To A T

Sometimes there are days when everything seems like it should be different.

Yesterday my son and I sat at this computer and watched the inauguration of President Obama (has a sort of nice new ring to it, no?) The fanfare was there, yes. The sense that just maybe there’s still a chance for us as a people, for us as a nation, to not only place our internal divisiveness behind us, but to also place eight years of corruption, no-bid contracts, constitutional subversion, a policy that acted unilaterally in almost every regard, and the rabid attempts to make certain that government is too broke (financially) to work anymore and that it should simply fold its tent and move elsewhere so the “rightful rulers” of our republic can take their “rightful” places and do whatever they wish for their own benefit under the investigation and scrutiny it requires. Let’s wash the ideas and the actions away forever. Let’s actually herald and work to make a new day. 

There were speeches and oaths taken on ancient (by American standards) Bibles, but not taken on The Constitution which, it seems to me and at least some others, they should be taken upon if we deem our constitution as the abiding principles that govern us. There lies a digression and alternate route I do not wish to take this morning, so I’ll leave it there. 

But, for me, and oddly enough for the ten-year old boy who sat here with me then, there came a moment, a set of moments, that were the most stirring, the most eloquent and the most heart-rendingly poignant of the entire ceremony and the followingg displays of pomp, circumstance and gaiety of the day: the benediction by the Reverend Joseph Lowery.

This was the place I cried. For that short and eloquent prayer was for me the one thing that will live on as word for the day. 

God of our weary years;

God of our silent tears. … 

This old man’s words came thropugh the screen, the microphones and out across the National Mall like a flash of lightning, like a beautiful counterpoint to the convocation by Rick Warren (whose appointment so many of us in the LTBG community decried.) I have no idea anymore what Rick Warren said. I only recall parts of what Joe Biden and Barack Obama said. About the only thing I can recall clearly now beyond Reverend Lowery’s prayer, is Chief Justice, John Roberts’ inability to get right the oath of office as he administered it to the new President.

This man exhorted us to “beat tanks into tractors” and encouraged us toward a time that  “let justice roll down like waters.” He came to his conclusion first with humor and a set of tropes long known in the black church, but perhaps more unfamiliar to people with other backgrounds, playing across the words of “Jesus Loves Me” and the Civil Rights Movement:

….help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.”

Afterwards this call, again, not an unfamiliar one at all to many gathered there and around tv screens and computer screens: “Let all who do justice and love mercy say amen and say amen.”

In loud response of the crowd to that second “amen” I found myself saying it at this screen as though I were there, typing it as well into my Facebook/CNN interface, for there was something about Joseph Lowery’s earnest pleas and something about the hopoe that’s grown within me over the past few months, something about the blond head laid across my left arm that made that prayer ring in me and that broke the dam of anxiety I had harbored for weeks. 

Perhaps in the coming days my anxiety for our nation, our people, for people I have come to love, respect and enjoy my contact with will come to fruition. I hope not, for my fear revolves around the fact that the Bushites and Karl Roves, Ann Coulters, Bill O’Reillys and numerous others have done their work far too well to have it ameliorated by the eloquent and bright man who swore his oath of office on a cold and breezy day in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Perhaps the promise of government of, by and for the people shall indeed perish from this earth and be supplanted, like it was supplanted in the Augustan imperium in Rome which made plain what had been wrought by Sulla: a government strictly of the very wealthy and the best-heeled. 

It seems to me that we are close to that already, perhaps just the slightest push will set us free of any semblance of democracy and dry here the streams of “justice rolling like waters.” For I also rose this morning and after a time went here, to my compatriot, Zoe Brain’s, blog and found this: 

At just barely 21, I was jumped by two or three guys in the evening as I walked away from a bus stop, where I had gotten off. I was about half a mile from my apartment that was over a family friends garage.

I don’t remember much, excepted something hitting me from behind, and I hit the ground.
I remember going down and everything was fuzzy and muddled.

