Today is Blogging for LGBT Family Day

I really like when LGBT doesn't mean same-sex couples only, when the T is part of the conversation.

This essay "My Impossible Father" on Bilerico Project written by a young son talking about his transgender MTF father. Jillian T. Weiss posted it in honor of the day.

I love his description of transition along with his father.

We both underwent changes in our time apart; I sprouted into adolescence while she transformed into a woman. Each time I saw her she had transformed more and more into a woman. By the time I was ten years old, and began to understand the world, my father was comfortably a woman, and I was comfortable with her as a woman.

My relationship with my father has molded me to who I am today. The lessons I draw from my father include those about gender, but largely influence my life in ways only a father can. I learned tolerance, patience, and acceptance from my father's transformation but more importantly she instilled in me a fundamental tolerance for the unknown as well as vigorous passion to find that which I love, not that which provides momentary satisfaction.

I imagine this passage resonates with anyone who has witnessed the transition of a parent, or any loved one. We need to share our stories.

Kids of Trans Resource Guide

The KOT Resource Guide went to the printer today, which means it's actually written. I should have 1000 copies of the 40-page booklet by May 16th. Luckily, we found a great designer named Amie LeeKing who was able to work hard all last week to make it pretty. It's so exciting!

Email me at kidsoftrans (at) colage(dot) org if you'd like a copy of the guide.

So Many Tools At My Fingertips

San Francisco continues to woo me, as my fellowship nears its end. I had a conversation the other day about the possibilities of evolving personal politics in spaces where you don't have to defend your existence and experience. It feels like I am really tapping into that, now, after seven months in the Bay Area. I even get to have fun and it's for a good cause. There are so many opportunities to learn from the multitude of activists working for all kinds of change, even causes I may never have considered. This seems fitting, since many people have never considered advocating for people with transgender parents.

The Kids of Trans Resource Guide is with the designer and will be available in print by May 18th (at our Transgender Family Picnic in Dolores Park). If you'd like a copy, please get in touch. I am wishing for more time and better foresight for the design and printing of the guide. Hopefully, it will actually look pretty, since it will be the resource guide for people with transgender parents. I'll know soon enough.

Beyond my work at COLAGE, I've attended some great workshops recently. Class Action facilitated a one-day workshop on class last week, which I was privileged enough with my co-worker from COLAGE. We focused a lot on class background, which helped me overcome a lot of shame of growing up working class. It also left me wondering how to reconcile my current class experience as middle professional class. Upon leaving the workshop, I wondered how I would use it, since there were very few hard tools provided. Brilliantly, the session made me more able to talk about my own class and open up conversations about class in many areas of my life. Well done.

I've also been blessed with the opportunity to attend two fantastic open sessions put on by the Catalyst Project, a center for political education and movement building with a commitment to deepening white anti-racist organizing. Two of my friends are participating in the four month Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training Program through Catalyst and they invited me to these open sessions. The first was a panel on visionary politics, which got me fired up with hope that a better world is indeed possible. The panel gave me taste of the amazing radicals doing work in this area. I've always learned better from people than from books, so it appears I've found my activist home.

Yesterday, I attended a panel on anti-racist organizing. People had some good things to say about knowing your political history and being willing to make mistakes. As white folks living in a system of white supremacy, we are taught that we know everything. It's part of how the system works. So, it's fundamental for us to be able to engage in the work in order to learn the lessons of doing the work. One woman talked about utilizing the political moment of elections to bring conversations to the masses of people who are apolitical the rest of the time.

Today, I read this transcript in the NY Times of Rev Jeremiah Wright's speech about the black church in the US. His speech encompasses so much history, which seizing this political moment to talk about race. Seriously, how often does the main stream press print quotes like:

Maybe this dialogue on race, an honest dialogue that does not engage in denial or superficial platitudes, maybe this dialogue on race can move the people of faith in this country from various stages of alienation and marginalization to the exciting possibility of reconciliation.

Of course, Obama is adamantly distancing himself from the radical reverend.

“Obviously, it’s not ideal,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior strategist. “It’s pretty clear that Reverend Wright is not out there to help Obama — he’s out there to help himself. It’s a sideshow, and the media is consumed by it.”

Actually, it seems like Reverend Wright is actually out to get people talking about race in America. He is seizing the moment and his connection with a major party candidate to bring the conversation to the front page. Too bad the mainstream messaging is set up to support the status quo, which means not talking about all of the systems (race, class, gender, etc) that privilege some and oppress others.

Fortunately, I live in a place where the common political discourse is more progressive than anything you will see in the mainstream press and the cover to a dance party always goes to a good cause.

