Open letter on woman-only space, and why I should not be in it

(warning: there might be triggers in here, so read warily)

To whom it may concern:

In the early 1990s, back when I was trying so hard to be a regular ol’ lesbian, and to totally suppress the constant feeling that I was supposed to be a man instead, I spent a lot of time arguing with my friends and coworkers about MichFest. Why? Because I didn’t understand, and avidly didn’t like, the written-in-stone policy that MichFest had of not allowing trans women in, on the grounds that They had been born men, and were therefor not women. Then, as now, I thought this was bullshit. I didn’t want to go to MichFest anyway (patchouli, camping, separatists = not fun for me), but this sealed it for me.

Last year, I went to Thanksgiving at the home of a friend in New Jersey. This friend is a cis lesbian, an old West Point buddy of my Person, so I was a little wary. Many of the other folks at the table were also cis lesbians (=almost all of them), and eventually the talk turned to a religious (Christian, mainly) retreat that one of them organized and continues to run. It transpired that she has a policy of barring cis women (of whatever orientation) who harass and belittle trans women. That she would rather trans men not show up at all.

You would think that the second story would reflect the evolution of woman-only space in general over those twenty years, right? You would also be wrong.

Over the last several months, as I have wandered the Interwebs and met folk on Twitter and Facebook and generally explored the issue, I have found that this is a huge problem. In addition to the extant transmisogyny in the GLB community (it goes something like this, sometimes: don’t worry, New Hampshire, we’ll get married, but we won’t let those men in dresses into the ladies’ rooms), there is the issue of trans men.

Some trans women don’t think trans men should be able to claim the trans, for a variety of reasons. My feeling is that if a person has made irrevocable changes and identifies as a man, after however long of trying unsuccessfully to identify as a woman, he should get the trans (mostly because I feel it’s an important part of who I am). HOWEVER.

And this is a large however.

A trans woman I follow on Twitter recently described trans men as short, fat, ugly bundles of transmisogyny. She also described trans men as hairy dykes with their tits chopped off. While a lot of people thought these were extreme descriptions, and that she should catch a lot of flack for it, let me, an actual trans man, tell you why she has a point.

All over the country, people of all ages who were assigned Female at birth are working on transitioning into Male. A lot of those people have lived more successfully in the cis lesbian community than I did, and once they transition, they maintain the same friends, lovers, and community ties. In theory, this is a good thing. I bet it makes for a much easier transition (and, despite the on-paper – but not always reality-based – disparity between MTF surgery and FTM surgery, it’s easier for FTM people to pass, and safer to deal with the bathroom thing, and so on).

The other thing it does, though, is create a population of men who feel entitled to be in woman-only spaces. Men who take it upon themselves to seek healthcare at women’s clinics.

To those men I say, get out of there. Those spaces are not for you. If you identify as a man, you are not identifying as a woman. And if you are not identifying as a woman, you should not be in woman-only space.

To those men who get their doctoring done at women’s clinics, and then use their privilege to keep trans women from receiving care (apparently the presence of trans women can trigger abuse memories in trans men, on account of the ever-terrifying possibility that the trans woman might have a penis), you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself, and you should stop.

Has it not occurred to you, in your Testosterone-swamp of privilege, that trans women may have been abused as kids? As adults? May have been raped and brutalized and marginalized?

Trans women are many, many times more likely to be raped and murdered and discriminated against than trans men. When FTMs transition and then keep the cycle of transmisogyny afloat, that is the worst sort of collaboration.

I know not all trans men are like this. I am fortunate to know a handful who are working hard to solve this. But I also know more who are doing jack shit about it, who have bought into their have/eat cake new lives.

If you work for a GLB organization, or a women’s clinic, use your privilege to get the doors open for trans women, not to shut them out. And I know, I know. You’re all, “But I don’t have privilege! I’m trans!” Yeah, about that – if you are any kind of man now, even a short fat weird-looking one, YOU HAVE MORE PRIVILEGE THAN MOST PEOPLE. Whining about being trans and thus having no power is not okay. Using privilege to take up space in woman-only places is not okay. Using it to get those woman-only spaces to become truly open to ALL women is better.

