I’ve gotten some interesting comments to my post about belonging and thought more people should check them out.
To all you who responded:
Thanks all for very interesting insights & thoughts.
I have always been an ally of the LGBT – & felt welcome as one. (I was that person all the gay boys came out to after HS, & likewise a little later with lesbian friends.)
But my own sense of my LGBT-ness comes out of my own genderqueer qualities, and I wonder how trans partners who are more gender normative (& not otherwise gay, bi, or lesbian) might feel. To me, it’s all about creating safe spaces, and of course I’ll continue to do that.
On that note, the guys who date transwomen who identify as straight are *never* going to feel part of this community while we all gossip that they’re ‘really gay.’
< Jill and I right before the workshop on trans relationships at TIC.
We had a lot of great conversations with people up at TIC especially in the trans relationships workshop Jill Barkley & I hosted – about identity, compromise, sexuality, fetishization and respect. The one point that came up early was why non-trans people often are accused of being fetishizing or predatory for doing things that trans people might do and not be similarly accused – as in, if a trans person seeks another trans person as a partner, it’s understood as being a shared interest or experience, but if a non-trans person seeks a trans person as a partner, they are accused often of fetishizing transness.
I do value Betty’s transness because of my own gender stuff, but sometimes it feels like that wouldn’t “count.” It kind of reminds me of a story told by two professors I had (who had been married to each other for upward of 50 years), about when they met in the 1930s, when one of them was a Socialist and the other a Communist; their friends lay bets on how soon they would break up, since one was considered a “committed radical” the other only a “fellow traveler.”
I’ve also had people who’ve met me since the book or in my 20s “worry” that my own discovery of my gender stuff is somehow Betty’s fault. It isn’t, of course, and anyone who knew me when i was 20 or younger knows that.
The way these things interlap is of ongoing interest to me, and I welcome your further comments.
Five Questions With… Renee Reyes
Renee Reyes is the webmistress of www.reneereyes.com, a huge site where t-girls of all stripes have found information over the years. She is a strong believer in the commonality of experience of all kinds of transfolk, from crossdressers to transsexuals. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
< Renee Reyes
1. As far as I can tell, we’re rare in talking about admirers. Why do you think so many trans sites avoid the subject?
I’d say there are a couple of reasons. First, the large majority of gender-related web sites are hosted by girls whose feminine existence is still a very limited affair. In terms of sheer hours these gals have little time to fully consider their sexuality as precious femme time is wrapped up in improving their appearance. Attraction to others is limited to other transgenders & females. Alas, the sometimes crude approaches from neophyte male admirers aggravate the situation.
Admirers are an important segment of the gender community. They provide beauty affirmation and serve as healthy outlets for relationships. Like the girls…most admirers didn’t necessarily choose to find transgenders highly appealing. Nature just wired them that way.
Gays weren’t initially very accepting of transgenders. Admirers suffer the same sort of fate. We’ll get there.
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Five Questions With… Arlene Istar Lev
Arlene Istar Lev LCSW, CASAC, is a social worker, family therapist, educator, and writer whose work addresses the unique therapeutic needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. She is the founder of Choices Counseling and Consulting (www.choicesconsulting.com) in Albany, New York, providing family therapy for LGBT people. She is also on the adjunct faculties of S.U.N.Y. Albany, School of Social Welfare, and Vermont College of the Union Institute and University. She is the author of The Complete Lesbian and Gay Parenting Guide (Penguin Press, 2004) and Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and their Families (Haworth Press, 2004). Additionally, she maintains a :Dear Ari” advice column, which is currently published in Proud Parenting and Transgender Tapestry. She is also the Founder and Project Manager for Rainbow Access Initiative, a training program on LGBT issues for therapists and medical professionals, and a Board Member for the Family Pride Coalition. Her “In a Family Way” column on LGBT parenting issues is nationally syndicated.
< Arlene Istar Lev
1. You work a lot with LGBT parenting issues. What do you see as the major differences between LGB parents and T parents?
Lesbian and gay parents deal with numerous issues of oppression, and depending on the state or locality in which they live, this can be minor issues of societal ignorance, to huge issues of public and legal discrimination. However, as difficult as the issues facing lesbian, gay, and bisexual people may be, they pale in comparison to the blatant oppression transgender and transsexual parents face.
