Trans – Page 4 – Feministe

Hateful Girl Scout Mad That Girl Scouts Lets In Girls

“Wait, what?” you ask. “I thought the Girl Scouts was for girls?” And it is! But one California teen haz a mad because the Girl Scouts created a policy to let in all girls — including trans girls. She wants everyone to boycott Girl Scout cookies, because the Girl Scouts should be punished for not ostracizing a little trans girl from their organization. If you want to be extra-horrified, read the Baptist Press’s take on the issue. And then make yourself feel better by ordering a few extra boxes of Samoas this year.

“She always knew who she was.”

The Boston Globe has a sweet, heartbreaking, heartwarming story of Nicole Maines, her twin brother Jonas, and their parents. Nicole knew from toddlerhood that she was a girl, and her family and friends are supporting her in developing “a physical female body that matches up to [her] image of [her]self.” Nicole is fourteen.

From the beginning, Nicole* liked Barbies, mermaids, and princess dresses, wanted to know when she would “get to be a girl,” and cried hating her body. Identical twin Jonas told their father, “Dad, you might as well face it. You have a son and a daughter.” It took them an adjustment period, more than a few mistakes, and a lot of research, but they did–Wayne and Kelly Maines took the bold step of… trusting their child. They contacted a physician who specializes in child gender management services, and with judgment and cruelty from some sides and acceptance and support from others, they embraced their daughter. By fifth grade, she was wearing long hair and dresses and living fully as Nicole. Now, at age 14, under the supervision of the physicians of the Gender Management Services Clinic at Children’s Hospital in Boston, she is taking drugs to suppress puberty until she can begin estrogen therapy to help develop a grown woman’s body.

Read the Maines’s story at the Globe–there really is more to it than I can do justice. Even with the judgment they’ve suffered–and the family ended up moving to a different town to escape the abuse of some in their community–what’s striking is the support they’ve gotten from the kids’ friends and their new school. Jonas, of course, loves–and is protective of–his sister, and their parents love having a daughter. And every family, whether their children are transgender or cisgender, could learn a lesson from them.

“I believed in Nicole,” her mother said. “She always knew who she was.”

*post has been edited to correct name and pronoun errors on my part; discussion of that is in comments

Auf’ed Is A Word In Every Gender: A Few Reality TV Notes

So here’s the thing: while waiting this past weekend in my just-across-the-block-from-the-evacuation-zone apartment for the threatened transformation of New York from this:

Into this:

…I did not spend my weekend writing posts for Feministe, as was my brief, but instead watching Project Runway.

Project Runway Australia.

I won’t qualify Project Runway as a guilty pleasure. It’s a full-on, bells and whistles, so much fun that even a lapsed Catholic can enjoy it simple pleasure. I started watching the U. S. show in its fourth season, and have been devoted ever since. (Although I do have a few words for you, Mr. Christian Soriano! Love your clothes–but lose the catchphrase.)

But what are you going to do when you’re all caught up on the current season, and still need your “let’s make a dress from tile grout and shower curtains!” fix? Easy–watch the international editions, starting with Australia.

So fiancée and I huddled next to our cats and our “Go Bag” to watch Season Two of PR: A. Which leads me to the subject of today’s musings-posing-as-a-post: reality shows, and transness, and Anthony Capon.

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Reflections

The New York Times ran this article on Sunday about, of all things, transgendered women. And while mocking the Grey Lady was my rainy day activity over at my blog–oh, Ross Douthat, keep chasing that rainbow!–I have to give them credit this time: they actually called trans women women, with nary a birth name to be seen.

That’s progress, I guess, or what passes for it in these times.

The article is about pumping, having liquid silicone injected into your body in order to enlarge things you want enlarged and contour the things that have the wrong contours. If you are lucky, you will get injected with medical-grade silicone by someone with medical training. If you are not, you’ll get industrial-grade silicone squirted into your flesh by someone who has seen it done a few times.

Pumping is one of those things you learn about when you are trans. Something that people will cluck over, if you’re on the right side of the tracks that day–because it is dangerous, and potentially disfiguring, and with money and the right doctor you can have all those things done nice and neat. It’s a class boundary, a lot of the time–because so many trans people aren’t on the right side of the tracks, have about as much hope of navigating a hostile medical system as being called up to read the lottery numbers on Channel 5, and despair of ever assembling the thousands of dollars at one time just about any procedure that has the modifier “trans” attached to it would cost. In a world of bad ideas and lousy options, what’s one more?

