I wanted to point out a new section of my links/blogroll, which is for allies, family & partners. Right now it’s got Abigail Garner’s Damn Straight, Monica CL’s A Seat on the SOFFA, Annie Rushden’s Gardens in Bloom, COLAGE’S Kids of Trans pages, Jonni P’s Trans Married, and PFLAG’s TNET.

If people know of other partners, allies, or family members who regularly blog on glbT issues, do let me know so I can add them. Please, not just LGB allies; they have to regularly address trans issues and need to be currently blogging with some consistency and some history.

There’s a new publication available for families & parents of trans youth:

Families in TRANSition: A Resource Guide for Parents of Trans Youth is the first comprehensive Canadian publication to address the needs of parents and families supporting their trans children. Families in TRANSition summarizes the experiences, strategies, and successes of a working group of community consultants – researchers, counsellors, advocates, parents, as well as trans youth themselves.

The guide aims be inviting and inclusive of families who may be at any one of a number of stages, and especially so for parents who may have had their adolescent or young adult child come out recently as trans. Families in TRANSition provides practical and sensitive parent-to-parent and professional therapeutic advice, and tries to anticipate and address common questions and concerns, as well as normalize the varied reactions families may have. The guide offers accurate, up-to-date information on terminology, health, and issues related to transition, and suggests to families important ways they can take care of themselves and one another through this challenging and critical time. Families in TRANSition provides a provincial context and relevant Toronto resources for continued youth and family support towards strengthening families.

The guide will be available as a free pdf download from our website (www.ctys.org) after June 8th. You will also be able to purchase a hard copy through our website for a nominal fee.

It is so great to see more and more information like this out there.

170+ bloggers contributed to this year’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day, which is damned impressive. Go to Mombian to check out all the posts.

This year, to blog for LGBT families, I want to highlight the fantastic new work by COLAGE called the Kids of Trans Resource Guide (pdf). I’m not sure if I can express how desperately this guide was needed nor how happy I am to see it published. It includes not just tips for people who are children of trans people - whether they are still children or have become adults - but it also gives great advice to trans people who are parents, as well, including this gem:

“As a parent, remember that your children come first and your transition comes second. Transition is an inherently self-focused process, as you align your body and appearance with your gender identity. The best way to be a responsible parent during transition is to make your children a major priority throughout the process. Sometimes this means that you have to compromise your ideal time frame for your transition in order to keep relationships with your family healthy.”

Shock and revelation! Trans people are parents, children, spouses; they have families, extended families, and can adjust their transition goals to help the people who love them transition around them. How much does that rock? You can also access COLAGE’s Kids of Trans pages on their website.

(cross-posted to Trans Group Blog)

More on Governor Paterson’s decision:

When David A. Paterson was growing up and his parents would go out of town, he and his little brother would stay in Harlem with family friends they called Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald.

Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald were a gay couple, though in the 1960s few people described them that way. They helped young David with his spelling, and read to him and played cards with him.

“Apparently, my parents never thought we were in any danger,” the governor recalled on Thursday in an interview. “I was raised in a culture that understood the different ways that people conduct their lives. And I feel very proud of it.”

It’s a nice article on the how the governor became an LGBT ally.

Betty & I recently went to a ‘family-friendly’ kind of amusement park while we were in Pennsylvania with my family. We were going to celebrate my grandaunt’s 85th birthday; since no one’s explained the situation to her & she adores ‘Jason,’ Betty decided to go in guy mode to keep things simple. We had a nice day at the park, especially the walking around hand in hand & being able to kiss in public for the day bits. At some point we were talking to my mom about how it was to be a straight couple again for a day, and my mom, being the loving, naive woman she can be, said something along the lines of how we should feel comfortable anywhere. Of course we aren’t, & I had to explain that in places where I see a lot of people are wearing Jesus t-shirts, WWJD stuff, etc., I often feel especially uncomfortable and not welcome. She was unfortunately not surprised but finds it a sad commentary on American christianity.

(Hey, queer-friendly Christians! Take your religion back from the haters!)

