National Coming Out Day

October 11th is National Coming Out Day, and I wanted to provide some resources for some of you who might have someone to come out to – a wife, girlfriend, parent, child, friend, or peer.

  • Here’s a short piece by Abigail Garner, the author of Families Like Mine.
  • Lambda’s tips for coming out are brief but helpful.
  • HRC has a special section of their Coming Out Project pages called Coming Out as Transgender.
  • The APA has a “Just the Facts” sheet that’s more geared toward the GL, but still has a lot of useful information on reparative therapy (for those of you who might come out to more Christian friends & family).
  • And there’s the transgender division of P-FLAG, T-NET, which has a bunch of useful information for the family of transpeople.

Good luck!

Five Questions With… Mona Rae Mason

mona rae masonMona Rae Mason is the Transgender Project‘s Field Coordinator and has been out and active in the TG community in NYC and Northeastern PA. for several years. As a former barmaid in a mid-town Manhattan cocktail lounge, she promoted and hosted several successful trans fundraisers – one for The NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, another for City Meals on Wheels. She has been active in arranging, promoting and hosting transgender specific parties and events, and also speaks at various Transgender support groups and organizations.

1) What is the Transgender Project and what is its goal?

The Transgender Project is a longitudinal study of the male to female Transgender community of the greater NY metro area. The goal of The Transgender Project is, quite simply, to learn! ” The more we learn of ourselves, the better we can teach others”–and that’s pretty much what all this is about. When all is said and done, we will be able to present to MD’s, therapists, and clinicians some powerful and important information about our communtiy. After all, we can’t really expect them to be able to help us if we don’t give them proper information. We need to help them to help us.
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Five Questions With… Loren Krywanczyk

Loren KrywanczykLoren Krywanczyk is an undergraduate at Yale where he first organized Trans Issues Week in 2004, as a sophomore. The 2nd Annual Trans Issues Week took place in 2005, and Krywanczyk is currently planning the 3rd in the series.
< Loren (left) with his partner Vera
1) What encouraged you to start Trans Issues week at Yale?
I founded Trans Issues Week through my capacity as Special Events Coordinator of the Yale Women’s Center my sophomore year, a job that entailed putting together a speaker series during the spring semester. I was at the time purely woman-identified, and yet for some reason which I am still not entirely sure of I decided that it would be a good idea to devote the week to an exploration of intersections and tensions between feminism and trans/gender issues. I met with Jonathan D. Katz of the Larry Kramer Initiative for some direction in potential speakers, since I had very little knowledge of trans/gender issues or theory, let alone key visible figures in the field. Through contacting speakers and getting closer with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale, I received a one-month crash course in gender while throwing together what became the first annual Trans Issues Week at Yale. The week itself inspired me personally as well as academically, and shortly after the series my sophomore year I began incorporating genderqueerness and fludity into my own everyday life and intellectual pursuits. I guess you could say that a personal interest and activist/education-buildling initiative sparked my organization of the series, but even so I don’t know exactly where that personal interest stemmed from at the time.
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Glitz Speech

