Why should I personally go forward as a trans activist pushing for change? Why do anything for trans and LGBT community members when I have received a significant amount of pushback through the years from the religious right, LGBT community members, radical lesbian feminist separatists and even transsexual separatists?

I’ve written in the past about why there is trans activism and what are the major goals of trans activism, but have never really spelled out what motivates me personally.

I began by blogging and archiving LGBT stories for the SD-GLBT and transgendernews Yahoo groups. At the time I was studying for an information systems undergraduate degree – that degree being a feeder degree for a library science graduate degree. Archiving articles that dealt with gay and transgender issues was a way to combine my interests in current events and library work, and combining these with my then recent coming out as trans.

I then began blogging for the Ex Gay Watch back in the mid-2000s, and later for Pam’s House Blend. For me, the blogging at these LGBT blogs was centered on teaching T to L, G, and B community members, since at the time there were no trans bloggers in the most visible LGBT blogosphere. I wanted to highlight commonalities between the trans portion of the LGBT community and other community members.

At Pam’s House Blend, I began being more personal in what I wrote because it dawned on me that many lesbian, gay and bisexual people had never met a transperson in the brick-and-mortar world, so I wanted to humanize T-experience for my peers in the LGBT community

Well, that was how it started. Fairly soon after blogging at Pam’s House Blend, I realized that humanization of trans people and experience was more for me than for my LGB peers. I began thinking in terms of what many of my trans activist peers and I wanted for our next generations of trans community members – to include transsexual adults who would come out needing the means to change their gender identification markers, and that needed antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity in housing, employment and public accommodations.

Then I was confronted with the reality of trans youth. And, I remember being a child that couldn’t put a finger on why I felt different from other children. But now, through therapy, I discovered that I identified more with the little blond girl Susan than the little boy Tom in those old elementary school Ginn Basic Readers of the 1950s and ’60s. I also realized that one of my motivations for activism was found in earnestly desiring to create a better, loving world for trans youth.

My community’s children, as well as my community’s next generations, are great, precious gifts to the world, and I prefer to give them hope and not hopelessness.

In small part, I’ve worked to give them tools to live their lives in such a way that they may never waste what little time they have; to be able to legally establish their gender identities and more easily obtain housing and employment.

There are always going to be people who are going to see my life, and the lives of other trans people as lies; yet I see my life as an opportunity to pay forward love and hope to a community that I love.

Any action I might take that may help even one other trans person see and live in hope that the world will recognize them for the boys, girls, men, women and genderqueer people they know themselves to be, then my actions in my brief moments here on earth will have been more than worth it.

During the past few years I’ve been changing my documented gender at various government agencies. I’ve obtained a court ordered change of documented gender with the state of California and used that court order to obtain a new birth certificate indicating I was born female. I also have provided required documents and followed specified procedures for changing my recorded gender with the Department of State (for a passport), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the Social Security Administration.

The one last government agency that still recorded my gender as male was the Department of Defense (DOD). But, as of April 12, that changed. My recorded gender with the DOD is now female.

OutServe-SLDN and I are announcing today, May 16, that I’ve changed my documented gender with the Department of Defense. We’ve together documented which documents are required to change one’s electronic gender marker in the DOD’s databases, and the procedures and service specific addresses for submitting those documents to the four DOD military services. In a very direct way, documenting and publishing procedures will give other trans military retirees a template for how to accomplish changing their own DOD documented gender.

Documenting the DOD specific procedures have also put a spotlight on how different the required documents and procedures are for changing one’s recorded gender for the State Department, VA, Social Security Administration and DOD. The State Department and VA, in accordance with procedures found in Volume 7 of the U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual, require a letter which “upon presentation of a signed original statement, on office letterhead, from a licensed physician who has treated the applicant for his/her gender-related care or reviewed and evaluated the gender-related medical history of the applicant” will result in the issuance of a full validity U.S. passport or change of one’s recorded gender in the VA’s databases.

The DOD’s requirements are more onerous. They require all of the following documents to change one’s recorded gender:

1. Changed birth certificate (original or notarized copy)

2. Court order: name change document (original or notarized copy)

3. Notarized letter indicating surgical transition letter

4. Court order: change of gender (original or notarized copy)

5. Copy of updated Social Security Card or notarized copy of current Social Security Benefits indicating changed name and SSN

6. Copy of driver’s license, state-issued ID card, or passport with new name and gender indicated

The following additional document is a required document if one has a spouse that is enrolled in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS):

7. Notarized letter from the retired servicemember’s spouse indicating that he or she understands that after the DOD documents the gender change they will lose their Tricare coverage.

Considering that only approximately half the states in the Union allow changes to birth certificates to change one’s gender, the DOD policy on changing a veteran’s recorded gender is out of reach of a large number of trans former servicemembers.

In publicly documenting how onerous the current DOD’s policy is for changing recorded gender, I know I hope that the spotlight will bring pressure to bear on the DOD to change their policy.

And, changing one’s recorded name and/or gender at the DOD won’t result in being able to obtain an updated DD214 – a servicemember’s Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty. According to the Army Board for Correction of Military Records’ Applicant’s Guide To Applying To The Army Board For Correction Of Military Records:

“If you have a name, gender, or social security number (SSN) change after discharge from the military, even if it is court ordered, the name and gender on your military records will not be changed since they are historical documents which record facts during the time you served in the military. If you need a certificate to show your current name or gender and that you served in the military under another, you can request such from the National Personnel Records Center, Military Personnel Records …”

Perhaps putting a spotlight on how trans veterans aren’t able to update their DD214’s to show their changed name and DOD recorded gender will also put a spotlight on how that policy should change too.

Documenting the current DOD process to change one’s recorded gender, though, is the first step toward changing DOD policies that harm trans servicemembers and veterans.

I’ll be working with OutServe-SLDN into the future to do just that.

There is an Asian-Pacific Islander (API) community, and there is API community activism. There are differences between those of Samoan ancestry and those of Chinese ancestry; there are differences between those Americans who have familial or ancestral ties to Japan, and those Americans who have familial or ancestral ties to Indonesia. But along with differences between ethnic groups that fall under the API umbrella, there are also many similarities and many commonalities between the subcommunities of the API community. And the commonalities include the discrimination they experience that’s based in racism. Many of those who discriminate against API community members can’t tell a Korean-American apart from a Chinese-American from a Japanese-American; those who discriminate against all who’ve gathered under the API umbrella have banded together.

Sociopolitical umbrella communities still exist even if individuals who could define themselves as members of a sociopolitical umbrella community choose not personally to step under a particular sociopolitical umbrella.

In other words, not every person who identifies as Chinese-American, Samoan-American, Korean-American, Japanese-American, Indonesian-American, chooses to identify as an API community member.

For similar reasons, there are commonalities between lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people that have resulted in LGBT people forming a community. The subcommunities share the experience of discrimination if not conforming to the heteronormative sex and gender norms of broader society.

Here in California, by banding together we’ve seen antidiscrimination legislation laws passed at the statehouse for the entirety of the LGBT community, as well as marriage equality that was overturned by popular vote. We’ll see repeal of Prop. 8 in the state soon whether it’s by the Supreme Court of the United States or by popular vote should the appeal fail – our legislature will make sure it comes up for a vote again should our community lose in the federal courts.

There is a transgender umbrella too for the trans subcommunity of the LGBT community. We’ve gathered under community umbrellas in part because the prejudice and discrimination we face.

With legislative or regulatory language, there is no way to protect against discrimination of the gender identity of transsexual people without protecting the gender expression of genderqueer people, cross dressers and drag performers.

When a newly out transsexual comes out in the workplace, protecting gender identity doesn’t necessarily protect the gender expression of that person who is not yet legally the gender to which he, she or ze identifies. If an employer defines a person as male, but the gender expression of that person is female, the lack of protection of gender expression means an employer can fire someone in the first year of transition.

Here in California, one can’t go back and forth – conforming, let’s say to workplace dress codes for males one day and workplace dress codes for females another day. One has to pick a gender to which dress codes will be followed, and that will be the gender-specific dress codes which apply to an employee.

But protection of trans people in schools and workplaces don’t just benefit trans people. If sexual orientation becomes a protected class without gender identity and gender expression, then peers and employers can discriminate against or harass gays and lesbians not because they are (or are perceived to be) gay or lesbian, but instead because they are perceived to be not conforming to societal sex and gender norms.

Working for the common interest of LGBT people is a reason why there is an LGBT sociopolitical community umbrella; working for the common interest of trans people is a reason why there is a LGBT sociopolitical community umbrella.

There is a case to be made for LGBT community activism; for trans-specific community activism. And, that’s even if a significant number people who could fall under the LGBT and trans specific community umbrellas choose not to.

There are sociopolitical umbrella communities; these are all here to stay. Community activists in these communities are here to stay too.

Transprogressive

BY AUTUMN SANDEEN

Jazz Photo: OWN

Saturday, April 20, I attended the GLAAD Media Awards with media credentials as a columnist at San Diego LGBT Weekly. I listened to the acceptance speech of Steve Warren of GLAAD’s board upon being presented with the Steven F. Kolzak Award, as well as listening to former President Bill Clinton’s acceptance speech upon winning the Advocate for Change Award.

Their speeches were heartfelt and meaningful, full of references about changes in mainstream media in portraying LGBT lives and how society has changed, and is still changing for the better, on LGBT issues.

Quoting President Clinton from his acceptance speech, “I want to thank GLAAD for the award and congratulate the other honorees […] I think that the staff, the board of directors and the most active supporters of GLAAD deserve the award I’m getting because they are the real agents of change. They had this idea, a long time ago, GLAAD did – there would be a lot of people lobbying Congress, but somebody ought to be personalizing and humanizing these issues for the LGBT community. They actually believed you could reach a human heart. They actually believed that people could think and feel differently.”

One of the examples I saw of society changing for me was found in meeting the Jazz of the Oprah Network’s I Am Jazz. She is a trans youth who is changing the perception of trans people in broader society. She has become a spokesperson not only for the authentic lives of trans youth, but also for how the authentic lives of trans adults are not just about sexuality that many in Western society perceive to be the most significant reason trans people transition. It’s impossible to realistically associate sexuality as being a motivating factor for why preteen trans youth socially transition.

I interviewed Jazz briefly as she walked and talked to reporters while traversing the red carpet. When I asked her how she felt about being such a high profile voice for the trans community she responded, “Well, I wouldn’t be in the media if it weren’t for the fact that I would be changing different lives for different kids … different people and their parents too. So, the whole reason I’m in the media is for that reason.”

Jazz was being escorted by Lauren Foster of the GLAAD Miami Leadership Council. She described what they do, beyond advocating for trans adults and youth as, “Putting the T back in LGBT.”

It’s Jazz who personifies for me the message of President Clinton’s commentary about GLAAD, “They actually believed you could reach a human heart. They actually believed that people could think and feel differently.” Jazz reaches hearts; Jazz no doubt has changed hearts and minds.

When it comes to why many of us trans activists and advocates press for antidiscrimination legislation based on gender identity, as well as for the ordinary equality of trans people in broader society, a big motivator is bettering the world for our next generation of trans people. Trans youth are part of our next generation, and doing our best to protect trans youth against public accommodation discrimination in the present, and housing, employment and public accommodation discrimination in the future, is a big part of why trans activists and advocates do what we do.

I’m proud to belong to a community that has Jazz as a spokesperson for our community’s youth, as well as being a spokesperson for trans adults like me. She teaches what trans youth experience can look like to a broader society that still doesn’t quite get trans people. Jazz humanizes not just herself, but she humanizes all of us in the trans community as she advocates for trans youth like herself.

Frankly I was humbled and honored to meet Jazz and her very supportive mom.

To Jazz, I have a simple message, “Thank you for all you are and for all you do. I appreciate it more than you’ll ever know.”

In the week since I wrote my last column, scheduled Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) performer Ubaka Hill released a statement in response to the Change.org petition asking that this year’s performers at the festival boycott the event.

She stated, “My response to your courageous request that I cancel my Drumsong Workshop and the Drumsong Performance by participating in a strategy of a boycott against my own employment, my fans, my students, my peers, my musical, spiritual and cultural community of womyn and against the collective MWMF community is this is not the method of change that I want to participate in. The old ones would say, ‘Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.’ ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.’ I do listen to the teachings of the Elders. I speak only of the method and not the essential cause of which I want more inclusion in the discussion of change through peaceful dialogue and interaction. We must be watchful of horizontal hostility. There’s got to be a better way!”

As I opined recently, the womyn-born-womyn policy (WBW) has been in place for 36 of the 38 years of the festival’s existence. If talk alone could have changed the anti-transgender discriminatory policy born of prejudice, the policy would have changed long before now.

I’ve been thinking of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in the I’ve Been to the Mountaintop speech because of this situation. He talked about the parable of the Good Samaritan in the speech given on the day before he was assassinated, and how it applied to the civil rights struggles of his day. He said, “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But … the Good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”

It was three years ago this month I took to the White House fence with five other military veterans toward repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT). I put on the line in that protest.

Being retired from the U.S. Navy I receive a pension, and therefore I’m still subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Navy Uniform Regulations state that as I’m a retiree I’m not allowed to protest in uniform. Failure to obey that regulation meant that if convicted at court martial, as was possible, I could have received as a maximum sentence forfeiture of my military pension, a dishonorable discharge, and confinement at a military brig for two years. And, if sentenced to the brig, I would have been confined with men because at the time the Department of Defense (DOD) considered me male.

I’m also a disabled veteran with service connected disabilities. If the character of my discharge changed from an honorable discharge to a bad conduct or dishonorable discharge, it would’ve resulted in my losing my VA disability pay and my VA health care.

Repeal of DADT didn’t change the DOD regulations on trans servicemembers. If one is trans, one isn’t allowed to join; if one is found to be, or admits to be trans while serving, one is discharged.

Yet knowing about the possible consequences of protesting, and knowing that participating in the protest wouldn’t change things for trans servicemembers, I still chose to act like the Good Samaritan, and not like the Levite of the parable. I chose to serve my LGB community siblings in their struggle toward them being able to serve openly.

What I’m discussing the MWMF WBW policy in this context is the three evils of prejudice, discrimination and segregation. I’m not asking the Indigo Girls or Ubaka Hill to do more than I did to join the struggle against a discriminatory policy born of prejudice.

Quoting Martin Luther King Jr. again, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

It pains me to say that the performers at the MWMF – performers I know that are just trying to make a living at what they do well – are cooperating with those three evils, but they are free to do so.

But, trans people are just as free to apply pressure toward them not passively accepting evil.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Martin Luther King Jr. stated: “The nonviolent resisters can summarize their message in the following simple terms: we will take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first.

“We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to truth as we see it.”

Working for peace, as Martin Luther King Jr. saw it, included nonviolent direct action. Talk is good; fair compromise is good, but there are times where achieving what suffragist Alice Paul called “ordinary equality” means direct action and suffering, and sometimes even loss of life.

How much prejudice and discrimination then by members of one subcommunity of the LGBT community toward other subcommunities do we tolerate? How much prejudice and discrimination then do we tolerate from minority communities that intersect with the LGBT community, such as members of the feminist community.

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) expressed festival attendance policy is a womyn-born-womyn (WBW) policy. The policy is one that is based on the premise that trans women aren’t really womyn because they weren’t, by their definition, really women who belong in women’s spaces.

The last iteration of the MWMF policy by Lisa Vogel, a lesbian feminist who is the lead organizer for the festival, came in a 2006 press release in which she stated:

“I deeply desire healing in our communities, and I can see and feel that you want that too. I would love for you and the other organizers of Camp Trans to find the place in your hearts and politics to support and honor space for womyn who have had the experience of being born and living their life as womyn. I ask that you respect that womyn born womyn is a valid and honorable gender identity. I also ask that you respect that womyn born womyn deeply need our space – as do all communities who create space to gather, whether that be womyn of color, trans womyn or trans men. I wish you well; I want healing, and I believe this is possible between our communities, but not at the expense of deeply needed space for womyn born womyn.”

Healing will come only when prejudice and discrimination against trans women by a larger intersection of minority populations by the festival leaders ends.

Scheduled 2013 MWMF performer Andrea Gibson withdrew from the event this year when she learned about the discriminatory policy. The Indigo Girls put out a press release this past week indicating they will perform this year at the festival, but it will be their last performance at the festival. In their press release, they wrote the following:

“We understand that there are many folks who feel passionately about these issues, but we encourage people on both sides to act peacefully when they express themselves. There is nothing to be gained from hateful rhetoric or aggressive actions.”

Yes, there is something to be gained by peaceful, direct actions which they appear to be identifying as “aggressive.” If the Indigo Girls choose to perform at the festival, they should bring transgender women to the festival who have fought for community civil rights.

