Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
This article about a recent upsurge in attacks against queer/trans people in Venezuela isn’t easy reading, but it is important to get through. We’re reading Stone Butch Blues in my Transgender Lives class just now, and it’s never easy to read or re-read, even.
I tell myself sometimes that I teach this stuff so that some day I won’t have to, or I can teach it only as history, not the present.
Imagine 59 years together! I can’t. I’m not sure they can, either, but my parents have been married that long. Here’s a couple of tracks that remind me of them; “The A Train” because that’s my fad’s favorite music. Danny Kaye for multiple reasons: he & my dad went to the same high school, and my mom loves them both.
They were both raised in Brooklyn, so when I moved back, it was like home-coming. Now, like good retired NYers, they live in Florida.
There is too much to say, to feel, to think. I cried through the President’s announcement the other day – tears of relief, not joy or sadness. But I am most happy for the people who might be able to get out from under the evil that Bin Laden was:
Something similar was on the minds of residents in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, home to the city’s Little Pakistan. A group of men at a halal butcher shop called Bin Laden’s death a blessing. In the office of a Muslim community group, advocates handed out celebratory sweets. In a kebab restaurant, an Afghan waitress said she hoped people would finally stop linking her people with terrorism.
Indeed, the neighborhood was alive with hope on Monday that the terrorist’s removal would mark a new beginning for Muslims in New York, many of whom have felt under suspicion since the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Thank God he’s gone — it’s good news for the whole world,” said Ahmad Sajjad, the owner of a grocery store where men gathered to discuss the news. “It’s finished. Now we can go back to 2000.”
But Mian Zain, a customer, was less sanguine. “Someone will take over for him,” he said. “The game is not over.”
Mohammad Razvi, executive director of the Council of Peoples Organizations, a Muslim advocacy group, cloaked his building on Coney Island Avenue with a two-story American flag on Monday. “It’s a celebration for everyone,” he said. “This guy had nothing to do with Islam.”
At the Islamic Cultural Center on East 96th Street in Manhattan, the imam, Shamsi Ali, agreed. He likened Bin Laden to a cancer growing in the body of the Muslim community that had finally been cut out.
“We really applaud the efforts of the U.S. government,” he said. “Hopefully this will be the start of Muslim communities living in tranquillity and peace.”
At the largely Afghan Hazrat Abubakr Mosque in Flushing, Queens, celebrations were being planned for the weekend, and the imam, Mohammad Sherzad, said he was overjoyed at the terrorist’s death, not least because of the violence he had perpetrated against his own people.
“Everybody was happy because we suffer a lot from that criminal,” he said. “Before anybody else, he did a lot of crimes against the Muslims.”
The whole piece is very well done – balanced, thoughtful, varied. It put me back in NYC for an instant, and in Brooklyn in particular. I think it is hard to understand that we never stopped mourning in New York, and probably never will, but this death, at least, is a sign that someday we might.
My god do I wish I were in NYC.
Osama bin Laden is dead. I may be drunk for a week.
I had two year-old kittens on 9/11 who are 11 now; one was diagnosed with cancer last week.
It’s the 8th anniversary of Dubya’s bullshit “Mission Accomplished” photo op.
Nearly 50K US soldiers have been killed or wounded in the time since.
I hadn’t been married for even two months; in two months, we celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary.
& That asshole has been alive all that time.
Osama bin Laden is dead.
Jamison Green, Jason Cromwell & Dallas Denny did a survey on trans terminology 10 years ago to try to educate people who were writing about trans issues. It’s a whole decade later, & they thought it needed an update, so they’ve created a survey for those of us in the community to weigh in what terminology doesn’t suck and what does. Here’s their letter:
Greetings!
Ten years ago, we conducted a short survey of our community’s reactions to the use of descriptive terminology in the professional literature of gender identity issues. Basically, we were interested in reforming the literature so it could speak respectfully about transsexual and transgender persons. To do that, we wanted to find out which terms transsexual and transgender people liked, and which they didn’t like. The results of our study were reported at the 2001 scientific symposium of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), and had an immediate impact on the hundreds of medical and social scientists who were present.
A lot has changed since 2001, and we thought it would be interesting to re-open the survey, collect new data, compare the results 10 years later with the original results, and present our analysis at the 2011 scientific symposium of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (formerly HBIGDA) this September.
We are asking community members to rate and give us their opinions of certain terms which have been used in the literature, and some of the terms put forth by the community itself, so we can communicate the community’s opinions to the members of WPATH and (we hope) more widely in a subsequent academic publication.
