The Undeclared War On African American Trans Women

[tekla]

Starbuck, do you want someone to fall in love with you because you're a short order cook?  It's nice if they like your cooking, but I'm sure you'd like to get out of the kitchen on occasion and be liked for something else.  I like it when people like me for being able to fix things, or make things, but if that's all it is, then I'm nothing more than a tradesman, not a lover.

As it turns out, Sean Conery is NOT James Bond, in fact I understand he is a bit of a lout.  Likewise I did a location shoot once with a guy who is one of Hollywood's #1 Tough Guy.  He did a series of three movies that had he had any less dialog they would have been silent movies.  But in real life, he is very soft spoken, and very, very articulate.  You don't want people who love the image, you want someone who loves you.

[Rachael]

I dont even think i suggested that.... remotely... infact where the hell did you get this idea from?

You said rockstars would rather pay 300 than fall in love... i said well they do occasionally... they are human, i did not say that it was just for thier job... dont treat me like a nieve little girl... I dont like it, and neither will you. 
the carear point came up from your once again name droping your work in the music industry... not any point of mine.

[tekla]

They are not paying that money to fall in love, they pay it so the girl will not fall in love.  Huge diff.  Like I said, they don't pay them for love, they pay them to go away.

[Rachael]

As i said last time, lovely sentiment, whats it go to do with this topic?

[tekla]

In the beginning, it was about how some people - minority members - get more arrests, and stronger sentences for the same crimes that others commit, and walk away from.  But of course, I'm sure that just a problem here, and would never happen anywhere else. 

Then it got into a long discussion about being a hooker. (A very American term BTW), and if that was a good, or bad, or neither deal.  I voted neither.

[cindybc]

And I presume you know all about what motivates hookers and why they are out there freezing their butts off. Is it to sell a little piece of themselves so they can buy some cocaine or maybe a cheap motel room to be out of the cold for the night? Or maybe they fight to get into a hostel for the night. And some even used my bathtub for their weekly baths and to wash a few items of clothes I used to get from Sally Ann's for them. And yeah, why not bed down some member from a rock band, they pay good money. Some of my best friends were hookers.

Cindy

[tekla]

I've never said they were my friends, nor that all was one or the other.  I know that the two inches that are the only barrier from one world to another.  The stage door from Taylor Street to the stage are about an entire universe apart.  Separate realities, separate worlds, different lives.  All I'm trying to say is that while all of you see the crack ho's I see a different kind of person too.  Not that one is right, or wrong, or good or bad.  Or that either of those people are there because of choices, both good and bad that they made in their lives. 

I think on those two inches a lot.  I'm there a lot so I can do that.  Two inches, the difference between being on stage at the Warfield in San Francisco, fortune, fame and all that goes with it - including the limo ride to get you the hell out of well, hell.  Because that's Taylor Street, that's hell.  Some mornings I have to kick some bum who is sleeping in a puddle of his own piss out of the doorway that a few hours later some chucklehead who wrote some song that made him more money that god himself can count will walk through.  Out on Taylor Street, the crack ho's who will sell themselves for less then five dollars, on the other side are the the uptown girls who make more money for a few hours than I'll make that day, and I'm not badly paid.  Two inches.

That's all it is.  Two inches.  Just a door between two worlds.  (with the biggest black guy you've ever seen in your life deciding who gets to go through that door, and who does not)  Two inches. 

And my problem with a lot of this is, is the single minded idea that 'the world I know is the only world that is'.  And that just ain't happening.  There are lots of worlds.  Some better, some worse, and some, worse than you could ever imagine.  Then, on the other hand, some much better than you could ever dream of.  Two inches - that's the difference between the two.

It's like separate universes coexisting, without either one really ever changing the other one.  That you don't see both - nor the millions and millions of words in between - is just pretty much a failure of imagination more than anything else.  And I don't think I even got it until I sat out there night after night, and thought about it myself.  Hell, I was fifty years old, with a PhD and never got to see anyone die in front of my own eyes, and then, in the short space of two years I got to see three.  Two by guns, one by a knife - and that stuff will change you.

