Dubya & Co. have been in power long enough to pretty much devastate the economy, and in response, women are reporting that they had abortions in the past year precisely because of the bad economy. Women, being imminently practical, and carrying the burden of most childcare, and being the first and hardest hit by dropping wages, can’t afford to have their babies.

An interesting dilemma for Republicans, no?  So if you want to prevent abortions, maybe it would be a good idea to quit funding tax cuts for the rich.

(via Feministing)

The AMA just passed a resolution to outlaw home births. Astounding. As if women haven’t been giving birth for eons at home, with the help of midwives. My own mother was born in her family’s home in PA with the help of a midwife (and she had to fight for the right to have natural childbirth when she was giving birth to her own children in the 1950s & 1960s).

This is baffling, and unfair. For a lot of poor women, the increased costs of health insurance, the debilitating recovery needed from the over-prescribed C sections, and just the sheer cost of a hospital delivery, make it nearly impossible for these women to do anything BUT give birth at home.

& Here I was cheered by the news that the AMA resolved to support the treatment of GID by health insurance coverage (more on that tomorrow). I feel like I’ve just been spun in a revolving door.

(via Feministing)

To all the fathers of the trans community, whether they’re male or female or some other gender of their choosing: have a happy father’s day.

Here’s a cool article by Dana Rudolph of Mombian about Marti Abernathey and her son.

There’s a new publication available for families & parents of trans youth:

Families in TRANSition: A Resource Guide for Parents of Trans Youth is the first comprehensive Canadian publication to address the needs of parents and families supporting their trans children. Families in TRANSition summarizes the experiences, strategies, and successes of a working group of community consultants – researchers, counsellors, advocates, parents, as well as trans youth themselves.

The guide aims be inviting and inclusive of families who may be at any one of a number of stages, and especially so for parents who may have had their adolescent or young adult child come out recently as trans. Families in TRANSition provides practical and sensitive parent-to-parent and professional therapeutic advice, and tries to anticipate and address common questions and concerns, as well as normalize the varied reactions families may have. The guide offers accurate, up-to-date information on terminology, health, and issues related to transition, and suggests to families important ways they can take care of themselves and one another through this challenging and critical time. Families in TRANSition provides a provincial context and relevant Toronto resources for continued youth and family support towards strengthening families.

The guide will be available as a free pdf download from our website (www.ctys.org) after June 8th. You will also be able to purchase a hard copy through our website for a nominal fee.

It is so great to see more and more information like this out there.

170+ bloggers contributed to this year’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day, which is damned impressive. Go to Mombian to check out all the posts.

This year, to blog for LGBT families, I want to highlight the fantastic new work by COLAGE called the Kids of Trans Resource Guide (pdf). I’m not sure if I can express how desperately this guide was needed nor how happy I am to see it published. It includes not just tips for people who are children of trans people - whether they are still children or have become adults - but it also gives great advice to trans people who are parents, as well, including this gem:

“As a parent, remember that your children come first and your transition comes second. Transition is an inherently self-focused process, as you align your body and appearance with your gender identity. The best way to be a responsible parent during transition is to make your children a major priority throughout the process. Sometimes this means that you have to compromise your ideal time frame for your transition in order to keep relationships with your family healthy.”

Shock and revelation! Trans people are parents, children, spouses; they have families, extended families, and can adjust their transition goals to help the people who love them transition around them. How much does that rock? You can also access COLAGE’s Kids of Trans pages on their website.

(cross-posted to Trans Group Blog)

A very very happy mother’s day to all the moms out there - including our own.

(& Please don’t wish me a happy mother’s day. I’m very proud of not being a mother.)

As it turns out, Oprah will be recording a new show about trans - in fact, two shows (again!). We did not, unfortunately, make it on this time either, as the shows are focused on families & children. From what I know, the first will be about families in which there are children who are trans, and the second will be focusing on families where a parent (or both) is trans.

Thus, not us. And while I could rant & rave about the legitimacy of our family, because we ARE one, dammit, even though we don’t have children, I won’t, as the producer we’ve spoken to has been quite lovely and the whole experience very pleasant & encouraging.

I don’t know when the shows are airing, but I assume in not too long.

A woman named Sharon Underwood, who is the mother of a gay son, wrote a letter to of Vermont’s Concord Monitor that was published on April 30, 2000.

I found it here, via Bilerico, & I’m reprinting it here in its entirety, below the break. Read it. Remind yourself of it every time one of our presidential candidates waffles over homosexuality during the debates. More…

South Carolina wants women who are considering an abortion to view the ultrasound first.

I say okay if women who aren’t considering abortion have to take tours of foster care and chat with Child Services first, too, then have their finances and future earnings analyzed by a forensic accountant, and their support network (extended family, friends, etc.) evaluated for soundness.

Ditto for the father. (Who?)

Maybe a short spiel on population control and global carrying capacity might be in order, too.

Amazing, this:

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Innocenti Research Center released a report yesterday ranking the well-being of children in the world’s most economically advanced countries. Out of 21 countries, the United States came in second-to-last, at number 20.

The study focused on six areas: material well-being, health, education, relationships with peers and family members, risky behavior, and their own sense of happiness.

And damned embarrassing, too.

Okay, that’s not exactly what they reported, but to my mind, it pretty much is:

“Gender equality and the well-being of children are inextricably linked,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “When women are empowered to lead full and productive lives, children and families prosper.”

For some people I guess the idea that women need to be equals and to make important decisions about family resources still needs to be made, and for them, UNICEF has created a report that delineates exactly how and why:

The State of the World’s Children 2007 report finds that equality of women produces a “double dividend,” allowing empowered and healthy women to have empowered and healthy children, according to the report (PDF).

