Category: books & writing

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Trans Bodies, Trans Selves Call for Interns

Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is looking for interns for the positions listed below. The deadline for submission of applications is December 1, 2010.

Internships begin December 15, 2010. Their end date depends on the particular position. The survey and chapter interns will likely complete their work by the end of the Spring. The website and publicity interns will continue on through the book’s publication, tentatively next Fall.

Undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to apply. The book’s editors are willing to work with your school to obtain credit for your internship.  Unfortunately we do not have funds at this time to provide payment to interns. All interns will be recognized by name in the final book.
Continue reading “Trans Bodies, Trans Selves Call for Interns”

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Lavender, Not Pink or Blue

Here’s an article about gender that actually makes sense; I’m looking forward to the book, even.

“If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild,” Plomin told the Observer.

Again: there’s more similarity than difference between genders.

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Nothing to Fear

From Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, toward the end of Chapter 10:

I’ll tell you a secret about fear: it’s an absolutist. With fear, it’s all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot’s fall, has more or less nothing to do with ‘courage.’ It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life. I stopped being afraid because, if my time on earth was limited, I didn’t have seconds to spare for funk. Lord Khusro’s injunction echoed Vasco Miraanda’s motto, another version of which I found, years later, in a story by J. Conrad. I must live until I die.

I’m reading it because I recommended his Midnight’s Children to a student, then wanted to re-read it myself, & so instead picked up one of his I hadn’t read. I love his writing – it’s at once so inebriating, the joy he takes with language, but then exhausting — why aspire when someone is already so good at what you want to do? — still, I’m writing anyway.

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Gender Outlaws: TNG

I’ve just read the new Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. I’ll write a more thorough review later, and interview them about the book, but for now, here’s the blurb I wrote:

She-males and drag queens and bois, oh my.

Bornstein & Bergman found not just the outlaws but the outliers, the people who have deconstructed, reconstructed and reimagined their genders, for whom gender is not just an identity or expression but the last tool in the toolbox. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation is a good way to get up to speed on the shifting, new, and created identities of Genderland.

Vive la Revolution.