Transphobia
A little transphobia raised its ugly head during my ongoing RC class last night. It's actually a combination of two classes being taught by the Area Reference Person. This happens every so often, so far as I can figure out, in order to give the individual teachers of these classes a breather. Consequently, it's a large class with a lot new relationships to forge and only a few weeks for which to do it.
Fran is a transgender male with a youthful face and low center of gravity who variously makes his living as a performance artist and temp teacher. When I first met him two years ago I honestly didn't know what pronoun he went by and I'm not sure anyone else did either. It's possible the leadership clued the class in, but, if so, I wasn't there when they did it. I only found out the hard way, by referring to him as "she" in front of class one evening and being corrected later on by someone else. He apparently took a session about it while I was out of the room.
That was about a year and a half ago. Fran has been bouncing around from one class or another ever since. He has attended the area-wide men's support group once twice and the multi-regional gay men's support group once. I thought he was warmly welcomed at the meetings where I was present at the same time.
But, last night, when the combined class of about thirteen people broke into to groups by gender, the ARP announced that the men would meet n one room and those who were "raised as women" would meet in another. I thought it was an interesting turn of phrase, but, didn't realize its full implication until the men had gathered and we looked around and noticed that Fran was not among us. One guy, to his credit, questioned this and the answer given by the ARP only raised more questions than it answered. Was Fran given a choice about this? Was he given some session time the rest of us were not aware of?
The situation presented a perennial problem within RC as it pertained to what was once referred to as "individual leadership" which is, how to confront decisions you don't agree with? I thought Clark's approach set the right tone; he was respectful and agnostic about the whole issue of transgendered people within RC. But, it didn't result in a very satisfying explanation.
Fran is a transgender male with a youthful face and low center of gravity who variously makes his living as a performance artist and temp teacher. When I first met him two years ago I honestly didn't know what pronoun he went by and I'm not sure anyone else did either. It's possible the leadership clued the class in, but, if so, I wasn't there when they did it. I only found out the hard way, by referring to him as "she" in front of class one evening and being corrected later on by someone else. He apparently took a session about it while I was out of the room.
That was about a year and a half ago. Fran has been bouncing around from one class or another ever since. He has attended the area-wide men's support group once twice and the multi-regional gay men's support group once. I thought he was warmly welcomed at the meetings where I was present at the same time.
But, last night, when the combined class of about thirteen people broke into to groups by gender, the ARP announced that the men would meet n one room and those who were "raised as women" would meet in another. I thought it was an interesting turn of phrase, but, didn't realize its full implication until the men had gathered and we looked around and noticed that Fran was not among us. One guy, to his credit, questioned this and the answer given by the ARP only raised more questions than it answered. Was Fran given a choice about this? Was he given some session time the rest of us were not aware of?
The situation presented a perennial problem within RC as it pertained to what was once referred to as "individual leadership" which is, how to confront decisions you don't agree with? I thought Clark's approach set the right tone; he was respectful and agnostic about the whole issue of transgendered people within RC. But, it didn't result in a very satisfying explanation.