Birthday thoughts

On July 5, I will turn 34.  But this year, there is a birthday that feels more important.  In a few hours, it will be June 17, or the day that my uncle would be turning 62 years old.  His birthday is a lot more important than mine, because it's more important to remember him than to just turn 34.  I'll be in my thirties for a while. It's not that big of a deal.

Robert is a big deal.  He's a big deal  to our family, and he's a big deal to me.  I really only barely knew him as a person, because he wasn't around a lot.  It was a different time, and there were a lot of things that weren't talked about.  What I figured out about Robert, I mainly did through piecing things together on my own.  But there are a few things I do know.

When I was born, in 1981, Robert tried to give blood for me in case there was an emergency, and he wasn't allowed.  Gay men were banned from giving blood and they still are banned today. (ETA: Actually, any man who sleeps with men is banned from giving blood so that includes bisexual/pansexual men as well.)

Later in my life, my mother and father decided that with the wrong, gay, influences, I was going to "decide to turn," so I wasn't allowed to be around my uncle (or my father's gay sister) very much.

I can pretty much count the number of times I was arouund Robert at a family thing on my hands, and that's it.  I only remember a few times I was with him, but the times I remember, I've probably played a thousand times each in my head.

Most of the times I was with Robert, he was organizing.  Handing out leaflets in a park, making voting reminder calls.  Pretty much any time I saw him he had some political goal he was working toward, and we never talked directly about those things, but I never, ever forgot them.

I'm not the organizer that he was.  I'm not the politician that he was either.  I'm not very good at long range planning (I don't think life allows me to long-range plan either).  But I think the most important part of any of it is just remembering.

Remembering so that I can ask myself what he would do pretty much every day.  Remembering so that I can imagine the pep talk he would give me right before I explain, AGAIN, what human dignity is supposed to look like, and that as a disabled, queer, trans person, I am still allowed it.  Remembering that anything that he did, I am allowed to continue-and expand on.  Remembering so I can imagine that if I explained what being trans, what being non-binary, what being a disabled adult is like, I can walk myself through what he might say (the good and bad).  Even remembering so I can confront my family history, also the good and bad.

I don't have to tell you a lot of detail about him.  Some of those things are for my family, some are in a museum in Queens, some are embedded into the history of ACT UP NY, the St. Patrick's Day Parade For All (also in Queens), where he was an honoree this year, and some things I'll just never know.  Sometimes that last part is really horrible, and sometimes it's just how things are.  Some things I was there for and don't remember, and I hate those things the most.

Sometimes I'm known as the really argumentative one. (Okay, that's all the time.)  Sometimes I know that I'm probably way more argumentative than he ever was.  To be an organizer, you have to deal with way more people than I am good at dealing with.  So, you know, I'll never be him, but that's okay.  I carry him in the back of my head and he gives the best pep talks in the world--way better than anything I could come up with by myself.

Happy birthday, Robert.  I love you.

Ooh, look, gender police, take two!

Some time ago I wrote a post on being gender policed by a younger male.  I did not give specifics of this. I also generalized quite a few of the events. This blog post is not that exact blog post.  I was quite upset while writing it, and did not save a backup copy. Later, this man started screaming at me that I was a liar, further triggering me, so I took the post down. One of my closest friends, Emily Titon, fielded quite a lot of this situation, so knows more or less the entire story.  

I do not enjoy having to elucidate this here. It is difficult to write about, and I risk becoming re-triggered by the situation.  I have a number of difficulties relating in the disability community due to previous instances of bulllying, gaslighting, and the internalized ableism of others coming out in conversation with me.  This is why I deleted the original entry to avoid conflict, but that wasn’t being true to myself.

This man accused me of LYING (several times, sometimes but not always in caps) because I could not provide direct quotes. He also conveniently did not remember many events--because they did not trigger him.  So this post, written several weeks later instead of the morning after the events (on zero sleep because I could not become untriggered or calm down after a final offense), will not have direct quotes. Part of this is because as a result of this interaction I have left a private group and unfriended two people.  I could possibly stilll find our chat logs, but I would rather not do so as the experience of going back through them would be triggering all over again.

This, therefore, is my personal interpretation of events. In some ways, it will be more specific than the last version of this post.  In other ways, because of time passing, it will be more general. THERE WILL BE NO DIRECT QUOTES as I do not have them.  I will give general summaries of sentiments expressed, sometimes in comically exaggerated dialogue. THIS DOES NOT MEAN I AM LYING. If anything, I am creating a parody of bigotry.  This post is liable to be on the long side.

My first indication that this young man (12 years my junior--and those were a big 12 years for me) had a problem understanding gender and gender policing is when the following happened:

We were discussing approaches to activism. I am a third generation New Yorker and third generation activist, and these two things are related. I learned activism with compassion.  I wrote about it on Martin Luther King day on my Facebook, and I then backdated the entry, so if you need a refresher on my family’s activism, it’s told through the story of my grandfather, an Italian- and English-American Queens native with family as far away as Africa (a fact which probably informed his politics).  

I told this man that I had learned not to go on other people’s walls and correct them or police them.  He said, “That’s probably a female-gendered response.”

Oh, really?  I’m transgender, but okay, kiddo.

I didn’t say anything. Sometimes if triggered, you lose words.  Sometimes if you have disability stuff in common with Autistics/are neurodiverse, you lose words too.  In his words, I was supposed to articulate to him I was triggered. I’ve been mulling over that one.  The thing is, telling him would have only been paying him a courtesy.  Especially as I was struggling with words then.  I just got through it, because being triggered is similar to a panic attack that can ruin and change  your entire day.  Later he told me I had acted wrongly by not informing him.  This is victim blaming, plain and simple.  He is a 21-year-old man with a personal mythology that it upsets him too much to upset someone so he doesn’t upset people.  Would that it was so easy.  But if he really is so concerned with the impact of upsetting people, then basically he should not victim blame or gaslight.  But that did come later, so let’s continue.

There may or may not have been another similar instance after the first triggery experience. It’s now blurry.  I did notice him doing ableist things around me, like talking around me in threads as if I was some kind of intruder among his friends or something.  I was in a private group with him (I have left it) so I spent some time psych-braining about how he interacted with people. I could have unfriended or blocked him after the first incident and was considering leaving the group (I don’t do groups well, especially not anymore), but I was biding my time a bit. I reasoned that he was young and certainly younger people still have room to learn, and with that I left it alone.

Then I came out as trans in a thread in the private group. This person came in to tell me that he had a theory of being able to categorize people’s gender by speech patterns, and that I have a “femme” way of relating events in text. I told him perhaps my female name had leant to this interpretation as well.  For me, I have no cognitive dissonance whatsoever with being pangender but maintaining a female name, because I picked it myself long before I came out. Keeping this name is honoring my younger self.  I have been Elena to my friends for 20 years now, and that won’t change any time soon, although since coming out as transgender I do vastly prefer being known simply as E. The truth is that part of my reclamation of Elena has to do with the fact that some sites refuse to allow me to be known as E.

I discussed my situation at length with the aim of informing not him but the people in the thread who might actually learn something.  It’s possible that I may be too good at switching into anthropologist or psychology brain, because instead of telling him he was wrong, I asked him why he felt I was “femme.”  He then listed several reasons related to my speech patterns and how I communicated things in text.

