Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
I’m watching the live feed of the Largo City Council hearings, starting at 8:30 PM, where citizens are getting a chance to speak up about the firing of Steve Stanton.
(12:05 AM) Dammit dammit dammit. Steve Stanton has lost the job.
(Read below the break for the whole night’s blogging & commentary.)
Virginia Erhardt, Ph.D. is a licensed therapist, a founding member of the American Gender Institute, and the author of Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals.
(1) How long did it take you to compile the stories in Head Over Heels? Where did you find partners who were willing to talk about their experiences?
It was about two and a half years from the point at which I began soliciting participation in 2002 and then sent out questionnaires, until the time when I had created “stories” from the SOs’ responses to my questions. During that time I also worked on my substantive, didactic chapters. It took another two years and a few months from the time when I completed the project and signed a contract with The Haworth Press until Head Over Heels was in print.
I put out a Call for Participants to every online listserve and transgender print publication I could think of. I also requested participation from people at trans conferences at which I presented.
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Virginia Erhardt”
One of the revelations I had at First Event came as a result of talking to one trans woman after I did my talk and she ripped me a new one about partners needing more support, precisely because hers was a wife who refused to learn anything & refused to accept anything & left. She spoke to me from a place of pain & I appreciated her honesty. Later, someone else told me that her wife requested a divorce & the date of separation listed on the decree was the day she told her spouse she was trans. Those two experiences explained the resistance I feel sometimes when I talk about having partners become more involved in the larger trans community, or even when I speak as an advocate for partners at all: there’s just too much pain for a lot of trans people around the subject of relationships, that too many trans people don’t think partners need support because their own partners didn’t want it, didn’t look for it, and just wanted out.
The second half of that revelation is that partners really do need the support. The group I hosted was varied: some lesbian-identified partners of FTMs, mostly wives/girlfriends of crossdressers and transgender and transsexual MTFs, and one male partner of a younger MTF. We didn’t always share outlooks, or life experiences, or even attitudes about transness (though we did agree that nobody knows what causes it). But the one thing that came up over & over again was the sense of isolation we all experience, of not knowing others like us, of not having anyone to talk to about the most intimate parts of our lives.
What occurred to me is that I feel like I have to stand up, & want to keep writing & being visible. I thought later that trans people have so many role models, so many sources of (various forms of) success: the Christine Jorgensens and Virginia Princes and Jenny Boylans and Kate Bornsteins and Robert Eadses and Jamison Greens and Leslie Feinbergs. So many I can’t even list them all. But is there any partner of a trans person whose name people know? Is there anyone partners can point to and say, “She did it”? There isn’t, not one. & I don’t really want to be that person; I’d argue that I’m NOT that person. But in some ways I want, at least, to keep talking about partners and partners’ issues not just because partners need the role models, but because trans people should know that they can and will be loved for who they are. I want trans people and partners alike to be able to see that trans people do not exist in a void, that they have lovers and spouses and children and parents and siblings.
Sometimes I don’t think trans people realize just that simple fact of it. You all may have paths that are difficult to find, that leave off just when you think they’re going somewhere, or that stop cold, but partners are still standing at the edge of the jungle, machete in hand. There isn’t even a bad path visible.
But mostly I don’t think the pain of how badly things have gone for some people should dictate all our lives, which is why I keep talking, and keep pushing therapists and the trans community at large to find ways to support the partners who have at least made a commitment to try. What I want to see is not for all couples to stay together, but more that couples separate without the kind of bitterness & hostility I’ve already seen too many times.
Although Richard M. Juang is an otherwise studious English professor, I came to know him through my participation with the NCTE Board of Advisors, and increasingly found him to be gentle and smart as a whip. We got to sit down and talk recently at First Event, where he agreed to answer my Five Questions.
(1) Tell me about the impetus that lead to writing Transgender Rights. Why now? Why you, Paisley Currah, and Shannon Price Minter?
