When the Trans Community Seems Royally Messed Up (Because in Many Ways it Is)

I have a confession to make. Sometimes I want to strangle the trans community, much like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s tale about her journey Through the Looking Glass when she squeezes the Red Queen into a kitten.

As much as I may want to strangle the community I intensely love it. I think you can relate. Face it. In our interactions with others in the trans community, either in a support group at a brick-and-mortar space provided by some noble soul or in social media, we sometimes wonder if we can really call it a community at all. It’s fragmented. Transpeople often attack one another like rabid cats in a cage as it sinks into the leaching field of a sewage plant. Alienation abounds. Clearly, the trans community might be called “royally messed up.”

Just last week a distraught trans friend called me on the phone like others have from time to time. Not only did she worry about the ominous political trends against transpeople in the United States, she expressed how fed up she felt with the trans community. “Too many are just in it for themselves,” she said.

She’s right in many ways. With all the manipulation, grandstanding, alienation, and even overt meanness, sometimes the trans community has the charm of being ferried by Chiron while Virgil demands your commitment with a Saturday night special pointed at your ribs because he thinks you’re Dante and he has to pay his agent. In such a predicament, the trans community could seem like it’s an unwritten level of Dante’s Inferno.

UNITED VOICES?

As a transgender writer I often feel a kinship with other transgender writers. At other times I wonder what I’m doing here. I often feel the latter when I encounter a writer, especially one who claims to have achieved some “big media” status and replaces genius with Hollywood-style snobbery. Many among the range of variants broadly called, “trans” have cultivated the latter instead of the joy of joining together with united voices.

Here’s an example how:

Many years ago when I actually had a model’s body, the Vice President of Transgender San Francisco (TGSF) recruited me to compete in a beauty pageant they held every year. I wasn’t sure I could do a stage performance for a talent competition precisely because I never tried. Yet suddenly I found myself thrust into a position in which I not only needed to do a stage performance, but I had to do it “professionally”. And I did. I proved to myself that I could, even though I still feel no special affinity for the entertainment field.

Why did I do it? Simply this: in those days, anything that contributed to raising awareness of transpeople was worth doing, even if it didn’t feel natural. I had no intention of gaining a title. I had determined in advance that I would prefer the next girl to myself.

After all, I had entered divorce proceedings and might have to move away in the following months. Holding the title and responsibilities of a transgender beauty queen in San Francisco for a year seemed preposterous. It still does, though my aging middle offers the greater explanation today.

In the initial meeting one couple half-jokingly offered reward money to any contestant who bowed out of competition. The organizer also told us all that they wanted competitors and to not try to blow it in the interview process.

That’s when I decided to make the organizer permanently mad at me. When it came time for my interview, I told an aide to one of the judges who was also a member of the Board of Supervisors, “When I first came to San Francisco, I felt plenty of negative feelings because my welcome consisted of being raped. I said, ‘San Francisco is 19^th century gingerbread wrapped up in a condom and dipped in nicotine.’”

Nervous laughter rippled from around the table— except for the organizer who looked at me as if she wanted to commit me to the corner butcher. But I didn’t care. I had restricted my purposes strictly to raising awareness. I didn’t play to the judges. I played to the media.

Perhaps I played it a little too well. I ended up getting a disproportionate amount of press including an article Silke Tudor wrote about the event in San Francisco Weekly in which she spent a quarter of the article on me. I felt embarrassment from the disproportion and this became a lesser factor that led me to not consider competing again, even if it greatly displeased the Vice President at recruitment time.¹

I’ve worried about the stated objectives of organizations ever since. I later wrote an editorial letter to The Channel voicing some of my criticisms:

“When I first came to TGSF I never heard of the Cotillion [their beauty pageant] even though I was hounded to compete almost from the first month. Even when I went into rehearsals I didn’t understand what a debutante was supposed to be. But that wasn’t what bothered me. What worried me was the flack I took for deciding that I was going to go through preferring the other girl to myself. I do not make apologies for this attitude even if it reeks of non-competitiveness. Such a preference is a commitment to that principle called ‘brotherly love,’ a concept practically unknown after Vietnam. My transgenderism seeks to bring out this and other ‘feminine’ qualities, even if it appears ridiculous.”²

Later that year the finalists of that beauty pageant ran roughshod over other members and even members of the public, even with overt rudeness. One such display at a restaurant I frequented must have convinced the staff not to trust transpeople. The incident left me so embarrassed I later returned with deep apologies and an extra large tip. One of the offenders also entered a hotly contested election made hotter by bitter resentments.

See the difference? While you’d think a community would consist of united voices, we often find cutthroat competition, even “support” entities that exact cultlike control that render many transpeople unable to relate to any other kind of approach. Too often we encounter a “me first” mentality in discussion groups, award’s banquets, or speaking events. It’s the kind of ambition that pushes others out of the way irrespective of cost; and when people find themselves pushed out, resentment and resignation follow more often than anyone admits.

