Categotry Archives: i get around

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Yet Another Below The Belt Post

Categories: below the belt, i get around

That time of the month again:

The first person I knew who told me they weren’t transgendered was a crossdresser I’ll call Gene. He (and he did later come to insist on male pronouns, and stopped calling himself Gina on the message board we met on), decided that he really was in it for the clothes, and didn’t find himself aligned with the other crossdressers on the board, who all thought of themselves as transgendered.

It was a little jarring to me at first; I had naively assumed that crossdressing=transgendered, so having someone overturn that conviction was surprising. But as I reflected on it, I could see his point. And since that time, I’ve met other people like Gene, some crossdressers, some genderqueer, and even some transsexuals who identify completely as their post-transition gender and have no desire to continue with any kind of transgender identity.

There exists, however, a group of trans women–at least, they seem to be exclusively trans women–who resist being placed under the transgender umbrella. Some refuse to even call themselves transsexuals, preferring the term Harry Benjamin Syndrome instead. They claim that transsexualism is a case of being “neurologically nteresexed” by which they mean that they have a “female brain,” and therefore a medical, not a psychological condition.

Finish up over here.

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Below The Belt: The Umbrellas of Transburg

Categories: below the belt, i get around

My latest post for Below The Belt is now up:

I invariably use trans as short for transgendered, and transgendered in its so-called “umbrella sense”: embracing anyone with a variance with the gender assigned to them because of their biological sex. (When referring to a transsexual’s gender, however, I use trans as an adjective modifying that gender: trans man, trans woman. Although this is slightly confusing, I agree with Julia Serano and helen boyd that the space is vital in avoiding “othering” or invalidating a transsexual’s gender–something that transwoman doesn’t do, since it implies that transsexual women aren’t women but something else entirely).

You can read the rest here.

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If it’s Wednesday, it must be Below The Belt

Categories: below the belt, i get around

My bimonthly post for Below The Belt is up!

One of the things about being part of a maginalized population that is the most fun–if for fun, you read “uncomfortable, occasionally stomach-churningly so”–is that many pleasures cannot simply remain unmixed: messages, tropes, and cultural references that can be overlooked, disregarded or just plain unseen by the dominant group hit home with you in unmistakable and unignorable ways.

Even worse is when you make the, ahem, transition from dominant to marginalized groups. Things that once gave you easy enjoyment now leave a bad taste in your mouth, and when you complain, people tell you you’ve become humorless or a radical.

And that’s just when you talk about popular entertainment.

Which leads me to Adult Swim…

You can read the rest here.

Edit: Links Now Work–Sorry!

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Looks Like Trouble

Categories: below the belt, i get around

My second post for Below the Belt is up!

When I practice aikido, I always wear lipstick.

That probably seems odd. I mean, getting thrown around the floor has nothing to do with my cosmetics–despite advertising claims to the contrary, lipstick won’t improve my performance or even distract my partner with my feminine wiles.

Still, I always make sure to wear some lipstick when I practice. Because I want to have something about me that looks feminine.

Normally I don’t need to worry about such things. I am a bit of a femme by nature and wear skirts about as often as pants. I’ve developed sufficient curves over the course of my transition that I don’t worry too much about the remaining somewhat-masculine features I possess.

But when I am practicing at the dojo, I find myself much more insecure about my appearance. Squashed into a sports bra and muffled under the heavy layers of my uniform top, my breasts are much less noticeable. Ditto my hips. With my hair pulled back for comfort and convenience, my face reveals a masculine cast. I suddenly become very conscious of how much taller, heavier, and broader I am than most ofthe other female students

You can read the rest here! And yes, new posts to the Blog Itself are coming, ducks!

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I Get Around (and Around and Around…)

Categories: i get around, Your RDA of Outrage

Howdy, ducks! Sorry no posts recently…I plead being busy writing this bit about Caster Semenya for the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section!

