Ohio License Doesn't Require Surgery, Just Insanity

It’s official. The Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ no longer requires a letter stating a person has had gender-confirmation surgery, an amazing victory. Now people are able to correct their licenses gender marker enabling them safer, more accurate identification. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people.

This past week I was sent the unofficial, pre-press printout of the new BMV form. I was thrilled, like a kid on Christmas. My head was swimming with the possibilities, not just for myself, but for so many others. I opened the PDF and started to read.

“To be qualified, the medical professional must attest that the transition is being conducted in accordance with World Professional Association for Transgendered Health (WPATH) Standards of Care. This change is only to be made as part of a permanent, full time gender transition.”

My heart sank. I could see the image of that laminated M disappear. I can’t get my marker changed because I don’t follow the standards of care.

Every six months I drive five and a half hours to Chicago to get my trans-health care because I refuse to be diagnosed with gender identity disorder. My identity is not mentally disordered. I refuse to be labeled as such simply because queer gender does not conform to what is considered normal. If you had the right doctor, you could maybe swing something, but good luck finding a doctor who’s willing to break out of the box. Remember, this is Ohio. Could I get a letter? Maybe I could, but in order to do that I have to bow to a system of standards that oppress me, that oppress my people. I don’t look like a woman, I don’t sound like one, and I don’t belong to the F marked on my license but that isn’t enough to get it changed. I have to be legally diagnosed as mentally disordered- I have to be certifiably “transsexual” and apparently I’m trans enough to count. I understand that GID is on the books, and as long as it is I shouldn’t expect our community to get anything but the bare minimum, and as a genderqueer I shouldn’t expect to get anything.

Diligent, amazing activists worked hard to make this change as comprehensive and accessible as possible, but as long as we are inside a system that supports the pathologization of gender non-conformity our community is still controlled and oppressed. We are all trapped in this system, and if we ever want these first steps take us anywhere, the system itself must be changed. My dear friend wrote about change happening from the ‘bottom up.’ To me, it isn’t just about grassroots activism; it is a statement that this is the bare-minimum. We started with nothing, now we have a something, but we have a long way to go. Other movements have left us out but we cannot leave each other. Any gender transgressor is in our community and deserves to fight and to be fought for. No genderqueer left behind.

x-posted MidwestGenderQueer.com
x-posted Amplify Your Voice

Intro Post

Hello All,
I'm the newest contributor, JAC Stringer, commonly known as Midwest GenderQueer. I'm a trans-genderqueer community activist, performer, and writer. I focus the majority of my work on bettering Ohio and the Midwest for queers and genderqueers alike. I have founded several organizations focusing on activism and education, such as GenderBloc, The Queer Peer Education Program, The Queer Canon Zine, the GenderQueer Coalition where I currently serve as director. I'm also a co-manager and performer in the internationally recognized drag troupe The Black Mondays. In addition to activism I'm pursuing independent research in sexology and gender studies focusing on non-pathologized gender variance, GID reform, and queer sexualities. I'm very excited to take part in this excellent blog project. Thanks for having me!

-JAC
MidwestGenderQueer.com

DNC governing body gets first trans member

Good news:

The Democratic National Committee voted last week to welcome a transgender woman to its ranks, the first time that a major U.S. political party has appointed an openly transgender person to its national governing body.

Transgender activist Barbra Casbar Siperstein, president of the New Jersey Stonewall Democrats, a statewide LGBT organization, was among six new LGBT people nominated Sept. 7 by DNC Chair and Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine for at-large seats on the 447-member DNC.

The six LGBT nominees were among 75 at-large DNC nominees that the full DNC approved Sept. 11 during a meeting in Austin, Texas. The additions bring the total number of LGBT people sitting on the DNC to 25, up from 15 in 2008, and boost the membership of the DNC’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Americans Caucus to its highest level since the party officially recognized the caucus in 1998. full article

The Colonic

ENDA!!

NCTE held a conference call tonight about ENDA & they've put a recording of it online (.mp3). The deadline is rapidly approaching. They've got a bunch of resources up (.pdf), and on Facebook, Jillian Weiss is posting daily actions.

This is for all of us - LGBTQI & all our families & allies.

