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Five Questions With… Monica Canfield-Lenfest

As many of you know, Monica Canfield-Lenfest is the daughter of a trans woman and created a new resource, with COLAGE, for kids with trans parents. I highly recommend it.

1) First, tell me about COLAGE & how the book for Kids of Trans happened, what your goals were.

COLAGE (www.colage.org) is a national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer parents. We build community and work toward social justice through youth empowerment, leadership development, education, and advocacy. I first contacted COLAGE five and a half years ago, when I was working on my undergraduate thesis: “She’s My Father: The Social Experience of People with Transgender Parents”. Looking for references for my project, I discovered a diverse community of queerspawn who gave me the space to better articulate my experience and encouraged me to continue my work, since there are hardly any resources for transgender parented families. I started presenting at transgender conferences and gained a renewed sense of responsibility to build community and develop resources for people with transgender parents.

During a COLAGE conference in Dallas two years ago, I suggested to Meredith Fenton, COLAGE Program Director, that perhaps I could fill a fall internship position at the national office. We came up with a Fellowship model for my position, which has become a new program for the organization. I worked full-time for eight months focused specifically on the Kids of Trans Program. The major goal of the fellowship was to develop resources for people with transgender parents. Since there was no book detailing our experiences and offering advice to people with trans parents, the Kids of Trans Resource Guide became the obvious main project.

My goals in writing the guide were: first, to tell other people with trans parents that they are not alone; second, to recognize that the entire family transitions when a parent transitions; and third, to provide compassionate advice from people who have similar families. In short, I hoped to create the book I wanted my father to give me when she came out to me over ten years ago. Continue reading “Five Questions With… Monica Canfield-Lenfest”

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Book Review: Live Through This

Not long ago, I picked up a copy of Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction. As many of you know, I used to write fiction all of the time – all of it as yet unpublished – and thought I might get in touch again with my creative self, and the relationship that creative self has to my own personal demons.

Because I remember avoiding therapy when I was 19 for fear that it would hurt my art.

It didn’t. But as a result, my favorite of this collection of essays by various female artists about the intersection of their angst & their art was Diane DiMassa‘s, who, in pictures of course, traces the way her conversations with her therapist became Hothead Paisan.

Of interest to a lot of people who read here is Kate Bornstein’s essay on her experiences with art, demons, & Scientology. So now we know she’s not only a remarkable author, playwright, and performer, but she’s also a pretty fantastic visual artist. (Not that that’s surprising.)

In some ways, this book may be more useful as a way to read about the women’s lives than it is to read about artistic process, though: so many of the essays are more about the strife that caused the art (which ranges from sexual abuse to drugs to cutting to anorexia) than about how the person managed to channel that into their art, exactly. What I’m always interested in is how artists – especially female artists – find the resources to keep going.

So it’s not a how-to guide, but it doesn’t purport to be one, either; it IS a remarkable bunch of women writing about what made their art. It’s published by the very cool Seven Stories, and of course available at amazon.com and independent booksellers.

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Healthcare Proxy Forms

A couple who’ve been together for 18 years went on vacation, on a cruise, with three of their four children. One of them had a massive stroke as their ship was about to leave port, which meant she received medical care at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, where her partner was told the couple made the mistake of being in “an anti-gay city and state” and refused to let her partner in to see her, but for five minutes, as she was dying.

She died about 18 hours later. Both women were only 39 years old.

This is what DOMA & all this other anti-gay bullshit leads to, but please queer folks, fill out your healthcare proxies. You can find NYS’s here, and here in .pdf format. If people have or find links for these forms in their state, please post them below, or send them to me via email & I can post them.

More instructions and state-specific forms below the break. Continue reading “Healthcare Proxy Forms”

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Gender Biased Science

The other day a woman on our message boards wrote to me to say that as a scientist, she didn’t always feel comfortable or welcome on our message boards exactly because she is a scientist, and (I assume) happy & proud to be one. She was aware of my strongly-held opinions about scientists, especially when it came to gender.

What’s always interesting about having someone confront you about your prejudices is having to recognize them for what they are. On the one hand, I really love science, and scientists; the fearless work many have done in terms of environmental science, or medical research, and into all sorts of other cool things that I may or may not care about. But I’m suspicious of science when it comes to gender, and I had to figure out why.

First, I’ve probably read way too much Fausto-Sterling than a lay person should.

Second, I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at a time in my life when I was – well, a humanities major, & a political one.

But all half-kidding aside, this is why I take issue with science, and with scientists who study gender: the field of science is pretty notorious for gender discrimination. That fact has been pointed out by scientists, many of whom wrote in response to Lawrence Summers’ vague theorizing about why women aren’t in as esteemed positions in research and higher mathematics. So you’ve got an industry – & especially the feminists within that industry – clearly pointing out that the FIELD of science is pretty damn discriminatory.

However, I’m told that scientists’ goals are objective, which I believe. I believe many aim to be objective (as do many journalists, judges, etc.). First, that doesn’t mean they ARE objective. It just means that’s their goal. It’s a good goal. But when you’ve got actual scientists pointing out discrimination against women in hiring, on the one hand, and scientific studies about the differences between male and female brains, on the other, you kind of have a problem. Unless you’re going to argue that the people doing the research on the male and female brains have nothing whatsoever to do with the people who are doing the hiring and firing and grant-giving, and I have a hard time believing that.

Aside from that, of course, are all the other reasons: how we once saw race as a legitimate way to compare brains. How we used to think smarter people had larger brains. How it’s pretty obvious that people want to use the findings of science to justify ass-backwards gender roles.

But mostly what I want to know, now, is how we can trust an entire field of study which regularly discriminates against women not to bring those kinds of prejudices into the evaluation of male and female brains.

I’d really like an answer, if anyone has one.

(A slightly different take, over at Feministing, but I think both were inspired by the recent reports that straight men & lesbians have similar symmetries of brain, as do gay men & straight women, which is, as usual, being totally blown out of proportion by the media coverage of it.)

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Writing While Listening

I wrote most of My Husband Betty while listening to Rufus Wainwright‘s music, which is one of the reasons I thanked him in the foreword of that book.

She’s Not the Man I Married took motivating music; things like “Go Baby Go” by Garbage I remember listening to over & over again some nights, for its queer lyrics and sugary enthusiasm.

But now, this novel — which I started writing when I was first listening to a lot of Smiths — is now getting written to a soundtrack of nearly exclusively Elliott Smith, specifically XO, and some nights, I’m just so taken my how honeyed and gorgeous his voice was, and how much it saddens me that he won’t ever sing again. It’s just such perfect middle of the night music, somehow, full of longing and a kind of stubborn dignity, and the perfect soundtrack for this book.

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White Privilege

& More on the Fr. Pfleger post! Someone wrote to me & said:

I am Catholic as well, 1st generation Irish-American, I was poor, faced prejudice – and feel I owe nothing to Father Pfleger’s constituency. I feel I worked myself out of the bottom and I don’t feel anyone owes me anything either. But if this race-baiting (as I see it) continues then I might have to argue that I was discriminated against as well—if not here in the USA then maybe in Ireland/England.

But then when does it end? When does victimization end? It has gone on a long time in the USA and it hasn’t improved. I don’t think victimization helps improve people’s lives. It never helped me. I worked my way out of it (and people don’t understand the work that I did unless they did it themselves).

But when Father Pfleger says we owe some of or 401k’s to black people because we had ‘white privilege’, I have difficulty understanding it because I don’t feel I had equal opportunity and yet I don’t resent it. I accept it–It is life and I don’t think it will ever change.

Which is all perfectly logical & makes sense to me; I think it’s the nut of why poor and working-class white people sometimes object to Affirmative Action programs.

Except that the reality, in the US, is that we have inherited a system where some people are oppressed because of their race and only because of their race. It is not the only way people are oppressed, and plenty of us (white folks) did not have family here when slavery was operable. But the system that came out of race-based slavery was, in turn, racist.

So while poor white people didn’t benefit from equal treatment – because we didn’t – we didn’t have to deal with being poor AND black. We were privileged in one aspect – being white – and oppressed in another – by class. Catholics and Jews and other “white” immigrant groups were often also oppressed due to their religion or recent immigration status. Often these groups are referred to as “white ethnic” – meaning ‘white but not WASP.’ It’s what I consider myself. For an excellent book on the subject, specifically the way whiteness was sold as privilege to unionized white workers – check out The Wages of Whiteness, or on White Ethnic groups, check out White Ethnics.

Being able to look at the ways we are each privileged and the ways we are oppressed is what we call Intersectionality in Gender Studies.

But more importantly, let me say this: the idea here isn’t about victimization. It’s about understanding one’s individual story in context. It’s not about sitting around & saying “woe is me” or anything like it. It’s just about knowing which aspects of your own experience and others works against you, & them; it’s a way of explaining why some women are more privileged than others, and why, say, a white, rich, professional gay man might have a hard time understanding why a black poor lesbian can’t get a decent start in life despite them both being LGBT.

So: no whining. Just acknowledgment in the ways we exist, as individuals, within the larger culture and its institutions, and the ways those institutions, in turn, shape us. (Of course that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who would prefer to blame everyone & anyone for why they suck, but that’s an entirely different issue entirely.)

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PA Writing

I recently read two books that took place in PA, one fiction, the other non-fiction. Baker Towers is the story of a Polish-Italian PA family, which was intriguing since I’m from a Polish-Italian family (except in my family the husband was the Italian, not the wife, & they met in Brooklyn, not PA). I found it lacking because there were historical inaccuracies – there were no Magic Markers during WWII, women used eyeliner to draw their stockings’ seams, – and because the writing was competent, but not interesting, and the characters were so arm’s-distanced that it was hard to feel for them.

The other, called The Day the Earth Caved In, was about the Centralia mine fire, & while it was good, it was – also kind of dully told.

You’d think a mine fire – and a mine disaster – would be easy to make interesting. Maybe there’s something about writing about PA that people feel they can’t be a little flash when they write.

& I say all that because I’ve written two novels (as yet unpublished) that deal, to a large or small degree, with PA, and with coal towns, and even with WWII. Jennifer Finney Boylan tells me there is a whole literature surrounding the Centralia mine fire these days, and that Harper’s Magazine even did an article about it. (Ms. Boylan has also written two books, The Planets, and The Constellations, that take place in PA, & involve mine fires).

I feel sometimes like a reverse snob; I don’t care for literary writers much, except when they’re very very good (like Tolstoy, like Calvino). I’d like to be a writer who sells books. Honestly, trying to be literary probably set my writing back quite a few years. I look back at some of the stories I wrote before college & they have clearer voices than some later stories (but, like most juvenilia, they have almost no authority to them.)

Anyway. I think Twain said once, never let literature get in the way of your writing. Or something similar.

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Testicles to Spare

James Carville recently joked that if Clinton gave Obama one of her testicles, they’d both have two.

har de har har.

That, plus the joke about her “testicular fortitude” – ugh, does a woman running for president have to have balls?

Worse, making a joke about the black candidate having less than two is really ugly – and historically, a pretty loaded thing to say, considering the sexualization of black males, specifically as predators, & the way so many black men who were lynched were also subject to castration or other genital mutilation.

Carville turned into an asshole this campaign season, imho (which started with the whole Bill “Judas” Richardson fracas.) To me, this is unforgivably ignorant of American history and some of the racialized hate we’ve experienced as a nation. There is no excuse for someone as high up as Carville to make this kind of wisecrack. As if gender baiting weren’t bad enough.

Shakesville summarizes why the gendered part of the joke isn’t funny, either:

“From “pansy” to “testicular fortitude”2 to this little outburst, Clinton surrogates have been trying to paint Clinton as a tough, manly man, and Obama as, for lack of a better word, a sissy. This is a line of attack that demeans Obama, demeans Clinton, demeans women, demeans men, demeans anyone who believes that toughness and sensitivity need not be tied directly to gender. I expect more from the Clinton campaign; given the amount of misogyny that Clinton has faced, I’d like to think her campaign would be free of it. But evidently it’s easier to paint Hillary as a man than to argue that women can be tough too; it’s easier to paint Obama as less than a man than to argue that women can be tougher than men. And it’s a shame, because clearly, there are some women tougher than some men. Hillary Clinton may be tougher than Barack Obama. But it isn’t because she’s a guy, and it isn’t because he’s a girl.”

(via Shakesville)

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Party with the Sexerati

It just so happens that some of our sexed-up friend are throwing a double book launch party on our 39th birthday, so of course we’re going, & you’re free to join us:

On May 13, 7:00-10:00 pm, you and your peeps are invited to….Party with the Sexerati!
Come celebrate the release of two exciting new books:

  • Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino and
  • Tantra for Erotic Empowerment: The Key to Enriching Your Sexual Life by Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson.

Tantra teachers Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson and sex expert/Village Voice columnist Tristan Taormino will party with the Sexerati as they schmooze, dance, and sip on special complimentary cocktails provided by Espiritu del Ecuador. You’ll get an exclusive sneak preview of their latest collaboration: see Mark and Patricia teach Tantra techniques to performers in Tristan’s latest volume of her award-winning porn reality series, Chemistry 4: The Orgy Edition. Every person who purchases a book will get a free tantra, sex ed, or porn DVD. Guests will also be treated to fabulous gift bags full of sexy, sensual, fun goodies hand-picked by the authors. Plus, don’t miss an exciting performance at 9 pm by a very special guest!

(Directions & other info below the break) Continue reading “Party with the Sexerati”

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Will Work for Food

I recently corresponded with two different people putting together an anthology about trans lives, and I asked if contributors were getting paid. I was told no one is getting paid, but they’re pitching to commercial publishers.

What the hell is that? I’m writing about this because it terrifies me. I’m not making a living writing – not many authors do – but jesus h., we still need to get paid! Sometimes I worry that because of the fierce competition in academic circles that people will do *anything* to get published, but goddamn.

So here’s Harlan Ellison giving you the what-for, writers. Get paid! & Join a damn union, whether you write books or scripts.