Category: trans

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Urgent from NCTE

Today Senators Kennedy (D-MA) and Smith (R-OR) introduced the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 1585), which is being debated in the Senate this week and next. This amendment could be voted on as early as today. In short, today transgender people are one giant step closer to gaining federal hate crimes protections!

The language of today’s amendment is identical language to that of S. 1105, which the Senators introduced in April.

But to ensure that the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act becomes law, you must contact your Senators now and urge them to support this life-saving legislation.

As you read this, the Radical Right is mobilizing their base to oppose the federal hate crimes bill. They’re using scare tactics and flat-out lies in hopes of killing Kennedy’s amendment. Make sure that your Senators hear your voice and the true importance of this bill.

The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act would:

  1. Extend existing federal protections to include “gender identity, sexual orientation, gender and disability”
  2. Allow the Justice Department to assist in hate crime investigations at the local level when local law enforcement is unable or unwilling to fully address these crimes
  3. Mandate that the FBI begin tracking hate crimes based on actual or perceived gender identity
  4. Remove limitations that narrowly define hate crimes to violence committed while a person is accessing a federally protected activity, such as voting.

Find your Senators’ contact information.

The time to act is now! Call your Senators today and urge your friends and family to do the same!

(A sample letter you can copy & paste is below the break.)

Continue reading “Urgent from NCTE”

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Clocked

I was talking to my friend Maurice when I got to see him recently, and commented that African American people are often quicker to clock trans women more easily or more often than others.

About a day later, he came up with the idea that perhaps that’s because hair doesn’t have the same gendered connotations for African American people as it does for white folks: as he pointed out, African American women will often have buzzcuts, or very short hair, or hair that is cornrowed close to the head – i.e., not the kind of hair that often indicates woman-ness in white culture. Likewise, African-American men sometimes have that long flowing hair – in the shape of dreadlocks – so that his theory was that they may not respond to hair as a gender marker as strongly as white folks due, & see through to other kinds of gender markers that white folks – distracted by hair – might not notice.

& Yes, Maurice is African-American.

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TransForming Community Anthology

I’m up at my usual ungodly hour having just finished a piece for an upcoming anthology called TransForming Community: Stories from Merging Trans and Queer Communities which will come out on Suspect Thoughts Press next year and is being edited by Michelle Tea and Julia Serano.

It comes out of a spoken word series Michelle Tea started a while back; Julia Serano recently reported on her experience at one.

My piece is on queer heterosexuals, specifically crossdressers/transvestites and their female partners, and how we do or don’t fit into queer community, or straight community, or trans community, depending.

It’s also about how to tie your shoes.

When I have a final edit, I’ll put an excerpt of it up here.

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About 20/20

So I’m still thinking about the 20/20 show that was on a few weeks ago about young kids coming out as trans.

& The thing I can’t quite get past is how many people who are gender variant grow up to be gender variant but okay with the sex they were born. A gay friend of mine called after the show was over & asked, “So what’s the difference between them & me?” because he went through most, if not all, of what one of the young MTF expressed. He did drag for most of his childhood, expressed the desire to be a girl as a child, and had a hard time dating guys who didn’t want to date a queen. I didn’t have an answer for him. I don’t know what makes some of us gender variant & some of us trans. Continue reading “About 20/20”

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Creative Fundraising

An interesting article from The Village Voice about fundraiser party for top surgery for masculine spectrum types. Interestingly, this is about someone who’s removing hir breasts in order to have a more androgynous body, not a male one, per se.

I read at one of these years ago when My Husband Betty was just published, and it was very cleverly called Take My Breasts Away.

We did.

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Just Call Me Joe

My old friends occasionally get flummoxed over what name to call me when I’m doing readings & the like, & this past Thursday for my reading at Sugar was no different. My dear friend & former roomie Maurice asked me more than once if he could call me “Gail” at the reading, & I told him he could call me whatever. “But I should call you Helen,” he continued. “Sure, call me Helen.” He wasn’t sure if he’d remember, so I told him to call me “G” which is actually what he’s called me for years. It seemed settled.

Of course when we got to the bookstore he called me Gail about half a dozen times, & I don’t mind it at all; I really don’t care what my old friends call me – I just thought it was funny.

But I also thought that maybe when trans people get upset about someone getting their name wrong, it has nothing to do with gender & everything to do with the funny way your brain works (or doesn’t work) with your mouth. Because I knew Maurice meant to call me G, & it was as if, because he was thinking, “don’t call her gail don’t call her gail don’t call her gail” of course Gail was what came out.

Just sayin’.

& In the meanwhile, my thanks to Maurice & his lovely wife for putting me up while I was in Balto.

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Not Alien at All

So I decided to take a flying leap out of the gender world & read a novel, right? & I chose The Alienist, since it was a book Betty had recommended to our reading group years ago for a meeting that I missed. And what does the first grisly murder scene entail? A young boy painted and dressed like a girl who’s been selling himself sexually to survive.

Is that weird or what? It’s like no matter what I do, there’s a tranny somewhere, or more like everywhere. I can’t escape.