trans-man they are so scared of the religious right in marginal electorates that they have said they only support marriage between “a man and a woman”, with the changes they made in recognising relationships they changed the laws that reduced the pensions of elderly and disabled and unemployed same-sex couples who of course previously have been paying the higher tax rates of singles.
The Labor party has promised to streamline the various states and territories anti-discrimination legislation but have not yet promised to include sexuality and gender identity and expression. So that the conservative ‘Liberal’ party have promised this is interesting.. ah but they can’t promise to do it in the first term of course.
Labor has promised funding to address the massive suicide rate of Gays, of Lesbians, of Bisexuals… but what about Transgender Australians who face an attempted suicide rate of 37%-40% far higher than that of GL or B Australians? And what about Intersex whom it seems no-one is even bothering to count? http://www.starobserver.com.au/news/2010/07/27/gillard-to-fund-gay-suicide-prevention/28743 and theres important stuff in the comments about the organisation Beyond Blue. Here’s OII on this http://oiiaustralia.com/australian-labor-action-tackle-suicide/ note the response they got from the government, where they give their reason the most at-risk groups were the ones left off a list of a project that’s meant to prioritise the most at-risk communities!
So it seems that while both major parties do want the votes of the Gay Lesbian and Bisexual community and are willing to compete for those votes it’s very different for Trans and Intersex. Whose lives they aren’t concerned with putting effort into saving let alone improving.
“We build ourselves prisons and live there, sometimes all of our lives.
We think we will be safe in them, but we just cut ourselves off from everyone else.”
Larissa
It’s my great good fortune to be employed in an environment which allows me to see and speak with some of the most remarkable human beings I imagine live on Planet Earth. They are nondescript, often poor and many times uneducated in the ways of suburban American lives.
Sometimes they are loud, often they see things I do not and can describe them in detail. Often their thoughts do not resonate with my experience, but the offering of them resonates within the speaker, sometimes to such a degree that no one else can speak to the thoughts presented.
The people I am fortunate enough to work among have that thing about them that most Americans fear, more so, I think, than most of us fear death. They have diagnoses. They have mental illness diagnoses.
Yes, the things we fear greatly: schizophrenia (often of the paranoid type,) schizoaffective disorder, severe bi-polar disorders, dysthymic disorders, acute glossalaliac mania, and depressive disorder. Many also have the lesser Axis II diagnoses that add a tremendous handicap to both themselves and the practitioners who work with them, the families who once (and occasionally still do) loved them (and sometimes contorted them into beings as brittle and delicate as funnel cakes,) and for those who live near them, interact with them and wish that they would just go away: borderline personality disorder, complex PTSD, anti-social personality disorder and the frightening to others dissociative identity disorder.
Some of those I work among are persistently at risk for self-harm, up to and including suicide. Very few and very rarely do they express a desire to harm others (no more so, anyhow, than the 10-million-times-a-day-said-by-most-children-and-many-adults-and-generally-not-considered-acutely-threatening “I wish you (him, her or they) would die” or a so-usual-as-to-be-not-noticed-in-the-suburbs “I’m gonna kill you (her, him or them.)”
Odd, no, how the addition of a diagnosis that scares the hell out of layman and professional alike (some if not all of those listed above) can make the mundane startlingly emergent, leading to calls for crisis clinicians and police officers, ambulances, psych-wards and state-owned psychiatric hospitals.
Ask politicians if scaring the bejesus out of the population isn’t an effective way to govern unhampered a supposed democratic republic. Better yet, ask yourself how many freedoms and tolerances are you willing to forego for the constitutional right to live forever regardless the fact of your own mortality.
“Larissa” (not, of course, even close to her real name) is one of those folks I am privileged to work among and with. She has one of those dreaded diagnoses so many of us perceive as nightmares on nights when we’ve over indulged in peanut-butter, dill pickle and bleu cheese with Alfredo sauce pumpernickel crust pizza chased by a 6-pack of PBRs.
