the worth of human life

Repre-fucking-sent.
Mabuhay, hermana.

The world keeps moving, everyone, and the upwelling of truth is everywhere. Take a listen.



(embedded video of Filipina trans activist Sass Rogando Sasot seated at the assembly of the United Nations, speaking passionately about human rights. I don't have a transcript, but if I get or make one, I'll post it here.)
(thanks to a commenter, transcript can be found here: http://www.rainbowbloggers.com/2009/12/un-speech-reclaiming-lucidity-of-our.html)

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.

we are ready now

Brownfemipower, once again, speaks truth.

The Allied Media Conference is life-changing. I know because I was lucky enough to go last summer. I was able to go, in part, thanks to the generous help of a couple of you out there who thought it was important enough to help me out. The dividends of that kindness have echoed through my entire life like a shockwave of affirmation, strength, hope, and new community. I left Detroit last June with a new way of looking at the world, a new courage to engage, and new hope for the greatness and potential of letting radical love be at the center of everything.

I never got around to posting about AMC last year because I couldn't find the words. I couldn't describe what it was like to walk into a dynamic community of people who all had been willing to sacrifice in order to come together and hope--without the constraint of always, always having to go back to square one, without the exhaustion, for just a little while, of an oppressive world--who had brought their dearest families, their secret joys, their history-battered strengths in order to dedicate themselves to evolving a new way to go forward. I saw five generations holding hands and supporting each other, across differences, due to deep and mutual respect. I saw children light up with possibility and bravery and laughter. I saw teenagers, arm in arm, teaching everyone in the room what it means to learn. I saw elders in a place of honor, leading the way toward change. And rolling around Detroit, watching as a city forced to its knees by the betrayal of industry continues to provide incredible examples of growth and innovation and faith in the power of community to the rest of the world, I saw a new kind of community that I'd never had before. It was about making not what we're paid to make, not what we're told to make, but what we need, for each other.

At AMC I made connections I had never dreamed I could have--not just as an aspiring writer and media-maker (though I found those and then some) or as a radical activist (we got amazing work done and started projects that blow me away every day) but as a queer woman of color, a sister, a partner, moving through the world and trying to figure out where I fit in it. I went from quietly saying "I'm a woman of color" with my head hung awkwardly to standing up proud and saying "I'm a woman of color" in a clear voice full of certainty. It was the best reminder I could imagine of the idea that that identity is fundamentally about claiming yourself as part of a greater whole, of defining your own identity by your choice of solidarity with others. It's not a "my name is"--it's an "I belong to." It's not a "here's what I'm called"--it's a "here's who my family is." It says you've chosen to prioritize your connection to community, the shared struggle across different iterations of oppression, and the irresistible truth that together we are far more than any one of us.

The Allied Media Conference gave me new tools as a media activist, but it also reminded me where I belong, and to whom I am connected. The people I stood with, sat around a kitchen table with, traded stories and skills and dreams with, re-taught me not just how to do the work, but who I am. They gave me more to stand for, more to love, and more to value within myself. I could integrate all those identities--trans, queer, rural, brown, religious--and nobody tried to force me to take myself apart and just be parts of me. I came away more aware of myself and my context than ever before, ready to keep growing.

On the plane to Michigan, my bag lost, my flight delayed and rescheduled, sandwiched between a dental hygenist and a yuppie who wouldn't turn off his fancy phone, I told people I was on my way to a professional conference of media-makers, and that was true.
On the plane home to Oregon, weeping openly with the joy of discovery and the pangs of distance from a new world of wonders, I told people I'd been in Detroit visiting family, and that was true, too.

I'm ready for more of that. Are you?

same as the old boss

I'm sorry, you were making a point about online feminists reproducing historical patterns of marginalization and privilege?

I couldn't hear you over the deafening roar of "I'll tell you what you're going to be called, and you're going to sit down and like it."

Lesson, kids: when someone you have privilege over says, "Excuse me, but I would appreciate if you didn't use that word to describe me, it makes me really uncomfortable," what is the proper response?
A: "I'm sorry you feel that way, but I'm going to keep doing it."
B: "Some of my best friends are (insert somebody here), and they told me it was okay."
C: "I'm reclaiming that language for you, as a show of alliance. It shows I'm comfortable with your kind."
D: "You're wrong about the context of that word. It's not offensive and I didn't mean it to be."
E: "I guess I'll try to consider not saying it in front of you people in the future."
F: "Why are you so oversensitive?"
G: "Oh, okay, I didn't realize that. Sorry, I'll knock it off, because I respect your ability to know what is and is not hurtful to you."

Because only one of those is going to get me saying, "Oh, cool, I'm glad you understand, thanks. Shall we move on?" And the others? That's your greater inclusion? Let me tell you where to stick it.

(And all blogs are businesses? What about all the people who never attempt to profit from blogging, not because they can't, but because their aim isn't their own individual career success, but to build widely-accessible community connection? You know, like most of the women of color you reference?)

Seriously, as a smalltime woman of color blogger I really, really wanted to like this post and the ensuing conversation. And you just let me know that as a trans woman of color, it's okay to "colonize" me.

going around in (Venn-diagram) circles

I keep saying I'm going to write about this, and I keep not doing so.

