advocacy

Our Model of Suicide and Maintaining Mental Health Stigma

/ Mira / 1 Comment

This is one of those short posts that started life as a comment on someone else‘s timeline on Facebook. My friend, Tania*, asked for people’s thoughts about the idea of legalized euthanasia, suicide, and/or physician assisted suicide. Her questions follow this article from the NYT last weekend.

Anorexia is my personal experience, but it's also relevant to me because there is so much policing around the expression of and fear around the honesty of us as women who are there (and to a lesser extent who were there) Source: @daniellehelm on Flickr

Anorexia is my personal experience, but it’s also relevant to me because there is so much policing around the expression of and fear around the honesty of us as girls or women who are there (and to a lesser extent who were there, and of course, of the men who’ve been there, too) Source: daniellehelm on Flickr

There was one book**, back when my struggle with anorexia was much more active, that was about a young woman who did eventually die (passively) – the young woman made an argument that, in her case, anorexia was terminal. Her argument was based on her experience trying a wide variety of both outpatient and inpatient treatments, and getting progressively sicker. It was a pretty sophisticated argument – it wasn’t a simple brinkmanship kind of argument. The anorexia world is full of these stories of people who drop down to unimaginable weights – like a person who weighed 120-130 lbs dropping all the way down to the sixties – who go on to survive and thrive. Marya Hornbacher is just the most widely celebrated of these stories***. But the young woman… well, actually, it wasn’t her making the argument – if I remember correctly, the book was written by her surviving father, who was telling her story, bravely even including her feelings about the terminality of the illness. Again, if I remember correctly, he didn’t necessarily agree wholeheartedly with what his daughter said, but he had given it deep thought, and he had come to the conclusion that it could not be cursorily written off (as many people are wont to do – for instance just cursorily saying the young woman in the NYT story shouldn’t be “allowed” to “choose” suicide). And, importantly, he recognized that he did not understand the illness like she did, because he had been there as an observer, but the battlefield had been her body.

As survivors (and proud of it!) we know an elemental joy of surviving that you, who have never survived, may not be able to understand. But in having survived, we come face to face also with the knowledge that our survival was not guaranteed, and if we take pride in our survivorship, that pride must recognize the sisters we lost. Source: @Rega Photography on Flickr

As survivors (and proud of it!) we know an elemental joy of surviving that you, who have never survived, may not be able to understand. But in having survived, we come face to face also with the knowledge that our survival was not guaranteed, and if we take pride in our survivorship, that pride must recognize the sisters we lost. Source: Rega Photography on Flickr

What’s important about this view is also that she was not saying that all people who are suicidal should end their lives – people who find this to be their solution are not saying, for instance, that no suicide prevention work should be done, or even that our efforts to prevent suicide should not be intensified. Rather, they are merely saying that an expectation of survival of their illness may not be reasonable.

I read this book more than ten years ago, and so it’s taken me a long time to evolve how I think about this. But, what stuck with me for a long time is that, when we talk about diseases and disorders that affect things other than the emotional brain, there are many, many things that don’t have a 100% survival rate. My fiancé had leukemia twice – he survived, and I am thankful, but we accept that a minority will not. For all kinds of leukemias integrated together, the five year survival rate is now just over 60%, meaning we accept that almost four in ten will not make it. Death may not have been a certain outcome in Teri’s case, but neither was life a certainty. If one ignores whether death was “one’s fault,” then the reality is that several mental illnesses – anorexia is one of them – have known rates of mortality. Anorexia is one of them.

When we talk about mental illness, there is not nearly often enough the kind attitude of survivorship mixed with pushing us all to do more, be more clever and resourceful, to help more people survive. My experience, anyways, is that this attitude is very different when talking about a non-mental illness that might take one's life vs. a mental illness that might take one's life. Source: A Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Light the Night Cancer Walk, Dave Overcash on Flickr

When we talk about mental illness, there is not nearly often enough the kind attitude of survivorship mixed with pushing us all to do more, be more clever and resourceful, to help more people survive. My experience, anyways, is that this attitude is very different when talking about a non-mental illness that might take one’s life vs. a mental illness that might take one’s life. Source: A Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Light the Night Cancer Walk, Dave Overcash on Flickr

In contrast, we assume – without a clear basis other than that we believe that people are responsible for their mental illness in a way that people are not responsible for their physical illness – that mental illness cannot be terminal (maybe, excluding dementias, although I think we mostly consider dementias neurological and not psychiatric).

That basis – the belief that people are responsible for their mental illness – is a deeply problematic one for a variety of reasons. The fact that psychotherapy can help people help themselves feel better really does not validate that idea – all manner of disorders and diseases are amenable to behavioral “treatments,” not just mental illnesses. Schizophrenia is not only significantly more heritable than, say, hypertension (compare this and this), but although both are amenable to behavioral treatments, behavioral treatments (like weight loss, diet, exercise) have higher effect sizes by far for hypertension. Infectious diseases are not given the stigma of mental illness based on one’s having “chosen” the illness, even though they are clearly essentially completely behavioral, whereas almost no mental illness is considered completely behavioral by scientists****.

The result is that, when we think about some other health problem, that has a death rate, we assume those deaths might be preventable, if we get cleverer and come up with new technologies and new medical practices and new ways to help people with prevention. In contrast, when we think about suicide, we assume that those deaths are preventable, and that nothing needs to be done to prevent them except to coerce people to not commit suicide, to call people who commit suicide cowards, to criminalize suicide, etc. To me, that’s deeply problematic, whether or not one believes one should be able to “choose” suicide.

Moreover, it should be deeply problematic to everyone who is trying to reduce / prevent suicide, as well. It pushes suicide into a deep taboo. And it’s hard to treat something that’s taboo. And, of course, it’s deeply problematic for people with mental illness even when suicide is not a part of the conversation.

So, to me, do I support the policy Belgium enacted? I probably do. But the thing I support far more firmly is destroying stigma around mental health. I believe in it for me. I believe in it for all the friends with eating disorders who saved my life, time and time again, ten years ago. And I believe in it for all my friends who live with mental illnesses that I haven’t experienced in the way I experienced anorexia and so don’t fully understand.

I believe in it for all of you, too, who have never been there, and so who find it easy to pass judgment. At times, I yearned to be back in your blissfulness of ignorance, although today, I include my experience with anorexia alongside all the many things I am thankful for in my life. It made me the woman I am today. I am glad – daily – to survive, all the more because I know my survival was not guaranteed.

* God, what is it with me, I can’t even get past the italicized intro without a footnote. Just pausing here to say that Tania is such a heroine for the AutismFamily. Her particular passion is autistic (she coins “Aspien”) girls and women, and I love her work so much.

** Comment or message me if you know the book. I think it’s one I borrowed from the Jacksonville Public Library, the summer before grad school in psychology, which was the time of my rock bottom with respect to my own struggle with anorexia / disordered eating.

*** And I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how much of a heroine Marya is, and how amazing it was to, if only for a moment, meet her when she was here to speak.

**** Getting overly technical, susceptibility to a wide range of infectious disease is heritable. But again, the heritability of many mental illnesses is far higher than the heritability of many infectious diseases, if not most/all of them.

Living Like Black Lives Actually Mattered

/ Mira / 1 Comment

Let me start by stating what will be obvious to some and make others uneasy: We aren’t. We haven’t. We don’t.

Seriously, this restaurant is such a marker for pretty much everywhere crime and poverty happens in this city. And I refuse to not drive by it because I'm afraid. Crime happens in the locus of every Chicken Coop not because black people are criminals but because every Chicken Coop is ensconced in an entrenchment of poverty, and those of us who have always had enough to eat have no idea how hard it is to climb out of poverty.

Seriously, this restaurant is such a marker for pretty much everywhere crime and poverty happens in this city. And I refuse to not drive by it because I’m afraid. Crime happens in the locus of every Chicken Coop not because black people are criminals but because every Chicken Coop is ensconced in an entrenchment of poverty, and those of us who have always had enough to eat have no idea how hard it is to climb out of poverty. Source: WZZM

It’s endemic in the way we talk (leading to terms like microaggression). That part of town. Don’t get caught with a flat tire over there. My neighborhood is bordered on the northern side by a street that is a huge racial and class divide, with mostly white lower middle and middle class people (and a few affluent people and a few poor people) on one side, with modest, but stable housing values, and systemic impoverishment and deprivation of American lives on the other side, mostly visited on black people. A food desert, with roads that somehow magically never get fixed, and a clear lack of opportunity. Not a coincidence – no, this situation is all too common in all too many towns and cities, as a result of redlining (not just conceptually, but redlining was real, here, in Grand Rapids). Not just for black people, but for our Hispanic family, too. So there’s this fabulous restaurant on Division here in Grand Rapids – it’s an old drive-in, with a big awning and picnic benches for eating outside, a very “hearkening back” kind of vibe, makes you feel safe and wholesome. Taqueria San Jose. We’ve known about it forever, but somehow it seems like a light, summer thing, and when we’re hungry, we end up someplace else (we go to a number of other restaurants right there, just never this one), and when we drive by it, we’re forever saying, “We should go to that place!” A lot of my hipster friends know about it (and it was full of white hipsters on lunch break when I went). But I get surprised that many of my white friends know this part of town incredibly poorly, and are surprised I go there at all. “Oh, I don’t get out to that part of town very often.” You should know a few things about Division. One is that a disproportionate number of the violent crimes that happen in Grand Rapids happen on stretches of Division, typically late at night (but it’s totally safe from inside my car, for me, any time of day, and particularly in the middle of the day, because, of course, this violence isn’t random violence but violence that exists in a racist system that impoverishes groups and classes of people). You should also know that the Hispanic community has invested greatly in their money, and their sweat, and their tears, in building businesses in this part of town, something that has changed rapidly even just in the six years I’ve been here*.

I loooved Hyde Park. And my favorite Hyde Park memory was the elderly women who had Barack Obama tees pulled over their church dresses at the bus stop, and the look of optimism on their faces.

I loooved Hyde Park. And my favorite Hyde Park memory was the elderly women who had Barack Obama tees pulled over their church dresses at the bus stop, and the look of optimism on their faces. (Source: Wikimedia)

I had another similar experience – back when I was in the business of dating straight girls** – I was on eHarmony (okay, you guys, I really didn’t know about this, and I’m sorry), and I was living in Hyde Park in Chicago. Hyde Park is kind of a unique place. It and its sister neighborhood, Kenwood, are predominantly black, but also affluent, and there are very few places like Hyde Park in the US that are congregations of black affluence. Which is too bad, because y’all should really have the opportunity to live in such a place. The University of Chicago is there, along with the Museum of Science and Industry, the former being what brought me to town. I lived in a brownstone rental two and a half blocks from the Obamas’ home. But I remember at least once, a woman couldn’t believe I lived in Hyde Park and made it really clear that she would never come to Hyde Park, because of the danger, with heavy racial implications. I politely indicated that I loved living there, and I made it really clear that she and I would not be dating (#TaylorSwiftVoice Like, Ever). Many of my white friends in the city told me I had a different experience living there, because while neither black people nor white people think I am them, they both have a stronger tendency to just be themselves and be comfortable around me than they would around each other, but I had a beautiful time, as an outsider living in a black neighborhood, and I’m so thankful for having had that opportunity and for the graciousness with which black neighbors accepted me. For me, I spend much of this American life surrounded by people who don’t look like me (that’s you) – but it’s still good for me to be in a place where all the people are black and don’t look like me, and not only in places where all the people are white, and don’t look like me. If you’re white, you should have this experience, because particularly if you’re a white man, you may not have any idea what it would be like if the world didn’t belong to you. If you’re black, you should have this experience (again, there are so few of these kinds of places in the country that most black people haven’t), because you need to see black power.

