Category: Media

Reformers want to cut Grand Central bathroom budget

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You may remember New York Daily News transit reporter Pete Donohue’s insensitive take on the Grand Central bathroom ruling last year.  Well, the News is at it again.

This time I really believe that they’re trying to do something good: root out the Three Corruptions of waste, fraud and abuse at the MTA.  Most of their findings and implied recommendations are spot-on: the MTA doesn’t need a completely separate administrative hierarchy in every sub-agency, with its own set of lawyers, for instance.  And if, as Aaron Donovan admits, the “housing allowance” for executives is not actually for housing but really just a part of their salary, it shouldn’t be counted separately.  But one thing struck me as bizarre:

BATHROOM ATTENDANTS

There are 21 bathroom attendants at Grand Central making $16,270 to $53,867 a year. Says Metro-North: “700,000 pass through each day, 10,000 meals are sold and they all have to pee.”

This is simply stated by the News reporters in a sidebar without any comment; the implication is that it’s either waste, fraud or abuse.  But come on: Grand Central has at least three sets of bathrooms (although I can’t remember ever seeing more than two sets open at once).  I think the Metro-North response is more than reasonable.  With 700,000 people passing through every day, you’d expect at least, what, 35,000 to use the bathrooms?  There are only 21 people to clean up after them, and given that the terminal is open seven days a week, 20 hours a day, that’s really at most two people working at any given time.  Most of the time, probably only one person.

Is the “waste” in the salaries?  I really, really don’t get all these people who have a particular idea about what certain jobs should pay.  In October we had the Subwayblogger arguing that people scraping gum off the subway platforms shouldn’t make more than $38,000 a year.  Now we’ve got the Daily News who seem to think that people who wipe shit off the floor don’t deserve to make – what? it’s not clear because they just leave it unsaid.  Certainly not $53,867.

In my book, someone who spends their days cleaning bathrooms, and frequently has to wipe up some bum’s diarrhea, or some Scarsdale party girl’s vomit, deserves every penny of that $53,867.  That’s about as much as I made when I was a full-time computer support tech, and a bathroom attendant job is at least as demanding and deserving as the job I had.

This is the same kind of thinking that gets people blabbering about illegal immigrants being required to do “the jobs Americans won’t do.”  As this Slate article succinctly argues, it’s not that Americans won’t do those jobs, it’s that they won’t do them for the small amount of money the employers are offering, at the long hours, oppressive conditions and humiliating environment they demand.  If you pay them decent wages, give them decent hours and safe, pleasant environments where they’re not being insulted all the time, Americans will be happy to mine coal, pick strawberries or mop pee off the floor.  But apparently Subwayblogger and the News reporters think that people who mop pee don’t deserve that.

Let’s say that the Metro-North execs, scared by this News report, cut the Grand Central budget in half.  It would be an absolute disaster.  Unsafe stalls, broken facilities going unreported for hours, messes not getting cleaned up, you name it.  But most importantly – and here’s why this is in my Trans Blog – lower salaries for bathroom attendants.  Lower salaries means higher turnover, which means less experienced attendants.  Anyone who says this is a “semi-skilled” job is talking out their ass.  One important skill for a bathroom attendant is judging who’s a threat and who’s not, and knowing that trans people belong.  If you’ve got high turnover, that means that every couple of weeks you’ve got a new bathroom attendant who’s going to blow the whistle on some trans person in the bathroom.  Just what we need.

I don’t see any waste, fraud or abuse in this aspect of the MTA.  If anything, $16,270 is low for even a part-time bathroom attendant.  Imagine if we quadrupled the budget for Grand Central bathroom attendants.  That means that bathroom attendants will actually be able to support a family in a decent apartment, and will probably stay on the job longer and take pride in their work.  It means less overtime and less stress for the attendants, which means they’ll do their jobs better and probably be nicer to the patrons.  It means that Grand Central will be able to open more than one set of bathrooms at a time, adding to convenience and cutting down on the lines that can sometimes get waaay out of hand.  I’d pay 4% more on my ticket to Irvington for that.

Gender, Safety and Desirability

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Streetsblog recently featured four different articles that highlighted the role of gender in the success of public spaces and practices. In the first post, traffic psychologist Ian Walker attached proximity measuring equipment to test how closely (i.e. how dangerously) motorists came when overtaking him. He found that they came closer when he wore a helmet than when he was bare-headed, presumably because they felt he would be protected if they hit him. But they gave him the most space when he wore a long wig and (he assumed) passed for a woman from behind.

