Forty-five years ago, Christine Jorgensen quietly returned from Stockholm after undergoing one of the first successful sex reassignment surgeries. The Swedish doctors who performed the operation on her body were professional and discreet. The American passport officers who performed the operation on her identity papers were not. A nameless bureaucrat sold her story to the press, and soon, headlines like “GI Becomes Blonde Bombshell” were screaming across the tabloids.

Though she was not the first trans woman to undergo these procedures, she was the first who was outed to the world. Much to her dismay, she led us into a swamp of media titillation and popular confusion about transsexuality, transvestism, and crossdressing that we are still slogging through today. In cultural terms, 1952 is as long ago as the Mesozoic Age, but dinosaurs still roam the minds of most when it comes to trans issues. Even among card-carrying queers, I am often disappointed at the general lack of understanding. In my bluer moments, I feel like non-trans people will never get it. I have visions of spending the rest of my days giving people vocabulary lessons and correcting pronoun usage. I’ll be the life of every party. Whee.

I am impatient, this I know, for my gay friends tell me so. When I whine, they nod sympathetically and assure me that things will be so much different in ten years. They are probably right, but whether there will be less confusion, more confusion, or just different kinds of confusion is an open question. Trans people, like lesbians and gay men, have been around as long as people have been around. But, for some reason, gay people have been able to bust through cultural barriers more successfully.

I’m not going to use this space to try to educate you, Gentle Reader, about Trans 101. Library cards and Internet accounts are readily available. Please use them at your leisure. Instead, I’d like to elevate my private whining onto a higher, public plane. I propose to rant about some battles still being fought which should have been over long ago. I call them “Things We Shouldn’t Have to Deal With Because It’s 1997, Fer Chrissakes.”

First up: semantics. So many words we have: transvestite, transsexual, transgendered, cross-dresser, he/she, she-male, drag queen, drag king, transwoman, transman, FTM, MTF, boychick, chick-with-dick, oy gevalt. Sometimes, it seems like there are more words for trans people than there are trans people. Yet, despite all these words we have for describing ourselves, the difference between such fundamental terms as transsexual and transvestite is still fuzzy in many people’s minds.

During the recent flap over Eddie Murphy, the has-been actor, and Atisone Seouille, the trans hooker, I heard news announcers using both terms interchangeably—sometimes in the same story. It’s not uncommon to hear either word used as a synonym for prostitute. Why does this continue? When will it end? How many of you thought “oy gevalt” was another word for a transgendered person?

We have to get non-trans people to clearly understand the language of trans issues before we can ever hope to be accepted. There is so much work still to be done. But, whatever we do, let’s not re-hire the person who invented the word “transgendered,” OK? Kee-rist, what an awful word. It rolls off the tongue with all the grace of words like “conglomeration,” “juxtaposition” or “Yugoslavia,” and confuses more people than it enlightens. But, since the transgendered “community” is really just a confederation of people tied together by the loose threads of gender/sex dissonance, maybe a word that evokes a Balkan image is completely appropriate. We even have our own version of Comrade Tito: Leslie Feinberg, the unifying, mesmerizing, charismatic, radical leftist “strongman.” (If you don’t know who Leslie Feinberg is, put down this fishwrapper immediately and go read Stone Butch Blues.)

But, I digress. Let’s move on to social “justice.” Despite enlightened civil rights legislation in Minnesota, Philadelphia, and King County, Washington, trans people are still being treated like dirt by courts and juries around the country. Case in point: on November 19, 1995, William Palmer, a computer programmer in Watertown, Massachusetts viciously beat and apparently strangled to death Chanel Pickett, a transsexual woman, in his bedroom. He admitted that when he discovered she was trans, he “freaked out,” put his hands around her throat and “squeezed very hard” to “defend himself.” He claimed that she was still breathing when he fell asleep, but awoke to find her dead. Yeah. Right.

Even after he admitted to assault and battery on the stand, his lawyer had the gall to request that he be released on probation, claiming Palmer was “not responsible and should not be treated as if he was.” The implication was that Ms. Pickett tricked him and deserved everything she got. The jury apparently felt that it’s still OK to kill a tranny, as long as you “freak out” first, and on May 9, 1997, acquitted Mr. Palmer of murder, only reluctantly returning a guilty verdict on the assault and battery Mr. Palmer had admitted to. Amazing, isn’t it? At least the judge had the decency to give Palmer the maximum punishment he could: two measley years.

I could write a nice long book about injustices inflicted on trans people in recent years. But, let’s move the whining on to another nice long book: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (lovingly known as the DSM-IV). This tome, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is the Shrink’s Bible. It “precisely defines the differences between similar disorders and gives guidelines for making diagnoses.” Both “Transvestic Fetishism (302.3)” and “Gender Identity Disorder” (302.85) are listed in the DSM-IV. Homosexuals were deleted from the DSM in 1973, but I’m still in there! Let’s ignore the fact that there are scores of trans people who function perfectly well in life. Probably better than the average psychiatrist. No, medical science says we’re officially loony tunes, so lock your doors and hide your children!

Of course, my health insurance does not cover any actual remedy for this so-called illness. In fact, it specifically excludes “surgery or treatment for transsexualism” in its glossy brochure. So, the shrinks say we’re sick and need help, but the suits at the insurance companies say we’re just freaks and won’t pay for our frivolities. Can both be right? Meanwhile, we are left to ourselves to scrape together the money to pay for a lifetime of medication or $10,000 to $50,000 for various surgeries. No wonder all my transsexual friends are broke.

Next, let’s head for Hollywood, where trans people are basically invisible, except in caricature. Call Central Casting and order a trio of trans characters: a drag queen, a straight crossdresser, and a transsexual. The drag queen will wear a blond wig, speak breathily, teeter around on stilettos, and spew bitchy venom between puffs on her ever-present cigarette. The straight crossdresser will look like an ordinary shlub until he suddenly finds himself trapped in a situation where he has to dress as a woman. Wacky hijinks will ensue until he is finally able to break free from his predicament, get his girl, and reassure the audience that he’s still a normal guy and wouldn’t ever want to wear a dress again, nosireebob. The transsexual will be exactly like the drag queen, because Central Casting doesn’t know the difference. Oh, maybe she’ll do heroin instead of Marlboros. Don’t even bother trying to ask for a transsexual man. They’ve never heard of them.

Finally, I have a personal beef with personal ads. Unless you are trans yourself, you probably have never noticed how uniformly insipid and demeaning ads aimed at trans people can be. First of all, we are always lumped into the “Alternatives” section with people who want to clean your house in the nude or be stomped on the chest with golf shoes. And the alternative action always comes last. Back of the bus for us freaks. But check out the ads themselves. In the straight sections, men are looking for interesting, complex women who are into outdoor sports, ethnic dining, and live theatre. In the trans ads, men say things like “I need a TS. Must have breasts and be very feminine.” Excuse me, do I have USDA Choice stamped on my forehead?

Now, maybe you’re saying “if she got laid more often, she wouldn’t be so cranky.” To this, I politely reply, “k-duh!” Interested parties are ever so welcome to apply. (No Cro-Magnons, please.) Unfortunately, it’s going to take a lot more than breaking my own celibacy streak to make me feel like trans people have arrived. For there is no trans Ellen on the horizon. No trans Barney Frank. No trans Martina Navratilova. No trans David Geffen. For the foreseeable future, we seem destined to remain on the fringes of society, and I wish I knew what we could do about it besides waiting patiently. Does anyone have ideas?