Go take it. Tell your friends to take it.
Knowledge is Power.
Tamara Dominguez #HerNameWasTamara
I wish I’d known her. She seems like she was a beautiful person, and it’s very obvious she was well-loved. Her friend Rendon spoke for the family.
“He doesn’t know she has family. She had her mom. She had her nephews, brothers, and sisters that person didn’t think about what he did,” Rendon said.
The family is trying to raise funds to bury their loved one. Donations can be made by calling 816-745-2904.
I can’t share the details because they break my heart. Last night, learning this news, I just crumpled. For those of you who don’t understand any of this violence, here’s a brief piece in Time about it. I don’t know that it explains anything at all to anyone who is sane and not full of hate.
I’m worried about all of you these days. Please be careful out there. Let someone know who you’re seeing and when.
#saytheirnames – Three Trans Deaths This Past Weekend
I mean to distract you from your online bickering for a moment.
This weekend, three trans people of color were reported murdered – one in Arizona, one in Detroit, one in North Carolina. They had nothing else in common from what I can tell, but for being at that fatal intersection of identity that is being black and trans.
The murders this year in the US are already greater than the total number for 2014.
The deaths are always gruesome, cold-blooded, but often intimate and overkill. And when I hear a new report I think: this is never just transphobia at work, but racism and patriarchy, too – patriarchy because violence is still seen as some kind of legitimate response to a threat. Look at the “but he was threatening” defenses of armed cops who have killed unarmed people. These murders are the worst excesses of patriarchy.
Then I read something like this piece, about feminists trying to get at questions of gender construction – what is gender, how we define it, how we “make sense” of the gender of trans people as feminists who only defined gender as a system of oppression. Like many feminists of my era, my reluctance toward femininity comes from a suspicion that women are raised to be feminine because it makes us less powerful, easier to ignore, easier not to hire or promote. It makes us happier to be at home with children instead of in the workplace.
But for trans women, femininity can mean life. Survival. Acceptance. Their version of gendered oppression – and mind you, they’re already also dealing with sexism – means that the one thing the world has told them is that femininity is not theirs to have and that femininity will keep them alive.
It’s not really that complicated, and it’s not a theoretical point. Women, trans women, women of color – there may be variations on the ways we’re told to be, but the fact is that we are told to be a certain way, and the punishment for not being that way is death.
- Shade Schuler.
- Papi Edwards.
- Lamia Beard.
- Ty Underwood.
- Yasmine Payne.
- Taja Gabrielle de Jesus.
- Penny Proud.
- Kristina Gomez Reinwald.
- London Chanel.
- Mercedes Williamson.
- India Clarke.
- K.C. Haggard.
- Amber Monroe.
- Kandis Capri.
- Ashton O’Hara
- Elisha Walker
This is not a theoretical argument about gender. This is not about Caitlyn Jenner. This is not about femininity. This is about life, and about these terrific losses.
My heart is so broken all the time and I look up and see the arguments and lateral violence and theoretical discussions and I don’t know what more to say but SHUT THE FUCK UP and notice. Please, folks. Stop busying yourself with the ideas and find real-world ways to stop the violence.
Guest Author: Darya Teesewell, “Hollywood Takes Care of its Own,” Unless You are Trans
In response to my HuffPo post, we have our first crosspost, by my friend Darya:
A young trans friend of mine in the Hollywood film industry, a union member, spoke to me recently about a conversation she had when she asked an individual representing the Motion Picture Industry Health Plan about health care for herself. She began with the most basic question; will they pay for hormones? The answer was a flat and simple no.
Page 63 of the Active MPI health plan states that “gender change” is excluded from coverage. Some of us would argue that we aren’t “changing” so much as “restoring” genders, but let that be, for now. On her own, my friend found that that there was another plan available to union members, an HMO, that did indeed cover all aspects of trans health care including Gender Reconfirming Surgery with an excellent provider in Arizona.
Even then, she found she had problems with representatives of the provider depending on where the offices were located. The Hollywood/Los Angeles office was helpful and knowledgeable, while other offices seemed perplexed, as if she were requesting something no one had ever heard of before.
If you are a trans person seeking health care, you are no stranger to this. In spite of a groundbreaking state law in California that prohibits insurers from excluding trans-related care from health plans, many insurers still push back against providing it, subtly, or not-so-subtly.
HuffPo, & An Invitation
I’m pretty sure most people don’t realize this, but HuffPo doesn’t pay writers. Like EVER, like any of them. People who write for HuffPo do reserve their rights, however.
And because I’m a professional writer who believes writers should get paid, because we’re professionals like everyone else, I don’t like to read things there.