In many states, lesbian and gay people can now jointly legally adopt their children as out same-sex couples; this provides their children with many benefits and protections. However, transgender people experience discrimination in all routine areas of family life. Judges determining parental custody will rarely award custody to out trans people, except possibly in cities like San Francisco that specifically offer transgender protections. Trans people are viewed by the courts as unfit by the virtue of their (trans)gender status. Additionally, adoption agencies do not see transgender people as “fit†to be parents, and the obstacles faced by transgender people wanting to be parents can feel insurmountable.
Lesbian and gay people have fought for the right to become parents. I remember a time when simply being an out lesbian would bias a judge’s custody decision. Although there are some localities where this still would be true, even in upstate New York in rural communities, judges minimize the issues of sexual orientation in making custody decisions. However, I cannot imagine the same being true regarding gender transition. In my book, The Complete Lesbian and Gay Parenting Guide, a transwoman tells the painful story of losing custody of her son after her crossdressing was used to “prove” that she was a deviant and a pervert. The legal status of trans people, regarding their rights to their children, is reminiscent of LGB legal rights 40 years ago.
However, there is good news to report. Trans parents are coming out of the closet in increasing numbers. Many trans people who have positive relationships with spouses and ex-spouses are finding ways to parent together and address the issues the gender-transpositions can have on family life. Increasing numbers of people are choosing to have children as out trans people. Some FTMs are getting pregnant, placing medical personnel in a position to work with pregnant men, creating a radical and challenging new phase of queer parenting. Additionally, many MTFs are storing sperm before transition, so they are able to have biological children as the sperm donor/father with a female partner. Clearly, LGBT people have developed innovative family-building forms, and I suspect we are only at the beginning of this process.
There is, of course, no reason that a trans person could not be as competent a parent as any other person, but like LGB people, they will likely have to “prove” that to the powers that be. In my experience, children take gender transitions in stride; it is adults who find the whole issue confusing and shocking. Older children might have more difficulties accepting gender changes, particularly as they near their own puberty. It is my contention however, that families can weather many challenging issues, and transgender status is no more, or less, challenging then other issues that families face.
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Shayla & Shirene
When I was researching My Husband Betty, I went to the SPICE conference, and there we met a young, enthusiastic couple named Shalya and Shirene. (Okay, she wasn’t Shayla then, but I can’t remember her original femme name.) But Shirene nodded at everything I nodded at when we were in workshops, and then the four of us – plus the lovely Penny (whose name wasn’t Penny then, either) & Jayme – sat in the hotel lobby and talked about sex the rest of the night!
Shayla & Shirene are going to be on Inside Edition this coming Friday, February 10th. Do watch them; they’re a lovely, articulate, optimistic couple, who are (if I do say so myself) fantastic representatives for the trans community – especially the much-neglected crossdressing set.
^ me, Shayla, and Shirene, at IFGE ’04.
Us, Updated
Betty and I went out with Alexandra and Cathy when they came up to NYC last weekend, and someone snapped a photo of us for the event’s website.
How post-Goth of me to wear brown to a goth club, eh? Betty is in guy mode, theoretically speaking.
Five Questions With… Mara Keisling
Mara Keisling is the founding Executive Director of NCTE (National Center for Transgender Equality). A Pennsylvania native, Mara came to Washington after co-chairing the Pennsylvania Gender Rights Coalition. Mara is a transgender-identified woman who also identifies as a parent and a Pennsylvanian. She is a graduate of Penn State University and did her graduate work at Harvard University in American Government. She has served on the board of Directors of Common Roads, an LGBTQ Youth Group, and on the steering committee of the Statewide Pennsylvania Rights Coalition. Mara has almost twenty-five years of professional experience in social marketing and opinion research.
1) How much do you think your personality and sense of humor have to do with your success as a lobbyist? What personality? What humor?
I’m not yet ready to claim personal lobbying success, though I know we definitely are having an impact and NCTE was integral to getting the first ever piece of positive trans legislation introduced in Congress this year. I do know though that my sense of humor is a vital part of my personality and helps keep me strong. “They†say that keeping one’s sense of humor is important to weathering bad situations and I certainly believe that. And I have always been lucky enough to be able to amuse myself. Hopefully sometimes others are amused as well.
The work we do educating policymakers, though, is deadly serious and I do treat it that way. That doesn’t mean I do not inject humor as appropriate though. I think it humanizes us and me and makes our stories somewhat more accessible to those who may be trepidatious at first.
By the way, kind of as a hobby, I have begun to do a little bit of standup comedy again and may be coming to a town near you, or at least a trans conference near you.
