Chez Emily - Mots d’une femme transsexuelle

I got this from Lisa Harney at Questioning Transphobia:

Sunday, September 28th, 2008
9:57 pm More DOMESTIC TERRORISM. how is this NOT huge national news?????
Has this been on a news blackout? How is it that no-one has heard of this until now??

On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West — the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail — were distributed by mail in Ohio, a “chemical irritant” was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers. This, apparently, is what the scare tactic political campaigning of John McCain’s supporters has led to — Americans perpetrating a terrorist attack against innocent children on American soil.

Chemical irritants being sprayed on innocent children? If these had been white children and it had been a muslim group who’d performed the attack, it would have been on the front page of every single major newspaper. Muslim children being attacked? It doesn’t even go beyond the Dayton Daily News!

You can get more information from the Daily Kos here.

Come on… The US is meant to be better than this. I don’t expect to see this on Fox News, but what about the more liberal newspapers? People need to know about this!

I haven’t written a poem in decades, but someone very, very special has inspired me to do so.

It’s not her fault - she was born like that
A girl’s thoughts in a boy’s form
It’s not her fault - she was born like that
The son her parents never had

It’s not their fault - she was different
A girl they saw as a boy
It’s not their fault - she was different
A victim of fists and kicks

It’s not a woman - it’s an illness
Another sad disorder
It’s not a woman - it’s an illness
It’s another cure or kill

It’s not our fault - she’s not one of us
Trans and women do not mix
It’s not out fault - she’s not one of us
Don’t let them into our space

It’s all her fault - she’s just one more freak
A girl smiles and is murdered
It’s all her fault - she’s just one more freak
A court judges and ignores

It’s not a woman -  call it an it
A body in the bushes
It’s not a woman - call it an it
The press fawn to the masses

I’m a woman - I always have been
Lived as male just to survive
I’m a woman - I always have been
Now let me be who I am!

It’s not a great poem, but it covers some important points. It covers being born in the wrong body and trying to live up to ones parent’s expectations. It covers the beatings one gets whilst a child learns to hide who they really are. It covers shrinks who view us as aberrant (with butchers like Zucker curing or killing us). It covers feminist, lesbian and gay spaces that actively kick us out. It covers murderers that try to excuse themselves because of a smile. It covers the press calling us “it” because it’s safer. It covers why I lived as a male when I knew I wasn’t and above all, it covers me wanting just to live as who I am.

This is a view known to French people, francophiles and news-addicts the world over:

Yes, smarty-pants, I know it’s the Eiffel Tower! You see, what’s special about this photo is not the subject, it’s the place it was taken from. France’s TV culture and pretty much all of foreign reporting in Paris is all centered on a set of studios on the rue Cognacq-Jay in the 7th arrondissement. This is the place where the first TV broadcast was done in France (and the place which all French people of a certain age link with TV in general) and the place where CNN and the like do their reports on happenings in France.

It sounds very grand, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not, really (like all too many TV sites): It’s a metal platform on the roof of a building which is lethal for anyone in heels. Mine fell straight through the holes, nearly tipping me over an 8 floor drop whilst trying to get this picture!

The studios themselves, however, are as cool as ever and it was fun being amongst all the buzzing activity of a place such as this, especially considering its importance to modern French culture.

A vous Cognacq-Jay!

The strength of doctors and medical staff simply amazes me. The way people faced with trauma and the loss of a loved one react amazes me too. There are some truly wonderful people out there.

http://keepbreathing.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/320/

I’m still crying.

Professional people who are transsexual are not rare, however sites which focus on transsexuals in the work place have been rather rare. The ones that have existed have largely been either focussed on the difficulties of transitioning in the work place or sites such as Lynn Conway’s Transsexual Women’s Successes which show that transsexual people can be successful professionals.

A new site came to my attention this week which is a site focussed on providing networking between transsexual people as well as providing a resource and contact point for HR professionals who want to understand TS employees or to improve their knowledge of TS employment.

