How (Not) To Be An Ally

Posted by helenboyd – June 19, 2013

My patience for snark is really, really low these days, but I still found some of the gems in “8 Ways Not To Be An “Ally”: A Non-Comprehensive List” pretty useful.

But I’m still going to re-articulate them for those who don’t understand irony. I’ve put her comments in italics, and tried to articulate in my earnest, non-snarky way, why this list is so vital. I’ve also added one of my own.

1. Assume one act of solidarity makes you an ally forever means fighting oppression is an ongoing, day to day struggle that doesn’t come with much resolution if any. One day the world is not going to just be better. Which means that you, as an ally, need to keep doing whatever work you do to minimize racism, sexism, homphobia, etc.

2. Make everything about your feelings, or, it’s not about you. The best way to go about this is to shut up and listen. That’s all. Stop talking so much. Listen. Pretend you don’t have an opinion and that other people’s lived experiences are actually as valid as your own. It’s a nutty idea, I know, but it’s true. People who live with marginalization are often – shocker! – at least as smart as you, if not smarter.

3.  Date ‘em all will not, in any way, make you an ally automatically. In fact, it could instead mean that you’re a fetishizing, exploitive, clueless jerk. (Trans admirers take special note here, please.)

4. Don’t see race/gender/disability/etc. is a good way of eliminating someone’s identity and specifically an identity which – because of the sexist, racist, transphobic, ablesist culture we live in, tends to essentialize a person due to that marginalization. Not seeing that aspect of them is belittling and really only lets you off the hook, free from your white liberal guilt. That is, it does nothing for people who are marginalized, but everything for people who aren’t.

5. Don’t try any harder, or, try until you succeed, not just until your white liberal guilt is assuaged. See above. More→

Five Questions With… Joy Ladin

Posted by helenboyd – June 18, 2013

I had the chance recently to ask Joy Ladin, the author of Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, a few questions. What followed was a conversation about transition, marriage, separation, spirituality and religion.

1)      I was a little surprised that there wasn’t more about theology, and specifically Judaism, in your story. Is there a reason you shied away from addressing the issue of transness & religion head on?

I don’t feel I shied away from talking about transness and religion; I talk quite directly about how Judaism, particularly the Torah, and Jewish communal norms, affected my sense of my gender identity when I was growing up, and the course of my transition after. But my intention in the book was to talk about trans identity and its consequences in very personal terms, rather than to reflect about general issues. As I say in the book, I grew up in a family that barely practiced Judaism; being Jewish was an ethnicity, not a religion, for us. I was religious, but I more or less invented the Judaism I practiced, based on my reading of the Torah and scattershot study of Judaism. I wasn’t interested in theology; I was interested in God, with whom I have had an intense relationship from early childhood to the present. Since the book was finished, I written a number of pieces that are part of the fledgling but growing discourse of trans Jewish theology, but I hadn’t done any of that when I wrote the book. What issues did you want me to address that weren’t in the book? I’d be happy to address them now.

** Fair enough. I guess because your employment was at an Orthodox school, and so many people seem desperate to disprove some of the Torah’s verdicts on gender and sexuality, I expected a specific take. I’d be curious to know what the themes are of the pieces you’re writing now about trans Jewish theology.

Traditional Judaism doesn’t directly address transgender identity. There is the prohibition against cross-dressing in Deuteronomy, which I discuss in my memoir, rabbinic prohibitions against doing anything that would impair male fertility that are taken by many Orthodox rabbis as prohibiting male-to-female transition, and a brief discussion in the Talmud about how to integrate intersex Jews into Jewish law and community. Strikingly, the rabbis WANT to include intersex Jews, and reinterpret the law to make that possible. Yeshiva University made Orthodox Jewish history when it allowed me to return to teaching after transition, but that was clearly in response to secular law rather than a desire to be a trend-setter in terms of Orthodox Judaism. However, there are many trans Jews living in the Orthodox Jews. Most are in hiding, but many are “out” to their rabbis, who are privately empathetic. I have recently heard of one Orthodox community whose rabbi has explicitly welcomed a trans member, and the Orthodox world is in the midst of an intense discussion of how to respond to LGBTQ Jews in their midst who can no longer be quietly ignored or exiled. There are now several organizations, including Eshel and Keshet, of which I am a board member, working toward full inclusion of LGBTQ Jews in the Jewish world.  I think it’s a time of difficult but positive change. My work on trans Jewish theology is still preliminary, but you can hear some of my thinking in this podcast of my talk to rabbinical students and their teachers at the Jewish Theological Society, and read some in this essay, written for the first Jewish Trans Gathering last fall in Berkeley, CA. I discuss the intersection of trans and Jewish identity more generally in this podcast of my conversation with Lilith editor Susan Weidman Schneider at last fall’s  DC JCC Jewish Book Festival.

