An old friend of mine is in town, and she was asked to guest drum at a bellydance performance tonight. As I’ve rarely gotten to see her drum, I went, & dragged my sister with me. (Betty, sadly, is not very mobile). I’ve seen bellydance performed before, but tonight, on top of my usual introverted discomfort, I kept thinking about how I was supposed to be in that room.

The dancers were all lovely. The first act, Sri Devi, was (I’m guessing) still pretty young to dancing, but she was fabulously talented and funny and fun in her performance. She seems like the type of performer who has a real star in her.

The final performance, by Hannah Nour, was really a hit out of the park. She had what I call “sea legs” for a performer - the way sailors are more comfortable on a boat than on land, some people are more comfortable performing than not. (Betty was that kind of actor.) She showed no self-concsiousness, seemed like she was really engaged and enjoying herself, and was technically stellar. And her clothes! Like a Hindu Love Goddess, all light blues and greens and whites and pinks - like a female version of the traditional representation of Rama.

Because on one level bellydance is a seductive art, sexual, exhibitionist, and yet it’s also social. It’s not burlesque. And I couldn’t figure out how to watch, at all. Most of the guys sit there just kind of ga-ga (in a more or less sexualized gaze) and a lot of the women were other dancers who were there to cheer on their friends or learn or just to appreciate the art.

But I was just there, looking like a dyke in the corner, and now that I’m aware people see me as a lesbian, it’s all I think about. I suppose if I actually desired women, I’d sit there like most of the guys, enjoying the sensuality & beauty of the ladies dancing without feeling weird about it. But because my desire, per se, is not engaged, I just sit there wondering how to watch, because it’s still titillating - dance is innately seductive, no?. I find myself tied up in knots, and kind of uncomfortable despite the performers being very comfortable with themselves and the dance form.

(I know, I know; I’m self-conscious & I think too much. Tell me something I don’t know.)

But despite my own silliness, DO GO see bellydance if you can! It’s a cool art form. The night I saw tonight happens every Sunday (thought with different performers, I think).

Today I’m taking the GRE, or Graduate Record Exam, and let me tell you, I’m not excited about it. I don’t mind taking a test for four hours - my time spent writing often runs longer than that - but the idea of this exam just pisses me off. I don’t do well with standardized anything, but the idea of standardized intelligence is so unbelievably counter-intuitive, especially for us humanities types.

I’ve always been good at math; I just didn’t like it. My sister, who always scored higher on verbal than math, went into banking. I always scored higher on math than verbal and I’m the writer. Maybe it’s just inborn perversity, or maybe this whole idea of a “right” answer offends me. Math encouraged the wrong bits of me entirely.

I’ve spent most of my intellectual career teaching myself not to look for a right answer, but to look instead at things in a way they’re not usually seen, to ask questions that expose more of the riddle of the thing in question. I love the idea of imbuing the subjective narrative with authority; of defining the universe in a kind of Buddhist solipsism. You know, in a healthy sort of way, that maximizes the importance of our humanity and decreases our judgment of what’s right or wrong.

Call me a recovering Catholic, but I had a literature professor in my first year at Fordham - I started out a theology major, no kidding - who called me The Church Lady because I found Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” a moral outrage. I was The Church Lady with a mohawk, but judgmental nonetheless. I think that tendency is sometimes referred to as liberal fascism, or for you D&D types, Lawful Evil. I recognized the streak and since then have learned to tame it.

And then this test comes along, a test I avoided taking the first time around by getting my MA in Writing, of all things, but now, considering doing a Ph.D., I can’t avoid any longer. And they want to know the best opposite of restive is, and I have to spend the first seconds while reading the question turning off the part of my brain that wants to know the context, and whether restive is being used sarcastically, who’s using it and what they’re describing. The next seconds I convince myself to just answer the damn question the way I expect they want it answered, and the next seconds after that I have to convince myself to stop thinking about it because my first “this is the answer they want” impulse is usually the one that gets me the check mark of correctness. It’s exhausting.

