… that what JT LeRoy did is inexcusable.
Galley Cat interviewed me, and Jenny Boylan, and Max Valerio about the JT LeRoy brouhaha, too.
If Only…
“It’s gotten to the point where I see men on the street and go, Damn. If that were a woman? That’s how far I’ve been pushed in this city: I look at pictures of Johnny Depp longingly and think, If only you didn’t have a penis.†– Deborah, a 34 year old femme lesbian
From an inaccurate article about FTM culture in NYC by Female Chauvinist Pigs author Ariel Levy. Betty and I were talking tonight about god-knows-what when it popped into my head. I remembered it as “I look at pictures of Johnny Depp longingly and think, If only you had a vagina,” which, to my ear, is funnier. But funny either way, yes?
Two Books
I was just reading some of Curve magazine book reviews, and came upon a couple of books I thought people here might be interesting to people here.
Here’s one about this nation’s “founding feminists,” called Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists.
(Note that she uses the correct term, suffragists, and not the derogatory ‘suffragettes’, in her title.)
For you musicheads, there’s one about the rise of queer rock via Homocore called Homocore: The Loud and Raucous Rise of Queer Rock.
Five Questions With… Lacey Leigh
Lacey Leigh is the authr of Out & About: The Emancipated Crossdresser as well as 7 Secrets of Successful Crossdressers. She moderates an online community, speaks publicly as a crossdresser, and helps a lot of CDs gain confidence as they take those first fledgeling steps out the (closet) door.
1. What do you think is the most important thing crossdressers need to know?
One of the major changes I have made is in my personal lexicon – my working vocabulary, as it were – is to eliminate the words that carry semantic undertones of judgement or personal imperative: should, must, ought, need, etc. We use them unconsciously, not realizing how such terms of absolutism color the message we’re trying to communicate.
People and friends, beginning with my wife, have reminded that while I have the zeal and passion of a recent convert to faith, there is also a frequent tendency to climb on the soapbox and get a little ‘preachy’. Mea culpa. I’m working on it. It’s especially difficult to keep the lid on it when sharing an attitude, a mindset that has provided such an empowering personal perspective – for me as well as everyone else who has tried it.
Terms that carry such cultural sovereignty are often reliable indicators of personal bias. Count the number of times people use similar words of subtle judgement, multiply by the frequency of the personal pronoun (I, me, my, etc.) and you’ll get a pretty good indicator of how deeply a person is into himself – and whether that person is operating with a closed or an open mind.
A favorite theme is “Why allow people to ‘should’ on you?”
Anyway, I would rephrase “need to know” with “might benefit from understanding.”
Back to your question…
You started with ‘the biggie’; a topic for which a glib reply can lead to greater confusion. To lend a perspective, it might benefit readers to jump over to one of the essays on my outreach website.
Clothing serves as a primary cultural communication. Absent that imperative, we might just as well wrap rags, moss, or bubble wrap around ourselves for protection and comfort. This point is essential in order to grasp a further understanding of crossdressing. We send myriad signals about ourselves through the medium of personal attire and decoration; our ethnicity, our religion, our social status, our allegiance, our mood, our gender, our fantasies, our ‘availability’, our mood – the list is infinite.
Crossdressing is communication.
Which leads to a plethora of additional questions. What, exactly, are we communicating? To whom are we sending the message (trick question)? Is it getting through or is it somehow garbled or confusing? Is the message content accurate at the source? Is the communication important in the first place?
Crossdressing is not about the clothing. Rather, the clothing is a conduit of expression – about our very essential, inner natures. Doesn’t it make sense to say positive, empowering things?
A famous Russian tennis player was once the butt of a locker room prank when his new ‘friends’ educated him with a few phrases in English to help him get by. When he thought he was asking, “Where is the men’s toilet” the words he’d been taught were more on the order of “I need to s**t, which way is the G**damn crapper?” As he became more fluent in English he didn’t appreciate the humor.
In the crossdressing ‘community’ there are many who start out the same way, attempting to communicate in a language they don’t really speak. Little wonder they don’t get much in the way of tolerance; they have made themselves (albeit unintentionally for the most part) intolerable, primarily from restating the messages they absorb from their less thoughtful sisters and from a sensational media that emphasizes the lowest common denominators.
It’s common sense that if we wish to earn respect, it’s a good idea to appear respectable. Our culture, while uncomfortable with nonstandard gender expression, is waaaaaaaaay more uneasy about things deemed overtly sexual. Thus, when crossdressers openly display as clueless Barbies, truckstop trannies, or BDSM submissives it’s understandable why the public at large react as they do. A natal female attired in the same manner would generate a similar reaction. Get a clue! As it harms no other, do as you will – behind bedroom doors, and keep them closed please.
