Transgender support: healthcare, education, and community

Recently, Rep. Jimmy Panetta reached out to PFLAG to suggest a listening session about issues faced by transgender people, their families, and their communities. The meeting took place in the back yard of the Diversity Center with representatives from PFLAG Santa Cruz County and the TransFamilies of Santa Cruz County,. We were graced with the fun sounds of a live band at the regular Friday midtown street party in the parking lot next door.

The goal of the meeting was not necessarily to solve any problems, but at least to gain a sympathetic ear and educate a politician about transgender concerns. Concerns that were discussed at length included three broad areas: healthcare policy, educational outreach, and continuing issues with access to support.

Healthcare policy

Andrea Damon of the TransFamilies of Santa Cruz County cited a statistic from the Kaiser Family Foundation that in 2020: 67% of workers who got their health coverage through their private employer were in self-funded plans. What this means is that instead of contracting with a health insurance company to provide insurance to employees, the business creates its own healthcare group. These groups are not necessarily covered by federal or state law governing health insurance.

If you’re thinking ahead, you already know what comes next: many of these plans do not follow mandates written to regulate health insurance, including health coverage for transgender care mandated under the ACA. Often, business owners don’t realize there is an exclusion, and willingly add trans care when confronted. However, other owners can legally refuse to cover trans care through their self-funded plan.

Most workers have no idea that their “health insurance” isn’t legally required to cover transgender care, and it’s only when they are in crisis with a transgender child that they face barriers to getting appropriate, timely care for their children.

“TransFamilies has worked with several families over the last year who were faced with coverage being denied through their self-funded plans,” Damon says. Results have been mixed; some employers willingly added coverage, while in others, TransFamilies had to “apply pressure” to the board of directors, ultimately convincing two such employers to add coverage.

Rep. Panetta made an enthusiastic request to know more about when self-funded insurance isn’t required to follow insurance laws/requirements, since this is an area under federal jurisdiction.

Educational outreach

Santa Cruz County boasts a robust LGBTQ+ educational program supported by the Diversity Center. This program, Triangle Speakers, will send a trained panel of speakers into any school for any event for free. A similar speakers program in Monterey County is provided by Rainbow Speakers and Friends.

However, access to these programs is spotty, to say the least. Rachel Morales-Warne, a parent advocate whose children attend SLV schools, said that the Triangle Speakers hasn’t been invited to the district in at least the last ten years.

All of the advocates agreed that even when intentions are good, the lack of teeth in the FAIR Education Act (CA Senate Bill 48, 2011) means that it’s up to individual teachers, schools, and districts to decide how inclusive and supportive they will be.

“As an educator, 50 years now, I find it so frustrating that schools are not following what the law says, what we expected them to be doing,” said Lynn J. Walton, retired math teacher and PFLAG SCC Executive Board member. “There are no teeth in it. A lot of teachers have good intentions, but they don’t have the tools to go to the next step. We need to train our teachers so there’s harder conversations.”

Even in “liberal Santa Cruz County,” the treatment of LGBTQ+ students, including bullying, intimidation, misgendering/naming, and shaming, is common. The County Office of Education’s focus on equity in the coming school year, advocates say, is unlikely to make a substantive difference in the everyday experiences of queer kids in our schools if the training and support is not applied more consistently.

Access to support

Michelle Brandt and Andrea Damon (TransFamilies) offered the statistics that underpin everything that advocates do: Kids who grow up in families that support and affirm their gender have wildly better outcomes than kids who don’t.

“Having an affirming, accepting family is the number one indicator for a young person’s mental health, so that’s a big part of what we all do,” Andrea Damon explained. “PFLAG, TransFamiies, and the Diversity Center: for the kids—through the parents but for the kids.”

But support is applied unequally and sometimes it feels like parents have to keep refighting battles that had already been fought by a previous parent.

“You get tired and think, I can’t do this anymore,” Michelle Brandt says.

Rachel Morales-Warne responded more colorfully. “In our house, pardon my language, but I’m like, We’re fuckin’ still doing this?”

Neal Savage, also a PFLAG Santa Cruz board member, pointed out that the way to reach parents in the past doesn’t suit today’s parent population. “When you start expanding the population into Latinx and any kids who are in foster care, those families and those kids aren’t getting help. The number of families that can afford to go someplace on a Tuesday night for a meeting has gotten very small, given geography, money, two jobs. The PFLAG model from 30 years ago is in some ways a middle-class luxury.”

