In a discussion on the message boards, one of our veteran posters was told that she has “a foot in both worlds” and sometimes I wonder if that’s not, in some small way, the basis for transphobia. You know, like loyalty oaths, or pennant races or elections – you’re supposed to pick a team and stick with it.
I wonder if the whole “traitor” suspicion in some ways underpins transphobia.
The very same idea – the foot in both worlds – is viewed as a source of “magic” and “theatre” in Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests, too. On the positive tip, it can be seen as “divine” or “prophetic” in discussions of ‘third sex’ people like the berdache, where being of more than one gender perforce means knowing more than a singly-gendered person. The IDEA, then, is well-documented: trans people have one foot in both worlds.
But I really do wonder if the dark side of that same coin is the suspect nature of someone who doesn’t/won’t pick a team.
Best Lingerie Ever Award Goes To…
A gift, today, to all the lingerie-loving crossdressers out there: one of my favorite lingerie shops, Agent Provocateur.
Switzerland
Endymion is the great moderator between these Aeneas and Aurora, who tend to greet each other with swats otherwise.
Nobody, but nobody, gets between Endymion and his food.
A Few More AIDS Resources
Richard Holbrooke, former U. S. Ambassador to the UN, writes in The Washington Post:
According to U.N. figures, over 90 percent of all those who are HIV-positive in the world do not know their status. Yet there has never been a serious and sustained campaign to get people to be tested. That means that over 90 percent of the roughly 12,000 people around the world who will be infected today — just today! — will not know it until roughly 2013. That’s plenty of time for them to spread it further, infecting others, who will also spread it, and so on. No wonder we are losing the war against AIDS: In no other epidemic in modern history has detection been so downgraded.
- www.worldaidsday.org
- www.worldaidscampaign.org
- www.aids.org
- www.amfar.org
- www.aidsquilt.org
- www.nap.org
- campkindle.org
Have you been tested?
World AIDS Day
It’s World AIDS Day.
Despite decreases in the rate of infection in certain countries, the overall number of people living with HIV has continued to increase in all regions of the world except the Caribbean. There were an additional five million new infections in 2005. The number of people living with HIV globally has reached its highest level with an estimated 40.3 million people, up from an estimated 37.5 million in 2003. More than three million people died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2005; of these, more than 500000 were children.
Much-Paraphrased Michelangelo
So, yeah. I spent the day today putting together a bunch of writing I’ve done for the next book. Editors tend to want ‘sample chapters’ but I don’t write that way – putting together a chapter would require writing a whole book.
In the beginning of the project I just write and write and write. Then at some point – internal or external, I don’t know – I start re-reading it all & seeing how or where it fits together, and start providing the bridges between subjects. It’s how Ii was trained as a fiction writer: write that one scene, or one character, or one piece of dialogue, and expand from there. You know, discover the sculpture under the slab of rock, the sculpture that’s already there.
Anyone else work like that? For me it’s like this feeling of letting things coalesce and then congeal. Yes, at some point, I do put the thing in the refrigerator to speed it on its way. But mostly I find book-length projects have their own internal reason that it’s best not to fuck with – but rather to just create a space for and keep it guarded from interruption or wrong paths.
ugh. I hate when I talk about art. Hate it.
Five Questions With… Caprice Bellefleur
Caprice Bellefleur, 57, got her BA in Economics at the U. Wisconsin @ Madison, and earned her JD. She’s been married 17 years, has no children, and is a member of the bar of the State of NY. She retired after 25 years as a computer programmer, and though she felt the urge to CD since she was a child, she didn’t – to any great extent – until she was in her mid 40s. She considers herself a person of mixed gender, and has presented as a woman in public for 7 years. Caprice is not only the treasurer of CDI-NY, but carries the special burden of being King’s Envoy on the (en)gender message boards – meaning, she’s a moderator. She handles both roles with class, culture, and enviable cleavage.
1. You do a lot with organizations for the larger GLBT, and I was wondering what kinds of things you do, and how/why you realized that service to GLBT orgs should be part of your life as a crossdresser.
I like to attend the meetings and functions of GLBT groups when I can–political, legal, social, all kinds of groups. I think it is important for trans people to be visible in the LGBT community, so that we’re not just a meaningless initial tacked on at the end. There is a lot ignorance about trans people among gays and lesbians–not all that much less than in the straight community, actually. I’ve given the “Trans 101” class to more gays than straights–especially if you count the “outreach” I’ve done in various gay and lesbian bars. And an important part of my “Trans 101” lesson is to explain how there is significant overlap between the GLB and the T segments of GLBT–many GLBs are gender-variant (“umbrella” definition T), and many self-identified trans people have G, L or B sexual orientation. When people understand that, they understand why the T belongs with GLB.
I am a member of several GLBT organizations, but I have really only been active in one: the LGBT Issues Committee of the New York County Lawyers Association (NYCLA) . Even that was something of an accident–though I now believe it to have been a very fortunate one.
I think I started with the Committee in 2002. I wanted to do something to advance the legal protections of trans people, and the Committee seemed like a good fit. (I would have gotten more involved in the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), but its Saturday afternoon meetings were very inconvenient for me.) I had been a member of NYCLA for many years, and I saw a notice in its newsletter for the Committee. The notice outlined the Committee’s mission, which included legal matters relating to all LGBT people (even though its name at the time was still the Committee on Lesbians and Gays in the Law). I e-mailed the chair, and found out that a) a trans person would be welcome, and b) the meetings were quite convenient to my schedule. So I went, and I joined. I was the first trans person on the Committee–and the only one until this year.
From the start I was surprised at how much of the Committee’s work was trans-related–close to 50% that first year. The main thing was the founding of the West Village TransLegal Clinic Name Change Project. This is an operation where volunteer lawyers help people obtain legal name changes, something very important to anyone who is transitioning, or has already done so. I attended a number of meetings where we worked out the logistics among the various organizations involved–besides our Committee, the Gender Identity Project (GIP) of the LGBT Center and the LGBT Lawyers Association (LeGaL) were instrumental. It was there I first met Carrie Davis of GIP, Dean Spade of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and Melissa Sklarz of the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats (GLID). Melissa, in her role as co-chair of the LGBT Committee of Community Board 2, was very helpful in getting funding for the Clinic. What developed was a monthly non-representational drop-in clinic at the LGBT Center. We (the volunteer lawyers) interview the clients and complete the Petition for Adult Name Change, which the clients then submit to the court. I usually serve once or twice a quarter.
I also served on the Law Firm Survey Subcommittee. We developed a questionnaire about the policies and practices concerning LGBT employees and the LGBT community, which we submitted to the 25 largest law firms in New York City. Our primary goal was to create a resource for LGBT law students to help them decide where to look for a job. There was a section of questions about trans issues, which I largely wrote. We envisioned giving report cards to the various firms, grading them on how we thought it would be for an LGBT person to work there. We were pleasantly surprised to find that all of the 24 firms that replied were at least somewhat LGBT-friendly. For instance, every one of them offers benefits to the same-sex partners of employees. We decided to forget about the grading. The section on trans issues was not quite as encouraging as the rest, though. Only one firm explicitly included gender identity and expression in its non-discrimination policy. None had any procedures or specific policies covering employees who wished to transition–and none of them reported having had an employee who had done so. A substantial percentage of the firms had dress codes that were not gender-neutral. Next year I want to do a follow-up survey, to see if there have been any improvements by the firms. (The report can be found at www.nycla.org/siteFiles/Publications/Publications38_0.pdf. It won the award for the best committee report at NYCLA this year.)
Right now, I am working on getting NYCLA to endorse the New York State Gender Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA). I drafted a report outlining the reasons why, which has been adopted by the Committee, and sent to the NYCLA board for its consideration.
I think my work on the Committee shows there are many gays and lesbians who want to help trans people achieve the legal protections that they have, or are still working to achieve. Most, if not all, of the other volunteer lawyers at the TransLegal Clinic are gay or lesbian. I am the only trans one. I have never seen any reluctance, let alone opposition, from any of the other Committee members to the Committee’s work in trans areas. The trans community is decades behind the gay and lesbian community in organizing to achieve its civil rights. We would be fools not to work with them.
Personally, I will continue with my work with the NYCLA Committee, perhaps in a leadership role next year. I also am being proposed for a position on one of the LeGaL boards for next year. One of my problems is not biting off more than I can chew, because I am also active in trans-specific organizations, such as the NYS GENDA Coalition (currently under construction), and Crossdressers International.
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Caprice Bellefleur”
Let's (Not) Have Sex?
It’s a funny thing to be envying a couple who haven’t had sex since 1986.
But upon reading a recent interview with Meredith (nee Wally) and Lynne Bacon, I can’t help envying them. It would be so much easier to make it through transition if sexuality were already out of the picture. And while I admit that I have no idea if the lack of sex Meredith and Lynne had before Meredith’s transition is a complicated story (my guess is that it is), settling into a platonic though perhaps romantic friendship with your former husband could be nice.
Some say it’s age, but it’s not. I’ve met older partners of transition for whom sex is just as important as it is to a 25 year old (and a horny 25 year old, to boot).
(I really do dread menopause.)
Of course I also have this niggling thought that I first had when Jenny Finney Boylan & her wife Deirdre were on Oprah: that when they want to hear about transsexualism, they talk to a transsexual (which makes sense), but when they want to know about the relationship, and the wife’s feelings, they still talk to the transsexual (but include her wife in the interview). Now why is that, do you think?
Or is it that they prefer to interview couples who say they don’t have sex, and who aren’t going to say words like queer on television? Dunno. Sometimes, looking at the long-suffering wife scenario, I figure that I’m just not what they’re looking for.
It's a Queer Day…
It turns out this site is the link of the week at Queer Day magazine, so for all of you coming over from there, welcome!
These Damn Death Shows
Okay, is anyone else addicted to these murder procedurals? It started for me with Law & Order: Criminal Intent, because I liked Vincent D’Onofrio. But then Crossing Jordan was on after that.
I barely watch any tv and yet I can’t keep from watching these – even when they creep me out. Even when I can’t sleep after. Stupid of me, but I can’t cut it out.