In the dragon’s heart there’s a furnace. The furnace has been forgotten by the sons of men and they dream peacefully of a world that embraces them caringly. They feel the world as safe until, abruptly, they find their most fearful dreams and awake sweating and terrorized in the middle of the night. They gasp in the dark and light lamps to frighten away the shadows of their dreams.
The dreams, although they do not often know it, cannot define them as such, come from their deepest 
hearts, their deepest conditioning, and from the fears that conditioning has built upon. They have heard the tales of horror coming in the night to stalk them, eat them in their beds. The dragon has the face of a woman. The fear has the heart of ignorance and it burns silently during much of their lives.
Then, perhaps, there comes a day when horror breaks across them, as though they’d been left alone in a very small boat during a very large hurricane. A perfect storm.
Before them a sea-monster rears it’s ugly head and with their last strength they heft an axe, or a sword and hack at the monster, leaving great wounds and dripping ichor on blade, boat, monster, ocean and themselves. Exhausted they sink back into their boat and lie there unconscious; too tired to care anymore about the storm. Too exhausted to find that in some magical fashion the storm has disappeared as though it were never there.
The writer of this makes some good points, but all in all, the points are about, or seem to me to be about, demanding of a woman like Angie Zapata a standard of behavior after her death that he doesn’t apply to Ray Andrade who’s still alive.
O, there’s no doubt in my heart that Ray saw the dragon and it was fiery. Probably the most fearsome thing he’d experienced maybe ever. His penis had been in the mouth of a woman who was born with a penis. How terrifying that must have been to him. How he must have roiled and toiled in his imagination all day back on July 17, 2008. Then, when she arrived back home, he grabbed her crotch and felt the worst heartache and humiliation he’d ever known.
To expunge that humiliation he chose to slay her.
I agree with the writer about Ray Andrade:
In the case of this woman being murdered…I really dont think he needed to go that far. In no way shape or form is it ok to KILL any living human being. It is not in your power to decide whether a persons life should be ended or not. He didn’t even have sex with the person yet. Yeah you got your dick sucked. Big deal, you got a hummer by a tranny…deal with it.
Surely Mr. Andrade had allowed his desire for sex with a 20-year old woman to override his thought of what might lie beneath the clothing of that woman. In that desire he found a terror so great he could only attempt to expunge it, to slay it, the best way he knew how. He killed the one who he felt had brought him to this pass. He neglected to find his own complicity in what had occurred.
In that regard, Mr. Andrade’s actions can be pretty well understood by us all. He discovered afterwards what he regretted. If he had to go back and do things over now, he’d probably do something else. Perhaps he’d simply learn that staring at a picture on a screen and “chatting” with a person who belongs to that picture requires a bit more discovery: of that person I speak with and of myself. Then, perhaps, I can follow a different tack that won’t leave me in a hurricane, beset by the horrors of the depths of my own soul.
That women of transsexing histories long for relationship and love simply comes down to a fact about us all. Those things we all desire. They are natural and even redeeming human qualities that we are driven to enact simply by dint of being human. We cannot live without relationship, without love and care.
I think my problem with the writer’s thoughts come with his next paragraph.
… this is the type of shit that Im talking about when people just want to to what they want to do to satisfy their own sexual nature and dont think about the consequences or how it may hurt other people, and in the end probably hurt you.
My final point: Even though it is your decision to live your life the way you want, you should not subject other people to dealing with it because YOU feel they should. Its just like when you meet a person who has children, or has an std, or anything that could potentially affect the other person in anyway, you should let them know. If you feel like you can not let them know because your pretty sure they won’t be able to accept it, then maybe that’s not the person you should be pursuing. So just be honest or leave them alone lest a situation like this occurs and then whose to blame?
The “blame” seems to devolve entirely onto the dead woman. The points about sex and even telling someone one’s history prior to revealing to them, or having them suspect, that one’s genitalia don’t meet the specifications the lover truly desires, well, those seem right to me. If one has not completed a genital surgery, then one should definitely allow a prospective lover to know prior to spending the night, even making a date with them. If one is to avoid danger, then one should do what’s reasonable to avoid that danger.
But, as always, there’s more. More that the writer doesn’t seem to regard as worthy of comment. My friend Whatsername, has seen fit to make the comments that perhaps reveal another side, another aspect of this case that not only makes sense, but also speaks to men who might find themselves in Ray Andrade’s shoes. Protection of one’s self is always a two-way street.
