Unexpected Black History Honor

Received an e-mail from Josephine Tittsworth yesterday that advised me of something that made me cry when I thought about the enormity of the news I was receiving.

At the University of Houston-Clear Lake, in their Bayou Building atrium they have a display up for Black History Month that includes our local heroes and sheroes and their accomplishments such as the late great Rep. Barbara Jordan

According to Josephine, one of the people UH-Clear Lake included in their Black History Month display was me.

Wow.  I was blown away by that news    Rep. Jordan has always been one of my sheroes, but never in my wildest dreams when I began fighting for the human rights of trans people in 1998 did I ever think that people would consider me in those terms.  In fact, Barbara Jordan is one of the trailblazing women I've tried to role model in terms of what I do with my own flava added to it.


But I do have some indications of my impact on history and the legacy I'm building even if I try to downplay my role in shaping that history.

At TBLG events and conferences people tell me it's an honor to meet me.  I'm mentioned in Dr. Susan Stryker's Transgender History book.   I'm one of four African-American transpeople to receive the IFGE Trinity Award and the first African-American Texan to win it. 

I was one of the founders of NTAC in 1999 and its political director until 2002.   I served on the boards of Louisville's Fairness Campaign and C-FAIR, have this award winning blog, helped organize the 2005-2006 Transsistahs-Transbrothas conventions in Louisville and participated in lobbying events locally in Houston and Louisville, nationally, in Texas and Kentucky.  

When the opportunity presents itself, I get invitations to discuss trans issues from an Afrocentric perspective. I enjoy speaking to college students and various audiences about our issues and love participating in panel discussions.  

So yeah, guess I am living Black History being made and need to toot my own horn a little bit.     

I have respect from the Houston, Texas, national and international trans communities, but this is a really cool and mindblowing thing to hear when people are putting you in the lofty company of Barbara Jordan and other trailblazing African-Americans. 

But I'm still a work in progress.  All I've been trying to do since 1998 was push for trans human rights coverage in Houston, Texas and the nation, ensure that POC transpeople's voices are included in the policy mix, tell our stories, unearth our history and be the stereotype busting role model for African-American transwomen that I didn't have growing up. 

And what makes me happier is that even my African-American brothers and sisters and some in the African Diaspora are beginning to recognize what I do.

From where I sit, I still have much work to do just to be close to being mentioned in the same breath with Barbara Jordan and other trailblazing African-Americans.   To quote the old Curtis Mayfield song, I'm going to have to keep on pushing to get there.

And oh yeah, if anyone has a picture of that display at UH-Clear Lake, send it to a sistah.

Poland Elects Trans MP

For the first time since 2008, there will be a transperson sitting in their nation's highest legislative body.

57 year old Anna Grodzka is a member of the newly minted liberal party called Pallikot's Support Movement, which stunned the political establishment in Poland by garnering 10 percent of the vote in Sunday's election..

The party was founded by vodka tycoon Janusz Palikot who was a lawmaker in Prime Minister Donald Tusk's center-right Civic Platform until he got exasperated with the party's conservatism on social issues and broke away to form his own party.   Pallikot's Support Movement has attracted younger voters with its support for gay rights, abortion and legalization of soft drugs and with its attacks on the influential Roman Catholic Church

Grodzka is also an example of what can happen if you just step out there, put yourself in the game and get in it to win it. "I decided to be a candidate for Palikot's Movement because I want the voice of people who are excluded and discriminated against in the Polish political system to be heard," she wrote in her blog. "I believe that little by little does the trick."

She garnered 19,541 votes in the Krakow II electoral district to secure her place in the Sejm, Poland's lower house of Parliament.  She is set to become the first transperson in Poland to become an MP and the first in Europe since Vladimir Luxuria lost her seat in the Italian elections in 2008.

Georgina Beyer, the world first transsexual to be elected to their national legislative body, retired from New Zealand's Parliament after serving as a Labour MP from November 27, 1999 until February 14, 2007

Grodzka is the founder and president of NGO Trans-Fuzja, and has her work cut out for her in her stated mission of help Poles understand the problems of people who transition as she did last year.   The Polish anti-discrimination law of 2010 does not include gender identity nor gender expression as possible grounds for discrimination.

Congrats Anna on making some trans history.  May you be wildly successful in your dual missions of representing your constituents and fostering increased understanding of transpeople in a staunchly Catholic Poland.

Cristan's Transgender Research

Cristan Williams of the Houston based Transgender Foundation of America continues to put out the nuggets of history from the archive that it has painstakingly built up that blows up the lies of those who claim that the transgender term is only a 90's invention.

It also blows up the lies of people who claim that transsexuality is just a late 20th century-21st century phenomenon.

from Clinical Sexuality, a 1974 book by  John F. Oliven, MD 

The milder case of transvestitism does not come easily to medical or any other professional attention, and it has rarely been included in the reports from clinic now specializing in transgender research.

From the 1979 Newsday article on Christine Jorgenson reprinted in the Winnipeg Free Press 

As a young man, Jorgensen experienced strong emotional attachments to two male friends, but she says those feelings were never expressed. She admits now that she wasn’t entirely candid in the book. She did have “a couple” of homosexual experiences before she went to Europe to seek a medical solution to her problem, but they only reinforced the feeling that she wanted to relate to men as a woman, not as another man. “If you understand trans-genders,” she says, (the word she prefers to transsexuals), “then you understand that gender doesn’t have to do with bed partners, it has to do with identity.”

There's some fascinating stuff here that Cristan continues to add to at this transgender research link.