Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
A
s promised, a few of the resources I promised to people who came to the Love, Always reading yesterday at A Room of One’s Own.
My online group for partners of trans people: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/engender_partners/info
Our online forum for trans people and their partners, friends, family, and allies: http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/community/index.php
You also might want to check my posts tagged resources and/or trans partners.
(Photo credit to Violet Wang)
Excited to be reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival for the second time tomorrow, once again joined by my awesome writer friend Miriam Hall & Shawnee Parens. We’ll be reading from Love, Always, the book by Transgress Press that is composed of pieces written by the partners of trans people. I wrote the Afterword, so that’s what I’ll be reading.
“I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific, enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. ‘Slavery’ is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professsors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she died, the world – which is really the only world she can ever know – ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history.”
from Between the World and Me, Ta Nehisi Coates, p. 69-70.
A couple of amazing students put this short clip together for a class that promotes media making in the service of community.
I was honored to be a part of it, but the real props go to Rowan and her amazing family.
I love that Indigenous People’s Day is taking over, but as someone of some Italian American heritage (Sicilian American, it turns out), it would be nice to have a day of recognition. Just not Columbus, please, who enslaved a peaceful people, and by his own admission:
“[The Indians] do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… . They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
But there are other Italian Americans that might fit the bill. Because I’m generally horrified that all people know about Italian Americans is the mob and pizza, here are my choices:
My top choice is Mario Cuomo. He died just as Indigenous People’s Day was getting some recognition, so the timing seems right.
Joe Petrosino, a Sicilian American, who was the first detective to really go after the Mafia & the Black Hand in particular; he was assassinated while in Italy (supposedly undercover) in 1909, and they’ve only just “solved” his murder.
Then there’s Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who was surely innocent of the crimes he was killed for but who wrote some beautiful, peaceful letters while in prison. His trial, along with Nicola Sacco’s, caused the first real anti death penalty push in the US & continues to inspire. Their judges called them racial slurs – proving they didn’t get a fair trial, whether they were guilty or not – and connects to a lot of the racialized injustice happening even today around the death penalty in particular.
Alternately, we could just have a day for eating, because Italian food.
& Honestly, living here in Wisconsin, a Lombardi Day seems like a shoo-in, and the famous coach was anti-homophobic and anti-racist in ways that the NFL could still take a lesson from. His daughter explained: “My father was way ahead of his time,” Susan Lombardi said. “He was discriminated against as a dark-skinned Italian American when he was younger, when he felt he was passed up for coaching jobs that he deserved. He felt the pain of discrimination, and so he raised his family to accept everybody, no matter what color they were or whatever their sexual orientation was.”
The always awesome S. Bear Bergman put this up for National Coming Out
Day, and I immediately loved it, and shared it, like you do.
What surprised me was that a few people responded thinking it was sarcastic, not heartfelt. Bear said no one had interpreted that way before.
So it occurs to me that there is a subset of my readers, in particular, who take National Coming Out Day particularly hard: the crossdressers, surely, and even some (stealth) trans men and women. As groups, for the most part, they aren’t always or even often out. Sometimes they’re making sure to stay employed because of dependents. Sometimes a partner or spouse doesn’t want them to be. Sometimes it’s just easier for them not to, because they’re not the kind of people who want to explain shit all the time. (As I’ve always joked, I wrote my books so I could enjoy parties again.)
And recently I’ve been thinking about the alarming number of younger out folks who have committed suicide, and somewhat maternally wonder if maybe everyone shouldn’t be, or at the very least shouldn’t feel like they *have* to be. I still think there’s a huge difference between gays and lesbians vs. trans outness, but also, I now live in a place where the repercussions of being out are far more drastic than they might be elsewhere.
So maybe let’s remember that: all of us choose not just when and how we come out, but IF we do, and even why we might not. As per usual, let’s give ourselves some room for diversity of situation, judgment, and choices.
Love to you all whether or not you’re out. Pride doesn’t require us all to be the same.
Sadly, this transphobic bathroom stupidity has arrived at our doorstep, WI. It’s time to act.
Here’s the MoveOn petition. Go sign it.
Here’s a letter draft you can email to your representatives:
I imagine you have heard of a bill proposed by Sen. Steve Nass & Rep. Jesse Kremer that will limit transgender students’ access to bathrooms that correspond to their gender identities. This bill is discriminatory and further stigmatizes transgender and intersex youth, who already face disproportionate levels of discrimination, harassment, and bias from teachers, community members, and often peers and family members.