Also, there is this conversation with Rev. Shay Kearns which took place at the Encountering Sacred Texts panel at the 2012 Philadelphia Trans Health Conference – in conversation with Rev. Shay Kearns: Part 1 and Part 2.

2)      Betty has commented that she thinks she wound up an actor in order to find some kind of man she might be able to be (but didn’t). I’m wondering if the conservative gender roles assigned by religion now seem like a bulwark against your own sense of gender incongruence.

As I discuss in the book, I found in teaching literature as a profession – a vocation – in which I could feel close to people in a way that seemed to me to temporarily transcend gender. As I said in the book, I’m not and have never been an Orthodox Jew, or a practitioner of any conservative or traditional form of Judaism. I commute to the Orthodox world, because I teach at an Orthodox Jewish university, but I don’t live the way my students live, and my gender identity and expression have nothing to do with theirs, or with Orthodox Judaism’s gender roles. I’ve never looked to Judaism for guidance about my gender identity or expression either when living as a man or now that I’m living as myself. More→

ATP: Association of Transgender Professionals

Posted by helenboyd – June 17, 2013

A press release about the launch of ATP crossed my desk the other day, which read in part:

New York, NY, June 7, 2013 – The Association of Transgender Professionals (ATP), was formally dedicated this week, according to ATP Executive Director, Denise Norris and endorsed by a national advisory board of voluntary leaders and allies.

The association is intended primarily to serve people who have, had or will have non-conforming gender expressions/identities and seek to advance their professional careers.

The goal of this group is to encourage the networking and mentoring which strengthens careers and promotes the next generation of leaders.

To learn more about the Association of Transgender Professionals and its vision and goals, please visit www.transgenderprofessionals.org and view an introductory video on You Tube.

It seems they’ve also received a Calamus challenge grant for $25k, which means that every dollar donated will be matched by Calamus.

Good luck to you, ATP!

Minus Dad

Posted by helenboyd – June 16, 2013

I wanted to send my love out to all of you – which includes me – who don’t have a dad to celebrate this year.

Some days, Facebook just feels like a plague of shitty, happy people.

Still, I will spend mine on a bike, in the sun, & call my mother, as all those things would have made my dad happiest. (I will leave the eating of cured meats to my siblings.)

& Now I will get back to my marathon screenings of Mad Men. More on that another day.

Trans Elders

Posted by helenboyd – June 14, 2013

Although the language seems a little dated (“transgendered” and “T-girls” most especially) these seem like worthwhile studies and good for anyone providing medical services for trans people, especially an aging population.

The transgendered population confronts a myriad of difficulties which hospice must also address.  Socially, transgendered folk, gentle folk, find themselves relegated to a near-netherworld existence.  Forced to society’s fringes they feel isolated, even abandoned, by family and friends.  They may find their friendships restricted to a “gay-friendly” environment or to other ‘T-girls’.  Many T-girls succumb to a personal economic collapse with a loss of job, loss of insurance, and even a homeless existence.

I like “gentle folk”. While it’s not always true, you get a sense of who Dr. Killeen “met” by reading these studies. At least I do.

Another Bathroom Case: Maines in Maine

Posted by helenboyd – June 13, 2013

Nicole Maines is in a court case to decide whether or not her school did the right thing by her when they asked her to use a staff bathroom.

BANGOR, Maine (AP) — Maine’s highest court heard arguments Wednesday over whether transgender students can use the bathroom of their choice, and the girl at the heart of the case said she hoped justices would recognize the right of children to attend school without being “bullied” by peers or administrators.

Nicole Maines, now 15, watched lawyers argue over whether her rights were violated when the Orono school district required her to use a staff bathroom after there was a complaint about her using the girls’ bathroom.

Maines said after the hearing in Bangor that she hopes the Supreme Judicial Court will ensure no one else experiences what she went though.

A couple of things:

1. I am so glad there are younger people with supportive families who are taking on school systems.

2. I’m also very happy to see we are beginning to have a national dialogue about this, and that many people are starting to realize – often because of the visibility of young transitioners – that trans women are women.

3. It blows my mind that these kinds of cases are even possible, having been around when trans students weren’t given any options besides having to use the bathroom of the sex they were declared at birth.

 

RIP JoAnn Roberts – & Thank You

Posted by helenboyd – June 12, 2013

JoAnn RobertsJoAnn Roberts, aged 65, died on June 7th, 2013. She was an early advocate for trans rights, trans community, and built a few institutions that provided people with hope, community, and resources. She started her work in the mid 1980s – more than 25 years ago.

