over the rainbow

How do you navigate the politics of heartbreak?
Really.
No, really.

Because I see so many of us burn out. Slow down. Drop out. Get tired, exhausted, worn down. Nothing gets to an activist like despair, and there is no despair like that inspired by just looking at things the way they are.
All of our work, all of our exhaustion and blood, will not make our own situations very different, really, for the most part. The change we want--the deep-seated social shifts that will make the world a more decent place for more people--that will echo, and grow, and move planets for our children's children's children, and maybe they will thank us. But we will not taste it. We will not cross the Jordan. And what is it we're changing?
Well. Put simply? This world is a heartbreaker. This world is a heartbreaker and love--the only thing that makes activism, or life, worth anything--the only thing that can make all this effort, and all this breathing, all these heartbeats, matter or even work--love is a breaker of things. Sometimes they're things that needed breaking. Sometimes they're things you wanted very much to keep.
And it doesn't care. The soil, the sky, and the social structure could give a good goddamn, really; as it turns out, a life of virtue, or even a simple devotion to looking after the people you love...well, that and a buck fifty might get you a soda at the corner store.

You know, though? This is the wrong tack to take, in this windstorm. It's not this big stuff that matters. It's not the overwhelming nature of the world's sorrow, it's not the impossibility of processing all of the hurt in this world in this moment.
It's us. It's our lives. It's our jobs and our loved ones and our burnt dinner. It's the fact that, with our hands braced against that big world out there, our backs are braced against--well--the clock-on-and-off. The family you got or made. The ache in your joints. The lovers, coming in and out of the pattern like so much gold embroidery. It's the fact that I'm not writing this out of a grand apprehension of some philosophical principle or as an outgrowth of a theory of the universe I hold dear.
It's that tonight at work, I had to call in a break so I could find an unused room and break down, for a half-hour, into uncontrollable, ragged, desperate sobbing. And I only got it together, really, honestly, because there was work to do, and it wasn't going to stop needing doing, just because I wasn't going to do it.
It has to do with the fact that when you grow up, your responsibilities never go away. Ever. You can just choose whether or not to be responsible about them. And they usually won't wait.

So how do you deal? How do you deal with looking at your job day in and day out when the state of things outside, in the world, is tearing at your insides? How do you set your shoulder against social injustice or poverty or oppression when your guts are tied up in knots over what you'll have to face when you go home? Where do you draw your lines? Where do you find the strength? How do you manage to be a person, and a servant of a cause, and a participant in humanity, and survive? And the answer is I don't know. Winston Churchill said that sometimes it's not enough to do your best; sometimes you must do what is required. Fine words. And everyone, looking hard at this mess from the beginning of all of us, has tried to come up with some way to reconcile it:

The world hurts. It hurts bad. It takes us apart and grinds us down and shatters what we thought we could lean on. So how do we get back up? How do we brush off the dust and the scabs, crack our knuckles, and keep going?
Well, there's always "because we have to." It's a good one. Hope isn't optional, in this world. It's a survival skill. It's a will to continue. And there is too much need not to get up if you still can and get back to it. Your goodness will not protect you and your loved ones, but what you build might.
There's "it's a crooked game, but it's the only game in town." That's something. Life isn't fair, but the alternatives are pretty permanent. The dead have plenty to do that we don't, whatever it is they do, but there's plenty of time to be dead. One way or another, you'll be doing a lot more of it than being alive, so you may as well do the things you can do in life that you can't do when you're not living. Act like the living while you're alive. Play the hand you've got. Plenty of time to get to the rest of it later.
There's "we just don't understand the big picture from here." Nice. Quite possibly true. And, to a tiny little person, pretty useless, because even if it tells you someone's in charge, it means they might not notice you at all anyhow.
Okay, sure. But that doesn't make it okay. That's not a comfort.
Neither, honestly, is the thought of the benefits of future generations. Does it give me a warm feeling? Sure. Is it the goal? Sure. But I won't know any of those people. I won't see them benefit or even smile. I won't see them benefit and I won't see my neighbor right now benefit, either, and that? That burns. It rankles.

So what are the politics of heartbreak? How do we go on, in this? How do all of us--even those of us who mostly do well, because we all have these times--how do we deal with living in a world that does such damage to us? How do we scrub away at the tears and keep on going, even while the hammer falls on our hearts, over and over and over? Make important decisions, or any decisions at all? Because, by and large, somehow, we do. Somehow we're still here, and still fighting, even if it's just fighting to tread water.
There were those alongside us who didn't make it. I know. But somehow, those of us left have found a way to make it work, and sometimes, improbably, impossibly, to look to those who couldn't, and try to do something. We have taken that great wrecker, love, and made it the warmth of our hearths. We have reached across chasms of understanding to join hands. We have, against every set of long odds there ever was, kept getting up after beating after beating.

