Categotry Archives: Uncategorized

A wild Real Life appears!

They Call Me Vroom uses “focus on writing commitments”.

Real Life uses “flooded basement”!

It’s super effective!

They Call Me Vroom uses “walk it off”.

Real Life uses “Pride Weekend”!

It’s super effective!

They Call Me Vroom is about to faint!

Real Life uses “begin planning trans conference held out in Nor Cal redwoods!”

They Call Me Vroom uses “take some time to get her shit sorted out and feel bad about it later”.

Pride. The activist blogger’s lament. A year toiling beneath the dull bluish hue of a computer monitor, forwarding e-mails, penning snappy one-liner cuts on queer snark message boards (more like TWISTED CISTER, AMIRITE?) and conducting grueling, midnight-oil burning research on a possible cure for that special type of stupid that causes “Harry Benjamin Syndrome”, all so you can be outdone by a cadre of shirtless assholes on the Bank of America float.

Oh em gee, how progressive and brave of them to show their support of the cause…and advertise at a street fair with at least a million fucking people in attendance.

I’m sorry. It’s not BoA. Or the girl in rainbow armbands and the shirt that said “straight not narrow” passing out flyers for some show of her friend’s band or whatever. Or the guy rubbing one out on the Burger King wall. It’s me.

Only I could go to SF Pride and be more excited about my ice cream sandwich than experiencing community and visibility and blah blah blah grumble get off my lawn. To say I had a terrible time would be untrue. I got to see a living statue (and squee), took my picture in front of a banner for my girlfriend (who couldn’t attend)’s rugby team, and got to use the word “classist” in casual conversation sans eye-rolling from my friends. So it wasn’t a total bust.

Now I know how a freegan left inside the Mall of America must feel. How can there be this many people and nothing to do? I mean, there’s tons of shit to buy, but nothing to do. And who the fuck told Leather Alley it was okay to charge a $5 donation? AND HOW CAN IT BE A DONATION IF IT’S MANDATORY? I ALREADY GAVE YOU $10 AT FOLSOM LAST YEAR! WHEN DOES IT END, I ASK YOU, WHEN DOES IT END?!

I think I need to regain my perspective. So I’m going home to Phoenix for the 4^th of July weekend. Four days of my friends and family referring me by my birth name/gender and being asked for ID every time I use a public rest room should give me something to really cry about.

I seem to forget that out here in SF, I’m considered among the privileged. I pass. 100 percent of the time. I have access to hormones, and have never gone longer than two months without. I have a partner who accepts and validates my identity. The fuck do I have to complain about? I bet I won’t even last four days in Phoenix. Five bucks says I crack the first time an establishment refuses to serve me. I’ll be missin’ all that fancy big city commercialism when people are poking my hair and tits, asking me if they’re real.

It’s easy to forget that not every front of the struggle is fought on balanced terrain. Here and now, my objective is not to be obligated to buy useless shit I don’t need as a condition to participate in my community. Tomorrow, in Phoenix, my mission will be to take a leak in peace. In April I am hosting/organizing/bottomlining a Camp Trans-esque event out here in Nor Cal. And while there, I will sit down with every person who attends and ask them what their day to day, real life experience conditions are, and be wiser with the understanding of just how misbalanced the needs and wants of the community per region really are. And then, I don’t know, I’ll become a famous artist activist and travel the country fighting the kyriarchy and sawing women in half or something. Maybe. I dunno. I’ll let you know when I’ve learned the “buy cupcakes without incident” trick down.

For every friend who asks me if I’ve heard about the passport policy change I will donate $1 to a charity of your choice.

[I’m so pleased to announce the debut of our next contributor, long-time commenter Dr. Morbius! Do yourself a favor and check out the movie reviews on her blog, because they’re amazing! And now she’ll be doing the same for us at The Second Awakening, plus tossing in our usual mix of feminism, trans-activism, and merciless burns of the New York Times. So without further ado, take it away, Doc…]

My initial reaction to C. L.’s invitation to contribute to The Second Awakening was along the lines of Jeff Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: “I can’t help but feel like there’s been a mistake.” I’m an amateur and untrained feminist, and I said so to C. L., to which she replied: “Amateur and untrained is how we do things at TSA!” So I guess I’m qualified to be here.

