Monthly Archives: June 2009

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The Second Awakening: Special Retro-Mobile Edition!

Categories: all about me, posting at the speed of Amtrak, silly blather, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Sgniteerg Skcud! I mean, greetings, ducks! I’m on my way home again and blogging at 50 mph, after spending a weekend teaching myself to play the theme from Love Story, listening to my niece read to me, and finally catching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Hulu. Which, along with my return homewards, has me in a retrospective mood.

I didn’t watch Buffy back when it was on TV–oddly enough, I had seen (and even liked) the movie, and maybe that kept me away at first; I remembered the film as harmless fluff. By the time I heard that Joss Whedon had taken it in a very different, darker, and (as usual) beautifully-characterized direction, it was too late to catch up on things and I didn’t want to try to come in late. So I missed it, until now.

I’m not one of those trans peeps who regrets not having a girlhood, per se; I know how lousy my adolescence was, and I really don’t think having been female would have helped much. (Or would it? I’ve become such a different–and better–person since I transitioned, maybe it would have worked out…) But that doesn’t keep me from occasionally getting blue about–about the tremendous waste involved with my early life, the years of being strangled with doubt and confusion, the horrific amount of mental baggage I carried around. And then too there is the consciousness of not having had a girlhood, of not having had to deal with being a teen ager, of all the ways my history separates me from other women.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t compensations; I was raised to believe that all things were possible for me, whereas sadly far too many women I know were raised to believe that they could be only those things that were proper. I might have been drowning in dysphoria, but I was never stifled by sexism, never silenced by society. I might have struggled with my assigned role, but it was a lot easier role to deal with than being an adolescent female.

On the other hand, though, try being the boy in sixth grade with a stuffed animal collection that covers his bed. That hill ain’t so fun to climb either.

I adore Buffy so far. I love how the show manages to have empowered female characters, to show the human side of everyone, all without denying the ordinary pressures of adolescent society: Buffy might be a superhuman being with an awesome responsibility, but she worries about being popular; Xander’s sly self-deprecation reminds me of someone I used to know (Ahem. It was one way to deal with always being picked on.) And I love Willow, even if she hasn’t become a witch yet.

Plus, Joss Whedon’s pitch statement–“high school as a horror movie”–pretty much sums up my recollection of those days.

Even so, watching it can’t but help stir the pot of my memories–if part of my tranisition has been learning about how unhappy I used to be (without even knowing it), then high school was me at my most miserable–tormented by my strangeness, my awkwardness, and the horrible feelings I had that I feared were at the root of everything. Watching Buffy can lead me to those “if only” moments–if only I knew that I could be a woman, if only I knew how happy it would make me–if only I could have just been born female and avoided all of this pain.

I can’t change that. I’m not even sure I would if I could; the person I am today was forged on the anvil of my transness, and I would be a very different person indeed without it. And I like that person, more and more every day.

So I shouldn’t regret the past. If only I could.

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The Second Awakening: Special Mobile Edition!

Categories: all about me, silly blather, travels with CL, your rda of misogyny

Welcome again, ducks! Today’s post comes to you live from Amtrak! I am on my way to visit my parents, and as we are a Green outfit here at TSA, we’re riding mass transit. I am writing this on my trusty blue Acer Inspire One, which I bought for the trip to Thailand and has become my indispensable travelling companion–it fits in all my purses, and with the wireless broadband modem, I can blog anywhere!

Speaking of that trip, I passed through a large swath of Asia during it, and in honor of the first post I’ve written at 50 miles per hour, I thought I’d share some impressions of sex roles and segregation I gathered on the way.

Our first stop was Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. We only were there to transfer flights–if you’re flying to India or Thailand, I highly recommend Etihad Airlways; they spare no expense, the planes are comfortable even in coach, and the food was actually good. But even that brief layover gave me a sense of the character of the place. There were women working, but mostly as servers; the salesmen we saw at the various stores were, well, men. Abu Dhabi is a crossroads in the Persian Gulf, so we saw all varieties of dress, from full burqas to women in completely Western dress. (The flight attendants on Etihad, though, wore these odd combination pillbox hats and veils.) The bathrooms were a bit different; there was an attendant/chaperone, and they follow the British custom of having full-own rooms with doors instead of stalls.