So here's a question I've been asking myself:

Why is it that I feel much safer in women-of-color spaces that are mostly cissexual and straight than I do in queer-and-trans spaces that are mostly white?  Why is it that I've gotten so much more understanding from one than another?

I've been trying to suss this one out, because it confuses the hell out of me, and I've come at it from multiple angles.  Is it just a coincidence of which circles I run in?  Is is because the (white) queer spaces I've run in are far more clueless about white privilege and than the (straight) women-of-color spaces are about straight-and-cissexual privilege?  Why is that?  Is it because oppression-by-race is somehow a better beginning education in privilege than oppression-by-gender-or-orientation?  I'm really not sure.

I've considered, too, that even a lot of the queer spaces I've run in are cissexual-dominated, so, to wit:  I'm a trans dyke of color.  Maybe it's a matter of cissexual (white) queer spaces and cissexual (straight) WoC spaces, really, dealing with me as two kinds of Other and fitting them together in different ways.  So why is it?

I'd really like to have a discussion about these issues, because it's counter to a lot of what I was told as a baby activist--for instance, that communities of color have more of a problem with queer issues than white communities do.  In my experience, that hasn't been true.  Is it an economic-class thing, where some groups are just forced to live near the disadvantaged trans members of their group and thus have more familiarity through shared disadvantage?  Is it a cultural-imperialism thing, where those of us with roots in more trans-and-queer-inclusive cultures are at an advantage compared to those whose ancestral cultures were not so understanding?  Is it just an American thing?  

I just can't figure out what it is, and it's not only an interesting question to me, it's a matter of safety.  I've left a whole lot of primarily-white queer and even exclusively-trans spaces because they were not safe spaces for me as a woman of color or because there was simply a poor understanding of intersectional privilege and related ideas.  Too much "Is Gay The New Black?" and not enough Gloria Anzaldua.  Too many deeply transphobic LGb(t?) spaces, even ones labeled "trans-inclusive" that only really mean female-assigned genderqueer and transmasculine folks, you know?  And I've found warm shelter over and over in women-of-color spaces that were by-and-large straight and other than me exclusively cissexual, with people who surprised me by considering it their own job to do their homework, understand my situation, and make me welcome--to really acknowledge the patterns of intersectional oppression.  Why is that?  Do I just run in the wrong trans and queer circles?  Have I just been lucky in my POC circles?  I honestly don't know.

What are your experiences with these dynamics?  Are they vastly different from mine?  Why do you think things are the way you've experienced them?  I think there's something valuable to be picked out of these discrepancies, if we chip at them for a bit.

shall not perish

Today is the tenth annual International Trans Day of Remembrance.
Yesterday was the one hundred and forty-fifth anniversary of some of the most influential five minutes I know of, five minutes and ten sentences that mattered and continue to matter and, I think, apply on this dark day, as well.
They came from a depressed, disabled person who was probably queer and certainly haunted, looking out over a community in mourning, crushed by loss, divided by rage and blood-grudges and barely holding back from another round of vengeance. They came from a hated, mocked leader who looked out on a people undergoing tumultuous change, some free for the first time in memory, some having to deal with it. They came from bereavement and fear and the understanding that sometimes, there's just nothing you can say that will make it better, make it go away, but there is always--always--the kind of hope that says, what we can do? We can work to keep this from ever happening again. We can't do this loss and these lives honor by anything else: we just need to put our shoulders to the wheel and do the hard work of hope.
I'd change the gendered pronouns, myself, were it my speech, but they were the conventions of the time, and it is not.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government, of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." --A. Lincoln in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., 19 November, 1863

the quick and the dead

EDITED TO ADD--IMPORTANT: It has come further to my attention that HRC is not in fact doing any of the planning for Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance, which is, of course, a glaring error. I am retaining the current text to preserve my inaccuracy rather than pretend it never happened.
Having checked with one of this year's organizers--someone who did work I admired a great deal for last year's event--I had it confirmed to me that while HRC lobbied hard to have involvement and control over Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance and in fact announced to their listserv and on their website that they were so involved, the organizers from Portland State University took a stand and chose to limit HRC's involvement to a display table.
I find this news both heartening and reassuring. At the same time, I also think it remains important and disturbing that HRC tried to run the Day of Remembrance, and is doing so in many other cities and towns across the country. Additionally, I think it remains important that HRC continues to claim their heavy involvement in Portland's commemoration even though they were not invited to do so--they are supposedly presenting the commemoration "in conjunction" with the people who have actually put it together.
This information indicates that while my point regarding Portland specifically can be set in part aside, to my great comfort, it still stands in all the places where organizers were not able to stand up to HRC as Portland's did. I commend PSU's organizers and chosen speakers, and again apologize for repeating HRC's inaccurate publicity in this piece.


It has come to my attention that the Human Rights Campaign has got its hands on Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance.
Yes, that Human Rights Campaign.

It's being touted, along with many events across the U.S. this year, as a change of emphasis from "Trans Day of Remembrance" to "Trans Awareness Day," something much more upbeat, much more focused on feel-good celebration of the community, something much more acceptable to upper-class, culturally-normative assimilationists you can put in the newspaper without making anyone feel threatened.

