I have been thinking about how my social status has changed since I've been transitioning. I definitely notice some changes, which I will think about and talk to you about later, mostly related to how my relationship with women in general has changed and improved, but one of my subscriptions at youtube brought up a subject that really drove home something interesting and weird about American society in general. First, here's a video from Mel, who lives in Detroit, I think, or at least somewhere in urban southern Michigan:
And here's a response video from Angela, who lives in NYC. It's really interesting to me to see American attitudes through these two different perspectives.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
Son: A Reflection on My Identity and Values
(Note: This is a paper I just submitted for an American History course I'm taking. I thought it pertinent enough to include here in the blog. I have no idea how it will be graded, but I like it.)
This past week was my birthday. My mother sent me a card in honor of it, which was nice. I saw it on top of my mail pile and noted it was in a pretty blue envelope. I like blue. It’s one of the colors I feel that I wear well, so when I saw her handwriting on the front, I smiled. I opened the envelope. At the top of the card, in letters about an inch and a half tall, it said,
“SON.”
The card itself was, of course, also blue. There was a drawing of a very happy looking puppy dog (complete with wagging tail.) Beneath the emphatic gender identifier, it said, “Here’s a card you’re sure to like—It doesn’t lecture, advise, argue, pry, or disapprove…” and when opened, shows the puppy again, holding a banner in its teeth. Above the pup it reads, “It just sits in your hand and says” and on the banner: “Happy Birthday, with lots of love!” and it was signed, simply, “Mom.”
My mother has been here to visit me from Texas, where she now lives, earlier this month, and we spent a pretty enjoyable ten days together. There was a bit of tension around my newly revised public persona as a woman, but in general we had a good visit. Along the way, she gave me some advice about posture, went shopping with me for clothes, and did not object to me being en femme pretty much the whole time she was here. At one point, she made her position clear: “I’m still not sold on this, though you seem to be. As far as I’m concerned, you are still my son.”
Fair enough, but the card still felt a little like having salt rubbed in an open wound.
I have always been taught to be honest. Even when it seems like it will put me at a disadvantage, I have the tendency to tell the truth, because I believe that in the end, honesty is its own reward. Concerning my lifelong desire to be female, however, I would have to say that I haven’t lived up to that ideal very well, at least until recently.
I think, historically, that the culture I come from tends to compartmentalize in this manner. It shows up in our history and our thinking in both large and small ways. It shows up in crashing, dramatic contradictions in our behavior; how is it that we are able to make weight loss aids a huge industry in our culture and yet have the highest incidence of obesity in the world? How is it that we can, many of us, follow a religion ostensibly based on love and the golden rule, and yet be involved in two wars of choice, having built our country on two major genocides, and currently spend more money on the machines and methods of war than the rest of the world combined? All the while we wonder why we are feared and despised in the world. We can do this because we don’t consistently apply our philosophies across the board. It seems we can’t be trusted.
My own family history, like that of many American families, is illuminated in certain specific areas, and shrouded in mystery in others. I have seen a family tree for a particular branch of my family that goes back ten generations, to a man who was born in Monmouth, Wales in 1695, and who was killed in North Carolina in an Indian attack late in life, shortly before the Revolutionary war. My grandfather on my mother’s side liked to claim he was a quarter Cherokee, but when asked which of his grandparents was full blood, he would back down from his claim. I have heard other members of this branch of the family suggest that he was telling the truth, though no one has been able to confirm the source of our supposed Cherokee blood. For my own reasons, I would like to know this information, because I would like to find that person on the rolls of Cherokee Nation and become an enrolled member of the tribe. I have asked my mom about this and she doesn’t know where I can find this information, though she did think that probably the direction to go was in through my grandfather’s mother. She also emphatically stated, “I’m white!”
On my father’s side of the family, the line back through to the past is really not clear to me. My grandfather on that side is not someone I ever met, and my grandmother raised 5 children alone in depression-era Los Angeles. The apocryphal family story is that for at least part of that time, she worked as a bootlegger’s mule, carrying whiskey in flasks attached to her legs underneath her skirt. I don’t know what else she did; there is much in that half of my family that is not talked about. What I do know is that my father was born in Cedar City, Utah and that at that time the family was Mormon. I don’t know why they left the church, but it seems to have been a less than amicable parting of the ways. I also have heard that supposedly my grandfather was chronically hospitalized with shell shock, which I believe he sustained in the First World War. It’s all very mysterious, somehow, there’s so much about how my Dad grew up that I don’t know. There’s also an aunt of mine whom I’ve never met, who is estranged from the family.
