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.
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:
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.)
It’s the 1st Korean film about the FTM experience, & it’s called 3xFTM. Here for more details.
(h/t to Matty)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
– S. Bear Bergman – Kate Bornstein – Bullough & Bullough: The Politics of Transgenderism – Patrick Califia: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals – Virginia Erhardt: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman – Leslie Feinberg – Jamison Green – Just Evelyn – Julia Serano – Reid Vanderbergh
Transformations is a photographic book from the early 80s documenting (mostly) the lives of crossdressers. It was the first book Betty gave me that made any sense. Allen’s second, The Gender Frontier, won the Lambda Lit Award in the transgender category in 2004. There is an interview with Mariette Pathy Allen in my Five Questions With… Archive. : One Life, Two Friends, Three Genders. Nettie, one of our regulars o nthe MHB Boards, wrote a fantastic review of this book. You can find that review here. I reviewed this book for Transgender Tapestry, and the review and further discussion can be found in our Reader’s Chair Forum. There is also a Five Questions With… Interview with Rosalyne on my blog.* Kate Bornstein’s thoughtful and revolutionary book about gender. Feel free to comment on or read further discussion about this book in our Reader’s Chair Forum.* A historical book about crossdressing through the ages; thorough, slightly academic, a great reference. There is also a Five Questions With… interview with Vern Bullough in my blog archives. Written when Patrick Califia was still Pat Califia, this book is a good overview of both what it means to live in the gender binary and a discussion of transgender politics of the last 50 or so years. I especially love it for two things: 1) a feminist eye, and 2) accessible writing. S/he doesn’t get bogged down in jargon, and his extensive background as a feminist sex radical informs a lot of the opinions expressed.. ** added 6/3/06* I’m not sure Leslie Feinberg has an actual fan club, but if there is one, I want in. When I first read Stone Butch Blues, it blew my mind. A lesbian friend – since transitioned – made me read it. Made me, and for good reason: it’s like a sledgehammer of experience for anyone who has ever lived in the world as queer, or working class, and especially for anyone who has lived in the world as both. My friend knew it would speak to me, as it spoke to him.Transgender Warriors was equally great, full of information, rage, inspiration. I remember practically pointing out passages to strangers on the subway when I was reading it. But Drag King Dreams is like something from another world. Leslie Feinberg is not just remarkable as a person, and activist, but as a writer. Or as a radical, righteous soul. When I met hir at TIC (UVM’s trans conference), zie came up to thank me and Betty for what we were doing, and I could have been knocked over with a feather. I’m still astonished. Leslie Feinberg thanking me? For anything? Absurd. But now I know why. Leslie Feinberg was thinking about crossdressers, and zie was thining about crossdressers a lot, and in deep, empathetic ways. Crossdressers: buy this book. You think I’m your friend? Leslie Feinberg is the mensch you want at your back, believe me.The book starts with Max Rabinowitz (transman, drag king, genderqueer, bulldagger – it’s not really clear and doesn’t matter) talking to hir friend Vickie. In a moment of frustration, of ‘transer than thou’ anger, zie says something about how Vickie can take the clothes and the wig off and go back to being normal.The next day Vickie is found brutally murdered. And the rest of the book is Max’s meditation on friends, community, activism, family; it’s an insider’s view into being queer, being outside, being “other†while also being well-loved, deeply loving, and sorry. The book is Max’s apology to Vickie, for that moment of assumption and hierarchy that a crossdresser’s life is somehow “easier†than anyone else’s. Throw in some amazing scenes about being ungendered online, a lovely exchange between a “tough as nails†femme and an “suit and tie bulldagger,†a remarkable speech by Vickie’s communist uncle; a chilling scene of an apartment break-in by mysterious and angry visitors, and one scene – an exchange of sweet, light coffee and flags – that was so touching, so genuine, and so intense that I could taste the coffee and jonesed for a smoke right along with Max. The cast of characters is a veritable melting pot of transness and their empathizers: Estelle’s surviving wife being one. I’ve never seen myself in a novel before, and though I have no interest in living Estelle’s reality, some of her words rang out in ways that were profound to me. I cried a lot just thinking about her, who she is, who she is to me. But it’s the delicacy that this book really thrives on: Feinberg doesn’t say “Max doesn’t feel solidarity with this asshole transman because he’s middle-class†but zie makes the point. Zie shows, not tells: the first lesson in fiction writing, and the one most writers get wrong.Leslie Feinberg, THANK YOU. This book was given to me by a friend – a friend who also identified as stone butch, and who now IDs as trans. At the time, many years ago, it was really just a book that was supposed to give me an idea of what her life was like. Although I don’t think the writing is all it could be – Les Feinberg is better at speeches and non-fiction prose, in my humble opinion – the impact this book had on my life can’t be underestimated. It’s one of the only books written not just by a lesbian and butch, but also by someone who lived a working-class life. As a result, so much of the book deals with what I’d call the real world: working in a blue-collar industry, dating women, dealing with family estrangement but also innate homophobia. The one scene that really hangs in my memory is one where the narrator has started taking T and is passing for male, and dating a woman who is straight. At some point, the woman says something