Apologies to Lambda Lit, my fellow readers in DC, and anyone who intended to go/went to the reading tonight to see me: I’ve spent the day in our local emergency room trying to find out what’s wrong.
I’m about to crash on vicodin, but thanks to all for your good wishes, and apologies again for not going to tonight’s reading. I’m terrifically disappointed that I couldn’t be there.
Off to DC
May 5, 2005 — Lammy Reading — Washington
Location: Goethe Institut 812 Seventh Street, NW
Hosted by One In Ten
Time: 6 – 9 p.m.
Confirmed readers include:
Helen Boyd, My Husband Betty
Laurinda D. Brown, Fire & Brimstone
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde
Barbara Johnson, Once Upon a Dyke
Amy King, Antidotes for an Alibi
Jeff Mann, I Do/I Don’t
Damian McNicholl, A Son Called Gabriel
Therese Szymanski, Shadows of Night
Colm Toibin, The Master
Gary Zebrun, Someone You Know
Partners, Priorites, and Presentation
I seem to be cranky on Mondays.
I’ll admit upfront that Betty and I were interviewed for the spot on Oprah that Jennifer Finney Boylan and her wife got. Aside from my obvious question of weren’t two episodes of Oprah enough? – since there are so many of us who have written good books about trans issues, and get little to no mainstream publicity – I have a few thoughts on their appearance.
[/raise feminist hackles] I wonder first why it is that when “the media” want to know about transness they go to a transperson who’s written a book, but when they want to know about a partner’s experience, they go to the wife of the transperson who’s written a book, instead of to a partner who’s written a book herself. That is, if you’re going to give any writer credit for thinking about stuff in order to write a book, shouldn’t you give the same credit all around? For me, this was a not-so-subtle reminder that women are still more valued for who they’re married to than for what they’ve accomplished on their own. [/lower feminist hackles]
Of course I know that ultimately JFB and her wife were chosen because Jenny was on the show previously, and everyone wanted to know what this wife who initially refused to speak had to say. Even me.
I understand and thorougly appreciate her need to wait for a time when she wasn’t going to lose her shit on television. She was calm, she smiled, she came off as a sane woman who’s made the best of a bad situation. No Springer-esque accusations and tears, no melodrama, no rage through gritted teeth.
I’m happy for Jenny and Deirdre, that they’ve found whatever kind of peace they have. I know, without asking anyone, that Deirdre still has moments of anger and sadness so deep she probably doesn’t like to admit them even to herself. I know wives who have been with someone who transitioned who still admit to bad days. We saw a glimpse of Deirdre’s raw emotion when Jenny mentioned her expensive new vagina and her sexual interest in men. Just a glimpse, but enough for me to know there’s still something there, vitriol or bitterness or rage.
I get that. Betty and I have had very “successful” interviews turn into day-long arguments after the fact. In one case, we looked at our wedding album in order to provide one show with b-roll and ended up re-evaluating where we’d been, where we were, and where we were headed.
But despite that momentary glimpse into Deirdre’s “dark side,” I’ve already seen posts in the online support community from transpeople enquiring as to how Deirdre “got there.” She was angry, she mourned. We know the stages of grief and we know trans-partners go through them. At the end of the day, it’s what we can and what we cannot accept that determines the outcome of the relationship.
What Deirdre can accept – a celibate marriage – is something I could not. For others, it might be the loss of public heterosexuality. Still others, stubble or short hair. Every partner is different. For transpeople, there are the Standards of Care, which guide and instruct (and to some, gatekeep). There is no SOC for partners, no guidebook, no way of knowing what straw will break a camel’s back. All you can do is talk to her, ask her, keep talking, keep arguing, and understand that where she is in her own process might color her response.
Deirdre’s acceptance – placid now – is based on her giving up sexual intimacy, the love of a man, and the idea of having a husband. She has had to accept that her children will have to explain why they have two mothers – neither of whom is a lesbian. Sometimes women can make outrageously practical decisions. A woman’s generation, her upbringing, her maternal commitment, her sexuality, her unwillingness to be divorced, or single, or to do the dating scene again: all of these might contribute to what decision she makes.