One definite difference: the metal detectors were sex-segregated, to make sure that you were only touched by someone of the same gender. (This was to be a recurring theme, we shall see, and one that usually left me pretty worried.)

India: Saying anything authoritative about India is an excercise in futility; it’s too big, too varied, too everything. Our tour was exclusively in the northern part, so there were more Muslims there than other parts of India; again, there was a lot of variety in how Muslim women dressed, though when we visited the Jammu Mosque in Delhi, I saw quite a few people in burquas.

Indian standards of modesty are different than those found in America: bare bellies are fine (and an artifact of wearing a sari, as I know now–I bought two), but shoulders and knees should be covered. Both my boyfriend and I had to don ceremonial, wildly-patterned caftans when we visited the Jammu Masjid; once again, the metal detectors and clothing attendants were strictly sex-segragated.

Indian business and commerce are far more completely dominated by men than I was used to. We did meet several businesswomen, but almost exclusively in hotels; in stores, and the various “local craftsman” factories we were taken to by our guides (so we could be browbeat for 20 minutes in the hope of buying a rug/inlaid marble table/block printed cloth–the guide got a commission, of course), the people who did the talking were always male. As were all our guides; come to think of it, I think all the Indian guides I saw were male, as were a majority of the servers in restaurants.


Plate 1: The Author contemplates that the most beautiful building in the world was built for a dead woman.

Moreover, the quintessential picture of Indian poverty, I am sad to say, is a woman with her children. While I’m sure I saw some men begging–I certainly saw many, many poor people of both sexes; in India, if a space is flat, somebody’s living on it–the people who approached us were almost universally women. (On the other hand, the people who tried to sell us overpriced trinkets while we waited on various lines were exclusively male.) Every public bathroom I went to in India had an attendant; I’m not sure if that was always true for my boyfriend, but it was for me. These were very poor women (or heartbreakingly, little girls) who handed you a napkin to use to wipe yourself in exchange for a small tip; we usually gave them 50 ruppes, around a dollar. I can’t speak with any sure knowledge, but I would hardly be surprised to find that these women were Dalits.

On our way out of Indira Gandhi Airport (the first place I ever saw a traffic jam of luggage carts), we once again were run through sex-segregated metal detectors. These were more elaborate than the ones in Abu Dhabi; you were in a completely screened-off area, where you got wanded by the guard. Of the proper sex, of course.

Perhaps nothing captures the attitudes I encountered in India better than this: I was the one who booked the trip, who paid for it, who had negotiated with the tour company. When we arrived in Delhi, my name was on the card the tour representative held up at the airport exit. Yet when we got in the car–I was sitting right behind the rep–he turned to my boyfriend and said, “So, sir, is this your first time in India?”

Invisibility and being pushed around by men were the hallmarks of the trip for me.

Cambodia: Once we left India, we noticed a marked change in the presence of women in business–in that we actually saw several. Men still did most of the jobs that involved talking, including guide to foreign tourists. Like India, my boyfriend was spoken to first and more often.

I have no idea what the rules for the separation of the sexes are in Cambodia, but there seemed to be something subtle going on around us: our guide, Mr. K, constantly talked about the pictures of the apsara, or dancing girls that you see in bas-relief everywhere on the Angkor temples. He was often wistful about it, whispering: “Aspara. Dancing girls. Very beautiful girls.” We suspected dating was pretty complicated in Cambodia.

Plate 2: Mr. K wants you to know he feels nothing for these women. Nothing!

Thailand: We passed through Thailand twice, actually: once, very briefly, on the way to Siem Reap in Cambodia, and then of course of the Purpose of the Visit. Thailand, least in Bangkok and Suvarnabhumi Airport is huge, and more modern than LAX or Newark Liberty; if not for the presence of signs in Thai, you’d hardly know you weren’t in America.

