Bobbie Lea Bennett and her contribution to history may seem like a small one on it’s face, but it was in fact, monumental. She is best remembered for forcing the United States Medicare system to consider covering gender affirming surgeries.
As opposed to previous (unsuccessful) attempts to obtain Medicare coverage for gender affirmation surgeries, Bobbie Lea occupied the uniquely advantageous position of already being a Medicare recipient. She did not need to build the case that transsexuality was itself a disability. This forced Medicare to address the singular issue of gender affirming surgeries.
In 1978, after mobilizing media interest in disability rights in her favor, she literally pushed her case into the faces of government administrators. She set off on a cross country road trip from San Diego to the Baltimore, Maryland offices of Thomas M. Tierney, the director of Medicare at the time. During the meeting, Tierney assured Bobbie Lea that a committee was assessing her case. Three days after this meeting, Bennett received a check in the mail. Medicare denied that this check was to cover Bennett’s surgery, instead claiming that they were simply correcting an error.
Bobbie Lea Bennett is best remembered for this particular instance of activism but she dedicated her life to the pursuit of liberation. In 1985, she founded the St. Tammany Parish Organization for the Handicapped, which served the interests of wheelchair users, and other disabled persons that lived within St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. This organization has since been dissolved.
We don’t have much more in the way of facts about Bobbie Lea’s life, but she is remembered as a beloved wife, and mother to 2 children.
Thomas(ine) Hall has a fascinating story. A lot of historical accounts still require more strict verification, however, it is generally accepted that Thomas(ine) was born Thomasine Hall sometime around 1603 in Newcastle upon Thyne, England. According to their own account, though they were born intersex, Thomasine was raised as a girl and trained in traditional women’s crafts such as lace making, and needlework.
The first recorded instance of Thomas(ine) adopting traditionally male dress, name, and pronouns was when they cut their hair, and “changed into the fashion of a man” in order to join a brother in the military. Upon returning to England from the service, Thomas(ine) again resumed the lifestyle of a woman.
In or around the year 1627, Hall took an opportunity to resettle in Jamestown, Virginia, dressed as a male indentured servant, ultimately moving to a smaller settlement on the James River. At the time, there was likely more work available on tobacco plantations for people who were coded as male. However, it appears that Hall remained fluid in their gender expression by occasionally being seen about in women’s attire. In explanation of this particular “quirk”, Thomas(ine) Hall offered what I consider to be one of the best historical quotes ever: “I goe in womans apparel to get a bitt for my Catt”. This has been interpreted as meaning that women’s attire allowed Hall to enjoy sexual relations with people with penises.
Eventually, this flaunting of current social norms caught up with Hall. They were accused of having had sexual relations with a maid. Apparently, the gender of the offender became a matter of criminal responsibility. The legal system of the time stated that if Hall was a man, they could then be charged for sexual misconduct with a servant, but women were deemed incapable of committing this particular type of crime. The “criminal investigation” into this matter consisted of the townspeople taking it upon themselves to examine Hall’s anatomy without their consent, possibly while they were sleeping. Despite a prominent local man determining that Hall was not a proper man, this did nothing to change the townspeople’s desire for punishment, and led the villagers to take the case to the Quarter Court of Jamestown. After hearing from several witnesses, as well as from Hall, the court handed down a punishment inconsistent with legal precedent at the time. The court ruled that Hall was of a “dual nature”, and where usually these offenders were made to choose one gender, Hall was punished in a rather unusual manner.
The court determined that Hall would go by the name Thomas(ine) and “goe clothed in man’s apparell, only his head to bee attired in a coyfe and croscloth with an apron before him”. Meaning that Hall was made to wear both men’s and women’s clothing simultaneously, essentially branding them a permanent outcast.
Not much is known about this person’s life after this controversy, but I like to believe that they hit the road and continued to get a bit for their cat.
https://wams.nyhistory.org/early-encounters/english-colonies/thomas-ine-hall/ – CW: If you do choose to look at this source, it is rife with cisnormativity. The author consistently uses either “she/her” or “he/him” pronouns (when we know that this person’s identity was more fluid than these terms), and describes intersex genitalia in a rather offensive manner.
Unless otherwise specified all quotes are from Miss Major’s personal website, which you can find here: missmajor.net
For those of you who aren’t aware of her, Miss Major’s website really says it best: “Miss Major is a Black, transgender activist who has fought for over fifty years for her trans/gender nonconforming community.”
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was born on October 25, 1940 on Chicago’s South Side, where she participated in the drag scene in her youth. I appreciate that she has pointed out that she and her contemporaries were unaware that they were exploring their personal gender identities through drag, as the current vocabulary around gender identity simply did not exist back then.
