Rep Bernie Saunders of Vermont is once again going to try to get the Freedom to Read Amendment passed. The Amendment would cut off funding for library and bookstore searches that came with the USA Patriot Act.
You should contact your House Representative and urge him or her to vote yes on the Freedom to Read Amendment. You can find your Rep by checking the House’s website.
For more information, check the boards, and these organizations.
American Library Assocation
American Booksellers Association
Association of American Publishers
PEN American Center.
www.readerprivacy.org for more information.
Think-Tank
Tonight Betty and I did a presentation on trans/GLBT issues for an emerging lefty think-tank. It was formed just after the last presidential election, formed out of frustration, anger, and a sense of outrage – not just at who won, but at how the right had stolen words like “morality” (by which they really mean heteronormativity), “family” (again, only heteronormativite families need apply) and “family values” (when they meant, keep those freaks out of my neighborhood).
A lot of the conversation was just trans 101, which Betty and I rushed into and interrupted each other and circled around and back and forth. (The poor guy keeping notes gave up at some point, I think.) We got some of the basic points across, and of course the group got to meet Betty – not your average tranny, but who is?
One of the pertinent questions asked – and this is a smart group – was Where are the Surveys? Where’s the equivalent of the Kinsey Report on trans stuff? and, in a more tactical sense, How many are you, and how do we count you?
There weren’t any good answers for these good questions. Aside from Lynn Conway’s numbers on the prevalance of transsexualism, which doesn’t include crossdressers or drag kings or any of the rest of the gender-variant community, I don’t have any. How many of us are there? More importantly, how many of us are there who will stand up and be counted? What are our issues? Who will lead us? Who are our allies, and to what other (non-trans) causes can we lend our weight?
These are only some of the questions currently being discussed on the message boards, of which I’m very proud.
Come join the dialogue.
Why We Stay
Every once in a while, one of the partners in an online support group will get up the courage to ask, “But really, why do you stay?” It’s usually asked by someone new to the group, new to transness, who is looking at the prospect of having her husband become either a part-time or full-time woman, and who honestly can’t imagine herself staying, and can’t come up with one good reason why any woman would. I know I’ve told several women friends they could date CDs, and that’s about all they hear before they change the subject. It’s rare to find a woman who would even be open to dating a CD, much less finding one who would want to.
But it’s good for partners especially to cut through the sentimental stuff about love and soul-mates – not because that stuff isn’t true – and get to some of the more pragmatic issues at stake. I really appreciated having one of the older women on the list admit that her partner transitioned close to their mutual retirement age, and that neither of them had the funds to live separately, anyway. She added, as well, that after a few decades’ worth of marriage, her and her partner’s extended families had become her own. That’s a practical answer, one I believe more than the ones full of love. (I’m not much of a romantic: I’ve read way too much sociology.)
Deborah Feinbloom said in the 70s that we must all either have low self-esteem or be latent lesbians, of course. For me, that was a little too clinical, a little too cold an analysis, but over and over again I hear things from partners that make me wonder. Not about the lesbianism, but about the self-esteem. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that, either. That women don’t believe they can live in the world on their own might explain women who stay with alcoholics, abusive husbands, cheating spouses. But it still doesn’t explain us, the partners of transpeople.
I just read an essay called “Explaining stable partnerships among FTMs and MTFs: a significant difference?” by Frank Lewins on the differences between the FTM and MTF communities when it comes to relationships, and the writer came to all sorts of conclusions that had to be sought out – while avoiding the obvious one. In study after study he cited, transpeople with female partners turned out to be the ones who were in relationships. It didn’t matter if they were FTM or MTF.
I wonder, often, what that means about women. There is socialization: women are raised to value relationships and family more than men are. Women do tend to put relationships and family before career and status. Maybe there is a maternal instinct: women who love too much are not unlike partners of transfolks, who in some ways need to be protected, taken care of, and encouraged. I’ve never denied that one of the important, albeit Freudian, aspects of a relationship is the way two people might parent each other. But I don’t think that’s the whole of it, either.
I am pretty sure that a lot us simply don’t want to be single (again). We don’t want to live on what we can earn ourselves, because we’re still getting that 69 cents on a man’s dollar. Some don’t want to be single parents, and others are just plain used to their partners. Grayson Perry’s wife was quoted as saying something along the lines of “perverts are very loyal” so we know a little bit about why she stayed – loyalty weighed in as a stronger “pro” than the “con” of being married to a man who others view as a pervert. (It’s also obvious by her comment that she came armed with a sense of humor, too.)
But I still worry about the economics, and the fear, and how much of both motivates the partners of transpeople to stay. I worry because I know I’m one of those open-minded souls, who doesn’t mind taking the path less traveled. But others aren’t, and yet they stay, too.
Once I get past the “because Betty loves me and I love her, and we’re soul-mates” stuff, I end up back at “because I can.” All relationships, I think, are moderated by how close the relationship comes to what the person expected, and how much they get out if it vis a vis how much they put into it. I spent my whole life dating men for whom I had to put in 85% to their 15%. Betty puts in a lot more. She can talk. She likes politics. She values having a smart wife who’s a writer. She understands, as a basic premise, that relationships are full of compromise, unexpected joys, and most of all – friendship. For her, no matter how difficult I am, at the end of the day she knows she’s lucky to have a friend who is her lover – as am I.
Sometimes the obvious answer is the closest to the truth, even when it isn’t the whole truth: I think the only real secret of any successful relationship is that both people want to be together more than they want to be apart, and they do whatever it takes.
New Message Boards
After that awful hacking we took, Betty & I decided it was time to start fresh, and we’ve got the new boards up and running.
So please come join us – the water’s fine.
Helen & Betty
Apologies Again
Apologies once again for not being where I was supposed to be; I’d been looking forward to being on a plenary panel this morning with Eli Clare, Yosenio Lewis, and Betsy Driver to talk about “Alliances, Umbrellas, Coalitions?” in the trans community. I had a lot to say, too – since there were no other workshops that discussed either crossdressers or partners in the rest of this weekend’s conference.
I’ll eventually put my thoughts together and post them here, since once I thought about the subject I realized I had quite a lot to say.
In the
meantime, I fear I’ve managed to get Betty sick as well, and we’re not sure either of us is going to make it to the scheduled party for the NCTE tonight; nor will I make (I doubt) the screening of Susan Stryker’s documentary Screaming Queens, which I was very much looking forward to seeing (as we’d seen a teaser cut of it at Fantasia Fair last year).
On top of everything else, I’ve gotten worse, not better, as my stomach is now in revolt (from all the painkillers, aspirin, and anti-biotics.) The cats, however, encourage me to nap, which is about the only time I don’t feel like hell.
(^ Me with the cats, on a day where I felt much better than I do today.)
Welcome to the Re-Design
Welcome to the newly-redesigned www.myhusbandbetty.com. There’s nothing missing (well nothing that we won’t add back!) but there are a ton of new features I’m pleased about.
On your right, groovy links to pages about me, the book, & the website.
Then you’ll find an interesting set of “blog categories.” These are categories I can put my blog entries into (yes, I went back and categorized all of them) so my blog can now be read. If you only want to look at pictures of cats, say, you can do that. Or, if you only want to read my thoughts about various aspects of gender and the trans community. You pick.
The search box way up top is good for looking up something specific, like “Fantasia Fair” or “shoes.”
- If you keep scrolling down on the right, you’ll find
a recommended list of books (recommended by me, of course)
good places to find good sex advice
a list of links to trans resources and organizations
a list of other organizations i like
and the monthly archives for my blog
The cool thing is that this site re-design allows me to make changes more easily, and without Betty’s help (for the most part). So I’m hoping to make it a less static site, with more regularly-updated info.
Welcome! Feel free to look around, and let me know what you think. You can do that again, now, because I’ve got blog comments again, too.
Thanks to WordPress for great software, Betty for fixing every tiny little thing, and to all of you for making MHB a site worth re-designing.
Transvestites and Terminology, Redux
I wanted to reiterate one point: I’m not calling for people to start using the term transvestite if it makes them uncomfortable. I am all for people calling themselves what they themselves choose. In the same light, I’d love to see crossdressers accept the fact that some people will opt for transvestite- whether it’s because they’re from the UK, as a queer strategy, or for any other reason. We don’t have to agree on terminology in order to educate, by any stretch, and angrily arguing with another person with a male body who wears women’s clothes about what he calls himself seems counter-productive; likewise, writing a letter in response to a journalist’s use of the word is also pointless. My over-arching point was that it’s not the terminology that will make or break the chance of crossdressers and transvestites achieving public acceptance, but education as to the broader issues.
