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Pitchforks & Puritanism

No matter what hypocrites get exposed (Josh Duggar, & there will no doubt be others from the “family values” crowd), I just can’t enjoy the mass doxing that is the Ashley Madison hacking.

Maybe I work too much with couples in long term relationships who are trying to work out all kinds of things in the face of crossdressing and transition and identity and I know how complex and conflicting decisions made within a long term relationship can be.

Maybe it’s because when I read this advice I notice an incredible lack of empathy for a man who is mourning someone he loved, and who he obviously loved deeply.

Maybe it’s because I’ve had to stand down criticism and ostracism for becoming non monogamous myself. Maybe it’s because as someone who’s been practicing ethical non monogamy for a few years now, I’m amazed at how difficult it is for people to make a distinction between cheating and becoming non monogamous with the full consent and acceptance of your spouse. Maybe it’s because I’ve been on the wrong end of that puritanical glee that’s going around.

Maybe it’s because of the Brave New World this mass doxing implies.

Maybe it’s because men tell me about their lives, and like Rachel Kramer Bussell, I never met a married guy on Ashley Madison or OK Cupid who didn’t make me sad (but not so sad I had anything to do with them). I met men married to lesbians who had a great life and great marriage but no sex. I met men who were trying to keep it together for the children. I met men who had made their kids their top priority post divorce who didn’t want another relationship, who were broken and exhausted by a previous one.  I met closeted lesbians married to men who couldn’t come out because of work but wanted a woman in their life who didn’t require a relationship.

I often wondered if, as a culture, we should have a day when people didn’t have to honor their commitments and could, instead, find some measure of what they were seeking, a kind of bacchanal escape valve. I’ve often wondered if we didn’t spend so much time judging other people if we might try to understand the kinds of pain that people try to salve with sex.

So I can’t share the popcorn or the schadenfreude, because in not so long marriages will be ending because of this, and maybe a lot of those marriages were ones that should have ended long ago. But others would have gone unharmed by a spouse’s ignorance, as Dan Savage points out. I just hope spouses who suspect their partners remember a few things: (1) if your spouse isn’t on the list, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, (2) that just because s/he is, doesn’t mean it did, and (3) make sure that you really really really want to know. What I hope, instead of this sleuthing, is that the people who did sign up admit to it so that they might start to have a conversation about what it was they were missing, about what they hoped to gain, and that maybe, just maybe, they might figure out a sane way to call it quits or to rebuild.

More soon. Right now, though, I’m feeling a little heartbroken by humanity and by the glee other people are taking in others’ misfortune. If this mass doxing only effected the raging hypocrites out there, it would be one thing, but it won’t. Even if it does expose the dogs and serial cheaters, it’s going to cause so much hurt in so many ways for so many people doing their imperfect best to be happy

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My Online Group for Partners

I’ve been getting quite a few requests for this link, so I thought it was about time to put it up again:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/engender_partners/info

It’s open to all kinds of partners: wives of crossdressers, partners of people considering transition, partners of people who have transitioned, those who just found out, those who have known for years, those who fall anywhere on the line of being more or less accepting. Often people come on and read through past bios of other partners and start up one-on-one correspondences, but we have a lot of conversations as a group, too, that may be useful to new people. We talk about sex and anger and depression and all the related stuff being experienced by us and by our trans beloveds.

You will, if you join, send in a short bio about yourself and your situation.

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To the Wife Who Just Found Out

I read this piece in the LA Times by the ex wife of a transitioned trans woman yesterday – and read all of the amazing commentary about it on my Facebook page by trans people and trans partners – and woke up this morning and started writing this long overdue letter to the wife who just found out.

It starts like this:

To the wife who has just learned her partner is transgender,

I don’t know you. I get emails from women like you all the time, though, and I’m never quite sure what to say to you. I wish I didn’t need to work so that I could hop a flight every single time one of you contacts me and find somewhere to talk and cry and drink and curse for a night into the wee hours. I don’t think there is any substitute for being able to talk long and hard with someone else who has been where you’ve been. I didn’t have anyone like that myself, which is one of the many reasons I started doing this work. You’re alone, and you’re scared, and there’s so little information, and no one, but no one, in your life, has any way of understanding what is about to happen. Sometimes others can make it worse, and sometimes they provide enough support – which is amazing especially when they don’t understand – to get you through the hour, the day, the week.

