Trans Parental

As I type, there are 25 sourdough English muffins cooking away merrily: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/3241/sourdough-english-muffins I played live culture roulette and put buttermilk in with the sourdough culture last night, and it appears to have done no harm whatsoever. They're delicious.

Simone approves - she's devouring one with jam right now.

The September once-a-month menu doesn't appeal to me too much, so I plan to develop my own while I'm in Maine using the forms available on the site: http://onceamonthmom.com/category/resources/create-your-own-menu/

In addition to a happy, burbling little sourdough, I also maintain a buttermilk culture. I started with 8 ounces buttermillk in a very clean quart glass jar and added 24 ounces of milk. I shook well and let it sit at room temperature overnight. Buttermilk ensued. WHOLE MILK BUTTERMILK. Imagine the decadence.

I use it in a whole lot of things: scrambled eggs, biscuits, muffins, any number of cooked things that call for milk. Adjust the chemical leaveners for extra acidity if the original recipe calls for milk*, and if you're using it in sourdough recipes, scald it first so the culture doesn't overtake your wild yeast. Anything milk can do, buttermilk can do better! Well, except cereal or coffee. Ew.

Today, my sourdough needed another feeding before it could bake something nice. I wanted bread anyway, so I decided to try something new. I found a recipe for whole wheat buttermilk bread: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2644/claytons-buttermilk-whole-wheat-bread It's not in the oven yet, but the texture, smell, and taste of the unbaked dough are pretty spectacular.

*To achieve the desired result when using buttermilk instead of milk, substitute baking soda for some or all for of the baking powder. For each cup of buttermilk used in place of sweet milk, reduce the amount of baking powder by 2 teaspoons, and replace with 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda.

Makes about six pints.

1 1/2 Tbsp celery seeds
2 tsp whole cloves
1 4-inch-long cinnamon stick, broken into pieces
3/4 tsp whole allspice
1 1/2 cups cider vinegar
12 lbs tomatoes, cored and quartered
1 1/2 cups chopped onions
1 tsp cayenne pepper
2 Tbsp sauce from canned chipotles in adobo
3/4 cups granulated sugar
2 Tbsp canning or pickling salt

1. Tie celery seeds, cloves, cinnamon, and allspice in a square of cheesecloth, creating a spice bag.

2. In a stainless steel saucepan, combine vinegar and spice bag. Bring to a boil over high heat. Remove from heat and steep for 25 minutes. Remove the spice bag.

3. Meanwhile, in a large stainless steel pot, combine tomatoes, onions, cayenne, and adobo sauce. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring frequently. Reduce heat and boil gently for 20 minutes. Add infused vinegar and boil gently until vegetables are softened and mixture begins to thicken, about 30 minutes.

4. Working in batches, transfer mixture to a sieve placed over a glass or stainless steel bowl and press with the back of a spoon to extract all the liquid. (You can also do this in a food mill.) Discard solids.

5. Meanwhile, prepare canner, jars, and lids.

6. Ladle hot ketchip into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch (1 cm) headspace. Remove bubbles and adjust headspace, if necessary, by adding hot ketchup. Wipe rim. Center lid on jar. Screw band down tight until resistance is met, then increase to fingertip-tight.

8. Place jars in canner, ensuring that they are completely covered with water. Bring to a boil and process for 15 minutes. Wait 5 minutes, then remove jars, cool and store.

About once a week, we go to the library and check out an enormous stack of books. The past few weeks have seen an increase in the amount of material checked out, since we're traveling almost every weekend, and a pile of books* is about the only thing that makes a happy Simone.

So far, so good, but we're not done yet. There are a couple more trips yet to go this summer, and I'm looking for some audiobooks for the ride. Are there any that you guys particularly like? Some that have worked well for us recently are: The Tale of Desperaux, The Penderwicks, Coraline, and pretty much anything by E. B. White.

*Evidence of ridiculousness attached below.

About a week ago, my family went to Philadelphia for the 10th Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference. I've thought hard about going since I first heard of the conference in 2009, but this year was the first year that I actually attended.

There were a lot of things I loved about the conference. I know this is sort of a goofy thing to be delighted about, and actually, the more I think about it, the more angry I get that it should even be an issue - I loved the unisex bathrooms. I love them on general principle whether I'm with kids or not, but the best part was being able to go into a bathroom with Simone without experiencing any hostility.

One of the things that made the whole conference possible for me was the kids' camp. Many queer events don't make a concerted effort to be family-friendly, which makes it difficult for me - and other parents - to participate. Providing free, excellent childcare as part of the conference definitely went a long way toward making me feel welcome.

