Category: Articles

“How could they do this to a family?”

grvsmth

When I was in fifth grade (the same age as my son is now), I had an argument with another boy in the class, a boy that I had been sort of friends with for a little while. At a certain point, his eyes narrowed, and he spat, “You dumb Jew!”

I was glad that my mom called his mom that night, and that his mom apologized to us, and got him to apologize to me. It was an inappropriate thing to say, and it needed to be dealt with promptly. But I wasn’t hurt.

I knew that some of the smartest people in the world were Jewish, and I knew that I was one of the smartest kids in the class. I was even mature enough at that point to know that the people who might be called “dumb” still deserved respect.

I also knew that my other classmates didn’t care that I was Jewish. They might have resented me because I got better grades than them, because I was a city kid, or because I didn’t make any effort not to cry. Or they might have quite legitimately resented me because I was a smart-aleck know-it-all. But even though they were all Catholics and Methodists and Dutch Reform and Jehovah’s Witnesses, it just wasn’t a big deal being Jewish.

So this boy combined a lie that wouldn’t have hurt me if it had been true (“dumb”) with a fact that I wasn’t at all ashamed of (“Jew”). How could this hurt me? I was hurt by the fact that this boy hated me so much he reached for what he thought would be the most hurtful thing he could say. I was hurt a few weeks later when he succeeded in convincing a mutual friend to reject me, through some combination of lies and bribery. But I wasn’t hurt by his words. They didn’t make any sense.

That’s the way I feel about Friday’s cartoon by Sean Delonas in the New York Post. The cartoon refers to the fact, recently discovered by the local political press, that Chirlane McCray used to identify as a lesbian and had sexual relationships with women, which she publicly proclaimed on the cover of Essence magazine in 1979. This is news because McCray has been married to a man, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, since 1994, and they have two teenage sons.

Delonas’s cartoon shows McCray and de Blasio in bed smoking cigarettes, the conventional signal that they have just had sex. McCray, with a big smile on her face, is on the telephone telling someone, “I used to be a lesbian, but my husband, Bill de Blasio, won me over.” The bearded de Blasio is wearing a padded bra, panties, stockings, a garter belt and high heeled shoes over his hairy male body, and looks annoyed with the situation.

My reaction to Delonas’s cartoon was the same one that I had to this kid calling me a “dumb Jew” in fifth grade. Delonas starts with an obvious truth, that McCray once said she was a lesbian and had lesbian relationships, but which nobody should be ashamed of. He then adds a speculation that may or may not be true: that de Blasio cross-dresses when having sex with his wife. It’s probably not true, but if it is, it’s also nothing to be ashamed of.

It’s clear that Delonas is a nasty man who thinks that cross-dressing and being a lesbian are both things to be ashamed of. This is obvious in the cartoon, in the cartoon that he published today, and in his previous body of work. It’s also clear that he sees de Blasio as a political enemy and wants to hurt him. What’s not clear is why de Blasio should be hurt by this. It’s either a lie mixed with an obvious truth, or two truths together, none of which are anything to be ashamed of.

De Blasio is clearly hurt by the cartoon. At a rally Saturday, he announced “I’m offended they denigrated a woman who is a role model by any measure.”

A number of politicians, including potential rivals for the Democratic nomination for Mayor next year, were there to defend de Blasio. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said that the cartoon was “the worst” thing in the coverage of McCray’s past. Former Comptroller and failed mayoral candidate Bill Thompson, who identified himself as a personal friend of de Blasio and McCray, said, “The first thing you think about is, my God, how could they do this to a family? How could they do this to their children? How could they do this? … While you won’t get an apology from the Post, on behalf of good people from New York, I’m sorry you have been dragged into this mud by this newspaper.”

Delonas clearly meant this as an attack, and I understand the impulse to defend yourself and your friends. But here’s the key: it’s only a successful attack if you believe that cross-dressing in the bedroom is something to be ashamed of. If there’s nothing wrong with a guy wearing a garter belt in bed, then it’s not denigrating anyone, it’s not doing anything to a family, and it’s not dragging anyone into the mud. When there is no shame, there is no mud.

