JoAnn Roberts: On My Mind (2006)
“On my Mind” was JoAnn Roberts’ column as publisher of LadyLike. Here she remembers and eulogizes a number of transgender community publications, including Transgender Tapestry. I was editor of Tapestry from 2000-2008.
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Transgender 2006
In the mid-2000s I was approached by the principals of the soon-to-be-launched LGBT World website (probably no relation to today’s site of the same name) and asked to write a monthly column. I produced this piece (which was geared toward a general audience) and then four others, but the site went nowhere.
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Millenimania (2000)
We’re about to turn a corner. A year is ending. A decade is ending. A century is ending. A millennium is ending. We all know it, and we’re all excited and a bit frightened by it. We’re wound up like clockwork toys, ready to party like it’s 1999, ready to see the great comet come out of the sky and smash into the earth. We’re prepared to meet Jesus.
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Traditional Families (1998)
In promoting their vision of the “family,” the radical right is not pro-family at all. What the right favors is a deviant 1950’s Ward and June Cleaver lily-white sensibility that sacrifices substance for style. Rather that acknowledging its diversity and facing its problems, the “traditional” family of the radical right sweeps everything under the carpet.
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The T-Shirt That Changed the World (1998)
The Transexual Menace t-shirt doesn’t have universal acceptance. It’s upfront and in-your face, and some transpeople don’t like that. Certainly, not everyone would want to wear one, but then those who don’t want to wear them don’t have to. But they can, with pride and in relative safety. And that’s what the black t-shirt has given us.
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The Transgender Community’s Lack of Consensus Around Identity Politics (1998)
When we fight for our rights on the basis of our constructed social identities, we of necessity exclude those with other identities. This leads to a series of political movements in which groups campaign separately for their rights rather than uniting to fight for rights which encompass all categories.
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My Drug Habit (1999)
Of all the drugs with which I experimented, estrogen was without doubt the most potent. Not only was it psychoactive, opening doors of perception otherwise closed; it was a metamorphic drug, taking my body through the physical changes of the feminine puberty I had been denied. It reshaped by body and my mind. And subtle it was, marking changes not in minutes or hours or even days, but over months and years, so a decade after I had begun taking it I was an entirely different person than I would have been without it.
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Jessica Xavier and Riki Ann Wilchins Are Taking Heat They Don’t Deserve (1998)
Jessica Xavier and Riki Ann Wilchins are taking heat they don’t deserve.
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The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry: Canada’s shame (1998)
The Clarke is a Jurassic gender clinic, an anachronism. It is a national embarrassment, a holdover from the dark ages of the early gender clinics, when transsexuals were treated with contempt and impunity– a place which should be censured rather than licensed as Canada’s ultimate experts on transsexualism– for, you see, despite its opinion to the contrary, The Clarke in fact knows very little about transsexuals or transsexualism, and most of what it does know is wrong.
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Nobody’s Transvestite Fantasy (1999)
My personal decision to change sex wasn’t an easy one. It was predicated on a number of factors, including the aforementioned feminine facial features, a long history of successfully passing in public while crossdressed, being unencumbered by marriage (Lynne and I were divorced in 1977), children, social circumstances, education, or career, and by my lifelong desire to be a woman.
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Beyond the Media Circus: A Perspective on Transsexualism (1999)
Rather than seeing transsexual people as crippled, we should see them as enabled. They have overcome or are setting out to overcome something that has made them miserable for their entire lives. They should be proud of themselves, and whether or not we approve of what they have done, we should be proud of them.
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Annotated Bibliography: Selected Readings on Transvestism, Transsexualism and Related Subjects (2000)
The bibliography presented is divided into two major categories: professional and popular publications. The professional category contains objective scientific research literature, whereas the popular category contains works of a more general nature, some of them very subjective. Because transsexuals and transvestites cross the line between gender roles, works discussing femininity and masculinity are also included. Not all of the works listed here present transvestism or transsexualism in a positive manner.
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Remembering JoAnn Roberts (2013)
I knew and admired JoAnn Roberts. I wrote this piece a week or so after her death on June 7, 2013.
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Twenty Years On (2011)
Twenty years on, the fact of my transsexualism escapes me for the most part, even when I’m writing or talking about transgender issues. Every once in a while I think, “Oh, yeah, I am, aren’t I?” Life is comfortable and rewarding and easy, and I feel grateful beyond belief to be living it congruently, as a woman.
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Virtual Personae: Part I (2011)
In a paper written in 1993, Allucquere Rosanne (Sandy) Stone described an incident that took place in 1982 on the text-only CompuServe CB chat simulator: Sanford Lewin, an American psychiatrist and a male, created an account using the name Joan Green and contrived an elaborate masquerade as a physically disabled female neuropsychiatrist.
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Virtual Personae: Part II (2011)
In the anonymous and often highly sexually charged world of Second Life, gender is of primary import. Most avatars are human, and almost all are decidedly male or female. Most, like me, are young and thin and beautiful and extravagantly dressed. It’s the avatarian norm.