They are, however, pretty willing to publish some good trans stuff. So here’s an offer for those of you who publish there: let me crosspost your work so that a bunch of people who won’t read, click on, or link to HuffPo articles can still read you. They’ll still make all the ad dollars from whoever clicks on their version, & I won’t make a dime.
Just send me your text & voila, I’ll put it up here.
Bernie Sanders Shows Us How It’s Done
(For the record, I’m only going to comment here about how Sanders responded to the shutdown of his speech in Seattle. I’m not interested in talking about activist tactics (but I think they were right), but more in how white allies respond to criticism.)
Honestly, I’m so impressed to see any politician respond exactly how he should have to being protested and shut down: he conceded the stage, listened, and responded with a remarkable statement about what is needed in order to do something about the systemic, structural, economic, carcerel racism in this country. But of course Sanders is more than a politician; he’s an old school radical who’s been arrested for his views and actions in the past.
I’m sure it was incredibly frustrating but you know? Black activists are furious for a reason, and it’s embarrassing to me that more of us aren’t with the disregard we have for the bodies and lives of people who have created so, so much beauty and music and labor and theory. Honestly. Love black people as much as you love black culture is exactly right.
More tomorrow on misplaced outrage and purity politics.
S onewall: the Movie (Because It’s Missing the T)
Again, I’ve been doing this a long time, so here’s the shorthand:
If, as a director, you want to make a movie about a young gay man who has been kicked out of his Kansas home by his Christian parents for being gay who then, in turn, comes to NYC & becomes a queer radical, make that awesome movie. It’s needed.
Just don’t, um, call it Stonewall. It can even be about that era, or that particular guy’s experience in the uprising, but calling it Stonewall implies it is about the whole of the event, not just one person’s experience in it.
- This isn’t hard. If you’re going to make a movie about one of the most important moments of queer liberation – globally! – then maybe try to get the history right.
- The burden is on the filmmaker to get it right.
- Gay white men did an awful lot for queer liberation, actually, and there are plenty of stories to tell about them, including at Stonewall and during it. They just weren’t the ones who threw the first brick.
- Hiring a few trans people to work on the film would have been great. Also black and latinx actors.
Miss Major explains the rest, as far as I’m concerned.
People aren’t upset just because of this movie; they’re upset because this has been happening since 1970 when Silvia Rivera was first asked not to speak at the 1st anniversary of Stonewall, the very 1st PRIDE. And you would think that perhaps someone might do their research and realize how incredibly frustrating it has been for the trans community to experience this erasure, especially after being dumped from legislation that benefited the LG and not the T. That is, there’s a history to the history.
I think I’m most disturbed by the idea that the director and screenwriter were surprised by this backlash and calls for a boycott. There are about 800 people who do trans history and advocacy who could have warned them, and maybe they were warned and dismissed the warning. That said, I’ve also seen them called out for using the word “transvestite” which – although it’s not used anymore – was, in fact, the word used by Rivera and Johnson, whose organization was called STAR, after all, for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. While I’m at it, there’s this:
What people fail to realize is that the Stonewall was not a drag queen bar. It was a white male bar for middle-class males to pick up young boys of different races. Very few drag queens were allowed in there, because if they had allowed drag queens into the club, it would have brought the club down. That would have brought more problems to the club. It’s the way the Mafia thought, and so did the patrons. So the queens who were allowed in basically had inside connections. I used to go there to pick up drugs to take somewhere else. I had connections.
[From Rivera’s piece “Queens in Exile, the Forgotten Ones,” in J. Nestle, ed., Genderqueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, at pp. 67-85 (2002).]
Does all this mean the movie will suck? Maybe not. It does mean that I won’t go see it.
Signed Copies
I haven’t kept my own books in stock for a long while but I have some at the moment, so if you’ve ever wanted a signed copy this is a chance to get one.
Short & Sweet
Maybe I’ve been doing this too long, but in preparing to do a presentation for a local organization this week, all I keep thinking is that I want to walk in and say “trans women are women, trans men are men, and some people are neither or both. Don’t worry about their genitals, their socialization, or anything except whatever services you’re providing for them. Ask everyone what name & pronoun they prefer for themselves, and then use them.”
</end Trans 101>
& Obviously, I know it’s not that simple, but it really kind of is, isn’t it?
#mileofmusic 3 Starts Today
I’m excited. This whole city becomes an entirely different place for four days – well, it really has for nearly the past month – so much music, so many more people, so much of everything. The 3rd Mile of Music has officially begun.
It’s a really great festival & I really really want to see more people come into town for it.
My picks? Artists I discovered previous years, like Charlie Parr and Swear & Shake and Pop Goes the Evil.
Groups I wanted to see last year but didn’t manage to: Bruiser Queen and The Noble Thiefs, for starters.
& Then all sorts of everything else. The best thing is just wandering down the Ave and wandering into places that music is wafting out of.
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