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Love & Shame & Having a Thing for Trans Women

Here’s a great interview with the amazing Laverne Cox and Janet Mock about Mister Cee – who was caught soliciting a trans female – that he loves women, dates women, but occasionally desires fellatio with a “transsexual” – that is, a trans woman.

What’s fascinating is how many people think he’s “just gay” and needs to come out.

Liking fellatio – and he’s unclear if he’s interested in a trans woman blowing him or blowing a woman who still has a penis – doesn’t make someone gay.

Liking men, as a man, makes someone gay (if anything does).

Men who like trans women are straight. Maybe adventurous. Maybe they like penises and women.

They said there is no language for someone who loves trans people, but in fact the term “trans amorous” – “trans am” for short – has been around quite a lot. They’re called trans admirers sometimes, or “transsensual” (which is used more on the FTM end of things).

THAT SAID: plenty of men who date trans women are straight men. Period. End of statement.

Janet Mock talks more about shame and gender policing in her article which is, as per usual, right on.

A very, very long time ago I asked trans admirers to step up.

I’m still waiting.

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A Trans Inclusive Feminism.

It was the principle of the thing.

I’ve been doing this work for more than a decade now, so if you’re indecisive, I’m going to say this: there are no doubt trans women who are jerks, misogynists, and who carry around a fuckton of male privilege. But they are NOT all trans women, and they are not jerks BECAUSE they are trans.

Cis women can be jerks, too, but we’d all rather not have people’s opinions and policies decided based on their behavior.

Anyway. I don’t think of what I do as fighting transphobia. What I think I do is practice an intersectional, trans inclusive feminism. & That is all.

There are many, many ways a woman arrives at “woman”. Trans is just one of many paths.

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Bereft of Butches?

This is a really great piece by a woman who has dated butches and trans men for most of her life, telling the brief story of how she came to understand why the lesbian community isn’t “missing” the butches who choose to transition.

She says:

Most trans men I know came out as lesbians, then claimed a butch identity, and then transitioned. Some of them have realized they never were attracted to women at all and are now gay men — this isn’t as odd as it might sound, if you accept that the lesbian community is the only safe space to explore gender, so it’s where many trans men start their journey.  

Maybe that’s why lesbians feel we’ve lost them: because we believed they were ours.

It is, overall, a great piece of writing, plainly laid out, touching on major objections and criticisms of trans inclusion, but it’s also got a light touch. It’s not an angry piece – if it’s anything, it’s got a tiny note of sad in it – not because of the perceived “loss” of butches, but because so many in the lesbian community don’t yet seem to get it.

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Trans Health Publication Needs Your Help

Jamison Green & Maddie Deutsch have created a document that will be free and shareable with healthcare professonals — but they need to buy the distribution rights from the publisher. They need $2500 to do it, & they’re well on their way, so please do contribute if you can.

Here’s a special appeal from Jamison Green about why they’re raising the money now & not waiting:

We are restricted from distributing the article for one year, and the audience for the journal is pretty specific, but the content of our piece is (we believe) important to many, and we wanted to get it out as quickly as possible, particularly since work on EMR standards is proceeding apace, and we don’t want to be barred from the conversation by virtue of not having a weighty voice. The authors of this article have publicly shared these ideas previously from many other platforms (public lectures, personal consultations, etc.), and through work done by the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health at UCSF. Even the CDC has begun to take up some of the concepts. But the value of being able to show (for example) a hospital administrator a copy of an article in a peer-reviewed journal can often carry the needed weight to make a needed change happen, when the advice from an individual might be ignored or disregarded because it was perceived to be only one voice. We know that the more voices carrying the message, the farther it is likely to get; if we thought we could afford to wait until next April when we will have the right to distribute, we would have waited, and continued to share the information at medical conferences and through other media as we have been doing. But we think we can do better by distributing the article more quickly, and we wanted to engage the wider community in sharing the knowledge, too. Again, I appreciate your help!

You can read more at the GoFundMe site for it, too.

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1st Day Back

Because Lawrence is on the term system, we are just starting our fall term next week, but we’ve got a special first section of our Freshmen Studies class, which I teach. Tomorrow a small group of unsuspecting first year students will meet me as their 1st college professor.

