Category: trans

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Grey’s Anatomy (of a Wife)

Last week, our downstairs friend who is a huge Grey’s Anatomy fan, called us at the very start of the show, telling us only “there’s a plot line you’ll want to see.” So we watched as a trans woman character came to the hospital for her GRS surgery, and were quite surprised – as were, no doubt, lots of viewers – that her wife had accompanied her there.

(You can read more about the episode, and even view it online, at the Grey’s Anatomy website. Spoilers below, so go watch it first.)

That fact of it alone was a great education for a lot of people, making the clear point that plenty of trans women prefer females, thank you very much.

While some of the informaton on the show was a little off – like when they implied that if she went on hormones her beard would come back, completely eliminating the likeliness of laser hair removal or electrolysis – it was absolutely an empathetic portrayal. The monogues by the wife were especially accurate, that odd combination of gallows humor and anger and sadness and sympathy that so many trans partners express about transition.

Most accurate, I thought, was a key moment when the trans woman is being told the hormones she’s taking to be a woman are giving her breast cancer & she doesn’t want to give them up, and the wife – frustrated & scared – uses her partners male name to tell her to “Wake up!” and flees the room after she does. Not much later, she talked about going on dates only to find that she wanted to talk to her “best friend” about those dates – like you do – and finding her husband, male or female, was her best friend. Which is how she ended up holding her hand for surgery.

It’s that “best friend” bit that’s most problematic to me. Betty is my best friend, has been since the minute we met. She’s also my teacher, my role model, my mentor, my child. All of them. And all of those things could and would stay in tact post transition. But it’s that other role – lover, husband, monogamous pervert – that’s the problem. Desire is desire, and it’s very hard to predict what might make it go away.

I talk about this at length in the new book of course – of course! – but I did want to thank the writers of Grey’s Anatomy for doing an excellent job portraying the feelings of het partners of trans women.

Feel free to come discuss the episode further on our boards.

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Not Dancing

So I found this interesting article – way more measured and frankly, sympathetic, than most articles about transness that throw around the word “mutilation,” so instead of ignoring it as I’d normally do, I responded.

I certainly understand where you’re coming from, Josie, but tell me this: what do we do with the people who could be either? Who are both?

My husband is. She never knows what bathroom to use. We worry about someone disagreeing with the M on her license.

A lot of people who are innately gender variant, or androgynous, may transition only because more cards fall on the F than on the M when they fall from the sky.

And at the moment, the only way to get your ID changed is to get genital surgery.

I think a lot more of them would keep their healthy, operative genitals if that weren’t the case, but you try telling the DMV you want neither gender marked on your license.

Go ahead.

Or, just read some of Dr. Harry Benjamin’s work. People have tried to relieve transsexualism via therapy, spirituality, and all sorts of other non-operative means. But what Benajamin notices is that it doesn’t work. So he fixed their body (since their minds wouldn’t be changed).

There are plenty of us working within the trans community who would like to see people be able to peacably live as either gender, or both, or fluid. But living that way is, for now, brutally hard work. I’d agree with you, philosophically, if I didn’t see what my husband and other friends go through every day, all day long, day after day after day. The world just beats the crap out of them, puts them at greater risk for hate crimes, and insists on them being “ma’am” or “sir” when it comes to buying a cup of coffee to using a public toilet.

So, join us. Make the world safe for the gender variant, with us.

helen boyd
www.myhusbandbetty.com

There are a lot of other ways to respond, but this was the one that struck me. I’m sure some of you can add other important facts. Just please, be polite and be reasoned.

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NCTE’s Responding to Hate Crimes manual

Just in time for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, held annually on November 20th, NCTE has published a small manual called Responding to Hate Crimes: A Community Resource Manual, which, according to NCTE’s Simon Aronoff, “represents a holistic, community-based approach to responding to hate violence in a wya that aims to curb the number of attacks faced by transgender people.”

