Barbara Sehr
For LGB — It Gets Better! For Trans — Not So Much…
By Barbara Sehr on October 5, 2010 at 4:28 PM
Watching the story of still another young gay man plunging off the George Washington Bridge last week struck too close to home for me. The story line for this one was slightly different — an invasion of privacy that resulted in public electronic humiliation — but the push that came to shove ended in a familiar result. Being "different" remains a capital crime in some circles, even more when the voices in your head are -shouted down by the voices all around you.
Now, a new campaign has started within the LGBT community to remind teenagers enduring the culture shock that for every Christine O'Donnell dabbling in hate craft, there are dozens Lady Gaga's that will never ask or tell your adult private life — unless you wish to make it public. The message being sent out by the likes of Seattle's own sex-columnist Dan Savage is simply "Gay? It gets better!" I wish that was the message to the entire LGBT community, but as someone who represents the last letter in that acronym, for the "trans" world, it's far from true.
As someone who silently shattered the values of my family until I could be silent no more, I frequently yearned for an exit door when others were still learning to make an entrance. In a family with links to the upper circles of German breweries, my open rejection of malted beverages (even as a teen-ager) already made me a black sheep. I did all I could to keep my internal fight with my chromosomal apparitions very private. As an eight-year-old, in 1956, I was sent to a posh German, all boys private school near Heidelberg–while my parents spent their first year in America. Soon I became the target of a latent post-World War II hate insurgency that made me wish I had been born Jewish in Germany a decade before. To the other boys, I was the German equivalent of a"fag," to myself; I was the only girl at the school.
It didn't get much better when I arrived in America. I still had no understanding of the feelings in my head, and I wasn't about to ask anyone — certainly not my father, who had learned his values growing up in the Hitler Youth. By the time I was a teenager, I knew I wasn't attracted to men, so I knew I could not be "gay." It wasn't until I read the autobiography of Christine Jorgensen in my late teens, that I began to discover myself.
It took a couple of more decades before I could act. As an adult, life never really got better. Yes, there have been people outside of my immediate family who have kept me from looking for my own George Washington Bridge. Yes, there are comedy audiences who share my laughter at a world that can be very funny. Yes, there are people who defy all odds, and actually love me.
Yet, for myself, and too many of the folks with whom I share stories in this very tiny community of ours, our world is still a lonely one — even as adults. Employers too often share my father's belief that my brains were removed in surgery. Strangers can be repelled all too easy, since all they've ever learned about "trannies" they learned when shifting down into a nether world that at least one Supreme Court justice noted that "I know it, when I see it!"
For many trans folks, it doesn't get better, as adults. The only way this will ever change is when our community advances on the public stage. Few people know someone like me. It has been my personal challenge to bring my community forward by educating as many folks as possible. Whether it is through my writing, my comedy, or even lobbying in Washington, I think it's what we must do to tell the world that operators are NOT standing by to recruit the gullible.
As we approach the Transgender Day of Remembrance in just over a month, I want there to be a time when we look at this challenge we face as something "special." After all, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.