I’ll be speaking at Tri-Ess’ annual “Holiday en Femme” this year, which will happen in Chicago, from November 4th – 8th.
Honestly, I miss crossdressers so I’m sure I’ll have a blast.
Tag: crossdressing
Alcohol Poisoning
Posted by – July 22, 2009
Sadly, it was a lot of the same old same old: cursory interest in parent, partner, & children. The kids were adorable. The wife was determined. The father was exhausted.
- Multiple shots and references to surgery, instead.
- Trans woman discovers surprising, sudden interest in men.
- Expresses longing to be mother while wife is pregnant.
- Voiceover talking about wife meeting her husband for the first time “as a woman” post Thailand, even though the husband had been living in female gender role for a year as per SOC.
Atypical trans documentary bits?
- Added insult to injury for wife, while trans woman wonders – fleetingly – if she’s married her ex-girlriend if she’d have needed to transition. Fleetingly, stressed by Prince, but goddamn do wives of trans women everywhere hate her for that one. Yeah, thanks, it’s our fault you needed to transition. Do you really think we don’t wish, sometimes, that you’d married your ex-girlfriend, too?!
- Newly female husband going up telephone pole in gear
- “ “ ” mowing lawn with reference to still “wearing the pants”
- ‘out of the mouths of babes’ testimony that natal female still does all the parenting and housework
- bee stings lead to discovering of IS condition which justifies transition. (the years of crossdressing certainly don’t count for shit, right?)
So yeah, I’m drunk.You?
They all seem like reasonably nice people. I hate documentaries about teh trans. Hate ‘em. I hate the way our lives our distilled into reverse camera angles and earnest questions across kitchen tables. I hate how the beauty of a trans woman admitting that she still sees her wife the way “he” did is degraded by the “sudden interest” in men. I hate the sad, confused, tendentious quality of trans women’s wives who are obviously overwhelmed with the whole business and still in love with their spouses.
* sigh*
Having been someone who has done shite like this, my only excuse is: it was in my contract. Not that that’s much of an excuse, but you do usually have a clause saying that you will in good faith blah blah blah consent to blah blah blah that will help sell the book. I’m not sure there’s any other reason to do these things anymore, but I hope, for Rene’s sake, & the boys’ sake, & the dad’s & Chloe’s, that this one will be forgotten when it’s Sweeps Week next year or in five years. Not because it’s bad, but because it isn’t. There are things I said and wrote at the time of My Husband Betty that embarass me now, as well as plenty that I”m still happy about. But I wrote a book, so when I”m lucky, you can see its brown spine in the LGBT section of bookstores these days. But a show like this is going to be dredged up at 3am for a few years, and every once too often, Rene and Chloe and her boys and dad will be online at the supermarket / drugstore / in the waiting room / at the doctor’s office / showing up for parent teacher night when someone they’ve never met couldn’t sleep and saw them on the TeeVee. And then, well, then is when you wish you could change your name and move to Timbuktu.
My best to all of them. Can we stop making these now?
Sony Shames Crossdressing
Posted by – June 10, 2009
While Darcy was watching a live blog of the E3 press conference by Sony, she noticed that during a demo of a kart racing game where the player can customize their character, they threw in some shame for the crossdressers.
12:44PM “Right now, the two developers are showing off the avatar selection screen. The animation is absolutely adorable. One character has its costume changed to a dress, and it tries to hide, embarrassed.”
As if CDs don’t get it from all sides already.
RIP Virginia Prince, 1912 – 2009
Posted by – May 3, 2009
Dr. Richard Docter announced at dinner last night, here at the Liberty Conference, that Virginia Prince had died at the age of 96. She was in good health and mentally acute until about a month ago when her health began a steep decline. Docter was her biographer
I met the grand dame here, in this Philly Airport Hilton hotel, about five years ago, and I am a little surprised by how moved I have been to hear of her passing. She was an imperfect person, as we all are, but rocked where it counted: having the cojones to be an out-transvestite in the 1950s. Her bravery is something we’d be fools, as a community, not to acknowledge.
Imperfect, problematic, heroic. You often don’t get one without the others. We have lost an important pioneer.
Trans Couples Talk
Posted by – May 2, 2009
This is the text of the talk I gave at the Liberty Conference on May 2nd, 2009:
How We Love You: Let Us Count the Ways
There are partners who are male, female, and trans; there are partners who met their trans person before the trans person knew what was going on; there are partners who married crossdressers who had sworn off crossdressing who purged and then dressed and then purged and then dressed again; there are partners who met their husbands crossdressed; there are partners who met their trans person during transition; there are partners who met their trans person long after transition; there are partners who didn’t know their trans person was trans when they met.
