Monthly Archives: May 2009

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Bromantically Linked

Categories: douchebaggery, media tool kit, oh no not teh menz

Hello ducks! If you are like me, you watch television. (Actually, if you are like me, you watch too much television–stop it! It’s keeping you from doing better things, like read this blog!) And if, like me, you watch too much TV, then you’ve probably seen commercials for the next great man-child movie, The Hangover.

Of course, it may be difficult to pick out this new film from the constant swirl of frattish comedies–after all, it’s Judd Apatow’s world now, we just live in it. Never fear, though, ducks! The New York Times, in its ongoing mission of reminding us that all the news fit to print is by, for, and about men, has an article about The Hangover‘s creator, Todd Phillips.

In fact, the article makes Mr. Phillips out to be some sort of seer to the doucheoisie, a sort of guru of the frat boy picture. (In fact, one of his first movies was called, um, Frat House.) Mr. Phillips, in case you didn’t know, is the auteur behind Old School, Road Trip, and Starsky and Hutch. (Disclosure: I actually enjoyed the last one for the chemistry between Stiller and Wilson. I’m not perfect, ducks.) All in all, he has a portfolio that makes him the Apatow-lite, a secondary purveyor of the immature bromance.

Never fear, though: The Times breathlessly reports:

That doesn’t mean “The Hangover” can’t aspire to be the most grown-up work in Mr. Phillips’s unapologetically immature portfolio.

Well, that’s a relief–not the least because he doesn’t apologize for his movies! No, Todd Phillips is proud of his films! He wants you to squirm while watching–that is, if you are not an immature man-child (or at least aspire to be one.)

But wait! He’s not content for simple metaphysical torture–at least, where his actors are concerned:

Mr. Phillips does not always get his way. For a scene in which a police officer tests his stun gun on the guys, the director wanted his actors to be shot with a live Taser. “He goes, ‘Look at these clips on YouTube,’ ” Mr. Galifianakissaid. “ ‘It doesn’t hurt that much.’ And then the Warner Brothers lawyers stepped in, thank God.”

Well, there’s always next time–and given advances in technology, perhaps within a few years he’ll be able to tase the audience as well! Oh, think of the laughter we’ll have! Between the blackouts, that is.

Let’s give the last word to Todd, before he uses that darn taser again:

…[W]hen he tries to describe the plots of his films concisely, Mr. Phillips said recently, “the one-liners on my movies sound really retarded.” He chuckled briefly at his own analysis. “The movies, ideally, are better than they sound,” he added.

Speak for yourself, Mr. Phillips.

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Two Cheers for Monarchy

Categories: Humorless Tranny™, let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz

Over at Shakesville there’s a heartwarming post about an openly gay student who was elected prom queen. (You can read the original story here.)

I’m certainly glad to know that a high school can be so accepting; the idea of a student being openly gay at my high school was unthinkable, and that was only–well, more than a decade ago. And I’m really happy that Sergio Garcia can be open, and be himself.

All that said, I’m afraid I have to be a bit of a wet blanket about this. Call me a Humorles Tranny™, but I as a trans woman I see a few complications with this whole thing.

First, I have to wonder: would somebody who was openly trans have been elected prom queen? (Maybe; it happened in Fresno.) Then there is the question of why somebody who doesn’t identify as female is even running for prom queen. According to the article, “He thought the role [of prom queen] would suit him better than prom king.” Yeah–isn’t that kind of the point? I mean, if he had been elected prom king, if the student body would have been happy to put him into that bastion of heterosexism, then you might have something to really talk about.

According to the article, his campaign began as a stunt “but ended up spurring discussion on the campus about gender roles and popularity.” Which is really wonderful–we need to have these discussions, especially in high school–but I can’t help feeling that it remained something of a stunt til the end.

For example, the article repeatedly makes it clear that despite running for prom queen, Sergio is all man.

“[I’m] not your typical prom queen candidate. There’s more to me than meets
the eye.”
“He also promised that he would be wearing a suit on prom night, but ‘don’t
be fooled: Deep down, I am a queen.”
“‘I don’t wish to be a girl,’ he told the Los Angeles Times. ‘I just wish to
be myself.'”

Call me oversensitive, but I see a lot of subtle trans- and femmephobia in there. There’s the clear implication that if he were to wear a dress, that would be somehow wrong. His “more than meets the eye” clearly echoes trans stereotypes in the media, from porn to movies. And fuckall, how am I supposed to read how he doesn’t want to be a girl–yet runs for prom queen–as anything other than the idea that a boy who did want to be a girl and run for prom queen would be weird, as opposed to his decidedly non-weird candidacy?

