Protecting Marriage

When senator Sam Brownback of Kansas says "We're not going to stop until marriage between a man and a woman is protected," I can't help but wonder what the hell he is talking about. How is it unprotected? Does a same sex marriage undo a straight marriage?

The rhetoric has gone back and forth on the same sex marriage debate for several years now, and I still don't get it. Marriage is nothing more than two people saying I do to a series of commitments that they want to make to one another. Some make that commitment in the presence of God -- through whatever faith they believe in -- and others forgo religious presence and simply have it witnessed and sanctioned by the state.

The reality is that people can make a commitment to each other without approval of the church or the state, and have done so for centuries. The real argument is simple: Does America provide equality to all of its citizenry equally?

We as Americans need to grasp the concept that we are a country of diverse people, cultures, races, and religions. As such, whatever discussion that is on the table has to be addressed from multiple angles. Take the situation and reverse it, pretend you're in the minority as a straight couple. You pay your taxes, you're home owners, you go to work every day, you're good neighbors, you give back to your community, BUT, you're not allowed to have a formal recognition of being a couple with your lover, AND, you're penalized financially for it. Is that America? The problem we suffer is age old: they're are some people that believe they have a monopoly on the truth and they alone get to decide what it right and wrong.

While some Americans are uneasy with the same sex marriage concept, this argument is not as much about gay rights as it is about a free society. If we allow the state to determine something as personal as who we can love (between consenting adults) it will ripple into so many others areas of people's personal lives that the thought is scary, and when that ripple does hit home opponents of same sex marriage will regret their stance.

The Religious Right Preach but ...

I have always found it interesting how people come to their opinions about things. They don't seem to develop opinions; they just seem to have them. Being very out as a transgender person I find myself from time to time confronted by the religious right. Some, like Robert Knight, will email me a statement supported by something he has read somewhere, sometimes out of context and sometimes not. Other times they infiltrate my Yahoo group and pose as transgender girls and then post their party line. The funny thing is that had they simply said who they were I would have allowed them into the group anyway (if they wanted to have an honest discussion on the issues.)

"James," one of the posers in my club a month ago rattled off 5-10 posts a day. The group got a little anger but I let him have his say. After all, I can't say one thing and then do another. So, unlike them I allowed them to have their say and responded accordingly. In time it was starting to wear thin however, because "James" never responded; he just preached. After I put him on moderated status (meaning his posts wouldn't go to the group until I approved them) he went ballistic, calling my a bitch etc. We had a few private emails back and forth and suddenly the man who was posting 5-10 times a day went silent. It seems he needed an audience, thinking he was actually swaying minds.

But statements in the absence of the dialogue to support those statements is just arrogant and ignorant. Arrogant because they assume they are right, and ignorant because the statements they put forth arn't even their own, and moreover, many of the statements they make are flat out wrong, supporting the notion that these guys have never really researched the topic that they are preaching about.

It isn't his opinions that bother me, although in most cases I disagree with them, but rather the unwillingness of these guys to engage in real dialogue about them. They seem to have lots of statements to make, but dodge any questions put to them or discuss any evidence that may dispute their position.

They tend to be sort of like hit-n-run drivers that are here one minute and then gone as soon as it is time to face up to their actions. I can't help wonder what they are afraid of, after all, according to them, I'm just a guy in a dress, and for them how much of a challenge could that be? 

As always, be happy, be safe, and think pretty.

GenderEvolve: Candidly Transgender

GenderEvolve: Candidly Transgender

Transgender Box

Fear can singularly be the most debilitating emotion we as humans experience. And, to bare one’s soul may be the most frightening of all human endeavors. Fear is instinctive. We sense it when we are in immediate danger. But what about long term danger, do we sense that? For most of my 47 years, my life was molded by a quiet, undetectable force of expectation – both my own and others. Are the goals we strive for really our own? How do we know? And, what if you dream of what your life should be, only to wake up one day to find out that what you’re living is not it? Can you change who you are, should you?

