Sunday, February 28, 2016

Losing Home: the Rape of Transgender Lives in Exile & Pride


"My body became an empty house, one to which I seldom returned. I lived in exile"

Exile and Pride
Eli Clare
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The Place of the Hermit

Growing up in Port Orford, Oregon, near Route 101, Eli Clare felt at home with the land but alienated from the society that defined the place and those who lived there. A coastal town, it is located near Siskiyou National Forest that provided logging jobs for Clare's family and many in the area. As he walked home along a road following the Elk River, Clare would watch logs gloat down the waters and fisherman dipping in their lines. These walks through the woods or up mountains were among the moments where Clare felt most at home in the place where he was being raised. Yet among the community of the logging town, the young transgender youth often felt like an outsider. "I watched and listened to the girls in my school talk about boys, go behind the equipment shed to kiss them, later in algebra class about fucking them," recounts Clare of his school days, describing his emotions as like a metaphorical wall between himself and the the girls of the town, "I watched from the other side of a stone wall, a wall that was part self-preservation, part bones and blood aloneness, part impossible assumptions I could not shape my body around" (124). Although he lived in the same forests as his schoolmates, he was unable to feel welcome in the space because of the cisgender and heterosexual norms of girlhood that organized the lives in the town. Clare puts these feelings into metaphors drawn from around him. Walls, especially made of stone, were all around him. They defined the physical place. Yet it was his  social place, being raised as a girl, and his work to relate to his body and his environments in ways that his body resisted. As a result, he felt alone and without a place in Port Orford. 

The effect of these stone walls was to turn this small Oregon town into a kind of machine that produced and housed proper cisgender heterosexual girls. Despite feeling alienated in his social environment, Clare recounts trying to survive in the town by allowing himself, to degrees, to submit to its production of straight feminine girls. "I pull out an old photo of myself from the night of my high school graduation," Clare recalls looking at on old album of his childhood home, "I wear a white dress, flowers embroidered on the front panel, the plainest, simplest dress my mother would let me buy. I look painfully uncomfortable, as if I have no idea what to do with my body, hands clasped awkwardly behind me, shoulders caved inward, immobilized, almost fearful beneath my smile. I am in clumsy, unconsenting drag. This is one of the last times I wore a dress" (136). While the physical space of Oregon make no special demands of femininity on Clare, the place he lives is defined by such rules imposed on bodies it marks are female. Once described as a wall, the physical and metaphorical boundaries that Port Orford places on Clare's body become as close to him as an flowery dress. The wall metaphor placed Clare on the outside but the dress makes him feel alienated from his surroundings within an encircling embroidered garment. Inside the linen walls that wrap him in girlhood, Clare feels like a foreigner in his own body. Often transgender experiences are compared to drag. Usually this is a conflation of a trans person's post-transitioned inability to pass and a Drag performer's intentional performative gender that emphasizes its own points of failure to create a sense of shock. Yet Clare turns this around and suggests that the transgender person does not point to the artificiality and failure of their gender after transition but before transition, to reveal the socially constructed walls placed around them.

Being put in the place of a girl, Clare began to feel his body was taken away from him. Port Orford did not feel like a home to him and in time neither did his body. "I do understand how certain clothes make me feel inside my body," explains Clare (135). Certain clothes marked Clare as automated as a girl, as though Clare was not resident, at home, or in control of his body. Meanwhile, other clothes marked his body as in his control, free to move and dress as he will; but these were the clothes marked for men. "For me, Vogue and Glamour held none of the appeal that Walt Maya did, dressed in his checkered shirt, cowboy boots, and wide-brimmed hat," explains Clare (136). "I joined the boys in their emulation. I knew early on the feel of boots and denim, knew I would never learn to walk in a skirt." Just as Clare could watch girls from the other side of a figurative wall, so too he could watch boys from the other side of a  paneled dress. He was trapped in the place, the physical clothing and the cultural associations of girls while he watched boys living the life he wanted on the other side of a gender divide. Had the strict cisgender mechanisms that produced girls and boys had more lubrication, allowed for parts to move more freely, then perhaps Clare could have had an easier time moving from one social position to another. As it is, he experienced a lot of friction as he tried to transition and became marked as a failed girl rather than as a trans man. "I tried to wear skirts my mother sewed for me... I failed," admits Clare. "I loved my work boots and overalls long after the other girls had discovered pantyhose and mini-skirts. But failing left a hole in my heart; I wanted to belong somewhere." (124). Rather than be allowed to move from one place, one gender designation, to another, he became marked as defective and felt as though he lost his body, his home, and his place in the world
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Losing Home

