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Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue
Author	Leslie Feinberg
Publisher	Beacon press
First published	1999
Source	https://transreads.org/trans-liberation-beyond-pink-or-blue/

Dedications

Dedicated with my love to the memory of revolutionary leader Dorothy "Dotty" Ballan who urged me to develop a vocabulary of persuasion

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number —

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep hadfallen on you —

Ye are many — they are few.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

We Are All Works in Progress

The sight of pink-blue gender-coded infant outfits may grate on your nerves. Or you may be a woman or a man who feels at home in those categories. Trans liberation defends you both.

Each person should have the right to choose between pink or blue tinted gender categories, as well as all the other hues of the palette. At this moment in time, that right is denied to us. But together, we could make it a reality.

And that's what this book is all about.

I am a human being who would rather not be addressed as Ms. or Mr., ma'am or sir. I prefer to use gender-neutral pronouns like sie (pronounced like "see") and hir (pronounced like "here") to describe myself. I am a person who faces almost insurmountable difficulty when instructed to check off an "f" or an "m" box on identification papers.

I'm not at odds with the fact that I was born female-bodied. Nor do I identify as an intermediate sex. I simply do not fit the prevalent Western concepts of what a woman or a man "should" look like. And that reality has dramatically directed the course of my life.

I'll give you a graphic example. From December 1995 to December 1996, I was dying of endocarditis — a bacterial infection that lodges and proliferates in the valves of the heart. A simple blood culture would have immediately exposed the root cause of my raging fevers. Eight weeks of 'round-the-clock intravenous antibiotic drips would have eradicated every last seedling of bacterium in the canals of my heart. Yet I experienced such hatred from some health practitioners that I very nearly died.

I remember late one night in December my lover and I arrived at a hospital emergency room during a snowstorm. My fever was 104 degrees and rising. My blood pressure was pounding dangerously high. The staff immediately hooked me up to monitors and worked to bring down my fever. The doctor in charge began physically examining me. When he determined that my anatomy was female, he flashed me a mean-spirited smirk. While keeping his eyes fixed on me, he approached one of the nurses, seated at a desk, and began rubbing her neck and shoulders. He talked to her about sex for a few minutes. After his pointed demonstration of "normal sexuality," he told me to get dressed and then he stormed out of the room. Still delirious, I struggled to put on my clothes and make sense of what was happening.

The doctor returned after I was dressed. He ordered me to leave the hospital and never return. I refused. I told him I wouldn't leave until he could tell me why my fever was so high. He said, "You have a fever because you are a very troubled person."

This doctor's prejudices, directed at me during a moment of catastrophic illness, could have killed me. The death certificate would have read: Endocarditis. By all rights it should have read: Bigotry.

As my partner and I sat bundled up in a cold car outside the emergency room, still reverberating from the doctor's hatred, I thought about how many people have been turned away from medical care when they were desperately ill—some because an apartheid "whites only" sign hung over the emergency room entrance, or some because their visible Kaposi's sarcoma lesions kept personnel far from their beds. I remembered how a blemish that wouldn't heal drove my mother to visit her doctor repeatedly during the 1950s. I recalled the doctor finally wrote a prescription for Valium because he decided she was a hysterical woman. When my mother finally got to specialists, they told her the cancer had already reached her brain.

Bigotry exacts its toll in flesh and blood. And left unchecked and unchallenged, prejudices create a poisonous climate for us all. Each of us has a stake in the demand that every human being has a right to a job, to shelter, to health care, to dignity, to respect.

I am very grateful to have this chance to open up a conversation with you about why it is so vital to also defend the right of individuals to express and define their sex and gender, and to control their own bodies. For me, it's a life-and-death question. But I also believe that this discussion will have great meaning for you. All your life you've heard such dogma about what it means to be a "real" woman or a "real" man. And chances are you've choked on some of it. You've balked at the idea that being a woman means having to be thin as a rail, emotionally nurturing, and an airhead when it comes to balancing her checkbook. You know in your guts that being a man has nothing to do with rippling muscles, innate courage, or knowing how to handle a chain saw. These are really caricatures. Yet these images have been drilled into us through popular culture and education over the years. And subtler, equally insidious messages lurk in the interstices of these grosser concepts. These ideas of what a "real" woman or man should be straight jacket the freedom of individual self-expression. These gender messages play on and on in a continuous loop in our brains, like commercials that can't be muted.

But in my lifetime I've also seen social upheavals challenge this sex and gender doctrine. As a child who grew up during the McCarthyite, Father-Knows-Best 1950s, and who came of age during the second wave of women's liberation in the United States, I've seen transformations in the ways people think and talk about what it means to be a woman or a man.

Today the gains of the 1970s women's liberation movement are under siege by right-wing propagandists. But many today who are too young to remember what life was like before the women's movement need to know that this was a tremendously progressive development that won significant economic and social reforms. And this struggle by women and their allies swung human consciousness forward like a pendulum.

The movement replaced the common usage of vulgar and diminutive words to describe females with the word woman and infused that word with strength and pride. Women, many of them formerly isolated, were drawn together into consciousness-raising groups. Their discussions — about the root of women's oppression and how to eradicate it—resonated far beyond the rooms in which they took place. The women's liberation movement sparked a mass conversation about the systematic degradation, violence, and discrimination that women faced in this society. And this consciousness raising changed many of the ways women and men thought about themselves and their relation to each other. In retrospect, however, we must not forget that these widespread discussions were not just organized to talk about oppression. They were a giant dialogue about how to take action to fight institutionalized anti-woman attitudes, rape and battering, the illegality of abortion, employment and education discrimination, and other ways women were socially and economically devalued.

This was a big step forward for humanity. And even the period of political reaction that followed has not been able to overturn all the gains made by that important social movement.

Now another movement is sweeping onto the stage of history: Trans liberation. We are again raising questions about the societal treatment of people based on their sex and gender expression. This discussion will make new contributions to human consciousness. And trans communities, like the women's movement, are carrying out these mass conversations with the goal of creating a movement capable of fighting for justice — of righting the wrongs.

We are a movement of masculine females and feminine males, cross-dressers, transsexual men and women, intersexuals born on the anatomical sweep between female and male, gender-blenders, many other sex and gender-variant people, and our significant others. All told, we expand understanding of how many ways there are to be a human being.

Our lives are proof that sex and gender are much more complex than a delivery room doctor's glance at genitals can determine, more variegated than pink or blue birth caps. We are oppressed for not fitting those narrow social norms. We are fighting back.