There are no physical or psychological risks associated with responding to this survey, and there are no age restrictions for respondents, though we caution participants that some terms offered for your evaluation may be offensive to you or other individuals. The survey has only 8 questions (though most questions have many options to choose from) and should take less than 20 minutes to complete. Please complete it all in one sitting – if you exit the survey before you complete it, your answers will not be saved. The survey is scheduled to close June 28, 2011, so please respond soon!
If you are interested in receiving a copy of the paper which will eventually come from this, you will be given an email address at the end of the survey so you can contact the researchers separate from your responses to this survey. Any communication you initiate with us will not be associated with your survey answers, and no identifying information will be retained. We will treat your email address as confidential and will use it only for distribution of the paper to you. Your answers to the survey also will be treated confidentially, and no data reported in our analysis will be traceable to you.
Here’s the link to the survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8RGBH25
Thank you VERY MUCH for participating in this survey and helping us with our research!!
With Gratitude,
Jamison Green, Jason Cromwell, & Dallas Denny
Let them know what you think. The paper will be published this fall.
I read an article in Slate recently, by the author of Stiltsville
It was this section of her article that rang (sadly) true for me:
Midwesterners are wary of prying—they consider it impolite, even unfriendly—and they don’t readily reveal personal information. Which means they exist comfortably at a certain remove that can take years—and I mean years—to breach. When my family gets together in Florida, we share a meal, heatedly discuss current events, then retire to separate bedrooms to catch up on email. When my husband’s extended family gets together, it’s an all-day family-fest. They might not talk about much, but they truly enjoy just being together. To a coastal-hearted misanthrope like myself, it’s mind-blowing. But spending time not saying much of anything with family is one thing—doing it with acquaintances is another thing entirely.
I might find, say, having dinner with acquaintances, where the topics range from the weather to the menu, disappointing. Exhausting and depressing, even. But acquaintances are acquaintances, no matter where you live. The trouble here is the trouble everywhere: how to find close friends, how to really connect. And though I appreciate Midwestern civility (a departure from Miami, for example, where in an afternoon one might witness a fight at a traffic light, have one’s cart rammed at the store, then be persistently ignored by a waiter), I continue to wrestle with the barriers of it.
When you are both an introvert and a “coastie” (as we’re called), there’s real trouble. I generally know when I like people and feel that I can trust them, and in NYC, at least among my group of friends, sexual peccadilloes, money woes, medical diagnoses and trashy humor are conversation starters; I can’t recall ever talking much about the weather — although it may be that midwesterners talk more about the weather because there is so much more weather here (a recent day featured not just snow, sleet, rain, and hail, but thunder, lightning, and tornadoes).
That doesn’t mean there aren’t others like me; for starters, there are other transplants, other “coasties” who leap right in too. And there are most definitely midwesterners who are the NYC pilgrim sort, and who obviously understand, and even like, slightly brassier manners. In an odd way, as depressing as it was, this article was incredibly useful to me as well; I’ve felt like a bit of an outsider, but in the context she’s given me, I’m doing just fine.
But I hate to break it to her that Danskos are quite hip in NYC, especially since we all walk and stand so much more,which leads me to wonder if standing in subways close enough that we can smell each other breaks the ice much more easily than always being cocooned and enveloped in your own private car and your own private smells. I, for one, think we underestimate being both social and animals.
Good to see.
TLDEF applauds the United States Department of Labor’s announcement yesterday that it has taken steps to protect its transgender workers from employment discrimination. The Department of Labor added gender identity as a protected category in its equal employment opportunity statement. The policy applies to all hiring, promotion and disciplinary practices for the approximately 17,000 employees of the Department of Labor.
“Whether in private or public employment, what matters is not who you are, but how you do your job,” said TLDEF executive director Michael Silverman. “The Department of Labor now joins the many public and private employers that have recognized that discrimination is bad business. We applaud Labor Secretary Hilda Solis for her leadership on this issue.”
Transgender people face tremendous discrimination in the workplace. In a recent survey, 47% of transgender people reported being fired, or denied a job or promotion, just because of who they are. In a recent case, TLDEF filed a lawsuit on behalf of a transgender man who was fired from a male-only job solely because he is transgender.
“Employers like the Department of Labor set an example for other employers to follow. It is a great day when diversity is embraced and discrimination is rejected in the workplace,” added Silverman.
Pakistan has recently adopted a new law that allows people who don’t identify as male or female to choose another gender on identity documents.
Allows is the key word. They don’t require it. It seems like a good thing – not just for those who are third gender, but for those during transition, and for those who don’t have passing privilege.
If only we could manage something similar here.
If you haven’t seen Stonewall Uprising on PBS’ American Experience yet, do. It’s good stuff. Here’s the first (of nine) chapters:
Watch the full episode. See more American Experience.