Driving while black is real, even if it doesn't happen to happen to you (and particularly if it doesn't happen to happen to you because you're not black). Source: NY Daily News.

Driving while black is real, even if it doesn’t happen to happen to you (and particularly if it doesn’t happen to happen to you because you’re not black). Source: NY Daily News.

There’s a story I’ve told a number of times – it’s one of those stories I tell because I don’t really understand what it means. There’s some funny business to the driving while black / driving while brown phenomenon. One of the funny things is that I don’t get profiled as an Indian American (and I’ve rarely heard of my Indian American friends getting profiled, either***), even though from a distance, I can’t look that different from the range of appearances of Hispanic people. When I was starting to come out – this was two winters ago – I went out for drinks, with Teri, and I was driving home down Division (the same street Taqueria San Jose is on), and this big SUV pulled up next to me at a light. There were these two big, white guys in it, and they were clearly staring over their steering wheel at me. And I was scared, as a newly visible woman out by herself. I reached for my cell phone, to call the police. And we made eye contact, and I realized they were the police. And as soon as we made eye contact, they lost interest, drove off, and pulled someone else over a block up. What was that all about? For one thing, it was about the racial order of things – as I’ve commented before, although I am not white, as a mostly non-marginalized minority, in the racial ordering of things, I am placed**** in the category of the people who are protected and served, whereas Black and Hispanic people are often placed immediately in the category of the people from whom “we” are protected. To me, it is also about the insidious nature of racism. I am, somehow, subtly, read consistently in this process, through a mixture of minute signals. I think sometimes those signals are wealth signals (I was driving my cute VW Eos, for instance), although I think even wealth signals are subverted by the process of racism – for instance, clean cut and made up, in a fancy-ish car, I might be read to be a professional, whereas my car might be read as having been the result of my work in the drug trade or some other illegal enterprise, if I had been read other.

The biggest problem, to me, the biggest barrier, in talking about these realities is that we want to talk about them without talking about racial/ethnic diversity. So, we point out the obvious – that, biologically, race is a marginally meaningful construct at best, that all lives matter, that everybody deserves respect and dignity.

Yeah, that isn’t going to work. Really. It’s not going to end racism. And racism really can be defeated.

What should we be doing? One, we need to stop expropriating issues. I mentioned this in the context of Lana Wachowski at the Trans100. 84% of hate crimes against LGBT people are against trans people. Of hate crimes against trans people, almost all of them in the US are committed against blacks and Hispanic people, largely impoverished black and Hispanic people. In a similar way, ignoring the fact that violence and crime in general, in many of our cities, like Grand Rapids, is not evenly distributed – that there is no unitary concept of how safe a city is, explaining how Grand Rapids can be simultaneously the best place to raise “your” children and the worst place to be black. We need to stop talking about crime like risk is unitary and talk about the people most at risk and the factors placing and keeping them at risk.

Two, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, we should talk about it as a duck. Whatever else turns out to be the truth, Charleston was either an act of terrorism, or there is no such thing as terrorism. It is not only racist and ethnocentric to operationally define racism as only acts committed by radicalized people of Muslim background – it is nonsensical. When a white person shoots up a church – not any church, but a church that has burned down, been attacked many times, because it is a seat of anti-racist movement – we should talk about it as an act of racial terrorism unless some mysterious countervailing evidence appears.

Three, we should learn about and embrace the cultural heritage of others. I have been telling this story recently, in the LGBT context, as queering the value equation – but we have to start understanding that embracing the fact that people are different from “us” (and perhaps that there really is no “us”) – is one of the greatest sources of power available to us in a diverse country like the United States. So stop telling minorities (or women or LGBT people) they’re just as good as you. They’re already aware of that, and they’re aware of the ways they’re better than you, too.

And four, we need to be showing up in these impoverished communities – supporting them. Not just at candlelight vigils for their dead (as a trans person, much as I love our own TDoR and the importance of remembering our fallen, our story is not just about loss but is a story of hope, and we have to accept that marginalized communities are not a sob story for which to have pity (I hate pity), but a wondrous source of resilience, creativity, and innovation. So, stop saying you’re sorry, and show up. Don’t just show up at the vigils and the protests – don’t just tweet the rage hashtags – show up at the shops and restaurants. Make your own business open and inviting to people who aren’t like you, too. Again, not for the purpose of pitying them or showing them charity, but because you embrace them as sisters or brothers or … whatever.

Because you actually see their beauty, because the truth is, people who don’t look like you are beautiful.

* I actually just joined the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of West Michigan. I believe it’s the right thing to do to serve underserved families, including black and Hispanic families, but I also know that, demographically, we are going to have more and more young Hispanic kids over time, so being perceived as the best partner for this community is cold hard business, too.

** I know more than a few trans women who still try to date straight girls, after they transition, which is the joke… for the record, I think this is a really bad idea and more likely than not will be invalidating for everyone involved. But, hey, live and let live.

*** There was an incident when I was in maybe fifth or sixth grade, when my mother was driving us home from some youth activity – she went through a series of ridiculously cheap giant station wagons – if you’re much younger than me, you don’t get this, because they were rapidly becoming relics already by then, but the 40+ crowd knows what I’m talking about. Anyways, we were driving home in this big lumbering station wagon, and my mother used the turn signal, and slowed down to take the left onto our street off of the two lane road leading up to it. This truck came careening from behind and tried to pass us on the left, while she was turning, and it knocked our car into the woods. I suppose we could have been seriously injured, but miraculously, the car slowed down and neither of us were hurt. She sent me home on foot while she dealt with the situation. She felt that the driver of the truck was obviously drunk, and even though he, himself, said that her taillights and turn signal were clearly visible, the other (white male) driver wasn’t tested for intoxication and was not ruled at fault. My mother had a couple other times like this when she did feel discriminated against, and I take her more seriously with age. Clearly, there are also awful hate crimes against Indian men, particularly Sikh men, absurdly***** mistaken for Muslims (as if it were okay to kill Muslims), but I do argue that, in many contexts, most notably Nikki Haley sitting over South Carolina during this crucial time, in much of America, this is how things are, and as I argued before, there are dangers in distracting us from the dangers and depredations visited on Hispanic and Black communities.

**** This is the very point of the idea of privilege – I did not place myself in this category, and I did not decide how this was supposed to work. But I derive benefit from it, whether I like it or not, even if I make myself part of trying to pull the system down.

***** Deserving of my vaunted (and ridiculous) footnote-on-a-footnote, absurd because these men are thought to be Muslim because they wear turbans, whereas men who wear turbans in the United States are almost invariably Sikhs. Made more absurd because of the history of relations between Islam and Sikhism. And of course, and sadly, made far more absurd, yet, by the fact that most of the acts of mass violence in the United States are committed by white men.

Authenticity as the Sine Qua Non of the Trans Success Story, and the Virtuous Cycle of Narratives Informing Lives

/ Mira / 1 Comment

I’d like to try and draw together some thoughts that evolved during dinner with a friend at Philly Trans Health Conference, over the weekend. She and I are two very different, but similarly very happy trans women. This topic of happy trans people is established as one of importance to me. I want to move our happiness from a privilege, from luck, to birthright and expectation for our people*. Much like I want to make a world where people are proud to be autistic, where society recognizes the immense gift it is given in the form of the autism family, I want to make a world where LGBT (and particularly T) people aren’t just safe, but we are truly proud.

Proud as Proud Can Be... and you can click on the flag to buy trans pride stuff from randomflyingpidgeons!

Proud as proud can be… and you can click on the flag to buy trans pride stuff from randomflyingpidgeons!

In pursuit of this goal, I made my friend, Kelly, really think during dinner**. I wanted her to evaluate, critically, what it means to be a woman*** – beyond being addressed or seen correctly by others, and certainly beyond wearing a dress or heels, and granting that our identities as women are diverse, beautifully heterogenous, and ever evolving, what did it mean to her that she was a woman? She was a little surprised at how hard it was for her to answer this question.

I asked her a second critical question – not to push her or distress her, but because I think the answer is central to our cause. Why was she happy? And if the first question was hard, the second question was far more difficult.

One piece of extremely worrisome data I want to bring into this conversation is the subset of suicides, particularly of trans youth, that have arisen recently and that explicitly do not seem to look or functional like marginalization, lack of acceptance, or oppression stories. More than a few trans youth have killed themselves in the recent past (like Kyler from San Diego), who had parents who loved, accepted, and celebrated them. Who had solid, if not world-class access to transition-related medical services. Who had schools that celebrated them – one of them was Homecoming King – and who were in at least some cases pretty well-integrated into their communities. Who do not seem to have been experiencing a lot of traumatization by way of bullying or other victimization. I think we need to stop and question why these kids are dead, and how we failed to do anything about it. And we have to recognize that just acceptance – people recognizing one’s gender identity, people supporting one’s name or pronouns, access to school, employment, accommodations – doesn’t seem to always be enough.

This is Istanbul's 2011 Pride... the change is global! (Source: Wikimedia)

This is Istanbul’s 2011 Pride… the change is global! (Source: Wikimedia)

Moreover, trans acceptance, and LGBT acceptance more broadly, is not a static picture. It has changed dramatically just in the recent history – the stuff that happened since Stonewall – and it is changing at a breathtaking, accelerating rate every day. What is the quality of evidence that acceptance is reducing suicidality in our community?

I want to propose an answer to my own question. I cannot provide an evidence basis for it, but it is consistent with my base of anecdotal evidence. I’ve quickly had the privilege not just to become a happy trans person, but to get to know a lot of happy trans people, in fact many of the most influential ones, and even to share my very life with one. And I’d like to hypothesize based on my experience of them and myself. My hypothesis is that every happy trans person begins their process of authenticity with a sincere, internal step of self-acceptance. I mean real self-acceptance. They enter transition or coming out, knowing and deciding to learn to love, who they are. They do this first, and every subsequent decision in their authenticity process derives directly from this internal conviction – a conviction not just in the truth of their gender identity, but in the goodness and rightness of their gender identity. And, this is really important, they enter into coming out and transition happy. Really happy. Although they may gain confidence, surety, ease, from things like their name or pronouns, or from transition-related medical services, they neither seek nor obtain wholeness from them. They don’t, in fact, need to seek wholeness from anything, for they enter this process with it.