[Author’s aside: I grew up in a conservative Christian household from the American South, so this explanation resonated with me on a personal level.]
Miss Major came out as a trans woman in the late 1950s, after which she was ostracized and routinely assaulted by her peers. Through the ensuing years Miss Major was on the ground during the Stonewall Riots, and survived both Dannemora Prison and Bellevue Hospital’s “queen tank.”
These experiences continue to inform her “work to uplift transgender women of color, particularly those who have survived incarceration and police brutality.”
Miss Major’s personal and professional accomplishments are next to innumerable, so I will attempt to portray the highlights:
She worked directly with people with HIV/AIDS in New York during the early 80s
This helped her create and drive the first mobile needle exchange in San Francisco
She is the former leader of the TGI Justice Project, which works “to end human rights abuses against transgender, intersex, and gender-variant people, particularly trans women of color in California prisons and detention centers.”
She now runs House Of GG, an educational leadership retreat primarily aimed at Black Trans women who live in the Southern U.S., which you can learn more about at their website: houseofgg.org
Her recent creative work includes “executive producing the series Trans in Trumpland (now streaming everywhere), and a book on her life’s activism, a collaboration with Toshio Meronek”
No amount of explanation or bullet points can accurately convey the impact that the incomparable Miss Major continues to have on the lives of the most marginalized and brutalized members of our society. She continues this valuable work to this day, including the upcoming publication of her autobiography Miss Major Speaks which you can pre-order from Verso Books.
I’ll admit I did not know much about this particular stance from this particular time when I first heard about it. Upon looking through the site, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of the arguments presented there articulate the position of “queer by choice” in a way that somewhat reflects the backbone of arguments being made in the queer community today.
“The reason everyone has the right to be queer is that everyone has the right to control their own mind and body unless it infringes on anyone else’s right to control their own mind and body.”
Gayle madwin
“Self-definition and self-determination are about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves… It’s OK if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.”
Janet mock
The use of the word “choice” initially struck me as a bit strange, because I remember staunchly advocating the position that homosexuality is not a choice in a sociology course I took in high school. (I felt that I was homosexual at the time, but I now understand that what I was experiencing was being trans). Queerbychoice dot com definitely comes from a perspective of queer sexuality, as the author appears to be a queer cisgender woman, but don’t let that put you off reading. This site contains a wealth of insight into queer life and the queer zeitgeist of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and is a great resource for exploring the idea of choice in depth. It has a list of resources and quotes on queerness, and it has quality answers to some of the arguments that people espouse against choice. The perspectives offered on the implications that declaring you are queer by choice can have, even to this day, is a bit of the site that has aged particularly well.
One of my favorite pages on the site is under the question, “When you say you chose it, do you just mean it’s a product of your social environment?”. This page contains an answer to the question that is one of the few references to trauma that the site contains.
“Of course you could argue that in a case of severe trauma, environment can produce post-traumatic stress syndrome without a person choosing to experience it. But if we’re talking about a healthy person responding in a healthy manner to a healthy social environment, then we’re usually talking about someone who’s making choices in response to that environment.”
Queer By Choice FAQ “When you say ‘chose’ it…”
Upon reflecting on this quote, I realized that I have never been in, seen, or been close with someone from a healthy family environment. I imagine this might contribute to why this thought of “choice” initially struck me as strange. Choice has never been a part of my life, or the lives of literally anyone around me, in a healthy way. Based on this quote above, I am led to think that Gayle has a much more healthy relationship with choice than many people. This may be the reason Gayle found it difficult to “know what it means to be ‘unable to change’…”, in much the same way as I initially did not understand what she meant by choice.
The last quote, and the following quotes are from a conversation between Gayle Madwin and Frank Aqueno: “…when people think that something is not an option it is because they keep questioning incessantly whether it really is one instead of just going with it and TRUSTING that the option is there” – Let’s address this issue of trust by thinking about what these choices represent for some people, and at what age these choices are presented. I will not insult anyone’s intelligence by explaining the collateral damage that can result from expressing your queerness, but I will point out that when it comes to gender queerness many people are forced to make a choice to either explore it, or deny it long before they are confronted with their sexuality.
This is the main reason I think the site falls somewhat short in it’s generalization of it’s arguments to include gender. Gender ups the stakes of one’s choices for almost everyone who wants to explore existences outside of the “norm”. (Here, and throughout, I use the concept of “the norm” to mean the cisgender/heterosexual/white/bourgeois conception of the gender binary that prevails in the majority of mainstream Western culture)
I do not believe you can equate the choices one has around living their sexuality, and living their gender because society has always had much more of a problem with public facing “deviancy” from the established norm. There are so many people that will say things like “I don’t care what you do in private but why do you have to ‘flaunt’ it in public?”. This dichotomy between tacit tolerance of one’s private behavior and the rejection of the public-facing expressions related to these behaviors has plagued every part of the LGBTQ+ community, and thus heavily affected the perceived “choice” one has around being oneself. The thinking behind this statement is what prevented the federal recognition of gay marriage for so long. And it is the same rejection and violence that trans people are still facing today.
