Looking Back On the T and I in LGBTQIA+ For Pride Month 2021
The Transgender Experience Is A Lifetime of Self Discovery
1My “transgender journey” started in Lakeview Township, which was Chicago’s only fully integrated neighborhood, even economically, with the very wealthy, close to the lake and the very poor around the CTA “El” tracks. Annexed in 1917, Lakeview is just north of downtown, facing Lincoln Park to the East, where Clark Street forks into Broadway at Diversey. Clark and Diversey was the heart of the Gayborhood when I was young, moving up onto Broadway between Oakdale and Belmont in the mid to late 1960’s.
I had no idea that I couldn’t be the girl I thought I was because I had a penis until my first buzz cut the day before my sister’s first birthday August 3, 1958 and I totally didn’t understand why my “pisser” had anything to do with that.
Not wanting to get spanked for crying too much, I played along as best I could, refusing to do the “man” thing any more than I needed to to get by. To this day, after 6 years on hormones, I still choke back the tears if there’s nobody to hold me when I cry, which I do a lot more often. Thankfully, it’s been more tears of joy than pain and grief, but i can’t do it for very long unless there’s somebody to cry with me.
I was pretty, but not so pretty that I was bullied for it at the Nettlehorst school, because I wasn’t allowed to act the least bit effeminate and I was very self conscious about that. Instead, I got bullied for being too fat or too smart, but not a lot because I wasn’t shy about throwing the first punch. At Lane Tech, an all male school, it got bad because my naked body was so effeminate, so the gym locker room, like it was for so many of my trans sisters, was the Gate to Hell. We had to swim nude. I refused to go through it much, hardly went to school at all my second semester freshman year or all through my sophomore year, cutting school and only showing up for tests. It was a very dark period in my life that I’d rather not go deeply into right now to stay focused on the general history. My aunt and uncle stepped up and took me into their home in Skokie and I graduated Niles East a semester late in the winter of 1973.
Lakeview never had the problems with the law over crossdressing in public that led to both the Compton Cafeteria riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district and the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village. As long as the bag is kept full, Chicago’s funniest look the other way. They liked to come down on the hippies around the Sheridan statue at Belmont and left the queers alone on Broadway. The sex workers were almost certainly being protected by pimps. Mobsters selling hippies weed, LSD and pills, weren’t paying extra to protect their clientele. I’d hardly ever see the sex workers get rousted very hard and then it was just to break up clusterfucks near the club entrances, as they waited for their “dates” to pick them up and four “gurls” were swarming every car that pulled up . They used to call each other “Miz Thang” . The cops would swoop regularly on the Sheridan statue, surrounding it with cop cars and bust everybody with any drugs.
When I graduated college and came home in 1978, all the action in the Gayborhood, stretched from Diversey to Roscoe street, with sex workers of all kinds walking it. My dad used to take his out of town friends cruising Broadway down to Wrightwood and back to gawk at the transgender sex workers. Several of them were living in the 3rd floor apartment of the flat building adjacent to ours and used to throw parties on the porch. My sister and her friend couldn’t have been more than 8 years old the first time they saw all different kinds of queer people necking, which put me at 11, thinking hard about how I could be the woman I knew myself to be on the inside, on the outside like them.
When I got out of college, I was busking with my sax on Broadway around Briar near the clubs and was hanging out in a hot dog joint on breaks with two sex workers about my age, Brenda and Tonette. They were hilarious, talking about their tricks and the shit they’d do to keep their Johns from touching them at all while they tried to get away with just jerking them off. No butt sex for these girls were because they were trying heterosexual to make enough money on their own or meet a rich guy to finance their surgeries so they could have proper sex with a man. Caroline Cossey wrote pretty extensively about why she wanted to get the surgery. They really didn’t like giving head a whole lot to strangers and head was only worth 20 bucks then. I met a totally whacked out trans woman a few years ago claiming she gave over a 100 $20 hummers one night in Las Vegas in the early 90’s.
I never came out to Tonette and Brenda, because I couldn’t see myself in the sex trade around the corner from my grandmother’s house. When I got hit on while I was busking, I’d say, “Sure. $500” and they’re like “but I can get it for twenty down the street”.
