Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Savage Love: Letters
by Dan Savage
There are times when I suspect you give an outrageous response to a reader so you can get a free column out of the angry responses.
Regarding your response to Auntie Mame about the femmy 5-year-old nephew, I think calling his father’s reaction emotional abuse is completely over the top. Restrictive and unfair? You better believe it. But abuse? Nothing in her letter leads me think the kid would get pulled from his home by a social worker.
If the dad were abusing the kid, he’d be in his face calling him a sissy and a namby-pamby or whatever, and making him sit in a dark room. Or making him eat dog shit to make a man out of him (see the bookTen Points by Bill Strickland). Leave the term “abuse” for those who deserve it.
Iowan Dissenter
I just wanted to commend you on the superb advice you gave the lady who’s worried about hiding her nephew’s homosexuality from her brother. My son is exactly like the little guy described, and apart from making me sit throughHigh School Musical 2 instead of father-and-son rugby games, I couldn’t love him more. It saddens me that there are parents who set themselves and their kids up for the most astonishing amount of heartache by denying a kid’s sexuality.
All Power to Auntie Mame
“Auntie Mame” has a 5-year-old nephew who likes to play dress-up in girl’s clothes, and the father has forbidden him from doing so. You wrote that there’s “a 100 percent chance that your brother will one day regret his actions,” and even to tell the nephew that his father “will come around one day.”
I’ve got to call 100 percent bullshit on you. In fact, I’m sort of forced to wonder what planet you’ve been living on recently. I was also caught cross-dressing by my parents at about the same age—and their displeasure was clearly communicated to me, and I dropped it for the rest of the time I lived with them (mostly). We’ve never discussed it since—I’m now in my late 30s—and there’s no way in hell my parents are going to “one day regret their actions/come around.” Late in high school I was told that the one thing that would get me disowned would be to “run off with” my male best friend at the time.
Is my life destroyed? No, I really don’t think so. Perhaps screwed up a bit—I couldn’t even call this “emotional violence,” frankly, just a big difference in taste.
But at any rate,please don’t get the hopes up of Auntie Mame and her nephew in such an unrealistic fashion. Waiting for an acceptance that never comes may be far more hurtful, on an ongoing basis, than just accepting that your father and you don’t like all the same things.
Been There, Done That
While I don’t disagree with the advice you gave Auntie Mame—be supportive and prepare to provide more emotional and physical support—I wonder if the nephew in question isn’t experiencing more of a gender-identity challenge than one of sexual orientation. Yes, there’s the whole “Zac Efron is cute” thing, but what the heck does that mean when you’re 5?
As a breeder female, I chose at that age to play with the boys because they had trucks, and got dirty, and mixed up weird botanical crap found in the back yard and dared you to eat it. That was cool. Although I identify as female, I was drawn to the power of male environments. Perhaps young nephew isn’t even gender-identity challenged—he just likes the really fun—and powerful—parts about being a girl.
Plenty of self-respecting gay men never thought of putting on makeup and dancing to show tunes. Many have. Many females have never been enticed by silly boy shit. Many have. How ’bout we add the advice of not making assumptions about our young nephew while providing a safe space in which he can work it out for himself?
HFP
I was delighted to see Auntie Mame’s letter today, because I’ve been wondering for two years whether my 6-year-old son might be gay. It’s fine with me whatever his sexual orientation is, but one wants to know, and to be aware of who your children really are so you can be sure to parent them the right way. And I think the last thing you want, no matter what age your kids are, is toask them these things, especially when they’re sweet and shy and sensitive. You just want the conversation comfortable so they can tell you things.
Anyhow, two years ago he started asking whether men can marry men (I tell him people can marry whomever they love), and pointing out that “boys are much prettier than girls.” He’s sweet, shy, gentle and musical, and loves to paint his nails and dress up. He once asked wistfully if YouTube had any videos of “two men mating” (I assured him it didn’t).
This is all fine, and not a parenting challenge, and he’ll grow up to be darling whatever his sexual orientation is. But what has surprised me is the number of our liberal, open-minded, non-homophobic friends whose reaction when we would mention this is that “no one could possibly know at age 5 what their sexual orientation could be.” That seems wrong to me. You don’t have to know anything about sex, or to want to have it yet, to know what kind of person you are interested in. I knew perfectly well at age 4 that I was a princess and that I would marry a prince, and that princes were in some way attractive, even if I wanted nothing to do with them in real life.
