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.

Proudly from Washington, Proudly from GLIFAA

On the Amtrak Acela from Washington to Boston, we just crossed the Susquehanna River.   Tomorrow the Concord Bus will take me the rest of the way to Bangor as I repeat the route I took almost exactly one year ago when I first arrived back in the US at the end of my three-year life in Romania.  For the first time in many months, I begin to relax from what has been the most exhausting but at the same time most productive and gratifying year of my life.

This has been the year of my life in GLIFAA, our officially recognized lgbt+ organization for the Department of State and other foreign affairs agencies.  I knew a year ago when I was first asked if I would be willing to serve as GLIFAA president that this would be a challenging year.   It was so challenging that I gave up writing in this web journal several months ago, recognizing as hopeless the possibility of finding time to write here while engaged in two full-time jobs.

The first full-time job, my day job, was in arms control in an operations center that works 24/7/365.   We worked in shifts of 6-days-on/3-or-4-days-off, rotating between 7am-to-3pm, 3pm-to-11pm, and 11pm-to-7am shifts.   I worked on Christmas Day and New Years' Day, and I will work on the 4th of July.

The second full-time job was GLIFAA.   In Department-of-State-speak, it was the desk officer job that challenged and required me to be always on alert and always ready to manage, solve problems, and advance issues through white papers and meetings with highly-placed officials.  Suffice it to say that I got used to meeting with officials at the Undersecretary and Deputy Secretary levels.   In my day job I never would have met with people at that level.   I met with officials at the White House and with peers in other LGBT groups representing employees of federal agencies and departments.

One year ago I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of lgbt+ and, in particular, trans* activists whom I knew in the US; all of my contacts were in Romania, Moldova, and in a handful of other European countries.   I may have been just a meteor rushing across the sky of U.S. activism this year, a flash soon to be forgotten.  Still, for the few who witnessed the flash firsthand and who were affected by it, I hope a memory will remain of the bright falling star that moved against the background of fixed stars, against the background of those who have been carrying the weight of U.S. lgbt+ activism for decades.

This was an lgbt+ year for GLIFAA.   When I agreed to run for GLIFAA president in the spring of 2013, I had worries of what it would be like to be president of what historically has been a gay men's organization.   (See In Homage to Allyson Robinson.)  I am only the second woman to be GLIFAA president, the first to be so by virtue of the transgender experience.  In fact, I am only the second transgender woman to be visibly involved with GLIFAA, following on the bold example set by Dr. Chloe Schwenke in 2008.

My worries were unfounded.   Perhaps more than anything else, I consider the biggest success of this year has been GLIFAA's continued internal evolution.  My Board of Directors (BoD) consisted of six men, and our Governing Committee (GC) consisted of two men and two women.   (Although those numbers are still heavily weighted in one gender direction, I hasten to say that one of the women on the GC was the powerhouse of energy who got us through many an event with her energy, organizational skills, and boundless enthusiasm.)   It was a year for the BoD and GC to learn from me what it is to be trans*, and it was my year to learn more about what it is to be gay or lesbian.

In September the BoD took up the discussion of GLIFAA's brand.  Have you noticed that I have yet to spell out what GLIFAA stands for?   When it was founded in 1992, it stood for Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies.  That spelling out of GLIFAA did not on its surface include me or those who are intersex, gender queer, gender fluid or any of the other letters of the ever enlarging LGBT rainbow.  The BoD decided the time had come to discuss the future of GLIFAA's brand.

That discussion went on from September through February.  All sorts of new names and tag lines were proposed and discarded while ever new ones were proposed.   In the end we chose to respect both our history and our future.  Like Coca Cola, GLIFAA is a name with deep and honorable roots.  If it had not been for those brave souls, mainly gay men, who founded GLIFAA at a time when security was still routinely rooting out gays and lesbians, I and many others would not be here today.  A number of our founding members paid with their careers for founding GLIFAA.  The price that they paid needs to be remembered and honored always.

