Category Archives: Transgender

Coming Out

Published December 17, 2015 / by rmaddy / 2 Comments on Coming Out
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I never had friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.  Jesus, does anyone?  –the Narrator in Stand By Me (1986).

I left high school like I was shot from a cannon.  Three months later I moved out of state, returning only rarely for family gatherings, and three years after that I was married and completely disconnected from my entire graduating class.  Last month I rejoined those classmates for only the second time in 30 years.  The first time, ten years ago, I wore a jacket and tie.  This time, boots, skinny jeans and a dazzling1 topcoat.  True, I sported long (permed) hair and earrings in 2005, but even I had no real inkling at that point that in 2015, I would return on the other side of gender transition.

As I flew out to my the reunion, I knew that I would be asked when I had come out.  Should I tell them 2008, when I basically decided that I was going to dress the person in the mirror how I damned well pleased?2  Or perhaps 2009, when I started to pay a social price for doing so.  Maybe it was 2014, when I petitioned the court to change my name, or the same year, when I engaged the power of social media to reintroduce myself.  The answer could be any of these, or all of them taken collectively.

The expression “coming out” as applied to LGBT people originally drew upon the traditions of social initiation, wherein the debutante enters womanhood.  The metaphorical closet (of denial, social isolation, etc) was apparently layered on to the concept over time.  Either way however, the sense of a distinct moment is present, with one mode of living giving way to another.  It is very understandable, therefore, that to the person who has never gone through the process, coming out might be imagined as a single event.

This has not been my experience.  To be sure, coming out has a beginning to which one might point, but if there is an end, I have never personally encountered it.  Part of this might be occupational–I work as an Emergency Room doctor.  I have no practice3 to which patients return.  I am in the business of meeting strangers.  Further, being transgender is far more visual than, say, being lesbian.  One’s sexuality does not often come up in professional conversations, but the social transgression of not passing means that every new encounter involves an element of personal disclosure.  Whether a gift that keeps on giving, or a nagging eternal pain in the ass, coming out is something that I continue to do far more than something that I have done.

Fortunately, it has gotten a little easier.  When I first began, I did not understand, let alone know how to convey my story.  All I had really done in coming out was to enter a phase of exploration with no clear destination in mind.  I disclosed by getting dressed, but I often had no clue how to answer the questions which my self-presentation generated.  The result was a seemingly endless sequence of embarrassing moments and awkward conversations.  A polished quinceañera I was not.  Eventually, however, I figured out who I was and how to talk about it.  Perhaps it would have better for all parties involved, in retrospect, if I had sorted everything out first then come out in one dazzling fell swoop, but alas–this is not how I roll.

Still, the reunion was a bit of a debut for me.  I had never previously come out to so many people simultaneously and in person.  I admit a little nervousness heading into the weekend, but by the time I arrived at the party, I doubt my psychological state was too much different than that of anyone else there–I was proud of who I have become and eager to see how my classmates also had flourished.  And flourish they have.  What a great group of people!  Life in 2015 was unimaginable for me in 1985, but no less so for them.  I found the whole experience warm and mutually affirming.  Reunions are a bit surreal anyway–for a fleeting moment our erstwhile importance to each other was rekindled, only to have it recede again in the weeks and months to come.  Still, it was just like old times.

But real.

 

Transgender athletics

Published December 4, 2015 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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Competitive women’s tennis died forty years ago.  At least, it was supposed to have.  Mere months after (then) Bruce Jenner set world records in the 1976 Olympic decathlon, a 42-year old ophthalmologist and semi-pro tennis player named Renée Richards applied to play in the US Open Women’s tournament.  The wrinkle was that she was transsexual and refused to be subjected to chromosome testing.  No helpful precedent existed.  Athletes, officials and the sports media all expressed fears of unfair advantage.  Her application was denied, and she sued the US Tennis Association, ultimately winning her case in the New York Superior Court.  In 1977, she reapplied and was accepted to play in the Open, where she lost  to Virginia Wade in the first round.  She lingered in pro tennis for a few years, but left a substantially larger mark on the culture than she ever did in the record books.

The conversation that Dr. Richards started has, if anything, intensified over the last ten years.  The carnival came to my neck of the woods last year when the Minnesota State High School League debated what rules ought to apply to transgender athletes.  The above picture was part of an advertising blitz by “family” groups to block transgender participation in high school athletics.  The MSHSL ultimately decided to adopt rules similar to those laid out by the International Association of Athletics Federations, which I will summarize below.  First, however, I would like to lay out the arguments for and against allowing transgender athletes to compete.

I assume that the answer to the question, “Why would a transgender person want to engage in sport?” is pretty much the same as the answer to, “Why does he listen to punk music?”, or “Why would she want to drive a car?”  There is likely a mixture of whim and utility intermingled in the answer, but the most striking thing about the question is its silliness.  Trans people read, drive and compete for reasons similar to the general population.  Regarding athletics specifically, some seek the health benefits.  Others thrive on competition or are driven by the vicariously fantasies of parents.  A gifted few might have the further enticement of financial renumeration, whether through scholarships or professional status.  Nevertheless, most of us do whatever we do because we simply like to do so.