At a recent Eureka En Femme Getaway it was an uphill battle with one middle-aged CD. When asked why she favored miniskirts and CFM strappy platform shoes she replied, “My legs are my best asset.” To which I replied, “Your legs are writing checks that your face and waistline can’t cash.” Her rejoinder was, “I don’t care – people will just have to deal with it.” Sure, a chip-on-my-shoulder attitude will win tolerance every time. Where is a good cluebat when you need one?
I finally got through to her by opening a side door; vanity. She was out on the street the next morning, blissfully displaying her butt cheeks to everyone in her aft quarter, when I walked up to her and in a conspiratorial whisper said, “One word – ‘cellulite’.” That afternoon, she was wearing trousers.
Just as with any language, there are blessings and curses; bold proclamations and subtle suggestions; the vulgar and the tasteful; the shout and the whisper; the symphony and the grunge. It’s helpful to keep in mind that we master a language through practice, total immersion, feedback, trial, and error. The kind of feedback we receive in an echo chamber (‘support’ groups, ‘trans friendly’ venues, and TG social circles) isn’t nearly as helpful as that which we gain by expressing among the culture at large.
Thus, my advocacy for open crossdressing.
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Lacey Leigh”
Diversity in the Classroom Guide
An old and dear friend of mine recently put together a book about diversity in the classroom. It’s not a regular book – more of a workbook or guide for teachers, school therapists, and other people who actually work with kids in schools. It’s called Voices of Diversity: Stories, Activities and Resources for the Multicultural Classroom.
The good news is that she’s an old friend of mine, and asked me for a trans story – maybe some of you remember me asking around for someone who had a first-person account of a trans student and some crisis that came out of transness – but I can certify that at least this book has one trans student in it.
The others that I read – one featuring a gay couple dealing with Mother’s Day – were all really wonderful, & helpful.
Five Questions With… in 2006
I’m going to be slowing down how often I post a ‘Five Questions With…’ interview in 2006, mostly because it’s a pretty time-intensive process, and I’m writing a lot now, and will be ramping up how much time I spend working on the new book shortly. Okay, and because I’d rather space it out then have big blocks of time when I don’t run any.
So I won’t press to run one every Wednesday as I have been, but I will post the ones I do on Wednesdays.
Still, there will be 22 posted for 2005, which is an average of about four a month.
If you have any suggestions for people I should interview, you can post your idea in this thread, which is also a good place to discuss the interviews.
I am also hoping to have some news about the new book this coming Wednesday, fingers crossed.
Ready for Prince Caspian
Just wanted my fellow Narnia junkies to know it really is safe to go see the new film version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. They didn’t ruin it, and in some cases were very faithful to details.
& I also wanted everyone to know that as usual the ballyhoo about the book/movie’s supposedly rampant Christianity is way overdone and much the effort of people who don’t have anything else intelligent to say about stories, or CS Lewis, or talking animals.
It’s not that it’s not there, it’s just the least of it. I’ve always found more Arthurian legend in Narnia than straight-up Christian allegory; advice about cleaning one’s sword and not locking oneself into wardrobes is far more useful, anyway.
Of course I’m particularly fond of stories where the youngest is the smartest.
Narnia
“Lucy felt a little frightened, but she felt very inquisitive and excited as well. She looked back over her shoulder and there, between the dark tree-trunks, she could still see the open doorway of the wardrobe and even catch a glimpse of the empty room from which she had set out. (She had, of course, left the door open, for she knew that it is a very silly thing to shut oneself into a wardrobe.) It seemed to be still daylight there. “I can always get back if anything goes wrong,” thought Lucy. She began to walk forward, crunch-crunch over the snow and through the wood towards the other light.
In about ten minutes she reached it and found that it was a lamp-post.”
– C. S. Lewis, from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Much-Paraphrased Michelangelo
So, yeah. I spent the day today putting together a bunch of writing I’ve done for the next book. Editors tend to want ‘sample chapters’ but I don’t write that way – putting together a chapter would require writing a whole book.
In the beginning of the project I just write and write and write. Then at some point – internal or external, I don’t know – I start re-reading it all & seeing how or where it fits together, and start providing the bridges between subjects. It’s how Ii was trained as a fiction writer: write that one scene, or one character, or one piece of dialogue, and expand from there. You know, discover the sculpture under the slab of rock, the sculpture that’s already there.
Anyone else work like that? For me it’s like this feeling of letting things coalesce and then congeal. Yes, at some point, I do put the thing in the refrigerator to speed it on its way. But mostly I find book-length projects have their own internal reason that it’s best not to fuck with – but rather to just create a space for and keep it guarded from interruption or wrong paths.
ugh. I hate when I talk about art. Hate it.
Christmas Presents?
For anyone who might be interested in getting a signed copy of My Husband Betty for a loved one this Christmas, please order one now! I don’t have many in stock (just a short stack piled on a spare bit of shelf over my writing desk!) and because the book is now officially between printings, I may not be able to get more until January.