I Dreamt This Prayer Last Night

(I dreamt this prayer last night.)

I stand with my feet on the earth and know that all that I am or hope to be comes from Her.

I am grateful for my life, for this body, for the flame inside this body.

I will tend this flame with respect, tenderness and compassion.

I am here because my Ancestors were here, and sacrificed for my survival.

We are here because our Ancestors were here, and sacrificed for our survival.

I am here because my Ancestors ARE here, and want me to survive.

We are here because our Ancestors ARE here, and want us to survive.

I am here so that my children and grandchildren and all of my descendants will know that I loved them, that I will always love them, without boundaries of time or distance.

We are here so that our children and grandchildren and all of our descendants will know that we loved them, that we will always love them, without boundaries of time or distance.

Today, we will be warriors of peace.

Today, we will protect, with love, the gifts entrusted to us with love.

My father said, "Let's name her ..."

 My mother said, “Only if we spell it the right way.”

She meant, the Hebrew way. Not “Debra,” the modern, stripped-down, secular version that would make for great playground moments of shame.

Not that shortened version only one letter away from Zebra, as if I were an illustration for the last letter of the English alphabet, a poor animal kidnapped from its ancient homeland, caged for children to point at.

Not the easier-to-spell, 50's B-movie-star, untethered way.

No, my mother meant Deborah, a name full of lineage, a name whose sonorous syllables conjure up the steady gathering of golden pollen all day long, the defensive don’t-fuck-with-me sting, the die-for-my-hive-sisters attitude. 

My mother knew right then, right there, at UCLA Hospital in October 1961, before anything else but my miraculous birth had happened, before any of the apocalyptic moments ahead of us had peered over the horizon, that her brown half-Indian, half European girl would need the real thing.   

Deborah, the venom and the honey. Deborah, the fury and the dance. Deborah, the howl and the song.

She did not know she would only be with me for forty years. She did not know that she would abandon me a thousand times before that final departure. She did not know that she herself would inscribe my body with the scars that spell out our severed story.

But she left me with a name that would stay, a name I have grown into at last.

A name like the guardian she could never be.

Needs Improvement

I was in elementary school when I was told, with a small group of other fourth grade girls, to report to the school counselor’s tiny office once a week.  I have no idea who signed us up, but every Wednesday, there we were: Mrs. Case, three raggedy white girls, and me – the only American Indian kid in the school.  

 I don’t remember much about this “counseling,” other than the glorious novelty of one adult’s undivided attention for 30 minutes, and the fluffy pink key chain our mothers pitched in to buy from the Wigwam as a thank-you gift for Mrs. Case at the end of the school year.  Maybe we were singled out because we were the poorest kids in the school, or maybe we’d each let slip something about our “unstable” home situations to an adult at Soos Creek Elementary.   

Soos Creek Elementary was my fifth elementary school in five years. 

It’s hard enough to know what’s inappropriate at that age; throw in late nights waiting up for alcoholic parents to come home, molestation by Mom’s wayward boyfriend, or a good case of ringworm, and god only knows what alarms get set off.  Missing 19 days of school might have had something to do with that, too.

Being assigned to this counseling group was the first time in my life that I was officially identified as damaged, or in need of ‘fixing.’  Although I had occasionally been graced with a loving teacher who lavished tenderness on me, this was the first time a mental health professional was brought in to try to treat me.  It was also pretty much the last time anyone made that effort.

Either the school district thought Mrs. Case was a miracle worker and we were all repaired by the end of the school year, or they gave us up as a lost cause; or, maybe like so many other rural, poor girls, we just fell through the cracks … because despite the fact that my home situation only got worse and I experienced still more damage, I made it all the way to high school graduation without any further official administrative interventions.  In high school, a few tender-hearted teachers took me under their wings, offered real books to supplement the censored materials handed out in class, praised my creative and scholarly writing, gave me access to AP English classes, and even extra food when I started looking a little too thin. I remember these teachers vividly and gratefully.

But without anyone ever actually saying so, I learned early on that this damage – the wounds inflicted on my body and soul during my childhood - would be left up to me to deal with. Let’s be clear: I did not have a fucking clue.