Our trip to Phoenix and the Glitz was a little nutty thanks to the usual trans community in-fighting. I’d written this speech about partners and family, but when I got there I realized an entirely different speech was needed.
So I never delivered this one (though I will use it for an upcoming speech elsewhere, no doubt).
* * *
Thanks to G____, B_____, and to all the people of Transgender Harmony who put the Glitz together for inviting me to speak tonight. An especial thanks for the excellent timing – even a few days’ escape from a NY winter is more than welcome!
There are moments when I’m at an event like the Glitz, talking to another wife while our pretty husbands share beauty tips, and I wonder, “How did this happen? How did I get here?” and then “What did I do to deserve this?”
Do you ever have those moments? Times when you’re just astonished at how things have turned out? I don’t know how many years you have to go back, but I’m sure all of you can remember a time when the only place you went en femme was from the bathroom to the bedroom. Your heels had never walked on pavement. Maybe there was a time when your wife didn’t know, or your best friend – maybe they still don’t. But everyone in this room has made some kind of progress to be here – whether this is your first time out (first timers? Where are you?) or if you’re in the middle of your real life test. How big a step, or how many you’ve taken, isn’t always the important thing.
One of the things a wife has a really good view of is how hungry for progress you are; it’s the thing that scares the dickens out of us. More than one CD has gone from telling his wife that he likes to wear women’s clothes to him planning their annual vacation around a trans conference, so he can spend a week en femme. You can call it euphoria, or kid in the candy store syndrome, but no matter what you call it, it makes wives nutty. That’s especially true when they’re initially accepting, in any way, because somehow, coming out as a crossdresser, or a transsexual, affects your ability to measure, and every mile only looks like an inch. As a result, we start to feel like we’ve been taken advantage of, with the ever-escalating needs, the ever-increasing purchases. There are times now I feel surprised when I see a man WITH underarm hair.
And of course it’s not just wives. For some of you, the loved one you drive most crazy might be a close friend, a parent, or a child. No matter who it is, there’s almost no doubt that your need to express yourself will make them a little crazy remembering the right pronouns. I’m here to tell you – we need your help.
A very mature but young transman told me recently that he dreaded telling his mother he’s going to live as a man. He wasn’t worried about her being accepting – in fact, he was pretty sure she would be – but he understood what he was taking away from her, and how much he was pushing her. He said to me, “She already accepted me as a lesbian, and lost all of her dreams of planning my big-white-dress wedding, and now she’s going to lose her daughter altogether.” And I thought, when he told me, that all of us should be raised as women until a certain age, where some of us can then decide to live as men. Transmen are – in my experience – the coolest guys ever. I like to joke with Betty that if I’d known about transmen when I was single, we might not have ever met. But my point is – he got it. He got the loss, the change, the sense of feeling that we have to accept more and more – that sometimes, it feels like the changes never stop.
What that transman knew and understood was that his transition wasn’t just about him, and that his own happiness was also the cause of his mother’s disappointment. His concern for her had the potential to enable him to help her through his transition. It gave her the chance to have a good relationship with her new son.
It’s not just people living fulltime who need to help their loved ones through change. A wife who is told her husband is a crossdresser has to adjust just about everything in her life as well. Her ideas of her marriage, her man, and her future all change. Her sex life might change. She has to start thinking about gender and so-called “deviance” in ways she probably never has before.
The thing is, I hear too many stories of things not working out. Whether the cause is transition or euphoria, I don’t really hear much in the greater trans community about how to think about others as part of your self-expression, and what I do hear seems to be kind of condescending, along the lines of “how do I get this person on board for what I want and need?” Which is not quite the same thing as “how do I help this person I love deal with the changes I’m about to thrust upon them?” or even “how do I modify my needs in order to keep this person I love from running as fast as she can?”
There are workshops on fast track transition, but never any on transitioning slowly enough so your partner can keep up. There are workshops for CDs on how to remove hair but never one on how to do your wife’s makeup, so she can feel glamorous too. Endless makeovers, photo shoots, and receipts – all add up to a lot of time and energy and money, and the wives, and girlfriends, – especially the ones who are willing to be here, or join an online support group, deserve to feel pampered too. Look at it this way: if you spend as much on your partner as you do on your femme self and you won’t run out of closet room so fast. Honestly, would you go to a week-long conference for whatever her gig is? Would you want to be around a bunch of women who scrapbook, knit, write fiction, do yoga? Do you know as much about her as she does about both of you?
The bottom line is that your loves ones are your best allies – potentially. If you can help them understand, they can become the people who will stand up and say you’re not crazy, and that this isn’t a joke. We don’t have the shame to get past, we don’t have the internal conflict. Once we’re on board, we’re on board. You want us on your side. Nurturing our change – along with yours – will go a long long way toward getting us there.
I don’t say all this only because I’m a wife. I say it because I don’t want to see anyone else end up on the other side of the mirror alone. I say it because I’ve seen too many relationships – romantic, familial, friendships – strained to the breaking point. I know it’s not easy – that you’re impatient, that the revelation of who you are is HUGE. It’s easy, when you’re online, reading message boards or mailing lists, and coming to events like the Glitz, to think that everyone knows about gender. But they don’t. The education isn’t out there – on TV, transsexuals are still shown as serial killers when they’re seen at all. Crossdressers are still a joke. You know that when you tell family and friends, you have to start with transgender 101. I’ve yet to meet someone trans who isn’t on their way to a PhD in trans studies, which means, of course, that you’re way ahead of us, a Chief Financial Officer of a global corporation teaching someone how to balance a checkbook. The chasm between is what causes the difficulties. What we need – as your potential allies – is to get you to slow down, and yes – please repeat that.
We can all do something to help couples and families through. When a married CD friend says, “I went shopping,” you can ask: “what’d you get your wife?” When your favorite transwoman starts listing her hormones, WITH dosages, ask her how her mother, father, wife, or child is. Remind each other that you’re not in a void, that you’re not alone, and amazingly enough, that there’s more to life, and gender, than hose, heels, and hormones.
You deserve for there to be more. You deserve love, and happiness. Being trans is not easy – not ever. You’re reinventing yourselves in ways that are mind-blowing, but you innately understand why you need to. We don’t. We’ve never thought about gender. You have no choice. Most partners can get that. We can see the difference, even when we don’t like it. Sometimes we know it even when we know we can’t go with you. The liberation – the sheer joy – y’all exhibit is obvious. Hold onto it in your dark moments. Hold onto it when your mom screws up your pronouns for the Nth time. Hold onto it when you look in the mirror and don’t see what you want to see. Hold onto it when your wife cries about her loss. For you, there’s struggle and joy, but for us, it’s just struggle and loss. You need to find a way to let your joy, your liberation, infect us, recharge us. It’s your joy, your freedom, that will win over not just partners, but friends, employers, family – and the rest of society. And it’s way better than Angry Tranny Syndrome.
When most of us can’t make up our minds how to cut our hair or quit a job, you’ve gone and imagined the impossible – and started making plans to have it happen. If you give your loved ones a minute, once in a while, to catch their breath, they’ll be there for you when things look bleak. Your wife will remind you not to tuck your dress into your pantyhose. Your best friend will help you figure out the line between being a man’s man and a macho jerk. Your mom might be the one to see that after all, you DO look like her. Give us time, give us love, and give us hope. Some of us will get lost, or stuck. But lots of us – I mean look at this room! – will be the ones who help you go forward with grace, confidence – and far from alone.
* * *

