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).

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.)

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.

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!

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.

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…

Donna, one of our mHB forum moderators, happens to be the only person we know of who has ever transitioned while working as an attorney at a law firm in New York. Recently she came upon an article about how great it is to be a GLBT lawyer these days, and her reaction was, “Maybe GLB - but T?” and wrote a letter to The American Lawyer about being trans and a lawyer. She refers to a report by the NYCLA from 2005 (which Caprice, another one of our mHB forum moderators, worked on):

A survey by the New York County Lawyers Association of the 25 largest law firms in New York City in early 2005 asked how many attorneys had ever transitioned (that is, publicly changed their gender) while working at those firms. Every one of the firms answered “none.”

She came to the conclusion that in this case, the use of LGBT is used more “reflexively” and so, for T people, “essentially meaningless.”

Thanks to Donna for being willing, not just to transition openly at a law firm, but in being willing to out herself for the sake of setting the record straight, especially because there are, at this point, quite a few people she deals with professionally who don’t know about her history.

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.

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.

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.

More…

A recent conversation on the boards brought up the whole ‘brain sex’ debate again, and what I want to know is why all of these studies or conclusions need to be so mutually exclusive? Isn’t it possible for one person to be transsexual via brain sex & another person to be transsexual for another reason?

I don’t think like a trans person about this stuff, but being gender variant, I “could” pin my gender variance on my high levels of T. But that doesn’t explain why I was a tomboy growing up, either. Maybe it was having a lot of older brothers. I don’t doubt, either, that some of it  had something to do with the way women are treated in this culture. It could have been anything, but I tend to see it as an amalgamation.

& While I understand the necessity of “proving” it a medical condition, I don’t see why a combination of womb hormones, brain sex, karotype, etc = might not be responsible.

Why do we always want/need One Big Answer? Especially when the systems we’re talking about = reproduction, cell formation, genetics, sexual identity, consciousness, ETC = are all pretty damn sophisticated unto themselves?

Two threads from a week or so ago got me thinking about what you might call The Big Picture. First, there was one about whether or not the mHB message boards have become a little cheerleader-y when it comes to people transitioning, and the other was Donna’s sad report of an altercation with her son.

I didn’t want to write this at the time, but wanted to give Donna - & the others reading - some time to feel a little better.

But in one particular post, our resident poster buddha pointed out that so many threads are more about the slippery slope than avoiding it, per se. In a few private emails, others pointed out the same thing, & one person in particular said she found the way the boards have changed quite in keeping with what I wrote in My Husband Betty, in (of course) Chapter 5, the Slippery Slope? chapter. When I think about the people who first came to the boards, it doesn’t take long to name quite a lot who used to identify as crossdressers who have recently transitioned, are transitioning or who are about to transition.

Most of those people have also seen their relationships fail, which is where Donna’s thread about her son comes in, because I found myself wanting to say something along the lines of this is exactly what I’m always going on about. We hate it. We don’t know why it’s hard, nearly impossible, to accept a gender change in our loved ones, but we do. And in talking about it with Betty I realized that as much as transness is impossible to understand for someone who isn’t (me included), I think it’s equally impossible for a trans person to understand why it’s so hard to accept a change of gender in someone they love, whether that person is a parent, friend, sibling, child, or partner. We want you to be happy if you change gender, but I think plenty of us who love you never quite are, or maybe, just maybe, it takes much longer for us not to be angry about it, still.

& I don’t know why. I don’t have any huge conclusions, here, except to say that I find myself feeling more precariously lucky when I look at the growing list of transitioned former crossdressers who are no longer with the women they were married to when they first crossed my path.

Sometimes, honestly, I don’t want to do the math. I don’t want to know what kind of statistic I’m up against. I worry that the only reason Betty and I have managed so far is because she hasn’t transitioned, and I still fear she will, and I fear, even more, that a year and a half after she does, or ten years after she does, I will say the same kinds of things Donna’s son said in a fit of anger.

For good reason, that worries me sometimes, sometimes way more than I want it to.

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.

Kate Bornstein is an author, playwright and performance artist. Her latest book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws, came out last month. Kate’s published works include the books Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us; My Gender Workbook; and the cyber-romance-action novel, Nearly Roadkill, written with co-author Caitlin Sullivan. Kate’s plays and performance pieces include Strangers in Paradox, Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex Is Neither, Virtually Yours, and y2kate: gender virus 2000. It was both a pleasure and an honor to get to speak with her.

1. I love that you mention in Hello, Cruel World how trans folk are separating themselves into “male” and “female” by using terms like MTF and the like, because I’ve noticed that those of us who are hot for trans folk seem to like the transness, not the ‘target gender’ (or really even the ‘birth gender’) alone. It’s the chaser’s dirty secret. Do you think trans people will start to enjoy being trans, sexually or otherwise?

