Here’s a column of mine that appeared in the New York Times on August 17, 2014.

BELGRADE LAKES, Me. — MY Uncle Clarke woke me before dawn with a shake to the shoulder. He gave me a look that asked, You in? I nodded. I was in all right.

Ten minutes later, we were on bikes riding through the gray light. We pedaled past sleepy summer homes with hammocks in their side yards, towels hanging from porch railings, inflatable rafts stacked up like pancakes. This was Rehoboth Beach, Del., August 1968.

Uncle Clarke (not my real uncle, but my father’s best friend from high school) rode every morning at dawn. He had one of those “English” bikes that were all the rage in the 1960s, a Raleigh three-speed with the gear shift on a tiny lever near the rider’s right thumb. I rode a borrowed Sting-Ray belonging to my cousin Martha. Usually Uncle Clarke led an army of us kids on those morning rides, but that day it was just me.

We rode over to the bay side and then to the boardwalk, its Skee-Ball parlors and salt water taffy machines closed up at that hour. We looked at the ocean and listened to the surf. The poet Matthew Arnold once called it “the eternal note of sadness,” but it sounded all right to me.

T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock laments that his life has been measured out in coffee spoons, but I think I could take a pretty good measure of my own life in bicycle tires. There was the orange Huffy of childhood that I transformed into something I called Tiger Bike, complete with a furry tail given out at the Esso station during its “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” promotion. Later, there was a 10-speed I took to college, where it was stolen from a friend’s house. In my 20s, I owned a Lotus racing bike. Once, I got my shoes so hopelessly entangled in its toe clips that I spilled right onto the asphalt of Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Now, in my 50s, I have two bikes — a Specialized Secteur for the road, and a hard-core Trek Fuel 70 for the fire roads and logging trails of Kennebec County. Me.

When my sons were in elementary school, there were weeks in summer when they’d jump on their bikes in the morning and disappear down our dirt road with a crew of other boys from the neighborhood. “Bike patrol,” they called themselves. They’d head off to the lake, or to one another’s houses, or — who knows? — to secret locations that I, as one of their mothers, will never know.

I have several friends who partake in something called “spinning,” which is the health-club version of cycling, involving a group of women on stationary bikes who pedal fast, then slow, then fast, as the instructor blasts the kind of music you usually hear in stores that are trying to get 16-year-olds to buy pants, and yells things like, “Feel the burn!”

I prefer exercising at least two miles away from any other human being. For me, biking is a solitary activity. In the Kennebec Highlands, on my mountain bike, I pedal past Kidder Pond, up to the blueberry barrens high atop Vienna Mountain. From there, I watch bald eagles and ospreys, and other birds, whose poop, owing to their diet of berries, stains the gray rocks purple. Sometimes I’ve run into deer and porcupines, and on one memorable occasion, a moose. Another time, I lay with my back against a tree, watching a beaver build a dam in Boody Pond.

Stephen King writes of a solitary childhood encounter with a deer in his story “The Body”: “My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand in my mouth and touched it.” Later, the narrator decides not to tell his friends about what he has seen, to keep it for himself. “The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.”

These are the gifts that I will most miss when, some day in the not-so-distant future, I have to give up biking alone. At 56, I’m really too old to be hopping over rocks and fallen trees, an hour or two from help, should anything terrible happen to me, which, odds are, it will. Recently, I encountered a bunch of young men who were climbing a mountain trail that I was riding down; one of them looked at me, mud-spattered, sweat-covered, and said, “Whoa! Hard-core!” It wasn’t clear whether he was saying this out of admiration, or concern.

A couple of years after that bike ride with my Uncle Clarke, he and my father had some kind of falling out, and I didn’t see him again. I don’t think about him very often, except on summer mornings in August, when I’m climbing onto my bike.

That morning in Rehoboth Beach, I saw the first sunrise I can remember. My uncle nodded at me, and I nodded back, and we got on our bikes. The air smelled like salt, cotton candy and tar. When we got back to the house, my mother was making pancakes.