Yeah, truly exquisite and torturous nightmares engulf us when we consider the possibility of a D-I-A-G-N-O-S-I-S. Frightening stuff, gimme a flaming pit in the deepest Puritan hell instead.
Yet, when one finds herself 21 years down the road working with such folks in one capacity or another, she finds that in most respects, hell, all respects on most days, she feels more safe and blessed to be among them than she feels herself to be among her suburban neighbors and acquaintances. There is no creature alive, I am certain, more liable to erratic, unhinged behavior than a suburbanite on a highway or road with an SUV or sedan.
No creature can be as unpredictably dangerous as the remnants of the disappeared white middle-class who profoundly believe that the ubiquitous relegation of a Puritan-based “Sinners in the hands of an” Angry God to fireside tales designed to frighten children has somehow managed to denigrate their supposed democracy to a plaything of “socialists and those people” who wish to enchain them in a subservience they grew up thinking was reserved to those of browner hue.
They decry their stolen wealth that they declare was taken by those who struggle to eat three meals a day and buy Pampers for their babies and in not admitting that they have been hoodwinked, bamboozled, relegated, stolen from, and demeaned by the very iconic paragons of America’s “wealth equates to righteousness and we do God’s work” financiers, corporate heads and minions, corporatist-Neolibs, Libertarians and -Neocons who they fervently dream will raise them to the level they believed they were born to. Those people are dangerous and frightening.
However, the fever dreams of the disappeared American middle-class and the cynical dictatorships of the wealthy and their minions in modern America aren’t the focus of the canvas I’m trying to paint in this essay.
The words attributed above in the epigraph to “Larissa” are the focus of that canvas. But, I know that her words bear as well on the “American problems” delineated above. We who make prisons for our selves live in the realm of our severe and persistent nightmares. We alienate ourselves from others and find our only friendships are among those who fear the same things as we fear: relationship, compassion, social consciousness and conscience. Afterall, the trope goes for the past three hundred years: God’s blessings are evidenced by the wealth and power he grants us, not by the good and decent works we do nor by finding that love and care are inexplicably among the few slivers of human existence that are both plentiful and free-of-charge.
“I dance in your words. Appreciating your vulnerability. Surprisingly comfortable with my own. Your work is beautiful. Your journey is felt with passion and respect. Rest comfortably in yourself for you inspire me.”
Words from the Netz, graciously posted in comments here. I give her a curtsy in return and offer my hand, how else respond to such a gift?
In her words I dance, knowing full well what it costs to open just a tiny crack in a prison wall that’s built on years of torment and harm received. The common wisdom wraps us, as smooth and constricting as swaddling, or wrappings on the feet of classical Chinese women. It whispers through our limbs and alights while we sleep in our dreamscapes, you must be strong and alone to survive, else the demons will come again and ensnare you, begin the torture again.
Yet, what we know is true is that our dreams possess us even in daylight. Voices from the past flitter or shout through the bones we use to dance. Fear ripples through the muscle that moves the bones we dance with. Still, we maintain our notions of prisons, the safety that inheres inside the walls, closed away in dark cells where, if we are fortunate, the fears cannot find us.
Alas, no one is that fortunate for fear holds the keys to the prison and to the doors of every cell inside the thick, stone walls. He visits us when he cares to and we are helpless under his gaze and in his keeping.
The only avenue out is the avenue we most usually refuse to walk along. Avenue V that bears the initial of the keys to our unbearable, invisible prisons: vulnerability.
The truth is paradox. My hiding and fear never managed to release me from the prison of my being. The recognition and embrace of my vulnerability released me. Your recognition will release you as well. For, what are we if not inherently vulnerable? Who among us is unbreakable, immortal, needing have never a care for death, sorrow or pain?
Would all the secrets of a heart keep that heart from pain or sorrow, keep the brain that holds that fear from moving through the doorway into death? Thus, what is left, but to try the door that one fears most, but that one never tries at all?
In vulnerability lies the sacred space we imagine lies beyond our deaths. In vulnerability and its acceptance for one’s self lies the fact of one’s inherent freedom: the freedom to be, to be one’s very self and take joy in that.
