An Open Letter to Legislators on “Small” Bureaucratic Barriers

I want lawmakers to stop thinking in terms of a small amount of money, a small hassle, a small barrier to a Constitutional or human right.

Lawmakers, you represent the people, but you are not The People.  You are the privileged few.  Some of you are more aware of this than others, certainly.  I’ve been moved in particular by several recent videos from the House floor, where women of color Representatives have used their own experiences as narratives to illustrate their arguments on social issues.  But as a group, you are the privileged few, and I need you to stop thinking of barriers to rights as “small.”

An additional identification requirement at the voting both may seem simple to a lifelong citizen whose birth certificate, passport, social security records, and medical history have always lived in a metal filing cabinet in the office of a mid-sized suburban home, but it is not the case for those whom these laws affect.

A 24-hour waiting period for an abortion may seem small to someone who drives a car that gets 34 miles to the gallon and has always had an employer that allows for at least ten vacation days a year, but it is not the case for those whom these laws affect.

A $100 filing fee for a name change petition may seem small for someone who has always had at least a few thousand in the bank, someone whose very humanity, dignity, and ability to get through life without a constant fear of harassment has never been in question because a name is just something given by parents that sticks to your identity over time, but it is not the case for those whom these laws affect.

I need lawmakers to start thinking seriously about the impact of fees, waiting periods, documentation requirements, and other “little” bureaucratic considerations on the actual people who are affected by these laws.  And I need you to start thinking about the kinds of fundamental rights these people are trying to access, and I need you to sit with that for a minute.

Thank you.

Gendering Humanity with the French Concept of Etat Civil

Recently, I read a news story (I can’t even remember what it was, to be honest) that got me thinking about the concept of etat civil.  Etat civil is a French legal concept that, roughly translated, means “civil status” or your legal state of being.  The French Wikipedia describes it as “a person’s position in the family and society, resulting from a written procedure of administrative identification.”  It comes up in the contexts of births, marriages, and deaths, pretty much, but it also encompasses things like your name and gender, so it’s relevant in transgender identity context.

The idea bothers me because although the practical meaning of the term is more like what we call “vital statistics” in the United States, and is dry and deals with demographic data, the actual French term implies much more.  It bothers me that one’s very being, one’s “state” or existence in the public arena is gendered.  Not only is it impossible to escape the gender binary in France due to the gendering of nouns and adjectives in the language, but your being in the eyes of the state must be either male or female (and is exceedingly difficult to change).

Sadly, this is not surprising.  I am not surprised that discrimination is so important to us as a society that it bothers us not to be able to gender someone, because I live this every day.  Nor am I surprised that we aren’t sure how to treat someone “as a human being” with no other data.  We’re obsessed with gender as a framework to tell us how to behave, and many among us are deeply bothered when we get gender “wrong,” are confused about someone’s gender, or find that someone’s gender is changing.

I would be curious to know if anyone’s done a study on human interaction in online spaces where gender is not known, though I imagine it would be difficult to find many where gender isn’t stated fairly early on in an interaction.  I do find it interesting that among queer and trans Twitter friends, I often don’t know someone’s gender, and am sometimes surprised when I learn it.  I imagine that some assumptions are made based on the online space–gaming, for example, being principally male; Pinterest being principally female–but it’d be interesting to know how many spaces there are where that isn’t the case.  I would love to learn that, even in tiny niches, human beings are simply taken as that, end of discussion.

Do Charter Schools Impact Systemic Education Problems?

Recent, Colorlines ran a piece on Chicago’s Urban Prep Academy, a charter school that boasts three years of 100% college acceptance rates among its senior classes.  Urban Prep’s student population is exclusively black and male, and unsurprisingly it’s making big news for its successes with a generally at-risk demographic.  At the same time, a lot of students who enter as freshmen don’t make it to the senior class, and there have been accusations of “creaming,” or encouraging students with behavioral problems and learning disabilities to leave.

Whether or not those accusations are true, I do think this is an important problem to consider for proponents of charter schools.  There’s no doubt that charter schools can be great for some students.  My experience at a charter high school for academically gifted students in a large Southern city absolutely turned my life path around.  The school was brand new when I started as a freshman, and by that time I was burnt out on public schools that didn’t engage my intellectual curiosity.  After two years where half my teachers had PhDs, students were encouraged to pursue foreign languages and geeky extracurricular pursuits, and humanities classes encouraged critical thinking, I had gone from a C/D to an A student with several leadership roles.  I have that school to thank.

At the same time, I don’t support my alma mater financially because of what it quickly became.  After a couple of successful years with students like me who took a gamble on a new school and started it off with a geeky freshman and sophomore class, parents started taking note.  High test scores encouraged more and more upper class white parents in the suburbs to apply.  Many of those parents could afford private school, but didn’t want to pay if they didn’t have to.  The great teachers remain, but I’m turned off by the focus on a million-dollar building campaign at a school that used to be housed in a quirky cotton mill that we restored with our own hands, surrounded by a long-standing public housing project that was soon bulldozed for townhouses our teachers couldn’t afford.  It’s one of the best high schools in the country, and it’s done nothing to alleviate the systemic educational problems in the city and county.

Like my school, Urban Prep and others that focus on impressive test results or college attendance rates may be doing something great for individual students but not much to change the overall climate.  Unlike my school, Urban Prep is focused on an at-risk population, and even if many of the students are “creamed,” I don’t doubt that those who graduate are thankful for the opportunity they have.  But despite that, we need educational solutions that look at the huge systemic problems we’re facing.  We need schools that don’t, like my high school, require middle school courses for admittance that most students of color in poor neighborhoods have no access to.  We need high schools that lead projects to improve elementary education in the community, and to look at other problems–from police violence to environmental issues to immigration to the challenges single parents in the neighborhood face.

If you know of programs that are addressing these issues, I’d love to hear about them.  And if you did go to charter schools, I’m curious about your experience.

Evolution of a Blog: From Scholar to Activist

I don’t normally get this meta, but I’ve just read or skimmed through the past few years of this blog, which started in 2008 as “A Lesbian & A Scholar,” and it’s been interesting to see how things have changed over the years.  Besides the obvious fact of my gender and sexual orientation being different now from what they were four years ago, I’m realizing that a reader who once e-mailed me, asking why my writing had become less scholarly over time, was right.

I started this blog when I was in law school, and many of my posts were comments on something discussed in class, something I read, or a lecture I attended.  I don’t exactly read less now, but I do much more skimming.  In the Twitter age, much of what I read is quick and opinionated, and my reactions are similarly quick and opinionated.  While a scholar has time to research and develop a thesis, an activist in the 21st century has to constantly be reacting, assessing strategy, using the news as leverage for change-making.

Is one approach better than the other?  Not necessarily.  I have learned from other writers and from reading my past material that I could stand to use more links and references in my writing here, like I do when I write for other sites.  I used to do more writing about law, and now it’s more about culture, policy, and theory related to gender and sexuality.  I’m happy with that shift, but I have been craving more action, less writing about problems and more writing about how we might solve them.  That said, I do enjoy cultural commentary and critique and I’ll keep doing that.

I’ve done some messing around with categories this week to better reflect what I’m actually writing about, and to make it easier to find old posts.  I do want to note that if you’re looking back in the archives, there are plenty of opinions that I no longer stand by.  I’ve left them up because I prefer that approach to “editing the past,” but some of what I said then makes me cringe.  It’s pretty amazing to see how my attitudes on gender, feminism, sexuality, and relationships shifted so drastically in the space of a year or two.  In a way, I think it’s inspiring, because it means that when folks fuck up, we can change.  We just have to do the work to get there.

White Feminists: It’s Time to Put Up Or Shut Up on Race

Listen up, white feminists.

We have a problem.  I’m including myself because none of us are immune from this problem.  We all fuck up.  And you can say “fucking up is natural,” and that’s true, but it’s time for us to start identifying our fuck ups, and not just learning from them, but acknowledging the hurt they cause other people.

