Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
“We like to travel on trains,” she says. “That’s part of the whole drive: Reinstate public transportation, especially trains. Get out of the cars. Destroy all the streets and roads and bridges and dams. Just get rid of it.”
Hey, me too! Does this make me a rock star?
Sadly, no. But it does mean The Pretenders have a new cd out, & it’s called Break Up the Concrete, and you can listen to samples
Just because this year hasn’t sucked for Betty enough medically, she broke her foot yesterday while helping create the media installation at JFK’s new (not yet opened) JetBlue terminal.
We spent 8 hours in the emergency room today waiting to find out if it was broken, getting x-rays, and then having it splinted. She’ll get the cast proper later this week.
*sigh*
I’ll be speaking at West Virginia University’s Morgantown campus tonight at 8:30 PM, so if you’re anywhere nearby, please do come, as the event is open to the public (& only an hour from Pittsburgh, if you’re wondering).
We’ve added a blog entry by a currently-transitioning trans woman, and a Transmissions column in the Bay Area Reporter by the incomparable Gwen Smith of rememberingourdead.org.
Both go a little more into the whys of Obama (for those of you who haven’t made up your minds).
& We’ve now raised nearly $15k for Obama’s campaign to be president. It makes me positively tingle.
If you like what we’re doing here & can help us keep doing it, please donate. Thank you so much.
My old blog template couldn’t make use of all the groovy new widgets and functionality of WordPress, so I dove into a site re-design the other day, and I’m still tweaking.
I’ve kept lots of cool stuff, like my flickr badge and extensive blogroll, but here’s the cool new stuff:
So do explore, and if you have any more suggestions, that’s what the comments section is for. In the next months I’m hoping to update both helenboydbooks.com and Trans Group Blog, but for right now, I’ve had my fill of tweaking code.
& We thought we loved Betty White before!
I’m fiddling with the re-design, so forgive me if for the next several days you can’t quite find everything you’re used to. Eventually I’ll get it all in place, but wow – a website that’s been tweaked for a few years has a ton of tiny stuff in the code.
Found this quote on Feministing:
For many Gen X women like myself (and Palin is Gen X) the primary sexist experience is: “Those men gave the job to that clueless chick instead of me, because the boss thinks she’s hot and/or will be a yes-man with no ideas of her own.”
& While the whole Boomer / Gen X feminist difference is interesting to me, what really struck me was that I DIDN’T KNOW ANYONE ELSE FELT THIS WAY! Really. It is my chief experience with feminism, at least in terms of employment, & it really blew my mind to see it summarized so neatly and talked about as an ur-experience for women in my age bracket.
Or, as I might put it, it’s guys hiring with their dicks. I just heard from an old friend who says he loves her verve. I’ll try hard to still respect him in the morning.
& In the meantime, a wicked Rolling Stone article about Palin that nearly convinced me to forgive them for putting sleazy, non-musician women on their covers for the past 40 years.
& Now, off to the debate! Get your bingo cards ready.
Kate Bornstein has her wrap-up post up (thanks, Kate!) and so does our Canadian friend Veronique, and I also wanted to get in a few words from Melissa Sklarz, who is currently the vice chair of National Stonewall Democrats, about NSD and its trans representation:
NSD has had trans representation on its board for almost 10 years. I have been on the Board for 6 years and have been a vice chair of the Board for the last 4. We have had trans representation from the East and the West and now our friends in Colorado are starting an NSD trans group for all of us. The three of us comprise 8% of the Board total and all do service at the Exec level.
Most gay poltical groups have either few or no trans folks on board.
Which is one of the reasons it’s so damn cool that they decided to host the donations for Obama for the trans community. Thank you, Stonewall Democrats, especially Jon Hoadley and John Marble, who spearheaded this project, and thank you Babrbara Casbar (NJ), Melissa Sklarz (NY), and Laura Calvo (OR), for your work within NSD’s state organizations.