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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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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After All These Years (2012)
I met her for the first time on a grassy hillside. She was building a fountain, using textures she had made from her mother’s stained glass. I flew close and said, from ten meters in the air, “I’m looking for land to buy. I hope I’m not intruding.”
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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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Transsexualism at Forty (1993)
Forty years ago, Christine Jorgensen was in Copenhagen, Denmark, and not just to see the sights. She was undergoing the final stages of a series of hormonal and surgical treatments that would enable her to live the rest of her life as a woman, even though she had been raised as a boy, had duly grown into a man, and had even served a hitch in the U.S. Army. Her “sex change,” as it came to be called, was hardly the first, but when the story was leaked to the newspapers, the headlines shocked the world, creating a media circus which has lasted for forty years.
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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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Can a Man Become a Woman? (And Vice-Versa) (1992)
When transsexual people reach the point of “realness”—when they are integrated in society and cannot be “read” (or “clocked,” as we say in the South), then they have become what they have been trying to become. They don’t just walk like a duck and talk like a duck. They are ducks. They function entirely as men and women, with bodies which are consonant with their place in society as men and women.
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Do Transgender Issues Affect the Gay Community? (1992)
Margaux Schaffer and I wrote this article in response to the murders in Atlanta of three crossdressed women of color in Atlanta in as many months.
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Atlanta Killings Require Community Response (1992)
The murders of three transgendered persons in Atlanta during a one-month period is a matter of grave concern. Whether or not the killings are related, they must be stopped. We hope and trust law enforcement officials will take immediate and thorough action to find the perpetrator(s) and put a stop to these tragic deaths.
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So You Think You Want to Be a Woman (1992)
If you have pleasurable fantasies about being a woman, indulge them, but don’t make the mistake of thinking they are anything other than male imaginings. They are part of your own psyche, your own specialness, your own sexuality, to be enjoyed. But when they drive you to seek sex reassignment, it’s time for a reality check. You must— I repeat must separate your sexual motivations from your sense of who you are before making irreversible physical changes to your body.
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The 1992 Southern Comfort Conference and 1992 Holiday en Femme (1993)
Atlanta is the central city of the Southeast. It’s a magnet that attracts transgendered people like Cincinnati attracted out-of-work Kentucky coal miners in the earlier part of this century. It’s been characterized as a northern city that happens to be in the South. That’s true, and yet it’s not. There are more northern immigrants here than native Georgians, to be sure, and it’s a city where the bottom line is the bottom line, where legions of yuppy puppies in their German-made automobiles make owning a BMW or Mercedes a stigma rather than a status symbol— but it’s also a city of great elegance, with more trees than people, green parks, slow-talking sales clerks, restaurants serving down-home food like grits and collard greens, and friendly neighbors.
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The Transsexual Script (1998)
Today there is a new transsexualism. Those new to the community, exposed to both the Benjamin and transgender models on the Internet and at support group meetings, tend to subscribe to the transgender model. Many of these folks self-identify as transsexual as well as trangendered, and certainly they avail themselves of the same medical treatments chosen by those who followed Benjamin’s model, including hormonal therapy, gender role change, and sex reassignment surgery.
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Scent of a Transsexual Woman (1998)
Halston, like other perfumes, was forbidden to me. Although I found it no less attractive twenty-five years ago than I do today, its lingering qualities were a danger, something that could give away the horrible secret of my inner femininity hours or even days after I broke social convention by applying it to my skin. It was a time, after all, when men’s scents were pungent and woodsy.
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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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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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Chrysalis Quarterly Issues (1991-1998)
Chrysalis Quarterly was the house journal of the nonprofit AEGIS, The American Educational Gender Information Service. It averaged sixty pages, with glossy cardstock cover. The cover, and, when we could afford it, the interior pages, were printed with gray ink and a burgundy spot cover.Each issue was themed.
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TG 2000 (2000)
As the new millennium begins, we have a new vision: one in which gender is a vast field in which we are free to wander in any direction. We can choose from a multiplicity of genders, or construct singular genders of our own, freely changing them as our ideas of ourselves change– and we are also still free to identify as members of one of the two traditionally recognized genders
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Rodney and the Rest of Us (1993)
Three transgendered people were murdered in Atlanta last year, their bodies found in ditches. Another was shot. No suspects, no charges, no convictions. The year before, a transgendered person was found murdered in her apartment at Christmastime. There is a curious apathy in the police department about this sort of violence, and it extends to gay people as well.
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Maynard and Tula (1992)
Caroline Cossey is a beautiful British model who was brutally outed some years ago by the British tabloid News of the World. The story is in her autobiography, My Story, which was recently published in England by Faber and Faber. My Story hasn’t yet been released in the U.S. Caroline told me she is negotiating with several publishers here. They want her to kiss and tell; she refuses. Good for her.
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A Primer of Sex and Gender (1991)
Gender Identity is one’s sense of being a boy or a girl, a man or a woman. Kessler & McKenna (1978) have noted that as gender identity is a self-attribution, it isn’t measurable with psychological tests. The verbal statement of the individual is the best indicator of gender identity (“I am a man”; “I am a woman”).
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Equal Rights (Not Special Rights) (1994)
I wrote this letter in counterpoint to an essay by Kristine Holt. I sent it to the editor of Mirror Images, the newsletter of the Erie Sisters. where it appeared in the April, 1994 issue alongside Ms. Holt’s article. Later that year Ms. Holt’s piece appeared in issue No. 5 of Davina Anne Gabriel’s TransSisters magazine; my letter ran in the next issue.
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Female-to-Male Reassignment Surgery in the ’90s (1991)
In 1984, the publication of an article by T.S. Chang and W.Y. Hwang marked a major improvement in phalloplasty techniques. The radial forearm flap provided a hairless donor site, allowed sufficient material for construction of an urethra, and required but a single surgery.
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You’re Strange and We’re Wonderful (1994)
With its newly-found voice, the transgender community will no longer tolerate colonization by the gay community. People like Billy Tipton, Radclyffe Hall, and Joan of Arc are being reclaimed as transgendered—queer, but not gay. And it’s clear it’s a reclamation and not a revision, for they were stolen from the transgender community, which wants them back. And make no mistake about it: the murmur of today will be a roar tomorrow.
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A Raid on Donahue’s Bread (1990)
MacManus could have targeted any of the others: Saunders, Kinnon, Ayers, Britton, or Halvington. But Saunders was fleet of foot, with a vindictive nature; Kinnon was bread-wise and kept a close guard on his slices; Ayers was on a diet and got no bread at all, and so was on the prowl himself; and Britton and Halvington operated on the buddy system and were mutual body and bread guards. That left only Donahue. It had to be Donahue.
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Just Another Year in Chronic 1A (1988)
We’re on the big goddamned yellow and black school bus, on our way to a “picnic,” which means we’ll stop at a roadside park with three trees and two concrete picnic tables and eat extra krispy recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken, bones and all, and maybe even the plastic sporks, the hungrier of us. Then we will be put back on the bus and driven back to the hospital, where we will disembark and be rolled back to the musty, dusty, and always gloomy buildings, back to the chronic wards.
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