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PRIDE, PREJUDICE AND PANCAKE MAKEUP

Bridging the Gap With Our Trans Brothers and Sisters

by

Melinda L. Harris Revised 2-08

Okay, Queers and Dears, lend me your ears – do I have a topic for you to ruminate on today! Even though we’re all part of a community - a diverse, thriving community to be sure, how many of us who fall into the categories of gay, lesbian, or bisexual truly ever wonders what it would be like to live as a transgender man or woman for a day?

Would you expect only the garden-variety stares and rude whispers from the married-with-an-SUV-and-2.5-kids couples, or perhaps a nasty remark or two from groups of testosterone-driven teenagers marauding through the mall? Well, I’ve got news for you. We, the G/L/Bs of the GLBT, have some serious soul-searching to do right now, along with our straight brothers and sisters.

Being the spouse of a transgender male-to-female, I can give you some interesting (sometimes humorous, sometimes sad) accounts of how Joselyn and I get treated in the straight world…that’s the easy part. Here’s one for the books:

Christmas, 2004. We pick up my mother and my stepfather from the airport. They are famished, so we head towards the nearest Italian chain restaurant we can find. (Probably our first mistake, but when you’re miles away from the fine dining of Hillcrest, what’s a girl to do?) We order our drinks, and attempt to make small talk with my mother and her increasingly speechless husband. Joselyn is dressed rather conservatively for the occasion, but I am my usual outrageous self, donning a loud chiffon blouse and sporting my brand-new hair color. Something I call “Cherry Bomb.” Make no mistake - I am definitely the flamboyant half of this relationship, but you wouldn’t know it by the reactions we glean in public.

The minute we walk in the door, all eyes are upon Joselyn, and conversations seem to come to an almost deafening silence. My mom and her husband (whom I’ll call “Dick,” to protect the identity of the guilty) quickly find two seats at the end of the table, as far away from the object of everyone’s attention as they could possibly get and still be considered a party of four. At some point during dinner, I notice my stepfather’s head is practically in his plate, like he had discovered some new china pattern he’d never seen before. I ignore him (as I usually do) and continue chatting with my mother and Joselyn.

Fast-forward, two months later. My mother isn’t speaking to me! I hear, through

the family grapevine I’ve dubbed “radio-free California,” that Joselyn committed the unforgivable sin of touching up her face powder as we were waiting for our car to be

brought around. The audacity – oh, the humanity! Hide the children – Joselyn is busy powdering her nose!

“Pancake makeup!” my mother hollered into the phone, practically in tears.

“What’s the big deal?” I bellowed back. “I open a compact and apply lipstick all the time, and no one’s ever stopped speaking to me because of it!”

“That’s different,” my mother said. “You’re a woman, and Joss just does things like that to shock and humiliate us! It’s so…inappropriate!” she wails. “Dick was so embarrassed that he couldn’t even look up from his plate for the rest of the evening!”

“So that’s what his problem was, I thought. Well, let the little pinhead

be embarrassed – that way no one has to look at his smarmy face all through dinner…”

I was bewildered, incredulous, and just plain pissed off by this revelation.

When Joselyn got home from work that day, I couldn’t wait to tell her what had been keeping Mom mum all these weeks. We just assumed she didn’t like her Christmas presents.

“Pancake makeup?” she cries, bracelets and rings clinging and clanging about as she pulled her long hair into a twist. “Pancake makeup…did your mother really say that?! Does she have any idea what pancake makeup really is? Your mother is so…I’m…oh, this is so infuriating! You tell her that I’ve never worn pancake makeup in my life!”

My eyes were as big as quarters after seeing Joselyn fly into such a tirade. We can now look back at this and laugh ourselves silly. It became, as author and radio-talk-show-host Charles “Karel” Bouley says, one of our “Big Gay Moments.”

Some of these moments can be endearing as well. Joselyn, who is a nurse, was once cornered by a shy, sick little boy. He looked up at her with his big brown eyes and said, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

“What do you think I am, dear?” she asked.

“Well,” the little fellow replied, “you are pretty like a girl, but you sound like a boy to me.” Folks, it just doesn’t get any cuter than that. From the mouths of babes come the absolute truth (or, sometimes, things their parents should’ve never said in the first place).

On a more serious note, however, I would like to take a moment to talk about the

ongoing rift in the GLBT community regarding how some of us perceive our transgender brothers and sisters, and the responsibility we have in ensuring their safety and acceptance within the gay community.

Be honest for a moment. Remember how long it took for those of us in the gay/lesbian community to accept bisexuals as a viable part of the queer community? How many of us out there have secretly (or not-so-secretly) made trans men and women the new “fence sitters” of the community, either by outright exclusion or more subtle forms of discrimination?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to honestly feel that Mother Nature screwed up and you’re living in the wrong body? Or do you look at transgender

and/or transsexual individuals as merely the “entertainment” portion of the gay community?

