Intersex

When author Jeffrey Eugenides appeared on the Oprah show to promote his then-new book "Middlesex", I was shocked by the medical stats explained by a doctor also on the show; that 1 in 20 people are born with either ambiguous genitalia, or internal sex organs related to both sexes. A young woman in the next segment had Androgen Insensitive Disorder, meaning that she was diagnosed in puberty with a set of undescended gonads that had secreted enough testosterone during puberty to stop her female maturation process. After having the tissue removed, she easily decided to proceed with hormone injections that would give her female breasts, since she had always identified as a woman, but for other Intersex patients, it's not so easy.  

Her adolescence had given her the height of a man and slenderness of a boy that made her a natural fit for working as a runway model, as she readily admitted on the show that most of the models she worked with were also Intersex. Her reasoning was excellent, too. Think about it: a 6-foot tall girl with a square jaw and no hips?! Gives "Victoria's Secret" a whole new connotation, doesn't it? But for all the intersex people who have clearer choices between genders, many do not. The young model went on to explain that her male hormones had destroyed her ovarian tissue, and she was born without a uterus, so she can never have children. And that's the less complicated version.

For intersex people from older generations, babies born with ambiguous genitalia were often assigned a gender at birth while still in the delivery room, based on the leanings of the attending physician, without consulting the parents or allowing the child to develop into puberty, armed with information that would assist them in making a choice later in life. One man didn't learn that he had a complete set of fully functioning ovaries and a uterus until an MRI technician told him while he was an enlistee in the army who'd just broken his back, because he also had fully functioning male genitalia and the total outward appearance of a man.

He isn't alone in his gender assumptions, either. Several years ago, a very well-known Olympic runner was newly diagnosed as intersex after her first full medical exam during the Olympic trials was performed on her, because she came from a poor, remote African village that was far from the readily available medical communities of a big city. Her grandmother explained that she'd raised her as a girl, because she looked like one (!), even though she'd never had her menses, which is often common for extreme athletes. The runner was embarrassed beyond belief to have her unusual condition plastered across the evening news, especially since it also cast a shadow over her athletic performance. She'd originally tested positive for the elevated testosterone levels that are typically linked to the usage of performance-enhancing drugs (like steroids) that are banned from legitimate competition.

I'm happy to report that she was finally accepted into Olympic competition for the women's team years ago, and again more recently as a competitor in the summer Olympic Games, proud to represent her African country unblemished with questions about her performance and her gender. For her, the story ends with a successful entry into womanhood, though for many intersex individuals, such is not the case. New York finally granted its first documented designation of intersex gender status THIS YEAR to a driver's license applicant, which tells you about the lack of acceptance and recognition within a LGBTQI community that places a "Q" for "questioning" before the biological reality that is Intersex. Even further progress has been made medically-speaking, with the standard of allowing intersex children to self-identify later in life without surgical intervention. For them, there are no questions about being intersex, because they already are. 
How's that for an "I"?

In Vitro

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_fertilisation# 

Native New Yorkers can be wildly out-of-touch with typical American norms, as evidenced by our sophisticated tastes that fit "hand-in-glove" with our thriving street culture. It's both baffling worldly and crazily down-to-earth, as a mixture that both stumps and stupefies the provincials who reach our shores. What to do? Where to go? "Melting pots" stumble those who are new to its exciting mix that we thrive on daily. There's tons of flashing lights, and lots of colors, and movement, and sounds, like a toddler-packed "Cats" matinee musical for savvy adults not on Ritalin. That, unfortunately, was me. Sigh...what I won't do for family.

As it turns out, the same sentiment was shared by my co-workers at my very first publishing job in the historic Flatiron building, located in Manhattan. Your tourist photo op was my first office space, as it still is for the people working the house. While many of you struggled to adapt socially to a rather feminine young man, I was having interesting hallway chats with a very nice production editor proudly sporting a prominent "pink triangle" button to work, as he talked to me about being a Harvard grad and a gay grandfather who came out after marriage and kids. With a woman.