Do take a look at this site… I’m rather impressed! It’s here: http://transworkplace.ning.com/

Renée over at Womanist Musings wrote a wonderful post about privilege which really resonated with me. I recommend reading it, but before I write about how I view this, she says very simply that one should own one’s privilege, not be embarassed by it, but own, accept and be responsible for it.

I identify as a transsexual woman who is bisexual. It’s funny how my identification is in the areas where I lack privilege and that partially reflects the pressures I feel from society and partially reflects the parts of me which are different, which I am trying to celebrate.

However, irrespective of the fact that in these areas I lack privilege, I am also privileged:

• I am white
• I am from a well-off background
• I am educated
• I am international
• I am able-bodied
• I am psychologically healthy (though don’t tell that to the doctors who define transsexuals as being mentally disordered: They’d disagree!)

It even goes onto areas which are outside of the normal gender, class, race, cis, ableist and class privileges:

• I am ectomorphic so being overweight is less of a worry (though I do want to lose a few kg)
• I am tall (which does have a negative side as an identifier of being a transsexual woman, but is something which I have embraced as a positive thing)
• I have good hair

The last may seem trivial and one thing that I don’t want to do is to trivialise this, but the last three like the first six are all areas which give me privilege.

I’m not going to stop fighting against the bigots who put me down because I am a bisexual transsexual woman, but before I can ask them to accept their privilege, I need to accept my own.

By this, I mean that I understand that I have a better chance at a lot of things in life because I am white… The discrimination which one has against those of an Arabic/Maghrebian background (the most common racial discrimination in France) will never touch me. I am not overweight and even though my life at the moment is nowhere near as healthy as I would like it to be, I am unlikely to gain enough weight to be so. This means I will not suffer the crippling ridicule, discrimination and disgust that a lot of overweight people feel from society.

I am discriminated against, and that makes me angry, but I am also privileged and I accept that. It’s a responsibility and one which I need to take account of when I reproach others for discriminating against me and when I interact with those where I have a privilege they don’t.

Thanks, Renée… Your post really helped me to sort out how I feel about this. I hope that others can benefit from this, too.

IF YOU CARE ABOUT TRANS ISSUES, READ THIS. IT’S IMPORTANT

Unfortunately, the medical establishment owns the transitions and the lives of most transsexuals up to at least the point where they are able to set themselves free after their operations have been done. Even more unfortunately, the medical establishment is highly conservative and very unwilling to actually understand transsexuals (which one would have thought would be a prerequesite of treating us).

This is something which happens in a great deal of countries and there’s a lot of pressure from the transsexual community to change this, to bring the treatment more into line with what we actually need, but challenging the medical establishment is hard. It is so even for doctors with new ideas, it’s doubly so for a group of rather unrespected and generally misunderstood patients.

Now, one of the most influential bodies trying to control the treatment of transsexuals is the American Psychological Association (the APA) which carries a lot of weight with psychologists elsewhere in the Western world. Recently, they did a study which indicated that the prevalence of gender dysphoria was much lower than expected (by a factor of up to 20) and there is very strong evidence that they did so on purpose.

In this study, they used two well known anti-trans ‘experts’, Anne Lawrence* (who holds onto a very insulting and old-fashioned view of transsexualism which is very focussed on a pecking order of ‘real’ transsexuals and the rest) and Ken Zucker* (a psychologist who believes in quite horrific ‘reparative’ treatment, especially of transsexual children) even though there has been opposition to their inclusion due to their extreme views on the transsexual issue.

Lynn Conway is transsexual activist who has put a lot of effort into first of all showing transsexual people as normal people who have a condition from which they can recover with the right, physical treatment and secondly into standing up to the old guard and anti-trans parts of the medical establishment. She has written an open letter to the APA which is worth reading, even if you’re not in the US.

You can read the open letter here.

The results of this exchange is going to make major impacts on the lives of transsexuals everywhere. This is important.