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

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Transformative Change

Guernica interviews Dean Spade, the first openly trans law professor, about his activism and work with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. It’s a must-read, but the lead particularly caught my eye: The average life span of a transgendered person is twenty-three years.

The whole interview is amazing, and do read it. A sample:

A lot of my writing is about trying to understand what role legal work has in strategies for transformative social change. Part of the reason that question is so important right now is that there has been widescale attacks on social movements over the last thirty or forty years in response to the very meaningful social movements in the sixties and seventies that had very transformative demands, that were seeking a redistribution of wealth and of life chances in really significant ways. What’s emerged in their place is a very thin national narrative about social change that often centers on the law and often says that groups that are marginalized or experiencing subjugation of various kinds should just win lawsuits and pass laws to change their lives.

But the hard thing is that few lawsuits actually have those effects. On one hand, a lot of laws are not enforced or never implemented. For example, in a lot of places it’s illegal to fire or not hire someone for being trans, but that happens every single day. Very little can be done about that in the current framework. The systemic homelessness and poverty many trans people face doesn’t seem to be sufficiently addressed by passing a law that says we shouldn’t discriminate against trans people. Law reforms declaring race and disability discrimination illegal haven’t solved concentrated joblessness, poverty, homelessness, or criminalization of people with disabilities and people of color. Often people who the law says should have equal chances at jobs still don’t have equal chances at jobs, and they’re still on the losing side of the severe wealth divide in the U.S. So how can we start to strategize for social movements that don’t believe the myth that changing the law is the key way to change people’s lives?

Another thing is that at times what law reform does do is put a window dressing of fairness on systems that are deeply unfair. Maybe some of the people, the most enfranchised in a particular group, will be somewhat better off through law reforms, because they have a lot of other kinds of wealth or privilege in terms of the overall system. Oftentimes, in that way law reform stabilizes a status quo; it stabilizes the existing field of maldistribution. Those people who are worst off really don’t see a lot of change, or may be further marginalized.

A lot of us are trying to look at what has really been powerful in the history of the U.S. in terms of changing people’s lives, and that’s been broad social movements led by people directly impacted by the issues. They often have demands that far exceed what the law could ever give, demands that are not going to be passed by Congress or won in courts. Those demands actually confront the things that America is based on, like white supremacy or settler colonialism. The law can be a useful tool to address certain needs for certain communities, but it’s nowhere near a silver bullet that will make people equal. That mythology is the part of the mythology of our nation, a mythology that people are often not willing to question if they are benefiting from existing conditions of maldistribution.

Twisty nails it on “women-only” spaces

I do think there’s something to be said for creating women-only spaces, under certain circumstances and for certain purposes. Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy has decided to make her blog all-woman all the time, and received some immediate push-back in the vein of “But what about trans women?” To which I would reply, “Did you see the part where we said this is a women-only space? By definition that includes trans women.” And yet there still seems to be some debate about this? (I use the term “debate” loosely here, because that term implies some sort of actual good-faith argument from two or more sides, and that’s not really what’s happening here). Twisty takes on said “debate,” and it is a thing of beauty. You should read it. I’m a little iffy on the Dworkin bit at the end (Point 3 in particular), but overall it is an excellent post. Just don’t read the comments — they are extremely bigoted and may be triggering.

Thanks, Lauren, for the link.

Injustice at Every Turn

The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) just released a report on discrimination against trans and gender-noncomforming people, and the results are (predictably) horrifying. The report is based on the largest survey of trans and gender-nonconforming people ever taken in the United States, with 6,450 participants. Among the key findings:

-Survey respondents were nearly four times more likely to live in extreme poverty (household incomes of less than $10,000 per year)
-Respondents of color were especially at risk for discrimination (although discrimination was widely reported by respondents of all backgrounds). African-American trans and gender-nonconforming people reported the most severe discrimination.
-Health care access is a major problem. One in four respondents reported being HIV positive. Nineteen percent reported being refused care because of their trans identities, or non-conforming gender presentation. African-American respondents reported even higher numbers of health care discrimination.
-Survey respondents were twice as likely to be unemployed compared to the population as a whole. Half of respondents reported workplace harassment or mistreatment, and a quarter had been fired because of their gender identity or expression.
-Nineteen percent of respondents reported being refused a home or apartment; 11% reported being evicted from their home because of their gender identity or expression. One in five survey respondents experienced homelessness.
-Twenty-two percent of respondents reported feeling uncomfortable asking law enforcement for assistance.
–Forty-one percent of survey respondents reported attempting suicide. Only 1.6% of the general population has reported attempting suicide. The rate of attempted suicide among trans people and gender-nonconforming people is significantly higher even than the attempted suicide rate of people who are diagnosed with chronic depression.

