Gay Peeps Need To 'Evolve Already' As Well

I hear vitriolic griping on the Net and elsewhere coming from elements of the GL community aimed at President Obama.   It's either because he hasn't wholly embraced their position on same gender marriage or executed their political wish list as expeditiously as they wanted him to.

Well, the trans community feels y'all have some evolving of your own to do when it comes to trans civil rights issues.

Gay males need to come clean about and evolve on your issues with transwomen.  As much as elements of the community have internalized trans hatred Jim Fouratt would be proud of, being trans is not a threat to your masculinity or your rainbow way of life.

Lesbians, and especially those of the radical lesbian separatist variety need to evolve from your disco era hatred of transwomen and the hateraid elements of you have for transmen that you have carried into the 21st century and to TBLG community activism.. 

It's so bad now a new generation of radical lesbian separatists has picked up the sword and shield of trans hatred and written anti-trans screeds in their blogosphere that would make Janice Raymond and Germaine Greer proud..  

The GL community as a whole needs to stop throwing stones at the African American community and complaining about what the Black community hasn't done for you rights wise. 

You're sitting in pink tinted windowed glass houses guilty of the same sin you accuse others of when it comes to the human rights of transpeople. 

You need to evolve already and get busy being civil rights allies of transpeople instead of civil rights oppressors like you've been since the 70's and sadly, some of you have continued to be in the second decade of the 21st century.  

A Tale Of Two Flight Attendants

As a former airline employee, I've been following the story of Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who went off on a still unidentified female passenger.

He shouted obscenities over the PA, grabbed a beer and deployed the emergency slide when the JetBlue flight parked at JFK in a dramatic resignation that earned him a trip to jail and has him facing federal prosecution and seven years in a Club Fed facility.

But what if flight attendant Steven Slater had been Black?

I already know the answer to that question because just five years ago, there was a very different reaction for one of my former CAL co-workers, flight attendant Sharon Brown.

And before I delve into this post, in the interest of journalistic integrity, during my time I worked at CAL I met, worked multiple flights at my gates with Ms. Brown as part of the flight attendant crew and had some long conversations with her at various times.

Now back to your regularly scheduled TransGriot post.

She had a December 19, 2005 confrontation with Lakewood Church's Victoria Osteen in which she was according to her attorney thrown against a first class lavatory door and elbowed in her breast while Osteen tried to bumrush the cockpit.

And the reason for all that drama? Because Brown didn't in Osteen's estimation clean up a spill in her first class seat fast enough to her liking.

The altercation led to Osteen and her family being asked to leave the flight to Vail, CO and eventually paying a $3,000 FAA fine for interfering with a crew member. A subsequent $500,000 assault lawsuit filed by Brown was later dismissed two years ago this week.

The thing that I'm noticing is the differing reactions to Slater's and Brown's cases. Slater is being hailed as a hero. Brown was accused of 'playing the race card'.

Exhibit A The Houston Press August 8, 2008
scott says:

this sharon brown thinks just because she is black she can get her way bull crap if this happen in 2005 then why is she now just cring about it it's 2008 something wrong in this picture and she claims she lost faith and received injurys come on what kind of games is she playing here it's all about money an IM sure she offer marie johnson a small cut if she testfied for her where's the proof of damange and if u lost faith in god don't blame mrs osteen for it she can't make you so brown and johnson just grow up and ask god forgivness and your lawyer has to be an idiot for repesenting you and any one in that courtroom believing ms brown something is wrong with you.should have brown and johnson take a lie detecter test.

Exhibit B The Chocolate City Blog

Denise
Ms. Brown behavior is nothing but that of an opportunistic low life individual trying to reach the fast pace of success through someone else’s hard work. She needs to find a real job!
9:54 PM on 8/13/08

And I'll spare y'all the really vile crap I stumbled across on the white supremacist site Stormfront.

Sharon Brown didn't get a Facebook page with thousands of followers hailing her as a shero for doing her job and standing up to someone with wealth and fame behaving badly. She just got reviled, disrespected, called an opportunist, her sanity questioned and what happened to her on that Vail flight belittled and dismissed.

Slater's case has yet to finish playing out. We still don't know anything else about the female passenger that triggered this incident. I'm curious to see if this mystery passenger is a POC and how that affects the public perceptions of Slater.

But once again, this tale of two flight attendants points out just how much race affects the perceptions of everyday incidents in America.

Feeling A Little Blue Today

TransGriot readers,
Taking a break today. Been feeling down about some things going on in my personal life that I need to do some hard, solid thinking about.

It isn't helping that my hormone script ran out as well. ;(

Some of it is just part of being Moni the activist and educator on trans issues. I'm human and need to recharge the batteries every now and then, even if my haters don't think so.

Part of it is the fact I haven't been back to Houston since the summer of 2005 or inside Texas borders since November 2006. Recent opportunities to return to the home state that I was looking forward to such as the family reunion have fallen through.

