This is the text version of the keynote talk I gave at TransOhio this past Saturday. From what they’ve told me, it was recorded so hopefully we’ll get a video link in not too long.I did interrupt myself so that the people listening could participate in the Nationwide Kiss-In.
First, thank you to Shane and Sarah and all the other TransOhio people who made this event happen. It is a very cool event, & I’m honored to be a part of it: thank you again for inviting me.
Recently I received a letter from a woman who had transitioned. She was married and had two young children, and was trying to figure out if there had been any way she could have transitioned where she might have left out some of the pain & confusion her wife and family had experienced. In the email she sent me, she mentioned how it’s expected for couples to try to stay together through transition, and I had to rub my eyes and read it again.
Is it?
Whether it was her perception or indicative of a larger change, it surprised me. When Betty and I first met, it was considered absolutely unlikely that any couple would make it through transition. Shoot, it was a huge toss-up that any wife could tolerate her husband crossdressing. But it was when I started writing back to this woman, to explain how that had never been the case before, that it hit me: I started my first online support group nearly 10 years ago – 10 years this coming February, actually. That’s like 50 in trans years, right? In large part I founded it – and this might make some of you laugh – because I wasn’t angry or sad enough to fit in with the culture of the existing partners’ groups. I was weird for being supportive, and occasionally felt like I was a minority of one. I wasn’t, of course – people who are good with the whole thing don’t seek out support groups – but it was still rare, then, to find anyone who was just looking for community, for other couples in similar situations, to share notes and stories and have someone to be “out” about their partners’ transness with. So to hear, 9 short years later, that now it’s assumed that a couple will stay together, or at least try like hell to do so, shocked me.
The idea isn’t shocking – after all, I had no plan to leave Betty for crossdressing or if she transitioned. I was that kind of post-gender feminist who didn’t think gender really mattered that much. I wish that didn’t make me laugh so hard now. It’s still such a great idea, and in the world at large, I hope that it turns out that way. But in a relationship, I found, wow does gender matter. I’ve admitted recently to the sexism I discovered in myself once Betty started living as female, which I told myself was about her passing better, or more consistently, or protecting her from all that awful stuff we grow up hearing as girls – you should smile more, why don’t you wear dresses more often, etc. In essence it was probably a lot more about “hey, you don’t get to be more liberated than me just because you were socialized male.” I mean, she’d already had 30+ years of something resembling male privilege, so goddamn if she was going to play air guitar as a woman. (Air guitar is, btw, the only behavior I have decided is actually gendered masculine.)
This woman who wrote to me had read somewhere about Betty, about how she had made the decision to transition like a glacier – because they may move slow, but they win in the end, which meant us making decisions together, and in some cases, it meant her letting me make a few decisions, for stuff that was particularly hard for me, or symbolic. It took me a long time to give in to her getting her facial hair lasered, for instance, exactly because I knew it was a Gateway Drug (and honestly, I was right, because it was. Everything else followed much more swiftly after she’d done that.) Still, Betty had waited for me to give her the gift certificates for the laser place, which was my way of saying “well go ahead already.” I like to kid with her that her life really did turn out like a Fictionmania story, since I was the one who told her to get rid of her guy clothes already, and to change her name already, and to go on hormones already. None of it is easy, but sometimes it was easier for me, as the person who loved her, to see that she was “stuck” – kind of in the middle of transition, but holding out on doing some things until it was obvious to me that it was time to do more.
I had to tell that woman who wrote to me that I don’t know how Betty did that. I do know why, though: she respects me, and she loves me, and she has said, over & over again, that her goal was to stay married, only. She has had innumerable trans women ask her what her goal is, what her plan is, and she always says the same thing: “to stay married.” When they clarify that they were talking about her transition, she explains that she meant that the goal of her transition was to stay married. Not to be a woman, not to get an ID marked F, but to stay married.
Trans people tend to respond to her goal in one of two ways: either they look like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick, or they dismiss her, effectively, as whipped. The transguy we were on The Dr. Keith Showwith told her she was living for me and not for myself, to which we responded like dogs that had just been shown a card trick. Huh? We still can’t figure out how staying married to the person she loves is about me and not her. Her promise to me was : I’ll go as slow as I can. My promise to her was : I’ll go as fast as I can. It’s a kind of Gift of the Magi compromise, and so far, it’s worked.
What I told this woman who wrote to me was that growing up trans is probably something like knowing, somewhere, at some point in time, someone’s going to come up and throw a bucket of cold water on you. Maybe you don’t want it to happen, you don’t want to have to deal with it, you hope at some other time you’ll be more prepared for it then you are that moment. But for partners, and family, and close friends, it’s a little more like walking along humming happily to yourself when you turn a corner and someone throws that bucket of water on you. You don’t even know you’re wet for the first minute because you’re so surprised, so much in shock, for so long. You’re too busy asking “what was that?” to get around to asking “why?” and “why me?” and “what do I do now?” and “did I do something to deserve that?”
