Sign a petition to get President Bush to fire Karl Rove for outing an undercover operative.
Yes, I really do hate Karl Rove that much.
The Amancio Project Vigil
I received this message in the comments section, but I thought it deserved greater notice. This is a follow-up to my original blog entry from June 12th, 2005.
June 27,2005
The Amancio Project Vigil surpassed expectations. The tone and mood was one of joy, sadness and resolve.
Because of the dreadful murders Yuma yesterday of six people (four children), the news media came early and left before many vigil attendees arrived and left before the speakers delivered their messages. A head count went over 100.
Amancio’s family was there in force, all wearing t-shirts with Amancio’s picture on them. That was a beautiful sight by itself. Many people drew and wrote their thoughts onto “The Memory Wall.†A video was shown depicting Amancio’s life from early child hood to a few days before his death. It was obvious he was a happy child, spunky adolescent, spirited teenager and talented and giving adult. A poem by Don Gilbert, “One of Liberty’s Children†dealing with hate crime was read by Don and a framed copy handed to Amancio’s mom.
Speakers included myself as the Organizer of The Yuma County Gay Meetup and The Amancio Project, Representative Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona House of Representatives (first speaking for herself then delivering a message from Arizona Representative Amanda Aguirre), Luis Heredia representing Congressman Grijalva, Brenda Galvan Aguirre from the Arizona Leadership Institute, Donna Rose with the Human Rights Campaign, Lori Girshick the Anti-Violence Project Coordinator for Wingspan in Tucson, a hate crime victim’s mother whose son was murdered three years ago and the culprits have not been caught, a member of the Southern Arizona Gender Alliance, Vigil coordinator Hanna, with the Yuma County Gay Rights Meetup.
No Yuma city or county representative was in the audience, an observation which did not go unnoticed by Rep. Sinema and Mr. Heredia.
A wreath was presented to the family. The mother and the grandmother then handed out “Angel†pins and small crosses to everyone while the candles were being prepared (unfortunately, it became too breezy to light them).
It is now incumbent upon all of us to keep this spirit alive and the momentum going.
Michael H. Baughman
The Amancio Project
www.gayrights.meetup.com/177
www.TheAmancioProject.org (still under construction)
Roving Idiot
Rove, in a speech Wednesday evening to the New York state Conservative Party just a few miles north of Ground Zero, said, “Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.†Conservatives, he said, “saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war.â€
source: MSNBC news
Rove should resign. He is divisive, hateful, and offensive.
That Time of the Month
No, not that time of the month – but the time of the month to donate to help support the message boards and my blog. If you like what you see here, please consider donating whatever you can to help keep us going.
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.
Hacked Again
I think the MHB message boards have been hacked again. Stay tuned for more details, and apologies. I hate these creeps.
Partners, Priorites, and Presentation
I seem to be cranky on Mondays.
I’ll admit upfront that Betty and I were interviewed for the spot on Oprah that Jennifer Finney Boylan and her wife got. Aside from my obvious question of weren’t two episodes of Oprah enough? – since there are so many of us who have written good books about trans issues, and get little to no mainstream publicity – I have a few thoughts on their appearance.
[/raise feminist hackles] I wonder first why it is that when “the media” want to know about transness they go to a transperson who’s written a book, but when they want to know about a partner’s experience, they go to the wife of the transperson who’s written a book, instead of to a partner who’s written a book herself. That is, if you’re going to give any writer credit for thinking about stuff in order to write a book, shouldn’t you give the same credit all around? For me, this was a not-so-subtle reminder that women are still more valued for who they’re married to than for what they’ve accomplished on their own. [/lower feminist hackles]
Of course I know that ultimately JFB and her wife were chosen because Jenny was on the show previously, and everyone wanted to know what this wife who initially refused to speak had to say. Even me.
I understand and thorougly appreciate her need to wait for a time when she wasn’t going to lose her shit on television. She was calm, she smiled, she came off as a sane woman who’s made the best of a bad situation. No Springer-esque accusations and tears, no melodrama, no rage through gritted teeth.
