Year: 2010

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A Boy’s Name?

A girl named Randi was beaten for having a boy’s name.

“They started talking about me like I was a man,” she told local news station WREG. “That I shouldn’t be in this world. And my name was a boy name.” The four girls and a boy surrounded her after a Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, and, she said, kicked her in the rib and leg, hit her in the face, sat on her, pushed her face into the floor, and threw her onto a cafeteria table.

It really makes you wonder what they’re teaching kids in a Fellowship of Christian Students. I guess they didn’t get to the “don’t beat people up” meeting yet.

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When I Was a Hipster

I never thought of the label as an insult until later – maybe the 90s – when being a NYC insider somehow earned you the wrath of all the people who come to NYC in order to find/buy/live near cool. I won’t call them arrivistes, like this article does, because that’s just silly.

Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-­surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious — the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be “superior”: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.

It’s a pretty stunning observation, to my eye. Of course my hipsterism pre-dates skinny jeans and big glasses.

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Macho Ears

Even the talented Scott Turner Schofield has to go to the supermarket:

and has to ask: I’m sorry, what did you just say about the commercial construction of gender? In the supermarket, you say? No!

Sleep Pretty or Hearos? Pink or blue? Really?! Wouldn’t sizes be more appropriate? Do they block out only masculine or feminine noise?

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Brooklyn Queers Say It Gets Better

Oh, the lovely queers in Brooklyn say it gets better, too:

= makes me homesick, yes it does. I miss being in clubs full of crossdressers and drag queens, strippers, sex workers and straight guys. I really do.

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This Halloween’s Gender Story

Every year there’s a Halloween gender “problem,” but now, at least, there are moms who tell other moms to “back off.”

I can’t tell you how many people sent me this story, but I know it made plenty of us cry. In the good way.

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Let Them Serve Openly

Democrats, grow a pair already & get this done. These men and women want to fight for their country, and no one should bar a citizen from being able to do that. Gays and lesbians have always served: it’s up to us, as citizens, to recognize their service and the diverse life experiences it comes with. Doing anything else is – I’m gonna say it – unpatriotic.

The dog tags also remind him of a fraternity roommate at the University of West Virginia. The young officer, who had recently married, was killed in Korea.

Phillips was a graduate student studying theater when he heard the news. His student status made him exempt from the draft, but, he said, “I thought I should do something.” He enlisted in the Army over the objections of his father back home in Elkins, W.Va. Having known since he was 17 that he was gay, the 22-year-old lied on the enlistment form, just as gays and lesbians still do today.

. . .

The young =sergeant shared sandbag bunkers, tents and Quonset huts with other soldiers, but the lack of privacy “was not a problem.” He kept a photo of a “girlfriend” from college on his footlocker so no one would get suspicious. “I acted all my life,” he said of his pretense at being straight.

Only once did Phillips confide his secret, telling his company commander. “He reached over and took my hand and said, ‘It’s OK, buddy, this is between you and I.” It was a tremendous relief. He was straight, but he was understanding — there were people back then who were.”

. . .

When Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators earlier this year that the military’s policy on gays “forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Phillips could relate.

He recalled how when he came down with malaria in Korea, it was a black sergeant who carried him to a Jeep and took him to the hospital. The Korean War marked the first time black troops served alongside whites. For years, opponents of desegregation had argued that blacks would ruin morale and unit cohesion, a line of reasoning often heard now in the debate over gays in the military.

“If somebody’s protecting your back,” whether they are black or gay, Phillips learned in Korea, “who cares?”

More of Garrison Phillips’ story can be found here.

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One Gene Away

I’m not going to try to re-phrase this article about how ovaries/testicles are determined by a single gene. Better you read it from the source:

As embryos, our gonads aren’t specific to either gender. Their default course is a female one, but they can be diverted through the action of a gene called SRY that sits on the Y chromosome. SRY activates another gene called Sox9, which sets off a chain reaction of flicked genetic switches. The result is that premature gonads develop into testes. Without SRY or Sox9, you get ovaries instead.

But Henriette Uhlenhaut from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory has found that this story is woefully incomplete. Maleness isn’t just forced onto developing gonads by the actions of SRY – it’s permanently kept at bay by another gene called FOXL2.

Uhlenhaut developed a strain of genetically engineered mice, whose copies of FOXL2 could be deleted with the drug tamoxifen. When she did this, she found that the females’ ovaries turned into testes within just three weeks. The change was a thorough one; the altered organs were testes right down to the structure of their cells and their portfolio of active genes. They developed testosterone-secreting Leydig cells, which pumped out as much of the hormone as their counterparts in XY mice. They only fell short of actually producing sperm.

Uhlenhaut found that FOXL2 and SOX9 are mutually exclusive – when one is active, the other is silent and vice versa. The two genes are at opposite ends of a tug-of-war, with sex as the prize. FOXL2 sticks to a stretch of DNA called TESCO, which controls the activity of Sox9. By sticking to TESCO, FOXL2 keeps Sox9 turned off in the adult ovary. Without its repressive hand, Sox9 switches on and sets about its gender-bending antics.

and

Uhlenhaut’s work isn’t just of academic interest. It could also help to treat disorders of sexual development. It could also change how gender reassignment therapies are done, paving the way for gene therapies rather than multiple painful surgeries.

Emphasis mine. That is such a goddamned cool idea.

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Two Tune Tuesday: Luciana Souza

I got to see & hear Luciana Souza this past Friday night at Lawrence, and she really blew me away. Like most gringas, my intro to this kind of music was “The Girl from Ipanema” — I’ve got a few versions of it, including that lovely disco one that was on Red Hot + Rio a million years ago — but I’d forgotten how sensual and melancholy a samba can be.

There’s very little good available on either YouTube or Playlist.com of hers, so instead I’ve put up this promo clip from her most recent CD:

And here’s a link to some samples from the CD. Since I can’t stand translated music – I’d rather have no idea what the lyrics are about, or read them – so I’d recommend checking out the “Adeus America & Eu Quero Un Samba.” & here’s Amazon’s mp3 samples, for more.

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New Round of Trans Characters

Bored to Death, the HBO comedy, is adding a transgender character, but that should’nt be too surprising since one of the characters is based on Jonathan Ames.

A Canadian show called Degrassi – which first aired in the 80s but has returned in recent years –introduced an FTM spectrum character this past summer. (Warning: the clip on that website is triggery.)

If anyone wants to review these, or let me know about others I may have missed, please do!