Monthly Archives: March 2010

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David Brooks: What Price Happiness? (Hint: Ladies, Keep Your Man!)

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, double bound, i heart oppression, internuts, kyriarchy, media tool kit, privilege stories, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all

I haven’t played kick the can–where can means the New York Times–for a while, mostly because it’s too easy: the stolid Grey Lady’s inability to cover issues beyond it’s narrow frame of all the news white, middle-class, male America finds worthy to think about is a cliche at this point. I mean, for goodness sake, their lead writer on women’s rights is a dude! (Not to knock Nick Kristoff–keep up the good work!–but still.)

Truth be told, I only scan the headlines and drop in to read Krugman and Rich when they’re up. I don’t usually bother to read the rest of the columnists, and certainly not perpetual anal-cranial inversion artist Ross Douthat or David “Bobo” Brooks, master of somehow finding the tone your clueless, warm-n-fuzzy conservative uncle might strike–somewhere between concern trolling and reminding you that if you just wore lipstick more often, you’d find a nice fella.

But every now and then, I drop in on what he says, either because I’ve been referred there or because for some reason the headline writer is earning her or his pay this week by getting me to read something I ordinarily wouldn’t. Take today’s headline: The Bullock Trade. (It actually is “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” but it was truncated in the little upper-righthand corner area the Times puts it’s op-ed links.) Now, I was intrigued, both by the possibility that Brooks was branching out–bullocks could mean anything from modern Hindu religion to the sacrifices of the ancient Minoans–or by seeing what behavior by Ms. Bullock Brooks was disapproving of.

Because I’ve read him before, and I knew that there was no way he’d be in favor of her doing anything except marrying a Republican Senator.

But whoo boy, was this a piece of work:

Continue reading →

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Justice Department to Gender-Nonconforming Kids: You Exist

Categories: beating them at their own game, kyriarchy, milestones

This is kind of huge, given how Title IX has generally been interpreted pretty narrowly against trans and gender non-conforming people:

Federal prosecutors have used a novel interpretation of the Title IX statue, which prohibits discrimination against students on the basis of gender, to help broker a settlement in a lawsuit brought by a gay teen against his upstate New York school district, NPR’s Ari Shapiro tells us.

The lawsuit involved a boy who was bullied for being effeminate.

This is the first time since the Clinton Administration that the Justice Department has claimed that Title IX applies to discrimination based gender presentation, beyond simple discrimination based on sex.

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If It’s Wednesday…

Categories: below the belt, i get around

…well, every other Wednesday.

We interrupt your obsessive Nestor Carbonell marathon for a new post on Below the Belt:

One of the more difficult aspects of talking about transness is how many facets it can encompass. Because transness is more than just an internal sense of rightness or wrongness with your body: it catches up so much else in a whirlwind of confusion.

Take, for example, sexual identity. It is now a commonplace in queer communities–well, most queer communities–that a transgendered identity is separate from a gay or lesbian identity; that is, trans women are not “gay men who can’t deal” any more than gay men want to be women. And yet: it is the rare trans person who has not had to confront issues of sexual identity as part of understanding their trans identity. A MTF trans person often has to confront the fact that many of the things that are markers of femaleness–high heels, makeup, skirts–are also markers of straight sexuality, and exactly what adopting those markers might mean for them when out in the world and attracting the attention of men. So, too, do many FTM trans people have to deal with the complicated issues of butchness in the lesbian community, and where, if anywhere, the the line between boi and boy lies.

However, an even more complicated relationship exists between the transgendered and drag worlds.

Sashay over!

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Welcome to the New Digs!

Categories: relaunching

Howdy, ducks! Welcome to the relaunch of The Second Awakening! I hope you enjoy the place.

I’ve wanted the blog to look something like this for a while, and it became clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to do that with Blogger. Also, I wanted to move to WordPress. And finally, I wanted my own domain name! And now here we all are.

The main image, by the way, is from Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, one of my favorite paintings and, I think, somewhat appropriate for the subject of the blog.

So settle in! I am told that there are goodies like threaded comments and the like. And who knows what else? I’m figuring this out as I go along too!

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Mass Resistance Made Me Mad Enough To Vomit

Categories: i get around, shakesville rocks, the transsexual empire strikes back, transphobia: now in blog format, Your RDA of Outrage

In the spirit of spring training, I am apparently having an Away week, as all most posts so far have originated elsewhere!

Today’s offering appears at Shakesville:

First Event is an annual conference held in January by the Tiffany Club of New England, a transgender support group. Like any conference, it consists of workshops, cocktail parties, and banquets with awards ceremonies and occasionally pompous keynote addresses. About the only difference between it and, say, a Linux convention is that there will be slightly more trans people at First Event. (There may also be more computer engineers, for that matter.)

But that’s not all. According to Southern Poverty Law Center-certified hate group Mass Resistance, First Event is what America will look like in the horrifying post-Homosexual Agenda world soon to be imposed upon the honest, godfearing citizens of These United.

And to prove their point, they made a video….

 Fight the power!

