Jenna Ware

Shadow Life: Aerospace, Love, and Secrets (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Based on a true story: He was aerospace, I was secret, and we had love between us. Our life together was the picture of difference. He was a man of national note, a conservative Republican Christian 40 years older, and I was private, a liberal Democrat Jewish transsexual. Joe was former Lockheed Skunk Works, who helped make the first two Air Force Ones for President Eisenhower and who was Department Manager of Engineering Flight Test over the U-2, and the SR-71; I was a social worker and, before that, in the National Security Agency, NSGA, NSOC, SIGINT, Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Shadow Life is a beautiful romance between two people in a mixed mar-riage, fighting to stay together, corrects popular misconceptions about transgender and transsexual living, and makes a suggestion. I've been in this since the 1970s, I've lived the life, and I've helped others. Inspired by Kenji Yoshino (Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, 2006), I'm con-cerned about the current direction of the transgender paradigm: It's still hiding key stigmata.

I've done it myself. I tried to keep my sexuality away from other peo-ple's concern, but there is no such thing as actual stealth living. People knew. I wouldn't discuss it, and my husband and I caught hell for years. Now I see most transgender people doing the same thing in another way, unwittingly enabling prejudice and opposition they don't handle any better than I did. It's not the fact they're transgender they're hiding but what they really need or desire.

The transgender movement is winning access to places most don't even want to go, where disrobing is required. If they can't say it, they can't show it. So they don't go, marginalizing themselves into a less than equal integration, furthering lack of awareness, preventing equal employment, and where it's dis-covered during sex, possibly even incurring surprise violence or murder.

Trans people can never fully integrate into society if we're embarrassed to embrace ourselves. Leaders of the social movement cannot advocate for something they downplay. They need to bring these issues to the fore, not leave them to serve as doubt and denial, not relegate them to the periphery or treat questions as offensive. Rhetoric must be as clear in media as it would be in locker rooms so that those who are interested may more fully integrate. I've waited 20 years for leaders to do so. Most of them don't, so I did, herein. Shad-ow Life is explicit.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Jenna Ware
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. Dezember 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781946438010
• Artikelnr.: 47987164

Autorenporträt

I was born and raised in the Midwest. We moved a lot, but gravitated to the area south of Dodge City, Kansas, USA. I entered the Navy at 17, was placed in the NSA, Ft. Meade, MD, left because of my personal needs, recounted in Shadow Life, transitioned to female in 1981. I went to college and graduate school, got my Master of Social Work and my LCSW, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, a psychotherapist, forensic psychiatric social worker, and got my first pilot certificate. After a few years I met my husband, a fellow pilot, who helped make the 1st Air Force One and was flight test engineer in charge of the SR-71 at Lockheed, Skunk Works.

It was a mixed marriage, not unlike in some ways, a racially mixed marriage in the 1960s might have been.

I have always been interested in cultural differences, how diverse people can get along, and it intrigues me how people filter their view of life through their own experiences, their own issues. I do it, too. How can we not? Yet, there also seem to be some needs we face as diverse human beings living on this earth together. In precise detail, everyone is different from everyone else, but also in a general sense, large groups of people can also be radically different from other groups.

So how can we get along? How is it possible for groups with diametrically opposed values and views to coexist in peace, even synergism?

The answer, I believe, is in the quality of respect for the quality of diversity, itself, that a person adds to the richness of our human experience by being different. Certainly I draw the line at expression of difference with violence. But where the difference is in what the person believes is right or best, or whom she loves, or how he dresses, or his field of study, or how he believes his body should be

The essence of coexistence is respect despite difference. It must be that we can learn to value another human being even if he is different.

People who are different demand equality in life. Of course. Who wouldn't want equality? But then I sometimes see those same people lash out in anger at others with a different view. My view: I think we need to extend the hand of friendship to others who are different, even those who think we're messed up or think we shouldn't be here, in order to help us gain our own dignity, our own integration. As Meryl Streep said on the Golden Globes, paraphrasing, anger, bigotry, violence, begets more of the sam...