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Indian FTMs

An article predominantly about lesbians and FTMs in India (despite the photo of MTFs dancing) appeared in The Hindu, India’s national paper. The West is blamed for intolerant attitudes:

The hostility to alternate sexualities, LesBIT activists say, is a modern phenomenon. Evidence of lesbian, bisexual and transgender relationships can be found in Vedic literature, tantra, Sufi poetry, and in the ancient sculptures o f Konark and Khajuraho. The criminalisation of gay, lesbian and transgender sexuality is, however, a product of the Victorian morality of British colonialism. What is interesting is that while homosexual marriages are today legally recognised in the United Kingdom, they continue to be criminalised in India.

That is, the Hjira may be evidence of a tolerant past, but their existence doesn’t prove a tolerant present.

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If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say…

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.)

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Bathrooms in Arizona, Letters to The Advocate

Michele DeLaFreniere, a trans woman in Arizona, is suing a bar that kept her from entering.

The bar’s owner objects to having been quoted as saying he doesn’t want “her kind” in the place, but does admit that he’s blocked trans women from coming to the bar because of the bathroom issue: trans women were being harassed in the men’s room, and female bar patrons didn’t want the trans women in the women’s restroom.

As the story was reported in The Advocate, Anderson told the AP, “There was no place I could put these people.”

Two letters to the editor about the issue weigh in on the side of keeping women’s restrooms free of trans women, one calling them “men” and the other calling them “‘women’.”

Yet another “women’s space” issue, but I’m not sure the best answer is simply to insist that trans women use the ladies’ rooms. Education, unisex bathrooms, – surely there are more intermediate ways of handling this instead of just telling women – who may be ignorant but also fearful, for good reason, of sharing bathroom space with people they view as male. Convincing women raised female that trans women are not male requires a hell of a lot of education, which will take time, so what do we do in the meanwhile?

(My thanks to Joanne Herman for the heads-up.)

(Xposted to Trans Group Blog.)

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Princess Amygdala

How do we know with transness that there isn’t just something in the brain that’s mistaken? I don’t mean that in a bad way. I say that from the position of someone whose body was gender variant due to a hormone imbalance. When I see people’s before/after photos, I see FTMs who are physically quite feminine (i.e., normatively physically gendered), with no excess body hair, few large jaws or big hands, who get regular periods, etc. Likewise with MTFs: pre transition can be quite masculine, with very male skeletal structures, musculatures, a lot of body hair. I see such externally “gender normative” bodies I’m even jealous, though of course there are trans people whose bodies are gender variant, in various ways, too, who have ovaries or testicles that don’t function right, or make too much of the “wrong” hormone, etc.

It’d certainly be simpler if trans people all had physical evidence of their gender variance but obviously that’s not the case. All people who have physically gender variant bodies due to hormone imbalance are not trans, either, of course. But when I read that a lot of FTMs have PCOS like me, that makes perfect sense. Or when MTFs have gynecomastia or no body hair. Continue reading “Princess Amygdala”

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Clocked

I was talking to my friend Maurice when I got to see him recently, and commented that African American people are often quicker to clock trans women more easily or more often than others.

About a day later, he came up with the idea that perhaps that’s because hair doesn’t have the same gendered connotations for African American people as it does for white folks: as he pointed out, African American women will often have buzzcuts, or very short hair, or hair that is cornrowed close to the head – i.e., not the kind of hair that often indicates woman-ness in white culture. Likewise, African-American men sometimes have that long flowing hair – in the shape of dreadlocks – so that his theory was that they may not respond to hair as a gender marker as strongly as white folks due, & see through to other kinds of gender markers that white folks – distracted by hair – might not notice.

& Yes, Maurice is African-American.

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About 20/20

So I’m still thinking about the 20/20 show that was on a few weeks ago about young kids coming out as trans.

& The thing I can’t quite get past is how many people who are gender variant grow up to be gender variant but okay with the sex they were born. A gay friend of mine called after the show was over & asked, “So what’s the difference between them & me?” because he went through most, if not all, of what one of the young MTF expressed. He did drag for most of his childhood, expressed the desire to be a girl as a child, and had a hard time dating guys who didn’t want to date a queen. I didn’t have an answer for him. I don’t know what makes some of us gender variant & some of us trans. Continue reading “About 20/20”

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Photos

Every once in a while I wonder, when I see photos of MTFs that have been doctored, or taken in just the right light, etc., whether other people worry the way that I do that people will love the photo but then meet you in person & think you look like crap?

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The Graduate

Recently in our forums, Nettie jokingly made a reference to the “Class of 2007” – meaning those who would be transitioning in 2007 – and in the context of our experience talking to people at IFGE, & in the light of a review of She’s Not the Man I Married someone sent me which criticized the book for not having an “ending,” I’ve been thinking recently that perhaps one of the most slippery aspects of the slippery slope is that transition provides an ending, and maybe even closure. The thing is: from what post-transition trans women tell me, that’s not necessarily true, but for anyone who’s been suffering all their lives with their trans feelings, it sure does seem like one hell of an attractive idea.

So while I very much tried to communicate in the new book that I may be waiting for the sound of a shoe that may never drop, folks don’t seem to understand that sometimes there isn’t so much of an “ending” as instead a “being finished.” But I also wonder if there’s anything that crossdressers or middle path types might do to accomplish more of a feeling of closure that transition brings trans women. I know CDI throws “debutante parties” – which seems like a great way to come out – which might work for plenty of CDs, especially since deb parties come with pretty party clothes. But what about middle path types? Do they send out a press release? Because no matter how many times we tell people that Betty is where she is, people persist in believing Betty will want to transition medically or legally or both. & You know, she might. She might in a year from now, & she might 10 years from now, or 20. But the whole idea of having other people tell you you’re not “done” until transition is a huge aggravation for us both.

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The Penn State Law Talk

I’m hoping that this talk was recorded as planned and so will be available on Penn State Dickinson School of Law’s website, eventually, because there were a lot of interesting questions discussed in the Q&A after I spoke. Prof. Rains also added a lot of useful legal insight.

I started with a kind of preface in order (1) to define terms like transgender, MTF and FTM, and also (2) to explain that while people like drag queens and crossdressers are considered part of the transgender community, discussions about legal marriage issues don’t always or often effect them; that is, this talk concerns people who identify nearer to the transsexual end of things. that said, drag queens are often already gay and so deal with the same marriage discrimination all gay people do, and crossdressers often suffer with the stigma of being perverts, and one of the reasons they are not out is exactly because they don’t want their wives to divorce them, or lose custody of their children, or lose their jobs, all of which can & does happen to crossdressers who come out.

I never expected that any aspect of my life would cause me to speak at a law school to future lawyers about the odd ways that my life has become complicated by laws about gender and marriage. I’m surprised two-fold: for starters, I never expected to get married, since as a younger and Very Serious Feminist I saw it as a Tool of Patriarchy, symbolic at least of the ways women have always been chattel, and so, not for me. But I also never expected to get married because I was, starting as a teenager in the late 80s, an ally of gay and lesbian people.

& Then I met Betty, who at the time we met presented as male, and as she likes to explain, we knew, both of us, nearly from the get-go that we were supposed to be together. It’s a difficult feeling to explain, and poets have tried, but it took us a few years to decide once & for all that we were in this thing together. We decided to get married because things were so easy between us; on our 2nd date we sat together and read, one of us The Nation and the other The New York Times. When you’re something like an old married couple on your 2nd date, you know that you’re doomed.

Continue reading “The Penn State Law Talk”