Class + Trans*

Here’s a nice piece about economics and class, specifically in the US, when it comes to trans people and transition. It’s written by a woman whose sister is transitioning to female.

She ends the piece:

In a perfect world, an individual’s trans*ition would be marked by celebration, dedicated to their instinctive disconnection from their bodies and/or the societal binaries that surround us, and without cost (or, at least, fully-funded). But this isn’t a perfect world.

Ours is a species dominated by cost. And so far, I don’t see any feasible way around it. So, what does that mean? It means either biting the bullet and paying through the nose for procedures that would (hopefully) mean harmony of mind and body, or going without.

What is more difficult is that many trans people cannot get to the point they want without significant medical intervention, and if they always register as trans, will deal with untold amounts of discrimination. It’s frustrating, but true.

Moreso, even if someone can find a way to scrape up the money to have genital surgery and the like, that may mean they are sacrificing something else – going back to school, having kids, buying a home, or whatever other things most people would do with upwards of $20k. Which means that trans people, as a class, are bound to be poorer than their peers — much like women often are.

Proof Needed?

So here’s a weird story: a/n (assumedly cis) woman found the wrong gender marker on her birth certficate and so went to have it changed because she needed to renew her license. She was required to get a copy of her birth record from Vital Record Services where she was told “she’d have to receive Pap exam and deliver to them proof of her reproductive organs”.

“She said I needed to go have a PAP exam, have a doctor write a note verifying you’re a woman, and bring it back-– notarized,” Grimes told FOX 5.

Considering the woman was a mother, she should have just brought in her children.

That said, there *are* women born women who don’t have cervices (that is, the thing a PAP is done on) or uteri. Maybe she was born with sealed labia or a large clitoris, or maybe the M was a clerical error.

The point is: this is stupidly invasive, and makes the bullshit trans people go through that much more apparent to those of us with cis privilege who – accept if we get pregnant in certain states – are rarely forced to show anyone our genitals in order to get the right paperwork signed.

The Night a Feminist Army…

… of loud angry bitches beat the GOP, is the full title. I absolutely love this article about what happened in Texas the night of the 25th. I stayed up and watched it as the midnight hour drew near and passed; I was watching when the time stamp was changed on the vote; I was watching when the “At what point?” question was asked – which should, imho, go down in history as AT LEAST as significant as the “Have you, at long last, no decency?” that was asked during HUAC).

It was an insane thing to see but a proud, proud thing to watch.

A feminist army of loud angry bitches. We need more of them.

SCOTUS: DOMA Sucks and So Does Prop 8

Which many of us knew already, but which the SCOTUS has now, finally, ruled on.

So DOMA is no longer Constitutional – equal protection and all that – and the previous ruling that Prop 8 was unconstitutional has been upheld, too.

It’s a good day to be same sex married.

Even for those of us who are same sex married with hetero privilege – we got married when she was still a boy one – it’s a huge relief. It’s not just about the law – it’s about the message: our marriage is equal.

(The rest of us who live in suck states with DOMAs or superDOMAs in the state constitutions have to move next. That includes Wisconsin.)

RIP Richard Matheson

I’m not a real science fiction junkie, but I am a Twilight Zone nerd; those shows were some of the first ways I started thinking about things in a more complicated, maybe even existential, way. & Matheson wrote some of the best of them: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (which was in both the TV series and in the movie), The Invaders (one of the very few TV shows with no dialogue at all), Little Girl Lost (which is basis for Poltergeist), Death Ship (super creepy, and starting Jack Klugman), and to me, the very special Once Upon a Time, which starred none other than Buster Keaton.

Here’s one of my all-time favorites, A World of Difference. It brought what Pirandello was after to the American TV audience, imho.

You can watch all of the episodes he wrote or which were based on his stories for free on hulu.