Tonight it was brought to my attention that a CD in the online group A Crossdresser’s Secret Garden had warned another CD that my book was too heavy on the issues surrounding transition, and so recommended Peggy Rudd’s book My Husband Wears My Clothes, instead. I have to start off by explaining that I don’t have an issue with some people preferring Peggy Rudd’s book over my own; we both have our audiences, and as Dr. Rudd once said to me, ‘it’s not like there isn’t enough room for two of us.’ (She also told me I didn’t have to answer all the email I’d get, which was sound advice I’ve mostly failed to follow.)
It’s funny that this advice should come just now, but not just because my interview with Melanie and Peggy Rudd is the Five Questions With… blog post that precedes this one, but also because – well, transition issues come up in exactly one chapter of My Husband Betty. I told the story I did because it was part of my own experience. When I was trying to reach out to other couples, especially other girlfriends of CDs, I happened to meet Katie, and we had an instant rapport. At the time we became friends, every crosssdressing website emphasized the fact that *crossdressers don’t transition.* I found out otherwise when I watched my friend Katie go through a painful divorce that was caused by her crossdressing partner’s transition.
And while I’m happy to report that Katie and Elle have both gone on to live happy, separate lives, it was precisely because of that experience that I included their story – and how it affected our story – in my book. Because I didn’t want to see even one other Katie get blindsided like that, not ever again.
In the warnings about how “scary” my book is, the CD pointed out once again that CDs rarely transition. Or that a very small percentage do. And the ironic thing is that I know the group, and I know that quite a few of their members were CDs when they joined who later transitioned. Some of them – gasp! – were even married. So it makes me wonder why this information is re-iterated over and over again, when no-one has any idea how many CDs eventually transition.
I certainly don’t know the percentage. I just wonder at what point people think it’s okay to mislead spouses like that. I mean, if you had a 1 in 100 chance of finding out that your marriage was going to be dead in the water in a decade, would that be a high enough risk for you to maybe warn your future partner? 2 in 100? 5 in 100? 10 in 100?
And while I understand the need to help wives who are already married keep their wits about them and not freak out, I cannot abide the idea that anyone is telling a girlfriend or a fiancee of a CD not to worry about it – especially if they’re under the age of 30.
And while I also know there are no guarantees in this life, I also know that plenty of crossdressers said they’d never transition and did. Wives or no wives, children or no children. And I wonder why this urge to reassure wives comes so fast. I know after I found out that all those people who had told me that *crossdressers never transition* were full of it, I held them accountable for having bullshitted me. Because even if the chance is 1 in 1000, a woman deserves to know the truth, especially if she’s about to make a lifetime commitment. Or have children. Or buy a house with her husband. Or work more to put him through school. Or start saving for retirement.
A woman deserves to know – no matter what the situation – that there’s a chance her CD boyfriend may eventually become her ex-wife. I’m tired of no-one wanting to say it outloud. I’m tired of hearing how it’s a negligible percentage. I want to know who gave anyone the right to decide what “negligible” means when it comes to a person’s life. And I want to know too where they get the numbers that have convinced them it’s “negligible.”
Because I’d like to see them. And I know they don’t exist. My best guess why crossdressers think the number is so negligible is because transitioning women leave support groups intended for crossdressers when they transition, so crossdressers stop seeing them – a kind of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ phenomenon. Either that or they’re going by that whacked Tri-Ess logic, that says a CD who transitions was never a CD, anyway – even if they identified one for a couple of decades.
. . .
The even richer irony for me is that so many married transwomen and partners of transitioning women don’t read my book because the word “crossdresser” is in the title. Isn’t that rich? Sometimes I think I should find myself a small army of terrified CDs to go into the TS community and explain exactly how much My Husband Betty is about transitioning! Yet I had a partner in another group I’m in say – after having read my book – that there is nothing out there for spouses of transitioning people.
Papa Bear on one hand, Mama Bear on the other. Now both of them can’t be right.
It’s actually the partner of the transitioning person who’s right, in my opinion. My Husband Betty is not about transition; the story of Katie and Elle is a cautionary tale, only. It’s there so that others will understand it can happen. And it can happen even when the couple is deeply in love. I am hoping to write about what it’s like to live with someone who is considering transition in my next book, however, and I’ll certainly let you know if/when I do.
