SPOILER ALERT: Being trans or non-conforming is not an obstacle to a career as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State!
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Queer Diplomacy: A Transgender Journey in the Foreign Service
Thursday, October 12, 2023
The Highs and Lows of Trans at State
In 2022 I was asked to contribute a chapter to the compendium, Surviving Transphobia. The editor understandably shortened my contribution, but I was never consulted on the edits until I was presented with page proofs in August 2023. Some of the edits are unfortunate, simplifying or making a muddle of the original text, and one glaringly inserts a word that makes me cringe. To be specific, in my opening fourth paragraph I quote Ambassador Bill Burns:
In the words of Ambassador Bill Burns, diplomacy is America’s foreign policy tool of first resort.
In the edited version this became:
As ambassador Bill Burns notoriously [emphasis added] wrote, “Diplomacy is America’s foreign policy tool of first resort.”
To be clear, I entirely agree with Ambassador Burns, and the insertion of notoriously distorts my meaning, giving it a negative connotation that I disavow.
Given this and other unfortunate edits, I am providing the original, unedited text here. The editor has promised to work with me on corrections in a second printing. In the meantime, I ask that anyone who may have purchased the book get out a black sharpie. There is nothing notorious about removing notoriously at the request of the author.
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The Highs and Lows of Trans at State
Robyn Alice McCutcheon1
I am contributing this article as a transgender American who served her country openly as a commissioned Foreign Service Officer (FSO) at the U.S. Department of State. For over fifteen years I lived and worked in Moscow, Bucharest, and throughout Central Asia, not to mention in Washington, DC. At the time I retired as an FS-02 mid-level FSO in 2019, I held the diplomatic title of First Secretary, roughly the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the military
“Whoa, Foreign Service? What in the world is that?” you ask. “Do you mean the French Foreign Legion?”
No, I did not serve with a rifle somewhere in the deserts of Africa under a French flag. The Foreign Service is that arm of the U.S. Department of State that staffs our U.S. embassies, consulates, and other diplomatic missions. Sometimes referred to as America’s Other Army.2 Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) are America’s diplomats.
I offer this thought to transgender Americans who want to serve the American people. Military service is not the only option. The old adage applies: The pen is mightier than the sword. In the words of Ambassador Bill Burns, diplomacy is America’s foreign policy tool of first resort.3 Interests in languages, cultures, and international relations are a prerequisite, but being transgender is no obstacle. More than that, the Foreign Service may be one of the most welcoming branches of the U.S. government for all colors of the LGBT+ rainbow.
Was it always that way? Of course not. The Foreign Service was a male bastion from its inception. Women were largely excluded, and women who married were required to resign as recently as 1971. In the 1950s the Department rooted out all gay FSOs it could identify in the so-called Lavender Scare.4 Careers were destroyed with tragic consequences. A few of the outed gay FSOs committed suicide. The witch hunt lessened after the 1950s, but it was still official policy as recently as the early 1990s to revoke security clearances from gay FSOs. The reasoning went that being gay and in the closet left an FSO open to blackmail. Perversely, being gay and out of the closet was seen as giving leverage that foreign intelligence services could exploit.
In 1992 a few brave FSOs stood up, declared themselves openly as gay, and founded Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (GLIFAA).5 Several of the founders were dismissed when they came out openly, but the organization persisted. One of their greatest successes came in June 2009 when Secretary Hillary Clinton introduced a policy on Same Sex Domestic Partners (SSDP), under which partners of gay and lesbian FSOs were granted all spousal benefits to the maximum extent allowed by U.S. law. In 2017 Secretary John Kerry issued a formal apology for the decades of discrimination against gay and lesbian FSOs.
So what about trans? Fuggedaboutit. As far as anyone knows, there was no trans person in the Foreign Service into the first years of the 21st century. Indeed, the status of any trans person anywhere in the U.S. federal government was at best tenuous, and I mean “at best.”
Dismissal for anyone coming out as trans was more the rule than the exception, and this only began to change when Diane Schroer filed suit against the Library of Congress in 2005. Why did she file suit? Because the Library had revoked a job offered to her when she told her future supervisor that she would be reporting for work presenting in a gender different from the one in which she had applied.
With the help of Sharon McGowan from the ACLU, Diane Schroer won. On September 19, 2008, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Library had illegally discriminated against her. In its decision, the court found that discrimination stemming from gender identity or presentation is sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
At about the same time the District Court handed down its decision, Dr. Chloe Schwenke, at that time a senior staffer at a contractor to the State Department’s sister agency USAID, announced she was transitioning. She was fired. After being let go, Chloe went to glifaa. Together they successfully lobbied to have gender identity added to the employee non-discrimination policies at State and at USAID. Secretary Clinton signed gender identity into Department policy in the summer of 2010, and President Obama appointed Chloe directly to USAID. Together with Amanda Simpson and Dylan Orr, Chloe became one of the first high-level trans appointees in the U.S. government.6
So where was I in all of this? I can answer in four words: deeply in the closet.
Eisenhower was in his first administration when I entered this world. When I first heard a term to describe what I felt deep inside, that term was transsexual. I don’t reject it even today insofar as I did, ultimately, go for corrective surgeries. I have trouble with the term transgender because gender is the one aspect of my life that has never changed. I identified as something closer to female from my earliest days. If anything changed, it’s in how society views me. You could say that I transitioned society so that it sees me as I always knew myself to be. I transitioned society and now live – pun intended – in a TS world.7
What I really thought in the 1960s and 70s was that I was insane. How could anyone be transsexual? That was the stuff of tabloid headlines, something to run away from even as I wondered when my breasts would start to develop. I played with the other girls at school recess until teachers made me go out to the sports field where I knew I wasn’t wanted. Instead, I would go to the edge of the field and sit down alone, usually with a book. What would people think if they knew what was going on in my head?
Only in college when I read Jan Morris’s Conundrum did I understand I wasn’t the only one like me in this world. I reached out to gender clinics and for nearly a year lived a double life, appearing as male to friends and professors but as female at a solitary night job. I took long bicycle rides through the countryside, trying to make sense of my feelings and what I now knew to be possible.
In graduate school I ran from the word, the white noise of feelings that could only be drowned out but never entirely driven away. In academics and work I found the socially acceptable drug to mute the feelings. A double major in college, two Masters degrees, and an intense career in space flight dynamics were only part of the formula. I threw myself also into Russian and Soviet history, getting research grants, working in Soviet archives, and publishing in academic journals. Along the way I married a friend, herself a history graduate student, even though I had never dated. A mutual interest in history and international affairs is what brought us together.
Being a round-the-clock activity machine can only get one through for so long. The sand in my hourglass ran out in 1990. That spring I was part of the launch and early mission support team for Hubble Space Telescope. I also had a publication deadline for a major history paper. On top of this, I was now a parent who was going through on-the-job training with a year-old son.
I spoke the trans word to my spouse for the first time that summer. I had been at the University of Illinois with a writing grant to finish my history article, but I found I was unable to work. It wasn’t writer’s block. At the time of my greatest career successes and joy at being a parent, the contradictions inside me were yelling, "Enough, this can't go on!"
A day after speaking the word, I found myself in a psychiatric ward at a local hospital. My spouse declared me persona non grata and threw me out of the house. The consequences of speaking the word were as bad as I feared, even worse. I stood at the edge of a DC Metro station platform and wondered if it might not be best to end it all instead of facing the condemnation of family, friends, and co-workers. In the end it was my own sister who took me to the hospital out of fear I might put my thoughts into action.
