I interviewed Damian McNicholl, author of Lambda-nominated A Son Called Gabriel, and now he’s gone and returned the favor by putting up an interview with me on his blog. He’s also included some of his own thoughts about My Husband Betty, prejudice against crossdressers, and growing up with “inherited” prejudices.
Baby Bear
Tonight it was brought to my attention that a CD in the online group A Crossdresser’s Secret Garden had warned another CD that my book was too heavy on the issues surrounding transition, and so recommended Peggy Rudd’s book My Husband Wears My Clothes, instead. I have to start off by explaining that I don’t have an issue with some people preferring Peggy Rudd’s book over my own; we both have our audiences, and as Dr. Rudd once said to me, ‘it’s not like there isn’t enough room for two of us.’ (She also told me I didn’t have to answer all the email I’d get, which was sound advice I’ve mostly failed to follow.)
It’s funny that this advice should come just now, but not just because my interview with Melanie and Peggy Rudd is the Five Questions With… blog post that precedes this one, but also because – well, transition issues come up in exactly one chapter of My Husband Betty. I told the story I did because it was part of my own experience. When I was trying to reach out to other couples, especially other girlfriends of CDs, I happened to meet Katie, and we had an instant rapport. At the time we became friends, every crosssdressing website emphasized the fact that *crossdressers don’t transition.* I found out otherwise when I watched my friend Katie go through a painful divorce that was caused by her crossdressing partner’s transition.
And while I’m happy to report that Katie and Elle have both gone on to live happy, separate lives, it was precisely because of that experience that I included their story – and how it affected our story – in my book. Because I didn’t want to see even one other Katie get blindsided like that, not ever again.
In the warnings about how “scary” my book is, the CD pointed out once again that CDs rarely transition. Or that a very small percentage do. And the ironic thing is that I know the group, and I know that quite a few of their members were CDs when they joined who later transitioned. Some of them – gasp! – were even married. So it makes me wonder why this information is re-iterated over and over again, when no-one has any idea how many CDs eventually transition.
I certainly don’t know the percentage. I just wonder at what point people think it’s okay to mislead spouses like that. I mean, if you had a 1 in 100 chance of finding out that your marriage was going to be dead in the water in a decade, would that be a high enough risk for you to maybe warn your future partner? 2 in 100? 5 in 100? 10 in 100?
And while I understand the need to help wives who are already married keep their wits about them and not freak out, I cannot abide the idea that anyone is telling a girlfriend or a fiancee of a CD not to worry about it – especially if they’re under the age of 30.
And while I also know there are no guarantees in this life, I also know that plenty of crossdressers said they’d never transition and did. Wives or no wives, children or no children. And I wonder why this urge to reassure wives comes so fast. I know after I found out that all those people who had told me that *crossdressers never transition* were full of it, I held them accountable for having bullshitted me. Because even if the chance is 1 in 1000, a woman deserves to know the truth, especially if she’s about to make a lifetime commitment. Or have children. Or buy a house with her husband. Or work more to put him through school. Or start saving for retirement.
A woman deserves to know – no matter what the situation – that there’s a chance her CD boyfriend may eventually become her ex-wife. I’m tired of no-one wanting to say it outloud. I’m tired of hearing how it’s a negligible percentage. I want to know who gave anyone the right to decide what “negligible” means when it comes to a person’s life. And I want to know too where they get the numbers that have convinced them it’s “negligible.”
Because I’d like to see them. And I know they don’t exist. My best guess why crossdressers think the number is so negligible is because transitioning women leave support groups intended for crossdressers when they transition, so crossdressers stop seeing them – a kind of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ phenomenon. Either that or they’re going by that whacked Tri-Ess logic, that says a CD who transitions was never a CD, anyway – even if they identified one for a couple of decades.
. . .
