Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Courtesy of Our Lives magazine:
President Obama’s decision to direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services to take steps to ensure that hospitals participating in Medicare or Medicaid respect the rights of patients to receive visitors and designate others to make decisions about medical care in the case of an emergency is the right one. It follows the lead of many states and makes a strong statement about who we are as a nation and what we value.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s cool these PSAs for LGBT – even specifically T!! go Mara! – have been made. But they should have been out a month ago, at least. I know we received our forms & sent them back long before I had this information. I did put my Task Force sticker on it (although even that didn’t have a “queer” option).
But if you haven’t filled yours out yet, you can watch others too: one with Harry Knox, another with Ben de Guzman, another with Bret Camp, Earl Fowlkes, or George Takei, for the geeks, or you can just check out all the PSAs made for the LGBT communities. Thanks to GLAAD for the heads up.
Two elderly otters who were best friends and lived side-by-side for 15 years have both died of a heart attack within an hour of each other.
It’s thought the second heartbroken animal passed away from the stress of watching his mate die.
Daz and Chip – both male – lived and died at Naturelands Zoo in Nelson, New Zealand.
Zookeeper John Miller said the Asian otters, who were 19 and 16 years-old, had been best friends for 15 years.
It’s thought that having each other for company kept them alive beyond the normal otter life-span of 14 years.
There’s no one who hates Robert Plant as much as I do, but the stuff he recorded with Allison Kraus is too gorgeous, so here’s a track as part of a set of melodic antidotes to all the Valentine’s frippery we all love to hate. The other by the Violent Femmes, and honestly I think this is a recording that should have been on the Eraserhead soundtrack (yes, there was one) since it’s just that right kind of creepy.
& Please don’t try to talk me out of my dislike of Robert Plant or Led Zeppelin: deaf ears I’ve got on the subject.
Okay, this made me cry, really.
The world is changing. Slowly, but it is. I have met so many really cool kids – teenagers & adults, mostly – who are cool with their parents’ gender stuff that it is really nice to see this. That’s what made me cry; just seeing a presentation of all those cool KOTs (Kids of Trans) in any medium.
I recently had a partner of a trans woman ask me – and many have asked before – when it’s time to go. I didn’t have an answer, but I did want to point out that asking when it’s time to go – what straw breaks the camel’s back – is certainly not exclusive to trans partners. All sorts of people in all sorts of relationships ask this question of themselves – some for years, some for days – before they make up their minds about staying or going.
I’ve always seen relationships as more like a daily or weekly affirmation. Not that I’m not planning the long haul – I admit I’m painfully loyal – but I also like to remind myself that I’m in a relationship because I choose to be in one. I don’t have to live with another person. I don’t have to do someone else’s laundry. I choose to. I hope, in the long run, that helps me enjoy the company of my partner more.
But I’ve certainly left relationships in my past. In some there was little gray area; I’d made up my mind as to where the line was, & even if I hadn’t articulated it, I knew it the second it was crossed. But what did it? In almost every instance, looking back, what I see is a lack of engagement – not engagement as in the “we’re going to get married” kind, but engagement as in participation. I’d traveled to be with one guy a few times & when it was time for him to come hang in my court, he didn’t, and that was that. With another, it was time for a change in our relationship, a greater commitment, & he couldn’t manage it, & that was that. (& Only now, writing this, does it occur to me that I was one the one who instigated the breakup in all of my past relationships. Who knew?)
I’m curious about your own stories: when did you leave, & why? Was it after a lot of torment? A simple lack of progress? One act of betrayal?
(& I know this isn’t a pleasant topic to end the year on, but I thought it would be worse to start the year with it!)
Ah, good news!
The Washington, D.C., City Council voted Tuesday to legalize gay marriage in the nation’s capital, handing supporters a victory after a string of recent defeats in Maine, New York and New Jersey.
Mayor Adrian Fenty has promised to sign the bill, which passed 11-2, and gay couples could begin marrying as early as March. Congress, which has final say over Washington’s laws, could reject it, but Democratic leaders have suggested they are reluctant to do so.
I was chatting with a new friend the other day & we were talking about coupledom; specifically about how often it is that you don’t like both halves of a couple you meet. He suggested that if you meet the couple as a couple, it’s more likely, but I wasn’t sure. At least in my experience, I tend to warm to one person more than the other, or just have more of a simpatico with one. The likeliness of liking both people in a couple goes significantly down when you’ve known one of the people for a while & then your friend introduces you to their new special friend.
That said, I can think of exceptions, of course, to everything I’ve just stated. In one case, we were so pleasantly surprised by liking a friend’s new partner & so enthusiastic about saying so that my friend of many years felt neglected as a result. (We reassured her, of course, that we loved her just as much.) In another case, I had a much easier friendship with a friend’s partner, & continued to be friends with him long after they broke up.
I assume there are always going to be people who like Betty more than they like me, and people who like me more than they like Betty. We appeal to different people because we do — I assume that’s also why we appeal to each other. (What those differences are I won’t bother to go into.)
It’s always so good to hear when another partner support group starts! Go Madison!
Just to let you know there is a SOFFA support group starting in Madison.
It will meet every other Tuesday evening, 7p-9p, beginning January 19.
It will meet at Outreach, 600 Williamson Street.
We will be focusing on the SOFFA experience and narrative.
It is a drop-in, peer support group.
I’ve done a few workshops on mismatched libidos over the years, and what surprised me the most when I started out was how many men profess to having lower libidos, and how much shame men can feel when they don’t have the kind of libido that’s on all the time no matter the circumstances. That men always have those kinds of libidos is a myth which is sadly reinforced by how almost all coverage of low libido issues is about women, such as in this NYT article of a week ago.
It’s problematic because it confirms a lot of unfortunate cultural mythology. Along with the expectation that men always have the higher libido is the one that says women always have lower ones. (That one is true doesn’t mean the other is, by the way. More bullshit binary thinking at work there.) Aside from the obvious heterocentrism that’s usually at the heart of this kind of gender essentialism — as if, in lesbian relationships, libidos are matched because both people are women! – the added hurdle of feeling gender atypical when you’re already feeling sexually atypical makes working on this stuff, or even admitting it, doubly difficult.
So for the record: lots of people of all kinds of genders in all kinds of relationships have low libidos, & all kind of people of all kinds of genders in all kinds of relationships have high libidos. The problem, as many of you know firsthand, is when your libido doesn’t match your partner’s. The one thing that I repeat frequently when I do these workshops is that having a low libido that’s satisfied by having sex once a season is not a problem — if you’re partnered to someone whose libido is the same/similar. It’s when the quarterly libido partners with the twice a weekend libido that problems arise.
