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Some of Calpernia’s favorite diary entries.
“You a MAN!” Does Association with the Gay Community Invalidate Trans Womanhood?
May 21st
Would you be like this ravenous-for-blood audience? Is this the position into which you’d put trans women? (See 1m33s)
My recent emergence as a Hollywood cabaret singer and performer seems to have stirred up some members of the rapidly aging 1970′s/80′s stealth trans community who (understandably for the time) made denying their transition into a sacrosanct religion. Most members of the trans community are basically supportive, when and if they think of me at all. But apparently some have too much time on their hands, now that their “sexy” days are long behind them, and ditching dialup has put all my YouTube videos at their fingertips. How they manage their own histories is one thing, but criticizing my choices warrants a response.
Let’s be clear… My journey of self discovery had its start in the gay community. I was an artistic, feminine child who quickly learned to hide any allegiance with females or sexual interest in males. A stint in the military as a young adult gave me the confidence to begin discovering who I really was, and my only resource afterward was a huge gay nightclub and theatre. I was taken in by incredibly talented entertainers and eventually given a job that allowed me to indulge my performance skills AND get paid a living wage while being encouraged to become as feminine and womanly as possible. It was ideal.
My internet and media presence is obviously visibly inclusive of my trans history. In my daily life, walking around the city or having lunch with friends, I do not make an issue of my transition and I believe that most people around me have no idea that I ever transitioned. If a stranger asks me whether or not I’m trans, and there’s no value in discussing it, I will simply tell them to fuck off. Not because I deny that I had to transition my physical body into alignment with my soul, but because I don’t feel like discussing it on the street with a moron.
(Click CONTINUE READING to see the note that came in, and my response)
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I Hate the Bell Witch, But I’m Not Scared of Her
Oct 13th
The Bell Witch House, Photo by : kelly : on Flickr
All the Pretty Little Horses by calpernia
Yesterday I realized that I am not afraid of the Bell Witch any more.
In this month of October, as every year, my thoughts often turn back to the gorgeous Autumns of my Tennessee childhood. Every horizon back home was a fringe of trees, and as the leaves began to turn orange and red and gold, those colors became the peripheral background to our Fall routines: Hog killing at Uncle JC’s farm, hiking with the school Ecology Club, walking the endless fields to find this or that creek to hunt crawdads.
Being someone with an attuned interest in weirdness, the supernatural and folklore, I particularly enjoyed the rare ghost stories told by uncles and grandfathers at our occasional big group suppers, just before we all went into the living room or porch to play Bluegrass gospel together and sip sweet iced tea. (The same family suppers and gettogethers from which I was banned forever somewhere around 1994) There was a story about an enormous rotted log that my Uncle M came upon in the woods one pitch black fall night, the inside hollowed out and dripping with phosphorescent slug-riddled fungus. He told how there seemed to be a sound echoing from inside it, and when he leaned in close he could hear the soft hopeless wailing of little children coming up from somewhere deep underground. My skin prickled and my ears almost popped, it sent such a thrill of horror through my guts. “How terrible, how nightmarish it must have been for those children to be trapped who knows where, under the cold damp earth below that rotting log!” I thought over and over.
But the most horrifying, the most believed story that everyone told in Tennessee was the story of the Bell Witch.
One such haunting is the legend of the so-called “Bell Witch,” a sinister entity that tormented a pioneer family on Tennessee’s early frontier between 1817 and 1821. Unlike the blockbuster films and many other ghost stories, the “Bell Witch” haunting involved real people and is substantiated by eyewitness accounts, affidavits, and manuscripts penned by those who experienced the haunting first hand. This distinction led Dr. Nandor Fodor, a noted researcher and psychologist, to label the Bell Witch legend as “America’s Greatest Ghost Story.”
From the image of a lifeless body hanging from a tree, to the apparition of a pale-faced woman and three children in a field, “Kate” was all-knowing, all-powerful, and the personification of evil. She helped children in danger and nursed John Bell’s wife when she was sick; however, her two missions were to destroy Elizabeth Bell’s engagement and to kill John Bell. She accomplished both. Generations later, many descendants of those who were involved are STILL reluctant to discuss the legend. And even today, unexplainable things happen on and near what was once the Bell farm.