But I also think understanding where terms come from is important. Transvestite was coined by a fellow transvestite; I’ve just learned that Magnus Hirschfeld crossdressed (though if anyone can back up that claim, I’d like to see the evidence, as I’ve never run across it before). As much as I can understand a community choosing a new term over a word that had become loaded with negative connotations, I also strongly feel that taking back those words – emptying them of their charge – is equally valid. (I just learned that ‘Suffragette’ was a slur against the women who called themselves Suffragists, in fact, as if to minimalize and ‘make cute’ their issue. The Suffragists were not deterred by the slur and it certainly didn’t stop them in their tracks, since they won the right for women to vote not long after.)
Again, what words we use is not the important issue.
One of my themes recently has been that we need to be more gentle with each other within the trans community. We also need to ‘wait and see’ a bit more. I was accused not too long ago of using the term ‘real woman’ in one of my workshops. I was made aware of this fact by a transwoman who hadn’t read my book and who told me how offended she was, how hateful and hierarchical the term was, about a minute after my workshop ended. I was dumbfounded. As any of you who speak to groups know, you’re not always conscious of every word choice while you’re speaking. Still, I was pretty sure I hadn’t used the term – except perhaps in quotes, to indicate what someone else might have said. (Later, a transwoman and friend of mine, when she heard how upset I was, confessed that she had been the one to use the term in my workshop, and immediately volunteered to explain to the angry transwoman that she had attacked me unnecessarily. At the end of the day, the issue was resolved, but not before I’d felt attacked and shaken for having said something I never said.)
I’ve learned, as a feminist, that pointing out that I’m not a girl but a woman is met often with raised eyebrows. And this, within the trans community, where using the term transvestite instead of crossdresser or ‘real woman’ instead of ‘woman raised female’ can cause flame wars online and arguments in person! It’d be ironic if it were even a little bit funny, but it’s not. The constant use of ‘GG’ offends me regularly, for two reasons: because chromosomes are not necessarily the definitive evidence for one’s gender/sexing at birth, and because I’m over the age of 18 (as I like to remind my dad). But is it a big deal? No, it’s not. I mention it when someone refers to me as a girl, but if another partner or SO uses it for herself, I’m not going to correct her and tell her what she should be offended by.
Righteous anger over how transpeople are misrepresented is often needed, but a lot of the bickering and judgments we make of each other are unnecessary and distracting. I’ve read letters sent to newspaper editors, journalists, and the Lambda Literary Awards people that horrify me. Do we need to be righteously angry and insulting in order to get our point across? I’ve read exchanges on message boards that are more full of hate than I’d expect from my worst enemy. I understand anger, as I’m a punk rocker at heart, but are we really going to gain allies and educate the larger community by telling everyone they’re insensitive idiots? Must we use full-blown, dramatic rhetoric every time someone gets a pronoun wrong, or refers to a transsexual as transgender?
The question is whether or not we want to be heard beyond the trans ghetto, and if we do – what we need to get there. The community needs to be a place of support and power, a place that we go back to, to recharge and energize ourselves for the larger work of educating the general public. Time spent arguing about semantics among ourselves is time not spent coming up with creative ways to represent the trans community to the rest of the world in a positive way. Confronting each other instead of calmly suggesting a mistake makes it harder to collaborate in the future. Our words matter, but our attitudes matter more: the goal is tolerance by larger society, not who wins points on the message boards for telling a fellow transperson what-for.
Glitz Speech
Our trip to Phoenix and the Glitz was a little nutty thanks to the usual trans community in-fighting. I’d written this speech about partners and family, but when I got there I realized an entirely different speech was needed.
So I never delivered this one (though I will use it for an upcoming speech elsewhere, no doubt).
* * *
Thanks to G____, B_____, and to all the people of Transgender Harmony who put the Glitz together for inviting me to speak tonight. An especial thanks for the excellent timing – even a few days’ escape from a NY winter is more than welcome!
