A Dahl’s House

First posted at Shakesville, then at Trans Group Blog and Bilerico.

Last Wednesday was a bit of an emotional roller coaster for me.

I took grim satisfaction that the Library of Congress was ordered to pay Diane Schroer nearly $500,000 in what is the largest award in transgender job discrimination case. (Short version: Schroer, a former Army Special Forces commander, was widely agreed to be the most qualified applicant for a job as a terrorism analyst, but when the woman who offered the job found out that Schroer was transitioning from David to Diane, she had a blatantly transphobic freak-out and yanked the job offer the next day. We’re still waiting to see if the Obama administration will appeal the decision.)

I was pleased to see the U.S. House of Representative once again passed a bill expanding anti-hate crimes laws to include both sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. (The real test will be when the Senate votes on it.)

I was ecstatic when the New Hampshire Senate unexpectedly passed a marriage equality bill, making that state poised to become the fifth one to allow same-sex marriages.

But there was also some news you probably didn’t hear about. That same morning, the New Hampshire senators unanimously — let me repeat that, unanimously — voted to kill a bill that would have extended housing and employment anti-discrimination protections to trans people.

This came after the fundamentalist haters used a campaign of bearing false witness lies to portray it as a “bathroom bill” — a nickname picked up and used by the local media — that would allow male sexual predators in dresses into women’s bathrooms. (Never mind that there’s been no bathroom incidents in the 13 states that have similar laws. Or that trans people are already in bathrooms, because you know… sometimes we have to pee too.) Now evidently there was some sort of political maneuvering behind the vote, since even the sponsors voted against their own bill. One of the sponsors said that passing it now would only worsen the situation for trans people because of the way the bill was portrayed. (I guess they had to destroy the village to save it….) But whatever the good intentions, the 24-0 vote wound up sending the message: You don’t deserve the same rights as everybody else. You don’t even deserve a valient-but-losing effort. You just don’t matter.

It was yet another Prop. 8-like moment for trans issues, particularly given the contrast to the same-day marriage equality vote. I feel the same sort of bitter aftertaste to sweet success that I felt on Election Night. I’m beginning to feel like we trans people are human shields, taking the brunt of the anti-LGBT hatred out there while marriage equality is becoming mainstreamed. We’re “those people,” the ones who can be demonized, the ones who by comparison make the shiny, happy sex-same couples waiting to walk down the aisle looking ever so “normal.” Because after all, they’re the ones who matter.

You probably didn’t hear about the vote, not even in the LGBT media/blogosphere. I guess having a ghost at the banquet is a bit of a downer. (FYI, I know a number of these sites knew about the story because I personally alerted them to it.) The thing is, it’s just latest incident in their all-too-frequent deafening silence when it comes to trans-related issues and news. Schroer’s victory was also MIA today. A week ago, a jury in rural Colorado took less than two hours to convict the killer of Angie Zapata of first degree murder and committing a hate crime — the first U.S. hate crime conviction ever in the murder of a trans person. It was the trans communities’ equivalent of the Matthew Shepard murder and attracted hordes of attention from the mainstream media. The gay and lesbian media… not so much (with a few notable exceptions) — even on the eve of the federal hate crimes bill going to a vote. Because apparently the T in LGBT doesn’t seem to matter.

But I wouldn’t give the MSM a cookie either. All too often their coverage began: “A man who claimed he snapped after discovering a transgender woman was actually male…” — repeating as fact the exact same self-serving “trans panic” defense, the same “deceptive tranny” victim blaming, that the jury specifically rejected. Nor did they bother to mention that the evidence showed Zapata’s killer knew she was trans 36 hours before she died, that there was no evidence that Zapata had sex with him that night she died, that he returned to finish her off when he realized she wasn’t dead yet. Because we don’t matter enough to get the story right.