I am many things. I am a writer, a socially isolated disabled person, and an internet addict. Any of those things can and do effect my interactions online because most are textual.  When I first started to feel transgender-ish, at age 3, I informed my mother that I was going to grow up to be a boy.  (This was not her favorite thing, and the resulting conversations I had with her were not my favorite thing.)  I assimilated into cis female space, but never easily. I was on the outside a tomboy who was queer (notably attracted to women, but not a lesbian).  I didn’t ever fit in with women--many geek girls don’t, though, so that’s not an indicator.  I did note their behaviors, though.  There is absolutely nothing in my experience that backs up this man’s assertion that my being courteous about people’s walls, for instance, is a “female-gendered response.  It’s called basic courtesy and respect of people’s autonomy and willingness to let them have an opinion unless it’s dangerous or something.  Have you ever heard of cat fights? There is an expression because they are real.  If being courteous about information on people’s walls is “female-gendered” or “femme,” then my female parent must be trans, and in fact all gaslighty women must really not be women!  But, see, I’m fairly certain this guy is cis.  He neither grew up skirting transgender issues nor relating to women as a presumably cis woman.  Women (or anyone who has lived as a woman while figuring out trans issues, i.e. me) know(s) women better than men know women.  That’s where tons of self help comes from, so you know I’m right.  This is why quite a lot of women refuse to have that many female friends.  Don’t believe me?  Most women I’ve talked to report that they didn’t have many female friends until at least college age. I’m the same way.

I could tell you a million stories that illustrate how I am not actually femme, just a writer, but I’ll give the salient points: I don’t know what even happens in a salon.  I collected rocks and dreamed of climbing trees as a kid. Spiders, lizards and snakes are my favorite animals. This blog is named after a cornsnake, for fuck’s sake.  (I also enjoy bears. Is that too femme?)  I don’t own a dress. I own one pair of shoes.  I don’t dress for anything other than comfort (although I have a lot of sensory requirements, I will admit).  I refuse to be fashion-policed.  I don’t shop for clothes, or anything else, for fun. (Partly that’s a reality of being poor, but I’m an in-and-out-of-there shopper. I don’t window-shop or do any of that for fun and never have.)

See, now I’m starting to sound possibly sexist, or something,  but all I am trying to do is point out: I am in a female body until I die.  I don’t want surgery. (He said “I was not like other trans people” because of some of this. Well, sure.  Only a subset of trans people get media attention. They may fit a stereotype. That belongs in another post.)  Additionally, my binary did break later in life, partly due to trauma. (Speaking for myself only--I can’t speak for how/why/when other people’s binaries break or don’t function.) Nonbinary experiences of being trans ARE different from that of trans people who have an intact binary.   None of this has any bearing on whether I am “femme” or have “female-gendered” behaviors or not.

I have a few. Not too many though.  But of course I have some--I float around in a nebulous gender soup.  It doesn’t matter, though. By him labeling me, he’s gender-policing me.  He asserted all kinds of things about how he KNOWS female behavior and femme behavior.

You know who knows those things? People who have lived or identify as women.  But even with that being said, any time he’s asserting how I come across, making a point over and over again, that’s gender policing.

So no. Actually, no. He doesn’t know.  The only person responsible for understanding (for the purpose of self-accceptance) their own gender is the person in that particular body. We can try to make people understand, but we’ll fail at times (especially if we are “not like other trans people”), like I did here, especially when I talked to him after the first time I wrote this damn post.  

Because I did talk to him after this second policing session.  I PMed him to tell him that this line of reasoning he was going after was not going to help him, that it was nonproductive to get into this too far as he never knew when he was around trans*, or even just nonbinary folks like me.  He asserted that he understood that I wanted to be known as nonbinary.  He apologized.  But then he blocked me.  He has a reasoning of being overloaded, which is perfectly reasonable, but I had been reasonable with him, letting him know I only confronted him out of respect--which is how I roll. I don’t confront people I don’t think will learn something.

So he blocked me on Facebook and I blogged this the first time. He then unblocked me, talked around me in threads a bit, and then started gaslighting me in PM.  He called me a liar in several places.  (Once in PM and once on a reposting of the original blog post.)  Sometimes it was in caps.  I was re-triggered and I wanted to not be called a liar so I took the post down.  I kept talking to him and he kept saying that we weren’t really compatible with being friends because of communication differences.  Whatever. That’s happened to me before.  He told me that I should have informed him I was triggered.  He related the situation to some kind of error in computer science or other.  