The most compelling argument against allowing transgender athletes is one of fairness, which I think most will readily affirm as a positive value.  Specifically, the MTF athlete 1 might possess strength, agility and/or endurance above and beyond that of her peers which result in competitive advantage.  To the extent that is the case, perhaps it makes more sense to segregate by birth sex, which, after all, is easier to establish than psychosocial identity.

The devil is in the details.  One could graph out a range for normal strength, stamina, etc. for males and females and demonstrate that they are different, but they overlap.  The proponents of this argument are not really looking for a measurable talent cutoff.  Their preferred segregation is between the sexes, not between strength and size categories.  Secondly, I have no doubt that Usain Bolt and Carli Lloyd work hard at their sports, but to what extent can we say that they do not enjoy some degree of innate physical advantage?  If we truly want a level playing field, we will have to select more random activities–competitive coin flipping, perhaps.

Muddying the waters even further, what really persists after transition?  It turns out that it largely depends on when the person started hormones.  Male and female body structure is quite similar until puberty.  At that point, the bodies start to become sculpted by estrogen or testosterone.  Estrogen closes the growth plates in bone earlier than testosterone, resulting in lower female stature, and muscle type/mass is significantly increased by testosterone.  One of these differences, you will have guessed, is permanent.  Those MTF’s who start hormones post puberty will likely have increased height and bone density, whereas those who started earlier will be more comparable to natal females.  However, it appears that estrogen therapy brings muscle mass fairly quickly into the female range.  Again, no one is actually arguing for segregation by precise physical measurements when it comes right down to it.  Most transwomen will be somewhat taller, but not necessarily stronger than their co-competitors.  Interestingly, athletes post-transition tend to be as, but not more competitive, than they were pre-transition.2  The world being what it is, maybe there is someone out there just crazy enough to undergo gender transition for the sake of athletic advantage, but there is no evidence whatsoever that it would work.

As I mentioned, the IAAF has established rules that determine eligibility of the trans athlete.  The athlete must report her transition.  She must have legally AND medically transitioned, with the latter being defined as a minimum of one year on testosterone blockade/estrogen therapy.  Hormone levels are to be checked, and the final decision is made by a panel of medical experts.  The process is rigorous, well-defined, and frankly puts a very high burden on the post-transition athlete in terms of extra verifications and concession of privacy.  Parenthetically, transwomen will almost always end up with much lower levels of testosterone–typically zero for transwomen vs. 20-60 ng/mL for natal females.

Once you get past the fairness discussion, the arguments against letting transgender women degenerate rather quickly.  Most of them you can read in the advertisement above.  Transwomen are really men.  Predators.  Imposters looking for easier competition.  Thieves, taking scholarships from “real women”.  Each one of these is a version of You Don’t Count.  This affront, and not hope of personal gain, is what drove the otherwise shy Renée Richards to let herself be cast as “an extraordinary spectacle”3 in the summer of 1976.  She wanted to play, and she didn’t like being told that she could not.

Women’s tennis did not die in 1977.  Richards went on to coach Martina Navratilova to a pair of championships at Wimbledon, where she herself was never allow to play.  She returned to her ophthalmology practice, and apparently still pops back into the office a couple of days per week.  In 2014, two days after her 80th birthday, another quirky fairly late-transitioning forty-something transgender physician stood up in Scott County District Court and testified that she too, would like to be called Renae, reborn.  It was so ordered.

Drag

Published December 1, 2015 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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I don’t do drag.

By this I mean to say two things.  First, drag has a specific definition which does not apply to how I present.  Second, drag makes me personally uncomfortable, and I would rather not be one of its consumers.

First things first:  drag typically refers to cross-gender dress for purposes of entertainment or performance.  Drag queens usually do not identify as female, nor do drag kings identify as male.  Many, if not most may not even see themselves as transgender.1 Drag demands, or at least thrives upon, a stage.  It tends to the garish/outlandish and stereotypical.  While drag performers often seem quite comfortable–more so in fact than many of the other transpeople with whom they are confused–they are not primarily motivated by a quest for comfort.

Dee Snider (above) is a drag queen.  Alice Cooper was.  Eddie Izzard dresses during his performances, but probably is not.  The distinction turns on purpose, and/or whether or not one’s cross gender presentation has anything to do with one’s day to day sense of self.  Caitlyn Jenner arguably presents a caricatured view of femininity, but presumably out of a sense of deep personal conviction.  She is no drag queen.

Drag elicits a reaction.  Indeed, this is the point of drag.  For those who fancy it, it is delectably transgressive, mocking the gender binary by reducing it to absurdity.  Drag isn’t so much about who the performer is as what he or she is trying to say.

Or, perhaps not.  I ought not to overgeneralize.  Many engage in drag because they simply find it fun.  Thousands of people dress in drag on Halloween.  By November 1, they have moved on to something else.  The individuals in question quite probably break the rules merely for the pleasure of do so.  Others revel in the theatrics and artistry, which, I concede, are undeniable.