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Five Questions With… Jade Gordon
Jade Gordon is the artist and author behind the trans-amorous comic Lean on Me.
< A drawing from Lean on Me featuring the two main characters.
1) What motivated you to start drawing “Lean on Me”?
I thought it would be a good way to pick up chicks!
Oh, a more serious answer, eh? What motivated me was a fiery burning need. I am a genetic female who tends to prefer femininity in a romantic partner, regardless of physical gender. I had been repressed for a long time, and I just started to crack. I had to start expressing what I really felt somehow. I was, at that point, spending a lot of time alone in a small, dank apartment, stewing about my true feelings. I decided to try putting my ideas into a visual form. I had never done sequential art, and I think I instinctively knew that I could work out what I was feeling with fictional characters a little easier than direct confrontation.
I also really, really needed to reach more people like me. I grew up in an environment where loving someone of a different ethnicity was very wrong, never mind color, and anyone who was anywhere in the realm of GLBT wasn’t allowed to exist because it was the ultimate in wrong. I found myself not just leaning toward lesbian, but also embracing people who were, in my previous environment, the sickest of sick – the *crossdressers*, the *transvestites*. I *knew* in my heart that I was perfectly normal and healthy in my desires, but I felt like a complete alien among women who typically seemed to prefer freaking out about partners that wanted to crossdress or transition. The comic helped me connect with other women who maybe didn’t immediately want to kick their man to the curb just because he was pretty sometimes.
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Five Questions With… Bradford Louryk
Bradford Louryk created and performs in Christine Jorgensen Reveals – as Christine Jorgensen herself. In the play, he lipsynchs a recorded interview with Jorgensen that was conducted by Nipsey Russell and recorded in 1958. The show, as directed by John Hecht, has garnered rave reviews, including at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Louryk did his BA at Vassar, and has acted at varied theatrical venues, from Studio 42 (of which he was a founding member) to Playwrights Horizons to hERE. Christine Jorgensen Reveals plays in New York until January 28th.
1. How has this piece affected your understanding of gender? Is this the first time you’ve played a woman?
This is not the first time that I’ve played a woman, but it’s the first time I’ve played an historical human being who happens to have been a woman. My previous experiences were with Greek tragic heroines – Klytaemnestra, Elektra, Medea, Phedre – and with biblical figures – Judith from the story of Judith and Holofernes, and I’m currently developing a piece about The Virgin Mary called “Version Mary.†I like to stretch myself as much as I can as an actor every time I’m onstage. Whether that’s through language or physicality or playing the opposite sex, I always want to grow as a performer through whatever role I’m creating.
That said, since I first became aware of cross-gendered casting as a politicized choice (when I was exposed to Charles Ludlam’s writing) when I was about 15 years old, I have understood gender as a fluid construct. Thus, my approach isn’t about being male or being female, but about realizing the character in an honest manner. Men are not exclusively masculine and women are not exclusively feminine, thus, when you paint your character with details from the spectrum of what we understand gender to be, you arrive at – I hope – a fully rounded person, with whom the audience can interact.
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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”
Five Questions With… Vanessa Edwards Foster
Vanessa Edwards Foster is the board chair of
NTAC (National Transgender Advocacy Coalition). A Houston-based activist, Foster is one of the people who lobbies the US Government every year on behalf of transgender people everywhere.
1. Why did you become an activist on trans issues?
Circumstances. Hormones took to me far too quickly, and I lost my job before I was ready to transition. This was back when I thought (having good natural features) that I’d have a seamless transition. It was the late 90s (greatest economy ever), and I was unemployed for nearly 21 months, so it was obvious what was happening. At the time, I led two other local groups and started thinking about what they were experiencing, and how bad it must’ve been for them. And I couldn’t interest anyone else in doing it for us, or for me. So I decided to bite the bullet and do what came unnaturally for me — political activism.
My heritage is heavily native, and my ancestors on all sides were part of the Trail of Tears, as it’s called. So I grew up like all of us were taught: we hate government, we hate politics and politicians (plastic people), we hate the manipulation, the deceit and the devotion to self-interest. Politics was the seamiest of trades, promises from them were made to be broken and any attempt to get involved politically was an exercise in futility and ultimate frustration. The only ones attracted to the political life were lusting for power and money. My parents initially thought me crazy to involve myself in this, then later seemed hopeful and proud of this actually making a difference. But as time went on, these last couple years have reaffirmed their warnings rather than disproved them. Politics, as it is today, is no savior. Quite the opposite.
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