And while a sex test sounds benign enough, it won’t be anything as simple as a DNA test – as Meloncye McAfee points out, there are a variety of conditions that can lead to a man having two X chromosomes, or a woman having a Y chromosome. No: Semenya will not only have her DNA checked, her urine and blood sampled and her genitals examined, but will even be required to have an interview with a psychologist – hopefully to help her get over the trauma of having all these tests done in a media fishbowl.

The irony is that had she not been born female, she could compete perfectly legally.

The rest of the article can be found here.

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Think It Like A Man

Categories: all about me, i get around

Greetings, ducks! Today I am very pleased to announce that I have been invited to be a regular contributor to the Below the Belt blog, “a multi-faceted genderblog designed to provide a space for informed, critical commentary about gender, sex, sexuality, and the many other aspects of gender facing people around the world.”

They do really good and cool work over there, and I’m enormously happy to be working with them.

My first post for them is up today:

In between rounds of the pub trivia contest, my friend Vanessa told me that
sometimes people tell her she thinks like a man.

“I hate it,” she said. “It’s so sexist.”

I knew what she meant; Vanessa has been on several game shows and has an
astonishing recall of facts, as well as a killer competitive edge–two things
generally considered either “male” or at least “unfeminine.”

I wondered if people thought the same thing about me.

In my pretransition days, I’m sure many people saw me as “thinking like a
man.” I used to be told that I was very logical; I was good at analysis; I was a
fierce debater. Yet at the same time, I was always convinced that on some level
I was “thinking like a woman”–because part of me was convinced beyond all
debate or contrary evidence that I was female.

Go on over to BTB to read the rest of the post.

Oh, and I even get this cool pinkified avatar!

This is so cool.

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Adventures in Transition: Édition Internationale

Categories: all about me, i get around, travels with CL

A dear friend of mine recently had her GRS done up in Montreal. She’s had a long history of complications from surgery, and sadly this was no exception–so yesterday her son and I hit the road and took a seven-hour road trip up to visit her. (It would have been six hours, but I always get lost–also, asking a truck driver for directions to a gas station when you speak a very imperfect French is a wonderfully Dadist exercise.)

She’s doing a little better today, and was surprised and pleased to see us, so I’m very glad we were able to run up here.

It also reminds me of a few things.

This isn’t the first time I’ve visited Dr. Brassard’s clinic; I came here last spring, when I was considering using him as my surgeon. (I ended up going to Thailand when I decided to have more things done; it cost the same to go to India and Cambodia–and fly home via business class–as it would have cost to have everything done in Canada.)

Back then, I still wasn’t sure when I would even want to get surgery; it wouldn’t be until the fall of that year that it would take on a sudden urgency. I ended up hanging out over the weekend with a few of the patients who were waiting to have their surgery done–there was a very pre-op vibe.

Appropriately enough, thios time all the patients are post-op, the last group of surgeries before the clinic’s summer vacation. And it carries me back to my own early post-operative days, the camraderie between me and the other patients who were staying at the hotel. (We had two pizza parties while I was there, and generally hung around in each other’s rooms for a while; I also met the nicest person in the world there, a trans woman who had made the trip on short notice to be with her friend who was having the surgery.)

I don’t use the word comrade lightly, either; we were like any group of disparate people thrown together by a painful shared experience–we bonded fairly tightly while we were together, but our natural differences pulled us apart afterwards. I’ve seen so many different takes on what we went through: from people who convinced this was the most important and transformative experience of their lives to grim-faced agnostics like myself who were convinced that nothing important would change after surgery. (I was wrong, though not necessarily about what the surgery did to me; it was how I felt about myself afterward that was the radical difference.)

The residence where people stay to recuperate here is quite pleasant, and is another what if place for me: because this is more or less what it would have been like to stay here had I done my own surgery here. In some ways, it would have been easier–on the same continent as my family, and my French is about eleventy-million times better than my Thai (and my French ain’t that great, so you get the picture.) Not that I regret my trip, because I got to finally see India and Angkor Wat, and even use my French when talking to Frenchwomen in Thailand for their own surgery. But it is kinda nice to make it up here and see what it would have been like.

Meanwhile, I’m worried about my friend, but happy as well to be able to be up here for her. Send her some good wishes if you can.

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