Last year's Day of Remembrance in Portland featured a young, poor, politically-radical trans woman of color (hi!) as an invited speaker and was organized, grassroots, by a multiracial, cross-class, cross-generational group of locals, largely students. This year it's HRC, a Democratic Party flack, a local therapist, and the executive director of an advocacy organization, two of the three white, all binary-identified, middle-class, and middle-aged--all acceptably-photogenic Spokespeople For The Community. This is not to disparage those speakers, some of whom I've worked alongside personally--I just find the choices telling. They may all be good people who do good work, but the diversity seems to have gone away in who we're presenting as our community's face, at the same time that we're supposed to be de-emphasizing commemoration of the dead and trying to re-focus on the sunshiny bits. I cannot imagine that has nothing to do with our inviting a national GLb organization in, one whose goals have largely been assimilationist, white, middle-class, and yes, anti-trans--to "present" us.

The Day of Remembrance is not about being photogenic. It is not about fundraising or lobbying or recruitment. It does not need the HRC.

The Day of Remembrance is ours, and it is sacred. It is the one day we set aside to honor those in our community, overwhelmingly poor trans women of color, who were killed due to bigotry and hatred. It is a single day in the year where we make certain that the names of the murdered are heard and held up, so we can all remember that these people mattered, were real, were loved, and are missed. It's a day to gather the community together and call attention to the violence directed against us and the caring we have for each other. It came from us. It was built by us. It was never supposed to be flashy or glitzy. It is a solemn mourning for the dead, a place to hold hands, and a promise to those who violence took away from us that we who are still living will hold together, take care of each other, and push forward together into a world where that violence is only a painful memory.

We can do better than this, for our sacred dead. We can do better for ourselves.
We need better than this.

Our community is constantly looking down a gun-barrel, and organizations that don't honor or support us continually ask for more of our money, our time, our hope, and now, even our events so they can push their own agenda--one that often leaves us behind. It doesn't just leave us behind deliberately, as in the ENDA fiasco. It also leaves us behind by prioritizing goals that many of us simply don't have on the radar because we're too busy surviving. An inclusive ENDA would have helped guarantee jobs and homes for the most marginalized in the queer community, a bare chance to just have a table to put food on, let alone the food. Instead, we're focusing all of the queer community's resources on what, marriage equality? That's a worthy goal. It's just not on the docket for many of us--working-class queers, queer people of color, trans people--who're often more worried about keeping our families alive than having full legal equality for those families. That equality would be wonderful, as would the public affirmation of us as full citizens. But those of us who aren't even considered citizens--those of us who aren't even considered human, or important enough for an organization that purports to speak for us to advocate for--those of us who are denied votes, livelihoods, and more--we have a much more basic agenda. Make it till tomorrow. Make it till next week. We're dying out here, this year at a rate of more-than-twice monthly, and we are not such a large community we can afford that. This month alone, as many as six trans people--again, almost exclusively poor trans women of color--were reported murdered, and the month isn't even over.

Where are our priorities? Where are the priorities of our so-called allies? You were all out on the street, in the hundreds of thousands, protesting Proposition 8. Where will you be on Thursday night?

HRC just recently put out a new line of designer wear. (Hey, look, it's Christian Siriano, who made his fame spitting on trans people and encouraging the public to use bigoted slurs!) As a young, queer trans woman of color with a white-collar education and a blue-collar job, I can't afford new shoes, and I'm one of the more privileged in my community. Do you get it yet? Do you get why this is such an obscenity?

I am all for marriage equality, believe me. I proudly wear the ring that displays my engagement to my partner, another queer woman, and I look forward to our wedding, whether or not it's legalized. I want those legal protections for my family, and I want the security of knowing that my society places equal responsibility, honor, obligation, and sacred meaning on my marriage as anyone else's. As the law currently stands--and until we achieve marriage equality in the United States--as a trans person with mismatched government ID, I can't legally marry anyone.
But I have to live long enough to get married, and I have to know that my partner won't come to harm for loving me, and I would like to no longer have to carry the knowledge that as marriage is for people, until my society considers me fully human, it will never consider me "marriage material."

Listen, I know marriage is important, but it is not the only issue, here, okay? Because, per the studies even HRC cites, as a trans woman I have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered. 1 in 12. To put that in perspective, as a member of the general population I have an approximately 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car crash. I am almost ten times likelier to die of murder than a car crash! How many people do you know who've been in traffic accidents? How many of you know someone who's lost someone to a car wreck? Because they're extraordinarily common. And they're accidents. Murder is not. A population ten times likelier to be victim to violent crime as the general population, with a more than fifty percent sexual assault rate and a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered, is not an accident. It is a pattern. It is an epidemic. It is an all-out war. And marriage won't protect us from that. Neither will cocktail-party fundraisers.

You know what else won't protect us from that? Mainstream queer organizations. Not "GLBTQ" newspapers that purport to serve a whole community but list themselves, when not being called out, as "Gay and Lesbian News"--and give the Trans Day of Remembrance an almost two-inch blurb, a whole page to a gay men's drag show, and half a page to a gardening column. Not the Human Rights Campaign with its consistent pattern of taking trans people's money, time, and hope only to cut the legs out from under us when they think it'll make them a buck, who're keen on replacing our in-community, vital Day of Remembrance with an upbeat "Trans Awareness Day" that's easier for cissexual and straight people to swallow without feeling guilty about that long, long list of names, easier to organize parties with keynote speakers around, easier to pass the collection plate during. We need more of that, after all; the greater community only has Pride Festivals and a couple of TV channels to work with, right? All those dead people are such a downer. We should focus on our accomplishments and what makes us feel good, not dwell so much on the overwhelming epidemic of violence directed at our community and what to do about it, not take a whole two hours of a whole day in the autumn to solemnly commemorate the passing of hundreds of people who often never even got a decent funeral, to honor those so disparaged and degraded as sacred, missed, and important--
Where's the champagne in that?

You know what else won't keep you and you and me off that crack-of-doom, heartbreaking list? Hiding the freaks, sweeping the genderqueers under the rug, putting only our most privileged out front, bowing and scraping, and constantly apologizing for existing in a way that might make someone uncomfortable. That won't save my life. That won't save the lives of my friends. Trusting cissexual organizations to represent us and choose who represent us because they have money--that won't save our lives. Considering ourselves less than the cissexual people around us--that won't save our lives.

This isn't a matter of "reasonable people can disagree" or "it's just politics."
This is life and death.
This is whether or not you and I find a world where my fiancée has a 1 in 12 chance of being a widow due to murder alone acceptable, and whether or not watering down the one chance to honor those our community has lost to violent crime, the one chance to call attention to the constant violence aimed at my trans family and especially young, poor trans women of color, is the way to change such a world.
This is a matter of "allies" who turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest for civil marriage equality staying home and dead silent, a week later, when it comes to advocating for and honoring murdered trans people and the great loss to all of us now that those beautiful people are gone. You want us on the street for your "Day Without Gays" or cheering for a group screening of "Milk"? Show up. Just once. For us. We're not just getting made fun of out here, and it's not just our relationships being invalidated--it's our basic humanity and right to live another day. Hundreds of thousands were in the street for marriage equality last week. Last year, at the Day of Remembrance in Portland, I saw fewer than forty attendees.

I would love to get married. As a trans woman, especially a queer trans woman in a same-sex relationship, I have just as much hurt and yearning about marriage equality as anyone. I plan on living that long, and I plan on living long enough to grow old with my partner and, heaven willing, children. Whether or not that happens may just be up to you.

My right to stay alive is more of a priority than my right to get legally married. And right now, as this society and its culture and its legal system stand, I'm one of many people who don't have either right. You want to fight for my right to marry? Wonderful. Thank you. But those hours protesting, those donations, all that outrage and community support and work--I'd prefer they went, for a start, to keeping me alive out here. And I think the "GLBTQ" community in the United States, such as it is, needs to take a long, hard look at why they have money and time to fight Measure 8, but nothing to give but silence, co-opting, and more requests for us to pipe down and lighten up when it comes to the more than monthly murder of trans people. Show us our lives and deaths matter to you. Show us you acknowledge that the violence against us is worth paying attention to, that our dead were real people who deserved far better, and that our living shouldn't have to live in fear.

See you in the street.

here's some pride for you

Hell yeah.

I generally don't weigh in on the specific situation this badass sister is starting from--Michfest--as I think I've said my piece, and have found it more productive for myself to work on the generalities right now. But I have watched so many people I respect--and people I came of age looking up to--defend its policies, or choose to perform there (you disappoint me, Dar Williams, after making a younger me cry so hard hearing "When I Was a Boy" the first time), or shrug and say, yeah, it sucks, but I have a good time...
And you know what? It's a fucking music festival, you might want to say. One I never intend to go to, because I have better ways to emotionally abuse myself. But it is also a symbol. It is a touchstone. And it sends a message, a message that some of its organizers and proponents are proud to send, and others are just plain willing to be complicit in:

Stay Out. Stop Existing. Accept That You Are Unacceptable. Just Shut Your Damn Mouth And Stop Begging For Scraps. Remember, At All Times, That You Are A Lie.

I said, a while back, hell no. I will not swallow all that. I will not choke down my status as an abomination. I will stop letting you make me afraid, and join voices and hands until we can all raise them up.

And this sister? She's preaching that song in a way that makes me proud to have this thing in common with her. Proud to share a city. Proud to share a people.

This is a letter by one woman to another about a specific situation. And it's also a bright-shining "Ain't I A Woman" heir that hits truth hard and doesn't slow down.

Keep on preaching, woman. Hasta la victoria siempre.

if we do not hang together

A long time ago in a town called Cordoba there was a young music teacher named Abbas. Abbas was earnest, ambitious, well-known around town. Abbas was consumed with an obsession that nearly ended his life.

Abbas was utterly obsessed with the notion that, like the birds, he could fly.
Now, there are a lot of crags around Cordoba, and a lot of birds, so there was plenty for young Abbas to pay attention to. He had a keen eye and an inventor's zeal. He was certain that he would be the first human being to soar among the clouds, the very first to ascend to the heavens. He would leave behind this great crusher gravity, remove his feet from the earth, and dance up with the gulls and eagles. He would be gone from down here, from his prosaic music-teaching existence, and ascend past the height of poetry to somewhere newer, better, that none of his fellows could go. Like a falling angel's opposite number, he would blaze up toward Heaven.