Some days that’s what it feels like – that that’s all you can manage, like recovering alchoholics do – one day at a time.

The funny thing about it is that I know you’re fine otherwise. You’re taking the kids where they need to go and visiting with neighbors and going out with your friends and taking in a movie with your trans spouse, maybe. You’re trying new recipes and getting your butt to yoga and doing all of the things you normally do. But that sense of isolation is there, and it keeps growing. That sense that you don’t know what you want to do, or what you should do, and whether those two choices have anything to do with each other.

You know you need to stand up for yourself and your needs. And you know you want to, and do, love your spouse and be supportive and awesome.

The problem is that those two choices don’t often feel like they can exist together.

There’s a few more pages and I hope I know where I’m going, but you know, books are always out to surprise you, especially the ones you write yourself.

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Kathleen Dunn Show – Done!

Our radio interview on WPR’s The Kathleen Dunn Show is now up & available for listening or downloading. It’s a call-in show and we got a lot of good questions. Ms. Dunn was, and is, a great interviewer.

Topics included: Caitlyn Jenner (of course), including that misguided NYT piece from yesterday (I won’t link to it), trans youth, why we don’t answer questions about genitals, family, but mostly it was about trans partners and what it’s like to go through transitioned while married.

So, yeah.

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Cheated.

My wife and I were lucky enough to score tickets to see The Replacements this past weekend in Milwaukee; neither of us had ever seen them back in the day and both of us were fans. And they were, as expected, amazing; Paul Westerburg’s voice still sounds incredible and the band was tight.

But today, while doing an interview – I’ll post info about it when it turns up – I realized something about even going to concerts that sucks these days: my wife can’t sing to me when we’re in public and use her full range; instead, it makes me nervous when she drops below a certain register instead of it making me happy. We can’t hold each other or kiss, much less make out, for fear of our own safety. I worry that she doesn’t have much of a spideysense for that too-drunk dude next to her who has started to stare at her or me or worse still, us, in that disconcerting too-drunk dude sort of way.

Mostly, though, what upsets me is the thinking about it. Yes, we both want to say to hell with all of it so she can sing anyway and we can make out where we want to and ignore too-drunk dudes because they are idiots. We want to be awesomely brave, progressive, proud queers who don’t give a shit.

But we’re not.

And we know straight people don’t entirely get it; as I’ve said many times, I thought, as an LGBTQ ally, that I understood, but I didn’t. Yet a lot of same sex couples don’t get it either because they haven’t lived on the heteronormative side of the fence or haven’t for a very long time. Our heterosexual past, as it were, is always present; that guy I met, our ability to make out in public, it all happened, and with each other, and not very long ago. So we find ourselves between the demanding ethics of LGBTQ* politics and well-intentioned but clueless straight people.

What I resent, mostly, is that a simple urge to kiss my partner because she is smiling so hugely because oh wow we’re watching the goddamned Replacements, I wind up in my head thinking about what to do or how to do it and then getting angry that I have to think about it at all, feeling guilty, talking myself out of feeling guilty, coming up with another (non verbal) way to tell her I’m happy she’s happy, and by then I’m noticing too-drunk dude who is listing creepily in our direction and the whole thing starts all over again.

Mostly we both feel cheated of our lives, of the life we had together, and even though it’s no one’s fault. there it is.

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Partner’s Blues

Here’s a smart piece about dating someone who is still uncomfortable with their own gender issues, who embraces and then rejects them, and how one partner tried to come to terms with that – but didn’t.

This:

The wall I’m talking about is plastered together with our society’s definitions of a man, a woman, a person, and a relationship. You’ve probably hit this wall, too, perhaps without recognizing it. Women may have hit it when trying to assert their desires in relationships. Men may have hit it when trying to be emotionally vulnerable with their partners. And while it would be so easy to say I was just physically incapable of a romantic relationship with a self-identified woman, I find it more likely that this wall divided Ryan and I from each other and blocked my view of a future between us.