Mommyman, Mommyman

I joined Livejournal today, in order to post a response to a transgender parent whose daughter was asking him to where a dress to her wedding. Hopefully, he'll take my advice about leaving the door open for his daughter to come around. We all transition - the whole family - and everyone goes through their own process. It's really hard to hear when parents expect their kids to accommodate them and shirk their parental responsibility.

This is a big challenge, since people going through a gender transition tend to be a little self-involved. I mean, it is an enormous life change. The problem is that if the parent's gender stuff eclipses their parental role, no one wins. Kids are resentful that they've 'lost' the parent they used to know. Perhaps this 'new' person is more interested in their own transgender emergence than in their relationship with their kid, which creates a real loss for the child. My consistent advice to parents: You are the parent! Act like it. It doesn't matter how old your child is. You need to act like the parent and be supportive of your kid.

On a lighter note, one of the parents on lj posted a song his 7-year old sang to him, to the tune of the spiderman song: "mommyman, mommyman, does whatever a mommy can. Can she spin a web, yes he can...cause he's mommyman, mommyman...". I love this kid, wherever he is.

Dinner with another KOT

I had dinner with my friend Jonathan a few nights ago. He is a self-described nomad and quite an interesting fellow. We met through the COLAGE community via internet and phone. This past fall, we met in person at Southern Comfort in Atlanta, where we sat on a panel of people with transgender parents. His father is also a woman. She transitioned when Jonathan was twenty-one. Jonathan is a storyteller and seeks the stories of others with transgender parents to create an anthology of essays. If I can figure out how to post audio, I will post a recording of his story 'I am My Father's Son'.

We met up with my friend Ruby and saw this great SF band called Rupa and the April Fishes. It looks like they'll be traveling to NYC and Austin soon, so check them out.

Speaking of traveling, I'll be back on the east coast on Thursday night! I am looking forward to the snow and multitude of reunions.

Looking for a Road Map

This week I found myself wishing for a map. After the holiday, it was hard to get back into project mode and I found myself overwhelmed by everything I hope to accomplish in the next few months. My friend was talking about 'generation me' this morning, that we have too many choices and too much information so we are constantly trying to plan the next thing, but find the choices increasingly overwhelming. Perhaps this is part of my problem?

When I started this work over four years ago, I was seeking corroboration, a collection of others' experiences that resonated with my own. It had never occurred to me to look before then.

Ten years ago this month, my four-year old sister told me, "some people are girls on the inside and girls on the outside, like you and me. Some people are girls on the inside and boys on the outside, like Dad." A very memorable conversation with my father followed. My dad was becoming a woman... (s)he had been seeing a gender therapist... (s)he would start taking hormones in January... (s)he had half a closet full of women's clothing and a makeup mirror. All of this was news to me. Dad handed me a pamphlet about transgender people and I went into my room to cry. I wanted a pamphlet for me, one that explained what it meant to have a parent transition, one that made me feel less alone in my experience and gave me some sort of guidance. To be honest, I never read the other pamphlet.

It wasn't until years later when my high school friend sent me an excerpt from Noelle Howey's book that I realized I was still missing that pamphlet. I sat on the green line train in Boston, reading Noelle's story about her father's transition, and the tremors of her story ran through me. My eyes teared as I realized it was time to start talking about this part of my life. It was time to find others because, for the first time, I realized they existed.

I decided to focus my anthropology honors thesis on 'the social experience of people with transgender parents'. Surely, I would find research some brilliant scholar had completed and supplement that work with my own experiences. My library search came up with a few results: Noelle's memoir, Noelle's collection of essays by people with LG or T parents (Out of the Ordinary), and a psychological study by Dr. Richard Green stating that people with transsexual parents are 'normal'. Clearly, not enough material on which to base a thesis.

Rather than depending on secondary sources, I decided to do qualitative interviews with people with transgender parents. When I started contacting organizations and web-based support groups, everyone told me that I was doing really important work (i.e., work that still needed to be done). This revelation was exhilarating and terrifying. Was this really my responsibility? When I contacted Abigail Garner to see whether she knew of any, she echoed the need for my work and asked to interview me for her book. That summer, I attended my first Familyweek and connected to the queerspawn community and COLAGE for the first time. It changed my life and made me truly grateful that my father is a transwoman, because that fact connects me to this incredible movement and community. So began my journey into becoming a professional queerspawn.

I am finally writing the pamphlet that I'd hoped for ten years ago. It will be more like a resource guide. I am still exhilarated and a bit terrified, but I know that it's my work to do. Thankfully, there is a great organization and a beautiful community supporting me in this journey. Unfortunately, they don't have the map either. I guess that's the beauty of it... this is my path to chart myself.