This was my first encounter with psychiatry. It was not a pleasant one. I don't remember the name of my psychiatrist. I recounted to him my history of gender-confused feelings going back to earliest childhood. He sat stony-faced, never commenting. We met daily for a week. Only at the last session did he pronounce his verdict, telling me, "What you are is overworked and depressed." He was convinced there is no such thing as gender dysphoria, so he prescribed an antidepressant. He released me to the care of my spouse, assuring her I would be fine. I went back to work after having disappeared for a week. No one said a word about my unexplained absence.
Continuing discussions with my spouse made it clear that I had to choose. Pursue transition or take the pills. It was also clear that if I went for the former, I would find myself divorced with no access to our son. It was a stark choice. So I chose to stay married, be a parent. I chose to ignore my own desires, to accept the diagnosis of depression, to take the pills and go on for the good of all.
Our son grew. In 2004 I made a radical career change to the U.S. Department of State as an FSO. Why? Well, why not? Hubble was using only the mathematical part of my brain while I pursued my interests in Russian language and Russian/Soviet affairs as a sideline.
Transition? It was not on the agenda. I thought it was too late, that I was too old. I said nothing about gender issues when interviewed for a security clearance. I lied through omission, and I feared that the secret would come to light one day. But when? In 2000 a NASA scan of its computer systems determined that someone at one of its Maryland facilities had been visiting pornographic websites. A warning went out to all staff. No one was named, but I knew it was me. The warning identified a URL for a website with information about gender transition as the pornographic site. What would the State Department do if it found out about my gender-conflicted life story?
In my first year at State I was a Political Officer on the Russia Desk. I had jumped from being a respected, senior analyst on Hubble to being, “Hey, you!” I was the most junior person on the Desk as I concentrated on understanding Russian intentions vis-à-vis Georgia.
A year later the State Department sent me to Moscow. For the first year I did visa interviews, cringing at the thought that I held lives in my hands. In my second year I covered the Russian nuclear energy industry after someone realized that a rocket engineer who had worked on Hubble could be put to better use. In the tumult of embassy culture and never-ending assignments from Washington, I found my peace on a bicycle. On weekends I would ride to the outskirts of Moscow to ride on the bicycle track that had been built for the 1980 Olympics. On one long summer weekend I bike-packed to Borodino, camping along the way in woods where I hoped no one could see me from the road.
In 2008 I moved on to our embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where the State Department in its wisdom had assigned me to cover economic and business issues. When I objected that I knew next to nothing about either economics or business, the wry retort was, “Neither do the Uzbeks. You are well matched.”
The fear that one day my trans secret would come to light was realized in 2010. In 2007, with our son now in college, my spouse and I had moved toward divorce. Conducted long distance from Tashkent, the divorce proved to be messy. My trans history complete with my 1990 psychiatric ward sojourn was woven through the discovery materials. It became a factor in the property settlement agreement in which I gave up, essentially, everything. Word got out. I was summoned for an interview, more accurately an interrogation, with Diplomatic Security. I found myself on leave without pay as my fate was decided.
I expected the worst from Washington, but I wasn’t aware that the world for trans persons was changing. I knew nothing about Chloe Schwenke. Although I was stripped of a follow-on posting back to Moscow, I was allowed to take what the Foreign Service calls a down-stretch to a position below my grade in Bucharest, Romania, as an Information Management Specialist – i.e., as a data tech instead of as a political officer. As I watched the foliage change colors in fall 2010, it dawned on me that my biggest issue was that I had a secret. What if I came out openly?
Lifelong experience as a bicyclist had taught me important lessons about visibility. I learned the lessons of urban bicycling the hard way. I hugged the curb, trying to stay out of everyone's way – which resulted in repeated mishaps and injuries as motorists pushed me into the gutter or off the road entirely. As I gained experience, I learned that bicycle safety means taking one's rightful place in the traffic lane and being visible. It is far safer to position oneself as a vehicle, taking as much of the lane as needed. Motorists might not like seeing me in their lane, but they accept me as something that cannot be ignored and pushed to the side.
Could these lessons from my two-wheeled life be applied to my life as a trans person? In college I had gone forth as myself only in the shadows, scared to death what would happen if anyone recognized me. In my trans life I had hugged the curb, doing my best to stay out of everyone's way. Now I applied the same, hard-learned rule of riding a bicycle: Be visible, be assertive, and join the traffic. I had as much right to walk down the street as anyone. “Yes, I am trans, and I don’t care who knows or what anyone thinks.”
That’s how it happened that at Embassy Bucharest on November 10, 2011, I became the first FSO to transition gender while posted overseas. One senior embassy official wanted me out of the country on psychiatric grounds, but the State Department’s regional psychiatrist from Budapest pronounced me sane, only trans. Washington fretted about how the Government of Romania would react and instructed the embassy’s Political Counselor to meet in person with the Americas’ Desk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Department insisted on press guidance that both the Embassy and the Department crafted late into the night on the eve of the transition announcement. The guidance included the following potential question that it feared could be asked by the press:
The Department of State previously sent a gay Ambassador to Romania, Michael Guest. Is the Department sending a message to Romania with the appointment and now this transgender issue?
That question alone illustrates just how concerned Washington was that a transition taking place at an overseas embassy could cause embarrassment.
Washington’s concerns evaporated when the transition announcement caused barely a ripple either within Embassy Bucharest or the Government of Romania. Moreover, Washington quickly came to see me as an asset with access no one else had to the Romanian LGBT+ community. Over the next two years I penned numerous cables on LGBT+ rights in Romania with titles such as Roma and Gay: A Triple Stigma, Transgender Community Comes out of the Shadows but Remains a Fractured Minority, Moldova Makes Progress on Transgender Rights, and Anti-LGBT Protesters Win a Battle, Lose a War? In 2012 and 2013 I organized the Embassy’s participation in the annual Bucharest Pride march that had, in previous years, been subject to attack from anti-LGBT protesters.
Moreover, my Bucharest apartment became a regular meeting place for the local community, in one case after the release of several activists who had been arrested for protesting in front of the Russian Embassy. Olympia, a young trans woman who had been beaten by her non-accepting father, took up residence in my guest bedroom.
In 2013 I returned to Washington for a one-year assignment at the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) that oversees our nuclear arms control treaties with Russia and conventional arms treaties under the umbrella of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. That was the day job even if it was 24/7 shift work. The highlight of the year, unfortunately, was Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, which for the NRRC meant having to produce in rapid succession accurate translations of reports from Ukraine for use by policymakers in the Department, the National Security Council, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
The real job, however, was at glifaa, which had elected me president. An entirely new glifaa board came into office with me. There were new vice presidents for State and for USAID, a new communications director, a new social director, and a new secretary/treasurer. Most importantly, Selim Ariturk came onto the glifaa board as policy director. With a penetrating analytical mind, Selim was an excellent strategist, the perfect person to craft policy. We often disagreed, but I admired the way Selim’s mind worked. Over the coming year we discussed and debated often, looking for consensus that satisfied us both and, we hoped, glifaa members around the globe.
In September 2013 we convened a Sunday retreat of the glifaa board to discuss priorities and strategies. We chose three issues to top our list:
- Post-DOMA strategy and the fate of SSDP,
- Privileges and Immunities (Ps & Is) for spouses and domestic partners, and
- Removal of the transgender exclusion from Federal Employee Health Benefit (FEHB) insurance plans.
