My Big Queer October, part I

Hello, avid readers.

I have been remiss, but mostly because I’ve been sick. Also, I think now is the first time I’ve had a minute to sit down and actually work on the Club. SO much to tell you! The March, the Philadelphia adventure…. Sigh.

So. The March. When last we met, I was concerned that my Saturday-before-the-March had been just the teensiest bit GLB, and not much T or Q. I am delighted to inform you that the March itself exceeded most of my expectations. It was better organized, better attended, and better integrated than even most of the optimistic supporters had thought it would be, and I was damn proud to be there.

I had, as you know, worried that it would be a bunch of 30-40 year old gay men and lesbians, mostly white, mostly of a particular income. I had worried that if the weather was lovely it would turn into an opportunity to saunter around DC with a flask of mojitos and no shirts. I had worried that it would be like my last March, which was in April 1993: a ginormous Pride Parade with bands and music and a lot of spectators hanging from lamposts.

This was not the case.

We Marched. We carried signs about every issue I could imagine — marriage and DADT were heavily represented of course, but so were trans women, and people of color, and health care, and HIV/AIDS, and sex workers… Everyone who could possibly be in the queer umbrella was there. And oh my God, the kids!!!! That was the best part. Cleve Jones made sure that queer kids came in en masse from all over the country, and then he gave them the best jobs. He asked them to March with him in the front, if they didn’t have another group to join, and he fed them from his hotel’s hospitality suite, and he hugged every one of them. He had them escorting Lady Gaga around the city, having rescued her from HRC’s foul clutches. And they were awesome.

About Lady Gaga — she showed up wearing more or less normal clothes (no Muppet heads, for example), and she didn’t sing. She didn’t perform. She said, Being here is the best day of my life, I feel like I’m doing something important, and I want you to know that part of what I can do, other than loving you all, is working to end the rampant insane homophobia in the music industry.

There were a lot of speakers. Most of them were not your basic middle/high income white gay/lesbian person. Most of them were people of color, or trans people, or kids, or other folk not part of the HRCsexual wishlist.

I will write more later as I process, but… It was glorious. Yes, I wished that there were MORE trans folk, and I always wish that people would stop saying “gay” as if that were the right word, but whatever. I wish that there had been MORE noise about health care.

But it was good. It was real. It was not a party. And it was definitely not a Joe Solomonese/Barney Frank glory hole mixer.

And then there was Philadelphia… Oh my. I think the Philadelphia Story requires its own post, actually.

pax

Today’s adventure: a little more heteronormative than I expected

So hello.

Not going to write much, because right now I am SO angry with POTUS, and with the increasingly gross HRC, that I am not actually coherent. So it would not be perfect and incisive anger. Just snark.

Some highlights of the day:

1. The wreathlaying at Tomb of the Unknowns. Knights Out represented, and did a great job, and it was very moving. Usually the changing of the guard crowd is not a bunch of super weepy queers. Grade: A

2. The Leonard Matlovich memorial, which was theoretically also supposed to be a DADT protest. It was very moving, but damn it went on and on and on. Also, why were there no women? And why was it so extremely white? More on this tomorrow — best part was Tracy Thorne, once upon a time a dashing Navy pilot, who showed up with his cute partner and their adorable children; boychild was carrying a purse and wearing nail polish. Grade: speeches B (except David Mixner, who was all kinds of A). cute kids: A

3. Cleve Jones & Sherry Wolf at Busboys & Poets. This is going to require LOTS more blogging later. It was extremely interesting and beautiful, and Sherry especially spoke a lot to how things like DOMA and DADT, even though they are not radical issues at all, are part of the radical problem. Definitely more on this later. Also, Sherry and Cleve were the first people all day who seemed to WANT to include trans people, bisexual people, polyamorous people, radical queers, and folks who are not HRCsexuals in their March. It gave me great hope for tomorrow.

4. meeting lots of Twitter pals at Busboys. Yay awesome queers who are so damn young!!!!!

5. AIDS/HIV rally. Finally! Queers! Trans women! People of color! Old queers! Fat queers! Faeries! and a lot of A-list gays & lesbians apparently shunning the HRC event.

6. HRC dinner with POTUS. Yeah, this will take more time. Must think through response so I can breathe again. Short version: WTF? Slightly less short version: Look, Obama said lots of pretty words and the fabulous homotocracy gave him a dozen standing ovations. Neat. No trannies. Not even at the “Stonewall protests.” I was a little surprised by how thoroughly trans folk were excised – but then I remembered that most of what he knows about the current queer universe he gets from people like Joe Solomonese (what a hole he is) and Barney Frank (uh, yeah).

