Tag: crossdressing

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Letter To a Wife

My friend Shirene, who I met while I was researching My Husband Betty, and at a SPICE conference to boot, has contined to work with wives who have just found out their husbands are crossdressers. She wrote this letter recently to one such wife, and I thought it was worth sharing here, for any husband who might want to use it to help come out to his wife, or for any wife who has just found out.

I don’t necessarily agree with how she simplifies certain issues – like the “crossdressers are heterosexual” meme – but a lot of the rest of it is a good “talking down” for a new wife who might be completely panicking.

Dear Jill,

Hi.  I hope you don’t mind receiving a letter like this from a stranger, but my husband is  transgender also and I know that if I could have received a letter such as this when I found out, it would have made it easier on both me and my husband. My name is Shirene, I’m 43, we live in S******, IL and I’ve known about Shayla since ‘98.  We’re at 555 555 5555.

I will admit it’s somewhat of an adapted form letter so please ignore the things that don’t apply to your situation and please excuse the things I’m telling you that you already know. Continue reading “Letter To a Wife”

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Site Re-Design

My old blog template couldn’t make use of all the groovy new widgets and functionality of WordPress, so I dove into a site re-design the other day, and I’m still tweaking.

I’ve kept lots of cool stuff, like my flickr badge and extensive blogroll, but here’s the cool new stuff:

  • more & newer photos in the random photo header
  • a compact category list
  • a tag cloud! this one excites me, even if it means going back & tagging 5 years of blog posts. still, it helps locate more of my posts on specific topics, like crossdressing, or the Gwen Araujo trial.
  • & most importantly for you, dear reader, is the new “share this” button on every post, so you can put my stuff up on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, LJ, and Technorati. But you can also email it to a friend! How cool is that? I feel like The New York Times.

So do explore, and if you have any more suggestions, that’s what the comments section is for. In the next months I’m hoping to update both helenboydbooks.com and Trans Group Blog, but for right now, I’ve had my fill of tweaking code.

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Trans for Obama: Ongoing Issues

Goal Thermometer

Kate Bornstein is fired up, and wants our various transgender communities to start working together more, all because she’s dizzily happy about being acknowledged by the Obama campaign. Jillian Weiss is asking similar questions, but more along the “how in hell did this happen?” about the Trans for Obama campaign. I love that she calls me a Transgender Media Empire – that kills me, since I’m really just an underemployed author with a tech-savvy partner. Even on Monday, when I put a lot of energy into Trans for Obama, half the reason was that I had to take the GRE two days later and my best-loved furball was having surgery.

Still, this issue of “community” is one that always frustrates me. Community is about being willing; if you want in, come on in, and if you don’t, please go away. It’s as simple as that, imho: the HBS type are free to do whatever it is they do (and some are active in feminist issues, actually, instead of trans ones), and the homophobic crossdressers, of which there are some, can hang out together by themselves, and – well, you get the idea. I don’t really care, honestly: since my existence as a member of the trans community is always liminal to some people, because I’m a partner & not trans myself, I’m all for defining community by those who want to be there.

But Monica Roberts (in the comments section of Jillian Weiss’ Bilerico post) has brought up the issue of trans POC not being encouraged, or recognized, and I think she’s right that we need to do more. So I’m looking for a trans POC volunteer to take over my blog for a day, to at least raise some awareness.

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The Umbrella

There’s been a recent thread on the message boards about the relative usefulness & accuracy of the “transgender umbrella” & quite frankly, I’m stumped by people who have a problem with the idea. I don’t see that it’s a complicated idea: that people who “trans” gender in some way – change, permanently or temporarily, their gender, or question the binary, etc. – have something in common. It doesn’t mean you’re all alike. It doesn’t mean you share all causes or issues or complaints. It doesn’t mean anything except that at some point, you question(ed) the assignment of an F or an M on your birth certificate as an accurate description of your gender at all times.

What I expect underlays the complications is an expectation of harmony, or unity, under that umbrella. That’s not going to happen, simply because different types of people under the umbrella have different experiences, identities, and definitely different complications with expressing that identity in the world. The post-op young transitioner who is happily married to a man may pass seamlessly as a woman, but only stealth keeps it that way. The crossdresser needs places to change, & community that isn’t heterocentric or homophobic. The genderqueer person wants to be acknowledge that they do not have a single gender, or any gender, or a consistent gender, or a binary-driven gender, depending on how they express being genderqueer.

There’s a lovely amount of variety.

What I think happens is that some forms of transness are considered “less than.” I can understand why a trans woman might feel her femininity mocked, or made questionable, by a crossdresser’s evocations of feminity. I’ve felt the same way when faced with some crossdressers’ interpretation of feminine. But I can’t imagine disliking crossdressers as a group because of that. After all, as many partners & feminists have experienced, transness in general tends to blow up a cissexual’s notions of gender in the first place, with its emphasis on nature & not nurture. We don’t dislike trans people as a result (well, some people do, of course, but I’m assuming most people reading this think that’s kind of dumb, if not outright prejudice.)

It’s not as if I’m not horrified by the behavior of some white folks, or other women, or writers, or Brooklynites, but I can’t deny I have something in common with them, either.

