Thousands of gay and transgender people have come to the U.S. to escape discrimination and violence in their countries. Their stories need to be heard.
If you are not familiar with her story, CeCe McDonald is a trans woman who was harassed and attacked by strangers one night on her way to buy some eggs. Defending herself, she ended up killing two of her assailants and served 19 months, her sentence reduced for good behavior and for the 275 days she’d served prior to trial.
While in prison, the Free CeCe campaign spread across the World in social media and at her release there was a Twitter-storm. This week Rolling Stone Magazine tells her story:
“My story wouldn’t have been important had I been killed. Because it’s like nobody cares,” CeCe says forcefully at her dining-room table, as day turns to evening. A shiny, sickle-shaped scar cuts across the jawbone of her left cheek, a permanent reminder of her tragic walk to the supermarket. “But fortunately for me, I’m a survivor. I’m not gonna beat myself up for being a woman, I’m not gonna beat myself up for being trans, I’m not gonna beat myself up for defending myself.”
This is a wonderful video about a young trans girl who not only wants to be girly, but who insists she is a girl. This girl is lucky to have such a wise mother!
There is one problem with this video and others like it, though, and that is that it may be used to create yet another image of the “gold star transsexual” and the “perfect trans kids” – the ones who follow the stereotypical gender scripts to perfection.
I fear for the male to female trans girls who do not want to express their identity through pink dresses and unicorns. A lot of girls assigned girls at birth express their gender in other ways. A trans girl should be allowed to do so to, but I suspect that such trans girls will find it hard to articulate their identity and may never be seen for whom they are.
Then there are the shy, people pleasing, kids: the kind, introvert and silent children who find it easier to give in to the pressure to conform in order to please their parents, friends and superiors, even if they deep inside would love a pink dress (or in the case of the FTM boys: to dress up as a warrior).
The shy ones are also invisible. Indeed, many of them will repress their true identity completely, only to meet it as depression, undefined anxiety and dysphoria later in life.
We need to create a society that allows all of them to express themselves as early as possible.
A gender binary exists in fashion, and that’s a challenge for those who don’t conform. Masculine-presenting women are often destined for boys’ departments or bad fits, while people born male who transition or simply like to dress in femme clothes sometimes don’t know what to expect in sizing or from sales clerks.
Laura Jane Grace, who fronts the punk band Against Me!, transitioned from male to female in dress onstage in 2012. At 6 foot 2, with a mostly black wardrobe worthy of a rocker, Grace recalls the days before she was “out” and on the hunt for women’s clothes.
“It was always kind of terrifying, going out and actually shopping for stuff,” said Grace, who lived in small-town Florida before moving to Chicago.
Mary Going, a masculine-presenting lesbian who’s 5 foot 3 and 120 pounds, wanted a formal suit for her 2008 wedding. After fruitless trips to Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Men’s Wearhouse, Banana Republic and Macy’s, she had one tailor-made for about $1,800.
“I’ve had cars that cost less than that,” said Going. “I loved that suit. I felt great in that suit in a way that I had never felt great in my clothes before. I felt taller. I felt like I got more respect and I don’t know if that’s because I presented more respectfully or because people really did see me differently.”
Going “wanted to offer that same feeling to other people, but without the $1,800 price tag” or the wait. So she founded Saint Harridan, which makes off-the-rack suits with sleek masculine looks for women and transmen.
Michelle Goldberg on the dispute over what it means to be a woman. The transgender-rights movement has forced a rethinking of what sex and gender mean, and radical feminists now find themselves shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue.
I would like to draw attention to this quote from this well researched article on the conflict between trans-bashing radical feminists (TERFs) and transgender activists.
‘Yet, at the same time, the trans-rights movement is growing in power and cachet: a recent Time cover featuring the actress Laverne Cox was headlined “THE TRANSGENDER TIPPING POINT.”
The very word “transgender,” which first came into wide use in the nineteen-nineties, encompasses far more people than the term “transsexual” did. It includes not just the small number of people who seek gender-reassignment surgery—according to frequently cited estimates, about one in thirty thousand men and one in a hundred thousand women—but also those who take hormones, or who simply identify with the opposite gender, or, in some cases, with both or with neither. (According to the National Center survey, most trans women have taken female hormones, but only about a quarter of them have had genital surgery.)
The elasticity of the term “transgender” has forced a rethinking of what sex and gender mean; at least in progressive circles, what’s determinative isn’t people’s chromosomes or their genitals or the way that they were brought up but how they see themselves.
Having rejected this supposition, radical feminists now find themselves in a position that few would have imagined when the conflict began: shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue. It is, to them, a baffling political inversion.’
“It doesn’t hurt to sit down and get to know somebody. I know there are lots of times where people assume things about me, and then they have this perplexed look on their face when I explain who I am. When you take time to get to know a person, that’s how you learn.”
