consummation

This piece was debuted last night at the National Queer Arts Festival show, Girl Talk, in San Francisco. Thank you so much to Gina and Julia for putting the show together, to everyone who came together for an incredible set of performances, and to everyone who came out to support us. It was a pleasure and an honor.

The day they took the silver spoon out of my mouth and replaced it with a gun barrel, I learned a lot about hunger. And hunger taught me far too well.
I came out at nineteen and lost my family when I began transition, lost my way home, my plans, my everything. No small-town hometown, any more, no talking Family Business shop with Mom in the kitchen. In an instant an entire childhood with full cupboards changed, and I was a nineteen-year-old girl whose parents cut off her food supply, who couldn’t even get a job washing dishes, and at the same time as they started refusing to tell me they loved me without qualifiers and started with “you can never have a family,” I learned that the garbage is a pretty decent place to get a bite to eat.

Sometimes we are ghosts in orbit, too afraid of burning up on re-entry to ever go home, unwilling to abandon the sight of it for the cold vastness to which we turn our nervous backs. Circling around each other, stately, flash-frozen at the moment of grief, we wait for gravity to make the choices for us; we pretend we don’t know what else to do.
Bitterness is a waltz.
It’s easy to end up lost in the upper reaches of the air when the ground goes out from under you, you know? When the road you planned crumbles away and, brave Fool, you just walk off into the airy emptiness instead.
Sometimes that bridge you bought is under your feet after all. Sometimes you just join the wind-skating dusty dead, out at the edge of the atmosphere.
We’re all up here, the ghosts and strays, needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until we have mouths enough again for a meal. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss.

Family was where the food came from. It was where the love came from. And I lost both, and had to learn, in only the way someone who hasn’t already had to grow up without these things must, where to get nourishment on the fly. The poor little rich girl got an abrupt education in what she thought she was entitled to before, and what could be substituted when all that plenty went away.
In all the things I didn’t used to think were food, or love, that I could take because I suddenly discovered I needed them.

It is no mistake that I learned to eat the scraps from other people’s plates and make ugly compromises for handouts in the same season I entered a relationship where I lost count of the times I was raped. I learned what I was good enough for. I learned to settle for what I could get. What I could digest. What I could endure, in order to have someone touch me and say they wanted me, in order to get a full belly. Food poisoning and abusers both reach a fist into your guts and pull out what they want, after all, but you don’t see either one coming when you’re so hungry you can’t think.
The things we learn to survive are just that: survival. They keep us surviving, for better and for worse.

The thing is, if you go long enough scrounging, snapping and snarling at the edge of the lamplight, it becomes part of everything you do. You learn to hoard every little bit you can get right now, even if you don’t want it, because you don’t know where your next meal will come from. Better to gorge yourself on way too much discarded bread, half of a stranger’s sandwich, or enough abandoned bacon to make you sick, and store it up in case there’s nothing but a carrot, an egg, and hot water tomorrow. It doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, or whether or not it’s any good; it’s something, and the just-in-case justifies everything. Discriminating by quality or desire is a luxury, and when the emotional Dumpstering starts—when you start believing that solidarity’s scraps are enough to make it on, and give up on thriving—you start to packrat every touch you get, even the violent ones, you beg even the friends who degrade you to stay.

I have a steady paycheck now, enough to put food on the table without worry, with no kids to feed and tastes made simple by the school of make-do. I have a ring on my finger from the person I love most in all the world, and we have made a warm safe home where I sleep every night.
But I still eat every scrap in front of me and wipe the dish, even if I’m feeling sick, because part of me can’t look away from the shaky precipice of my life as a queer trans woman of color who’s making it. I’m the monster of the story, lurking at the margin, and it can all be taken away in a heartbeat: that’s what I learned. That it might be safer to be someone’s dog, and at least get the scrapings from the table, but I’d better beg. The ground is unsteady under my feet, and the job, the pantry, the door that locks, I can get pulled off it just as fast as I can be locked up for soliciting for walking down the street for groceries. My mismatched ID is only a sign of how quickly anyone can figure out that I’m a nonperson, a mismatched thing on the edges, the kind of thing that takes scraps or blood to survive. And no matter how steady things get, no matter what I build, I learned that lesson well and it’s just as hard to shake as any lesson about how you can’t eat dignity, about conditional love. Do you see? I’m still gorging on every abandoned plate I pass, just in case the next paycheck doesn’t come. I’m still begging for leftovers of closeness I can stitch into my monster heart. And somewhere, way past that fresh gorgeous produce and piping-hot pie in my kitchen, I still retain the terror that, like Lamia, all that I am will be seen through, and the real people will tear unacceptable me from the feast and my love, that even the woman who knows me all the way to the bottom will somehow someday discover the discarded skin of her selkie bride, and I will lose everything on my way back to the sea.
When I went off the map and up into the ionosphere, I stopped trusting anything good was real, was any more lasting than my breath, and a litany of loss taught me too well to heal right. When I went from scholar to scavenger, the precariousness of my position was a reasonable lesson to learn, but I’m not there any more, not still cobbling together a life from the bits I could sneak off everyone else’s plates.
My mistress with a monster is in love, and I am still learning to trust that she knows what she’s getting into with a fierce conviction and devotion I never thought possible, still learning that leaning on her, the first real family I ever had, is less shaky than I first supposed. When I didn’t know I could be taken care of, she insisted on reaching for my needs. When I was shivering sick she spoon-fed me medicine. At half my size she stood up for me against the whole world without hesitation, and loving her is the truest thing I could possibly know. We have done the work to be family—solid ground—for each other. So why is part of me still waiting for the other reality to drop? Why am I so unable to let go of the hunger, so ready to allow a starving status quo to dictate my life when I am filled daily with love and strength and hope? Where is the trust in a world that can change? In the possibility of feasts, so long as I let them spread out before me, and in a future that is more than a threat? What day will be the day I stop waiting to lose this miracle?
I am planning a wedding, planning motherhood, even as I hold tight to someone who finally told me that I don’t have to accept the leftovers, that I can ask for a brimful cup and watch it sometimes arrive, that I can be not just sated, but satisfied if I let go of believing I don’t deserve it. And at the end of the day, I still fight to remember that it’s not that she’s real and I’m in tenuous human guise, but that she’s cis and I’m trans and that love can be realer than any of those divides, that we can be back-to-back against a whole world full of loss and deprivation and feed each other every day and in the home we are for each other, there is nobody who can stop us now. I’ve come in from the cold and there’s soup waiting.
It is no mistake that when I learned I couldn’t have love, I learned that I couldn’t have a warm meal, either. It is no mistake that in our home, I cook as often as possible.

I’ve been up here in the cold upper air for a long time, with the ghosts and the strays. Needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until I had a mouth enough for a meal again. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss. But sometimes one of us can look down and see a soft place, a warm kitchen. And then, all alight in that hopeful embrace, we are shooting stars, rushing home, consumed.

like a hungry runaway*

This morning my partner sent me down the street to pick up some things for breakfast, because neither of us was thinking about what would happen on the way.

I rounded the corner past the church, its bells pealing for Mass, kids running about, and promptly stumbled into a gauntlet of a solid dozen cafes and restaurants and lunch carts all packed kitchen to door, all their signs cheerfully chalked to announce their specials for Mothers' Day Brunch. It seemed like every storefront had something to say on the matter, or was closed so they could be home to say something else more personal.

I've been trying to avoid noticing today, to skip past all the greeting cards and helpful internet reminders and e-mail from Planned Parenthood telling me via cute video about how much I should appreciate my mother, the best in the world. Last night's crying jag made it clear that this was not a workable strategy. This is not a fun day for me. This is not about picturesque brunch.

When you're barren and motherless, Mothers' Day is a calendar mark to dread.

I will never carry a baby under my heart and above my hips. And the person who carried me, we don't talk any more. There's too much hurt. There's too much poison. Here we are at the day where I'm supposed to idealize that, where I used to call every year and pretend things were other than what they were. This time, it's different. This time I'm not pretending. The rest of my family probably had a lovely spread on the table this morning, but I wasn't there. I may never be again.

I've been trying to hide from this day as best I could, but, as when I was a child, there's nowhere to hide, is there? There's nowhere I can go that the people who made me aren't with me, in the end, nowhere that who they are and what they did isn't encoded in my bones and carved into my corneas. I already knew when I was little that even hidden in a closet or up a tree, nowhere was safe for long, if nothing else because I was there, and I brought it all with me. When it's in you, when it is you, when it's where you come from, you bring it everywhere, stinking in your hair like rancid cigarette smoke, like a red-eyed thing hanging behind your neck and reading everything over your shoulder. I don't know who I am without it. There has never been a version of me without it.

Last year in March I climbed a mountain alone, and sat at the peak trying to put away the whole human world for a while so I could see further, but I brought it with me. My veins and shoes and food wrappers and eardrums were all human, and all came into that place. When I tried to strip away everything and get to the bottom of myself, near the bottom was a terrible, paralyzing fear, infecting all my decisions. That fear spoke in a voice I recognized all too well. Sometimes it wore a face that I recognized, too. Always there. I couldn't get away from where I came from. I brought it with me.