Marya is amazing. So thankful for sisters like this one. Source: Mark Trockman / trockstock.com

Marya is amazing. So thankful for sisters like this one. Source: Mark Trockman / trockstock.com

When I was in the throws of surviving anorexia, like many other anorectics, I found a lot in Marya Hornbacher’s words. Her Wasted has this phrase**** all the “ana’s” knew by heart: “If I eat this apple sandwich in precisely twenty bites, no more no less, I will be happy.” We repeat a similar mantra, over and over again, as trans people, and it’s sheer and utter nonsense. If I just have the facial features I think I want, I will be happy. If I just have a vagina, or I don’t have a uterus anymore or, …, I will be happy. If I have a beard, I will be happy. If I get pronouned correctly, I will be happy. If I “pass,” I will be happy. And we continually defer happiness to some future that never seems to come. Recovery from anorexia depended (for me) crucially on rejecting the idea that I would be happy if I just lost another one, two, ten pounds, and not just because I had gone far, far beyond the place where I had ten pounds to lose.

In Christianity, there is a rift between evangelistic and liberation theologies, in that the one is interested in finding deferred happiness in heaven, and the other is interested in helping people be well and whole. The rift is old, and deep, not just in Christianity, but far beyond it. The Christ who overturned tables, fed masses, cured the sick, and befriended the harlot, is alongside the apostle, in the same New Testament narrative, who cared less for what is good and what is evil, and cared more for what is right, and what is wrong. Before that, the God that demanded the Israelites strike down their enemies and leave no survivors was the same God that demanded grapes be left on the vine for the poor and the stateless, again, the one a question of rightness and the other a question of goodness. And on it goes back, turtles astride turtles, and we are forever, the serpent and the sons of Adam, at odds, the one striking at the other’s heel, and the other smashing one’s head*****. It plays out far beyond Christianity, and it is deeply enmeshed in the way we live.

And this is where I bring to the trans community not an answer, but the right framework to find that answer. We are failing these fallen siblings of ours, trans youth and trans adults, not just because we haven’t won complete acceptance and inclusion for our kind, but because we have not taught nor empowered each other to find our identities, to take that internal step of self-acceptance that allows for and necessarily precedes the pursuit of authenticity, and in so doing, we do more than just put the cart before the horse. We kill our own kind by selling them a dream that can never succeed.

So how do we stop? How on earth do we not just stop selling this absurdism that transition or coming out experiences, in themselves, can make anybody happy?

My thoughts from dinner that night, over margaritas and excellent Mexican food, link me back now to a video that I helped do for my beloved Actors Theatre, a couple of months ago. In it, I discussed a virtuous cycle between art and life, where life inspires ever greater, more true, more honest art, and art in turns drives us towards our own truths and our own authenticities, making us better people. This is the kind of art that Actors does, and I believe desperately that this is something of which people need far more.

I am far from done in figuring this puzzle out. But my first answer to this question is that we, as visible trans people, must think of our trans visibility, our stories, our narratives, as participating in a similar virtuous cycle with all the life experiences of the trans-gentry******. If we tell stories that are focused on how far we take transition, or how much external acceptance we gain or take, we will instead participate in a vicious cycle, in which we will press our own people ever farther from the thing that could save their lives. So rather, we must tell stories of authenticity, of identity, not because others could ever take on our identities*******, but because, as iron sharpens iron, as life and art lift each other up, our authenticity and identity stories will push our people higher and elevate them in their pursuit of the self-acceptance that presages being a happy trans person.

That’s my theory. I’m all for gathering supporting data, but I’m not going to wait, because this is life and death, and as one of that minority of really, truly, madly, deeply happy trans people, I’ve got to do something. While happiness remains a privilege, like any other privilege, I need to use it not just for me but for making the world a better place.

* Consider this also a shot across the bow of those people (you know who you are) who think that misery is at the heart of trans activism, and who reject any trans person who is happy. I view happiness like I view footnotes. I put it out there until you quite consider it over the top, and then I put it out there some more. The next shot will be between the eyes, my darlings, for I am out to get your worldview.

** I also made her change our plans and go to a place where I could get reservations, because you know, that process of walking around until you find a place to eat is what leads the world to eat at TGIFridays, and life is far too short. And excellent Mexican food came with Mexican revolution – there was a handwritten sign propped in the glass above the door calling for social justice in Mexico. Thank you for that, my darling Kelly.

*** Make no mistake… this ownership of what makes a woman is the principle bullet of exclusionary feminism movements. Although I respectfully agree with these women that women are a wonderfully diverse people who defy simple definition, and the seat of our definition is not in our cleavage, our hips, our dresses or makeup or any of those kinds of things, I continue to strongly reject their claim that only the cisgender early female life experience can be a gateway to womanhood, or that women of all kinds cannot coexist and build each other up and empower each other.

**** In fairness, none of us have any idea what an apple sandwich is, and if I had reached a greater place of sureness in myself when I got to meet Marya, I would have not just thanked her for what she did for me, which was a lot, but I would have pressed for an answer on this important question.

***** I’m with the serpent, and Ruth, and Mary Magdalene, and Jesus, and all of those seeking good over evil and not right over wrong, but you knew that.

****** A very cute term I am now borrowing from Kinky Boots.

******* The boom boom I have, that all the boys chase, and all the right junk I have, in all the right places, belongs to me and no one else. Just as I can never be any better than lousy at being someone I’m not, none of you will ever be a better me than I will.

A Sorry, Not Sorry Conversation

/ Mira / 7 Comments
Dis furst part dedicates to da ladeez

Dis furst part dedicates to da ladeez

I want to try and address two very different situations, involving the word sorry, and explain why, although on the surface the arrangement primarily benefits me and disadvantages everyone else*, I’m not sorry for saying I’m sorry in the one situation, and I wish you would stop saying you’re sorry in the other.

So first, the situation that should be sorry. There is so much ballyhoo about we womenfolk saying we’re sorry. We’re almost bombarded with this message, from feminist blogging, to worrisome study results measuring the concerning level of sorriness among women, to advertisers (damn you, you make us cry anyways) who sell us woman power by criticizing our behavior, and even from our feminist boyfriends who chide us for saying we’re sorry. I was particularly taken by Amy Schumer’s latest contribution to this conversation.

Sorry, Amy, not with you on this one. Although you're amazing and I encourage robust debate amongst us as feminists and women.

Sorry, Amy, not with you on this one. Although you’re amazing and I encourage robust debate amongst us as feminists and women

In the video, a panel of women scientists are apologizing over each other, and the situation is used to essentially poke fun at the way women act. Now, I really do like Amy Schumer. But normally, when we make fun of women for being women, … that’s sexism. When we implicate that there’s something wrong with women, that their preferred behavior is implicitly wrong, and that they should just be men (because men and their behaviors are superior), that’s misogyny. But we give feminists a pass to attack women, if they’re attacking women for saying they’re sorry, or for all the other behavior more common among women that some feminist or another has arbitrarily adjudicated as furthering the patriarchy. And we never ask why men don’t say they’re sorry more – we just attack women and tell them to stop apologizing – that itself should be a clue that something is… hinky.

I’m not so down with this. Scratch that. I’m so not down with this. Look, Teri, Ms. Schumer, everybody. I don’t think you understand why I apologize. This is most tellingly clear in that you don’t pay attention to all the things I’m not sorry about. I’m not even vaguely sorry for being a feminist. I’m not very sorry for bringing the revolution. You interpret me as being sorry for the space I occupy, sorry for the air I breathe, sorry for the attention I demand. What you fail to understand is that I – and I believe, a lot of the other women out there “over” apologizing, we – apologize not because of remorse or regret, but because our apologies act as a social grace. We say we’re sorry because it bridges a gap between you and us. We say I’m sorry, when we sit down next to you, because it covers over the awkwardness that lingers in the air when we sit and say nothing. And we’re also giving you an entrée to make a little small talk, or strike up a conversation with us, if you like.

Because here’s the thing. We really like it when you’re comfortable. This is perhaps a sine qua non in your budding understanding, if you’re not high femininity, of your very feminine friends and loved ones. This is really important to us – and although, on the surface, we do it for you, we ultimately do it for us, as a recognition of who we are, and for our own joy. Just like women who like to look pretty, not only like to look pretty themselves, but like to have pretty things around them**. And while we cultivate that prettiness for ourselves, we take joy in your enjoyment of it. A thing which no feminist is very willing to talk about but which any high-femininity woman knows perfectly well is this: we’re not very interested in being feminine in the middle of a forest, where nobody is around to see it***. And this scares a lot of feminists away from femininity itself. Because they’re so busy trying to rid women of objectification that they fail to understand that femininity is the oldest of performance arts.

Just like this. A cushion of air. Except without so much crying for Argentina.

Just like this. A cushion of air. Except without so much crying, not crying for Argentina.

It’s such an old art that it’s embedded into the architecture of your world****. It’s actually really important to you, too – you just don’t know it, half the time, because you float on an air cushion of our social graces without even realizing it. Just like you appreciate our beauty often without appreciating the line between a woman being the object of your admiration and a woman being objectified. You don’t notice that, when you’re around us, and we’re “over” apologizing, you’re fighting less, you feel better. And then you apply the lens of how you think, to us, because you still think we want to be like you*****.

Now maybe, we do care too much about other people’s comfort and not enough about our own. But your “intervention” in the form of criticizing what I do without understanding it isn’t helping – it just makes me feel badly about myself (which wasn’t why I said sorry in the first place, and if you thought it was, you may actually create the very problem you’re trying to avert). No. This is how many women, how femininity in general, does things. Get used to it. And masculine folk, maybe you should try extending more social grace to others. Maybe, who knows, you’ll like it as much as we do. Or maybe at least you won’t get into as many fights. Maybe your partner will even find it hot. Or, if you really can’t say you’re sorry very often, don’t – it’s okay to just apologize when you’re actually sorry. But stop criticizing my sorries – if you want to help me, because you think I don’t take care of myself, do it by investing in me and supporting me, not by criticizing me.

Sadly, this is is way more intended to help you feel better about yourself than to do any good (HuffPo, 2013)

Sadly, this is is way more intended to help you feel better about yourself than to do any good (HuffPo, 2013)

Right. So here’s the switch to not sorry, as if you thought I wasn’t pressing hard enough already. Now I know you ain’t gonna dig this. Christians, this one’s for you. And your campaign to come to Pride and say you’re sorry. Yeah, stop doing that. Oh, come to Pride. You belong – you don’t have to be LGBTQIA+ to be Family. But come because you belong. And quit with the “I’m sorry”. Quit with the “Not All Christians.” And (if you are really clueless), quit already with the #BlameOneNotAll.

