Category: trans

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A Few Questions With… Miriam Hall

Miriam Hall is a partner of a trans person and a contributor to the book Trans Kin: A Guide for Family and Friends of Transgender People. She and I did a reading together for the Wisconsin Book Festival a few months ago at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore in Madison.

1) What encouraged you to create this book?
I always write about what is happening to me – it’s my way of understanding. When I met Dylan I was already writing about my own sexuality, and so writing about our combined sexuality and her gender fit right into what I was writing. When I saw a posting (I don’t remember where!) asking for writings for this anthology, I was excited to know I could put a bit of what I was doing somewhere. I am working on a longer memoir of which this is a part.

2) What, in reading it, is the biggest surprise? What was the most expected?
I was surprised at the large number of people who formerly dated trans people and their incredibly strong advocacy. There’s an unfortunate stereotype, not to mention fear, that people who leave trans folks do it only because they are trans. That they are all bitter or anti-trans. Being really close to someone – like living and sleeping with them – who is transitioning is quite a bit closer than being friends. It’s really intense and not easy – like a “regular” relationship, only pitched up that much higher. I really appreciate allies – really, really appreciate them. But nothing beats the person I am talking to/reading having (or having had) their own heart on the line (ie another partner or former partner).

3) In your opinion, what is the biggest misconception about the friends, family, and spouses of trans people?
I think the most common misconception is that you cannot be an ally, much less a partner or even a trans person, without messing up: using the wrong pronoun, etc. People figure if they don’t “have it down yet” they aren’t “doing a good job.” I find this tragic. Like so many things in life, you simply have to jump in with a good heart and try your best, be apologetic when you screw up and let it go and move on.

You can find Miriam Hall’s writing, photography, & practice online: her website.

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Dean Spade & Normal Life

The found of the Sylvia River Law Project talks abut his new book, Normal Life. He is, as ever, smart, compassionate, and earnest about providing some answers to how we protect the most vulnerable. Totally worth watching:

He is too cool. Here’s Part 2.

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Emails

It’s the end of the year, and as much as I would like to write back to every email I get from readers, I never do. If I did I would never get my own work done. BUT: I do get them, and I do read them, and I do love them. I wish, too, that I had answers for people: how to accept an emerging need to transition (in yourself or your loved one), how to be fair to a wife or husband who can’t accept that transition, how to tell children or other relatives; how to deal with employment and coming out to people and accepting whatever loss might come.

I don’t have those answers. I do know that transition is one of the most subtle and difficult things I have ever lived through. A good transition – which ours was – doesn’t have gigantic amounts of drama. Everything legal and medical has gone relatively smoothly. But everything changes; there is nothing in our lives that wasn’t effected by her transition.

So in a sense, that’s my advice to all of you who email: nothing will ever be the same, and you will be amazed at how entirely consuming and yet utterly boring a transition can be (if it goes well). If it doesn’t? Nothing will ever be the same then, either.

Thank you all for the emails – for telling me the books have been useful to you, or this blog, or some of the other various things I do and have done. It’s nice to feel appreciated. I’m just sorry I can’t pay everyone more personal attention, because so many of you need and deserve it, and there is so little out there for people living through this stuff. But do know that you aren’t alone. We do still run our online community forums, so do come there if you can.

 

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Scalzi on Why He’s a Trans Ally

& This explanation of why he supports trans people, from one of my wife’s favorite writers, John Scalzi, which is really common sense and compassion:

People who are trans seem to me to have a particularly hard journey: The eventual recognition of the disconnect between the gender their bodies have and the gender they sense themselves as being, the years of dealing with that disconnect, the hard choice to rebuild their lives and all the repercussions of that choice, and having to do all of that with much of the rest of the world looking on and judging. That’s a hell of a road to walk.

Exactly.

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Dysphoria > Disorder > Dysphoria

And the APA has reinvented the wheel.

Still, this will hopefully be good news. Interesting other news is that he APA is working on treatment guidelines, or what sounds like an APA version of the SOC.

Here’s Julia Serano’s take which is an important and vital NOT SO FAST warning, because there is a new and improved, bigger and better than ever trans pathologizing diagnosis that’s been snuck in. This is so the equivalent of when homosexuality was removed but GIDC was inserted. feh.

 

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Grateful.

I moderated a panel of four local trans people for an event initially scheduled for TDOR. They were all amazing: well spoken, focused, honest, heartfelt. I didn’t really have to do much as a moderator, to be honest, but did talk some about being an ally. I chose questions. Afterwards, a mom asked me how she could become a better ally for her son; we’ll have lunch.

I walked away from the event simultaneous thinking two things: (1) I wonder how many hours I have logged talking about trans issues? How many, if I compiled them all? I started my blog in 2003, and My Husband Betty came out in 2004, so that’s nearly 10 years of lectures, moderating panels, doing readings, attending conferences, doing trainings and workshops and more recently, teaching classes. There is trans content in every gender studies course I teach. How many parties have I spent explaining trans issues? If I compiled those hours, how many would there be?

And that’s just the speaking part of it. If I added the hours I have spent writing about trans issues, in emails, my blogs, press releases, the books (of course), and added in the responses to emails from trans people and their partners, the message boards I host, the online support groups… how many more?

The second thought was: (2) how did this happen?

I can’t say I really know.
I can say that I’m very proud of the work I’ve done.
What is surprising is that if I had ever decided to do this work I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. I was a writer, sure, but one who was often too shy to do readings much. I was a queer ally, but I never felt I had a perspective on LGB issues that wasn’t covered by someone else. And now, somehow, I have done all this talking and writing about trans issues.

And you know? The only thing that makes any sense is that it’s all been love. Not for my spouse only. Tonight, as with every time I see trans people speak on their own behalf, I am overwhelmed with it. It’s a profound and nearly religious experience for me. But it’s so satisfying just to stand up and say NO. Stop the hurt. Stop the discrimination. Just stop. And to say to allies: help me stop it.

It may all have been something of an accident — a gradual, amazing accident — but it is very lovely to be able to say: I am proud of what I’ve done. And amazingly satisfied that it used to be like a cry in the wilderness, and now? Now everyone knows trans people exist, at the very least. That wasn’t true even when I started this work. Most liberal people know they face untold discrimination and difficulties.

It is eminently satisfying to say that the feeling that we (as a community) were tiling at windmills when I started has become something else entirely.

And then, walking home by myself afterwards, just thinking THANK YOU to the universe for helping me find a place where I could be of use to a great many people, and where my skills have made a difference. It’s profoundly satisfying.

Kind of my late Thanksgiving blessing, I guess, & maybe sentimental or even maudlin, but it’s all true, too.

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A Brief History of Trans

GLAAD did this. It’s pretty cool. It focuses mainly on highly visible, media kind of things at the end (otherthan legislation), but otherwise, interesting stuff. Lots missing, of course, but the idea wasn’t to be comprehensive – just to give a broad outline of trans history.

Also cool is this slideshow of 50 trans people – it covers at least a few people who are not traditional transitioners (which is nice to see).

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Transgender Day of Remembrance 2012

Here’s what I’ve got this year: I want this day to go the fuck away. Not because it’s not valuable and intentional and useful. It is all of those things. It serves a useful function. It helps people understand the very pervasive discrimination trans people are up against.

It’s just that there are all these people I love in my life who happen to be trans and it breaks my heart to see this very real reminder that somehow we are so upset by transness that we allow this kind of violence to persist.

I don’t want to remember someone for being trans and being killed. I want to remember people I miss because I miss something about them – their smile or their voice or their kindness of their love of trains.

But another year passes, and another TDOR comes and goes, and I think instead of all the radical, amazing activists I know who happen to be trans, and of all the amazing artists and musicians and writers I know who happen to be trans, and of all the amazing, boring people living perfectly mundane great lives post transition who no one knows are trans and I think: YES.

So that’s why we have the Transgender Day of Remembrance: to get the attention of all the people out there who don’t realize what the hell is going on out there. For me it is a day to remember why it is I chose this work, or why it chose me, and why I keep choosing it.

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Beatie Divorce

Sadly, the Beaties filed for divorce in March. That is sad news for them and their children, but the ramifications of this divorce and the legal precedent it could set might be sad for a lot more people. Here’s the problem:

Unexpectedly, on June 26, 2012, Judge Douglas Gerlach, the Maricopa County Superior Court judge overseeing the matter, vacated the final trial date and put the divorce on hold. The judge backpedaled from what seemed to be the course for a normal divorce case to issuing a Nunc Pro Tunc Order challenging the jurisdiction and validity of the Beaties’ marriage and Thomas’ male identity. Due to the fact that Thomas chose to use his reproductive organs and give birth to his children, the judge potentially sees their marriage as a same-sex union.

That a judge might seek to annul a marriage between a trans and cis person is not new news. That has happened before – too many times. The difference here is the issue of how Beatie’s legal maleness is being challenged precisely because he gave birth to his own children. And while essentialists the world over locate female-ness in the ability to give birth, there are too many reproductive technologies available (and more coming!) which will further distance birth from being female.

Of course same sex marriage legalization everywhere would resolve an awful lot of this pretty much overnight. But until then, trans people have to face the idea that a government can legally declare their sex invalid based on their roles as spouses and parents.

Because many of us are very, very worried – and feminists should be especially – if we start setting legal precedent by pairing childbirth and femaleness.

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Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Obama #6: Joe Biden

The man’s famous for telling it like it is, even when he’s supposed to tell it like it’s supposed to be, which is what makes this story even more amazing: Joe Biden recently said that transgender issues are “the civil rights issue of our time”.

The mom of Miss Trans New England asked Biden if they would help trans people from “being killed” and in getting their civil rights, which is when Biden said it was “the civil rights issue of our time”.

I’ll add, too, that the Obama-Biden presidency was the very first to send a representative to a trans conference.