I’m guessing that most of the people who read TSA have no idea who I am, and that’s understandable. I mostly write about movies on my own blog(s) to a small audience that’s probably not much larger than my own circle of friends. Therefore, introductions are probably in order. My name is Christianne. I’m a movie addict. I’ve been writing about movies for my own edification since I was a teenager. I used to fill thick spiral-bound notebooks with movie reviews. I’ve been publishing my movie writing on the internet since 1997 on a vanity web site called “Monsters from the Id,” and later on my blog, “Krell Laboratories” (I have a thing for Forbidden Planet, as might also be evident in my nom du guerre, “Doctor Morbius”).  I was published in a book on horror movies called “Horror 101” in 2007. I presented a seminar on transgender imagery in mass media at the Southern Comfort Conference in 2005.  I’m currently a screener for a film festival, though I’m prohibited from saying which one. I also used to run a video store.  Those are my bona fides.

I’m also trans.

Movies and being trans are probably what I’ll write about here in varying combinations. I might even write about trans movies, but, frankly, trans portrayals in movies are usually such a festering cesspit that I may not have the intestinal fortitude to do that very often. When the most empowering cinematic depiction of being trans that I can think of is Bugs Bunny, I know that thinking about it will drive me to pistol and ball eventually if I’m not careful.  Still, I might have something to say about the curious subgenre of transgender kung-fu movies or the persistent transgender themes that crop up in the films of David Cronenberg. Or something like that.

That’s all for the future. Right now, I’d like to talk about a little bit of political synchronicity that happened to me yesterday. Early in the day, I read this piece by Dr. Jillian Weiss over on Bilerico, in which she basically gives up on politics in favor of hands-on activism. The whole piece is dispiriting and disillusioned and all I could think of while I read it was my own collisions with politics over the last year or so. In December, I attended a meeting of my town’s board of aldermen to speak in favor of a non-discrimination ordinance. I live in deep red-state bumfuck, so the very fact that this ordinance was even being considered had me a little bit gobsmacked. I almost wish that it wasn’t being considered at all, because it would have spared me the spectacle of a parade of fundie Christian pastors, each with a story of how terrible GLBT people are, replete with the usual comparisons to child molesters, polygamists, and drug addicts, and of how an anti-discrimination ordinance would infringe on their freedom of religion and freedom of speech (“Thou shalt not bear false witness” being one of the more fungible beliefs, I guess, because this ordinance, like all others like it, would have done no such thing). One particular speaker for the opposition wanted to know how people were supposed to identify “real” transsexuals and was in favor of some kind of identifying badge–I’m not kidding about this; he really suggested this. Fortunately, this guy was shouted down and not by someone from the GLBT continuum, but by an audience member who was Jewish. All told, there were about twenty speakers against the measure and only three in favor. It failed on a 2 to 4 vote, and I went home feeling EXACTLY like Dr. Weiss doubtless feels right now (or how I surmise that she feels based on her Bilerico post).  I didn’t have quite the same kind of let-down after lobbying my state legislature as part of a GLBT lobby day a few months later, but when I got the email from the organizers after the end of the legislative session informing us all that they hadn’t moved any of the initiatives on our agenda, it was still demoralizing. Anyway, as I say: I think I know how Dr. Weiss feels.

The second thing that happened was a phone call from the local Democratic Party inviting me to an organizing meeting for the upcoming campaign season. Two years ago, I might have jumped on it. This year, on this particular day, after reading Dr. Weiss’s post-mortem on the ENDA debacle, I’m hesitating. On the one hand, I really want to work against guys like Mister “Bring Back the Pink Triangle” and his clerical enablers, because keeping people like that out of politics is a matter of life and death. Further, GLBT issues do better locally than they do nationally (I mean, there are places in friggin’ Utah where it’s illegal to discriminate against GLB and T people; Utah!). Tip O’Neill was right when he said that all politics is local. On the other hand, I don’t believe in the Democrats right now. I have a problem with the idea that a choice between a far right and a center right party is any kind of viable political choice at all. It took me a long time to come around to the idea that conservatism is a march to the tar pits, but I firmly believe that these days and when I see Democrats tacking to the right, it makes me weep for the future. Lately, and not for the first time, I’ve been thinking that Sweden or Denmark might be lovely places to live. And then I think of the portrait of Sweden provided by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and I realize that life is a shit sandwich for women everywhere, no matter how progressive the government might be. That’s doubly so for trans women.

All of which makes my little obsession with movies seem frivolous in the end, but it’s what I know most intimately. I go to movies like other people go to church. In the absence of any kind of religious belief, art is where I find transcendence (only very occasionally, unfortunately). Even in the face of late-capitalist civilization, I think there’s still great meaning in human expression. Hell, in the face of late-capitalist civilization, I think art is even MORE important than it’s ever been.

So this is what I have to contribute.

Greetings, meatbags and meatbaguettes.

So, TCMV, I hear you ask in a shrill monotone that for some reason makes me miss my days in art school, what are some ways I can assist in the overthrowing of the patriarchy from the comfort of my own home?

Here is a small list of things our boys and girls out in the field needed yesterday.

• A hot meal. Feminists don’t let feminists eat hot pockets in the dark. A pretty girl who made me dinner did more for my state of mind than a fistful of pharmaceuticals.

• Gifts. Right as I was about to quit queer blogging forever, someone sent me a copy of Transparent in the mail. Now I’m writing for twice as many publications as before, and tomorrow I’ll be taking an international conference call to discuss being a managing editor of one of the biggest gender studies blog out there. OMG THE BOOKS ARE FUCKING MAGIC.

• Taking one for the team. Right now I want you to type “Sex improves” into google and see all the autocompletes it generates. Concentration. Health. Studying. Athletic Performance. Other stuff you probably need a little help with. Don’t guard that shit like the Guggenheim. Pass it around. Do your part in helping us create an army of super flexible human calculator feminists to bring down The Man. Hot damn, I’m getting horny just thinking about it.

• A place to crash (if they’re in town for something). The less money spent on accomodations or rental cars/public transit, the more you can spend on like flyers and signs and shit. And booze. Not that I think 24 packs of PBR should be associated with feminism. I’m just saying. We could use to win over as many people as possible.

•Pretty much anything you would do for a local band you were really into and wanted to see succeed. Hey. You never know. Maybe you’ll hit the jackpot and meet a trans feminist who’s also in a band. I hear these people exist out there, somewhere…(tell the door man you’re there to see Trapped In The Arcade and if we get enough to show up they’ll actually pay us!)

Til next time.

Fight the chaotic good fight.

-TCMV

Yeah, I have a post up…someplace other than here. You know where.

If I were to tell you that the New York Times had published something that skirted the line between outright misogyny and paternalistic smugness, you’d probably yawn. If I told you that Ross Douthat had said something mock-controversial about women, you’d probably note that I had come up with an observation of the same erudition that rain is wet and litterboxes stink. (I know. The litterbox thing seemed like a natural metaphor for a Ross Douthat column to me too.)

But ladies–and those few poor gentlemen in the room–I have news for you! Because according to Mr. Douthat, the long war of the sexes is finally over! And FEMINISM WON! YES! IT’S V-F DAY! YOU LADIES HAVE FINALLY DONE IT!

And how does Mr. Douthat know this? Because a teabagger candidate won a primary in Nevada. While female.

Mansplain away, folks.

So hey: the Second Awakening craves content! It demands it! It keeps me up all night mewling about it! And since I’ve got to feed it and the rest of my kittens–er, writing commitments–I’m in the process of adding some regular contributors to the site. I’ll have more on this soon, but in the meantime, I am very proud to introduce our first new regular contributor, They Call Me Vroom. I worked with Vroomsie, as we call her behind her back at the watercooler here in TSA Central, back on Below the Belt, and I’m very proud to have her join the team! (And if you are interested in writing for The Second Awakening, shoot me an email.)

