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Can’t Afford Kids

Dubya & Co. have been in power long enough to pretty much devastate the economy, and in response, women are reporting that they had abortions in the past year precisely because of the bad economy. Women, being imminently practical, and carrying the burden of most childcare, and being the first and hardest hit by dropping wages, can’t afford to have their babies.

An interesting dilemma for Republicans, no?  So if you want to prevent abortions, maybe it would be a good idea to quit funding tax cuts for the rich.

(via Feministing)

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Allies, Family & Partners

I wanted to point out a new section of my links/blogroll, which is for allies, family & partners. Right now it’s got Abigail Garner’s Damn Straight, Monica CL’s A Seat on the SOFFA, Annie Rushden’s Gardens in Bloom, COLAGE’S Kids of Trans pages, Jonni P’s Trans Married, and PFLAG’s TNET.

If people know of other partners, allies, or family members who regularly blog on glbT issues, do let me know so I can add them. Please, not just LGB allies; they have to regularly address trans issues and need to be currently blogging with some consistency and some history.

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T Family Resource

There’s a new publication available for families & parents of trans youth:

Families in TRANSition: A Resource Guide for Parents of Trans Youth is the first comprehensive Canadian publication to address the needs of parents and families supporting their trans children. Families in TRANSition summarizes the experiences, strategies, and successes of a working group of community consultants – researchers, counsellors, advocates, parents, as well as trans youth themselves.

The guide aims be inviting and inclusive of families who may be at any one of a number of stages, and especially so for parents who may have had their adolescent or young adult child come out recently as trans. Families in TRANSition provides practical and sensitive parent-to-parent and professional therapeutic advice, and tries to anticipate and address common questions and concerns, as well as normalize the varied reactions families may have. The guide offers accurate, up-to-date information on terminology, health, and issues related to transition, and suggests to families important ways they can take care of themselves and one another through this challenging and critical time. Families in TRANSition provides a provincial context and relevant Toronto resources for continued youth and family support towards strengthening families.

The guide will be available as a free pdf download from our website (www.ctys.org) after June 8th. You will also be able to purchase a hard copy through our website for a nominal fee.

It is so great to see more and more information like this out there.

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Tionary

The other night I wrote a paragraph that went like so:

I don’t think we said a word the whole ride; we both just stared out our respective windows smiling glibly. If I could only have filled the car with amber and kept us preserved like that, I would have been content. If Sartre said that hell is other people, then heaven is something like silence with someone you love.

But I wondered afterward if one can smile glibly or not, and whether glib is the antonym of earnest, or circumspect, or studied, or some other word entirely.

So I looked it up, and found this at dictionary.com

1. readily fluent, often thoughtlessly, superficially, or insincerely so: a glib talker; glib answers.
2. easy or unconstrained, as actions or manners.

and hoped that when I’ve accused of being glib, it was more the latter I was being accused of then the former.
But then I found this obsolete definition, which I thought my be useful to the emo kids:

Glib\, n. [Ir. & Gael. glib a lock of hair.] A thick lock of hair, hanging over the eyes. [Obs.]

and then, still yet, this last one:

Glib\, v. t. [Cf. O. & Prov. E. lib to castrate, geld, Prov. Dan. live, LG. & OD. lubben.] To castrate; to geld; to emasculate. [Obs.] –Shak.

which once again goes to show that I cannot ever, it seems, escape the transness of things.

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GID Group

For those who are astounded by the news that Blanchard has been appointed to the Work Group for Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders, consider this: the chair of that group is Dr. Ken Zucker, who believes transgender kids can be cured with reparative therapy.

Read this story, from NPR, about the difference between therapists in how to treat children who are brought in with gender issues. And then consider that Zucker is in charge of the work group working on GID for DSM V.

If you are a psychologists or know any, please ask them to contact anyone they know at the APA to advise against Zucker as chair of this work group.

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Not a Donkey

A New Yorker article about C.S. Lewis I’d missed that talks about the “two Lewises.” I’m a huge fan, & this was a good piece about him. I like this bit especially:

What is so moving about the Narnia stories is that, though Lewis began with a number of haunted images—a street lamp in the snow, the magic wardrobe itself, the gentle intelligent faun who meets Lucy—he never wrote down to, or even for, children, except to use them as characters, and to make his sentences one shade simpler than usual. He never tries to engineer an entertainment for kids. He writes, instead, as real writers must, a real book for a circle of readers large and small, and the result is a fairy tale that includes, encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape. Had he tried for less, the books would not have lasted so long. The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure.

Prince Caspian comes out May 16th. The trailer gives me hope.

