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 Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 4:10 am
I'm really getting sick of certain gay folks thinking their orientation gives them the right to dictate to transfolks how they should feel and behave. I'm thinking of someone particular, just now, but it comes up now and then in the larger LGBT community. I keep wanting to say "Who died and made you Queen of the transfolk?" I think when it comes down to it, there are certain debates best conducted within a community. This is part of why I listen to certain race debates but keep my mouth shut. I'm not brown, so I don't get to cut in on certain kinds of debates and dictate terms, because that would be jerky. It seems just as jerky for a gay cisperson to wander into a complex debate about identity vs identification vs culture vs reality and start ordering people around. It sucks all the subtlety out, for one thing, and for another it's fairly derailing to constantly have people stopping to explain that the experiences of gay and trans aren't always identical or that not everyone fits the stereotypes in his generalizations that he's using to prove all trans people are delusional. Um, thanks?
For the record, I'm very anti-deep stealth, but given the danger of job loss and violence, I believe everyone needs to make the decision about out vs stealth individually based on personal risk assessment and circumstances. I don't think it's reasonable for me in my position of relative safety to get all judgmental at someone for stealthing at work because they need the rent money and can't risk the job, or the transwoman who fears beating or murder if she's spotted as non-cis in her area. I do think people ought to be out with potential partners; I do think the more people out and visible, the better off everyone is in society in general in the long term. (I side with the author of Real Boys in believing strict enforcement of a behavioral binary is toxic for everyone. It most obviously harms LGBT folks, but it stunts everyone's options and encourages bullying and violence generally.)
The point is, that the stealth issue isn't a matter of simply being in or out. There are people completely out with friends/family who do pride and things, but who are in at work and in restrooms in certain geographic locations for safety. There are people out all the time. there are people in all the time and all the shades between. Sometimes people just want to have fun and hang out instead of being "professionally trans." Most healthy people have a whole bunch of other things going on in their lives besides activism. Gay folks insisting all transfolk walk around all the time with big identifying trans labels seems a little unfair.
I say all this as someone who doesn't feel much need to pass, who is non-binary, who will always be queer whatever happens with top surgery.
Seriously, do all gay men walk up to everyone on the street and announce they are gay? Sure, lots of people wear pride jewelry or have stickers on their car, but lots of people are fully out without the constant need to talk about it all the time. Why can't the same be okay for transfolk. Why don't trans folk get the individual choice of how much we get to talk about it, where, and to who, you know like gay folk mostly get? For example, how many gay men would walk into a biker bar in the deep south covered in rainbow stickers? Why is it okay to order a transwoman to do the equivalent because it's good for the movement? Maybe it is, but it doesn't sound so good for the transwoman's health.
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Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 3:28 am
* Another transwoman murdered: http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2009/06/im-getting-really-fed-up-of-things-like.html
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Posted: Sun Jun 28, 2009 5:40 am
* Another attempt to support Lt. Dan Choi: http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/s/SupportDan* Church beats a teen to get the gay demon out: http://news.aol.com/article/gay-exorcism-video/542577?icid=main|aimzones|dl3|link4|http://news.aol.com/article/gay-exorcism-video/542577 What would Jesus do? Beat people until they vomit!
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Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2009 1:18 am
On the 40th anniversary of Stonewall
I have watched mainstream gay organizations and the Advocate that so mainstream gay magazine quietly shove the more flamboyant members of the community under the carpet. If we look like them, maybe they'll start liking us is the thought. I get that, i do. This is the thing though, without the drag q1ueens and the transwomen there would have been no revolution. It was the drag queens who started the Stonewall riot; many of those same drag queens have since transitioned as SRS became more available. it is the drag queens, the transwomen, and the femme gay cismen who bear the brunt of discrimination, violence, and harassment. They are the ones most likely to be harmed or killed because they stand out, because they keep being who they are, because some men find their very existence an attack on their personal self image. We have lost so many over the years: to violence, to aids, to suicide.