I don’t believe in check marks of correctness, and the idea - at this age! - of having to take a test to give someone a numerical way of understanding how smart I am, or am not, is pretty damned frustrating.

Either way, I’m taking the GRE today.

Please wish me luck in not sticking the pencil in my own eye out of frustration.

Our friend and book reviewer Jude Russell wrote a short, simple piece about the binary that really resonated with me. I hope it does for many of you, too.

There have been a couple of threads recently wherein gender outlaws (and I use that term with utmost affection and respect) have run afoul of cisgendered folks who have gotten the gender wrong - typically persons in “boy mode” who were androgynous or feminine enough to be gendered female - although I am sure it runs both ways.

Now, I spent many years in that gender neutral zone - where I’d be gendered female in one interaction, male in another, and trigger some confusion (and possibly, anger) in a third. It was all very interesting (from a sociological perspective), and fun (from a Loki / coyote / mischief maker perspective) but also somewhat stressful (especially when things like waste elimination came into play, or I’d run into someone who had a problem with it).

I guess my reaction to these experiences has been somewhat different than others. Because I think we need to take some responsibility for choosing to color outside the lines, choosing to bend gender, choosing to break the rules. So when I was in boy mode and got gendered female, I was less pissed off, and more amused - it was my decision to adopt a more feminine affect, and it was, in some ways, rewarding to have that recognized even as it was uncomfortable to be called on it. I began to pay attention to how others were gendering me - and acted accordingly. If I was vibing female that particular day, well, I stayed out of male gendered spaces; opting for unisex or female gendered spaces, or being cautious and quick in male gendered ones. Many a time, I sought out a unisex bathroom, or watched the gendered bathrooms until I was pretty sure they were empty, or wandered towards a pair of gendered bathrooms and decided at the last minute which one to use, based solely on if anyone was going in or coming out of either.

And when I was called on my gender blur - well, I had a collection of responses ready. “Yeah, I guess I am pretty androgynous” or “I’m still deciding” or “Sometimes I’m not really sure myself”. And yeah, when it got to be too stressful, I’d move in one direction or the other, to reduce the friction. In some ways, my decision to transition was of this nature - that living in between genders required too much energy, produced too much friction in the world.

I guess my point is, we live in this binary gendered world. And slowly, things are loosening up - there are unisex or gender free bathrooms, gender markers are removed from forms and identity documents, salutations are made optional, gay marriage (the prevention of which is, IMHO, the primary reason for rigid binary gender boundaries) is made legal.

But in the meantime, we need to live in this world. And we need to own the fact that we are the gender outlaws, that we need to live on this binary coded planet. Even if the long term goal is a lot less gendered society, we’ll grind ourselves into dust with stress and anger if we do not figure out how to bend and move in the margins at times.

Often starting our journey from a position of cisgenderer privilege - where we could use the right bathroom unconsciously, where we could simply move through the world on automatic pilot, feeling a sense of affiliation and belonging with our gender, its difficult to find ourselves stripped of that gender privilege. But the quicker we realize “I’m privileged differently now, I need to adjust my attitude accordingly”, the more gently we move through society. We can still fight for rights or visibility or a less gendered world. But we can do so without the constant erosion of our energies and self esteem…….

It’s sort of a reframing - becoming less of a victim of a repressive culture, and more of an anthropologist or explorer, carefully moving among this binary culture that we are studying and experimenting with.

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.

There was quite an inflammatory thread on our boards recently about drag queens and crossdressers who dress in over-the-top ways, and it’s gotten me thinking. I’ve often heard that feminists hate drag queens because they mock women, which has always baffled me, for two reasons: (1) I don’t think all DQs are mocking women, and my guess is that most are not, and (2) I think there’s about a million feminist issues to deal with and that the relative powerlessness of your average DQ is hardly a major problem.

But the trans woman who brought this up was very upset by the way DQs mock women and in some way “misrepresent” transness - or at least her variety.