I’m sorry to be coming down so hard on this kid; truth be told, I’m happy that he won, happy he goes to a school that’s so accepting, and happy that the reporting on the story doesn’t smirk or treat the whole thing as ridiculous.

But compare this nice, respectful story about a clean-cut gay kid who gets to be prom queen with this (triggery) piece about a nice, respectful trans kid who gets elected prom queen. Thrill to the wondrous transphobia: the refusal to use her preferred name (Crystal), the emphasis on her height in heels (cause, you know, she’s totes a dude in drag), and fuckitall, the unconscionable refusal to use her preferred pronoun–even after noting she prefers to be called she. You read that story–picked up without comment on a website whose mission statement is “To encourage a world where globalization is not about homogeneity and exploitation, but rather, about diversity and cooperation”–and, if you are like me, you get pissed off and throw a wet blanket on somebody else’s party.

Because seriously, great for you Sergio, but am I really supposed to be happy that a guy took another woman’s job, even if that job is stupid and heterosexist to begin with?

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Fear of a Diverse Planet

Categories: privilege stories, teh tranz, Your RDA of Outrage

Warning: some of the links below may be triggery, as I went to the originals.

The Sotomayor nomination has once again driven the white male protestant establishment–who after all suffer from the greatest discrimination–in an uproar. And as usual a new coded language emerges–Sotomayor is a “bully” for dressing down (male) lawyers, that she got her nomination thanks to affirmative action, and, of course, she’s not qualified.

The idea that the white guys might be biased against everybody but white guys is of course ignored.

That is, of course, the gift of privilege–the ability to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist. White men are “normal” in this country–anybody not a white guy is a “minority” even though white men–and men in general–are the real minority in this country.

One of the things about being trans is that it has the potential to help you visualize your privilege, especially if you were, like me, a white male crossdresser–outside I looked no different than any other guy (well, except for the groomed eyebrows and long fingernails), but I knew that if anyone knew about my inner life, I’d immediately lose my “normal” status.

Not everybody makes use of this opportunity. I’ve met incredibly chauvanistic crossdressers–and even transsexuals aren’t immune; I’ve encountered many who were so busy sandcastling their privilege that they try to deny the womanhood of other transpeople. (Warning: super-triggery.)

(I’d be on their list for fessing to having identified as a crossdresser.)

Those who do, however, learn an important truth: that “normal” can’t live in the abscence of “abnormal”–that there always has to be some shadowy Other who opposes all your basic values. The shock of those people of privilege–like myself–who realize that their transness has made them that Other can often lead them to feel solidarity with all the other Others. (Perhaps this is why trans people still support lesbian and gay rights even after one of the largest gay rights groups threw us cruelly under the bus during the ENDA fiasco last year.)

Privilege is afraid of diversity, because it forces it to confront the Other; privilege hides in the language that underprivileged people use in order to subject them to ridicule; privilege, in short, is nothing else than fear of the Other, of losing that which didn’t belong to it in the first place, of having, in other words, “normal” become normal–a world where our various diversities of race, gender, religion, sexuality are no more important than our diversities in favorite sports team or ice cream flavors.

They live in fear, unfounded fear because diversity has never hurt anybody. Except in their minds.

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Vessels

Categories: the great woman theory of history, why i blog, your rda of misogyny

My friend Viola is a talented ceramacist. Not, I should mention, a potter–she doesn’t use a wheel. Her art is unique and organic (not to mention wonderful), but she hasn’t thrown a pot in years.

The other day she met a new member of the studio where she makes her art. They got to talking, and he mentioned that he had a dealer and was doing very well. (She later verified that via Google.) Now, like many artists (and bloggers), Viola is ambitious about her art and was immediately intrigued–and interested in how she might be able to network with this guy.

As they talked, he told her that he was putting together a group of artists and wondered if she might want to join? Of course she was interested, but–being a person of fierce integrity–she made sure to show him her work first. They talked for a while and agreed that her work really wouldn’t work with the rest of the show–but, the guy asked, could she throw some vessels for him? And it gradually dawned on Viola that all he wanted was her to make a lot of vessels for him to paint.

I find it strangely apt that this–let’s be fair–clueless tool would want her to make vessels for him. (Presumably narrow-necked for maximum–never mind.) I won’t belabor the obvious: that for centuries women have been seen as nothing but vessels for men–convenient receptacles for them to empty their important, creative work into–a holding pen for their serious ideas to gestate.

You don’t have to be a radical feminist to see that the idea of women being the non-creative side of birth as being a bit skewed.

