Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Not a big surprise, but the former Surgeon General under Bush, Dr. Richard Carmona, has testified that he was asked or told to withhold information on abstinence-only sex ed, emergency contraception, and stem cell research.
They have, of course, found this sap Holsinger to nominate, who I’m going to assume is more their kind of yes man. Not only that, but he’s declared publicly that homosexual sex is unnatural & unhealthy.
They love posing like this, asleep, eyes closed, blotting out the flash. As it gets hotter & hotter, they sleep together less & less, for good reason. They don’t think there’s any reason to worry about the supposed “bad luck” of Friday the 13th, but of course they’re not black cats, either.
& Happy birthday to my sister Kathy, too!
Just a tip: put your air conditioner on 80 degrees to save money on your electric bill. You don’t have to be cool, just not hot.
Check out a bunch of other smart, green tips on how to use air conditioning best (& most cost-effectively), and otherwise check out ways to save energy in the summer (& prevent those local brownouts).
& Unplug your chargers! That’s a new one I just learned. When you’re not actually charging your iPod / cellphone / PDA, you’re using energy just by leaving the charger plugged in.
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:
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.)
Guilty confession: I like porn, & always have. So can I, um, recommend some? I don’t watch much, but I just got around to watching some of Tristan Taormino’s Chemistry Volume I, and damn. It’s seven porn stars, in a house, for 36 hours, unscripted. She interviews them throughout, about scenes they did, scenes they want to do… and for anyone who likes porn, it’s a cool “behind the scenes” but with plenty of actual porn, too.
She’s also got some how-to videos out: so far, cunnilingus & anal (of course), but I haven’t watched those yet – maybe after we put in the AC.
Betty’s got the interview Lisa Birnbach did with me online now, so those of you who didn’t hear it at the time can hear it now.
I personally think it’s worth it just to hear her say, “so go smoke that!” in response to me mentioning that Betty still considers herself my husband.
So do I get to be a private person, too?
That’s the thought that’s been going through my head lately, since a partner in another online group for partners I belonged to recently commented that she was feeling hesitant about reading She’s Not the Man I Married because Betty stepped in to defend me on some occasion on the message boards.
& I was a little surprised, for two reasons: (1) because the idea of someone deciding I’m not independent enough or that I’ve hidden behind Betty’s skirts (as it were) kind of confounds me in general, considering the criticism I get more often is that I’m such a ball-buster who is exploiting Betty for the fame & fortune, and (2) because it never occurred to me that others wouldn’t recognize that while I have a public life as a partner & as an author, I’m also still also just one of a gazillion partners of trans people who is trundling through this experience. Continue reading “Public/Private”
Apparently all the pet food recalls and other food scares aren’t really keeping the Department of Agriculture busy enough, as they’ve got the time to bug the Hemingway estate & the city of Key West about their cats. At least whoever’s running Key West has a brain.
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.
The question of whether or not gender is on a continuum or not comes up an awful lot in trans conversation, and I’ve always been of the opinion that it does. Others don’t necessarily agree.
But for me, having been a masculine woman in straight culture (which does not recognize masculine genders in women in other than pathologizing ways) & in lesbian culture (which recognizes quite a few masculine genders expressed by women), I’d say that the points inbetween genders can *absolutely* indicate something meaningful.
It’s an easy idea to dismiss if you live in a world that doesn’t actually recognize any of the points along the spectrum, but once you’ve experienced what it feels like to be taken seriously as whatever form of gender variant you are, to not feel pathologized or having failed at “being” one gender or the other, & in fact are appreciated for existing, that’s a whole different thing entirely.
I would have lost my mind if I hadn’t found lesbian culture at certain times in my life. & Likewise, femme lesbians have been some of the only women who helped me understand & appreciate femininity exactly because of the way they queer it, which in turn lead me to a level of self-acceptance I might not have found otherwise.
When I lecture on the subject of gender variance, I’m usually speaking to a room full of people. I ask them to think of the room we’re all standing in as the gender continuum. The way i postulate it, “gender normatives” are at one end (usually near the exit doors, opposite from where i’m standing, with Masculine to the left of those doors, and Feminine to the right), with the fully androgynous at the other pole (where I’m standing). then I ask people where they would be standing, where they might place the person next to them, etc. because in almost any room i’ve ever been in you get a pretty full range of gender expression, even if we like to pretend otherwise.
The assumption that those of us who like to refer to a “continuum” or “spectrum” of gender are actually referring to a straight line with “man” on one end and “woman” on the other is needlessly binarized to start with. I think of gender much more as a circle, or maybe a triangle, with gender normative on one end & androgynous on the other side, directly across from gender normative masculine & feminine.
Though of course I expect someone to tell me now that it’s very feminine to visualize things in circles or triangles instead of straight lines in the first place.