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.
Many bloggers, including me, have expressed frequent consternation at the lack of substantive female voices in the mainstream media. On that note, there are times when I wonder what both Kathleen Parker and Maureen Dowd are both smoking and inhaling. Tweedledum and Tweedledee routinely write columns crafted with such a flagrant disregard for coherence or original analysis that I wonder how they even ended up with a job. Both of these writers are supposed to be the apex of serious journalism and with it the mouthpiece of womanhood and womens' concerns. It seems as though both conservative and liberal women are getting the short end of the stick, though I'm hardly surprised at the revelation. And it isn't just women who are suffering from such inadequacy.
Parker asserts that shoveling is something men just need to do, like it's hard-wired into our genetic code. "What do men want?" she asks. "Shovels. Men want shovels, the bigger the better," she responds.
"Women can't be blamed for wanting to be independent and self-sufficient, but smart ones have done so without diminishing the males whose shoulders they might prefer on imperfect days. Add to the cultural shifts our recent economic woes, which have left more men than women without jobs, and men are all the more riveted by opportunities to be useful," she observes.
According to her profound analysis on the matter, the minute we simple-minded men see a flake of snow, we go running to the nearest shovel. "Man is never happier than when he is called to action, in other words. That is to say, when he is needed," she posits. Of course, she does add that women will shovel, but she only admits as much to avoid "sexist stereotyping." Yeah. That's like prefacing a homophobic joke by saying, "But some of my best friends are gay!"
I frequently use personal examples in my posts and diary entries, but I am always careful to try to use facts and other sources to bolster my claims. There is great power in the personal, but Parker proves that the personal can be used very wrongly to stand in for objective truth. Ignoring societal conditioning in favor of innate biological programming is a tactic frequently employed by the Right, particularly as a means of keeping gender distinctions frozen in time. Even so, there are a few undeniable elements of our behavior that must be chalked up to the undeniable fact that some of us have two X chromosomes and some of us only have one. Yet, relying too heavily on that fact fails to take into account that we are distinct from other animals in that we have highly advanced brains and reasoning abilities. Since the beginning of time, humankind has been imposing its own version of reality beyond purely biological imperative and survival instinct.
The feud between Parker and Dowd is well-documented and I don't need to add much more to it. Unsurprisingly, both columnists manage to miss the point altogether when they cobble together a collection of stale arguments and pseudoscience to make their case. They end up on opposite ends of a great existential divide, managing to be equally wrong in the process. Contrary to what Dowd says, men are necessary, but it should be added that they are necessary in ways beyond shoveling driveways or providing emergency manual labor. Contrary to what Parker says, it's not biologically determined that men are born snow shovelers and ditch diggers.
Later in the column, Parker at least makes an effort to try to state that she isn't homophobic or dismissive of the fact that gay men are equally capable of being "masculine", but the conclusion she draws is bizarre, at best. If it wasn't so strangely rendered, I might take more offense to what it implies.
As for Craig, he's been happy the past 25 years with Jack, who, though he pleads a bad back, cooks a mean stroganoff, from which I have benefited twice since the snows began.
Doubtless, such displays of manliness -- which in my view include feeding the hungry -- are, like the weather, passing divertissements. And these jottings are but a wee contribution to the annals of gender study. But if one should ever stop pondering the malaise of modern woman long enough to consider what men might want, the answer is obvious to any except, perhaps, the U.S. Congress.
Give a man a job, and he'll clear a path to your door.
Her convoluted conclusion seems to be that women have focused too selfishly on their own empowerment that they've failed to understand or appreciate the contributions of men. With it comes an underlying assumption that men feel confused these days because their time-honored roles in society have been somehow denigrated or tarnished since women started demanding equal rights, equal pay, and basic equality. If only things were this simple. If only women had anything remotely close to the same degree of parity with men. If only, for example, there was some set standard of what all men wanted or what all women wanted, for that matter.
One can't just make a blanket statement based on absolutes. Men are not some monolithic entity any more than women are. Surveying the women and men with whom we work, live, and interact will reveal that gender distinctions are not distributed exactly the same for everyone. In that spirit, it is equally wrong-headed to reduce men to violent brutes or women to flighty fashionistas. A major problem everyone faces is that we are forced to conform to gender roles that are designed for one-size-fits-all settings when we are all different sizes, shapes, and proportions. If gender were a set of clothes, we'd be tugging on it constantly, hoping that with enough effort it eventually would cover us properly. And so long as we impose simplistic identity upon complex humanity, it never will quite work.