Our struggle will also help expose some of the harmful myths about what it means to be a woman or a man that have compartmentalized and distorted your life, as well as mine. Trans liberation has meaning for you—no matter how you define or express your sex or your gender.

If you are a trans person, you face horrendous social punishments — from institutionalization to gang rape, from beatings to denial of child visitation. This oppression is faced, in varying degrees, by all who march under the banner of trans liberation. This brutalization and degradation strips us of what we could achieve with our individual lifetimes.

And if you do not identify as transgender or transsexual or intersexual, your life is diminished by our oppression as well. Your own choices as a man or a woman are sharply curtailed. Your individual journey to express yourself is shunted into one of two deeply carved ruts, and the social baggage you are handed is already packed.

So the defense of each individual's right to control their own body, and to explore the path of self-expression, enhances your own freedom to discover more about yourself and your potentialities. This movement will give you more room to breathe - to be yourself. To discover on a deeper level what it means to be your self.

Together, I believe we can forge a coalition that can fight on behalf of your oppression as well as mine. Together, we can raise each other's grievances and win the kind of significant change we all long for. But the foundation of unity is understanding. So let me begin by telling you a little bit about myself.

I am a human being who unnerves some people. As they look at me, they see a kaleidoscope of characteristics they associate with both males and females. I appear to be a tangled knot of gender contradictions. So they feverishly press the question on me: woman or man? Those are the only two words most people have as tools to shape their question.

"Which sex are you?" I understand their question. It sounds so simple. And I'd like to offer them a simple resolution. But merely answering woman or man will not bring relief to the questioner. As long as people try to bring me into focus using only those two lenses, I will always appear to be an enigma.

The truth is I'm no mystery. I'm a female who is more masculine than those prominently portrayed in mass culture. Millions of females and millions of males in this country do not fit the cramped compartments of gender that we have been taught are "natural" and "normal." For many of us, the words woman or man, ma'am or sir, she or he — in and of themselves — do not total up the sum of our identities or of our oppressions. Speaking for myself, my life only comes into focus when the word transgender is added to the equation.

Simply answering whether I was born female or male will not solve the conundrum. Before I can even begin to respond to the question of my own birth sex, I feel it's important to challenge the assumption that the answer is always as simple as either-or. I believe we need to take a critical look at the assumption that is built into the seemingly innocent question: "What a beautiful baby—is it a boy or a girl?"

The human anatomical spectrum can't be understood, let alone appreciated, as long as female or male are considered to be all that exists. "Is it a boy or a girl?" Those are the only two categories allowed on birth certificates.

But this either-or leaves no room for intersexual people, born between the poles of female and male. Human anatomy continues to burst the confines of the contemporary concept that nature delivers all babies on two unrelated conveyor belts. So are the birth certificates changed to reflect human anatomy? No, the U.S. medical establishment hormonally molds and shapes and surgically hacks away at the exquisite complexities of intersexual infants until they neatly fit one category or the other.

A surgeon decides whether a clitoris is "too large" or a penis is "too small." That's a highly subjective decision for anyone to make about another person's body. Especially when the person making the arbitrary decision is scrubbed up for surgery! And what is the criterion for a penis being "too small"? Too small for successful heterosexual intercourse. Intersexual infants are already being tailored for their sexuality, as well as their sex. The infants have no say over what happens to their bodies. Clearly the struggle against genital mutilation must begin here, within the borders of the United States.

But the question asked of all new parents: "Is it a boy or a girl?" is not such a simple question when transsexuality is taken into account, either. Legions of out-and-proud transsexual men and women demonstrate that individuals have a deep, developed, and valid sense of their own sex that does not always correspond to the cursory decision made by a delivery-room obstetrician. Nor is transsexuality a recent phenomenon. People have undergone social sex reassignment and surgical and hormonal sex changes throughout the breadth of oral and recorded human history.

Having offered this view of the complexities and limitations of birth classification, I have no hesitancy in saying I was born female. But that answer doesn't clear up the confusion that drives some people to ask me "Are you a man or a woman? " The problem is that they are trying to understand my gender expression by determining my sex — and therein lies the rub! Just as most of us grew up with only the concepts of woman and man, the terms feminine and masculine are the only two tools most people have to talk about the complexities of gender expression.

That pink-blue dogma assumes that biology steers our social destiny. We have been taught that being born female or male will determine how we will dress and walk, whether we will prefer our hair shortly cropped or long and flowing, whether we will be emotionally nurturing or repressed. According to this way of thinking, masculine females are trying to look "like men," and feminine males are trying to act "like women."

But those of us who transgress those gender assumptions also shatter their inflexibility.

So why do I sometimes describe myself as a masculine female? Isn't each of those concepts very limiting? Yes. But placing the two words together is incendiary, exploding the belief that gender expression is linked to birth sex like horse and carriage. It is the social contradiction missing from Dick-and-Jane textbook education.

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape.

And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine. To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write.

That is why I do not hold the view that gender is simply a social construct — one of two languages that we learn by rote from early age. To me, gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught. When I walk through the anthology of the world, I see individuals express their gender in exquisitely complex and ever-changing ways, despite the laws of pentameter.

So how can gender expression be mandated by edict and enforced by law? Isn't that like trying to handcuff a pool of mercury? It's true that human self-expression is diverse and is often expressed in ambiguous or contradictory ways. And what degree of gender expression is considered "acceptable" can depend on your social situation, your race and nationality, your class, and whether you live in an urban or rural environment.

But no one can deny that rigid gender education begins early on in life—from pink and blue color-coding of infant outfits to genderlabeling toys and games. And those who overstep these arbitrary borders are punished. Severely. When the steel handcuffs tighten, it is human bones that crack. No one knows how many trans lives have been lost to police brutality and street-corner bashing. The lives of trans people are so depreciated in this society that many murders go unreported. And those of us who have survived are deeply scarred by daily run-ins with hate, discrimination, and violence.

Trans people are still literally social outlaws. And that's why I am willing at times, publicly, to reduce the totality of my self-expression to descriptions like masculine female, butch, bulldagger, drag king, cross-dresser. These terms describe outlaw status. And I hold my head up proudly in that police lineup. The word outlaw is not hyperbolic. I have been locked up in jail by cops because I was wearing a suit and tie. Was my clothing really a crime? Is it a "man's" suit if I am wearing it? At what point — from field to rack — is fiber assigned a sex?