I’m happy for Jenny and Deirdre, that they’ve found whatever kind of peace they have. I know, without asking anyone, that Deirdre still has moments of anger and sadness so deep she probably doesn’t like to admit them even to herself. I know wives who have been with someone who transitioned who still admit to bad days. We saw a glimpse of Deirdre’s raw emotion when Jenny mentioned her expensive new vagina and her sexual interest in men. Just a glimpse, but enough for me to know there’s still something there, vitriol or bitterness or rage.
I get that. Betty and I have had very “successful” interviews turn into day-long arguments after the fact. In one case, we looked at our wedding album in order to provide one show with b-roll and ended up re-evaluating where we’d been, where we were, and where we were headed.
But despite that momentary glimpse into Deirdre’s “dark side,” I’ve already seen posts in the online support community from transpeople enquiring as to how Deirdre “got there.” She was angry, she mourned. We know the stages of grief and we know trans-partners go through them. At the end of the day, it’s what we can and what we cannot accept that determines the outcome of the relationship.
What Deirdre can accept – a celibate marriage – is something I could not. For others, it might be the loss of public heterosexuality. Still others, stubble or short hair. Every partner is different. For transpeople, there are the Standards of Care, which guide and instruct (and to some, gatekeep). There is no SOC for partners, no guidebook, no way of knowing what straw will break a camel’s back. All you can do is talk to her, ask her, keep talking, keep arguing, and understand that where she is in her own process might color her response.
Deirdre’s acceptance – placid now – is based on her giving up sexual intimacy, the love of a man, and the idea of having a husband. She has had to accept that her children will have to explain why they have two mothers – neither of whom is a lesbian. Sometimes women can make outrageously practical decisions. A woman’s generation, her upbringing, her maternal commitment, her sexuality, her unwillingness to be divorced, or single, or to do the dating scene again: all of these might contribute to what decision she makes.
But I don’t think a woman’s ability to make the best decisions she can – and to accept that what she wanted, and what she thought she had, is not what she’s going to get – should be a revelation to anyone. That there is no good answer when it comes to a married transperson’s dilemma shouldn’t shock anyone, either.
And while I think it’s wonderful that America has finally gotten to see one transwoman who’s not a huge mess screaming on Jerry Springer, I also wonder if the swing of the pendulum won’t whitewash trans experience. Normal, after all, also presented a picture of a wife who stayed – despite tears and protest – and who shared a bed with her partner. But counsellors who work with couples and partners tell me that’s rarely the case. Instead, partners are often fuelled by the kind of rage that births vengeful divorces and vicious custody battles. Sometimes the recently-transitioned woman starts spitting misogynist sentiments and unintentionally pointing out the obvious chasm between wives raised women and the women who used to be husbands.
As much as I once criticized the free-for-all bitch sessions of CDSO, I worry now about the impact of the self-sacrificing wife as a standard-bearer for other partners: put up or shut up isn’t a choice. Partners need a safe space for their anger and bitterness, to heal the sense of betrayal, to own their sadness.
I wonder if we, as a community, are so committed to getting positive representations of transfolk into the world’s eye that we might end up forgetting that the positive image is for them (those who know nothing of transness, who might react with fear, mockery, or violence) but that an accurate image is more useful and healing for those of us who are living it. I wonder who will provide safe spaces for partners’ uglier emotions, if conference organizers will prioritize our needs, or if the individual transpeople who are in charge would rather ignore that sound of the other shoe dropping.
It’s not just about every individual transperson paying attention to what’s going on with their own partner. It’s about all of us putting pressure on conferences to make sure there are workshops for partners – and not just the cheerleader ones, either – and finding other spaces where it’s okay to acknowledge that the survival of most MTF relationships depends greatly on the way women are socialized. Jude presented a scenario on the MHB message boards: what would happen if a heterosexual wife of a heterosexual man came out as an FTM? Would he stay? We know he wouldn’t. Why not? Why do we expect the wife to stay in the face of transness and not the husband?
Why – you might ask? Is perceived lesbianism less culturally problematic than perceived homosexuality in men? Is estrogen less feminizing in the case of MTF’s than testosterone is masculinizing for FTM’s? Are women just more accepting? Do women tend to value family and stability a bit more? (yes, yes, yes, and yes, in my opinion)
All of these surely play into it – but in my eyes, the biggest reason is PRIVILEGE. Women are much less likely to have the life skills, confidence, earning power, and education to support themselves (and their kids, as Steve has said). So they hang onto the ship.
Women make their own decisions. As much as transwomen can’t go back and be socialized as the women they were meant to be, those of us raised female can’t undo that we were. And until we have a conversation about why women are raised the way they are, and why men aren’t raised the same way, all of those transwomen who are hoping to make it through transition with a happy partner haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell.
On Being a Partner
One of our MHB board regulars mentioned that she feels she might be rationalizing away that her wife won’t stay with her through, and post-transition. The idea of it alarmed me, because I think a lot of transwomen want to transition so badly that they kind of glaze over a lot of the realities that might be coming: like a wife who leaves, children who are angry, job loss, etc.
This was my response:
It’s entirely possible for someone to rationalize that she’s going to stick with you through transition, even if you don’t think she will, or if she’s stated she won’t.
That would be a very huge mistake, imho.
I talk to gender therapists sometimes (y’know, for fun) and the cases of wives going ballistic/vengeful are out there. Plenty of them. & While I know you are certain that your wife is an angel of goodness (as am I & all the other partners on here, ahem), you really never know.
Hell hath no fury like a woman whose partner transitions.
But you might replace ‘fury’ with sadness, desperation, frustration, anger, rage, bottomless sorrow.
When I’m feeling coldly rational I think – if Betty transitions, well – I’m only 35 & we have no children. We’re both young enough to find others to love and who love us, & Betty would be better off with a lesbian who loves having a tall, gorgeous woman for a partner instead of me, who really does love & is turned on by her guy self.
And then I think of my wedding pictures, or of the time we went to Scotland when we got engaged, or of when we first met & made a game of making each other guess the name of obscure new wave records, or of how last night she helped me changed the default colors on the new site, or of… many other million things.
& Then I feel angry, & sad, & frustrated, & I want to kick the universe back for the kick it’s given me in the teeth.
Some days, I kick betty instead, when I don’t mean to, but I don’t know what to do with my anger at feeling like I’ve had a really dirty trick played on me, what I was calling for a while ‘the smoothest bait & switch ever perpetrated.’ I mean, I meet the boy of my dreams and it turns out… well you all know how it turns out. The boy of my dreams wants to be 1) the person of my dreams, while also being 2) a woman.
& I don’t see any way out of this that makes any sense. Either he gets what he wants (to be a woman & to be with me) or I get what I want (for him to be something like male, & to be with me). We’ve been traipsing around a middle ground where Betty is sometimes a boy and more often now a girl (even when she thinks she’s passing as a boy, in fact) and right now – it’s like we’re kinda happy. Neither of us is thrilled.
And I consider options: finding a man I could have sex with (but then I realize it’s not about sex). or deciding that having a partner – but maybe not a romantic partner exactly – isn’t so bad (but then I realize I would have ‘married’ one of my gay friends years ago if that was all I wanted). sometimes I think I can live with the burden of being “the reason betty never transitioned” and other days I realize I might, at the end of my days, decide I’ve been a silly, stubborn wretch of a person who put my happiness before betty’s, & how I would regret having done that. some days I think we’re stuck in an O. Henry story with a happy ending, and other days I think we’re stuck in an O. Henry story that has no happy ending, & that – at the end of the day – love & self-sacrifice will not be enough, and that self-sacrifice is just a story, a mug’s game, & just one of the ways we rationalize not making hard decisions about ‘mutual incompatibility’ and all those other things divorce lawyers turn into legalese.
I’m on a partners’ list where a woman who had a hard time supporting her partner’s transition was just told – post-transition – that her partner discovered a desire for men. She will not be the first (or the last) transwoman to discover such a thing, & I’m sure there’s a thread on here somewhere where Dana talks about how that happens (since it happened to her). & when I think about the fact that I might manage going through transition with betty, only to realize that would never happen, I realize too that betty has also told me 1) she didn’t want to be a woman, and 2) that she’d never transition, and 3) well you get the idea. Being with a transperson is all about not knowing what they might figure out next.
So the only way around it, as far as I can figure, is telling Betty that I love her, and trying to dissect what it is that makes me unhappy about having a female partner. There’s the sexual issue. There’s the public identity issue. There’s the “she’s a skinny bitch” issue. There’s the “this brings her so much joy & I only feel sorrow” issue. There’s the feminist issue (because I really don’t see any male partners sticking through transition, no husbands on here wondering what to do when their female wives start taking T.) there’s a lot of compromises I’ve already made & I hate making more. There’s wondering if dealing with this shit is just another version (new & improved & updated for ’05!) of being a doormat.
There’s the fact that often, I feel like with writing the book & making plans to write another, I’ve simply made lemonade out of the lemon I was handed.
& What Dana says – about lies – is all true. You all did lie, maybe to yourselves first & well, & then to us. & to everyone else you know. & though I can forgive that, I don’t know how to not be mad about it.
My goal, you see, is to be able to look at our wedding photos after Betty transitions (if she does) and still be able to say, “That was the best day of my life.” I can’t yet. Right now, I’m going through a period of feeling like it was a sham of sorts. Because Betty’s “self” was. & as a result, I’m not sure who I married.
There is nothing selfish about wanting to be whole. There is nothing wrong, either, with self-expression (though you seemed to take that as my belittling the ‘why’ behind transition, which it wasn’t). what the problem is, is expecting to have the rest of the people in your life be okay with this, to accept your new “self” as having been the only “self” all along. Because we – your partners, your friends – we really liked the old “self.” we fell in love with the old self. We made a commitment to the old self.
& We don’t like being told that there’s a (wo)man behind the curtain, because we feel foolish, tricked, and stupid for having believed the lie.
The only way I live with Betty not transitioning for my sake is to realize that it is, ultimately, her decision. She could gamble & lose. She could gamble & win. But it’s her decision.
Mine is to stay, or to go, to be generous or vindictive. But I can’t change what I’ve been handed at all. Neither can you. & most days, that’s what helps us: is knowing that neither of us wanted this, that both of us would rather have it otherwise, & that all we can do, at the end of the day, is try to find our love somewhere in the shared difficulty of knowing we have to deal with this.
Helen
The entire thread is proving to be one of the most thought-provoking to show up on the boards for a while.
Received Wisdom
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve read or heard that when a CD/TG goes through a “slutty phase” it’s because they’re just going through their female adolescence, like all girls go through – experimenting with styles, wearing too much makeup, etc., I’d be rich woman.
While it may be true that teenaged girls experiement with makeup and clothes, it also occurred to me that I had never gone through a “slutty” phase. So I started asking other women – partners, friends, sisters – and amazingly enough, none of them had.
One woman (a trans-partner as well) pointed out that the “slutty” girls in high school – the ones everyone knew would have sex with nearly anyone – were the only ones who dressed that way. (She also pointed out that in retrospect, those girls were most likely subjected to sexual abuse or violence as children or young adults, which I think is entirely accurate).
Most of us were busy covering up our newly-exploding bodies, dealing with what it felt like to have curves, to be looked at sexually. It wasn’t easy. But the last thing we were doing was dressing like sluts – believe me, it comes as quite a shock to have thighs, get your period, grow breasts – and suddenly find that your male friends look at you differently. A lot of women I know just covered up – in whatever ways possible – until they’d made peace with their new bodies. And for a lot of us, that didn’t happen until college, if then.
So what are trannies really doing when they dress slutty? It’s my feeling that what they’re doing is indulging in a “look” that they – socialized as men – think is powerful. It’s part of the mythology that women are in control, that we use men to suit out purposes – you know, the “cold hearted bitch” myth that even Robin Givens is debunking on Oprah this week.
And that’s not so much what bothers me. What bothers me is how quickly we as partners are to accept this “received wisdom.” This crap wasn’t explained this way by a partner – I’m pretty sure of it. Because it does not compute. Any woman who has been raised as and lived as a woman knows it doesn’t compute, but we tell each other things like this to feel better about the way our partners are objectifying women in their choice of clothes. We fail to inform our partners, too.
The most beautiful women I know are not masters of their realm. They are usually more insecure than other women who don’t play the beauty game, actually. I was friends with a woman who was beautiful who would always make sure people had noticed her when she walked into a room; it helped boost her confidence, because otherwise she felt she had nothing to give. She waited by the phone like every other girl, wondering if he was going to call like he said he would.
So please – let’s drop this little bromide. Every time a partner tells you her partner is going through the “slutty” phase, just ask her: did you have one? My money is on the fact that she didn’t go through a “slutty” phase, and neither did any other woman she knows.
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.