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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
bettysgrrl's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, June 18th, 2007 | | 3:38 am |
As I make my way back from Baltimore, I thought I should announce a new pet project I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks, and that’s to start a group blog about trans issues, with a bunch of different bloggers coming from various segments of the trans community blogging. And so far, it’s working! Right now, the (working) list of bloggers (in alphabetical order) is: - Marti Abernathey
- me
- Jennifer Finney Boylan
- Betty
- Marlena Dahlstrom
- Jamison Green
- Richard Juang
- Julia Serano
- Max Wolf Valerio
- & Reid Vanderbergh
But there are invitations out to others who I hope will sign on & participate. It’s called Trans Group Blog and you can find it at http://transgroupblog.blogspot.com/. Do come check it out. It's also already been set up here at LJ: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/transgroupblog/profile)
Current Mood:  pleased | | Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 | | 1:22 am |
The trans support group episode of All My Children will air Thursday, March 8th & Friday, March 9th. You can find out what channel it’s on and when on the AMC website. Betty will be on with six others, including Jennifer Finney Boylan. Current Mood: chipper | | Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 | | 12:55 am |
| | Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 | | 12:08 am |
Well, we’re almost there, folks: the official pub date is just two weeks away, and I know many of you are already reading or have already read She’s Not the Man, but for those who aren’t, this is the last preview I’ll be putting up. It’s from my Preface: This book is a sequel to My Husband Betty, at least in that our story and my reasons for thinking about gender take up where it left off. Mostly it is a love story, our love story, which, like any other, is not typical. It is the story of how a tomboy fell in love with a sissy, how a butch found her femme, how a boyish girl met a girlish boy. Who is who is not always clear and doesn’t always matter. In some ways, that’s the heart of this book: the idea that a relationship is a place where people can and do and maybe even ought to become as ungendered as they can. It comes from my very specific dislike of Martian men and Venusian women and the adversarial ideas about relationships that permeate our culture. While I am not interested in a genderless world, I am curious about the ways that gender can be manipulated in a romance, the ways it can be controlled instead of controlling our roles. | | Monday, February 5th, 2007 | | 1:37 pm |
| | Thursday, February 1st, 2007 | | 4:53 pm |
Books
While I was at a client’s today, Betty got to receive a very large, heavy box full of the new book. This is the first I’ve gotten to see it, so it’s very exciting. It’s a sturdy book, and there’s an artsy typesetting effect that I really love. Those who have ordered signed copies should get them by the end of the week (unless you live in, say, Australia). & Just to say: it is something to hold your first book in your hands. It is something else altogether to hold your second. Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble online seem to have them, too, as the pre-order page is down and the "usually ships in 2-3 days" message is up. Exciting. Current Mood:  giddy | | Saturday, January 13th, 2007 | | 12:13 am |
8th Preview from She's Not the Man I Married
Excerpt from Betty’s Afterword: I walked into a meeting with Helen recently and someone we both know said, “Betty, I didn’t recognize you. I thought you were a woman,” when she first saw me. She was looking for “Betty” and all she saw was “some woman” with Helen, instead. She meant I didn’t look trans and that made what I see in the mirror more real. It was a backhanded compliment, of course, but the nut of it really struck me. More and more, I really do look like a woman. Jeebus, does Helen know this? Yes, she does. It’s odd, this life of ours, and I’m terribly aware of my culpability in said oddness. It is our life, though, and there is no one on the face of this earth that I’d rather be with than Helen. She really is the girl I always wanted to meet. And wouldn’t you know it? I met her . . . and she liked me back. And we got married. And I feel like a lottery winner. I’m amazed that she feels even remotely the same about me—the guy who looks like a woman a lot these days. But she does.
| | Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 | | 10:51 pm |
NYC Nobody Passes reading
I contributed to a book by Mattilda called Nobody Passes, and I will be doing a reading with other contributors here in New York, on March 21st, at the bookstore Bluestockings. (Other upcoming readings for Nobody Passes below the break.)
 other Nobody Passes upcoming readings: Wednesday, January 24 @ 7:30 p.m.
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia (@ 20th)
San Francisco, CA 94110
www.moderntimesbookstore.com
(415) 282-9246
with Sandy Chang, Logan Gutierrez-Mock, Amy Andre, Jen Cross, Dominika Bednarska, Tommi Avicolli Mecca and Eric Stanley Friday, February 9 @ 7:30 p.m.
Skylight Books
1818 N. Vermont Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90027
(323) 660-1175
with Jessica Hoffmann, Ruth Blandon, Irina Contreras, Stephanie Abraham, Benjamin Shepard, Jen Cross and Jennifer Blowdryer Thursday, March 8 @ 7:30 p.m.
