I will be at the Southern Comfort Conference this week in ATLANTA, GA, to give two talks as well as to see readers and friends.   I am scheduled to give two readings–one, a “craft” talk on writing memoir, at the early hour of 9 AM this Friday morning, 10/3; and a second one that same afternoon, a reading from new work at 3:30.  (I’m scheduled to read from I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU but depending on audience request may well read a brand-new piece which had its world premiere in Binghamton NY this last week at the Writing by Degrees Conference.)    Most likely, excerpts from both work, plus finishing it all off with a short piece from SHE’S NOT THERE.

Hoping to see many of you this week– for more information on the SoCo conference– registration, location, etc, please check out their web site– the event is NOT open to the general public, alas, but if you are interested in gender, this is the largest conference of trans people and their allies in the world.  Hope to see you then!

This evening sees me jumping in the car after my last class at Colby and setting out on the first of a handful of author appearances connected to the impending paperback release of I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU. First stop is THURSDAY OCTOBER 25, at the Writing by Degrees Conference, (The “National Graduate Creative Writing Conference” in BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK. poster above. Thursday is non-fiction day, and I’ll be giving a “craft talk” at 3:45, followed by a panel at 5 with other NF writers, and a reception after that. I’ll be giving my big reading at 7:30– not sure what I’ll read yet but I might preview another new piece called TRANS which I think is being excerpted in the “Modern Love” column of the New York Times this winter.

All of this is free, and open to the public. The venue is the BUNDY MANSION, at 129 Main Street, Binghamton.

Not nearly as many wild road trips for me this coming year as last–thank goodness, but a dozen or so; look for the updates on the soon-to-be-updated Appearances page (Betty’s working on it!). Next stop for me is SOUTHERN COMFORT CONFERENCE in Atlanta next week, from October 2-4.

Hope to see some of you in months to come!

Jenny B.

September 2008
The answer to those critics who bewail the ascendance of memoir as a genre at the expense of the novel is Jennifer Finney Boylan’s  glorious second memoir.  I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted,  the follow-up to her 2003 Lambda Literary Award winning bestseller, She’s Not There, which told the story of how she transitioned from male to female.
In I’m Looking Through You, Boylan (the author of four novels as well as her previous memoir) takes the reader back further into her past.  In 1972,  Boylan’s family moved into the “Coffin House,” a 1740 Pennsylvania mansion named after the man who built it, Lemuel Coffin.  But the actual ghosts in the house aren’t the only specters haring the roof of the Coffin House. Boylan’s secret, that she ( then “he”) was transgender, is at least as vivid a haunting as the footsteps in the dark, the eldritch voices, the floating blue mists.  Always a master of metaphor,  the first ghosts Boylan sees in the Coffin House is herself, in a mirror,  “a feminine creature with chopstick arms and legs.  My glasses were covered with a blurring film, so that it appeared that in some ways as if I were looking out at the world from an aquarium.”  As she writes, realizing that she is a girl in a boy’s body, “in order to survive I’d have to become something like a ghost myself, and keep the nature of my true self hidden.”
Metaphor notwithstanding, what separates I’m Looking Through You from the increasing number of trans memoirs is the caliber of Boylan’s writing. The book unfolds with the balletic precision of a first-rate literary novel, and readers could be forgiven for forgetting, at times, that they are reading nonfiction at all.  I’m Looking Through You is a multi-tiered enterprise: at once a poignant, powerful chronicle of a trans childhood, a vivid addition to the literary canon of 1970s suburbian American adolescent narratives, and naturally, a ghost story.
One of the primary strengths of the book is Boylan’s refusal to shy away from the supernatural aspects of the story.  Yes, there are metaphorical ghosts in I’m Looking Through You—gender secrets, the loss of family members, the cost of truth-telling—but literary snobs who might hope that the author would restrict herself to allegorical phantoms are going to have to deal with the fact that Boylan has written a serious coming-of-age memoir with ghosts.  IN the book’s opening chapter, we meet Boylan at a biker bar in Maine where she’s playing with her rock band. During a break in the set, she encounters the shade of a drowned little girl on an upper floor of the bar.  “Then she turned her back, drifted up to the top step, and dissolved into the door.”  For a writer of serious memoir, this is a display of confidence that is borne out throughout the book.
The characters in the book are vividly sketched and infinitely memorable: Boylan’s gentle, loving father who has no idea of the horrific burden he is placing on young James by urging his son to prepare himself to be “the man of the family”:  his sister, to whom he is devoted, but whose closeness doesn’t survive the eventual news of his transition: his garrulous grandmother, who has a taste for telling embarrassing family stories in public.  But the most vivid character in the book is Boylan herself, and she doesn’t let herself off her own autobiographical hook at the expense of the story.  In a book already leavened with genuine wit and humor (including the account of Boylan returning to the house with a motley band of ghost-busters in 2006 to solve the riddle of what is haunting the Coffin House) one of the best, most moving examples is young Boylan’s “discussion” with Sausage, the dog, whose silence allows it to be the voice of the author’s conscience.  Living the stinging masquerade demanded of a boy who knows he’s a girl, Sausage’s dry, occasionally hilarious admonitions are the truths Boylan can barely bring to tell herself.
I’m Looking Through You is, among other things, a thinking person’s memoir that reads like an excellent novel.  It is also a story about secrets, told with honesty, empathy, and exquisite skill, making it both appealing and relevant to readers across the entire LGBT spectrum, indeed to anyone with a desire to understand the wonderful complexity of the human heart.