What I have always recommended is this: that any wife who is new to having a crossdressing partner read the first four chapters of My Husband Betty first, sit on them, mull over them, discuss them with her therapist and her partner. After a while, when she hits a certain comfort level, and she’s ready for more, she can read (the dreaded, terrifying, all-too-realistic) Chapter Five. She can read Peggy Rudd’s book(s) before or after mine – it’s not like there’s a whole slew of books by wives out there, is there? Some will prefer one over the other. Some will find them complementary in some ways. Others will hate and excoriate one and bless the heavens for the other. That’s not the issue for me; the issue is that sometimes CDs are so freaked out by the fact that I even talk about transition they remember the whole book being about it.
After my experience with Katie, and after doing all the research for My Husband Betty, I became convinced that if there’s anything a crossdresser’s wife needs to know, it’s exactly what crossdressers don’t tell her. You see, I didn’t write the book to scare anyone. I wrote it because I’m a wife, and I wish someone had told me everything I had to find out for myself. I wanted to spare any other wife the pain that Katie went through, and the fear I experienced. I wrote it once in the book, and I’ll write it again here: crossdressers do transition. Not all of them, not most of them, but some of them. And their potential spouses need to know.
A Boyd in the Hand
People ask me why I chose “Helen Boyd” for my pen name, and just tonight on the boards Andrea wondered if there was some connection to it being more “WASPy” than my given name, but no.
I chose it for being queerer, actually.
Helen’s my middle name, and there’s nothing exciting in that except that I was named Helen for my grandmother, and the name “Helen” (and its variants, Eleanor and the like) fill in a lot of my family tree. (My cousin, who did our geneology, likes to joke that there are only two pages in the Polish naming book.) I’m proud to bear it, as my grandmother was one of my role models growing up.
But Boyd is a little more complicated.
I certainly didn’t choose it to sound WASPy, as I’ve always regretted I didn’t get one of the more ethnic names – like Frollo or Topolski – I might have had (if we lived in a matriarchy).
It’s not Brooklynese for “bird,” as Mariette Pathy Allen once mused, either.
The thing is, I’d already been using ‘bettysgrrl’ with “Helen,” so I was turning up in people’s address books as “Helen B.” So I needed a last name that started with B, and it was the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay who loaned it to me.
In 1919, before she became a famous and popular poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote some early magazine pieces under the name Nancy Boyd. She was infamously bisexual, and some of the love poems she wrote were – gasp! – written to women. Thus, the pen name, borrowed from the phrase “nancy boy” which is slang for a sissy, a momma’s boy, an effeminate male. Millay, who signed her name Vincent (never Edna), was “Nancy Boy’d.”
I’ve always thought it was funny, and genderbent, and a nice bit of queer literary history, as in: a woman poet writing lesbian poems to girls straight out of Vassar uses a genderslur about feminine boys as her pen name, and in choosing my pen name in order to write a book about my feminine husband, I thought it was only appropriate to borrow Millay’s pansexual, genderqueer joke, since I admire her both as a woman and as a poet.
Recently it’s become even more lovely that I chose Boyd since Neil Gaiman – who is a favorite writer of mine, and one who coincidentally has written more than one cool, sympathetic story about a tranny – just published his new novel Anansi Boys, which is again another pun on “nancy boy” but this time borrowing from the Jamaican stories of Anansi the Spider.
An ironic coincidence is that after I chose the name, it turned out to be the actual name of one of my Jewish friend’s grandmothers – ie, someone who would have been the last person I’d have asked if he had a relative named “Boyd.” Go figure.
(Well, I think it all makes perfect sense.)
And for those of you who are wondering, and who have asked: please keep calling me Helen. I actually prefer it to my given name.
Passing
I have a lot of thoughts about our family reunion trip to Colorado, but I’ve been at least meaning to point out the awfully creepy feeling I had passing for a “straight” couple while we were there. Since Betty’s parents do not know their son is any gender but male, she went as “he” for the five days we were visiting.
I’d like to be able to have a time machine right now, and do the whole trip again with Betty as her female self, and us as a queer/lesbian couple, and so really be able to compare the difference. But I can’t, so I’ll theorize about what I think might have been different – and how – later this week, before it’s 5am and all my braincells are shot.
Can't Stand the Suspense
As many of you know, I’m in the process of trying to sell my next book – a process that is a little like torture, a little like some kind of humiliation roleplay in BDSM, but also a little like that “keep the ball in the air” game people play at major sporting events.
Torture because I’m a control freak and there’s nothing left for me to do; it’s all in the hands of my agent at this point.
