Author: Helen Boyd

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Jeff & Esther

I mentioned Esther Williams to a wife of a crossdresser not long ago and she looked at me blankly – silly me, assuming everyone knows the story of the million-dollar mermaid and her crossdressing movie star boyfriend.

“Jeff Chandler was standing in the middle of the bedroom in a red wig, a flowered chiffon dress, expensive high-heeled shoes and lots of makeup,”

she said about her near-husband, Jeff Chandler, Hollywood hunk.
Here’s a great review that talks about the genderedness of it all that originally appeared in Salon, and I find it interesting the way he ties in her LSD trip, the recognition of her own animus, and how her acid-induced knowledge of her male self makes a crossdressed husband especially horrifying.
I wonder if the acid is required, since otherwise I fall into the same category of being aware of my animus, except I didn’t scream. Not even once.

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No Sissy Stuff

I was just watching a documentary about Gene Kelly, who my mom always loved & who I came to love watching as well, and they mentioned that in 1958 he did a TV show called Dancing: A Man’s Game which basically showed how the movements and timing of sports were much the same as the movements and timing of dancing.
Interestingly, Kelly wanted to be a Pittsburgh Pirate, and only accidentally (or incidentally) became the dancer and movie star he was.
Still, the documentary asserted that Kelly is the one who re-defined dance to include not only athleticism but a blue-collar masculinity, evidence by his own quote:

I didn’t want to move or act like a rich man. I wanted to dance in a pair of jeans. I wanted to dance like the man in the streets.

Betty did a part a long time ago where he had to leap up on a desk and sing wearing a pair of jeans; his character was a union organizer, and it was the actual musical called The Cradle Will Rock (that the Tim Robbins movie is about). & Yes, it was probably my favorite part he ever did (though in a three-way tie with Algernon and Macheath).

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Three More Ways

Three more ways you can help the larger trans community, according to NCTE:
#26: Make a Restroom More Accessible to Trans People
&
#27: Collaborate with another group on a community project or social event.
&
#28: Work to pass an anti-discrimination policy at your workplace
Eventually there will be 52 suggestions, one per week, listed at the NCTE website.

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Please Donate

If you can, please donate to help us keep doing what we do. Thanks to all of you who have contributed in the past.
I should also mention that starting August 2nd, I will be more available to do consulting or coaching, so if you’ve been putting off talking to someone – whether it’s a crisis or you’d just like to have an hour of my time, uninterrupted – now is a good time to do so.

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On the Side

There are times when I think I have achieved the ideal form of monogamy: I spent the day with my husband for our anniversary, and now I’m about to go out to a lesbian club with my girlfriend. (And yes, I prefer thinking of Betty as my girlriend on the side, not as my wife. It’s sexier, no?)

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Ben Barres, My New Hero

So someone is finally using transness as the last tool in the feminist toolbox, and I’m pleased as punch. Ben Barres, a PhD in various types of biology at Stanford, has written a response to Larry Summer’s views on women in science and gotten it published in the journal Nature.
Barres is an FTM who is recounting some of the experiences he’s had as a female scientist, and more recently as a male scientist – just to demonstrate the difference to people who don’t seem to get it:

Once (at MIT), he was told that a boyfriend must have solved a hard math problem that he had answered and that had stumped most men in the class. After he began living as a man in 1997, Barres overheard another scientist say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister’s work.”

– but not only that, he’s actively working on getting female scientists more awards and grants:

Last year, Barres convinced the National Institutes of Health to change how it chooses talented young scientists to receive its Director’s Pioneer Award, worth $500,000 per year for five years. In 2004, the 64-person selection panel consisted of 60 men — all nine grants went to men. In 2005, the agency increased the number of women on the panel, and six of the 13 grants went to women. Barres said that he has now set his sights on challenging what he perceives as male bias in the lucrative Howard Hughes Investigator program, an elite scientific award that virtually guarantees long-term research funding.

Quite a few major papers have covered his editorial, and if anyone out there has a copy, I’d love to see the full text.
Thank you, Ben Barres!

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Happy Birthday, Kath

My very lovely sister Kathleen turns a new age today. (It’s not my decision whether or not she wants anyone to know how old she is, and I’m no fool.) She has been very, very supportive of my writing for years now in both practical and emotional ways.
One night, a long time ago, when we were sharing an apartment (read: I was living in her apt), I wrote a short piece about my parents, in honor of their anniversary, and left it for her when I went to bed at whatever godforsaken hour I did. She worked for a bank most of her life, and got it when she woke up a few hours later. When I saw her next, she was holding it in her hand, kind of gesticulating with the pages, and said, “So you just sat down and wrote this, just like that?” I shook my head yes and watched as the lightbulb went off over her head; I’m not sure in all of her years of banking it had ever occurred to her that someone would sit down and write a short story for no reason whatsoever.
It was like our own sororal cultural exchange: not too much later, she sat me down and taught me how to write a budget. As it turns out I’m excellent at writing them; it’s keeping to them that’s the tricky part.
But a very happy birthday to you, Kath!

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2nd Preview of She's Not the Man I Married

This excerpt is from Chapter 2: The Opposite of 49.
And I should mention I’m not going to say for sure the chapter names are going to stay the same either, or even if the chapters will stay in the same order.

It took me a long while to figure out how gender and power were intersecting for Betty and me. I had trained myself to be more submissive, and certainly worried that my natural ability to wear the pants in our relationship was going to screw things up. I always felt worried about being myself with a guy, because everything told me I wasn’t supposed to be the way I was naturally. It was difficult, to come to terms with out-butching Betty by a long shot. (Granted, I actively try to bring out her native tomboy, if there’s one in there, because I won’t have an “I broke a nail” partner.) Interestingly, when I first started experimenting with saying out loud that I was more the husband than the wife, I got nervous giggles and was corrected a lot. Plenty of people said right away, “But you’re not butch,” or “Betty’s still stronger than you,” or some kind of affirmation of my femininity. Some of my characteristics are feminine, and very innately so, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t also wear the pants. Still, I’ve been a little astonished at the ways in which people have effectively said, “Don’t say that out loud” when I talk about being the one in charge. It’s as if I were embarrassing them somehow. This has been one of many experiences over the past couple of years that has made me realize: (1) tomboys are okay as long as they are children; (2) masculinity in women makes people nervous; (3) heterosexuality was no place to figure out how to be who I am; and (4) most people don’t want to talk about how their relationships are gendered.