Still, I don’t like it.  Done poorly, it makes me feel like my life is a joke; done well, like make believe.  The over-the-top spectacle of it becomes, for those unfamiliar with trans people, particularly transsexuals like me, the gestalt of what it means to be transgender.  Drag teems with epithets like “she-male” much in the same way as gangster rap is littered (and, to my eye, polluted) with the N-word.

LGBT events are heavily salted with drag.  One cannot go to Pride Festival, for example, without being utterly inundated by it.  And, as I said, it makes me squirm.  Perhaps this reaction is evidence of the iconoclastic success of drag–after all, some women feel that my feminine presentation caricatures them too.  Might they not also assert that my presence brings them down?

The best that I can do by way of rejoinder is to say that this has never honestly, consciously been my intent.

I don’t do drag.  I do me.

Milestones, Part III

Published November 26, 2015 / by rmaddy / 1 Comment on Milestones, Part III
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These days, one cannot buy a banana without being asked to fill out a customer satisfaction survey, but six years ago, they were still a fairly novel and challenging development in the practice of medicine.  Though anonymous evaluation can be intimidating, I initially embraced it.  For starters, I thoroughly believed that clinical savvy falls flat in the absence of kindness, respect and good communication.   Further, I had very little negative experience with the surveys.  Generally speaking, I hit it out of the park pretty consistently.

I had not suffered any direct consequences at work for being transgender yet.  Quite the opposite, really.  The nurses suddenly seemed to like me more and Mary, my boss, had played a significant role in me coming out to the hospital staff by communicating some talking points which we prepared along with her personal support.  Then again, the hospital had not yet suffered any consequences on my account either.  A couple of months earlier, when people started to notice and/or complain about my transitioning appearance in my church, the leadership there wasted little time in kicking me to the curb.  Initial reactions aside, would the same happen to me on the job if patients complained?  For the first time, I began to fear public feedback.

The dreaded complaint arrived bundled in a summary of recently returned surveys.  As we took pride in our customer service in the ER, these results were generally posted on our bulletin board.  Scanning through the initial charts and graphs, my eyes gravitated to one of the free text comments listed below.  “Unprofessional,” it said.  “Inappropriate.”  The anonymous author named me, described my appearance, and stated in no unclear terms that he or she found it wholly unacceptable for a person in my position.  Instantly, my heart was in my throat.

Of course there was no chance that this would go unnoticed.  Devastated, I photocopied the comment and walked down toward the administrative offices, where I found Laura, the Director of Nursing at her desk with the door open.

I asked her if she had seen the most recent surveys.  She said she had not, so I passed the photocopy of the comments to her.  She read it in silence, looking up when she was finished.

“As far as I know, this is the first,” I began.  “I doubt it will be the last.”

“No, probably not.” she replied.

“Well, what should we do?” I asked.

She thought again for a moment, appearing as calm as I was agitated.  Then, she picked up the paper, leaned over and tossed it in the wastebasket, adding, “It looks like they answered a question that we didn’t ask.”

Milestones–Part II

Published October 29, 2015 / by rmaddy / 1 Comment on Milestones–Part II
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Fast forward.  The lunchtime conversation with Mark is at least a half dozen years behind me, but not forgotten.  I am still quite religious at this point, and find myself at church in an adult education class–basically Sunday School, but for big people and, importantly, with coffee and donuts.

A man across the chair circle from me abruptly launches into an unsolicited rant about “the homosexual agenda.”  Witness our subsequent conversation, more or less:

Me:  Do you know that song, “Come Just As You Are”?
Concerned Citizen:  Yeah.
Me:  Could a gay person do that here?
Concerned Citizen:  Well, they have to give up their lifestyle first.
Me:  Why do gay people have to change first if the rest of us get to come as we are?  Can’t God fix whatever needs fixing?
Concerned Citizen:  I suppose.
Me:  And what if being gay doesn’t need fixing?  Have you considered the possibility that there is nothing wrong with them?

He hadn’t.

I don’t remember exactly how long it took me to progress from the idea that there wasn’t anything wrong with gay people to the thought that perhaps there wasn’t anything wrong with me either.  Even now, I don’t always feel too sure about it.  Still, I connected the dots, and decided to quit fighting my transgender identity.

I regret to say that I did not come out the next day in a technicolor blur of fabulousness.  As always, I waded slowly into the water.  I managed to convince myself that I was in a safe place, and that my friends either did not notice or did not care that I was gradually feminizing.  It would be another several years before I found out how wrong I was.

That too, was a milestone, but one I think I’ll leave undisturbed.

Potty Politics

Published September 19, 2015 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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Merely 100 years after the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the new Norman/English nation, led by King Henry II, extended its reach into Ireland, seizing a large swath of land starting at Dublin and extending northward up the Irish east coast.  For centuries they tried (and ultimately failed) to preserve this area as a distinctly English enclave, separated from local blood, customs and language.    They marked the contentious boundary between their lands and those of the native Irish with a series of stakes demarcating the territory that they claimed and were prepared to defend.  Collectively, the stakes lent their name (Latin:  palus) to the English lands within, although the stakes themselves gradually gave way to a series of defensive ditches and hedges which could not even restrain livestock.  Nevertheless, psychologically the English separated themselves from the great unwashed–the uncouth, uncivilized heathens living “beyond the pale”.