My first meetings in a professional setting were the production meetings we have in publishing. They are weekly check-ins with every branch of the house that works directly with the manufacture of books. There was so much for me to learn as an apprentice that I often didn't know what to ask, so I just listened and wrote stuff down, or scribbled doodles on my big lined notepad. Yay! Office supplies! I was really young. And the managing editor who ran (runs) those meetings was (is) an openly gay women who staged a sit-in at the administration offices while attending Oneonta, which meant we shared the same counter-cultural vibe. She's also from Rockland, and I think Metis.

Needless, I hit it off with that first group of people really well, which made the technical complexity of the work the bulk of my day, over in-house squabbles and political double-timing. I didn't have the power to do anything about it, anyway. But, my higher-ups were tackling the deepest societal issues you can imagine, and they did it while "on the clock" in a fast-moving office that keeps and prints every mistake we make as the core model of our business. 

The managing editor running our weekly meetings had a second-in-command who's also an "out" gay woman, along with my bisexual friend MaryLouise the production editor (her former assistant), plus the gay granddad who also worked in production editorial, and the girl who publicly hooked up with the butch design director at a company Christmas party one year, in what was once known as "the toy building". She was teased for years for sitting on her lap and making out in front of her co-workers. Yeah...that's how we rolled.

I noticed a pregnant woman at one of my first production meetings, and my boss (the senior production manager) chose it as a "teaching moment" that outed her in the process, too. You see, the pre-meeting discussion at the table (before the meeting minutes officially began) centered around Lisa's pregnancy and how her maternity leave would effect the titles in the schedule she was working on. A big part of production is re-assigning work depending on situations just like this one, because life happens all the time. 

She told me a bit about the company's policy on maternity leave, as well as some of the costs related to it that our health insurance covered, which left Lisa the production editor to fight some serious battles with her supervisor's help. And help she got. Not only is Lisa gay like her two direct bosses and other production editorial co-workers, but she was the first woman I ever knew who had an openly in-vitro fertilization process with her also-out female partner through a sperm donor. And that was called "Tuesday morning" at our house, in the autumn of 1993. What does your house talk about?

Scouts Honor

My dad was the Scoutmaster for my bro's Boy Scout troop growing up, and it was awesome. We did really fun things like canoeing, wilderness hiking, and history tours that became treasure hunts to find the most building markers in Philadelphia at nighttime, which kind of felt like that t.v. show "Sleepy Hollow". I learned about camping (always pack extra white socks for makeshift bandages, and triple-wrap matchbooks in foil and plastic for waterproofing), orienteering (moss almost always grows on the north side of a tree, but always carry a working compass anyway), reading trails and the landscape, but I mostly knew that anyway. I was the best scout my dad ever had, until I joined "The Brownies" and then "The Girl Scouts".

Then, the pace slowed to a crawl, and there were no boys around. At all. There were absolutely no menfolk or boys around anymore; just a really "butch" troop leader who'd adopted two kids with "her" "husband", which was jarring to me outside of a girls-only softball practice that I did not attend outside of school hours. Ya dig? Country queers were deeply closeted back in the day, but we knew who was who anyway because we knew "gay", even as very young children. For instance, at Chestnut Grove elementary school in New City, his name was Patrick, and he was (is) a very nice, quiet, devoutly Catholic Irish-American boy with a blue pen type of birthmark. In junior high, his name was "Bryon", and he did funny things like foil bullies from pulling on his pants for wedgies and compose sonnets on the fly while pursuing an acting career in the city that he continued for years.

In high school, "the gay kid" was Pete and he's an awesome painter, albeit with a lifelong appreciation of goth music and/or the lifestyle, but I digress. We're talking about lesbians. In our school, her name was Gina, and she was famously found in bed with her "best friend"—a petite, highly-freckled Irish-American girl one grade behind her—by her mom the summer before we all left for college. Unlike the average suburban "sports dyke" though, Gina was (and is) the real deal: an all-star athlete who attended college on a basketball scholarship, not that it ended there. She played almost every sport that we had a team for, like volleyball, track and field, baseball, swimming, etc. So, we knew "gay" and we knew the real deal, too, not just the awkward "closet case" lurking around doing vaguely "faggy" stuff. We were "out" with each other about who were were, because we were all we had back then as a generation.

