We're All In This Together

Art Of Politics

Transgendered Like Me

By Judy Osborne
I got really angry the other day. The gay community had given us a major act of charity (I'll fill in the details next month). I met with a few other transpeople to figure out how to do something useful in return, or that's what I thought.

Instead we talked about having a rally, giving speeches at Pride Day, writing a statement, and lots of other stuff which was visible to those involved and didn't take a lot of effort.

I asked if we could raise some money to help. No, I was told, the transgender community doesn't have any money. Could we get t-people to ask passerby's to sign petitions? No, there aren't enough of us to make a difference. How about if we staff phone banks or stuff envelopes? No, we aren't here to deal with little things like that.

I asked if we shouldn't help in some concrete ways. Look how far the gay, lesbian, bi-communities climbed out on a limb for us. No, I was told. They did it because they were afraid of what we would do if they had turned us down.

What? Would we tell our neighbors? Would we boycott the petition drive? Would we withhold our funds? Would we decide not to help?

It seems to me that gays and lesbians have taken about a twenty-year head start on transpeople. Many are out, demonstrating to friends and neighbors that they don't really have nine heads. Anybody who gets to know and like a gay person can never be quite so prejudiced afterwards.

So far transgender has no face. We lack a human image. We're shadowy figures, like a monsters hiding in closets waiting to pounce on frightened kids after dark.

Little by little, the more adventurous among us are beginning to put a human face on transgender. People seem mostly to like us when we do, but it's a slow process when we're twenty years behind and when probably the majority of t-people haven't even opened up their front door for the first time.

Still, we want to be protected from violence and discrimination, and we want to be accepted out in the world just like our gay and lesbian cousins. We just don't want to make the effort to slog through twenty years of violence, discrimination and prejudice to catch up.

So whenever gays, lesbians and bisexuals achieve something, we want it too! Right away! For sure! It's only fair! We make demands, throw rallies, make speeches, demonstrate, lobby, disrupt. Sometimes we even tell lesbians and gays we'll work against them if they don't carry us along to whatever goal they're pursuing at the moment.

About the only thing we don't do is work with gays and lesbians to help everybody get to the goal. We make noble speeches and march and protest and argue endlessly about who's being unfair to us, but when there are envelopes to stuff, phone calls to make, doorbells to ring, petitions to get signed, or money to be donated, we're outta' there.

About the only big gay organization which has left us behind so far is the Human Rights Campaign, and we've protested and leafleted their events all over the country. But there's a reason they have refused to include transgender in the national Employment Non-Discrimination Act every year including 1997 -- we have no face, and we don't help very much.

All the other big gay and gay- supportive organizations on the national scene and in Seattle -- The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Lambda Legal Defense Fund, National Organization for Women, Hands Off Washington, the Northwest Pride March, Privacy Fund, and others -- have embraced us, made our plans and dreams their own, and fought for our justice along with their own, sometimes at peril to their own hopes and dreams.

In my opinion, the leaders and supporters of these organizations are very classy people. They have made our cause their own because they believe in fairness, justice, inclusion, and unity and because they understand what oppression feels like and don't want others to suffer it.

In the ultimate gesture of inclusion, Gabriel Rotello recently wrote an article in The Advocate (12/10/96) entitled Transgendered Like Me. The title refers to a classic book of the fifties written by a white reporter who managed to darken his skin enough to pass as black.

His intense and moving experiences on the other side of the race barrier became the text of Black Like Me.

In Transgendered Like Me Rotello, who is gay, asks readers if he looks transgendered in his photo. He does not, at least by any standard definition. He goes on to say "I increasingly believe that I am transgendered. What's more, I believe that if you are lesbian or gay or bisexual, you are too. And I believe that an emerging definition of all gay people as transgendered is the wave of the future."

After noting that "most heterosexuals tend to feel and act and desire and respond and present themselves in a fairly 'sex typical' a way - pretty much all-male or all-female," Rotello goes on to argue that "Gay people, on the other hand, exhibit a whole range of 'sex- atypical' characteristics, meaning characteristics that are most commonly associated with opposite sex."

Remarking on the tendency of many, probably most, gay boys to "report that they identified strongly with girls when they were very small" and that "the opposite seems true for most lesbians," Rotello concludes that "what distinguishes us is that we all, to some degree or another, have major traits that place us somewhere between the two primary genders. In that sense we are all transgendered"

" Homophobes don't merely hate us because of how we make love. They hate how we make love because it violates our expected gender roles. Really, we are hated for gender transgression ... all gays are in a basic sense transgendered, all homophobes are first and foremost 'transphobes'."

And finally, "if the ultimate cause of our oppression is gender transgression, then shouldn't it also be the focus of our identities and our movement? Shouldn't we stop being the les-bi-gay-trans- whatever movement, with a new syllable added every few years, and simply become the trans movement?"

"Once we stop thinking of ourselves as oppressed by what we do in bed and start thinking of ourselves as oppressed because we occupy a space between genders, the sexual differences between us will fade into unimportance, and our common humanity will emerge into the light.

If that's not a higher form of liberation, I don't know what is."

So maybe we in the t-community could stop sounding like Rodney Dangerfield. We're finally "gettin' some respect." Let's stop bantering and bickering and throwing bombs at each other and going for glory and putting each other down. Let's forget about our differences. Let's start doing some of the real work.


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