Posted on

The Penn State Law Talk

I’m hoping that this talk was recorded as planned and so will be available on Penn State Dickinson School of Law’s website, eventually, because there were a lot of interesting questions discussed in the Q&A after I spoke. Prof. Rains also added a lot of useful legal insight.

I started with a kind of preface in order (1) to define terms like transgender, MTF and FTM, and also (2) to explain that while people like drag queens and crossdressers are considered part of the transgender community, discussions about legal marriage issues don’t always or often effect them; that is, this talk concerns people who identify nearer to the transsexual end of things. that said, drag queens are often already gay and so deal with the same marriage discrimination all gay people do, and crossdressers often suffer with the stigma of being perverts, and one of the reasons they are not out is exactly because they don’t want their wives to divorce them, or lose custody of their children, or lose their jobs, all of which can & does happen to crossdressers who come out.

I never expected that any aspect of my life would cause me to speak at a law school to future lawyers about the odd ways that my life has become complicated by laws about gender and marriage. I’m surprised two-fold: for starters, I never expected to get married, since as a younger and Very Serious Feminist I saw it as a Tool of Patriarchy, symbolic at least of the ways women have always been chattel, and so, not for me. But I also never expected to get married because I was, starting as a teenager in the late 80s, an ally of gay and lesbian people.

& Then I met Betty, who at the time we met presented as male, and as she likes to explain, we knew, both of us, nearly from the get-go that we were supposed to be together. It’s a difficult feeling to explain, and poets have tried, but it took us a few years to decide once & for all that we were in this thing together. We decided to get married because things were so easy between us; on our 2nd date we sat together and read, one of us The Nation and the other The New York Times. When you’re something like an old married couple on your 2nd date, you know that you’re doomed.

Continue reading “The Penn State Law Talk”

Posted on

Philly IFGE

When we arrived at IFGE, we were greeted nearly immediately by Veronica Vera & Mariette Pathy Allen, even while we were checking in! Miss Vera would answer the question “Are crossdressers obsolete?” in her opening remarks the next day, & she looked fantastic. (Her answer, in a nutshell, was “no.”)

Crossdressers made a graceful stand for their place in the trans community this year, as in addition to Miss Vera, Miqqi Gilbert received a Trinity Award & delivered an acceptance speech that both (1) asked crossdressers to step up & (2) asked anyone who would disrespect or exclude CDs to step off. I was damned glad to hear it, since there really are some trans women who come off so smug I often feel tempted to mention that being a woman does not prevent one from liking crossdressers.

Donna Rose (author of Wrapped in Blue) & Alyson Meiselman (one of Christie Lee Littleton‘s lawyers) won Trinity Awards as well, which was an interesting juxtaposition, since Donna Rose is on the Board of HRC, which I imagine Meiselman considers something like the Evil Empire, since she delivered an acceptance speech that detailed exactly how much groups like Equality Georgia (& by extension, groups like HRC) sold out the trans community by not excluding “gender identity & expression” in legislation that got them theirs (discrimination protection for gays & lesbians).

Dallas Denny was given the Virginia Prince Award for Lifetime Achievement, and intended to explain that she’d turned down the award in years past because she was the paid editor of Transgender Tapestry at the time, but as she stepped down last year, she felt free to accept it this year, & did so with a concise list of what concerns her about the current state of the trans community (underfunded orgs) & what encourages her (the increases in visibility).

The biggest, nicest surprise for us was having Jamison Green unexpectedly in attendance. He stayed over from having given the keynote at Trans Health the previous week in Philly. His presence always adds some warmth and intelligence.

Our favorite new personality & friend was Ethan St. Pierre of NTAC & TransFM & FUAH. (NTAC, btw, has merged with IFGE, the news of which was announced at this conference.) Betty finally got to meet the irrepressible Monica Helms, of TAVA, who I met last year when I went by myself, & many games of wise-cracking pool were played.

& There ends the bigwig update from IFGE. More on our personal experiences when I get there.

Posted on

Back from IFGE

‘Twas a lot of week while we were away: we left for IFGE Wednesday, and the very next day I accepted a job to teach Gender Studies & heard news of Kurt Vonnegut’s death; later I found out my uncle had died, too. On Saturday we got a call from our cat/fish-sitter who had to tell us our Omega – the last of our first generation of fish – had died as well.

Our 9th anniversary of having met was on Saturday, and New York State managed to get us our tax refund on Friday. I sold all the books I brought with me to IFGE – 27 in all – & I decided we should probably invest in a laptop for the rest of this tour.

Much more when I’ve gone through the mail, emails, & the like.