Posts

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One Date Only

I’m struck by this short piece about a woman who went out on a date with an amazing man only to have him die before they could go on a second one.

Maybe because it is so much about the promise of what love is supposed to be and then wasn’t. Or because it exactly fulfilled the the best possible outcome of a first date and because it was all there would be, it stayed exactly that. No relationship. No arguments. No boredom.

It had to be a profound experience, and a haunting one, and I kind of wish someone like Margaret Atwood would write a poem about it.

Or maybe I appreciate it because so many people were posting this other story about a guy who didn’t know what love was until he had been married for a while, and who now looks on his first affections for his wife as not-love. Every time someone I knew posted that on Facebook I wanted to respond “I call bullshit” so I’m going to do that here instead. Love is only long-term commitment? Love is only changing diapers? Ugh, please. Just what we all need: more smug coupledom from people who need to tell themselves that they have the Real Thing even though they’re busy compromising pretty much everything in order to have it.

I hate that. & I hate that even more as a person who has been in a committed relationship for 15 years, precisely because the early days of wonder and joy really were days of wonder and joy. It’s okay that the start of a relationship is more exciting than conversations about who’s going to empty the dishwasher a decade later. Nobody would ever get married if a relationship started the way it will be in 15 years. You need the days of wonder and joy to be blinded to the compromises that are coming.

And I say that, too, as someone who really does believe in long-term commitments. I think many, many people are happier in them than not. But I also know a lot of people try to stay in a relationship that bores them to tears and frustrates their desires and hems them in on all sides because of schmarmy essays that like that one by the husband.

Call me a romantic, but I prefer the idea of being in love with someone because I am, not because they do the dishes. Call me crazy.

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Condoms Required

It seems like a no-brainer to me after 3 porn stars tested positive for HIV and a recent outbreak of syphilis, but when Tristan Taormino recently announced she will have all male stars use condoms in her porn movies, all hell broke loose. Here’s a CNN clip about it, if you prefer video.

Here, she explains why she made the decision she did and also explains that she is still not for mandatory use of them for everyone. This is her own decision, for her films, and in keeping with her own (feminist) labor practices.

If you support her decision, do go like her Facebook page & post a message of support.

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This New Pope

I’m liking him more & more every time he speaks or does an interview.

Pope Francis, in the first extensive interview of his six-month-old papacy, said that the Roman Catholic Church had grown “obsessed” with preaching about abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he has chosen not to speak of those issues despite recriminations from some critics.
An Interview with Pope Francis

In remarkably blunt language, Francis sought to set a new tone for the church, saying it should be a “home for all” and not a “small chapel” focused on doctrine, orthodoxy and a limited agenda of moral teachings.

And that’s after he was asked about gay priests and said “Who am I to judge?” Kind of mind-blowing, and a welcome change.

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Love & Shame & Having a Thing for Trans Women

Here’s a great interview with the amazing Laverne Cox and Janet Mock about Mister Cee – who was caught soliciting a trans female – that he loves women, dates women, but occasionally desires fellatio with a “transsexual” – that is, a trans woman.

What’s fascinating is how many people think he’s “just gay” and needs to come out.

Liking fellatio – and he’s unclear if he’s interested in a trans woman blowing him or blowing a woman who still has a penis – doesn’t make someone gay.

Liking men, as a man, makes someone gay (if anything does).

Men who like trans women are straight. Maybe adventurous. Maybe they like penises and women.

They said there is no language for someone who loves trans people, but in fact the term “trans amorous” – “trans am” for short – has been around quite a lot. They’re called trans admirers sometimes, or “transsensual” (which is used more on the FTM end of things).

THAT SAID: plenty of men who date trans women are straight men. Period. End of statement.

Janet Mock talks more about shame and gender policing in her article which is, as per usual, right on.

A very, very long time ago I asked trans admirers to step up.

I’m still waiting.

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A Trans Inclusive Feminism.

It was the principle of the thing.