No one should lose or not get a job because of their sexual orientation or gender identity and expression. Make those calls, send letters, emails, and forward this info to your friends & families so they do the same.

protecting our trans communities: CA and the Equal ID Act

Nice work, California:

California State Senate joined the Assembly in passing the Equal ID Act by a 22-14 vote. The bill, AB 1185, sponsored by Equality California (EQCA) and introduced by Assemblymember Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), expands legal protections for transgender people born in California. If signed by the Governor, the new law would allow qualified transgender people born in California to return to the county of their birth and obtain a court order reflecting their correct gender and an accompanying name change, if applicable. The court order is then used to obtain a corrected California birth certificate. full article

The Colonic

if it walks like a duck: sports and the regulation of female bodies

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck...it's a duck.

Substitute woman for duck, and one has illuminating insight as to what our culture finds appropriate femaleness, as well as the absence of wiggle room.

Just ask South African athlete Caster Semenya. Muscular body? Deep voice? Stellar athletic performance? Must be a man.

Top it off, Semenya now needs to take a "gender verification test."

News flash: gender is not a more sophisticated or politically correct term for sex. Sex refers to chromosomes and genitals, and gender refers to social performance. Therefore, a person whose biological sex is male may have a female gender performance.

This brings about another issue: how do members of trans communities participate in sports teams? I'd love to get some feedback.

The Colonic

How I Found Out I Was Sexist

I wrote this piece for On the Issues magazine, and it's since been picked up by Bilerico and by AlterNet, so I thought I'd post it here, too.

It's been a surprise to find out what a sexist I really am. I've been calling myself a feminist for two decades, and surely was one for the two decades before that.

I'm a woman who found myself with a female husband - the man I married is trans and currently transitioning to living as female in the world. She has been doing so socially for some time and only now has decided to make it official with a name change and all the legal ballyhoo. I've been surprised by a lot of aspects of this process, not least of which is our relationship surviving it.

People can't and don't just change their sexual orientation because they want or need to, and partners of transgender people are no exception. I can't magically become a lesbian, no matter how useful that would be. I am seen as one by most other people when I am holding my female spouse's hand.

If I were categorically heterosexual I wouldn't have managed this transition at all, which is one of many reasons I think of myself as simply queer.

I never played a heterosexual woman very convincingly, but I tried. That's one of the reasons I didn't expect any sexism in my own attitudes about gender in relationships. I was a tomboy growing up. As an adult, I was always a little too forthright and ungiggly for most straight guys. I preferred buying my own dinner and drinks in order to avoid any expectations later in the evening. I didn't play along, reflecting them at twice their natural size, as Virginia Woolf once so famously put it in A Room of One's Own. That said, as the woman in a straight relationship, you're assumed to be the more feminine of the two of you - even if you aren't.

What has surprised me the most are the expectations I had first of a male husband - and what the loss of "him" meant - as well as my more recent expectations of having a female wife. I use both husband and wife because both are true: legally, she is my husband, but socially, people see her as my wife. It is one thing for someone to become "not man," which is more like subtracting visible markers of masculinity, both physical and social. And it is quite different for someone to become a "woman" - which involves something far trickier.

When it came down to it, I feared my partner's transition because I expected her to become a woman, but what I didn't expect was how differently I would see certain things she did.

It wasn't about her femininity. As I noted, she was always more feminine than me, even when she lived in the world as male. My own gender, and our relationship, makes a lot more sense to people - what the gender theorist Judith Butler would call "cultural intelligibility" - now that we live in the world as a lesbian couple. Because I'm a tomboy, mentioning a boyfriend meant conversations would grind to a halt while I waited for people to make sense of what I'd just said. Now, when I mention a female partner, people just keep on talking, underwhelmed by the detail.

I'm sure that there are plenty of women like me, who are regularly surprised by the subtle ways our culture has of telling women to take it down a notch. A friend of mine had someone chide her about how openly she tells her husband how much money he can spend on drinks when they're out. A few years ago a bunch of college guys said they didn't want to marry women who had more money or more impressive jobs than they did, and women who make a lot of money or who have a lot of authority in the world have found that being in relationships with men who don't wear the pants in the relationship still want to be treated as if they do, as Carrie Fisher once pointed out to Maureen Dowd.

But at home, I wanted her to stop doing Lewis Black impersonations and playing air guitar. At the time I'd convinced myself I was just trying to help her fit in - something some transgender people value very much. In other ways, I was shielding her from the kind of admonishment any tomboy is sensitive to. I didn't want her to hear the snide comments I'd heard as a kid, and as a teenager: you're too angry, you don't smile enough, or, why don't you wear heels or dresses or more makeup.