What is worse, by being outraged, de Blasio and his friends have created the mud. If it is “the worst” thing to accuse someone of cross-dressing, what does that say about me and all the other cross-dressers in New York City? How many guys are going to feel a tinge of shame the next time they reach for their nylons?

I’ll tell you one thing: I doubt that de Blasio cross-dresses, but if he does, the most powerful thing he could do for New York City in his lifetime would be to come out of the closet and then run for Mayor. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch, since Rudy Giuliani has already appeared onstage in nylons and heels. Even if he lost, he would accomplish more by being strong and running without shame than by anything he could do if he stayed in the closet and got elected. I think that Quinn and any other out gay politician in the city would agree with me.

Assuming that de Blasio doesn’t cross-dress, it would be a huge gesture to us if he and Bill Thompson could simply make a statement saying that cross-dressing is nothing to be ashamed of. All I want is seven words: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

My life as a data point

grvsmth

I came across this quote in the abstract of a conference presentation by Sel J. Hwahng (on Page 7 of this PDF):

It is well known among public health researchers that in the U.S. the majority of male-to-female transgender (transfeminine) people are low-income people of color, while the majority of female-to-male transgender people (specifically those that identify as transmen, FTM, or genderqueer) are white and economically/educationally privileged.

I was floored by this statement, since I’ve been very adamant about the fact that we just don’t know what the majority of anything trans is, and about the need for caution when making any kind of statement involving proportions. The statement goes against my own perceptions, but I deliberately avoid reading too much into my own perceptions, because I know how much I don’t know. If this non-fact is “well known among public health researchers,” then my opinion of public health researchers just dropped quite a bit.

I was further intrigued to discover that I’m in those numbers. Me personally, I’ve been counted! Several years ago I volunteered for a multi-year study of male to female transgender people in the greater New York area. Every few months I’d go in, answer a bunch of questions, and get a blood test and a few bucks for my trouble. I didn’t do it for the money, which was well below my hourly rate for computer work. I was contributing my data, in part to provide a counterpoint to the idea that all transfeminine people are low-income people of color. I guess it only goes so far.

It turns out that Sel Hwahng was one of the researchers. I might have talked to him once or twice, but I mostly dealt with Mona Rae Mason and Monica Macri. And yes, non-Hispanic white people counted for only 27% of study participants and people making more than $30,000 a year were only 26%, so us well-off white people are certainly a minority of the study participants. No, you can’t generalize from that, but then again I didn’t really talk sampling with anybody while I was there.

Reading that abstract got me looking up the results that have come out of the study. Sel Hwahng used some of the qualitative data in this report from 2007, showing how the MTF trans population in New York is segregated into distinct communities based on ethnicity: black/latin, asian and white. It’s got a lot of interesting existential observations, but I could do without the implication that all of us “middle-class White cross-dressers” are just waiting to break up with our wives to transition. Some of us plan to die as men.

In 2009 the whole group published a report using the quantitative data to argue that life for transgender people is more complicated than Ray Blanchard’s simplistic “homosexual” and “autogynephilic” dichotomy. They then got into a thing with Anne Lawrence about it. What I find most interesting is that among the study participants were 221 people who reported that at some time in our lives, wearing feminine attire was “sexually arousing,” including 90 who reported not being attracted to non-transgender females, and 58 who reported not being attracted to non-transgender males. One of those 58 is me.

In 2011 the group published another report based on questions about verbal and physical abuse, and whether such abuse was related to gender identity or presentation. They showed that MTF transpeople who experience that kind of abuse tend to be more depressed, and also to have more unprotected anal sex, and to be at greater risk for HIV infection. I’m glad to say that I didn’t have any abuse, depression or unprotected anal sex to report, and I didn’t test positive for HIV. I’m sad to read that there were 107 people who came in and told Monica or Mona that they’d been verbally or physically abused, 145 who were depressed, and 43 who had unprotected anal sex with a casual partner or a john. The point of the article is that one way to overcome AIDS is to stick up for transpeople, and of course that’s a message I support.

The 2007 report makes unsupported leaps even without explicit quantitative statements, but in the 2009 and 2011 reports, Larry Nuttbrock was very careful to include disclaimers about the limits to generalizing the results. I’m glad he did, and I think his conclusions were mostly justified. Overall, I’m satisfied with the reports that have come out of this study. It was an interesting experience to answer all those questions. I wonder what they’ll do next.