JoAnn Roberts founded TG Forum, which is one of the very first resources my partner introduced me to more than a decade ago when we met. She’s written a great deal for TG Forum over the years. Roberts was a crossdresser with a drag queen’s flair, and she also created Renaissance, which was a huge organization with chapters that was welcoming both to crossdressers and transitioning trans people. They held week-long getaways in Pennsylvania and generally focused their work in the northeast.

She also wrote Coping with Crossdressing, which was written expressly for couples who were negotiating a husband’s crossdressing — and both her first and second wives accepted her as a crossdresser. She also published LadyLike magazine, whose importance is likely to be undervalued now that we have computers: for many CDs, this magazine was the only thing that had useful information about events, dressing tips, and which helped people feel a little less alone.

Dallas Denny has written a piece remembering her on TG Forum; they worked together for years on AEGIS; Roberts also went on to be part of the now-defunct GenderPAC and wrote The Gender Bill of Rights in 1990. It was short, but it was powerful, especially in 1990, when no one was even using the word “transgender” (it was, more frequently, “transgendered”, and even that was rarely used).

It states:

The Gender bill of Rights by JoAnn Roberts
It is time for the transgendered community to take a stand, a strong stand, against all gender-based discrimination simply because some people are different and simply because some people do not fit into current social norms of gender roles. It is time the gender-based community articulate this stand in words that clearly define exactly what our gender rights are. It is time to stand alongside other minority rights movements to declare these gender rights as follows:

The Right To Assume A Gender Role

Every human being has within themselves an idea of who they are and what they are capable of achieving. That identity and capability shall not be limited by a person’s physical or genetic sex, nor by what any society may deem as “masculine” or “feminine” behavior. It is fundamental, then, that each individual has the right to assume gender roles congruent with one’s self-perceived identity and capabilities, regardless of physical sex, genetic sex, or sex role.

Therefore, no person shall be denied their Human and/or Civil Rights on the basis that their gender role or perceived gender role is not congruent with their genetic sex, physical sex, or sex role.

She stopped working visibly on trans issues about a years back – having accomplished more than most for members of the trans community.

She will be missed, but she shouldn’t be forgotten.

Leslie Feinberg in Hospice

Posted by helenboyd – June 11, 2013

Oh, this sad news. Please do make sure you read the requests Leslie Feinberg has made about how to send well wishes and respect them.

I want to be the one to tell you that I am failing to thrive very rapidly, and a local hospice expert is working to set up care in our home.

In the meantime, messages of personal support are welcome, but I can’t respond. I can’t do interviews or videos.
Please no commercial inquiries of any kind.

Minnie Bruce and I welcome your messages of support at: minniebrucepratt@yahoo.com

Please do not send these messages to our other e-mail accounts!
And—please do not ask for details or send medical advice.

. . .

While it might not be realistic or possible, I have a fierce determination to get out in the streets with you all at the Central New York Pride March this Saturday, June 15.

We love you, Leslie, for all you have done and for who you are.

Mark Pocan (D-WI) on ENDA and ExxonMobil

Posted by helenboyd – June 11, 2013

Pretty simply put with a lot of useful information about why ExxonMobil is the exception and not the rule and need to get out of the way of this important American legislation.

Mark Pocan is gay, out, and is now filling the position recently vacated by Tammy Baldwin when she became the first out LGBTQ Senator.

Here’s a 7 minute video of personal stories about the importance of this legislation. Even though it is specifically about West Virginia, it makes the point for many states without this kind of basic protection.

Non-Op Resource

Posted by helenboyd – June 10, 2013

There is very little out there for those trans people who don’t medically transition – for various reasons – or who straddle a non-binary gender identity and expression. But today someone sent me a link to this website, which collects both resources, like their Trans 101, and stories of either non-op transitions or non-transitioning trans people.

From the site:

What there is a lack of, is information for people who don’t want to change their bodies for whatever reason.

I’m going to preface this by saying that I fully support transition. Transition is a valid option for people who experience severe dysphoria, many of these people need to transition.

What I don’t support is the pressure the law, society, and even the transgender community puts on people to get expensive medical treatment they may not want. It’s extremely hard for non-transitioners (or non-ops) to find support or resources for the unique problems facing them, and I’m hoping to fix that.

What a very cool thing. If you have any other resources like this one, feel free to post links below or email them to me.