Transsexual Clichés and Stereotypes in Film, Television and Print Media
Aug 31st
Gotta get that shot of her "sexy shoes" in!
This little piece was originally written for a documentarian, but has been expanded and can inform any media piece about transsexual women. Its style and tone are conversational and idiomatic, reflecting the fact that these are my unpolished thoughts and this essay is not meant to be my perfectly considered “last word” on the subject. I write here almost exclusively about transsexual women (write what you know!), and will be interested to read a similar viewpoint from the trans male community when it is written. Someday I will probably reformat and footnote this essay, but until then I think the information can be useful to any media creator who wants to hear my perspective. Don’t miss my 1,000,000+ view YouTube video “Bad Questions to Ask a Transsexual” for a humorous but informative slant on these issues.
I’ve participated in many documentaries, going back to at least 1993, and I’ve probably seen or am aware of most English language docs or films of the last several decades that deal with trans characters, as well as many foreign language films. While I’ve done my best to influence those in which I’ve participated, my awareness has had to evolve over time, and sometimes I was simply not in a position of power once my participation was done. I have also participated in many narrative projects, including “Soldier’s Girl”, “Transamerica”, “CSI”, “Transamerican Love Story” and our own “Casting Pearls” and “Transproofed”. In addition to the points I make below about the storytelling in narrative projects, a major concern of mine as an actress, activist and consumer is that transsexual women are rarely allowed to play ourselves on screen. We are almost never allowed to play non-transsexual women. In both docs and narrative films, some key patterns have become apparent to me which are still fairly invisible to many creatives, so I will share an abridged list of some that I feel are negative, false, tired (ie:overused) or wrongly applied to transsexual women. This list isn’t intended to disparage the creative work of some very talented people, but I do feel it to be important to put this information out there. This is what transwomen who know something about film, tv and history are probably saying when they see these topics on screen.
Documentaries/Reality Television
Below are some of the seemingly “required” shots which can be found in most trans-focused documentaries and many trans-themed narratives, along with some reasons why they are negative, insulting or unnecessary:
- Ultimate cliché Hall of Fame (Used in both films and documentaries): Subject putting on lipstick (usually in the mirror), sliding foot into high heel shoe or stockings, painting fingernails, shopping for clothes. Usually done in close-up on the body parts. Typical dissection of us into fetishized, sexualized body parts and easy broad-stroke telegraphing of a director’s ideas about femininity. You’ll find these shots in almost every movie with a prominent trans character, all the way up to the film made about my life (“Soldier’s Girl“) and the mostly wonderful “Transamerica”. If you can imagine the shot in a 1950′s black and white “Ladies’ comportment” instructional film, it’s probably falls into this category. The intended zing of these shots is usually the contrast between the highly female gendered behavior and the visibly gender variant trans woman. “Look, a ‘man’ putting on high heels!”
- Before/After Photo: Deserving of it’s own category, the before and after photo set and old name/new name are seemingly mandatory inclusions in any representation of a transsexual in any media. It is undeniably fascinating to the average gawker, in the same way that some people find autopsy photos of JFK or Marilyn Monroe fascinating. But what it does is implant an image in the viewer’s mind which “disproves” the subject’s womanhood. Once the viewer sees a photo of a mustachioed guy in a flannel shirt named Frank Smith, the current image of the transitioned woman becomes overlaid with subconscious thoughts like “Their real name was Frank. They used to be a man.” Unfortunately, many transwomen have so little support and recognition in their lives that they are eager to do anything to please anyone who shows interest. They gladly offer up anything requested, at the sacrifice of their own dignity and identity. Sometimes they don’t even understand this is happening. And of course, for some people who transition, it really is all about the process, the mechanics, and the surgeries rather than just *being* a woman. They are as much a gawker at the eye-popping before/after photos and “would’ja believe my name used to be Frank!?” shockers as anyone, and I believe these people have something else entirely going on than I do. There are also a small number of women who share old photos and information among other transitioners in order to educate and inspire, and I personally remember being very inspired and heartened by seeing selectively shared photo evidence of how far some of my trans idols were able to come in their transitions. This sacrifice is admirable because outsiders seeking their carnival sideshow fix will usually be along to snap up these images for their own purposes, ripping them from websites and albums intended to inspire and splashing them across tabloid media projects.
