Donate if you like her work and/or if you’d like to own a copy. She needs just under $3k in a month. (Tell her Helen sent you! My thanks to Lannie Rose for the heads up.)
Face of the Day
On 12/1, Andrew Sullivan had a “Face of the Day” photo of a Pakistani hjira (although he called her a eunuch).
NOH8
A Lawrence student has been taking photographs of faculty, staff & students who wanted to participate in the NOH8 campaign, and yesterday, 
on our 12th anniversary, we decided to (finally) get ours taken. Here are some of the shots.
Trans Couples: Tink & B.
A Note from the Author:
Just a couple of things I want to say first. As one of the conditions for this is no names, I shall refer to my beloved in boy format as B*. This stands for Beloved. Another major character is X, which refers to the ex-wife. Finally, please excuse any pronoun confusion that may arise. I have tried to use “he†when referring to my dearest in “boy-mode,†and “she†when referring to same in “girlie-mode†(his own terms) but there are still times when I’m not sure which to use when.
Chapter 1: In which Tink sees photos.
I think I first fell in love when I saw her picture. The problem was, he belonged to somebody else- a friend of mine- and so I put it out of my mind.
I had known B* for a couple of years. He was going out with X, who was a friend of mine, and we became good friends ourselves, the kind that sees each in other in the pub, but with occasional deep and meaningful conversations between just the two if us. This was one of those times. Most of our other friends had retired early, and it was just the two of us in one of those dodgy local rock clubs that you seem to find in every city. He was entertaining me with pictures on his mobile phone. They were various models, singers and actresses all looking beautiful. I had the difficult task of putting names to the faces, and my knowledge of popular culture kept letting me down. He selected another image and presented it to me. Again I was clueless. She was slim and beautiful like all the rest, with lovely long, dark hair and dressed in black. I took a wild guess.
“Morticia Addams?†Apparently I was wrong and had to look again. “I have no idea, but whoever she is, she’s very pretty.â€
“It’s me.â€
“Wow!†I was stunned. I looked again, and I just couldn’t believe it. She was just amazing.
Continue reading “Trans Couples: Tink & B.”
New Piercing
I’m pleased as punch that I got a chance – right after my keynote at Fantasia Fair – not only to meet the Bearded Lady of Provincetown, but to get her to stretch my previous ear piercings so that I could wear these lovely new omegas I bought in her shop.
She tells me that I can make them bigger in a few months, too. Betty’s starting to worry.
If you’re coming here after Fantasia Fair, do remind me of the resources I said I would post. I know some (a lot) of them are probably about sex, so you might want to start by browsing the posts marked s.e.x. on this blog.
Trans Couples: Jeanne & Diana
There are not a lot of stories of successful transsexual / non-trans partner marriages. One recurring theme that I see is the need for pacing. Unfortunately too many trans-partners once they have their epiphany rush like a runaway freight train towards transition. Like most runaway freight trains these relationships typically end in destruction.
I’m not going to say that there is any one right way to transition. We all know that those paths are as unique as the individuals who tread them. However, if a couple is going to have any possibility of remaining intact each partner must be willing to recognize that compromises will be an integral part of the process.
Five Questions With… Julia Serano
Julia Serano is a Bay Area slam-winning poet, author, performer, activist, & biologist. She organized the GenderEnders event from 2003 until last year; plays guitar, sings & writes lyrics for her band Bitesize, and oh – has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. We got to meet her when she was in town promoting her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
(1) I loved Whipping Girl, for starters. I think it’s a pivotal work for trans communities, especially in building trans pride. But you know I kept waiting for you to actually define “feminine” – maybe if not for all time, but in some way that I could understand what you meant by it specifically. Your “barrette Manifesto” came close, except that I see barrettes as childish, not feminine per se. So can you help the genderblind like myself? What is femininity? Can you be feminine without being girly?
In the next to last chapter of the book, “Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism,†I talk about that a bit, but I’ll try to define it here a little more clearly. I would say that femininity is a heterogeneous set of traits (some of which are cultural in origin, some biological, some psychological, and many are a combination thereof). The only thing that all feminine traits have in common is that they are typically associated with women in our culture. But they certainly aren’t exclusive to women, as many men and MTF spectrum transgender folks also express feminine traits (similarly, many women express masculine rather than feminine traits). I think most of us tend to express some combination of both feminine and masculine traits.
Trans Couples: Natasha & Kyle
“Tranny, 24, slim attractive brunette, seeks fun loving friend for laughter and love.”
Hey, every story has to begin somewhere, and this one’s starting with that. It’s the text of a personals ad, submitted to a local free weekly paper. The sort of thing that’s three quarters real estate listings.
I can’t claim sole authorship for the ad. My ex wife and I penned it. We started with the vague notion that it was about time I started seeing people. She, after all, had hooked up with a new guy and was rapidly approaching domestic bliss. I’d been moping around for a while, but was now finally starting to re-emerge into the world; to get my shit together, as it were.
Five Questions With… Marilyn Frank
Marilyn Frank has been sharing her story with wives at Fantasia Fair, IFGE and Tri-Ess seminars since 1982. She married her husband Len in 1954 and didn’t learn about the cross dressing until 1964, 10 years and 3 children later. At that time the only information available to her was Virginia Prince’s book The Transvestite and His Wife (now titled The Cross-dresser and His Wife) which she still finds to be one of the best books written.
1) First, Marilyn, I want to thank you on behalf of all the partners out there, for stepping up at a time when most of us weren’t even in high school yet. Without women like you & Peggy Rudd, the struggle to have partners’ issues recognized would be a lot more difficult. So what caused you to do the educating you did?
In the 1970’s I was a volunteer on a crisis intervention hot line in Morris County, NJ. When I became Director, I questioned some of the professionals in the group, who did not know much about cross dressing, but were able to assist me in finding people who did know. During this time we came upon Tri-Ess, and then in 1980 Len read the article in Playboy about Fantasia Fair and in 1981 we spent a few days at the Fair. I had many discussions with Ariadne Kane about the wives’ needs, and this brought Niela Miller to the Fair and that’s where my true education began. Since it had been a very lonely road not only for Len, but for me, I decided I would reach out to help others, so that’s when I started facilitating a wives group at our local Tri-Ess Chapter, which I did for for over 10 years. I also was instrumental in starting the wives’ program at the first IFGE Convention. My philosophy is that every time I help someone, I help myself. It’s true the marriage had its ups and downs where the cross dressing was concerned, but for us it was a small part of our overall marriage. We have always had good communication, enjoy many of the same things and do have a sense of humor (that helps).
Five Questions With… Eli Clare
Eli Clare is the author of Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999) and has been widely published. He has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program and co-organized the first-ever Queerness and Disability Conference. He works for the University of Vermont ‘s LGBTQA Services. We were lucky enough to meet him at a Translating Identity Conference at UVM, and I was happy to get the chance to talk to him about his new book, The Marrow’s Telling, which was recently published by HomoFactus Press.
(1) Why poetry?
As a writer, my first love is poetry. I think of it as a thug who grabbed me by the collar many years ago and whispered in my ear, “You’re coming with me.” I went willingly, not having any idea where poetry would take me or what it would demand. Twenty-five years later I find myself writing a mix of poetry and creative nonfiction; my first book, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, is a collection of essays, and my second book, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion, which ought to be rolling off the press at any moment now, is a mix of poems and short prose pieces, not quite essays but more than prose poems.
Audre Lorde in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” writes of poetry as a “revelatory distillation of experience.” Poems demand both wildness/revelation–moments where language, sound, and rhythm, rather than thought or idea or analysis, take the lead–and discipline/distillation–the paring down to heart and bone. As a writer, a reader, an activist trying to make sense of the world, I need revelatory distillation.
I also know that in the United States too many of us have been taught to fear or avoid poetry, to feel bored or stupid in its presence. As an activist-poet, I always hope that my poems will be doors held wide open, roller coasters, parachutes opening above you, slow meandering rivers.