The major problem at play here is that Feminist groups and women's rights groups tend to often to couch their analysis in overly-academic terms. I can vouch for this personally. This means that pop-feminist analysis like Parker and Dowd ends up shaping the perception of most people, as though these sorts of stilted descriptions are some objective picture of the way things really are. But these two aren't even the worst offenders. At least these columnists usually mean well and usually at least aim high. Meanwhile, aside from "serious" analysis, a perversion of Feminism leads women to believe that there is something empowering in being publicly sexual or in adopting the same pose of their chauvinistic brethren. Objectification by any other name, this is an attitude reflected ever more frequently in popular culture. But instead of focusing on whether or not it's a good thing that now Tween aged girls are dressing provocatively rather than like the children that they are, or whether we're including people of color into our depictions of feminine identity, or whether transgender citizens are treated with the respect they deserve, instead we get into the eternal back and forth about whether the cause of women's rights has done more harm than good and whether men are suffering as a result.
This degree of navel-gazing does no one any good. Periodically, it might be helpful if we engaged in a respectable dialogue about how far the rights of women have come, where the movement is headed, and what we all might take from it. However, if this territory is mined constantly without anything especially novel or even interesting to report from it, then we forget that there's much more to Feminism and gender equality than the tit-for-tat that never ends. Gender is a construct of the human mind and it is so pervasive that its impact effects us in ways that are both exceptionally glaring and maddeningly minute. The complexities of civilization and the human mind have given rise to a huge amount of interrelated information to be combed through, but if we fail to survey it in totality, then it does us no good. The mysteries of men and women will remain so forever. We might not solve them all, but we'd be a damn sight closer to a greater understanding than we are now, instead of focusing so narrowly on one particularly yawn-inducing issue.
Being that we are growing closer and closer to Valentine's Day, the supposedly most romantic (or depressing) of all holidays, I'd like to branch out a bit and take on a different topic than the norm today. NPR commentator Lori Gottlieb has just released a book entitled Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. In it, Gottlieb insists that a generation of contradictory messages and empowering commandments largely advanced by Feminism have prevented women from choosing a more-than-adequate husband when the opportunity presents itself. Instead, as Gottlieb suggests, such pronouncements have encouraged women to hold out for the perfect mate. Liesl Schillinger's review of the book in The Daily Beast summarizes and echoes my own response to a very incendiary text.
The way she sees it, as she explains in a chapter called, "How Feminism F****d Up My Love Life," a generation of women (or should I say 'girls'?) who ought to have been taught-like their great-grandmothers and like women in Taliban-era Afghanistan-to be demure in deportment and modest in aspiration, were tricked by the women's movement into "ego-tripping themselves out of romantic connection." That's right girls: If you're unwillingly unwed, blame it on mom and Title IX for duping you into educating, respecting and supporting yourselves. She intends this book, she writes, as a blood-chilling cautionary tale, "like those graphic anti-drunk driving public service announcements that show people crashing into poles and getting killed."
Even I, as a man, take issue with many of Gottlieb's conclusions and rather glib pronouncements because they seem to reflect personal experience more than abject truth. A variety of factors besides luck, personality, and presentation determine our success at the often-infuriating dating game. Gottlieb's analysis never takes into account rudimentary and simplistic variables that cast doubt as to the veracity of her entire work as a whole. Of all of the areas she neglects to take into account, that which comes to mind first is location.
In Washington, DC, my adopted home, one gratefully finds a vast amount of young adults like me in their twenties and thirties. A disproportionate share of them are female, which means that the competition for available men can be fairly fierce, if not deeply frustrating at times. A 2006 Washington Postarticle confirms this.
The U.S. government has confirmed what we single women in Washington have known for some time -- there are no single men in the District. Or, more precisely, not enough single men in the District.
