Green, (Charles Stuart) Jamison 1948-

views updated

GREEN, (Charles Stuart) Jamison 1948-

PERSONAL: Born 1948, in Oakland, CA; married Heidi Bruins (a human resources manager), October, 2003; children: (with first partner) one daughter. Education: Earned M.F.A.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Vanderbilt University Press, VU Station B 351813, Nashville, TN 37235-1813. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER: Gender diversity consultant. Worked variously as a commercial voice actor, photographer, and percussionist; publications manager and manager of publications and engineering services at two high-tech manufacturing companies, became vice president of operations at a publicly held software publishing firm. FTM International, Inc., president, 1991-99; board member of Gender Education & Advocacy, Inc., Trans-gender Law & Policy Institute, Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, and Equality Project; has worked in collaboration with or in support of numerous national and international organizations. Actor in films, including You Don't Know Dick.

MEMBER: Human Rights Campaign Business Council.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pushcart Prize nomination, 1984, for "Circling"; Trinity award, IFGE, 1995; Transgender Pioneer, 1995; ETVC Community Leader award, 1996; Virginia Prince award, 1998; named among most influential gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people, Lambda Letters Project, 1999; named among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community's twenty-five Best and Brightest Political Activists, Advocate, 1999; Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2004.

WRITINGS:

Eyes (stories), Olive Press (Portland, OR), 1976.

Becoming a Visible Man, Vanderbilt University Press (Nashville, TN), 2004.

Writer of "Visible Man" column for PlanetOut.com; contributor to periodicals, including Transgender Tapestry, San Francisco Bay Times and Harpies Quarterly. Contributor to books, including Male Lust, edited by Kerwin Kay, Jill Nagle, and Barach Gould, Haworth Press, 2000; Transgender Equality: A Handbook for Activists and Policy Makers, by Paisley Currah and Shannon Minter, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, 2000; Unseen Genders: Education beyond the Binaries, edited by Haynes and McKenna, Peter Lang, 2001; and The Gender Frontier, by Mariette Pathy Allen, Kehrer Verlag (Heidelberg, Germany), 2003.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Gender Validation: The Collision of Law, Medicine, and Private Lives (Ph.D. dissertation in law); Making Penises, a study of male genital reconstruction; and Someone Elses Body, a novel.

SIDELIGHTS: Jamison Green is an advocate who writes about and contributes to conferences and documentary films that study the various aspects, issues, and challenges associated with the female-to-male transsexual experience and transgender men. Green worked for the passage of San Francisco's Transgender Anti-Discrimination Ordinance and acts as a consultant, speaker, and lecturer to organizations, groups, and educational institutions.

Green is a female-to-male transsexual who draws on his own experiences in Becoming a Visible Man. At the age of one month, Green was adopted by a couple wanting a girl, but his male tendencies were apparent from an early age. Even as a toddler, he refused to wear dresses, and although his body was female, he exhibited male traits. He was athletic and excelled in sports as a girl, but he was often ridiculed for his masculine appearance. At age fifteen, he began to use the androgynous name "Jamie," and by the time he reached his early twenties, he suspected that he was transsexual but was afraid to undergo a sex change, believing that it would be an indication of mental imbalance.

As an adult, Green was in a long-term lesbian relationship, and his partner gave birth to two children through donor insemination. Green was named as father on the birth certificates, although he had not yet become legally male. His daughter, with whom he enjoys a close relationship, was born in 1985. He began his transition in 1988, after which time his partner left him and had his name removed from their son's birth certificate. In April 1991, Green became legally male, at which time his birth certificate was corrected and reissued. Green married Heidi Bruins in 2003.

"It really is about remaining standing," noted Jarek Steele in Lambda Book Report. "In this respect, the book is an overwhelming success." Steele noted that there are many issues that continue to be debated, including whether females-to-males and males-tofemales should be studied in the same context, and whether the transgendered community should be considered part of the gay, lesbian, bisexual community.

Green writes of surgical procedures and hormone use, problems facing parents with the decision, the loss of children and family, and the ability or inability of a partner to see the transgendered person through the long and arduous process. Steele wrote that "subject after subject splinters away from each other, making me wonder if he had intended this to be a memoir, a tool for teaching, or a resource for other transmen who are searching for another way to light 'a series of candles in a dark cave.'" Steel continued that it then occurred to him that Green's "intended audience is anyone he can reach; the book is intended to be all of these things. It is just as multifaceted as the individual who wrote it and each individual who reads it."Booklist reviewer Whitney Scott felt that nontranssexuals may benefit and understand Green's journey "via the concept of realizing personal integrity, and thereby gain immeasurably from his testimony."

Green told CA: "I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was seven years old. There were times when I thought I ought to choose a more practical profession, though, and for a while in my early teenage years I entertained the thought of becoming a philosopher, a traffic engineer, or an architect. But in high school I reconnected with my sense of myself as an artist, and I re-committed myself to practicing the art of written communication. I have been fortunate to have made a living almost exclusively by writing (or by managing writers in high technology design and manufacturing companies, with an occasional teaching stint thrown in) since I was about twenty-eight years old, though its mostly been writing on behalf of other people, as opposed to what I have wanted to write. As a consequence, I've written and published a lot of papers and technical books that don't have my name on them at all. My best-known work is nonfiction, and I hope to get back to writing fiction again someday, but for now I still have a lot to say in a non-fiction context.

"My writing is strongly influenced by the work of John Gardner, Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Even when I write non-fiction about political or academic subjects, I try to think about the potential emotions that might be stirred, the natural pace and texture of the physical world that human beings touch, the effect of changing light on our visual perceptions, and the effects that what I write may eventually have on other peoples lives. I think that real writing takes place in that magical zone between the words on paper and the reader's mind. The eye takes the symbols in, translates them, and the mind processes them somehow, creating (one may hope) some kind of understanding, which may be very different from what was inside the writer's mind. Writers have to know this, and anticipate distortion. It's in the distortion, which is beyond our control, where we find connection with our readers. We have to have the strength to carry our vision through that distortion, and the confidence that the sense of clarity with which we infused our words at the start will survive, however those words are interpreted through the experience and consciousness of our readers, people we may never meet. I love the challenge and promise of written communication.

"I hope my work will inspire, inform, and transform others so they might be more compassionate and courageous in their own lives."