Morales-Warne agrees. “I talk to a cousin’s friend of a cousin because I have a child, because they can’t afford to go to these meetings or they don’t feel comfortable. It’s not necessarily a safe space to live in. I think some of the biggest obstacles are education and language. Not just language as in bilingual language, but the language around what it means to be nonbinary or trans or queer or gay or pan.”

Some takeaways

Rep. Panetta’s job is federal, which informs the areas where he is able to exert influence. Listening to the advocates at the meeting, he responded, “You see the continued need for the resources that are so necessary.” He shared his memories of a powerful meeting the week before about LGBTQ+ experiences moderated by our local State Senator John Laird and hosted by the Diversity Center.

It’s clear that transgender children and adults will benefit from a more focused, united push for understanding, inclusion, and legal protection.

Resources

This isn’t what we meant when we said ‘equal’

I was inspired to muse on the changing way we depict women when my family went to see the most recent Star Wars film. The previews, of course, were geared toward audiences that might see a Star Wars film. Given the new emphasis in the Star Wars series on female characters, we got an ample preview of action movies featuring “strong” women.

Women shooting, women fighting, women yelling, women killing.

Now, please don’t get me wrong: I love seeing physically strong, active women on screen. The days of helpless women being tied to train tracks and dancing on chairs in fear of a mouse are over, and good riddance. Women’s bodies should be valued and celebrated as much as men’s.

However, these suddenly ubiquitous depictions of “strong” women have a problem:

Women aren’t the same as men.

The Star Wars movie progressed as they always do, and our heroine was pitted against a pack of weapon-wielding guards. Yes, I know that this is movie violence and that she was assisted by The Force, but she was depicted as resisting several large, well-trained male fighters with the force in her rather small, light-boned female body.

In She’s Not There, Jennifer Finley Boylan’s memoir about her transition from male to female, she writes that as her body’s testosterone was suppressed and she added estrogen, she could see daily changes in her body. She started to lose upper body strength and needed men in her band to help load her amp into the van.

This was a woman who had spent decades as a male. She has the heavy bone structure that testosterone created, the larger, stronger muscles. But within months, she started to experience the reality of being a woman:

Women are equal to men, but we are not the same.

I’m not sure why this concept is a problem for the human brain to grasp. We can offer equal opportunity to all people at the same time as acknowledging that we are different. For example, people with African ancestors have a higher risk of sickle cell anemia. To say so is not racism. To deny them healthcare—equal treatment—is racism.

It is not sexist to say that women are generally physically weaker than men. Yes, there are physically weak men and physically strong women within the spectrum of humanity. But in general, if you give a physically average woman and a physically average man the same martial arts training, the woman will have no chance in a test of pure physical strength. It is not sexist to say this. It is, however, sexist to deny women the opportunity to use their bodies however they wish, including training to be Jedi warriors.

So what’s the problem with showing women as physically equal to men? These are just movies, right?

The problem is that when we insert women into roles that are basically written for men, we depict them in the same violent way we depict our male “heroes.”

We should celebrate women and the strengths we bring.

Here are some facts about how violence breaks down by sex:

  • Nearly all stranger-on-stranger murders are committed by men.
  • Mass murders are overwhelmingly committed by men.
  • When women do kill, they are most likely to kill in self-defense.

When we create movies showing women acting like men, is it equality? Or is it another way of putting on our cultural blinders?

Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, the essay and then the book of the same name, hit people with its bluntness about the problem: Our culture doesn’t face and name the real issue. We don’t have a problem with violence. We have a problem with male violence. If we suddenly only had the violence that women commit, we’d feel we had been transported to some sort of pie-in-the-sky utopia.

Everyone from historians to social scientists to biologists offer partial explanations for this state of affairs, but devising a solution seems beyond us. And one reason we haven’t found a solution is that we’ve gone from ignoring male violence to pretending that violence has no gender. We put an automatic weapon in the hands of a female action hero and call it “equality.”

We need to depict women’s real stories, even when they are fictional.

