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Vicky Lee with Helen Boyd SCC Atlanta 2004
Vicky Lee with Betty SCC Atlanta 2004
Vern L. Bullough, SUNY Distinguised Professor Emeritus, past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, honored with the Kinsey Award for his research, and author of Crossdressing, Sex & Gender.
"This is an insider's view of transvestism. It is sympathetic, understanding but also realistic and critical. It should be essential reading not only for wives of transvestites (the author is a wife of one), but for transvestites and transgender individuals themselves. I know of no other book that gives such a realistic and all encompassing view of the topic. For those who are not involved in or with the transgender community, it ought to be a fascinating read about a group of people of whom they know little. I recommend it highly."
Riki Wilchins, Gender PAC
"Crossdressers are an important and underserved part of our American community. Cutting, incisive, sometimes maddening - My Husband Betty will help bring them back into the public debate"
Gina Lance - Girl Talk Magazine
"The most thorough study on crossdressing I've ever read. A mmust for every transgendered person and their families. Helen Boyd speaks the truth, elopuently!"
Lacey Leigh, Author of Out & About and 7 Secrets of Successful Crossdressers
"Helen Boyd's insight, humour and no-punches-pulled style provide a refreshing, spouse-eye-view of crossdressers and what makes them tick. My Husband Betty should be liquified, bagged, and plugged in as an IV drip for all self-questioning crossdressers and those in their lives". |
AUTHOR PROFILE
Helen Boyd is the author of My Husband Betty which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and is now in its 7th printing. Her second book, She’s Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband, has been called “the (im)perfect modern love story” and “a postmodern reflection on transness.”
Her blog (en)gender can be found online at www.myhusbandbetty.com.
Helen has been running an online group for couples since 2000, and has spoken at many trans conferences, including the IFGE, First Event, Fantasia Fair, Southern Comfort, the Chicago Be-All, and also at special events, like Trans Issues Week at Yale University. Helen and Betty have appeared on The Dr. Keith Ablow Show and spoke about GLBT marriage on PBS’ In the Life. Her writing has also appeared in anthologies edited by Matt Bernstein Sycamore and Vern Bullough.
Helen Boyd is a nom de plume for the otherwise bookish Gail Kramer. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from The City College of New York with a degree in literature and a few other awards in tow. Her other interests - a love for the films of Buster Keaton, punk rock, writing fiction, and the history of anthracite coal mining in the U.S. - have taken a backseat to her study of gender. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Betty and their three cats.
"In 2004 in the year 'My Husband Betty' was first published, I attended the 'Southern Comfort Conference' in Atlanta USA. I had already read the book and was thrilled to meet Helen and Betty. We sat together to eat one night and I enjoyed the company of a very young very modern relationship in which I found Helen's, oh so down to earth approach to life so refreshing. Helen knows that her level of understanding and acceptance is helped by her generation and the reluctant honesty of Betty. We talked about the many crossdressers from older generations who have hidden their "real" selves while being married in long relationships. We agreed that the wives in these relationships would struggle to understand Helen. But this makes me think that when the sh-one-t hits the fan in such a relationship, the wife AND the crossdresser should read Helens book. Maybe old dogs can learn new tricks. Helen however prefers cats, and you cant teach a cat anything - they know it all"
BOOK CONTENTS
The book explores the relationships of crossdressing men and their female partners. Men like Helen Boyd's husband are starting to come out and win the respect of friends, family and society - even if their behavior still baffles mental health professionals and the crossdressers themselves.
Helen explains her understanding of the distinct societies within the transgendered community, the range of sexualities, and the issues faced by the wives and girlfriends of crossdressing men. Helen's own experience is at the heart of this book, but her story is complemented and contradicted by her interviews with crossdressers, drag queens, "tranny chasers", and other transgendered couples.
Review by: Anne Gordon - UK Angels 10/02/2004
"
Shortly after Helen Boyd met the man who was to be her husband he told her that he cross-dressed. It has cost her some struggle and pain to come to an accommodation with this side of his nature, but she's a Renaissance woman and used her intellect to grapple with it. A pragmatist of some stature, she stepped outside the matter to take a long, hard and penetrating look at it. The result is a remarkable book - My Husband Betty. From the cover the almost impossibly beautiful face of her husband Betty gazes coolly at us, looking us straight in the eye foreshadowing the frankness of the book itself. Helen Boyd, a New York writer, dissects her subject matter with the precision, ruthlessness and forensic skill of a surgeon. This is strong meat, and those who only look in mirrors to see what they wish to may find that its uncompromising honesty makes them uncomfortable.