Now we wake before 6 AM each day, and the house fills with the smells of coffee brewing, ham and eggs frying, dogs scampering around for their first fill of fresh air, the sound of hot showers running and backpacks zipping and unzipping. I load the boys in the car, or deedie does, and we drive to the top of the dirt road and leave the young one at the bus stop, then drive the older to the new prep school.

Say what you like about private school– this has already changed my son for the better. It’s amazing to see how he has, in no time at all, raised the bar for himself. He’s memorizing the capitals of Central American countries. (Bellmapan? Tegucigalpa?)* He’s volunteered for a fiddle group that will travel to Ireland next year. He’s washing dishes. (at school, not, alas, at home.) He has friends from Korea and New York and Boston. He auditioned for the school play. He is on the mountain biking team. He has learned to TIE A TIE and does so each morning at dawn.

We drive through the foggy steam coming off the lakes in Maine, through the countryside, as he plays his heavy metal music on the stereo and I listen to it and talk to him about it and quiz him on stuff. Capital of Paraguay? Ascenscion. I look at him and all at once, I see a man.

Then the light changes and he’s a goofy thing with braces who wants to talk about monsters.

We’re off to Emily Russo’s wedding this weekend, home on Sunday, wind up the clock for the next week of this.

Our kitchen at the “main” house is being redone, so we’re happily stuck at the summer house through September, which is lovely, except it does feel a little bit like we’re those people who wouldn’t leave the party even though it is after midnight and our hosts have already gone to bed.

I’ve taught nearly two weeks of school again, and it’s GOOD to be back in the classroom. I have been around Colby long enough that I begin to feel the kind of ease and comfort that long years and a long shadow can bring. STill, for my students it’s all new, and I am trying to meet them where they are. Graded my first two papers of the year yesterday.

The Dean made a big deal of my appointment to the selection committee of the Fulbright Scholarships at the faculty meeting on Wednesday, and I admit it felt nice to be cheered for something so purely academic.

It’s off to Pennsylvania to see my mom next week, then a writers conference in Binghamton NY the week after that, and then Southern Comfort. Wee ha.

Creatively, I’m now sketching out book two of the FALCON QUINN series, waiting for the first serious editorial notes on Book One from the editor.

I am new at being a Fifty Year old. Now and again a sense of regret and time passing sweeps through me. But more and more I feel a sense of peace, a sense of being in the right place.

That’s the news from Belgrade Lakes Maine. The boat comes out of the water today, and goes off to the shed until next May. I can hear loons. The fog is lifting.