But I don’t think a woman’s ability to make the best decisions she can – and to accept that what she wanted, and what she thought she had, is not what she’s going to get – should be a revelation to anyone. That there is no good answer when it comes to a married transperson’s dilemma shouldn’t shock anyone, either.
And while I think it’s wonderful that America has finally gotten to see one transwoman who’s not a huge mess screaming on Jerry Springer, I also wonder if the swing of the pendulum won’t whitewash trans experience. Normal, after all, also presented a picture of a wife who stayed – despite tears and protest – and who shared a bed with her partner. But counsellors who work with couples and partners tell me that’s rarely the case. Instead, partners are often fuelled by the kind of rage that births vengeful divorces and vicious custody battles. Sometimes the recently-transitioned woman starts spitting misogynist sentiments and unintentionally pointing out the obvious chasm between wives raised women and the women who used to be husbands.
As much as I once criticized the free-for-all bitch sessions of CDSO, I worry now about the impact of the self-sacrificing wife as a standard-bearer for other partners: put up or shut up isn’t a choice. Partners need a safe space for their anger and bitterness, to heal the sense of betrayal, to own their sadness.
I wonder if we, as a community, are so committed to getting positive representations of transfolk into the world’s eye that we might end up forgetting that the positive image is for them (those who know nothing of transness, who might react with fear, mockery, or violence) but that an accurate image is more useful and healing for those of us who are living it. I wonder who will provide safe spaces for partners’ uglier emotions, if conference organizers will prioritize our needs, or if the individual transpeople who are in charge would rather ignore that sound of the other shoe dropping.
It’s not just about every individual transperson paying attention to what’s going on with their own partner. It’s about all of us putting pressure on conferences to make sure there are workshops for partners – and not just the cheerleader ones, either – and finding other spaces where it’s okay to acknowledge that the survival of most MTF relationships depends greatly on the way women are socialized. Jude presented a scenario on the MHB message boards: what would happen if a heterosexual wife of a heterosexual man came out as an FTM? Would he stay? We know he wouldn’t. Why not? Why do we expect the wife to stay in the face of transness and not the husband?
Why – you might ask? Is perceived lesbianism less culturally problematic than perceived homosexuality in men? Is estrogen less feminizing in the case of MTF’s than testosterone is masculinizing for FTM’s? Are women just more accepting? Do women tend to value family and stability a bit more? (yes, yes, yes, and yes, in my opinion)
All of these surely play into it – but in my eyes, the biggest reason is PRIVILEGE. Women are much less likely to have the life skills, confidence, earning power, and education to support themselves (and their kids, as Steve has said). So they hang onto the ship.
Women make their own decisions. As much as transwomen can’t go back and be socialized as the women they were meant to be, those of us raised female can’t undo that we were. And until we have a conversation about why women are raised the way they are, and why men aren’t raised the same way, all of those transwomen who are hoping to make it through transition with a happy partner haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell.
Lambda Literary Nominees' Readings
Lambda Literary Foundation is hosting a few readings for the nominees of this year’s Lambda Lit Awards. I’m doing on in DC on May 5th, and another in NYC at the GLBT Center on May 19th.
There’s also one taking place in LA on May 7th.
You can get more information at the Events section of Lambda Lit’s website.
You can even download the cool poster for the May 19th reading, which even has a picture of me on it.
Obvious
This may seem obvious to the rest of you, but I’ve had a major revelation tonight.
I’ve been reading Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity – just started it, in fact – and I’ve been looking forward to reading it since I was given it – so much so I hurried through the end of another book (yes, about gender too) I’d been reading.
And then I came to this, on page 28:
Because female masculinity seems to be at its most threatening when coupled with lesbian desire, in this book I concentrate on queer female masculinity almost to the exclusion of heterosexual female masculinity.
My enthusiasm dropped like a lead balloon, then, but I read on:
I have no doubt that heterosexual female masculinity menaces gender conformity in its own way, but all too often it represents an acceptable degree of female masculinity as compared to the excessive masculinity of the dyke.
And there you go: not only is she not talking about masculinity in heterosexual women, but she managed to get a dig in about how “acceptable” my masculinity is. (Tell that to all the boys who wouldn’t date me, and all the kids who called me dyke over the years, Prof. Halberstam!) So not only did I not find validation, but found its opposite.