Viola turned him down, for reasons both practical–she’s far too out of practice to make pots quickly with the quality she’d want–and personal: the guy was being completely exploitative of her. Because she’s quite capable of making her own art, thanks, and has no desire to be this guy’s vessel.

But hearing the story from her made me think about art, and my art (if that’s what I’m doing here is), and women in art. My favorite painting in the entire world is Manet’s Le dejeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass):

It hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and I always make a point of visiting it whenever I’m there; the canvas is enormous, and the vibrancy of the light–it never comes through in prints–is astonishing and always makes me smile.

But as much as I love this painting, being who I have become I can’t help but notice that it sums up attitudes towards women that sadly weren’t abandoned to the 19th century. That is, the only two roles available were the the object of the artist’s gaze–the nude woman in the foreground–or supporter, like the woman who is bathing in the background. Both fundamentally passive roles; how few of the works of the great masters show women doing anything other than, perhaps, resisting the rape of an overly amorous Olympian?

Of course, you can go another layer. The nude woman in Le dejeuner sur l’herbe is Manet’s longtime model, Victorine Meurent (though in an early example of Photoshopping, that’s her head on a more voluptuous model’s body.) Meurent was the model for Manet’s notorious Olympia, and that painting’s shocking subject–it certainly seems to depict a courtesan–led people to conclude, wrongly, that she herself must have been a prostitute.

In fact, she was an artist, and a successful one at that–she exhibited several times at the Salon des Artistes–although only one painting of hers is conclusively known to survive. In later life she was inducted into Societé des Artistes Françaises. She called herself an artist until she died.

I think of Victorine Meurent–the famous half smile, head tilted up in disdain or arch condescension–knowing that the gaze of the Great Man was falling on her and not demuring; bold, passionate yet tempered, willing to fight for her art and even sacrifice her own image in order to get the training she needed. I think of this Object who dared to be her own Subject, a woman born too early, perhaps, and yet still remaining as an enigmatic reminder that history is not always what They tell us it is. I think of her, and Viola, and vessels and painters, models and sculptors. And I write.

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Notes From Underprivileged

Categories: media tool kit, oh no not teh menz, your rda of misogyny

Greetings Ducks! Many apologies for the lacuna of posts–I had a houseguest for the weekend and one thing pushed out another! Still, while I was away, asshattery was, as ever, on the march, as shown by the following…

Item: Women are unhappy despite liberation, or so argues new NY Times columnist Ross Douthat. Ross, you are to be congratulated! It takes most conservatives years to achieve full-on douchebaggery in the Times–you’ve taken just a few weeks! I haven’t read the study he describes–it’s not free–but I wonder: did anyone ask women why they don’t feel happy? Or would that be too much bother? Isn’t it more fun to speculate on them? Yes, if you write for the Times.

Item: Sonia Sotomayor is mean! This seems to be the first arrow in the coming perfect-storm backlash! On WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show, the host asked for comments from people who had appeared in Judge Sotomayor’s court. One lawyer (you can listen in at about 35:00 on the link) said that he found that she “made gratuitous comments that were abusive.” This apparently was caused by an incident where she told a different–ah, yes, your friend, right–attorney that his brief was the worst she’d read in 20 years and he should rethink his career choice. Because no male Federal judge has ever been that mean! And even if he was, they’d just have a beer after. Which you can’t do with Judge Sotomayor–on account of her vagina!

Item: California Supreme Court upholds Proposition 8. No jokes here, just disappointment. My houseguest is a Californian, and we read the story on an iPhone while sitting in a park. Interestingly, all 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place before Prop 8 are still legal. This just in: California Supreme Court rules all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

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Sandcastle Virtues

Categories: all about me, teh tranz, This Was My Life, tv (trans)

Once I knew a crossdresser named Monica. This was several years ago, when I was a regular in the transgender demimonde–the curious collection of repurposed-for-a-night bars and “safe” restaurants we frequented on the weekends. Given that most people in this world were closeted, or like me, semi-closeted–I was out to all the important people in my life, but the idea of going out in public during the day was still too frightening–and this was their one chance to “go out” (that’s how we said it, too: “I’m going out this weekend” meant going somewhere crossdressed), after a while you got to know the regulars, the ones that were there every week: that girl who always wore pleather fetish outfits; the married couple that dropped in so the husband could dance and flirt with guys while the wife got wrecked at the bar; the very pretty, I-can’t-believe-she’s-forty crossdresser who had once run her own trans themed party but now was limited to a few nights out a month because she had a young kid.