I’ve been doing this work for more than a decade now, so if you’re indecisive, I’m going to say this: there are no doubt trans women who are jerks, misogynists, and who carry around a fuckton of male privilege. But they are NOT all trans women, and they are not jerks BECAUSE they are trans.

Cis women can be jerks, too, but we’d all rather not have people’s opinions and policies decided based on their behavior.

Anyway. I don’t think of what I do as fighting transphobia. What I think I do is practice an intersectional, trans inclusive feminism. & That is all.

There are many, many ways a woman arrives at “woman”. Trans is just one of many paths.

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Bereft of Butches?

This is a really great piece by a woman who has dated butches and trans men for most of her life, telling the brief story of how she came to understand why the lesbian community isn’t “missing” the butches who choose to transition.

She says:

Most trans men I know came out as lesbians, then claimed a butch identity, and then transitioned. Some of them have realized they never were attracted to women at all and are now gay men — this isn’t as odd as it might sound, if you accept that the lesbian community is the only safe space to explore gender, so it’s where many trans men start their journey.  

Maybe that’s why lesbians feel we’ve lost them: because we believed they were ours.

It is, overall, a great piece of writing, plainly laid out, touching on major objections and criticisms of trans inclusion, but it’s also got a light touch. It’s not an angry piece – if it’s anything, it’s got a tiny note of sad in it – not because of the perceived “loss” of butches, but because so many in the lesbian community don’t yet seem to get it.

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Trans Health Publication Needs Your Help

Jamison Green & Maddie Deutsch have created a document that will be free and shareable with healthcare professonals — but they need to buy the distribution rights from the publisher. They need $2500 to do it, & they’re well on their way, so please do contribute if you can.

Here’s a special appeal from Jamison Green about why they’re raising the money now & not waiting:

We are restricted from distributing the article for one year, and the audience for the journal is pretty specific, but the content of our piece is (we believe) important to many, and we wanted to get it out as quickly as possible, particularly since work on EMR standards is proceeding apace, and we don’t want to be barred from the conversation by virtue of not having a weighty voice. The authors of this article have publicly shared these ideas previously from many other platforms (public lectures, personal consultations, etc.), and through work done by the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health at UCSF. Even the CDC has begun to take up some of the concepts. But the value of being able to show (for example) a hospital administrator a copy of an article in a peer-reviewed journal can often carry the needed weight to make a needed change happen, when the advice from an individual might be ignored or disregarded because it was perceived to be only one voice. We know that the more voices carrying the message, the farther it is likely to get; if we thought we could afford to wait until next April when we will have the right to distribute, we would have waited, and continued to share the information at medical conferences and through other media as we have been doing. But we think we can do better by distributing the article more quickly, and we wanted to engage the wider community in sharing the knowledge, too. Again, I appreciate your help!

You can read more at the GoFundMe site for it, too.

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1st Day Back

Because Lawrence is on the term system, we are just starting our fall term next week, but we’ve got a special first section of our Freshmen Studies class, which I teach. Tomorrow a small group of unsuspecting first year students will meet me as their 1st college professor.

Otherwise, everyone else is back on campus now too, & classes start in earnest on Monday for all.

So welcome back, Lawrence! & So it begins again, this time for the class of 2017.

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Gender Binary’s Disservice

This just in from the “We’re not just making this stuff up” department of gender studies, where we don’t actually just talk about how the binary prescribes and proscribes our lives, but even moreso, how it influences and limits medical research:

Both men and women make estrogen out of testosterone, and men make so much that they end up with at least twice as much estrogen as postmenopausal women. As levels of both hormones decline with age, the body changes. But until now, researchers have focused almost exclusively on how estrogen affects women and how testosterone affects men.

Sadly, we have known for a very long while that men have & need estrogen and vice versa, that neither is the “male” hormone or “female” hormone, and yet we persist in separating these hormones based on their dominance in one kind of body or another.

The article goes on to point out that middle aged spread in men is likely due to a decrease in estrogen levels, which was previously believed to be caused by the decrease of T, which, coincidentally, has lead to a $2 billion dollar testosterone industry. Go figure.