A pure moment of unadulterated teenaged glee, here, but: Adam Ant has written his autobiography. A couple of years ago when he was first really struggling with manic-depression he got a “1%” tattoo on his body somewhere – yes, I’d like to know where – because 1% of the world’s population suffers with mental illness of some kind.
And I thought he rocked then.
But this just thrills me; in a sense it’s been a book I’ve been waiting for my whole life, or at least since I was 13 or so. I still have dreams about finding Ants stuff I don’t own, and there’s precious little out there that I don’t. And now, this, as a grown-up; it’s even better than the time he was on Northern Exposure, which was my favorite show at the time, & a little surreal, for my favorite person/hero to be on what was my favorite show. Like the kind of dream you have when you’re 16 & your life sucks.
(& by god, but look at his face! i think he’s the most perfectly formed person who ever lived, i swear it.)
Advance Praise for She's Not the Man I Married
Wow, Kate Bornstein liked it, too!
This is the first public voice of a new identity in the world, whose story includes and goes far beyond boy meets girl, boy meets boy, and girl meets girl. How stunning is that! The author’s courageous vulnerability makes her tale accessible, moving, and pee-in-your-pants funny. She pulls no punches, and she’s blessedly kind-spirited; which encouraged me, thrilled me, and scared the hell out of me.
— Kate Bornstein, author of Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws
4th Preview of She's Not the Man I Married
Excerpt from Chapter 4 – Snips & Snails & Sugar & Spice:
Gender variant heterosexuals often are the people others gossip about, the ones that people mumble are just closet cases married to each other. Those slightly feminine older bachelors who everyone assumes are gay are probably at least occasionally crossdressers. Some of them are perhaps surprisingly het—as Betty and I both were to many people who knew us, including our families. But we exist. (I like to joke that Betty’s parents didn’t care so much that I was a liberal because they were so relieved I was a woman.) I would imagine not a few of us just learn how to get by; Betty hid her gender variance from a young age because of how huge the taboo against being a sissy is, and I was free to be a tomboy until puberty. We both got a slight break in the androgynous ’80s, and we’re both very thankful for that bit of cultural good timing. But once we were both in our twenties, we tried very hard to perform our respective gender roles properly. For Betty that meant pretty much avoiding relationships, and for me, it always felt like playing a part. My guess is that we have both now begun to acknowledge our gender variance because we have found a place to do so: the larger LGBT community. Since the T has been added, we have effectively been welcomed into the only subset of American culture that acknowledges gender variance. We are those mysterious “queer heterosexuals†that are starting to get mentioned in academic journals and LGBT papers.
Literary Menstrual Hut
This recent article by Michelle Tea in the SF Bay Guardian made me laugh, since I’m being published by Seal Press as well – and I can’t say the words “menstrual hut” ever crossed my mind.
But “literary” did. As did “trans friendly.” My experience with Seal so far has been stellar, to be honest, and I feel much as I did when I decided not to work for most straight male clients when I do my freelance bookkeeping (which I should write more about one of these days): it’s just such a pleasure to work with a bunch of kick-ass women.
Moreso, I just wanted to point out how hip Seal has been about publishing interesting trans books, like The Testosterone Files, Nobody Passes (edited by Mattilda), She’s Such a Geek (edited by Charlie Anders & her partner), Julia Serano‘s upcoming manifesto, and my book. In a nutshell, Seal’s trans titles are becoming a Who’s Who of the 30-something trans generation, no? And you’ll notice, too, that these feminists include both FTM and MTF narratives in their trans collection, just as they should.
First Blurb
The very first blurb for my book is in, written by the talented Jennifer Finney Boylan:
“Like a tightrope walker, Helen Boyd performs several amazing feats simultaneously in her impressive book, She’s Not the Man I Married. She provides a postmodern reflection on transness; she writes a feminist critique of gender and culture. Above all, she gives her readers a sense of the deep love she shares with her husband Betty, a love we see in all its complex, messy wonder. Through its author’s honest, lucid prose, She’s Not the Man I Married is brilliant, unsettling, and sweet.â€
– Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There
Two New Book Reviews
I added two new book reviews to this site today, both about books I read this summer and was providing blurbs for. Neither are out yet, but they both have links on amazon.com now, so I thought I’d add them to my list of gender/trans books.
- S. Bear Bergman’s Butch Is A Noun thread.
- Virginia Erhardt’s Head Over Heels thread.
I’ve also put them in our Reader’s Chair Forum so that those who want to discuss them can do so (obviously, that might take a while, but I’ll try to remember to bump both threads when they do actually come out).
Wondering What They'll Think
It’s been one weird (long) month for me. I handed in the manuscript of the next book way at the beginning of the month, recently found out it’s already listed at amazon.com, and my publisher tells me that the initial copies have gone out to “early readers” – which is code for “people who might say nice things about it that we can put on the cover.”
So, my first readers. Well actually my 5th – 12th, or thereabouts, since a few people read the whole of it, or nearly so, while I was writing it. But still, nerve-wracking. I just hope if they hate it they don’t tell me that. But they have until late this fall to send in a blurb so I may not know for quite a while. It’s this waiting bit that really is the hard part.
(I hope they don’t hate it. Betty keeps telling me they won’t, but I think Betty’s biased.)
