kivablog3

[kivablog3]

Too Many Ifs

If I were the Speaker, deedle deedle deedle ... I’d organize a select committee run by Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, and Elijah Cummings, the chairs of Judiciary, Intel, and Oversight, and use combined staff from them and from other committees, like Financial Services, Armed Services, and Homeland Security, who may be familiar with parts of this. And “this” could be anything from intricate Trump Org. violations of charity donation provisions of New York State tax law to Ukrainian politicians bribed with funds drawn on a bank in Cyprus that came from a Russian military intel unit in St. Petersburg. Even if we go full-tilt, this will be complicated.

Call it the Select Investigatory Committee on Presidential Crime; I agree with Donny Deutsch on Msnbc who wants to rebrand impeachment so it won’t freak out Middle America. Like that conservative woman in Michigan they interviewed, who was genuinely bewildered to hear Mueller say that there was no exoneration; she had believed her media and they’d told her it was all good. Full exoneration. People like her--and there are a lot of them, people who still can still notice the cognitive dissonance when faced with the truth, and wonder what’s wrong--have to be brought up to speed. And they have to be shown, on television; they’re not going to read that goddamn report. Even I haven’t read it, and I used to read this kind of thing for a living. Like that writer (on Slate?) said, “He wants us to read the report. Has he met us?”

As for Mueller’s performance: It’s all in the report, only 460+ pages of single-spaced legalese--which makes it over 900 pages in real, double-spaced legalese, plus a Courier 12-pt. font could potentially stretch it out even more--and about 2,200 footnotes. It’s already 25% redacted so that should make it go quicker. Right? Everyone should read it. 

At any rate, I’m not the Speaker. Almost everyone isn’t, after all, much as many might wish they were. So I haven’t had to game out impeachment disaster scenarios with my leadership team and try to get everyone to calm the fuck down in the Democratic caucus, especially the newbies. But things look worse every day, and here in the AM (After Mueller) I have to ask: if not now, when? if not him, who? Has any preznit more richly merited removal from office, public disgrace, and the spending of his last years crouched over a table in a Manhattan courtroom as he tries to stay out of prison? 

Of course not. So I finally tried writing down IFs about impeachment, and came up with these notes. I wish it were optimistic. These are all the Scary Scenarios I’ve come up with today:

In any of these scenarios:

IF he’s convicted and refuses to leave?

IF he summons his minions to Washington to flood the city with armed deplorables? 

IF he explicitly tries to flip the military/law enforcement?

IF he explicitly tries to overturn laws he hates?

IF he openly defies the orders of the courts?

IF Mitch refuses to hold a Senate trial at all?

IF there is no conviction, or even during a trial?

IF there is no impeachment at all?

IF there are unknown unknowns at any point which upend everything, like a terrorist attack large enough for him to declare martial law and put tanks on the streets of DC?

A. Does it leave him and his allies in a dominant position re the 2020 campaign? B. Does it leave him and his minions in a stronger position to assert unilateral/illegal powers to further damage and maybe destroy the republic? *

* - How do you know he’s destroying it? Examples are orders to: “Postpone” elections/prosecute election “crimes”, order DoJ to hold show trials of opponents, assert emergency powers through sweeping declarations, arrest opponents and hold them without trial, squelch civilian trials during military “emergency”, suspend habeas corpus, attack due process, militarize the border, suppress the media (or try to), act illegally as and when they please; deport queers to Nevada and put us all in a Gender Reëducation Camp--although they wouldn’t spell it with a ë--put reluctantly pregnant people in forced-carriage-to-term “pregnancy prisons.” Once I start to imagine things;

I stopped here and wrote the rest in the margin:

He has given illegal orders in public. Like the Border Patrol agents he told to deliberately injure the people they caught, and that he’d pardon them if someone tried to prosecute them. After the Satanic Cheetoh left, the commander of the Border Patrol told them in no uncertain terms that even though they were just told to break the law by the preznit, that they were not to do as he’d told them. 

The command team that was there were clearly alarmed for their people, being told to break the law by the goddamn preznit. The were afraid of obeying an illegal order. That’s what keeps us free. If Federal law enforcement agents and military personnel ever become afraid not to obey an illegal order, we are lost.

[kivablog3]

Sylvia’s Cooking

I just got my first Stonewall 50 email. At the bottom of the email in the small print it says Heritage of Pride™, which means it’s still run by the same guys as always, except under more scrutiny now, after getting the march on Channel 7 and with the whole world coming next year to physically or spiritually fit into that little pie-wedge space on Christopher Street where the Stonewall Inn bar is located. This World Pride thing isn’t just an advertising slogan they came up with at HoP, it’s a Thing, like Stonewall 50’s a Thing. My therapist, who’s very active in the community and probably gets lots of interesting emails from various Things, told me it happens at a different city’s Pride each year.

And next year, of course, they’re coming to New York, because it’ll be the 50th Anniversary of the night Sylvia Rivera and her friend Marsha P. Johnson (who I never met, and who may have thrown the first punch, there are scholarly debates on this point, but I am told that Sylvia firmly insisted that she was the first one who punched a cop, it’s like the debate over Lexington and Concord, they’re not sure exactly where the Revolution started but we know that they started it) threw out the first punches to start the legendary three-day riot, rather than just get in the police van like always, right in front of the Stonewall Inn. The night the drag queens finally began to fight back. It made a sound heard ‘round the world, and it’s still reverberating, and if anything really changed the course of history in that wretched year of 1969, that surely did.

It reached me in the front seat of our car when I was with my mom one Saturday, when for once my sister wasn’t with us. I used to like tagging along on her Saturday visits to her office, wherever that was. As we were about to drive away from the small airfield where she worked as a secretary to go to some thing where co-workers were already playing bad country music, I asked her what a homosexual was. It was a sunny day and there was no one else around for a mile in any direction. It was the Summer of 1969, of course, and I was eleven years old.

I can only suppose this is just after I’d heard of Stonewall in the news. It was the first time I’d ever brought up sex as a topic of discussion with my mother, and I did this with some trepidation. I sort of knew this wasn’t her favorite topic of conversation generally, sex, much less transgressive sex. The kind hippies had. Maybe some of them were homosexual, who knew? So I persisted in my line of inquiry. What I didn’t know was that she’d been waiting for some version of that question ever since she’d stopped dressing me in dresses, when I was two.

She put the transmission back in park, turned the engine off, sighed, and for once didn’t light a cigarette before we started what turned out to be a lengthy, meandering conversation, which wandered after a while into related and then tangential topics, and which ended with me correcting her on some minor misunderstandings as to how gonorrhea was transmitted, at which point things kind of ground to a halt and she started the car up.

The whole thing probably took an hour. She used to joke that she’d had the Talk with me, the generalized birds and bees talk, because we did touch on conventional sex and How Babies Are Made, but that I had ended up explaining some things to her, instead, which shouldn’t have surprised her. I did read a lot, after all. I probably already knew a couple of things about homosexuals, but I wanted an explanation of how they actually Did It, and as squirmy as that made me, I wheedled it out of her. I could’ve asked her more about how a male-female couple had sex, but that wasn’t what was on my mind. She wasn’t happy about it, and did her best to make it clear that it was all gross and disgusting. I think she made a face when she was explaining lesbians to me. I liked the sound of the word the first time I heard it, tbh: Lesbian. It sounded soft and fuzzy.

I remember wondering about the feasibility of anal sex, as she sketchily and hastily outlined it, which apparently was what men did together; but what women did together sounded really kind of fun and not nearly as difficult. She didn’t want to talk about that, though, and I do remember that it was around there that the discussion went off into the weeds, to things related and not. Eventually we ended up at syphilis and gonorrhea (aka “VD,” or venereal disease, where venereal=“vaginally transmitted,” rather than “of or having to do with the goddess or planet Venus” — clearly a term invented by men) and I explained some of the then-current science on transmission to her, i.e., you don’t catch it from dirty toilet seats in public restrooms. Not girls, not boys, it’s a myth, mom. They told us in science.

All that was fifty years ago, as of next June. The following June, in 1970, they had the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March, so 2020 is the fiftieth anniversary of the March. But next year is the Big One. It looks like this anniversary will be just as controlled and careful as the 25th anniversary in 1994 was huge and utterly chaotic and wonderfully random, with 200,000 marchers from around the world. We took over Central Park. We took over freakin’ Midtown. It rocked.

Well, not next time. No more of that anarcho-festive celebration stuff. Now you have to be part of a signed-up contingent to be part of the march, and those slots are limited. And no more hopping in-and-out from the sidewalk, apparently. They want everyone in a marching contingent to wear the same t-shirts, ffs. It has to be controlled, as well as going backwards (starting a few blocks north of Christopher, past the Stonewall the wrong way, and up Fifth Avenue, what the fuck?) I’m told some of the people in the Village are tired of the crowds and the noise. They can do what people do in Austin when SXSW comes along: leave town. Tiniest quantum violin playing.

Now that it’s a TV show, I guess it has to run on time and look good on camera. They’ll have a beautifully made-up drag queen doing commentary like last year, along with the usual probably-white cis-guy-&-cis-gal parade anchors. I don’t know where they find those. It’ll become another tradition soon, that trio as parade anchors, now that scientists have established that str8 people in statistically significant numbers will watch drag queens on television and thus advertising time can be sold for this event. It’ll be just like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or the Fourth of July, only with One of Us in the booth along with two of them.

“And you know, Mike, the rainbow flag has been a unifying symbol in the LGBT community since it was first designed in 1978, and did you know that originally it had eight stripes….” There will be carefully-timed performances in front of the Stonewall, and commercial breaks. Some of the stories people tell will break your heart, some will make it sing. Plus commercials, did I mention the commercials? You can record it and FF through them. I did. I stopped this year to watch Chelsea and Rusty talking about Sylvia, which is what makes me think of them all, along with the fact that Sylvia and Marsha deserve statues, and you get reminded of that every June. I’d love to have a statue of the two of them at the Stonewall National Monument, which technically is the little triangular pie-slice shaped park, the benches and the wrought-iron fencing, where you can sit next to the statues representing gay men and women from the 1980s. They should add Sylvia and Marsha.

The whole parade on TV represents some kind of weird queer communications breakthrough, I guess. And now that it’s on every year, I suppose it has to be faaaaaaabulouss! I guess we can record it and go, too. And watch. There were some forums recently at the Center, maybe just one, where people could come and complain about the corporatization of Pride, and the most-of-us not marching thing, and the reverse-route thing where it just kind of ends around 28th Street for no apparent reason, and ask for things they won’t get, but that part’s over and it’s time for Early Bird sign-up.

Whatever. Sylvia and Marsha are the mothers of us all, both trannies and everyone else that fits under this patched, unwieldy tent called “LGBTQ.” We argue, some of us incessantly, about which part of the tent is what, and whether this part is even really part of the same tent as that other part of the tent, but no one argues with the fact that Sylvia and Marsha put up the first tent poles. That may not be the most elegant metaphor, but I’m going with it. Never apologize for your art.

And it’s kind of okay, I think now, or at least I’m trying to convince myself it is, that I never realized “who” Sylvia was, even though at least two people said I should talk to her because I was “interested in politics.” Hm? Oh, ok. No one ever said why. Ffs.