The even richer irony for me is that so many married transwomen and partners of transitioning women don’t read my book because the word “crossdresser” is in the title. Isn’t that rich? Sometimes I think I should find myself a small army of terrified CDs to go into the TS community and explain exactly how much My Husband Betty is about transitioning! Yet I had a partner in another group I’m in say – after having read my book – that there is nothing out there for spouses of transitioning people.
Papa Bear on one hand, Mama Bear on the other. Now both of them can’t be right.
It’s actually the partner of the transitioning person who’s right, in my opinion. My Husband Betty is not about transition; the story of Katie and Elle is a cautionary tale, only. It’s there so that others will understand it can happen. And it can happen even when the couple is deeply in love. I am hoping to write about what it’s like to live with someone who is considering transition in my next book, however, and I’ll certainly let you know if/when I do.
What I have always recommended is this: that any wife who is new to having a crossdressing partner read the first four chapters of My Husband Betty first, sit on them, mull over them, discuss them with her therapist and her partner. After a while, when she hits a certain comfort level, and she’s ready for more, she can read (the dreaded, terrifying, all-too-realistic) Chapter Five. She can read Peggy Rudd’s book(s) before or after mine – it’s not like there’s a whole slew of books by wives out there, is there? Some will prefer one over the other. Some will find them complementary in some ways. Others will hate and excoriate one and bless the heavens for the other. That’s not the issue for me; the issue is that sometimes CDs are so freaked out by the fact that I even talk about transition they remember the whole book being about it.
After my experience with Katie, and after doing all the research for My Husband Betty, I became convinced that if there’s anything a crossdresser’s wife needs to know, it’s exactly what crossdressers don’t tell her. You see, I didn’t write the book to scare anyone. I wrote it because I’m a wife, and I wish someone had told me everything I had to find out for myself. I wanted to spare any other wife the pain that Katie went through, and the fear I experienced. I wrote it once in the book, and I’ll write it again here: crossdressers do transition. Not all of them, not most of them, but some of them. And their potential spouses need to know.
Five Questions With… Melanie and Dr. Peggy Rudd
Peggy Rudd is the author of My Husband Wears My Clothes as well as other titles about crossdressing. She was the first wife to write about the experience of being married to a crossdresser, and Melanie Rudd is her crossdressing husband.
1) Melanie, it strikes me that you and Betty are rare among trannies. What’s it like to be the subject of such intense – and published – perusal by your wife?
Melanie’s life has not been the same since My Husband Wears My Clothes was published in 1989. Mel/Melanie’s life story was open to the world or at least anyone who read the book. This book, as well as the other three that followed, were affirmation of the support, acceptance and un-conditional love Melanie had sought for so many years. The most joy and fulfillment from Peggy’s books has been the thousands of transgendered individuals and their significant others worldwide who have told Peggy and Melanie in writing, telephone calls and face to face contact how much the books have helped them in their search for answers. We are certain that Helen and Betty have experienced this joy and fulfillment because of Helen’s book, My Husband Betty. Now if we could only clone Peggy and Helen!
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Melanie and Dr. Peggy Rudd”
Board Upgrade
Betty is planning to update the message boards in the next 48 hours, so please read her announcement about it.
Victoria's (Still) Dirty Secret
It seems that Victoria’s Secret is still using unrecycled papers for their 900,000 catalogs, and the folks at Forest Ethics are still pissed off.
Their new ad is for the holiday season.
You can donate money so they can afford to run it in The New York Times.
For more information and a sample letter you can send to Victoria’s Secret, check my previous post about this issue.
Typical? Yes.
I received this email through one of the partners’ groups I’m in, and I thought it was a perfect articulation of the kind of thing I’ve heard happen over and over again. She called it “Bait and Switch” which is a term I’ve used more than once in describing what it was like to go from accepting Betty as a TG to watching her wonder if she would transition.
I feel deceived.
I met my husband online – over 4 years ago. I was looking for a BDSM relationship – I wanted to be dominated. Jack* responded to my ad – and with a few emails it seemed like we might make a good fit. A few long phone calls full of “me too’s” and giggles – and finally a real date. We really hit it off!