Sexual behavior and gendered experiences are heavily related, but I argue that they are functionally different when it comes to this “development of the core” self that Gayle and Frank discuss. I believe the policing and enforcement of gender roles, which are different than the societally prescribed sexual roles, serves as a means of exerting control over the populace in general, in the interest of maintaining certain other societal systems whose frameworks were expressly designed to serve the interests of powerful, white, men. In my experience, this means that the people around you, and society as a whole, has systems in place that work much harder to ensure compliance in this particular aspect of one’s life. I bring this up in the interest of shedding light on a complicating factor to choice that queerbychoice.com does not seem to address in any kind of depth. This complication is the reality that the perception of one’s own freedom heavily influences one’s capacity for choice.
The essence of freedom, and our relationship to it, is the heart of this rhetoric of choice.
When I came out to her, my mother told me “Well, you know it’s always been your choice?”, and I assented vaguely. But in truth, no. I didn’t know that I had a choice. I knew I was never a girl, but I was never told I had the freedom to actively choose the social, public-facing role of manhood. And as for publicly declaring yourself to be anything other than a man or a woman, well, that was just not done, what else could there be? I guess I could have asserted myself, but when you’re a child, your parents and other adults around you determine the limits of your reality, and thus your choices.
Sure I knew what trans people were in a vague sense, and I understood the basics in the abstract by the age of 12 or 13. But no one ever told me that being trans was something that could explain my experience, and I never really saw myself in the limited (and hate-tinged) view of trans people to which I had access. What I am getting at, is that for me, sexual behavior was fairly obvious. However, when I was experimenting with my gender expression and using this to explore my gender as a concept, I was still constantly told that that behavior was ok for “girls”, that all “girls” did this at some point, and “you can be whatever type of woman you are”. Gender was seen as immutable, not as something that can be developed like one’s taste for food.
I’m happy to report that my thinking has evolved beyond this rigidity and I can finally see that, for me, I do have the choice to live as an out and proud trans man. And choosing to live out and proud is freedom. A freedom that deserves to be exercised to the fullest extent it can be. But this change took a ton of personal development, some of which came with age and experience, but the majority of which came from actively choosing to engage in queer media, and open my mind to many other people’s perspectives. So in this aspect, I see the element of choice in the development of my queerness.
After a lot of work to deepen my understanding, I arrived at the conclusion that there is little possible in the way of finding a “rational” explanation for gender, choice or otherwise. I personally think gender can have an essence of innate feeling for many people, and the same goes for sexuality. But even choosing to believe this is a choice isn’t it?
Maybe I feel like there can be something innate and there can be an element of choice because I like to center the idea that every self-conscious being has its own unique perception of it’s existence. I cannot hope to fathom the possibilities for variety that this reality of consciousness provides. Queerbychoice.com has so many examples of people who understand their queerness to be a choice, so who am I to question the personal testimony of so many people? I am only here to hopefully continue this conversation on choice and freedom with the benefit of time and perspective.
If we take the rhetoric of choice to truly be about freedom, we then understand that we need to work on ensuring that freedom is extended to everyone. Queerbychoice dot com expresses this very same idea in it’s response to those who say that the idea of “choice” means that queer people don’t deserve equal rights:
“Perhaps the most important contribution of queer by choice people to the fight against homophobia is that when we say that we chose to be queer, we force people to realize that it’s possible to want to be queer. For too long homophobes have painted us as one-sided creatures who experience nonstop pain. To paint us this way is to paint us as something less than full and well-rounded human beings, and they paint us this way specifically to scare others into repressing their own potential queerness. The reality is that there’s much to enjoy about being a member of the queer community and we who are queer by choice want homophobes to realize and acknowledge that.”
Born Ernestine Delois Eppenger in 1941, Ernestine Eckstein would become one of the most important activists in both the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the nascent LGBTQ+ movement of the 70s.
Her civil rights activism began during her time as a student at Indiana State University, as an officer of a chapter of the NAACP. But her progressive ideas eventually brought her to the more progressively minded Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), which she joined upon moving to New York City in 1963 at the age of 22.
