San Diego’s Autumn Sandeen says she likes to whine. A lot. In fact, the board member of San Diego’s Transgender Community Coalition and member of California’s Transgender Equity Alliance—who also dedicates six hours a day researching and posting items as a moderator on Yahoo’s transgender news group —sees her trans activism as stemming from her complaining nature.
“I don’t like things that should be challenged going unchallenged,” says the transwoman. “I just feel like I’ve got to do something. I’m not disciplined enough to do a column. The next best thing is writing letters to the editor. So that’s what I do. I’m a whiner.”
One of Sandeen’s many critical letters was addressed to Chris Crain editorial director of Window Media (publishers of LGBT regionals like the Washignton Blade) who wrote an October 2005 editorial criticizing transgender rights activists for “trans-jacking” federal gay rights legislation by a “Trans or Bust” strategy.
Still angry, Sandeen argues that no matter how much unsupportive gays want to distance themselves from trans people, they will not succeed because our enemies won’t make those distinctions.
“People outside the GLBT community cannot tell the difference between a drag queen, an effeminate gay man, a cross dresser and a transsexual. Try and separate us out, what happens is the external forces push us back together. If it’s justice for white gay men and not justice for transsexual women of color, then are we really fighting for equality? Or is it as they say in that book Animal Farm, ‘Some pigs are more equal than others’?”
Like many transpeople, Sandeen has been the victim of harassment, and like others, the abuse was directed at her because her attacker thought she was gay. Near the end of her twenty year career with the US Navy and before she began her transition, Sandeen was investigated for allegedly violating the ban on gays in the military.
“They perceived I was an effeminate, gay male,” Sandeen explains. “[But] I’d never slept with a man in my entire life. So the only thing that identified me as gay was effeminate behavior.”
Sandeen, who’d been a Naval equal opportunity and sexual harassment instructor for seven years, was the wrong woman to dick with. She knew exactly what her rights were.
“I turned it around and said these guys violated Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and sexually harassed me. Both of the people who sexually harassed me basically got the absolute minimum they could get while still being found guilty.”
Although it was a mixed victory, Sandeen says the experience set her on the path to activism and taught her a few critical lessons.
“A policy doesn’t stop anything. You have to enforce the policy for [it] to be meaningful,” Sandeen says. “I understand now that if you can document, you can make things happen. That is a secret power.”
Once mistaken for a gay man, the forty-something Sandeen now calls herself a frustrated lesbian. She says that until she has genital surgery, a relationship may be out of the question, but she has mixed feelings about the procedure.
“My penis doesn’t bother me as a body part…[but] as a sexual organ I’m very uncomfortable with it. I’m going to be an op, I’m a pre-op I guess, but at the same time I’m not really sweating how long it takes me to get there. But at the same time love is out of the question for me. Well, not out of the question but I feel uncomfortable with relationship stuff. I’ve literally only had one partner in my entire life and I’m just not interested in sex. If I could have a relationship with someone that was just as intimate as a sexual relationship—but without sex—I would love that.”