Five Questions With… Kate Bornstein
Kate Bornstein is an author, playwright and performance artist. Her latest book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws, came out last month. Kate’s published works include the books Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us; My Gender Workbook; and the cyber-romance-action novel, Nearly Roadkill, written with co-author Caitlin Sullivan. Kate’s plays and performance pieces include Strangers in Paradox, Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex Is Neither, Virtually Yours, and y2kate: gender virus 2000. It was both a pleasure and an honor to get to speak with her.
1. I love that you mention in Hello, Cruel World how trans folk are separating themselves into “male” and “female” by using terms like MTF and the like, because I’ve noticed that those of us who are hot for trans folk seem to like the transness, not the ‘target gender’ (or really even the ‘birth gender’) alone. It’s the chaser’s dirty secret. Do you think trans people will start to enjoy being trans, sexually or otherwise?
There are lots of un-named, unclaimed desires that are free from the male/female gender system. Desire for sex with oneself is a sexual orientation in itself, and you can be any gender or no gender in order to have that desire. My former partner felt the most important component for his desire was that his partner be the same gender as him. When he was a woman, he was with women; when he was gender-exploring he was with someone who was also gender-exploring; now that he’s a man he’s with men. I think what you’ve got is an as-yet-un-named sexual orientation: the desire for sex and romance with someone who’s neither male nor female.
Give your desire for transness a name. Then, speak your desire loudly, and proudly and seductively. I think if people hear that, that you’d like them the way they are, they’d be more encouraged to live that place of neither/nor.
As to using terms like MTF/FTM – yeah, I’ve been complaining about that for years. In this new book, I’m just a little less patient about it. It’s amusing and humiliating to admit it, but I still work hard to pass in public. I’m an old fart, and that’s still important to me. Out in the world, I pass to avoid the shame and the danger. But intimately with friends, community, or our lovers? The not-passing is the dance of love. No need for male or female, what luxury!
1b. But I seem to upset some transsexual people when I recognize that Betty’s masculinity turns me on – even if it’s in addition to my being turned on by her femininity.
Upset them! When you go beyond either/or, people think you’re a radical, that you’re less safe because you’re less predictable. Speaking or writing down the truth of your desire unlocks the political and moral shackles of desire.
3rd Preview of She's Not the Man I Married
Chapters have indeed been switched as I expected they might be. This excerpt is from what used to be Chapter 3: Confessions of a Grown-Up Tomboy (but is now Chapter 2: Confessions of a Grown-Up Tomboy. Chapters 2 & 3 switched places.)
My experiences with Betty trying to figure out what exactly she’s after in wanting to be a woman is completely confounding for both of us. I feel like someone who lives in a rainforest who’s trying to understand why Eskimos have a few dozen words for ice and snow. I once found myself trying to explain to a Burmese monk how cold it would be in Tibet, where he was going on a short visit. It’s very difficult to explain how cold snow is to someone who feels chilled in 70 degree weather; he didn’t understand how a human being could physically survive being that cold, though by the end of the conversation I had convinced him he couldn’t wear sandals and should bring every article of clothing he owned. My sense of gender is similar to that monk’s sense of cold: they tell me I should wear these kinds of shoes, and these kinds of clothes, and I might not ever like it, and in the end the idea of it will probably be more fascinating than the reality.
Book Meme
Well, Caprice tagged me, so here are my bookish answers:
1. One book that changed your life? The Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton. It’s a pre-teen book, maybe YA (Young Adult) about two poor kids who live in a crazy house in Concord, Massachusetts, and whose aunt gives piano lessons to awful children while the banker is always trying to repossess. But the story is about a poem the kids find which is a transcendental dream poem, and leads them through a series of dreams. There’s one about mirrors that shaped how I thought about my own life and choices.
2. One book you have read more than once? The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Yes, I do read books about grown-ups, but they’re not the ones with the deepest meanings to me. I re-read Narnia every few years, as a kind of refresher course.
3. One book you would want on a desert island? Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. It’s a good combination of simple and complex that would keep me occupied. (Favorite story: went into a bookstore for a copy and couldn’t find it, asked the staff. Staff person says, “Oh you mean Les Mis, like the musical?” Oy.)
4. One book that made you laugh? Butch Is A Noun, forthcoming from S. Bear Bergman. There are bits in it that made me laugh out loud on the subway, & Betty even let me read it to her outloud some, which is pretty much verboten when it comes to gender books. Though sometimes I read Judith Butler outloud to make her laugh, but in a very different way.
5. One book that made you cry? More kids books, but more recent: His Dark Materials. The scene where she is separated from her familiar is almost too painful.
6. One book you wish had been written? I have to do this one historically, because otherwise I think, “Well if you’d like to see a book written, write it!” So, instead, The New Academia Series: Volume I: Accessible Prose (published c. 1982 or so).
7. One book you wish had never been written? Get your sticks and stones, kids: The Bible.
8. One book you are currently reading? Betty gave me a copy of a book called Dragon Wing and so far it’s entertaining. It’s certainly a nice break from the umpteen gender books I was reading as research.
9. One book you have been meaning to read? A book called The Trouser People, about Burma.
10. Now tag five people: JW, Maurice, Kathy, Donna, and John R. If any of them actually get back to me, I’ll post them here. (But feel free to use the comments section, folks! That’s what it’s there for!)