This post came across my feed this morning:
http://www.shakesville.com/2014/01/careless-cruel-and-unaccountable.html
It calls an article "Careless Cruel and Unaccountable" in its exposure of a trans-woman, living in stealth, who invented a new and unconventional golf putter.
Naturally, I had to read the article for myself.
http://grantland.com/features/a-mysterious-physicist-golf-club-dr-v/
The original article starts off reading like an interesting piece of investigative journalism. Then, the author mechanically picks apart a trans woman's desperate attempt at keeping her privacy and dignity intact and outs her to the world, in the name of the same spirit of investigative journalism. I felt a tangible drop and sickening in my stomach when the line was crossed in the story.
When you just want to live your life, free of the animosity, bigotry, hatred, and fear that the general public can have for a trans woman, you have little choice but to go "stealth". To abandon everything you once were, everyone you loved and who loved you, your entire history, to become who you desperately need to be, because not doing so means your life is not worth living.
In fact, I'm not sure it's even been 10 years since THIS WAS THE EXPECTED COURSE OF ACTION OF A TRANSGENDER PERSON IN ORDER TO RECEIVE MEDICAL TREATMENT.
OK, the inhumanity of all that aside, let's look at this from a practical standpoint.
It is impossible to truly achieve stealth.
Every step of your life, your identity is documented. School records. Work records. Accomplishments. All of them have your name attached, some your birth sex, and few if any organizations are willing to audit their records to reflect your new corrected information.
Recently, a friend of mine experienced the epitome of this. She had completed sex reassignment surgery, and went to have her birth certificate corrected to reflect her actual gender rather than the birth defect that was visible prompting the doctor to declare her male. When she filled out the government forms for change of gender, attached her signed affidavits from the surgeon regarding her corrected body, she got back a photocopy where they had literally taken a pen and crossed out the original information and wrote in the change.
This was her birth certificate. That piece of documentation she needed to produce to obtain insignificant things like a Passport.
How difficult would it have been for them to simply fill in a new form with the corrected information, and preserve her dignity?
Thus is the life of a trans person. Dealing with disclosure every single time we deal with institutions. "Umm, yes, don't pay attention to that, just please make sure my passport says 'F'."
The problem that the trans community has with this article is with the fact that this particular "mystery" is one that ethically SHOULD NOT BE unravelled. It is one that de-humanizes a person. Turns the truth into what appears to be a fabrication.
WHEN, IN FACT, THE FABRICATION WAS THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTATION.
Indeed Dr. V. saw this coming, and that was her original wish.
The story and tragedy of Dr. V. should remain a mystery, to preserve her dignity and humanity.
