It’s always so good to hear when another partner support group starts! Go Madison!
Just to let you know there is a SOFFA support group starting in Madison.
It will meet every other Tuesday evening, 7p-9p, beginning January 19.
It will meet at Outreach, 600 Williamson Street.
We will be focusing on the SOFFA experience and narrative.
It is a drop-in, peer support group.
I was interviewed not long ago by Amanda Waldroupe as she was writing a column for just|out of Portland (OR) about the way in which partners of trans people need support and get or don’t get it.
While numerous resources exist for transgendered people during their transition, there is a dearth, both in Portland and nationally, for their partners—who go through their own emotional and sexual travails during the experience.
Reid Vanderburgh, a local transgender therapist, says partners can have a tough time throughout the transition process, even if they support their partner.
As far as I know, it’s the first column I’ve ever read about support groups for us partners – but maybe I missed one. Thanks to Ms. Waldroupe not just for writing the column, but for quoting me accurately.
Allison Laing’s wife Dottie Laing died tonight after a long struggle with illness.
She left this note:
Celebrate my life!
Please do not be sad.
Remember me in fondness.
I have enjoyed my life, and treasure my family and friends.
I am proud of my loved ones, and feel content knowing that a part of me lives on in each of them.
I will always be there each time you smile thinking of the good times we have shared.
It’s been a great life!
- Dottie
She worked for and in the transgender community for many of the 50 years she & Allison were married. She was the kind of woman who smiled at the new wives at Fantasia Fair, and whose smile held a world of wisdom. We’ll miss her very much, & no doubt she will be missed at this year’s Fantasia Fair tremendously.
Do keep both Allison & Dottie in your thoughts & prayers. If you have any memories of Dottie you’d like to share here, please feel free to use the comments section below to do so.
This is B.’s reaction to the Chloe Prince documentary that was on the other night. Since I’m a partner, & have a soapbox from which to talk about my reaction as a partner, I thought I’d open my blog to the child of a trans parent on her feelings.
She’s 15, and her father, now female, transitioned about five years ago. She was about the same age as Prince’s eldest when she as told of her father’s imminent transition.
At first all I really felt was sadness for the children and the wife. The poor woman had to watch her spouse say on TV that she thought she might not have transitioned if she had stayed with her ex-girlfriend, something that must have felt awful and been humiliating to watch. I was shocked that the children’s reaction to the fact that their father was going to become a woman had been recorded in the first place, let alone aired on TV. As the child of a transgendered person I would be horrified if my initial reaction was shown to people all over who I didn’t even know. It’s an incredibly private moment that the rest of the world doesn’t have any business in watching.
As the show progressed I started to feel increasingly angry, and not just because she seemed to me a parody of a woman, intent on acting like a stereotype of how a woman “should be” and appearing very feminine, or because despite this femininity she still did all the “masculine” chores around the house, and we got to see pictures of her working with tools and at her job (I would have expected someone who had undergone a male to female transition to not be sexist).
I wanted to punch a hole in the wall every time it was mentioned that the children had “lost” a father. I never lost my father, just because she’s a woman doesn’t make any difference to the fact that she is my father. A sex change operation doesn’t change that. Chloe had no right to be upset about being missed out on the mother’s day photo- it was for mother’s day, not father’s day. Those children are going to have a hell of a time growing up now, and will have to deal with people they don’t know recognizing them and even judging for something they didn’t even do.
Thanks very much B. for sharing your thoughts with us. I would love to read comments from other trans people with kids, if their kids watched, what they thought.
Sadly, it was a lot of the same old same old: cursory interest in parent, partner, & children. The kids were adorable. The wife was determined. The father was exhausted.
Atypical trans documentary bits?
So yeah, I’m drunk.You?
They all seem like reasonably nice people. I hate documentaries about teh trans. Hate ‘em. I hate the way our lives our distilled into reverse camera angles and earnest questions across kitchen tables. I hate how the beauty of a trans woman admitting that she still sees her wife the way “he” did is degraded by the “sudden interest” in men. I hate the sad, confused, tendentious quality of trans women’s wives who are obviously overwhelmed with the whole business and still in love with their spouses.
* sigh*
Having been someone who has done shite like this, my only excuse is: it was in my contract. Not that that’s much of an excuse, but you do usually have a clause saying that you will in good faith blah blah blah consent to blah blah blah that will help sell the book. I’m not sure there’s any other reason to do these things anymore, but I hope, for Rene’s sake, & the boys’ sake, & the dad’s & Chloe’s, that this one will be forgotten when it’s Sweeps Week next year or in five years. Not because it’s bad, but because it isn’t. There are things I said and wrote at the time of My Husband Betty that embarass me now, as well as plenty that I”m still happy about. But I wrote a book, so when I”m lucky, you can see its brown spine in the LGBT section of bookstores these days. But a show like this is going to be dredged up at 3am for a few years, and every once too often, Rene and Chloe and her boys and dad will be online at the supermarket / drugstore / in the waiting room / at the doctor’s office / showing up for parent teacher night when someone they’ve never met couldn’t sleep and saw them on the TeeVee. And then, well, then is when you wish you could change your name and move to Timbuktu.
