BayWindows report on Helen Boyd's 2007 First Event Speech

Helen Boyd, author of the 2004 book My Husband Betty, a memoir about her experience as the wife of a cross-dresser, had one overriding message for the 350 people who turned out for the Tiffany Club’s First Event banquet Jan. 20: to put aside the division and the backbiting among different factions of both the transgender community and the larger LGBT community. She said when she and her husband first began connecting with the transgender community they found a world where cross-dressers had their own separate circle, transsexuals had their circle, “and never the twain shall meet.” She said the division was particularly glaring on the various websites and message boards that form the heart of the online trans community.

“But what I find online is we still do a lot of that, separating people out according to where they are, if their transness is serious enough, kind of games of who suffers more, who suffers most, which I don’t particularly find productive,” said Boyd.

She compared the constant questioning within the transgender community of other people’s identity and commitment to the community to a troll who lives under a bridge and forces people to answer three questions before allowing them to pass.

“And in this case the questions are often things like, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ ‘Are you trans enough?’... And that always drives me crazy because partners don’t really pass any of the tests, and yet we’re a part of this community,” said Boyd.

She said she first decided to share her and her husband, Betty Crow’s, story through her book after discovering how few resources there were for the partners of transgender people. A veteran social justice and environmental activist, Boyd traveled regularly in progressive political circles but was unfamiliar with the transgender community when her future husband came out to her early in their relationship as a cross-dresser.

“Betty told me initially she liked to wear women’s clothes occasionally. I think that was the understatement of history,” said Boyd, prompting laughs from the crowd. “But she was right in a sense that there was a challenge to me of trying to come to understand what it meant to her, and a challenge to her in trying to communicate her transness to me, because so little of the language really describes [it]. It’s sort of very diagnostic but not very descriptive, certainly not when you’re living a life from day to day.”

She said she and Crow sought support in the trans community, both in person and online, and it was then that they discovered some of the longstanding divisions between different factions of the community. She said she sees those divisions and arguments as self-defeating because they rob people of the energy needed to do the work to help support and advocate on behalf of the transgender community as a whole. Between political activism and social support she said there is vital work needed to be done, and with the increasing visibility of the community through films like TransAmerica and the documentary series TransGeneration she said the community is coming under more frequent attacks by the religious right and other opponents of trans rights. Boyd told the crowd the last thing the community needed was to get bogged down in internal conflicts. She praised First Event, the second largest transgender conference in the country, with bringing those factions together under one roof.

“[My message is] that we can really find a way to talk to each other that’s positive instead of negative, that has a sense of community, that we don’t constantly break things down and say, ‘We’re okay because my little subset of the trans community is okay, because we’re not like those people over there, because they’re kind of weird and I don’t really get them either.’ We can make a lot more effort to figure out all the jobs basically that need to be done on this boat that we’re all on, which is a boat, I like to remind people on a regular basis, that a whole bunch of other people are trying to sink,” said Boyd.

She said partners of trans people play a crucial role in that struggle because they can serve as “emissaries” from the trans community to the world at large.

“So one of the things that partners do, for me, in the trans community is something like what PFLAG does in the LGBT community,” said Boyd. “We’re here to kind of be emissaries of a sort to the rest of the world and say, ‘I know you don’t get this. I know you don’t understand it. I didn’t really either. But I know this person and they’re a great, wonderful person.’”...