If you’re not white (although I’m kind of guessing you are, #SorryNotSorry), you probably already know why. Hang in for a second and let me educate the majority culture, please. In the 1990s, there was an era of “I’m sorry” events – I think inspired by the beauty of the reconciliation in South Africa, without understanding any of its problems. A group of white people would get a group of black people to come to them, and they would apologize, and then cry and cry over their healing of racism. Yeah, and you probably don’t get why this is a problem, do you…. It’s a problem because the black / non-white people in this dynamic were basically props – they were there to get the decor right for the white people to feel the sense of forgiveness that they wanted. If you ask them, and they’re being really honest, they’ll tell you the whole thing was kind of awkward and not healing for them. They’ll tell you they didn’t ask you for an apology (and can we talk about back income, if we’re really saying we’re sorry here, write me a check). Moreover, they probably (but you may not) know that you left those events and you didn’t change the world******. And this is the way in which this process differed deeply from the goals of South Africa’s racial reconciliation – in the 20 years since those “I’m sorry” events of the 90s, those people who were sorry built communities that were more and more segregated, so that they could spend less and less time with the people to whom they were supposedly sorry. If anything, in many ways, things got worse instead of better, and in any event, while what happened was an important step, racial healing isn’t what happened.

Okay, so these guys were not too shabby. But pay close attention to everything they did, not just one thing they did. Context is queen.

Okay, so these guys were not too shabby. But pay close attention to everything they did, not just one thing they did. Context is queen.

And there it is. Changing the world. Here’s the thing straight Christian allies frequently fail to get. We don’t need you to tell us God loves us “even though” we’re gay, or “no matter” what we are. We already know that. God already knows that. It’s not even in dispute. The only ones who don’t know it… are Christians. We don’t need you to apologize. We don’t need you to tell us you’re not like the rest, any more than we need men to tell us they’re not rapists. What we need you to do, is change the world. Or more particularly, change not God (who is just fine), not Christ (who is just fine), but change Christians (who need to get back to God). Make them confront how they took religion and turned it from a vehicle of love to a vehicle of hatred. Call them out and call them in – make it clear that exclusionary practices are deeply and fundamentally inconsistent with core Christian values, but that they can return to what they once believed in. Tell them that, if they walk away from the idea that Jesus died on the cross for everybody, then whatever it is that they’re doing, it’s not Christian, and it isn’t holy, and that you can’t support their lifestyle choice, although you will not stop praying for them, nor stop hoping. If they’re the sort of people that put up angry billboards or protest marriage equality, particularly, don’t put up a competing billboard telling us you love us. Help them remember the time before their hearts were filled with hate, and help them teach themselves to love, again.

So remind them that they need forgiveness, that it’s not too late for them, and that God still loves them, even if they stopped loving God (because you can’t hate us and love God… if that’s what you think, there isn’t anything about your own religion that you get, at all). And if you haven’t figured it out, don’t do this work at Pride, because that’s not where the problem is. Go do this work at your church, at all the churches. And recognize that the problem has nothing to do with the LGBT community but is about the hearts of Christians.

And again, when you come to Pride, come to celebrate, because that’s what Pride is there for – celebrate because it is so, so good to be. Good to be me. Good to be you. Greater gift has no one ever received than this, and when you don’t get that, you struggle to belong at Pride not because we don’t accept you (we do), but because you don’t understand what we’re doing or why we’re gathering.

So stop saying you’re sorry, and get to work. And stop saying I need to stop saying I’m sorry, and get to work, and let me do the work I need to do. Because there is so much work to be done. And doing that work alongside me is the only thing that can make you my ally.

* Interestingly, I have been accused both of apologizing excessively and of being excessively unapologetic. Curious and curiouser. But you’ve got ninety nine problems, and this bitch ain’t one. Speaking of which. I’ve been meaning to write a piece about bitch pride. But you’ll have to wait for that, pups. Even though you recognize that this footnote is nothing more than excuse to use the word bitch. Three times.

** And the gender binary is at the heart of why they make an exception when it comes to men, who they might legitimately not value heavily on their prettiness, but whom they value for a host of other characteristics.

*** In defense of pointing out the obvious, especially to ourselves as obvious, I would point out that intersectionalism, which often seems to blow the minds of mainstream feminists, was not really an attempt to say something profoundly new, but to inject what had always been obvious to black women, just from having to integrate feminist movement into their complicated lives, into the feminist vernacular, in essence to remove the invisibility from it so that white feminists could see what was directly in front of their own noses. But that’s what happens when you bathe in isms – obvious stuff gets hidden in cloaks of invisibility.

**** So like any great architecture, if you stand back and take it in, it’s breathtaking, but you’re also allowed to let it make you whole and nourish you while barely even noticing it is there.

***** The most savvy of readers will note that I used to rail against the idea of difference feminism. The reason I hated it was not because I didn’t believe in difference – viva la difference – it was because there was no critical assessment of women’s beliefs or values in most of difference feminism. I believe very much in that critical assessment, and in fact, I claim that I’m offering a deeper, more nuanced, and truer assessment of this whole business of us saying we’re sorry, than the people who are telling you to stop apologizing.

****** Which to me, is maybe the second most damning of sins, behind failing to live for oneself.

Sexism is bad for men, too

/ Mira / Leave a comment

A short thought, but long enough to put here instead of just making it a Facebook post!

Sometimes, I think the Economist really doesn’t get it (and they still use some languaging that sounds very much like they don’t get it). They wrote a reactionary article a few years ago, on the idea that the Y chromosome was being evolved out of the gene code, because it is so small (in a kilo-basetide-pair sense), which came out shortly before scientists figured out why it was so small, and why that allowed it to have such a strong influence on the future of the genome.

"The Weaker Sex," The Economist, 2015.

“The Weaker Sex,” The Economist, 2015.

After giving me a moment to simmer down, I think this article, when you remove the inanity, really makes a simple point on which the Sisterhood has long agreed, but which feminist movement has not always effectively conveyed, and which feminist theorists have at times butchered:

Sexism itself, is BAD FOR MEN (and not just for women). Although, in some ways, men reap benefits from the patriarchy, in insidious but far more damning ways, they are hurt by it. This is why the good ones among the Sisterhood care so much about our menfolk. This is why I care so much about my own Teri​’s pursuit of authenticity as a man.

Because just as much as I live in a toxic bath of sexism that sends me negative messages about myself as a woman, and as much as I am held in chains, often trapped beneath the surface of that bath from the breath of good air, they, our menfolk, they are, too.

How I Became a Real-Life, Fairytale Princess

/ Mira / 8 Comments

I had the opportunity to provide a lunchtime keynote speech, participate in a panel, and provide a workshop during the 2015 annual conference of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network of Grand Rapids. I was particularly honored to speak alongside some really powerful guests, including a number of personal friends and the tremendous damali ayo. I wrote a short, separate post with a link to this full text and also a link to my presentation visuals for the afternoon. This is the full text of my lunchtime keynote.

Thank you so much for inviting me to speak, today. I’m thrilled to be here, with all of you, with all of the energy, the passion, the dedication, and the commitment you bring to the various dreams and missions you are carrying out. Uniting them is a drive to make this world a better place, not just in the abstract, but in the actual, within our own lifetimes and lovetimes. And thank you, as well, to damali ayo for making time to be here with us today – your words and your work are so inspiring, and I am so thankful to have had and to be having the opportunity to learn from and with you.

This afternoon, I will be giving a more formal presentation, Queering the Value Equation, and I hope you come (not that the other choices aren’t very good, too, but come to mine!). Right now, while you digest both your food and the ideas you heard this morning, I want to get a little more personal. I’ve written before that I am a real-life, fairytale princess. My dream and my mission revolve around young children, so I’m going to do what “kid people” do, and offer you a little storytime. For your lunchtime story, I’d like to tell you how I got to princesshood. So, I’m going to tell you part of my story, the mixed up tale that brought me to the autism revolution, and how I found myself, and love, along the way. In my time at Hope Network, I’ve gotten the chance to learn from an excellent teacher of storytellers, but I can’t make a story really, really good all by myself. For a story to be really, really good, though, you’ll have to believe alongside me. I hope you’ll do that.

Like any good story, it’s a long story. I don’t have time to tell you all of those parts here, today, but I do want to start briefly with how I became a nonprofit professional – it wasn’t my original aim. I actually studied engineering in college, and liked it enough to get a master’s degree. I worked in the engineering world for about five years, and although I think people have an increasingly hard time believing it, and sometimes I myself have a hard time believing it, I was actually a really good engineer. I learned, in particular, the art of magic-working as an engineer, and particularly that magic doesn’t come just from one’s own internal power, but it comes from connections and community. I had the chance, relatively late in my five year engineering career, to take on “fixing” a project that should have had a five year development cycle, but needed to be started over, eight months before the finish line. It was maybe the first time in my life I really worked magic, and it taught me an important lesson. What I did to pull it off wasn’t in the technology – I could solve a mean equation, but that wasn’t what helped me do what needed to be done. Rather, it was deeply within relationships. Building relationships with our customer to help them understand just how perilous the situation was, without paralyzing them with fear. Building relationships with our plant staff, who were often angry, burnt out, and felt under-appreciated. Who were never valued too much, but without whom the miracle couldn’t happen. Managing all those feelings, all those fears, pushing them but not overwhelming them. Bringing them together, even if they didn’t realize it. To make magic happen. And I – we – we did it. We launched that product on time. Not quite without a hiccup, but those are stories for another time. Nonetheless, we launched our product on time, and it worked, and the magic we wrought together saved the day.

Ummm, yeah, it didn't work anything like this.

Ummm, yeah, it didn’t work anything like this.

It worked, but it was the beginning of the end. After I’d proven to myself that I could do that – not just solve equations, not just make scientific discoveries or extend science, but build things that actually worked – I knew that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. For me, personally, although I like solving problems, I wanted a more human, connected, personal set of problems to which I could take my analytical abilities. That took a while to find. Professionally, I spent more than two years taking night classes while working 60 hours a week or more as an engineer. I dismissed some ideas, for me, right away – going to law or business school – there isn’t anything wrong with either of those things, but for me, they were dangerous because they were surface and not deep gratification of my need to change. I didn’t want to put the effort in, just to end up behind another desk, pushing other paper, feeling equally unfulfilled. See, this is something you have to know about me – I can’t live, if the fairytale dies. I don’t have life events. I go on adventures. I don’t mean taking exotic vacations (the truth is that I’m usually too busy trying to change the world to take vacations, but I’m trying to learn, I really promise I am), but this is rather how I’ve always needed to see my life, and at that point, as a young professional, I was finally committing to finding some way to make my life full of adventure, to take my rightful place. Maybe you’ve had a moment like that in your life – where you could do what was safe, or you could do what was good. Like Aslan in C. S. Lewis’s stories, I chose in that moment to be good, but not safe. And I needed to do that, to inch closer to being the fairytale princess I was supposed to be.