But it felt sort of like I knew Sylvia, the way it feels like I know these professors and other people who my wife works with, after I hear her describe them a few times. She’s a union delegate as well as a math professor, so she knows a lot of people. By now I also know a lot about professors in general. And in the same way I realized after a while from talking to people around T-House, conversations in which she came up, often at vital junctures, that Sylvia was the Mom around the place: she made dinner, I knew that much, and she did a lot of other things to keep Transy* House, Chelsea and Rusty’s house, from burning down, falling over, and sinking during those raucous years around the end of the 20th century. She seemed quite nice when I was introduced across a crowded room downstairs, which actually happened twice I think. She smiled and said hi, I do remember that. She seemed nice.

That, in and of itself, was quite difficult for some people I was around back then — this was and still is New York, the Attitude Capital of the Western Hemisphere and, during Fashion Weeks, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the General Assembly, perhaps the world — but from my brief impression she seemed genuine, and older in a reassuring way when I was twenty years younger. She gave off these hippie-mama vibes, just by making dinner. In a house where a whole lot of chaos happened, and necessarily so given how many trans kids with no other home came through there — because Chelsea and Rusty never turned anyone away, not as far as I know — not to mention how much fun was had there on a regular basis, at least some of it destructive of property, she just looked to me, in a vortex of drama, like a pole of stability.

Maybe that’s shaped by how people talked about her. Everyone said how nice she was; but I wasn’t over there often enough to run into her when she was (a) there and (b) had a free moment, and didn’t know I should prioritize it anyway. And there were other people using up the oxygen in the room at any given time, including me. But it would have been awesome to truly know her.

I knew other people there, had my own reasons for being there. I lived with Kathleen and our two-year-old son in an apartment which was also on 16th Street, in Brooklyn, two blocks away. It was the Nineties, so it didn’t seem unusual to me that there was a house full of transfolx a short walk away, nor that my friend Jamie knew everyone there. Like, she knew everyone. She was the other pole of stability then, around the turn of the century. She doubtless knew Sylvia pretty well, and she probably told me enough to form an impression.

Now Chelsea and Rusty own a bookstore upstate, and T-House is long gone, replaced by the ineluctable tidal forces of gentrification, although there’s a queer history tour that stops at the site and tells a short version of The Story. I wish sometimes they could have a sort of T-House reunion, somewhere, somehow. I would very much like to find Jamie again, even if only online. And I do still wish I’d gotten to talk with Sylvia.

#HistoricalNearMisses

__________

Footnote: Everyone back then except Chelsea, more or less, called it that, but without the “s,” if you get what I mean. We don’t say it anymore, at least not when younger transfolx are around. People get really upset, and if it’s only been used to hurt you it’s a painful word, I get that. Yet it was our word then, and it didn’t hurt at all. It was a warm, friendly word. It was what we called each other, lovingly, and no one else had any reason to use it, and I miss it.

this article also appears at https://medium.com/@kivazo/sylvias-cooking-1b1b4f24e780

[kivablog3]

He’s Projecting

Nearly everything negative that Agent 45 tweets can be flipped, as it were, and “translated” into his reality. “Projecting” is something people with not much self-awareness and bad boundaries do a lot. Here’s an example:

“CNN is being torn apart from within based on their being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake. Sloppy @carlbernstein, a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country! Fake News”

Here it is flipped:

USA is being torn apart from within based on my being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake. Sloppy @realdonaldjtrump, a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country! Fake News

See? It’s easy. Here’s another one:

“The hatred and extreme bias of me by @CNN has clouded their thinking and made them unable to function. But actually, as I have always said, this has been going on for a long time. Little Jeff Z has done a terrible job, his ratings suck, & AT&T should fire him to save credibility!” =

The hatred and extreme bias of @CNN by me has clouded my thinking and made me unable to function. But actually, as I have always denied, this has been going on for a long time. Little Donnie T has done a terrible job, his ratings suck, & USA should fire him to save credibility!

Try to flip it with as few word changes as possible. Anyone can play! 

[kivablog3]

An impeachment that can’t check its own privilege, and more word games

DC NerdWatch for Friday July 27th 2018 / Midterms in 103 Days

Impeachment: The Privileged Resolution that Wasn’t Privileged

Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan filed articles of impeachment this week against Rod Rosenstein (am I the only one who thinks all this alliteration is vaguely comic-bookish? You know, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Peter Parker, Stephen Strange, that kind of thing). Only they said they weren’t filing it “as a privileged motion,” so off it goes into some committee in the Neutral Zone, never to return. This makes no sense, because under House of Representatives Rules of Order an impeachment resolution takes precedence -- it’s privileged, in other words -- over any other motion except the one motion that’s always in order, a motion to adjourn.

This all makes so little sense that I haven’t even looked this up online, I’ve already lived through a couple of presidential impeachments and I remember. This is a quirk of the H. of Rep. Rules, because impeaching any criminal serving in Federal office is urgent, they decided once, so urgent that all other business may be safely put aside. 

But they claimed their motion wasn’t privileged -- I don’t know how they did this other than by simply asserting that it was -- and it was sent off to die by the actual Speaker with a scoff and a sneer. This doesn’t mean impeachments don’t usually go to the Judiciary Committee, they do, but in theory they don’t have to. If something is privileged, then anyone can call the question on it and demand a vote; and then Congressman Shirtsleeves and his Caucus of Doom would be quickly revealed for what they are, maybe three dozen fanatics who will happily follow their leaders off the cliff into the icy waters of the fjord, there to drown pathetically.

If Congressman Shirtsleeves wants to pretend-run for Speaker, he can’t have his little dog-wagger’s caucus exposed as making up, at best, maybe 12 percent? Google doesn’t want to actually tell me, it wants to teach me fucking arithmetic. Not. Now. 

But howsoever large it may be, this dog must be sore from all the wagging it’s had to put up with from the Tail Caucus. There’s a small moderate edge that gets smaller every two years, and then there’s a mass of incoherent conservatives in the “middle” of the party who aren’t actually flat-out bizarre themselves, but whose voters mostly admire that kind of thing and therefore voted for Agent 45, because he does bizarre so well. 

And he does privileged very well, of course. A lot of people enjoy watching this sort of thing on TV. And the show is still pulling in the viewers, and isn’t that what he really understands? The more privilege you have, the less likely it is to even occur to you to check it. But sometimes, in politics, you have to check it and then say it isn’t there.

When the Preznit Tweets in ALL CAPS, Is the Policy Also All Caps? And WTF Does That Even Mean?

Back when this shitshow was just getting under way, in January of 2017, I heard an interesting segment on NPR. The problem was that anything and everything the president says in public is, ipso facto, a statement of the official policy of the United States. That’s why normal presidents -- defined here, very loosely, as the first 44 presidents -- were almost always careful not to say something stupid in public, however tempting it might feel at the time. 

People in DC were seriously worried: are tweets going to be considered policy statements? If he announces some sudden policy zigzag, like embracing Russia and spurning Montenegro in a furious four a.m. fusillade, does that become the official policy zigzag of the Untied States? No interagency process, no levels of input, no feedback, no attemtpt to avoid doing something stupid in public, since that’s what he does. It’s how he got so close to being elected president. All we get from those who choose to work for him are brief texts leaking things to reporters as they go hurrying along after him, trying to keep up with the Preznit and scoop up his messes at the same time.

Yes, of course, is the short answer. Those who oppose him oppose America, and are enemies of the people. Show trials to follow. He may not know what the fuck he even thinks he’s doing, and he’s already tanked the dominant sectors of the ag economies in half a dozen states (Iowa = soybeans, Maine = lobsters, Maine and Massachusetts = cranberries, etc.) with his idiotic garbled version of a 20th century trade war, but he has the phone in his hands, so he has the power, and his minions try to keep up and pretend all this is Normal. It’s the new abnormal. It’s the way we live now. __________

I have a submission package I’m working on but I can’t only write about one thing all the time, and I have a few days left in July. Usually I don’t write about "mainstream” politics for public consumption, I just inflict it on family and friends. But, not to belabor the point, this is not a normal midterm, where picking up maybe 20 seats but not quite taking the House is seen as a respectable result, and then they get ready for more respectable results in 2020 by attacking the left wing of the party and blaming the shortfall on them. 

If we the people of the Untied States can’t flip the House -- picture 218+ Democrats picking up a (small) house and flipping it over -- then we will be stuck with Mad King Don reigning unchecked another two years. They’ll lock in every advantage they’ve gotten a grip on and reach for more, and no one will investigate anything. He might even feel confident enough to fire Jeff Secessions and Rod Rosenstein. Then he’ll finally get to hire people who are “loyal” to run DOJ, and they’ll conduct a thorough purge at Justice like the one they’re doing now at EPA. Then they may start testing things like emergency executive orders, to see what they can get away with once the snowflakes are gone. Hearings and trials are so tedious, especially when you already know who’s guilty. It worked in England for the Stuarts, for a while anyway.

And above all they will dig in for the 2020 Census around the country: first warp the survey, then fiddle the numbers, so they can twist the outcome in the state legislatures that will sit in 2021 with slash-&-burn gerrymandering, now that the Supremes have made clear they won’t do anything to stop that kind of thing. We have to take back state legislatures, they are as important as the US House, almost more so since the redistricting fights will be carried on by the winners of the 2018 and 2020 elections.

The election is in 103 days.

[kivablog3]

Part 2 of NYC Pride™ will be back right after this...

There’s nothing in this show that would make an establishment-type white cis guy, queer or str8, uncomfortable. Like the Dykes on Bikes all had on shirts or flags or something covering their naughty-pillows, at least while they were on camera (which is set up across from Sheridan Square, near the Stonewall, and now near the start of the March), and, trying to come up with a male equivalent, I don’t see any of those gold-glitter-colored jockstraps you used to see so much on men, either. The whole T-Mobile group has on their T-Mobile shirts, which reminds me of that everyone-wear-the-same-shirt rule. Maybe it really was to make sure everyone actually wore one. Everyone with naughty-pillows, anyway, because it may be legal in New York for women to go topless, but you never see it except at Pride. So, maybe not there anymore, either, or not on TV. [Note: A friend of ours who was at the March, a couple of blocks past the cameras, said she saw a cop get a lap dance, after which he looked rather embarrassed for a couple of minutes. Maybe the secret from now on will be to actually go IRL to the March. Because it’s finally on TV, so you can’t see it as easily anymore. As Yogi Berra once said: “No one goes (to eat) there anymore, it’s too crowded.” This town….] 

Someone said to me the other day that she feels about the same way as I do re the huge commercialized Pride Inc. LLC thing we have going now in NYC and other large cities, but that she’s more supportive of marches in more conservative places where the community is subject to persecution. I agree, there are places where people come together gratefully around symbols like the rainbow flag, and even the word “gay,” as something that unites them all, and they so very much need that. There are scared closeted kids, and scared closeted adults, who are terrified of actually making the journey, but who would give anything to be here in New York today, and out, and safe. 