Over time, Monica and I became close friends; I even saw her male self a few times, and later on she got to see mine when I invited her to my birthday. We both agreed that these “parties” were nothing more than an extension of the closet; we deplored together the awful dance music the hostesses played (not that it would have mattered much: it is a curious fact that most of the white, middle-aged CDs I knew didn’t like to dance); we longed for something more than the desultory anomie of these Saturday nights, but neither of us was ready yet to try to do anything more.

Not everyone who came to these parties was a crossdresser. Some wives and girlfriends came, whose expressions ran the gamut from pie-eyed terror to exhilarated joy. We always looked at these women with curiousity, scarcely allowing ourselves to believe that it was possible to find a woman who could deal with–with all this. There were also the trannie chasers. They were a hard crew to figure out–perhaps because most of them were having a hard time figuring out their own attraction. Some wanted to crossdress but couldn’t face their own fears; some wanted to suck a dick attached to something feminine, to mitigate their attraction to male genitalia; and a few just seemed to be turned on by trans bodies. The greater part of them were very shy, standing with their backs to the wall or the bar, always looking just slightly uncomfortable.

We all looked down on the chasers.

There was one group that we looked up to, though: the transsexuals. Relatively few ever came out to these nights, which somehow made us respect them more–they had done it, they had transitioned and they didn’t need an extended closet to be women in. A few did come by, though, out of nostalgia, or maladjustment to their new lives; out of friendship for other transgendered people who hadn’t transitioned, or out of a need for a safe space as they first began their transitions; out of curiosity or empathy or condescension. They fascinated us. These were people that were more than just women for the weekend; they were women period now, and their stories haunted and attracted us.

For a lot of crossdressers, the idea of transition is something that you never really ever let go of. I think this may be because as a transgendered person, you want to be the opposite sex, even if it is only for a little while; so to deny that you would want to transition is to deny that you want to be a woman, which is what you really do want to do. It’s all highly confusing, and I think that was one of the reasons we sought out transsexuals: to find our boundaries, to compare stories and see where they were different, to listen to the struggles they had undergone in order to transition and silently do a secret accounting of our own lives and wonder if the price we’d pay would actually be worth it in the end.

But we were told–or at least we had heard–that there were real differences between crossdressers and transsexuals; that crossdressers never transitioned, that transsexuals were in such pain from their gender inconsonance that they had no other choice but to transition. And we believed those stories, crossdressers and transsexuals alike; we crossdressers told our wives and girlfriends that we weren’t destined to transition, and transsexuals told the world that they weren’t just men who liked to wear women’s clothing.

There was one transsexual who was a regular. I didn’t really know why Ingrid kept coming (and after a while, she just didn’t), but I guess she fit into the category of people who were starting transition and needed a place to get their bearings. We were friendly, and used to talk politics and Japanese martial arts and the American songbook–she had a lovely voice and sometimes would sing a few bars of Cole Porter.

One thing about Ingrid did bother me, though: she didn’t like Monica. Or rather, she thought she was a mess, directionless, and misguided. Now, truth be told, Monica’s hairstyle was out of the Marilyn Quayle school of immobility, her clothing choices were pretty drab and uninspired, and her shoes–well, it’s best not to talk about them. I had myself recently graduated from my evening-wear phase, when I would wear gowns and formal dresses out to bars and had started to dress in a fashion that I thought a woman of my age might dress. So that gave me license to be a bit of a snob, and I am ashamed to say that sometimes I snarked right along with Ingrid.

In the trans community, people tend to be judged on a scale that I will call–borrowing it from the world of drag–realness. This isn’t surprising, given that the very drive that defines us as transgendered is to be the opposite sex. Realness is a troubling term, though. It’s not that it’s inaccurate–it very accurately describes the attitudes I usually encountered. But we made “realness” mean the same thing as “authenticity”–we based our perceptions of you as a person on how close you were to this ideal of “womanhood.” Thus, people who wore everyday clothes were superior to people who wear fetishistic clothes; people who lived as women were better than people who only crossdressed on the weekend; people who had had the surgery were better than people who hadn’t, or didn’t want to.

Wearing pants was even somehow better than wearing a skirt–because real women didn’t wear skirts all the time. (Neither do crossdressers in their everyday lives, but making that point hardly helped their case.) In fact, it was a bitter joke amongst us that if you started to show up wearing pants, it meant you were bound to eventually transition.

If I would sometimes put Monica down, I also defended her; I would point out that she was one of the sweetest, kindest people I knew, and that went a lot further with me than her fashion sense; and in any case, the more she came out, the better she looked. But no matter; Ingrid thought she was a hopeless case, and Ingrid was a woman of firmly-held convictions.

Besides, Monica and I were both crossdressers, and so clearly didn’t know what we were talking about.