* I have used the TS Roadmap reviews of these people’s views on transsexuality because I believe they are fair an accurate descriptions. I encourage you to read these pages and others to get more information on these people’s views. In my opinion, they are improperly in positions of power over transsexual people’s lives and we need to know their views.

Overheard on the plane from London to Frankfurt today from two well-dressed business men in their fifties:

Character 1: No, I’m not an expert on houses either.
Character 2: <Grunt>
C1: I can do the basic stuff… <Pause for thought> You know, a house is like a woman…
C2: <Grunt?>
C1: Yes, with a woman, if the bones underneath are OK, pile the make-up on and they can look pretty…
C2: <Affirmative grunt>
C1: But if the bones underneath are like…

At this point he waved his hands in a confused way in front of his face.

C1: Then there’s no hope!
C2: <Grunt, laugh>

Luckily by now, I could make my way down the corridor to my seat, which was, thankfully, several rows back from these two Neanderthals.

What is it with men like this that lets them think they can talk like this? It’s bad enough that they’d do so in the first place, but then to do it on a packed plane?

It takes a lot to shock me, but I was speechless as I made my way to my seat. How can society justify such stupid behaviour?

Gosh, we have a loooooong way to go.

As you may have guessed, I spend far too much of my life in airports and in planes (in fact should you ever write me a letter, just address it to “Emily, The tall one asleep in 4F, Lufthansa”!) Now, one of the almost daily routines is the moment when the security guard looks dubiously at my super huge handbag with everything I need to survive in it and asks ‘Ma’am, may I check this please?’… Thus it begins!

First of all, these guys have all got PhDs in ‘Advanced Techniques of Increasing Entropy in Suspect’s Handbags to the Point of Pure Chaos’. Every Sunday I sort my bag out so that I can find things in it, every Monday morning this little character at the airport turns it into a level of chaos I could never imagine!

What I would love to know, however, is what these characters see in all the handbags they search? I’m sure that some of them could get together and write a book on ‘weird things women carry in their handbags’! I think that in my case, the only weird things I carry are a little soft toy of a cat (it’s the replacement of my cat when I’m travelling, just without the food bill and the white hair everywhere on my black suit!) and a little bookmark I bought in Barnes & Noble last time I was in the US: The head and torso of a chimp with the most wonderful eyes and a long furry ‘tail’ which acts as the bookmark.

I may come across some weird things in my travels, but I guess these guardians of handbag chaos see a lot weirder things than I ever will!

My favourite salmiak, Salt Pastiller

There’s this sweet we eat in Scandinavia called Salmiak… It’s a love it or hate it thing, and I love it!! It’s a weird thing to the rest of the world… Most people have tasted liquorice, well imagine liquorice but without a sweet flavour, instead with a salty flavour. That’s salmiak! I said it was a love it or hate it thing!

Whilst I said that sakmiak has a salty taste, it doesn’t have much salt in it. Instead, that salty flavour comes from sal ammoniac, which is ammonium chloride (and salt is sodium chloride). Sal ammoniac is a compound used in things from batteries to the flux in the lead in church windows and if your wedding ring is anything less than 24 carats, sal ammoniac was used to mix the silver and/or copper into the gold. But, what do we Scandinavians do with it? Yup: We eat it, and I’m one of those afflicted with Salmiak addiction… I find it just lovely!

Natto - Eeek!!!

However, after loving this stuff since childhood, I’ve found an even better use for it! Those of us that have been to Japan may have had the fun experience of tasting natto. This is a dish of fermented soy beans and is one of those things which the Japanese like to give to new visitors to Japan to catch them out. Why? Because it’s horrible (even for the Japanese, it’s an acquired taste!)

I have found Europe’s natto revenge: Salmiak. Handing this wonderful sweet around to my Japanese colleagues resulted in the same faces we gaijin make when they give us natto.

Emily’s tip: If you go to Japan, bring some salmiak along and make sure to follow up that natto with a little taste of it! Trust me, it’s a good effect!