Every once in a while, I try to share news of interest to the trans community with people from outside our community, in the hopes that people will get a better idea about what goes on in our lives. It's all part of that teaching effort that we have been told we must do before we can ever hope to be accorded equal rights.
What else is new? department:
Item: Transwoman killed in the East Hollywood portion of Los Angeles. This was actually last summer. What is really new is that the office of Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti is offering a $50K reward for information as to the whereabouts of Jose Catalan, who has been labeled a "person of interest" in the case. Catalan may turn out to be a suspect or may be just a witness. But currently he is a missing parolee and is considered to be armed and dangerous.
I got into a discussion the other day of the kind I really don't enjoy. I felt required to defend transsexual women against a stereotype of us.
There are many such stereotypes. We are liars and deceivers, according to some. But in the case in point, the accusation was that we are sexually aggressive. And that brings up a difficult topic to discuss for many transfolk: sex.
The instance in question occurred in a DADT diary and was referring to gays in the military already:
I never saw overt, mincing, steriotypical "NOLA Fat Tuesday transsexual type" of behavior, but then there are strict codes of conduct for heteralsexual relationships while in Uniform also.
I still am unsure as to what exactly constitutes "NOLA Fat Tuesday transsexual behavior", but that may be that, while I am indeed transsexual and have been to NOLA many times, it was never during Mardi Gras.
I've become disgusted the past few days. Actually it has been coming on for several weeks, but the last couple of days have brought things to a head.
My basic thought?
It is difficult enough to fight the conservatives who wish to deny us equal rights, strip away the few freedoms and liberties which we do have, and even deny us the basic necessities of life, like even the freedom to use a public restroom without having to choose between being arrested or being physically and/or sexually assaulted.
We should not have to battle the slings and arrows hurled at us by those who one would think we should be able to rely on as our friends.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
It all comes down to a matter of respect. Who deserves some and who has some to give?
Earlier today, teacherken posted an essay entitled, American, land of opportunity - Not!. It was mostly about the the limits of upward mobility caused by race and class. In fact, the paper he cited discussed downward mobility caused by those factors.
Downward mobility is not strange to people in the trans community. In the news yesterday was this report from the 2010 Creating Change conference, courtesy of Renee Baker for dallasvoice.com.
Numbers. They were preliminary numbers, but numbers nonetheless. And I'm a numbers person in the eyes of most part, so I thought I would share and comment on them.
They are not exactly new. The numbers come from a preliminary report dated in November. NGLTF released an even rougher sketch of the data earlier in last year.
But the question comes up from time to time. Do transfolk really need to be covered by an inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act?
We all grow up with a vision of what is right and just in this world. Many, if not most, of us grow up with the idea of pursuing "the American Dream". For some that has meant the pursuit, as when it was first enunciated in 1931 by James Truslow Adams, of achieving a "better, richer, and happier life". In his book, The Epic of America, Adams stated it this way:
that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
Oddly, in view of today's circumstances, Mr. Adams was a banker.
She is an eloquent speaker, an expressive author. Elizabeth Edwards is effervescent, effusive, and has an excellent mind. She understands profound policy issues as easily as she prepares a sandwich. Her memoir appeared on The New York Times bestseller list. Few think of Elizabeth Edwards as every woman. Other daughters of Eve might say Edwards is exceptional; surely, she is not as I am. Yet, life experiences might have taught Elizabeth Edwards otherwise. Just as other ladies, she is brilliant, beautiful, and not nearly equal to a man.
I've been watching the Prop 8 trial...except not really, since SCOTUS disallowed us folks who couldn't be in the courtroom to watch what may be the most important court case ever for GLBT people. So I watched the transcripts instead, as they were posted by the people at the Courage Campaign Institute and FiredogLake.
One of the assertions made time and again by the defense was that Proposition 8 was not based in animus.
What? No strong dislike of GLBT people? No enmity? Are we seriously expected to believe that there was no hostile attitude?
I'd like to think that one could discount those assertions as being false on there face. But this was a court of law. I am no lawyer, but as a writer and a mathematician, I know words and logic.
Having followed the trial closely, I have to ask the following.
When you deliberately choose not to learn about people who you wish to discriminate against, what is that if not animus?
No. I disagree. There is nothing cute about Hak-Shing "William" Tam.
I expected at any moment for him to just stand up and say "just kidding! Got you big-time, you don't think I actually believe that garbage, do you? Ha-ha!"
Methinks that let's Mr. Tam off the hook too easily.
The American Foundation for Equal Rights is the leading the effort by Ted Olson and David Boies, who are the lead attorneys in the case to invalidate Prop. 8's gay marriage ban, now has a website up.
The American Foundation for Equal Rights is dedicated to protecting and advancing equal rights for every American.
Through its groundbreaking federal court case against California's Proposition 8, The Foundation is leading the fight for marriage equality and equality under the law for every American.
Once upon a time, way back at Forest Hills Elementary School in Lake Oswego, Oregon, we were taught about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Included in that was the Whitman Massacre by members of the Cayuse and Umatilla tribes, who blamed the Whitmans for bringing measles to them along with their religion. I remember going to the library and reading, among other things, about the Nez Perce and how they were treated by our government. They now have a reservation in Idaho and who usually call themselves the Nimiipuu.
Out of such things are activists born.