I’ll admit it, my nerves are a bit raw about this. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen a feminist blogger crack a tranny “joke” and then tell people who objected to lighten up (and STFU). Because after all, it was about “Mann Coulter” so it was OK. We’ve seen similar “you’re just being too sensitive” comments posted over at Bitch Magazine directed toward those who thought a cartoon about lesbians who fetishize trans men was embodying the very attitudes it supposedly was critiquing. We’ve seen a series of problems with trans people being silenced in the comments discussions at Feministing and Feministe. (Though to their credit both sites are trying to address the problems.) These problems ranged from plain old privileged cluelessness — “stop the discussion until someone explains what ‘cisgender’ means because I can’t be bothered to figure it out for myself,” to “I want to talk about how I deserve a cookie for being so enlightened about those exotic trans people,” to “I know the post was about trans rights, but I want to talk about how I don’t like sharing bathrooms with men” — to insisting that people’s lives conform to someone’s pet ideology, to outright transphobic attacks. When men engage in this sort of silencing behaviors, especially in feminist spaces, many feminist women are quick to anger and quick to call them on their shit. But when some of these very same women do the exact same thing to trans people… well, not so much. Because we don’t matter.

Except, we do.

When I started this blog, I mentioned that there might be odd pauses and occasional silences. I just didn’t realize that they might last as long as they had. But after some folks mentioned they were bookmarking me (hi Shakers!), that’s given me a needed kick in the ass. More coming soon…

In early 2007, Los Angeles Times sports columnist Mike Penner was one of two high-profile transitioners to hit the new. Unlike former Largo city manager Susan Stanton, who was run out of town, Penner’s story had a happy ending. The Times stood behind Penner, who rechristened herself Christine Daniels, even giving her a blog to chronicle her transition. While I’m sure neither Stanton nor Daniels wanted to be poster children for the transsexual communities, they nonetheless became ones.

Now comes news that Penner has de-transitioned and quietly returned to work as Mike. The blogs by Daniels have all been removed from the Times’ website.

The news has been a bit of a shock to the transgender communities, even if Penner is far from the first person to de-transition. It’s left me feeling a variety of things — mostly sorrow. I’m sorrowful that I’m sure Penner’s de-transition will be misused by Christianist fundies to argue in favor of discriminating against trans people. But mostly I’m sad for Penner. In interviews and her blog posts, Daniels seemed so happy and full of hope — maybe a little naively — about her future. Whatever has transpired over the past 18 months, Penner must have become pretty miserable to have reached the point of deciding to go back, and even if he has no regrets about doing so, I’m sure he’s still hurting at the moment.

If deciding to transition is one of the hardest decisions someone makes in their life, deciding to de-transition is arguably even harder. But the point of “real life experience” as it’s known is precisely to find out whether living as a different gender is something you want to to do for the rest of your life. Sometimes you only figure things out by trying them. People make life-altering decisions in all sorts of ways. People get married, get divorced, take jobs and quit them, they move cross-country. Sometimes it’s a bad decision, sometimes it’s a bad decision that others can see but the person involved can’t, sometimes it’s what seemed like a good idea at the time, sometimes it’s was a good decision that had unexpected consequences.

Why do people de-transition? Sometimes male-to-female transitioners can have unrealistic expectations about what life is going to be like as a woman, the sexism they have to live with — in addition to the homophobia they can also encounter if their attraction to women means they go from being seen as straight men to being seen as lesbians. Needless to say the sports world probably wasn’t friendliest place for a MTF transitioner. Sometimes trans men discovered that while becoming men bring privilege it also brings burdens they’d never imagined. Likewise, they can under-estimate the hostility they encounter from some lesbians who angrily denounce them for switching teams. Likewise, sometimes people get stuck in being seen as trans woman not women (or trans men, not men). All of which can be too painful to handle. After all the point of transitioning is usually to make life easier, not more difficult.

Some do so because they can’t find jobs as their desired gender, especially if there are children involved. Presumably that wasn’t an issue in Penner’s case, so I’m guessing he had other reasons for doing so. While I don’t know Penner’s reasons, I know friends of Penner who assure me that it was a exceedingly painful decision he made with a lot of thought and counseling.

It’s possible Penner still sees himself as transsexual, but decided other things in his life — such as a relationship — were more important than transitioning. I know people who transitioned at a glacial pace, or who de-transitioned because of this.