Shortly after this move to New York City, Ernestine Eckstein also became involved in the Daughters of Bilitis, the first known lesbian civil rights group in the United States. When she was appointed as Vice President of the New York chapter of the DOB, she came to represent the desire of the younger generation of lesbian and gay activists to see the movement’s strategy move away from private negotiations with doctors and psychologists (in an effort to end the practice of trying to “cure” homosexuality), towards a tactic of more direct action, such as political lobbying and public demonstration. In this attitude, she was on the forefront of strategic thinking around civil rights, and she is quoted as having said that, “Picketing I regard as almost a conservative act now. The homosexual has to call attention to the fact that he’s been unjustly acted upon. This is what the Negro did”.
Eventually, Ernestine moved to the west coast and joined the progressive activist group Black Women Organized for Action (BWOA). This group was one of the first Black feminist groups in the country. The organization was known for it’s conscious inclusivity of all Black women and it’s unique lack of a hierarchical internal structure. Unfortunately, this organization dissolved after members decided that Reagan-era conservative sentiments rendered their 1960s style strategies ineffective.
Not much is known about Ernestine’s life post-BWOA but she is recorded in the Social Security Death Index as having passed away on July 15, 1992.
I’m just going to come right out and say it: people being jealous of you for how much you “pass” is not a worthy transition goal. This is unhealthy at worst, and unrealistic at best (for most). A better transition goal is to attempt to maintain body neutrality, or body positivity if that works for you. Through basically ignoring my body beyond the attention needed to keep myself alive and healthy, I have found that I can appreciate the changes my body goes through as they happen without giving in to the desire to constantly body check myself to see how much and in what ways my body changes.
If I allow myself to focus on the body as the main vessel of transition I am quickly met with a slippery slope back into the eating disorder and severe body dysmorphia that I have struggled with for my entire life. My body changes pretty wildly every single month, and in a variety of ways each time. Some months I gain 15lbs during my cycle, some months I lose 5lbs. Some parts of me are more swollen than they “should” be, or than they were last month. I can’t even give another example because I have been actively trying to avoid letting this topic take up space in my mind for so long. Suffice it to say that my body has been less than helpful in my quest to “feel like a man”. In fact, my body has been my largest impediment to this feeling.
All this isn’t to say that this approach is best for everyone. For some monitoring the changes your body goes through may be helpful “to see how far you have come”, and this can be affirming for some. One just has to look at the plethora of transition selfies and videos available online for proof that a lot of people find a lot affirmation in comparison. This same idea is also pushed in the weight loss industry as a way to “help” or “encourage” people to keep up healthy lifestyles.
I see monitoring my calorie intake and sometimes even focusing too much on the quality of my food (is it “healthy” enough?) as playing on my obsessive tendencies. Tendencies that have a propensity to bring to the surface a certain form of internalized transphobia that I wasn’t even aware I was dealing with. I regularly catch myself focusing on how much my body doesn’t “look like a man’s”. Yes it does. It just looks like a trans man’s body. It is a man’s body because it is my body. I have been forced to expand my cissexist definition of “man” and found that the audacity to self-define is not the exclusive domain of cis people.
This could easily have been titled “why external validation doesn’t make you trans”. Your transition is not defined by how much you look like a cisgender person. I am not cis and because of this I have to ask myself if how much I “pass” really matters to my perception of myself and my inherent masculinity.
This is not to say that “passing” itself is wrong, or the desire isn’t useful in a good many situations. A lot of trans people find comfort, and psychological and material safety in “successfully passing” or “going stealth” in their everyday lives. This essay is not designed to excoriate “passing”, itself. Rather, here I attempt to offer an alternative to the self-hatred, and dissonance that does occur when one, like myself, is visibly queer and not in imminent physical or material danger because of this. The alternative I offer is to base your perception of your transition around more than one facet, and on facets that are within your personal circle of influence.
Yes, a lot of the time hormones and surgeries can bring on the bodily changes that one should have had all along. But that does not mean that you have to focus all of your mental and emotional energy on policing your self and your actions so as to prevent “looking like a man/woman”. This is just a hamster wheel of self-hatred with a veneer of “transition goals” slapped over it. In fact, I argue that we shouldn’t base most aspects of our sense of self on “not being a man/woman” because this is just unproductive. I posit that one should focus on growing up well.
My thinking on this issue has been deeply influenced through learning more about nonbinary people and their experiences. Because there isn’t really a way to “pass” as nonbinary, this “passing is the goal” problem can’t really exist. (Of course, that is not to presume that nonbinary people can not “pass”. This is not true in any sense.)
For nonbinary people “passing” cannot be the sole factor on which they define their transitions, so they must take a more multi-dimensional approach. This may sound basic to some, but for me, seeing this reality for the first time opened the door to the possibility of a more playful relationship with my gender. From watching, specifically Milo Stewart, and other nonbinary creators, I have been able to get a glance at an existence that isn’t ruled entirely by the norms of cis experience. This idea of someone wanting to live and thrive in a space that is so uncomfortable for me gives me hope that I can be happy regardless of how much my body changes, or doesn’t. And if I can be happy regardless of if I “totally pass” or not, then I can free up some of that energy I was wasting on obsessing over my body and appearance, and direct it towards the more appropriate goal of growing into a decent man, which is something over which I have total control.