Meg Murry, I will always be in your debt.

Meg Murry, I will always be in your debt.

About that… being a fairytale princess. To do that, I needed to find my voice as a woman. Which was somewhat complicated by this whole business of people thinking I was a boy. For a long time, I’d been cultivating girl and women role models, from Meg in Wrinkle in Time and Madeleine L’Engle, to Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Austen, to Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, and their characters, later, in college. I learned to be as much like my inspirations as I knew how to be while letting people continue thinking I was a boy. In the middle of my engineering career, I had a little time off to myself. Really, I got laid off a couple weeks before 9/11, and there just weren’t jobs to get. During that time, I found feminism, which made things better, and worse. Gloria Steinem and others contextualized in a powerful way for me, what I had already found in Morrison and so many others. They taught me what women’s voices sounded like, and they taught me how to know, instinctively, when they were absent, and how to think about drawing them out (which is the “better” part). But I couldn’t quite master drawing my own out (which is the “worse” part).

These sisters, calling me.

These sisters, calling me.

So, my own woman’s voice was the one most markedly absent in my life. I didn’t really know what to do about that, yet. As I continued trying to molt the image of myself as an engineer, which wasn’t for me, and try to find some kind of way to the butterfly underneath, I didn’t find me, quite yet, but I did find psychology. I took a class, and I loved it. It was, admittedly, human sexuality (I hadn’t taken psychology ever, before that, except one terribly boring high school psychology class, about ten years earlier, and human sexuality is nothing if not completely unboring). How could that go wrong, right? I took that class thinking, well, I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I ought to stay sharp, until I figure it out. It was sort of like mental training. But it was amazing – I found myself intellectually stimulated, asking questions, growing as a person. So I took another. And I asked myself, what am I looking for, really? Why am I looking for my path, when it’s right here? So I set out to become a psychologist, because it brought out my passion, which ultimately led me to graduate school at Florida.

This came just a little bit later!

This came just a little bit later!

But I wasn’t a princess, yet. I had, actually, found this exotic thing called a “transsexual” (that’s the word they used, in those days). But that whole thing sounded, well, not me. There were too many problems with it. There was some kind of arcane process wherein some kind of surgery turned you into something you were not. But I didn’t want to be something I was not. I wanted everyone to know what I actually was. If there’s good magic and dark magic, that sounded an awful lot like dark magic, at least the way it was presented to me and the way I understood it at that time. And also I didn’t want to be a freak show – I totally respect people who flaunt societal expectations, and I think a new wave of people who are socially non-conforming in new ways, is doing new and really exciting things. In other ways, I, myself, am proud to not conform, but the truth is that I also kind of like fitting in, because I really love connectedness, and for me, if I couldn’t have that, I wouldn’t be authentic to me. In hindsight, since it’s such a trite plot-line in adventures, I had an obligatory near-miss with my destiny. I figured out I was indeed trans (not the arcane and dangerous sounding thing I’d heard about, but the real thing), but I figured it out just a few moments too late. About a year after I came to that realization, Jenny Boylan was the first modern, American trans professional to really tell her story of coming out while retaining her profession and her community – her connectedness. In fairness, I had missed Jan Morris entirely, who also would have appealed more to my sensibilities, than what I found, and she had originally published her book long, long ago. But, anyways, I missed the tidings of good news that were already out there, and I missed the tidings of good news that came just a few moments too late, and I made the strategic decision that coming out, and being fully authentic, wasn’t right for me (yet).

While I focused on getting out of engineering and becoming a psychologist, I accepted, but hid, this idea that I was trans. Although non-binary identities weren’t really a thing that I had been exposed to until after I ultimately came out, I essentially tried to create one for myself. Non-binary identities are great, when they’re representative of that towards which you are running, but they’re not so good when they’re just a form of running away. I didn’t talk at all about being trans, but I gave myself fairly broad ranging permission to stop much of the pretending. I did that, ultimately, for ten years. That identity occasionally made people uncomfortable, but far more people accepted me than didn’t, and I guess it was a gateway to authenticity. It wasn’t authenticity, however, and if you’ve ever been “this close” to what you’d always wanted, you know that it’s not a place to hang out for extended periods of time – that gets excruciating. And it was excruciating, although the truth is also that I made so many friends during those days, I had so many adventures, and I experienced so much joy, too.

In the meantime, though, adjusting to psychology as a culture took some work. I survived more than few faux pas, not the least of which was interviewing with someone (who would become my dissertation chair) who had been the president of two international bodies governing my sub-field and was in the process of becoming the leader of the other one, and telling him that I didn’t know exactly what this “neuropsychology” was about, but neuropsychologists seemed to ask interesting questions, and they work with interesting patients, so would you still let me in? Surprisingly, he did. It took my path away from Los Angeles, where what I thought I wanted had been, and to Gainesville, Florida, where what I needed was.

Seriously, you guys, I did not see either of these two, like, ever.

Seriously, you guys, I did not see either of these two, like, ever.

Gainesville was an adjustment, itself, too. Probably none of you are as naïve (or stupid is a good word, too) as I was, to think that all of Florida looked like a scene from those old Miami Vice shows. But that’s what I thought, and I was all ready to start stocking up on linen blazers and pastel. I arrived in Jacksonville (where my parents had actually moved, coincidentally or not so coincidentally, depending on how you look at it). Jacksonville is much more Gone With The Wind than it is Miami Vice. And then I got on the road, and I drove to Gainesville. And the swamp on the way to Gainesville is way more Anaconda than it is Miami Vice.

Also, when I got to Florida, I found I had to do rotations with children, and this was kind of a problem. The thing is, I was all excited about finding psychology, but I sort of hated kids. The only exposure I had to kids, besides having been one, was being stuck in nursery by my church, because I was a warm body, and it was my duty, which of course came with no training, and being basically thrown into a room full of crying babies. But I knew I had to learn, and so I decided to do what Buddhists call turning into the sharp points, and instead of minimizing the role of kids in my life, I started spending lots of time volunteering with them, at one of Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Camps, Camp Boggy Creek. That changed a lot. The Hole in the Wall Camps are camps for kids with serious illnesses. They’re the sort of place that generally elicit one of two polar-opposite responses, of overwhelming joy, or of revulsion and pity, and it says everything about you which response you have. But they’re also places where you can learn something. I’d never thought of childcare as something in which one learns skill. I thought it just took talent. I’ve never been very good at being talented, but I’m a great learner. And when I did learn, it turned out kids actually kind of liked me. I was good for them. And they were good for me. They wanted – needed – my friendship, my love, my spirit of adventure, but never my pity. And knowing them in their joy was that deep sense of fulfillment and connectedness that had brought me in search of a new career to begin with. It must have had some impact. A few months later, people in my graduate program thought I was studying to be a child psychologist, even more than a few of the child psychology trainees thought that.

That Camp was – is – a place where love burns bright. The love burned bright there, because, there, if only briefly, the fairytale was real. When I was there, I was a fairy-tale character. But far more importantly, getting to understand kids was another pivotal moment in my professional development. When I was an engineer, I had learned that magic was real, and that it came from my connections and relationships. Spending weekends at Camp Boggy Creek and my weekdays in a hospital, one foot in the fairytale and one foot in “reality,” I learned that I could bring the fairytale back with me. Much as the magic, once I learned to unleash it, it started following me everywhere I went. I found that I could create a forcefield around me, and in my forcefield, I could be a real-life fairytale character. Being a real-life fairytale character let me learn to be a doctor without pity, which is the only good kind, because pity has never really helped anyone – if that’s the other thing my kids taught me in those years, it was that, no matter how rough the things that were happening to them were, they never, ever wanted pity from me.

So, things were getting good. Now, I was just missing the princess part. I brought the magic and the fairytale with me to Chicago for a year. I got to live around the corner from the Obamas (not that I ever really saw them). And go on more adventures. When I got my marching orders for fellowship, it took me, surprisingly, back here, to West Michigan (Holland was my home for the second half of my childhood, but I hadn’t really planned on leaving the South, once I fell in love with it, let alone coming back to West Michigan). So, back to Grand Rapids I came, and this was where all the rest of the pivotal events in my ascension to princess status happened.

The next pivotal event was Hope Network. Although, after learning the fairytale was real in Florida, I had continued to work with kids all the way through my time there and in Chicago, I had actually wound up, at Mary Free Bed, in a fellowship working with adults. Although I had ranked the position really highly in the match, it hadn’t been perfectly what I was looking for. In a different way, Hope wasn’t what I was looking for, or what I thought I was looking for, either – I knew how to diagnose autism, but I didn’t really know too much about an autism center. It was kind of funny, really, because one of my dear friends in graduate school would have thrilled at this job, back then, and she got the job I thought I needed (at a famous research hospital), and I got the job she thought she needed. And we’re both the happier for it. I accepted a position with Hope way in advance of finishing my fellowship.

And then I got to Hope – you know, there have to be dramatic turnarounds in stories like this, and this is where the lighting turns dark and the music dips into a foreboding, minor key. The thing about stories is, the good ones never go in a straight line. I walked into an empty clinic. Having finally signed the mortgage on my first home, I was surprised with an unannounced non-compete agreement, but then far more worrisome, a ghost town. We had half a dozen people on staff, but we weren’t serving any kids, maybe for an hour or two a week, at most. We had a practice manager on staff, but we didn’t have a practice. And I started seeing patients and quickly ran rings around the rest of the clinic combined, but I couldn’t generate enough revenue to sustain us all. So I did a lot of going home and crying myself to sleep.

As luck would have it, my boss, who directed the Center, and who had no idea what he was doing, took us to a conference in Philadelphia that winter. There was one other person on the team who seemed to also be a heroine plucked out of her story and placed in this wasteland, my beloved friend and ever since then, my left-hand woman, Elyse. Heroines find other heroines. In this case, we got frozen yogurt. And I asked her what we were actually supposed to be doing – you know, if I had a magic wand (I didn’t yet, back then – I do, now – I got it for my birthday and it lights up and it’s kind of wonderful), I asked her, what was our Center supposed to look like? She was the only person on the team to whom I didn’t need to say, “Because you know it’s not supposed to look like this.” Because she knew, already. And Elyse told me what she knew – which turned out to be a lot – she was the first behavior analyst I really got to know well, and although I’ve gotten to know many more since then, she’s still one of the best I know, and she’s still my left-hand woman, although now our triumvirate is completed by my right-hand man, Joe. And there was my next lesson… sometimes, fairytale princesses need to stage coups, you know, build armies, ignite revolutions, raise hell.

Before I was all like,

Before I was all like, “Welcome to the Revolution!” I was like, “Awww, crap, what have I gotten myself into?”