It’s possible Penner realized that he’s a crossdresser, not a transsexual, and living as a woman part-time satisfies his needs. Part of the problem is that it’s so difficult to explore gender. Crossdressers easily outnumber transsexuals 10:1, but the vast majority are so incredibly closeted they’re the “dark matter” of the trans spectrum. For most crossdressers, life is akin to being gay or lesbian pre-Stonewall. I was exceedingly lucky that 1) I never felt guilty and shameful about my crossdressing like so many of my peers are; and 2) that when the need to express that side of myself that society deems “feminine” came on stronger than ever before in my late 30s — like it does for so many others — I was single, living alone and mostly working out of the house. Which meant I could more-or-less spend as much time en femme as I wanted to. For me, I discovered that after a certain amount of time en femme I hit a saturation point, and I’m happy to go back to being a guy. A friend of mine who firmly believed she was also “just a crossdresser” was in similar circumstances and ended up transitioning after realizing that she was essentially living full-time as a woman outside of work.

I hope one lesson people would learn from this is that it’s OK to experiment with your gender; that it’s OK to be uncertain about your gender; that being convinced you aren’t gender A, doesn’t inherently mean the only alternative is to become gender B. Because sadly, even within the trans communities, there’s not always a lot of space between.

Crossdressers and other non-transitioners are all-too-often on the receiving end of the same sort of disrespect from transsexuals that bisexuals get from gays and lesbians. We’re afraid to commit. We don’t have the courage to come out. We’re the little sisters tagging along and embarrassing them in front of all their friends. Etc. Etc. Announce that you’re planning to transition and there’ll usually be a round of “You go girl!” You rarely hear similar cheering when someone says that they’ve thought it through and figured out that they’re “just a crossdresser.” Likewise, I’ve heard comments that “oh, she must just not be ready,” or that “she just needs more time.” Which leaves me livid. Because it presumes to know more about Penner’s gender identity than he does, in the same way that some sports fan snarked about Daniels being a “man in dress.” In the same way some transsexuals presume to know where I am on the gender spectrum. Sadly it’s the people who’ve made the biggest messes of their own lives who seem the most determined to have their own choices validated in the lives of others, and who are the most vocal in encouraging others to follow blindly in their footsteps.

Which is precisely why I think that regardless of Penner’s reasons we should salute him for the courage to make the hard — and I suspect humiliating — decision to change course after he decided transitioning didn’t make sense for him. It’s his life after all. Because question really isn’t about whether one should transition or not — the question to ask oneself is: what kind of life (one the addresses my transness) do I want, and who will be part of it?

First let me offer my congratulations on this joyous day. It’s been far too long in coming.

Now I hope you’ll indulge my taking a moment to note that it was a trans man who was the lead attorney in the marriage equality case, the one who made the oral arguments to the California Supreme Court that marriage won’t be worth less if more can take part in it. More importantly, I’d ask you to remember Shannon and his dedication to this cause when ENDA (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act) comes up for a vote in Congress again and the “virtually normal” gay and lesbian crowd claims that trans and gender variant people (who can also be LGB or even hetero) should be excluded because supposedly we haven’t done jack to deserve anti-discrimination protections. In the spirit of the day let me mention:

Something old
Trans people have part of the LGBT communities – and fighting for LGBT rights – for decades. As the authors of “Gay L.A.” noted:”We choose to call our book Gay L.A. because, as our older informants told us, ‘gay’ in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s was the term that included homosexual men, lesbians, transgenders, and even bisexuals.” A few highlights:

In 1895 a group of New York “androgynes” organized The Cercle Hermaphroditos “to unite against the world’s bitter persecution” – two years before the world’s first gay liberation organization, nearly 30 years before the first known gay activist group in the United States and nearly six decades before the first long-lasting gay and lesbian rights groups.

In the 1960s, trans man multi-millionaire Reed Erickson was the major funder (to the tune of $2 million — more than $1 billion in today’s dollars) of ONE Inc., one of the first gay rights organizations, which won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision.

In 1965, Dewey’s Lunch Counter in Philadelphia was the target of the first LGBT sit-in, after the diner refused to serve young gay and trans patrons in what were euphemistically called “non-conformist clothing.” In 1966, trans woman fed up with police harassment turned into “screaming queens” and rioted at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco. In 1969, trans woman and drag queen Sylvia Rivera threw one of the first bottles at Stonewall and later was a tireless advocate for queer rights.

Despite Rivera’s efforts, within a few years New York’s gay rights establishment dropped drag queens and trans people from its civil rights agenda and Rivera was physically prevented from speaking at the 1973 Stonewall commemoration. Sadly this was part of a larger anti-trans backlash within not only the gay communities but also among lesbians, where trans women – such as Beth Elliot, who had been vice president of the pioneering lesbian rights group, the Daughters of Bilitis – were systematically outed and purged from lesbian feminist circles, and where Janice Raymond’s notoriously transphobic 1979 book, “The Transsexual Empire,” became lauded reading.