I wanted to start this series off with the person who inspired it. The Public Universal Friend, about whom I learned just the other day, was born Jemima Wilkinson on Nov. 29, 1752 in the Colony of Rhode Island. After suffering an epidemic disease, now widely regarded as being typhus, this person was near death with an extremely high fever. After recovering from this disease, this person adopted the moniker of “The Public Universal Friend”. This is a reference to the term for itinerant preachers within the Society of Friends (Quakers). These preachers were referred to as “Public Friends”. The Friend claimed from this point forward that Jemima Wilkinson was dead, and her body was granted a new soul, that of the genderless Public Universal Friend.
The followers of the Public Universal Friend founded the Society of Universal Friends, many of whom were unmarried women. This group acquired land in Western New York, on which they founded the township of Jerusalem.
The Friend and their followers were disowned by the greater Society of Friends at the time, specifically because of the Universal Friend’s rejection of gender. The Friend’s teachings were otherwise very much in line with those of the Society of Friends. Popular newspapers and other literature from the time harshly rebuked this idea that anyone of any gender could gain access to God’s light, eventually stirring up enough controversy to incite protests outside of the Friend’s sermons and speeches. This is the reason I have decided to include the Public Universal Friend in this series. They were persecuted for their gender expression, an experience with which so many people to this day can identify.
In closing, I offer this quote as a way of placing the Public Universal Friend within a historical framework: “Scott Larson…writes that the Friend can be understood as a chapter in trans history ‘before ‘transgender’.'”
Being transgender is pretty difficult. There are a lot of ways this can affect your life, and well being, physically, mentally, and financially. This last category is one that is often neglected, and yet is of the utmost importance. Being prepared for how your identity will affect your future finances can help you weather the storm just that much better. Here are a few issues that I have identified based on research and personal experience.
1. Depending on your family and support system, you could lose much needed financial support after you come out.
I hate to start off on such a crappy note, but it needs to be said. This is still a reality for a lot of transgender and genderqueer folks, especially younger people. If your finances are not your own, or you are otherwise beholden to someone who may object to your identity (i.e. living with your conservative parents), you need to plan how you will support yourself after you come out. Of course, I hope and pray that everyone will have a great support system, and will be fully accepted by their community after they have the courage to come out. But the sad reality is, that is just not going to be the case for some people. If you feel like there is a chance that you will lose much needed support after coming out, you should do your best to plan your future before coming out. Get a job, any job that will have you and works with your schedule. Save as much money as humanly possible. On top of that, you can start DoorDashing if you are old enough, or you could take a longer approach and start a blog or other business that could eventually become a source of income.
If someone is paying for your schooling, you need to consider how coming out will affect this, as well. If there is a risk of losing your support you either need to save enough to support yourself, hold off on coming out until you have an income that can support you (which I hate to recommend, but could make sense for some situations), or just accept that you may have to take a break from school to save some money. You could do like I did, take a break from college until you are 24 and your parents are no longer legally required to be a factor in paying for your education.
2. If you feel it necessary to medically transition, this opens up a whole can of worms. You may need regular medical care for the rest of your life, surgery (or surgeries), and time off from work to recover from each surgery.
If you are in the U.S., you may be familiar with the dismal state in which we find our current healthcare and insurance systems. I am currently insured under my mother’s plan through her work, but I don’t use it. It is very hard to find a doctor in my area that accepts the insurance. Even if I wanted to, I would still have to pay a copay that is way out of my price range. My mother, who makes well over six figures annually, complains about how high the copays are with this plan, that she chose. But she chose the cheapest monthly plan, and only insures me because she feels she has to as I am not yet 26 years old. Suffice it to say, I feel like I don’t have health insurance, because I can’t afford the insurance I have. It is for this reason alone that I have yet to pursue medical transition. I have had to chose between legal transition and medical transition, and I have chosen to save for the legal costs first.
3. You should be planning for the fees associated with legally transitioning.
I plan on doing a whole article on this topic alone, because it is that important. The legal transition process can be arcane and opaque depending on the state in which you currently reside and the state in which you were born. Personally, I currently live in California, which is primarily concerned with getting paid. If you have the money, and fill out the forms correctly, you can legally transition tomorrow. It will take awhile to process the paperwork, but it really is that simple to begin with. If you were born in California you could have your birth certificate updated during this process, but if you were not, like me, things get a little more complicated. Unfortunately, I was born in Virginia. This means that in order to change my name, and gender on my birth certificate I will have to submit a court order from California that demonstrates this change. This just adds one more thing to the laundry list of other documents that need to be changed, some of which can cost money to replace depending on where you live.