Later the same day I was waiting online for the the merry go ’round with my youngest niece, & a girl who was a little developmentally disabled was waiting on line next to us. She asked us which animal we wanted to ride on, and pointed out that she was set on the big gold carriage. We had a nice chat about the park, & who had brought her, & about my family. After the ride was over, I had this moment that I realized it took a really long time for people like her to be able to go to a family park, too. We used to keep “people like that” out of the public eye, you know?

& In some small way that gave me a moment of hope.

Betty & I are spending some time with my family today & Monday; we plan to be back sometime on Tuesday. We’re going to coal country, where my mother’s peeps are from, as it’s my grandaunt’s 85th birthday - yes, she’s my grandaunt Helen, there really is only one page in the Polish baby names book - while my parents are up north for a visit, too. We’ll go revisit some of the places they brought me as a kid, but with my sister’s kids, who’ve grown up going to that region on their summer holidays and tromping around what they call “the bush” (otherwise known as the woods) the same as I did.

It’ll be four generations in two cars, which to me is always a lovely, if complicated, experience.

Since I’ll be in coal country, I’ll be thinking about those trapped Utah miners & their families, of course. This bullshit cowboy mining should be illegal, by the way. I’m sure John L. Lewis is turning in his grave now that they’re even stripping the pillars. Greedy bastards. Please keep in mind, folks, that while trapped miners are always a good “human interest” though tragic news story, we don’t often hear about the accidents that just kill miners outright - not here, or in China, or in India.

A couple of days ago, I was on a marathon phone chat with my mom, who somewhere toward the end of the call thanked me for sending her a copy of the new book and said, “You look great on the cover.”

Yeah. My mom can’t even tell me from Betty.

Amazing, this:

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Innocenti Research Center released a report yesterday ranking the well-being of children in the world’s most economically advanced countries. Out of 21 countries, the United States came in second-to-last, at number 20.

The study focused on six areas: material well-being, health, education, relationships with peers and family members, risky behavior, and their own sense of happiness.

And damned embarrassing, too.

For those of you who know why we’re in North Carolina, the deed is done, & all went well. Thanks for your good thoughts & well wishes.

Betty and I went shopping at Macy’s the other day because we’re going to be taping a television show later in the week (more on that when I get around to it), and the windows at Macy’s were really spectacular. The entire 34th street side is an ode to the movie Miracle on 34th Street. The Broadway side is much more magical, and in one window, a huge roaring lion is absolutely gorgeous. You could see the kids just glassy-eyed, full of wonder, reflected in the glass. I felt the crying coming on, tried to hold it back, and then Betty asked me what was wrong - and out it came. My grandma used to bring me in every year to see the windows, just me & her, & then we’d go to the Radio City Christmas Show. She died in early December & Christmas has felt a little wrong since then, even though it’s been twelve years now. It surprises me that a moment like that can get me, but you know,you throw in a big lion & there’s Narnia in the mix, and it’s like all of my childhood laid out in front of me. I become a huge puddle of a person, still missing her company, still sad to have lost - to some degree - that glassy-eyed wonder at the world.

Christmas is a rough season when you’ve lost someone close to you. My love goes out especially to the Heskins this year and to a few mHB posters who have lost loved ones this year (you know who you are).

Two threads from a week or so ago got me thinking about what you might call The Big Picture. First, there was one about whether or not the mHB message boards have become a little cheerleader-y when it comes to people transitioning, and the other was Donna’s sad report of an altercation with her son.

I didn’t want to write this at the time, but wanted to give Donna - & the others reading - some time to feel a little better.

But in one particular post, our resident poster buddha pointed out that so many threads are more about the slippery slope than avoiding it, per se. In a few private emails, others pointed out the same thing, & one person in particular said she found the way the boards have changed quite in keeping with what I wrote in My Husband Betty, in (of course) Chapter 5, the Slippery Slope? chapter. When I think about the people who first came to the boards, it doesn’t take long to name quite a lot who used to identify as crossdressers who have recently transitioned, are transitioning or who are about to transition.

Most of those people have also seen their relationships fail, which is where Donna’s thread about her son comes in, because I found myself wanting to say something along the lines of this is exactly what I’m always going on about. We hate it. We don’t know why it’s hard, nearly impossible, to accept a gender change in our loved ones, but we do. And in talking about it with Betty I realized that as much as transness is impossible to understand for someone who isn’t (me included), I think it’s equally impossible for a trans person to understand why it’s so hard to accept a change of gender in someone they love, whether that person is a parent, friend, sibling, child, or partner. We want you to be happy if you change gender, but I think plenty of us who love you never quite are, or maybe, just maybe, it takes much longer for us not to be angry about it, still.

& I don’t know why. I don’t have any huge conclusions, here, except to say that I find myself feeling more precariously lucky when I look at the growing list of transitioned former crossdressers who are no longer with the women they were married to when they first crossed my path.

Sometimes, honestly, I don’t want to do the math. I don’t want to know what kind of statistic I’m up against. I worry that the only reason Betty and I have managed so far is because she hasn’t transitioned, and I still fear she will, and I fear, even more, that a year and a half after she does, or ten years after she does, I will say the same kinds of things Donna’s son said in a fit of anger.

For good reason, that worries me sometimes, sometimes way more than I want it to.

A new Yale study - granted, studying only Yalies - says that women and men both want families and want to parent (& approximately the same number of children, even).

My very lovely sister Kathleen turns a new age today. (It’s not my decision whether or not she wants anyone to know how old she is, and I’m no fool.) She has been very, very supportive of my writing for years now in both practical and emotional ways.

One night, a long time ago, when we were sharing an apartment (read: I was living in her apt), I wrote a short piece about my parents, in honor of their anniversary, and left it for her when I went to bed at whatever godforsaken hour I did. She worked for a bank most of her life, and got it when she woke up a few hours later. When I saw her next, she was holding it in her hand, kind of gesticulating with the pages, and said, “So you just sat down and wrote this, just like that?” I shook my head yes and watched as the lightbulb went off over her head; I’m not sure in all of her years of banking it had ever occurred to her that someone would sit down and write a short story for no reason whatsoever.

It was like our own sororal cultural exchange: not too much later, she sat me down and taught me how to write a budget. As it turns out I’m excellent at writing them; it’s keeping to them that’s the tricky part.

But a very happy birthday to you, Kath!

Today’s the day we blog for LGBT families!

Betty and I have had the good historical luck to be able to be legally married, but most LGBT families don’t have that right yet. Ironically, it was a lesbian friend who got so angry with me that I was taking part in an institution that she couldn’t that made me even more sure I had to have the legal rights that come with marriage: hospital visitation rights and decisions about all sorts of important life & death issues. The default of course would be family/parents, and I had no doubt that Betty’s folks would make unfortunate choices if they had to be made.

Like not recognizing her femininity, or her multiple selves, or her queerness.

The poor family of a transwomen who was murdered in Chicago have had to deal with that from the press, & the courts; but imagine how heart-breaking and disrespectful it would be if a partner didn’t have the right to insist on her partner’s chosen name and gender. It’s more than insult added to injury; it’s salt in a wound.

I’ve come to believe that it’s more important for LGBT people to have the legal rights afforded to heterosexual folks, because heterosexual relationships are already socially and culturally recognized; since LGBT relationships are just becoming visible, they especially need the legal recognition. I know that I am often “disappeared” as Betty’s partner whether she’s read as male (in which case “he” is assumed to be gay) or female (in which case she’s “too femme” to be read as a lesbian). That is, there’s too much misinformation and outright ignorance out there for LGBT couples to count on a kind soul or an educated person to give them the access and power they should have as a partner, but that’s what we have to depend on without legal rights.

Please support whatever local efforts to get LGBT people that right. It’s better for the couples, it’s better for the kids; it’s better for the whole of society.

Here’s a list of participating blogs, too.

For various reasons of my own, I was doing some light reading on sex differentiation and H-Y antigens and I came upon a wiki article about fraternal birth order, which says:

“It is hypothesized that the fraternal birth order effect may be caused by increasing levels of antibodies produced by the mother to the HY antigen with each son. The HY antigen (histocompatibility Y-antigen) is found on the surface of the cells of male mammals. The presence of this foreign chemical when bearing a son could trigger the mother’s immune response, which may then lead to different brain development patterns in later male children.”

Which got my head going in all kinds of gyne-utopian scifi kinds of directions, because doesn’t it sound like the mother’s body is actively preventing too much macho in the world? The “different brain development patterns” being obliquely referred to is of course gender variance and/or homosexuality in males.

Dunno: it just sounds like Charles Wallace and his mitochondria, in a way, doesn’t it?

Arlene Istar Lev LCSW, CASAC, is a social worker, family therapist, educator, and writer whose work addresses the unique therapeutic needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. She is the founder of Choices Counseling and Consulting (www.choicesconsulting.com) in Albany, New York, providing family therapy for LGBT people. She is also on the adjunct faculties of S.U.N.Y. Albany, School of Social Welfare, and Vermont College of the Union Institute and University. She is the author of The Complete Lesbian and Gay Parenting Guide (Penguin Press, 2004) and Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and their Families (Haworth Press, 2004). Additionally, she maintains a “Dear Ari” advice column, which is currently published in Proud Parenting and Transgender Tapestry. She is also the Founder and Project Manager for Rainbow Access Initiative, a training program on LGBT issues for therapists and medical professionals, and a Board Member for the Family Pride Coalition. Her “In a Family Way” column on LGBT parenting issues is nationally syndicated.

< Arlene Istar Lev

1. You work a lot with LGBT parenting issues. What do you see as the major differences between LGB parents and T parents?

Lesbian and gay parents deal with numerous issues of oppression, and depending on the state or locality in which they live, this can be minor issues of societal ignorance, to huge issues of public and legal discrimination. However, as difficult as the issues facing lesbian, gay, and bisexual people may be, they pale in comparison to the blatant oppression transgender and transsexual parents face.

In many states, lesbian and gay people can now jointly legally adopt their children as out same-sex couples; this provides their children with many benefits and protections. However, transgender people experience discrimination in all routine areas of family life. Judges determining parental custody will rarely award custody to out trans people, except possibly in cities like San Francisco that specifically offer transgender protections. Trans people are viewed by the courts as unfit by the virtue of their (trans)gender status. Additionally, adoption agencies do not see transgender people as “fit” to be parents, and the obstacles faced by transgender people wanting to be parents can feel insurmountable.

Lesbian and gay people have fought for the right to become parents. I remember a time when simply being an out lesbian would bias a judge’s custody decision. Although there are some localities where this still would be true, even in upstate New York in rural communities, judges minimize the issues of sexual orientation in making custody decisions. However, I cannot imagine the same being true regarding gender transition. In my book, The Complete Lesbian and Gay Parenting Guide, a transwoman tells the painful story of losing custody of her son after her crossdressing was used to “prove” that she was a deviant and a pervert. The legal status of trans people, regarding their rights to their children, is reminiscent of LGB legal rights 40 years ago.

However, there is good news to report. Trans parents are coming out of the closet in increasing numbers. Many trans people who have positive relationships with spouses and ex-spouses are finding ways to parent together and address the issues the gender-transpositions can have on family life. Increasing numbers of people are choosing to have children as out trans people. Some FTMs are getting pregnant, placing medical personnel in a position to work with pregnant men, creating a radical and challenging new phase of queer parenting. Additionally, many MTFs are storing sperm before transition, so they are able to have biological children as the sperm donor/father with a female partner. Clearly, LGBT people have developed innovative family-building forms, and I suspect we are only at the beginning of this process.