“So go find a twenty dollar hummer, Bubba” , worked every time they’d ask me a stupid question like “Do you blow anything besides that horn?” outside the gay clubs on Cedar Springs in Dallas when I was working at the medical school. I had a neighbor who was constantly trying to get me to top him, which wasn’t at all in my play book and i had to always be removing his hand from my inner thigh. When he convinced me to go in one of the clubs with him, I had to keep my butt to the wall and my hands up to protect my boobs, they were so grabby in there.
Tonette was gone in a few years from AIDS, Brenda quit turning tricks and got a straight job clerking at a head shop called Smugglers on Wells Street in Old Town. Lakeview was being called New Town then. In the 90’s when I was on the road, we reconnected when the shop was moved up onto Clark, just north of Belmont and I was working a consignment thing with the owner. Eventually, Brenda met a guy who bought her bottom surgery and a house in Lake County and I hope they’re still living together there happily.
I’m really monogamous and heterosexual at heart, didn’t relate well to any of the Pride scene and went hippie hair bag instead. I hid behind a beard in the hippie music and arts festival scene spawned by Woodstock, helping to do what was called “putting the Woodstock Notion in motion” by Rainbow A. Day , the Woodstock Barber, one of the last of the beat poets. Along with Diamond Dave Whitaker, in San Francisco, those old crusty freaks are pretty much the poet laureates of the Rainbow Family today. Again, I want to move back to the general history, rather than focus on myself in this kickoff post for the Pride Month.
I would suggest that the King and Queen of Queers of the techno geek world for the virtual Pride Month should be the late Alan Turing, the gay mathematician, cryptographer, and a pioneer of computer science who broke the German "Enigma Code" and Lynn Conway, the very much alive transsexual computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, and transgender activist, who pioneered "Very Large Scale Integration" microprocessor technology enabling the global cellular network of today. Lynn was 83 in January and is still writing online and giving speaking engagements.
A Sense of Wonder Motivates VLSI Chip Revolutionary Lynn Conway
When I was around 8 or 10, Christine Jorgensen helped me understand myself. Christine was the first reported “sex change” accomplished with hormones and surgery. Her story and others are told in 60 Years of Transgender Surgery
Since first reading a copy of Kim Christy’s “Female Mimics International” , in 1974, I’ve been following what Drag Queens, Transvestites, and Transsexuals wrote about themselves and spent a fair bit of time in the Chicago Public Library, U I Chicago, U Tampa and U Texas - Dallas libraries searching the stacks on “transsexual”. The term “transgender” wasn’t coined until the mid 60’s for conflicting reasons that are touched on in this article, that I’ll expand on in a separate essay.
In Queery: What Does the Word Transgender Mean
In the earlier classified ads, people were either TV, pre- or post- op TS. TG didn’t really appear to take hold until the mid 90’s with the expansion of the internet. I don’t remember seeing it much in pre-Internet print media, but I also wasn’t involved with the community back then, just lurking classified ad sections, living in my head. Mostly, the ads were offering either seriously outrageous sex practices or the pleadings confused, frightened and lonely pre-ops looking for love or at least friendship.
The changes in attitude since the internet has enabled the gender non-conforming community to get to know each other and build a lot of bridges into the straight world, largely through supportive parent groups like PFLAG and Human Rights Campaign (HRC) have been astounding. Long term clinical studies are clearly demonstrating that when transgender people of any age are allowed to be themselves in a loving environment, they thrive, with all the typical behavioral health co-morbidities, most notably self harm and suicide, falling back into ranges typical of other demographics . The offerings of outrageous sex practices have gotten even more outrageous with the advent of “cam whoring” , but trans people aren’t nearly so confused and lonely any more with so much more information available to us and having each other to compare notes. More and more , transgender people are able to have decent careers and families, holding them together through their medical transition. IBM finally apologized for firing Lynn Conway when she came out last year.
I had never even heard of Intersex until after I joined the online support community around 2012 and people recognized the elements in my back story. I suspect that I was born hermaphroditic with internal testicles, which was “surgically corrected” at about 15 months , leaving me with an overactive penis and a brain that couldn’t see it properly. My secondary sex characteristics are gender ambiguous. My ancestors told me to just live with it without killing anybody and I would be healed properly when they returned or born into a body whose sex and gender matched after I died. Not all intersex people are transgender, but among those of us who are, we often find it easier not to mention it at all, than try to explain. Because there are so many different intersex body variations, and people are coming to understand the transgender condition, i usually feel that it’s best to leave it at that.
In Tucson, I hardly ever need to give a Trans 101 lecture to anybody. I’m a transgender person living with what I was born with instead of getting my sex brought into congruence with my gender surgically. People can wrap their heads around that much easier than they can wrap their heads around genital surgery. If I get misgendered, all I have to do is say that I’m not a guy and most people get it without discussion. Some people might see that I’m trans, but they don’t say so out loud. Most people apologize for getting it wrong the first time. Transgender people everywhere should wake up tomorrow in a town as safe and accepting as Tucson.
The most comprehensive glossary of LGBTQIA+ terminogy is the GLAAD Media Reference Guide . There are a number of different standard medical authorities regarding standard guidelines of health care for transgender people, the main ones being the WHO Transgender Health in ICD-11 and WPATH Standards of Care v 7 (World Professional Association for Transgender Health). Various large medical institutions follow their own protocols, like Johns Hopkins and the UC system.
Caroline Cossey was a beacon of hope to my generation of gender bent kids as young adults that we could one day be a beautiful, successful and witty woman married to a rich, handsome devoted man. She is far and away the "Queen of Queens", born a few months before me, raised by parents who were supportive of her femininity when she was young and offered to pay for her surgery, but she wanted to pay for it herself and was working as an exotic dancer when she met a men who married her and paid for it. She had a blossoming career in modeling and acting when she got outed in a Playboy spread about the 1981 James Bond film “For Your Eyes Only” that pretty much wrecked it. She was forced to fight very hard for her own human rights as a transgender woman in the UK and talks about it in this interview.
Three Drag artists, two queens and a king, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Storm DeLarverie, started the struggle for queer equality . There is a lot of myth surrounding who threw what first, but it was almost certainly Storme’ DeLarverie who set it off by being the first one to punch a cop. They all went on to create advocacy and support organizations that survive today and these three people should be beatified for their sacrifices in this world. This is an excellent look at the story, raw, through the eyes of people who were there.
Who Threw the First Brick At Stonewall
When I came online full time in 1999, the first transgender role model I found was Lynn Conway. Her homepage, along with a few others, like Susans.org and Andrea James' TS Roadmap stand at the root of today's transgender community online. There are numerous young transgender adults whose stories I've been following since they were children, I'll post about through the month. Some grew up to be reasonably well adjusted adults, often achieving great success in the arts or technology, many who grew up to sell sex and some who are total train wrecks. One suffered a mental breakdown after a botched GRS and failed romance , killing herself and one grew up to become a State Senator.
Lynn Conway's Homepage
Transgender Map by Andrea James
Susan's Place - Transgender Resources
When somebody asks me this question, I just grin, shrug and say, “Neither? Both?” The simple fact is that some men are born with a vagina, some women are born with a penis and some of those people are unable to cope with the mismatch, getting their genitals modified to match the gender of their brain. Nobody wants to call it a “sex change”, but that’s what it really is. Sex can be changed, but gender can’t. Conversion therapy is child abuse, not allowing your gender creative children to express themselves in a safe, loving and accepting environment.
What’s so difficult to understand and what possible valid reason could anybody have for making our lives more difficult than they already are? Doctors saw it in the 90’s and that’s why you see the first generation of happy trans kids and reasonably well adjusted transgender adults in the history of western civilization today emerging in the US very strongly, since the Coy Mathis ruling in 2013 and Obergefell vs Hodges in 2015. For everything else repugnant about her, Caitlin Jenner’s tabloid transition that year gave our global advocates and local organizers MSM press access like we’ve never had before. Historically, trans people stayed in the shadows and post ops disappeared completely, but seeing this happening, brought closeted trans people and post ops who had been living in stealth for decades out by the thousands to stand with the families to help protect the trans kids, myself included on April 1, 2014, the day I came all the way out after talking about it for several years . We won’t go back and we will see the Equality Act passed just as soon as enough Republicans get busted for sex crimes and/or sedition in Congress to get past Moscow Mitch and the filibuster.
Thanks for reading. Happy Pride Month. Stay Safe.
Tommie Jayne
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/jk-rowling-and-the-use-of-pseudoscience-to-justify-transphobia.88020/