Plate 3: It’s like Los Angeles, just with worse traffic.

In Thailand we finally saw something approaching gender equity. Women were firmly entrenched in the workplace, at about the same proportion that you find in America. Men talked to me–sometimes even first!–and women were definitely assertive, at least to me.

That isn’t to say that there wasn’t a lot of sexism; there was. Thai (or at least Bangkok) culture has something resembling a mix of 50s-style mores, plus a thousand years of Buddhism, plus modern capitalistic ruthless. My nurses told me, for example, that it was still considered somewhat risque for women to smoke–I mean, holy Mad Men!

But at least in Thailand (and Cambodia) I could pee by myself; there weren’t any bathroom attendants. And the metal detectors were unisex.

This is the face of progress, ducks: a man being wanded by a female security guard.

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Crossroads

Categories: privilege stories, teh tranz, tiger beatdown rocks, your RDA of intersectionality

Intersectionality, ducks! It’s all the rage! Everyone talks about it because–everyone lives it!

Take, for example, this story over at Pam’s House Blend. It seems that there was a topless coffee shop up in Maine, one that a (deranged, angry, spiteful) local resident decided it was OK to burn to the ground. Nobody was hurt, but they could have been–the owner and his wife and children were sleeping inside. In addition to the destruction of his uninsured building, the owner lost the lobster pots and carpenter’s equipment he used to make a living.

Why am I bringing this up? Because of the dizzying intersections of forces, privileges and theories in this one case. When I first read the story, my thinking went something like this:

  1. A topless coffee shop? That’s got to be some sexist exploitation going on.

  2. Didn’t deserve to burn down, though. That’s not right.

  3. Wait, they had a topless waiter too?

  4. The family nearly died?

  5. Still, I think a topless anything is probably exploitative.

  6. The townsfolk didn’t like the place.

  7. But they didn’t like it, it seems, because they thought it was sexist: they didn’t like it because they thought it was “dirty.”

  8. Well, sex isn’t dirty. I like sex. People, such as me, should have more sex and feel less guilty about it.

  9. Wait, one of the waitresses was using the money to put herself through college?

  10. But it’s still exploitative, right?

  11. Sure, because it’s sexist that being a topless waitress was the best way for her to make money. Whew. I almost had to think for a second.

  12. My head hurts. I can’t figure out if I should write a post condemning the place, or write them a check. Or both.

And that’s a relatively benign example. Things can get far more complicated than that.

For example, there’s me.

Being trans opens you up to a wonderful world of intersecting under- and overprivileging. On the one hand, I’m a woman–I identify as one, I look like one, I am in general treated like one, with all that entails. Moreover, I’m a trans woman, which means that if/when people find out/are told/Google me that their attitudes about me will very likely change. Some will stop thinking of me as a woman. Some will think of me as a woman with an asterisk. Sometimes I’ll be expected to be the mystical tranny, here to tell everyone about what it’s like to be trans. (And, of course, almost everyone will want to know what my genitals look like, something not an ordinary area of discourse, at least not at lunch.) Not to mention that there are people who will react violently towards me, who will single me out, who will make me a special target–that over and beyond the targeted/othered status I bear as a woman, as a trans woman I’m at risk for even greater degrees of violence.

But wait. There’s also no denying that I have and have had privileges simply not available to most women. As a very, very simple example: it is highly unlikely that a woman who had my editorial assistant job 14 years ago would have been given the license to teach herself how to program computers that I received. (Especially not at that company–the boss was a right old chauvinist.) In fact, just about everything about my career in IT, which is my bread and butter, was aided by being male at the time. I had instant credibility; it was considered proper for me to be in the field; and I never had to vouchsafe my identity as a programmer the way many women in IT have to. (Though many women don’t have to vouchsafe their gender the way I often have to; like I said, it gets dizzying.)

And of course I’m white, not overweight, college-educated, not disabled. A ton of privileges. Do my underprivileged characteristics–not cisgendered, not straight, not chromosomally female–outweigh my privileges?