Humiliation because it meant putting together all my stats, every thing I’ve ever done of note, every review, every *everything* and adding it up. What are you worth? What have you done? Why should I be impressed? In some sense, it’s like the worst interview ever, but not in person. And ironically, I’m not in bad shape in terms of what I’ve done, either. Something about the fact of it – like a work review – is just innately unpleasant.
Keeping the ball in the air because every day is a new day, a new publisher, someone else to say “hey, really, I write good books” So there’s this constant game of the balloon wanting to fall (I didn’t sell 50,000 copies of MHB yet) and of keeping it up (but I was a finalist for the Lambda Award) and watching it fall again (but I didn’t win the Lambda award) and popping it back in the air again (MHB was mentioned in Entertainment Weekly), and on and on and on.
Off to the Post Office to mail more press kits. Wish me luck, folks – not luck in getting published, but luck in not having my head explode before then.
The Phoenix Boycott Redux
Apparently I’ve stirred things up a bit by mentioning that I was boycotted in Phoenix by members of the local Tri-Ess group, Alpha Zeta. Word from Tri-Ess is that there was no “official” boycott whatsoever – not amongst the local group, nor from the National.
I was going by what I was told by one of the organizers of the event – which was reiterated by other people in the T community there. In fact, I was told this several times, over & over again actually. I nearly felt the need to address it in my speech (which was already written) but didn’t. That is, I felt bad to hear that my appearance there might have dissuaded people from coming.
The difficulty is, I get reports and I get reports. Just yesterday I heard from a spouse who was asked to write something for The Sweetheart Connection (Tri-Ess’ newsletter for spouses). She intended to write a review of my book, and then was told it wasn’t wanted, that “books about transsexuals have nothing to do with us.”
I didn’t ever think there was a boycott in the official capacity. What I thought was that a group of AZ members agreed amongst themselves not to come. Tri-Ess’ National leadership has been very clear: they have not made any public statement against the book, nor do they support it. Kind of “live and let live.” Some local chapters have read and reviewed the book, and as far as I know, were not reprimanded for doing so.
It turns out, of course, that there were other underlying politics involved, including the recent inclusion of a local BDSM group in the Glitz. Apparently, several Alpha Zeta members were not attending because they are uncomfortable with the presentations of some of the BDSM-oriented CDs.
Let me make it clear: I don’t feel defensive about Tri-Ess, and I don’t have any kind of “agenda” with them. For instance, I’ve had people forward me emails from other Tri-Ess groups where CDs are bashing the book without having read it! Stupid stuff like that. People like stirring it up – apparently too many have too much time on their hands.
On the other hand, there are many Tri-Ess members who have been positive about the book and without agreeing with everything I’ve said in the book, understand I’m on your side – even Tri-Ess’ side, in fact. I’d just like to see the group expand their horizons a bit – to catch up with the times, and the types of couples that are coming up now. I have never failed to acknowledge what a life-saver Tri-Ess has been for many, and I can cite the instances in the book where I talk about that. My only issues have ever been the half-truths (CDs never transition) and the exclusivity of membership – especially of gay CDs.
I hate this crap.
I still don’t doubt that a few people didn’t come because I was speaking, but I think the whole thing was blown out of proportion.
Shoot. We all have so many other better things to be doing with our time.
Boycotted in Phoenix?
Betty and I got back home a few hours ago after having been in Phoenix since Friday. I’d been invited – quite a few months back – to be the keynote speaker this year at the Glitz Ball. A lovely CD named Grace – who was, I’m sure, the instigator of my being invited – picked us up at the airport, and as we were chatting (with me still blurry on anti-anxiety drugs because I hate flying), she casually mentioned how a bunch of people weren’t coming this year because I was guest speaker, and just as casually, started talking about something else.
Betty and I checked into our room and I asked if I’d been experiencing auditory hallucinations as a result of the drugs, and she said no – she’d heard what Grace said, too.
Later we were introduced to a few amazing other people, including Rene McCray, who does a lot of the makeup for the trans-community in Phoenix. We were both told we’d get along, and get along we did. She’s no wilting lily. She came into my workshop a little late, and just as I was about to end the session, she asked loudly, “So why do some people hate you?” or some version thereof. Maybe it was “Why doesn’t Tri-Ess like you?” It was one of the only questions I’ve been asked that I wasn’t expecting, but my answer went something like this: 1) for starters, I think sometimes people like to shoot the messenger, and 2) I publicly criticized Tri-Ess for their policies of excluding gay crossdressers and transsexuals from their groups, and for not letting local chapters (which might be the only trans support in their community) make those decisions for themselves.
