Emily Alford




Of Courage, and Commitment

By Emily Alford




As I've read TG Forum, Crosstalk, Tapestry, and even the mainstream press over the last few years, I've been struck harder and harder by the sheer courage of some people in the transgender community, and by how much they have gained for all the rest of us.

Not that long ago, the expected course for a person who decided to transition was to abandon family and career, invent a new history (with all its risks of inconsistency), take a huge cut in standard of living, and "go stealth." Now transexual lawyers, police, firefighters, doctors, professors, and bus drivers are highly visible people, doing exactly what they had done before, just where they had done it. It may still be harder to admit to cross-dressing or part-time cross-living. Western culture continues to like polarities. But it's getting easier.

This hasn't happened spontaneously or because of the transgendered vogue in films. Real people have brought it about, by standing their ground when others would push them off and by pushing themselves when necessary, Any subscriber to TGF knows the most prominent names, but there are plenty of others. The gains are enormous. Being transgendered is less and less a matter for shame. It's a matter of belonging to a legitimate minority, among many others. It's good for us, and it's good for society as well.

I had my chance to join the envelope pushers just after Halloween. And I blew it. I don't think I did wrong.

I was lunching with a colleague. He is also a close enough friend that he turned to me and my spouse for understanding when his long-term gay relationship went sour. Talk turned to Halloween in our city's large gay community, and he told me that he "just can't figure out transvestism." Everything in the situation said "enlighten him, now" and my face probably went red enough to give me away. But I said nothing, beyond some anodyne comment.

Did I let the community down? Maybe, but if I had simply opened up I would have let something else down that is vitally important to me. I'm married to a spouse who is incredibly understanding and supportive. She bought me what I'm wearing in the photo that accompanies this article. She took the photo itself. She has helped out other transgendered couples. She has written for TGF. But she has her limits. She hates being talked about, and she wants our personal life kept separate from my work. My colleagues are gossips. Over a long tough haul of commuting marriage (transatlantic, which is some commute) I've kept them from gossiping about me. So there wasn't really any choice, when my friend confessed to not understanding my own self.

I've thought about something larger as I've reflected on my snap decision for silence. I don't think I'm a coward. During the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras I gambled both my freedom and my safety for what I believed. But I'm not an in-your-face person. I hate confrontation. Being a historian by trade, I reflected on one of my personal heroes, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. His testimony against slavery was powerful and courageous. But Douglass had his limits. He admired John Brown but he declined to join Brown's valiant but futile attempt to turn protest against slavery into insurrection by slaves. At the same time, Douglass did not stand alone. A community of free black Americans surrounded him, living their quiet lives while they made possible what he did.

I've thought also about something Norman Mailer said in his account of the great Pentagon demonstration of 1967, THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT. No matter how far a person goes on an untravelled road, the gist of it runs, somebody else will always go farther. Douglass knew that, I guess.

Maybe I'm rationalizing. But I'm not ashamed of keeping quiet, this time. Gutsy people have made it possible for the rest of us who cross the gender line to be a lot better off than we all used to be. One of the big gains is that a lot of marriages are surviving, despite one partner's going pretty far down the transgendered road. My own is such, and I go pretty far. Every such couple has to write its own rules, because the normal rules of manhood and womanhood clearly don't apply. I think that our being a couple on terms we have written ourselves, that both of us being open about it within the community, and that sometimes helping other couples in the same situation are contributions to the well-being of transgendered people too.

Someday, of course, I may face a situation where I'll just have to be brave. But a post-Halloween lunch with a colleague in a gossipy department in a smallish conservative university wasn't it, even if the colleague is both gay and a friend. Come to think of it, he's pretty discreet himself.


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