According to the Census Bureau's recently released 2005 American Community Survey, the District has the lowest -- read, worst -- ratio of single men to single women in the nation. For every 100 single women in Washington, there are only 93.4 men. That's just over nine-tenths of a man for every woman. Now, if you've been single for as long as I have in this town, nine-tenths of a man is starting to sound pretty good.
Further compounding this struggle is that the stereotypical Washingtonian male is heavily Type A, married to his job, bereft of an actual personality outside of his occupation, and inclined to frequently take his work home with him, both literally and figuratively. Speaking purely from my own experiences, my girlfriend jokes that she had to import me from elsewhere, since many prior experiences finding a suitable relationship partner had been dismal. I wasn't aware of how common the problem was until, while at dinner one night, each of her female friends seated around the table mentioned they'd had the same exact problem. If we're to take Gottlieb at face value, then these women ought to put the blame at the feet of Feminism or at the dissolution of the traditional ways of courting.
According to a recent Pew Research study, the District of Columbia has the lowest marriage rate in the country. Only 23 percent of women and 28 percent of men and in D.C. are married, compared to 48 and 52 percent nationwide. The rates in D.C. are so low that they lie entirely off the Pew map's color key. The closest states to D.C.'s numbers are Rhode Island, where 43 percent of women are married, and Alaska, where 47 percent of men are married.
Why aren't D.C. residents getting hitched?
The Pew poll offers up one possibly related figure: residents of D.C. get married significantly later in life than do the residents of the 50 states. In D.C., the median age at first marriage is 30 for women and 32 for men. In contrast, the median age for a first marriage in the state of Idaho is 24 for women and 25 for men.
In the suburban, middle class, predominantly white city in Alabama where I grew up, most in my age range got married either in their early twenties or at least by their mid-twenties. When it came time for my tenth high school reunion this past August, I noticed by a quick survey of the Facebook page thoughtfully created for the event that roughly 60%-70% of my class had already gotten married. Of those, based on my own research, it appeared that 40% of my female classmates had given birth to at least one child. To say that I didn't quite fit in to the prevailing demographics would be putting it exceedingly lightly.
To return to Schillinger's analysis,
A woman doesn't always find it easy to persevere in a tepid affair once it's actual, not notional. And a man doesn't have to be handsome to bolt-or to take umbrage at the suspicion that he's being "settled" for. Perhaps in the future, in an over-perfected, suspense-less, Gattaca universe, men will come with LED displays on their foreheads that read: "I mean business" or "I'm deliberately wasting your time," or, "Actually, I'm gay," or "I'll marry you, but we'll loathe each other and I'll leave you for a 20-year old when you're 37." Until that day comes, one wonders how Gottlieb can be so emphatic in her pronouncements, so blistering in her blame of single women for being entitled and picky in their 20s, and "desperate but picky" thereafter.
I wouldn't at all encourage anyone, male or female, gay or straight (or somewhere in between), cisgender or transgender, to find much helpful or worthy of emulation in the traditional strategies regarding marriage and/or settling down that are prevalent in the region of my birth. Had I been born in the rural South rather than the city South, most people in my high school class would be married by now and many would probably have had at least one child well before the age of thirty. I've often been a proponent of waiting and using extreme caution before jumping into marriage or parenthood---both require a tremendous amount of patience, maturity, and energy. As such, I take tremendous offense to Gottlieb's bitter hypothesis, since I doubt she'd be any happier with three kids, a mortgage, and a lingering sense of doubt that she'd tossed aside the freedom of adulthood for the supposed contentment of marriage and motherhood. Between the fear of spinsterhood and the fear of being forced into a role of great responsibility at too early an age rests the reality. Life promises us nothing but the chance to roll the dice or play a hand at the table. Both sides of the coin, be it a lifetime of cats as companions or PTA meetings and dirty diapers are not necessarily the only two expected outcomes from which women can choose.
Schillinger concludes,
There's such a thing as luck, and there's such a thing as love. Sometimes the two forces combine, sometimes, they don't. If luck and love had combined for Gottlieb, today she might be a housewife in Teaneck with an SUV of her own, two kids and a mortgage, and she would not have had the need or the time to have built her fabulous career, or to have written this whining, corrosive, capricious book. Now there's a happy ending. But for anyone who dares order millions of people she doesn't know to sell out their dreams, regret their accomplishments, fear their futures and "Marry him," whoever he is, I have two words: You first.