I found my 4th grade report card the other day. I don't remember ever getting a "C+" for reading in my life. Perhaps I just didn't like the reading material? The teacher marked me as reading at the 5th grade level, so the C+ makes no sense. It may have been my attitude. It may have been hers. Mrs. Burt was a real piece of work and I hated her guts for making me feel like a piece of crap in her classroom.  "Completes assignments on time" was "NI" - Needs Improvement; I remember getting lost in my head doing worksheets that seemed so easy, running out of time because I was "daydreaming." I still do that.

I was given a "B" grade for Health, although I received a "+" for "tries to keep neat and clean" and "effort." Apparently, trying was not enough to overcome whatever it was I was dragging in from our trailer in the woods. 

"Debbie has written many imaginative stories. She'll receive further practice in writing factual reports," Mrs. Burt reported (misspelling my name, as she always did: it was Deby), "Debbie dislikes arithmetic, but with more patience with herself, I think she'd feel less frustrated." Now I remember: I used to get a well-timed stomachache just in time for math sessions! Because of course Mrs. Burt, my least-favorite of our "team" of teachers, taught math. I was switched to a different head teacher at the semester.  At the end of the school year, Mrs. Burt's contract was not renewed. She wasn't "compatible" with the school's open-concept design. Or, I think, with children in general.

But I do remember those "imaginative stories." In those stories, I could control things. In those stories, I could write about what was unspeakable, even if it were entire rabbit families being massacred and disappeared, not people.  

In my stories, I could be brave. 

 

Psalm of No Surrender

My destroyer;
Master of disguises. 

Able to breach my defenses
with a single searing word. 

Faster than adrenaline's rush. 
Stronger than a nightmare’s claw. 

Creature of a thousand beloved faces. 
Ventriloquist of every voice I’ve longed to hear. 

Chameleon. Sorcerer. Stalker.
O, you deathless thing.   

You track me down
by the stink of my loss.

You lead me into the eager quicksand,
make me lie beneath the beast’s belly. 

You coax the iron from my blood
into your own shallow veins.  
 
You bury me in the desert
of steaming asphalt, drown me 
 
in the sewage of your monstrous language. 
Shall I be your slave, your poet, your captive?
  
Will you be my god,
shall I have no other? 

Must I worship you
with all my disgrace

and all my hatred
and all my shame? 

This handfasting
works both ways. 

If I am yours,
you are mine.

We go down
to the sea of no stars

with our wrists bound
tight as ticks;

we go down
to the sea of no stars

and you will not see
that silvery surface again

without me at your side:
your relentless, bloodied bride.

Deborah A. Miranda

For many years now, I have been trying to write about fear. Joy Harjo and Raymond Carver's poems about fear both take on the concept with visceral specificity and honesty, and speak clearly about the damage our own fears can do in our lives. Yet crafting something of my own about fear has escaped me. And I mean escaped: the "fear poem" drafts are piled up like dead bodies, while fear went flitting on, uncontained.

I found a very rough draft of this poem in my "freewrites" folder yesterday. It wasn't very good, but it had something intriguing there that pulled me back in. I let myself start playing with it again, around 1 a.m.  Maybe 1 a.m. is the perfect time to write a poem about fear. I was alone in the house except for two dogs who'd given up on me ever going to bed, and snoozed in the bedroom without me. The air was finally cooler, and our neighborhood was, for a Saturday night, quiet. It was just me, and the poem. The poem opened up and Fear walked in.

It's not finished, but it needs to sit for awhile now. "Sit and think about what it's done" is what my wife would say.

This morning, I realize that I've been writing about fear most of my life. What I wanted to do differently was write a poem TO fear, address fear as an entity that has controlled so many of my actions and made me its puppet.

Harjo's compassion at the end of her poem is stunning. She sees her fear as a victim itself, almost a young child whose rampages are the result of its own trauma, and needs comfort rather than anger. Carver lists his fears; the poem is a catalog, a way of trying to organize and control fear that, at the very end, slips the leash and takes off on its own again.

I wanted to capture the horror of being at the mercy of fear, of losing control. But I also wanted a glimpse into the fact that I haven't given up. Yes, there is a terrified small child at the core of this picture; but she's grown up into a woman with the guts to take fear on. At the end, I hope the poem intimates that the struggle is more evenly matched that it first appeared.