You can't run from where you start. You can't hide from it. You can stop picking up the phone, change your address, change your name, but you'll find it chalked onto the sandwich boards of every cafe in your neighborhood, find it in your inbox as a reward for your volunteer service, and you will find yourself looking over your shoulder every minute, afraid to see in person the people who are always there anyway, but no longer made of smoke and mirrors and hurt but flesh and blood and audible voice, ready to dismantle every shrine you've built in yourself.

I am trying to come to terms with this day. Trying to find a way to make it positive for myself instead of a stab-wound. I think, well, I will never carry a child inside, but I may be a mother someday. I think, well, what about metaphors, about cultivation and vegetable gardens and art, about making new things and nurturing them? I think about the wonderful mothers in my life, who aren't my mothers but who surely count. I think about all the people who helped mother me even if we never shared blood, all the people who gave me somewhere to run to, who showed me a different way to be. I think about elders in my community worth honoring. I think about spiritual mothers, universal mothers even, trying to reach further out into something sacred and more wholesome.
I think of someone dear to me who reminded me that, as Audre Lorde said, we have to learn to mother ourselves. But it's hard to know the best way to mother yourself when your only model is so full of hurt, and is so full of hurt because her only model in turn hurt her. Learning to mother yourself in a new way, when you don't know what the safe and healthy way to do it even looks like, is a tall order.

Mothers' Day is no picnic when you're barren and you're motherless. But I'm not really either of these things. I am fertile, though I cannot give birth, as soil in which to grow things. And I have a mother. If I didn't, this would be a very different kind of hurt, but I do have a mother, one who shaped me, one who is integral to who I am and have become, who is never not looking over my shoulder whether I like it or not. The key is not in the fiction of being motherless. It's in learning to deal with the mother I have, or had, and what she is, now, in me. It's in healing the mother in me so I can mother myself, and so someday when there are children in my care I can do right by them. I don't know how to do these things, but maybe Mothers' Day is a good place to start. My Independence Day, or Dependence Day, or something, something about saying right here and now that even when you ran away, even when you changed your name and address and phone number, you cannot hide from what is written in your ribcage and seeping to fill your muddy footprints, sketched on your palms and wrapped around your throat. If you cannot hide, you have to figure out something better to do.

For all of us learning to mother ourselves, if not a happy Mothers' Day, a hopeful one, one where we give ourselves more chances. A day to remember the good days, the moments of respite. A day to learn to grow something new in ourselves, and start to be brave enough to loose its seeds on the wind. A day to support the mothers around us who are, as our own did, doing the best they can. A day to believe that they, and we, can do it differently.

Where we come from is always in us, and we take it everywhere. Maybe we can learn something from it better than what it wanted to teach us. Maybe someday we can go home.


*props to my friends Coyote Joe and Miss Grace, who you should know better

pieces of holes (TRIGGER WARNING)

I was raped.

I can't really make that flowery. I can't pretty it up or find some more eloquent way of saying it. I've tried so hard to turn it into the piles of words I paint everything with that I've failed to just say it.
I know I'm not alone in it. It's something more than a third of women in general, and more than half of trans women specifically, can say. It took me a long time to admit that I, too, can say it.
I was repeatedly sexually assaulted a few years ago. There's not any way to put that that I can really come up with that doesn't amount to protecting you and me from the simple fact that a while ago, I was repeatedly fucked without my consent.
But my getting fucked didn't stop there, and that's why I'm finally fighting down the nausea and saying something about it in public and exposing myself to even more of the kind of nastiness that I find the Internet is happy to deliver. So I won't make this pretty either:

After I was raped, I was re-victimized by transphobia and transmisogyny.

It was in all the people who said I was "really" a man, and therefore couldn't have been sexually assaulted, and therefore didn't offer support and resources I needed to recover.
It was also in the people who saw that the person who did it, female-assigned and genderqueer, as "really" a woman and therefore unable to perpetrate sexual assault in the first place.
It was in the administrators and healthcare professionals who were told that I was dosed with hard liquor I didn't know I was drinking and then thrown down behind a locked door after I got back from the ER for alcohol poisoning, and decided the important thing to address about that situation is that I clearly must have had a drinking problem.
It was in the people who saw I was trans and therefore decided that I must have invited what happened to me. After all, you know how they are. They're into that kind of kinky stuff. Hell, I hear trans women get raped on purpose, and that's one of the reasons they're so especially suited to prostitution, which they do in order to get off on victimizing female bodies they can control. Hell, I hear they're dangerous and mostly rapists themselves, and that's why they can't be allowed into public bathrooms or rape crisis centers.
It was in all the messages I absorbed about how nobody would ever love me or consider me desirable again, about my freakish and unacceptable body that was good only as a revolting punchline, and how someone pinning me down and not taking "no" for an answer was the best I could ever hope for, so why not lie back and pretend that hey, it's at least someone willing to look at me without clothes on and call me "she," and that makes it okay.
It was in knowing that I certainly couldn't ask for help, because everyone around me was still having a hard enough time with my coming out in the first place.
It was in all the people who wouldn't believe me anyway, because being trans meant I was obviously unstable and an unreliable narrator of my own experiences.
It was in the missing support from birth family, who rejected me when I came out a few months before by telling me I would never find anyone to understand or love me, that I was making up a sick lie to hurt them, that children shouldn't be exposed to people like me and I could never have a family of my own. It was in all the threats to disown me if I didn't knock it the hell off, which certainly didn't help make me vulnerable to the sort of person who looks for lonely, isolated, desperate people who have a hard time fighting back or standing up for themselves.
It was in the missing support from many of my friends, many of whom quietly vanished from my life as soon as I came out, many more of whom trickled away in the months following, often without even bothering to make excuses.
It was in the vulnerability caused by my sharp and steep downward economic mobility as my family's support dried up to a coercive trickle and I found myself suddenly and mysteriously unable to get so much as a job interview to wash dishes, which left me unable to afford healthcare or therapy or, for that matter, basic nutrition. It was in the constant indignity of eating out of the garbage and the messages that reinforced about what I deserved from other people. It was in being too busy surviving to look after my recovery or even stop for a few minutes to deal with what happened to me.
It was in all the voices telling me I was demanding so much of society by asking it to accept me as a woman that I didn't dare ask for anything else, like help.
It was in all the voices telling me that someone showing up in my bedroom at all was the best I could ever hope for, and if beggars can't be choosers then monsters can't either, and what's regular sexual abuse as a price to pay for someone, anyone, willing to be seen with you in public or touch you at all?
It was in all the people who let me know my place and that I should be grateful for being allowed to live at all, and shouldn't be complaining, and why couldn't I just be a man anyway and move on?

You know what else it was in? It was in my not talking about it until now.
It was in all the fears I had about saying anything because of the ways that would reflect on my whole community. It was in all the ways I could be afraid that my talking about my rape would reinforce stereotypes about trans women of color as tragic, agency-stripped victims, as sex fiends, as people who invite rape on themselves. It was in all the conversations I swallowed about the subject because I didn't want to make the community look bad by saying I'd been assaulted by another trans person. It was in every stereotype of deceptive trans people that told me that I wouldn't be believed if I spoke up. It was in the ways I knew that victim-blaming that would be unacceptable to my supposed political comrades about a cissexual woman would rear its head and ask why I didn't fight back harder--why let this person come back again and again and let it happen more than once--why I covered it up by making jokes about it for five years as a buffer against letting it take me apart--because it wouldn't be asking, it'd be telling, and the answer would be because you're trans. It was in my dread that even this, even this could be interrupted by someone asking me to justify my transition instead of letting me be a human being with a story.
It was in an awful, hollow truth: that I even had some fond memories of the person who did it, that there was ambivalence, because they were the first person I'd ever been involved with who would at least call me their girlfriend and didn't recoil from the reality of my transition. Even though they used it and its accompanying vulnerability to do unacceptable things to me. And that that ambivalence, not uncommon for survivors of sexual assault especially by intimate partners, would damn me as a trans woman and make a thousand vicious stereotypes more convincing. How much hate are you supposed to have for the person who raped you? What's the acceptable cutoff before people start believing you asked for it? What about when you're trans?
It was in knowing something even worse: that if the rape had turned into murder, still, I'd have been "asking for it" as soon as it hit the courts and newspapers.

I was re-victimized by transphobia, and transphobia helped make me vulnerable in the first place. It isolated me and set me up to be frightened, desperate, and unwilling or unable to stand up for myself. It made unacceptable acts invisible or falsified my consent. It cut me off from resources and recovery in the aftermath. And it even kept me from talking about it for a matter of years, even kept me from admitting to myself that even when it's me, there's a word for nonconsensual sex, that saying "no" counts as not consenting, and that maybe, just maybe, I ought to wake up and call a spade a spade even though I wasn't supposed to have the right.

Tell me again that because of what I am, I'm a danger to other women. Tell me I shouldn't have access to resources for survivors of sexual assault. Tell me that I should expect to be vulnerable as the price for what I am, and that my public safety is begging for special treatment. Tell me I asked for it.
Tell me again about my fucking privilege.

You know what? Here's a word that didn't mean anything to the person who sexually assaulted me, and didn't mean anything to the people and institutions that made it worse, so much that I'd almost convinced myself it didn't mean anything when I was the one saying it:

No.

the sky is falling

It is time for us to acknowledge that our love is an act of war.

