Cold Showers and Statistics

I've just finished compiling national and statewide statistics on anti-transgender discrimination and violence for the non-discrimination work that we're doing in Massachusetts. I enjoy the work, intellectually and as an activist. It's also the equivalent of taking an arctic cold shower: sobering and very effective for putting things in perspective.

Employment:

A study in the San Francisco Bay Area conducted in 2006 of 194 transgender individuals found a 35% unemployment rate, with 59% earning less than $15,300 annually.

Nationwide, the rates of employment discrimination against transgender people are consistently high. A Williams Institute review of six studies conducted in cities and regions on both coasts and the Midwest, showed the following ranges for experiences of discrimination based on gender identity:

13%-56% of transgender people had been fired
13%-47% had been denied employment
22%-31% had been harassed, either verbally or physically, in the workplace

Housing:

A large number, possibly a majority, of transwomen are likely to have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives.

Education:

GLSEN's 2005 School Climate Survey, which surveys 1,732 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students from all 50 states and Washington DC, reports that, because of bias against their gender identity or expression:
40.7% of students felt unsafe in their own school
45.5% had been verbally harassed
26.1% had been physically harassed
11.8% had been assaulted

Health Care:

Draconian and irrational exclusions from health care coverage are still the norm. It is difficult to attribute transgender health care exclusions to anything other than a mix of transphobia and ignorance. The City of San Francisco, a self-insuring employer, provided coverage for SRS from July 2001 to July 2004, at the cost of an additional $1.70 per month per enrolled individuals. At the end of July 2004, the City had collected an additional $4.3 million while paying out only $156,000 on seven SRS claims.

… more statistics are available, and the situation becomes at once more complicated and clearer when you break things down by race, gender identity, and location. Transwomen of color face severe oppression across the board. The interconnectedness of oppressions both at a specific point in time and across a lifetime becomes clear.

Was King Hatshepsut Trans?

Egypt's most famous female pharaoh, alternately called Queen or King Hatshepsut by 21tst century media outlets, ruled ancient Egypt from 1473-1458 B.C. S/he was apparently well known for wearing a false beard--although it's not known if s/he really wore it all the time or just had depictions of her/him done with the beard in place to more closely resemble the previous pharaohs.

National Geographic says "Art from this period shows her wearing feminine garb but capped with the headdress of a male king. Eventually Hatshepsut was depicted in statues and wall carvings as afully male ruler: bearded, bare-chested, and without breasts."

National Georgraphic also calls Hatshepsut "the gender-bending queen." But is it really accurate to use our modern terminology to describe someone who existed before those words were invented? Especially when we don't know if the motivation for those actions were the individuals gender identity or desire to be taken seriously as a ruler?

Fresh Meat Festival & SF Trans March

Last month Diane and I made it to this year’s Fresh Meat Festival as guests of director Sean Dorsey. Dorsey, a critically-acclaimed dancer and choreographer, created Fresh Meat Productions to showcase the talents of trans and queer performers and artists. Though I’d interviewed him and his partner trans rocker Shawna Virago and written several articles about them, I’d never had the chance to meet him in person or see him in action.

San Francisco’s Fresh Meat Festival is a three day event presenting new work from some of the hemisphere’s leading trans and queer artists including Dorsey, Colombian Soul, Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu, Taiko Ren, Imani Henry, Miguel Chernus-Goldstein, Shawna , Julia Serano and Ryka Aoki de la Cruz.

For this year’s festival, Dorsey challenged performing artists to re-imagine traditional forms—like Hula dancing, taiko drumming and Afro-Colombian dance—from trans and queer perspectives. We went on opening night and were delighted by the diversity of the performances—everything from spoken word to dance, from aerial gymnastics to drumming.

We particularly enjoyed the taiko drummers and Freeplay Dance Crew’s hiphop style dance numbers. Freeplay features Joshua Klipp a trans musician who who Diane offended when he came to our book release party and she called him the guy who sings in two different voices. Although he did have one song that featured both his pre- and post-transition voices, it isn’t his usual manner of performance.

Klipp has unusual breadth as a musician, setting down standards at San Francisco’s old Jazz clubs, putting out the pop EP Patience and touring with trans hip hop artist Katastrophe. A bit of a Renaissance man, Klipp also holds a degree in law, teaches dance, directs the Freeplay, provides promotional photography for local artists, sits on the board of directors for Youth Speaks (a poetry and spoken word organization) and founded San Francisco Bay Area Artist Development and Support to help artists develop “the business and professional infrastructure they need to propel their artistic ambitions.”

If nothing else, this year’s San Francisco Trans March made us glad that we’d been to the Fresh Meat Festival. A number of the performers from Fresh Meat brought their acts to the Dolores Park stage but it was really a waste of their talents. Unfortunately acoustic problems made it almost impossible to hear the performers and the audience seemed more interested in chatting with each other anyway. The poor MC couldn’t even muster applause between artists. Every fourth performer or so the acrostics would kick in long enough for us to put down our stuff and stay awhile longer, and then it would go out again.

