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The Multiplexes Giveth…

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, let's hear it for the ladies

“So do we get to watch Steel Magnolias?” That was my long-suffering girlfriend’s response when I told her about this particular writing gig. This is an ongoing joke between us. Every so often, she’ll ask if I suddenly like Steel Magnolias and I’ll tell her that I still don’t like it and she’ll mutter something like “the estrogen isn’t working.” My take on that film is similar to Manhola Dargis’s take on Nora Ephron in an interview she gave to Jezebel earlier this year:

“Sometimes I think women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That’s just like, blech.“

One of the things that most annoyed me about Steel Magnolias was the Julia Roberts character, who contracts one of those diseases whose main symptom seems to be a tendency for the character to get more beautiful. In film circles, it’s known as Ali McGraw’s Syndrome and dying beautifully is a hallmark of weepies.  Women are never asked to go all Robert De Niro when it comes to looking bad on screen, and it’s particularly egregious here. The only time I can remember actually seeing a major actress get anywhere near what dying from an incurable disease might really be like was in Mike Nichols’s Wit, in which Emma Thompson’s prickly English professor is confronted by the unpleasant facts of the end of her life. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a legitimately great movie and you SHOULD see it, but I’ll never, ever watch it again myself. It looks too much like my mom’s slow death from breast cancer, and I imagine it looks like what my own death might be like at some nebulous time in the future.

Which brings me in a roundabout circle to what’s on my mind today. Continue reading →

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Negotiations and Love Songs

Categories: adventures in transition, bitterness, the tiniest violin in the world

I met my old lover
On the street last night
She seemed so glad to see me
I just smiled
And we talked about some old times
And we drank ourselves some beers
Still crazy after all these years

So it seems that The Second Awakening, that is when I get around to posting on it, which is approximately never right now (New Job! Ongoing Tiger Beatdown Commitment! Did We Mention A Little Footy Match Between Deutschland and England Today?), is going to be my Whine Blog. Which is okay, I guess, although I seem to have done a lot of work just to make a MySpace page.

So today, I’m going to talk about love. Yes, love.

Well, okay, and sex.

I’m not the kind of man
Who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on
Old familiar ways
And I ain’t no fool for love songs
That whisper in my ears
Still crazy after all these years

See, the thing is, for a long time I’ve been good at being alone. I made an art of it: I could sing the libretto of loneliness with the best of them, ’tis true. And you know, it’s mostly good; I have my cats, my writing, some good friends, a decent job, the occasional trip to other corners of the map. I’m not complaining much.

Sure, there was a time after my marriage imploded, then exploded, then imploded twice more before exploding a few more times, when I wasn’t so good anymore at being alone. I’d been in relationships, long-term relationships, for a decade, and I didn’t really remember how to deal with being alone again, especially not suddenly. Don’t fret, ducks; it worked out, and it gave me the space to figure out what it was that I needed to do with my life.

And part of what I was going to do to myself, I realized, carried the very real risk of being alone. Permanently. As long-vanished as my fertility.

Now, I was okay with it then, and I’m okay with it now. It was a price I was willing to pay, and in any case back then me and my Ex-Significant Other of Variable and Often Fabulous Gender were still an item, still going strong. So I’d beaten the odds, right? Had cake, ate it too, went back for more cake.

But there wasn’t any more cake, it seems. Me and SOOVAOFG broke up (it was a long-distance relationship in any case), and I was back where I started, although with several problems in my life fixed. All well and good.

Except…

Except…

Except, sometimes, you meet people. People you like, and people you’re even attracted to. People you wouldn’t mind knowing, as the kids today don’t say anymore, a little better, if that’s how it was going to work out. Not like major lust or even burning infatuation; just finding somebody that you think there might be a spark of something, a little glimmer of possibility.

And when that happens, then the long hours alone are harder to distract yourself through, and you don’t feel like staying home, but you don’t feel like going out either, because you’re too depressed to be with other people, even if that was what you needed to do, really. But it’s just too hard.

Four in the morning
Crapped out, yawning
Longing my life away
I’ll never worry
Why should I?
It’s all gonna fade

It’s hard because, once again, you can’t run from who you were, not really, not forever. Oh sure, you go around and live your life as if it never was any different. And you don’t make a big deal of things. You, don’t, really, even when you are a blogger known pretty much for only this one topic.

But then, like I said, you meet somebody. And now what to do? Do you talk about who you were, the you that you never wanted to be? Do you just go on as if that you never was, like you wanted?

There are people who can handle things that way, because to them, it’s true. I don’t mean that in the sense of “to them, the sky is green”; I really mean that there’s no prevarication because they never felt themselves to be what other people said they were.

I envy those folks, sometimes. Maybe a lot.

