Cynthia Majors was born and raised in Teaneck New Jersey. She graduated from Teaneck High School in 1970 and Bergen Community College with a BA in 1972. She and her wife Sharla were married in Sept of 1983 and still live in Teaneck. Cynthia has been a member of Chi Delta Mu Chapter of Tri-Ess for about 10 years and is now serving as President for the second time. Besides being an active amateur drag performer Cynthia is also a member of a Drag Performance group called Flavah which has been a regular in the NYC Pride Parade for the last several years . Their photos have appeared in the NY Daily News and the front page of AM New York. In addition Cynthia has been interviewed on both WPLJ and WINS Radio on several TG issues.
1) You were President of CDM and then you weren’t and now you are again: did you take a break or are you feeling reluctant about leading CDM?
To put it frankly, I took a break. I felt that I was getting in over my head because I was trying to do everything myself and it just wasn’t working. I had gone into being President with what I had thought were some very good ideas but when things didn’t work out the way I had hoped I became frustrated and I think it had a very adverse effect on how I handled myself and the group. When election time came around again I had no interest in continuing as President. Now. a little older and a lot wiser, I’ve opted to try it again for several reasons. First I now have a great team working with me. My wife Sharla is the Treasurer and Linda Mills is my VP. I’ve finally learned that things need to be delegated or you burn out-not an easy lesson for a Type A personality to take in.
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1st Preview of She's Not the Man I Married
I thought I’d put up a little preview of some stuff I’ve been writing for my next book. You know, just for fun. I can’t promise anything I put up here will end up in the final, though.
This excerpt is taken from Chapter 1 – Girl Meets Boy:
There’s an old standby in the crossdressing community, a line that crossdressers tend to use on their wives, that goes: “But I’m the same person underneath.†The wife, who is standing there looking at a person who sounds like her husband and who might look like him somewhere under the wig and breast forms and press-on nails, tries to parse what exactly that’s supposed to mean. She’s suspicious that her husband is trying to blow smoke up her ass, the same as a husband who might come up with an ingenious reason why he had to spend his weekend fishing instead of shopping for new sofa upholstery. She might look at him, adjust his wig, and then sigh and take him shopping.
Others just balk.
Some women are just smarter than me, I think, and when they first heard that line, they ran for the hills. Likewise for the ones who hightail it when they hear their husbands say, “I’ve always imagined what it would be like to have breasts,†or “When I was young, I always wished I was Susie Perkins.†They call a lawyer, they get custody of the children, and they wish their future ex-husbands well, but want no part of it. Not me. I didn’t believe in gender; gender wasn’t important.
Review: Leslie Feinberg's Drag King Dreams
Murdered Crossdressers, and Other Facts of Trans Life
review by Helen Boyd
June 3, 2006
Drag King Dreams
Caroll & Graf
by Leslie Feinberg
I’m not sure Leslie Feinberg has an actual fan club, but if there is one, I want in.
When I first read Stone Butch Blues, it blew my mind. A lesbian friend – since transitioned – made me read it. Made me, and for good reason: it’s like a sledgehammer of experience for anyone who has ever lived in the world as queer, or working class, and especially for anyone who has lived in the world as both. My friend knew it would speak to me, as it spoke to him.
Transgender Warriors was equally great, full of information, rage, inspiration. I remember practically pointing out passages to strangers on the subway when I was reading it.
But Drag King Dreams is like something from another world. Leslie Feinberg is not just remarkable as a person, and activist, but as a writer. Or as a radical, righteous soul. When I met hir at TIC (UVM’s trans conference), zie came up to thank me and Betty for what we were doing, and I could have been knocked over with a feather. I’m still astonished. Leslie Feinberg thanking me? For anything? Absurd. But now I know why. Leslie Feinberg was thinking about crossdressers, and zie was thining about crossdressers a lot, and in deep, empathetic ways.
Crossdressers: buy this book. You think I’m your friend? Leslie Feinberg is the mensch you want at your back, believe me.
The book starts with Max Rabinowitz (transman, drag king, genderqueer, bulldagger – it’s not really clear and doesn’t matter) talking to hir friend Vickie. In a moment of frustration, of ‘transer than thou’ anger, zie says something about how Vickie can take the clothes and the wig off and go back to being normal.
The next day Vickie is found brutally murdered.
