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.