Sign a petition to get New York State to add the ERA to the state constitution.
So It’s Begun
I’m starting to get emails from people asking about the new book and whether or not I’d be willing to come to one trans conference or another. Likewise, the “call for presenters” emails are also showing up.
This year, for obvious reasons, Betty & I would love to go to all the conferences we’ve attended before – to celebrate the new book, to help more people, to dispel what rumors we can and to share what we’ve learned in the years since we’ve been to them.
But the same old problem stands in my way: we can’t afford it. My publishers don’t pay for conferences, and a physical book tour, per se, isn’t financially feasible. And as per usual, unless I’m to be the keynote speaker – such as at First Event – I’m told over and over again that the conferences do not help presenters get to these conferences or even waive conference fees, much less pay for hotel rooms or travel costs or the like. I say “I’m told” because that’s what conference organizers tell people when they have requested my attendance – and yet that’s not what I hear from other presenters.
Interestingly, I’ve been told that because I’m selling books I’m a “commercial interest,” which amuses me, considering that even if I sold a book to every single person who came to these conferences – which is far from likely – I still wouldn’t make enough money to break even! But of course I don’t actually sell my own books at these conferences: IFGE does.
So my response to everyone just now is that I honestly don’t know if we can come. We can’t afford to put out the $1000-2000 it costs for us to go to a conference, but we certainly can’t do that several times next year. It costs us more of course because there are two of us – and people always want Betty to come, because she’s Betty.
Mind you, I’m not asking to make money going to these things. I just don’t want to have to spend my own money working for a conference that is – from all reports – making money. I’m happy to donate my time and costs to conferences that are non-profit and have done so in the past. It would help if I felt any of these conferences had a clear-cut policy on these issues. But beyond all that, I know I can draw an audience because I’m told I make a decent advocate for partners, and that a lot of what I have to say is very different from what you hear in the rest of the trans community, and that that difference is useful.
Unfortunately, then, I can’t go unless my expenses are covered, and that is up to the organizing committees of the various conferences.
Short Film
Watch this short film about a Taiwanese-born Chinese-American trans person.
Chic Heroine
As if I didn’t like Tina Fey enough already, she’s gone and done it again.
But Tina, please don’t insult the trannies like that. Paris Hilton aspires to look like a tranny.
Lumeric was Both
“Just ask whether Lumeric was a man or a woman.”
“And what’s the right answer?” Candy asked.
“Both,” Malingo and Jimothi replied at the same moment.
Candy looked confused.
“Lumeric was a Mutep,” Malingo explained. “Therefore both a he and a she.”-from Clive Barker’s Abarat, where Lumeric the Mutep was also a magician of the highest order.
Rock & a Hard Place
I’ll admit that I find it incomprehensible to remain part of a Church that didn’t want me as a member or that felt I was “less than.” When I found out at a young age that I wouldn’t be “allowed” to be a priest, I washed my hands of the Church, and while I still consider myself culturally Catholic*, I’m also an agnostic and don’t miss mass. & I was always allergic to the incense, so I don’t miss that either. But I do still go to Saint Patrick’s to light candles in my grandmother’s memory, and I like to think she’d be quite pleased knowing that she – even from the grave – gets me into a church at all. I still read The Lives of the Saints, and I love the peace I can achieve, easily, when I’m sitting in a Church between masses. The quiet, the art, the ritual, the iconography: all these things make me feel at home.
But queer folks often don’t feel at home if they actually believe in their faith and want to be committed members of a faith-based community. One of my fellow Catholics has joined the UU but I think misses something of the aesthetics of Catholicism (one of the few things, imho, the Catholic Church did right. If you don’t feel a sense of awe entering Saint Patrick’s, I’d be very surprised).
One of the things I see Betty struggle with is how the faith she was raised in might condemn her for who she is, and she’s the one who brought this article to my attention.
I applaud the way these folks have stuck to a faith they believe in, that they feel comfortable in, and have not backed down or compromised their beliefs. But at the same time I find it quite baffling: if literal and conservative interpretation of the Bible yields the label of “sinner” for any gay or lesbian, yet you know you didn’t choose to be gay, why stay? Jesus’ advice, that those who are without sin cast the first stone, might be the key. Because we are all sinners, aren’t we? In one way or another, we are. The man who casts homosexuals out of his church or makes them feel uncomfortable has masturbated once in his life, at least. Or maybe he’s gambled, or coveted his neighbor’s wife, or over-eaten, or blasphemed, or doubted, or lied, or eaten shellfish. There are plenty of ways to sin – especially if one’s going to be strict about Old Testament restrictions – other than having sex with someone of your own gender, and I find the current Christian obsession with homosexuality as the sin that inspires Christians to act in decidedly un-Christian ways quite baffling. I still don’t remember anything in the Bible that says human beings should be judging each other’s sinfulness; last I checked, a sinner’s sins are between him and his God.
As someone raised Catholic I can’t help but find it tragic; after all, one of the huge reasons the Protestant religions happened was because the Church on Earth was interfering in the way a sinner might know his God, so for me, this current revival of people thinking they know the mind of God is a little bit of (the worst of) history repeating itself.
Continue reading “Rock & a Hard Place”
HB: In the Flesh
I just received the final lineup for the Erotic Memoirs Reading I’ll be doing for Rachel Kramer Bussel’s In the Flesh series on January 17th.
