Visionary

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She laughed as she thought about that
sideways thinker,
or was he just hungry,
the one who first thought to look past shells
and the smell of seafood…
limpets, mussels, clams, shrimp, snails,
oysters (omg shudder shiver).

Desperate, or bored?
Interested or Inspired?

No matter…what a world he opened up, what a
feast of delicate and wondrous
flavors, aromas, delights.

I lick my fingers,
and suck butter out of my
garlic escargot, and ask Lady Grace
to give me courage to look
past shells, smells, false tells,
with no fear and great inspiration
to find true treasure in everyone I meet
drawn up from
God’s Great Sea.

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Another repost: “What Grantland Got Wrong”

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Sorry readers…I have been stewing over this for a couple of weeks, and have finally found the courage and balance to try and express myself over it.  One last re-post, and then you are on your own and equipped with what you need to educate yourselves on this topic.

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What Grantland Got Wrong

Understanding the serious errors in “Dr. V’s Magical Putter”

BY CHRISTINA KAHRL ON JANUARY 20, 2014

When you’re a writer, you want something you create to have a long life, to be something that readers will remember and revisit for years to come. If such was Caleb Hannan’s wish, it’s been granted, because his essay on “Dr. V and the magical putter” figures to be a permanent exhibit of what not to do, and how not to treat a fellow human being.

Hannan’s job might have seemed fairly straightforward. There’s a cool new tool with a padded sales pitch — does it really work? He could dig into its virtues on the golf course and look at the validity of Essay Anne Vanderbilt’s claims on behalf of her product, and as a matter of basic homework verify her claims of expertise in inventing it. And he did a good chunk of that checklist, effectively debunking her elaborate claims of expertise with an ease almost anyone in the electronic age has within his or her power. He struggled with the question of whether or not she’d actually designed a great putter; if you’re a golfer, that might have been what you wanted to know. It certainly would have been the extent of what you needed to know.

Unfortunately, that isn’t where Hannan stopped. Instead of fulfilling his mission in its entirety, he lurched into something that had nothing to do with his story, but that he was excited to share, repeatedly: Vanderbilt was a transsexual woman.

By any professional or ethical standard, that wasn’t merely irrelevant to the story, it wasn’t his information to share. Like gays or lesbians — or anyone else, for that matter — trans folk get to determine for themselves what they’re willing to divulge about their sexuality and gender identity. As in, it’s not your business unless or until the person tells you it is, and if it’s not germane to your story, you can safely forgo using it. Unfortunately, he indulged his discovery. The story’s problems include screw-ups you might expect for a writer or editors who aren’t familiar with this kind of subject matter — misgendering and ambiguous pronoun usage upon making his needless discovery of Vanderbilt’s past identity.

But we’re not here because Hannan and his editors blew a pronoun and that’s rude and we have some very thoughtful style guides from GLAAD and the Associated Press to recommend that deserve your perusal to avoid this kind of mistake in the future.

We’re here because Essay Anne Vanderbilt is dead.

And she’s dead because — however loath she was to admit it — she was a member of a community for whom tragedy and loss are as regular as the sunrise, a minority for whom suicide attempts outpace the national average almost 26 times over, perhaps as high as 41 percent of all trans people. And because one of her responses to the fear of being outed as a transsexual woman to some of the people in her life — when it wasn’t even clear the story was ever going to run — was to immediately start talking and thinking about attempting suicide. Again.

It was not Grantland’s job to out Essay Anne Vanderbilt, but it was done, carelessly. Not simply with the story’s posthumous publication; that kind of casual cruelty is weekly fare visited upon transgender murder victims in newspapers across the country. No, what Hannan apparently did was worse: Upon making the unavoidable discovery that Vanderbilt’s background didn’t stand up to scrutiny, he didn’t reassure her that her gender identity wasn’t germane to the broader problems he’d uncovered with her story. Rather, he provided this tidbit to one of the investors in her company in a gratuitous “gotcha” moment that reflects how little thought he’d given the matter. Maybe it was relevant for him to inform the investor that she wasn’t a physicist and probably didn’t work on the stealth bomber and probably also wasn’t a Vanderbilt cut from the same cloth as the original Commodore. But revealing her gender identity was ultimately as dangerous as it was thoughtless.

What should Grantland have done instead? It really should have simply stuck with debunking those claims to education and professional expertise relevant to the putter itself, dropped the element of her gender identity if she didn’t want that to be public information — as she very clearly did not — and left it at that. “That would have been responsible,” transgender activist Antonia Elle d’Orsay suggested when I asked for her thoughts on this road not taken. It’s certainly the path I would have chosen as a writer making this sort of accidental discovery, or would have insisted upon as an editor.

But because the site did go there, we have a problem, one that goes well beyond putters and overly contrived sales pitches. Because of this screw-up, we owe it to the ruin wrought in its wake to talk about the desperate lives that most transgender Americans lead and the adaptive strategies they have to come up with while trying to deal with the massive rates of under- and unemployment from which the trans community generally suffers. And we owe it to Essay Anne to understand how an attempt to escape those things became its own kind of trap, one Grantland had neither the right nor the responsibility to spring.

Let’s start off with acknowledging that, while I did not know her personally, apparently Essay Anne was a transgender woman in deep stealth, a term that means she did not want to be identified as transgender publicly, and probably not on any level personally. Stealth is tough to maintain, and generally involves trading one closet for another: You may be acting on your sense of self to finally achieve happiness, but the specter of potential discovery is still with you. And if you wind up in the public eye for any reason, stealth might be that much more difficult to maintain.

As an adaptive strategy to cope with being transgender, stealth is something of an unhappy legacy of an earlier age. It was often the recommended goal for trans folks from the ’60s well into the ’90s from a psychiatric community that was doing little better than winging it, and that poorly served a (now) older generation of the generally white trans women who could afford psychiatric help. So, at the same time the outbreak of AIDS was killing off so many of the nascent trans community’s much-needed leaders — including some of those who instigated the Stonewall riots and launched the LGBT rights movement in this country — another segment was being screwed by professional advice to cut themselves off from their families, their jobs, and their hometowns to begin life anew as someone else in their new gender. In stealth. Without the support network they’d spent their lives with. As if being trans weren’t hard enough, therapy’s best solution was to tell you to isolate yourself.

Which is nuts, but let’s be generous and accept that psychiatric care for trans folks was and remains a developing field, where the science is still trailing the authenticity of the lives that trans folks of every stripe are forced to lead. As a Z-list public figure as a columnist at Baseball Prospectus when I came out 11 years ago, I dispensed with the entire notion of stealth as ludicrous — I wanted to keep my career, family, and friends, and I felt (and still feel) no stigma as a result of the benefit of being born trans. If this is the hand I’ve been dealt, my job is to cope and make it work. I’m trans — so what? I certainly wasn’t going to detach myself from a past I had enjoyed as best I could, so figuring out how to integrate my past as Chris with my future as Christina was the centerpiece of my adaptive strategy.

But that’s the thing: When you’re trans, you learn that while there’s no one right way to transition into your new life, there are also plenty of wrong ways. One of the difficulties that Essay Anne had imposed on herself is that, while trying to live a life in total stealth, she was also a hostage to the impossible and implausible collection of lies she’d created to promote her invention, inevitably risking discovery in an era when a cursory investigation can invalidate claims about something like a doctorate.

Which does not get Grantland off the hook for blundering into outing her. A responsibility to the truth should have limited itself to what was relevant. If it had, would that have generated a happy ending? No, so let’s not kid ourselves. Shredding Vanderbilt’s claims of expertise by publication alone almost certainly wouldn’t have left her in good shape with her investors or consumers. She risked that by conjuring up an apparently bogus set of credentials to reinforce her claims for her putter, claims that were unavoidably part of the story because she’d made them in the first place. There’s no getting around that.

Hers is not the only story without a guaranteed happy ending where trans folks are concerned. For as much progress as seems to have been made, it has been a mixed bag of gains and setbacks. In sports, Bobbi Lancaster should get a shot to join the LPGA tour in 2014, but MMA fighter Fallon Fox has to compete in front of some of the most ferociously hateful audiences in any sport. In entertainment, we can revel in Laverne Cox’s breakthrough performance on Orange Is the New Black, but we also have to sit through watching Jared Leto make an unsympathetic ass of himself while taking bows for his caricature of a trans woman in Dallas Buyers Club.

But as high-profile as trans people within the sports and entertainment industries might be, most trans folks are coping with much more desperate real-world concerns. While some of you are fidgeting over the Affordable Care Act’s benefits, in 45 of 50 states trans folks have to deal with the fact that the law doesn’t explicitly cover their health care needs, forcing us to pursue legal remedies. We can be happy that CeCe McDonald, a trans woman whose only crime was defending herself from a bigot’s assault, was released from prison last week after 19 months in jail; at the same time we have to live with knowing that Islan Nettles was beaten to death for being trans in New York City — in front of a police station, in front of multiple witnesses — and there has not been and may never be any justice done in her name. They’re just the names that achieved mainstream recognition, but behind CeCe and Islan are thousands of trans people ill served by our public institutions, by our public servants, and by more than a few of our fellow Americans.

Which leaves me deeply frustrated. First off because, even though we’re separated by layers of company hierarchy, if I had known this story was in the pipeline, my first instinct is that I’d want to help Bill Simmons and his team get the job done right. Even if I really would rather be talking about baseball — my day job, my dream job, my job-job as part of ESPN.com’s editorial and writing team for MLB — if I can help my colleagues and simultaneously make sure that the trans people who come up in their coverage get a fair shake, I welcome that opportunity.

But I’m also angry because of the more fundamental problem that this story perpetuates. We’re talking about a piece aimed at golf readers. So we’re talking about a mostly white, mostly older, mostly male audience that wound up reading a story that reinforced several negative stereotypes about trans people. For an audience that doesn’t usually know and may never know anyone who’s trans and may get few opportunities to ever learn any differently, that’s confirmation bias of the worst sort. I may not have made you care about people like CeCe McDonald or Islan Nettles or even Essay Anne Vanderbilt here, but better to fail in the attempt than to reinforce ignorance and contempt bred through the thoughtless trivialization of their lives and challenges.

CHRISTINA KAHRL covers baseball for ESPN.com. She is also on the board of directors of GLAAD.

A Good Aggregate about Dr. V’s Tragic Death

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This is from a good blog:

http://beautifulterriblestrange.tumblr.com/

I am not capable of saying it this well.  Please read and allow yourself to be enlarged.

 

Dr. V, Caleb Hannan, and Grantland

 

Hi — thank you for opening this and reading more about this horrible set of events. As it involves the life and experiences of a trans woman, which I am not, I ask that you read the voices of trans women writing about Dr. V before reading mine. (Or just their voices, if you have limited time.) They are very often written about, and not listened to, and it’s important to change that. Thanks.

Also, as the situation involves a reporter posthumously outing his subject as trans after her suicide, please consider this post and all of the links herein to have content warnings for suicide, transmisogyny, transphobia, and outing.

I’m adding new pieces as I find them, but please feel encouraged to send them to me to accelerate: @handler on Twitter, michael/at\grendel/dot\net via email, or contact via Tumblr. Thanks. -mh

Dear Caleb Hannan & the editors of Grantland:

I’m not a habitual reader of Grantland, because I’m not much into the work-a-day issues and discussions of the sports world. I do love long-form journalism about specific people, and culture, and pop culture issues, and the works that I’ve read on Grantland have been satisfying enough that I kept on wondering why I wasn’t making it part of my regular reading rounds. The other week, I stumbled across Chuck Klosterman’s article about Royce White and mental health, and I shared it with my SO, and she shared it with her family, and we had a deep and connecting discussion about it which I am still appreciating.

Despite my lack of regular connection to Grantland, I am compelled to write in to you about Caleb Hannan’s article about Dr. V, which I read today, mostly in openmouthed disgust, and with increasing horror as it built to its conclusion.

There’s no question that the design, origin, and performance of a new golf club of mysterious provenance, from outside the historical establishment of equipment design, is a compelling and interesting story on many levels. There’s no question that the behavior and history of an erratic and inconsistent inventor, whose claimed superlative credentials persistently cannot be verified, is also compelling and relevant to the narrative.

There’s also no question that the way that Dr. V’s existence as a trans woman was researched, outed, and used in the narrative of the story was monstrous, stereotypical, transphobic, hurtful, and wrong.

 

  • Caleb outed Dr. V as trans. Outing people is wrong, full stop. (The onlypossible exception is if the person holds a position of power and is using it to mistreat and oppress the population of which they are a member, e.g. secretly queer homophobic politicians, and even then, opinions are often divided on this topic. Regardless: it doesn’t apply here.)
  • Caleb builds his outing of Dr. V as a trans woman into a narrative peak in the story, as if it’s something incredible or horrible or notably relevant, which it is not. He reinforces this by saying “a chill actually ran up my spine,” easily read as reinforcing that this was shocking news. (That he “ironically” calls this out as an explicit cliche doesn’t help, at all.)
  • Caleb writes about Dr. V’s existence as a trans woman in the narrative of her apparently unverifiable claims about her work history and education, tarring her gender by association as another potential lie or deception or inconsistency amongst many. Any number of human beings of all gender histories have engaged in exaggeration or deception about their education, work, or accomplishments; why is her purported behavior tied to her gender in this story?
  • Caleb writes that she was “born a boy” and uses male pronouns and her birth name for her when writing about her early life, without any knowledge that this would be what she wished, or an explicit disclaimer that he has no idea what her desires would be.
  • Caleb’s article treats the fact that Dr. V was a trans woman as the linchpin in his narrative of her apparent deceptions and inconsistencies. Even in the section about the silent investor, he continues by inserting a parenthetical aside where he reveals outing her to Phil Kinney, contrasting Mr. Kinney’s description of her appearance and clothes with the (implied horrifying/misleading) “truth” about her.

I’m not a trans woman, and in no way should what I write here be taken as an authoritative list of what’s wrong with this article, nor do I want to claim to be an authority about how one should write about trans women in order to treat them with respect.

But having read even a small number of narratives and writing by trans people, and by trans women in particular, the starting list here of glaring, flaming, eternally repeated and perpetually painful mistakes are both obvious and completely avoidable. Simple decency and compassion for other human beings gets you the rest of the way there to confirming that.

None of this invasive mock-detective work was necessary to tell a compelling and complete story. A narrative of “I couldn’t verify any of her work or education history, and she wouldn’t participate in any verification in a way I could accept” is just as good. A different name and assigned gender at birth is just another set of queries to run in a database, and come up with no results. But for whatever reason, Caleb fixated on Dr. V’s gender as a way to run this story to ground narratively, and in that way may very well have helped run her to ground, too.

Caleb: I don’t know what was in Dr. V’s mind; I only know her through your words, and I’m not sure how much I can trust them, both because of your clear biases and mistakes here, and because I’m not sure she trusted you enough to give you a full and accurate picture of herself. (Rightfully so, as it turns out.) So I can’t and won’t make a stark assertion that you are responsible for her suicide. But, given what you knew about the state of her mental health (apparently in advance), and what you easily could have understood about the risks of what you were engaging in… If I was in your shoes, I’d wonder daily about just how culpable I was in her death, and be haunted by the realization that I’d never know.