4. You may feel outsized pressure to build a secondary income stream, at least part time.
Capitalism has made relying entirely on one job at a time to support all of your financial well being a near impossibility for almost everyone who isn’t uber wealthy. Given this, those people who find themselves anywhere outside the gender binary may feel extra pressure to build some way to bring in money outside of their day job because they may struggle to find or keep a day job at all. Historically, members of the trans community have resorted to legal/illegal/extralegal means of making money i.e. different kinds of sex work, just to survive, and this continues to this day. While you may not find yourself doing sex work, you may still struggle to get and keep a job because up until June of 2020 it was perfectly legal (on the federal level) in the U.S. to fire, demote, refuse to hire, or otherwise discriminate against someone who is transgender. There were some states of the union that extended legal protections to the trans community before 2020, but there were plenty more that didn’t. Local sentiments about the trans community and awareness of this change in labor laws will take even longer to get up to speed with the times. You may feel unsafe in your workplace, even if no material punishment befalls you. You may be subject to insidious forms of harassment, such as deadnaming, misgendering, and being made the butt of inappropriate jokes. This kind of harassment is difficult to stop, especially if you end up in a workplace where management is ill informed on trans specific types of harassment. A secondary income stream could provide a small cushion while you leave this type of workplace and find a new, more understanding one. If you didn’t have a little something on the side, you may be forced to stay in this trauma inducing workplace, which is something I hope no one has to endure.
5. Family planning can get complicated, and thus, expensive.
Any family planning option that is outside of the standard heterosexual manner is automatically expensive because it enters the realm of the medical; anyone who has suffered from infertility can attest to this. If you find yourself wanting children of your own, you have a few options depending on your sex at birth. If you are able to produce viable sperm, you will have to find someone to donate an egg, and someone to birth the baby. If you have a willing, and healthy friend this option can be relatively close to the heterosexual, cisgender experience. But many people find that they have to seek out and purchase a set of eggs from a donor, and then have them incubated and placed via IVF into a surrogate. This is an incredibly expensive process. So much so, that it oftentimes prohibits people who would otherwise be wonderful parents from having children that are related to them by birth.
If you are willing and able to carry a pregnancy to term, things become a bit more complicated, and can depend entirely on your comfort with your own body. I personally will never birth children, for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is I have no desire to be pregnant. My fiancee did for a very long time, and we decided that should we pursue having children she would, ideally, provide the egg and carry them to term. But even if we did, sperm is not cheap, and not at all guaranteed to work. It is perfectly normal for a heterosexual, cisgender couple to find that it takes them close to a year to successfully conceive. This means that you could feasibly spend over $800 per month, for 12 months before pursuing other means such as IVF. A typical round of IVF could cost upwards of $10,000. Even if you have a kind friend that agrees to donate some sperm, you still have to have a contract drawn up to facilitate this transaction, adding legal fees to this process.
6. Your financial priorities change overall.
Finance first piqued my interest during a time in my life when I had no money. When I say no money, I mean no money, and no way of making money on my own. No computer, intermittent access to a working mobile phone, no job prospects, nothing. I found myself in a position of powerlessness, and decided that once I had money I never wanted to be broke again. A lot of people who find themselves on the margins of society find that money is never far out of mind. It is just our reality. It would behoove everyone, but especially those for which society has little or no tolerance, to take an active interest in how to effectively manage and use money. But from what I have seen cis and hetero people who take an interest in money management, finance, and business more broadly tend to approach these tools as a means of creating wealth, whereas people who find themselves marginalized tend to see money as a means of attaining that ever elusive sense of material safety. It is a small but, important distinction.
Things such as food, transportation, and reliable and safe housing are extremely important goals for which genderqueer people can spend their entire lives striving. These experiences of material deprivation scar you, and reshuffle your priorities, usually with safety and stability right at the top. This can prevent someone from taking material risks the way that cis/hetero people can. Risks such as buying a house, seeking education beyond the minimum legally required by one’s profession, and starting a family can seem too expensive for people who have different ideas of what is the worst that could happen, and may not necessarily have family that is able to lend them money, or other material support. A supportive community is the key to stability, and up until very recently, most of this country seemed hell bent on denying access to a supportive community to genderqueer individuals.
Wrapping it all up
Taken together, all of this paints a bleak portrait of the financial possibilities afforded trans people. But this portrait is an incomplete one, for centuries trans, genderqueer, and other marginalized communities have found methods to survive and sometimes thrive. You might be interested in learning more about finance and transgender people’s reality by reading this exceptional article by TransLash Media.
