6th Printing

I knew it was on its way, but I got the official word today: the 6th printing of My Husband Betty has been ordered, which means there are now more than 10k copies in print.

Unusual Romance

People find Betty’s and my romance odd for the way it’s gendered, but tonight, as I sit here watching election results with my husband, laughing over references to Bob LaFollette (that was Keith Olbermann, of course) and getting aggravated at how grating Tweety’s voice gets (that would be Chris Matthews), it strikes me that the political part of Betty’s and my romance is a lot weirder, maybe, than our genders.

Maybe.

I was supposed to be at the meeting of the MHB group at the Center tonight, but Betty had to work late and we have never *not* voted together. So instead I waited for her to get home and we took a short walk to our polling place together. We don’t always vote the same – I tend to vote Green or WFP or occasionally even Socialist (it took a lot to resist a Socialist named Willie Cotton this year, I mean he sounds like a character in The Grapes of Wrath), and Betty occasionally votes Libertarian – but we share a deep belief in democracy having muscle, but moreso in the crazy notion that people should choose how their lives are run.

So apologies to the people who went to the group expecting me, but Election Day is a little like Valentine’s Day for us. I mean, we did see Point of Order on our first date, & all.

First Event Keynote: Me

Well, the news is out: I’m going to be the keynote speaker for TCNE’s First Event next year. The event will be from January 17th – 21st, and in addition to the keynote I will be doing a reading from the new book and (I think) doing a workshop for partners.

We have never otherwise been to First Event and are very much looking forward to it.

There’s a thread about this on our boards where you can check in with others who might be going, too – so do come!

Read the press release below the break.
Continue reading “First Event Keynote: Me”

What It Is

Two threads from a week or so ago got me thinking about what you might call The Big Picture. First, there was one about whether or not the mHB message boards have become a little cheerleader-y when it comes to people transitioning, and the other was Donna’s sad report of an altercation with her son.

I didn’t want to write this at the time, but wanted to give Donna – & the others reading – some time to feel a little better.

But in one particular post, our resident poster buddha pointed out that so many threads are more about the slippery slope than avoiding it, per se. In a few private emails, others pointed out the same thing, & one person in particular said she found the way the boards have changed quite in keeping with what I wrote in My Husband Betty, in (of course) Chapter 5, the Slippery Slope? chapter. When I think about the people who first came to the boards, it doesn’t take long to name quite a lot who used to identify as crossdressers who have recently transitioned, are transitioning or who are about to transition.

Most of those people have also seen their relationships fail, which is where Donna’s thread about her son comes in, because I found myself wanting to say something along the lines of this is exactly what I’m always going on about. We hate it. We don’t know why it’s hard, nearly impossible, to accept a gender change in our loved ones, but we do. And in talking about it with Betty I realized that as much as transness is impossible to understand for someone who isn’t (me included), I think it’s equally impossible for a trans person to understand why it’s so hard to accept a change of gender in someone they love, whether that person is a parent, friend, sibling, child, or partner. We want you to be happy if you change gender, but I think plenty of us who love you never quite are, or maybe, just maybe, it takes much longer for us not to be angry about it, still.

& I don’t know why. I don’t have any huge conclusions, here, except to say that I find myself feeling more precariously lucky when I look at the growing list of transitioned former crossdressers who are no longer with the women they were married to when they first crossed my path.

Sometimes, honestly, I don’t want to do the math. I don’t want to know what kind of statistic I’m up against. I worry that the only reason Betty and I have managed so far is because she hasn’t transitioned, and I still fear she will, and I fear, even more, that a year and a half after she does, or ten years after she does, I will say the same kinds of things Donna’s son said in a fit of anger.

For good reason, that worries me sometimes, sometimes way more than I want it to.

Secret Lives of Women show

Tonight the cable channel WE (Womens Entertainment Network) showed an episode of their regular show Secret Lives of Women – an episode about women who are married to crossdressers. I was interviewed for the show but we decided Betty and I were too “out” to really be classified as “secret” anymore. I was happy to hear that Peggy Rudd would be on, instead.
That said, the show did recommend My Husband Betty (along with Peggy’s books) as further reading. But, it looks like something has gone haywire, since the amazon.com links for My Husband Betty and for Peggy’s books are super-wonky.
If anyone who saw the show found this site as a result, you can still get My Husband Betty at Barnes & Noble online, or at Powells.com, another online bookstore, and I’m sure amazon.com will figure it out shortly.
If you did come here as a result of the show, do look around. There’s a selection of things I’ve written for the blog about relationships vis a vis crossdressing/trans issues, and of course there is a forum just for partners on our message boards.