And … here’s the Macy’s float. I know for damn sure we didn’t used to have a Macy’s float in the Pride March. Or maybe now it really is a parade, not a march, because why would Macy’s be in a protest march? Maybe this is the year when I should give up on that old debate, along with any illusion of my own influence over it.

I guess that’s the worst part of this. It feels like something that belonged to us that gradually got taken away, whoever the “us” is: They took a protest march and turned it into a glossy, glitzy, colorful Event, something that Channel 7 can sell enough ad time on for it to be worth their while covering it. My fifteen years of not paying attention to all this made it more jarring when I started again. It’s like, Gee, look at all the rainbows! Happy Pride!, and also, Oh, jeez, yeah, look at all the rainbows, there’s even one on my bank now. It’s kind of nice, all the rainbows, yet at the same time it’s really, really annoying. 

_____

I don’t want to ever take any of this for granted. Two years ago, I was one of those terrified closeted adults. I had been for many years, and that still mostly hadn’t changed even after I came out. Leaving the house most days seemed impossible, with little prospect for change. Now, thanks to care from the people at the Callen-Lorde clinic, I have photos from the Trans March I went to Friday. I have friends now who I would never have known if I had stayed hidden. At the Trans March I noticed a couple in front of me, a trans woman and a cis woman, dressed matchy-matchy and hugging. She had such a sweet smile, the trans woman. And I thought, Kathleen and I aren’t the only couple like us, even if it still feels like it, just like I’m not the only trans lesbian on Earth, even though I thought I was, as recently as 30 years ago.

If you’re transgender — and if you are, or think you might be, message me, we should talk — Start again: Because I am an out trans woman, here or anywhere else, I am always super-aware of my surroundings, where and when is safe and why and by how much, given who I am. Everything that’s happened since the summer of 1969, when I was eleven and I asked my mother what a homosexual was, is amazing when viewed as a whole. But when lived day by day, being queer is both a common challenge and joy and also different for each of us, because we are each also all the other facets of our selves: our different skin colors, and genders, and cultures, and beliefs, how we got here, how we survive, what we love, and who and how we love.

And so many of us have incredibly complicated feelings around this, about the meta-import of today’s march and our place in history and how we got there, and also about the compromises which have always been necessary with the NYPD and the City just in order to make this actually happen every year. And obviously not every interaction in this town involving queers and the police goes as smoothly as this year’s parade is going. I’m glad they’re there, the queer cops, but at the same time it still feels deeply weird, having all the police standing around before things start. Especially if you remember the days when getting arrested was still an outside possibility, just like any other protest march, depending on how things broke.

Hey, they’re doing a segment on Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and they interviewed Chelsea Goodwin and Rusty Moore! I knew them back in the day. That’s pretty cool, I have to admit, seeing a short feature on them all. I used to drop by Rusty and Chelsea’s home, T-House, back in the day — we lived a couple of blocks down on 16th Street in Brooklyn — but I never actually got a chance to talk with Sylvia, just waved and said, “Hi!” No one explained to me then that Sylvia was a living historic legend, they just said, “Oh, you’re into politics, you should talk to Sylvia.” No one ever told me why. I was hoping Sylvia would get some screen time on this show, but I didn’t expect to see people I knew. That’s pretty cool.

That idiot on Channel 7 just said that the riot was in 1968 again. This is agony. 

[ transcript trails off into massive typographical errors and PKD-levels of florid incoherence from this point forward ]

[kivablog3]

NYC Pride March™ 2018, brought to you by…

I wrote this up while watching the Pride March on TV, mainly because just the idea of watching it on TV was so weird. Part 1 of 2.— 

The March is on now, but it’s not informal like the hallowe’e’n parade, meaning not in an informal, NY1, someone-with-a-camera wandering-around kind of way. More a sort of, “Welcome to ABC7’s coverage of the NYC Pride March! Here’s an establishing shot of Lower Manhattan from NewsChopper 7!” way. In what I have decided to call a thanksgiving-gays-parade kind of way. There’s a pair of apparently-str8 parade anchors or whatever you call them, a white cis man and white cis woman with a black drag queen anchor providing expert queer commentary. She had dangerous hair and I forget her name, which proves I was the only person watching who didn’t know who she was. I’m not only out of the loop, I can’t even see the loop from here. Sometimes even the existence of the loop seems speculative.

There’s a bunch of students from (I think) the High School for the Performing Arts to start the show, dancing and singing a song I’m not familiar with (see loop, out of, supra). Now there’s another kid singing the national anthem. I swear. This ain’t no football game, y’all. Did everyone get a chance to take a knee? I would have been deeply annoyed if I’d been there. “From its dimly-recalled semilegendary origins as a sort of protest rally, today the NYC Pride March….” I made up that quote, but not by much.

The kid who led the singers from Performing Arts is being interviewed now, and this is different, people like them getting to speak to the cameras. Voices like this get lost in the noise. That’s new. It’s also…interesting seeing who bought commercial time on this. Nissan, TD Bank, I forget the first one. T-Mobile.

So, here we go for real. Shot from above of the Dykes on Bikes, they take off…and Channel 7 chooses this moment to try to explain as well as describe the new route. Justify the new route, tbph, since last year the traditional longform march took nine hours, apparently. 

Now they’re explaining who lesbians are, or were fifty years ago, something like that. Here comes the Dykes on Bikes for real, they’re honking and waving. But the announcers are awkwardly discussing transgender murder rates at the moment, and trying to talk about tolerance, and history, but all in a sort of gee-whiz way, giving us, “Lesbians used to go to the bar too, some of them, and a lesbian actually overturned a police car! which helped start things off at the riot, and….” “That’s right, Brian, and here’s one of the Grand Marshals of this year’s march, Billie Jean King.” Aaand here’s a touching, pre-produced segment, talking with Billie Jean. Sort of like on the Olympics when they talk to athletes. It’s nice, but several of these after a couple of hours will feel like interruptions.

I think we should build a monument, a statue of the Nameless Lesbian Who Flipped a Cop Car at the Stonewall Riots by Herself; I’ve heard this story before. But it’s all delivered in this weird parade-announcer dialect, like, “How many balloons are there in those arches?” “Well, there are 2000 balloons in each arch, and as you know, the rainbow has been the symbol….” I may have to turn off the sound. Because, okay, it’s nice getting to see the Grand Marshals and the Dykes on Bikes and the balloons, even. It’s just so commercialized now, it makes even real stuff, like help and counseling and history, sound cheesy and artificial. 

It seems like it’s in large part designed to explain queer stuff to str8  people, and to maybe-not-str8 people who are questioning, all of which is commendable, in theory, but in the execution it’s a little wobbly-looking. Well-intentioned encomiums to equality and descriptions of social services are interspersed with, Oh, look, another float…and now that it’s been established that heterosexual audiences will watch television shows about drag queens, Channel 7 will put as many onscreen as possible. That’s certainly different.

There are some brief politician interviews, and now they have Rachel Tiven in the booth. She’s head of Lambda Legal, “The People Who Sue.” I hadn’t heard that line before, but it’s catchy. If I’m going to try to use my legal language skills somewhere, and I’ve tried some other places that just aren’t responsive, then maybe I should try Lambda. They get involved in high-impact cases that have, I gather, the potential for change beyond simple redress for the litigants. That’s somewhere I could be useful in serious litigation, help make change happen. I’m glad she got interviewed. It’s sort of as if for today we’re all just another part of the larger community. It’s kind of amazing, even bizarre, that we have corporate sponsors and live coverage. And I’m not used to seeing this many queers on the air for this long without a lesbian fictional character dying.

Some of the marchers from Lambda have this Cindy Sherman-style design on their tees: “Read My Briefs!” For legal humor that’s not bad; the bar is set low. That’s a pun. Sorry.

To be continued…

[kivablog3]

Our Third Pride Together

Brooklyn, New York / June 2018 / Anno Muris 49 (Year of the Stone-Wall)

Happy Pride, it’s a beautiful day in Park Slope. And the noise from the infernal building site on 22nd St, the lot catty-corner-plus-two to our backyard, the workers and the power tools and the yelling and banging drowning out the normal neighborhood noise, it’s gone for now, thanks to the rain. Seven days a week, starting at 8 am. Rain’s the only thing that even slows them down. 

It’s five tall stories of framework now, I think they’ve finally topped it off. I just want this nuisance to abate for a while, long enough to think, because I do want to keep the balcony doors open to the breeze. I want them to finish that fucking building, too, and I realize these two desires could be said to be directly at odds, but I want everything. I want them to finish quietly. As long as I’m wanting things I can’t have, I might as well want things I really really want, or really really can’t have. 

Kathleen’s on the loveseat, reading something on her ipad, looking concerned, going, Hm. She is the greatest gift in my life, a gift from the Goddesses, just a few feet away. She is a shining rainbow every day, and she shines into my heart. When she came into my life and added her light to mine, the two burned so much brighter together, perhaps mine more so because it had been so dim for so long. 

It’s our 27th Pride together, if you count the intervening years when the whole Pride thing just depressed me and I tried to ignore it when it came up in the news or in conversation. Oh, look, purple stripes down Broadway, that’s great. Everything gradually changed, then not so gradually. Windsor v. U.S., wow, that’s great! 

Because my superpower is proofreading, friends started asking me odd questions about pronoun usage, odd primarily in that people don’t ask me  very often about grammar. But also, pronouns? I you he she it we they? (My sixth grade English teacher would’ve been so proud just now, she was determined we learn them.) Odd hypotheticals involving people who wished to be referred to in the plural but were single individuals: singluar plurals, accusatives and reflexives, although they didn’t call them that of course, off deep in the weeds: “They want to be referred to as ‘they’? So, then, would it make sense to address them as ‘y’all?’ Instead of ‘you’? … okeee, jeez, just asking. What about, is it, ‘themselves’ or ‘themself’?…”  

More and more lesbians were appearing in television shows, I did read about that, and some of these apparitions survived for more than a few episodes. And there was L Word, that happened, although we stopped watching after that awful ski resort trip to BC at the end of S2 (or S3, I forget.) It’s a real good thing I didn’t see what the writers eventually did to Jenny before the show finally ended. Yeesh...I identified with Jenny, ffs. 

Oh, really, a TV show starring a Black trans woman? An actual trans woman playing a trans woman, that’s great, but does she…no, I don’t watch prison shows. They give me claustrophobia. Does she die?… 

…What? — “Transparent,” that’s funny, is that like a joke?…Does she die?…Oh…Because we always die, Jen, trannies and dykes always die by the end of the show, that’s why!!

And, not that many of them ever hated me personally, not women who actually knew me, but I learned that things were really truly different now: lesbians, cis lesbians, especially younger queer cis women and gay and bi cis women, they mostly didn’t hate trans women anymore. It wasn’t acceptable. I watched gender language gradually change for parties I wanted to go to, sounding more like places where someone like me would actually be allowed to attend. 

Yes, I was told, you’d be welcome now at [fill in any really cool all-women event other than Michigan or an Olivia cruise, and btw, how the fuck did a women’s record company turn into a cruise line? I don’t actually want to go on one, well, okay, I sorta do but I know even though they deny it strenuously, or at least it was true last I checked, that it gives them the willies if a trans woman turns up at the dock and their usual cruising clientele still sneer at us, so, I just wanna know, what the fuck??]. 