I’m not here on behalf of the community. Any community. Nobody knows I’m here. This is…let’s call it a professional courtesy. Because you have to treat activism like a business. It is not a hobby. Remote control airplanes are a hobby. A hobby is something you can put off for a week or a month at no detriment to you or your quality of living. The struggle for your rights, as a woman, as a transgendered individual, as a queer, whatever it says on the button pinned to the strap of your messenger bag, is a 24/7 industry. There are no “slow periods” in the fight against the kyriarchy. Demand always outweighs the supply. And in that kind of a market, freelancing really is the way to go. I say this not to discredit the benefit of the community. There can be no fight, no struggle, without organization, and when the time comes we all need to heed the call, per se. But the community is busy. It has community-sized problems. The community does not have time to pressure your employer or frequented establishment to adjust their attitude towards our plight in the world. The community does not have the manpower to visit each and every one of our families and educate them. That’s your job. And my job. If you do yours, and I do mine, then alas, we can accrue small victories for ourselves and for others without having to involve the community. There is no greater service you can provide for “the cause” than to learn to think and act for yourself.

The problem with entrusting your identity to the collective is that nobody can or will agree on what any of this means. What does being a woman mean? What does being trans mean? Feminist? Activist? What does all it all mean? I’m waiting. You seem a little unsure there. Are you asking me or are you telling me? Write it down. Right now, write it down. Don’t show me yet. Are you finished? Give it to me. Before I read it, let me tell you what it means for me.

Being a trans woman, to me, is about learning how to mix that metaphorical lemonade. It means accepting that I may never be truly happy with my body presentation, because sexual reassignment surgery is not a fucking mindwipe. A vagina will not replace will erase the irrational anger I have towards my genetics for not being born with one in the first place, or at myself for not coming out earlier than I did or finding a better paying day job that would have expedited this whole process.  And then there’s still the guilt of being able to afford a vagina when there is a plethora of trans people hanging from the poverty line, unable to even procure hormones or clothing that matches their gender expression. All this and I still love myself and do my best to let others love me. That, to me, is pride.

I’m as sensitive as I can bear to be. I use language like “pre-op” and “pre-transition”. I refer to my genitals as my penis (and occasionally by car parts, though I’ve tried to tone that down upon realizing that I don’t know how a fucking car works and if these metaphors are even applicable). I don’t care if that language doesn’t sit well with you. I’m not speaking for you. I’m speaking for myself. I do my part by not spreading my thoughts and opinions around as the party line of the trans community. You can do yours by not giving your cis hetero friend in need of education a link to my blog. If you don’t agree with what I say, don’t let me speak for you. If your friends, family, employer, gardener asks you about pronoun usage or what constitutes an invasive question, I’m willing to bet my last rupee that you are going to be the only person they apply any of this new modern learning towards. So go ahead and tailor make the experience to fit you, with the caveat “this speaks only of my experience”. The most important lesson we can impart on our cis hetero loved ones is that no two of us are alike.

One of the nicest compliments I ever received was “being trans wasn’t the strangest thing about [me]”. I take pride in the eccentrically typical behavior my queer feminism compels me to exhibit. For example, after I began living as a woman, I gave up beef. Then poultry, pork. Last week I gave up fish. I am officially a full time vegetarian, though I’ve been preaching it a lot more than I’ve been practicing. I advocate vegetarian, vegan , and pescetarian options at queer spaces and queer get togethers. For me, queer feminism means recognizing the systemic brutality of the meat industry, and connecting that to the similarly ruthless oppression and subjugation of women and queers by The Man. I don’t use quotes because I take The Man very seriously. He believes you exist. You should return the favor. You might be one of the lucky majority who can sit through a Burger King commercial and not instinctively make the link between the “real men eat meat” sentiment and corrosive disease of “body image perfection” that has infected and overrun the “female oriented” magazines that populate your local supermarket. Real men eat red meat. Real women don’t eat at all. Fuck. That. You have your chicken fried steak and twice cooked pork, and I’ll keep my falafel and pad thai. Besides, if Hungry Man did come out with a tofu option it would probably taste like cancer.