No.  This was policing. It also became gaslighting.  You can ask people who know that I was upset enough (partly due to the fact that gaslighting from other crips feels worse) to take the original post down.  I can only remember ever deleting one other thing in the past 12 months or more--I don’t delete often. In fact, I deleted something else due to a friend of this same person. So now, neither of those people are in my life.  It’s not that I am so conflict avoidant--it’s that I have disability-community-specific trauma.

But the truth is, this still happened, and now it’s blogged again.  Sorry but I won’t be asking his permission to exist, to be transgender, or to figure out what my gender is.  This post stays up. It’s for me, but also for any trans* person who has been gaslit and policed about their gender.  So here it is.

Martin Luther King Day 2014: Stanley Rygor, My Activist Grandfather

in honor of Martin Luther King day, I would like to tell a story about my family--specifically my grandfather. I learned this story at Christmas this year.

In my family's home, civil rights pioneers of the time were in pictures all over the house. Martin Luther King, Kennedy, etc. There is an awesome picture of my family with a picture of Dr. King "photobombing" the photo. I will post it in comments.

My grandfather Stanley is a very principled kind of guy. He's the kind of guy who will strike up a conversation with you, and if he finds out you have nowhere to go where you are loved, cherished, and appreciated, he will bring you to the next gathering at his house. It doesn't matter if that's Thanksgiving, Christmas, or somebody's birthday party. There is an open door policy at my grandparents' house for anyone who is struggling to come have tea. I know, I know, in the middle of New York and everything?

My grandfather is a New Yorker. He has lived on the same block for the majority of his life. He taught me what integrity and openness really were, not just once but about a million times. At Christmas, he had another lesson to teach me. He engaged me in conversation about the 1960s. He told me about sneaking into the back of NAACP meetings and hiding in the very back row of seats. He told me about the day that it was decided by the people presiding over the meeting he attended that he should be allowed to come to the front, with them. (My grandfather is white.) Soon, my grandfather was a very active participant. He was so active, that he was bringing the entire meeting into his house. He was also conducting research in which he would be paired with another woman (not my grandmother) and try to get an apartment as a white couple. They could always get an offer of the apartment, even if a black couple sent from the ranks of the NAACP meeting could not receive the same offer. (i.e. every time.)

Although it took some time for him to get there, my grandfather later took this same basic belief in human dignity and applied it to GLBT rights. As of my last understanding, he has two GLBT children plus me, his granddaughter. I can honestly tell you that it completely meant the world to me when I saw my grandfather see the light on GLBT rights. I am extremely grateful to have witnessed it, from both sides, even though he is not my father. Technically, I am not sure what my grandfather knows or doesn't know about my status as a GLBT American but I can tell you that what is important is what I know about my grandfather. We don't agree on every political issue but he taught me to always be warm and welcoming to people, even when you might be struggling that day yourself. I do not always uphold this--I can have visceral "no way" reactions to people, and I will honor those too. I have been through enough in New York, Boston, and online, that to not honor my "inner ding" on that stuff would be really, really detrimental. But that said, I try to keep an open mind about most people, and I have people around me from a variety of political persuasions and religious or spiritual ideologies.

As long as you respect me, I respect you. My grandfather taught me that. I've honestly never met a more respectful, genuine guy. On this Martin Luther King Day, I am honoring Dr. King, but I am also honoring my grandpa Stanley because he deserves to be known as a guy with deep and abiding principles who has done a ton of good in the world. I am honored to be a part of his family because he showed me how to demonstrate pretty much unconditional love to any New Yorker he could find.

That's what New York is about to me, and it always will be. NAACP meetings in the home of a white family at the dawn of the civil rights movement. How much more melting pot can you get?

Stanley Rygor, I salute you.

Happy Martin Luther King Day, all.:)

ETA: As a postscript to this entry, it came to my attention through the retelling of this story that in addition to doing this activism in 1960s NYC there are also stories of my grandfather doing comparable activism in Rhodesia, where we have family.  Although I haven't heard the full story yet I hope to one day soon.