It seems distasteful to say. It feels wrong. Our love, our lives, our nurtured gardens and families, we say, these are not weapons. These are not acts of violence. To us, they are not.
Nonetheless, there are those who insist breathlessly, endlessly, that they are. That our families are destroying their way of life. That our existing in public shocks and harms them. That attending school, sitting in a restaurant, having to hear at all that we exist is an affront that threatens to annihilate them. And they gather their stormclouds over and over, they teach their children, they shout from the pedestals and rooftops and radio waves that we are, by virtue of drawing breath, destroying them. That we are at war, and that our heartbeats are a sword at their throats.
I think it is time to admit that they are right. Whoever started this, however much those of us who abhor war and all it means cannot go near the word, there it is: there are people, many, many people, who believe that by existing alone we wage war on them. And in response, they gather arms and preach daily that our threat must be removed by any means necessary. By their believing it, it is made so; bloodless though it may be for them, we are at war. And each of our acts of war, each exposed inch of brown skin, each held hand, each public footstep of an unacceptable body and each child raised in a home they abominate, each of our acts is met with a salvo of invective and violence, and our people die and die and die.

There is a war on, and the stakes are infinite, because the only outcome acceptable to the mustering many who believe that your breath or mine is an act of war is for us to be forever wiped clean from the face of the earth. We have to stop speaking where any of them can hear us. We have to stop being seen. We have to stop loving and conceiving and using precious resources stolen from their mouths. And in this world, as perhaps there has always been, there is the destructive power to achieve this. In this struggle, we have only two options: to prevail, or to find none of us in a position to care any more. Those who would annihilate will eventually find that they cannot exist much longer than we do, but it doesn't matter. They won't be in a position to care any more either.

There is a war on. All we can do is succeed, or find ourselves no longer in a position to care. Daring to continue living, let alone daring to speak, will be considered an act of war until there are no more battles to fight, and no one to fight them.

So let's admit it. Our lives? Our lives are an act of war. They are open defiance. They are invasion. They are insistent violation of the borders of a world that desperately pretends we do not exist. They are rude gestures and thrown rocks at the rumbling war machines of systems who choose to write us out of history, beginning only a moment ago and stretching back to the beginning of all things. By standing here and living, we defy the notion that we have no right to, and we scream out that no world where we are torn apart into nothingness can continue. Every seed we plant, lover we kiss, drum we beat is indeed a grave and mortal threat to the entire world as they know it, because our reality forces it to crash against us over and over only to find us still here. Even when we die of it, we are dead, but we are still here, we still are, we still were.

We can call it linking arms. We can call it embraces. We can call it a garden plot or a home or a marriage. We cannot concede that it is war. We cannot look at the arrows fired by our adoration of our loved ones and the mortars launched by our still-real, still-abhorrent bodies. We look into the furtive, fervent trenches dug by those who call our lives war and shake our heads, wondering what they're on about.

Here's what they're on about: they live in a world where we are monsters. They live in a world that trembles daily, because we snake our faultlines through its foundations and each time we move more crumbles and falls over the yawning edge of the flattened sea. In their world, once near us, their children can be lost to them, and just seeing us represented fills them with the rage of people struck in the face and deprived of their birthrights.
That world needs to end, and we know it. That world will end, and they know it.

There's a war on. Either we succeed, and their world ends; or they succeed, and ours does. Does it matter that we want them to go on living in our world, that our world has room for them to build cities and parks and futures? Not really. The very act of not getting to define everything for the rest of us is the end, for them. The fact that none of them would actually die, that their children would be fine and their blood unshed, is irrelevant. We can abhor and condemn violence and torture, and this too is an act of war. We can love them depthlessly as people and wish them no harm, but we cannot avoid the implications. If we are considered equals, their world is over. Our lives are the explosives that end it.

So, okay. Let's sit that knowledge down on our kitchen tables and give it a good look. There are two possible worlds: one where we prevail, and get to live side-by-side, and one where we do not, and are annihilated. And side-by-side looks like annihilation to the folks who have to live next door. There goes the neighborhood. We might think it's a really nice neighborhood to raise our kids; doesn't stop the neighbors from thinking their lives are over because we continue to exist yards away.

I say let's call down the thunders, then. Let's stand and fight. Let's own that our love is a matter of artillery, and fire salvo after salvo. Let's hold hands and kiss and fuck and dance while all over, rock shears from the cliff-faces of their shuddering world and it frays at the seams. Let's defiantly exist, exist hard, right next to them, public, brazen, beautiful. Let's drill and march and right on their doorsteps let's have unacceptable bodies and loud music and food whose aromas they find foreign and offensive. Let's fucking sing.

We can call it jubilation. They can call it war. Either way, the results are the same. We succeed, and walk hand in hand into a new world where our very existence is not considered a violation, or we do not--and are no longer in a position to care.

"I was crying...why were they doing this to me?"

I got more updates from RNC today. And this is at least as serious as anything I've already posted.

There has been a lot of talk about prisoner abuse in Minneapolis-St. Paul directed at arrested protesters. Indymedia's open publishing wire is reporting multiple instances confirming these accounts, and if verified, they do constitute actual, honest-to-gods torture.




(video transcript: a young white American man, badly bruised and with many stitches above his eye, speaking at a press conference and describing extensive beatings and torture while in custody after his arrest at the RNC protests. His experiences also included verbal abuse, denial of food, and being forced to keep his head in a bag full of his own vomit.)
This? This is torture of a civilian citizen on US soil for expressing political views and without being charged with a crime. He fell off his bicycle and bumped into a cop, who said there was no harm done before the guy was rushed and arrested. You can't make excuses now that it's just for foreigners, or immigrants of dubious documentation, or criminal terrorist types that we just know did something. This here is a grade-A white cissexual able-bodied male citizen who fell off his bike and got nabbed, with enough evidence to press charges regarding his allegations. And those of you who have been saying that torture won't be directed at you, it's okay, it's excusable, it might even be a good idea when it's thrown at brown people from other countries? Queers you don't know? Trans women of color who're probably whores anyway? "Enemy combatants?" Now you're seeing its fruition. Now you're seeing what the rest of us already know: they test what they do on us, and when they think they've got it down and nobody's complaining, they'll aim it right at you the moment you step out of line.

There is a direct connection with the use of Raytheon maser weapons in US occupations overseas and their deployment on domestic crowds considered to be trouble. There is a direct connection between use of Tasers in covert torture in other countries and their overzealous, sometimes lethal application in the States. You cannot sensibly separate the same technique being used by the same government in two different places. You say sonic crowd-control weapons are only going to show up in Iraq and whammo, they're making folks vomit uncontrollably right here at home.

And we keep pretending! We keep arguing that we can sanction our government to train and deploy torturers unapologetically on some people, and then we express shock that the techniques bleed right on back into our domestic law enforcement. And once we're putting military personnel into the equation, too--including units fresh back from military occupation in Iraq, primed to see a civilian population as a crowd of strangers full of possible threats, always to be suspected and controlled and if necessary taken out--how are we expecting the violence we export not to land on our doorsteps? How are we deluding ourselves into believing we can tell our soldiers and police that torture is okay when the prisoner's someone we don't like--say, a suspected terrorist--and not expect that the same techniques won't be used on someone they don't like--like an unarmed, handcuffed, helpless protester in custody who dared to call them a name? How can we continue to pretend that our willingness to dehumanize and abuse our supposed enemies has nothing to do with authorizing the dehumanization and abuse of people a little closer to home? How can we continue to pretend that this infection of inhumanity and wanton cruelty doesn't spread when we feed it, no matter where we think we're pointing it at first?

Some of us see this treatment every day. Some of us see it at routine traffic stops. And we've tried to warn you that every chip you cut away from our civil rights is eroding the base of yours. But some of you didn't want to listen, did you? It's just gonna be bad guys. It's just gonna be criminals. Well, it sure isn't gonna be American citizens, we've got rights.

You allow the rights to be taken from other human beings, sanction or look the other way when it happens because they must have done something to deserve it, you're contributing to a wider trend, a deep current eroding away at human dignity and the rule of law. And then we're all shocked when it comes right on home and hits people usually exempt. "But he didn't do anything!" Of course he didn't. That's the point. Guess who else hasn't.

We've got people in charge of this country right now who think this is perfectly acceptable, that someone arguing with their ideas is an enemy just as much as the guy shooting a gun, and that anyone marked an enemy forfeits all human rights. They've spit on the Geneva Conventions and even the US military manuals of conduct. Here they are, asking for another four years, another eight, another sixteen. Except it's not "asking." It's jailing and torturing anyone brave enough to be in the street to argue about it.

This is only the beginning. The guy in the clip above didn't die, praise be, nor did the detainees allegedly beaten, teargassed, burned, harassed, and raped. If we let this go on, it is only a matter of time. If we don't fight back at this madness with all we have, this is only the beginning. They have a whole new world planned out for us to live in. Someone else has already described it far better than I can:

"...imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."

and now some nourishment

I believe very firmly in balancing the microcosm with the macrocosm, in calling out support to good people doing good work just as much as standing up against injustice. And that means backing up people who're building a better world and coming at it from new angles.