Like so much else, this poem is a work in progress.

Doorway to the Ancestors

As I continue working on my collection of essays using Isabel Meadows' narratives, Isabel and her connection to both the past and the future are much on my mind. I have written of Isabel as being a doorway, a threshold, through which knowledge, spirit and love pass through, going in both directions.  From her to the Ancestors, from the Ancestors back to her, and from Isabel to us in the form of story.

Sometimes I get jammed up, unable to translate the feelings generated or opened up by Isabel's words.  That's when I turn to wordless creation. Working with my hands gives my heart and mind other ways to translate what it is Isabel might be trying to tell us. Working with the materials she speaks of - abalone, pine nuts, olivella, dentalium, twined string, icons from Catholicism - is a tactile, even sensual, method of bodily-felt research. I lose myself for hours, days, in such work, and when I eventually emerge, intangible, abstract yet terribly real sensations seem to be more willing to be held in the shape of words.

This summer was like that.  A lot. In writing a chapter about the Indian women of the Carmel mission in post-secular trauma, and trying to couch those stories using Dian Million's "felt experience" theory, my body was sometimes swimming in fear. If you've ever read the book Watership Down, by Richard Adams, you might be familiar with the state of being "tharn." I've tried to explain what going tharn feels like:

It comes with bone-deep paralysis, something colder than freezing, and a cessation of breathing.  Not breathlessness, which means you are trying to breathe, and not holding your breath, which means you are trying not to breathe – I’m talking about a simple lack of breathing, of never having breathed in your life, of passive stasis: not breathing, not not breathing.  Maybe that is what death feels like.  You aren’t asleep.   You aren’t dazed.  There is a kind of clarity in the moment, perhaps even a blanket of calm.  If you breathe, either in or out, that would disturb that veil of almost serenity.  But you can’t call it serenity; that would be blasphemy.   There is no serenity about rape.

I understand that for some people, going tharn means amnesia.  Those people aren’t going tharn; they are disappearing.  I was never like that.  I never forgot the details.  It wasn’t a question of memory or forgetting.  Of wanting to forget or wanting to remember.  It was separating myself from the scary parts, of surviving, of getting through it, and moving on.  Survival, not disappearing.  Maintaining some presence.  A foot still on the ground.  A way back.  An anchor.  Going tharn lets you do that.

Because disappearing is way worse than going tharn.  I knew that.  I knew people who had disappeared.

Going to sleep at night after a long day of wrestling with notions of wounds and healing, I began to imagine a door. The door.  The doorway between us, and the Ancestors who survived so that we could be here to pull their stories out of silence and into the laps of our selves and our children. My wife's Aunt Laya, a collector of beautiful and odd things, had long ago gifted us with a small teak door from some little hand-crafted boat being sold for parts. With brass nails and hinges, a worn handle, and a wonderful square window that opened outward and down, it has waited in a dusty corner for us to find the perfect use. So I began to imagine that door, plain yet sturdy, maybe the only survivor from that old boat, as something to hang my image of a doorway to the Ancestors on.

Every night, I lay in bed and tried out materials, designs, ideas, on that door. The door became my lullaby.

During the day, I began to gather the materials. Some of them I already owned from beading - dentalium, feathers, clay beads.  Some I scoured the internet for, happening upon someone's cache of vintage rectangular abalone beads from an old warehouse.  Still others had been gifted to me during a decade of readings in California Indian territory - pine nuts, olivella shells, white sage. Some ideas came to me in dreams: I would have kept the doorway pure Indian, but Isabel insisted on the Sacred Heart milagros, and in this way I reminded myself that our identities are what they are because of what we've used to survive. If there is anything pure about us, it is that we are pure survivors.

Playing with pieces of polished abalone shell, I realized they had transformed themselves into umunipsha, the little hummingbird who often appears when I am speaking or thinking of Isabel.

