Tag: communities

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Virtual Book Tour

Today The New York Times published this piece, “The Author Will Take Q.’s Now,” about what it’s like to be an author these days. The funny thing is that I probably do more in-person touring because of the various trans conferences, and because – let’s be honest- the trans community isn’t the same as a bunch of people who are enthusiastic about baking or reading novels, because there are real needs involved, whether for trans people or partners themselves or for the community as a whole.

Still, if any of you are regular readers of other blogs, especially ones that review books and authors, do let them know about my book so that I might guest blog elsewhere.

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Five Questions With… Eli Clare

Eli Clare is the author of Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999) and has been widely published. He has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program and co-organized the first-ever Queerness and Disability Conference. He works for the University of Vermont ‘s LGBTQA Services. We were lucky enough to meet him at a Translating Identity Conference at UVM, and I was happy to get the chance to talk to him about his new book, The Marrow’s Telling, which was recently published by HomoFactus Press.

(1) Why poetry?

As a writer, my first love is poetry. I think of it as a thug who grabbed me by the collar many years ago and whispered in my ear, “You’re coming with me.” I went willingly, not having any idea where poetry would take me or what it would demand. Twenty-five years later I find myself writing a mix of poetry and creative nonfiction; my first book, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, is a collection of essays, and my second book, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion, which ought to be rolling off the press at any moment now, is a mix of poems and short prose pieces, not quite essays but more than prose poems.

Audre Lorde in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” writes of poetry as a “revelatory distillation of experience.” Poems demand both wildness/revelation–moments where language, sound, and rhythm, rather than thought or idea or analysis, take the lead–and discipline/distillation–the paring down to heart and bone. As a writer, a reader, an activist trying to make sense of the world, I need revelatory distillation.

I also know that in the United States too many of us have been taught to fear or avoid poetry, to feel bored or stupid in its presence. As an activist-poet, I always hope that my poems will be doors held wide open, roller coasters, parachutes opening above you, slow meandering rivers.

Continue reading “Five Questions With… Eli Clare”

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Victoria Arellano

I just happened to be catching up on my Feministing reading when I discovered a post by Jessica Hoffman about the death of trans inmate Victoria Arellano (or Arrelano) who was denied her AIDS medication and then Hoffman followed up her post wondering why this death hasn’t been covered.

It’s interesting time as just recently I’ve been bothered by a recent article in The Boston Globe about a doctor who transitioned with much of her life in tact – ironic since Arellano didn’t wind up with even her life in tact. Big article, no article.

& They say there’s no such thing as privilege.

Mind you, my complaints about the way various media outlets cover trans issues aren’t directed at the trans people who are often featured in these articles: their intentions are for the most part good, & they are trying, in their own way, to raise awareness of trans issues in general, all of which is much needed. It’s not that it was a terrible article in terms of The Big Picture, but I’m tired of journalists/media writing a piece that is pretty much like every other piece about a trans person (choosing someone professional, white, with a traditional narrative including surgery & the like) & presenting it as if it’s a revelation.

It’s not a revelation. I’d like to get the bar set a little higher, & to start pressuring media to cover more types of trans people, in more situations, with more of the kinds of issues that come up. Like what does a person like Betty, or others like her, do about the ID issue? What do people do when their license says one thing but they can’t get their passport changed? What are the issues for young transitioners, who are going to be dealing with discrimination from the outset of their careers? How is the expectation of not getting divorced changing what kinds of legal issues couples face? How does transness come into play with legal issues? What happens if a recent medical student comes out before she has a practice or an income or a family & established community?

I could go on. I won’t. Like I said, this is good for general use, but as someone who is “in the field” & who works with the media on a regular basis, I also feel I have a responsibility to pay attention to the way media coverage ISN’T changing at all, & how the struggle to represent the diversity of trans experience, from within the trans community, is or isn’t being reflected by the media, & maybe keeping an eye toward changing that, somehow.

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Trans Partner Advocacy

Recently on our message boards, the partner of someone who was transitioning posted about her very last day with her male husband. She was sad, she was mourning, and she was feeling both loss & resentment.