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Technologies of Transformation (2011)
The last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth saw advances in medical procedures that made it possible for men and women to more effectively alter their bodies toward that of the non-natal sex. While none of these technologies were developed with sex reassignment in mind, they were easily adapted and modified by medical professionals and by transsexuals themselves and have come into common use to create somatic changes.
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The Names We Call Ourselves (2011)
Jamison told the assembled physicians, psychologists, social workers, and other professionals that while we weren’t yet prepared to say what transgendered people wanted to be called, we could with some authority say what they DIDN’T want to be called
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Disaster, Deceit, and Betrayal at the International Foundation for Gender Education (2011)
I wrote this article after I was contacted by two members of the Winslow Street Fund. Both expressed concern about the fund; they feared it was being drained by its caretaker organization, the International Foundation for Gender Education. By the time I wrote my article the Winslow Street Fund, which had had more than $100,000 in its coffers, had almost certainly been drained by the very organization that was sworn to protect it.
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A Look at the WPATH Standards of Care (2011)
The WPATH Standards of care, born at a time when transsexuals were almost universally considered mentally ill, were devised as a path out of ignorance and subjectivism, and as such have been of immense value by marking a clear path to transition. I enthusiastically support them and I hope you will too.
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Some Words on Parenting a Trans Kid (2011)
What should you do if you have a child who is gender nonconforming — or one who does conform to a gender role, just not the biological one? What if the doctor recently told you your child is intersexed? What if your child is telling you she wants a sex change?
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Transgender Archives: The First Pilgrimage (2011)
Yesterday I walked out the door of my girlfriend’s apartment in the Hudson Valley, crossed the street, and caught a bus to New York City. I was embarking on the first of what I hope to be a dozen or so pilgrimages to visit the world’s known repositories of transgender and transsexual historical materials.
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Reflections as 2011 Comes to a Close (2011)
As 2011 draws to a close, I’m gratified to know our killers no longer automatically go free, and horrified to know we are still getting abused, killed, and discriminated against with astonishing regularity.
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The Silicone Wars (2012)
Deaths from silicone injections had been happening with depressing regularity since the 1950s, especially for transgendered women.
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Forced Sterilization in Sweden—An Outrage (2012)
The Scandinavian countries in general and Sweden in particular are generally considered the most liberal on the planet, second only to the adjacent Netherlands. Sweden, however, has a long history of forced sterilization; from the time the Sterilization Act of 1934 was passed until its repeal in 1975, more than 62,000 people were sterilized. Of those, some 30,000 were coerced or forced to submit to medical procedures. Most were women.
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Why We Should Question the Work of George Rekers (2012)
Rekers is a fake–and I suspect his “science” is too.
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Rick Santorum, Boy Gender Fascist (2012)
Republicans are attempting to roll back a half-century of social progress by women, gay men and lesbians, and transgendered and transsexual Americans.
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Haters Have… Issues (2012)
Haters. Look behind the curtain and you find they have… issues.
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Crushes On the Wrong People: A Review (2012)
Meet Billy Abbott. At age thirteen he finds himself in the public library of the little Vermont logging town of First Sister, smitten by the tall, broad-shouldered librarian. “In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing I decided to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost–not necessarily in that order.”
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The Real ID Act: A Catastrophe in the Making (2012)
I felt compelled to write this essay because of the effect of the Real ID Act upon a friend. She has had a driver’s license here in Georgia since the 1970s. When she went to the DMV last week she was turned away because she could not produce a birth certificate. Unless she can locate a copy and copies of two divorce decrees she no longer has to show changes to her name, she will most likely lose the right to drive a motor vehicle.
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Obama: The Most Transgender-Friendly President Ever—Re-elect Him!
I wrote this during the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential Election.
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A Comprehensive List of Trans Autobiographies (2012)
If you know of any autobiographies I’ve left out, please let me know. It’s possible I missed some while compiling the list from my larger file of books, and it’s possible it’s just a work I never stumbled across.
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On Trans Autobiographies (2012)
The autobiographies that bother me are the ones by writers who, two pages from the end, clearly haven’t resolved any of their life’s troubles. Often they’ve had SRS, and they would like us to believe it has magically fixed everything, when clearly it hasn’t. Quite frankly, it’s difficult to maintain the suspension of disbelief when the story ends weeks or at most months after surgery and the author is simultaneously proclaiming how wonderful everything is and yet sending a clear covert message that things are not at all well. I
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Differing Opinions Over “Orca Shrugged” Episode of FX TV Show Sons of Anarchy (NSFW)
Walter Goggins, wearing realistic breast prostheses was clearly having fun as van Damme. So, too, were the rest of the cast members. Throughout the scene club member Tig Trager (Kim Coates) is clearly sexually interested in van Damme. “Really?” says club member Juice (Theo Rossi) as he raises an eyebrow at Tig.
