Feng Shui & Me

Yes, I’m one of those people. I hadn’t ever heard of Feng Shui back in the day, and I’ve been rearranging rooms for “flow” for as long as I can remember. I had a friend who used to make me come with her to see apartments so I could determine whether her furniture would work right in it. What I do, for the record, isn’t Feng Shui at all. I just have to feel right directionally.

When I moved into my apartment at Lawrence, I was so thrilled with the size of the place that I tried very hard to ignore how unfortunate the bedroom layout was. Until now. What happened is this: the other night I woke up in the morning and I had moved myself to sleep on the bed perpendicularly. In my sleep, that is, I had rotated myself a full 90 degrees.

So despite the fact that the room doesn’t work so well because of a misplaced radiator, I’ve rotated the bed the same 90 degrees I’d moved myself in my sleep, and voila: I just realized my bed is now facing North, as it should be. (It faces NE in Brooklyn, but that’s because Brooklyn’s crooked.)

I am hoping this clears up some of the wrong moves, wrong words, wrongness in general that has been plaguing me lately.

Cold Case: Daniela

(1:15 AM) …I get a night to stay up late enough to catch some old Cold Case episodes & guess what the plot twist is tonight? The girl who gets killed was a boy

(2:00 AM )… & this was a really good one, despite some language that made me wince … I guarantee it’d make most trans women cry their eyes out, in a good way. Check that: it’d make most people cry, I think.

Prop 8 & The NAACP

The NAACP has been one of our strongest allies in the fight against Proposition 8 in California. The national NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund (LDF) and the California branch of the NAACP joined other civil rights groups in filing a major brief before the California Supreme Court in support of equality, and LDF recently urged the California legislature to enact resolutions calling for the invalidation of Prop 8.

The NAACP is getting some push-back for these efforts. Now is the time for us to support them and show that coalition politics goes both ways. Please join me in expressing your support for their statement of equality to your local NAACP branch:

We are not alone in this fight. Let’s show that we know how to step up to the plate when others step up for us.

(via EJS & NCLR)

Benefit Performance

Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund and PFLAG New York City invite you to Christine Jorgensen Reveals: A very special benefit performance supporting the work of Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund and PFLAG New York City

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
7:00 PM to 8:30 PM

The Lion Theatre at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street (Between 9th and 10th Avenues)

Tickets are $40, and you can buy them here.

Two Tune Tuesday: MIA & Annabella

This week maybe an odd mix, but maybe not: MIA is Tamil, Annabella’s Burmese. How often do women of southeast Asian descent show up in the pop charts?

There were so many Bow Wow Wow tracks to choose from, but I couldn’t resist this one. There’s so much about Annabella’s early appearances as BWW’s front that are – erm, problematic, as a feminist. Manipulations by svengali McLaren that got her to pose naked for a BWW album cover, naked, at age 15, among them. & Yet. & Yet: there was something about Annabelle that said something to me when I was 15 about being cool & tough & sex-positive. With a mohawk.

Get a playlist!

Drag Day

Today is the 1st annual Drag Day at Lawence University. Okay, it’s just the first, but I’m hoping it’s not the last. The students in my Trans Lives course expressed a desire to play with gender, and I thought it’d be safest on a day that’s already a little nuts: Mardi Gras.

So laissez les bon temps rouler & have a good Drag Day!

Agile Gene Splitting

“Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another, or different by virtue of one’s similarity to a third. So it is with individuals. A short man is different from a tall man, but two men seem similar if contrasted with a woman. So it is with species. A man and a woman may be very different, but by comparison with a chimpanzee, it is their similarities that strike the eye – the hairless skin, the upright stance, the prominent nose. A chimpanzee, in turn, is similar to a human being when contrasted with a dog: the face, the hands, the 32 teeth, and so on. And a dog is like a person to the extend that both are unlike a fish. Difference is the shadow of similarity.”

Gorgeous, eh? It’s the first paragraph of Matt Ridley’s The Agile Gene, a book I’m currently teaching in Lawrence University’s Freshman Studies program.

It articulates in a new way the old adage about lumpers & splitters, or hedgehogs & foxes, but then it adds what I’d call a postmodern spin: lumpers can’t be lumpers unless there are eras when splitters hold sway.

Philly in Spring

I won’t be at the Femme Fever Ball I blogged about yesterday because I’ll be speaking in Milwaukee, but I will be back on the East Coast this spring, in early May, in Philly, for the Liberty Conference. Some of my fellow presenters include:

Dr. Richard Doctor, Arlene Lev, Dr. Jeffrey Spiegel, Dr. Sherman Leis, Dr. Jennifer Burnett, Dr. Sandra Simmons, Dr. James Thomas, Dr. Richard Hauer, Dr. Mark Zukowski, Dr. Maureen Osborne, Rev. Karla Fleshman, Allison Lang, Jan Brown, Stephanie Battaglino, Mona Rae Mason, Lady Ellen Melissa Clark, and Georgie Jessup

I’ll be speaking at the Saturday Luncheon about relationships in a talk called “How We Love You: Let Us Count the Ways” which will address issues of identity, intimacy, compromise, sex, family, and marriage.

You can read more & register at www.transeventsusa.org.