My best to all of them. Can we stop making these now?
In light of the documentary about Chloe Prince that will air tomorrow night, I thought we should all be prepared for what looks like it’s going to be a doozy of a predictable documentary.
So, the rules, such as they are, for watching a trans documentary:
Believe it or not, these are not the most snarky suggestions by some of our mHB board members. Also remember: there are quite a few people who hang out on our boards who have done this kind of media work, including me & Betty, of course, but also Jenny Boylan, amongst others. We need to laugh at ourselves as much as we laugh at the inanity of it all.
Twelve-Steppers should find their own version, of course. Maybe those ice cream poppers? But the point is to feel as physically ill by the end as the drinking crowd.
(Thanks and love to Gwen Smith who wrote her own version of this back in 2005 and to anyone else who has posted their version of this game.)
As of today, Chi Delta Mu, the Tri-Ess chapter of the tri-state area, voted to leave Tri-Ess and become an inclusive & independent trans group.
At issue were the chapter’s non-compliance on three major required items: (1) that the local members be due-paying members of national; (2) that the group keep its focus on providing “support and education on behalf of heterosexual crossdressers, their spouses, partners and families”; and (3) that the local chapter file a financial statement with national.
From what I know, CDM hadn’t done (3) in a long while, hadn’t been (2) in a long while, and (1) that most of its members were not members of national.
From what I understand, there was nothing contentious going on – just National asking the local to respect its rules of the charter, and the local realizing that their group had evolved in such a way that becoming compliant again wasn’t going to work for them as a group.
In response to this last post, I received this short email:
“My Husband Betty: Love, Sex, and Life with a Crossdresser”
This is where you loose me Helen. You say you don’t use words like “Husband or Wife”….but then you write books using that exact terminology.
Very confusing.
I responded:
I wrote that book 6 years ago. My thinking is surely allowed to change, no?
He responded:
Convenient. No?
& I responded:
Is that how you’d talk to Betty about her decision to transition? That it was “convenient�
My partner was a self-identified straight drag queen when we met, with a male identity.
She is living as a woman & doing what paperwork she can to reflect that.
One of the reasons I can’t & don’t use “husband†anymore is because people then start using “he†pronouns about my partner. She is not a he. To avoid that, I avoid the gendered terminology that leads to it.
When she had a genderqueer/androgynous presentation, she didn’t mind mixing up the pronouns – as I did in the 2nd book. Now, “he†chafes her, doesn’t fit.
So sue me for having had to make adjustments – especially ones that are entirely out of consideration of my partner’s gender.
Please don’t write back. Your response was rude beyond belief. I shouldn’t be justifying it with a response at all, but I like to give people a fair shake.
If I stop using “husband” then it’s somehow just “convenient” that I’m doing so. Surely it couldn’t have anything to do with my partner’s change in gender! *sigh* I’m having one of those days.
We don’t use the words “husband” or “wife” because they’re gendered, but we don’t generally use “spouse” because it seems too clinical, or legal, & yet I wonder if it lacks warmth precisely because it’s not gendered.
Yes, it’s a depressing thought, but I’ve seen so many of them in the trans community over time that I thought I should share these two articles I found on the topic.
One of called “What Every Married Woman Should Know About Money,” by Carol Mithers and has a bulleted list of 7 items:
- 1. Carry your own plastic.
- 2. Read the fine print.
- 3. Define what’s yours, mine, and ours.
- 4. Don’t give up bill-paying duties.
- 5. Get to know your financial advisers.
- 6. Make plans for the future.
- 7. Keep your professional hat in the ring.
The other is “What To Do When You Can’t Afford a Divorce” also by Carol Mithers and has this useful bit of advice about credit:
Credit is a different story. “Shred joint cards and get a new one in your own name,” recommends Lisa Decker, an Atlanta-area-based financial analyst specializing in divorce. “It can be hard for a woman to get credit after a divorce, especially if she hasn’t been working. If you have a balance you can’t pay off on existing credit cards, freeze the account so that neither partner can run up the debt further. Also put freezes on home equity so that neither of you can take out a second mortgage or line of credit.”
Not cheery, but still important reading.
