Now you can go vote for me, since I made the Top 10. Thanks to all who nominated me!
Top Ten Trans Reads
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.
- Butch is a Noun
- Gender Outlaw
- Crossdressing, Sex & Gender
- Sex Changes
- Head Over Heels
- Transgender Warriors
- Becoming a Visible Man
- Mom, I Need to be a Girl
- Whipping Girl
- Transition & Beyond
You’ll notice none of them is a YETA (Yet Another Transsexual Autobiography), since after you read Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There
Lambda Lit Transgender Finalists
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.
Whipping Girl
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.
Queer + Catholic (Like Me)
It looks like I’ll be one of a few readers reading our pieces that will appear in the Queer + Catholic
Encore!
It looks like Betty & I will be doing an encore performance here at Lawrence University before I/we leave at the end of term. It’ll be on Sunday, 3/16, at 3:30 PM, probably again in Science 102. Hope you can make it if you missed us last time.
Translations
Recently, someone from Brazil inquired as to whether or not a Portuguese translation of My Husband Betty existed. Sadly, the answer is no. Neither is there a Spanish or Japanese version — which are the ones I’m most often asked about.
Seal Press owns the translation rights for My Husband Betty, but I’m pretty sure I own them for She’s Not the Man I Married. Not 100% sure, but nearly. So if you – or someone you know – is interested in publishing a different translation of either, do let me know, or contact Seal Press. Likewise for Audio versions. Personally I’d like to see all of these happen, but so far, no luck.
The Writing Business
Two things you need to know if you want to be writer.
First, from Lewis Black: don’t.
New Resources
So I’ve discovered a few interesting new resources in team teaching Gender Studies 100 this semester, and never posted some I discovered last term. Here are a few:
- The Trouble with Testosterone by Robert Sapolsky – a very accessible read about the popular misunderstandings about testosterone (for instance, that it causes aggression)
- Iron Jawed Angels – about the last push for the vote for women in the US
- The Fire, Earth, Water trilogy by Deepa Mehta – stunning, beautiful film series by a woman director about various aspects of Indian culture. Mehta has a gentle but powerful hand as a story-teller.
Tillie Olsen
I didn’t know she died last year. I’m feeling a bit like a door just hit me in the face. I came to know her through her work at CUNY’s Feminist Press, and it was like a revelation: a working class white woman writer, brilliant and often neglected. Her book Silences was then, & is now, a revelation.
The NYT notes, in her obituary, that when Margaret Atwood reviewed it when it came out, she said:
“It begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long, circumstantially enforced silence,” Ms. Atwood wrote. “She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.”
The books she helped bring back – like Life in the Iron Mills and Daughter of Earth (Agnes Smedley’s autobiography) were some of the first reflections of where my people came from I’d ever read.
How frustrating not to have known.