The dominant family attachment for me, therefore, has always been my mother’s side. Her mother was raised in southern Texas near Corpus Christi. Her family was a staunchly Southern Baptist family of tenant farmers who worked in the cotton fields. My grandfather on that side of the family had been raised in the Ozark Mountains, loved to play baseball and had a large repertoire of “old songs” that he knew and at one time loved to sing, though by the time I knew him, he had stopped singing entirely. I never heard him sing a note. It’s so strange to me that he cut himself off from these things that I find so interesting: his heritage, his singing. He and my grandmother struggled very hard to raise my mom and her brothers, having moved to the mountains in Colorado and lived on starvation rations for most of the Great Depression, my grandmother and her kids living in a one room cabin with a dirt floor, my grandfather travelling everywhere he could to find work, often riding the rails hobo style looking for migrant farm work. I suspect struggling as hard as they did to make a life probably caused certain things to seem unimportant.
My own parent’s lives were easier, as the country became prosperous after the Second War. My father had served in the Army Air Corps and following the war had become fairly successful as a car salesman at a Cadillac dealership in LA. My mother was pretty and smart and 12 years younger than my dad. She had left Colorado to escape her mother who had the frustrating habit of chasing off every man she became interested in. After meeting my father through mutual friends, she married him within three months in the fall of 1958. My father began an auto body repair business, which quickly failed. I was born in California within a year of the wedding. My next younger brother was born almost exactly two years later in Colorado, after my parents’ financial collapse and subsequent move to live with my mother’s parents.
My grandmother, predictably, hated my father. That never changed.
My own childhood was angst-y for my own reasons. I was female-identified right from the start; my best friends in my toddler and preschool years were little girls. When I started kindergarten, I remember an exchange from, I think, my first day. I had tried to start up a conversation with a girl who was a classmate of mine. I remember her yelling at me, saying, “You’re a boy! I don’t talk to boys!” and my troubles proceeded from there. I never had friends in school. I got beat up a lot. I always felt different from everyone else. To be clear, I generally identified as male, but I was never happy about it, and whenever something would happen that placed me in a female context somehow, I would secretly feel this intense joy, like the real me had somehow escaped into the sun. I can provide many examples of this from throughout my life, but I won’t do so here in the interest of space. I would have these revelations over and over again, and because I didn’t know what to do with them, and because I was ashamed of them, I would push that part of myself back into the darkness and forget. Even with my efforts to forget this part of myself, I always felt lonely and alienated. I had this strong feeling that there was no one like me. Further, I often had the experience of being with my extended family, feeling separate from them, thinking, “If you really knew me, if you knew who I was, you would hate me.”
I survived it all and grew up (sort of; I feel I am still very much a work in progress!) In my twenties I became a punk rock musician. I became a Buddhist. I am politically very much a leftist. For a long time I thought I must be gay, though I knew I was attracted to women. This is common among transsexuals who haven’t figured themselves out yet.
It’s another way to compartmentalize. I think that this inconsistency is something that happens when you live by an impossible moral code, and I think that Americans do this as a matter of course. I think we find it very difficult to accept each other and ourselves the way we truly are. I think we are an incredibly inwardly blind society.
When I first came out to my mother, her immediate response was that she could point to any number of instances in my life that would make sense with the notion that I think of myself as female. I felt really good about that first conversation, though at the same time I had some doubt that she would stick to that level of approval, and it turns out that I was right to have my reservations. She has clearly retrenched along the lines demarcated at the beginning of this paper, though my perception of things is that she is having trouble with it because of her Christian worldview. If it were only a matter of whether or not I were happy, I think she would be having less of a problem with my transition from male to female. She never talks about it from the Christian perspective, but I perceive her as living in a very Christian place and social world, and so I think, though she won’t talk to me about this from a moral or religious point of view, it is in her mind that what I am doing is morally wrong. I know that she will never frame her feelings in that way for me.
If I am to have any hope of resolving this matter in a happy way with her, I am going to have to be consistent, firm, loving, and honest.
I think I can do that.