Transgender Rights helps create a discussion of the concrete issues faced by transgender people and communities. Our contributors have all written in an accessible way, while also respecting the need for complex in-depth thought, whether the topic is employment, family law, health care, poverty, or hate crimes. We also provide two important primary documents and commentaries on them: the International Bill of Gender Rights and an important decision from the Colombian Constitutional Court concerning an intersex child. Both have important implications for thinking about how one articulates the right of gender self-determination in law. We wanted to create a single volume that would let students, activists, attorneys, and policy-makers think about transgender civil rights issues, history, and political activism well beyond Transgender 101.
One of the things the book doesn’t do is get bogged down in a lot of debate about how to define “transgender” or about what transgender identity “means”; we wanted to break sharply away from that tendency in scholarly writing. Instead, we wanted to make available a well-informed overview about the legal and political reality that transgender people live in.
Oddly enough, Shannon, Paisley and I each did graduate work in a different field at Cornell University in Ithaca NY. (Apparently, a small town in upstate New York is a good place to create transgender activists!) The book represents a cross-disciplinary collaboration where, although we had common goals for the book, we also had different perspectives. The result was that, as editors, we were able to stay alert to the fact that the transgender movement is diverse and has many different priorities and types of activism.
I’m starting to get emails from people asking about the new book and whether or not I’d be willing to come to one trans conference or another. Likewise, the “call for presenters” emails are also showing up.
This year, for obvious reasons, Betty & I would love to go to all the conferences we’ve attended before – to celebrate the new book, to help more people, to dispel what rumors we can and to share what we’ve learned in the years since we’ve been to them.
But the same old problem stands in my way: we can’t afford it. My publishers don’t pay for conferences, and a physical book tour, per se, isn’t financially feasible. And as per usual, unless I’m to be the keynote speaker – such as at First Event – I’m told over and over again that the conferences do not help presenters get to these conferences or even waive conference fees, much less pay for hotel rooms or travel costs or the like. I say “I’m told” because that’s what conference organizers tell people when they have requested my attendance – and yet that’s not what I hear from other presenters.
Interestingly, I’ve been told that because I’m selling books I’m a “commercial interest,” which amuses me, considering that even if I sold a book to every single person who came to these conferences – which is far from likely – I still wouldn’t make enough money to break even! But of course I don’t actually sell my own books at these conferences: IFGE does.
So my response to everyone just now is that I honestly don’t know if we can come. We can’t afford to put out the $1000-2000 it costs for us to go to a conference, but we certainly can’t do that several times next year. It costs us more of course because there are two of us – and people always want Betty to come, because she’s Betty.
Mind you, I’m not asking to make money going to these things. I just don’t want to have to spend my own money working for a conference that is – from all reports – making money. I’m happy to donate my time and costs to conferences that are non-profit and have done so in the past. It would help if I felt any of these conferences had a clear-cut policy on these issues. But beyond all that, I know I can draw an audience because I’m told I make a decent advocate for partners, and that a lot of what I have to say is very different from what you hear in the rest of the trans community, and that that difference is useful.
Unfortunately, then, I can’t go unless my expenses are covered, and that is up to the organizing committees of the various conferences.
In case anyone’s deluded into thinking all’s well in genderland, someone named Arlene Starr decided to take me to task for my post on the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
She writes:
I must be too sensitive, be that as it may I was totally offended by Helen Boyd’s first line of her blog entry for the 20th. It read;
“Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we honor our dead.â€
We Helen? What gives you the right to stake any claim to this day? This is your husbands day, my day and others like me. Is nothing sacred? Let us remember our dead as only we can do. Try as you might to be one of us you are an outsider and always will be. Once again you have proven how little you really know about “Trans.â€
Charming person, eh? It’s this kind of attitude that makes partners (and family) of trans people feel unwelcome in the trans community. Of course I’m not trans, but if she thinks violence against gender variant folks isn’t my problem, she’s off her rocker. It’s true: I’m never scared for Betty. I’m never worried we’re targeted for violence as a same sex couple because of Betty’s transness. & Of course I’d never find myself needing to protect Betty if some jerk figures out she was born male.