Though I, as a man don't quite feel the same societal compulsion to marry, I will mention in all seriousness that I always craved the stability and the solid grounding of, if not marriage, certainly a long-term relationship. Though I am nearly thirty, I spent most of my twenties being ahead of the learning curve, and my expectations were always severely tempered by prior relationship partners who wanted only to have fun and to not entertain anything particularly serious. Now, finally, what I want and have wanted for a while is more in line with others my age, but in saying this, I would never make the assumption that every presumably heterosexual woman in her early thirties and beyond who isn't married is desperate to find a husband and start a family. This is certainly true with some, but not all. Not even close. Believing what Gottlieb has to say means that we must take her overblown postulates and acerbic suppositions at face value without expanding them beyond a very narrow sample of the population.
No successful movement is instantly realized upon enactment. Establishing greater equality for women at times looks a little raggedy and uneven because change doesn't happen overnight. Like Gottlieb, it is easy to confuse states of transition with proof of their ultimate dysfunction. It doesn't take a leap of faith to trust that gender equality is inevitable, but it does take an open mind and with it quite a bit of patience to recognize that no unfinished work in progress will find its way onto the walls of an art gallery as an unquestioned masterpiece. This same kind of buyer's remorse I see from time to time in books like Gottlieb's, each of which reflects the same basic frustration and fear that irrefutable results for generations worth of effort are never going to manifest themselves and that these sorts of struggles have created more problems than solutions. Again, I counter that true contentment lies within the self, not necessarily within the parameters of any movement. Each of us has more control over ourselves than over any progressive construct of seeking cultural evolution. Look within the movement as a whole if you want to know where to leave your mark, but look within yourself if you want to find a relationship partner. Never confuse the two.
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.
At least one major network has recently devoted much time to advancing and promoting women's rights, and it is in that spirit that I offer this post. Gender discrimination, in particular, is complicated to the extreme by the fact that gender as a construct is so loosely and inexactly defined. What constitutes "masculine" as well as "feminine" leaves more than ample room for debate and indeed it varies considerably from person to person. Moving targets are notoriously difficult to hit. We might define gender the same way Justice Potter Stewart famously remarked about pornography: "I know it when I see it." Perhaps, but looks can be deceiving.
Recently I watched the 1951 Swedish film, Miss Julie, which was based on the play of the same name written by August Strindberg. Strindberg's tortured psyche and resulting tumultuous love life must certainly have factored in to the equation, as he sees the relationship between men and women as being a combative, loathing affair in which both sexes are driven together only by carnal lust. The two main characters, Miss Julie and her nominal lover Jean, spend the majority of the film variously exchanging insults, spilling forbidden details of each's dysfunctional childhood, while desperately striving to keep away the barely concealed desire that so strongly pulls them together. This, to Strindberg, is what characterizes every romantic pairing at its basest core. The war between the sexes is just that, war, and a particularly bombastic affair where victory quickly gives way to defeat.
While I might not agree with said statement, I do grant that the playwright does deserve some praise for being ahead of his time to some degree. Power dynamics, particularly those regarding types of privilege are explored in much detail, especially the means by which gender inequality trumps class distinction and vice versa. Miss Julie holds power over her working-class, though highly educated lover because her background is aristocratic. Jean, however, has power over Miss Julie because he is male and is not restrained by upper-class values. Ironically, the aristocracy is shown to create its own needless restrictions and its own cages, and though the working-classes might have less money or influence, they also live lives of greater freedom than their social betters. As for Jean and Julie, their flirtation is as much about control as it is about lust, and in it neither character wins the upper hand for very long. Instead, we the audience are left with a maddeningly unresolved squabble that, by the film's conclusion, is never really put aside.
