29 Linear Feet! Oct13

29 Linear Feet!

Twenty-nine linear feet! If you’re a book geek, if you’ve spent a lot of time in libraries and archives, you’re already excited. If not, let me the space a collection takes on a library’s shelves is described in linear feet. In this case it’s the cumulative length of the pamphlets, flyers, and correspondence of The National Transgender Library & Archive materials at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Thousands of books and hundreds of journal titles are housed elsewhere in the archive and aren’t counted in those twenty-nine linear feet.

Just a Crossdresser Aug22

Just a Crossdresser

There needs to be a serious reaching out by all parties in the transgender world. This includes not only the MTF transsexuals and crossdressers, but FTMs and the intersexed as well. No one has a lock on righteousness, pain, suffering, or the right way to be gendered. By beginning to trust each other we can create a much stronger base from which we can make the world safe for gender freedom.

First Contact Aug21

First Contact

My first contact with the transgender community was with Virginia Prince. I reproduce here my letter to her, written in 1980, and her reply.

The Route Less Taken Aug16

The Route Less Taken

If asked by anyone, “Would you change anything about your life if you could?” my answer would have to be a firm no. Yes, there have been times when I wish I hadn’t had the choices I had, when to just live one life would have had to be enough, but then I think, “How boring!”

Remembering Virginia Aug07

Remembering Virginia

Virginia Prince was a hard person to forget, so naturally my memories of her are crystal clear. Here, for what it’s worth, are my recollections from the nearly twenty years of our acquaintance.

Virginia Speaks Aug05

Virginia Speaks

I recently came across this remarkable speech by Virginia Prince in a book of transcripts from the first IFGE Coming Together conference. It was delivered on March 7, 1987.

Feminist Frequency Aug03

Feminist Frequency

Anita Sarkeesian is the creator of Feminist Frequency, a series of webcasts that describe and depict the stereotyped and derogatory ways in which female characters are portrayed in video games.

Finding Geoff Brown

Where did Geoff Brown get inspiration and information for I Want What I Want? A newspaper article? A copy of Niels Hoyers’ Man Into Woman that turned up in a bookshop? We shall never know. Geoff Brown is over seventy now and not about to grant an interview.

A Response to Intent

Having read your letter to Dallas Denny and Jamison Green, I have to wonder how you see yourselves as being any different than the people (trans-activists) you state you are rallying against. In what amounts to a tirade against the aforementioned two and against transgender people in general, you have obliterated the facts of what their letter, the one that so upsets you, was attempting to bring about.

A Night in the City Jul27

A Night in the City

“My husband used to love this time of year,” the elegant woman says, without moving her head. She doesn’t glance in my direction. Her voice is gentle. I think I might have imagined it and then a smile spreads across her thin red lips. I relax, but notice the smile doesn’t reach her eyes.

Intent to Oppress

The anonymous author declares war on me and for that matter on all transpeople. He or she and his or her six compatriots will raise an army of graduate students who will opress me and others like me and render us impotent and invisible– in the name of academic freedom. It’s a peculiarly-worded and most impolite declaration of war based upon an irrational philosophy of who I and others like me are. Happily, he or she is not the arbiter of who I am. I get to say who I am.

Virginia Prince Jul06

Virginia Prince

Prince was a controversial figure in the transgender community. Her insistence on excluding gay and bisexual crossdressers and transsexuals from her groups and her autocratic leadership style generated resistance from the earliest days of her groups.