So man up, trans boys. It’s time to stop being the problem.

Wedding bells in D.C.?

So the District of Columbia voted overwhelmingly to get its gay marriage on, which is very exciting. Of course, Congress is going to have to agree to this, which is going to be a problem no matter which way it goes.

As I understand it, D.C. has the extremely unfortunate luck of having no Congressional representation, and so Congress itself acts as its legislative arm. This is idiotic on any number of levels, most particularly the level that pretends that everything in D.C. is part of the government’s process; don’t forget the many, many regular people who live there and are not lobbyists, involved in Congress, Supreme Court justices, the President, etc etc etc etc. Seriously.

So that means, to the best of my knowledge, that Congress now has to decide whether the D.C. city council’s vote stands, and whether D.C. will join Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts in the marriage equality good guys map.

But either Congress will say yes, in which case it will make it damn hard for them to explain why it’s okay to have marriage equality in D.C. but not, say, nationwide, or they will say Nay, in which case it will exacerbate the District’s growing dissatisfaction with its lack of representation. Either way, it changes how D.C. works, which is good, but will bring chaos.

Meanwhile, what about the host of other problems facing queer D.C.? What about the fact that trans folk born in the District can’t get sparkly new birth certificates (I believe that one can get an amended one, which is…less than desirable)? What about the lack of human service delivery for any of the economically disadvantaged in D.C., most especially the homeless queer youth, and the trans folk? What about the murders of trans women of color this year in D.C., and the city’s not exactly overwhelming efforts to do something about it? Perhaps the D.C. city council could take a moment and name a street after Nanny Boo or one of the other victims of racism, transphobia, transmisogyny, and the host of other evils that trans women face (although recent history tells us they would be far more likely to name it after a white gay man, not a trans woman of color).

Anyway. A note to the queers — if you should go to D.C. to get married, think about making sure that some of your guests, instead of giving you gravy boats or matching his and his towels from Crate & Barrel, make a donation to a trans health center in D.C., or to a group working with queer kids, or something.

Loraxing for Bookstores (cross-posted from Faunboy)

As most of you know, I am an Enemy of Amazon.com, mainly because it’s killing the local independent bookstore, but also because they continue to refuse to add trans benefits, diversity training, etc., into their variety o’ benefit packages. When I see an independent bookstore die, which is happening more and more as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble compete in an insane literary survival of the fittest with CostCo and Sam’s Club, it hurts me.

It also hurts the communities in which these stores are small but vital parts of the distinctiveness of a given neighborhood, town, region.

This is especially true when the bookstore is devoted to a particular group, as the late & lamented Hue-Man Bookstore was in Denver, or the more recently late and lamented Oscar Wilde Bookstore in NYC. Now we hear that Lambda Rising is going away after Christmas, both its Dupont Circle location in Washington DC and the annex at Rehoboth Beach.

This hurts.

I know that many of these stores are not always the most trans friendly of places, but dammit…

Sometimes the queer bookstores are the only place a kid can go and find a book about other people who are the same kind of freak and weirdo. The same kind of queer. Sometimes a person struggles to find community, and can’t, but at least there are books. I was not a very good lesbian, ever, but I was damn glad to have Rubyfruit Jungle and The Revolution of Little Girls, People Like Us, and the ever-invaluable Dykes to Watch Out For series. Without being able to go to the queer bookstores in Denver, Albuquerque, and, yes, Washington DC during my late teens and early 20s, I don’t know what I would have done. And now, trying to find trans references… Yeah.

So help your independent stores. And help the queer stores. Right now a dear splendid friend of mine is trying to save Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. The Giovanni’s Room people have a lovely store, are extremely decent people, and need your help. If you’re buying something queer, order it from them. No, it won’t be as cheap as it would be at Amazon.com. But it will matter more.

For Rudy’s thoughts on this, read this lovely post. For my thoughts on imperative books that you can get from the sweet little story in Philadelphia, watch this space. More coming soon.

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.