The Indigo Girls should pay attention to Martin Luther King Jr. on how to peacefully struggle against prejudice and discrimination – that they fully acknowledge is unacceptable. Living up to the courage of their convictions require more than just words alone: it requires peaceful action.

On the day the constitutionality of Prop. 8 was being argued before the Supreme Court, a rally was organized by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, Family Equality Council, GetEQUAL, Marriage Equality USA and the New Organizing Institute. The rally was successful, almost in every way, in how the event demonstrated a unanimity of LGBT community organizations and members standing behind marriage equality.

Almost.

There was an incident involving a trans person standing near the podium of the rally holding a Transgender Pride Flag. An HRC staffer asked the trans person three times to move away from the podium. The HRC representative told the trans person that the rally organizers wanted only American flags on or near the podium. The incident went viral on social media the next day, and it was reported by someone who was there that the trans person was told by the staffer that marriage equality wasn’t a trans issue. The HRC put out a statement regarding the incident which included this paragraph:

“It is not true to suggest that any person or organization was told their flag was less important than another – this did not occur and no HRC staff member would ever tolerate such behavior. To be clear, it is the position of the Human Rights Campaign that marriage is an issue that affects everyone in the LGBT community.”

The problem for the HRC is that the organization has a horrible reputation in trans community. In 2007, three years after the HRC publicly stated that they wouldn’t support any form of the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that didn’t include antidiscrimination protections that didn’t include gender identity, they supported a version of ENDA that didn’t include those antidiscrimination protections. Even though the HRC now has staff members that are personally committed to trans equality, numerous trans people still don’t trust the HRC.

There seems to me to be a cold war between trans community members and the HRC, and returning to the détente that had been in place prior to this incident seems untenable in the long term.

One of the problems is that the HRC doesn’t have good optics on trans community issues.

So with these thoughts in mind, here are some ideas on what the HRC could do to demonstrate that transgender equality is a high priority for their organization and in the long term tamp down the cold war:

1. Hire more transgender staffers. The HRC and the HRC Foundation together have more than 100 staffers, but since Allyson Robinson left to become the executive director of OutServe-SLDN they now have no trans staffers. They need some trans specific affirmative action.

Specifically, they could hire a trans staffer for their policy setting department to make sure there is trans participation in their decision making processes. Additionally, they could hire a field organizer that specifically could be dispatched for trans specific legislation as their current regional field organizers aren’t experts on trans legislation and are utilized mostly on field organizing for marriage equality. Lastly, they could add trans people to their department management to demonstrate to the LGBT and business communities that transgender people can be eminently capable leaders.

2. Update their health care policy to include all transition surgeries. Currently, San Francisco, Calif..; Portland, Ore., Multnomah County, Ore., and a number of Fortune 500 companies have more progressive health care policies for transitioning trans people than the HRC does.

3. Devote more resources to transgender issues. Significantly more HRC resources are devoted to marriage equality than basic civil rights protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and since basic civil rights protections based on gender identity are the number one issue for most trans community members, devoting more resources would send a strong message to trans community members.

The HRC can do more than they have to build credibility among trans people, as well as to trans intra- and extra-community allies, so incidents such as this one regarding the Transgender Pride Flag don’t resonate negatively in the way these currently do.

The question in my mind is whether that credibility they currently don’t have regarding trans people and issues is important enough to the organization that they take decisive actions to improve their reputation.

John Kavanagh

State Rep. John Kavanagh (R-8th District) recently submitted an amendment for state Senate bill SB 1432. He’s stated that the amendment is a response to Phoenix passing an ordinance granting housing, employment and public accommodation antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity for transgender citizens.

His proposal is to limit public restrooms and locker rooms usage to the gender identified on one’s birth certificate that transgender advocates have labeled a proposed transgender “paper’s please” potty law. This is because it would essentially require that every trans person in the state, as well as everyone who’s gender presentation may not conform to societal sex and gender laws (think in terms of many butch lesbians), to carry a copy of their birth certificates with them to prove they’re using the legally mandated restroom.

If this proposed amendment were to become Arizona law, violation of it would be a class 1 misdemeanor punishable by a $2,500 fine and incarceration for up to six months.

The presumption is that trans women, or men posing as trans women, would at worst be predators in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, and at best make cisgender women “uncomfortable” – this is the “bathroom bill” meme of social conservatives who argue against antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity.

Out gay Phoenix City Councilmember Tom Simplot, who argued for the Phoenix ordinance that banned housing, employment and public accommodation discrimination based on gender identity in his city, stated that if the transgender “papers please” potty amendment that Rep. Kavanagh has proposed becomes law, it would criminalize the “very nature” of being transgender.

There are many states and localities across the nation with antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity in place across the country, and none of these have resulted in a documented increase in bathroom predation by trans women, or even men pretending to be trans woman.

There is another argument, too, against Rep. Kavanagh’s amendment and that is trans men. As Masen Davis, the executive director of the Transgender Law Center, pointed out in an MSNBC interview, should this amendment become law he’d be required to use women’s restrooms. That’s because that even though he’s balding and has a full beard, his birth certificate states he was as female at birth.

Bathrooms and locker rooms have been a component of every civil rights movement. Before the successes of the American Civil Rights movement, segregated bathrooms in Southern states were the norm. In arguing against the Equal Rights Amendment, opponents argued that if the constitutional amendment became law it would mandate unisex bathrooms.

In arguing against the American Disabilities Act, opponents argued that accommodating disabled people in bathrooms would mandate changes to restrooms that would be too costly for small businesses. And prior to repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), opponents argued that out lesbian and gay servicemembers would engage in predatory leering and sexual advances in communal showers and locker rooms.

The transgender civil rights movement has a bathroom component as well, which should be a surprise to no one.

In the case of proposed legislation like the Kavanagh amendment, we should continue to argue for antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity even when no such antidiscrimination legislation is currently on the table.

The transgender “papers please” potty amendment enshrines discrimination of transgender and gender nonconforming people into law, and it’s just wrongheaded and stupid.

At what age do transgender girls become perceived predators? Do we consider a transgender girl in kindergarten – a girl born with male genitalia – to be a predator toward other girls in her elementary school class should they all use the girls bathroom? Would the line be a third grade/8-year-old trans girl? A sixth grade/11-year-old trans girl? A tenth grade/15-year-old, trans young woman?

And, for those male-to-female middle and high school aged trans youth, do we consider them to be perceived predators of their cisgender female classmates in locker rooms?

These aren’t hypothetical questions for female trans youth in California and across the United States – this is a very current education issue across the nation.

Colorado first-grader Coy Mathis was banned this year from using the girls bathroom in the elementary school she previously attended – she’s now being homeschooled. What do the school administrators think Coy could or would be doing in a girl’s bathroom that would be inappropriate behavior toward her cisgender classmates?

Last November in Maine, the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) reported that a trial court judge dismissed the case of a transgender girl they’re representing who experienced discrimination and harassment at her Orono school – much of it to do with which bathroom she used. Beginning when both were in the same fifth grade class, the girl was bullied by a cisgender male classmate at the urging of his grandfather. GLAD is appealing the trial court decision.

And last February in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Education Department announced a statewide policy document for how transgender students are to be accommodated in the commonwealth’s public schools. Per the new policy, students “may access the restroom, locker room and changing facility that corresponds to the student’s gender identity.” Trans students also are specifically allowed to play on sports teams that correspond to the gender with which they identify – in other words, trans girls can play on girls sports teams with cisgender girls and trans boys can play on boys sports teams with cisgender boys.

Most are aware that first and fifth grade trans girls aren’t bathroom predators. These trans youth aren’t using the school’s girls restrooms to prey on their cisgender female classmates, but are using the bathrooms just like their cisgender classmates: to go to use the toilets. As for trans high schoolers …

Well, here in California, one of the two bills that the Transgender Law Center (TLC) is supporting is AB1266, a bill that will ensure that transgender students have a fair opportunity to participate in programs and facilities that match their gender. As the organization’s executive director, Masen Davis, stated about the bill, “Transgender boys are boys, and transgender girls are girls, and this bill ensures they are treated as such.”

Essentially, AB1266 would codify into California law something akin to the regulatory policy that the Massachusetts Education Department recently generated.

San Francisco’s school district accomplishes a yearly survey, and, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the last survey indicated that transgender students represent about 1.5 percent of those enrolled.

The program manager in school health programs for the district told the Chronicle that the district currently has about one-hundred-fifty middle school students and three-hundred high school students who identify as transgender. San Francisco’s district policy matches the policy that AB1266 would mandate for the state.

For a transgender student in the San Francisco school district to use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, students must identify as a certain gender “exclusively and consistently” – in other words, the gender fluidity argument that religious and social conservatives put forward, the one where boys pretend to be girls for a couple of days to peep at naked girls in school locker rooms and then go back to being male – is addressed by the district’s policy. Notably, the district’s health program manager stated there have been no problems with students claiming to be transgender when they are not, nor have there been complaints from parents.

I’m back to the quote from Masen Davis about transgender boys being boys and transgender girls being girls. These trans youth aren’t predators. These trans youth are who they know themselves to be and how they present themselves to the world. When AB1266 becomes law, our state will again be on the progressive side of transgender civil rights, and in my mind that’s a good thing.

Allyson Robinson

March 9, OutServe-SLDN’s Executive Director Allyson Robinson gave a speech at a Washington, D.C. fundraiser for her organization that was billed as “The State of LGBT Military Service Address.” In her speech she gave a description of how her family supported her through her time, first at West Point and then later during her military career as an officer. Toward the end of that description, she stated:

“ … That’s our story, the story of a family sticking together to achieve a goal so lofty none of us could have done it on our own – but in many ways, it’s our story, isn’t it? It’s the story of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which stood up in 1993 to defend servicemembers against the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law and grew to assist more than 13,000 LGBT servicemembers and veterans, many of whom went on to become supporters, board members and staffers themselves.”

That wasn’t my experience with the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) in March 2000. I contacted SLDN by email regarding my then current Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) difficulties. My chain of command had the perception I was gay. I had a subordinate tell a lie where he stated that I made a sexual advance toward him.

In a meeting with my chain of command in the office of the USS Coronado’s executive officer (XO), my XO tried to avoid the DADT barred question of “Are you gay,” so instead he asked me, “Is there anything you want to tell us about?” I knew it was a veiled question about my sexual orientation, so I contacted SLDN. They never contacted me back.

At a San Diego Pride festival in 2004 I asked an attorney who was staffing the SLDN booth why they didn’t contact me about my DADT situation after I contacted them. She mentioned something about the limited staff the organization had at the time.

I took the tact of filing an informal complaint against my subordinate, and a formal complaint against my XO stating I was sexually harassed, and the command investigation sustained my complaints – the investigator concluded that my subordinate and my XO had indeed sexually harassed me.

In 2004 and 2005 SLDN, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and American Veterans for Equal rights developed, and were collecting stories for the “Documenting Courage” campaign.

The joint program, which SLDN was taking the lead on, was collecting the stories of veterans who had DADT stories in an effort to see DADT repealed. I participated because I wanted at least one story of a trans veteran included in that collection.

Now in 2013, OutServe-SLDN has a trans woman as their executive director. In an interview published in LGBT Weekly (Nov. 1, 2012), Robinson stated that open service for trans servicemembers was one of the four major goals of the organization in coming years – the repeal of DADT didn’t result in trans people being able to serve openly in the military services.

Times have certainly changed since my experience with SLDN in 2000. OutServe Magazine has a trans columnist, and in some of her columns she’s telling the stories of trans people who have been impacted by the military’s policy of not allowing even post-operative trans people to serve openly.

In the same speech I quoted at the beginning of this column, Robinson announced a new initiative for her organization: they’re committing themselves to growing their membership from the current 6,000 to 14,000 actively serving members by the end of 2014 – that’s one for every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, and Coast Guardsman kicked out under DADT. New categories for membership will include veterans and allies.

When an OutServe-SLDN chapter is formed in San Diego that includes military veterans, I’ll be joining. I’m proud to be an LGBT veteran, and supporting the organization in its quest for ordinary equality for active duty LGBT servicemembers is something I can get behind 100 percent.

I would never refer to African Americans by the terms “colored” or “negro” even though Martin Luther King Jr. used those terms frequently. Times have changed, and the terms we use for the African American community and its members have changed. Many, if not most, African Americans now consider those terms to be offensive, although as I read during the past census there are still a number of older African Americans that still identify with the term “negro.”

I would never call a woman “bitch” either, although there are women who embrace the term for themselves – some women are even attempting to reclaim that word as a positive term.

I would never call a member of the LGBTQIA community “queer” unless a person individually identified themselves as queer. Even though I personally identify my sexuality as queer, I’m so aware that many in the LGBT community – especially those who lived as out gays and lesbians in the ‘70s and ‘80s – had the term “queer” regularly hurled at them as a pejorative. Calling someone “queer” when an individual doesn’t identify as queer can be highly offensive, and yet at the same time many LGBTQIA community members are reclaiming the word as a positive term.

I call those who identify as queer “queer,” and don’t call those who don’t identify as queer by the term. Reclaiming the term for those who don’t want the term reclaimed for them seems to me to be pretty offensive.

Just as “queer” is one of those terms people should be sensitive about using, so is the term “tra**y.”

A few years ago while writing for the blog Pam’s House Blend, a woman who disliked my point of view referred to me as a “house tranny.” The woman who referred to me as tra**y meant it as a derogatory term, and connecting it to the term “house” was meant to evoke the racist meaning attached to the term “house negro.” That’s because the blog mistress of Pam’s House Blend is Pam Spaulding, and she’s an African American lesbian. I’m especially sensitive to the term “tra**y” and that’s just the worst example of many where the term was hurled at me as a pejorative.

In 2009, the Dallas Voice experienced blowback from trans community members over their positive take on Brad Luna, the producer and director of the film Ticked Off Trannies With Knives. The Voice came under fire by a number of trans people for using the term tra**y and supporting a filmmaker that used the term in the title of his film. The Voice interviewed RuPaul during the clamor; at that time he told the publication it was OK to use the term:

“When we say ‘tranny,’ or ‘drag queen’ or ‘queer,’ we’ve taken the word back and owned it again. And that it’s coming from a place of love and respect.”

I don’t feel love and respect when someone uses that term to describe my community peers and me who find the term offensive.

In a letter to the Voice’s editor, former HRC board member Donna Rose responded to the Voice’s embracing of the term tra**y by RuPaul and the publication:

“To limit those who object to both the tone and the content of your story to transgender ‘activists’ would also be wrong and highlights why so many in the trans community feel so distant from our LGB brothers and sisters. For many of us, this is personal. It’s about respect and dignity. The “N” word is still forbidden for African Americans unless you’re African American and talking about other African Americans. ‘Faggot’ is not appropriate in any context. And ‘tranny’ is no different.”

And:

“A far more sensitive way to handle this would have been to acknowledge that these terms are considered offensive to many as pejorative, degrading and dehumanizing, and to have elicited a broad range of opinions rather than to treat it in such an off-handed, mocking way based on one person’s opinion.”

Lena Dahlstrom added this in another letter to the editor on that same subject:

“I do agree with RuPaul that one does need to take intent into account. I’ve got gay friends who’ve thrown around ‘tranny.’ But when I’ve gently mentioned that it’s a term that a lot of trans people find problematic when used by people who aren’t trans (or friends and allies), guess what. They stopped using it. But no, you had to go pissily justify your right to use the term and accuse people who complain of ‘Nazi-like’ rigidity. That’s hardly ‘coming from a place of love and respect,’ now is it? The place that comes to mind is: asshat-ism. Because bottom-line, if you have to ask yourself whether a term you’re using is offensive, that’s a pretty good clue that it’s not a good idea to use it. Words may never hurt me, but they can piss me off.”

To be sure, there are some trans folk who are attempting to reclaim the term. For example, there is a support and social group of trans youth in Los Angeles who call themselves “Tranny Rockstars.” They, like those who are reclaiming the term “queer,” are reclaiming the term for themselves as a positive term.

But the embracing of the term tra**y isn’t universal, and RuPaul isn’t trans. He doesn’t get to reclaim the term tra**y for a subcommunity of the LGBTQIA community where a significant number of that subcommunity’s members find the term offensive.

I’m sure RuPaul wouldn’t wish to be referred to by the n-word by someone who isn’t African American; he probably wouldn’t want to be called “fa**ot” by someone who isn’t gay. Respecting him as a human being means not referring to him by those terms.