But what of the future?   How were we to include our allies and other parts of the LGBT rainbow?   It was in February that that we came to a collective decision that enthused us all.  GLIFAA's name henceforth would be, simply, GLIFAA without any spelling out.  At the same time, we approved a new tag line for use in our literature, on our website, and in our correspondence: lgbt+ pride in foreign affairs agencies.  The + encompasses all the other letters in the LGBT rainbow.   Pride means we are proud of GLIFAA, of who we are, and of the agencies and departments in which we work.   The BoD's decision is subject to a month-long membership vote that is now underway, but I am confident that the decision will be ratified.

GLIFAA Board Meets with the Five Out Gay Ambassadors

If you go to our website (www.glifaa.org), you will see what GLIFAA's banner looks like today.   I am proud beyond words of my BoD and GC for taking this evolutionary step. Indeed, this was not Robyn's issue.   Rather, it was other board members who took the lead, and the result was collective decision on an issue that affects all our members.   We proved that the L and G can work to common purpose with the T.  My concerns when I first agreed to run for GLIFAA president were unfounded, and it is my sincere hope that our cooperative, collective example will help other groups that are going through their growing pains as they look to include all the letters of the lgbt+ rainbow.

What else?   We had our monthly membership meetings and happy hours, not to mention our monthly newsletter.  Our website is entirely new as of February and, unlike the old, is easy to update and maintain.   Our largest annual social event, The Pink Party, filled the ballroom at The Chastleton and showed a profit for the first time that anyone could remember.   There were also pride marches and festivals and more roundtables, seminars, workshops, and meetings than I can remember let alone enumerate.

The GLIFAA BoD and GC Celebrate at the Pink Party!

So what about policy?   We had three big policy issues this year.   I won't go into detail here – see our website for that -- but I can say that we were successful beyond my greatest hopes when we first laid out our policy program last September.  The State Department's domestic partners policy first introduced by Secretary Clinton still exists today just as it did a year ago.  We pushed back against the misguided view that "Hey, since you can all get married now, you don't need domestic partner benefits."  In fact, we pushed back hard using every possible avenue we could think of.  The fact that the domestic partners policy is still in place today just as it was when our board took office in September is a quiet but huge triumph.

In the Capital Pride March

We have made progress in keeping our LGB families together when foreign service officers go to their overseas assignments.   This will be a long-term, uphill battle as governments in some parts of the world are adopting laws against gay propaganda or even making it a criminal offense to be gay.  These same countries have begun denying visas to spouses of our officers more often than they did in years past.  Our success this year has been an internal one at State and USAID as we educated upper level management and brought them to an understanding of the issue that will allow them to take steps that will make it easier to keep our families together.

Our third big issue had to do with transgender health care for federal employees.  Without wanting to attract undue attention, I will allude to a certain June decision from the Office of Personnel Management regarding Federal Employee Health Benefits.   GLIFAA, working with a coalition of allies, worked hard in this area.

We also worked closely with those involved in official State Department and USAID foreign policy.   I helped to write the first State Department cable (i.e., instruction) to all diplomatic posts on carrying out reporting on and outreach to transgender communities around the world.  In Washington, the Department of State had its first-ever observance of Transgender Day of Remembrance.  So did a number of U.S. embassies and other diplomatic posts around the world.

Escorting Secretary John Kerry to Pride at State on June 19

So what is the cause for my mood of celebration and relaxation today?  That is simple to explain.   Last Thursday, after planning and organization that went back to early March, we had the annual Pride at State ceremony.   It was held in the Benjamin Franklin room on the eighth floor of the State Department, a venue that was beyond the dreams of GLIFAA's founders whose first meetings were in member living rooms in the early 1990s.  The keynote speaker was Secretary of State John Kerry, who gave the strongest State Department statement on LGBT rights since former Secretary Clinton's speech in Geneva two and a half years ago.   (You can find the Secretary's speech at http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/06/228045.htm.)  Russian-American LGBT activist Masha Gessen was our guest speaker, and she spoke eloquently on the need to push back against the restrictions on human rights in Russia and a number of other countries.  Yours truly moderated and gave the opening and closing remarks.

Sharing the Stage with Secretary Kerry, Masha Gessen, and
Janice Caramanica from the State Department's Office
of Civil Rights

Moreover, Pride at State took place on June 19, my mother's birthday.   I was wearing her pearls and thinking of her that day.  By serving as GLIFAA president, I had finally become the manager that my father had always hoped I would be, a role for which I had no stomach in my former life.   It is remarkable how what once was so hard has now become so possible.  I could feel the spirits of my mom and dad in the Benjamin Franklin room that day.   As I read the list of our VIP guests, I knew who were the VIPs who headed my personal list.