She was - due to the demands of her own internal sense of gender - a tomboy too, but the kind who wears heels and beats everyone at pool. I found myself discouraging her from being the kind of woman who kicks ass and takes names, all for fear she might be clocked as trans.

What's funny is that I never shielded her from the jokes about how "whipped" she was. She heard these regularly when she was my boyfriend. But that was about my gender and my feminism. It was okay for her to call and see if I was cool with her hanging out with co-workers when she was a guy, because that was considerate. As a woman, I found myself embarrassed by her being so considerate because it seemed "clingy" instead.

It astonishes me that that was all it took: same person, same decision, same expression of her love for me, but my own sexism kept me from seeing how much the same it was.

When "he" used to get us both drinks, it was gentlemanly; but once she became female, it was hard not to see it as subservient. "His" humility can look more like a lack of confidence; "his" graciousness can be read instead as self-sacrificing.

All of what she does looks like something else because she's a woman.

I should have known better. My own decision to stay with her as she transitioned to a woman has been categorized as either the worst kind of self-effacing, "stand by your man," doormat codependency, or as evidence of my own radicalized choice to reject gendered expectations.

Feminism is in the eye of the beholder, apparently. I just never expected my husband to be the one whose gender would let me know I needed an optometrist.

Writer's workbench: On the ecstasy of the home stretch

Writers’ workbench: On the ecstasy of the home stretch

By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN | Published: AUGUST 7, 2009 | Edit

This is actually a re-tweet (sic) from my own blog, www.jenniferboylan.net, and the content here has not much to do with trans stuff. But as writers, and allies-of-authors, I'm hoping this resonates with somebody.

So here I am, late summer, deep in the heart of the first draft of a new book. I’m in that euphoric, terrifying, mysterious frame of mind that arises when the end of the draft is almost in sight. I try to write about 1000 words a day, which translates to about four pages of double-spaced manuscript. I’m on about page 350 of a book that feels like it will be around 450 pages long. Everything’s set up for the ending, all the characters and clues and tools are in place, and now mostly I have the feeling of standing back, watching the storm I have created roll through the village.

I don’t know if people who are not writers can relate to this at all, but I wanted to linger over this moment with you here. Right now, the world of the book I’m writing is really all I care about. It’s what I can’t wait to do once I get up in the morning, and when I’m doing it, I”m about as happy as I can be, and when I’m finished, I start to think about what I’m going to write tomorrow. Each tiny block of pages brings me closer and closer to the end. I know a lot of what’s going to happen, but not exactly, and there’s still room to be surprised, both for better and for ill. But this particular place– the home stretch–is such a delight.

I have hopes to be done with this first draft by summer’s end, which would truly be impressive (and tidy, since it means I wouldn’t be dragging summer projects into the academic year.) I am such a confused flibbertygibbet of a writer that I really have to go through two drafts, just to have a first draft, because even at my most careful, I am still capable of writing, “A hole fell out of the wall.” (The HarperCollins copyeditor actually caught this one recently; with deep chagrin I had to change it to, OF COURSE, “a stone fell out of the wall, leaving a hole.”) And so on. It is so easy to get blind, in the whirlwind of this part of writing.

Steve King encourages writers to write 2000 words a day, if possible, and to spend no more than 3 months on a first draft. I’m a fast writer, but i’ve never been THAT fast. Still, these fantasy books I’m writing have come faster, and been more fun, than almost anything I’ve ever done. The problem is that, every 200 pages or so, I have to completely stop and go back and fix all the things i’ve screwed up because only writing the story lets me know what the story is. And while this might well be a crazy way of writing (rather than planning it all out in advance), I’ve NEVER been able to do that; for me it’s always writing blindly but with hope, and then going back, and fixing it, and fixing it.

So coming down the home stretch is especially exciting because the options narrow, and I’m less likely to go off down a blind alley. AT this point, I’ve been down so many of them that the number of false moves has been reduced– because I’ve already taken so many of them.

This particular project, by the way, is FALCON QUINN AND THE (SOMETHING SOMETHING) (we’re keeping the something something secret for now). It’s book two of the Falcon Quinn project, and i’ve just learned that book one, FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR (the cover for which is here) is now slated for April publication. I’ve had such a ball with these books, and even now I am still doing what I started doing two years ago with book one– doing a morning’s writing, and then reading the day’s work to my boys at day’s end. Zach and Sean continue to be some of my best critics, especially with this book, which I’ve written for (and in many cases, with) them.

