Over at The Washington CityPaper one of my favorite columnists — Amanda Hess — did some critique of what I said in my diary entitled MMC L.A. Memorial Service For Christine Daniels. In Hess’s article A Eulogy For Christine Daniels (And Not Mike Penner), She wrote:

After Penner’s death, transgender activist Autumn Sandeen spoke to the importance of identifying Penner as Penner. “In my heart, I know her as Christine. In my job as a writer, I have to think of him as Mike,” she said. “I would love to remember him as Christine, but he didn’t give us that opportunity, and I’m going to be sad about that…How he identified was important. We can’t just pick and choose how we want to identify someone. I’m militant about that, but I’m frustrated at my own militance.”

…In death, how do we reconcile a person’s public and private lives? After he publicly detransitioned back to Mike, Penner indicated that he still wanted to be identified as Christine to his minister and a very close friend of his. That’s private. In his professional life, however, Penner was still writing columns as Mike and presenting outwardly as male. At the memorial service, the Reverend Dr. Neal Thomas made Penner’s private identity public by delivering a eulogy remembering Christine Daniels. In death, should we defer to Penner’s wishes in life by keeping his private identity private? Or should we pay tribute to the reality of her life by finally publicly eulogizing her as Christine?

Well, I have two answers to the public verses private identity. The simple, easy one is from the GLAAD Media Reference Guide‘s Transgender Glossary:

NAMES & PRONOUN USAGE

We encourage you to use a transgender person’s chosen name. Often transgender people cannot afford a legal name change or are not yet old enough to change their name legally. They should be afforded the same respect for their chosen name as anyone else who lives by a name other than their birth name (e.g., celebrities).

We also encourage you to ask transgender people which pronoun they would like you to use. A person who identifies as a certain gender, whether or not they have taken hormones or had surgery, should be referred to using the pronouns appropriate for that gender.

Christine told us through her minister and her close friend Susan Horn how she identified:

I never stopped being Christine.

And…

Don’t you ever think I’m not Christine.

When I didn’t know how she identified after her detransition to living again as male, I identified her by male pronouns and used her male name because when one doesn’t know how one identifies, the Associated Press and GLAAD styleguides tell journalists to refer to a person by how the person presents his-, her-, or hirself. Now that I know how Christine identified herself, I’m referring to her by the female name by which she identified herself, and using the pronouns appropriate for that gender. To not identify Christine as Christine when I now know that she identified herself as Christine would be to erase her expressed female gender identity, and the name she associated with that identity. I will not participate in erasing Christine’s self-expressed identity after her passing.

The second reason in much more complex, and much more personal: The second reason is that the closet kills trans people.

[Below the fold: What can the trans closet look like, compared to "out," Out," "OUT," and stealth, as well as how I feel the closet kills trans people.]Before I explain why I feel the closet kills trans people, I need to explain how I’m using terminology.

So first of all, there is a difference in trans community in living closeted and living stealth. For transsexuals, I’d personally define one way of living in the trans closet as having a gender identity that doesn’t match one’s public gender expression (for example, knowing with certainty that one’s gender identity is female, but presenting oneself publicly to the world as male). Living stealth, by contrast, would involve having a history of gender expression that doesn’t match one’s the sex one was assigned at birth, but transitioning to have one’s gender identity matching one’s gender expression. Living completely stealth would mean not telling anyone at all of your past history of having one’s gender identity not matching the sex assigned to one at birth — usually assigned at birth by the shape of one’s genitalia.

So, to describe this in personal terms, if I had chosen to be stealth, I would have transitioned socially from male to female, have plans to (or have had) genital reconstruction surgery to align my genitalia to the genitalia normally associated to the sex to which I publicly present, and then have “disappeared” into my target sex. I would have disappeared into a life where no one with whom I associated with on a day-to-day basis would be aware that I am a transsexual, or that I had history of male gender expression before I transitioned to have my female gender identity and gender expression match.

However, I didn’t choose stealth; I instead chose to live out of the closet.

I would say that even living out of the closet has degrees. Such as, there is OUT in all capital letters (as I chose to live my life — out in the public in almost all circumstances), out with a capital “O” (living out in the public in many situations, but not out in a significant number of situations), and out in small letters (living out of the closet only with close friends and in selected environments, but otherwise living a relatively stealth life).