I will admit to being the “she” of whom Whatsername speaks in her statements, another interlocutor in the conversation we were all having at an internet forum. No doubt the others, a number of men for the most part, in the conversation felt that they didn’t partake of Mr. Andrade’s personal narratives of emotional horror. Yet, at base there was something that allowed the very notion of homophobia to be dismissed as “not on point.”
And that, for me, is the problem: an unwillingness to accept that even if homophobia hasn’t yet been accumulated among the many Anxiety Disorders of the DSM, it exists and that “transphobia” is simply “homophobia” most generally clothed in a dress. The basis remains the same: the fear of a penis, or the fear of the fact a penis used to be there. Fear of the one like me. Plain and simple, and from my experience, quite the point.
The Wikipedia article cited in the link above can give you an fairly deep and concise relation of the debates about whether or not the word is useful and how it can be used as a pejorative against certain social point-of-view. There is the argument that anything used against socially accepted tropes is, de facto, unfair and not useful. What many fail to realize is that the psychology-profession pervasively is used as a social control, a way of making the society’s overall values safe from criticism and not subject to valid questioning. Very often the disorders are disorders labelled such because the society at large is rarher uncomfortable with the ways people express themselves. Thus, the psychologist will help you cure whatever problems you have with the society. Our diagnoses often partake in “curing” things that make majorities uncomfortable.
One argument made in the discussion from which I have excerpted Whatsername’s reply was that “homophobia” is a “gimmick” that has no psychological validity. That was, in point of fact, true. Currently there is no “psychological” condition called “homophobia.” Nor is there one called “transphobia.” Although one 
might also opine that reactions that lead to murder and mayhem probably should be seen as being harmful to the ability of a person to accomplish without difficulty the normal tasks and responsibilities of daily living.” I believe that incarceration for murder does, indeed, severely hamper the individual’s ability to negotiate his daily affairs.
One might also presume to think that such murder does, indeed, do society some harm. If it doesn’t why bother to arrest the likes of Ray Andrade at all?
Thus, here is whatsername’s argument. I find it persuasive, but you may not. Still and I I thought the ideas would at the least provoke some discussion.
The other strain of thought, which she articulated and which my argument came from as well, is that it is not lack of disclosure but something deeper which causes rage at discovery of a trans or intersex past/present.
… there is something unique to the information of a trans/intersex past. That other information is routinely left out of discussion before sexual relations take place, and that discovery of it, even important, life impacting sorts of things, do not result in murder. Taking that into account, there must be a unique element to the information of T/I to the person hearing it, that DOES cause such reactions.
I think she hit the nail on the head, that unique element is homophobia.
The man in this case is not upset that you didn’t share information with him. Certainly a man you’ve been married to for 20 years probably IS upset at that, but that’s not the case we’re discussing here.
The man in this story is upset because you “lied” to him, you “fooled” him into think you’re a “real” woman. It’s not your words or your lack of words that creates this “lie”, it is your very existence and his response to your existence.
He is attracted to you, and by his definition you are not a “real” woman, but in fact a man. Thus he was attracted to a man, in his mind. His resulting rage is therefore rooted in homophobia.
This is also a larger part of what I was arguing before, these responses from these men aren’t about you (the T/I person) they are purely about themselves and their fear of what their attraction to you means to their self identity.
Perhaps here is a root worth following to find where and why it’s rooted so very deeply in a man’s life that he can only come to terms with it in violence. He seemingly knows no other way to handle the inchoate horror that rises in him. Were there no words, no thought, no walking away from that beast, possible for him, for many men? There seems to him (Andrade,) evidently, but one way in which to assuage the terror and the horror: kill, strike out physically.
It’s a rather common reaction among men. They quite often appear to release their emotional upsets through violence of a physical variety. I believe that you’ll find that women tend to be more verbal in our releases of emotional upset. (Please, no wild-goose chase about nature and nurture here. Please no arguments about essence and conditioning.) Whether the reactions are born within us or parts of extremely adept and long-standing conditioning, they exist. And they exist, I hope you’ll agree, as a general rule just in the way I’ve written them there.
Men often resort to physical expressions and women more often resort to verbal expressions of the emotional turmoil we feel within ourselves in many situations. Whatever the etiology of that, events generally show the validity of the generalization. That it’s not true in every instance may speak more to what Whatsername reports later in the quoted conversation.
This is why my cissexual husband wouldn’t respond this way. I discussed this with him last night, setting up a scenario wherein he meets an attractive woman, they go home together and when things get naked or shortly before, he discovers she has a penis. I asked him what he would do. He said he would be a mixture of disappointed and terribly amused. Amused at this “oops” moment, because he is simply not sexually attracted to penis. Disappointed that he’s not actually getting laid that night.
