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From the Mailbag

Dear Helen,
First, let me say that i thought your book < My Husband, Betty > was excellent. I’m not a crossdresser myself and had figured that out before i read your book, but since a friend of mine’s picture was featured in it, i simply had to buy the book. It turned out to be a pretty fair description of the crossdressing world that i had seen in my brief and peripheral experience of it. At least, that’s my opinion.

You wrote: “it always struck me as ironic that VP, who put these standards & membership rules in place, prefers she-male porn and is living full-time as a woman – and has been for many years.”

Meanwhile….. On doing some internet research on crossdressers who use non-over-the-counter hormones (the rationale of this puzzled me) i came across the above quotation. Who is the VP you are referring to? I know Virginia Prince is a “transgenderist”, but i always assumed her tastes were of a rather vanilla variety. Do you know if she also uses hormones? If not, does she have a position on their use by crossdressers. She has a rather perscriptive personality on most such issues, so I’m just curious.
Best Regards,
Lori

Lori,
Yes, I was referring to Virginia Prince with that shorthand of VP.
From what I know – Virginia used hormones for herself until she got the breasts she wanted. Then, because estrogen disrupted her sex drive and/or functionality, she quit taking them. That said, she does live full-time as a woman and has for many, many years now – more than she lived presenting as a man at this point. In some ways, she’s like a transsexual who didn’t have bottom surgery.
If you want to know the whole scoop, you need to get Richard Docter’s book about her, From Man to Woman. That’s where I got the information about her liking she-male porn; she even admitted that if she were young now, that’s probably what she’d be doing. She was infamously oversexed.
I don’t know if she ever had a “position” on crossdressers using hormones, but I’ve met quite a few now who simply want breasts. Some of them use hormones to get them – and then “bind” for their male lives. In some cases, that kind of “treatment” is even recommended, to relieve body dsyphoria and gender role dysphoria by enabling the CDs to pass more easily when they do dress.
Like I said in the book, the definitive line between crossdressers and transsexuals is not so definitive. Often the distinction made is whether the person presents as female part of the time (= crossdresser) or all the time (=transsexual). Others make the distinction with body modifications – ie, hormone use and/or surgery. But there are plenty of transsexuals who opt not to have surgery, or who maintain male identities for their professonal life, & all sorts of other combinations. Still another distinction that’s been made (& one that I think is the least valid, to be honest) is that for crossdresser’s it’s sexual, and for transsexuals it isn’t.
This stuff is getting murkier & murkier every day, what with the internet & hormones being easily gotten, and according to some researchers, the largest category of people have always been the ones who don’t fit the “classic transsexual” or “classic crossdresser” definition.
Thanks for writing, and for the praise.
Helen

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The Warhol Trannies

I’m currently reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk – which I highly recommend – and I’ve just gotten to the section about Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling and Jayne (then Wayne) County – and from one observer’s pov, they didn’t care if people knew they were born male.
According to Leee Childers:

To me, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn and the rest of them were the most glamourous people. They weren’t drag quens. They weren’t crazy. These were just people who lived twenty-four hours in dresses and old ladies’ shoes . . . (Holly) didn’t really care whether other people knew she was a man or a woman or a Martian.
The stove immediately became coated with zip wax from them zipping their faces, because in those days you zip-waxed your beard, and what it achieved wasn’t a feminine look.
You took hot, molten wax, put it on your face, let it dry, and then grabbed it and pulled it off. So what it did was rip out your beard by the roots, which made your face swell up all red, bloated, ugly. Then they’d put this Woolworth’s makeup on, because that was all they could afford – this Woolworth’s orange makeup all over their red faces and then go out in pubic! No one thought they were women, no one thought they were men! No one knew what they were! And they dressed in old-lady dresses. This old lady died next door to us, and Jackie walked the ledge from the window to her window and broke into her apartment to steal all her clothes. Those were the clothes that Jackie wore, the dead old lady’s dresses!
Holly just wore anything. She’d just wrap a sheet around her. In fact, Holly got in trouble with the welfare people. She was on welfare, everyone was. She would show up at the welfare office to get her welfare check in ostrich feathers and false eyelashes. One day they took her into an office and said, “Sire, this is the welfare office. You’re showing up in evening gowns and ostrich feathrs. The other welfare recipients are getting very upset about this.”
Holly said, “But me some jeans, I’ll wear them, otherwise I’ll spend my money as I please, and I please to spend it on ostrich feathers.”
— Please Kill Me, p. 91

Ah, NYC in the late 70s. I’m not sure there’s anything an artsy, proto-punk junkie speedfreak sub subculture wouldn’t forgive.

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Feeling… Hopeful?

There have been two recent break-ups (three, if you count Chrissy’s recent news) on the MHB message boards, which I’m sure have left a lot of people who read/post on them a little less than optimistic. Unfortunately, two other couples we know are probably on the verge of splitting. Unfortunately, breakups are very regular news for us.
It’s one of the downfalls of the trans community, and one of the reasons I find it hard to extend myself to partners, especially. The trans person remains trans – and after a break, often returns to the community. (Lots of trans people only find the community after the breakup of a relationship, as well.) But the partner is free, of course, to go on their way – and leave all this stuff behind, which is what they usually do. I’ve invested in so many partners who became friends, who after a while of trying to keep in touch, faded out of my life after fading out of their tranny’s.
But the good thing is that very often both parties find some kind of happiness with other people, after a time. Some days it can seem that the statistics are very, very bad specifically for us, but it is still true that half of all marriages dissolve, not just trans ones.
A longitudinal study of marriage find that the happiness people experience with marriage dips after the “I do” and for four years after that, then plateaus until years 8-10 (the so-called “seven year itch”). Not good news, but still it’s better knowing than having something like that bite you in the ass, right? And the message couldn’t be better timed, for me, since Betty and I will be celebrating our 8th anniversary this April (and our 5th wedding anniversary this July).
I especially liked this bit:

”Research shows it’s not how much you love each other that predicts the success of a marriage, but how you handle the problems that come along in life,” he said. ”Happily married couples view problems as ‘us against the problem.’ They identify themselves as a team.”

Which for me is very fitting for those of us dealing with transness, and which, to beat a dead horse, is another good reason for the trans person not to refer to it as a “gift” – especially if that’s not the way the partner feels about it. A difference of opinion, in this case, might rob a couple of one type of comraderie that they might really, really need.
But in the meantime, I’d love to have a bunch of you post here with how long you & your partner have been together, to give some of the folks out there a glimmer of much-needed hope.
For us, eight years and counting. You?

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Scrawny Shoes

The other day, just for fun, Betty and I popped our heads into a shoestore around 14th Street – not the DSW, the other one. I had envied Tom’s shoes that night at Yale, and all of my own shoes are very very scrappy-looking indeed, which is fine for daily wear, but I’ve always believed one should have at least one pair of shoes good enough for church.
I found a sharp pair of Kenneth Coles – square toe, visible stitching – and was told first that they were men’s shoes. When I didn’t scare so easily, the clerk told me they only started at men’s size 7 which is at least a women’s size 8.
[sigh] I’m a women’s 7 & 1/2, max, usually a 7. [/sigh]
So I went to the women’s section of Kenneth Cole – just for shits & giggles, since I knew what I’d find – and found all these… scrawny shoes. Thin little ballet slipper shoes with thin soles or thin heels or both. It made me sad. There wasn’t enough shoe to any of them. I miss the era of unisex, urban shoes.
But, still optimistic, I went online and checked that shoe behemoth zappos.com. Women’s shoes : Oxfords revealed about 15 pairs, not all of which were actually Oxfords. I tried Men’s : Oxfords and found plenty, but nearly all of them started, like Ken Cole’s, at size 7. The ones that didn’t were either extraordinarily expensive or looked a little too much like the shoes an out-of-touch mom might buy her teenage son for his confirmation – or a funeral. And even he’d have the good sense to not like them.
So alas, I checked Dr. Marten’s, and they had shoes. Not the steel-toed ones I’d seen at Trash & Vaudeville, but shoes made for something a little less dainy than picking flowers.
dms
At long last I gave in and checked ebay, where I bid on (and won) a pair of stand issue, unisex, black DMs. For $5.50. I bid and won another, slighly different pair, for $9. That will hold me for a couple of years, no doubt – the shoes I wear most often I bought before I met Betty. (We’re celebrating our 8th anniversary this April.)
And crossdressers wonder why I don’t like to talk about shoes. For me, shoe shopping is often a hostile universe, where my requests are so often met with comments like “these only have a small heel” or “but it’s not much pink.” As a kid, I wanted the round-toed sneakers the boys wore, not those pointy tennies girls were supposed to wear. Ah, to un-dainty my dainty feet. At least Betty & I got to laugh over the fact that if I ever transitioned, my feet would be my “tell.” Ironically, I grew up thinking I had very large feet, because – c’mon, you can guess this one – I had older brothers who convinced me I did. When I was 25 or so, I actually said, “I know I have big feet” to a shoe salesman, who then asked how tall I was. When I answered (5’6″) he looked at me like I was from another planet. “Those are small feet, for your height,” he said simply.

