Tag: gender

I would be a fool not have doubts about posting some of the things I write.  I would be more of a fool if I let that stop me from posting them.

I’m a lesbian.  I’m not a gay man.  I’m not a man of any sort, though I am aware that there are many people who disagree with me on that.

Because I am a lesbian, I have the social liberty to speak out.  It’s really hard to find a straight transwoman who will speak up.  Did you ever wonder why?

The WeaveMothers were one and several.  The collective imagined a HereNow.  But the autonomous units were going to do what autonomous units do.  The distance between imagination and image on the one hand and reality on the other was immense through the eye of any disinterested observer.

As if there existed such a concept as disinterested observer…

It started out in the comments to one of my essays.  I have rewritten the comments just a bit for the purposes of readability.

so,

1. is there abandonment of the gender identity you, Robyn, had before your surgery?

2. and a full embrace of the gender you had surgery to become?

3. or is there a sense of identity with both genders,

4. or this there an identity awareness of a new, blended gender?

and the reason i mentioned this belonging in your Friday essay was due to the quote pulled from Friday’s essay that prompted these questions.  you notice, i hope, that i’m finally taking you up on your offer to answer questions, Teach!  

– kj

So I respond, with full knowledge that sharing even this much diminishes the probability that venturing inside will happen…

A question was asked this morning.  “What am I reading?”  Because of my poor eyesight, the current answer is all too often, “Not much.”

But I’ve had a burr under my saddle for about 10 days and I decided to remedy that.

It all started with NLinStPaul‘s essay, Right Brain Consciousness about Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor.   Well, I’m as much a brain geek as the next layperson, so I was interested.  I made the following comment last week:

What of someone who habitually combines what are traditionally thought of left-brain and right-brain activity?  And what of the place of cross-fertilization?

From wikipedia:

The corpus callosum is a structure of the mammalian brain in the longitudinal fissure that connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres. It is the largest white matter structure in the brain, consisting of 200-250 million contralateral axonal projections. It is a wide, flat bundle of axons beneath the cortex. Much of the inter-hemispheric communication in the brain is conducted across the corpus callosum.

…

Of much more substantial popular impact was a 1982 Science article claiming to be the first report of a reliable sex difference in human brain morphology, and arguing for relevance to cognitive gender differences.

Oh, really?  My interest is piqued.

It was a brilliant summer day in Atlanta, and the lumescent, blue sky lifted my already risen spirits as I was planning my wedding. A coworker and I were shopping for wedding dresses in an upscale suburb, both of us dressed in the standard uniform for such an event: sweats and sneakers. My coworker carried the look off with much more chic than I, with her tall frame, warm brown eyes and rich, espresso colored skin giving her the natural grace of a woman for whom sweats is a weekend indulgence.

Me? I just looked a little dumpy.

On Monday I read Learning to Count Past Two…with a few updates as asides…to a Women’s Studies class called Changing Women’s Lives.  My partner Debbie is coordinator of the Women’s Studies Resource and Empowerment Center (WSREC)  and teaches that class.  It would be great if it were a faculty line, and hence a full time position, but that is not the case.  She’s rather considered more of a hybrid staff/adjunct faculty person (i.e. she gets no benefits, except as my spouse).

Let’s not even talk about adjunct compensation.  It’s one of the things our society should be ashamed of.

I’ve presented that piece live a time or two before.  It was, in fact, written to be presented to a Psychology of Women class at the University of Central Arkansas.  The professor who invited me to lecture her classes several times didn’t get tenure.  That’s an observation, not a conclusion.

But it is true that many, many people think that teaching about people like me to college or high school students is beyond the pale.  And I leave open the definition of “people like me.”

Sixteen years ago, when I was 44, I started transitioning.  Oddly, fourty-four years ago, I was 16.  It was also a transitional year, in many ways.  I have spent the week trying to remember it, perhaps with hindsight that is quite more myopic than 20-20.

It was a time…

It’s hard growing up knowing that there is something so terribly wrong that it must be hidden from everyone.  It would have been best at the time if I could have hid it from myself as well but, as I’ve said before, ideas cannot be unthought.  I was, in my mind, a pervert.  Nothing was going to change that.  The best I could do was to try to hide it.

On Wednesday I posted my poem about my obsessive-compulsive disorder.  I spent an equally absurd amount of time trying to disguise that.

This news item is a few weeks old, so I apologize to those who have read it already, rolled their eyes, and punched a wall. It aptly illustrates that we haven’t quite arrived at the station aboard the post partisan express, and maybe, just maybe, talking about race and gender is instructive. It is also proof one can still turn the verbal double play all in one conversation and be racist and sexist at the same time. Certainly takes a special talent. The short article appears here.

A county judge in Hagerstown was reprimanded for calling three black female lawyers “the Supremes” in court and advising the defendant to get “an experienced male attorney.”

Washington County Circuit Judge W. Kennedy Boone has acknowledged that his comments suggested racial and sexual bias. In his written response to a complaint, Boone said he was trying to protect the three public defenders from representing a difficult defendant.

Oh, I get it, he was trying to help them, ah the burden of the white man must be excruciating. What is a guy to do when he is surrounded by those he is certain are beneath him? There is no chance that these lawyers went to school to learn their profession and could be competent. Maybe he was gravely concerned that they went to one of those girl law schools where they teach you to dress cute and make a darn good cup of coffee for the men and might be overwhelmed by the challenge of …. being a lawyer. Was he worried they went to the singing law school, you know the one that black women all go to. After all, if an experienced male attorney was assigned to the case he might be able to fix up one of these women with an appropriate husband. Isn’t that why women of any color go to law school? To find husbands? Besides, these women were taking honest work away from experienced male attorneys and somebody has to stand up for their rights.

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.

I sometimes refer to when I came out/was outed.  Sometimes people ask what I mean by phrasing it that way.  I’ll get to that in the story that follows.

I am out.  I make no secret about being a lesbian.  And I make no secret about being born male.  Some people don’t like that.  Some people think I’m doing a disservice to all sorts of folks by being out.  Some people think I should shut up and go back into the closet, so everyone (except maybe me) might be able to be happy.

Recently I’ve been engaged in several discussions about the proposed exclusion of gender-variant people from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.  A few days ago someone wrote to me:

Are you a woman or not? If so, then the rights you should be fighting for are those of womens’ rights. Which means being legally recognized as a woman and having access to all the rights of women and nothing more.

Seeking special laws to address transsexual women is a self-proclamation that they are ‘different’ from other women, which is a setback and a political dead-end.

If I were not exhausted and didn’t have an afternoon meeting…or if maybe sometime during the week I would have seen this coming and managed to set aside some time to write about it, this is where I would have posted a piece about the talk about the removal of protections for transgendered people from the Employment Non-Discrimination  Act.

But I am tired.  Oh, so tired.  As Fanny Lou Hamer said,

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired

Since I am having a meeting today to discuss trying to get my stuff published in book form, I have no time.

So I went back in the stacks.  Way back.  This was presented first to a Psychology class at the University of Central Arkansas in the mid-90s.  The professor who invited me to give this and several other lectures did not earn tenure at UCA.  I’m sure there was no connection.