Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
An amazing op-ed by Dan Savage in yesterday’s NY Times.
“What the New York and Washington opinions share — besides a willful disregard for equal protection clauses in both state Constitutions — is a heartless lack of concern for the rights of the hundreds of thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples.”
I’ve been embarassed to be a resident of NY State since the ruling. We can do better.
Tonight I finished my last revision of Chapter 7, and coincidentally Victor/Victoria was on PBS, and I happened to catch it right from the beginning. People will be surprised to hear that I’ve never seen it before. (Though no-one should be, I keep saying that I just don’t like movies, and I think I saw Chariots of Fire that year instead, because I really do see only a few a year.)
I can see how utterly shocking this movie must have seemed in 1982 when it was released. But I can’t see Julie Andrews passing at all; I mean she’s Julie Andrews! The hills are alive and all that.
But the romantic subplot (or is that the main plot?) with James Garner is – well, dumb. But at least it’s not one long homophobic joke… except it is. There’s also just something creepy about the way it’s all so ‘demimonde packaged for the suburbs’ too, which is beginning to tire me. The scenes of them trying to navigate public spaces as a gay couple are hurting my brain.
“I guess the problem is that we’re not really two guys.” UGH. My crazy bet is that she’s going to choose to drop the act and become properly gendered so they can be together. Am I right? (It’s not over yet, still on while I’m typing.)
And why a Polish count? Are Polish folks just considered genderqueer or something? I’m starting to think so. I have very little idea as to how this movie was received, and I’m sure most of you have seen it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts, initial reactions, etc.
I was just now re-drafting one of my chapters, when out of the blue it occurred to me that one of the issues for a (female + mtf) couple making it through transition (social, medical or otherwise) is the ability to pass as a lesbian couple. I know about all the “like sisters” people; they’re all well and good and don’t have to pass as anything but friends (or sisters, obviously). But for those of us who still want a publicly visible, romantic and sexual relationship, what we’re effectively looking to do is pass as a lesbian, or bisexual, or queer couple. In order to do that, I think you have to know something about what lesbian, bisexual, and queer couples are like, no?
Jan B. is one of the people who started a trans group in Poughkeepsie called MHVTA. She’s been helping run the group since 2001, and I’ve known her for about that long. I used to call her “perpetual lurker Jan” on my very first yahoo support group, CDOD.
1) MHVTA is a nice group – how did you decide to start it? Do you have rules or guidelines, or are you making it up as you go?
Helen, thanks for the opportunity to answer these 5 questions. This is also a nice way to publicize our group so I want to start with a Shameless Plug:The Mid-Hudson Valley Transgender Association (MHVTA), a chapter of Renaissance, is a fairly new group. It was founded in May 2001 by Nikki and I. MHVTA serves the mid-Hudson Valley area of New York (the area north of New York City and south of Albany, from the Pennsylvania border on the west to Connecticut on the east). It’s an active group with regular monthly meetings near Poughkeepsie.
We were so frustrated that nothing was local. We had to travel forty to seventy miles to find a group, so someone said. “Well, just start it yourself (and they will come).” I had never been to a TG support group before but was pretty used to other types of support groups. We met in homes for four meetings and eventually found [an affordable] place to meet, with discreet off street parking.
It varies but there are around 20 dues-paying members who attend meetings. We have more than 100 members on our list server who are interested but don’t necessarily attend meetings. The membership requirements are that you are a TG interested to know more and we are open to the TG spectrum including family if they want to attend. We currently don’t invite admirers in but they sometimes sneak in when someone brings a friend. The members seem to appreciate the level of confidentiality and the one on one interviews pre visiting the group.
MHVTA’s principal mission is to provide outreach and support for our members, their families, their friends, and to be active in the Transgender Community and the greater community of the Mid-Hudson Valley, New York. MHVTA is a non-discriminatory group which is structured to allow participation by all those who support the transgender community. We respect and support the right of free and open expression and the right to be treated as equals by society. We focus on providing an understanding peer support network for anyone who would like to be a part of it and to assist others who wish to learn more about the Transgender community, acting as a Transgender advocate to other groups and institutions in the Mid-Hudson Valley area. We welcome new people with sensitivity towards their fears and concerns that accompany revealing themselves to others. MHVTA aims to accomplish this through: Regularly scheduled meetings, social events, and frequent and open communication. For more information, you can check MHVTA’s website.
You can also find an interview with some members of MHVTA at www.tgforum.com (but you can go directly to the article if you’re a subscriber).