I think I can safely add that the opposite is also true: people who prefer women not to be equal are not “pro child.” Somewhere in here I think I can also conclude: feminists are actually the real “family values” set!

I chose to take my road without children. It doesn’t make me shallow or immature, it makes me realistic. If I had children it would be to satisfy other people, not me. I am a lover, daughter, sister, writer and friend. I don’t need the label of mother to make me more. I am enough.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this article since Marlena posted a link to it, because it is so often my own experience (except that I never moved to the West Coast and most of my friends are right here, in the tri-state area, and still I see them about as often as she sees hers). That said, I know that having children is a lot like a new relationship in the way it can completely occupy someone, becoming their sole focus for a while. But I also know they come back; maybe they don’t come back as the same person they once were, but they do. Older, wiser, fatter, perhaps.

For me there’s been a simultaneous self-occupation, in my writing, which is a kind of trade-off. My friends with children understand that my writing occupies my mind and my time better than anyone else. But what bothers me about women “disappearing” into having children is when they expect the rest of us to want to, or otherwise to think that everyone cares about the details of what their kids did. I mean, I know I bore people because I have gender on the brain. I don’t assume spending eight months writing a book is a universal experience.

Most of the women I know certainly know that child-rearing isn’t either, but other parts of our culture do assume that. For us childfree types, it becomes kind of tedious, explaining that we don’t want children or don’t feel incomplete or that - god forbid - we are completely oblivious to any biological clock that’s supposed to be ticking so loudly in our heads.

You’d think, what with overpopulation, those of us who choose not to have children would be encouraged - but we’re not.

Often what I hear from parents is something along the lines of “It’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done,” as if my life is without meaning because I don’t have children. My standard response these days is, “Well apparently you’ve never written a book.” Smug Street can go both ways, after all.

We all read a lot about women having babies and not having careers as a result, and some feminists tend to present women’s inability to have a career and have children as a form of gender discrimination.

But you know, I don’t think it is. I thought that was the point of choice - that women who choose to have babies can, and women who don’t choose to have babies, don’t. The women without babies are then able to work the ungodly hours required of the top strata of high power jobs, and the women with them aren’t.

& I know that’s an unpopular opinion, but I thought that was the whole “revolution” birth control brought with it: that women can CHOOSE whether to have children or not. I wonder often if this assumption - that women need to have babies - isn’t a result of all that “women are nurturing” bullshit. I don’t know. I’ve wanted to be childfree my whole life, and what I see are a lot of women in my life who wanted children - wanted them more than their careers - and made that choice. So why the bellyaching? We all make decisions, and we all have to live with them. To me it’s such a fantastic thing that women have been freed from having to have babies, that there are healthy ways to prevent pregnancy and plan to have a family (or plan not to have one).

I have a funny feeling there’s a privilege thing in here somewhere that might blind me some. I just can’t imagine walking into the universe expecting the world to allow me everything I wanted. I mean, imagine if I wrote an article claiming that it was “discrimination” because I can’t hold a high power job *and* write novels - which I can’t, because of the time required of both. I’d be laughed right off my blog, and well I should be if I made that argument. But some feminists portray having a baby as some requirement of woman-ness, and I thought the whole point was - it’s not. We’ve freed women up to have careers if they want. Or to have babies if they want. & That’s all cool.

I mean, if women want babies and don’t want to give up their careers, adopt and marry a house-husband father type.

Of course it is expected that women raise their children once they have them, & that’s the problem, as far as I’m concerned. The expected gender roles are unfair, because fathers are and can be parents as much as women can be mothers. Is it “fair” that men can have children and expect their wives to take care of them? No. But I don’t see why women can’t decide to have children and expect their husbands to take care of them - especially if the women is the one making the higher salary.

But in speaking to a feminist friend recently, she told me she’s having an absolute blast raising her son and not working so much - but still somehow sees it as “wrong” that she can’t be a litigator at the same time. I just don’t get it. She not only chose to have a baby but to raise the baby; she could have gotten a nanny and gone back to work at that high-powered job. She didn’t. And again, that’s all good. But I don’t see it as discrimination; I see it as a decision. Would she catch some flak if she went back to her fulltime job and left a nanny and her husband to raise her child? Sure. But she could do that, if she wanted.

It’s not like those of us who are childfree don’t catch flak. Or that those who decide to stay home with their kids don’t catch flak. The thing about being a woman is that nothing you do is right: someone, somewhere, will have a problem with whatever choice you make. But for me, being a feminist is in supporting any woman in her choices, and that includes calling her out when she’s complaining about having to make them. Having a choice doesn’t mean you get everything; it means you get one thing & you have to live without the other.

But then again, I was raised by Devo.

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.

A new Yale study - granted, studying only Yalies - says that women and men both want families and want to parent (& approximately the same number of children, even).

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!

Take care of your mom today, thank her for being selfless, to whatever degree she was.

Thanking anyone who’s mothered you might be a good idea in general.

Then go and sign a petition to help working moms at www.momsrising.org. Do check out the new book The Motherhood Manifesto, too.

But most importantly, read this heartwarming piece about motherhood by Natalie Angier.

This little bit on Hulabaloo is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in a while: daughters dressed in prom-type dresses go to a Purity Ball with their dads, and they learn to fox-trot together. All good. But then at some point during the ball, the girl looks up at her father and says:

“I pledge to remain sexually pure…until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband. … I know that God requires this of me.. that he loves me. and that he will reward me for my faithfulness.”

Patriarchy, anyone?