But despite the absence of Whipping Girl, I do want to congratulate the finalists:

• Transparent, Cris Beam (Harcourt)
• Male Bodies, Women’s Souls, LeeRay M. Costa, PhD, (Haworth)
• The Marrow’s Telling, Eli Clare (Homofactus Press)
• What Becomes You, Aaron Raz Link & Hilda Raz (University of Nebraska Press)
• Nobody Passes, Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore (Seal Press)

I have an essay in Mattilda’s Nobody Passes of course, but I especially wanted to congratulate Eli Clare and thank him for all the work he’s done in/for the trans community.

The Lambda Literary Foundation’s list of finalists for the 2007 Lammies is out, and She’s Not the Man I Married didn’t make the cut. And I’m okay with that; it can be a little tiring to see how even trans people don’t seem to care, often, about how loved ones see/relate/deal with transness, but I’m getting used to it. Besides, I got my props the first time around, when My Husband Betty made finalist.

That said, Whipping Girl didn’t make the cut and that is absolutely 100% wrong.  & I’ll tell you why.

Whipping Girl is, to date, the only book to address, theoretically, the uneasy relationship between trans people - specifically MTF transsexual women - and feminism, and that work was long overdue. It addresses sexuality, media representations, the historical pathologization of trans people by psychologists, the fetishization of tans women’s sexualities, the inherent misogyny of a feminist politics that mocks femininity, and then some.

It has been personally & politically important to me in confronting what remained of my own “natural attitude” toward my own gender, what Serano calls cissexism (and rightfully so) and proposes the concept of “subconsious sex” which did more to explain transsexualism to me than anything ever has — outside, maybe, of Betty’s “because” model.

It’s a real shame that this book was not recognized by the Lambda Literary Foundation. It will be considered a classic, revelatory and ground-breaking book in time; it’s just sad the Foundation’s judges don’t have the foresight to give it its due now.

Julia, personally: thank you. I always appreciate when anyone, with their words and logic and anger, can make me a little less of an asshole, and Whipping Girl did that in spades.

Seal Press rocks so hard it’s ridiculous. Not only has word come that the first reprint of My Husband Betty has come out with Seal’s imprint, but they’ve apologized for the situation that lead to me being left off the Transgender category nominees’ list for the Lambda Literary Awards.

Buy Seal’s books, people. They are a great press, & do good work.

I just found out that my publishers missed the deadline to nominate my book She’s Not the Man I Married for a Lambda Literary Award. Considering that it’s probably the only award that has a Transgender category at all, I’m - well, beyond words about how shitty this is.

It’s like the last kick in the ass from 2007 arriving a little late.

But congrats to all my friends & fellow writers on the list: Reid Vanderburgh, Eli Clare, Julia Serano, Mattilda, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. May the best person win.

Congratulations to Susan Stryker and The Transgender Studies Reader for winning this year’s Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender category, and my condolences to the finalists who didn’t win: Max Wolf Valerio; Paisley Currah / Richard Juang / Shannon Minter for Transgender Rights; Drag King Dreams by Leslie Feinberg, and Supervillainz by Alicia E. Goranson. That “so close, but yet so far” feeling sucks, but honestly, that’s a damned impressive list of five books, and very esteemed company.

& The winners are…

Transgender/GenderQueer
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press)

More…

Finalists for the 2005 Lambda Literary Awards (alphabetical by category):

Transgender/GenderQueer

Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press)
In a Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam (NYU Press)
Deliver Me from Nowhere by Tennessee Jones (Soft Skull Press)
Just Add Hormones by Matt Kailey (Beacon Press)
The Riddle of Gender by Deborah Rudacille (Pantheon)

More…

i’ve been going to book expo every day including friday; today is the last day.

apparently to publishers other than my own, being a lammy finalist *does* mean something.

it is a nuthouse. the directory of exhibitors is larger than most phonebooks of most US towns, no kidding. there are literally thousands of people - all the traditional publishers (the big ones, like simon & schuster, have their own zip codes, with 25 employees on the floor) and then there are the tiny ones, the radical presses, the lesbian pulp fiction publishers, the green press, ipublishers, = you name it. i had no idea how vast the publishing industry is.

the coolest thing is FREE BOOKS! there were signings today by nick hornby & orson scott card (& gloria estefan & half a million other people i had no interest in), & it’s just like a bookstore signing - except they GIVE you the book. very cool. i’m only limited by how much weight i’m willing to carry around. my feet - well, i should be hobbled by monday.

anyway, there should be good news in not too long. hopefully a couple of weeks. i’m getting *way* more interest than i expected, & occasionally from suprising corners. so in a sense, i “mapped” in terms of the larger publishing industry, & that pleases me no end.

& i also have the good news that barbara carrellas is going to be publishing a book about “urban tantra”! i ran into her & kate bornstein today. (they’ll also be at DO in the fall, btw.)

& spent the whole day with jamison green yesterday, who is one of the most intelligent, remarkable people i have ever met. for the record. you should all go buy his becoming a visible man it definitely should have won the lammy (if MHB didn’t!)

so it’s insane, yes, but kind of buzzing with energy and books books books. i strongly recommend it for writers who are wanting to get published. in three short days you can talk to all kinds of editors, attend workshops, meet agents: kind of like a crash course in publishing.

Today is the day, or rather tonight is the night - when I find out if I win the Lambda Literary Award or not.

Here’s wishing all the Lammy nominees the best of luck.

