Bits and Pieces- By Diane Frank

I’ve already written about the ENDA meeting we attended at the Stonewall Democrats meeting this month. While March hasn’t been as busy as last fall, there has still been a lot going on around town.

On March 20th, renowned transgender lecturer and performance artist Kate Bornstein read selections from her works and answered questions at Case Western Reserve University. Kate charmed, entertained and challenged the largely female audience for about two hours.

Although Kate claims to be neither man nor woman, men don’t typically leave a black bra strap showing on a shoulder that peaks out of a boat necked top, so I will eschew the non-gendered pronouns and refer to Kate as she or her. And although she claims not to be male or female, and she likes to play all the options, she likes best to play girl in real life. Kate makes an important distinction that people should be aware of: She thought sexual reassignment surgery would bring her peace of mind, but it didn’t. This isn’t to say she’s unhappy, but given her intelligence and level of creative gifts, it is a profound statement that people contemplating SRS should be aware of. Kate is the author of several books listed for sale in the bookstore section of our website including: Gender Outlaw and Your Gender Workbook.

The next day the 21st, after service at Chevrei Tikva, I returned to Case to attend their annual Lavendar Ball, for GLBTQQI students and friends. What you may ask is GLBTQQI? In the latest trend in academic political correctness, this stands for Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Transgendered (that’s some of us, dear readers), Queer (well I don’t exactly like that word either, but what are you going to do with kids these days?), Questioning (remember when that meant whether to have a tuna fish or roast beef sandwich), or Intersex. The party was catered with food from Siam Palace, and the crowd featured graduate and undergraduate students from all over the world. Most of the clothing worn was not suitable for a job interview.

Striking a pose with friend similar to the sculptures from the Kama Sutra at the Surya temple in Konark, one young lady from India assured me that she wouldn’t be showing the pictures to her mother or father. Truth be told I’ve got pictures I wouldn’t show to my mother or father either. Don’t you? But seriously, I did bump into a woman on the counseling staff at Case. She had been meaning to come to the event for years, and was somewhat disappointed at the turn out. "Case was a hard school to come out at", she said. I left her with some cards and brochures in case she encountered any faculty, staff or post-doctoral fellows who might be in need of AO services.

Thursday the 27th, I was present at the Cleveland International Film Festival to view and review three films on the 'transgender' and 'transsexual' topics and to participate in a panel discussion after two of the films.

The first film, "All About My Father", was a biographical film about a Norwegian physician, Esben/Esther... a cross dresser, made by his son. Esben described his cross dressing as starting at age 8 and being exciting and rewarding. When he hit puberty he found that the crossdressing became erotic and found that traumatic.

The film shows extensive interactions between Esben/Esther and family...and only two interactions between Esther and the rest of the world. The first is when Esther and spouse (also therapist) Elsa are at a book signing and award ceremony for a book about Transgender issues. However this is just public speaking and book signing...there is no personal interaction shown. The second is when Esther and Elsa go to a dress shop and the shopkeeper, though friendly, refers to Esther as he rather than she. Esther asks "do you see a woman or a man", and when the clerk replies a woman, he/she demands, "then call me she".

There is a long, talky section among Esther/Esben, Elsa and the son, (Even) about the nature of gender identity. The son can accept the idea that his father thinks of himself as a woman in part, but cannot himself see his father as a woman in part...just as a man in a dress. The wife pretty much takes the same line, but adds that other people not seeing Esther as a woman doesn't make Esban's self-ideation any less real.

This film dramatizes two concerns I have.

First, I cannot believe that with all the time spent on the film, that that the son simply refused to show anything about his father having something like normal social interactions with people who at least provisionally accepted him as a woman. We see Esben doing situps and brushing his teeth. We see Esther walking the streets, and sailing a boat. We see Esben confessing intimate sexual experiences. We see Esther's nude torso, we see Esben dancing with Esther and floating through the air above the crowds in some kind of ecstasy (the special effects in the film). I argue that the reason the material about a social life isn't shown is because it is absent. Esther is stuck in some small fraction of a woman's life.

Second, this scene in the clothing store is one of the demand to be accepted. It is a scene of bullying someone into the appearance of acceptance rather than one of acting in a way where the saleswoman of her own accord uses "she" because she recognizes Esther as a woman. I continue to find this demand that other people capitulate to our internal vision/religion of ourselves to be very problematic. Elsa and his son understand his viewpoint intellectually, but can't themselves see Esben as anything other than a man in a dress.


