Freedom for Transness

Defending Our Rights

I am heading to Washington DC this weekend to celebrate two graduations, a birthday, and a gender transition. Setting foot in the town I once lived in, for 33 years as a political person. I visit now as a citizen, for family reasons.

Like so many of us, I have been trying to separate my soul from the cacophony of injustice and authoritarian babble that comes out of DC.

There is so much in this endless parade of injustice, authoritarianism, and abuse that even when I try to get away into creative solitude or family events it intrudes. A stray e-mail from Erin in the Morning tells me that progressive Mayor Zohran Mamdani is failing to meet his commitment to defend trans children.

He is creating a support facility, for trans people over 19. Fortunately, my transitioning grandchild meets that age standard, the same one being used by the Trump regime. But he has not budgeted the $65 billion for trans support he promised in the campaign and he has not pushed back against NY hospitals who are closing their trans support practices.

I should not need to make the case to Mamdani, who made his support for trans children clear in his campaign. Suicide rates for teens seeking to find themselves are high. But our country is in such a sad state that even good people like Mamdani are making concessions to madness.

To the degree the anti-trans push succeeds, it is leaving the next generation of young people in the lurch with nothing but so-called “conversion therapy” that denies their reality. Many young people live and swim today in the waters of gender fluidity, an open opportunity to find fully who each of them is.

This journey is now interrupted by an interpretation of reality and history that can only be described as oppressively biblical. As poet e.e. cummings put it:

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”

Seamus Heaney, whose life I just explored on a trip to Northern Ireland, framed well

the importance of opening, not closing doors, as one goes through life.

“The image of the god Terminus was kept in the Temple of Jupiter, at a point where the temple was unroofed, open constantly to the sky. In other words, even Terminus, the god of limits, refused to recognize that limits are everything. The open sky above his head testified to his yearning to escape the ground beneath his feet… We are placed, as individuals and as a species, between a given history and habitat and any imaginable future…Remember that the anchor of your being lies in human affection and human responsibility but remember also to keep swimming up into the air of envisaged possibilities.”

There is great freedom in being able to find oneself, change perspective, swim in the sea of uncertainty and discovery. I have experienced that freedom; do, every day. The inner core of who I am, of who one is, can only come from that freedom. Not from dogma; dogma constrains, limits freedom.

We are wading deep in dogma, right now. Even deeper in lies portrayed as truths. There are only two genders, we are told. Yet science and history prove conclusively otherwise.

There is no such thing as gender identity, we are told. And yet the entire universe of advertising routinely redefines gender identity to encourage consumerism. Sometimes it is manly-looking women with asexual bodies; sometimes voluptuous, curvaceous ones. Males are redefined the same – as willowy, or, later, as the incredible hulk. Or androgyny is the marketed appearance.

The externalities of identities are constantly morphing. Commerce knows what religious zealots refuse to admit: the world of gender identity is constantly changing and has done so throughout history. We need to hold to that truth through the onslaught.

Digression on Graham Platner

I lived in Maine for eight years and was active in Maine politics. Politics are different in Maine. It is a small state, where people meet with politicians all the time – in bars, restaurants, the hardware store and the supermarket. I would sit down the bar from Angus King as we each ate our dinner in Scarlet Begonias, Brunswick Maine, where we both lived. I met with him and with Susan Collins as part of local lobbying groups. Politics is intimate there; folks want to know who these people, their neighbors who happened to run for office, truly are.

I didn’t ever meet Graham Platner. Or maybe I did, in meeting fairly rough-hewn, articulate Mainers who were far from perfect but talked straight. Who were independent and meant it; they were suspicious of all elected officials. It’s a serious streak in the Maine character. And Susan Collins has lost touch with that.

Platner speaks to this independence; it is a Maine tradition.And he speaks well (I heartily recommend his victory speech.)

As for his character, I would put it up against most Republicans in the Congress, who replace virtue with self-serving press releases and platitudes. Daniel Barkuff put it well, in writing about Gen. Grant in a Substack column on Platner: “His imperfections did not negate his virtues; they existed alongside them.”

As they do with all of us.