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Tickling a Slow Loris

Since Monday sucks for almost everyone, & I’ve gotten too many emails in the past week from people who are really going through some complicated stuff, please take a moment to watch this video of a slow loris being loved on. Really. It’ll do your soul good.

(Found on Allison’s blog about her Medical Spa, Tres Belle, the services of which I highly recommend.)

(How anyone could see those eyes and kill these critters for them I can’t understand, but they do, which is why these critters are endangered. How messed up is that? What goobery lovely big eyes on an obviously gentle creature.)

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Tragedy, Again

If you can bear to read it, there’s a long story about Christine Daniels / Mike Penner in The LA Times. The whole thing is so fucking tragic, a huge waste. There are times I get so pissed off about how euphoric people get about transition that I want to spit nails.

Toward the end there’s this soulless quote by Marci Bowers:

Bowers believes Penner put one foot in the grave by abandoning the transition. “If we had done surgery, it probably would have saved her life. Now she died as an unhappy soul who never got a chance to align her body and soul, and that’s the greatest tragedy about her.”

I’m not sure that doesn’t win an award for most self-serving pile of crap I’ve ever seen.

Her whole story, I’m going to say, makes me want to scream. PEOPLE CAN AND DO CHOOSE TO TRANSITION. People can and do choose not to when what they might lose is a too much to lose. It is not “transition or die.” Sometimes it’s “transition and die.” That does not mean I’m saying people shouldn’t transition, or that late transitioners shouldn’t transition. What I’m saying is that the larger trans community – and especially the gender therapists who “serve” this community – have got to get it through their heads that someone who has lived a long time in one gender & who has had something like a good life, career, and marriage, might want to think long & hard before deciding to transition.

Or, as we were told, DO AS LITTLE AS YOU CAN to relieve the gender dyphoria.

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Welcome to the Present, Newsweek

It’s not a bad piece, something like a big summary, and brief, and there is a general glaring lack of the word genderqueer. Still, some nice bits:

Many scientists, he says, see gender as a continuum and acknowledge that some people naturally fall in the middle. Gender, Bockting says, “develops between the biological and the environmental. You can’t always detect gender by physical evidence. You have to ask the person how they identify themselves; in that sense, it’s psychological.”

and

But Drescher says he is certain of one thing after a lifetime of working with gender: “There is no way that six billion people can be categorized into two groups.” Now if we could only figure out the pronoun problem.

and

Instead, Drescher says, the committee is proposing changing the name to “gender incongruence” and making the diagnosis contingent on the person feeling significant distress over their gender confusion. “We didn’t want to pathologize all expressions of gender variance just because they were not common or made someone uncomfortable,” Drescher says.

and finally:

Bockting says it’s not uncommon for people undergoing sex changes to find that surgery doesn’t resolve all their gender-identity issues. “With time,” he says, “they accept a certain amount of ambiguity … We have this idea that people take hormones and undergo surgery and become the other gender. But in reality it’s more complicated.”

except I would add: except when it isn’t.

There is also a photo gallery of people – it’s not clear how any of them identify but all the portraits were taken at the LA trans job fair – and I really have mixed feelings about the photos. I’d love to hear what you all think of them.

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Lavender, Not Pink or Blue

Here’s an article about gender that actually makes sense; I’m looking forward to the book, even.

“If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild,” Plomin told the Observer.

Again: there’s more similarity than difference between genders.

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College Admissions

Two interesting articles about admissions and LGBT students have come across my desk recently:  One is about colleges seeking gay applicants, and the other is about asking students, on the Common Application, what their orientation is.

As much as I’d rather see LGBTQ students at a college that really does welcome them, I hate anything that seems like it might be ghettoizing students. For some, their orientation is barely important; what med school they want to get into is most important.

But at the same time, that anyone’s even asking the questions means there is starting to be more consistent recognition that gender and sexual orienation are important aspects of identity.

Now if we oculd just get them to make the question about gender a blank to fill in instead of a choice that dichotimizes our genders.

Thoughts?

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MWMF: Solidarity, Please

This photo of a protest/action, in support of inclusion of trans women  at MichFest (aka MWMF) brought tears to my eyes. Thanks for the linkage goes to Joelle Ruby Ryan, who teaches Women’s Studies and is a transfeminist. She is as excited as I am by bridges being built between trans and non-trans women, and you can follow her on twitter at JoelleRubyRyan.

(Of course there’s nothing that could keep me away from a music festival more than a policy of it being only for women, but I’m not big on any kind of separatism.)