It’s been a long time since I was a regular in that world, and I’ve learned quite a bit since then. One thing that I learned is that I wanted to transition, that the bright lines I had drawn were a lie; crossdressers really did transition. That led me to question other things, to wonder if being a transsexual actually made you more real; or was it that, crossdressers were perfectly real crossdressers? And that somehow, that wasn’t wrong or something to put people down about? On one of my last trips out to one of these parties, I was sitting at the bar, silently smirking at this or that poorly-done outfit, when an elderly crossdresser came in. Her dress looked terrible on her, her lipstick was as crooked as a Vermont dirt road, and her wig was haphazardly clinging to the top of her head. But when I looked more closely, I could see the pure joy in her eyes, the incredible relief at being able to finally express this part of herself. And my smirk died a cold death on my face and I–I in my careful makeup and fashionable clothes–I was ashamed.

Since then I’ve learned much more about feminism and power structures; I see now that what we saw as realness was nothing else than judging people on their looks; that people have the right to define their own gender/personality/womanhood however they want to, and that makes it as real as anyone else’s. I learned, too, how often it is in underprivileged communities that heirarchies arise, tiny parodies of the larger, oppressive order. I learned that trans people were hardly alone in equating realness with authenticity; everywhere I looked among the various underprivileged communities I encountered–female, feminist, people of color–I saw the same pattern of holding other members of your group up to your own personal ideal, and then calling them out on how far they fell short of it. People complained about it; long and bitter struggles took place with each faction trying to prove their authenticity to each other. And yet the patterns persisted, over and over and over again.

I last saw Monica four years ago, on my birthday. She wore a tasteful leather suit, a short wig, and perfect makeup–she looked, in short, the very model of a still-rockin’ suburban woman in her 40s. She had begun to play electric guitar–she was a huge Kiss fan–and had even done her own drag act in Las Vegas. She was still one of the sweetest people I have ever met. And she seemed very happy.

I ran into Ingrid about a year later at a Julia Serrano reading. By that point I was well into my own transition; in fact, outside of onsite visits to my clients, I presented as female all the time. Ingrid, on the other hand, seemed to be much as I had last known her; she was presenting as male that day, which surprised me–it had been five years since I’d seen her last, I thought she’d have gone fulltime by then.

I wondered if she still though Monica was a mess. If she, and me, were still wedded to our fantasy heirarchies, our own petite power trips. I still wonder that about myself.

Despite our internecine conflicts, we still manage to gain a victory and then all of us move forward: sissies can get married just the same as the straightest-acting modern Mattachinist; the woman who clutched her pearls until her hands bled got to vote the same as a bloomers-wearing suffragist; and maybe, just maybe, one day crossdressers and transsexuals will both be able to pee in peace.

We are like children on the beach, building little sandcastles, while above us the guns of a real fort threaten our lives. And yet, rather than march together on that fort, we bicker over how grand our sandcastles are, how much better they arethan other people’s, how beautiful, how necessary, how safe. And so we will stay until these sandcastle virtues are all swept away.

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The Second Awakening: A Moral History

Categories: let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz, This Was My Life, tiger beatdown rocks, vive le feminisme, why i blog

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”

–George Orwell, “Why I Write”

I want to thank everyone who dropped by in the last day or so–it is a remarkable experience to see your page views jump 9,500%, even if it is humbling to consider how few visits you got beforehand. (Especial thanks, of course, to Sady of Tiger Beatdown who gave this blog a rave review.)

I am still figuring out not only what this blog’s subject matter will be but also how to live a feminist life. I’ve talked before about how I slowly awakened into a feminist consciousness, and then found myself roused a second time as a result of my transition. But I don’t think I’ve conveyed the profoundness of the changes I’ve experienced in the last–can it be so short?–16 months.

I think I was always some sort of weak-valence feminist. My mother may not have used the term for herself, for some reason, but she definitely believed women should have all the rights of men. She’s told me over the years how she prefers the conversation of men of her generation, because she dislikes the domestic subjects most women of her age engage in–perhaps an over broad generalization on her part, but there is no question that she felt she had the right to engage in the traditionally male spheres of politics, religion, social policy, etc. Certainly my father was like-minded; neither of them gave their children any hogwash about “proper” gender roles.

So I grew up about as gender-blind as a boy in the 1970s could be, or at least a boy in the 1970s who was conscious of wanting to be a girl, or at least wearing girls’ clothing–I wasn’t always sure of the difference, early on. (When I was maybe four or five, I sometimes would run up to the mirror in my bedroom in the morning hoping I’d been changed into a girl overnight. Sometimes–sometimes I would delay getting out of bed, hiding under the covers in order to hold myself in some sort of Schrödingian state of not-maleness, trying to hold on to the desperate possibility of transformation. That there was a way to collapse the waveform without using a mirror never occurred to me; so you can see that the distinction between being a girl and dressing like one wasn’t particularly clear to me yet. And that I was a very weird little boy. But you’d probably gathered that already.)