As a feminist, however, what I found most appalling is the presentation of Miss Julie's mother. She was not a part of the original play and was instead added later by Alf Sjöberg, whose screenplay also fleshed out the character of the count considerably. A woman who comes across as a sadistic parody of first-wave feminism, her character reads like a laundry list of male privilege paranoia. For starters, she broaches propriety by being unwilling to get married because she does not wish to be seen as her husband's property. Loathe to give birth or to be a mother, she nonetheless becomes pregnant, while plainly hating the child that emerges from her womb. Her daughter is forced to dress in boy's clothing, forbidden to play with dolls, or to embrace even the most modest of female gender roles. All of this is meant, as the playwright asserts, to prove that women are equal to men. However, these draconian tactics lead to much misery and confusion for the child who finds traditionally male pursuits like hunting or plowing a field either perplexing or impossible. She is therefore raised as a boy would be, learning the same chores and same societal obligations as would a male offspring, though the implication is that gender role distinctions to some degree exist for a good reason. The mother's designs even fall upon the workers of the estate. Women servants are required to perform men's work and men servants are required to perform women's work. Neither does so competently and before very long the family is nearly penniless. It is then without much surprise that Sjöberg notes how much Miss Julie's mother hates, fears, and mistrusts men and seeks to pass along this same perspective to her daughter. The mother's belief in radical feminism crosses the line from empowerment into misandry and it is this gross distortion of feminism that still finds its way into modern conservative discourse, particularly in the bluster of Rush Limbaugh's frequent rantings about so-called femi-nazis.
Returning to the film, it is at this point, unsurprisingly, that the established patriarchy attempts to re-establish control and save the day. Her husband, Miss Julie's father, is a well-meaning and kind-hearted count who patiently tolerates his wife's behavior until he takes a firm look at the balance sheet. At this point, he insists that a more traditional means of both raising a child and conducting business will be employed. He liberates his daughter from boy's clothing, dressing her in what he believes to be gender-appropriate fare. He arm-twists his wife into a marriage ceremony and exchange of vows, much to her extreme distaste. However, he fails to take into account her perfidy and bitterness, as she sets fire to the estate, forcing the family to take on more debt and leaving them without a place to live until the Count finds the means to rebuild. She then suggests that her husband should borrow money from a close personal friend, one that she happens to be having an affair with, no less. The money borrowed is secretly her own that she has hidden away, but she lies deliberately to entangle her husband into an economic arrangement that could have been otherwise avoided. The Count discovers what she has done, but due to the insidious nature of the transaction cannot file charges or seek justice.
Strindberg's own views were frequently perplexing and capricious. At times in his life he advocated for women's suffrage but also made misogynistic statements that completely negated his original position. He was, quite unsurprisingly, married three times, each of which ended in bitter, acrimonious divorce, due in large part to the fact to the fact that he was hypersensitive and highly neurotic. It is easy for us to come down harshly on those who make anti-feminist statements or who state shocking offensive opinions. Criticism is always justified, but I try to, as best I can, take into account the circumstances and the state of mind of those who make patently inappropriate public as well as private statements. Words do matter, as do statements of brazen misogyny and unrepentant sexism, but without excusing such behavior, I do seek to find its root in an effort to formulate a solution. The past several months have shown a marked uptick in what seems like a perpetual cycle of insults, retorts, charges, counter-charges, and the like. I know this sort of behavior goes along with the territory but I still wonder about the ultimate impact. Whether our dialogue is somehow coarser now than before I can't say and whether our children are more or less inclined to violence is a matter of debate, but the fact remains that so long as we fail to seek a common humanity, we'll always be at war, not just with our enemies, but also with ourselves.
I spent the morning and afternoon trapped in my apartment as workers painted the stairwell which leads to the only exit from the building. The paint fumes were probably consuming my brain cells. I sacrificed brain cells in better ways when I was younger.
I had hoped to write about an attempt to save what has come to be called McClellan Forest in West Orange, NJ on the site of land once belonging to Major General George Brinton McClellan, organizer of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War...and former Governor of New Jersey.
Whether anyone has a positive or negative opinion of McClellan is irrelevant. What is relevant are the 250 year old trees...and the resolve the Archdiocese of Newark has to replace the forest with athletic fields to honor the current headmaster of Seton Hall Prep.
But the files I wanted have not as yet arrived from the woman from the Sierra Club who spoke about the efforts on Tuesday.
So I had to come up with something else for tonight. Maybe the 8 by 10 glossies and maps will arrive before next Friday.
Then I realized it was October 9...one day after another anniversary of THAT day. And I realized that Sunday is National Coming Out Day. Maybe it is time for another progress report.
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.