I deeply respect Commissioner Ramirez, and it’s certainly not my place to school such a community icon on any LGBT community matter. And, he is right that the term tra**y has to be looked at in context, and in a lot of contexts the term isn’t a negative. But with all due respect too, it’s not OK for Commissioner Ramirez to say it isn’t a trans negative for RuPaul to use a term that he knows a significant number of trans people find offensive. That’s especially true considering he doesn’t identify as trans himself; that’s especially true when, as a media figure, he’s teaching people outside of the LGBTQIA community that it’s OK to use that term for trans people that a significant number of trans people find degrading and dehumanizing.

When it’s appropriate for a non-gay person to call all gay people queer it’ll be about the time when it’s appropriate for a non-transgender person to call all trans people tra**ies.

I agree with GLAAD when they labeled the term tra**y as “problematic.” I also agree with GLAAD’s take on words and images when they say “Words and images matter. With those two thoughts in mind, I just can’t “chill out” over language that a significant number of trans people find problematic.

Should there be a third gender category birth certificate gender assignment? The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is considering just that after its Law Reform Advisory Council advised the government in Canberra that gender options for birth certificates and other identity documents should include the options female, male, intersex, to be advised or indeterminate.

In 2010, the U.S. State Department implemented a policy that made it possible to permanently change one’s passport gender marker without surgical intervention. The choices for gender on a U.S. passport however, are binary – the two gender marker choices are male and female.

The Australian Passport Office adopted a similar policy to the U.S. policy in 2011, and like the U.S. policy on passport gender markers those who identify themselves as a gender different than the one assigned to them at birth are able to choose their preferred gender for their passport – so long as it is supported by a statement from a doctor.

Beyond that however, the Australian government provided a third option. They also provided the option of X for “indeterminate, unspecified or intersex.” According to the Australian Passport Office, a “letter from a medical practitioner certifying that the person has had, or is receiving, appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition to a new gender, or that they are intersex and do not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth, is acceptable” to change one’s gender marker to M, F or X.

California and one other U.S. state have adopted the U.S. State Department standards for determining legal gender for state identity documents, to include birth certificates.

In a similar manner, The ACT is contemplating adopting their Australian Passport Office standards for changing their territory identity documents, to include birth certificates. And, ACT is considering it because of that Law Reform Advisory Council report entitled Beyond the Binary: Legal Recognition of Sex and Gender Diversity in the ACT.

That report, if fully implemented by ACT, would go far beyond just modifying existing birth certificates, but impact how gender is determined for children born in the here and now.

Summary recommendations in the report include changing their Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1997 (BDMRA) and Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Regulation 1998 (BDMRR). From the report:

“… to give legal recognition to sex and gender diverse people who are not defined by the female/male binary, wherever the BDMRA and BDMRR refer to two sexes, male and female, they should be amended to recognize three sex and gender identities: female, male and intersex.

The report continues:

“… the sex of a child when it is notified (s5 BDMRA; s4 (1) BDMRR) should be any of female, male, intersex, to be advised or indeterminate.”

In our California reality where Prop. 8 became enshrined in our state constitution – a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman – one could only imagine the monkey wrench that an officially recognized third gender marker X would throw into the legal wrangling over marriage equality.

If only our laws in California not only recognized marriage equality because it’s an equal application of the established fundamental right to marry, but because all of us don’t fit into a gender binary of male and female.

I, for one, would like to see California embrace the concept behind the Australian gender identifier of X.

Progressive politics should be forward thinking by recognizing only the gender binary of M and F are “flawed and contrary to basic biological realities.”

I own a butterfly kite. It’s has an ombré color fade from blue to purple in the wings, as well as a pair of 50-foot long rainbow tails. When the wind is blowing and it’s in the air it’s quite a sight to see – the wings even appear to flap in the wind.

Last November I bought an identical kite for a woman on her birthday, and I intended us to fly kites together in December. December was when I was going to visit her in her hometown of San Francisco to see an art show with her. She and I were in a long distance relationship that lasted a little less than six months, and it ended before an opportunity to fly our kites together.

I loved that woman deeply, but our relationship just didn’t last. There were lots of things that worked against our relationship lasting. Distance, of course, was one of those things.

However, there was a time in the relationship when I considered what it would be like to be married to her. I’m a good cook, and I imagined waking up a half an hour earlier than her most mornings and making her breakfast before she went to school (she was working on a master’s degree). Perhaps a couple of years from now making her breakfast before she headed off to work. As someone who’s retired for health reasons, I pretty sure I would have assumed many of the aspects of being a stereotypical homemaker.

But, of course, it wouldn’t have been been a stereotypical relationship as both of us are trans women. Should the relationship have developed, marriage equality issues would have come into play as it does for all same gender couples.

If only Superman could come and fight against the evils of marriage inequality. As a comic book superhero, he famously has been an advocate for “truth, justice, and the American way,” and fighting for justice would seem to include fighting for marriage equality.

But, Superman might not always be for justice related to the LGBT community these days.

It’s true, DC comics has introduced a number of gay superheroes (Batwoman and Earth 2’s Green Lantern being two of those characters) and has generally been moving in the direction of portraying LGBT characters as three-dimensional. Heck, DC has won multiple GLAAD media awards because of their pro-LGBT comic book story lines. However, DC has hired Orson Scott Card to be one of the writers for an online only Superman series Adventures of Superman. He’s even writing issue number one of the series.

If you read science fiction, you may recognize Card as the author of the highly regarded book Ender’s Game. But, he’s also is famously known for advocating against gay rights.

He’s written such essays as The Hypocrites of Homosexuality and Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization. In the later essay he wrote, among many things:

“Homosexual ‘marriage’ won’t accomplish what they hope. They will still be just as far outside the reproductive cycle of life. And they will have inflicted real damage on those of us who are inside it.

They will make it harder for us to raise children with any confidence that they, in turn, will take their place in the reproductive cycle. They will use all the forces of our society to try to encourage our children that it is desirable to be like them.”

In an interview with Salon in 2000 Card stated, “Gay rights is a collective delusion that’s being attempted.”

And lest anyone think those viewpoints are years old and that he may have evolved on the issue, it should be noted that he’s currently on the board of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the lead organization that’s fighting against marriage equality wherever state legislatures or voters are voting on allowing LGBT people to legally marry.

I’ll never marry that woman I fell in love with last year, but that doesn’t mean I won’t in the future fall in love with someone else and want to get married. Superman may not live in the real world, but I’d like to think that if he were a real being he would be on the side of justice for LGBT community members.

With Orson Scott Card writing issue one of a new Superman series, I’m less sure that Superman would, if asked, support marriage equality. And, that to me is a sad thought.

Monica Beverly Hillz

I want to love RuPaul as a drag performer for his trans-positive actions, yet I find I can’t because of his trans-negative statements. I can’t quite reconcile my mixed feelings about him.

RuPaul’s Drag Race (on Logo’s basic cable channel) has had three transgender contestants on it. Two of those contestants came out as trans after their seasons ended, but on this season – season 5 – there is an out transgender contestant named Monica Beverly Hillz.

I’ve read an interview of Hillz online, as well as several articles about her, and it appears she’s going to be a wonderful representative of the trans community to that part of gay community that enjoys watching drag and reality show drama.

That RuPaul and his producers have a trans drag performer on their show is significant; it’s a trans-positive development. It means, as one of the producers said when queried about having a trans contestant in season 5, that Hillz being trans wasn’t a consideration for participation in the show. It speaks to a progressive view on trans community members – I know many gay men in conversations with their gay peers say quite derogatory things about trans women so RuPaul and his producers are bucking the trend.

I might have watched this reality show specifically to watch the transgender contestant, much as I watched Top Model during the season that transgender contestant Isis King participated. (Well, at least until King was eliminated as a Top Model contestant.)

But, even though on one level RuPaul is trans-positive, he’s also trans-negative in his choice of language regarding trans people – especially trans women.

Back in January 2012, RuPaul did an interview with Michelangelo Signorile of SiriusXM’s OutQ and the Huffington Post Gay Voices where he commented on an incident where Lance Bass used the term tr**y, and then apologized to the trans community for using the term that he previously didn’t know that to many trans people is a derogatory epithet. RuPaul’s comment was, “It’s ridiculous! It’s ridiculous! I love the word ‘tranny’… and I hate the fact that Bass has apologized. I wish he would have said, ‘F-you, you tranny jerk!’”

“F-you, you tranny jerk!” Clearly RuPaul used the term tra**y as an epithet in that quote. He uses, and supports others using, language that many trans people find offensive – and used an “f-you” to make that point.

In LGBTweekly.com’s article (Jan. 12 2012) “RuPaul ‘loves’ using the word ‘tranny’”, Ruth Fine reported on RuPaul’s take on the now-defunct sitcom Work It which depicted two men faking female gender in order to score better jobs. RuPaul stated, “Don’t take life so seriously … we live in a culture where everyone is offended by everything.”

There, RuPaul used the derailing tactic of “You’re just being oversensitive,” implying here that trans people are looking for offense where none really exists; that nothing in that television show was really hurtful, offensive or bigoted to trans people.

Just as many African Americans identify terms that their community members find offensive, such as “boy” and the n-word; just as many women identify terms that they find offensive, such as the c-word; just as many LGBT community members identify terms that they find offensive, such as fa**ot; many trans community members identify tra**y as an offensive term.

The GLAAD Media Reference Guide has identified tra**y as a problematic term that media folk should avoid using.

RuPaul’s is a media figure. His use and support of others using a term, that is considered transphobic by many trans people, is very trans-negative. Yet, he and the producers of RuPaul’s Drag Race, by including a trans contestant in this season’s show, is doing something that’s very trans-positive.

Which goes to show that one can be trans-positive and trans-negative at the same time; demonstrating that allies can be inconsistent allies.

Autumn Sandeen’s first day at work as a woman

Feb. 6 2003, I went to my place of employment as Autumn for the first time.

As many already know, I served in the U.S. Navy from 1980 through 2000. I’m a retired, disabled, Persian Gulf War veteran; my disabilities are service connected and my Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) disability rating is 100 percent. In early February 2003, I started working for the VA’s San Diego Healthcare System in La Jolla as a student work study. My low paying job at the Patient Health Library on that February day (and for many more days following that day) was to serve the disabled veterans who needed help with materials. I obtained that job as a student work study for a whopping twenty-five hours a week because I was using VA benefits toward obtaining an Information Systems degree at National University.

That day I had a limited idea of what my life was going to be like from that day forward. Not only has my appearance changed dramatically in these past 10 years, but so too has my life dramatically changed during those years after I decided to publicly live the gender I know I am between my ears. (Having a gender identity that didn’t match my natal sex wasn’t something I chose, but my decision to live as a female certainly was a choice – a great choice.)

There is a grainy photo taken at the Patient Health Library on my first day as Autumn which is included with this column. I’d say now that it’s not a very pretty picture of me, but it is a photo that has a lot of meaning for me. Day one being fully out to the world, in a very visible way, is a pretty significant thing, and having a photo of me from that day is a pretty wonderful thing.

I had an epiphany at 14 – while mowing the backyard at my family’s home, of all things – that I was a transsexual, but I talked myself out of that basic truth almost immediately. I talked myself out of that basic truth because I wasn’t heterosexual in my target sex of female, and I mistakenly thought one had to be heterosexual in one’s target sex to transition.

As a veteran, I had therapy through the VA medical system. On the first day I had access to mental health services and met with a psychiatrist I told him I had gender concerns. At the time my mantra involved telling myself that I wasn’t sure if I was a transsexual, but I was absolutely sure I was more than a crossdresser. I communicated that mantra to the doctor, and he assigned me to one of their staff therapists.

At 44 I had another epiphany right after I had just completed one of many conversations with my therapist, after again stating that same mantra. Walking down the second floor hallway of the VA Medical Center I remember the three sentences of my internal conversation, “Who the hell are you kidding? You know you’re a transsexual. You know you’re female.”

So with my therapist and an endocrinologist, I planned the first months of my transition. I spent three months going to work as Autumn without hormones, and April 10, 2003 I took my first conjugated estrogen tablet. May 4 of that year I began living as Autumn 24/7, and the following July 3 I changed my legal name from Stephen Mark Sandeen to Autumn Violet Sandeen.

As many of you know from reading my recent columns, last year I changed my legal sex in California from male to female. In many senses my transition is over. I’m still a transsexual and I’m still transgender, but the process of my transition is pretty much over.

A decade of transition; a decade of living as Autumn. It’s been my season now for 10 years, and in my mind that’s a good thing.

Jerry Brown

Last September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill protecting LGBT youth from the psychological abuse of reparative therapy (sometimes referred to as conversion therapy).

SB 1172, due to a temporary injunction by the federal courts, isn’t currently being enforced. The Liberty Counsel argued for three plaintiffs who practiced reparative therapy that implementation of the law would violate their free speech rights, and a federal judge agreed that the three plaintiffs could continue practicing reparative therapy. Dec. 21, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal applied the injunction statewide. A hearing on the injunction is currently scheduled for April 12.

It isn’t just homosexuality that’s considered a temporary, “curable” condition by those who support reparative therapy, but transsexuality is also considered a temporary, “curable” condition by these supporters as well.

And, along with the “bathroom bill” meme – the argument that providing antidiscrimination protections based on gender identity will result in predatory behavior against women and children in bathrooms and locker rooms by cross-dressed men – the argument that transsexuality is temporary, “curable” and is psychotic in nature is used to argue against antidiscrimination legislation based on gender identity.

Canada’s parliament has considered Bill C-279 within the past year; Bill C-279 is an antidiscrimination bill based on gender identity. (Antidiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation is already written into law in Canada.)

The leading association that advocates for reparative therapy is the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Dr. Joseph Berger, a psychiatrist who has been a member of NARTH’s “Scientific Advisory Committee,” presented comments to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights regarding Bill C-279. In his prepared comments he stated:

“‘Transgendered’ are people who claim that they really are or wish to be people of the sex opposite to which they were born as, or to which their chromosomal configuration attests.

“Sometimes, some of these people have claimed that they are ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ or alternatively ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body.’ Scientifically, there is no such a thing. Therefore anyone who actually truly believes that notion, is by definition deluded, psychotic.

“The medical treatment of delusions or psychosis is not by surgery.”

He ended his statement with this sentence:

“As a psychiatrist, I see no reason for people who identify themselves in these ways to have any rights or privileges different from everyone else in Canada.”

It amazes me that anyone takes Dr. Berger seriously anymore after his 2006 aspersion that trans youth should be bullied:

“I suggest, indeed, letting children who wish to go to school in clothes of the opposite sex – but not counseling other children to not tease them or hurt their feelings.

“On the contrary, don’t interfere, and let the other children ridicule the child who has lost that clear boundary between play-acting at home and the reality needs of the outside world. Maybe, in this way, the child will re-establish that necessary boundary.”

Make no mistake, reparative therapy is a fully LGBT issue, and it’s a civil rights issue. Reparative therapy and LGBT civil rights may not at first take appear to be connected, but the two very much are. If LGBT community members are only temporarily LGB or T, “curable,” and/or psychotic, then the argument is that we shouldn’t be afforded antidiscrimination protections, and, our LGBT children deserve what they get – to include bullying.

To me, it’s truly distressing that antidiscrimination protections against a class of people can be argued against on the kind of psychiatric grounds that Dr. Berger puts forward. It’s unconscionable.

The media often facilitates the barriers in the way of tolerance of trans people in broader society, and sometimes are the barriers themselves.

One recent example is from Great Britain. Columnist Suzanne Moore wrote an article entitled Seeing Red: The Power Of Female Anger for the British newsmagazine The New Statesman speaking to how women were victims of Great Britain’s recession, and how many feminists were angry about it. Her piece however, used what she later called a “throwaway line” that read, “We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.”

A Twitter follower of Moore’s commented that that language was “shock transphobia,” and “Trans women deserve solidarity, not implicit shaming.” Moore responded on Twitter, stating “I don’t prioritize this f***ing lopping bits off your body over all else that is happening to women,” and “People can just f*** off really. Cut their d***s off and be more feminist than me. Good for them.”

Many trans people were far more upset about the follow-up Tweets than the apparent transphobia of her “throwaway line.”

What made the situation worse was a defense of Moore by columnist Julie Burchill for The Observer. In the piece entitled Transsexuals Should Cut It Out, Burchill slurred trans women as a class, using pejoratives and was threatening. The last paragraph read as follows:

“Shims, shemales, whatever you’re calling yourselves these days – don’t threaten or bully we lowly natural-born women, I warn you. We may not have as many lovely big swinging PhDs as you, but we’ve experienced a lifetime of PMT and sexual harassment, and many of us are now staring HRT and the menopause straight in the face – and still not flinching. Trust me, you ain’t seen nothing yet. You really won’t like us when we’re angry.”

Shim and shemale are pejoratives in the same vein as fa**ot. The Observer took the Burchill piece down and apologized for publishing it at all.