The first issue had been a sleeper surprise. The SSDP policy enacted by Secretary Clinton in 2009 accorded family benefits to registered SSDPs, but the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) put limits on what SSDP could offer. Employee insurance and retirement programs still excluded same-sex partners. FSOs rotating back to Washington could not bring partners who did not have U.S. citizenship or residency.
The nationwide LGBT+ community celebrated in June 2012 when the Supreme Court overturned DOMA in United States v. Windsor. Same-sex couples could now enjoy the full rights and benefits of marriage. Same-sex married couples had achieved equality with opposite-sex couples in the eyes of the law.
The key word here was married. FSOs live and work largely overseas, often in countries that are unabashedly homophobic. What happens if an FSO finds a partner in a country that does not recognize same-sex marriage? If this couple flies to the US to marry, what happens when they return to post? Could the now married partner be subject to social or legal retribution?
These were serious questions that worried gay and lesbian FSOs. The devil was in the details of how the Department of State would interpret SSDP in the post-DOMA world. Our glifaa board urged the Department to go slow, to leave SSDP in place until the details could be worked out.
The second issue, Ps & Is, followed from the first.8 As far as gay and lesbian FSOs are concerned, the countries of the world are divided into three tiers:
- Those that wonder why the US had been so slow to recognize same-sex marriage;
- Those that will never recognize same-sex marriage under any circumstances; and
- Those that waffle in the middle, not recognizing same-sex marriage but, valuing their relationship with the US, are willing to grant some form of status to FSO same-sex partners as long as it can be done quietly.
Our glifaa board advocated for reciprocity, a policy by which the US would deny accreditation to a foreign diplomat’s family member if that country had denied Ps & Is to the same-sex spouse of an FSO.
I personally put the transgender exclusion on the advocacy agenda. Most of my glifaa board members didn’t know that an exclusionary clause dating to the 1970s denied coverage of trans health issues to all federal employees, FSOs included. Just as I was learning the issues facing my gay colleagues, they were now learning the issues facing trans Americans.
We wrote white papers for each issue, building a lobbying blueprint for the year. Lobby we did, meeting repeatedly with officials on mahogany row, the power corridor where the Department’s top officials have their office suites on the seventh floor of Main State. We went all the way to Secretary John Kerry’s Counselor Heather Higginbottom and Chief of Staff David Wade. We met repeatedly with Undersecretary for Management Pat Kennedy and Acting Director General Hans Klemm. These were the people who had it in their power to change policy.
Selim set the agenda and tactics for each meeting. We decided early that I would advocate for the issues affecting our gay and lesbian members. Selim, State VP Christopher Hoh, and USAID VP Jay Gilliam would take the lead in advocating for removal of the transgender exclusion. It was a strategy that cemented us as a board. The old adage is true: the best way to learn a subject is to teach a course in it.
Our results varied, but we did better than we might have expected. We slowed Pat Kennedy’s rush to roll back SSDP in the post-DOMA world. He heard us even if he often did not agree with us. Like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, we were able to keep the edifice of SSDP in place for another year.9
On Ps & Is we finished the year as we started. Pat Kennedy feared that reciprocity could lead to tit-for-tat visa wars. Behind-the-scenes negotiation for individual cases remained the official State position, but Pat Kennedy mandated that each post send an annual assessment of conditions for LGBT+ families. He also directed posts to advocate strongly with host governments on behalf of same-sex FSO families, and glifaa assisted with a number of those cases. Ps & Is remain a glifaa issue to this day.
Our most unexpected success proved to be elimination of the transgender exclusion. SSDP and Ps & Is depend only on the Department of State, but the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) administers FEHB plans. How could we influence the policies of an agency entirely outside the Department?
Our answer was to use what openings we did have. Both Pat Kennedy at State and his counterpart Elizabeth Kolmstetter at USAID agreed to send letters to OPM Administrator Katherine Archuleta laying out the case for removing the transgender exclusion. OPM could ignore glifaa, but it could not ignore Pat Kennedy and Elizabeth Kolmstetter. OPM wrote back that the issue was under study with no time frame for a decision. We expected this, but the letters gave us a back channel.
The Foreign Service has its own union, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA). AFSA, in turn, has an associated benefits arm, the American Foreign Service Protective Association (AFSPA) that administers the Foreign Service Benefit Plan (FSBP), an FEHB plan tailored to overseas FSO life.
We sent copies of the Pat Kennedy and Elizabeth Kolmstetter letters to AFSPA and asked that it request OPM approval to remove the transgender exclusion from FSBP. After all, this is our health insurance program for our Foreign Service family, and the top management officials at State and USAID were asking that the exclusion be removed.
Glifaa wasn’t alone in pushing to eliminate the transgender exclusion. We reached out to LGBT+ employee associations at other federal agencies. We worked in concert with the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). We all knew we had to keep up pressure from as many directions as possible.
As winter turned to spring, we didn’t know if our back channel gambit would bear fruit. Time was running out. The annual commemoration of Pride was coming, and Secretary John Kerry would be our guest of honor for this well-attended event that includes reporters. As glifaa president, I would introduce the Secretary, and that introduction gave me leverage. I allowed word to leak out that if there was no progress on the transgender exclusion before Pride, I would denounce this discriminatory clause -- in the presence of the Secretary and the press.
The gambit worked. Less than a week before Pride, NCTE’s Mara Keisling convened a conference call. OPM had relented. It would allow individual FEHB plans to drop the exclusion on the condition of no publicity. Mara said it was glifaa’s advocacy that had made the difference. Instead of denouncing OPM at Pride, I thanked AFSPA for its unfailing support of the Foreign Service family.
My overseas State Department career ended with a posting to Astana, Kazakhstan, in 2014-17 as the Regional Representative for Environment, Science, Technology, and Health (ESTH). I, a trans woman, now ran my own section with my own budget and travel that took me to all five post-Soviet ‘stans covering issues as diverse as climate change, water management, and global health security.
As in Romania, my apartment became a group home and a gathering place for the LGBT+ community. I added LGBT-related meetings when I traveled regionally. Unregistered, below-the-radar interest groups existed in Almaty. Bishkek was home to Labrys, an official NGO and the leading organization for LGBT+ rights in Central Asia. I met with community members in Dushanbe. In Tashkent I met with a transgender man, an artist and actor who told me how the trans community survived in this authoritarian country. In Turkmenistan it was more difficult, but I did manage to meet with a woman activist in Ashgabat, the two of us going on a long evening walk in a city park until she detected that we were being followed. We separated quickly. Two women walking together in Turkmenistan are suspect by definition.
These meetings usually happened in the evenings, on the margins of my official meetings and events. I was conscious, however, that my duties as Regional ESTH Officer included the letter H for health. There was overlap. I incorporated HIV/AIDS into my reporting, meeting with state-financed HIV treatment centers when I traveled.10
I joined forces with the Embassy Astana’s human rights officer. Together we got funding from Washington for a roundtable on trans rights that included representatives from the Ministry of Health and the Republican Psychiatric Institute. Jamison Green, at that time president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), came to Astana as our U.S. expert on trans issues. That roundtable was the first small step in a dialog that continues to this day.
As with Olympia in Romania, in Kazakhstan I found myself deeply involved in the fate of one individual: Sultana Kali. Her story and my role in it illustrate the gulf between the hopes and the reality of a mid-level FSO’s ability to change the life of an individual in the country where she serves.
