Friday, February 23, 2007

a very public outing

Tampa Bay Newspapers : Largo Leader

"Stanton tell employees he’s transgendered in an e-mail
By SUZETTE PORTER

LARGO – City Manager Steve Stanton sent out an e-mail to employees dated Wednesday, Feb. 21, announcing that he is transgendered and intends to become a woman." [Link]


This is a very public outing and a very public transition. It will be interesting to see how the residents and the government of Largo handle this situation.

The Free Methodist Church in Canada...our stories: Introducing people to the God of compassion

Some Christians understand their God's commandments:

The Free Methodist Church in Canada...our stories: Introducing people to the God of compassion

I found this particularly evocative:

I met a teenage transsexual living with AIDS who was ostracized by his family, because of sexuality. When I inquired about his support system, who was there for him….he shuffled and stared disconcertedly. His confusion grew when I pressed him further about spiritual care, wondering if he had struggled with the tough questions or thought of seeking out some of his religious leaders for direction. He laughed sarcastically. “I could never talk with them…look at me. I’m a reject (outcast) for them. Trash!” “That’s what they call people like me. I already feel bad enough – why would I go to them to feel worse?” Overwhelmed by his obvious pain, I blurted out: “Trash? No. God does not create trash.” I then began to share with him what I believed about God. “God does not breathe life into trash, but rather into human beings made in His own image, which you are. Life has purpose and meaning. You were created to be loved and to reciprocate that love.” Tears filled the young man’s eyes as he listened to my words about a God who loved him and understood his pain and confusion. His sad expression changed as he suddenly realized what this meant…he was not alone…nor would he die alone and unloved, even though those who had loved him, had walked away.


No idea if he got the gender pronouns right, but it's his compassion that counts, I think.

A very different experience than I had from my church, which is also a Methodist church. I came out to a couple of the pastors there. When I told the head pastor, he said to me three times that I would have to go elsewhere to transition. It turned out to be true, I was not welcomed back to that church after I transitioned. No one reached out, no one was there for me. All the friends I thought I had supporting me vanished. So much for Christian love, I thought.

I have since become an atheist, not because of that experience, but because of personal growth and understanding. That path led me through different Christian churches, then through Buddhism, and finally, after reading enough science, I just gave up on the supernatural altogether.

But it's good to know that there are people who live by their convictions and still do reach out a helping hand and don't condemn blindly because their leaders tell them to, or their fear blinds them to the fact that we are real, live human beings, just like them. Respect us. Treat us with the dignity you would anyone else. Even love us as your neighbors. We really are not a threat to you and yours.

Welcome a New Voice

I'd like to welcome A Wild Elegance to the blog roll. Donna Dawn Konitzer is an MTF prisoner who is also an activist for prisoners with GID to be treated better within prisons in the US. Please read her blog, it is eye-opening. Also consider a pen-pal relationship with one of the prisoners she lists toward the end of her entry (in part III of IV).

Prisoners with GID are a minority within a minority within a minority. Yet, some figures put the rate of incarceration of people with GID (Gender Identity Disorder - the defining mental disorder of transsexuals) at 30%, some as high as 65%, although that seems exceedingly high. But imagine the horrors, if you will, of someone with GID who is mid-transition facing incarceration based upon the shape of their genitals, not their identity or their appearance otherwise. Someone, who to you or I would appear as a female walking down the street may not have had SRS yet, and if they should be so unfortunate as to commit a felony, would be assigned to a male prison population. Harsh, much harsher than they deserve, I think. They are there to put in time, not to be the punching bag and fuck-hole for the other prisoners. They are routinely harassed, called by their male name, male pronouns used, which is psychologically damaging. Just punishment? I think not. Say "they broke the law, they should have known better"? Most of the time, these crimes are of desperation, because people will not hire transsexuals, even in spite of there being laws to prevent discrimination.

I'm not asking anyone to forgive their crimes and mitigate their sentences. But perhaps we can make their prison experiences a little less hellish and maybe more rehabilitative.

Monday, February 19, 2007

On Menstruation and Marriage - a link

Interesting post over on http://neebother.blogspot.com: On Menstruation and Marriage where he takes to task someone over their dislike of being lumped in with transsexuals in Malta, where now it is legal for transsexuals to marry people of their opposite adopted gender.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Trannies aren't real people

We aren't. Just face it.

I was on-line in an IRC channel tonite, one of my regular haunts. We're having polite conversation, a bunch of us, about what I don't recall now. One of the guys suddenly says "/me checks imnotaboy to see if they have a penis of a vagina."

BAM.

Right out there in the open.

I know what many of you are saying: "It's a chatroom, it's not real life." Bullshit. I have never felt so violated in my life.

This is the dread of every ts person out there, I think. I happen to be post-op, but still, to have someone want to check your panties to see what's in there is such a violation. No one would think of doing that to a woman-born woman. It's only the TSs that garner such treatment. "What's down there, anyway?" is a common enough question on people's minds that I hear it enough on blogs and comments.

I am feeling so ill. I don't feel safe. I feel violated in the worst possible way save for rape itself.

And this is someone I thought was my friend. Shows just how friends can act.

Needless to say I won't be going back to that channel for awhile.

Friday, February 9, 2007

Whose rights are right?

This is a somewhat rambling post.

In the flap over whether pre-op transsexuals get to use women's facilities for changing, there is a clash of rights, it seems. Certainly, women born women can and should expect to have their privacy and be free from men in the intimate atmosphere of a changing facility. At the same time, a pre-op ts woman should be free from being forced into the company of men in order to use the same facility. However, the reality is that most facilities have only two changing areas: one for women and one for men. Where does the pre-op ts woman go to change?

Some of course argue that the pre-op ts woman should be allowed into the women's facility. Yet there is a strong sense of impropriety from the women born women against this; they see a person with a penis in their facility, they feel unsafe. Never mind that they are in much less danger from this penis than they are from the one attached to their boyfriend outside. It is a matter of fear, uncertainty and doubt and causes much complaint from the women born women in the facility when a pre-op ts woman is allowed in.

So, what to do? Does the pre-0p ts woman forgo the use of changing facilities altogether? I know I have done so, instead opting for showing up ready to work out and leaving without showering in the facility, instead going home to shower. This was convenient for me as the facility was located within a few blocks of my home. Later, I joined a women-only club that did not have any changing or showering facilities ("Curves") that was also within 4-5 blocks of my apartment so did not have any sort of issues with revealing what I had between my legs. (By this time, I had had my SRS operation so it wouldn't have been a big deal anyway, but still, the situation applies.)

This also gets into the issue of m2f transgendered people invading women-only spaces where the women-born-women want to exclude those women who were brought up as men. The classic example, of course, is the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, but there are other spaces where this is true. As a ts woman, I do not have the experience of being brought up as a girl and then a woman, so I do not have a shared experience with women-born-women that might be necessary to form a bond with them at such events. I might, in fact, reek of manhood in such events, although I never fully embraced that as I was growing up, either. The subtleties of male priviledge certainly shaped me growing up and in the work force, but being well aware of them and railing against the feeling of maleness and all it's trappings also shaped me growing up and in my adult life. Still, it doesn't make me capable of understanding all that goes into being a woman-born-woman, and that's a special class all to it's own. So, I think it makes sense to leave such a space open for them to share in their uniqueness and specialness. I think we, as ts women, need to create our own space to celebrate our uniqueness and specialness, which is just as valid as theirs, but separate, and whole.

Recently, there was news of a ts woman who lost her fight against a rape center that was exclusively for and of women-born-women. She fought for the right to work there as a rape crisis counselor. Here, again, I can see the point of the center; there is something special about being a woman-born-woman, and what that insight can bring to another woman in a rape situation perhaps. There are other rape crisis counseling opportunities that are open to ts women; this center wasn't the only one. What I find interesting, however, is that the ts woman was confronted about her past after enrolling; apparently, she was not "passing" -- she was coming across as not female. I think if her demeanor was incongruent, she would not really make a very good rape crisis counselor anyway. Perhaps this affair might be a wake-up call to her to examine her behavior rather than merely calling out "unfair to transsexuals."

It's not that I think everyone has to pass perfectly. I don't -- I think some people read me as a former man, but I do think that even when they read me, they see me as a woman now, and I'm gracious enough to accept that they give me the benefit of the doubt. I think it's a matter of being accepting of people's errors in perception and not smacking them down if they make a mistake, but being gracious about it, and ultimately, connecting with their humanity. I smile when I say "I'm not a boy/man" and it comes out nicely.

But would I have the wherewithall to counsel a woman about rape? I'm not sure I would. I walk about without fear -- a legacy of my male past, I am sure. Yet I am a potential victim as any other woman would be. I may be larger than the average woman, but I'm not necessarily stronger. I don't know any self-defensive moves; I've never taken any martial arts classes. But it may be the way I walk without fear that permits me to move in the world without being a potential victim as well; i.e. I'm not a target because I don't look like a target. This is something to discuss with my cisgendered women friends, I think.

The need for women-born-women to have a place where they can congregate and celebrate their femaleness, separate from men and women-born-men I think is an ok thing. I don't think they need include ts women as a matter of course. There are many things ts women can do to celebrate and validate their womanhood/femaleness as well. There are places where women-born-women do include ts women into their ranks.

I'm still learning about the feminist argument against transsexuals, which I'll attempt to discuss in another post. At this juncture, all I can see is that it is based on some misconceptions about brain development and the experiences of m2f ts's growing up as men.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Does the lady regret?

The NYT recently ran an article "The Lady Regrets" about Dr. Renée Richards, who is touting her new book, “No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life.” In the article they seem fixated on pointing out that Dr. Richards seems regretful about her life as a transsexual by this comment:

“In 1999, you told People—” the reporter begins.

Dr. Richards interrupts.

“—I told People what I was feeling, which I still feel: Better to be an intact man functioning with 100 percent capacity for everything than to be a transsexual woman who is an imperfect woman.”

Is this really regret though? Is a [edit] pre-op, pre-self-disclosed transsexual a 100% intact man? I think not -- although remaining intact sexually is one thing, one is not intact mentally. I surely was not. I was depressed, morose, suicidal -- hardly things one could call functional. I was as much an imperfect man then as I am an imperfect woman now, except I'm a lot happier as who I am now. Sure, the plumbing doesn't work 100% well, but it is close enough. But more importantly, I am now functioning at a higher level than I was before. I think this holds true for most transsexuals, although I don't know all that many personally.

The NYT goes further with Dr. Richards:

In the same interview, Dr. Richards talked about wishing for something that could have prevented the surgery.

“What I said was if there were a drug, some voodoo, any kind of mind-altering magic remedy to keep the man intact, that would have been preferable, but there wasn’t,” Dr. Richards says. “The pressure to change into a woman was so strong that if I had not been able to do it, I might have been a suicide.”

I can understand what she's saying here, and although it may sound regretful, it sounds more like regret that there isn't a way to reconcile one's life prior to transition in the case of late-transitioning transsexuals (so-called "secondaries") who may have built lives for themselves and have children and so on (as I had done). It was hard to give all that over, and yet, the choice seems to be to transition, to become a woman, or to take my own life, just as it was for Dr. Richards. Is that a choice? Is that regret? There is no magic elixir to "cure" a transsexual, i.e., make the gender dysphoria go away and make them fully happy and functional in the body they are given. If there were, certainly for us so-called secondaries, maybe more of us might choose such an option. Then again, maybe not. I am a product of my upbringing, with a lifetime of thinking about myself the way I do, of living with the gender dysphoria. It has certainly sculpted me. Would such a "cure" make me into a different person? I don't know.

And yet it is all hypothetical because it does not exist. Even the NYT asks the million dollar question and gets the answer back straight from the doctor:

Does she regret having the surgery?

“The answer is no.”

So, no regrets, really, not facing the reality of life as it is. I have no regrets for how I went about it. Occasionally, I think to myself "gee, I wish I had transitioned earlier." But then I think about not having my daughters, and that sort of trumps that wish, because the world would be a much dimmer and unhappier place without them.

This so-called transsexual regret is not really regret at all, I think, but perhaps a realization that life isn't all roses on the other side of transition. And for that, we have no one to blame but ourselves and our glamourization. Perhaps our care-givers can knock some sense into us before we make any irremediable steps, but the pressure drives us on, anyhow.

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

A Beginning

Hi everyone.

I am starting this blog because I feel a need to speak out about Transsexual issues. I am an M2F post-op transsexual woman, am fully assimilated as a woman, live my life as best as I can without my past being much of an issue. And yet, I cannot deny that I have a past, nor can I deny what and who I am. This blog will be anonymous, as I don't want people tracking me down based on what I reveal here; I want to keep my blogspace separate from my real life as much as possible.

I am doing this because there are many things going on in the world affecting transsexuals and that affect me as an individual that I feel the need to write about, and hopefully, through writing, can make a difference in the world. We'll see if I ever get a readership that cares, that thinks, that provokes, that responds.

I will maintain full editorial control over this site and it's contents, including the comments, if there are any. I reserve the right to remove comments I find offensive or inflammatory or spammy, or for any other reason I choose; my space, my rules. If what I write provokes, please comment.

No promises about how often I will write. I'll try to keep up with it, but I won't write for the sake of writing. If I have nothing to say, you won't hear from me.