by Mel Green

On Transgender Day of Remembrance, let’s remember those who have lost their lives to suicide and murder, but let’s also remember — and celebrate, honor, love, and welcome — the living. Even if we don’t “get” them. There’s so many worthy, cool, and interesting transgender and genderqueer people with all kinds of lives and all kinds of interesting stories to tell.  And not only stories about being transgender.

Transgender Day of Remembrance was set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. The event is held in November to honor Rita Hester, whose murder on November 28th, 1998 kicked off the “Remembering Our Dead” web project and a San Francisco candlelight vigil in 1999. Rita Hester’s murder — like most anti-transgender murder cases — has yet to be solved.

The above is pretty much the text I used for the Bent Alaska post I prepared for Transgender Day of Remembrance last year.  But it’s stock text, really. I want to get a little more personal this year.  The transgender people I know and care about deserve far better from me.

Earlier this month, I became involved in a conversation in the Fairbanks Pride Facebook group about how transgender persons are perceived and treated within the larger LGBTQ community.  One participant said a couple of things that struck me:

The T is LBGT is often viewed as just “thrown in there” from the transgender community.

Which reminded me of how, in May 2009, at the beginning of the long summer of public debate on the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64, a transwoman at one meeting asked if the LGB portion of the community would renege on its loyalty to the T part of the community — as she’d seen happen in other places she’d lived.  We had, in fact, been publicly advised to do exactly that by an otherwise fairly steady ally, who told us that the ordinance would stand a better chance of passage if gender identity was removed from its provisions.

I’m glad to say that Anchorage LGBs held firm to “keeping the T in LGBT” in 2009 — “We are all, or none,” we said. But I’m not sure we did as well on educating the public in Anchorage about gender identity, or about the lives and challenges of our transgender community members in the face of virulent anti-trans messaging and outright lies from ordinance opponents. Most of us LGBs don’t really know, after all, much more about transgender people than most non-LGBTQ people do. Just last month, at the Alaska Pride conference, I was struck by the absence of transfolk in discussion at a workshop about māhū, third gender persons with defined roles in traditional Hawaiian culture (similar to Tongan fakaleiti and Samoan fa’afafine).  I wrote about it at the time:

We also discussed western cultural expressions of gender identity and expression — which was something of a strange experience for me, as I realized that none of the people present (to my knowledge) were trans, so it felt rather like talking about people behind their backs.  This is no reflection on [the workshop presenter], who led a great discussion and pointed out some excellent resources, but did cause me to wonder at how few transfolk were at this year’s conference, and also the need in Alaska for the LGB portion of our community to educate themselves more about the trans issues and challenges.

In fact, the closest we came to having a trans person in the room was me, a lesbian whose ex-partner is a transman, and a friend of mine, also a lesbian with a partner who is a transman. And while both of us can speak knowledgeably about how a partner coming out as trans has affected our lives, we can’t speak with authority about what it’s been like for them to live their lives.  Only they can do that.

Which is exactly the point that the participant in the Fairbanks Pride conversation made next:

The straight truth is that no one really “gets” (i.e., understands) transgender — they may say they do, but they don’t GET it unless they ARE it.

Word.

I realized a couple years ago in conversation with a straight man who was fixing my ceiling that… I don’t even GET heterosexuality. My parents, my siblings, so many friends all through my life: still, I don’t GET it. I can watch a movie about a romance between a man and woman and know they’re in love, and so on, and even cheer their love story along —  but I don’t GET it.  No matter how well the love story is portrayed, I feel no strong emotional chords playing down deep within me, no sexual resonances, nothing.  It’s just all in my head.

So what? I’m not wired that way.  It doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the love between a man and a woman as real, or that I can’t celebrate that my mom and dad really loved each other, and had the hots for each other — even if I don’t GET it. And I really think that a large part of why antigay straight people have such a hard time with accepting us LGB folks is because they can’t imagine it, they can’t GET it, they’re not wired that way, and they can’t conceive that anybody is. For whatever reasons, they don’t feel capable to accept difference unless they can understand it internally. Whereas we have learned — because we have to — because we are a minority — that there are all kinds of differences that are beautiful and fine and to be celebrated and welcomed and honored — even if we don’t GET it.

And yet, I think that when it comes to our trans brothers/sisters/genderqueer siblings, many of us non-trans LGBs still have difficulty for the very same reason: we’re wired differently. Paradoxically, we cis-gender people are never going to understand transgender and accept and celebrate transfolk as more than just “an extra letter on LGBT” — to give them a true welcome in the LGBTQ and better yet the big wide community for all of us — until we get that we’re never gonna complete GET what’s going on inside another person. Any person.  Even the person other than yourself that you feel you know the best.

If you don’t fit in my boxes of predetermined categories of personhood… then maybe I’d just better get rid of my boxes.

How little most of us knew about transgender lives.  But I can give you plenty of stats. For example, I can tell you that transgender respondents experienced discrimination, harassment, intimidation, and violence at a higher rate than non-transgender respondents on just about every measure in the Anchorage LGBT Discrimination Survey (preliminary report issues a couple of weeks ago).  I can tell you that on the national level — as stated by U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis in a statement issued this past Friday — “More than 90 percent of transgender people experience harassment and mistreatment in the workplace, with nearly half being fired or denied a promotion,” and that 26 percent of the respondents to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, published this past February, reported being physically assaulted and 10 percent being sexually assaulted because of their gender identity/expression.  I can tell you that at least 681 transgender people in 50 countries have been murdered since 2008 — at least 116 of them in the first 9 months of 2011, including at least 7 in the U.S.

But that’s not the whole story.  In the words of the authors of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey:

Despite all of the harassment, mistreatment, discrimination and violence faced by respondents, study participants also demonstrated determination, resourcefulness and perseverance.

And in the words of trans author Kate Borstein,

Transgender Day of Remembrance is problematic because it’s so concerned with death and despair. We should be celebrating. We should be celebrating because those who are gone whether by murder or their own hand are not here to.

How little most of us knew about transgender lives. Let us not sum them solely in terms of their deaths.  There’s so many worthy, cool, and interesting transgender and genderqueer people with all kinds of lives and all kinds of interesting stories to tell.  And not only stories about being transgender.

Don’t GET it?  So what.  Start a conversation. Get to know another person who, like every other human being beside yourself, is different from you.  And today, let’s remember those transgender persons who because of prejudice and hatefulness have lost their lives to suicide and murder, but let’s also remember — and celebrate, honor, love, and welcome — the living. And begin to work together, hand in hand, to build a world in which we don’t have to talk about suicide, murder, violence, and discrimination ever, ever again.

Photos by Melissa (Mel) S. Green (yksin on Flickr).