What is transphobia?

grvsmth

You’ve all heard the Trans 101 definition: “irrational or persistent fears or non-acceptance towards people whose gender identity or expression differs from the gender they were assigned at birth. Transphobia can lead to direct or indirect discrimination or harassment in a variety of forms; the common theme is a misunderstanding of, or failure to respect, gender diversity.”

Are you ready for something more advanced – say, Trans 201? It’s all very well to declare that someone’s fears are irrational, and many of them sure are, but that doesn’t really tell us much about where they come from, so it doesn’t help us to stop it. We can only get true understanding through empathy and compassion. I count at least eight distinct reasons for someone to feel afraid of or hostile towards a transgender person. They all have different sources, and they all call for different responses. Lump them together at your peril.

  • Entitlement policing: the fear that someone is getting away with something they don’t deserve. This is behind bathroom anxiety and so much more. It’s even more intense if the self-appointed border guard believes that the transgender person in question needs to be made an example of, or else “they’ll all want one.”
  • Moral condemnation: the belief that transgender behavior is immoral and must be punished. Usually there is no reason given for this condemnation, it’s just written in a book somewhere.
  • Sissy discipline: the belief that “men” (particularly young ones) who refuse to accept male roles must be punished for shirking their duties.
  • Deception rage: anger based on a belief that someone has deceived you to gain something valuable from you, including but not limited to sexual gratification. This is a factor in many murders of transgender people.
  • Fear of unintended consequences: fear based on the belief that someone may be unintentionally putting themselves in danger, or making a choice they may regret.
  • Fear of shaming or retribution by association: the fear of being attacked for having loved, cared for or been intimate with a transgender person. This is a legitimate fear based on events such as the murder of Barry Winchell, Calpernia Addams’s boyfriend, in 1999. It is also a factor in murders of transgender people.
  • Fear of self-hatred: some people who are intimate with transgender people criticize themselves for it, especially if they believe that it means they are “gay.” They may further believe that killing their lover will somehow absolve them of “gayness” or demonstrate their rejection of it.
  • Fear of shaming or shunning of a transgender loved one, by others or even by oneself. Yes, some people attack their loved ones because they don’t want to feel obligated to attack them in the future. How messed up is that?

Do these make sense to you? Am I missing anything?

I will die a man

grvsmth

Back in 2004 I lost my father, who had been there for me since I was born. In May I unexpectedly lost Ed Kossoy, the man who joined my mother in raising me from when I was twelve. If you think saying goodbye to one father makes you think about your own mortality, you can imagine what it’s like with two.

There have been other deaths near me recently as well: a thirty-year-old neighbor dropped dead of a heart attack; another acquaintance died of a freak (i.e. non-car-related) accident. Friends have told me about losing loved ones in painful ways. Even pets: two years ago one of our cats died after a long illness.

I’m not a kid anymore, and sometimes I have weird health issues and I wonder, could this be it? Of course I hope I’ll be around for many years to come, but my time will come eventually. And I know several transgender people who have decided to transition when they were confronted with the fact that some day they will die. As I understand it, they realized that they really didn’t want to live as men their entire lives, and that if they didn’t transition they might just die as men. That was their choice for themselves.

For myself, I’ve seen two men I love die, and I think it’s okay. When the time comes for me to go, I’ll be a man like them.

Does this mean that I no longer feel any desire to be a woman? Far from it. I feel it every day, as much as many who have transitioned. But I also feel a desire to be a man. Not some caricature of manliness, but a thoughtful, problem-solving man like my dad and Ed both were. A strong and loving man. Long ago I realized that I can’t be both, and chose to be a man.

I still plan on cross-dressing on a regular basis for as long as I can. You may some day see an elegant old lady walking down the street, and it’ll be me. But then in a few hours I’ll go home and change back. I hope that I don’t die in the dressing room at Macy’s, but there are certainly more embarrassing ways to die. And of course the most embarrassing way of all is to die after a lifetime of hiding yourself in fear. Whatever happens, it won’t be that for me.

Why HRC, GLAAD and TLC’s advocacy hurts the transgender community

grvsmth

Today I got an email from the Human Rights Campaign saying, “Tell ABC: Your new comedy is no laughing matter.” It’s about this new television show called “Work It.” HRC says,

As part of their winter line-up, ABC is releasing a new comedy called “Work It,” featuring two men who dress as women in order to get jobs. The problem is that the premise reinforces false, hurtful stereotypes about transgender people. This kind of programming only mocks those who don’t adhere to society’s gender norms. Tell ABC’s president to can “Work It” now.

The link in HRC’s email goes to a petition asking ABC “not to air a show that reinforces negative and damaging stereotypes about transgender people.” On their website, HRC says that their president Joe Solomonese “contacted ABC Entertainment Group President Paul Lee today to request a meeting to discuss the very real challenges transgender Americans face in the work place – with the goal of ensuring “Work It” can be a light-hearted comedy that doesn’t belittle or mock these obstacles; or reinforce negative and potentially damaging stereotypes.”

With a little googling, I found a trailer for the new series, and articles at The Wrap and the Hollywood Reporter. These both said that not only HRC, but the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination were up in arms about the new show.

On GLAAD’s website, I found a blog post attempting to explain “Why ABC’s New Sitcom Work It Hurts the Transgender Community.” That blog post linked to a Huffington Post article by Mark Daniel Snyder of the Transgender Law Center saying, “We owe it to our constituents to speak out anywhere we see an injustice, no matter how big or how small.”

I don’t particularly feel that this show is harmful to transgender people. I’ll explain my reaction in more detail later, but for now I want to focus on the advocacy messages.

Note that in the HRC website and email, and the statements in the media, we do not hear from a single trans person. HRC president Joe Solomonese is not transgender, and I’m pretty sure that neither is GLAAD Acting President Mike Thompson or Matt Kane, their Associate Director of Entertainment Media. The transgender Huffington Post bloggers who’ve discussed this issue, Emerson Whitney and Mark Daniel Snyder, are both female-to-male, as is Transgender Law Center Executive Director Masen Davis, quoted in the Advocate.

It took a lot of digging to find any public statements by male-to-female transgender people, and there was a negative one by Kelli Busey and one withholding judgment by Jillian Page. The only expert on transgender workplace diversity I know of, Jillian Weiss, has produced a single tweet, “@kellibusey I like your guest post on care2.”

What I find a lot more disturbing than yet another crappy sitcom is reading pronouncements by a bunch of gay men and FTMs about what MTF transgender people feel and think and want, at best referencing yet another problematic convenience-sample survey, without a single MTF voice to be heard. Do Joe Solomonese and Matt Kane and Mark Daniel Snyder know any MTFs? Emerson Whitney at least quoted Kelli Busey; why couldn’t Mike Thompson or Mason Davis?

I’ll tell you what hurts the transgender community. It’s the pretense that we are united by anything other than the hatred we get from outside. It’s the idea that we all care about the same things, feel the same way, react the same way. It’s the constant stream of shoddy convenience-sample survey reports that allow some gay guy who read The Celluloid Closet or some FTM who read Marjorie Garber to set themselves up as authorities about What Hurts the Community. It’s the idea that this is a problem ABC can solve by meeting with Joe Solomonese instead of, say, an actual transgender person, maybe even an actor or producer.

I’m thinking of starting a petition.

The value of finality

grvsmth1 Comment

In my last post I mentioned the other big finding in Dan Gilbert’s work: that people only get that satisfaction if they think the choice is final. When they knew they could change their minds about the painting, they were less happy with it. This explains a lot about the way decisions and commitments are made. If you’ve made a very difficult choice that affects every aspect of your life, like marriage, a job or a child, you’re going to have mixed feelings about it, and from time to time feel a desire to change your choice. The easier it is to make that change, the more time you’ll spend thinking about it, and the less time you’ll spend adapting to the choice you made. In the end that means more satisfaction.

The implications for “transition optional” transgender people are clear: we will have difficulty making peace with our choices unless we’ve ruled out the other choices. This makes it easier to understand the origins of transgender dogma. If you believe that it’s your destiny to live as a woman no matter how many people insist you’re a man, you’re going to think less about the choice you’ve already made. On the other hand, if you believe that you’re “just a crossdresser,” you’ll be less likely to think maybe you should transition after all.