Love My Son
I love your column, and think that 99 percent of the time, you are bang on, primarily because you recommend honesty and communication. However, this time I think you really blew it, primarily because you recommended dishonesty and subterfuge.
You were right on when you said the homophobic father was endangering his relationship with his son. As I once said to a homophobic mother: “Your attitude toward your son is never going to make him sorry that he’s gay. It’s only going to make him sorry that you’re his mother.”
However, you advised Auntie Mame to do the gay stuff with little Johnny on the sly. There we part ways. It’s not addressing the real problem, which is the father’s, not the boy’s. He’s learning at a young age to disrespect his father (who, I know, already disrespects Johnny), to do things on the sly (shades of Larry Craig), to not trust his father, to find an adult who will indulge him (manipulation), to lie, and worst of all, to bein the closet about who he is.
It’s all going to come out anyway—what 5-year-old can keep a secret, or even understand that one must be kept? Johnny will be punished, and probably the worst thing, Auntie Mame will be denied access, and then that little boy will have no one in his life to support him.
Better for Auntie Mame to bravely tell Daddy the damage he may be doing to his son and to his relationship with his son, and offer to pay for a few visits to a therapist for Daddy. Communication is what’s necessary here, not ideology or self-righteousness. A little boy’s future is at stake.
Ben J.
Auntie Mame and you both are making an assumption that is likely wrong. Lets go over the evidence: The young nephew likes “putting on makeup, watching and dancing along to musicals with vampy women (likeChicago), (and) playing dress-up.” This doesn’t sound so much like the child is gay, but rather that he’s possibly (male to female) transgendered. I should know because I am myself.
If instead of a nephew doing these things it was a niece, no one would mind or give it a second look. Assuming someone is gay and not possibly transgendered when in fact they are transgendered can cause just as much harm as assuming they’re straight when in fact they’re gay.
Having had my say, I will agree with your overall advice regarding the letter writer to be supportive and how to deal with the dad. Ideally all parents will let their children grow up to be whoever they will be free of preconceptions.
TGIRL
Transgender Rights Are A Worldwide Struggle
One of the things I've noticed over the last few years is how transpeople all over the world are gathering the courage to stand up, proudly proclaim their pride in who we are and fight for our human rights to be respected. The battle over ENDA in the United States is just one front in this struggle to not only gain recognition and respect but to be able to openly and honestly live our lives.
As a transgender person, my brothers and sisters are everywhere. I am not limited to the borders of the United States or my ancestral home continent of Africa in this regard. Any success that we as transpeople have somewhere on planet Earth affects me positively. I also share the pain and disappointment when I hear about the violence and repression faced by transpeople in many parts of Africa, Central America, South America, Jamaica and the United States or the legal setbacks in various countries when it comes to transgender issues.
I cheered when Israel's Dana International won the Eurovision song contest. I'm envious of my sisters in Thailand who get to transition early without the faith-based hatred that we face here in the States. I marvel at the beauty of the transwomen from Mexico, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan and other parts of the globe. I was moved to tears when Georgina Beyer became the first transwoman ever elected to a national legislative body as a member of New Zealand's parliament. I was happy to see that then 12 year old Kim in Germany was allowed to transition and is now happily growing up as a teen aged girl. I'm thrilled by the victories that Spanish transpeople gained in terms of their name change rights. I was fascinated to discover that transpeople even exist in Iran and other parts of the Middle East.
I jumped for joy when the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 was passed by the British Parliament. The recent Irish case allowing a transwoman there to change birth documents will hopefully help us here in the States.
Some of my early role models when I was growing up in the 70's were international in scope such as Britain's Caroline Cossey. I'm inspired to fight harder for my rights here in the States by drawing on the examples of courage from Ugandan Victor Juliet Mukasa , the Queen of Africa and transactivists in Argentina.
And my thoughts are reciprocated in other parts of the world as well. The upcoming Transgender Day of Remembrance started here in the States but has quickly become a worldwide event. I was pleased to discover that my blog is read internationally when I noted that Portugal's Eduarda Santos links her transgender blog to various posts of mine on occasion. I hope that you international readers are enjoying getting to learn about what life is like for a transgender person who also happens to be an American proud of her African roots.
I'm delighted to see that transgender pageants are exploding in popularity in the Philippines, Thailand and Great Britain and that our transpeeps in South Korea, thanks to Harisu, can not only get their name changes done but get married as well.
Even China has an emerging transgender community with Chen Lili as its poster girl. And like Georgina Beyer, more transpeople are getting elected to public office in various countries, including my own.