It depends.

One of the reasons I began writing this blog was the gradual awakening I had about the iniquities of privilege. It’s the passion that drives me, even as I struggle to understand and expose my own privileges. It’s why I am an opponent of kyriarchy, why I so staunchly oppose all the various petty divisions within the different communities of underprivilege.

But as it turns out, checking your privilege is very hard to do.

Which leads me to Shakesville. I’ve only been a recent reader there, but the community there had a profound influence on me; indeed, Shakesville and Tiger Beatdown are the two sites that inspired me to start blogging again after a four-year hiatus.

I’m mentioning Shakesville because–as you may have noticed in my little blogroll widget–the site is in stasis right now. You can read about it at Shakesville, but what it breaks down to is: Melissa McEwan, the founder and webmistress of the site, had to take a break from posting. On her own blog. Because people wouldn’t listen to her when she said that a lot of the comments were bothering her, and that people needed to be more civil.

I’ll repeat that. She stopped posting. To her own blog.

Even though I’ve only been a recent Shaker, the safe space that Liss has created and worked so hard to maintain is something I cherish. And even as I get mad that things came to this head, I feel bad for my own failings, sins of commission and omission, there.

The idea that Shakesville has reached a crossroads, that there could really not be a Shakesville anymore, is chilling.

Sady at Tiger Beatdown as usual is all over this, far better than I can add with my poor powers. But I will say: this is an issue of privilege, of flaunting it and most of all of not examining your own privilege. But just so we all understand:

When somebody tells you something you said hurt them, and you don’t take it
seriously, that’s privilege.

When somebody tells you your conduct is against the simple rules she created
for her own space, that’s privilege.

When you repeatedly ignore complaints except to occasionally apologize and
then go right back to doing what you were doing, that’s privilege.

If you think that somebody is supposed to do something for you, something
that you value and treasure, and you don’t listen to what they say, you in fact
act like you were owed something–you better believe that’s
privilege with a capital-fuckin’ P.

And when somebody writes an incensed blog post about privilege, you can bet she has some privilege too. We all do. So what are you going to do about that?

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Satire or Wince–You Make the Call

Categories: bitterness, Humorless Tranny™, teh tranz

I’m in a bad mood right now, ducks, so I find myself not in a position to judge on the humor of this piece–I get what they’re doing, but I’m surprisingly humorless about this subject.

But judge for yourselves:


Conservatives Warn Quick Sex Change Only Barrier Between Gays, Marriage

(h/t helen boyd at (en)gender)

Me, I’m off to hide under the covers against the moment when somebody takes me to task for using a sports reference in the title of this post–it’s only been a few hours since someone tried to revoke my womanhood, and I need to recharge.

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Except I Am

Categories: all about me, bitterness, teh tranz, vive le feminisme, why i blog

Reasons I Am Told I Cannot Be A Feminist
Culled from Books, Message Boards, Web Pages and Conversations by, for, and against feminists

  1. Because I shave my legs.
  2. Because I color my hair.
  3. Because I wear skirts.
  4. Because I wear dresses.
  5. Because I wear high heels.
  6. Because I had plastic surgery.
  7. Because I had breast implants.
  8. Because I had vaginoplasty.
  9. Because I am attracted to men.
  10. Because I still am attracted to women.
  11. Because I’ve read a few books on feminism.
  12. Because I’ve only read a few books on feminism.
  13. Because I have a vagina–now.
  14. Because I didn’t have a vagina–then.
  15. Because I don’t have a cervix.
  16. Because I had a penis.
  17. Because I had male privilege.
  18. Because I had white, male, middle-class privilege.
  19. Because I still have white, middle-class privilege.
  20. Because I wasn’t raised as a girl.
  21. Because I look like a dude.
  22. Because I look like a woman.
  23. Because of who I was.
  24. Because of who I am.
  25. Because I dare call myself a woman.