I met Sultana in March 2016 at the welcome dinner I hosted on the eve of the trans roundtable. She spoke at the roundtable the next day. With poise and dignity, she told how she had been expelled from her high school in Pavlodar in 2015 after coming out as transgender. She had been only a year away from graduation.
Might it be possible to find a school somewhere that would accept Sultana? Surely there must be at least one school in Kazakhstan that would accept a trans student? I offered my help to Sultana and her mom Natasha, and we set to work.
I was wrong. Through the summer of 2016 I found all doors politely but firmly slammed in my face. That included the international schools and the elite Nazarbayev University. No official would admit to being transphobic. Instead, they alluded to administrative problems and traditional Kazakh values. The admissions officer at Nazarbayev University recommended that Sultana study abroad. The director of an international school recommended an American community college. That is what we decided to do.
I moved Sultana and her mom into my apartment. Natasha kept us fed through the winter of 2016-17 as we worked on college applications and fundraising. In the end, Lane Community College in Oregon accepted Sultana and gave a small scholarship for her essay, "I Just Want to Live an Ordinary Life -- and Create a Revolution."
In June 2017 Sultana went for her visa interview. With a college acceptance and sufficient funds for the first year, the issuance of a visa should have been a given.
I was wrong again. After a three-minute interview, the Consular Section chief at Embassy Astana refused the visa, saying Sultana didn’t have enough money to make ends meet for four years of college in the US.
I assured Sultana that we could overcome this hurdle. Nothing in U.S. immigration law says international students must demonstrate sufficient funds for four years, but consuls are not required to explain their decisions. Sultana submitted a second application. This time, I filled out an attestation of support committing to cover expenses for all four years.
Sultana went for the second visa interview in July. Refused again. The vice-consul didn’t even glance at the additional documentation. Not one to give up, Sultana tried a third time, this time after Senators Tammy Baldwin, Ben Cardin, and Susan Collins had made inquiries on her behalf. Denied again.
I despaired. There was nothing I could do internally. Department rules forbid FSOs from intervening in visa cases. What, I wondered, had the consular officers seen in Sultana as she stood at the interview window, handing over forms, bank statements, and passport?
In 2017 Sultana still carried a passport bearing a male name and gender marker. Was she rejected as an openly trans woman, someone whom consular officers suspected would remain in the US illegally, an intending immigrant? Under the law, that finding would make her ineligible. Since I can’t ask directly, I will never know.
But I know this: Of 16 Kazakhstani students accepted by Lane Community College between 2010 and 2016, Sultana was the first to be turned down for a visa.
All I could do was make noise, not permit this visa denial to pass quietly. I published several pieces in the HuffPost,11 going right up to the line of accusing consular officers of inherent bias. The Kazakhstani edition of Esquire picked up and published the intentionally inflammatory Russian language interview I had given to journalist Botagoz Omarova.12 This forced Embassy Astana to respond, albeit with characteristically bland verbiage that privacy concerns prevented it from commenting on individual cases. I wrote an internal Department dissent cable that earned me a meeting with the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Nothing changed.
I drafted a resignation letter and nearly sent it. With less than two years until retirement, I had nothing to lose. So why not scream my head off wherever I could? Just as with gender transition in 2010-11, I might as well go down fighting. To its credit, the Department cleared each of the HuffPost articles. They were not of official concern even if I did use fighting words.
If there is a positive side to my failed attempt to get Sultana Kali into college in the US, it is that Sultana landed well. On paper she still has only an 11th grade education, but she is better spoken in English than most Americans. Today she is part of an LGBT+ project administered by Columbia University and in 2019 traveled to Estonia as a Kazakhstani representative to a regional conference. She also became one of the first Kazakhstani citizens to succeed in changing the gender marker in her passport, a success that stemmed from the 2016 trans roundtable.13
I am retired now. Being an FSO is one of the few careers left in the US that has mandatory retirement for age at 65. After seeing more of the former Soviet Union in my working life than I had of the US, I finally have the time to discover my own troubled country. In 2019 I celebrated retirement by bike-packing from Washington, DC, to my home in Maine. Since then I have bike-packed across the US from Atlantic to Pacific twice, and in 2023 I rode from Alaska to Montana. As should be clear by now, the bicycle has been my instrument of inner peace from the beginning of my life, the vehicle that allowed me to survive decades of being closeted trans and then the pressures of life as a diplomat.
That’s my story, the highs and lows of being trans at the Department of State. I leave it to the reader to write the continuation. I joined the Foreign Service late in my career. A young trans or otherwise gender non-conforming person taking the Foreign Service Officer Test today has the potential of rising to the level of Ambassador.14 It is my ardent hope that I will still be here to shake his, her, or their hand. Several trans Americans have already followed in my diplomatic footsteps, and I know they are only the start.
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1Robyn Alice McCutcheon is a retired Foreign Service Officer who served in Washington, Astana, Bucharest, and Tashkent. Although Ms. McCutcheon was employed by the U.S. Department of State, the views expressed in this column are strictly her own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of State or the U.S. Government.
2Nicholas Kralev, America’s Other Army: The U.S. Foreign Service and 21st-Century Diplomacy (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015).
3William J. Burns, “The Lost Art of American Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2019; William J. Burns, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (Random House, 2019).
4See, for example, https://adst.org/2015/09/the-lavender-scare-homosexuals-at-the-state-department/.
5In the years since, GLIFAA has become glifaa in lower case to emphasize that it is no longer an acronym. On its website and in all its literature, it is now glifaa, lgbt+ pride in foreign affairs agencies. The change happened during my tenure as the organization’s president in 2014-15 and was adopted to reflect inclusion of the full LGBT+ spectrum.
6Chloe eloquently chronicles her own life journey in SELF-ish: A Transgender Awakening (Red Hen Press, 2018)
7Drawing from the realm of classical physics, I used a transformation matrix to rotate society to my own reference frame.
8Diplomats are granted privileges and immunities in the countries to which they are accredited so that they can represent their home countries without being subject to host country law. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961), which defines the framework for the conduct of diplomatic relations, codifies international law on diplomatic immunities and privileges.
9The Department ultimately phased out SSDP in 2017. The phase-out did, however, include a grandfather clause allowing new couples to stay under the SSDP umbrella until the American FSO rotates through Washington, at which time the couple is required to marry if they wish to continue being recognized as a couple.
10The HIV crisis in Kazakhstan stems mainly from intravenous drug use, but the percentage stemming from sexual contact of all kinds is growing. At the HIV center in Karaganda, I asked the deputy director about the LGBT+ community. He acknowledged there is a problem that is heightened by stigma, but he said they were making some inroads in the gay community. When I asked about transgender women and men, he said there were none in his region. When I pressed, he took umbrage, saying that of course he would know a transgender person if he saw one.
11HuffPost articles: “Why Is The U.S. Denying This Young Trans Woman A Student Visa?” ibid.; “U.S. Consuls Already Have The Tools To Discriminate In Visa Decisions,” 3/7/2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-mccutcheon-visa-discrimination_n_5a9cc6e2e4b089ec353bee8d; and “A Transgender American Diplomat Who Does Not Exist,” 11/10/2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trans-student-visa-kazakhstan_b_5a0a2626e4b0bc648a0d5569.
12The Kazakhstan edition of Esquire does not maintain an archive of older articles, but the Internet portal Vteme.kz picked up the theme in “ТРАНСнациональная трагедия [TRANS-natsional'naya tragediya],” 11/21/2017, http://vteme.kz/publ/analitika/ehnigma/transnacionalnaja_tragedija/34-1-0-133. Video of my Russian-language interview with journalist Botagoz Omarova can be found at “Трансгендерной девушке, ЛГБТИК+ активистке, Султане Кали отказали в выдаче учебной визы в США [Transgendernoi devushke, LGBTIQ+ artivistke, Sultane Kali otkazali v vydache uchebnoi vizyv SShA],” 8/27/2017, http://101tv.kz/video_news/723-transgendernoy-devushke-lgbtik-aktivistke-sultane-kali-otkazali-v-vydache-uchebnoy-vizy-v-ssha.html. An English-language interview with the Kazakhstani LGB organization kok.team can be found in “Robyn McCutcheon: 'The dark times ushered in by Trump will pass,'" 10/9/2017, https://www.kok.team/en/2017-10-09/robyn-mccutcheon-the-dark-times-ushered-in-by-trump-will-pass.
13A 2018 Russian-language TED talk given by Sultana Kali can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2XT2uCb2qI .
14https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/officer/test-process/
12
Thursday, March 30, 2023
Transgender Day of Visibility 2023
If a picture is worth a thousand words, than how much value is there to a video lasting more than fourteen minutes? It has been some time since I last posted to Transgender In and Out of State, the primary reason being that for the past three years I have put all of my eggs in one basket by devoting myself to writing a memoir. After three major rewrites and working with a professional content editor, I now have an agent, the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Thus there is hope we will find a publisher, but as of yet there is no guarantee. For more, do watch the video. I'll be happy to send a draft of the memoir to anyone who is interested.
In the video I urge transgender Americans with an interest in languages, history, and culture to follow in my footsteps as a Foreign Service Officer (i.e., diplomat) with the U.S. Department of State. Sign up for and take the test, the FSOT. You have nothing to lose and perhaps a career to gain. The Department of State is one of the most welcoming government agencies for transgender, gender queer, and non-binary persons. In glifaa it has one of the oldest, strongest associations advocating for the rights of LGBTQI+ officers and staff.
I also mention the weekly missives that I send to an e-mail distribution. If you would like to sign up for this, send an e-mail to me at msrobyn-alice@usa.net.
Now retired, I spend much of my free time on my Rivendell Atlantis bicycle. I call her WoodsWoman. Last year I bike-packed with her from the Arctic Ocean in Deadhorse, Alaska, through Canada down to Montana. For more on that and other bicycle adventures, see my alternate blog, Alice In and Out of State.
Sunday, June 12, 2022
TransIAm: Wheeling Through Hard Times
Introductory Note
I wrote this article by request for a compendium of articles on how trans folks survived through hard times. I sent it to the editor in October 2021. Two months later, the editor responded that they did not like it. Why? Because it sounded too much like a love story, the object of affection being a bicycle. It turns out that the editor wanted an article not on how I survived through hard times, but what it was that I survived. Signals thus uncrossed, I wrote a new article that will appear in the compendium that should be coming out in late 2022.
That said, I still like the original article on how I survived and offer it here. It is unabashedly a love story, one that continues. My next adventure with Woodswoman will begin a week from today as I bike-pack south from Deadhorse, AK, on the Dalton Highway and onward through Yukon Territory, British Columbia, and Alberta to reenter the US near Glacier National Park. Stay tuned.
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I call her Woodswoman. She’s my Rivendell Atlantis touring bicycle. To be precise, I have two Atlantis touring bicycles. One is Woodswoman I, and the other – surprise! – is Woodswoman II. The names are my homage to Anne LaBastille, the author of the Woodswoman series. Since Anne wrote four Woodswoman books, perhaps one day I’ll add Woodswoman III and Woodswoman IV to my collection?
Mine is a story of wheeling through hard times. I’m what you might call a traditional trans woman. Although I played with my sister’s dolls and loved it when they would dress me in their clothes, I was otherwise a pretty traditional child from a pretty traditional family. I was also a pretty traditional child cyclist, first on three wheels, then on a hand-me-down from my sisters, and then on my own Raleigh three-speed English racer when I was eight years old.
Eisenhower was in his first administration when I entered this world. When I first heard a term to describe what I felt deep inside, that term was transsexual. I don’t reject it even today. As I said, I’m pretty traditional.
What I really thought in the 1960s and 70s was that I was insane. How could anyone be transsexual? That was the stuff of tabloid headlines, something to run away from even as I wondered when my breasts would start to develop. I played with the other girls at school recess until teachers made me go out to the sports field where I knew I wasn’t wanted. Instead, I would go to the edge of the field and sit down alone, usually with a book. What would people think if they knew what was going on in my head?
Only in college when I read Jan Morris’s Conundrum did I understand I wasn’t the only one like me in this world. I reached out to gender identity clinics and for nearly a year lived a double life, appearing as male to friends and professors but as female at a solitary night job. On my first ten-speed bike, a French Gitane, I took long rides through the countryside around Charlottesville, VA, trying to make sense of my feelings and what I now knew to be possible.
In graduate school I ran from the word, the white noise of feelings that could only be drowned out but never entirely driven away. In academics and work I found the socially acceptable drug of choice to mute the feelings. A double major in college, two Masters degrees, and an intense career in space flight dynamics were only part of the formula. I threw myself also into Russian and Soviet history, getting research grants, working in Soviet archives, and publishing in academic journals. Along the way I married even though I had never dated. My spouse-to-be, also a historian, popped the question. Somewhere along the way in the 1980s, I put the bicycle away as I strove to be the perfect husband, professional, and owner of a fixer-upper house in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.
Being a round-the-clock activity machine can only get one through for so long. The sand in my hourglass ran out in 1990. That spring I was part of the launch and early mission support team for Hubble Space Telescope. I also had a publication deadline for a major history paper. On top of this, I was now a parent who was going through on-the-job training with a year-old son.
I spoke the trans word to my spouse for the first time that summer. I had been at the University of Illinois with a writing grant to finish my history article, but I found I was unable to work. It wasn’t writer’s block. At the time of my greatest career successes and joy at being a parent, the contradictions inside me were yelling, "Enough, this can't go on!"
A day after speaking the word, I found myself in a psychiatric ward at a local hospital. My spouse declared me persona non grata and threw me out of the house. The consequences of speaking the word were as bad as I feared, even worse. I stood at the edge of a DC Metro station platform and wondered if it might not be best to end it all instead of facing the condemnation of family, friends, and co-workers. In the end it was my own sister who took me to the hospital out of fear I might put my thoughts into action.
This was my first encounter with psychiatry. It was not a pleasant one. I don't remember the name of my psychiatrist. I recounted to him my history of gender-confused feelings going back to earliest childhood. He sat stony-faced, never commenting. We met daily for a week. Only at the last session did he pronounce his verdict, telling me, "What you are is overworked and depressed." He was convinced there is no such thing as gender dysphoria, so he prescribed an antidepressant. He released me to the care of my spouse, assuring her I would be fine. I went back to work after having disappeared for a week. No one said a word about my unexplained absence.
My dad wanted to take over my finances since I was obviously mentally disturbed. Continuing discussions with my spouse made it clear that I had to choose. Pursue transition or take the pills. It was also clear that if I went for the former, I would find myself divorced with no access to our son. It was a stark choice. So I chose to stay married, be a parent. I chose to ignore my own desires, to accept the diagnosis of depression, to take the pills and go on for the good of all.