Sure, the worst exists, and you should never forget it.  Hell, I'm sure a lot of those people out there on the streets had people, mothers, fathers, kids, lovers, who loved them.  I also know that a lot of people on that stage did it despite everyone telling them they could not ever make it, and they told them all to F off.  Nothing is universal.

Two inches, nothing is universal. 

[NicholeW.]

I've never said they were my friends, nor that all was one or the other.  I know that the two inches that are the only barrier from one world to another.  The stage door from Taylor Street to the stage are about an entire universe apart.  Separate realities, separate worlds, different lives.  All I'm trying to say is that while all of you see the crack ho's I see a different kind of person too.  Not that one is right, or wrong, or good or bad.  Or that either of those people are there because of choices, both good and bad that they made in their lives. 

I think on those two inches a lot.  I'm there a lot so I can do that.  Two inches, the difference between being on stage at the Warfield in San Francisco, fortune, fame and all that goes with it - including the limo ride to get you the hell out of well, hell.  Because that's Taylor Street, that's hell.  Some mornings I have to kick some bum who is sleeping in a puddle of his own piss out of the doorway that a few hours later some chucklehead who wrote some song that made him more money that god himself can count will walk through.  Out on Taylor Street, the crack ho's who will sell themselves for less then five dollars, on the other side are the the uptown girls who make more money for a few hours than I'll make that day, and I'm not badly paid.  Two inches.

That's all it is.  Two inches.  Just a door between two worlds.  (with the biggest black guy you've ever seen in your life deciding who gets to go through that door, and who does not)  Two inches. 

And my problem with a lot of this is, is the single minded idea that 'the world I know is the only world that is'.  And that just ain't happening.  There are lots of worlds.  Some better, some worse, and some, worse than you could ever imagine.  Then, on the other hand, some much better than you could ever dream of.  Two inches - that's the difference between the two.

It's like separate universes coexisting, without either one really ever changing the other one.  That you don't see both - nor the millions and millions of words in between - is just pretty much a failure of imagination more than anything else.  And I don't think I even got it until I sat out there night after night, and thought about it myself.  Hell, I was fifty years old, with a PhD and never got to see anyone die in front of my own eyes, and then, in the short space of two years I got to see three.  Two by guns, one by a knife - and that stuff will change you.

Sure, the worst exists, and you should never forget it.  Hell, I'm sure a lot of those people out there on the streets had people, mothers, fathers, kids, lovers, who loved them.  I also know that a lot of people on that stage did it despite everyone telling them they could not ever make it, and they told them all to F off.  Nothing is universal.

Two inches, nothing is universal. 

Excellent post, tekla.

Even if for no other reason because I think that we sometimes never even bother to think, let alone ever bother to know or recall, that no matter how great a job we believe we've done with our lives. No matter how moral, intelligent, pretty we think we are and no matter how worthy of honor and glory we may think we are -- it all comes down to chance more than anything else.

A chance that when you were eight that you didn't dodge into the street and get mailed by the kid from across town who was speeding his dad's Buick to the drive-through. The odd chance that your father didn't come to your bed when you were in it at age ten and turn you into his "date" whether you were thought of as male or female at the time. The chance that the gun that was fired wasn't turned an inch in a different direction in the hand of a shooter and so you saw someone else die rather than being dead yourself.

There's a lot of will involved in a lot of our actions. It's easy for us to say that we are somehow more moral or more law-abiding and so we are not hounded by the law, etc. But life has a lot of chance connected to the results of any individual life as well.

It's nice that after five pages that finally gets recognized by one writer on this thread. *nod*

Nichole

[lisagurl]

Then you should like "Outliers: The Story of Success " however "Chance" is very heavily influenced by probability. Being in the right place at the right time is not always an accident.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html?_r=1&hp

[NicholeW.]

The persistence of the self-made person. Lisa, Ayn Rand, no doubt, is somewhere and proud of all that!

N~

[lisagurl]

Try this idea on morals.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?ref=magazine

I do agree with much of Pinker's ideas.

But what little I know of Ayn Rand, i do not agree with.