I asked him if he would feel this woman lied to him or deceived him. No, he said.
This is not to laud my husband, he’s a good guy and I love him but he’s far from perfect and yes we butt heads. But it does reflect something about hetero-cis men in my opinion. You say that they don’t need to examine their sexuality in depth the way she did. I couldn’t possibly disagree more. In fact I think het-cis guys are the ones who MOST need to examine their sexuality, because (as my husband reflects) I believe their homophobia is directly rooted in their NOT doing so.
Aye, there lies the rub. How willing are men, or women, to examine our deep-rooted presumptions about our sexuality and how often are men given a “pass” on that examination without the requirement being there for them to actually discover themselves?
Having had a raising in the “boy-world” I see this is a matter of fathers and sons and boys with other boys. The fear runs deep in the training of boy-children that there is something most unsettling, most decisively horrific in being attracted to a penis. (Given our overt symbolic praise for the penis: obolisks, skyscrapers, steeples, weaponry, this seems sort of ironic and senseless on it’s face. Shall we praise the penis or bury it?) One simply cannot be thus. For to be “gay” is often, by default, to be less-than. It is to be an object of derision and “no real man would ever be so attracted.”
The dragon sleeps until it’s startled awake and the overwhelming nature of its awakening overthrows the man in whom the dragon sleeps. Must it always be so?
I rather think not. But, in order to expunge the beast, to tame it and harness it, one must realize its existence and do some work to make the dragon domesticated rather than wild and fierce.
Throughout our history and tales gay men have shown time and again that they can be great warriors: Achilles, Richard Couer de Lion, The Theban Sacred Band, Alexander the Great and a host of other renowned fighters and warriors. A host of past and present athletes have been and are gay. Politicians are gay. Scholars and poets have among their numbers gay men. Engineers, doctors, lawyers, men who fill trash-trucks with trash, unemployed men, homelss men and rich men are all now and have been gay. In other words, gay men should actually partake in the same role-modeling we make for our sons as straight men do. Yet, to be seen as being “gay” is most often seen by boys as being less-than and wierd, even scary.
The examples of positively viewed gay males are simply endless, or at least so many that it would take years to recount them all. What man has never touched or even admired a penis, at least his own? I suspect the open nature of public toilets makes that a frequent if unspoken habit, seeing another’s penis. At least one notices other penises, even if the cultural mores dictate that one acts as if he doesn’t notice them at all.
As an aside, one of the endearingly hilarious aspects of a comparison of men’s and women’s toilets and how they differ is the dearth of conversation among strangers in the latter and the frequency of such conversation in the former. So, exactly why the hesitation to discuss and realize those fears, until, as for Ray Andrade, the discussion, the thought, the facing of the dragon, comes too late and the dragon hasby then taken on the aspect of Angie Zapata or Mathhew Shepherd? It’s unleashed before it’s remarked on, noticed, spoken of.
I wish I had an answer to that question. I have made attempts to discuss this with my sons, discussing with them their sexuality and the fears they will be given by their peers about all women, other men, and most of all, gay males. The general fear of gay males so far exceeds the statistical reason for the fear (less than 10% of population) that it simply shows itself to be another in a long list of “accepted wisdoms” that are never wise, but most surely are accepted. Can’t we do better than that?
When I read my friend’s essay I was moved to recognize her naming of the dragon. She’s very astutely placed a label on the difficulty so often apparent in both the murders of women with transsexing histories and the paucity of most investigations of those murders. The loathing and fear I believe we find shameful. Thus, we are unwilling to discuss it.
In USA we spend vast quantities of money in the making of sexualized advertisements, movies, tv shows, even newspapers, novels and short-stories. Our culture reeks of sex, but sexuality becomes oddly hidden by sex. We can watch it, laugh at it, feel fear or desperation over it, but we are, under no circumstances, to talk about it. It leaves us with feelings of shame, anger, disappointment, complete embarrassment. And all too often it leaves us with murder and mayhem and a willingness to not investigate murders for what they truly are, nor to find room for discussion of why such murders take place and how deeply our own hearts are troubled by the same dragon that Ray Andrade found within himself.
Instead, the story becomes: she should have taken better care of herself. She should have known better than to deceive him. Yet, as Whatsername so brilliantly points out, who was deceiving Ray Andrade? Who deceives the commentors on that blog I linked above? Is it truly the women with trans or intersex histories or is it the men themselves who are the deceivers of themselves?