There are lots of un-named, unclaimed desires that are free from the male/female gender system. Desire for sex with oneself is a sexual orientation in itself, and you can be any gender or no gender in order to have that desire. My former partner felt the most important component for his desire was that his partner be the same gender as him. When he was a woman, he was with women; when he was gender-exploring he was with someone who was also gender-exploring; now that he’s a man he’s with men. I think what you’ve got is an as-yet-un-named sexual orientation: the desire for sex and romance with someone who’s neither male nor female.

Give your desire for transness a name. Then, speak your desire loudly, and proudly and seductively. I think if people hear that, that you’d like them the way they are, they’d be more encouraged to live that place of neither/nor.

As to using terms like MTF/FTM – yeah, I’ve been complaining about that for years. In this new book, I’m just a little less patient about it. It’s amusing and humiliating to admit it, but I still work hard to pass in public. I’m an old fart, and that’s still important to me. Out in the world, I pass to avoid the shame and the danger. But intimately with friends, community, or our lovers? The not-passing is the dance of love. No need for male or female, what luxury!

1b. But I seem to upset some transsexual people when I recognize that Betty’s masculinity turns me on – even if it’s in addition to my being turned on by her femininity.

Upset them! When you go beyond either/or, people think you’re a radical, that you’re less safe because you’re less predictable. Speaking or writing down the truth of your desire unlocks the political and moral shackles of desire.

More…

The other day on our boards someone mentioned how everyone saw her former partner as “an FTM in denial.” I don’t like that. No, more than that, I can’t stand it.

I find it especially frustrating coming from anyone trans, since trans people are so often referred to as being “really” their gender-assigned-at-birth instead of their target gender, or they’re seen as “really” homosexual, etc.

But what bothers me about it is that it’s know-it-all laced, clever, condescending. The idea of knowing someone else’s gender identity/sexual orientation (since the whole “He’s really a closet case,” is one I hear a lot, and always have) better than they do themselves is just aggrravating to me.

& I think it’s mostly mean-spirited. Not everyone is - some are sympathetic, or bemused, especially when they themselves struggled with bringing a subterranean identity to light for a long time - but I think it quickly turns to gossip and cattiness.

Just say no. The next time you hear someone do it, object. People are so quick to judge, and sometimes I think they should spend a little more time looking at their own shit than calling someone else on theirs.

Des Scènes dans le Chemin Moyen

So, I’ve been thinking about this middle way stuff oh these last three or four…years. When I was married, it was to find an accomodation with my wife that would make us both happy; and now, it’s because of the very realistic possibility that it will be the only way for me to be happy, since I’m pretty sure just being a weekend princess won’t be enough but it remains very much to be seen if transition will ever make sense for me.So I wonder: how middle way am I? I know, no definitions, but…most days a week I wear a suit to work (even though it’s not necessary: but I like them to think they’re getting the high-priced consultant they paid for.) Sure, may nails are a little long, and if you look closely you’ll see I’ve “groomed” my brows (though I do wear my glasses a lot…)

And in my less princessy moments on the weekend I’m pretty metrosexual. I like floral shirts, I’ve been known to wear shirts to show off my chest and pants to show off my ass.

So right now I’m somewhere between Chelsea salaryman and victim of the “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” guys, right?

But: I’m out to every important person in my life, though not all of them have seen me cross-dressed (I find “as Michelle” to be a somewhat creepy construction for me.) I’m out as CD and other stuff to my current flame. I’ve told every lover I’ve ever had before we became lovers; hell, my ex-gf and I went to Edelweiss for our first “date” (though it only retroactively earned that appellation.)

I don’t scream to the rooftops that I’m trans, though I care less and less if anyone knows. One of my neighbors in the building saw me coming home one night, so I know at least some folks in the apartment building know. (She always smiles when she sees me now. Hmm.)

The guys in folkmusicienne E.’s band have met me both ways without flapping an eye.

I go where I go crossdressed. OK, I haven’t quite gotten to the point of doing my grocery shopping while crossdressed, but movies and dinner and just being out in New York I do without thinking too much about it. I’m not even sure when the last time E. saw me not crossdressed was; I think it was back in the middle of May. (She said, “I haven’t seen you in a while.” I told her that was because she was hanging out with that crazy Michelle chick.)

I’ve taken dance lessons crossdressed, and had the odd experience of having “Michelle York” called out for attendance…this really bizarre understanding that this, persona, mask, whatever you want to call it, was beginning to become an actual person. I go walking in daylight now, usually from my therapy sessions to wherever I’m meeting E. I did that today, without anybody saying anything or even staring (well, staring more than they would at anybody wearing a white skirt.) I don’t think I was passing, either; my predilection for tank tops may get my “ordinariness” points fashion-wise but does little to hide the fact that my shoulders have benefitted from years of testosterone in much the same way that a fraternity mixer benefits from a truckload of kegs–to excess, and frequently embarrassingly.

