Normal Rockwell, great American folk painter, paints Gary Cooper getting painted by a makeup artist. Who knew?
It’s one of 10 genderbent magazine covers at Flavorwire, and DO click their links – they lead you to some interesting places.
Goodbye Tony Curtis
(with a Sheboygan reference, to boot)
Bearded Lady
Wheeler’s facial fuzz had appeared at birth with an inch and a half of light hair covering her cheeks and chin. She says her mother wanted a daughter, and doctors were instructed to remove the male parts.
Wheeler claimed her father was humiliated by his bearded little girl, but it didn’t prevent him from capitalizing on her condition. She began working in sideshows at an early age, earning money to send home to her family.
Between tours, she would return home and reach for a razor.
“My dad said to shave because people wouldn’t understand why I had facial hair, saying, ‘This is what you’ll have to do to fit into society,'” Wheeler told AOL News.
As she grew older, she would shave sometimes to placate the men she dated, “because of their low self-esteem. It didn’t bother me.”
The boldface is mine. How amazing is that?
(Thanks to Patricia on our boards.)
FTM’s Partner in the NYT
I wish the NYT had been this hip when my books came out – either of them! Still, it’s good to see they’re catching on.
About a year after my partner’s surgery, we moved to a city in the Midwest where he’d been accepted to graduate school. Largely unknown there, we easily passed for a straight couple, no longer having to explain anything about our identities. Our home was in a lesbian-friendly neighborhood, and when we encountered lesbian couples on the street, they didn’t seem to notice us.
I wasn’t sure I minded. I cycled through feelings of relief and guilt over how we now fit into the straight world. My best friend visited and noted that I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable in queer groups; I hid behind the privilege that being straight afforded me.
Although my partner and I made friends in the local queer community, I realized I was reluctant to be seen with friends who looked “different” when I was around my straight co-workers. I grew my hair long and wore makeup. I waxed my eyebrows. I couldn’t have told you what was happening to me. I had my first girlfriend at 16, and when I told my parents, they rolled with it. Coming out then was one of the only times I had explicitly proclaimed my sexuality. I was completely unprepared at 26 to come out again.
This woman has lived pretty much the reverse of what I’ve been through, and yet, there it is: the way that your own gender, as a partner, is changed and emphasized and underlined by your partner’s transition, which seems to me, from so many partners I speak to, to be the one issue that’s a surprise, whether the person’s gender was unchanged and unquestioned or heavily investigated and fluid.
Straight: It’s the New Gay
Nice comic bit on gender, gender roles, and desire, but really, don’t let me make it sound not funny, becausei t is.
Kevin Barnes: Of Montreal and Of the Next Wave
This interview with Kevin Barnes of Of Montreal is too cool. Wow: queer straight guys are really starting to exist. It makes me so happy.
The void came in handy when the family moved to staid Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. His brain still smoldering, young Barnes disappeared into his music. When he wasn’t writing songs about his desperate lust for girls, he was fantasizing about being attracted to boys. “I was more feminine than the other straight guys, and I got picked on,” says Barnes, who speaks in a fey whisper, so this is easy to imagine. “I was like, if I’m going to get picked on, I might as well be gay. Then I would at least have a support group, and we could isolate ourselves and be in that world together.” Being gay also seemed more interesting. “I romanticize homosexuality. Most of the gay guys I met were smart and so many of the straight guys were dipshits, especially in South Florida. I wanted to be part of the more elegant caste.” But Barnes never found a serious boyfriend—making out has been the extent of his homosexuality, which is why he says he’s not gay. “I’ve never had a connection where I wanted to tear a guy’s clothes off. I’ve been open to it. Maybe I haven’t found the right guy.”
Wow. It’s been cool for women to admit to such things for a long while now, but for guys? Not so much. Ah, brave new world, you can’t get here fast enough.
Semenya’s Return
And another via my friend Matty, with whom I will be team teaching Gender Studies 100 this fall, about Caster Semenya’s return.
She added: “Even if she is a female, she’s on the very fringe of the normal athlete female biological composition from what I understand of hormone testing. So, from that perspective, most of us just feel that we are literally running against a man.”
To which I might say: isn’t the whole point of athletic competition pushing the envleope / finding the fringe of “normal”?
His Son’s Dress
I don’t know why these stories depress me so much, and really, it’s the ones with the cheerfully liberal dad who really is trying his hardest not to be a dick.
And yet, he is.
Sigh. And we didn’t even have to wait until Halloween this year.
Some Lovaas Lost
I was sent the link to a cool little blog called Killing the Buddha, and specifically to this post about “The Feminine Boy Project” which attempted to rid young boys of their femininity, and of course, their homosexuality. The blog’s author specifically calls out the NYT for leaving out Lovaas’ involvement in the project:
Well, George “Rentboy-renter” Rekers is no gay activist . . . Just last year, Rekers described Lovaas as not only critical for the funding and oversight of the study, but also for its planning. In fact, the way Rekers tells it, Ivar Lovaas came up with the idea in the first place.
…which is just a smidge more than being tangentially involved, no?
So if anyone out there has more information on Rekers’ statement, let me know.
Welcome to the Present, Newsweek
It’s not a bad piece, something like a big summary, and brief, and there is a general glaring lack of the word genderqueer. Still, some nice bits:
Many scientists, he says, see gender as a continuum and acknowledge that some people naturally fall in the middle. Gender, Bockting says, “develops between the biological and the environmental. You can’t always detect gender by physical evidence. You have to ask the person how they identify themselves; in that sense, it’s psychological.”
and
But Drescher says he is certain of one thing after a lifetime of working with gender: “There is no way that six billion people can be categorized into two groups.” Now if we could only figure out the pronoun problem.
and
Instead, Drescher says, the committee is proposing changing the name to “gender incongruence” and making the diagnosis contingent on the person feeling significant distress over their gender confusion. “We didn’t want to pathologize all expressions of gender variance just because they were not common or made someone uncomfortable,” Drescher says.
and finally:
Bockting says it’s not uncommon for people undergoing sex changes to find that surgery doesn’t resolve all their gender-identity issues. “With time,” he says, “they accept a certain amount of ambiguity … We have this idea that people take hormones and undergo surgery and become the other gender. But in reality it’s more complicated.”
except I would add: except when it isn’t.
There is also a photo gallery of people – it’s not clear how any of them identify but all the portraits were taken at the LA trans job fair – and I really have mixed feelings about the photos. I’d love to hear what you all think of them.