Jamison Green is the author of Becoming A Visible Man
(Vanderbilt U. Press, 2004), which won the CLAGS’ Sylvia Rivera Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Finalist. He writes a monthly column for PlanetOut, and is a trans-activist of unmatched credibility. He is board chair of Gender Advocacy and Education, a board member for the Transgender Law and Policy Institute and the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, and served as the head of FTM International for most of the 1990s*. He is referred to in many other books about trans issues, including Patrick Califia’s Sex Changes, Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein, and Body Alchemy by Loren Cameron.
1. Betty and I often repeat your “there is no right way to be trans” idea, and I was wondering if any one thing contributed to you believing that.
I guess you could boil it down to the desire not to invalidate other people, but that desire has been informed by exposure to a wide variety of transgender and transsexual individuals of many ages, from many cultures, and many walks of life. Some people take it upon themselves to judge other trans people, to say “You’ll never make it as a man” or “as a woman,” or “you’re not trans enough,” “radical enough,” “queer enough,” whatever the case is. But I’ve known people who were told those things who went on to have successful transitions and generally satisfying lives, though they often felt burned enough by “the community” to stay away from it. I think it’s a shame that people cut themselves and/or others off from the potential for community, and I think that if we all truly believed there was room for everyone and we could learn to truly appreciate other’s differences and each person’s intrinsic value as a human being –and if we worked to make that a reality– then we, as collective trans people, might really make a positive difference in the world.
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Advantages of Having a Crossdressing Husband:
None, as far as I can tell.
Someone posted this ‘wish list‘ (or this one, or this one) of the good things about having a CD for a husband, and I mentioned how it was this kind of article that bothered me so much way back when. Ironic or not, I was about 300% more positive about having a CD for a husband than most of the women I met online too.
But this list, I suspect, was written by a CD, not a wife, or maybe it was written by a very cheerlead-y wife in an optimistic mood. (If anyone has any info on the actual origin/writer of this piece, I’d love to hear it.)
While I think it’s an advantage to have a considerate, gentle, domesticated husband, conflating one with the other is a mistake. I know considerate, gentle, domesticated men who are husbands who are not CDs. I have met CDs who are insensitive, beer-cracking, remote-stealing boors. And while I know that many CDs feel that their desire to be feminine makes them – well, more feminine – I’m not sure that CDing has anything whatsoever with how nice a man is, or how nurturing he is.
What I think CDing *can* do for a man is bring along the kind of crisis that forces a man to dig deeper into himself, to think hard about difficult issues of identity, and to think about who he wants to be, and how. Likewise, for a couple, that same kind of crisis can open new pathways: to conversation, to the meaning of trust, and to a reconsideration of expected gender roles and even sexuality.
But it doesn’t do any of those things automatically, by any stretch. It requires a great deal of integrity, responsibility and sheer nerve to face this stuff and deal with it in a way that isn’t destructive to self or family. And someone capable of that is not a “good man” nor a “good CD” but really just a good partner, spouse, parent, or child.
Five Questions With… Alice Novic
Alice (Richard) Novic is the author of Girl Talk magazine’s “Go Ask Alice” column and also the author of the newly-published Alice in Genderland, a modern (readable!) memoir by a crossdresser. Dr. Richard Novic, Alice’s male self, is a psychiatrist who lives with his wife in the LA area, and his femme self, Alice, has a steady boyfriend.
1) How did being a psychiatrist aid/hinder your self-acceptance?
Well, Helen, I’d have to say it’s good to be a crossdresser and a psychiatrist. As I trained in psychiatry, I came across more people and ideas than I ever would have encountered on my own. That perspective gave me the confidence to shrug off all the conventional negativity about crossdressing, and instead see it as an exuberant and healthy part of human diversity.
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Tranny Drinking Games
Last night, the very lovely Crystal Frost was filming a documentary about transfolks that she’s been working on for the past year and a half. She prepared specific questions for me and Betty, good questions, about my erotica, about sexuality, about GLBT politics. I wasn’t surprised; the first time I met Crystal, at FanFair last year, we both instantly seemed to know that we understood each other. It had something to do with the fact that she had brought her boyfriend, and that I was not your average wife. She is a gay man in guy mode, and appreciated my inclusion of gay CDs in my book.
Quite to our surprise, we got the red carpet treatment when we arrived. Ina, Silver Swan’s hostess, saw us first, and then Crystal waved us over: we would be next up for our interview. We didn’t even have time to get a drink. We powdered our noses and reapplied our lipstick, and we were off. At the very end of the interview, off camera, I said to Crystal, “I don’t know who most of these people are; I’ve never seen them here before”. “Camera whores”, she whispered back.
