So if anyone wants to know a little more about where I’m living, it turns out Prairie Home Companion is in town, & they’ve shot a little local footage for the show:

Houdini’s birthplace, yes, but also Joe McCarthy’s. It’s an odd little place I really have come to love.

I really loved this ABC clip from What Would You Do? that Feministing posted. I can’t say I agree with Vanessa’s comments (or with Renee or Pam’s) but maybe I’m just that much older than she is, but this is huge progress to me.

I also think there’s a level of affection in public that makes people uncomfortable no matter the orientation of the couple. Even straight couples hear the “get a room!” comments yelled if things get too hot in a public space.

Likewise, making the couple interracial in an all-white or mostly white bar would confuse whether or not the bar patrons were homophobic or couldn’t deal with the intersection of homosexuality and race. I think it’s important to control an experiment like this, to make sure the LGBT couple were a good “fit” for the community that goes to that bar.

But the whole idea of people being offended, as that one woman was, by any LACK of tolerance is very, very cool. As is this.

This is one of the most bizarre commercials for a “feminine hygiene product” I’ve ever seen. There’s a second in the series, and a third.

Honestly I don’t know what to think. You?

LOGO has all their trans shows listed in one spot, for your viewing pleasure.

(via Calpernia Addam’s blog)

NPR’s This American Life recently had a show on about two 8 year old (trans) girls who met & hit it off. It’s the middle/second segment.

Act Two — Tom Girls: Lilly and Thomasina have a lot in common. They’re both 8 years old. And they were both born boys, although it became clear pretty early on that they’d prefer to be girls. There aren’t all that many kids in the world like them, but recently, at a conference in Seattle on transgender parenting, they met. And they immediately hit it off. They could talk about things with each other that they’d never been able to share with other friends back home. And that’s comforting, even if they never see each other after the conference ends. Producer Mary Beth Kirchner tells the story, with production help from Rebecca Weiker.

It’s only about 20 minutes, & worth listening to.

(Thanks to Chris & Jess for the tip.)

(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.

I am so freaking happy I don’t have to watch the Oscars.

Law & Order’s show tonight is about a trans teenager who is accused of attacking her father who insists she’s a boy and is trying to get custody of her from her mother.

9:59 PM definitely sympathetic. hopefully indicative of a sea change. still problematic in some ways, but pretty damn good for within the context of a police procedural.

9:57 PM crying.

9:54 PM history, violence, genitals.

9:52 PM oy.

9:51 PM hooboy. non trans advocate of trans youth loses her mind.

9:48 PM the kid can ACT. (& he’s from Poplar, WI.)

9:46 PM wow. sympathy for the loved ones of the trans person who don’t get it! & also the anger & frustration & sadness of the trans person, too.

9:39 PM getting worse. & worse than that. fast.

9:34 PM hooboy. weird turn. righteous trans youth activists who knock off pharmaceutical companies.

9:27 PM hrm. so far so good. inaccurate information, sure, but so far sympathetic. nearly an after-school special.

Has anyone else seen this video? It’s unbelievably paranoid, no?

I’m not sure what part of “your religion stops where my government starts” they don’t understand. They can say anything they want, and usually do. What they can’t do is fire someone for being homosexual, or censor television whose morality they don’t approve of. That’s it. They just don’t get to control shit for the rest of us. But they are perfectly free to avoid watching shows with gay characters, they don’t need to go to same sex weddings, etc. etc.

I’m never going to get this kind of “I don’t get to control you therefore I’m oppressed” type of thinking.

If you really need a good cry, just watch an episode of Animal Planet’s Underdog to Wonderdog. Jeez louise. Children & families & poor abandoned critters who bring each other new life. Totally goober show, but charming as all hell.

(I’d love a cat version, of course, but cats take a lot longer to adjust to new situations. Maybe they could use a time-lapse camera.)

My friend James Hipps of www.gayagenda.com called a radio morning show after the DJs used “fag” on the air today, and he ended up on the air.

You’ve got to hear it.

Forget the gay-baiting. The gender-baiting is astounding. Is this how it is now? That a guy can be “pro gay marriage” and still a hateful schmuck?

Within a few weeks of me arriving in Appleton, a transgender person named Sierra Broussard filed a lawsuit against a local club for not allowing her in. They checked her ID which still has an M & didn’t let her in. The Post Crescent, the local paper, covered the story.

There were so many comments left on that story that they wrote another story about the lawsuit for Sunday’s paper. The reporter asked for people who were willing to be interviewed, and me and Lynne volunteered.

