Newspaper reporters quickly learn, if they’re any good, to find their own stories. The only way to keep your job from devolving into an endless treadmill of zoning board meetings is to figure out what interests you and get busy. Otherwise you spend your career being told what to do, and who wants that?
Thus in my younger days I’d scan phone books, looking for …. I wasn’t sure what. Something unusual. Once I called a number listed in the Yellow Pages under “Currency engravers,” only to find a sofer, or Hebrew scribe. I’d phoned hoping to see a Brazilian bank note being etched and ended up watching a man finish penning a torah scroll with a turkey feather.
Once in 1992, I was browsing the classified ads in the back of the Reader and noticed a shop on Elston Avenue selling women’s clothing in large sizes to men. “Now there’s something you just don’t see in the paper every day,” I thought, and went over. Another key reporting skill: go and find out.
I quickly realized that this wasn’t a story about dresses; it was a story about people. There was a community here, holding secret dances — I went to one — and maintaining safe houses. Because a guy couldn’t keep his female wardrobe in the closet at home, where his wife might find it. Often, she didn’t know.
The story “PRETTY, WITTY — AND MALE CROSS-DRESSERS KEEP CULTURE CLOSE TO VEST” ran over several pages in the paper. I’m proud of it, because there was no snickering. I used the pronouns my subjects preferred.
Not that I understood it all. The subculture who, in the 1990s, were men dressing as women, seemed to vanish into men who were women, and visa versa. I didn’t exactly get it, completely, but that was okay, because it isn’t about me — another superpower of being a reporter. It wasn’t my job to pass judgment.
When gays and lesbians got the right to marry, I wondered whether the trans community could slip through the door they’d kicked open. They did, for a while; then reaction set in. Big time, with the past election, as Republicans ginned up harms to focus on, making fear of trans a central plank. “Kamala Harris is for they/them,” one heavily-hyped commercial went. “Donald Trump is for you.” If only public health care was given the same attention.
That not only won, but framed the issue in such a way that many don’t even realize how skewed it is. When we talk about trans, we talk about bathroom policy and fairness in sports, hormones and surgeries. Controversies, not people. Republicans who fall quaking to the floor if you suggest that parents shouldn’t bat the diphtheria vaccine away from their kids’ arms suddenly are adamant that they know best what care is right for youngsters they’ve never met.
It’s actually a mirror of the abortion issue. Puff away the smoke, and you’ve got religious fanatics who think that a practice, or a person, shouldn’t exist at all, insisting they are the ones to make the decisions regarding that practice or person.
Me, I like making my own decisions, thank you, and assume that holds true for people, including women making reproductive decisions and those whose gender identity now differs from that of their past.
The bottom line for me is not Olympic boxing, but this: they’re here. The Centers for Disease Control did a survey last year and found that said 3.3% of high school students identify as transgender. How should they be treated?
That is really what needs to be considered, particularly during Transgender Awareness Week, which ends Wednesday with a Day of Remembrance for all those murdered and harassed to death. An issue barely whispered, compared to the screams greeting the scary boogeyman the Republicans have created. Kindness and tolerance might have lost the last election, but I’m not one who puts his morality up to public vote every few years. Less time inflating bathroom etiquette into a society-rattling crisis and positing imaginary harms, more time focusing on the reality before us.
I don’t want to make everybody journalists — while the profession works for me, the pay isn’t so hot and people learning what I do give me puzzled looks, like I’m Lazarus come from the dead. But that aspect of neutral inquiry — who is this? — is helpful in putting things in perspective. Assuming that perspective is what you want, and you aren’t just another fear junkie scrambling to find your daily fix.
You don’t have to appreciate trans people, aesthetically. You don’t have to like them. It really isn’t about you. Another important lesson journalists figure out, again, if they’re any good.