The book begins as a journey of self-discovery: Helen, almost amazed at her own reactions, exploring the world and minds of cross-dressers, scalpelling deep to see what makes them tick. The majority of cross-dressers are, she thinks, miserable because although they are able to revert to the power and privileges that go with being male, they are trapped in the social constructs we call masculine. Their behavior and demeanor have potential to bring catastrophic change into their lives and they fear it, so hide in the closets. Involved in this is a lot of avoidance behavior which Boyd explains well in setting out her desire to start her own on-line support group; 'Basically I wanted a community that wouldn't be scared of honesty; that could discuss sex as adults, and that wouldn't reassure me with half-truths'. She found it, and it is this community that has enabled her to throw the cold light of day on behaviors that many cross-dressers prefer to sweep under the carpet such as masturbation and sexual fantasies. This flies in the face of the image preferred by an older generation of cross-dressers who hold to the view that what they do is somehow more acceptable if it is non-sexual, but 'gender-orientated'. Boyd gives that idea short shrift, which will win her some disapproval, but from this quarter, loud applause.
In some places Boyd retreads paths already blazed by folk like Peggy Rudd or Marjorie Garber, but she does it with a clarity and a modernity that make it more immediate and relevant mixing academic rigour with intimate detail, the pragmatism mixing with often raw emotion, introducing us to real people and real lives. And what fascinating lives and people; Heather, who is more comfortable cross-dressed and could happily live as a women, is a 14 year combat veteran in the US Army; Victoria, a Vietnam veteran; Jayne, a musician. We meet also their wives, read their testimony and wonder at what compromise and acceptance can forge out of the plain straight love that two people have for each other- as Meredith, wife of Victoria says; 'His interest in crossdressing is not going away and as long as he doesn't shove it down my throat I can tolerate it. ' Or there's Kathy; 'I have always had an underlying interest in feminine men since a very early age' who deliberately set out to find a man who cross-dressed. Boyd scans the spectrum of cross-gendered behavior with a clear eye, interviewing transsexuals, cross-dressers, fetishists, drag-queens, TGs, RGs, BDSMs, GGs and an alphabet soup of human deviations from what we may risibly see as 'the norm'. I love her classifications of TG behavior, so I'll list them; The straight Drag Queen, the fetishist, the closeted cross-dresser, the transgenderist, the slutty cross-dresser, the out cross-dresser, the classic transvestite, the sissy cross-dresser and the blend. I'm a 'Blend' and I forecast with some certainty that this term is destined to become part of the glossary as applied to cross-dressers. Boyd may be bold in nailing down such categories, but there are, believe me, few people more qualified to make these sub-divisions.
It's fair to say that a man could not have written this book. I confess that there are few features of our community that anger me more than the almost blasé and unthinking claim that because of what we do we can somehow imagine what it's like to be, or empathise with a woman. Well we can't - unless we are TS and that's because they are women already in their heads. Few things damage us more with women, did we but realise it than that spurious notion. One of the most fascinating things about it is the shafts of insight that allow me to peep at, if not truly comprehend, what woman think of what we do. 'I sat sullen in the cab, envisioning my new boyfriend who suddenly didn't jive with the artificial girl sitting by my side... That handsome man seemed far away and I was terrified that there would some a day that he would be dead and gone, and only Betty would remain.' Boyd lives with that fear and makes no attempt to hide it. A friend of hers had a partner called Luke, who is now Elle. And yet her pride in her husband is evident also - a strange mixture she is of fear, fascination, an almost maternal pride, and unconditional regard for the man she evidently loves to distraction; 'My husband is beautiful as a man or a woman, but unbelievably beautiful when he's something in between.'
Some sections of the book will no doubt offend some sensitive souls- but I'm not one of them. I find myself in total agreement with all that she says, even if I have not the courage to leave my house and (secluded) garden dressed. She inspires me, and yet she makes me afraid. Her conclusion is that other minorities like black people, Gays and lesbians have gone through a civil rights struggle in the last 30 years and the only significant minority group not 'out' is us. All we have to do is let go of our place in the 'straight world' and we would lose a lot of our fear. She's probably right- and she makes me shake in my boots. This book is and will be a classic - buy it and read it because it is simply the most insightful thing I have ever read about people like you and me. It is also very well-written, a pleasure to read in terms of language, syntax and image- and very hard indeed to put down. This is my wife's opinion also".
SUMMARY
280 pages. A view from the perspective of a woman born in the USA in the mid 1970's. Whose partner (of a similar age), announces he is a crossdresser. This well researched well written book is Helen's life experience coming to grips with the joys and the difficulties of an unexpected lifestyle, sexuality, and relationship with her tranny partner and the tranny friends, their wives and partners. Controversial, Inspiring. This book is a must read. Especially if your partner is a m to f crossdresser.
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