I’ve gotten some interesting comments to my post about belonging and thought more people should check them out.
To all you who responded:
Thanks all for very interesting insights & thoughts.
I have always been an ally of the LGBT – & felt welcome as one. (I was that person all the gay boys came out to after HS, & likewise a little later with lesbian friends.)
But my own sense of my LGBT-ness comes out of my own genderqueer qualities, and I wonder how trans partners who are more gender normative (& not otherwise gay, bi, or lesbian) might feel. To me, it’s all about creating safe spaces, and of course I’ll continue to do that.
On that note, the guys who date transwomen who identify as straight are *never* going to feel part of this community while we all gossip that they’re ‘really gay.’
< Jill and I right before the workshop on trans relationships at TIC.
We had a lot of great conversations with people up at TIC especially in the trans relationships workshop Jill Barkley & I hosted – about identity, compromise, sexuality, fetishization and respect. The one point that came up early was why non-trans people often are accused of being fetishizing or predatory for doing things that trans people might do and not be similarly accused – as in, if a trans person seeks another trans person as a partner, it’s understood as being a shared interest or experience, but if a non-trans person seeks a trans person as a partner, they are accused often of fetishizing transness.
I do value Betty’s transness because of my own gender stuff, but sometimes it feels like that wouldn’t “count.” It kind of reminds me of a story told by two professors I had (who had been married to each other for upward of 50 years), about when they met in the 1930s, when one of them was a Socialist and the other a Communist; their friends lay bets on how soon they would break up, since one was considered a “committed radical” the other only a “fellow traveler.”
I’ve also had people who’ve met me since the book or in my 20s “worry” that my own discovery of my gender stuff is somehow Betty’s fault. It isn’t, of course, and anyone who knew me when i was 20 or younger knows that.
The way these things interlap is of ongoing interest to me, and I welcome your further comments.
Messier Bedroom
Last April, sex columnist Josey Vogels forwarded me a letter from a 21 year old women who was turned on by her boyfriend dressing in women’s clothes, and I got a shot (for a day) at being a sex advice columnist.
It turns out the same woman recently wrote to Josey to thank her for the advice:
“Last year I wrote to you, worried about my sexuality because the only time I had ever orgasmed with a guy was while my boyfriend was dressed as a french maid. You offered advice on a couple of possibilities that didn’t involve me necessarily being gay. Through a little experimenting we found that yes I do think my guy is really sexy when he’s my girl. Part of it is that it’s kind of sweet that he would do it to indulge me, part of it is he makes love entirely differently when he is wearing panties. We’ve started channeling that into our regular sex and I am now glad to say that he gets me off regularly even without the lingerie. I figured once that happened we had seen the last of the dressing but for Valentines day (which we celebrated last weekend) he rented a red maid’s dress and waited on me hand,foot and other areas too. It was so sweet. Just wanted to say thanks for saving my love life.”
And I’m just pleased as punch! See? There *are* women out there for whom crossdressed men is a genuine turn-on. Keep looking, CDs – you never know when you might find one.
I’m also really pleased because after my recent Trans Sex and Identity workshop at TIC, someone who’d caught the workshop told me that he and his partner had great sex as a result of what I’d talked about. There really isn’t a better feeling in the world than hearing something like that.
3/6/06 = #10
NCTE’s 52 Things You Can Do for Transgender Equality:
#10 Donate money to an organization providing direct services for transgender people.
Woman, in Suit
I saw a woman on the subway today who was remarkable in more than one way. For starters, she was tall, but wearing square heels of at least 2.5″, and wearing a women’s suit that fit her perfectly. She had no coat on like everyone else – just a pair of leather gloves.
I assume she was going somewhere underground to somewhere else underground, or maybe she was Norwegian and scoffed at what we call cold in NY. I only saw her for a minute, and she had a large frame, and for a minute I wondered if my eye was different, or if she just was what she was so perfectly, so confidently, & so comfortably, that she made me feel quite proud of being strong, and not petite, and womanly, at once.
New Site
I wanted to introduce my new author website, helenboydbooks.com. The sidebar to the right was just getting too cluttered, & when I thought about adding info for the new book, I just decided it’d be better to have a new site for that stuff.
I’m pretty impressed with myself – no, Betty did not create it; I did. Betty will probably put together a schmancier site at some point, but for the meantime, it’s got all the info it’s supposed to.
Oscar
Jon Stewart, in the opening lines of his Oscar hosting:
Welcome, Ladies, Gentlemen (pause) … Felicity.
Jon, you didn’t have to do it. And you really shouldn’t have.
Now I Know How Joan of Arc Felt
Remains purported to have been Joan of Arc’s are being tested as to whether they could be hers. They can’t, of course, confirm anything, as they don’t have anything of hers to test against.
The illiterate farm girl from Lorraine in eastern France disguised herself as a man in her war campaigns and said she heard voices from a trio of saints telling her to deliver France from the English. Joan of Arc was beatified in 1909 and made a saint in 1920.
Actually, this is quite wrong. Everyone knew Joan was a woman; her crime was wearing men’s clothes despite the fact that she was a woman. If she’d been passing as male, she would have had a lot better chance of escaping the interrogations and pyre.
TG Life Interview
I was interviewed for this month’s TG Life – in the Celebrity Spotlight.
Do check it out.
… I think a lot of transpeople want to be attractive for being women or men, which is fine, but I think those of us who love you all tend to love the transness itself. Not the issues, not the narcissism – but the very fact of someone who transcends or combines or expresses more than one gender.
Worried Like This Forever
I’m generally having a problem with the way things are going these days, what with the South Dakota bill and the news that the US Government didn’t only fuck up New Orleans and the other areas that got hit by Katrina at the time but are continuing to fuck it up now, & that Paul McCartney is trying to keep people from beating baby seals to death. It’s the last one that got to me the worst – I mean, didn’t we highlight how barbaric that crap was like 20 years ago? I was almost surprised to find out it’s still happening; I thought Canada was cooler than that. Then Megan delivered the news that increased air travel – accelerated by cheap fares – will eventually guarantee that we can’t see the stars.
I keep hoping we human beings take ourselves out before we wipe out every other species that calls this planet home.
But something Sandy posted made me feel a little better:
I sometimes feel so weighed down by everything that is so wrong, and so bad, about how we humans treat each other and the world.
I worry.
I worry about an all-out, probably nuclear, war between the Muslim world and everyone else. I worry about bird flu. I worry about resistant strains of bacteria (and would everyone PLEASE quit using “anti-bacterial” soap, you’re making the problem worse, and gaining no benefit in the meantime). I worry about overpopulation and food and water supplies. I worry about the crazy rise in the incidence of all types of cancers in our country. I worry about plastics and pesticides and volatile organic compounds. I worry about all the no-money-down mortgages and credit card debt that people are getting into and not out of. I worry about the incredible, collossal amounts of waste in every aspect of our fat American lives. I worry about how stupid and sinister our government is, and how just plain stupid we citizens appear to be. I worry about the dubious role of huge corporations in society. I worry about children whose parents are mean to them. Now too, I worry about the demise of astronomy as we know it. I’m not being facetious. I care about all of this stuff.
My husband even worries about living on the East coast, downwind of all the air pollution in the rest of the country. I don’t go quite that far. But if we moved to the west coast, I’d probably worry about missiles from North Korea.
There’s no automatic healthy dose of “fuckit” attitude in my life anymore, that feeling that used to kick in when the world looked too cruel. All I can do these days is limit the amount of news I take in. (Ah, parenthood. It takes away some humor, for sure; thank God it installs some new kinds as well.)
One thought that eases my mind a bit is that people have worried like this forever… and life continues, and it’s mostly really, really good.
Thanks, Sandy.
If You Haven't Heard
South Dakota has just made abortion illegal, state-wide. No exceptions – not for the health of the mother, for rape, or for incest.
So I think South Dakota needs a new state slogan, yes? Here’s my entry:
South Dakota: The Inbred State
I’m sure some of you clever folks can come up with better ones.
This law is an attempt to take Roe down, absolutely. And in the meantime, women in South Dakota will now have to travel across state lines, at much greater expense, to have a safe, legal abortion. Greater expense often means delay, which means abortion later in the pregnancy, which means great health risks to the mother.