But there was one bright spot in the person of a housemate from the group house where I had lived in the 1970s. We had not been particularly close. Our politics were too different. I was the progressive liberal while he was an arch, almost reactionary conservative. Still, we had managed to stay in touch.
He came the day after my release from the hospital. We took a long walk, and I found the nerve to tell him my story. When I was done, he stopped, turned and looked at me. "Maybe this really is you," he said. "Maybe you really were supposed to be born a woman." I was stunned. The person I least expected to accept me was the one person who validated my feelings.
Lost in my thoughts, I almost missed it when my housemate friend suggested joining him on a group bicycle ride the next weekend. He thought the physical exercise would be a good release for me after the stresses of that long summer.
A bike ride? My college bicycle was gathering dust in the basement, but why not? The next weekend I pumped up the tires, oiled the chain, and went on that ride. It couldn’t have been more than ten miles through the Maryland countryside. Thirty-six years old, I was woefully out of shape from a life that for a decade had revolved around office, libraries, archives, and family. I had to push the bike up many of the hills, but I made it.
In the weeks and months to come, I kept riding. I started commuting by bicycle, marveling at the stars when I commuted home on winter nights. By now I was a senior pointing control analyst for Hubble, and I worked through many new algorithms as I pedaled the fifteen miles from work to home under the night sky. The rhythm of my legs and the quiet of the night road became a solace and a source of peace. The words from an old Gordon Lightfoot song played in my head:
Bless you all and keep you with the strength to understand,
Heaven can be yours just for now.
Soon I was riding over 5000 miles a year. Where psychiatry and its pills failed, the bicycle saw me through to a better day.
I also found refuge at a Potomac Appalachian Trail Club cabin in western Maryland. It’s there that I discovered the first volume of Anne LaBastille’s Woodswoman series in the cabin’s book collection. I couldn’t put it down. Here was a woman who in the 1960s defied convention by divorcing and then building a cabin on a remote lake in the Adirondacks. When I say she built a cabin, I mean just that. She built it with her own hands and lived there without electricity. There was no road. Going to town meant a canoe trip in summer or snowshoeing in the winter. Yet she thrived in nature and went on to become an Adirondack guide and an internationally recognized ecologist. I understood the peace she found. I felt it at the PATC cabin, on mountain hikes, and on long bicycle trips. I found it in my first bike-packing journey, all of 184 miles along the C&O Canal from Washington to Cumberland. I started to think of myself as an Aspiring Woodswoman.
Our son grew. In 2004 I made a radical career change to the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer (FSO). Why? Well, why not? Hubble was using only the mathematical part of my brain while I pursued my interests in Russian language and Russian/Soviet affairs as a sideline. In 2007, with our son now in college, my spouse and I moved toward divorce.
Transition? It was not on the agenda. I thought it was too late, that I was too old. I said nothing about gender issues when interviewed for a security clearance. I didn’t know much about the history of gays and lesbians in the Foreign Service, but I knew it hadn’t been good. As late as the early 1990s any FSO found out to be gay would lose their security clearance. Transgender persons weren’t even on the radar.
I lied through omission, and I feared that the secret would come to light one day. But when? In 2000 a NASA scan of its computer systems determined that someone at one of its Maryland facilities had been visiting pornographic websites. A warning went out to all staff. No one was named, but I knew it was me. The warning identified a URL for a website with information about gender transition as the pornographic site. What would the State Department do if it found out about my gender-conflicted life story?
I continued to ride. Through the 1990s I had ridden a number of garage sale Motobecanes and Fujis. I rode them until they could be ridden no further. One failed when the top tube snapped in two on my morning commute.
Woodswoman I, my first Rivendell Atlantis, entered my life in 2004 just as I was joining the State Department. I rode her that year as a daily commuter to Foggy Bottom and my first position as a Political Officer on the Russia Desk. I had jumped from being a respected, senior analyst on Hubble to being, “Hey, you!” I was the most junior person on the Desk. I could hardly find my way around the building, let alone navigate politics and policy. Woodswoman steadied me and saw me through on the morning commutes and on the late evening rides home.
A year later the State Department sent me to Moscow. Woodswoman went with me. I was now an urban commuter in one of the world’s largest cities with traffic jams that made Washington look tame. For the first year I did visa interviews, cringing at the thought that I held lives in my hands. For the second year I covered the Russian nuclear energy industry when someone realized that a physicist/engineer who had worked on Hubble could be put to better use. In the tumult of embassy culture and never-ending assignments from Washington, I found my peace with Woodswoman. On weekends I would ride to the outskirts of Moscow to ride on the bicycle track that had been built for the 1980 Olympics. On one long summer weekend I bike-packed to Borodino, camping along the way in woods where I hoped no one could see me from the road.
After Moscow I moved on to our embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where the State Department in its wisdom had assigned me to cover economic and business issues. When I objected that I knew next to nothing about either economics or business, the wry retort was, “Neither do the Uzbeks. You are well matched.”
Again I found balance with Woodswoman. A 45-mile ride around Tashkent on the Ring Road, the city’s version of a Beltway, became standard for the weekends. I rode 100-mile century rides to the dam at Charvak. I rode the back roads for three days from Tashkent to Samarkand.
Another time I rode to Khujand, Tajikistan, in the process gaining both a rebuke and a reputation. Our political chief had loaned me out to Embassy Dushanbe to support a regional economic conference. Relations between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were so poor that there were no flights between the capitals. The only way to get to Dushanbe was to go overland from Tashkent to Khujand and continue from there by domestic flight. In Tashkent no one believed me when I said I intended to bike the 100 miles to Khujand, but that’s exactly what I did. When I got back to Tashkent, our Regional Security Officer rebuked me and told me never to repeat such a stunt. Washington, however, viewed it differently, even as a positive for our relations. Along the way I had attracted crowds wherever I stopped. No one could believe that an American diplomat would ride a bicycle. Even the guards at the Uzbek/Tajik border wanted photographs with me.
The fear that one day my trans secret would come to light was realized in 2010. My divorce, conducted long distance from Tashkent, proved to be messy. My trans history complete with my 1990 psychiatric ward sojourn was woven through the discovery materials. It became a factor in the property settlement agreement in which I gave up, essentially, everything. Word got out. I was summoned for an interview with Diplomatic Security and found myself on leave without pay as my fate was decided.
In the fall of 2010 I took long rides as Washington decided my fate. With what little money that was left to me, I had bought a small camp in northern Maine that summer. It was there that Woodswoman II entered my life. I expected the worst from Washington, but I wasn’t aware that the world for transgender persons was changing. Although I was stripped of a follow-on posting back to Moscow, I was allowed to take what the Foreign Service calls a down-stretch to a position below my grade in Bucharest, Romania.
As Woodswoman and I watched the Maine foliage change colors, it began to dawn on me that my biggest issue was that I had a secret. What if I came out openly?
Life on two wheels had taught me important lessons about visibility. In the 1990s I learned the lessons of urban bicycling the hard way. I hugged the curb, trying to stay out of everyone's way – which resulted in repeated mishaps and injuries as motorists pushed me into the gutter or off the road entirely. As I gained experience, I learned that bicycle safety means taking one's rightful place in the traffic lane and being visible. One is far safer positioning oneself as a vehicle, taking as much of the lane as needed. Motorists might not like seeing me in their lane, but they accept me as something that cannot be ignored and pushed to the side.