Stating that gender and sexism is in the environment can bring subtle aspects to the forefront, such as clothing, but this does not discount personal agents in the ecology of household that persons in their place (or disrupting a place's sense of comfort) can directly and violently control a life. Indeed, in naming what gave Clare the deepest feeling of "losing home," he names the rape and sexual abuse he received from his father. "I could start with the ways my body has been stolen from me," writes Clare. "Start slowly, reluctantly, with my parents. My father who raised me, his eldest daughter, as an almost son. My father who started raping me so young I can't remember when he first forced his penis into me." (125). In the grim details of his father's rape of his body, Clare marks a point in which the loss of a sense of home moved from a distant wall, to intimate apparel, and through the threshold of his body as his father violently penetrated him. The father who gave him a place to live, and room to explore his masculinity, chose instead the most direct and penetrative way to vacate Clare's power from his body. In each way, the rape demonstrates itself as an assertion of ownership and power. "I could start with the brutal, intimate details of my father's thievery, of his hands clamping around my neck, tearing into me, claiming my body as his own" (128). However he allowed Clare to wander towards masculinity in his public presentation, in privacy he put Clare in the place of a girl; a girlhood defined by sexual violence and submission. To be put in the place of a girl, in the Clare house, was to have one's body taken.

Although the theft of his body is direct and personal, Clare nonetheless views the rape as a part of the wider environments sexist system of taking control over bodies. In these details, Clare fears the mechanisms of such power can be forgotten. "I lose the bigger picture," worries Clare, "forget that woven through and around the private and intimate is always the public and political" (128). By examining the rape not as isolated incidents of an unusually violent man, Clare opens up his story to wider questions of gender and sexuality. "How did my father's violence, his brutal taking of me over and over again, help shape and damage my body, my sexuality, my gender identity?" asks Clare (126). This process worries him because such discourses around the relation between rape and queer gender or sexuality usually take the perfunctory form of cause and effect. "Will my words be used against me, twisted to bolster the belief that sexual abuse causes homosexuality, contorted to provide evidence that transgressive gender identity is linked directly  to neglect?" (125).  Rape is taken as the cause of a girl fleeing femininity to live as a man or else to be sexually engaged with only women. This conclusion however depends on an arrangement of the facts only in a particular flow of causation. This is the "twisting" that Clare fears. Such a twisting begins by assuming cisgender and heterosexuality is the natural starting position and transgender and queerness as the artificial, rather than normative manhood and girlhood as one the the chief products of such highly gendered structures of power. Indeed, this irony is evidence by the contradicting supposition of cause and effect. Non-normative gender and sexuality is supposed to come from too much (even violent) impositions of gender, concluding it as a kind of failure or overcompensation. Yet transgender and queerness is also supposed to come from neglect, as though they are the natural state that has not been properly imposed out of the life by such over-acting parents.

Yet by allowing such questions, asserting there is a relation between sexist environments and rape, Clare can ask other questions as well. "How did his non-abusive treatment of me as an almost son interact with the ways in which his fists and penis and knives told me in no uncertain terms that I was a girl?" (126). Opening up the conversation, Clare is able to turn the tables on sexist assumptions about queerness and rape. Rather than assume that rape causes non-normative genders and sexualities, Clare asks the necessary question if rape is intended to form or fix straight men and women. The masculine behavior came before and around the rape, it was during the rape that Clare was put in a humbled female position. By admitting these questions, Clare points to the lack of easy answers and thus the evident lack of stable genders in the environment where he lived. "How did his gendered abuse - and in this culture vaginal rape is certainly gendered - reinforce my sense of not being a girl?" adds Clare. "How did watching him sexually abuse other children - both boys and girls - complicate what I knew of being a girl, being a boy?" (126). Rape is a performance and an act which speaks of power dynamics in the environment. Fort Orford was not simple a place for cisgender heterosexual boys and girls, nor simply the place where they were made into normative men and women, but a place where gender was always already unstable and unraveling. The need to put Clare in the place of a girl, emphasized how he was not at home in that place. Taking away Clare's power revealed that he had power to take. Likewise, it teaches the lessons that straight, cisgender male supremacy needs to take power from others in order to maintain its dominance. It needs to police the borders of gender because those who live in the space are not naturally bound by the sexist social laws of place and position. 