- Surgery and Process Focus: People outside the transsexual community, especially guys, love to hear all about the mechanics of transition. They cringe with excited horror at descriptions of genital surgery, leer at breast implant procedures and want every scalpel slice diagrammed and illustrated for their shivering, fascinated disgust. Most trans-focused documentaries focus on these mechanical aspects of transition and have included the seemingly required blood-drenched surgical porn disguised as “operating room footage”. Non-trans people seem to love to cringe at the sight of genitals being carved up, and there are many freaky transition fetishists who are mesmerized by the sight of gory sex-change surgery, too. Transsexual people themselves are interested in understanding the procedures that they may someday undergo, but this wise self-education is very different from the body-parts obsessed surgery porn that is usually a part of documentaries. I personally find surgical footage revolting, and for me, the nitty-gritty of one’s vaginoplasty was better kept a private experience. For most transsexual women, vaginoplasty and other surgeries are just a part of the journey to their target gender. Far too many documentaries make the transformation itself and the gory surgery the entire focus of their film, or the “big finale”. For many transsexual women who choose to have surgery, having vaginoplasty marks the beginning of their new life assimilated into the community of women. Few filmmakers ever look at what happens once the surgical landmarks have been passed, so we are left being portrayed as eternal debutantes, preparing for the big moment and then once it happens, the credits roll.
This process focus is mostly due to the camera always being in the hands of cluelessly fascinated straight people, or gay/lesbian people who think they understand because they really liked “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”.
Narrative Film/Television
Narrative filmmakers have been fascinated with transsexual people for as long as they have been aware of them. As an artist and storyteller myself, I understand that the journey of a transsexual character can seem like a bit of real magic happening in the mundane world. To the sympathetic eye, it can illustrate someone literally “transforming” from one form into another form, crossing some of the most basic divides in humanity: sex (physical characteristics) and gender (social roles). To the un-sympathetic eye, it can represent a profoundly disturbing freakishness that masquerades itself as “one of us” and walks among “us”, grotesque truth hidden by dark and forbidden alchemy of bio-chemicals and surgery and affect. Obviously, I ascribe to the former view when considering my own journey, choosing to find magic and evolution in my story.
- The Four “P’s”: Unfortunately most filmmakers (certainly not all… but most) pull a cardboard sketch of transsexuality out of their store of ideas and use it to illustrate one of four basic types, the “Four P’s“:
- Prostitute
- Punchline
- Psycho
- Poor thing! aka the “Noble Victim”
- And with these worn-out caricatures, they pepper their stories with a bit of drama, a laugh, a moment of “justified” revulsion or some sweet progressiveness-affirming pity.
- Negative Focus: Genre writers especially love to write transsexual women characters as prostitutes (see every cop show ever on television, except for that very special episode of Andy Griffith they don’t air anymore), the punchline/butt of a joke (see Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Surreal Life: Alexis Arquette), noble victims (see Soldier’s Girl, Gwen Araujo Story) and scarily mentally disturbed (see Silence of the Lambs or “Ava” in Nip/Tuck). Decades of these portrayals influence many documentarians, writers and filmmakers to seek out these archetypes or play up these traits in their subjects, whether they realize they’re doing it or not. “I’m going to write a transsexual character… I guess I should read up on prostitutes!” or “I’m going to write a transsexual character… I guess I should crack open some books on abnormal psychology!” is not the way to start your research. Where do these clichés come from? Like many clichés, they probably have roots in some real situations that tend to be more visible than other less flashy ones. There are many transwomen driven to sex work in order to survive, because their families have cast them out, their schools did not protect them from bullying and companies will not hire someone who is visibly gender variant. There are many people undergoing medical and social transition who play with gender tropes to get a laugh, from drag queens to people who feel humor eases some social tension when they are unsure of themselves. There are some people who crack under the indescribable pressure of transition, and there are even some few people who are just plain crazy and their flavor of insanity directs them to pop in a set of implants and decide that they’re a woman just like the person next to them has decided that they are Napoléon Bonaparte. And there are many of us who have suffered somehow at the rough hands of society, and who try to bear this suffering with nobility and move forward from it. But clichés are really just a kind of shorthand that people use to categorize others into comfortable “types” without having to do much work, and even when someone seems to fit a cliché, there are always deeper levels. Outside of the easy clichés, there are so many other interesting realities to use when telling your stories. Why not a transsexual computer scientist? A transsexual doctor? A transsexual airline pilot? Click here to look at some amazing transwomen you may never have heard of. You may ask, “Well if they’re not going to be a gritty prostitute or a shocking reveal, then why does it even matter that the character is transsexul at all?” EXACTLY!!! IT SHOULDN’T!!! Why not let the character be interesting because of what she feels, says, chooses to do, instead of because of what she “is”?