There are moments when I’m at an event like the Glitz, talking to another wife while our pretty husbands share beauty tips, and I wonder, “How did this happen? How did I get here?†and then “What did I do to deserve this?â€
Do you ever have those moments? Times when you’re just astonished at how things have turned out? I don’t know how many years you have to go back, but I’m sure all of you can remember a time when the only place you went en femme was from the bathroom to the bedroom. Your heels had never walked on pavement. Maybe there was a time when your wife didn’t know, or your best friend – maybe they still don’t. But everyone in this room has made some kind of progress to be here – whether this is your first time out (first timers? Where are you?) or if you’re in the middle of your real life test. How big a step, or how many you’ve taken, isn’t always the important thing.
One of the things a wife has a really good view of is how hungry for progress you are; it’s the thing that scares the dickens out of us. More than one CD has gone from telling his wife that he likes to wear women’s clothes to him planning their annual vacation around a trans conference, so he can spend a week en femme. You can call it euphoria, or kid in the candy store syndrome, but no matter what you call it, it makes wives nutty. That’s especially true when they’re initially accepting, in any way, because somehow, coming out as a crossdresser, or a transsexual, affects your ability to measure, and every mile only looks like an inch. As a result, we start to feel like we’ve been taken advantage of, with the ever-escalating needs, the ever-increasing purchases. There are times now I feel surprised when I see a man WITH underarm hair.
And of course it’s not just wives. For some of you, the loved one you drive most crazy might be a close friend, a parent, or a child. No matter who it is, there’s almost no doubt that your need to express yourself will make them a little crazy remembering the right pronouns. I’m here to tell you – we need your help.
A very mature but young transman told me recently that he dreaded telling his mother he’s going to live as a man. He wasn’t worried about her being accepting – in fact, he was pretty sure she would be – but he understood what he was taking away from her, and how much he was pushing her. He said to me, “She already accepted me as a lesbian, and lost all of her dreams of planning my big-white-dress wedding, and now she’s going to lose her daughter altogether.†And I thought, when he told me, that all of us should be raised as women until a certain age, where some of us can then decide to live as men. Transmen are – in my experience – the coolest guys ever. I like to joke with Betty that if I’d known about transmen when I was single, we might not have ever met. But my point is – he got it. He got the loss, the change, the sense of feeling that we have to accept more and more – that sometimes, it feels like the changes never stop.
What that transman knew and understood was that his transition wasn’t just about him, and that his own happiness was also the cause of his mother’s disappointment. His concern for her had the potential to enable him to help her through his transition. It gave her the chance to have a good relationship with her new son.
It’s not just people living fulltime who need to help their loved ones through change. A wife who is told her husband is a crossdresser has to adjust just about everything in her life as well. Her ideas of her marriage, her man, and her future all change. Her sex life might change. She has to start thinking about gender and so-called “deviance†in ways she probably never has before.
The thing is, I hear too many stories of things not working out. Whether the cause is transition or euphoria, I don’t really hear much in the greater trans community about how to think about others as part of your self-expression, and what I do hear seems to be kind of condescending, along the lines of “how do I get this person on board for what I want and need?†Which is not quite the same thing as “how do I help this person I love deal with the changes I’m about to thrust upon them?†or even “how do I modify my needs in order to keep this person I love from running as fast as she can?â€
There are workshops on fast track transition, but never any on transitioning slowly enough so your partner can keep up. There are workshops for CDs on how to remove hair but never one on how to do your wife’s makeup, so she can feel glamorous too. Endless makeovers, photo shoots, and receipts – all add up to a lot of time and energy and money, and the wives, and girlfriends, – especially the ones who are willing to be here, or join an online support group, deserve to feel pampered too. Look at it this way: if you spend as much on your partner as you do on your femme self and you won’t run out of closet room so fast. Honestly, would you go to a week-long conference for whatever her gig is? Would you want to be around a bunch of women who scrapbook, knit, write fiction, do yoga? Do you know as much about her as she does about both of you?
