Categotry Archives: i get around

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A Farewell to…Stealth

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, adventures in transition, all about me, i get around, omphalos gazing, tv (not trans), tv (trans)

Okay, so this has gone out to a couple of places. First, the big news:

Jeopardy!, the famous international quiz show, is having a 30th anniversary tournament. They are bringing back former champions to play, broken up (initially) by decade. All very good.

As a gimmick, they are asking the fans to vote for the last player in each decade from five former champions.

One of the champs from the 1990s…is trans.

Great! Visibility! Barriers broken! I hope she gets on!

Especially since she managed to also out herself…as me.

Aw, raspberries.

That was somewhat of a mistake. Stuff happens, I dropped a reference to my work for the Guardian and so that the producers could check, left in my nom-de-plume. And they ran it unchanged.

Oh well. There are lots of blogging aliases out there. Have I introduced you to my new blogging partner, D M Mignon?

Anyway.

Most likely, the only thing that will come from this is that I will have permanently wrecked my life. For sure, stealth is gone, done, dead; I’ve left a paper trail that you could make an origami mansion out of.

Eh bien? Non. But hey, I walked into this propeller of me own free will.

So, vote, if you like, and you want to see a trans person get a lot of visibility. More than she’s comfortable with! Much, much more!

And if you wanna pass it along, please do. If I gotta go up in a blaze of glory, let’s make it a doozy.

Meantime, I might as well write a few things. Tomorrow is no good, I’m gaming, but I’ll try to write up something on Jacques Demy (the Film Forum is currently doing a festival of all his movies) and feminism.

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Speaking of Posts…

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, i get around, tiger beatdown rocks

Have I mentioned that I’ll be doing a regular Tuesday column at Tiger Beatdown?

Have you noticed today is Tuesday?

Have you noticed…I have a post on Tiger Beatdown?

Once, a long time ago (in Internet terms; for non-digitally based life forms, it was about twelve months ago),someone paid me a compliment about something I’d written. You have a great voice, she said. It was a very nice thing to say,  and even more so to hear it from someone who is an amazing writer, because voice is something writers tend to worry about. Mostly because nobody is sure exactly what it is that makes a voice, but everyone agrees it’s a good thing to have.

Voice is more than just style. It’s not that hard to imitate a style, as anyone who has read my Raymond Chandler–J. R. R. Tolkien crossover will have seen. Even the really out-there stylists can be imitated–you could, for example, mix a World War II engineering text with random pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to come up with a fairly good imitation of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. You would not, however, have Pynchon’s voice, the thing that can make a forty page digression on an obscure meteorological phenomenon in Central Asia seem gripping, goofy, and lord help us even a bit profound. (If you like that sort of thing; I do, or at least I know I did once.)

Voice is a lot of things: but if I had to define it for myself, it means using all your quirks, knowledge, style, tics, vocabulary, word choice, hell, even your spell check and thesaurus, to create an effect that not only communicates what you want to say, but does it in a way that is uniquely you. Maybe once we’d have called it wit, but this is America and the twenty-first century, and we don’t have time for anything that can’t be barked out at a personal improvement seminar.

On a number of levels, I’ve had to learn a lot about voice.

On y va, mes cheries!

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Protest Against Ticked Off You-Know-Whats With Knives

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, don't get your panties in a bunch, hipster irony must die, Humorless Tranny™, i get around, takin' it to the streets!, we don't put the "T" in LGB

So if you are going to be in New York tomorrow, and you care to protest the shameful exploitation of both trans women and some of the most brutal murders of trans people, you might want to run down and help us protest the Tribeca Film Festival’s decision to screen Ticked Off…Disparaging-Word-For-Trans-People…With Knives.

Here are the details of the protest, from its Facebook page:

“Protest/rally Against Tribeca’s Decision to Premiere Transphobic Film “Ticked Off Trannies With Knives”

What: A protest/rally demanding that Tribeca Film Festival remove the transphobic film “Ticked Off Trannies With Knives (TOTWK)”. Melissa Sklarz- Director of New York Trans Rights Organization, celebrities, elected officials & LGBT activists will be speaking. A candle light vigil for trans victims of hate crimes will also be held.

When/Where: Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 6:30-8:00pm @ Tribeca Cinemas @ 54 Varick Street, NYC

Why: The movie makes light of violence and rape against trans women, exploits the high-profile murder of teenager Angie Zapata, includes the pejorative term “trannies” in its title, inaccurately depicts trans women’s identities as drag queen “performers” and “caricatures” and misrepresents the lives of an extremely disenfranchised group who suffer violence at alarming rates.

Continue reading →

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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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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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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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Is YOUR Muffin Bluffin’

Categories: below the belt, c.l. minou--least hip person in the world, i get around

What’s that? Yes, ducks, we are still a going concern, though lately that seems to be…going away!

(Thank you, I’ll be here all week.)

The truth is that the day job from hell–currently consuming 50+ hours of my week every week–while allowing me to do useful stuff like eat and pay off both my credit cards in a year, is Not Conducive for the whole writing thing, especially when I don’t get any sleep.

That said, I still do try and do stuff, and I’m hoping to pick up the pace at Tiger Beatdown, at least, where Sady and I have been talking about stuff of late! Some of it will even be cool!

Anyway, if it’s Wednesday Thurday, it must be Below The Belt! This week, I write about one “Lady GaGa,” whom, I hear, is all the rage with the kids these days!

I am almost terminally unhip when it comes to popular music. It’s not that I have snobbish pretensions, or at least I try not to–I’m a firm believer in Duke Ellington’s maxim, “if it sounds good, it is good,” and there’s room for both Mozart and Garbage on my iPod, Radiohead and John Coltrane, Bjork and Kanye “I’m going to interrupt this playlist” West. But the fact is, I don’t watch MTV–not that they have much to do with music nowadays, but I’m dinosaur enough to remember when they did–or listen to much top 40 radio, so I almost never have any idea of what those kids, thesadays, are listening to. (And they need to get off my lawn, too.)

It’s so bad that about the only way I hear popular songs is when they’re background music for a TV show. (When my ex made me watch “Smallville” or “The O.C.” with her, I used to parody the way that they would have a constant churn of hot bands: “Hey, I hear {BAND_OF_THE_WEEK} is playing at the club tonight! I love {BAND_OF_THE_WEEK}.” Of course, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is immune from my scorn, since a) it’s awesome and b) all of those bands are safely a decade behind us.)

But even a pathetic stick in the mud like transfeminist has heard of every queer’s new best friend, The Lady Gaga. 

 Ba-ba Lo Lo Lo Bel Bel Below the Belt!

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Songs of Love and Hate, and Mascara

Categories: all about me, i get around, tiger beatdown rocks

Sady at Tiger Beatdown has been running guest posts on breakup songs in honor of Valentines Day, and was kind enough to ask me to write one. So I did, and it’s over here. I wrote it on Leonard Cohen, who you might have guessed is my favorite songwriter, but of course I touched on other stuff. Trans stuff! (I know, I know, jeez lady can’t you ever not talk about that?) But it was an interesting assignment and I ended up getting personal in a way I don’t always do even over here, so you might find it good reading. Meanwhile I’ll hang out here muttering the “Dress Rehearsal Rag” to myself.

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