I think Obama won, & I spent the debate tweeting. You?

There are so many other places online, and I’ve been using a few of them. For starters, there’s my Facebook page, where I’ll keep whatever events I’m doing updated, and will send out invites so that you don’t have to find out for yourself.

Then there’s Twitter, which I mostly read & respond to, but don’t post as much myself.

Lewis Black on the US government delivering veterans’ checks up to two years late: “I can access three million vaginas in two minutes, and they can’t get the veterans their check? What century am I living in?”

Many of you have asked about whether I won the “Top Ten Female Bloggers” contest over at WVWV, and in fact I did not. Digby did. and Digby should have; she’s a damn good blogger.

But what’s interesting to me is that she was not known to be female when she started blogging in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, & 2006. The many years she was being linked to by the likes of Kos, no one knew she was female.

No, it was when she won an award she accepted in person, in the summer of 2007, that everyone found out she is a woman. If you read some of those comments, the surprise was a little more than “Oh, Digby’s a woman, huh” but people were a little more upset than that by the revelation, which is interesting since she never said she wasn’t a woman; her readers did the assuming, & we all know what assuming means, thanks to that classic moment in The Odd Couple.

As a gendery-y sort, & especially as a writer of a gender-y sort, I find that interesting. I don’t want to admit that maybe George Eliot’s method still works better than being known as a woman, that hiding your gender, if you’re female, lends you more credibility than not.

But I fear that is true, & that Digby’s win perhaps underlines that point. Still & all, she is a fantastic political blogger. I am not in anyway trying to say she isn’t. What I am trying to say is that I’m not sure she would have been recognized if she had been known as female from the outset.

Either way, I think it was damned smart of her, since the likeliness is high that people will diminish or ignore the political opinions of women.

Which is sad in itself, of course, but still true.

The NYT did an article about the legal issues when you’re a heterosexual couple and one of you legally changes gender. I’ve been talking about the ramifications of this stuff for so long that I failed to notice for others it might be quite a surprise, and revelatory, but it is.

Interesting comments have come in from Cara at Feministe and a young trans woman who calls herself Critical Thinking Girl. As CTG points out, it is pretty tawdry - the usual before & after photos, etc. - and when she notes:

The tone of this article is clear - Fran is a put-upon woman, with an eccentric husband. The picture they chose is also curious as it has the trans woman in the relationship holding back her wife.

As many of my regular readers already know, one of the things that drives me batshit about the media in general is the way they choose rubes to write about, instead of speaking to activists or advocates who are prepared to deal with media, or who have become allied with LGBTQ people on the issue. For those of you who are interested, here’s a talk I gave at the Law School of Penn State Dickinson last year.

Because honestly, same sex marriage recognition would make life easier for all trans people in relationships - including CTG.

Oh - and to The Times - and everyone else: it’s “transition” not “sex change.”

I came back from visiting Betty upstate to find out that there is a huge mess involving Seal Press (my publishers) which came right on the heels of BFP’s departure last week.

So without pointing out every phrase and person involved, I’ll just say a few things as a white feminist who really only consciously became a feminist after reading Michele Wallace, and who, for nearly 10 years, worked for author Walter Mosley, who has written and talked about the absence of POC in the publishing industry, specifically.

The under representation of WOC in publishing has been a problem for a long time. The under representation of POC has been as well, in general. It’s not just chronic; it’s really fucking awful. More…

Here’s a link to my Technorati Profile.

They’ve raised over $26,000 for Breast Cancer Awareness, so for this year’s Breast Cancer Month, I’m in!

My mother survived breast cancer, & I bet she can think of about a gazillion other ways she’d prefer to have me help raise money. I can hear her already, “You could have just walked or something.”

But no. I think using breasts to raise money for the health of breasts makes way too much sense - so go! Make a donation! Guess which ones are mine!!

Just found out that this year’s Blogger BoobieThon will happen on October 1st. What a cool idea, to use breasts to raise money for the health of breasts and to raise awareness of Breast Cancer.

Last month I discovered something called The Carnival of Bent Attractions, which was hosted this past month at A Delicate Boy’s blog, and I’m a part of it.

Do check out some of the other posts that were highlighted as part of this month’s Carnival, because there’s a lot of interesting stuff there, like Jay Sennett’s stuff on MWMF, the woman who reports on why her gay friends thinks it would suck to be straight, Nina Smith on the economics of lesbian motherhood, and those lovely feminists in Wales on the intersection of queer & feminist politics.

A) Four jobs I have had in my life:
baker’s assistant, writing tutor, NYPIRG canvasser, professional assistant

B) 4 movies I would watch over and over:
Raiders of the Lost Ark, A Room With a View, Sherlock Jr., and the last one I’m leaving blank because I really don’t like movies very much.

C) Three places I have lived:
Brooklyn, NY - Manhattan, NY - San Francisco, CA

D) Four TV shows I love to watch:
The Twilight Zone, House, Gilmore Girls, Frasier

E) Four places I have been on vacation
Paris & London, Singapore, Burma, New Orleans

F) Favorite foods:
stuffed cabbage, chocolate cake, spaghetti (in nearly any form, but especially in white clam sauce, cinnamon toast

G) Four websites you visit daily
wiki, amazon, the animal rescue site, myfooddiary.com

H) Four places I would like to be right now:
Mandalay, the house we went to this past Labor Day weekend, in bed, Hawaii

…is the death date the Spark death test gave me. That’s 66 years old. This one at least asked if you smoke or not, have unprotected sex or not, drive the speed limit or not.

You Will Die at Age 76

You’re pretty average when it comes to how you live… And how you’ll die as well.

I don’t usually take these, but this one I find nearly useful. You know, so I can schedule stuff I want to get in before my expected end. Granted, I could be surprised either way, but having at least an estimate works for a control freak like me.

Well, Caprice tagged me, so here are my bookish answers:

1. One book that changed your life? The Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton. It’s a pre-teen book, maybe YA (Young Adult) about two poor kids who live in a crazy house in Concord, Massachusetts, and whose aunt gives piano lessons to awful children while the banker is always trying to repossess. But the story is about a poem the kids find which is a transcendental dream poem, and leads them through a series of dreams. There’s one about mirrors that shaped how I thought about my own life and choices.

2. One book you have read more than once? The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Yes, I do read books about grown-ups, but they’re not the ones with the deepest meanings to me. I re-read Narnia every few years, as a kind of refresher course.

3. One book you would want on a desert island? Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. It’s a good combination of simple and complex that would keep me occupied. (Favorite story: went into a bookstore for a copy and couldn’t find it, asked the staff. Staff person says, “Oh you mean Les Mis, like the musical?” Oy.)

4. One book that made you laugh? Butch Is A Noun, forthcoming from S. Bear Bergman. There are bits in it that made me laugh out loud on the subway, & Betty even let me read it to her outloud some, which is pretty much verboten when it comes to gender books. Though sometimes I read Judith Butler outloud to make her laugh, but in a very different way.

5. One book that made you cry? More kids books, but more recent: His Dark Materials. The scene where she is separated from her familiar is almost too painful.

6. One book you wish had been written? I have to do this one historically, because otherwise I think, “Well if you’d like to see a book written, write it!” So, instead, The New Academia Series: Volume I: Accessible Prose (published c. 1982 or so).

7. One book you wish had never been written? Get your sticks and stones, kids: The Bible.

8. One book you are currently reading? Betty gave me a copy of a book called Dragon Wing and so far it’s entertaining. It’s certainly a nice break from the umpteen gender books I was reading as research.

9. One book you have been meaning to read? A book called The Trouser People, about Burma.

10. Now tag five people: JW, Maurice, Kathy, Donna, and John R. If any of them actually get back to me, I’ll post them here. (But feel free to use the comments section, folks! That’s what it’s there for!)

For some reason we haven’t figured out yet, the right sidebar of this website has disappeared when viewed with Internet Explorer, Safari, or Opera.

It is perfectly viewable with Mozilla’s Firefox browser, however (which Betty and I highly recommend anyway, all the time).

In the meantime, here’s your link to the mHB message boards.

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.

Mombian has had the clever idea to start an LGBT Families Day, and I wanted people to know about it before it came and went.

On June 1st, blog about your LGBT family, or blog about why LGBT families rock, or why they should have more legal rights, or whatever pertains to the subject that you need to say.

HRC has it up on their site, too.

I’d also like to point out our own little clearinghouse of information for parents who are trans.

You can get more information at Mombian’s blog post about it, and do make sure they know you’re in on it!

Much to my chagrin, Kiss of Athena discovered people were blogging against heteronormativity this past Saturday.

Better late than never, I guess.

You can read more about why at this blog, blac(k) academic.

The photo is of three Yale students, c. 1883, which I found courtesy of Staci’s blog, Passing Interest, where she notes that:

A Yale dean ruled that no member of the Yale Dramatic Association could impersonate a female on stage for more than two consecutive years ‘because continued impersonation tended to make men effeminate.’”

Slippery slope, indeed.

You can find more history of crossdressing at Yale at the Larry Kramer Initiative site. I recommend reading the whole of these archives of LGBT history at Yale, but if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, do at least check out the entry about two trans Yale alums.

Just for fun, I decided to make the photo box in the letterhead above random, so now, every time you come to the blog, you’ll see a different photo.

It seemed a trans imperative, since I otherwise don’t have a “photos” page on this website.