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A Word from the Editor (Tapestry #89) (2000)

A Word from the Editor (Tapestry #89) (2000)

©2000, 2013 by Dallas Denny

Source: Denny, Dallas. (2000, Spring). A word from the editor: Hello. Transgender Tapestry, 89, p. 5.

This was the first issue of which I was the editor.

 

 

 

 

A Word from the Editor

By Dallas Denny

 

In your hands you hold the transgender community’s single most important outreach tool. Transgender Tapestry has the potential to reach tens of thousands of minds and change tens of thousands of hearts. I hope in some small way to help it realize that potential.

If this is your first issue of Tapestry, welcome. If it’s your 89th, welcome also. I’ve tried to prepare for you an entertaining, exciting, and informative read.

As the title suggests, this magazine is about transgender— that is, transgressively-gendered people, people who have traditionally been called crossdressers, drag queens, and transsexuals. But I have a larger audience in mind. I would like Transgender Tapestry to be of interest to anyone who has ever questioned any aspect of their gender role, from desiring a job that isn’t “gender appropriate” to being ridiculed for wearing hair that’s “too short” or “too long” to having a voice that’s “too high” or “too low” in pitch to loving someone of the “wrong” gender.

I’m excited to find myself appointed to the position of editor-in-chief of this fine periodical. I’d like to thank Merissa Sherrill Lynn for starting the magazine and editing it in its first incarnation and to previous editors Vivian Allen, Jean Marie Stine, Matthew Carlos, and Mykael Hawley for taking it to its present standard of excellence.

I’d especially like to thank IFGE Executive Director Nancy Cain and Rose Ryan, who edited and laid out issue #88 during the interim period in which there was no editor and no art director. Director of Operations Sára Herwig held down the fort at the IFGE office while Nancy and Rose did a marvelous job, but more than that— they did it in a timely fashion, despite having no particular training or experience with editing or layout, on a computer unfamiliar to them (the Mac, long may it live!), and using software (Quark XPress) they had never used before. Such a task is roughly equivalent to moving a mountain using a spade and a wheelbarrow. Even more wondrously, #88 was as fine and in some ways finer than any previous issue. Issue #88 was a labor of love, a gift from Nancy and Rose to the readers of Transgender Tapestry and the IFGE board. I’m in awe.