This is kind of huge, given how Title IX has generally been interpreted pretty narrowly against trans and gender non-conforming people:
Federal prosecutors have used a novel interpretation of the Title IX statue, which prohibits discrimination against students on the basis of gender, to help broker a settlement in a lawsuit brought by a gay teen against his upstate New York school district, NPR’s Ari Shapiro tells us.
The lawsuit involved a boy who was bullied for being effeminate.
This is the first time since the Clinton Administration that the Justice Department has claimed that Title IX applies to discrimination based gender presentation, beyond simple discrimination based on sex.
Several years ago, back when I was still a crossdresser myself (and working as a man), I came across a picture on an old hard drive of my boss. Wearing tight leather pants, a low-cut blouse, and makeup. And written in a pink script on the picture was a feminine name that shared his first initial.
I was caught somewhere between completely weirded out and strangely relieved to know I wasn’t the only trans person in the office.
Well…except for the fact that like me and my boss, somebody found pictures that seem to look like the ex-mayor on his computer hard drive. Wearing lingerie.
I’m not going to reprint the photos here–you can find them easy enough, ducks–except to say that they do look like the mayor, and that they “vibe” crossdresser for me. (When you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ve seen this sort of thing before.)
And speaking of seeing this thing before, it reminds me of another crossdressing pol who was outed before an election: Sam Walls, a conservative Republican in Texas who lost a runoff election for the state House in 2004. Now, in Walls’ case, you just have to wonder how he didn’t think this would happen: not only (as the pics showed) had he been out and about while crossdressed, but for Pete’s sake he seems to have been the treasurer of the local chapter of Tri-Ess, the national crossdressers’ organization.
Cases like Walls’ and Brewer’s show some of the disturbing inequities of life under the transgendered umbrella. One may point out that people like Walls or Brewer retained substantial privilege and did not face everyday transphobia–something that MtF transsexuals often have to deal with every day. But. Even in Oklahoma, a trans woman can run for office and be open about her history, whereas neither of the crossdressing politicians felt comfortable doing that.
And that shows the relatively large gap in both visibility and acceptance between transsexuals and crossdressers. Television shows, news reports, books–all concentrate on transsexuals, not on crossdressers; and the leadership of many trans organizations is dominated by transsexuals. Now, again, some of this is because there is a greater incentive for transsexuals, especially trans women, to push for their rights. There is too what helen boyd once called the “fear of queer”: crossdressers can look “normal” in their everyday presentation and can fear (or feel no need) to lose that part of their gender identity in service to activism.
But that obscures–just as crossdressers themselves are obscured; no one is really sure how many there are, since so many are relatively closeted–the very real pain and angst of being a crossdresser, of not having the comforting narrative of transition–a story that seems, at least, to have a beginning, middle and end. If people now seem to understand, if not accept all the time, the transsexual narrative–“you’re a woman on the inside” or “born wrong” or whatever the current popular meme is–but how do you explain that you only need to be a woman part of the time? That you only seek temporary solutions? That you live in the shadow of, as helen has also said, the other shoe never dropping?
[…]my transness will always be subordinate to other people’s experience of either womanhood or transhood. Women can look down at me because I’m a “part-time” woman, who dresses in costume and “doesn’t know what a real woman’s life is like”; transwomen can throw the same criticism at me, with the added vector that my transness can’t be serious because it doesn’t manifest itself constantly or as urgently as it does for a transsexual.
But it isn’t true; I’m trans all the time, and there are a lot of times that I feel trapped in an endless cycle of oscillation between femininity and masculinity with no way to end the cycle.
Sure, compared to transitioning, my problems are the difference between jumping off of a cliff and riding the kiddie roller coaster. But who the hell wants to ride on the kiddie coaster for the rest of their lives?
But let’s not stay all doom and gloom…courtesy of Joe My God, here’s Donna Sachet performing the national anthem before a Giants game in San Francisco–the first drag performer to ever do so! Rock on, Ms. Sachet!
*She later transitioned, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, it’s a good sentiment.
Greetings, Ducks! Today, it turns out, is the one-monthery (strictly speaking, an anniversary refers to a year. Yes, I took Latin! Yes, I am a shameless pedant!) of this blog. Which I seem to have celebrated by taking the day off (well, to be fair, that proposal I wrote the other day blossomed into further proposals and some discussions with the potential client, so I was busy.)
I want to thank all of you who have dropped by, and especially all of you who left such nice comments here. Starting a blog again was something that I did with some trepidation, and your encouragement has really been so lovely.
I had trepidation because part of my “process” (no, thank you, Anonymous!) is figuring out exactly how much my transness is going to be integrated with the rest of my life, and starting a blog where I was so open about it (albeit with personal details obscured) seemed to have the potential to swallow my life up again. After so, so many years where my transness was a constant, overriding distraction to my life, I really wanted to just try being a woman for a while.
But it’s clear that I have things to say about transness, and especially about how transness intersects with feminism. So I say them here, and so far it hasn’t consumed me–in fact, it’s acted as a safety valve, letting me work on living a life not always dominated by where I’ve come from, but by where I’m going.
So thank you all for dropping by, for your encouragement and support, for giving me a reason to write every day–something I thought I might never do again. And here’s to the start of our second month!