Sometimes the larger trans community seems to view feelings like that as anti-trans; that a partner isn’t throwing the big coming out party for her transitioning companion is seen as less than enthusiastic, and the difficult feelings are interpreted as saying ‘trans is bad.’

But the thing is, it’s part of the gig. There’s a lot of change involved in transition, which every trans person with half a brain admits. I mean, that’s the point. Change is a difficult thing for most people – all people, really – and it is stressful even when the change is a good thing, like getting a better job or getting married or having a baby that you’ve long wanted.

But to miss the old, worse job, or thinking fondly about the time when you were single or childfree, doesn’t mean you don’t want the new change in your life. You do. But you can’t just tell your mind not to think about how it once was, either.

& Sometimes I think that’s what’s expected of partners, that we never have a time to say, “I did love him as a man.” We can’t admit that we liked the cocky or shy guy we first fell in love with, & the partners of FTMs aren’t supposed to mourn the loss of breasts and smooth cheeks that they loved to touch.

But the thing is, as any trans person should know, repressing a feeling of loss or sadness is really bad all around; repression poisons the groundwater, in effect, and everyone feels it. So while I don’t advise partners make themselves miserable longing for the past (just as I wouldn’t advise trans people to think the future will definitely be rosy simply because they’ll transition), expressing the more difficult feelings associated with transition is healthier, in my opinion, in the long run. Not easy to hear as the trans person, for sure, but from what I hear from same trans people, they too may need some time to mourn the loss of their own former self.

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The Importance of Being Earnest, or Accurate, or Both

A reviewer recently misquoted me as having written that I was called a “dyke” when I was a kid, when in fact the word I used was “butch.”

That mistake, while minor on the surface, has got me thinking.

The difference between the words is that essential difference between sexual orientation and gender presentation, which are often conflated in the first place, but which I tried to dissect in She’s Not the Man I Married. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t issues like this that cause some of the rift between the gay/lesbian community and the trans community; I’d imagine, for many masculine-leaning lesbians, “butch” and “dyke” are pretty much the same slur. But the thing is, “butch” bothered me – because it was true. I was butch. Being called a dyke never had the same effect, exactly because I knew myself to be heterosexual.

Of course reading that kind of error made me wonder about how much the critic could have actually gotten out of my book, or how much she might have been willing to get out of it. I’m fascinated by the ways gender variance is allocated to gay & lesbian people but not to heterosexuals; it’s a big theme of the book. For someone for whom the words “dyke” and “butch” are the same thing, I must seem like I’m splitting hairs. But the review, alas, did end:

(I)t’s an earnest book that might appeal to those questioning the nature of gender identity, marriage, and social attitudes about both.

& I did learn, quite a long time ago, the vital importance of being earnest.

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Public/Private

So do I get to be a private person, too?

That’s the thought that’s been going through my head lately, since a partner in another online group for partners I belonged to recently commented that she was feeling hesitant about reading She’s Not the Man I Married because Betty stepped in to defend me on some occasion on the message boards.

& I was a little surprised, for two reasons: (1) because the idea of someone deciding I’m not independent enough or that I’ve hidden behind Betty’s skirts (as it were) kind of confounds me in general, considering the criticism I get more often is that I’m such a ball-buster who is exploiting Betty for the fame & fortune, and (2) because it never occurred to me that others wouldn’t recognize that while I have a public life as a partner & as an author, I’m also still also just one of a gazillion partners of trans people who is trundling through this experience. Continue reading “Public/Private”

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TransForming Community Anthology

I’m up at my usual ungodly hour having just finished a piece for an upcoming anthology called TransForming Community: Stories from Merging Trans and Queer Communities which will come out on Suspect Thoughts Press next year and is being edited by Michelle Tea and Julia Serano.

It comes out of a spoken word series Michelle Tea started a while back; Julia Serano recently reported on her experience at one.

My piece is on queer heterosexuals, specifically crossdressers/transvestites and their female partners, and how we do or don’t fit into queer community, or straight community, or trans community, depending.