The reality of why I was arrested was as cold as the cell's cement floor: I am considered a masculine female. That's a gender violation. My feminine drag queen sisters were in nearby cells, busted for wearing "women's" clothing. The cells that we were thrown into had the same design of bars and concrete. But when we — gay drag kings and drag queens — were thrown into them, the cops referred to the cells as bull's tanks and queen's tanks. The cells were named after our crimes: gender transgression. Actual statutes against cross-dressing and cross-gendered behavior still exist in written laws today. But even where the laws are not written down, police, judges, and prison guards are empowered to carry out merciless punishment for sex and gender "difference."

I believe we need to sharpen our view of how repression by the police, courts, and prisons, as well as all forms of racism and bigotry, operates as gears in the machinery of the economic and social system that governs our lives. As all those who have the least to lose from changing this system get together and examine these social questions, we can separate the wheat of truths from the chaff of old lies. Historic tasks are revealed that beckon us to take a stand and to take action.

That moment is now. And so this conversation with you takes place with the momentum of struggle behind it.

What will it take to put a halt to "legal" and extralegal violence against trans people? How can we strike the unjust and absurd laws mandating dress and behavior for females and males from the books? How can we weed out all the forms of trans-phobic and gender-phobic discrimination?

Where does the struggle for sex and gender liberation fit in relation to other movements for economic and social equality? How can we reach a point where we appreciate each other's differences, not just tolerate them? How can we tear down the electrified barbed wire that has been placed between us to keep us separated, fearful and pitted against each other? How can we forge a movement that can bring about profound and lasting change — a movement capable of transforming society?

These questions can only be answered when we begin to organize together, ready to struggle on each other's behalf. Understanding each other will compel us as honest, caring people to fight each other's oppression as though it was our own.

This book is one of my contributions to this societal discussion. Many of the chapters are adaptations of talks I gave in the spring of 1997, as I set out on the rocky road to recover my health. In the weeks after the last intravenous tubes were removed from my arms and chest, I emerged from illness like a resistance fighter climbing up from a sewer into the sunlight. I faced a calendar filled with opportunities to speak with people at universities, conferences, and rallies. That particular spring was a precious gift I could not take for granted. I'd fought so hard to live.

I remember the enormous physical effort it took to lug my suitcase off a conveyor belt, to walk long distances through crowded airports. But I also remember amazing conversations I had with many wonderful individuals. I found people were ready to talk about sex and gender liberation in every part of the United States I visited -from Manhattan to Tallahassee, from Birmingham to Denver. I was moved by the emotional and enthusiastic responses I received from audiences in Berlin, Leipzig, Koln, and Hamburg, Germany.

Some of those speeches are included in this book. I've prefaced l hem with a description of the circumstances, audiences, and surroundings, so that you can feel yourself a part of it. I've also included the voices of other trans people — each of whom I deeply respect. These trans people have different identities, experiences, and viewpoints from mine, so you can hear the wider conversation that is now underway.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Be conversant with transformation." This book is my voice in this conversation. I look forward to hearing yours.

Allow Me to Introduce Myself

As I stood at the podium to deliver the luncheon keynote at the 9th annual Texas "T" (Transgender) Party in Richardson, Texas, I faced 350 heterosexual cross-dressed males and their spouses. I was the only person in a suit and tie in a room filled with people in dresses. For me, it was an emotionally moving and beautiful moment. I am a cross-dresser. In that sense, I was brother to a room filled with my sisters—male and female. The oppression battled by my spouse, Minnie Bruce, was also deeply understood by those in this room.

One aspect of what makes the annual Texas "T" Party so important is that it brings together bi-gender cross-dressers and their partners — a vast, hidden segment of humanity submerged by oppression.

But the Texas "T" makes another essential contribution. It creates a safe space to bring together people whose lives have been lived in isolation and fear. That’s a monumental feat. Part of what made the event feel so safe was that the organizers did such a great job winning over the hotel staff that all the workers wore Texas "T" ribbons and were warm and welcoming to us throughout our stay.

This event offers us the puberty and senior prom we missed. And it’s a week long model of a society in which gender freedom is defended. The Texas "T" is a remarkable achievement that may enjoy more recognition for its contributions from generations to come than we realize today.

This event is largely carried out through the labor and strength of three organizers — Linda Phillips, Cynthia Phillips', and Bonnie "B." Cynthia and Bonnie were born female. Linda lives full-time as a woman. Linda and Cynthia have been married for 40years. They share an extraordinary love that is visibly robust. For nine years these three remarkable people have worked like oxen to pull off these successful events. Linda and Cynthia also manage to run the Boulton and Park Society for heterosexual male cross-dressers, issue a regular newsletter, and maintain a Web site.

Most of the cross-dressers who attend this event might be described as bi-gender, meaning they have two important components of their identity—a feminine and a masculine side. A few may identify as bisexual, or would prefer to live as out, full-time transgenderists, or secretly dream of sex-reassignment. However, it is necessary to accept that there are tens of thousands of people in this country—perhaps millions — who want to express both a masculine and a feminine side — and many, many of those people are heterosexual.

Like closeted lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, a large segment of the bi-gender population has lived in airless, confining closets of shame. That's another reason I knew I was in a room with people who understood my own oppression. We did not all have to articulate the guilt, humiliation, or fear of sexual violence that had marred our lives. It was verbalized in our body language; it shone in our eyes.

I knew that the day after this keynote, when suitcases were packed and hotel rooms paid for, when the dresses and the wigs were hidden in luggage, that many of the people in this room would appear to be very different. They would stand around the breakfast atrium in jeans and chinos and two-piece suits. To a casual observer, they might look like other masculine men.

But when this event ends, tears will stream down the cheeks of many of these men. A few will sob because they are going home to a wrenching divorce. Their wives, who did not attend this joyful event, could no longer live with the isolation and the oppression. Others will weep because these are the only days out of their entire lives that they could be themselves — and the event is over.

If you looked at their hands you would see that it is so painful for these males to pack away half of their gender expression — one-half of who they are as human beings — that many will not have removed their red nail polish. When nail polish remover has erased the last visible trace of their transgender, will they be distinguishable from other masculine men? The pain and shame will still linger in the way some hold their bodies, or drop their eyes during conversations. But with others you might never know. What an important reminder that there are a lot of assumptions we make everyday about people based solely on whether they are female or male. Assumptions about consciousness, experience, relationship to oppression, and potential as allies. And those presumptions are not always true.