The result is that we get a lot of people claiming to be “transition or die” or “transition and be miserable” when in fact we’re transition optional. We do this for our own sanity, our own peace of mind. But that doesn’t mean it’s without problems.

The “transition optional” group is larger than you might think

grvsmth

In my last post I noted that we can divide people with transgender feelings into five groups. Some will commit suicide if they don’t transition, and some will be miserable. A third group will commit suicide if they *do* transition, and a fourth group will be miserable.

The fifth group, in which I count myself, has the ability to live in either gender without being miserable or suicidal. Or else they would be miserable or suicidal in any gender lifestyle, so transition would not make a difference.

A reader told me that she had heard of a study indicating that our “transition optional” group is the largest of these five. I’d like to see that study, but I’m skeptical that it actually shows that. As I’ve said before, we don’t have any kind of transgender population census, so any prevalence figures are likely to be completely inaccurate.

I do have a theory that predicts that the “transition optional” group is large, though. It comes from Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, who has done research on happiness. I strongly recommend reading his book, Stumbling on Happiness, which is an easy read. You can get the short version from Gilbert’s engaging TED talk.

There were two big things I took away from Gilbert’s work. The first is that we humans are capable of making the best of all kinds of situations. When the subjects thought they were stuck with their third-choice painting, they learned to appreciate it more; when they thought they were not going to have their second-choice painting, they lost interest in it.

This suggests to me that the “transition optional” group is bigger than we think. I personally can think of a few things that might have been better in my life if I had transitioned, like shaving, but since I know those things aren’t going to change I try to make the best of them and focus on the good things, like strength. I’d imagine that if I had decided to transition back in 1995, I’d be trying to make the best of hormones or whatever, and focusing on the positive aspects of post-transition life.

I’ll talk about the second big thing later.

Transition or die

grvsmth

One of the strongest arguments in favor of gender transition is that the person may commit suicide. They may also engage in other self-destructive behaviors like cutting or drug abuse, which carry the risk of accidental death. If the risk of self-destructive behavior is high for a person, I think most people would agree that transition is the better option.

A major problem, though, is that there are people who commit suicide after transition. As with all suicides, it is impossible to know in any given case whether a person’s transition was a factor in their decision to kill themselves, but in some cases at least it is clear that transition made them less satisfied with their lives. If we accept that the risk of suicide after transition is higher for a person, then we can agree that not transitioning is the better option.

There are others who might not commit suicide, but who are miserable in their assigned gender and have exhausted all options for improvement. Most people would probably agree that transition is appropriate. A fourth group would probably not commit suicide if they transitioned, but they would be miserable. Most people would probably agree that transition is not appropriate.

Then there is a group who would be equally satisfied with either option. I would probably put myself in the fifth, “transition optional” group. I have chosen not to transition, but if I were to wake up one day in the body of a postoperative transsexual, I would live that life and try to enjoy it to the fullest.

I should point out here that I’ve made all these groups the same size. I do not mean to suggest that they all contain the same number of people. I don’t know how many people are in any of these groups.

I want to stress that all of us on this spectrum have the same transgender feelings. We all feel a desire to be a different gender from the one they were assigned. Some may feel that desire stronger than others, and some may feel a competing desire to remain in their assigned gender, but on the basis of feelings we are all transgender.

My comment on transgender data collection

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Comment on Notice of Availability of Proposed Data Collection Standards for Race, Ethnicity, Primary Language, Sex, and Disability Status Required by Section 4302 of the Affordable Care Act (Document ID HHS-OMH-2011-0013-0001)

The deadline to submit your comment is Monday, August 1, 2011!

As a transgender person and a social scientist, I am excited to hear that HHS will be collecting information relating to transgender phenomena. These activities have the potential to bring us valuable information about the prevalence of transgender feelings, thoughts, beliefs and actions in the general population, beyond an often self-selected community that identifies as transgender and participates in the existing surveys. As a social scientist I have some longstanding concerns about the collection and presentation of survey data about transgender individuals, and I hope that your work will improve the situation. Here are some recommendations that I have, for the process of deciding what data to collect and how, and for the data collection itself.