- Assumption of Monolithic Community: Most media people assume transsexuals all form a homogeneous group of like-minded people with the same goals, motivations and beliefs. Actually, there are COUNTLESS reasons why people assigned the male gender role at birth decide to adopt things associated with the female gender role, from the aforementioned lipstick and heels to body-affirming surgeries and the social role itself. These are just a few:
- Transvestites: Some men are incredibly “turned on” by items which represent archetypical femininity (such as makeup and clothing), or the erotic humiliation scenarios that result from wearing these things and adopting female-gendered behavior in public. Some eventually come to build their entire lives around this fetish. They may self-identify using the DSM-defined terms “crossdressers/transvestites”, or they may be so invested in the erotic scenario that they adopt the supposedly more “acceptable” medical self-diagnosis of “transsexual” to maintain or justify it. Like the famous definition of pornography, many transsexual women feel that people undergoing medical and social transition for erotic reasons is a situation which “they know when they see it”, but issues of identity can be difficult to pin down if the subject is unwilling or unsure themselves. Whether transitioning for erotic reasons, under the influence of poor mental health or just doing it with limited success, these characters are often very alluring to documentarians and television news people, because they are usually visibly gender-variant (many characteristics traditionally identifiable as male are obviously visible in high contrast to attempts at female gender presentation), sometimes fairly exaggerated in presentation and usually eager to act out their eroticized scenarios of gender role-play and humiliation for anyone interested. Much of the time, those chosen for portrayal are older and often have a wife and children, which adds to the drama. This crossdresser/transvestite type has been quite over-represented in documentaries, in my opinion. Why not just do a Ken Burns image montage narrated by a somber-voiced man illustrating World War II? That’s probably the only documentary cliché more hackneyed than “Let’s watch Uncle Billy become a lady! Wow, there’s the surgery footage! Roll credits!”
- Late Transitioners: Many transsexual women of previous generations were forced to hold off acting on their need to express their target gender, and are older with a wife and children when they finally decide to begin transition. Documentarians and television news crews love to follow them on their first awkward fumblings through femininity, watching with smirking wonder and patronizing pats on the back as someone who “looks like their grandpa ” shops for dresses and models a first wig. Transition is not an erotic fetish scenario for these women, but they have put it off for so long in consideration of their loved ones that everything can appear tragically new and difficult for them to the merciless eye of the camera. I always find it very sad when these women are taken advantage of, sometimes with their pitifully grateful compliance and sometimes at their complete uncomprehending expense. Instead of spotlighting these women in their most awkward moments, why not document your mom’s experience of menopause for us all to watch?
- Survival Sex (Gay Males) : Some gay men living on the streets who become involved in sex work find that a flamboyant female “character” catering to the larger “heterosexual” sex market makes more money than a gay male sex worker. Closeted men unwilling to give up their self identificationy as a “straight male” sometimes find it easier to have gay sex with a male prostitute who is in drag. These characters wrap up the media-beloved heartbreaking-but-sexy prostitute story with the always fascinating “look! It’s a guy in makeup!” story, but many times these unfortunate people are driven by financial need and opportunity rather than a lifelong core identity as a woman. Vastly over-represented and exploited.
- Survival Sex (Transsexual Women): Some transsexual women are driven to sex work after being cast out by their families and rejected for traditional jobs and educational opportunities. The media usually lumps them in with the previously mentioned category, uninterested in differentiating. Vastly over-represented and exploited.