It’s funny, though, I will end book Two before Book One has come out yet, so I wont’ know whether there will be books Three and up (and yeah, I have a pretty specific idea of how many of these there will be) when I have to hand them in. So I have to come up with an ending for Book Two that will end the series if we end at two, but also provides an opening if we go more than that, which I surely hope we do.

At any rate, I am not at all sure that this makes me a very fun or pleasant person to be around right now, because my mind is really drifting away to Shadow Island and the world of the story all the time. Deedie is long suffering and patient about this, having long ago decided that the best way to deal with a writer-spouse is to pretend I’m normal. The boys, meanwhile, want to CONSTANTLY talk about the latest twists and turns in the story. It’s such a fun and fulfilling place to be.

There are times I wish I could stay in this frame of mind forever. But that’d be no fun, because then I’d never find out how the story ends. And I’d be denied the even scarier, even more amazing prospect, of staring something new.

On Breaking up With Myself

I wrote the following very short entry for the Penguin Blog in support of my story, "Trans," in the anthology LOVE IS A FOUR LETTER WORD, which is about broken hearts and breakups. The entry I post herewith; the blog itself you can visit here, if you want, and read more from the other authors about this subject, and their own stories.

Breaking Up With Myself
by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Nine years ago, I made a big stack of all the clothes I had ever worn and gave them to the homeless. This included wingtip shoes, three-piece suits, Grateful Dead T-shirts, ties, belts, cotton shirts and boxer shorts. Pffft, down the chute. A moment like this is one of the rites of passage for transsexuals in transition, or can be. It was for me.

And yet it was not without a bittersweet pang that I hauled the bags of clothing down to Goodwill. What I realized was that I was saying farewell not only to the Perry Ellis suit and the Timberland jacket, but to the man I had been when I had worn them. In some twisted way, I was breaking up with myself.

Fifteen years earlier, I'd broken up with Allison (an account of which appears in Love is a Four Letter Word). I was glad to be done with the endless bickering, (like the night after my friend Tim died, and she said, "I'm glad he's dead! He was so annoying!") On the other hand, Allison was the person I'd been closest to when my father died, when I lost my first job, when I got my first short story published.

It was Allison who'd held me in her arms, when I was twenty-five, on the day that the dog I'd gotten as my eleventh birthday present was put to sleep.

So when we broke up, I wasn't only losing her. I was losing the person I had been during the time we were together.

It's like that Hopkins poem, "To a Young Child," when our man tells little grieving Margaret, "It is the doom that man was born for; it is Margaret that you mourn for."

I think the same thing is true of breakups. When we lose someone we've loved, it's not only that relationship we mourn. It's the loss of our own history, a connection to the people we have been.

I was so glad when I left the world of being James, and began the world of being Jenny. In its own way, it was a miracle. Still, after I gave away my clothes, I thought: Who would know that the stains on that striped shirt had come from the Beaujolais I drank the night I got engaged? Who would know that that green tie was the one I'd worn that day in high school, when I wrecked my parents' car?

I think about the man I used to be, now and again, with fondness, and bereavement, and wonder idly, what ever became of that dude? I look at photographs of my younger self, and heave a sigh, and think the thing we all think as we grow older, and our former selves recede: You never call. You never write.

Trans-centric

One of the things I've always liked about Vanessa Edwards Foster is that she doesn't lose sight of the goal: actual equality. I agree with her that our standards are low when it comes to justice for the trans people, and their families and friends, who are murdered. I agree that "manslaughter" is not murder, and that shooting at someone who is basically a sitting duck in a car can't possibly have been an accidental killing.

But what I don't agree with is the vitriol directed at the LGB leadership of the organizations that called the ruling on Teisha Green's murder a victory.

Our standards are low because we are too used to seeing no justice at all when it comes to people who intentionally hurt and kill trans people for being trans. There are too many cases that break your heart. There are too many families who have had to hear the most hateful bullshit about their trans loved one. There are too many cases that are simply not solved, nor investigated.

But that the jury came back to rule her death a hate crime is a good thing.