And this wasn’t the only recent, intolerant media presentation of trans women. The SyFy Channel, an NBC Universal channel, has a series on it entitled Lost Girl. GLAAD described the first episode of the show’s season 3, shown first Jan. 14, this way:

“The episode introduced its villain of the week, a beautiful but sadistic and sexually abusive women’s prison warden and female leader of the Amazon women prison guards. The evil warden violates the inmates and secretly impregnates them to sell their babies.

“The climax of the plot twists when the warden is discovered to be an anatomically male ‘trickster’. The show’s heroine Bo “outs” the warden when she notices beard stubble during a kiss. When the men-hating prison guards forcefully grab the warden’s genitals, trans panic violence ensues. The amazon guards scream and attack the warden hand-to-hand and with night sticks, while the warden cries out, ‘My mother was an Amazon! I am one of you!’

“The guards beat the warden (off-screen) and leave her for dead.”

When the producers of the show apologized for the portrayal of the warden, stating in their apology statement:

“The warden in the premiere of season 3 is a character based off the mythological shape shifter known as the liderc. The warden was only intended to represent this mythic being. We did not intend this character to be seen as a transgender person, we apologize if the character was seen as such. We do hope that you accept that no comparison or discrimination toward the transgender community was intended by the depiction of this mythological character.”

A liderc; however, is a Hungarian mythical creature that is in one of three versions of this creature a shape shifter that can take on male form to be a woman’s lover. Interesting too, a liderc always has one goose foot. The character in the episode then would be a hybrid character of Hungarian and Amazon mythology: the writers and producers created their evil trans character from whole cloth.

The media can shape societal views of trans people as it has shaped societal views of other minority populations during the past decades. The media has a ways to go toward accurate reporting, commentating and storytelling about trans people’s lives.

Apologies are appreciated, but responsible media should get it right in the first place, and that would help trans people be better tolerated in society.

Chuck Hagel

There is a measure by which we’ll be able to judge current secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel’s support for the LGBT community that I haven’t seen mentioned yet in discussions. Should Sen. Hagel be confirmed as secretary of defense, his legacy on open service for transgender servicemembers will be a plumb line measure for the depth of his commitment to full equality for the LGBT community.

For those who haven’t followed the story, shortly before Sen. Hagel was nominated for secretary of defense by President Obama, his statements regarding the nomination of James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg were highlighted by the HRC’s executive director, Chad Griffin. Specifically, Hagel referred to Hormel as “openly, aggressively gay.”

Sen. Hagel later apologized for his 1998 remarks regarding then-Ambassador Hormel, stating in an apology letter, “My comments 14 years ago in 1998 were insensitive. They do not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any LGBT Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights. I am fully supportive of ‘open service’ and committed to LGBT military families.” At first, Ambassador Hormel rejected the apology, but later on Facebook stated that he accepted the apology.

The HRC accepted Sen. Hagel’s apology as well, and OutServe-SLDN – after Sen. Hagel was nominated – came out in support of his nomination.

But let’s step back a moment to Sen. Hagel’s apology statement. He apologized to “any LGBT Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights.”

Does Sen. Hagel believe that open military service for the T in the LGBT community is a civil right? I would. Many other trans people would too.

It’s doubtful that question will arise in the confirmation process; no one in the Senate will likely ask him what his stance will be on open service for transgender servicemembers.

As OutServe-SLDN’s executive director, Allyson Robinson has pointed out in press releases and interviews, the Department of Defense has yet to issue an antidiscrimination policy based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and hasn’t granted family benefits to the spouses of LGB servicemembers that can be granted even without repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

A true commitment to the civil rights of LGBT servicemembers would certainly include those things, and I would join those who would demand that he live up to his stated commitment.

But without doubt the deepest measure of his support for LGBT Americans will be whether or not a Secretary Hagel would support open service for transgender servicemembers. This is because without doubt it would be the most politically progressive, and the most politically controversial, step of true commitment to LGBT civil rights.

Nov. 2 2012 I received a letter from the California Department of Public Health, Vital Records. In that letter came proof that I was “born again.” I was born female.

You see, the gender listed on my original birth certificate was male, and my name was my given, male name. The gender listed on the birth certificate I received in November was female, and the name was the female name I’d changed my legal name to in 2003: Autumn Violet Sandeen.

The new birth certificate isn’t a revised version of my birth certificate; my new birth certificate in no way indicates it’s a revised birth certificate as revised birth certificates in a number of other states do. There is no difference in document style between the birth certificate issued when I was born and the new birth certificate issued by the California Department of Public Health, Vital Records in late October and delivered to me in early November.

So, 2013 is going to be the first full year I live as a “female-born-female,” or said in the language of some radical feminist lesbians, “womon-born-woman.”

So, 2012 was the year the California court changed my legal gender, followed by a change in my California birth certificate to match my California legal sex. And besides this, 2012 was the year where my gender was changed from male to female within the VA medical system, and 2011 was the year the Social Security Administration (for my Social Security and Medicare records) and the State Department (for my passport) changed my legal sex from male to female.

So for me, 2012 was my real year of bureaucratically experiencing documented womanhood. My New Year’s resolution for 2013 is completing the bureaucratic trek from male to female.

The last government agency at which I need to change my legal sex is the Department of Defense (DOD). As a military retiree, this is the agency that sends me my military retirement check each month; this is the agency that issues me my retired military identification card.

Since I have the documentation which the U.S. Navy states it requires to change the gender in my DOD records, my change of legal gender from male to female in their system will almost assuredly occur in 2013.

This coming Feb. 6 will be the tenth anniversary of my living as Autumn, so it will have taken just about 10 years to complete my bureaucratic change from male to female. It’s been an arcane and amazing paperwork journey, for sure, and that paperwork journey has been a piece of a rich wonderful life experience I wouldn’t trade for anything.

The evening I’m writing this column is an evening after a day spent fishing at Lake Cuyamaca. I haven’t been fishing in more than three years. The last time I went fishing was March 2009, which was the month before I went to Greeley, Colo. to cover the Angie Zapata hate crime murder trial.

Before this day of going fishing I had a tough week. I lost a relationship with a close friend, and had a significant family related concern that I attempted to resolve. But, attempting to resolve that family issue resulted in a number of other family issues and anger bubbling to the surface.

I needed to recharge. It didn’t matter that it was bitterly cold and windy at Lake Cuyamaca. It didn’t matter that it rained and snowed while I was fishing. It didn’t matter that I didn’t catch any fish. I spent the day with beautiful mountain scenery, listening to ducks quacking and other birds chirping. I even ate lunch at a small diner that overlooked the lake.

I like to catch and clean my own fish, in part because I believe if I’m going to eat flesh I should be connected to a more full process of animals in nature to my dinner table. I think hunting and dressing land animals would connect me to nature and the food I eat in a similar manner.

When I got home this evening after fishing, the news was about a gunman killing dozens of elementary school children and then taking his own life. The newscaster also said that the shooter’s brother said the shooter had mental health issues.

I don’t own a gun. I never will own a gun. Frankly, I’m currently dealing with situational depression. However, that depression is compounded by a bipolar condition that leaves me feeling most of my emotions more intensely than others do. That time in nature fishing, like other times I’ve experienced, is something that calms some emotional intensity.

I have a mental health condition, and even though I’m not a danger to others I could be a danger to myself.

You see, with my bipolar condition I swing between the high energy of hypomania and the low energy of depression.

Sometimes I even feel symptoms of both hypomania and depression at the same time.

I, like others who have bipolar conditions, am subject to what’s referred to as mixed states where one simultaneously feels emotionally down and physically energetic.

I learned in a class for bipolar patients at the Veterans Administration that this mixed state is what makes people with bipolar conditions more statistically likely to commit suicide; and this is because people with bipolar conditions can get depressed to the point of suicidal thoughts and have a great deal of energy to act on those thoughts.

I’ve made the assessment that even though I wouldn’t be a threat to others by owning a gun, I could be a threat to myself if I owned one, even if it were one specifically designed for hunting. So, I don’t own a gun.

I’m self-aware enough to know I personally shouldn’t own a gun, but many with mental health conditions aren’t so self-aware.

As I think about the shooter who killed dozens of school children, then killed himself, and hearing from his brother that he had mental health issues … well, somehow I think we need gun controls that better track people who have mental health conditions where they have significant potential to be dangers to themselves or others.

And, I’m saying that as someone who might be in the group that should be legally told I couldn’t own a gun.

Saturday, Dec. 2, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced that their governing body has voted to replace Gender Identity Disorder (GID) with Gender Dysphoria (GD). It’s a milestone for transgender and transsexual people, as well as for those who identify as both transgender and transsexual; the decision has medical, political and psychiatric implications.

From a medical and political standpoint, Dr. Dana Beyer sums it up in a recent Huffington Post piece:

“The board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has ratified the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the fifth edition of what is known colloquially as the ‘psychiatrists’ bible,’ so as of Dec. 1, trans persons are no longer classified by the medical community as mentally ill, this decision coming 39 years after homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness by the same organization.”

Kelley Winters, Ph.D. is a writer on issues of transgender medical policy and founder of GID Reform Advocates. She wrote on the GID Reform Advocate Web site:

“Some of the proposed gender-related revisions in the DSM-5 are positive, however they do not go nearly far enough. The Gender Identity Disorder category (intended by its authors to mean “disordered” gender identity) is renamed to Gender Dysphoria (from a Greek root for distress). Though widely misreported today as “removal” of GID from the classification of disorders, this name change is in itself a significant step forward.

“… a worse problem in the DSM-5 is the Transvestic Disorder (formerly Transvestic Fetishism) category. It is punitive and scientifically capricious – designed to punish nonconformity to assigned birth roles. It has been expanded to stigmatize even more gender-diverse people and should be removed entirely from the DSM.”

Julia Serano, the author of the trans-feminist book The Whipping Girl, wrote on her Web site:

“While the Transvestic Disorder diagnosis supposedly targets ‘heterosexual males’ who cross dress, the psychological literature regarding autogynephilia repeatedly claims that lesbian, bisexual and asexual trans women are really just heterosexual men with a fantasy problem. Therefore, according to this proposal, a queer-identified trans woman (such as myself) could theoretically be diagnosed as having Transvestic Disorder any time that I have any kind of sexual urge while wearing women’s clothing.”

Autogynephilia is defined as a paraphilic interest in having female anatomy.

The Transvestic Disorder diagnosis also will be gender neutral now. So by extension, butch lesbians who buy clothing from the male side of a department store, and have sexual urges while wearing that clothing, could also be diagnosed with Transvestic Disorder.

The changing of GID to GD is a step in the right direction, but other changes to the DSM are not only not so good for trans people, but arguably not so good for the broader LGBT community.

So how soon is it until they start working on DSM-6?

Do you remember Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno? He was the alderman who stated he wouldn’t allow a Chick-fil-A to be built in his ward after Chick-fil-A’s CEO Dan T. Cathy stated that Chick-fil-A supported “the biblical definition of the family unit,” and the broad LGBT community became aware that Chick-fil-A’s non-profit arm (the Winshape Foundation) was donating millions to organizations that were working against marriage equality.

Alderman Moreno, as a straight man, threatened government action to shut down business in a manner that many LGBT community and religious, social conservatives thought was quashing free speech.

And, a number of religious right, socially conservative organizations blamed LGBT community members for the actions of Alderman Moreno even though multiple national LGBT non-profits spoke out against Alderman Moreno’s pronouncements. Many LGBT advocates and activists thought that the LGBT community lost the PR battle on that issue.

There is a parallel problem of others speaking for trans people in San Francisco when these speakers aren’t trans themselves, and the commentary of these non-trans speakers is seen by many trans advocates and activists as damaging to the community.

The particular issue of non-trans speakers speaking on behalf of trans people was the flying the Transgender Pride Flag over San Francisco’s City Hall Nov. 20 – the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Behind the scenes, the ask was made of the mayor to fly the Transgender Pride Flag over San Francisco’s City Hall by San Francisco’s Transgender Day of Remembrance planning committee.

The committee knew the flying of the flag was symbolic and were ready to accept a “no.” They were also very aware that the more important things were the substantive legislative and regulatory changes that their city and our state made for trans people’s civil rights and access to appropriate health care.

A San Francisco based gay blogger found out about the ask of the mayor and took it up as a cause. This blogger took a very confrontational approach on the issue; he began by making a strongly worded demand to the mayor that the Transgender Pride Flag be flown over the city, sending the letter in on a weekend, and then demanding an answer by Sunday when almost no one was working at City Hall.

The blogger was asked repeatedly by multiple members of the TDOR committee, as well as by other longtime transgender community advocates and activists, to stop his unwanted activism on behalf of the trans community. He responded by telling the committee members, advocates and activists that he was going to continue his public demands of the mayor.

In the end, the Transgender Pride Flag wasn’t flown over San Francisco’s City Hall. The blogger posted about how horrible the mayor was for not flying the flag on city property.

So who will ultimately be assigned the credit for making brutish and unreasonable demands of San Francisco’s mayor? Will it be the individual non-transgender blogger, or will it be San Francisco’s trans community? I look at Alderman Moreno’s actions and the anti-LGBT backlash that followed and wonder.

If a credible group of activists from a minority community tells someone outside that community that their advocacy is counterproductive and should be stopped, the appropriate response isn’t to keep going with the unwanted advocacy, but instead is to just stop.

Christine Daniels and Autumn Sandeen

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, that’s now become a major holiday season shopping day, has a different meaning for me. That’s because on Black Friday in 2009 Christine Daniels, fka Mike Penner, died by suicide. I wasn’t her closest friend by far, but her death still impacts me greatly to this day.

For those who don’t know or recall her story, Christine Daniels was a Los Angeles Times sportswriter. For most of her career her byline was Mike Penner, but in 2007 she publicly transitioned to Christine Daniels. A year-and-a-half after transitioning to Christine, she retransitioned back to Mike Penner.

Before I go on, let me quote from the GLAAD Media Reference Guide which states the following: “If it is not possible to ask a transgender person which pronoun he or she prefers, use the pronoun that is consistent with the person’s appearance and gender expression.”

However, the reason I refer to her as Christine and not as Mike and refer to her with female pronouns is that when I went to her memorial service, her minister, and one of her best friends repeated what Christine told them after she retransitioned.

She told both of them words to the effect of “I never stopped being Christine” and “Don’t you ever think I’m not Christine.”

She retransitioned back to Mike not because she wasn’t Christine, but for whatever external pressures to which she succumbed because presenting as Christine became too much of a burden to bare.

I met Christine at the 2007 National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association’s convention in San Diego. She, and the other three of us trans people who attended the convention hung out together; we had a marvelous time.

I know a couple of the reasons she retransitioned. One is because she called me up in December 2008 to tell me how badly she was treated by some of our trans community peers.

Her transition had started out as a publicly easy one with a smooth transition at work, and in her Los Angeles Times blog she often wrote about the designer clothing she wore.

Some trans people who had rougher transitions derided her for “not paying her due” and some trans people vocalized how unhappy they were that she wasn’t the “serious” trans activist they wanted her, as a public figure, to be.

When I last talked to her, in 2008, she told me that at a recent public speaking event that someone came up and angrily told her that her transition wasn’t representative of most trans women’s transitions and that she was a horrible activist.

Other pressures of her transition included the failure of her marriage. In the Los Angeles Times retrospective of her life, reporter Christopher Goffard wrote, “Daniels told Amy LaCoe, her transsexual friend, that she had ruined her marriage and made a mess of her life.”

LaCoe insisted that Daniels stay with her for a couple months. “She stared at my bedroom ceiling for a long time,” LaCoe said. “She had stopped caring about herself.”

Her wife was also a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times, and as Christine was experiencing joy at the beginning of her transition, others in her workplace saw the pain her wife was feeling related to Christine’s transition.

And like me, Christine was bipolar. I know that when bipolar people become depressed, we have a tendency to hunker down and cut off inputs that cause us stress. Christine cut off most of her friends, especially her transgender and transsexual friends.

As I think about Christine this holiday season, I’m reminded how much that all of us must take care of ourselves. And, when we’re in pain, we need to reach out to others even when we don’t feel a desire to reach out; even when we don’t feel like anyone cares.

Rest in peace, Christine Daniels. You’re still loved and remembered by your friends.

Masen Davis

What I believe we can’t have enough of is leadership training for our young, as well as our older, newly-out future leaders in the LGBT community. And, given that the only national LGBT non-profit organization with a trans person at the helm is OutServe-SLDN, more leadership training to develop and prepare more trans people to take larger and larger leadership roles in the LGBT civil rights movement seems a must.

For six years, the California Transgender Leadership Summit has been held up and down the state – half of the summits held in Northern California, and half in Southern California.

This year’s summit at U.C. Berkeley, the seventh, saw it renamed simply as the Transgender Leadership Summit, and was held Nov. 9 -11.

According to Transgender Law Center Executive Director Masen Davis, “We’re still building a movement to transition California, but we’re also broadening out and doing a partnership with the Trans Advocacy Network this year, bringing in local and state leaders from throughout the country to build skills, share information and build a stronger movement for trans equality nationwide.”

Sponsors of the summit included Google, AT&T, Gap Inc., Sempra Energy, Comcast, The Southern California Gas Company, Fenton Communications, Macy’s, Estrada Land Planning, The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, The Bob Ross Foundation, The Evelyn & Walter Hass Jr. Fund, Balif (an LGBT bar association), Archer Norris, Arnold & Porter, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and well known trans community surgeon Marci L. Bowers.

The diversity of sponsoring corporations and organizations demonstrates not only how far the concept of trans equality has permeated into progressive thought, but it also indicates how mainstream the idea of equality for trans people is becoming.

Some of the topics in the summit’s workshops included Media Activism and Training, Successful Strategies in Support of the Passage of Trans Laws, How to Make Local Policy Change, Fostering Youth Leadership Though Social Media and Fundraising for Trans Organizations. There was a clear focus on training trans people to actively “build a stronger movement for trans equality nationwide.”

Participation guidelines for the summit included one that should apply outside the summit:

“No Assumptions: Transgender and gender non-conforming communities are incredibly diverse in identity and expression. Please don’t make assumptions about people’s identity or pronoun usage. If you are uncertain about someone’s’ identity or pronouns, please politely ask rather than making assumptions.”

And, as is often seen at summits, conventions and events where trans people are public participants, the participation guidelines spelled out a gender neutral bathroom policy:

“Bathroom Policies: The Transgender Leadership Summit is a place where we model the change we want to see in the world. One of the places our communities experience oppression is in bathrooms. Because of this, we have gender neutral bathrooms through the summit space. Please let us know right away if you experience any trouble using the restrooms.”

And by the way, the Transgender Law Center is hiring. They’re looking for a new, full time Project Health program manager. This staff member will manage all operations, including fiscal management and administrative functions of Project Health. And, Project Health is a multi-faceted, state-wide, medical-legal program that seeks to improve healthcare access for transgender communities.

Times are changing, and the transgender community is growing. There were more than 400 attendees at this year’s summit.

And who knows, the next nationwide LGBT community non-profit executive director may have been in attendance, receiving training. There’s a progressive thought.

This past Election Day, LGBT rights activists had a lot to celebrate. Marriage equality was legalized on the state level by popular vote for the first time, but not just with one state’s vote, but in all three states where freedom to marry the one you love was on the ballot: Maryland, Maine and Washington. The president was re-elected, and the number of pro-equality Democrats in the Senate expanded.

We in the LGBT community, who live in blue states or municipalities, sometimes forget that all LGBT people don’t live in the same world in which we live. In Salinas, Kan., LGBT people saw a 5-month old ordinance to grant antidiscrimination protections in housing, employment and public accommodation based on sexual orientation or gender identity overturned by popular vote by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent.

So, what now?

What we’ve seen in the past four years regarding progressive social issues from LGBT rights to immigration rights is that the president usually needs to be pushed into action. Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell didn’t happen in a vacuum; neither did June’s Dream Order. LGBT community members and immigration community members pushed and then saw action.

So in the LGBT community here in San Diego, and the rest of California, what do we want locally and statewide? What do we want federally?

Here in our state, we need marriage equality. Whether by court order or a future popular vote, we will see marriage equality – that is, if a significant number of us in the LGBT community continue choosing to keep working and sacrificing to achieve it.

Nationally, LGBT community members need repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), as well as passing into law the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) – an act that prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. We also need open military service for trans servicemembers in the same way that lesbian, gay and bisexual servicemembers can serve openly. If we can’t realistically achieve these national legislative goals through legislation in the next four years, then we firstly, need a Supreme Court ruling that nullifies DOMA, and secondly, we need the president to sign an executive order to ban LGBT discrimination among federal contractors – a Contractor Employment Non-Discrimination Act, so to speak.

Who of us are going to fund the LGBT equality efforts such as the marriage equality court cases winding their way to the Supreme Court? Who is going to lobby Congress or take direct action toward passage of ENDA or achieve a Contractor ENDA? Who is going to volunteer time and resources and donate money to achieve open service for trans servicemembers?

Who is going to push President Obama on our community’s issues in the way that has resulted in action on progressive issues previously?

If not you, who?

If we want ordinary equality for LGBT people we have to act as if we want it. If we don’t act that way, then we simply won’t achieve the ordinary equality we could obtain if we worked and sacrificed for it. It’s really just that simple.

Many in the LGBT community aren’t aware that there is a Transgender Pride Flag. It’s flown at transgender specific events; it can be seen each year at the San Diego Pride festival at the transgender booth. It’s a flag that visually symbolizes the T subcommunity of the LGBT community in a manner similar to how the Bisexual Pride Flag symbolizes the bisexual subcommunity, as well as how the Rainbow Pride Flag visually symbolizes the entirety of the LGBT community.

Yet, many of us in the LGBT community and our allies, when seeing the Transgender Pride Flag, have no idea why the flag is flying and what the flag represents.

The Transgender Pride Flag was designed by Monica Helms and first flown in Phoenix, Ariz. in 1998. The flag has five stripes on it – two pastel blue stripes, two pastel pink stripes, and one white stripe. The blue and pink stripes represent male and female; the sex assigned to children at birth. The white stripe represents those who don’t fit in that gender binary. That includes those who’s assigned sex at birth doesn’t match their gender identity; those who’s gender expression doesn’t match societal sex and gender norms; and those who’s gender doesn’t align with either male or female societal sex and gender norms.

The stripes on the flag are arranged so that the flag can’t be flown upside down. The message of that feature of the flag is that just as there is no wrong way to fly the flag there’s no wrong way to be gendered.

Nov. 20 of each year is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. On that day the transgender subcommunity of the LGBT community remembers those who’ve been killed due to anti-transgender violence. It’s a somber day, and a somber ceremony held internationally where the names and manner of death of those killed in the previous year are read aloud.

There is a march held in conjunction with the event where the Transgender Pride Flag, as well as the Bisexual Pride and Rainbow Pride Flags are carried by some in the march, and this year the march will start in front of The LGBT Center on Centre Street at 6 p.m.

The Hillcrest Business Association (HBA) was approached earlier this year about an additional location for prominently flying the Transgender Pride Flag here in San Diego: the flagpole on the corner of University Avenue and Normal Street. The HBA readily agreed to the idea. So, in a ceremony beginning at 9:30 a.m. the Rainbow Pride Flag, usually flown 24/7 at that flagpole, will be lowered, and the Transgender Pride Flag will be raised to half-mast.

The remembrance march that begins at The LGBT Center will end at the flagpole. The Transgender Pride Flag will then be lowered, and the Rainbow Flag will again be raised. After the raising of the Rainbow Flag, the ceremony where the names of the dead are read will begin. That ceremony begins at 7 p.m.

It’s with great credit to the HBA that they welcomed honoring people killed by anti-transgender violence.

This month especially, I’m proud to be a member of the trans community living in San Diego, and there’s a Transgender Pride Flag that reflects that kind of community pride.

Transprogressive

BY AUTUMN SANDEEN

Autumn Sandeen at the VA Medical Center

In a recent San Diego LGBT Weekly column, “What good is improved VA gender policy if it’s inaccessible?” I wrote about how I was pretty much the only transgender military veteran in the United States who was unable to take advantage of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA‘s) new policy for changing sex markers.

In that column I spoke about how a new treatment policy for disabled transgender military veterans was released June 2011, and about how one of the policy’s intent’s was to make it easier for transgender people to change their VA sex marker. The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) did the heavy lift of getting the VA‘s healthcare policy changed, and I was the test veteran to see if one actually could change one’s sex marker under the new rules.

In testing the policy we found that one couldn’t change one’s sex marker as easily as the new healthcare policy was supposed to make it. So October 2011, I filed an appeal with the VA challenging the denial of my request for a sex marker change.

That appeal was the tool NCTE and the VA used to clarify the policy. So March, the VA identified what kind of documents would be acceptable for changing one’s sex marker. I had applied fall 2011 with the kind of documents the VA identified as acceptable in their March policy clarification. Yet, the new policy didn’t impact my ability to change my sex marker: my appeal was still pending.

As of Oct.15 – almost a year to the day after filing my appeal – I was sent a letter from the VA. My appeal was resolved in my favor. Per the letter, sometime within the next thirty calendar days the VA will change my sex marker from male to female.

Pardon me as I just let out a huge WOO-HOO! I’m entering the territory of emotional relief at being able to obtain for myself what I previously helped to obtain for my disabled veteran trans peers.

The relief comes at knowing my misgendering at the VA will soon end; it’s an entrance to a new reality.

For example, at a recent medical appointment at the VA Endocrinology Clinic, I was called “sir” by the nurse calling me in as a patient. She looked at the gender marker on my medical record and just called me “sir,” and that wasn’t aligned with the VA‘s policy on transgender healthcare regarding pronoun usage.

I expressed anger toward the nurse in a restrained voice, but I was angry at being misgendered, and she knew it. When I saw my doctor at the clinic I talked about being called “sir.” I told my doctor that Endocrinology Clinic staff just using the gender marker found in the electronic healthcare record is just not good enough for how one addresses a patient. Basically, the clinic’s staff needs to be more careful in the use of honorifics and pronouns, and I reminded both the nurse and the doctor of that.

It was the second time in two days that I’d been misgendered by the VA because of the sex marker in my VA medical record. I’d received a computer-generated letter from the VA‘s Radiology Clinic addressed to “Mr. Autumn Sandeen” just the day before that Endocrinology Clinic appointment. I was sent that letter because I have an upcoming colonoscopy.

Some days, I want to be treated as a patient instead of being a transgender issue educator. On that day at the Endocrinology Clinic I found myself being an educator, but that day I was a very unhappy one. Having my sex marker changed within the VA‘s electronic records between now and mid-November will go a long way toward being treated with dignity as a disabled veteran patient.

I’m glad I worked with NCTE to improve the situation for my peer disabled trans veterans. I’m just as glad that I can finally take advantage, personally, of the policy changes that my peers have been able to take advantage of since last March.

Life is often about family, and many of us who have pets know that they’re family.

I have two feline family members named Kitty Bon-Bon and Maggie. Kitty Bon-Bon is 7-years-old and Maggie is 8. Both of these cats have had health issues of late that have been pretty expensive, and it’s not like they have insurance that covers most of their medical bills.

Having had Maggie lose a tooth to extraction a couple years back, I make sure Maggie’s teeth are checked and cleaned annually by her veterinarian. This is on top of the dental treats I give her daily to help keep tartar from building on those teeth.

Well, I took Maggie in for her annual teeth cleaning during the second week of October and found out she needed to have two more teeth extracted. On top of that, her ears were “dirty” and infected, and therefore needed cleaning. Since this is the third or fourth trip in a row where this same ear issue has come up, I now have to clean her ears a couple of times a week – and you can imagine how fun that is.

Of course, Maggie’s heath issues have cost hundreds of dollars at the veterinarian’s.

As discomforting as Maggie’s recent health issues have been, Kitty Bon-Bon’s have been more serious. Kitty Bon-Bon apparently stepped in a small spill of laundry detergent a number of months ago, and it chemically burned a front and rear paw. She was treated when it occurred, and even though her front paw healed her rear paw never fully healed.

Since that first cone, Kitty Bon-Bon had been fitted with two more different styles of neck devices to keep her from licking that back paw, yet she found ways to defeat all of the devices and continue to lick that rear paw. Now on top of wearing a neck device, her rear foot is wrapped in bandages that are changed out every other day. One of my adult sons has been helping me with the bandaging.

Of course, Kitty Bon-Bon’s health issues, much like Maggie’s health issues, have cost hundreds of dollars – so far.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to afford my feline family members medical treatments even though those are now requiring some extra sacrifices on my part. My cats are family, and as family members they’re well worth the cost of keeping them healthy.

I often write about life and issues through the filter of LGBT activism. But like many in the LGBT community, coming out as an LGBT community member has cost me in terms of my relationships with my family of origin. Developing other family relationships has become quite important to me as a result, so family relationships I’ve developed with my pets have special importance with me. In my case, “balance” in my life includes recharging time spent with my feline family members.

My feline family members are important enough to sacrifice for. How can I say it any other way: family is important, and I need my family – even my family pets.

Transprogressive

BY AUTUMN SANDEEN

Indigo Girls

What is the “My Family. Together.” campaign that was launched in February 2012? According to Immigration Equality:

“For couples facing separation, exile or undocumented status, the president’s inaction has serious, immediate consequences. Today, we are telling the president: We can’t wait.

Today, we’re launching a new campaign – My Family. Together. – to tell our families’ stories and to tell the president to stop denying our families the simple right to be lawfully together in the country they love.”

The Indigo Girls recently posted a video on YouTube for this campaign in which they framed the issue as an LGBTQ campaign. I personally object to Amy Ray and Emily Saliers including the T in their use of LGBTQ. In 2005 and 2010 the band participated in segregation of trans women out from all other women. Because of this, the band members have no credibility to speak on behalf of trans people and issues.

Where they participated in discrimination of trans women is their multiple performances at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) which has an explicit “womyn-born-womyn” policy for attendance at the festival. The articulation of the phrase “womyn-born-womyn” in the MWMF attendance policy is specifically meant to exclude trans women from the festival who were assigned male at birth. The Indigo Girls, by participating in the event, have knowingly participated in segregationist behavior.

And, it was knowingly – especially for their 2010 performance at the MWMF. In 2005 it appeared for a brief moment that the MWMF had changed their segregationist policy. However, Lisa Vogel – the lead organizer for the annual festival – put out a press release to clarify their policy hadn’t changed. Vogel, speaking directly to trans women, stated:

“Since 1976, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has been created by and for womyn-born womyn, that is, womyn who were born as and have lived their entire life experience as womyn. Despite claims to the contrary by Camp Trans organizers, the Festival remains a rare and precious space intended for womyn-born womyn.”

In 2005, the Indigo Girls performed at the MWMF. And with that 2005 controversy, Amy Ray interviewed trans women and Lisa Vogel, and posted these conversations on the Indigo Girls‘ Web site (Correspondence: 2005-06-13: Amy – Michigan Womyn’s Fest Interviews: Interviews #1 and #3). Ray and Saliers are very aware that the MWMF‘s “womyn-born-womyn” policy is meant as a segregationist policy directed at the minority population of trans women. As Jessica Snodgrass, a then on-land organizer from Camp Trans (a protest held outside of the MWMF each year) stated in a published interview with Amy Ray, “Camp Trans‘ mission is to change the policy from ‘women-born, women only’ to ‘all self-identified women.’”

And … “I will tell you that, the transsexual women who I know, who are in my everyday life, and in my feminist and women’s communities outside of Michigan, had a different kind of girlhood. And, one that I can’t imagine because I’m not a transsexual woman, but one that I can relate to because I still grew up a girl.”

Trans women are women in the same way that African American women, disabled women and women veterans are women. To have a policy at the MWMF that identifies one kind of woman as a kind that’s not welcome at the festival is discriminatory… is segregationist.

Yet knowing this, in 2010 the Indigo Girls again performed at the MWMF. By performing at that 2010 festival, they knew the festival segregated against trans women in the festival entry policy. And with those thoughts in mind, it’s safe to say the Indigo Girls knowingly participated in anti-transgender segregation.

Which, if they believe in anti-transgender segregation – or even just as alleged allies of trans people tolerate that kind of discrimination – then they are free to hold that tolerance of gender inequality.

But, two years later, to speak on behalf of trans people for Immigration Equality and their “My Family. Together.” campaign by referring to LGBTQ community in their video: No. The Indigo Girls should not speak on behalf of trans people because of their past tolerance of – and participation in – anti-transgender segregation.

And too, Immigration Equality should distance themselves from the Indigo Girls video. Having the Indigo Girls speak on behalf of the T-community in their “My Family. Together.” campaign is simply not acceptable.

Jerry Brown

From an LGB, but especially T perspective, there are three pieces of legislation that have been of interest to me, as well as Equality California (EQCA) and/or the Transgender Law Center (TLC).

The first is SB 1172, Limiting Sexual Orientation Conversion “Treatment” Act. According to Gov. Jerry Brown in his signing statement, “This bill bans non-scientific ‘therapies’ that have driven young people to depression and suicide. These practices have no basis in science or medicine, and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”

Having received reparative therapy in the 1970s, I couldn’t agree more with Brown signing this bill into law.