So as I sit in the Acela, now somewhere in New Jersey, I can say to myself, "You did it!"  Although my term of office extends officially through August, elections are now underway for our new board.  We will know the results in early July, but I'm reasonably confident of the results even today.  GLIFAA will continue forward in very good hands.  Once the election results are official, we'll begin a transition period that will allow me to step back and regain more of the personal time that I need for family and friends and for the preparations I must make to move on to my next post in Central Asia in September.

As I once wrote Proudly from Tirana and Proudly from Bucharest, I can now write Proudly from Washington, Proudly from GLIFAA.  This has been my year of lgbt+ leadership, the year when I gave all for the causes I believe in.  I am proud of my GLIFAA board and all we accomplished.   I'm proud that I had the honor to serve as GLIFAA president.   To all whom I have known and worked with this year, your GLIFAA mom sends her warm thanks.   I am proud and honored to have known and worked with all of you.

Please Continue to Hold During the Silence

No, I have not given up writing in this web journal.  Let's just say I've had to take a pause due to an overwhelming abundance of commitments.  In addition to my full-time day job, I have a second full-time job as president of GLIFAA, our LGBT+ association for employees of the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other U.S. foreign affairs agencies.  That is where my time and attention are going, day and night, at least through June if not through the end of my term in August.

Serving as president of a major employee LGBT+ organization is both a privilege and a challenge, exhausting but always gratifying.  If you would like to know more of our work this year, visit our new web page at www.glifaa.org.  There you will find information on our initiatives, our history, and photos from our various events.  

If you were familiar with our old web site and literature, you will notice that we have a new tag line:  GLIFAA -- LGBT+ pride in foreign affairs agencies.  This year's board of directors under the leadership of yours truly is doing all it can to become more diverse and inclusive.  No longer does GLIFAA represent only gays and lesbians.  We have a number of transgender members both in the US and at posts around the world.  Our doors are open to all flavors of orientation and identity wherever they may be on the bright LGBT+ rainbow.  If you are in the Washington, DC, area, come to one of our monthly meetings, happy hours, or other social events.  If you are outside the US, you may find that there is a GLIFAA representative at a U.S. embassy or consulate near you (www.glifaa.org/about/post-representatives/).

GLIFAA Board of Directors at the Annual
"Pink Party" in February 2014

Be assured that I will return to writing in this journal once I have become an ex-president.  Where will I be next?  Look for me somewhere on the Silk Road as of next September as I return to Central Asia.  Until then, follow me at www.glifaa.org!

Our Winter Love: Thailand Anniversary and Return to Bucharest

One year ago today, Nadine and I were at the Phuket International Hospital (PIH) in Thailand.  Nadine was recovering from her surgeries, and I was still in the process of mine.  Our two weeks at PIH are a cloud of memories overlapping and intermixing.  Days and nights blended together as we moved in a fog from one medical procedure to another, one meal to another.  Confined to our beds for many days, we would watch movies, read books, and listen to music.

It is very human to identify a piece of music with a time and a place.  At some point during our weeks of recuperation, an old instrumental piece from the 1960s came streaming over the Internet from MPBN in Maine.  It was Bill Pursell's Our Winter Love.  I then found it on YouTube and listened to it again and again.  Released from PIH, I would sit on the balcony at the Aspasia Resort, looking out on the beach and the blue sea with the strains of this music surrounding me.  An odd choice, perhaps, but Our Winter Love came to symbolize for me the time that Nadine and I spent in Thailand.  I have but to hear it to be transported back to Phuket.

View from the Aspasia, January 2013

I have not written much of late.  That was inevitable when I accepted the presidency of GLIFAA, the LGBT rights association representing LGBT employees at the State Department and other U.S. foreign affairs agencies.  The GLIFAA presidency is nearly a full time job in and of itself.  Combine it with a full time day job and watch all leisure time disappear.  It's a very good thing that I enjoy and am gratified by both of my jobs.  I do miss writing here, however, and move forward in the knowledge that another change will come in my life late next summer that will again give me the time to write.

