Wrote a letter to my state senators
So. Senate Bill 723.
Dear Senator,
I'll understand if you have attachments turned off (you probably get all sorts of weirdos sending you stuff), but I would appreciate it if you'd take a moment to look at this one.
That's me there. So my question is this: who would you rather I married, a man or a woman?
On one hand, I'd like to know why I even have to ask you that. You're an utter stranger; how is my theoretical marriage any business of yours? However, a great many people have decided to MAKE it their business who I'm allowed to marry, hence this exercise.
The punchline, which you may or may not have guessed, is that I'm legally female. You wouldn't know it from meeting me, because despite what a lot of people would like to believe, they actually can't recognize gender-deviants when they see us. Anyone who claims otherwise, who claims that they can always "tell," that they could never be "fooled," are -- to put it mildly -- wrong. No one's ever guessed that my birth certificate has an "F" on it unless I told them.
So if I marry a woman, it's F + F on paper. If I marry a man, it's two dudes kissing in front of the justice of the peace. What'll it be, then? Which one is same-sex marriage? How do you even define the terms "same-sex" or "opposite-sex" when it comes to someone like me? Even for people opposed to gay marriage, it's counter-intuitive and frankly somewhat silly to insist that my manly self HAS TO marry another man, all because of what a doctor stamped on a sheet of paper twenty-six years ago.
Intersexed and transgender people don't make for easy bookkeeping or tidy paperwork -- I get it. And conservatives think we shouldn't even exist -- but we do. Intersexed or transgender, you can't even draw a line between the two, because what it comes down to is that there is no foolproof way to determine gender for some people. Whether you want to decide it by birth certificates, chromosomes, hormones, external genitalia, internal genitalia -- there will always be someone who doesn't match up right. For some of us it was a choice, and a hard one. Some of us never got the choice at all.
Williams and his conservative allies are trying to take away the rights of intersexed and transgender people so they can score points with their anti-gay voter block. They stand a good chance of succeeding because Democrats (especially in as red a state as Texas) have so much to lose and so little to gain by opposing them. I get it, I really do. We're a tiny, invisible demographic, and politically it's so much safer to let them throw us under the bus than it is to be our friend.
But if they're allowed to take away our rights simply because we're too few to be worth fighting for, then no one wins but the bigots. Please, please vote against SB 723.
Dear Senator,
I'll understand if you have attachments turned off (you probably get all sorts of weirdos sending you stuff), but I would appreciate it if you'd take a moment to look at this one.
That's me there. So my question is this: who would you rather I married, a man or a woman?
On one hand, I'd like to know why I even have to ask you that. You're an utter stranger; how is my theoretical marriage any business of yours? However, a great many people have decided to MAKE it their business who I'm allowed to marry, hence this exercise.
The punchline, which you may or may not have guessed, is that I'm legally female. You wouldn't know it from meeting me, because despite what a lot of people would like to believe, they actually can't recognize gender-deviants when they see us. Anyone who claims otherwise, who claims that they can always "tell," that they could never be "fooled," are -- to put it mildly -- wrong. No one's ever guessed that my birth certificate has an "F" on it unless I told them.
So if I marry a woman, it's F + F on paper. If I marry a man, it's two dudes kissing in front of the justice of the peace. What'll it be, then? Which one is same-sex marriage? How do you even define the terms "same-sex" or "opposite-sex" when it comes to someone like me? Even for people opposed to gay marriage, it's counter-intuitive and frankly somewhat silly to insist that my manly self HAS TO marry another man, all because of what a doctor stamped on a sheet of paper twenty-six years ago.
Intersexed and transgender people don't make for easy bookkeeping or tidy paperwork -- I get it. And conservatives think we shouldn't even exist -- but we do. Intersexed or transgender, you can't even draw a line between the two, because what it comes down to is that there is no foolproof way to determine gender for some people. Whether you want to decide it by birth certificates, chromosomes, hormones, external genitalia, internal genitalia -- there will always be someone who doesn't match up right. For some of us it was a choice, and a hard one. Some of us never got the choice at all.
Williams and his conservative allies are trying to take away the rights of intersexed and transgender people so they can score points with their anti-gay voter block. They stand a good chance of succeeding because Democrats (especially in as red a state as Texas) have so much to lose and so little to gain by opposing them. I get it, I really do. We're a tiny, invisible demographic, and politically it's so much safer to let them throw us under the bus than it is to be our friend.
But if they're allowed to take away our rights simply because we're too few to be worth fighting for, then no one wins but the bigots. Please, please vote against SB 723.