This is how I relate to queer feminism and what it means to be. It’s a stereotype, and I own the ever-loving shit out of it. It’s more cost and energy effective in the long run to just admit what you, enjoy being it, and save yourself the countless hours spent actively contemplating ways you can be more atypical. My promotion of healthier, alternative eating habits as a means of embracing queerness and feminism is only as superficial and forced as you buying ever season of The L Word on DVD or bragging on your blog about how short your hair is and how you own no skirts or dresses. Just because it’s an “act” doesn’t make it insincere.  My experience may not match yours. In fact, in a way I hope it doesn’t. A community that makes no room for differing (but respectfully so) viewpoints will falter and implode with stagnation.

And let me ask you this: who the fuck am I, anyway? You wanna write for a trans feminist blog? Do what I did and become friends with a trans feminist activist who has a blog. Or fuck. Start your own. It’s that fucking simple. There’s no vetting process to get to where I am. You ever wonder why you can’t find your views and values adequately represented in the blogosphere? It’s probably because the person who should be doing that is reading this post right now and is too distracted with how much an idiot they think I am.

Don’t trust me with spreading your truth and telling your story. I work alone. And so should you. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, collaborators, sisters in arms, lovers. By fighting for yourself, you fight for others. In the end this all boils down to the freedom to express one’s individuality. We must lash out at the kyriarchy in every direction, like an octopus on crystal meth playing the drums.

If you come see the opening of my art show I’ll go to one of your games. Deal?

Okay. So that’s my answer. Let’s see what you wrote down .

Ah.

You drew a picture of me being hit by a…is that a train?

Clearly, I underestimated you. It shan’t happen again.

So guess who has a guest post up at Feministe today? (Hint: it’s me. I shamelessly self-promote a lot here.)

So here’s the thing. I want to talk quite seriously about the whole issue of sexual assault and trans women, bring in all kinds of good scholarship, talk quite soberly and calmly about the facts, weighing each one with all due rational consideration. In fact, as I type this my browser has a forest of tabs open to anti-violence centers, studies on the incidences of violence in the LGBT community, articles, policy papers, and citations to more of the same.

But I really can’t be scholarly and rational, I fear. I really can’t sit back and give you the statistics that will horrify for a moment, break up your day with some hideous imagery for however long it stays in your memory. I can’t do this because for one thing, the studies are practically non-existent–not too many people have bothered to investigate the prevalence of sexual assault in the trans community (and, as we’ll see, there’s probably a lot of underreporting anyway.) That’s one reason.

The other is that for trans women especially, sexual assault rarely stops there. In a depressing number of cases, the assault isn’t even mentioned. Because the victim is dead.

Go on, read the rest at Feministe!

I’m attending the Women, Action & the Media conference in New York today, so if you happen to be floating around there, come up and say hi! It looks to be fabulous!

Who dat saying they going to beat Below The Belt? Who dat? Who dat?

I had my birthday last week, which beyond the reminder that I am a) one milestone closer to ultimate mortality and b) so much older than so many of my internet comrades, was a true blast: I took the day for myself, finally caught “The Hurt Locker,” and had dinner with the hardest core of my friends. And friend gave me “Leonard Cohen: Live From London,” which takes me back every time I listen to it (which is constantly) to the concert of his we both had the good luck to be blown away by last year.

So, hey, yay for transfeminist. Pass you some nachos and maybe you’ll care, right?

But wait, things are going to get complicated.

On y va, cherie!

It’s Below the Belt time again!

I call myself transfeminist, because I identify as trans (with a little help from our wonderful society which does so much to keep me from forgetting it) and feminist. Usually this isn’t a problem: I identify as a woman, and  feminism is about furthering the causes and rights of women, and I am. so. there.

But at the same time it has to be acknowledged that feminism and transgender activism often have found themselves in at best an uneasy alliance, and at worst completely divorced from each other. A certain strain of radical feminism (see: Heart, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and my friends at AROOO) maintain a richly transphobic tradition of never seeing trans women as women (or trans men as men, for that matter; that’s why so many trans men have had no problem getting into MWMF), using such all-time hits as “mutilated men,” “colonizers,” and still number one with a bullet, “rapists.” (I always like that one. I once went looking for statistics on how many trans women get raped a year. The numbers proved very elusive–it seems most trans victims are either killed instead of being raped, or killed right after being raped.)

 Mach schnell!

 So Bil Browning posted a non-apology apology over at Bilerico and mumbled the usual things about wanting challenging posts, noted they had run stuff from ex-gay activists, made a typical mistake about the meaning of “safe space” (hint: it’s not a space where no one disagrees, it’s a space where people don’t get attacked based on who they are as a person rather than what they believe or do.) But let’s take Bil at face value: he wants challenging posts, and I’d certainly still like to write for Bilerico. Let’s see if this post would run there:

What is a homosexual? Well, there are two sorts who seem to be covered by the name, the gay guys and girls so good at portraying cartoon imitations of straight people, and queers, the folks who report that from an early age they’ve acted in ways that don’t look like how normal boys and girls act. Despite the equipment they were born with that belies their assertions, they say they are really attracted to men or really attracted to women.

What does it mean to be really attracted to a man or a woman? Since it’s not just about genitalia, it must be about personality, and what, one asks, is a male or a female personality? Even transsexual people nowadays concede that some men have attractions to men in ways thought to be exclusive to women, and some women have attractions to women in the sort that used to be thought exclusive to men. And transsexuals have always known that people of the same gender can be very different from each other. Isn’t it true that those we form mated relationships with are always complementary – even polar opposites – to ourselves?

Let me state it categorically. There is no such thing as a gay or lesbian personality. Personality is not a function of sexuality.

So where does that put the concept of homosexuality? In my view, down the tubes! And that leaves the further questions of how homosexuals got to think the way they do, and what to do to resolve their dilemmas. I hope I’ll be forgiven for rejecting as just plain silly the idea that some cosmic accident just turned these people into queers. What happened, more than likely, is that, from an early age, when they discovered that their personalities didn’t jibe with who little boys and girls are supposed to be attracted to, they just assumed they mustn’t be real straight little boys and girls–when in fact they’re just real transsexual boys and girls, and a sex-change is the natural and correct way for them to express this side of themselves.

So, parents of such little boys and girls, do not take them to the psychiatrist and treat them like they’re suffering from some sort of illness. Explain to them that, whatever the other kids say, real little girls attracted to boys, and real little boys are attracted to girls. And make sure the teachers are on the same page.

As for adults struggling with what to do about their feelings, I’d tell them too to stay away from the psychiatrists – those prime reinforcers of sexuality stereotypes – and remind them that whatever they’re feeling, or feel like doing, it’s perfectly possible with the sexuality everyone else has. If a man wants to sleep with a man; if a woman wants to sleep with a woman; if people want to change their sexuality; who says they can’t violate these perfectly arbitrary taboos? A short historical and cross-cultural survey should establish that men and women have worn and done all sorts of stuff. I recall reading something by Ron Gold in which it seemed that he thought at the age of 13 he liked boys. For starters, I’d have told him that I like boys too, but like normal people I got rid of my pecker to do it.

Perhaps it isn’t needless to say that a No to the notion of homosexuality does not excuse discrimination against gays or lesbians in employment, housing and public accommodation; and I strongly support legislation that would forbid it. I would, however, get after the doctors – the psychiatrists who use a phony medical model to invent a disease that doesn’t exist, and the activists who use such spurious diagnoses to endanger with horrific diseases the bodies of the deluded.

 Somehow I think not.