Happy Friday! We here at The Feronia Project so hope that you have a good one.
Today, we’re sharing a story from the amazing-and-awesome StoryCorps about what happened to one family when one member transitioned from female to male and the whole family became stronger. It’s a lovely story.
(Thanks to NPR for the original link!)
Today, we’re very pleased to have Morgan Boecher guest posting on The Feronia Project. Morgan, who is trans male, runs What’s Normal Anyway, a webcomic about being trans male.
Sexual health takes on new meanings for those who transition from one gender and/or sex to another. Not only are there plenty of challenges navigating medical care for physical health, but there are the less frequently discussed issues of maintaining mental health while negotiating the minefield of sexual relationships as a transgender person.
When I came out and began the social and physical transition from female to male, I started creating a comic called What’s Normal Anyway. The comic helped me reflect on my experience, connect with others, and expand the narrow world of transgender media by a little bit. I also had a secret reason for putting my comic out there: maybe it would help me get dates, I thought.
Now, perhaps a webcomic artist isn’t quite the sexiest thing one could imagine, but while I was entering a realm of foreign gender customs and newly sprouting secondary sex characteristics, I was looking for reassurance in any form. Until that point, I had lived my life as a reasonably feminine female who did not have trouble finding straight boyfriends. While I had a hard time identifying with heterosexual dating scripts, I at least knew how to follow them. As a masculine person, I found that the rules changed. Straight guys no longer flirted with me, and what on earth would gay guys think of me? (Of course, there are straight and gay trans men, but they are relatively few and far between.) I sometimes felt more like a curiosity than dating material.
Dating experiences among transgender people must be incredibly varied due to the multiplicity of identities, sexual orientations, and bodies represented within the community. At the same time, each attempt to form a new relationship poses some degree of risk for a transgender person. A date does not have to react with violence or hostility to make a trans person feel disconnected, feel not enough of something – not man enough, not woman enough, not queer enough.
Dating presents another layer of challenges for transgender people trying to be themselves, and be loved and accepted as such. The will to keep in the game can require a great deal of resilience and self-esteem, and the journey is rarely clear and simple.
But hey, that’s what makes for good webcomic material after all.
Morgan Boecher is a Florida-grown New Yorker who is working on a Master of Science at Columbia University’s School of Social Work while he creates a comic about being trans male called What’s Normal Anyway, which he updates every Monday at whatsnormalanyway.net.
In my own city, a popular bar called The Bishop recently refused a patron participation in Ladies Night (free drinks) because the bouncer thought she was a he. She is Alex Borrego, and her ID says she’s a female. Alex was born male but spent “two years of hell” transitioning to a female.
The transition process isn’t easy. It often involves numerous medical appointments and treatments, psychological evaluations and counseling, a legal mess, support (or not) from family and friends, and heap of courage. There are lots of different terms used to describe the variations from the traditional (and outdated) binary models of male vs. female and masculine vs. feminine, but here’s what it boils down to: a transgender person wants to live on the outside how they already feel on the inside.
Alex and her friends decided to leave the bar that night, but soon after the incident, they launched a Facebook campaign to boycott The Bishop. It wasn’t long before the owner of the bar, Dean Marshlack, caught wind of the campaign. He immediately apologized and did it the right way by not making excuses for his staff. He used the situation as a teachable moment and took the opportunity to educate his staff. The Bishop is also changing its Ladies Night policy so any person who says they are female, even if they don’t have an ID, will be served.
The sad truth is that there are far more people out there besides this bouncer who do not understand any kind of variation when it comes to the spectrum of sexuality that lies between male and female. Today I simply commend the use of the teachable moment, the sincere apology, the coverage of it in the media, as well as Alex’s courage to speak out. In the future, The Feronia Project commits to dig deep into transgender issues.
Today is a guest post from one of the other members of our affiliate who also manages a gender studies department at a local university.
In an ideal world, everyone involved in the medical field would understand that “mark one: M/F” doesn’t work for all of their patients. Sadly, we’re far from an ideal world, and especially when you’re approaching a new medical office for issues unconnected to transitioning (getting tested for STIs, getting an annual exam, getting antibiotics for strep throat), there are a few things that you can do to make it a little easier.
1. Ask your friends for a recommendation. This is probably the best way to find someone, since you can follow in their footsteps.
2. Research potential medical offices in advance. Some practitioners aren’t going to be a good fit for you, and it’s best to find that out ahead of time, rather than after an expensive appointment. Some steps to consider:
3. Bring a friend – this can be a stressful experience, and having someone who can be your advocate is a real boon.
4. Plan out what you’ll do if the office is horrible. Sometimes, you need a prescription for antibiotics and you’ll decide to grit your teeth and get through it, but if you know ahead of time what your exit strategies are, you’ll be able to walk out when it’s warranted.
5. Lastly, please go to the doctor when you need medical attention. Depending on finances and insurance, go to a clinic, find a place with sliding-scale fees, make a drive to get to the nearby town with a supportive doctor, but don’t neglect your health. Your body deserves to be cared for and deserves a doctor who will treat you well.
Here’s some more links that may be helpful:
http://transequality.org/
http://www.firelily.com/gender/gianna/talk.html
http://doctorz.wordpress.com/
Today is a guest post from one of the other members of our affiliate who also manages a gender studies department at a local university.
As many of you may already know, yesterday marked the 13th Transgender Day of Remembrance. For those of you who hadn’t heard of it before, this day exists to mark the loss of all of the people who’ve died during the past year as a result of violence based on bias against transgender people.
It first came about because of Gwendolyn Ann Smith, a transgender graphic designer, columnist, and activist, wanted to memorialize the death of Rita Hester in Allston, Massachusetts in 1998. She created the project Remembering Our Dead in 1999, marking the anniversary of Rita’s murder with a candlelight vigil. Rita’s murder is still unsolved.
In the 13 years that this day has been commemorated, we’ve remembered 328 people who were killed within the US because they were trans*. We’ve remembered 313 people who lived outside of the US who were killed because they were trans*. We’ve remembered the countless others whose deaths haven’t been reported, where the circumstances of their deaths aren’t known, who took their own lives because of the transphobic violence they faced, and whose names are unknown to us.
Remembering people whom we’ve never met is important, because for those of us who didn’t know them, it can be too easy for tragedies to get reduced to numbers. But knowing their names and seeing their faces means that we acknowledge how their deaths – deaths that are often minimized, trivialized or ignored by the mainstream media – affect us all.
Even if this is the first time you’ve heard any of their names, their deaths do affect each one of us. Every time someone is murdered or attacked because of who they are, we’re losing a part of our community to hatred and intolerance.
The Day of Remembrance is about the people who are no longer with us because of this violence. While more states, and even the IRS, are becoming more accepting of transgender individuals, the problem of violence is far from solved. Today, and going forward, it’s up to the rest of us to keep working for a world where that violence has no home.
Additional Day of Remembrance projects:
DOR Art Vigil: http://tdor.weebly.com/gallery-2010.html
DOR Webcomics project: http://tdor.boolean-union.com