(That you started out today tweeting about how blocking people feels fantastic, after you’d started getting angry responses to this article, well… I will call it what it is: smug privileged assholery at its finest.)

Caleb, on the 12th of January you tweeted multiple times about how awful Bill Keller’s NYT op-ed about Lisa Adams was. (I agree emphatically, and wrote my own screed about it on Medium.) You called it “anti-human”, and retweeted @popehat saying “Do you regard suffering human beings as abstractions?” This shows to me that you do know the perspective that many of us who are speaking to you about this share. I don’t know why you weren’t able to bring that same awareness to bear on your own writing, reporting, and direct interactions with Dr. V, and for her sake, I truly wish you had been able to.

Grantland editors: This is article is journalistic overreach and malpractice at its most basic level. I don’t know what the group of you knew, and when you knew it, but if you were aware of the extent of Caleb’s activities during his writing, you should have stopped him from hounding her to the extent he did. Barring that, it should not have been published in this form, with this narrative. There’s no sign, discussion, or apparent awareness that this may very well have been a situation where the activities of your reporter contributed to or caused the suicide of his subject. I’m horrified that you’d want it published under your masthead, with your names on it.

I know you’re not Buzzfeed or Gawker or a tabloid. It’s clear from your site and your activities in general that you all feel connected to the practice, history, ethics, and importance of journalism, and generally strive to be a good example of… whatever that is evolving into being, in the modern era. But you stepped very, very far across the line here, and that needs to be acknowledged and repaired, to the extent that it can be.

As a class, trans women are currently some of the most vulnerable human beings on the planet, and it’s up to everyone to work toward changing that, if you don’t want to be an monster (by action or inaction) during your brief life here. Outing someone or subjecting them to asymmetrical attention can lead to abuse and harassment, or loss of housing, physical safety, sanity, health, stability. These are not hypothetical concerns, and they are painfully experienced (and exceedingly well documented) by trans women, every day. The Internet can present copious examples to you instantly, if you take but a moment to look.

Journalism is needs to be about punching up, not punching down towards people who can least afford to respond, or be the target of it. Hounding Dr. V when she clearly wanted to be left alone, telling her story to the world in your words and perspective (when she’s dead and can’t respond — and daring to call it a “eulogy”!) and flaying her open on the page (for the “sin” of having lied about where she went to school and worked, while inventing and marketing a possibly curiously useful new golf club) is punching very very very very far down indeed.

I know we’re all human. You made a mistake; that’s inevitable for all of us. But this is a big one, a horrendously bad and unkind one. You published an article that got its perspective very very wrong, and treated its subject as less human than others, and clearly concerned and hurt her very badly.

Please, please, please, please, please listen to what is being said, reflect on this and understand, and try and make it right, both for Dr. V and for the future.

Thanks for reading.

—Michael Handler

On the Outing and resulting suicide of a transwoman, and the aftermath

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Are you aware of the recent outing of a trans-woman by the blog Grantland?  It is a heartbreaking story to all of us who share humanity, as there was yet another life laid on the altar of the yawning maw of the false gods of trans-phobia and hate…and it is a tragic and gut-wrenching story to trans-humans everywhere…countless other blogs have written in detail about it, but I want to give my thoughts and reactions to this thing.

First of all, just google the Story of Dr. V, or Inventor of magical putter…go to Grantland.com and look for the archives and it is easily found…you can read the original story and if you are cis, you will have one reaction to the story…but this was my reaction:

Here is someone like me in terms of the volcano of hurt and despair and desperation and ultimately hopelessness that happens within someone who has woken up in the wrong body and has to serve a life sentence.  She had to try to cope, and then when she (like me) discovered that something can actually be done about it, there is indeed a trapdoor through which one can slip out of jail, but also that the hounds will trail, will bay and howl and sniff…

…so she took her courage in hand, pulled the rip chord, and then did her best to stay escaped, walking in the waters to hide her scent from the dogs, walking on the rocks so as not to leave tracks, striving to leave behind her past…not because she is ashamed of who she was!!!  But rather because if the hounds and jailers found out who she was THEY would make her present a paradigm of shame and loathing and she would be then seen as a freak, and worse.

Alas, life.  Life happens to we humans, regardless of gender.  All humans have made mistakes, all humans have told lies, all humans have presented themselves outwardly to others differently than who they truly are inside.  All humans have endeavored to present themselves truly, and then perceived falsely and thus been labeled liars or worse.  For the cis world, wrapped in the legacy gifted to them by their gender “normalcy”, there is compassion for the wrongly accused, there is mercy to the fallen, and ultimately, for the ones who intentionally deceive for sordid gain there is pity and the sop of correction via the penitentiary system.

But if you are also a transgender human, suddenly you find a level of malevolence added to all of the above, a sense of de-legitimacy is bound round about you…what might be a simple failure of life common and possible for anyone to stumble in instantly becomes a deviant and diabolical plot to deceive and defile.  And for some reason or another, the fear that someone might actually bond with a transgender person and like them engenders so much loathing that the justified reaction to that is to destroy them violently (and usually with extreme malice…this is factually the case nearly always: dismemberment, the complete basing in of the face and head, and worse)…

…and then there is the “compassionate reaction”:  simply shame them, rain down ridicule and hatred with such unrelenting force that they kill themselves!  Perfect solution!  Make the trans human do your dirty work for you, so you can sit with Pilate and clean hands looking on.

This poor woman transitioned, and then, only she knows what she did and more importantly why she did it…she falsified credentials and history, and then created a brilliant new golf club that many people liked very much.

Along came a young and curious cis-gender male, wrapped without knowing he was, in all his priveleged splendour!  Eager to practice all he had been taught in becoming a journalist, he did his best investigative reporter schtick and began to try to do a feature story on this club and its creator…and in the process, thanks to his talent and skill that lay tragically uninformed by wisdom or education, he realized that things were not adding up.

I will let you read for yourselves the resulting conclusion he came to and what he did with it.  But let me just say this:  if you google transgender, and scratch even a shallow ways beneath the sensational and porn polluted links that form the cartoonish and lewd popular image of trans-people, you can find pages and pages of well written, calm, scientific explanation of a real condition that falsifies the binary and woefully insufficient definition of the gender experience of human beings. You will find story after story of men and women who very successfully and morally transitioned to their proper body orientation thanks to modern medicine, and have gone on to live fruitful and contributing lives in a wide variety of ways.  You will find that gender variance is more common than many birth defects that are accepted as nearly instantly correctable.  And you will find that new and enlightened views on gender do not assume that variance is a result of a defect at all!

It is actually quite encouraging, interesting, fascinating even.

You will find that other cultures and other times have actually been light years ahead of us, having far more enlightened and merciful views on these things.

And you will also find tragic stories that read so similar to any tale of the desperate and cruel measures taken by people of privilege when that privilege is threatened and on the wane.  The same tactics of othering and then destroying.

This can be done in a matter of days…and for an important article such as the one that this author aspired to produce, it seems obvious in hindsight that such research should have been done.  Consulting with other transgender people and asking them how they see the issue before anything else is done would seem obvious.

But not only was this not done…it was not even THOUGHT OF!  Gawd…it never even occurred to the author, or the editors of the sight.

The transwoman begged them to not go forward with things…and they heard the pleas of a con artist found out, instead of an escapee from gender prison who felt the hot breath of the hounds on her heels.

I felt her fear…I felt her horror…I felt her terror…I felt her despair…and at last, I felt her death, and it rocked me back, it frightened me and terrified me.  I cried most of the day after I read it, for with the wrong step, the wrong word, that could be me, and the walls come tumbling down onto me, destroying my life as I know it.  I plan to leave this life behind…but in due season and time, like a child leaves the womb at the right time.

MY GENDER IDENTITY IS MINE TO REVEAL AS I CHOOSE, WHEN I CHOOSE, and HOW I CHOOSE!

The thought of some stranger coming into my life, prying, asking questions, and making threats chills me.

Bill Simmons wrote a well intentioned apology, and it was pretty good for one soused in ignorance.  I can only hope that he is haunted by knowing that indirectly her blood is on his hands…and maybe he can be motivated to educate himself on these issues and allow his consciousness to be raised.  Think of what could happen if he allowed transgender contributors to educate, inform, and then ultimately just join in the conversation and judged only on the content of their ideas and not on the label put on them gender-wise.

In conclusion…a word of thanks you you my followers, for I have been received as me…without exception!  Many of you have written me the kindest little notes that have encouraged me to keep on writing.

“Oh Humans…we have been shown what is good, what is required of us…it is simple and short:

Do Justly.

Love Mercy.

Walk Humbly.

Love one another, forgive, and be kind.”

that’s it.

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” She makes all that cis punk sound limp in comparison.”

From a review of Laura Jane Grace’s new album Against Me by Jeremy D. Larson

 

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18902-against-me-transgender-dysphoria-blues/

Miriam’s Song

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Roll back stormy waters, roiling steely dark and deep.
Roll back clinging finger-waves and the icy grip they keep.
Make a way thru waters where there isn’t any way
And lead me laughing, walking, running out of miry clay.

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Elder voices rebound around, echoes from my past,
Deep bass rumbles, gruff and loud remind me of my caste…
Hairy, clumsy, unrefined the world which held me chained
Roll them back, please scour me, set me free from all that’s stained.

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Behind me, tumult quiets as I stride forward in grace,
At my left hand are threatening wails and rain-lash on my face,
At my right arm benighted phobic zombies gibber shrill
Roll back the waters Adonai, and lead me up Your hill.

http://ziza.es/2009/06/02/Fotorecopilatorio.html

I walk on dry ground breathlessly, forward in the night
Reminding myself all the time I walk by faith not sight.
My soul will someday sing the song of Miriam and rejoice,
But now, ROLL BACK, please…save me, for You are my always choice.

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Mirror Image: A PLEA to Cis-Gender People!

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I have been thinking of the extreme reaction that most people have who are uninformed or have never ever given any thought to the construct of gender when they come into contact with a transgender person.  Unfortunately, especially with cismen, this reaction is nearly always violent and abusive emotionally, and very often that violence takes on physical expression as well, and another transwoman joins the broken and crushed ranks of the statistics.

My thoughts are running along the question:  WHY????

Why the violent reaction?  At times ciswomen react that way as well, but usually it is men.  Now, obviously this reaction is not okay in that it results in a lot of hurt in every way.  But to stop there, with the understanding that it isn’t ok is to miss a larger and more salient observation.  It is this…I think that transphobia and dysphoria are mirror images!!

Think about it:  most of the time the horror of cis-gendered males, even fear and loathing…the immediate and totally male reaction of taking physical steps that involve muscle and doing to change something…the attempt to eradicate the “wrong” person and condition…the attempt to “otherize” the trans-person, all in hopes that “normalization” can be reestablished and the status quo restored…

…all of these things mirror the feelings that assail one who suffers from gender dysphoria…the horror of being in the wrong body…the attempt to change that wrongness…the anger and fear of being trapped in the wrong body which is turned inward and becomes depression and suicidal desire.  Tragically, we transgender people have “murdered” as many of us as cis-gender people have, in that we commit suicide at a horrendous rate.

So…please, when you encounter a trans-gender person, and you reflexively go to the far corner of the binary, and if you find strong feelings within yourself about the interaction, stop!  Think!  And try on this idea…

The very same sort of horror you may be feeling is what we have lived with since the day we became conscious!  Except you can go somewhere else and forget about it, but us?  No matter where we go, there we are.

Let me propose a better way…let us all lay down our horror, our revulsion, and let us acknowledge that the binary is simply inadequate and artificial and needs to be trans-cended…let us lift up our hearts and open our spirits to a better way, and assist us all in truly becoming who we are created to be, intended to be.  And let us realize that the miracles of modern medicine and technology can literally work wonders for humans of all gender!

Amen.

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A very thoughtful editorial on how Transhumans are not allowed to belong to themselves

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Long ago, when I first began this blog, I posted about how I discovered that my gender belonged to everyone else that I knew and not to myself.  I quickly realized once I knew the inner truth that I had so long tried to tell myself, and for so long had run from, that people would literally freak out if they found out that I was actually a woman and always had been.  Oddly, it would make so much sense to so many who never really understood me…male friends who were totally perplexed by me, and who often called me gay, fag, a girl, etc. would then actually have a logical explanation.  Women friends who like me very much and actually treat me like one of them would finally understand why I was easy to talk to and not like other men…

…but in actuality, the unusualness of this would freak people out, and my gender would be severely policed.  I would be run out at w**k, almost immediately, as due to the nature of our c**w interaction, those guys would feel betrayed.  It feels so weird to see everyone else allowed to own their gender with virtually no cost, but to realize that mine would have to be purchased from everyone else with the currency of fear, shame, rejection, alienation, and possibly even violence.

What I didn’t  realize though, is what Brynn writes about in this article, on how so very little of our lives as transhumans is allowed to be ours.  I encourage you to read this and ponder it.

One last comment…my dearest darling had an experience where she felt labeled as being “masculine” and it irked her deeply.  She resented being gendered that way, and fumed.  Later, as she reflected she realized that her reaction was so much due to her upbringing and being deeply immeshed in the binary concerning gender.  After she finished relating the story to me, I asked her to consider a life where everyday, in virtually every encounter, she was mis-gendered that way…where she incurred significant social pressure to dress according to the mis-genderedness, to act according to it, talk according to it, work according to it, love and marry according to it…

…she was very quiet and thoughtful, and told me she had just gained a deeper glimpse into the life that I had walked everyday since I was just under 4 years old.

On to the essay……………………………….

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Brynn Tannehill

Director of Advocacy, SPART*A

GET UPDATES FROM BRYNN TANNEHILL

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The Fatal Transgender Double Standard

Posted: 01/10/2014 12:07 pm

 

Laverne Cox

A few days ago, Katie Couric interviewed transgender model Carmen Carrera, andOrange is the New Black star Laverne Cox. For whatever reason, Couric chose to veer suddenly into questioning Carrera about how her “private parts” are “different now” and if she’s had that surgery yet. Carmen shushed her immediately, and reminded Couric that’s a very private issue. In the next segment with Laverne, Couric went right back to asking Ms. Cox about the genitalia question.

Laverne’s answer was flawless.

“The preoccupation with transition with surgery objectifies trans people and then we don’t get to really deal with the real lived experiences. The reality of trans people’s lives is that so often we’re targets of violence. We experience discrimination disproportionately to the rest of the [LGBT] community. … [B]y focusing on bodies, we don’t focus on the lived realities of that oppression and that discrimination.”

Other commentators have noted that the bodies of transgender people are somehow public domain. Though Laverne alluded to it, not only are our bodies expected to be public domain, but so are our histories. The results of this unrealistic expectation are horrific.

In Australia, police took a man into custody. While there, the police (illegally) informed him that his girlfriend was a post-operative transsexual. After being released from police custody, he went home, found his girlfriend sleeping, and woke her up by repeatedly bludgeoning her with a glass ash tray until it tore her lips off. After she lost consciousness, he took her to the attic balcony and threw her over the rail onto the concrete two floors below.