Still, trans people continued to fight for the gay and lesbian communities. Connie Norman was a nationally known AIDS activist during the 1980s, who also pioneered the first commercial radio talk show programs on gay and lesbian issues.

Unfortunately, people like Norman weren’t enough to change these widespread transphobic attitudes. In 1993, the gay and lesbian organizers of the “March on Washington” – one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in history – decided to include bisexuals, but refused to include “transgender” as part of the name of the protest. And when the 1999 murder of soldier Pfc. Barry Winchell was turned into a gay rights cause celeb, forcing President Bill Clinton to order a review of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” gay activists and the gay press suppressed a critical, but inconvenient truth – Winchell wasn’t killed for being gay, but because he was a heterosexual man in love with trans woman (which Winchell’s killers assumed made him gay).

Something new
By all accounts, when ENDA is reintroduced next year it will be stripped of protections for gender identity and expression. This isn’t a “trans-less” ENDA as it’s often referred to – it’s an ENDA without protections for anyone (even heteros) who isn’t straight-acting enough. Employers may not be able to fire you if you’re gay or lesbian, but they’ll still be able to fire you for being too nelly or too butch. In fact, a GenderPAC survey found that a third of gay, lesbian and bisexual respondents who suffered workplace discrimination said it was due at least in part to their gender expression and another 10 percent said it was due strictly to their gender expression.

Something borrowed
From a July 1990 flier by Queer Nation: “We are Queer Nation. We are here to promote unity between all people—some of whom are like us, most of whom are not. We do not necessarily expect to understand the differences between our cultures, our desires, our beliefs, but we do seek to increase respect and acceptance for all our differences so that we may move into the twenty-first century with joy and dignity.”

Whether the “virtually normally” crowd likes it or not, gender variance is, for the foreseeable future, going to be linked to sexual variance. That’s the thing about being “othered,” you don’t get any choice in how others perceive you. No matter how straight-acting folks like Andrew Sullivan like to portray themselves, the haters are still going to invoke the specter of diesel dykes and flaming nellies. No matter how loudly a few (sadly homophobic) trans people insist they’re heterosexual-I-said-heterosexual-dammit, the haters are still going to call them queers.

Lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people are all minorities. (Just for the record, a number of trans people are also lesbian, gay or bisexual.¹) We have to work together to move our causes forward. We also have to rely on allies who aren’t LGBT. Just as trans people, being a minority within a minority, have to rely on the LGB communities as allies. As Ben Franklin once said, we can either hang together or we can be hanged separately.

Something blue
I know that a number of you from states without marriage equality are irate about the “go slow” request from the ACLU and a half-dozen major LGBT organizations, asking people not to file lawsuits in your home states to have your marriages recognized there. (These groups fear that losing court cases outside California will set back the cause.) I hope you’ll remember those feelings of disappointment, dismay and anger when the incrementalists like Barney Frank and John Aravosis once again tell trans and gender variant people to step aside and wait patiently for anti-discrimination protections “because the public just isn’t ready.” Which is an odd argument really, since surveys show far more support for protecting trans and gender variant people from discrimination than for marriage equality.

I suppose that’s why the other canard is that trans people haven’t done enough lobbying work – ignoring the fact that we’ve been working for anti-discrimination protections since 1980. If we weren’t part of the “official” campaign for ENDA until a few years ago, it was because we had to spend at least a decade convincing gay and lesbian lobbying groups that our rights matter too, and that we should be allowed to join their efforts. Nonetheless, we still helped the LGB communities win a number of state and local anti-discrimination measures that included not only protections for sexual orientation, but also gender identity and expression.

Anyway, I don’t mean to be the ghost at the wedding banquet. This is your day, savor it in the fabulicious style that I know you will.

Best wishes, and may you have long and happy marriages,
Lena

Note: Thanks to historian Susan Stryker whose research provided many of the historical examples.