Because for me, it’s harder, because I was always a bit of a borderline case, because I had a reasonably long and fairly successful life before transition, because I’ve hardly cut any ties with my old life, and because, damnit, it took me over three decades to finally be honest with myself about being a woman and it’s hard for me to to just automatically assume that habit. Oh, sure, I’ll defend trans women as women until my face Doppler shifts from blue to red; and I believe it about myself with a firm conviction.

But. But it’s hard for me to also not include the “trans” part in there.

That’s a weakness, maybe. A flaw. The more-trans-than-thou crowd will pin it on me being a poseur, a “late transitioner”, a cross-dresser, a man in a dress. Whatever.

But it’s hard, I guess, for me–just me, mind you; I’m making no claims on anyone else–to be open and honest enough to pursue a relationship with somebody and hold…that…fact…back.

Now I sit by my window
And I watch the cars
I fear I’ll do some damage
One fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years

So what do you do, when you’ve met somebody you like, maybe even have a crush on, when the way their eyes light up when they smile can make you smile just remembering it, and yet you think that maybe knowing about who you were would be the deal-breaker, that you’d be friends, of course, but that’s all? Especially what do you do on the weekend where your Dilation Drama Theater screening was an episode of “Law and Order: Special Dead Lady Unit” about Teh Tranz, about a girl who hadn’t told her boyfriend, because she was afraid of losing him? And he was filled with rage and more-or-less killed himself? And the character in question had been beaten repeatedly and ends up gang-raped in prison at the end? Besides cry in the shower for a while, that is.

I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out. Especially after they, the subject of your little crush, has already been fairly open with you, has made their own revelations and was worried on their end about losing you. Me. Your mixed-up correspondent.

I mean, “Gift of the Magi” anyone? To tell, or not to tell? Either way risks losing, either now or later. No good choices here.

How can it be, that when you’re finally fixing your life, really emerging as the person you wanted to be, the person who could finally really give, that you realize that maybe nobody will ever want to get?

I don’t know. I wish I could tell you. I wish I had my normal moral authority, ducks, and could fill you with some wrath and rage and well-turned oratory. I wish I could do it for you, so you could do it for me.

It’s just that even when you’re a past master at the art of loneliness, sometimes the long years before you weigh a lot more than they usually do, and the realization that there’s a very good chance you won’t be with anyone becomes a steeper price than you thought.

Oh, still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years

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Introducing: Doctor Morbius

Categories: Uncategorized

[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.

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Proto-Feminist Beach Party!

Categories: Uncategorized

Greetings, meatbags and meatbaguettes.

I come to you a witness to a bleak, insipid future, twisted from apathy and self-amusement. A future where I awake in the middle of the night and realize that despite the multitude of laughs my faux queer studies critiques of Star Trek: TNG and World of Warcraft may have provided the queer community, ultimately I have done less good for the feminist cause than Kate Gosselin and granola-flavored sports drink. Overwhelmed with self-loathing and despair, I throw myself to the floor, weeping. The cacophony gives away my position to the mecha samurai gender police, who pull me away to die in the high fructose corn syrup mines before I have time to make sure my eyebrows are even.

We must rewrite the future. Or, at the very least, vandalize its Wikipedia article.

Thus I have come to the present day to fight the kyriarchy on its own turf. And get some of those banana waffles from Trader Joe’s that I like.

I’m going to take the fight to The Man or get a million pageviews trying.

Which brings me to the other reason I’ve come before you.

I know you were all really excited about charging into the belly of the beast all cowgirl style getting gunned down in righteous infamy, but the truth is you’re probably better off staying here and holding down the fort. We can’t all be guerilla feminist cyberspace commandos. Commandettes? Nevermind.

What I’m getting at is that the cause needs sympathizers as much as, if not more, than it needs soldiers. No, I’m not talking about when an American pro wrestler suddenly turns bad and starts dressing as whatever country or culture we’re at war with to anger all the white cis hetero fans in the audience. Jesus.

The fuck are you doing watching that haberdashery anyhow? ChickFight or gtfo.

I’m talking about establishing a support network. Grassroots and shit. Setting up safe houses and supply drops and raising morale and stuff.

Hey, don’t rush me. I’ll get to the literal logistics in my own whimsical time. Chill.

We have, as a community, grossly underestimated the effect of activist burnout on our numbers. This isn’t saving the rainforest or getting Facebook to add a polyamorous option in the relationships section. Nobody’s going to burn down your crops on Farmville for speaking your mind or demanding your rights. The threat of harassment in this “line of work” has a money back guarantee. Even if you make it through the jungles without being picked off by the enemy, you can still get team-killed by misinformed allies or other activists who feel your gender identity is an “invasion of their space”. Experts in the field call this phenomena “fucking bullshit”.