You, the individuals who are in love, were in love, who are seeking companionship and partnership and occasionally a good spanking, are said to be like snowflakes. Flawless Mother Sabrina told me that one night at the now defunct Ina’s Silver Swan, and she was right. Each of your stories is unique, even when there are similarities; each of you realizes your transness, as I like to call it, in a different way: some crossdress, others do drag, others transition. Some do all three, and others – none of these, but you express your genders in some other way. But you have your stories, your characters in movies, even if and when they are comically or tragically or unfairly drawn, but those you love have – well, we’ve got a machete and a spot on the edge of the wood we mean to get through.
Crossdressing Husband & Father on NPR
Posted by – November 30, 2008
Some things you just never expect. NPR recently did a show about a crossdressing husband & father that was about as off the mark as Dr. Phil usually is. Pathologizing, full of the embarassed & shamed comments by the wife and commentary of the narrator, it was rife with ignorance and misunderstanding, and seemed to equate this person’s other mental health issues with his need to crossdress.
Wow. I wish I were more often pleasantly suprrised by the media, but I really never expected this kind of crappy story-telling from NPR. Just one opinion that offset all the negativity would have been nice.
That the story is about someone who is deceased makes it all the more sickening. There is no one to represent Doug/Donna to explain what crossdressing is all about.
You can listen to it here – all of 12 minutes & nothing redeemable! – & narrated by a family “friend.” Feh.
Letter To a Wife
Posted by – November 21, 2008
My friend Shirene, who I met while I was researching My Husband Betty, and at a SPICE conference to boot, has contined to work with wives who have just found out their husbands are crossdressers. She wrote this letter recently to one such wife, and I thought it was worth sharing here, for any husband who might want to use it to help come out to his wife, or for any wife who has just found out.
I don’t necessarily agree with how she simplifies certain issues – like the “crossdressers are heterosexual” meme – but a lot of the rest of it is a good “talking down” for a new wife who might be completely panicking.
Dear Jill,
Hi. I hope you don’t mind receiving a letter like this from a stranger, but my husband is transgender also and I know that if I could have received a letter such as this when I found out, it would have made it easier on both me and my husband. My name is Shirene, I’m 43, we live in S******, IL and I’ve known about Shayla since ‘98. We’re at 555 555 5555.
I will admit it’s somewhat of an adapted form letter so please ignore the things that don’t apply to your situation and please excuse the things I’m telling you that you already know. More
Site Re-Design
Posted by – October 11, 2008
My old blog template couldn’t make use of all the groovy new widgets and functionality of WordPress, so I dove into a site re-design the other day, and I’m still tweaking.
I’ve kept lots of cool stuff, like my flickr badge and extensive blogroll, but here’s the cool new stuff:
- more & newer photos in the random photo header
- a compact category list
- a tag cloud! this one excites me, even if it means going back & tagging 5 years of blog posts. still, it helps locate more of my posts on specific topics, like crossdressing, or the Gwen Araujo trial.
- & most importantly for you, dear reader, is the new “share this” button on every post, so you can put my stuff up on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, LJ, and Technorati. But you can also email it to a friend! How cool is that? I feel like The New York Times.
So do explore, and if you have any more suggestions, that’s what the comments section is for. In the next months I’m hoping to update both helenboydbooks.com and Trans Group Blog, but for right now, I’ve had my fill of tweaking code.
Trans for Obama: Ongoing Issues
Posted by – October 3, 2008
Kate Bornstein is fired up, and wants our various transgender communities to start working together more, all because she’s dizzily happy about being acknowledged by the Obama campaign. Jillian Weiss is asking similar questions, but more along the “how in hell did this happen?” about the Trans for Obama campaign. I love that she calls me a Transgender Media Empire – that kills me, since I’m really just an underemployed author with a tech-savvy partner. Even on Monday, when I put a lot of energy into Trans for Obama, half the reason was that I had to take the GRE two days later and my best-loved furball was having surgery.
Still, this issue of “community” is one that always frustrates me. Community is about being willing; if you want in, come on in, and if you don’t, please go away. It’s as simple as that, imho: the HBS type are free to do whatever it is they do (and some are active in feminist issues, actually, instead of trans ones), and the homophobic crossdressers, of which there are some, can hang out together by themselves, and – well, you get the idea. I don’t really care, honestly: since my existence as a member of the trans community is always liminal to some people, because I’m a partner & not trans myself, I’m all for defining community by those who want to be there.