Despite the pace of work, Our Winter Love also applies to this winter.  December and January have been filled with good news both for me personally and for those I love.  Although I was working a shift on both Christmas and New Year's Days, I felt my small student-style apartment in Takoma Park was infused with love.  I had my own candlelit Christmas dinner the day after Christmas.  My son and his girlfriend sat on one side of the table.  Next to me sat a gentle man who has entered my life these past several months.  A wonderful holiday feeling and smell hung in the air.  It was a beautiful Christmas.

Having worked through Christmas and New Year's, I finally got my own break when I flew home to Bucharest on January 5.  Riding into the city from Otopeni Airport, I had tears in my eyes.  Bucharest still feels like home, much more so than my temporary abode in suburban Washington.  I looked out the window of my taxi at each familiar site as we approached the center.  Nothing had changed.  It was as though I had never left.

Holiday Lights Are Still Lit in Bucharest Until January 6

I no longer have an Embassy-provided home in Bucharest, but I rented a small apartment for two weeks not far away, just off Piata Victoriei.  Exhausted from the flight, I fell into a deep sleep on the couch and didn't hear when my dear young friend PE knocked on the door.  Rather, she told me afterward that she was banging on the door and had taken fright when I did not answer.  She was in the administrator's office to ask about "the American woman who arrived today," when I finally woke up and saw that she had been calling.  In a minute she was back at my door, and I was able to give the biggest hug I have to someone I had dearly missed these seven months.

My Homecoming Open House in Bucharest

For two weeks I felt I was back in my family with friends coming and going.  We had a reunion open house the Saturday after my arrival.  It might not have been on the scale of the parties I used to hold, but the same warm feeling was there with most friends not leaving until well after midnight.  Another day I went to the Embassy "just for 2-3 hours". . . or so I thought.  I spent most of a day there sitting and visiting with the local staff that had worked with me and with my American friends who are still there.  Another day I went to ACCEPT, the Romanian LGBT rights organization, for most of an afternoon.  I went to my favorite hairdresser -- the only one who truly understands my hair -- and visited Mirela, the magical electrologist of Bucharest.  PE and I went shopping together just like old times.

With Nadine on a Cold Day in Chisinau

Moldova, of course, was not going to allow me to come so close and not pay a visit there as well.  I flew up to Chisinau on a Monday morning and spent two and a half days there.  I had chosen my dates well, arriving in Chisinau on Old New Year's Eve.  Nadine, Dan, and I celebrated the Old New Year together with their friends, and on Old New Year's Day we went together to a Finnish sauna to bake out the old and make room for the new.  Nadine and I reminisced about Thailand, Our Winter Love playing in my head.  We agreed that we must return there one day and truly visit that magical land that we saw largely from our hospital window and from the balcony of the Aspasia.

I knew before I went that two weeks would go by in a flash and that I would again miss my friends.  I have no regrets.  It's far better to miss friends whom one has been able to see and hug at least briefly than to live only with a memory from a year ago.  

Of this I am certain, Bucharest is still home.  I hope ardently that it will also be my future home.  It is where I came to be myself, whole at last, living my life as it always should have been lived.  As Pascal Mercier writes and as is portrayed on the screen in Night Train to Lisbon --

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place.  We stay there, even though we go away.  And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.

I am again in Washington today, back in the hustle of work and GLIFAA.  It is gratifying work, and I stay in touch with my friends overseas as best I can.  I pause for a moment and allow the mind to wander.  Our Winter Love starts to play in my head, and there I am, on the beach in Thailand with Nadine or walking the streets of Bucharest with friends so close that they have become family.

To all my friends and family in Romania and Moldova, Robyn sends her winter love.  Ne vedem mai tarzio.  We will see each other again soon.  

* * * * * * * * * * * *

For those who have not heard Our Winter Love, listen now and imagine me with Nadine sitting on a balcony a year ago in Phuket.

Our Exclusive Halloween Ogre Visits Again

The leaves are falling, blanketing the parks of Washington with their gold and red.  The breezes bring a chill now as the days shorten. . . .