(*these would be the capitals of Belize, and Honduras, respectively.)

from the New York Times, Op/Ed page

Sunday August 3, 2008

Belgrade Lakes, ME

IN the 1936 Olympic Games, the sprinter Stella Walsh — running for Poland and known as the fastest woman in the world — was beaten by Helen Stephens of St. Louis, who set a world record by running 100 meters in 11.4 seconds. After the race, a Polish journalist protested that Stephens must be a man. After all, no woman in the world could run that fast.

Olympic officials performed a “sex test” on Stephens, who was found, in fact, to be female, proving once and for all that a person could be incredibly fast and female at the same time.

Forty-four years later, Walsh, who had become an American citizen, was shot to death in the parking lot of a discount store in Cleveland. Her autopsy revealed a surprise: It was Stella Walsh, and not Helen Stephens, who turned out to have been male all along, at least according to the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s office.

Last week, the organizers of the Beijing Olympics announced that they had set up a “gender determination lab” to test female athletes suspected of being male. “Experts” at the lab will evaluate athletes based on their physical appearance and take blood samples to test hormones, genes and chromosomes.

On the surface, it seems reasonable for there to be some sort of system by which Olympians can be certain that female medalists really are female. The problem is that China’s tests are likely to produce the wrong answers, because they measure maleness and femaleness by the wrong yardsticks, and in the process ruin the lives of the innocent.

It would be nice to live in a world in which maleness and femaleness were firm and unwavering poles. People can be forgiven for wanting to live in a world as simple as this, a place in which something as basic as gender didn’t shift unsettlingly beneath our feet.

But gender is malleable and elusive, and we need to become comfortable with this fact, rather than afraid of it.

At the original Olympic Games, no gender testing was considered necessary. Back in 776 B.C., the Games were for men only, and they were conducted in the nude (with female spectators prohibited).

The modern era of gender testing began in 1968, at the Games in Mexico City, when it was believed that Communist countries in Eastern Europe were using male athletes in women’s competitions. (The truth was that some of the Eastern European athletes had been on a regimen of testosterone and steroids, giving them the physiques of young Arnold Schwarzeneggers.)

The test, which began as a crude physical inspection, has become more sophisticated over the years. In the 1970s and ’80s, the test was performed by a buccal smear — the scraping of cells from the inside of the mouth — and the sample studied for chromosomal material.

Over the past 40 years, dozens of female athletes tested in this manner have tested “positively” for maleness. That’s because these tests don’t measure “maleness” or “femaleness.” They measure — and not always reliably — the presence of a Y chromosome, or Y chromosomal material, which no small number of females have.

The condition, known as androgen insensitivity, occurs in about 1 in 20,000 individuals. Basically, a woman may have a Y chromosome, but her body does not respond to the genetic information that it contains. Some women with androgen insensitivity live their lives unaware that they have it. By any measure, though (except the measure of the Olympic test), they are women.

In 1996, eight female athletes at the Atlanta Games tested positively. Seven of these women were found to have some degree of androgen insensitivity, and one an enzyme defect. All were subsequently allowed to return to competition.

Ten years later, however, Santhi Soundarajan, a runner from India, was stripped of her silver medal in the 800 meters at the Asian Games for “failing” a sex test. An Indian athletics official told The Associated Press that Soundarajan had “abnormal chromosomes.” She was ridiculed in the press, and her career was destroyed. In the wake of her global humiliation, she attempted suicide.

You might think that gender testing at the Olympics is conducted to weed out transsexual women, who might be perceived to have some sort of physical advantage over natal females. Yet this is not the case. Since 2004, the International Olympic Committee has allowed transsexuals to compete as long as they have had sex-reassignment surgery and have gone through a minimum of two years of post-operative hormone replacement therapy. (As for the advantages that people born male supposedly have in competing against people born female, the combination of surgery and hormones appears to eliminate it entirely. Studies show that postoperative transsexual women perform at or near the baseline for female athletes in general.)

