Solstice Sky at Dusk

Hard to believe this is Manhattan, no? I am incredibly lucky to live where I do in upstate Manhattan, where the woods out back and their constant (and constantly changing) beauty buffers city life.

I have been thinking (pondering, mulling over) recently about how difficult it can be to hear hard truths, and then today I stumbled over this quote:

"We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him." Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

Which kind of says it all. (Montaigne was French, from the Renaissance, known for introducing essays as a form of literature. (His Essais were published in 1580, you can read them online.)

August in the Adirondaks

I spent a birthday week in the Adirondaks with Sealy.

I had Sealy as a medical foster puppy last October, and after her lung surgery in January was able to (yippee) adopt her in March.

Here she is, atop of Rattlesnake Knob.

Yay, Sealy!

sigh...

snipped

 “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

Read the whole op-ed:   Is My Marriage Gay? by Jennifer Finney Boylan 

The New York Times

May  11, 2009

Belgrade Lakes, Me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12boylan.html?scp=1&sq=transgender%20marriage&st=cse

As many Americans know, last week Gov. John Baldacci of Maine signed a law that made this state the fifth in the nation to legalize gay marriage. It’s worth pointing out, however, that there were some legal same-sex marriages in Maine already, just as there probably are in all 50 states. These are marriages in which at least one member of the couple has changed genders since the wedding.

I’m in such a marriage myself and, quite frankly, my spouse and I forget most of the time that there is anything particularly unique about our family, even if we are — what is the phrase? — “differently married.”

Deirdre Finney and I were wed in 1988 at the National Cathedral in Washington. In 2000, I started the long and complex process of changing from male to female. Deedie stood by me, deciding that her life was better with me than without me. Maybe she was crazy for doing so; lots of people have generously offered her this unsolicited opinion over the years. But what she would tell you, were you to ask, is that the things that she loved in me have mostly remained the same, and that our marriage, in the end, is about a lot more than what genders we are, or were.

Deirdre is far from the only spouse to find herself in this situation; each week we hear from wives and husbands going through similar experiences together. Reliable statistics on transgendered people always prove elusive, but just judging from my e-mail, it seems as if there are a whole lot more transsexuals — and people who love them — in New England than say, Republicans. Or Yankees fans.

I’ve been legally female since 2002, although the definition of what makes someone “legally” male or female is part of what makes this issue so unwieldy. How do we define legal gender? By chromosomes? By genitalia? By spirit? By whether one asks directions when lost?

We accept as a basic truth the idea that everyone has the right to marry somebody. Just as fundamental is the belief that no couple should be divorced against their will.

For our part, Deirdre and I remain legally married, even though we’re both legally female. If we had divorced last month, before Governor Baldacci’s signature, I would have been allowed on the following day to marry a man only. There are states, however, that do not recognize sex changes. If I were to attempt to remarry in Ohio, for instance, I would be allowed to wed a woman only.

Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be. The case of J’noel Gardiner, in Kansas, provides a telling example. Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.

Similar rulings have left couples in similar situations in Florida, Ohio and Texas. A 1999 ruling in San Antonio, in Littleton v. Prange, determined that marriage could be only between people with different chromosomes. The result, of course, was that lesbian couples in that jurisdiction were then allowed to wed as long as one member of the couple had a Y chromosome, which is the case with both transgendered male-to-females and people born with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome. This ruling made Texas, paradoxically, one of the first states in which gay marriage was legal.

A lawyer for the transgendered plaintiff in the Littleton case noted the absurdity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

Legal scholars can (and have) devoted themselves to the ultimately frustrating task of defining “male” and “female” as entities fixed and unmoving. A better use of their time, however, might be to focus on accepting the elusiveness of gender — and to celebrate it. Whether a marriage like mine is a same-sex marriage or some other kind is hardly the point. What matters is that my spouse and I love each other, and that our legal union has been a good thing — for us, for our children and for our community.

It’s my hope that people who are reluctant to embrace same-sex marriage will see that it has been with us, albeit in this one unusual circumstance, for years. Can we have a future in which we are more concerned with the love a family has than with the sometimes unanswerable questions of gender and identity? As of last week, it no longer seems so unthinkable. As we say in Maine, you can get there from here.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor of English at Colby College and the author of the memoir “I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted.”

Postcards from the Mall

Some casual recollections from Inauguration Day...(illustrated with cell phone photos) got picked up and are now online at Women for Parity

- why not here, too?

*************

Barack Obama was not my first - or even second - choice for president in the primaries. To say it was cold on Inauguration Day was an understatement. I don't care for crowds in the slightest. So why did I go down to Washington, DC from New York City for the inauguration? I suppose I wanted to "be in that number" for this historic moment in American history, to experience this event for myself. What follows are a few "postcards" of my observations and impressions of the day.

In the shower that morning I found myself singing "Oh Happy Day" - a song I didn't even know I knew! - although the spiritual was combined somehow with "Day by Day" from "Jesus Christ Superstar." (I'm not very good at remembering lyrics so my version went something like "When Jesus da-dum...(day by day)..."