Wait a second, didn't I write something much like that a year ago?  Let's see, there was To Peris(h) by Bicycle, Autumn Comes to 45-deg N, and what was it?  Oh yes, An Exclusive Halloween Ogre Just for Us!

Halloween is in the air once more.  It is again the time of witches, fairy princesses, hobos, Boo Radley, and the Hollywood fantasies of a childhood younger than mine.  It is the time when I am again reminded of the transgender exclusion, that special ogre that visits transgender women, men, and children of all ages in the form of exclusionary clauses in medical insurance policies.  In macabre fashion, these clauses deny coverage of medical procedures that are in any way connected with or, in the eyes of insurance providers, a consequence of gender transition.  

In many cases, the services being denied to transgender persons – such as estrogen or testosterone medications, hysterectomies, or mastectomies – are regularly being provided to others who are not transgender.  It is not uncommon for an insurance provider to deny coverage for claims for gender-specific care based on the person's gender marker on file with insurance.  For example, insurance may deny coverage to a transgender woman who develops prostate cancer.

The transgender exclusion brings consequences that may extend years beyond transition.  A provider may deny coverage for a heart condition if it decides that this condition was in any way transition-related.  My own provider, the Foreign Service Benefit Plan underwritten by Coventry, now routinely questions every claim whether it is directly related to my transition or not.

Last year I wrote of the growing list of progressive public and private employers who now offer medical policies without transgender exclusions  to their employees.  In the Washington, DC, area, American University is just the most recent addition to this list.  (See http://www.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/CorporateEqualityIndex_2013.pdf.)  Almost all employers that now provide transition-related coverage report that there has been little or no increase in premiums.  (See http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Herman-Cost-Benefit-of-Trans-Health-Benefits-Sept-2013.pdf )

"Has the U.S. Government (USG) joined this group of progressive employers over the past twelve months?"  I'm glad you asked.  

Alas, I regret to report that the transgender exclusion is still alive and healthily flexing his muscle in the FEHB plans offered to federal employees.  Sigh.  As equal employment opportunity and workforce diversity policies have progressed, health insurance has remained quaintly in the age of disco.

What I wrote a year ago still applies.  The answer has not changed, nor, I am given to understand, will it be any different in Federal Employee Health Benefit policies for 2014.

"Why has there been no change?" you ask.

"I don't know," your humble servant replies.

Unlike a year ago, however, I am now in a position to do something more than just wring my hands.  I am president of Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (GLIFAA).  We have written a white paper on the transgender exclusion in which we present all the arguments why this clause is discriminatory and must be removed.  We will be presenting this white paper to highly placed officials within the agencies whose LGBT employees are represented by GLIFAA.  We will be requesting that these agencies go on record with the Office of Personnel Management as favoring the exclusion's removal.  

Will this work?  We don't know, but we hope so.  

Meanwhile, as I wrote a year ago --

Beware as you make your rounds this Halloween night.  Amidst the witches, hobos, wizards, and zombies, our own exclusive hobgoblin lurks, waiting to pounce.  Someday he will transform into a beautiful fairy prince or princess, ready to grant all wishes.  Of this I am certain.  It hasn't happened quite yet, but like any fairy tale, this one too will have a happy ending.

For those of us covered by FEHB, may Halloween a year from now be ogre-free.

Rising from the Ashes

The sun is sinking low, the last rays filtering through the leaves and branches of the Norwegian pine that are my front yard in the lake region of Maine.  Three years have passed since I watched the sunset on the eve of my departure for Romania, worried about the future and not knowing quite yet that I had already set out on the path to gender transition.  Then, as now, the warm sun on an October day gave comfort and peace, a promise that somehow, however improbably, things would work out.  I took the promise with me, and the memory of that October sunset saw me through the weeks that were to come.

As I knew it would, life in Washington this year is proving to be both exhausting and exciting.  I broke away last Thursday evening and flew to Maine for a long weekend.  The reason was practical, to check on progress in the rebuild of my small camp.  The old camp, much like my old life, stood on a shaky, rotten foundation.  There was no way to fix it, my handyman said, other than to tear most of it down and start anew.  Where the camp once stood, there is a newly spread gravel footprint.  Between me and the Norwegian pine lies a black circle, the scene of a bonfire that consumed the old camp.  Building supplies are stacked to the side, ready to become the new camp that will rise on the ashes of the old.  The scene parallels my own life story of the past three years.  No longer can I turn around and walk inside to the familiar of the past.  Instead, I sit outside, exposed for all to see, the edifice of my new life a work still under construction.