The second is AB 1856, Providing Safe, Supportive Homes for LGBT Youth. The legislation requires that the existing training programs for foster youth caregivers include information related to cultural competency and best practices for LGBT youth.

As of this writing, Gov. Brown has neither signed nor vetoed this bill, but I anticipate he’ll sign this one.

The last piece of legislation was the Trust Act (AB 1081). AB 1081 reforms California’s participation in the federal government’s “Secure Communities” (S-Comm) program and will provide essential safeguards to address serious concerns raised over the program’s detrimental effects on public safety, community policing and civil liberties.

And beyond hate crimes, transgender people are disproportionately profiled by law enforcement. The Williams Institute and Bienestar recently released a report that indicated just under 70 percent of transgender Latina women report negative experiences with police. Some Latina trans women are deported after being picked up by police for walking to the bus stop and being profiled as trans sex workers – it’s an area where the interests of the trans community and immigrant community overlaps.

Gov. Brown vetoed the Trust Act, stating it was “fatally flawed,” taking away the discretion of sheriffs’ to comply with efforts to deport those convicted of serious felonies. His veto statement also stated that many of those who are picked up and sent back to their countries of origin are selling weapons and drug trafficking.

However, only a third of those who are returned to their country of origin are convicted of serious felonies – the rest are convicted of misdemeanors and previous immigration violations. In my opinion, this was a wrongheaded veto.

One, one and one. I’m hoping that the governor makes it two out of three soon.

In June of 2011 the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) changed its policies for transgender veterans who access veterans’ services, especially the Veterans Healthcare Administration (VHA) portion of the VA system.

When the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) announced the policy change, they stated that transgender veterans would be allowed to change their genders within the VA system to match their self-identified genders. NCTE published this question in their FAQ for the new federal policy:

“Does the new VA policy affect my medical records?

“Yes. The documented gender in the VA’s medical records will now reflect an individual’s self-identified gender. In order to change the name and gender in VA medical records, the individual must provide official documentation as per Veterans Health Administration policies.”

Here’s what VHA Directive 2011-024, the directive that announced the policy changes, stated:

“The documented sex in the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) should be consistent with the patient’s self-identified gender. In order to modify administrative data (e.g., name and sex) in CPRS, patients must provide official documentation as per current VHA policies on Identity Authentication for Health Care Services and Data Quality Requirements for Identity Management and Master Patient Index Functions.”

There weren’t any clearly enunciated policies in those two referenced documents.

Well, the clear intent of the VHA directive was to allow trans veterans to change their gender in the system to “consistent with the patient’s self-identified gender.” So, I tested the system for the NCTE and my peer trans veterans.

My gender in the VA was listed as male, so on three different occasions I provided documentation that indicated my self-identified gender was female. The last document I handed the VA was a letter from a medical doctor that was formatted exactly as required to change a sex marker with the State Department – the State Department being the government agency that issues passports.

And, it came back rejected. I filed an administrative appeal with the VA.

Because of that appeal, the VA clarified their policy. To quote the NCTE from their blog entry “Veterans Administration makes important clarification on records policy” (March 2):

“The VA has now clarified that this policy is intended to mirror the State Department passport policy. Effective immediately, to change the gender on VHA medical records, a vet must simply provide a letter from a physician certifying that the vet has changed genders and has had appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition. To be clear, the physician’s letter does not need to certify that some specific surgery or any particular medical procedure has been completed – only appropriate clinical care for the individual veteran as determined by the physician.”

With this clarification of VA policy I should have been able to easily change my gender with the VA. Yes, should have.

My appeal is the impetus the VA is using to hash out what their backend documentation policy regarding how many sex/gender markers there will be.

So, the VA changed their policy on gender markers to address the issue of people like me. But, I’m not allowed to avail myself of the relatively new policy because the VA is using my appeal to help clarify their backend documentation issues.

It all feels a bit bittersweet. It’ll work out in the long run, I’m sure, but in the short run … well, the VA misgenders me in a way my trans veteran peers don’t have to be misgendered.

I surrendered use of my name given at birth, Stephen Mark Sandeen, in 2003 because that name no longer fit me. At age 44 I finally embraced what I first knew about my sex and gender at age fourteen – yet at 14 I was not able to fully accept that personal truth, in large part because of what I was taught in the Pentecostal Church, I was raised in, regarding transsexual people. I didn’t understand what the Bible had to say about variant sex and gender in Isaiah 56:3-5 and Matthew 19:12; I didn’t understand how 1 Samuel 16:7b applied to me:

“God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

My heart was female even though I was born male-bodied.

My parents were very spiritual people who very much embraced their Christian faith. My parents gave me the first name of Stephen, named after the Christian faith’s first recorded martyr. The name Stephen means “crowned,” which is in direct reference to the laurel wreath crown placed on the head of winning Olympians in ancient Greek Olympic Games.

I was also named after the Apostle Mark. Mark being the apostle traditionally credited with writing the second Gospel of the New Testament. The meaning of the name Mark is “consecrated to the god Mars.” It’s also interpreted to me as “warring” or “warlike.” It’s an interesting middle name given my 20-years of service in the Navy.

I legally changed my name to Autumn Violet Sandeen in 2003 when I began my transition. I picked that name for several reasons. My name reflects all of the colors of the changing leaves of autumn. Also, after the first two seasons of spring and summer comes the third season, autumn. At 44 I was entering into what I saw as the third season of my life. And, as I’ve come to understand the name Autumn as I’ve grown older, it’s a name that reflects the season of harvest – reaping what one sows in an earlier season.

Violet is a name that carries through that embrace of vibrant color.

In the life I led under the name Stephen, I had three children. Each of them was named with a “bird” middle name, and on my back is the only tattoo I have on my body, and in that tattoo are three herons that represent those three children. Those herons reflect I’m a parent.

What comes in a name; what comes in a title … well, I don’t hold the titles of mom or mother, but instead hold the titles of dad and father. Those titles reflect my personal history, and it’s a history of living and presenting to the world as male before transitioning in 2003. It’s also a personal history that I fully embrace, so there are masculine titles that are connected to the woman I am now because of that history.

I accept the contradiction of being a female dad because my love for my children is as unconditional as I humanly make it. For their sake I embrace a title and role that with just a hint of pain misgenders me. It is what it is.

So even though there’s a hint of pain in the titles of dad and father, I’m not my children’s mother – they already have a mother and it’s not me.

With us in life we carry names and titles, and many of us embrace identities that on some level define us. Mine include Autumn, father, military veteran, transsexual, transgender and LGBT community member. As much as some of us would like to do away with titles, in the brick-and-mortar world we carry these with us – for better or worse. I like to think mine are for the better. v

Brian Eichenberg

Brian Eichenberg, M.D. is a board-certified plastic surgeon specializing in female-to-male (FTM) chest contouring surgeries – commonly referred to in the FTM community as “top” surgeries. He completes approximately fifty of these surgeries each year, and that works out to about a tenth of his surgical practice.

Essentially, “top” surgery is the removal of breasts to take a female chest and make it a male chest – contouring the shape of the chest in the process. The surgery specifically addresses the discomfort that many trans men have with their bodies due to gender dysphoria.

Dr. Eichenberg practices medicine at the Renuance Plastic Surgery Center in Murrieta, Calif., and this means Dr. Eichenberg is the closest surgeon, specializing in FTM surgeries, to San Diego. Most of his “top” surgery referrals come from FTMs whom he’s previously treated and his surgical satisfaction rate is high.

While talking to Dr. Eichenberg recently, I asked him about surgical outcomes for trans men. One of the things we talked about was patient satisfaction. One thing I learned about patient satisfaction with trans surgeries was the link with reasonable expectations going into the surgeries. Patients satisfied with their surgical outcome have realistic expectations of what the surgery can and can’t accomplish, and that’s something of which he and his staff are very cognizant. Part of his practice is being aware of individual patients’ expectations and ensuring their expectations are reasonable.

We also discussed how androgens (male hormones) have a better effect at masculinizing trans men than estrogens have at feminizing trans women; but surgical outcomes for trans men are often said to be less satisfactory than the surgical outcomes for trans women. I wanted to know where he thought surgeries for trans men would be in twenty years – from a technical standpoint relating to patient satisfaction. He said in response:

“Typically in surgery there are no giant leaps and bounds. There are very small incremental steps. So I think twenty years from now there will have been multiple small level steps that will have made things better, but there won’t be one giant leap where one day we’ll say ‘Now we have this figured out because we’re doing this.’ It will be a bunch of tiny steps that happen along the way. It’ll be things like making people bleed less and making scars look better and making people recover faster.”

What Dr. Eichenberg and I are aware of is that some insurance policies are covering trans related surgeries, and the trend is upward. The market is going to function to help improve surgical procedures. Not only will trans related surgeries technically improve as more resources become available for these surgeries, but trans people’s individual lives will improve as they have more access to appropriate medical treatment.

I also asked him how he answers those who believe, as many (if not most) social conservatives believe, that those performing body modification surgeries on trans people are facilitating “perversion.” He replied:

“I think that’s a crazy notion to say [that surgical treatments for trans people are] perverted in any way. This surgery for me gives me a lot of satisfaction. It’s very rewarding surgery for me because I feel like I’m helping people become who they really are. If I can help them transform to be the person they’re supposed to be – that they feel comfortable being – I think I’m doing a really good thing. It’s nothing like perversion. I think that’s just a crazy notion.”

Gender dysphoria can in large part be alleviated through treatment, and the “top” surgeries performed by Dr. Eichenberg are appropriate treatment for trans men. Helping many trans men become more comfortable in their own skins isn’t perversion: instead it’s a great thing.

What has come clear to me in nine-plus years of activism is that modern transgender/transsexual history has two significant, distinct beginnings. There are other trans beginning points, for sure, but I’m going to focus on two particular beginnings that have often been in conflict.

The two beginning points I want to focus upon are these: The psychiatric/medical approach to transsexualism, and the civil rights focus of transgender activism.

Cristan Williams, a Houston-based trans civil rights pioneer and transgender community historian, documented that, as far back as 1965, the term “transgenderism” was used as a synonym for “transsexualism.” In John F. Oliven, MD’s 1965 book Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, he stated:

“Where the compulsive urge reaches beyond female vestments, and becomes an urge for gender (‘sex’) change, transvestism becomes ‘transsexualism.’ The term is misleading; actually, ‘transgenderism’ is what is meant, because sexuality is not a major factor in primary transvestism.”

In 1966, Dr. Harry Benjamin’s book, The Transsexual Phenomenon, was published. It’s the book that first outlined psychological identification of transsexuals for the specific treatment of surgical intervention. In fact, that is how the transsexual experience was originally approached; if one were deemed by gatekeeping psychiatrists, endocrinologists and surgeons as transsexual, then the expectation is that one would have body modification surgeries. What followed were a number of university medical program gender identity clinics, with perhaps the most famous of these clinics being at John Hopkins.

Within a number of years after setting up gender identity clinics, universities stepped away from their programs to leave us with individual therapists and doctors taking on the work – with much less rigorous gatekeeping as to who is and who isn’t a transsexual, as well as understanding that being diagnosed as being a transsexual doesn’t necessarily mean that one is on a rigid path to genital reconstruction surgery. Yet, there are many of transsexual history who still hold valid that the only appropriate outcome for a diagnosis relating to transsexualism is genital reconstruction surgery.

As Williams also documented, even Christine Jorgenson preferred the term transgender over transsexual – she essentially wanted to take, for herself, the sexualization out of the trans experience. Riki Wilkins, in a similar vein, spelled transsexual as “transexual” – with only one “s” – an attempt to remove the medicalizing labeling of transsexual people, experience, and trans activism.

The sixties also saw transgender people organizing on their own behalf – both in political and service-oriented forms of activism.

The basic goal of the transgender activism movement is simple, ordinary equality.

On one hand we have the goals of transsexualism being medical treatments and possible “stealth” living; on the other hand we have the goals of modern transgenderism being antidiscrimination and ordinary equality. For many transsexual people, we can blend aspects of the medical and the political within ourselves. Yet, there are others who see intrinsic conflict between living publicly and politically as trans without the personal and surgical outcomes that many of Dr. Benjamin’s adherents and the gender identity clinics envisioned as best life experience outcomes.

I see no difficulty in the concept of blending the medical treatment schemas for transsexual individuals and antidiscrimination and equality goals of transgender community activism into trans identity. But that said, not every person of transsexual history would agree with me – some see these two points of origin as being so separate as to be in conflict with the other point of view. It’s in this view of inherent conflict one can find the lack of solidarity in what it means to be trans, or of trans history.

There were five community leaders selected to be speakers at the San Diego Pride Stonewall Rally. I was personally honored to be one of the two San Diego LGBT Weekly sponsored speakers at the podium; the other speaker, LGBT Weekly sponsored, was keynote speaker Dr. Clarence Jones, who served as a draft speechwriter, personal counsel and a political advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. from 1962 to April 4, 1968.

My column this week is the prepared text of my speech to the Stonewall Rally.

“As you just heard, my name is Autumn Sandeen – and I am a transgender American.

I’m not a monster of tooth and claw, scales or deformity: I am a human being – a citizen of the United States of America. I’m a Persian Gulf War veteran who retired in 2000 after 20-years of service; I have a 100 percent VA disability rating: my invisible disabilities are service connected.

Although I’m not a monster, I’ve engaged in the activism of the monstrous. With GetEqual in 2010, I twice joined lesbian and gay veterans as we handcuffed ourselves to the White House fence over repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. We at GetEqual fought for open service for lesbian, gay and bisexual servicemembers as did many other LGBT activists, such as those activists at the HRC, SLDN, and Servicemembers United.

And you know what? We won! We won a victory in the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

And yet, it’s an incomplete victory.

One of the ways it’s incomplete is that military service for trans people wasn’t impacted by the repeal. We trans people are functionally seen as monsters by the Department of Defense: If we’re diagnosed as transsexual, then by regulation we’re considered mentally deficient for service. If we have had surgeries to align our bodies to our true genders, then by regulation those surgeries disqualify us from service.

I knew all of this when I took to the White House Fence – that repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell wouldn’t mean open service for trans people. But you know what? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell affected three subcommunities of the LGBT community, so as a transgender veteran I was glad to work by and for my LGBT community siblings. For me, if an issue is an issue for even one subcommunity of the LGBT community, then it’s my issue.

Do you feel the same way about LGBT community issues as I do? Do you?

Then let us, as an LGBT coalition of the willing, say, “The issue of open service for trans people is my issue.”

Tomorrow, I’ll be marching in the active duty servicemembers and veterans contingent – proud to openly march with my LGBT community peers – many in uniform. Some didn’t want us to march at all last year, and some didn’t want us to march in uniform this year. But the deputy secretary of defense said we could have our active duty peers march in uniform. And we’ll be proud of all of them.

And, with me I’ll be carrying this tiny rendition of the Transgender Pride flag as a tiny, quiet, nonpolitical reminder to community. We’ve come so far on LGBT military service issues, but we’ve still not achieved ordinary equality for all of us. We won on open service for lesbian, gay and bisexual servicemembers with the aid of activism of the monstrous; with hard work and perseverance we’ll win on open service for trans servicemembers …

Thank you.”

Here we are in San Diego, Calif. a city on the U.S. border with Mexico. We live within a nation of immigrants in a state that used to be a part of the country of Mexico.

And here we are, as LGBT Californians – as LGBT Americans – aware of how we aren’t granted the same benefits of citizenship as our straight American brothers and sisters. We only have to look back to when Proposition 8 passed and marriage rights, that had only months earlier been granted by the California state Supreme Court, were taken away by California voters. Barriers to ordinary equality are very visible to us in the LGBT community.

We in the LGBT community share commonalities with other minority groups in our state and country; and those commonalities can be tools to both teach us about minority populations, with which we might not be personally familiar; as well as to form coalitions to push for that ordinary equality we desire to have in common with our peer citizens who aren’t part of our minority populations.

With those thoughts in mind, let me draw attention to commonalities between immigrant populations and the T (trans) subcommunity population of the LGBT community. As members of minority groups, trans and immigrant people have high percentages of economically disadvantaged folk. The whys of that economic disadvantage are rooted in similar issues.

A common root issue, for both trans and immigrant community members, is identity documentation. Whereas immigrant populations may not have documentation that identifies them as citizens or legal residents of the United States, trans people often have identity documentation that doesn’t match their gender. Trans people may have gender markers on their identification cards that identify their names or gender inappropriately, or that bear photographs that don’t match their current appearance.

The impact of these identity documentation issues is similar across both communities. The ability to be gainfully employed and obtain housing is hindered by issues with identity documentation. Access to adequate and appropriate health care is often denied due to issues with identity documentation. And, the lack of proper identification by some members of these minority populations creates a situation where law enforcement officers may inappropriately profile the entirety of the minority populations.