Abbas watched the birds. He made sketches. He began to spend every waking moment nursing his idea, sleeping with it held close when he could sleep. Wood and cloth took shape by his workbench, changing every day with some new addition, some adjustment of the curves. He would collect feathers, and attach them to it wherever he could. And finally Abbas had a pair of wings, a great sail he could strap to himself and fly away with. So he made the announcement: everyone from far and wide should show up to the cliffs outside of town tomorrow afternoon, because for the first time in human history, a man would fly like a bird.

Now, in that day and age, there wasn't much to do around Cordoba that didn't involve hard work and sheep. And when the choice is your day's labor, or a spectating at a grandiose tragedy, most human beings don't have a difficult time choosing.

The hour came, and there was Abbas; some say on the roof of a tower, some say with his feet firmly planted on the cliff-top. His miraculous wings were strapped to his back. And, depending on who you listen to, he was naked, and had glued feathers all over his body. Abbas made his announcement. And then he made his leap.

Abbas and his wings soared, but they didn't get to Heaven. The man transfigured sailed in a straight line for the length of three football fields, by all accounts, over grass and trees and houses and an astonished crowd. And it was only then that Abbas realized, in a flash of insight, that he had forgotten one feature in his design, had passed over one function of a flying machine that ought be considered earlier than late into its maiden flight.
He hadn't thought to design it to land.

The music teacher came to Earth again with a sickening crunch, alive but broken in the wreckage of his miraculous wings. And in his long convalescence, Abbas had plenty of time to modify his design, to become obsessed with newer, better wings, wings that had a tail like a bird's attached, a mechanism for steering and slowing down so a flying man could safely return home to the ground. The trouble was, Abbas couldn't get a running start any more. He could barely walk. And there were, shockingly, no volunteers to test the new pinions, and they mouldered, unused.

Abbas ibn Firnas didn't get to Heaven. He did not make it, alone, to the dome of the blue sky, there to leave behind a normal life forever. But he did have another hobby, and a new obsession. Abbas couldn't get up to Heaven, but he could bring a piece of it down.

So he ground lenses. He built telescopes. And, immersed in study, surrounded by skeptics, Abbas began a new masterwork: an intricate planetarium, one that would bring the stars and the planets close enough for anyone to touch, not just one flying man with a broken dream. It had to be perfect. It had to mimic the wheeling of the constellations, the positions of the Sun and Moon, even the weather. He worked on it, day and night, with his back and legs aching from old disappointments.

Abbas wasn't a young man forever, but by the time he was an old man, there it was: a piece of the sky brought down for everyone to see, a bit of Heaven you could get close to with your feet still on the ground. And by all accounts, he died happy.

That planetarium is gone, but it can still instruct us. Too many of us think if we can leave our fellows behind, if we can just make our devices perfect, we can escape from our human contexts. We can get out of where and what we are, and get to our own Heaven, so long as we're willing to leave everyone else behind. We can make our one pair of wings and ascend. As it turns out, some of us even manage to fly a ways, to soar over houses and mud and gravity, over oppression and degradation, over our own histories. We manage for a little while to separate ourselves out and get close to what we want.
And then it all comes crashing down, and there's nobody there to catch us, there's nobody there willing to carry on our schemes for us, there's nobody who understands what we were trying to do. And it's our fault. We didn't include them from the first. We didn't explain it. We didn't want their help, or their contagion, or the embarrassment of association with them. We wanted to get ours, and get away, and buy that ticket to the skies.

There is another way. It means not getting everything we want, sometimes. It means tinkering with the dream, a little. It means giving up flying away from all the dirt and rock we stand on, and seeing what can be done down here. It means letting go the notion that, alone, we can leave behind others and escape context and history. It means working for each other, not just ourselves.

We can bring some of that Heaven to each other, instead of running for it alone. We can build it, right here where we stand, if only we can set aside the self-centered obsessions for a moment and take stock of what we have. We can sacrifice that lone flight into the wild blue in exchange for making a better world that all of us can share, one with joys for the folk who don't have the privilege of spending days and months building personal flying machines. We can look past the privilege of miraculous wings and devote ourselves to a greater, deeper, more long-lived miracle: creating edifices on the ground that elevate all people. Not everyone has the money and time and material to buy their own wings and workshops. Not everyone can climb a cliff to begin with, let alone wearing nothing but feathers and pride. Why do we keep thinking that it will work to abandon those around us and, by so doing, buy our way to the gates of Paradise? Why do so many of us forget how much we can all see if we just join hands, take up our tools, and dream together?

There are many of us with a half-finished pair of wings in the yard, a new design set aside for far too long, the wreckage of one that didn't work out, the broken bits of past disappointments and hurts. The one thing that can heal those wounds is community. It is solidarity. It is letting others in and joining with them to contribute to something larger than our own comfort and ambition. It is choosing to use what privilege we do have to give more people access to what, before, was far out of reach. Let others invent the hang glider and the airplane and the Tower of Babel. Let us instead turn our brilliance toward something that can be shared, and that, because of its collective strength and firm human foundation, is much harder to knock down.

comfort

"Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed--with no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun." --Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 (NRSV)

I woke up to bad news today. It didn't stop coming.