As I looked out over the Texas "T" audience, I thought about what it was that I wanted to stress. There were two things. First, that women's oppression can't be effectively fought without incorporating the battle against gender oppression. The two systems of oppression are intricately linked. And the populations of women and trans people overlap.

I believe that the lives of many of the cross-dressers and their spouses at this event will be enriched by drawing experience and consciousness from the women's movement. While many males in society think of females as inferior, many of the cross-dressing males at this event think of women as superior. They idealize women and put them on a pedestal. Of course, some women also glorify what it means to be a woman.

But the oppression of women and trans people in this society has led many of us to the same questions. What does it mean to be a woman or a man? Is that different from being female or male? How many variations of sex and gender expression exist? How many of those permutations are socially punished? How do those forms of oppression affect consciousness?

The answers to those questions will be very valuable for both our movements. So one message I wanted to bring to this gathering was the importance of building alliances between the women’s and trans liberation movements.

But there was another message I wanted to deliver that I thought was of paramount importance at this historical moment: The lives of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals overlap with the lives of trans people of all sexualities. I was facing an audience who had been told all their lives that men who wore dresses were drag queens who were sexually attracted to men. I knew these heterosexual cross-dressers risked losing the women partners they loved because of this societal assumption that they are gay.

My own life and consciousness straddles the trans communities and the lesbian, gay, and bi communities. I can feel the muscle we could flex if we could fight back together against all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and bashing. And I wanted each person in this room — cross-dresser and partner alike — to feel the potential strength of that coalition.

And so as I began to speak, unity was the most important issue on my mind. The room grew quiet. Food service workers slipped out of the kitchen to listen. No ice clinked in glasses; no forks clanked on plates. As I talked about the connections between our lives, virtually the only sound was of soft sobs as some partners cried quietly into their napkins or on each other’s shoulders.

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Leslie Feinberg— you can call me Les. I am a masculine, lesbian, female-to-male cross-dresser and transgenderist. Because I was raised as a female in this woman-hating society, my consciousness has been shaped by some of the experiences that girls and women of all nationalities generally share in the dominant society. In addition, being a very masculine female has also subjected me to experiences that neither non-trans women or men face.

I support the right of all people to self-determination of their own bodies. I am a resolute ally in defense of transsexual women and men and intersexuals, and in the struggle for women’s rights to reproductive freedom. However, I do not personally identify as a man, so I don’t believe I should have to change my body to "match" my gender expression so that the authorities can feel comfortable.

Being a masculine female means I am uni-gendered, not bi-gendered. So I have been "out" all my life. That places me — like millions of other masculine females and feminine males - in the social category of "pronoun-challenged." Please feel free to refer to me as "he" in this transgender setting, since in doing so you are honoring my gender expression.

Outside the trans communities, many people refer to me as "she," which is also correct. Using that pronoun to describe me challenges generalizations about how "all women" act and express themselves. In a non-trans setting, calling me "he" renders my transgender invisible.

I would like to live in a world in which I would be described as "Les Feinberg." But I live in a society in which I will never fit either of the little stick figures on public bathroom signs, and I cannot shoehorn myself into either the "m" or "f" box on document applications. Does the "m" or "f" on a driver’s license mean Male or Female, Masculine or Feminine? Those who created the M-or-F boxes may think the two are one and the same, since the contemporary dictate is that females will grow up to be feminine and boys to be masculine. But we in this room are all living proof of the gender variance that exists in our society and societies throughout human history.

So I — and millions like me — are caught in a social contradiction. It’s legally accurate to check off the "f" on my driver’s license permit. But imagine if a state trooper stops me for a taillight violation. He (they have always been he in my experience) sees an "f" on my license but when he shines his flashlight on my face he sees an "m." Now I’m in the middle of a nightmare over a traffic infraction. So I marked down "m" on my driver’s license application for my own safety. I can be fined and jailed for that simple checkmark with my pen.

I am someone who loves to travel. There isn’t a single spot on this planet I don’t long to see and explore. But the M-or-F boxes on passport applications kept me under virtual "house arrest" in this country for most of my life.

So I called the State Department official in charge of the categories on passports and asked her what transgender people like myself were supposed to do. She said if I could provide letters from a psychiatrist and a surgeon detailing that I was a transsexual man and had completed genital surgery, I could check off the "m" box. I explained that this policy was the result of an important legal victory won by transsexual men and women, but it did not apply to millions of us who were transgender.

I added that unless the State Department required the same letters from all passport applicants, this was in effect an illegal strip search of trans people. She replied that 1 had to check off the "f" box for my own protection because it was based on how passport agents saw my sex.

Well, based on that tidbit, I decided to see how passport agents did view me. I was lucky enough to get one of the new short-form birth certificates. As states transfer information from handwritten birth records to computer, some offer short forms that only include name, date, and place of birth. (I am aware that this is only helpful to those with gender ambiguous birth names.)

I checked off the "m" box on my application and handed it to the passport agency clerk. She looked at me, processed my application, and two weeks later my passport arrived in the mail — as male.

I became a felon at the same time. It’s actually a felony to check off the "m" box if you were born female. But I’m not afraid. If I am arrested at any time because of my identification papers, I’ll let our communities everywhere know. We are all vulnerable where our identification documents are concerned. I think we could make a hell of a fight out of such an arrest by demanding the M-or-F boxes be removed from documents like passports and driver’s licenses.

Authorities like to say such rules cannot be changed. But when I was a kid, I was required to put down my race on documents. That was mandatory—until the Civil Rights and Black liberation movements challenged the racist underpinnings. Then the authorities were forced to remove the "race" box.

What I want to know is why do we have to have an M-or-F box on an application for a document that has a photo? Isn’t that the most complex and compelling form of identification? Passport agents don’t need a description of anyone’s genitals or gender identity. They are just empowered to determine that the traveler and passport match. There’s no reason, for example, that a bi-gender person cannot be issued two pieces of identification with photos that reflect both aspects of who they are. I think this is just one example of the ways that communities who don’t share the same identities can join in a common struggle for change that will benefit everyone.

That’s really the single point I want to stress today. I am a gay, female, cross-dressing transgenderist. I believe that I — and my communities—can be important allies for you as heterosexual crossdressers and partners. The only question is: Have we reached the moment in history where this dialogue between our communities can begin?

Misconceptions have been a barrier between our communities. In order to have any real dialogue, it means we must all listen carefully to each other. I eagerly read every bit of writing I can find — from Gender Euphoria to Renaissance to Monmouth Ocean County Transgender Newsletter — to listen to your communities in order to understand more. Yet in conversations last night with cross-dressers and partners, I learned still more.