As transgender and genderqueer people become more comfortable expressing themselves in a professional setting, the culture, and habits of any workplace will need to adjust or risk, at best, alienating its employees, and at worst, committing outright harassment. Here are some pertinent statistics on the harassment that genderqueer individuals have experienced in the workplace:
A study, linked below, of aggregated surveys by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy found that 90% of transgender workers have been harassed on the job
The same study found that 47% of workers have experienced an adverse job outcome because they are transgender. This includes:
– 44% who were passed over for a job – 23% who were denied a promotion – And 26% who were fired because they were transgender
Moving Forward
With these harrowing statistics in mind we can turn to figuring out how to better support our trans coworkers. The foundation of feeling secure in the workplace should be a robust and routinely communicated sexual harassment policy and an anonymous reporting system. Most organizations have some sort of sexual harassment policy in place, yet sexual harassment still happens everyday. Which is exactly why the the leadership team is the best place to start with any improvement to company practices.
People respect people in positions of authority. It isn’t enough to just have some outside company come in and show some videos, and discuss some hypothetical situations with your team. As a leader, you are responsible for taking a hard line against harassment, and for articulating that every complaint will be thoroughly investigated so as to discourage false reporting, (which is so rare it hardly needs discouraging). This communication doesn’t need to be a long drawn out meeting, either. In fact, you would be better served keeping things as clear and concise as possible, so as to leave no room for misinterpretation. If it does nothing else, this small effort on the part of those in leadership positions, will communicate to anyone who may become a victim of harassment that they should come forward. Ultimately, anything that promotes a culture of acceptance is worth the effort.
How to Help Transgender Coworkers
Building an accepting workplace culture takes more than an email. Leaders have to demonstrate this acceptance in their day to day actions and conversations.
Keep in mind that repeated misgendering is a form of sexual harassment and should be dealt with as such. Meaning, misgendering and deadnaming should be explicitly included in any sexual harassment policy, and should warrant the same consequences as any other form of verbal sexual harassment would.
If someone has a nickname, any nickname, ask them if they are ok with it, preferably in private.
Take a look at your access requirements, and other forms in your organization. If they require the use of a legal name, this could be extremely distressing to your trans and gender expansive colleagues. On the flip side, the use of alternative names should be a standard policy across your organization. Meaning, if nicknames are allowed to be used for email addresses and other access points, you should definitely allow a trans person to use their correct name for these items.
Be sure to always address people by their chosen names, and proper pronouns. Please do not revert to using only their name.This is obvious to everyone and is still considered harassment as you are essentially refusing to acknowledge them in the same way as anyone else.
Be careful what jokes you repeat. Workplace culture has changed so rapidly that some older employees are not aware of what is appropriate. i.e. Buffalo Bill jokes, Ace Ventura jokes, ladyboy jokes. When they happen, call these jokes out and calmly explain that they are offensive to some people, and have always been. This is not a new thing, the only difference between now and the 1980s is that people are speaking up more.
Avoid tokenism – if you are putting together a diversity panel, or are looking to ask questions about “the trans experience”, “how you can help” or “how you can improve company culture in regards to transgender issues”, your one trans employee is NOT the first place to find this information. This is a form of emotional labor that many marginalized communities are forced into performing. LGBTQ+ people and people of color are not your source for all things relevant to their identity. They are not representative of their entire community. All it takes to shift this idea of the token “insert identity here”, is for white/cis/hetero people around us to do the work of educating themselves up front. Read books and articles written by trans people and people of color. Listen to our podcasts, follow our Instagram pages, support our causes. Get in the trenches with us, so you can be an accomplice, not just an ally.
Lastly, keep in mind the reality that your employees may be facing. This country is not a terribly accepting place. We have not made as much progress as some would have you believe. People face harassment and micro-aggressions everyday. In fact, before the landmark Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, it was completely legal to deny a promotion, refuse to hire, or terminate an employee for being transgender. Bostock v. Clayton County, which was only decided on in June of 2020, finally extended the Title VII protections against discrimination on the basis of sex to gender expansive individuals. Meaning that terminations like the one that Vandy Beth Glenn faced will finally be illegal. Let Vandy, who held a job with the Georgia General Assembly, tell you in her own words what transgender people face when cis people become “uncomfortable” with their transition.
[My boss] told me I would make other people uncomfortable, just by being myself. He told me that my transition was unacceptable. And over and over, he told me it was inappropriate. Then he fired me. I was escorted back to my desk, told to clean it out, then marched out of the building…I was devastated.
