August 5, 2011

On Being Transgender: Part 2
By Jennifer "Baby Girl" Gann

Having first gravitated towards girlhood in my preteen years and developing bisexuality in my teenage years, I had finally came out in adulthood as a bisexual transgender. I've always had a sense of the sacred feminine principle and divine mother principle in the universe.

Throughout the 1990s, I incessantly studied the pre-Christian Indo-European cultures, whose ancestral religious mythology included goddess myths and ritual worship. In 1998, I enrolled in a yoga homestudy course based on the goddess centered Shakti teachings of Kashmir Shaivism. I've since become a practicing yogini and devoted disciple of my beloved guru, an Indian woman. In addition to continuing the course and performing daily sādhanā, Hindu culture acknowledges and accepts hijras and hijranis, albeit in a limited and sexualized way. They are both considered the "third sex." Many Indian men are effeminate.

Sexually, I have always had a preference for the submissive role in sadomasochistic fantasies of the dominatrix and fetish sort. I had a feminine fetish, and desperately desired my own emasculation and feminization by a leather-clad, stiletto-heeled mistress. My total fascination and overwhelming 24/7 obsession with the idea of becoming and being a woman has also included Amazon and lesbian eroticism.

My first conscious awareness of the actual existence of real-life transsexuals, as far as I can recall, is probably having seen it on television as the topic of talkshows like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich. I specifically remember the British transsexual Bond-girl, Tula, as one of my earliest exposures to transgender women.

I first came into personal contact with the transgender community around 2000-2001 when I began writing to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) contacts listed in various prisoner resource guides. I then subscribed to newsletters such as GIC TIP Journal and zines such as TranSpirituality, which further advanced my self-education of the inner conflict and personal struggles which I share in common with transpeople.

In 2004, after undergoing a couple of years of psychiatric care and therapy, I official became a "dropout", or ex gang member, and disassociated myself from the AB and Skinheads. I have began, and continue to be, full of regrets for my past involvement in such groups and for my criminal activity and conspiracies with them. White racism destroyed my life and led to my imprisonment with a 105 year to life sentence under the three strikes law!

I was eventually transferred from Pelican Bay to Pleasant Valley State Prison, where I was placed in a Sensitive Needs Yard (SNY) facility with other gang dropouts and LGBTQ prisoners. I was around a lot of queens there for two years and was inspired by their pride for being out.

I came out in 2006 before leaving Pleasant Valley and transitioned while in transit form there in early 2007. I changed my name to Jennifer and chose the nickname Baby Girl. I also started on a regime of estrogen hormone therapy and became involved in a serious relationship. I fell in love for the first time with an older Latino prisoner named Jesse, which lasted for two years through ups and downs.

I became a woman, for all intents and purposes, fulfilling my lifelong desire. I have never been happier with myself or felt so at peace. I have fully transitioned, short of my goal of sex-reassignment surgery (SRS), not only into womanhood but also into an entirely new mental perspective and political consciousness.

As an Irish and Cherokee transwoman prison activist, my political involvement is now focused around radical feminist, LGBTQ, and Maoist ideology. I support the famed American Indian Movement (AIM), indigenous people's struggles, and fully dedicate myself to the people's revolution!

Sylvia Rivera (7/21/51~2/19/02), the Boricua transgender activist who participated in the Stonewall riots, remembered Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton in an interview with Leslie Feinberg: "Huey decided that we were part of the revolution—that we were revolutionary people." She and Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans-activist, co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a political group intended to advocate civil rights and provide social services for the transgender community in New York.

Inspired by these revolutionary comrades' legacy and the people's liberation struggles of the 1960s and '70s, I decided to join the prison abolitionist and revolutionary feminist struggles of the Maoist Internationalist Ministry of Prisons as a member of the MIM (prisons)-led United Struggle from Within (USW).

In late 2010, as a result of a disagreement with MIM on gender line and LGBTQ revolutionary potential, I co-founded the Amazon Maoist Party (AMP) based on the concepts of women's struggles as an "Amazon national liberation struggle." AMP supports the anti-imperialist united front and USW.

Continued in Part 3.