The Photo Shoot

I’m not putting up any of the possible book cover photos – that would be cheating! – but there are some other shots that we took that I thought I’d share. Last time around media folks seemed to want photos of us together, so for publicity’s sake I had our photographer take some of us together.
It was a pretty nutty experience all around, and almost nothing like the shoot for the MHB cover. For starters, we already knew the photographer (she was our wedding photographer, actually) and she took my author headshots not long ago. It was all around less tense, with fewer wardrobe changes, and with no art director on hand. It seems important to point out that these are not the best of the lot; I’m saving those.
So there you go. Our next job is to pick our favorites that were shot for the cover & send them on to the design team at Seal. As soon as there’s a cover, I’ll be putting it up here so you can all get a look-see.

Five Questions With… Jan B.

Jan B. is one of the people who started a trans group in Poughkeepsie called MHVTA. She’s been helping run the group since 2001, and I’ve known her for about that long. I used to call her “perpetual lurker Jan” on my very first yahoo support group, CDOD.
jan b.1) MHVTA is a nice group – how did you decide to start it? Do you have rules or guidelines, or are you making it up as you go?

Helen, thanks for the opportunity to answer these 5 questions. This is also a nice way to publicize our group so I want to start with a Shameless Plug:The Mid-Hudson Valley Transgender Association (MHVTA), a chapter of Renaissance, is a fairly new group. It was founded in May 2001 by Nikki and I. MHVTA serves the mid-Hudson Valley area of New York (the area north of New York City and south of Albany, from the Pennsylvania border on the west to Connecticut on the east). It’s an active group with regular monthly meetings near Poughkeepsie.

We were so frustrated that nothing was local. We had to travel forty to seventy miles to find a group, so someone said. “Well, just start it yourself (and they will come).” I had never been to a TG support group before but was pretty used to other types of support groups. We met in homes for four meetings and eventually found [an affordable] place to meet, with discreet off street parking.

It varies but there are around 20 dues-paying members who attend meetings. We have more than 100 members on our list server who are interested but don’t necessarily attend meetings. The membership requirements are that you are a TG interested to know more and we are open to the TG spectrum including family if they want to attend. We currently don’t invite admirers in but they sometimes sneak in when someone brings a friend. The members seem to appreciate the level of confidentiality and the one on one interviews pre visiting the group.

MHVTA’s principal mission is to provide outreach and support for our members, their families, their friends, and to be active in the Transgender Community and the greater community of the Mid-Hudson Valley, New York. MHVTA is a non-discriminatory group which is structured to allow participation by all those who support the transgender community. We respect and support the right of free and open expression and the right to be treated as equals by society. We focus on providing an understanding peer support network for anyone who would like to be a part of it and to assist others who wish to learn more about the Transgender community, acting as a Transgender advocate to other groups and institutions in the Mid-Hudson Valley area. We welcome new people with sensitivity towards their fears and concerns that accompany revealing themselves to others. MHVTA aims to accomplish this through: Regularly scheduled meetings, social events, and frequent and open communication. For more information, you can check MHVTA’s website.
You can also find an interview with some members of MHVTA at www.tgforum.com (but you can go directly to the article if you’re a subscriber).
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Jan B.”

John Money, 84, Dies

For more obituaries and articles, check the mHB message boards.

After consulting with Dr. Money in 1966, the parents of a young boy whose penis had been destroyed in a botched circumcision decided to raise their son as a girl. In 1973, Dr. Money reported that the child, who had been castrated and furnished with dresses and dolls, was doing well, and had accepted the new identity as a girl.
But in a 1997 report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, a pair of researchers provided a detailed follow-up: the boy had repudiated his female identity at age 14 and had even had surgery to reconstruct his genitals.
The report caused an uproar, and Dr. Money was criticized in news reports and in a book on the case.
In 2004, the man who had reclaimed his sex committed suicide. His family blamed the effort to change his sex.
Dr. Money was mortified by the case, colleagues said, and as a rule did not discuss it. “Given what the field knew at the time, Money made the right call about what to do” with the child, said Dr. Richard Green, a former colleague and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s easy in hindsight to say it was wrong, but I would have done the same thing.”