Can’t open pdfs at work, will have to wait until later. Could some point out the more horrid parts of the interview, and maybe give a rough estimate as to how much of it was spent talking about the operation?
edited to add: Forgot to say thank you very much.
I think old McGregor the Sheep Fucker would understand Wendy’s feelings about the matter.
McG the SF wouldn’t bring the subject up nine years later right out of the blue to complain about what people said nine years before-He would have left sleeping sheep lie.
Well, for one, Wendy uses the term transexual throughout, except where she says that she prefers the term transgender. To generate 800 pages of transcript, they had a large number of interviews. In the last part of the introduction, the interviewer says that he was hit by a cab and had a sprained knee. Wendy came to his house and during the interview nursed him. He describes her appearance as “stunning” and said that was the first time he really saw her as a woman, that any thoughts of her “being a man in a woman’s body went the way of all flesh”.
The interview starts with her childhood, and the gender dysphoria she experienced. She says that she always felt she was a girl, and couldn’t understand why her parents couldn’t see that. Puberty was even more traumatic than usual, but she had no sex life of any sort, not even masturbation, and didn’t masturbate until 1974, after her transition.
The bulk of the interview is about her transition, but this is Playboy. Keyboard magazine would be a better one to talk about electronic music.
Which parts of the interview put her in a bad light, do you think?
A bad light? None of it. When she was talking about her childhood I really felt for her. I don’t think any reasonable modern person would read it and think the less of her. A bit of her prickly personality does come across:
**
Playboy:** What about children in your own life? Does it make you feel unfulfilled as a woman to know you can’t have kids?
Carlos: A lot of people can’t have children. I guess in a way saddens me, but in another sense I know I’m a career monster. So many ideas are so much more important to me than children. I probably would have chosen not to have children, anyway, so I don’t mind particularly.
Playboy: Would you consider marriage?
Carlos: I would consider anything. But do I think seriously about marriage? No. Do I think would be easy to find someone would marry me? Absolutely not. You have to be a very strange person to be able to tolerate someone who, as of this interview, is going to be a publicly acknowledged transsexual.
Playboy: What if your closest friend, Rachel, got married?
Carlos: I try not to think about it. Rachel and I have lived very closely together for many years and, to some degree, that will come to a stop. And that saddens me, frightens me. She has a man, and they’re talking about getting married. So it may well happen. But it won’t be because I gone public. Rachel is about the only person I can name in this interview, because she is not afraid. There is nothing I can say that can scare her. So it’s not as if I fear rejection by her.
Playboy: But fear of rejection was one of the shaping influences your life?
Carlos: Transsexuality is a crash course in dealing with the fear of rejection. I was raised as a boy. I wanted love. I wanted people to like me. So I was not going to say something that, in my infant mind, could cause people get upset with me. There is nothing particularly striking about my background, except that, in my head I had this obsession is among my earliest memories. So, in a way, it’s all so boring. I think I would feel happy if the reaction to this interview were a yawn. I mean, who cares? I gone through procedure. It’s done with. Just let me with my God damn life and I will let you live yours.
Um… I read all of the post, and the response, and I don’t get what your point is in this rebuttal. Could you tell us, please, where the disconnect is?
The thing is that when you agree to give an interview, you lose control over how your story and words will be presented. What you see as the most important elements of your life may not be what the interviewer sees as the most important or compelling. It’s too bad, in some sense, but as **Czarcasm **points out no one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to talk.
Also, when you’re asked questions about things you’d prefer not to take a lead role in the resulting story, you can smile and say, “I’d prefer not to talk about that, thank you.” Otherwise, sure as shooting, it’ll wind up in the story, probably as the lead.
I’m nobody famous, but I have given journalists a number of interviews over the years and I know this. I’m sorry for her pain, but I’m left wondering how she didn’t know it.
The fact that all of his questions were already answered? There were an entire two paragraphs explaining the situation with Playboy.
So, according to what was said above, they took an interview that was supposed to be about her entire life and reduced it to just be about her sexuality, even throwing in an freaking insult, calling the rest of her life and all of her contributions to music just “cosmic ramblings.” She was just a subject of “lurid curiosity,” or, in other words, treated like a side show attraction.
Playboy themselves “twisted her arm” by misleading her as to what the interview was about. Misleading people tends to make you the villain. And demoting someone’s entire life to “cosmic ramblings” tends to portray people in a negative light.
And it sure doesn’t help that Czarcasm asked the questions as if they weren’t answered in the text, using them rhetorically to imply answers that contradict the text. That level of ignorance in the face of spoonfed information is a bit frustrating. Especially when a poster seems to make a habit posting such questions.
Not always! I know of cases where the contract stipulated the subject had approval rights over the final form of the interview. This is not the usual case, I hasten to add. Playboy would never agree to it. But it is not unknown.
She chose to give an interview to a magazine with a primary focus on sex and is surprised that they choose to focus on sex?
The next time you decide to attempt to rip me a new one, try to get something right. From the intro to the interview:
]So it isn’t the 790 pages that weren’t used that are called “cosmic ramblings”. It isn’t the majority of the interview that is called “cosmic ramblings”. It is the few times she wasn’t in control of the interviewing process and didn’t want to talk as freely to the interviewer as she did when she was still in control.
As far as her not wanting to talk about the operation and its effects on her life, she volunteered this at the start of the interview, after talking about how scared she was:
She knew what the magazine was about, and she decided that it was the place to talk about what she had, and was, going through.
Let’s not minimize the importance of surgery. For us surgery is important, it’s just not the all-consuming thing which cisgender people tend to think it is for us. And many of us skip it because many of us are desperately poor, scared, or have coincident health problems which make us not surgical candidates.
Living as one’s gender is the most important thing, by far, as you say.
Holy Hannah, I would love to get those 800 pages…
All too common. It’s much better now than it used to be. My last media interview was nearly an hour, and surgery didn’t come up once.
They’re both useful words with an important distinction - is one in the process of or have completed a legal, social, and physical transition, or not? I’m a transsexual, my transition is done. I’m also transgender. I’m also intersex. And at times in my life, I’ve been gay, bi, lesbian, asexual, and questioning, and I was born intersex. I have as many labels as an old-school suitcase. It happens, and I don’t harp on it. If I hadn’t decided to become a community activist, I would have gone stealth and just been “woman.”
Indeed.
As would I. The Wikipedia article is dreadfully thin on her music.
One of the interesting items in the interview is that Wendy had a sibling who died in infancy who was intergendered.
Hi, Wendy!
LOL… Nah, just a fellow windbag. I do love the great, geeky, unfiltered richness of Wendy’s website and the way she freely mixes personal anecdotes, deeply technical information, and theory of all sorts. Let’s not forget that she’s from a generation which precedes the sound bite, and for whom deep and often wide-ranging correspondence was rather normative, nor that she corresponded for decades with such polymaths as Robert Moog and Arthur C. Clarke, for whom a complex sentence or a context switch in media res would have been no big deal.
She is also clearly concerned with putting down as much as she can in writing on her site as she gets older, for which we should be grateful – too many pioneers in their fields left us with only minimal insights into who they were as human beings, which is ultimately at least as interesting than the dry facts of their achievements, as it goes to the forces that drive such people to take the risks that change our culture.
And, finally, it is worth noting that some of the laudatory introductory text on Wendy’s site, as well as some of the discography and other interstitial text, was written by her web editors, not by Wendy herself.
What do you know of the 800 pages that were not used in the Playboy interview, and why did you claim they were dismissed as “cosmic ramblings… relevant to Wendy but irrelevant to the interview”, when I have shown, from the actual interview, that it wasn’t true at all?
It is also worth noting that, if it is indeed Wendy’s site, then anything written on it meets with her approval.
Am I the only one for whom Wendy Carlos means Tron?
If I knew someone, even as a mere acquaintance, who really wanted to talk about her transexuality, I would be ashamed of myself if I couldn’t rally to be supportive. But it’s not a subject that I myself am prepared to speak of comfortably. So, if someone doesn’t want to talk about it, I would consider myself glad to be off the hook. Why not talk instead about, say the Tron soundtrack?
Because people will talk about what they want to talk about, trying to put some aspects of a famous person’s life off-limits, almost a decade after such talk was actually happening is bound to cause people to revive the supposedly forbidden topic. To do so while making claims that can easily be verified in this age of the internet doesn’t really help.
BTW, the Wiki article puts much more focus on the musical career of Ms. Carlos, but the only official website listed there goes to one not updated since 2009. Is there a more recent official website available?