Faulkner on Salinger

Posted by helenboyd – June 9, 2013

“I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing. I have not had time yet. So I must speak only of the ones I do know. I am thinking now of what I rate the best one, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because this one expresses so completely what I have tried to say. A youth, father to what will — must — someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who — he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it because God perhaps had put it there — loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. There was nothing for him to do save buzz, frantic and inviolate, inside the glass wall of his tumbler, until he either gave up or was himself, by himself, by his own frantic buzzing, destroyed.” – William Faulkner

When he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. My god that’s gorgeous.

Evon Young’s Killers

Posted by helenboyd – June 8, 2013

Trigger warning: this death was horrific and brutal and cold blooded, in my opinion. The description is journalistic and, as a result, very upsetting.

Evon Young’s killers are pleading guilty to various charges which is a good thing that will help his family and the other communities he was a part of find closure in his death.

I don’t really understand any of it. I have been reading reports of these up close and personal, brutal, immolating murders for a decade now, and no part of it ever makes any sense to me. Who are these people and why do we even consider them human, still? I really don’t know. But I’m always newly horrified at how coldly, how brutally, these things can happen.

There are days when you cry, and days when you spit nails, but none of it makes any sense of this kind of crime. I don’t think I’m ever going to understand.

But I will say: this is why the world needs to get past their fear of trans people. It’s why all of us need to stop thinking of trans people’s birth genders as their “real” gender. It’s why denying trans women as women – whether that’s coming from a fundamentalist Christian or a radical feminist – isn’t ever just theoretical or political. These are the lives that are lost when we deny the truth of trans people’s experiences and reports of their own genders.

I am losing any tolerance I once had of any kind of transphobic “theories” of gender that deny a person’s humanity and their gender and Evon Young is why.

The Big Guns: Endymion

Posted by helenboyd – June 7, 2013

Endymion J. Crowl, May 2000 – June 7th, 2013

endymion_best

He left us today after a week in which he aged a decade. He was the most handsome of cats, and the sweetest, and the softest, and he greeted us at the front door – wherever that front door was – every day of his life until this past week.

Oh, big Endymion. Big loyal beastie. We loved you.

RIP Esther Williams

Posted by helenboyd – June 7, 2013

Esther Williams, the swimming movie star, or the Million Dollar Mermaid, died yesterday. I’m not really a huge fan & like a lot of people find those movies kind of bizarre, but she is otherwise known for having outed her ex husband, Jeff Chandler, as a crossdresser. From what I can tell, she never recanted, but no one ever verified it, either, and plenty of people denied it. For me, though, her comment that he only felt “happy and secure” in women’s clothing rings true, no?

 

Go Kristin Beck!

Posted by helenboyd – June 6, 2013

A retired Navy Seal, now named Kristin Beck, just published a memoir about being a Seal and about being trans.

What’s fascinating about that – aside from the obvious uber-manliness, of course – is that it’s still a mental disorder to be trans in the US military. Gays and lesbians are fine (now), but trans people are still classifiable as not fit for service.

So maybe there’s hope.

I know I met a crossdressing Seal years ago, in Arkansas, but I don’t remember her name.

Naked Trans Women

Posted by helenboyd – June 5, 2013

It’s embarrassing to hear that my fellow feminists are shaming trans women for their bodies. It breaks my heart, really. I’ve probably seen more trans women naked than the average person, and there’s nothing scary about their bodies.

They’re beautiful bodies, like all women’s bodies are.

But when Red Durkin writes this:

Specifically speaking to the issue of sexual assault survivors: Especially in a queer/lesbian space, I find it incredibly dangerous to equate penises with sexual violence. This erases MUCH of the assault/abuse/violence that happens within lesbian communities. It also erases the women who experience that violence. As I mentioned in my initial reply, I am a sexual assault survivor myself. I feel completely ignored/unseen when trans women and sexual assault survivors are spoken of as though they’re mutually exclusive. I am the cross section of those identities. So, so, SO many trans women are. Do we not deserve healing?

How much more violence can we really do to trans women’s bodies at this point? Recognizing the deep ways we shame and blame trans women does not erase or eliminate anyone’s concern for women’s bodies.

Patrick Stewart Wins Again

Posted by helenboyd – June 4, 2013

This is a pretty amazing statement on domestic violence, post traumatic stress disorder, and respect for parents.

At 2:40 & 6:20 he’s especially astonishing.

Gynandromorph

Posted by helenboyd – June 3, 2013

How cool is this? This cardinal is a gynandromorph, where an animal is actually split – usually along a midline – and expresses sex characteristics of a male on one side & of a female on the other.

