Some of you might notice that my former list of “Required Reading” (which listed 10 books with their amazon.com links) has been changed to a “Recommended Reading” link, instead.
It looks simpler on the main page (good thing #1) and provides me with more flexibility to update the list (good thing #2). By creating a page – instead of just links – I was able to add more information (good thing #3), like links to discussions in the Reader’s Chair Forum and to interviews with authors originally posted on this blog.
I hope, in time, this will grow into a valuable resource and bibliography. I’m not listing books I didn’t like, since my mom taught me not to say anything when I didn’t have anything nice to say.
Please Donate
If you have the means and the intention, please donate to help affray our costs this month.
Thank you,
Helen & Betty
Gloria Anzaldua
I just found out – when looking up a reference – that writer Gloria Anzaldua died last year. Her essay “Speaking in Tongues” was an important one for me (it’s in the collection This Bridge Called My Back) and I’m sorry we have lost such a firebrand.
There’s a good interview with her from 2000 that appeared in the journal MELUS.
Blogging Betty
My lovely partner has decided to start a blog in order to rant about the innumerable things she thinks and reads. My best guess is that little will be trans-related, but it’ll be a great resource for interesting reading, especially political notes.
I suppose this means I have to start acting.
http://bettoi.blogspot.com/
Keeping Cool with Aeneas
Five Questions With… Interview with Jamison Green
Jamison Green is the author of Becoming A Visible Man
(Vanderbilt U. Press, 2004), which won the CLAGS’ Sylvia Rivera Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Finalist. He writes a monthly column for PlanetOut, and is a trans-activist of unmatched credibility. He is board chair of Gender Advocacy and Education, a board member for the Transgender Law and Policy Institute and the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, and served as the head of FTM International for most of the 1990s*. He is referred to in many other books about trans issues, including Patrick Califia’s Sex Changes, Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein, and Body Alchemy by Loren Cameron.
1. Betty and I often repeat your “there is no right way to be trans” idea, and I was wondering if any one thing contributed to you believing that.
I guess you could boil it down to the desire not to invalidate other people, but that desire has been informed by exposure to a wide variety of transgender and transsexual individuals of many ages, from many cultures, and many walks of life. Some people take it upon themselves to judge other trans people, to say “You’ll never make it as a man” or “as a woman,” or “you’re not trans enough,” “radical enough,” “queer enough,” whatever the case is. But I’ve known people who were told those things who went on to have successful transitions and generally satisfying lives, though they often felt burned enough by “the community” to stay away from it. I think it’s a shame that people cut themselves and/or others off from the potential for community, and I think that if we all truly believed there was room for everyone and we could learn to truly appreciate other’s differences and each person’s intrinsic value as a human being –and if we worked to make that a reality– then we, as collective trans people, might really make a positive difference in the world.
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Advantages of Having a Crossdressing Husband:
None, as far as I can tell.
Someone posted this ‘wish list‘ (or this one, or this one) of the good things about having a CD for a husband, and I mentioned how it was this kind of article that bothered me so much way back when. Ironic or not, I was about 300% more positive about having a CD for a husband than most of the women I met online too.
But this list, I suspect, was written by a CD, not a wife, or maybe it was written by a very cheerlead-y wife in an optimistic mood. (If anyone has any info on the actual origin/writer of this piece, I’d love to hear it.)
While I think it’s an advantage to have a considerate, gentle, domesticated husband, conflating one with the other is a mistake. I know considerate, gentle, domesticated men who are husbands who are not CDs. I have met CDs who are insensitive, beer-cracking, remote-stealing boors. And while I know that many CDs feel that their desire to be feminine makes them – well, more feminine – I’m not sure that CDing has anything whatsoever with how nice a man is, or how nurturing he is.
What I think CDing *can* do for a man is bring along the kind of crisis that forces a man to dig deeper into himself, to think hard about difficult issues of identity, and to think about who he wants to be, and how. Likewise, for a couple, that same kind of crisis can open new pathways: to conversation, to the meaning of trust, and to a reconsideration of expected gender roles and even sexuality.
But it doesn’t do any of those things automatically, by any stretch. It requires a great deal of integrity, responsibility and sheer nerve to face this stuff and deal with it in a way that isn’t destructive to self or family. And someone capable of that is not a “good man” nor a “good CD” but really just a good partner, spouse, parent, or child.
Cat Scratch Fever
Have a lovely weekend, all – and make sure you scratch whatever itches need scratching!
So You Think You Can… Queer Gender?
Tonight Betty & I saw about 10 minutes of that new So You Think You Can Dance? show, and what I saw made me ill. I like dancing, and I love watching dance.
The problem was this: one contestant is a 6′ tall woman, graceful and strong, who got on the show doing Irish dancing. During the elimination rounds, from what I can figure, different groups of dancers are put with different choreographers, blah blah blah. This tall woman wound up with a Latin dance choreographer, and at some point he picks up a tiny woman (she was maybe 96 lbs, if that) and kind of had her twist around him, like a snake, or a vine, from about his shoulder to the floor.
The tall woman knew she couldn’t do that with any man in the room; she was taller than all of them. Interestingly, the choreographer was significantly shorter than her, and shorter than the other men in the room.
But not being willing to give up, she tried the move with him, and about halfway through the twist, they both fell over, because he couldn’t support her 6′ tall frame.
She got upset (you know how weepy these reality TV shows are) and his response was to play a joke on her, by showing the “final move” for the dance number, where he literally threw this tiny 96 lb. woman all over the place – over his head, off to one side, through his legs, upside-down – and the tall dancer just left in disgust, knowing she’d lose because she couldn’t be tossed around like that. Ha ha, what a funny joke, to make a tall beautiful woman feel like a horse. I wanted to smack him for her.
Anyway, I just sat there feeling like Buster Keaton on the set of a Marx Brothers movie* thinking, “But there’s such an easy solution to this problem – let her toss around the smallest guy there, or the 96 lb. woman the guy was using!”
But alas, primetime is not ready for such radical gender inversion, not yet.
* During the 1930s, the late, great Buster Keaton often worked at MGM working out gags for other comedians .
Five Questions With… Alice Novic
Alice (Richard) Novic is the author of Girl Talk magazine’s “Go Ask Alice” column and also the author of the newly-published Alice in Genderland, a modern (readable!) memoir by a crossdresser. Dr. Richard Novic, Alice’s male self, is a psychiatrist who lives with his wife in the LA area, and his femme self, Alice, has a steady boyfriend.
1) How did being a psychiatrist aid/hinder your self-acceptance?
Well, Helen, I’d have to say it’s good to be a crossdresser and a psychiatrist. As I trained in psychiatry, I came across more people and ideas than I ever would have encountered on my own. That perspective gave me the confidence to shrug off all the conventional negativity about crossdressing, and instead see it as an exuberant and healthy part of human diversity.
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Alice Novic”