Away

In case anyone’s wondering, or waiting for an email response from me, or wondering why we haven’t been posting on the boards, it’s because we’re away. & Will be, for a few more days.

Catbox

auroraThe label’s a bit of a misnomer; she’s not very fragile, really, more like a hellion in orange.

Getting Clocked

Three months from now, on May 15th Lambda Legal and other LGBT organizations will be “clocking in for equality” – dedicated a day to educating people and companies on workplace discrimination and diversity. They suggest people sign on to do something – wear a button, create a “safe zone” for LGBT employees, put aside a day to lobby on LGBT workplace issues – and I was thinking that this is exactly the kind of thing trans people & their allies should absolutely do, since the discrimination trans and gender variant people face is often brutal.

Maybe we can do something as a group? If you’re not a “joiner” I’m sure there’s still something you can do individually. Think about it: you’ve got three months.

Happy Hearts Day

As those of you who are reading/have read She’s Not the Man I Married know, Valentine’s Day has always been some kind of locus of confusion for me & Betty. We’re in much better shape now than we once were, though when we’re planning dinner, or just having the “So what do you want to do for Valentine’s Day?” conversation, there’s still this silent thing that hangs in the air.

That silent thing is what gender Betty is going to be, which she’ll be perceived as, & how exactly I’m supposed to interact with that gender.

Mostly now I try to go into Valentine’s Day assuming that the person I’m with will be seen as female, which pretty much wrecks the PDAs that I prefer. Sometimes the reality that I really miss having a male partner lands squarely in my lap on Valentine’s Day, too, so I have to wrestle with the guilt and fear I still fear in having a trans partner. The thing is, I still don’t know how to be romantic with her if I’m not feeling masculine-ascendant myself; I don’t know how to be female with a female partner. & This year, maybe because I’m feeling vulnerable because the new book is out there, or because we’re going to have “the big talk” about Betty’s transness with some important people in our lives, I’m feeling a bit – intrepid.

Sometimes I just think Valentine’s Day should be tossed altogether. I mean all it does is make single people miserable and puts a lot of pressure on couples that are newly together – well, on all couples, I think. I mean how many of us are the types in the jewelry ads, having dinner & being presented with the new diamond solitaire? No one I know is like that, but kudos to anyone who is. But for me, this year, despite a planned dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant, my feeling is:

Down with Cupid!

Continue reading “Happy Hearts Day”

9th Preview of She’s Not the Man I Married

Well, we’re almost there, folks: the official pub date is just two weeks away, and I know many of you are already reading or have already read She’s Not the Man, but for those who aren’t, this is the last preview I’ll be putting up. It’s from my Preface:

This book is a sequel to My Husband Betty, at least in that our story and my reasons for thinking about gender take up where it left off. Mostly it is a love story, our love story, which, like any other, is not typical. It is the story of how a tomboy fell in love with a sissy, how a butch found her femme, how a boyish girl met a girlish boy. Who is who is not always clear and doesn’t always matter. In some ways, that’s the heart of this book: the idea that a relationship is a place where people can and do and maybe even ought to become as ungendered as they can. It comes from my very specific dislike of Martian men and Venusian women and the adversarial ideas about relationships that permeate our culture. While I am not interested in a genderless world, I am curious about the ways that gender can be manipulated in a romance, the ways it can be controlled instead of controlling our roles.

Not Transitioning

For me, the sign that Betty was kind of transitioning under my nose was when she didn’t want to act as a male anymore. She felt she wasn’t transitioning. I called foul.

Sometimes it’s like trans folk do everything except SAY you’re transitioning.

& Since we just heard from yet another person who formerly identified as a crossdresser who then started using transgender who now worries she’s truly transsexual, I want to see any marriage that ends because of transness end without the kind of bitterness that’s too frequently the case. I’d rather be more optimistic & say my goal is to keep the marriages from ending, but I’ve gotten to a point where containing the damage seems like more than enough to accomplish.

It’s as if there is something built into transness that makes it especially hard on partners: trans people don’t want to be trans, don’t want to hurt their loves ones, don’t want to up-end their own lives. Who would? That part is easy to understand. Trans people don’t want to be trans but are sometimes still actively but subconsciously moving toward transition and even beginning to without saying “I have made up my mind to transition.”

Unfortunately that gives lie to all the hoo-ha about trust & communication that we’re all always hearing about. When the trans person isn’t accurately communicating what we, their partners, see going on right before our eyes, we can’t trust what we’re hearing, and start to judge the situation beyond and despite what the trans person might be saying.

Some of the problem of course is defining what transition is, exactly. As Caprice pointed out in the thread on the boards where we’re discussing this, “Partners may see ‘transition’ differently than the transperson. A TG may think that transitioning is changing to be a woman. A partner may consider transitioning to be becoming anything that is not-man.”

But of course for someone like me, “not man” is entirely acceptable while “woman” is not. For others, “not man” is unacceptable. Judging the difference between the way the trans person defines transition and how the partner does seems like a huge part of this, but it’s not all of it: some of it too is about the trans person recognizing the change.

I remember Betty & I looking at our wedding pictures one day after months of me remarking about how “not male” she’d become, and finally, it registered. She finally saw how much she was male when we got married, and how much she wasn’t anymore.

It was a relief to me, much like when an umpire/referee agrees with your call on a close play. “He must be blind!” fans yell at the TV set. “He must be blind!” partners post in their support groups. It’s knowing that when someone looks in the mirror they are seeing what you’re seeing. It’s about perception itself, wrapped up in how we define gender and in how we recognize it and mark it on ourselves. It’s the no-man’s-land where the line between “feminine” and “female” is gigantic to me, but not so much to Betty.

One of the reasons I wrote Chapter 5 of My Husband Betty despite the myriad protestations of crossdressers was because I don’t think wives leave when they learn that crossdressers sometimes transition. They run when it gets personal, when they start to see their very own crossdresser husband research HRT, or finding out what it takes to legally change names, i.e., doing things that look more to them like transition than crossdressing.

I feel like we, personally, ended up on the brink of transition just by exploring and trying to navigate a middle path. When it comes to trying to find a compromise between closeted crossdressing and medical/legal transition, we are all standing at the edge of the wood, machetes in hand. There are few paths. The people who went before – Virginia Prince comes to mind – thought she was forging a new path, and probably still insists she was. But to her wives? If I were her wife, I’d say she transitioned without GRS. I’d say she did more than live as a “transgenderist” when she took the hormones that gave her breasts and started living full-time as a woman.

Having a trans woman who is long past transition around has been critical for me in even addressing this, or realizing it. Suzy, much to her chagrin perhaps, confirms my worst fears – and thanks to her for doing so. Are trans people who hope to find a middle path fooling themselves? Or are they just putting themselves at greater risk of transitioning without intending to? Do they have an extra burden of being more careful about making decisions without making them?

Is there a reason that partners see the first permanent body mod as a warning sign? Of course there is. I felt petty and unsupportive (and a ton of pressure) when I objected to Betty removing her facial hair permanently. But in retrospect, I was right to protest, because permanent facial hair removal was all she needed to make living fulltime possible. Possible slides into probable slides into done slides into irreversible quite quickly in trans land. For others, possible might happen as a result of taking hormones, or crossdressing fulltime, or even just accepting one’s transness.

Partners aren’t crazy. We are not willfully putting our heads in the sand. For the most part, I think we’re just able to admit what’s going on sooner, and more clearly, than our partners can, the Cassandras of transland. And like the historical Cassandra, we’re often both disbelieved and forced to stand and watch, hopeless and unable to prevent the thing we’ve predicted and feared, come to pass.