Still, the crazy dykes in my troop surpassed even my sophisticated New York understanding of gay culture. They were fucking horrible. They were cliquish to the extreme and insane, and instead of feeling ashamed about it, they reveled in their loud queerness like the assholes they were. My mom loved it. Unlike, say, dancing or art, she could excel in this. My mom remains one of the bitchiest gossips I have ever met in my life, and she's also kind of an "art fag", too. She loved the little cliques she could giggle with like a kid, over weird shit like different colored strings that were made into bad crafts no one really likes. That's a fucking badge for chicks in this troop?! The good sportsmanship of my father and my brothers had wrecked me on this gay girl experience, and nothing less as a scout would do.

I made it through Brownies easily because I really liked the illustrations that came with the handbook for me to read, plus my friends were part of that troop, but once the local "closet case" took over, she upped up the manic energy a few gay cheerleader notches, and I couldn't take it anymore. My mom immediately bonded and then sided with the gay girls and their dykey troop leader with the crew cut, to laugh about me behind my back and make fun of me, which is what she did at home with her sisters anyway, so why did I need to earn a badge in it? I really didn't. Plus, did I mention there were no boys? Like, no men at all, and that's hell for a straight girl, man-ladies. Turns out that hell for a totally heterosexual woman is a bunch of bitchy, bipolar, deeply closeted queers in a homocentric Girl Scout troop in the 'burbs, with no room for escape. Buckle up, boys. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Art Fags

Attention all humans of Planet Earth: this is the official "Art Fag" hairstyle. Please note that it hasn't changed much through the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Brooks.

People in genuinely creative industries like mine suffer from all manner of indignities and degradation, not least of which are the groupies and hangers-on that we call "Art Fags". They are: that chick who likes art, dabbled a little bit in oil painting during college, and then went on to the much easier Art History degree to work a vaguely arty job. Or, he's that overly-opinionated gay guy at the cocktail party; you know, the loud drunk one who thinks shopping is design, as he makes his way through his circle of friends, family, acquaintances, and fellow barflies to redecorate rich people apartments all over New York City. 

She's also that rich housewife "decorator" who wrongly assumes that design is searching for "rare" stuff that's sold in catalogs. To justify her time (and billable hours), she spends a lot of time finding old chairs in quaint little towns upstate, which she has reupholstered ridiculously in bright showy patterns, thus making the whole point behind this personality: it's an annoyingly immature "Look at me!" posture towards the world that marks the amateur every single time. Ditto with the "photographer" wife (with the rich husband who buys all of her over-priced camera equipment), who takes inane head-shots for other arty types with dreams of the theater and "trodding the boards" of Broadway, pretentiously wearing a showily bright and a pronouncedly jaunty ascot that may or may not be included in the onstage act. 

Same with the emaciated "Fashionista" who mistakes magazine work and extreme dieting for thousands of hours worth of pinning, sewing, cutting, and fabrication. Instant "art" career? Move to New York City, "pretty" girl! I've seen many an Art Fag go down that way. How do I know? These are all the types I encounter(ed) first-hand out there in the world, where the amateur mixes with the highly-trained professional every day, sometimes even getting away with it, especially if there's Nepotism* involved. How can you speak out against it, when your paycheck dangles in the balance? You can't, which is why the company's owner is such a fucking bitch to you and every other person in the office; she's not talented and she knows it, and it's all your fault because you're in the same room as her twisted ass. 

Luckily for me, the best art and design school on Planet Earth prepares us for mixing it up with the provincial locals by schooling us rigorously in techniques that do not come undone with time, money, or any type of rigged network connections. It just doesn't work that way for a Maestro. We do not come undone under stress or with distractions, nor with any other kinds of abuse that mark the amateurs' envious attempts at sabotage, which must be extremely irritating for all of you who try so hard each and every day to rock my boat.

I saw my very first pair of openly-sported assless chaps (worn by the slightly less leather-clad partner of a young "out" gay couple), at my first (and last) RISD Artist's Ball, so unless you plan on turning your office boardroom into the gayest drag show ever ("No T, no shade!"), with lots of rainbow feathers, weirdo angel wings and garish makeup, set to spinning strobe lights and people with really bad attitudes wearing brilliantly homemade costumes constructed by the fiercest creative minds in the world, drop the fucking act. Now. Because it will never work. It never has, and it never will.  Le Fin.

https://www.tumblr.com/search/risd%20artist%20ball

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism