Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
In some small way, this explains why Hilly Krystal gave up fighting to keep CBGB open, despite his wish that the club survive him. On your way, Hilly, to that garage band bar in the sky.
R.I.P. Hilly Krystal, 1932 – 2007 (with his daughter Lisa in front of CBGB. Photo by Bob Gruen.)
Marilyn Frank has been sharing her story with wives at Fantasia Fair, IFGE and Tri-Ess seminars since 1982. She married her husband Len in 1954 and didn’t learn about the cross dressing until 1964, 10 years and 3 children later. At that time the only information available to her was Virginia Prince’s book The Transvestite and His Wife (now titled The Cross-dresser and His Wife) which she still finds to be one of the best books written.
1) First, Marilyn, I want to thank you on behalf of all the partners out there, for stepping up at a time when most of us weren’t even in high school yet. Without women like you & Peggy Rudd, the struggle to have partners’ issues recognized would be a lot more difficult. So what caused you to do the educating you did?
In the 1970’s I was a volunteer on a crisis intervention hot line in Morris County, NJ. When I became Director, I questioned some of the professionals in the group, who did not know much about cross dressing, but were able to assist me in finding people who did know. During this time we came upon Tri-Ess, and then in 1980 Len read the article in Playboy about Fantasia Fair and in 1981 we spent a few days at the Fair. I had many discussions with Ariadne Kane about the wives’ needs, and this brought Niela Miller to the Fair and that’s where my true education began. Since it had been a very lonely road not only for Len, but for me, I decided I would reach out to help others, so that’s when I started facilitating a wives group at our local Tri-Ess Chapter, which I did for for over 10 years. I also was instrumental in starting the wives’ program at the first IFGE Convention. My philosophy is that every time I help someone, I help myself. It’s true the marriage had its ups and downs where the cross dressing was concerned, but for us it was a small part of our overall marriage. We have always had good communication, enjoy many of the same things and do have a sense of humor (that helps).
In the ‘astonishing, but not surprising’ category: CNN does a report on Iraqi women who have ended up prostituting themselves due to the war, asking sometimes as little as $8 a day. The point of course was to do a human interest story, or a feminist story, or a reality of war story, but some guy, dick in hand, instead wants to know if it’s true & how he can get in on the action. Another comments:
You are a fortunate man to find ass here in the IZ so quickly. I live here and it took me 4 months to get my connections. We have a PSD team contact who brings us these Iraqi cuties but dangerous it is.
Now that’s class. Don’t keep reading that message board if you’re an actual person with actual compassion, please.
There are days guys wonder why women hate them en masse. This is why, sensitive New Age guys. Please do something about these fuckwads & then get back to me about your problems.
(via The Cunning Realist.)
More occasionally than I’d prefer, I hear MTFs bemoaning the style faux-pas of their fellow trans women. Sometimes it’s the transitioning women commenting on a crossdresser’s appearance, & sometimes it’s the other way around. But you know, style is a very personal form of self-expression, and should be respected as such. A person may intend to look exactly like how they appear, & do not feel any need for anyone’s “help.” That, & you may not know what their reasons are for looking the way they do.
Some of you may know Trankila, who is a regular at events like FanFair & IFGE & who keeps her full beard when she crossdresses. People who don’t know her/her story just think she’s insane or has no sense of style. But the reality is that her wife loves her beard, & happens also to be specifically attracted to cross-gender presentation, Trankila keeps it even when she crossdresses. (Trankila & her wife talk about their experience with Trankila’s gender on an old GenderTalk show.) For the record, there are also women raised female who can grow their own beards, & who do.
Likewise with something like pantyhose: (1) plenty of people wear hose because they’ve say, made a deal with their wives not to shave during the summer or other times (or through the year, depending on the deal they’ve made, and (2) other people use hose to help tuck.
Having a mohawk makes me more suspicious of “style policing,” in general, but also, as a partner advocate, I’ve heard from too many wives who were comfortable with whatever deal they made with their partner, who then comes home from a conference where people told her not to wear necklines that covered her collarbone (which she was doing so as not to shave chest hair her wife loves) or not to wear hose in the spring/early fall (which she was wearing to keep her leg hair because there’s a family BBQ the next week), etc.
& Frankly, I’ve had my own feelings hurt so many times by people insulting what I’m wearing at these MTF conferences/events that I’m thinking of having t-shirts made up that say Being a Catty Bitch Does Not Make One a Woman. Grow yourself some manners, & if you don’t have anything nice to say about someone’s appearance, then STFU. (Okay, that’s not the way our mothers taught us that Golden Rule, but consider it updated for the internet generation.)
A recent working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) of India has posited that rural women in India, who tend not to be literate, learn a lot if they watch cable:
Women who were exposed to cable television over a 6- to 7-month period in India were less likely to report a preference for sons or complacency with domestic violence, and more likely to report autonomy in household decision-making, according to the working paper. In addition, more girls enrolled in school and fertility rates dropped.
But of course they’re talking about Indian television, not American, so let’s not send them Baywatch.
By a somewhat unusual series of events, I’m going to be teaching a Women’s & Gender Studies class this fall at Merrimack College in N. Andover… Massachusetts. I wasn’t expecting to, which is why I won’t be moving there, which means instead about a six hour commute – that’s one way! – in order to do so. But I couldn’t turn it down, since it would give me the chance to work with the very cool Gordene Mackenzie, of Nancy & Gordene from GenderTalk, as she runs the program there. Since I’m writing again, I’m always pleased to have good writing time – both on the train & during the time I’ll be on campus. I’m very much looking forward to it, and hopefully I’ll get to see some of my friends who live in the Boston area while I’m there.
Yet another report has come out that abstinence-only education fails our kids; in this case, abstinence-only education has been shown not to prevent HIV infection.
So what I want to know is when we go on the offensive, and start accusing people & agencies who back this bullshit why they want to kill children. Granted, people don’t die of HIV the way they used to, but goddamn, if we can avoid having a kid get a serious, life-long compromised immune system, surely that should be enough reason to get some real sex ed taught, no?
Okay, I’ll admit it: I was entirely astonished to read the story of Virginia Grace Soto over on Autumn Sandeen’s blog. Ms. Sota was born and raised female, but due to her androgynous appearance, was housed with men, in the men’s jail, in DC. Again, Ms. Sota is NOT TRANS. From the DC-area MetroWeekly (where you can see a photo of Ms. Soto as well):
Despite being strip searched and having female genitalia, Soto’s androgynous appearance led to assumptions that placed the 47-year-old in a male facility where she had to shower with four other men. Her pleas to be moved to a female facility were repeatedly ignored.
There is no mention as to whether Soto is straight or gay, though I’m going to guess that the guards acted out of homophobia (on the assumption that all gender variant people are homosexual, which of course isn’t true at all). The good thing is that three of them will be fired over their misconduct, at least.
But the underlying issue of course is that we have no standards in place for people who are not obviously gendered male or female, or whose male appearance doesn’t correspond to their female genitalia, or vice versa. Sandeen quotes local trans activist Ruby Corado:
“It’s the perfect example of how not having a plan on how to deal with individuals that do not fit in the binary gender of this society, of being male or female, creates [problems],†she says.
Exactly. Solutions? If anyone has any resources links of people who are working on prison issues concerning gender, please post them in the comments section.
Grace Paley, author, activist, and feminist, died Wednesday night, August 22nd, 2207, in her home, after a long struggle with breast cancer. Her writing credits are astounding; the most famous of her books is the short story collection The Little Disturbances of Man which are spare and stunning glimpses into love and relationships, a gem of a collection. She was the first official writer of New York State.
But beyond that, Paley was an activist & a feminist:
However, Paley was known as much for her political activism on behalf of peace and women’s rights as her literary accomplishments. Paley was jailed several times for her opposition to the Vietnam War, and traveled to Hanoi on a peace mission to negotiate for the release of American prisoners in 1969. She helped found the Women’s Pentagon Action and the Greenwich Village Peace Center. She was one of the “White House Eleven†arrested in 1978 for placing an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn. Most recently, she actively opposed the war in Iraq.
Julia Serano, about Bailey, on Feministing today:
The fact is that when a self-appointed “expert†like Bailey claims that transsexual women transition for purely sexual reasons, and that they are lying if they state otherwise, people will believe him because of his academic/scientist status. The NY Times may try to frame the controversy surrounding Bailey’s book as an example of political correctness run amok, but the truth of the matter is that Bailey himself did exponentially more damage to the field of academic research when he misrepresented anecdotes and innuendos as though they were science.