I go online looking in earnest for my people: What’s an…autostraddle? 

So, it’s really our third Pride together, after 2016 and 2017. The 28th of June is my birthday and marks two years of hormone replacement therapy. I’ve gone far enough that I can look back and see footsteps in the sand and tell how far it really is. It turned out in the end that they’re* right: you can’t suppress your innermost self, you can’t hide what you know is the brightest part of your soul, without making yourself profoundly sad and causing yourself endless pain. And when you stop doing that, you feel so much happier. It may be sappy, but it’s true. All the sappy stuff turns out to be true. 

* - There’s “they” as aux. for person(s) of unknown gender(s). We do use it already.

{ Coming Soon: Part Two }

[kivablog3]

I never quote boys but this is true. All the sappy things like this turn out to be true.

[kivablog3]

Looking for Evie

note: I found her! I love this part about being queer, it’s sort of like belonging to a secret club where everyone is within three degrees of everyone else. How easy is it otherwise to find a stranger you met in Brooklyn? Even if you both happen to read Missed Connections on Craigslist.

Repeating this from elsewhere, kind of unlikely to help here but it’s my blog:

Idk if this will work but: Your name is Evie, you have reddish-blonde hair, you were wearing ram’s horns and an ethereal look. A couple of weeks ago I asked if you were Baphomet, at the bus stop on Fifth near 9th Street in Park Slope. We talked comics. I said I was annoyed about the Cap/Hydra thing, but then my bus came. I forgot to get your info, we should talk some more! Message me if you see this somehow. (Or anyone who knows her? I figure the ram’s horns narrow it down at least some.)

[kivablog3]

Fashion Week

I am going the wrong way through the little park which has Greenwich Avenue running along one side, trying to get to Boom Boom Brow Bar at 30 Greenwich Avenue, where I’m getting laser treatments from Nikki, who is an absolute sweetie and who will change my life.

I’ve waited years for this, to start “clearing” my face of at least the 70% of facial hair which is still dark. The gray hairs are iffy, depending on how much pigment is left to get fried. But it can still fix two-thirds of my problem, including my jaws, chin, and upper goddamn lip. If she can just make the dark hair I see in the mirror when I glance at it go away, I’ll be so happy. We can figure out the gray hairs later.

It may involve learning to apply makeup. I have to be open to new ideas. __________________

I’m wearing a pair of men’s sneakers without socks, a pair of old grey woven (and distressed, but naturally so) shorts, which like the shoes are left over from when I was still presenting as male in public and which I think I’d at least once promised Kathleen I’d never wear in public again.

But, shoes are shoes. Shorts are shorts. And they don’t always look so bad with girl clothes, it turns out. Depends on what you’re wearing: there’s you, and there’s your clothes and accessories, something different each day. I’m still learning this part.

I’ve got on my most favorite top, a hippie-ish zigzags-&-diamonds pattern tunic I got from Marketplace of India online. And my only jewelry is the bracelet my sweetie gave me, which has zigzaggy sunbursts which echo the pattern from the tunic, each sunburst around a big spiral. It’s perfect. And it’s special because she gave it to me.

I’d decided that I didn’t have time to hang something cute from my ears, I was running late. My hair looked fine, I’d washed it the night before. I had this wonderfully shaped cut that Tiz gave me, the way my hair framed my face now, and my lowlights, the shade was her idea too. A friend said on Facebook that it was the color of emmer wheat in the summertime, I think. Tiz transformed my whole look.

And I had on my sunglasses, with the black frame in front and the red earpieces. They’re the sort-of-rectangular ones, not the big round ones or anything more definitively femmy, which is relevant here.

So, when I was about two-thirds of the way across the park, headed for the triangles sculpture, confidently going the wrong way, I heard this:

‘That is a *look*’, said a woman with a very distinctive London accent, upper class it seemed to me, saying it quietly but definitively as I made my way across the park. It sounded like someone who was people-watching and commenting, which anyone can do for free in New York, but this was said quite quietly and with a purpose.

‘Yes, it is’, agreed a man even more quietly. A man with a definite London accent.

Gosh. Really? I thought. 

Remarkable, the accents. It sounded as if Emma Peel and John Steed from The Avengers in the ‘60s had come to life on a bench behind me and quietly said something nice about my outfit…coolly appraising it, because it’s relevant to a case they’re working on, probably. Steed has that cane and hat and Diana Rigg is in this unbelievable leather catsuit that I always picture her in, even though I know there were times she didn’t wear it.

I didn’t look around to see who’d said it. I was still processing. I realized the numbers were going the wrong way, and it had to be the other way down Greenwich Avenue. So I turned around and headed the other way, leaving the park and jaywalking.

Then I remembered: hearing on NY1 - over and over, on TV sets in delis and bagel shops - that it was Fashion Week again, and fashion industry people from all over were in town for the runway shows. It fit: Peel and Steed were here from the UK for the week.

Wow, like, for reals? I couldn’t be sure, but I couldn’t come up with an alternative theory that accounted for the facts. (Tbh, I wasn’t trying that hard.) That, and the park was relatively quiet, apart from a few kids playing in the playground and some people on benches. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the park, I was busy getting lost.

So no one else was striding purposefully toward the white triangles except for me. I’m hard to miss anyway, and I decided if I was wrong I’d rather not know.

It’s a look! and it works! I thought. Yesss! OMFG! I finally did it! I — I have to try not to overthink this, I decided, overthinking it.

Maybe the key is not caring too much, I thought, but not doing it on purpose, either: I didn’t wear my bra because it was too hot. I didn’t even wear a necklace. And I didn’t have time to hang something cute from the little holes in my ears…it’s not a serious idea but it’s attractive, because if true it means I don’t have to wear them unless I want to. I file it away for later use.

It’s the tunic!, I finally decided. It really must be the tunic! Plus the bracelet, that went with the tunic, in a way the designer of neither originally had in mind, when they designed them.

I did that. That’s how this works, I decided. This, my belov’d hippieish tunic with the diamondy - zigzaggy patterns, and the bracelet Kathleen gave me, with the spirals and zigzags around them which echo parts of the tunic’s pattern but not relentlessly, and no other jewelry, and my beat-to-shit shorts and shoes, and of course my sunglasses, here, in this place, where once there was a village on the river called Greenwich, just a short ride north from New-York. __________________

The Fashion UN, meeting for a week, five times a year if I’m not mistaken, and the city is full of fashion industry people, who I decide really are just the sort to sit in a park in downtown New York on a nice day and just hang out, looking for someone wearing something Different. A look. That worked.

I’d like to think that for once, that was me.

[kivablog3]

Flip, Flop, and Fly: Flynn Flees Felonies, Fate

Flynn Flips! Woot! Mike Flynn has pled guilty to a single felony, in return for telling Mueller & Co. every single effing thing he knows about this. It’ll make for Must-See TV, and sell a lot of newspapers too. This could be fun for political junkies, as long as the Republic survives all this.

Flynn pled on a single charge of lying to an FBI agent about two 2016 phone calls with the Russian ambassador. The Russians were so agitated about something that they, on December 22nd and 29th, 2016, just had to talk to Flynn about it right then, during the transition. Seems it couldn’t wait until the Orange Menace took power on January 20th.

Why, ffs? Idk, but Flynn admitted he lied about it to an FBI agent in January. Sentencing will happen after he’s finished testifying. All in return for what he has to say now: he will and must tell all. Before, he told Mueller’s team just enough to get a plea agreement in return for something huge. Now, for this low-level plea, in return he has to tell them everything. I mean, everything. The dots should finally get connected.

This is happening really fast. Mueller and his team are moving with blinding speed for lawyers. As if he’s extremely aware that they could all be fired one morning at 6 am via tweet. They already knew there‘s Something huge, a secret about the Orange Menace, and now they have someone who can tell them what the Something is.

They’re probably talking to Flynn right now. A lot of dots may be connected soon. This is major. Hope they go easy on Flynn, he’s a good guy. (that’s, like, irony)

We don’t do this often on Kivablog3, as in never before, but we'll give the Lord of Hosts the final word:

“The moral arc of the Universe is long, but it bends toward impeachment.”

-- God (@TheTweetOfGod), Dec. 1st 2017

[kivablog3]

PeachFuzz #130: A Steady Pace

Dedicated to the fan who told this to me! @cartoonsandhiptoons ! Super inspiring!

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supported by incredible fans like you!

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[kivablog3]

Missing Kate

by Kiva Offenholley / © 2017 v. 4b (every time I post this it ends up slightly different, if it matters)

This needs a lot more work but by this version I’d gotten it to tell a story, and i wanted to post it to prove to everyone i’m alive and everything. The Center, of course, is the LGBTQ community center in New York. The rôle of Kate Bornstein is played by Kate Bornstein, and that of Dian Hanson by Dian Hanson. Everyone else, including me, is fictionalized.

1.

I went to get coffee that Tuesday afternoon at The Center. At least I tried to get some coffee at The Center. I came in and checked out the socially-conscious and generally well-staffed caffeine bar in the lobby, looking for one of the bouncy baristas you usually see, but there simply was no one there.

This had never happened before. But voters were streaming in and out of the auditorium, since it was Primary Election Day and The Center’s aud was being used as a polling place. This may have quickly turned the normally peaceful coffee bar into a zoo of insufficiently caffeinated primary voters with jobs to get to, and perhaps the staff were at length forced to flee. Speculation is idle, but it’s fun. At any rate it seemed that for once, no one was in charge.

So I went on out back, deciding I could spend twenty minutes or so fiddling with my iPhone. But this evening, every freaking table in the Courtyard was taken up apart from one. So I sat down and rearranged oblong things in my new bag, started to rethink where to keep my phone. I had to be at Callen-Lorde in a half-hour, more or less. It was essential. But it wasn’t time yet, it was still 6ish.

I ran into Dee in the Courtyard at the Center, which wasn’t unusual, but this night, as it happened, Kate Bornstein was speaking there. That was unusual. At 7, Dee said. I was glad to see her up and about again. I’d seen the poster before for her talk, I was just thinking about something else and didn’t really absorb the message.

I love Kate. It’s wonderful that she’s beating the cancer and I’m proud that we helped her pay for her care when she needed us, those of us who could, in this insane system of “health care,” including my wife and me. I think of her as a mother-figure, the closest I have to one anyway. I would’ve given anything to see her that night. But me, I had to be at a doctor’s appointment seven blocks away at 6:40. It was impossible to do both, I was telling Dee in what I hoped was a light tone:

“Alas, no, no, I can’t come! I have an appointment at 6:40, I totally have to be there…I was just going to get some coffee, but the auditorium is open and people are going in and out, voting”—Dee nodded—“and there’s no one out front doing the coffee, and I can’t see Kate anyway, so I guess I’ll go.” I got up again to leave. I didn’t want to talk about Kate with Dee and then not get to actually see her. There were other places to go. “…No, yes, I know, I adore her, I really wish I could stay. I do love her. The only time I met her….”

And every head, it seemed, of every other individual in the Courtyard, as far as I could tell at least, they all turned ever-so-slightly at the same time.