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.
For today's story, we will travel far afield from the typical domains of politics or science or law that have so often provoked our thinking into an often overlooked area of human relations:
To which gender do you belong?
It's a simple question, or so common sense would tell us-either you're male, or you're female.
As it turns out, things aren't quite so simple, and in today's conversation we'll consider this issue in a larger way. By the time we're done, not only will we learn a thing or two about sex and gender and sexuality, we'll also learn how to offer a community of people a level of respect that they often find difficult to obtain.
Small weights, individually not much, bound to my joints, dragging me down, generating immobility, accumulating.
Sometimes I want to turn away. Sometimes it is not that I desire to do so, but that I feel that I must, if only for my own sanity. But there are times when even so, I must push onward, searching for glimmers of progress, of hope, of the remnants of dreams.
Last spring I volunteered to teach one section of students how to use the computer with college-level proficiency. These students were brought here under the auspices of the Educational Opportunity Fund.
Sometimes I should try to remember that no good deed goes unpunished.
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.
Yvette Melendez from Glastonbury, Conn., who is sitting in the nominee's VIP section in the hearing room, said she winced inwardly when Sen. Tom Coburn said, "You'll have a lot of 'splainin' to do." But Melendez says she didn't feel offended. "I personally did not think it was appropriate," she told me in an interview. "But I'm sure he said it as a joke."
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.
After...how long is that? Forever? Really?...the Congress has a couple of bills before it which would actually be beneficial to the GLBT community. And...horror of horrors...to transfolk as well.
What's up with that?
The two bills go by the unofficial names of the Matthew Shepard Act and ENDA. They cover two of the parts of what I have in the past considered the heart of The Gay Agenda:
the right to not be fired for being GLBT
the right to not be thrown out of our residences if discovered to be GLBT
the right to be served in a restaurant
the right not to be beaten up every other Tuesday
I am aware that other people think that marriage equality and the right to serve in the military are also at the heart of said agenda. I'm of the feeling that maybe they are more of the lungs. What I listed in the box affect all GLBT people, including those who are not in relationships or who have no interest in the military (including those who, like myself, who have already served, thank you).
So I was trying to spend the first part of the week continuing with a a fictional story I have been working on. Wall. There was this realization that to really do the story justice, I needed to write a whole historical background for a people who had none.
Big wall. Immense wall.
Then I had a rather severe allergy attack. Putting the two of those together left me in a panic because Friday was fast approaching and I had nothing for the column.
But I was saved, sort of. Chaz Bono came out. That may seem a bit weird, being as how not long ago Bono was Director of Entertainment Media for GLAAD. But there are different kinds of coming out:
I can't say it has been a top of the line week. Given that last week included the death of the faculty colleague I work most closely with, one might have expected this week to have little direction to go but up. But one apparently would would have been wrong about that.
Of course leading off with Memorial Day weekend was a giant indication the week wasn't going to be a whole lot of fun. Don't Ask, Don't Tell ramps up for veterans, whether the public is supposedly honoring the live ones or the dead ones. As a former draft dodger who was arrested by the FBI and forced to serve as an alternative to spending five years in the Oklahoma State Pen, I'm not terribly proud of my service...but I did the best I could while I was there.
Irony is one of the things the military does best. What better MOS for a draft dodger than military police. There was method in the madness, however, since at the time, Nixon had told the public that draftees would not be made into combat troops and combat troops would be brought home from Nam. What he failed to mention was that MPs were not combat troops, that the combat troops would be replaced by MPs and the draftees would be trained as, you guessed it, MPs.
As some of you have probably heard, I've been fairly ill for the past week. I'll include an update about that at the end of this piece.
But being ill...and it being the end of finals week, I had a difficult time generating a brand new topic. Where are Bob and Doug when you need them?
So...like Felix...I reached into my bag of tricks and searched around for something to put together for tonight, even if it had to be somewhat hastily.
I remembered that I took some photographs at the end of the April, of the Bloomfield College 2009 observation of the Clothesline Project.
March on Washington
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.
I spent the morning and afternoon trapped in my apartment as workers painted the stairwell which leads to the only exit from the building. The paint fumes were probably consuming my brain cells. I sacrificed brain cells in better ways when I was younger.