“So,” she asked. “How’d it go?”

My uncle looked at me with what might have been love. “We had a good ride,” he said.

My New York Times column for 3/7/14.

BELGRADE LAKES, Me. — I WAS in trouble. The first few analogies were pretty straightforward — along the lines of “leopard is to spotted as zebra is to striped” — but now I was in the tall weeds of nuance. Kangaroo is to marsupial as the giant squid is to — I don’t know, maybe D) cephalopod? I looked up for a second at the back of the head of the girl in front of me. She had done this amazing thing with her hair, sort of like a French braid. I wondered if I could do that with my hair.

I daydreamed for a while, thinking about the architecture of braids. When I remembered that I was wasting precious time deep in the heart of the SAT, I swore quietly to myself. French braids weren’t going to get me into Wesleyan. Although, in the years since I took the test in the mid-’70s, I’ve sometimes wondered if knowing how to braid hair was actually of more practical use to me as an English major than the quadratic equation. But enough of that. Back to the analogies. Loquacious is to mordant as lachrymose is to … uh …

This was the moment I saw the terrible thing I had done, the SAT equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster. I’d accidentally…(click here to read the full piece on the NYT site).

JFB column in Washington Post, February 7, 2014.

Here we are, still devastated from the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination (Nov. 22, 2013), when along comes the 50th anniversary of the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” (Feb. 9, 2014) to lift our spirits. It’s not as sobering an occasion as the 50th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech this past Aug. 28, or as chilling as the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis (Oct. 14 to 28) the year before, but for my money it’s at least as inspiring as the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight in Friendship 7 (on Feb. 20, 2012), and surely as satisfying, for a liberal, anyhow, as the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s landslide victory over Goldwater, coming up this fall. ¶ I am sure that, many years from now, we will turn to our grandchildren and tell them the stories of where we were on the 50th anniversaries of all these historic events. Yes, Jenny Junior, I still remember where I was on the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Julia Child’s “The French Chef” (Feb. 11). I was standing in my kitchen, making a soufflé and tearing the pages off of a calendar.

The decade of the 1960s, currently celebrating its golden jubilee, provides us with a seemingly endless series of moments upon which we can look back with misty-eyed wisdom. As Nietzsche said, “History repeats itself — first time as tragedy; the second time as a listicle on Buzzfeed.”

Readers who find such features wearying are in for a rough time in the years ahead. Between now and Aug. 9, 2024 (the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, and the cultural finale of “the 1960s”), we should expect a column about the 50th anniversary of some damned thing pretty much every other week. In the next few months alone, we can anticipate 50th anniversary retrospectives, complete with never-before-seen-photos and now-it-can-be-told revelations, on everything from the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the introduction of Hasbro’s G.I. Joe.

Given that, after 50 years, there’s so little new one can say about most of these events, our insatiable hunger to keep reading about them suggests that the thing we’re actually interested in is….(read the rest of the column at the Washington Post site).

Jeffrey Tambor in a scene from "Transparent"

BELGRADE LAKES, Me. — THERE’S a scene in the new Amazon show “Transparent” when the family patriarch, Mort, walks in on his oldest daughter in flagrante with her lesbian lover. The character, who’s been struggling throughout the pilot with how to come out as trans, stands there in drag with a bemused expression. “Hello, ladies,” Mort — now Maura — says.

When I was first asked to serve as an adviser to the show, I hesitated, fearing that it would get the issues all wrong, as television and film often do where transgender characters are concerned. And yet I was won over by the pilot’s charm. So far, anyway, “Transparent,” written and directed by Jill Soloway, shows every sign of being one of the first television shows to depict the life of its transgender heroine with grace and respect.

Of the 10 pilots released early this month as part of Amazon’s gambit to enter the content-streaming market, “Transparent” is the breakout hit. A reviewer in the culture blog Vulture called it “my favorite pilot in years, and by a lot.” She continued, “the thesis of the show” is that “we hide some things and disclose other things but maybe not as well as we think we do. (Or maybe, accidentally, too well.)”