Let’s clap our hands and believe very hard that we can achieve unilateral equality within a year. That’s a year you may have to go without family, childhood friends, job security, physical safety, steady housing, social validation, and a whole litany of other basic life necessities that I won’t go into because getting up as early as I do for my day job is daunting enough already. Now add onto that the questions universal (How will I pay all these bills? How much food will it take to keep me alive? Where do I get those shiny metal things that turn on the pinball machine?) Then there’s, you know, that whole “write essays, read lots of blogs, protest on street corners and talk into microphones without drooling all over yourself” business, which shouldn’t take up TOO much of your time if you’re the fucking Flash.

Yeah. Not so “copy and paste”, is it?

So okay. You probably can’t, or shouldn’t, be joining the fray. You have your reasons. A job. A family. Living with illness or disability. Whatever the reason, you just can’t devote as much time to the fight as others. That does not, no matter what anyone (especially me) tells you, make you less vital to the cause.

Here. If you’ll permit me to get all anecdotal:

When I played little league soccer and my team lost or I got a fucking cleat right in the knee or something, the only solace there was to be had was knowing at the end of the game there would be juice boxes and fruit and feigned (but well-meaning) praise from my parents. I played soccer for three years. Without those end of the game morale boosts to mend my frayed self esteem, I wouldn’t have lasted two months.

Soccer kids need juice boxes. Freedom fighters need safe houses. Mix and match as you see fit.

One to do the fighting and one to give the former a helping hand when they need it is more valuable than two who fight, burn out from lack of support, and quit within a year.

Now, before you open another browser tab and bring up my last post and make me eat my words, let me clarify: being a sympathizer, a support, a helping hand, can also be a 24/7 gig. In some cases, being a supporter is a greater challenge than being an activist.

My activism consists mostly of writing and art, both of which I would be doing anyway if I wasn’t an activist. I can’t fucking wait for this civil war to be over so I can actually do this shit for money. I enjoy this. I get an immense amount of gratification for this. Much more, I imagine, than you will doing any of the things I suggest at the end of this article (with maybe one or two exceptions…brown chicken brown cow). I’m not a hero. I just know all the songs.

If there’s any money left over after I make my student loan payment this month, I will buy a hat and tip it towards you.

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

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O Hai!

Categories: Uncategorized

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.

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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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Introducing: They Call Me Vroom

Categories: Uncategorized

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.

by

The Rest Is Silence

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, double bound, failings, how to tell if you've transitioned, the tiniest violin in the world

So, hi, ducks.

I’ve been away a bit. Not completely away, I’ve written a thing or two here and there. But I haven’t written much of late.

I have an excuse, for what it’s worth.

The excuse is that I was depressed to the point of…well, of taking rather irrevocable action to solve my depression.

Now, that would be kind of hasty, I think. But I was down so far that I couldn’t really see up anymore.

The thing is, I got laid off at the end of March. The job sucked, so I didn’t miss it, but I sure as heck missed the money. Because coupled with my previous client’s habit of not paying my invoices until I screamed and turned blue, and then being out of work for two months, my savings were pretty thin. And I’d been using my paychecks from the last gig to reduce some of my debt, so that I could live cheaper than I do, in case this kind of thing happened again. Which is a great plan, but it blew up in my face when I got laid off after only ten weeks.

I don’t have to tell you it’s hard out there. It’s hard, even if your day job is a fairly skilled position, and in one of the few segments of the economy that’s making a come back. Even so, it’s hard out there. I would send out resumes and work the phones but only a trickle would come back. I had one or two interviews but no second interviews.

At some point I realized that I was between six and ten weeks from being bankrupt, and losing everything I’ve spent the last fifteen years building.

I have to stop myself there. What I am complaining about is still incredibly privileged. I’d lose my home, but I wouldn’t be homeless–my family can easily put me up, and a friend of mine would do the same. That’s one thing.

Another is…that I’m complaining about the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to live in my expensive (now–it wasn’t when I moved in) neighborhood in Manhattan. I mean, boo fucking hoo, yeah? That would only be something I’d share with all but 1.8 million people in the world. This is not a tragedy.

But all the same, it felt like one. This apartment has been my home for over eight years; it’s where I lived with someone for the first time, where I got my first pets as an adult, the place where I’d come home to a person I loved, the place where I decided to transition and the place where I made that happen. And the neighborhood feels the same to me; I’ve lived within three blocks of this apartment for the last fifteen years.

And too this is the only place I’ve ever wanted to live, and I’ve sacrificed (some) to get here.

And also…it was shocking how quickly it could all get swept away. Three months could do it. That seemed shocking.

There was other stuff too. Between the fall and the last two months, this is the longest I’ve been out of work as an adult. I’ve had a job of some kind since I was seventeen. I’ve always found a way to get some work in the door.

So all that, plus our threadbare economy, had me down. But there was some other stuff. And I think I need to talk about this, because it is a feminist issue, because it is something I can comment on maybe more than other people.

That was the two strikes (at least) I had against me: that I was a woman trying to get a job in technology, and that I was a trans woman trying to get a job in technology.

All that stuff you may have heard about how much harder it is for women just to look professional is true. A stupid example: getting an interview would cost me at least ten bucks, because I’d go and get my nails done, because I can’t put a sheer color on myself and have it look good, and because where I was looking for work, women at my professional level don’t wear colored nail polish.

Okay, that’s a privilege thing, and maybe just my own prejudices. But when you have big hands (and you worry about what people might conclude about that), you do your best to not draw attention to them either from lack of care or for flamboyance.

Anyway. I had other stupid image issues. I haven’t been able to afford a decent hair cut in a while now–and a bad haircut would be held against me far more than it would a man–so I had to either try to blow it out and go long, or pin it up and hope I didn’t look too masculine. I’ll talk more about that in a bit, but: this is an issue for every professional woman, and it’s one of the cruelest of the catch-22s of patriarchy. To wit: professionalism is defined by men’s dress codes. So they tend to make women look more masculine. But you can’t look too masculine! But you don’t want to look too feminine either! It’s the same dynamic as the pointless manicures: don’t get your nails done, and you look too butch and like you can’t be bothered to be professional. But have red nails and you might be too feminine. And so it goes.

These are of course my prejudices. People can and do make either end of the spectrum work. But it’s a much tougher, much more individual struggle than it is for most men. That you’re getting straight from the horse.

Of course the other part of butch vs femme, masculine vs feminine for me was worrying about being read as trans. If my hair is up, I don’t have to worry about it looking too bad, but will it make my face look too masculine? My pumps are my most neutral dress shoes, but do they make me too tall? Will my voice hold up for an entire interview? Will they know? Will they care? It doesn’t really matter that I live in a place where there are workplace protections for trans people. I’d never be able to prove anything.

I’m not really making that up, not that you would think I am. There was this study by Make the Road New York which is pretty depressing in just how blatant the discrimination is. And yeah, I know, it was retail, right CL? I mean customers public face corporate image! Surely it’s different in other jobs.

Surely you jest. You think if people aren’t comfortable buying jeans from a trans lady that having one be your CTO is going to make people more comfortable?

Or to put it more simply: everywhere I went I hoped they didn’t make me fill out a formal job application. Because then I’d have to give my social security number and Ghu knows what they’d be able to find out; sure, I fixed that and my driver’s license, but even with letters to my credit bureaus, that stuff just lasts forever.

This story has a happy ending. I finally found a small place where I was able to meet with the guys doing the hiring right away and I hit it off with them. And two days later they offered me a job that will pay my bills and even get me out of debt. Which again makes me one privileged cat, one lucky ducky: and I’m very thankful.

But for a long time there I was really scared. And you want to know what one of my signs that I’ve transitioned is? I no longer am confident I’ll always pull things out anymore, not like I used to be. And that’s part of the reality of being a woman and being trans in the world today.

So hey: where have I been in the meantime? Well, Below the Belt is on hiatus, but I’m now a blogger at Change.org! You can read the two pieces I have up so far–about a trans woman and the crappy treatment the DC police gave her, and more about our favorite douchebags, Roman Polanski and Bernard Henri-Lévi!

And over on Tiger Beatdown, where I am somehow now the Senior (non)Contributor, I have this trifle about “The Tudors.” Enjoy!

by

Kate Bornstein ♥’s TOTWK; Or, It’s Hip to be Au Contraire

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, beating them at their own game, bitterness, don't get your panties in a bunch, Humorless Tranny™, i heart oppression, kyriarchy, the transsexual empire strikes back, transphobia: now in blog format

Hey, ducks! I’ve been talking quite a bit of late about Ticked Off No-I-Won’t-Say-Its With Knives. You know, because of the outrage, and because I went to the protest. What ho!

Now, the general consensus here in Transland (Population: More than you think) is that this thing is outrageous, especially the trailer (which Luna has now modified to take out the references to recently brutally murdered transfolk. Um, thanks–I’m glad to know it took a massive outcry for you to display basic humanity! No, kudos to you, sir!) But that doesn’t mean that there’s massive agreement on the film. Some people actually are defending it! Trans people! Trans people who were not employed in it as actors!

Take, for example, Tom Leger’s post over at Trans Group Blog:

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