Advocate Screws It Up

JD Freeman of the Alabama Gender Alliance sent me a copy of a letter he wrote to The Advocate:

Dear Editor –

Regarding this article:
http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid90450.asp

Here you have a self-identified transgender person, and you have refused to honor that person’s affirmed gender, making the bigoted editorial choice to call Kimah a man and to apply the masculine pronouns “he” and “him”.

You should know better. How are we to achieve liberation when our own publications mistreat us?

It’s time for me to renew my subscription. Guess you don’t need my money after all.

I’m copying GLAAD. Clearly, you need to re-read their media guide. I’m also copying NCTE and every major trans blog.

You owe Kimah an apology.

J D ‘Ox’ Freeman
President
Alabama Gender Alliance

TransOhio Conference 2009: August 14-16

I’ll be speaking at TransOhio’s annual conference this year, deliverying both a keynote and doing a workshop about sex & identity.

When: August 14-16, 2009
Where: Columbus, Ohio
What: Lots of cool workshops for trans people, their partners, & allies

You can read the descriptions of my keynote and workshop below the break, but in the meantime check out TransOhio’s conference site for more details.

Continue reading “TransOhio Conference 2009: August 14-16”

Sexless Marriage

Obviously this NYT article about sex & marriage is written from an incredibly heterocentric perspective, and it’s primarily talking about marriages where the sex started good & disappeared over time, and, in my opinion, it’s unnecessarily pessimistic.

The answer to this question “Are couples in sexless marriages less happy than couples having sex?” is especially reductive. We can’t tell if happy couples are happy because they’re having sex, or if they’re having sex because they’re happy, or even if the two things have anything to do with each other. & I’m suspicious of any self-reporting when it comes to sex, since so many people say they’re having a lot more than they are.

Otherwise, I’m interested in her longitudinal research. I just hope she includes more than heterosexual relationships in her work.

Marital Biology

This brief but mostly accurate article about Philly-area politics and same sex marriage summarizes the issues of how we define man and woman.

The only problem, of course, is that we do define man and woman legally, and judges can do so when it comes to marriage and divorce. Just because there are more than two sexes when it comes to biological or cultural gender doesn’t mean judges can’t legally define only two. Trans people especially have had their sex defined for them – and usually not in the way they wanted.

So while her argument is valid, and imho, true, it isn’t any kind of protection against having our genders defined legally in ways we don’t like.