Now, handling court intrigue is on my short list of talents (this is not one of my more endearing qualities, at least to the HR people). So, I sharpened my knives, but I didn’t even have to depose that director. Amusingly, ridiculously, call it what you want, he got re-tasked a couple months later. The next director – she was the fifth of the Center, in the two years it had been opened, listened to me in a way he had not. She encouraged me when I asked questions. She usually didn’t know how to get the answers, but she always understood why I was asking and never wrote me off. Like any good fairytale, friends and allies are where you least expect them. She got re-tasked, too, though, and eight months after my first job working as a psychologist, I was asked to direct the Center. So, I went from never having any formal management experience to having all this responsibility. Also like any good fairytale, alliances shifted and evolved – when I first met the major donor who had made my Center possible, she stormed in yelling about how the front office never answers the phone. About what she was angry, I had no idea. But I found out, and fixed it, and we’ve been friendly ever since, and she later proved to be a really powerful ally (that’s the thing, the best people make the best friends or the worst enemies, and it’s all a matter of perspective). In that first year of rebuilding the Center (this was three years ago), I spent a lot of time responding to people who had never tried to build an autism program, let alone fix the one we already had which was flopping around like a fish on a boat deck, but who still knew better than I did what it needed to look like. I got pushed, over and over, into death by committee instead of design thinking (sorry, I love freedom, and I empower my people, but I don’t really believe that dreams are democracies). And I had to grow a backbone, and quick (not all of you went to grad school, but grad school isn’t exactly built, too often, around encouraging the idea of backbone … all too often, we’re selected as much for our smarts as we are for our sense of masochism).

It took time, but it worked. Fortuitous winds blew. I got to be involved in changing Michigan law so that kids with autism could get the help they need. I had to “fake it till I make it” with respect to being an autism expert, and I read a lot of journal articles and listened to a lot of science, and I got there. I still think being an autism expert means I’m only marginally less ignorant than the rest of the population, because we know so little about autism, but I did establish myself, as rightfully as most people can claim it, to be a little bit of an expert. And a team started growing around us, and we started delivering results. By the end of our Fiscal Year 2013, we were getting close to fifteen times the size we’d been when I started two years earlier. Little kids were thriving – learning to communicate for the first time, learning to learn, learning to play, learning to have a brighter future. Sometimes – not always – they did so well that people wouldn’t believe it, even though they were watching it with their own eyes. Parents were going from autism victims and survivors to autism advocates. And we were building community.

After I became Director of the Center, I was packing up files the prior directors had left behind, and I found a printed out e-mail with my CV in it. It was written to the director who had hired me. It said, to my great amusement, that I wasn’t a very good candidate for the job, and I really didn’t have much experience or seem very promising, but the recruiter thought she ought to at least pass on the resume, anyways. I still cherish that letter – I’m going to get it framed at some point. And it’s yet another time in this story when I had a surprise up my sleeve. What can I say? I love an underdog story.

But I was still hiding. That summer, I brought friends to Actors Theatre (if I can put in a brief plug – go see their plays. They tell stories no one else in Grand Rapids tells, and they are stories that we all need to hear). They put on a play called Looking for Normal. In the play, what starts out as an apparent mid-life crisis turns on its head, when the main character admits to family for the first time that they are transgender, and need to transition, or start living authentically as who she is supposed to be. I was transfixed. And squirming – yes, yes, I know that’s an oxymoron, but never mind that. I was waiting for people to jeer or laugh. I was waiting for people to get pitchforks and torches out from under their seats (you know, if people try to sneak a text message in during the middle of a play, they would try and sneak pitchforks into the theatre). But they didn’t. They gave the play a standing ovation, cheering and cheering. And my assumptions about what I couldn’t do, myself, turned upside down.

This is the next to last lesson I learned, but it’s the most important. I could wield the magic, I could live in the fairytale, and even bring it home with me, I could have the dream, but it would be just that – a dream, just for a time, still pretend – if I was still in hiding. Hiding wasn’t where I belonged, and until I took my rightful place, the dream couldn’t come true, couldn’t be real or permanent. I’ve always taught my team the belief that we make a long-term commitment, to hold the hand of the AutismFamily, to be an adopted part of that family, and that we can’t just make them a promise today, but we have to build, and to be, in such a way that we can keep that promise tomorrow, and five, ten, fifteen years, or more, down the road. Just as we couldn’t make decisions that would let us serve them now, but then have to shut the doors in a year and leave them, stranded by the side of the road, I couldn’t keep surviving like this, and until I could come out of hiding, I wasn’t really in a position to make anyone, including this family I loved so much, long-term promises.

So, I took a deep breath. The fall of 2013, I invited one of the friends I’d taken to the play for coffee. And I came out. For the first time, ever. And like the theatre goers, but in a far more powerfully personal way, she didn’t laugh, jeer, doubt, boo, turned out not to have brought her pitchfork, but she accepted, believed, encouraged, loved. That was so profound that I didn’t sleep at all that night. I came out to another person, and another, and the same thing happened, except for the not sleeping part – I love to sleep, usually. In December, I asked my Executive Vice President of Talent Management to coffee. I came out to her. She took a deep breath, and she said, “We want you to do this right here. You tell us what you need.” I came out to my own manager at the time, another EVP, and she did the same. They came out to my CEO on my behalf, and he did the same. When he in turn came out on my behalf to my board, the benefactress who had come in yelling about the receptionist all those months earlier was my most passionate defender. All the people who shouldn’t have – the conservatives, the clergy, the risk averse – they supported me. In the meantime, I kept coming out in my personal life. To my astonishment, no one rejected me (and really, no one ever has). Because relatedness and connectedness is really at the center of everything I am, I had a really big professional network, plus almost fifty families in our day therapy program, hundreds of families I saw as evaluation patients, a lot of people who needed me to come out to them. So I did a lot of coming out. Which is kind of good, because, after a while, you know, I started to re-learn confidence. Hundreds of people have accepted you so far. Maybe your carriage isn’t ever going to turn into a pumpkin, and maybe you don’t need to lose a glass slipper at all. Parents responded with an awful lot of hugging and crying. With more than a few “I thought you were going to say you were dying, or that you were moving away, this is great!” And a couple of, “You know, we know a thing or two about having a child who wasn’t anything like we thought they would be, and then realizing they’re pretty great. You’ll be fine.”

In February 2014, I flew to Florida to come out to my parents. I didn’t really know what to expect, although I didn’t really expect them to do anything crazy. But I had in part delayed coming out all this time for fear of hurting them. I was ready, if it really came to it (fairytale princesses must be willing to risk everything) to sit on the curb, call a taxi, and go straight back to the airport. My daddy said, “I don’t know why you came all this way to ask if I accept you. Of course I accept you. You’re my child.” My mamma (my original inspiration for taking no prisoners), lived up to form and said, “If anyone has a problem with it, they have to come through me.”

It took a lot of planning, but I ultimately transitioned at work about ten months ago – although it seems like it was a lifetime ago, and in many ways, it was. The AutismFamily accepted me as their own, just as it always has. We planned for “acceptable casualties” when I came out, but we didn’t lose any patients. Rather, my Center became sustainable for the first time, ever, in the middle of me coming out. My team celebrated me (and may possibly have gotten me drunk, but don’t tell HR that!). While I was walking through the doors of my Center as myself, for the first time, we were passing the million dollar annual revenue mark, for the first time, and we’re on track to pass the two million dollar mark easily, a year later. We keep running out of space and we’re not even slowing down, but learning to move faster. But much, much more importantly, and this is yet another lesson – I learned that, as a leader, when I was brave, my bravery had an amplifying effect. Far from being afraid or rejecting or running away from who I was, I found, over and over again, that people saw me as brave, and when they did, they decided to be brave alongside me. In their eyes, I saw love, yes, and acceptance, but I saw something much more profound – in allowing them to love me, I gave them pride. People with pride can do anything.

This Prince Charming, though.

This Prince Charming, for real

Just one thing left for this story, right? Prince Charming? Yes, that happened, too. In January of 2014, when I wasn’t looking for love, a friend who is never social asked me to come out for a drink. I couldn’t say no. I teetered up the icy back fire escape of the restaurant, trying not to fall. At the top of the stairs was Teri, in his vest and necktie, smoking a cigarette (of course I made him quit) with friends. He opened the door for me, and our eyes met, and I knew. I got him to come over and say hello, found an excuse to keep talking to him, met up with him a few more times in a group, and then we went out on a date. He almost didn’t come, because his car wouldn’t start, and he didn’t have any money. So I picked him up (I might be a Princess, but this isn’t the old days anymore, you gotta do what you gotta do). He seemed nervous, and I touched his arm to reassure him (and turn up the heat). Apparently that’s when he finally figured out it was really a date. He didn’t kiss me, that night, but he did the next time. And we’re enjoying living happily ever after, even if our life is still full of dragons that need dealing with and villages that need help. I encourage Teri’s creativity as a writer and passion for serving youth through the fabulous youth group at the Network, Grand Rapids’ LGBT Community Center, and he encourages me in my role in the autism revolution and in my own role as an LGBT advocate. There isn’t really a good lesson in this part of the story, except, if your Prince Charming (he, she, or they) opens the door for you, and your eyes meet, and you fall in love… for the love of God, don’t ever let go.

So mine is a modernized, but real-life, fairytale story, of a princess whose dreams came true. I’m a princess who took her castle from an embarrassment to something for which people move to Grand Rapids, just to bring their kids. I’m a princess who has created almost fifty full-time jobs in the last four years, with lots more on the way – not just jobs, but with a career pathway, professional development. Something like 30% of my staff is pursuing graduate education – when I say I’m in the business of helping kids chase their dreams, I get to have a broad definition of kids. I’m a princess who added more than two million dollars a year to the local economy and is just getting started. Who taught a large non-profit a thing or two about its own mission. And along the way, found not just the love of her Prince Charming, but a whole lot more besides that.

So, adding up all the lessons along the way, because storytime is almost over, the moral of my story, dear ones, is simple, and complex. It isn’t that magic is real – of course it is, any child knows that. It isn’t that life has purpose, anyone who’s really lived knows it does, and if it didn’t come with purpose, they made purpose. It isn’t that you can survive being different – I’m neither the first nor the best to do that. It isn’t that there isn’t any kind of love except love given freely – I can’t love against my will, and neither can you. It isn’t that we used to leave half the talent on the table, because we wouldn’t hire women, and now we leave talent, still, on the table, when we won’t hire ethnic, gender, or sexual minorities, again, you’re smart people, and you can do basic math. My moral isn’t any of those things.