- Early Transitioners: In these times of increasing acceptance, some transsexual women are able to access social, informational and medical resources at an early age. They are usually able to transition fairly smoothly and lead average female lives. Traditionally there has been very, very little portrayal of these women, although in the last few years some news programs like the Barbara Walters feature have covered real stories, and some reality television series like “Transgenerations”, “The Real World”, “I Want to Work for Diddy” and “Transamerican Love Story” have blazed trails. Perhaps these real-life portrayals will open the minds of creatives and inspire stories that are more representative of real trans people.
My basic advice, in light of what I’ve written above, is this: If you really want to step into uncharted territory and do something that hasn’t been done before, try to be aware of the clichés, pitfalls and easy-outs that I’ve mentioned. Try to tell the story of how the issues you’re interested in affect a woman who is rejected, hated and disbelieved. A woman who has repaired a disfiguring birth defect. If you advertise for subjects in the back of the local gay rag next to the escort ads, you are going to get responses from one kind of person. If you advertise with fliers at the local college, another. If someone’s website has a photo gallery named “My Sexi Leg Pix” and blocky animated gifs of big-eyed Manga teeny bopper girls in crop-tops with pink hair blowing kisses — and they are a fifty year old construction worker — then apply the same screening criteria you would when looking for subjects who aren’t transgendered. Don’t just assume that “that’s the way transsexuals are” and stop there because it’s easy. The only subject you can find/write is a fifty year old married construction worker? (really?) Then find a fifty year old married construction worker who otherwise fits into society with other fifty year old women, one who is earnest about really being a woman and one whose transition was the path to living a fulfilled life in society rather than an end in itself. You can only find/write a sex worker? Then consider a bright, inspiring one who is saving that money for school or a home.
Because really being a woman, day to day, in relationships and in society, is what transition is about. When all the colorful makeup is washed away, the frilly sexy clothes are replaced with jeans and a white t-shirt, the hair pulled back, the mirror confiscated, does this person still feel like they are a woman? That’s the core from where everything else grows. The showgirls, sex workers, activists (and yes, the “nut cases”) are the visible tip of a vast, secret iceberg. There are real transsexual women of all ages, races and careers, living all over the world. Quietly in neighborhoods as members of the PTA, or walking the runways of Milan, in what we call “stealth” with no one knowing their history. We are all around you, if you only care to look.
Hall of Shame
Some of these movies were good or even great pieces of art, and some weren’t, but their treatment or use of a transsexual character (stated or implied) was damaging or poor, in my opinion.
- Normal – Regardless of the writing on the back of the DVD, this was made as the story of a man who decides to start wearing earrings and perfume to his factory job. Even the lead actor didn’t take his character’s transition seriously, referring to “Ruth” as “he” and “him” in most interviews.
- Flawless – Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a nuanced performance as a feminine drag performer, and then the writer takes the story on a bewildering turn in which Hoffman suddenly decides to get a sex change without ever a mention of any of the groundwork that transsexual women go through before that last step. Why not have the character announce in the third act that he is going to compete in the Olympics, without ever mentioning that he had trained for them?
- Dressed to Kill: Michael Caine as a man in a dress, killing people.
- Psycho - Tony Perkins as a man in a dress, killing people. The psychologist at the end says that Norman wasn’t really a transsexual, but a tacked-on dismissal by a non-character does not compete with the previous imagery of the male lead character in a dress and wig, stabbing another lead character to death over the strains of that iconic violin music.
- Silence of the Lambs – Another psychiatrist (this time a psychotic killer himself, and thus not a reliable source) briefly mentions that the villain is not a “true transsexual”. But this does not compete for space in our psyche with the unforgettable image of Jame Gumb smearing on drugstore makeup, tucking his penis between his legs and asking the camera, “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me… I’d fuck me so hard…”
- Check this great list of “Top 15 Transsexual Killer Movies“
Hall of Fame
- Ma Vie en Rose – Gorgeous movie about a little boy who wants to be a little girl, and the resulting strife felt by his family.
- Red Without Blue – Documentary which focuses on relationships rather than mechanics of transition.