I have slept nine hours each night since coming to Maine.  I am making up for a deep sleep deficit.  Six hours per night was the rule for the previous week.  The night before I left it was only five hours, and my coffee habit reached new heights to see me through the day.

Why such a deficit?  I have only one year in Washington before going overseas again, far away to Central Asia.  I have a real sense of a ticking clock.  Time is a precious commodity to be used as well as I can devise.  Even my personal life is being planned on a calendar weeks in advance.  My apartment has the temporary feel of a warehouse or dormitory, a place for sleeping and little else.

My official work keeps me busy, but this is only the base of my Washington life.  The volunteer job of serving as GLIFAA president is far more taxing and time consuming with meetings both official and unofficial filling the week.  (It is also one of the most personally rewarding jobs I have ever undertaken.)  Then there are my sisters, son, and friends with whom I want to spend as much time as possible.

Finally, there is dating.  Yes, without giving away details, I have begun dating as much as time will allow.  I have the very real sense that I must fit an entire decade of adolescence into a single year.  Dating for women at an overseas post is more difficult than in the US, and thus I must use this year more than just well.  Even the question of my sexual orientation is up in the air.  Borrowing a phrase from a friend, as of today I would say that I am asexual with romantic leanings.  I am much more attracted by personality than by physical chemistry.  I am, however, still only a 13-14 year-old adolescent girl.  By the time I'm on the Kazakh steppe a year from now, I want to have aged at least to my late teens or early twenties.

This weekend in Maine has been a beautiful autumn respite from the rush of Washington.  Much like the new edifice of my life, my new, better camp will rise from the ashes of the old.  Meanwhile, the last rays of sun shimmer through the branches of the Norwegian pine, bringing to a close an autumn day of peace in Maine.

In Homage to Allyson Robinson

So let's see. What's new?

Well, I am now living in an empty apartment in Takoma Park, MD, just over the line from Washington, DC.  My furniture consists of a folding table and two folding chairs loaned by my sister, and my bed is an inflatable mattress on the floor.  My dressers are several cardboard boxes and the two suitcases I have lived out of for almost two months now.  My household effects are somewhere in transit between Bucharest and Washington.  I can almost see the container ship rolling in the waves of the North Atlantic.

My youngest sister came from Arizona, and we had a small reunion at my oldest sister's vacation home in western Maryland. We don't see each other nearly enough.

I hear nothing but good news from friends in Romania.

I was down with what I think was my fourth cold of the year, perhaps in part the product of the stresses of moving around the world so much, not to mention sleeping on the floor on an inflatable mattress?

I was elected president of Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (GLIFAA).

I began my new work assignment two weeks ago in an operations center environment that allows me to use of my Russian.

"Slow down!" you say.  "What was that about GLIFAA?"

Yes, yours truly is now the president-elect of GLIFAA.  You might say that I'm GLIFAA's lady in waiting as the stupendous outgoing president and board finish their work.  The elect will be dropped from my title on August 22nd at the next business meeting.

"Isn't it presumptuous of you," you ask, "to take the lead position in an organization you knew almost nothing about five years ago?" Well, yes, perhaps, but I was asked to run by more than one respected member of the outgoing board.  Also, membership organizations of this type depend on members who have been active, committed, and effective.  In my own minor way, I fulfilled this description as GLIFAA's post representative in Bucharest.  I rather did expect to have something to do with the board as I came to Washington for a year, but the presidency?

I do get the symbolism.  In its twenty year history, GLIFAA has had only one woman serve as president.  I will be the second.  (My predecessor writes one of the best-known web journals on foreign service life and on occasion has been known to look at these jottings.)  I will also be the first transgender person to lead this organization made up primarily of gay and lesbian members and straight allies.  Note that there is no "T" in GLIFAA.  Well, OK, neither is there a "B" or an "I" or any of the other letters that are becoming common after "LGBT."