What we can gain from seriously depicting women’s stories is the experience of people who have spent their lives with less physical power than half of the human race. When you know that other stronger, more violent human beings could be targeting you on a daily basis, it changes your relationship to the world. I know some males who would disagree with this, but remember: they’ve never lived as women. If you’re male and you don’t believe me, ask a few transgender women, and you’ll hear the same story. We have an undeniably different relationship to the world than cisgender men do.

What if women suddenly had more physical power?

In her novel The Power, Naomi Alderman posits a near future in which girls start to be born with the power to kill anyone without using brute physical force. In other words, suddenly the balance is shifted. The world we live in is one where if an average male gets his hands around the neck of an average woman, the fight is over. But what if she could zap him with an electrical charge strong enough to stop his heart before his hands can even get near?

In Alderman’s fictional world, the power shifts everything, and women start to behave like men. But in our real world, no such power exists. Yes, on screen Rae may be able to throw a 6-foot, 200-pound male off of her small female body, but in our real world, that’s not the usual end to things.

We have to work with what we’ve got, which is that women are not the same as men.

But we are equal.

Luckily, Star Wars didn’t stop there. In the movie, an incredibly tall, long-necked, purple-haired Laura Dern actually does show that women are different—and equal. Instead of blasting back at a bigger, stronger opponent, she tries to outfox them. It’s the hotheaded “flyboy” at her side who foils her plan, which is beautifully female while also demonstrating strong leadership.

When the time comes for violence as a last resort, Dern’s character does what women have done throughout the ages when a stronger aggressor won’t let her have agency over her own body. She turns her body into a weapon.

Solnit writes, “…Violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins wth this premise: I have the right to control you.”

Giving women physical power over other human beings is no sort of equality.

These depictions simply extend the problem of male violence with a fantasy that female violence is some sort of parity.

The reality is the women are not men, and that’s good. Diversity makes us strong. Our value as human beings should not be measured on the basis of our physical strength alone. It’s not progress to get more women in movies if they are simply acting in parts written for men.

How to raise boys who respect women

I hope you didn’t come here looking for answers, because this will be a column full of questions.

How is it that we’ve come so far, but we haven’t come far at all?

Before feminism, men gave women a bad deal: You stay home, forego most opportunities for self-fulfillment, have no financial or physical independence, and put up with whatever life deals you, and we’ll take care of you. It was imperfectly enforced: poor women still had to work though with little pay and no status; all women had to risk that there were men who weren’t interested in holding up the we’ll take care of you part of the bargain.

Then we got feminism, we got some basic civil rights (though they’re still not guaranteed in the US Constitution), and we got the sexual revolution. That pact between men and women was thrown out: women were then expected to work, expected to do both the jobs they used to be confined to and also their new jobs, and expected to be sexually free. Men no longer had the responsibility of taking care of women; we were supposed to be strong and take care of ourselves.

Then we got third wave feminism or post-feminism (depending on who’s defining it), and we realized that we still hadn’t quite got it right. Men were still preying on women but women weren’t being protected. Women could get jobs, but with no guarantee that they’d be treated equally once they were there. Women were supposed to be sexually available but were also supposed to take care of themselves when they didn’t want to be sexually available. No one had clearly defined the line between “flirting” and “harassing.”

How do we raise sons in this world?

I don’t know. Men are now being called out publicly for behavior they committed which was excused under the first pact (any woman not in the care of a man is fair game), and which was encouraged by the second pact (women who go out in the world are sexually available to all men).

I haven’t asked them, but I’m guessing that the moms of these men didn’t raise their sons to behave this way. Heck, maybe even their dads didn’t. (Being a dad was different 50+ years ago.)

But I’m speaking here from the perspective of being a mom. I’ve always hoped that if you are a woman who expects and receives respect from the men in her own life, and if you model that behavior in front of your sons, it will eventually take root.

Here’s the problem: It’s not like you can enforce respectful private behavior the way you do, say, manners. When your child doesn’t say please, you prompt him, right? And eventually he turns out to be a polite person (when he’s not at home, that is).

What do you do when your child starts laying the roots of private disrespect for girls in his life? Will you even see it happening? How much more influence does what your son sees in media and out amongst his friends have on his behavior? We can do our best at home, but these things don’t happen at home.

If men’s private behavior is so different from their public behavior, how can we prevent it?

Is this actually a question about raising girls?

I am in no way a believer in the men-are-victims-of-their-own-biology line of reasoning. Men can, and do, control themselves.

All humans control ourselves: We learn not to defecate in the backyard. We learn to eat in a socially acceptable manner. We learn how not to throw fits at the DMV.

None of these behaviors follows our biological programming.

So the argument that men will be men and thus women have all the responsibility for protecting themselves is b.s., pure and simple.

How can we parents make sure that our kids’ experiences are different?

Boys that sees girls as friends and people first are less likely to treat women as targets later…or so we hope!

Humans will always be complicated, and no human system is perfect. But there’s just got to be a better way.

Men should know when they are harassing a woman.

Women should feel empowered to deal with it publicly.

As a society, we’ve been in a place where any woman not directly under the care of a man was fair game. We’ve been in a place where women were assumed to have full agency and were expected to stop victimization at the hands of men. But we’ve got to get to a place where men take a responsibility for their own and other men’s actions, and where women are able to get the support they need when they can’t handle something on their own.

But what is the path from here to there?

Sorry, just questions today.

Beauty and the modern human

Recently a Facebook “friend” (a young woman I was in a class with for a few months) posted that she had been deemed “ugly” by an app that purports to be able to divine whether someone is “beautiful” using math.

Apparently, her “interocular distance” was too wide, and some other such nonsense.

Well, yes, it’s nonsense—but I’m sure that mathematically, it’s true. This young woman is striking by anyone’s measure. She doesn’t look like anyone else. Her eyes are noticeably far apart. But does that make her ugly?

I was lucky to have been assigned John Berger’s Ways of Seeing as college reading. No doubt it’s terribly dated now, but at the time, it was mind-bending. Using the nineteenth-century oil painting tradition, he showed how “beauty” in many instances is actually more about power and ownership.

Real beauty isn’t perfectly symmetrical faces. It’s not female bodies molded to fit an ideal invented on a computer screen. It’s not the perfection of a Photoshopped landscape that removes all irregularity and dullness.

The Botticelli head cut out by John Berger in the opening sequence of “Ways of Seeing”

When I think about things I find beautiful, I know that it’s the imperfection that sets them off. Why would I find beauty in a face so generically perfect I wouldn’t be able pick her out on the street? I read somewhere that all the most successful actors have something “wrong” with their faces.

But this is the joke our modern culture is playing on us: On the one hand, we prefer imperfection. We find people attractive who have all sorts of imperfections. Sometimes the imperfection itself is what attracts people.

On the other hand, we are pressured to change our own selves to make ourselves more and more perfect, less and less interesting. Women especially, but men more often now, fuss about their faces, their butts, their ankles, their hair. In a world where we actually can change almost any aspect of our looks, people are starting to think that they should.

The problem is, perfection isn’t attractive in the literal sense of the word: humans are not attracted to perfect specimens. I read recently about an experiment that underscores this: viewer were shown two photos of the same subject. One photo was a selfie, approved by the subject; the other was an informal photo taken by a researcher. The viewers overwhelmingly choose the non-selfies as “more attractive.”

This is from a 17 Magazine article about taking the perfect selfie. What a perfect illustration of how repulsive we can make ourselves look when we are trying to please other people!

In other words, what we do to ourselves in the name of social acceptance may actually have the opposite effect. When thong underwear were all the rage, for example, a male of my acquaintance confessed to me that he found panty lines very erotic.

I was very heartened by the responses that came from my “friend’s” real friends: They were appalled, amused, outraged. One of her friends posted something like, “the male half of this species begs to differ.”

I feel like each one of us needs to consider that everyone we meet is subject to this sort of media onslaught. We need to appreciate each other’s imperfect beauties, and do it out loud. We need to appreciate the individual ways in which people make this world more beautiful, whether it’s by what they wear or what they do.

Our culture is hell-bent on making us all feel like ugly, repulsive creatures who need to submit ourselves to daily torture to pay for our sins.

I beg to differ.

 

Santa Cruz Families March for Women… and all of us

Interviews by Suki Wessling
Photographs by Abe Jellinek

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Thousands of Santa Cruzans marched together in an incredible show of unity in our support of diversity and dignity for everyone.

Click on photos to see them full-size.