We need to acknowledge that we cannot know what it’s like to be an oppressed racial minority.  Cannot.  The end.  Period.  We don’t know because we’re queer, because we’re disabled, because we’re Jewish, because we were the nerdy kid in school.  These things may have hurt us severely, but we need to stop playing Oppression Olympics and acknowledge that when we’re talking about race we Do.  Not.  Know.  No more metaphors.

Are Unpaid Internships Ethical?

I’ve noticed some chatter lately about unpaid interns at non-profit organizations, and whether the practice is ethical or not.  My kneejerk reaction was a yes answer: after all, most non-profits have tiny budgets, and it’s hard to get a non-profit job in this economy.  If someone wants to work for free, why not let them?

The problem with unpaid interns, though, gets at the heart of what’s wrong with the way many non-profits do fundraising, as well as at some of the problems non-profits have with recruiting a diverse staff.

Occupy Wall Street for a Radical with a Job

I haven’t said a lot about Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement generally because I haven’t quite decided where I come down.  It would seem that this movement is tailor-made for me.  After all, I’ve been waiting for the (peaceful) revolution for a while.  I don’t believe that we can solve our problems through voting.  I’m an enthusiastic student of Howard Zinn, and I’m frustrated by how the myth of economic prosperity has been used to blame and shame ordinary people, to turn natural allies against one another by tapping into our Puritan ideals of “it’s my fault if I don’t succeed.”  I think this country needs a drastic paradigm shift.

The occupy movement addresses this myth in some ways, by pointing out through the 99% concept that ordinary people are struggling, that often it’s not your fault in this country if you don’t succeed, because its structures and its politics do not support you.  I support this tactic.  I love the “we are the 99%” blog, and how it tells the diverse stories of people who are struggling.  I also love tactics like closing big bank accounts, staging teach-ins, and donating to a big library of radical books so that everyone can learn about feminism, homophobia, racism, etc.

But the movement is not perfect.

The occupiers may be challenging the economic prosperity myth, but at the same time we’ve seen racism, transphobia, and sexism in the camps that shows many occupiers are buying into a different myth about power structures.  Just as the idea that America is a great, prosperous country has been used to shame those who don’t succeed, the support for the ideas of white, straight, able-bodied cis men in this country often keeps these Americans from seeing their own faults.  Radical liberals who have these traits tend to dominate discussions and challenge the perspectives of more marginalized people, rather than listening up, or, as Tumblr gleefully terms it, “taking a seat.”  There are reports of rape and anti-trans violence in the camps.  The entire movement suffers from its blind spot regarding the fact that this is already a colonized country, and all us white folks, for richer or poorer, the colonizers.

Beyond these problems, which others have blogged about at length, I have further difficulties finding a place in the movement.  Of course, the “occupy” tactic mostly works for those who don’t have jobs, or those who are able to quit.  I am employed at a wonderful organization that does work I care about, and I have no interest in leaving to join the revolution.  I believe that the work we do is revolutionary–maybe not all of it, but certainly some.  And as much as I believe in revolution, and realize that a revolution needs bodies to take place, it’s hard to tell, in the middle of a movement, whether this is The One.  I still find myself more comfortable writing about change, giving talks, and having conversations than I do waving a protest sign or putting my body in the way.  I believe strongly in a revolution of ideas, in change through education.  That, to me, is the beauty of the occupy movement, and that’s the part in which I feel most comfortable participating.

Transgender Day of Remembrance and What We Can Learn

Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, where we take time out of our day to remember those we’ve lost–too often to violence and suicide.  As we mourn those who have died this year, it’s important to remember who we’ve lost and why.  A few thoughts:

