Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
tv shows, magazine articles, movies
The Gender Puzzle is a 45 min documentary about intersex that can be seen on YouTube; it’s worth watching if you’re new to intersex issues. You can also check out a 10-min. version.
You can buy a copy here, check out a t r u t h o u t column about it (& Caster Semenya), or check out the filmmakers’ website.
I assume the corniness is typical for daytime TV, but there’s no reason a same-sex sex scene can’t be as corny as anyone else’s. With fireworks, even.
For someone who went to see My Beautiful Laundrette about a dozen times – in theatres, people! – it makes me happy to see this on regular old television.
Love is love is love.
(h/t to Alex Blaze @ TBP and to Feministing)
I have no idea if anyone in the world watches the show Conveyor Belt of Love, but I did find this clip (& this blog post about it) interesting.
Scott Schofield, as he introduces himself, is Scott Turner Schofield, trans guy, activist, artist.
More interesting to me is the whole “geek hot” idea – I mean that it requires its own terminology. I didn’t know other people didn’t find geeks hot. When is smart not hot? Baffling. Once again, I discover that I have never done “straight woman” correctly.
Okay, this made me cry, really.
The world is changing. Slowly, but it is. I have met so many really cool kids – teenagers & adults, mostly – who are cool with their parents’ gender stuff that it is really nice to see this. That’s what made me cry; just seeing a presentation of all those cool KOTs (Kids of Trans) in any medium.
This is exactly the kind of thing I don’t want to know about: Steve Severin of the Banshees has written scores for surrealist silent films & will be performing at Galapagos. Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and Dulac’s The Seashell & The Clergyman are two of the films.
Ox Freeman of the Alabama Gender Alliance just posted the info from GLAAD about the stupid joke that was made on David Letterman about Amanda Simpson, and with it he commented that, “Trans people will not be safe from hate violence until it is safe to be attracted to us, to love us, and to regard us as human.”
He’s entirely right, of course, and it’s nice to have someone else articulate exactly why I do what I do.
Betty and I are both for trans people having more of a sense of humor, but we both agree: this joke is not even a little funny, exactly because this reaction to finding out a woman is trans is the same reaction that causes the heart-breaking violence trans people — and especially trans women — face.
As Allyson Robinson of HRC put it in an article by ABC News:
“Your skit affirmed and encouraged a prejudice against transgender Americans that keeps many from finding jobs, housing, and enjoying freedoms you and your writers take for granted every day,” HRC’s Allyson Robinson wrote in the letter.
Robinson said the punch line of the bit has “been used as a defense in nearly every hate crime perpetrated against transgender people that has come to trial.” She cited two cases in which individuals suspected of murdering transgender people claimed they did so in a rage after learning about their victims’ gender identity.
So now go to GLAAD.org and bug CBS, or do the same thing via change.org.
I’ll be on SistersTalk radio this Wednesday, January 6th, at 7PM Central time. & Yes, they’re on Facebook. They recently interviewed Rachel Kramer Bussell, erotica empress.
Other upcoming for me: a reading at Appleton Public Library on March 3rd, and I’m doing a reading for the Fox Cities Book Festival on April 12th. My best calendar is still on the front page of my author site, www.helenboydbooks.com (along with a list of past appearances, etc.)
Staci Hunter over at Femulate decided I’m a beautiful blogger. Thank you, Staci! It’s a nice way to start the year, and I do have a scintillating personality, at least.
(Is “femulate” not one of the best names for a blog ever?!)
I do have important responsibilities that come with this honor.
So those seven interesting things:
So now, the seven people whom I’ve chosen:
So thank you again, Staci, and thanks to all of these bloggers for writing so regularly, and about such interesting things, and for being beautiful while doing so.
From Harper’s 2009 Year in Review:
Sea levels continued to rise, and a 40-yard-wide asteroid just missed the earth. The Mediterranean Sea was plagued by blobs. Pope Benedict XVI visited Africa; in Angola he warned against witchcraft, corruption, and condoms. Papal archaeologists in Rome authenticated the bones of Saint Paul the Apostle, and Jesus Christ was dismissed from jury duty in Alabama. Toxic-mining wastes in Idaho were killing tundra swans; a man in Munich received a two-year suspended sentence for beating another man with a swan. Highly aggressive supersquirrels were menacing gray squirrels in England, where the Law Lords were replaced with a new Supreme Court whose justices wear no wigs, and where cosmetic nipple surgery was increasingly popular. A London taxi driver tied one end of a rope around a post and the other around his neck and drove away, launching his head from the car. Anglican hymns were sung at Darwin’s tomb. Two Yellowstone National Park workers were fired for peeing into Old Faithful. Sarah Palin published a book, and Sylvia Plath’s son hanged himself in Alaska. Scientists in San Diego made a robot head study itself in a mirror until it learned to smile.
Happy Christmas Eve! Check out this amusing post from 2004 about the 10 Least Successful Christmas Specials. Here’s my favorite:
Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)
In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”