There’s no one who hates Robert Plant as much as I do, but the stuff he recorded with Allison Kraus is too gorgeous, so here’s a track as part of a set of melodic antidotes to all the Valentine’s frippery we all love to hate. The other by the Violent Femmes, and honestly I think this is a recording that should have been on the Eraserhead soundtrack (yes, there was one) since it’s just that right kind of creepy.

& Please don’t try to talk me out of my dislike of Robert Plant or Led Zeppelin: deaf ears I’ve got on the subject.

Okay, this made me cry, really.

The world is changing. Slowly, but it is. I have met so many really cool kids – teenagers & adults, mostly – who are cool with their parents’ gender stuff that it is really nice to see this. That’s what made me cry; just seeing a presentation of all those cool KOTs (Kids of Trans) in any medium.

I recently had a partner of a trans woman ask me – and many have asked before – when it’s time to go. I didn’t have an answer, but I did want to point out that asking when it’s time to go – what straw breaks the camel’s back – is certainly not exclusive to trans partners. All sorts of people in all sorts of relationships ask this question of themselves – some for years, some for days – before they make up their minds about staying or going.

I’ve always seen relationships as more like a daily or weekly affirmation. Not that I’m not planning the long haul – I admit I’m painfully loyal – but I also like to remind myself that I’m in a relationship because I choose to be in one. I don’t have to live with another person. I don’t have to do someone else’s laundry. I choose to. I hope, in the long run, that helps me enjoy the company of my partner more.

But I’ve certainly left relationships in my past. In some there was little gray area; I’d made up my mind as to where the line was, & even if I hadn’t articulated it, I knew it the second it was crossed. But what did it? In almost every instance, looking back, what I see is a lack of engagement – not engagement as in the “we’re going to get married” kind, but engagement as in participation. I’d traveled to be with one guy a few times & when it was time for him to come hang in my court, he didn’t, and that was that. With another, it was time for a change in our relationship, a greater commitment, & he couldn’t manage it, & that was that. (& Only now, writing this, does it occur to me that I was one the one who instigated the breakup in all of my past relationships. Who knew?)

I’m curious about your own stories: when did you leave, & why? Was it after a lot of torment? A simple lack of progress? One act of betrayal?

(& I know this isn’t a pleasant topic to end the year on, but I thought it would be worse to start the year with it!)

Ah, good news!

The Washington, D.C., City Council voted Tuesday to legalize gay marriage in the nation’s capital, handing supporters a victory after a string of recent defeats in Maine, New York and New Jersey.

Mayor Adrian Fenty has promised to sign the bill, which passed 11-2, and gay couples could begin marrying as early as March. Congress, which has final say over Washington’s laws, could reject it, but Democratic leaders have suggested they are reluctant to do so.

More at NPR.

I was chatting with a new friend the other day & we were talking about coupledom; specifically about how often it is that you don’t like both halves of a couple you meet. He suggested that if you meet the couple as a couple, it’s more likely, but I wasn’t sure. At least in my experience, I tend to warm to one person more than the other, or just have more of a simpatico with one. The likeliness of liking both people in a couple goes significantly down when you’ve known one of the people for a while & then your friend introduces you to their new special friend.

That said, I can think of exceptions, of course, to everything I’ve just stated. In one case, we were so pleasantly surprised by liking a friend’s new partner & so enthusiastic about saying so that my friend of many years felt neglected as a result. (We reassured her, of course, that we loved her just as much.) In another case, I had a much easier friendship with a friend’s partner, & continued to be friends with him long after they broke up.

I assume there are always going to be people who like Betty more than they like me, and people who like me more than they like Betty. We appeal to different people because we do — I assume that’s also why we appeal to each other. (What those differences are I won’t bother to go into.)

It’s always so good to hear when another partner support group starts! Go Madison!

Just to let you know there is a SOFFA support group starting in Madison.
It will meet every other Tuesday evening, 7p-9p, beginning January 19.
It will meet at Outreach, 600 Williamson Street.
We will be focusing on the SOFFA experience and narrative.
It is a drop-in, peer support group.

I’ve done a few workshops on mismatched libidos over the years, and what surprised me the most when I started out was how many men profess to having lower libidos, and how much shame men can feel when they don’t have the kind of libido that’s on all the time no matter the circumstances. That men always have those kinds of libidos is a myth which is sadly reinforced by how almost all coverage of low libido issues is about women, such as in this NYT article of a week ago.