That conversation has two avenues it should take. The one is tried and true and leaves us again and again with the same result: woman has sex, woman gets killed, man can be understood. Just exactly what would be the difficulty of having the entire conversation? Why should our sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, friends, and, yes, even ourselves, be protected and be given our sympathy when they are fooled? In facing what my friend calls us to face I rather think the fooling is self-delusion that such monsters do not exist. They are simply dreams we never meet, tales told around fires deep in the winter that leave us shaken and exhilerated by bringing us fear, but fear that is said to be far-distant from our real lives.
Why not place the responsibility where it belongs? On you and I, on us all, to stop accepting “accepted wisdom” as being a baseline from which we operate. Why not remove the raised-flooring and get into the basement where the bottom-line truly resides?
What is so fearful about the dragon of our own sexuality and our own accepted wisdoms that makes us unwilling to examine them for flaws, for deep-seated horror that poses, all too often, as wisdom or Truth and leads us almost inevitably to death and the resulting excuses for why we find this death or that death not worthy of investigation, not worthy of seeing from many angles, not worthy of recompense? For how long must we make excuses for murder and its pains?
I’d hazard a guess that for all the brave talk of “honesty” we ascribe mostly to ourselves and our friends that we are fearful of the dragon in the basement. We are unwilling to name it as Whatsername’s husband has named his dragon. We seem to be afraid to even look at it and so remain “completely shocked” when it spews its flame and wreaks havoc on our lives and those of strangers or the people we love.
Don’t you think, just maybe, that it’s time to discuss the entire problem rather than just the side that appeals to our conditionings?
So, if you found your identity threatened this week by people who aren’t like you then I just have to admit I feel a pang or two for what you’ve given up. You’ve given up your own humanity, your own empathy, to extol instead a sense that “they are not me, they don’t matter.”
Andrade, no doubt, liked what he saw, until he discovered his sight was not as particularly acute as he’d imagined it. Yes, I don’t know for a fact that he did so, but the aftermath would indicate to me that was so. 
How good will erections be? This could harm his body in untoward ways later in his life. Yet, in searching through archives I don’t find much in that regard about the female-objectified birth-control medications. Such concerns seem to have been, and perhaps still are judging by various reports in the past five years, not an issue when it comes to female bodies. Or at the least they become issues after they’ve been developed: certain faux estrogens and intrauterine-devices like the old Lippe’s Loop and others coming to mind immediately.
only reasonable answer is: the dragon’s responsible for her own egg. She decides if it hatches and maybe even when. Period. No state involvement in a so-called “best interest.” After all, the State doesn’t take responsibility or demand it for the hero’s seed does it? If she trusts him and he’s willing to be a part of the discussion, not the demand, then the hero gets a say as well. 
wood-on-fire. In our sleep we cannot know if, when we rise in the morning, cold and shivering, the heat can be aroused within the firepit and the flame rekindled to make a breakfast and so renew our strength for making the journey we’ve left before us.
Perhaps in the reading we can see that if we give way to the same vitriol and dismissal that we will become ogres as well, scary stories to frighten children at night in their dreams. Perhaps somewhere deeply within ourselves we know that. And so, we become unwilling to risk the chance. When I look at the matter that way my despair lifts. I imagine that there is some hope of understanding and appreciation even if another is unlike me. For in their unlikeness they are still human and all their lives show me is that I, too, partake in wonderful human possibility and the chance to assist in the alleviation of pain. 
and grown. Now his literary arts have achieved proficiency and his maths skills, according to the national test he finished last Spring, place him in the 95th-percentile of students across the nation beginning fifth grade. Quite an accomplishment for a mildly dyslexic child who recently despaired of ever learning to read. 
Instead we give ourselves to the seriousness (when we have transsexing-histories) of how dosages of hormones and drugs will affect our looks, our thoughts, our very lives. We define ourselves in our transitions as more or less successful depending on the ways we come to blend, the ways we look, the causes we adhere to, the pattern of body-chemistry and deportment tied to a change so great that many never seem to manage a safe-passage to the other side. Such serious business!
be serious about. (Wo)man is most nearly h(er)self when (s)he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. My life must be one of play for me to touch the Joy Mother’s granted me. Like learning to read well, the skill comes when the skill can be embraced with joy, with play and with delight. (As an example, watch your own child or another’s and see who reads better and how they go about it. The child who believes reading is a serious business will never quite read as well, or with the delight, of the one who finds within her reading joy, comfort, imagination and an understanding that the task is no longer a task, but a kind of wondrous and magical play.) 
water itself that will bring her, in time and inexorably, to the shining reaches of the inevitable ocean.
To A T 
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