This quaint historical echo of English condescension resurfaced last month when New Jersey governor and playground bully Chris Christie referred to a bill changing the requirement for gender-corrected birth certificates for transgender New Jerseyans as once again, beyond the pale.  Existing law allows such a change only for those who have had genital surgery; the new proposal, which Christie has now twice vetoed in consecutive years, amends this to those who can document “appropriate medical therapy.”  This year as last, Christie cited the possibility of fraud as justification for rejecting the bill.

While I don’t believe for a minute that he actually believes such a bill would result in significant identity fraud, I am hardly surprised that, given his aspirations for the Republican Presidential nomination, Christie is not an early adopter of transgender rights.  What caught my attention was not so much that he is unconvinced such a measure is right for New Jersey.  He could have said that such an idea was “beyond the Hudson” without arousing much more than a confused shrug from those who slept through their high school geography class.1  Christie aroused my ire and news outlet scrutiny not because of his predictable conservative stance, but rather because he seems to have laughed derisively at the bill in public comment, misrepresented it as requiring nothing more than a capricious feeling on the part of the applicant, and casting it as somehow ridiculous, employing the colorful Anglo-Irish metaphor which merely two paragraphs ago inspired our rapt attention.

The extent to which Christie’s meager 1% support in the polls owes to his stance on transgender rights is dubious.  However, it is increasingly clear that in 2016, Presidential contenders will, at the very least, need to have a stance on such rights.  To my upraised finger,2 this represents a huge shift in the political winds.

I digress.  Thanks to my own nativity in the State of Confusion3, I already have a reissued birth certificate.  It felt important at the time for me to obtain it, but it is my driver’s license which daily proves my name/gender, and my passport which put an end to the extraordinary rate of rescanning, patting down, and in one case barely disguised groping I used to experience at TSA security.  One year and a dozen flights later, they have not laid a hand on me since.  Documents really do matter.  Nevertheless, the signature battle for transgender rights will not occur at a government desk, but rather in your local restroom.

Transgender bathroom bills are all the rage this year.  Culture warriors increasingly rally troops bruised by losses on gay marriage by pivoting to a front where they still feel like they can win–the legitimization of transgender discrimination.  Whatever.  Christie and other state/local officials may obstruct on birth certificates, but practically speaking, one usually isn’t required until something is needed to staple to the equivalent death document.  I expect to have to pee long before then.  Transphobic activists are working overtime to put an end to such excretory nonsense.

Until I got to know more transgender people I wondered if I was becoming a bit lavatory-obsessed.  Writing my Bathroom Song was the first sign.  Then came the (unrecorded as far as you know) Garth Brooks spoof,4 riffing on the same theme.  Was I stuck in a rut?

Well, it turns out that I have absolutely nothing on the fanaticism of transphobic activists and legislators.  They propose laws which explicitly discriminate, well…indiscriminately against both FTM’s and MTF’s, although honestly they don’t seem to have heard of the former.  MTF’s themselves are cast not as women in any sense, but posers and pretenders faking an identity crisis to justify legalized voyeurism.  “The clothes make the man?” Pshaw…it’s all about the naughty bits, and they are coming after your daughter.

The central assumption of anti-trans bathroom legislation is that a short and slippery slope exists between transgender identity and sexual predation.  Further, the only way to prevent such acts of sexual violence is to ensure that people use the bathroom corresponding to those parts of their bodies which are unquestionably the least likely to be seen by others in a public restroom.  Or, the hypothetical discomfort of born men/women with trans men/women in the Gents/Ladies5 is sufficient cause to compel transfolk to use facilities where they are actually uncomfortable and genuinely at risk for assault.

I have been called selfish for using the Women’s room, but honestly never by anyone inside of it.  Maybe no woman has ever had the heart to tell me.  However, I suspect that the truth of the matter is that once I reached the point when I was thought it was more appropriate to use the women’s room, most reasonable people agreed with me.  Think about it.  Is this or this really more comfortable for all parties concerned?

I’ll wager that beyond some threshold of minimum facility cleanliness before dropping your drawers/lifting your shift you don’t have a Bathroom Strategy, let alone one that rates capital letters.  I’ll let you decide if it reveals a potential threat to the common good or if it’s merely neurotic as hell:

It starts with intelligence gathering. Are the rooms multistall or locking singles?  Are there just the two options, or is there a door number three?  How philosophically compromising, on a scale from 9 to 10, does door number three feel today?  Can I tell which side the stalls will be on by the distance between the men’s and women’s doors?  I look for temporary lulls in traffic like a golfer trying to time a shot between invisible gusts of wind.  Wait, it’s intermission…perhaps I can dart in quickly after they flick the lights to signal the rest of the patrons back to their seats.

Time to move. Eyes downcast, or at least distant and unfocused, I enter the bathroom hugging the wall.  One stall will be larger–this time the handicapped designation doesn’t seem to goad me.  Being 6’3″ in a room full of ridiculously low toilets is handicap enough.  Sitting down on one of those little toadstools captures 90% of the essence of falling ingloriously on one’s ass. I might never rise again, and they’ll find me stuck here during third shift cleaning.  I bee line for the taller seat if available, but if not, then closest port in a storm.

