Year: 2008

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Trans for Obama: Ongoing Issues

Goal Thermometer

Kate Bornstein is fired up, and wants our various transgender communities to start working together more, all because she’s dizzily happy about being acknowledged by the Obama campaign. Jillian Weiss is asking similar questions, but more along the “how in hell did this happen?” about the Trans for Obama campaign. I love that she calls me a Transgender Media Empire – that kills me, since I’m really just an underemployed author with a tech-savvy partner. Even on Monday, when I put a lot of energy into Trans for Obama, half the reason was that I had to take the GRE two days later and my best-loved furball was having surgery.

Still, this issue of “community” is one that always frustrates me. Community is about being willing; if you want in, come on in, and if you don’t, please go away. It’s as simple as that, imho: the HBS type are free to do whatever it is they do (and some are active in feminist issues, actually, instead of trans ones), and the homophobic crossdressers, of which there are some, can hang out together by themselves, and – well, you get the idea. I don’t really care, honestly: since my existence as a member of the trans community is always liminal to some people, because I’m a partner & not trans myself, I’m all for defining community by those who want to be there.

But Monica Roberts (in the comments section of Jillian Weiss’ Bilerico post) has brought up the issue of trans POC not being encouraged, or recognized, and I think she’s right that we need to do more. So I’m looking for a trans POC volunteer to take over my blog for a day, to at least raise some awareness.

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WVU

I’ll be speaking at the University of West Virginia’s Morgantown campus on Thursday, October 16th, at 8PM.

Place: Greenbrier Room in the Mountainlair at West Virginia University
When: 8 pm 16 Oct
Open to everyone – the more the merrier!
Sponsor: Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Mountaineers (BiGLTM)

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Biden v. Palin

Found this quote on Feministing:

For many Gen X women like myself (and Palin is Gen X) the primary sexist experience is: “Those men gave the job to that clueless chick instead of me, because the boss thinks she’s hot and/or will be a yes-man with no ideas of her own.”

& While the whole Boomer / Gen X feminist difference is interesting to me, what really struck me was that I DIDN’T KNOW ANYONE ELSE FELT THIS WAY! Really. It is my chief experience with feminism, at least in terms of employment, & it really blew my mind to see it summarized so neatly and talked about as an ur-experience for women in my age bracket.

Or, as I might put it, it’s guys hiring with their dicks. I just heard from an old friend who says he loves her verve. I’ll try hard to still respect him in the morning.

& In the meantime, a wicked Rolling Stone article about Palin that nearly convinced me to forgive them for putting sleazy, non-musician women on their covers for the past 40 years.

& Now, off to the debate! Get your bingo cards ready.

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Trans for Obama: Obama Pride Says Thanks

Trans folks and partners and allies: you did good with the Trans for Obama campaign, so good, in fact, that the Obama campaign has blogged about our efforts:

Obama Pride is honored by the enthusiastic support of so many in the transgender community and we congratulate all the participants in Trans Blog for Obama day for their huge success!

We’re very proud of us, too, and of Obama Pride for keeping LGBT issues visible for us all.

What’s even more important is that one of my favorite bloggers has written a remarkable piece about Obama from the perspective of someone who is female, African-American, and trans. Monica Roberts is a shining star in this community, and wow is that apparent from this current post of hers. My apologies that she did not hear about Trans for Obama Day until noon on Monday; the event’s organization happened very quickly, and while I tried to get to everyone – and tell them to let everyone else they knew to get on board – Ms. Roberts should have gotten her own invitation.

Sara also has a new post up about why she’ll vote for Obama now instead of voting for Kucinich in protest. & That’s exactly what Monday – and indeed this whole Trans for Obama week – was all about.

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Genderqueer Vid

Has anyone watched this genderqueer video called Gender Rebel that was on Logo? You can watch the whole thing online (which is good, since we don’t get Logo).

The middle part, where Lauren and her partner try to explain genderqueer to Lauren’s aunt, and how they don’t think of themselves as a lesbian couple, is really interesting. The aunt is a lesbian in Howard Beach – notoriously macho, Italian, racist Howard Beach – who doesn’t get it, but I love that she says “I’ll fight to the death for you.” Which to me is mostly what counts.

There are more episodes planned, but I suspect every person who identifies as genderqueer will define it – and present it – differently than the next.

At 19, had this term existed then, I probably would have identified as genderqueer, though I’m still waiting to find a natal female who is genderqueer that dates boys. That is, it still seems a term used by those in the lesbian community, which is why I understand Lauren’s aunt’s confusion. To an “old school lesbian” genderqueer just looks like butch by another name. Even if it isn’t.