We need them. We need them to throw the first stone, to challenge the status quo, to shake things up, to demand to be heard. Where there is the most risk, there is the most bravery.
I honor those drag queens and transwomen, who risked everything in the year of my birth so that the rest of us could be free to live, to love, top hold jobs, to exist, to gather in public, to wear what we want.
I will not say, let's pretend they don't exist so we can be more palatable to bigots who won't like us anyway.
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Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 12:19 am
* Gender expression, high school: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/fashion/08cross.html* When I was teaching, I stayed away from dress code things. I admit, I really did not want to see nipples of any kind while teaching, nor did I want to see the underside of butt cheeks. Past that, I rather felt it wasn't my business. I remember a pair of indignant middle school boys round about 2001 or so, utterly baffled by the ruling that one of their tasteful Limp Bizcuit tees was forbidden. The office had covered the Bizcuit and not the limp under the no drugs, alcohol, or tobacco rule. (I would have got it if they thought is was maybe an obscure sex reference, but that wasn't what the little guy got in trouble for). I had to agree with their WTF. It was clearly a band tee with a tour reference on it. We decided that someone in the office must think it a reference to some cocktail none of us had heard of. My point here is that no one under the age of forty or so would have thought it was anything but a band reference so punishing children for not knowing the names of obscure cocktails seems to me insane. Instead of letting an innocent kid ride, they had a whole group of 12 and 13 year old boys thinking about cocktails all day. A lot of dress code things are honestly confusing like that. Graham Burnett got in trouble over and over my senior year of high School, because his family bought his school trousers in Europe that year, and even though there was nothing about pleat depth in the dress code, they kept sending him home because they didn't like the cut of his trousers. So the pleats were an inch longer then American men's dress trousers. They looked just fine, and to every single kid at the high school, it looked like pointless harassment. it was also way more distracting to everyone to have adults stopping him at random in the halls to measure his trouser pleats. This doesn't even get into the gender bullshit, boys hassled for a quarter inch too much hair or girls sent home for having there's an inch too short. I hated the gender police aspect at my school when I was a student, no way was I going to bug guys over makeup and earrings or young women for looking too butch. I was lucky to teach at schools that mostly let gender expression alone, thanks to a series of lawsuits in the 1990's mostly. I was lucky enough to teach in schools that thanks again to stuff that happened just before i started teaching, treated gender variant children well, protected them from harassment, and quietly provided unisex bathroom access. It made a huge difference for the kids. We had surprisingly little trans related bullying and in one school, the cool thing was to treat the trans boy well. yes, I get that safety is an issue, but my experience is, if the school has a good anti-bullying track record and the adults are willing to show leadership, it's not a problem. The real problem to my mind is allowing kids to run around playing gender police on each other and worse yet, adults scapegoating kids on gender expression, which gives bullies permission to follow suit.
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Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 12:45 am
It's been days and I'm still pissed off about that Criminal Minds with the Norman Bates of Mexico plot. Given the incredibly low incidence of violence by trans women and the incredibly high incidence of harassment and violence against them, can we please retire the whole serial killer in a dress concept? I'm also looking at you horrifically bad X-files movie. I keep thinking about how much better the Listener and Bones have handled trans issues in the recent past. (The Listener did a beautifully sensitive look at the problems faced by trans men teenagers, in which all the social services types did the right thing, in contrast with a realistically a*****e parent. In Bones, the woman's death had nothing to do with her trans status and every time booth was assholish about her, one of the science types would correct him according to character. All the corrections except Angela's were mild, but it created a sense of booth being the socially out of touch one. Seriously, when is the last time you saw a fictional trans victim of violence who was treated respectfully as her gender by all but two characters on the whole show? I can't think of one. The episode seemed very awkward as a whole and really old fashioned and out of touch with modern psychology, which is really jarring in a show about using psychology to catch criminals. I'm not even going to touch the race issue here because it's been done better and more knowledgeably elsewhere, but the whole thing managed to combine race fail and gender fail into one big cluster ********.
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Artemesia_of_Persia Vice Captain
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