So what I’ve been thinking is that, ironically, I have found the one place where a lot of radical feminists and trans women might agree: in their dislike of DQs. So maybe MWMF should have an “anti-DQ” rally so that they can find the common ground that’s been so sorely lacking.

I’m kidding, of course. Still, the anger of the trans woman who had the courage to post her feelings about DQs surprised me, and usually things that surprise me make me pay attention. I just didn’t expect it. I just can’t see DQs as threatening of anyone. & Yet it was very clear she was threatened and angered, so I’d love to hear other input from people here. Do you other trans women resent drag queens? Why?

(Here’s an article from the Orlando Sentinel about the DQ pageant scene, which comes with some interesting terminology. Thanks to Donna T for finding it.)

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.

There are people up in New Hampshire trying to convince the DMV to change their surgery requirement for gender marker change on licenses. In order to show how much support there would be for such changes, they’ve started an online petition.

Requiring surgery as a condition of ID change is both medically and economically discriminatory.

Do sign it.

I still have moments of looking at the LGBT bookshelves in bookstores feeling sheepish - sometimes because I feel like I’m not “queer enough” to be doing so, or because people are clocking me as queer, that you must be queer if you’re browsing the LGBT section of a bookstore.

What’s funny to me is that I’ve stood in front of 200 people & talked about strapping it on, yet strangers in bookstores looking at me looking at books can still make me shy.

The issue of whether or not the term SOFFA (Significant Others, Friends, Family & Allies) is used throughout the trans community to describe people like me came up recently in an online discussion group, so I thought I’d share here a list of the terms that are used. Keep in mind this list is drawn from my own experience online & in person, in co-moderating partner support groups at conferences, & in my various conversations with others “like me” in the trans universe.

Historically speaking, it was pretty apparent especially when I first went online as a trans partner, nine years ago or so, that if I found “SOFFA” support I would be quite on my own as a historically-heterosexual female partner of an emerging MTF, & was often directed to more Tri-Ess type organizations when/if I did find them.

So just for the sake of it, here’s some other terms & the way (in my experience) they breakdown in use:

• SO - most often used to describe the female partner of a CD or MTF of CDing experience
• SOFFA - short for “Significant Other, Friend, Family or Ally” and is used  predominantly in the FTM community. (note: it is not pronounced like the furniture, but like the O in hot)
• partner - seems to be used by both
• chaser/admirer - again, out of MTF spaces, for (mostly) the guys who date/seek out sex with CDs or pre op/non op MTFs. “chaser” is the pejorative; “admirer” is used when their attention is appreciated by the trans person in question.
• trans-am(orous), transsensual - terms that come out of the FTM universe, for women who date/seek out sex/relationships with FTMs - often intentionally *not* used by FTMs due to the fetishistic connotation, though I find it’s quite a radical idea to describe women who desire MTFs (there aren’t so many of us, so fetishization doesn’t seem to be an issue!)
• Of recent coinage, which some partners seem to respond to, is NQAL (pronounced “nickel”)- for Not Quite a Lesbian. Used by those of us who either are lesbians but are with FTMs who are stealth, & also by female partners who are heterosexual but are viewed as lesbians when our MTFs transition/crossdress.

Other notes:

• One of the reasons I don’t use SOFFA is exactly because lumping together those who date/partner with trans people is already such a mixed bag of people, & because the term can be off-putting to allies who aren’t dating trans people to be seen as only being there for the sexual/romantic partnerships. Also, because there is a big difference between an ally who is trans am & the partner of an MTF or FTM who is transitioning after years of a long term relationship. (The mutual scorn can be palpable.)
• As support group practice (at least at the LGBT center in manhattan) has dictated, putting the parents/family of trans people in the same room with partners/admirers/trans-am people is pretty disastrous as well.
• PFLAG’s trans support is referred to as TNET, though I often just use TFLAG (for families of trans).

The good news in all this verbal soup is that there are more & more of us everyday!

Recently I did a talk that one of my queer femme friends attended, and at some point during the talk I mentioned what a hard time I had with Betty’s femininity because it brought up my own issues with my own “failed” femininity. Afterwards, she asked, “Well don’t I drive you nuts, then?” or something like that.

