Jay Sennett's Blog, page 3

Sister Fa – Creativity and Dynamic Social Justice

Sister Fa
Berlin November 2008

Sister Fa, one of Senegal’s first female hip hop artists, works tirelessly to end female genital cutting in West Africa and the African diaspora community in Germany. She experienced FGC as a girl.

Through her efforts and the work of a local NGO, her home village of Thionck Essyl has abandoned FGC entirely.

“There are old ways of talking about FGC, which involve going just to village elders and asking them to change. This does not work, as it sidelines and neglects the young people and treats them like they don’t have an impact on their own future. This is where I and other west African musicians come in – we are trying to catch young people through music. We are teaching them about their human rights.” (My battle against female genital cutting)

“I am working with the UK-based Orchid Project, which is supporting me to tour Senegal in April and May. We are on the frontline of the movement, and we plan to stay here to use our voice. I am just trying to speak for the many women who cannot raise their voices. I feel that when I talk, one person listens; but when I sing, thousands of people can hear my song.” (My battle against female genital cutting)

Artists as Activists is part of an ongoing curiosity I pursue through my email newsletter, Making Art in a Time of Rage.

Source

Off-Kilter Transsexuality: The Barrel of a Gun

The War Children Child

In my prehormone college days of Ronald Reagan and the Eurythmics, I possessed a single, simple understanding of men (but only white men, since I lacked any awareness of my whiteness and white privilege): they had the power; women had none.

I walked around the world with this understanding, a belief I had little reason to change. Men just always seemed to come out on top. Even baby girls were penalized. When I lived in Hong Kong with family in the 1970s, I learned that some families in China, driven by Mao’s one-child only policy, wanted boy babies badly enough that they disposed of girl babies, so they could again attempt for a boy, without fear of reprisal from the government.

I heard about this practice when I was about thirteen, a time when menstruation ended a personal myth that I could easily still be a boy — just in a girl’s body — and enhanced my gender dysphoria.

At some level, part of me believed that by becoming a man I would leave all of the gender hate behind, as though misogyny were a problem only for women.

The Barrel of a Gun I

This  singular understanding became challenged in small ways as I got sober. During those years, as I began exploring in a more directed manner how I might address my deeply held belief that I was a man, I met many kind and thoughtful men, some gay, some not, who lived complicated lives and shared these complexities with me.

One man I recall hailed from Alabama and loved doing drag. We were in a group discussing what is the role of a spouse for a recovering partner. The typical advice — directed at women, of course —  to be quiet and give the husband time to stop blacking out, losing jobs, maybe even becoming occasionally physical violent, rankled him.

With shaking hands and a hardness in his jaw, he said, “This is just bullshit. My father drank and beat my mother every day until I got to be old enough for him to beat me after he was done with her.”

“You know when he stopped doing that,” he asked while looking a few people straight in the eye.

“He stopped doing that the day I got his .45, knocked him on his back, shoved the barrel down his throat and told him if he ever touched my mother or me again, I would kill him.”

He leaned forward in a room that was absolutely quiet.

“I can still recall his teeth chattering against that gun barrel.”

His story didn’t elicit any epiphany in me. I didn’t shoot up from chair that night and say, “Oh my gosh! You know what! Things are more complicated than thinking that men always have the power and women don’t.”

Such an admission eluded me. I didn’t even know I maintained such a simplistic understanding of gender, and had no mental framework for sussing out my assumptions.

Hey Faggot! I’m Gonna Kill You!

I just knew I wanted to be a man. Perhaps the belief I describe here played a part in my mission. To deny this seems stupid. But I can’t say for certain. So strong was my sense of dysphoria in my body that notions of power-over played little premeditated role in my desperate need to change my body.

The changes, wrought by hormones, set me on a path which, over these last twenty years, has done nothing short of pulverizing my belief.

Less than two years after starting hormones, people read me as a man, which made me feel fantastic. How to be read as a straight man, though — that didn’t come to me naturally.

People often thought I was gay in those early days of my transition, which didn’t bother me at all, until the first time two white guys in a pick up truck tried to run me over in a crossing zone.

“Hey faggot! I’m gonna hunt you down and kill you!”

I shot diagonally across the parking lot and hoped the men wouldn’t see me enter my apartment. Shame and rage ran through my veins.

Why couldn’t I fight back?

Why didn’t anyone fight back for me?

Would I always have to outrun these homophobes? And what if they caught me and found out I was transgender?