After dressing in many layers (three on the bottom, four on top, plus a coat, neck gaiter, gloves (with glove liners), three pairs of socks, scarf, headband, and a hat), I set out on my folding bicycle at a little before 7am. With tiny 16" wheels - regular bike wheels are 26" - with me on top instead of a six year old it looks more like a clown bike than an adult's mode of transportation. I rode up the east side of the Potomac River on the Mt. Vernon bike trail, taking a leisurely 45 minutes to ride the eight miles from where I started in Alexandria, VA to a free bike valet just south of the Jefferson Memorial. At first along the way there was hardly anyone on the path, but as I got closer there were a number of other bicyclists, and in the last mile or so, pedestrians.

I was the 205th person to enter the bike valet (827 total at that location, another 1127 at the bike valet by the White House) and after handing over the bike and helmet I walked around the west side of the tidal basin through the FDR Memorial to Mall and onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. There was no security at all. People were literally dancing as they arrived, as a repeat of Sunday's "We Are One" concert was being played over the PA system. (I entered to "Bye Bye American Pie" and "Shout!") The energy was joyous and jubilant with smiles everywhere from everyone to everybody.

While the Lincoln Memorial offered some protection from the wind, a high vista, and excellent sound (along with the ghosts of Marian Anderson and Dr. King), there wasn't a Jumbotron in sight, and it was as far on the Mall from the capitol (1.9 miles) as one can get. So even though I'd grabbed one of the last seats there (this was shortly after 8am), after some time I decided to move up closer in order to be able to see the day's events on a screen. But first I visited the interior of the Lincoln Memorial, reading his words and thinking about the president who ended his second inaugurational address 144 years ago "... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." A vision we are still seeking. The ceremonies proper began while I was inside the Memorial, at about 9:30am, starting off with a children's chorus from my old hometown of San Francisco.

I wandered up towards the Washington Monument, but the crowds were too thick between the WWII Memorial and the Monument to get through. The Monument sits on a bit of elevated ground; in order to have a view of the Capitol (and a very distant one at that, it's 0.9 miles away) one has to be on the east side of the Monument. So I headed back west. It turned out that the only Jumbotron behind the WWII Memorial - on either side of the reflecting pool behind the Monument - was about 2/3 of the way back, on the south side of the mall just a bit east of the Korean War Memorial. I staked out a spot there. (One thing to remember is that almost all the television shots of the crowd showed just the area from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. A huge expanse, to be sure, but the Mall extends almost that same distance BEHIND the Monument, and that area was packed, too. Not as tightly, but still...)

The crowd responded to the announcements of arrivals with cheer, boos, and wild applause, depending on the person. The most popular by far were the Obama's (shots of Michelle Obama received rock star screams), the least favorite was Dick Cheny, who was greeted by boos and hisses.

People shared stories throughout the day, initiating conversations with strangers which usually began by asking where folks had come from and if they'd ever been to Washington, DC before. The area I ended up standing in had a wide range of ages - perhaps because there was no security at the very far end of the mall, people were able to bring their babies in strollers and elders could enter with walkers and in wheelchairs. There was a mix of race, as well, with perhaps one-third of the people black, heavy on young families and older women, women who had been teenagers and young women during the civil rights struggle. One woman I talked to - with five of her grown grandchildren with her - told me that she'd been on the Mall in just about the same place as she was now for Dr. King's "I Have a Dream Speech." I had just turned three then, she was twenty-five. She told me that while she'd raised her children, and then later her grandchildren, to believe in that dream of Dr. King, she never, ever, thought inside herself it could begin to come true in her lifetime.

Eventually the more formal part of the ceremony began. Everyone laughed when the MC asked the crowd to "please rise" because all of us had been standing for many hours by then - and would continue to stand!

Through the welcome and the invocation (no one near me booed Rev. Warren) people were silent. They loved Aretha Franklin's singing (and that hat!). Many cheers went up after Joe Biden was sworn in by Justice Stevens. John Williams' chamber quartet music provided an opportunity for contemplative reflection of what was about to come next. Wild, wild, cheers erupted at the introduction of Barack Obama. Utter stillness followed...with tears rolling down face after face, including my own, as Barack Obama took the oath of office. Then...pandemonium! Nothing was audible aside from cheering for close to two minutes. Truly a joyful noise! (I confess that during this time I was looking up the text of Article 2, Section 1 the Constitution of the United States, being quite sure that "so help you God" was not part of the presidential oath of office. Indeed it wasn't. Shame on Chief Justice Roberts! I can understand - perhaps - mixing up word order, but adding in THAT?)

People listened closely to the inaugural address - a fellow near me said afterwards that this is what he'd wanted to hear on Sep. 12th, 2001 - and started departing immediately at it's conclusion. By the time the poem was over, the crowd near me had thinned out a good deal, and there was finally room to move around again.

My throat tightened at the timbre of Rev. Lowry's opening words - such a tired voice, sounding every one of it's 89 years, telling of weary years and silent tears, words I know from "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" but which he knew from his life. Non-religious, non-beliver me was surprised as not just one, or even two, but three "amens" leapt out of my mouth at the end of his benediction.

At the end of the ceremony everyone left in my area sang our national anthem. Quite loudly. (Two things I've found rare in America, from Americans.) There is a power in communal singing intensely strong, and bonding, something that has the ability to define and build community.

I was tremendously moved by how far as a nation we have come, humbled and sobered by how high the cost has been, and how long it has taken us to get to this day.

Yes, it was freezing cold, and no, I couldn't see anything in person (except the helicopter flying Mr. Bush away afterwards).

Yet I wouldn't have missed being there in person for the world.

(PS By the following afternoon I had warmed up again.)