Tag: gender

There are so many ills tainting our world.  People’s inhumanity towards one another expresses itself in so many different ways.

Pick one.  Work on it.  Make it your Cause.  Commit the rest of your life to it.  Commit to bring it to an end.  Do anything you can to advance that issue, including working on other issues…so that maybe when the time comes someone might have learned enough about you and your issues that they might actually care about them as well as their own.

What?  What was that last part?  Work on other people’s issues?  Why would anyone ever do that?  Isn’t that, like, a colossal waste of time and effort?

Actually, no.  It’s how something…anything…gets accomplished.

Down here at the bottom of the issue food chain, the only way anyone is going to notice us is if we push other people forward, people who are and issues which are obscuring our existence.

In a life not dominated by the desire to change the world so that it would be a better place to live, moving would be a great excuse for taking a month away news and politics and trying to spread the word.

But my life is dominated by that mission.  

So I flipped a coin to see whether I should try to wrap some new words around an idea or two or post something old.  When one gets to be as old as I am, it gets more difficult to “write something new” since one may find that almost everything has already been addressed in the past couple of decades…or the 292 diaries posted here…or the 260 poems written.  As much as I would like for people to read my old diaries, in the spirit of learning about lives they cannot conceive, I know that the past gets forgotten very easily and reading someone’s old diaries is an unlikely occurrence.

Unfortunately for me, since it meant no nap this afternoon, on the last day before the moving begins, “something new” won.

For today’s story, we will travel far afield from the typical domains of politics or science or law that have so often provoked our thinking into an often overlooked area of human relations:

To which gender do you belong?

It’s a simple question, or so common sense would tell us-either you’re male, or you’re female.

As it turns out, things aren’t quite so simple, and in today’s conversation we’ll consider this issue in a larger way. By the time we’re done, not only will we learn a thing or two about sex and gender and sexuality, we’ll also learn how to offer a community of people a level of respect that they often find difficult to obtain.

Small weights, individually not much, bound to my joints, dragging me down, generating immobility, accumulating.

Sometimes I want to turn away.  Sometimes it is not that I desire to do so, but that I feel that I must, if only for my own sanity.  But there are times when even so, I must push onward, searching for glimmers of progress, of hope, of the remnants of dreams.

Last spring I volunteered to teach one section of students how to use the computer with college-level proficiency.  These students were brought here under the auspices of the Educational Opportunity Fund.

Sometimes I should try to remember that no good deed goes unpunished.

Here it comes again.

At a time when the country of Pakistan, not what anyone generally conceives of as a bastion of progressive attitude on GLBT rights…Pakistan for %^&$%^’s sake…can have its Supreme Court rule that transfolk should be able to enjoy the same rights under the law as do the so-called normal people, there is a struggle in this country to even admit we are human beings, deserving of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Or, failing those, at least the use of a bathroom.

Since we had to go house hunting Friday afternoon, I decided to put together a summary of some trans news items for Friday evening’s column.  But while I was doing so, one of my favorite movies came on, namely Carl Sagan’s Contact.

The news, of course, is what it is.  The movie put a different spin on the whole thing,  so maybe this will come out as not only commentary on those items but also a statement about the state of the universe.

Just maybe a few readers out there will get the point of what I am trying to say.  There is always hope for that.

They’re here.

After…how long is that?  Forever?  Really?…the Congress has a couple of bills before it which would actually be beneficial to the GLBT community.  And…horror of horrors…to transfolk as well.

What’s up with that?

The two bills go by the unofficial names of the Matthew Shepard Act and ENDA.  They cover two of the parts of what I have in the past considered the heart of The Gay Agenda:

• the right to not be fired for being GLBT
• the right to not be thrown out of our residences if discovered to be GLBT
• the right to be served in a restaurant
• the right not to be beaten up every other Tuesday

I am aware that other people think that marriage equality and the right to serve in the military are also at the heart of said agenda.  I’m of the feeling that maybe they are more of the lungs.  What I listed in the box affect all GLBT people, including those who are not in relationships or who have no interest in the military (including those who, like myself, who have already served, thank you).

So I was trying to spend the first part of the week continuing with a a fictional story I have been working on.  Wall.  There was this realization that to really do the story justice, I needed to write a whole historical background for a people who had none.

Big wall.  Immense wall.

Then I had a rather severe allergy attack.  Putting the two of those together left me in a panic because Friday was fast approaching and I had nothing for the column.

But I was saved, sort of.  Chaz Bono came out.  That may seem a bit weird, being as how not long ago Bono was Director of Entertainment Media for GLAAD.  But there are different kinds of coming out:    

I can’t say it has been a top of the line week.  Given that last week included the death of the faculty colleague I work most closely with, one might have expected this week to have little direction to go but up.  But one apparently would would have been wrong about that.

Of course leading off with Memorial Day weekend was a giant indication the week wasn’t going to be a whole lot of fun.  Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ramps up for veterans, whether the public is supposedly honoring the live ones or the dead ones.  As a former draft dodger who was arrested by the FBI and forced to serve as an alternative to spending five years in the Oklahoma State Pen, I’m not terribly proud of my service…but I did the best I could while I was there.

Irony is one of the things the military does best.  What better MOS for a draft dodger than military police.  There was method in the madness, however, since at the time, Nixon had told the public that draftees would not be made into combat troops and combat troops would be brought home from Nam.  What he failed to mention was that MPs were not combat troops, that the combat troops would be replaced by MPs and the draftees would be trained as, you guessed it, MPs.

As some of you have probably heard, I’ve been fairly ill for the past week.  I’ll include an update about that at the end of this piece.

But being ill…and it being the end of finals week, I had a difficult time generating a brand new topic.  Where are Bob and Doug when you need them?

So…like Felix…I reached into my bag of tricks and searched around for something to put together for tonight, even if it had to be somewhat hastily.

I remembered that I took some photographs at the end of the April, of the Bloomfield College 2009 observation of the Clothesline Project.

I wandered into a diary the other day, written by someone from New Hampshire who disapproved of gay marriage.  He calls himself a “Libertarian-leaning conservative,” which in his case apparently means that he is in favor of personal liberties, except for GLBT people.

I’ve experienced the very definition of mixed feelings about the news out of New Hampshire the past week.  I think it was fabulous that the state senate voted 13-11 in favor of marriage equality.  After reconciliation between the two houses, New Hampshire-style, it will be up to their governor to either veto it or not.

So that was a huge positive.  Most people missed the negative.  Totally missed it.

The same day it passed the marriage equality bill, this august body rejected equal protection under the law for transgender people by a vote of 24-0.

Yes, you see that correctly:  24-0.  Not even the bills sponsor’s voted for it.