It’s also about how to tie your shoes.

When I have a final edit, I’ll put an excerpt of it up here.

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The Penn State Law Talk

I’m hoping that this talk was recorded as planned and so will be available on Penn State Dickinson School of Law’s website, eventually, because there were a lot of interesting questions discussed in the Q&A after I spoke. Prof. Rains also added a lot of useful legal insight.

I started with a kind of preface in order (1) to define terms like transgender, MTF and FTM, and also (2) to explain that while people like drag queens and crossdressers are considered part of the transgender community, discussions about legal marriage issues don’t always or often effect them; that is, this talk concerns people who identify nearer to the transsexual end of things. that said, drag queens are often already gay and so deal with the same marriage discrimination all gay people do, and crossdressers often suffer with the stigma of being perverts, and one of the reasons they are not out is exactly because they don’t want their wives to divorce them, or lose custody of their children, or lose their jobs, all of which can & does happen to crossdressers who come out.

I never expected that any aspect of my life would cause me to speak at a law school to future lawyers about the odd ways that my life has become complicated by laws about gender and marriage. I’m surprised two-fold: for starters, I never expected to get married, since as a younger and Very Serious Feminist I saw it as a Tool of Patriarchy, symbolic at least of the ways women have always been chattel, and so, not for me. But I also never expected to get married because I was, starting as a teenager in the late 80s, an ally of gay and lesbian people.

& Then I met Betty, who at the time we met presented as male, and as she likes to explain, we knew, both of us, nearly from the get-go that we were supposed to be together. It’s a difficult feeling to explain, and poets have tried, but it took us a few years to decide once & for all that we were in this thing together. We decided to get married because things were so easy between us; on our 2nd date we sat together and read, one of us The Nation and the other The New York Times. When you’re something like an old married couple on your 2nd date, you know that you’re doomed.

Continue reading “The Penn State Law Talk”

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Philly IFGE

When we arrived at IFGE, we were greeted nearly immediately by Veronica Vera & Mariette Pathy Allen, even while we were checking in! Miss Vera would answer the question “Are crossdressers obsolete?” in her opening remarks the next day, & she looked fantastic. (Her answer, in a nutshell, was “no.”)

Crossdressers made a graceful stand for their place in the trans community this year, as in addition to Miss Vera, Miqqi Gilbert received a Trinity Award & delivered an acceptance speech that both (1) asked crossdressers to step up & (2) asked anyone who would disrespect or exclude CDs to step off. I was damned glad to hear it, since there really are some trans women who come off so smug I often feel tempted to mention that being a woman does not prevent one from liking crossdressers.

Donna Rose (author of Wrapped in Blue) & Alyson Meiselman (one of Christie Lee Littleton‘s lawyers) won Trinity Awards as well, which was an interesting juxtaposition, since Donna Rose is on the Board of HRC, which I imagine Meiselman considers something like the Evil Empire, since she delivered an acceptance speech that detailed exactly how much groups like Equality Georgia (& by extension, groups like HRC) sold out the trans community by not excluding “gender identity & expression” in legislation that got them theirs (discrimination protection for gays & lesbians).

Dallas Denny was given the Virginia Prince Award for Lifetime Achievement, and intended to explain that she’d turned down the award in years past because she was the paid editor of Transgender Tapestry at the time, but as she stepped down last year, she felt free to accept it this year, & did so with a concise list of what concerns her about the current state of the trans community (underfunded orgs) & what encourages her (the increases in visibility).

The biggest, nicest surprise for us was having Jamison Green unexpectedly in attendance. He stayed over from having given the keynote at Trans Health the previous week in Philly. His presence always adds some warmth and intelligence.

Our favorite new personality & friend was Ethan St. Pierre of NTAC & TransFM & FUAH. (NTAC, btw, has merged with IFGE, the news of which was announced at this conference.) Betty finally got to meet the irrepressible Monica Helms, of TAVA, who I met last year when I went by myself, & many games of wise-cracking pool were played.

& There ends the bigwig update from IFGE. More on our personal experiences when I get there.