Note that I wrote, "I will be the first transgender person to lead this organization made up primarily of gay and lesbian members."  In 2012 Allyson Robinson was appointed executive director of OutServe-SLDN, the association of actively serving LGBT military personnel.  That made her the first transgender person to lead a large LGBT organization.

Gulp.  Am I following in the footsteps of someone I admire as much as Allyson Robinson?  Although GLIFAA is orders of magnitudes smaller than OutServe-SLDN just as the Department of State is orders of magnitude smaller than the combined arms of the U.S. military, the fact is that I am, in effect, following Allyson Robinson's example.  Although there has been some turbulence of late in the board meetings at OutServe, Allyson set a mark for other transgender activists to match.  Gulp.

All humor aside, this will be a very busy year.   In meetings with outgoing and incoming board members, I am coming to grips with the issues currently in play and those that are likely to rear their heads.  Although the Supreme Court threw out the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional in June, the devil, as they say, is in the details.  As many organizations are finding, it's not as simple as declaring that all rules and policies concerning heterosexual couples now apply to same-sex couples.  It's much more complex with many layers of nuance.  At State, much of this nuance will be worked out in consultation with GLIFAA.

As a transgender person, I am learning the depth of the issues of most concern to GLIFAA's gay and lesbian members.  I will be representing their interests to the best of my abilities hand-in-hand with my fellow board members.  I will also be working to make transgender issues more visible within the Department.  At this time I can count the transgender foreign service officers I know on the fingers of one hand.  I doubt that I would exhaust the fingers of the other hand if I were to add in Civil Service, yet I expect there are more who have as yet chosen not to become visible.  It is my goal that by my example, some of those yet in the shadows may choose to become visible.

I do not plan to make this web journal a forum for GLIFAA business.  That will remain within the confines of our board discussions and business meetings.  If my postings to this journal become infrequent, know that it is because I'm doing my best to serve an organization that has made my life possible.  If not for the work done by previous GLIFAA boards, I might not be writing this journal at all.  It is time that I return the favor.  It will be a very busy year, one that I know will be both exhausting and fulfilling and, I pledge, successful.

Bucharest Farewell

It must have been late February when I first asked Daniela at the Romanian LGBT rights organization ACCEPT, “When will GayFest take place this year?”  In 2012 it was the last week of June.  I already knew that I would be departing Bucharest in mid-June, so I followed up by pleading, “Please have it in the first half of June so that I will still be here.”

I will never go so far as to say that my personal needs have any influence on the scheduling of significant public events, LGBT or otherwise, but I was more than simply pleased when the answer came that ACCEPT was trying to schedule GayFest for the first week of June.  It felt as though a party was being scheduled to ease my emotions as the day of my final departure from Romania approached.

It's no exaggeration to say that GayFest was bigger and better this year.  Our Embassy contingent from Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (GLIFAA) had learned from last year's experience, and our Cultural Affairs office was fully engaged.  SC, newly arrived in Bucharest, took over from me as GLIFAA Post Representative on May 1, and LQ, FT, and SE jumped in actively.  TT and a number of other straight allies were there as well, as was our new human rights officer LQ. (By the way, I offer a complimentary Romanian covrig [pretzel] to anyone who can decipher the code I use for naming friends without actually naming them.)

Diplomatic Reception with Chargé Duane Butcher,
Buhuceanu from ACCEPT, Author Kevin Sessums, and
Finnish Ambassador Ulla Väistö

One big change for our GLIFAA contingent this year was that we reached out to other diplomatic missions.   (Big thanks to SE for that idea!)  We sat around the table with colleagues at a Bucharest restaurant in late March to talk it over.   As a result, the diplomatic reception on the eve of the June 8 Pride March was co-hosted.  The venue was the residence of the U.S. Ambassador, but the invitations were jointly sent out from the U.S., UK, Swedish, Finnish, Austrian, and Israeli embassies.  Since we are currently without a U.S. Ambassador, our Chargé d'Affaires Duane Butcher hosted, and Finnish Ambassador Ulla Väistö delivered remarks to over 100 guests from the community of Romanian LGBT advocates and allies.

