Dyssonance

In the middle of the night

I go walking in my sleep

From the mountains of faith

To the river so deep

I must be looking for something

Something sacred I lost

But the river is wide

And it’s too hard to cross

(Billy Joel, River of Dreams)

Sometimes, you have to stop running in order to run again.

The last couple of weeks, as I closed down a bit more than I had before, as I stopped running from the knee bending, gut wrenching, throat catching deep pain I’ve been in over my present situation and the responses I only rarely get back and the options available to me and so on long enough to stare at it in the face and let it have its moment to overcome me, I wrote a few other posts.

About  6.  Most I didn’t finish – all of them circled around again back to the issue that I was avoiding, back to the pain I was trying to stay away from, back to the deep well of frustration that I feel and the resentment that surrounds because when I feel frustration and resentment I get anger, and in a lifetime of anger, I have come to fear it when it is that bright and shimmery and appealing.

The ones I did finish, I didn’t post because they were filled with derision and compromise, an interesting couplet that I shan’t allow much freedom to in my life.

And much has happened, still.  Life is what happens while you are busy doing other things, and I’ve long enjoyed the way that life cruises by me, and I believe wholeheartedly in reveling in it while you can. We don’t always have time to do, you see, and we never truly know when that chance will pass us by.

There was a phenomenal conference – one that has sent reverbations throughout the local community here at multiple levels, the ripples of it still spawning further ones and the whole doing a great job and I hear tell it was thoroughly enjoyed by all who did attend, and there were a lot of people who attended.

Indeed – the only sour grapes I’ve heard were from those who did not attend.  Which is usually a good sign, since if they didn’t come, they really didn’t care.

Someone I admire and count friend is spending her last few days in a hospice a short ways away from me. The thought of her makes me cry, without warning, and it’s usually all I can do to keep it somewhat hidden until safe to do so.

Someone I once counted among my friends now spends some of her time pointedly talking about how she wants nothing to do with the GLB to a person who’s life work involves dealing with the GLB out of what is absolutely willful ignorance.

Yesterday, a woman I know vaguely spent the day posting about how she resents crossdressers using the term transwoman or woman – and how no amount of surgical alterations can make you a woman.  Either you are, or you aren’t.

In her case, and the case of many others, its not willful that does such, but an absence of willingness to learn about others, and a desire in part to remain ignorant.

This past weekend, I facilitated another All Gender Health Seminar – a critical endeavor that I’m most proud to be a part of as it deals in the thing where my energy is not spent, but magnified such that I am afire with joy and passion and energy.

And that is educating other trans folks.

And so today I posted two questions.  They are each simple questions.

Do you know your history, as an LGB or T person (or both!)? If not, why, not?

I got a response back: I couldn’t care less about Trans history. And then later: I just don’t think there is anything in Trans history worth my time.

And what comes to mind when I read this is “How can you know if it will or it won’t be of aid to you if you do not know it?”.

And, rather than being discouraging (which it wasn’t meant to be), it actually fired me up to write this post I’m going into right now.  It solidified the commitment I’d made once again, and demonstrated just how important the work I will seek to undertake truly is.

That mindset is the same one I face when educating outside the trans community – be it the wider world or the cisGLB one.

“Why should I care?” is what it boils down to.  “I am not there, I am not part of that, I am not like those, I don’t need to, I don’t care.”

Why should *I* care, if so few others do, then?

I am an old con artist. I admit it, freely, merrily, often with a twinkle and wry grin. I am aware of the power of “What’s In It For Me?”, the ancient art of using WIIFM to get something done.

It’s used all the time, all around us, in the commercials and ads we see – advertising is built on the idea of WIIFM, and if you want to sell something to someone you need to find a way to make it apply to that simple formula.

You can get anyone to do anything for you if you understand that simple principle and use it effectively.

But when the answer in their minds is already “Nothing” no amount of smooth tactics will work.

So why should I even bother? I mean, of what use is all that energy and passion if the value of it is meaningless?

On an email list I subscribe to, I stepped into a conversation on the nature of how transsexualism is looked at.  I pointed out some facts and a few opinions, and rather than actually deal with what I wrote, the readers leaped on something they refused to understand because of their own prejudices.

I stepped out of it. I am not interested, right now, in engaging prejudice within the community.  I will, once more, but first I have to deal with the conflation of crap that leaped on me following the end of my trip.

I am not all that strong a person, actually, and I am indeed sensitive to issues around my appearance, and so yes, the statements made by a former friend and antognists got to me and they stung and they hurt and they set poison in mind.

I’m still ill from that – still sensitive to it, but no longer to the same type of attacks and never singly – they were given power by the unique conflation of events that surrounded it all.

So, to return to the point, why is it that I should invest time and energy and power into a community from which all the *worst pains* of the last six months of my life have come?

I dislike pain.  It hurts, and I am not Snake Pliskin and this is not NYC as a prison.

Seriously – the things that have had the deepest emotional and spiritual pain for me in the last several months have all come from people who may not identify as transsexual or transgender in the sense that I use them, but absolutely were such, because as most who read me in general know, I don’t give a flying rat’s ass how the fuck you identify.

I will still use an accurate description. That I care about.

Another thing I did recently was related to something outright hilarious. And is good for the point of showing the problem outside the community, in the GLB community.

The Onion News Network is one of my favorite sources for outright Satire – sometimes it even offends me, but not often.

Just recently, they put up a video about choosing the right Halloween costume for your effeminate Boy.

How To Find A Masculine Halloween Costume For Your Effeminate Son

This was featured in an article on a popular blog I frequent that deals in LGBT politics, and in ewatching it, I realized that all the boys featured were subject to GID in Youth as described (based on the subject, of course).

GID In Youth is the “transkid” diagnosis, and I noted in reading the comments that everyone was leaping to the conclusion these were gay kids.

None of them saw that the humor was dependent on characterizing their lives as sad and wrong and horrible, and because it’s humor, of course, its supposed to be ok.

I laughed at it, myself.  It is funny.  But that doesn’t change the fact those kids were Trans.

It’s erasure, and I really dislike erasure. Not on the part of the video makers, who never say the kids are gay or trans, merely effeminate, but on the part of the gay folks.

I posted that they were kids, even provided the relevant aspects of the SoC and the diagnosis so that everyone could see it.

I got one response: “now I know why I don’t post on trans related threads”.  This from someone who has written erasing and denigrating things about trans people and been blind to their privilege until I pointed it out to them.  So it’s safe to say they have a grudge given the history.

But it pretty much killed the thread when I posted it.

Could it be that gay folks don’t like to be described as trans?

I kinda think so.

But, this is, once again, leading into the question:

Why should I seek to spend my time telling people why it is that history, and community, and inclusiveness, and privilege, and assimilation, and language matter?

What do *I* get out of it, and is it enough to justify my doing so, for all the hours and hours I’ve spent?  Why should I fight for marriage?  Why should I seek to end DADT and the unfair expulsion of transfolks from the military? Why should I give a damn about couples torn apart by immigration laws?

Why should I care that transfolk have a 44% unemployment rate right now across the nation?

What does any of that have to do with me getting my surgery and my house and my life?

I’m asking, because right now, I’d really like to know.

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