I’ve also heard many misunderstandings about lesbian and gay cross-dressers. I think that is natural. All of us have been given a textbook definition that, unlike drag queens, heterosexual crossdressers are "normal in every other way." Many of us have been taught to identify ourselves by what we are not. But it’s not a satisfying definition and almost always hurts the people we are defining away from. I believe we should strive for positive self-definition and also defend each other’s self-identification as rigorously as we do our own.

Let me try to explain a little about the misunderstandings about lesbian and gay cross-dressers that I hear in this society, from my own point of view. I know that many think of sexuality as the organizing drive of lesbian and gay cross-dressing communities. That’s not completely true. In actuality, our gender expression has been the primary driving force of cohesion.

The gay and lesbian drag communities - particularly those of us who are uni-gender—have always been "out." We are hounded virtually everywhere we go in public because of our gender expression. So we created collective forms of organization that w'ere relatively public and "above-ground." The gay bars I first discovered in the 1960s in Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and southern Ontario were also transgender bars. They were filled with masculine females, feminine males, and our partners — who had their own highly stylized gender expression. A masculine female was referred to as "butch"; a feminine male as a "queen." If we cross-dressed, we were referred to as "drag."

Drag queens and drag kings are gay and lesbian cross-dressers.

There are bi-gendered lesbian and gay cross-dressers. But those of us who were uni-gendered fought back alone in public everywhere we went. So the only relief we could find was with each other and those who loved us. Our love was illegal - and still is in many states — and our gender expression made us outlaws, too. So we forged alliances, friendships, support, and love in community. The bars were not a peaceful, safe haven. They could be raided at any moment by cops or gangs. But we found relative safety in numbers in public. That fact has shaped our drag cultures dramatically.

Many people in this society have been taught that drag queens and drag kings exaggerate femininity and masculinity to the point of caricature. I vehemently disagree. You can find many styles and degrees of gender expression within the lesbian and gay drag communities. But each person’s expression of their gender or genders is their own and equally beautiful. To refer to anyone’s gender expression as exaggerated is insulting and restricts gender freedom.

If it is true that drag queens as a whole represent a larger percentage of high-femme expression — and I’m not sure that is a fact - there may be other factors to explain it. The public organization of gay drag life has attracted masculine females and feminine males who are brutally oppressed because of the degree of their gender expression.

And the gay drag community has been a space to explore self-expression. During puberty, most non-trans people had an opportunity to develop their self-expression, shaped in part by social feedback. Many trans people — straight, bisexual, and gay — never had that experience. Their self-expression emerged in isolation. So the gay drag community became the trunk in the attic filled with dresses and ties, boas and fedoras, high heels and wing-tip brogues. It became a place to try on your dreams in front of a community mirror and see if they fit.

And the gay drag community is so ferociously oppressed that high-femme and stone butch expression are also signs of courageous defiance — "I am not altering myself by an atom, no matter what you say or do to me!" That was the message that drag queens and drag kings delivered to the police who raided the Stonewall bar in New York City in June 1969. The raid ignited a four-night-long rebellion against police brutality. And that uprising, in turn sparked the gay liberation movement.

There is another factor that impacts on gender expression in drag culture. Some gay transgenderists found a way to scrape together a living and still be themselves by working in theater. Trans expression has shaped theater, and in turn theater — including modern vaudeville, burlesque, and Broadway—has left its imprint on many gay drag cultures. It has given those of us who walk through the world feeling despised the freedom to perform before cheering, appreciative audiences. Drag queens appear on stage dressed with spectacular flair and panache, wearing sequins and feathers, as do many female performers. As drag kings, we often performed in tuxedoes and tails. No one expects performance artists—from Judy Garland to Fred Astaire - to appear on stage in jeans and sneakers, or other everyday clothing.

I never describe anyone’s gender expression as exaggerated. Since I don’t accept negative judgments about my own gender articulation, I avoid judgments about others. People of all sexes have the right to explore femininity, masculinity - and the infinite variations between — without criticism or ridicule.

We, as cross-dressers—gay, bisexual, and straight—and our partners, have a stake in challenging restrictive attitudes toward human behavior and self-expression. And I believe that combating every form of prejudice against lesbian, gay, and bisexual love has importance for all of us here, as well.

For example, there’s a snake lurking in the definition that "straight cross-dressers, unlike drag queens, are normal in every other way" that will bite you if you reach for it. Does that mean that you or your partner are not "normal" some of the time? No! I am looking at wonderful, courageous human beings.

I want to stress that I understand there is a unique and awesome pressure that has made it difficult for us as gay and straight crossdressers to get together to talk about our differences and similarities. And that is because cross-dressing has always been socially synonymous with gayness. I think this misconception is based on the fact that uni-gender lesbian and gay cross-dressers were socially visible and organized at a time when most bi-gender, heterosexual cross-dressers were isolated or members of "underground" organizations.

So I want to talk to you about what I think is the deepest problem that has kept us apart. And if I make mistakes, please understand that I am still learning about your lives.

I understand the rage you must feel when someone claims that your identity is an expression of shame—that you are gay and won’t admit it. And I have thought a lot lately about what it must feel like to have one person in the world who loves you. Who you yearn for sexually. And who you fear will spurn you and leave you if they mistakenly think that your sexuality has changed — that you must be gay.

I talked about how the gay cross-dressing community has been shaped by being an above-ground, community-based group. But the heterosexual cross-dressing experience has all too often been shaped in isolation. I can barely allow myself to imagine the loneliness of a male who can only see her feminine reflection in a motel mirror in a strange town twice a year. The pain of a husband who thinks to herself everyday - my wife thinks she loves me, but she doesn’t know the real me. Would she still love me if she knew? Would she stay?

I have followed the discussion in your community about the ethics of telling or not telling your wives and partners. It is not my place to take a position in that internal debate.

I say to the wives here, I can understand how the disclosure after many years of intimacy can feel like a betrayal to you. But think about how deeply your spouse loves you for him to so fear losing you. You mean the world to us. For some of us, you are the only comfort and love and safety we have ever known. I feel nothing but compassion for both partners. In a society in which people could be themselves without fear of loss, humiliation, or brutality, who would not reveal themselves fully to the ones they love?

Of course you as cross-dressers have needed to stress to your wives over and over again that you are revealing twin aspects of your gender expression. That your sexuality has not changed. Perhaps there is a way to do that without using the phrase "I’m not gay" because those are such loaded words in an anti-gay society. I think what you are really trying to say is "You have been and you still are the person I desire." We all need to help in creating new words and concepts that say who we are, not who we aren’t.