I know without a shade of doubt that the thought of others knowing I am a trans-woman, or knowing that I experienced a brutal rape once upon a time may lead to their removal from my life … out of fear. The fear that grips us in the places we feel most vulnerable: our sexuality, our acceptance and regard from others.
So it goes … and so it goes. On and on human being leads us into useless and groundless fears. We cower before differences in skin color, differences in our beliefs about deity or its non-existence (very like a religion itself, except that it refers to itself with a trope seldom used by the traditionally religious. Whisper now, rationality).
We hide the facts of our rapes, of our brutality toward others or their brutality toward ourselves. We hide, quiveringly, our transsexuality, our homosexuality, our compassion, our empathy, our love, our desire, our skin-color sometimes, our parents and siblings, our girlfriends or boyfriends, our intelligence, our joy. All of our virtue, we often feel, must remain hidden away and unreachable by those who would hurt us, by those we might love, or meet in friendship.
Is it wondrous, then, that the human world abounds with suffering, or that many think of life as “a vale of tears?”
How so? We hide away the best of ourselves, imagining that is the only way we can live long and without pain. Yet, death seeks us out, pain seeks us out, even in our hidden fortresses where fear holds the keys to the cells in which we immure ourselves.
Life hurts us. It’s a precondition of living. To be mortal and made of vulnerable material is to be inherently subject to pain. No amount of dissembling or whistling past graveyards changes that fact.
Fear holds the keys, and the keys are our various vulnerabilities. It’s only in reveling in vulnerability, risking pain and living in freedom from our unbearable, invisible prison walls, that we thrive. Only through acceptance of our vulnerability and through exultation in that vulnerability can we finally live in freedom, knowing others, loving them and laughing with them, crying together and holding one another in spite of ever-possible sorrow, ever-possible joy.
This post originally appeared at Life Journeys To A T
I’m sometimes asked how people can advocate for the trans community, usually by apprehensive people who have visions of standing out in front of government buildings with picket signs shouting slogans, or sometimes by people who are whipping themselves up into an energetic frenzy so that they can be as boisterous as possible. The truth is that that’s only one form of activism (a kind of last resort, really), and the larger picture is, well, more mundane. That is not to say it’s easier, it can be very complex at times, but in the end it’s… well… a different kind of drama.
I will get to a how-to, but want to discuss an important underpinning first, in this part. This will also be one of the most basic yet invaluable things a person can do to be an advocate, without even having to be an “activist” in any way. And in typical fashion, I’ll start in the most roundabout way possible, but with a point to it all.
(more after the jump)
This post was originally posted at my own blog and deals with an issue that most of us face, people disbelieving our feelings of dissonance, dysphoria and/or identity because “it doesn’t make sense to them”
~RP
I get a lot of feminists, or really, a lot of cis people in general, who seem miffed about my dissonance as a trans woman. Or, in many other cases, confused. Apparently, a deep psychological or instinctual pain has to… make rational sense. Apparently.
This is illustrated best by a statement made by a cis woman I knew who I was speaking to about why I sought out hormone replacement therapy. Specifically, when I pointed out that I had dissonance regarding my facial hair’s volume (back before I got laser and estrogen, now my shaving is more of a safety concern and a lot less dissonance) she said, “but I have facial hair too! I don’t get how you can feel dysphoria over something regular girls have!”
Moving on from how she didn’t use cis and othered me, let’s take a look at this idea of “cis people have it too!” (more…)
(Personal brooding and frank, non-explicit sex talk alert)
Lately, most of the feedback on my blog comes back to me via Facebook, email or even Twitter. Which is curious, but means I’m sometimes answering the same questions more than once. So I thought I’d post a note here and let people know why I’ve been semi-offline for the past little while.