Dear God, no…there’s a line.  Please, please, please don’t talk to me.  Maybe I can pretend I’m 20 and just stare at my phone.  How convincingly can I say, No habla ingles? It’s not too late to turn back.  Two and a half hours…surely I can hold it for two and a half hours.

No, I can’t.  Hopefully there’s somewhere else to stop on the way home–a gas station preferably.  Good ol’ single rooms.  Fair odds in a fast food joint too.  Not the roadside, though.  There is no way in hell I’m going to be written up in the local paper as the transvestite[sic] cited for public urination.  I go through life bouncing from one embarrassment to another, but some humiliations are simply beyond the pale.

 

Happiness

Published August 5, 2015 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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Once upon a time…

Trans person discovers self.  Reveals self.  Awkward first steps.  Family, friends sustain and support.  Over time, trans person flourishes and thrives.  Storybook ending.  Happily ever after…

2015 is the Year of the Transgender Fairy Tale.  It’s not just okay to be out.  It’s absolutely fucking brilliant.  Pockets of resistance still clutter the battlefield, but the war is essentially over.  Tolerance triumphs over bigotry.  The rainbow-clad umbrella shelters a technicolor world of unique experiences and diverse truths.

More than any other comment, whether online or in my day to day life, I hear other people commenting on my happiness:

“Sure, it’s a rough road, but at least you found your happiness.”  
“Whatever makes you happy.”

And so on…

The Caitlyn Jenner spectacle centers on happiness1  The storyline runs from 65 years of secret misery to a summer of public happiness.  To be sure, Jenner’s own comments reinforce this narrative at nearly every turn.  Happiness is the story we want.  Happiness sells.

Is transgender happiness real?  Better, is it any different than non-transgender happiness?  Perhaps happiness is what we all prefer to show to the world.  A richly evocative metaphor proposes that we “put our best face forward.”  Philosopher Immanual Kant suggests that the increase of happiness is our highest moral principle.  For the most part, we act like we agree.

It can be quite unnerving to have others speak of your happiness when you are miserable.  Not everyone does so, of course.  A few recognize the emotional undercurrents which most apparently prefer to ignore.  During two separate multi-week intervals of intense depression this past winter, praise of my new happiness by others never abated.  Meanwhile, I was, if not suicidal, “praying for the mountains to fall upon me.”  I barely weathered the most intense emotional experience of my life–despair–and wondered at the fact that I had previously thought I knew what the word meant.  “As long as you’re happy…”

Nor are trans people immune to this sort of thinking.  Early in my transition, I lamented to my counselor that despite all the changes (relatively minor compared to what followed) I was not feeling happy.  She responded, “Oh…is that what you thought the prize was?”

Trans people may or may not find happiness, just as non-trans people may or may not find happiness.  The “prize” of transition is not happiness, but rather authenticity.  We cease living a life which is not ours to live.  We stop being two people, and become one.  We embrace what is increasingly being referred to as our “personal truth.”  We allow ourselves to do what our subconscious has been driving us to do against the force of other conscious and subconscious decisions to keep these things hidden.

Transition (ideally), reduces an internal struggle, but at the cost of an external one.  Moving through life as a gender congruent person was, by comparison, effortless, even if it simply felt wrong to me.  Now, I face a spectrum of public abuse, ranging from the overt taunts of “he-she” and “it” to the subtleties of non-inclusion into social behaviors.  Never before did I need a strategy for public restroom use, or consider waiting several hours to get home a viable option.  I plan my route through crowded rooms.  Even trans-accepting people tend think I’m at least a little bit nuts, some patting themselves on the back for putting up with it.  Others not-so-subtly project the idea that they are the adult in the room.  My phone never rings other than for business–I am neither one of the guys nor one of the girls.  Gentle reminders to address me by my name and with feminine pronouns are repetitively ignored, and more forceful requests are seen as bitchy.  The battle goes on and on.  Only the location has changed.  Sometimes I miss the days when I was merely torturing myself.

When speaking of medical transition, transgender happiness or at least contentment with transition has been subjected to scientific study.  One such paper made headlines within the past few years, with various findings being emphasized depending on the agenda of the reviewer.  Within support groups, one commonly invoked phrase is that of reaching the point of “transition or die”.  The good news is that the vast majority of people express contentment with their medical treatments.  However, transgender people still remain at substantially higher2 risk for depression and suicide.  Sometimes you transition and die.

We don’t know if Caitlyn Jenner is any happier than Bruce Jenner was.  In real time, we assumed that they both were.  I can’t guess at your happiness, and you can’t guess at mine.  In most cases, I tend to think that we publicly exaggerate.

Working toward happiness remains a worthy goal.  Gender dysphoria may prevent happiness, but gender transition does not necessarily produce it.  The pursuit of authenticity and the pursuit of happiness intersect, but they are separate journeys.

Perhaps seeming happy is a milepost on the road to becoming happy.  We move through life telling jokes and sharing laughs.  We binge watch sit-coms and dance to Pharrell Williams.  We write our Christmas cards and recount our family’s greatest hits. We put candles on birthday cakes and gather in December to cheer the new year.   We smile for the camera.  We reassure our friends that we, like they, are blissfully happy.

