Guest Author: Madame George

I haven’t put up a ‘guest author’ post in a while, but a partner wrote an interesting piece about disability and shame and the opinions of others that I thought was both interesting and useful:

I become so disheartened to hear family members and others acting like this is some kind of disabling burden to their partners. They make assumptions about the trans person making selfish choices or being mentally disabled. They make assumptions about the partners having some kind of dependency issues or whatever. They make asses of themselves.

When J and I met he had a habit of hiding his left arm in his sleeve or pocket. When we started dating he would hide it up the back of my jacket or even my shirt. (I guess I should explain that J’s left hand is no longer there.) Here was this wonderful person who was kind, intelligent, honorable, and my friend, and yet felt the need to hide part of himself. When I first admonished him for doing it he seemed surprised. “Aren’t you embarrassed, even a little, about being seen with me?”, he asked. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. Over the next couple of years I was a tyrant. I would not allow him to hide it, no matter where we were. I guess it was his mother’s reaction that surprised me the most. We were out having dinner with her and J’s dad. We were having a great time and J asked me to dance. Instead of putting his left arm at my waist he slid it just under the back of my blouse. I stopped mid step and put it gently at my waist and winked. When we got back to the table his mother lit into me. Supposedly, I embarrassed him and myself. “If John didn’t want people to stare at him, pity him, then he had every right to hide his arm!” She didn’t get it.

I guess that’s the part of it that I didn’t and still don’t understand. People to this day say things to us and it usually doesn’t make sense to me until they clarify it. One of my fellow PTO moms and friend made a comment at the last fundraiser John and I both volunteered for. She looked at me and said “I didn’t know your husband was disabled?” I thought she’d become confused or had been in the heat too long. I asked her what the heck she was talking about and she whispered something about his hand. I laughed and told her I had always considered his poor math and spelling skills a bigger problem. She looked appalled. She didn’t get it either.

A disablility is something that stops you from doing something. J can tie his shoes, type almost as fast as I can (I do around 65 wpm), cut his own food up, do dishes, and unbutton my blouse faster than I can. If there is something out there he can’t do we haven’t come across it yet. When we do I know we’ll find a way for him to do it.

If you hide it. If you let others dictate how you present yourself. If you let it stop you from doing anything then, and only then, is it a disability.

I have a feeling that the transness is going to work the same way for us. Others will see it as a disabling factor. They will try to pity one or both of us. They will pity our children. They will make assumptions based on their preconceptions and not bother to ask us about our reality. They will never get it.

As partners we unfortunately get the backlash of this dual thinking process. If this is not a disability then we are doormats, have dependency issues, or low self esteem. If it is a disability we are saints, loving partners, or nightinggales.

Perish the thought that standing tall next to the person you love shows your inner strength. Perish the thought that staying and helping your love through a tough time in their lives shows your true character. Perish the thought that this is not a disability unless you allow it to be.

Just Call Me Joe

My old friends occasionally get flummoxed over what name to call me when I’m doing readings & the like, & this past Thursday for my reading at Sugar was no different. My dear friend & former roomie Maurice asked me more than once if he could call me “Gail” at the reading, & I told him he could call me whatever. “But I should call you Helen,” he continued. “Sure, call me Helen.” He wasn’t sure if he’d remember, so I told him to call me “G” which is actually what he’s called me for years. It seemed settled.

Of course when we got to the bookstore he called me Gail about half a dozen times, & I don’t mind it at all; I really don’t care what my old friends call me – I just thought it was funny.

But I also thought that maybe when trans people get upset about someone getting their name wrong, it has nothing to do with gender & everything to do with the funny way your brain works (or doesn’t work) with your mouth. Because I knew Maurice meant to call me G, & it was as if, because he was thinking, “don’t call her gail don’t call her gail don’t call her gail” of course Gail was what came out.

Just sayin’.

& In the meanwhile, my thanks to Maurice & his lovely wife for putting me up while I was in Balto.

Wrong Side of a Good Thing

I read this great article about Diane & Jake Anderson-Minshall, who just co-wrote their first mystery novel, Blind Curves, and this line stopped me short:

“I would say Susannah was my wife, and they’d tell me she would have to contact them,” Diane says. “Now I say Jacob is my husband and it’s immediately accepted.”

Because Diane is, of course, talking about the difference in how their relationship is perceived by others now that they’re “straight.” I’m pretty certain they don’t think of themselves as straight, of course, but they are legally married now, and wow – it surprised me how much that one sentence stuck in my craw. I feel like I’m on the wrong side of the equation, even if I know full-well how difficult it is for partners like Diane and other lesbian-identified women to “give up” having others perceive them as lesbians.

But still. Damn.

Urgent Action from NCTE

We are down to the wire on the federal hate crimes bill (H.R.1592).

This Thursday, May 3, the federal hate crime bill is scheduled to be voted on in the U.S. House. We really have a chance to pass this life-saving law this year.