There is, of course, no reason that a trans person could not be as competent a parent as any other person, but like LGB people, they will likely have to “prove” that to the powers that be. In my experience, children take gender transitions in stride; it is adults who find the whole issue confusing and shocking. Older children might have more difficulties accepting gender changes, particularly as they near their own puberty. It is my contention however, that families can weather many challenging issues, and transgender status is no more, or less, challenging then other issues that families face.
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My parents are moving to Florida.

Despite the fact that I only see them a few times a year when they live only forty minutes away, I’m upset that I may not see them much once they move.

I really dislike Florida. It’s muggy and commercial and the home of Disney. To me, it’s the worst of suburban sprawl, and I think the alligators (and the Seminoles) should have been left alone.

Plus, I don’t like planes. I didn’t like them before 9/11, and I like them a hell of a lot less now.

Betty has a regular, 9-5 kind of job, and we take a lot of three- and four-day weekends to do outreach, when we can. As a result, we’ve kind of nickel’d and dimed her vacation time to almost nothing this year, and that without actually going on an actual vacation, so making time to visit them won’t be easy.

I know for most Americans it’s normal to have close relatives living far away. My family is a little more 19th Century: my parents grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island, where I was born, and raised, and which I left the minute I could – for Brooklyn. We’ve tracked each other around NYC like we’ve been trying to catch a Heffalump. Most of the rest of my family stayed put: some stayed married and others got divorced, but still, they had children, and houses, on Long Island. I’ve been blessed (and cursed) with having a huge Catholic family - five siblings, various siblings-in-law, two parents, seven nieces, and two nephews - right nearby.

That my parents are leaving seems incomprehensible. They were the ones who chose Long Island in the first place, and they’ve lived there 43 years. They leave not only their family, but their parish, their neighbors, their friends. But living in New York is too expensive for a couple in their 70s whose medical bills are only increasing. My mother can’t walk on ice or snow (she has what I refer to as a bionic knee) and I think my father has done his lifetime of shoveling the stuff. It makes perfect sense for them to go where they’ll have a pool in their complex, and where my dad will be a short hop from the Mets’ training grounds: heaven itself to a Brooklyn Dodgers fan.

I don’t doubt they’ll be happy. But I’m not. I keep having this feeling that there’s something I’m forgetting to do.

The way I see it, even though none of us trusts it, life has familiar patterns, slow cycles of eras. Dutiful daughter becomes rebellious teenager becomes young adult. You make your own life. With any luck, you start to appreciate your parents as friends and adults and not just as parents.

When you get married, you are simultaneously welcomed back into the family, and sent on your way to forming your own. My mom and I have talked about marriage a lot; she knew about Betty before some of my friends did, and always reassured me that if it weren’t trans stuff, it’d be something else, because it always is. We got to talk as mother and daughter, but also as wives, and as women.

With them moving, I’ve finally figured out where my pattern unraveled, like a piece of knitting left on the needle in an old woman’s lap: I’m not having their grandchildren.

Not having their grandchildren means I will never connect with my mother as grandmother and mother. Betty and I decided a long time ago that we wouldn’t have children; neither of us had any urge for kids, and crazy us – we figured our opinions were the only ones that counted. Believe me, that’s not the way other people saw it: we were asked regularly when we’d be having kids. And when we said we don’t want kids we heard about ticking clocks and what great parents we would be, so much so we eventually changed our standard response to we’re not planning on having children right now. The ticking never got louder, and we only became more convinced that people who don’t want children do not make good parents.

Yet there’s this sense of incompleteness, this void, of what to put in its place. Can anything possibly replace grandchildren? Probably not. But there’s still this urge in me, to do something for them, to say thanks, to tell them I love them in some more-than-verbal way. But all I have is words.

So thanks, mom and dad, for the house, and the yard, the food and the arguments, and even for the various neuroses I’m sure are your fault. But mostly, thank you for having enough children to have your grandchildren so that I don’t have to.

Here are a few other online support groups you might be interested in:

For the Gen X generation, there’s Ronnie Rho’s group:
Married Gen X CD support group

Lacey Leigh’s group for Successful CDs

A group for the Trans Family:
which focuses on couples

The sister group of the above, for partners only