It’s problematic because it confirms a lot of unfortunate cultural mythology. Along with the expectation that men always have the higher libido is the one that says women always have lower ones. (That one is true doesn’t mean the other is, by the way. More bullshit binary thinking at work there.) Aside from the obvious heterocentrism that’s usually at the heart of this kind of gender essentialism — as if, in lesbian relationships, libidos are matched because both people are women! – the added hurdle of feeling gender atypical when you’re already feeling sexually atypical makes working on this stuff, or even admitting it, doubly difficult.

So for the record: lots of people of all kinds of genders in all kinds of relationships have low libidos, & all kind of people of all kinds of genders in all kinds of relationships have high libidos. The problem, as many of you know firsthand, is when your libido doesn’t match your partner’s. The one thing that I repeat frequently when I do these workshops is that having a low libido that’s satisfied by having sex once a season is not a problem — if you’re partnered to someone whose libido is the same/similar. It’s when the quarterly libido partners with the twice a weekend libido that problems arise.

& for those who like to group all Catholics into one huge monolith, I will put money on Senator Savino being Catholic.

(h/t to Megan for this one)

New York is supposed to be hip & progressive, people! I mean, honestly: this is pathetic.

A straight couple has applied for civil partner benefits, not marriage, in the UK.
They are the first to do so & in so doing are hoping to point out the inequality of the situation.

Well done, Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle.

(thanks to Julie on our boards)

I was interviewed not long ago by Amanda Waldroupe as she was writing a column for just|out of Portland (OR) about the way in which partners of trans people need support and get or don’t get it.

While numerous resources exist for transgendered people during their transition, there is a dearth, both in Portland and nationally, for their partners—who go through their own emotional and sexual travails during the experience.

Reid Vanderburgh, a local transgender therapist, says partners can have a tough time throughout the transition process, even if they support their partner.

As far as I know, it’s the first column I’ve ever read about support groups for us partners – but maybe I missed one. Thanks to Ms. Waldroupe not just for writing the column, but for quoting me accurately.

This is a chart that shows the support for same-sex marriage by age group — which, in a nutshell, means we’ve got a waiting game on our hands if nothing else. There’s a nice analysis of the chart where I found it, too.

Other charts about same sex marriage issues can be found here.

I was asked recently for resources for trans people with children. Honestly, there’s never very much, but here’s the list I sent her:

• COLAGE does a lot of work with LGBT parents, & coming out: http://colage.org/resources/parents.htm
• They have specific information on how to come out to your kids: http://colage.org/resources/coming_out.htm
• there’s a new organization called TransFamily that might have some stuff: http://www.transfamily.org/
• You may also find useful information at Abigail Garner’s Families Like Mine site: http://familieslikemine.com/
• We have a forum on our message boards for people dealing with kids & family: http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=34
• There’s a Kids of Trans tag for this blog, too: http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/tag/kids-of-trans/

If anyone has any newer resources I haven’t yet seen, please do add them!

It’s not something a pervert like me would ever understand, but it’s damned cool that there is now a dating site for asexual peeps.

Of course the image at the site is heteronormative, which is problematic, but I’m sure they needed to communicate that the site is still about dating and romance and intimate relationships that aren’t sexual per se.

(via Queers United)

The judge who denied the interracial couple their marriage just resigned. That’s something, at least. Now we just need 52% of Maine to resign.

We’re still waiting on Maine and Washington as I get ready for bed. Washington state will expand the rights of domestic partners, but it looks like Maine will reject their same sex marriage law.

I am sick to death of people being able to vote on my marriage, my citizenship, my humanity.

I want the right to bring every heterosexual couple to the steps of the courthouse in Maine and have the rest of us vote on whether they should or can be married.

This is bullshit. It’s embarassing as an American that we are so far behind most of Europe on civil rights. We used to take the lead – with suffrage, with child labor, with all sorts of shit. And now… it’s just embarassing.

I want freedom from their religion, their stupidity, & their prejudice.

I have been on both sides of this issues – having been a legally married heterosexual, and in some ways, still being that – and it makes me fucking sick that people who don’t know me get to decide if I get to be married, and whether my legal marriage will be recognized or not.

I’m just fucking fed up.