Rene and I ended up speaking later (while she was generously doing our makeup), and I got to ask her if it was true that some people weren’t coming to the Glitz because of me. “Some,” she clarified, was about 40 people who’d come the previous year who hadn’t come this year – because of me.
I have to say, it kind of took me by surprise. I’m not surprised that people who have benefited from a group’s existence would defend that group or its policies. But I’m privy to a lot of information these days, and I know that arguments about Tri-Ess’ policies are going on throughout Tri-Ess, and even very high up in the organization. That is, what I’ve said about Tri-Ess a lot of Tri-Ess members are saying about Tri-Ess, so I didn’t think my comments were nearly as controversial as they apparently were. (To boot, many people have said such things about Tri-Ess long before me, including Dallas Denny and other former Tri-Ess members.)
I feel terribly that the Glitz should have suffered on my account, but I also wondered if the people who hadn’t come had read my book. Yes, I criticized Tri-Ess, but I also think my love for crossdressers is very, very clearly laid out. If I didn’t love CDs, and if I didn’t think they could do better in terms of their acceptance of TSs and gay CDs, I wouldn’t have bothered to take their main organization to task for their exclusionary policies. (Some would replace “exclusionary” with “discriminatory” but I’m trying to be nice here.)
What makes the whole thing even more ironic is that a gay men’s chorus sang at the event, and there were many TSs there, and workshops for them as well. That is, the Glitz is a mixed event, meant to unify the various factions of the trans-community. So the people who didn’t come are not people who refuse to mix with transsexuals or homosexuals, but rather refuse to listen to anyone who tells them it’s not nice to exclude either group from their organization.
Despite that, I had a wonderful time! I met a lot of people over the weekend, and had more than a few wonderful conversations. The speech I gave was not the one I’d written, but I expected that: I don’t like to write speeches at all, because I often have to write them before I meet the people I’m talking to, and prefer to tailor my remarks to the people who are in front of me.
So I’d like to thank Grace, and her lovely wife Anita; the straight partner of the trans-man who was willing to answer my questions; Rene, Bonnie, the bearded lady and her friend, ‘Just Evelyn’ and her partner Lacey (who came because I was speaking), and all the other folks who were kind enough to tell me they liked my speech, and who made me feel welcome despite the “controversy.”
Thanks, Josey
Betty & I filmed a short clip for a Canadian television show called Richler Ink which showed on Book Television, which is an entire channel dedicated to books & authors (so you know it’s not American). They themed their shows “Naughty Librarian Month” for January and so focused on sexual topics. (Whether or not we all think crossdressing is a sexual topic is beside the point, since 1) the point is outreach and education, as long as it’s done respectfully, and 2) the rest of the world still thinks it is, and they’re not going to understand otherwise until they hear about and maybe read a book like mine).
I hadn’t seen the show ever before, but it was explained to me that there would be in-studio guests, and Betty & I would be a segment. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the two books used as segments (My Husband Betty and another on women’s orgasm called She Comes First) would be commented on by the in-studio guest. It was as if Daniel Richler (the host) and the in-studio guest – who was in our case Josey Vogels – were watching the video clip of us with the audience, and when it finished, they chatted about it.
I was pretty upset when Daniel Richler couldn’t seem to keep a smirk off his face, and started muttering things about “kinky” & the like. But Josey Vogels, I’m happy to say, is not only well-informed but a pro. She’s apparently talked to straight, nervous, vanilla guys about sex before! And she talked a little bit about the transgender movement, and otherwise made sure Daniel Richler didn’t get to go anywhere with his nudge, nudge, wink, wink crap.
I’ve already thanked Josey Vogels, of course, for being a first-class act, and for not allowing the show to sink into Springer-esque insinuations, and she’ll hopefully be writing one of her columns about My Husband Betty as a result of our correspondence.
And though I certainly don’t mind spending time praising Josey Vogels (who was on promoting her current book Bedside Manners), that’s not why I sat down to write this: I write this because I was suddenly reminded that the world still thinks crossdressers are funny, or kinky, or both. In more than a year of going to trans-conferences and the like, you start to believe that everyone is tuned into the finer debates about passing, or other standard fare that’s dicussed within the trans community, until you realize – maybe because of a nervous talk show host or because of something someone shouts from the street – that we’ve got a long way to go.
