Saturday, July 18, 2009

Please check out the new blog at Jenniferboylan.net


Well friends, it's been lovely hanging with you here, but we're striking the tent at Blogspot and building a new civilization at the THERE FROM HERE BLOG at Jenniferboylan.net.

I began this blog in January because I liked the ease of the blogger software. At the same time, posting here marooned my extensive web site over at JB.net.

So after some thought, and a lengthy redesign, the old web site has been improved. And it combines the blog stuff I hope you've enjoyed here at blogger with the deeper-album-cut resources that were on the old web site.

This means that this blog HERE will essentially go into mothballs now, which is a shame in a way, but most of the highlights have been moved over to the new site.

All of which means, from here on out, please visit me at www.jenniferboylan.net; you'll find my resources there as well as the ongoing commentary you've read here, as well as comments from the generous followers and visitors to this site.

Thanks, and see you over there!

Jenny Boylan
July 2009

Monday, June 1, 2009

Crispy. Salty. Judicious

Editorial Observer

The Lord Justice Hath Ruled: Pringles Are Potato Chips

from the New York Times

Published: May 31, 2009

Britain’s Supreme Court of Judicature has answered a question that has long puzzled late-night dorm-room snackers: What, exactly, is a Pringle? With citations ranging from Baroness Hale of Richmond to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lord Justice Robin Jacob concluded that, legally, it is a potato chip.

The decision is bad news for Procter & Gamble U.K., which now owes $160 million in taxes. It is good news for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — and for fans of no-nonsense legal opinions. It is also a reminder, as conservatives begin attacking Judge Sonia Sotomayor for not being a “strict constructionist,” of the pointlessness of labels like that.

More on politics and potato chips here.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Now what?


What can I tell ya. I LIKE Tobasco.

Be that as it may: what next?

Grades filed, commencement done, boys guided through the Memorial Day parade, fiddle lesson, homework, and heaven knows what else.

Now? Well now, my friend, Professor Boylan spends some serious time chillin'.

Chillin, in my case meaning, writing as constantly as possible on Falcon Quinn Book 2, which I hope to have a rough draft of by summers' end. Book one will return to me in galleys and pages etc throughout the summer on its way to hardcover in 2010.

I'm also maybe writing a screenplay for my old friend Peter.

In the meantime, we'll be heading out to the lake place in a week or two, after Deedie/Grace returns from a week at my mom's house (watching the Devon Horse Show). Today I put Rustoleum on the outdoor furniture. In days ahead I hope to get our boat in the water, and then, oh please oh please, maybe I will just float around and catch some fish.

This summer looks to have our boys off at camp for quite a bit-- Zach is building a kayak and then sailing it, at the Chewonki Foundation in July, and Seanie is doing soccer camp, followed by French Horn camp, which we have promised to call "music camp" because "band camp" sounds bad. Anyhow, there's that.

Mostly I want to come to rest a little bit. Being me, "coming to rest" will mean writing a lot, two author appearances--the next of which is the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, coming up on June 10. But there will be time for the Red-Sox Yankees game the following night, and lots of floating around on the boat. Drinking mojiotos. And yeah: tobasco.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

May 17: Outwit, Outlast, Outplay.


Jenny B., left, at Umass, delivering a short speech after receiving the "Continuing Stonewall's Legacy" award. Note the bright red academic robes, plus the small Aladdin's Lamp (a gift from Mom Boylan) on the dias. The wish is granted!

Well, here we are, back from Northampton and Amherst, grades lodged, hanging out on a summer night waiting for the Survivor finale. Somewhere I will write about the LOST finale of Thursday (although what is there, ever, to say about LOST except, Whoa, you're blowin' my mind, dude!).

The ceremony at Umass was truly lovely, and it was wonderful to see the graduates and the guests, some of which included some of our own JB.netters. I was taken by my hosts for a lovely dinner on Friday, which included pomegranite martinis and squid and gumbo and popovers and Belgian ale. Debuted the story "Trans" at the Pride n Joy bookstore in Northampton next day, including a few more old friends in the audience, and then screamed on home to Maine, where I have now come to rest for 2009 and am starting to look forward to summer.

I DO have a couple of events scheduled for this summer, atypically for me, but I'll be doing some readings for the anthologies I"m in-- the next of which is at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, on June 9. But between here and there is mostly getting the boat in the water and writing Falcon Quinn II and starting the new grown-ups novel and CHILLIN.