And the rest of the book is Max’s meditation on friends, community, activism, family; it’s an insider’s view into being queer, being outside, being “other†while also being well-loved, deeply loving, and sorry. The book is Max’s apology to Vickie, for that moment of assumption and hierarchy that a crossdresser’s life is somehow “easier†than anyone else’s.
Throw in some amazing scenes about being ungendered online, a lovely exchange between a “tough as nails†femme and an “suit and tie bulldagger,†a remarkable speech by Vickie’s communist uncle; a chilling scene of an apartment break-in by mysterious and angry visitors, and one scene – an exchange of sweet, light coffee and flags – that was so touching, so genuine, and so intense that I could taste the coffee and jonesed for a smoke right along with Max.
The cast of characters is a veritable melting pot of transness and their empathizers: Estelle’s surviving wife being one. I’ve never seen myself in a novel before, and though I have no interest in living Estelle’s reality, some of her words rang out in ways that were profound to me. I cried a lot just thinking about her, who she is, who she is to me.
But it’s the delicacy that this book really thrives on: Feinberg doesn’t say “Max doesn’t feel solidarity with this asshole transman because he’s middle-class†but zie makes the point. Zie shows, not tells: the first lesson in fiction writing, and the one most writers get wrong.
Leslie Feinberg, THANK YOU.
You can find a discussion about Drag King Dreams, and Leslie Feinberg’s other books, Stone Butch Blues and Transgender Warriors, in our Reader’s Chair Forum. I’ve also got a list of books I recommend on gender/trans issues on my Recommended Reading page.
Five Questions With… Richard Docter
Dr. Richard Docter is a clinical psychologist and gender researcher from Los Angeles with 20 years of experience in the transgender community. Together with Virginia Prince, he is co-author of the largest survey of cross dressers ever published. In 1988 he published the book Transvestites and Transsexuals. He continues to be a frequent contributor to transgender conventions throughout the nation.
1) Your Transvestites & Transsexuals was one of the only books (other than Mariette Pathy Allen’s Transformations) that actually mentioned spouses when I was looking for information nearly a decade ago. What encouraged you to include spouses?
< Dr. Richard Docter with Christine Jorgensen, 1987. (Photo by Mariette Pathy Allen.)
There were a number of published articles about the concerns of wives published prior to 1988. I was interested in the views of wives because important family dynamics are almost always affected by cross dressing. Few wives were totally rejecting, but few had worked out an accomodation that felt good for both. The wives who seem most interesting to me are people like you, Helen, who defy the societal view that all of this is sick, sick, sick. Instead, some wives, as you point out, not only put shame on the back burner, but find ways to enjoy the joy of cross dressing that means so much to their husband. I hope you will keep collecting their stories so they can be shared with both husbands and wives.
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From the Catalog
We’ve written a description of She’s Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband for Seal‘s catalog, and since everyone has asked what exactly this next book is about, I thought I’d share it.
Not that it will answer all your questions; only the book will do that, ultimately.
She’s Not the Man I Married was inspired by the crisis in one couple’s marriage: Helen Boyd’s husband, who had long been open about being transgender, was considering living as a woman fulltime. Boyd was confronted with what it would mean if her husband actually were to become a woman socially, legally, and medically, and whether or not her love and desire for her partner would remain the same if he became ‘she’.
Boyd’s first book, My Husband Betty, explored the relationships of crossdressing men and their partners. She’s Not the Man I Married is in some ways both a sequel and a more serious and expansive examination of gender in relationships, for couples who are homosexual or heterosexual, and who fall anywhere along the gender continuum.
Boyd’s marriage serves as a platform for exploring the problems with gender in relationships. She struggles to understand the nature of commitment, love, and desire. Boyd’s strength is in her ability to share her doubts, confusion, and anger, offering anyone who’s in a relationship a lens through which to make sense of their own loves and losses, desires and disappointments. She’s Not the Man I Married is a fascinating consideration of the ways in which relationships are gendered, how gender limits us in the ways we love, and how we cope – or don’t – with the emotional and sexual pressures that gender roles can bring to our marriages and relationships.
Hirschfeld Revival
I’ve seen the revivals of a couple of people whose work I love: first, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had stopped being recognized in academia for a few decades before interest in her returned; before that, Buster Keaton, who now gets mentioned in documentaries on Bob Newhart and in various conversatons with film people.
But the revival of Magnus Hirschfeld really thrills me. I’ve often wondered how different the world might be if his work at the Institute of Sexuality had continued all those years ago. He circulated a petition to make homosexuality legal in Berlin; he personally testified on the part of transsexuals in order to get their gender identity changed on ID cards, and he is, of course, the person who coined both the terms ‘transvestite’ and ‘transsexual’ (though the latter was popularized by Dr. Harry Benjamin).
There’s a reason I dedicated My Husband Betty to him, and much thanks to Vern Bullough for “introducing” me to Hirschfeld’s work (in his Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender) and to Donna for posting the Gay City News article, and to Benjamin Weinthal for writing it.
Turn of the Century Tranny
The photo is of three Yale students, c. 1883, which I found courtesy of Staci’s blog, Passing Interest, where she notes that:
A Yale dean ruled that no member of the Yale Dramatic Association could impersonate a female on stage for more than two consecutive years ‘because continued impersonation tended to make men effeminate.'”
Slippery slope, indeed.
You can find more history of crossdressing at Yale at the Larry Kramer Initiative site. I recommend reading the whole of these archives of LGBT history at Yale, but if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, do at least check out the entry about two trans Yale alums.
Five Questions With… Holly Boswell
Holly Boswell helped launch the transgender movement with her groundbreaking essay “The Transgender Alternative” in 1990. S/he has been the chief architect of Southern Comfort‘s programs since 1991, and is a regular presenter at several conferences. In 1986 s/he co-founded the Phoenix Trans Support group in Asheville, NC, in ’93 founded the alternative Trans-Spiritual community known as Kindred Spirits, hosts the Bodhi Tree House, and directs the Traveling Medicine Show.
1) Recently our message boards have been discussing the way “transgender” seems to be coming to mean – in the popular/media usage – “transsexual.” As someone who self-identifies as a transgenderist, how do you feel about this new usage?
I reject the usage you describe of the term “transgender” as coming to mean “transsexual” — if indeed that is really happening. That is totally erroneous. “Trans” means to cross: either vestments, gender, or biological sex. All of these categories cross the lines of gender, which is why the word “transgender” has come to be an umbrella term for the entire Trans Community, such as it is gradually formulating itself out of its own amazing diversity. Transsexuality comprises only a small (perhaps 10%) segment of the overall Trans Community, and yet it receives the lion’s share of attention because it is so dramatic and sensational. Please, let us respect our terminologies, as well as the roots of our word meanings, so that we can continue to make sense out of our own personally complex equations, without abandoning our ability to communicate our truth to mainstream culture through a common language.
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Need a CD's Wife, asap!
I’ve been contacted by a national women’s magazine for a wife of a crossdresser. The hitch is that you can’t use a pseudonym & they do want a photo.
They also want it all by Wednesday at noon.
The article is going to focus on how women make decisions – in this case, how a woman might decide to stay with her crossdressing husband.
& Obviously I would do it but for another hitch: they want someone who hasn’t told their story before.
So if there’s someone out there who’s just dying to break out of the closet, do let me know asap & I’ll put you in touch.
Wolfpit Opened
Last night I got in on a 5:18 train from Philly and went straight to the theatre where Wolfpit was opening. Everybody else was dressed up; I was in traveling clothes (which yesterday meant jeans, button down, sweater, DMs. I was going to go buy a tie at Macy’s to dress it up a little but decided against it when I realized I had my luggage to lug around.)
Donna, Joanne, Caprice and her wife all came, and it was lovely to see all four of them. As Donna has mentioned elsewhere, Betty had a little surprise in store for me, but I can’t tell anyone what it is. It was a very nice surprise for me, that’s for sure. If you do go, let me just say that you’ll see a side of Betty that you’re not expecting to see (and that no one in the trans community has ever seen before, I don’t think).
The irony of course is that I’d just spent three days alone at IFGE with trannies aplenty, and had the bizarre moment of realizing every dark-haired girl who passed by was turning my head – yet another twist in the ongoing unexpectedness that is my life these days. But there are some very beautiful transwomen and crossdressers out there; some days I think for the good of all I should be polygamous.
Anyhoo, more on IFGE when I get around to that, but for now, I just wanted to recommend that anyone locally go see Wolfpit – it’s a bizarre and wonderful and disturbing play, with beautiful language and a really well-chosen cast.