I don't know how we do it. I don't. And in a moment like this, of weakness, of broken-ness, of vulnerability, I don't understand at all. But we do, somehow. We hold tight to that heartbreak and we keep on going--even if we have to step back from this or that in order to hold our ragged little ships together.

That's as close to a miracle as I'm willing to see right now. I hope it's enough.

things people do

NOTE: After a whole lot of busy, lately, I find myself having a profoundly rough week. It's likely going be another little while before I can bring myself to produce new stuff, or even finish what I've got in the works. So I've decided to bring in a handful of casserole posts (thanks, piny, I love the term) to cover up the shortfall so none of you think I've up and quit. This one is from November 2006, and I meant to import it over here then, but forgot in December's uproar since it was more preachy than topical. Thanks for your patience, everyone. --ll.


Life is an ungainly, terrible thing to behold.
It looks at you, without breaking eye contact, until you become nauseous, until you are desperate to break that gaze any way you can, drowning it in alcohol, burning it in exercise, whipping and sexing and pill-popping and televisioning it away in an elaborate exorcism gloriously peculiar to a people so very afraid of death.
Death is not a frightening thing. Death is stern, and death is dark, but looking Westward, it is difficult to conclude that death is anything but the fairest of all forces, the most evenhanded, the only truly reliable thing.
Death is not what we fear. We fear the moments of life before it, searing or cold, lonely, painful. We fear what our deaths will do to the lives of the living: make them suffer our loss, force them to weep at surviving us and missing us when we are gone from them. And we fear, ultimately, that death will be anything like life.
We can insulate ourselves with promises of golden mansions and green fields, but when it comes down to it, what's the fear of the Avici or Tartaros or plain old Hell but the terror that death is a continuation of life? That our lives keep mattering when we're supposed to be done with them; that we will still be ourselves; that those selves will suffer torments that we can only imagine as being like the torments a living creature may face, but worse, and for longer?
We fear change. We fear the unknown. Most of all, though, I think we fear the known. We fear life.

And rightly so. What is life, after all, but a shadowed valley that we briefly walk through between eternities doing whatever it is meat and bone and spirit do before birth and after death? What makes us think that the peculiar animation of our carbon and breath is the normal state of being?
Life is where we eat, and hunger; life is where we love, and lose; life is where it is cold, and hot, and bright, and bitter. Life is where we gamble at a vast table whose cards are our skin and whose dice are our teeth and eyeballs and hearts.
Life is where we know that we are naked, and know shame. Life is where the story starts, after all, so far as we're concerned. Life is where happening happens.

It is a terrible and awesome thing to behold, this endless cavalcade of life devouring life, of springing-up and grinding-down, of hope and harm. It's a mess. It's an explosion. It's too slow, and too short, and tenuous at best.

It's a special thing, life. It matters to taste the blood in your mouth. It matters. Life, as a concept, as a thing in us, wobbles as a newborn colt, and stumbles along; or it hammers us, as a merciless overhead sun; it never, ever makes sense. The most miserable of the dead are consumed with wishing they still had it, except the worse-off, who still think they do when it is gone. Death that looks like life is no good death at all, no more than life that looks like death.
Life refuses to make sense. No matter how much we want it to, no matter how many patterns we put to it, how many dewdrops and stars we connect up into constellations and highways and stories.
Life is not a narrative. It is not.

It is a terrible, ungainly, gorgeous thing, life.
We're lucky it ends eventually. And we're lucky to get to visit, for a while, even though birth, every time, is an excruciating thing.
We burst through blood and shouting, squirming, gasping, and we never really stop. And every moment we spend, organs and bone and blood wrapped in skin, we are attired for prayer and wonders and darkness, too.
We are here. We may as well act like the living. And that means the terror and the hiding from life, yes, because that is what the living do; but it also means looking it in the eye and meeting that gaze for as long as we can until our knuckles are white and our teeth gritting, and letting it know that we bleed, but we do not run. We know it is terrible. We know that so are we. And we go on, to eat, and to hunger; to love, and to lose; to hope, and to harm.
And we go on.

search and seizure

Note: There's some issues I want to tease out, but in order to do so, I'll have to talk about work. In the effort to maintain both my anonymity and my job, I will be modifying details. I am employed as something of a jack-of-all-trades at a modestly-sized, liberally-aligned institution with various troubles and underbellies we will call, for the purposes of this entry, the Ministry of Space*, with attendant identifying details altered. While I tend to do everything from vehicle maintenance to emergency first aid to clerical and administrative work to plumbing in the course of my job as Girl Friday, my actual job description is pretty gendered, on the masculine end, and I am generally called on--as, ah, an Assistant Deck Chief at the, er, Ministry of Space--to wear a uniform that is not, shall we say, flattering to the figure. I end up pretty androgynized, with functionality presiding over form.

Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl**, makes an interesting observation about the mid-transition period when she notes that she got to a certain point where, minute-to-minute, people began making unpredictable, but different and definite, assumptions about her gender and sex and running with them. They didn't think, "Well, hmm, that there is an androgynous person." They immediately shuffled her as either "woman" or "man" and then from there assumed that she was androgynous-for-a-man or androgynous-for-a-woman until confirmed or given to understand otherwise; the notion of "other" almost never came up. It was never clear, in any given interaction, which way they'd go, but she observed that it really had nothing to do with changes in her clothing or mannerisms, day to day, hour to hour, second to second. People just sort of picked.

I quibbled with this for about a second, remembering the two? maybe three? friends who'd told me, after a while of knowing me, that they sort of registered me as genderless, as an "other." The more I thought about it, though, the more true it seemed. People had to have me stored one way or another in their heads, right away, with very few exceptions. Some people managed to switch back and forth, depending on what I was wearing on a given day, but for the most part even those people were either thinking of me as a woman-sometimes-crossdressed or a man-sometimes-crossdressed, This was even before I was on hormone treatment.

Now, much further along, I have wandered deep into the unpredictable territory Serano was talking about, and I find it fascinating. So I thought I'd illustrate, and chase a few trails it brings up for me.

The other day I got called up, at work, to deal with an emergency. A child had been hurt behind a locked door, and I was called on to get in there, get the door open, and make sure the kid was okay. Now, when I showed up and took care of the situation, the two women present on my arrival were full of thanks--and grateful phone reports to others--about the woman from the, ah, Deck Chiefs' office, who had come to help. She--that is, me--had been helpful, this, and we watched her do that and that. It was even more explicit with the one of them who used Spanish: ella, not el, and so on. A few minutes later, the kid's mother showed up, and was immediately talking, third-person wise, about the deck-crew guy who'd saved her kid, the man from the Ministry, he, him, and so on. When the paramedics arrived to help, they were, pronouns-wise, sort of split down the middle. Were people biased by whether I was rushing in to deal with a kid, or making official phone calls, from one minute to the next? Cooing at a crying child to calm her down, or offering medical advice? I don't know. Maybe.

Nobody asked, mind you. They all just guessed, and I had other priorities--like helping a hurt child--than correcting any of them. But it had been a pretty high-stress situation, so I went down to the corner store afterward for a cold drink. While I was in line, an older male contractor, salt-and-pepper-moustachioed and drawling and everything, sidled up to me, winked, and said, "They sure do hire good-lookin' folk down at the Ministry of Space, don't they."
I blinked: "Oh?"
"You're up there on the deck crew, right?"
At this point, apprehensive, I assented. He leaned in closer.
"Well, I remember when you came out to help me with that job up at the moon base, and I thought t'myself, well, that there's a good-lookin' gal, what's a pretty little lady like her doing workin' on a deck crew?"
I swallowed; it's always thin ice when you realize that a straight guy who doesn't know you has been harboring a crush, flattering with definite undercurrents of I-hope-he-doesn't-get-violent-if-he's-disabused-of-his-assumptions.
"Your boss came out the next day, and I asked 'im, where's that good-lookin' gal came out yesterday? Why didn't y'all send her? He said you needed a day off now and then. Guess I can't argue with that, but you're a pretty little gal." Another wink.
At this point, I just felt awkward: "I, well, uh...thanks. Guess I do need days off now and then."
"Well, you sure do hire nice-lookin' folks."
"Well, thanks, guess I'd better get back." I moved to extricate myself, and he leaned down and winked again:
"I'll see you around."
I waved and bolted as politely as I could.

Now, getting hit on in this way is always a strange situation. Advances like these are inappropriate--in the oily and infantilizing way he presented it, anyway--and in my head they go in the same category as catcalls and sketchy pickup lines in bars. On the one level, as they do with most women, they make me pretty uncomfortable. But on another level, they confirm that I'm being read as female--not only being read as female, but being read as female by people who're pretty concerned with making sure, for the sake of their machismo, that the person they're addressing is definitely female. I feel dirty for getting a bit of a warm feeling from something that I find objectionable. I feel both safer and more vulnerable, all at once. And there's always that specter: the safety of "passing" opens you up to the ever-present accusation of deception. The consequences of that "deception" can be pretty awful.

Case in point, another example, from a much more serious place: the airport. I flew out to visit my partner in California last weekend, and I was frankly terrified. I haven't flown since beginning transition. With a combination of basic nervousness for flying and airports coupled to the post-9/11 fear of travelling while young, alone, and brown with a Semitic nose and getting someone riled up enough to either make a scene or get security to put me in a little room, I was edgy enough before; but now I have legal documents that don't match up, and it takes real effort to look male like my passport and other paperwork say I am. That's bad when you're trying to convince armed people whose job it is to be suspicious that you're not in disguise, trying to pull something, or using someone else's ID.*** Add to that my very justifiable fear of law enforcement officials behind closed doors, and we have a winner. I was not looking forward to this trip.

So I did my best to dress down and not make waves. Jeans. Doc Martens. T-shirt, with a second button-up shirt to help cover up my sports-bra-compressed breasts. Hair pinned up in a tight bun. Stud earrings. No makeup. I walked up to the security gate with my bags, probably looking edgy as all get-out, and the TSA guy looked at me, no blinking, and said, matter-of-factly, "Ma'am, would you please step forward?" Well, I wasn't going to argue--and that's when my hairpins set off the metal detector, and I had to take them out, which brought my hair tumbling down past my shoulders. I got led to the little glass box where you wait for pat-downs, and there was a little commotion as they found a female officer to search me; then I got patted down, and told, "Miss, you can be on your way," and got my belt and shoes back on and headed for the boarding gate.

Now, a minute-to-minute shift in that context could have had terrible consequences--a humiliating public scene at best, with a "worst" end of the spectrum that was really too awful to contemplate thoroughly. I got lucky. Bureaucracy saved the day, and all I got was a faintly apologetic pat-down. That kind of thing is awkward at work, and often funny in my social world, but in the wrong situation--drunk guys on the street, tense law enforcement officials--it's a recipe for nightmares. This unpredictable middle ground--where in a half-hour at work I can be addressed as a butch man, a femme woman, a butch woman and a femme man by people standing right next to each other--is one thing in a world like my kitchen or my workplace, but it's entirely another in a place where I don't have any power. At the next flight, from another airport with me much more confident about my getting by, the man checking my ID peered at it for a long time, checked it from a couple of angles, stared. He blinked, said quietly--eyes level with the pushed-up breasts under my tight t-shirt****--"to your right, Sir," and waved me along. No scene, but he sure had the option. The next station was just interested in moving me through, and by then I was "ma'am" again. Once more, the potential was there for me to be in trouble--he could have called over an official to discuss the incongruity, any number of things could have happened--but I got lucky.

I'm not sure what the lesson is, here, but if I had any doubts about Whipping Girl's assertion that this happens, they're gone now. Liminal spaces are in short supply in people's heads, even people who're more likely to accept variant gender presentations. They still want you, in their heads, to be a variant male or a variant female, in my experience. I'm not sure what to do with that.

All I know is that tonight out at the barracks, while I was performing first aid, my patient decided not to even guess. I'm not sure whether or not she kept changing her mind or what, but it seemed like she was alternating pronouns sentence by sentence. Seriously, people. Just ask if you have to.


*Possibly only Mags is nerdy enough in the right ways to get all the layers of this joke.
**Which I'll be holding a large discussion of at Feministe next month! You should all come. Bonus points if we can get Dr. Serano to drop by and tell me I'm a moron; I hear she uses the inter-tubes on occasion.
***I've been searching like crazy for the couple-years-old news story I'm referring to, and I just can't find the reference. It regarded a TSA airport-security memo dictating a policy of carefully searching anyone who appeared to be cross-dressed, because Terrorists could be using it as a disguise so they could Do Evil. It was a ludicrous, transparently bigoted policy in its wording, and a lot of bloggers wrote about it incredulously, and now I just can't find any of those old entries. Anyone?
****Don't you judge me. I'm young, and I wanted to give my girlfriend something to look at before I left.