So far, my radical pals are mostly right. But I am very hopeful that with this HRC travesty behind us, and all the kids in from all over the place tomorrow, the March will be better. Will be truer to a wide range of us, not just the hundreds of rich white cisgendered heteronormative unradical unfaerie undyke unbutch unfemme untrans Will & Grace L Word people at the dinner. I sure hope so.

MARCH!!

So tomorrow morning my part of the National Equality March begins. I’m still ambivalent — I still think there is too much attention on DADT and DOMA, and not nearly enough on AIDS or HIV or healthcare or poverty or homeless queer kids or a lot of other things, and I’m hoping that over the weekend I find other folks who care deeply about these things too. I hope that this weekend I end up feeling justified in marching, instead of disappointed.

Because I will admit to you that there is a part of me that wonders whether it IS going to be two hundred thousand white cisgendered heteronormative folks with a median age of 35 and a combined household income of $100K plus. If it is, if they are angry enough, fine. If they are angry on behalf of the millions of queers who won’t, or can’t, be there…

But if it’s a big circuit party I will be crushed.

My day starts tomorrow with a trans event; most of the people I know for sure will be there are not trans, so that’s probably a good sign. They are also not big HRC fans, so that’s a VERY good sign.

My day ends tomorrow with an HIV/AIDS rally and a protest against HRC, and against Obama, and most especially against Obama at HRC. He will say lots of pretty things and all the A-list gays (because they are mostly not queers, because that would be declasse, and might involve admitting that they like a decent fuck just as much as the rest of us, which would not be fitting for their Will & Grace personas) will clap and be SO HAPPY that they are there.

Well fuck that.

There are students of all colors and incomes and backgrounds and orientations and identities coming to this March however they can get there. Sleeping on church floors, dorm room floors, basements of people they’ve never met. Obama, if he is going to talk to anyone, should show up Sunday at the rally and speak to THEM. To those of us who can’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a table, don’t want to wear a tux, and refuse to bend over and make nice. To the folks who made the March, not the HRCsexuals who namecalled and whined until suddenly it was cool to say nice things after all.

Obama might even do something useful. But I doubt it. I think he will say the same magically delicious things he always says, and some of us will despise him, and some of us will wish we could believe him, and some of us will be all OH, he is SO RIGHT!

Me, I will be outside with my friends, who are not HRCsexuals, daring him to tell the truth about how he feels and what he plans to do about us. No more rhetoric. No more pretty speeches. No more platitudes about how families with two moms or two dads are just as good as families with one of each (right, the MARRIED ones). Just action.

Until then…

So that’s why I’m marching. I have been working on all these things for my whole adult life, and I’m ready for change to be real. I’m ready for truth, and action, and justice.

And by the way: Barney Frank? Please STFU. Kthxbai.

See you there, pals. I hope we’re right.

Ohio? Really? Huh.

News out of Ohio this morning — it’s good news, too. Apparently Trans folk in Ohio no longer need to get a letter from their doctors stating that they have undergone full SRS in order to get the correct gender marker on their driver’s licenses. Instead there is now a form that must be submitted with the signature of a doctor, therapist, or psychologist stating that the t-person is living in the new gender full-time.

This is HUGE.

It has long been my opinion that one of the hardest parts of transitioning is that year when you’re on hormone therapy and working on living as the new gender full time but you haven’t had any surgery, and you’re a hormonal mess, and you feel weird and you don’t pass very well. Those of us who ignore the whole Benjamin Standards and the gatekeepers because we think they are rude and invasive and not always a useful part of the process have it somewhat easier, because we manage our transition in a way that makes more sense — for example, by doing it my slightly randomized way, I did not have to be an increasingly hairy, deeper-voiced person with great big tits.

This new policy in Ohio means that an Ohio transperson can get his or her new license YEARS earlier in the process, which means in turn that if he or she is pulled over, or yelled at in the bathroom, or whatever, he or she has the new marker and can say, Yeah, actually, I do belong in this bathroom. Or whatever.

Good job, Ohio. I’m impressed.

Am I a Trans Poet? Or am I a Poet who is Trans?

I don’t know how to be a trans poet without being a TRANS POET. Half the things I write about have nothing to do with the trans thing… But then sometimes I DO write about it. Sometimes very deliberately.