I tell my team one more thing I want to share with you, which is really the moral of my story. I tell them there are two autism revolutions. The first, and less interesting one, is the one we bring – helping identify kids at very young ages and providing them the intensive therapy they need to learn to talk and listen and play and learn, so that they can chase a future of their own choosing. The second, and far more interesting autism revolution, isn’t anything we do at all. It’s the unexpected, unknown, unforeseeable ways that our kids are going to change the world, armed with the skills we’ve given them. The moral for our lunch story-time is much the same. My diversity moral isn’t that I was better for Hope Network embracing me (although I was), but it is about how Hope Network became better when it helped me stop pretending. My moral is that when we take the risk, collectively, organizationally, together, to let our people live out their fairytales, let them unleash their magic, give them the freedom to rebel against injustice, let them find the loves of their lives, dreams come true. We stop being 501(c)(3)’s and NPOs and all the acronyms and codes and all the blah-blah-blah, and we start being those places where the dreams come true. As leaders, we stop managing departments and we start laying the seeds that will change the world. That is your destiny, and nothing less. You have no idea what your dreams, if you allow them to come true, will do, and you have far less idea what the dreams you build in future generations of warriors and princesses will be or what they will do, but if you follow that path, it’s going to be breathtaking, and just like me, although somedays, it’ll be hard, you’ll never, ever regret it.

Thank you.

Queering the Value Equation

/ Mira / 3 Comments

I had the opportunity to provide a lunchtime keynote speech, participate in a panel, and provide a workshop during the 2015 annual conference of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network of Grand Rapids. I was particularly honored to speak alongside some really powerful guests, including a number of personal friends and the tremendous damali ayo.

I had the opportunity to give the lunchtime keynote, which focused on my own personal and professional story.

My afternoon talk was called Queering the Value Equation. In it, my goal is to show that reticence to be inclusive in nonprofit organizations is often directly related to reticence to fully, authentically embrace the organizational mission*, and investment in developing a culture of authenticity both solves the “LGBT question” and makes the organization real. For a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which is that I no longer give the kinds of presentations that involve a lot of bullet points, but rather the kind of presentations that tell a story**, I rarely do handouts, and I do not print a copy of my slides for people. I did, however, decide to make the visuals for my afternoon presentation available online, at least for now, via the beta iCloud Keynote. To see the visuals for that presentation, please head on over to here, using an iCloud supported browser. Think of it as a trial, and maybe I’ll decide to do it again in the future. Maybe I won’t.

Click the picture to see the afternoon presentation visuals

Click the picture to see the afternoon presentation visuals

* And I really mean the mission (or better yet, dream), not the mission statement. Mission statements, at their best, can be  powerful rallying cry or call to arms, but much more often, they are about as useful as traditional, annual performance evaluations.

** I do feel there is a certain element of intellectual property, as well, in the way I give presentations, which is mine and mine alone. I am pleased to give away passion and some knowledge, but I retain ownership over my art form. In case you’re wondering if I still think like a libertarian….

Sisterhood is the Best Part of Being a Woman

/ Mira / 7 Comments

The following is the text of my comments to the National Organization for Women Greater Grand Rapids Chapter. I was so glad to have the opportunity to speak alongside the fierce and inspiring Pastor Chaka Holley and the brave words of Lyza Ingraham, and alongside powerful award recipients including Kathy Humphrey and Lady Ace Boogie. The theme for the evening was “Voices from the Margin.” Apropos of the comments I made in the fifth footnote to this article, I chose to talk feminist ideology and feminist movement, although I very much enjoy telling my own, personal story. 

Thank you so much for inviting me to speak tonight, and just for the opportunity to be here, among so many fierce and committed sisters. I want to take a few minutes to talk about the Sisterhood, why it’s the best part of being a woman, and why sisterhood must be at the core of future feminism.

Sisterhood and solidarity are enduring and familiar to us as feminists and womanists

Sisterhood and solidarity are enduring and familiar to us as feminists and womanists

We have a long tradition of strong bonds among women. For a long, long time, while societal pressures isolated us as women – isolated us in our homes and childcare, isolated us in relationships that use a cloak of invisibility to keep us from escaping violence, isolated us in the pink collar ghetto or in the non-profit worlds many of us run in, often running according to mysterious and handicapping rules that the rest of society is free to ignore – for a long, long time, solidarity with other women – Sisterhood – has been our antidote to this. Sisterhood is a big part of what got us where we are – it shapes the way in which we are like no other movement, and our ideology is really like no other ideology. The sisterhood isn’t something sisters need to apply for – we shouldn’t ask why “they” haven’t joined the sisterhood, but how or why we have estranged them. The sisterhood is the birthright of all women.

Patricia Arquette is still a sister. But we need as sisters to call bad actresses back in.

Patricia Arquette is still a sister. But we need as sisters to call bad actresses back in.

As sisters, I don’t think we’re perfect, and I’m not back-tracking to the idea that, if we just put women in all the positions of power, there will never be another war. Don’t get me wrong, we’re going to put women in all the positions of power, anyways. But, one of the things we need to continue understanding better is feminine relational aggression. We should be paying attention, because probably many of us have gotten sucked into it, at one time or another, and many times, this is how we led the sisterhood astray. Sisterhood cannot mean ignoring, or worse, supporting bad actresses, and we need to know that, many times, when those bad actresses strike, it is relational aggression that is happening within the sisterhood. A feminism that keeps having “Patricia Arquette moments” will not do justice to representing all our sisters. But isn’t sisterhood a way to understand our own role in recognizing when sisters go astray and calling them back into the conversation? We just have to be good big sisters, right? We can’t be big sisters who victimize our little sisters, or exclude them. If we’re good big sisters, good sisters in general, to each other, it will be far more, and not less, natural for us to see it as our civic duty to the Sisterhood to fix the problems in feminism. In that light, whether they were actual sisters, or that girl a year ahead of us in school, or that women a step or two more senior than us in our chosen professions, I know for me, as far as I look back, there have always been big sisters looking out for me, big sisters to whom I looked to know my way. And now, I’m still looking to big sisters, every day, to know my way. I need to work harder as a big sister, myself, to help other sisters build their identity and find their ferocity.

Click on the image to learn more about how not having access to water affects women throughout their lives.

Click on the image to learn more about how not having access to water affects women throughout their lives.

If we can unite as a sisterhood, we have some critical opportunities. First, we are on the precipice of women in visible leadership like never before. The difficult choice in front of us is this – and I say this without a hint of irony as a transgender woman – when we get our chance to lead, will sisters lead by pretending to be men? Or will we lead authentically, as the women we are? Will we just keep talking about why women say they’re sorry, too often, and never about how men say they’re sorry, not often enough? Will we keep arguing about pantsuits and “girl” bodies, or will we talk about girl hearts and girl minds in leadership? Second, we have unprecedented visibility of ethnic minority, queer, and other sisters. We are just that – sisters – so will the sisterhood be a sisterhood for all of us, or just the “right sort” of sisters? Will it continue being okay for some sisters to not have water, education, menstrual, prenatal, child care, to not have choices? Will we parade in voices from the margin so we can feel sorry for “them” (I suspect some of my minority or queer sisters had the same groan I had over that thought) or will we push each other as sisters to spend all our time at the margins, where all the opportunity is? Finally (and I think you know this is the right answer), when we get all our sisters into the fight, into the margins, will we recognize that it will make a better sisterhood for everybody?

Let me start where I began – sisterhood is the best part of being a woman. It is our shared destiny as sisters that is our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity. So let us all rise and fall, together, as sisters.

The Hidden Danger to the Sisterhood of Hierarchical Assumptions

/ Mira / 1 Comment

I believe that one of the most worrisome, hidden dangers to the feminist movement of the fourth wave, is hierarchical sexism. This is sexism in the form of beliefs and attitudes that the masculine is better than the feminine and that the typical behaviors of men are better than the typical behaviors of women*. No feminist actually explicitly believes that men are better than women, mind you. But pervasive in our dialogue is the idea that masculine behavior is better than feminine behavior. This argument is supported from the other direction, too – masculinity is better (generally) than femininity in subjects, but femininity is better than masculinity in the isolated context of asking what may be objectified.

Heels can be a tool of patriarchy, but, somewhat amazingly, jackboots cannot. This was seen in the conversation between Laverne Cox and bell hooks about whether one can wear heels and not pander to the patriarchy, but it is much broader than that. Masculine garb is the attire of leadership. At the same time, women who simply prefer it face criticism for refusing to be objectified, prominently, Ms. Clinton. Thus, women find ourselves “damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.”

Photo of Military Presence in Georgia

Jackboots have never been used to advance the patriarchy? Really? Really?

The dialog around how often women say, “I’m sorry,” is entirely rooted around women apologizing less often. It carries the implicit assumption that masculine behavior is the baseline against which femininity should be measured. Women are taught to stop apologizing for taking up space, a very feminine behavior, far more than men are taught to stop assuming a right to take up space (although, finally, the latter is also happening). It is never suggested that men apologize more, and only that women apologize less**. Again, in contrast, when women are expected to take up space, it is typically for objectification (so our naked bodies are on far more billboards… sometimes selling the most seemingly non-sexual of things).

Dude, stop the spread, please.

If one really wanted to press the analysis, she might observe that men are asked, rather sheepishly, to change their specific behavior, but they are not asked to think about occupying space in the way most women think about occupying space.

We fight objectification (masculinity is far more rarely objectified), but we struggle immensely with the idea that women can ethically choose to be in object roles, even though we know perfectly well how many sentences in our language require both a subject and a direct object (this is part of the complex question of ethical sex work, although to me, this in itself is not enough to define the road to ethical sex work). Yet, again, damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

When powerful women choose to play object roles - in big ways, like an Allure photoshoot, and in small ways, like wearing sexy clothes to the bar - we frequently face criticism for being sexy (and open to objectification)... while ignoring the inescapable fact that a great many of us want to be seen as pretty (and yes, sometimes sexy).

When powerful women choose to play object roles – in big ways, like an Allure photoshoot, and in small ways, like wearing sexy clothes to the bar – we frequently face criticism for being sexy (and open to objectification)… while ignoring the inescapable fact that a great many of us want to be seen as pretty (and yes, sometimes sexy).

And – to our credit, we’ve picked up on this one a little bit – we have many conversations about whether women leaders can butch it up enough to lead, but we never talk about whether male leaders are feminine enough. Womanning up is not a thing at all***, and no one talks about how, if he spent a little time thinking like a woman, Vladimir Putin might engage in a few less atrocities – no, in order for there to be any sale to men of his ilk (say, our own Dick Cheney), sale must be made entirely on the idea that it is actually more masculine, more manly, to stop the bloodshed****.

This is the state, too, of conversations inside feminism, not just out in the broader world. Serrano and others, particularly in queer theory or queer feminism, argue the dangers inherent in this explicitly because masculinity and femininity are not the same as maleness and femaleness, but inside the sisterhood, we need to be particularly wary because, even if they are not the same concept, they are highly intercorrelated. This is a concept queer theorists seem to struggle with immensely – yes, gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things, but they are highly intercorrelated – it is not a coincidence, and any neuroscientist or biologist could tell you it is not a coincidence – that masculine people of any sex are relatively more likely to be attracted to femininity, and vice versa.

