A couple of months after I came out/was outed as being a transsexual woman, I wrote letter to the editor of the university newspaper.
At the time there was racial unrest on my campus (Central Arkansas). The school had decided that guard houses and restricted access to the campus were necessary to prevent possible violence on campus. Not surprisingly (this is Arkansas, after all) most of the people searched for weapons were African American. Guns were not allowed on campus, unless you were a good old boy in the making and kept your hunting rifle in your dorm room. A (white) woman in one of my classes told me how she felt it necessary to drive to school with a handgun next to the driver's seat.
A student group put rape-awareness posters on many of the public bulletin boards around campus, only to see them removed by the campus cops under the direction of the administration, who believed that rape was something that shouldn't be discussed on campus. When a frat boy/baseball player was named in connection with a case of sexual abuse in an article in the school newspaper, his buddies stole as many copies of the newspaper as they could to prevent the knowledge from spreading.
The advisor and some of the officers of the campus gay and lesbian student group had received threatening mail. Only a year or so before, some of the black professors had received death threats.
Three years later I sit in my office while in Boston a man tries to excuse his murder of a transgender woman by saying that he found out that she wasn't genetically a woman. I've been to a vigil in Nebraska for a transgender man who was killed precisely because his status became known. And in my home state two women have been murdered because they were lesbian activists.
I have grown a lot in the years since I wrote that letter...as a person, as a woman, as a writer. I hold the same sentiments about bigotry now as I did then, and I feel the need to revisit that letter.
A LETTER
To the university Community
As some of you might imagine (at least some of those that live locally), I have recently had a personal initiation into the world of prejudice. I am transsexual. Many of you do not have the faintest notion of what this really means. You also seem to have no intention of learning. It is much easier to condemn or make a sorry attempt at ridiculing. Some think that I must or should feel ashamed. I do not. I am who I am. For 44 years I was not who I am. I was very sick, but I'm much better now.
There are some people who profess that the Bible is the literal word of their god. They believe this until it comes time to condemn someone. My condition is not mentioned in any way, shape or form in that book. Because they view my situation as "morally wrong," they have called me a homosexual. I am not, at least in the sense that they intend. My orientation was toward women before I transitioned and still is, which makes me a lesbian now. There's a "catch 22" here, isn't there? My being oriented towards men would be proof that I'm really gay but my not being oriented towards men is proof that I am gay. Well, deep down I'm the same person I was before.
My particular condition is not one afflicting a large portion of the population, so it's easy to make jokes about me, to whistle suggestively, make catcalls and talk behind my back. Some people around the country have even seen the rightness of attempting to rid the world of "my kind." Employers, coworkers, and insurance companies have seen fit to discriminate against us with near impunity. This sort of public opinion is what kept me "sick" for so long. But there are more of us than you think and we will demand our basic human freedoms.
The problem is not so much ours as it is yours. Your method of raising children denies our very existence and is extremely detrimental to our mental health. One wonders what percentage of teenage suicides are linked to this.
This begins to make me sound too bitter about the past. I am not bitter anymore. I understand your hesitation. I see a panorama of a barely civilized village confronted with the unknown and warding off the "evil" unknown with hexes, formulas, and curses.
Perhaps this is an ancient inborn fear. It is certainly a modern-day cultural taboo. But we should have advanced beyond that by now. Even the least educated of the Americans of today is infinitely more educated than those near-savages of old, or should be.
Some of my friends are gay or lesbian, and I very much resent the attitudes of the people who condemn them and discriminate against them. When I read the story of Lot, I learned that aggressive behavior towards others was bad. The fact that the perpetrators may have been homosexual was incidental to the main point. But the nasty minded homophobic "Christian" community has seen fit to ignore the messages their Savior brought ("Love thy neighbor as thyself," "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") because it's much easier for them to be small-minded and bigoted. The refrain of "we don't hate homosexuals, only what they do" doesn't cut it, people. Your conception of what homosexuals "do" is couched in too much ignorance. You hate homosexuals. Hate...such an evil word. And because you hate them, they die.
Some of my friends are African American. Some are Asian. Some are Hispanic. My daughter has Native American heritage and my brother-in-law is Jewish. I deeply resent it when I see some of my race treat people belonging to other racial, religious or ethnic groups with anything less than respect, dignity, and total equality. It hurts me equally to see that some members of other races have bought their way into the arena of hatred and like to the play the same game. And to see members of any segment of society that accept the inferior position they find themselves in is deplorable. We all have the ability and should have the opportunity to succeed. But because some of us hate, some people don't have equal opportunity and many people die.
Most of my friends are women. To see someone who treats women with anything less than utter respect is something I find totally absurd. We all had mothers. If you didn't like yours, I'm sorry, but don't take it out on the majority gender. Women are not on this planet for the enjoyment of men. Sexual, physical and emotional abuse of women is not acceptable. But some men think it is, so some women die.
Some of my friends have physical problems. I am outraged that this world is not totally accessible to them. People look away or whisper behind their hands when they see them. One of my former students sat in his wheel chair in the rain for nearly 15 minutes while people avoided noticing that he could use some help opening a door. What's wrong with treating these people with the dignity that any human being deserves? Life is probably hard enough. They shouldn't have to live their lives for your comfort. They deserve a good life as much as you do.
Most of us recognize bigotry when we see it. But to say nothing about it when it occurs is to tacitly support it. We should shout it down when it happens. We should disassociate ourselves from those who practice it. Such people should be shunned by society. They should not be allowed to inflict their views on innocent children, forever stunting their emotional and intellectual growth. I consider such to be the one of the vilest forms of child abuse. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, the only people who should be the objects of bigotry are the bigots.
Remember that when you see anyone attack someone else verbally, physically, or socially, because of some perceived group affiliation, you are probably witnessing someone who is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, and is probably not too crazy about the differently-abled or some of those ethnic groups. Hate is hate and only needs a target. When the minority ten or fifteen percent of the population can dictate the affairs of the majority and the majority allows this to happen, then this society is in its terminal stages. We all have things that we fear. But there are so many other humans around that there should always be help available if we all worked together. We need to stop being so self-centered and realize that we are all just basically trying to survive in some degree of comfort in this hostile environment called Planet Earth.