I really do love the NYT. They put me in touch with rare tribes of people & exotic types of lives I wouldn’t know otherwise: in this case, the fine dining set, who worry about whether women are served first.

I didn’t even know that was the tradition, prole that I am.

Five years ago, she said, she often had to fight to get servers to let her be the point person for a group of men and women dining together. Servers had a stubborn tropism toward the men.

But lately, she said, that hasn’t been as true, especially downtown, where she has noticed that if she makes the first eye contact with a server and seems the most inquisitive and purposeful, the server notices, and responds to it. “Body language is recognized in a way it wasn’t before,” Ms. DeLozier said. “I think it’s possible for a woman to take the lead now.”

Those nutty folks downtown, treating women & men as equals. Still, a point I’ve made in the past & which this article shores up is that the more formal you get, the more gendered things are. My usual example is formal clothes - traditional tuxes/suits vs. gowns and LBDs - but dining, and wine selection, are apparently other good examples. What interesting to me is that when the restauranteurs have tried to de-gender things, the diners have asked that they serve ladies first. You can lead a snob to water…

The NYT publishes a column about Polyamory and specifically about Poly Pride, a celebration being held in NYC this weekend.

Alex Williams, the journalist who wrote it, seems to have come away with the main impression I’ve come away with: too much talking. I can barely manage one person in my life, but I can’t imagine more. I just don’t have the patience.

Toothbrush disputes are the least of it. In the era of safe sex and cellphones, a life that seems to promise boundless sex in fact involves lots of talking. And talking. And talking.

For one thing, they constantly have to explain the way they live.

That last line ring out to any trans people & their partners out there? One of the reasons Betty & I love the various alt.sex communities we’ve run into is that there is a shared experience: you may not be explaining the same thing, but you’re still explaining. Or, as I like to explain in my Uneven Libidos class, the further you are from the socially-condoned relationship - heterosexual marriage with something like traditional gender roles - the harder it is to find validation and support for the way you live.

If you want to know more about poly, I highly recommend Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up, and her website, which lists tons of resources for poly people.

For those of you who didn’t see it (and who didn’t send it to me), there was an article in the Style section of The NY Times about on-the-job transitions called “Smoother Transitions.” One insight that I had never thought about:

There are also easier routes for employees. At first glance, Ms. Fox said, it might seem easier to apply for a new job in a new gender rather than changing identities in place. But the latter turns out to be simpler.

“If you make the change with people who already know you, then the fact that you are transgender is just one part of you,” she said. In contrast, Ms. Fox said, starting from scratch with a new employer, particularly for a transgender person who does not completely look male or female, means an employer can be “distracted to the point that your gender identity is all they see.”

There’s also a few good quotes in here my Jillian Todd Weiss, who blogs about transgender issues in the workplace. My only wish is that they’d have interviewed Hawk Stone, since he’s been helping people transition on the job for a very long time.

The memorials for Tim Russert have been like one huge celebration of the culture I was raised in - working class, political, Catholic, and Democratic. I bawled straight through Bruce Springsteen’s performance of “Thunder Road” because I grew up with Bruce; whenever the E Street Band came on WNEW-FM, someone cranked it up and most of my family sang along while the rest of us shook our heads and rolled our eyes at the sheer silliness of it, the life of it. The only people with dry eyes at Russert’s memorial had to be the people who didn’t know the lyrics.

He was raised by Jesuits, and like Jack McCoy once said on Law & Order: “When you’re raised by the Jesuits, you end up either obedient or impertinent.” But it strikes me, upon hearing so much about who Tim Russert is, and the ways his culture and community cross paths with my own, that a well-raised Catholic is not one or the other, but both.

There is nothing like an Irish wake to bring out the story-telling, the luck & the blarney as well as the earnestness and moodiness of this part of the American pie. There’s a sense of grief under all of it, the foreshadowing of the grief that will come later, at night, when the doors close and the phone stops ringing. But I get the feeling that for those in Russert’s circle, there won’t be a time late at night when there isn’t someone on the phone to tell another story of the person who is so sorely missed.