After the interview, Betty and I went in for a drink and found a quiet table in back to talk. Unfortunately, the back room at Ina’s has lived up to the reputation of back rooms everywhere, and is now where the working girls set up trade. One of our CD friends was there, who chatted amiably with us about Betty’s next performance. The minute she walked away, an older chaser took her chair. He immediately explained he was confused by the place, and asked Betty if she was a boy. Although we knew what he was asking (effectively “do you have a penis?”) we didn’t clarify anything for him. He backtracked, pointing at me, “You’ve always been a woman, right?” and then went back to questioning Betty, who of course — as she always does — clarified that we were married. “So would you go on a date with me?” he asked in response. We’re still always dumbfounded by that. We tried to clarify. Betty: “We’re monogamous.” Me: “We met when she was still a boy, and got married, and we’re still married, happily.” Still confusion. Betty finally clarified, “we only have sex with each other, and we like it that way. We”e more like lesbians.” It took the L word to finally get that bulb to light over his head. “Don’t you think lesbians are the reason this place exists?” he said, “If these guys had been able to get dates, they wouldn’t have to do this.” “Uh, no,” I tried to explain. Betty chimed in with the usual ‘sex and gender’ clarification, and when she finished, he asked if we’d be interested in a threesome. “Oh wow,” I said, looking right at him, “we’ve never been asked that before.” I had him. “I’m kidding,” I said, “We get asked that every time we come here, and we always say no.”
At that moment, the very lovely Ina came up and told us we were urgently wanted outside. A big kiss to Ina for that bit of genius; I suppose I had started to look like I was going to hit him.
The night became more bizarre. Betty and I saw someone who looked vaguely familiar and she turned out to be Mona Rae Mason, who is currently interviewing transfolk for her Transgender Project. I stood outside and talked to Crystal’s producer for a while, about gender stereotypes and the way outsiders responded to transness; I got the feeling she was a woman who had seen a lot of the world and wouldn’t have been surprised by much. They moved the shooting inside and all the girls who didn’t want to be caught on film came outside. I chatted with a Silver Swan regular decked out in all white: white corset, hose, heels, – and not much else. I kept thinking about Diane Frank, one of our message board regulars who finds that kind of oversexed slutty outfit abhorrent, and trying not to laugh.
Eventually I went inside and sat next to Betty who was drinking a Corona and had bought me a white wine. “She took a sip,†Betty said, pointing to a tranny sitting catty corner from me. Apparently she’d needed a prop when the camera had come her way, and my wine glass was within reach. “I already gave her what-for,” Betty explained.
I tapped the tranny in question. “Hi, I’m Betty’s wife, I heard you drank my wine.” “Oh, sorry,” she giggled. She asked if it was our first time at the Swan, so I explained I’d done some of the research for my book there more than two years ago. She wanted to know why she’d never seen me there before then. “We don’t come that often; we tend to hang out in lesbian spaces.” “Lesbian?” she clarified. I nodded. She swiveled on her chair and stopped speaking to me altogether.
In the meantime, the camera had found its way to our corner of the bar to shoot a t-girl putting on makeup, so Betty and I took a drink, as per the rules of the Tranny Documentary Drinking Game. Ina brought another girl over to the camera and encouraged her to “do a kick.â” The girl complied. “Oh do it again,” someone else said.
And suddenly I could see the video tape cover to Mondo Tranny. We left soon after. I didn’t have to wonder anymore if the whole talk show modus operandi when covering trans subjects really is the producers’ fault; from where I sat, the trans community was more than willing to play into stereotypes, and no-one had to tell them to, not even egg them on.
That said, I have hope editing will make this a good documentary, anyway.
Why Bother?
Some days I wonder why I keep arguing about feminism on the message boards, especially when I should be working on my next book.
But then I turn on the television for ten minutes – 10 minutes of PBS – and there’s a public service announcement co-funded by Liz Claiborne that states that one 1 in 5 teenage girls is sexually or emotionally abused by their boyfriends.
So I did a little research and discovered a website dedicated to preventing relationship abuse called Love is Not Abuse.
And in its statistics section, this is what I found:
That’s why I keep arguing. While it may not seem that discussions as to whether or not women can use their sexuality as a kind of power have any relevance to the above statistics, I think they do. There is a tendency in the world in general to gloss over the actual lives of women, and instead fixate on the exception. Ironically, I think that comes out of an optimistic impulse: we don’t really want to believe that women’s lives can be so horrible only because they’re women.
