Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Yours Truly was interviewed for an article on “Ten Hot Sexuality (and Gender) Issues of 2007 by Naked on the Internet author Audacia Ray. My bit is mostly the “(and Gender)” part of it, about ENDA & the Hate Crimes Act.
I think it’s the first time I’ve been interviewed for anything that was also about pole dancing.
It’s the day Betty and I have been waiting for: the first day that isn’t 2007, at long last. We’re hoping 2008 will be a little kinder, maybe a little more amenable, which looks a little ironic from where I’m standing: amidst all the bags I have packed for Wisconsin. I am looking forward to teaching, to meeting various professors and students and even MHB readers, but there is also a part of me that doesn’t want to travel at all anymore; I just want a job, teaching most likely, somewhere I could live, and live with Betty, and have a home big enough for three cats and way too many books. As a result of the commute to North Andover this past fall, this trip to Wisconsin seems like the final test of my resources, or rather, if I ever had any slight bit of agoraphobia after 9/11, this trip is my proof that it’s all gone.
So, off we go. Tomorrow, Betty and I drive to Wisconsin, and we’re planning on arriving on Friday. If we can post from the road we will, but we might not be able to. Or we might not want to. Who knows? In either case, I’m on my way, and so is the new year.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… so was 2007 for the trans community, what with ENDA. Jacob Anderson-Minshall did a wrap-up of the year for The San Francisco Bay Times.
I’m looking forward to a long break from being quite so public; book tours are great fun, enabling you to meet tons of people who you wouldn’t normally meet, but they’re also exhausting because of all the travel. I’ll pass the torch to Jennifer Finney Boylan, whose new book I’m Looking Through You, comes out 1/15. (Jenny’s website was created by Betty.)
I’ll be traveling to Wisconsin to teach Gender Studies – and a course in Transgender Lives – at Lawrence University, while Betty stays in Brooklyn. This will be the first time in our decade together that we’ll have been separated for so long, but she is driving me there, probably visiting in February, and then coming to gather me again at the end of March. But I’m sure we’ll manage, but to answer the forthcoming questions: there is no reason for our separation other than employment.
All best to you all in 2008.
Tonight, do come to a crossdressing event at the LGBT Center in NYC. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Crossdressing: Erotic Stories book is the reason for the gathering. I’ll be reading, as will Miss Vera, amongst others.
Do come! It should be a fun night!
Is anyone else horrified by Vagisil commercials? The most recent one has a woman in it who is all dressed up but sees her own reflection as looking crummy, in a hoodie. And why does she feel that way? Because she worries that other people will smell her bad smell.
Ugh. I mean, come on already.
Buying a tube of whatever because your vagina is itchy and/or smelly is demented. First off, if things are itchy and/or smelly temporarily, that’s just how it goes – you don’t need Vagisil; you need a bath and maybe to wear cotton panties for a week. On the other hand, if your vagina consistently and chronically itches or smells bad, you need to see a doctor, not buy a tube of Vagisil. Yeast infections can be fatal, and you can give anything else that would cause itching (like crabs) to sex partners, and you know, that’s just not nice.
But the whole “women are icky and smell bad” = specifically because their vaginas smell bad = is misogynist bullshit. Women’s reproductive systems actually work to maintain a PH balance on their own, and while having a lot of unprotected sex with multiple partners throws off that PH balance, that’s not really an advisable thing to do anyway, considering all the possible STDs, including HIV, and of course potential pregnancy.
Read Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography. It’s a great, scientific, readable book about women’s bodies and how they work, a must-read.
To all of you who read me regularly, & all of you who participate/subscribe to the boards, or buy my books, or recommend them: thank you. It’s been a much longer, more chaotic year than I ever expected – it’s become the book tour that won’t end, which is, ultimately, a good thing – and it’s meant a lot for me to hear from so many of you who send me PMs or emails or who comment here.
Ha, it’s nice to know that when my head finally explodes someone will be there to see it.
(That’s going on the idea that my head hasn’t already exploded, & we’ve all failed to notice.)
I had someone write to me recently who hoped I would one day get all the awards & accolades that I deserve, and I’m sure I didn’t get into this for either. But knowing that sometimes something I’ve written has made someone feel a little less crazy, or less ashamed, or less shitty – that’s totally worth it. (Though I will take her wish that I one day score the kind of advances a writer can live on while writing, of course.)