Thanks, Tim Russert, for all those Sundays watching Meet the Press, but moreso, for always choosing the one kid for his team who he thought might never otherwise get picked. That’s the kind of underdog empathy that my upbringing foregrounded, and apparently it was in his, too.

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.”

The Sims make The NY Times.

… there’s an interesting discussion of misogyny and sexism is going on in response to Nicholas D. Kristof’s previous NY Times column about the difference between the two.

Down with evolutionary psychologists, is what I have to say.

That is, fine-tuning what the difference is doesn’t help the women with the fistulas much. Maybe action? Funding? Education? Punishing rapists and batterers?

(Thanks to Joanne for the link.)

The New Hampshire paper The Nashua Telegraph has been running a series on transgender people which apparently lost the paper some readers. That said, a NH grandma liked the series:

I am a heterosexual grandmother, who hopes that my grandchildren will learn to respect and understand all human beings who are leading legal, moral and, ultimately, happy lives.

What a nutty goal. You can let the paper know it’s an important series, not trash, by responding to a poll on the first page of the website (toward the bottom).

2007’s Most Depressing Feminist Moment

Discovering my well-loved Harper’s, to which I’ve been a subscriber since 1986, had the lowest percentage of by-lines by women writers. (I switched to Atlantic Monthly.)

Forbes has just published their list of the Top 100 Most Powerful women. Among them, politicans and CEOs, a couple of Queens (of Jordan, & the UK), a judge (Ginsburg), a few anchors (Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric), and Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, activist and Nobel Peace laureate (who is probably my favorite woman on the list).

Interesting, though, to see “Chairman” so frequently after a name. I guess “Chairperson” just doesn’t trip off the tongue the same way.

I just happened to be catching up on my Feministing reading when I discovered a post by Jessica Hoffman about the death of trans inmate Victoria Arellano (or Arrelano) who was denied her AIDS medication and then Hoffman followed up her post wondering why this death hasn’t been covered.

It’s interesting time as just recently I’ve been bothered by a recent article in The Boston Globe about a doctor who transitioned with much of her life in tact - ironic since Arellano didn’t wind up with even her life in tact. Big article, no article.

& They say there’s no such thing as privilege.

Mind you, my complaints about the way various media outlets cover trans issues aren’t directed at the trans people who are often featured in these articles: their intentions are for the most part good, & they are trying, in their own way, to raise awareness of trans issues in general, all of which is much needed. It’s not that it was a terrible article in terms of The Big Picture, but I’m tired of journalists/media writing a piece that is pretty much like every other piece about a trans person (choosing someone professional, white, with a traditional narrative including surgery & the like) & presenting it as if it’s a revelation.

It’s not a revelation. I’d like to get the bar set a little higher, & to start pressuring media to cover more types of trans people, in more situations, with more of the kinds of issues that come up. Like what does a person like Betty, or others like her, do about the ID issue? What do people do when their license says one thing but they can’t get their passport changed? What are the issues for young transitioners, who are going to be dealing with discrimination from the outset of their careers? How is the expectation of not getting divorced changing what kinds of legal issues couples face? How does transness come into play with legal issues? What happens if a recent medical student comes out before she has a practice or an income or a family & established community?

I could go on. I won’t. Like I said, this is good for general use, but as someone who is “in the field” & who works with the media on a regular basis, I also feel I have a responsibility to pay attention to the way media coverage ISN’T changing at all, & how the struggle to represent the diversity of trans experience, from within the trans community, is or isn’t being reflected by the media, & maybe keeping an eye toward changing that, somehow.

The cover article of this week’s Newsweek is gender - & specifically transgender issues.

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

Sometimes a book gets inordinate attention, especially books that reaffirm & reify the gender binary. But there’s plenty of interesting books about gender out there. & Some days, when I see a review of the book The Female Brain in a cool magazine, I wonder why they bother. I mean, bad publicity is good publicity, ultimately: it just wins the author, who the reviewer (and many others, including myself) disagrees with, more airtime, while other books, which are more feminist in terms of their take on gender, don’t get covered at all.