- Different for Girls – A true-to-life portrayal of a transsexual woman working a normal job and dealing with her relationships.
- Soldier’s Girl – I’m unavoidably biased toward this film, which depicts my relationship with my Army boyfriend and his subsequent murder. But I do believe that it showed a realistic trans character as a human being, a love interest and as someone worthy of love.
- Transamerica – A complex, real portrayal of one individual transsexual woman’s journey. “Bree” reflects a somewhat unique experience, but not an unrealistic one, and Felicity’s portrayal captivated the film world and put MTF trans roles into a new class of viability for female actors, rather than the typical “let’s put this guy in a wig and let him flex his acting muscles playing this tragic freak” track which characterized most trans roles up to this point.
See more examples of transsexual-interest films at http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/films.html
We Come From You: Transsexual People Are Not “The Other”
Nov 4th
We Come From You
(Originally published on Calpernia’s Psychology Today blog)
For most of my life, when I looked at the people passing by in my daily activities, on some subconscious level I felt like I was one of them. Beneath whatever surface tensions, we were all part of the human family, and aside from my transition I wasn’t terribly unlike most of them when it came to the basics. But even more so than a lifetime of almost numbingly commonplace rejection, the heartbreaking contempt toward transsexual people (as part of the GLBT community) exposed by the heightened politics around the 2008 Presidential election has left me feeling like I need to examine closely who and what I am a part of. For trans people, gender is forced into being a social, political and legal issue as a matter of simple survival.
Almost one transsexual person is murdered in the US every month, which is an astounding number considering how few of us there are nationwide. We have been at the center of legal attacks from schoolteacher Dana Rivers to wife Christie Lee Littleton to Colorado’s recent and typical
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against trans people being allowed to use public spaces such as the restroom by positioning it as “what if a MAN was in the restroom with your daughter?!” Look at my photo next to this blog entry. That is the face of someone who would be forced to use the men’s restroom by these people. Trust me, my interest in teenage girls extends only so far as they can accurately fill my order at the local hamburger drive-thru.
Most recently, after watching national leaders represent their constituencies’ beliefs by seeking to restrict marriage with Constitutional amendments redefining it as “between one man and one woman” and using condescending terms such as “tolerance”, I fear that next steps will inevitably involve imposing into the Constitution their definition of what exactly a man or a woman is. Should one’s gender be defined by reproductive ability? Then what about men and women born sterile? What about impotent older men and post-menopausal women? Does genitalia define gender? Then what are intersex people? Is it chromosomes? Then should we do a chromosomal assay on every newborn and adult, and do we claim to fully understand all aspects of the human genome anyway now? Very few opponents of non-hetero, non-gender normative people understand the science behind these questions, and many would eschew science in favor of religious interpretations anyway. In any case, it’s an unwinnable situation for us in their minds. We are “gross”, scary and threatening. All their rationalizations against us fall into line behind these gut-level feelings. These beliefs, held by politically powerful and wealthy people, directly influence my daily life and set a tone for the national zeitgeist that says trans people, as part of the GLBT community, are “less than”, and worthy of “tolerance” at best. If I sent you an invitation to my birthday party which said, “Calpernia will tolerate your presence at her upcoming birthday celebration on February 20th, 2009″, would you want to come?
Why did I “choose” this “lifestyle” of being a gender rebel? All I can say is that one’s soul seems to be whatever it will be, and our only choice is how to express it in our lives. At very early ages, I began to discover differences that went beyond the average person’s. Many things I wanted to do would upset the adults and other children, who seemed to follow their own hearts’ desires with the loving hands of the community guiding them onward while they reprimanded and punished me. My eyes were drawn to things like the games that the girls played with each other on the monkey bars, sharing secrets while perched like birds in a tree. They talked and watched the boys, or a leader would direct the others in improvised routines of flips and twirls done in hypnotic unison. I wanted to hang upside down with them and shake my own curtain of silky hair that swept the ground. I wanted to hear the whispered secrets, and receive the frightened consideration of the boys who were happy to be separated but endlessly fascinated with the girls.