Otherwise, everyone else is back on campus now too, & classes start in earnest on Monday for all.

So welcome back, Lawrence! & So it begins again, this time for the class of 2017.

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Gender Binary’s Disservice

This just in from the “We’re not just making this stuff up” department of gender studies, where we don’t actually just talk about how the binary prescribes and proscribes our lives, but even moreso, how it influences and limits medical research:

Both men and women make estrogen out of testosterone, and men make so much that they end up with at least twice as much estrogen as postmenopausal women. As levels of both hormones decline with age, the body changes. But until now, researchers have focused almost exclusively on how estrogen affects women and how testosterone affects men.

Sadly, we have known for a very long while that men have & need estrogen and vice versa, that neither is the “male” hormone or “female” hormone, and yet we persist in separating these hormones based on their dominance in one kind of body or another.

The article goes on to point out that middle aged spread in men is likely due to a decrease in estrogen levels, which was previously believed to be caused by the decrease of T, which, coincidentally, has lead to a $2 billion dollar testosterone industry. Go figure.

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Kittens

We happen to be fostering three kittens at the moment, all of them goofy, clumsy little ninjas, hungry and recently weaned. One orange, one grey, one tortico. And they have been amusing the hell out of me, like kittens always do.

But today? They are running all over the place & so I’m reminded of that day 12 years ago when I looked down at our hardwood living room floor in Brooklyn and noticed that our kitty boys – who were then about a year & a half – had left footprints while they played.

& That was when we noticed the light coating of ash on the floor.

& Then it all comes back: the smell, god the smell. But the phone calls, & my family gathering on Long Island that following weekend, to look at our wedding photos – we’d just gotten married in July. Walking down the street in Park Slope & a woman stopping to take a call on her cellphone & watching her go ashen & cry & fall to her knees right there on the sidewalk. Finding a day a few months later to shop up on 7th Avenue and running into a funeral for a Rescue One firefighter.

It was a lot of that. It wasn’t a day.

It was months, now years, more than a decade, & yet the shock of it, and the sadness, never goes away.

So today, tears, and kittens who leave no footprints.

 

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Your Own Ethics, or Someone Else’s

The essential issue with a surgery that people get to eliminate or “westernize” the epicanthic fold in their eyelid isn’t dissimilar from too many other arguments about similar surgeries: do you get bigger breasts to fit in, to feel happier, to get ahead? Then what’s wrong with it? If a trans woman gets Facial Feminization Surgery again, so she can fit in, and not to “as trans” as she might otherwise, then what’s wrong with it?

Long ago I decided that unless I were in a similar situation, I couldn’t judge and won’t judge. People make what decisions they do for themselves.

The financial argument – the ‘how dare someone spend that kind of money on vanity?’ kind of critique – also strikes me as a moot point. Every single day people in the industrialized nations spend money on stuff when other people need malaria netting for their beds and clean water.

So where do you end up? I don’t know whether to focus this issue on the marginalization and orientalism that contribute to the kind of discrimination Leo experienced or on the aesthetics and our absurd beauty standards:

The truth is more complicated, if you ask Jiang: “There is a difference between looking more like a white person and looking less like your race,” he believes. “At the highest echelons of beauty, the categories all begin to look the same. We’re all trying to achieve racial transformation, but in a homogenized center ground. My personal view is that there is a white, idealized version of beauty associated more with Western beauty ideals. The argument is whether it’s coincidental or constructed.”

There are two major ways of thinking about it, for feminists: on the one hand, that no one who lives in a culture with all of these intersected oppressions can possibly make a choice out of their own free will (and that a feminist, in rejecting these oppressions, will reject any decision that compromises her ability to resist patriarchy/beauty standards/sexism/etc, OR, that every individual has to make choices based on personal agency and the ability to recognize systemic oppressions and choose to do something to circumvent or resist them.

So which is it? Is he grabbing the bull by the horns or being gored by it?

Personally, I find the epicanthic fold beautiful, and always have.

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Make Your Own Dress

Okay, this is both funny and kinda gorgeous: on Reddit, a bunch of men tried their shorts on in a whole new way, creating an off-the-shoulder slinky ass dress for themselves.

There’s a bunch more. I chose this one because of the well-chosen details that wound up on his arm.