I wanted to thank Cheryl Anderson, the journalist on the story, for getting across what I had to say. Sadly, however, she called Betty “he.” Unfortunately for Betty, there is enough evidence for me using “he” - from when she had a multi-gendered identity - that I can understand how that happens, even if I said “she” and “partner” throughout the interview. Of course if she met Betty that “he” would never seem appropriate.

I don’t know Ms. Broussard personally, but I do know that the whole “it” thing is unacceptable (as Lynne says in the interview) and that a person who lives as female 24/7 should use the ladies’ room. The legal hocus pocus is what people don’t necessarily understand: that a penis is not really a penis once it’s been on estrogen for even a few months; that genital surgery is not covered by health insurance *and* that it’s very expensive, and to plenty of people it’s just unnecessary surgery - and who wants to have surgery that they don’t have to have? That’s what I meant by education & tolerance; that maybe the average Joe doesn’t know all that’s involved, and that if they knew more, they might not be so quick to criticize the decision not to have genital surgery.

The problem is the legal requirement for genital surgery to change a gender marker on an ID. We have to come up with another way for trans people to change that, because surgery is a ridiculous requirement.

Coraline - Neil Gaiman’s horrifying children’s story - is coming out on February 6th. It better be coming to a theatre near me.

I’ve had the remarkable good fortune to teach Freshman Studies at Lawrence this term, which is a class Freshmen take, a kind of critical thinking course. We’ve already talked about Milgram and his obedience studies, and next up is Gilliam’s Brazil.

In watching it for the umpteenth time, that I’m still amazed at how remarkable this movie is.

I’m also really shocked at how much more like the movie the world has become since the last time I saw it - just the metal detector scene in the beginning, where Sam runs into Jack (Palin) while they’re both waiting for security clearance, & then again when Sam dines with his mother - right before the bomb goes off in the restaurant.

It’s wholly depressing, but that seemed entirely unlikely at the time it came out - and just as dystopian as so many other of the film’s details - and yet, here we are, going through security in so many places these days, and with the same bland obedience as they do in this film.

from yesterday’s Dr. Phil show. It seems the typical “poor mom” trans kids show until Toni confronts the reparative doctor.

Here’s Jacob Anderson-Minshall’s now annual “Trans Year in Review” article, which covers a lot of interesting people and events and media in the trans commmunity for 2008.

Rachel Maddow on the Rick Warren decision:

I just got this lovely note from Ethan St. Pierre:

http://www.TransFM.org
TransFM would like to thank our listeners for inviting us into your homes, offices and mp3 players over the years and as is customary for TransFM, we will be broadcasting LIVE during the Holiday season. We will begin our daily broadcast of the12 Days of Christmas, Tonight Saturday, December 13th from 5:00 PM - Midnight EST and will continue daily right through December 25th. Please check our website for further details.

Happy Holidays,
Ethan St.Pierre
Founder and Creator
www.TransFM.org

It certainly looks like Huckabee is doing some early work to get out in front for the 2012 presidential run, doesn’t it?

As Pam over at PHB points out:

“This man ran for president and intends to do so again. Journalists, particularly openly progressive ones, have an obligation to bore in on pols like Huckabee because their views are often wrapped up with a wink and a smile and sold as protecting family, children, the word “marriage”, etc. as if this is all a benign act that hurts no citizens in this country.”

Jon Stewart took him down in a good way - you can see the clip at Pam’s - and I agree with her that we need go shut this down before it gets too big.

The NYT did an article about the Oaxacan tradition of recognizing male-bodied people who grow up to live and fulfill a female role. What’s interesting to me is that a few people on our boards objected to the one time that one of the muxe was referred to as “he,” which started an interesting conversation about cultural imperialism, effectively.

• That is, can we tell a mother of a muxe that she is wrong for using the “he” pronoun for her child?
• Do we know that a muxe would find that problematic?
• Do we even know that someone muxe would identify as what we think of as trans?

I don’t think we can know any of that, but I do know that I’ve had enough people tell me I can’t call Betty my husband to object to anyone saying they know for sure what pronouns to use. An interview with a muxe that appeared in a gay magazine of Argentina (English translation) helps explain: he uses he for himself but does explain he doesn’t speak for all muxe, too.

Interestingly, perhaps, someone at the LGBT Blogger event asked me & Autumn about all the “correct” language issues within the trans, & we both kind of rolled our eyes. She points them to GLAAD’s usage guidelines, & I said he’d never make every trans person happy but to ask the person, if possible, or to ask others who might know. (I also mentioned that being upfront about feeling ignorant was entirely acceptable, & might defuse a lot of tempers.)

We didn’t quite come to a conclusion, but one of our frequent posters ended on this note:

“Trying to overlay one’s cultural understanding, whether consciously or not, over those of another is risky at best.”

Which is an excellent rule of thumb.