But it’s just a fairy tale.

 

Passing Revisited

Published July 24, 2015 / by rmaddy / 2 Comments on Passing Revisited
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Image credit Johnny Hart.

He pedaled directly to where I sat by the lake.  He appeared to be seventy or so, and looked harmless enough.  The trouble is that you can’t always tell.

Immediately I begin to flash through the inventory.  Let’s see:  I’m sitting down.  Good.  He can tell that I’m tall, but now how tall.  Sunglasses cover my eyes and brows.  Excellent.  I happen to be wearing old men’s swim trunks, but they are very loud colors and paired with a swim shirt which offers no solid clues.  I shaved yesterday.  To me, it suddenly feels like a bumper crop of thistles, but from his side, it’s probably still blond enough.  My fingernails are hot pink.  Oh well, here goes nothing…

I told you that I reject the idea of passing.  It’s time to clarify.  I reject that I should have to appear feminine for the comfort of a binary world.  I reject the idea that not passing makes me less of a woman than a transsexual who can pull it off or a natal female who doesn’t have to.  I don’t owe anyone anything vis-a-vis my presentation except myself.1

That said, being clocked2 every time I encounter a stranger is a lamentable pain in the ass-bone.  It really doesn’t matter how many times you see someone’s face fall as they say, “Oh…”, or hear the “are you a man/woman” question.  There is no graceful exit once the bottle is tipped.  You’ve already got Awkward Sauce all over your new white shirt before you ever push away from the table.  So, while I don’t owe anyone an inconspicuous cameo, I also admit that I can’t sustain the energy necessary to clean up the spill dozens of times per day.  For my own sake, I learn to pick my spots.

In this case, I remain fascinated with the lake.  I don’t turn to face him directly.  I remember to smile as we make small talk and I tune in to his reactions as well as I can with my eyes elsewhere.  I push my voice up from it’s normal residence in the center of my chest to the larynx.  This raises the pitch a few notches, but not to Mickey Mouse levels.  I turn down the volume and let the pitch bounce a little.  It’s not to hard to break the monotone once you realize it’s there–something men rarely seem to do.

I feel deeply conflicted about vocal training.  For one thing, I am a singer, and though not very good at it, I shudder to think of the loss of my vocal signature.  Everyone has one.  It is the permanent narrator of your thoughts, as familiar to you as your own face.  Probably more.  Second, I see vocal training as a concession along the same lines of visually passing.  Indeed, voice is far more important in passing than appearance.  There are many oceans left to navigate on my voyage, but the passage I dread the most at this point is the fact that some time soon I will have to figure out what to do with my voice.  Meanwhile it’s just so damned easy to sound like me.

I know the basic principles of voice modulation.  And, I would be a complete idiot if I didn’t cultivate the ability to sound plausible in a pinch.  Today it was apparently optional.  Another day my survival might depend on it.

Most of the time, “clocking” leads merely to mutual embarrassment.  The person who reads me is often just as flustered as I am, or even more.  They might never have experienced this before, whereas I am thoroughly practiced and cannot help but be a little numb.  Still, it builds up.  Whatever the stranger feels will only be felt this once, whereas my life is an endless repetition of such moments.  And that’s the best case scenario.

Trans people need to develop a strategy for men.  Personally, I don’t have much use for them.  I am not attracted to them, and don’t seem to share many of their typical interests.  I don’t care for my own smell, let alone their generally less disguised version.  I was never any good at being one and I’ve noticed to my amusement that many of them are not especially good at it either.  Only the flavor of our failure is different.  Nevertheless, despite the wicked lie of my upbringing 3, I have to admit that the vast majority of them are really decent folk, and to channel Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless.

Most encounters are therefore quite benign.  On rare occasion, however, being transgender can be a death sentence.  The flashpoint typically occurs when a man experiences sexual attraction to a trans person before the lightbulb goes on.  In order for this to be truly dangerous, the guy has to be fairly unglued to start with.  I have definitely seen guys get flustered when they are either making casual conversation or overtly hitting on me when they suddenly discern my unique origins.  Almost all of them just want to go crawl into a hole somewhere.  Some get rude.  It is my great fortune to have never seen an outcome much worse than this.  Nevertheless, trans people are murdered every year by guys whose sexual attraction morphs into uncontrollable rage.

The sunlight of public attention is just beginning to dawn on this situation, but the sharks are still circling in the water.  The recent Supreme Court decision ends only one type of publicly-sanctioned discrimination against LGBT people.  As I mentioned recently, it is still legal to fire people for being queer in 29 states.  Attempts to rewrite public ordinances to allow transgender people the right to pee in the most comfortable restroom are routinely fought by people casting us as a threat to children.  The DOD is spending six months investigating a solution, but I am still not eligible to serve openly in the military.  When I go to the vendor areas at medical conferences, the military recruiters literally4 look down at the floor as I pass their booth.