Valzhyna Mort says, quoting someone else (probably Carolyn Forche?), that poets are the secretaries of the invisible. Which might mean that I have a moral imperative to be the voice for my people, because we have need for voices. I will not ever be our King or our Milk or our X, but I might possibly be our Taliesin.

Last night a poem of mine got slammed (by one person, not universally) for having trans issues in it, which apparently added “too much weight” to the poem. Is it a real criticism, or is it a reaction to me going on and on and on about trans things? I’m not sure. With some people I would be absolutely certain, one way or the other, but this time…? I think I will have a clearer idea next week, when another poem with the same issue will come up (and not one of mine, either). Will it be deemed too weighty?

In my poetry class, meanwhile, we are going to talk about the poetry of Patricia Smith, who is exactly the kind of secretary, and witness, that Forche describes. Her book Blood Dazzler about the murder of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the Bush Administration is maybe the most beautiful, most painful, most wrenching book I have ever read. It is, in Friends terminology, a “freezer book.”

I don’t know if I can write a “freezer book” of poems about the trans experience. But I am pretty sure I should try. I thought I was going to be the voice of the Bay — write my region — all that good stuff — but it seems that in fact I may have a different task. And I don’t know what to do.

(this is cross-posted from my poetry blog, faunboy.wordpress.com)

Tan, trans, and ready to fight

Hello everyone.

Can’t believe it’s been since JUNE that I last posted. Embarrassing… Ah well. Somehow I got all busy with summer and its inherent TOO MUCH NOTHING TO DO. Plus, it wasn’t really NOTHING TO DO. But anyway. I’m back.

I want to write again about the National Equality March, because as the date draws near there is more arguing, more chaos, more agitation… And somehow I have ended up as someone with a little tiny voice in the matter. A handful of people seem to care what I think about it. So I am going to present exactly what I think, again. Only better.

Dear Everyone:

I am going to the March in October. I am pretty sure there will be entirely too many planning chaos issues. I am pretty sure there will be too many white people, too many cisgendered people, and too many relatively privileged people. But I am also pretty sure that it’s my job as a queer trans guy who is out and vocal in every other arena of his life to be out and vocal here too.

By going to the March I add one small pocket of mass to the larger mass that will bring us visibility. Every one more of us (us = anyone who is on our side, for this purpose) is one more face, one more story, one more body, that the powers that be will have to consider. I was at the March in 1993 when the Park Service kept issuing counts of 200-400K. Some of us had been in crowds of that size before; the 1993 crowd was MUCH larger. Yet we let the Park Service count us low.

This year we need more people. We need more bodies for them to count, or miscount. We need to show everyone how many of us there are.

Is there too much money being drained for this from other important purposes? Probably so. But marriage equality is not the most important issue we queer folk face. Health care is a tremendous issue, and dollars are being sliced from those budgets and funds by federal, local, state governments at a horrifying rate. Most of the March dollars that are lost from health care would probably have gone instead to some kind of HRC gala (this is not a statistically provable fact, just my opinion/suspicion).

The attention on the March is not being taken away from trans veterans. Or HIV/AIDS care and prevention. The people who have worked their asses off for those causes are not suddenly turning their backs and saying, Oh, never mind, I want to go party with Cleve.

I care, a little, about marriage equality. And I care a little more about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I care tremendously about health care for queers, especially for trans folk. Even if we get the magic public option, it will still be dangerous and scary and weird for people like me to go get a regular annual physical. Marching this October will probably not help with that — but it might create a ripple.

Everyone keeps saying Oh, well, folks are more likely to be sympathetic when they actually know a queer person. Well. Yes. So if we get out and March in all our glorious variety, people learn who we are. They learn that we are not all Will Truman, we are not all Bette and Shane. We are sure as hell not Max. If we go to the March, people see a huge cluster of us on CNN or MSNBC or, gods preserve us, Faux News. Then when we go home, we can build on those connections.

I think people like @bigolpoofter and @autumnsandeen and the many others who have criticized the funding and planning of the March are almost certainly right. But I also think we have a chance here to be part of something large and beautiful and important.

I know it’s far away from almost everyone, and that getting to DC and finding lodging and all the rest of it is going to be a bitch and a half for a lot of folks. I don’t know how I would be pulling this off if I lived someplace more distant from DC. But there are buses. There are 9 zillion queers with sofas and floors in the DC/Baltoville sprawl. Try, if you can, to make it work.