In the four years since the ruling, there have been no transsexuals — or at least no athletes who are open about it — in Olympic competition. But this year, Kristen Worley, a Canadian cyclist, came close to qualifying. If transgender athletes are now allowed to compete officially, and if gender testing has been shown frequently to render false results, then what exactly are the Chinese authorities testing for?

The Olympic hosts seem to want to impose a binary order upon the messy continuum of gender. They are searching for concreteness and certainty in a world that contains neither.

Most efforts to rigidly quantify the sexes are bound to fail. For every supposedly unmovable gender marker, there is an exception. There are women with androgen insensitivity, who have Y chromosomes. There are women who have had hysterectomies, women who cannot become pregnant, women who hate makeup, women whose object of affection is other women.

So what makes someone female then? If it’s not chromosomes, or a uterus, or the ability to get pregnant, or femininity, or being attracted to men, then what is it, and how can you possibly test for it?

The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person’s life, the lives we live each day. Surely the best judge of a person’s gender is not a degrading, questionable examination. The best judge of a person’s gender is what lies within her, or his, heart.

How do we test for the gender of the heart, then? How do we avoid out-and-out frauds, like Hermann Ratjen, who said he was forced by the Nazis to compete as “Dora” in the 1936 high jump? (He lost, finishing fourth.)

A quick look at the reality of an athlete’s life ought to settle the question. Ratjen was male not because of what was in his genes, but because of who he was. He returned to his life as Hermann after the Berlin Games. “For three years I lived the life of a girl,” he said in 1957. “It was most dull.”

It’s hard to imagine a case like Ratjen’s recurring today, but if it did and he slipped through the cracks, then so be it. Surely policy for the Olympics — and civilization — shouldn’t be based on one improbable stunt perpetrated by Nazi Germany.

Which brings us back to Stella Walsh. While the autopsy revealed that she had male sex organs, a chromosome test ordered by the coroner was more ambiguous. She may well have had androgen insensitivity or some other intersex condition. More important, she spent the whole of her life as a woman. She should be celebrated for her accomplishments as an athlete, not turned into an asterisk because of a condition beyond her control.

The triumphant fact of a life lived as a woman made Walsh female, and the inexact measurements performed by strangers cannot render her life untrue.

Maybe this means that Olympic officials have to learn to live with ambiguity, and make peace with a world in which things are not always quantifiable and clear.

That, if you ask me, would be a good thing, not just for Olympians, but for us all.

I liked Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir “I’m Looking Through You” Broadway Books, $23.95 even before I started reading it.

First, there was the author’s bio which usually includes chest-puffing accomplishments like where the writer got their MFA or how many times their other books were on the bestseller list. In Boylan’s bio was the notation that she had played herself on “All My Children,” making her life apparently soapy enough to be included in the same TV space with voodoo, bomb scares and sudden memory loss.

Now that’s a reason to read a memoir.

Then there was the author’s note in which the professor of English at Colby College reminded us that memoir should not be considered a photograph, but an impression.

“This story,” she wrote, “contains occasional elements of invention, in keeping with the facts of my life, not in order to shamelessly bamboozle the reader but in order to fill in gaps in the narrative, or to dramatize scenes I did not witness first hand.”

In a publishing world speckled with college-educated young women who write of growing up in a gang neighborhood in South L.A. or of being raised by wolves during the Holocaust, this was a refreshing acknowledgment and a clue that Boylan would handle her story without hand-wringing and overwrought drama, but with humor and grace.

And that’s exactly what Boylan delivers. This talented writer gives us a refreshing, funny and thoughtful look at growing up as a boy trapped in a woman’s body.

Boylan, who wrote an earlier memoir of her transformation from James to Jenny called “She’s Not There,” began this story when she was 13 and her family moved into a crumbling old house in Pennsylvania, which was apparently haunted by ghosts only the young James could see.

There was a gauzy middle-aged woman who sometimes appeared in a room the family called “the Monkey Bathroom” for the chimpanzee named Jesus who had once lived there and the young girl who had purportedly drowned and haunted the upstairs room where the author slept.