After I learned how to hold my body, how to walk and talk like a straight man, theses questions faded for me. What I taught myself was how not to be a victim, or so I thought.

The Barrel of a Gun II, or an Elegy for My Grandfather

The White Ribbon project provided an intellectual framework for understanding that men violate other men, not as much as women, but often enough for men to fear other men.

For years I failed to tie that intellectual understanding not only to the homophobic violence I experienced, but to my grandfather’s murder at the hands of the husband of the woman he had been dating.

This man, like so many intimate terrorists, decided to quell his fear by pulling the trigger on a double-barreled shotgun aimed at my grandfather’s head. I was not yet seven when he blasted my grandfather’s brains out of his skull.

I can recite to you many facts of the case, find the location of his still running car on google maps or tell you about the first time I fired a gun, a 9mm Glock, gobsmacked at how fast I emptied the cartridge.

I struggle to divulge that each time I play acted the moment of my grandfather’s slaughter I murdered him, several times in fact. Not once did I sit behind the wheel of a car, play acting that today might be the day I would die, that I’m really scared of my girlfriend’s husband, that I can’t think that because I’ve got to hurry to the hospital to deliver a baby, that I do love that woman waiting for me to return from the hospital.

No. I taught myself a long time ago never to be the victim. Better to run up to the car and shoot my grandfather — kill the part of myself that is vulnerable and soft and scared — and grow up believing I am invincible (because if I act it out enough times, it must be true) simply because I am a man.

This belief doesn’t square with the possibility of being killed by homophobes. My ascent to manhood should be a direct ascent to the top with no detours, no assaults by other men.

The Transition Handbook never provided operating instructions or pithy sayings about how to navigate contradictory realities of power and violence that befalls a heterosexual man in late twentieth-century America.

And therapists, had they been less concerned with confirming their own gender and more concerned with actually helping me transition, could have helped but didn’t.

And all those men’s lifestyle blogs and websites? Completely worthless. They’ve never met an emotion that they wanted to explore.

So I’ve learned as most men do in America, by myself and through my wife, a 20-plus years domestic violence advocate.

“Are you asking me if I think you are a victim of domestic violence,” she asked, about five years ago.

“Yes,” I said.

“I do. I do think you are a victim of domestic violence.”

A man who is a victim of domestic violence who has been a victim of homophobic violence who hasn’t always felt very powerful yet knows how much power he has at any given moment on any old day — the contradictions of being transsexual are what would kill most people in the end.

That’s why I’ve always contended that changing genders isn’t for the faint of heart. The weight of so many contradictions proves too burdensome.

Do I think men have all the power all the time?

The dismissals, condescending voice tone, the honeys and sweeties and get me some more coffee, and can’t you just take a joke, backed up by the threat or fact of assaults ranging from unwanted attention to men using their penises as weapons, live and thrive today in the early 21st century.

Some of these men have probably been victims of acts of violence at the hands of other men.

One of the consequences of surviving this type of violence should be a broader understanding of male violence by these same men, and how that violence operates in women’s lives.

But that seems to happen very little. Men always have the option of not talking about it. In fact, we’d prefer that.

What I do know is that men, damaged and broken men, men humiliated and raped by other men, continue to move through the world in mild or pronounced power displays.

Even if I’ve been humiliated by another man, at least I’m not a woman is the lie patriarchy teaches all of us, and has certainly taught me, a transsexual man.

My initial belief that men have all the power hasn’t changed as much as deepened and broadened to understand that the violence, victimization and access to power I’ve experienced are common dynamics of masculinity.

This essay appears in Moxie, Vol. 1.

Source

A Beautiful Form of Politeness

The Montgomery Ward catalogue – a now defunct retailer promising satisfaction guaranteed to all rural and urban customers across America – served as a sacred, secret text, conveying to me, a little red-headed girl in Houston, Texas, the knowledge of how to dress like a man.

Carefully turning each page in the men’s section, sun streaming through my bedroom window, I studied each page, dreaming of the day when I would dress like these men.

“Two smart looks,” one layout read.

“Dacron polyester adds long wear, wrinkle-resistance to Avril® rayon. Extra strong-cotton Avril® pockets, trim.”

The listing asked for the buyer’s waist, then inseam. No such information was required of pants for women.
The y-front underwear seemed like a dream come true. The bulge eluded me, I knew but I didn’t care. If I could somehow, someway, wear that underwear, I would feel better. Even at six I knew this, however vague the details of timing and execution remained.