And to the partners: What language is there for you? How do you deal with your gender preference for a masculine sexual partner, when your husband reveals a feminine side to you? How does that change the ways you express your sexuality? For you also it’s important to have fresh ways to think about yourself and your bond of sexuality with your partner. Some wives I have talked to tell me that their partner’s disclosure means they have to consider whether they are in a lesbian relationship. Others are exploring their own gender expression; some have also begun cross-dressing.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all support the understanding that gender expression does not determine sexuality, and then open up a discussion between our communities? Many in this room could benefit from being able to sit in workshops with lesbian and gay and bisexual cross-dressers and partners, and talk about how to free human sexuality from the paradigm that heterosexuality is normal and same-sex love is not.

After all, you may be legally married, but to Jesse Helms two partners in identical lingerie are not straight!

We have all been wounded in the ways we negotiate sex and intimacy; we fear communicating our needs and desires. Greater freedom to conceive the limitless potential of human sexuality, without shame, is an important and necessary contribution to all of humanity.

And we need more language than just feminine/masculine, straight / gay, either / or. Men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus. We all live on the same planet. The "separate planet" theories have been used to justify the discrimination, violence, and inequality women face. Everything that supports such spurious "theories" must be called into question. We need to refocus on defending the diversity in the world that already exists, and creating room for even more possibilities.

A person who lives as another gender—whether in a motel room twice a year or in a marriage, a flight of fantasy or a gay bar — challenges what it means to be male or female, what it means to be a man or a woman. Our partners share that confrontation. What is manliness or womanliness? What to keep? What to reject? Is there just one road to woman or to man? Is it common experience for African-American and white cross-dressers? Female-to-male or male-to-female cross-dressers? Corporate executive or sales clerk?

When we find the courage to live openly as who we are — trans people and partners — we begin a wild roller coaster ride. The weight of difficulties we endure as a result of our decision is a constant reminder of the unwavering force of social gravity. And no longer being tracked into "gender-appropriate" behavior and dress sends us hurtling into freefall because we are no longer able to easily define ourselves or our relationship to others.

But what a ride! Even at gunpoint, I would not choose a different path in life. My determination to remain a person who I can be proud of has made all of my views and insights and consciousness possible. It has made me see more clearly how many other lives in society are being limited through forms of discrimination and injustice. It has illuminated my relationship to them as an ally, and steeled my resolve to spend my life actively working for a world in which economic and social equality, and freedom of self-expression, are the birthrights of every person.

We as cross-dressers don’t have to explain why we are the way we are. We have to explain who we are. How we see ourselves.

And you, the wives, are an extraordinary group of women with individual qualities of bravery and insight that can shape the way all women look at themselves. You had to reexamine everything you were taught about what it means to be a woman when your partner joined you by taking her first wobbly steps on high heels down that road together. We need you in the ranks of the women’s liberation movement, too!

Personally, I would also benefit from expanding concepts and language of gender possibilities. In rooms outside of these, it is necessary to describe myself in terms of a simplified social equation: I was born female, and my gender expression is masculine. For that reason, my birth sex and my gender expression appear to be at odds. I believe this is a social contradiction that can only exist in a society that mandates — with coercive force — that gender expression must conform to birth biology.

I do not champion the idea that we are each born completely biologically hardwired for life. I don’t think of my biology as a fixed constellation, or as the only star that steers my life’s course. On the other hand, I don’t endorse the belief that I am merely a blank slate, following societal instructions. I don’t refer to my own self-expression as a role or a part that I have learned by rote through simple memorization of societal rules. If that were true, my trans identity could be explained away as merely an inability to learn.

The modern premise that we are born already completely coded for all our complex sexual responses and gender expression embodies similar dangers for the lesbian, gay, bisexual communities and the trans communities.

I think that the race involved in the genome project — which is a rather polite term for the land-grab, patenting, and private ownership of the genes that are the building blocks of human life — has been accompanied by its own form of Jurassic Park public relations. I view science as the priceless legacy of humanity’s search for understanding of the material world. But in an unequal economic system, science cannot avoid being stained by prevailing prejudices and bigotry—not only social sciences, like anthropology, but the so-called hard sciences like biology.

For example, look at all the hoopla about the gay hypothalamus. The discovery of somewhat smaller hypothalami, in a few brains labeled gay, resulted in a media popularization that reduced the findings to a kind of bully-boy schoolyard boast that "my hypothalamus is bigger than yours."

But were the brains that were labeled gay those of men who were attracted to other men for their entire lives without exception? And how do we know if the "heterosexual" brains were really so straight? Could scientists really go back and rule out that college weekend, or that hunting trip with a good buddy? The whole search for a gay gene is predicated on the hypothesis that human beings can be so easily and so rigidly partitioned into either "straight" or "gay."

One of the great gifts of the Kinsey report, which most of us in this room remember, was that it revealed that even in a society where the coercive and punitive powers of the state are wielded to repress same-sex desire, those who identify as exclusively heterosexual or homosexual for their entire lives are in a minority. Like a rainbow of new information after a storm of suppression, Kinsey revealed the iridescent hues of human sexuality.

So how can we not be suspect of scientific findings that don’t ask: What size is a bisexual hypothalamus? Let alone the question of whether the limitless variations of same-sex fantasy and desire can really be solely ruled by a chromosome rocking in a chemical ocean.

And doesn’t the fact that sexual passion between two men or two women is illegal in many states affect both the premise and the interpretations of such research projects? Are the fears of some lesbian women and gay men that the search for a gay gene will lead to a eugenics campaign to eradicate this aspect of human sexuality unfounded?

The search for a gay gene in a society in which gay and lesbian • love is illegal and brutalized is about as "objective" as a scientific study of potential differences between Jewish and Gentile brains would be if it was conducted in Germany during the rise of fascism.

I feel it’s possible to say that at this moment in time, our destinies are determined by the constant interaction between the ship we are fitted with, the direction we set for ourselves, and the forces in society that affect our course - including the gale winds of bigotry, the undertow of discrimination, and the deeply carved channels of poverty and inequality.

The "nature versus nurture" debate has meaning for each of us here because we are constantly being asked in life: Why are you the way you are? When did you first know you were different? Do you think that while you were in the womb your tiny fist inadvertently clenched an essential gene too hard? Or was your mother domineering?