About 20/20

I'm still thinking about the 20/20 show that was on a few weeks ago about young kids coming out as trans.

& The thing I can't quite get past is how many people who are gender variant grow up to be gender variant but okay with the sex they were born. A gay friend of mine called after the show was over & asked, "So what's the difference between them & me?" because he went through most, if not all, of what one of the young MTF expressed. He did drag for most of his childhood, expressed the desire to be a girl as a child, and had a hard time dating guys who didn't want to date a queen. I didn't have an answer for him. I don't know what makes some of us gender variant & some of us trans.

But I do know that talking about my own gender variance causes some trans people to decide that I'm trans, which is exactly what worries me. Were I younger and expressing my gender variance, & someone told me that meant I was trans, I'm not sure I would have had the ability or perspective to say, "No, I'm not." I'm not sure my friend would have been able to do that, either. But both of us are quite happy being who we are, passing in & out of stages in our lives where our gender variance was expressed, hidden, or naturally waned.

There is a part of me that, like the director of The Gendercator, that is concerned that all gender variance is disappearing into transness, and that diagnosing gender variance so young will only affirm the binary, that our choices will become Mr. or Mrs. Cleaver, or even some 21st Century version of them.

Yet there is another part of me that says it's great kids can at least say something, or that some of them can, to some of their parents, & that they don't get kicked out of their homes or forced into therapy for doing so. That's a good thing.

The other reality - that so many gender variant children grow up to be gay or lesbian - is also a concern. Homophobia is so huge, so unspoken, and it concerns me that most parents would rather have a daughter than a nelly, a son rather than a tomboy. While of course they might just step from homophobia into transphobia, I suspect that plenty of these parents will opt for raising their child stealth - with no one knowing their child is trans, and so will sidestep transphobia and homophobia - and the awful fear of gender variance - altogether. For some it will be too tempting to disappear into gender normalcy. & Of course, some would say, that's a GOOD thing; everyone has the right to feel normal about their gender. I just don't agree. I think instead people should be more conscious of gender, & the ways that gender delimits who we allow ourselves to be.

But mostly I'm still uneasy about early hormone use.

The cause for my concern surprises me the most, because what worries me is the child's decision not to procreate. I'm surprised because I'm happily child-free and a Zero Population Growth type; the fewer reasons people have to have children the better, as far as I'm concerned.

But being who I am, I also know the astonishment people express when I say I'm happy not having children. We all know how much late-breaking couples will spend on fertility drugs in order to get pregnant at age 41. That is, having children seems to be a basic, undeniable component to most people's happiness, and raising children gives many lives meaning it might not have otherwise.

Going on hormones at a young age means the child or teenager gives up the ability to procreate, & that is a huge thing to give up. More than one trans person has told me they're quite pleased they didn't transition younger precisely because it gave them the chance to have children. The thing is, I'm not sure that a 15-year-old can know, necessarily, whether or not they might want children in the future. I knew that I didn't, and that never changed. But for others, it does; teenagers are notorious for growing up & changing their attitudes significantly, after all.

These are not easy issues, any of them. I don't envy any parent with a gender variant child. At some level I distrust parents, for the most part, as I suspect most would want to keep their child safe, above all else: safe means fitting in, dealing with the world as it is, and not changing the world to make it safe for those of us who don't fit in. Plenty of us, I'm afraid, would not be good at being gender normative men OR women, whether we transition or don't.

Justice for JT?

Laura Albert has to pay back $110,000 - + $6500 in damages - that she was paid for the film rights to her book Sarah, because it was supposed to have been written by her alter-ego JT LeRoy, trans prostitute, who of course, does not, & never did, exist.

Having it both ways

I went to the 3rd annual TransForming Community event tonight – it is an event that is dedicated to exploring the friction at the intersection of contemporary trans and queer communities. I think my two favorite pieces of the evening were those by Prado Gomez and Storm Florez, both of whom (in different ways) addressed the issue of trans men needing to own the fact that they are men (rather than retreating into the excuse that they are not “really” men when it suits their interests). Prado’s piece discussed how some trans guys will wield masculine/male power and privilege at one moment, then the next argue they don’t actually have such power because they’re trans, or they weren’t socialized male, or that they aren’t capable of sexually violating someone else because they don’t have a penis. Perhaps I appreciated these pieces so much because they addressed a certain double standard that I see going on all the time in queer/trans/feminist communities, but which has not yet been clearly articulated.