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Felicity’s Last Flight

Felicity Chandelle, pilot and crossdresser, died Monday at the age of 102. She was, as far as I know, the world’s oldest living crossdresser. I interviewed her a few years ago, when she turned 100, and not long after that she donated all of her papers – many of them magazines about crossdressing – to the LGBT Center Library here in New York. Some of them would not be able to be used until after her death, whereupon her male, legal name could be revealed, as if her part of her collection, too, were crossdressed.

Thanks for the gift Felicity. Fly right.

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1st Battalion Tranvestites Brigade

Just in time for Pride month, Lena found this lovely 1st Battalion Transvestite Brigade: Airborne Unit t-shirt. Now before anyone gets upset with me for using the term transvestite (again), this shirt is drawn from an Eddie Izzard routine in Dress to Kill, and Izzard is, of course, a self-identified transvestite himself.

Were you surprised?

I was surprised.

Which are lines that Betty & I use on a regular basis at home.

& Yes, I’ve already ordered one for myself, even if I already missed wearing it to Brooklyn Pride.

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Goddess Worship

The Times of India ran an interesting story about a crossdressing religious tradition:

They are about to take part in the Kottankulangara Sridevi temple festival. The ancient temple in Chavara, Kerala, has a unique tradition. On the last two days of the festival, regular men, common office-going professionals, dress up as women for the chamayavilakku (chamaya is make-up, vilakku is lamp). Bedecked with flowers, lamps in hand, they wait patiently till the wee hours of dawn for the goddess to bless them.

It’s also become a gathering for “feminine men,” or Kothis – which the article identifies as homosexuals and transvestites.

(Thanks to Veronica for the link.)

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Top Ten Trans Reads

Out Magazine recently put together a really asinine list of transgender books for their transgender issue. I haven’t seen the issue, but the list doesn’t really inspire me to go buy it, either, since Myra Breckinridge is on it.

For the past years I’ve always mixed my gender / feminism / trans books, but since that Top 10 of Out‘s is so lame, and the Lammies recently neglected Whipping Girl, which they shouldn’t have, I thought instead I should post my own Top Ten Recommended Trans Reads for LGBTQ readers. There are a few everyone might not need to read – like Virginia Erhardt’s Head Over Heels, which is about the partners of MTFs – or they might want to substitute Minnie Bruce Pratt’s S/he instead – but mostly this list gives a good “big picture” view of the trans community, including a variety of identities.

I might suggest different books for family & friends who are trying to understand transition but who aren’t big readers, & I’ll have to think about that list, too.

Of course now that I’ve written it I have to say I’d add my own books, My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married, too.

& Maybe The Drag Queens of New York as well.

  1. Butch is a Noun – S. Bear Bergman
  2. Gender Outlaw – Kate Bornstein
  3. Crossdressing, Sex & Gender – Bullough & Bullough
  4. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism – Patrick Califia
  5. Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals – Virginia Erhardt
  6. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman – Leslie Feinberg
  7. Becoming a Visible Man – Jamison Green
  8. Mom, I Need to be a Girl – Just Evelyn
  9. Whipping Girl – Julia Serano
  10. Transition & Beyond – Reid Vanderbergh

You’ll notice none of them is a YETA (Yet Another Transsexual Autobiography), since after you read Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There (which I assume everyone has) you don’t need to read any others, and hers is the best-written, in my opinion. You can see the list in context on my Transgender Books page, which has reviews or links to reviews and discussions of them all.

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Trans History Timeline

I’ve been putting together a Trans History Timeline for my Transgender Lives class. The idea was to give them an idea of the events that lead up to the modern Transgender Movement (such as it is).

  • 1910 Magnus Hirschfeld coins “transvestite” and “transsexual”
  • 1919 Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research given housing
  • 1930 Lili Elbe undergoes five surgeries, the fifth of which kills her in 1931
  • 1933 Institute for Sexual Research burned by Nazis
  • 1939 – 1945 WWII
  • 1945 Michael Dillon has first FTM surgeries
  • 1951 Roberta Cowell transitions in the UK
  • 1952 Christine Jorgensen headline, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Bombshell”
  • 1959 Virginia Prince starts Transvestia
  • 1961 VP starts Heels & Hose (12 crossdressers!)
  • 1964 Reed Erickson founds the Erickson Institute
  • 1966 Harry Benjamin publishes The Transsexual Phenomenon
  • 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riots, SF
  • 1969 Ist Gender Symposia (becomes HBIGDA)
  • 1969 Stonewall, NYC
  • 1973 First Introduction of ENDA (US)
  • 1975 Fantasia Fair starts in Provincetown, founded by Ariadne Kane
  • 1976 Tri-Ess formed
  • 1976 Crossdressing becomes legal in SF
  • 1977 HBIGDA becomes an org
  • 1979 Sandy Stone leaves Olivia Records due to attacks in Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire
  • 1980 Crossdressing becomes legal in Houston, TX (due to Phyllis Frye’s efforts)
  • 1986 FTM Int’l started by Lou Sullivan
  • 1987 IFGE formed
  • 1990 AEGIS started by Dallas Denny
  • 1993 Mosaic web browser
  • 1994 Death of Brandon Teena / Netscape web browser
  • 1995 “All FTM Conference of the Americas” organized by Jamison Green & Jason Cromwell (with grant from Dallas Denny)

I was teaching Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man at the time, which is why it ends where it does, but I’ve been adding to it since, & will continue to do so.