We are all interconnected. Transpeople know this lesson better than anyone. Just look at how SRS technology advanced. It was an international effort and we traveled to wherever it was available.
In 1952 the late Christine Jorgenson got her pioneering surgery done in Denmark. Others later flocked to Morocco in the 1960s to get the updated techniques from Dr. Georges Burou that modern SRS is based on. The late Dr. Stanley Biber of Trinidad, CO built upon and perfected it during the 70's and 80's. Montreal surgeons Dr. Yvon Menard and Dr. Pierre Brassard built on that work and Dr. Michel Seghers was doing cutting edge SRS surgeries as well in Belgium. Now transpeople flock to Thailand from all over the world to take advantage of the reasonably-priced cutting edge work of the Thai doctors to get it done.
The civil rights struggle, like the medical advances in SRS techniques is an international one as well. We may feel in our various countries from time to time that we're fighting it alone, but we aren't.
But the fight is an ongoing one. Just as we have religious zealots in the United States seeking to retard our progress, so do our brothers and sisters around the world. Islamic fundamentalists are opposing our sisters in Malaysia and Indonesia. Nigerians have the double whammy of being opposed by Islamic and Christian fundamentalists.
Like the US Republican party, there are politicians pandering to the bigot vote like Prime Minster John Howard of Australia and our transsisters are caught in the crossfire. The Catholic Church has moved from an affirming position on transgender issues to an increasingly intolerant one under Pope Benedict XVI. Our sisters in the Philippines have recently suffered a blow from their Supreme Court in terms of being able to change their birth documents.
As former South African president Nelson Mandela so eloquently stated, 'the people are their own liberators.'
We must take his words to heart and act as our own liberators. We must continue to support each other, reach out to supportive family members and friends, win allies, pool information, strategies, tactics and information so that we reach our ultimate goal: respect of our humanity.
We transpeople should never give up hope. We must continue to fight to have our basic human rights in our various homelands respected and protected. That must happen if we wish to contribute our talents to help build our communities and our respective nations. We must be able to work without being harassed or denied employment we are qualified for. We mush be able to live quality lives without having fear, shame, guilt and the specter of violence heaped upon us. We must be able to freely use our talents to accomplish whatever we set our minds to do and have the faith to believe that one day we will prevail over the Forces of Intolerance.
And yes, I believe this will happen in my lifetime. . . .
Transsexual women
The Court recently denied the petition of Rommel Jacinto Dantes Silverio, a transsexual, to change the entries in his birth certificate in the Office of the Civil Registrar -- specifically, his gender from male to female and his first name to “Mely.” This despite the fact that Silverio had undergone what is technically called a “sex-reassignment surgery” in Bangkok in 2001 to become a biological woman. The Court, however, ruled that while the petitioner “may have succeeded in altering his body and appearance through the intervention of modern surgery, no law authorizes the change of entry as to sex in the civil registry for that reason. There is no special law in the country governing sex reassignment and its effect. This is fatal to petitioner’s case.” The Court concluded that it is up to Congress, if it chooses, “to determine what guidelines should govern the recognition of the effects of sex reassignment.”
The riveting story of Rommel/Mely Silverio is detailed in an intimate Internet account titled “My Life as a Transsexual Woman,” which he/she divides into: (1) pre-gender transition from birth to 1995; (2) pre-surgery days in Hawaii from 1996 to 2000; and (3) post-surgery life in the Philippines from 2001 to the present.
It was as a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa that I came to know Rommel very well. His late mother Anita I knew back in Manila. He was all of 230 pounds but over time I could notice a gradual change in his appearance. He had embarked on a regimen of female hormone pills and estrogen shots. I teasingly told him one day that he was becoming “sexy” but to be “careful.” By the end of 1996, he had already lost 50 pounds. He continued the routine until he lost another 30 pounds. So by now, he was down to 155 pounds evenly distributed in his 5’8” frame. He was becoming a woman and gaining a “greater sense of self-esteem and confidence.”
He went on to defend his dissertation on youth sexual behavior in 2000, and had acquired a “boyfriend” who consented to have him go to Bangkok for the sex change. For about three hours, a renowned Thai surgeon performed vaginoplasty and breast augmentation, increasing her breast size from A to D. Her recovery and post-surgery therapy lasted 18 months, after which she introduced her boyfriend, the man she was going to marry, to her family.
While Rommel had become Mely, for which she was ecstatic, several problems arose. The name on her passport was that of a man and inspectors couldn’t reconcile this with the tall, svelte and well-dressed woman standing in front of them. She had to have two sets of documentation all the time to attest to the fact that Rommel and Mely were one and the same. Bank personnel would do all sorts of checking, so she would seek out only those that already knew her to avoid any confusion and embarrassment. And so on. She could have easily come back to the United States where she wouldn’t have these hassles.
But discriminatory comments such as that the Philippines is not ready for transsexual women like her only increased her resolve to be treated equally and justly. Such remarks only “added fuel to my desire to be regarded as a professional colleague, to be treated with respect as a woman, and to be given a fair chance at life in general.” She escalated her personal struggle to attain “full legal recognition as a woman here in the Philippines, my country of birth” by petitioning the courts to change her gender and first name. The Court of Appeals denied her petition, which was a devastating blow. I am certain that the Supreme Court verdict upholding the lower court was even more devastating.
So, what now? I have great compassion for Mely -- whom I will always remember as Rommel -- who is really a very bright and likable individual. What does it matter really -- Rommel or Mely, man or woman -- it’s the same human being! And she has gone through the whole process with extreme pain of validating the essence of her identity and humanity. What more can we ask? But the law as they say is cruel, but it’s the law.
As a footnote, the large majority of transsexual (TS) transitions work out very well over the long term as documented in Lynn’s “Transsexual Women’s Successes.” However, in some cases, complete TS transitions “fail to meet very unrealistic expectations, and way too late the transitioner may realize that undergoing sex reassignment surgery (SRS) was a BIG mistake.” Among the “regretters” is Renee Richards, who was born a male but transitioned as a female via surgery in 1975 at age 40 and became a famous tennis player. She wished she had not done it, but too late. She realized she would always be seen as a transsexual and never as a real woman that she had earlier hoped to become.
My only hope for Rommel/Mely is that she won’t regret the biggest decision she made in her life, and that society will become increasingly tolerant, if not accepting, of diversity in all its possible senses and meanings.
Belinda A. Aquino is director of Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she has been professor of Political Science and Asian Studies.
Over One-third Of Former American Football Players Had Sexual Relations With Men, Study Claims
In his study of homosexuality among sportsmen in the US, sociologist Dr Eric Anderson found that 19 in a sample of 47 had taken part in acts intended to sexually arouse other men, ranging from kissing to mutual masturbation and oral sex.
The 47 men, aged 18-23, were all American Football players who previously played at the high school (secondary school) level but had failed to be picked for their university’s team and were now cheerleaders instead. They were at various universities from the American south, Mid-West, west and north west.
Dr Anderson, now of the University of Bath, UK, said the study showed that society’s increasing open-mindedness about homosexuality and decreasing stigma concerning sexual activity with other men had allowed sportsmen to speak more openly about these sexual activities. He found that this sex came in the form of two men and one woman, as well as just two men alone.
He said that the sexual acts described differed from acts of ‘hazing’ or team-bonding that often include pretend-homosexual acts.
“The evidence supports my assertion that homophobia is on the rapid decline among male teamsport athletes in North America at all levels of play,” he writes in his study, entitled ‘Being masculine is not about whom you sleep with…Heterosexual athletes contesting masculinity and the one-time rule of homosexuality’. It will be published in the journal Sex Roles in January. . . .
Either way, "Miriam" an awful dating show
There's Something About Miriam , 10 p.m., Fox Reality Channel)
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Yes, there is something about Miriam, all right. She's a guy. Or, well, a pre-op transsexual, anyway. Welcome to "The Crying Game: The TV Series."
Six strapping heterosexual British dudes. One stunning Latin model. A mansion in Ibiza. The guys compete in this "reality" dating show to be the one who gets to go on a weeklong yacht cruise with Miriam and pick up 10,000 pounds ($20,670) in the bargain. What they don't know, of course, is that she is in one very important area actually a he.
Fox Reality Channel snatches this show whole from the U.K., where it's said to have been a controversial hit nearly four years ago under the title "Find Me a Man." The suitors here don't become privy to their prize's true anatomical nature until near the end of their quest, which is simply cruel. Miriam offers that she is into "straight guys," so it's no wonder she has been so frustrated in her search for Mr. Right to this point. That penis thing keeps getting in the way.
The contestants here engage in various physical challenges -- under the direction of a genuine no-nonsense drill instructor -- to impress the object of their affection. Previews from upcoming episodes confirm that there is early speculation about Miriam's gender among the lads. It's undeniable that Miriam, who was 21 at the time, is beautiful. But it's also obvious that she is pretty dim, making her an appropriate subject for this pointless piece of exploitation. . . .