deeply homophobic, and the convolutions of thought that go on in the narrator’s head at that time are enlightening. S/he wonders exactly what would happen to hir if that same woman were to really what/who the narrator really was; the fear in that scene is palpable. And practical. And realistic. (When I met Les Feinberg, at UVM last year, zie thanked me for the honesty of My Husband Betty. I was flabbergasted. Utterly flabbergasted. And I told hir: without Stone Butch Blues there would be no MHB. It sets a very high standard for other biographical books, one which most don’t even reach, but one which more writers should keep in mind when they write. For the record: I was not one bit surprised, however, to find out Les Feinberg was as gracious as zie was zealous about gender politics. Zie spent more than an hour after giving hir speech taking pictures with fans.) (Check out this review of SBB, too!) Leslie Feinberg’s history of trans and gender-variant people thoughout the eras. You can find more discussion about this book in our Reader’s Chair Forum. An academic book about every aspect of crossdressing – a great reference. So – why Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man? For starters, it’s a good read. James writes to be read, unlike a lot of writers on trans experience or in gender theory. Since my “audience” comes mostly from the MTF end of things, I also think it’s vital for us to educate ourselves as to what the experiences are from those on the other side of the fence. Having run FTM International for a million years, James has more than his own experience to rely upon for this book – he has head the stories of thousands of FTMs, from those that embrace a more genderqueer radical place, to those who wish, simply, to pass well enough so they can marry and mow their lawn on Saturdays. Beyond that, James is a great guy, a good writer, and penned the phrase that Betty and I repeat ad nauseum: There is no right way to be trans. He is also selfless with his time and energy – and has been for quite some time. Becoming a Visible Man was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and won the CLAGS book award. Feel free to comment or read further discussion about this book in our Reader’s Chair Forum. You can find a Five Questions With… interview with James Green on my blog.* Magnus Hirschfield’s 1910 book in which he coined the word “transvestite.”* Lacey Leigh’s guide for how to be an out crossdresser. There’s a good Five Questions With… Interview with Lacey Leigh on my blog archives as well. Arlene Istar Lev, wearing one of many hats, answers questions from people about queer parenting in her “Dear Ari” column at www.prideparenting.com, but she also wrote the ground-breaking Transgender Emergence, which makes her one of the first therapists to acknowledge partners’ concerns and therefore a friend of mine. The title of The Complete Lesbian and Gay Parenting Guide is a slight misnomer – there should be a T in there somewhere – as Lev made a point of bringing up a trans related issue in every chapter of her later tome. Her “Dear Ari” columns show up in our Kids Forum with some discussion, and Transgender Emergence has been reviewed & discussed in our Reader’s Chair forum. ** added 3/2/07 **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?
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).
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.
I was talking to my mother the night before TDOR, about all the stuff trans people often need to do, the legal stuff, the ID changes, sometimes the medical issues, and she mentioned that she was really touched by a recent Cold Case show she’d seen. I haven’t seen it yet, though I’m a fan of the show and watch it pretty often. The story was about an FTM in the 1960s who at the time was assumed to have committed suicide but who, in fact, was dead before he hit the water. Thus, the re-opening of his “cold case.”
My mom didn’t call him an FTM; she doesn’t have that language yet. What she said was, “She was a girl who was really a boy.” And I had a moment where I wasn’t sure if she meant an FTM or MTF, but once again, my mom impressed me; he was an FTM, &, to her mind, “really a boy.”
Which is of course the opposite usage of most people who throw their “reallys” around when talking about trans people, which strikes me as too cool.
But what she wanted to know was whether things were better now, and she was asking me this the night before TDOR. And I told her for some people it is, but the violence against trans people is still too up-close & personal. She thought people should be taught to keep their hands to themselves, at the very least. But I did also tell her about FORGE’s document, about us allies and partners and family being recognized as also often being the victims of violence, and she said, “of course.” She said she’d light her candle on the 20th, too.
Yeah. My mom rocks.
The Point Foundation’s next application season begins January 2nd, 2008, & they are actively seeking trans candidates for scholarships. From The Point Foundation:
“With Point Foundation, the “T†in LGBT is not just an afterthought. They really mean it,†states Point Scholar Ben Singer. Point Foundation (Point) is the nation’s largest LGBT scholarship organization. Point provides financial support, mentorship, and hope to meritorious students who have been marginalized due to sexual orientation, gender expression, or gender identity. Point is currently supporting 84 undergraduate and graduate college students with an average scholarship amount of $13,600 annually. Of its 84 current scholars 10% identify as transgender (7 FtM, 1 MtF). Additionally, Point’s Alumni Association is comprised of 26 alumni, 3 of which are members of the Transgender community (3 FtM). While Point Foundation is pleased to support this many Transgender scholars, it is not enough. “The applicant pool in 2007 consisted of only 4% Transgender identified candidates. We need to get the word out that this support is available,†urges Joanne Herman, member of Point’s National Board of Regents. Please visit our website at www.pointfoundation.org for more information and help us spread the word.