I’m sure for a lot of you, finding stuff about drag queens (or even crossdresser erotica that ends with the CD being sexual with a man, or the stories about how most MTF transsexuals end up dating/marrying men, etc) had the same effect, the same kind of let-down, the hope of finally reading something about yourself only to find, in fact, the author is precisely not talking about you.
What I realized is that in some ways, this is my connection to crossdressers: of being gender variant in a heterosexual context. In fact, one young TG just came on our boards trying to figure out where to meet girls who might like his gender mix; I spent most of my teens and early 20s trying to find a guy who liked women who weren’t models of prototypical femininity, and let’s just say: I found a lot of friends, and not a lot of dates. (I did get asked out by women an awful lot, though.)
Although I probably knew this at some level before now, the actual experience of opening this book with expectation – that I might learn something about who I am and how I fit in – came to an abrupt and unsatisfying halt: oh cool this is about – well maybe it is – no she doesn’t seem to be – oh, it’s not about me at all… like the judges on The Muppet Show.
After writing damn in the margin, I kept reading, and found out that the clitoris was officially discovered in 1559 when two Italian anatomists . . . gave the organ a name and ascribed it a function (p. 60). So far, aside from the academic writing style (which makes me want to take out a red pen) it’s chock full of goodies like that one, despite the fact that I won’t find any answers to my own questions in it.
In solidarity,
Helen
Sneak Preview
These photos are from a contact sheet given to us by the brilliant Mariette Pathy Allen, which she took of us at Fantasia Fair last fall. Mariette’s book The Gender Frontier is also up for a Lammy (against MHB, unfortunately) but she is the official/unofficial photographer of the transgendered.
It was a pleasure and an honor to be photographed by her, despite how freaking cold it was on that beach!
Lammy Nominees' Reading
I’ve just found out that I’m going to be part of the “New York Voices” part of the Lambda Literary Awards readings here in NYC. On May 19th, time tba, nine of my fellow nominees and me will be reading from our nominated works at the GLBT Center in Manhattan.
Just what my dad wanted for his 77th birthday, no doubt!
Glitz Speech
Our trip to Phoenix and the Glitz was a little nutty thanks to the usual trans community in-fighting. I’d written this speech about partners and family, but when I got there I realized an entirely different speech was needed.
So I never delivered this one (though I will use it for an upcoming speech elsewhere, no doubt).
* * *
Thanks to G____, B_____, and to all the people of Transgender Harmony who put the Glitz together for inviting me to speak tonight. An especial thanks for the excellent timing – even a few days’ escape from a NY winter is more than welcome!
There are moments when I’m at an event like the Glitz, talking to another wife while our pretty husbands share beauty tips, and I wonder, “How did this happen? How did I get here?†and then “What did I do to deserve this?â€
Do you ever have those moments? Times when you’re just astonished at how things have turned out? I don’t know how many years you have to go back, but I’m sure all of you can remember a time when the only place you went en femme was from the bathroom to the bedroom. Your heels had never walked on pavement. Maybe there was a time when your wife didn’t know, or your best friend – maybe they still don’t. But everyone in this room has made some kind of progress to be here – whether this is your first time out (first timers? Where are you?) or if you’re in the middle of your real life test. How big a step, or how many you’ve taken, isn’t always the important thing.
One of the things a wife has a really good view of is how hungry for progress you are; it’s the thing that scares the dickens out of us. More than one CD has gone from telling his wife that he likes to wear women’s clothes to him planning their annual vacation around a trans conference, so he can spend a week en femme. You can call it euphoria, or kid in the candy store syndrome, but no matter what you call it, it makes wives nutty. That’s especially true when they’re initially accepting, in any way, because somehow, coming out as a crossdresser, or a transsexual, affects your ability to measure, and every mile only looks like an inch. As a result, we start to feel like we’ve been taken advantage of, with the ever-escalating needs, the ever-increasing purchases. There are times now I feel surprised when I see a man WITH underarm hair.
And of course it’s not just wives. For some of you, the loved one you drive most crazy might be a close friend, a parent, or a child. No matter who it is, there’s almost no doubt that your need to express yourself will make them a little crazy remembering the right pronouns. I’m here to tell you – we need your help.
