Busy Day Yesterday (and Today)

I took the day off yesterday and today (Its not like they are going to fire me.) to do an Outreach at a college in New Haven and afterward we had a lazy lunch with the professor. By the time I got home it was time to head off to Poughkeepsie New York to hear a book reading by the author of “She’s No the Man I Married”, Helen Boyd. I wanted to get my book autographed and say “Hi” to Helen and Betty. Besides reading from the book she talked about some of the problems being married to a transsexual. I finally got home after midnight and I was gone all day today.

“One of my first moments of Wow, has my life gotten weird happened on Betty’s and my first Valentine Day together. I went to Macy’s to buy her a present. As I traveled up the escalator, bypassing all the women who were shopping in the men’s department for their boyfriends, I momentarily thought of Betty’s face if she opened a clothes box to find a pair of boxer shorts and a tie flashed through my heads. I stayed put on the escalator, I was going to Women’s Lingerie, sixth floor.”
“I’ve been there a few times since. And I’m not quite used to it yet. A friend who was coming out as lesbian told me years ago that when you check “Rubyfruit Jungle” out at the library, the librarian stamps the due date in your book and LESBIAN on your forehead. But buying a handful of panties for Betty – and I mean a handful precisely – causes Macy’s sales clerk to look at my ass. Maybe she was trying to be helpful, but the cogs were turning in her head as she scanned tags – SM, SM, and SM – and again looked at my butt. No jokes can lighten the mood while she’s figuring out whether I’m delusional or a lesbian, and saying “They’re for my husband” wouldn’t help anything at all. I don’t want to know what name she’d ring up for me in the register in her head if I said that.”

“… But still, I feel protective of Betty. I often fell like Thelma, warning Louise’ that waling down to the corner bodega to get a beer in really tight jeans at 2:00 AM really isn’t a good idea. In an essay written for the now-defunct magazine “Anything That’s Moves”, the bisexual girlfriend of a pre-op MtF trans woman mentioned the kind of fear you can experience as the partner of a trans person: She and her girlfriend were waiting at a bus stop when some men only stare at them. She found herself hoping her girlfriend would get her genital surgery soon, because then ‘they’ll only rape her, not murder her.’ And unfortunately, that’s the reality of living with someone who is trans, which is maybe part of the reason I feel I come up short in terms of playing the male role. What can anyone do against that kind of ignorance and hate?” (Helen Boyd, "She is Not the Man I Married", pages 161 - 162, 164)

Everyone thinks we have courage to transition, but the person who has the real courage is the spouse who stays with their partner, because for them they have also to reassess their identity and sexual orientation out of love for the partner. If they are in a straight relationship, they with now be in a lesbian or gay relationship and conversely if they are in a lesbian or gay relationship they will now be perceived to be in a straight relationship.