Tag Archive | rants

Privilege Is Not Inherent

I recently saw an anti-transgender feminist rant that male-to-female transgender persons do not “lose” male privilege because it is inherent. Yet the feminist movement provides examples counter to this as does history itself. Let’s look at just a few.

In the 19th century, Irish began arriving in the United States. They were very strongly “othered” by the existing white establishment, who treated them badly (but not nearly as badly as people of color). Irish did not have “white privilege” simply by being white. In fact, white privilege was something that whites grant to each other, and if they do not grant it to someone else, it’s not there.

Another example is light skinned persons of color have frequently written about how they obtain and can exploit white privilege unless they reveal their racial heritage. And then it’s gone. They get othered from that moment forward by people who know.

A third example comes from the feminist community itself. Feminists have long argued about how strongly “butch” lesbians can and do gain male privilege in certain situations. They have also documented how that privilege vanishes when someone discovers they are dealing with a lesbian rather than another male. Again, privilege was not inherent. It was granted.

The reason I bring this up, and I refuse to link to the offending anti-transgender rant that spawned this blog post, is that the entire rant rested on the assumption that MtF transgender people “possess” male privilege and therefore every single conclusion in that rant is suspect. Logical conclusions that rest upon faulty assumptions are, themselves faulty. Therefore every conclusion in that rant is useless, suspect, and faulty.

LGBT Republicans, Stop Giving Me The ‘Single Issue’ Excuse

Oct25

I often ask LGBT Republicans why they vote for the GOP despite the GOP’s open hostility towards LGBT people. The answer is usually something along the lines of “I’m not a single issue voter!” Well, let’s look at that utter nonsense, shall we?

Economically, since 1980, tax rates on the wealthy have steadily fallen due to Republican influence. If tax cuts created jobs, we should be swimming in them, but we’re not. Instead, as the chart on the right shows, Republican led economics, since 1980, have led to the shrinking of the middle class. It’s a documented fact that the economy always does better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

Then there’s the deficit. Republicans love to scream about the deficit. But who are the only presidents in the last 50 years to reduce the deficit? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both Democrats.

And discussion of the deficit leads to discussion of the national debt. Who tripled the national debt? Ronald Reagan. Who was on course to double the national debt before he lost a second term? The elder George Bush. Who did double the national debt? The younger George Bush. And the younger George Bush did that with a completely Republican Congress after being handed a balanced budget that was paying down the national debt under Bill Clinton.

How, in the face of these facts, can any person believe anything the GOP says about economics? HOW? What sort of twisted mental outlook does it take to lie to yourself to convince yourself that you should vote for these failures and liars?

Republicans scream about Obama issuing executive orders, but he’s issued the lowest annual rate of executive orders since Grover Cleveland! Here is a chart showing the number of executive orders issued per year and Obama in no way issues more than Republicans. So that’s another lie.

And the orders Obama has issued have largely been because Republicans have refused to work with a president elected by massive popular vote as a means of punishing the entire nation for daring to reject their right wing extremist views!

When do you, as Republicans, stop and look at reality and realize that it is your party that is being obstructionist? That it is your party that is exhibiting every sign of racism imaginable? That it is your party that wants to institutionalize bigotry against LGBT people’s civil rights as some sort of “religious freedom”?

So economically, everything about the GOP has been a lie and destructive to you, the middle class voter. Every single thing. Have they been right ever about anything? Can Republicans ever even tell the truth economically?

Then there’s the false bogeyman of “gun control”. LGBT people who vote based on this single issue wrongfully claim that Democrats want to ban all guns. Nothing could be further from the truth. Howard Dean made the case several years ago that extremism (notice that word?) about gun control was a losing political issue, so the Democratic party looked at that and realized it was true, and walked away from that. Yet the Republicans still try to throw that charge against Democrats even as they try to ignore mass shooting after mass shooting. Even as they try to ignore massive levels of gun violence among our poor (and largely minority) communities. Yet the GOP continues to push absurd notions like every teacher being a walking armory rather than other measures that have worked in other nations. But nothing demonstrates that hypocrisy like the NRA’s own convention where guns were banned. I wonder why they did that, hmm?