Amapola is doing work I've never seen before that I think is vital, and is now blogging about it at Imperfect Patient Syndrome. She's a queer femme of color who's been through the treatment system for anorexia and is now examining it from the outside, as an academic, with cutting insight. Her research is digging into ways that data on eating disorder patients--and the methods of treatment applied to them--leave out the narratives and concerns of working-class women, queer women, and women of color. It pulls open how privileging a "model" eating-disorder patient who is middle-to-upper-class, straight, and white, as has been standard in both theory and practice, not only neglects the voices of those outside that paradigm; it also harms their ability to get proper medical care. Amapola also works in her own personal narrative, bringing it all home to people you love and know and avoiding the sterility of a lot of academic work.

It's sharp analysis that keeps alternately making my jaw drop and making me wonder why there's so little material working with this perspective. This is an area of research with too few people working on it, and longtime readers here will know they're issues close to my heart. I think Amapola's work is, one of these days, going to save lives.

Imperfect Patient Syndrome. Go check it out.

essential analysis

Go and read this post. Right now. Trust me, you need to hear it.
Thank God for you, BFP.

ain't misbehavin'

My friend Graham, a feminist activist who I've been proud to work alongside out in the kind of activism where you have feet on the ground and an all-around sharp lady, has started a blog on sex work, feminism, public health and sexual politics. She's got a keen eye, knows her way around a sentence, and has a perspective that neither sugarcoats nor demonizes the sex industry or the people working in it.
Watch this space, folks. I think she's going to have some really interesting things to say.
Check it out: Red Spine.

phone booths, v: broken voices on broken phones

(Previous installments of the Phone Booths series here, here, and here. "Phone Booths" part 4 is currently in a vault; I can, indeed, count.)


A while back I lost my voice.
I've been thinking about that, lately. In the long tail-end of my illness, I've found myself laryngitic, stopped up, hoarse. I find myself repeating old nightmares where something important is happening, and I open my mouth, and nothing comes out but a whisper, and it's never, ever loud enough. I find myself revisiting silent childhood hours in the backs of closets and homemade bird-blinds, back when, though nobody now believes it, I was quiet.

But those are moments and inflictions and afflictions and airy nothings, in their way, though they go deep. A while back, not a long while, I found myself losing my voice.

One of the hardest things about the kind of transition I am currently going through is that while the chemicals and processes, laws and re-namings with which I currently reshape and reclaim my body can rearrange a great deal, there are some effects of my history that cannot be edited. One of those is the effect of testosterone on the larynx. It adds flesh that does not atrophy or melt away with simply hormonal treatment or complex practice. That organ is lengthened and thickened and inclined to stay that way.

Sometime around seventh grade, always too quiet except when provoked to long, breathless encomia about my latest scientific obsession or favorite novel, painfully awkward, I became fascinated with music. I had always hidden from music, because I grew up in a profoundly musical family. My father and brothers each to some degree have perfect pitch. They are all talented in the extreme; my father, rusty from years of focus elsewhere, is now only an accomplished pianist and harpsichordist, but my brothers can each play upwards of seven instruments with proficiency and panache, and sing in a way that always leaves you wanting more. Music appreciation came to me from my first steps on, a necessary discipline and source of pleasure, but--surrounded by people who could appreciate a level of nuance and mastery I felt locked out of, like a colorblind child in a family of painters, I found myself embittered, and hid. My fingers were too clumsy to dance on the keyboard. My ear was too impatient to learn the rhythms and the keys. I preferred, instead, to play hooky from piano lessons and cajole the teacher to take me out back, to her stable, where she taught me the care of horses, the cleaning of an iron shoe, the facts of heredity, the pungent realities of mucking out a stable stall, the hard work of training and moving with a creature without a common language.
And one day, weedy, thirteen, freshly bruised from some intimidation, walking down the cement-brick hall, I heard it: harmony.

I began to give up my lunch periods to huddle unseen in the vestibule of the choral hall, ducked out of sight of the window in the door, utterly rapt. They rehearsed--a junior high school chorus, of all things!--and I was fascinated on a level that became religious. There was a piece of heaven there I had somehow missed in my entire childhood drenched in Bach and the Beatles and Bob Dylan and Beethoven. One day, inevitably, I was discovered, curled up outside the door; the rumor was that I was there to stare clandestinely at a pretty girl in the back row. Blushing, I allowed it: how much less embarrassing was the truth? The teacher simply smiled, confused, and invited me to sit inside the room while they practiced. Eventually I was moved into the back row myself, though it was some months before they discovered I was skipping meals to do so, attending an extra class a day just to be near the music, and shuffled nervously to make my devotion legal. I was enrolled in the choir, untrained, strained, croaking, enthusiastic and always struck with headaches at the high notes.

That was when the teacher began to realize she had an unusual child on her hands. Eventually my secret was torn out of me: I couldn't sing the baritone part. It was far too high. I was the first basso profundo she had ever taught. Though I never mastered the technical theory, I could feel chords, right or wrong, in my chest and in my bones. I was used as a secret weapon in competitions, dragged out suddenly to rumble out a low C and grind out gospel and blues with a voice children my age should not have had. Suddenly my voice was the thing--I could not sing like my brothers because I could not sing like anyone we knew my age. I was, however, called on for impressions of Louis Armstrong and James Earl Jones. I was, eventually, cast as a string of stage villains as long as my arm, stentorian, sinuously resonant, and with a few more years of training and practice, able to shake people's chairs, bounce my rumblings from the back of large auditoriums, drown out an entire choir without a microphone. My voice was huge. The casting shifted from petty Shakespearean noblemen to Death, and then the Wrath of God. And I took greater joy in it than I could say. My voice was my own, and it shook my whole body like the sound-box of my brother's guitar, like the string-full bulk of my father's piano. It poured emotion out of me whenever I needed the outlet. It did whatever I asked of it, except for those high notes. It was witchcraft. It was pride.

By high school, it was something else, too. A friend shoved me in front of an anti-war demonstration shortly before my fifteenth birthday, and someone handed me a microphone, which I did not need. And I froze for a moment, and then words came out, words upon words, with a pattern, with a picture. I didn't know how it happened, but they were clapping, they were hugging me, and someone cried.
I didn't just have a voice. I had words to use it for, my own words, not a script's, nor a score's. I could get up in front of people and say things that mattered. It wasn't just pride: it was an instrument of change, a connection to other people, maybe even a calling. I was a preacher, and suddenly the voice was not just my own. It was something I could give to ideas that I felt mattered. I could speak, not just for myself, not just for an audience, not just for the sake of glorious noise, but for standing with others.

And then it was a millstone around my neck, because I trained it lower and lower, for more and more resonance with whatever I asked of it. When it was pointed out that my speaking voice and my voice on stage, in song, were hugely disparate, I caught the hole in my persona, and dropped the speaking voice an octave or so. And when I sang the blues, I meant it. When I sang "I lay down this world" with my best vibrant Gospel exhaustion, I meant it. Because I was trapped in a person I wasn't.

And when I came out, that voice was a problem. I'm not particularly tall, or broad. As my family goes, I came out small, and curvy, really, with long hands and big brown eyes. Even before I started my physical transition, I didn't have a great deal of trouble being read as a woman--at least until I opened my mouth. I heard it over and over: "I'd never have known, until you started talking." "I'd never have known, until you opened your mouth."

The other side of that was obvious: "You can have the life you want, the transition you need, if you just don't open it. Shut up, and you can have the world."

I was soaked in the messages every other young woman gets, of course, by that point. Keep quiet. Nod and smile. Defer and demur. Make your sentences into questions. Keep it soft. Keep it sweet. And while I was proud and relieved to let go of the part of male privilege that encouraged me to interrupt, to talk over, to drown out, I began to drown myself in this. If you want your life, if you want to get by, if you want to be safe, keep quiet. Don't rock that boat. Don't demand your place at the table. Accept that you are unacceptable. Understand that you cannot be understood. Don't push it. Don't push it. Don't push it.

Just. Shut. Your. Mouth.

And I choked back so, so many words.

How many vibrations of my vocal cords did I waste? How much did I throw on the scrap-heap of my head, to rust unsaid for fear that it might mark me less-than-real? How many knives did I force into my voice, like Abraham and Isaac unhalted, desperate to sacrifice it for my undeserved place in the world?

I cannot say. I cannot say. But my breath was held back, eventually, even my gestures growing smaller, as I tried to make myself breathy and unthreatening and demure. And I could not say, though, like another voiceless girl I'd met as a child, my feet ached and burned with each silent step in a world not willing to make room for an immigrant who smelled like the sea.

Something burst within me, over and over. Because I had felt it, singing in me, once, as I sang, as I shook crowds: that my calling in life would require my voice. That my voice would not only carry me, but could be a comfort to others, would not be a career but a lever for a better world, somehow. It seemed big enough, then. Its vibration seemed strong enough. And here I was, faced with what looked like the worst of choices: do you take your calling, your great chance to give something to the people around you, your meaning, while giving away your chance to feel whole and worthy of love? Or do you complete yourself as a human being, make your skin and bones and face tolerable, at the cost of giving up what you feel gives that humanity of yours meaning? Do you seek duty, or love? Words, or the touch of another person? What you feel you must do, or what you feel you cannot do without?

How could I preach, with my own voice always tripping me up, humiliating me, getting in my way? How could I speak warmly to loved ones? How could I sing?