Most of you probably find these things to be very sad.  Further, you would be outraged to learn that “trans-panic” has been used with some success to assert innocence of violence against transsexuals and to reduce sentences for such crimes.  The idea is that it is justifiable to attack someone who surprised you by being who they are.  Many red states have been fighting like hell against hate crimes statutes and only now are losing out to superseding federal considerations.  Let’s make it personal:

Try this thought experiment.  Does a transsexual person have a duty to disclose himself/herself to a potential sex partner before making steps in that direction?  Why?  While the times are certainly a-changin’, exhaustive knowledge of private matters has never been a pre-condition for sexual activity.  I challenge you to consider whether you believe that transsexuals must lay all their cards on the table in the way a “real man/woman” would not, and what this has to say about your value of transgender life.  Of course one eventually needs to sort out the mechanics of it all, but the truth of the matter is that often identity disclosure often ends brings an evening to a screeching halt, and deep down inside you may have to admit that it would for you too.  To be transgender is to be Less Than.  Maybe a few laws are falling our way, but society still hates us, and won’t even concede the point.

Therefore we make do.  There are several things we can do to be safe.  One is to avoid being noticed at all.  Trans people tend to be much more socially withdrawn.  This, and not our gender identity itself, accounts for the mental illness which we undeniably and disproportionately suffer.  Second, we can try to pass, or at the least make half-way adjustments aimed at soothing the bruised ego of the beholder .  At the risk of beating a dead horse, we keep this option open not because of moral obligation but rather because it is simply in our best interests in a broken world.  Defensive strategies often involve a combination of both.  Fly below the radar whenever you can, even it would be more pleasant to be uninhibited and free.  Third, make some friends–fast.  Without people to watch your back, the target on it grows ever larger.  Finally, learn to recognize the weirdos.  Unfortunately this is an inexact science.

Today, however, the tale has a happy ending.  Whether totally convinced or just pleasantly unconcerned, our cycling gentleman departed as amiably as he arrived.  Heading off towards home, he called over his shoulder, “Have a wonderful day, my girl.”

Pride

Published July 15, 2015 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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June 28, 1969

I’m not particularly fond of crowded places.  Therefore, even if I had been more than two years old at the time and living in New York City, I probably wouldn’t have been at the dive bar run by the Genovese family on Christopher Street early that Saturday morning.  Besides, I’m not especially fond of dancing, cheap booze and filthy restrooms, either individually or in combination.  Plus, I don’t care for trouble, and this joint always had more than its fair share.

Like many mafia-owned establishments, bootleg (untaxed) liquor was the norm, and police raids were common.  Complicating matters, it was illegal to sell liquor to “sexual deviants” or to permit same sex dancing.  This particular club was a magnet for the gay and transgender communities.  Often the management would be tipped off that a raid was imminent, allowing time for them to hide contraband and/or empty the bar.  Barring this, however, typical roadmap of a raid involved seizing the booze and lining up the patrons for ID checks.  A female officer would take all those dressed as women into the bathroom and check their genitals.  Anyone found to be crossdressed could be arrested.  Women could also be arrested if they were not found to be wearing at least 3 articles of feminine clothing.  By targeting transgender people (“butch” lesbians, transsexuals and drag queens)–a small minority of the clients–police selectively harassed the most marginalized of the marginalized.

Why things didn’t go as planned that evening isn’t entirely clear.  Maybe everyone was still sore about a raid on the previous Tuesday.  The relationship between the bar and clientele wasn’t exactly rosy either–apparently the mafia owners had been blackmailing wealthier clients by threatening to out them to their employers.  Additionally, New York police vice squads were arresting about 1000 homosexuals per week.  Those arrested would be publicly exposed and stand to lose their jobs.1  Undoubtedly, by 1:00 AM a prodigious amount of liquor had been consumed.   A perfect storm was brewing fueled by chronic oppression, long-held resentments and a gathering mass of intoxicated people who felt that they had nothing left to lose.

Police entered the bar, turned on the lights, stopped the music and barred the doors.  All of this had happened before, but on this particular night, many of the men refused to show ID.  Lesbians and transgender clients refused examination.  Police persisted, handcuffing some and shoving others.  Some of the women were felt up by officers “looking for evidence.”2  Those released did not disperse.  Squad cars attracted more attention to the scene and the gathering swelled to 500 or more.  When police roughly escorted one handcuffed woman out of the bar, the burgeoning crowd erupted.

The riots which ensued on that night are now remembered by the name of the bar where the spark ignited–the Stonewall Inn.  They were not the beginning of the fight for LGBT rights, but rather a memorable rallying point, a defining moment which signaled the growing refusal to accept an unacceptable status quo and the authority attempting to enforce it.  LGBT activists still speak of civil rights pre-and post-Stonewall in much the same fashion as others speak of civil rights post-Selma or more recently, post-Ferguson.  One year later, on June 28, 1970, a galvanized LGBT community marked remembrance of the riots with simultaneous marches in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.  These marches recurred annually and proliferated to cities across the country.  Pride was born.

Those of you who were among the 500,000+ who ventured downtown for Twin Cities Pride a couple of weeks ago would be hard-pressed to recognize that the rainbow-soaked, corporate-sponsored fiesta in Loring Park owed its existence to one summer night decades ago when a frustrated minority turned violently against the establishment which was oppressing them.  These days, city police parade in celebration of Pride.  Along with them march senators and mayors, businesses and churches.