If ever all of Santa Cruz gathered for a big family photo, this would have been the day. On January 21, the day after the inauguration of a president that Santa Cruzans overwhelmingly voted against, whose platform contradicts nearly every strongly held value of our citizens, our community came out for a day of celebration. We celebrated our diversity and our strong values, along with our affirmation of the rights of all the people who felt that their voices weren’t heard in this election. In this photo essay, each family we photographed answered the question, “What are you doing here?”

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Kate with children, ages 8, 10, and 12, and two friends

Kate: “We’re here to support rights for everybody, for women, for minorities. There’s a lot of fear out there. For the kids, we’ve been aware that the fear is going through to them, so we wanted to say something positive. We’re stronger together!”

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Andi and Warren

Andi: “I am marching as the parent of a transgender child whose safety is in jeopardy with the incoming administration, as well as her trans-specific healthcare which will almost certainly be removed from insurance mandates.”

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Tessa Henry, 11, with Jeremy and Tiffany Henry

Tessa: “I’m here for women’s rights and just because of everything is going on, I want to feel safe with everything.”

Tiffany: “We wanted to be an example to her to show that in terms of standing up for yourself, you’re never too young to come out and be supported by your family and others in your community to get your point across.”

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Julie Crandall with Bella (11) and mom Britney Anderson

Julie: “We’re here in solidarity for women. Everybody is equal, we need equality and reproductive rights. Equal rights are human rights. We can try to support love and not hate. I think that’s really important.”

Bella: “My mom said that she wants me to grow up to do anything that I want to do.”

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Jen and Darrin Caddes, with Leslie, Luna, Amelia, Jack, and Parker

Darrin: ”I’m here because I love my kids!”

Kids: “We want to protest!” “I want to avoid World War III!” “Yes!”

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Gretchen and Craig Miller with Landon

Gretchen: “We’re here in solidarity with women. We’re disappointed with the direction of our country and we want to do something positive.”

Craig: “I want my son to know that all people are equal and that no one can put anybody else in a box and tell them what they can and can’t do. It’s the world I want him to live in, so I’m here to show that.”

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Evyn, 12, Ella, 9, Ethan, 4, Jim & Kimberly (from St. Louis)

Evyn: “We are here to support women’s rights, gender equality, basic civil human rights, religious freedom, LGBTQ rights, and immigrant rights.”

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Leslie Burnham with Laura Spilman, daughter Julia, 2 ½, and baby due May 2

Leslie: “I’m here because I’m really upset at the illegitimacy of this election and I want to promote values across the US, I feel like we’re really inoculated in some ways against what’s happening in other parts of the country. I don’t want there to be normalization of values of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and islamophobia.”

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Rose, 15, with her brother The Spirit of Vengeance and Death, otherwise known as Macky, and their parents, Larissa and Mo, and friends

Rose: “I’ve known many situations and I know lots of people who would probably be in trouble if things like that happened and I care about things too much, so I don’t like it.”

Macky: “Because I like protesting!”

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Lisa, Maya, 10, and Lisa

Lisa: “We’re here to support anyone who, now or in the future, might not be treated fairly. We’re trying to stay on the positive, it’s not that we’re fighting against something. We’re fighting for equality and fairness for everyone.”

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Kirstin, Leo 8, Evan, 9, and Anthony

Anthony: “To support women!”

Kristin: “I think it’s important that they see they have the right to stand up against tyranny and fascism and to make their voices heard and to peacefully assemble.”

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Elizabeth Becera with son Sebastian, his dad, and a friend

Sebastian (about his sign): “I just wrote ‘Be Kind’.”

Elizabeth: “We both come from families that our parents are immigrants. I feel that we have a right to be here, our parents have a right to be here, and I’m just happy to be among people that are for that. I’m really happy to stand strong and not let hate get to us.”

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Beth and Ben Oneto with Tyler, 7

Tyler: “For my mom. To stand up for our rights because everyone is the same.”

Ben: “We wanted to get involved in things for a little while, and now that we’re in Santa Cruz we decided that this is the time.”

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Liam, Finnegan, and Christina

Christina: “We’re here to fight for everything we believe in that we feel is at risk. The rights of all people, the environment, science, the fight against bigotry, and also against the 99.9% having all the power.”

Children playing with bubbles before the start of the march.

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More bubbles!

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Santa Cruz families celebrate diversity.

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