I've been thinking a little bit about the thing I do: tell stories, and tell them usually from the first person as a transwoman. There are other people who write in the trans community-- Susan Stryker and Julie Serrano and Helen Boyd being three-- who might be better considered activists, or at the very least theoreticians. I have always been more concerned with Story than with Theory. And the Stories that I know are the ones that have happened to me. So what I tend to write about is my own life, and that of my family. This might make people think I'm narcissistic, or self-centered or something, but truly, my desire is not to talk endlessly about myself; my desire is to tell stories, since that is the only language I know, and my own stories are the only ones I feel confident about telling.

You're damned if you do, or don't, though: if you only write about yourself, people think you're self-centered; if you try to speak for others, well people rightly say, You don't speak for me.

Anyway, I have reached a resting point on this spring evening and will look forward to continuing to appear now and again to talk and to tell stories. And when I do, I hope I"ll run into some of you there. IN the meantime, sending everybody love.

Jenny B.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

JB op/ed in New York Times, 5/11/09

"Is My Marriage Gay?"
© 2009 Jennifer Finney Boylan

Op/Ed, New York Times, May 12, 2009

Belgrade Lakes, Me.

AS many Americans know, last week Gov. John Baldacci of Maine signed a law that made this state the fifth in the nation to legalize gay marriage. It’s worth pointing out, however, that there were some legal same-sex marriages in Maine already, just as there probably are in all 50 states. These are marriages in which at least one member of the couple has changed genders since the wedding.

I’m in such a marriage myself and, quite frankly, my spouse and I forget most of the time that there is anything particularly unique about our family, even if we are — what is the phrase? — “differently married.”

Deirdre Finney and I were wed in 1988 at the National Cathedral in Washington. In 2000, I started the long and complex process of changing from male to female. Deedie stood by me, deciding that her life was better with me than without me. Maybe she was crazy for doing so; lots of people have generously offered her this unsolicited opinion over the years. But what she would tell you, were you to ask, is that the things that she loved in me have mostly remained the same, and that our marriage, in the end, is about a lot more than what genders we are, or were.

Deirdre is far from the only spouse to find herself in this situation; each week we hear from wives and husbands going through similar experiences together. Reliable statistics on transgendered people always prove elusive, but just judging from my e-mail, it seems as if there are a whole lot more transsexuals — and people who love them — in New England than say, Republicans. Or Yankees fans.

I’ve been legally female since 2002, although the definition of what makes someone “legally” male or female is part of what makes this issue so unwieldy. How do we define legal gender? By chromosomes? By genitalia? By spirit? By whether one asks directions when lost?

We accept as a basic truth the idea that everyone has the right to marry somebody. Just as fundamental is the belief that no couple should be divorced against their will.

For our part, Deirdre and I remain legally married, even though we’re both legally female. If we had divorced last month, before Governor Baldacci’s signature, I would have been allowed on the following day to marry a man only. There are states, however, that do not recognize sex changes. If I were to attempt to remarry in Ohio, for instance, I would be allowed to wed a woman only.

Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be. The case of J’noel Gardiner, in Kansas, provides a telling example. Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.

Similar rulings have left couples in similar situations in Florida, Ohio and Texas. A 1999 ruling in San Antonio, in Littleton v. Prange, determined that marriage could be only between people with different chromosomes. The result, of course, was that lesbian couples in that jurisdiction were then allowed to wed as long as one member of the couple had a Y chromosome, which is the case with both transgendered male-to-females and people born with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome. This ruling made Texas, paradoxically, one of the first states in which gay marriage was legal.

A lawyer for the transgendered plaintiff in the Littleton case noted the absurdity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

Legal scholars can (and have) devoted themselves to the ultimately frustrating task of defining “male” and “female” as entities fixed and unmoving. A better use of their time, however, might be to focus on accepting the elusiveness of gender — and to celebrate it. Whether a marriage like mine is a same-sex marriage or some other kind is hardly the point. What matters is that my spouse and I love each other, and that our legal union has been a good thing — for us, for our children and for our community.

It’s my hope that people who are reluctant to embrace same-sex marriage will see that it has been with us, albeit in this one unusual circumstance, for years. Can we have a future in which we are more concerned with the love a family has than with the sometimes unanswerable questions of gender and identity? As of last week, it no longer seems so unthinkable. As we say in Maine, you can get there from here.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor of English at Colby College and the author of the memoir “I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted.”

Sunday, May 10, 2009

I love you, Mom.


Here's a picture of my mom, with her family (taken at Christmas, 07, i think, and wow, have the boys grown since then.) My mom, who, upon learning about me, said, "I would never turn my back upon my child. I will always love you. Love will prevail." My mom, who said, "It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know." My mom, who said, "Jenny, you'd look so much better if you just lost five pounds." Mom, whom I love. Happy Day, Mom. I love you!