Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
For those who have been feeling frustrated and sad about Prop 8, Charles Kaiser at OpenSalon says:
Therefore, this week’s victories for the religious right in California, Arizona and Florida are really the last gasp of a fringe movement trying to forestall the inevitable, rather than proof of a new “cultural brick wall.â€
& He provides some very compelling evidence, so go read it, & be heartened.
My next Our Chart column is up, this one about political opinions and relationships.
My 3rd relationships column – this one is about monogamy – is up at www.ourchart.com.
A recent blog post written by someone who attended SCC reminds me, again, that whoever is in charge of partners’ events at SCC isn’t doing their job.
The only thing that I attended that did not live up to my expectations was the Comfort Zone, a group for SOFFA (significant others, friends, family and allies) of MTF trangender women. I qualified for the group as a wife of a MTF. The group was predominately made up of wives of cross dressers with about 4 of us being partners or wives of transgender people. It appears we all left before the meeting was over. The next morning Sarah and met two young women who had not been eligible for the group since their partners were FTM. They were in happy relationships. We exchanged email address and may try to put something on the internet for happy partners and wives of trans people.
This really thrills me. Two years ago a partner of an FTM was told she wasn’t welcome because she identified as lesbian, & this year they just don’t allow partners of FTMs into the partner support group.
It’s not hard to run an inclusive partner group. I’ve done it tons of times. I offer every year. I don’t need to get paid, just to have my costs covered. I would be willing to go down there to train some locals as to how to be inclusive of all partners.
Whoever is doing this workshop needs to be asked not to do it. The isolation most partners experience is quite enough, but isolating them further – at a trans conference! – is entirely unacceptable.
Please, SCC organizers, please. You have no idea what a knife in the heart it is, as a partner, to get to a conference and feel like no one bothered to care that you have a sense of community, too.
GenderVision, who are Nancy Nangeroni and Gordene MacKenzie formerly of GenderTalk, did an interview with us in November 2007. Two parts of it you can watch online, but then there’s other conversations we had, with both of them, that you can only get by buying the DVD. I got mine today, and it’s nice to see professional packaging. We don’t make any money from it, but they do good work up there, so do support them. It’d make a good DVD to pass around within a support group, or to watch bits of at a meeting, even.
Tell them Helen sent you!
On BBC, an interview with the (female) partner of an MTF and the (male) partner of an FTM is worth listening to. Though I will say the FTM in question turned into a jackass, not a man.
Most interesting to me are their thoughts about their sexual relationships.
A couple who’ve been together for 18 years went on vacation, on a cruise, with three of their four children. One of them had a massive stroke as their ship was about to leave port, which meant she received medical care at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, where her partner was told the couple made the mistake of being in “an anti-gay city and state” and refused to let her partner in to see her, but for five minutes, as she was dying.
She died about 18 hours later. Both women were only 39 years old.
This is what DOMA & all this other anti-gay bullshit leads to, but please queer folks, fill out your healthcare proxies. You can find NYS’s here, and here in .pdf format. If people have or find links for these forms in their state, please post them below, or send them to me via email & I can post them.
More instructions and state-specific forms below the break. Continue reading “Healthcare Proxy Forms”
Nancy Nangeroni & Gordene MacKenzie, who used to bring you GenderTalk, are now bringing you GenderVision. We were up in their neck of the woods last fall and did an interview with them for GenderVision, which they’ve now got up at their website, www.gendervision.org.
A lot of our conversation is about partner advocacy within the trans community, the role of partners, and transitioning from within a committed relationship. It’s a lengthy interview, about an hour, and amazingly enough Betty talks quite a bit about her own partner advocacy, and why she speaks so little about her own experience.
I wanted to point out a new section of my links/blogroll, which is for allies, family & partners. Right now it’s got Abigail Garner’s Damn Straight, Monica CL’s A Seat on the SOFFA, Annie Rushden’s Gardens in Bloom, COLAGE’S Kids of Trans pages, Jonni P’s Trans Married, and PFLAG’s TNET.
If people know of other partners, allies, or family members who regularly blog on glbT issues, do let me know so I can add them. Please, not just LGB allies; they have to regularly address trans issues and need to be currently blogging with some consistency and some history.
I don’t often wear trans shirts when I’m with Betty – no need to out her casually, she does enough outreach for one trans person – but Betty was sick this past week & so I was walking to my sister’s wear my NCTE “T” shirt (the old one – I don’t have the new one yet.)
Then someone on our boards asked if people would say yes if someone asked them if they were transgender.
And it made me wonder how often people think I’m trans – because of the t-shirts, the various places I post, the relative absence of partners in trans circles, and especially in LGBT circles. I think I mentioned here how two people I met at USC had assumed I was the partner of an FTM since the queer-identified partners of MTFs seem to be few & far-between – okay, practically non-existant.
It’s made me think of the days I was an honorary lesbian, which I am, still, kinda, depending on who’s deciding what I am.
I never told people I wasn’t a lesbian – unless the person was who wanted to sleep with me or a person who I wanted to sleep with – and in the same way I don’t think I’d care to clarify that I’m not trans if someone thought I was.
Maybe I should get a shirt that says GVETGI = Gender Variant Enough To Get It.