In another post, the New York Observer reported that a new group of women are seen riding bikes in New York: young, attractive, and most importantly, forsaking jocky spandex for a host of femme signifiers: dresses, skirts, high heels, long hair, baskets, perfume, pink, Hello Kitty. They include famous actresses and models such as Naomi Watts, Chloë Sevigny, Gisele Bundchen and, most recently, Sarah Michelle Gellar. Streetsblog pointed out, however, that Copenhagen, um, women are way ahead of New York, riding bikes in skirts and heels in great numbers.

Today, in a discussion of the soaring popularity of cycling in Portland, Oregon, the comments turned to Portland’s concern with the numbers of women cyclists. “Women cyclists,” the city’s transportation office asserts, “are the indicators of a healthy bikeway network.”

Bryant Park (1960), Charles W. CushmanStreetsblog commenter Gretel pointed us to a New Yorker report about Danny Gordon, whose job is to count the numbers of men and women in Bryant Park, every day at lunchtime. The idea comes from a man named Holly Whyte, a sociologist and founder of the Project for Public Spaces. “Women pick up on visual cues of disorder better than men do,” Gordon’s boss, Bryant Park Corporation president Dan Biederman told the New Yorker. “They’re your purest customers. And, if women don’t see other women, they tend to leave.” New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten added, “Presumably, a female preponderance not only emboldens more women but also entices more men.”

Paumgarten acknowledged that it’s not always easy to classify people by gender. “Sometimes I’ll make it a man, sometimes I’ll make it a woman,” Gordon told him. “And, if I realize afterward that I was wrong, I’ll change the next person.” For Biederman’s purposes it doesn’t matter if Gordon gets it slightly wrong, because what really matters is how many women are perceived to be in the park.

Biederman’s assessment of the role of women in the success of a public space is probably correct, but I would guess that when safety is an issue (as it was in Bryant Park in the ’80s, and as it is in cycling now), the critical issue is that women, overall, are more vulnerable than men, and are perceived that way, by themselves and by others. They pick up on visual cues of disorder because those are likely to be cues of danger for them. When people see a place full of women (who aren’t being held captive in some way) they take that as a signal that the place is safe. When people see women engaging in an activity, they take that as a signal that the activity is safe.

I’ll even go further than Biederman and argue that the women aren’t all equal in that regard: the femmer the women, the more vulnerable they appear, and the more femme women, the safer the space appears. If I see Bryant Park at midnight full of leather-clad women with crew cuts, I won’t get the same feeling of safety as if I see it full of women with long hair wearing high heels and dresses. (Of course, there’s no feeling of safety if the women appear to be prostitutes.) Similarly with cycling: a few frail-looking women in dresses indicate safety much more than a lot of athletic-looking women in spandex.

How does transness fit into this? I think it has a lot to do with passing. An FTM once told me that he knew he passed when he saw a woman cross the street to avoid walking past him. I knew I passed late one night when a strange woman curled up next to me on the subway and fell asleep. Maybe some women would be reassured by seeing a non-passing MTF in the crowd, maybe they wouldn’t. Something to look into, perhaps.

Larry Wachowski still not transitioned

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Gothamist has summaries of the gossip that came out in 2003 about Larry Wachowski, one of the creators of the Matrix series. After learning that he was dating a dominatrix who was Buck Angel’s ex, and started appearing in public with more feminine grooming (clean-shaven, long hair, make-up, fancier clothes and jewelry), the gossip columnists figured that there was only one explanation.  He’s getting a sex change (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!

Of course, in November of that year Wired ran a story with this quote: “One source who knows the couple and the scene dismisses the sex change rumor, explaining that Larry is merely a cross-dresser, not a transsexual.”  But apparently this did not stop the rumors, and a Fox entertainment reporter was fully expecting to find a woman on the set of Speed Racer.  He didn’t.  He didn’t find Wachowski either, but everyone he interviewed said that Larry was still a guy.