And, then there’s the stigma. There is stigma associated with being visible as an immigrant-community member – or even being perceived a member of the immigrant community. Likewise, there is stigma associated with being a visible trans-community member – or even being perceived as a member of the trans community.

Immigrant and trans-community members are seen as two-dimensional caricatures – cardboard cutouts, instead of three-dimensional human beings.

I ask you; should we in the trans subcommunity of the LGBT community, as well as all of us in the broader LGBT community, look for commonalities with the immigrant community to attempt to make the world better for all of us, by building a coalition rooted in our commonalities?

I think we should. We have the opportunity to overcome; should we decide to embrace the opportunity for community building that lies waiting before us.

Isis King

Most folk who aren’t part of the T of the LGBT community aren’t aware of the divides between some of those who identify as transsexual, but not as transgender, and those who identify as both transsexual and transgender. To me, the divide seems to be about whether or not one embraces diversity as a value or not.

And, this divide couldn’t be more visible than in model Isis King’s recent participation in American Apparel’s Legalize Gay advertising campaign – fifteen percent of all proceeds from the sale of the T-shirts benefit GLAAD’s work to share stories that build support for equality.

For those who don’t know, Isis King was a past participant in the reality show America’s Top Model. She didn’t win in the year she was on the show, but participation in that show arguably left her as America’s best-known transgender model.

And transgender she is: Isis identifies as both transsexual and transgender.

Isis was recently approached by GLAAD and American Apparel to be this year’s face for the Legalize Gay advertising campaign. Isis described how she became involved with American Apparel’s ad campaign in an interview with Fashionista.com.

“I got involved through GLAAD. We have worked together on quite a few things now – including the I AM: Trans People Speak video campaign, which aims to lift the voices of a diverse range of trans people – and they thought of me for this amazing opportunity. They told me what it was for and I knew this campaign would be a tremendous step forward for everyone, including fashion, American Apparel and trans women with a dream!”

Well, Media Advocates Giving National Equality to Transsexual & Transgender People (MAGNET) has attempted to organize a boycott of American Apparel and GLAAD over the advertising campaign. As MAGNET’s Ashley Love explains,

“GLAAD and American Apparel are partnering on a Pride month campaign with Isis King (Tyra Bank’s America’s Next Top Model’s first contestant born with transsexualism) modeling T-shirts that read “Legalize Gay;” however, Isis is a heterosexual woman, not a “gay” man. Gender identity or a transsexual medical condition is not the same thing as sexual orientation. The word “gay” is not interchangeable with the word transsexual. The advertisements, perhaps unintentionally, send misleading and nonaffirming messaging about transsexual and transgender realities.”

MAGNET’s Ashley Love has told people she’s labeled as “Gay Inc.” that they need to learn to be “true allies” of transsexual people and engage in coalition building. In contrast, Isis King is a trans woman who’s building coalitions at community intersections: Isis demonstrated her support of her gay peers in the LGBT community by wearing pro-gay T-shirts in a pro-LGBT advertising campaign. To me, it’s the difference between being an ally versus just telling others how to be an ally to you.

I’m going to stand with those who are taking action to build intra- and extra-LGBT community coalitions; count me as standing with Isis King in her efforts toward embracing diversity and community building.

I am not a monster. I am not a creature of tooth or claw, scales or deformity – I am not any sort of monster that is an evil antagonist bent on chaos and destruction.

My transgender peers and I don’t prey on women and children in public restrooms or classrooms as some imagine. My peers and I are not the essence of the monstrous epithets and pejoratives that we have been called.

My transgender peers and I are not inhuman monsters; we are instead fully human.

I also know that I am perceived as a monster. If the sociological model’s definition of a situation is true – the definition which states “if a situation is perceived as real, it is real in its consequences” – then the perception that I’m a monster is real in its consequence.

How does one define transgender people as monsters? Well, this is how Conan O’Brien accomplished it in his June 12 monologue from Chicago, Ill.:

“Obviously one of Chicago’s nicknames is ‘The City Of The Broad Shoulders.’ Yeah. Yeah, which is much better than the name they almost went with – ‘The Unconvincing Tranny.’”

At that point Conan used his hands to outline the shape of an imagined trans woman with broad shoulders and a square body frame. Conan then dramatized a stiff hug and a short kiss, followed by facial expressions and body language to convey disgust and revulsion. He then saluted the imagined trans woman – as if to say this imagined trans woman is really a gay sailor.

The monstrous trans woman of Conan O’Brien’s imagining is one of stereotype; a burly gay man who pretends he is a woman; a parody of a woman. The most monstrous part of Conan’s description of trans women is not “passing” as female.

Conan O’Brien named his scary transgender monster “Unconvincing Tranny.”

Conan O’Brien has apologized for making a transphobic “joke” during the monologue portion of the June 12 broadcast of his late-night show on TBS. GLAAD officials contacted producers of the show after I reached out to GLAAD with news of the otherwise barely noticed slur against the transgender community.

The Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) named their scary version of transgender monsters June 12 as well. In a fundraising eletter sent out by that religious right organization that day, they defined transgender monsters this way:

“Mary is a little, shall we say, confused …

“… but Mary isn’t confused about whether or not the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is going to allow someone like him to keep teaching your kids while he undergoes his transformation from ugly caterpillar into a beautiful … something or other …”

They included a fundraising photo of how they want society to view those trans women they believe are monstrous: a bad wig, thin make-up, and a nose ring and a visible beard line on a middle-aged face. And, the facial expression of their image of a transgender monster is one of her being on the edge of tears.

Later in the eletter they labeled trans people as “transgenders and she-males.”

TVC president, Andrea Lafferty named her scary transgender monsters in the eletter she signed as “something or others” and “she-males.”

Perhaps it’s time for the transgender activism of the monstrous. That’s not to embrace the idea that we are confused sexual, bathroom, or elementary school predators – that’s not to embrace the idea that we are men pretending to be women and therefore deserve to be the butt and brunt of jokes – but instead to embrace the monstrous activism of fighting back with rhetorical tooth and claw against those who define us as monsters. It would be embracing the monstrous activism of transgender “monsters” we choose to name “humans” – being not truly monsters at all.

Those who’ve seen the film Milk may remember the scenes in the film showing Harvey Milk working with labor leaders to further civil rights for his primary identity community. And when he ran for San Francisco supervisor multiple times, and eventually won his district’s seat, he achieved office, in part, by not only working on gay and lesbian community issues, but also by taking on the issues of minority and majority populations in his district.

And, Milk was an early supporter of the United Farm Workers grape boycott. And, while on one hand it was seen by Milk and his supporters as just the right thing to do, this work at the intersection of employment and labor issues saw dividends for LGBT community members. Quoting the March, San Diego LGBT Weekly article Remembering César Chávez by Ian Stokell and Steve Lee:

“[César] Chávez was the first major civil rights leader to support gay and lesbian issues visibly and explicitly. He spoke out on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the 1970s. And in 1987, he was an important leader of the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.”

Our LGBT community has a history of working at the intersections of communities – finding commonalities where our issues overlap the issues of others and then finding a way of working together to achieve goals that benefit all of us.

Trans women especially have a history of working at intra- and extra-community intersections. At the Stonewall Riots, Stonewall Uprising and Gay Liberation Movement, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson were there working on lesbian and gay rights. In the ’70s feminist movement, Beth Elliot and Sandy Stone were there working on feminist issues in feminist spaces. That these folk were treated poorly by the movements to which they were working at the intersections didn’t stop later trans people from still choosing to work at community intersections.

Many don’t know that the marriage equality court case that brought Californians the freedom to marry prior to Prop. 8 being passed into law was argued by the National Center for Lesbian Rights’ Shannon Minter – a trans man. Many in San Diego don’t know that one of the two primary organizers of San Diego’s 20,000 person march against Prop. 8’s passage was Kelly Moyer – a trans woman.

And at the Netroots Nation Conference in June of this year, the panel of Feministing’s Jos Truitt, Transgriot’s Monica Roberts, Bilerico’s Jillian Weiss, and I spoke of working at community intersections. Jos, for example, has worked as a trainer and organizer for reproductive justice. Jillian worked organizing a letter-writing campaign for the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in the 2009/2010 congressional session. Monica is working on the developing bonds between black and LGBT communities. I worked for repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – an LGBT issue that didn’t impact open service for trans people.

What’s happening now is that as trans people are working at intra- and extra-LGBT community intersections, others who work with these trans people are becoming interested in trans community issues as a result. Since the trans subcommunity of the LGBT community is such a community, we need allies to accomplish civil rights goals – working at community intersections means we’re doing the bridge-building to develop those allies.

I recently listened to a trans activist talk around a table about the work of his trans-specific service organization. The organization provided antidiscrimination training that complied with a particular government mandated sexual orientation and gender identity training requirement for a particular service sector. There were no broader LGBT organizations in the immediate area providing that kind of training; the gender identity training was integrated with sexual orientation training – the trans organization didn’t provide gender identity only training.

The public and private enterprises receiving the training expected the trans organization to be subject matter experts with the gender identity portions of the training, but weren’t so sure that trans people could be experts on sexual orientation training. The public and private enterprises would often ask if this trans-specific organization partnered with a broader LGBT organization in the local area, such as the local LGBT Community Center – The Center not having training of public and private enterprises of this sector in their mission or vision.

Even though trans people clearly are part of the LGBT community, the trans activist described this phenomenon as an assumption that trans people are only able to credibly speak for trans people, and are assumed as not being able to credibly speak for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

But when one thinks about major LGBT organizations, lesbian and gay spokespeople are assumed to be credible spokespeople for trans people and issues.

Let me put it this way. Do you ever see any large LGBT organization put forward a trans spokesperson as their public voice to speak about marriage equality or LGBT antidiscrimination legislation? A recent Task Force survey of trans people indicates that more than half of trans people aren’t heterosexual in their target sex, so it’s not as if there aren’t transgender LGB people who could speak on issues that primarily impact LGB people from the position of being a lesbian, gay or bisexual person themselves.

Could you imagine that a transgender veteran would speak for the HRC or any of the LGBT military service-focused organizations about repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? If it were just veteran status that qualifies an LGBT community member to speak on LGBT veterans issues, let me note here that in 2010 when repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was winding its way through Congress, the HRC’s only military veteran in their approximately 130-person permanent staff was a trans military veteran.

Can you imagine the HRC, the Task Force, Equality California, The San Diego LGBT Community Center or San Diego Pride credibly having a trans executive director sometime within the next five years? Perhaps in the next ten years?

How would those of you who are gay, lesbian and bisexual who aren’t also trans feel about having a trans executive director at an organization such as our San Diego “Gay Center?”

When I recently wrote about the 2012 California Transgender Advocacy Day, trans people were spokespeople for lesbian gay and bisexual community youth when lobbying for the Foster Youth: LGBT Competency bill (AB 1856). Transgender people didn’t have a representative from Equality California in the approximately 50-person large contingent of citizen lobbyists; no broader-based, larger-sized LGBT organization was there shepherding the lobbying work by the trans people at that annual lobbying day. The world didn’t crumble.

There seems to be an unwritten rule at play where trans people can’t credibly speak for the LGBT community. Maybe it’s time we, as a broad LGBT community, put the rule up for review.

Lobbying – California’s Transgender Advocacy Day, 2011

Here’s the gist of a parable told by the Transgender Law Center Executive Director Masen Davis, May 22 to a group of trans people, their significant others, friends, families and allies (SOFFAs) set to participate at 2012 Transgender Lobby Day in Sacramento, Calif.:

“There was a man standing by a river. While looking across the river, he saw a baby floating down it. He dived in, saving the baby from drowning as he brought the child ashore. Then he looked across the river and saw another baby floating down the river. He again dived in, saving the baby from drowning as he brought the child ashore. Then he looked across the river yet again, but this time he saw dozens of babies floating down the river. He at that moment realized that he, as just one person, couldn’t save all of the babies floating down the river. And at that moment too, he realized that the real problem he needed to solve was upriver. Solving the problem required finding out how and why so many babies were floating down the river.”

Here in California, we have direct service providers for LGBT people that work to “save the babies floating down the river;” they don’t always have the time to fix the systemic problems that leave so many of our community in need of assistance.

California’s Transgender Advocacy Day (CTAD) occurs annually in May as an effort to fix the systematic problems lesbian, gay, bisexual and especially trans people face.

One of the two pieces of legislation that CTAD advocates lobbied for this year was Foster Youth: LGBT Competency (AB 1856). The legislation requires that the existing training programs for foster youth caregivers include information related to cultural competency and best practices for LGBT youth.

As the Transgender Law Center frames the issue, LGBT youth are disproportionately targeted for harassment and discrimination in the foster care system. This abuse is perpetrated not only by youth peers, but in some cases by facility staff, foster parents and other service providers.

The other bill CTAD advocates lobbied for the TRUST Act (AB 1081). AB 1081 reforms California’s participation in the federal government’s “Secure Communities” (S-Comm) program and will provide essential safeguards to address serious concerns raised over the program’s detrimental effects on public safety, community policing and civil liberties.

And beyond hate crimes, transgender people are disproportionately profiled by law enforcement. The Williams Institute and Bienestar recently released a report that indicated just under 70 percent of transgender Latina women report negative experiences with police.

Transgender people are not only working to “save the (individual) babies floating down the river,” but are working to fix the systematic problems. CTAD 2012 is one way transgender people are doing this.

Here in the United States, the Department of State recently implemented a relatively new regulation for changing one’s gender marker/one’s recognized sex for one’s passport. The new regulation for changing one’s gender marker/one’s recognized sex, as identified in 7 FAM 1300 – Appendix M: Gender Change, states the following:

“b. Medical Certification Accepted for Gender Change/Transition:

“(1) A full validity U.S. passport will be issued reflecting a new gender upon presentation of a signed original statement, on office letterhead, from a licensed physician who has treated the applicant for his/her gender-related care or reviewed and evaluated the gender-related medical history of the applicant.

“Note: Such licensed physicians include Medical Doctors (M.D.) and Doctors of Osteopathy (D.O.). The physicians may specialize in various medical fields, including, but not limited to, internists, endocrinologists, gynecologists, urologists, surgeons, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and family practitioners. Statements from persons who are not licensed physicians, such as psychologists, nurse practitioners, health practitioners, chiropractors, are not acceptable.”

Surgery is very important and very necessary to a quite a number of trans people, who very much need to have these surgeries to align the shape of their genitalia with their gender identities to the maximum extent that medical science can reshape their genitalia. Trans people of all stripes should be supportive of those who need those corrective surgeries to feel comfortable in their own skins. For these trans people, these surgeries aren’t cosmetic or unnecessary, and no doubt all trans people should encourage businesses and/or governments to cover these full alignment surgeries.

That said, I’m quite aware of some trans-identified people who believe trans people of all stripes should never have these surgeries, and instead embrace a gender existence where these surgeries are unnecessary to live their sex and gender truth. These trans folk who are completely unsupportive of those who need those surgeries to align the shape of their genitalia with their gender are trying to apply their own non-need for those surgeries into a universal truth – based pretty much on the idea that their trans experience is (or should be) the universal trans experience.

Somewhere in between the extremes of people who demand no trans people should have surgery, and those who demand all trans people have surgery there is middle ground that recognizes that no group of trans people really should dictate what trans experience is the universal trans experience.

I believe that there’s no right way to transition; there’s no right way to be trans or intersex. Embracing the diversity of sex and gender experience seems to me to be a better path.

Famed transsexual, Christine Jorgensen embraced the term transgender in an attempt to distance herself from the sexualization of her life. From Oct. 16, 1979 issue of the Winnipeg Free Press’ article Christine Recalls Life As Boy From The Bronx:

“If you understand trans-genders,” she says, (the word she prefers to transsexuals), “then you understand that gender doesn’t have to do with bed partners, it has to do with identity.”

December 18, 1985, she went further by telling the Regina Leader Post:

“I am a transgender because gender refers to who you are as a human.”

There is a divide among the population of transsexual, transgender and gender nonconforming people over what terminology should be used for trans people; and the divide speaks to why trans civil rights are a much more difficult thing to achieve than one would think it would be. We can’t seem to unite behind a community label in a struggle for ordinary equality.

The word trans people united behind in the 1990s and early 2000s was transgender. There’s even a Transgender Pride flag.

The term transgender, in the diversity model of the 1990s and 2000s, was cast as an umbrella term. Those who fell under the umbrella included transsexual people, crossdressers and genderqueer people. Many also included drag performers and intersex people under the umbrella.