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The Balcony Is Closed

Categories: media tool kit, the male ogle, your rda of misogyny

You probably think your humble blogeuse never does anything but write proposals and gather outrage for her next post. On the contrary! Like many denizens of A Great American Metropolis, I occasionally venture out of the apartment to do–stuff. Like eat Chinese food! Or go to movies!

On Friday I went out to see a festival of independent short films. (For independent read student.) Normally, an evening screening films is a pleasure to me–why, I’ve even sat through Robert Altman double-features and left feeling elated. (Confused and strangely unconfined by narrative, but elated.) But last night set my teeth on edge, because I saw a strong thread running through all the films, none of which, I should mention, were directed by women. What could that thread be? Read on to find out! (But, as Sady would say, Hint: THE MISOGYNY.)

Yes, I’m afraid that most of these films were either lady absent or lady silencing or, everybody’s favorite, lady objectifying. Not all the films–for example, there was a cute little Canadian Star Trek parody that was not only funny, but had a woman in it–a woman with actual lines! (This lovely young woman, incidentally, was the only woman in the entire evening’s show that had a direct line of dialogue.) There was a disturbing yet amusing time travel movie that definitely broke new ground in the genre. And there was an amusingly dark animated short about the perils of the workplace.

The rest though, primed me to gun up the outrage engines. There were two films that were montages of film clips that were cleverly edited but didn’t seem to have a real point of view. “The Control Master” was definitely a technical feat–the animation was taken from clip art advertising from the ’50s–but began with the villain stalking the heroine and turning her into a dog. Lovely. The last film before the intermission was a mash-up of video games and afternoon cartoon shows like “She-Ra” that had one good sight gag–the invaders from space were, well, Space Invaders–but mostly seemed to be an excuse to film a heroine in her panties, from behind. Oh, and the reason she and the villain are fighting is because she messed around on him (even if he is a giant cube.)

The film that really set me off, though, was “Funny Guy.” The premise began amusingly enough–a guy telling horribly bad jokes to his bathroom mirror–and our realization that he is a very disturbed young man is–disturbing. So, a good start, if not exactly the most original place to go.

It’s where director Frank Rinaldi takes this that provoked my strong reaction. It turns out that our disturbed young man wants to talk to a prostitute who hangs out across a highway from him, but is too shy. (This is the only woman in the entire film–a prostitute with no lines. Sigh.) He later chases the girl down to confront her, tracks down one of her johns and gets into a confrontation with him, and then later ambushes the john and takes him back to his bathroom. The filmaking in this sequence is tense–we sense imminent violence, especially when our abductor reveals the hideous black fungus (a metaphor for his own disease?) growing on the shower stall walls–with a human ear embedded in it.

Yet this scene deflates, and we next see abductor and abductee share a moment sniffing paint thinner. The john agrees to try and get the woman to talk to his abductor, but when he shyly hides from them the john takes off with her.

The film is disturbing all right, but what disturbed me was that it was ultimately another piece of stalker porn; that once again I had to watch a misunderstood guy who goes nuts and finds the only way to connect to women is to hunt them down. His rage over her “rejection” of him–that seems to be the way he interprets her going off with the other john–echoes nothing but the normal sense of entitlement to women’s bodies that most men feel.

The movie isn’t bad, per se–technically, it’s an accomplished student film. I’m just annoyed that these techniques are put in the service of yet another story where women are stalked, fought over, shared between men, and ultimately purely adjuncts to the plot–a motivating factor, a force of nature, incapable of speaking or acting in their own defence (it’s telling that she’s a prostitute, and thus not even allowed to choose her own sexual partners.) I spoke to the director after the movie–it turns out, ducks, that he was sitting right in front of me–and talked to him about my concerns. (No blood was shed.)

I expect a little misogyny when I go to the movies, because I expect a little misogyny when I step out of my apartment, turn on the tv, or read the newspaper. There are even great films which are profoundly misogynistic–for example, “Taxi Driver.” Scocese’s misanthropic and misogynistic gem from 1976–made at a time when he was battling a cocaine addiction, going through a horrific divorce, and basically “hated women”–remains a tough film to watch. Yet the women in that film–idealized, paternalized, and ultimately hated by DeNiro’s Travis Bickle–retain their own agency–they are people, and make choices. “Taxi Driver’s” awful force of misogyny is only part of its awful force, period–although it is women who inspire Travis’ acts of violence, it’s also clear that these actions are only possible because of a deeper instability in his character.