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The World of the Exile

"I wanted to be a hermit," declares Clare on recalling his overall feeling during his childhood, "to live alone with my stones and trees, neither boy nor a girl." (124). For all the difficulty that his physical body and environment posed for him, it is his social body and environment that made him feel alienated and not at home in either. The matter of his body remained relatively the same but their meaning for him was continually being defined for him by his father and the patriarchy. "My father raped me for many reasons," analyzes Clare, "and inside his acts of violence I learned about what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy as well" (129). The woodlands and the flesh are spaces where many different sort of lives could have been explored by Clare but in the toxic social environment of Port Orford life was continually being put in its place. Indeed, Clare lived a life full of of contradiction, as both boy and girl, but overall was the command that whatever or whoever he is that he learns his place under the power of men. In the end, the rape did not assert for Clare was not the stability of masculinity or femininity, heterosexuality or homosexuality, but the lack of stability and security in his body and his home. "I lived by splitting body from mind, body from consciousness, body from physical sensation, body from emotion," writes Clare (131). "My body became an empty house, one to which I seldom returned. I lived in exile." In the end, the gender dysphoria Clare felt, the alienation from his body, in some ways points to the violence and instability of gender in the place where he grew. To be clear, it is not Clare's masculinity or attraction to women that came from this toxic environment but rather the suffering that walled off his transition to these places and yet also painfully made sure he never felt at home in femininity or attraction to men. The suffering did not put him in the place of a man or a girl but took from him the power to feel at home in any place. It made him an exile. 

If the imposition of walls, coverings, and bindings are the tools that cause the loss of a sense of place, what then are such exiles and hermits left to imagine the world? Upon considering the lessons of force and repression, Clare decides that putting up such blocks in the discourse of his own body and environment will likewise fail to describe his experiences. Clare writes, "this strategy of denial, rejecting any possibility of connection between abuse and gender identity, abused and sexuality, slams a door on the messy reality of how our bodies are stolen" (125). Theft does not mean the annihilation of the valued objects, be they bodies, land, or power. Rather the loss of home is a rearrangement and cordoning off of objects in the space. Certain bodies are not allowed to interact with other bodies, such as women sexually with other women or trans men with boots and overalls. Instead, they become jealously guarded by certain bodies from other bodies, such as the violent force of such men to claim sexual access to these young girls or to the right to wear such masculine trappings in public. The logic of claiming or stealing a place is not about creating or destroying lives but about controlling them. "We live in a time of epidemic child abuse, in a world where sexual and physical violence against children isn't only a personal tragedy and symptom of power run amok," concludes Clare, "but also a form of social control"(128-129). Putting up walls, around land, a community, a person, or a story, does not fundamentally change what is being contained or excluded, rather it attempts to control them by making them submit to personal possession. Such a possessor sets the manner and possibility of how people and the world relate to one another. For Clare's father, it seemed less important whether Clare was a boy or a girl, but rather that he could determine when he could claim himself as a boy and when Clare's father could violently claim him as his girl.

There is nothing in the woods or the water that make Port Orford a place for straight cisgender girls and men, but not queer transgender youth. Nor is it simply that things, like social progress, move slower there by nature. Often when such places are shrugged off by urban queers or defended by locals as obviously conservative, what is meant is that these are places where violent male supremacy, the isolation of gay men and lesbians, and the hatred of trans persons dominate. Such places exist because they are occupied territories and the people living there are subject to patriarchal control. The rejection from female community and the occupation of Clare's body by his father evidence how these places are defined by such power dynamics. "What a better way to maintain a power structure," asks Clare, "than to drill the lessons of who is dominant and who is subordinate into the bodies of children." (129). Such overt acts of violence may or may not rare, Clare was subject and witness to many of them, but the lessons of them serve more than personal ends. Rape or the fear of rape, exclusion or the fear of exclusion, are one of the chief weapons that keep men and women, boys and girls in their place in Port Orford. Those who step out of line become targets for abuse. "And here is the answer to my fear: Child abuse is not the cause of but rather a response to - among other things - transgressive gender identity and/or sexuality" (129). Clare lived as a boy before he was put in the place of a girl by his mother's dresses or his father's rape. His transgressive gender and sexuality did not come from abuse. Although Clare admits, "I feel safer, somewhat buffered from men's violence against women, walking the streets after dark, knowing my night time outline and stride are frequently read as male." (127). Rather, for young Clare, the abuse came in response to his gender transgression. The abuse may have come regardless. Walls are not only put up for those who would climb over them but to make a statement not to try. This is how any why hatred inscribes itself in the environment and the bodies of a place like Port Orford.
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More on Eli Clare:
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Monday, February 15, 2016

Children of the Earth: The Reverend and the Doctor Get Engaged!


"I could swear by your expression 
that the pain down in your soul was the same 
as the one down in mine... We call it love"

The Origin of Love
Stephen Trask
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Valentine's Day

I spent the morning writing Valentine's Day notes to the girls, C. and N. Bahr. It is special that this year (unlike last) that we got to spend the day together as a family and I wanted to make sure they knew how they complete our love. The Reverend had taken the girls to Church, telling me I could take the morning off to get things ready. I posted a piece on how Power Rangers was helping me parent my gender queer youngest daughter (which actor David Yost responded that he liked). I also found and posted a very fitting picture of our oldest being an amazon that could illustrate much of my appreciation for my young warrior women. With the public displays of affection taken care of I went and made sure the private gifts were ready. For C. and N. both received personalized pocket notebooks and a pack of sugar-free gum (they had both stock-piled candy from school and friends). For the Reverend, I had ordered flowers and a signed 1st edition book by black liberation theologian James Cone. I laid out some snacks and everything seemed ready when the girls and my partner arrived home. We got some hugs in just before the baby sitter showed up, letting me know that I was excused from parenting and that the Reverend was waiting to whisk me away for the afternoon. There was a brief stall. Before we could get going, my partner insisted that we drop off some supplies at a mutual friend's house with the excuse that she was helping with some fundraiser for Church. Such stops and projects were commonplace for our family so I thought little of it. Soon we were off!

