Eredien's Journal

Another email off to Mission Change, the LGBTQI advocacy organization at Wellesley, and another email to Laurie, the Admissions Dean at BMC. I really want to volunteer to help current students and/or alums with gender activism--there's a huge need for on-campus advocacy for LGBQI and specially transgendered students--but it seems like I'm getting blocked from even starting. Discouraged, but hopeful.

2011 was kind of a wash for me. There were some good things--making new friends, seeing old ones, achieving the goal I'd had (and had been stymied in by doctors and moving for 2+ years) of actually getting on depression medication, helping my boyfriend figure out what he needs from himself in a relationship with me and his other SO, starting the process of recognizing the good decisions I made in 2010 and forgiving myself for the bad ones. There were some bad things--sharing an apartment with an alcoholic who "forgot" to pay the internet and fix the heat, moving into a second apartment where one roommate constantly promised to move but didn't and the landlord preferred evictions over conversations; having my phone die; having both laptops die; and generally running short of cash from too many moves with too little preparation in too little time.

I am proud that:
- I have started beta-testing as a vendor at an online marketplace which I can't talk about yet but is going to be awesome.
- I have gotten on medication and it has made my life better. I am not scared of medication anymore: it makes me be the person I am at my best, instead of the person I am when I'm at my worst. I am still waiting for medicaid to come through, which is a paperwork bear (as opposed to a paper tiger), but knowing that my doctors won't write off my depression as something I am making up, or tell me that if I changed my body drastically in terms of weight I wouldn't be depressed anymore, is pretty awesome. Also, getting a 90-day refill from my therapists in MA without having to pay $120 out of pocket every three months is amazing. I wish that option had been available to me in October, but now that I am on meds again I am less angry about the fact that it wasn't, and less angry about the fact that I lost another place that had become home because of the fact that the medical establishment limited my access to necessary medication because my insurance wasn't any good there and I couldn't pay out of pocket. Both of these things are good.
- I have become more informed, and more self-informed, about race and the history of racism, both worldwide and in America.
- I have started watching movies and anime that I want to watch and reading books I want to read and reviewing them online when I feel like it. This seems like a very small thing, but when you have held off on having the experiences you wanted to have because you wanted not just the experience of doing the thing, but also the meta-experience of experiencing that experience with other people who care about you and the experience, and the other people want to share those experiences with you but don't set aside time to do so, eventually you get tired of waiting for the other people. It's not as much fun as experiencing these things alone, and I don't enjoy it as much as I would if I had a group of friends and loved ones with me. But it's better than being told, "I want to have this experience and I want to experience it with you, but I won't set a time to tell you when and won't let you set a time for me," and getting confused, hurt, and resentful at constantly having to hold back experiences I wanted to have yesterday, so that I can have them on someone else's constantly-unspecified timeframe, and then hurting the people I love when I express my hurt and resentment to them but present it to them, wrongly, as a personal character failure on their part.
- I have determined that it is necessary for me to find a long-term relationship with another person (probably a woman-type person) who makes it clear to me that I am a pleasure in their life and won't doubt my love for them, while also continuing my relationship with [Bad username or site: ab3nd" @ livejournal.com] for the foreseeable future. I am not ready to go find that relationship yet. I still hurt too much. But I think determining that it was necessary was a good thing.
- I have determined that to get this relationship, I need to make it clear to the other person that they are a pleasure in my life and I want to live with them and enjoy their company and love them, and I will do this by not pointing out the goodness of the good things in my life, instead of complaining about the few bad points of the good things in my life, which is basically how I lose a lot of loved ones and friendships. I was better at this in the past, and I can get better at it again.
- I started going back to the gym (actually, it's what I'm going to do after I finish writing this journal entry). I am going to the gym not even to get in shape because my doctors won't medicate me for sleep issues without weight loss on my part (which was largely the case in 2009-10) or because I think losing weight will make my partners want me more or less than they ever did, because I'm beautiful whether people can see it or not: I am going because an hour or so of physical activity a day gives me a specified time alone to get in touch with my body via physical meditative activity, as well as an opportunity to listen to new music, podcasts, and audiobooks which I wouldn't have time for otherwise. An hour or so of physical activity a day is a great way to set aside positive time for me having my need for time to make and consume art be interrupted by other people's demands of me.
- I have accepted the fact that my family will never approve of my relationships, whether those are friendships or loved ones, because they have a hard time approving of many of the things I do, because they have a hard time approving of themselves because they are resentful of the things they tell themselves they cannot do. Their lack of approval of my relationships is not my problem or my partners' problem. I will keep doing what I am doing in my romantic and sexual life and remind myself to have compassion for others who think poorly of me when I make choices that make me happy, and who think poorly of my friends and loved ones when they make choices that make them happy, and limit my association with such people.
- Finally, I am most proud of getting rid of almost all of my stuff except what I was actually using. I had too much of it, and too much of it was around because I wanted to be a person who had specific experiences (skiing, reading, making jam) but did not actually have those experiences, and so the stuff just sat there reminding me of all the things I wanted to experience but hadn't. If I want to do that stuff, I can: I can borrow someone else's jam making set, or rent skis, or buy more books (though I got a Kindle for Christmas, which is awesome because I will no longer need to move with boxes and boxes of physical books but will still be able to read to my heart's wallet's content. It also makes moving a lot easier for me, both physically and psychologically).

Resolutions for 2012:
- Finish and publish at least two things.
- Continue 365 Days of Art (which took a hiatus for the holidays and will be back today).
- Continue to make my relationships with loved ones deeper by complimenting the people I love instead of complaining about my or their shortcomings within a relationship, which makes them think that I don't love them or respect their choices or respect myself despite my shortcomings, makes me feel that they don't care about what bothers me, and gets me the opposite of what I actually want when I complain (which is respect for the fact that I am bothered by something, manifesting in a mutual discussion about how and why to resolve the problem).
- Keep on meds without a break.
- Sell model horses on ebay.
- Transfer old cassette tape music to MP3s. Sync all MP3 collections across devices.
- Setup KeePass to manage passwords safely between devices. Setup gmail with 2-step authentication again and this time print out everything.
- Catch them all in Pokemon SoulSilver or Diamond.
- Pay off credit card debt, personal debt, cellphone debt, and personal loans racked up in 2010-2011 through unexpected moving and continued medical expenses.
- Continue paying off education loan on a regular basis.
- Make sure multiple address change(s) have percolated through USPS system. easy!
- Sell awesome things on online store.
- Make professional-looking website/twitter.
- Keep going to the gym 3x week. Do not allow my mother to manipulate me into going to the gym more than I need or want to.
- Get a job, preferably with benefits. Continue to explore career options with hands-on internships related to N. Bennett St School degree tracks.
- Apply to N. Bennett St School this year.
- Travel to weddings of various friends. Enjoy myself there. Mission accomplished!
- Get in touch with gender activists at other womens' colleges and continue to work for the rights of MTF transgender women as women in traditionally bio-female-only spaces.
- Transfer LJ to Dreamwidth and set up cross-posting there.
- Get hormone balance tested by a doctor, with new results instead of old ones. Life without PMS is really, truly amazing.
- Get sleep tested by a doctor.
- Get allergy tested by a doctor.
- Make a financial plan for the next 5 years.
- Plan 2013 travel, with suggested places including DC, Boston, Toronto, California, and Belgium.
- Make plans to move back to Boston, including budgeting for a space without roommates and medical emergencies.
- Bike commute in spring, summer, and fall whenever possible.
- Optional bonus resolution: compose music.

So, the Dean of Admissions at Bryn Mawr (whose name and email can probably be found publicly, but I won't post right here) wrote back to me. She is probably pretty busy, so I appreciate that it took less than a month for her to reply. (I still haven't heard back from Smith's group, which isn't surprising, as I now realize they are almost all in finals or on vacation).

Some good news: BMC, based on the Transgender Task Force recommendations, apparently already planned on making a public website that "[articulates] just these policies and practices [ie, those regarding transgendered students and admissions]. [...] You will be pleased to know that the new Dean of the Undergraduate College has reviewed the Task Force recommendations, and has made this website a priority for the coming summer."
Conclusion #1: Yay. This is necessary. It's both good practice and good news they will be articulating their stance in public. It's possible such a public articulation wasn't necessary in 2000 (I wouldn't bet on it), but it's probably only going to become more necessary as the century goes on, which can only be a good thing. If I'd waited another six months, there would probably have been a website actually talking about some of this stuff, in public. That's a good thing.

Another good thing: The Dean has said she will forward my info and my desire to help out to the people who are already involved in dealing with these issues.
Conclusion #2: It looks like it's too late to get in on the ground floor of Transgender Task Force stuff for me, but it looks like there's an elevator going up, and there is still Useful Stuff Being Decided and Done.

A third good thing: "How an individual self identifies in terms of gender, or any changes in self-identification while a student is enrolled here are personal matters and not something the College tracks. As I hope you experienced, our students tend to be exceptionally accepting of each others' differences and we in the administration try to create as healthy and supportive an environment as we can for all our students."
Conclusion #3: Possibly, it's silly to list this as a good thing, because honestly it's a pretty basic expectation of human dignity, but not all colleges do this, so I'm going to give them props (although, apparently, if you self-identify as kinky while at the college, individual classes of alumni may not feel bound by creating 'as healthy and supportive an environment' as they can... ;P)

...But here's what I consider to be a grammatical end-run around the actual question I asked: "Bryn Mawr's admissions policy as a women's college is to admit female students only. If it is not clear that an applicant to the College is female, we would approach the situation on an individual basis to gain a better understanding of the student's circumstances. However, our policy to admit female students only would not change."
Conclusion: I was an English major, so I'm already inclined to parse sentences for minutae; and everyone I know from college, including myself, learned how to be a better critical thinker there even if they were already decent when they came in. If they didn't think I could see that they elegantly sidestepped my question, or hoped I wouldn't ask about it...well, let's just say that I hope they expected this line of detailed questioning from one of their own alumna. They should have especially expected it from an alum who has multiple kinds of personal investment in the cause of the college and gender equity, and actively wants to donate her precious time to both causes, and so is going to make darn sure those causes are actually going to be advanced before committing a lot of time to advancing them.
If they didn't expect such a pointed reply (perhaps they were hoping I'd accept the studied phrasings and implications of the sentences in the letter, from which arise answers of an almost elegant incompleteness), that's a shame.

Frankly, I expected it to be a blanket "no way, we don't admit MTF students," so I am pretty psyched that there is the possibility that BMC and its admissions office might instead choose to deal with similar situations on a case-by-case basis. However, the answer given obviously and almost totally sidesteps the question at hand: if your "policy is to admit female students only," how do you define "female," and make that decision on a case-by-case basis? For that matter, how do you decide if "it is not clear" that some individual applicant to the college may or may not "be female?"

I would *love* to see a driven young transgender woman just get admitted and study and graduate without anyone ever noticing or caring; it would be fantastic (and also fantastically fraught, though for all I know somebody's already done it, and I just haven't heard about it). See also: “Well, if I have no way of telling, the person wouldn’t be in violation...I mean, if you can’t tell, what’s the difference?"
Words aren't always the same thing as answers.

This is the email that I wrote in reply.

Hello there, [name]! Thank you so much for writing back to clarify. I am happy to hear that the Transgender Task Force's recommendations will be reviewed and updated on the website this summer! If there is any way that I can help the Transgender Task Force or the admissions office or indeed anyone involved with making these kinds of recommendations or decisions, now or in the future, I would be thrilled to help out. Please definitely let me know if I can be of assistance; you can email me at the below address or, if you like, call: [number].