The dance shawl that my sister Louise made for me has done a lot of work in its time. I wore it the night I danced in honor and memory of my mother at an Esselen Nation gathering. It has graced an altar or two. Melted wax spots from candles, a burn from a piece of sage that slipped out of an abalone shell, dust from California roads decorate it along with Louise's designs of acorns and oak leaves. Isabel wanted that shawl, even though the red sun design is from the Chumash. I am a mix of my grandfather - Esselen - and his wife, Santa Ynez Chumash. Doorway to all the Ancestors.

Bit by bit, through hot July and August, these materials sitting on my workbench made their way onto the teak door, arranged and rearranged themselves. As I cleaned and polished the teak, I remembered that Isabel's father was a sailor, an English man who arrived in Monterey on a whaling ship and never left. Ah, I said to Isabel in my head, you snuck that one in on me, didn't you?

My writing desk is on one side of my office at home, running along the wall.  My workbench is on the opposite side, against the other wall. All summer long, I migrated back and forth from one kind of work to another. 

After awhile, I sometimes forgot which table I was at, and that is what finally allowed me to finish both the chapter, and this piece: Doorway to the Ancestors.

No Words

No Words

but a luna moth

rests on a beetle-chewed stump

just off the path

like a precisely

placed flag,

a ripple of green,

pulsing.

You can’t exist.

There's no splendor

left in the world.

 

Oh but you do,

oh beauty

you do, 

stretched out soft-leafy sails,

luminous pearls perched 

on each wing.

Your feathery antennae

sift the wind,

twin tails ribboning,

trembling.

You, with no mouth,

you cannot be bothered to eat

or drink, waste no time

on song or taste.

You must be part angel,

made to be beauty, create beauty

be beauty, create beauty

be beauty, create beauty

be beauty, create beauty

or else made for something

even more mysterious

than I

can imagine -

me, with my human sin:

I have

a mouth, luna,

but I have

no words.

After a Drought

-->

Today, I am taking up a difficult project after a long time away.

I feel a little prayer pushing up from my dry heart, like the tentative seep of an old spring coming back to life.

Sitting in this office built on the land between Big House and Little House Mountains in the place now called Virginia, I’m grateful to the Ancestors of the Indigenous peoples who sprang from this earth.  Thank you for letting me do my work here in the shade of these oaks, hickories, pines, tulip poplars, black walnuts; thank you for the moist red clay beneath this thick blanket of leaves.  Thank you for this space to take into my hands these books, articles, photographs, shards of a mosaic, aching to become newly shaped.  Thank you for allowing me to make a space for my Ancestors here in this small cabin.

Cholom, Yunisyunis, Estefana, Teodosia, Josefa, Isabel, I am diving back into a dark, dark pool, but it is a place that needs exploration and sensing and shaping into thought.  Far from our homeland, I carry that place in my teeth and bones, blood and memory, in your names and actions.

I’m asking for strength, Ancestors, for companionship on this dive, for your accumulated wisdom, questions and ideas to guide me.  

What do you need me to know?  What do you need me to discover, uncover, recover?  What can I do to help you rest more peacefully, what can I voice for you?  Lead me to those places and help me dig, brush away, put together, make into a story those pieces which honor your struggles and pain.  Guide me through those places and I will take on as much as I can, filter it into this language of necessity the best that I can. 

I have put down this work for a long time now, out of fear, out of exhaustion, but today I return.  Uncertain, unsure of my sense of direction.  I have a job to finish, though.  No way around it.  I’m taking some deep breaths.  I’m opening my mind to the task. We tell women laboring in childbirth, “Push towards the pain” even though that is the exact opposite of what we have learnt about pain.  

I am pushing towards the pain, Ancestors, because that is the only way through it.  You are my promise that there is light on the other side.  Nimasianexelpasaleki.  Here we go!

Re-naming Point Lobos - NOT Another Colonizer's Name

 

Holes made by Indigenous women pounding acorns, at Ichxenta Point, Los Lobos State Park

June 1, 2016

To Whom It May Concern: [emailed to secretary@resources.ca.gov  (mark "Attn: John Laird),

Stephen.Bachman@parks.ca.gov , Rae.Schwaderer@parks.ca.gov ]

I am writing to suggest that the original Indigenous name of “Ixchenta” become the new name for the area currently called Point Lobos, rather than “A.M. Allen Ranch.”

While it is true that Alexander M. Allan purchased 640 acres of a former mining company’s property at Point Lobos with an eye to preserving the land’s scenery and unique habitat, I do not think that this is enough reason to change the name of the area to “A.M. Allan Ranch.”  Allan was a man concerned with retaining the true nature of the area, and I believe he would have been more than pleased to have the Indian word for that area preserved in the same way that he worked to preserve the land itself.

I am a Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, and enrolled member of the Esselen Nation.  I am currently working on a book of essays (under contract with U of Nebraska Press) in which I assert that Isabel Meadows, an Indian woman whose mother was born in the Carmel Mission, is far more than just “J.P. Harrington’s Indian informant.”  In fact, Isabel Meadows was tribal historian, intellectual critic of missionization and colonization, and cultural preservationist (languages, songs, religion, place names, traditional foods and gathering techniques, family stories from her time back to her grandmother’s as well as tribal creation myths and teaching materials).  She purposely placed her wealth of materials in Smithsonian J.P. Harrington’s hands to make sure that her knowledge, accumulated over a long lifespan and consisting of many lifetimes’ worth of information, would be available to her people long after she was gone. 

I tell you all this because it is Isabel who tells us that the land at Point Lobos is, very specifically, a Native village called "Ichxenta Iwano" (Ichxenta village).  At least one, and probably more, of my Ancestors were documented by the Spanish priests as coming from Ichxenta.  My ancestral roots go back to Ichxenta and forward to Los Angeles, where I was born, and continue on as I teach in the State of Virginia.  What this should tell you is that the story of Ichxenta isn’t over yet; it isn’t past.  It is an ongoing story that flows from time immemorial right into this very moment. 

California has a rich history of Indigenous culture and lifeways, and most of that is written on the land itself.  Today’s California Indian people are still creating art, song, and literature.  You have the opportunity to acknowledge and encourage this richness by giving space to an Indigenous place name and celebrating that originality.  The Eselen Institute knew this when they used one of our names for their  space, and it has worked well for them.  Alfred Kroeber made a special study of how California Indigenous place names had crossed over into Anglo usage, and his list is a beautiful litany of one way that Indigenous presence continues on California land:  Ojai, Simi, Cucamonga, Hetch Hetchy, Hueneme, Klamath, Lompoc, Malibu, Pacoima, Pala, Petaluma, Pala, Saticoy, Tamalpais, Tomales, Topanga, to name just a few of the more familiar (see Kroeber’s materials at https://archive.org/stream/californiaplacen00kroerich/californiaplacen00kroerich_djvu.txt). 

People go to Point Lobos because of its unique, spectacular, unparalleled environment, and a place like that deserves a name that can speak to such beauty and reverence.  Please, do not use the name of yet another colonizer, or commemorate the theft of yet another piece of Indigenous homeland.  Naming is a powerful act.  Ichxenta is a beautiful name, and would help begin to heal many wounds in both land and Anglo/Native relationships.

Sincerely,

Dr. Deborah A. Miranda

Washington and Lee University

John Lucian Smith, Jr. Endowed Chair
204 W. Washington St.
Lexington VA 24450
mirandad@wlu.edu

Responses from officials will be posted below as they come in.

THE TALK

THE TALK

I drove Margo to the airport this morning; it was dark all over the place with a huge yellow-orange moon setting.  We drove into the fog’s long skirts and I was glad for the lack of traffic.  We listened to NPR until a clip featuring a particular politician came on; then I had to reach out and hit the power button. 

We pulled into the “Kiss and Fly Zone” at Roanoke Regional Airport, and opened our doors to the chilly air.  Margo put on her motion-sickness patch (“too late,” she worried, “you’re supposed to put it on 3 hours before the flight”) and I pulled her suitcase out of the back of the car.  We embraced and said goodbye.  I remember when I moved to Virginia in 2004, we still said our goodbyes inside the car.  Two women kissing like that were quite rare in our part of the world; we felt self-conscious and yes, a little fearful.  It’s still a big deal for us to hold hands on the street.  This morning, I waited for an airport employee to walk past before putting my arms around Margo.  Progress is all relative, right?  As Margo quips, “Well, it SAYS ‘kiss and fly,’ we’re just following directions.  It doesn’t say, ‘heterosexually kiss and fly.’”