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GREat

Today I’m taking the GRE, or Graduate Record Exam, and let me tell you, I’m not excited about it. I don’t mind taking a test for four hours – my time spent writing often runs longer than that – but the idea of this exam just pisses me off. I don’t do well with standardized anything, but the idea of standardized intelligence is so unbelievably counter-intuitive, especially for us humanities types.

I’ve always been good at math; I just didn’t like it. My sister, who always scored higher on verbal than math, went into banking. I always scored higher on math than verbal and I’m the writer. Maybe it’s just inborn perversity, or maybe this whole idea of a “right” answer offends me. Math encouraged the wrong bits of me entirely.

I’ve spent most of my intellectual career teaching myself not to look for a right answer, but to look instead at things in a way they’re not usually seen, to ask questions that expose more of the riddle of the thing in question. I love the idea of imbuing the subjective narrative with authority; of defining the universe in a kind of Buddhist solipsism. You know, in a healthy sort of way, that maximizes the importance of our humanity and decreases our judgment of what’s right or wrong.

Call me a recovering Catholic, but I had a literature professor in my first year at Fordham – I started out a theology major, no kidding – who called me The Church Lady because I found Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” a moral outrage. I was The Church Lady with a mohawk, but judgmental nonetheless. I think that tendency is sometimes referred to as liberal fascism, or for you D&D types, Lawful Evil. I recognized the streak and since then have learned to tame it.

And then this test comes along, a test I avoided taking the first time around by getting my MA in Writing, of all things, but now, considering doing a Ph.D., I can’t avoid any longer. And they want to know the best opposite of restive is, and I have to spend the first seconds while reading the question turning off the part of my brain that wants to know the context, and whether restive is being used sarcastically, who’s using it and what they’re describing. The next seconds I convince myself to just answer the damn question the way I expect they want it answered, and the next seconds after that I have to convince myself to stop thinking about it because my first “this is the answer they want” impulse is usually the one that gets me the check mark of correctness. It’s exhausting.

I don’t believe in check marks of correctness, and the idea – at this age! – of having to take a test to give someone a numerical way of understanding how smart I am, or am not, is pretty damned frustrating.

Either way, I’m taking the GRE today.

Please wish me luck in not sticking the pencil in my own eye out of frustration.

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Trans for Obama: Day 3

Kate Bornstein is just popping with thoughts about presidential politics, change & trans. Trans people certainly know something about change, she points out.

We’ve also moved up a ranking in ActBlue’s list of donor groups. We’re at #7 now! And most of these groups have been fundraising for quite a long time. Right now we’re 2 away from hitting yesterday’s goal of 261. I’m really just so damned impressed that I’ve also posted about the Trans for Obama campaing on invert(e) and Bilerico. I’ve never done so much guest blogging ever!

So keep it going, folks!

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Heart Failure

Here’s a great description of why the economy greatly depends on Congress acting to rescue the credit economy.

The financial services sector is the heart of the economy.  They have fucked up badly in the last couple of years, but really, they’ve generally fucked up because we have allowed it.  Companies don’t exist to provide good jobs or good benefits.  Companies exist to turn a profit, and public companies exist to return value to their shareholders.  They are made to do this on a quarterly basis.  A good quarterly report returns profit to shareholders.  A bad one returns no profit to shareholders (generally).  So why would we think, after removing regulations and failing to enforce most of those that remained in place, that Wall Street would do anything beyond what we have made it possible for them to do?  And that, in a nutshell, is to work the system – mostly within the law – to return insane short-term quarterly profits and therefore shareholder value.  The idea that business would think a) long term (when we are painfully short-term focused from a market perspective; and b) do things to benefit people rather than their own bottom line is counter-intuitive because we don’t reward business for behaving in that fashion.

But do go read the whole thing.

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Trans for Obama: NSD + Trans

Kate Bornstein has her wrap-up post up (thanks, Kate!) and so does our Canadian friend Veronique, and I also wanted to get in a few words from Melissa Sklarz, who is currently the vice chair of National Stonewall Democrats, about NSD and its trans representation:

NSD has had trans representation on its board for almost 10 years.  I have been on the Board for 6 years and have been a vice chair of the Board for the last 4.  We have had trans representation from the East and the West and now our friends in Colorado are starting an NSD trans group for all of us.  The three of us comprise 8% of the Board total and all do service at the Exec level.

Most gay poltical groups have either few or no trans folks on board.

Which is one of the reasons it’s so damn cool that they decided to host the donations for Obama for the trans community. Thank you, Stonewall Democrats, especially Jon Hoadley and John Marble, who spearheaded this project, and thank you Babrbara Casbar (NJ), Melissa Sklarz (NY), and Laura Calvo (OR), for your work within NSD’s state organizations.