In Bucharest it dawned on me that these lessons from my two-wheeled life applied to my transgender life. In college I had gone forth as myself only in the shadows, scared to death what would happen if anyone recognized me. In my trans life I had hugged the curb, doing my best to stay out of everyone's way. Now I applied the same, hard-learned rule of riding a bicycle: Be visible, be assertive, and join the traffic. I had as much right to walk down the street as anyone. “Yes, I am transgender, and I don’t care who knows or what anyone thinks.”
In Embassy Bucharest in 2011, I became the first FSO to transition gender while posted overseas. A bike-packing trip in Transylvania that summer helped to ease me through the period when my gender presentation could at best be described as betwixt and between. I found a local endocrinologist and a local electrologist. One senior embassy official wanted me out of the country on psychiatric grounds, but our regional psychiatrist pronounced me quite sane, only transgender. Washington fretted about how the Government of Romania would react and insisted on press guidance, but in the end all loose ends were smoothed over. My coming-out was the annual Marine Ball on November 12, and I never looked back. Moreover, Washington now saw me as an asset with access to the Romanian LGBT+ community that no one else had. Over the next two years I penned many reports on LGBT+ rights and conditions for transgender persons in Romania. My Bucharest apartment became a regular meeting place for the community.
I continued to ride. In Romania I rode with dykes on bikes and with an elegant Scottish ex-pat who had lived in the country for over a decade. I found myself at rallies for bicyclist rights in Bucharest while also organizing events promoting LGBT+ rights.
In 2013 I returned to Washington for a one-year assignment at the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center that overseas our arms control treaties with Russia. That was the day job even if it was 24/7 shift work. The real job was at glifaa, the State Department’s affinity group for LGBT+ foreign service, civil service, and locally employed staff overseas. I had been elected president. Still only a mid-level FSO, I now met regularly with John Kerry’s staff and other senior officials in Foggy Bottom as we worked through new policies on same-sex partners and trans-inclusive health insurance.
I was again a Washington commuter on Woodswoman in all weather and often at night. I lived that year in a basic, spare apartment less than a mile from the home I had owned for 25 years. On one rare snowy winter evening, I realized this spare apartment had become home. Woodswoman and I had just rolled out of Foggy Bottom sometime after 11:00 p.m. A light snow was falling. I pedaled up Virginia Avenue and then into Rock Creek Park. There was not a single car in sight on Rock Creek Parkway. A thin layer of white covered the roadway. What on most days was a busy car commuter route had become a silent, beautiful enchanted forest with wet snow hanging heavily in the trees. I pedaled as slowly as I could, wanting to make the moment last.
When I finally arrived at my apartment, Woodswoman was dirty and snow-caked. There was no way I could bring her into my living room. I spent an hour bringing rags and buckets of warm water out onto the stairwell. When I finally rolled her inside, I looked around and said quietly, "This is home.” More than that, I was at home in the same area I had lived in during my former life. I was at home in myself.
My overseas State Department career ended with a posting to Astana, Kazakhstan, in 2014-17 as the Regional Representative for Environment, Science, Technology, and Health. I, a trans woman, now ran my own section with my own budget and travel that took me to all five post-Soviet ‘stans covering issues as diverse as climate change, water management, and global health security.
Of course, Woodswoman was with me. I didn’t just cover environmental issues. I walked the walk. When I was invited to address a conference on ecotourism at a town 75 miles north of Astana, of course I went there on Woodswoman, thereby earning mention in the local newspaper as the American diplomat who lives the life she preaches.
I also walked the walk on LGBT+ life in Kazakhstan. My apartment became a group home and a gathering place for the community. We even got funding from Washington for a round table on transgender rights that included representatives delegated by the Government of Kazakhstan.
I am retired now. Being an FSO is one of the few careers left in the US that has mandatory retirement for age at 65. After seeing more of the former Soviet Union in my working life than I had of the US, I finally have the time to discover my own country. In 2019 I celebrated retirement by bike-packing from Washington, DC, to my home in Maine. In the Covid year of 2020 I rode across the US on a route known as the Northern Tier.
2021 was my year to ride the TransAm from Virginia to Oregon with nine crossings of the continental divide along the way. The TransAm, known originally as the Bikecentennial route, was created to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial in 1976, a time when I was deep in my college struggles with gender identity.
In Kentucky a young trans friend from Western Kentucky University joined me for a day and two nights. As we climbed the hills of Appalachia, Levi declared, “It should be called the TransIAm route.”
“How appropriate, how right he is,” I thought as Woodswoman and I pushed westward through the Ozarks with the Rockies and Cascades yet to come. The passes we climb in our TransIAm lives take all our strength and effort, but we all have what it takes to make it to the top. Woodswoman and I have climbed many passes together and will climb many more. Whatever passes life may yet have in store for me, I am ready for the climb.
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You can find my day-to-day travel log of my TransAm adventure, complete with slideshows, in my alternate blog at:
https://attitude-maneuver.blogspot.com/2022/01/robyns-2021-transam-bikecentennial.html
Saturday, January 23, 2021
No Trotsky on the Potomac
Retired and nearly a thousand miles from the Washington, DC, that I called home for much of my professional life, I am now a bystander to events taking place there. When I first moved to DC in 1978, it was no longer the sleepy southern city of pre-Kennedy days, but it had not yet become the metropolitan capital that it is today. The downtown area near the White House felt abandoned, not yet recovered from the aftermath of riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.
At the same time, Washington was a wonderful walking city. One could approach quite near to the White House on the Ellipse side, and on the other side Pennsylvania Avenue was still a traffic thoroughfare. Every time I had a visitor from out of town, we would go to the Capitol, walking up the steps on the east side directly into the Rotunda. There were no metal detectors or barriers of any kind.
With continued battlefield disasters and attempted counter-revolutions in the summer of 1917, more and more of army melted away as the Bolsheviks gathered the disaffected under its banners. Trotsky led when the time came in November. Brilliant, ruthless, and a military genius, he melded together a small, armed Red Guard with the broader masses. Trotsky commanded, the Red Guard led, and the masses followed. Presented in Soviet history as a heroic storming, the occupation of the Winter Palace on November 7 was an anarchic but more or less peaceful affair in which the mob wandered the halls while the Red Guard searched for the room where ministers of the Provisional Government were meeting. When they found the room, they took the ministers prisoner. The Provisional Government was no more.
How times have changed. The barriers began going up after the Kansas City bombing in 199x and accelerated after 9/11. Each time I came back from overseas after 2004, I could feel the government buildings slipping ever further away, ever more distant from city residents and visitors.
When a riotous mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, I thought back to my early DC days that now seem naively distant. Watching news coverage, I thought of another city that has played a major role in my life: St. Petersburg, Russia. Whereas pundits compared the January 6 mob with the mass events associated with the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 30s, I thought of something different: the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd on November 7, 1917.
The genius of the Bolshevik coup that overthrew the Provisional Government is that its professional revolutionary core understood how to present itself as leading a populist cause. Since the abdication of Tsar Nicholas in March 1917, successive Provisional Government cabinets had remained true to Russia's commitments in World War I, putting off major reforms until elections could be held for a Constituent Assembly. The Provisional Government saw itself as a steward that would see the country through until that elected Assembly could take over.
Lenin would have none of it. When he returned to Russia in the famed sealed train from Germany, he announced his April theses that emphasized an end to the war and agrarian reform. The Bolshevik slogan of "Peace, land, and bread" fell like rain on the fertile soil of Russia's working and peasant classes and on the common soldiers who had done most of the dying for the Russian Empire. The masses could not care less about the Marxist dialectic or the differences between Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries, but peace, land, and bread? "Why yes, we're for that!"