I had never heard of transsexualism or homosexuality. I had never seen a drag queen or transsexual, never read “Heather Has Two Mommies”, never encountered anything other than simple suburban Southern folk in a Christian home. Yet these needs were there, from the earliest ages. My only choice was whether to hide my true self, or cherish and express it.
I discovered quickly that hiding it was my only option, as I was not welcomed by the girls, and while the boys had no desire to include the feminine child I was in their games, they rained down all the derision they could muster when I left them to flip and twirl on a lonely perch atop the parallel bars by myself. But I still felt like I was one of them all, a person among persons. Just not a popular one. If worse came to worst, we were all in this life together as human beings, I seemed to know without putting it into words. I would learn in the coming years that I was not considered “one of them” by the majority, to my great disadvantage.
In my world, it is simply a fact that social and religious conservatives are horrified by people who transgress the gender boundaries that they have set up. This is backed up by a lifetime of personal experience. Never mind that current gender boundaries are mostly fabricated based on what is comfortable and familiar to the majority, and have little to do with anything “universal”. “Well, my little Joe likes trucks and baseball, so all boys should!” Here in America, men don’t wear dresses, women do. Men have short hair, women have long hair. Boys wear blue, girls wear pink. Mostly meaningless, but crossing those lines has often stirred up fevered responses driven by terror from mostly conservative and religious citizens. Trust me, I’ve walked through a mall full of conservative Southern families as a fledgeling transsexual woman. I’ve seen the responses.
There are certainly a few religious groups who welcome or at least “tolerate” gay, lesbian and transsexual people without subjecting them to “reparative therapy”. I can’t think of any socially conservative groups who are welcoming, but in any case none of these small groups seem to be in a position to dictate public policy, legal precedent or social moires in the way that I see from the major religious and conservative groups. And by “dictate policy”, I mean legislate me out of the fabric of society.
A lifetime or two has passed since those childhood days, and now I am a battle-hardened and battle-weary veteran of the rejection that only grew more complex and urgent as those children grew into adults. Where they once excluded me, the feminine little boy, from their playground games, now they vote and litigate to exclude me, the transsexual woman, from their social institutions, workplaces, schools and hospitals. But looking beyond the immediate threat of debates on whether a transsexual woman is legally a “woman”, and thus belongs within or outside of things like California’s upcoming anti-gay-marriage “Proposition 8″ initiative, I look at what these questions mean about what these people would do with us, if they had the power to do so. Where would they have us go? How would they have us live?
I won’t even go into the fact here that the biggest threat to heterosexual marriage and families is obviously a little something called “divorce”, which rends up to half of all hetero families in two. What if the tens of millions of dollars they spent fighting the tiny threat of GLBT marriage had been spent fighting divorce?
Keeping us out of the concepts of “family”, marriage, the workplace, schools, health care and the very fabric of society is part of a larger mission of “othering” us as much as possible in the current legal framework. I wholly believe that people seeking to push us out of those spaces in society would ultimately only be happy if we didn’t exist at all, in any way. If we can’t work, study, take care of ourselves or be a part of families, what’s left?
What has become most distressing to me over the past few years is the attempt by religious and social conservatives to exclude trans people (as part of the GLBT umbrella) from the universal concept of “family”. As if we came from something other than a family ourselves. A prime example of one of the groups that uses the word “family” to mean “not Calpernia Addams” is the online Journal of the American Family Association. They even put my picture on the cover of their July 2006 issue, as an example of “sexual radicals who hate Christianity”. While “hate” is a rather strong word, considering my treatment by the institution, you can bet I don’t “love” them. They are one of countless conservative and politically active groups using the term “family” as something that doesn’t include GLBT people, and scaring members by holding up their children as assumed targets of our imagined nefarious schemings.
The word “family” has been appropriated by conservative religious people as a code that means “NOT gay, lesbian or transgendered”. Where once the word meant “mom, dad, brother and sister” to me, now it means “NOT YOU!”, which is a terrible shame. And a terrible way to position another human being’s place in this society.
Because, you see, we are not the monstrous aliens from some other dimension who hunger for the souls of your children, as conservative media personalities would have you believe.
We come from you.