This is an attitude easily adopted by both gays and straights alike during annual Pride Fests, where scores of drag queens are out in full regalia, often dressed in what some would consider over-the-top hairdos, dresses, and makeup designed to draw attention (whether positive or negative) towards their outward appearance only. Predictably, many straight folks are both fascinated and appalled by drag queens. Some gays and lesbians embrace them fully; others wish they’d just go away.

But what lies beneath the surface, you ask? Should drag queens and cross dressers be considered part of the transgender crowd, or do they deserve their own moniker as well? Perhaps another consonant should be added to GLBT, or would that be adding even more confusion to an already murky, oft misunderstood faction of the queer community?

In Riki Anne Wilchins riveting book, Read My Lips – Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, she describes herself as a “transsexual menace” with a powerful tale of the trials (and triumphs) she’s faced as a transgender male-to-female, or M to F, for short.

Wilchins is unapologetically hostile in her stance on issues of transgender discrimination within the gay community. For example, when a transgender woman applied for admission in New York City’s 2004 Gay Games, she was given the following

memorandum from Ann Northrop, a member of the Gay Games Board of Directors. The memo stated the following rules for all transgender participants:

1. Supply a letter from your personal physician confirming that you have been on hormones for at least eighteen months, as well as a letter attesting to your health.

2. Supply a letter from your personal therapist confirming that you have been in therapy for at least eighteen months, and an additional letter explaining why it would be “difficult” or “impossible” for you to compete in the Gay Games as your “birth sex.”

Needless to say, no such invasive, insulting mail was delivered to “regular” gay men and women wishing to participate in the 2004 Gay Games. Wilchins’s activist group Transgender Menace, TransGender Rights!, and the Metropolitan Gender Network succeeded in persuading the board to abandon their inequitable policies, and the Gay Games went on without incident.

However, Wilchins points out that her response letter to the Gay Games Board of Directors ended with a clear warning. “Nonetheless,” she writes, “we are not prepared to be doormats for anyone, nor to be marginalized in any way, nor to have our concerns or participation sacrificed for anyone else’s comfort…”

Strong words from a strong lady. But it doesn’t end there. In the 2005 edition of Pride magazine, writer Cindra Feuer takes gender politics a step further in her article

entitled, Is There An I in LGBT ? The “I” Ms. Feuer is referring to stands for intersex, a term that I am well-acquainted with, since my spouse Joselyn is not only transgender, but intersexed as well. She has XXY chromosomes, which made her a research subject years ago at the Salk Institute.

Interestingly, there has been proof that some incarcerated men are XYY, which they dub “super males.” These men are the most violent of the prison population, and they continue to be so even after being taken off the streets, causing most of the violence inside the penitentiaries.

The article interviews Betsy Driver, founder of the group Bodies Like Ours, which serves to educate both straight and gay individuals about the special needs of intersexed men and women.

According to Ms. Feuer, many people confuse the term “intersexed” with “hermaphrodite,” the former encompassing individuals whose bodies can’t be identified as absolutely male or female. Instead, they have a combination of physiological characteristics (as does Joselyn) from both recognized sexes. Hermaphrodites possess both male and female genitalia.

Within the intersex spectrum, Ms. Feuer explains that there is a plethora of gender and sexual identities. Fascinating stuff to be sure, but not all members of the GLBT community willingly embrace intersexed members of the community, any more than they do transgender men and women. Simply put, they don’t know how to “classify” them, which leads to infighting, misunderstanding, and sadly - hostility in a community that now (more than ever) needs to stand together and present a united front if it wants to remain strong in our current (and very conservative) political and religious climate.

Why is this concept of unity in the GLBT community more important than ever? To stop the hatred - the violence, the senseless murders of blameless victims whose only

crime was being “different.” For the memory of so many gay, lesbian and transgender men and women, who lost their lives for what (and not who) they were.

Brandon Teena. Gwen Araujo. Matthew Sheppard. Billy Jack Gaither. Tyra Hunter. Christian Paige. Deborah Forte. Chanelle Pickett, Lawrence King, Cameron McWilliams, and Chris “Simmie” Williams. The list goes on and on, but someday - with education, tolerance, love and understanding, my prayers are that this list of murdered innocents will one day cease to exist. Hopefully, these are your prayers as well.

Works Cited

Wilchins, Riki Anne. “Read My Lips – Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender” Pages 73-78, ISBN# 1-56341-091-5, Copyright 1997 by Firebrand Books, Milford, CT USA

Feuer, Cindra. “Is There an I in LGBT?” Originally published in Pride05 magazine, The Official Magazine of Interpride 2005. Pages 63-64, published by Profile Pursuit, Inc., New York, NY USA