Things have been building up for awhile, I’ve been burning out, and in fact I’ve been taking some conscious steps back for a few years (with blogging as an exception) — the point was not to leave advocacy altogether, but to take a supportive role and inform newer folks who might be stepping up. But something seems to always draw me out again (last year it was the delisting of GRS; this year, it’s Bill C-389). I’ve also been facing down some personal issues. That much has been obvious to some, and the disappearance from the various forums and groups I’ve been a regular at for years. I won’t go into details, but I’ve had to face up to something that is somewhere between post-traumatic, minority and survivor stress, which I’ve been putting off for years in order to focus on others and community.
There is another part to it, and it’s very much a case of Too Much Information, but I mention it here because I really don’t know anyone who has experience with this, or who to contact.
When someone physically transitions from male to female, hormone therapy causes a significant reduction of libido. In most cases, it’s a reduction, but once in awhile, it’s a complete obliteration of the ability to experience anything from sex. The medical process is designed to sterilize us, and sometimes it does a little more. I don’t mean just lack of orgasm, I’m referring to the ability to get any enjoyment at all.
I’m the lucky one.
(more after the fold)
To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of? – Hamlet III, I, 69-89
[This piece originally appeared at Life Journeys To A T on 6/27/2010 and is cross-posted at The Spectrum Cafe.]
Friend, Antonia, requested that I consider becoming a contributor to the Spectrum Café, through the good offices of Javier. I agreed, but lingered much too long in the coils of writer’s block, or cramp.
Whichever it was, or is, until now I’ve found other tasks that required completion before I took the time to write. Then yesterday, Javier asked again. Alas, off to The Cloisters to walk among the remade medieval architectures and contemplate chapels once in Langon transported to Fort Tryon Park, Manhattan.
The purported sculptured face of Aliénor d’Aquitaine gazed half smiling from a capital above me as I sat feeling, perhaps, much as she must have felt on a single evening in the chapel over eight hundred years ago. Raised to poetry by a poet father, oldest daughter and heiress to a domain larger than those of either of her two husbands, although they were kings in a world where kings could rule, lest the Pope disagree. Perhaps the chapel comforted her, left her contemplative of her life and times.
So much so, that she made a donation to the abbey made a donation to the abbey and had her face memorialized; although, as the audio guide suggested, we’ve no documented evidence of such a bequest and, thus, perhaps the capital faces are neither, authentically, she nor Henri Court-manteau. But, recall, there are things the soul knows that evidence and mind cannot grasp, at least, not in the ways our four hundred year science insists they must be grasped.
Yet, why the incessant push for science? The incessant push for religion? As though in the grasp one’s reach could reach so far beyond the ken of men past and men future to hold as truth what refuses to rest amenably in the hands of humans?
For, alas, what we imagine we know is too often known differently later, by those more studied, or those with a better technology that ranges deeper than that we use today, though the technology be only the visions of a better world, at least one more given to a vision beyond the material congregation of things we deem valuable or of worth, placing in those catchments property, mathematical equations that weight transactions in such a way to limit one person’s exposure and maximize another’s.
Or to demand documentation of a gift made by an Angevin queen almost nine hundred years ago to a chapel through, one may imagine, a Gascon clerk to whom she wrote asking that the gift be made to an abbess. One imagines that a good deal of Aliénor’s correspondence might well have not been kept for the intervening intervals, and documentation fails to support the donation carried through the passage of time to become a fond tale little believed and, almost, expressly denied by historians.
Just so, in the early hours of Friday I found myself in a garden in Berlin, perhaps on the shores of the Wannsee, behind a great house and on a day where the clouds were thick and threatened rain, yet allowed a bit of sunlight to illuminate the day, enough to cast shadows of flowers and trees, the bulk of the house.
I sat on a marbled bench, done elegantly and rounded for the comfort of curves in spite of the nature of stone. The air was wet, not unusual, but fresh and clear as well.
I watched small birds and a flock of ravens mill about. Insects buzzed and whirred through flower heads and the grass along the brown gravelled paths still held drops of dew from the night before.
