Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
The Deputy Assistant Secretary for HHS’ Office of Population Affairs, Eric Keroack, has resigned. & There was much rejoicing because he was not just anti-choice, but anti-contraception.
This Bush government is really just insane. Honestly: putting someone who is against even contraception in charge of the Office of Population Affairs is like putting a wife-beater in charge of the Office of Domestic Violence.
But, that’s one nightmare over.
Tonight is the Partners’ Drop-In Group at the LGBT Center. 7:30 – 9PM. The theme this month is sexuality. Details here.
The first thing: it’s obvious the commissioners went in with their minds made up ahead of time, & all of the people who waited hours to testify were wasting their time & their breath. & To hell with those commissioners for being so cynical, close-minded, & pig-headed about it: those are bureaucrats, pure & simple, who don’t have a conscience to examine.
Props of course to the Mayor Pat Gerard and Commissioner Rodney Woods for making the right decision. Mayor Gerard’s wish that there would be a day when LGBT employees felt safe working in Largo was heartfelt, and her point that that is not the case now was chilling.
That said: I found this round pretty damned encouraging, to be honest. In all the time I’ve been paying attention to trans politics (something like 5 years now), this has been the most unified response to an unfair, discriminatory firing. Hearing the various lesbians and gays and trans people of Florida speak at the hearings was absolutely inspiring and heart-breaking; hearing so many ministers of various religions – the Friends, of course, but also Unitarians & others – speak so plainly against discrimination against LGBT people actually made my night. A labor organizer, a minister that wasn’t one, and ordinary citizens all came & said “don’t do this.” And that was damned cool. The testimony of the objectors was far greater than the testimony of those who wanted him fired, and they were – by far – more articulate, more heartfelt, and came off as far more rational than the bitter people who spoke about wanting him fired.
Honestly, it’s good to see “my team” in such good shape, willing to wait in line for six hours to speak, and doing so in defense of trans people – even though, as more than one speaker pointed out, they don’t necessarily understand transness.
That, my friends, is progress.
Our thoughts are otherwise with Stanton, his wife, and family. & Mine, of course, are especially with his wife. You can find a bunch of video, photos, & news articles about the hearings & initial firing at The St. Petersburg Times site.
Virginia Erhardt, Ph.D. is a licensed therapist, a founding member of the American Gender Institute, and the author of Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals.
(1) How long did it take you to compile the stories in Head Over Heels? Where did you find partners who were willing to talk about their experiences?
It was about two and a half years from the point at which I began soliciting participation in 2002 and then sent out questionnaires, until the time when I had created “stories” from the SOs’ responses to my questions. During that time I also worked on my substantive, didactic chapters. It took another two years and a few months from the time when I completed the project and signed a contract with The Haworth Press until Head Over Heels was in print.
I put out a Call for Participants to every online listserve and transgender print publication I could think of. I also requested participation from people at trans conferences at which I presented.
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Virginia Erhardt”
Wow.
Donna sent me a link to an episode of “Real Housewives of Orange County” which is one of those shows that’s supposed to convince us that rich people have real problems, too. I’m really kind of astounded by it; as much as I wrote Chapter 2 of She’s Not the Man I Married with more of a theoretical shoe-buying bonding moment between women in mind, I didn’t expect to actually see something like this on TV, much less that the store these women go to happens to be a Jimmy Choos, since that’s one of the types of shoes I mentioned. (The other was Kenneth Cole.)
But, yeah. This kind of scene is enough to give me hives all over again, from all those years just trying to buy a pair of summer sandals that I didn’t hate. If this is “women” then I’m not of them.
The new Eddie Izzard show, “The Riches,” is about to start on F/X.
“A wild new playground for a TV drama,” says Newsweek.
& Apparently the son likes to wear dresses.
“Could be worse,” says the wife.
“He could be on crack,” says Izzard’s character.
But Eddie Izzard as a con man – somehow, it’s perfect. It gives him a chance to be the eight million people he can be – the kind of broodiness I’ve seen him do on Broadway, but then that big used-car salesman schmaltzy guy he does, too – which has nothing to do with him being a transvestite, & everything to do with him being a really good actor.
Wednesday is the Partners’ Drop-In Group at the LGBT Center. 7:30 – 9PM. The theme this month is the partner’s gender identity. Details here.
As those of you who are reading/have read She’s Not the Man I Married know, Valentine’s Day has always been some kind of locus of confusion for me & Betty. We’re in much better shape now than we once were, though when we’re planning dinner, or just having the “So what do you want to do for Valentine’s Day?” conversation, there’s still this silent thing that hangs in the air.
That silent thing is what gender Betty is going to be, which she’ll be perceived as, & how exactly I’m supposed to interact with that gender.
Mostly now I try to go into Valentine’s Day assuming that the person I’m with will be seen as female, which pretty much wrecks the PDAs that I prefer. Sometimes the reality that I really miss having a male partner lands squarely in my lap on Valentine’s Day, too, so I have to wrestle with the guilt and fear I still fear in having a trans partner. The thing is, I still don’t know how to be romantic with her if I’m not feeling masculine-ascendant myself; I don’t know how to be female with a female partner. & This year, maybe because I’m feeling vulnerable because the new book is out there, or because we’re going to have “the big talk” about Betty’s transness with some important people in our lives, I’m feeling a bit – intrepid.
Sometimes I just think Valentine’s Day should be tossed altogether. I mean all it does is make single people miserable and puts a lot of pressure on couples that are newly together – well, on all couples, I think. I mean how many of us are the types in the jewelry ads, having dinner & being presented with the new diamond solitaire? No one I know is like that, but kudos to anyone who is. But for me, this year, despite a planned dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant, my feeling is:
Down with Cupid!
For me, the sign that Betty was kind of transitioning under my nose was when she didn’t want to act as a male anymore. She felt she wasn’t transitioning. I called foul.
Sometimes it’s like trans folk do everything except SAY you’re transitioning.
& Since we just heard from yet another person who formerly identified as a crossdresser who then started using transgender who now worries she’s truly transsexual, I want to see any marriage that ends because of transness end without the kind of bitterness that’s too frequently the case. I’d rather be more optimistic & say my goal is to keep the marriages from ending, but I’ve gotten to a point where containing the damage seems like more than enough to accomplish.
It’s as if there is something built into transness that makes it especially hard on partners: trans people don’t want to be trans, don’t want to hurt their loves ones, don’t want to up-end their own lives. Who would? That part is easy to understand. Trans people don’t want to be trans but are sometimes still actively but subconsciously moving toward transition and even beginning to without saying “I have made up my mind to transition.”
Unfortunately that gives lie to all the hoo-ha about trust & communication that we’re all always hearing about. When the trans person isn’t accurately communicating what we, their partners, see going on right before our eyes, we can’t trust what we’re hearing, and start to judge the situation beyond and despite what the trans person might be saying.
Some of the problem of course is defining what transition is, exactly. As Caprice pointed out in the thread on the boards where we’re discussing this, “Partners may see ‘transition’ differently than the transperson. A TG may think that transitioning is changing to be a woman. A partner may consider transitioning to be becoming anything that is not-man.”
But of course for someone like me, “not man” is entirely acceptable while “woman” is not. For others, “not man” is unacceptable. Judging the difference between the way the trans person defines transition and how the partner does seems like a huge part of this, but it’s not all of it: some of it too is about the trans person recognizing the change.
I remember Betty & I looking at our wedding pictures one day after months of me remarking about how “not male” she’d become, and finally, it registered. She finally saw how much she was male when we got married, and how much she wasn’t anymore.
It was a relief to me, much like when an umpire/referee agrees with your call on a close play. “He must be blind!” fans yell at the TV set. “He must be blind!” partners post in their support groups. It’s knowing that when someone looks in the mirror they are seeing what you’re seeing. It’s about perception itself, wrapped up in how we define gender and in how we recognize it and mark it on ourselves. It’s the no-man’s-land where the line between “feminine” and “female” is gigantic to me, but not so much to Betty.
One of the reasons I wrote Chapter 5 of My Husband Betty despite the myriad protestations of crossdressers was because I don’t think wives leave when they learn that crossdressers sometimes transition. They run when it gets personal, when they start to see their very own crossdresser husband research HRT, or finding out what it takes to legally change names, i.e., doing things that look more to them like transition than crossdressing.
I feel like we, personally, ended up on the brink of transition just by exploring and trying to navigate a middle path. When it comes to trying to find a compromise between closeted crossdressing and medical/legal transition, we are all standing at the edge of the wood, machetes in hand. There are few paths. The people who went before – Virginia Prince comes to mind – thought she was forging a new path, and probably still insists she was. But to her wives? If I were her wife, I’d say she transitioned without GRS. I’d say she did more than live as a “transgenderist” when she took the hormones that gave her breasts and started living full-time as a woman.
Having a trans woman who is long past transition around has been critical for me in even addressing this, or realizing it. Suzy, much to her chagrin perhaps, confirms my worst fears – and thanks to her for doing so. Are trans people who hope to find a middle path fooling themselves? Or are they just putting themselves at greater risk of transitioning without intending to? Do they have an extra burden of being more careful about making decisions without making them?
Is there a reason that partners see the first permanent body mod as a warning sign? Of course there is. I felt petty and unsupportive (and a ton of pressure) when I objected to Betty removing her facial hair permanently. But in retrospect, I was right to protest, because permanent facial hair removal was all she needed to make living fulltime possible. Possible slides into probable slides into done slides into irreversible quite quickly in trans land. For others, possible might happen as a result of taking hormones, or crossdressing fulltime, or even just accepting one’s transness.
Partners aren’t crazy. We are not willfully putting our heads in the sand. For the most part, I think we’re just able to admit what’s going on sooner, and more clearly, than our partners can, the Cassandras of transland. And like the historical Cassandra, we’re often both disbelieved and forced to stand and watch, hopeless and unable to prevent the thing we’ve predicted and feared, come to pass.
Tonight is the Partners’ Drop-In Group at the LGBT Center. 7:30 – 9PM. The theme this month is community. Details here.