And my answer is: Who cares! As long as my right to explore the full measure of my own potential is being trampled by discriminatory laws, as long as I am being socially and economically marginalized, as long as I am being scapegoated for the crimes committed by this economic system, my right to exist needs no explanation or justification of any kind.

More sex and gender variation exists among human beings than can be answered by the simplistic question I’m hit with every day of my life: Are you a man or a woman?

I can speak more complexly about myself here because of the amount of time we in this room have spent pondering questions of self-expression. I would say that I was born with physical characteristics that — within my particular ethnicity, nationality, class, region, and historical period — were not considered distinctly female. And by the time I had developed fluency in spoken language as a child, and uniquely adapted it to fit my own needs for knowledge and communication, I had also developed a dialect of movement and body language that was considered only appropriate for male articulation.

I watched as masculine girl children like myself — referred to as tomboys - and feminine boys — branded as sissies and pansies — were shamed, threatened, beaten, and terrorized into conforming to a pinker or a bluer tint of gender. Many of the accommodations they adapted as teenagers — longer or shorter hair, a practiced swagger or sway, or an exaggerated public exhibition of heterosexuality — did little to conceal their forbidden gender expression, but instead twisted their whole beings into a countenance of self-loathing and defeat.

Others, like myself, either could not or would not conform. Our wounds are deep and clearly visible, too. I think that’s one of the reasons, as I mentioned before, that butch females and feminine males are sometimes accused of gender overstatement. I would call it a courageous gender confrontation. And since the world is such a dangerous place for us wherever we go, and the violence is so intense that few of us live out our full lifespans, there is little time or room for gender development or gender layering.

I am lucky to have survived to the age of 47. Last year I was very close to death, needlessly, because of bigotry and lack of money. The instances where I was treated with hatred and denied emergency health care were based on one obvious fact: I am a masculine female. I am perceived as trying to look or act "like a man." I actually think that’s a very limiting concept that endangers the rights of any female or male to a range of gender choices.

I actually feel that on my own loom, weaving my internal weft against the warp of external pressure, I have created a tapestry far more intricate and complex.

While there is as yet no language for who I have become, I articulate my gender - silent to the ear, but thunderous to the eye. And that is what determines the depth and breadth of the oppression I battle on the streets virtually every minute of every day. That is the truth of my life that cannot be answered by the simplistic question: Are you a man or a woman?

Yet radio and television interviewers still repeat the same questions to me again and again. "But were you born male or female? Why do you think you are the way you are? Were you born this way? Was your mother overbearing? Did your father want a boy?" These questions have no meaning for me.

I don’t think the point is: Why are we different? Why have we refused to walk one of two narrow paths, but instead demanded the right to blaze our own? The question is not why we were unwilling to conform even when being beaten to the ground by ridicule and brutality.

The real burning question is: How did we ever find the courage? From what underground spring did we draw our pride? How did each of us make our way in life, without a single familiar star in the night sky to guide us, to this room where we have at last found others like ourselves? And after so much of ourselves has been injured, or left behind as expendable ballast, many of us worry "What do we have left to give each other? Upon what basis will we build something lasting between us?"

I think we have a whole world to give back to each other.

We have the material to create the strong structures of each of our communities, while still building the foundation for a coalition of our diversity to fight for common goals. If we want to win our own demands, we need allies. And as we fight for each other’s rights, we strengthen our own.

When your rights are trampled on, call on us — the lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities. We are your allies.

Picture the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and the trans communities as two huge overlapping circles. Like the drag queens who rebelled at Stonewall, I stand in that overlap, and we can serve as bridges. Let us combine the power of our communities. Stonewall was not just a lesbian and gay rebellion. Stonewall is your historic landmark too.

So I end as I began: My name is Les Feinberg. I am a gay, female, cross-dressing transgenderist. I believe that I — and my communities — can be important allies for you as heterosexual cross-dressers and partners. The only question is: Have we reached the moment in history when this dialogue between our communities can begin?

Portrait: Linda Phillips - "I have actually had the best of any life I could dream of"

Thank you so much for your interest in that part of my life which encompasses a great deal of my sixty-two years. I have many people ask me why I changed "sex" when, of course, it was my gender I "changed." When a cross-dresser is young he believes it is all in the clothes, if he is allowed to experience a change of gender he discovers clothes had nothing to do with it. However, in the male way we are visual and the clothes have the ability to let us feel, if only for a short time, what it must "seem" to feel as the other gender. When we are young we mix it all up with sex, being full of testosterone and desire. When some of us get older and begin to understand what this might mean, it can be terrifying.

There are few men in this world who want to abandon their masculinity, regardless of how they might really feel inside. Being a man is a very heady thing in our world and, even if you have had to "fake it" as I did for fifty years, it is a familiar thing and no one wants to leave the familiar to take a long step down into the other world. Few of my friends who are cds [cross-dressers] would care to do as I have and, to be frank, it is economic suicide as well as disturbing to others of your acquaintance.

In my case I always knew what I was regardless of evidence to the contrary between my legs. The awful part came when I realized I was attracted to women and not men, which I just naturally assumed I would be. Imagine a little girl peering into her mother’s mirror wondering where she could find another little girl who would be interested in her.

Somewhere in the late 1940s, my mother-who kept finding me cross-dressed, took me to a famous therapist who deemed that I was indeed a homosexual because I wore girl’s clothes. While my mother was upset, I was almost relieved. I knew inside I was a girl but was confused about the sex part. For some time I would wake up in the morning thinking this was the day I would start liking guys. I would furtively glance at the other guys in the boys’ shower, but I was disappointed because they looked just like me - not that I wanted to look the way I did - but I was not impressed by all those penises and gawky bodies. I still mooned over the girls; I wanted to not only love them and be with them, I wanted to be them.

When I started dating, it was my mother’s turn to be confused. I started going out when I built my first car at fourteen (two things I loved to do growing up, working on cars and dressing as a girl. Go figure.) I went with all the girls I could go with, almost destroying my health in the process. I found to my delight that girls really liked me; I had the unique ability to understand where they were coming from and truly liked being with them - unlike my male friends who only wanted a quick conquest. I never had a woman turn my advances away, and in most cases it was they who made the first move in a romantic situation. This was because I loved romance and being in love just as they did. The other boys they went out with had none of my finesse.

Sometimes I would tell these girls about myself and the attitudes were mixed; young girls do not usually have fixed opinions about things such as cross-dressing. It is not until they start looking for someone to marry and have a family with that they become concerned with finding a "straight, - normal guy." My dating years were happy and full of fun; I even found girls who would allow me to wear their clothes and play bedroom games.