The end results were this:
A smashed in skull and face, with severe damage to my left eye socket and cheek bone. The left eye suffered optic nerve damage, that left me with a permanent blurred vision in it.
The right temple was shattered and the upper part of my skull was seriously cracked and was swelling.
My jaw was cracked in half at the chin, at I had a molar knocked out. All of my front teeth were push in. The left side of my jaw was broken at the rear.
I had multiple broken ribs,with a punctured lung,and a smashed dislocated left shoulder. Which has never healed correctly.
My pelvic bone was broken into pieces.
The right hip bone socket and leg bone had been damaged, leaving me with a slight limp today.
I was slashed multiple times across the back, sides, thighs.
I had been savagely gang raped, and my anus was torn and bleeding profusely. The colon was torn too.

I somehow had crawled out the drainage culvert, and up onto the sidewalk where I collapsed. How I managed it, I’ll never know.
A passing motorist saw this heap in the grass between the street and the sidewalk, and stopped to investigate. What he found horrified him. He called 911. Others stopped to help I am told.
I was rushed to a hospital about 3 miles away. The EMS people, told the police I wouldn’t make it. I was in a coma. I had stopped breathing twice on the way there, and had lost to much blood.
I was rushed into a emergency surgery room, and prepped for surgery to try and save me. When they took my ripped up dress off, then they saw it. I wasn’t a female, and they immediately thought I was a cross dresser. The staff dilly dallied a while until the friends I was staying with came rushing in and raised Holy Toledo with them. Then they changed their tune, and began to work on me.
It is my understanding, that when the staff told the police about my gender, they had a good laugh about it. My parents had been notified and arrived the next day. Then the real Hells Fury started once my mother and sister were there.

I was in emergency surgery for over 3 hours just to stabilize me. I actually flat lined multiple times. It was touch and go for the next 48 hours.
I would face many more surgeries to actually replace and repair everything that had been damaged.

My mom, my sister, and my and their friends cried all night long.
No one thought I’d survive. I remained in the coma for three weeks.When I started to come out the initial coma, they induced a second one. They felt my mind wouldn’t have been able to handle it then.
The police told my mother and sister, that I was raped and the guys who did it, tried to murder me. They used some kind of heavy blunt objects,plus they mercilessly stomped and kicked me, and they cut, stabbed and slashed me over and over.

My sister has told me that I looked a war casualty…and had more lines running in and out of me, than she thought would be feasible.

Technically I had been dead…and I had been brought back to life.

The police think that either the attackers knew me, and stalked me, or it was random, and they freaked when they didn’t find a vagina. However my mouth and anus were violated, because tests indicated thus. The perpetrators were never found or arrested.

It took over 25 total surgeries; to reconstruct my face, putting in stainless steel plates/plastic and assorted parts, reset my front teeth, try to save my left eye vision that never did come back right,repair the cheek bone with a plastic one, replace my pelvic bone with Stainless and Nylon, steel pin my thigh socket, and reattaching the femur to the socket,repairing my left lung, and one plastic surgery after the other for over two years. I was in the hospital for almost three months, and then bed ridden at home for another two.
I have scar lines all over my back,sides, and legs where I had been sutured, and the faint scars from surgeries. Today, I won’t wear a two piece bathing suit.
I have a slight speech lisp and cannot remember the attack at all. After I came out my my 2nd induced coma, I thought I had been hit by the bus somehow.

When my mom and sister held my hand crying, telling me what had happened, I was so shocked, that I passed out. All the mirrors in my hospital room had been removed for my own good. I didn’t see myself for a long time. I could feel all the braces and heavy bandages on me, and I hurt something awful, unless the nurse came in, then she open the drip line and I’d drift off..finally I was released, and was taken home.

I didn’t leave the house for months, and everyone constantly kept an eye on me.
I wouldn’t and couldn’t be alone for almost a year. I was scared to death of the dark. I never knew how many loving friends and family I had, until I came home to convalesce. The out pouring of love was incredible. It took more than 4 years to get everything repaired as best as it could be. I was off hormones for a year and half, in the beginning, then was allowed to go back on them. I had lost a lot of shape and weight.

{ the damaged/replaced pelvic stirrup, and the finely cracked hips bones around the repair, nearly held me back from SRS. There was great concern about whether or not I’d ever be able to have sex, and if I broke it again, I might lose my female genitalia from more surgeries. After many long physician conferences, they agreed to go ahead}

I wasn’t as lucky as I thought I was…I have never taken it for granted since then. Today, I am almost never alone. Someone is always with me. The cost of this nearly life ending event, was over one hundred thousand dollars after all the bills were compiled. Insurances paid for about 80% of it, and my parents paid the rest.

