Always forward, never straight – how it is in roller derby.
Erica Tremblay is making a documentary about the queer subculture within roller derby, and she needs funds.
Cool.
Voting While Trans: A Guide
This is HUGE: a voter guide for all of us out there who could be impacted by the intersection of disenfranchisting Voter ID laws and gender markers, name changes, and state-issued ID.
DO read it, & share it. The goal of these Voter ID laws is to keep people on the margins from voting at all, so let’s get more trans people to the polls than ever before.
& DON’T tell me no one’s working for you. The list of amazing things the Obama presidency has done when it comes to trans rights & protections is too kick-ass to ignore.
Trans Obama Call
Trans United for Obama has set up a national call for Obama supporters on August 20th. Find out more & sign up now.
Crossdressing Room
What a great piece on identity, crossdressing, and the internet:
I grew up surrounded by the notion that bodies and identities come in 1:1 ratios: we get a body and an identity. But from as early as I remember, I had a body that did not line up flush with any single identity but instead slipped this way and that so that it lined up with Tori at one point, or the hard man of Cameroon at another, or any one of the many selves I’ve deployed throughout my life.The discovery of the personal ad flipped a switch in the dark: the slippage I had experienced occurred not only on the side of body, but on the side of identity as well, so that Tori might slip from one body to another just as I slipped in and out of various presentations of identity. Once recognized, the logic struck me as obvious, a happy and symmetrical discovery.
I don’t mean to pretend that somehow, body and identity have been cleaved free from one another, or that we live in a world where body has no relevant bearing on identity and vice versa. After all, those pictures of Tori showed my arms, my face, my ears, that mole on the cheek next to my nose. Yet, somewhere in the hinterland of the internet, some other person had claimed one of my identities, an identity borne of my body, but one that transcended skin, muscle, hair, fat and bones, as she moved through online space, until she settled upon the imagined teenager, his body becoming hers, her voice speaking through his throat to the anonymous man on the other end of the phone.
Do take the time to read the whole of it. it is so nice to read something about the trans by someone who can really write.
(My thanks to Lea for the tip.)
Vagina Song
When I first saw the title I was kind of hoping it would be sung to the tune of “Redemption Song” but no such luck.
Many of you will find it tasteless, offensive, and crass.
Others will think it’s charming and funny.
I think it’s both.
Isis King / Janet Mock
Here’s a cool interview by the folks at In the Life: Isis King of America’s Top Model is interviewed by/conversing with Janet Mock, the out black trans woman of People magazine.
Bill Corbett Rocks
The comedian Bill Corbett used the word “tranny” on Twitter & had no idea how offensive it was. He went on to write this, & I thought it was (1) not only considered and smart and humane, but (2) it provides an amazing, graceful way to respond when you’ve fucked up.
I want to stand on the side of humanity. I want to be humane, even when being a goddamned wise-ass. There’s no tried and true path through this, but it’s really worth trying to find it. I want to make people laugh, not feel shitty about life. ”Leave the world a better place than you found it.” A twisty task for someone in comedy, but others have shown that its not impossible . . .
. . . An equally likely answer is that I really don’t know any trans people — no close friends, no family members that I know of. The one and only trans person who I knew well was someone at a regular AA meeting I used to attend. We are both there to recover from addiction, and [no name: anonymous, y’know*] was an inspiration: she’d been physically abused by family for years, was pulling herself out of drug and alcohol addiction, and was doing it with an amazing amount of dignity and cheer, considering what she’d been through. She was a person vital to helping ME recover. We no longer live in the same city, and so have lost touch… But the thought of causing her further pain in life breaks my heart.
In apology, and to honor my friend, I am donating $100.00 to the Anti-Violence Project in New York, where I grew up.
Well done.
Tech Tools, Master’s House
Two Chrome extensions: Jailbreak the Patriarchy – which swaps out all the “he” pronouns for “she” pronouns, and Jailbreak the Binary, which replaces all gendered pronouns for gender neutral ones.
Cool.
Male Femme Responds
A transvestite of my acquaintance has written a very interesting response to the radfem anti-trans position that is worth reading. Jeffreys, and other radfems, seek to disenfranchise trans women on the basis that they are just transvestite men, and this male femme takes on why, exactly, that doesn’t make sense either.
This section is particularly interesting:
After that digression, in her final section Jeffreys asks the (for her, rhetorical) question: “Transfemininity – Transgressing Gender or Maintaining It?”, reiterating once again that “Femininity is exciting because it is the behaviour of subordination” and, further, that “it is because it is the behaviour of subordination that it cannot be preserved.” From my own perspective, femininity is not intrinsically the behaviour of subordination, so any move to eliminate it is unwarranted (never mind being hopelessly impractical). Instead, what is required is the negation of gender stereotyping, so that people are able to develop their gender freely and are free to express it as they need or wish. As for Jeffreys’ question itself, I think the answer is pretty much “neither” in all cases:
— For trans women (with whom Jeffreys is primarily concerned at this point) the question has no relevance, since trans women are not inevitably feminine; their gender is as variable as that of any other woman. (Jeffreys merely confuses sex and gender here.)
— For male submissives transgression does occur in a sexual sense, in that maleness is disassociated from stereotypical expectations of sexual dominance. Sissies might appear to render this ambiguous by coupling femininity with sexual submission, but it is still in essence male submission. In either case gender transgression is not really the point.
— For male transvestites cultural gender rules are certainly transgressed, but that doesn’t imply any real gender transgression either. As Jeffreys’ selective evidence indicates, some transvestites (like anyone else) can have quite ‘traditional’ views on gender. (A penchant for cross-dressing is no assurance of progressive values.) Moreover, transvestites’ default stealth (i.e. closetedness) rules out meaningful transgression for most of us, whatever our politics. The best that might be said is that transvestites are potentially transgressive. If we were all out and open about our (varied) gender expression, so that the assumed correlation between femininity and femaleness was shown to be false, we might well be gender transgressive. But, with a few notable exceptions, we mostly aren’t.
As much as I would rather see this embarrassing radfem position just go away, it won’t, until or unless pro-trans radfems are willing to speak up and provide logical theoretical reasons for why trans people should be included in a radical feminist agenda.
Riki Wilchins’ Mangina Monologue
“Because old guys getting erections is vital to the very moral fiber of our social foundation.” Funny. I never thought Riki Wilchins would do dick jokes.