The one thing I had expected of this Valentine's Day was that the Reverend said she was taking me to the movies (our usual private get away) and to lunch. In all seriousness, I thought the story of this Valentine's Day would be "we saw Deadpool." Don't get me wrong, I was more than thrilled that this was how I was going to remember it. The year before we had a bountiful dinner and show at Medieval Times. This year, going to see a Rated-R super-hero comedy that had received 10/10 by critics and 100% on Rotten Tomatoes seemed like an excellent way to spend our adult time. Walking out, the film was everything it was cracked up to be. Afterwards, we had some time left before we needed to relieve the babysitter so we decided to go for a drive. There had been a filling lunch of steak and mushrooms before the movie so we weren't very hungry but I asked if we could stop and pick up some cheese, chocolate, and smoked meats. With out goodies in hand, we drove up and along York Beach. The sun had gone down on the winter evening and the snow frosted waves looked hauntingly beautiful. As we drove, we talked about love. I said how grateful I was that we had met at this point in our lives. She was a complete person, I was a complete person, and together we made something bigger than the sum of our parts. More importantly, we both are people we strongly believe in something bigger than ourselves, meaning that we faced our lives as partners on a journey further up and further into the world rather than ending our lives at one another's doorsteps. We had a nice moment and then laughed. How different this sentiment was compared to the film we just saw. Indeed, perhaps fittingly, Ryan Reynolds now has an unexpected and uncanny presence in the story of our love.

Throughout the drive - and indeed throughout the film - the Reverend's cellphone was constantly going off with texts. Again this was not uncommon. Being a Pastor means that someone or other is nearly always reaching out to you. At one point, seeing a text from the babysitter who was getting anxious about an errand, we drove home to the kids. Except the girls were not at the house. At some point on the drive the Reverend had mentioned that the babysitter couldn't wait on the errand and was forced by circumstance to bring the girls with her. Unloading the salty and sweet snacks, I stretched out on the couch. The Reverend mentioned that once the babysitter got back she was going to ask her to take a Valentine's Day photo, then asked if we should put on anything special for it. I decided that I would touch up my make up and run a comb through my hair. As I did, the Reverend checked her phone and groaned, "ugh, I forgot to send a report to one of the officers at the Church. She needs it by tomorrow morning. Would you mind if I run out really quick and get something from my office?" Obliviously, I told her that it would be fine. This sort of thing happened fairly frequently. Suddenly alone in the house, I put my feet up, turned on a film critic show to hear all the spoiler-filled reviews of the movie I just saw (again, in my head, this was a "Deadpool Valentine's Day") and played a game on my phone. Halfway through a level, my phone buzzed. It was the Reverend telling me her car battery wasn't working and asked if I could give her a jump. Once again, I agree obliviously because this sort of thing also happened regularly with her old beat-up car. Putting on my coat, I drove to the Church and chatted with my equally oblivious mother on the way. Seeing my partner's car, I ended the call and parked in a way to jump her vehicle. Then running up to the Church office, I knocked on the door but found it locked. I checked a window and no lights were on inside.
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The Origin of Love

At this point, standing outside the Church office, I was freezing in the 1 degree air and my brain was not working on anything besides getting warm. Looking back at the vehicles on the street, I considered waiting for the Reverend in there as I thawed. Stubbornly, however, I stayed at the office door and called my partner. It rang several times then she answered, "Hey, you here?" "Yes," I told her, "and I am very cold. Where are you?" "Some people were at the office when I arrived and we wandered over to the Sanctuary. Can you come over?" she asked. More cold and unthinking than oblivious, I speed walked over to the front door of the Church sanctuary. Only as I climbed up the front walk and onto the stairs did my analytical side hit me like a bag of bricks, bricks full of all the little clues (frequent texts, very specific schedule, lack of kids, lack of babysitter, paperwork that needed to be finished on a holiday night at Church, a broken down car, moving from the perfectly warm office to the Sanctuary). Suddenly, on the steps, I broke into a run. I opened the door with equal anticipation and dread of something that I had so failed to anticipate. Then I saw it through the windowed entrance, a whole mass of people in the front of the Sanctuary with my partner in the center. Just after I finally got my brain working again suddenly my mind was utterly and completely emptied, filled only with what was happening.

From here my recollection is spotty and I was probably not totally conscious. Somehow I moved forward, legs on autopilot, like a gnat transfixed by a lightbulb. Halfway through the vestibule I became aware of another person, a good friend, standing there with arms outstretched and saying something that made me feel good. My brain did not compute words anymore, only significance. This was a very strange experience for a woman devoting her life to the study of language and literature. What came of the good feelings and outstretched hands was my friend taking my coat from me. Then she disappeared behind me as I walked into the Sanctuary transfixed by my partner as she began to sing. Once in the aisle, listening to my partner heartbreakingly singing, my brain became overwhelmed by the feeling that my legs and body were no longer functioning right and I was about to fall to the ground. I've fainted a couple times before and I knew the signs. To brace myself I reached for the pew to my right and used it to prop myself up. Then I became aware of song the Reverend was singing. It was "Origin of Love" from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. And at that realization, something like meaning but not yet words came back to me. I understood the what and the why enough to be undone by the song. I began weeping. The song told an alternative history of gender, sexuality, and love. Drawn from Plato's Symposium of Love it sets Aristophane's myth to music, singing of early humanity before the dawn of Love. At this time, the philosopher and song says, there were three genders: the Children of the Sun (which were like two men glued together), the Children of the Earth (same but with two women), and the Children of the Moon (same but with a man and a woman). Fearing the power of these collectives, the gods slice each in two leading to the halves of each constantly looking for their partners. It at once suggests that all of us might be either a bit transgender or a bit queer, or both.

Clutching the next pew I regained enough of myself to launch myself forward a few steps. The Church was a blur as my eyes were half shut (because my smiles also crinkle my cheeks and cover my vision) and filling with tears. As I reached the next pew, my crying shocked me enough and gave me enough catharsis to become slightly more aware enough of myself. My walking became more steady, however slow and stilted. I briefly realized that I was feeling my make-up running but I didn't care. All I cared about was taking each step that would bring me closer to my partner. By an impulse I wasn't consciously controlling, I found myself stopped a few feet away from the Reverend as she launched into my favorite stanza from the song: “You were looking at me. I was looking at you. You had a way so familiar I could not recognize 'cause you had blood on your face, I had blood in my eyes. But I could swear by your expression that the pain down in your soul was the same as the one down in mine. That's the pain that cuts a straight line down through the heart. We call it love.” Somewhere in there I found myself singing along. It was an automatic respond to the song that I had first heard beside my partner, a song I listened to on jogs, a song that I've taught in multiple seminars. I was being carried along by the music and I was responding to the music. The heart song that came from my partner was echoing out of me. Facing the song reflected back at her, the Reverend finally began to break down, her voice cracking and stumbling over words as she cried. She had kept herself together, following her plan, but my singing had surprised her and suddenly she was awakening to the awesome power that neither of us were able to contain or control. We got through the end of the song together, sniffling the rest of the way. As the music subsided, my partner got on her knee and everything went silent again. Maybe it was just the sudden vacuum in my head but it seemed as though the whole Church and the whole winter night was holding its breath.
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The Proposal

We become resistant to the power of metaphors, so we don't expect that when they are true, like "my heart was beating out of my chest," that they can actually hurt. This is a feeling we also call "ecstasy." Ecstasy is the experience of being pulled out of yourself. While in the throws of ecstasy, it is a break in the consciousness from feeling resident inside your body. In the moment when she fell onto one knee, I was being torn half in and half out of the limits that usually hold onto me, my nervous system, my senses, my sense of time and place. The only thing that felt real, my tether to the world, was my partner's hand holding mine as she slid a ring onto it. When the ring was revealed, my fingers were shuffled around as the Reverend asked which hand to put the ring. The crowd burst into laughter and I felt called back to reality for a moment by the question and response. My partner was evidently out of her mind too. With my sense momentarily returned, I listened as she said to me things which were so true I felt like I had known she was going to say this forever. The words felt inscribed inside my bones and looking into me, she was reading them aloud for us to hear and affirm. The words were so personal, it was almost as though the others in the Church were not there to hear them. Or if they could hear the words, they wouldn't understand. It is as though the meaning of what was said was being revealed to us alone; we dwelled in a significance just outside of language...


[The words of the proposal are omitted]

... After our moment together, the Reverend stood up and she gestured to the crowd who all flipped over posters in their hands which spelled a summary of what had been said, "Will you be mine?" Yes, in speech that other people can understand, this points people in the right direction, even if it can't get anywhere close to the place where we shared our meaning. Briefly glancing at everyone's signs, the power of common speech came back to me. Aided by this simplicity I was able to turn to my partner and say, "Yes! Of course, yes!" My partner embraced me in her big arms and I think I was swallowed whole for a time. The sound of cheering and crying and laughter beat on us from outside while I rested inside her like a cocoon. Eventually, yet again, I emerged back into the Church space. I looked at my partner who smiled and laughed and cried as I smiled and laughed and cried. We turned to look at our daughters, who shared private looks that as soon as they were over made them self conscious at their vulnerability. C. rolled her eyes and smirked, looking at the Senior Pastor of the Church. N. came over and hugged us both, then ran back to her friends who embraced her. Suddenly I was aware of all the people who were there. Each of them erupted out from being extensions of my partner into their particularity. There were faces I knew well, some I knew not as well as I would have liked, and some who were only now just meeting me face to face. Each came in turn and embraced me, saying words that again took on the form of understanding rather than language. Some had gifts, some took pictures. Each exchange felt good but were blunted by the presence of an even greater Joy. It rattled me around until I was back in my partner's arms. And then, at last, I collapsed.

Falling together like this, I don't believe is the end of our story and nor is it the beginning. I don't know when our love began exactly. It has been falling into place since we moved to Maine to raise our daughters, her developing as an Associate Pastor and I as a burgeoning scholar and writer. Pieces certainly fell into place when we first began dating in Chicago, her and I, a Youth Minister and Ph.D. student. Yet these felt more like buddings of growths that have roots and preparations that go much deeper and further. In a sense, our whole histories seem different in their wake like our love effects our pasts as much as our futures. Our love, like the Origin of Love, I don't believe is about finding your other half in order to be complete. We do not long for a return to a prelapsarian wholeness because if that ever existed for any of us that is not the world as we know it. Rather, our engagement and our love is a celebration of our incompleteness. Our proposal story is an affirmation that we don't know what is going to happen in our lives or (especially in my case) what is going to happen in a single day. In each other's arms, we don't come to the end of our meaning but witness the means by which our meanings will continue to unfold. We are more ourselves and called to be more than ourselves by our love. As we are affirmed and sustained, we are queered and transformed. We are, in a sense, Children of the Earth, like spirits and minds. We are also, in another sense, Children of the Moon, complimentary and even comically diverse as partners and within ourselves. Incompleteness is not the failure of love but, as Hedwig attests, the making and the makings of Love. What love and my beloved have taught me is that I won't get the Valentine's Day, the proposal, or the life that I expected, I will get something much better instead.
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Thank you all for your love and support
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Saturday, February 13, 2016

It's Morphing Time: Transgender Lessons from the Power Rangers


"I think they learned their lesson"

The Mighty Morphing Power Rangers
S1.E8. Switching Places 
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A Valentine for My Daughter and Hero, N. Bahr
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Lessons for Viewers

As I sit on the couch after dinner watching episode seven of season one of the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers with my six-year old, she asks me, "Why aren't there three girl Rangers and two boy Rangers?" I love this child I thought. "That's a great question!" I say. "Well, let's pretend there are three girls. Who would you like to be girls?" I ask her. She thinks for a moment then responds, "well the Pink Ranger, she is the girl who is good at gymnastics. The Yellow Ranger, she is good at fighting. How about the Blue Ranger? She would be the girl who is smart." As if responding to her question and supposition, as episode eight begins to play it announces itself as "Switching Places." In the episode, the Pink Ranger, Kimberly, (Amy Jo Johnson) and the Blue Ranger, Billy, (David Yost), switch bodies. The central struggle of the episode then becomes dealing with what it is like to be a boy trapped in the identity and embodiment of a girl and a girl trapped in the identity and embodiment of a boy. What a perfect opportunity for us to discuss gender! As a trans mother to a young butch daughter, who just the day before cut her own hair again, because "I want to be like a boy," I'm constantly on the look-out for children's or child-friendly media that reflects the transness and queerness of our family. Towards this end, the Power Rangers offers lessons on transgender, feminism, and queer sexuality, but perhaps not the lessons the writers of the show intended.

From the surface, the episode does not appear very deep or live up to the potential the premise of the gender swap allows. This is a frequent problem in literature and film, especially aimed at young adults and children, where the writers are afraid of going deeper because of the questions of sexuality, gender, and social imbalances (such as sexism, stereotypes, privilege) that would inevitably arise if such plots were taken seriously. As a result, as when the Animorph books involve gender morphing (which only happens twice but for which the premise of the series seemed to offer infinite opportunities and motivations), the gender switch is not only surface level comedy but abortive in how little the plot deals with the issue. In the episode, the central problem becomes rather how to deal with an attack from multiple enemies at once and an enemy who can't be defeated directly. As a result, in the twenty minute episode which is book ended by the gender swap scenes, only a few minutes are actually devoted to the matter and it in no ways relates to or is explored in the rest of the episode. Billy and Kimberly try an invention designed that allow telepathy (the power to read each other's minds), they switch bodies instead, Billy struggles to be a girl (i.e. wear make-up and cook), Kimberly struggles to be a boy (run basic computer programs), and in the end they switch back. All in all, the issue is treated as a joke, depending on tired gender stereotypes usually reserved for satirical drag performances. It seems almost as though the writers could not come up with material that wouldn't "go too far" on any number of matters (i.e. sexuality, gender, social inequalities), material which would likely be censored. In the end, as far as the narrative goes, the gender swap was an utterly insubstantial and abridged gimmick.