In my experience, many organizations and agencies working with transgender communities repeatedly and consistently make generalizations about transgender populations that are unsupported by any data. For example, the Transgender Law Center found 194 transpeople through unrepresentative “convenience” techniques, of whom 114 reported annual incomes of less than $15,333. A cover article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian summarized it as, “In other words, more than half of local transgender people live in poverty” – an incorrect characterization that was not disputed by the study authors. As any introductory statistics textbook will tell you, prevalence in a convenience sample tells you nothing about prevalence in the general population. No one knows if the sample was representative of “local transgender people.” Presenting it as representative is misleading to the public and can lead to inappropriate funding allocations and badly targeted health initiatives, and possibly even a backlash against transgender people.

I believe that convenience samples can be very useful, for example to show the existence of job discrimination, poverty and prostitution in our community. There is a limit to their usefulness, however, and they are consistently used beyond that limit by social service providers and community advocates. The result is to spread unreliable information, and quite probably to waste taxpayer money and charitable contributions.

Reports like this are often accompanied by a disclaimer; the Bay Guardian article said, “TLC doesn’t claim the study is strictly scientific — all respondents were identified through trans organizations or outreach workers.” Unfortunately, they almost always go on to report the data as if the disclaimer were meaningless: the next sentence reads, “But the data give a fairly good picture of how hard it is for transgender people to find and keep decent jobs, even in the city that is supposed to be most accepting of them.” The reporting of percentages invites this kind of lip service to sampling procedure. Percentages are meaningless in these situations, but they are always reported, and the effect is to dismiss the disclaimer as a formality, encouraging media reporters to do the same.

On your website I see that you anticipate that the Williams Institute and the Fenway Institute will play a strong role in helping you formulate procedures for collecting information on transgender communities. I agree that they have done a lot of good work, and I support their inclusion in any round tables that you convene. However, both institutes have a history of presenting convenience samples as representative. I strongly recommend that you balance their participation with people who are knowledgeable about the appropriate use of sampling.

I am a strong advocate of qualitative research as a means of finding out problems that exist in the world. There are several advocates from the transgender community who have done quality ethnographic and autoethnographic work. One that I know personally is Gail Kramer, who has written the books My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married under the pseudonym Helen Boyd. I urge you to include in your Roundtables at least one qualitative researcher like Helen.

To my knowledge, only one researcher has done a representative sample of any segment of the transgender community. That is Niklas Långström of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. I strongly recommend that Långström, or someone familiar with his survey, be part of your Roundtables. I am also willing to participate, as a transgender person interested in these issues and as a social scientist who has used representative sampling in my professional work.

The curious incident of the healthy transwoman

grvsmth

I’ve noticed that transgender health researchers tend to focus on people with health problems, and that makes sense. Consequently, I’ve often felt a bit guilty talking about transgender health issues. I don’t have a sexually transmitted disease, the worst thing I’m addicted to is sugar, I’ve never been bashed, and I’m not depressed or suicidal. So why should I talk about my health? Why would any researcher want to study someone like me?

The answer comes from Sherlock Holmes, in the story “The Silver Blaze”:

Gregory ( Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you
would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time .”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time .”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

There’s a fancy word for this: negative evidence. Often, the absence of a salient event can tell you more about the causes of a problem than a hundred events.

I see this all the time in my computer consulting business. If a customer is not getting an image on their computer monitor, it could be caused by a fault in the motherboard, the video card, the video cable, or the monitor. I can turn on the computer and get a blank screen a hundred times, but that doesn’t help me figure out which component is causing the problem.

If I can get a picture even once, however, I can isolate the problem. If I hook the computer up to a different monitor and the display comes on, I know that the monitor is the problem. If I put in a different video card, I know the customer needs a new video card.

This method can work with transgender health as well. We are a diverse group, and there may be something in family background or upbringing that can make the difference between health and sickness.

There are many choices that we make in our lives, and those choices may affect our health. We need to know the consequences of those choices. Even if that knowledge doesn’t ultimately change our decisions, it can prepare us and allow us to plan better.

That is why we need to hear about a whole range of transgender people, not just those that the researchers were able to track down.