The only problem? The actor playing Maura, Jeffrey Tambor, is neither female nor trans.

One might think that this is not much of an issue; stepping into other people’s skins is, after all, what actors do.

But there are plenty of talented transgender actresses in Hollywood, including, of course, the amazing Laverne Cox, currently burning it up in “Orange is the New Black.” There are others as well; Calpernia Addams and Candis Cayne come to mind, although, admittedly, they aren’t old enough to play the part of Maura.

But you can understand why trans viewers might grow weary of seeing themselves constantly portrayed by straight actors for whom trans roles are an opportunity to “stretch themselves.” Why do these parts go to people who struggle to imitate us, when… (click here to read the full column in the NYT).

Update, Dec. 9: Please scroll to bottom for the latest.

Hello there.  For the third year in a row, we are doing THE DECEMBER PROJECT.  The plan is simple.  If you are trans– or if you love some one who is trans– and you need a friendly voice, email us and we will call you on the phone.

We began this project in 2011.  I was thinking that year how hard the holidays can be for people– but they can be especially hard for trans people and their families.  Charles Dickens had it right when, in the CHRISTMAS CAROL, he suggested that it’s Christmas, not Halloween, that’s the most haunted of holidays.  Our memories are heightened at this time of year– we think back to our childhood, to our many struggles.  For some of us it’s a time when we’re acutely aware of how cut off we are from those we love.  The world is full of transgender people who are unable to see their children, their parents,  their loved ones, all because of the simple fact of who they are.

We cannot undo all the hurt in the world.  But what we can do is CALL YOU ON THE PHONE and remind you that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.  You don’t have to be in crisis to take advantage of this project.  All you have to do is want a friendly voice.

The project is run by four people– Jennifer Finney Boylan, national co-chair of GLAAD; Mara Keisling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality;  Dylan Scholinski, director of Sent(a)mental Studios, and Helen Boyd, Professor at Lawrence University.  We are two trans women, a trans man, and a spouse of a trans woman.  Between the four of us, we have heard many different kinds of trans narratives.  If we can help you, we would be glad to do so.

How do you get us to call you? By emailing jb@jenniferboylan.net.   I’ll use that email as the central mailbox;  if you have a particular preference to talk to one or the other of us, let me know– although I can’t guarantee that you’ll always here from the person you request.  Also please tell us the time of day and the date you’d be free for a call; you might want to give us a couple of options.  And of course, tell us your phone number.  WE WILL KEEP YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION ABSOLUTELY CONFIDENTIAL.

We will start with calls on December 1, and keep this going until New Years.

Sound good?  I hope so.  We hope we can help, even if just a little.

Three other caveats I should mention at the end here:

1) First, no one in the December Project gets a dime out of it.  This is a shoestring operation, largely consisting of four people trading phone numbers.  If you want to support our causes, you can let us know, and we’ll tell you how to give.  But this is not about that.

2) If you are in serious crisis, please bypass us and go directly to the national suicide prevention lifeline: 1-800-273-8255  WE ARE NOT TRAINED AS THERAPISTS or as counsellors for individuals in crisis.  If you need something more serious than a “friendly voice,’ please call the lifeline.

3) For the moment we are content with this project consisting of the four of us;  in past years, we have been a little overwhelmed (and yes, deeply touched) by the many, many of you who have wanted to join us.  While we thank you for your grace and your love,  it’s also overwhelming for us to sort through the requests; we hope you’ll understand if we ask that folks writing us be primarily those who want a call. There are many ways you can get involved in your own community, and we heartily encourage everyone who wants to spread some love around to do so in their own way, starting right at home.

Thanks so much!  Wishing you all the best for a positive, hopeful, loving holiday season!

Sincerely,

Jennifer Finney Boylan, on behalf of the December Project

Update, Dec. 9:  We have been deluged with requests!  We are making the calls as swiftly as we can, but if you haven’t heard back from us, please be patient.  Also, please request calls via the email address listed above, and NOT through the comments section below!  Thanks so much.