Read the full press release from NCTE below the break, and read or download a copy of the manual at NCTE’s website: http://www.nctequality.org/resources/hatecrimes.pdf

Continue reading “NCTE’s Responding to Hate Crimes manual”

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Countess’ Court?

A very long time ago, a friend sent me this postcard from the UK. The text on the back says:

Julian Howes resigned from London Underground when his employers refused to allow him to wear a female uniform, London 1979.

and on the bottom is says, in caps:

BETTER BLATANT THAN LATENT

Kinda cool, no?

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Purdue

The good folks at Purdue (mainly Tom Mihail, who did all the legwork for my talk there) have put up some photos from my talk and a description of it as well.

I had a wonderful time there and am still planning on culling my journal some to describe the whole experience in more detail.

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First Event Keynote: Me

Well, the news is out: I’m going to be the keynote speaker for TCNE’s First Event next year. The event will be from January 17th – 21st, and in addition to the keynote I will be doing a reading from the new book and (I think) doing a workshop for partners.

We have never otherwise been to First Event and are very much looking forward to it.

There’s a thread about this on our boards where you can check in with others who might be going, too – so do come!

Read the press release below the break.
Continue reading “First Event Keynote: Me”

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What It Is

Two threads from a week or so ago got me thinking about what you might call The Big Picture. First, there was one about whether or not the mHB message boards have become a little cheerleader-y when it comes to people transitioning, and the other was Donna’s sad report of an altercation with her son.

I didn’t want to write this at the time, but wanted to give Donna – & the others reading – some time to feel a little better.

But in one particular post, our resident poster buddha pointed out that so many threads are more about the slippery slope than avoiding it, per se. In a few private emails, others pointed out the same thing, & one person in particular said she found the way the boards have changed quite in keeping with what I wrote in My Husband Betty, in (of course) Chapter 5, the Slippery Slope? chapter. When I think about the people who first came to the boards, it doesn’t take long to name quite a lot who used to identify as crossdressers who have recently transitioned, are transitioning or who are about to transition.

Most of those people have also seen their relationships fail, which is where Donna’s thread about her son comes in, because I found myself wanting to say something along the lines of this is exactly what I’m always going on about. We hate it. We don’t know why it’s hard, nearly impossible, to accept a gender change in our loved ones, but we do. And in talking about it with Betty I realized that as much as transness is impossible to understand for someone who isn’t (me included), I think it’s equally impossible for a trans person to understand why it’s so hard to accept a change of gender in someone they love, whether that person is a parent, friend, sibling, child, or partner. We want you to be happy if you change gender, but I think plenty of us who love you never quite are, or maybe, just maybe, it takes much longer for us not to be angry about it, still.

& I don’t know why. I don’t have any huge conclusions, here, except to say that I find myself feeling more precariously lucky when I look at the growing list of transitioned former crossdressers who are no longer with the women they were married to when they first crossed my path.

Sometimes, honestly, I don’t want to do the math. I don’t want to know what kind of statistic I’m up against. I worry that the only reason Betty and I have managed so far is because she hasn’t transitioned, and I still fear she will, and I fear, even more, that a year and a half after she does, or ten years after she does, I will say the same kinds of things Donna’s son said in a fit of anger.

For good reason, that worries me sometimes, sometimes way more than I want it to.

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Partners, Why Not?

For the past three weeks I’ve been co-moderating a Trans Partners’ group at the LGBT Center in Manhattan, and for three weeks we’ve had outright pathetic attendance.
In the meanwhile, I get emails all the time from partners, and I’m in groups online where they post, and they’ve got plenty to say. This group is cheap/free, and yet very few people are coming, and I can’t figure out why.
So partners, why aren’t you coming? Is your partner stealth/closeted & you’re scared about outing him/her by showing up? Do you think it’s a huge bitch session? Do you think it’s a bunch of cheerleaders? Do you think you have nothing in common with other partners? Do you think your stuff isn’t important enough to talk about? Would you rather not think about your partner being trans altogether?
I know you’ve got stuff to talk about, because you write to me, and to other partners, and you post in groups online.
So tell me why you’re not coming.