I’m tired of spending Election Days worrying about my friends, their spouses, their families, their kids.

When do we get to vote on whether heterosexual marriage is acceptable? When do we get to apply some arbitrary and hypocrital set of moral standards to everyone else’s relationships?

Since Alex Blaze took it on, & since we’ve been discussing this whole “is it okay to call someone who isn’t trans cisgender?” question on the boards, I may as well put it down here.

First, I’m going to claim a difference between cisgender & cissexual. Cisgender, the problem seems to me, is not the easy opposite of transgender. Cisgender implies, or means, or could mean (depending on who you talk to), that someone’s sex and gender are concordant. So your average butch woman, who is not trans, or is, depending on how she feels about it (see Bear Bergman), is now somehow cisgender. So is someone like me. So is a femme-y gay man who maybe performs a more gender normative masculinity for his job. That is, those of us who have variable genders, who maybe are gender fluid or gender neutral but who don’t identify as trans, are now somehow cisgender.

& Honestly, that’s bullshit. There’s a reason I use GVETGI to describe myself = Gender Variant Enough To Get It, is what it stands for.

So there’s the first issue, that “cis” may stand for “cisgender” and it may stand for “cissexual” but no one knows for sure which it is when it’s abbreviated. Crossdressers, for instance, are cissexual but they’re not cisgender. For instance.

Then there’s that little usage/connotation/denotation problem.

Telling me, & other partners whose lives are profoundly impacted by the legal rights / cultural perceptions of trans people, that we are “not trans” implies that we are also not part of the trans community. I’ve been saying for years now that we are. When trans people are killed, harassed, not hired, fired due to discrimination, denied health care, etc. etc. etc., their loved ones suffer along with them. Their families, their lovers, their kids especially. We are not just “allies.” We are vested, dammit, & a part of the trans community, so when “cisgender” comes to mean, or is used to mean, “not part of the trans community,” we are once again left out in the dark.

(Somehow, I can’t help thinking of the muggles & mudbloods of Harry Potter, here. Partners are the equivalent of the kids born to magical families who are not themselves magical. In the books & movies, they are part of the magical community, & without question. Ahem.) More…

Allison Laing’s wife Dottie Laing died tonight after a long struggle with illness.
She left this note:

Celebrate my life!
Please do not be sad.
Remember me in fondness.
I have enjoyed my life, and treasure my family and friends.
I am proud of my loved ones, and feel content knowing that a part of me lives on in each of them.
I will always be there each time you smile thinking of the good times we have shared.
It’s been a great life!
- Dottie

She worked for and in the transgender community for many of the 50 years she & Allison were married. She was the kind of woman who smiled at the new wives at Fantasia Fair, and whose smile held a world of wisdom. We’ll miss her very much, & no doubt she will be missed at this year’s Fantasia Fair tremendously.

Do keep both Allison & Dottie in your thoughts & prayers. If you have any memories of Dottie you’d like to share here, please feel free to use the comments section below to do so.

An MTF spectrum person murdered hir wife, & the Nebraska affiliate of ABC that reported it made this comment:

Experts on transgender and cross dressing say it’s unusual for such cases to end in violence, and when they do, it’s usually the cross dresser who is the victim.

& Granted, the phrase “such cases” is incredibly vague, but still, I want to know which experts they interviewed, because in all of the 9 years I have been working in the trans community, I have yet to hear of a case of a non-trans spouse murdering his/her trans spouse. I’m not saying it’s impossible – I’m just saying I’ve never heard of it. If anyone knows of a case, I would like to know about it.

However, there’s the trans woman who killed her husband in Cleveland, and the upstate NY crossdressing doctor who killed his wife, & now this case.

I am not saying that transgender people aren’t victims of violence way too often. They are murdered in hateful ways way too often. However, I have never heard of a trans person who was murdered by their own spouse. Instead they are often murdered by: strangers, johns, dates.

I am also not saying that trans people are homicidal, because they aren’t.

I am also not saying that partners of trans people are saints, by any stretch.

I would just like to know on what evidence this assertion by “experts” was based.

So this pisses me off, since the experts implied that spouses are often the murderers, when/if there is a trans person married to a non-trans person, and as far as I know, there is no evidence whatsoever to back up that assertion.

A very happy congratulations to all the Wisconsin couples who registered as Domestic Partners today!