Tag: rant

Things One Can Do With Language

Order dinner
Find a bathroom
Listen

Make a phone call
Write a blog
Talk to the press

Interview a subject
Deny
Affirm

Tell the truth
Tell a lie
Create a web of lies

Come out of the closet
Be your true self
Hide from yourself

Fall in love
Marry
Divorce

Tell your grandkids
What it was like
In the good old days

Break the law
Write the law
Change the law

Be a slave
Own a slave
Outlaw slavery

Run for President
Start a war
Stop a war

Invent God
Follow God
Refute God

Chant
Sing
Write

Dear Editors: I Am Not My Transition!

I’ve heard back from more than one editor, and a couple of agents as well, that a story about my childhood that I’ve been sending around is “just a chapter” because it includes a scene of me directly trying to deal with my gender issues: they all seem to want to make the whole 6,000 word story I’ve submitted about that one page-long scene. I don’t have the opportunity to explain that the story I’ve sent them doesn’t really have anything to do with “transition” per sé, because cover letters need to be brief and professional. If I did take the space to try to explain this, it would feel like I’m apologizing for my work if I were to drill down into aspects of my story in a preface that only the editor will ever see. A story needs to stand on its own.

So I’m writing this post.

I’ve been told to just leave that part of the story out, but that seems just as unreasonable. Physically, it would be possible to do that, and while that would certainly bypass the issue of my “problematic” identity, to leave that important part of myself out of my story would feel like I’m retreating into the closet that I’ve fought so hard not to be trapped in. From my point of view, the choice I’m being presented with is either to leave out this important aspect of who I am or focus my story on the expected trope of transition.

Imagine requiring a story about a black kid to include some kind of resolution to the “problem” of their blackness, or else leave that out of the story entirely. Such an expectation from an editor would immediately brand them as racist. And yet, any time I have heard an actual critique of the piece I’m discussing, this is what I hear back.

I’m trans every day. Getting my hormone prescription was only one day, one story. There have been so many stories in my life: I was trans in all of them. My being trans is just a trait, not my whole identity. I am not my transition. That’s not the only story I have to tell. Surprisingly, the vast majority of what’s happened in the time I’ve been walking the Earth has nothing to do with a particular course of medical treatment.

I refuse to accept that any memoir I write needs to either deny who I am or be about the gatekeepers who OK’ed my medical transition. I am grateful to them, but at least one of these people has had me sign an NDA. They don’t want the publicity, and I’m OK with that.

This particular memoir piece is a story about a kid who is being bullied. The fact that the main character is trans is important, but not central, and the resolution to the story is not going to come from waiting the thirty seven years it took me to get my medical transition started: the situation is much more immediate than that, so the resolution must be, too. That resolution must be about being bullied and how the central character, who happens to be trans, deals with it.

By the logic of these literary gatekeepers, no story can be self-contained, because there is always some central issue in a person’s life that won’t resolve into a nice little package with a ribbon and a bow on it. Requiring a self-contained solution to such a global problem as gender incongruence is unreasonable. Conversely, you can live with such an unresolved issue for a very long time, while many other things happen. I can tell you that this is so from personal experience.

Unfortunately, it’s been a major obstacle to getting my work published. It’s quite frustrating.

The End of an Empire

In the example of the medieval Roman Empire, I see lessons for us in the modern era.

It took centuries for the Byzantine Empire to fall. In fact, Constantinople was sacked on 4 separate occasions: in 1081 when Alexios I Komnenos wrested power from Nykephoros III Botaneiates, in 1204 when the Latins — agents of the Holy Roman Emperor in Rome — took the city from the Byzantines, in 1261 when the Nicaeans under Michael VII Palaiologos retook the city and made it once again the seat of the Empire, and then in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed II finally ended the Roman Empire for once and all time.

I have been thinking about the process by which the Empire failed, and trying to contextualize what happened nearly six hundred years ago against what is happening here and now, in the US. There are a few points I linger over: things that cause me both trepidation and hope.

When Alexios came to power, some of the factors that led to the demise of the Empire were already in place. The Empire had been stable for centuries in part because succession to the throne was generally orderly. Alexios took power by coup: he had been a successful general, and from that platform was able to raise enough support from the army to mount an attack on the capital. For most of the history of the Empire to that point, civilian and military leadership had been kept separate. Alexios was one of a stream of Generals to have risen to power in the years preceding his ascension to the throne. One thing that can be said of Alexios is that he fostered a period of apparent stability: he himself held power for almost 40 years, and his next two successors had similar reigns.

In addition to altering the power structure of the Empire, Alexios also created a situation, out of apparent necessity, which contributed greatly to the eventual demise of the Empire. The Emperor Nykephoros, whom he had supplanted, had drained the Empire’s finances. At the time that Alexios took power, the Empire was facing an invasion threat from Robert Guiscard, a Norman who had risen to power on the Italian peninsula and then set his sites on the throne of the Byzantine Empire. In order for Alexios to meet the threat of invasion by Guiscard, he had to negotiate help from another foreign power: the Venetians, who had a substantial navy. He made certain promises to them, including the privilege of importing and exporting goods to Constantinople without paying any tax. The Venetians also gained control of a section of the capital. Eventually, similar deals were made with other Italian city-states, including the Genoans, and the Pisans. This caused the Empire to lose a crucial revenue stream, and they were never able to recover from the loss. In the end, it also gave the Latins entrée into the city so that they could take it from the Byzantines themselves in 1204: the second sacking of Constantinople.

Yet even from this, the Empire was eventually able to reconstitute itself for a time. Remember: they were Romans. That identity sustained them through some serious crises, and even an apparent collapse. I don’t wish to draw the parallel too closely, but my take on this story includes the suggestion that a great country like the Byzantine Empire, or the United States, does not fall easily or quickly.

That demise the Byzantines ultimately faced at the hands of the Ottoman Turks was centuries in the making. Perhaps the alarmists and naysayers in our own time are too pessimistic. Perhaps this country is not so near its end as they might suspect. And perhaps, given the will and the force of commitment to our better natures and our strengths as a nation, we might yet survive and even thrive in the coming centuries.

Goodbye, Roseanne.

The value of the Roseanne Connor character was the other side of the double edge that got her fired: frankness, a willingness to put her ideas out there, regardless of possible consequences. There’s bravery in that, and the risk factor made for good comedy, most of the time. The show Roseanne also felt essential in this time as an avenue for the dialog that we have long since stopped even attempting to have as a nation.

I have family who are like her — the character and the flesh and blood woman — in some ways. Though most people who might happen across this post might not agree with me, I think this culture lost an important opportunity today, a chance to dialog across this widening chasm between those of us on the left and those on the right. The point of the show was to look beyond the ideological stances that divide us so sharply and remind ourselves that even though we disagree, we can at least try to see each other as people: as family.

Still, what Roseanne was fired for, she absolutely should have been fired for. It was a gross betrayal of the very thing that was most crucially valuable about Roseanne. There’s nothing defensible about the things she put in that tweet. Those remarks were personally directed and indefensibly mean-spirited. They were uncalled for and bore no constructive value. In fact, quite the opposite was true: they were meant to wound and they betrayed an attitude of dehumanization and cruelty. Their ilk has been with us for centuries, and there is nothing to be said in response to them. One can only dismiss as irredeemable the person who would invoke those ideas at this point in history.

On the other hand, Roseanne has said harsh things about trans people. Those comments about bathrooms and trans folk still need to be addressed whenever possible, because public cognizance of us as normal, productive, well-adjusted members of society is new — not the truth of them, but the currency of them in our society. I hate to hear the sorts of things those who hate us say, but I would rather those things get said out loud than thought and not said, because I can’t respond to hateful, wrong ideas about who I am, about my experience, if I never hear them stated. If ideas like that can’t be said in the public sphere, people will only transmit that hate among the like-minded, in private. If somebody is hiding what they think of people like me for fear of the consequences of speaking their minds out loud, that’s far more dangerous for me.

I’m reminded of sitting with family recently, after my transition, an uncomfortable and impenetrable silence between us. Those people no longer talk to me. If only someone — either my cousins, or my aunt, or, for that matter, if I — had spoken up, said what we were thinking, maybe we could have found a way to still be talking, even across the divide and disagreement we would still both have between us, rather than the huge, resounding silence that is all we share now.

This November, my state (Massachusetts) is going to vote on my right to exist via a ballot initiative. I would very much rather have the conversation about who I am and whether I am a danger or not, as painful and frustrating as it is, than to have to worry about what’s going to happen with people who think one way and talk another. It’s the way they think that will determine what happens when they vote, not what they’re willing to say when I’m in earshot.

Roseanne was the one TV show making the attempt to conduct some sort of dialog between conservatives and progressives, on issues that are, frankly, life or death for many. It was rightly cancelled due to the words of its star. Unfortunately, I fear that the failure of this lone attempt at having a conversation is a sign that it’s already too late for us to find our way to be one national family again.