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 COVER STORY

June 2008

By Meg KRUGEL

© Copyright 2008 ColorsNW Magazine

Gender from the Inside Out

Identity goes beyond body politics for transgender people of color

There wasn’t an exact moment when they knew.

For the five people of color featured in this article, outward changes started at different ages ranging from 5 to 33. Inward changes happened much before that. The realization of feeling “different,” as far as gender identity was concerned, continued in various ways – when one kissed a third-grade crush of the same sex because he felt more masculine than feminine; when, as a 5-year-old, another felt out of place wearing “boy” clothes and put on pearls instead; when a woman’s basketball team supported him through the beginning stages of his transition from female to male; when yet another was forced into “early retirement” from her position as a deputy sheriff.

But there was never an exact moment when it “hit” them – when these five people knew they were transgender.

“My story is similar to a lot of stories,” explains Rej Joo, who is a youth worker at Outside In, a service center for homeless youth in Portland. “I did feel different as a kid, and it was during my middle school years that I began to see being different as a bad thing.”

Joo, 26, who emigrated with his parents and two siblings from Seoul, South Korea, when he was 8, closeted his male identity in high school. “Apparently I did it well,” he says – he was named the Beaverton High School prom queen. But, as Joo moved on to Wagner college in New York, he started exploring gender more freely; on his women’s basketball team, he transitioned from looking like a really “feminine person to a very butch person, and luckily, my teammates were queer-friendly.”

After college, he returned to the Portland area and came out first as a lesbian, and then as gender queer, and later as transgender. Though his parents were at first supportive of his identity as a lesbian, they had a more difficult time accepting his decision to begin hormone therapy and transition from female to male. In the early stages of his transition, Joo explained to them what being gender queer meant – that he didn’t identify as female, but didn’t fully identify as male either – and they struggled with that. “They couldn’t understand the middle identity,” he says. “Once I felt comfortable with identifying as a guy, I said ‘I’m a guy, I just need to be myself.’ ” And, that made sense to his parents. “They told me – when you were a kid, we definitely knew you were a boy. They understood the binary gender more so than the ambiguous gender,” he explains.

During this time, Joo turned to some local community support groups for LGBT youth, and in doing so “I felt like I could just breathe and be me,” Joo recalls. He became active in the Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center (SMYRC) in Portland, where queer-identified youth gather in a safe space to participate in community organizing, support groups and enrichment activities like art and music.

“Being involved with as progressive a community as Portland is, as a youth, that’s when I began to discover the variation of gender identity and the separation from sexual orientation. Although I initially came out as a lesbian, I began exploring trans or gender queer identities,” Joo explains. “Something really resonated with me about those identities, since, honestly, I never really knew what it felt like to be a woman.”

In the past five to 10 years, discussions around sexual orientation have become hot-button issues – in politics, education, religion, media – even pop culture. With widespread opinions about equal rights for lesbian and gay couples (some favorable, some not) comes an inherent sense of progress – at the very least, experiences around sexuality are being made known. In many realms, these experiences have even been normalized. A recent milestone was the California Supreme Court’s decision in May to allow same-sex couples to marry, starting June 16. However, the Alliance Defense Fund has asked the court for a stay on the ruling and a new hearing.

Less can be said for awareness around gender identity and the transgender and gender non-conforming community. In the public use of the acronym “LGBT,” there is a way of thinking which categorizes each group (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) as one and the same. But, as Joo points out, gender identity and sexual orientation come from two very separate experiences.

To identify as transgender – which more than 3 million people in the United States do, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality – individuals identify with a gender different than what they were assigned at birth. Using a spectrum to understand transgender identities can be helpful, since people will identify as somewhere between strongly “feminine” and strongly “masculine.” Importantly, gender identity has no link to sexual orientation; just as a biological male or female can identify as gay or straight, a transgender male or female will identify by a range of sexualities.