It was a bad story, and badly told. But the point is straightforward: another sister murdered today. Another name for the Day of Remembrance. Another young trans woman of color, stabbed to death. Another voice we're never going to hear again. Another world, another way, another life, stomped on and punctured and torn open ragged and wet and, in the end, missing.

And another set of jeering, contemptuous onlookers. Another bunch of cops whose first sympathy is with that poor, traumatized ex-convict who stabbed her to death and got her blood all over him, poor shaken guy, duped, tricked, threatened, violated even, though God no, it's no reason to murder someone, it's just, well, you can understand why he would. Another crew of reporters willing to sensationalize and abuse the story of another murder victim, to spin it and twist it until she brought it all on herself, until all the facts of her life and hopes and dreams and loves, her favorite foods, her warm breath, her days and nights and days again--until all of those are reduced down to nothing but a list of exploitable physical flaws, a flock of whispers and insults, a splashy, lurid headline. Until it's all just her shoes and her measurements and a name and idea she worked so hard to leave behind, as though the past years of her own making, besides the snide references to her breasts, can be undone--chipped from the record of history like the name of a hated pharaoh or a long-since-disappeared political rival, scrubbed clean from anyone's having to deal with the complexities of her situation.
Until the public can be satisfied that it's finished the murderer's job. He ripped her breath and blood out of her, after all, but her body remained, in an abandoned pile of meat and bone and contemptible breast implants. Her name remained. Her memory remained, even in neighbors who assumed she could only have so many callers because she must be a whore like all her kind, even in family far away, even in the simple things left behind in her Bronx apartment.

We couldn't have that. We couldn't allow that residue to stay on our daily concrete.
There's nothing new under the sun, okay? But we erase what we cannot stand to remember was here, as best we can. We turn the hose on those sticky bloodstains and try desperately to fence the stolen goods, patch up the places where it's obvious something is missing, make sense of the fact that a twenty-five-year-old woman was here just the other Saturday, laughing, a cheerful fixture of the neighborhood if anything's to be believed in those reports, and now she's not, she's a statistic, she's a corpse, and we can't even afford her the dignity of having been complicated. Because it's not enough that a man more than a decade her senior, with a criminal record, seems to think it was appropriate for him to commit brutal murder, or that for many onlookers, he's the hero of the story. We need to make it make sense. We need to make her make sense. We need a reason that a person might do such a thing to another person, and the truth is just so hard to look at--the truth, and our whole society's complicity in that truth--that we have to turn it inside-out and make it her fault, not his, not ours, just in order to preserve the fragile avoidance of the fact that this world can be terrifying, that it's the people who respond to not seeing what they want to see with knives who often have those knives ready, that those on the bottom fighting for a chance to just scrape out a safe, warm place in this world more often than not do not get that place. The breaking is there, the breach in what ought to be, and we cannot look at it, so we have to sweep at the edges of it, put its weight on those who aren't ourselves, and make them carry the burden of their own oppression so we don't have to know that they are like us, and that we are like them, in how quickly our own breath can be torn out.

We all might die alone. But some of us have to be ground and ground and ground down into the ground so the rest of us can feel a little better about our own chances at avoiding it. We have to make them more alone, even in death. We have to take away their names and their dignity. We have to take away even the chance that they might be mourned as real human beings who are gone and never coming back, who are missed by loved ones somewhere, who meant something. A murder is incomplete, and we cannot stand ending on an unresolved chord. We all have to join together and finish it, so the eyes of the murdered cannot accuse us in our sleep.

We do this to each other.

We did this to Sanesha Stewart, who is dead.

We did this to so many. We could do it to me, tomorrow. How many of you would know, in another obituary about a deceitful boy with breasts who had it coming, that these words were mine, and that I was gone? But the dead are not, indeed, more fortunate than the living, though perhaps they are more comfortable. Oppression still weighs on those of us with breath, but we have a chance to look it in the eye. We have the chance to put our hands against it and push. And maybe this is not enough. Maybe it doesn't make up for our hard days, and our hungry children, and our bruises from the business end of injustice after injustice. Maybe this is all vanity, and chasing after the wind.

The living don't have the luxury to care, because we're here, and most of us plan on going on living. And it wasn't enough for Sanesha Stewart, but it might be enough for me. Or you. Or someone you never knew had it coming until they ended so senselessly that some stranger decided to tell you they deserved it, just to finish that job. In the end, it's still better to light a candle than curse the darkness, even in the face of a darkness that viciously extinguishes candle after candle, light after light, because it has to be done. And we can do it together, we can stop this erasure, we can stop this sacrilege, we can stop losing more and more family, until maybe we can put down the nausea and see the dead waiting for us to pull it together and give them reason to rest.

It has been a long day, full of worry and sorrow and grief and fear. But I'm not alone, and I still have my name, and I still have breath to lend to this, and we can do this so long as we remember that we're not alone, any of us.

I will hold my partner a little more tightly, tonight.
Keep safe, everyone.

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken." --Ecc. 4:9-12

hanging around in the lost and found

If you're a student of ancient history, you've probably stumbled across silphium, or something like it.
Silphium is all over the literature of the ancient Mediterranean. It was used extensively by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and probably the Phoenicians and the Berbers and other North Africans--that is, anyone near enough to the areas it could be found to grab a handful. And "extensively" is not an exaggeration: the Hellenes record using silphium as a sovereign remedy for everything from headaches to fevers, as a birth control and an abortifacient, even as a popular cooking spice. An entire city's economy ran on it, and ran well. It was pictured on currency, pastoral pieces were written about people harvesting it, ancient doctors raved about its myriad uses. It was considered priceless.

