Interestingly, 1928 was the same year women got the right to vote in the UK.

Coincidence?

(h/t to The Progressive’s “Hidden History” calendar, via FW)

The only thing that bugs me about this is the idea of using the term “gender non-conforming” for a child like this. On the surface of it, sure. But it’s exactly the gender typical femininity of such kids that often convinces people they are trans in the first place; if she were more of a tomboy, her trans status wouldn’t be as obvious to people, right?

He was an inspiration to me, and I’m glad I had a lovely conversation with him many years ago at one of his readings.

His turn toward conservative in these years since 9/11 echoed a similar turn of one of my other favorite writer-heros, John Dos Passos. They weren’t such poor company, really: both of them so in love with the US in some ways, and so deeply critical of it in others.

I’ll miss you, Hitch. I’d say Godspeed but he was the most ardent of atheists, for which I loved him too.

“A lot of times, parents with straight kids, they think like, ‘You know what? That would never happen to my kid so why would my kid need to learn something like this?’ And I think the key is your kid doesn’t need to be LGBT. As long as your kid is perceived with any trait associated with LGBT, they can be bullied. They can be made fun of. Your kids can be a victim of any of that.”

He adds that parents of transgender children go through a difficult emotional process of their own.

“Parents, they have to go through different stages themselves,” he explains. “In the beginning, they tend to deny it. They hope their kids will grow out of it. They are having a tough time. They have to grieve over losing a son or a daughter and welcoming a new gender of a child. And I think that’s a process. It’s not easy for any parent to accept that because no parent has a kid and then think that this kid may be a transgender kid…. It’s tough… [when you have] a dream for your kid and all of a sudden that dream vanishes, and you have to recreate a dream for your kid[’s] future, and at the same time, knowing that society is not so tolerant out there. And I think that is very tough [for] a lot of parents to accept that.”

He advises parents who have transgender children to talk as much as possible with other people about these issues.

“I really think that [they should] talk to people about it, talk to other parents about it. And don’t just talk to one person. I would talk to multiple people. Talk to the school principal, talk to the counsellors, talk to the professional psychologists or social workers…even family doctor[s], so they can know there are people like this out there, they are not alone, and they can get help.”

Good advice all around.

She’s Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband($15, Seal)
Helen Boyd’s first memoir, My Husband Betty, introduced the world to her and her cross-dressing husband and her own concerns about whether the man she married is a cross-dresser or a transgender woman just waiting to transition. In She’s Not the Man, the funny, sometimes infuriating follow up, Boyd deftly explores the role of gender in her own marriage and culture at large and gives us a thinking straight girl’s treatise on the complex world of gender identity.

Plenty of other favorites of mine are also on the list: Kailey’s Just Add Hormones, Green’s Becoming a Visible Man, and Califia’s Sex Changes.

For a list of books on trans subjects I recommend, I’ve got a whole pile of reviews from over the years (which needs updating, but still, the books mentioned covered a great many aspects of transgender life).

Still, I don’t write every day. That’s a guilty confession, because I should. I shouldn’t say that: I do write something every day – a blog entry, a journal entry, a long(ish) email, but I don’t work on my writing every day. There’s no way I will do NaNoWritMo, but it’s a cool idea if you’re one of those people who’s always wanted to write a novel but never has.

Some of us have written a few, and the rule is that you never get your first one published.

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”

Woolf has always been for me where the personal meets the political, but her sentence became personal in a way I never expected and certainly never wanted.

Two planes flew into those two towers, and my sister was in World Financial Center #7. I talked to her at 9AM that Tuesday morning, heard that she would be running the evacuation for her company, and then didn’t hear from her again until 3PM, when her cellphone finally started working again, just as she was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot.

I was fine after that, like so many people in New York were fine, if not being able to leave the house to buy a gallon of milk constitutes fine. I found I couldn’t leave the house alone. The subway was nearly impossible without Ativan. I quit my job, and I wrote a novel.

My book and my kittens were the only things that kept me alive in 2002. I got to know my own walls better than I’d ever wanted to. They were what made me feel safe; they blocked out the people, and the places, of the who I had once been.

One day I remember clearly looking up at my husband and saying simply, “hello.” He looked at me cautiously and cried. I hadn’t been around for a while, he told me, but it was good to have me back. I was still in a deep hole, but now at least I knew I was; I could see something like a shaft of light overhead.

For the second time in five years, I started the slow recovery process of putting down my fear. Me and the vets, I used to joke, were the only ones alarmed by traffic helicopters, even when we knew what they were and that they arrived at rush hour every day at the same time. What you know doesn’t matter when you have PTSD; all that matters is how you feel, and how you feel is scared.

That’s what it took for me to write: fear, and nothing left to lose. It wasn’t so much that I’d gained any confidence in my writing. I didn’t have anywhere else to put the whole world of me besides on the page; restricted from going out in ways unlike any Brontë, I charged and re-charged and over-charged the bricks and mortar I lived within. I wasn’t just scared by suicidal terrorists – I knew it was still more likely to die of a car accident than a bombing – but the war drums were being beaten again, this time loudly. The one thing that I couldn’t stand was the sense of powerlessness, which is of course a key aspect of PTSD. Fear creates shock which creates immobility which creates, usually, an overactive adrenal gland and a hyper amygdala. I’d already spent a lifetime voting, working voter registration jobs, keeping a green home; I’d donated money to every organization I thought was doing any good, but the sense of powerlessness I felt when we went to war in Iraq was something new, something more. It was about my home, my city. It was too much to live with but too big to be able to do much about personally.

So I wrote. I wrote about transgender people. I wrote about them because my husband is transgender and because right now, they are the only set of Americans who it is legal to discriminate against both federally and in most states. I wrote because the secular, democratic world I believed in was being beaten into submission by the Religious Right on one hand and the violent end of Islam on the other. I wrote about being queer, because we’re the ones they all love to hate; they’re the one thing the fundamentalists agree on. In my own way, I wanted to take on a fight that meant something to me: to make the world safe for people who are not safe, nearly anywhere, because that’s what the New York I love is about, the one that has room for people of different cultures and religions and races and sexual orientations. It was my New York they were after, and I couldn’t stand idly by and watch them change it.

Some days I felt like I was squeezing the walls for what I had stored in them: the anger and terror and heartache I couldn’t face and let soak into the old thick walls of our small apartment. They were saturated, super-saturated, with the emotions I couldn’t bear for too long, and slowly, as if peeling away multiple layers of old paint, I started removing them. I only took on as much as I could handle. Some days that still wasn’t much: a few chips of fright, an ounce or two of shock, a veneer of rage. It would be a long time before I exorcised all of what I stored in our walls, and that time hasn’t come yet.

What I had to find again, under all the hard emotions of PTSD, were the things I felt I had lost, that for a while, I felt the world had lost with me: love and trust and bravery and justice and decency. Those virtues were there, too, soaked into the walls, stifled under the other layers of rage and revulsion the ugliness of the world had painted on them. They don’t come off as easily, luckily. They are, in some sense, the mortar that holds an old brownstone together, and it’s to those things that I harness my pen.

But I long for the kind of privilege that would give me permission to write what I want, and not write what’s needed. I talked with an old friend who has had two novels published well, who got the tenure-track teaching job with only his M.A., and he is yearning to give up writing because, as he put it, “I got into this to change the world.” Instead he made money. I told him about about the hundreds if not thousands of emails I get from appreciative readers. They thank me for saving their marriages, or their lives, or both. They thank me for “being out there” in a way so many others can’t. They thank me for writing the things they were thinking, and making them feel not so alone.

It is a remarkable thing to get emails like that. My faith in humanity is perhaps greater than my friend’s as a result. But every month I wonder if it’s time, at long last, to give up the work I do for others, and the writing that does others good, in order to work more, to make more money, to make enough money. But month after month I answer the question with the same ‘barbaric yawp’ of a Yes that I started with, because my writing has become not just a balm but a buttress, and now not just for me but for a lot of others.

I still can’t get on a plane without a lot of medication, and even so I avoid it, choosing to travel long hours by train when I’m asked to speak. I still sometimes need to get off the subway and re-teach myself how to breathe, and my heart still thumps in my chest when I hear the traffic helicopters overhead. For now, at least, I know that I’m fighting the good fight, a personal fight for love and justice and freedom, with whatever wits I’ve got.

Nick Krieger recently published the FTM spectrum narrative Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender and I was very impressed with the book. I’ll admit that his bio, on the back of the book, was what reeled me in: “A native of New York, Nick Krieger realized at the age of twenty-one that he’d been born on the wrong coast, a malady he corrected by transitioning to San Francisco.” With a sense of humor like that, how could I not read it? Beacon Press published it.

One of the many amazing things about living in San Francisco is the diversity. Difference is accepted and celebrated, which allows more space for self-expression. After spending ten years in lesbian and queer communities, I really started to see the myriad ways that people presented and understood their own genders; there was so much room outside the binary gender boxes. From the media, shows like Dateline and 20/20, I had always believed that all trans people were “born in the wrong body” and had Gender Identity Disorder. But in looking around my community, I discovered a new understanding of transgender that included a whole array of FTM spectrum (trans-masculine) people.

I very intentionally tried to respect the choices of the other characters. I think that in any type of personal inquiry or journey, it’s really easy to judge/oppose one side and admire/align with another. It creates certainty during an uncertain time. But it also limits the opportunity for self-growth, reflection, and understanding. In early drafts, I work through my judgments in the hope that I’ll eventually be able to render my characters with compassion and acceptance.

2. There’s a line about how sexual partners of pre transition trans people always want to appreciate the (physical) part of a trans person that the trans person doesn’t want appreciated. Can you elaborate?

There is this great challenge in a relationship where one person is fundamentally uncomfortable in their body and the other person loves everything about them, including their body. It is a sad and painful deadlock because the body is the vehicle to express and share physical intimacy.

For me, there was one distinct moment when this issue really hit home and became an insurmountable obstacle. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in an intimate moment with my girlfriend, Ramona. I had such a distinct understanding of my own self-image that when I saw my reflection exactly as she saw it, I was horrified that she found me attractive. I had a lot of guilt throughout our entire relationship. I always felt like I was stripping her of one of the greatest pleasures of being in a relationship, appreciating and loving her partner physically.

3. I have to confess to a moment of “oh, those Kriegers” while I was reading. Do you feel there was any additional pressure on you as a result of your family’s status? Has there been any resolution with your father?  We always worried about our loved ones feeling a sense of “fine, you’re trans, but did you have to tell the world about it?”

Haha—Sometimes I have those moments, too. But while I felt constrained by familial values that I tie to my class upbringing, like markers of respectability and success, I didn’t feel additional pressure. I never really thought of us as having status. We’re the type of family that would want to win the golf tournament, but avoid staying at the golf club after to socialize.

When I came out as a dyke (ten years before I came out as trans) there was very much a “Fine, you’re gay, but do you have to tell the world about it.” I learned a lot about my dad through that experience. He is deeply private about everything. He’s just not a sharer. I often think I became a writer in response to this environment. I always notice the fear and shame that lurks in the silence. This intrigues me. I believe the awkward, potentially embarrassing, messy reality of being human binds us together, that vulnerability is the key to connection, and that sharing (not oversharing) is empowering.

Yes, there’s been some resolution with my dad. It has been a great lesson that the more I care for myself, the more I have to offer other people, especially my parents. My anger and frustration have really dissipated now that I no longer feel constrained by them. My mom has been ridiculously supportive about the book. Her only discomfort is with the sex parts, which I understand completely. She’s near apologetic about not pushing the book on her friends, and I’m all, “Mom, you’ve done enough, really.” On some level, I feel like I’ve exasperated her beyond her breaking point. She doesn’t care what I do or who I am—she just wants her kid. We’re closer now than we’ve ever been.

4. Your acknowledgement of your own privilege was a refreshing change of pace. I find that kind of ownership is much more common in FTM spectrum spaces. Do you agree? Care to venture a guess why?

In my experience, ownership of privilege is relatively common in the FTM or trans-masculine spectrum people. Almost all of the ones I know lived as lesbians for some or many years, and there is so much social awareness, activism, and political consciousness within this community. Also, some of these people were butches and/or hardcore feminists; they find acquiring “male privilege” abhorrent. The trade-off for moving into the male realm is being really outspoken about privilege and becoming an agent for change and progress.

For me, once I started exploring male privilege, it forced me to notice and confront other areas of privilege. Acknowledging my class privilege was a challenge because it’s almost something to be ashamed of in queer community. But I’ve found that to write a memoir, and to live in integrity, I have to be completely honest with myself.

5. One of the things that most struck me about your narrative was how different it was. Your exploration of trying to figure out what was up, exactly, and how you might do something about it, expressed far more finesse than many trans narratives (of the “I always knew I should have been a girl” variety). I suspect your experience reflects many others’ experiences, and I’m wondering what kind of response you got to that honesty.

I expected my story to resonate with people in the middle ground/genderqueer space, but I was a little surprised at how many trans guys taking testosterone, living as men, have written to tell me that this is finally a trans narrative that they could relate to, and that they were exhausted by the typical, “I knew I was a man because [insert gender stereotype]” stories.

While exploring my gender, I kept reading these typical stories, none of which spoke to my experience. I wrote this book to offer an alternative, a new angle that shows how complicated gender is, and how much diversity exists. I hope that it encourages those who share aspects of my story, but I also hope it inspires those whose experiences have yet to be written.

I have to add that I have terrific hair envy. I’m sure I’m not the only woman who wants to get her fingers in it.

You leave the toughest *question* for last, huh…?

While I never wished I were a boy growing up, I did often think that if I were a boy, I would have long hair. I decided to grow my hair literally the second I decided to take my first testosterone shot. In the past two years, my hair has become a magnificent beast with a life of its own, endlessly surprising me with its possibilities. I probably shouldn’t disclose this publicly (a phrase that for a memoirist functions like a dare) but I don’t wash my hair. Ever. My stylist, whom I’ve been with for six years, says it’s unnecessary. I also don’t own a brush. All of which may explain why it’s been a little too long since a woman has gotten her fingers in it.

My review of Nina Here Nor There will be in an upcoming issue of make/shift, but in the meantime, do check it out.

I do have a list of trans books. It does need updating, but a lot of the ones I’ve reviewed are still excellent choices. I’ve recently read Nick Krieger’s Nina Here Nor There
and Justin Bond’s Tango, and my reviews of those will appear in an upcoming issue of make/shift. If there are any books you’d like to see me review, let me know.