But Monica Roberts (in the comments section of Jillian Weiss’ Bilerico post) has brought up the issue of trans POC not being encouraged, or recognized, and I think she’s right that we need to do more. So I’m looking for a trans POC volunteer to take over my blog for a day, to at least raise some awareness.
The Umbrella
Posted by – July 27, 2008
There’s been a recent thread on the message boards about the relative usefulness & accuracy of the “transgender umbrella” & quite frankly, I’m stumped by people who have a problem with the idea. I don’t see that it’s a complicated idea: that people who “trans” gender in some way – change, permanently or temporarily, their gender, or question the binary, etc. – have something in common. It doesn’t mean you’re all alike. It doesn’t mean you share all causes or issues or complaints. It doesn’t mean anything except that at some point, you question(ed) the assignment of an F or an M on your birth certificate as an accurate description of your gender at all times.
What I expect underlays the complications is an expectation of harmony, or unity, under that umbrella. That’s not going to happen, simply because different types of people under the umbrella have different experiences, identities, and definitely different complications with expressing that identity in the world. The post-op young transitioner who is happily married to a man may pass seamlessly as a woman, but only stealth keeps it that way. The crossdresser needs places to change, & community that isn’t heterocentric or homophobic. The genderqueer person wants to be acknowledge that they do not have a single gender, or any gender, or a consistent gender, or a binary-driven gender, depending on how they express being genderqueer.
There’s a lovely amount of variety.
What I think happens is that some forms of transness are considered “less than.” I can understand why a trans woman might feel her femininity mocked, or made questionable, by a crossdresser’s evocations of feminity. I’ve felt the same way when faced with some crossdressers’ interpretation of feminine. But I can’t imagine disliking crossdressers as a group because of that. After all, as many partners & feminists have experienced, transness in general tends to blow up a cissexual’s notions of gender in the first place, with its emphasis on nature & not nurture. We don’t dislike trans people as a result (well, some people do, of course, but I’m assuming most people reading this think that’s kind of dumb, if not outright prejudice.)
It’s not as if I’m not horrified by the behavior of some white folks, or other women, or writers, or Brooklynites, but I can’t deny I have something in common with them, either.
Felicity’s Last Flight
Posted by – June 28, 2008
Felicity Chandelle, pilot and crossdresser, died Monday at the age of 102. She was, as far as I know, the world’s oldest living crossdresser. I interviewed her a few years ago, when she turned 100, and not long after that she donated all of her papers – many of them magazines about crossdressing – to the LGBT Center Library here in New York. Some of them would not be able to be used until after her death, whereupon her male, legal name could be revealed, as if her part of her collection, too, were crossdressed.
Thanks for the gift Felicity. Fly right.
1st Battalion Tranvestites Brigade
Posted by – June 18, 2008
Just in time for Pride month, Lena found this lovely 1st Battalion Transvestite Brigade: Airborne Unit t-shirt. Now before anyone gets upset with me for using the term transvestite (again), this shirt is drawn from an Eddie Izzard routine in Dress to Kill, and Izzard is, of course, a self-identified transvestite himself.
Were you surprised?
I was surprised.
Which are lines that Betty & I use on a regular basis at home.
& Yes, I’ve already ordered one for myself, even if I already missed wearing it to Brooklyn Pride.
Goddess Worship
Posted by – April 7, 2008
The Times of India ran an interesting story about a crossdressing religious tradition:
They are about to take part in the Kottankulangara Sridevi temple festival. The ancient temple in Chavara, Kerala, has a unique tradition. On the last two days of the festival, regular men, common office-going professionals, dress up as women for the chamayavilakku (chamaya is make-up, vilakku is lamp). Bedecked with flowers, lamps in hand, they wait patiently till the wee hours of dawn for the goddess to bless them.
It’s also become a gathering for “feminine men,” or Kothis – which the article identifies as homosexuals and transvestites.
(Thanks to Veronica for the link.)
Top Ten Trans Reads
Posted by – March 19, 2008
Out Magazine recently put together a really asinine list of transgender books for their transgender issue. I haven’t seen the issue, but the list doesn’t really inspire me to go buy it, either, since Myra Breckinridge is on it.
For the past years I’ve always mixed my gender / feminism / trans books, but since that Top 10 of Out‘s is so lame, and the Lammies recently neglected Whipping Girl, which they shouldn’t have, I thought instead I should post my own Top Ten Recommended Trans Reads for LGBTQ readers. There are a few everyone might not need to read – like Virginia Erhardt’s Head Over Heels, which is about the partners of MTFs – or they might want to substitute Minnie Bruce Pratt’s S/he
I might suggest different books for family & friends who are trying to understand transition but who aren’t big readers, & I’ll have to think about that list, too.