The police who leaked this information got community service as punishment.

In Scotland, a transgender man has been convicted of rape and placed on the sex offender list for not disclosing to his girlfriend that he was transgender before engaging in consensual sexual activity.

I have seen it expressed that any transgender person who does not tell their partner that they have transitioned is guilty of rape, and that violence against the transgender person is merely an act of justifiable self-defense. The way this man stuck his hands down the pants of a transgender woman without her consent and then beat her when he found out her birth gender. One commenter on this assault summed up how transgender people are expected to know their place:

“Since heterosexual males generally are not looking for a person of the same physical sex as them, shouldn’t this transgender person have informed the man that she is in reality a male? “Anita” Green is the problem here, not the poor guy who got duped.”

When 18-year-old Angie Zapata’s boyfriend found out she was transgender by forcibly groping her, he bludgeoned her to death with a fire extinguisher. A commenter on theDenver Post summed up society’s feelings in one sentence: “This transgender brought it on himself…”

Not only are our bodies not our own, neither are the history of your genitals or your genetics. For whatever reason, this seems to only apply to transgender people.

Is there societal acceptance of someone who beats a woman when he finds out she’s a quarter Jewish? Are men required to tell if they’re circumcised? Women have to announce if they’re had a clitoral hood piercing? Is it self-defense if you murder your boyfriend because you found out he’s not a gold star gay like you? How about throwing your girlfriend off a balcony when you find out she identified as bisexual before she identified as a lesbian?

From Gwen Araujo, to Brandon Teena, to Angie Zapata, to Cemia Dove, our lack of ownership of our bodies has meant being forcibly stripped, groped, raped, strangled, stabbed burned, and bludgeoned. It means that transgender panic defenses live on in court, and sometimes even win. After Brandon McInerney shot Larry King twice in the back of the head in the middle of a crowded classroom, the jury deadlocked on the case. Some even sympathized with the murderer. “[Brandon] was just solving a problem,” one juror said.

Since Couric’s interview, much has been written about how transgender people seem to have no expectation of privacy. Laverne alluded to the violence that the transgender community faces. Couric’s expectation that transgender people have little right to physical privacy is an expression of the cause.

Follow Brynn Tannehill on Twitter: www.twitter.com/BrynnTannehill

How I LOVE this Quote

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I have never encountered it before, but I have been told similar things before…accused of sincerity.  Oh, and accused of being “enthusiastic” also.  I cried when someone said that to me with the intent to injure me…until Mama directed me to go read the definition.  It literally means “filled with God, infused with God”.  I have proudly been sincerely enthusiastic ever since, in the most intentional of ways. 🙂

“I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.”
— Anaïs Nin

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Golden Grateful and Glad

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Flowers sprout
with fierce purpose.
Pushing, unnoticed, til thru
dark and unconscious earth
they poke, appear, and sing.

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Blossoms of hope,
of song, of trailing beauty
and fragrant comfort.
My heart soars,
rises like the wave rises
and longs for Her
as the wave’s curl
longs to break
onto the shore
and be wasted there
in adoration…
and I too
will break on her
and rush over this earth
as a tide of fragrant blossoms.
This girl,
your garden of Grace,
this Grace
Golden
Grateful and
Glad.

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Ode to Psalm 5

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Give ear, sharp, perked up
Oh Lady Grace my Liege
to my words.

Consider my meditation.
Draw near, hover,
snuggle down over
my fear, pain,
anxious moments and
tossy topsy turvy turnings.

Hear my inner voice,
may it call true to You,
from mourning to morning,
may my soul learn to trust Thee.

For in the morning
will I direct my cries unto You,
and to you shall my inner eye
always gaze straight.

 

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On the notion that everything happens for a reason…

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We have all heard it, have we not?

“It’s all good…everything happens for a reason.”

That line is used as a salve and as a panacea to any and all things not understood or sensible to us.  And the implication is that we are supposed to just go with the flow and let this reason manifest.  Far too often, this results in a sort of hollow fatalism which results in our justifying any action that we wish to pursue after we stamp our experience with that cliché.

But let’s stop a minute…what is the reason everything happens??? 

Is it always the same reason that everything happens?  Does each thing happen for a different reason?

What if the reason is evil?  Meaningless?  Absurd?  What then?

When atrocities occur, are those happenings for a reason, and if so, is there a reason to stop them?  To let them continue?

See…it is the vague pithiness of that assumption that deeply disturbs me in my core.  I think that it is a modern quan cribbed (as so much of our law, morality and guidelines for living in our culture are) from the remains of foundational bedrock spirituality bequeathed to us by Christendom, when it was vital, alive, and dangerous.  I think that it comes from this truth, penned by the great thinker Paul of Tarsus:  “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose“.

Do you see that?  There is a condition!  Similar to our own experience when we wish to help someone mired in something bad for them–a habit, an addiction, a bad relationship, bad choices–it is impossible to truly help someone who refuses to embrace and receive that help!

Free will is a bitch!  And it is the fulcrum that pivots our lives from one side of the truth that everything happens for a reason to the other side of it, which is God involving Himself in our lives and changing what is happening into something that ultimately is for our good.

Right now, it is true indeed that everything happens for a reason, and that reason is that this world is deeply broken and wounded by sin and death.  No, not just the countless acts, great and small, which are mean, evil, venal, and self serving…sin and death are powers that have entered in and taken us hostage to their icy and implacable hold.

But it is also true that God has loved, does love, and will love us enough to get Himself dirty and covered in filth on our behalf, and through His involvement transform and resurrect our purpose and destiny into one that fills us with life, love and hope.

For those reading who already know that I urge you to comb back thru the recent events in your life and recalibrate…root out the sloppy thinking and fatalistic resignation to the happy illusion that it will all just work itself out…it won’t!

For those reading to whom the concept of loving God and choosing to be called according to His purpose is new:  I invite you to consider asking God first of all what His purpose might be…what Love is…and for Him to begin to dialogue with you regarding the possibility of choosing to love Him.

Everything happens for a reason, and God, who loves us, cares enough to cause all things to work together for good if we let Him, if we open the door to Him by our free will and choice to love Him.

Pedantic words perhaps to some…but no less true for it.

Love,

Charissa Grace

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Breaking into Wholeness

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There, ‘neath the charred and crisp skin
the hull, the shell, the null…
Something shines,

laughingly lurking and eager
to break thru the crusty cap and gleam
brilliant and true.

Fire and rain have fallen
and taken tribute from
my bleeding vital heart,
and twisted back again and over,
licking kissing and
claiming all their bounty…

what can be shaken is
what can be eaten is
Leaving…what?  Who?

Leaving me
Charissa Grace
Shining thru.

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Janet Mock is an Amazing Woman

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She is such a role model for me…she has truly transitioned.  What do I mean by that?  It seems to me that so many transwomen get lost in transition, and are actually a bit too fearful to ever really internalize for their own identity the fact that they truly are women and have made their way into the body they desire.  There is still life to be lived post transition!  There is a walk to be walked, there is a life to be lived, and a destiny to be actualized.

This is what I have been trying to sow into my own heart and spirit as each day passes.  Well, Janet inspires me sooo hugely!  She has really lived with courage and strength and yet with tenderness and vulnerability as well.  She is smart, cogent, beautiful and amazing.  She speaks well for us, and for anyone who wishes to learn about the experience of being a transwoman, read her amazing writing and learn.  I do each and every time I read.

Thanks Janet!

Love,

Charissa

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I’M A TRANS WOMAN, BUT PLEASE STOP ASKING ME ABOUT MY GENITALIA

Author and advocate Janet Mock breaks down Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrera’s appearance on Katie Couric’s talk show

By Janet Mock

Society, Career & Power

January 9, 2014

Aaron Tredwell

I don’t talk about my kitty cat with my friends. It never seems to come up when we’re gabbing about The Real Housewives or gagging over Beyonce’s “Partition” music video. But I—an unapologetic trans woman and writer—have been asked about my vagina (by people I do not know, mind you) more times than I can even recall.

Outrageously, trans people’s bodies have been open for public dissection since 1952 when Christine Jorgensen became the media’s first sex change darling, and in the 60 years since Jorgensen’s headline-making path to womanhood, journalists from Barbara Walters to Katie Couric are still asking the same tired questions about our bodies.

Related: Meet the Women of ‘Orange Is the New Black’

It’s stunning that legendary women have found themselves asking other women about their genitalia—in public. As I write in my upcoming memoir, Redefining Realness“Undergoing hormone therapy and genital reconstruction surgery are the titillating details that cisgender people love to hear.” (For the uninitiated, cisgender is nomenclature for those who are not trans, and therefore less likely to experience the misalignment of their gender identity and assigned sex at birth.) But these are “deeply personal steps I took to become closer to me, and I choose to share them.”

It’s about choice. We, as women, have the choice to invite people into our lives, into our struggles, and into our bodies. Consent is key here, and on Monday, model Carmen Carrera and Orange Is the New Black actress Laverne Cox wielded their agency during a joint appearance on Katie, the ABC daytime TV talk show hosted by Katie Couric, who posed the genitalia question–twice.

When Carrera was asked, “Your private parts are different now, aren’t they?” her response was simple: she shushed Couric on her own show. Like a bawse.

“I don’t want to talk about it; it’s really personal,” Carrera said, visibly and rightly uncomfortable by Couric’s gaze. “I’d rather talk about my modeling…There’s more to trans people than just [genitalia].”

What was interesting to me in this moment was that Carrera laid claim to her body. She’s danced in pasties in clubs across the country, on our TV screens in RuPaul’s Drag Race, and in two W magazine shoots with photographer Steven Meisel—but don’t get it twisted: Her body is not ours to dissect.

Related: ELLE Canada Features Transgendered Miss Universe Contestant Jenna Talackova

Couric backpedaled, stating that her question was not in vain, that it was more than just “peering interest,” yet she posed the same question to Cox when she took her seat beside Carrera in a glowing BCBG Max Azria sheath. Couric told Cox that Carrera “recoiled a little bit” at the “genitalia question” and that she wondered if she had “the same feeling about that as Carmen does.”

“I do,” Cox said, backing Carrera up. “I was so proud of Carmen for saying that…the preoccupation with transition and surgery objectifies trans people and then we don’t get to really deal with the lived experiences, the reality of trans people’s lives.”

Cox then broke it down for the journalist, serving Couric facts for days: Trans people face discrimination everywhere, from employment to the streets, where trans women, specifically those of color, disproportionately face brutal violence (Cox mentions the murder of Islan Nettles in New York City, giving the tragedy its highest media profile to date). The actress concludes by saying that our culture’s focus on bodies doesn’t allow us to zero in on trans people’s “lived realities of that oppression and that discrimination.”

And that was the moment in which, Couric, a TV veteran, had to “bow down” to the magnificence of Cox, leaving her with this throwaway statement: “You’re so well spoken about it.”

Let’s be clear though: This story is larger than Couric; it’s about our culture and its dehumanization of trans people’s bodies and identities. Because trans people are marked as artificial, unnatural, and illegitimate, our bodies and identities are often open to public dissection. Plainly, cisgender folks often take it as their duty to investigate our lives to see if we’re real.

Curiosity is vital to the growth of our society. It allows us to stretch our minds and learn more, which I truly believe was Couric’s intention: to educate her viewers. But curiosity and mere mystery objectifies and others those that are being gazed upon, pushing our most marginalized peers to defend their right to exist without the pervasive violation of the dehumanizing gaze of curiosity.

The real takeaway from this Katie appearance is the transformative power of solidarity and sisterhood, as exhibited by two successful women—two trans women, two women of color—at the top of their game. As Cornel West, someone Cox often quotes, said, “Justice is what love looks like in public,” and these two women loved one another in public.

Carrera and Cox applauded one another, gushing about how proud they are of the others’ success and how their various achievements help elevate the public’s perception of what’s possible for trans women. And it was this public showing ofsolidarity that actually flipped the media’s tired genitalia script when it comes to women and girls like us.

When Couric re-posed the question to Cox, even after being shut down by Carrera, to me, it seemed that the TV host was trying to pit the women against one another; instead, Cox said, she was “proud” of Carrera for not answering the question. It was like glorious choreography—again, I’m referencing Beyonce’s “Partition,” in which two women dance in unison against the ropes, moving together as a leopard-print spotlight silhouettes their bodies. Carrera and Cox are equals, partners, a team, and they produce something revolutionary: a new possibility for trans women.

And it’s a possibility model for us all.

Janet Mock is a writer and advocate, whose book Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More will be released February 4 by Atria Books. For more info visit JanetMock.com.

Read more: Janet Mock ‘Redefining Realness’ – Empowerment for Transgender Women – ELLE
Follow us: @ElleMagazine on Twitter | ellemagazine on Facebook
Visit us at ELLE.com

Read more: Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrera – News Treatment of Trans Women – ELLE
Follow us: @ElleMagazine on Twitter | ellemagazine on Facebook
Visit us at ELLE.com

Flawless Trans Women Carmen Carrera and Laverne Cox Respond Flawlessly To Katie Couric’s Invasive Questions | Autostraddle

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I am sharing this post, and hope that you would click thru to see the story and video.  It is a fabulous example first of all of how easily and literally without awareness it is for cis-gendered people to do things to transgender people which they would never ever even think to do to cis-gendered people.

Secondly, it is also a great example of how to handle things with Grace and Kindness…far too often I find that we are so very sensitive and hyper aware of any slight, no matter how small.  It seems in our culture today that regardless of gender, sexuality, political persuasion, or religion we are by and large eager to take offense and cannot wait to grab those arrows of offense and stab our own selves with them!  It is is if we want to be infected with that poison, and then we turn around and start trying to infect others

No wonder that zombie movies and shows are so popular now…they are a metaphor for a process in our time by which it seems that we make ourselves and one another into spiritual zombies, rampaging about biting and devouring one another.

Let’s all just stop!  Step back.  Take a breath…and then simply

be kind…be merciful…be full of grace.

kindness-wave

Imagine…no not a world where there is no heaven, or religion, or any of the drivel that John Lennon sang about, for that very philosophy was already tried by the communists of Russia and Stalin’s regime, to the tune of nearly 100,000,000 deaths…that same philosophy was adhered to by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia…

No…imagine a world where each person actively sought to just be kind…to just show mercy…to just be full of grace…

What is required?  Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly, and love your neighbor as yourself.

See these two amazing human beings, and glean…maybe you too will be inspired as was I to strive to be a kinder and more gentle person.

Blessings,

Charissa

Flawless Trans Women Carmen Carrera and Laverne Cox Respond Flawlessly To Katie Couric’s Invasive Questions | Autostraddle.

A friend told me this…

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“…Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power — not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”
— bell hooks

Is this true?  Part of it really resonates.

 

PS:  Laser went AWESOME!!

Reposting an article on People who are Intersex

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Very well written and good article.  Please read it, and continue to learn about the amazing continuum that human gender is.  Ya know, the rainbow was given as a promise from God…it is a continuum as well!

 

I know the more I have learned, the more better I feel!  :)))

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DECEMBER 30, 2013

A NEW ERA FOR INTERSEX RIGHTS

POSTED BY 
hospital-nursery-580.jpgJim Ambrose was born in 1976, with, he wrote last year, “genitals that frightened my parents and caregivers.” He had one X and one Y chromosome, but his sex organs were ambiguous, resembling a large clitoris or a small penis. Doctors have an easier time eliminating tissue than adding it, and so they decided to surgically remove the organ and the nearby testes. The baby was raised as a girl, named Kristi Bruce.

When Ambrose was twelve years old, he began to take female hormones. At eighteen, he prepared to undergo a vaginoplasty, the surgical reconstruction of the vagina. Suffering from depression, Ambrose contemplated suicide. “I knew that I wasn’t a girl,” he later told a reporter. The following year, Ambrose obtained his medical records, and discovered what had happened to him as an infant: “I was sterilized at birth—and no one ever told me.” Ambrose was born with a condition that inhibited testosterone production; after adolescence, he began to take testosterone shots, and had surgery to remove his breasts.

 

Approximately one in every fifteen hundred to two thousand children born each year is diagnosed with a disorder or difference of sexual development. (Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, because it is difficult to measure degrees of physical and hormonal difference, and because many, like Ambrose, may not know they were diagnosed as such.) Some advocates believe the numbers are even higher: by the broadest measurement, one out of every hundred children has some subtle form of “sex anatomy variation.” Parents whose newborn babies have indeterminate genitalia typically follow what has long been the standard medical advice, to have doctors perform surgery to help the child conform to one or the other fixed gender category. Traditionally, the choice has been which gender to assign to the baby, not whether to put a baby through invasive surgery at all.

Today, we pride ourselves on letting children defy antiquated gender stereotypes. Boys can now have dolls, and girls Erector sets; we agree that the salient differences between genders are social constructs, and give little leeway to those who insinuate that, say, women have less aptitude for science and engineering. Yet, even as many fight against the persistence of rigid gender norms, we still separate the sexes as soon as kids are old enough to be potty-trained; when gym class arrives and locker rooms are needed, we push the boys and girls even farther apart. For all the progress that has followed from the enlightened credo that gender is but a construct, we keep hesitating at the notion that sex, too, does not obey strict binaries. Some people aren’t just pushing away from prototypes of sinewy maleness or delicate femaleness; they were born with bodies that don’t conform to the “M” or the “F” boxes on the census form. There are children, in other words, whose genes have not defined for them which bathroom to use, or where to change for gym class; babies can be born with XX chromosomes in certain cells, and XY chromosomes in others—mosaic genetics.

Attention to the complexities of biological variation is growing. Two weeks ago, the New Jersey legislature passed a bill that would grant citizens the right to change the gender on their birth certificate without having gender-reassignment surgery. The bill “revises the requirements for obtaining an amended certificate of birth due to a change in sex,” which can now be done through an official form indicating “that the person has undergone clinically appropriate treatment for the purpose of gender transition, based on contemporary medical standards, or that the person has an intersex condition.”

In early November, Germany—which, in part to combat the legacy of the Third Reich, has deliberately asserted the rights of marginalized groups—became the first country in Europe to allow a third gender designation: X, for indeterminate or intersex. (Australia introduced a similar measure in July.) If a baby is born with ambiguous sex characteristics, it won’t be forced to undergo a normalizing operation just so that nurses can tick “male” or “female” on its birth certificate. The legal acknowledgment of a third category should mean that fewer doctors urge parents to have sex-assignment surgery performed on their newborns. Fewer children should suffer the plight described by one person quoted in a report that helped lead to the new law, a German born with ambiguous genitalia in 1965, who spoke of being a “patchwork created by doctors, bruised and scarred.”

The law has angered some intersex-rights groups, who object to its stipulation that a child “assigned to neither the female nor the male sex … is to be entered into the register of births without such a specification.” The new designation, they argue, still presents a requirement rather than a choice; they want the determination to be a personal decision, not the result of doctors making judgments on the basis of observed physical characteristics.

These advocates feel that the law will do little to combat stigma, and may, in fact, inspire parents to push harder to avoid a formal intersex designation for their children. The law doesn’t solve the problem, in their words, of “the externally determined gender assignment, the practice of sexed standardization and mutilation, as well as medical authority of definition on sex.” The only real solution, some suggest, would be to ban gender-assignment surgeries for infants, which would provide intersex persons with the opportunity to decide, later in life, whether to identify with one gender, or neither.

While certain religious groups argue that sexuality is a choice (and certain sexual lifestyles are therefore sinful), no one makes that argument about biology, which might suggest a certain logic to granting rights to genetic difference before sexual preference. A report filed to the European Commission in June, 2011, implies that the case of intersex persons is more clear-cut than that of gay or transgender individuals: “Intersex people differ from trans people as their status is not gender related but instead relates to their biological makeup (genetic, hormonal and physical features).” By this token, Germany’s measure is a conservative one, addressed to questions of biology rather than identity, and not necessarily linked to the L.G.B.T. movement. Same-sex marriage is not legal in Germany (although civil unions are recognized), and the ruling on a third gender category does not clarify how the intersex designation might affect marriage laws.

While broader cultural developments have begun to clear space for the expression of formerly unorthodox sexualities and gender identities, those who would have once been called hermaphrodites remain even more marginal than transgender persons. But the order in which old taboos dissolve varies without much logic: the movement for gay rights and same-sex marriage has helped the admittedly slower recognition of transgender issues, while intersex rights have sometimes been granted in statutes, like the one in New Jersey, that enhance transgender rights. On December 17th, the Netherlands approved a law that will allow transgender people to change their gender on identity papers without undergoing sex-reassignment surgery, amending an earlier statute that did not grant individuals the autonomy to define their own gender identity. The Dutch law does not include a provision for intersex rights; in November, Maya Posch, a Dutch woman who is intersex and has fought for a decade to have her status acknowledged, announced that she planned to move to Germany. A lesbian in Berlin who wanted to marry might make the opposite move: the Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.

Whatever the sequence, diverse expressions of gender and sexuality are becoming mainstream. In March, Margaret Talbot wrote in the magazine about Skylar, a transgender teen-ager who grew up with doting parents in an affluent suburb, a milieu vastly more open to his gender identity and decision to undergo surgery than would have been imaginable decades ago. “Like many ‘trans’ people of his generation,” Talbot wrote, “he is comfortable with some gender ambiguity, and doesn’t feel the need to be, as he puts it, a ‘macho bro.’ ” Talbot’s story about Skylar is about transgender identity being far less of a story than it used to be.

In 2000, when Jim Ambrose was twenty-four and still living as Kristi, he was one of the subjects of a short documentary, “XXXY,” by Porter Gale and Laleh Soomekh. Ambrose was a bike messenger then, and told the filmmakers that riding all day was an inhumane ordeal: “Vaginoplasty is so fucking disgusting and so barbaric, it’s starting to come out—the inner part of the intestine is starting to come out, stick out.” The film includes an interview with Ambrose’s parents, who seem quite helpless. His father recalls that doctors didn’t present much of a choice: they said—without malice, he notes—that they could simply correct the problem. And that was that. When their child found out about the surgery, Ambrose’s father says, “we tried to explain that we thought this was the best thing, with the doctors. But she was not very happy at all.” His mother adds, “She was real angry.”

Ambrose no longer sounds angry at his parents. In the film, he speaks about forgiveness; more recently, he wrote that parents “were often led to believe they were doing the best thing for the child.”

“XXXY” also contains a startlingly personal interview with Howard Devore, a clinical psychologist who is intersex. Devore speaks candidly about the emotional devastation of growing up as someone doctors consider a freak, someone the medical establishment tried to “repair” at birth. He has spoken with thousands of intersex people around the world. “I don’t know one intersex individual who is happy with the treatment they have received from the physicians they have consulted with over the years—not one,” Devore tells the filmmakers. “One’s sexual feeling, ability to feel like they can couple with another human being, is literally destroyed by some doctor’s idea of how genitals are supposed to look.”

In childhood, as soon as he realized that other kids spent their summer vacations at Yellowstone, Devore says, “I learned to lie. I couldn’t tell other kids I went to the hospital and had my genitals chopped up again.” He lived with a plastic tube attached to his genitals so that he could stand to pee; his urinary opening came at the base, not the tip, of his penis. Cosmetic surgery should not be performed on infants, he insists. “If they choose, later, to have a surgery—if it’s their choice. If I’d had the chance to do that, I wouldn’t have gone quite so horrible an adolescence, quite so difficult an identify formation as an adult.”

Today, Jim Ambrose works at the Interface Project, a nonprofit sponsored by Advocates for Informed Choice, a legal group that champions people with intersex conditions. Ambrose is a fellow of remarkable good humor, on display in a video introduction where he hails the effects of testosterone, “which makes my voice deep, and gives me this hair on my face, and”—he points—”is killing my hairline.”

“I have chest hair; I have much bigger muscles than I did before, because before,” he takes a beat, “I was living as female. And I was living as female because when I was born, I was born with a very small penis, and internal testes, and XY chromosomes. And my parents were very upset, my doctor was very upset, and the only information that they had out there to treat a problem like me was to remove my penis, and take out my reproductive organs, because they didn’t like the way it looked.”

“Remember: your kid is going to want his genitals. Your kid is going to want her genitals,” Ambrose tells the camera. “My mother regrets having my penis cut off and my testes cut out so, so much.”

Watching Ambrose’s testimonial today, it galls to think of this person in 2000, when he went by Kristi, saying that these surgeries would stop within his lifetime. In “XXXY,” he said it like a pledge, and today it’s becoming true: little by little, doctors and parents—and even politicians, from New Jersey to Germany to Australia—are questioning, delaying, and cancelling cosmetic genital and gender-assignment surgeries.

“I’ll get to talk to little hermaphrodites running around, I’ll get to hold them in my arms,” Ambrose says, choking up, in “XXXY.” “I’ll get to tell them—I’ll get to tell their parents how wonderful their children are.”

Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind/VII.

Your Happy Daughter

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Unquenchable, I sally forth in song
Unbreakable, I shatter into view.
Unmakeable, I plop onto the wheel
Unanchored now, I give myself to You.

Come down, come close, come change this mottled clay
Into the Living Woman that I am.
Take every barb and barrier stinging sharp
And give Your song, that bright celestial jam

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Let Heaven flow into my tattered soul
Let earth be rent and give up all my dead.
I rise remade, renewed from sorrow’s bed
Your daughter, touched, delivered, and made Whole.

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Find Me

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Look.  Past appearance, past hair and smell
and braying wheezing dischord as my soul
Strives to sing.

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I am HERE!
Singing, dancing and waiting.
I groan and ache.
Who I am is not here,
Who knew that emptiness,
null could be so
concrete, so staunch,
so unyielding and
sternly hard?

My absence is a pit that breaks my teeth.
PULL ME OUT OF MYSELF ALIVE!
Let me live, be.
Please? Deliver me.

God grant me grace,
chance to let the knife
Cut away the bray
and set my heartsong free.

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From Whirling to Spinning

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She spins,
drawing down and deep
from her most secret treasure.
She carries with her silk,
gossamer strands and strategy
and patiently she makes
from who she is inside…
her one and only option.
And need.  Her One Desire.
She gets life, sustenance,
exists for transformation
and creation
of her web of life.tumblr_ldlhpe2nsW1qdnbr8o1_500And I watch, fascinated
by her patience,
her diligent patience,
her perseverance.
Mama, teach me
to take the traumas,
desires, longings,
emptinesses, hurts, wounds,
deposits and experiences,

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Teach me to yield
and let this whirling
confusion become spinning,
and spinning out of who I am,
that I might spin a web
to catch Your Sacred blessings
and life.

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Horizon Beckons: Passages From A Journey Painted in Haiku

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I walk slow on a
road that bears leaves in mountains
on the peaks of spring.

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#1
rain-filled ruts reflect
an apple-red summer sky
that highlights brown hills.

in the wind my skin
revels amidst bitter-sweet
echoes of that day.

wind, you will have a
terrible time smothering
my soft clarity.

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#2
in fog a tree steps
back graceful, allows passage
shedding misty skin.

light fall of the moon
gently caresses the tree
and subtracts some dark.

silver sliver slides
through dark blue breaths of still night
on a cricket’s song

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#3
voices of snowmen
call the white-haired children home
then melt in their mouths.

beggar’s withered hand
stretched out inert, silent as
if already dead.

The old ones, bookends
whose bodies encrust their lives
find peace yet again.

#4
a good poem somehow
makes what’s true a little more
DISTURBING/PROFOUND.

melting candles drip
with hidden light most precious
a grain-growth of gold

Poem within the poem
Grace inhabits this body–
Image finds its Source.

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#5
I love you, but it’s
not the finish, not the end
but the beginning.

flow’ring thru silk sleeves
are come memories of all
the moments of life.

You say “I love you”
a sound so tender that the
dead could even hear!

View More: http://juliemassie.pass.us/kristenplusalli
#6
I raise my hands high
to have them remember you
they trace you in air.

Floating Home
together they sway
like a small boat on a lake
hull snuggling waves

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there is no rainfall
no wind’s taste nor full moon’s touch
soft enough for you.

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#7: Final Call
Come. Walk beside me
Heads held high we’ll sing into
the difficult dark.

River meets river
They meld, one to another
our beings, the streams

We journey slow, on
a long road that leads to a
Final, Always-Dawn.

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ROTFLMAO!!!

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I LOVE this post…it made me giggle so hard I snurfed my coffee outta my nose!

 

man i wish homophobic people were actually AFRAID of gay people like could you imagine having the power to strike fear in peoples hearts with your homo…”If I do not have one trazillion dollars on my doorstep by noon tomorrow, I swear I will KISS THIS WOMAN on the MOUTH in front of your children.”

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Butterflies are Free

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They move, they flit.
I have felt Them.
Lumps of Life weighty, inert
thick points of presence.

Though there was thick stillness now
They have wriggled,
struggled and groaned
their way free.

I accept them.
I receive them.
They are me,
and I am free.

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Merry Christmas

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And I sit, pondering today,
tomorrow, but yesterday
Yesteryear looms large.

The shadow cast of those events shines
inverted and bright
Light on Darkness Backdrop.

Crystal clarity and
pure purpose precipitated,
linger now,
surge now,
stay now
inside me.

I face fears,
uncertainties and self-centered acts
that will wound and rend.
People of agenda which is
dark on light’s backdrop,
people of ignorance
who assume all things.

My heart quakes,
my bones are water,
my thoughts are anxious acid
that etches my soul.
I pray thee,
Precious Christ Child,
cover me in such a way
that all that is
etched away leaves you
Shining thru me
The Christmas Star.

LK072

What an Edifying and wonderfully encouraging article.

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My sincere thanks and heartfelt gratitude to Adam Hunt, who posted an amazing apology and educational article about what we transgender humans face regularly.  Coming from the gay community, this is huge, for it is exactly like he says, and unfortunately some of the worst hatred and vitriol directed at us comes from Gay and Lesbian identified humans, and that hurts even more than the regular kinds of hatred, for they really ought to know better, and have more empathy.

Thank you sooo much, Adam!!!

Dear Trans Persons Everywhere, I’m Sorry for Being a Bad Gay

Posted: 12/20/2013 8:27 pm

 

Apology
I wasn’t always an ally to the trans community. In fact, it was only a little over a year ago that I had pretty awful opinions about the trans community and the struggles they face. (“Why can’t they just accept that if they have a penis, then they’re a dude?”)

But then something happened. I met some people who changed my life and the way I see the world, the gender binary, and so forth. You see, it was really easy to judge what a trans person goes through, because I didn’t know any trans people. I thought drag queens were exactly the same as trans people (with a little more makeup and an extra boa or two). I also just assumed that a trans woman was just an overly effeminate gay male who wanted so much to be submissive that he decided to get an operation to have his dick chopped off. I know. I wasn’t a great human being, but is it really that far off what many members of the gay male community think? Or society at large? Maybe not, but that doesn’t make it okay.

I have these friends, and they’re some of the greatest parents I’ve ever had the privilege to know. Their fabulously autistic daughter was working in her phonics book when she came across the question: “Would a prince wear a fancy gown to the ball?” Her answer: “Sure! If he likes the dress, he should wear it everywhere!” It’s astounding that the one diagnosed with a social interaction “disability” is also the one with the purest innate understanding of gender identity and expression. It’s not a complicated notion for her, yet many of us in a progressive educated community can’t wrap our heads around the concept.

What it really comes down to is this: if a trans person is telling you he or she or ze is offended by the language you’re using, are you going to be the asshole that keeps doing it anyway? If a person says they’re a particular gender, whether you agree or not doesn’t change how they want to live their life. Does that sound like anything you’ve faced in the struggle for acceptance?

We’re an LGBT community, but somehow in our gay agenda we have lost sight of the misunderstandings and external ignorance transgender persons face on a day-to-day basis. So to keep it simple for now (because there is indeed so much more to learn), here are five things you can do to be a better trans ally. I mean, if we don’t stick together, what sort of community are we?

1. Pronouns: A person who was pronounced male at birth but identifies as a female (M2F) is a female. Don’t identify her with male pronouns (he, his, him…). It’s one of thosemicroagressions that can really tear at a person’s heart. The same goes for someone who is F2M, but the opposite.

2. “Cisgender” v. “Normal” or “Regular”: Refer to a non-trans person as “cisgender” or “cis” when needing to disclose their non-transgender status. When you refer to a non-trans person as “normal,” you’re effectively calling a trans person abnormal. Not cool.

3. Operations: No operation necessary to identify as a particular gender. It’s not about body parts, remember?

4. Gender and Sexuality: Very different things. Just because someone is trans does not mean they’re gay or lesbian. There are straight trans people just like there are straight cis people.

5. Verbiage: How dumb do you think a person sounds when he or she says, “Moving to L.A. gayed that boy,” or, “I heard Jennifer has been lesbianed by her friends at Hot Topic”? The same goes for when someone is “transgendered.” “Transgender” is not a verb. I can’t “transgender” a person any more than a church in Idaho can “straight” me, so make it easier on yourself. Drop two letters, or eight! It’s “transgender” or “trans” (or even “T”).

Gay dudes, we’re awesome. We have an awesome culture and history. We live awesome lives and go to awesome parties. We volunteer for awesome causes and we have awesome taste in just about everything. It’s hard to believe we can be more awesome, but we can! Be an awesome ally. Don’t you remember being told you were unnatural or against God’s creation? Were you ever isolated? Haven’t we been fighting for the rights we deserve? We have a lot of work to do to gain full acceptance and equality, and our trans brothers and sisters have even more. We’re stronger together, so if we can change some minor behaviors and pave the way for understanding, then why not?

If you’re looking for some additional resources to continue learning how to be a better ally to the trans community, Being Transgender in America with Melissa Harris-Perry is fabulous, as is Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook.

Follow Adam Hunt on Twitter: www.twitter.com/AdamTopherHunt

Rape Culture

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“Gentlemen. This is what rape culture is like:

Imagine you have a Rolex watch. Nice fancy Rolex, you bought it because you like the way it looks and you wanted to treat yourself. And then you get beaten and mugged and your Rolex is stolen. So you go to the police. Only, instead of investigating the crime, the police want to know why you were wearing a Rolex instead of a regular watch. Have you ever given a Rolex to anyone else? Is it possible you wanted to be mugged? Why didn’t you wear long sleeves to cover up the Rolex if you didn’t want to be mugged?

And then after that, everywhere you go, there are constant jokes about stealing your Rolex. People you don’t even know whistle at your Rolex and make jokes about cutting your hand off to get it. The media doesn’t help either; it portrays people who wear Rolexes as flamboyant assholes who secretly just want someone to come along and take that Rolex off their hands. When damn, all you wanted was to wear a nice watch without getting harassed for it. When you complain that you are starting to feel unsafe, people laugh you off and say that you are too uptight. Never mind you got violently attacked for the crime of wearing a friggin time piece.

Imagining all that? It sucks, doesn’t it.

Now imagine you could never take the Rolex off.”

— The Wretched of the Earth: On Rape Culture (via felicefawn)

The Healing of The Light King: A Story of Christmas

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Healing Charissa

“ Grandpa! Please, please tell us a story,” the young children exclaimed.

They were seated in the lap of a man who had seen many, many years. His gnarled, rough hands were like the branches of an oak tree, and his hair was thick and full, and white as snow. His face was a harvest apple in January—wrinkled and browned, but sweet to the taste. He was old as the hills and yet his eyes…full of light and joy, tears and grief, brokenness made whole… they made this old trooper seem like an eager child on Christmas Eve! He gazed down at his grandchildren, Young Frederick on his right knee, Sweet Caroline on his left.

“So!” he boomed. “‘Tis a story you be wanting, is it my sprites? Well then! ‘Tis a story you’ll be getting, only then you’ll have to run off to your beds! For tomorrow we celebrate HIS birthday, and GLORY what a celebration we’ll have, eh? Frederick, throw some more wood on that fire whilst Sweet Caroline and I scoot closer to it.”

LK013

Frederick jumped down to obey. The old man rose with his granddaughter under one arm like a kitten, and with a casual flick of his wrist he tossed his huge oaken chair about three feet closer to the fire, like it was made of twigs. He sat down, and Sweet Caroline squirmed up his chest and wormed her arms around his corded neck. “Grandpa,” she said with a solemn face, “Tell us about your journey. Tell us about Him.”

“Yeah!” Frederick chimed in excitedly as he launched himself upon his grandpa. “Tell us about when you were The Light King, and when you went to see Him when He came, and about Gillae and Brownie and—“

“Whoa, slow down my bumpkins,” interrupted the old man. “You’ve heard that story so many times it must be nearly worn out from the telling! Surely you’d rather hear about how your papa, the King, killed the ugly dragon, Ba’alzamon,LK074

or about how he rescued the beautiful Princess Katherine and made her his Queen and your mother?”

LK025

“NO GRANDPA!” they shouted in concert. “Tomorrow’s the Day–—His day and it’s your day too,” said Frederick.

“Yes, Grandpa,” said Sweet Caroline. “It’s my favorite story, to hear how you met Him and everything. Please, Grandpa, oh please?”

The old man sat looking back and forth between them as if caught deep in indecision. He glared at them in mock irritation while delight danced in his eyes. The children sat in suspense, hardly daring to breathe, hearts straining with desire to hear the magical story. Sweet Caroline looked at Frederick, and had a giggling fit. Frederick shushed her with an agonized frown and the darkness of the night pressed in through the windows as they huddled close to the fire. The room was full of lamps, all of them unlit and dormant. The fire popped and crackled fiercely. The old man drew in a deep breath, held it, just to build the suspense and then exhaled in mock resignation and secret gladness.

“Oh very well you smooth talkers. The tale is yours for the telling.” Frederick let out a whoop and Sweet Caroline accompanied him with gleeful clapping. “I swear! You two could talk an elephant out of his trunk while making him feel he was the talk of the town for the bargain! Okay then—gather close and settle in, and you shall hear the telling of

THE HEALING OF THE LIGHT KING

He took a deep breath, and began…

“‘Twas on this very day, 77 years ago that I left this very castle, LIGHTSHINE HEARTHHOME and began the journey. I was sick, and full of torment. The fever upon me was getting worse. The times I felt whole and pain free were fewer and shorter, as aches and hurts grew like hungry dragons feasting on my days and devouring my nights.

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“The Light King” they called me then, though the name was given first in mocking jest. But King I was…then. Before the pain there was not a man under my eye that didn’t pledge his all for mine. What needed doing we did! No hesitation or moment of indecision! Strength it took, and strength I had! But it left me, strength, deserted me just when I needed it the most to fight off afflictions that no sword and shield could slash or beat down.

I loved the light in those days—and now—more than all else! I remember how sunlight through clouds and moonlight through trees fascinated me. I wanted to touch that light! To hold it, to drink it, to breathe it! To live IN it…ah!

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In those days men said there was a shine upon me not seen around others, a shine that matched my strength. But my strength began to fade, and the shine began to cease.

I was terrified. Oh, I put on a brave face, but secretly I cried in desperate agony and fear. I began to collect lamps and fill LIGHTSHINE HEARTHHOME with as much light as possible—lamps in the kitchen and lights in the hall, lamps in the library, wherever I could fit them. But the more lamps I brought inside the castle, the less light I had inside of me! It was like they were stealing their light from mine and burning my strength for fuel. The castle and all in it was brighter, but me—I was growing dimmer, fading you might say.

I heard whispers behind my back, and “LIGHT KING” became a mocking title because I had so many lamps and so little light.

Oh, to my face it was all peaches and cream, but behind the curtain I was mocked as a laughingstock—king in name and calling only. Always remember: position and riches do not royalty make. It takes qualities of spirit that cannot be bought, but only earned.

LK014Then it got worse. The dreams began—awful dreams of agony and torment over what I saw in the dreams. I feared going to sleep, and with the coming night came dread as well, to lie like a great monstrous dog across the foot of my bed.

“Oh, Grandpa,” gasped Caroline. “What were the dreams about?”

Ahh. They were about a new baby who became a noble man. This man was…well, it’s hard to say after all these years…he was light! I know that seems like an odd way to tell whom someone is, but there it is.

He’d be laying there, a new baby shining like a diamond, and right before my dreaming eyes he’d grow up into a man, who was LIGHT!

He was incredible to behold! Not exactly handsome, or attractive, even…but he was beautiful! And if I was “The Light King’, then he was King of Lights! I thought if he’d just reach out and touch me, then I’d be so full of such light as’d never fade nor flicker and the pain would be eaten up and I’d be strong again!

But then the awful part of the dream started. The darkness took on shape, like dragons and daemons, and it gathered against my King of Lights and tore him with claws of hatred. It beat him and broke him into a bloody horror.

LK046Then he was nailed to the stake and blood was everywhere. Finally the darkness set its teeth into his torn body to drag him down into its maw…deeper and deeper down…I screamed in rage and terror and ran to him and grabbed him to keep him from being pulled down into the blackness.

But I wasn’t strong enough and I was dragged down with him into the pit and I wasn’t brave enough to hold on and face the terror at his side so I let go in despair and shame…and woke up screaming and weak, dim and dying. This nightmare happened all night every night, and it was killing me.  LK064

I was near death when the Star King and the Mountain King arrived. The Star King had seen great portents in the sky of a Mighty One who was to be born, and together with the Mountain King was making pilgrimage to do him homage. To survive this journey they needed the support that my treasury could offer them, and they desired me to accompany them! The fading Light King—nearing death, and I was supposed to help them? But I was intrigued by these tidings. A mighty one born in my lifetime. “Perhaps the Mighty One of All,” the Star King kept saying. It stirred…truly and deeply.

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The kings stayed with us three days, and I was determined to accompany them despite being in no condition to make such an arduous journey. We had no idea where we were going, or how far it was. All we had was a new star that the Star King said sang to him to follow until it stopped where the Mighty One was. I would most likely die before I returned and yet…I knew in my heart of hearts that I was destined for such a quest.

And so we set out that fateful morning so long ago. The Star King had a big barrel of frankincense to give to the Mighty One. The Mountain King had a big chest of gold to give to Him. ‘What will you give Him?’ they asked me. I laughed in mirthless despair. What could such as I give to such as Him?LK032

I would most likely be dead before we found Him, but I said, if I was not dead, then I would give Him myself. HA, HA—a joke on the Mighty One—a dead King as a gift. So, I loaded my pack animals with food, water, and a large trunk full of burial spice—myrrh. It would most likely be used on me before we arrived, but if not, then I would complete the joke and give it to the Mighty One in the face of death, as a down payment for his dead King. My subjects lined the roadway and cheered us—some in jest and some in sorrow. Deep inside it was like everyone knew I was not coming back alive.
We traveled for months, following that star, and I grew weaker and weaker, and my dreams more and more terrible. I saw each blow of the whip and heard each gasp from His mouth. I saw each drop of living blood fall, liquid ruby light. I saw each time He was hit. I saw every crystal tear drop, and I saw the hammer fall time and again as it drove the nails through Him and stuck Him to the stake. I saw Him dropped into the earth like a broken sword in the midst of an empty grave. I needed constant care but death like the tide just kept creeping closer and closer.LK054

Finally one night, in the dreams, LK067I held onto the King of Lights as He was drawn down. Deeper and deeper into the teeth of the darkness I was pulled, but still I held on, down into such hell itself. The pressure and sorrow and grief and the undead dark were overwhelming and again, in shame and despair I had to let go and seek the light of the world I knew. But I couldn’t find my way back. I was lost, and in the darkness, I wandered alone. The Star King and the Mountain King thought me dead and left me with all that I brought.

And I lay, I know not how long. LK011

Sensations swirled behind the darkness that I wandered in, and in the tenuous patterns slowly formed. I listened eyes closed, and was comforted by noises that gave me hope all was not lost. Bells…voices …and then I noticed aromas of fields and wet wool…SHEEP! That was it! I was walking in a dark cloud surrounded by sheep!

A rough, wet, slobbery thing touched my cheek and my forehead. I was being LICKED! I pushed out with my hands and found the rich wooly coats of sheep gathered round me. I was not walking upright in the darkness at all, but was actually laying on my back in a dewy, cold field, and these sheep were gathered around me, licking me like I was Hiram the Shepherd’s salt lick!

“Gillae, come quick! An angel lays in our midst, fallen and ill!” I heard a high-pitched young voice scream. I turned my head and the world tilted violently as I did and I felt sick and began to groan and heave in dry wracking spasms.

“HIE! Back off there, Brownie! Not too close! After what we just went through I be not wanting ye to take any chances! Let us have a lookee!” The voice that spoke was like a waterfall’s roar, deep and loud, and not a little alarmed. With all my might I tried to turn to look, but before I could I felt a hard rap to my ribs and a persistent jabbing. The fool was poking me with a stick!

“WHAT BE YE!?” shouted the voice! “Speak up, now, and be quick about it! We are in no mood for further shocks and surprises, for the events of the night have greatly unsettled us!” Somehow I managed to get my head turned and my eyes open, and there I beheld a giant of a man.

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He rose from the ground like the Yule Tree in the Castle Courtyard. At the top of his head was the bushiest, tangledest mop of hair that ever crowned a head! His beard was long and it moved in the wind with a life of its own. His hands were like shovels, and they held a staff the size of a small sapling! His eyes flashed brightly in the moonlight, and his teeth glistened like pearls as he spoke to me. He was one of the most commanding men I have ever met.

“Hie! I’m talking to you, there! Be ye man or be ye angel or be ye demon!?”

“I’m just a king” I managed to choke out.

“A king? You are a….KING?” The giant threw back his head and laughed like his sides were split. “You are no king, that is for certain! Brownie, bring us a light.”

A small, slight boy stepped from behind the man, bearing aloft a lamp. He was quick and well built, and had a pleasant, intelligent air about him. He gave the lamp to the giant shepherd, who scrutinized me closer.

“Hmm. Now that I can see things more clearly I am certain that you are no angel either. You do not seem to be much of anything!”

“He’s no king…is he Gillae?” said Brownie, seeking reassurance from the big man.

“Back away there Brownie,” Gillae said, and he took the lamp and drew it close to my face, and began to study me intently. His gaze was piercing, but strangely inspiring, and I felt life begin to flow again. I stirred myself to his challenge, and sat up to return his look. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed there were several other shepherds on the fringe of the lamp’s circle of light.

“By the Maker,” said I, “King I am…in a land far away. ‘Tis true that I do not look like a king, nor feel much better, but far I have journeyed to find the end of my travels. I seek the treasure of the ages. And why, by the heavens do you talk of such things as angels and demons?”

“Hmmm…perhaps I see royalty in yer veins, it may be as ye say”, Gillae said. “‘Tis evident that you have many miles of a journey upon ye, and ye are not well. But after this night’s drama it is no wonder that we knew not if you were human or inhuman. But ye speak of treasure…what is this treasure that a king would leave home and kingdom for?”

So I told him of the Mighty One that we sought, of the star that traveled and moved, and drew us on to the One. I told him of my illness and of my companions who had gone on without me, and Gillae grew evermore full of wonder and comprehension. Finally I was too weak to go on.

LK003
I raised my arm towards the sky, and gestured weakly at the night, at the star that still shone brightly and steadily overhead, silently shouting of great wonders.

“I must find Him!” I gasped. “I must….”

Gillae rubbed his chin, regal as any king I ever saw and sat silent and brooding as he considered all the things I had said. He was weighing my story, weighing me by some measure that I knew not but I cared very much to be found adequate and worthy of his good judgment.

A short and chubby shepherd stepped up to Gillae and began to speak to him in whispered tones that I couldn’t make out. Gillae nodded and answered something back, and then the little butterball stepped back to the small group of shepherds and began to urge them out to the flocks, and there they went to work gathering the sheep together as if to make a journey.

“Well, King. You are fortunate that we happened upon you. Our good man Dannaeo says that we should bring you with us on our journey, and I concur. It seems that your quest overlaps considerably with an errand that we have recently been…charged with. The boys are gathering the sheep, and when they are finished, we will fashion a means to take you with us.”

LK045
“Sir Shepherd,” I said, “you have mentioned dramatic and unsettling events. Pray tell, what happened to you and how did you stumble upon me?”

Gillae fixed his eyes upon me and stared sharply. He shifted his great bulk and rubbed his jaw reluctantly.

“Please, Sir, speak up,” I commanded in as regal a manner as I could summon. He cast his eyes down, and said “Very well Sir King. I will tell you enough to get us all to the fold in the same herd, but most pressing is our errand.

“Nigh on three hours past sunset the boys and me were on the move from yon ridgeline headed toward this very field to set the flock in for the night. It is well protected and the sheep love the sweet grass of this swale. Brownie had the flock well bunched and moving a good clip. Up at the head of the copse yonder we began to allow the flock to spread out, and we looked for firewood in amongst the trees. Dannaeo rustled up some grub and soon we were cozy in the shelter and settling in for a cold but not unpleasant evening.

“Several of the boys were nodding off and there was peace in the still night. But things began to change. I noticed that the sheep were restless and stirred myself to look for some slinker that wanted an easy meal. The air grew heavy, and shivery like, and then began to glow with golden glimmers that grew brighter each passing moment. Suddenly there was a brilliant burst, like when a big knot bursts in the midst of a roaring fire, and standing before us was a gigantic shining man! I must confess that I was undone, and I fell to my face before him like a dead man.”

“YOU DID NOT, GILLAE!” shouted an outraged high-pitched voice. I looked over and saw that young Brownie had been lingering on the edge of our conversation listening in. He rushed into our midst and began to shout, “Gillae is always changing things around to cover up his bravery! He is the biggest and bravest shepherd of all, and he stood up to that guy and made him tell us wh—“

LK039

“Hush yourself Brownie!” Gillae said sternly. “Since when did I ever teach you that it was polite to eavesdrop on the conversation of others, let alone listen in to a royal report to a King?”

Brownie dropped his eyes and hung his head. “Umm, never sir” he mumbled.

“What was that, young whelp? I can’t hear you,” Gillae chastised, all the while managing to conceal the indulgent look in his eye. It was evident to me that Gillae loved Brownie very much, and was secretly pleased with the spunk and spirit of the young shepherd.

“Brownie, it is important that ye learn to listen twice as much as you talk. This will please the Maker to see you use EACH of your ears so when you return to Him you will be full of wisdom and not emptied of sense.”

“Aww, yes Sir” Brownie mumbled, but then his fire rose up and he just couldn’t help himself, bursting out with ”but Gillae, if this is a king he should KNOW of what you are!”

“That will be QUITE enough, Jubal Dripsten…do you HEAR me!” This time the note of command and chastening was unmistakable and evident. “Back to the flock with ye, and make things ready. Have Mikkens and Towser fashion a litter upon which we can bear our companion. Sir King, I apologize for this whelp. He is young and impetuous.” Gillae followed Brownie’s departure with his gaze.

“No apologies needed, Sir Shepherd” I retorted. “I too have been his age. But pray tell me more, and do feel free to give me the FULL story.” I sensed that there was more to the tale than Gillae was telling…indeed there was more to this man than he was revealing.

“Oh, well. Let’s see…where was I?” he muttered.

“I believe you were laying on the ground like a dead man?” I remarked dryly.

LK021

Gillae shot a hot look at me that bordered on anger, but then he got a hold of himself.

“Yes…laying on the ground. Well it turns out this was the angel of the Lord, and he gave us word that the Redeemer of All Things had just been born. We were supposed to find Him in Bethlehem and declare His birth to all that we meet. Then the angel disappeared, and all was still. So we roused ourselves, and set off towards Bethlehem. Just minutes later we stumbled across you, and now you know the rest of the story.”

I looked Gillae squarely in the eye but he quickly cast his eyes down, and I was certain that he was not telling me everything. I just nodded, and said “Well, Sir Gillae, what now? Off to this Bethlehem, to see the King?”

“Aye, that is the path for us all.” Gillae answered.

He stood quickly and began to call to the others. Mikkens and Towser came over to me carrying a rickety looking litter and my baggage. They gently picked me up and placed me on the litter and then lifted me up onto their shoulders.

“I am sorry, good men to be a burden unto you. Thank you for your sacrifice and good hearts.”

“Sir King, I tell you that you are light, not heavier than a yearling lamb” said Mikkens.

“Aye”, echoed Towser. “It is our privilege to carry you. It is not every shepherd that gets to carry a King to meet a King.”

And off we went, Gillae leading the way, the flock following close at heel, the group of shepherds scattered round them, and then Mikkens, Towser and I bringing up the rear. We travelled an hour or so in this manner, following the star, men speaking to one another in hushed expectant tones.

As we travelled, I marveled at the endurance of my 2 bearers, and I could not help but reflect on the difference between these 2 and my previous 2 companions. One thing was becoming evident the more time I spent with these shepherds: Royalty is not a title or station in life, but rather a way of being that is oriented towards joyful sacrifice. Perhaps my bearers were kings more than the ones who had left me to die.

LK012

After a while, I started to doze off, rocked by the soft motion of our travel.

I was startled by a voice and woke to find myself staring into Brownie’s intense gaze.

“Gillae wasn’t telling you the whole story, and I think you should know it, being a king and all. I don’t know much about kings, you being the only one I ever met” (and with this he eyed me dubiously), “but I can tell you that Gillae is braver than any man I ever met, and he is stronger and more giving than any person alive. Many times we have all been too tired to take our watches and we fall asleep, only to wake and see him on guard, over us and the sheep both. And in truth, tonight’s events have only added to his exploits!”

“Brownie” said I, “You have all seemed on edge and wary, and of course all of your hints and outbursts tell me there is more going on here than meets the eye. What exactly befell you on this evening of wonders?”

Brownie looked forward at Gillae to make sure he wasn’t listening…and no fear of that for Gillae was leading, and walking at ready as if expecting an attack of robbers, or worse. Then in a low voice, Brownie began to speak.

“Well, it all happened like Gillae said, but when the gigantic man appeared to us, we fell to the ground like dead men, but not Gillae! He stepped forward and raised his staff, and challenged the newcomer to identify himself as friend or foe, and if foe to prepare to meet his doom. The giant shining guy began to speak to us as we all clung to the ground like babes to their nursemaids.

LK016

I will never forget his words:

‘FEAR NOT, oh sons of Adam’

he declared.

‘I bear to you good tidings from the throne of the Most High God Himself, tidings of great joy, to all men in all places here and for all time until the Breaking is made Unbroken on that Day. Unto you is born this day, in David’s city, a Savior! Christ the Lord!’

“His voice hung in the air like a living thing, and was frightening but beautiful. He said he was the angel of the Lord come from the throne of the Maker.

‘You are to go to the Savior with all haste. Look for Him wrapped in swaddling clothes’

said the angel.

‘But what are we supposed to do, break into people’s houses?’ Gillae said. The angel gave a thunderous blast with his voice, that must have been angelic laughter, and it both chilled and invigorated my soul.

‘Look in the stables, Shepherd, for this King will be with the sheep, lying in a manger.’

“’A manger'” Gillae replied. ‘What kind of king is it that is born a Savior yet is lying in a feeding trough?’

When he said this, the guy just threw back his head and again thundered a laugh. But bold Gillae demanded proof that he was the angel of the Lord, and not some seducing deceiver from the Breaker’s dungeons. He actually stepped forward and thrust his staff into the face of the angel!

When he did this, the angel rose straight up about 50 feet, and clapped his hands three times…and the night split openLK041 and rolled back like a scroll and in its place was light like you cannot imagine!

It was like a hole had opened in the night, and the shadows were torn away, and Heaven’s own glory was invading the dark earth, and if you think we were scared before, we were simply undone now!

For as the light rushed through the tear in the night it filled up the air around us. This light was SOUND! Crazy I know, but the light was music, and the music I heard was the light! But the worst was yet to come, for suddenly, out of the very midst of this heavenly light angels began to pour forth.

Hundreds upon hundreds, and thousands upon thousands! Like grains through the glass they came, each one singing loudly at the top of its lungs!

‘GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST, AND ON EARTH PEACE, AND GOODWILL TOWARD MEN!’

Over and over they sang this, and the song took wings and flew forth from around us out into the world. LK020It is flying still, of this I am sure, to the darkest and loneliest places in the world. It is a song that will never be stopped. It will live with heaven’s life and all that hear its triumphant ring will thrill in their hearts with hope and comfort and joy.

“As this all happened even Gillae was knocked down, but while we all buried our heads in our arms and sought to hide in the dirt, I snuck a peak at Gillae. He lay on his back, face unveiled and eyes alight. As the gigantic angel of the Lord sang, he flew round and round over Gillae’s head and Bold Gillae just laughed in great bellows almost as loud as the angels.

And then, things started to go backwards-like, and trickled in reverse, and began to flow upwards, back to heaven, until only the angel of the Lord was left.LK023

‘Rise, oh chosen of the Most High’

he said.

Gillae stood immediately, and the angel’s booming laugh echoed in my head, and he said

‘I am talking about all of you! The King of Glory has a special fondness for shepherds. He has chosen you as His heralds. Go quickly to Bethlehem, proclaiming to all you meet that He is born the Divine Christchild, Light of the world. Tell the world the Maker is not mad, and He says Peace, Peace, for there IS Peace! But beware, for the forces of the deceiver gather even now to steal away the light of the world. You must be on your guard! They will stop at nothing.’

“’Bring them on!’ shouted Gillae. ‘The evil doers will regret the day they opposed the Maker, and shall be sent back to the chaos that spawned them,’ and Gillae brandished his staff towards the angel of the Lord in skillful and dangerous flourishes!

The angel rose up on high with a loud shout, and then with a clap like thunder disappeared in a lightning bolt! All was still, except for the gentle wind and the sound of our hearts hammering in our heads and the echo of Heaven’s Choirs ringing in our ears.

We lay there like dead men, but Gillae roused us up and said ‘Come lads! Heard ye not the angel of the Lord? We have a KING to find.’

“We slowly lifted our heads, still quaking from Heaven breaking into the night, but as the seconds passed, we got excited, for Gillae was jabbering and encouraging us constantly, prodding us with his voice like we were sheep on the business end of his staff.”

Brownie was silent after this, and I waited for him to resume. He glanced around uneasily, and then looked at me as if I might still just be a phantom.

“Speak on, Brownie” said I.
“Well, Sir King, off we went as the angel had said, but suddenly we heard something that chills the bones of shepherds everywhere…the lonesome sinister howl of a hungry wolf!

LK002“’Hie! To the flock men!’ shouted Gillae. ‘Remember the angel’s warning! We have a king to find! Let nothing quench your heart! Defend the flock!’

And then they were on us in a flash, 6 big, black wolves with red eyes and yellow teeth. They were taller than my head, and the likes I have never seen and hope never to see again. We tried to stand, but the howling, slashing mouths were terrifying! I was frozen in fear, and one of them actually had me by my cloak, and was dragging me off to eat me, but Gillae came flying out of nowhere in a leaping shouting whirling wind of vengeance.

He whacked those skulkers with his staff, and their bones cracked like kindling! LK042They crumpled with yelps of pain and death, but still Gillae pressed on for though 3 were slain, the rest had him surrounded. He circled as they darted in and slashed, and parried each attack. The rest of us were milling about chasing the sheep so we were no help to him as he fought for his life and ours.

“But then the air grew cold, like the grave, and a dank foul smell arose from some evil place. Life was draining out of me and I wanted to run away. I glanced at Gillae and saw that something blacker than night was floating toward him. It wasLK009

like a tear in the night that let in death and despair and it was painful to look at.

Gillae slashed at the wolves and cracked the head of one like a ripe melon as he backed off from the dark thing. He drew himself up to his full stature and shouted ‘HALT FOUL HELL SPAWN!’ Leave us for we are on a mission for the Maker!’

“Everything was still, and then from the midst of the black, 2 red eyes opened and an awful black hole gaped like a mouth. From the midst of the dark came a scream so evil it must have been from hell.

At this, my knees DID buckle, but still I looked on at Gillae. I thought that if I could just keep my eyes on him I would be safe.

When Gillae heard that death cry, he actually threw his head back and laughed!

‘Be OFF with your foul self!’ he commanded.

And the thing actually stopped. But then IT spoke, and the sound was terrible, like the squeaking of a cemetery gate. It dug savagely into my mind. LK079

‘You have no authority to make such command’ it hissed. ‘For your insolence I shall stop your heart and feed it to my wolves!’ the thing continued. ‘You have no part of this. But, in my great mercy I may let you live and even give you wealth and fame and comfort! But you must walk away and leave the night to us.’

“Gillae jumped forward with a war whoop and swung his staff with all his might right at the center of this thing, and screamed ‘In the name of the Baby King and Heaven’s Song I come against you to the death and I rebuke you!’

And with that his staff found its mark. The demon gave a scream of pain, fear, and rage mingled with defeat, and then with a bang the monster was gone!

Gillae looked at me as I sat speechless and frozen in fear. The great man winked and nodded, and gently said ‘Eh, Brownie, pick up your jaw and rise up! We have a flock to lead and a king to find!’

And then he was off to slay the remaining wolves.

“I hurried off across the field in search of the sheep, and that is when I stumbled over you! All this time you had been out of it, lying in the field while angels and demons made war round about you. I looked over for Gillae just as he slew the last 2 beasts, and hollered for him, and, well, you pretty much know the rest. Can you see why we were uncertain regarding yourself? After what we had been through you could have been nearly anything! It is funny when you think about it…we found our king all right, but one who was old and dying, rather than a newborn babe who is called Wonderful Counselor!”

Brownie walked in silence and I pondered what he’d said.

Finally I said “Thank you for the tale Brownie. I understand why you are such a fierce defender of Gillae. He is brave AND modest, a rare and pleasing combination. Your testimony is true and loyal.”

“Aye, and it is also too much talking and not enough working!” that booming familiar voice thundered. There stood Gillae, big as a horse! He had slipped back to us unnoticed as we talked, and overheard everything Brownie said. Brownie hung his head and hurried off to help the other men with the flock.

“Forgive the boy, Sir King” Gillae requested. “He is forward and given to bragging. It is to my detriment that I have not succeeded in instilling within him some restraint.”

“On the contrary, Sir Shepherd,” I answered. “He is a bright boy, and I sense his story is true, yes? A more complete picture worthy of reporting to a king?”

Gillae reddened and inhaled sharply. “I am reluctant to speak about such things” Gillae answered quietly. And then Gillae would speak no more on the subject.

After a while, Dannaeo fell back to walk with Gillae and Mikkens and Towser and I. “We draw near, Sir King,” he said.

Gillae looked intently at me and said “Know that all is not as it seems. High is come down and low is lifted up. Light is cloaked and darkness becomes light. Even as He comes, so too must you come.” I was at a loss when he spoke, but my heart stirred at the promise of light. Gillae gazed at me unblinking, eyes glowing. LK075

I looked back in exhausted confusion. “What do you mean, Gillae?”

“I will say no more, lest I put you in danger of pride. Only realize that to rise you must descend, to be found you must be lost. Take heart and be bold. Believe your heart, and remember your dreams!”

“Remember them!” I repeated in pain. “I spend all my waking hours trying to forget them!”

“Nevertheless, again I bid you—REMEMBER THEM! For the Master wastes nothing.”

We finally came to the outskirts of a small town and the Star stopped, and fell lower and lower until it was drawn impossibly near to earth and hovered there, motionless in stellar proclamation of heavenly portents.

LK073

The town was bursting at the seams with impossible crowds of people all trying at once to find food and lodging. We came to the inn, and I was sure that Gillae and the boys would get a room for me to rest and prepare to meet the Mighty One. But they walked straight on by with nary a glance! Down a narrow lane into an even narrower alley, flock and all, only to enter into the gloomy darkness of a smelly, dirty old stable!

“Gillae, why do we come to THIS place,” I asked him in confusion.

“Listen in your heart, and you will know, Sir King,” he answered, “but if you are deaf, then lift up your head and you will see the star over your head like a bonfire of comfort and joy.”

And I looked up and there it was in its beauty to take away your breath. I looked around us and saw animals, some people (shepherds mostly), and even Kings! Yes—the Star King and the Mountain King had found this decrepit place, too.

But no one was looking at us. They were all looking at a manger, or rather, the small baby who lay in the manger. He was newly born and at peace.

The Star King wore a look of disbelief. The Mountain King seemed disappointed, like someone at the end of a long, unfruitful quest. LK076

I cleared my throat, and said weakly, “Hail and well met fellow kings. Why be you in this god-forsaken place?”

The Star King glanced, then did a double take. “Hail and well met fellow King,” he replied in astonishment. “We thought you dead this night. Even now you look more dead than living. But alas for us all. We came looking for the Mighty One of whom the Star sings, but found only yon babe and vanity!”

Gillae spoke up, eyes blazing: “Good King, yon babe IS the Mighty One! Do not err! Take heed my counsel: to rise up you must bend down. The eye of pride cannot see the light of humility.”

I glanced at the Star King to gauge his response, but he merely stared at Gillae like he were some dirty peasant beneath his notice and station. I looked back at the baby, and noticed a man and a woman seated near the manger looking overwhelmed by all the attention and commotion.

All at once, the babe opened his eyes, and gazed straight into mine. I felt lost in their depths.

Then I heard a Voice… “Come to Me, Light-King,” it said.

I looked all around but I couldn’t see who was speaking. Suddenly Gillae was thrusting his staff against my back, pushing me towards the babe.

“Go on, quickly!” he hissed. “The Master calls you.” I laughed out loud.

“The Master? Him? That helpless babe? Surely you jest. He is no more master than you are, Sir Shepherd!”

Brownie ran up to stand at Gillae’s side. “Go on,” he urged. “Remember what Gillae told you! ‘…As He comes, so to must you come…’ He sent for you: now you must answer Him!” I looked back and forth between the baby and my friends.

“Remember your dreams!” called Gillae.

“Yes,” said the Voice. “Remember your dreams.”

Suddenly I realized that the baby before my eyes was the same one I had dreamt of for all those years! He was the King of Lights who was savaged by darkness. I gasped in awe and terror. If the dream baby was real, were the dreams real as well?

“Yes, they are,” he said. It was the baby who had spoken, though His lips had not moved. The Voice I was hearing was His!

“Draw near to me, my Light King and learn the meaning of these things.” He called me “Light King”, but in his mouth it was not a curse but instead was a caress.

LK052

I knelt at the side of the manger. Memories swept over me and in pain I wept. Tears ran down my face and crowned the baby’s brow. His tiny hand reached out and grabbed me with a grip stronger than life, stronger than death. I tried to pull away. But he held me stronger than chains and looked into me.

“My precious Light King. I called you. You answered. I prepared you. I send you. But first I will heal you.”

LK077

The stable fell away and we were in my dreams, only this time He held onto me. Darkness came rushing at us with hungry teeth and sharp screams. I was terrified. Claws of dark tore at Him and His light bled out and the darkness took us down, down deeper into Hell.

I screamed and tried with all my might to get free but He held me there with Him. The awful stake came and pinned Him there with nails of death, but still He held onto me, and still we went down. His light was pouring out, but we went down deeper than I’d ever been in any of my dreams.

He took me down all the way. It was there, at the bottom that I saw what I’d never been able to see before…the ending of all His light at the bottom of the end of down. LK018

I screamed in despair, certain that all was lost.

But then came His blood in a rush!

LK001
His light had made a way into Dark’s evil heart and the flood of His blood raced on the heels of the Light! Dark thought it devoured His light, but Dark was deceived! Like an arrow straight and true Darkness was pinned and blood consumed it.

And by His blood the Breaking was broken,
and by His blood death undone.
By His blood all light resumed flowing,
by His blood all healing begun.

LK029

From the lowest, most impossible place of all, we began to rise, He and I and still His marvelous hand gripped me. We were rising on a tide of living light; lifted by the flow of His blood and He sang with victory and triumph!

“Behold, the King of Lights is come,
Bruised and poured out from on high,
The Blood King’s battle now is done
And Death’s devoured by victory!
King of Lights, Eternal Fount
The Blood King conquers every foe
Rising with triumphant shout
Peace, Goodwill to those laid low!

As He sang the light grew brighter and blood redly ran deep and wide and we were high and lifted up, and still He held me. He held me! And I understood.

The stable came back. I was still kneeling beside the manger; my tears were still His crown. The others had all gathered close and were waiting in a hush.

The baby let go of my hand. He turned His tiny head and looked at the side of the manger. The point of a careless nail protruded starkly through the wood. Slowly, deliberately, He reached His tiny hand toward it. The woman perceived His intent, and started forward to stop Him, but the man stopped her.

The baby covered that nail point with His hand, and then, deliberate and slow, He pushed His palm against the nail. He never hesitated; he never even winced. He drew back his hand, and there in His palm lay a red pearl of great price—a drop of His innocent blood.

He reached His wounded palm out to me and then He pressed it against my forehead like a kiss… and my pain was gone. My grief and sorrow vanished, and I was healed, and filled with light—HIS very light!

I rose and ran to my packs and drew out the chest of myrrh. I took it to the baby and laid it at his feet.

“Oh my Blood King, my death is your death, and your life is my life,” I said. I was still weeping, but now with tears of joy and gratitude.

He answered

“I am King of Lights who has become Blood King. Your death has become Mine, and My Life and My Light are become yours. You are My Light King! Here is My charge to you: go in My Light. Spread it wherever you go. Care for the children.LK044  Give them gifts. Wherever you speak, there Light shall be. Wherever you give, Life shall grow. Remain faithful until you see Me return on high! For I will go, and I will return!”

The Star King and the Mountain King, transformed by these events came and they bowed low, laying their gifts at His feet. They had found the Song of the Star! LK015

Gillae, Brownie, Dannaeo, Mikkens and Towser also stepped forward. The Baby giggled and petted each one. They received His touch like knights receiving the dubbing of their King’s sword.

Gillae turned to me and said, “I see now, Light King, the hidden ways of the Master. I honor Him and acknowledge you, His messenger and Giftbearer.”

The old man’s voice faltered and grew silent. He seemed lost in memory. Sweet Caroline and Frederick waited, and waited for him to continue, but finally Frederick could wait no longer.

“Finish the story Grandpa! PUH—LEEZE!”

“Yes, oh yes”, chimed in Sweet Caroline. “What happened next?”

“Huh?” asked the old man. “Oh. Sorry my bumpkins, I was just remembering. Well I told the Star King and the Mountain King all that had happened to me and introduced them to my shepherd friends. Then an angel told us to go home a different way. LK035Seems the Breaker had gotten hold of an evil king’s heart. But that’s the stuff of other tales.

“I finally arrived back at LIGHTSHINE HEARTHHOME exactly two years to the day I had departed. Everyone was shocked to see me. They thought I had died. And –in a way—I had. They had let all the lights go out.

“Except for your dad! Maker’s hands, he had kept his burning for me, and he stepped out of the crowd that day, marched straight up to me, and proclaimed, ‘BEHOLD THE LIGHT KING!’ And nobody laughed, for it was finally, impossibly true.”

“And all the dead lamps, Grandpa”, asked Sweet Caroline. “Did you light them?”

“Yes Grandpa,” echoed Frederick. “Did you bring light back home?”

LK062

The old man was quiet, and then said simply, “Yes. I did.”

“Oh, show us, Grandpa. Please show us,” the children begged in unison.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

“Now, now,” protested the old man. “It’s time for bed, you fuzzyheads! Come into my arms and I’ll carry you to your room.

“Oh, Grand-pa!” they wailed, but they obeyed.

He hoisted them like they were babes and turned to leave the fire’s light. He hesitated, and then he strode over to a dark, lifeless lamp, and stood still a moment. The Children, one under each arm, looked at each other excitedly and held their breath.

And then…the old man breathed on the lamp…WHOOSH…and laughed as light

…pure light…

leapt up in the lamp in answer to the call of his breath.

LK004The old man laughed and danced around the room, swinging the children high and breathing upon lampLK010 after lamp LK043LK026until the whole room had blossomed, ablaze in light, and then he whisked the children out of the roomLK031 and whirled down the hall to their room.LK030

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERASome time later, he emerged.

“Hello Father”, came a deep, strong voice.

The speaker was a tall, noble man with grey streaks of wisdom in his beard and a golden crown upon his head.

The old man looked up and grinned. “Hello son, err, Your Highness,” he bowed with only a hint of teasing.

“Kids settled in, Father?” asked the King. “I was just coming to tuck them in.”

“Oh yes. I expect you’ll find them ready and waiting. Ready and waiting”.

The king looked at his father…all dressed beautiful red—like blood—and hair white as snow and shining bright.

“You’re putting’ on a little weight, there Father. Your belly looks like jelly!’

“Aye, that it does, son, that it does. Too much ale and good cooking’ I guess.”

“But you look healthy, Dad. By the Star—you look like you will live forever!”

The old man threw back his snowy head, pulled his crimson cloak around him, and roared in delight.

“That I may, son, that I may”.

Then he walked down the dark hall to his chambers and as he passed, every dark dormant lampLK048 blazed on in glorious heavenly echo of the light of his passing.LK049

The King stood and watched him until he disappeared round the corner, and the echoes of his laughter faded in the distance.LK047

“Behold, the Light King”, he said softly. “Behold.”

He turned and went in to his children.

The End

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Can I Just Say AMEN!!!!?????

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“Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”

— Rosemarie Urquico

Reposting an amazing Post on Being a Parent of…

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a non gender conforming child.  Oh, how things have changed.  Where might I be if…

ah well…read on:

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A Thousand Heartbreaks

A Thousand Heartbreaks

While sitting around drinking coffee Sunday morning I came across this post on Raising My Rainbow and it broke my heart. On so many levels. This blog is about a gender nonconforming first grade boy named C.J. and his family. He dresses like a girl and plays with traditional girl toys. He’s amazing. You should read all about him. And, of course, he has a special place in my heart because my daughter Eliza lives between genders. She’s a badass if I haven’t mentioned it lately and so is C.J.

But recently C.J. wet his pants at school because he was being bullied in the boy’s bathroom. Little boys were peeking through the stall cracks trying to see if he had a penis or a vagina. Intimidated, C.J. stopped going to the bathroom at school and peed in his pants. After drying their collective tears, C.J.’s mom found herself at his school, in front of his teachers and principal, fighting for him. I have been there. And I know I will be there again.

We are mothers of children who don’t fit into the binary boy/girl paradigm our culture subscribes to. We are mothers of children who wear ill-fitting boxer briefs because they don’t make them to fit a girl’s frame. We are mothers of children who wear colorful bracelets and pink skirts but have to use the boy’s bathroom. We are the mothers who drag ourselves to the principal’s office, to the swimming pool, to the soccer team to explain once again that our child is different and fabulous. We are the ones who stand firm footed, square-eyed with people who don’t understand and tell them she’s amazing, she can really kick the ball, that she will be on the team, that she won’t wear a swim shirt unless she wants to, that it is okay to call her by the name she chooses even if it’s Frederick. We watch from the front row when she rocks a double-breasted suit at her guitar performance and we tell her every single day how lucky we are to be her parents. We are grateful for her. For him.

And, yet, we are tired. We live one step away from an off-handed remark, from a misplaced comment, from the seething rage we feel every time someone says something unkind to our perfect, loving, generous, brave children. We keep our children in a bubble as best we can, we pay for private schools, we live in small spaces, we try every day to live from a place of love and not fear. We hold them close at night and tell them there are other people like them even though we don’t know any of them. We tell them every day that they are so incredibly loved and we hope like hell the love and acceptance we’ve shown them will pay off, will protect them.

We harbor the kind of worry that is so profound it catches in our throats when we try to explain it. Because we can’t explain it.  We know our gender creative children are exactly who they are meant to be and in the dark moments that is more comforting that you can imagine.

While our children are breaking trail in front of us, we walk close behind with bright lights to search the path ahead. We are vigilant, we are strong, we have one eye on their safety and one eye on their self-esteem at all times. We allow stories like C.J.’s to break our hearts a thousand times so that we keep fighting. We take a deep breath and let it out because we know that if a child cannot safely go to the bathroom at school while dressed in clothes that make him feel comfortable, we have a long way to go.

Can’t get enough of Savagemama? Read more of her stories here!

On Yielding

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There is a style of life that is aggressive, taking and conquering and always advancing and planting the flag of one’s own orienting Structure…the beam of one’s being, the beacon of your way of meaning, whatever it might be.  Many find what looks like success with this style.  Many who are humanist, atheist, positivist, even Christian.

But I find this to be a style that when it is all said and done is still oriented with humanity at the center, at the pivot point, at the crux.

Is that a sufficient foundation?  Can it hold, neath the stress and strain and weight of all existence?

There is a style that is passive, one that embodies the heartfelt axiom that all is fated beforehand, and beyond influence or control, and thus one must surrender and simply allow the waves to wash and crash and carry wherever they have whim or are driven by other forces impersonal and random.  And I find this style to still be at its core one with humanity at its center, for if it is true, why even say it?  It is spoken with the notion that its articulation will help others…but help them…why?  To what?  If all is ordained already, it is moot whether you help or not help, and thus vanity.

Humanity itself is a declaration of meaning!

So there is a 3rd way, the way of Yielding.  This is one that has at its core a white hot passion and confidence, no…a KNOWING that there is meaning, there is pulsing and throbbing like a quasar a Heart that is the Signifier from which all things are signified!  In this way is the understanding that this Heart is able, is willing, and is active to constantly work to show forth Beauty, Truth, and Mercy.  To do other than to make an active choice to yield is to inhibit the actions of this Signifier.

It…the source of all water.

We…the faucet, and we may or may not be tapped in depending on our choice of faith (yes, you all, everyone, have made faith choices).

Our will the spigot, cranked by the choice to yield or not, either open or closed.

Not my will, but yours be done is a statement of a way of life.  One simultaneously so easy and so difficult in that simplicity.  And yet, in that yielding is an austere mountain to conquer, and that mountain is the notion that we somehow can do something in and of ourselves and our own innate strength that has more significance and permanence than merely adding to history’s catalogue of vanities.

In stating my life mission, I invite you to participate in the simplicity of its towering Glory and yawning Depths of Grace.

Yielded vessel, Yielding Blessing.

Not that I have obtained it, but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind, I press on towards that upward calling of The Hope of Glory in the Father of Lights.

Won’t you join me?

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The Harp of Hope

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For upon my heart will I play my song,
plucked and strummed and tapped
with fingers of faith-full thoughts and Hope,
Assured that I belong.

For Hope’s not hope that only wishing
waits in resignation.
Hope sings, soars, and gladly yields
And echoes Faith’s Vibration.

I dare not hope in my own strength
for strength is but illusion.
I rest instead in Their own Rest
and dwell there in Collusion.

HA! Trite and amusing rhymes
occupy my busy and anxious soul…

And give space and time
To Choose, to know Whom,
and Play the Harp of Hope

Amen.
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Windows and Pathways

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Altars within.
What lies inside leads Outside.
Windows and pathways, like sunrise
Faithful and free.

I sip, slow, as spectrums
Bloom and what was fullness
drains, swirls, and I see beyond
Wavelengths.

There is a forgetting that is born of folly,
There is amnesia kissed by Grace
How to remember and forget in this
stoppered Lonely Place?

Oh Creation, be my window, be my pathway,
Be my temple to stretch out and
Fill with GloryGrace.,
And toast That Which is Beyond
And They Who are Within

Windows and Pathways.

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Numinous Vineyard

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Numinous Vineyard!
You place unnamed and unashamed,
flourishing in the swirling and tenacious
embrace of splendor and beauty…

STOP!!

Turn around!!
The True Wine is behind you…

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A visual to help you sympathize

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Ever wonder why transgender people have dysphoria?  What’s the big deal, right?  So you feel like you are in the wrong body and you want to be in the right one, but know you can’t ever really be in the right one?  No problem, just suck it up, put it out of your mind, and carry on, right?  I mean, that is what everyone else does with the things that bother them so what’s the diff?

Well, check out the pic below…picture sitting in it, how it would feel…that is what it feels like to be gender dysphoric!  You are forced to sit on something you know will hurt you bad, and always cut.

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In light of this, be kind…please?  Just be kind.  Is that so hard?kindness-wave

 

Come Sit With Me

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Come sit with me, still
in the cold and winter wonder
of the singing silence and
radiant velvet dark night.

The moon hovers,
a hen nestling down
on us, chicklings,
and our sentinels
stand watch,
stand guard for
our place.

Come sit with me,
my love,
my love

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“And it has been
one hell
of a year.
I have worn
the seasons
under my sleeves,
on my thighs,
running down my cheeks.
This is what
surviving
looks like, my dear.”
— Michelle K, It Has Been One Hell of a Year

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Reposting an article on Intersex people…

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Hi everyone…this is a very good article on a phenomena that is far more common than anyone realizes.  If I recall, I think it is more common than cleft palate!  If you would, please treat all humans you run into with kindness, gentleness and compassion.  You will be better off for it, and so will they!  🙂

Special report: Intersex women speak out to protect the next generation

One in 2,000 babies does not fit neatly into male or female categories. Sarah Morrison meets four members of a new group that’s campaigning  to change attitudes and to help others feel less alone

Saturday 30 November 2013

It has taken Holly Greenberry, Sarah Graham, Dawn Vago and Elizabeth Jo Roberts years to go public with their stories. Born into a world that insists on dividing people into two sexes, they did not always know how they fitted in. They were born to typical families in typical areas of Britain, but none of them developed into typical male or females. They are intersex.

An estimated one in 2,000 babies is born with an intersex condition or a (controversially named) disorder of sex development (DSD), which means that they are born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not fit the typical definitions of female or male. This can include atypical genitalia, chromosomes or internal sex organs.

The women argue that their very existence has been “eradicated” by British society. Generations of children have been operated upon to “normalise” their genitals or sexual anatomy, while official documentation, from birth certificates to passports, requires a male or female box to be ticked.  They argue it’s one of the last “human rights taboos” in the western world.

The women have a type of androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), which means they have XY chromosomes, but are partially or completely insensitive to testosterone – they are all infertile.

The group has come together to launch a campaign, calling for the Government to urgently review the way intersex people are treated. Following on from Germany’s decision to allow newborn babies to be registered as neither male nor female, their recommendations include the option to leave the sex on British birth certificates blank, measures to protect babies or young people from irreversible and non-consensual treatment and surgery, better emotional support and increased education.

“We are at a tipping point,” said Greenberry, co-founder of Intersex UK. “Most intelligent human beings would be completely surprised and utterly dismayed at the civil inequality and human rights abuses that healthy intersex children and young adults are facing.”

She added: “We need to sit around the table with the Government because we have lived through it. We are positive role models, and professional and intelligent women, who want to represent the needs of children so that the problems we experienced aren’t replicated.”

In the 1960s, it became the norm to operate on children with atypical sexual anatomy at a young age. Doctors assigned the child’s gender and operated to reinforce it. Although attitudes started to change around the turn of the millennium, and clinicians say they have moved to a more “multi-disciplinary” approach, there is still no record of the number of operations carried out, according to Professor Sarah Creighton, consultant gynaecologist at University College London Hospitals.

This year, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture condemned non- consensual surgery on children to “fix their sex”, saying it could cause “permanent, irreversible infertility and severe mental suffering”.

XXXora, a 33-year-old intersex artist from London, who supports the women’s campaign, refused an operation. She was born with ambiguous sex organs and raised as a boy, but describes herself as “super-feminised from the beginning”. She said: “I never had surgery or hormones. We talked about it, but then I wouldn’t be me. I don’t want to morph into a blue or pink box; I want to stay in my silver box.”

But the campaign is not all about surgery. Certain intersex people, such as Greenberry, are struggling to correct the sex marked on their birth certificates, which makes it impossible to marry and more difficult to adopt children.

Lord Wilf Stevenson, opposition whip and former special adviser to Gordon Brown – who has a more common DSD called hypospadias – supports the campaign and has raised concerns with ministers. “The issue is that the current law has been overtaken by medical technology,” he said.

There is also a need to provide long-term emotional support for intersex people. Ellie Magritte (not her real name), the mother of a girl with AIS and a member of the support group DSD Families, said adults “need and deserve much greater investment in adult DSD care, focusing not on gender, genitals and genetics, but on health, wellbeing and happiness”. She said not all people with a DSD define themselves as intersex, but added: “The main challenges for families and kids is the social context in which we live with these conditions.”

Pia Clinton-Tarestad, head of specialised commissioning at NHS England, said that the NHS is “working to assess the services we commission for intersex people”, and that it understood that “issues surrounding the timing of, and consent to surgery, are controversial”. She added that best practice involves “co-operation and agreement” between child, parents and a multidisciplinary clinical team.

Holly Greenbury

When Holly Greenberry was born, almost four decades ago, doctors spotted a degree of sexual ambiguity. She has XY chromosomes, but also partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, leaving her partly insensitive to testosterone. She was assigned a male sex on her birth certificate, but she did not develop secondary male characteristics during puberty. She knew her gender was female and underwent treatment and surgery throughout her teens. Now, the businesswoman, from south-west England, is in the process of adopting a child. Because she is unable to change her name or sex on her birth certificate, adoption is harder and marriage impossible.

“I’ve never been completely male nor completely female in my genetics. I didn’t masculinise the way a male was expected to, and my body feminised in certain areas. I didn’t have the words to express myself; I didn’t know how I fitted in. It left me feeling really isolated and, while I tried to identify as male, I couldn’t do it. It was like having a series of repetitive panic attacks. Surgery was horrifically damaging and led to huge number of follow-up surgeries. It all could have been prevented if there had been more medical understanding and if there had been less haste in trying to guess which label best fitted. I should have been allowed to be an ambiguous teenager with the freedom to express my natural gender.”

Dawn Vago

Thirty-three years ago, when Dawn Vago was born, she looked like a typical baby girl. But when she was a young child, doctors told her parents that she had testes which would have to be removed. The married singer and programme director from Warrington, Cheshire, is genetically XY and has complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, which means she is totally insensitive to testosterone. She has been on oestrogen replacement therapy since she was 11.

“The doctors told my parents there was no one else in the UK with this condition. I felt alienated from all of my classmates. I always identified very much as female, but had issues accepting myself. When I first read my file and saw my diagnosis, my world completely exploded. I found a support group and all of a sudden, felt like I wasn’t alone. The moment of joy turned into anger. I was in my early twenties and had spent my whole life and childhood feeling alienated. I realised that it doesn’t have to be this way.

“The doctors told my parents that they should push me into a career and make me become a busy woman, so maybe I wouldn’t have time to settle down and have a family. They said I would find it very difficult to find a partner. Two and half years ago, when I walked down the aisle to my incredibly handsome husband, deep inside I was sticking a middle finger up to the entire medical establishment. I am very proud of who I am and I love my body, but I hate the journey that I’ve been on.”

Elizabeth Jo Roberts

Elizabeth Jo, a 29-year-old freelance journalist from Edinburgh, was brought up as a girl. At three years old, when doctors discovered undescended testes, they removed them without her parents’ consent. She was told at the age of 10 that she was infertile and, in her mid-teens, that she had androgen insensitivity syndrome, having been born with XY chromosomes. She met other people with intersex conditions for the first time only a few weeks ago.

“My parents told me I couldn’t have children at 10 years old. I took it pretty badly. It’s like when you’re winded and all the air is sucked out of you. It destroyed my adolescence. I got bullied quite a lot. When I was 10 or 11, I was first given oestrogen pills, but I used to forget to take them, so I never really developed significantly.

“I struggled with identity issues throughout my adolescence and even in my twenties. I’ve left it late on in life to meet others like myself. It has been one of the best things I’ve done; emotionally cathartic. I suffered quite heavily from depression. I want to help others to not feel the same way. They don’t have to feel bad about themselves. Social change takes years to happen, but we should be living in a society where people don’t feel bad about their identity because they have chromosomes that are variations on the norm. They should have freedom to express themselves.”

Sarah Graham

Sarah, 44, did not find out the truth about her diagnosis until her early twenties.  The counsellor from Surrey has complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. She presented at birth as a baby girl and was raised as one, but she has XY chromosomes and was born with internal testes, instead of ovaries. When doctors removed them, at the age of eight, they told her they were removing her ovaries to protect her from cancer and  imminent death.

“They should have told my parents the truth about my diagnosis. The lies were enormously damaging to me and affected my life. They put me on oestrogen replacement therapy when I was 12 years old but, if they had left my body intact, I would have produced hormones naturally. Every six months, I was prodded and poked by an army of medical students.

“Once I saw my diagnosis, I felt like a total freak, like I didn’t belong, and was offered no support. I felt like the only person in the world with the condition and that no one would love me. I went into a massive period of self-hatred and self-destruction, which fuelled a drug and alcohol addiction. Children need to be able grow up intersex if they want and parents shouldn’t be so pressured to make a decision. We must be given the space to exist.”

To find out more visit:

Intersex UK

The Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group

DSD Families

Hypospadias UK

Moments of Metamorphosis and Eternity

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Light, fragile, buoyantly beautiful
and strange they emerge from
woolly woven tombs and skins
of hairy fur and no wings.

Just legs, too many and multipede
in creepy ambulation from plant to twig
avoiding the crushing boot and pecking beak.

Do they know, what they are and will be?
Do they crawl in faith, miracle filled
and waiting?

Or do they toil, in their
earthbound blind and brown dimension
to fall into chrysalis, not knowing that
Emergence waits?

Oh Mama,
may my cocoon be wrought
by Your Faithful and Loving Hands,
May my tomb be rent
by His Faithful and Fierce Sword of Light,
and may my cage be carried
and left behind in moments
of metamorphosis
and eternity.

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