Nancy Nangeroni & Gordene MacKenzie, who used to bring you GenderTalk, are now bringing you GenderVision. We were up in their neck of the woods last fall and did an interview with them for GenderVision, which they’ve now got up at their website, www.gendervision.org.

A lot of our conversation is about partner advocacy within the trans community, the role of partners, and transitioning from within a committed relationship. It’s a lengthy interview, about an hour, and amazingly enough Betty talks quite a bit about her own partner advocacy, and why she speaks so little about her own experience.

As she promised on the air during our last interview, Bonnie Graham of WGBB’s Up Close & Personal is having us back on her show to talk some more about relationships, change, & gender. Do tune in as we’ve got the whole hour, from 6-7 PM.

Julia Serano is a Bay Area slam-winning poet, author, performer, activist, & biologist. She organized the GenderEnders event from 2003 until last year; plays guitar, sings & writes lyrics for her band Bitesize, and oh - has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. We got to meet her when she was in town promoting her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, recently published by Seal Press.

(1) I loved Whipping Girl, for starters. I think it’s a pivotal work for trans communities, especially in building trans pride. But you know I kept waiting for you to actually define “feminine” - maybe if not for all time, but in some way that I could understand what you meant by it specifically. Your “barrette Manifesto” came close, except that I see barrettes as childish, not feminine per se. So can you help the genderblind like myself? What is femininity? Can you be feminine without being girly?

In the next to last chapter of the book, “Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism,” I talk about that a bit, but I’ll try to define it here a little more clearly. I would say that femininity is a heterogeneous set of traits (some of which are cultural in origin, some biological, some psychological, and many are a combination thereof). The only thing that all feminine traits have in common is that they are typically associated with women in our culture. But they certainly aren’t exclusive to women, as many men and MTF spectrum transgender folks also express feminine traits (similarly, many women express masculine rather than feminine traits). I think most of us tend to express some combination of both feminine and masculine traits.

More…

& I’ve gotten home to Brooklyn in time to rest, eat, bathe, & then head out to be interviewed by Diana Cage on her radio show on Sirius OutQ, at 11PM.

(I promise I will not review the history of modern feminism, which is what I did in class today. Oy, patriarchy!)

Betty & I are off at that twice-annual conference we go to, & are looking forward to catching up with old friends & enjoying the green.

But in the meantime, a local arts paper called The Brooklyn Rail did a profile of yours truly.

Some things aren’t quite right, and “frilly feminine” is certainly not right - more like “trendy” or “stylish” - but it’s the first type of piece about me like this. I have decided it’s nearly impossible to talk about our past as a couple - when Betty’s identity was still male - and not have a journalist throw in a “he” when talking about our present tense.

Marilyn Frank has been sharing her story with wives at Fantasia Fair, IFGE and Tri-Ess seminars since 1982. She married her husband Len in 1954 and didn’t learn about the cross dressing until 1964, 10 years and 3 children later. At that time the only information available to her was Virginia Prince’s book The Transvestite and His Wife (now titled The Cross-dresser and His Wife) which she still finds to be one of the best books written.

1) First, Marilyn, I want to thank you on behalf of all the partners out there, for stepping up at a time when most of us weren’t even in high school yet. Without women like you & Peggy Rudd, the struggle to have partners’ issues recognized would be a lot more difficult. So what caused you to do the educating you did?

In the 1970’s I was a volunteer on a crisis intervention hot line in Morris County, NJ. When I became Director, I questioned some of the professionals in the group, who did not know much about cross dressing, but were able to assist me in finding people who did know. During this time we came upon Tri-Ess, and then in 1980 Len read the article in Playboy about Fantasia Fair and in 1981 we spent a few days at the Fair. I had many discussions with Ariadne Kane about the wives’ needs, and this brought Niela Miller to the Fair and that’s where my true education began. Since it had been a very lonely road not only for Len, but for me, I decided I would reach out to help others, so that’s when I started facilitating a wives group at our local Tri-Ess Chapter, which I did for for over 10 years. I also was instrumental in starting the wives’ program at the first IFGE Convention. My philosophy is that every time I help someone, I help myself. It’s true the marriage had its ups and downs where the cross dressing was concerned, but for us it was a small part of our overall marriage. We have always had good communication, enjoy many of the same things and do have a sense of humor (that helps).

More…

Today we’ll be interviewed by host Bonnie Graham on WGBB AM (Long Island), on the show Up Close & Personal, at 6PM, for about a half hour.

You can listen online, too, by clicking the ‘Listen Live’ button in the upper right hand corner of the WGBB website.