If Wachowski wanted to transition four years ago, with as much money and power as he has I’m guessing that he probably would have by now, but he hasn’t.  Maybe his girlfriend influenced his fashion sense.  Maybe it’s some BDSM thing.  Maybe he really is a cross-dresser.  The idea that The Matrix was partly written by a transgender person makes a lot of sense to me.

Of course, it’s none of my business if he’s a transsexual, a cross-dresser, or something completely other.  But geez, will some people get it now that being trans doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to transition?

Sam de Brito on cross-dressing

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Metafilter featured this interesting blog sponsored by the Sydney Morning Herald (and apparently named after this Nick Lowe song). The guy may be a jerk, but he’s got some valuable insights, I think. He did one of those “non-TG journalist cross-dresses for science!” pieces, which is more interesting than it might sound. I was also impressed with how sensitive he was to trans people. Also, he hooks up with a woman while cross-dressed, which (although not unheard of), is pretty cool.

  1. My life as a woman
  2. My life as a woman: in the beginning
  3. On the town: Samantha gets lucky
  4. Samantha: getting deeper, getting out

(Bonus YouTube link in case you were wondering what Nick Lowe looks like when he’s really singing and playing – although I’ve never seen anyone play a bass with a pick before. The guitarist and drummer are pretty sharp too.)

Don’t you bring me down today

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This recent article from Virginia Postrel helped me put my finger on what bothered me about Christina Aguilera’s song “Beautiful.” Or rather, the biggest thing that bothered me; Aguilera’s show-offy vocal stylings grated on me from the beginning, but it was really the lyrics that annoyed me. I just found out, from the Wikipedia article, that the music and lyrics were written by 1 of the former 4 Non Blondes, Linda Perry.

I’ve only just watched the video that I linked, since I figured I should watch something before I show it to you. Up to now, my exposure to the song has been involuntary; it’s been forced into my brain by our local Clear Channel pod. Aguilera does get props for including a drag queen in her video, but that idea isn’t new; in the liner notes for a Go-Go’s compilation I have, one of the members writes about how their (much more insightful) song “Beautiful” was inspired by a scene from a John Waters movie featuring Divine.

So what really rubs me the wrong way about this song is the assertion that “I/We/You are beautiful, in every single way.” In other words, everyone is beautiful. I’d kinda agree that everyone has something beautiful about them, but is everyone beautiful in every single way? Well, no. Adjectives serve to distinguish people, and when there is no distinction, the adjective becomes meaningless. If everyone were really beautiful in every single way, then no one would be beautiful, and beauty would cease to exist. But beauty clearly does exist in people’s minds, and very few people really think that everyone is beautiful in every single way.

Continue reading “Don’t you bring me down today”

Eddie Izzard update

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Who doesn’t love some Eddie Izzard news? Just saw his name headlining an ad for his new show The Riches and wondered what it was all about.

It seems like the show has been an occasion for lots of interviews. The Daily Telegraph has an interesting discussion with him about balancing cross-dressing with work, and although he works as an actor, I think what he says is true to some degree for any non-transitioning transgender person regardless of their line of work.

The Discovery Channel has an article that combines some of my favorite things: it’s a summary of a forthcoming article in Language and Communication by SUNY-Binghamton professor and University of Chicago graduate Douglas Glick where he analyzes the techniques used by standup performers, focusing on two Izzard routines. At the end of the Discovery News article, added almost as an afterthought, is a quote from Glick’s colleague Stephen Straight explaining why Don Imus really did use (as opposed to mention) both a racist insult and a sexist one against the Rutgers basketball team, and the fact that he was joking is not an adequate defense.

I’m a proud Binghamton alum, the last linguistics major declared before the Cuomo budget cuts put the major on hiatus for several years, and Steve Straight was my advisor. I remember, at Steve’s suggestion, doing a paper on frame semantics and reading Victor Raskin’s frame-semantic analysis of humor. I don’t know if Glick used Raskin’s work; I’ll have to wait until the article comes out. After Binghamton I got my M. A. at Chicago, but I don’t remember Glick; he must have been in the Anthropology department. Binghamton and Steve Straight, the U of C, linguistics, humor analysis and Eddie Izzard, all in Discovery News.

The Abbé de Choisy, first pass

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I’ve been doing a lot of reading of the history of France, and occasionally I encounter a famous French transgender person (in the umbrella sense of “transgender”). Today I came across mention of the Abbé François-Timoléon de Choisy. This is the first I’ve heard of him (I use the male pronouns because he lived as a man for the later part of his life), but I’ll peruse his Aventures de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme at my leisure and report back here. Sadly, his later memoirs are not on line, but they may be worth buying to get an idea of what non-transitioning transgender people can do when they get old.

One thing that really galls me is that when I searched for reference to Choisy with the word “transgender,” I came up with a bunch of links that read (emphasis mine):

1676 MTF transsexual Abbe Francois Timoleon de Choisy attended Papal inaugural ball in female dress. His memoirs, published postmortem, offer the first written testimony of cross-dressing.

It turns out that these are all copied from a publication by Lambda Legal called “Bending the Mold: An Action Kit for Transgender Youth,” with this note at the end: “Special thanks for assistance and source materials goes to James Hoagland, T. Aaron Hans, Pauline Park, Kay Brown and Leslie Feinberg.” On a cursory reading, the information and recommendations in “Bending the Mold” seem fairly straightforward and unproblematic. But it really steams me up that someone would claim as a “MTF transsexual” someone who lived over two hundred years before the word was invented, lived as his birth gender for the last two thirds of his life, and never had any permanent body modifications. Maybe something in his memoirs will provide some support for an argument that he was a “true transsexual” (blech) on some level, but come on. Way to put the screws on those trans youth, eh?

Anyway, rant’s over. I’ll update you on our friend the abbot once I’ve had a chance to read more.

So confident

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Here’s a topic that deserves thoughtful, in-depth treatment. Unfortunately, I don’t have time for that now, so consider this a placeholder.

Today Metafilter had a post linking to a front-page Washington Post article about people who hear voices. Here are some notable highlights, starting with the first sentence:

IF HARLAN GIRARD IS CRAZY, HE DOESN’T ACT THE PART.

Continue reading “So confident”

Bathrooms: A Masculine-Spectrum Perspective

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Masculine-identified, female-bodied comedian Ian Harvie and his friend, comedian Margaret Cho, were harassed and assaulted (can you think of a better word for a private citizen grabbing your breasts without permission?) in the women’s room at a Halloween fundraising party in the Waldorf-Astoria.

Read Cho’s telling of the story first for the quick introduction.

Then read Harvie’s telling for some priceless details.

This was a bit of an eye-opener for me.  I’d heard that masculine-spectrum genderqueer people got questioned in women’s rooms, but I didn’t know the extent of it.  I really appreciate now the extent of their predicament: use the women’s room and get harassed like Harvie, or use the men’s room and get arrested like Dean Spade.  Yeesh.

Whose Dead? Whose Day?

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The subject of unity and the Transgender Day of Remembrance leads me to an unpleasant issue. Helen Boyd had a relatively innocuous post about the Day, and then a transwoman named Arlene Starr attacked her for presuming to use the phrase “our dead.” You see, Helen is not trans herself (although she has described having transgender feelings), she’s “only” married to a transwoman. Kind of the way I’m “just a cross-dresser.”

The problem is, God forbid I’m ever killed, who would suffer the most? My wife, my son and the rest of my family. Who worries the most about me getting attacked? My wife and my mother. The same is true, by and large, for Helen’s husband Betty. Think about Sylvia Guerrero (PDF), mother of Gwen Araujo, and Jennie Heskin, mother of Krystal Heskin.

Think, also, about the impact that spouses and mothers have had on public policy when their children’s lives are at stake. No one wants to be against motherhood, and very few people want to be seen as coming between a mother and her children. (The less said the better about those who are against marriage for transpeople, or who would come between a transperson and their partner.) I’m very proud that my own mother has been active in this area, and I think it’s made a difference. Our loved ones are natural allies in this.

Most importantly, as Marlena Dahlstrom wrote in the comments on Starr’s blog, partners and other loved ones can be targets too. Private first class Barry Winchell was brutally murdered in 1999 for dating a transwoman, Calpernia Addams, who has since become a nationwide community leader.

(Interestingly, as the article I linked discusses, people downplayed Addams’s identification as a woman and Winchell’s identification as heterosexual in order to construe his murder as a gay murder and fit it into a wider debate about gays in the military. While it is certainly related to those issues, it is not the same. I think this raises similar issues about claiming the dead and demanding reforms based on them as I mentioned in my last post.)