So where does that leave me? Over 75% of my waking life I spend in male presentation (financially I want to do nothing to fuck up my contract until my new corporate masters get taken over by their corporate overlords in about two years.) I try to take care of my male appearance and actually like shopping for my casual clothes.

On the other hand, right now, if I can conceivably go out cross-dressed I usually do so. (Caveats, and yet another wonderful “isn’t it great to bond with women” moment: I was thinking a couple of weeks ago about catching a movie I wanted to see down at the Film Forum one Saturday night (for those playing at home, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows) and then heading out to get a few drinks. But I didn’t have anyone to go with, and I didn’t think it would necessarily be such a bright idea to go out alone to a movie dressed to go to a bar later. Especially seeing as I’m, you know, a man. Maybe I was being paranoid; but maybe not…) The idea that I will dress up when I can is becoming so commonplace to my mind that I plan almost unconciously around it. (Even so, I’m still only dressing in public 2 or 3 times a week.)

So, middle way? Weekend Princess? I don’t know. I feel better, mostly, about myself and glad that I have these chances, though to tell you the truth it’s also really stirred the pot of my gender fuckedupedness (sorry, dysphoria.) And while I don’t have the full-blown body dysphoria of the cut- it- off- cause- it- disgusts- me, I- can’t- look- in- the- mirror- cause- a- man- looks- back variety, I’m less happy with my body nowadays, disenchanted with my broad frame and my peasant shoulders and my cowcatcher jaw.

And the sense of oscillation, of vibrating between different extremes of emotion, is hard to take. It’s not like crossdressing necessarily helps, either, though in general it quiets some of my dysphoric feelings; or, as I told my therapist a while ago, crossdressing lets me stop having to fight my impulses to be feminine. But at the same time, I’m acutely aware of what I look like and how little I pass, and that makes me feel sad as well. As sad as wearing a suit instead of skirt can make me feel? I don’t know, yet. Nor am I completely sure that the good feeling I get from wearing nice men’s clothing–and I do have that, I enjoy my peacock moments–will be enough to compensate for never living as a woman.

So, some scenes from a little down the Middle Way. I’m not sure I can help going further into the woods; but I’m not sure I’m blazing a trail either.

Something in a couple of not-so-recent threads - one about growing up a tomboy & the other about kids and gender identity - had me thinking about categories, since right now, boys compete against boys and girls against girls, though there are sports where that’s starting to change.

Two thoughts resulted:

1) I wonder what would happen if overnight we had people compete based on 1) build (height, muscle tone), 2) fitness level, and 3) experience in the sport/game. That is, if we got rid of gender altogether.

2) What if right now our real problem is that we don’t have enough categories? I mean, say we split the world up tomorrow by hair color instead of gender, Blondes and Brunettes. It’d force red-haired people to choose, and argue that there should be a third hair color. It’d force someone like me (who has kind of streaky hair) to choose. What if we told the Blondes they had to be delicate, graceful, and nurturing (how I have come to hate that word!) and told the Brunettes they had to be aggressive, powerful, and strong? Would L’Oreal make a fortune? Would there be Blondes trapped in Brunettes’ bodies?

I’m quite serious. Take all the attributes we normally assign to male/masculine or female/feminine people, and apply them to people with one hair color or another.

Sure seems arbitrary, doesn’t it? My guess? The whole men/women thing makes about as much sense.

Ariadne Kane has been doing transgender outreach longer than many of us have been walking - since 1972. She was on The Phil Donahue Show in 1980 and probably gave some of the people reading this a glimpse that they weren’t alone in being trans. Somewhere in there she came up with the idea of Fantasia Fair, as well.

< Ariadne Kane

1. Since you were the person who ‘invented’ Fantasia Fair, how did it come about? What did it take to put on the first couple of them? How has it changed in the ensuing years?

Fan/Fair (the abbreviated version) was conceived of in 1974. It struck me that we could create a dynamic program of activities that were educational, social and practical for all CDs & TSs who were willing to come out from the ‘closets’ of shame, guilt and shyness. I believed that, in a tolerant and open community, they could learn some things about being femme or masculine; get much needed help about comportment and presentation and, have truly educational experience out of the ‘closet’. It was with this guiding premise that Fan/Fair was created. It was with the help and financial backing of 3 members of the Boston Cherrystone ‘T’ Club and myself that Fan/Fair 1 became a reality in 1975.

Needless to say, we learned a lot about the needs and aspirations of the ‘T’ community, including what program elements worked in favor of our Goals for the program. Over the next 3 decades, the Fan/ Fair Steering Committee adopted a template for programming and administration, These included a balanced mix of educational, social and practical modules for the ‘T’ person who wanted to emerge from the ‘closet’ and learn the dynamics leading to personal growth and adaptability in either the feminine or the masculine gender role of choice. This template is still the guiding instrument in the design of every Fair, even today.

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