Category: books & writing

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Trans Answers and Surveys in the NYT

Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth recently answered a bunch of questions about transgender issues in The New York Times. It’s in three sections: one, two, and three. She’s working on a book called Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, and people like Jennifer Boylan and Jamison Green and Pat Califia (on sexuality!) have already signed on to write for it.

She is also currently conducting surveys, and yes, there’s one for partners:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=exaD1ewtMleNRnDAkKTkqPKWKAYSBdKPW8BsiUBKy3I%3d&

I am pleased as punch to see that they’re going with a qualitative survey for partners’ issues. If you’re a partner, and especially if you’re the kind of partner who isn’t “typical” or in the majority most of the time (boyfriends/husbands of trans women, male partners of FTMs, women who intentionally sought out trans partners) make sure you fill it out.

There are other surveys for the book for trans people, of course, too, and one for parents, as well.

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Impact: MHB

Jessica Who? wrote a nice piece about her experience reading and re-reading My Husband Betty. It’s so satisfying to know that anything I’ve written helped someone else come to terms with their crossdressing or their transness. I was just putting the finishing touches on it seven years ago, around this time of year. I had no idea how my life would change once it was published, but I’m sure I had even less idea that anyone else’s would!

Congrats to Jessica Who? on her year of blogging.

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Trans Characters in Novels

Cheryl Morgan asks Is There, or Should There Be, Such a Thing as Trans Lit? It’s a good question. She leaves out a bunch of books, like Feinberg’s Drag King Dreams and Luna, written for young adults and winner of the prestigious National Book Award. Ursula LeGuin’s entire civilization in The Left Hand of Darkness is, effectively, trans, in a third gender, gender-fluid, gender-neutral sort of way. Neil Gaiman has had good portrayals of trans people in his books, most notably in Sandman. There’s Trans-Sister Radio, which came out a few years back.

I’d love to hear more, if you can think of others – novels in which trans people are characters – so have at it.

I think there already is such a thing as Trans Lit. As with gay & lesbian lit, it includes all the various genres: history, fiction, non-fiction, memoir, etc. Personally I’d like to see more books where a character happens to be trans, and what is important about them isn’t necessarily, or only tangentially, their transness. The novel I’m working on now has at least one, and I’m not even sure I’m going to mention that the person is trans. Honestly, isn’t every book about any person potentially about a trans person? How do we know Jake Gatsby wasn’t a trans guy, after all?

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Happy 100th Anniversary, Die Transvestiten

It’s been a hundred years since Magnus Hirschfeld published The Transvestites. The earliest bibliographic entries Ray Blanchard tracked down are these:

Die Transvestiten – Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb [Transvestites – A Study of the Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress], Pulvermacher, Berlin, 1910.

Co-authored with Max Tilke: Die Transvestiten – Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb [Transvestites – The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress], Illustrierter Teil, Pulvermacher, Berlin, 1912.

How cool is that? I couldn’t help but think that Virginia Prince died only last year, at the age of 96. Imagine, she was born only a few years after that book was published, when the idea of anyone being “out” about crossdressing was – to borrow from Hirschfeld’s language – verboten.

It’s hard to imagine what might have been, if the Nazis had not destroyed Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sex.

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Books

My Husband Betty was published in January 2004, which means it’s been in print for six years.

She’s Not was published in 2007, which means it’s been in print for three years.

Kind of amazing, really, to know there are tens of thousands of copies of my books out in the world.

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Dilly Boy Bar

Dairy Queen – whose name is funny enough, really, & kind of obscene – sells something they call a Dilly Bar.

A Dilly Bar. It sounds obscene in so many ways, doesn’t it?

But what makes me laugh the hardest is that “dilly boy” is slang (in Polari) for a male prostitute. So theoretically, a bar where male prostitutes hang out should be called a Dilly Boy Bar.

(Okay, so my mind’s in the gutter. And?)