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Me, Victorian Prude

I was reading over at feministing.com about casual sex, & read a recent bulletin from GenderPAC about the increase in Purity Balls, & then was mourning over the loss of another trans woman who got beaten to death by a guy who she’d previously given a blowjob to, & it got me thinking.

See, I wasn’t comfortable being a nubile when I was younger. I wasn’t comfortable ever being a nubile, & am still only wont to dress in sexier ways in very safe spaces – like DO, or certain queer/drag/fetish events, or the like. As much as I know it’s never a woman’s fault if she is hurt because of the way she’s dressed, I also had enough contact with non-sexual street violence to be twice as cautious about leaving myself open to any kind of sexual abuse or harassment, much less violence.

Which probably makes me painfully Second Wave, but there you go. I just don’t get it, & I’m never going to get it. I never had good sex that was casual; a long-standing “booty call” type relationship was a little closer to my experience of having good, non-committed sex, and maybe here we’re just defining “casual” in different ways, and the folks over at feministing are talking about the same kind of relationship. Continue reading “Me, Victorian Prude”

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Hungry Woman Dinners?

We were grocery shopping the other day & Betty was scanning the frozen dinners – have I mentioned neither of us are particularly good cooks? – and chose a Hungry-Man one. I told her she couldn’t eat those anymore, not being a man & all. Then I looked at the frozen dinners marketed to women: Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine. It’s sad, really: even the freezers at the supermarket tell women they’re fat, & not hungry.

Edited to add: & yes, men are told it’s okay to die of stroke or heart attack with the way we define “manly” eats.

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Calling All Femmes

Femmes are having a conference in Chicago in August – hey, did anyone think about how much that’s going to suck for people who wear makeup? – and speaking: Dorothy Allison & Julia Serano, amongst others. From their Mission Statement:

“We are using this term (femme) to specifically and intentionally include lesbians and same-gender-loving women as well as genderqueers, transwomen, and folks of every sex and gender who identify as Femme and see themselves as part of LGBTQIA/SGL and genderphile communities.”

First time I’ve heard the term genderphile, which is meant to mean anyone who loves gender. Hanne Blank used it in her keynote speech at the 2006 Femme Conference (pdf).

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The Umbrella

There’s been a recent thread on the message boards about the relative usefulness & accuracy of the “transgender umbrella” & quite frankly, I’m stumped by people who have a problem with the idea. I don’t see that it’s a complicated idea: that people who “trans” gender in some way – change, permanently or temporarily, their gender, or question the binary, etc. – have something in common. It doesn’t mean you’re all alike. It doesn’t mean you share all causes or issues or complaints. It doesn’t mean anything except that at some point, you question(ed) the assignment of an F or an M on your birth certificate as an accurate description of your gender at all times.

What I expect underlays the complications is an expectation of harmony, or unity, under that umbrella. That’s not going to happen, simply because different types of people under the umbrella have different experiences, identities, and definitely different complications with expressing that identity in the world. The post-op young transitioner who is happily married to a man may pass seamlessly as a woman, but only stealth keeps it that way. The crossdresser needs places to change, & community that isn’t heterocentric or homophobic. The genderqueer person wants to be acknowledge that they do not have a single gender, or any gender, or a consistent gender, or a binary-driven gender, depending on how they express being genderqueer.

There’s a lovely amount of variety.

What I think happens is that some forms of transness are considered “less than.” I can understand why a trans woman might feel her femininity mocked, or made questionable, by a crossdresser’s evocations of feminity. I’ve felt the same way when faced with some crossdressers’ interpretation of feminine. But I can’t imagine disliking crossdressers as a group because of that. After all, as many partners & feminists have experienced, transness in general tends to blow up a cissexual’s notions of gender in the first place, with its emphasis on nature & not nurture. We don’t dislike trans people as a result (well, some people do, of course, but I’m assuming most people reading this think that’s kind of dumb, if not outright prejudice.)

It’s not as if I’m not horrified by the behavior of some white folks, or other women, or writers, or Brooklynites, but I can’t deny I have something in common with them, either.

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A Bit of Good News

A German court has decided that a pre-existing marriage does not have to be dissolved if one of the spouses in said marriage changes their legal sex.

In the UK, that’s exactly what has to happen, & if the couple wants to remain married, they can then have a civil union (just as Jan Morris & her wife have just done).

In the US, of course, it’s more a loophole because marriage is a contract, & contract law is such that as long as the contract is legal at the time it’s written, it continues to be unless otherwise contested.

But as far as I know, this is the first ruling to acknowledge that some transsexuals are already married when they transition, that they choose to remain married after transition, and that their marriage is legally a same-sex marriage after the fact.

It’s good news.