Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we honor our dead.
Talk to your friends who are trans; make sure they’re safe and have safe habits. Exchang phone numbers, walk people to their cars in groups, travel together late at night.
Donate money to some of the people who are helping.
And be thankful, in the spirit of the season, for everything you’ve got. Life included. Celebrate who you are and work for a time when we can stop having this Day altogether.
No kidding, a porn flick with everyone dressed as pirates, and then, real queer couples get it on in an SF apartment.
Reading John Waters’ article about Tennesee Williams – and in The New York Times Book Review, no less! – was a treat. I love them both, for being queer, for their art, for their humor and sarcasm and truth.
These are my people, and always have been.
But it made me think about the books I had to “steal” as a kid, or read secretly. For me, it was Joe Orton’s biography, Prick Up Your Ears, first and foremost. I heard about him reading interviews with Adam Ant, who simultaneously introduced me to Marc Bolan, the erotic art of Allen Jones, Derek Jarman, and Tom of Finland. Around the same time I discovered Soft Cell and Marc Almond, who in turn turned my head toward the likes of Jacques Brel and Jean Genet. (And I wonder why I turned out the way I am, reading about rough trade and anonymous bathroom sex when I was 15.)
They were all great “bad” influences, their books and art I hid from my mother. They told me there was another world out there, just as Tennesee Williams told John Waters there was.
So who were yours?
Kos has a great story posted about the way a team that started as three people managed to build a campaign out of nothing, using only Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point concept to keep them going. Carol Shea-Porter, the candidate in question, won the House seat for New Hampshire.
I especially love the guy’s TRUST WOMEN button. Anyone know where I can get one of those?
On my desk, on my envelope full of proof pages, and about as tired as I am of editing.
The US government is now using the phrase “very low food security” to describe people who are hungry.
You know, fuck them. I don’t care who is in charge. Whoever suggested the change in language should have his jaw wired shut for the next two months and then he can tell me about his goddamn food security issues.
Last week, our downstairs friend who is a huge Grey’s Anatomy fan, called us at the very start of the show, telling us only “there’s a plot line you’ll want to see.” So we watched as a trans woman character came to the hospital for her GRS surgery, and were quite surprised – as were, no doubt, lots of viewers – that her wife had accompanied her there.
(You can read more about the episode, and even view it online, at the Grey’s Anatomy website. Spoilers below, so go watch it first.)
That fact of it alone was a great education for a lot of people, making the clear point that plenty of trans women prefer females, thank you very much.
While some of the informaton on the show was a little off – like when they implied that if she went on hormones her beard would come back, completely eliminating the likeliness of laser hair removal or electrolysis – it was absolutely an empathetic portrayal. The monogues by the wife were especially accurate, that odd combination of gallows humor and anger and sadness and sympathy that so many trans partners express about transition.
Most accurate, I thought, was a key moment when the trans woman is being told the hormones she’s taking to be a woman are giving her breast cancer & she doesn’t want to give them up, and the wife – frustrated & scared – uses her partners male name to tell her to “Wake up!” and flees the room after she does. Not much later, she talked about going on dates only to find that she wanted to talk to her “best friend” about those dates – like you do – and finding her husband, male or female, was her best friend. Which is how she ended up holding her hand for surgery.
It’s that “best friend” bit that’s most problematic to me. Betty is my best friend, has been since the minute we met. She’s also my teacher, my role model, my mentor, my child. All of them. And all of those things could and would stay in tact post transition. But it’s that other role – lover, husband, monogamous pervert – that’s the problem. Desire is desire, and it’s very hard to predict what might make it go away.
I talk about this at length in the new book of course – of course! – but I did want to thank the writers of Grey’s Anatomy for doing an excellent job portraying the feelings of het partners of trans women.
Feel free to come discuss the episode further on our boards.
So I found this interesting article – way more measured and frankly, sympathetic, than most articles about transness that throw around the word “mutilation,” so instead of ignoring it as I’d normally do, I responded.
I certainly understand where you’re coming from, Josie, but tell me this: what do we do with the people who could be either? Who are both?
My husband is. She never knows what bathroom to use. We worry about someone disagreeing with the M on her license.
A lot of people who are innately gender variant, or androgynous, may transition only because more cards fall on the F than on the M when they fall from the sky.
And at the moment, the only way to get your ID changed is to get genital surgery.
I think a lot more of them would keep their healthy, operative genitals if that weren’t the case, but you try telling the DMV you want neither gender marked on your license.
Go ahead.
Or, just read some of Dr. Harry Benjamin’s work. People have tried to relieve transsexualism via therapy, spirituality, and all sorts of other non-operative means. But what Benajamin notices is that it doesn’t work. So he fixed their body (since their minds wouldn’t be changed).
There are plenty of us working within the trans community who would like to see people be able to peacably live as either gender, or both, or fluid. But living that way is, for now, brutally hard work. I’d agree with you, philosophically, if I didn’t see what my husband and other friends go through every day, all day long, day after day after day. The world just beats the crap out of them, puts them at greater risk for hate crimes, and insists on them being “ma’am” or “sir” when it comes to buying a cup of coffee to using a public toilet.
So, join us. Make the world safe for the gender variant, with us.
helen boyd
www.myhusbandbetty.com
There are a lot of other ways to respond, but this was the one that struck me. I’m sure some of you can add other important facts. Just please, be polite and be reasoned.
If you can. We haven’t won the lottery (yet).
I’d love it if more of the people who used the boards subscribed. Surely they’re worth $5 / month, no? Cheaper than that crappy movie you don’t need to see, at least, and lasts way longer than 2 hours.
Just in time for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, held annually on November 20th, NCTE has published a small manual called Responding to Hate Crimes: A Community Resource Manual, which, according to NCTE’s Simon Aronoff, “represents a holistic, community-based approach to responding to hate violence in a wya that aims to curb the number of attacks faced by transgender people.”
Read the full press release from NCTE below the break, and read or download a copy of the manual at NCTE’s website: http://www.nctequality.org/resources/hatecrimes.pdf