Even now, it’s blocking my story from you, the reader, because the right words to describe Ryan and me and our relationship simply don’t exist. There’s no word for someone who usually lives as a man but feels more like a woman but really is neither or both or somewhere in between. There’s no word for the sexual orientation of someone who accidentally fell in love with a woman in the process of falling in love with a man. Instead, I’m forced to leave you with a muddled mix of he’s and she’s and no answers.

This approach/avoidance thing is not uncommon, of course, but when you’re trying to date someone who is doing it… well, partners call it “the roller coaster”.

You can get more of a sense of this experience in Linda Thompson’s sympathetic piece about being married to Jenner, in the early stages when the star athlete was beginning to approach the idea of being trans.

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Love, Always Epilogue

I’ve been meaning to wrap up my interviews with partners by putting up a small piece of my Epilogue for Love, Always. I read it Saturday night at a FORGE meeting because Trystan Cotten, Transgress Press’ Managing Editor, was in town.

Also, he’s an awesome guy & you should all buy more of their books.

In the meantime, here’s that snippet:

And we do it all in a wilderness with little support from our own closest friends. Sometimes, when I speak to partners, I remind them that We Are Out There and we may not have a Prof. X to find us all, but we are. We are raising children and packing lunches and going back to school ourselves and sighing at our in-laws or at Oprah getting it wrong again. We are sex blogging and arguing with doctors and following the arguments about Prop 8 and DSM V.

No wonder some of us forget who we are, forget our self-care; no wonder we occasionally rant and sob and grow some giant-size anger.

Where we find ourselves is often between that infamous rock and hard place: if our partner’s transition makes us look like half a lesbian or gay couple, we have to deal with homophobia; but if our partner’s transition makes us look like half of a straight couple, we often lose the support of the lesbian or gay community we’ve belonged to and found safety in for many years of our lives.

Because we transition into trans partners, no one really knows anything about us. We don’t become lesbians when our wives become women, and we don’t become straight when our guys become men. That joke, as Morrissey so famous quipped, isn’t funny anymore. We end up in a place where we have our own histories, our own orientations, hidden from public view, especially if our trans love isn’t out as trans. Some of us opt to identify as bi- (to explain, perhaps, why we’re married to women while nursing a crush on Mark Ruffalo – at least in this partner’s experience, I swear my taste in men got bigger and hairier as my partner transitioned). We find stories to explain why we’re lesbians and why we’re sad about Leslie Feinberg’s death – or why, indeed, we even know who Leslie Feinberg was. In straight and gay communities, an awful lot of people think you’re only ever one or other; we have some common ground with bisexual people in that we’re largely invisible and must, must, be repressed/oversexed/self-hating/whatever crappy things people think about bisexual people these days. Yet some of us don’t like bi- because it’s binary. So a lot of us, you’ll find, wind up under the big bad queer umbrella, so we don’t have to explain a lifetime of dating women but being married to a man; we don’t have to explain becoming non monogamous because we miss certain kinds of sex or desires or even ways of being desired. We don’t want to feel like jerks for missing the bodies or parts or sex acts that we love. But we also don’t want to be judged for loving your trans bodies because they’re trans.

We are always standing on the edge of the forest, machetes in hand, hacking our own paths.

We can’t complain to people we know because we know so many of those around us want us to fail or cry or be pathetic and pitiable or even to condemn the trans. If you give in a little, if you complain about the transition to a good friend, then all of a sudden the whole reason you’re unhappy is that your partner is trans. That happens with therapists, too, way too often.

In trans community, when we’re allowed to partake, the complaining we do or the gentle mocking or the loving critiques or not so loving critiques – please stop dressing like a 19 year old, dear, because you’re 35 – are often viewed as transphobic. If we are not on board and behind every single decision the trans person makes, we’re out. Suspect. If we ask the trans person to slow down so we can catch our breath or save up some money or come out to someone else who needs to know we are, again, judged unwilling or transphobic. We can’t refer to our former boyfriend as a boyfriend even though he was because she is our girlfriend now and has only ever been so and don’t you forget it and that’s even when your own trans person is perfectly okay with hearing you talk about what a cute guy/hot butch you once were. We don’t seek to offend but we do need room to deal with transition our own way. We’re going to screw up pronouns and new names and you know what? So do trans people, sometimes. Our intentions matter.

Despite feeling like outsiders in so many other communities we once belonged in, we often feel liminal even within trans community. We know that. We own our cis privilege, if we are cis. We know more than anyone else what it means to have it. And that’s when we’re even allowed in. So many lesbian women and their trans guys get shut out of queer women’s events; so many straight women and their trans female partners are never let in. Gay men flirt with my wife as if she’s a guy in a dress, and sometimes straight women do, too. Queer women fetishize trans guys as if they’re prizes and yet refer to our trans husbands with female pronouns when they’re not around. We end up defending your gender identities and yet all the while try not to speak for you.

We need more support from the trans community, and we need for the rest of the LGBTQ+ community to realize we’re here and we’re queer and get used to it, already. Sometimes we look straight but we’re not. Sometimes we are straight and don’t know how to do this. Sometimes we need someone to say, “Hey, you look nice” and sometimes we need people to understand that transition is like some crazy combination of marriage (name change), medical crisis (hormones, surgery) and divorce (social ostracism, pity). It’s a lot to deal with at once, and often, when the trans person is busy dealing with all of the emotions and fears and new discoveries, we are picking up an awful lot of slack emotionally and even just logistically. But you get to be brave and living your own truth, or whatever condescending stuff it is that non trans people say about transition these days. You are noble, and suffering, while we’re often assumed to be codependent or desperate.

We get asked all the offensive, obnoxious questions they know not to ask you by now.

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Five Questions With… Miriam

The last (for now!) of my interviews with partners of trans people who wrote narratives for Transgress Press’ Love, Always, is not, by far, the least. Miriam Hall is also a friend, fellow writer, & fellow Wisconsinite. She’s a writer and photographer and teaches both as contemplative practice. You can check out more of what she does at her website.

1. What didn’t you write about in your narrative but wish you had?

I am always writing about this process, so there’s nothing I wish I had included in this particular essay that I won’t just include elsewhere. One of the hard things about this process is that just when I think I’ve “finished” a particular experience and can write about it, then something else emerges. The writing is a living process – not a reporting, but something that then feeds back into my life and vice-versa.

I know that I will look back later and wish I had a clearer view on co-dependency, say, in this essay, but I also know enough by now to know that its worth it to write as I go along, not just “after I have figured it out completely.”

2. What is the biggest misunderstanding you confront as a partner to a trans person?

The biggest misunderstanding I encounter is the assumption that this is their experience. This one is really subtle, but it’s a constant micro-aggression: How is she doing? That must be really hard for her! I can’t imagine what that is like for her! These are good signs that folks are expressing compassion and concern for her, but – and this is not all folks for sure – often that overlooks the person who is right in front of them.

3. Where do you get your support?

I get my support from a few main folks. I have feet in various support communities – including yours! – but I am really a one-to-one person. As Ilana’s transition quiets down, increasingly I find I can get the support I need from non-trans involved folks (eg soffas and trans folk, who were more my main support in the first few years). Plus my peeps are pretty well trained by now.

4. How has your experience been in bringing up your own difficulties with the trans person you’re partnered to?

We have a lot of co-dependency in our relationship – Hello! Normal for everyone! – and I am starting to understand how to look at it in that more universal way. It’s not that trans relationships are all co-dependent, it’s that transitioning makes everything – e-ver-y-thing – that much harder, while also masking it all at the same time. It is really only now, post-transition, that I am even allowing my own issues to really come to the front. That having been said, we do have an exceptionally loving and supportive partnership, so I have never felt she only wanted to focus on her own issues only.


5. Do you think you would partner with other kinds of trans people? That is, if you are partnered to someone feminine spectrum, would you date someone who is masculine spectrum? If they’re binary, someone genderqueer?

Yes. I am certain now that I am queer. I always identified as bisexual, but now I realize I am more than that – or not just that. Spectrum sexual. Attracted in particular to folks whose genders are in flux, in terms of presentation, as well as whose physical sexes are in flux. Somehow – call it my Buddhist-ness – I am more comfortable with the ambiguous and constantly changing than the fixed.