I became, at that moment a firm believer that people should have equal rights in the eyes of the government, that nobody should be treated as second-class citizens, or worse.
As a child I loved Halloween. We'd go to Mrs. Silver's house across the street and she would invite us inside and make us fresh caramel apples or popcorn balls. Lord knows, one can't do that anymore.
And we would go door to door around the neighborhood and get a real haul of treats. And somewhere, later, older kids would toilet paper someone's house or yard, which we would discover on the way to school in the morning. I never liked the "trick" part.
Razor blades and pins and poison and just plain bad people put a stop to most of the good stuff I remember.
As I got older, the tricks became worse and the treats were few and far between.
I had an alternate title: Frienemies with Aging. This could be part two of a very slow-moving series: On Aging was published March 7, 2008.
----------------------
When we got home from teaching last night, and with Debbie not having to teach at City Tech this morning because classes were canceled for Rosh Hashanah, I decided to use the fact that we had no classes this morning to do something to make the place slightly more livable.
Like assemble the cat tree we had purchased online and that arrived via UPS on Wednesday. Photos of the finished project will be interspersed among this story of pain and fatigue and just growing old. Now I didn't have the camera with me last night when I was stuck on the floor, so I went the extra mile for verisimilitude and got back down on the floor in order to show the view from there and during the struggle to rise up against my oppressor: gravity.
Someone sent me an item last week about a transitioning transwoman (video at the link), a high school mathematics teacher in West Linn, OR. On the face of it, this wasn't a huge story, but it struck me as a huge coincidence.
Currently I have hardly slept for two days because every time I lay down, I have to cough. The moving that is finally over apparently left my body in a run down state and I caught something on the first day of classes on Wednesday. So I apologize if my current delirium causes any disjointedness.
We've been barely keeping our heads above water with the move, so I hadn't had much time to think about what to write.
Teddy's death hit us hard. There's a new school year starting...one which I would really prefer not to deal with. A couple of avant-garde ideas almost breathed air.
But nope. I really had not much.
In cases such as this in the past I have either written about why I was struggling to find something to write about (but that is transparent: it's the moving) or checked the news to see what I could find.
The news proved to be quite sad, for the most part.
There are so many ills tainting our world. People's inhumanity towards one another expresses itself in so many different ways.
Pick one. Work on it. Make it your Cause. Commit the rest of your life to it. Commit to bring it to an end. Do anything you can to advance that issue, including working on other issues...so that maybe when the time comes someone might have learned enough about you and your issues that they might actually care about them as well as their own.
What? What was that last part? Work on other people's issues? Why would anyone ever do that? Isn't that, like, a colossal waste of time and effort?
Actually, no. It's how something...anything...gets accomplished.
Down here at the bottom of the issue food chain, the only way anyone is going to notice us is if we push other people forward, people who are and issues which are obscuring our existence.
So we're still moving and certainly not in Pittsburgh with all the cool people. Because of the moving, my brain is pretty much on the fritz as to anything momentous to write about. There just hasn't been enough continuous time to sit down and piece something together about the things I'd like to write about...even if I could really delineate what those items might be.
In a life not dominated by the desire to change the world so that it would be a better place to live, moving would be a great excuse for taking a month away news and politics and trying to spread the word.
But my life is dominated by that mission.
So I flipped a coin to see whether I should try to wrap some new words around an idea or two or post something old. When one gets to be as old as I am, it gets more difficult to "write something new" since one may find that almost everything has already been addressed in the past couple of decades...or the 292 diaries posted here...or the 260 poems written. As much as I would like for people to read my old diaries, in the spirit of learning about lives they cannot conceive, I know that the past gets forgotten very easily and reading someone's old diaries is an unlikely occurrence.
Unfortunately for me, since it meant no nap this afternoon, on the last day before the moving begins, "something new" won.
At a time when the country of Pakistan, not what anyone generally conceives of as a bastion of progressive attitude on GLBT rights...Pakistan for %^&$%^'s sake...can have its Supreme Court rule that transfolk should be able to enjoy the same rights under the law as do the so-called normal people, there is a struggle in this country to even admit we are human beings, deserving of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Or, failing those, at least the use of a bathroom.
Since we had to go house hunting Friday afternoon, I decided to put together a summary of some trans news items for Friday evening's column. But while I was doing so, one of my favorite movies came on, namely Carl Sagan's Contact.
The news, of course, is what it is. The movie put a different spin on the whole thing, so maybe this will come out as not only commentary on those items but also a statement about the state of the universe.
Just maybe a few readers out there will get the point of what I am trying to say. There is always hope for that.
Pride Month has come and gone, Gentle Reader, with no comment from this desk.
It's not that I'm in some way insensitive to the subject; instead it's more of a desire, once again, to stay off the beaten path.
And in that spirit, I do indeed have a story of Gay History...but it's not from the Summer of '69...instead, this story was already well underway before the Summer of '29.
So put on something très chic and let's head on over to Harlem...at the time of the Renaissance...because it's time to meet Gladys Bentley.
March on Washington
Every once in a while, I try to share news of interest to the trans community with people from outside our community, in the hopes that people will get a better idea about what goes on in our lives. It's all part of that teaching effort that we have been told we must do before we can ever hope to be accorded equal rights.
Mr. Tam admits he, at the very least, helped author the fourteen words central to Proposition 8.