VERSIONS OF DISTANCING

One FTM online discussion made me think. One person expressed the following which reflects the issue:

“There was one guy who [sic] I related to more, but he stopped going after one of the facilitators flipped out at him for calling her out on dominating a conversation that was mean to focus on ftm [sic] issues. He’s a bit younger and earlier in transition, but we did actually try hanging out outside the group once he left. We met once and then he ghosted me and I haven’t really had the energy to message him again.”³

But another comment expressed a completely opposite stance, one that could tempt one to interpret it as an example of “self absorption:”

“I don’t want to be an activist or anything, I just want to “assimilate” I guess [sic] Edit: another point to add is that while I’m a pretty androgynous person I don’t feel the need to experiment with gender expression at all.”⁴

We shouldn’t presume self-absorption or non-caring on the part of this individual. The need for authenticity in life can overwhelm anyone, an authenticity that may or may not require any sort of transition. For this person, “assimilate” may simply mean being able to go to a church function and perhaps help with the dishes without fear of suspicion. It may simply mean being able to make friends with anyone without fear of violence. Not all of us are activists, organizers, or otherwise engaged in activities directed toward social justice. Some have different sets of gifts. We need to recognize that.

Or it could simply mean the available groups are out of sync with that person’s experience as this one expressed:

“I just wish there was [sic] more spaces for post-transition people. And, like another commenter said, I often ‘leave my stuff’ at the door because I don’t want to freak out people in a very vulnerable place, which means I end up not dealing with my issues.”⁵

Such people may find themselves distant because of the expectations of others, whether they represent “not trans enough” attitudes, or simply find themselves so out of line with the experience of others they find themselves unable to help, except with silence. They deserve as much compassion as anyone else.

FINDING YOUR CORE JOY

The 1960’s proved to be a formative period for political activism. We saw phenomena like Dr. Martin Luther King, activists for women’s rights, peace marches, Stonewall and its subsequent movements; all which many elders remember with fondness and amazement at how they changed America and the world. But most transpeople in the scene today were born after those days and now exercise their own voices for change. They make me feel hope for the future of transpeople, despite trends that threaten to snuff out our existence.

I believe the greatest generation is yet to come, or may prove to be the one taking action now in resistance to governmental and religious oppression. Many of them have to unlearn the ways of my generation or need to unlearn the gross ambition of recent decades that says, “me first.”

Some of us who are older have to reawaken too. Many of us have been injured by the gross ambition of others, and among them we can find those who have permanently withdrawn from activity. They’ve become like those Chiron already ferried to the underworld and even now some of us feel ready to join them.

That’s when you must reawaken to your first altruism. You must because there’s a part of you deep down that will always be trans and that part needs to reach out to others. Reaching out is a natural human instinct.

Let me illustrate what I mean by “reawakening to one’s first altruism.”

Years ago I entered a bar that caters to transfolk and their admirers. I was there on business. The manager had graciously offered the use of a floor for a committee meeting that reported to the Transgender Civil Rights Implementation Task Force. I had in my hand papers emblazoned with the Seal of the City and County of San Francisco. Some of the johns who looked me over mumbled, “There’s something wrong with this girl.” But transgender prostitutes whose trust I had gained looked at the papers and asked about them. When I explained what was happening their faces flushed with jubilation, for they didn’t want to live the lives of prostitutes. They had simply felt trapped in that world because of discrimination.

The manager told me of their plight over dinner one evening. He described cases of girls who immigrate to the Bay Area from Southeast Asia and who wait around at the bar playing with dice till they meet with their next client. But a day comes in which they have transitioned. They’re simply women now, no longer young exotic things the clients crave. They’re no longer wanted. But they often fail to gain those skills necessary for a good occupation. They’re lost.

This is so wrong. The memory of those girls’ faces continues to haunt me to this very day. I wish I could free them all.

It’s a memory that has driven me back to service again and again, despite periods in which I felt ready to write off the trans community as nothing more than a “good idea.” This memory reawakens in me my own first altruism.

Your language of awakening and reawakening very likely is quite different from mine. I would expect it to be so from one person to the next. It is, after all, engrained in the personal mythos every one of us has, whether we may realize it or not. It’s part of our narratives and we’re a narrative species.

Those narratives have a life-giving quality, leading us to service; and no human is truly happy without finding some avenue of service whether great or small. It’s part of the joy of giving. When President John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” he knew what he was talking about.⁶ But if you substitute “community” for “country” in his statement, you can see that the principle is very much the same. It’s an essential component of happiness, not after a hedonic version that passes, but a eudemonic happiness that lasts.

SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY GO THIS FAR

When you come to terms where you can reawaken that first altruism, it may be time to take stock. What has worked? What needs to change? Sometimes one realizes that the best way to proceed is to start over.

If one already has committed to a service, such must take extra effort and time to evaluate the direction of that service. Most of the time it won’t be necessary to eliminate it. But it may require restructuring to employ the lessons learned, and we all have lessons to face.

Because in a royally messed up community, we as individuals are often messed up ourselves. It’s why we have psychiatric professionals available, not just to sort out gender issues, but other issues of life concerning which we should seek counsel more often than we admit.

But most of all, a life without service to others is a life not well lived. If one should reinvest, reinvest. But know that if one retires permanently, at least part of one’s life may collapse into disarray. It’s like the lake that becomes stagnant if it has no outlet, but remains fresh if water freely flows through it. It’s not just an issue of drive, it’s an issue of health.

Among the millions of transpeople on Planet Earth, one person may begin a movement, but that movement must represent an echo of united voices. Nobody who leads can forget that. The real leaders don’t rule with iron fists. They aren’t the control freaks. They’re the initiators of a dream of joy, of goodness, and of liberty. What may seem like Dante’s Inferno could actually be the Purgatory, leading to an ultimate Paradise finally attained through sacrifice.

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Featured Image: A lighthearted version of a woodcut by Gustav Doré illustrating Inferno by Dante Alighieri, Chiron’s ferry altered with the colors of the transgender flag. Chiron was the mythical oarsman who ferried the souls of the dead to the realm of Hades.