I’ve been transgender since - well, long before I ever knew what that meant. Slowly, I’ve come to learn what certain meanings represented, only to realize that being transgender means much more than the box people tried to get me into. After a lifetime of internal conflict, I began to recognize certain truths that were about to change my life in profound ways. Like many, my wanting to experience “being” a girl, was overwhelming – compulsive, a need I had to fulfill. The word “compulsive,” conjures up images of someone out of control. It screams of Anthony Perkins in psycho: a schizophrenic who can’t control the demons within. But the truth is, for most of my life crossdressing was compulsive. But, rather than releasing the raging demon within, it brought out a fun-loving, happy, free spirit, and I found a sense of balance in the process. The “box” that the media built, didn’t represent me. In more recent years I transcended the act of dressing and simply lived how I felt from day to day, androgynous much of the time.

After decades of repeat and purge, I first began to actually think about and understand elements of what I was struggling with. The fear had subsided, and with it came a clarity that was just as overwhelming as crossdressing at an early age was. Over the years four questions kept coming to mind:
1) What would it be like to be a girl,
2) Could I become a girl,
3) Would I prefer to be a girl, and
4) Should I be a girl

For a group of people (TGs) that don’t completely understand themselves, it would be almost impossible for outsiders to accurately identify and define the varied characteristics from one group to another. But yet, they try. I referred to myself for years as a drag queen, ignorant of what that really meant, and that the label was inaccurate. As we entered the new millennium, there are now so many boxes to choose from: transvestite, drag queen, crossdresser, she-male, transsexual, t-girl, and the all-inclusive transgender. Boxes, boxes and more boxes - are any of them accurate? They seem to be a double-edged sword. For some they serve as a beacon of light to lost souls in search of a safe haven of like-minded individuals, while at the same time they divide, isolate and confuse others.

I was in Boston, covering the Tiffany Club’s First Event Convention, when I became engaged in conversation with a young, handsome and outgoing F > M transsexual named Robbie. I learned that Robbie avoided discussions about sports with other F > M transsexuals. He never liked sports growing up, yet all the transsexuals he knew, did. “Maybe I don’t fit into this group,” he thought – because the description on the box didn’t fit. It would be logical that many M > F transgenders (a catch all name) experience this as well. They want to belong somewhere, and if the group has a slightly different identity, they disguise or hide it. How sad is it that people can come out, only to still be in hiding.

Do you have the courage to pursue who you should be, rather than who you could be? Knowing who you want to be, and who you should be, are not necessarily the same thing. That distinction may reveal itself in the final leg of the discovery journey. But in finding yourself, you have to consider many things. I once gave a piece of advise to my friend’s daughter, who was just entering NYU as a freshman. I told her, “Find your passion – that in which you enjoy the process as much as the result. Then, find the core of who you are and fulfill your life outward from there.” U Thant, co-founder of the United Nations, was once quoted as saying, “You can’t know how you want to live your life until you know how you want to be remembered.” So, how do you want to be remembered?

In trying to discover who you are and what you’re about, are boxes helpful, or do they pigeon hole us in the eyes of the mainstream, and each other? Feel free to write me and let me know what you think.

As always, be happy, be safe, and think pretty.Brianna Austin

And they burned witches too

So many of us suffer needlessly with feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, and embarrassment. That shouldn’t really be a surprise when our society is rooted in a belief system that has little room for anything or anybody outside the status quo. Most us were raised in that belief system. It’s ingrained in the depths of our subconscious, and so to express ourselves outside the norm contradicts what we were taught. Larger groups, and even countries many times deal with conflicting views by killing each other – so apparently, the mainstream doesn’t appear to have all the answers either. After all, killing defies the very God that Christians, Muslims, and Jews (to name just a few) they say they worship. I was raised in a mixed religious household, both Jewish and Christian, which either makes me more confused, or less, I’m not sure which.

I was at a family reunion during the 4th of July weekend and was -- in my brother’s absence -- confronted with questions, and fishing expeditions, as to how I felt about my brother and his partner raising an adopted 16-month old baby. My Midwestern relatives love my brother, but don’t agree with his lifestyle, they say. The idea of a gay couple raising a child to them is “against the laws of nature.” On the more practical side, they argued that a child needs a mother and a father. My brother, and other gay activists, would argue that a child needs love. I informed them that their approval wasn’t required, and that my brother and his partner would make great parents – and by the way, it wasn’t so long ago in Salem that they burned witches too!
I went to Sunday school, I was taught the Bible, the stories, and what it meant. Suddenly, the recent events got me to wondering who gets the privilege of determining the social order by which we are told we have to live? If time has shown us anything, it is that things evolve. One cell became two, and the world, as it was, changed. The dinosaurs no longer roamed the Earth - except of course those on the extreme right. Hey, the 50’s have come and gone, get over it, move on!

Conservative societies need to recognize that their way isn’t the only way. Transgender people existed in some native Indian and Buddhist cultures – referred to as “two-spirited,” and were accepted in those societies with jobs of great importance. Today they have been called freaks, deranged and sick. On a weblog were comments that concluded that (gay, transgender, etc.) were an affront to God. I believe in God, but what does that mean? Is it possible that the religious teachings could have been misunderstood?

The thing that has caused transgender people such hardship is that they crossed the boundaries of gender expression. Some felt like woman trapped in a man’s body, some identified as feminine men, while other’s just liked to crossdress. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, how many guys would be killing each other in their Sunday best? “War? I might get a stain my new dress, no thanks, I’ll sit this one out.” Society seems to prefer a frustrated, angry and dangerous-to-society “macho” guy as opposed to a happy man who simply likes to expresses himself with feminine things, or, a well-adjusted contributor to society who happens to be attracted to the same sex. What is it about being different that scares everyone so?
Many people outside societies description of “norm,” have felt embarrassed because they were made fun of, guilty because they were “taught” that it is wrong, and continue to believe it because it is enforced in the collective social mindset. To break the emotional and psychological chains that bind them might require a change in thinking altogether; questioning everything you’ve been taught about God, heaven, hell, society and nature. In the end the only person who can answer those and other questions … is you. If you choose to believe what you’ve been taught, that’s fine, as long as you have questioned it, and then decided it makes sense to you. Not that you believe it because you were told to believe it. So what do you believe? Are we physical beings created by God in search of the spirituality necessary to get us into heaven, or are we spiritual beings simply experiencing a physical world? There are many books with views that go from one end of the spectrum to the other: one version describing us as eternal beings, and another defining us as animals that live and die – game over.

In a world that is so marred with the here and now, it is easy to loose sight of the larger picture. We all find ourselves caught up in the drama of life, you know, the little things -- that in the end --weren’t really all that important. So I asked myself one day, “why are we here? What purpose could it serve?” While I don’t profess to have any of these answers, I wanted to explore the possibilities. Maybe, as it has been theorized for centuries, we are born out of a collective entity, part of, yet less than God - a collective consciousness. This is not a new theory, but let’s take it a step further and ask, why then are we here, on Earth? One explanation might be that we are here to experience that which we can’t experience in our higher form: an individual body and singular consciousness. Such a thought would suggest that the “human experiment” is simply to “experience” individuality. By experiencing what you’re not, you can better understand what you are. Coming from a united body of collective consciousness connecting all things, it would then be reasonable to understand why we as humans would feel the need, and be comfortable with, belonging to groups - whether they were ideological, social, political, racial, religious or any other like minded circle. But if the singular consciousness theory were correct, then the purpose of being here would be exactly the opposite of what most of us do: to celebrate our diverse individual expressions, and not engage in “heard-like” behavior.

How does that make you feel? Does it make you afraid, or fearless? Are we limitless? When we look in the mirror, is that WHO we are, or is the body merely a taxicab to carry "us" around in this dream on Earth? Are we really then just the sum of our thoughts, love and spirit? And if we are limitless in our abilities, are we confined to a belief system based on form, which "we", the collective masses have taught ourselves? Like the Elephant, who as a baby had his leg shackled to the stake in the ground, as an adult cannot shake loose the concept of not being able to break free. The idea becomes the reality.

I recognize that all of this may be a bit extreme, but it is in creative thought that we can mentally run free to consider all the many options. For so long the medical and psychiatric community has tried to understand why a person is “gender dysfunctional.” What if being transgender isn’t dysfunctional at all. What if the quest to express our individually, is in fact the entire object of the exercise?

I don’t know the answer. There is no real explanation as to why some people fall outside the lines that society draws; perhaps it’s simply evolution. Maybe it’s our subconscious mind resisting the horrors of what our society has created in the form of an escape mechanism, or just perhaps, we are experiencing our individuality. But either way, I do know that if you are not ready to question everything, to discover what rings true to you, then, you will always be at the mercy of someone else’s belief structure.

As always, be happy, be safe, and think pretty.Brianna Austin