And then there was the ghost that lived inside the thin, awkward James himself: the girl Jenny who would lie in bed with a halter top stuffed with grapefruits reading Betty Friedan or sleep in a negligee usually kept hidden behind a secret panel in her third-floor bedroom.

How is it, Boylan writes, “that some people manage to integrate their lives, and live in the moment, while others become stuck, become Exes, haunting their own lives like ghosts?”

That is a question for all of us to consider. How many of us are stuck in our own pasts?

Deliciously, the book is also populated by a strange and wonderful cast of characters: the kimono-wearing Grammie who tells fortunes with an upturned fishbowl and whose philosophy of life includes the advice that a woman’s pizzazz “comes from your bosom,” the fierce and independent sister Lydia, the sweet, clueless father who keeps advising James that he will one day be “the man of the house” and even the high school teacher who “stood in front of the room, saying ‘Settle down, settle down,’ over and over again, although it was not clear whether he was speaking to us, or whispering, desperately, to himself,”

I found myself devouring this book, laughing out loud and, at the same time, feeling a kind of protective understanding of this boy-girl. Exploring issues of gender, of living with secrets and of coming to peace with the person we are — not the one we are expected to be — this book is a fine, literary undertaking.

I found myself not only setting Boylan’s book on my nightstand to be read again, but going to her Web site to watch the “All My Children” episode and a video tour of that big old house where she grew up, which halfway through caused that dreaded spinning color wheel to appear on my screen and mysteriously shut my computer down.

Hmmm.
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Jennifer Boylan is a best-selling author and professor at Colby College in Maine. Her new memoir is I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, which is about growing up in a haunted house, and about what it means to be “haunted.”

Until 2001, Jennifer published under the name James Boylan and while she now has a perspective on “a life in two genders,” she also provides an interesting view about the financial realities of transitioning. Skip to Question 6! Or start from the top as Jennifer gets personal with all things money.

1. What are some preconceived notions about money that typically get associated with gender?

In my family, you’d go to my mother for small amounts of money, and she’d say no. Like, you needed five dollars for the school trip. She’d ask you why you needed five dollars, grill you about the whole thing. Then maybe, if you were lucky, you’d get two. You’d go to my father if you need a lot of money, like a hundred dollars for a new amplifier. And he’d always say yes.

2. Are there any money lessons in I’m Looking Through You?

Well, there’s a chapter where I’m the world’s worst bank teller. I was so dreamy then. I’d give people six thousand dollars when their check was for six hundred. Or I’d just lose tens of thousands of dollars in my drawer because I hadn’t counted it right, or left a wad of thousands by the coffee machine. Eventually they put me on “probation”, and my supervisor, Mrs. Muhammed, had to watch me like a hawk. That helped, but not much. Nothing they could do would make me less dreamy.

3. What was your very first job? How did it teach you the value of a dollar?

I mowed lawns when I was a kid. A very male job, I guess. I liked the constant drone of the engine and the smell of the freshly mown grass and the gasoline. I liked the clank the mower would make when I ran over a rock. Or you’d mow right over a mound of dog poop and it would all spray out the side. Good times.

My first job in college was working at Lenny’s Hot Dogs in Atlantic City during the summers. That was a whole other trip.Working the night shift with my friends. It felt kind of like being in a play, every night, making hot dogs, burgers, fries, corn on the cob, frozen yogurts. We’d get off at five or six in the morning and walk down the beach and look at the stars. Minimum wage, but a great job.

When they gave me the W-4 Exempt from Withholding form at the beginning of the summer, I had no idea whatsoever what this was. Withholding? What’s withholding?

4. As a college professor, have you seen a shift in the financial values of students throughout your years of teaching?

Colby students come from a pretty wide swath of financial backgrounds, but a lot of them have spending money. My students, like people across the country, have gotten used to having more disposable income over the last 25 years.

