True Confessions of a TERF Plus La Liendre

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In an effort to jumpstart my interest in HVAC services—the latest boring but modestly remunerative client—I started planning my New Mexico trip.

Can’t take trips without remuneration!

This picture is from Thanksgiving five years ago when I took the sons to New Mexico.

Robin was surly and awful the whole time, and Max and I got into a major fight over transgender issues. We were listening to NPR on the drive between Santa Fe and Albuquerque and heard a story about a student at one of the few remaining all women’s liberal arts schools on the east coast who’d decided to transition. He was on a rampage demanding male bathrooms.

“That is ridiculous,” I said.

Max bristled. “Why?”

“Well, in the first place, since he identifies as male, he shouldn’t be enrolled in an all women’s school. But the more practical reason is that it costs money to upgrade bathrooms, and I’m quite sure a college has better things to spend that money on.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mom, so really you should just shut up about it,” said Max.

Clearly, I had just outed myself as being somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun. We stopped talking to each other for 12 hours or so.

My feelings about transgender are fairly complex, and I guess politically incorrect.

I firmly believe in the right of the individual to do anything he/she wants with his/her body, dress however he/she pleases, use any set of pronouns that makes him/her happy.

I know all about the Hijra of South Asia, and I note that even the hardline regimes of Pakistan and Bangladesh readily accept Hijra as a third gender.

In fact, I’d be happy to accept them as a third gender. I’m very comfortable with the notion of a third gender, a fourth gender, an infinite number of genders.

BUT…

Gender is a social construct.

When someone in a male body says, I feel female, it seems to me that what they’re really saying is that they identify with the various stereotypic behaviors, preferences, and presumed reactions that Western culture crams into the box labeled “Female.”

To me, identification with one gender or another is the result of social conditioning.

It kind of mystifies me that the current politically correct way of viewing things is to present it as a biological imperative.

In strictly biological terms, the only thing all female humans have in common is that the shape of their genitals makes it difficult to pee standing up.

A ridiculous thing, you might say. But it’s easy to see how it could be a formative thing before the invention of plumbing amenities when humans were still doing most of their peeing in the bush.

That sense that “I am not what my body says I am” does not seem to be based on urination postures, though. Or does it? I don’t actually know any transgender women well enough to ask.

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Anyway.

The photo above was snapped in La Liendre, a true ghost town. Gotta love New Mexico! If it ever had a post office, it’s always on the map.

In the 1840s, La Liendre was a prosperous community of Spanish ranchers. Like the inhabitants of Easter Island, they all disappeared! Leaving behind a handful of ruined adobe buildings, foundations, broken pottery, glass shards. There’s an ancient cemetery here, too, that by New Mexico state law must remain publicly accessible in case any Hispanos want to visit great-great-grandpa. Bird songs and wind. The haunters and the haunted.

The town is a small dot on the very end of the Great Plains. To get there, you drive 20 miles east of Las Vegas along NM Route 67, which might best be described as a ghost highway. Then you cut 14 miles down a very steep cliff and come to a valley along the Gallinas River.

The valley itself is vast, magnificent and completely unpeopled.

Well. Not quite.

Jeanna, my sister, has been hiking here for decades. She has a museum-quality collection of arrowheads, grinders and other Native American artifacts, and they were all found here.

However, on the trip Jeanna, Robin, Max and I made to La Liendre five years ago, we were actually met by a trio of men in cowboy hats toting guns though the guns weren’t aimed in our direction. Very Breaking Bad! Scary, truth be told. They wanted to know what we were doing there.

“We’re looking for the petroglyphs,” Jeanna said.

They nodded. They were neither friendly nor unfriendly.

Of course, apart from the cemetery, this vast grassland was private property. Though I was fairly sure the guys with the guns were not the owners.

This was the first time I’d ever encountered any other human beings in La Liendre in all the many hikes I went on there with Jeanna.

I remember it as a place where more than once, I literally lost track of time.

Where we’d hike for 12 hours looking for arrowheads—a game of pattern recognition because arrowheads look like so many other things—and I thought only 20 minutes had passed.

That usually doesn’t happen to me unless I’m tripping.



I am thinking I want to visit end of August, beginning of September.

Jeanna never travels farther away from Las Vegas than Santa Fe, so I’d have to take a train from Albuquerque since I don’t want to rent a car.

I imagine it’s a nice train ride. Right through the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.