Kappa Beta Serving the transgendered community since 1988

Something that's been on my mind lately is trying to describe to the non-TG what it's like. Of course there's no real way to do that. But here's the beginning of my idea:

We've all had to be in really hot rooms for a while, especially here in the South. You start sweating and you can feel your energy sapped from you. It affects you ability to think and interact. It certainly makes you irritable.

"Tell everyone what you want to do and someone will want to help you do it." — W. Clement Stone

One thing we need to explain to people, somehow, is that "activist" does not mean "militant." You don't have to be right out front, leading the march. You don't have to be the one in the park burning some symbolic item. A person can, quite effectively, be what I call a "passive activist."

If you correct people who make stupid jokes about crossdressers or point out that not all crossdressers are drag queens, you are a passive activist. Just getting out "in drag" is activism of sorts; people will see you and know that you are not a monster; you've made an impression on them. The more they see us in a positive (or at least non-negative) light, the less likely they are to fight us.

The more store owners see us with our money, they more willing they are to serve us. The more often restaurants see us (and our money) and know that we aren't there to create a scene, the more willing they are to have us, even at the expense of less reliable customers.

Let's take a brief look back over the last century: at the beginning of the 20^th century we had the Women's Suffrage movement; in the mid 20^th century we had Women's Lib (and I won't go onto this any more because I could write a book on it); in the last half of the 20^th century we had the Civil Rights movement; now at the beginning of the 21^st century we have Gay Rights, to which, rightly or wrongly, we transgendered souls are trying to attach. What do they all have in common?

Our Western society, to which people of the USA belong, has a very basic tenet: a basic respect for every one of us as a human being. These movements all have in common reminding people that those who have been oppressed are human beings too. I know some people believe that respect must be earned, but that is not totally true. Western society demands the basic respect for human beings or we would be running around killing each other, as other cultures seem to do. This is not something to be earned; it may only be lost, as mass murders find out.

What’s in a word? Words can be powerful, beautiful, or simply descriptive. All successful movements started with a word; a word that defines the movement. Civil, Black, Gay, Lesbian were words used as adjectives followed by the noun that defined the objective. That noun? "Rights." We, as transgender folk, also talk about wanting the same Rights as the mainstream community. When we tell our friends, our family, our Senators, our Congressional Representatives what we desire, we do a pretty good job of defining those desires. What we fail to do is tell them who we are. We are ‘T’. However, since we – as members of the "T’ community – cannot even agree upon what "T" means (or even the spelling of the word), how can we ever hope to gain respect and acceptance without this ability to define ourselves? Please note that none of the above mentioned movements tried to further define themselves to mainstream America by all the variations that could exist within the movement. We didn’t see, for instance, the "Butch Lesbian Rights Movement", "The Lipstick Lesbian Movement", or "The Lesbian with Bi-Sexual Leanings Movement." We saw a single word: Lesbian. It only serves to confuse and dilute a move toward acceptance when the movement is broken down into sub-groups. A single, unified group has hope; a fractured movement does not. Additionally, once Rights are established, the word Pride can be substituted in the movement’s name.

One of my earliest memories as a young lad of eight was of a picture of a southern belle woman dressed in a beautiful Civil War era gown. That image stayed with me until this summer when I finally emailed a seamstress in NY about making a dress for me. She was delighted to do so and did a wonderful job for me. The next step was to find a place to wear this dress.