In the past week or two my mind has been on the Mental Wayback Machine a few times. I seem to always end up in the same place/times.
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™.
Even though I once belonged to an email list named Trans Theory, I don't have a theory about why people are transgender. When people ask me why transpeople exist, I tell them that knowing why they exist is the least important facet of the whole topic. Transpeople exist because transpeople exist. I know that's a tautology but I don't see how any other answer is necessary or even desirable.
As to why transfolk behave as we do, I think that question assumes that each of us behaves like any other of us, an assumption steeped in stereotype. We don't all behave the same, though I will concede that there are behavioral similarities.
I'm going to attempt blending these two thoughts into some writing of importance. Knowing me, I'll probably fail...but I'll be better, and perhaps the world will also be minutely improved, if I make the attempt. These thoughts come from 2007 and 1998.
One wonders, though, how much of our similarity is instilled in us because of the rigidity we tend to encounter when we first begin exploring our gender difference. Isn't that the purpose of the Standards of Care?
No, I'll retreat to what I told the chair of my department when he asked "Why?" My response was, "The question of why we are who we is central to philosophy. People have been working on it ever since we began thinking. I don't have time to summarize all the different views or to critique them in order to discover if one of them might be correct. Why are you who you are?"
Kate Bornstein, in Gender Outlaw, says that while officially transsexuals don't get together because they don't pass in numbers, she believes that a big reason is that they threaten the hell out of each other.
Hmmmm....I've never ever felt threatened by another transperson's ideas. Why should I be? We have no target, no model of how we are supposed to live our lives, so why should someone else's conception of how they want to try living their life be threatening me? Of course, I'm highly aware that because I'm quite open abut my history, there are some transfolk who wouldn't come near me when I'm in public. But on the other hand, other transgender people stopped by my office or my home two to three times a week.
We all build these theories that explain transgender, and many of us are willing to say them at the drop of a hat. Virtually every out transgender person does at least one or two information sessions, explaining transgender to others -- or at least explaining their view of it.
Speaking as someone who does about five or six appearances a year, I'll only comment that I spend very little time trying to explain gender variance in anything other than general terms (i.e. What is it? How do gender-variant people fit into a world which does not allow for their existence? Those sorts of questions. I'd never presume to attempt an explanation of why anyone is the way they are except for why I am who I am, and I don't even have all the answers to that one.) Do the rest of you really try to explain *why* we exist?!?
There are few real challenges to these ideas because we talk to basically naive audiences who really can't question us.
I guess most people must draw different audiences than I do. I get some tough-ass questions every time I speak...like when my boss said,
If only you were gay...
I can't be the only person who understands that there is an unvoiced "just" in there.
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?
A friend wrote:
This weekend, at a gathering that was designed to bring together the religious communities and the gay & lesbian community, four transgender people I knew showed up. There was me - radical queer, Katherine -- dedicated transsexual, Melodie - aging crossdresser, and Tina - born male, living androgynously and explicity not homosexual. I know that people who spoke to us, asked us about transgender, got four very different views about what all this means, some much less thought out and inclusive than others.
Isn't it great that people who spoke to you four came away with the knowledge that transfolk are a diverse lot...that since we don't behave the same and we don't think the same, perhaps we ought not be treated as if we were all the same?
I don't believe I need a theory about why transfolk are the way they are. I believe that it's more important to ask, "What are we going to do about it?" How I got to this point in my life won't change the fact that I am here. The challenge is to find where to go now. Examination of gender is important in attempting to resolve that question, but again, that's a different question: "What is gender? How does its existence affect how I live my life?"
So I had a purpose...a goal...and a dream. It was worth remaining alive in order to dedicate my life to the eliminating the phrase, "If only you were gay... ." Nobody should have to hear that in the context that it was offered.
I set out to prove that we were people, too. My daughter's partner suggested I join the Sappho list and try to teach the Internet's larget lesbian email list that pre-operative transsexual women were above all women, and as such that we were lesbians, too. And I helped found another email list, OWLS, for lesbians over 40. I remain a member of that list to this day though it seems to have gone defunct.
One day, there was another list spun off from that, named Aloft, which would presumably have involve philosophical discussions on a bit higher level. When I asked to be a member, I was basically told, "If only you were gay..." It was created as a list for women-born women only. Many of my friends left OWLS to join that list. I haven't been in contact with many of them since then. To them I guess I was not really a lesbian.
After my surgery, I tried to find employment in my field (I'm a mathematics professor by training) outside of Arkansas. I must have applied to a hundred or so colleges and universities. I even took a leave of absence and moved temporarily to Seattle to see if approaching people in person would help in the process. I was told, over and over again, in some subtle ways and sometimes directly,
Returning to Arkansas, broke and despondent, I sought to rebuild a life there. But my friends kept getting fired, or at least told to leave, because my employer assumed that anyone who was my friend must be, at the very least, gay or lesbian. It seemed not to matter if they weren't.
My online work to improve our image included work for PFLAG. My daughter was, after all, a lesbian. She's one of those lesbians who will no doubt receive no benefited from the new ENDA, since she was extremely androgynous, even refusing to prune the hairs which were growing out of her chin. And I joined Little Rock PFLAG locally and committed myself to opening that organization to the parents, family and friends of transgender people. Those people didn't need to be told that they were unwelcome because the person involved was transgender, not just gay or lesbian. And those years of effort bore some fruit.
And I worked to open doors in women's space for transwomen, because I didn't then and still don't believe that transwomen should be excluded from the definition of what constitutes a woman.
I am a lesbian. It is not anyone else's place to tell me differently. If only I were gay... Indeed.
And one day, while serving on the Board of Directors on the Arkansas Gay and Lesbian Task Force, I learned that I would not be covered by the Arkansas Non-Discrimination Act. An inclusive ANDA would have protected people like me from hearing those words I heard. Instead I was being told by my peers on the board,
I resigned. I'm sure my detractors will say that was a mistake, that I should have just put on a happy face and accept the fact that to my colleagues on the board, I was just a man in a dress, someone whose problems were not theirs. That was in the mid 90s.
I spent the rest of my years in Arklansas running a GLBT group for students at my campus and running a GLBT group in the Conway community out of my home. I provided room and board for a former student at UCA during her transition. She had dropped out of school after being abused for being differently gendered. I housed a gay student who was kicked out of his home and was not safe in the dorms. And I wrote and gave workshops and did speaking engagements on the same basic theme. T belongs with G, L, and B. I managed to convince some people of that...some influential folks. I thought that might help. It turns out I was wrong.
It was 15 years and a month since I first heard those words when on November 7, 2007, the House of Representatives, as a body, and Barney Frank, as an individual, spoke them again:
What happens when a dream dies? Where does it go? I hope with all my heart that it gets dreamed by someone much younger than I, someone in whose lifetime maybe some slight shift might occur, wherein we become almost like people, when we cease being things,”its” and “he/shes”, when "transsexual" isn't just something to accuse someone of being if you really want to degrade that person. But it won't be my lifetime. That's what I learned that week.
I was left with the words of a great man:
There are people who are your fellow citizens that are being discriminated against. This is a simple bill. Please don't turn your back on them. -- Barney Frank
I'm old. I've progressed from being 44 to nearing 70. I'm still broke from my efforts. That hasn't changed. I moved to New Jersey and I had to temporarily change my profession. I was often sad that one of the best mathematics teachers in this country didn't get to exercise that skill anymore, having become instead a barely adequate professor of computer languages.
But in time I was back in the mathematics professor business and remained there until I retired to California.
I'll still try to exist, even if the reason I have been doing so has been on death’s doorstep for over a decade. I have a spouse now who needs and deserves more of my attention. I need to finish writing about that. I shall find myself something to keep me occupied in my remaining years. I'm just not sure what it will be now.
My father tried to drill it in to me that I would never be good enough. I hate it that it appears he was right.
--Robyn Elaine Serven
I know this needs sharpening. Perhaps I should have ended it with one of my poems. Well, there is still time for that:
It is a city built of bones,
and daubed with flesh and blood,
in which old age and death,
pride and hypocrisy
are the inhabitants.
--Dhammapada, verse 150
Phenomena XXXIV: dying
Doorway
Mort
At some instant
one day
the words will cease to flow
their creator (or vessel)
having passed through
the Door
between herenow
and therethen
The words left behind
the ideas they expressed
the actions they instigated
will be all
that remains
to weigh the meaning
of this particular existence
Regret is extinguished
if the words
have expressed
peacefulness
concern and care
and a life lived well
--Robyn Serven
--September 21, 2007
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