I've never been much for autobiographical writing. I'd much rather talk about my activism and advocacy work than myself. Most of writing to date has been focused on my advocacy work through the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and other transgender-specific and LGBT organizations. And most my speaking engagements have focused on my work on behalf of the transgender community and LGBT/queer people of color (especially Asians/Pacific Islanders).

So I hesitated a bit when my friends Patty and Jinky asked me to submit an autobiographical essay for an anthology they were putting together. I met them for lunch when I was out in California for Creating Change (the annual conference of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force), which held its 2005 meeting in Oakland in November of that year. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed, and the result was "Homeward Bound: The Journey of a Transgendered Korean Adoptee," my first extended foray into the world of autobiographical writing. The essay was one of 60 contributions selected from over 600 submissions to Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time, an anthology edited by Patricia Justine Tumang and Jenesha de Rivera, published by Seal Press earlier this year.

'Zie' and 'hir' have come into vogue in certain corners of the transgender community. The equivalent of 's/he' and 'him/her,' these gender-neutral pronouns are meant to free transgendered and gender-variant people from the tyranny of the sex/gender binary. The expectation, I suppose, is that once American society has overthrown the oppression of 'he' vs. 'she,' the Utopia of gender liberation will be achieved. I don't mean to burst anyone's genderqueer bubble, but it seems to me that the argument for the use of gender-neutral pronouns is a profoundly ahistorical one that is not informed by a close examination of how languages actually work.

I would point out that Chinese has a gender-neutral pronoun and has had one for thousands of years, and yet China has traditionally been among the most patriarchal societies on earth. A great civilization -- arguably the greatest continuous civilization in human history, China nonetheless has been and unfortunately remains a profoundly misogynist Confucian culture even after half a century of ostensibly gender-egalitarian Communist rule.

Leave it to the New York tabloids to turn the already lurid Jon Benet Ramsey murder case into a story about a freaky transsexual wannabe pedophile killer.

I had a queasy feeling when I first heard reports about John Mark Karr and his reported interest in seeking sex reassignment surgery (SRS) in Thailand. Somehow, I knew it would not help the cause. On August 20, the Associated Press reported that Karr, now the object of international attention, had visited the Pratunam Polyclinic in Bangkok to consult with Dr. Thep Vechavisit about surgery, but the Denver Post quoted Vechavisit on August 21 as denying that. There have also been reports that Karr had had electrolysis in Bangkok to remove facial hair, a procedure that many transsexuals have prior to SRS.

I recently got dragged into a flame war on a listserve for LGBT academics by calling Judith Butler a bad writer. For those of you unfamilar with Butler, she is the doyenne of gender studies and certainly the dominant figure in the study of transgender. A professor of comparative literature and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, Butler is best known for her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, which is arguably one of the most influential books in LGBT studies and queer theory. Gender Trouble is required reading for the queer theory crowd, but it is also, like most of Butler's work, virtually undecipherable to the non-academic. Even to those schooled in French post-structuralist theory (including the work of French theorist Michel Foucault), Butler's writing can be extraordinarily difficult; and to the non-academic transgendered person, her writing is all but incomprehensible.

The trouble with Gender Trouble is that Butler's writing need not be so impenetrable. Call me a Philistine, but clarity of expression is a value in my aesthetic. The very notion that 'impossible to understand' means 'profound' is one that is simply not borne out by even a cursory glance at the literature. Foucault's "Discipline and Punish," for example, is eminently readable. The argument that Butler's writing is so difficult because she is using 'technical' language simply does not withstand scrutiny. Consider, for example, Charles Rosen's "The Classical Style," which uses a good deal of technical language; but it is also accessible to a general audience and not merely to musicologists with extensive background in the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The notion purveyed by Butler's defenders that the turgidity of her writing is an indication of the profoundity of her thought is based on a false dichotomy, as anyone who has read Thoreau (just to cite one thinker) can attest. In my view, there is simply no excuse for bad writing, and Butler is a bad writer by any reasonable standard.

One of the biggest myths around is the myth of 'the liberal media.' Eric Alterman has persuasively debunked this hoary myth in his book, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (Basic) ( excerpted in The Nation)

The mainstream media are (note 'media' is the plural for 'medium') not really liberal; rather, mainstream media in the United States are corporate, which means that they often reflect the worst of market-based imperatives, above all, the need to generate a profit for owners and investors.

Nowhere is this un-liberal profit motive more in evidence than in media coverage of transgender issues. Consider an article in the New York Daily News from January 25. In "Welcome to the drag race! Gender benders are crossing over, into your living room," Joe Neumaier writes,

"Sure, 'Brokeback Mountain' is riding atop solid box office (even in red states) and is lassoing every award in sight. But the real sex story du jour in American pop culture? Try transgender people: Women identifying as men, and men as women. In movies, at the bookstore and on TV, people are passing for the opposite sex. In many performance spaces, drag queens and drag kings reign supreme. And the very human stories they're telling are dragging people in."

"TransAmerica" is a road movie with a twist, a kind of psycho-sexual picaresque about sexuality and gender identity in the early twenty-first century United States.

I must admit I was a bit skeptical of the idea of a female playing a transsexual woman, particularly Felicity Huffman, who I think is a very good actor, but when I heard she was playing the lead role, I wondered if they picked her because of the "Desperate Housewives" fame -- and oddly enough, her character in the film is named 'Bree' (though not surnamed 'Vandekamp'), even though of course she plays Lynette in "Housewives".

But I was really impressed by this film, written and directed by Duncan Tucker. Huffman is really convincing (if that's the right word here) as a male-to-female transsexual (MTF TS). My only reservation is that the film is a little too 'medical model of transsexuality' for me -- with an implicit GID (Gender Identity Disorder) pathologizing of the "I feel like a woman trapped in a man's body" kind. Having said that, "TransAmerica" is, in my view, one of the best feature films I've seen with a transgender theme; perhaps not quite as powerful as "Boys Don't Cry", but unlike that film, the central character is not a victim, but rather an ordinary transgendered woman feeling her way toward self-empowerment.