[cindybc]

Well Tekla, I have lived on the other side of that 2inches. Have you? Do you really know what it's like, or do you only know it second hand. Try walking for a week in that drunks shoes who pissed on your door step.

Even when I couldn't even help myself I was helping others. Any company on the street is better then the horror of being alone on the street. Sisters watches over sister during the night hours, and each go their own way by day.  You know, hon, there is actually camaraderie among the girls that live there?

They are quite human, they have emotions and feelings just like the rest on society and their values are probably much higher then one would think. They are human.

Cindy

[Ell]

Well Tekla, I have lived on the other side of that 2inches. Have you? Do you really know what it's like, or do you only know it second hand. Try walking for a week in that drunks shoes who pissed on your door step.

Even when I couldn't even help myself I was helping others. Any company on the street is better then the horror of being alone on the street. Sisters watches over sister during the night hours, and each go their own way by day.  You know, hon, there is actually camaraderie among the girls that live there?

They are quite human, they have emotions and feelings just like the rest on society and their values are probably much higher then one would think. They are human.

Cindy

uh, Cindy...i hate to tell you this, but i think you and Tekla are both on the same side of this discussion.   *dashes back under rock*

-ell

[cindybc]

Well now Ell, I'll be a hoot owls aunt. I be danged, gots some room under that rock? All we need now if we get board under the rock is a bag of marbles and a slingshot to keep the dogs from pissin on our rock.

Cindy

[tekla]

I don't think you have to live it to know it.  You don't have to be the person getting shot and bleeding out on the sidewalk to know that you don't want that to happen to you.  You don't have to wake up in a pool of your own urine and vomit to understand that's not the best way to live.  I don't have to do it, to know that I would not want to do it.  Seeing is believing at times.

[cindybc]

I pray you never have to find out, I pray no one here on this board ever has to find out.

Cindy

[Rachael]

You've clearly never attended a Frat party Cindy

[cindybc]

If being an alcoholic for twenty years qualifies the equivalent of a Frat party, and ending up being striped of everything of any value including pride and self esteem in myself, the drunk on Tekla door step so aptly described is an example, then I would say I graduated from the Frat party with flying colors.

Cindy

[NicholeW.]

I think the "frat party" angle is prolly a good comparison.

TBH, a lot of young people get into the party aspects, especially whilst in college, of alcohol. All but about 10% go about their lives without any problem once school's out forever and the job line starts. That 10% though can find life really difficult years down the road when they find themselves in the positions that tekla and cindybc have mentioned.

People, with luck, age. The fart party aspects of alcoholism may be fine for younger people. When someone's out on the street in their late thirties or in their forties or older there's no party anymore: creaking joints, terribly aged skin and bones and some real evidence that street-life for any period extended beyond a few months tends toward adjustment disorders that are hard to overcome. And those tend toward what we so professionally refer to as mental illnesses.

The party is fine as long as I am able to leave it and go home. After a few years of partying though the positive returns on the partying seem to disappear to be replaced by some pretty grim realities.

[cindybc]

Hi Nichole

Right on Senorita. yas gotchum. I was one of the few lucky ones to have come out the other end of the ->-bleeped-<- house blues with my health still intact. Call it divine providence if you so desire or just a horse shoe up my back side shortly after finding sobriety I went back to school and got what I needed to obtain a job as a social worker.

I was proud of my accomplishments and regained much of my pride and self esteem. I loved working with people so working as a social worker was right up my ally so to speak. A few years later I came to the door steps of transitioning.

I had nothing to lose, I had already lost everything that was dear to me even before I ever hit the skids, or the streets, which ever one prefers to call it. Now it's 9 years later and here I am still doing support work, well guess what? appears I have went full circle in my life and I find myself once again among both those women that work the street and those that live there, this time working with them in a woman's shelter. The very same people I was trying to help 20 years ago when I was on the street myself and could hardly even keep my own head above water.

So like I have said before in response to one of Tekla's posts, I been on the other side of that 2 inches that she mentioned. I know what it's like, it's not nice and I do pray that you all here are smart enough to stay one step ahead of that 2 inches.

Cindy