As Nancy Goldstein says in the American Prospect, it’s crucial that this survey even happened in the first place:

Currently most surveys — including the census and epidemiological studies — contain zero questions about sexual orientation, never mind gender identity and expression. The consequences of not being counted, of being invisible, is that no one knows who constitutes the transgender community, what its members experience, or what their challenges or needs are. The many costs to transgender people include the fact that they are allotted little if any funding or resources on the state or federal level. That’s even true of resources spread within an LGB community that often forgets the “T.”

Much of this discrimination, it’s worth noting, is entirely legal. Trans people are routinely left of out anti-discrimination laws that protect citizens from discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, nationality, etc. And the breadth of problems faced by trans and gender-nonconforming people all tie together: It’s awfully hard to keep a job if you can be legally fired for being trans and if your co-workers routinely harass and discriminate against you; it’s hard to stay above the poverty line if you’re not employed; it’s hard to avoid homelessness if you’re living in extreme poverty and if landlords routinely refuse to rent to you; it’s hard to enforce even existing anti-discrimination laws if you don’t trust the police (and for good reason — twenty-two percent of respondents reported being harassed by law enforcement); it’s hard to stay healthy when health care providers refuse to care for you.

This kind of discrimination, bias and hate kills. Trans and gender-nonconforming people attempt suicide at astounding rates. When health care providers refuse to help, patients die (and trans people have died because doctors and emergency workers didn’t do their jobs). When people are desperate for a place to live and for food to eat, and when above-the-board employers won’t hire them, sometimes the only option is to enter underground economies, which (especially for marginalized populations) can bring with them higher incidences of drug use, higher-risk sexual activity and incarceration — all of which may be factors in higher rates of HIV. And of course, trans and gender non-conforming people aren’t just killed by suicide, poverty, discriminatory medical workers and health issues — they are also sexually and physically assaulted, abused and murdered. Back to Nancy (trigger warning):

There’s a direct link between being able to earn an above-board living, having stable housing, and staying alive. The results of facing continual job discrimination, combined with being refused housing (19 percent) or being evicted (11 percent), and having a nearly 1-in-5 chance of being homeless at some point, are not only painful, stressful, or unhealthy but catastrophic. Those who have been fired due to anti-transgender bias are far more likely to enter the underground economy, where sex work and drug sales expose participants to a range of increased risks, including incarceration and a higher incidence of intravenous drug use and HIV (with rates in the survey at four times the national average). No wonder respondents, when asked to list their policy priorities, threw the biggest numbers (70 percent) behind protection for transgender/gender nonconforming people from discrimination in hiring and at work.

Transgender people often suffer harm from the very systems designed to protect most citizens. Twenty-two percent report being harassed by police, but the problem extends beyond law enforcement. In 1995, D.C. resident Tyra Hunter died from entirely treatable injuries incurred in a car accident. First, the firefighters who arrived at the scene stopped emergency medical treatment once they cut away her clothes to discover male genitalia. (One witness reported hearing a firefighter say, “This bitch ain’t no girl. … It’s a nigger, he got a dick.”) Once they stopped joking around and got her to the emergency room, the doctor refused to treat her. She died there of blunt force trauma and medical negligence. Fifteen years after Hunter’s death, the survey’s numbers still stink: 19 percent of respondents reported being refused care because of their gender identity or expression, with even higher figures for respondents of color. Nearly 3 percent reported being attacked in emergency rooms.

This is despicable. Mainstream American society has created the conditions that harm and sometimes kill trans and gender non-conforming people. Federal bills protecting the most basic human rights of trans people are non-starters. Even “LGBT” groups routinely throw trans rights under the bus to accomplish other parts of their agendas.