Yikes. Suddenly, I realized, I was talking to everyone there. Everyone else in the courtyard was there to see Kate, the Mother of Us All, I think of her as. Other people have other mother-figures, she’s mine. She’s become revered, and why not? Reverence is due, IMHO. Why wouldn’t they be there to hear her speak?

But there’s something very anti-introverted about a very shy person realizing she has suddenly, unintentionally gotten the attention of maybe twenty or more people, every one of whom, I realized at that very moment, were there to see Kate. D’oh! And then here I come along, this funny-looking old trans lady dressed like a hippie, and casually say, “The only time I met her…” This is someone who’s met her?!?

I think I actually froze, I kind of looked around without moving my head,  my eyes even, and said, I wished it was to myself only everyone could hear me: “Oh, god.” Then I pressed on.

I told an abbreviated account of my Kate story, from the time a few months after My Gender Workbook came out, it was 1998. A Different Light (the gay and lesbian bookstore, back when there was such a thing) had a monthly book club session, and this month’s meeting was about Kate’s new book. I was quite excited because they didn’t talk about transgender books often. Well, ever, or not until then at least, I think. They did Leslie Feinberg one month I think. I kept checking their little transgender niche, hoping for something new to turn up next to the crossdresser porn and the occasional zine. And she actually came, herself, when she saw it listed in the store’s newsletter. No one expected her, including Different Light, clearly, but there she was. She was curious to learn what we thought about the book, not to talk about it herself. And it was an incredibly interesting discussion, having her there with us.

She was utterly adorable. It was wonderful, just getting to talk with her afterwards: “You know, you don’t have to have the surgery,” she said at one point. It was 1998, and when transsexual women said “the surgery,” we had in mind a competent vaginoplasty. Beyond this most dared not yet dream; the important thing for a tryke was that the surgeons in Montréal apparently knew what a clit was for, understood the relationship between a penile shaft and a clitoral shaft and why all those nerve endings were there. This was quite unlike most of the surgeons around back then, who to various degrees were obsessed with vaginal depth and “vaginal orgasms” and that sort of thing, their phallocentric notion of a vagina. So when the time came, I’d go north. I liked the idea of Montréal anyway, surgery or no. “I know, other people have told me the very same thing,” I replied to my transsexual lesbian hero. “The problem for me is, everyone who tells me that, all of you, you’ve all already had the surgery….” “Okay,” she said, and laughed. “I see your point.” I think she even said something sympathetic, about understanding why I’d feel that way.

And she was right, of course. I didn’t have to have The Surgery™, and at least in New York having had it isn’t compulsory anymore, which is part of why I’m out again. It felt like the most important thing in the world, back then. I wish I could remember more of that afternoon. I wish I could see her again and just talk. Or just listen to her talk.

But I had to run that particular night, the night the Center was hosting the Primary Election as well as Kate, who really is now a living transgender legend, a living LGBTQIA legend, a real human being I had a brief conversation with once, long ago, which I can’t really remember but which I’ll never forget. Dee told me in the Courtyard that the book we’d discussed, My Gender Workbook, was the one that had helped her come out. I told her my Different Light book group story and then I said, “For me, it was just seeing her in OutWeek, in this interview in 1990, I went, ‘Oh, you mean I’m not the only one!’”

…I sensed confusion. Which wasn’t unusual; most of my weird, dry jokes made no sense to her, it seemed, she didn’t seem to care about politics in detail, and whenever the subject of lesbians came up (something that, almost always, happened because I’d included it in a convo somehow), she always looked at me rather startled, as if I’d just started to speak in French.

“You mean I’m not the only one.” I’d said it in a semi-ironic way, which is the only way people say it anymore. This is a phrase that has become a stereotypical description of that moment of self-realization for many queers, that you really are different but you’re not alone. What I’d just said could mean anything, so I pressed on: “The only trans lesbian, I mean.” Nothing. I thought, you know, Dee knew. Apparently I really was speaking in French. “She ID’d as lesbian at the time,” I said. I gestured ambiguously. Elle a une identité lesbienne aux temps. Dans les annees 90. Un autre siècle. (She had a lesbian identity at the time. In the 90s. A different century.)

My inner introvert finally seizes power: picture it, if you’ve seen it, something like in the movie Inside Out, where our hero, Riley, is 12, and she had five or six powerful new emotions struggling over the control panel. In my case, at this moment, Sheer Panic is now firmly in the driver’s seat.

I just wanted some coffee.

2.

Interlude: On Hormones

Because I am undergoing my transitional hormone therapy, I am walking around with a system, body and brain both, that is going through puberty. I have the emotional energy and emotional stability of a 13-year-old, I said the first year.

Now, I’m more like 15, Kathleen said recently; but basically, because of my hormone therapy, I now enjoy the estrogen levels normally found in a pregnant woman — or an adolescent girl. I feel everything profoundly-intensely, like an adolescent girl, the kind who spends lots of time writing in her journal, and I get as hormonal as a pregnant woman. Everything is more vivid, every feeling is feelsier. And then without warning:

Scenario: Let’s say I just felt angry and not listened-to and frustrated at being criticized for doing something slightly wrong and I was just fed up, and I was ready to go off … and it turns out that’s “being hormonal.” I didn’t understand what was going on inside Kathleen, watching from the outside. 

I’m still not sure what happens to me, on the inside. I discussed the topic a bit with my doctor, the wonder Dr. Eunmee Chun at Callen-Lorde, who finally got what I was after and said, laughing, “If you want a physiological cause, I can’t give you one.” 

Ohhhh…. Got it. That would explain why I can’t find out what the hell it is or why it happens, in a meta sense. We don’t know.

Kathleen wins the Good Sport Award for 2017 and potentially for 2018 and 2019 for this sort of thing; she says that it’s just payback for when I had to endure her: going off randomly, vividly hormonal, when she was pregnant. By that measure, I have a ways to go yet, as we say Down Home.

I remember back then, when she was pregnant, learning—someone told me, and that this was vital—that the one thing you must never, ever say to the being-hormonal woman is, “You’re being hormonal, aren’t you?” or anything else that even remotely references it. Not if you have as much estrogen in you as I do. Kathleen maintains that saying that to a being-hormonal woman who then strangles you will still return a verdict of justifiable homicide in New York State.

Kathleen even has body language that reminds me of the way I once sat: chin in hand, just looking at her—because she wanted my undivided attention—and staying silent—because saying shit made it worse—and just kind of wondering, “What the holy fuck is she so worked up about? Did I do something wrong? What the hell is wrong?? Is anything wrong?”, etc.

So, when I feel an intense emotion, especially a sudden one, it’s like the way you felt emotions in 9th grade: really, really intensely. Embarrassment, isolation, awkwardness, humiliation, things that normally make you feel bad, they all feel absolutely deadly. You hate yourself. You feel the urge to hide in your bedroom and write in your journal and cry. You feel alone. That sort of thing.

[kivablog3]

More or less my story too. ⚢ ⚧ 🏳️‍🌈 

When trans women are mocked and made into jokes in the media, I get very upset, and I am often told “Kay, you can’t go through life getting offended every time someone makes a joke.” And I sputter and object but they don’t hear me. So I want to be clear for once, about why the jokes make me angry.

I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about “men in dresses”, about people who “got their dicks chopped off”, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.

And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldn’t bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself. And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.

And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men. And they’re still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.

That is, if she doesn’t kill herself first.

[kivablog3]

beautiful

if u ever worry about your future as a wlw please know that my mother who just turned 40 and her girlfriend who started transitioning at 39 (who are both divorced and had children w/other ppl) are currently singing duets in our kitchen while my stepmum plays acoustic guiter and they’re beautiful and happy and there is always hope for you

[kivablog3]

Spring Repost of “Why I Am Not a Pagan”

March 2017 -- I’m reposting this since the Spring Equinox is coming up, along with the festival of the goddess Eostre, whence derives our word for it: Easter. Along with the eggs, and bunnies too, I think. Fertility, at any rate. In wicca it’s the winter solstice which starts the new year, but for me it was Spring when the light truly came back: Daylight Saving Magic. So I think of it as the start of my own year. Also, I attended an open Dianic Goddess circle for the first time in my life. So I may even have to change the title. Maybe put the predicate in the past tense. Idk, maybe nothing will come of it, but I want to try. Happy Eostre, everyone.

Fall 2016 -- I wrote this for an anthology, about trans wicca and paganism, which was triggered by a conflict between terfy witches who wanted to have a ceremony for “all women” at a large pagan conference on the West Coast, but for “women-born women” only, and everyone else was appalled, not just us, and a conflict resulted over whether this was right or even acceptable behavior anymore. At the time I was convinced this was a hopeless cause, transfolx and Dianic Wicca, and thus wasn’t sure there was any point in arguing about it. That may be changing too, there are a lot of changes I am still unaware of. 

So, I wasn’t even a pagan, and kind of relieved about that when I heard that this conflict was still going on in the pagan community, fifteen years after it helped convince me I had failed, because I was just born wrong, and that was that. The Goddess did not see me. It certainly helped convince me I wasn’t a pagan; I had less than no use for a binary divinity, a Goddess with a God. And I wasn’t allowed to just follow the Goddess, so that was that. It was a long time ago.

But I had a story to tell that might be interesting to a few other people, since this still seemed to be a raging conflict ffs. Somehow this conflict at the pagan conference on the Coast resulted in a trans pagan anthology being planned by way of response in the UK, which my friend in Boston tipped me off to; she’s written books which have actually been published, some of them on paganism, and is just generally networked with everyone fun, queer, kinky and/or just interesting in New England and a lot of other places. So I just started writing this, which I’d been trying to do for months. It’s about an important turning point in my life, but the ending is mushy and incomplete because I was afraid of writing my own truth and not caring if someone else was upset by it. This is why the ending is sort of abrupt. It has to be revised and extended and tied together with other stuff that happened then. (And is happening now. There’s a bad case of abrupt going around lately. Alyssa Harley told me I should just write from the heart, and not worry about who else might or might not read it and how they might react. That my writing is first of all for me, explaining myself to myself; and it turns out I learn a lot of things about myself that I wasn’t aware of. Like most advice she gives me, she’s right about this.) [note: This all helped me see that what I really love doing is writing and then editing what I wrote. Some effort will be involved in figuring out things like where to submit finished work and how to write brief, informative cover letters which might get the submission passed up to an editor. Where to do open-mic readings, and which six minutes and forty-five seconds of my work did I want to read? This may all turn out to be very interesting and unexpected things may happen. But I love writing now, I do it most nearly every day So that’s a start.]

After I wrote this piece, sort of all at once, I looked at the publisher’s site, and saw that their catalog runs toward books which have lots of footnotes and a scholarly approach toward the subject at hand, and I have a feeling they’re not going to use this because it so isn’t that. [Note: In the event, it didn’t even merit a rejection email. ] But it’s the most important part of What Happened to Me, how I was out for years, how in the end I couldn’t keep going after 2001, and hid again, in plain sight, for a long time. 

So I’m going to keep working on it. I have a printout of Parts 2-3 I want to mark up and then incorporate those changes into the new version. But right now I’m in maintenance mode, learning about myself and trying to love myself and waiting for it to get warm. I’m much happier then, and it’s easier to be out, somehow. Coming out publicly caused a rebound, and a few days’ worth of migraines (tension + pollen + dry air = M, where M is any migraine bad enough that you have to turn all the lights off and you throw up). It’s taking a while to get up off the canvas and clear my head enough to continue to fight back. I don’t feel like fixing the paragraph breaks right now, sorry for any confusion. Anyway, here it is:

Why I Am Not a Pagan by Kiva Offenholley (The section letters/numbers are placeholders and not meant to be consecutive or even logical.) Part One A. So how do I tell this story? Where do I start? When I was poring over books on lesbian feminism in the library? [note: upon reflection, this is probably the point at which I lost the attention of the editor of the anthology. I assume it will get published at some point.] In the 1970s while I was in high school, reading everything I could find at the branch library and then becoming a page at the central library, when did I first run across witches? Who first mentioned the Goddess? I remember how powerful that particular idea felt when I first ran across it: that God was a woman, that there was another way. She wasn’t constantly promising punishment as well as or instead of love (so she wasn’t my mother, or G. the Father). She wasn’t scary—well, She wasn’t male, for one thing, and males scared me to death. I was supposed to be one, and I was really, really, really bad at it, and in Texas that still matters even now, a lot more than it should. It was worse then. I read some books that involved witches, even though I didn’t believe in magic per se (my sister kept trying spells and nothing much seemed to happen), which I understood then to be witchcraft. It wasn’t clear to me why belief in the Goddess necessitated not just ritual activities for their own sake, but ones which enable or prevent the use of invisible forces (the existence of which I have yet to be convinced of) to cause or prevent change in the real world, summoning spirits (see above) or even magic defined as creating change inside yourself using a Jungian approach to archetypes and ritual actions to focus intentionality and release energy. Maybe it’s because I was never in a Dianic coven, or any other kind, and I probably would’ve changed as I learned more. But possibly not. As it was, I just wanted to experience rituals because they are beautiful, and they are for Her. Ritual for its own sake. I may not believe in a deity—that’s Southern for “I’m an atheist”—but I have loved Her instinctively and completely, from the moment I learned of Her, and the idea of Her. And I hoped that maybe I could learn why I was made this way, why in my soul I felt like a girl. And it seemed to me that, if I tried, I could feel loved. Because I love the Goddess. B. It was clear even to me that one thing I definitely could not be was a lesbian separatist, which was a shame because I needed that too: I had nothing but rage and fear from men and for them, and wanted to live in or at least envision a world where we were in women’s space. I had only ever felt safe when I was with other women, or some of them at least. Most of them. Someone once called it “swimming in the safe sea of women.” I just wanted to count as a “woman” of some sort, maybe not fully female yet, if it was a problem, but I’d sit in the back and not get in anyone’s way…. They had somehow gotten undisputed custody of the real-world carrying into concrete action of the idea of the Goddess, and despite having read histories like The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, or Starhawk or Merlin Stone, of course, anything I could find, my only connection to the other universe, I wasn’t supposed to feel like I belonged. Avidly reading, and thinking and feeling all this stuff that made me feel like I not only belonged inside the circle, that it was the place I would be safe, but that it was the only place outside a classroom that I could ever discuss Gerda Lerner with someone else. I just kept reading, and tried to understand why some radical feminists hated us so much. We were less than or other than women, according to the women who hated us; we were less than or other than human. We were used for ideological target practice. It was like the inverse of being hated by Southern Baptists, the result was the same. It was a part of why I finally skidded to a halt, and detransitioned in 2001, after the period described here. It seemed that Goddess-centered religion was destined to be controlled by those unknown women, like the music festival in Michigan: my spouse, having attended once, assured me that I would consider it close to hell on Earth, between the mud and the rain and the bugs and the heat and the mud, given that my idea of roughing it is a hotel room with no minifridge. But I would’ve liked to have had the option. Around that same time, 1999-2000, I had a nasty encounter in a local institutional setting which I can’t or won’t really identify here. It was with two of the people we now call TERFs: an angry ideological one, who’d just joined the institution, to attack me viciously—none of my friends, no one, ever told me what she’d said while I was out of the room, so it must’ve been awful—and a reflexively 70s-grounded person in a position of authority to unthinkingly and unknowingly privilege TERF 1’s painful past, which was bad, over mine, which was pretty goddamn awful but which never really came up since it still wasn’t really clear to TERF 2 what the hell exactly I was, anyway, even though I had been around for nearly ten years. For a long time it seemed like she could barely greet me civilly when we on occasion ran into her on the street. But she never turned up at parties, which was what mattered, and so it really didn’t seem to matter, at the time. Years of work, living out as a woman among women who loved women in our wonderful little neighborhood: making and deepening friendships, learning to love our little world especially after our son was born, since we still had large lunches on Saturdays then, and he was so darned cute, and everyone loved him. And then I began the estrogen, and it was like I’d had my finger in a light socket for decades, had sort of learned to put up with it, like chronic pain, but it felt so good when I got to take my finger out finally, I felt so relieved when it stopped. All this time I’d been preparing myself, learning to not be afraid, not afraid to let myself Be. To do what someone has described as the most difficult thing you’ll ever do. But that was apart from this story, and it all started just as the getting-TERFed part (for which we then still didn’t have a term) was getting truly awful, so I truly needed something good to happen. And I thought I could finally use all this learning, all that reading I’d done for decades. And I was looking for a spiritual guide, too, it turned out. B. I took a class called Women & Religion in 1987, at Hunter College (from Dr. Serinity Young, who is now at Queens College CUNY and is still a wonderful teacher and human being), and one day while I was enthusiastically talking with the professor after class—it was the only way I talked with her, enthusiastically; I think she even taught me the origins of the word “enthused”—I casually let drop that not only did I want to major in Women’s Studies, I actually would really kind of like to become one someday. Like, medically, you know? And so she had the sad duty of letting me down as gently as humanly possible, but clearly someone had to tell me, I think she must’ve thought, and so: not only would I not be welcomed by a Dianic coven, any of them, she explained, I would face open hostility from radical feminists in general. That what I really wanted wasn’t feasible after all. That the team I wanted to join didn’t want someone like me as a member. That it was genuinely impossible, apparently; some of them hated us. At least I learned this from one of the gentlest souls I have ever known, it hurt less that way. I used to read a lot of those expensive little scholarly/theoretical radical feminist quarterlies they sold in the 80s for like $7, in the newsstand in the Pan Am Building back in the day. I had run across this hatred toward trans folks before; I just didn’t realize that it was so prevalent. That it was widespread, for some people it was an ideological litmus test. What Serinity told me did not completely surprise me, but the extent of what she described did. My best friend back then, who was from Long Island—think “where suburbs were invented”—said of course she was “a feminist, but not the kind that goes to demonstrations.” She may have even used that old saw about being in favor of equal pay, everyone said that back then if you asked if they were feminists. Her girlfriend at the time said that she wasn’t one, and that moreover she didn’t date feminists because she didn’t like women who don’t shave their underarms. (I do. I’m Old School. But I have to admit I was confused by all this.) So this idea and ideal, “Feminism,” had given me hope of a kind for years, feminist thealogy providing a Great Mother figure which I really needed when my own mother was beating me, sometimes unconscious, but never quite killing me; and I never quite killed myself either. I wrote stories and drew sketches and imagined a science-fiction future where there was a Lesbian Nation, a refuge for women of any orientation and a force in the world fighting for women. I had this belief that the world could be different or we could build a new one even, a better one, this escape hatch from the hatred of a world full of men, and most of them had hated me practically since I was born, it seemed to me. Because I wasn’t nearly enough like them, and far too much like a woman—the escape hatch was useless, it wouldn’t work for me because under the rules I could never ever be a woman. I would have to live the remainder of my life as a man because there was no such thing as “transsexual lesbians.” I might as well have spent years studying a dead language. Because the women who spoke it apparently wouldn’t talk to me. I tried to not care, but it involved a lot of nights of crying, and after that one class I gave up on Women’s Studies, on the idea of finishing my degree, and on the idea that I could even possibly not be male. I must be some kind of a gay man, then, I thought yet again, dejectedly, struggling with the limited rôles “permitted” in the old order. I guess I’m gay, I’m just not sexually attracted to men…I spent years in painful solitude, rarely dating (and always women) because I didn’t fit anyone’s pattern. I was born in the Friend Zone and apparently would die there. I just kept wishing I’d been born a girl, not a boy, like always: the existential mistake that felt like grief, that I wore like a suit of armor you can never take off, like walking in sunlight in a darkness that would never lift. Again, I didn’t quite kill myself. I wrote some simple performance art pieces, just monologues really, about how much I hated it all, and delivered them on open mic night at the old Dixon Place, Ellie Covan’s apartment on First Street. Maybe I could express this misery through art, squeeze some of the pain out onstage, writing monologues I wouldn’t have been able to sit through if I hadn’t written them myself. And then, in 1991, when I was 33, I met my future spouse. I invited her to come see my performance at Dixon, and we suddenly fell for each other, and everything changed. C. When I officially finally came out as trans—or “transsexual” as we used to say—it surprised absolutely no one. My wife identified as lesbian when we first got together in 1991, and being part of the lesbian/bi women’s community in the Slope in the 90s gave me a context and a place to want to be, since unlike most trans folks I was “transitioning in place.” Meaning that coming out as trans didn’t automatically destroy my personal relationships, as happens to so many of us then and now, and so I didn’t have to start over somewhere else, creating a new identity as if you’re in a Gender Relocation Program. It also meant (and now it means, again) that people who knew me as male before, not friends but deli clerks, auto mechanics, the bagel store staff, everyone, will have to adjust. It was the hardest thing I’d ever try to do. But it finally seemed doable. It seemed perfect, not just doable. We lived in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, which was a wonderfully diverse and welcoming lesbian community in the 1990s, and the Slope was still a place young lesbians starting a career in New York could move to and find an apartment at a reasonable price. All that new energy kept the neighborhood interesting. The lesbian social universe was arrayed around the karate school, and my wife had been at the school since before we met. I saw people I knew every day, just walking down Seventh Avenue. We had a baby, then I started taking estrogen. We were so happy. Then, as it happened, in the Spring of 2000 I met a cis woman who was already a witch and we tried to start what she assured me was indeed the First Trans-Friendly Dianic Goddess Circle, which ended up being the Last Trans-Friendly Dianic Goddess Circle, sort of. There are others now, I am told, who don’t even care what gender you are or aren’t, but this was the turn of the century, and it was still well-nigh unheard of.

Part Two A. The Center—once upon a time, a long, long time ago, it was the Gay Community Center, hence the venerable web address: gaycenter.org, then the Gay and Lesbian Etc., then the Lesbian and Gay But Not Bi, Definitely Not Bi Center, then the Lesbian, Gay & Alright, Already, Bi Center, then they finally went to LGBT, this was along about when they—whoever “they” were, the ones who ran The Center, and whoever they were, they seemed to arrive a tad tardily to each of these transformations. And as I recall they were still coming to terms with the whole adding-the-T part, and it hadn’t happened yet, or maybe it had already happened but I sincerely didn’t notice, I was busy: the spring of 2000, a beautiful warm spring with a lot of sunny days, at least as I remember it. The Center was in the Swing Space, the temporary building that they were operating out of around the turn of the century, so that the old school building could be turned into, in time, the space station command center-&-caffeine bar-fronted miracle of architecture and fundraising you find there now, over at 218 W. 13th Street. But this was the between-time, somewhere out near where the old “The Vault” S&M club had once been, around the corner of this triangular wedge of real estate just below 14th Street, around Ninth Avenue. I am told that there were rather a lot of directions given then that began, “You remember where The Vault used to be? You walk a block down past it, hang a right….” So I was on my way out of the Swing Space one day, after trying to do some kind of transgender networking, and I passed a woman with beautiful eyes, in warm fuzzy hippie clothes and interesting jewelry, with Tori Amos-like long wavy red hair and some kind of energy or sense of purpose about her. She had some kind of small bag or satchel with her. We passed, she smiled, I smiled. She saw the “Trans Dyke” button I had on—possibly the only such button extant at the time in the US if not all North America, unless the inspired artist/buttonmaker had made more of them. It was drawn by hand, in colored pencil, with TRANS DYKE written across it in large, friendly letters. I’d found it quite by accident among an assortment of handmade radical buttons in a cigar box, at an alternative bookstore in Montréal when I’d visited with K. the previous winter. I couldn’t quite believe my luck: I was still hesitant to say what I was aloud, but buttons were no problem. [K. had very supportively agreed to come with me to freaking Canada during hockey season so I could see a Canadiens game at the Centre Molson (now Centre Bell). I was clearly out of my mind. We lost a set of keys and came back two days later to the same parking spot on a hunch, and we found them in the snowbank, two feet down, where they’d landed. It was cold. I love Québec, but go in the summer.] That button was just perfect at the time for me, still a novel idea a decade after Kate Bornstein came out as lesbian and trans in OutWeek magazine. That was the first time I asked myself that ages-old queer question, “So you mean I’m not the only one?” So just wearing the fucking button around the Center felt somewhat defiant, improvising a sort of pronoun-sticker years before they existed, saying who I was. It mattered. I was wearing it on my jacket, all the time since it wouldn’t stay on my backpack, and she turned around and asked me one of those life-changing questions: “Hey! Would you like to come help me with a transsexual-friendly Goddess circle? I’m going to hold one upstairs!”

Well. I had sort of been waiting 25 years or so for someone to ask me that. So sure, yeah, I’d love to, I may even have said something like, “I’ve waited years for someone to ask me that!” and I headed back with her into the Swing Space elevator, and up. I helped her set up the altar furnishings. Candles (couldn’t actually light them because of building regs plus sprinklers going off) and statues, I think, pretty scarves and cloths and jewelry. It wasn’t anything complicated, but it was amazing to me just to be there, suddenly, seemingly by chance. Friends of hers came, a trans couple from New Jersey showed up, and we held our ceremony, greeting the Spring Equinox and thanking the Goddess for the new season. I forget details from there, just that I helped her clear up afterwards and the two of us talked. What sort of thing are you into, she asked. Going way back, really, I said, I’ve read about the Sumerians and their religion. “Inanna.” “Right. The earliest written records we have of Mesopotamian religion. And they mention servants of Inanna, they’re like two-spirited, I mean, both-gendered or something…” She knew the word for them. We talked some more, about sort of Jungian stuff, like what images spoke most powerfully to me? The Great Mother, primarily, “possibly since my own mother was, um, she was nuts.…” She nodded to let me know she “got it,” as far as survivor stuff, then I went on: “I hope you don’t think this is weird, but I’ve always been fascinated by the temple prostitutes in Sumeria. The service of the Goddess, through the celebration of sex itself.” She gave me one of those dazzling smiles. “No,” she reassured me, “I don’t think it’s weird at all. In fact, it’s also sort of what I had in mind….” Wow. “What’s your name?” I asked, finally. “Yana.” “I’m Kiva,” I said. And so it began. B. She had come to New York a few years before, and with her fascination with the Goddess already intertwined with the Marian devotion she had learned growing up in the Roman Church. She was Catholic, but not Christian, I think she said, Catholic to the extent of the Marian practices which she’d been taught and had read about. Then she became a Dianic witch and studied all sorts of other women-focussed practices across denominations that all fed into Goddess history. She felt the church was the people who turned up, all of us flawed, but it wasn’t her primary interest. The Black Madonnas, devotions related to marriage and a safe delivery, “churching” women after a birth, implying they were impure afterwards; different beliefs from Eastern Europe, the Orthodox, from all over, but mostly she’d read a lot of what I had, particularly European and Middle Eastern religious history and especially the odd or neglected corners of it, the backwaters like the three villages in Syria that still used Aramaic in their services, the witches of the mountains in their different forms, Babayaga, all this off-the-beaten-path stuff. Ishtar, Istar, Ester. Enna, Enana, Innana. Timelines, conjectures about periods without written or archaeological records, or ambiguous sites like Çatal Hüyük. It was more or less pre-Google, so any kind of conjecture could possibly be true, depending on how late at night it was. We talked about labryses, and Crete. We talked about goddesses, and witches, and magic, none of which, I explained, I really believed in, I was just sort of fascinated by it all, you see. I was just stubbornly atheistic as a default setting, since I was a recovering Southern Baptist. We touched on Bokononism when I brought it up; I don’t remember if we got around to the Cathars. I’d never met anyone before her, outside of that class at Hunter in 1987, who’d even heard of Çatal Hüyük. We talked and talked, for hours, for days and days, about all of these things, and all of them at once, it seemed like. Everything was connected. We’d read the same books. A lot of the same books. We talked about who we were, how we identified, how we got to where we were. She talked about how she got involved so deeply in trans women’s activism (and, “no,” she replied when I asked, “I’m not transgendered;” it was clearly a question she got sooner or later from each of us.) We didn’t have the words “cis” and “trans” as such then, “cis” still dwelled quietly as a prefix in old Latin and French dictionaries. At the time we called cis women “GGs,” genetic girls, or “biogirls,” both of which were self-deprecating, self-devaluing, and inferiority-reinforcing terms we came up with all on our own, as a community; as for ourselves, I learned soon that to save time and avoid arguments over changing terminology such as “transsexual” (“ss,” not “s”, dammit) and “transgender,” and who was and wasn’t really a whatever, we called each other by this diminutive term no one outside our little world seemed to have heard of: “trannies”…. She’d been homeless not all that long before, and it was trans women, sex workers out working the street in Manhattan, who kept her from starving, let her sleep on couches, nursed her to health, and I gathered that somewhere in there she’d fallen in love, too, and by that point she’d come to love us as we were. And so she was an ardent lesbian trans ally at a time when we didn’t have many (we didn’t have the term “trans ally” yet, for example) and a lover of other trans women when few cis women openly were—for a while she and K. wanted to start a support group but I think they’d have been the only ones there. Like K., she was was a gem cut in a distinct pattern. She was unique and unafraid. And she loved us. Yeah, I had sort of a crush on her. She was magical. She asked me to help her start a pagan meeting circle, a stable, ongoing Goddess-focussed Dianic circle. A Dianic circle like any other, except this one would welcome trans women. It was dedicated to lifting up trans women spiritually, meeting what in Yana’s eyes was an obvious need. I said okay, and set to work. We were going to call it Two Spirit Moon Circle but I wondered if it might be appropriating a Native American term outside its cultural context. So I kept accidentally calling it Two Moon Spirit Circle, as if we were on Mars or something, and eventually we decided to call it that. Yana had a phone list of people who were supposed to be either interested or potentially interested. It was a handful of names and numbers, some of them names you weren’t supposed to use to ask for them with because they were still closeted, as transgender or as pagan or as both even, and in the (as it transpired, extremely unlikely) event that someone answered the phone, I said something vague, some preset phrase like, “I’m calling on behalf of Yana.” Several of them had no surname, just a name and a phone number. Some of them never did answer, a couple of numbers proved to have gone out of service, two or three of them didn’t need to be called because they were close to Yana. I still have the list around here somewhere, I saw it recently stuck in a book, and I was amazed by how much of it was blank space. There was no social media, no smartphones, and the Web was still in its toddler stage. It was all we had to work with. Somehow Yana had talked the NYC Metropolitan Community Church into letting us use their basement room after their services were over on Sunday afternoons. The MCC was originally organized as a gay-friendly church because there weren’t any other ones, except the Unitarians. Yana attended services there, which may have helped. And for a few months, we held circles nearly every Sunday. Yana tried to find more members; she knew the folks at what we shall refer to here as “T-House” on 16th Street in Brooklyn, which turned out to be three blocks up from me (the Slope was like that then). It’s gone down in history as “Transy House.” We never did get many people from T-House to attend our circle, or if we did it wasn’t more than once. The circle didn’t grow. C. I happily took on the task of writing up a ritual we could use for a special occasion, like the solstice. As it happened, I was enrolled at the New School for one semester, taking some class on religious symbols. So I had access to their library, and way back on the bottom shelf, full of the dusty volumes of history which no one used for research and which hadn’t been opened in decades, there was a really old series of books with the translated Sumerian scriptures in them. It looked ancient, so I checked the indicia and it was published in 1912 or something like that. In the 1900s, but before 1914. I forget now what they were called, and don’t particularly want to try googling for 20 minutes looking for it, but they were special messengers of Inanna, and they were both female and male together in one. There was a passage where Inanna made a promise to them—and we argued, by extension, you could include us, trans people, and gender-variance of all kinds too, I believe, although we didn’t quite have the freedom to imagine all that at the time. Inanna made a promise to Her two-gendered beings, who were special to Her, that she would protect them. Nothing complicated, nothing that other divinities wouldn’t subsequently promise to their special peoples, except that it’s hard to find one where the Goddess says she will protect us. But Yana and I both knew how far back you had to go to find a strong Inanna figure: as far as possible, in early Sumerian theology, some of the first written records of a religious belief system. I think it was from reading The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner that I learned the story of how Inanna had gradually been weakened and eventually subordinated or sidelined in later Sumerian and then Akkadian theology; this weakening and subordination reflected the same thing happening to Sumerian women in reality, losing rights to buy and hold property, rights in inheritance, independent social existence gradually subordinated to the control of the father: patriarchy. This wasn’t the only society and time when this happened, but the Sumerians had left detailed real estate and inheritance records. I remember how exhaustively she went over and cited her source material, all those footnotes. My copy is still in the basement. I just brought up the laundry and I forgot to bring it up with me, but I guess the point is it touched on the area of ancient religions. So I looked in it for a reference which would help me find the huge old rebound-in-green volume of forgotten Sumerian scriptures that I needed: the story about Inanna trapped in the underworld. But I think in the end I just went down to the New School library, and pulled out a volume. It was one of those old-school, 2000-large-pages volumes that voluminous scriptures used to end up in. Bound volumes of Theravada Buddhist scriptures are about the same size and weight, you can probably find them in the 200s section of your public library, depending on how large it is. They have a very nice set at the Brooklyn Central Library. So I opened up the book, spine on my knee, and it more or less opened to the place I needed, the story of Inanna in the underworld and the transgender messengers she sent, and the promise she made. I took it to a table and started to make notes. Yana maintained that this was a small example of divine intervention, that She guided my hand, helped me pick the right volume, open it to the right chapter. I said I thought it was a coincidence, although I wasn’t too sure at the time. It’s possible also, I argued, that I wasn’t the first person to ever go looking for that particular story, and so the book opened to that page, more or less. Because the spine, mostly unspoiled through the decades by the routine damage inflicted by readers of books, probably had a single crack left in it from before. It’s possible that the volume, if it had been used before, was reshelved by the user sticking out slightly instead of flush with the other books, and so I unconsciously chose it (I used to be a library page—a minion—long ago). I recount this to illustrate what a stubborn subject I was and am when it comes to faith and belief. Yana knew about Jungian archetypes and self-actualization and so on, but I think deep in her heart she totally and sincerely believed in Her, that She exists, that She loves us, and that She had agency in the mundane world which she used to help us, if we but asked her. I was just never able to let go, to trust in someone I didn’t think existed. Archetypes, schmarchetypes: I needed Her to *exist*. I needed proof. 5. I read online a couple of years ago that there was some kind of all-pagan conference on the West Coast, where a group of Dianic witches held an “all women-born women welcome” Goddess ritual from which trans women were of course angrily and ostentatiously excluded. It was instructive to me, when I read about it, of something I’m trying to learn over and over until I believe it: apparently nearly everyone else had the decency to be appalled and regarded it as bigoted and ignorant of who we actually are. This book is itself one consequence of this conflict, I am told. In some parallel universe, maybe even nearby, where radical feminists and lesbian separatists of every kind had welcomed trans women into the community from the beginning, valued us, maybe even cherished us for our unique critique of masculinity, our courage in crossing the river of fire, I might be some kind of elder by now, possibly even considered wise. That, along with having transitioned, successfully, long ago. They do feel like they should go together, at least for me. It always felt logical. But I can’t claim a pagan identity now, retroactively, and have it become something that provided comfort and joy over the years, because it isn’t. It didn’t. It never happened. Just like I was never really a Christian after the Southern Baptists chewed me up and spit me out. Past age eight, I never really had the feeling that when I said my prayers, there was someone on the other end listening. By adolescence I knew that they hated people like me, even if whatever the hell it was that I was had not become clear yet. They hated just about anything related to sex that had happened after 1960. The various kinds of baptist churches were gradually taken over in the 1980s by fundamentalists, who had been kept at bay by conservatives for decades (sound familiar?) but now overran the Baptists and other evangelical churches. They voted for Reagan and gave birth to the generation which is now smitten by Trump. They are the real reason I left Texas. I tried for years to make Christianity work for me somehow—you don’t read Tillich on a whim, I spent months checking out everything I could from the library on theology. Fascinating subject, but to me it is fascinating largely as history and supposition. Yana used to say that it didn’t matter if I didn’t believe, it wasn’t a matter of belief; it was a matter of trusting in Her even though you don’t believe it will help. I tried to take the rituals into me, let out that little spark inside, let out the little kid in me. She’s still there, and she’s still scared to come outside, afraid of being slapped again. And for a while it was better. I even tried to meditate. I can’t meditate for shit, but I tried. Our little circle met until it didn’t. It wasn’t like herding cats so much as trying to teach kittens to march down Broadway in lockstep and chanting, “The kittens/United/Will never be defeated!” Only you can’t find enough kittens. And around then, Yana began to vanish into what became an opaque relationship: a glom-on girlfriend who would never give her messages or call her to the phone, she was always “not here,” who eventually closed her off from everyone, or at least everyone at T-House, which was, like, everyone, but apparently the girlfriend thought it included me for some reason; and, long story short, after a couple more times I never saw Yana again. What really kills me is, I introduced them. For political purposes; Glom-on was trans and in a position to help. But the next thing I knew, Yana was telling me the old, old story: “well, you know, we worked all those late nights together on the protest, and next thing you know….” It was the greatest unforeseeable mistake I have ever made, to this day. 3. The Goddess lives in my heart, of course, some kind of small (yet apparently inextinguishable) light, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the strength to survive growing up and getting beaten, a few times nearly to death, by my mother the psycho vodka-swilling pillhead, or to survive living in New York for years with nothing but my sheer uncrushableness and a talent for proofreading. Without Her I could never have embraced my trans identity, then somehow detransition yet not fall apart completely, in a time when it seemed impossible after all to make it through transition as an out lesbian who didn’t pass (2001), and to survive until a time when it does seem sort of possible (2016). Without Her I wouldn’t be able to come back and embrace my trans identity, a choice which saved my life. But that light mostly doesn’t sustain me or reassure me or whatever; it just is me, it feels pain, too. It feels like She put it there, subjectively; like She made me, somehow. She lives in each of us, that light is the You that you hope to find if you look inwards far enough. Maybe that’s what the argument is really about, whether She lives in us, made us the way we are, whether that light is inside us and she really did make us women. Instead of monsters. I’ve met some boring trans people, but I’ve never a monster who wanted to destroy womenspace by demanding admission even though it has a penis. Mostly, we’re just kind of reticent, afraid of sounding too femme, or not enough, or just reminding people we’re different. Like clearing my throat, always comes out sounding deep. It’s like the current bathroom nonsense: as has been true already for decades, we’re just looking for a place to pee. Only now, everyone knows we exist. Maybe it’s the estrogen-wash theory, that high E levels plus maybe really wanting a girl can prevent a fetus with a Y chromosome from fully changing into a male, at least in the brain. I read a study that suggests there are genetic signatures of some kind in some sort of brain cell, and ours differ from men’s, they’re longer yet there aren’t very many testosterone receptors. (Sorry, I don’t have a footer for that.) I have enough material from age five up for another book or two. It took them years, until around age eight, to convince me that not only was I not a girl, but I wouldn’t turn into one later, it didn’t work that way, and when I grew up I wouldn’t be a woman. I’d wear one of those suits, like Dad, not a dress. I hated those suits. I thought this would be an essay about an attempt at forming a circle in the intersection of Goddess religion and trans women’s culture, because you want academic papers with footnotes and everything. But it turns out it’s as much about Yana as about the Goddess or Dianic wicca or other stuff you’d research and footnote and make a biblio out of. It’s all just from me; it’s my story, and what it is, too. My close encounter with having a pagan religious identity, my pagan identity, the one I wanted to at least try, before that identity zoomed past me, then looped around the Sun and shot back out into space, probably all the way to the Oort Cloud. It should be back in a few thousand years. It was Yana who embodied Her for me, and made Her seem real; so once Yana was gone from my life, that sense of the numinous, of spirit in everything, went away too, leaving behind a fondness for a hill with a circle of trees on it in Prospect Park where we used to go to talk and be. I don’t believe that in any of this I was in point of fact a pagan; I was an acolyte of Yana. I trusted her, I learned from her, I believed her, I miss her.

Part Three A. I am 58 now. I used to care so very intensely about this, I was so proud to be co-organizing a Goddess circle for women like us. That was 2000, and so much else was going wrong in my personal life that year, so this was special, something I tried harder to keep hold of even as it slipped further out of my grasp. When I was forced by events to detransition in April of 2001, it hurt like I was dying. I had to cut loose a lot of things to survive, and caring so intensely about this, since I was spiritually on my own once again, became one of them. Like with anything transgender, I didn’t want to know, I turned away, shamed by what felt like my epic failure, and I didn’t want to hear about it anymore. If I couldn’t have it, I couldn’t bear to look at others who could. Because they’d learned to go out dressed without trembling. Because they were living. I felt like the kid with her nose pressed against the glass again, looking in, like before, and it started to seem normal again to feel like I was permanently wrong, or at least I was too emotionally exhausted to fight. I suspended my transition, for 15 years it turns out. A lot of things have gotten better in the meantime, a lot more than I could’ve imagined. Like marriage equality isn’t a Thing, it’s the law. Hating on trans folks of all stripes on modern gay/bi women’s sites, like Autostraddle.com, isn’t acceptable behavior anymore, or at least TERFy posts draw multiple posts from allies. This is the generation we gave birth to, and they mostly as a rule just don’t believe in hate; and there isn’t an exception made to that rule for trans people. Yet it turns out this, the reason I’m a cynical atheist instead of a somewhat less cynical witch, is still a Thing in 2016. So many awful Things, Things that seemed unchangeable for queers for so very long, have changed in the last fifteen years, but this isn’t one of them. And we do this to ourselves. Queers who obsessively hate certain other queers. It seems so wrong now, when I think about it like that. So a friend of mine who is a writer and a witch told me about the call for papers. I intended to write something more like I might have written for an academic paper, and if I were still taking college courses I probably would have, MLA format and all. This is not that story, this is the story that wanted to be told. So I have I decided to try and tell the Tale of Yana and Kiva. I would’ve made a lousy pagan anyway. There’s the indifference to magic. I can’t meditate for shit. I feel antagonistic toward religion in general. I’m hopelessly cynical. I’m an atheist, for Chrissakes. B. Last week my wife K. and I went to Massachusetts to visit old friends. We stopped at my favorite used bookstore in the world, the Raven Used Books in Northampton, on Old South Street. Most of what I found in LGBT or Women’s Studies was from the 80s or 90s, when I was reading some of the same books I found there. I asked about transgender theory—I murmured “trans” and she thought I said “trains”, so I said, “transgender” in this slightly apologetic way I still do. She thought for a second and said they are largely a used book store (“academic” being a given) and that since the field has started growing so recently and so quickly, they didn’t have them in great numbers, yet, but when they did it would be shelved in LGBT. Which makes sense to me, really, since the oldest of the new wave of major works I have read are from about 2005 on. They haven’t had time to finish the cycle: first migrate in signifigant numbers onto syllabii at Smith, Holyoke, Hampshire, Amherst and UMass, to wax and wane in popularity and utility, and thence in time make their way to Happy Valley’s used bookstores, particularly to Raven. Where people like me buy them. Maybe they’re still waxing in popularity. I hope so. But this visit I wasn’t into languages or mediæval history or Buddhism, I was back where I began, at LGBT and Women’s Studies. And the future is so new here that the books I was hoping to find are still being used, rather than having been used. They have some mugs and bags for hardcore fans like me. But I already have two mugs. So I bought a nice copy of Carol Christ’s Laughter of Aphrodite, since I haven’t read it and thealogy is really sort of timeless, even if some of the people she was discussing and critiquing advocated then-current arguments which have become dim with the passage of time. (Remember, everyone: if you have a used book you haven’t read before, it’s new.) Laughter of Aphrodite came out around the time Christ (pronounced “krist”, with a short i) was co-editing the now-classic anthology which we used as our principal textbook for the Women & Religion course at Hunter College in 1987: Womanspirit Rising. I’m looking forward to reading it.

But, like I said, I’m not a pagan. Go figure.

[kivablog3]

Definitely watch to the end. You’ll spend the whole time going awwww and laughing.