I don't think I really slept, for a while, tossing back and forth, tearing myself up over it, all those harmonies that had intoxicated me becoming discordant, the tones and tunes matching up wrong until the vibrations were ready to shatter my bones and write angry burnt symphonies on my skin. I felt monstrous. How could I want something so badly for myself that took away my ability to use what I saw as my gift? How could I want something that took away what I thought was my best chance to serve?

Of course, I was holding the score upside-down. I was missing part of the script. I had shown up for a demonstration, a pulpit, on the wrong day. I was speaking words of comfort to someone who didn't want them.

I learned many things about listening, while I choked, of course. I learned many things about myself. I learned much more than I thought I ever would about all the things I could do that were not about my voice, but about hands and feet and everything under a rib-cage. But I also learned that I had been a fool.

I never lost words.

And my voice just needed to learn new songs.

The options are limited, as options always are. I could allow a hot scalpel into my throat, for a great deal of money, to edit and excise the cartilage that made my voice what it was, at the risk of losing all ability to speak aloud forever. I could send a different pile of money to people who would promise to make me sound like something else. I could keep silent. Or I could do the painstaking, day to day work of training myself in new ways, so that I could speak in a voice that would not make my life untenable, but that still left room for laughter, for conviction, for range. I could find a new way to raise my voice, out of the depths but without losing the resonance.

I've stumbled, on that road, and it is still a source of difficulty. And I have still not found a way to sing, and it breaks my heart, some days. But I'm looking. I'm looking. And I will, someday. I will someday take it back, all but the bit I cut away some ways back on the road, to let the road know I'm serious.

I will sing again, someday, and it will be my voice, but it will not be the voice it was before.



This is done with saying, for now, but I should say this, anyhow, outside the bounds of what I just made. This place you're reading: this was born, if anything, of fear. This was made by a person frightened she had betrayed words, betrayed her voice, and could not speak. This was made as a proof that I still could. And I give you all the thanks I have for listening.
Goodnight.

there is no spoon

I have been very, very ill.
I mean, I'm only just getting back the ability to sit up, eat, talk, or type, ill. I had my first solid food in more than a week today. And it got me thinking.
See, there I was, incapacitated, unable to sit up or wash myself or feed myself, body weakened by four days of 103-degree fevers and convulsive chills and dehydration, in so much pain that I couldn't drink clear water. Everything hurt--joints, tongue, you name it--even down to my eyeballs, which were in so much pain I had to blindfold myself. I had to be taken care of. At the doctor's, I needed a wheelchair, and nobody talked to me like a person.
And I was angry.
I was hurting, I was feeling sorry for myself, I was miserable with the ravages of whatever illness this was, but you know what? I was angry.

Isn't that interesting? Angry. I felt a sense of profoundly wounded pride, I was upset at the total stripping-away of my dignity, I didn't feel like a person. I was sitting there naked and reeking and unable to drink water by myself, and it made me mad.

What, because I didn't deserve it? Because it wasn't fair? Because I'm entitled to an able body and what comes with it? Because my inability to take care of myself or even sit up filled me with a thousand childhood messages about self-sufficiency and strength and weakness and illness-as-moral-failing, and the result was self-loathing?

Yeah. That.

I wasn't just feeling pain, though that was significant and independently upsetting. I was feeling a temporary loss of privilege, and my reaction was not pretty. Phrases like "reduced to this" came to mind. Phrases like "this is what the proud daughter of a warrior clan comes to." Words like "pathetic" and "weak" and "vulnerable." I was frightened, I was suffering, but more importantly, I didn't feel it was fair.

I find that fascinating. I expect to be treated like a person who knows what a fever is. I expect to be able to drive myself to the store for medicine or food. I expect to be able to get up and walk to the bathroom. I expect that my acceptance of help from others in any given hour is optional, and a matter of character. I expect to be able to feed myself. And all of that went away. All of those expectations. I was weak, and vulnerable, and dependent. I needed--still need, I'm not all recovered yet--assistance to perform basic life functions. And that gets to me, hard.

Where do I get those expectations? And where do I get off feeling like less of a person for not meeting them or having them met by the world? Where do I get off feeling that way when I find the idea of looking at other people with similar limitations that way, well, abhorrent? And do I, in the end, still apply that internalized cultural ableism to my lens on the world?

My answer to that last, in the honesty of my vulnerability, is yes. And it bothers the hell out of me. I know I'm not alone in this, and I know my able-bodied privilege is one of the last I became aware of. I credit others in the blogging community with making me less of a damn fool about it. And I know it's there. I may be only temporarily able-bodied on a good day, but it's a whole lot of able, speaking as a former competitive athlete who's been, nearly without exception, healthy as a horse her whole life. I take it for granted, and when it's taken away from me, I take it personally. I take it like a personal offense. I take it as unfair.

Well, isn't that nice for me.

I'm privileged. For the most part, for now, I have an astonishingly able body, and with it the privilege and luxury of nitpicking my health and choosing when to be dependent on others or not. And that's been waved around in my face this week, and I've been forced to confront some of that privilege.

I'm talked before about how important solidarity is between the trans and disabled communities. Now, more than ever, I'm convinced of it. Ability privilege is the one privilege that we all, at some point, lose. So we'd all better suck it up and realize that this problem needs all of our effort no matter what our bodies do for us right now, because none of us is entitled to our health, and there's nothing fair about it for anyone. This is not a cause anyone can afford to ignore, and there's already amazing people working hard at it--there have been for many years--and it would behoove the rest of us to listen to them, and listen well.

And then it would be good, right after some of that listening, to lean forward and say, "Okay. What can I do for you?"

lighting more candles

I actually have some simple shout-outs I want to drop. Have a look, everyone, if you haven't.

Lisa Harney does an excellent round-up of Day of Remembrance links. Really, though, what blew me away was her naked, honest, and utterly brave Fear, which hit home so hard I'm still a little out of breath. Lisa's been getting a lot of well-deserved attention lately. I hope you'll add to it.

Megan Julca's roundup on the Day of Remembrance, with its links to news stories and pictures, is a must-read.

Queen Emily lays herself open with amazing candor on dissonance, dysphoria, and real life.

Shiva of Biodiverse Resistance wrote an amazing post on intersections between trans and disability activism, the kind of post that I've been wanting to write since forever--and even had some kind words for me toward the end. Shiva, you're new to me, but I think this is vital discourse.

Monica at TransGriot brings in an amazing statement of trans solidarity. Between her own stuff and the work she's found and put together from elsewhere, she's been on fire lately.

Julia Serano posted 2003 piece of hers called "scared to death." Julia, for so much, thank you, but for this, I don't have words. Thank you for fighting back, and helping so many of us to join that battle line. If you have not read this, everyone, go to. Go to.

Together, we are mighty.
Together, we can carry this until it doesn't need carrying any more.

search and seizure

Note: There's some issues I want to tease out, but in order to do so, I'll have to talk about work. In the effort to maintain both my anonymity and my job, I will be modifying details. I am employed as something of a jack-of-all-trades at a modestly-sized, liberally-aligned institution with various troubles and underbellies we will call, for the purposes of this entry, the Ministry of Space*, with attendant identifying details altered. While I tend to do everything from vehicle maintenance to emergency first aid to clerical and administrative work to plumbing in the course of my job as Girl Friday, my actual job description is pretty gendered, on the masculine end, and I am generally called on--as, ah, an Assistant Deck Chief at the, er, Ministry of Space--to wear a uniform that is not, shall we say, flattering to the figure. I end up pretty androgynized, with functionality presiding over form.

Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl**, makes an interesting observation about the mid-transition period when she notes that she got to a certain point where, minute-to-minute, people began making unpredictable, but different and definite, assumptions about her gender and sex and running with them. They didn't think, "Well, hmm, that there is an androgynous person." They immediately shuffled her as either "woman" or "man" and then from there assumed that she was androgynous-for-a-man or androgynous-for-a-woman until confirmed or given to understand otherwise; the notion of "other" almost never came up. It was never clear, in any given interaction, which way they'd go, but she observed that it really had nothing to do with changes in her clothing or mannerisms, day to day, hour to hour, second to second. People just sort of picked.

I quibbled with this for about a second, remembering the two? maybe three? friends who'd told me, after a while of knowing me, that they sort of registered me as genderless, as an "other." The more I thought about it, though, the more true it seemed. People had to have me stored one way or another in their heads, right away, with very few exceptions. Some people managed to switch back and forth, depending on what I was wearing on a given day, but for the most part even those people were either thinking of me as a woman-sometimes-crossdressed or a man-sometimes-crossdressed, This was even before I was on hormone treatment.

Now, much further along, I have wandered deep into the unpredictable territory Serano was talking about, and I find it fascinating. So I thought I'd illustrate, and chase a few trails it brings up for me.

The other day I got called up, at work, to deal with an emergency. A child had been hurt behind a locked door, and I was called on to get in there, get the door open, and make sure the kid was okay. Now, when I showed up and took care of the situation, the two women present on my arrival were full of thanks--and grateful phone reports to others--about the woman from the, ah, Deck Chiefs' office, who had come to help. She--that is, me--had been helpful, this, and we watched her do that and that. It was even more explicit with the one of them who used Spanish: ella, not el, and so on. A few minutes later, the kid's mother showed up, and was immediately talking, third-person wise, about the deck-crew guy who'd saved her kid, the man from the Ministry, he, him, and so on. When the paramedics arrived to help, they were, pronouns-wise, sort of split down the middle. Were people biased by whether I was rushing in to deal with a kid, or making official phone calls, from one minute to the next? Cooing at a crying child to calm her down, or offering medical advice? I don't know. Maybe.