Betty in the NYT

From the Tuesday, January 18th edition of The New York Times and an article titled “Actors Exit One Troupe to Build Another”:
“The longtime familiarity among the actors was critical, said Jason Crowl, who played Titorelli, the artist who finally reveals to Joseph K. the truth of his horrible situation, as a sinister, epicene figure. Mr. Crowl left the Cocteau about two years ago because he was unhappy.
Mr. Crowl, who describes himself as transgendered, said, “I wouldn’t have made Titorelli as interesting as he was if I didn’t know the people in the cast and couldn’t say, ‘I’m going to make him freaky and androgynous and hope everyone is O.K. with that.’ ”
That would be my husband Betty. I’m newly amazed by her bravery, coming out in the paper of note.
(Thanks to Eddie Izzard for opening the door.)

Remembering We're Living

On the eve of TG Day of Remembrance, it’s bothering me that the only international recognition of transness is in the all-too-brutal murders of transpeople. What Gwen Smith has created in the Remembering Our Dead project is vital work: vital because these transpeople are murdered out of hate, often brutally, and way too frequently, their killers are not found, or not prosecuted. Historically and politically, Remembering Our Dead is a project that is both emotionally powerful and sympathetic; it reminds me, most often, of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
That said, I meet with all sorts of living, struggling transpeople every day. And while you could say that the other 364 days are theirs, we all know that’s not quite true. What we all need – other than to mourn our dead and keep vigils for justice – is a way of simultaneously recognizing the great progress in the trans community among the living, so I propose a supplement to Gwen Smith’s brilliant work: The Remember We’re Living Celebration.
What I foresee is that transgroups stand up and honor their own members by having a kind of New Year’s: by asking each of us to stand up and cite one piece of progress, or a victory, we experienced in the past year. The closeted CD could cite his recent decision to come out to his wife. The out CD might celebrate her involvement with a GLBT charity group. The transitioning sister could tell us how close to the end of her Real Life test she is. And the transitioned woman might share in what ways she’s helped her sisters coming up. Transmen might point to their months on T, coming out (usually for the 2nd time) to their friends and families, or rallying with their transwoman sisters at Camp Trans.
We all struggle within this community; some of us within relationships, some of us with loneliness. But my feeling is that I would put my last dollar on a bet that says we have all accomplished something, whether private or public or both, which could use a round of applause.
I would love to see the vigils for Remembering Our Dead morph into living transpeople testifying to their own successes, their own beauty, their own victories. I would like to see the GLBT papers cover these events and have something other than gruesome deaths to report.
If you think this is a good idea, pass this message on.
For now, we’re asking every transperson who receives this message to send us a note, via the MHB message boards, or leave a comment here, noting one victory, success, or piece of happiness they’ve achieved in the last year concerning their transness.
Helen Boyd