So, we share with each other, our fantasies, our wishes, our dreams. It’s all so lovely.
He liked to dress me. Take me shopping. Put me in clothes and shoes I’d NEVER have picked out myself. Made me feel sexy and admired… wow! I ate it up!!!!
He mentioned that he’d dressed up as a woman once or twice – but felt like he made such a horrible version of the female gender he’d not done it anymore.
So, once in awhile, when we’d feel like dressing up in some fetish wear – he’d slip into a skirt. Then he began to order high heel boots for himslef online. And, while shopping with me and in the women’s underwear department – he asked if I’d mind if he bought himself a pair or two of silky, ladies underwear. Of course I said “sure” – who could resist wearing such comfy silky things – more power to him.
I’ve been openly accepting – encouraging even. Everytime he’s left alone in the house – he dresses up. Now he does it everytime we have the house to ourselves. Whatever… if it makes him happy – right?
But – then there’s me. He doesn’t dress me up anymore. He doesn’t admire me. He’s obsessed with shopping for his clothes, finding new outfits. He seems to think it turns me on – when it certainly does not! He doesn’t understand why I’ve lost my entire labido – I have NO desire for sex – because he does’t turn me on at all… I’m feeling more and more seperated, lonely, desprate, deceived.
Am I alone in this? Is his desire to dress as a woman more important than our relationship? should I accept that and move on… this sucks.
I posted it here because I want CDs to see it. I hear CDs bemoan the fact that they don’t have an accepting, supportive woman in their lives, and yet time after time, I see posts and emails like this from accepting, supportive women.
I’m sure a lot of people would just write it off as ‘gender euphoria’ or ‘being lost in the pink fog’ but I think that makes it the partner’s problem, something she should ‘wait through’ – letting ‘boys be boys,’ as it were, in the meantime. Some of you, no doubt, will say to yourselves, “Well if I had an accepting wife I’d never treat her that way” but then – why does it seem to happen so often?
Unfortunately, sometimes an email like this is followed up a few months later by the “Now he says he needs to be a woman!” email, too.
I wanted people to see this, so simply put, so heartfelt, so dejected, because these feelings are so typical of the kind of pain I see partners in, and the kind of pain I’ve felt myself. You give your CD partner some room to be himself sexually, to relieve himself of the shame and guilt he’s suffered with all his life, and for a ‘thank you’ you get neglect, a partner who seems more interested in ‘her’ than you, and an assumption that his crossdressing actually turns you on.
Pah. I’m never sure what to say, either, – especially if after I ask if she’s talked to him about it, she says “Yes, I have, in no uncertain terms.” Then what? A 2′ x 4′?!
* Jack is not his real name.
(en)Gender Consulting
Some of you may have noticed a new link in the right navigation of this page titled (en)Gender Consulting.
I’ve decided to try this out for a few reasons.
One is the very obvious time restraint. I expect to be working on a new book shortly, which is going to cut down significantly on the amount of time I have available. My priorities, once I start writing, will be 1) to write, and 2) to continue to make some money. This way, I can continue helping others without robbing myself of my writing time and while also continuing to pay the rent.
The second reason isn’t so much a reason as a story. I recently had a well-intentioned person let me know that I’d helped them a lot, and I really appreciated hearing it. But he went on to explain that “I’ve paid my therapist $150/week, and she hasn’t helped that much, but you’ve helped a lot more than she did, and you’re free!” It was just one of those moments of realization, an epiphany.
The third reason is simply that I want to keep helping people, but I get more and more requests every day. Everyone just wants “one question” answered and I nickel-and-dime my day away answering them; it’s literally gotten to the point where I already don’t have enough time to get to all of them, especially if I’m simultaneously moderating the message boards, writing blog posts, working on a book, writing articles, helping people organize partners’ stuff at conferences – and of course, bookkeeping. I didn’t want to cut out the individual support because I think in some ways it’s the most important part of what I do.
