I’ll be doing a reading & signing at Harmony Cafe for the Fox Cities Book Festival on April 12th at 7:30 PM.

Thank you to all of the lovely people who came to my reading tonight at the Appleton Public Library. It was a really lovely crowd, but I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk more with the LU folks who came out to support me. I am determined to read fiction at my Fox Cities Book Festival reading @ the Harmony cafe on April 12th.

& I stand by my claim that I have never yet met a librarian who wasn’t extremely cool.

I’m reading Wednesday night at the Appleton Public Library, 6:30 PM — be there or be square.

I had the lovely honor of getting to introduce Kate Bornstein when she spoke at Lawrence, & thought those of you who couldn’t be there might want to know what I said.

Welcome Lawrentians, Appletonians, geeks, freaks & Others with a capital O

Thank you for coming.

What I first started working as an advocate and ally to the transgender community, one of the first authors people recommended was Kate Bornstein. What self professed tomboy could resist a title like Gender Outlaw? I couldn’t stop reading it and I still haven’t. I still re-read sections of it with my classes  & on my own. I read My Gender Workbook – and took all the quizzes – and Hello Cruel World, which taught me that superheroes are, after all, outsiders. So it was a real pleasure, and honor, when a website that features interviews with authors by authors asked me to talk to her. We had been introduced long before then, but that was when we really met. & What surprised me and impressed me the most – amongst all the other possibilities – was how many questions she asked. She is, after all, the Grand Dame of transgender activism and has influenced a generation or two of gender activists, artists, & theorists. As our one hour on the phone turned into three, I realized that it might be because she asks such good questions – of others, & of herself – that she is the star she is.

The questions she has asked of herself have not been easy ones, and they tend to be the kinds of questions most of us would rather avoid. They’re sticky, troublesome questions about identity, and desire, and the dark things that go bump in our psyches when we’r ealone. They are questions of survival, first, but of joy and creativity and community too. She asks them with curiosity & a kind of Puckish delight, which is why she is the 21^st century role model for the many communities she inspires.

Please join me in welcome the astonishing, rule-breaking, and shame-liberating Kate Bornstein.

She did tell me she very much liked being referred to as a Grand Dame. Rachel & I had the lovely honor and pleasure of getting to hear a reading of one chapter from her upcoming Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, and let me/us tell you: we are in for a real treat. It will be published in Spring 2011 by Seven Stories Press.

Back in Appleton after the Big Gay Conference and kind of exhausted. More when I’ve fully recovered. But hot damn on getting to spend five days in a row with Kate Bornstein!

I’m doing a reading / Q&A at Appleton Public Library on March 3rd @ 6:30 PM. If you’re on Facebook, you can check out the event page here, & RSVP.

I’ll be on SistersTalk radio tonight, January 6th, at 7PM Central time.

(& Wow, they’re quick: it’s already up.)

I’ll be on SistersTalk radio this Wednesday, January 6th, at 7PM Central time.  & Yes, they’re on Facebook. They recently interviewed Rachel Kramer Bussell, erotica empress.

Other upcoming for me: a reading at Appleton Public Library on March 3rd, and I’m doing a reading for the Fox Cities Book Festival on April 12th. My best calendar is still on the front page of my author site, www.helenboydbooks.com (along with a list of past appearances, etc.)

The Lawrence campus has been mostly closed for a solid month; faculty has been off since Thanksgiving at least. Students were gone and the campus was like a ghost town. Since we live on the edge of campus, that was especially apparent, as we’re used to the regular parade of faculty who live nearby walking past on their way to classes.

Only today, with classes starting tomorrow, has life really returned. At dusk, a frat boy was moving back into a Greek house around the corner; the luggage he was carrying looked like it weighed twice his body weight. Instruments were being carried back into the Con (or dragged, pushed, & pleaded with, as was the case with one very large harp). The events listings are back up on the calendar page of the website, and the academic building offices will be buzzing with syllabi copying tomorrow.

I’ll be teaching Freshman Studies 101, which includes Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, short stories by Borges, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the writings of Zhuangzi (formerly known as Chuang Tzu), and Reading the Rocks, a book about geology by LU prof Marcia Bjornerud. I’m looking forward to it; I hope they are, at least a little.

So welcome back, Lawrentians!

At some point in the last month, this blog had its 1 millionth visitor.

Cool.

A while back, I found an email inviting me to be the keynote speaker for Tri Ess’s Holiday En Femme conference which was to take place in November, in Chicago. I immediately asked the organizers if the National leadership were okay with me being asked, since Tri Ess hasn’t been happy with me since I wrote My Husband Betty and criticized Tri Ess’s policies in its pages. They had reason to be unhappy with me, that is, which is why I was surprised when I received the invite.

The organizers were confident they were in the clear, having been told that HEF is an inclusive conference. That said, over time, National got wind of what they were planning & had some problems with it – not just with me as the keynote choice, but with workshops on hormones & some other things.

The organizers who invited me eventually quit because they felt the national Tri Ess leadership were trying to control everything to a degree that made it impossible for them, the local organizers, to plan the event.

That said, I had given my professional word that I would speak, and so repeated my agreed-upon conditions with national. They were agreeable to the same conditions. Jane Ellen Fairfax and I exchanged a few pleasantly agreeable emails, even.

A local friend in Chicago emailed me a few days ago just to say hi and happened to mention, in passing, that he hoped Tri Ess had at least let me know before putting that message up on the HEF website. Not having any idea what he was talking about, I went & checked it, only to find this message:

The Board of Tri-Ess held a Conference Call last evening in order to determine the status of the various elements which are necessary to a provide an enjoyable, enlightening and productive Holiday En Femme for all of our Chapters.

After thoroughly reviewing this project for viability in meeting these goals, we determined that, with the short time remaining, Holiday En Femme should be canceled for 2009.

The Board of Tri-Ess wishes to recognize and thank those chapters as well as the many individual sisters and supporters who participated in our endeavour and offers a deep respect for all who made every effort to try to provide you a quality Holiday En Femme.

More…

As of today, my lovely partner is the official Web Content and New Media Coordinator for Lawrence University.

In other words, she got a job at the very same university that has been employing yours truly as a teacher for the past few years.

We’re basically moved into our groovy new apartment in Appleton; it’s in the house next door to the house I lived in last year, & I’ve already nearly walked up those steps instead of the new ones a few times.

We have a lovely big porch to the front & side of the place, a big picture window, high ceilings, a big bathroom. It’s a lovely apartment, and because we both came this time, it already feels like home. When I’ve lived by myself here, for three months or six months, I tended toward monasterial. Or bachelor. Or both.

Tomorrow I attend a small symposium about pedagogy; Saturday I meet with a student about her senior project.

It’s nice to be back at work, & to feel the cold floorboards of the porch under my feet in just socks; better still to look up at a nearly full moon and a sky full of stars.

What our apartment will look like as soon as we’ve unpacked some:

For those who have ever had cats who have to be put in carriers:

(Actually, ours just get in them, for the most part. They’re very good cats.)

In the next four days, I am packing up someone’s truck with our stuff which they’ll then drive to WI; meeting with an elected official about ENDA, dropping off the last of our donations; putting a bunch of stuff into storage, and finally, at long last, packing up the kittoi and the car and heading to WI.

So I won’t be around much. Consider this my annual blog vacation.

This is the text version of the keynote talk I gave at TransOhio this past Saturday. From what they’ve told me, it was recorded so hopefully we’ll get a video link in not too long.I did interrupt myself so that the people listening could participate in the Nationwide Kiss-In.

First, thank you to Shane and Sarah and all the other TransOhio people who made this event happen. It is a very cool event, & I’m honored to be a part of it: thank you again for inviting me.

Recently I received a letter from a woman who had transitioned. She was married and had two young children, and was trying to figure out if there had been any way she could have transitioned where she might have left out some of the pain & confusion her wife and family had experienced. In the email she sent me, she mentioned how it’s expected for couples to try to stay together through transition, and I had to rub my eyes and read it again.

Is it?

Whether it was her perception or indicative of a larger change, it surprised me. When Betty and I first met, it was considered absolutely unlikely that any couple would make it through transition. Shoot, it was a huge toss-up that any wife could tolerate her husband crossdressing. But it was when I started writing back to this woman, to explain how that had never been the case before, that it hit me: I started my first online support group nearly 10 years ago – 10 years this coming February, actually. That’s like 50 in trans years, right? In large part I founded it – and this might make some of you laugh – because I wasn’t angry or sad enough to fit in with the culture of the existing partners’ groups. I was weird for being supportive, and occasionally felt like I was a minority of one. I wasn’t, of course – people who are good with the whole thing don’t seek out support groups – but it was still rare, then, to find anyone who was just looking for community, for other couples in similar situations, to share notes and stories and have someone to be “out” about their partners’ transness with. So to hear, 9 short years later, that now it’s assumed that a couple will stay together, or at least try like hell to do so, shocked me.

More…

The TransOhio Conference!

(all day). Do come up & say hi.

What we’ll be doing at 2PM EST:
kissing.

What I read before getting on the train: a great piece about angry white America, and a Dan Savage column in which he answers the question “Do post op trans people have any obligation to tell their lovers they were once the other sex?”.

I don’t think I’ve explained very much about what’s going on with us these days, & in the upcoming weeks, & I’m starting to get a lot of emails and messages asking what’s up.

So, here’s the nutshell version:

1. Betty is now officially Rachel Elizabeth. She’ll always be Betty – since that’s a short form of Elizabeth. She got a court order to change her name & the kind folks she ran into at the DMV changed her gender marker for her. The combination will really help out in our day to day lives, and yes, I’m more than okay with it, I’m happy for her, and for me, since I won’t have to buy the beer anymore.
2. I was offered a part-time teaching gig at Lawrence University for the upcoming 2009/10 school year, which I accepted. We will be living in university housing, which means I get to walk to work again, as I did the past two times I worked there, which I love. She is coming with me this year, since the 6 months apart this past year really sucked, and because this will be for 10 months.
3. We are subletting our Brooklyn apartment with the blessings of our landlord and to people who know our downstairs neighbors and who need our furniture. So it’s win-win, since we’re not actually moving to WI (yet) – just going for the 10 months.
4. Rachel is currently looking for work in Appleton, and is otherwise (of course) always looking for clients she can build/design websites for. You can contact me at helenboyd (at) myhusbandbetty (dot) com if you’re one of those potential clients.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

I’m leaving today for Columbus, OH, where I’m speaking at the TransOhio Conference, & yes, I am traveling by train. Tons of people from our MHB boards are joining me, including my lovely wife. (“She said ‘wife’!”)

They closed the online registration yesterday, but they WILL be registering walk-ins at the conference, so even if you haven’t registered yet, you can still come. They’ve made it very reasonable – $30, $20 for students, and that comes with lunch. Students can go for $11 but with no lunch & no me. Basically, it’s a tiered system, allowing people as much conference access as possible. There’s a meet & greet on Friday, 8/14, AND a brunch on Sunday. (The day-of registrations are more expensive, and may not come with a guarantee that there will be room for you at lunch.)

So yes, make your plans to come while I’m on a train to Pittsburgh!