We opened our own Pride celebration at the U.S. Embassy the week before GayFest by hosting a digital video conference with former Ambassador Michael Guest before an audience of LGBT community members, journalists, and representatives of non-governmental organizations.  The first openly gay ambassador to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Ambassador Guest is well remembered and highly regarded in Romania.  In a deeply personal hour and a half of give and take, Amb. Guest told about his family life, what it was like to serve in Romania accompanied by his spouse, and why it was that he left the Foreign Service in 2007.   His words left a mark, and they were cited by Sasha, a young transgender activist in our audience, when he was interviewed the following week in the newspaper Romania Libera (http://www.romanialibera.ro/opinii/interviuri/interviu-cu-sasha-ichim-transsexual-sunt-judecatori-care-spun-ca-suntem-niste-monstri-304217.html).

Kevin Sessums with Bucharest LGBT Activists

This year we also had a special Embassy guest speaker.  I first met Kevin Sessums at the LGBT workshop in Tirana a year ago. (See Proudly from Tirana.)  Author and editor, he wrote in his memoir Mississippi Sissy what it was like to grow up gay in what at the time was the most conservative, segregationist state in the US.  It was not nice.  Kevin worked with the Embassy and with ACCEPT to inaugurate LGBT bookshelves, the first of their kind in Romania, at the Carturesti bookstores in Bucharest, Cluj, and Constantsa.  When he read from Mississippi Sissy before a standing room only gathering in Bucharest, he spoke with such passion and animation that at one point he slammed his fist down, in the process cracking a glass table top.

The week belonged not to us at the Embassy, however, but to our Romanian friends who worked so hard and so well to bring off a week of events that included movies, discussions, exhibits, and a bigger and better Pride march than had ever before taken place in Bucharest.  For the first time, the march took place in the city center on the street that is Bucharest's equivalent of embassy row in Washington, DC.  Upward of 400 people participated, noticeably more than last year, and the energy of those who marched was higher.   Everyone remembered the incident in February when protesters prevented the showing of an LGBT movie.  (See Home Sweet Home in Romania.)  The police were out in force, but the feeling was one of celebration.  The march route ended in Kiseleff Park just around the corner from my apartment, but rather than participants simply dispersing, there was an after-march Diversity Zone in the park with speeches and a party atmosphere.  GLIFAA had its own table in the zone, and SC officiated by distributing free water, soda, granola bars, and literature.

At the Pride March

It really did feel as though my Romanian friends had arranged the entire first week of June to keep my mind away from leaving.  When the movers came to pack me out on May 31, TJ, BD, PE, TH, and several other friends came to keep me company, to keep an eye on the movers, and to keep me in the moment.  They made fun what otherwise would have been a very sad day.

GLIFAA Table at the Pride March

Most happily, I found peace over those final weeks with my emotionally adopted adult child.  Our relationship continues.  If anything, what we both experienced together and individually has made the bond stronger.  My first post-transition relationship crisis has passed. 

GayFest over, my final week in Romania had arrived.  There was no holding back the emotions now.  The day after the Pride March, friends lured me to ACCEPT to watch a movie.  As the evening went on, more and more people came.  They had conspired to make this my farewell evening, a chance for last hugs and photos.  There were more than a few tears.

My last day at the Embassy was Wednesday the 12th.  My  checkout list complete, I made the rounds from office to office for goodbyes and goodbye hugs.  I took one final long look as I walked out the door for the last time.

Then my phone rang.  "We're waiting for you in the park!"  It was Sasha.  He and several others had gathered in Kiseleff Park and were waiting for me.  We sat and talked until the storm clouds came.  Then we adjourned to my apartment and ordered pizza.  It was the last party in a home that has seen many parties and evenings with friends.

Thursday, my last day, had come.  There was one last visit to Mirela, the magical electrologist of Bucharest, and one last shopping trip.  Ma Ni, a new friend, helped me with some hair products and eye makeup.  When the Embassy car came at 4:30 on Friday morning, she and my adopted daughter went with me to the airport.  My bags checked, we sat over coffee until the time had come. . . .  I won't describe the parting scene.  I'm certain you can see it without my words.  Already on the other side of security, I turned and looked back.  Tears flowing, we waved at each other one last time.  Then I turned and walked toward the future, a future that will be richer because of my life in Romania and the people I have known there.