Then there’s the issue of voter suppression. The GOP works tirelessly to enact laws that are aimed at suppressing would-be Democrats (poor minorities and women) from voting. They’e even admitted this. Here’s a collection of public Republican statements about the real effects and real intentions of “voter id” laws: Unbelievable GOP Statements on Voter Suppression

And yet despite openly saying that, Republican voters refuse to listen to what their own party leaders admit, and cling, irrationally, to the idea that voter id laws will clean up some non-existent voter fraud problem.

Then there’s the War Of A Thousand Lies. Iraq was the war where Republicans proved, over and over and over again, that they will lie about anything to start a war to make their corporate buddies rich. And that’s what happened. Cheney’s Halliburton raked in $35 billion alone from the Iraq war. And those nearly 1000 lies? They killed over 4000 Americans, wounded another 30,000+ Americans, and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. There’s no morality that can excuse what the GOP did to get us into the Iraq war or excuse the human costs of the Iraq war.

Then there’s the truth that the GOP has introduced over 120 anti-LGBT bills this year at the state and local levels around the United States. How many have Democrats introduced? Zero. The GOP hates you if you are LGBT. And thinking you can change the GOP from within? How’s that working out for the Log Cabin Republicans? In the 1970s, the GOP didn’t even care about LGBT people. They weren’t for us, but they were not rabidly against us. But today they are foaming at the mouth against LGBT people everywhere, trying to pass laws that would institutionalize bigotry against LGBT people, and yet some of you vote Republican?

I could go on and on, but I won’t. Voting Republican as an LGBT person is an act of insanity. Don’t give me the “single issue” voter excuse and dismiss me being LGBT as my reason for voting Democrat. I vote Democrat because Democrats are not war mongers, because Democrats are good for the economy, because Democrats want to improve and enforce reasonable restrictions on buying and owning guns, because Democrats have actually been good at controlling and even reducing the national debt, because Democrats want you to have health care, because Democrats believe you should not retire in poverty.

Voting Democrat as an LGBT person doesn’t make me a single issue voter. It makes you positively insane for believing all those Republican lies when the plain facts in front of your face tell you they are not true.

So what excuse do you have now for voting Republican? It’s sure not a “single issue, LGBT” excuse, is it?

A Public Service Announcement About Facebook, Network Connections, and Bad Programming

Sep22

Facebook is an amazing social media experience but technologically, it’s a pile of crap. And it’s not the only pile of crap out there either. A lot of work has gone into making the HTTP/HTTPS protocols useful as “live” protocols when they never intended as such. HTTP/HTTPS were always intended to grab static content and deliver it for viewing, not interaction.

But this is like VHS and Betamax. VHS was worse but it won that war. The world wide web now sits atop a mess of HTTP/HTTPS code that is really problematic and often unnecessary, and which often has unintended side effects.

Case in point – I recently lost access to my Facebook account. Every time I tried to login, pages would not successfully load. I checked all sorts of things, flushed browser caches, tried four different browsers on four different machines. None of this helped. I could login to a different account fine on a given machine but not into my account.

A friend came along and mentioned that she had similar issues before and solved them by going into Settings, choosing the Security tab, then choosing “Where You’re Logged In”. Since I couldn’t even login, I wasn’t sure this was helpful, but I persisted and I finally managed to login to my account on Chrome on my HTC One smart phone. When I did, I was shocked. There were a large number of sessions, from all sorts of places. One was from the Atlanta airport in 2013 – more than two years ago! Yet Facebook still counted this as an “open” session and apparently was trying to keep it alive.

I began killing clearly old sessions. After whittling that number way down to just the few machines I use around my house, I tried to login from my desktop PC again. It worked. The laptop worked. And while I don’t always do that, it worked logging in from my work laptop as well.

So I am making this post as a public service announcement, and for myself as well. I want to preserve this reminder on somewhere other than Facebook so I can get the specifics again, should I ever need it again.