Roger Cohen followed up his column mentioning the women of Iran with a column about them entirely:
A friend told me he no longer recognizes his wife. She’d been of the reluctantly acquiescent school. Now, “She’s a revolutionary.†I followed as she led us up onto the roof. The “death to the dictator†that surged from her into the night was of rare ferocity.
Very much worth reading – go check it out.
I’ll be speaking at TransOhio’s annual conference this year, deliverying both a keynote and doing a workshop about sex & identity.
When: August 14-16, 2009
Where: Columbus, Ohio
What: Lots of cool workshops for trans people, their partners, & allies
You can read the descriptions of my keynote and workshop below the break, but in the meantime check out TransOhio’s conference site for more details.
Today’s the day! I’m blogging, as I have in years past. for LGBT families – who have, thankfully, seen some gains this year! I know plenty of my queerio friends are tired & frustrated with the whole push for same-sex marriage, and trans activists are frustrated as well, because they want the attention on non-discrimination legislation, but as a married person, who is now same-sex, it makes me kind of ill to realize that the state I’m currently living in is actually struggling only to recognize domestic partnerships (for f***k’s sake). My home state can’t work it out either, which is downright embarrassing as a NYer. It’s a mistake, in my opinion, to divorce marriage from the economic issues that are at stake: even something like health insurance is vitally important, & very expensive if one spouse can’t be covered by the other’s health insurance.
So from my very small family to yours: keep working on same sex marriage. You don’t have to ignore other issues – like the gender identity & expression version of ENDA – but goddamn if I’m going to be a 2nd class citizen, & neither should anyone else.
Here’s some other trans family bloggers:
Join us next year!
Fairfax High School elected a male student Prom Queen.
Tom Ackerman, a gay man, has vowed to call his friends’ wives their girlfriends, because he’s decided his religious views don’t allow him to recognize opposite-sex marriage.
The New Scientist tells you everything you ever wanted to know about female ejaculation (& maybe a few things you didn’t want to know).
A woman named Brenda Lee got dragged bodily off of Air Force One when she tried to give President Obama a letter asking him to stand up for heterosexual marriage.
Publishers Weekly reports from the BEA that US Publishers have vowed to fight digitized piracy.
Please sign this petition in favor of domestic partner protections for Wisconsin! It looks like they will be voting on it toward the end of the week.
Well then. Honestly, what do you say? My parents and my siblings must feel *really* old today, since I’m the youngest of the family.
But as my dad always said, it’s not like the only other option is any good, so you may as well grow old.
Thanks all for the lovely gifts and well wishes and your support in these recent years. To 50! To Cronedom! (I am glad that we get to do this milestone together, at least. Having the same bday as your partner is sometimes annoying, but this year, it’s a relief.)
Jean Lewis has been kind enough to provide the MP3 of my Liberty Conference Talk.
These surveys are being conducted by Jamison Green, and I certainly don’t think I have to attest to his coolness, do I?
If you are a trans man who has been partnered to another trans man, you can take both.
This is the text of the talk I gave at the Liberty Conference on May 2nd, 2009:
How We Love You: Let Us Count the Ways
There are partners who are male, female, and trans; there are partners who met their trans person before the trans person knew what was going on; there are partners who married crossdressers who had sworn off crossdressing who purged and then dressed and then purged and then dressed again; there are partners who met their husbands crossdressed; there are partners who met their trans person during transition; there are partners who met their trans person long after transition; there are partners who didn’t know their trans person was trans when they met.
You, the individuals who are in love, were in love, who are seeking companionship and partnership and occasionally a good spanking, are said to be like snowflakes. Flawless Mother Sabrina told me that one night at the now defunct Ina’s Silver Swan, and she was right. Each of your stories is unique, even when there are similarities; each of you realizes your transness, as I like to call it, in a different way: some crossdress, others do drag, others transition. Some do all three, and others – none of these, but you express your genders in some other way. But you have your stories, your characters in movies, even if and when they are comically or tragically or unfairly drawn, but those you love have – well, we’ve got a machete and a spot on the edge of the wood we mean to get through.
Thank you, Brian Williams. The point he made tonight on Olbermann — that 9/11 was 10 minutes ago to the people who experienced it first-hand — is only too true. I have no doubt that tons of people are upping their anti-anxiety meds and having those awful apocalyptic nightmares again as a result of this stupidity.
I remember flying from Denver a few years ago & hearing a security officer ask a flyer about their anti-anxiety meds, wanting to know if they were because he was a nervous flyer. He answered something more along the lines, “No, I’m just from New York” and a moment later, in an aside to his wife, “We are all on anti-anxiety meds.”
Yeah. We are. I don’t expect ever to have the same feelings about fall that I did before 2001.
