The Transgender Ghetto

Gender Immigrants and the Migration into Mainstream Society

Main Entry: 1ghet·to

        2 : a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure

        3 a : an isolated group  b : a situation that resembles a ghetto especially in conferring inferior status or limiting opportunity

In the  English language, the word "ghetto" has taken on unpleasant connotations. It often conjures up visions of squalor, violence, sadness, and hopelessness.  It hasn't always been that way.  At one point ghettos were staging areas for people with a common heritage to gather on their path to cultural assimilation into larger societies.  However, today a ghetto is a place to escape from.  It is not a healthy place to stay for very long. 

Make no mistake.  There IS such a thing as a Transgender Ghetto.  It may not necessarily be a specific place that a person can visit, or that a person can find on a map in large cities around the country.  No, the Transgender Ghetto is a state of mind.  It is a mindset that historically has caused transgender people to huddle together out of safety and community in a society where many have historically been able to find very little of either.  Those who are perceived to challenge common notions of sex or gender find themselves relegated to a caste near the bottom of society’s value system and, as with any marginalized group, life on the fringes can be lonely and difficult. 

The Transgender Ghetto can be as oppressive and dark as anything that exists in our physical world.  For some, it is a community Pity Party where all life’s real and perceived slights are directly related to a person’s gender issues.  It is a place where broken people huddle outside the direct glare of society – victimized and demoralized.  It is an energy sucking abyss from which few find the strength (or the hope) to escape.  It isn’t pretty, and it certainly isn’t health, but for many - it’s home. 

An immigrant is a person traveling from someplace to someplace else.  It is a journey.  Often, the immigrant chooses this journey in search of any number of things: escape from turmoil, a better life, happiness, peace.  The risks are often staggering as it requires a person to leave all they’ve ever known and loved in hopes of finding a more fulfilling life someplace else.  There are no guarantees, and the stories of courage and of dedication are true testament to the power of the human spirit.

In a very real way, transgender people are immigrants similar to those who came to America nearly 100 years ago.  They were full of hope for a better life – arriving here in droves with little more than the clothes on their back.  Often, they didn’t know the customs or the language or any of the other things many of us take for granted as we live our day to day lives.  However, that didn’t stop them from coming. 

Once they arrived they huddled in small communities populated with people just like themselves.  They shared a common bond; common roots that neither distance nor circumstance could diminish.  More than that, though, they established community for the sake of security.  Being around others like them made them feel safe, especially when the outside world challenged their right to even be here in the first place.

An immigrant mindset is a complex one.  On one hand you’re drawn by the promise of a better life.  You really don’t want to step on anyone’s toes – you just want to earn your way.  You want to believe in simple concepts like justice, and that if you work hard you’ll be successful, and that good things happen for good people.  On the other, there’s a world of people telling you that you don’t belong.  It challenges your right to even exist.  Oftentimes, it works to forcibly dislodge you from your foothold.  Sometimes, it even takes your life.

All those things are true of the transgender community today.  Instead of having to prove any nationalistic or cultural heritage, we’re challenged to legitimize our gender.  We’re forced to prove that we’re real men and woman in a culture that doesn’t tolerate ambiguity very well when it comes to gender, or to sexuality.  We’re asked to risk everything we’ve known on a trek across the gender line.  And, all along the way there are those who would attempt to tell us who and what we are.

For the longest time transgender people faded into the fabric of society out of necessity – often forsaking their transgender roots.  Those who could not do this often found themselves in a deadly Catch-22 - unable to continue the charade of their former life any longer, but unable to get employment and acceptance as their authentic selves.  There was no such thing as a transgender “community” because each person was on their own mission of simple survival.  Any attempt to achieve higher levels of self-actualization was nullified by the constant day-to-day efforts to survive.

For many, that precarious existence has changed.  As much as any single thing that has transformed transgender people over recent years, the development of a transgender consciousness is perhaps the single most important development we’ve seen.  Whereas in the past people have moved on to other things, new generations of transgender people are choosing to identify AS transgender.  They are finding ways to live their lives while at the same time maintaining the link to their transgender past.  They are refusing to allow themselves to be reduced to one-dimension of themselves; rather they celebrate in the realization that they’re vibrant, complex, healthy people.