Within the growing “out” population of transgender individuals, people come face-to-face with trans communities of color navigating gender identity alongside ethnic identity. “I got the message from my aunt that transitioning was okay if you were wealthy and white,” says Vanessa Grandberry, an African-American native of Memphis who transitioned from male to female around age 20. Grandberry, 41, who formerly headed a health education program for transgender women of color at People of Color Against AIDS Network (POCAAN) in Seattle, recognizes how gender identity in the African-American community has its own unique challenges.

“Racism is not dealt with in the trans community. There are white transsexuals who start out as privileged white males; once they transition, they lose some of that privilege and they become second-class citizens and for the first time in their lives, they are finding out what it means to be discriminated against,” she says. “When you take somebody like me, who is African American, I have already been through that. When I have a job interview and I don’t get the position for some reason, I know it can be because of the color of my skin or my gender identity.”

Part of Grandberry’s transition process, she explains, was marked by the “burden” of not wanting to bring shame to her family or her race, since “it is white privilege to be seen as an individual and not a member of a collective group.”

At age 5, Grandberry would stand in her mother’s closet and put on women’s clothes and paint her face with blush. She loved the way she transformed from a boy to a girl – though eventually, she figured she would outgrow the cross-dressing “phase.”

As in Grandberry’s experience, the development of a transgender identity begins early.

In his landmark paper on the theory of gender, Dr. Carl Bushong, a leading psychologist on gender identity based in Tampa, Fla., explains in the article “What is Transgender and Who is Transgendered?” – published in Transgender Tapestry magazine in 1995 – that brains develop gender just a few weeks after conception until 2 or 3 years of age. From this point onward, brains develop gender in three independent dimensions: brain gender (how we are “wired along gender lines”); brain sex (how we perceive sex and relationships) and gender identity (how we perceive ourselves, as male or female).

Transgender adults can choose to modify their gender expression in many ways. For some, this includes the use of hormone therapy or hormone replacement therapy. Typically, after 12 months on hormone therapy, a trans individual can opt to pursue sexual reassignment surgery with the help of a mental-health-care provider.

It is difficult to fully estimate the number of transgendered adults who have undergone surgery – the most commonly referenced statistic stems from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), which estimates that 1 in every 30,000 male-to-females and 1 in every 100,000 female-to-males undergo surgery. However, an outspoken critic of the DSM-IV data and transgendered activist Lynn Conway argues that this data is based on a study conducted in the 1950s. In 2001, Conway, a professor of engineering at University of Michigan, released data from a survey she conducted of U.S. surgeons to show that 1 in every 2,500 adult male-to-females have had sexual reassignment surgery.

In 1982, Grandberry, then 16, went to her first doctor’s appointment regarding sexual reassignment surgery (she would stop going after three times, due to bad experiences with the doctor). Grandberry’s mother dropped her off at the appointment on her way to work. “To my mother’s credit, she was very open-minded,” she says.

But it took time to educate her family on the difference between sexuality and gender – a trial-and-error process she connects to the experience of being African American. “More education needs to be done on gender issues in the African-American community,” she says. “It isn’t that African Americans reject us, it’s just that there are so many issues we have on our plate already, and people can be unwilling to work on this one in particular.”

Grandberry knows that being transgender in the 21st century means being part of some “unexplored territory,” as gender identity remains an unfamiliar concept for many. In other parts of the world, transgender people are gaining visibility,. An article in ColorLines magazine reported that the experiences of transgender people in Asia, Latin America and Africa are changing: In Ixhuatan, Mexico, a trans woman ran for political office in 2003. In Brazil, a court ruled in 2007 that sexual reassignment surgery must be covered by the government as a constitutionally protected medical right.

And how are Northwest transgender and ally communities of color engaging in gender justice? As our subjects show, engagement is a reflection of personal values. It comes through community-building, public education, and perhaps most importantly, by sharing stories.

