As many of you know, Betty and I not only have two grey cats & one orange, we also have two gray fish and & one orange. It was all quite an accident, but it was still kind of Twilight Zone eerie when we realized it.
But the fish were once two grey fish (well really they’re silver & black sharks) and two orange, but we lost Eugene of the black stripes when we were on our honeymoon. We were novice fish owners then, and lost him out of ignorance.
But now our Miss Emma is sick, upside down sick, and it doesn’t look very good for her. We’re doing everything we can – including trying to manually feed her green peas – but so far no luck. She’s still fighting, though – she tries to wrestle herself to an upright position for a while, then gets tired and rests, and then goes back to trying to right herself.
It may seem silly to be worried about a fish, especially when you have three cats you feed salmon and tuna to almost daily. But Emma is part of the family. We’ve had her longer than the cats, and we’re very used to walking into our orange bedroom to see the little patch of orange in the tank wave her silky orange fins at us. I call her our Disney fish, because she really does just need eyelashes to look like an orange femme fatale.
So while Betty is out at a Phoenix Theatre Ensemble fundraiser, I watch the hospital tank we have Emma in, and hope for the best.
Paper Lanterns
Someone recently wrote to me to thank me for a piece I’d posted on the boards, so I thought I’d share it here for those of you who are not board readers:
sometimes life is about understanding your own mythology, your own story. at different times in your life those stories change. from warrior to princess to wizard to crone. & i don’t think there’s any harm in seeing those stories, or of taking a lot of painful things – like the death of a son, or transness itself – and translating those things into something comprehensible for yourself, something that gives your life meaning, and maybe even purpose.
some people are practical-minded and only want to count the beans. others find more meaning in going a little hungry and burying a few to see if something grows.
i just think, sometimes, that we are too demanding that people always see the harsh, bare bulb of fact. life is hard enough. sometimes we’re all a little blanche debois, and want the paper lantern.
Memoirs
I’m reading Joan Didion’s remarkable The Year of Magical Thinking right now, because the book got such outstanding reviews (and a National Book Award), but also because I’m writing a memoir-ish book that will also go into more abstract issues – like gender, & marriage, & things such as that. I want to see how Didion did it; I like to learn from the best. (Actually, the best writing advice I ever got was to read good books.)
I was wondering if anyone else has recommendations for other good memoirs I might check out – obviously, ones on the serious side.
Outing Myself
I’ve discovered my true identity, at last.
With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts also dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. “People person” is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like “guarded,” “loner,” “reserved,” “taciturn,” “self-contained,” “private”—narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty.
Thanks to Betty, via Kevin Drum.
Condolences
I can’t even begin to imagine how those families feel – getting the good news last night and today getting the correction.
I find a report of Bush’s condolences about the miners in a Chinese paper – not surprising, really, as coal miners die in China pretty much every month and their deaths go unreported or under-reported.
My condolences to the families, and a wish for freedom from guilt for that one guy who survived.
(If you haven’t worked it out, my grandparents & much of their generation were anthracite miners around the turn of the century.)
Let's (Not) Talk About Sex
Betty and I spent Thanskgiving Day at my sister and her husband’s house – a place we frequent on a regular basis. I like to joke that our standard of living is brought up significantly by dinners at her place: good food, plentiful wine, deep sofas & a fireplace. It’s lovely.
She had a ridiculous amount of people over for Thanksgiving Day itself: a couple in from SF, CA with their two small children; a couple from DC with their dog; a friend from Tucson and three of his friends; us; them; her acupuncturist & old friend, and another old friend with his friend. I think it was 16, or 18, all told. Which is lovely: being from a big family it just feels right to me to sit at a very long dinner table. My sister’s husband, who’d taken the foot of the table, actually called my sister at the head of it twice during dinner as she otherwise couldn’t hear what he was asking. Amusing.
At some point when people had had a bit to drink, one of the friends of friends kind of plopped herself next to me and Betty on the couch. I knew what was coming. We’d met her before, at a previous party, and she had asked a lot of questions, then, too. I think I even wrote about that incident, when I just got tired of it & kind of ‘ran away’ on some trumped-up excuse.
“So, when you two make love…” she started. She did add the “if you don’t want to answer that’s okay” caveat, but still: not fun. And I realized tonight what’s not-fun about it to me – and that’s the assumption that 1) because we ‘look different’ from others we have some kind of outlandish sex life, 2) that because we look different people actually have the right to ask us about our sex life, and 3) that it was quite possible that any other couple at the dinner had a far kinkier sex life than we do.
At some point, I just returned her “So when you two have sex…” question with “Well how do you two have sex?” The thing is, these questions never get asked in a kind of ‘I’m curious’ way but in a “I’m so normal and you’re so not” kind of way. The funny thing about it was that her husband and she did not strike me as totally normally gendered: she came off as kind of aggressive, bulldog-ish, and he seemed kind of sweet and passive.
I always find it kind of funny that people are so willing to present themselves – to me, of all people – as somehow “normally gendered.” Because if anyone’s going to see anything genderqueer about anyone, I’m a safe bet. I’ll find the residue of an inkling, if it’s there. I’m thinking sometimes I should come with some kind of warning label: Abandon gender certainty, all ye who converse here.
Known But Not
I’m not sure if anyone knows how weird it is being a public person, if you’re not. I know there are people on the boards and in the larger trans community who are known in their fields, so I’m sure they have a little bit better of an idea of it.
But Betty and I regularly deal with people feeling they know us better than they do. I don’t mind being out or visible or public. But it is an interesting experience, one that requires you to learn new things about how people relate and to notice when people are communicating in a way that has ‘crossed a line.’ The problem is that writing requires a writer to wear her skin as thin as she can, to bleed on the page, as some authors have put it. Some days it can be a little tricky to be thick-skinned (as a public figure) and completely open (in my writing) – simultaneously.
Having been a devoted fan of more than one band when I was a teenager – and currently being a fan of Rufus Wainwright – I understand how people have a sense of “me.” I also know now that anything I think I “know” about someone public is probably mostly wrong, or a part of the truth.
Anyone who knows me personally knows that I hate having my looks discussed. It’s not because I don’t think I’m pretty or any self-esteem issue like that; it’s just that I don’t think it’s worth discussing. I look like what I look like: nothing more, nothing less. Some people find me attractive, others don’t, but mostly I’m pretty content with my lot in that department. But at the same time it just seems odd for people who don’t know me to talk about what I look like. Talk about my ideas, my writing, my lectures and workshops – of course. Those are things I work on, that I care about, that I actually like feedback about. But my looks? Pah.
But who am I kidding? In a community where both passability and prettiness count for something, I’d be fooling myself to think I’d be left out of the self- and other- scrutiny in the looks department.
And yet – and yet: I would rather be left out, please.
Gossip & Calumny, Pt. 2
The real problem with having stupid gossipy things happen is that I have to deal with them instead of answering an email from someone in need.
Last night I got the email from the person who told me that Bobbi Williams was repeating that tripe. In the same session, I also got an email from a woman whose husband went off the deep end – convinced he was transsexual, he had a therapist tell her instead of telling her himself, and then backed off the whole idea, only to realize he’s just a crossdresser. She’s freaked out, needed resources, and instead of getting back to her asap I had to cool down a while first.
That’s why being gossiped about is so annoying.
Just a Gripe
You know, I recommend the store (Toys in)* Babeland in my book and just about everywhere I go, and they still don’t stock My Husband Betty. It’s kind of funny to be looking for a good porn flick and then feeling too grumpy to get one, even with a gift certificate.
And it’s not because they don’t carry non-sexual, non-fiction trans titles, since they carry Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook and Mariette Pathy Allen’s Gender Frontier (neither of which have even close to as much sex info as MHB, by the by) and books by Loren Cameron and Patrick Califia.
They also carry het porn so it’s not about that, either.
Pah.
* They just changed their name & are now just “Babeland.”
Doing What You Do
Recently, a suggestion was made that I quit doing what I do as a moderator on the message boards, or maybe that I do a little less of it, or a little less frequently, or zealously. Or something like that.
Since then, I’ve gotten numerous emails and comments from people that I really should cut back, that it’d be good for my sanity.
Maybe it would.
But the thing is, I moderate the boards the way I do because I like the way they are, the way they’ve attracted intelligent, occasionally captious types who are also funny, creative, and supportive of each other. I mean where else on the trans internet are you going to find a Trans Periodic Table and abstracts to Blanchard articles? There’s a 15 page thread on football (football!), too, and that’s in addition to the empathetic comments from a TG who saw a young child made fun of for wearing nailpolish.
The boards are, in some way, the kind of community I was looking for years ago, before I wrote My Husband Betty, and it’s kind of nice that the book has given me the kind of reach to create that – to fill a void, as it were. I’m proud of them, and pleased to be doing the work that makes them a good place for both support and debate.
Sometimes I can be sensitive to criticisim – precisely because I do spend a lot of time moderating the boards – and it hurts to have someone tell me I should be doing it differently, or could be doing it better – tempting me to say (mostly to myself) “you get what you pay for” on a regular basis. But snarkiness aside, I enjoy the boards, and I’m proud of having built them – so they would come.
Most of the time that’s enough – other times, it’s just nice to hear that others appreciate them and are getting something out of them they can’t find anyplace else. For the nearly 500 of you who are registered users, and the 60 of you who post regularly, and to the lurkers, I’m thankful, not burdened.