& The funny thing is: no, she doesn’t. Aside from her being a nice person who takes people as they come (moreso even than most other open-minded folks I know), she’s a queer femme. & The girls who were the bane of my existence - and the women who still are - were almost always straight femmes. Because queer femmes are somehow different than their straight sisters. For starters, they flirt with me, & I can flirt with them, & even though everyone knows nothing is happening, there’s a script of sorts that jives with everyone involved. Queer femmes have met other women with my gender before, & a lot of the time, they’ve dated them too. Our genders are mutually complimentary, you might say. Butches seem occasonally puzzled by me, or they seem to understand me, or they accept me as some kind of liminal butch, but they certainly aren’t threatened. Gay men - femme and masculine - seem to get that I’m not a jerk. (Or, as a gay friend said when he met me, “Oh, so you’re hip?” - after which we didn’t really need to discuss anything about my gender or SO beyond that.)

But it’s straight feminine women I can’t seem to have an un-awkward conversation with; often I feel like they’re worried I’m going to hit on them, and/or that their boyfriend is going to like me better than them (because of that “one of the guys” thing). Sometimes I swear they’re worried about both simultaneously. Straight feminine women seem to have way more invested in a kind of combative, competitive relationship between women - you know, who is the prettiest, the most feminine, the most fashion sense, or who gets the most attention from boys. Mostly I feel like I’m being asked to a duel but I haven’t got a pistol & I don’t the rules and I don’t know who I challenged and certainly didn’t mean to. It’s really like being in a culture that I don’t know & I’m not familiar with, the way that sometimes, as a white person, another white person will say something racist to you as if assuming you agree, or as a straight person, having another straight person make a homophobic joke assuming you’ll think it’s funny, too. Straight women like to complain about “what a guy” their man is, & how they don’t understand them at all, especially how they don’t hear anything when they’re playing a computer game or the like. And when I’ve said something along the lines of, “yeah, well I tend to tune out when I’m playing The Sims,” I get stares all around as if they’ve discovered a traitor in their midst.

And I am, I guess, a gender traitor. I don’t have much in common with the people who are assumedly “my tribe” - other heterosexual women. I don’t know how to talk to them. I don’t know how to make them feel better about themselves, or reassure them that I really dress the way I do on purpose. But it hadn’t occurred to me that it wasn’t all feminine women I felt that way about until my friend asked me that question. Looking back, it’s often been queer femmes who have helped me think about femininity in ways that didn’t just piss me off.

There’s an event happening in San Francisco (of course) called “Not Queer Enough” on June 27th. Among the speakers are people like Max Wolf Valerio & Julia Serano.

I wish I could be there.

My own feelings of being “not queer enough” I’ve mentioned at various times, usually when I’ve felt shunned at an event or gathering, or been made to feel otherwise square for being married or monogamous or heterosexual. Shoot, I’ve felt “not feminist enough” for being heterosexual & married, too.

& I’m very very certain that plenty of trans people feel “not trans enough.”

But not queer enough? What defines someone as queer? Their politics? Being visibly queer? Their worldview? Their haircut? Who they have sex with?

I don’t know. But I’d like to be in San Francisco that night to hear other people talk about their experiences.

Info about the event below the break.

More…

So do I get to be a private person, too?

That’s the thought that’s been going through my head lately, since a partner in another online group for partners I belonged to recently commented that she was feeling hesitant about reading She’s Not the Man I Married because Betty stepped in to defend me on some occasion on the message boards.

& I was a little surprised, for two reasons: (1) because the idea of someone deciding I’m not independent enough or that I’ve hidden behind Betty’s skirts (as it were) kind of confounds me in general, considering the criticism I get more often is that I’m such a ball-buster who is exploiting Betty for the fame & fortune, and (2) because it never occurred to me that others wouldn’t recognize that while I have a public life as a partner & as an author, I’m also still also just one of a gazillion partners of trans people who is trundling through this experience. More…

I’m up at my usual ungodly hour having just finished a piece for an upcoming anthology called TransForming Community: Stories from Merging Trans and Queer Communities which will come out on Suspect Thoughts Press next year and is being edited by Michelle Tea and Julia Serano.

It comes out of a spoken word series Michelle Tea started a while back; Julia Serano recently reported on her experience at one.

My piece is on queer heterosexuals, specifically crossdressers/transvestites and their female partners, and how we do or don’t fit into queer community, or straight community, or trans community, depending.

It’s also about how to tie your shoes.

When I have a final edit, I’ll put an excerpt of it up here.

Recently in our forums, Nettie jokingly made a reference to the “Class of 2007″ - meaning those who would be transitioning in 2007 - and in the context of our experience talking to people at IFGE, & in the light of a review of She’s Not the Man I Married someone sent me which criticized the book for not having an “ending,” I’ve been thinking recently that perhaps one of the most slippery aspects of the slippery slope is that transition provides an ending, and maybe even closure. The thing is: from what post-transition trans women tell me, that’s not necessarily true, but for anyone who’s been suffering all their lives with their trans feelings, it sure does seem like one hell of an attractive idea.

So while I very much tried to communicate in the new book that I may be waiting for the sound of a shoe that may never drop, folks don’t seem to understand that sometimes there isn’t so much of an “ending” as instead a “being finished.” But I also wonder if there’s anything that crossdressers or middle path types might do to accomplish more of a feeling of closure that transition brings trans women. I know CDI throws “debutante parties” - which seems like a great way to come out - which might work for plenty of CDs, especially since deb parties come with pretty party clothes. But what about middle path types? Do they send out a press release? Because no matter how many times we tell people that Betty is where she is, people persist in believing Betty will want to transition medically or legally or both. & You know, she might. She might in a year from now, & she might 10 years from now, or 20. But the whole idea of having other people tell you you’re not “done” until transition is a huge aggravation for us both.

On Wednesday night, I did the Nobody Passes reading at Bluestockings, the radical/feminist LES bookstore. As the room was filling up I leaned over to Betty and said, “I feel like I’m in a Williamsburg subway station” because of the multiple piercedness in the room. It’s the punk in me, maybe; I have an old punk rocker friend who likes to yell “freak!” at people with multiple piercings and green hair, because he figured - as it was when we were doing it - that was the point. I mean if you weren’t shocking someone’s suburban sense of normality with your non-conformity, then you weren’t doing it right, but in Williamsburg sometimes it’s like having facial piercings IS normality.

& I say all that with a kind of fondness, love, and a little bit of envy, because I don’t have the energy to look like that anymore. I prefer passing as more mainstream these days, because I like the little shock people express when I launch into a diatribe about the exclusion of crossdressers from trans politics 12 minutes later.

The idea we were discussing was passing - as one thing or another: passing as white, or black, when you have parents who are both; passing as female when you aren’t; passing as female when you are. It was very heady, indeed.

But what was most interesting to me was that to some people, I wasn’t passing at all. One person registered something like scorn every time I answered one of the Q&A questions. The conversation tended around issues of queer community, and LGBT politics & media, which I guess was predictable - Mattilda is the editor of the anthology & all - but still, the book does cover many types of passing - passing as middle class when you’re working class, or the other way around - & yet there were no questions - or assumptions - about class while there was an assumption that everyone in the room was LGBT. & I had a moment - I think of it now as social Tourette’s, but it’s basically just my punk rock spirit moving in mysterious ways - of wanting to say the word “heterosexual” as many times as I could. Why? Because when I did, people twitched. It’s a funny feeling to talk about community and “scenes” and queerness in a group of people who you can bet don’t all consider you part of their “us.” I’m used to that, mostly, except when I find someone copping an attitude toward me, that I’m not properly queer because I don’t fuck girls per se, or for whatever reason they’re not telling me. & That’s okay with me, actually — Betty & I exist at the intersection of most identities and often feel excluded from one community or another — except when it highlights the irony of being branded “not queer enough” in a room of people talking about inclusion.

On Thursday afternoon, as a kind of counterpoint, I did an interview with a journalist from an online magazine, and at some point, she stopped, a little flabbergasted after I was talking about sex with Betty, and said, “You are so queer - I mean, you’re talking about sex between bodies that are heterosexual and you can’t see it that way at all, can you?”

& I thought, Well no, I can’t, but if you ask a couple of people who were at Bluestockings Wednesday night, they might tell you otherwise. & That, folks, is the nature of passing: sometimes you do, with some people, & sometimes you don’t, with other people, & we’ve gotten to the point where we never know which it’s going to be.

My thanks to the journalist for her compliment, and also to Mattilda for hosting and Liz Rosenfeld for reading and especially to Rocko Bulldagger for hir essay (which is largely about feeling ‘not genderqueer enough’) and conversation, and to Kate and Barbara and all the other lovely souls in attendance.

For me, the sign that Betty was kind of transitioning under my nose was when she didn’t want to act as a male anymore. She felt she wasn’t transitioning. I called foul.

Sometimes it’s like trans folk do everything except SAY you’re transitioning.

& Since we just heard from yet another person who formerly identified as a crossdresser who then started using transgender who now worries she’s truly transsexual, I want to see any marriage that ends because of transness end without the kind of bitterness that’s too frequently the case. I’d rather be more optimistic & say my goal is to keep the marriages from ending, but I’ve gotten to a point where containing the damage seems like more than enough to accomplish.

It’s as if there is something built into transness that makes it especially hard on partners: trans people don’t want to be trans, don’t want to hurt their loves ones, don’t want to up-end their own lives. Who would? That part is easy to understand. Trans people don’t want to be trans but are sometimes still actively but subconsciously moving toward transition and even beginning to without saying “I have made up my mind to transition.”

Unfortunately that gives lie to all the hoo-ha about trust & communication that we’re all always hearing about. When the trans person isn’t accurately communicating what we, their partners, see going on right before our eyes, we can’t trust what we’re hearing, and start to judge the situation beyond and despite what the trans person might be saying.

Some of the problem of course is defining what transition is, exactly. As Caprice pointed out in the thread on the boards where we’re discussing this, “Partners may see ‘transition’ differently than the transperson. A TG may think that transitioning is changing to be a woman. A partner may consider transitioning to be becoming anything that is not-man.”

But of course for someone like me, “not man” is entirely acceptable while “woman” is not. For others, “not man” is unacceptable. Judging the difference between the way the trans person defines transition and how the partner does seems like a huge part of this, but it’s not all of it: some of it too is about the trans person recognizing the change.

I remember Betty & I looking at our wedding pictures one day after months of me remarking about how “not male” she’d become, and finally, it registered. She finally saw how much she was male when we got married, and how much she wasn’t anymore.

It was a relief to me, much like when an umpire/referee agrees with your call on a close play. “He must be blind!” fans yell at the TV set. “He must be blind!” partners post in their support groups. It’s knowing that when someone looks in the mirror they are seeing what you’re seeing. It’s about perception itself, wrapped up in how we define gender and in how we recognize it and mark it on ourselves. It’s the no-man’s-land where the line between “feminine” and “female” is gigantic to me, but not so much to Betty.

One of the reasons I wrote Chapter 5 of My Husband Betty despite the myriad protestations of crossdressers was because I don’t think wives leave when they learn that crossdressers sometimes transition. They run when it gets personal, when they start to see their very own crossdresser husband research HRT, or finding out what it takes to legally change names, i.e., doing things that look more to them like transition than crossdressing.

I feel like we, personally, ended up on the brink of transition just by exploring and trying to navigate a middle path. When it comes to trying to find a compromise between closeted crossdressing and medical/legal transition, we are all standing at the edge of the wood, machetes in hand. There are few paths. The people who went before - Virginia Prince comes to mind - thought she was forging a new path, and probably still insists she was. But to her wives? If I were her wife, I’d say she transitioned without GRS. I’d say she did more than live as a “transgenderist” when she took the hormones that gave her breasts and started living full-time as a woman.