A very mature but young transman told me recently that he dreaded telling his mother he’s going to live as a man. He wasn’t worried about her being accepting – in fact, he was pretty sure she would be – but he understood what he was taking away from her, and how much he was pushing her. He said to me, “She already accepted me as a lesbian, and lost all of her dreams of planning my big-white-dress wedding, and now she’s going to lose her daughter altogether.†And I thought, when he told me, that all of us should be raised as women until a certain age, where some of us can then decide to live as men. Transmen are – in my experience – the coolest guys ever. I like to joke with Betty that if I’d known about transmen when I was single, we might not have ever met. But my point is – he got it. He got the loss, the change, the sense of feeling that we have to accept more and more – that sometimes, it feels like the changes never stop.
What that transman knew and understood was that his transition wasn’t just about him, and that his own happiness was also the cause of his mother’s disappointment. His concern for her had the potential to enable him to help her through his transition. It gave her the chance to have a good relationship with her new son.
It’s not just people living fulltime who need to help their loved ones through change. A wife who is told her husband is a crossdresser has to adjust just about everything in her life as well. Her ideas of her marriage, her man, and her future all change. Her sex life might change. She has to start thinking about gender and so-called “deviance†in ways she probably never has before.
The thing is, I hear too many stories of things not working out. Whether the cause is transition or euphoria, I don’t really hear much in the greater trans community about how to think about others as part of your self-expression, and what I do hear seems to be kind of condescending, along the lines of “how do I get this person on board for what I want and need?†Which is not quite the same thing as “how do I help this person I love deal with the changes I’m about to thrust upon them?†or even “how do I modify my needs in order to keep this person I love from running as fast as she can?â€
There are workshops on fast track transition, but never any on transitioning slowly enough so your partner can keep up. There are workshops for CDs on how to remove hair but never one on how to do your wife’s makeup, so she can feel glamorous too. Endless makeovers, photo shoots, and receipts – all add up to a lot of time and energy and money, and the wives, and girlfriends, – especially the ones who are willing to be here, or join an online support group, deserve to feel pampered too. Look at it this way: if you spend as much on your partner as you do on your femme self and you won’t run out of closet room so fast. Honestly, would you go to a week-long conference for whatever her gig is? Would you want to be around a bunch of women who scrapbook, knit, write fiction, do yoga? Do you know as much about her as she does about both of you?
The bottom line is that your loves ones are your best allies – potentially. If you can help them understand, they can become the people who will stand up and say you’re not crazy, and that this isn’t a joke. We don’t have the shame to get past, we don’t have the internal conflict. Once we’re on board, we’re on board. You want us on your side. Nurturing our change – along with yours – will go a long long way toward getting us there.
I don’t say all this only because I’m a wife. I say it because I don’t want to see anyone else end up on the other side of the mirror alone. I say it because I’ve seen too many relationships – romantic, familial, friendships – strained to the breaking point. I know it’s not easy – that you’re impatient, that the revelation of who you are is HUGE. It’s easy, when you’re online, reading message boards or mailing lists, and coming to events like the Glitz, to think that everyone knows about gender. But they don’t. The education isn’t out there – on TV, transsexuals are still shown as serial killers when they’re seen at all. Crossdressers are still a joke. You know that when you tell family and friends, you have to start with transgender 101. I’ve yet to meet someone trans who isn’t on their way to a PhD in trans studies, which means, of course, that you’re way ahead of us, a Chief Financial Officer of a global corporation teaching someone how to balance a checkbook. The chasm between is what causes the difficulties. What we need – as your potential allies – is to get you to slow down, and yes – please repeat that.
We can all do something to help couples and families through. When a married CD friend says, “I went shopping,†you can ask: “what’d you get your wife?†When your favorite transwoman starts listing her hormones, WITH dosages, ask her how her mother, father, wife, or child is. Remind each other that you’re not in a void, that you’re not alone, and amazingly enough, that there’s more to life, and gender, than hose, heels, and hormones.