There trouble is, we don't know what silphium was.

We know silphium was a plant that grew wild around the Mediterranean, especially along the African coast, and that it was hard to cultivate its most potent varieties in any kind of quantity, so it was encouraged to grow wild all over the place. We have rough pictures of it, stamped on coins and painted on pottery. We have descriptions of the way it was processed down into medicine, down to the ungodly reek that potsfull of its resin produced. We even now have documents pointing out other plants that some of its proponents believed were similar or related to it; asafoetida, which we still have, was considered a poor substitute by Roman physicians, for instance. But none of those ancient readers felt the need to identify which plant silphium was in any detail.

The trouble for those of us now reading is that there was never any need to explain what silphium was, or describe it in detail, because it was so ubiquitous that it must have seemed silly to do so. Nobody in a modern conversation or a modern novel hands a bottle of aspirin to a friend, pausing to note, 'This is an aspirin pill, a small bit of compressed powder of synthesized willow salic, a chemical derived from the bark of the willow tree. We use it as an anti-inflammatory and painkiller despite its deleterious effects on the liver and stomach.' And indeed, few of us reaching for that bottle of pills know where aspirin comes from. It's everywhere. There's no need to know; you can trust that the people who made it knew what they were doing and where they got it, and that when you put it on your grocery list, whoever reads it will know what you mean. Casually describing the rest of it comes off as redundant, pretentious, and unnatural.
We know where silphium fits in the ancient Mediterranean. We have a rough idea of what it might have looked like, a few snatches about the smell, some idea of other plants related to it. We can guess, with reasonable accuracy, that it was probably an extinct relative of fennel and parsley, of all things. But nobody felt the need to leave us an elaborate map pointing at where to find this sovereign remedy, this popular cure-all. They assumed it would always be around, and that our parents would be able to tell us, and their parents tell them. And somewhere around a thousand and a half years ago, that got shaken up, and it was gone forever, due to overcultivation, or desertification of the southern Mediterranean, or simple neglect. Maybe there's still a few clumps of it in Tunisia that someone drives by every day without knowing.

History is full of these things, no matter where you go, things we can circle around, draw rough outlines of, even make very good educated guesses about. But we don't have them any more, and we're different people now, and nobody thought to leave us careful instructions because they just assumed that what they had would always be there. There's an entire genre of Song Dynasty Chinese poetry that's really song lyrics, but we don't have the tunes any more in part because they were so popular they didn't need to be written down. There are buried cities that periodically turn up all over Arabia that we don't even know the names of, any more--huge capitals of trade and art just vanished, when once everyone knew where to go to find them.

When I first began my transition, I searched desperately for context. I grew up in a small town surrounded by miles and miles of sagebrush and juniper and lava rock, where storms would come rolling down from the north and have nothing to stop them for the length of another three states. Nobody gave me patterns for what I was going through. Nobody gave me a starting place. I was off the map. So being who I am, I ran for the library, and I pulled out every book I could. And in between all of the autobiographies and sociology and theory, I was shocked to discover that there were all these rough pictures, throughout history, of people going through something that looked similar.

It wasn't the same, I later found out. They had other cultural contexts, in different times and places, with different tools and ideas to manage what looked very much like gendered lives outside of a biology-bound binary. I looked, though, at those stone tablets, at those translated manuscripts, at those colonialist records of destruction, and I found not only people familiar to me, but societies that had places for them.
Often enough, it wasn't explicit. There were words that were considered hard to translate, or that had no English equivalent at all. There were pictures of people who didn't seem like the other men or women in their societies. There were references, here and there, to crossing boundaries of physical sex. There were records of social and work roles. Some were more complete and detailed, though often colored with the confusion and disgust of colonizers and cultural imperialists. Some were the vaguest of conjectures. Some were just indications of where certain kind of people fit, how they dressed, what they ate, what they did, who they loved, without specifying who they were; why do so? Everyone knew who was being talked about. It was elementary.
Like many before me, I ran up against too many missing pieces to get those shattered pieces of human life back. Even extant examples of living, breathing people in parts of the world far from me were irrevocably altered by colonization, globalization, and the inevitable turning of time, and I found little desire to exacerbate that process with my own intellectual invasions. I had substitutes to find, and bits of culture or idea that, by crude replication or convergent evolution, performed similar work in my own cultural context, in my own life. There were relatives in that family tree I could cobble together. But those histories, no matter how important and how much they informed my own approaches, were histories. What they recorded was gone for good, and even if I could take it back I in most cases had no right to. Ci songs had gone tuneless. Silphium was extinct, or missing, but certainly out of reach forever, and something else would have to take its place if its kernel could not be found hiding somewhere. Whatever was left of it was changed enough to be unrecognizable, buried under centuries of sand and silence.