In recent years, some lesbian women have chosen to bear children through various means, and some gay men have adopted. Some few GLBT people have children from previous mixed gender relationships. But for the most part, historically the GLBT community has not made up a large segment of the reproducing population. And even when we do reproduce, our children only have the same tiny percentage chance of being GLBT as anyone else’s. Most likely, we’re making more of you, not more of us.
For the most part, we do not reproduce ourselves. We are not born from space pods, or made from string and twigs by witches. You, the average heterosexual gender-normative couples, make us. We are made up out of your offspring, and your families. We come from you.
Yes, “families”, that word from which they work so hard to exclude us. Every time you, your relatives, your friends, have a baby, you are rolling the dice and a small number of times out of every so many babies, a child comes who will eventually be attracted to members of the same sex or who will not fit gender stereotypes. This is just a fact, played out throughout recorded history and across the world in every culture.
Not only were we once children, just like the precious ones held up as shields by the terrified parishioners who fund scare-tactic television ads and websites encouraging you to push us out of the fabric of society. But some of those little angels who play among your own children right now in school, church and the neighborhood are young gay, lesbian and transgendered human beings just like I and my GLBT friends once were. Some of your own children are young gay, lesbian and transgendered human beings, just as some are young heterosexual and young gender normative humans.
As most GLBT people will tell you, we always knew something was different. We weren’t hetero-normative and gender-normative kids who decided at age 21 to become gay or to transition. We may have learned to fake it, or tried to suppress it, but most who I’ve met always knew something was going on. We were gay, lesbian and transgendered children, just as others were straight and gender-normative kids. Yet, we had birthday cakes with big wax candles in the shape of the #1, just as other kids did. We watched cartoons and wanted to eat too much candy. We studied for algebra tests, attended or rejected the prom and had all the same human moments that you all had, albeit with an added layer of strife due to the rejection of our sexuality or gender identity by society.
We are not “the other”, we are not monsters. We come from you. It’s a very simple thing, but it’s one that bears mentioning to the many who would “otherize” and demonize us as monstrous threats to “their” proprietary ideas of family and children.
And it’s something that I must remind myself, too, when I look out my window now at the people walking down the street. I struggle with bitter knee-jerk thoughts of “are you the one who votes against me, or apathetically doesn’t support me? Are you the one who rejected me, mocked me and insulted me from childhood all the way up to now? Are you the one who lackadaisically sits in judgment of whether or not the things most natural and comfortable to me are acceptable to you in a social, workplace, medical, legal or entertainment setting, while your most natural and comfortable urges often get a free pass by your own religions and social systems?” I then have to remind myself to hope that these strangers are not a cruel, unified, hypocritical majority of “others”, but that they are imperfect human beings just like me, and that I do indeed come from them, so there is a possibility that someday they will see me as one of them. That I am still part of the human family, and that there is still some thin hope that the hypocrisy and hate will end one day.
Bad Questions to Ask a Transsexual: 1,000,000+ Views!
Oct 16th
Posted by Calpernia Addams in Comedy
33 comments
How exciting! “Bad Questions: The Director’s Cut”, my sassy improvised comedy video telling rude people how I feel about their questions, has reached over 1,000,000 views! Combined with the original, longer cut’s 300,000 views the concept has 1,300,000+ views! Not bad for a transsexual topic. What really kicked it off was YouTube’s surprising decision to contact me and put it on the front page of the site as a promoted video, but actually a huge portion of views have come from just viral spread throughout the community. Thank you, Cal-pals!
Originally just a list of questions here on my site that I had gathered over years of dealing with the public, one evening I decided to slap some Coty Airspun powder on my face, paint my eyes and lips, slip into a vintage 1970′s thrift store dress in Oxblood, have two fingers of Lagavulin and improv away based on the list sitting in my lap. Since then, “Bad Questions” has been translated into French, played for groups at community centers and even shown in college classrooms, far exceeding any expectations I ever had for it. One just never knows what will become of an evening’s work!
In celebration of the 1 million mark, here’s a little essay I’ve been sending out to people who write to me about the video, usually to express anger at my tone and claim that “curiosity is normal”. In a nutshell, I respond that the tone is comedic and I agree that everyone is curious about unusual people but that curiosity is not a license to ask rude questions. Look it up, dum dum!