Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
I love this idea: couples were asked to switch the clothes they were wearing with each other.
The ones I’ve posted here, amongst others, are the ones where the switched clothes make both people look better – in my humble opinion – than their original outfits, or where, despite a very genderered different, like a skirt, the styles are nearly the same anyway.
So have you seen this cool, fully illustrated gender book? It needs to be funded for it to be published, but you can read it online for now.
I haven’t read it yet, but soonly.
No, really: at long last, trans woman Laverne “I’ve literally played a prostitute about seven times” Cox is playing a trans women on the new Orange is the New Black.
Cox, who shares an acting coach with Nicole Kidman, plays Sophia, a trans woman who, pre-transition, was a firefighter. In the third episode, guest-directed by Jodie Foster, we learn about her complicated relationship with her wife and son. “I don’t know of a trans character on television played by a trans person that has as much humanity as this character,” Cox says. It’s true. Generally, trans folks are portrayed as tragic or heroic, but Sophia is multidimensional and complex, part hard-won confidence, part sweet underbelly.
It doesn’t sound anything like my kind of show, to be honest, but I will try to tune in because Laverne Cox is amazingly cool.
My wife just discovered two gray kittens, brother & sister, at a local pet store.
Votes? Should we or shouldn’t we?
I need to quote a huge chunk of this article by Jacob Anderson Minshall. It’s in response to the idea that somehow, his wife’s insistence on her own identity as a lesbian makes him less of a man. He transitioned a few years back; they’ve been together for 22 years.
And over the years more trans people than cisgender people have questioned whether Diane’s insistence upon retaining her own identity is a slight to my manhood.
The questions I throw back at them are many: Is the partner of someone who goes through a gender transition required to alter their own self-identification? Is your sexual orientation truly determined by the shape of your partner’s genitalia? If so, where does that leave partners of trans people who haven’t undergone genital surgery? Or maybe it’s your partner’s gender identity or gender expression that determines how you should identify? What makes our right as trans people to self-identify sacrosanct, while our partners must have their identities determined for them based on particular attributes not about themselves, but about us?
If a straight woman is married to a man and that man transitions to a woman, then we seem to want to force them into a gay relationship and require them to identify as lesbians. Likewise, when — after nearly 15 years as part of a lesbian couple — I transitioned, people seemed to believe that Diane wass required to alter her identity, because, the theory goes, she could not remain a lesbian while continuing to be with me.
I find it almost offensive that this line of argument originates so frequently from trans individuals.
Trans people have often argued, almost vehemently, that it doesn’t matter what we look like physically, it doesn’t matter what other people think, it doesn’t matter what style of clothing we wear, it doesn’t matter if our voices have changed or if we’ve undergone surgery or if we started hormone treatment — the only thing that matters is how we identify.
Once I verbalize my gender identity, I expect to be taken at my word. If I say I’m a man, I expect you to accept that I am a man. I could be wearing a dress, I could look like Miss America, and if I say I’m really a man, then you are supposed to accept that I am.
So it’s almost incomprehensible to me that we as a community or that individuals who identify as trans would not use the same logic when it comes to other people’s identities. It is not our place to identify someone else as a lesbian or as a straight person or as a bisexual person. It is completely up to them to decide and verbalize what their sexual orientation is.
This double standard is offensive. We can’t demand the freedom of self-identification for ourselves and then not allow other people that same right.
Like everyone else, Diane has the right to choose her own identities and to proclaim, “This is who I am,” and be taken at her word.
I’ll add, as someone standing on the other side of this fence and who did decide to identify as queer at least in part because of my partner’s transition: Not only is there an expectation that partners change their identity, but if they do, they are criticized for that as well. “Queer” fit me better than straight ever did & made more sense once my partner transitioned, but my process of self awareness and “coming out” was often assumed to be codependent or worse. I am still often denigrated as a heterosexual wife, — which of course I was, once upon a time. And I still find LGBTQ people don’t see me as part of the community, but some kind of “ally” — which, as any partner of a trans person knows, is really ridiculous. Of course neither of us identifies as a lesbian, either, because – for similar reasons to why Diane still is one – we really never lived in the world as lesbians. She never dated women as a woman. I never did either. Diane, however, very much did. So to me, the idea is that people not just recognize their own choices, but really do try to respect their own histories and communities as their lives change.
When you can’t win no matter what you choose, you’re pretty much dealing with prejudice of the 1st order, even if/when it’s based on ignorance.
But thanks, Jacob, for affirming a partner’s rights to have their own gender identities and sexual orientations. It’s nice to have some company, at long last. It’s frustrating to have people “use” me to somehow prove that my spouse’s gender isn’t as real as someone else’s.
Here’s a nice piece about economics and class, specifically in the US, when it comes to trans people and transition. It’s written by a woman whose sister is transitioning to female.
She ends the piece:
In a perfect world, an individual’s trans*ition would be marked by celebration, dedicated to their instinctive disconnection from their bodies and/or the societal binaries that surround us, and without cost (or, at least, fully-funded). But this isn’t a perfect world.
Ours is a species dominated by cost. And so far, I don’t see any feasible way around it. So, what does that mean? It means either biting the bullet and paying through the nose for procedures that would (hopefully) mean harmony of mind and body, or going without.
What is more difficult is that many trans people cannot get to the point they want without significant medical intervention, and if they always register as trans, will deal with untold amounts of discrimination. It’s frustrating, but true.
Moreso, even if someone can find a way to scrape up the money to have genital surgery and the like, that may mean they are sacrificing something else – going back to school, having kids, buying a home, or whatever other things most people would do with upwards of $20k. Which means that trans people, as a class, are bound to be poorer than their peers — much like women often are.
It’s an interesting clip, but this story by Matt Tullis – the story of the intersex Olympian – is ever better, detailing, sympathetically, some of what she and her fans experienced as a result of her autopsy and revelation.
Stella Walsh (trailer) from Steve Felix on Vimeo.
So here’s a weird story: a/n (assumedly cis) woman found the wrong gender marker on her birth certficate and so went to have it changed because she needed to renew her license. She was required to get a copy of her birth record from Vital Record Services where she was told “she’d have to receive Pap exam and deliver to them proof of her reproductive organs”.
“She said I needed to go have a PAP exam, have a doctor write a note verifying you’re a woman, and bring it back-– notarized,” Grimes told FOX 5.
Considering the woman was a mother, she should have just brought in her children.
That said, there *are* women born women who don’t have cervices (that is, the thing a PAP is done on) or uteri. Maybe she was born with sealed labia or a large clitoris, or maybe the M was a clerical error.
The point is: this is stupidly invasive, and makes the bullshit trans people go through that much more apparent to those of us with cis privilege who – accept if we get pregnant in certain states – are rarely forced to show anyone our genitals in order to get the right paperwork signed.
… of loud angry bitches beat the GOP, is the full title. I absolutely love this article about what happened in Texas the night of the 25th. I stayed up and watched it as the midnight hour drew near and passed; I was watching when the time stamp was changed on the vote; I was watching when the “At what point?” question was asked – which should, imho, go down in history as AT LEAST as significant as the “Have you, at long last, no decency?” that was asked during HUAC).
It was an insane thing to see but a proud, proud thing to watch.
A feminist army of loud angry bitches. We need more of them.