So to get gynandromorphs in flies, all that has to happen is that one X chromosome gets lost in one cell when the initial cell in a female (XX) zygotes divides in two.  One half of the fly then becomes XX, the other XO, and the fly is split neatly down the middle, looking like the one below.  But gynandromorphs don’t have to be “half and halfs”.  X chromosomes can get lost at almost any stage at development, so flies can be a quarter male, have irregular patches of maleness, have just a few male cells, or even a male patch as small as a single bristle.

Cool, right?

I’m not sure what the genetic similarity is between these birds and people who are intersex at birth, but some smart biogeneticist out there will let me know.

Lorde & Baldwin

Posted by helenboyd – June 2, 2013

Here is an amazing thing: a conversation between Audre Lorde and James Baldwin.

The incomparable Audre Lorde says:

There is a larger structure, a society with which we are in total and absolute war. We live in the mouth of a dragon, and we must be able to use each other’s forces to fight it together, because we need each other. I am saying that in our joint battle we have also developed some very real weapons, and when we turn them against each other they are even more bloody, because we know each other in a particular way. When we turn those weapons against each other, the bloodshed is terrible. Even worse, we are doing this in a structure where we are already embattled. I am not denying that. It is a family discussion I’m having now. I’m not laying blame. I do not blame Black men for what they are. I’m asking them to move beyond. I do not blame Black men; what I’m saying is, we have to take a new look at the ways in which we fight our joint oppression because if we don’t, we’re gonna be blowing each other up. We have to begin to redefine the terms of what woman is, what man is, how we relate to each other.

It’s worth reading, and re-reading, and re-reading again.

Five Questions With… The Collection (Pt. 2)

Posted by helenboyd – June 1, 2013

Here’s the second half of that interview with a few authors of the anthology The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, published in 2012 by Topside Press. The Collection is currently a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction and was selected by the American Library Association on their 2012 list of top LGBT books for adult readers.

(Here’s the first half, if you missed it.)

Why is transgender literature important to you?

Casey Plett:  Because I love books and I’m trans! Duh!

Red Durkin:  It’s actually really simple: every culture has stories. That’s one thing that fundamentally distinguishes us as a species, I think. Literature possesses an incredible power to influence the way a group of people sees itself and is seen by others. I think trans people are at a point where they need this validation. We’ve been maligned and mischaracterized for too long. We deserve a change.

Imogen Binnie: Because it sucks never to see people like yourself represented anywhere! I’ve been reading all the time for almost thirty years and a lot of books have resonated with me for a lot of reasons- for example I have been disappointed with the world and found it reassuring to see that reflected in novels. I have been dazed and had trouble feeling feelings, and it has been reassuring to see that reflected in novels. But very few novels- if any at all- have resonated with me in a way that reflected myself as a trans person with a three dimensional life. In other words, whatever pleasure, joy, frustration or reassurance I have felt in a text has been mediated through the fact that I have rarely if ever been able to directly identify with a text: these texts are for cis people, not for trans people, and so I usually the best I can hope for is to identify as best I can with a cis character. Like, has anyone addressed, in fiction, the subtle ways that being trans can complicate the experience of falling in love with a cis person? Where are the class- and gender-conscious bildungsroman about trans women? Where are the stories in which the trans woman characters are different at the end from who they were at the beginning- not counting those where they’re different at the end because they’re dead?

How do you see your work fitting (or not fitting) in with trans literature?

Casey Plett: I really don’t know. I hope it does fit in in some way and I hope that trans people read my stuff. Beyond that, I dunno.

Red Durkin: It’s hard to say, really. I mean, there’s no doubt in my mind that the work I create is trans literature, but I don’t know where that puts me among other writers. I’m not writing for teens, if that makes a difference.

Imogen Binnie: Ideas about being trans among trans people have been evolving really fast for the last, like, ten or maybe twenty years; eighteen-year-olds who grew up on social justice tumblr are a literal generation after of the groundbreaking work of Susan Stryker, Kate Bornstein, and others who put together the original framework for the way we conceptualize ourselves as trans now. It’s amazing and I feel like that body of work- the stuff people are saying about gender and queerness and intersectionality and identity and oppression on tumblr, which seems to have migrated from livejournal, and which also shows up on WordPress and blogspot and places like that- is more relevant to the lives of most of the trans people than, like, John Irving’s last book that probably had a trans woman in it. And while my characters themselves have not tended to be particularly invested in that culture of progressive trans politics, I think my work as a whole, like thematic stuff or whatever, the questions I’m interested in, are very much a part of and in conversation with that body of thought.

What challenges do you see trans writers facing in the writing world? What challenges do you face? Any suggestions to address those issues? More→