The gender of clothing confronted me everywhere. Left- versus right-sided buttons; the same for zippers; dresses and suits; the aforementioned waist and inseam options for men but not women; degrees of showing and hiding, concealment and revelation that could, for women, be dangerous both in winter and sadly at work or on the streets.

The clothing I yearned to wear was stitched in ways that reflected me. What I missed or overlooked or simply wasn’t taught was how those same stitches also reflected class choices and my class standing.

* * *

Clothes don’t matter, except when they do. A hoodie seems meaningless, a simple source of warmth. For Trayvon Martin, the hoodie represented a death sentence.
Clothes do say something about us, judging each other by the cut and by the material. Putting the yes in polyester implies a bias for natural fibers, typically far more expensive, and therefore available largely for wealthy buyers, than human-made fabrics.

The drape, how the clothing, falls towards and away from the body, projects a wearer’s fitness level, their income level, their taste level. Well-fitted clothing, often cut to a specific person’s body, moves with a person, better than clothing purchased off the rack, designed from an average of body types and sizes, and costing hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars less than bespoke. Rich people can afford to be comfortable. Such comfort remains elusive for everyone else.

Clothes aren’t the most important thing about a person. Far from it. But to say that clothes have no consequence at all seems naive.

Besides Trayvon Martin’s hoodie, we have the canard thrown at women: his violence resulted from your dress.

Men’s clothing, and the ability to now wear it all the time, has taught me a lot about myself.
 Suits, ties, french cuffs, I love all the ways there are to dress as a man.

On hormones for maybe six months, a friend shopped with me to help me find men’s clothing. At seeing the huge smile on his face, I purchased a pink-ruffled tuxedo shirt, sophisticated with a hint peacockery, just like guys wore these to weddings in the 70s, the decade of my early adolescence.

I wore this shirt to court when I had changed my name legally, while the shirt and a weather-worn white truck driver taught me my first powerful lesson about men, masculinity and clothing.
 Clothing conveys privilege and power in many forms. As a now white, heterosexual man, I eschew blue jeans. Men can certainly wear well-fitted jeans in style, jeans in a hip-hop style or even a punk style. They key is that they are all wearing a particular style for their own reasons.

My decision to not wear jeans is a response to an all together different kind of man: the upper-middle class one who chooses to wear baggy, ill-fitting jeans that looks like an adult diaper butt with puddles of material at the ankles. Along with the jeans he usually wears a stretched t-shirt.

He thinks he’s keeping it real, choosing comfort over conformity. But I would argue it is a kind of class privilege to be able to dress this way without worrying about what other people will think about you, your upbringing, your mother, your intelligence.

We have a slew of epithets for poor and working-class people who dress badly. No such equivalent epithets exists for upper class people.

The ability to dress like a slob all the time epitomizes a particular kind of class condescencion, class snobbery and rudeness directed at others.

Ill-fitting clothing says you are not important to me. Ill-fitting clothing says I can dress badly without fear of that it will reflect badly on me as a person. Ill-fitting clothing says my comfort, my ease, my laziness are the most important facts of our time together.

I am upper middle-class and dressing like a slob disrespects the people I am with. How many events I’ve attended where the focus has been on people of color and the majority of white, upper class men appear as though they just rose from a sleep of the dead.

So consumed are they by their self-loathing, they can’t shift their attention to others. There they are, looking like slobbish fools.
 Jeans nor t-shirts nor sneakers look bad in and of themselves.  A persistent lack of concern about clothing will turn even the newest, darkest pair of jeans – not matter how expensive – into a greasy pile of rags. 
In becoming a man, and finally have the permission to wear what I’ve always wanted to wear, I’ve learned the importance of dressing respectfully.
Jeans.

T-shirts. Sneakers. All of them can be worn with self-respect and respect for others.
 No article of clothing emanates evil.
 But through our clothing we suggest or state outright, our position in the world.

Through clothing I’ve learned how rich people crush others with one of many double-standards. I’ve learned that poor and working-class people don’t have the luxury of dressing sloppily and having others see it as hip or cool. No. We simply see it as the inability to dress properly.

Through clothing I’ve learned I can’t pretend I come from a different class background by wearing hipster work clothes. I can’t buy my way into the working-classes through my Red Wing work boots and Pendleton wool shirt jackets. Doing so just makes me look like poser. The only people who are fooled by this costume are the rich people who can afford the $500.00 selvedge denim Levi’s designed from their 1930s archives.

