Trans/plant/portation

This was supposed to be my last 2-hour writing stint at my favorite Seattle coffee house before I returned to packing for our move to Walla Walla. And then the Internet exploded with the story of an apparent political assassination—the youngest woman ever elected to the House, Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat from Arizona, was shot point-blank at a meet the representative-type event in Tuscon, along with a dozen people who had come out to hear her and interact with her as their Congresswoman. Read More…

I should begin with a clarification; I’m thinking of inner critics here. Whether an individual literary critic who says something about a single piece or section of literature should be considered is a whole nother question, and I’m unwilling to jump into the lava pit of that debate. But when it comes to the voices in our heads, the nasty ones, I will relate a refreshingly brief tale and feel fine about it. Read More…

It’s been a strange year in which we’ve lived in four different places, made a cross-country trip, and attempted to start a family, sometimes with hilarious developments in that process. So here are the moments that made me laugh the hardest.

Enjoy, and Happy New Year! Read More…

On my 40th birthday in June this year, my mother called me, and I was at the sheer edge of phone reception, having decided to trek to Yellowstone National Park—where everything around me would be older than me, and by a lot. She was really cheery, Mom was, and she said, with a busload of glee, that the next 40 years go by a lot faster than the first 40. She’s a dear.

To round out the context for this post, I’ll turn to my work-in-progress, a novel in which a lot of the action takes place in the 1920s and early 1980s. Thinking back, to my teenage years, we lived in a whole different world, and in many ways, technology is at the center of what’s changed since the start of this century. Read More…

It’s been a good year, even if I did have a lot of hopes for 2010. If 2008 was chock full of life events—getting married, moving to the other side of a large continent—and 2009 was about adjustment to those new environments, I figured the next year, this year, would show up with big rewards for my good behavior. And it did, kind of. It’s been hard work on top of more hard work, and a lot of it has been frustrating (I’m looking at you, rejection letter). All told though, I can look back and see several important lessons. Which leads me to: Read More…

My father passed away in 1995, a few weeks after my birthday, and a few weeks before his 67th. He was a gambling addict, a child of the Great Depression, a churchgoer and a divorcé. I have been made well aware of this one man’s faults from many people he wronged, even though I didn’t commit his crimes and even though I am likely to internalize his shame. After 15 years of reflection on the father I knew and lost, I think I see him for who he was—a person with faults who wanted to do right and often fell short, a man who felt a terrible push-pull of obligation and scratching for freedom, and who most sadly, died full of regret. I fight to push past his mistakes and my own because I don’t want my life to end with any similarity. Read More…

I recently finished watching the fourth season of Mad Men, and am glad to call myself All Caught Up with the rest of the AMC-watching world, which in the grand scheme of things, is not that large. I’ll add here that I’m not nearly as happy to hear that Jon Hamm refuses to wear underwear unless he’s wearing skivvies in a scene. He may be handsome, but all I can think of is the unlucky dry cleaner on the set. Regarding his character, Don Draper, audiences have known since early in the first season that his identity is a stolen one, and the narrative around this subplot only gets more complicated from there. There are spoilers from here on out, so please consider this my warning. Read More…

I saw Kate Bornstein speak in Seattle last week at a book signing, and even though probably two-thirds of us had heard her story before, she told it to us. And once again I was subject to a familiar-sounding tale: that of confronting one’s demons, at the precipice of life itself.

I’m making it sound dramatic because in the final analysis, it is. I’ve spoken to dozens of people in the years before, during, and after my own transition, and in those stories, there are loads of differences. We come from divergent backgrounds, understand our identity in a multitude of ways, prioritize this aspect or that over others, and have created strategies for transition or for not transitioning (or for de-transitioning) that reflect ourselves. We resist the notion that there is a “Transgender Narrative,” namely, that we are all our chosen sex in the wrong body. Postulated decades ago in order to explain to non-trans people why we feel so strongly about our decisions to buck the gender binary, the “girl in a boy’s body” trope has pigeonholed the transsexual experience, and among the people I’ve spoken with, we hate its place in our community’s mythos.

But there is common thread I’ve noticed. In every single story I’ve heard, including Kate’s, we have contemplated suicide. Read More…

When I was a project manager, I loved the three hours after winning a new contract. Nothing had been sullied; the project lived only in my brain, free from reality, bad decision making, a change in funding, or the soul-crushing realization that a lot of computer work is boring, especially when it’s on behalf of a government project. Before all of that would inevitably occur, I could take a wee snatch of time to smile, knowing others had seen fit to approve the project I and others had outlined. It was a lovely spot of validation, and no fools had yet rushed in. Read More…

Many of us who had the fortune to attend college, or who lived in a tight-knit community can relate to the concept of venturing out around campus and its nearby neighborhoods and running into lots of people they knew. In Syracuse, an acknowledgment or short conversation seemed to happen every 6.3 yards. With my move to Washington, DC, after nine years in snowy Central New York, I was suddenly anonymous. And in that urban landscape, hardly anybody cared if they saw a masculine woman in a tweed jacket, so I was initially pleased that I’d gotten some degree of quiet in my subway/walking commute to work. But quickly, I realized that I missed the little, often pithy small talk from New York. What I missed was that degree of community. Read More…