Holy hand grenades, Batman: we’ve got a bitter dimwit on our hands.
So I found this interesting article – way more measured and frankly, sympathetic, than most articles about transness that throw around the word “mutilation,” so instead of ignoring it as I’d normally do, I responded.
I certainly understand where you’re coming from, Josie, but tell me this: what do we do with the people who could be either? Who are both?
My husband is. She never knows what bathroom to use. We worry about someone disagreeing with the M on her license.
A lot of people who are innately gender variant, or androgynous, may transition only because more cards fall on the F than on the M when they fall from the sky.
And at the moment, the only way to get your ID changed is to get genital surgery.
I think a lot more of them would keep their healthy, operative genitals if that weren’t the case, but you try telling the DMV you want neither gender marked on your license.
Go ahead.
Or, just read some of Dr. Harry Benjamin’s work. People have tried to relieve transsexualism via therapy, spirituality, and all sorts of other non-operative means. But what Benajamin notices is that it doesn’t work. So he fixed their body (since their minds wouldn’t be changed).
There are plenty of us working within the trans community who would like to see people be able to peacably live as either gender, or both, or fluid. But living that way is, for now, brutally hard work. I’d agree with you, philosophically, if I didn’t see what my husband and other friends go through every day, all day long, day after day after day. The world just beats the crap out of them, puts them at greater risk for hate crimes, and insists on them being “ma’am” or “sir” when it comes to buying a cup of coffee to using a public toilet.
So, join us. Make the world safe for the gender variant, with us.
helen boyd
www.myhusbandbetty.com
There are a lot of other ways to respond, but this was the one that struck me. I’m sure some of you can add other important facts. Just please, be polite and be reasoned.
Just in time for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, held annually on November 20th, NCTE has published a small manual called Responding to Hate Crimes: A Community Resource Manual, which, according to NCTE’s Simon Aronoff, “represents a holistic, community-based approach to responding to hate violence in a wya that aims to curb the number of attacks faced by transgender people.”
Read the full press release from NCTE below the break, and read or download a copy of the manual at NCTE’s website: http://www.nctequality.org/resources/hatecrimes.pdf
Finalists for the 2005 Lambda Literary Awards (alphabetical by category):
Transgender/GenderQueer
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press)
In a Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam (NYU Press)
Deliver Me from Nowhere by Tennessee Jones (Soft Skull Press)
Just Add Hormones by Matt Kailey (Beacon Press)
The Riddle of Gender by Deborah Rudacille (Pantheon)
Excerpt from Chapter 4 – Snips & Snails & Sugar & Spice:
Gender variant heterosexuals often are the people others gossip about, the ones that people mumble are just closet cases married to each other. Those slightly feminine older bachelors who everyone assumes are gay are probably at least occasionally crossdressers. Some of them are perhaps surprisingly het—as Betty and I both were to many people who knew us, including our families. But we exist. (I like to joke that Betty’s parents didn’t care so much that I was a liberal because they were so relieved I was a woman.) I would imagine not a few of us just learn how to get by; Betty hid her gender variance from a young age because of how huge the taboo against being a sissy is, and I was free to be a tomboy until puberty. We both got a slight break in the androgynous ’80s, and we’re both very thankful for that bit of cultural good timing. But once we were both in our twenties, we tried very hard to perform our respective gender roles properly. For Betty that meant pretty much avoiding relationships, and for me, it always felt like playing a part. My guess is that we have both now begun to acknowledge our gender variance because we have found a place to do so: the larger LGBT community. Since the T has been added, we have effectively been welcomed into the only subset of American culture that acknowledges gender variance. We are those mysterious “queer heterosexuals†that are starting to get mentioned in academic journals and LGBT papers.