Tag: Friday Philosophy

Lately there have been a lot of people pissed of at Bill Clinton for one reason or another.  Some think they have good reason.  Some think attacking Bill Clinton is good politics.  I have a hard time believing that most people really believe what they are saying.  Not deep down.  At least I hope not.

But people have different experiences than I have had…and many are much younger than me…and hardly anyone else here lived in Arkansas when I did…and most of those probably didn’t meet Bill and/or Hillary as many times as I did…and I’m completely certain that none of the people who did those other things began gender reassignment during the Clinton campaign in 1992.

My vision of the era is tinted by the fact that I came out to the world, beginning my transition in September of 1992, precisely because I persuaded myself that Bill Clinton was going to win the election, that Bill and Hillary were going to be in the White House and I could do so with a lessened fear of being fired from my job, thrown out of my house and/or murdered.  

Of course, I lived in Arkansas so I had a different viewpoint than a lot of folks…people who were not standing in the freezing rain at the Capitol Building in Little Rock singing along to “Yesterday’s Gone” and crying in joy about newfound freedom to be oneself.  I made one of my first public appearances as the new me as one of the crowd on election night.

Bill Clinton was the Barack Obama/John Edwards of that instant in time.  He was hope for a better future.  He was…and is…a hero to many people.

Did I ever mention that I have a small collection of kaleidoscopes?  I used to have more of them, but currently have three, I think.  Along the path of my life, others have been lost or discarded, I guess.  I have never put much value in stuff and each time I have moved, some of it has gone away.

I also have different lenses through which I view life.  I’ve not discarded any of those, even if I may forget some of them from time to time.

For the past week, I’ve remembered a lens from the past which intersects with my critical thinking lens.  It’s all about fair play, about having a level playing field.  I don’t expect that many people will view the world through those same lenses.

So I may be speaking to the wind.  That seems to be happening more often lately.  But I don’t believe it is pointless.  I believe the wind sometimes listens.

A new year can open new possibilities.  It can also provide impulse to past fears.

Some of you may know what’s been going on the past few days.  

At the end of September my sister wrote me a comment:

I am just thinking now that you could contact a publisher in Corvallis that I know that historically publishes women’s literature.  The publisher’s name is Margarita Donnelly, and the magazine publication is Calyx. For what it’s worth.

I’ve got to say that my initial thought was that she was insane.  Check that.  She’s sane.  I’m the insane one.

I was already familiar with Calyx.  I had grave doubts about belonging among the women they have published.  I still do.  Ursula LeGuin…Paula Gunn Allen…Barbara Kingsolver…and me?  Give me a break.

What happens if you let your mind flow?  What words don’t get written or spoken if you do?

Life is often about the words not written, about what a person chooses not to say.  Or maybe rather it might be about the words one has no time to say.

There is also a lot of meaning in the moments between the words.  But how does one capture it?  Certainly not with words.  

Sometimes there are images.  But even as the images are being created, there is a chatter.  Forever something is begging me for attention.  I imagine they are thoughts.  Given the world I was raised in, they are probably contending to be given voice rather than cooperating efficiently.  A jumble of ideas struggling to interact, analog in a digital age.

Once upon a time…

…or maybe it was twice.  Come to think of it, it was definitely much more often than that.

It was, after all, all about the time.  Then again, it was also about the place and the people who were there and the things that happened.  So maybe I need to restart.

Once upon a spacetime, I was there.  I have been an observer.  Somehow I adopted the notion that it was important for me to observe and record.  If not me, who?

It all started with a vision, although it may have started before the vision and elsewhere.  That’s the trouble with spacetime.  One wherewhen’s herenow is another wherewhen’s therethen.  But for the life of us we keep counting the time.  Sometimes it becomes all too apparent that it is a dwindling resource.

But I’ve kept recording.  It is my nature.

On Tuesday I received a letter from a former student at the University of Central Arkansas, where I transitioned from 1992 until 1994 and where I taught for six more years after that.  From time to time, people from that spacetime contact me.  There are other people at Daily Kos who have been faculty or students at UCA.  The memories of there/then are bittersweet.

It took several days for me to formulate a response.  I’d like to say that I was just too busy to write back immediately since it was Finals Week here at Bloomfield.  

The truth is rather that it was too difficult to come up with any quick response…and that the letter deserved a more thoughtful response than what I could immediately come up with.

I’m not even sure if the response I finally came up with is appropriate or sufficient.  But it is what I have.

One night in the FarAway/LongAgo, I had trouble getting to sleep, so I sat up for several hours thinking about some things and felt like writing a bit about them.  It was a bit of a ramble.

I had not really been sharing much of my writing at the time because I came to a point where I thought that other people in the gender community needed to find themselves more than they needed to listen to what I had to say.  Someone questioned that stance and I thought it through and realized that I had perhaps been too hasty.

The following is a rewrite of that ramble, with some new words hung like ornaments here and there.  It was originally written as an address to my community.  Ultimately, however, circumstances did warrant continuation of that withdrawal.  There are limitations on how thin one can spread oneself and still be able to delve deeply.  Decisions made about which is more important have consequences.

Maybe I was born this way.  Maybe it’s a genetic mutation.

Maybe it happened when I was sitting on the dock of the bay in my hippie youth.

Maybe it happened because once upon a time it became clear that my life and my needs didn’t matter to the progress of this thing we call human society and its relationship with and survival on this planet.

Which means maybe Poul Anderson is to blame.

Maybe it happened because I’ve lived so close to the edge of death by my own hand so many times.  That could have singed away any real motivation for the self-interest that I have been told recently is at the heart of every human being’s motivation and that virtue is only enlightened self-interest.

I gave myself an assignment on Tuesday.  I decided I needed to write about one of those topics I have the hardest time with.  I assigned myself the the topic of Hate.  I’ve also had difficulty writing about Love.

Go figure.

Once upon a time I appeared in an anti-hate commercial, part of the the Hate Free Zones campaign sponsored by the Arkansas Progressive Network back in the  late 90s.

My partner (at the time) and were seen walking along the riverfront in Little Rock, an interracial lesbian couple, one of us transsexual and the other bisexual.  The commercial displayed all sorts of human targets of hate, set to the music of INXS’ Mediate.  The final video scenes showed the burned out station wagon at the scene of slaying of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

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.

In the past few days my mind has been on the Mental Wayback Machine a few times.  I seem to always end up in the same places.

When I made the conscious decision to not end my life, I had to find a purpose in life beyond just existing.  I latched on to a statement I heard from my boss when I refused to resign For The Good of the Team.™

How does one respond to that?  What was I supposed to say?  Was I supposed to point out that no openly gay or lesbian faculty member at the University of Central Arkansas had ever been granted tenure?  Or was I just supposed to accept that assertion that being gay would be an improvement in my life?