Why the difference between me and my cd friends? One important word: guilt. I never had it. I knew I had come down the assembly line this way, why worry about it. It was not until I got into the tg [transgender] community that I learned about the terrible way everyone seemed to suffer from guilt. My parents allowed me to just grow up. My mother did not like my cross-dressing, but never told me not to do it - just keep it in the closet so the neighbors wouldn’t know. We were not religious people, but I did read the bible. I suppose I never picked up on the admonition to not wear the clothes of the opposite sex and probably would not have paid any attention in any case simply because it was not the clothes I was after, it was the desire to be who I really was.

I didn’t know what a lesbian was until I was around seventeen or so. I never figured them to be in the slightest way connected to me - after all, they were still real women and I was not. And the lesbians I came into contact with frightened me; they were so much like the very thing I hated being a male. It was only when I was much older and met a "femme" that I got a glimmer of understanding about these women.

"In this world of ordinary people" was how I was leading my life-when on the only blind date I ever had in my life, I met the person who has made my life the absolute joy it is. One day, after we had known each other a suitable amount of time - around two or three months - I told my lady that I wanted to "win the Indy 500, loved old movies, walks, picnics, and, oh yeah, once in a while I liked to put on a dress and be a girl." Cynthia was not shocked, not upset in any way; she accepted it as she accepted all my oddities. When we fell in love, the gender part simply did not play a large part in it. She has that incredible ability to see into the inner part of a person, their soul. The only jarring note I remember in all this was when she first saw me dressed, she made the deathless remark that I "certainly needed a lot of work!"

When you see me, you see the result of her forty-year effort to make me the lady I wish to be. She never gave up on me. It is not easy to turn a male into a female, either the apparent or the inner part. The mental was the most difficult; no one would begin to imagine how difficult it is to stop thinking as an aggressive, demanding male - the person I had to be in order to survive in a world women can only guess at. Cynthia taught me what I needed to know in order to be what I felt I was, since "wanting" is only a tiny part of accomplishment.

When I was young I had a fear of being found out by my peers so I invented "Jim," a guy that would literally beat the shit out of anyone who looked at him the wrong way. When it was discovered, much later in all this, that "Jim" had become "Linda" I lost 99% percent of the males I had once called friends - not because I was a cross-dresser, but because I had become so totally a woman.

When I was a male I was a straight, aggressive, hard male; when I was a woman I was the complete opposite, no one knew except my lady. When we went out in public with me as Linda no one ever guessed; after all, I had all the expertise and knowledge of one of the most beautiful women in the world at my disposal. She would have never let me out the door if I wasn’t as good as I could be. No one laughed, no one pointed, and more importantly to me, no one knew. In those years, cross-dressing was highly illegal. It truly was an era when to be read was to be dead. I was never oppressed because everyone thought of me as the perfect male when I was acting as one, and I was never pointed out as a queen or a cd because I appeared to be a feminine woman who blended in with the other women - because I had someone who looked out for me and made that possible.

True gender lies not in the appearance of the body but the workings of the mind. Cynthia and I have what you might term a monosexual relationship -we really aren’t like two lesbians but we aren’t like two heterosexuals either. Since the day we met we really have had only eyes for one another and now in the declining years of our lives we find an even greater love for one another. She treats me, much to my delight, as the woman I appear to be. And much to our surprise, I seem to become that woman more so every day. All this makes my life so wonderful it is difficult to imagine.

I wish could write about the problems of being transgendered, and of course I have had problems with it, but they were really not problems to me, looking back. I have actually had the best of any life I could dream of.

Portrait: Cynthia Phillips - "Our life today is vastly different from when Linda was Jim"

I always have a difficult time trying to explain the relationship between Linda and I. Everyone wants to believe I am either excited about Linda’s lifestyle or I am the most tolerant woman in the gender community. Neither is correct.

The fact of Linda being a transgendered person has really not played that large a part in our relationship. When we were young and she told me about it, I knew nothing about any of it. I really wasn’t even aware that there were people who were unhappy with their sex (now I would say gender). Linda did not know a lot about what she was at the age of twenty-two either. She was so matter-of-fact in telling me that I was not shocked or upset about it; I just accepted it as a part of someone I was in love with. I felt that Linda was such a fine person that anything she did could not be a bad thing. I always have looked inside a person and have not been concerned about appearance. So when I looked into Linda’s (Jim’s) soul I saw someone who had the qualities I desired in a person I planned on spending my life with.

Linda says that I have made her the woman she is today, but that is a statement I am not in complete agreement with. All I did was provide a role model for her to be not only a woman but a lady, something that is important to both of us.

Our life today is vastly different from when Linda was Jim. Jim felt, as most men, that if he earned the major part of our income he was not obligated to take part in any of the household chores. He also felt that all his decisions were correct and not to be questioned, a feeling most males have. Now that I have Linda I have someone who not only helps me but who actually seeks and values my opinion.

When Linda went full time, I was a little frightened at the prospect. Now I believe it was the best thing that could have happened to our relationship. She has been able to release the softer side of herself, which she kept bottled up for years. The kind, gentle person I have always known was there is the one I see every day.

CYNTHIA AND LINDA PHILLIPS, THE ORGANIZERS OF THE TEXAS "T" PARTY, CAN BE REACHED AT: P.O. BOX 17, BULVERDE, TEXAS 78163

Acknowledgements

This book includes adaptations of speeches I gave at conferences and rallies in the spring of 1997. I want to thank the organizers of those events. Those who deliver the keynotes or rev up the rallies from the podium receive high visibility. But as an organizer, I know just how much painstaking work went into building those events. Without the organizers there would be no podiums.

I am grateful to Gary Bowen, Cheryl Chase, Mike Hernandez, Craig Hickman, William Mason (Peaches), Linda Phillips, Cynthia Phillips, Sylvia Rivera, Deirdre Sinnott (Al Dente), and Dragon Xcalibur for contributing their truths, their insights, and their eloquence to this book—and to my life. Thank you Marilyn Humphries for the sensitivity of your vision behind the lens.

I thank my literary agent Charlotte Sheedy, my editor Amy Caldwell, the entire staff at Beacon Press, and my friend Deirdre Sinnott (Al Dente) for the work and confidence they put into this book.

And last, but not least, thank you Minnie Bruce Pratt—wife, partner, lover, friend, cothinker. You make even a day with catastrophic illness serenely exhilarating. "Loving everything about you, I forget nothing."