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Ben Barres, My New Hero

So someone is finally using transness as the last tool in the feminist toolbox, and I’m pleased as punch. Ben Barres, a PhD in various types of biology at Stanford, has written a response to Larry Summer’s views on women in science and gotten it published in the journal Nature.
Barres is an FTM who is recounting some of the experiences he’s had as a female scientist, and more recently as a male scientist – just to demonstrate the difference to people who don’t seem to get it:

Once (at MIT), he was told that a boyfriend must have solved a hard math problem that he had answered and that had stumped most men in the class. After he began living as a man in 1997, Barres overheard another scientist say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister’s work.”

– but not only that, he’s actively working on getting female scientists more awards and grants:

Last year, Barres convinced the National Institutes of Health to change how it chooses talented young scientists to receive its Director’s Pioneer Award, worth $500,000 per year for five years. In 2004, the 64-person selection panel consisted of 60 men — all nine grants went to men. In 2005, the agency increased the number of women on the panel, and six of the 13 grants went to women. Barres said that he has now set his sights on challenging what he perceives as male bias in the lucrative Howard Hughes Investigator program, an elite scientific award that virtually guarantees long-term research funding.

Quite a few major papers have covered his editorial, and if anyone out there has a copy, I’d love to see the full text.
Thank you, Ben Barres!

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Happy Birthday, Kath

My very lovely sister Kathleen turns a new age today. (It’s not my decision whether or not she wants anyone to know how old she is, and I’m no fool.) She has been very, very supportive of my writing for years now in both practical and emotional ways.
One night, a long time ago, when we were sharing an apartment (read: I was living in her apt), I wrote a short piece about my parents, in honor of their anniversary, and left it for her when I went to bed at whatever godforsaken hour I did. She worked for a bank most of her life, and got it when she woke up a few hours later. When I saw her next, she was holding it in her hand, kind of gesticulating with the pages, and said, “So you just sat down and wrote this, just like that?” I shook my head yes and watched as the lightbulb went off over her head; I’m not sure in all of her years of banking it had ever occurred to her that someone would sit down and write a short story for no reason whatsoever.
It was like our own sororal cultural exchange: not too much later, she sat me down and taught me how to write a budget. As it turns out I’m excellent at writing them; it’s keeping to them that’s the tricky part.
But a very happy birthday to you, Kath!

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2nd Preview of She's Not the Man I Married

This excerpt is from Chapter 2: The Opposite of 49.
And I should mention I’m not going to say for sure the chapter names are going to stay the same either, or even if the chapters will stay in the same order.

It took me a long while to figure out how gender and power were intersecting for Betty and me. I had trained myself to be more submissive, and certainly worried that my natural ability to wear the pants in our relationship was going to screw things up. I always felt worried about being myself with a guy, because everything told me I wasn’t supposed to be the way I was naturally. It was difficult, to come to terms with out-butching Betty by a long shot. (Granted, I actively try to bring out her native tomboy, if there’s one in there, because I won’t have an “I broke a nail” partner.) Interestingly, when I first started experimenting with saying out loud that I was more the husband than the wife, I got nervous giggles and was corrected a lot. Plenty of people said right away, “But you’re not butch,” or “Betty’s still stronger than you,” or some kind of affirmation of my femininity. Some of my characteristics are feminine, and very innately so, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t also wear the pants. Still, I’ve been a little astonished at the ways in which people have effectively said, “Don’t say that out loud” when I talk about being the one in charge. It’s as if I were embarrassing them somehow. This has been one of many experiences over the past couple of years that has made me realize: (1) tomboys are okay as long as they are children; (2) masculinity in women makes people nervous; (3) heterosexuality was no place to figure out how to be who I am; and (4) most people don’t want to talk about how their relationships are gendered.

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John Money, 84, Dies

For more obituaries and articles, check the mHB message boards.

After consulting with Dr. Money in 1966, the parents of a young boy whose penis had been destroyed in a botched circumcision decided to raise their son as a girl. In 1973, Dr. Money reported that the child, who had been castrated and furnished with dresses and dolls, was doing well, and had accepted the new identity as a girl.
But in a 1997 report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, a pair of researchers provided a detailed follow-up: the boy had repudiated his female identity at age 14 and had even had surgery to reconstruct his genitals.
The report caused an uproar, and Dr. Money was criticized in news reports and in a book on the case.
In 2004, the man who had reclaimed his sex committed suicide. His family blamed the effort to change his sex.
Dr. Money was mortified by the case, colleagues said, and as a rule did not discuss it. “Given what the field knew at the time, Money made the right call about what to do” with the child, said Dr. Richard Green, a former colleague and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s easy in hindsight to say it was wrong, but I would have done the same thing.”

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Bleary-Eyed

I was hellbent on finishing a complete draft tonight, and though at one point I was actually wondering whether I intended to write “horse” or “house,” I did it. I may wake up tomorrow and decide that nothing I wrote in the past few hours makes a damn bit of sense, but the important thing to me, right now, is that I have the shape of the whole book.
That said, there is still a lot more work to be done, so I’m off to sleep. It’s nice to get to bed early enough to squeeze in an hour or so next to my honey.

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I (heart) Buster Keaton

I haven’t quite given up on my youtube.com addiction, but instead of hunting out 80s music videos, I’ve been hunting up other interesting things.
And by “other interesting things” I mostly mean Buster Keaton clips. Because (I confess) I love him.
There are a couple of Buster montages that have been set to music (like a Sherlock Jr. trailer that’s set to Air’s “Sexy Boy” and a montage set to ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down”) but one of them actually made me cry because it’s just that beautiful. The montage is all of Buster’s romantic scenes with his leading ladies* set to the very treacly but effective “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” by Bryan Adams.
And since I’m supposed to mention gender, do notice that some of Buster’s “I’m so in love with this crazy girl” moments are very fey, indeed. The scene from One Week where Buster’s character finds his on-screen wife drawing hearts on the wall of their new house is especially cute.
Of course my ultimate goal is to make damfinos of the lot of you. Or at least convince you that Buster was not just about gags, but also had a screen presence like no other, was a stuntman like no other, and directed with the best of them. There are moments in the love scenes where the expression on his face is heart-wrenching.
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* The very last leading lady in the montage is Eleanor Keaton, the wife who made Buster very, very happy toward the end of his life, after a bunch of crappy years and two bad marriages. That’s what made me cry, in the end; it was a very romantic touch.

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Book Covers


Betty took this photo of me not too long ago, and the funny thing about it was that we accidentally got some nifty stuff in the background: the beige thing, far left is (1) a galley copy of Virginia Erhardt’s upcoming book Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals (Haworth, Winter 2007); the reddish thing, taped to the wall is (2) mock-up of a groovy cover by our own Lucy & Mary, which unfortunately got rejected for being “too abstract” but which I really loved, and right behind my head, with white text, is (3) the current mock-up of the intended cover, but with a model who is not Betty.