I think by the time I knew what a feminist was I had no problem describing myself as one–at least as far as my understanding of what a “feminist” was anyway; I had heard it meant that you believed in women’s rights–I was ignorant of the larger controversies. Perhaps that was a good thing; I was generally incredulous of people who didn’t call themselves feminists–it seemed ludicrous to deny that women were people just as good as men, as outdated as racial prejudice, which my parents had strenuously sanitized from our upbringing.

That is not to say that I was some Kwisatz Haderach of gender-studies, the result of some cabalistic breeding program perhaps founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Dr. Blackwell. Like most men of my position–and I’ll call myself that for the purposes of this post, even though there are some issues in applying without qualification the label of “man” for what I was–I was largely unconscious of my privilege, and I picked up the usual assortment of stereotypes, falsities, foolishnesses and outright idiocies. Some were survival tactics–if you walk amidst the world of men without the courage to show your real self, you learn how to camoflouge yourself–some were simple artifacts of my time and gender, and some were just stupid blindspots. I didn’t believe in any of the idiocies I sometimes mouthed–the occasional misogynistic/homophobic/even, god help me, racist joke–but neither did I believe particularly strongly in the opposite positions, at least not strongly enough to protest very loud. I had no courage of my convictions; being all-in was terrifying to me; I was, in short, your garden-variety fauxgressive.

I am deeply ashamed of all that today.

The first signs of any changes happened during my marriage, which I know I have not talked about before. My wife and I had suffered through a few years of tearful impasse about my transness–this was back when I still identified as a crossdresser–only to come to a fairly reasonable accomodation. She sometimes would come with me to dinners and social events with other trans people, and in turn I was experimenting with metrosexuality and ways to enjoy my masculinity. During this time I met helen boyd and began to learn about feminism beyond my lukewarm “women’s rights” position.

It was the beginning of the 21st century, Bush was in office, political oppression was in the air, and I was reading Backlash and The Beauty Myth and for the first time really waking up to the misogyny all around me. Yet my motivation was complex…part of it was the realization that as a crossdresser, a person who sympathized with women, who saw myself at least in part as a woman, I needed to go beyond the trappings of feminity and learn about the real experiences of women; part of it was meeting bold, feminist women and listening to their stories; and part of it was the progressiveness and liberalism that I found myself taking up now that they were threatened. Even so, while my passion for feminism grew to a white-hot passion, it was still an intellectual passion–at root, I could always take solace in my disconnection from it on an everyday level.

A young trans woman of my acquaintance once asked me about life as a woman. She had been reading my diatribes against transphobia and misogyny on a message board we both belonged to, and wanted to know, was it really so bad? Was she really going to feel constantly oppressed?

No, I said, it wasn’t so bad–but the thing is, once I had transitioned, I never had to seek out misogyny again. Before transition, I could ignore it, I needed people to point it out to me–but after transition, I see it constantly. And that changed everything; I was shorn of my detatchment; the political became truly personal, and awoke my outrage.

And that is the essence of the second awakening. I cannot claim to know, to feel what it is like to have been the target of misogyny my whole life; I’m not sure I can even claim to know what it’s like to feel transphobia my whole life–it is difficult to make evaluations like that when you’re in the closet. I have no doubt that I will make a lot of mistakes in the future as I continue my mission to discover what a feminist life will look like for me. Which is why I am so glad for the women I’ve found in the feminist blogosphere, for Liss and her Shakers, for Pam and her Blenders, and especially for Sady and her Beatdowns–because it was Sady who gave me the template for the kind of blog I wanted to write, one that was mostly impersonal (I am anonymous, after all) but still came from a deeply personal place of passion and outrage, to create something that wasn’t just reportage or even opinion, but my own work of art, a monument to my implacable fury.

I’m still learning. But I’m thankful to have you along for the ride.

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You’ve Come a Long Way. Maybe.

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, politicians have penise (or should), tv (not trans)

I’ll confess to being a person who watches “24”, though if it makes you feel better, I feel dirty inside afterward. The constant nail-biting suspense of the first few seasons has long since been replaced by torture porn–every week the question is how is Jack going to hurt somebody today?