¹ It’s often easier to talk about whether trans people are attracted to men or women (or both), because their perceived sexual orientation changes with their perceived gender. Those who transition from male-to-female early in life typically are attracted to men and most female-to-male transitioners are attracted to women, so they go from being seen as gays and lesbians to being seen as hetero women and men. Transsexuals who transition from male-to-female late in life typically are attracted to women and female-to-male transitioners who are attracted to men go from being seen as hetero men and women to being seen as lesbians and gay men. So the vast majority of transitioners find themselves seen as homosexual at some point in their lives.

It’s wall-to-wall marriages on the 11 o’clock news and I’m getting teary-eyed. I’m just so overjoyed that my friends who want to get married, finally, at long last, can. Marriage isn’t worth less just because more can take part in it.

helen has been pondering on how ironically some radical feminists and trans women find common ground: their hatred of drag queens — and was wondering why some trans women find drag queens so threatening.

I thought Daniel Harris, in “The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture,” made a pretty asute observation:

If traditional forms of drag tended to dress upscale, aiming to achieve the glamour and elegance of the inaccessibly remote celebrity, more contemporary forms of drag dress downscale, revolving around the absense of glamour and elegance, around the barbaric and the crude, the beer-can curler, bunny bedroom slippers, and ratty negligees of bedraggled housewives. It is perhaps because kitsch plays such an important political function in the aesthetic of contemporary drag that many feminists mistakenly believe that drag queen are misogynistic, when in fact they are taunting, not women in particular, but complacent hetrosexuals in general. The drag queen orchestrates a brilliant stylistic reprisal against the leisure-suited chauvinists sitting in the Naugahyde La-Z-Boys beneath the velvet paintings, exacting an eye for an eye, a clutch purse for a clingy tube top.” (Pg. 214)

(That’s not to say some drag queens aren’t misogynistic. Unfortunately, I’m seen some myself. FWIW, I find that’s more common in the “shock drag” types that Harris talks about than among old school “glamour queens” like myself — though the latter can be prone to “women these days just don’t know how to look good, act feminine, etc.” sexism. Again, I think Harris offers another good insight: “This new breed of drag queen is so ambivalent about the stereotypically effeminate behavior of the old-style swish that he attempts to deflate his costome, turning it into a knee-slapping farce.” It’s similar to the inevitable buffoonary of straight guys who crossdress for Halloween, or a fundraiser or because they lost a bet — it’s a way of signaling, “this is just for laughs, I’m not doing it because I might actually enjoy wearing a dress, no sirree, not at all.”

For trans women there’s of course the whole conflation issue that Jude touched on over at helen’s blog — i.e. often gay men and occasionally lesbians just assume “hat the way I move through the world is one big performance that I will be ending at some point by pulling off a wig and declaring in a husky voice ‘fooled you!’” (Ironically, Jude says this never happens in straight circles.)

But I also wonder if there’s not an element of envy for some. If you were closeted for years, obsessed with passing and fitting in, to see someone who just doesn’t give shit if someone sees her as a guy in a dress, who seeks to be the center of attention… well I can see how that could trigger a lot of envy.

I was all set to write a happy little post about Christian Siriano retiring his catch phase, “hot tranny mess.” Apparently someone clued him in that it might be offensive after he compared drag queens and trans people to “white trash.” Maybe the light went on after hot pissed-off trans actress Candis Cayne ripped him a new one after he used the phrase on stage at the Logo NewNextNow Awards that she was hosting. Maybe he even read my open letter about why it’s so not fierce when “tranny” is used by someone who isn’t trans.

I was willing to overlook that it was one of those not-quite-an-apology “I wish that my words were not taken in that way” apologies that’s all too common with public figures these days. And yes, he even mentioned that some of his best friends are trans. (BTW Christian, if you’re reading this, just a heads-up, we trans people don’t exist solely to provide you with fashion inspiration.) As I said before, I think it just never occurred to him that as a self-described “very flamboyant gay man” that he could say something that’s considered derogatory speech, and I’m willing to overlook all that because I’m just glad that he publicly said he’d stop and maybe, just maybe, that would get other people to think twice about using it as a catch phrase.

What’s got me not-so-happy are the comments on various gay blogs about how trans people are overreacting and picking on poor little Princess Puffysleeves. How come you’re so humorless? Gawd you’re so P.C. Can’t you see it’s a just a joke? What’s the big deal anyway? We call each other faggots all the time, it’s no big deal. Get it over! Not to mention, I’m sick of being hounded for not being properly appreciative of T people.