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All I Ever Needed to Know* I Learned From "Sex in the City"

Categories: it...came...from...TUMBLR, silly blather

* for the set {being a woman, being a writer, living in New York, things that are totally inaccurate}

  1. It is possible to rent a large one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side as a writer whose only paid gig is a column for a newspaper that is a) free b) more annoying than the free morning paper they hand out in subway stations and c) couldn’t beat the Village Voice’s circulation even when you had to pay for the Voice.
  2. In addition, you will be able to afford a closet full of designer dresses and shoes.
  3. And also only take cabs to places, because real New Yorkers don’t ride the subway.
  4. The worst thing that will happen to you in a mugging is that the mugger will take your shoes.
  5. Writers only take their inspiration from the messed up lives of their friends.
  6. The most likely person for a highly-motivated, highly-overworked, and highly-educated lawyer to end up with is a bartender.
  7. Who will make her move to Brooklyn.
  8. And be the primary caretaker of his ailing mother.
  9. Every woman needs a gay friend to have a truly complete life.
  10. Gay friends come in two flavors: nebbishly queeny, and outrageously queeny.
  11. There’s a third type, the incredibly hot underwear model, but within a few years that character type will be straight anyway.
  12. Female friendships are all-consuming, have no boundaries of time, subject, or privacy, and absolutely necessary for life because your girlfriends will support you no matter what.
  13. They will also, however, mock your grooming habits and sexual partners.
  14. Women need to be strong, self-actualized, and firm in their knowledge of who they are.
  15. However, they should also change their lives completely for a man. Such changes include but are not limited to: changing your boro of residence, changing your city of residence, changing your religion.
  16. You will start out by declaring your sexual freedom from the past. You will plan to enact this by having the same soul-less, commitment-less relationships of the douchiest of guys.
  17. You will then spend the next several years doing completely the opposite.
  18. A gentle, caring man who is a committed artist, interested in you and your career, and supportive of your friends and life-choices will enter your life. You must reject this person.
  19. A man who alternates between a creepy sexual obsession with you and treating you like an afterthought to his social calendar will enter your life. He will specialize in sending mixed signals. He will ignore your needs and career. He will break up with you, get married, and only then declare his love for you. He will enter and exit your life with a total disregard for your feelings, and refuse to ever discuss any of these points and how they relate to your relationship. He will, in short, treat you as an amusing accessory. You must cling to this man like a drowning sailor to a life preserver.
  20. There will be a television show about four female friends who engage in frank discussions about their sex lives. Often these discussions will take place during a meal. A frequent subject will be the difficulties of dating at their age. In the 1980s that age will be the late 50s. A decade later, the age will be the mid-30s. This will be considered progress.

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In Reality

Categories: below the belt, i get around

Oh, yeah, you know what time it is…time for REALITY TELEVISION:

OK, I’m dense: but “I Want to Work For Diddy” wasn’t on my radar two years ago, and anyway, having a trans person on a reality show isn’t that big a deal anymore; we’re like the gay folks in the “Real World” reruns from the ’90s, only with a lot less flannel shirts and Hole albums in the background.

So I don’t know much about Ms. Cox, except I admire her for her success and for turning her 15 minutes of fame into a full half-hour. Kudos, ma’am, kudos.

But: is it good for teh Tranz?

You go, person of any gender!

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What It Means

Categories: Blog for International Women’s Day

IWD

Today is Blog for International Woman’s Day. It is also about two years since I started living as a woman fulltime, and one year since I made my body finally align with my head.

It is hard, to come to grips with what that all means. It is hard, to talk about what being a woman means. Not just for me, but for all women. But I do know this, and it is something that bonds me with all other women: I sure have a lot of people willing to tell me what I should think it means.

In a lot of ways, I can really not remember ever not being a woman. The things that I did, that happened to me, before transtion: a lot of the time they feel like things that happened to some one else, some one I once knew but isn’t around anymore.

I cannot describe how good that feels.

Other times, I am conscious of all the differences between me and the great majority of women out there; I am reminded that I am a woman who was never a girl, and that there is a great gulf between me and the other women of my background, one that I’ll never fill. That no matter what I do, I’ll always be an outsider.

But. There is this too: I know that I am a woman, and a feminist woman. I know that I struggle against the same oppression as any other woman. I know that I have many, many sisters throughout the world, and their struggle is, should be, must be, will always be mine. I know what it feels to look out upon my culture and see no place for me, for what I feel, for my desires and needs and thoughts. I know what it feels like to be ignored, commodified, boxed in, defined, talked to, talked down to, talked to not at all. To be unheard, unnoticed, unregarded. To be only seen for what I look like, to be only heard when I say what they want me to say, to only be expected to know what they want me to know.

I’ve stood in a bookstore and been deafened by the volumes of men’s voices around me, all the books and books and words words words written by men, and so few thoughts by women.

I’ve despaired at the billions of women history forget, ignored, suppressed, oppressed, killed, raped.

I’ve feared the same for me.

I fight against that. For me. For my sisters. For our daughters, nieces, mothers, grandmothers, granddaughters. Because I must.

Because I am a woman.

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