Having a trans woman who is long past transition around has been critical for me in even addressing this, or realizing it. Suzy, much to her chagrin perhaps, confirms my worst fears - and thanks to her for doing so. Are trans people who hope to find a middle path fooling themselves? Or are they just putting themselves at greater risk of transitioning without intending to? Do they have an extra burden of being more careful about making decisions without making them?

Is there a reason that partners see the first permanent body mod as a warning sign? Of course there is. I felt petty and unsupportive (and a ton of pressure) when I objected to Betty removing her facial hair permanently. But in retrospect, I was right to protest, because permanent facial hair removal was all she needed to make living fulltime possible. Possible slides into probable slides into done slides into irreversible quite quickly in trans land. For others, possible might happen as a result of taking hormones, or crossdressing fulltime, or even just accepting one’s transness.

Partners aren’t crazy. We are not willfully putting our heads in the sand. For the most part, I think we’re just able to admit what’s going on sooner, and more clearly, than our partners can, the Cassandras of transland. And like the historical Cassandra, we’re often both disbelieved and forced to stand and watch, hopeless and unable to prevent the thing we’ve predicted and feared, come to pass.

the threads on wasted youth and teen photos have had me thinking about the idea of reconciling past selves. & i think sometimes trans folk think they corner the market on this one, but i know a lot of different people who have various kinds of misspent youths - even if they weren’t so misspent as they think. when i was a teenager, my (by then in his 20s) older brother balked whenever anyone found a photo of him from when he was a teenager - and at the time i remember thinking, “i never want to be like that about how i look now.” (& mind you, how i looked then wasn’t considered socially acceptable by any means.) sometimes i wonder if it didn’t alter other choices i made in life, in order to live a life consistent with having been that punk rock kid back in the day.

but i don’t know. there are other pasts: times i spent as a green, etc.

& maybe i’m feeling particularly vulnerable right now, because quite a few of you out there are reading or about to read my book, which is about me in ways that are more personal than perhaps people would predict.

anyway, a part of me just wanted to say: trans people are not the only ones with pasts they have to reconcile. & i say that to you trans folk just so you know it, & don’t go around thinking that that’s one more burden of transness.

i like to think all the people i’ve been, the aspects of myself i brought to the front burner or pushed to a back one, are all always there, operating all the time. like turning up the bass & turning down the treble while listening to music - some things dim & come back again, some things appear once & never re-appear, other things maintain their frequency and intensity all the while.

anyway. this was just to say, mostly.

It’s been a while since a Five Questions With… Interview, but I can’t imagine a better re-entry interview than one with Max Wolf Valerio, the author of The Testosterone Files. Max and I “met” as a result of us both being published by Seal Press, and because we were both friends with the late, great Gianna Israel. His Testosterone Files are a fascinating account of his move from his life as a radical dyke and poet to being a ’straight guy.’

1) I often joke that I only ever “passed” as a straight woman, and there were parts of The Testosterone Files that made me feel like you “passed” as as lesbian. Is that even close to right? How do you feel about your former identity now?

Yes, I definitely did “pass” for a lesbian, a dyke, whatever you wish to call it. I was dyke-identified for at 14 years, and more, if you count my adolescence. Early on, I realized I was attracted to women, and so, a lesbian identity made the most sense to me. It was all I knew to name myself. The idea of transitioning in 1975 and before, when I was a teen, was completely off the map.

I am proud of the person I was as a dyke, and I learned a lot in my years as a lesbian. I understand many of the finer points of feminism, in all its permutations. Through lesbian feminism, I also came to an understanding and empathy for other types of radical politics. It was quite an education, and an amazing immersion in female life. Ultimately, dyke life is about immersion in female life I think, and it provided an axis for me as well as a point of departure.