Talking Politics: Laura Calvo

Laura Calvo wears her political affiliation proudly on her sleeve. Her “broom closet” of a office at the Multnomah County Democrats headquarters in Portland, where she is treasurer, is covered in political regalia. There is a certain flair about the space to suggest that Calvo, 51, is somebody who, at the end of the day, really just loves being a Democrat – no matter who stands behind the campaign podium.

Understanding her gender identity didn’t come as easily to Calvo as understanding her political identity. The daughter of two naturalized American citizens from Costa Rica, Calvo struggled with gender identity throughout her early adult life. But, she also notes that her struggle had little, if anything to do with being Latina. “There is a huge community of GLBT Latinos and Latinas in the world,” and points to the first Latino pride festival in Oregon in 2006 as proof. “Everywhere I turn, there is somebody of color that is gay, lesbian, bi or trans.”

After a four-year paramedic internship in an ambulance, she left her childhood home of San Francisco in 1980 and wound up in Grants Pass, a smaller, more reclusive community in Southern Oregon, where she figured her gender “issues would all just go away.”

Until the mid-’90s, Calvo wedged herself into traditionally “masculine” lines of work, including 16 years at the deputy sheriff’s office as a law enforcement officer and supervisor. “I was going to prove that there was nothing wrong with me to myself and everyone else,” she recalls. During that time, she also married, had two sons and divorced, though she won’t pinpoint why. In some ways, her separation from her former wife can be linked to the “unraveling” of her gender identity in her mid-30s.

When Calvo’s storage unit (where she had locked away her women’s clothing) was robbed and then recovered by the police in 1995, her career came to a sudden end. She was called into the lieutenant’s office, told she was a “freak” and that she wouldn’t be coming back to work. At the time, there were no protections at work based on gender identity; if she wanted to go public with the story, she’d face scrutiny at the federal level and would inevitably attract huge attention – something she wasn’t ready for, especially since she hadn’t yet transitioned. Instead, she negotiated a “medical retirement” from the sheriff’s office in 1995, and hasn’t held a traditional job since.

“I had an interest in politics, and I’d always felt that what had happened to me was wrong,” she says. In 2003, Calvo decided to testify about her experiences during Oregon’s first public hearing on the employment non-discrimination bill, Senate bill 786. As she remembers, “it must have been a slow news day.” The morning after her testimony, her story made the front page of the Josephine County newspaper: “Ex-Josephine County Deputy Becomes Transsexual and Testifies at Gay Rights Hearing.”

“That really blew out the barn doors on coming out; it was my choice to do so, but I didn’t expect it to come out like that. There was really no way I could be in the closet anymore,” Calvo says. In the end, the residual affects of the article “gave me the strength to be who I am, and took away all that rationalizing. What came out of the ashes was me.”

In May 2007, the testimony by Calvo and others paid off. Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed the Oregon Equality Act into effect, which prohibits discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations based on sexual orientation, broadly defined to include “actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality or gender identity, regardless of whether the individual’s gender identity, appearance, expression or behavior differs from that traditionally associated with the individual’s sex at birth.” The bill took effect this January, and makes Oregon one of 21 states to have an employment non-discrimination law.

Washington saw its own non-discrimination bill pass a year before Oregon’s; in early 2006, the state legislature amended the “Washington Law Against Discrimination” to include sexual orientation (which, in this particular case, includes heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender expression or identity).

Both states’ enactments come on the heels of a proposed federal employment non-discrimination law (ENDA) – of which there are two versions, one that protects people on the basis of sexual orientation alone (HB 3685), and one that protects based on sexual orientation and gender identity (HB 2015). The ENDA bill that does not protect gender identity (HB 3685) was passed by the House Committee on Labor and Education in October 2007.

Meanwhile, transgender activists have rallied to also implement protection around gender identity into the same mandate – though the counterargument suggests this group is already covered based on existing laws that prohibit employment based on gender stereotypes. House Bill 2015, introduced last year in April, is in the first step of the legislative process – though, this is where 12 bills of similar titles were put to rest in previous Congresses. President Bush has declared he will veto the bill if it comes to his desk.

The exclusion of gender identity from federal recognition in ENDA has caused strife between the gay and lesbian community and the transgender community. As understanding of the differences between the two ENDA bills developed in the late 1990s, leading LGBT rights organizations to formalize stances against bills that didn’t protect the transgender community. In August 2004, the Human Rights Campaign (a primary lobbyist for the bill) announced that it would only support the passage of ENDA if the provisions included protection based on gender identity. And then, in November 2007, the group reneged on its stance and supported a non-inclusive ENDA instead.

The Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) decision to support HB 3685 was influenced by a poll it conducted in late-October 2006 of 500 LGBT Americans regarding the passage of a non-inclusive ENDA bill. The results showed that 70 percent of respondents favored passing an ENDA bill that does not cover transgender people over not passing the bill at all.

The struggle around ENDA and inclusion of gender identity propelled Calvo right into political organizing, following her transition at age 46 and a move to Portland where she could have a fresh start. Her arrival was celebrated by statewide LGBT rights organizations like the Northwest Gender Alliance and Basic Rights Oregon, who were familiar with her testimony and her work as the co-chair of the GLBT political caucus of Southern Oregon. She began working with both organizations around the time when a spurt of gay-marriage licenses was issued in Multnomah County in 2004, which ended after only a month after a ruling from Oregon Judge Frank Bearden. “It became painfully clear to me that the only way we’re going to get through this is by getting a majority of the Democrats to support us,” Calvo says.

Through a sweep of political affiliations – from the National Stonewall Democrats, where she is a regional director, to the Democratic Party of Oregon, where she is a member and current delegate of the Third Congressional District, to her day-to-day work as treasurer of the Multnomah County Democrats – Calvo is holding true to what she believes to be the purpose, and the promise, of the Democratic party.

“I don’t see ENDA and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” act and the “Defense of Marriage Act” and marriage equality issues as being different things; I think the genesis of it all is equality, and until that point where everybody is equal and playing on the same field, we need to band together and work towards that,” she says. “Those who oppose us have a strategy to divide us by color, by who we love – and it’s worked in the past. But everybody is getting a little wiser about that.”

“I don’t see myself as a transgender person of color. I see myself as just somebody out there trying to do the right thing. In that respect, when I take a step back and realize I am a trans person of color and a Latina and a lesbian on top of that, I realize: Wow, that’s pretty cool. To be able to do the things I do, and live the life I live and to be happy and see hope for a brighter future – that wasn’t always the case,” she says.

Talking religion: Chris Burns

When Seattle University student Chris Burns was contemplating how to come out about his transition to his parents, he, naturally, turned to an LGBT support group on campus called the Triangle Club. There, he was told “families of color don’t really understand this kind of stuff” and was handed a pamphlet on “how to talk to (basically) bigoted Baptist people. I said – but my mom is Catholic and my dad is just Christian – and the Triangle Club told me the pamphlet would work because they’re black.”

Burns, 23, explains his transition three years ago as pretty much “a pronoun change and a hair cut.” Before college, he struggled to find a gender identity that felt comfortable, since he considered himself at times to be “high-femme” and wasn’t interested in sexual reassignment surgery, but also didn’t identify with female pronouns anymore. During Gender Awareness Week on his college campus in 2005, he was introduced to an individual who “identified as male even though he had breasts – and I thought – that’s me! I’m trans too,” Burns says.

Studying at a Catholic school in Renton, Burns’ experiences around gender identity began in kindergarten, when he asked a teacher how to spell “Chris” instead of his birth name. In the third grade, he kissed a girl during recess and a few of his classmates told the teacher, who then scrapped the lesson for the day and lectured on the “evils of homosexuality,” using Burns as her example. But family was never really an issue as Burns began to adjust socially to having a different sexual orientation and gender identity than his peers.

“I think there are lots of families out there who don’t get credit for being accepting – the ones that aren’t accepting get the press. My mom catches herself when she says ‘she’ and corrects herself, and that’s awesome,” he says. He notes that families of color may be perceived to be intolerant of gender non-normative identities because of a longstanding history with the Christian faith – but that sexuality, and particularly homosexuality, is more addressed by the church than gender identity and expression is.

“There is a lack of education around gender identity, and I want to acknowledge that some people I’ve known have had bad experiences with church and gender expression. But sometimes, the ignorance can be a helpful thing, since it’s more a person’s feeling that gauges (acceptance), rather than a church doctrine,” Burns says.

He is pretty open about his relationship with religion – he identifies as pan-religious, deeply spiritual – and sees where his own gender identity fits within this construct. “I have always felt that God interacted with me as a male, and I knew that God was accepting of me, and I never had issues with that,” he says.

With help from a couple of transgender friends and a mentor from Seattle University, Burns started up a trans Bible study to explore sexuality and gender identity within the Bible, which he hopes will broaden out as a queer Bible study group in the near future. Through his experience discussing religion, race and gender in this setting, he’s able to pinpoint key passages that show “gender bending” in a positive light. He points to the example of Jesus washing the feet of the Disciples, which he explains was “gender bending – he was going across gender, race and class boundaries.”

Burns recommends Mark 14:12-16: Jesus instructs the Disciples to find the room for the Last Supper, where a donkey and a man carrying water on his head would be waiting. “Carrying water on the head was a “woman’s” work, so this could have been a transgender man or a gender-bending person,” Burns says. “God foresaw that a transgender person had a place in His plan, so why not the rest of us?”

Currently, Burns is preparing a session he’ll present to his study group on race and religion, identifying where the Bible is racist and where it promotes good racial politics.

As a newly transitioned male, Burns continues to navigate the experience of a pronoun change, even though his body remains quite feminine. The process of his transition will take longer than for those who start looking and sounding like the “typical male” – and it likely will always be a conversation he’ll have to navigate. “I happen to be a guy with breasts and a vagina, and I love them, but I do get a lot of question marks,” he explains.

But, there are two sides to this equation. “It’s different being perceived as a black man in society than it is being perceived as a black female, and I kind of look like I’m more on the female side,” Burns says. He has heard different experiences from black gay male friends, who when walking down the streets see white women clutching their purses. “That’s an experience of manhood that I probably won’t have, just because I have breasts.”

As for his own campus climate, he says it’s been a positive place to transition. His professors and on-campus co-workers switched their use of pronouns almost immediately, and people who don’t know about trans issues seem eager to learn. “I think that society is progressing; some places are more positive than others. Things are definitely opening up and I like being a part of that,” he says.

Talking Health, and Healthy Attitudes:
Vanessa Grandberry

Vanessa Grandberry has heard it all. Twelve years as a hairdresser and seven years in HIV education will teach you how to relate to people of all backgrounds, she explains. She’s learned about the importance of confidentiality, about self-hate, about transphobia even within the trans community. “I got caught up in all of my clients and friends, though I never called them clients – just called them friends,” she says.

Over the course of her work at POCAAN in Seattle, “I lost so many over the years (due to HIV infection) and it’s a drainer. Some people who have been in prevention so long just get jaded – it gets to you and you wonder if what you are doing is in vain, or if you really are reaching somebody. It’s humbling, and affirming,” Grandberry says.

In her work with trans women, Grandberry knew that HIV education involved more than a condom and a wave out the door. “You have to deal with the issues that lead to people becoming infected and put people at risk; you have to take a holistic approach with prevention,” she says. Her work involved looking at issues of loneliness and internalized self-hatred – which she points out that not all trans women feel – that the ones most at risk for HIV typically do. Of those women, a majority will stay in abusive relationships or fall into “survival sex” work.

A 2004 report by the Eliminating Disparities Work Group shows that there is a rash of violence directed against transgender people in the United States, particularly trans women of color, 27 percent of whom have been victims of violence at some point. Between 1973 and 2003, nearly 300 people were murdered in anti-trans violence in about 20 states and 89 cities, according to the “Remembering our Dead” project, which honors fallen transgender individuals each year with a Day of Silence in November.

Grandberry explores health education by narrowing in on how her clients feel, rather than how they look. “At the outset of my transition, I went through what many girls go through – it’s all about the physical and passing as a woman. I would basically put as much makeup on as I could to obliterate who I was and my own face,” she says.

But, she began to feel imprisoned by this trans identity, finding it was limiting and binding – and it wasn’t a good representation of who she was. “You do it to make people feel comfortable with you,” she says. “But there is a part of me that still has a masculine side – I see it, anyway.”

“There is a lot for us to overcome – as far as self love is concerned,” Grandberry says. She explains that we have to start looking at the experience of being transgender from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. “I’m not talking about makeup – I’m talking about who you are as a person,” she says.

Talking Youth: Mickey Balderas and Rej Joo

Changing the experience of transitioning – making it a welcome process and a celebrated process – is perhaps most realized when it starts from the bottom up. Youth who create community early in their transition can better realize a gender identity that fits. This certainly was true for Mickey Balderas, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Washington. Balderas, who is half Mexican and half white, was raised by his father in a small town near Port Townsend, Wash. Contrary to public belief, the small town environment was “really the best opportunity I could have had. There were a lot of experiences for leadership, and I knew the same kids from the time we were 8 until we were just under 20,” he says.

When he decided to transition and change his name, his classmates just accepted it. “I adjusted very quickly,” he remembers, though he never discussed his gender identity with his father, a single dad who died at the end of Balderas’ freshman year in high school. “I never came out to my father, but I got the idea that he knew. If he would have asked me, I wouldn’t have lied,” he says.

As Balderas moved on to college, he found a broader support group in Delta Lambda Phi, a national fraternity for gay, bisexual and progressive men. Interestingly, the national fraternity has a bylaw stating that only biological men are accepted into the fraternity, though the UW chapter, called Psi, changed the bylaw to include self-identifying men, which includes trans men. As far as Balderas knows, he is the only transgender male student in the UW chapter, though he is not the only student of color (the fraternity is majority Asian American).

As a freshman, Balderas dove headfirst into trans activism on campus. He’s part of about three or four queer and trans interest and support groups on campus (one for queer people of color), and has been working with a senior trans student to get transgender healthcare covered by the student health insurance plan on campus. As this student graduates, Balderas will step into her position to see the change through next year. “I have big shoes to fill,” he says.

The communities he’s formed are also helping Balderas reconnect to his Mexican and Latino identities, which he has felt disconnected from because he doesn’t speak Spanish and “appears very white.” He has thought about studying abroad in a Spanish-speaking country, but isn’t sure how being trans might affect the home-stay process.

“In my high school, I was the only trans person I knew. Now, I want to humanize the experience – a trans person isn’t just somebody who walks through a sex change,” Balderas says of his goal to gain greater visibility for trans students on campus.

As a youth, Rej Joo, of Portland’s Outside In, juggled finding the space where he was comfortable as an ethnic minority and as trans. In the end, he found it easier to be an Asian man in a predominantly white queer space, than a trans man in an Asian support space. This isn’t true for all trans people of color, he notes. “In either space, I just feel a bit off, but either way I choose, I am more equipped to deal with racism. I am just tired of dealing with transphobia and homophobia.”

Through Outside In, Joo has been working on a pilot project funded by the United Way, which identifies specific needs from the LGBT homeless youth population in Portland. A recent report issued by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that about 40 percent of homeless youth identify as a sexual or gender minority. “We had to ask ourselves – how can we reduce the level of homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism in our own services?”

On the most basic level, Joo says primary understanding is built through sensitivity to pronoun use, and not treating the trans body as a public body. “I’m tired (of) people focusing on trans experience and body around surgery only. It’s time to be able to step back and ask the other more meaningful questions about their experience,” he explains. “It’s a way of really respecting a person’s gender identity, instead of their gender body.”