Friday Philosophy: Remembering

It has been a difficult time lately for some of us.  Not only have we discovered that political symbolism trumps equal protection under the law and the importance of coalition building, at least when it comes to protections for people like us, we get told in the back pages that we really need to shut up about our concerns, that speaking up for ourselves is the crassest form of selfishness.

It comes at a bad time of year.  It’s a time of year when we remember those who have fallen, and invite other people to remember them with us.  On Tuesday, November 20, is the 9th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance.  Special props to Gwendolyn Ann Smith, who started this. Some people know Gwen as a columnist for the Bay Area Reporter, whereas I know her as someone who transitioned at the same time I did.  Thank you, Gwen.

I won’t be able to post anything on that day.  It’s our last day before Thanksgiving Break and I have to teach three classes and chair a meeting of the Bloomfield College Gay/Non-Gay Alliance, where we will continue to plan our Safe Space training for the spring semester.  That, I suppose, is just more of my selfishness rearing it’s ugly head.

So, not having it in me to post what I would really like to say, since it is too hard right now, and the pain to close to the surface while simultaneously cutting too close to the bone, I’m posting this instead.

It’s an old piece, the only edition of my column From Outside the Gender Prison which has not appeared in it’s entirety in recent years.  There are links to the other 10 pieces in the deep down below.

From Outside the Gender Prison:  Role Models

[First appeared in Triangle Rising Newsmagazine, Little Rock, AR, April, 1997]

It’s sometimes a bit lonely out here.  And sometimes it’s a bit scary.  And it’s definitely got its confusing moments.

You see, we have no idea how a gender-variant person is supposed to behave.  For most of the years of our lives, we have been inundated with the news that we don’t exist…that everyone fits easily into one of the categories “woman” or “man.”  When we finally come to our own conclusion it’s not as simple as that, we look around for some sign of what that conclusion implies about how we are to live our lives.  We find no role models.

Yes, there are other people like us whom we can go for advice and support, but those people are themselves “works in progress.”  We can’t look at how a gender-variant person traditionally behaves.  We have no tradition…no roots, if you will.

That’s not entirely true.  Les Feinberg‘s book, Transgender Warriors, documents some transgressively-gendered people of the past.  And no gender-variant person can help but identify with the Native American berdache culture Walter Williams describes in The Spirit and the Flesh.  But we must of necessity read our own lives into those historical ones and interpret them by today’s standards, which is not entirely fair.  We end up squabbling with gay and lesbian people over whether Lucille Hart was a lesbian or Alan Hart was a transgendered man.  Only Alan/Lucille could tell us that, and s/he is dead.  And s/he didn’t have today’s reality to draw on in order to make such a determination.

There is no continuity.  Oh, sure, I spent two wonderful afternoons near Oakland, CA, with someone who was a generation older than me, both in terms of chronological age and length of time since surgery, but she herself didn’t have the same opportunity.  Her only role models were basically men and women (in the traditional sense of those words).

Humans desire a comfortable social niche.  It’s an inescapable fact. People in the gay and lesbian community surely know that the orientation issue is about more than who one sleeps with, but also about community…about who one is and who one identifies with. Social icons were rare for too long, but they have emerged…witness the numerous lesbian and gay actors and musicians, artists and writers, and even politicians and lawyers, who are on our television screens and in the news.  Heck, there are magazines that cover our cultural news.  Whether these people are role models themselves or they are merely expressing a gestalt that exists independently in the lesbian and gay community, we recognize their importance in helping to build acceptance for “people like us.”

I can’t think of a single social icon for gender-variant people.  Oh, sure, there’s RuPaul and there’s Dennis Rodman and there’s a raft of gender-variant people on the talk shows with more problems than I can handle, but for the most part, television culture treats us like jokes, like freaks, like curiosities worth little more than a giggle or a vicarious thrill for the masses.  We are rarely taken seriously.

So we are left to our own devices.  We must invent ourselves.  We must invent a way that we behave.  So pardon us if we don’t always fit your mold of what a woman is or what a man is.  We are who we are.

We’ll let you know when we discover what that means.

From Outside the Gender Prison appeared in the Triangle Rising Newsmagazine from March, 1997 through January, 1998…at which time I resigned as member of the Board of Directors of the Arkansas Gay and Lesbian Task Force when protection for gender identity was excluded from the Arkansas Non-Discrimination Act.

What, you’ve not heard of that act?  That’s because it sacrificed a coalition in favor of an act which never became law.

The Gender Prison
Women-only space
Life in the Passing Lane
Pride
The Substance of Style
Choices
Building a Better Society
The Question of Religion
Controlling Shame
Dear Distressed: