Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (42 page)

B
OOKS ABOUT TRANSGENDER EXPERIENCE:

Whipping Girl: A Transgender Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
by Julia Serano. Seal Press. ISBN: 978–1580051545.

Transgender History
by Susan Stryker. Seal Press. ISBN: 978–1580052245.

True Selves: Understanding Transsexualism—For Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals
by Mildred Brown and Chloe Ann Rounsley. Jossey-Bass. ISBN: 978–0787902711.

Stone Butch Blues
by Leslie Feinberg. Firebrand Books. ISBN: 978–1563410291.

Becoming a Visible Man
by Jamison Green. Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN: 978–0826514578.

O
RGANIZATIONS ADVOCATING FOR NONTRADITIONAL FAMILIES:

• PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) promotes the health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons, their families, and their friends through: support, to cope with an adverse society; education, to enlighten an ill-informed public; and advocacy, to end discrimination and to secure equal civil rights.
community.pflag.org

• The Family Equality Council works at all levels of government to advance full social and legal equality on behalf of the approximately one million lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families raising two million children.
www.familyequality.org

W
EBSITES OF AUTHORS PARTICIPATING IN THIS PROJECT
:

• Richard Russo:
www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/russo/

• Ralph James Savarese:
www.ralphsavarese.com

• Trey Ellis:
www.treyellis.com

• Augusten Burroughs:
www.augusten.com

• Edward Albee:
www.albeefoundation.org

• Timothy Kreider:
www.thepaincomics.com

• Dr. Christine McGinn:
drchristinemcginn.com

• Ann Beattie:
authors.simonandschuster.com/Ann-Beattie/1926455

• Susan Minot:
www.openroadmedia.com/authors/susan-minot.aspx

• Anna Quindlen:
www.annaquindlen.net

J
ENNY
B
OYLAN’S WEBSITE
is
www.jenniferboylan.net
and contains a wealth of material, some of it specifically related to this title. Jenny can be contacted at
[email protected]
; she attempts to answer all mail, except when things get a little backed up. She can be followed at JennyBoylan on Twitter and as Jennifer Finney Boylan on Facebook.

T
HE
B
OYLAN FAMILY
maintains two endowments, which are sustained by proceeds from this book and other JFB projects. The Boylan prize in nonfiction at Wesleyan is a small fund supporting undergraduate writers at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. More information is available at
www.wesleyan.edu/writing/community/prizedetails/boylan.html
.

The J. Richard Boylan Scholarship in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University provides major support for undergraduates at JHU in Baltimore, Maryland.
www.jhu.edu/∼admis/catalog/misc/scholarships_awards_prizes.pdf
.

Sympathetic readers and other supporters of undergraduate education wishing to contribute to these endowments can contact the schools directly at the links listed above, or write to the author at
[email protected]
.

I
WISH TO EXPRESS
my sincere gratitude to everyone who helped with this project—the parents and former children who suffered through my endless questions; to Anna Quindlen, for agreeing to perform (and edit) the interview that provides the afterword to this work; to editors Deb Futter, Gerry Howard, Christine Pride, and Lindsay Sagnette at Random House; and to my agent Kris Dahl at ICM, for standing by me these last twenty years. I want to particularly thank my assistant, Grant Patch, for all the research he did on my behalf, as well as for transcribing many of the interviews. Other interviews were transcribed by Verbal Ink Transcription Services (
www.verbalink.com
).

I’m especially thankful to Augusten Burroughs, who first suggested that I write this book over a dinner of burning-hot food at Spice Market, in Manhattan; it’s probably worth mentioning that in reply I told Augusten that I was “all done with memoir” and “all done with gender.” Augusten is also responsible for the photograph of Edward Albee as well as the author photo.

I’m grateful to my colleagues and students at Colby College in Maine, as well as at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. It was Ursinus’s president, the late John Strassburger, who, along with English professor Jon Volkmer, brought me to that campus for the fall of 2010 and invented the position of Grace Hoyer/John Updike Distinguished Visiting Creative Writer for me. I miss him.

Above all, I’m grateful to my family—my parents and my sister; my brave, glorious sons, Zachary and Sean; and to the incomparable Deedie Finney Boylan, whose love has made my life possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

©
Augusten Burroughs

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN
is the author of twelve books, including the memoirs
I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted
and
She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders
, the first bestselling work by a transgender American.
She’s Not There
was reissued in an updated, tenth-anniversary edition in 2013; both books are published by Broadway/Random House. Jenny has appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live
, and the
Today
show. Documentaries about her life have appeared on CBS News’s
48 Hours, The Barbara Walters Special
, and the History Channel. In 2005 she played herself on several episodes of ABC’s
All My Children
. The high point of her scholarly life was being imitated by Will Forte on
Saturday Night Live
.

She has spoken at conferences and universities around the country, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia,
Cornell, Wesleyan, Amherst, Middlebury, Bowdoin, and Duke, as well as the National Press Club in Washington, DC. She has served on the national screening committee of the Fulbright Scholars, is on the national board of directors of GLAAD, and is a member of the board of trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. She is the winner of a Lambda Literary award as well as the “Stonewall Legacy” award from the University of Massachusetts. A frequent contributor to the op-ed page of the
New York Times
, Jenny’s work has also appeared regularly in
Condé Nast Traveler
magazine and Salon. com. Since 1988 she has been professor of English at Colby College. She lives in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, with her family.