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Guest Author: Jill Barkley

Jill Barkley is the former partner of an FTM, femme-identified, and the very cool person I got to co-host a ‘trans relationships’ forum with at TIC both last year and this. It’s a pleasure to get to post something written by her:
Chipped Red Nail Polish
I made plans for a manicure and femme processing session when my sleepy roommate stumbled into our living room and into my arms that morning as I was struggling to put on my coat to leave for work. I had returned very late the night before from Philadelphia, where I was a presenter at the Trans-Health Conference for two workshops – one for partners of Transpeople and the other about Femme as a gender identity. The weekend before I had been at the Translating Identities Conference in Burlington doing much of the same work.
Looking at my hands as I drove across the bridge to work, I saw the remnants of stress in the chipping away of my red nail polish from each of my long fingernails. I felt the same stress in my shoulders, in the dull ache of my lower back and the pain shooting still through the balls of my feet as I climbed the stairs to my office.
My body looked and felt like I’d been climbing out of a cavern or scaling the side of a mountain or scrapping the colorful grips on the wall of a rock climbing gym.
This overall feeling of having pulled myself out of something is fitting for the last two weeks of intensity, overhaul and re-evaluation. I felt the opening of still recent wounds, the spreading out of bruises, the scars still pink and puffy. I had ended my relationship with my last partner, a Transman, in September, but decided to still attend these spring conferences and offer much needed partner and femme space to the other attendees through my workshops. As I sat at my desk, feeling the pain settle over my tired body, I wondered if it was all at my own expense.
On Friday after the partner’s workshop, I had let my body fall into a huge black cushioned chair, swinging my red high-heeled feet over the armrest. I was worn out from an hour and a half of similar stories, overlapping experiences, nods of understanding and sighs of shared hurts. These partner workshops always seemed like group therapy to me, similar to the support groups I ran for women surviving Domestic Violence in that everyone present always had an intense need for validation of their experiences, the desire to not feel so alone.
I’ve been asked countless times that if by holding these workshops or moderating my on-line community for partners of Trans-people I’m trying to suggest that relationships with someone who is Trans are somehow especially difficult. I think of the things that were most painful about my last relationship having little or nothing to do with the Trans-ness of my partner. However, the stories I’ll share and the experience I’ll reflect in my workshops is about his being Trans. I’ll talk about communication and preparing one’s heart for the changes to another’s body. I’ll speak to the importance of ‘securing your own oxygen mask before assisting others’ and finding partners who will let you safely vent without screaming accusations of Transphobia.
Any relationship is going to have its issues —not just relationships where one or both parties are Trans-identified. But there are definitely issues that are unique to a relationship of this kind and having a community of support is essential to working through the hard things and celebrating the common good.
When processing out loud about running partner’s workshops as someone who is no longer partnered with someone Trans, the words ‘I could be partnered to a Transman in the future’ slipped past my lips and anchored me in the truth of that statement.
Admittedly, I had joked that I might just walk into these workshops screaming ‘run’ to everyone seated in the circle. Looking at that sentence now, I know that isn’t funny and, actually, offensive. I think that unsolicited advice was coming from some kind of attempt at grounding myself in the reality of ‘what went wrong’ in my last relationship. Truthfully, what went wrong had nothing to do with gender identity, hormones or surgery.
I would have loved to have gone into things with my last partner a little more aware, much more supported and with somewhere to create some space for what I was going to experience in terms of being a non-Trans person partnered with someone Trans-identified.
When I had asked for advice about how to deal with any change on our horizon, I was given ways to support my partner and advice for how to prepare to do so. Looking back, there are ways I needed to be more prepared for how everything might affect me. Instead, I was encouraged to grab my pom-poms and become a ‘perpetual cheerleader’, a ‘super partner’, a brave smiling face. As if one could be so strong and unwavering at all times. There were things that were hard for me and too often, I felt like there was no space for my feelings in what was suddenly my new community.
Spending time with friends from Ann Arbor, Michigan at the conference made me long for having shared a town when we shared similar couplings. He is recently transitioning from F to M and she is a non-Trans woman. To have had someone close by to relate to around the issues I was encountering around my own partner’s transition would have felt so supportive. I would have loved to have someone else to talk to about feelings I didn’t necessarily need to go to my partner with first, a ‘pre-process’ if you will, to work out the delivery and shed light on the hopeful end result about bringing the given issue to the surface.
In my experience, I was almost six months into my relationship before I met other partners at a support group my partner and I attended. One sunny fall day, we drove in silence to the middle of Maine and walked toward people seated in chairs in a circle. When we broke off into a separate meeting for just partners, I remember sitting facing two lesbian identified women who were five and ten years, respectively, into their relationships with Transmen and still experiencing struggle from time to time. I talked for two hours non-stop that Sunday as they listened, nodded and even cried with me. I am still so grateful for the gift of understanding they offered me. I didn’t know it could exist.
Since then, I’ve been in the trenches of all of this, struggling to understand, seeking validation, wanting desperately to feel not so alone. As I pull myself upward, I’m seeing the light above and trying to bring others along to bask in it.
Offering these workshops was cathartic – and not just for me, but for those who attended, I believe. It was good to be given gratitude and to feel it emitting right back at those who expressed it at the end of each session. I am convinced we all need that community – for an hour and a half at a conference and continuing support once we find our way back home. It still remains invaluable to me and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
When asked if I would return to these conferences next spring, I easily answered yes. It is still work I want to do, still space I want to offer. Over the last two years, I have been lucky to have met so many strong partners who love fiercely and generously. I wish them the same love and loyalty in return.
Jill can be contacted at femme_bull@yahoo.com.

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Gender Gift Horse

A recent comment to a not-so-recent blog post required a thoughtful response. The subject was my dislike of the term “gender gifted” and while Michele pointed out some excellent reasons to prefer the term, I’m not an easy mind to change.
So let me explain a little moreso why I think the term is inappropriate, if not inexact.
I suppose there are a few reasons I think the way I do about the term “gender gifted.” One of them is that I think positivity-phrasing can often delude people in terms of the difficulty involved, and I don’t think that’s good for a few reasons: 1) the general public shouldn’t think it’s easy/a choice to be trans; 2) trans people should be aware of what they’re getting into when they open that Pandora’s Box; and 3) trans people need to be aware of what their partners, family, & friends may go through as a result of their transness.
I want to stress that I don’t believe it needs to be as simple as “it’s either a blessing or a curse.” Fire is both. Anger is both. Lust is both. Parents, even, are both. I can’t choose, and won’t.
But mostly I think what we’re coming up against is a sensibility difference: I find it easier to get through the world by knowing when my glass is half-empty, so I can start figuring out how I’m going to fill it. Others prefer to see it half-full until it’s empty. You can call me a worrywart (which I am), or the “pulls no punches” type, but either way I think that’s the real difference between what’s being said.
I think it’s been too long that people have considered transpeople crazy, reckless, or just out of touch with reality. And most people – if faced with any decision that might require the loss of job, partner, and home; a change of every piece of ID; tens of thousands of dollars of surgery and/or hormone maintenance – would say, that’s a f*** of a lot to go through for anything, much less a gift. So the whole idea of calling it “gifted” rings false for anyone who isn’t trans; remember, we’re not inside your heads and can’t (and probably won’t) ever understand any anything that would motivate a person to go through so much. And you do go through that much, whether you transition or not. – I assume that’s one part we can’t disagree on, yes?
To me, using the term “gender gifted” is much like being the kind of person who stands in a doorway when it’s raining and is thankful that the flowers are getting a good long drink. They may be honest, they may be sweet, they may love flowers. But the other people in that doorway who have been kept from getting to work, or home, or wherever they’re supposed to be, will think that person is just a little too out of touch, and a little well – touched, as well.
It doesn’t mean they’re wrong; it just means that their perspective may be perceived as a little left of center – which is okay on its own. I have no doubt that transfolks need upbeat types around to get through a day (or a life). I don’t think a unified message is necessary; I think the trans community needs its many voices, and many perspectives, in order to get everyone what they need.

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Pod Betty

It seems we’ve made it to podcast… a Detroit-based podcaster and blogger reviewed My Husband Betty recently (and her advice to people near death is very, very funny, & unfortunately, very close to the mark for many people). You can listen online or download the mp3.
Check it out here.

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Hollywood

I’m a little upset that they (Lifetime, and Sony Pictures) have chosen a male actor for the role of Gwen Araujo. I just don’t get the point of it – why not have a girl play her? Gwen did not experience 20 years of testosterone, and she never lived as a man at all. Maybe as a boy, but even that – very briefly. Shoot, she didn’t get to live long at all, much less as either gender.
Not only does it make me sad but it frustrates me, too. I just think, after all she went through, we might have given her that. But of course, not everyone agrees with me.
The guy they cast may do a good job, but still.
Years ago I wrote a paper about how I was tired of books about women where the heroine of the story died at the end. I think I’d just read Chopin’s The Awakening, but it could have been lots of others. When do strong women get to live? was the final line of the paper, and now, (ahem) years later, I find myself asking the same thing about transpeople in movies.