I had my surgery letters and enough money in the bank to pay for my srs left over from my share of the sale of our house, but watched in horror as it slowly drained away without a job to sustain me. I had the foresight to have paid for that mobile home in full, thus reducing my cost of living to the lowest possible, but months of no work still bled my dreams away. Finally, like so many before me, I got work through a temp. company at the local bank. My typing skills and basic computer literacy were the keys.
Meanwhile, I continued my advocacy work at the UU church I was now a member of as well as It's Time Ohio and It's Time America. Lacking funds, I didn't attend that year's LobbyDays, but Sarah represented us. The spring of that year the Lucent Technology GLBT group, Equal, was holding their annual meeting in Columbus. "MaryAnn" Horton was the local rep. Horton had already arranged for Meral Crane, self appointed "lead authority" locally, to speak to the group and fearing I'd object on behalf of It's Time Ohio, as well as I suspect to elevate his status to the conference, he began haranguing me about being "anti-crossdresser" and thus not worthy to be chair of It's Time Ohio. Having my hands full just seeking employment, not having wanted the job in the first place, and undergoing now constant email harassment from both Horton and Davidson, I resigned the chair.
Finally getting a job at which I was both liked and unquestionably accepted as female, I limited my activism to online communications, but activism wasn't done with me. Working at the bank was like a dream come true......for about three months. I came in one morning and noticed I was getting funny looks from some of my co-workers. The nursing mother who worked at the next desk suddenly started locking the office door during breaks to keep me out when she was using her breast pump. I asked another co-worker what was going on and was told that my supervisor had advised her that I used to be a man and had been taking all the other women aside the previous day and "warning" them about me. I asked for a meeting with the supervisor and asked her what was going on. She told me that she had received an anonymous phone call "outing" me as a transsexual and felt the other women needed to know. It seems that one of my "sisters" had decided to pay me back. Since I worked at the bank in the processing center and not with the public and only a few other activists even knew I had that job and almost no one in town was aware I was a transsexual, it was clear it came from one of the few who knew about me and my job. Later I was able to narrow the list of possibles to a few names but never could find out exactly who did it.
It changed everything at work. Suddenly my superior work wasn't quite good enough. Suddenly I was the one doing all the copying and filing. Suddenly there was no chance of me turning my temp position into a permanent one. Several weeks later the assignment was ended and once more I was out of work. This time I decided I needed a new career. Many years before I had worked a couple of years as a psychiatric aide and had discovered I loved nursing so I decided to get my credentials as a nursing assistant. I applied to a local nursing home who had a program for state licensing, bit the bullet of making less than I could possibly live on for a while and got my credentials. Finally I had a job skill in constant demand, if somewhat low paying.
During this time, Sarah Fox and I continued the work of It's Time Ohio. We often testified before various legislative committees, investigated possible leads towards future legislation and spoke at various groups about trans-issues. "MaryAnn" Horton did not appreciate my work and several times my membership in the email groups for It's Time Ohio and It's Time America "accidentally" was deleted. I avoided most of the ITO meetings. In September, in answer to a joking email to the ITO list by "MaryAnn", I replied the route to utopia might lay in mandatory castration. Most of the members found it funny, but a week later "MaryAnn" claimed an anonymous gay man filed a bitter complaint to Stonewall Columbus about it. Mind you, this was a supposedly closed email list for Ohio transactivists only. This was all the excuse Horton needed to openly ban me from the email list and declare me no longer a member of It's Time Ohio.
That fall the UU Church I was a member of was hosting a regional meeting of their GLBT organization. It was only natural I was asked to put together the "T" (trans) part of the program. It was only natural I invited my own friend and therapist, Marti Keyes, to be a keynote speaker on the gatekeeping aspects of being transsexual. I even invited "MaryAnn" Horton to do a presentation on crossdresser issues. When Meral Crane learned that she wasn't the keynote speaker after the conference, she and several of her people pestered the administrators of the UU Church repeatedly! It seems she also believed she was THE authority on transsexuality in the area and couldn't stand the competition. Opps.........
That fall was also when Sarah Fox and I were rear ended by a drunk driver on the way back from a Transfamily of Cleveland meeting, the first of what was to be a series of life altering back injuries I was to suffer.
Spring of 1999 I was still active on many lists for trans-activism, including being re-instated on the It's Time Ohio list and on the It's Time America list. Unknown to the members of ITA, Horton had started an "employment policy" page on the ITA website, a worthy goal except for one thing..........included in that page was a statement about the "official" ITA policy regarding gender "flip-flopping" or John on Monday, Joan on Tuesday, John again on Wednesday as well as a stated policy that crossdressers must be allowed to use the ladies room at work if they were crossdressed that day! Jeeze!........the dreaded bathroom issue again, again raised by Horton but this time taken national!
Someone brought the employment policy change ITA to the attention of the ITA list, there was a brief discussion then every single person and organization on that list except Horton voted to have it removed. Everyone thought it was a dead issue. It wasn't. Later that spring Congressman Barney Frank against inclusion of trans-people in ENDA, the national employment non-discrimination act on the basis that trans-people wanted nothing less than male bodied people using women's showers at work. He cited an "trans-activist handbook" as the basis of this opinion. There was to be further repercussions as well because even after the vote, Horton refused to take down the page.
That spring found me driving out to the GenderPac Lobby Days event with Dawn Wilson, Anne Casebeer and Monica Roberts. We arrived just in time for the Sunday night pre-lobby briefing. HCR representatives were out in force and we were told not to discuss ENDA while lobbying but instead to concentrate on inclusion in the Dept. of Justice hate crime statistics. The doors to a lot of congressional offices were no where near as open as they had been just two years before, but more alarming was that while joining Anne Casebeer and Dawn Wilson in Senator Mitch McConnell's office, an infamous arch conservative from Kentucky, he told us that HRC and GenderPac were making us look like fools all over the Hill. It seems that with Riki in toe, HRC had once more made the rounds prior to the Lobby Days urging everyone to not pay attention to the crazy transies. He showed us the business cards they all left. Sarah and I could not even get into Rep. Deb Pryce's office. Her new legislative aide was a former HRC lobbyist!
HRC was still at it, GenderPac had once again betrayed us.
Sunday night, prior to the lobbying effort, a number of us all went
to dinner, Monica Roberts, Vanessa Foster, Jessica Redman, Sarah Fox, Dawn
Wilson, Anne Casebeer and myself. The Bethesda Seven we were later
called because the resturant was in Bethesda, Maryland. The main
topic of discussion was whether or not a new, national trans advocacy group
was needed to replace GenderPac. When the following day's efforts
on the Hill then revealed more evidence of HRC and GenderPac prelobbying,
a number of us returned home determined to make that a reality. Knowing
that we'd have to prove the need, an email list was started almost immediately
to compare notes and keep in constant touch. This was a closed, private,
email group that came to be named the Transflakes list, members by invitation
only.
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