Last night I had the pleasure of reading with 7 other Lammy nominees at the Center, and it was a very cool event. (Aaron Krach, author of Half-Life, commented that he wished all readings had been like last night’s: five minutes, no Q&A, with a bunch of queer, friendly people in the audience.) I’m really thankful for Lambda Lit, because as I sat there listening to the readers, it occurred to me how stupid it is that there is so little room in mainstream publishing for GLBT writers. The stories were remarkable: one about an older man who’d fallen in love with a man with Downs Syndrome (Perry Brass, from Serendipity); another about a married man whose male lovers were being killed by a murderer (Gary Zebrun’s Someone You Know); another about a young Irish lad’s meeting with his priest at his mother’s behest (Damian McNicholl’s A Son Called Gabriel, and whose blog I just checked out); another a confrontation between a lesbian of color and her father (Laurinda D. Brown’s Fire & Brimstone).

They were all powerful stories, they were all stories that went beyond some definition of GLBT. They were about what stories are supposed to be about, the quiet little ways we suffer and rejoice in being our lovely, pathetic selves. But at the same time, without the Lammies, who would recognize a wife’s story of her trans husband’s beauty? Where else would I meet people who’d tell me about the tranny they knew, growing up?

It was a lovely night. I’m not 100% better, not yet, but I was damned glad I wasn’t still contagious, and could be there. I regret having missed the reading in DC even moreso now, but I am very much looking forward to the Awards Night at on June 2nd.

I’ll be reading this Thursday, May 19th, as part of the Lambda Literary reading for Awards’ Finalists, starting at 7 PM, at the Center.

Here’s the complete bill:

Mickey Small - Up All Night
Perry Brass - Serendipity
Gary Zebrun - Someone You Know
Kristie Helms - Dish It Up, Baby!
Damian McNicholl - A Son Called Gabriel
Laurinda D. Brown - Fire & Brimstone
Aaron Krach - Half-Life
Helen Boyd - My Husband Betty
Han Ong - The Disinherited
Alison Smith - Name All The Animals

I’ll be reading at around 8 PM, but the event starts at 7 PM.
Location: New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Center, 208 West 13th St.

If you can, please donate this month to help keep the boards running and Helen from pulling her hair out. Also needed: someone to help Helen & Betty buy tickets to the Lambda Literary Gala in June. (From what I know, Jamison Green and his partner Heidi need help going as well, so if you want to donate to me so I can help James buy their tickets, let me know!)

Helen

These photos are from a contact sheet given to us by the brilliant Mariette Pathy Allen, which she took of us at Fantasia Fair last fall. Mariette’s book The Gender Frontier is also up for a Lammy (against MHB, unfortunately) but she is the official/unofficial photographer of the transgendered.

It was a pleasure and an honor to be photographed by her, despite how freaking cold it was on that beach!

I’ve just found out that I’m going to be part of the “New York Voices” part of the Lambda Literary Awards readings here in NYC. On May 19th, time tba, nine of my fellow nominees and me will be reading from our nominated works at the GLBT Center in Manhattan.

Just what my dad wanted for his 77th birthday, no doubt!

It occurred to me that around this time last year, emails and T newsgroups and mailing lists and blogs were inundated with protests about the nomination of Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen for a Lambda Literary Award. I was against the nomination as were so many of us, and the driving force behind the protest was pretty remarkable, if not always polite.

However, not one trans website I’ve found has actually posted anything about this year’s nominees. I noticed, of course, because I’m one of the people whose book has been nominated, in the transgender category, along with the likes of Morty Diamond, Mariette Pathy Allen, Jamison Green and Julie Anne Peters. There are some other trans writers up for awards in other categories, and yet I haven’t really read anything about it.

Did the Bailey controversy end up nullifying the awards for the trans community? Or are we just way better at protesting than supporting the writers and educators who are doing good work?

So here, without further ado, are a few of the book award nominees for the Lambda Lit Award:

In the Nonfiction Anthology category:
That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation edited by Mattilda, a.k.a Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Soft Skull Press

In the Children’s/Young Adult category:
Luna by Julie Anne Peters, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (which was also a finalist for the National Book Award this year)

In the Drama/Theatre category:
I am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (which has won so many other awards, like the Pulitzer and the Tony, you’ll have to check the website for the entire list)

In the Transgender/GenderQueer category:
Becoming a Visible Man by Jamison Green, Vanderbilt University Press (which also won CLAGS’ Sylvia Rivera award)
From The Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond edited by Morty Diamond, Manic D Press
Luna by Julie Anne Peters, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
My Husband Betty: Love, Sex and Life with a Crossdresser by Helen Boyd, Thunder’s Mouth Press
The Gender Frontier by Mariette Pathy Allen, Kehrer Verlag

My Husband Betty has just been nominated for the 17th Annual Lambda Literary Awards, in two categories: Memoir/Autobiography, and Transgender/GenderQueer.

You can see all the nominated books and categories at Lambda’s website.

I’m thrilled and honored and really, really excited - what a Christmas present! As it turns out, it was just the needed push for the book to hit its 4th printing, too!

This just in, from Lambda Executive Director Jim Marks:

March 12, 2004. The Lambda Literary Foundation announced that “The Man Who Would Be Queen” has been removed as a 16th Annual Lambda Literary Award finalist.
More…

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the Lambda Literary Foundation chose Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen as a nominee in the TG non-fiction books category for their 2003 Lambda Lit Awards.

Despite emails from various people within the TG community (including me, Lynn Conway, Deirde McCloskey and many others), Lambda chose not to remove the book from the nominations list.

Lambda has not been insensitive about it, in my opinion - but found themselves faced with a situation that they had never encountered before. That all of their advisors and committee members are gay or lesbian and NONE are TG, is the biggest problem, and my hope is that they will actively look for a few bookish TG people who can help inform and educate the existing staff and committees of Lambda.

Sign the Petition

Read more about the controversy on Lynn Conway’s website

Read more about Lambda Literary Foundation

Listen to an interview with Jim Marks, the Executive Director of Lambda, about this book’s nomination and Lambda’s nominating process.