I felt my breath draw deep into my lungs and watched as my breasts rose and fell as I sat amazed that I should have returned to Berlin. My balances of cash and credit were far too meager for me to have weighed anchor from Pennsylvania and taken flight for my beloved Prussian city.
Caught in my amazement I startled and gasped as a hand came from behind to touch my shoulder. Whirling my head my amazement became sheer disbelief for there, just behind me and to my left, stood my father, hand stretched to squeeze my shoulder. His hand was warm.
How does one who died in 1971 come to stand behind his daughter in 2010? Yet, he asked if he could sit and at my nod came round and shared the marble bench, staring at me as though it were he had seen the ghost and not me.
“I’ve watched you a long time, Radha,” said he. “And I thought you were dead all those long years ago, Daddy. Why did you wait so long to find me?”
He smiled. “I was waiting for the day when you would be alive,” he said, “for it was only then I could speak with you.”
His voice, the soft southern drawl of Middle Tennessee, eased me. His voice, gone forty years, was as familiar as though he’d never left. His hair combed and groomed with Vitalis, I could catch the scent just as I’d done the last time I’d hugged him.
We talked awhile. He asked of my children, how they are and how I was making out with my life. He asked about Catherine and granted his approval. A father and a daughter chatting peaceably after many years and no news of one another, the event was as usual as the persistence of time.
Finally, he said he had to go, looking deeply into my eyes with his hazel speckled irises. He took my hand, enfolding it gently and then spoke.
“I want you to know that I approve of you. I want you to know that I love you still, my oldest child. And I want to apologize, if you will accept it, for not believing you so long ago. So much time I lost back then getting to know my daughter, refusing to accept what God had given, for it seemed more like an embarrassment at the time to me.”
“Now, I look at you and talk with you and see, I was wrong. You’ve always been my daughter and that now you are living that daughter’s life brings me a happiness I couldn’t have imagined then.”
I held his hand in both of mine, tears streaming down my cheeks, filling my eyes like fountains. I wrapped my arms around his neck and hugged him to me, not wanting to let go, feeling the strength of his shoulders and the pressed shirt and the suit fabric soaking up the brine of my tears. I thought they’d never stop falling again. I thought my heart would burst with relief, love and happiness.
He got up, gently putting my arms to my sides, and walked back toward the house, disappearing among the flowers and the trees. I stood and wept, watching him disappear and hearing the French doors open and then close again.
Then, my tears were soaking into my pillow and I heard the water running as Catherine showered, making herself clean for the workday. The clock read 6:30.
How does one fathom and plumb what really occurred?
Some might say, as I have thought, that finally I have given myself permission to be me, to hold who I am and how I move in the world. Others might opine that some unresolved dissonance had broken through my unconscious to my consciousness and now I would have to work my way through that and incorporate it.
Yet another might say, as did my friend Kim when I spoke (and wept) with her at lunch on Friday, that his spirit may have actually reached out to my own and come to me to ask forgiveness and grant his blessing.
For me, and the Velveteen Rabbit, that’s enough.
Some trans-related goings-on in Canada.
1) Newfoundland declines to include rights for trans people.
2) Quebecers rally regarding identification change issues.
3) Is the opinion of the Canadian wing of loudly trans-inclusive international LGBT organization on trans rights: it’s “not our hill to die on?”
4) Toronto City Council candidate participating in Trans March.
Details after the fold…
This post was also originally guest posted at Harlot’s Parlour as well as on my own blog. This post does not purely deal with the concept of attraction to mid physical transition bodies and purist attraction to trans folk in general. It also addresses those who are attracted to people with disabilities, who are commonly referred to as devotees. It is still very relevant despite the split focus, as the chaser culture is a major stumbling block that the trans community deals with every single day. This post deals very heavily with trans women and very lightly with trans men (and their issues with fetishization from the lesbian community) and doesn’t really deal at all with nonbinary/genderqueer folk and what objectification they might face. This is because the majority of my experiences are as a trans woman and I simply do not have enough experience with the kind of chaser cultures nonbinary/GQ people and trans guys face to write about them accurately and capably. ~RP
Chasers. Admirers. Fetishists.
Words that often create a very emotional response from trans folk and many other groups for whom such things apply to. If you’re not in the know there’s a bit of explaining to do here. Let’s start with attraction. (more…)
In Creed v. Family Express Corporation (2009 Westlaw 35237), Chief Judge Robert L. Miller ruled that a transitioning trans woman was, for the purposes of the law, really a man. That Family Express Corporation’s actions because Ms. Creed didn’t follow the male dress code (from what I understand, she did follow the female dress code) her dismissal was justified and allowable.
Those three words, “really a man” are, some of the most hateful things I can hear because it completely flies in the face of my experience and personal narrative. It completely disregards my right to define myself and essentially insists that I’m a liar when I present myself in a feminine social role. This adds irony to injury when I consider how mendacious I felt when I still pretended to be a man. It was that sense of living a lie that provided a huge motivation behind my decision to transition.
When trans people are assaulted and murdered, trans panic defenses are grounded on the statement that, “I found out he/she/it was really a man and I freaked out because of that and I couldn’t help myself and . . . and . . . , etc.” The thought that the poor victim was “really a man” is held forth as justification for the violence. After all, it’s not OK to hit a woman! This idea is also the driving force behind the hateful TV ad that “Citizens for Good Public Policy” ran to lobby against the non-discrimination law in Gainesville, Florida last year. If someone thinks that trans women are really men in disguise it makes perfect sense to fear them, after all they are being dishonest about who the really are! Who knows what other crimes and perversions are in their minds?
When portions of the feminist community institute rules denying trans women’s entry to “woman only spaces,” justifying their prejudice using the “womyn born womyn” meme , and when we read trans women being described as “male to reconstructed females” it’s based on the fact that we were born male and that we are, “really men in disguise.” Again, a total denial of the validity of trans women’s experiences and lives, not to mention a violation of their deeply held belief that biology does not equal destiny. When gay men insist that a trans woman should just stop pretending and get over the fact that he’s gay, they fall into the same assumption: That the trans woman in question is really a (gay) man, not who they say they are.
If I meet someone new and they start talking to a mutual acquaintance about me, if that mutual acquaintance tells them, “yeah, but did you know she was really a man?” and then I get assaulted and/or murdered for supposedly deceiving people (because that piece of gossip was just tooo juicy to keep to one’s self) it’s the “really a man” belief that drives that anger. After all, if I was really a woman, there would be no reason to even discuss me in those terms.
When I’m out with my spouse and we meet someone who knew us before transition, it often happens that I’ll get a handshake and she will get a hug. Or I’ll get a hug and she will get a hug and a kiss on the cheek. This even happens with people who are dear friends, who support us and love us. Yet they cannot get that “really a man” thing out of their heads so they treat me other than the way they treat my partner. I’m not sure they realize when they are doing this or even consider how much it hurts and I’m not sure if they did realize it, that they would be able to change the behavior. That “really a man” thing seems to sit very deep in a person’s paradigm.
That basic assumption, the belief that men are men and women are women and they can try to be but aren’t “really” the opposite gender, is what drives all too much transphobia. Combine that with the misogyny that we see mixed in and it becomes impossible to not realize that we need more than just job protection under ENDA. We need Congress to amend Title VII itself to specifically and unambiguously include sexual orientation, expression and identity. Once that happens, we may still be considered really men in the eyes of many, but it will be, at least, illegal all over the country for them to hurt us because of it.
Name: Mercedes
Web Site: http://dentedbluemercedes.wordpress.com/
Bio: Mercedes Allen is a professional graphic designer and writer, as well as a bisexual transsexual in a lesbian relationship. She has worked in advocacy related to Trans, LGB, Aboriginal issues, HIV, BDSM and sex work. Located in Southern Alberta, Canada, she started AlbertaTrans.org as a network to help foster and support trans communities within Alberta, as well as to provide information and training where requested. She is also a founding member of the Trans Equality Society of Alberta.
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