But I will also try to avoid that and periodically check my open session count, just to be sure it doesn’t end up crazy huge again either.

September 7th, A Day To Remember

Sep7

It was 19 years ago today, September 7th, that I was wheeled into surgery to remove the remains of a tumor that had been destroyed by months of chemotherapy. Prior to that chemotherapy, I had been about 195 pounds. By the end I was around 140, and honestly probably more in the 130s. By the end of chemotherapy, most days were enough time awake to eat, maybe watch a single TV show or two, and then sleep, 20-22 hours per day. And then I was told the tumor was dead.

Chemotherapy was over in mid-July of 1996. I was given basically 6 weeks to gain a little strength, then the surgery would ensure that the remains of that tumor were gone.

What was supposed to be a 4 hour surgery became 10. The tumor had apparently been wrapped around my aorta and in dying to the chemo, it had become this rock hard substance. My surgeon visited me later and apologized for the extra time but said he was literally chipping that stuff off my aorta, like flakes of cement.

The tumor had also been wrapped around the nerve to the left vocal cord. That nerve is a bit weird and shows how evolution does things, not always in the most sensible way. That nerve comes from the spine, over to the heart first, then back up to the left vocal cord. There was no way to separate the remains of the tumor from that nerve so it got cut.

This left me unable to speak since the left vocal cord was flaccid and unable to flex to meet the right cord, since no neural signals could now reach it. To correct that, a plastic implant was inserted in that vocal cord in another surgery in early November of 1996. I still have slight numbness in my hands and feet from chemotherapy. My scalp was ravaged by chemotherapy and never really recovered. And my hearing, already a 20 decibel loss in my good right ear, became a 50+ decibel loss and I finally admitted that I needed a hearing aid.

Despite all this, I survived. But this all also made me think very hard about myself, who I was, what I’d done to myself emotionally and psychologically to get to where I was then. I also got to see my children graduate from high school, get married, go to college, have children of their own. It took me another 8 years, to about 2004, to really learn about and understand the words transsexual and transgender but I’d bought into another lie – that if I hadn’t transitioned early, I couldn’t transition at all. It was six more years after that, 2010, that the mother of all dysphoria episodes began that simply would not relent and which drove me to the brink of suicide, before I finally admitted I needed help, and with prodding from Julie Jeznach, I finally sought that help.

The rest, as they say, is “herstory”. People to whom I gave my life, my time, my love, my earnings, have rejected me. That’s their choice and I have to accept that, but it’s still bitter. And knowing what I know today, I can honestly say that I do have regrets. We’re not supposed to have regrets and I know that I can’t change the past so I don’t plan to wallow in these regrets at all. But I do acknowledge them. And if I’d known 30 years ago what I know now, I would have just walked away instead of worrying about other people’s emotions and opinions.

So I write this today with my younger trans friends in mind. Being trans can suck. People can be ugly, cruel, callous, hateful. But we’re trans and we can’t escape that truth. My advice to you, to each of you, is make your decisions for yourself first. Anyone who can’t handle the decisions that you need to make for you neither loved you nor is your friend so is not worthy of your consideration of their opinions.

While I am very happy with where I am in life right now, in one sense, I write this today to my younger trans friends to say “Don’t be me.” Don’t put others ahead of yourself. Don’t defer what you need to be happy to make others happy first. Most of the time they won’t care about you. Not really. And those that do care? They’ll have your back and be there for you.

Have a good September 7th, a good Labor Day, and a good day for yourself first and foremost.

A Visit With Dr. Chettawut And Other Random Thoughts

Aug11

It’s Wednesday morning in Bangkok and I had my final visit with Dr. Chettawut today. He said I am healing “beautifully” so far. We took photos and while I guess I look less than stellar, no makeup and clearly physically tired, I’ll excuse myself with it having been just three weeks since surgery.

My only remaining medication is my antibiotic, which I was told to finish. Judging by what’s left that will be sometime next week.