Phone Script:Hello, my name is, and I live in city/town/district.I am calling about Proposed bill LRB 2643/1. What is your stance on this bill?I am concerned about this bill because it is seeking to discriminate against transgender and intersex students in Wisconsin. I urge you to not sign onto this bill as your constituent.
>Add personal reasons against bill here.<
In case anyone’s interested, here are my remarks from last night’s event.
(before video) Hi! I’m Helen Boyd and I teach gender studies here at Lawrence. I was inspired to make this video after hearing from a few male friends who were surprised that I think about my safety all the time, and I knew, from talking to women all of my life, that I was not alone in being vigilant.
(then we showed the video)
(after) When women complain about being catcalled, this is why. Too often we don’t feel safe and a catcall reminds us that we’re attracting attention – wanted or unwanted. & Sometimes it feels safer to be less noticeable when we’re out.
That phrase, “safe enough”, came out of a conversation I had with a gay man about what it’s like to walk past a guy on the street. You never know how he’s going to respond, or what’s going to happen. The safety concerns aren’t just women’s. The violence some of us worry about isn’t just sexual violence. It’s gay bashing. It’s transphobia. It’s racism.
The thing is, even if you’re not that guy, you probably know that guy. It’s not that you’d even know who he is, either, which is why everything you say or do when you’re only with other guys matters. Jokes about crazy bitches, gay men, all of that. When you don’t stand up in the little situations, the guys who would hurt gay men and trans people and women get permission. They think you hate us all too because of the jokes you tell or listen to without objecting.
Someone isn’t taking no for an answer, or is freaking out because a gay guy is crushed out on you, or because a trans woman is hot. It seems to me sometimes that it’s you guys who are afraid — afraid of losing face, of being gay, of wanting kinds of sex that other people don’t think is normal. And I know, too, you’re not supposed to be afraid and you’re not supposed to admit it even when you are. I’m a New Yorker and a punk rock kid and a professional activist – I make a living not being afraid of stuff. I get it. But something is wrong out there, something about the ways even the good guys don’t stand up, don’t step up, don’t tell that one guy in their crowd he’s ruining it for all of you. And believe me when I tell you he is – in communities where women feel safe and respected, they have a lot more sex, but in this culture, right now, women are so scared they give you the wrong number because they think a “no” will result in violence.
So what I’m asking of you, really, is to think about what you don’t think about when you walk home at night drunk. I’m asking you to think why you’d ever want to have sex with someone who wasn’t totally into you. I’m asking you to remember that someone else’s gender and sexual orientation is none of your goddamned business. I’m also telling you that not being an asshole doesn’t make you a miracle. Raise your own bar.
You’re going to be hearing some statistics next, and there are two things I need to underline: One is that all sexual violence is underreported, across the board. The other is that men are not just perpetrators, but victims – they are assaulted by men AND women, and they don’t report even more than women don’t. This isn’t about your mother or your sister or your best friend who is a woman. It’s about you, too.
So come join us in gender studies. Find out how many genders there are, how many kinds of sex exist, and how men who are married to feminists self report way better sex lives than men who aren’t. & Thanks for being here.
Despite my reputation as a humorless feminist, I’ve been working with a small group of undergrad men (& one female student!) on a group called M.A.R.S. – Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault. We have a huge – huger than predicted or expected – event happening tomorrow night where we’ll be showing that short clip on safety and I’ll be speaking super-briefly.
And it’s been amazing, to be honest. I know a lot of you roll your eyes at this kind of thing, and I know an awful lot of queer women, especially, who just can’t and won’t work with the guys, & all for very good reasons. But I like guys. Always have. In so many ways. So this work was really right up my alley, especially as I got to partner with a local community leader, my friend Shannon Kenevan, and the local sexual assault center, SACC. I’m the faculty advisor to Lawrence’s feminist group, DFC, too, so it really brought a lot of worlds together for me.
There are staff and other faculty on board who have been helping organize, too, and of course we needed funding and meetings and space and all of the many things that have to come together. Joe Samalin of Breakthrough is coming to speak as well – so this event draws from campus, local, statewide, and national talent.
But mostly I’m just thankful to be able to do what I do, to know such amazing, inspired, angry young people who want to make a difference, but most especially I’m thankful for all of the women who have stood up to tell their stories and worked to dismantle rape culture from the ground up.
We re-designed the blog about a week ago so it would be more mobile-friendly. Most everything is still here but in slightly different places; if you can’t find something, ask.
In the meantime, I was curious, so I went & looked up the very first version of my blog / this site, from march 2003.
The blog got added later the same year (which makes mine the oldest blog on trans issues still in existence, I think, but I’m happy enough to be corrected).
Here’s 2008, & then what it looked like right before this re-design.
Feel free to leave me some feedback.
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