The bottom line is that your loves ones are your best allies – potentially. If you can help them understand, they can become the people who will stand up and say you’re not crazy, and that this isn’t a joke. We don’t have the shame to get past, we don’t have the internal conflict. Once we’re on board, we’re on board. You want us on your side. Nurturing our change – along with yours – will go a long long way toward getting us there.
I don’t say all this only because I’m a wife. I say it because I don’t want to see anyone else end up on the other side of the mirror alone. I say it because I’ve seen too many relationships – romantic, familial, friendships – strained to the breaking point. I know it’s not easy – that you’re impatient, that the revelation of who you are is HUGE. It’s easy, when you’re online, reading message boards or mailing lists, and coming to events like the Glitz, to think that everyone knows about gender. But they don’t. The education isn’t out there – on TV, transsexuals are still shown as serial killers when they’re seen at all. Crossdressers are still a joke. You know that when you tell family and friends, you have to start with transgender 101. I’ve yet to meet someone trans who isn’t on their way to a PhD in trans studies, which means, of course, that you’re way ahead of us, a Chief Financial Officer of a global corporation teaching someone how to balance a checkbook. The chasm between is what causes the difficulties. What we need – as your potential allies – is to get you to slow down, and yes – please repeat that.
We can all do something to help couples and families through. When a married CD friend says, “I went shopping,†you can ask: “what’d you get your wife?†When your favorite transwoman starts listing her hormones, WITH dosages, ask her how her mother, father, wife, or child is. Remind each other that you’re not in a void, that you’re not alone, and amazingly enough, that there’s more to life, and gender, than hose, heels, and hormones.
You deserve for there to be more. You deserve love, and happiness. Being trans is not easy – not ever. You’re reinventing yourselves in ways that are mind-blowing, but you innately understand why you need to. We don’t. We’ve never thought about gender. You have no choice. Most partners can get that. We can see the difference, even when we don’t like it. Sometimes we know it even when we know we can’t go with you. The liberation – the sheer joy – y’all exhibit is obvious. Hold onto it in your dark moments. Hold onto it when your mom screws up your pronouns for the Nth time. Hold onto it when you look in the mirror and don’t see what you want to see. Hold onto it when your wife cries about her loss. For you, there’s struggle and joy, but for us, it’s just struggle and loss. You need to find a way to let your joy, your liberation, infect us, recharge us. It’s your joy, your freedom, that will win over not just partners, but friends, employers, family – and the rest of society. And it’s way better than Angry Tranny Syndrome.
When most of us can’t make up our minds how to cut our hair or quit a job, you’ve gone and imagined the impossible – and started making plans to have it happen. If you give your loved ones a minute, once in a while, to catch their breath, they’ll be there for you when things look bleak. Your wife will remind you not to tuck your dress into your pantyhose. Your best friend will help you figure out the line between being a man’s man and a macho jerk. Your mom might be the one to see that after all, you DO look like her. Give us time, give us love, and give us hope. Some of us will get lost, or stuck. But lots of us – I mean look at this room! – will be the ones who help you go forward with grace, confidence – and far from alone.
* * *
SAMHSA Stonewall
A few counselors who intended to present a workshop at an upcoming SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) on suicide prevention in GLBT communities were asked to remove “GLBT” from the title of the workshop. Instead of the title being “Suicide Prevention in GLBT Communities” the suggested title is “Suicide Prevention in Vulnerable Communities.”
Likewise, any mention of “gender identity” was removed from the workshop’s description (although “sexual orientation” was allowed to remain).
Workshops with the previous title had been given at two other SAMHSA Conferences, but both before our last presidential election.
Currently there’s stonewalling going on, where the counsellors are being told it was all a “misunderstanding,” but no-one has said the original wording is now okay. The counsellors will be speaking to some members of the media about this tomorrow, and hopefully, they will take the lead.
In the meantime, there are few representatives you can contact to lodge a complaint. Please see the MHB forums for further information.
Femme Fever Ball
Karen of Femme Fever, who has been doing a lot great work with the trans community for the past 10 years, is hosting the First Ever Femme Fever Ball, to take place on February 26th. Dinner, a fashion show, dancing are all included with the price of a ticket (which you need to buy before 2/22). Please see the Femme Fever site for more details.
Karen offers transformation services as well as support groups for all within the trans community. Again, see her site for more details.