As in the early part of the 20th centuries when people of many nationalities began the slow but steady process of integrating into the American culture, so too are we seeing this process with the transgender community.  It is a time-tested process of assimilation, and by slowly escaping the safe ghetto enclaves and mixing with the larger society we see the entire landscape of our every day existence changing.  Today, the transgender community is doctors, lawyers, engineers, pilots, executives, secretaries – they are a cross-section of America. 

So, too, are they sex workers, homeless people, and indigents.  For many the collapse of financial and professional opportunity still leads to desperate measures.  Sadly, that has not changed.  The transgender community is truly a cross-section of society in every sense of the world, and it is only now taking its rightful place IN society. 

That's what it's really all about, isn't it?.  Whether we want to admit it or not, gender is a social construct.  It requires other people - otherwise, what's the point??  It involves other people treating you in a way congruent with the way you perceive yourself to be: interaction, validation, and respect.  That's the sad part.  Many of us retreat to a transgender ghetto that is removed from society - a safe place where only other transgender people or similarly marginalized people go.  We eliminate the risk that being social involves by building barriers.  And, in a very real sense, we isolate ourselves to the point where we lose the opportunity to truly experience gender experience of any kind.  It is truly a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't existence.  And, I daresay, for most of us it is a dead end.

It’s hard to say whether this gradual exodus from transgender ghettos has caused greater acceptance, or that acceptance has led to greater freedoms to leave the safety of the nest.  Both are probably at play here, and both are accelerating at an amazing pace.   In workplaces around the country, recognition of the unique needs of the transgender existence is transforming our culture.  Empathetic portrayals in mainstream media (Boys Don’t Cry, Normal, Transamerica, Transgenerations) are slowly replacing the outdated caricatures and stereotypes that have plagued our existence for so long.  In courthouses, legislatures, and schools around there is renewed recognition that things are not always as they seem, and that people are far more complex than the simple binaries of man and woman.

 

I recently had this discussion with a co-worker, a British man who still identifies as British but at the same time who identifies as a first-generation American.  He reflected on his heritage and wondered aloud, “When does an immigrant stop being an immigrant and just belong?”  That’s a good question, and I doubt there’s any real answer.  I replied that I think the key element in this entire equation is Pride – a pride in who and what we are.  It’s a pride in our entire selves, not in a single component of it.  Pride is transforming, and nobody can take it from any of us unless we choose to give it away.

I look forward to a day when a crowd is full of diverse faces.  All have unique histories.  All have their own unique heritage.  All have come from someplace but their journeys have somehow brought them all together.  Among that crowd will be transgender faces.  Their journey will be seen for what it is, and their courage will finally be recognized.  The days of having to fight for our right to belong will be forgotten.  The stigma that has plagued us for so long will be a mere memory.

Perhaps even more amazing, transgender people - individually and collectively - are starting to have pride in their transgender heritage.  They may come to realize, as I have, that there's nothing inherently 'bad' in being transgender.  This phenomenon has existed and has been documented for as long as people have been recording history.. Other cultures have handled it in ways far less damaging, far less stigmatizing.  And, as soon as any of us can break free from the pervasive mindset established at the early part of the 20th century, that chose to treat it as mental illness, may of us realize it's a part of ourselves we actually choose to embrace, rather than to hide, or to shed.  Free from the suffocating social pressures and stigmas they will have the opportunity to appreciate their unique background in healthy and holistic ways.  As with Italian-Americans, or Irish-Americans, or any number of groups that have immigrated from somewhere to somewhere else, the end result will be a collection of attributes of where they've come from, as well as where they are now.  For many of us, that's the goal.  And, for the first time, for many of us - that goal is well within reach.

There is a pressure to keep immigrants in their ghettos - to suppress them.  We face that pressure, too.  Often, however, I suggest that the single-most acute source of that pressure is ourselves.  Our own fears are keeping us there.  We buy into the victim mentality that tries to convince us that we're broken, that we're bad, that we're somehow sick.  Those are the barriers that keep each of us individually confined and in hiding.  And, those are the barriers that each of us must overcome if we are to escape this ghetto.

The future will remember this time as a transforming period for the transgender community.  The transgender ghetto is still a place of safety.  But it is a place more and more of us are seeing from the outside for the first time. 

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[written 5-10-2006]