('i take it from the mouth of an animal')

In an art show in SF.

Made entirely of painted metal.

I haven't seen Turimel post anything publicly since...I think 2014? Up to that point, at least, she was insistent that she was not at all transphobic. She claimed that she only misgendered and deadnamed Andy because she was certain that his consistently identifying as male for 12 entire years (at that point; it's now been 24) and changing his name was all an attempt to obfuscate his past and to manipulate people. Given the length of time that she held on to that idea, I have no reason to believe she's changed her mind since then.

In my opinion, you cannot deliberately and continuously misgender and deadname someone without being transphobic. I don't care if you consider yourself an ally. I don't care if you have transgender friends or family members. I don't care if you march in Pride every year and have a "Support Trans Kids" sticker on your car. You're transphobic. Hell, even if you're trans yourself, you're still transphobic; it's just internalized.

Aside from that, in her book, she wrote about how she was suspicious about Andy's sex/gender back when they first met in person. I don't have the book in front of me, but there was something about his delicate bone structure, I think, and she must have questioned him about it because he gave her a story about having a hormone disorder that she later looked up in a medical dictionary. (I'll post an excerpt tomorrow, if I can find where I've stashed it.) I feel like that's not something that a person who is completely accepting of and comfortable with transgender people would do.

I pinned Jordan down about the gender business. From the moment I shook his hand at Project Elanor, I believed he was female—the bones in the hand and wrist were simply not those of an adult male. Furthermore, I had to show him how to effectively drive nails when he was working on the Elanor deck. I figured Abbey and Jordan had good reasons to put on the appearance of a boy-girl couple. There are bashers even in cool cities like Portland, and when you're trying to operate a charity, the last thing you need is an idiotic controversy over the directors' sexual orientation. If they wanted to be closeted, that was OK with me. Jordan assured me he really was a male—he had a rare testosterone resistance disorder, which feminized his features. He explained he had enough testosterone; it was a genetic defect in the testosterone receptors causing the effects. His explanation was very sophisticated, and when I looked it up that night in my Harrison's Textbook of Internal Medicine, sure enough, the symptoms of this extremely rare disease were just as Jordan described.

Renne, Jeanine. When a Fan Hits the Shit. Heisenberg Press, 2004.

Turimel equates sex with gender here and throughout the book. In the early 2000s, this was extremely common among both laypersons and members of the medical community, so I don't really hold that against her. She is also being gender essentialist by asserting that someone can't "really" be a man if he doesn't know how to use tools properly, and I very much hold that against her. Few things piss me off more than gender essentialism. Like, okay, Turi, you were able to show him how to drive a nail...does that mean you're not really a woman? Give me a fucking break.

My bigger concern here, though, is that as a doctor, Turimel should have been very well aware that a person can be a man without having been assigned male at birth! It seems that it never occurred to her that Jordan (Andy's preferred name at the time) could be trans; instead, she assumed from the beginning that he was really a woman (as in AFAB and identifying as female) and was lying to everyone about it. I don't even know how many times I've read the book at this point, and yet I never paid close enough attention to what she says here, beyond observing that she "clocked" Andy the first time they met and later questioned him about it.

My best guess is that she thought that a "real" trans person would or should introduce themselves as such, and since Andy didn't do that, he must have been a woman in disguise. Either way, Turimel demonstrates a truly stunning level of ignorance, made worse by the way she then pats herself on the back for being so understanding of the so-called closeted lesbians.

Finally, the worst part of this whole thing is that Turimel had the audacity not just to ask Andy about his sex/gender, but to "pin him down" about it, as if it were essential information that he owed her. I have to wonder how the conversation would have gone if Andy had come out as trans in that moment. Would Turimel really have taken it as well as she'd like us to believe? Or would she have called him a liar, since she'd already made her own assumptions?

There are other red flags throughout the book, the most obvious being Turimel's persistence in misgendering and deadnaming Andy, and using scare quotes every time she employs he/him/his pronouns or Andy's preferred name after page 115 (while recounting the morning after the Tent Moot crash).

Early on (p. 42-43), she writes about asking Diamond if she knew whether Andy was "really" a man based on what she'd seen of his body. This was when a detective was trying to convince her that the friend she knew as a man was the same person as the missing woman he was trying to track down, so I kind of understand it...but again, as a doctor, she should have known to phrase the question differently and not to equate physicality with gender. Asking Diamond, "Do you know if Andy is transgender?" might not have gotten her to the truth any more quickly, but would have been far less shitty than, "Are you sure he's a man? Well, have you ever seen him with his shirt off?" (paraphrased).

She casually uses the slur "dyke" on page 91. I know that's homophobic, not transphobic, but it seemed worth mentioning.

She makes sure to note that when Andy was arrested, he was housed in the women's division of the Marion County Correctional Facility (p. 119).

She proudly quotes an abusive email that she wrote to Diamond regarding a loan she'd cosigned that Diamond wasn't paying off as agreed. In the email, Turimel called Diamond "white trash" and asked if she was "prostituting [herself]", addicted to crack, or had AIDS (p. 233). She also smugly informed Diamond that she was ruining her own credit and therefore was doomed to live in filth and squalor forever, with nothing good in her life. Again, not transphobic, but horrible.

On page 241, Turimel laments, "Anyone could have called 'Jordan' on 'his' bizarre identity story, rather than politely ignoring the fact that 'he' was a she." In other words, if you believe you have "clocked" a trans person, you should immediately confront them about it because they are lying to you by identifying as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth! This is just disgusting.

On p. 253-254, she discusses the redirection of Bit of Earth's Prancing Pony message board to Versaphile's LiveJournal post in which she revealed that Victoria Bitter and Jordan Wood were the same person. Turimel notes that in the process of denying that this was true, Abbey and Andy repeatedly insisted that Andy was a man. She says, "One could expect two people who were psychotic enough to genuinely believe that a woman was a man would show other signs of failed reality." On one hand, she may be referring specifically to Abbey's having made certain claims (at Andy's insistence) about his genitalia. On the other hand, she doesn't say that, and she delegitimizes trans identities by indicating that one would have to be insane to believe that an AFAB person could actually be male. She goes on to say, "Did [Andy] really believe [he] was a man? It seems unlikely." This assertion is based on the fact that Andy did not share Jordan Wood's elaborate backstory when he was under a psychiatric hold, nor did he demand to be held in the men's division of the jail. Turimel says this indicates that Andy clearly was not delusional, and therefore must have been lying about being male. Yet again, she leaves no room for the possibility that he might be transgender and closeted. She never mentions it; she doesn't even consider it in passing.

Basically, it seems evident throughout the book that at least as of 2004, Turimel absolutely equated being a man with having a penis. If you told her back then that you were male, but you didn't have a penis, then you were a liar in her eyes. (It's unclear whether she found phalloplasty acceptable. I assume that packing was out of the question.) It might have been okay, if you were a trans guy meeting her for the very first time, to have said, "Hi, I'm [your name here], and I'm a trans man. I was assigned female at birth, but I identify as male and use he/him/his pronouns." (Let's not confuse her further by raising the possibility of "he/they" or other options.) But who knows?

I find it very telling that the words "trans", "transgender", or even "transsexual" do not appear anywhere in the book. The idea never seems to have entered Turimel's mind for even an instant, until Andy came out in his infamous LiveJournal post of March 4, 2007. It's worth noting that she asked Andy about his preferred pronouns in the comments on that post, "since you've been open about your transgender status." She said that she would respect them "now that you've been honest". This suggests that what I posited above is correct: she expected trans people to introduce themselves as such, as if their medical history and genitalia were any of her business. Also noteworthy is that Turimel never, ever respected Andy's pronouns or even his legal name after that one comment.

Goodwill, AZ