Still, it wasn't quite over. The one thing the Provisional Government has managed to do during its eight months was to organize the elections for the Constituent Assembly. The elections took place, and the Assembly met on January 18-19, 2018. The Bolsheviks did not have a majority. By this time, however, it was a simple matter for Trotsky to command the Red Guard into the meeting hall and disband the Assembly.
From this time forward, it was All Power to the Soviets!, to the councils controlled by the Bolsheviks who soon declared all other political parties illegal. In short order true power was exercised not by the soviets but by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and by its Politburo. With a growing bureaucracy of its own creation, the Politburo needed a General Secretary who could handle the minutiae of running a government. Stalin, the grayest, least eloquent of the original Bolsheviks stepped forward to take up this thankless task. The rest, as they say, is history.
Ironically, in the reign of collectivization, industrialization, and terror that Stalin unleashed in the 1930s, he remained wildly popular among the mass population that saw him as more like themselves, less elite than the Trotskys, Bukharins, and Zinovievs whom Stalin eliminated one by one. When Stalin died in 1953, the country wept while more than a hundred mourners in Moscow died of suffocation in the thronging crowds.
Have I taken the parallel between Washington and Petrograd too far? Perhaps. Undoubtedly. If there is one lesson I take from this parallel that gives me hope, it's that there was no Trotsky in the Washington of 2021. The mob that stormed the Capitol remained a mob. When it succeeded in breaking into the hallways of power, it seemed lost at what to do beyond taking videos and selfies. Leaderless, the mob melted away. May it stay that way, and may Trotsky remain a figure of history.
Thursday, November 19, 2020
A Bike-Packing Journey for Our Times
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| Lake Koocanusa |
Six hours into the day's ride, my rear tire flatted. I never should have left Maine without new tires. I patched the inner tube but could not find the cause. Sure enough, the tire went flat again in less than five miles as the sun sank lower. There I was on the side of the road with the rear wheel off the bike and the tire in my hands. I squeezed every inch of it to find the cause, the tears in my eyes and the silent "Why?" screaming in my head making the task that much harder. . . .
How many times in my life have I patched bicycle tires on the side of a road? As readers of this journal know, riding a bicycle and being transgender are intimately related in my life. If not for the former, I might not have coped with the latter during the decades it took me approach and finally succeed at transition. I learned to be visible and assertive in my lane position on a bicycle, and those skills transferred directly to being visible and assertive when I transitioned at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, Romania, in 2010-11. Experiencing two flats in a row that day by Lake Koocanusa reminded me that our life journeys, whether on a bicycle or in asserting gender identity, remain unpredictable even after we have accumulated years of life experience.
Covid and Trump. It is ironic that without the latter's leadership on the former, I never would have spent the summer of 2020 quite the way I did, on two wheels across 4000 miles of the northern US where Trump flags wave.
All through the winter of 2019-20, I had planned a cross-country bike-packing journey. Given that I live in northern Maine, I had designed a route across Ontario and Quebec that crossed back into the US at Michigan. From there I had planned to cross Michigan's Upper Peninsula and continue across the Northern Tier states to Anacortes, WA.
Then Covid hit. The world as we know it went away. The Canadian border closed, and even Adventure Cycling urged its members to stay home for the common public health good. An unabashed northeast progressive, I complied and abandoned my plans. Instead, I set out on May 31 to bike only around the state of Maine. At no point would I be further than a few hundred miles from home. I told friends this was my Bike Around Maine or BAM, a wry allusion to the Soviet Union's Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad. I found myself watching YouTube videos of the controversial, tragically naive American folk singer Dean Reed playing his guitar and singing This Train on top of a BAM railroad car in the 1970s.
That was my reduced plan, but a funny thing happened as I passed through Brunswick, ME. I met up with a bike-packing friend who urged me to reconsider. After all, she said, "What could be more socially distant than riding solo on a bicycle 6-8 hours/day and then camping at night?"
I mulled that over for several days as I continued north to the Canadian border that I could not cross. I wasn't convinced at first, but the more I thought of the Trump administration's leadership in confronting Covid, the more I thought my friend had a point. Infection rates in the upper Midwest were low as we headed into summer. I might not be able to cross Canada, but I could strap Woodswoman II on the back of my car, drive to Michigan, and start riding west from there1.
If there had been true national Covid leadership in Washington, I would have stayed home for the public good. With no national policy, however, I understood that the situation would become much worse in the fall and winter. The summer, on the other hand, still offered a more-or-less virus free route to the West Coast. I seized my chance.
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| Crossing the Cascades |
People were kind. Camp hosts found a spot for me at campgrounds that were full. One campground host in Montana brought me a home cooked dinner. A retired Lutheran minister drove over a hundred miles to bring me a new front tire when I needed one.
In Omak, WA, I took a day off to recover from the heat. I may have been the only person in that town to tune in to the Democratic National Convention to listen to Joe Biden's acceptance speech. Only after I had crossed the Cascades did the Trump/Pence flags thin out to be replaced by Biden/Harris 2020 yard signs, a sure sign that I was nearing my journey's end. I dipped Woodswoman's front wheel into the waters of Puget Sound at Anacortes, WA, on August 25.
Like most progressive Democrats, I had hoped for a crushing repudiation of Trump at the polls on November 3, but I knew better. I had seen and felt the adulation shown to him through most of the rural northern Midwest and also in my rural part of Maine's 2nd Congressional District. When the race was called for Joe Biden on November 7, I'm certain I was the only person in my small town to go out on her porch and bang a pot in celebration.
Come January 20, we will have a national public health policy. I'll do my part. If that means staying close to home for another year, so be it. I long for borders to reopen and to visit friends in Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia, and Uzbekistan. I look forward to other bike-packing adventures. In the meantime I will take solitary winter walks, read my books, and enjoy the beauty of a Maine winter. I will think back on the summer with a smile.
It is ironic that I owe my summer journey to leadership from Trump's Washington. That irony turns to tragedy when I consider that five people in my circle of friends and family have contracted Covid. One has died from it. As memorable as the summer was, I would have preferred true leadership even if meant staying home. In New Brunswick, less than 100 miles away on the other side of a closed border, the battle against Covid has been so successful that life has returned nearly to normal.
But let me return to that day along Lake Koocanusa. Getting control of my tears, I found the culprit that had caused my flats, a small piece of wire that had worked its way through the tire wall. I used eyebrow tweezers to extract it. A half hour later I pulled into a Corps of Engineering campground south of Koocanusa Dam. The first person I saw was a woman with her dog standing outside what turned out to be a school bus turned camper. She invited me to set up my tent next to her bus. She brought me cloths and a basin of warm water with which to wash away my day's accumulation of grime. With the sun now set, she invited me into her bus to warm my dinner on her stove, and we whiled the evening away with tales of our travels. I went to sleep that night with a smile. My new friend had turned my worst cycling day into one of my best.
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| Journey's End at Anacortes, WA |
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You can find my day-to-day travel log from this summer's bike-packing adventure in my alternate blog at:
http://attitude-maneuver.blogspot.com/2020/11/robyns-2020-bikecentennial.html
1 Woodswoman I & II are my affectionate names for my two Rivendell Atlantis touring bikes and also an homage to environmentalist Anne LaBastille.↩
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