Women & Children First Bookstore
5233 N. Clark Street
Chicago, IL 60640
773-769-9299
wcfbooks@aol.com
www.womenandchildrenfirst.com | | Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 | | 10:30 pm |
Act NOW
Health and Human Services is considering appointing Eric Keroack, a doctor who is not just anti-choice but anti-contraception, to be in charge of the US' birth control funding. Basically, he's an "abstinence only" type - which is, as most of us know, the worst form of birth control around. You can get more information about him from NOW's site. NOW has a petition up that you can (and should) sign, and is also asking people to write directly to their reps to get them to keep him from this appointment. Lunatics running the asylum. This is like us appointing someone hostile to the UN to represent the US... oh, wait, we did that one already. | | Monday, November 27th, 2006 | | 7:16 am |
Leslie Feinberg on SNTMIM
As if what people have said wasn't enough to make me delirious already, Leslie Feinberg read She's Not the Man I Married, and said: "Between the covers of this book, you'll hear how love sounds when it's so honest it bleeds. Trans liberation is more certain to "win" because Helen Boyd's on the team." -- Leslie Feinberg Thank you, Leslie. I hope zie's right. | | Saturday, November 25th, 2006 | | 10:21 pm |
Confirmed Events
I will have the extreme pleasure and honor of introducing Leslie Feinberg at the State Museum of New York in Albany, this coming February 3rd. Betty and I will also be attending IFGE 2007, in Philly, where I'll be presenting both my Trans Sex & Identity workshop (on Friday) and doing an additional workshop on She's Not the Man I Married (on Saturday). & That is in addition to my being the keynote speaker for First Event this year and doing an erotic memoir reading for Rachel Kramer Bussel here in NYC. More to come, no doubt! | | Monday, November 20th, 2006 | | 9:04 pm |
Transgender Day of Remembrance
Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we honor our dead. Talk to your friends who are trans; make sure they're safe and have safe habits. Exchang phone numbers, walk people to their cars in groups, travel together late at night. Donate money to some of the people who are helping. And be thankful, in the spirit of the season, for everything you've got. Life included. Celebrate who you are and work for a time when we can stop having this Day altogether. | | Thursday, November 16th, 2006 | | 6:24 am |
Grey's Anatomy (of a Wife)
Last week, our downstairs friend who is a huge Grey's Anatomy fan, called us at the very start of the show, telling us only "there's a plot line you'll want to see." So we watched as a trans woman character came to the hospital for her GRS surgery, and were quite surprised - as were, no doubt, lots of viewers - that her wife had accompanied her there. (You can read more about the episode, and even view it online, at the Grey's Anatomy website. Spoilers below, so go watch it first.) That fact of it alone was a great education for a lot of people, making the clear point that plenty of trans women prefer females, thank you very much. While some of the informaton on the show was a little off - like when they implied that if she went on hormones her beard would come back, completely eliminating the likeliness of laser hair removal or electrolysis - it was absolutely an empathetic portrayal. The monogues by the wife were especially accurate, that odd combination of gallows humor and anger and sadness and sympathy that so many trans partners express about transition. Most accurate, I thought, was a key moment when the trans woman is being told the hormones she's taking to be a woman are giving her breast cancer & she doesn't want to give them up, and the wife - frustrated & scared - uses her partners male name to tell her to "Wake up!" and flees the room after she does. Not much later, she talked about going on dates only to find that she wanted to talk to her "best friend" about those dates - like you do - and finding her husband, male or female, was her best friend. Which is how she ended up holding her hand for surgery. It's that "best friend" bit that's most problematic to me. Betty is my best friend, has been since the minute we met. She's also my teacher, my role model, my mentor, my child. All of them. And all of those things could and would stay in tact post transition. But it's that other role - lover, husband, monogamous pervert - that's the problem. Desire is desire, and it's very hard to predict what might make it go away. I talk about this at length in the new book of course - of course! - but I did want to thank the writers of Grey's Anatomy for doing an excellent job portraying the feelings of het partners of trans women. Feel free to come discuss the episode further on our boards. | | Thursday, October 19th, 2006 | | 4:36 am |
Helen Boyd in Indiana & Texas
I'll be speaking on October 27th at Purdue University in Hammond, IN, from 1-3 PM. More details are here. Do come if you're anywhere nearby; it's not often I end up in this neck of the woods and the event is open to the public. I'll also be speaking on November 1st at Austin College in Sherman, TX (near Dallas), from 4:30-6PM. If you're anywhere near there definitely come, because I'm very, very, very rarely in Texas. I don't have all the details for this one yet but I'll post them when I do. | | Sunday, October 15th, 2006 | | 11:12 pm |
End of the Century
Or more like the end of an era. Today CBGB closes its doors. Thanks, Hilly, for all those years of punk rock, for influencing 30+ years of music, for great unannounced gigs, hardcore Sundays and stacked chairs. Sometimes it's almost seems like all signs are telling me it's time to leave NYC; it's not my city anymore, at least not the one I fell in love with, anyway. < -- & Yes, that's me & Betty (she's in the tux & I'm in the gown - nutty, right?) on our wedding day. & Yes, those are DMs I'm wearing: Johnny Joey DeeDee, good times, indeed. I think Richard Hell got at some of it in this Op-Ed for The New York Times, in which he said, "We all know that nothing lasts. But at least we can make a cool and funny exhibit of it. I’m serious. God likes change and a joke. God loves CBGB’s."
But you know, we tend to come to regret when we don’t step in and save a well-loved institution or two, and I thought we’d learned that by now in NYC. But alas, apparently not, but I think we will come to regret this loss, to be honest.
Current Mood:  pissed off | | Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 | | 4:18 pm |
| | Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 | | 4:47 pm |
| | Thursday, October 5th, 2006 | | 3:42 am |
| | Sunday, October 1st, 2006 | | 8:45 pm |
| | Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 | | 1:53 am |
Trans Partners drop-in group
I will be co-moderating the GIP’s Trans Partner’s Drop-In group this fall, and I’m really pleased to be getting to do this kind of work, since I’ve been talking about doing a partners’ group anyway.
Here are the details:
When: Wednesdays - Beginning October 4
Time: 7:30-9:00 pm
Where: The Center, 208 West 13th Street, New York, New York 10011
(212) 620-7310, www.gaycenter.org
What: Trans-Partners/Trans-Amorous Drop-in is a 10-week group for people of all genders to discuss and explore their attractions to and relationships with trans-identified or gender non-conforming individuals. The group is open to people currently in partnerships with trans-people, people formerly in partnerships with trans-people, and people who are exploring their attraction to trans-people.
How: Registration is not required. There is a $5 suggested donation, but no one will be turned away for lack of ability to pay.
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