Funny how those arguments sound oh so familiar. I’ve heard the exact same things when I’ve asked clueless straight kids not to use “that’s so gay” as a put-down. Or when women ask not to be called “bitches” and “hos.” Or when the Sambo’s restaurant chain was pressured to change its name.

To be honest, I had more respect for the out-and-out haters – did you know I’m a “breeder with a mental disorder”? – because at least with them there was no pretense. They’d probably get along swimmingly with the conservative bloggers (who I won’t dignify with links) who had these recent headlines: “Shame on Dennis Hastert for joining tranny lobbist firm” and “Boycott NBC and its tranny sympathizers.” (Companies that value LGBT diversity, the horror!)

And of course there was this: don’t you have bigger things to worry about?

Well, yeah, actually I do. Trans people face hate crimes at a rate up to 16 times higher than gays and lesbians, yet we have to fight to be included in anti-hate crime laws. There’s some segments of the trans communities where only one in four trans people have a full-time job and more than half live in poverty, yet we’re asked to step aside so straight-acting gays and lesbians can get employment non-discrimination protections. Even when formal “transgender” protections are offered, crossdressers like myself are often excluded from them, and out in the every-day world they’re too often ignored anyway.

The thing is, those are huge issues that are going to take time and effort to overcome. Whereas not referring to someone by a term they find offensive is a small thing. A simple thing. The human thing to do.

But evidentially even that is too much effort for some people.

During one of my first forays out in public while crossdressed, I was walking down the street in San Francisco when an extremely flamboyant gay man flounced up to me and shouted out, “Hey Mary, you’re looking fierce! Work it girlfriend, work it!” (Yes I still remember the exact words.) Now he probably thought I was extremely drab drag queen, since I was dressed the way an ordinary woman of my age would’ve been, and undoubtedly he meant well and was trying to be friendly. But I was absolutely mortified. It had taken close to three decades to work up the courage to go out of the house while crossdressed, and consequently up to that moment I’d been ecstatic that not only had I not been beaten to death by sticks, but that — although I was getting the occasional stare — for the most part people seemed not to notice the guy in the dress in their midst. That confidence was crushed in an instant. I fought back the tears and just tried to get the hell away from him as fast as possible.

Ironically, I’ve since discovered that it’s LGBT spaces, ones that usually thought of as “safe spaces,” where I’m most likely to get “read.” In part it’s because LGB are simply more aware of trans people, but I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that when it comes to how people think about “being out,” the LGB and T communities are like two nations divided by a common language (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde).

In the gay and lesbian communities it’s usually presumed that being out is a Good Thing, and anyone who isn’t is someone who’s quivering in the closet. At the extreme, anti-assimilationists condemn those who are “straight-acting” for not being visibly queer, and milder forms of this thinking are behind the disrepect bisexuals often get for supposedly being “unwilling to commit” and “closeted when convenient.” But in the T communities being “visibly out” has far different connotations. Over at the My Husband Betty forum, we’ve had a serious discussion about what we’ve half-jokingly called the “rules of engagement” — i.e. if someone sets off your transdar, do you greet them as one of the tribe? In other words, do you overtly or subtly try to see if they’re trans too. It’s an issue gays and lesbians faced during the long years of needing to be discrete, and they evolved numerous subtle ways to identify each other without the straight population knowing what was going on: whether it was wearing red ties, asking if someone was a friend of Dorothy or mentioning you’d read “The Well of Loneliness.” (Sometimes it wasn’t subtle. Crossdressing (in part or in full) to signal one’s homosexuality goes back at least as far as the “Molly houses” in the early 1700s.) All these were ways of trying to (safely) communicate to others who one really was.

Trans people have the same desire — but the difference is that we usually want to be seen as the gender we’re presenting ourselves. So for transsexuals being “visibly trans” means being seen as a trans woman or trans man, and for crossdressers it means being seen as a “guy in a dress,” rather than being simply being seen as women and men. “Passing” (or as I prefer to think of it: “blending in”) is something that most trans people — at least those who aren’t gender queer — have usually thought about a lot during some point in their life. In fact, some people obsess over it. (Ironically it’s often those who are most likely to blend in — those of us with bodies that fall far outside the statistical norms for the height and build of our desired genders end up just having to make our peace with that.)

Now there’s some very logical reasons for wanting to blend in. The first is one that LGB people are familiar with: safety. Being visibly gender variant means being a potential target, and not just from transphobes — homophobes don’t bother to inquire about my sexual orientation (If they would they’ve find out I prefer women.) The few times I’ve been harassed, people didn’t yell “tranny,” they yelled “faggot.” Plus, higher percentages of trans people are victims of hate crimes than the LGB people — at rates as high as 16 times the national average (a figure all the more striking because many jurisdictions still don’t report hate crimes against trans people) — so it is it any wonder we seek to avoid attention? Even if there’s not a safety issue, constantly being an object of curiosity can just be wearying. Sometimes I just want to have an ordinary, boring day.

Another big reason — one that lesbian and gays don’t experience — is how your identity is too often disrepected when you’re “visibly trans.” Transsexuals often are treated with double-standards when they’re perceived as as trans men and women. As Julia Serano talks about in her excellent book “Whipping Girl,” trans woman who act “too masculine” are accused of really being men (or at least of having “male energy”), and those who act “too feminine” are accused of aping women — “unenlightened” women at that. Likewise, it seems like the current fetishization of trans men (most famously by Margaret Cho, who’s bi) in some lesbian circles stems in part from trans men being perceived as deliciously masculine without the icky side-effects of being, well.. you know… actually men. (I can only imagine how these same folks doing the fetishizing would react if a similar disrepect was shown towards their own sexual identity as is shown in the implicit assumptions about trans men’s gender identity.) As a crossdresser, I can tell you that the reception I get in some lesbian circles can be downright chilly, while gay men just assume I’m one of the boys.

Finally, there’s a serious emotional component as well. I’d venture the most staight-acting “virtually normal” LGB people still would like to be do things such as be able to mention their partner when people ask about their weekend, or to be able to put their partners’ picture on the their desks. In other words, to be seen as the person they see themselves as. Trans people want that too. I see it close-hand with one of my best friends, who transitioned a few months ago and who’s thrilled that she’s met new friends who see her simply as another women. But when we’re “read,” we’re seen as not who we want others to see ourselves as — just as I was on the street corner — and that can be emotional devastating.

Now don’t get me wrong. These days I’m both regularly out in public, and fairly publicly out — most of my company knows I perform as drag queen. (Yes I went from fleeing attention to seeking to be the center of it — after those long years in the closet there’s something extremely liberating about that.) Some of my co-workers also know that I also crossdress off-stage to express a part of myself that society deems “feminine.” I’m on various online forums for trans people and I see how being closeted eats away at people — particularly the vast numbers of crossdressers (probably ten for every transsexual) who make up the “dark matter” of the trans spectrum. I dearly wish my peers could step free of that closet.

But it’s still tricky at times. For the reasons mentioned, the consensus over at My Husband Betty was that one not let on that you think someone might be trans, and even dropping hints that you might be trans (like gays and lesbians of yesteryear) could be problematic — since the only people who would get the hints would know that they set off your transdar, that they didn’t blend in. It’s also a widely-held belief in the trans communities that two trans people together are far more likely to get “read,” (and three trans people together even more so), so there’s an additional factor that the other person may react badly because of their fears about that. All of which is tragic in a way, because it leaves people isolated. It’s not for nothing that people who disappear from the trans scene after transition call it going “deep stealth” — and some of these folks who do quietly dip their toe back into the trans-world feel a fair amount of anxiety about their past being discovered, in part because they may not be out to their partners. These are problematic issues, and that’s something the trans communities need to deal with.

However, these “rules of engagement” are, for better or worse, the rules most of us intuitively play by, and they can be hard for LGB people to grasp — particularly since their own gender-bending (whether it’s being a full-time nelly or butch, or whether it’s just for play on Halloween or at a Pride parade) is often done in part as a statement about their being gay, lesbian or bisexual. Likewise, these rules are often misunderstood as being somehow ashamed of who we are, instead of recognized for what it is: just wanting to be seen as the person you see yourself as, and simply being able to live your life in peace. The difference for trans people is that not being “out” doesn’t inherently mean one is “closeted.”

Probably the best advice that came out of the discussion also was the simplest — if someone sets off your transdar, just approach them and get to know them the way you would with any other person. If they’re comfortable acknowledging to you that they’re trans and they feel it’s relevant, they’ll do so. If the guy on the street corner had complimented me on my outfit and asked me about my day in the way he would’ve done with someone who was born female, would I have guessed that he probably had read me too. Yeah, probably. But I would’ve gone on my way with a smile on my face instead of tears on my cheeks.

Those darn kids… They make me want to cry (in a good way).

It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision that drove Brewster High School student Michael Loscalzo to go to school dressed as a girl.

“Years of taking judgment made me decide to stick up for myself,” said Loscalzo, 17. “All my life, people either said I was weird or that I was gay.”

The Brewster High School sophomore recently revealed his secret about his desire to become a woman by going to class wearing makeup and feminine attire. His choice has reverberated through the halls.

Loscalzo said school officials warned him Friday that he could be suspended if he continued to cross-dress, a claim that administrators denied yesterday.

In a show of support, several students have organized an “Equality Protest” this week, by showing up to school dressed in garments of the opposite sex.

Yesterday, about a dozen teens gathered at a local deli with boys wearing skirts, wigs and dresses and girls donning caps, cargo pants and T-shirts. They said about 60 students cross-dressed yesterday, though school officials said the number was far less.

“We want Mike to feel more comfortable in his surroundings,” said senior Shannon Dodd, 18, one of the organizers. “We’re letting the student body know that it’s OK to dress this way.”…

A recent article about the Thai army’s decision to stop branding transsexual conscripts as mentally disturbed, reminded me that Thailand’s national draft lottery is one of the more interesting measures about the prevalence of trans-ness. It’s pretty close to a random sample of the country’s entire population of 20-year-old males. In the latest article, an Army spokesman said transsexuals make up less than 1 percent of conscript, although a different spokesman in a 2006 article said that 1% to 2% of those who show up for the draft lottery are either transvestites or transsexuals.

(Guess Eddie Izzard will be getting his 1st Battalion, Transvestite Brigade, Airborne Wing…)

It’s interesting that that 1-2% figure roughly tracks with the 2.8% of men and 0.4% of women, ages 18 to 60, who reported at least one episode of transvestic fetishism in a Swedish study that’s the only one I know of that posed the question to a random sample of the general population. (The question was actually part of a larger survey on a variety of health issues, which is why the Swedes surveyed the entire country.)

It’s seems reasonable to assume the Thai statistics represent a minimum estimate because despite Thailand’s reputation for trans tolerance, being dismissed from the Army for being trans has serious life-long consequences. (Because men are required to prove if they have completed their national service when they apply for jobs or bank loans ,and those with a “mental disorder” discharge are automatically disqualified from many jobs and mortgages.) So it’s reasonable to assume that only the most gender variant trans people are being spotted by the Army and that those who can closet themselves do so.

I’d treat the Swedish study as a rough estimate, since on the one hand, even though the survey promised anonymity, it’s not unreasonable to suspect some people probably didn’t admit to trans behavior. Especially since (according to those who’ve seen the full study — I’ve only seen the abstract myself) the question posed was “Have you ever dressed in clothes pertaining to the opposite sex and become sexually aroused by this?”. So besides people who weren’t willing to admit to this, there were probably trans people who answered “no” because they didn’t see their crossdressing as sexual motivated. On the other hand, since reportedly anyone who did so at least once was counted, it’s likely they may have counted some people who crossdressed as an experiment, but who probably wouldn’t be considered — nor see themselves — as trans.

I’ve heard rumors of a UK study that looked at what percentage of male patients brought to the emergency room were underdressed — i.e. wearing or more article of women’s clothing under their men’s clothing — but so far I’ve not found any evidence that the study exists. Since not all trans people underdress, the statistic (if it exists) would drastically under-report the actual numbers of trans people. But one might be able to combine it with some survey work looking at the prevalance of underdressing. Obviously once again you run into issues of properly sampling a closeted population. So any result number would be an extrapolation of uncertain data based on other uncertain data, and would be at best a rough estimate.

Trying to estimate the size of a closeted population is inherently imprecise. But my take on it is that it’s a bit like on-GPS navigation in sailing, in which compass/celestial sightings are inherently imprecise (due to the motion of the boat and other reasons). Nonetheless you can triangulate among enough of them to calculate your position in a useful way — albeit within what’s referred to as the “area of uncertainty.” So we’ll never have exact numbers, but if different methods end up with results in the same neighborhood, it may be possible to develop some estimates that have a greater reliability than the individual surveys.