So I read The First Man-Made Man
But that’s not what bothered me so much: the tone of the book was remarkably condescending. The interview with the monk at the end just felt like a dick joke. & A lot of the time, the narration made me so uncomfortable I really just wanted to read the actual manuscript the first trans man wrote, instead. (Although from what I hear, no one seems to know if a copy exists at all anymore, or not.)
Don’t get me wrong: this is a valuable & interesting book & really gets at how remarkably new the tech was; I especially enjoyed the section on the early practitioners of plastic surgery. But it just felt to me that the author never really believed he was a guy at all, which strikes me as a remarkably unsympathetic way to write about not just transness, but about a trans man who was so inexorably alone as a trans person. Michael Dillon strikes me as a remarkable soul who had a tremendous amount of integrity and bravery, and frankly, this book gives you just enough about him to know that the book didn’t do him justice.
There’s an article in this month’s Writer’s Digest about “Alternative Fare” and specifically the LGBT markets in publishing, and I was interviewed for the T section.
Boyd points out that people of variant sexuality have always appeared in literature. “There is a long line of novel characters who are gender variant, from The Well of Loneliness to Orlando to Middlesex. I like to think of my work as having inherited a great deal from writers like Gertrude Stein or [Virginia] Woolf.”
The bit that was clipped was my clarification that people have always written books about being in love with someone who is gender variant, as in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Woolf’s Orlando.
Sonia in CO directed me to this interesting selection of YouTube videos by the always-astute Wayne Besen about sham marriages, but what caught her eye, and mine, was the comment by Zeke:
Why are discussions about gay spouses and the spouses that they betray, take advantage of, lie to, devastate, degrade, etc. ALWAYS, 100% of the time, about gay men and their victim wives. Why do we NEVER, EVER hear people talking about married lesbians and the husbands that they betray, take advantage of, lie to, devastate, degrade etc.? Lesbians marry men just as much as gay men marry women but yet they are NEVER discussed in the same visceral judgmental terms that are used speak of gay men.
He goes on to talk more about the way men are always villains and women always victims when we talk about divorce, in general. But I think the one thing that Zeke didn’t mention is how people are freaked out by sex between men, because they think it’s all about anal sex. I think that’s one of the reasons people are more offended/freaked out by gay men than by lesbians. I mean, women are also so valued for “being” sexy but we don’t talk much about women’s sexuality either, so I think – other than the uber-femme “fake” girl on girl porn, we tend to think of women who have sex with each other as doing something more like naked cuddling than – pardon my french – fucking.
There’s a story in Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity where she talks about this one case, in the UK, a century + ago, where the judges ruled out the possibility of these two female headmasters having sex with each other because – according to him – that wasn’t *possible.*
We also tend to assume women are more loyal, & more emotional; that women who leave a husband for a woman are doing so for love, while men – you know – men are always just out to get their rocks off.
That is, I think what Zeke missed is all the latent sexuality issues going on when we talk about divorce & relationships, & with all the gender stereotypes that come into it.
This, plus the recent Vatican issue, makes me wonder when we’re going to work out that half the problem is that men who come out as gay are villified because of all our own sexual hangups & mythologies.
This is the text of the talk I gave in Denver on Tuesday. It probably won’t surprise anyone that I’ve been busting at the seams wanting to have a say in all of the dialogue going on about ENDA. At least I don’t think it should surprise anyone, not by now.
**
First, let me thank Ed and Jordan and all the students who asked them to bring me here. It’s a pleasure to be here in celebration of National Coming Out Day, a pleasure to see all of you gathered, celebrating who you are. Thanks to all the crossdressers, the gays, the lesbians, the genderqueers, the trans men & women, MTF and FTM, & to their partners. Thanks to all of you who are family, or friends, or allies, for being here.
Betty and I have been on tour a lot this year because I had a book published in March, and we’ve gotten a chance, once again, to meet a lot of people and to talk to a lot of trans people and partners, and this year, we’ve met more gay and lesbian people who aren’t trans than we did before. And it’s been a pleasure all around in hearing people’s stories of their own gender variance, or the stories of how they came out to loved ones, or of their first big crush or the moment when they realized they were trans or gay or lesbian or how they came to understand the first identity they understood themselves to be was not quite accurate in the long run. What I love to hear the most is about how queer people find one identity fits for a while and then not at all; like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ chambered nautilus, queer people build themselves bigger chambers, bigger categories, labels that are not so confining, over time.
That’s how it’s been for us, certainly. By the time people get used to what we’re calling ourselves our identities have shifted a little, changed usually by experiences we never expected and wouldn’t trade for anything. Continue reading “On ENDA, on National Coming Out Day”