Our friend Leslie B. writes of her friend who is trans-gendered and visually impaired:
“…But it does get tricky. I have a friend who is trans-gendered, and, darn it, she still looks and sounds very much like a guy dressing up to look like a gal. Add to that the fact that she’s partially sighted, which means that she probably looks more like she’s sniffing bras in a store, rather than looking at them, and you might notify security about her, too. And she’s just trying to be who she is. She’d prefer it if she didn’t make people around her uncomfortable, but she’s not going to let their uncomfortable-ness stop her from doing what she has a right to do.”
I hear Billie Holiday and surely these matters of dignity and freedom couldn’t be stated more clearly. (Though the English professor in me hastens to point out that Leslie B. wants the word “discomfort” and not the brutal coinage “uncomfortableness” which sounds like “Bush speak” and we don’t do that over here on our small beach blanket.)
Gadzooks! Visual impairment is vastly misunderstood all on its own. Factor in your trans-gendered body and you’ve got a performative panopticon straight out of the brain of Jeremy Bentham and god almighty the cadres, nay “legions” of unthinking scrutinizers are likely poised to march you across the Bridge of Sighs with no questions asked.
It ain’t nobody’s business if I do.
Having said this its a matter of medium irony if I say that folks with low vision should try to admit their difference and carry a white cane–not merely because the world of automobiles and the rat race can be dangerous, but because though blindness is a scary semiotic abstraction its far better to be freed at last from having to explain your residual vision to others.
That too is nobody’s business.
And sometimes, nay, even more often than sometimes, people will help you.
Okay. Let us eschew abstractions. Let us be richly and strangeley human.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
But, SK, you still have not addressed, or possibly even read, my comments concerning your January 30 posting, “Random Talk, Friday Department” or you would have, at the very least, corrected your “Just Breathe Normally” link so that one would not be transported to the horrors of the Essex when one was hoping, instead, to receive words of comfort from the inspirational lady poet.
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…and she would have very much appreciated your use of the word “beautiful” to describe her. She really is, inside & out, and always has been.
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What?! Low vision isn’t understood? Yea Vrrily I say unto you, he who hath eyes is not seeing; he who has bad eyes is truly in the world. She who used to be a he who had bad eyes is the most beautiful of all. Inner vision is not what the other shoppers would suppose.
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“Let us be richly and strangeley human.” Amen.
Haha, my mother is an English major with a Ph.D. I think I started using discombobulated language as a child just because it so thoroughly annoyed her, and now in adulthood it’s habit. My Columbian ex-sister-in-law was such a wonderful addition to the family talking about her “deproving” English; she drew a lot of Mom’s potshots away from me. However, I do appreciate the corrections, but please, please, please don’t associate me with Bush, that blow is too low!
My friend does regularly carry a long cane with her. I remember the time that she told me about the end of it getting caught in the bus doors that closed on her face as she was trying to board the bus. She hung on tight to her cane as the elastic stretched to dangerous tautness. Then she realized that she’d better let go, or the cane would kill her upon its release from the door. She sadly remembers listening to her cane clattering away down the street, never to be seen again.
The problem that I’m sure you are well familar with is that people understand sighted, and they understand blind, but low vision — that’s a bit of a mystery. So a person with a white cane looking at brassieres in the store can elicit the comment, “Why is that blind woman sniffing the brassieres?”
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Every time I visit this blog I get confused, then I learn something, then I get confused all over again. Or maybe it’s that I learn something, get confused, and then learn something else. I need to get out more…
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