Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Well, we leave Wisconsin today, drive home through Illinois and Ohio and Pennsylvania and whatever other states I’m forgetting, and in a few days we’ll be back in Park Slope.
I’m sure I’ll be happy to be home. I hope I’ll be happy to be home. But wow did I enjoy living in Wisconsin. & Believe me, that surprises me more than it surprises just about anyone else.
I’ll try to blog from the road.
Apparently Wisconsin wants to make sure I remember how rough the winter is here, and is kicking me out with a fresh coating of snow.
(We drive tomorrow.)
Endymion with a catnip cigar he got for Christmas. I had a lot of scratches on my hands by the time he was through.
So here’s my dirty secret, which I re-realize every time I update my author site, helenboydbooks.com: “renaming” myself Helen Boyd for the sake of publication (& some privacy, theoretically) was about the smartest thing I’ve ever done in terms of my own self-confidence. Why? It gives me the feeling, sometimes, that I just work for her.
Which kind of allows me to shove my lack of self-confidence to the side and do what I need to do.
(Of course it did nothing for me in terms of privacy, since it was very shortly afterwards that I started using my legal name on this site & in my bios & elsewhere.)
I wonder if trans people experience anything like that in their own “renamings,” if they let you get rid of old baggage that might have little or nothing to do with gender.
Out Magazine recently put together a really asinine list of transgender books for their transgender issue. I haven’t seen the issue, but the list doesn’t really inspire me to go buy it, either, since Myra Breckinridge is on it.
For the past years I’ve always mixed my gender / feminism / trans books, but since that Top 10 of Out‘s is so lame, and the Lammies recently neglected Whipping Girl, which they shouldn’t have, I thought instead I should post my own Top Ten Recommended Trans Reads for LGBTQ readers. There are a few everyone might not need to read – like Virginia Erhardt’s Head Over Heels, which is about the partners of MTFs – or they might want to substitute Minnie Bruce Pratt’s S/he
I might suggest different books for family & friends who are trying to understand transition but who aren’t big readers, & I’ll have to think about that list, too.
Of course now that I’ve written it I have to say I’d add my own books, My Husband Betty
& Maybe The Drag Queens of New York as well.
– S. Bear Bergman – Kate Bornstein – Bullough & Bullough: The Politics of Transgenderism – Patrick Califia: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals – Virginia Erhardt: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman – Leslie Feinberg – Jamison Green – Just Evelyn – Julia Serano – Reid VanderberghYou’ll notice none of them is a YETA (Yet Another Transsexual Autobiography), since after you read Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There
Today, in New York, at the Center. For more info.
But despite the absence of Whipping Girl, I do want to congratulate the finalists:
- Transparent, Cris Beam (Harcourt)
- Male Bodies, Women’s Souls, LeeRay M. Costa, PhD, (Haworth)
- The Marrow’s Telling, Eli Clare (Homofactus Press)
- What Becomes You, Aaron Raz Link & Hilda Raz (University of Nebraska Press)
- Nobody Passes, Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore (Seal Press)
I have an essay in Mattilda’s Nobody Passes of course, but I especially wanted to congratulate Eli Clare and thank him for all the work he’s done in/for the trans community.
The Lambda Literary Foundation’s list of finalists for the 2007 Lammies is out, and She’s Not the Man I Married didn’t make the cut. And I’m okay with that; it can be a little tiring to see how even trans people don’t seem to care, often, about how loved ones see/relate/deal with transness, but I’m getting used to it. Besides, I got my props the first time around, when My Husband Betty made finalist.
That said, Whipping Girl didn’t make the cut and that is absolutely 100% wrong. & I’ll tell you why.
Whipping Girl is, to date, the only book to address, theoretically, the uneasy relationship between trans people – specifically MTF transsexual women – and feminism, and that work was long overdue. It addresses sexuality, media representations, the historical pathologization of trans people by psychologists, the fetishization of tans women’s sexualities, the inherent misogyny of a feminist politics that mocks femininity, and then some.
It has been personally & politically important to me in confronting what remained of my own “natural attitude” toward my own gender, what Serano calls cissexism (and rightfully so) and proposes the concept of “subconsious sex” which did more to explain transsexualism to me than anything ever has — outside, maybe, of Betty’s “because” model.
It’s a real shame that this book was not recognized by the Lambda Literary Foundation. It will be considered a classic, revelatory and ground-breaking book in time; it’s just sad the Foundation’s judges don’t have the foresight to give it its due now.
Julia, personally: thank you. I always appreciate when anyone, with their words and logic and anger, can make me a little less of an asshole, and Whipping Girl did that in spades.
Today Betty and I are doing our encore performance at Lawrence University – back by popular demand! – since last time around, the room was more than 50% over its seating limit and many people couldn’t get in.
We’ll start at 3:30 today. I’ll read from She’s Not the Man I Married, we’ll talk, we’ll answer questions. Come if you’re near Appleton, since it’s open to the public.
If you do use our boards – even just to read & lurk – please consider subscribing. It’s not required, but it is helpful for us to offset our costs and time.
You can also make a one-shot donation, if you’d prefer.
Thanks.