Nobody asked, mind you. They all just guessed, and I had other priorities--like helping a hurt child--than correcting any of them. But it had been a pretty high-stress situation, so I went down to the corner store afterward for a cold drink. While I was in line, an older male contractor, salt-and-pepper-moustachioed and drawling and everything, sidled up to me, winked, and said, "They sure do hire good-lookin' folk down at the Ministry of Space, don't they."
I blinked: "Oh?"
"You're up there on the deck crew, right?"
At this point, apprehensive, I assented. He leaned in closer.
"Well, I remember when you came out to help me with that job up at the moon base, and I thought t'myself, well, that there's a good-lookin' gal, what's a pretty little lady like her doing workin' on a deck crew?"
I swallowed; it's always thin ice when you realize that a straight guy who doesn't know you has been harboring a crush, flattering with definite undercurrents of I-hope-he-doesn't-get-violent-if-he's-disabused-of-his-assumptions.
"Your boss came out the next day, and I asked 'im, where's that good-lookin' gal came out yesterday? Why didn't y'all send her? He said you needed a day off now and then. Guess I can't argue with that, but you're a pretty little gal." Another wink.
At this point, I just felt awkward: "I, well, uh...thanks. Guess I do need days off now and then."
"Well, you sure do hire nice-lookin' folks."
"Well, thanks, guess I'd better get back." I moved to extricate myself, and he leaned down and winked again:
"I'll see you around."
I waved and bolted as politely as I could.

Now, getting hit on in this way is always a strange situation. Advances like these are inappropriate--in the oily and infantilizing way he presented it, anyway--and in my head they go in the same category as catcalls and sketchy pickup lines in bars. On the one level, as they do with most women, they make me pretty uncomfortable. But on another level, they confirm that I'm being read as female--not only being read as female, but being read as female by people who're pretty concerned with making sure, for the sake of their machismo, that the person they're addressing is definitely female. I feel dirty for getting a bit of a warm feeling from something that I find objectionable. I feel both safer and more vulnerable, all at once. And there's always that specter: the safety of "passing" opens you up to the ever-present accusation of deception. The consequences of that "deception" can be pretty awful.

Case in point, another example, from a much more serious place: the airport. I flew out to visit my partner in California last weekend, and I was frankly terrified. I haven't flown since beginning transition. With a combination of basic nervousness for flying and airports coupled to the post-9/11 fear of travelling while young, alone, and brown with a Semitic nose and getting someone riled up enough to either make a scene or get security to put me in a little room, I was edgy enough before; but now I have legal documents that don't match up, and it takes real effort to look male like my passport and other paperwork say I am. That's bad when you're trying to convince armed people whose job it is to be suspicious that you're not in disguise, trying to pull something, or using someone else's ID.*** Add to that my very justifiable fear of law enforcement officials behind closed doors, and we have a winner. I was not looking forward to this trip.

So I did my best to dress down and not make waves. Jeans. Doc Martens. T-shirt, with a second button-up shirt to help cover up my sports-bra-compressed breasts. Hair pinned up in a tight bun. Stud earrings. No makeup. I walked up to the security gate with my bags, probably looking edgy as all get-out, and the TSA guy looked at me, no blinking, and said, matter-of-factly, "Ma'am, would you please step forward?" Well, I wasn't going to argue--and that's when my hairpins set off the metal detector, and I had to take them out, which brought my hair tumbling down past my shoulders. I got led to the little glass box where you wait for pat-downs, and there was a little commotion as they found a female officer to search me; then I got patted down, and told, "Miss, you can be on your way," and got my belt and shoes back on and headed for the boarding gate.

Now, a minute-to-minute shift in that context could have had terrible consequences--a humiliating public scene at best, with a "worst" end of the spectrum that was really too awful to contemplate thoroughly. I got lucky. Bureaucracy saved the day, and all I got was a faintly apologetic pat-down. That kind of thing is awkward at work, and often funny in my social world, but in the wrong situation--drunk guys on the street, tense law enforcement officials--it's a recipe for nightmares. This unpredictable middle ground--where in a half-hour at work I can be addressed as a butch man, a femme woman, a butch woman and a femme man by people standing right next to each other--is one thing in a world like my kitchen or my workplace, but it's entirely another in a place where I don't have any power. At the next flight, from another airport with me much more confident about my getting by, the man checking my ID peered at it for a long time, checked it from a couple of angles, stared. He blinked, said quietly--eyes level with the pushed-up breasts under my tight t-shirt****--"to your right, Sir," and waved me along. No scene, but he sure had the option. The next station was just interested in moving me through, and by then I was "ma'am" again. Once more, the potential was there for me to be in trouble--he could have called over an official to discuss the incongruity, any number of things could have happened--but I got lucky.

I'm not sure what the lesson is, here, but if I had any doubts about Whipping Girl's assertion that this happens, they're gone now. Liminal spaces are in short supply in people's heads, even people who're more likely to accept variant gender presentations. They still want you, in their heads, to be a variant male or a variant female, in my experience. I'm not sure what to do with that.

All I know is that tonight out at the barracks, while I was performing first aid, my patient decided not to even guess. I'm not sure whether or not she kept changing her mind or what, but it seemed like she was alternating pronouns sentence by sentence. Seriously, people. Just ask if you have to.


*Possibly only Mags is nerdy enough in the right ways to get all the layers of this joke.
**Which I'll be holding a large discussion of at Feministe next month! You should all come. Bonus points if we can get Dr. Serano to drop by and tell me I'm a moron; I hear she uses the inter-tubes on occasion.
***I've been searching like crazy for the couple-years-old news story I'm referring to, and I just can't find the reference. It regarded a TSA airport-security memo dictating a policy of carefully searching anyone who appeared to be cross-dressed, because Terrorists could be using it as a disguise so they could Do Evil. It was a ludicrous, transparently bigoted policy in its wording, and a lot of bloggers wrote about it incredulously, and now I just can't find any of those old entries. Anyone?
****Don't you judge me. I'm young, and I wanted to give my girlfriend something to look at before I left.

phone booths, iii: snakes and ladders.

I totally lost it today.

I fell apart. I was short with my partner. I got upset over small things. I found myself, in trying to talk about it, shaky and weepy and sick. Everything felt wrong--like even my bloodstream belonged to someone else.

How did it happen? Well, I tried to give my body over to serving, for a little while, as a vehicle for my fertility. And it was...educational.

Let's put this in context: you can't deal, holistically, with trans issues without stumbling across fertility. And fertility is a big dog to be coming out, you know? If we're talking about big mojo to be poking with a stick, fertility is about as big and old as you can get.

After all, it's older than people. Hell, it's older than animals, this notion of the reproductive drive and everything around it, even though we started making a big symbolic deal out of it, oh, shortly before we figured out that sharpening one end of a stick made mastodons marginally easier to kill. A lot of anthropologists and historians will tell you that we know humans were humans--sentient, society-forming, humans--when we start to find burials. Consciousness of death and our connections to each other and contemplation of what we mean, you see. But we were probably pretty damn worked up about fertility right before that.

Now, relationships between the greater trans/transgender community and fertility, those vary a great deal, depending on what folk do with their lives and genders and how physical they get about it. But transsexuals? We choose to make ourselves infertile.

Let's take a deep breath, and look at that again.

We choose to eliminate our fertility. Animals. Deliberately. Eliminating. Their ability. To reproduce.
It's not just, say, non-reproductive sex. Or committing to a lifetime of non-reproductive sex. Or celibacy, even. Those leave the mechanisms intact. And you can trans- gender and leave all that intact, too. But when you trans- physical sex? There are consequences.

Some of us come up with end-runs around the concept. As it turns out, this thing happens even before you monkey around with genital structure directly. Long before (or in the absence of) a hysterectomy or a vaginoplasty, in most cases, hormone-replacement therapy tends to render the subject--well, not to put too fine a point on it--sterile. But that's on a timetable, and a lot of us sneak in in advance, duck on down to a fertility clinic, lay down some cash for some freezer space, and preserve us some gametes before the clock runs down. Heck, those of us on the male-to-female spectrum, once upon a time, produced those gametes by the squillions, without even much thinking about it. (I don't know if I did or didn't. I was never tested, and there's a goodly chance I was never fertile in the first place due to my dubious genotypical status. We'll never know now.)
This is a handy solution, if you have the money to put down. It was what I was going to do.

The trouble is, there is a running clock on it. You stay on the hormones long enough--and we're talking a couple of months--that stuff stops working, progressively. You have to go back off the meds to--and now I'm going to focus of MtF-spectrum stuff, because I know it better, and if any of the guys want to drop in to offer a FtM-spectrum perspective to match, feel free--get your little gamete factories working well enough to get your sperm counts high enough to save a viable sample.