Somewhere in there desertification set in, or maybe over-farming, or maybe unsustainable harvests, or maybe simple neglect. Maybe it was just wholesale murder. One way or another, the gears and tides of history moved on, and something our ancestors or their neighbors had--had so much of they took it for granted, that they never felt the need to explain it for posterity because it was elementary, because it was easy, because it would always be around, because it was so normal as to be an absurd object of study--went away and didn't come back.
There were cures that disappeared, people there stopped being room for, solidarities that were so commonplace as to be unremarkable until they dissolved into dust or were stomped into oblivion.
Some of them we need now, and we find that empty space, between the potsherds and the pastoral poetry, where once was something that could have done us some good. And we're left with the task of finding it again, or finding replacements. Human stories and human objects and human lives were lost. How do we rebuild? How do we cobble together new cultural spaces, new cure-alls, new places to fit something that we ourselves will someday take for granted so thoroughly that our descendants will scratch their heads and wonder what we're talking about?
And when we rebuild--how do we preserve it? How do we take these tools and keep them safe so our descendants will know what they were, and be able to make use of them? How can I describe my life, and written where, so that it will be helpful to those who come after? How can we make our hearts' work stick, our solidarities solid? How can we make sure our replacements don't need replacing?

There were times and there are places not my own, where someone like me might find a place that looks like home. I, and others like me, am tasked with finding something that works for me and for those on whose behalf I've chosen to work in the here and now. We have to cultivate, and harvest, cures for our own society's stumblings and sicknesses. And if we succeed so thoroughly that what we distill is accessible to everyone, what then? How do we weather history? How do we keep the places we build, the growth we achieve, the linked arms and shared voices we hold together from losing their meaning the more they grow?

Maybe we need to start by looking at what's already been lost. Maybe we need to understand what's missing and that much of what we ourselves become will someday go missing, too, and that it's up to us to make sure the important parts are still there for those who will come after us. Maybe it's just a matter of not assuming that these things we hold dear will be there when we're gone, and doing a little more work to make sure that even if our own fields are someday empty of them, that they grow wild somewhere else.

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.

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.

vigilance

So last night I ganged up with Katz of Athens Boys Choir and some amazing folks from Portland State University (I'm looking at you, Tash, Zena) and we had ourselves a Day of Remembrance. It was the first time in more than three years that I've read my work publicly, and I have to admit I shook like a leaf getting up to a microphone and reciting "The Seam of Skin and Scales." There were a few things I had in mind to maybe read for people, and the 'net was well represented; Tash Shatz read a piece from TransGriot before the reading of the names of the dead, and it sent a shiver through people. But I'm meandering.

I got up in front of the largest grouping of trans people, let alone their allies, I had ever seen. And I leaned out and made eye contact and I said it, all of it. "We are not mistakes." "No more being afraid." And whoever it shook out there, I think it shook me the most, after seventeen pages of the names of the murdered were read, in chronological sequence, and minutes in I would recognize a name, finally, and then realize it was someone who'd been killed when I was still in high school, and we had years yet to go in the chronicle of the brutalized and lost. No matter how many of us stood out there in the amphitheater, it was such a tiny, bright candle on such a cold night--this brief moment where we were, once in the year, literally shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering, some heads bowed, some held high.

I think it does something to people, to grow up transgendered in this world. It does something to grow up knowing you are considered expendable if not an abomination, that crimes committed against you don't matter, that laws aren't for you, that futures aren't. It does something knowing that in most places the best you can hope for is to be a punchline, and the worst a pulped, shattered, ragged statistic. It does something to grow up constantly having your perceptions of reality called delusional until the only way to survive is to convince yourself that you are indeed insane. It does something to go so far off the map, even leaving aside our own experiences, the batterings small and large, whether we have families who look out for us or families who cut us deeper than anyone, the endless funerals for people we'll never be.
I think it breaks most of us a little, knowing that sometimes the only time in a year we all get together is to read a thick stack of names of those of us who have been ground into the ground, punctured, stolen, crushed and rent apart, all in order to satisfy someone else's ideas of what the world ought to be--and to tell all the rest of us, look out. You could be next.

And yet we were shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering together, and raising our voices. And all of those people we were assured someone had tried to erase--because that's what so many of those murders were, efforts to erase the fact of a trans person from the world with the crudest and cruelest of instruments--rang out, remembered, even the ones called "unknown trans woman" and "unknown person" and "woman in man's clothing, name unknown." Real. Missed. And important.

No matter how many torches and pitchforks, there were were, refusing to forget. Refusing to allow that erasure. And that's what the day is about. It's about mourning those losses, and about telling all of those murderers and aiders and abettors that we are still here, we are not erased, and we will go arm-in-arm into the next day no matter the threats.

Many of us have lost someone in this struggle, whether they wanted to be part of the struggle or not. Many of us have lost parts of ourselves, and many of us have been hurt by people who wanted us on that list. But we endure, and we continue, and we light more candles, and we refuse to stop remembering, because it must be done.

At the end of the night, when we go our separate ways, we take each other home with us, every one--not alone, not over, not forgotten. We make it another day. It breaks all of us a little, living with the reality of the situation, but we keep it up, those of us who survive, and we live to keep a fire burning for those of us who don't.

Sacred dead, you are not forgotten. You matter. And we miss you.
We will carry this on for you. Let the weight pass from your shoulders to ours, for a while, and we will carry this struggle on for you until it doesn't need carrying any more.
Go, and rest. We will not forget.

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.