Going that long way is going to take working with the media where and when we can. Betty and I have had to turn down other television shows on advice from friends here in NYC who have been burned themselves or seen firsthand how disrespectful most of the talk shows are of their guests: from “surprise guests” to telling people the shows are themed other than they are, they actually trick people into coming on. Of course all the invitations seem respectful; none of them write to ask me if I’d be willing to portray a wife who’s been victimized by her crazy tranny husband.
And while I don’t even have cable TV because of the schlock that is American television, I’m well aware that most of America is informed via TV – depressing but true. Doing innumerable events like Trans-Week at Yale or speaking to a class at UVM are wonderful: talking to people who are intelligent and willing to learn and listen means a new generation aren’t going to become adults with the same uninformed notions in their heads as their parents.
The question is: what about the rest? How do we get to the rest of the people out there?
Doing publicity with a mainstream book helps. Knowing my book is in libraries where it can be found (not only by T-people and their partners but by any average, interested, curious reader) is something. People ask me all the time why we haven’t been on Oprah. After I ask them if they know anyone who works on the show who might get us on (no takers yet), I ask: why aren’t there more shows like Oprah?
Maybe those of us in the GLBT community can start pressuring networks not necessarily for more shows about us – but just for more intelligent shows, in general. We need to write to our local and cable stations and tell them we’re tired of schlock. The Jerry Springer-type shows wouldn’t hurt half so much if we had something to offset it. I was pretty amazed to find that when we did PBS’ In the Life, none of my friends in the red states could see it. Why? Their local PBS affiliate simply didn’t carry it.
But I’m sure that had nothing to do with why eleven states voted for banning gay marriage, or why we’re teaching Creationism in schools as if it’s science, or why no one seemed to notice that we’ve hung the whole of the guilt for the Abu Ghraib horror on guys who were following orders.
I’m sure it doesn’t have anything to do with it. It doesn’t, does it?
Namaste
I’m not the type to ask for prayers, ever, for anything, but Southeast Asia is a place near and dear to my heart. It’s going to take years for them to recover.
Please donate to your charity of choice (Betty & I favor Doctors Without Borders).
Happy Thanksgiving
To all, a very happy Thanksgiving!
Remember to make a list of all the things you’re thankful for, yes? It helps you get through the cold winter ahead.
For me, it’s simple: my family, my friends, and all the lovely letters and emails people have sent me after reading My Husband Betty. I am more than thankful for the opportunity to have done some good, for some people.
But I’m also thankful for and to New York, for being a home; for my cats, who provide that unconditional love we all need, and for Betty – who through good times and bad, is the person who walks through the world with me.
Happy Thanksgiving! Eat your fill and donate for those who don’t get to.
Remembering We're Living
On the eve of TG Day of Remembrance, it’s bothering me that the only international recognition of transness is in the all-too-brutal murders of transpeople. What Gwen Smith has created in the Remembering Our Dead project is vital work: vital because these transpeople are murdered out of hate, often brutally, and way too frequently, their killers are not found, or not prosecuted. Historically and politically, Remembering Our Dead is a project that is both emotionally powerful and sympathetic; it reminds me, most often, of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
That said, I meet with all sorts of living, struggling transpeople every day. And while you could say that the other 364 days are theirs, we all know that’s not quite true. What we all need – other than to mourn our dead and keep vigils for justice – is a way of simultaneously recognizing the great progress in the trans community among the living, so I propose a supplement to Gwen Smith’s brilliant work: The Remember We’re Living Celebration.
What I foresee is that transgroups stand up and honor their own members by having a kind of New Year’s: by asking each of us to stand up and cite one piece of progress, or a victory, we experienced in the past year. The closeted CD could cite his recent decision to come out to his wife. The out CD might celebrate her involvement with a GLBT charity group. The transitioning sister could tell us how close to the end of her Real Life test she is. And the transitioned woman might share in what ways she’s helped her sisters coming up. Transmen might point to their months on T, coming out (usually for the 2nd time) to their friends and families, or rallying with their transwoman sisters at Camp Trans.
We all struggle within this community; some of us within relationships, some of us with loneliness. But my feeling is that I would put my last dollar on a bet that says we have all accomplished something, whether private or public or both, which could use a round of applause.
I would love to see the vigils for Remembering Our Dead morph into living transpeople testifying to their own successes, their own beauty, their own victories. I would like to see the GLBT papers cover these events and have something other than gruesome deaths to report.
If you think this is a good idea, pass this message on.
For now, we’re asking every transperson who receives this message to send us a note, via the MHB message boards, or leave a comment here, noting one victory, success, or piece of happiness they’ve achieved in the last year concerning their transness.
Helen Boyd