When this first became a decision to make, I did not have $400 laying around. My partner offered to help, being amazing, but I was proud, and in bad, bad financial straits, getting my healthcare through a nonprofit emergency clinic, and still having rough times with my family. And on top of all of that, I was scared--imagine you've gone through all the effort to come out as trans, to deal with that, to identify against all expectations as who you are and identify further what you want to do with your body, and then you need to go to a fertility clinic and have a bunch of long, detailed conversations about your genitalia. Poke poke. And then you have to--in a weirdly clinical setting--manage to, ah, stimulate the situation to the point where you, shall we say, produce results. To go in the freezer next to the Otter Pops.

A lot of folk have more guts than I do, and manage just that for themselves. I was deeply leery. I didn't think I'd even be able to physically manage, and all that distress for the longshot gamble on maybe getting some genetic material to save in case I want genetic offspring at some point in the future, even though I don't right now? Hard to make simple decisions about it. In the end, going on the medication took chronological, emotional, and financial priority, and I put off the decision. And then two months went by. And then four. And then eight. And then it became clear that if I wanted to be making babies in anything resembling the old-fashioned way, I needed to put the brakes on my physical transition.

My partner has always talked about how beautiful the children we would make would be, and I have agreed.
My parents have leaned hard on me to do this, as a sort of compromise buy-off for their getting more comfortable with having a daughter. It's standard--after all, both of their cultures put a lot of weight on the filial duty to reproduce and carry on the family line. The notion of me changing my name is hard enough on them; the notion of my blood ending in my body is harder. I have siblings, but it's still hard. As family-oriented as I am, that might be hardest.
And this is me: I used to cry myself to sleep, at twenty-one, at the thought that I would never be able to bear a child. I have never had a problem with adoption, and I always considered it as an option for myself, since I have always wanted to parent one way or another. But it's hard to get an adoption approved when you're a brown transsexual woman who's probably ending up with another woman, and neither of us swimming in cash. And it still dug in deep when I thought about that emptiness anyhow, and I cannot predict how future versions of me will feel about it.

So I talked to the doctor down at the nonprofit clinic. She told me that if I went off the hormones for a month, and got tested, and then maybe stayed off another month, I might theoretically be able to get my counts up high enough to go through the ordeal of saving a sample. After that, I would have to start all over again on the medications, have to go through the vomiting, gut-wrenching, nose-bleeding, nauseous adjustment period all over again, with a possibility left open I didn't have before. Maybe. An even longer-shot gamble, now, with a good chance that even with all that, there'd be nothing to save.
Likely, the changes that have already happened to my body wouldn't reverse. Probably, there wouldn't be complications if I just went off for a month or two and back on. Yes, it would be a strain on my system, but I'm not yet twenty-five, and resilient. And then there would be options. Just a month or three of my life. Just another short delay, when I managed to wait twenty years to do this thing, and so many don't get the chance until much later in life. A month is a blink of an eye. Two months isn't even a season.

So I went off the hormone treatment. And nothing has ever convinced me more that I'm doing the right thing for myself by being on it. Just talking about the months off with the doctor scared the hell out of me, somewhere visceral; I was just about holding back tears in the exam room, and again when I tried to talk to my partner about it. Within hours, it escalated, and by the next morning, I felt--for the first time since I began this thing--like I wasn't at home in my skin. My dysphoria, absent for weeks and months, reasserted itself. Suddenly, pulling on my jeans and tank top, I felt like I was playing dress-up. Like all this was a mockery. It all just seemed hopeless. The prospect of more months feeling more or less like I used to pre-transition horrified me. I felt like I was giving in, somehow. Backsliding. Conceding ground I bled to win each inch of.
For, what, a day off the Pill? It didn't make sense. Even on a basic endocrine level, I shouldn't have been chemically disrupted enough yet to get as upset as I did. I was doing this for responsibility and filial loyalty, right? For foresight and the big picture and the long view? For the basic organic urge to reproduce? Wasn't it selfish and self-centered and shortsighted to place how I felt right then ahead of how I might want what options a decade down the line?

Didn't I owe my fertility to my family? Didn't I owe them to disrupt my body, make it feel unnatural and off, so that it could serve as an incubator for my reproductive capabilities, just for a little while, a matter of months? What was my temporary skin-crawling alienation from myself, just for a little while, just for a little while, next to, well, Posterity?

And then it started sounding awfully familiar, and I started feeling, on a tiny level, like it was maybe time to think about, well, choices. The analogy sort of drew itself; on a small scale, what was on the table was my reproductive freedom. Was my body for me to live in, or to make more bodies with my family name attached? Was it for my partner's needs? My parents'? My own? Was it worth it to make the deeply-uncomfortable concession of siring a child just so I could have one with my nose, when even if I never get to adopt I can still help caretake? I can be a teacher. A favorite aunt. A godmother. I can do those things, and at this stage in my life, those seem like far more attractive things than this mess, this looming, inexplicably dreadful thing that was the possibility of being a grown woman called on to father a kid someday, to compromise with my folks, to offer the possibility to my partner. To concede that the fertility that I have--that I had--was a male-bodied fertility, something I have never wanted any part of.

We all make compromises. We all decide what parts of us we allow others--including our loved ones--to lay claim on. But something broke when I made the decision to transition. I had to commit to the prospect that I belong to myself, and that I have the right--leaving aside other people's notions of who, what, and how I am--to make my decisions, and to look in the eye the notion that every cell of me is my own responsibility, subject to my own choices. And then I had to come to terms with the fact that, in some ways, there were choices for which it was too late. There will be mourning for that. It is what it is.

So I sat down with my partner, seeing as I was hyperventilating and getting weepy, and we talked it over, and she made it clear that my decisions about my body are my decisions, and reiterated her support. And after two whole days delaying my physical transition, I poured myself a glass of water. Dropped my pills onto my tongue. And took it back.

shoulder to the wheel

Okay, so I'm a deadbeat blogger. We know this. I've had all of two days off in the past month, most of my days on are ten- and twelve-hour shifts, I'm sleeping whenever I can, and I'm pretty wrecked.
Honestly, I've been reading, when I can, but I barely have the time to comment, let alone post. (Let's say nothing of my ability to do stuff like, oh, see the doctor and dentist.)

Well, blogging, especially political and feminist blogging, has got to be about community. I've refrained from doing as much linking as I ought to because I assume you-all are all reading the good stuff anyway.
I decided that's silly. I talk about how we ought to have more important concerns than irrelevant starlets and whether or not they wear whatever, that we ought to pay more attention to our allies? Well, fine. Money, meet mouth. No more kicking around with fifty jillion open tabs waiting to write something brilliant about what other people are brilliantly writing.

Here:
Listen to Nezua, telling you about the rights you've got when the boots hit the pavement. It's one I know some about myself, having discovered that when they're bigger and more armed than you, you have what rights they decide to give you.
Listen to Sylvia, who is wondering why the giant neon sign that says TERRORISM HERE seems completely meaningless to greater media when the weapon-stockpiling terrorists are white people and the targets are brown folks.
Listen to Brownfemipower, when she points out abuse of a media member. I've had my body saved from breaking by cameras. When they stop being scared of doing wrong in front of cameras because they can make the cameras disappear or because they stop caring or don't think anyone will hear it, you know you've got real problems. She's giving you stuff to watch. If you haven't, do. Actually, just listen to BFP as often as possible, because she's telling you stuff you need to hear. Pay attention. Please.
I mean, seriously, as petitpoussin points out, what is it? How are we allowing ourselves to go in circles about--actually, no. How are we panicking about outfits and tossing out people who could be allies instead of finding ways to welcome them in and--actually, look.
Let's just go with what Blackamazon had to say about it. For all the talk about solidarity and Class Whichever and We're All In This Together and how my demographic's concerns become those of more privileged folks when they need the ammo or the photo-op, but take a backseat to interminable debates about irrelevant media personalities as soon as there's a challenge, look. There's folks who will have your back, and those who won't. And we've got to look after each other. We've got to keep our eyes on who is actually working in solidarity, and who's paying lip service. We've got to build community with the folks who actually have given some evidence that they care.

Some folks don't have to think about these things. Here, Magniloquence points out that some of us have very, very different concepts of what "police" means. Here, Spotted Elephant grabs us by our collars and wants to know where the hell we are when it comes to time stand in solidarity with the disabled and mentally ill. For crying out loud, can we just stop dehumanizing each other while we're trying to "fix" people's problems?

Solidarity says "not my problem" is nonsense. We're all in this together. If you're not brown, you're not disabled, you're not poor, your legal status is all in one place, if--actually, see, no. There shouldn't have to be a list.
It should all get summed up when we tell each other, as allies, check your privilege.
Sit back. Listen to folks. Learn something. And then get your hands dirty.

on the record

This is another guest post by Pigeon, in response to the huge mess going around right now in relation to the accouncement regarding the Duke lacrosse rape case. I didn't feel qualified to offer an opinion myself, certainly not one that's not already been offered by folk who know better than I do, but this is important to read. If this doesn't bring it home for you and hurt, I'm not sure you're a person.
Anyway. I should leave it at that.
Except this, considering how many trolls are out running around right now: if you so much as consider being an asshole about this, I will moderate you so hard your ancestors will feel it, capisce?
--ll.




i tried to write about this post a few days ago, a few days after the duke verdict came out.
i tried, and erased and rewrote and erased, and gave up.
i want this to come out right. i want this to be so many things, i don’t much think it will be. but i think i need to write this anyway.

i didn’t expect the duke case to shake me so much. i feel like i hear about, talk about, read about, think about rape every day. i like to think i’ve built up some callous at this point, a tough, thick covering to take the edge off.

the whole thing caught me off guard. i didn’t follow the case very closely, mostly just reading feminist analyses on various blogs, snippets on npr. closely enough though, to know that the whole thing was deeply fucked up, that something happened to that woman that night, whether or not it fit the official charges or was perpetrated by the three accused.

and now they’ve been proclaimed not guilty, and that’s fine. i don’t know if they did it, but let’s presume innocence. glad they got their names cleared.

except now you hear the news, following “three boys innocent” with “she was never raped” and liar and whore. and no one seems to notice that the accused men’s innocence has nothing to do with whether or not she was raped, only that they didn’t do it. she called 911 for a reason, she went to the hospital afterwards, the examination supported her claims of sexual assault. we have no reason to think those results were wrong, no new information to contest it. perhaps she picked the wrong guys from the line-up, but that has little to do with what actually happened to her.
(go to feministe for more intelligent, coherent and thorough thoughts on this. read the comments at your own risk. i wish i hadn’t.)

but no one seems to remember that. instead it’s just liar, liar, liar. as if survivors aren’t called liars often enough as it is. this case just adds fuel to the fire of news media crying out, “she says she was raped, but what if she’s lying!” perpetuating the idea that women routinely lie about sexual assault to deflect attention from their own misdoings.

i don’t know a lot of statistics, and am never quite sure when to trust them, but i do know a lot of women, and i trust them a whole lot. of all the women i know, more than not have been raped, sexually assaulted or sexually abused at some point in their lives. of these women, more than not never reported. and of the few who did, more than not suffered pretty intense negative consequences because of it.

and no, this is not just the women i know, and, yes, they are representative of a much larger trend that exists in equal numbers outside of the communities that i’m a part of. it is not just a queer women thing, a once-alcoholic-drug-addicted women thing, a feminist women thing, a young collegiate women thing, a femme women thing.

and so here's yet another very public rape trial which ultimately tells survivors that it's your fault because you put yourself in a vulnerable situation or let him buy your dinner once, because you were drunk or not wearing enough clothing or made eye contact and smiled, besides, you’re probably a slut. and if you do try to press charges, no one will believe you anyway.

so, whatever, i was raped when i was sixteen. i was at your standard someone's-parents-are-out-of-town-for-the-weekend-let's-get-wasted high school party, drunk way past the point of blackout, he was the 21 year old buying us the booze. i thought i had been stupid and irresponsible getting so drunk in the first place, talked about how i needed to “take responsibility” for my behavior. rape never crossed my mind.

i was in therapy at the time, and told my therapist about what happened. she mentioned, initially, that she needed to check the mandatory reporting laws, that she might be legally bound to report it as statutory rape. i told her i didn’t want it reported. i never heard about it again, so assumed the law agreed with me. we talked about reckless sexual behavior, how that tied into my other self-destructive tendencies. the word rape never came up again.

looking back, i realize she wasn’t that great of a therapist, but i’m still shocked and retroactively appalled that she didn’t identify what happened as rape, that she apparently bought into my insistence that it was my fault for getting drunk enough to be blacked out enough to kind of say yes to a guy i was still too dizzy to even see clearly. (the left side of his face had a massive scar running from the top of his cheek bone down his jaw, the aftermath of a drunk driving accident a few years back. it is the only part of him that i can still picture in my mind, and something i did not actually see until the next morning). she knew how much i’d drunk—after smoking a few bowls, i downed ten shots of vodka in less than ten minutes, then topped off with some beer, on an empty stomach, at 100 pounds—that it was something of a miracle that i hadn’t ended up in a hospital with alcohol poisoning. we talked about why drinking that much was really not a good option for me, but not about how you are totally unable to consent while in a blackout. looking back, i can’t decide whether it was a matter of gross incompetence or internalized victim-blaming, or both.

what i didn’t know until very recently was that she actually was legally required to report what had happened. apparently the law is pretty straight forward.

261.5
(c) Any person who engages in an act of unlawful sexual
intercourse with a minor who is more than three years younger than
the perpetrator is guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony, and
shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one
year, or by imprisonment in the state prison.

he was 21, i was 16.
5 year age difference.
pretty clear.

there’s more too, about what does or does not constitute consent, and there’s the broader california rape law, both of which would have something to say about my blood alcohol level, but that’s almost beside the point.

whether or not i thought it was rape, whether or not she thought it was rape, she was legally obligated to report it.

and i can’t help but wonder why she didn’t, and what would have happened if she had.

as it was, my life was a mess. he lied about what happened a week later, my friends had known him longer than they’d known me, and i was quickly and quietly ostracized. although i didn’t see a connection at the time, my already not-so-great eating diminished from little food to no food, instead swallowing caffeine pills by the handful. more than anything, i was overwhelmingly disoriented. i could never remember how many pills i’d had at any given time, so would have another just in case. i remember throwing up and nearly collapsing at the park down the street from my house, laying on the sidewalk because that was all i could do. some of the neighbor stoner boys helped walk me home, and i made it up stairs in my room just in time to start shaking and convulsing uncontrollably, then puking some more. i was mentally and emotionally completely checked out, but my body knew and my body reacted, shaking and collapsing and puking where i couldn’t scream or cry or feel anything. (of course, the combination of caffeine pills and ephedrine and no food and no sleep helped that along nicely). i have no idea how i went to school, did homework, had conversations. i was utterly and completely wrecked, and i truly had no idea why. i maintained then and for years afterwards that the event had not affected me at all.

i can only imagine how much worse it would have been if she had reported. whether or not i would have given her his name, she would have had to tell my parents and the DA or the police or whoever these things are officially reported to. my parents would have made me tell them who it was, and would almost certainly have pressed charges. the friends who had quietly ostracized me would have then been forced to pick sides—and really, we all know whose side they were going to be on—and what was an incredibly lonely and isolating time might instead of been one of public shaming and humiliation. i imagine a hospital examination would have been required, which would have been terrifying and humiliating, followed by having to recount the events over and over and over again to the litany of people who inevitably get involved in official investigations—doctors, social workers, police, lawyers, we can probably add school officials because let’s face it, gossip gets round real quick at an all-girl’s catholic school. and there are all the ways in which they could try to discredit me—i’d had previous sexual partners (read: promiscuous), i’d lied to my parents to go to an unchaperoned party (read: dishonest, rebellious, put myself in a vulnerable/dangerous situation, irresponsible), had a mix of drugs and alcohol in my system (read: blatant disregard for the law, reckless behavior, self-destructive), history of self-destructive behaviors (read: emotionally unstable, mentally ill). it wouldn’t matter that i was an honor student with good grades, that i had never been in trouble before, that i was well-rounded in my activities, and generally pretty responsible. it wouldn’t matter that was i good kid, and really, just a kid even though i would have hated you for saying so. it feels cynical of me to assume that i would have been accused of lying, of trying to get attention, of being emotionally unstable, etc, etc. but i’ve been around long enough to know that it would mostly likely have gone down that way, especially since he was lying about it to begin with.

and sixteen year old me, who did not call it rape, did not even consider that it might be rape, would have been forced to choose between going along with charges that i didn’t want pressed in the first place, or saying it didn’t happen, or that i had wanted it, or something else that was not true, to try to put an end to it, which would only add to the opinion that i was some stupid, lying girl trying to get attention.

i know it might seem irrelevant to go down that road, create a reality that did not and will never now occur. it’s all guesswork, anyway, my best guesses of how it would have gone down knowing what i do about the people who were involved and the process of reporting sexual assault. but there is a point. ultimately, that therapist did me a huge favor by not reporting, however ethically questionable and illegal that decision may have been. it would have torn my life to shreds.

but here’s why this matters. i am the kind of girl who is privileged by our legal system. light-skinned, well educated, well spoken, from an upper-middle class family. my mother is even a lawyer. i was a good student & generally responsible kid on top of that. i was also pretty fucked up, but those battles were kept very private. on the outside, i had both institutional privilege and the approval of popular culture on my side. not to mention, i had a loving and supportive family, and a decent friend-base, even if most of them lived on the other side of the country at that point.

and it would still have turned out really fucking ugly. at best, i would only have had to face social consequences at school, among my peers; at worst, if it actually went to trial, if the media got involved (as cities go—if you could even call it that—the place was pretty small, so it’s entirely possible), i would have been surrounded and questioned and examined from all sides. and that would only be the outward assault—i have no idea how i would have held up emotionally under that kind of scrutiny. and who’s to say what the outcome would have been, i could very well have ended up a liar and a slut who almost ruined some poor boy’s life.

yeah, reporting sure is not looking too appealing.

and then imagine that you didn’t have a supportive family, maybe you risked physical abuse if your parents found out. imagine you’re black and the people you’re reporting to throw back racist stereotypes about how black women are promiscuous and sexually aggressive. imagine you’re a drug addict, imagine you’ve been in trouble before, maybe a lot, maybe you’ve got a record. imagine that he was actually your boyfriend, and that you’d been having sex for a few months now. imagine that your whole high school calls you a slut already. imagine that you really like to wear short skirts.

and how much worse does reporting sound now?