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Jan B.”
I mentioned Esther Williams to a wife of a crossdresser not long ago and she looked at me blankly – silly me, assuming everyone knows the story of the million-dollar mermaid and her crossdressing movie star boyfriend.
“Jeff Chandler was standing in the middle of the bedroom in a red wig, a flowered chiffon dress, expensive high-heeled shoes and lots of makeup,”
she said about her near-husband, Jeff Chandler, Hollywood hunk.
Here’s a great review that talks about the genderedness of it all that originally appeared in Salon, and I find it interesting the way he ties in her LSD trip, the recognition of her own animus, and how her acid-induced knowledge of her male self makes a crossdressed husband especially horrifying.
I wonder if the acid is required, since otherwise I fall into the same category of being aware of my animus, except I didn’t scream. Not even once.
There are times when I think I have achieved the ideal form of monogamy: I spent the day with my husband for our anniversary, and now I’m about to go out to a lesbian club with my girlfriend. (And yes, I prefer thinking of Betty as my girlriend on the side, not as my wife. It’s sexier, no?)
Cynthia & Linda Phillips were once a crossdresser & wife who started the famous Texas T Party. They have stayed together despite this crossdresser’s having discovered she was transsexual, and they make their life together as two women.
1) Why did you start the Texas T-Party? Why did the event get retired?
T
he Texas “T” Party was started by the Boulton & Park Society in the late ‘80s, as a form of outreach by several of the members who had been to other functions around the country. None of us ever dreamed it would be the huge success it turned out to be. Cynthia and I joined the club about the time the first “T” started. We had just retired and were looking for some way to help our community.
The reason we finally retired the “T”, after 10 years, was the stress had finally gotten to us. Most of the original organizers of B&P were gone, and we never had much help, in any case. Cynthia, because of her experience with group functions, did the majority of the work, with me tagging along behind. Her blood pressure became dangerously high from the stress of running the “T” and I had to pull her off the job of running the whole thing. It was just a matter of burning out.
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Cynthia & Linda Phillips”
I was reading the news about the rape of that woman and the murder of her and her family by an American GI*, and happened upon another article about marriage by Amy Sutherland.
I don’t know if I’ve read Amy Sutherland before but I’m not planning to again.
This is the kind of stuff I used to read in my mother’s Reader’s Digest. I didn’t think it was funny, or accurate, and I didn’t relate. I guess some women think of their husbands (and themselves) as trainable animals. But even the twist at the end doesn’t justify wasting any reader’s time with crap like this.
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*(I hope the military gets to try the GI. I know rape and murder of civilians has been part of war for forever, no matter how much we like to pretend it hasn’t, but the fact that this was pre-meditated makes me especially sick.)
For the years I was the most androge/genderqueer (though of course I was often simply called “freak”), I had no idea I was, until I realized that when someone called out “young man, you dropped a glove,” or “homeboy was out pretty late tonight” types of comments, they were talking to me. The odd thing is, I don’t remember any sense of “you’re talking to me?!” when that happened. Maybe the first comment was so obviously directed at me that there was no question, so I wasn’t surprised when it happened after that. I don’t know. It was harder for me to adjust to being called by Betty’s last name – I didn’t change mine – and more than one waiting room receptionist has called it out more than once.
I don’t like having to tell people not to call me “Mrs. Your Husband,” because they treat you like you’re intentionally complicating their lives somehow. But I just had another friend change her name upon getting married, and for the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone would do that. And please don’t repeat that “sometimes it means a lot to the husband” excuse to me; if it’s that important to him, let him change his goddamn name.
Yesterday we went to a party, thrown by a friend who is TG for his wife’s birthday, and at some point people started telling stories about how a groom or bride went missing at a wedding – in this case, it was because the bride was fixing the headpiece for the cake. At our wedding, Betty went missing to go “hang out with” her best man for a while, and I sat there for a bit, trying to figure out in my head how I could say that, & then realized this group knew Betty was trans anyway, so I just told the story with the “best man” bit in.
But I had a moment where I thought: what do you do with stories like that? Just resist telling them? Re-gender them (so that “she was hanging out with her maid of honor”?) The whole event made me kind of sad, because after we brought it up we ended up doing Trans 101, which is not the worst thing in the world, but we really didn’t feel like it (because sometimes even we want to just be normal folks who go to parties to eat & drink & talk & tell stories).
& I woke up this morning thinking: this is what I hate about transness.