It is a blessing now, to have a very protective husband, live in a private gated community, and have home security as well.

There really are very horrible people out there…I encountered them.

Again, I wept.

I’ve recounted here my own experience at 19. I had thought it was bad, and I suppose it was. But after reading this I saw that what I experienced I walked away from. This woman had to be carried away from her experience and then revived in a hospital. My pain and fear, I fear, can never compare to hers. I’m grateful that she can write her horror today and I only wish her peace and confidence.  

The thing that strikes me most, however; is that our mutual stories are not unusual at all among women of transsexed histories, nor among those we refer to as transgender. Nor are the experiences foreign to many lesbian women and gay males. Nor to many people who are not lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender or transsexual. The violence done to us through fear and loathing, unreasoning discomfort are, indeed, very much like the lynching of Emmitt Till, the burnings and torture of countless men, women and children of color in this republican democracy of ours and in other states and regions across the planet.

How does one, finally, distinguish the lynching of a boy from the crucifixion of Matthew Shephard, the murder of a lesbian, or the murder of a transgender/transsexual? What fine line separates these events from one another and makes some horrible and others merely “asked for?” 

But most of all, for I feel they should know better, are the appeals of my own sisters to decline at any price the legal recognitions, legal enforcement of protections and psychological and social acceptances of any but those of us who obtain surgeries and follow their appeals for a rolling back of acceptance for those they feel will besmirch in some way their identities their gender.

The fact remains, inconvenient though it is: how does one truly tell the difference? Does a surgery make some magical divide between “real” and “illusory?” If it does, how does anyone make the distinction prior to the surgery? How, when she was 21 did that woman whose story is above, were the attackers, the hospital personnel, the police, even her family to know that she was “real” and not “illusory” in her transsexuality? At 21 was it somehow ok for her to be beaten mostly to death? For, afterall, between her legs was a penis.

I’ll submit merely this: there is no way to tell and my identity, my gender, my sex is hardly worth a second of contemplation when it comes to the safety and well-being of other human beings. My philosophy, my movement, my sense of what is my right makes not a handful of dust in comparison to the safety, well-being and lives of everso many others who have not yet had their surgeries, perhaps never shall. I cannot parse justice and security so finely, so truly, that my thoughts on an internet forum, on a list-serve, can somehow override my sense that other human beings are treated with disdain, fear and hatred by those who are so like me that I share the earth and the air with them.

Enough is simply enough. It’s time we realized that our desires and our fears pale in comparison to the very real lives of others. It’s time we realize that not only “yes we can” but that “yes, we must” release justice, dignity, hope, and humanity so that they all roll like waters across our lives and through our lives so that even the least, even the most hated can recieve something other than being put into danger and death by our prim and proper dilletantism about who is and who is not like me. 

It’s past time for us who are transitioned to recall that there was a time when we, like those we would refuse protection to because they somehow offend our senses of our own validity, also had genitalia that did not match the genitalia our brains knew should be there. It’s past time that we realize that during a “real life test” or the beginnings of a transition done under the WPATH guidelines and in accordance with the dictates of our endocrinologists, surgeons and therapists that we could not and cannot be differentiated from those who are in thatposition today or who dress-up on weekends or daily.

Are we so ignorant, arrogant and unprincipled that we would say simply: “So what, they will make me look bad,” “I had to go through those fears, why shouldn’t they,” “They should learn that life is that way,” or “But this is about who I am, not who I want to look like or pretend to be.” 

It’s past time that we begin to get a clue: there IS no visible or distinctive difference that allows the finely wrought discrimination in law or in fact between ourselves and those hated others. The fact of our shared humanity should tell us that anyway. 

God of our weary years;

God of our silent tears …. 

Explore posts in the same categories: Barack Obama, Harry Benjamin Syndrome, hope, Humans, Inclusion, Joseph Lowery, Justice, Law, Rape, Transgender, Transsexuals

This entry was posted on January 21, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under Barack Obama, Harry Benjamin Syndrome, hope, Humans, Inclusion, Joseph Lowery, Justice, Law, Rape, Transgender, Transsexuals. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Barack Obama, Hatred, Inclusion, Joeseph Lowery, Justice, Legal Protections, Rape, Trangender, Transsexuals

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