My dilation schedule with #2 changed this week. That’s the dilator that’s getting most of the time now with #1 just basically helping me to relax and loosen up. Strangely enough, unlike a lot of the other women I’ve met here, my most relaxed session is the morning, and I’m at my tightest in the evening, so that session takes the longest.

I’ve stood a few times looking at myself in the mirror now, both dressed and undressed, both frontal and sideways. I don’t think I’m doing too badly for a woman my age either. And I will admit that I’m starting to see what my daughter must see when she teases me about a bikini next summer.

I recently participated in a long Facebook thread started by a woman who posted publicly (if you don’t want dissenting comments, post for friends only!) about her opposition to transgender protection regulations in a Houston suburb school district. I provided fact after fact, but these people refused to consider these facts, or the professional opinions of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, or the American College of Physicians. They refused to accept the scientific research, with one paranoid delusional claiming that science and professional medicine had been taken over by “liberals” and “Satan”. Well, buddy, when you’re that paranoid and delusional, you are the one that needs psychiatric help, not transgender kids. And they refused to accept the criminal evidence provided by the states and major cities that have enacted transgender protection ordinances, again claiming “liberal” conspiracy.

This little discussion was absolute proof that these bigots don’t care about facts. They just twist facts to try to justify their bigotry. They totally lack the compassion, empathy, and love that Christ himself told them to show.

That’s what dealing with transphobic bigots is like. Deny, deny, deny, fall back on “cuz Gawd”. It’s a blatant display of willful scientific and medical ignorance. And they are often proud of it!!! You’re left with a sick sinking feeling that these people are the exact sort that would gladly load cattle cars with human beings just so long as nobody disturbs their comfort. And granting equal rights under the law to transgender people? They just don’t want to. One practically admitted he wanted someone else to mock. These are sick, sick human beings.

In other matters, Tuesday evening (last night), Julie and I went to the Japanese restaurant just outside the Tesco department store about 5 blocks down the street. It was a feast for 950 Baht total (roughly $26). We got the beef and seafood. They put hot coals in the little burner in the center of your table and you cook your meal there, with over half a dozen different seasonings provided. We had more beef than we could eat, plus mega-shrimp, small salmon steaks, and various vegetables we could put on the grill as well. There was also a rice bowl that basically looked like fried rice unstirred, so we stirred that and ate about half of that as well. Julie and I split the salad and it was gone, and we each also got Miso soup with the meal. All in all, I came home stuffed and happy. It as delicious.

Today Julie is at the Tiger Temple. I have her looking for a few things for me for other people, plus I told her I wanted my own stuffed tiger if they’re available. She’ll be gone all day as that trip is 3 hours drive each way north of the city and 4 hours at the temple proper. She’s going to try to sign up for the chance to get a tiger photo where the tiger puts its head in her lap. I hope she gets it! If I can return someday, I want to see the Tiger Temple too, when I am healthier.

Our trip to the other side of the world is drawing to a close. Julie and I will see one of the local temples tomorrow, and maybe one other local sight on Friday. Saturday we rest and pack, as our ride back to the airport comes to the hotel at 9pm that evening and our flight back to the US begins just after midnight. We’ll arrive back in Houston on Sunday, August 16th, at about 8:30 am at international terminal D. I need to help Julie get over to terminal B for her flight home to Memphis that leaves around 10:30 so it will be close. We have to come in through customs, collect luggage, take the train to terminal B, then she has to check in at the counter and check her bag again for the separate flight home. We’ll make it but we’ll be busy. After she’s set, I’ll arrange to meet my ride outside terminal B at the arrivals pick up area. And then home, where the process of settling back in, re-establishing my dilation and massage schedules begins, and where I get comfortable for a week before resuming work on Monday, August 24th.

To all who have helped distract me on this trip, keeping my mind off the difficulties of healing early on, thank you. You have my gratitude for simply being there. But don’t worry. I’m not going away, and as I recover, I do hope to meet more of you who are in and around the Houston area.

Liz – Day By Day

A long journey to find myself