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.
Transvestites
In the middle of a recent thread about the term transvestite, Betty and I were both challenged as to our use of it. A lot of people are offended by the word and its connotations of mental illness and perversity. As I mention in the glossary entry in my book, however, Betty and I never saw it that way, for several reasons: 1) because without transvestite you couldn’t have transsexuals or transgenders – because it was the first of the three coined, and the others were coined from it; 2) because the rest of the world uses the term; 3) because the man who coined it had no such judgments of perversity or mental illness in mind when he coined it – all that came later, and 4) for Betty there was always a sexual aspect to crossdressing, and taking that out was the equivalent of white-washing the sexual aspect.
Someone even mentioned that they think first of Glen or Glenda when they hear the word “transvestite” – and I wondered, are we ashamed of Ed Wood?
Transvestites scratch the itch of gender dysphoria through crossdressing, and that’s all. Transvestites are not in the DSM (only fetishistic transvestites are, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who fits that description). As Donna, one of our MHB board faithful clarified, “…the word “transvestite” was coined by Magnus Hirschfeld circa 1910, was used as a broad, entirely non-judgmental term that would encompass what today would really be considered the entire tg spectrum, and was *not* invented by the psychiatric profession to pathologize or perversify people.” It just wasn’t Hirschfield’s style.
So in a sense, the word transvestite is a link to the whole of the T community’s history. That it’s become a word with negative connotations is due to the lack of education, the silence surrounding the word, our own willingness to disown people like Ed Wood and maybe even Eddie Izzard for not being exactly as we’d like them to be. But if there’s anything the queer community has taught me, it’s that discovering your history as a community is vital and important work. Do gays disown Rock Hudson because he was closeted or because he died of AIDS? Joe Orton because his lover killed him, or because he was famous for having anonymous sex in bathrooms? Of course they don’t. Because when you’re out there, trying to show people you exist – and that you always have existed – you need to find the figures from history that provide proof.
The Chevalier D’Eon, Ed Wood, Virginia Prince, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf: none of them are perfect examples. I’ve been asked a few times how it is I can like Virginia Prince for some things and excoriate her for others, and the answer is easy: she’s human. But what she did for herself, for all trans people everywhere, is more than mind-blowing. Did Charlotte von Mahlsdorf inform for the Communist Party? Only she knows, and she’s taken that secret to the grave. Ed Wood looked on the 60s, as an old man, with envy in his heart, for a decade where sexuality might be freer, gender a little more blurred. He made some of the best bad movies ever. But all of them, in their own way, made transvestites a little more visible; they gave people the idea of it, at least.
I understand that older crossdressers cringe when they hear it; they found that word in adult bookstores, in pulp erotica, and on the covers of sensationalist magazines. Betty found the word in the dictionary at a library growing up, and thought, ‘I guess that makes me a freak, but I know I’m not the only one now.’ Tri-Ess introduced “crossdresser” instead, to get rid of the negative connotations. The only problem is, I don’t see how the use of ‘crossdresser’ over transvestite really changes people’s minds; I can’t imagine any word that would describe a man dressing as a woman that wouldn’t be offensive to someone – especially to people who don’t like any kind of boundary-crossing, much less crossing the boundaries of sex or gender.
I’ve been in crowds shouting we’re here / we’re queer/ get used to it and I know what it does. It takes a word that was used to hurt – a word more full of negative connotations even than transvestite – and turns it around.
Now it’s in the title of a popular TV show. Believe me, no one would have imagined that even ten years ago, much less 20 or 50 years ago. But it happened. And it didn’t happen because queer people made themselves less queer. It happened because queer people made themselves visible, and got angry, and got organized, and demanded that even perverts are people, too.
Because today, in America, a show for kids gets taken off the air because a rabbit went to visit a little girl in Vermont whose parents happen to be lesbians. The show was funded in order to provide diversity education, if you can believe that, but as we well know, lesbians are still a little too diverse for some people. They’ve got their civil unions; they’ve changed the language to make themselves more palatable, and you know what? They still can’t be shown on a children’s television show about diversity.
Either people are going to respect you for who and what you are or they won’t. Cleansing ourselves of negative connotations is not as simple as word choice. If only it were that easy! But Tri-Ess started using “crossdresser” instead of transvestite a few decades ago, and I don’t see that it’s opened the doors of mainstream acceptance. Instead I saw Sam Walls go down in flames when he ran for office in Texas once it was shown he was a crossdresser. No one even called him a transvestite, mind you: all they needed were pictures of him en femme. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.
And once they have that picture, it doesn’t matter what thousand words you use to try to explain it. Not saying the “L” word didn’t save Buster from getting bumped. Calling Sam Walls a “crossdresser” didn’t make him more palatable to voters (neither did explaining that he wasn’t a homosexual). Had he stood up and said “Yes, I’m a transvestite” could that have harmed him any more?