Still I watch it, probably for the fascinating train-wreck of issues it presents more than for any pure entertainment. I’ll say this about Kiefer Sutherland, he has made Jack become tighter and tighter wound–he’s made Jack become more and more unpleasant to be around, which I hope is his commentary on the right-wingism of the series as a whole. But what about that rightism? Is it truly balanced by presenting black and female presidents, by the way it almost always sides against hawkish characters? By the fact that in the show’s mythology, the Nixonian president actually got arrested?

I don’t know; but such questions are the spice to the messy massala this show has become.

This season we were treated to another first in the mythology: having anticipated by eight years the first black president (and who knows? maybe helped that along), we have the first female president, played by the marvelous Cherry Jones. (I saw her in the original production of “Doubt” and she was awesome.) Her President Allison Taylor is the rare example of the show supporting a hawkish foreign-policy choice–she consistently overrules her cabinet and generals to push for an invasion of the mythical African country of “Sangala,” a sort of Senegal-meets-Côte d’Ivroie-with-some-Liberia-sauce. Of course, her hawkishness is of a different kind: she’s motivated by a humanitarian (dare I say liberal) desire to overthrow a vile dictatorship.

I won’t get into the ridiculous plot of the season–it’s filled with the usual multiple McGuffins, twists, turns, and absurdities (an attack on the White House? Really?) Instead, I want to point out how a show with a female president still ends up in Sexistville.

First, there’s Jack’s daughter Kim. She’s long been a target for the show’s critics, and once again she doesn’t disappoint here: her main purpose in the plot is to serve as a way of controlling Jack by stalking and threatening her. And yeah, she gets a token moment where she rescues a valuable laptop, but this isn’t the most empowered character even for this show.

Then there is Olivia Taylor, the President’s daughter. A savvy political operative, she forces out her mother’s chief of staff and organizes a hit on the man who conspired to kill her brother. (Of course, doing that results in a major freakout on her part and sends her crying to the man who arranged the details of the hit.) Not bad, I guess–empowered to do evil is still empowerment.

But wait, there’s more. The kick in the teeth for Olivia also manages to catch our first female president–who has hung tough the whole show, ordering attacks on foreign countries, authorizing black ops against terrorists, reaming out subordinates for their failures. When Olivia’s role in the assassination is discovered, President Taylor decides to prosecute her. Cause, you know, that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re sworn to protect the constitution. (President Obama–I know you’re reading this–take note!) The First Gentleman (gotta love that, actually) then comes down hard on Madame President–noting that the job has now cost them both their children (not to mention his own shooting) and just lays a complete guilt trip on her that has her practically weeping in the arms of her restored chief of staff–her marriage destroyed, one child dead, another soon to be a felon.

Thanks, guys. But to be fair, the message that a woman who pursues power will lose all human contact (most certainly because she is perverting her natural role as a nurturer, provider, and handservant) isn’t something you hear all the time; I must have seen only, oh, ten or twelve examples of it. Today. Before noon.

Finally, there’s one nice little bid of absurdist misogyny: when Tony Almeida, the rogue former government agent and colleague of Jack’s, confronts the slimy leader of the cabal that (unbelievably) has authored almost all the mayhem of the show’s seven seasons, he tells him the reason he is going to kill him: it’s not just because this guy arranged the death of Tony’s wife–it’s because she was pregnant! With his son! (At which point he begins screaming, “you killed my son!”) ‘Cause, you know, it’s kinda gay to be that worked up just over a woman, even if she was the love of your life and helped you escape from the shadow world of counter-terrorism. But an unborn son! Now that’s a manly reason for revenge!

So there you have it: torture works, women should rise no higher than the vice-presidency, and only a Y-chromosome can justify a four-year revenge trip. Actually, that last one might be true.

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Me and My Vagina: Part I of an Infinitely Reductive Series

Categories: all about me, my pussy my self, teh tranz

In the first place, it’s not so easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it.

–Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

I suppose that makes me a bit different, because I see my vagina at least three times a day, and usually six, and can look forward to a long future of regularly saying hi to my down there.

My vagina is a bit different than other women’s, as a consequence of my not having been born with one.

One of the things you learn about, if you are transsexual and if you are thinking about having The Surgery (italicization was really unnecessary, wasn’t it? I mean, if I mention surgery I know where your head is going to go) is about the D-Word–dilation. It’s one of the aftercare things they don’t tell you about back when you first realize that you want to be female, not that you’d have told anyone, at least, not if you were me.

The commonplace that nature abhors a vacuum works on my neo-vagina as well: left to its own devices, my body would fill it in gradually, like silt in a canal. (Ick.) So everyday, three times a day right now, I have to–well, dilate it: put something inside to hold the shape and gradually convince my body that it’s supposed to be there.