So, you get the idea. If you have any questions, feel free to email me, as per usual, at helenboyd@myhusbandbetty.com.
Thanks,
Helen
A Boyd in the Hand
People ask me why I chose “Helen Boyd” for my pen name, and just tonight on the boards Andrea wondered if there was some connection to it being more “WASPy” than my given name, but no.
I chose it for being queerer, actually.
Helen’s my middle name, and there’s nothing exciting in that except that I was named Helen for my grandmother, and the name “Helen” (and its variants, Eleanor and the like) fill in a lot of my family tree. (My cousin, who did our geneology, likes to joke that there are only two pages in the Polish naming book.) I’m proud to bear it, as my grandmother was one of my role models growing up.
But Boyd is a little more complicated.
I certainly didn’t choose it to sound WASPy, as I’ve always regretted I didn’t get one of the more ethnic names – like Frollo or Topolski – I might have had (if we lived in a matriarchy).
It’s not Brooklynese for “bird,” as Mariette Pathy Allen once mused, either.
The thing is, I’d already been using ‘bettysgrrl’ with “Helen,” so I was turning up in people’s address books as “Helen B.” So I needed a last name that started with B, and it was the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay who loaned it to me.
In 1919, before she became a famous and popular poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote some early magazine pieces under the name Nancy Boyd. She was infamously bisexual, and some of the love poems she wrote were – gasp! – written to women. Thus, the pen name, borrowed from the phrase “nancy boy” which is slang for a sissy, a momma’s boy, an effeminate male. Millay, who signed her name Vincent (never Edna), was “Nancy Boy’d.”
I’ve always thought it was funny, and genderbent, and a nice bit of queer literary history, as in: a woman poet writing lesbian poems to girls straight out of Vassar uses a genderslur about feminine boys as her pen name, and in choosing my pen name in order to write a book about my feminine husband, I thought it was only appropriate to borrow Millay’s pansexual, genderqueer joke, since I admire her both as a woman and as a poet.
Recently it’s become even more lovely that I chose Boyd since Neil Gaiman – who is a favorite writer of mine, and one who coincidentally has written more than one cool, sympathetic story about a tranny – just published his new novel Anansi Boys, which is again another pun on “nancy boy” but this time borrowing from the Jamaican stories of Anansi the Spider.
An ironic coincidence is that after I chose the name, it turned out to be the actual name of one of my Jewish friend’s grandmothers – ie, someone who would have been the last person I’d have asked if he had a relative named “Boyd.” Go figure.
(Well, I think it all makes perfect sense.)
And for those of you who are wondering, and who have asked: please keep calling me Helen. I actually prefer it to my given name.
American Grrls
The AFA (American Family Association) and an anti-Choice group called The Pro-Life Action League (ugh) are boycotting the company American Girls for two reasons:
1) They are pro-Choice and pro-contraception.
2) They encourage support for girls dealing with sexual orientation issues.
Girls, Inc. – the company that produces American Girls – was taken aback by this boycott. The president of the company, Joyce Roche, said “Girls Inc. takes positions on public policy issues if it believes women’s rights and opportunities are at stake. ‘Our philosophy is that women should have the right to make decisions about themselves,’ Roche said.
Crazy idea, that.
Support Girls Inc. by buying American Girls products and emailing them to let them know you support their stands on these issues.
MHB Group
I haven’t mentioned, and should have, that a group of couples who’ve met via these boards has started meeting once monthly at the GLBT Center. The meetings take place the first Tuesday of the month, from 8-10pm, and we split the cost of renting the room by however many people show up.
If anyone reading this is in the NYC area is interested, do check out this thread about how we came to choose the place/time, and then please get in touch with me first if you’d like to come.
It’s a private group, and not listed in the Center’s calendar, for now.