(Courtesy of Neil Gaiman’s blog.)

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The Trip to SC, Pt. 5 (conclusion)

After dinner, Jasmyne Cannick spoke about race + homophobia. I’m going to summarize some of her comments in another post so that they might be available for trans groups doing outreach into racial minority communities. But she was good, funny, and yet she didn’t turn down the heat when it came to asking white LGBT people to pay attention to the ways they exclude black LGBT people.

The evening ended with drinks at our hotel, conversation, food, goofing around, gossip updates, flirting – and of course with me packing to catch an 11:56 PM train. I got hugs from some pretty lovely people, exchanged info with a bunch of others, and got on the train feeling renewed and re-invigorated. I want to thank Lisa Johnson again for having me at this conference, and I hope it can become a tradition for the college.

& So I waited for a cab to take me the short distance to the station, & at the station I got to fill a bunch of novice train travelers in on Amtrak. We boarded, and I slept, and then I wrote most of what you’ve been reading.

On the trip back, I met another man and his son over breakfast, except the son was only four and was learning everything with big blue eyes; after he saw me peel my banana, he kept half a finger on his own until his pop wasn’t paying attention, and then, lickety-split, he had his peeled too and broken in half.

“Are you going to eat that?” his father asked.

“No.” he said, still examining the banana peel in tres partes.

Love kids who aren’t my own.

Now it’s raining out; the raindrops coating windows on one side of the train and not the other. A woman across the aisle from me sleeps with her mouth slack, glasses askew. Penn Station in an hour, and home, and kittoi, and Betty.

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The Trip to SC, Pt. 3

I missed the morning sessions given by Kelly James and Bernadette Barton (which I now regret missing) but knowing I had a train to catch at midnight encouraged me to shorten the day a little so I wouldn’t be cranky by dinner. As it turned out, it was a long day anyway; I got to the conference at noon and found Lisa who then found Ash who was the student who was going to introduce me. Lisa brought me to a table full of her students, who just turned and looked at me as if I’d sprouted an alien head, and I must have looked at Lisa bewildered, so she explained: “They’re having a fan moment.” I was just more bewildered. (Over the course of the day, I got to talk to all of them, and they are all so charming and bright and good-looking! I’m not kidding. & Like so many queer students, most of them smoked.)

After lunch Marilee Lindemann spoke about creating and administering her LGBT Studies program at U. Maryland and how she managed to ‘Queer the Turtle’. (It’s a long story & I couldn’t do it justice, but she did.) It was good to hear an administrator’s view of the current gender/sexuality/LGBT academic scene, though I can’t say it’s particularly good news for me: they got 200 applicants for 1 open position last year, mostly from people with backgrounds in English and an interest in gender. Sounds awfully familiar, no? *sigh* Continue reading “The Trip to SC, Pt. 3”

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Accepting Change

A partner who calls herself Madame George and who regularly posts on our message boards wrote this piece about growing up in a small town and about how similar that can be to watching your husband transition. I thought it was a beautiful piece, wistful, affirming, full of love but also change.

Growing up in a small town has its perks. Small town shop owners know you by name. In fact most times they know your family and your entire life story. That’s how it was growing up here. It’s one of my fondest memories of growing up in a small town. It has changed over the years and many of the shop owners that I knew are now gone. The store fronts now boasting dazzling electronics, plastic knick knacks, and country crafts. Gone is the independent pharmacist, the neighborhood greasy diner, and the ten cents store. Gone are the comforts of the past.

I loved the days when my mother would need something from the neighborhood drug store. There was a small one nearby that was complete with a soda fountain. It’s how I met Mr. Reider. An independent pharmacist whose shop was not far from my school. I knew him well. He knew my entire family well. He had a great store and seemed to always be adding unusual finds into his display cases and racks on a daily basis. It was probably more like a monthly basis, but to my young eyes I seemed to always find new items to wonder over. A favorite of mine was a metal bank depicting a monkey with it’s arms stretched wide. The one where you put a coin in one hand and you gently pulled the other one down and the coin would roll down its arm into a slot hidden ingeniously in the side of its head. Another favorite was the little porcelain nesting dolls with their funny looking painted faces. I remember well his gentle words of warning each time I would pick a set up. Never scolding, just a friendly reminder to be careful. Continue reading “Accepting Change”

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Aunt Nelly’s Macaroni

Today’s Word of the Day is —

macaroni /n

1: pasta made from semolina and shaped in the form of slender tubes. *2: an affected young man : fop

* “He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars.” – Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

Now there’s one I’d never heard before. I’m just wondering how you make it a plural… “Oh, those macaronis can’t even act straight.” Perhaps.