5. Do good grades typically translate to higher earnings in one’s career?

Depends what you do, I guess. If you’re out to become a fiction writer, or a journalist, good grades might get you the job, but the job of a writer is one that almost always guarantees financial hardship, at least it is if it’s your only income. Or unless you get very lucky.

6. Did changing your gender have any impact on your financial status?

Well, I changed genders right as we were going from parents of toddlers to parents of grade school kids. So there were lots of strains on us financially at the time. Going from male to female is expensive, at least if you go the whole nine yards and include all the therapy and the surgery and the electrolysis and the hormones. Plus having to buy mostly all new clothes. And moistureizer, for gods sakes. I probably spent over 20,000 bucks in the process, over five years. People going from female to male can spend four or five times that. And of course, none of this is covered by insurance.

This is one reason people transition in mid-life; it can take that long to have the financial resources to get from one place to another. I know plenty of genderqueer people are happy being in the middle, and I respect that, but I wasn’t happy there.

Issues of privilege and income (which are related anyhow) are wedded to trans issues in a way that makes them a world apart from the issues for gay and lesbian people. If you are trans and hoping to make a complete transition, then you will come up against the financial realities of it. You don’t need twenty-thousand dollars to come out as gay or lesbian. But if you embark upon a transition path as trans, you’re going to need that. And where will it come from? Do you ask your parents, at age five, or fifteen, or twenty five, “Say Mom, I need twenty thousand dollars for one a them sex changes?” Young people don’t have that kind of money. Plenty of older people don’t have it either.

And so people with privilege in the culture– whether it comes from race or sex or class or education– are more likely to have the financial resources to go through the process. Which means that plenty of people without those resources, who feel the issues just as intently, are left without a means to move forward. And so people’s lives get desperate, and they resort to whatever they can just to get by. Which means their lives are very, very hard. And that’s not right.

Money enables people to “pass,” and passing is a highly charged and volatile issue for trans people. The more you look like everybody else in normative culture, the easier your life may be. And people with deep pockets can buy the surgeries that enable them to blend in with everybody else. The tyranny of passing, of “having to look like everybody else” is often financial at its root. And so this is another thing that trans people have to struggle with.

When I counsel young people about how to move forward, often I give them the advice they least want to hear, which is, finish your education, get a degree if you can, and try to attain some sort of power in the culture, because it can take resources to overturn the cultures rules effectively.

Either that, or be prepared to live totally outside of society’s rules. “To live outside the law you must be honest.”

7. What is your most significant memory about money?

I remember being a young writer in NYC, and I was broke as can be. I made 300 dollars a month as a writer for a magazine. My rent on 108th street was $175 a month in 1980. So I had $125 for everything else. I asked my mother if she would send me a winter coat, which I figured cost $75; I was wandering around New York without a coat. My mother mailed me $25, and said, “Well you’ll have to earn the money for your own coat. But here is some money for the sleeves.”

My parents had the money– but they believed very strongly that you have to support yourself– especially if you’re going to do something deranged like become a writer. So they wanted me to learn the value of earning my own income. Which I did, but it still annoyed me. I mean, hello? You sent me money for the SLEEVES?

This is an example of the time I should have asked dad, instead of mom, for the money.

8. Which is your preferred way to make a living: writing or teaching?

They each have their pleasures. Teaching can be really hard, because you have to figure out how to reach each student differently. Sometimes there’s a nice matchup between what I know and what students need. Other times, I can’t figure out how to get through to students, and I don’t know what it is they need. Writing is more familiar to me, and I usually only have to answer to myself.

9. How does money play a role in the trans movement?

(See above.)

10. Do people in academia pay enough attention to finances?

Well, to become an academic means a series of acts of financial suicide– all the money you spend on tuitions for undergraduate and then your graduate work. You can easily wind up twenty-six, twenty-seven years old without every having had a job besides teaching and research. And then, if it’s a tenure track job, it comes down to getting tenure, or not. If you don’t, maybe you can get a job somewhere else, or maybe not. Sometimes people wind up in their late twenties without any prospects and an enormous personal debt. And only then do they have to start figuring out what to do next.