Giving Birth (& Other Metaphors for the Creative Impulse)
I chose to take my road without children. It doesn’t make me shallow or immature, it makes me realistic. If I had children it would be to satisfy other people, not me. I am a lover, daughter, sister, writer and friend. I don’t need the label of mother to make me more. I am enough.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this article since Marlena posted a link to it, because it is so often my own experience (except that I never moved to the West Coast and most of my friends are right here, in the tri-state area, and still I see them about as often as she sees hers). That said, I know that having children is a lot like a new relationship in the way it can completely occupy someone, becoming their sole focus for a while. But I also know they come back; maybe they don’t come back as the same person they once were, but they do. Older, wiser, fatter, perhaps.
For me there’s been a simultaneous self-occupation, in my writing, which is a kind of trade-off. My friends with children understand that my writing occupies my mind and my time better than anyone else. But what bothers me about women “disappearing” into having children is when they expect the rest of us to want to, or otherwise to think that everyone cares about the details of what their kids did. I mean, I know I bore people because I have gender on the brain. I don’t assume spending eight months writing a book is a universal experience.
Most of the women I know certainly know that child-rearing isn’t either, but other parts of our culture do assume that. For us childfree types, it becomes kind of tedious, explaining that we don’t want children or don’t feel incomplete or that – god forbid – we are completely oblivious to any biological clock that’s supposed to be ticking so loudly in our heads.
You’d think, what with overpopulation, those of us who choose not to have children would be encouraged – but we’re not.
Often what I hear from parents is something along the lines of “It’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done,” as if my life is without meaning because I don’t have children. My standard response these days is, “Well apparently you’ve never written a book.” Smug Street can go both ways, after all.
Dr. Keith
We taped an episode of the Dr. Keith show last week, and I’ve been sorting out my thoughts since then. I found the experience exhausting. From all reports (Donna, my sister, another friend) we were good. But some days it’s hard to consider the toll that’s paid.
I’m not sure yet what that toll is exactly, but it feels something like a distilled version of all the other work we do for college audiences & at trans conferences except the audience is so different: at one point during the taping I looked at a woman in the audience whose jaw was literally hanging agape.
It doesn’t help that I’ve replayed it all a million times in my head, hoping I said things that make sense. Before that I worried for days beforehand about whether I could really get something across of what this life is like for both the partner and the trans person. It’d be nice to be able to shut off my brain, to stop wondering what the whole show will be like, since we weren’t on alone: we had the company of a trans man & his ex as well as an intersex person.
Overall, I liked Dr. Keith’s take: his general tone was one of “Wow, that’s one hell of a hand you’ve been dealt,” and although the show was a little too anatomically-focused for me, people DO want to know about body mods and I think it was handled about as well as it could have been. It couldn’t have been thorough – transition, transgender, and intersex are a lot to cover in an hour – but it wasn’t sensational.
So I can only wait to see what the rest of you think. It should air before mid-March, and of course I’ll post info about the airdate as soon as I get it.
Guest Author: Katherine
There is a part of me that would like to rename this, “How to Estrange the Love of Your Life” or even “How Not to be Trans” but I think Katherine’s original title, “8 Easy Steps,” is a touch more delicate. Katherine is an mHB boards veteran.
I’ll teach you all this in 8 easy steps
A course of a lifetime you’ll never forget
I’ll show you how to in 8 easy steps
I’ll show you how leadership looks when taught by the best
–Alanis MorrissetteOne: My trans-needs and experiences will always be more exotic, painful, and interesting than your existence.
Two: Excessive narcissism can look like, “Hey, I’m just finally taking care of myself here!†but is every bit about creating the I-It relationships that Martin Buber warned us about.
Three: “I’m trans. You don’t understand me. I am complicated and, like—for sure, you’re not,†so you don’t have permission to judge me even when I am fully deserving of your judgment, even when your life is equally if not more complicated. I scored the ultimate “get out of jail free card†in life’s version of Monopoly. “Do not pass ‘Go,’†etc., and get your ass back on Baltic Avenue. My life is Boardwalk and Park Place, special.
Four: My martyr complex is so much fun for others! Thank you for hating me and disapproving of what I am doing; it makes me so much more special than you and is the ultimate buzzkill toward having a meaningful conversation about how and what I am doing is scaring and confusing to you, is scaring and confusing me.
Five: Let me be wonderfully sympathetic about your weight gain, about your angst, about your doubts, about your sense that this isn’t right for you, but let me still manage to appropriate your feelings and help you feel guilty again for having them.
Six: Oh, you want something to say about how my identity change is affecting your identity too with our friends, family, and co-workers? How shallow of you. Let me make you in these matters too feel guilty about caring for such things.
Seven: Let me attempt to appropriate the womanhood experiences you spent a lifetime living, reacting to, and making peace with in this sexist culture and act as though your role no longer matters and that the space you earned as wife, daughter, and sister can be appropriated by the “How to be Transsexual for Dummies†manual.
Eight: Let me shirk my responsibility to you by spending more time online, on the phone, and in person with my trans acquaintances than I do with you, designing for example cutesy posts about eight steps, while you are in the other room alone and afraid, facing as you do so often another day with bravery and grace.
I’ve been doing research for years
I’ve been practicing my ass off
I’ve been training my whole life for this moment (I swear to you)
Culminating just to be this well-versed leader before you
–Alanis Morissette