So what can "Switching Places" on Power Rangers teach my daughter? As it happens, even when storytellers try to not talk about transgender, feminism, and queerness, they end up supplying any number of suggestive lessons in the wake of their evasive dancing around the topics. Marginalized people have long had to appropriate places and things that are not made for them in order to survive. Watching TV shows as a queer and/or trans youth often means having to translate characters and scenarios designed to be about straight cisgender people and made it connect to their experiences. The hyper campy Mighty Morphin Power Rangers from the 1990s is well suited for this sort of cross-cultural reading against the grain. The show preached diversity, through its rainbow of Pink, Yellow, Red, Black, and Blue colored rangers. The diversity in the cast was meant to reflect this and did so in a transparently problematic way. The Black Ranger was African American and the Yellow Ranger was Asian American. The Blue Ranger was a man and the Pink Ranger was a woman. Even if the execution was stereotypical, Power Ranger clearly intended to be read by a diverse audience, each of which is bound to read the show in their own way. Whether or not the show had queer and trans families in mind, it nonetheless remains open to alternative ways of approaching its stories of gender. Yet as a critically trans reading of "Switching Places" demonstrates, there were undercurrents of queerness and feminism in the shows own production that disturb its over-determined and over-wrought normative conclusion.

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Lessons for Kimberly
(Amy Jo Johnson)

Twenty-some years later, Amy Jo Johnson still recalls "Switching Places" as one of her favorite memories during her tenure on Power Rangers and one of the most impacting on the development of her character, Kimberly. During a 2014 Question and Answer Panel, a member from the audience states that "Switching Places" is a fan favorite and asks Johnson what she learned from it. "I had some fun episodes with David," responds Johnson, referring to David Yost, the actor who performed the role of Billy. "Those were the most fun episodes... the switching places" (Lexington Comic and Toy Convention). Throughout numerous interviews, especially regarding Power Rangers, "fun" is a key word for Johnson. Noting that Power Rangers did not hire from the actors union, Johnson observed that the conditions on the show were frequently less than hospitable. In another interview, Yost, who would later leave due to the toxic environment of show, observed that the head producers of the show did not regard the story or the actors as significant. "Saban," said Yost of the Power Ranger's longtime show runner, "regarded the show are merely 30 minute toy commercials." The quality and conditions of the show were thus secondary. "The message was clear," said Yost, "any of us were replaceable." In this context, perhaps Johnson's emphasis that the swapping episodes were "fun," especially with Yost, are particularly significant. Indeed, as two of the only professional actors on the show, Johnson and Yost both cherished opportunities to derive lessons from the scripts they were given and develop their characters.

"I like when I got colors," says speaking Johnson to her fans on Youtube about how the switching episodes gave her a chance to add levels and depth to the character of Kimberly. "I got to be evil. And David. It was fun" (Youtube). Once again, "fun" appears to mark a significant point of departure for the actor and character alike. In the case of "Switching Places," audience and actor alike recognize how living for a time in the gender of another developed the character. Fans such as the questioner in 2014 have noted that at the start of the first season of Power Rangers, Kimberly was often written as a two-dimensional caricature of a valley girl, a ditzy, popular high femme. Over time, however, Kimberly moved from unintelligent to sarcastic, even witty, and from borderline shallow and materialistic to caring and empathetic. Many, including Wikipedia, note "Switching Places" as one of the first places where significant changes developed in the character of Kimberly. After living as a teenage boy for an undesignated amount of time, says the fan-edited entry, "She also displays a cunning, clever and intuitive side, also inherited from her time in switching bodies with Billy." While the shift from a stupid woman to a smart male reeks of chauvinism on the level of the show-running, the fact that a fairly shallow, straight, cisgender girl became more insightful, empathetic, and intuitive because of what could be called a "transgender experience" is critical. Even if it is only intended as a plot device, the transgender experience of a kind of gender dysphoria is being recognized as offering unique insights for the cis-community; so much so that people may change as a result.

