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Dex and DES

A few years ago it looked likely that we’d discover a drug that might be taken prenatally by mothers whose children might have a high risk of CAH – in order to prevent it.

Since CAH is the only intersex condition that can necessitate medical treatment, and specifically might prevent an “adrenal crisis” that can be life threatening to a newborn with CAH – this development could have been a good thing.

Except that it’s off-label use it intended to prevent lesbians and tomboys. And career women. Depending on how exactly you’re going to define female masculinity.

It’s nice to see Slate finally reporting on it, despite the dumb-ass & sensationalist title of the article, & I’m hoping that means this question gets put to a much wider range of parents and potential parents.

Here’s the paper by Dreger, Feder and Tamar-Mattis.
Here’s a summation out of Northwestern.

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WI Book Festival

I’m going to be speaking at this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival in November with my friend and fellow artist Miriam Hall.

You can check out the schedule & the list of authors who will be speaking or reading.

And check out the book Trans-Kin that Miriam has a piece in. It just came out this week.

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Octavia.

& Here’s a short film about an African-American trans woman who’s been doing sex work on the streets of LA but who has been getting her act together to change her life in significant ways. Her name’s Octavia.

She just won Quest, a pageant for trans women. From the APAIT website:

QUEST: Woman of the Year takes place on Saturday, December 10, 2011, at 7:00pm. The event will be held at the David Henry Hwang Theatre at East West Players, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles CA 90012. QUEST: Woman of the Year is designed to encourage the empowerment of the often marginalized transgender community while celebrating uniqueness and diversity.

I’m sure they always need sponsors.

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Queer Derby: Vagine Regime

Always forward, never straight – how it is in roller derby.

Erica Tremblay is making a documentary about the queer subculture within roller derby, and she needs funds.

Cool.

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Voting While Trans: A Guide

This is HUGE: a voter guide for all of us out there who could be impacted by the intersection of disenfranchisting Voter ID laws and gender markers, name changes, and state-issued ID.

DO read it, & share it. The goal of these Voter ID laws is to keep people on the margins from voting at all, so let’s get more trans people to the polls than ever before.

& DON’T tell me no one’s working for you. The list of amazing things the Obama presidency has done when it comes to trans rights & protections is too kick-ass to ignore.

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The New New Deal

This Slate article about Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a remarkable description of the kinds of programs and vision of Obama’s presidency. It’s really amazing stuff.

In the discussion about why the New Deal was popular and Obama’s Recovery Act wasn’t, the author notes:

FDR launched the New Deal after the U.S. had suffered through more than two years of depression under Hoover, while Obama launched the stimulus when the economy was nowhere near rock bottom. Everyone knew about the financial earthquake, but the economic tsunami hadn’t yet hit the shore.

That is, Obama passed the Act long before Americans were suffering the kind of devastating loss that they experienced in the Great Depression. Maybe you don’t have time for the book, but do read the article. It is one of the most clear explanations of what Obama is and has been up to as President. You can either vote for a guy who fires people when industry is suffering, or you can vote for a guy who tries to make sure people don’t starve if they lose their jobs = Not a tough call in my opinion.

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Crossdressing Room

What a great piece on identity, crossdressing, and the internet:


I grew up surrounded by the notion that bodies and identities come in 1:1 ratios: we get a body and an identity. But from as early as I remember, I had a body that did not line up flush with any single identity but instead slipped this way and that so that it lined up with Tori at one point, or the hard man of Cameroon at another, or any one of the many selves I’ve deployed throughout my life.

The discovery of the personal ad flipped a switch in the dark: the slippage I had experienced occurred not only on the side of body, but on the side of identity as well, so that Tori might slip from one body to another just as I slipped in and out of various presentations of identity. Once recognized, the logic struck me as obvious, a happy and symmetrical discovery.

I don’t mean to pretend that somehow, body and identity have been cleaved free from one another, or that we live in a world where body has no relevant bearing on identity and vice versa. After all, those pictures of Tori showed my arms, my face, my ears, that mole on the cheek next to my nose. Yet, somewhere in the hinterland of the internet, some other person had claimed one of my identities, an identity borne of my body, but one that transcended skin, muscle, hair, fat and bones, as she moved through online space, until she settled upon the imagined teenager, his body becoming hers, her voice speaking through his throat to the anonymous man on the other end of the phone.

Do take the time to read the whole of it. it is so nice to read something about the trans by someone who can really write.

(My thanks to Lea for the tip.)