For those folks who keep saying, “Well, they didn’t outreach to the Trans folk…” Yeah, I know. They did not do a super job of that — but then they realized their error and reached out. There are still nowhere near enough trans folk involved. But there are more than you probably think. I think Cleve et al may be making that mistake that drives me up the wall, of referring to all of us as “gay.” It’s easier than trying to remember what order all the initials go in, and what initials to include in the first place. I think it’s a mistake. I think he should stop doing it. But I also think he means all of us. All the folks who want to make change, who are angry about the myriad ways we have been left out of the change for which a lot of us worked and voted, who are over being taxed without being represented. That’s who I think he means.

I don’t know about you, but I was one of those kids who never got invited to anything (you may be startled to learn that I was a bit of a misfit). Sometimes I got dragged to a party to which I had not been invited, as when, in second or third grade, Beth did not invite me to her event, but I had to go anyway, because I was staying at Annika’s house while my parents were in Florida or something, and Annika had been invited. THAT was fun.

I fretted for weeks about whether or not the trans folk (and the faeries and the butches and the gender variant and the poly and everyone else) were invited. And then I invoked my Rule #11, which is FUCK IT. As in, Fuck it, I’m considering myself invited. I am going to try and assume that when the march organizers say “Oh yes, we mean everyone,” that they’re telling some version of the truth. I have made friends with a young fellow who is involved in the March, a very young, very strong trans guy, and I choose to believe him when he says they mean everyone.

I don’t want to be assimilated. I’m not a Will Truman type of gay guy. I never can be, even if I wanted to. So I am going not as “a gay” but as a middle-aged queer trans poet trickster. I am going to go be visible for my people (whoever they are), and I am going to represent myself, because then (if I follow my logic train correctly) I become represented. I would heartily recommend that if you are in a group that you feel will be ignored, you show up and represent. Don’t be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Please.

So join me, won’t you? Don’t sit back and bitch about how you’re not invited, when I think that, however clumsily it was done, you probably are.

Most sincerely yours,

The Fire Cat

I am not precisely one of “the gays,” people. C’mon.

SO much going on…

I guess I could write about the Obama Administration’s grotesque defense of DOMA. It wasn’t just, Oh, it’s standing legislation, so we have to stand next to it. It was grotesque.

Dear Obama: You can’t write a brief saying, we can’t change this law because it’s been a law for a long time. That’s the whole point of CHANGE, genius. And you can’t compare same-sex marriage to incest.

Or I could write about the continued lack of action on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Dear Obama: John McCain thinks there should be a panel. Hellooooooo.

Or I could write about how frustrated I am right now as a trans guy, because of the ongoing use of GAY as the WORD OF CHOICE all the freakin time.

What the hell?

Here’s what happened today. I, as you all know, spend most of my waking hours on Twitter, trying to build community and make things change. In this capacity, I spend a lot of time talking back and forth with a lot of people from all over the world, everywhere on the spectra of gender and sexuality, race, religion, everything. It’s changing my life, and I welcome that.

So a lot of us talk pretty often about the mainstream media (asshats), and the Administration (asshats), and “gay leadership” (right, whatever, ASSHATS). Mostly we try to use inclusive language, even though this is sometimes…challenging. And it often leads to awkward sentence construction, which is annoying.

But today there was drama because last night, while telling her viewers that Obama had dropped the queer football AGAIN, Rachel Maddow (whom I like very much) kept saying “gay” this and “gay” that. I got into a thing on Twitter with this other person, who is generally someone I like and respect, who kept saying, Oh, well, she means the whole range of GLBTQ etc. And I kept saying, Yes, I know, but if she doesn’t ever SAY trans, we keep being invisible in your big giant gay umbrella. And she kept saying, But if we say gay, then that becomes the common word.

It went on FOR A LONG TIME and made me want to drive to where she is and shake her. So I went and watched reruns of Joan of Arcadia for a while, and then I felt better.

Yes, I’m gay. If you didn’t know that already, and are all, what the hell? I thought he used to be lesbian! Doesn’t he like girls!? then chill out. I slept with girls so you wouldn’t find out I was gay, just like any other freaked out gay boy might do. As for Muscles, the light of my heart, she is only just barely a girl, and we are who we are, and we’re all crazy about each other, so cope. Jesus.

But I am also trans. When Rachel Maddow says “gay” (and Keith Olbermann, and that idiot Anderson Cooper, and all the excellent gay bloggers who are writing right now), people forget just a little more about me.

When people just say “gay,” and rely on groups like Human Rights Campaign for “gay” leadership, my people, the radical faeries and the stone butch dykes and the trannies and the rest of us, the people who don’t (or won’t, or can’t) fit into the happy cookie cutters, get left out.