Unfortunately most of us don’t have time to get to those questions. We’re still asking the “what the heck was that?” question when our partner or sibling or friend or parent or child is handing us books to read, and recommending movies and websites, when you’re still looking for a towel and dry clothes.
I’m not bringing up pain so all the trans people here feel guilty. You didn’t throw the bucket. You tried to keep it from happening, in most cases. You tried to keep your loves ones from the pain and worry your being trans might cause.
But at the end of the day, it’s there. Not for everyone, of course. There are plenty of people I meet these days who have met a trans person after transition where there is very little pain and worry, or only as much as there needs to be what with there being no non-discrimination laws on the books yet. (I’ll get back to that in a minute.)
But even if it’s not a partner, there’s going to be someone in a trans person’s life who is sad and sorry and scared for you, and for them, whether it’s a parent or a friend or a sibling. You want the people who love you to support you, to help where and when they can, to hold your hand the first time you go to therapy or when you come back from the doctor’s office. This being trans stuff is hard for all of us, for you as an individual and for all of those who love you. So here’s what you can do, if you want to.
1. Please don’t get too upset with us for not getting your name right very quickly. As Betty and I recently discovered, dealing with someone’s name change is hard when you’ve called someone one name for years and they change it. Betty noticed because we knew a guy – and had a guy name, of course – who also ID’d as a crossdresser and had another name, and then transitioned and chose a third one. No matter how hard she tried, Betty found herself referring to her as her crossdresser name. The genders of the names were the same. It wasn’t about her gender. It was just about getting used to a new name, not an insult or an intentional assault on your gender identity. Ask them how long they think it will take, and give them that much time – on the condition that they don’t say “20 years” or “eternity” or something equally stubborn. After you’ve given them the time they’ve needed, then you can get cranky about it.
2. Please don’t ask us to get excited about chin hairs or manicures. We’ve probably had both. Sometimes your excitement about the changes you’re going through – whether temporary or permanent – can sound a lot like a nail being hammered down. We need to know about what makes you happy, of course, the same as we need to know about what made you sad, but the play-by-play may be better suited to your friends who are trans. That’s what all those online groups are about, the ones that don’t like us – your allies & partners – around.
3. Get friends who are trans to talk about some of this stuff with, or a therapist, or both. I try to spare Betty the intricate details of why I chose the word “withdrew” instead of “left” when I’m writing; I talk to other writers about that stuff, because they’re the only ones who actually care, and sometimes they don’t, either. Something that is endlessly fascinating to you is not endlessly fascinating to someone who is having a hard time accepting it, especially.
4. Really do try to walk in our shoes. The relief I felt when I heard that Kate Bornstein –THE Kate Bornstein – couldn’t handle her butch partner’s transition to male – was such a gigantic relief. Some of us already feel like jerks and beat ourselves up for not being cooler than we are with it. Some of us are uncomfortable feeling defined by someone else’s identity. Some of us resent change in any form.
5. Know the person you’re talking to. If your wife or parent or kid or friend is one of those people who is very nervous about financial security, say, you might want to start by explaining your career plan as a trans person – whether you’re crossdressing or transitioning or whatever you’re doing. Try to figure out what the sticking point might be, & address it. Betty knew early on I was capable of nearly anything as long as my control freak was petted sufficiently. If your wife doesn’t want to be considered straight, try not to talk about how everyone thinks you’re a straight couple all the time.
6. Try to find the right time and space for the big heavy conversations. That should kind of be a no-brainer, since it’s true for any big heavy conversation, but remember that what you may consider a cause for joy may result in something like sadness or dread in us.
There are probably other specifics but I think these six give you an idea of the kinds of stuff to look out for.
Again, none of this is to make any trans person here feel guilty. There’s no point to guilt. There are always going to be people who can’t come along, who tell you they really aren’t comfortable with any of it, and others who will try but who will fade as friends over time. You are not alone, as a trans person, in dealing with people having limitations in how much they can manage. Believe me, try writing a book and see how many of your friends tolerate not seeing your for six months at a clip. 😉
For the allies and partners and family and friends: you have a commitment you’ve made too: and that’s to move as fast as you can with the change. Your trans person is usually suffering, and usually already feels guilty and dumping all this stuff into your life and your lap. They are often impatient to get things moving because they’ve been stuffing it away for a long time, trying on ways to get it to go away. They may have been really good at being the gender they were raised to be. The new gender, or the temporary gender, or the non-gendered, may seem like a put-on in the beginning. There’s this period of unlearning gender and re-learning a new one that has come to fascinate me because it’s a time when someone’s authentic gender may seem inauthentic to the people around the person. The thing to remember is that we are all imperfectly gendered, and that’s the beauty of it.
