Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Over the weekend I discovered a fantastic resource – Zagria’s Gender Variant Biographies Blog. What remarkable work! I’ve been scanning the entries for the past year or so, and so far, this one about a photo subject of WeeGee’s is my favorite.
Do go check it out, & from here on in you’ll also find a link to it in my Trans Resources blogroll.
Another gay-identified, gender variant teen, Simmie “Chris” Williams, was killed this week. Our thoughts are with Denise King and her family.
I’m amazed that the article focuses on whether or not she was a prostitute and not on the two men who (apparently) killed her. I’m so tired of this switcheroo, this bullshit blame-the-victim crap when it comes to trans people.
What a pretty girl she was.
Too many.
I’ve been putting together a Trans History Timeline for my Transgender Lives class. The idea was to give them an idea of the events that lead up to the modern Transgender Movement (such as it is).
I was teaching Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man at the time, which is why it ends where it does, but I’ve been adding to it since, & will continue to do so.
The New Hampshire paper The Nashua Telegraph has been running a series on transgender people which apparently lost the paper some readers. That said, a NH grandma liked the series:
I am a heterosexual grandmother, who hopes that my grandchildren will learn to respect and understand all human beings who are leading legal, moral and, ultimately, happy lives.
What a nutty goal. You can let the paper know it’s an important series, not trash, by responding to a poll on the first page of the website (toward the bottom).
There is a lot on the news about the shootings at NIU that left too many students dead. It’s too sad a story, and sadly familiar as well.
But there are two other stories of young people who have died that are barely being reported, and are just as important:
As confusing and frustrating as the NIU shooting is, these other two deaths were entirely preventable: if only we could give kids a little more room to be who they are, while ALSO educating people that gender diversity is not immoral, unnatural, or dangerous.
Still, it frustrates me to see that the deaths of these other children are barely being reported, once again confirming the idea that gender diverse people’s lives are worth a little less.
A great, much-needed and overdue article on the intersections of transness and race by Daisy Hernandez at ColorLines:
Louis Mitchell expected a lot of change when he began taking injections of hormones eight years ago to transition from a female body to a male one. He anticipated that he’d grow a beard, which he eventually did and enjoys now. He knew his voice would deepen and that his relationship with his partner, family and friends would change in subtle and, he hoped, good ways, all of which happened.
What he had not counted on was changing the way he drove.
Within months of starting male hormones, “I got pulled over 300 percent more than I had in the previous 23 years of driving, almost immediately. It was astounding,†says Mitchell, who is Black and transitioned while living in the San Francisco area and now resides in Springfield, Massachusetts.
This essay might be an interesting read to compare to Jacob Anderson Minshall‘s essay in “The Enemy Within: Becoming a Straight White Guy” which details what it’s been like for a feminist to transition to male. It’s in the new anthology Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power.
(via Feministing, where you will also currently see a blog ad for She’s Not the Man I Married)
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.
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.)
Betty’s always joking about wanting a magical pony, but I don’t think she had this one in mind.
(thanks to Xtine).
I really enjoyed doing this podcast with Josh & Sara, so I’m pleased to say it’s up on their website as an MP3 now.