In trying to understand your answer regarding Bryn Mawr's admissions policy on admitting "female students only," I am still running up against the fact that it is not clear to me how Bryn Mawr's admissions office defines "female students" (as obviously, there are many understandings of femininity, possibly as many as there are individual human beings). I very much appreciate the fact that in cases where a potential student's gender identity is in question, admissions deals with that applicant's admission on a case-by-case basis.

However, in the case of MTF transgender applicants, would such a clarification process would revolve around the potential student's pre-existing social/personal identity as a woman, such that MTF transgender applicants might be accepted to Bryn Mawr on a case-by-case basis? Or does "our policy to admit female students only" mean that such potential students would be denied application?

In short, does the definition of "female student" that Bryn Mawr and the BMC admissions office use include MTF transgender applicants by virtue of those applicants' personal and cultural understanding of themselves as women? Or does Bryn Mawr's definition of "female student" in use during the admissions process automatically exclude MTF transgender applicants, by virtue of the fact that such applicants possessed (or may still possess) male sex organs, and perhaps were originally socialized as men?

Or are such things decided strictly on a case-by-case basis?

Thanks so much! I hope to hear back from you soon.

Sincerely,

[Eredien] (BMC '04)
[email]

So, I just wrote the BMC admissions office asking for their policies on admitting transgender students, as I couldn't find them outlined anywhere on the admissions website, and have found some other info suggesting that the Transgender Task Force convened to make recommendations about this very issue a few years ago recommended the current possible admissions policy, which is admitting FTM students (great! (edit: or more like, "hm, are we actually respecting these students' gender identity when we admit them as women, if they're identifiying as men? But are we really gonna kick out students who transition to male in the middle of their undergraduate years?") but not MTF students (ugh).

I've been thinking about doing that for a long time, but I held off because I was scared. But I realized holding off wasn't going to do anything except stop me from making a decision and dealing with its consequences for as long as possible--I'd still eventually have to make the decision and deal with the fallout, and the longer I delayed the harder it would be for me to make a good decision because I'd have been worrying about the potential consequences for years, and my head wouldn't be in a good place to deal with the actual decision making and its actual consequences after that.

I wanna change that policy, if in fact that is still the official college policy, and asked how to get involved. I also wanted confirmation from the source itself--who knows, the policy might have changed in the last few years (one can hope). I don't know if the task force is even still around, for instance--and those were some of the questions I asked.

I am pretty much setting myself up for a firestorm here, but hey, if there's one thing that I learned at college, it was to be unashamed of the person I am, and stand up for myself as a woman and as a thinker, and stand up for others as a woman and a thinker, unafraid. If Bryn Mawr's goal is really to allow women to stand up for themselves and be taken seriously as human beings and as intellectuals, then they need to stop deliberately denying MTF women a chance to reach that goal during the applications process itself. To say that's their goal for all women, but deliberately encourage that goal for only some women and discourage it for others, is just sad.

I don't support other organizations with such exclusionary policies with my time or money, even if they mean a lot to me otherwise. Why continue to support this one? I'm not about drawing lines between "real Mawrters" and "fake" ones, then trying to support only the people I agree with while demonizing those I don't, such that those people in turn have a reason to label and demonize me.

It's taken a while for me to decide this, as I'm back in Boston now and I'd sure like to get involved with the BMC Boston folks again, but I certainly won't donate to or volunteer any more with the school until they change this policy (unless they want me on the Transgender Task Force, which I'd be happy to volunteer my time and effort for).

Every woman (and FTM persons, too) should have the opportunity to have Bryn Mawr mean as much to her as it did to me, but they don't, because as far as I can tell, the college has deliberately cut them out of those opportunities from the very beginning. That's not right.

I will post more when I hear back from the admissions office, because I want to make sure that I have the current and accurate facts in line. (Really, the first thing I want to try and get them to do is post their current policies somewhere people can find them).