The second film was a short subject about the reaction of three totally adorable sisters to the news that their uncle was becoming an woman. "No Stupid Questions" did make for some uncomfortable moments. Near the very end the girls say, that it's ok because only the outside in changing he'll still be the same inside. Whether the girls perceived the soul of Uncle Bill to really be the soul of Aunt Barbara isn't clear at all. Still this film offers our group a lot because it deals so effectively with the business of coming out to children.

It was with great relief that we watched the third film, Georgie Girl. The life story of Georgina Beyer, the first transsexual member of the NZ parliament (or anywhere?) accomplished two important things. First, it showed the real life story of an early transitioner, who worked the clubs, sex trade etc instead of presenting the usual later transitioner sob story ala HBO's "Normal". Second it showed that those things, contrary to ALL of Baileys' book ("The Man Who Would be Queen") needn't be the limit of life.

And this brings me around an important point. It's not where you start it's were you finish that's important in all of this. Far too many of the TS biographies focus on the before and transition, and never show the resolved life afterwards.
Georgie Girl is a rare exception to this, and I hope that the film gets wide coverage. I was also pleased to see that while Georgina has won over a conservative rural community, and is widely admired, she has not rejected her roots, appearing in gay pride parades in urban areas. The only apparent fly in the ointment is her lack of a partner in life...and she somewhat wistfully observes that with the attendant publicity it would take an extraordinary man to be her lover.

During the panel discussion I applied the idea of it not being where you start but where you finish in several cases, with a receptive audience response. Our FtM moderator guided our initial discussion of the films and their merits. I used this theme as I described my reactions to the films and was greeted with applause.


Afterwards, we took questions from the audience. The second question was from a psychiatrist (as I learned later) who asked for comments about the divisions in the community as represented by the dismissal of some people as mere fetishists by others. It seemed that I was Jane-on-the-spot for that question. I noted that the desire to be pure and have a defensible story was a big motivating factor in this kind of split, but that my observation was that individual stories were rarely pure. It is very tempting to try to show that you’re ok by creating a comparison to someone who can be painted as being horrible. I referred to Bailey and "The Man who would be Queen", pointing out how limiting his strict binary division of types of history was. I returned to my principal theme: We all have motivations, desires that we have no control of...it isn't how things start in these areas that's important, it's how they finish. Forgetting this is what causes the divisions, and I wished people would grow beyond it. This drew my second ovation. I wonder if more than anything else, it is "stuckness", the persistant focus on gender issues rather than simply living life that people recognize and react badly to in gender-variant lives. This is why a few fortunate transsexuals make far more sense to people than crossdressers or many other transsexuals.

This brings me to the last question I dealt with in the panel discussion and its aftermath. A woman in the audience ( a Cleveland municipal judge it turns out) asked what could be done to get people to stop seeing things in Jerry Springer terms. (I'm wishing that someone had taped the session, as I don't trust my memory to get the shadings and nuances of how questions were
asked correct). I suggested that they invite someone from the GLBT community to dinner.


This provoked a laugh of recognition from the audience. But I went on to make a serious point...it's not just to have some token GLBTQQI person at a dinner table to be the subject of examination and perhaps acceptance by the straight majority....there's a possible benefit to the GLBTQQI person as well... that there tends to be a ghetto mentality, where people restrict themselves to venues and associations only with other GLBTQQI folk (or their own particular subclass of this)... How I asked rhetorically, did Georgina break free of her old life and move on to a new one?, and could it be something as simple as a dinner with new people, could that get people stuck in a closed LBTQQI life to grow and expand? To get from where they started to some place worthwhile?

The aftermath of this question was particularly interesting. My partner and I were standing in the lobby, talking to a former drag queen who appreciated my remarks, when the judge taped me on the shoulder. I turned around and
was introduced to a couple of Eastern European women who where there to see a Eastern European film at the festival. We chatted about films and such and women's book club that had discussed "The Hours" (a recent Academy Award winning film about Virginia Woolf) and the minor concern about having a male professor provide some comments on this book about women written by a man ....nothing of consequence as I recall, nor did I say all that much except to ask polite questions about the women I was introduced to and what their interests were, and certainly said nothing about my story or history or what I was doing there. After they moved on, the judge explained to me
that when she told her friend what films she had been to see the friend gestured at me as an example ("Oh, you mean people like that"). So the judge with all intent brought me into the conversation to turn me from a stereotype into a person in her friend's mind...in effect inviting me to
dinner.