However, as I show dramatically in The Testosterone Files, I was much more than simply a lesbian feminist or dyke. I was, actually, just as involved in the punk rock scene, as well as in being a poet who crossed all lines of identity and just “wrote” and read for an audience that appreciated poetry as an art form period. So, this involvement gave me an “out” from dyke life and provided a portal to the fact that there is so much more out there in the world than simply lesbians or feminism. This portal would prove to be invaluable as I came into male life.

On the other hand, I think my perspective was a bit constrained anyway from being a lesbian all those years. I have had to re-examine many of my feminist beliefs and attitudes anyway, even if I was not entirely cloistered within the dyke perspective. Some of these attitudes no longer fit my male life, and I find them to be restricting. More importantly, I also have come to see that certain of these ideas were just wrong-headed, even if they served a purpose for me then. I mean, some of the anti-male attitudes, and anti-het attitudes that I absorbed. These attitudes and ideas not only do not serve my present life, they are not rooted in truth. I think I was often coming from a place of defensiveness, and I have learned, and am learning, to drop that.

Even so, I have many fond feelings about my past dyke life, and about lesbians in general, and will always feel related.

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Eli Green is a self-described ‘genderwarrior’ and ’social-justice & gender-junkie.’ Also an academic, activist, educator, author and researcher who focuses largely on addressing gender based systems of oppressio, Eli Green resides in New York City, working with trans and queer youth, and traveling around the country speaking at conferences and leading educational trainings. Current projects include working towards a doctorate in Human Sexuality, running Trans-Academics.org and working on the publication of the Community Needs Assessment Survey results.

1) www.Trans-Academics.org was one of the first sites I found that gathered resources for academics on trans issues. Do you find most academics interested in trans issues are trans themselves? If they are, is that necessarily a positive or negative thing?

I think that the majority of people who are doing positive trans research and academia right now are personally involved in the trans community - be it because they are personally trans identified, or that their partners, friends or family are trans-identified. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing - but it does have its pros and cons. For instance, if only transpeople are the ones doing trans research, it may be considered by some to be of lesser quality, (however inaccurate), or the research may be particularly slanted towards validating one type of trans experience. On the pro-side, gender diverse people are hopefully more invested in doing research that is respectful of all trans experiences, have access to a greater diversity of respondents, and have greater buy-in from research participants.

There does also seem to be a growing interest in trans related themes by cisgendered people. Gender diversity appears to be the next up and coming thing in academic and media circles. It seems like overnight there are about 15 new documentaries in the works, lots more books being published, and just more general recognition of gender diversity. I am not sure if it is because people are looking for the next best thing to make money off of, or if it is because educational efforts are paying off and people are truly interested in gender diversity. Either way, I think that as long as the end results are sensitive and trans-positive, it can be an important human rights stepping stone.

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More thoughts on the MWMF controversy: I find sometimes the anger expressed toward the exclusionary policy-makers at the MWMF bordering on misogyny. Because relatively speaking, lesbians want to keep trans women out of a camp. But when I look around at the world, and what goes on with trans women, I see really horrible things, like rape and horribly brutal murders and cops and media using phrases like “he” or even “it.” & I wonder if sometimes the level of outrage against MWMF isn’t kind of - overamped. I mean they’re just keeping trans women out of a private music festival, not firing them or denying them housing or health treatment or hormones or life.

You know? I don’t think their policy is right, but I also think there are bigger eggs to fry, and using all this energy and rage over MWMF might find people exhausted when something else comes up.

I understand that it’s much easier to be very angry and disappointed with people who should know better, and yes, I think the organizers of the MWMF should know better. But their actions, in terms of comparison, are not as hateful as some of the anger describes it as being. Discriminaton and exclusion is horrible, yes, but it’s a music festival, not the right to live and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I’m just not sure the level of anger is - well, appropriate.

But then I don’t think the level of hate and suspicion being tossed around by MWMFers toward trans women is anything like appropriate, either.

Neither of these reflections, by the way, has anything to do with what people have been saying on our message boards - they’re observations taken from other things I’ve been reading.