Protest or Support?
It occurred to me that around this time last year, emails and T newsgroups and mailing lists and blogs were inundated with protests about the nomination of Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen for a Lambda Literary Award. I was against the nomination as were so many of us, and the driving force behind the protest was pretty remarkable, if not always polite.
However, not one trans website I’ve found has actually posted anything about this year’s nominees. I noticed, of course, because I’m one of the people whose book has been nominated, in the transgender category, along with the likes of Morty Diamond, Mariette Pathy Allen, Jamison Green and Julie Anne Peters. There are some other trans writers up for awards in other categories, and yet I haven’t really read anything about it.
Did the Bailey controversy end up nullifying the awards for the trans community? Or are we just way better at protesting than supporting the writers and educators who are doing good work?
So here, without further ado, are a few of the book award nominees for the Lambda Lit Award:
In the Nonfiction Anthology category:
That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation edited by Mattilda, a.k.a Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Soft Skull Press
In the Children’s/Young Adult category:
Luna by Julie Anne Peters, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (which was also a finalist for the National Book Award this year)
In the Drama/Theatre category:
I am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (which has won so many other awards, like the Pulitzer and the Tony, you’ll have to check the website for the entire list)
In the Transgender/GenderQueer category:
Becoming a Visible Man by Jamison Green, Vanderbilt University Press (which also won CLAGS’ Sylvia Rivera award)
From The Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond edited by Morty Diamond, Manic D Press
Luna by Julie Anne Peters, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
My Husband Betty: Love, Sex and Life with a Crossdresser by Helen Boyd, Thunder’s Mouth Press
The Gender Frontier by Mariette Pathy Allen, Kehrer Verlag
Betty in the NYT
From the Tuesday, January 18th edition of The New York Times and an article titled “Actors Exit One Troupe to Build Another”:
“The longtime familiarity among the actors was critical, said Jason Crowl, who played Titorelli, the artist who finally reveals to Joseph K. the truth of his horrible situation, as a sinister, epicene figure. Mr. Crowl left the Cocteau about two years ago because he was unhappy.
Mr. Crowl, who describes himself as transgendered, said, “I wouldn’t have made Titorelli as interesting as he was if I didn’t know the people in the cast and couldn’t say, ‘I’m going to make him freaky and androgynous and hope everyone is O.K. with that.’ ”
That would be my husband Betty. I’m newly amazed by her bravery, coming out in the paper of note.
(Thanks to Eddie Izzard for opening the door.)
Board Betty
As some of you may know, Betty was being considered for membership on the board of a nation trans organization.
Tonight, we met with NCTE Director Mara Keisling who confirmed that Betty will indeed be one of the NCTE’s Board Members. NCTE (National Center for Transgender Equality) “is a social justice organization dedicated to advancing the equality of transgender people through advocacy, collaboration and empowerment.” So says their website. We’ve met with Mara Keisling a few times and have been continually impressed by her dedication, political savvy, and her wit.
Please do go check out their website, read more about them, and if you can – make a donation! (Tell them Helen & Betty sent you, too!)
Transgender Activists Celebrate Victory in New York City
Transgender advocates and activists are celebrating the release of Guidelines Regarding Gender Identity Discrimination from the New York City Commission on Human Rights this week. These guidelines interpret the Human Rights Law and are designed to educate the public about the prohibition on discrimination based on gender identity and expression that became part of New York City human rights law with the passage of Int. No. 24, the transgender rights bill signed into law by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as Local Law 3 of 2002 in April of that year.
Continue reading “Transgender Activists Celebrate Victory in New York City”
Happy Birthday, Adam Ant.
It’s the big 5-0, and in celebration, the very finest photo that was ever taken of him (in my humble opinion, at least).
There are about 3000 runners-up, of course.
Dark Odyssey '04
Or, How Helen & Betty Spent Their Weekend
When you arrive at a campgrounds for a conference, the last thing you expect is to be driven around in a golf cart by a service-oriented boi, and the first thing you don’t expect to see is a man walking along in leather chaps & not much else practicing the effective use of a bullwhip.
But that’s exactly what greeted us when we arrived at Dark Odyssey – DO for short – this past weekend. We’d driven four hours to a campgrounds somewhere in Maryland, and found ourselves at the end of a road: a weathered outdoor registration table set up a few yards from an old white house. I pictured camp counselors, bonfires, volleyball and smores. I’ve never been to a camp, not as a child nor an adult, but I’m pretty sure that camp hasn’t seen anything like DO before.
