Usually when I write something really angry like this I delete it or revise it to be polite and logical. This time I'm leaving the raw edges on. I'm blinking tired of being considered a failure—not a freak, I like and admire freaks—but a failure, a wannabe, an assimilationist who can't make the grade.
Whenever I read a magazine or newspaper article about a transsexual person (almost always a 'male-to-female' person, though there are plenty of transmen and others around) I find some mention of "the surgery that made or will make her a woman." Even if someone has lived for decades in their chosen role, there has to be some reference made to "what's down there." This makes me so angry I could just spit. (My mom used that phrase a lot.)
I'm angry that journalists feel they must talk about private issues they would never raise in any other context. Do interviews with aging statesmen inform us whether they can still get it up? Are we told which parts are missing from veterans wounded in action? Does the mother of the year need tightening up down there? Is the first lady in need of extra lube after menopause? I'm sure the public would love to know, so why not tell us?
I beat my head against the wall until it's bloody (I actually did that as a teenager) in rage at the simplistic model of sex and gender reinforced by articles that speak of a surgeon's knife as creating a woman from a man, while carefully mentioning the person's height, large hands and square face to support the knowing snicker that even the surgery is not enough. "I wouldn't be caught dead with one. And if I were, someone would be dead all right, but not me, if you get what I mean." I get it, and you're all guilty as sin of the next murder of a trans person. And the next, and the next.
Hypocritical bastards. What one of you is so certain of your own gender and sexuality that you dare say there is one true way to be a human being? How about doing some real reporting? Write about the way people actually are, instead of zooming in on the unfortunate few who cannot escape public notice. You're the ones marking us as targets, as sick perverts pretending to be what we are not and cannot be.
Gender is whatever the television shows and glossy magazines sell us, and sex is taboo; you're supposed to know only one set of genitals other than your own, and that in the dark, and then only if you're properly married. Sexuality is worse than taboo; a mention of masturbation is more than one's career is worth. Bog help you if you admit to anything kinky with another human being, even in the privacy of your own bedroom. (That goes for straight-acting gays and lesbians, too; you may be out, but so is being different in any visible way.)
Blind fools. Have you not minds of your own? Can you not own up to your own desires? Do you imagine we don't know why you talk about us? But it's not only us, "All the papers had to say, was that Marilyn was found in the nude." (Thank you, Elton.) Voyeuristic bastards.
Now that I've covered you all with electronic spittle, just what do I propose you write about? I have two words for you, for the price of one: sex and gender. You could get a Pulitzer, easy, if you'd use that mighty pen to truly write about the human condition, the fears and uncertainties that everyone has, the fragile facade of heterosexual normalcy. But you're not brave enough for that. No one is, until their only other option is watching their own blood swirl slowly down the drain....
That's how I feel, here in East Lansing on November 24, 2000.