Of course now that I’ve written it I have to say I’d add my own books, My Husband Betty
& Maybe The Drag Queens of New York as well.
- Butch is a Noun
- Gender Outlaw
- Crossdressing, Sex & Gender
- Sex Changes
- Head Over Heels
- Transgender Warriors
- Becoming a Visible Man
- Mom, I Need to be a Girl
- Whipping Girl
- Transition & Beyond
You’ll notice none of them is a YETA (Yet Another Transsexual Autobiography), since after you read Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There
Trans History Timeline
Posted by – February 23, 2008
I’ve been putting together a Trans History Timeline for my Transgender Lives class. The idea was to give them an idea of the events that lead up to the modern Transgender Movement (such as it is).
- 1910 Magnus Hirschfeld coins “transvestite” and “transsexual”
- 1919 Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research given housing
- 1930 Lili Elbe undergoes five surgeries, the fifth of which kills her in 1931
- 1933 Institute for Sexual Research burned by Nazis
- 1939 – 1945 WWII
- 1945 Michael Dillon has first FTM surgeries
- 1951 Roberta Cowell transitions in the UK
- 1952 Christine Jorgensen headline, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Bombshellâ€
- 1959 Virginia Prince starts Transvestia
- 1961 VP starts Heels & Hose (12 crossdressers!)
- 1964 Reed Erickson founds the Erickson Institute
- 1966 Harry Benjamin publishes The Transsexual Phenomenon
- 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riots, SF
- 1969 Ist Gender Symposia (becomes HBIGDA)
- 1969 Stonewall, NYC
- 1973 First Introduction of ENDA (US)
- 1975 Fantasia Fair starts in Provincetown, founded by Ariadne Kane
- 1976 Tri-Ess formed
- 1976 Crossdressing becomes legal in SF
- 1977 HBIGDA becomes an org
- 1979 Sandy Stone leaves Olivia Records due to attacks in Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire
- 1980 Crossdressing becomes legal in Houston, TX (due to Phyllis Frye’s efforts)
- 1986 FTM Int’l started by Lou Sullivan
- 1987 IFGE formed
- 1990 AEGIS started by Dallas Denny
- 1993 Mosaic web browser
- 1994 Death of Brandon Teena / Netscape web browser
- 1995 “All FTM Conference of the Americas†organized by Jamison Green & Jason Cromwell (with grant from Dallas Denny)
I was teaching Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man at the time, which is why it ends where it does, but I’ve been adding to it since, & will continue to do so.
Curl Up with a Crossdresser
Posted by – February 14, 2008
For Valentine’s Day, I got the lovely news that my story, “Halloween” was mentioned by name when Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Crossdressing anthology was chosen as a ‘spotlight pick’ by AVN.
Might be a good book for a lot of you to curl up with on this frigid (at least where we are) Valentine’s Day, whether you have someone to share the stories with or not.
Crossdressers Needed
Posted by – January 2, 2008
A couple of weeks ago I posted a survey by TAVA, the transgender veterans association, and they are especially needing to hear from crossdressers. I know you’re out there, so please do respond to the survey!
Sexual Politics
Posted by – December 2, 2007
The other night at the Crossdressing: Erotic Stories event, the three of us who read were asked about sexual politics. Veronica Vera’s response really hit the nail on the head, so I asked if she would send me something of a transcript of what she said. Here it is.
The political consequences of sex without guilt are enormous.
enormous.
Our culture is mired in guilt and this has kept us bound in chains of fear and powerlessness, not only about the experience of sex but of the experience of being human. Our institutions of state, church and the media, either through ignorance or guile continue the process.
When we feel guilty, we do not voice our opinions. If we do not voice our opinions, we cannot raise questions. If we do not raise questions, we cannot effect change.
When I gave myself permission to touch myself and my sexuality in all of its aspects, I gave myself permission to feel. I validated my feelings. The right to feel is a basic right and with it comes the right to have an opinion, and what follows is the right to ask questions. We ask questions and we meet others who are asking the same questions and together we create a world.
Crossdressing Erotica Tonight
Posted by – November 29, 2007
Tonight, do come to a crossdressing event at the LGBT Center in NYC. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Crossdressing: Erotic Stories book is the reason for the gathering. I’ll be reading, as will Miss Vera, amongst others.
- Where: LGBT Center, West 13th Street, www.gaycenter.org
- When: 7PM
Do come! It should be a fun night!
