Wow: Amos Mac and Original Plumbing magazine get a profile in the NYT. For those of you who think nothing has changed, and the media suck on trans issues, honestly: it’s just not true. These are huge changes, huge progress.
Tag: FTM
Book: Letters For My Brothers
Posted by – June 4, 2010
Matt Kailey – whose Tranifesto blog is worth checking out – is one of the contributors to the book Letters For My Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect. < /em>Other contributors include Jamison Green, Raven Kaldera, Aaron Devor, Lou Sullivan, and Reid Vanderbergh.
I don’t have a copy yet, but I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one.
Amos Mac + Original Plumbing Magazine
Posted by – May 20, 2010
How I miss Brooklyn and its hipsters, especially all the queerios and genderf***ers. (I know it’s fashionable to mock hipsters, but I was one before it was a pejorative.)
Either way, Amos Mac lives in Brooklyn now, and he publishes Original Plumbing – the term used by no-bottom-surgery FTM spectrum types to explain their bits – which is a new magazine for trans masculine folks. You can find OP on FB, too.
Mac doesn’t really see himself as a guy, but as a “transman,” someone who started out female and then shifted to the masculine side of the gender spectrum. And yet Mac also identifies as a “queer guy,” which means he often finds himself attracted to, and dating, gay men. He’s an exemplar for a new generation less concerned with gender boundaries. “When I was a woman or girl or whatever,” Mac says, “I very much identified as a fag. I was drawn to the community of gay men, and that’s how I embody myself.” And although he’s dated women, “I’m attracted to guys who have a bit of flair to them. They don’t have to be gay, but they can be queeny. I love an artistic queen.”
San Francisco 0
Brooklyn 1.
Not Just Amanda Simpson
Posted by – January 8, 2010
From the “there goes the MTF end of things sucking all the air out of the room again” division: in fact there were two trans people appointed by the Obama administration in late November.
The difficulty arose because Simpson is a former NCTE Board member, & so they sent out a press release noting their former board member’s new job, which is what caused all the hullabaloo.
Trans Documentary Drinking Game
Posted by – July 20, 2009
In light of the documentary about Chloe Prince that will air tomorrow night, I thought we should all be prepared for what looks like it’s going to be a doozy of a predictable documentary.
So, the rules, such as they are, for watching a trans documentary:
- Putting on makeup. Two drinks for reverse camera shot into mirror.
- Doing anything better done in jeans and sneakers in heels and a skirt. Examples: cleaning the house, shoveling the sidewalk, yard work, walking the dog.
- Before picture shown. Two drinks for picture in stereotypical male mode (sports team, facial hair, military, wedding tux)
- Camera shot putting on or taking off a bra.
- Photo of any wig, breast form, padding, etc.
- Surprise disclosure, when a trans woman is introduced and then partway through the piece, her secret is revealed.
- Camera focus on masculine body parts: hands, feet, Adam’s apple, height, etc.
- Any reference to genital surgery that refers to “becoming a woman” or “finally a woman”
- Minor chords played softly on a piano
- talk show host saying “you go girl”
- any discussion of plumbing or electricity
- black and white childhood shots, MTF with cap gun and cowboy hat, FTM as ballerina.
- Trans woman saying, “I am not a crossdresser. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
- Trans woman clutching large teddy bear in hospital bed.
- Birthday balloons after surgery.
- Trans woman with new boyfriend (after shot of tearful ex-wife).
- Trans woman sitting in chair in above-the-knee skirt, posed so you can see what great gams she has.
- Patient wheeled off to surgery …
- … lingering shot of the hospital bed with the teddy bear (or wife) left behind.
- Shot of protaganist sitting at the computer keyboard, looking at a trans support website or surgeon’s website….
- Any helping professional teaching deportment
- Camera in the operating room – just drink the whole bottle
- Any and all deployments of soft focus = 1 shot
- Close up of dotted lines in magic marker on pale fleshy body parts = 1 shot
- Earnest surgeon describes his motivation as “to help [girlname] become the woman she’s always really felt herself to be” = 3 shots
- Before picture with extreme facial hair – 1 shot
- Before picture in uniform – Military, Football, etc… – 2 shots
- Video from hair removal session : Laser – 1 shot, electrolysis – 2 shots
- Before picture – Last time she wore a dress (F2M) – 1 shots
- Breast binding – 2 shots
- Taking Hormones – Self-injecting -3 shots, orals – 1 shot
- Did anyone mention an arduous and lonely childhood?
- Meeting the school bully as “the new me” at the High School reunion?
- Looking at the old picture of self and saying something to the effect of “he was a nice guy….” or “Ken was a lot of fun, but his time is over. It’s Ginger’s turn now!”
- Trans woman claiming to have IS chromosomal pattern, an affinity for washing dishes, a sudden dislike of sports, etc.
Believe it or not, these are not the most snarky suggestions by some of our mHB board members. Also remember: there are quite a few people who hang out on our boards who have done this kind of media work, including me & Betty, of course, but also Jenny Boylan, amongst others. We need to laugh at ourselves as much as we laugh at the inanity of it all.
Twelve-Steppers should find their own version, of course. Maybe those ice cream poppers? But the point is to feel as physically ill by the end as the drinking crowd.
(Thanks and love to Gwen Smith who wrote her own version of this back in 2005 and to anyone else who has posted their version of this game.)
Korean FTM Documentary
Posted by – June 24, 2009
It’s the 1st Korean film about the FTM experience, & it’s called 3xFTM. Here for more details.
(h/t to Matty)
Remember Them as Soldiers
Posted by – May 25, 2009
What bugs me about this NPR story about a Civil War soldier is that the people who live in the town Albert Casher, nee Jennie Hodgers, are embarrassed by who s/he was:
Dina says some residents believe that embracing the story of Jennie Hodgers will help bring tourists to town. “Other people, I think, frankly, would rather everybody not know we had a cross-dresser in Saunemin,” she says.
She fought from start to finish in the Civil War. She went on to live as a man for the rest of her life, having gotten used to the freedom, the income, & the friends she made as a soldier.
“The women who went to war,” she says, “who disguised themselves as men and carried a gun, were overwhelmingly working-class women, immigrant women, poor women, urban women and yeoman farm girls.”
Surely not! Women couldn’t have chosen to live as men because the rest of their choices sucked!
So this Memorial Day I’d like to honor all the transgender people who fought in their nation’s wars: the trans guys, the trans women pre-transition, the crossdressers of all genders.
Surveys for FTMs, Partners of FTMs
Posted by – May 4, 2009
These surveys are being conducted by Jamison Green, and I certainly don’t think I have to attest to his coolness, do I?
If you are a trans man who has been partnered to another trans man, you can take both.
Spanish Language Trans PSA
Posted by – April 23, 2009
I don’t read/speak Spanish myself, but was sent this by someone who does:
Surprising campaign, under the auspices of the (Chilean goverment’s) Division of Social Organizations (they provide grants and help to NGO’s) and the communications division of the Metro in Santiago (2,000,000 riders a day). The posters appeared at all the metro stations and their design is very good; one can see a full size version from the last link. It was produced by a transmen’s org but displays very balanced info about MTF and FTM treatment and most of all about the difficulties and discriminations associated to being trans, pointing out that this is not a choice but an inborn condition. Trans orgs there are also in conversations with the government’s civil registry to be able to get national ID cards with the appropriate gender marker without having to certify surgeries (as in Spain).
(Apparently trans guys who speak Spanish are as cool as they’re English-speaking counterparts.)
POT
Posted by – April 12, 2009
Today, while getting my hair cut, I mentioned to my newest hairdresser that my partner is transgendered.
And he asked how long he’s been on T.
I’ve noticed that I am more consistently clocked as the lesbian partner of an FTM than the right way ’round.
WTF?
Posted by – March 6, 2009
Two female customers at a gay bar attack two trans guys in DC’s Dupont Circle. I mean, attack: whiplash and concussion. Presumably the two women were lesbians but since we don’t know that for certain, I’m not going to say it.
But still.
Partners’ Resources
Posted by – February 1, 2009
One of the partners who posts regularly on our forums has put together a list of online resources for partners, which she’s posted on the TransOhio website.
How cool is that? When I first went online as the girlfriend of a “CD,” there was exactly one Yahoo group, which was actually an eGroup (anyone remember those?).
The only thing that still bugs me is how much the partners of MTFs and FTMs segregate. It’s another case where I feel we draw too much of our identites from our partners’ trans ones. I’ve learned so much from partners of FTMs, male or female, straight-identified and queer.
SCC Failure
Posted by – October 8, 2008
A recent blog post written by someone who attended SCC reminds me, again, that whoever is in charge of partners’ events at SCC isn’t doing their job.
The only thing that I attended that did not live up to my expectations was the Comfort Zone, a group for SOFFA (significant others, friends, family and allies) of MTF trangender women. I qualified for the group as a wife of a MTF. The group was predominately made up of wives of cross dressers with about 4 of us being partners or wives of transgender people. It appears we all left before the meeting was over. The next morning Sarah and met two young women who had not been eligible for the group since their partners were FTM. They were in happy relationships. We exchanged email address and may try to put something on the internet for happy partners and wives of trans people.
This really thrills me. Two years ago a partner of an FTM was told she wasn’t welcome because she identified as lesbian, & this year they just don’t allow partners of FTMs into the partner support group.
It’s not hard to run an inclusive partner group. I’ve done it tons of times. I offer every year. I don’t need to get paid, just to have my costs covered. I would be willing to go down there to train some locals as to how to be inclusive of all partners.
Whoever is doing this workshop needs to be asked not to do it. The isolation most partners experience is quite enough, but isolating them further – at a trans conference! – is entirely unacceptable.
Please, SCC organizers, please. You have no idea what a knife in the heart it is, as a partner, to get to a conference and feel like no one bothered to care that you have a sense of community, too.
Partners, Talking
Posted by – July 19, 2008
On BBC, an interview with the (female) partner of an MTF and the (male) partner of an FTM is worth listening to. Though I will say the FTM in question turned into a jackass, not a man.
Most interesting to me are their thoughts about their sexual relationships.
More Death Shows: Cold Case
Posted by – July 11, 2008
I watch a lot of death shows, as I call them – the forensics, the procedurals, the investiigation shows. I’m a big fan of Cold Case, especially: the premise is that they have to take on a cold case – a case where the leads died, mostly – and solve it. So there’s a kind of historical quality to it, and some of the early shows I saw involved a woman who got an abortion when it was still illegal, and another about a gay bashing. Every episode I’ve seen involving LGBT folks is sympathetic, like the one my mom saw about an FTM, and “Best Friends,” which I saw recently, about an inter-racial lesbian relationship in 1932; Tessa Thompson played the African American half of the couple, and wore some natty suits.
But I find this show’s real appeal is the cultural history & the music: because it’s historical, they play a lot of good shit when they’re recreating a scene in the 1950s, or 60s, or 1978, or 2004. Lo & behold, someone has compiled all of the music from all the different episodes. Like Episode 21, “Torn,” which has music by Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton, or Episode 6, “Static” with Gene Vincent and Little Richard.
Musicheads, do check it out. They show hours & hours of it late at night on TNT.
T Shirt
Posted by – June 4, 2008
I don’t often wear trans shirts when I’m with Betty – no need to out her casually, she does enough outreach for one trans person – but Betty was sick this past week & so I was walking to my sister’s wear my NCTE “T” shirt (the old one – I don’t have the new one yet.)
Then someone on our boards asked if people would say yes if someone asked them if they were transgender.
And it made me wonder how often people think I’m trans – because of the t-shirts, the various places I post, the relative absence of partners in trans circles, and especially in LGBT circles. I think I mentioned here how two people I met at USC had assumed I was the partner of an FTM since the queer-identified partners of MTFs seem to be few & far-between – okay, practically non-existant.
It’s made me think of the days I was an honorary lesbian, which I am, still, kinda, depending on who’s deciding what I am.
I never told people I wasn’t a lesbian – unless the person was who wanted to sleep with me or a person who I wanted to sleep with – and in the same way I don’t think I’d care to clarify that I’m not trans if someone thought I was.
Maybe I should get a shirt that says GVETGI = Gender Variant Enough To Get It.
The Trip to SC, Pt. 2
Posted by – April 14, 2008
What a trip! I haven’t had so much fun without Betty since before I met her, and while I’m sad she wasn’t there to enjoy it all, I also know that she wouldn’t have found the train much fun at all (& so might have ruined it for me, ahem). But I was early for my train, & so hung around the ass-end of Penn Station for a while (that would be the 8th avenue side, of course), talking to guys trying to bum change and cigarettes. I don’t know why I like those guys; I must’ve been a hobo in a past life. But the guy I talked to was originally from New Orleans, and it’s hard not to have a good conversation with an older brother from NOLA, imho. In exchange for a cigarette, he said he’d buy me a drink next time we’re both down that way.
On the way down I was seated next to an older man who carried only his Bible, which was a “welcome to the south†a little early for me. He was a minister from Greenville, SC, it turns out, & his stop was the one after mine, so we were stuck with each other for the duration. He slept mostly, and I got very good at climbing over his napping legs.
But I ate dinner with a man and his 15 year old son on the way down; the guy was originally from the east coast, a professor and scientist, who knew Ben Barres when he was at Stanford, but who’d moved to VA and was traveling back to VA with his son after a short sojourn in NY. They were both really nice, and I had a great chat with them despite getting a little drunk on the half-bottle of wine I had ordered (which I had ordered in order to put myself to sleep). More…
FTM Newsletters
Posted by – March 27, 2008
If there’s an FTM or an FTM organization out there that would like a bunch of copies of the FTM Newsletter, let me know. The issues I have are #s 38 & 39, 41 & 42, 45 & 46, 48 & 49.
First come, first served.
Transgender Books
Posted by – March 17, 2008
Here’s a list of books I recommend on transgender issues and lives.
The starred (*) listings are books that I reviewed in greater depth in the annotated bibliography of My Husband Betty
You can read more about most of these books, find reviews and discussions of other books, or post your own book for discussion in our Reader’s Chair Forum.
If you’re brand new to the subject, see Boys Don’t Cry and read Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There. They’ll get you started, and then you can start reading these, which complicate trans identities in ways that are both essential and necessary if you want to understand transgender lives.
IF YOU ARE A THERAPIST, Lev’s Trangender Care & Vanderbergh’s Transition & Beyond are the books you want.
Here is my Top Ten List of Transgender Books for LGBTQ readers, with these and others reviewed below.
- 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
- Allen, Mariette Pathy. Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them*, & The Gender Frontier.
- Beard, Richard. Becoming Drusilla
- Bergman, S. Bear. Butch Is A Noun. I’m not sure I can even begin to describe how good Butch Is A Noun is: it’s funny, and charming, and substantial – much as I suspect its author is as well. I found myself wishing that there were 365 of Bear’s stories so that I could read one every day as a kind of meditation, to inform my day. The charm of Butch Is A Noun is that it takes its subject both seriously and with humor, but a gallows kind of humor, one that helps you survive a difficult world. There is no mistaking the undercurrent of sadness and anger, but the humor and love overwhelm both, as they should in any book about being butch. I really can’t recommend this book more highly: it made me laugh first, then cry some, think seriously about the world, and by the end I felt I’d been given a great big Bear hug.
- Boylan, Jennifer Finney. She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders. A required read since it’s probably the best written trans memoirs and makes the many other YETAs (Yet Another Trans Autobiography) redundant.
- Blumenstein, Rosalyn. Branded T.
- Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw.
- Bullough, Vern and Bonnie. Crossdressing, Sex and Gender.
- Califia, Patrick. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism.
- Erhardt, Virginia. Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals. I provided Dr. Erhardt with a blurb for this book, and have put my complete review in the Reader’s Chair Forum of our message boards. ** added 9/5/2006 **
- Feinberg, Leslie. Drag King Dreams
- Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues: A Novel.
- Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman.
- Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety.
- Green, James. Becoming a Visible Man.
- Hirschfield, Magnus. Transvesties: The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress.
- Just Evelyn. Mom, I Need to Be a Girl. Evelyn’s Mom I Need to Be a Girl is an unassuming book written by the mother of a transwoman – but a transwoman who realized her transness when she was just a girl. Not only would every transperson benefit from having a mom like Evelyn, but the whole community benefits from this amazing book. It was the first narrrative about transness that I read that I trusted – not just because, like me, Evelyn is an insider/outsider to trans issues, though that was one reason – but because the language of the book is so simple and heartfelt. There is no convolution here: it is a mother and child sorting out a very complicated question when there are no good answers readily available. I highly recommend this as a book to give others to read about transsexualism. For starters, it’s not 300 pages. But it is impossible to doubt this mother’s love for her child, or the seriousness of the problems they were up against. I think this book would soften the hardest of hearts – it is told in such clear terms, empathetically, and because you’re hearing the story from someone who loves a transperson, without the usual convolution of ‘whys and wherefores.’ Lynn Conway has made Mom I Need To Be a Girl available online and for download (with Evelyn’s permission of course) on her website. Feel free to comment on or read more discussion about this book in our Reader’s Chair Forum.
- Leigh, Lacey. Out & About: The Emancipated Crossdresser.
- Lev, Arlene Istar. Transgender Emergence, & The Complete Lesbian and Gay Parenting Guide.
- Pratt, Minnie Bruce. S/he. Minnie Bruce Pratt is Leslie Feinberg’s partner of many years, and in this short book, Pratt writes poetically about lesbian and transgender identity and sexuality.
- Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl (Seal Press,2007) Whipping Girl is, to date, the only book to address, theoretically, the uneasy relationship between trans people – specifically MTF transsexual women – and feminism, and that work was long overdue. It addresses sexuality, media representations, the historical pathologization of trans people by psychologists, the fetishization of tans women’s sexualities, the inherent misogyny of a feminist politics that mocks femininity, and then some. It has been personally & politically important to me in confronting what remained of my own “natural attitude†toward my own gender, what Serano calls cissexism (and rightfully so) and proposes the concept of “subconsious sex†which did more to explain transsexualism to me than anything ever has — outside, maybe, of Betty’s “because†model. It’s a real shame that this book was not recognized by the Lambda Literary Foundation. It will be considered a classic, revelatory and ground-breaking book in time; it’s just sad the Foundation’s judges don’t have the foresight to give it its due now. Julia, personally: thank you. I always appreciate when anyone, with their words and logic and anger, can make me a little less of an asshole, and Whipping Girl did that in spades. There’s a Five Questions With… interview with Julia Serano in my blog’s archives, and a thread about Whipping Girl in the mHB forums. ** added 3/17/2008 **
- The Lady Chablis. Hiding My Candy. The memoir of The Lady Chablis, aka “The Doll,” the trans woman who was in Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil. It’s an interestingly-told tale – her optimism and attitude gloss over some very difficult times in her life – and yet there’s a pathos underneath the fabulousness that, at least to me, makes it a perfect drag memoir – of a drag queen who isn’t quite a drag queen: The Lady Chablis is, by her own definition, “a woman with candy.”
- Vanderbergh, Reid. Transition & Beyond. Reid Vanderbergh’s Transition & Beyond is a holistic look at transition; it fills in so many gaps left by the previous literature. His empathy and admiration for partners of trans folk come through loud and clear, and his respect for us is what informs his insight and advice. Reid’s book is one of the few I know that sees the trans person in context, in the light of long-held religious beliefs, relationships, and families. His commentary on substance abuse and post-transition community are especially welcome. Transition & Beyond isn’t just vital reading for therapists but for trans people and their families. ** added 1/4/07 **
Butch Borders
Posted by – February 26, 2008
My class has expressed a lot of confusion as to where the thin line is between butch & FTM, so I had them watch S. Bear Bergman read “I Know What Butch Is,” the first chapter of hir Butch Is a Noun.
Should clarify everything, no?
