More on Gender

Yesterday's post was lazy, I admit. I didn't make any connections or delve deeper. It be's like that sometimes.

I could have elaborated and said that there have times that I've felt like an honorary boy in my family and described what that meant. I could have talked about the limits that rigid gender roles created in the family, for both women and men. I could have written about gender perks that I enjoy (like usually having a young brother step up to lift my old lady cart onto the bus for me when it's heavy with groceries). I could have shared that I have this longing to be a gender outlaw when I'm really fairly boring in my gender expression.

Since I didn't do any of that, in today's post, I am sharing some of other folks' work about people who are transgender because I started thinking that to talk about gender roles, maybe you need to look at the gender line and people who've seen both sides of it.

Daisy Hernández wrote a very interesting article titled "Becoming a Black Man." It actually includes perspectives from both transmen and transwomen, as well as sharing snippets from individuals who are part of a few other communities of color. The bulk of the story does focus on the words of Black transmen.

Louis Mitchell described how he has had to change since transitioning:

Before transitioning, Mitchell recalls being “cavalier and reckless” about what he did in public and about his interactions with police officers. “I didn’t think about it so much,” he says about cops. “At some point they would find out I was female” and that would diffuse the situation. Now, Mitchell finds that he doesn’t engage in small transgressions like jaywalking or spitting on the sidewalk. “I never know if they’re just waiting for something to happen to roll up, and I do not want find myself in custody. That would be just precarious and dangerous in so many ways.”

In the article, Monica Roberts shared that in addition to no longer being viewed as a "suspect," she has felt more powerful in the community:

Her father, a local radio commentator, tried to groom Roberts for leadership as his eldest child. Yet, it was only after transitioning that Roberts felt able to take on such a leadership role. Perhaps it was due to the toll that living in the “tranny closet” had taken on her self-esteem. But Roberts also noticed a difference in the responses she received from other people to her leadership as a Black woman. She got positive reactions, she says, “because I was basically doing the traditional work of Black women in the community in terms of uplifting the race.”

The following is the trailer for "still black," a documentary about Black transmen.



The blog post Trans Woman of Color Erasure & Objectification makes the point that transwomen of color are doing a lot of important work, though that might not be the impression you get if your only exposure is from the mainstream media. Another blog post, America’s Undeclared War On African American Trans Women, observes that Black transgender women are a target and that the violence is minimzed by the press and law enforcement.