Wrapping it up
To sum up, if you have read this far you are better informed than most people out there. Use the suggestions here to shape your company culture going forward, even if you aren’t in a position of leadership you can still have a positive impact. Intervene when someone makes an inappropriate joke, or comment. Use people’s chosen names, and proper pronouns, and insist that others do as well. Stay informed on the issues facing transgender people. Focus on being kind to people instead of just how you come off when speaking to someone. There is no downside to a basic sense of consideration in the workplace.
If you are interested in learning more about the reality of being transgender you can learn more about the financial challenges trans people face, and I highly recommend you watch this video by Milo Stewart on how using they/them pronouns for people who do not use them is, in fact, misgendering. Their videos have greatly improved my understanding of gender as a concept and of nonbinary people, specifically.
When I was teenager, I came across some advice for dealing with other people’s perceptions of you. The general idea was to assess the person that you are concerned about by asking yourself a series of questions such as “Who is this person to me?”, “Are they the kind of person that I would like to be?”, “Do they share my personally held values, beliefs, and standards of behavior?”, “Do they have some kind of material power over me (i.e. a parent, teacher, or boss)?”, etc.
Based on your answers to these questions, you can evaluate the utility of their opinion. This method is often used to get people to disconnect from the comments on social media. By asking the above questions about the random person on Instagram, you can pretty quickly figure out that you probably shouldn’t concern yourself with that person’s perception of you. But what about when a trans person asks themself these questions about the people they actually care about in their life? What happens when they find that they don’t have many people that pass this test, even among their family and friends? Well, my answer is make trans friends (where and when you can)!
I grew up in and around cultures that firmly believe that instruction from your elders, and ancestors is vital to one’s social, moral, and philosophical development. However this focus on instruction is often used as a means of social control and manipulation, rather than in the interest of true personal development. For example, I was constantly instructed to “act like a lady” and close my legs, and cross my hands in my lap, and keep silent when adults were speaking. I see the appeal. An entire list of exhortations, and behavioral instructions wrapped up in a single admonition. Personally, I chafed against this method of enforcing social order. I would purposefully splay my entire body across multiple chairs when left alone, and then immediately snap back into place when confronted by an adult, even in public.
But as I aged, mild rebellion just wouldn’t do anymore, and I sought out a framework for moral and social development that would actually resonate with my sensibilities and outlook on the world. I found one of the biggest men’s interests magazines on the web and took the lessons on morality, virtue, and the development of personal standards of behavior available there and generalized them to “include me”. Little did I know that I resonated so much with this white/cis/het/Western canon focused philosophy of masculinity because it was extolling all of the positive virtues of the oppressive structure under which I spent my childhood, while completely ignoring the reality of this oppression. I genuinely thought that I could take the good without the bad.
This isn’t to say that there is absolutely nothing we can learn from writings like these. I credit that particular magazine with introducing me to the wisdom of the ancient Stoics and their philosophy. I also credit these types of publications for opening my mind to the interrogation of gender as an idea, and a concept within our human nature.
I liked analyzing the relationship that our society has to gender, and how that relates to the individual and their development as a person. But I was always stymied because I didn’t agree with some crucial aspects of the arguments being made.
I didn’t personally believe that gender was a binary. I knew that I definitely didn’t fit into most people’s ideas of gender. Yet, because I identified so strongly with a lot of what else they were saying, I didn’t realize that the people having these intellectual discussions on masculinity would object to the nature of my own relationship to masculinity [being trans]. So I felt lost, and disillusioned with men as a concept. There are so many websites dedicated to the understanding of one particular type of gender [i.e. white-cis] and yet I struggled to find an aspirational model of trans masculinity that spoke to me.
And I still haven’t. Even my own writing is not necessarily designed to serve the same function as the “mainstream men’s interest mag”, which are generally designed to serve as a part of a massive, uber-capitalist media conglomerate. I am simply on a path that, while definitely well trod, has markers that have been hidden, obscured, erased, and buried. I would like to explore this ancient path, and possibly highlight some of these guide posts.
Ultimately, I am left thinking about a line from an episode of the Gender Reveal podcast I recently listened to. There was a moment in Episode 94 with Kirby Conrod that extolled the virtues of making trans and otherwise gender non-conforming friends. At minute marker 36:30, Kirby asserts that the transition from friends that misgender you (or otherwise “other” you) to ones that correctly gender you is a natural process and one that may happen throughout the course of your transition. By surrounding yourself with people who get you, you insulate yourself from some of the social trauma that your initial transition inevitably causes. With the psychological safety that having friends that respect you affords, you can have a more accurate self-perception. This is what I mean when I say make trans friends. I mean make friends that are people you can look up to, and who live their stated values and beliefs. People who are thinking deeply about their own relationship to gender. People with whom you can share ideas without fear for your safety. It might sound basic on its face, but I encourage you to consciously try it sometime. It might be an informative exercise, regardless of outcome!
