No one had called me back from multiple voicemails I’d left with the Long Island LGBT organization, the one that operates the transgender support groups I’ve attended in Bay Shore (young, well-attended) and Woodbury (more nearby, sparsely attended). No one had emailed me back from the emails I’d sent to the woman who teaches Women’s Studies at Old Westbury (where I was a Women’s Studies major 1985-88) and who also runs the women’s center on campus. I had put on my calendar a note to myself to get off my ass and follow through on both of these, to talk with the people involved and get the proverbial ball rolling on booking me to give some kind of presentation on gender, to be more of a local presence doing gender here on Long Island. Gotta build the author’s platform, you know.
So with the professor at Old Westbury, I obtained her office hours at least, with the notion that I could do this best if I could be seated across from her and sketch out some of what I wanted to present; I was figuring her lack of follow-through and lack thus far of enthusiasm was reasonable, she doesn’t know what my content is going to be like, why would she opt to have me present to her class just because I said I’d like to do so?
So next I called the LGBT folks. Similar assumption: they have no reason to rush out and try to schedule me to present my material when they don’t know as of yet what my material is. Seems like the thing to do is try to arrange a sit-down where I can explain enough of it for them to gauge my seriousness and the degree to which my perspective adds to rather than clashes with whatever they’re putting on. The receptionist took down some basic info including my telephone number and then said she’d have the programming director get back to me shortly.
I get the call maybe 45 minutes later. “So what’s this about?”, she asks. “Well”, I say, fumbling my way into it, “I consider myself to be a subtype of genderqueer… really I haven’t found much information about people like me in the materials that tend to be presented, and I guess you could say I’m trying to come out of the closet and be recognized for who I am, but that recognition requires people’s willingness to accept another gender identity. I have some materials and I gave a presentation at one local group which went over well, and I was wondering if I could make an appointment to come in and discuss, well, maybe I could do a presentation there, either in Woodbury or in Bay Shore”.
“Oh, well, we’re not really seeking any additional programming resources at this point but thanks anyway”.
“I don’t mean I’m trying to get a paid position or anything, I mean just the ideas themselves, I’d like to sit down with you folks as activists”.
“That won’t be necessary. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“I…um…wait… I don’t seem to be expressing myself well. I have trouble doing this over the phone. I’m… I found it difficult to… sort things out for myself growing up and… and I promised myself long ago that I’d see that younger people would not have to deal with this all by themselves, and there’s still no voice out there that I can really recognize as a voice of someone like me.”
“So is there some specific service you want from us?”
“I…you… I assume you are concerned with social… liberation, justice… in the same ways and that if what I’m trying to do is… meshes with… that we’re approaching the same issues and concerns…”
“As I said, we’re not looking for any programming to add at this point. We have support groups that meet in Bay Shore and Woodbury that you’re welcome to attend and although you said you aren’t seeking therapeutic counseling for yourself, that’s what I’d recommend for you. Aside from that I don’t know what else we can do for you”.
I repeated that I felt that I flail badly at this sort of thing on the phone and she suggested I email her instead, so I took her up on it, and explained more completely how I viewed my own situation and how I felt that I had a gender identity that wasn’t on the radar, generally speaking, and that I wanted to do something about that. She wrote back once again saying that the best they could offer me was the support group that I’d already been to.
I went to bed that night with an old old frustration burning hotly new, that too-familiar feeling of “I can’t believe this isn’t of more interest than it seems to be, why isn’t anyone inclined to be grabbed by it the way other people’s issues grab me when I hear about them? Why the hell can’t I make common cause with people?”
I woke up the next morning with a different judgment on myself. I’ve been kicking myself pretty hard these past 5 years for not trying harder to connect with organizations like Identity House and discuss my issues with gay and lesbian and transgender activists and instead putting all my efforts and energies into connecting with feminists and discussing my issues as aspects of feminist theory and feminist movement gender politics. Oh, sure, I’ve given myself a pass for having taken awhile to realize the possibilities and potential in gender activism, of seeing msyelf as part of the LBGT spectrum. But there was all that sense that gee, I’d been there and that I should have been playing a part of the political scene in which the modern transgender and genderqueer identities have burst onto the scene. But this morning I sat up and realized "I really did go to Identity House. And I really did try to talk to people about how I was and what my concerns were. And I stopped going or didn’t develop a habit of going very often because my concerns did not mesh with the concerns of the people I met there, and they weren’t particularly curious about or fascinated by me as someone coming at this from a somewhat different angle than they were.
So now again this seems to be the case.
OK. Fundamentals. The stance I have taken towards “Society”, in its overweening unwashed entirety, is an adversarial one. I feel mistreated and scorned and subjected to some harsh and vicious shit and I have spun around and with anger am being confrontational. This here sissy hatred has got to stop. If nothing else, I get to speak for myself, I get to have a voice, and I get to say I am happy to be who I am and I am proud to be who I am.
So I blithely turned to folks I assumed would be my allies, and blithely assumed that I’d be embraced and accepted there even though I’m different from them, because they’re LESS DIFFERENT. But let’s stay blunt here: my intention is to change them. To have an effect on them. To alter their agenda. It is not reasonable for me to assume that other people are going to WANT me to change them, to have that kind of affect on them, to get them to set a place for me at their planning table. So this relationship is potentially adversarial too. And I have to approach all my potential allies and comrades and similarly aligned people that I’m trying to make common cause with without expecting them to lap up whatever I exude. I’m not saying I necessarily need to become more abrasive, but I need to not be surprised if they don’t immediately latch onto my ideas and priorities and instead are obstructionist and intolerant of differences and myopic in their now-institutionalized thinking on many issues.
I need to remember that, just as with academia and feminism, the individual people at close range tend to be people with job titles or positions within an organizational structure, and probably most of them are not theory-heads who spend enormous amounts of their time playing with abstract ideas about gender and expression and perception and feelings and whatnot and instead are more rooted in everyday pragmatic concerns, on which level my priorities may seem as alien to them as they would be to the local Chamber of Commerce or something.