There are many good reasons for transsexuals to live more stealthy existences than I do. One set of reasons has to do with living free of harassment discrimination — If one is known to be of cross-sexual history, then one is more likely to experience harassment and discrimination in one’s day-to-day life. Another set of reasons has to do with being portrayed as either “pathetic” or “deceptive” — Read the article Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels by Julia Serano to get the take on how those two societal perceptions/depictions of trans people play out in western society.

And that leads us to another good reason to embrace stealthiness: Being out of the closet on any level means that many  will see one as a member of some third sex, instead of being seen as a member of one’s target sex. Frankly, when I out myself to people, I’m often not seen as fully female by the people I out myself too. And then, folk start asking inappropriate questions about my genitalia and medical history. Frankly, living out as transsexual and/or transgender means often not having a fully male or fully female life experience.

I had the opportunity to choose whether I was out of the closet as transsexual; Christine Daniels never had that chance. Being a well know sportswriter at one of the five most highly regarded newspapers in the United States (Christine’s paper being the Los Angeles Times, and the other four most highly regarded newspapers being the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Dallas Morning News) , Christine Daniels’ transition from presenting as Mike Penner was always going to be news. By outing herself in the article Old Mike, New Christine she was the one who framed her transition for the rest of the media.

But even in framing the discussion publicly, Christine never had the opportunity to just be Christine Daniels the sportswriter. Instead, she became Christine Daniels, the transsexual sportswriter who used to be Mike Penner. When I last talked to Christine in December of 2007, she lamented how she could never just be seen as a woman.

Which takes us to stealth. Christine would have no doubt been much happier if she could have lived a stealth life, or at least an lower case “out” life instead of a upper case “OUT” life.

Which is to say I chose to be OUT; but Christine was just OUT because of who she was before she transitioned, and there was no process of her choosing to be OUT — much as travel writer Jan Morris had no process of her choosing to be OUT.

Christine was much more quiet about her detransition to presenting again as Mike Penner in the fall of 2008. I do know that she was under a lot of stresses, and many were specific stresses pushing her to detransition..

The public news about Christine that came next was her completed suicide. We know what she said about why she transitioned to Christine:

I had to do it. It was this or die.

Talk to most transsexuals, and you’ll find that most have contemplated suicide — I know I have. It’s hard to deal with personal housing, employment, and public accommodation issues that are often associated with harassment and discrimination; it’s hard to deal with family members who don’t accept transition; it’s hard if you’re a person of Christian faith and the religious right says you’re not a Christian and you’re living in sin; it’s hard to deal with lesbian, gay, and bisexual members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community who don’t treat trans people as equal partners within the alphabet soup community; and It’s hard to deal with trans peers who are willing to rip deeply and personally into their peers at the slightest perceived error.

Add personal stresses to this mix — such as illness or death of a family member, financial problems, being a public figure etc — well, transition either makes one incredibly strong, or transition breaks one.

When transitioning people — or people of transitioning history — feel broken, distressed, and/or depressed, these people who are part of the trans community I belong to, detransition and/or contemplate suicide; more often than we’d like to think, these folk in the community I belong to complete suicide.

Detransitioning rarely relieves all the stress of having transitioned. In coming out as trans and detransitioning, one loses heterosexual privilege in the process of detransitioning; and then more often than not one is back to living with a gender identity that doesn’t match one’s gender expression.

I believe this is what Christine was dealing with in her last months; having a female gender identity, and trying to present herself to the world as male, which she earlier identified to the world as a death sentence for her.

To my peers whose gender identities don’t match the sex assigned to them at birth, I say this: live stealth, out, Out, or OUT, but strongly consider living out of the closet — which is in this context is to say “Live your gender truth by matching your gender expression to your gender identity.” Living within the closet, as I’ve defined the closet within this article, doesn’t kill everyone who lives in that closet, but it does kill far too many of us.

I believe the closet killed Christine, or at least played a major role in what killed Christine — that person who presented to the world as Mike Penner when she self-identified as Christine.

If I call Christine Daniels by her male name, knowing now how she self-identified, I feel I’d be erasing the soul of the person who knew herself as Christine, and tacitly endorsing the closet for others whose gender identities don’t match the sex assigned to them at birth.

I’m very, very comfortable calling the person who self-identified as Christine Daniels — while in her last months of life presented herself to the world as Mike Penner — by the name she associated with her female gender identity.

The closet kills. I’m just not going to tacitly endorse a closet that kills my peers.

.