Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
There are people up in New Hampshire trying to convince the DMV to change their surgery requirement for gender marker change on licenses. In order to show how much support there would be for such changes, they’ve started an online petition.
Requiring surgery as a condition of ID change is both medically and economically discriminatory.
Today it’s supposed to be -12 degrees F here in Appleton. The high? 1 degree.
Sunday it’ll be between 3 degrees and -4 degrees F.
Monday? Between 11 degrees and 0.
& It just keeps snowing.
They told me I arrived during a warm streak. Apparently. Who knew freezing could be “warm,” relatively speaking?
But I love it, I have to admit.
I still have moments of looking at the LGBT bookshelves in bookstores feeling sheepish – sometimes because I feel like I’m not “queer enough” to be doing so, or because people are clocking me as queer, that you must be queer if you’re browsing the LGBT section of a bookstore.
What’s funny to me is that I’ve stood in front of 200 people & talked about strapping it on, yet strangers in bookstores looking at me looking at books can still make me shy.
Congratulations to Tristan Taormino on her 200th “Pucker Up” column for The Village Voice. She’s been writing that column since 1999, and even mentions the column about The Queer Heterosexual that I cited in My Husband Betty. (She also wrote a column about My Husband Betty, which did the book a world of good).
So congrats Tristan, and keep on putting your nose (or whichever parts you choose) into other people’s sex lives – with their consent, of course.
I’ve never much liked “zie” and “hir,” but it seems there’s a whole new way to go about the gender-neutral pronoun: yo.
As in, “Yo likes cookies, genderfucking, and B-movies.”
Works for me.
(via Feministing.)
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Seal Press rocks so hard it’s ridiculous. Not only has word come that the first reprint of My Husband Betty has come out with Seal’s imprint, but they’ve apologized for the situation that lead to me being left off the Transgender category nominees’ list for the Lambda Literary Awards.
Buy Seal’s books, people. They are a great press, & do good work.
New York is considering a law that would make recycling those damn plastic bags a requirement – for businesses.
I think that rocks.
Tell Mayor Bloomberg to pass it.
An interesting commentary from The Guardian about all the new surgeries available to women to “fix” their vaginas.
“We rightly condemn female genital mutilation (FGM) when it’s forced on women and girls in the name of culture and tradition, yet we’re quick to embrace it when it’s sold to us packaged in the language of choice. There’s a glaring inconsistency in the western notion of female empowerment, when enshrined within that is the right of women to go under the surgeon’s knife in pursuit of a socially imposed model of physical perfection. It’s no wonder we face accusations of hypocrisy and cultural imperialism, when glossy magazines carry worthy articles about the horrors of FGM in the developing world on the one page, and advertisements offering the latest in designer vaginas in the classified section at the back.”
(Thanks to Petra for the link.)
Betty’s always joking about wanting a magical pony, but I don’t think she had this one in mind.
(thanks to Xtine).