But there’s something really wrong here. Women’s lives have not gotten better because they can show some cleavage and get some guy to buy them a drink. When a married tranny argues with me that getting yourself bought a drink or turning a man’s head is power, I often wonder if they think first to ask their wives why they don’t use their sexuality as power. After all, a lot of us are attractive women. But we’re also smart. And we don’t use that power for a reason – and it’s not because we don’t think we have it. It’s because once you use it, there’s this raft of assumptions about who and what you are. Most of us, frankly, just want to get through a day on our skills or our brains and really don’t need our tits to help out.
These arguments are not abstractions for me. I’m not arguing for the hell of it – I’d rather be writing. But I have very little patience for people who want to and willfully try to believe in something that makes them feel better instead of dealing with what’s really going on in the world. And I acknowledge that I get especially impatient when that person occasionally dresses as a woman, but remains somewhat oblivious of the reality of most women’s lives.
Parents and Children
My parents are moving to Florida.
Despite the fact that I only see them a few times a year when they live only forty minutes away, I’m upset that I may not see them much once they move.
I really dislike Florida. It’s muggy and commercial and the home of Disney. To me, it’s the worst of suburban sprawl, and I think the alligators (and the Seminoles) should have been left alone.
Plus, I don’t like planes. I didn’t like them before 9/11, and I like them a hell of a lot less now.
Betty has a regular, 9-5 kind of job, and we take a lot of three- and four-day weekends to do outreach, when we can. As a result, we’ve kind of nickel’d and dimed her vacation time to almost nothing this year, and that without actually going on an actual vacation, so making time to visit them won’t be easy.
I know for most Americans it’s normal to have close relatives living far away. My family is a little more 19th Century: my parents grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island, where I was born, and raised, and which I left the minute I could – for Brooklyn. We’ve tracked each other around NYC like we’ve been trying to catch a Heffalump. Most of the rest of my family stayed put: some stayed married and others got divorced, but still, they had children, and houses, on Long Island. I’ve been blessed (and cursed) with having a huge Catholic family – five siblings, various siblings-in-law, two parents, seven nieces, and two nephews – right nearby.
That my parents are leaving seems incomprehensible. They were the ones who chose Long Island in the first place, and they’ve lived there 43 years. They leave not only their family, but their parish, their neighbors, their friends. But living in New York is too expensive for a couple in their 70s whose medical bills are only increasing. My mother can’t walk on ice or snow (she has what I refer to as a bionic knee) and I think my father has done his lifetime of shoveling the stuff. It makes perfect sense for them to go where they’ll have a pool in their complex, and where my dad will be a short hop from the Mets’ training grounds: heaven itself to a Brooklyn Dodgers fan.
I don’t doubt they’ll be happy. But I’m not. I keep having this feeling that there’s something I’m forgetting to do.
The way I see it, even though none of us trusts it, life has familiar patterns, slow cycles of eras. Dutiful daughter becomes rebellious teenager becomes young adult. You make your own life. With any luck, you start to appreciate your parents as friends and adults and not just as parents.
When you get married, you are simultaneously welcomed back into the family, and sent on your way to forming your own. My mom and I have talked about marriage a lot; she knew about Betty before some of my friends did, and always reassured me that if it weren’t trans stuff, it’d be something else, because it always is. We got to talk as mother and daughter, but also as wives, and as women.
With them moving, I’ve finally figured out where my pattern unraveled, like a piece of knitting left on the needle in an old woman’s lap: I’m not having their grandchildren.
Not having their grandchildren means I will never connect with my mother as grandmother and mother. Betty and I decided a long time ago that we wouldn’t have children; neither of us had any urge for kids, and crazy us – we figured our opinions were the only ones that counted. Believe me, that’s not the way other people saw it: we were asked regularly when we’d be having kids. And when we said we don’t want kids we heard about ticking clocks and what great parents we would be, so much so we eventually changed our standard response to we’re not planning on having children right now. The ticking never got louder, and we only became more convinced that people who don’t want children do not make good parents.
Yet there’s this sense of incompleteness, this void, of what to put in its place. Can anything possibly replace grandchildren? Probably not. But there’s still this urge in me, to do something for them, to say thanks, to tell them I love them in some more-than-verbal way. But all I have is words.
So thanks, mom and dad, for the house, and the yard, the food and the arguments, and even for the various neuroses I’m sure are your fault. But mostly, thank you for having enough children to have your grandchildren so that I don’t have to.
A Room of Her Own
Recently, a transwoman wrote to me casually that all she ever wanted to do was be a ________. As a child, as a teenager, as an adult, she (then he) was intent on that goal. My first impulse was to think that I’ve never had that kind of calling, that kind of goal, but then – a few days later – I realized that’s not entirely true, either.
The problem with wanting to be a writer is somewhat like discovering you’re trans. You’d prefer anything else. You’d prefer a magic wand of a “cure.” You know it’s going to cost – socially, financially, familially – so it takes a while to admit to yourself who you are and own it, as the kids say. It’s as if something in you knows not to say it out loud, not to commit to that secret yearning in the corner of your heart.
I’m still waiting and hoping for my calling to be an accountant much as Betty is still waiting to feel comfortable living as a man. We may as well buy lottery tickets if we’re already playing odds like that.
I know exactly why I never knew, much less articulated, my urge to be a writer. I grew up working class, and writing was not on the list of career choices. It wasn’t a job. It was a luxury of rich people, the earned perk of a family that already had a generation of college educations and healthy business professions. My older sister was the first in our family to graduate from college, though a few of her siblings, like me, followed after. She is a banker. One brother is an accountant. Another runs the regional area for a supermarket chain. Another is a psychologist. In a nutshell, they all chose practical careers.
They make me feel like the dreamy, impractical baby of the family, which is, in a sense, what I am. During a recent family discussion (read: argument) my brother asked my sister why I didn’t have a full-time job. To her credit, she answered, “I don’t know, but why haven’t you written a book?”
His critical questions aside, I’ve been learning a lot about the publishing industry. While holding my breath (and pulling my hair and stamping my feet) through the negotiations around my next book, I’ve wondered why I’m in this profession at all.
I write because it’s what I do. I’ve kept a written journal since I was nine, which is about the same time I wrote my first short story (Called “Rainy Day,” it was a two-page ripoff of Madelaine L’Engle, of course; I’d just read A Wrinkle in Time.) I had to get married in order to be able to write full-time. The feminist implications of having marriage deliver this wish don’t please me.
Writing is about time.
“What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out the window.”
Rudolph Erich Rascoe
I’m lucky to have a husband who understands that even without a job, I’m working. Betty is a voracious reader, who actually enjoys having a writer for a wife. Still in all, what are the real problems of being a woman writer – even a married one?
- Here are some things to think about:
- Only 9 out of 52 winners of the National Book Award for Fiction are women.
- Only 11 out of 48 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction have been women.
- Women writers won 63 percent of the awards but less than 30 percent of the money in awards and grants reported by Poets & Writers. (January/February 2003 issue)
- In 2002 all but one of the Pulitzer Prize finalists for Fiction and Poetry were male.
- 94 percent of all the writing awards at the Oscars have gone to men.
- Only 25 percent of the advisory members of the National Endowment for the Arts are women.
- 68 percent of total art income in the U.S. goes to men and 73 percent of all grants and fellowships in the arts go to men.
(Source: A Room of Her Own Foundation)
The Humanities are supposed to be woman-friendly, too! I can’t even imagine what the stats are for women in the Sciences; I almost don’t want to know.
It’s a bit easier to understand why “I want to be a writer” never crossed my lips as a child, isn’t it? It is for me. Some days I’d still like that calling to be an accountant, maybe just for a little while, so that when I’m 40 or 50 I can quit accounting and write full-time without caring who the writing awards and grants go to and maybe even fund a few of them myself.
Spring Cleaning, Feline Variation
Okay, so we’re a little late for spring cleaning. Like three years too late. What we need is a wife.
Robert Hanley
One of my agent’s fellow hopefuls was entertainer Robert Hanley, who was there with his wife Corrine. We were waiting around at one point for Nancy to show, and we all started talking about our pitches, the responses we were getting, and about what kind of book we were pitching.
The only things I knew about Robert and his wife when I told them about My Husband Betty was that they were practicing Catholics and that Robert was an entertainer. (A little while later he told me he was originally from the Bronx). So I explained my next book a little cautiously, not knowing if they were judgemental Christians or not. But once what I was saying became clear to them, we had a great chat about homosexuality, acceptance, Catholicism – you name it. Robert said he’d pray for me – not because he’d cast me or Betty as sinners, though – but because he recognized the challenge to our marriage that transness was. Corrine even mentioned how she felt it must be an “at birth” condition, like homosexuality, because who would choose it?
One of the most wonderful things about being out is being surprised like this. That is, I end up talking to all kinds of people, not just people who I think might be cool with transness. And more often than not, I find people are more sympathetic than judgemental. And honestly, I think they can connect with me – even if they, like I, don’t innately understand transness, because anyone who is married, anyone who has been in love, understands that you do what you can to be with the person you love.