For people who are tenured, they sometimes then commence living inside of a bubble; education can be one of the few recession-proof industries. Which means that teachers can obtain a certain distance from the realities of the world, including the realities of the lives their students are living. Which means that if you want to stay relevant and connected to your students’ lives, you have to stay on your toes.

More about Jennifer Boylan
I’m Looking Through You Jennifer Finney Boylan is a widely praised author and professor of creative writing and American literature at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine. She is the author of 10 books, including She’s Not There, which was the first bestselling book by a transgender American.

Her new memoir, I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, was just published by Broadway/Doubleday (Random House). While trans issues form part of the exposition of the book, the primary focus is on what it means to be “haunted,” and how we all seek to find peace with our various ghosts, both the supernatural and the all-too-human.

Jerry Harkavy, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published Tuesday March 25th, 2008

BELGRADE LAKES, Maine - Jennifer Finney Boylan never set out to be the
public face for the transgendered.

But the novelist and English professor at Colby College was thrust
into that role by her 2002 best-selling memoir about the transition to
womanhood that freed her from the decades-long torment of being a
female trapped in a male body.

With three appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” two on “Larry King
Live” and numerous other interviews and public appearances, Boylan,
49, has become a sunny-faced activist for the transgendered and one of
the most widely recognized transsexuals of recent years.

“Activism for me takes the form of living a normal life and doing so
very publicly,” she said.

Boylan’s public schedule is getting busier with this year’s
publication of her second memoir, “I’m Looking Through You,” a
poignant but laugh-out-loud story about growing up in a Charles
Addams-like Victorian mansion on Philadelphia’s Main Line.

The author, then named James, concealed her conflicted sexuality,
hiding her stash of lingerie in a secret panel in her bedroom. The
spooky old house, with footsteps in the attic, clouds of blue mist and
a ghostlike figure of an old woman in a mirror, serves as backdrop for
an adolescence haunted by gender issues that forced Boylan to keep the
nature of her true self hidden. In so doing, she became something of a
ghost herself.

“As I wrote the book, it became clear to me that the Scooby Doo
ghosts, as I call them, were less interesting than the metaphorical
ghosts,” she said. “While not everybody believes in ghosts, everybody
knows what it means to be haunted.”

The inner turmoil about which she wrote is now ancient history for
Boylan, who detailed her 2000 sex change in the earlier memoir, “She’s
Not There.” Today, she lives with her spouse Deedie, their two boys
and two Labrador retrievers near the lake on which Henry Fonda and
Katharine Hepburn starred in the 1982 Academy Award-winning film, “On
Golden Pond.”

James Boylan had met Deedie (named Grace in the two books) while in
college and only told her of his secret about a decade ago, well after
they were married. Boylan had hoped that their love would be enough to
keep the gender demons at bay. They remain legally married.

Boylan said she didn’t go public with her life story to become a role
model or a poster child for the transgender community,¼¼ but rather
because writing and storytelling is what she does.

“A lot of good is done simply by being public, by being visible and by
telling stories so people can see that a life like mine, a family like
mine is familiar and it’s normal, and that it’s a lot less
extraordinary than it seems,” she said.

She hopes her story will help to reshape the public’s image of transsexuals.

“We think of transgendered people as living in a big locked house
somewhere. They never show their faces, or when they do show their
faces they seem tortured and unknowable,” she said. “When people see
me and they see my family, they see something that’s familiar.”

Now in the midst of a year-long sabbatical, Boylan juggles her writing
and family chores (she’s both a soccer mom and a tuba mom) with
appearances in support of her latest book and on transgender issues.
She’s also writing occasional op-ed pieces for The New York Times,
which focus largely on the political campaign and do not mention that
she’s transgendered.

Besides book tours, she speaks at colleges, corporate events and law
firms. Although she’s not comfortable in a lobbying role, Boylan
addressed the National Press Club last spring in support of
legislation to bar discrimination against transgender people.