The Genderbread Person is useful to illustrate that gender identity, sexual orientation, etc., are different things, but there is danger in assuming that two different things are automatically entirely uncorrelated.

The Genderbread Person is useful to illustrate that gender identity, sexual orientation, etc., are different things, but there is danger in assuming that two different things are automatically entirely uncorrelated.

This is also really a message that is recapitulated in many other -isms, and thus sharpening this dialectic sharpens our intersectionalism. Poor people are expected to understand and demonstrate some of the behaviors of affluence (or at least the lower middle class – most visibly seen by the fact that scarcely any Americans view themselves as not part of the middle class). In other contexts, at other times, they are expected to “act poor,” so that the barrier between affluent and poor people can be preserved. And thus poor people face criticism for having, perhaps, an iPhone, eating fish, having stylish boots or a statement purse (it is not the poor who are meant to be making statements!), or a decently clean and late model vehicle. Black professionals struggle with being open to criticisms that they are “acting too black” in the workplace, and at the same time, we can levy harsh expectations to “act black” on superstar African American musical artists and others. And queer people are at their most acceptable either when they are highly socially conforming, or when they’re highly “gay,” so that they can easily be read and othered.

Thus, this is important as a general concept. Any system in which the behaviors more natural to one group are assumed to be better than the behaviors more natural to another, without some more meaningful reason than the -ism, is dangerous to all of society. But, again, my provenance is the Sisterhood, and although I care about all these groups, I do care first and foremost about the cause of us as women.

Notorious, indeed.

Notorious, indeed.

And we sisters want a world that is made better because it is full of women leaders. There will be enough female heads of state when they are all women. There will be enough female Supreme Court Justices when they are all women. But here’s the tricky part: we want them to be all women, but are we ready for each one of them, to be, herself, all woman? Meaning, can women be seen as authentic with whatever mix of masculine and feminine traits they take on? Are we ready for unabashedly feminine leadership? Are we ready for femininity in leading men? Are we ready to see a world that changes, and changes we believe for the better, because it is full of the feminine leadership that patriarchy systematically weeded out (whether witnessed in men or in women), or are we only sufficiently invested to get to a world that is full of leaders who are women acting like men?

To me, if we accept the latter, we feminists risk unwittingly losing our fight altogether.

* Cross-reference, later in the article, this concept of intercorrelation, and how queer people don’t like intercorrelation, even though not liking intercorrelation is sort of like not liking the gravitational constant. The truth is, of course, that we all occupy dynamic space composed of some masculinity and some femininity – I am not, myself, wholly feminine in my predilections, and I have just a pinch of my own androgyny.

** Placing me in the somewhat amusing role of taking up space to voice my demand that I be allowed to say sorry whenever I damn well please.

*** This is evident in a much deeper way in American coming of age expectations. Girls are often considered women based solely on menarche, and thereafter their (young adult) womanhood is not called into expectation, whereas manhood is defined largely on “acting like a man.” For the longest time, I saw how this was harmful and problematic to young boys, but it is deeply problematic to women, as well – it sends a clear hierarchical message that womanhood is just something that happens (perhaps transforming the girl from “jailbait” to the woman who is “fair game”) not a chosen feminine object role but clearly objectification. Only manhood in this calculus is seen in aspirational terms.

**** And as I mentioned, previously, as in the case with Forster’s pithy analysis of colonialism in India, if femininity or womanhood is in this conversation, it is included primarily to discuss how it’s presence modifies masculinity.

Is the Era of the Community Center Over?

/ Mira / 1 Comment

The following are my remarks at Identifying Our Resource Center, an event that occurred on Tuesday, April 21, 2015, as a joint effort between Holland is Ready, PFLAG Holland/Lakeshore, and Holland Area Pride, three community organizations advocating for LGBT inclusion in Holland, MI, my hometown.

Good evening, and thank you so much for having me out.

I want to start, briefly, by telling you my story, because our lives and our stories matter, and a movement that doesn’t have time for us, as people, and our stories, is not a movement for me. God began calling me to accept who I am and, well, finally act like a grown woman, a little less than 15 years ago. I hemmed, and I hawed, and I said it was too hard, I wasn’t brave enough, or strong enough. God said, “No, little girl, I’ve got you.” I didn’t believe it, right away. It wasn’t until 2013 that I finally started being ready. My 38-year-long, less than impressive, farce of pretending first to be a boy, then a man, then an androgynous more-or-less man, none of which were me, was getting in the way of my mission to kids with autism. In the prior two years, I built the best place in West Michigan for early diagnosis and early treatment for preschoolers with autism. That revolution needed to grow and expand, because there are kids out there who need me, and I was wasting time and energy, pretending. So I gave in, I came out, and I ended the charade. I was scared at first, but I was met with overwhelming love, positivity, support, and celebration. I came out without losing a single friend, family member, colleague, or business contact, and I gained a sea of new loves and new connections in all those areas. When people saw me being brave, they chose to see my transition as an opportunity to be brave alongside me, and they found that we were all better, together, for it.

You have no idea what I'll do for my AutismFamily.

You have no idea what I’ll do for my AutismFamily.

In early 2014, God spoke to me again, when I walked up the rickety back steps of a bar, and there, before me, was the one. God said, “Love him.” I said, “I don’t know, I’m not looking for all that trouble.” God said, “No, I said, love him. He needs you. And you need him. You don’t see it now, but he was the one I made you for.” I hemmed and I hawed, again, and God said, “You know I’m always right.” To which I replied, “I have noticed that. It’s kind of annoying.” God said, “Yes, but it’s also true. Someday, you’ll learn to just accept that. But I’m not asking you for that, today. Today, I’m telling you to love Teri.” And I said, “Okay, done.” And God said, “Thank you.” He kind of gets to have the last word.

...or for my mister.

…or for my mister.

I am telling these two stories for a specific reason, to set the stage for understanding where we are, today. As you may know, in 2014, I was asked to get involved at a number of levels, both here in Grand Rapids and at the state and national levels, in LGBT activism. One of the tasks set before me was to re-invent our notion of LGBT Community in Grand Rapids, for the contemporary world. I’ve written in detail about what I learned in this process, but I am here tonight to ask you a provocative (and hopefully somewhat less offensive than it sounds) question: Is the era of the community center over?

We’ve come a long way since the sentinel events in our history, such as Stonewall. In the just under fifty years since that event, we’ve come into a world where stories like mine are becoming increasingly believable. Many times, in middle and larger cities, for lesbians and gay young men from non-marginalized backgrounds, stories like mine are becoming almost normal. They’re pretty rare, still, for trans people, but I’m neither the first nor the last. Let me be clear: what happened to me when I came out should not be a lucky blessing. It is what every single person who comes out deserves. And while it is becoming increasingly common, it is not universal, and it is not enough to rest on our past accomplishments and live in a bifurcated world where a growing population of connected LGBT people thrive, and a remaining segment of our community suffers.

Fifty years ago, Stonewall was a game changer. What will tomorrow's game changer be?

Fifty years ago, Stonewall was a game changer. What will tomorrow’s game changer be?

The community center has been a staple of these fifty years of progress. Many times, it began as a sort of safe house – sometimes, even in very covert ways (a storied community center serving the trans* people of the Boston area even had a cloak and dagger process of calling from a designated pay phone and being whisked away in an unmarked car to be sussed out and cleared as not a threat!). Often times, this remains the mentality of fighting for LGBT community. We spend too much time asking, “Which restaurants are LGBT friendly,” and not enough time asking, “Why are there any that aren’t?” We don’t come out to our doctors, because we’re afraid they will reject us. We build supports for homeless and runaway youth but we don’t think about how to get to a world where no youth is homeless because of their gender or sexual identity. We create “gayborhoods” as an act of self-imposed segregation.

I want to make the argument, today, that it’s time for us to stand a little bit taller than that. This conversation very much mirrors what I’ve been doing leading my part of the Autism Revolution. To quote a country song, “I will plant my heart in the garden of my dreams, and I will grow up where I want, wild and free.” This isn’t a hypothetical argument. Look around you. The partners for the Pride festivals in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo aren’t some sex shop or little nightclub. They’re Experience Grand Rapids. Bell’s Brewery. Our LGBT professional development program, OutPro, is the only one in the country that is an official program of our Chamber of Commerce, but we see similar actions happening nationwide. Fort Lauderdale last year became the first city whose convention and visitor’s bureau officially began attracting transgender tourism dollars. Five states and a number of cities now require insurance to provide access to transgender healthcare. It’s even pretty easy to find an inclusive church these days.

It is likely this will continue apace – vibrant companies, cities, and civic organizations will continue to court inclusion because it is good for business, good for community, good for everybody. But if we want to go even farther, to end the bifurcation and marginalization of a segment of our community, we need not just evolution, but revolution. If this is what you want, putting in place yesterday’s best practice just isn’t good enough, and yesterday’s weapons will not win tomorrow’s battle. So, what are tomorrow’s weapons? What does the LGBT community of tomorrow look like? My claim to you is the LGBT community of tomorrow must be Networked, Intersectional, and Engaged. And rather than having a community center to which we can go, in this future vision, we will be at the center of the community.

Listen to the pizza, y'all.

Listen to the pizza, y’all.

First, we must be networked. The scale of what needs to be done today cannot be done in a purely grass-roots fashion – the movement forward must span all the way from the activists and developers of queer ideology and philosophy, to the scientists, inventors, businesspeople, leaders, and everyone else. You must leverage a much broader conception of local talent and organizational partners. Second, we must be intersectional – it is dead clear that the bifurcation in the LGBT community is due to multiple marginalization – LGBT people who suffer not just because they are LGBT, but because they come from underprivileged ethnic minorities, from poverty, from lack of access to education, from core city wastelands, sexual victimization, mental illness, physical disability, and the list goes on. If we do not talk more constructively about how each of these things affects the experience of being LGBT, we will not create a world in which we are permanently and fully entrenched in society. Third, we must be engaged. To keep the success stories of the LGBT community engaged in the process, and to get people who are passive allies – who respect us but don’t fight alongside us – activated, we need to leverage much more heavily all the ways in which LGBT people are friends, spouses, parents, anchors to neighborhoods, schools, churches, businesses, how we are leaders not just in the LGBT community but out there in the world, and how we make the world better for everybody.

Together, these three things will provide us an opportunity to have a world in which the kind of experience I have as an LGBT person is a right and an expectation, and where we can all stand truly proud and tall. I’m not necessarily saying that a physical building cannot be part of this vision – but I am saying that the era of the cloistered and secretive community center, for a community in hiding, is over, and that we are now entering the era in which we put LGBT people at the center of all our communities, and lay the groundwork to keep us there, for many years to come. We are trying to do this in Grand Rapids, with the Network, with OutPro, and as queer and ally civic leaders. This is our revolution, and we welcome you to join it. Thank you.