What bothers me about the politics between the LGB & T is that there are plenty of other gay bashings and hate crimes experienced by the LGB that the trans community pays little attention to, such as Sean Kennedy's. If you want an example of an absolute failure when it came to our legal system, that's it. It's horrific. Every time I see that young man's beautiful face, and think about his parents' loss, I wonder where exactly the trans community has been in raising awareness of that horrible injustice. No, he wasn't gender variant. He was a young adult who was out and proud about being gay. But he's dead just the same as Teisha Green is, & for the same reason: someone hated him for what he was.

Do we know Michael Scott Goucher? Richard Hernandez? Satendar Singh? Ryan Keith Skipper? Jeremy Waggoner? Daniel Yakovleff? These are the names of gay men who have been murdered for being gay in the last couple of years. I didn't know most of their names.

Community goes both ways. We all have more than enough mourning to do.

'Bobbi with a I' and I

I'd run across "Bobbi with an I" by country singer Phil Vassar a few months ago and was intrigued. The song tells the story of the singer's friend Bobby, a former "linebacker, a quarterback sacker," who drives a tow truck and bench presses 335—and who shows up one night at the local bar "in his pink party dress." Jaws drop, but over time nobody gives it a second thought, it's "just Bobbi with an I."

Given that country music isn't known as a bastion of social progressivism it was a pleasant surprise, with a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor (one reason Bobbi gets respect is because "he's been known to knock a few teeth out if you ask him for a beauty tip") that doesn't make Bobbi the butt of a joke. It seemed like Vassar either knew someone who crossdressed, or at least had run across crossdressers hanging out at a bar somewhere.

Vassar just released a music video for the song and it's got some, ah, interesting differences.



The video adds a prequel where Bobby is invited out by his friends, but demurs because he's broke. But his eyes light up when his friend mentions "it's Ladies Night, free drinks for the girls!" Did someone say: free drinks? Cue the music. Bobbi enters the bar, a cigar-chomping burly "man in a dress" (in fact he's wearing sunglasses to conceal the fact that he's not wearing any make-up). And in interviews and his "behind-the-scenes" video, Vassar says: “Bobbi is actually a guy I knew—this outrageous guy who showed up at a club one night dressed as a girl. It was just a funny way to pick up chicks.” In other words—it's all just good fun, it's a one-time thing, and Bobbi doesn't really want to be seen as a woman.

I'll take Vassar at his word, he seems like a decent guy—but also a guy who comes across as savvy enough to know how far he can push things with his fans. Not that that might be a reason the video is at odds with the actual lyrics. (And don't think too hard about how Bobbi, who's flat broke, manages on short notice to get decked out in a cocktail dress, high heels, earings, platinum wig, fashionable women's sunglasses and a black sequin purse, or why he's got seemingly hairless legs.)

But even if the video undercuts the lyrics, Bobbi's having a great time, his friends are having a great time, in fact everyone's having a great time except an eye-rolling old man, who's presented as a curmudgeonly killjoy. The "big-boned girl with a platinum curl" is the life of the party. As Vassar sings: "That's how it is, nobody gives a second thought these days."

Would I have preferred that the video stayed true to its roots and cast someone like Victoria "Porkchop" Parker as Bobbi? Hell ya. But if the "lite" version ends up making life a little easier for some trans person in some shitkicker bar somewhere, I'm not gonna complain too much.

* Before anyone kvetches, yes I know Porkchop is a gay man who's a professional female impersonator. But she's burly enough as a guy to be a convincing Bobby and femme enough to be a Bobbi who would've left viewers stunned and amazed.

DC Bathroom Campaign

DC Trans Coalition and Office of Human Rights Launch Bathroom Access and Safety Campaign

Groups Mobilizing Community to Ensure Enforcement of the Human Rights Act

Washington, DC – On Friday, July 3rd, the DC Trans Coalition (DCTC) along with the DC Office of Human Rights (OHR) launched the Bathroom Access and Safety Campaign, otherwise known as the Pee in Peace Campaign – a community mobilization project designed to ensure bathroom access and safety for all residents, including transgender, transsexual and gender non-conforming individuals, in the District.

Even with the District’s comprehensive Human Rights Act, which includes protections for gender identity or expression, trans and gender non-conforming people continue to experience verbal and physical harassment ranging from being attacked and thrown out to even being arrested for simply trying to use the bathroom in the District. In fact, according to a recent citywide survey for transgender and gender non-conforming people, 70 percent of respondents indicated that they had experienced problems accessing or using gender segregated bathrooms.