But what we are hearing today is that the radical right has turned their lie machine on force blast and turned out their followers. Members of Congress and their staff are telling us that the people who hate us, who are lying about us, are contacting Congress in greater numbers than we are. That’s not unusual, but it is very dangerous. It is not unusual because that’s what they do: they scare their followers into calling their representatives in Congress. It is very dangerous because it could work this time.

What YOU Can Do

1. Find your member of Congress and call him or her.

2. Sign our petition supporting the hate crimes bill by clicking here.

3. Support the passage of this bill by joining us for NCTE’s annual Lobby Day on May 14-15!

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No Kissing in Public

One of our mHB board regulars recently mentioned kissing her wife while at a conference, and I was reminded that I wanted to post something about kissing Betty at trans conferences.

The thing is, I’m not comfortable kissing her in trans spaces, often.

I noticed that I wasn’t while we were at IFGE, most likely because we were at DO the weekend before. But the thing is, DO has some queer folks, and some trans, but mostly hetero BDSM people and swingers and pagans and polyamorous people. That is, there’s no reason *except* a sex-positive atmosphere that should make DO as welcoming to a dykey + trans couple like ourselves, but we are.

& The thing is: there is *every* reason in the world a trans space should feel welcoming & safe to a dykey + trans couple, but it isn’t. & That, I think, is exactly what can be so wrong about trans spaces.

Born in the Wrong Body

I’m up in the middle of the night for no reason whatsoever, so I wanted to let people know they should keep an eye out for an MSNBC program called Born in the Wrong Body. We caught it tonight & were pleased to see the focus on a younger trans generation, since their situation is sometimes very different than ours.

I especially loved a male partner’s description of being with a transwoman, which he explained by saying: say you like hamburgers but you don’t like fries, & someone offers you a happy meal – you’re not going to turn down the whole thing just because there’s one part of it you don’t like.

Clever. I wanted to wish all the young adults and the author Cris Beam – whose book Transparent is (I think) the impetus behind both this show & Barbara Walters’ upcoming 4/27 show on trans youth – the best of luck.

(& We are, of course, discussing it over on the mHB message boards, though feel free to post a comment here if you’d prefer.)

Green Man

My friend Lara (now infamous since she’s in the new book) sent me this story involving gender roles & green politics, written by No Impact Man – who is trying to live in such a way as to create no impact on the environment as a result of his living / breathing / consuming. Interestingly, in listing all the manual labor involved in doing such a thing, a woman wrote to him to make sure that if greens would embrace a ‘no impact’ life that the chores do not once again fall onto the women & not the men.

His response and musings on the question of gender roles & on manual labor in general are interesting, radical & green, but also smacking of male privilege: it’s one thing to do some manual labor as an experiment – & one for which he’s gaining a great deal of attention – & another to do it, day in & day out, for an entire lifetime, with little thanks or recognition. His situation is such that he already has the understanding & education to put his manual labor in context; it has a theoretical framework that instills value that your average housewife would not have to give her “perspective” while washing another 40 lbs. of family laundry. But still: he seems like a decent guy, & his blog is an ongoing interesting read for the kinds of values he’s examining.

It IS Earth Day today, so I moved this post to suit. What are you doing to lessen your impact?

The Penn State Law Talk

I’m hoping that this talk was recorded as planned and so will be available on Penn State Dickinson School of Law’s website, eventually, because there were a lot of interesting questions discussed in the Q&A after I spoke. Prof. Rains also added a lot of useful legal insight.

I started with a kind of preface in order (1) to define terms like transgender, MTF and FTM, and also (2) to explain that while people like drag queens and crossdressers are considered part of the transgender community, discussions about legal marriage issues don’t always or often effect them; that is, this talk concerns people who identify nearer to the transsexual end of things. that said, drag queens are often already gay and so deal with the same marriage discrimination all gay people do, and crossdressers often suffer with the stigma of being perverts, and one of the reasons they are not out is exactly because they don’t want their wives to divorce them, or lose custody of their children, or lose their jobs, all of which can & does happen to crossdressers who come out.

I never expected that any aspect of my life would cause me to speak at a law school to future lawyers about the odd ways that my life has become complicated by laws about gender and marriage. I’m surprised two-fold: for starters, I never expected to get married, since as a younger and Very Serious Feminist I saw it as a Tool of Patriarchy, symbolic at least of the ways women have always been chattel, and so, not for me. But I also never expected to get married because I was, starting as a teenager in the late 80s, an ally of gay and lesbian people.

& Then I met Betty, who at the time we met presented as male, and as she likes to explain, we knew, both of us, nearly from the get-go that we were supposed to be together. It’s a difficult feeling to explain, and poets have tried, but it took us a few years to decide once & for all that we were in this thing together. We decided to get married because things were so easy between us; on our 2nd date we sat together and read, one of us The Nation and the other The New York Times. When you’re something like an old married couple on your 2nd date, you know that you’re doomed.

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