• As a community, we cannot abandon those at our margins.  It is crucial that we focus on violence against poor transgender sex workers of color, a community where many of the murders take place.  How can we support sex workers as a community, and how can we adjust our attitudes to recognize ALL transgender people as our brothers, sisters, and friends?
• The prison-industrial complex is not just a term of art.  It is a violent, oppressive system that is killing our community.  Police who have no training in cultural competency aren’t just rude towards transgender people, but frequently violent and abusive.  Prisons don’t know how to handle transgender prisoners, who are often housed in the wrong facilities, confined in solitary, denied medical treatment, and particularly vulnerable to rape.  We cannot forget those who are “lost” to the system, and must be their unwavering advocates.
• The problem of suicide is a personal one to me, and difficult to address because I struggle with depression myself, often related to gender dysphoria.  It is difficult for me to conceptualize how others might help. However, this is a serious problem that claims too many lives, and beyond the general work we need to do to increase acceptance of gender variance in our culture, there are some solutions to make transgender and gender non-conforming people feel less alone.  Therapists, other medical professionals, and suicide hotlines that support trans* patients and have experience working with trans* people should advertise this and make themselves known in their communities.  Even for those of us who have the resources to seek professional help, the crippling fear of transphobia in the medical establishment can be too much to overcome without some sign that a provider will be understanding.  And of course, ordinary people, friends and family, can do a huge service just by listening, asking how to help, and not judging those who suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts.

Addressing Cis Male Transphobia

I had a thought about transphobia, particularly the kind of transphobia that involves cis males freaking out because the idea of a “gender change” is so wrong and unnatural to them.  When this kind of transphobia comes up, I think part of the problem may be that the kneejerk reaction is a sense of wrongness that the perpetrator feels when he imagines himself wanting to be, or turning into, a woman.  A common response is to critique that sense of wrongness, challenge the sense that femininity is wrong or less than masculinity, talk about gender fluidity, etc. And while that’s not a bad approach–certainly, the gender essentialism and sexism should be addressed–I think it might be more effective to instead latch onto that sense of wrongness and affirm it by explaining that many trans people feel a similar sense of wrongness before transition.  If we ask the hypothetical man to imagine instead being born into a female body, knowing that it is “wrong,” he might actually start to think about the transgender experience in a more sympathetic way.

Day of the Girl: The Right of Trans* Girls to an Education

Thursday, September 22nd, has been deemed the Day of the Girl.  Focused on girls’ empowerment, girls and adults around the world will be taking actions today to remind everyone about the issues facing girls around the world.  I wanted to write a brief post to focus on something that doesn’t affect all girls, but should be a concern of all adults.

There’s been a lot of news lately about transgender youth and treatment of LGBT youth in schools.  Recently, Nightline aired a segment about Jackie, a 10-year-old transgender girl in Ohio (TW for misgendering by the host).  Though not all trans* people claim their identities early on, it is obvious that there are girls in primary and secondary school who are treated by their parents and teachers as boys, as well as girls who may later transition to be boys, or may later determine that they are neither male or female.  While some schools may address gay and lesbian people in their history or health curricula, few talk about the wide range of gender identities that exist.

It’s crucial that we recognize this detriment in our education systems and advocate for change.  According to Injustice At Every Turn, 78% of kids who expressed a transgender or non-conforming gender identity in grades K-12 reported harassment.  35% reported physical assault and 12% reported sexual violence.  15% left school at some point (K-12 or college) due to harassment.  31% reported some form of harassment by teachers or staff.  These numbers were higher for trans and gender non-conforming people of color.  Over time, these negative experiences as a student can lead to outcomes including poverty, homelessness, drug use, and suicide.

What can we do?  Anti-bullying initiatives are one step, but they can’t be the only one.  Trans* girls have a right to an education, which not only includes safety in school, but also recognition of themselves as human.  Curricula need to address the variety of gender and avoid gender essentialization and stereotyping.  This would benefit all girls, of course, not only those who identify or later identify as trans*.  Teachers also need to provide support and put themselves out there as available mentors for all girls.

When I was a girl, I had no idea that genderqueer people existed.  I didn’t learn about transgender until I was a teenager, and when I heard about third gender it was only in an international context.  No one ever suggested in school that gender identity can change over time, or that people don’t have to have a body that “matches” gender.  When I was ten, I wanted to be a boy and was heavily ridiculed to the point of being physically assaulted by my best friend on the playground, with the backing of the entire fifth grade class.  I’m just one example, and things were undoubtedly easier for me than for a girl who is considered to be a boy by her parents and teachers, but the example is illustrative.  We need to do better.  Today, as we think about the rights of girls, let’s not leave anyone out.