There’s probably all sorts of ways to accomplish this–my surgeon’s instructions on the subject note that sexual intercourse is the equivalent of “only one dilation”–but the standard equipment is a series of four graduated lucite rods, rounded on one end, about seven inches long each. You start with the relatively small #1, about the diameter of a carrot, and eventually work your way up to the squat #4, which is wider than the handle of the flashlight I keep on my desk. Right now I use the #2 and #3 when I dilate, warming up for ten minutes on the first, and then a half an hour on the second. With time out for changing them, this lasts about as long as an hour-long television drama if you fast-forward through the commercials, so I tend to time-shift shows on my DVR to have something to do while dilating.

Because you can’t do much while dilating; as the dilation isn’t just about girth, but much more about preserving depth, you have to keep a constant pressure up with one hand. So typing is out, and even reading a book can be cumbersome. So, you watch tv, or maybe surf the internet one-handed.

When I first heard about dilation, naturally I feared that it would hurt, that every day I’d have to put myself through some sort of agony. It turns out that dilation doesn’t hurt, isn’t even all that uncomfortable: just a boring, repetitive chore. (You do have to stock up on lubricant, though.) On days when I am visiting a client, the first thing I do when I get home–before even making dinner–is to dilate, because I am overdue, and even then I have to do it again in a few hours. In time I’ll be able to do it less–most of the women I know who are several years out from their surgery dilate about once a week–but for now it’s an onerous duty. I am handmaid to my vagina.

But I do get to see it everyday. This might sound wonderful except of course that familiarity breeds–indifference. I no longer examine myself except to check that nothing looks inflamed, and to make sure I get the dilator in the right place. Maybe there are women who don’t need to use a mirror, but when I try I usually end up bumping something else instead, like my clitoris.

I do remember the first few times I saw it though–red, raw, inflamed, supperating in places and with ugly black sutures running inside it, Frankensteinian. But after the first few times of worrying about the discomfort of dilating, and the shock of this wound I had created, it became something else, a part of me, a long-sought for piece of the life I had always wanted and never had; my beautiful, glistening, gaping self; my other me made corporeal; my genitals, my wish, my pussy, my peace.

The last day I spent in Thailand, as I was getting dressed to go, I looked at myself in the mirror–lessened but made whole, no longer reminded by my reflection of where I had come from but only of where I had arrived. I smiled and happy tears welled up.

Then I lay on the bed and laughed, laughed, laughed.

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Show Us Your Hooves

Categories: beating them at their own game, the male ogle

In honor of Rachel Alexandra, the first filly in 85 years to win the Preakness Stakes, some stories from the world of sports:

New Woman’s Soccer League: After the WUSA discovered that Mia Hamm and the 1999 World Cup weren’t enough to sustain insane management mistakes, it looked like there wasn’t room for a woman’s professional soccer league (and given the generally parlous state of the WNBA, women’s professional sports in general are threatened.) Today, though, the New York Daily News had an article about the WPS, a new women’s soccer league.

Teams travel on commercial airlines, in coach seats; they take buses for shorter trips. They carry their own bags, and stay in reasonably priced hotels. And at every stop, the players completely embrace their core fans – the legions of pony-tailed, soccer-playing girls whose clubs and leagues WPS officials are relentlessly courting.

“I think we have to be very smart in making these connections to the community,” says Chastain, whose FC Gold Pride visited New Jersey recently, tying Sky Blue, 1-1. “Not in a lip-service way, but in a very tangible, very hands-on way.”

Starting up a new sports league is an investment idea of comparable wisdom to hiring Bernie Madoff to do your books, but I hope they succeed, and they seem to have some modest goals.

Besides, you just want them to succeed, if for no other reason than because of this:

When Yael Averbuch was a fifth-grader at Hillside Elementary in Montclair, her teacher went around the class one day and asked each child what he or she wanted to be when they grew up. When it was her turn, Yael stood up at her desk. She didn’t have to stop and think.

“I want to be a professional soccer player,” she said. The teacher looked back at her, with some exasperation.

“No, you need to pick a real profession,” the teacher said.

Rock on, Yael.

Of course, it can’t all be good:

Let us introduce you to the New York Majesty of the Lingerie Football League!

“Let’s be honest, sex sells,” quarterback and captain Krystal Gray said. We couldn’t have said it any better.

The League will kick off this fall, with the Majesty playing its home games at Nassau Coliseum. Last week in Freeport, a band of lovelys stripped down to their bare necessities for a chance to make the team, each sprinting, primping and strutting their way to the top. The Majesty will play seven-on-seven, tackle football wearing sports bras and volleyball shorts -in addition to helmets, shoulder pads and knee pads.

Way to move the goalposts, ladies. Wait….

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