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How To?

I didn’t even know about this how-to website, much less that someone might use it so creatively & list the ways to treat a trans person of your (implied: recent) acquaintance.

  1. respect their gender identity
  2. watch your past tense
  3. use language appropriate to the person’s gender
  4. don’t be afraid to ask questions
  5. respect the trans person’s need for privacy
  6. don’t assume you know what the person’s experience is
  7. begin to recognize the difference between gender identity and sexuality

Do go read the full descriptions as they do have plenty of caveats. To me this is pretty incomplete, to be honest, and yet also beside the point. I mean, don’t you try to respect any/everyone’s gender identity and use gender appropriate language?

To me, the really important one is #5, which I might rephrase as: if you know someone is trans, you should not be telling other people the person is trans. You can, often, ask the trans person what their own policy is with who knows and who won’t. Some only tell a handful of very close friends & family; others not even those people, and still others will tell anyone who asks & don’t mind having other people tell people they’re trans either.

& Always default to my rule #1: once you know 1 trans person, you know 1 trans person. & That is all you know. You don’t know anything about “trans people” as a group as a result of having one friend/co-worker/cousin.

Really, it’s just as impossible to say one true thing about trans people as it is to say one true thing about all women.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to Calpernia Addam’s brilliantly wiseass Bad Questions to Ask a Transsexual. AN ES THESIA is my favorite part. Buzzfeed has a clever, gif-heavy list of questions trans people are tired of hearing.

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Two Tune Tuesday: Those Darlins

I love them.

I first heard of them and saw this this weekend at Appleton’s music fest Mile of Music. The whole thing was amazing, with 10k people in attendance (!), and the event managed to cause a Wisconsin bar to run out of booze — after they placed a special order on Saturday and ran out of all *that* booze by Sunday.

But this band – oh, this band, I just fell in love with.

“I may have girly parts / but I have a boy’s heart…” is probably the standout lyric, but the one that first killed me was the “I just wanna play in the mud with you / you just wanna stick it in.” How great is that?

I honestly didn’t know what to make of them when they first came onstage, but I already knew I was going to go home & look them up. They started with a track from their newest, Blur the Line, called “Oh God”. The room went still and we all listened to every lyric, I think, rapt. Amazing stage presence, and they rocked. It surprised the hell out of me that they won over that crowd, and the lead singer told me later it surprised her, too. I’m hoping I’ll get to interview her/them at a later date. Check out “Optimist” – “I used to be an optimist / but it got too dangerous” – for the flip side of the sound of “Oh God”.

This is them playing the more straight-up country “Wild One” at Brooklyn’s (now defunct) Southpaw back in 2008. I wish I’d been there. They tour all over this fall. I will most definitely see them in Madison.

(This post is dedicate to Darya, who I predict is going to love them at least as much as I do.)

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CA Trans Students: Good News

Well, this is indeed good news:

Today, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the historic School Success and Opportunity Act into law, ensuring transgender youth have the opportunity to fully participate and succeed in schools across the state. Assembly Bill 1266—which goes into effect on January 1, 2014—was authored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and passed the California State Senate and Assembly earlier this summer. The law is the first of its kind in the country, and requires that California public schools respect students’ gender identity and makes sure that students can fully participate in all school activities, sports teams, programs, and facilities that match their gender identity. . . 

and

California law already prohibits discrimination in education, but transgender students have been often discriminated against and unfairly excluded from physical education, athletic teams, and other school activities, and facilities. This exclusion negatively impacts students’ ability to succeed in school and graduate with their class. For example, physical education credits are required to graduate, but transgender students often do not have the support they need to fully participate in the courses.

It’s the first law of its kind, but it would be amazing to see this happen in a lot more states.

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New Documentary: Americans in Bed

So this looks interesting:

. . . wide-ranging interviews with subjects who are filmed in the comfort of their own beds, asking probing questions about what people look for in a partner and how they know when they have found it. From a couple that has been together for 71 years to a pair of fresh-faced newlyweds, she encourages her subjects to open their hearts and minds as they share candid and touching insights into their relationships, underscoring the fact that no union is as simple as it seems on the surface.

Each couple gradually discloses intimate thoughts about the sometimes painfully private issues that affect every relationship, including passion, fidelity, family obligations, separation, conflict, negotiation and illness. As they talk about how they met and fell in love, some even surprise each other with feelings long held back, while others revisit old hurts as if they had happened yesterday.

Americans in Bed premieres Monday, August 12 (9:00 ET) on HBO. There’s a trailer here.

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RIP Dwayne Jones

(I don’t know what his femme name was, or if he even had one, or even if he used female pronouns. His friend Khloe, in this article, refers to Jones as “him” so I’m going with that.)

This is another heartbreaking account of homophobia and transphobia, and another reminder to boycott Jamaica until they get their act together.

Dwayne was the center of attraction shortly after arriving in a taxi at 2 a.m. with his two 23-year-old housemates, Khloe and Keke. Dwayne’s expert dance moves, long legs and high cheekbones quickly made him the one that the guys were trying to get next to.

. . . Minutes later, according to Khloe and Keke, the girl’s male friends gathered around Dwayne in the dimly-lit street asking: “Are you a woman or a man?” One man waved a lighter’s flame near Dwayne’s sneakers, asking whether a girl could have such big feet.

Then, his friends said, another man grabbed a lantern from an outdoor bar and walked over to Dwayne, shining the bright light over him from head to toe. “It’s a man,” he concluded, while the others hissed “batty boy” and other anti-gay epithets.

Khloe says she tried to steer him away from the crowd, whispering in Dwayne’s ear: “Walk with me, walk with me.” But Dwayne pulled away, loudly insisting to partygoers that he was a girl. When someone behind him snapped his bra strap, the teen panicked and raced down the street.

But he couldn’t run fast enough to escape the mob.

Here’s the original report of the murder.

& To hell with anyone who isn’t speaking up about what they saw and who they saw. The same to Jones’ family who wouldn’t even claim the child’s body.

 

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Trans*

In case you’re wondering, here’s a brief explanation of why some people are adding a * to the end of trans.

When the asterisk is put on the end of trans*, it expands the boundaries of the category to be radically inclusive. It can be understood as the most inclusive umbrella term to describe various communities and individuals with nonconforming gender identities and/or expressions en masse. In addition to its use as an umbrella term, it is also used by some individuals as an identity to describe just themselves (e.g. “I identify as trans*”).

Effectively, this is the same concept as trans-, which has showed up from time to time.

Betty used to say that she was trans – and you could add whatever you wanted after.

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Gendered Book Covers

Wow. If we take the gender flipping meme to publishing, then what of book covers?


Yesterday, author Maureen Johnson had a great idea. She tweeted “I do wish I had a dime for every email I get that says, “Please put a non-girly cover on your book so I can read it. – signed, A Guy” – and so came the idea for a challenge for her 77,000 followers. A challenge that she called Coverflip. Below, she explains more.

And the simple fact of the matter is, if you are a female author, you are much more likely to get the package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality. Because it’s “girly,” which is somehow inherently different and easier on the palate. A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simple more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it.

Go look at the slide show. It’s pretty staggering.

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Ready for Appleton’s Music Fest: #mileofmusic

I’ll be tweeting what I’m going to see today and tomorrow and Sunday – there are so, so many interesting bands playing, and at so many venues! It’s pretty incredible. Check for #mileofmusic on Twitter – there are already plenty of posts, photos, reviews & updates.

The full details are at the Mile of Music website & via the Post Crescent’s hub for the event.

Thanks, Cory Chisel! I’m personally hoping this will become an annual event. The whole thing is a little surreal, to be honest, since we now live in a house Chisel lived in when he lived in Appleton.

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Freud

io9 did this interesting article about Freud, and why he remains stubbornly, and maybe regrettably, important:

“Freud is truly in a class of his own,” writes Todd Dufresne, an outspoken critic. “Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say. But, luckily for him, academics have been — and still are — infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors, even as lay readers grow increasingly dumbfounded by the entire mess.”

It’s not so much whitewashing as having to teach him in order to teach a bunch of other things that reference his works. As someone who teaches, it’s hard not to notice how much of what we read and discuss has been written in response to Freud, but no one really assigns him anymore, either. So much of French feminism, feminist film theory, and post modern theory, rely on a basic working knowledge of some of his concepts, like Oedipal complex and castration anxiety and his ideas about the family’s role in the sex and gender roles, for that matter. (If anyone knows of a useful compendium of some of these major concepts, I’d love to know about it.)

But I was, also, reminded of his remarkable letter to the mother of a gay man who was worried about her son. He wrote:

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime – and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

That’s often the context I teach him in – as part of the movement of turn of the last century sexologists, some of whom, like Freud, were essentially compassionate if also paternalistic. That is definitely not true of all of them – Kraft-Ebing was a pathologizing asshole, for instance – but Ellis, who he mentions, wrote the introduction to the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, which was, in turn, brought up on obscenity charges only for portraying lesbian existence.

Bathwater maybe, but not the baby.

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Pro Porn?

This is good stuff – a candid discussion about the role of porn in our real life, actual sex lives, and the amazing Nina Hartley is in it!

There’s a short, teaser version of the clip, too, if you don’t have time right now to watch the whole thing, but it’s a very worthwhile 20+ minutes.

(& I’m just going to add: the banana/nutella business is not only crass, it’s wrong. Anal does not necessarily involve fecal matter. See Tristan Taormino’s short clip about anal here.)