Through clothing I’ve learned about subtlety and concern. With my now subdued color palette (blues and browns, mostly) I endeavor to convey that as much I as I care about myself, I care about others more. I want others to feel this about me before I ever open my mouth. I want to be the steady, reliable white guy in the background, working hard to make others shine, not the slovenly dressed rich white guy shouting at everyone, butting in and generally making everyone around him uncomfortable.

Clothing for me has become a beautiful form of politeness. I’m old enough and dorky enough to think manners still matter. That common respect – a please here, a thank you there, pressed shirts and pants, looking everyone in the eye – makes a difference.

Surveying the last twenty years of living as a man I realize I’m striving to create a uniform of politeness, a clothing of concern. This effort is probably meaningless in the scheme of our civil rights, our safety and free and easy medical access on demand. Yet I still feel compelled to do it. Clothing is one of the few areas where I have near complete control. Why concede it to advertisers and retailers who care nothing about me?

Dressing as I do I recognize haters may accuse me of upholding the binary gender system. Clothes can provide both orthodoxy and revolution. Is my clothing repressive or revolutionary? 
I think the latter, and, in the end, I am going to die, and I prefer to be politely, beautifully dressed when that happens.

Source

What’s Up With Cisgender Anyway?

Having stepped away from public trans life in 2000, returning in 2005, which meant creating an online persona, flummoxed me.

In 1995 I participated in a small, and I mean tiny, group of other trans and intersexed people totally no more than 5 people. We felt like it them against us.

We felt like the only ones in the large city of Chicago. Of course other trans people lived in the City. I even knew some of them. But to meet collectively as a group seemed to only ever draw the five of us. The same five people that didn’t include the other trans people I knew around Chicago.

One of the strangest encounters I had upon reentry happened when I first learned about the term cisgender, a term I’d never before heard.

Language and self-naming changes over time. When I first came out, everyone in transgender and genderqueer communities used to be called transsexual.

Transgender was new, requiring explanation and arguments as to why it should supplant transsexual.

The opposite of transsexual, or even transgender, was nontrans. This terms seemed clear and concise, without confusion. The term also allowed us to quickly communicate with others.

“Oh, Joan is nontrans.”

Fast forward to the mid 2000s. Now Joan is cis.

What? She is what? (Remember I’m in 2005, having lived a quiet working life with my bride, and just emerged in an attempt to reconnect with larger communities.)

She’s a sissy? A sister?

In my confusion I balked at the term. It just sounded clunky to me. Then I read the term came into existence by a German academic, and I understood why I initially thought the term clunky.

My foray into online commenting, where I used nontrans because it was (and is) part of my history and my truth, I was scolded. To be dressed down by a person who was in elementary school when I began transitioning pissed me off.

Who are you, you snotty-nosed kid, I had wanted to write at the time. But I didn’t.

I quickly gave up commenting and rarely participated in these newly emerging online communities. Whatever experience and history I had seemed unwanted.

Cisgender stills sticks in my craw. Honestly, I hate the term and cringe every time I read it or hear it. I won’t use it, either.

Nontrans has become my cri de couer against both the elitism of academia and the aging of my body. Using it, I mark myself as so old school as to be permanently unawake. Now I’m one of the old guys younger activists snicker at.

Actually they probably ignore me. No longer trendy and committed to my linguistic Ludditism, I have little to offer them.

But, as a writer, the precision of words and how that precision can become potentially revolutionary, drives my work. So I will say, again and again and again, until I’m desiccated, then dead, cisgender is unwieldy, dull and unclear.

Non can mean any of the following in English:

not of the kind or class described. “nonbeliever”
not of the importance implied. “Nonissue”
a lack of. “nonsense”

By stating Jane is non, we say that she is not of us, not important and lacks trans.

I find it emancipatory, even for a moment, to disdain someone because they aren’t like me, never will be and frankly don’t have the moxie to be like me.

Non does that for me. 
Chances are also I don’t have to explain what non means to anyone, unless English is a second or third language for them.

Cis can mean any of the following in English:

on this side of; on the side nearer to the speaker. “cisatlantic”
historical
on the side nearer to Rome.”cisalpine”
(of time) closer to the present.”cis-Elizabethan”
referring or relating to people whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.”cisgender”
CHEMISTRY
  denoting molecules with cis arrangements of substituents.

By stating Jane is cis, we say that her sex and gender match, which is fine, except then we have these other possibilities, one of which implies Jane is on this side of us. And we won’t even discuss Jane might have to do with chemistry.

Not everyone in our communities can access academia or the internet. Cis generates misunderstanding. It doesn’t lend itself to intuitive understanding. But when someone uses another term like nontrans, as I did, watch out for the virtue police. They’ll correct anybody, even people with limited or no access to either academia or the internet.

What do we gain by correcting people in condescending and snide tones?

Who are we to do this?

Non is easily understood and difficult to thwart.

When I call someone else nontrans I state who I am and who they are.

Clear, honest language can drive political change. I had the honor of volunteering to overturn an antigay ballot inititiatve in Ypsilanti MI in 1998. The co-chairs of the Ypsilanti Campaign for Equality talked with dozens of activists across the country.

Many had failed in their towns and cities with similar campaigns. 
In determining why they failed, the co-chairs realized language played an important role in ballot wins. In every initiative that used terms like human rights not special rights or equality, our side lost.

In every initiative that used the term gay rights, our side won. 
The fight was for gay rights. Period. Not human rights or one human family. Gay rights.

Using this language, we defeated the homophobes not once, but twice.

What do we achieve by using an ambiguous term requiring explanation?

Who really wins and who really loses?

Source

What’s the Point of Cisgender Anyway

The opposite of trans is nontrans.

Nontrans puts trans at the center.

Non allows us to communicate with others. Cis confuses people.

Do we want to be right or have others understand us?

Do we want to create a strong insider/outsider distinction in our language?

Yes, using non can create the following phrase: She has non privilege.

But the scales tip in favor of non, I think, when we want to single out someone as particularly egregious example of a boor.

She is so non.

Non sounds decisive.

§ § §

Non can mean any of the following in English:

not of the kind or class described. “nonbeliever”
not of the importance implied. “Nonissue”
a lack of. “nonsense”

By stating Jane is non, we say that she is not of us, not important and lacks trans.

Chances are we don’t have to explain what non means to anyone, unless English is a second or third language for them.

Cis can mean any of the following in English

on this side of; on the side nearer to the speaker.”cisatlantic”
historical
on the side nearer to Rome.”cisalpine”
(of time) closer to the present.”cis-Elizabethan”
referring or relating to people whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.”cisgender”
.
denoting molecules with cis arrangements of substituents.

By stating Jane is cis, we say that her sex and gender match, which is fine, except then we have these other possibilities.

Is Jane on the side of us?

Is Jane historical?

And we won’t even discuss the possibility that Jane might be a chemistry term.

Besides muddled language, how many people will quickly understand us when we say cisgender?

And after we explain it, how quickly can they mock cis?

Non is hard word to mock.

§ § §

Clarity remains a bedrock of change. I had the honor of volunteering to overturn an antigay ballot inititiatve in Ypsilanti MI in 1998. The co-chairs of the Ypsilanti Campaign for Equality talked with dozens of activists across the country, many of whom had failed in their towns and cities with similar campaigns.

In determining why they failed, the co-chairs realized language played an important role in ballot wins.
The fight was for gay rights. Period. Not human rights or one human family. But gay rights.

Using this language, we defeated the homophobes not once, but twice.

I am not telling anyone what language to use to describe nontrans people. 
I am asking what we achieve by using an ambiguous term requiring explanation that then often leads to mockery.

Who really wins and who really loses?

 

Source

Hovering at the Edge of Consciousness

In the Pre-Hormone Beginning

In my pre hormone college days of Ronald Reagan and the Eurythmics I possessed a single, unified, simply understanding of men, only white men, in fact, since I lacked any awareness of my whiteness and white privilege: they had the power; women had no power.

I walked around the world with this understanding, a belief I had little reason to change. Men just always seemed to come out on top. Even baby girls got defecated on. When we lived in Hong Kong I found out that some families in China, driven by Mao’s one-child only policy, wanted boy babies badly enough to dispose of girl babies, so that they could again attempt, without fear of reprisal from the government, for a boy.

Outrage flew out of my mouth when I attempted to discuss this reality with my mother. I learned of this practice when I was about thirteen, at time when I could no longer just be a tomboy and the beginnings of my gender dysphoria percolated through to my conscious mind.

The Barrel of a Gun

My singular understanding became challenged in small ways when I failed my better living through chemistry experiments and decided I needed to drop those behaviors.

During these years, as I began exploring in a more directed manner how I might address my deeply held belief that I was a man, I met many kind and thoughtful men, feminist men, some gay, some not, who lived complicated lives and shared these complexities with me.

One man I recall hailed from Alabama and loved doing drag. We were in a group discussing what is the role of a spouse for a recovering partner. The typical advice – directed at women, of course – to be quiet and give the husband time to stop blacking out, losing jobs, maybe even becoming occasionally physical violent, rankled him.

With shaking hands and a hardness in his jaw, he said, “this is just bullshit. My father drank and beat my mother every day until I got to be old enough for him to beat me after he was done with her.”

“You know when he stopped doing that,” he said and looked a few people straight in the eye.

“He stopped doing that the day I got his .45, knocked him on his back, shoved the barrel down his throat and told him if he ever touched my mother or me again, I would kill him.”

He leaned forward in a room that I still remember was absolutely quiet.

“I can still recall his teeth knocking and chattering against that gun barrel.”

His story didn’t elicit any epiphany in me. I didn’t shoot up from chair that night and say, “Oh my gosh! You know what! Things are more complicated than men always have the power and women don’t.”

Such an admission eluded me. I didn’t even know I maintained such a simplistic understanding of gender and had no mental framework for sussing out my assumptions.

Hey Faggot! I’m Gonna Kill You!

I just knew I wanted to be a man. Perhaps the belief I describe here played a part in my mission. To deny this seems stupid. But I can’t say for certain. So strong was my sense of dysphoria in my body notions of power-over played little premeditated role in my desperate need to change my body.

The changes wrought by hormones set me on a path that over these last twenty years that has done nothing short of pulverize my belief.

Less than two years after starting hormones people read me as a man, which made me feel fantastic. How to be read as a straight man, though, that didn’t come to me naturally.

In those early days people often thought I was gay, which didn’t bother me at all, until the first time two white guys in a pick up truck tried to run me over in a crossing zone.

“Hey faggot! I’m gonna hunt you down and kill you!”

I shot diagonally across the parking lot and hoped the men wouldn’t see me enter my apartment. Shame and rage ran through my veins.

Why couldn’t I fight back?

Why didn’t anyone fight back for me?

Would I always have to outrun these homophobes? And what if they caught me and found out I was transgender?

The questions faded for me many years later, after I learned how to hold my body, walk and talk like a straight man. This sounds hilarious, I know.

What I taught myself was how not to be a victim, or so I thought.

The Barrel of a Gun, or an Elegy for My Grandfather

The White Ribbon project provided an intellectual framework for understanding that men violate other men often, not as much as women, but enough for men to fear other men.

I failed for years to tie that intellectual understanding not only to the homophobic violence I experienced but to my grandfather’s murder at the hands of the husband of the woman he had been dating.

This man, like so many intimate terrorists, decided to quell his fear by pulling the trigger on a double-barreled shotgun aimed at my grandfather’s head.

I was not yet seven when he blasted my grandfather’s brains out of his skull.

I can recite to you many facts of the case, find the location of his still running car on google maps or tell you about the first time I fired a gun, a 9mm Glock and was gobsmacked at how fast I emptied the cartridge.

What I find more difficult to divulge is that in all my years of imaging my grandfather’, I murdered him, several times. Play acting his death, I fired upon my grandfather many times but never once did I sit behind the wheel of a pretend car, knowing, probably, that today might be the day I would die, but I couldn’t let myself think that because I’ve got to hurry to the hospital to deliver a baby and how I do love that woman waiting in her apartment for me to return from delivering that baby.

No. I taught myself a long time ago never to be the victim.

I had a hard time squaring this belief with the belief that men are in power always with the belief that I might be killed by homophobes.

The Transition Handbook never provided adequate operating instructions, pithy sayings about how to navigate contradictory realities of being a heterosexual man in late 20th century America.

And therapists, were they less concerned with confirming their own gender and more concerned with actually helping transsexual people transition, could have helped but didn’t.

And all those men’s lifestyle blogs and websites? Completely worthless. They’ve never met an emotion they want to explore.

So I’ve learned as most men do in America, by myself and through my wife, a long time domestic violence counselor.

“Are you asking me if I think you are a victim of domestic violence,” she asked, about five years ago.

“Yes,” I said.

