Does Transitioning Fight Oppression?

Biologically, I am a lesbian Yes, I consider myself to have been, not only born a female, but born a lesbian.  I am a feminist. I have absolutely no idea how "women" feel. I don't believe that I've ever felt like one. Men are even more foreign. I have always just felt like a person, one saddled with organs and anatomical features that cause me to be percieved as a female person.

I used to see a world divided into two types of people, functional and decorative. Each person has traits from each category but "women" skew toward decorative, "men" functional. Words like interior versus exterior could be used as well. But this is all a bit too simplistic. I actually find each package full of sex roles disgusting and any person who acts as one package, quite limited. The nature of each makes them anti-human and unacceptable. We are all so much more than either of those options. 

I wonder that if I were young today would I transition to a man? I might consider it but only because present-day options are so limited. For me, it would be a terrible mistake. The gendered world today is full of the misguided notion that all a person has to do is be the right gender, or no gender, and their problems will be solved. The idividual solution is the only one actively proposed today. It is the Ayn Rand gender solution.

Sexism is not some gender-binary equation. It is systemic, an integral part of the capitalist economy that exploits labor by race, class, gender and a litany of other things. It's a different issue than changing your body. Ideally, we should all be able to do whatever we want, pursue whatever inspires us within the context of the body we already have. Transforming the physical body is not the answer. Go ahead, if it floats your boat. Have all kinds of plastic surgery too! Just don't expect your decision to weigh in against the dominant paradigm.

We used to see broad-based gender stereotyping and discrimination as a social problem.That is something that was the basis of oppression. It required organizing, mobilizing, conciousness-raising, demonstrating and fighting for something better.

You can appoint yourself a god or a goddess. It may do wonders for your ego but nothing will change. Transgendered people have become frontline symbols for a much bigger, more compelling problem. They have been deluded into thinking that by simply altering a body you can make oppression vanish. If that were true, every movie actor would have already changed history. Do what you like to your own body. But don't delude yourself. Only organizing in the outside world can cause the struggle for justice to begin.

Suicide / Survival

Robin Williams’ suicide is a devastating waste and loss. The shock waves reverberating around the world seem out of proportion for one comedian however brilliant, poignant and universally respected and loved.

This is a reaction to the big question that if someone like Robin Williams could end his life, how can the rest of us poor fools ever manage to trudge on? If wealth, fame and universal adoration aren’t strong enough reasons to compel someone to stay here on earth, what does that say about all our struggles? It compells us to imagine a depth of despair that is truly terrifying. It speaks to the immense difficulty of this life that someone can go against every survival instinct as opposed to just waiting for inevitable, eventual death, an experience guaranteed to every one of us.  

Death in our culture is very scary. In my sixth decade, I currently see more friends taken down against their will than because of it. That was not always the case. I’ve had friends and family members and friends who’ve ended their lives. My grandmother took pills. my high school friend, Jill hung herself with her knee socks when we were in our early twenties. In those years, my friend Liz stole her uncle’s gun and shot herself in the head. As one of those they left behind, I felt grief was overwhelmed by a sense of failure.What could I have done or said that might have made a difference? Couldn't I have talked them into one more pizza, one more movie?

Yet, I have certainly gone through periods in my life when I’ve considered suicide as an option. Fortunately, there is a vast abyss between thought and action. Taking your own life is a violent act that requires a high level of desperation as well as commitment. It demands totally abandoning the idea that things will improve, that tomorrow will be that proverbial new day.

The tragedy of suicide is that violence is perpetrated not only on the departee but on the survivors. I blame my mother leaving me because of ovarian cancer, but if it had been her decision to go it would have made my anger that much stronger. We all want to debrief with the dead but, except for dreams and visions, they are no longer available to us. Anger, frustration and fear are the collateral damage that suicide leaves in its wake.

So grieve for Robin Williams and for everyone who couldn’t bear to wait around for the grim reaper and instead took things into their own hands.It’s okay to mourn. It’s okay to be pissed off. But the best outcome is to support the people you care about right now and make sure each one of them can keep on keepin’ on!

Class Comfort Level Persists

My father was a salesman who worked on commission only, my mother temped as a secretary throughout my childhood. My sister and I would spend every weekend at our immigrant grandparent’s apartment because parenting was not on the to-do list of either of my folks. In both environments, the kids I hung out with were from what we all considered “regular” families but now recognize to have been mostly from the socio-economic class that lies between the poor and the middle class.

My mother was always quite vocal about my father’s irresponsible financial behavior which consisted mainsly of going deeply into debt in order to project a middle-class image. She often called him Willie Loman, in reference to Arthur Miller’s character in “Death of a Salesman.” Both of them were Jewish and college-educated so, in some ways, they were atypical of the "white" working-class. And, in those days, Jews were not really considered white, anyway. 

In spite of my parents' educational achievements, they fell far short of the material prosperity held out by their socio-economic aspirations. None of us possessed the mannerisms of that desirable group. Kids in my school seemed to know instinctively that I was not one of them and treated me accordingly. Was I too outgoing? Too open? I couldn't figure it out. But the friends I made then were all from similar class backgrounds. We just had so much in common that I never considered befriending one of the “rich kids.” Like the weather it was just a given, a reality too obvious to be questioned or discussed.

At Ohio State University, I was introduced to a broader vision of the world. Now, if I so desired, I could be friends with students who wouldn’t have had anything to do with me before. And, sometimes, I chose to pursue these very people. It was to prove my worth, as though their privilege might rub off on me and allow me to rewrite my past. Sometimes making them like me was simply a way to extract a sort of revenge.

But as college years faded into real life, my path diverged sharply from that of the factory-owners’ daughters and the trust-fund babies. Economic struggle is not just theoretical when there is no family safety net waiting to catch you if you fall.

To this day, I find myself gravitating instinctively toward people from similar circumstances. Instead of diminishing, this tendency seems to be increase with age. I can’t put my finger on the exact cues of this shared oppression but, considering my automatic selection process, the indicators must be quite blatant and obvious to all.

Evidently, the people who can best put up with me, are those who have made their way without a lot of financial and emotional support. It has nothing to do with concious intention or some form of reverse snobbery. It just happens.

Here, Queer and Becoming Visible

Just 118 years after Oscar Wilde’s arrest for sodomy, the LGBT struggle is finally being validated as a worthy cause. The news is full of LGBT issues, from a lesbian military widow being denied spousal benefits, queers being thrown out of restaurants, denied marriage venues and wedding cakes, anti-gay prom efforts in the Midwest and the Associated Press Style controversy over whether the words husband or wife should be used for same-gender couples. Even Obama refers to us with some regularity, linking Selma and Seneca Falls to Stonewall.

This is not to imply that we are winning these battles, actually, in many instances, the backlash has become stronger. Soul-numbing slights have been an expected occurrence for queers for centuries. But it takes public validation for many heterosexuals to be able to see the forest through the trees. And, as in the Black civil rights struggle, people are coming of the woodwork claiming they supported us all along. Well, they say that hindsight is 20/20 and that is definitely preferable to total blindness.

In the bad old days, as an inveterate leftist, mostly what our community faced was invisibility. Bringing up the subject of our oppression would sometimes elicit accusations of “bourgeois decadence” or in some way imply that we were diverting attention from class and racial struggles as though we didn’t occupy places in all other groups.

When a brave non-queer stood up for us, more often than not the comment would have been preceded by an “I’m straight but…” disclaimer. Even in the early gay pride parades straight folks could, more safely, employ the option of marching together as “straights for gay rights.”

But we have persisted and in the geological timeframe of historical change. Will we eventually see full equal rights in this country and perhaps even in this world? I can only live in hope. Still, we have to brace ourselves for the end game struggle. The laps directly before the finish line tend to be the most draining and exhausting of the entire race.