Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
tv shows, magazine articles, movies
We’ve got London Fog paring Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) down to size.
Which puts my “yay, the future!” optimism on hold. Because it’s always been okay for skinny white guys to do whatever they want, while women, and actual gay men, will continue to deal with this bullshit.
Okay, someone send me a story that cheers me up again.
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.
Wow: Amos Mac and Original Plumbing magazine get a profile in the NYT. For those of you who think nothing has changed, and the media suck on trans issues, honestly: it’s just not true. These are huge changes, huge progress.
I had a friend do a translation of the text that accompanies the photo:
Lea, Born Again.
New top model alert: in this fall’s Givenchy campaign, Lea is standing, in feathers, close to Mariacarla, Malgosia and Joan Smalls. With hollow cheeks and faded eyebrows, she exudes a beauty that is regal, detached, retro, and androgynous, something between Greta Garbo and Candy Darling. Lea T., the sensation of fall 2010, is the new star of the agency Women. A woman to be [or possibly “a woman in the process of becoming”], born Leo, she decided to tame life in high heels. Originally from Belo Horizonte, she grew up a well-educated boy in both Brazil and Italy, in a respected Catholic family. With two sisters and a brother, Leo was destined for a career in veterinary medicine, up to the day when Lea appeared: “I met Riccardo Tisci, who had just come out of Central Saint Martins (College of Art and Design). Little by little, we became friends. And, one night, he encouraged me to wear high heels to a party. We went to buy drag queen shoes and also bleached my eyebrows. It was a revelation.” Lea followed her pygmalion/mentor to Givenchy in Paris and worked there as his assistant, confidante, and fitting model for two seasons. Back in Milan, she decided to start her physical metamorphosis, a treatment that was met with public prejudice and immense familial unease. “It was like a war inside my head,” she says. From Paris, Riccardo followed the ups and downs of the change. He offered help and “one day, he called to ask me to pose for a Mert & Marcus ad.” Lea accepted in the name of all her transsexual friends, a standard bearer for their cause, and “especially proud of her friendship with Riccardo.” Since that ad campaign, casting and interview offers rain on Piero Piazzi, Lea’s agent at Women, “another of my guardian angels.” Lea, with disarming simplicity, explains that she is waiting for the definitive intervention that will liberate her femininity, “as soon as the papers are finalized.” She is open to her future, be it on the runway, or perhaps in the fashion studio/workshop, or back home, her true birthplace, Brazil.
I think it’s cool, & I’m glad she did it, though I know some of you are burnt out on people using trans bodies as this week’s shock factor. I don’t think this one is doing that, even though it’s confrontational because she’s looking right at you, the viewer. It’s impossible not to see her as a person (unless you’re the kind of person who dehumanizes any naked woman). Thoughts?
Inception is a cool, cool movie – meaty enough for someone who prefers novels – there are moments you actually feel lost in its world(s) – and yet has all sorts of chase scenes, gun battles, & explosions.
Six Degrees of Buster Keaton: Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a fan, and there are moments that’s very apparent.
Fans of Twilight Zone, or District 9, or the now-mostly-forgotten Zentropa will like it, if not love it. & Honestly, it’s the only movie I’ve seen where everyone is attractive or talented or both.
& Six Degrees of Trans: Cillian Murphy played Kitten Braden in Breakfast on Pluto.
Prof. Joy Ladin on what it means to be transgender and Jewish:
Damfinos: there’s a new cut of Steamboat Bill Jr.
Also, there’s a new DVD of all the Educational Pictures pictures
For those of you who don’t know, Houdini is credited with naming Buster. He was visiting with the Keatons, who were a vaudeville troupe, when infant/toddler Buster fell down a flight of stairs and landed with that stone face. Houdini, looking on, said “that’s quite a buster,” & thus, Buster Keaton was born. Houdini was born here in Appleton, and the Keatons used to summer in Muskegon, Michigan, where the annual Damfino conference takes place. So apparently I’ve come to some version of the right part of the world.
South African doctor invents female condoms with ‘teeth’ to fight rape
Do you really even need to read the rest of the story?
Vagina dentata via prophylactic. (I’m sorry, has there not been a punk female vocalist named Vagina Dentata yet? or a derby grrrl?)
Oh, this killed me. Aside from the message being cool & groovy – what about all the trans women who used to identify as crosdressers – the “what CDs are doing on MySpace clip is priceless.
“I can see cisgender people from my house!”
(thanks to Melissa V. for the link)
How I miss Brooklyn and its hipsters, especially all the queerios and genderf***ers. (I know it’s fashionable to mock hipsters, but I was one before it was a pejorative.)
Either way, Amos Mac lives in Brooklyn now, and he publishes Original Plumbing – the term used by no-bottom-surgery FTM spectrum types to explain their bits – which is a new magazine for trans masculine folks. You can find OP on FB, too.
Mac doesn’t really see himself as a guy, but as a “transman,” someone who started out female and then shifted to the masculine side of the gender spectrum. And yet Mac also identifies as a “queer guy,” which means he often finds himself attracted to, and dating, gay men. He’s an exemplar for a new generation less concerned with gender boundaries. “When I was a woman or girl or whatever,” Mac says, “I very much identified as a fag. I was drawn to the community of gay men, and that’s how I embody myself.” And although he’s dated women, “I’m attracted to guys who have a bit of flair to them. They don’t have to be gay, but they can be queeny. I love an artistic queen.”
San Francisco 0
Brooklyn 1.
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