In 10 years, since I formed that first group, I have seen so many changes: in myself, in my spouse, in our relationship, in the trans communities, in the LGBT and queer ones, and in mainstream America. These are my concentric circles of identity and belonging. Take a minute to think about yours and what you were doing a decade ago.
Some of you who are parents weren’t yet parents then. Some of you were married – some of you, to different people than you are now. Some of you have added another decade of anniversaries. Maybe you were single then & you’re partnered now, or vice versa. Some of you, maybe, have been through a dozen lovers in the past 10 years – and good on ya if you can keep that up for another decade. Some of you weren’t yet adults and others of you may be discovering second childhoods in midlife. Some of you lived in the world as men who are now women; some of you lived in the world as women or girls and are now men. Some have thrown off gender; others have just slid a little down on the sliderule of gender and come up with a new sum.
But that there have been changes in 10 years, changes for you, personally, and for everyone in this room, is without a doubt. Maybe they were more of the big bang variety or maybe they were of the sneakier, more incremental variety. Some changes were planned, some plans were changed along the way. But no matter what, I’m sure everyone here can think of a few changes they never predicted, some they never wanted, and some they hadn’t dreamt up yet.
To me, the metaphor, and metamorphosis of “us” as a couple nearly parallels the trans communities’ growth over time. I still feel like the new kid in this community, because so many of the people who were already active in trans politics were active when I showed up and are still active now. Have you seen the clip of the comedian Louis CK, from when he was on Conan O’Brien? The one about how everything is amazing and nobody is happy? At the very end he talks about how people complain about how long it takes to get from California to New York. “Five hours,” he explains, “that trip used to take 50 years. Some of you would die, and people would be born – you were a whole different group of people by the time you got there.” That’s what 10 years in trans time feels like to me – about 50. We’ve got this ENDA bill and the Hate Crimes bill and we really really really need them both. But the thing is, the fight for ENDA started a long time ago, when trans people were not their own political community. It started way back when with Virginia Prince, who in the 1950s had the nerve to go out crossdressed and write about it, publish a magazine, and get censored by the US Mail for it. Virginia Prince may be a difficult, complicated person to see as heroic – but it’s my opinion she was, in the highly eccentric way that trail-blazers have to be. Regular people don’t do stuff like that. She was doing that 20-30 years before a bunch of us Gen Xers were even born. When I started that first support group, she was still alive, a spring chicken of 90 or so. We just lost her this year.
• Boys Don’t Cry hadn’t been made.
• I hadn’t written either of my books; Jenny Boylan hadn’t transitioned nor written hers yet, either . Shoot, that Bailey book hadn’t been published yet (which always makes me wonder what Lynn Conway did with her free time).
• NCTE didn’t exist yet. When NCTE was first formed, no one returned calls if Mara said the full name of NCTE. She had to use the initials, only, to have a chance at getting a call through even to LGBT organizations. Now, the White House calls her.
• The only famous “pregnant man” was Patrick Califia’s partner, Matt Rice.
• 10 years ago, 4% of the US population was covered by local and state anti-discrimination laws. 40% are now.
That’s 10 years. It’s like light years to me sometimes, that the people I talk to and work with are sometimes 20 years younger than me. It’s exciting to see the continuing influx of people. Shoot, when Betty set up my blog for me, no one knew what a blog was – except you geeks, of course. We wanted to use the word “transgender” in the subtitle of My Husband Betty but my publishers said not enough people would know the word well enough to search for books using it. Imagine that. Now there’s a Transgender Studies Reader and a Transgender Rights Reader and a Transgender History book. And while people are still kind of shocked and impressed with themselves when they know a real live transsexual person, a lot more do. Shoot, the haters know about us enough to try to scare the American people off of health insurance by lying and saying American tax payers will be funding genital surgeries. (We won’t. Or abortions. But that’s a whole other issue entirely.)
It took 20 years between Virginia Prince and Stonewall. It took 20 years between Stonewall and Brandon Teena. Hopefully, it’ll be just about / a little more than 20 years between the first time ENDA was proposed (in 1974) and when it gets passed. It’s slow going, a long haul. Your friends won’t get your new name right for a much shorter time than it took for anyone to even entertain the idea of trans people being included in a national Hate Crimes Act. Like Louis CK said: “you’re a whole different group of people by the time you get there.”
But get there you do, and with your allies, whether they’re LGBs, or queer people, or PFLAG & TNET parents, or Trans Youth Advocates, or just plain vanilla straight, partners and family and friends usually do work it out. That’s the point. We need to change with you, and have our own journey, our own genders, our own jobs and families and friends to “come out to.” When you come out, we have to, and in my experience, many of us find a way, even if it takes a few years to manage it.
Thank you.