This past week was my birthday. My mother sent me a card in honor of it, which was nice. I saw it on top of my mail pile and noted it was in a pretty blue envelope. I like blue. It’s one of the colors I feel that I wear well, so when I saw her handwriting on the front, I smiled. I opened the envelope. At the top of the card, in letters about an inch and a half tall, it said,
“SON.”
The card itself was, of course, also blue. There was a drawing of a very happy looking puppy dog (complete with wagging tail.) Beneath the emphatic gender identifier, it said, “Here’s a card you’re sure to like—It doesn’t lecture, advise, argue, pry, or disapprove…” and when opened, shows the puppy again, holding a banner in its teeth. Above the pup it reads, “It just sits in your hand and says” and on the banner: “Happy Birthday, with lots of love!” and it was signed, simply, “Mom.”
My mother has been here to visit me from Texas, where she now lives, earlier this month, and we spent a pretty enjoyable ten days together. There was a bit of tension around my newly revised public persona as a woman, but in general we had a good visit. Along the way, she gave me some advice about posture, went shopping with me for clothes, and did not object to me being en femme pretty much the whole time she was here. At one point, she made her position clear: “I’m still not sold on this, though you seem to be. As far as I’m concerned, you are still my son.”
Fair enough, but the card still felt a little like having salt rubbed in an open wound.
I have always been taught to be honest. Even when it seems like it will put me at a disadvantage, I have the tendency to tell the truth, because I believe that in the end, honesty is its own reward. Concerning my lifelong desire to be female, however, I would have to say that I haven’t lived up to that ideal very well, at least until recently.
I think, historically, that the culture I come from tends to compartmentalize in this manner. It shows up in our history and our thinking in both large and small ways. It shows up in crashing, dramatic contradictions in our behavior; how is it that we are able to make weight loss aids a huge industry in our culture and yet have the highest incidence of obesity in the world? How is it that we can, many of us, follow a religion ostensibly based on love and the golden rule, and yet be involved in two wars of choice, having built our country on two major genocides, and currently spend more money on the machines and methods of war than the rest of the world combined? All the while we wonder why we are feared and despised in the world. We can do this because we don’t consistently apply our philosophies across the board. It seems we can’t be trusted.
My own family history, like that of many American families, is illuminated in certain specific areas, and shrouded in mystery in others. I have seen a family tree for a particular branch of my family that goes back ten generations, to a man who was born in Monmouth, Wales in 1695, and who was killed in North Carolina in an Indian attack late in life, shortly before the Revolutionary war. My grandfather on my mother’s side liked to claim he was a quarter Cherokee, but when asked which of his grandparents was full blood, he would back down from his claim. I have heard other members of this branch of the family suggest that he was telling the truth, though no one has been able to confirm the source of our supposed Cherokee blood. For my own reasons, I would like to know this information, because I would like to find that person on the rolls of Cherokee Nation and become an enrolled member of the tribe. I have asked my mom about this and she doesn’t know where I can find this information, though she did think that probably the direction to go was in through my grandfather’s mother. She also emphatically stated, “I’m white!”
On my father’s side of the family, the line back through to the past is really not clear to me. My grandfather on that side is not someone I ever met, and my grandmother raised 5 children alone in depression-era Los Angeles. The apocryphal family story is that for at least part of that time, she worked as a bootlegger’s mule, carrying whiskey in flasks attached to her legs underneath her skirt. I don’t know what else she did; there is much in that half of my family that is not talked about. What I do know is that my father was born in Cedar City, Utah and that at that time the family was Mormon. I don’t know why they left the church, but it seems to have been a less than amicable parting of the ways. I also have heard that supposedly my grandfather was chronically hospitalized with shell shock, which I believe he sustained in the First World War. It’s all very mysterious, somehow, there’s so much about how my Dad grew up that I don’t know. There’s also an aunt of mine whom I’ve never met, who is estranged from the family.
The dominant family attachment for me, therefore, has always been my mother’s side. Her mother was raised in southern Texas near Corpus Christi. Her family was a staunchly Southern Baptist family of tenant farmers who worked in the cotton fields. My grandfather on that side of the family had been raised in the Ozark Mountains, loved to play baseball and had a large repertoire of “old songs” that he knew and at one time loved to sing, though by the time I knew him, he had stopped singing entirely. I never heard him sing a note. It’s so strange to me that he cut himself off from these things that I find so interesting: his heritage, his singing. He and my grandmother struggled very hard to raise my mom and her brothers, having moved to the mountains in Colorado and lived on starvation rations for most of the Great Depression, my grandmother and her kids living in a one room cabin with a dirt floor, my grandfather travelling everywhere he could to find work, often riding the rails hobo style looking for migrant farm work. I suspect struggling as hard as they did to make a life probably caused certain things to seem unimportant.