It was a celebration of kink in all its many forms – the sexualities about which we (especially as Americans) don’t speak. I’d brought with me a book called Sexual Anomalies by Magnus Hirschfield, and at some point I checked the Table of Contents to see if he mentioned any type of anomaly that wasn’t represented: nope. Hirschfield actually missed a few, from what I would learn.
We met a bisexual professor from VT, a D/s couple who met over the internet, a young het master and his beautiful female slave. We met Nina Hartley, well-loved porn star who has a brain that makes her boobs and ass look small in comparison, and we were led through a group meditation by a kind older man with a firm hand who a day later had a line of willing victims at his spanking station. We watched as an acolyte learned how to make smores for his domme, worried about pubic hair catching fire in a celebration of fire and trust, and wondered why a man with a drum had entirely waxed his genitals.
Now I think: we could have just asked. The variety of the sexual landscape was nothing in comparison to the open-ness of spirit, the willingness to ask questions and answer them about your particular kink. A swinger couple from the mid-west didn’t know why male-male sexuality wasn’t part of the swinger lifestyle even though female-female action is a regular part of it. A genderqueer FTM told us about fucking with his astral cock and his cunt, owning both his feminine and masculine sexualities.
I can’t even begin to describe what we saw at special events like the Mardi Gras party or the Garden of Carnal Delights. I have no vocabulary to tell you what it feels like to watch a beautiful woman realize a deep sexual fantasy right in front of you. The experience of standing in a hallway at the intersection of four rooms and hearing four simulteanous orgasmic yawps isn’t something you can describe. I can’t tell you the names of the equipment in the dungeon because I simply don’t know them. But I can tell you this: Betty & I were in a state of low-level arousal all weekend. So many naked bodies, so many well-placed piercings, so much love of the body, worship of both the yin and the yang. In a workshop led by Tristan Taormino (one of the organizers), a roomful of 50 people touched and kissed in blindfolds. I walked into that workshop feeling a little sick with nerves, and then Tristan announced we were either in for the whole of it, or should leave then. It took some kind of steel will for me to stay in my chair, but by the time we were halfway through, I was laying my hands on the inner thighs of a tranny I’d only met the night before, and enjoying the playfulness of it. (I was later glad I did, as Betty had the feeling that both men and women were unsure about how and where to touch a trans-person.)
I can say that we personally probably had the best sex of our lives – but in the privacy of our own room, of course. For a woman who was born clothed and a tranny whose body sometimes trips up both his and her sexuality, that was no small thing. We have been negotiating our own personal sexuality since we have been together, finding variations, positions, astral parts and appropriate lightning through arguments, standoffs, and weird backlashes of propriety. We have cried, screamed, and held each other in a kind of mutual sadness that we found ourselves so ill-matched sexually but so deeply in love. But at DO, there was no shame in the air, no misery over having the wrong body or kinks no one else understands. The overwhelming sense of the entire weekend was that everyone – no matter who you are, or what you like – can find someone to play with and others who like the same toys. And that no-one – not the transwoman, the dyke, the het female submissive, the bisexual bottom – should ever feel bad about what turns them on.
At DO, sex was pleasure, worship, love, catharsis, play. Celebration, desire, wholeness, and beauty. It was also dangerous, scary, unknown and unknowable. Acceptable, mystical, and good.
Betty later called Dark Odyssey ‘the Land of DO.’ As in, DO please yourself. DO please your partner(s).
I’m already thinking about next year, and whether or not I’ll be able to manage just standing somewhere – maybe by a bonfire – completely naked. I don’t want to do anything that is outside of what Betty and I want for us, as a couple and as individuals, and to me – that was the most important part of DO: no pressure to do what you don’t want, and only encouragement to do what you want. I have never experienced as profound a sense of respect for the body nor the individual as I experienced at Dark Odyssey.
Our thanks to the organizers, Tristan and Greg, and to all those happy campers, for a weekend that will inform and energize our sex life for many, many months to come.
The latest on Eddie Izzard
www.itv.com/news/641203.html
Izzard to star in his own life story
7.02PM, Sun May 16 2004
Comedian Eddie Izzard is making a feature-length documentary about his life.
Cameras have been following cross-dressing Eddie for the past three years in preparation of the documentary, called Diva 51, which will feature footage from his shows, backstage scenes and interviews with family and friends.
It will explore the subject of his transvestism, which he once described as being like “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body”, and follow his rise to fame in the States culminating in two Emmy awards for his stand-up show and a Tony nomination for his performance in A Day In The Death of Joe Egg.
Robin Williams, Tim Roth and Eric Idle also feature in the documentary, paying tribute to Izzard’s talents. Izzard is currently promoting the film at the Cannes
Film Festival which is scheduled for release in 2005. “There’s an element of my wild and large, rollicking ego about doing it, but I want the film to dig deep,”
he said.
Transgender Veterans
The Transgender Americans Veterans Association recently visited DC and laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Here’s Phyllis Frye’s report from www.texastriangle.com:
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Cry
TG veterans lay wreath at Tomb of Unknown Soldier
By Phyllis Randolph Frye
We met in D.C. as part of an event sponsored by the Transgender American Veterans Association (TAVA) (www.tavausa.org).
In our group that weekend were over forty veterans who are transgendered, including a WWII TG Vet, a TG Korean Vet and two who had been in the Gulf War. The rest of us were of various ages and had served our nation in uniform between those conflicts. Significantly, not all of us were white and not all of us were male to female. Those attending reflected the diversity of our country and of our current military.
On Saturday morning, May 1, we loaded up at the event hotel onto a chartered bus and were escorted with sirens and flashing lights by a D.C. police car driven by a member of the gay liaison in the police department. It was strictly V.I.T. treatment.
We offloaded at the Vietnam Veterans Wall and spent several hours with other tourists at the Wall, at the Korean Memorial and at the newly opened World War II Memorial.
As we initially began to walk along the Wall, one of the transgender veterans that I was walking behind began to falter. I quickly came up to her and said, “you have someone on this wall.” She said yes, a cousin, and that this was her first time here, and she did not know it would affect her so strongly. Another vet and I took her to get the cousin’s name location. When we found the cousin’s name, it was high up on one of the tallest panels. The Park Ranger set up a ladder and took a rubbing off of the wall. This transgendered veteran began to sob, and I held her close for several minutes.
I have been to the Wall six times now, and it is always a powerful experience.
We went to the Korean Memorial and to the World War II Memorial. While at WWII, we sat to rest and a woman approached us, saying that she and her husband had met some in our group and were curious as to the name of our group. We gave them the full story. and they sat down to visit and to learn. They were very proud of our coming that day and said they wanted to attend the placing of our wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier scheduled for 3:05 that afternoon.
Throughout the weekend, our entire TAVA group shared similar stories of ordinary citizens, touring the memorials, and showing respect for our being veterans.
Next we bused to the Iwo Jima Memorial for a short visit and picture taking.
Then we bused to Arlington National Cemetery and walked to the Tomb of the Unknown Solder. If there was ever an appropriate place for transgender veterans to be, it was here. For it is truly unknown as to just how many we are.
We were asked that question by people throughout the day. My answer was ‘many.’ When you think of it, what more masculine occupation would an emerging FTM want to try than the military? Indeed there are documented stories of FTM folks serving and fighting in the American Revolution and the Civil War. And for an MTF who is doing everything possible to deny or trying to kill-off the feminine impulse, what better way to try. That is why so many of us MTFs are Eagle Scouts and veterans as well as police officers, firefighters and paramedics. Yes, lots of us.
We watched a Changing of the Guard (twice each hour on the half-hours) and a Laying of the Wreath (four times each hour at 5, 20, 35 and 50 minutes past the hour) for another group.
We learned later that our wreath had been somehow lost, but members of our Transgender Honor Guard (selected by drawing of names from a hat at the previous night’s reception, sponsored by Mara Keisling’s organization, National Center for Transgender Education, located in D.C.) would have none of that. They went up the chain of command and within five minutes, our wreath was found.
And as it was placed, the Sergeant of the Guard announced in his clear and bold voice, just as he had done for the previous group, ‘This wreath is being placed by the Transgender American Veterans Association.’
I began to cry. Others did too. For those of you who do not know, I began to be an out activist on August 20th of 1974 – almost three decades ago. It is always a struggle to get people to give us the simply human dignity of using our name. I was expecting him to short us by saying TAVA, or tgvets, or something less. But as he stood in his dress blues, at that sacred site and proclaimed the words, ‘This wreath is being placed by the Transgender American Veterans Association,’ I began to cry.
Then there was a salute.
And then there was TAPS.
After the ceremony, I went with two transgender veterans to find the markers of people that were significant to them who were buried there. It was a beautiful thing to do.
That night we had a dinner. Speeches were made. More healing took place. The next morning many of us shared breakfast and then we went our ways to our homes.
As much as I have been through for transgender rights in the past, almost thirty years, this was different. I was changed by it.
I hope that the leaders of TAVA do it again.
I hope that you come with us next time.
Phyllis Randolph Frye is a nationally-acclaimed transgender activist and attorney. She received an Honorable Discharge after serving 1971-72 as 1 LT (Reg.) in the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps in Landstuhl, Germany.
There are pictures of the event online, too, at http://www.sheck.com/gallery2/tavatrip?page=1