“I do. I do think you are a victim of domestic violence.”

A man who is a victim of domestic violence who has been a victim of homophobic violence who hasn’t always felt very powerful yet knows how much power he has at any given moment on any old day.

The contradictions of being transsexual are what would kill most people in the end. That’s why I’ve always contended changing genders isn’t for the feint of heart. The weight of all the opposites we have to hold simultaneously crushes your average American.

Do I think men have all the power all the time?

I see men act out their belief that they are better than women all the time. The dismissals, poor voice tone, the honeys and sweeties and get me some more coffee, please, you’re the only girl here, live and thrive today in the early 21st century.

Some of these men have probably been victims of acts of violence at the hands of other men.

One of the consequences of surviving this type of violence should be a broader understanding of male violence by these same men, and how that violence operates in women’s lives.

But that seems to happen very little. Men always have the option of not talking about it. In fact, we’d prefer that.

What I do is that men, damaged and broken men, men humiliated and raped by other men, continue to move through the world in mild or pronounced power displays.

Even if I’ve been humiliated by another man, at least I’m not a woman is the lie patriarchy teaches all of us, and has certainly taught me.

My initial belief hasn’t changed so much as deepened and broadened enough to understand the violence and victimization and access to power I’ve experienced is rather just a common dynamic of masculinity.

 

 

Source

Transgender Story: A Pink-Ruffled Shirt Makes the Man

A huge thank you to Chelsey Clammer for publishing my story “A Pink-Ruffled Shirt Makes the Man” on Nervous Breakdown.

A transgender man enters a truck-stop bathroom wearing a pink ruffled tuxedo shirt. Will he be attacked? Schooled in basic humanity? Read on.

I want to tell my story in novel and unique ways. Whether I succeed or not, I can’t know. All I can do is continue to create and publish.

We need more transgender and transsexual stories out in the world. Please, please create and publish.

Source

Colossally Dumb Reason Why I’m a Transgender Man

I’ve heard some doozy and dumb reasons why I transitioned.

This one still ranks as no. 1 and has for over fifteen years and is a variation of the you-were-born-that way trope, which I despise.

Source

Colossally Dumb Reason Why I am a Transgender Man

I’ve heard some doozy and dumb reasons why I transitioned.

This one still ranks as no. 1 and has for over fifteen years and is a variation of the you-were-born-that way trope, which I despise.

Source

The Truth About Early Transgender Transition

The self-obsession I engaged in during my early days on hormones only became apparent in retrospect. Boy was I embarrassed.

The realization that I described my fears and sufferings in pitiful attempts to get dates gobsmacked me.

Why couldn’t I just speak kindly and trust my winning personality to get a date?

Then I doubly gobsmacked myself.

A vein of self-pity runs through masculinity, focused on how hard we have it, whether from family or work or school. This vein seems to function like gold for a gold digger for femininity, with its directives to always be helpful and suppress oneself for others.

As an FtM I mined this vein for my own nuggets: bathrooms are scary! why didn’t so-and-so get my new name/pronouns correct?!? they almost called the police on me!!!!

Of course these situations scared me. They would scare most people. But I managed to transform the fear from a rather ordinary – but terrifying – part of my life into a tool in my dating toolbox, one I used, I’m terribly sorry to admit, to get dates.

Lack of interest in a potential partner’s suffering plays a key role in this tool. Self-pity always sucks oxygen out of the room, regardless how many people it suffocates. People trained to suffer in silence – and this seems to be more true for women than men, particularly middle class white women – leap at the opportunity to subsume their needs and desires to help out their man/FtM/butch.

As an FtM I believe I possess many of the least desirable traits of masculinity. My previous life offers no exemptions. Yes, my status as a man is conditional. A quick snip with some scissors to cut off all my clothes reveals my complicated bodily status.

This same body moves through the world as a man, all the time. I’ve learned over the years how much people want to serve me and make me happy simply because I am a white man, a person perceived to have most everything from people who have less, or even very little.

Femmes and feminine-identified people look at FtMs like me complaining about how tough it is and probably wonder, rightfully so, why I am such a whiner. Self-pity engenders resentment in the listener and laziness in the speaker.

I never had to really touch my feelings of terror as long as I could complain about it. I never had to ask a woman I was interested in how she navigated a world where men lear at women, stalk them and harass them every minute of every day.

No. Self-pity hid that reality from me.

 

 

 

 

Source