So thanks to Robert, and Corrine, and all the lovely people out there who instead of thinking I’m a sinner or insane, know instead that I’m a woman struggling to preserve and honor her marriage, and that trans-folks are, in the same vein, neither sinners nor crazy, but people struggling with something that the rest of the world can’t understand.
Here’s a little more about Robert Hanley, if you’re interested. If you’re like me, you’re going to see his picture and think “I’ve seen him somewhere” and then, as you read the article, you’ll realize you have: he’s been in movies and tv shows, and did stand-up comedy, too.
But you know, I really should know to trust Catholic former New Yorkers. I mean, if you can’t trust a mensch from the Bronx, who can you trust?
Why We Stay
Every once in a while, one of the partners in an online support group will get up the courage to ask, “But really, why do you stay?” It’s usually asked by someone new to the group, new to transness, who is looking at the prospect of having her husband become either a part-time or full-time woman, and who honestly can’t imagine herself staying, and can’t come up with one good reason why any woman would. I know I’ve told several women friends they could date CDs, and that’s about all they hear before they change the subject. It’s rare to find a woman who would even be open to dating a CD, much less finding one who would want to.
But it’s good for partners especially to cut through the sentimental stuff about love and soul-mates – not because that stuff isn’t true – and get to some of the more pragmatic issues at stake. I really appreciated having one of the older women on the list admit that her partner transitioned close to their mutual retirement age, and that neither of them had the funds to live separately, anyway. She added, as well, that after a few decades’ worth of marriage, her and her partner’s extended families had become her own. That’s a practical answer, one I believe more than the ones full of love. (I’m not much of a romantic: I’ve read way too much sociology.)
Deborah Feinbloom said in the 70s that we must all either have low self-esteem or be latent lesbians, of course. For me, that was a little too clinical, a little too cold an analysis, but over and over again I hear things from partners that make me wonder. Not about the lesbianism, but about the self-esteem. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that, either. That women don’t believe they can live in the world on their own might explain women who stay with alcoholics, abusive husbands, cheating spouses. But it still doesn’t explain us, the partners of transpeople.
I just read an essay called “Explaining stable partnerships among FTMs and MTFs: a significant difference?” by Frank Lewins on the differences between the FTM and MTF communities when it comes to relationships, and the writer came to all sorts of conclusions that had to be sought out – while avoiding the obvious one. In study after study he cited, transpeople with female partners turned out to be the ones who were in relationships. It didn’t matter if they were FTM or MTF.
I wonder, often, what that means about women. There is socialization: women are raised to value relationships and family more than men are. Women do tend to put relationships and family before career and status. Maybe there is a maternal instinct: women who love too much are not unlike partners of transfolks, who in some ways need to be protected, taken care of, and encouraged. I’ve never denied that one of the important, albeit Freudian, aspects of a relationship is the way two people might parent each other. But I don’t think that’s the whole of it, either.
I am pretty sure that a lot us simply don’t want to be single (again). We don’t want to live on what we can earn ourselves, because we’re still getting that 69 cents on a man’s dollar. Some don’t want to be single parents, and others are just plain used to their partners. Grayson Perry’s wife was quoted as saying something along the lines of “perverts are very loyal” so we know a little bit about why she stayed – loyalty weighed in as a stronger “pro” than the “con” of being married to a man who others view as a pervert. (It’s also obvious by her comment that she came armed with a sense of humor, too.)
But I still worry about the economics, and the fear, and how much of both motivates the partners of transpeople to stay. I worry because I know I’m one of those open-minded souls, who doesn’t mind taking the path less traveled. But others aren’t, and yet they stay, too.
Once I get past the “because Betty loves me and I love her, and we’re soul-mates” stuff, I end up back at “because I can.” All relationships, I think, are moderated by how close the relationship comes to what the person expected, and how much they get out if it vis a vis how much they put into it. I spent my whole life dating men for whom I had to put in 85% to their 15%. Betty puts in a lot more. She can talk. She likes politics. She values having a smart wife who’s a writer. She understands, as a basic premise, that relationships are full of compromise, unexpected joys, and most of all – friendship. For her, no matter how difficult I am, at the end of the day she knows she’s lucky to have a friend who is her lover – as am I.
Sometimes the obvious answer is the closest to the truth, even when it isn’t the whole truth: I think the only real secret of any successful relationship is that both people want to be together more than they want to be apart, and they do whatever it takes.