However, the work for trans people’s civil rights has almost exclusively been for the benefit of transsexuals – those who live 24/7 as a member of the binary sex that isn’t usually associated with the genitalia they were born with. This is because visibly trans people are most often the focus of antitrans discrimination. And, lawsuits over trans employment discrimination in the past 20-years have all but once dealt with transsexual people being discriminated against.

The political decision of trans activists in the 1990s to unite behind the umbrella term transgender was related to why Christine Jorgensen preferred the term transgender: they perceived transgender as taking the “sex” out of “transsexual” – an effort to desexualize the sexualized perception of transsexual people.

Sexualized perceptions of trans women are persistent. Back in 2009, the Washington, D.C. Examiner reported:

“[C]ombined traffic from the top 10 adult sites and top 10 dating sites catering exclusively to trans-loving males has risen 350 percent. While some crossover invariably exists, heterosexual male visitors to these 20 Web sites now top 188 million annually. And this figure doesn’t include traffic counts from the additional 300+ transsexual sites already in existence or from new ones being created by mainstream giants like Hustler.”

There are a significant number of transsexual women, as well as women who no longer consider themselves transsexual, identifying themselves with terms such as “women of transsexual history” who don’t want to be associated with the term transgender. They see themselves as not being anything like crossdressers and drag queens, and they see evil in how many genderqueer and transgender identified people want to tear apart the gender binary. These transsexual women instead perceive themselves to be women with a medical condition that requires medical treatment, and that the focus should be on medically treating them. They embrace transsexual as a medicalizing term.

Rejection of the sexualization of transsexual people was what led in part to the embracing of the term transgender by trans women of past years. A re-embracing of the term transsexual by a number of trans women appears to be an embracing of the medicalization of trans people.

Somehow, I’d like to see a noncontroversial trans-related term that rejects both sexualization and medicalization of my peers and my life experience, and embraces my peers and me as whole beings. I’m not holding my breath.

Chaz Bono, Cher and Mary Bono at the GLAAD Media Awards

I was wonderfully surprised at the GLAAD Media Awards in Los Angeles Saturday, April 20. I was working the red carpet with my still camera draped around my neck and a small YouTube quality camera in my purse, and one of the actors I was introduced to by who I assume was her publicist was Jamie Clayton. She is an incredibly energetic, funny and attractive actor.

And, she’s trans.

I had a roughly one-minute-twenty-second interview with her on the red carpet where she talked about her new syndicated television show, Dirty Work. In the dark comedy about a trio of young people who clean up crime scenes after the investigators leave, she plays one of the three “bioremediation engineers” who do the hard work of site clean-up.

And, the character she plays is trans.

It’s not often that one sees a television show or film with a trans character in which the trans character isn’t sexualized and portrayed as somewhat deceptive. An employed, young trans woman with an interesting job – it appears that Jamie Clayton is playing a developed character and not a caricature of a trans woman.

Chaz Bono is someone who I’m already familiar with that I interviewed briefly.

On the red carpet of the 2010 awards event, the last question I asked him about was if he thought it was difficult to do one’s transition in public, and couched the question in terms of Los Angeles Times sportswriter Christine Daniel’s transition. He stated that he thought it was harder for trans women in the public eye that it was for trans men.

So, I asked him a follow-up question this year; I wanted to know if, after the year of taking all of the media drubbing he has over the documentary Becoming Chaz and his participation in Dancing With The Stars, he felt the same way. He answered this way: “My opinion hasn’t changed … I still think it’s harder for trans women.”

Chaz Bono was the recipient of the prestigious Stephen F. Kolzak Award; the Stephen F. Kolzak Award is presented to an openly LGBT media professional who has made a significant difference in promoting equality. Chaz is the first trans person to be the recipient of this award.

GLAAD has been expending their community credibility to fight for trans people, trans issues and the fair portrayal of both in the media. And, their support for full inclusion in the LGBT community was reflected at the GLAAD Media Awards this year in who attended the event, and who was honored at the event.

And if you ask me, that’s a good thing.

If you live in the U.S. and you’re not of trans history, chances are extremely high that the federal government considers you either male or female. By that I mean that every federal agency – every executive branch department – you have dealings with will gender you as male or female, and that gender identification will be consistent throughout each agency.

That’s not necessarily true for people of trans history, or people who are intersex.

In submitting paperwork to change my gender marker – to change my recognized sex – at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) March 5, it reminded me that the federal government doesn’t have a government-wide standard for determining the gender marker for transitioning and transitioned trans people. So agencies in the federal government’s executive branch do (or will) consider me female; some consider me male.

Take the three federal agencies that have provided photo identification cards to me – the VA, the State Department and the Department of Defense (DOD).

The State Department is the federal agency that issues passports. Until 2010, the State Department required a surgery letter to change the gender marker from the one on one’s birth certificate from male to female, or vice versa. If a citizen previously had a passport with one gender marker, and that citizen provided a new birth certificate indicating the marker had been changed from male to female or vice versa, without a surgery letter, that was considered insufficient evidence to change one’s gender marker.

But in 2010, the State Department changed the rules. Now the policy on gender marker change, according to Appendix M (entitled Gender Change) of the State Department’s governing document 7 FAMS 1300, is defined as follows:

“This policy explains the need for who has treated the applicant or reviewed and evaluated the medical history of the applicant regarding the change in gender, as well as the need for accurate identification and a photograph reflecting the applicant’s current appearance. It is based on standards and recommendations of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), recognized as the authority in this field by the American Medical Association.”

The VA’s policy on gender marker change was the same as the State Department’s policy pre-2010, but March 2 of this year changed their policy to match the current State Department policy. So even though the VA doesn’t put a gender marker on their ID cards, they do have a gender marker attached to the records of those who use their services – including medical records.

This is in stark contrast to the DOD. There are three separate policies for the four military services that fall under the DOD. {The Marines fall under the Department of the Navy (DON), so that organization has the same gender documentation policies as the Navy.) Since I’m a Navy retiree who has a retired DOD ID card, I recently inquired about changing my gender marker within my DOD records.

Depending on which agency was asked whether I was male or female, one could receive either answer – and that’s just loony. For me, I just wish the entire federal government accepted the progressive State Department standard for determining sex – for determining what sex/what the gender marker is for each trans and intersex United States citizen and resident.

Monday, March 5, 2012, I went to the Veterans Affairs (VA) San Diego Medical Center to change my gender marker from male to female. The previous Friday, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) informed trans veterans that the VA had clarified their policy, and were now using the U.S. State Department’s standard, developed for changing gender markers on passports.

If it were only the procedures that were so progressive it would be straightforward to change one’s gender marker in one’s Department of Defense (DOD) records. For military retirees like me, it’s rather difficult to figure out the specific department one forwards the request to, let alone what documents are required and the process for initiating the change.

But, of course, the process isn’t easy within the four DOD military services because trans people aren’t allowed to serve openly. The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) allows lesbian, gay and bisexual servicemembers to serve openly and proudly, but the same isn’t true for trans servicemembers.

Recently, OutServe Magazine printed an article about transgender active duty and reserve servicemembers. In the OutServe Magazine article, they indicated they have more than fifty trans servicemembers in their chapters.

I very recently spoke on the phone with Andy, an OutServe member who is a female-to-male trans servicemember. Andy is clear in his identity. He’s an officer in the military who will likely be discharged soon for service-related physical disability. If he were to complete his 20-year military career as he had originally planned to do, he would have more than five years of service left to complete.

When I joined the military, I believed myself to be an ex-transvestite; when Andy joined the military, he believed himself to be a lesbian – both of us hid our histories and our identities when we joined. I knew for the last four years of my military service that my transition from male-to female was a strong possibility; Andy has known for the last three years of his military service that he’s a trans man. During the time I was married to my now ex-wife and in the Navy, I hid my trans-related history from my children; Andy’s children don’t know the word transgender is a word that could be connected to him. Whereas I was a “Jane-girl” who appeared so feminine that my military peers presumed I was gay, Andy is a “Tom-boy” who isn’t suspected of being anything more than perhaps being lesbian – something that is legal to be now that DADT has been repealed. When I was married with my children, I was presumed to be a heterosexual male – I had what us LGBT servicemembers called “marriage privilege,” and my sexuality wasn’t questioned. Similarly, Andy’s children provide him “family privilege” that protects him from being perceived by his peers as trans.

When I talked to Andy on the phone, I could hear the male timbre of his voice that is the result of the prescription testosterone he takes … testosterone prescribed by a physician not connected to the military. At the VA Speech Therapy clinic at the San Diego VA, I had to learn to pitch my voice in a more feminine timbre if I wanted to better pass as female; Andy in turn has to now pitch his voice at work to a more feminine timbre so his voice passes as female.

While I served, I was alone … I felt isolated … I had to hide. Intellectually I knew there must be other trans people serving in the military, but there was no way I knew of to connect with any of them. Andy has OutServe. Andy is able to safely connect with some of his other trans peers in the military, and he described that connection as “Wonderful.” But in his daily workplace life, as a military servicemember, Andy, too, must hide an important detail about himself.

I have a dream that one day ordinary equality will be fully embraced for trans people in America, and that this ordinary equality will include the opportunity for trans people to serve openly and proudly as military servicemembers. Andy’s current silent service to country, along with the current silent service to country by all of our broad community’s trans servicemembers, deserves no less.

A few years ago, I came to the realization that trans people are considered ‘super-gays’ by the religious right. For example, Dr. Sander Breiner, in his National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) article entitled TranssexualityExplained stated the following:

“There are a significant number of male homosexuals who would like to be a female with a penis. There are others who would like to be completely transformed into a female, but can’t arrange to have such a complex surgical procedure. Both groups will obtain hormones from various sources; often it will be illegally from a pharmacy.

“The transsexual male who was not part of a university/medical school treatment program, will often take hormone treatment (self-prescribed and administered), and play a feminine role with unsuspecting heterosexual males (often as a prostitute). They will play the part as if they are a passive feminine object. Their approach has many masochistic behavioral qualities. However, their thinking about how they are tricking, fooling and using others has a clearly sadistic dynamic as well.”

Trans people, and trans women in particular, seem to be singled out as super-gays. It seems to me that the religious right picks up on this theme as one of the reasons that trans people shouldn’t experience equality under the law.

For me, it’s odd that there are Scriptures that talk in terms of genital surgeries not being a hindrance to entering the kingdom of heaven. For example, Matthew 19:12, as Scripture attributed as a quote of Christ, states this:

“For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it.”

Considering that this was the only genital reconstruction surgery available in Biblical times, it seems that the Lord recognizes those who’ve had such surgeries as those who can be his children. “He who is able to accept this, let him accept it.”

There is no known single cause of gender dysphoria, but to deny treatment that has been shown to have a positive outcome – because there are members in society whose faith in Christ would have them deny this treatment to others – would seem to be un-Biblical and cruel.

I will never understand the bitterness that leads many on the religious right to work so hard to deny humanity and civil rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. But not understanding their bitter dislike of gay men, I understand why trans people are caught up in the religious right’s efforts to deny antidiscrimination protections on the basis of gender identity and gender expression. Whatever their reasons for disliking – and even hating – gay men, that hate transfers over to trans women as being seen as super-gays.

Feb.16, one-time Republican candidate for president, Pat Buchanan had an article posted to The American Conservative’s Web site, entitled Blacklisted, But Not Beaten. In the article, Buchanan’s first line in the piece was, “My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.”

Buchanan highlighted in his piece how the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) had called out what I’d describe as Buchanan’s anti-LGBT rhetoric, as well as a string of statements that prompted the Anti-Defamation League, Color of Change and Media Matters to also call him out for what they perceived as bigoted views and inflammatory language.

In blaming African Americans, Jewish people and members of the LGBT community for the end of his career as a commentator with MSNBC, Buchanan admonishes readers about the perils of defiance against “liberal elites.”

“Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.”

Well, exactly.

In another recent story, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) called on CNN to fire their commentator Roland Martin for Tweeting an inappropriate, anti-LGBT comment during the Super Bowl. On his Twitter account, Martin had posted, “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”

Martin was suspended from CNN, and ended up meeting with representatives of GLAAD about his Super Bowl Tweet.

So are LGBT community activists and non-profit organizations trying to silence their critics? Well, not exactly.

There is a Bayard Rustin quote from his 1986 essay From Montgomery to Stonewall:

“[T]he job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That’s our job today: To control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment.”

And with the thought of anti-LGBT sentiments in mind, Bayard Rustin gave us good advice in that quote above. What Pat Buchanan calls blacklisting can also be called responding to corporate-enabled free speech with free speech of our own.

“The Mayor of Castro Street,” gay civil rights activist Harvey Milk, said this in his 1978 speech, That’s What America Is:

“Gay brothers and sisters … You must come out. Come out … to your parents. I know that it is hard and will hurt them but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth! Come out to your relatives … come out to your friends … if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors … to your fellow workers … to the people who work where you eat and shop … come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake. For their sake. For the sake of the youngsters who are becoming scared by the votes from Dade to Eugene.”

And then there’s Bayard Rustin. He was a black and gay civil rights advocate. He was instrumental in creating the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; he was the key organizer for the March on Washington. Over his lifetime, he was arrested 24 times in the struggle for civil and human rights.

In an interview with Joseph Beam in 1987, Rustin stated this:

“[I]f people do not organize in the name of their interest, the world will not take them as being serious. And that is the chief reason that every person who is gay should join some gay organization. Because he must prove to the world that he cares about his own freedom. People will never fight for your freedom if you have not given evidence that you are prepared to fight for it yourself. Incidentally, that’s the reason that every gay who is in the closet is ultimately a threat to the freedom of gays. I don’t want to seem intolerant to them and I think we have to say that to them with a great deal of affection, but remaining in the closet is the other side of the prejudice against gays. Because until you challenge it, you are not playing an active role in fighting it.”

I belong to the one subcommunity of the broader LGBT community that people graduate from – the trans community. What I mean is that trans people tend to come out of the closet at the beginning of their transitions, receiving the assistance they need from the community and sometimes joining the struggle for trans people’s civil rights, but usually before four years have passed these folks drop out of the community.

It’s easy to say to my trans siblings, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” But, knowing that when many come out that they are subjected to harassment and discrimination that they otherwise wouldn’t be subjected to, and knowing many trans people don’t want to live their lives being perceived as anything but the sex of their gender identities, it’s not an easy ask. Coming out of the closet may mean that a trans person may lose his, her, or hir friends, and perhaps lose their ability to obtain or keep jobs – the reality of asking trans people to be out of the closet is an extremely hard ask.

But, we are at that place now in the growing trans civil rights movement where what Bayard Rustin said about how staying in the closet is the other side of prejudice is true for trans people. Trans people can’t afford invisibility if we want antidiscrimination protections.

Even knowing what a hard ask it is to say trans people should be out of the closet and not choosing “stealth,” I’ll ask it anyway.

Come out, come out, wherever you are my trans siblings. Trans people need to be out of the closet not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of those trans people who come out after us – especially for those next generations of trans youth.

I served in the U.S. Navy between 1980 and 2000, and am now a military retiree. At fourteen I figured out I was a transsexual, but I talked myself into believing I was just a crossdresser – so even though I knew I was trans when I entered the service, I didn’t identify myself then as a transsexual.

By 1996 – four years before I was eligible to retire from the Navy – I knew that I was more than a crossdresser, but I still wasn’t ready to identify myself as a transsexual. During the last two of those four years, between 1996 and 2000, I was sexually harassed by the combined efforts of a subordinate and my ship’s executive officer. I still have the documentation where the Navy, in an inquiry, found that I was the victim of sexual harassment by male servicemembers because I was presumed to be gay.

I knowingly sacrificed my trans identity for the entire 20-years I was in the military; I knowingly sacrificed my need to address my gender identity concerns for the last four years of my service. Sacrificing my identity was really an unsustainable pursuit, as my sexual harassment experience showed me, and I’m absolutely amazed I made it through 20-years of service to retire.

OutServe Magazine has recently documented a portion of the personal stories of active duty trans people in the January/February issue in an article entitled, The New DADT: The Military’s Ban on Transgender Service. The author of the article, Katie Miller, indicated OutServe had 44 trans people signed up for their chapters.

There is an effort in its infancy to have trans people be able to serve openly. With that in mind, LGBT organizations should perhaps consider engaging in similar tactics for the repeal of DADT toward open service for trans people, and a first step might be a collection of stories by trans veterans with an emphasis on stories of those who’ve been discharged, or nearly discharged, for being trans.

We have open service for LGB servicemembers now, although we don’t have an equality of benefits for LGB couples with at least one servicemember

The amount of resources that a project to document the stories of the courage of transgender veterans would require would likely seem to be relatively small and such a project could be an important first step toward open trans military service. I believe the time for a project like this has come.