Like many of you, I knew little to nothing about Stonewall before I made my first pilgrimage to Twin Cities Pride.  All I knew at the time was that pride was the very last thing I felt about myself.  I hoped that a day among people who celebrate the vivid spectrum of human experience would be tonic against the shame which was my daily burden.  Happily, this proved to be the case.

2015 marks my seventh Twin Cities Pride.  It’s probably the closest thing to a high holy day in my book, and the fact that Kathy joined me for the first time this year made it 53% Pride-ier.  You can, if you look, still find undercurrents of protest and admonishments to tackle unfinished business, but mostly it’s a festival as festivals go–deep fried, sun-baked, garish, boisterous, corporate, shoulder to shoulder and generally over-served.  Face paint and port-a-potties.  Balloons and beer tents.  Dachshunds in tutus.  Epically rainbow.

On any given day, I prefer the serenity of my rural hilltop to the buzzing electricity of downtown.  So, although you wouldn’t have found me at the Stonewall in the summer of ’69, you can be sure that I will be somewhere lost in the crowd for its annual remembrance.  See you next year.

 

Exotica

Published June 20, 2015 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.  —Book of Bokonon; Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

The North American jackalope is among the most elusive of all native fauna. Speculated1 to have numbered in the tens of millions prior to colonization of the Desert Southwest, they are apparently destined to follow in the footsteps of the dodo, the golden toad and the jabberwock.  Despite the warnings on the sign pictured above, I didn’t see one damned jackalope on that entire stretch of road, nor indeed for several days afterwards.2

Nor is the life of an exotic animal always easy.  You are a curiosity.  People constantly point at you, sometimes whispering, other times shouting to make sure everyone else knows that you are the one who made the Epic Discovery.  Strangers poke and prod at you.  Camera-wielding thrill seekers try to pretend that they are taking a picture of something very interesting behind you, but you know they will display your image like a trophy to their friends later over craft beers.  Herding with other exotics only amplifies the effect.  Crowds gather and text messages start flying like hippogriffs and pegasi.  No small wonder, therefore, that many jackalope prefer to remain hidden in the crannies of the forest.

Which brings me to lunch…

Surgeon:  Would you like company as you eat?
Fabulous transgender ER doctor (F-TERD):  Sure
Surgeon:  Um, are you a girl?
F-TERD:  I’m a transgender female.
Surgeon:  Ok?
F-TERD:  It happens.
Surgeon:  I see.  Just so you know, I’m not interested in anything else.
F-TERD:  Thanks for the tip.

Having spent my entire life with one amazing woman, I lack recent experience with the complex mating, or in this case, explicitly non-mating rituals of the human animal.  I hear that humans develop an elegant fluency for this sort of interaction, but alas, I am entirely unpracticed.  Honest to Bob I thought it was a bit awkward.  No matter–he was fibbing a bit regarding his disinterest.  The next hour consisted of two ships passing in the daylight–me asking him about his hometown, medical practice and hobbies and he peppering me with a series of incredulous questions about how I managed to navigate the world, “seeming like a rational”3  professional attending the same conference that he was.  Guess I fooled him.

Most days I probably wouldn’t have bothered, but this time I chose amusement instead of indignation.  All in all, it turned out to be a decent conversation.  I’m pretty sure I saw him squirm a little when I described the freedom inherent in living a life without secrets.  I wasn’t just any old jackalope today.  I was a jackalope rockstar.

Human beings love exotica.  Witness how children love dinosaurs.  Big children (aka young Earth Creationists) love them even more.  Ken Ham’s Creation Museum postulates that extensive human contact with dinosaurs led to proliferation of dragon legends throughout the world.  “Prepare to Believe”, signs suggest helpfully.  I’m not making fun of them.4  My point is that whatever else we might disagree upon, the coolness of dinosaurs is beyond question.

Still, I think that they got it wrong.  We invent ogres, dragons, demons and unicorns because we need them.  They inhabit the darkened edges on the spectrum of possibility.  Tossed about in a world where no rule of thumb long remains unbroken, we cling to our superlatives:  the strongest, the most terrifying, the surreal and the mythical.  We embrace fantasy because most of the time reality feels far more absurd.  As GK Chesterton said:

Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird circulates in more than 250 newspapers and has spawned both friendly and competitive clone sites.  Would millions of people bother to read News of the Tedious and Mundane?  I think not.5  Shepherd sates our nearly unquenchable appetite for the bizarre, simultaneous providing us with something quasi-respectable to tell people that we are reading when we are actually looking at Dear Abby.  Or so I have heard…

At the risk of alienating the folks who probably comprise the vast majority of the page hits on this site, you didn’t find me nearly so fascinating in 2005.  I get it.  I suppose that I wasn’t.  Except that I was, and I was terrified to tell you.  We nearly missed the opportunity to know and love each other.  That’s the message:  somewhere out there, someone you know has an absolutely mesmerizing story to tell but is afraid to tell it.  If you can, try to project the sort of presence that makes others believe that you will listen to them, even or especially when the chain derails.