Eli Clare is the author of Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999) and has been widely published. He has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program and co-organized the first-ever Queerness and Disability Conference. He works for the University of Vermont ’s LGBTQA Services. We were lucky enough to meet him at a Translating Identity Conference at UVM, and I was happy to get the chance to talk to him about his new book, The Marrow’s Telling, which was recently published by HomoFactus Press.

(1) Why poetry?

As a writer, my first love is poetry. I think of it as a thug who grabbed me by the collar many years ago and whispered in my ear, “You’re coming with me.” I went willingly, not having any idea where poetry would take me or what it would demand. Twenty-five years later I find myself writing a mix of poetry and creative nonfiction; my first book, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, is a collection of essays, and my second book, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion, which ought to be rolling off the press at any moment now, is a mix of poems and short prose pieces, not quite essays but more than prose poems.

Audre Lorde in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” writes of poetry as a “revelatory distillation of experience.” Poems demand both wildness/revelation–moments where language, sound, and rhythm, rather than thought or idea or analysis, take the lead–and discipline/distillation–the paring down to heart and bone. As a writer, a reader, an activist trying to make sense of the world, I need revelatory distillation.

I also know that in the United States too many of us have been taught to fear or avoid poetry, to feel bored or stupid in its presence. As an activist-poet, I always hope that my poems will be doors held wide open, roller coasters, parachutes opening above you, slow meandering rivers.

More…

In Curve magazine’s current issue (Vol. 17, #8), there’s an interview with me and Julia Serano aptly titled “A Queer Three-way.” The interviewer was Curve editor Diane Anderson-Minshall.

Betty’s got the interview Lisa Birnbach did with me online now, so those of you who didn’t hear it at the time can hear it now.

I personally think it’s worth it just to hear her say, “so go smoke that!” in response to me mentioning that Betty still considers herself my husband.

For the month of July, the LGBT magazine show In the Life will be showing an episode called “Gender Revolution” and our bit on “Heterosexual Privilege” (originally broadcast September 2004) will be shown with an update to our story. You can also order copies of the show now, & they’ve provided a guide explaining how to request that your local PBS station broadcast the show it if they don’t.

The really cool part is that Charles Busch is the host of this episode, who is a friend of a friend & a very, very talented artist whom we both admire.

I’ll be on The Lisa Birnbach Show tomorrow from 9:20-9:45AM.

Yep, you read that right: in the morning.

You can listen to the conversation we had with Ethan St. Pierre the other night by downloading it from his Radicalguy website.

We’ll be on tonight at 9Pm, interviewed by Ethan St. Pierre. Tune in.

Sunday night around 9PM, Betty & I will be interviewed by Ethan St. Pierre for his podcast, so do tune in or download or whatever it is you do with a podcast.

Reid Vanderbergh is a therapist in private practice in Portland, Oregon who began his transition in 1995, and started taking hormones in 1997, at the age of 41. He went to Portland State University and then did his MA in Couseling Psychology at John F. Kennedy University. He is a member of the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health, formerly known as HBIGDA), the IFGE, as well as the American Asssociation of Marriage and Family Therapists. He is the author of Transition & Beyond, published by Q Press

(1) As far as I know, you are the only therapist who is also trans to write a book about transness. Do you worry about people assuming you’re biased (in a good or bad way)?

As far as I know, no other trans therapists have published books about working with trans clients. I have had the experience of people assuming I am biased in the direction of transition; usually, those who make this assumption are related in some way to a client considering transition. However, when this comes up, I explain to them that I am not biased toward transition, precisely because I DO know how difficult and life-changing this process is. Therefore I don’t approach it lightly.

Now that my book is out there, I expect this question to come up among people who don’t know me, and also don’t know any clients who have worked with me. I hope people will ask me the question directly, rather than making the assumption that because I’m trans and did choose physical transition, that I automatically assume that’s the path for all my trans clients.

The one arena which worries me somewhat around this question of bias is academia. I’m hoping my book will be used as a text; my fear is, if I am seen as a community member writing about my own community, my book may be “suspect” because it may not be considered objective enough for academic credibility. Being subjective has been considered the ultimate faux pas within academia. Not that I think this as a valid view - I think the ultimate experts on a lived experience are those who undertake it - but I do fear this attitude may affect acceptance of my book within academia.

More…

Betty grabbed the interview that Bob Johnson of WPKN did with me today, so we’ve put it online for your listening pleasure.

I’ll be interviewed today by Bob Johnson on WPKN/WPKL, 89.5FM out of Bridgeport, CT. Of course, you can listen online.

Upon our return from Harrisburg, I find San Francisco’s Bay Windows has run an interview/article about Betty written by Jake Anderson Minshall.

The interview I did just last night on KDVS with DJ Cariad is already online. The listing is DJ Cariad - The Fringe (128kbps).m3u

The interview begins at 4:40, & goes for about an hour.

If you’re coming here as a result of that interview, welcome!