& I’ve always wondered why magazines - especially indie, cool magazines that are mostly written by indie journalists & others like me who understand exactly how poor an industry publishing can be - give airtime to stuff they don’t like instead of giving airtime to stuff they do. Readers will buy a book that gets a bad review, just to see if they agree or not, & while I understand editors tend to think it’s Important, in a Fourth Estate kind of way, to rebut publicly some of the ideas coming from certain corners, it seems like it’d make more sense to help an interesting writer whose ideas they do like to sell a few books.

& Yes, in this case, I mean a book like mine, which nearly is a straight-up rebuttal of all the hogwash in The Female Brain.

From yesterday’s New York Times Book Review:

At the National Book Foundation ceremony, the bard of Bangor made sure his audience knew he stood outside the tribe: “The only person who understands how much this award means to me is my wife, Tabitha,” he said in his acceptance speech. “She also understands why I was in those early days so often bitterly angry at writers who were considered ‘literary.’ I knew I didn’t have quite enough talent or polish to be one of them, so there was an element of jealousy, but I was also infuriated by how these writers always seemed to have the inside track in my view at that time. Even a note in the acknowledgments page of a novel thanking this or that foundation for its generous assistance was enough to set me off.”

This year, King was granted the privilege of a Paris Review interview. On the ticklish subject of his literary worth, he said, “I’m shy talking about this, because I’m afraid people will laugh and say, Look at that barbarian trying to pretend he belongs in the palace.”

How I wish I could say I can’t relate at all. But I can. Betty sent me the link precisely because she listens to me grind my teeth about stuff like this. It’s nice to know that despite having made the kind of money he has from his writing that this kind of literary snobbery still gets to him. In some ways, it makes me feel better, and in another, worse.

What a lot of news today! It turns out the NYT published my letter to the editor concerning that piece about FTMs.

Interestingly, the letter from Sailor Lewis Wallace articulates much better than I did what I was trying to get at in my post about near-misogyny.

(Thanks to Caprice for spotting it!)

From today’s NY Times, specifically an article called “The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack”:

The fact that there is no apparent parallel imbroglio in the gay community toward men who become women is a subject of some speculation.

Despite the tangled set of issues involved, the survival rate of lesbian couples seems higher than among gay couples when one partner changes gender, advocates say.

Interesting that he’s looking for the wrong “other” situation, since the majority of MTFs who are in relationships and transitioning are in heterosexual relationships. It’s “The Trouble When Jack Becomes Jane” that I want to read next, and I hope it’s written with as much sensitivity.

An amazing op-ed by Dan Savage in yesterday’s NY Times.

“What the New York and Washington opinions share — besides a willful disregard for equal protection clauses in both state Constitutions — is a heartless lack of concern for the rights of the hundreds of thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples.”

I’ve been embarassed to be a resident of NY State since the ruling. We can do better.

The good news: there’s an article in today’s NY Times about Melinda Gates, who largely runs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The bad news: the tone of this article, which in talking about Ms. Gates’ accomplishments, seems to sound a little like, “look! we found a horse who can count up to 10 with his hoof!”

Why is this acceptable in this day and age? Why is it so astonishing that a woman with an MBA from Duke who married an equal is smart? Or that her husband respects her intelligence and engages her at a very high level?

But to portray Mr. Gates as the analytic strategist and Ms. Gates as the humanizing influence, the nurturing woman, would be a stereotypical distortion of their partnership, former foundation officials said.

Well then why bring it up at all?

And where’s the profile on the woman who just left the Foundation to run CARE instead? Do we only report on smart, successful women who happen to be married to famous guys?

Thanks to Joanne for the article. There’s a reason I can barely stand to read the papers some days.

This month’s issue of Bitch magazine, which is celebrating the magazine’s 10th anniversary, has a tidy little article on the history and definitions of feminism. It goes from Suffrage to the “I’m not a feminist, but…” waves of feminism, describing key points, debates, activists/writers and texts. It’s very much worth reading if you’re new to feminism, so you can parse the difference between a radical feminist and a sex radical and a pro-sex feminist.

Do check it out. It looks like this: