No Ordinary Man

My Sunday movie this week is No Ordinary Man. It’s a documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton. He was in various dance bands in the 1940s and headed the Billy Tipton Trio in the 1950s. So why is a classical music lover like me interested in Billy Tipton? Because he was transgender. One of the movie rating sites had a couple sentences from various reviewers. Most thought it was quite good. A few complained the movie wasn’t really about Billy Tipton. I’d have to agree with that, though that is a reason why I watched. In addition to learning something about Tipton this film has a secondary story of trans men trying out for the part of Tipton for a movie (which I don’t think was made). Through talking about how a scene could be played in an audition we learn about some aspects of Tipton’s life. The official story was that Tipton wore men’s clothes because the jazz performers of the time did. One had to be a man to play jazz. Tipton did it for the career opportunities. But that wasn’t completely true. There were ways for women to play jazz. That reason doesn’t explain that after a while he dressed as male in his personal life. In 1958 Tipton turned down two high profile jobs that would have boosted his career. In 1961 Tipton settled down with Kitty Kelly and they unofficially adopted three boys. When Tipton died in 1989, in Billy Jr’s arms, the Emergency Medical people revealed Tipton was a woman. Much of the film was about trans people, some at that audition, discussing Tipton’s life and times and what it is like to be trans. At the time it wasn’t about Tipton living his truth, it was that he was deceiving the world, especially his wife and sons. He was a liar, and a that big justifies violence against trans people. At the time there wasn’t a word for transgender. Though trans bodies have always existed, for a long time when transgender people were revealed the media pretended it was a new story every time. The media didn’t like being fooled. A biographer told Tipton’s story. All the trans people in the film were appalled at how disrespectful it was of Tipton, fueling the idea he did it to deceive, rather than being comfortable with who he was. In Tipton’s time no doctor offered hormone treatments or reconstruction surgery. If he went to a doctor he might have been refused care with doctors saying they don’t understand his body. So Tipton refused doctors and died of something that could have been treated. Billy Jr and his mother were on various talk shows shortly after Tipton died. The show hosts played up the scandalous deception. This film included Billy Jr trying to understand who is father was. I’ll share two more points from the trans people in the film: Just being trans threatens the structure of patriarchy. And: Are you being your own interpretation of happiness? I highly recommend this one as a step understanding the transgender experience. On Friday the Wall Street Journal published an article saying COVID will soon be endemic and they look forward to it. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos says that idea is completely wrong. His points on why: * The WSJ says a part of being endemic is the disease is manageable. But Sumner says “manageable” is not a part of the definition of endemic, which means always present in the population. But COVID is so severe we cannot live with endemic COVID. * COVID is 5-10 times more transmissible than the flu. While the flu may get another person sick COVID will cause breakouts, requiring schools to periodically close for days or weeks. * Each one of those COVID outbreaks will overload the local health care system. And this could happen at any time. * Flu causes an estimated 90,000 deaths a year. COVID would cause maybe 300,000 deaths a year. * One gets over the flu usually unscathed. COVID can cause heart damage, stroke, lung damage, brain fog, damage to smell and taste and hearing and vision, and cause the pancreas to fail resulting in diabetes. And these disabilities are not rare. Endemic COVID is a threat to the nation.