In my work on the issue of trans woman-exclusion, I have found that one of the biggest hurdles trans women face in making our case that we should be able to participate in lesbian/women-only spaces is the growing number of trans guys who now feel entitled to be in these spaces too. I have (on numerous occasions) heard trans guys who are on T and who go by “he” say they have no qualms about attending Michigan because they don’t feel 100% like a “man”. Or they’ll say they are genderqueer or boi-identified, even though their appearance definitely reads male. Of course, this having your cake and eating it too attitude comes at the expense of trans women. Because if trans guys are inherently “safe” because of their transness or female socialization or lack of penis, it implies that trans women remain inherently dangerous.

I remember once, when I was doing outreach for Camp Trans, getting into a heated discussion with a lesbian who insisted that trans women were a potential threat to women’s spaces because male socialization and privilege are insidious – she insisted that we still carry that around with us even if we feel as though we’ve moved beyond it. Afterwards, as I walked toward my BART stop, a guy harassed me. When I ignored him, he got hostile and made a point of telling me that he could take me if he wanted to. Afterwards, when I reflected on it all, I was really pissed – not only at the harasser, but at the lesbian who I spoke with just beforehand. It suddenly struck me that, in effect, she was lumping me into the same category as the guy who had just threatened to rape me.

For the same reason, I now get pissed at trans guys who want to have it both ways: being men in the male-centered mainstream and then being “not-men” in queer/women’s/feminist spaces. They seem not to give a shit about how this invisibilizes and marginalizes trans women. We, after all, are placed in no-win situation by this same ideology: We are treated as second-class citizens in the male-centered mainstream because of our femaleness, but then we are derided as being scary, untrustworthy “men” in queer/feminist/women’s spaces...

-julia

New Additions

Welcome to S. Bear Bergman (author of Butch is a Noun) & Matt Kailey (author of Just Add Hormones), both of whom have recently signed on to post here.

Are We Transitioning Simply To Marry?

This week there’s an article ( scroll down and follow link to read ) about Diane and I (and our Blind Eye Mystery series) in the Sydney Express News by Katrina Fox, who is, coincidently, the editor of Trans People in Love, a new anthology from Haworth that I have a piece in.

Katrina’ article is nice, nothing like the Catholic Daily News piece last month that seems think I transitioned to get around the rules against same sex marriage. The funny thing is that I’ve had lesbians ask me this too: will lesbians transition so they can gain access to legal marriages.

I can’t really see lesbians rush to become men, even if it would give them the legal privileges of marriage. Most lesbians I know aren’t interested in undergoing the counseling, legally changing their names and years of injecting hormones—and all the side effects like hair and clitoris growth, let alone undergoing surgery to have their breast removed and genitalia altered.

Considering the many couples that break up during transition, it hardly seems like the thing to do in order to commit your lives to each other!

I'd like to know what you think

Creative Fundraising

An interesting article from The Village Voice about fundraiser party for top surgery for masculine spectrum types. Interestingly, this is about someone who's removing hir breasts in order to have a more androgynous body, not a male one, per se.

I read at one of these years ago when My Husband Betty was just published, and it was very cleverly called Take My Breasts Away.

We did.

Intersections of Trans and Lesbian Lit Panel

My wife (Diane Anderson-Minshall) and I just returned from Atlanta where we attended the Golden Crown Literary Society conference. While there, Diane moderated and I sat on a panel about the intersections of trans and lesbian literature. It was interesting to see how lesbian authors deal with trans characters. JD Glass, author of Punk and Zen, introduced a trans character in that book and will be delving into trans issues more in her next book. In Burning Dreams drag king Susan "Smitty” Smith, has a trans character who teaches a bio guy how to be a man.

Although Radcylffe successfully introduced a crossdressing character into her work over a decade ago, lesbian penned trans and genderqueer characters tend to be trans masculine. As our panelist Monica Helms (founder of the Transgender American Veterans Association) pointed out, there are few MTF or trans women characters in lesbian works, though, clearly, trans lesbians--like her—are among the readers.

Still there seems new openness in lesbian literature—by readers and publishers—to address trans issues (at least on the FTM side of the spectrum). When we were first signed to do a series with Bold Strokes, I was originally surprised that I was not asked to assume a pen name. Would lesbian readers pick up a book that was written by man—even if he was trans? I wondered.

At the GCLS panel, Radcylffe (aka Bold Strokes Books Publisher Len Barot) admitted that even 5 years ago I might have been asked by publishers to hide my gender behind a pseudonym, but fortunately, times are changing. Diane jokes that now I’ve become like some kind of exotic fruit or I’m the zebra in the room. I wasn’t the only guy at the GCLS conference—there was one non trans guy who pens lesbian fiction—but I definitely stood out in the crowd.

Go Snopes, go!

Snopes debunks scare-tactic claims that the Hate Crimes Prevention Act before Congress, which also contains protections for gender identity, would infringe on freedom of speech of bigots to verbally bash homosexuals and trans people.

(Thanks to Veronica, for passing it along.)

DSM-V

It seems the DSM-V is going under review, with the completed new version appearing in 2011 or thereabouts.

I’m going to assume there will be changes to the GID diagnostics.