Year: 2008

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Jenny Boylan & The “Complementarians”

Here’s an interesting exchange between a blogger,  CWMW (a Christian group), and the NYT op-ed by Jenny Boylan about the gender testing planned for the Olympics:

The issue of the ‘extremely rare’ defects that result from this being a fallen world ‘not invalidating the binary nature of God’s good design of manhood and womanhood’ fails to address this. For if the binary is to hold, then 65 million people need to be categorized as either male or female. Otherwise they cannot logically be assigned scripturally defined gender roles. So what are the standards? Genitalia? Chromosomes? Capability to give birth? If the Bible doesn’t provide the standards, then someone has to. I look forward to CMWM’s answer to this.

Which is an interesting thought: if people are convinced our gender roles are laid out for us in The Bible, then what about the people who don’t fit the pre-existing genders? & What about the eunuchs?

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Media Trans

The next round of America’s Next Top Model will have a transgender candidate named Isis. I’m sure it will be a big mess, the way ANTM tends to be, with too many dramas & too much revelation about the candidates’ personal issues (issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with their ability to model).

BUT – compared to the recent footage of the recently cancelled Pretty Handsome (which was previously known as 4 oz.) – I’m sure it’ll be better, at least for the reason that the woman’s goal is not to transition on the show or anything like that. The focus will not be on her being trans, per se, but on her desire to be a model.

When transness becomes an aspect of someone’s identity – even an aspect that’s given way too much attention in light of the whole human being – they have a chance to come across as people, first.

edited to add: & I’m not going to dignify the comments made by a dickwad on Fox News about Isis by commenting or linking since it’s just the usual bullshit hateful transphobia you’d expect. GLAAD did demand an apology, but none was received.

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Queer + Catholic NYC Readings

I’ll be reading with other Queer + Catholic authors on September 4th & 5th in NY. Do come!

Queer and Catholic is an essay collection that examines the culture of how being raised Catholic informs and influences, positively or negatively, our queerness and how our queerness affects our Catholicism, our vestigial Catholic nature or even our flight from and continued struggle with the ʽthe Church of Rome.ʼ  Whether we embrace or reject our Catholic upbringings, they affect and shape who we are and bump up against our queer identities. Examining the culture of Catholicism, rather than the dogma or letter of it, these essays and short stories do not seek to address whether or not queers and the Catholic Church can reconcile or how and why the church should change, but instead explore the impact that growing up Catholic and queer has on us as individuals, writers, and political agents.

Join editor Amie M. Evans and contributors Helen Boyd, Joseph de Marco, Anthony Easton, Stephen Greco, Vince Sgambati, Charlie Vazquez and Emanuel Xavier as they read from their contributions to the anthology.

  • Thursday, September 4 at 6:30PM, CUNY Grad Center, 365 5th Avenue, Skylight Room, (Rm 9100, T. 212-817-7000)
  • Friday, September 5th at 7PM, Bluestockings, 172 Allen St (btwn Rivington and Stanton Street).

edited to add: the San Francisco reading is tonight at SF’s Main Library, 100 Larkin Street, 6PM.

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Five Questions With… Monica Canfield-Lenfest

As many of you know, Monica Canfield-Lenfest is the daughter of a trans woman and created a new resource, with COLAGE, for kids with trans parents. I highly recommend it.

1) First, tell me about COLAGE & how the book for Kids of Trans happened, what your goals were.

COLAGE (www.colage.org) is a national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer parents. We build community and work toward social justice through youth empowerment, leadership development, education, and advocacy. I first contacted COLAGE five and a half years ago, when I was working on my undergraduate thesis: “She’s My Father: The Social Experience of People with Transgender Parents”. Looking for references for my project, I discovered a diverse community of queerspawn who gave me the space to better articulate my experience and encouraged me to continue my work, since there are hardly any resources for transgender parented families. I started presenting at transgender conferences and gained a renewed sense of responsibility to build community and develop resources for people with transgender parents.

During a COLAGE conference in Dallas two years ago, I suggested to Meredith Fenton, COLAGE Program Director, that perhaps I could fill a fall internship position at the national office. We came up with a Fellowship model for my position, which has become a new program for the organization. I worked full-time for eight months focused specifically on the Kids of Trans Program. The major goal of the fellowship was to develop resources for people with transgender parents. Since there was no book detailing our experiences and offering advice to people with trans parents, the Kids of Trans Resource Guide became the obvious main project.

My goals in writing the guide were: first, to tell other people with trans parents that they are not alone; second, to recognize that the entire family transitions when a parent transitions; and third, to provide compassionate advice from people who have similar families. In short, I hoped to create the book I wanted my father to give me when she came out to me over ten years ago. Continue reading “Five Questions With… Monica Canfield-Lenfest”

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Deal

My only sign of aging this week is that anti-wrinkle commercials have really started to piss me off. Especially that one with Andie McDowell, who weighs all of 12 lbs., talking about how hard it is to lose a dress size & how easy to lose your wrinkles.

You get wrinkles when you’re not young anymore. Deal.

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Book Review: Live Through This

Not long ago, I picked up a copy of Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction. As many of you know, I used to write fiction all of the time – all of it as yet unpublished – and thought I might get in touch again with my creative self, and the relationship that creative self has to my own personal demons.

Because I remember avoiding therapy when I was 19 for fear that it would hurt my art.

It didn’t. But as a result, my favorite of this collection of essays by various female artists about the intersection of their angst & their art was Diane DiMassa‘s, who, in pictures of course, traces the way her conversations with her therapist became Hothead Paisan.

Of interest to a lot of people who read here is Kate Bornstein’s essay on her experiences with art, demons, & Scientology. So now we know she’s not only a remarkable author, playwright, and performer, but she’s also a pretty fantastic visual artist. (Not that that’s surprising.)

In some ways, this book may be more useful as a way to read about the women’s lives than it is to read about artistic process, though: so many of the essays are more about the strife that caused the art (which ranges from sexual abuse to drugs to cutting to anorexia) than about how the person managed to channel that into their art, exactly. What I’m always interested in is how artists – especially female artists – find the resources to keep going.

So it’s not a how-to guide, but it doesn’t purport to be one, either; it IS a remarkable bunch of women writing about what made their art. It’s published by the very cool Seven Stories, and of course available at amazon.com and independent booksellers.

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Siesta

I’ve been a little off with blogging lately; I think my brain has decided it needs a summer vacation, because I can’t seem to put a sentence together even when I want to.

Mostly I’ve been going to work, and coming home, & playing computer games, & being, well, a regular person. It’s kind of nice, playing with the cats & not worrying about a book I’m supposed to be writing.

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iPod

I didn’t know your iPod could become corrupted and stop working. The cure: restoring it to factory settings, which means you end up with an empty iPod. I just thought I’d warn the rest of you, because reloading 20 gigs of music was not what I was planning this week.

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Me, Victorian Prude

I was reading over at feministing.com about casual sex, & read a recent bulletin from GenderPAC about the increase in Purity Balls, & then was mourning over the loss of another trans woman who got beaten to death by a guy who she’d previously given a blowjob to, & it got me thinking.

See, I wasn’t comfortable being a nubile when I was younger. I wasn’t comfortable ever being a nubile, & am still only wont to dress in sexier ways in very safe spaces – like DO, or certain queer/drag/fetish events, or the like. As much as I know it’s never a woman’s fault if she is hurt because of the way she’s dressed, I also had enough contact with non-sexual street violence to be twice as cautious about leaving myself open to any kind of sexual abuse or harassment, much less violence.

Which probably makes me painfully Second Wave, but there you go. I just don’t get it, & I’m never going to get it. I never had good sex that was casual; a long-standing “booty call” type relationship was a little closer to my experience of having good, non-committed sex, and maybe here we’re just defining “casual” in different ways, and the folks over at feministing are talking about the same kind of relationship. Continue reading “Me, Victorian Prude”