It might be a lot to ask a student director to approach the skill of a Scorsese; but on the other hand, it’s thirty-three years later, and not exactly difficult to learn about how women feel about, well, anything. That it remains true that the easiest way to give a disturbed character motivation is to have him rejected by a woman is yet another depressing indication of the institutionalized misogyny of your liberal media.

And it’s sad that in a city as liberal and progressive as A Great American Metropolis that the only way to ensure that you will see an independent film directed by a woman is to go to a woman’s film festival.

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Annie Get Your…

Categories: let's hear it for the ladies, media tool kit

Randy Cohen, who writes the “Ethicist” column for the NY Times, has a modest proposal: keep men from openly carrying guns as we do today (in most places, ducks, in most places) but require women to carry them. It’s mostly facetious, but he does touch on the usual statistics: 90% of all gun violence is committed by men, and strangely (but rightly) hits on Susan Faludi’s observation (without referencing her, though) that occupations once considered high-status when dominated by men (secretary, frex) become low-status when dominated by women. (Ah, that’s the answer to the American epidemic of gun violence: sexism! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems!)

The comments are more interesting. The old canard (ahem) about guns solving the problems of 2,00,000 violent crimes. (Really? Think it’s that easy to shoot someone? See, for example, this, as well as S.L.A Marshall’s contention that only 25% of soldiers fired their weapons during WWII.) A surprising number of women write about their experiences owning weapons. One woman hopes that this will lead to guns in designer colors. Then there’s this charming passage:

Before you recommend to arm all womyn and unleash them on mankind please remember the import of the following two words:

Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS).

Ya know, folks, I happen to have pretty first-hand experience in the differences between male and female hormones, even if I don’t and won’t ever cycle. But given the disparity between male and female violent crimes, given how often men come to blows over minor disagreements (I saw two guys nearly get into a fight just yesterday–in the middle of the sidewalk. At 9 AM.), given how the culture of masculinity celebrates testosterone-soaked rage–why is it always women who are supposed to have the hormone problem? Don’t they also say that women are better at social networking? Shouldn’t we be telling guys to stay out of politics because their brains just can’t deal with the complexities of international diplomacy? Shouldn’t we tut-tut men for getting into a fight over who was the better hitter in 1939 by saying that they shouldn’t let their hormones get the better of them?

Yeah, probably we should. If arming women helps to bring that about–well, Mr. Cohen, sign me up.

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31 Days Later….

Categories: all about me, milestones, teh tranz, why i blog

Greetings, Ducks! Today, it turns out, is the one-monthery (strictly speaking, an anniversary refers to a year. Yes, I took Latin! Yes, I am a shameless pedant!) of this blog. Which I seem to have celebrated by taking the day off (well, to be fair, that proposal I wrote the other day blossomed into further proposals and some discussions with the potential client, so I was busy.)

I want to thank all of you who have dropped by, and especially all of you who left such nice comments here. Starting a blog again was something that I did with some trepidation, and your encouragement has really been so lovely.

I had trepidation because part of my “process” (no, thank you, Anonymous!) is figuring out exactly how much my transness is going to be integrated with the rest of my life, and starting a blog where I was so open about it (albeit with personal details obscured) seemed to have the potential to swallow my life up again. After so, so many years where my transness was a constant, overriding distraction to my life, I really wanted to just try being a woman for a while.

But it’s clear that I have things to say about transness, and especially about how transness intersects with feminism. So I say them here, and so far it hasn’t consumed me–in fact, it’s acted as a safety valve, letting me work on living a life not always dominated by where I’ve come from, but by where I’m going.

So thank you all for dropping by, for your encouragement and support, for giving me a reason to write every day–something I thought I might never do again. And here’s to the start of our second month!

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