At any rate, gonna turn off the cable news for a little while, chat with some of my cis and trans girlfriends, talk to my family, watch some movies from my expansive DVD collection, do some fiction writing and pull out the PlayStation 2 and just chill out for a few hours.

After sacking some virtual college quarterbacks I'll figure out a few interesting topics to write about.

Enjoy your day.

What I Wrote is EXACTLY What I'm Thinking

No matter how many time I say that what I write is what I'm thinking at the moment I penned the piece, too many times I'll get people who will try to decipher it as if I typed my words on a World War II era Enigma code machine.

The header on this blog states:

News, opinions commentary and a little creative writing from an African-American transwoman about the world around her.

While I'm happy that peeps think my writing is valuable enough to read, pontificate on and peruse, I'm not kidding when I say that I'm blunt and straight to the point about putting my thoughts down in this blog.

That means whatever I'm thinking about concerning the issues of the day is what gets fashioned into a post and goes up on TransGriot (or whatever blog I'm posting to) at that particular time and date.

You can't read my mind. If you have that ability, I suggest you call up the feds, have them pay you a seven figure salary and give you a high level security clearance. That way your abilities can be used to serve the country as you read the minds of various world leaders and our enemies.

So don't go off on some wild tangent about what you think I said or get it twisted.

What I wrote is exactly what I'm thinking.

That's a starting point for healthy debate and discussion about those issues whether you agree or disagree with the conclusions I came up with.

The Story of Carlett Brown

One of the cool benefits of the recent Johnson Publishing Company deal with Google that allows digitizing of the iconic African-American magazines JET and EBONY is that it not only provides a record of Black history as it happened, it also is a cultural time capsule as well.

One of the things I've always pondered is African American transgender people and our history. I know I and other African-American transpeeps didn't just pop up out of thin air. We have a long fascinating history that just begs to be told.

One of those fascinating stories starts unfolding across several JET issues during 1953. Coincidentally it starts around the time Christine Jorgensen had become a household name after the December 1, 1952 news story broke about her surgery and just before her February 13, 1953 return to the United States from Denmark.

It centers on a 26 year old professional female illusionist and shake dancer from Pittsburgh whose birth name was Charles Robert Brown but later changed it to Carlett Angianlee Brown.

Carlett was in a relationship with a 24 year old US Army sergeant stationed in Germany named Eugene Martin. She'd served in the Navy, and during her service time was checked out for an issue with recurring monthly bleeding through her rectal area.

The medical exam revealed that she was intersex and had some feminine plumbing. The surgeons wanted to remove it, but she declined to have that done and opted for SRS instead.

In the process of weighing her SRS options with three surgeons in various countries, she discovered that the laws of those countries at the time didn't allow foreign nationals to obtain SRS.

Dr. Christian Hamburger, the endocrinologist who supervised Christine Jorgensen's transition, advised Carlett that if she gave up her US citizenship she could have it done in Denmark. Germany's then justice minister advised Brown that if became a German resident and took the steps to become a German citizen, she could have it performed there as well.

So Carlett decided to do just that. She applied for her US passport and made arrangements to travel to Bonn, Germany in August 1953 and meet Dr. Hamburger there for her initial checkup before having SRS.

Carlett's game plan once she completed SRS was to get married to Sgt. Eugene Martin

"I just want to become a woman as quickly as possible, that's all. I'll become a citizen of any country that will allow me the treatment that I need and be operated on," she said at the time.

Fast forward to June 25 issue. Carlett has now traveled to Boston and signed papers at the Danish consulate renouncing her US citizenship. She's doing some bookings in the area to help pay for her looming August 2 overseas trip and even hit Filene's to shop for her wedding dress.

She now has her US passport with her new name of Carlett Angianlee on it and all systems are go to become the 'First Negro Sex Change'.

Then fate intervened. Crossdressing back in the 50's could earn you a trip to jail, and the Boston po-po's promptly arrested and jailed her overnight for doing so as the July 9 issue reported. Carlett was still undeterred and was still planning to leave for Denmark and her date with history.

She then postponed her departure in order to get a feminizing face lift in New York with Dr. George J.B. Weiss, as the August 6 issue reported. It even mentioned that Carlett's face lift was going to cost $500 dollars.


Then she was hit with the news that she was ordered not to leave the United States until $1200 in back taxes were paid. The October 15th issue reported that she ended up taking a $60 a week cook's job at Iowa State's Pi Kappa frat house that a friend helped her get in order to earn the money to pay off those back taxes.

At that point the trail through those back issues of JET in terms of Carlett's fascinating story starts turning cold. As of yet I haven't found out if she ever did earn the money to pay off the back taxes, make that trip to Europe, have SRS, get married or even how the rest of her life turned out. If Carlett is still alive she'd be well into her 70's.

But thanks to JET, mine and future generations will get to read it.