You deserve for there to be more. You deserve love, and happiness. Being trans is not easy – not ever. You’re reinventing yourselves in ways that are mind-blowing, but you innately understand why you need to. We don’t. We’ve never thought about gender. You have no choice. Most partners can get that. We can see the difference, even when we don’t like it. Sometimes we know it even when we know we can’t go with you. The liberation – the sheer joy – y’all exhibit is obvious. Hold onto it in your dark moments. Hold onto it when your mom screws up your pronouns for the Nth time. Hold onto it when you look in the mirror and don’t see what you want to see. Hold onto it when your wife cries about her loss. For you, there’s struggle and joy, but for us, it’s just struggle and loss. You need to find a way to let your joy, your liberation, infect us, recharge us. It’s your joy, your freedom, that will win over not just partners, but friends, employers, family – and the rest of society. And it’s way better than Angry Tranny Syndrome.
When most of us can’t make up our minds how to cut our hair or quit a job, you’ve gone and imagined the impossible – and started making plans to have it happen. If you give your loved ones a minute, once in a while, to catch their breath, they’ll be there for you when things look bleak. Your wife will remind you not to tuck your dress into your pantyhose. Your best friend will help you figure out the line between being a man’s man and a macho jerk. Your mom might be the one to see that after all, you DO look like her. Give us time, give us love, and give us hope. Some of us will get lost, or stuck. But lots of us – I mean look at this room! – will be the ones who help you go forward with grace, confidence – and far from alone.
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Protest or Support?
It occurred to me that around this time last year, emails and T newsgroups and mailing lists and blogs were inundated with protests about the nomination of Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen for a Lambda Literary Award. I was against the nomination as were so many of us, and the driving force behind the protest was pretty remarkable, if not always polite.
However, not one trans website I’ve found has actually posted anything about this year’s nominees. I noticed, of course, because I’m one of the people whose book has been nominated, in the transgender category, along with the likes of Morty Diamond, Mariette Pathy Allen, Jamison Green and Julie Anne Peters. There are some other trans writers up for awards in other categories, and yet I haven’t really read anything about it.
Did the Bailey controversy end up nullifying the awards for the trans community? Or are we just way better at protesting than supporting the writers and educators who are doing good work?
So here, without further ado, are a few of the book award nominees for the Lambda Lit Award:
In the Nonfiction Anthology category:
That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation edited by Mattilda, a.k.a Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Soft Skull Press
In the Children’s/Young Adult category:
Luna by Julie Anne Peters, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (which was also a finalist for the National Book Award this year)
In the Drama/Theatre category:
I am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (which has won so many other awards, like the Pulitzer and the Tony, you’ll have to check the website for the entire list)
In the Transgender/GenderQueer category:
Becoming a Visible Man by Jamison Green, Vanderbilt University Press (which also won CLAGS’ Sylvia Rivera award)
From The Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond edited by Morty Diamond, Manic D Press
Luna by Julie Anne Peters, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
My Husband Betty: Love, Sex and Life with a Crossdresser by Helen Boyd, Thunder’s Mouth Press
The Gender Frontier by Mariette Pathy Allen, Kehrer Verlag
Queer Stories for Boys
For years, my friend Doug McKeown has been running and directing a group called Queer Stories for Boys, which is a story-telling workshop for gay men. He gathers a group of gay men, and has them brainstorm on ideas of stories – the only caveat being that the story had to have happened in real life. After that, they whittle away at and sculpt the stories, so in the end they come up with fantastic monologues of real life experiences. Betty and I got to see a performance of “Queer Stories” a while back, and were thrilled (and wanted to try to convince Doug to do the same for transfolks, but no luck yet!)
A collection of these stories has just been published, called Queer Stories for Boys: True Tales from the Gay Men’s Storytelling Workshop, and I highly recommend it, especially for transfolks who are entering the GLBT world and don’t know much about their gay brothers.
Here’s the review I wrote for the book:
These stories are as honest as they are queer. Ranging the gamut from tragic to comic, they encapsulate what is often missing in descriptions of gay men: their humanity, their families, and their lovers. These men tell the stories of how they have managed to find themselves – and happiness – at a time when the public seems more interested in what they do than in who they are. Queer Stories for Boys reminds us of the people behind the political diatribes, and does so with elegance, wit, sadness and joy.