Categotry Archives: tiger beatdown rocks

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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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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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The Secret Lives of Married Men–Now With Bingo Cards

Categories: i get around, privilege stories, the male ogle, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all, tiger beatdown rocks

Where am I again? Why, Tiger Beatdown:

I have not, temporally speaking, been doing this here ladybusiness for all that long. (Some would draw a facetious comparison, in fact, to the amount of time I have in fact been a lady, but as that number would vary between never and 37 years depending on whether you asked Germaine Greer or Kate Bornstein, I’ll just move on.)
Yet even that short time, the depressing amount of material that exists out in the lady-hating or lady-indifferent or just lady, get me a beer world can drag you down. Why, you say to yourself as you labor over your blog in a hot kitchen (well, I’m baking cookies, see…) should I address another MRA apologia, tear apart another straw-feminist, or deal with this week’s Exciting Variation on the Tone Argument. (I solve those by getting louder.)
But then, as Sady herself discovered, you come across something absolutely stunning in its bold sweep, all-encompassing douchery, and just plain ol’ damnfoolishness.

 Yosh!

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A Purloined Girlhood Part 1a: Wild at Heart

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

Hey, where am I today? Over at Tiger Beatdown!

I saw “Where the Wild Things Are” this weekend, ducks. (One of the advantages of living in the Great American Metropolis is that movies tend to hang around a surprising length of time.)

I saw it because of Spike Jonze, and because I am just old enough to have grown up in the Golden Age of Maurice Sendak — that hazy, golden late afternoon in America when Sesame Street had become established, the children raised by Dr. Spock were raising their own children, and Sendak and Shel Silverstein dominated the bookcases of every “with it” parent. (I was too young to say things like “with it,” of course, but I had teenaged cousins, and was vaguely aware of things like The Disco… we are talking about that point in history when The Captain and Teneille had their own TV show, people.) It was an age brought to you by CTW.

 Vamanos!

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Now Let Us Praise Complicated Women, And Condemn Them While We’re At It

Categories: Humorless Tranny™, tiger beatdown rocks, transphobia: now in blog format, your RDA of intersectionality

So Mary Daly died.

(You might have heard about it.)

I don’t have much to say about Mary Daly, really. I haven’t read anything by her (because I am a bad feminist, or at least a lazy one, or at least somebody made very theory-adverse thanks to my graduate studies in English.) I’m not really sure if I’d heard her name before she died (because I am a bad…oh, you know.)

But I was utterly unsurprised to find out that she was a Second Wave radical feminist who, you know, hated me.

(Well, one thing surprised me: she was Janice Raymond’s thesis adviser. Janice Raymond! And no, I’m not going to link to anything about her–if you’re here, you should know about her; if you don’t, use the bloody Google.)

As I said over at the ol’ Tiger Beatdown today, it’s clear that Mary Daly gave a lot of women a new way of looking at the world; that in a very real sense, she liberated them. And the glowing testimonials of people who knew her–about how generous she was with her time, how she helped other women writers and feminists, how she created, in the truest sense of the word, sisterhood with her fellow women.

But I just can’t be all that happy about it, because she also wanted to deny me all those things; because to Mary Daly, I would never have been woman or even feminist enough.

And this doesn’t even touch on the criticisms Audre Lorde leveled at her of ignoring the voices of women of color except as anecdotes, a bit of “color” for a chapter mostly about white women–something Daly never publicly cleared up, at least not while Lorde was alive–or her belief that the male of the species should be reverse decimated (leave one in ten alive) and those secluded in zoos.

And yet a lot of women I admire got their start in feminism with her.

And yet she thought I was a monster.

And yet she was dismissive towards women of color.

And….and what? There was a lot of good Mary Daly did. There was a lot of bad as well. How do we sort this out? How can you honor the legacy of people who were noble in some ways, and wicked in others?

How do you make sense of human lives?

Me, I dunno; like I said, I never read her. But her fame should not expunge her failings.

(And if you want a balanced, no-nonsense appraisal of her good and bad, Sady has it.)

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A Purloined Girlhood

Categories: i get around, tiger beatdown rocks

I have a new post up at Tiger Beatdown!

It’s the first post in a series I’m calling “A Purloined Girlhood” where I look at the ways that watching movies about growing up female have a completely different resonance for me nowadays. The first post is about Say Anything:

You have an odd relationship to the past when you’ve transitioned.

There’s barriers, thresholds, hesitations. Things Not Wanted To Be Said. Occasionally, misdirection and dodging. It can get…complicated.

You see, I am a woman in her thirties Without A Past–or at least, Without An Adolescence.

There are times I don’t regret not having had a girlhood; from what I’ve observed, and from what I’ve heard from my friends, it can definitely be one of those things that is Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be.

But at the same time, I feel, sometimes…a loss? A lack? A missing connection between me and other women? Adolescence is such a key experience for so many of the women I know, so my lack of a girlhood sometimes leaves me feeling–still–like I’m on the outside, looking in. It’s difficult to pin down, exactly, especially because doing so sometimes brings back all the pain I felt during my childhood: the pain of having a boyhood I never wanted thrust upon me, the pain of watching others have the life I wanted and not being able to figure out what to do about it.

The next one will be on Heathers.

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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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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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QFT

Categories: tiger beatdown rocks, vive le feminisme, why i blog

From Sady of the incredible Tiger Beatdown:

Tiger Beatdown: Who Takes Responsibility for the Responsibility-Takers? Hint: Not Linda Hirshman

Because feminists – whether or not they have been victims of crimes – are engaged in continual acts of strength. To be a feminist is to be, on one level or another, an activist: actively engaged in confronting the problems of the world and seeking to change them. They confront injustices. They speak up. They refuse to shut up. They cause trouble. They take responsibility, not just for their own happiness, but for the betterment of the world around them. They also (especially if they are lady feminists) continually make the point that they are not weak, they are not passive, and they are not incapable of independence or self-determination. They are, in short, about as far from being victims as possible.

That will work as the mission statement of this blog.

And this has been another episode of What Sady Said.

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