The workshops in the past couple years have left me sort of lukewarm, but this year, there was obviously an enormous effort to diversify the schedule. There were a lot more workshops dealing with femme, POC, and family topics. The main reason that I attended this year, in fact, was that a marvelous friend had an idea for a facilitated discussion and kindly let us co-facilitate. The discussion was titled "Buliding Our Families - Parenting Through a Trans Lens." Here's the description:

This workshop will consist of a facilitated discussion centering on building families in relationships where one or more of the parents identify as transgender. People who are thinking of having or adopting children may also attend.

Trans folk and their partners have been having and raising children for decades, yet there is rarely a space where the unique circumstances of parenting as a trans person or a partner of a trans person can be discussed with people who have shared experience.

During this conversation, we will explore ways that participants have become parents, how identifying as transgender impacts their parenting, and ways that we can support one another in raising healthy families.

It was all that and more. The room was filled with queer families and people interested in parenting, and the discussions were wonderful. We broke into three small groups, loosely affiliated with methods of building families, parenting as a transperson, and what it's like to have a transgender parent. We didn't have nearly enough time to discuss all of the magnificent topics that people suggested, but here's hoping that we can do it again sometime soon.

Parents, prospective parents, kids of transfolk: what do YOU want to talk to other families about? Please let me know in comments.

My younger daughter has always been a poor sleeper. We spent a few years (!!) wrapping her in a sling and bouncing on a yoga ball to get her to sleep, but by the time she was 2, that became very unwieldy. I decided to try a weighted blanket, and it was an instantaneous and miraculous improvement.

Here's how I make them.

Materials needed:

-2 pieces of fabric, each 3 yards long. I used fabric that was 45" wide. One piece is for the top of the blanket, one is for the bottom. I use cotton for the top and have used both fleece and flannel for the bottom, each with good results.
-Poly Pellets You'll need enough pellets to supply 10% of the wearer's weight, plus one pound. For example: if you weigh 200 pounds, then your blanket will need to be about 21 pounds. Some people might need more weight, some people might need less.
-Postage/kitchen scale
-Sewing machine
-Pins
-Tailor's chalk/washable marker for marking the fabric
-Yardstick/measuring tape

You will want to eyeball your fabric and see how many pockets you want to put in. With a 45" X 86" blanket, I put in 32 pockets: 8 vertical pockets and 4 horizontal pockets. Mark the vertical and horizontal lines on one side of the fabric.

Figure out how many ounces of beads to put in each pocket. I made a 6 pound blanket. I figured out the amount of ounces in 6 pounds (96), then divided that by the number of pockets (32) to find out how many ounces of beads to put in each pocket (3).

Pin the fabric together with the right sides facing each other and sew around three sides, leaving the top edge unsewn.

Turn the blanket right side out and topstitch around the three sides twice. Reinforce the seam by topstitching over it again.

Sew along the vertical lines, making long channels. Reinforce the seams by sewing back over them.

Using the scale, measure out the proper amount of beads. Pour into each channel. Shake them down to the bottom, and pin the squares shut. Sew acrosss horizontally. Reinforce by sewing across a second time. Repeat filling/pinning/sewing/reinforcing until you get to the top row.

When the last row is filled and pinned, sew it shut. Be sure to pick a sturdy method of finishing. I sewed about half an inch from the raw edge, folded it over twice sort of like rolling a paper bag, and then sewed that down. When I was finished, it looked very much like the hem on a pair of jeans.

The blanket can be machine washed and dried on gentle.

Because of hundreds upon hundreds of spam comments and user registrations (how flattering!), I've just installed a spam protection module and deleted several hundred users. If you were a legit user and you find that I deleted your account, I apologize very sincerely. Please, create your user just one more time.

By way of the always-excellent Helen Boyd, here's a very nice video about tomboys. It sparked an enormously interesting conversation with Simone and she's asked several times since to watch it again.

Tomboy from Barb Taylor on Vimeo.

In seventh grade, I was eleven years old. I'm not sure if it still shows, but back then, I was scrawny, awkward, and quiet. I didn't talk much - I had very, very few friends and didn't suffer those that I considered to be fools gladly at all. I had just discovered the joys of what I then considered to be the opposite sex and spent many an hour dreamily pondering the more effeminate boys of my acquaintance. As complex as my sexual orientation is now, I had absolutely zero inkling what it was then. My classmates felt certain that they knew, though. They were certain that I was a dyke.

As an adult, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how middle school kids are ever alone enough to do each other emotional damage. They spend all day in a building with adults acting in loco parentis, for God's sake. But, it doesn't take long, really. I remember being hit, kicked, teased, taunted, spit on, and adults were never any the wiser. I remember kids leaning over the railing during gym class and hissing the word "dyke" at me. I remember nearly constant gender policing, with makeup tips, hair criticisms, outfit suggestions.

Why didn't I tell any adults about it? I don't know that there's any one reason. One reason is that I felt it was my fault for somehow being a dyke and not realizing it, and I certainly knew for sure by then that i was pretty much a thorough failure of a girl. By that point, too, I had been mistreated badly by teachers. One in particular stands out, the one who pulled me out of gifted classes and tried her level best to get me held back a year. Like many kids that age, I simply didn't consider adults to be trustworthy allies, and with good reason.

I was teased endlessly and mercilessly for being a band geek. I clung to music like a lifeline, desperate for something that I did well. I did think nearly constantly of quitting, but the need to get something right couldn't measure up even to the prospect of less teasing. Good thing, too, because in high school, music gave me my first clue that things would get better.

I met my friend Tom shortly before my freshman year of high school. He was also a band geek, and we had enough in common to be instantly joined at the hip. For the first time ever, I had the kind of friend I passed notes to and hung out with, talking about life and philosophical questions and music and boys and girls and God and any number of things. We were pretty much inseparable until he left for college in Iowa. Seminary, actually. We kept in touch, though, through Iowan and Polish seminaries and through French monkhood, sadly losing touch about a decade ago. I made another very dear friend my senior year of high school, and we're still in touch.

For the middle two years of high school, though, I muddled through with one or two local friends. The bulk of my rewarding social connections came from people I met in other areas of the state at juried music competitions. Somewhat unsurprisingly, I seem to have found all the young queers before any of us knew why we resonated with each other.

Years passed. I survived them all, somehow. I survived abusive relationships, a few too many drugs, wildly dysfunctional family situations, the military, terrifying poverty, and any number of things. I ended up in a good place with fantastic friends and a loving family. In many ways, life has indeed gotten better. But I would never tell anyone suffering through a rough family situation or the horrors of teenage cruelty to just buck up, little camper, because someday this will all seem like a distant dream. It doesn't ever truly heal, it just dulls. We all know that, deep in our hearts.

It's not as bad, now that my skin is thicker, but those things still happen. People still get up in my face on the street and scream that they want to smash my ugly dyke face in, that pedophiles like me shouldn't have kids, and the police do nothing but smirk when I call and report it. I have been stalked down the street by groups of men who assumed that I was dating my daughter. People have told the internet, with the best of intent, that my family, with its transgender component, is unimaginable.

It hasn't gotten all better, not by a long shot. I just don't notice it as much. People still cruelly gossip about my gender in front of my family in public libraries, and the librarians do nothing to stop it. Can you imagine? How would you feel if it happened to you? A woman that has known me since high school, listening to a bunch of teenagers saying "Is it a boy or a girl? Its kid called it Mommy, so it must be a girl." She heard, and she didn't say a word. She let them dehumanize me right in front of my children. Both of my daughters heard and are still working through how horrible it made them feel, and not a single soul spoke up. So I went back in, ass on fire and full of the rage of a mother tiger, and I did it myself. I truly believe, from their ashen faces and trembling hands, that they'll never do that precise thing again.

I won't stop speaking up when people do these horrible things. I won't. It made my knees shake and my heart pound, but I called the police about the unhinged neighbor, I let the teenagers in the library know that they were out of line, and I will never let anyone say within my hearing that my family is a weird exotic pitiful freakshow. I will continue to gently correct people who tell me I'm in the wrong bathroom.

Please, you speak up too. It won't make anyone's life magically better, but if enough people speak up when they see wrong being done, you might at least make someone's day bearable.

I come by it honestly. That's how my mother would phrase it, or my grandmother would have done. I come to this place of comfort in the domestic through hard work and close observation, both of which have been mostly honest. I do. I come by it honestly.

Plates can be an occasion on their own. When I was barely taller than the table, the hutch full of china looked like a cherrywood cathedral and felt no less reverent. The glass dishes with the tiny balls on the sides were candlewick, very fragile, handwash only. Never in the dishwasher. The pink china with the roses and gold edging was flown back from Germany after WWII by a friend of the family. No dishwasher for those either. There were wooden cases for the good silverware, actually silver, that had to be polished before each use. Bone china cups so fragile that sunlight made them glow, each with their matching saucer. I knew the mysteries of pickle forks, dessert spoons, butter knives, salt cellars, and water glasses. I learned fold a napkin several different ways, according to the solemnity of the occasion. In every instance, the more there was to celebrate, the more work there was to prepare and clean up. At a very young age, I understood that asking to use the good china meant that someone had to wash it, and that someone was most likely going to be me.

Home and hearth weren't just about things, though. I learned the finer points of etiquette: who gets introduced to whom, when to wear white, the importance of hostess gifts, always send a thank-you note, remember the preferences of frequent guests, always have the liquor cabinet well stocked. Always treat your elders with respect and never, ever, ever call anyone your parents' age or older by their first name.

I learned the art of baking, the care of hardwood floors, the secrets of laundry, several different ways to wash windows, and how to find likely places for wild berries and fiddleheads. I can make pie crust without a recipe or measuring cups, judging solely by decades of experience. I gut my own fish. I knit, I sew, I maintain a fantastic sourdough culture.

I'm quite sure that a boy child would have learned different things. My father wanted to teach me about fighting and motorcycles and the pursuit of cheerleaders, all sorts of aggressive manly activities. My uncles received their own folksy knowledge, but theirs was more in the line of hunting, car repair, bartending, how to make money mowing lawns. Unlike me, they were never expected to wash dishes after dinner, and they were never invited to gossip around the kitchen table with the ladies after dinner. They retired to the living room with the rest of the menfolk.

My family always made sure to tell me in words that I was welcome to do anything I wanted to do. I could be a teacher, an author, a lady doctor, a physicist - anything that requried a college degree. I could certainly aspire to marriage and motherhood. I was welcome to be a bookkeeper in the family auto body business, to tally up the receipts amidst the snap-on bikini calendars and sexist jokes, but I was certainly not encouraged to lay hands upon a vehicle. In retrospect, it was the most slyly traditional free-to-be-you-and-me upbringing ever.

It's fair to say that I was well prepared to be a wife and mother. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's been a very easy role to slip into. In both of my marriages, when push came to shove and someone needed to be a full-time parent, I have stepped up to the plate. I already know how to cook and calm a hysterical baby and make a guest list. I can put together a dinner party for 20 on a few days' notice. Let's not kid ourselves: none of those things are simple. They all require hard, honest practice and long, close observation.

What is the word that describes the intersection of my gendered upbringing and domestic choices? Sexism is a clear choice. I was a messy and haphazard child. There was no way that my family took my constitution and proclivities into consideration and thought, "now THERE is a future home economist." What they saw, and what they reinforced, was my gender. They assumed that someday, I would be in a heterosexual relationship. When one is in that sort of arrangement, someone needs to do the dirty work and it sure as hell isn't going to be a man. I remember my grandmother telling me that I was certainly free to date whomever I chose, but that I should keep in mind that it was as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it was a poor one. Would she have said something similar to a boy child? I leave the answering of that question as an exercise to the reader.

Times have changed, somewhat, but these things still happen. As anyone who has experienced pregnancy is aware, as soon as you get a little bulge in the belly, gender is the first thing people ask. Is it a boy or a girl? Why do you ask, Imre used to respond. Do you think they would tell us this early? Anyway, he would say, we don't much care. We're just hoping for human. In hospitals, media, clothing stores, books, schools, children are sorted and color coded. We hear messages of sexism everywhere we turn. Girls are bad at math, terrible drivers, overly emotional, passive-aggressive, the weaker sex. Women have lower pay, less prestigious job titles, mommy-tracking, and are inappropriately sexualized at every turn. Their bodies belong more to a Republican congress than to themselves. Sexism is everywhere, it's real, and it's so ingrained that we have a hard time seeing it as anything other than Just The Way Things Are. Really, honestly, is there another word that describes that better than misogyny?

Let's say that a hypothetical woman works as hard, but for less job security and less money than her male partner. Let's say that she still does a vast majority of the domestic work, and is considered to be the primary caretaker of her children. Let's say, like myself for many years, that it's a choice made in accord with her partner, after long and earnest discussion. Or maybe, the woman chooses to stay home with hypothetical children. Let's say they're uncomfortable with how much their relationship mirrors patriarchal gender roles. What are they supposed to do about it? Should the husband stay home, with no preparation or taste for running the domestic sphere? Should the wife head out to work for less pay? Why would this hypothetical couple go against the grain, against everything that's comfortable, just to prove a point? What kind of idiot would do that?

This kind of idiot. I would. In fact, I did. I put my ideals into action, and our relationship became the change I wished to see in the world. Was it an empty gesture based on appearances? Maybe, but it did more to change our collective consciousness than anything else that happened in our marriage.