Austin Reflections

Guest column by Fredrikka Maxwell

There’s a bridge across busy Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas. It crosses the Colorado River and is the home for the largest bat colony in the world and is a tourist attraction in the Texas capital.

And there’s a plaque on that bridge, still shiny and new, naming it for Ann Richards (1933-2006) the lady governor of Texas from 1991-1995 who was in essence a bridge builder advocating for equality of the races, women’s rights and rights of GLBT people

I was in Texas on the July 4th weekend giving a seminar at the Dignity USA convention in Austin. And as I explored the bustling downtown area and watched the variety of people young and old, black and white and brown going to and fro, I discovered the plaque on the bridge and realized that this is what it was really all about.

Building bridges.

And that was what I was doing in Austin that weekend. Building a bridge from the transgender community in the largest Roman Catholic GLBT group in the country to the group at large--a group that called itself a trans-inclusive group since the mid 1990s but had had nothing trans in its convention line up --which horrified me. It turned out that the transperson they had on the committee putting on the convention had to leave the committee for personal reasons. And, since conventions can take on a life of their own, it basically snowballed and I really believe that the trans aspect went out of sight and out of mind.

So I suggested that perhaps we could squeeze a trans workshop into the convention and I even prepared an outline. The convention chair and the Dignity list moderator both realized I knew my subject. And having been reared Catholic and so had a background for understanding the church didn’t hurt at all. In fact, that probably sealed the deal. So they invited me to give the workshop that we hoped would educate the general run of dignity convention-goers and help them grasp the issues inherent in being trans-inclusive.

It turned out that it was not a large gathering. Maybe 225 to 250 individuals all told gathered at the Hyatt Regency downtown. About a dozen showed up. But they were prominent people in the Dignity community and they were interested and I could see people taking notes and folks asked good questions. It felt very affirming.

I’ve read some figures from NCTE that there are maybe between 750,000 and 3,000,000 trans people in the US. That’s a liberal estimate and may not be exact. So many of us are in the closet, so many of us are stealth, living a life with a secret we pray never gets out. It is hard to know exactly how many of us are out there and that’s especially true for the minority population. It's hard to rally the numbers that will translate to the votes that we desperately need to get Congress to pass the laws that we need.

And so we need all the allies we can find. That was also true in the Dignity community. And some of them were in the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities.

But many of them don’t always understand us and our issues. And we may not always understand theirs. It was--and is-- therefore important to strive to find common ground. And to find common ground you have to educate folks in your issues and you have to let them know that some of their issues overlap and are right there with ours.

For instance, anti-hate crime legislation is a trans issue. It is also a gay and lesbian issue as well. I personally don’t know if Barry Winchell was REALLY gay or not and frankly it doesn’t matter if he was or not. The thing is it has to be OK to be who you are, whether you’re gay or straight, bi or trans, whatever. But somebody thought it did matter and killed him as a result. He’d probably still be walking around today if that hadn’t happened. So would Nokia Baker. Trust me, anti-hate crime legislation is a must.

Health care is also a gay and lesbian issue. Since it’s also tied to marriage equality getting it for oneself and one’s partner is a challenge. Especially if the person’s employer doesn’t offer domestic partnership benefits.

And sometimes hospitals will not allow a gay person at the bedside of the beloved because of policies that dictate only “family” may visit and only “family” may make healthcare decisions for the patient--and if you’re gay and you can’t get married, then you could be out of luck because only married people are respected as “family”

Although it’s possible to draft legal paper such as durable powers of attorney for health care, and legal paper to declare yourself next of kin so that you can visit the patient that might get around that. But it’s not automatic as it is for straight married couples That makes it a real burdensome issue for gays and lesbians.

And also a trans issue. We know, for instance, that many insurance companies do not cover what we need in the way of health care. many do not cover Gender Reassignment Surgery, and some don’t cover hormones, and some don’t cover facial feminization surgery, the procedures that make the face more feminine for male to female trans people for instance. Health care is for sure both a trans issues and a gay and lesbian issue.

And it’s understanding issues like that that will go a long way towards strengthening the GLBT alliance, allowing us to find common ground and understanding of our sometimes joint issues.

So I was glad to be a bridge builder. Thank you, Ann Richards, for reminding me.

Advice To A Young African-American Transwoman

TransGriot note: This morning one of the peeps on the TSTB list asked this question.

I want to know from others what makes you complete or would leave your life fufilled? Should it be something more than a relationship, career or status? Whatever it is how do you go about getting there?

I hope for people it's something more/deeper than just SRS. Because I've seen my fair share of unhappy, bitter post ops

This was my response:

Are those bitter post ops you meet WHITE ones? White transsexuals go through a different transition path than we do. They are coming from a situation where the world revolved around them as white males. Many of them bitterly lament losing that WMP status.

I've been transitioned for over a decade. My life is far happier and better AFTER transition than it was BEFORE transition.

It's not about money, power or fame. It's about living life honestly, openly, being comfortable in your own skin, being happy and being the best person you can be. It's about trusting the feminine intuition and gifts you've been given and getting in tune spiritually with them. It's about discovering who you are and what type of woman you want to be.


In a nutshell, you're about to repeat your teen years all over again, but this time you're preparing to be the woman you know you are inside and should have been from birth.

You may want to get a subscription to Essence to help you get in tune with your genetic sisters and the sistah inside you. Another suggestion would be to find a genetic sistah as a loyal friend who will honestly assess where you are, have your back and break down the mysteries of womanhood to you from the perspective of someone who was raised from birth to fulfill that role.

Ordinarily your mother or other female relatives would ideally do that, but at the moment she ain't inclined to pass those lessons on to you. You have to have that knowledge in order to grow.

Don't fall into the rhetorical trap or let anyone tell you that because you don't have a uterus and a vagina and can't give birth to a child you aren't a woman. Women are made, not born. There are genetic women who possess a uterus and vagina and CAN'T give birth. Do they think of themselves as anything less than a woman?

No they don't. Neither should you.

Once you achieve that and it's an ongoing process, frack errbody else and their unsolicited opinions about whether being transgender is 'wrong' or whatever other word they use to cover up their disapproval of our lives.

Remember, being a woman, especially a Black woman is serious business. That's the way our biosisters see it and that's why many of them are real hard on us when we first transition. They want to know that you aren't trivializing their existence and they know when someone isn't serious about it.

As they see it, you are joining the ranks of the mothers of civilization. The standard bearers for our race. And you got to have a little flava as you navigate through this process.

While this is an ongoing, serious process, evolving into a Black woman, enjoy the ride. Laugh at the mistakes you make along the way. Take time to enjoy the things you like to do. Cry if you feel the need to. You are no longer bound by masculinity's rules.

You are a Phenomenal Transwoman. Enjoy the journey.

The Color Line IS A Transgender Community Problem Too

At the dawn of the 20th century, W.E.B. DuBois made his famous prediction that 'The problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line.

Seven years into the twenty-first century, not only was DuBois on target, but the twenty-first century has an American color line exacerbated by conservative policies and rhetoric that's worse than the one in DuBois day. While I don't face the prospect of being lynched because I dared to vote or forcefully speak up for myself in the presence of a white person, the two centuries of racist negativity still lives.

I have often said that the GLBT community is a microcosm of society at large. It is illogical to think that we GLBT peeps are free of the ills of the parent society. Since we are a subset of a racist society, we're infected with the same sickness as well. Every now and then I get reminders of the racist past that permeates our present.

During the recent lobby day I participated in two months ago AC and I were taking some peeps back to a DC METRO station past The Mall. We'd had a debrief in our hotel room in Silver Spring about the day's lobbying effort. I'm the lone African-American in this vehicle and we took Georgia Avenue enroute to the METRO station. We got stopped at a traffic light on the Howard University campus. While waiting for the light to change I noted just to my right a DC police officer executing a patdown search on an African-American male. I made a comment to AC about it and one of the peeps we were chauffeuring chimed in, "They must be searching for the crack cocaine he was selling."

I turned my head and shot that person a lethally nasty look before saying, "Most of the peeps selling and using crack share your ethnic background."

It isn't the first time I've been confronted with racism inside the transgender community. I've been called the n-word multiple times on various transgender oriented discussion lists simply because people disagreed with me. When a group of us started putting together the first Transsistahs-Transbrothas conference in 2005 we were motivated to make it happen after a person made the comment that 'it will make it easier for them to service their tricks' along with other racist tripe in their posting.

When the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition was founded in 1999 by a group that included transpeople of color, some people in the white transgender community savagely dissed it. Never mind the fact that some of the NTAC founders exposed the duplicitous relationship HRC and GenderPac. Some of them hated the idea that transpeople of color had the temerity to not only form an organization, but step up to the plate and provide leadership for the transgender community.

The racism in the transgeder community has created a situation in which African-American transpeople feel the same disconnect they feel in the parent society. We don't feel respected or valued. When we do try to offer our input, expertise or suggestions, they are dismissed or vilified, then we find the white community after trying it their way and failing eventually doing what we suggested years before.

It aggravates many of us in the African-American transgender community to no end. It has led me to the conclusion that in order to get our voices into the mix and make rapid progress toward gaining our civil rights, we may have to do what our parents and grandparents did.

Do it our damned selves.

We have issues in our community that only we are qualified to deal with. It is African-American transpeeps who will have to take on the sellout Black church folks and call them on their hypocrisy. We will have to do the 'ejumacation' on transgender issues in the African-American community. We will have to do the things within our own transgeder community that build self esteem and pride. We will have to forcefully demand that we get our rightful seat at the African-American family table.

To accomplish that, we may have to form our own organizations if we are ever going to make any headway toward dealing with the problems that affect the African-American transgender community. We realistically can't count on help from people who are 'scurred' of us or get jealous of whatever progress we make and seek to retard it.

We must embrace our proud history. We are a people that have accomplished great and wonderful things when we pull together, brainstorm, roll up our sleeves and just do it.

It time for us to prove to the world that we can do it again.