Do read the whole report — it’s depressing and heartbreaking, but necessary.

Transgender Day of Remembrance

This is a guest post by C. L. Minou. C. L. Minou has written on trans and feminist issues for the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, Change.org, and Tiger Beatdown. She blogs at The Second Awakening.

[TW for transphobia]

I don’t remember when I first heard of the Trans Day of Remembrance. It must have been at least five or six years ago, when I was just beginning to connect the private tortures of my transness to larger societal concerns. I can’t, to be honest, remember very well my reaction to it. Probably something along the lines of “that’s a good idea.”

I mention this not to give you insight into the Banal Morality of C. L. Minou, but because it seems that nowadays some trans folks are turning against TDOR. Not just the various observances of it, but against the entire concept of having a day to remember the murdered trans people of the previous year. “It’s depressing,” say some. “Where is the positive day?” say others. “Why do we only talk about the depressing deaths, when trans people have accomplished so much?”

And some say, “why should I care about a bunch of prostitutes who have no bearing on my life?”

I’m not going to dispute the first two points. Yes, indeed, remembering the deaths of people who died simply because of who they were is depressing–horribly depressing, and it’s horrible that every year there isn’t a shortage of names to add to the list. And of course trans people are doing amazing things: becoming judges, working in government, bravely taking a stand against ongoing discrimination. These are all amazing things and we should celebrate them.

But that still doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a day to remember the dead, or exchange that day for one of unfettered celebration.

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Kye Allums, NCAA Basketball Player, Comes Out as Trans Man

I don’t know much about college basketball, but I know it’s a fairly big deal when a player comes out as trans. Kye Allums is on George Washington University’s women’s basketball team and is officially out as the first openly trans NCAA Division I player.

Queerty points out that things might get dicey for him because he’s on a basketball scholarship for the women’s team. If he’s taken off the women’s team, he loses his scholarship, and there’s no scholarship in place (not yet, anyway) for the men’s team if they let him play on that instead.

Kye has opened up about the positive feedback he’s been getting, including from people he doesn’t even know. It’s great to see the outpouring of warm wishes.

I’ve had numerous Facebook messages, text messages, people calling me, people I don’t even know, telling me how they’re proud of me and how I’m a really brave person, and it’s been really positive.

NYT mentioned that the NCAA is going to review their policies for transgender athletes. For now, they’re letting him stay on the women’s team because he hasn’t undergone any hormone treatments. It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on this as the season progresses — I’m sure this isn’t the end of it.

New Report Shows Trans* People Experience Huge Gaps in Health Care Access

Earlier this month, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force released the National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report on Health and Health Care (pdf). Reliable statistics on trans* people are notoriously difficult to come by, and among those that exist, many are outdated and/or derived from very small sample sizes. This U.S. survey included over 6,400 trans women, trans men, and people imperfectly grouped together as “gender non-conforming,” from all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. That makes it really big news, and a really important resource for information.

Sadly but far from surprisingly, there’s a lot of bad news. From the key findings of the report:

Survey participants reported very high levels of postponing medical care when sick or injured due to discrimination (28%) or inability to afford it (48%);

Respondents faced significant hurdles to accessing health care, including:

Refusal of care: 19% of our sample reported being refused care due to their transgender or gender non-conforming status, with even higher numbers among people of color in the survey;

Harassment and violence in medical settings: 28% of respondents were subjected to harassment in medical settings and 2% were victims of violence in doctor’s offices;

Lack of provider knowledge: 50% of the sample reported having to teach their medical providers about transgender care;

Despite the barriers, the majority of survey participants have accessed some form of transition-related medical care; the majority reported wanting to have surgery but have not had any surgeries yet;

If medical providers were aware of the patient’s transgender status, the likelihood of that person experiencing discrimination increased;

Respondents reported over four times the national average of HIV infection, 2.64% in our sample compared to .6% in the general population, with rates for transgender women at 3.76%, and with those who are unemployed (4.67%) or who have engaged in sex work (15.32%) even higher;

Over a quarter of the respondents misused drugs or alcohol specifically to cope with the discrimination they faced due to their gender identity or expression;

A staggering 41% of respondents reported attempting suicide compared to 1.6% of the general population, with unemployment, low income, and sexual and physical assault raising the risk factors significantly.

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