"That machine blew up," says Johnson in an interview describing how the prop would spark and malfunction, dangerously burning them and the crew. In many respects, the detonation of the physical set-piece was indicative of the machine's part in the queer undoing of the shows normative operations. After the end of the episode as the dysphoric plot device that had allowed for a trans experience to break into the mainstream was never again seen. Within the narrative world of the Power Rangers, the elimination of the gender-switch machine was to close off the radical possibilities and undercurrents that were already brewing in the show. If the machine continued in working order, would characters be drawn to use it again for tactical purposes? It's potential for a radical sharing of skills and embodiments are predicted by one of the Power Ranger's bullies, Skull, asking if he could us the machine and Billy's brain to get him through an upcoming exam. The possibilities for cross-utilizing abilities also suggest queerer potentials for cross-identification. What if someone wanted to switch bodies not for strategic or utilitarian purposes but for the sake of trans and queer desires. Characters could change bodies in order to access other genders. Likewise, people could switch places in order to experience new sexual pleasures. The machine had powers to transform characters and the social environment beyond a single plot line. Indeed, while it was never again used on screen, the show never confirms that Billy did not keep it or use it again. Johnson confesses that a single use of the machine was a turning point for her character. What about the actor and a character of Billy who continued to subversively, subtextually persisted with alterity hidden in the background. For David Yost and Billy, more queer explosions were to come.


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Lessons for Billy
(David Yost)

My butch daughter's decision to welcome Billy the Blue Ranger into womanhood before even seeing episode eight is significant not necessarily of a nascent femininity but of an accessibility that allowed her to identify with him. The character did not police the boundary between genders and sexualities. As a gay man, still discerning himself, David Yost instilled the Blue Ranger with an openness to the trans, queer, feminine power of our family. Whether it is his lack of refusal or his active disturbing of divisions from the trans-masculine and trans-feminine, Yost as an actor and Billy as a character were able and willing to cross the boundaries of gender executed in "Switching Places." It was imaginable that Billy could be or become transgender, as well as invite others into the trans experience. For months later, my daughter names this episode as her favorite and asks to watch it again and again. The episode offers the possibility for her say, "Hey, that is like me!" Does it speak to her own transgressive mode of gender? Does it remind her of her trans lesbian parents? The episode also offers other chaotic and undetermined potential for meaning, embodiment, and perspective. Does the episode simply speak to her of queer alternative possibilities that aren't nameable but they aren't predictable by Power Ranger's producers or its audience. In the end, perhaps it is the inability to know what the show and characters mean to her that makes them so dangerously, subversively powerful. The story of characters like Billy and actors like Yost demonstrate the brave, transformative ability to take the social positions and scripts we are given, then switch them around.

Off screen treatment of Yost affirmed that the homophobic misogynist producers of Power Rangers used the show to control gender and sexual minorities and the cultural power they represented. By shutting down the queer, trans potentiality of Billy's gender swap machine, erasing it from later episodes, mirrored the desire among Producers to limit or eliminate queer lives. "I felt like I continually being told that I am not worthy of where I am because I am 'a gay person,' that I am not supposed to be an actor, and you can't be a superhero," confesses Yost. "That's sort of the vibe I was getting," (No Pink Spandex). The producers at once needed Yost's talents to embody Billy, who became increasingly popular because of episodes like "Switching Places." Yet the show also feared, even hated Yost and the cultural power he represented and wielded. The problems Yost faced personally embodied a tension in the wider system of the show. On one level, Power Rangers profited from using queer talents and preaching diversity. Yet on another level, it worked tirelessly to control or expunge non-normative alternatives through over-wrought messages on gender and sexuality. Power Rangers at once needed and hated queer agents, it allowed for diverse trans experiences of genders even as it worked to shut them down. This conflict, however, is not without casualties. Eventually Yost left and Billy was written off the show. Yet the elimination of the character suggested more deadly real world consequences for this kind of homophobic trap for queer actors. "I was worried about my life. I was worried I might take my life," admitted Yost on his emotional state after years of being used and abused by the show's producers. "I needed to leave when I left" (No Pink Spandex).

Despite the overbearing hetero and cisgender programming for the characters on the show and the oppression of actors behind the scenes, episodes like Switching Places offered windows into the alternative lives, potentials, and lessons that could not be beaten out of the show. For a long while after performing an exchange of embodiments and characters, Yost and Johnson had a special connection that undermined the supposed separation of their characters along terms of gender and sexuality. Kimberly was the object of desire for prominent male characters like Tommy the Green Ranger but was not supposed to have a closeness to Billy who was effectively neutered and desexualized over the show. Despite this hetero-sexist division, Yost and Johnson maintained a subversive humor. "Amy Joe and I would get the giggles, we would just look at each other and we would start laughing," recounts Yost. "She is just a close person to me. She is almost like a sister to me. She and I always had a great chemistry together,"(No Pink Spandex). Because of the unexpected, unintended alliances and sympathies of these two actors, episodes like "Switching Places" arouse. This connection affirmed not only the connection between the actors but audience members who identified with Billy, Kimberly, as well as the trans and queer audience members who identified with Billy as Kimberly or Kimberly as Billy. However the show tried to script gender and sexuality, an undercurrent of queer and trans humor continually pointed to alternative possibilities.


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