Boylan has been a valuable asset in helping to change public
attitudes, said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National
Center for Transgender Equality.

“Her sense of humour, her wit, are really an important part of the
education she does. She has a communication style that’s accessible to
a lot of people,” Keisling said.

Boylan, tall with strawberry blond hair that flows to the middle of
her back, remains equivocal about offering her private life for
everyone to see. But because she had a hard time finding role models
while growing up, she said it’s probably good to have someone
recognizable to look to.

There are many ways of dealing with gender variance, she said, and her
story is not the only one that deserves to be told.

“There are plenty of people who have, one way or another, gotten on
with their lives and live lives of fulfillment and happiness,” she
said.

Although such positive outcomes are not always the case, some
employers, such as Boylan’s, are increasingly showing more compassion
and understanding. The overall society, too, seems to be showing more
awareness of transgender issues, she said.

I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU has done well in its first two months of publication. I would like to steer readers to these nice reviews in the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times; a complete list of reviews is available here. There is also a “Book Tour Minute” for your video inspection here; as well as a longer video piece from a reading at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. A vast pile of other material is available at www.jenniferboylan.net, including a community message board for readers and other fellow-travelers.

I’d also like to steer readers of all stripes to the goodreads.com site; this is a new networking site in which readers of sympathetic temperaments are connected to each other. An ongoing “Q&A With Jennifer Finney Boylan” and JFB Readers group can be found here.

I think my next op-ed in the New York Times is slated for Sunday March 23rd. This is part of the ongoing “Campaign Postcard” series; the most recent one before that ran February 19th, and can be read here.

Here’s an update of forthcoming events:

March 13th: Andover Bookshop, Andover MA
March 18th: Student Union, University of Maine, Orono ME
March 25th: Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science, Boston ME
April 3rd: Radford University, Radford, VA
April 13-15: Lobby Days, Washington DC. (TBA)
April 15-16: Northfield Mt. Hermon School, Northfield MA
April 17th: River Run Bookstore, Portsmouth NH
April 25-27th Events in Houston, TX - Unity Banquet.
April 29th: Linkage Incorporated. Corporate Event, Atlanta GA
May 4th: Palm Springs Book Festival, Palm Springs CA
May 18th: Philadelphia Free Library Festival of the Book, Philadelphia, PA

As always, please check with the venue in question for further details and confirmation; not all of these events are open to the public. Or, you can email me; my email is available on my web site at jenniferboylan.net.

I’ll be looking through YOU!
Jenny B.

I’m back from the West Coast– and many thanks to the readers who came out to join me at the events in Seattle, Portland, Olympia, San Francisco, Corte Maderia, Oakland, Los Angeles and West Hollywood. In the weeks ahead I’ll be at the following venues:

Feb. 19: The Childrens Hospital, Philadelphia PA
Feb 21: The Tattered Cover, Denver, CO
Feb 21-23: Gold Rush Convention, Denver CO
Feb. 26: Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, MA
Feb 27: Bates College, Lewiston ME (Katalin Vecsey’s class)
Feb 29: Borders Bookshop, Albany NY
March 1: Northshire Books, Manchester Center, VT
March 13: Andover Bookshop, Andover MA
March 18: Two events at the University of Maine, Orono: Sandy Caron’s Class and a Public
lecture later that afternoon.

Keep your eyes peeled for published works by JB in this months Philadelphia magazine (an excerpt from the book); in the March Glamour (an essay on friendship), and an op/ed in the New York Times scheduled for Sunday February 17th.

In March, April, and May, I’ll be at Northfield Mt. Hermon School, in Northfield MA; at the Unity Banquet in Houston TX; at a corporate event in Atlanta, GA; and at the Philadelphia Free Library Festival of the Book on May 17 and 18.

Check www.jenniferboylan.net for all the latest details on the tour, the book, and my work.

Finally, here’s the video teaser one last time, hosted on YouTube. A much higher quality version of this video is viewable by clicking the ‘video tour’ link here.

In the meantime, here’s the YouTube: