Tag: heroes

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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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Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself

I was going to write a column about why, as a feminist, I’d rather be voting for Barack Obama and why, precisely, I’d rather not vote for Hillary Clinton, but one of my students beat me to it.

As smart as she is, however, Hillary is a seriously repugnant actress. Anyone who has sat through a community theater rendition of Shakespeare might know how I feel when I watch Hillary on TV. You are literally crawling out of your skin by the time intermission rolls around. Hillary is like Lady Macbeth and Ophelia rolled into one, and that, my friends, is a very unfortunate combination of ambition, madness, victimization, and desperation.

Do read the whole of the article, since it expresses so much of what feminists who don’t like Clinton don’t like about her.

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He Can Say It

From The Stranger:

Obama’s rally in Beaumont today was the highest-energy of this Texas swing, with a crowd that was about three-quarters black cheering at almost every turn.

An interesting moment came when he was asked a question about LGBT rights and delivered an answer that seemed to suit the questioner, listing the various attributes—race, gender, etc.—that shouldn’t trigger discrimination, to successive cheers. When he came to saying that gays and lesbians deserve equality, though, the crowd fell silent.

So he took a different tack:

“Now I’m a Christian, and I praise Jesus every Sunday,” he said, to a sudden wave of noisy applause and cheers. “I hear people saying things that I don’t think are very Christian with respect to people who are gay and lesbian,” he said, and the crowd seemed to come along with him this time.

(Do notice the comment left by Dan Savage. It’s #9.)

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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.

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Sullivan Said

I just came back from an impressive lecture by Andrew Sullivan about the current election. When it was planned, they didn’t realize he’d be speaking on Super Tuesday, but it’s good that he did.

It was a pretty stunning analysis of the way the Boomer generation’s politics have divided the country and our politics for too long, and pointed up the ways that the (predicted) winning candidates, McCain and Obama, transcended some of those divisions, divisions left over from the 60s: the blue/red, left/right, hippie/straight divide.

His articulation of the way Hillary Clinton is the last current hope of any Republican party unification was not just funny but on the mark. She pisses off Republicans in a way no one else can, and as Sullivan put it, “It may not be her fault – but it is a fact.” & I agree. I’ve been frustrated by the Democratic Party’s backing of her for a very long time – not because I dislike her, but because she symbolizes – fairly or unfairly – the kinds of ideas that divide the country. (Even if, as Sullivan pointed out, both she & her husband are moderates.)

What he had to say about McCain was equally interesting: that because he was in, and suffered during, the Viet Nam War, he would never go after the likes of Kerry in the ways his Republican party cohorts did. And that what may have gotten him through his own torture was the thought that the country he was fighting for would never do such things. But we have. And so, Sullivan pointed out – and as he said, “maybe naively” – McCain feels the dishonor Dubya and his cohorts have brought to America in a way that most Americans feel it, as well.

The image of Mitt Romney as Glenn Close in the bathtub scene in Fatal Attraction will forever stick in my memory as well.

But of course Sullivan is well-known by now to be an Obama supporter. As he pointed out, Obama is not a Boomer. Thankfully. And like most people under 40 in the US, Obama knows that it isn’t a choice to be pro-gay or pro-family, that the idea of women being equal isn’t radical or terrifying, and that there isn’t necessarily a divide between letting a government help people it can help while letting the rest thrive with relative freedom from government. Conservative after conservative Sullivan interviewed (for his Atlantic Monthly article on Obama) said they like him, because even when Obama disagreed with them, he listened to them with respect.

It strikes me now – a half hour after Sullivan finished speaking – that what both candidates stand for, more than anything, is not being their own Party’s favorite son (or daughter), and simultaneously being capable of bringing some dignity back to politics in the US.

I hope he’s right.

Now go out & vote.

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Now, NOW

What a fracas: NOW-NY issued a press release yesterday roasting Ted Kennedy for endorsing Obama, and did so with some of the most extravagant language I’ve read in a while. “Betrayal” seems a little much, but “ultimate betrayal”? Yikes.

But NOW National has stepped in like a calm, protective aunt whose niece has just thrown a shit-fit.

This whole “you’re not a good feminist unless you vote for the woman” stuff is just so tired – as if most women need one more voice in the world telling them how to be good feminists (or good women, for that matter). The other assumption – that men aren’t feminists, and therefore need not be loyal to a feminist candidate – also tires me.

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Greetings From Kenosha, Wisconsin!

We’re nearly there. Not quite. It’s been a lot of driving – just crossing Pennsylvania takes a day, after all. We’re in Kenosha now after driving today though the end of PA, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, & then just the first tip of Wisconsin. It’ll be a few more hours to Appleton, tomorrow.

For those of you who have asked, or guessed, where I’ll be teaching: Lawrence University is the answer. I’m only teaching for a term, which is three months.

So, the trip. We started later than we were supposed to (of course). Betty forgot her license & her phone. We drove & drove & drove through Pennsylvania, & I finally convinced Betty to stop in a little town near the Ohio border called Barkeyville, PA. Ah, what a town! We found a Comfort Suites, checked in, & then went out to find dinner & beer. We checked one place that didn’t have any. We checked another. & Then, finally, I asked someone who said, “Oh, this is a dry county.”

So much for beer.

But the boys have been fantastic, absolutely lovely, the brilliant kittoi I’ve always known them to be.

Another highlight was that someone clever, instead of writing the usual WASH ME on a dirty truck, wrote I WISH MY WIFE WAS AS DIRTY AS THIS TRUCK instead. That was somewhere in Ohio, I think.

We have eaten way too much fast food.

We have sat way too long in a minivan.

We are very excited about arriving tomorrow.

& With that, I’m off for a bath, & a toast to Barack Obama for his Iowa Caucus victory, & bed.

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Mara Keisling on C-SPAN

If you haven’t seen it yet, Mara Keisling’s appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal last week is worth viewing, and apparently isn’t going to be online forever, so do go watch it within the next week or so.

(You want the 11/10/2007 show.)

My favorite bit is when the woman calls to talk about how the founding fathers were Christian, & how Mara shouldn’t be allowed to talk at all, & Mara drinks her coffee stone-faced like Buster Keaton, the smile only showing at the very corners of her mouth, after which she explains, again, that the Bill in fact exempts religious institutions. (It’s at about 1:17 or so.)

& As one caller put it, I agree with him: Mara is a brilliant woman, and I’m happy to see her doing advocacy. That anyone said, “you can’t be a full person if you have to hide all the love in your life,” on Washington Journalis amazing, but I’m pleased as punch it was someone talking about LGBT rights.