Rufus Wainwright's new CD

This has nothing to do with transgender anything, but everything to do with my loves in this world, the chief musical one among them for the past 4 years or so being one Rufus Wainwright. His new CD (that’s Compact Disc) is coming out in a couple of weeks, but VH1 has a preview up.
Listen here

Chris Kahrl, TG sportswriter

From the Washington Blade
OUT IN SPORTS
Throwing a curveball Chris Kahrl, the transgendered co-author of the annual Baseball Prospectus, is finding life outside the closet rewarding.
Friday, April 09, 2004
FOR MORE THAN A decade, Chris Kahrl has turned a love of baseball into a successful career in sports publishing, working with a long-standing team of
authors to write, edit, and publish the annual Baseball Prospectus. The definitive guide, feverishly updated each winter and published a full month before Major League baseball’s opening day, which was last week, analyzes statistics on each player in the profession. It reaches 60,000 readers annually. Noting that other attempts to chronicle anything can be as ‘dull as paste,’ Kahrl and colleagues pepper the ‘Prospectus’ with intelligent humor and thoughtful
commentary, successfully turning a reference guide into a legitimate coffee table book for even the most casual fan to enjoy.
Reflecting that humor and charm, Kahrl, a lifetime athlete and baseball fanatic, publicly discussed the book and baseball last Thursday for nearly three hours
at Politics and Prose bookstore in Northwest D.C. The Baseball Prospectus may be different because of its hip, fresh approach to one of America’s favorite
pastimes. But it’s also unique for another reason: Its co-author Chris Kahrl has been living openly as a transgendered woman for the past six months.
COMING OUT STORIES have a certain arc to them and can almost write themselves today. But Kahrl, 36, offers a rare perspective about the torturous layers involved in coming out as a transgendered person that few others, including gay men and lesbians, have experienced. “For me, the process of coming out is effectively unzipping your head for everyone’s benefit,” she says.
“I was scared to death when I took my boss out for drinks. But when I told him, he said, ‘Well, Chris, I’m your friend, you’re a great author, and we’re going to make this work.'”
That might seem unbelievably enlightened for a boss, but Kahrl of Virginia has known him and all of her colleagues for more than 10 years. “I’ve had good fortune with all of my friends, even my family,” she says. “I gave being a guy my best shot, and it didn’t work out and that’s OK.”
STILL, MOST OF her work with Major League Baseball is researched over the phone and Internet, not in the locker room. At Politics and Prose, it was standing room only when she appeared last week. Kahrl said it couldn’t have gone better.
“People blinked for a minute, but as I kept rolling along, talking about baseball, gender issues disappeared from everyone’s radar as it became clear everyone was going to get what they came for baseball,” she says. Her relatively painless transition says something about the strength of her character. Her colleagues, further still, attribute it to her comportment and professionalism.
“Sure, there is gossip out there,” says Gary Gillette, co-author of Baseball Encyclopedia, a publication similar to the Baseball Prospectus. “But these days, everyone is either enlightened enough to deal with it or wise enough to keep their mouths shut. Chris is very well-respected, well-liked, in this industry,” he says, “and that will certainly continue.”
Kahrl sees no inherent disconnect between the masculine world of baseball and her identity and, in fact, says that a love of the former eases the awkwardness of the latter. “Baseball is something I could relate to with my great-grandfather – with all people,” she says. “Sports give us all something in common to talk about that is essentially inoffensive.” Still, she expects the stares, the puzzled faces, and the common inquiries, and views them as an easy tradeoff for being able to live openly. Her story should inspire anyone in agony over crossing bridges or taking risks.