Now, I am not as radical as a lot of people. Some of these other people, like Elian Maricon, are brilliant and wonderful and brave, and I have enormous respect for them. Elian has changed my mind on some things, and challenged my thinking on everything else. I owe him tremendously. You can link to his blog, Queers Against Obama, from over in my blogroll thing. Same for Diane Gee and Wild, Wild Left. I learn from them all the time, and through those lessons I am increasingly finding my voice.

And more and more I think Elian is more right than I originally thought. For instance, there’s this giant March on Washington in October, with lots of pro and con arguing about why it is or isn’t a good idea. Both sides have a lot of good arguments. I am probably going, because I think visibility is important. But Elian (and others) have pointed out that it’s mostly going to end up being the white gay people who can afford to go, who show up. If I were any more distant from DC than I am, there’s no way I could go. And I don’t get the idea that the word trans is going to be used much. It’s organized by Cleve Jones, who is one of the good guys, and he has talked (a little) about trans issues, but…

But I don’t care about gay marriage. I care about marriage equality (when I care about marriage at all). My issues are human than gay, and more trans than gay. I worry about health care for trans folk. Not just the shots and the surgery and all, although that’s important. But what the hell is anyone doing about the older trans guys who need regular Pap smears and mammograms? What about the older trans women who need prostate screening?

I’m sorry if I’m ranting (only a little sorry). I’m tired of being the last letter in our little happy rainbow. I worked hard to get Obama elected (and now am VERY sorry about that), and I worked hard for years on gay & lesbian issues. It would be really swell if just for a minute, there was some payback.

I’m Mickey Mouse, and I’m here to recruit you! (well, a boy can dream)

Last night I was watching “Hannah Montana” (I was bored and waiting for the GF to come home) and realized that the Disney Channel might be part of the solution for the bullying crisis in our schools, playgrounds, and athletic fields. They touched on it in the first High School Musical movie, but then it never went beyond that.

But last night… They have created this huge multi-star online presence to deal with environmental issues, and because it’s Disney, kids will listen to them, and nag their parents about recycling, and a few things will get a little better. Also, Disney & ABC have long had solid policies on the corporate level that prevent discrimination in jobs, etc., because of sexual orientation as well as gender identity/expression. Plus, they are one of only a few companies that got 100+ on the HRC Corporate Equality Index, because they offer all the regular stuff for the 100, in addition to trans surgery benefits. Which is huge.

So they might just be the right company to get the ball rolling.

Join me, please, in contacting the Walt Disney Company to a) commend them on being so GLBTQ friendly, and b) ask them to create a PSA that will address bullying and homo/transphobia in schools.

Here is a link to their Corporate Responsibility Feedback form.

And yes, I am going to cross post this to Faunboy, and put it on Twitter AND Facebook. I might just something useful done after all.

Yay! POTUS says it’s okay to be gay…in June.

For reasons that I can’t quite comprehend, an inordinate number of queer bloggers, Twitterers, journalists, and regular people are beside themselves with joy over Obama’s proclamation that June 2009 is Big Queer Month… They act as if this has NEVER happened before. And often they proclaim all about that.

Fact is, folks, Bill Clinton issued a similar proclamation in June 2000. While it didn’t mention Bisexual or Trans folk, and was based purely on sexual orientation, it was overall a much more compassionate and engaged proclamation.

If I recall correctly, this did not stop Clinton from screwing us over on DADT, DOMA, and a host of other issues.

Here is a link to the POTUS Obama proclamation, so you can make up your own minds, but seriously. Stop dancing in the streets just because he finally acknowledged we’re out here. These are not new words from him — they are quite similar to the magic candy he fed us during the campaign. They are not action, and they need to be.

You all know that I have VERY mixed feelings about the marriage thing. But I would like to point out that even though everyone is singing Hosannas about the proclamation, it was Dick Cheney who, to my astonishment, since I am still quite sure he is EVIL, was talking up gay marriage. And I am pretty sure that when Cheney is more on our side about ANYTHING than POTUS is, that’s not so good.

For comparison’s sake, here’s Bill Clinton’s proclamation (it is worth noting also that Secy State Clinton issued a statement of her own yesterday BEFORE Obama issued his…just sayin).

Get a grip, kids.

marriage would be nice, but is secretly not the biggest fight I face

Hello everyone.

You maybe expected I would be posting all fire and rage on Tuesday, after the California Supreme Court issued its unfortunate decision on Prop 8… But I felt that I, and certainly my readers, would benefit from a more measured response.

As I become more involved in trans activism, and queer civil rights in general, I find myself less obsessed with the marriage issue.

YES, I think it’s an important issue. I think it’s completely unreasonable that same-sex marriage is not merely not permitted, but actually banned, most places. My friend MsStacy13 (she is a Twitter friend) has posted on this already, and said it much better than I would have, so I will just quote her and provide you a link:

“So far as I know, Proposition Eight was the first time a State Constitution was ammended to rescind the rights of a specific group. One must wonder–if 52% of voters in California decided that women could no longer vote, or that persons of African or Asian ancestry were no longer citizens, would the Supreme Court of the State of California begrudgingly concur with the madness, or would they recognize that As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except those we vote to exclude.”

When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure…
–Abraham Lincon, 1855

Why did no one arguing against Proposition Eight have sense enough to argue along these lines?”

That post, and more of her wisdom, can be found at her blog, here.

Meanwhile, the rest of the blogosphere has been up in arms on one side or the other for days now. Aside from MsStacy13’s post, my favorite response so far is, of all people, Rob Thomas (yes, from Matchbox 20) at the Huffington Post. You can find that here. The best part of it? Where he points out that civil union is about death, and marriage is about life. I was impressed.

But where, you may be wondering, do I stand on this? That’s a fine question.

Back when I was a lesbian, I had a ceremony with the woman to whom I had partnered myself, and it sure looked like a wedding. We wore dresses and people read from the Bible and other sources, and our friends and families helped us drink a lot of champagne. After, we referred to ourselves as “married,” and to the ceremony as our “wedding.” We did not call it a “commitment ceremony” or a “civil union” or any of those things.

Of course she recently said, rather bitterly, “Well, at least YOU can get married now, because you are a MAN.” Well, sortof. I can get married if I can get away with it. If nobody wants to see a birth certificate, or if nobody in the IRS puts the records together. So, yeah, sortof. But not really. But she’s all, “I know lots of trans people who are married.” For the record, NOT SO MUCH.

Anyway, I was angry and hurt then that it wasn’t “real,” and I still am. There is simply no good reason to prevent a man from marrying a man, or a woman from marrying a woman, or a trans person from marrying a trans person. I’m not talking about church weddings — in my world, separation of church and state means THAT THEY ARE SEPARATED, and thus my imaginary weddings have nothing to do with churches — but about going to City Hall, or the Botanic Gardens, or Griffith Park, or Coney Island, or a country club, and just getting hitched.

Marriage didn’t start out as a church thing, but as a property thing. Which is exactly the point now — queers have ownership and money and estate issues just like non-queers. And not being able to get married screws with that in a large, ugly way.

That said… Although I am glad that this fight is being fought, I remain increasingly unconvinced that this is THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE facing GLBT America right now. Personally, I am much more concerned about health care — for everyone, but particularly for everyone who has the weird health issues that trans folk have — and not being fired, and not being thrown out of housing, and things like that. Regular old Civil Rights stuff.

At the moment, the TSA has announced a new round of even more complicated travel ID requirements — which will make it even harder for trans folk to travel. I’m lucky, because the driver’s license people in NYC gave me a DL with M on it instead of F. But my birth certificate still says F, and always will, because I was born in DC and not someplace that will just issue a fresh one. So relatively lucky, I guess. I have yet to determine whether my passport has the new e-chip in it that says I’m a trans person — I guess I’ll find out when I travel someplace and get humiliated. Thanks, state department and DHS!

Meanwhile, we’re still in two wars, which show no sign of being managed any better than they already were. Yes, I think DADT needs to go away, but I wish that queer folk were less anxious to get turned into IED fodder. I am actually MORE worried about our new Afghanistan commander, who is a torture nerd, and thinks it’s okay to brutalize prisoners to get them to tell us things (even if they don’t, or if they make stuff up, or if we can’t understand what they’re saying as a result of having discharged all the gay translators in the Army). I am more worried about Obama’s ever-increasing circle of lying about everything, and to everyone, and the ways in which he is turning out to be a pretty alarmingly Fundie conservative type.

I am more worried about schools, and child welfare. As a queer person, I am more worried about whether I will ever be able to get a job. As a trans person, I wonder whether the LGB elite will start sharing the power with us, or whether their transphobia (which is at least as extreme in many cases as the idiots at NOM, or Obama, or anyone else) and racism and transmisogyny will continue to keep my people on the outside.

We’re within a month of the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. I wonder whether the trans folk will rise up again, and if so, against whom.