My own parent’s lives were easier, as the country became prosperous after the Second War. My father had served in the Army Air Corps and following the war had become fairly successful as a car salesman at a Cadillac dealership in LA. My mother was pretty and smart and 12 years younger than my dad. She had left Colorado to escape her mother who had the frustrating habit of chasing off every man she became interested in. After meeting my father through mutual friends, she married him within three months in the fall of 1958. My father began an auto body repair business, which quickly failed. I was born in California within a year of the wedding. My next younger brother was born almost exactly two years later in Colorado, after my parents’ financial collapse and subsequent move to live with my mother’s parents.
My grandmother, predictably, hated my father. That never changed.
My own childhood was angst-y for my own reasons. I was female-identified right from the start; my best friends in my toddler and preschool years were little girls. When I started kindergarten, I remember an exchange from, I think, my first day. I had tried to start up a conversation with a girl who was a classmate of mine. I remember her yelling at me, saying, “You’re a boy! I don’t talk to boys!” and my troubles proceeded from there. I never had friends in school. I got beat up a lot. I always felt different from everyone else. To be clear, I generally identified as male, but I was never happy about it, and whenever something would happen that placed me in a female context somehow, I would secretly feel this intense joy, like the real me had somehow escaped into the sun. I can provide many examples of this from throughout my life, but I won’t do so here in the interest of space. I would have these revelations over and over again, and because I didn’t know what to do with them, and because I was ashamed of them, I would push that part of myself back into the darkness and forget. Even with my efforts to forget this part of myself, I always felt lonely and alienated. I had this strong feeling that there was no one like me. Further, I often had the experience of being with my extended family, feeling separate from them, thinking, “If you really knew me, if you knew who I was, you would hate me.”
I survived it all and grew up (sort of; I feel I am still very much a work in progress!) In my twenties I became a punk rock musician. I became a Buddhist. I am politically very much a leftist. For a long time I thought I must be gay, though I knew I was attracted to women. This is common among transsexuals who haven’t figured themselves out yet.
It’s another way to compartmentalize. I think that this inconsistency is something that happens when you live by an impossible moral code, and I think that Americans do this as a matter of course. I think we find it very difficult to accept each other and ourselves the way we truly are. I think we are an incredibly inwardly blind society.
When I first came out to my mother, her immediate response was that she could point to any number of instances in my life that would make sense with the notion that I think of myself as female. I felt really good about that first conversation, though at the same time I had some doubt that she would stick to that level of approval, and it turns out that I was right to have my reservations. She has clearly retrenched along the lines demarcated at the beginning of this paper, though my perception of things is that she is having trouble with it because of her Christian worldview. If it were only a matter of whether or not I were happy, I think she would be having less of a problem with my transition from male to female. She never talks about it from the Christian perspective, but I perceive her as living in a very Christian place and social world, and so I think, though she won’t talk to me about this from a moral or religious point of view, it is in her mind that what I am doing is morally wrong. I know that she will never frame her feelings in that way for me.
If I am to have any hope of resolving this matter in a happy way with her, I am going to have to be consistent, firm, loving, and honest.
I think I can do that.
Monday, October 4, 2010
What Are the Odds?
Hmmm… It’s a month out from the elections, the Democrats are starting to tick up in the polls a little bit, the economic news is not as dire as might be hoped in opposition circles… Who would have thought that a vague but ominous-sounding terror threat would pop up of a Monday morning, just when most people’s stress levels are up anyway?
Friday, October 1, 2010
Project Runway meta
I have not had time to blog about each successive episode of PR. I think episode 9 or 10 was just on, and the last ep I blogged was 4. I can go back and do them all, but is it worth it? maybe it is, I haven't decided. The main issue is time, but I also haven't been happy with how the drama has gotten in the way of the design part of the show. there have been a couple of weeks where I have liked very few of the looks lately, and I feel like that shouldn't be the case, especially this late in the game. If I can find the time, though, maybe I will go back and blog some of the episodes from my DVR.
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