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[From the Chair]
ALPHA OMEGA

By Gloria Fenton
Girls’ Things

I have no idea why, at an early age that I as a boy was drawn to want and need to see and feel “girls’ things” on me.  And, early on, when I did try on “girls’ things”, I was caught, scolded, and told that boys were not supposed to wear “girls’ things”.  As a boy, it was wrong for me to even try on “girls’ things” as my parents told me.  Yet inside me I had felt so good and so right with the “girls’ things” I tried on, on my body.  Even if it was wrong, I had needed the girls’ things on me, and I had liked the “girls’ things” on me.

I remember sensing that I felt pretty and even beautiful in “girls’ things”, and it was a very wonderful feeling, far different than anything I knew as a boy.  There was a very real confusion inside me.  I was a boy and not supposed to want to wear “girls’ things”.  And I knew nobody would want to hear that what I had tried on seemed to belong on me.  Nothing I wore as a boy felt so good and right on me.  And though I was told I was a boy, I really wasn’t sure what that meant.

I didn’t know what it meant to be a girl, either.  Yet somehow I seemed to sense feelings and want sensations meant for girls and not boys.  If my wearing, and wanting to wear “girls things” was so wrong and bad, then my seeming to know more inside me of what a girl felt, instead of what a boy was supposed to feel, had to also be wrong and bad.  I didn’t want to be wrong and bad, and I remember vowing to myself that I would become the boy I was supposed to be.  I told myself that I would not wear girls’ things again, no matter what.

Sensations that I had felt that I wasn’t supposed to know, I tried very hard to bury and forget.  If I did think of things I began to hate myself for it, and tried even harder to be a boy.  I felt guilt for even having tried on “girls’ things”, shame for having done wrong, hate for having liked what was wrong, and fear for sensing something was different about me, and therefore, wrong about me.  I fought hard within myself to be a boy.

My being teased one day by some of the boys and some of the girls that I ran like a girl, played like a girl, and had a girl’s legs, was a massive humiliation for me.  I was trying so hard to be a boy and I hated that humiliation that hurt so deeply.  Somehow something I was trying so hard to bury and forget had seemed to surface.  Even without my “girls’ things” on me, other kids had laughed at me for being more girlish than my being a boy. 

It was, however, not the hurt I felt from the other kids humiliating me that lingered.  It was my own guilt, shame, hate and fear that grew even stronger inside me.  Even trying so hard to be a boy, I had failed.  It wasn’t my being teased about running and playing like a girl that really hurt, though.  Kids could say some nasty things when it suited them to try and hurt someone.  Being told I had a girl’s legs did hurt deep; and having not only other boys, but also some girls laugh at me for that was more than normal teasing.  One girl that laughed at me even told another girl that my legs were too pretty to be a boy’s legs.  Right at that moment I hated my legs.  Even girls had said I had a girl’s legs that were pretty.  That was not something that a boy, trying so hard to be a boy, wanted or needed to hear.

I never told my parents about my humiliation as I didn’t need them reminded of my being caught in girls’ things.  I did, however, refuse to ever wear shorts to school again.  After that I only wore shorts at home.  Even more resolved, I tried even harder to be a boy.  Still I knew that no matter how much I tried to be a boy like the others that something inside me, was not like other boys.

I fought the good fight for over two years.  I have no idea why it happened, but needing to see and feel a pair of nylons on my legs became an overwhelming fixation.  It got to a point where I literally felt I was going to explode inside me if I didn’t at least once try on nylons.  The need was far stronger than anything I had ever felt inside me.

Taking a big risk, I tried on a pair of my mother’s stockings.  I was only going to try them on once so I could shake and satisfy the need I felt.  My biggest effort, however, was aimed at not getting caught in my mother’s stockings.  I didn’t need my mother or father even suspecting I was trying on “girls’ things” again, since I was only going to do it once. 

I didn’t know why I needed those stockings on me, just that I did.  The stockings looked and felt so incredibly wonderful on my legs, and it was like they belonged to me. 

Even with that, I might have been able to try on nylons just once, except for one thing.  When I looked down at my stockinged legs, I didn’t see a boy’s legs in stockings.  It was the first time I looked at my legs and I saw them as pretty as the stockinged legs of any girl or woman I knew of.  My legs were, as I looked at them a girl’s legs.  I had not expected to see or feel that.

And where as before I had hated being told I had a girl’s legs, I suddenly found myself knowing I liked my pretty legs.  It had been a long time, but I knew I was once more feeling sensations only a girl was supposed to know, and sensing how right they felt on me.  Nothing I knew or wore as a boy even came close to how I felt seeing my girl’s legs in those nylons.

I had no idea why I wanted and needed “girl’s things” on me, or how or why they always looked and felt so good and right on me, like they belonged on me.  It’s been fifty years since then, and I still have no good answers to those questions.  I seemed to know and feel things that a boy wasn’t supposed. to.  It took another thirty-one years from the time I was seven, getting away with trying on my mother’s nylons, until I began to accept what was inside me for so many years, even without understanding it.

Gloria

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If you feel like counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, then you might venture in the whole business of who is “transgender”, who gets what labels, what motivates who and so forth.  And then there are people who rise well above that.  One such person is Mara Kiesling,

I’d say more, but I could only meet Ms. Kiesling briefly during her stop in Cleveland …as I had a Passover Dinner (Seder) to get to, just before the actual Town Hall meeting on Sunday.  

The reason I count Mara as someone who rises above all that was her response to my asking what she had to say to the non-transitioning communities.  She was direct:  ENDA has been carefully crafted to be inclusive on a number of difficult issues.  There is for example what she referred to as the Peter Oiler provision:  Companies can set dress codes for employees ONLY while on the job.  She also remarked that so many times we don’t know the gender identity of the people counted in transgendered murder victims.  What she meant was that the hate crime protections being sought protect more than people transitioning. 

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Some News You Might have Missed:

Another event sponsored by Transfamily and the LGBT center took place at the Pilgrim UCC on the West Side .  

Adolescents Killed Around the Nation Due to LGBT Hate

 ( CLEVELAND , OH ) – The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Greater Cleveland along with Cleveland State University will present “Breaking the Silence” an evening commemorating adolescents taken from us due to LGBT hate and also ending the Day of Silence. The Day of Silence is a day when students in high schools and colleges around the nation remain silent in order to display and protest the silence felt by LGBT people daily. Breaking the Silence will be held at Pilgrim United Church of Christ ( 2592 W 14th St. Cleveland , Ohio 44113 ). There will be speakers, live music, slam poetry and an open mic session. The event will be Free of Cost!! It will begin at 7pm on Friday April 25th at Pilgrim United Church of Christ. There will be light refreshments.  

“Matthew Shepard was murdered over ten years ago due to LGBT hate and the country was shocked that something like this could have happened. The reality is that atrocities such as this continue to happen today, it has been going on for too long and we need to acknowledge those who have been taken from us and express our outrage while teaching the community at large,” says Maureen Havelka, Case Manager of the Metro Youth Outreach program at the LGBT Community Center. Judy Shepard, Matthew Shepard’s mother, was the keynote speaker for the Center’s Metro Youth Outreach Anniversary Reception on Friday, April 4^th and she reminded us that what happened to her son continues to happen today. Hate is far too prevalent in today's society. “When children decide it is OK to kill a fellow classmate because they are different one has to wonder what is being taught to our children? Not to mention the fact that LGBT people are being killed just because of who they are, how they express themselves or who they love is unacceptable. Society has turned a blind eye once too often on the injustice done to our community and it has to stop NOW!” states Jake Nash, Executive Director of TransFamily. Recently Lawrence King (15) and Simmie Williams (17) were killed because of their gender non-conformance and LGBT hate. Lawrence was gunned down by a fellow classmate while at school and Simmie was killed on the street. “There are too many headstones testifying to society's ignorance and resistance to what is fact. There are gay people, there have always been gay people, and still today in America, we have youth literally dying to be accepted as they are and dying trying to be accepted as society wants them to be,” says Mika Major, Director of Programs at the LGBT Center.  

I managed to drop in…late, and heard some expressions of sadness and anger from a number of talented young performers.  One told a story of repeated physical assaults.- dsf

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Mara Keisling, Executive Director
Mara is the founding Executive Director of NCTE. A Pennsylvania native, Mara came to Washington after co-chairing the Pennsylvania Gender Rights Coalition. Mara is a transgender-identified woman who also identifies as a parent and a Pennsylvanian. She is a graduate of Penn State University and did her graduate work at Harvard University in American Government. She has served on the board of Directors of Common Roads, an LGBTQ Youth Group, and on the steering committee of the Statewide Pennsylvania Rights Coalition. Mara has almost twenty-five years of professional experience in social marketing and opinion research.

If you feel like counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, then you might venture in the whole business of who is “transgender”, who gets what labels, what motivates who and so forth.  And then there are people who rise well above that.  One such person is Mara Kiesling,

I’d say more, but I could only meet Ms. Kiesling briefly during her stop in Cleveland …as I had a Passover Dinner (Seder) to get to, just before the actual Town Hall meeting on Sunday.  

The reason I count Mara as someone who rises above all that was her response to my asking what she had to say to the non-transitioning communities.  She was direct:  ENDA has been carefully crafted to be inclusive on a number of difficult issues.  There is for example what she referred to as the Peter Oiler provision:  Companies can set dress codes for employees ONLY while on the job.  She also remarked that so many times we don’t know the gender identity of the people counted in transgendered murder victims.  What she meant was that the hate crime protections being sought protect more than people transitioning.   

And she’s a good friend of Helen and Betty’s…which means she’s cool beans anyhow.
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http://www.ottawasun.com/News/Features/2008/04/26/5396511.html

http://www.ottawasun.com/News/Features/2008/04/25/5385546.html

http://www.ottawasun.com/News/Features/2008/04/25/5385676.html

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On another front- there was a “news of the weird” item a few weeks back about a man in drag ramming his truck into the front of a lingerie store.  Here’s what one compassionate and perceptive columnist in San Diego wrote about it:

 http://www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/at_odds_with_odd_news/6848/

By D.A. Kolodenko

Know what I’ve grown to kind of dislike? Weird News. Or Strange News, Odd News, Oddball News, Funny News, Very Strange News, Bizarre News, Water-Cooler News or whatever you want to call those brief, fleeting stories of human deviation that decorate our wondrous World Wide Web like tinsel on a dying tree.

Take this example: On Sunday, April 13, a cross-dressing man was arrested for intentionally and repeatedly plowing his 1994 Geo Tracker into the wall of a risqué lingerie shop in Commerce Township , Mich.

News to all of suburban Detroit , sure, but The Associated Press? All the major networks and blogs? China ’s Xinhua News Agency? Really?

Apparently, cross-dressers don’t have it a whole lot easier now than Glen did in 1953. I’m speaking, of course, of B-film director Ed Wood’s angora-fancying alter-ego hero in his masterpiece of courage and startling incompetence, Glen or Glenda. Like Glen and the universal Glenda for which he stood, Jeremy Paul McIntosh, the man in jail in Michigan , is a laughingstock.

That’s why in many of the hundreds of Odd News reports of the incident, McIntosh is defined not as a self-identifying cross-dresser, but as an “admitted” cross-dresser—as if being a cross-dresser is something shameful that you wouldn’t want to admit to, like having voted for Bush in 2004.

How can McIntosh be anything more than a joke when the hook of the story is that he committed his pathetic crime in unconventional garb? Had he rammed the lingerie shop dressed as a douchebag in a backwards baseball cap, he probably wouldn’t have made the last 10 seconds of the 6 o’clock news in Detroit .

Fortunately for the water-cooler crowd, though, Oakland County Undersheriff Michael McCabe thoughtfully provided the bemused Michigan media with a full report of the transgression in detailed specificity: Jeremy was wearing “facial makeup, lipstick, blue Capri pants, red ‘flip-flops,’ a flowery blouse and a matching flowery women’s bra.” It’s comforting that there’s a cop out there who knows a pair of Capris when he apprehends a perp in ’em.

The rest of the AP story of McIntosh’s unhinging—repeated verbatim and ad infinitum from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu—is a surface-level summary of events that can only suggest the complex life and the sublimated history of the man.

First, according to the police report, McIntosh, who had no prior criminal record, attacked the lingerie shop, Intimate Ideas on Union Lake Road , because he had applied for a job there in January and had been turned down. This part of the story reminds me of a phenomenon I observed in Bangkok : Cross-dressers there seem to face less employment discrimination than in the U.S. In department stores, malls and kiosks in Thailand , I saw cross-dressing retail workers alongside other employees and being treated by shoppers without so much as a raised eyebrow. Imagine the reactions of the Fascist Valley contingent if they saw a guy selling dresses at bebe while wearing one.

I don’t know if McIntosh was denied employment at Intimate Ideas because he is a cross-dresser, but it probably didn’t help. Odd News stories don’t have to answer all the questions; they don’t even have to try. They just have to be odd. Since they’re disposable stories about disposable people, they raise questions and then leave blanks for the cruelty and ignorance of the common blog commenter to fill in. There is rarely a follow-up to an Odd News story.

Second, we are told that before his big crash, McIntosh came into the store and told a 20-year-old woman working there that he was going to ram his Geo Tracker into the building because he was angry about not being hired.

So, even though he was mad, McIntosh had the presence of mind to calmly inform the employee inside what he was going to do and why he was going to do it. We never learn whether the employee felt endangered, but we do learn that McIntosh’s ramming his car into the side of the building caused “merchandise to fall off the shelves” (picture dildos if you’re visualizing the scene; that’s what I did) and $3,000 worth of damage. No one, including McIntosh, was injured. The severity of the act is not self-evident from the story, but, again, it’s the lipstick and matching flip-flops that are the point.

Third, we learn that “when a witness walked up to McIntosh’s vehicle after he hit the building, McIntosh said his vehicle was totaled and that the building was really tough.” Who is this brave witness? Apparently someone who felt threatened neither by McIntosh’s appearance nor his behavior. And note again the calm resolve of McIntosh. He knows what he’s doing. He’s determined to make his point. Maybe his point was this:

Being a cross-dresser is who I am. You may not think it’s pretty, but I think I’m pretty—or at least I’m trying to be pretty.

Whom exactly does it harm that I pluck my eyebrows and prefer vivid outfits?

Why have I been treated as a pariah, mocked and denied a job for expressing this essential aspect of myself? This store discriminated against me, and now it will stand as a symbol of discrimination.

Of course, we don’t know what he really thought. Odd News leaves it almost entirely to the imagination.

One final detail crammed into a single sentence that suggests all of the pathos and depth expunged from the one-note, sideshow, Odd News formula: McIntosh also told police he was homeless and wanted to go to jail because he had nowhere else to go and was sick of freezing in his car at night.

Homeless, alone, scorned, shivering in his car against the bitter-cold Michigan nights, Jeremy finally chooses jail. But before he goes, he makes his last act, his surrender, a reckless subversion that symbolizes the suffering of all of the world’s oddballs—and maybe even the suffering of anyone who, in these desperate times, longs to express him or herself in full, living color.    

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Continuing with our examination of Gender and Sex as shown in the pages of the New Yorker from 1926, including one I missed on my first pass through that year. 

 One of the impressions one gets from the New Yorker these days is that the cartoonists are a bunch of white males.  Indeed, there have been remarks about the absence of “people of color” from the roll call.   What’s a bit remarkable about these early years is the number of women commenting on gender and sexuality…and not always from a more enlightened point of view.

In our first selection, from July 31 of 1926, Barbara Sherman shows her take on the androgynous look of the roaring 20's.  Recalling the frustration of gangster/restaurateur  King Marchand in Victor/Victoria, over his attraction to “Victor”, this cartoon reflects the perpetual anxiety about who one is attracted to. If the nerves fire, then the target must be right.  This anxiety shows up still…consider this quote from an excerpt of a new book about Drusilla’s transition:  

Dru couldn't win. On a bad day, transsexual women look so awful they're embarrassing. If only they'd go away. On a good day, transsexual women look so convincing, they're dangerous (they might trick us) - if only they'd go away.

 Peter Arno returns a bit later with this veiled reference to the old trope of the stereotypical occupations of gay men.  Rather than ask how it feels to be gay, she asks how it feels to be an interior decorator.  Surely her closed body pose and flapped wrist and his delicately held tea cup and saucer and taken aback expression carry the meaning of a taboo subject scandalously brought into the light of day.  The next cartoon could be run today, with the increasing awareness of the “gender queer” option.

Otto Soglow 10/23/1926

What’s possible is the question- is it a woman with a beard or a man with beard and breasts? 

Near the end 1926 is this tribute to gay stereotypes.  The careful language of the caption, “I simply have my heart set on” leaves no doubt that  gay effeminacy was the context.  And unless Reah has changed gender this cartoon was by a woman.

Reah Gardner 10/30/1926

Our final cartoon from the year in the midst of the roaring 20s shows the uses of costume.  Nothing particularly novel about this, but the sly look on the "mules" face as he slips past with his bootleg booze is charming.

Alfred Frueh, 12/4/1926

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Publication Information
This newsletter is copyright 2008 by The Alpha Omega Society. All rights reserved. Articles and information contained in this newsletter may be reprinted by other non-profit crossdresser organizations with advance permission of the author and provided that proper credit is given to author and source. The opinions or statements contained in this newsletter are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Alpha Omega.

Contributions of articles are welcomed, but may be altered in the editing process, with the author’s intent retained, or may be rejected, whether solicited or not. We will exchange newsletters with any other similar group.

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