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Crossdressers Across the Decades (2012)
Due perhaps, to businesses that sell products to help them with their appearance; to the Internet, which is full of sources to help them learn their craft; and to a breakdown of the categories crossdresser and transsexual (which allows them increased access to electrolysis, hormones, and plastic surgery), today’s crossdressers are more likely to have more sophisticated presentations than the crossdressers of yore.
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Transsexualism at Sixty, Part I (2013)
Twenty years ago I took a look at transsexualism on its fortieth birthday, as arbitrarily determined by Christine Jorgensen’s return from Denmark. News of her sex reassignment resulted in international headlines in December, 1952, knocking news of the first hydrogen bomb test from the front page of the New York Times. Take that, all you one-name celebrities!
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Transsexualism at Sixty, Part II (2013)
I’ve been taking a look at a paper I wrote twenty years ago. Forty years had passed since Christine Jorgensen’s return to the U.S. after sex reassignment in Denmark and the world went crazy for five minutes, so I called the piece Transsexualism at Forty. Now my paper is twenty years old and transsexualism is sixty.
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I Was a Trans Student (2013)
If I had turned 13 in 2013 instead of 1963, my story might have been a different one. I’m sure I would have had to work through the same shame and guilt and fright, but there would have been sources of support. There would have been ready information. And perhaps, just perhaps, my parents would have tried to understand, had I found the courage to come out to them.
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Preserve Our (And Your) History (2013)
Twenty or so years ago I was on the phone with Ms. Bob Davis in San Francisco. We were talking about our collections of transgender historical material and wondering how much material was out there and what it might be worth. “In ten years we’ll know,” said Ms. Bob. “The Internet will sort it out.”
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These Eyes (2013)
My pain was ever present, but was more, as I’ve said before, like a rock in my shoe than a knife in my breast. Still, I think you’ll agree after viewing the photos, it showed in my eyes.
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Laugh a Little (2013)
Keep your sense of humor (and if you don’t have one, cultivate one). You will only be as unhappy as you allow yourself to be. You can plod miserably along, or you can enjoy yourself. You can find humor in the ludicrous situations you will find yourself in and the things people will say which have a whole different meaning because of your gender status. Those you meet along the route will prove amusing, if you allow them to be. They will be your comrades in arms, and some of them will become your friends.
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Stealth is Soul-Destroying (2013)
Those who live in stealth keep their trans status secret. Those who interact with them–sometimes even their spouses–have no clue about their past. That’s how thoroughly they deny their transsexualism.
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Xenophobia: “Us” and “Them” (2011)
I wrote this piece in 1994; it was published seventeen years later in the online magazine Transgender Forum.
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Reed Erickson (1998)
Reed Erickson was an important in the history of transsexualism. It’s unfortunate he’s been almost forgotten, for he did more for transsexual people than anyone else, with the possible exception of Christine Jorgensen and Dr. Harry Benjamin. His story, although obscured by time and his history of protecting his privacy, is a fascinating one that was almost lost but is slowly emerging through the historical research of Dr. Aaron Devor, a Sociologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
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Millennimania (2000)
We’re about to turn a corner. A year is ending. A decade is ending. A century is ending. A millennium is ending. We all know it, and we’re all excited and a bit frightened by it. We’re wound up like clockwork toys, ready to party like it’s 1999, ready to see the great comet come out of the sky and smash into the earth. We’re prepared to meet Jesus.
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“Tabletop” John Brown Gets His (1999)
An article by R.S. Spitz, published in Viva magazine in the mid-1970s, identified Brown as one of the worst plastic surgeons in the United States. Even then, Brown was doing male-to-female sex reassignment surgery— badly, I might add. He never lacked for customers, since his only criterion for surgery was whether the check cleared. He was famous for doing SRS in motel rooms and on kitchen tables, leaving his victim to wake up in the back seat of her car or on a couch in an abandoned house.
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Fantasy and Reality in the Transgender Community (1998)
It is wonderful to have such a useful tool as fantasy, as it helps keep us healthy and balanced. And yet, like any tool, fantasy can be misused. When the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, we are liable to get into trouble.
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The Brief but Illustrious Career of Reggie Ramloose (1983-1987)
When I arrived in Nashville for grad school I ventured to a computer store on 8th Avenue North for the formation of a users group for the VIC-20. There were about a dozen people, and each of us was eyeing all the others, wondering what sort of weirdo would have a computer in their home. The group grew and in 1983 merged with a forming C-64 group to form The Nashville Commodore Users Group. Soon there were more than 450 members and there was at least one meeting every week.
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The Letter (2012)
When I learned Routledge Press was planning to publish a book about transgenderism by Australian academician Sheila Jeffreys, I was astonished.
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We Eat Our Leaders (1999)
The day of the charismatic ruler is past. It’s time for us to start hiring, electing, or appointing our leaders and paying them a living wage and giving them a retirement plan. Those who lead the community should be its duly designated, compensated representatives rather than its willing slaves.
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