Kind of like those t-shirts, bumper stickers and mugs that all say, “Virginia is for Lovers” with the big red heart.  What they really mean is “Virginia is for HETEROSEXUAL lovers.”  Before the Supreme Court decision that same-sex marriages must be viewed as legal in all states, I used to fantasize about using a big chisel-tipped Sharpie to draw an arrow on one of these shirts with the word “heterosexual” inserted between for and lovers.  Just to be clear that I knew MY love and I were not included, and I loved her in Virginia, anyway, as well as everywhere else.

So we kissed and told each other to take care, and she walked into the airport pulling the shiny blueberry rolling bag, her back pack on her shoulders. Once through security, I knew Margo would have to go into a restroom and put on all of her braces: a big back brace (it has to go under her jeans in order to work), wrists, maybe her neck brace, though that can wait until she’s actually on the plane.  I sat for a few minutes and checked my email on my phone, waiting – as I always do – to see if Margo came back for something she’d forgotten, or if there’s some complication ...  She never does, but I always wait.  Finally I put away my phone, belted up, checked my mirrors, and pulled out of the Kiss & Fly zone.  Headed home slowly in the fog as the sun rose and the darkness pulled back like a thick tide.  After about 20 minutes, the dashboard of our little car lit up with an incoming text from Margo.  I hit “listen” and a robotic voice said, “So far so good.  Boarding area without setting off any alarms.”  I had to smile to myself.  She knows I worry.

I’m not the only wife who worries about her wife going out into the world of gendered rest rooms.

Yesterday, Margo and I had “the talk.”  The talk that anyone who loves a transgender person or butch-identified woman must have with their beloved these days: please be careful when and where you pee; have Megan (Margo’s daughter) go with you if she’s there; look for unisex restrooms; prepare yourself emotionally so you won’t be taken by surprise if you ARE challenged; think about what you might say …

It was a talk about being realistic.  But it was also a talk about fear.

Even though restrooms have always been fraught with possible confrontations for anyone whose gendered appearance seems outside the norm, I have more reason to worry than ever.  Here in Virginia, we live next door to North Carolina and the unbelievable yet frighteningly real “Bathroom Bill” (H.B. 2), stating that everyone must pee in the bathroom that matches their original birth certificate.  Although she didn’t plan it that way, this time my wife’s connecting flight is through Philly; normally, she goes through Charlotte, North Carolina.  Also, due to her disability, we usually fly together, so I often serve as a kind of deflector in bathroom situations (we’ve gotten some dirty looks when people realize we’re ‘together,’ but we’ve never had anyone mistake Margo for a man when I’m at her side in a public restroom).  I’m really relieved that she’s avoiding Charlotte, even though Philly is NOT my favorite connecting hub.  Still, the stories I’m hearing and reading about come from all over the U.S.; North Carolina’s state law speaks quite clearly to those susceptible to mob mentality everywhere.

My wife is not trans, but she was born butch.  That means, she gets “sirred” at least once a week (this happened most of her life, even before she cut her waist-length straight black hair to a short and curly ‘do), wears dark Sauconeys, jeans and t-shirts or button-up shirts marketed as men’s clothing.  The only jewelry she wears is a pair of small silver hoops in her ears, and our wedding band – nothing particularly feminine.  Her voice is a little husky and deep.  She’s a small person, 5’2” (“AND A QUARTER”), slender, not threatening; she just has this butch vibe going on.  Friends and family (including myself) who buy her clothing as gifts often mistakenly get Large sizes because that’s how we think of Margo.  She jokes that she’s really 6’2” and 160 pounds; the truth is, she projects a big presence, one of the many things I love about her.  Still, it would take a big imagination to see Margo as a predator of anything more than a handful of delicious alfalfa sprouts.

She took her earrings out a month ago for an MRI and we never put them back in.  Now I’m sitting here worrying about that, wondering if that would prove a key part of someone else’s perceptions about her, if that little touch of bling might tip the scales in favor of seeing my wife as a biological woman if someone challenged her.  You just never know, and in the current climate about binary gender, now folks seem to feel they have permission to police gender in loud, aggressive, bullying ways.

As I see the stories about these kinds of bullying appear in my FB feed, or read news stories about straight women with short hair, lesbians with hats (?!), and actual trans people, all being harassed in or around restrooms, I see all too clearly how fragile the safe space around us has always been.  The transphobia around public bathrooms encourages the same phobic people to unleash their homophobia as well.  Now it can show itself under the guise of “protecting” women and children who appear heteronormative.  As Shannon Minter writes, “But while HB2’s attack on transgender people has attracted the lion’s share of attention, its negative impact on others is just as real. Among the many groups harmed by HB2, gender-nonconforming women, including many who are lesbian or bisexual, are especially at risk.  In the words of one butch blogger, ‘Bathrooms are spaces of extreme vulnerability for gender nonconforming folk.’”

I said earlier that “Margo and I had ‘the talk’.”  But the truth is, I was doing all the talking.  My wife didn’t have much to say.  She ducked her head and nodded a lot.  I hope I didn’t scare her.  I wonder what was going on in her head.  She has spent a lifetime being independent, mobile, and brave.  Now, in addition to her genetic disability slowing her down with loss of mobility and severe, chronic pain, there is the very real possibility of having to defend herself if she needs to adjust her brace, take a pain pill, or god forbid, actually pee.  Yet I couldn’t send her out into the world without warning her, could I?  We live in a small southeastern college town where most people have known my wife for years; it’s a safe little bubble in many ways.  Leaving it reminds us of that fact.

A suit against H.B. 2 asserts that the law is unconstitutional in that it allows discrimination on the basis of gender.  I’m glad that some North Carolinians have stepped up to fight the law, but that doesn’t protect my wife or other non-binary/trans folks from being harassed or even physically escorted out of a bathroom by security or police, being asked to “prove” their gender identity matches that of the bathroom in question, and all sorts of traumatizing and potentially explosive situations. 

And no, I’m not bashing ALL of North Carolina by association.  Many North Carolinians are taking stands as allies and compassionate human beings. 

(Interestingly, the FB page where the owners of that pizza parlor posted their sign has been made private since the sign appeared in January.  I’m pretty sure that harassment about the sign caused that to happen.  How many businesses have to make their FB site private?)  And on my own campus, the Hillel House bathrooms have recently been re-signed:

All in all, I’m glad that once my wife arrives at her destination, she’ll be in the company of family for the remainder of the trip, until she flies out alone again to come home.  I mean, it helps a little.  She’d have back-up.  My anger and anxiety levels are exhausted by the tone and political climate that has made using a public restroom one more thing to keep me awake at night because of someone else’s whacked-out imagination. 

Because the truth of the matter is, if a woman or child is going to be harassed anywhere – bathroom, waiting room, dark hallway, parking deck, library, school, public transportation – sheer statistics point not at a transgender person, but the predictable straight, white male.  Demetrios Psichopaidas, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, writes that “As of 2014, there has not been a reported incident of violence or peeping by trans men or women in bathrooms in the U.S., according to data from Media Matters. There is absolutely zero evidence of any violence ever committed in a restroom by such individuals. However,” – and this is an important point – “violence against these persons [transgender individuals] is quite commonplace,” (TakePart). 

That’s right.  In fact, Justice Department statistics show that 8 out of 10 of sexual assaults are committed by people already known to the victim, not strangers, while 64% of transgender people will experience sexual assault in their lifetime (study by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality). 

I’m sure someday, some brilliant psychologist will connect the dots about this restroom rage in a way that helps us understand the psychosis behind it, similar to the way we know that the loudest homophobic voices typically belong to people who doubt their own heterosexuality.  In other words, those who are so vigorous about “defending” women and children in public bathrooms may quite likely be the very ones who fantasize about attacking women and children in public bathrooms. 

Fear, as always, is the monster here.  Not someone looking for a place to empty a bladder with a little dignity and comfort before simply going on with their lives. 

One of those someones is my wife. 

So I worry.  And write.  Oh yeah – and I vote. 

Take care, everyone.  Take care.