Tag: haters

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Fear of Flying

Okay, so those of you who know me know I hate flying, & haven’t flown in a couple of years. Interestingly, perhaps, the last time I flew was also to Denver Airport, for Betty’s family reunion, which was maybe summer 2005 (since the incident is in She’s Not the Man I Married, so I knew it was before I wrote the book in the first half of 2006).

& Really, I did incredibly well considering. I took some new anti-anxiety drugs my doctor prescribed, & they helped a ton; I nearly almost enjoyed the trip out there.

BUT, on the way back, there was a thunderstorm between us & Laguardia. & Getting through it wasn’t the bad part; the bad part is that they needed more time between landings when it’s raining so hard.

Do we had to go into a holding pattern above the airport, flew in circles, through turbulence, for an hour, pitching & tossing & UGH.

I vomited & vomited & vomited. & Sweated. & Shook.

I can’t even think about how it would have been without the anti-anxiety meds.

But otherwise it was a lovely trip, and we met some really great people, all of which I’ll blog about in the upcoming days: I have the lovely luxury of being home five full days before we leave for Fantasia Fair early Thursday morning.

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Passed!

from NCTE’s website:

Senate Passes Historic Hate Crimes Bill

The Hate Crimes Amendment to the Defense Authorization Act (S. 1105) was passed on a voice vote of the Senate today, September 27th.  Immediately prior to the voice vote, a cloture vote to end debate of the Amendment was passed 60-39 with bipartisan support.This amendment was already passed on May 3rd in the House by a vote of 237-180.   NCTE is calling on President Bush to sign the bill with this historic provision included.

Mara Keisling, NCTE Executive Director, says, “While transgender people still have many obstacles to overcome, we are overjoyed that the hard work of so many people is coming to fruition.”

The Hate Crimes Amendment extends the federal hate crimes law to include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and disability.

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Five Questions With… Julia Serano

Julia Serano is a Bay Area slam-winning poet, author, performer, activist, & biologist. She organized the GenderEnders event from 2003 until last year; plays guitar, sings & writes lyrics for her band Bitesize, and oh – has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. We got to meet her when she was in town promoting her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, recently published by Seal Press.

(1) I loved Whipping Girl, for starters. I think it’s a pivotal work for trans communities, especially in building trans pride. But you know I kept waiting for you to actually define “feminine” – maybe if not for all time, but in some way that I could understand what you meant by it specifically. Your “barrette Manifesto” came close, except that I see barrettes as childish, not feminine per se. So can you help the genderblind like myself? What is femininity? Can you be feminine without being girly?

In the next to last chapter of the book, “Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism,” I talk about that a bit, but I’ll try to define it here a little more clearly. I would say that femininity is a heterogeneous set of traits (some of which are cultural in origin, some biological, some psychological, and many are a combination thereof). The only thing that all feminine traits have in common is that they are typically associated with women in our culture. But they certainly aren’t exclusive to women, as many men and MTF spectrum transgender folks also express feminine traits (similarly, many women express masculine rather than feminine traits). I think most of us tend to express some combination of both feminine and masculine traits.

Continue reading “Five Questions With… Julia Serano”

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Hate Crimes Vote – Thursday

ACTION ALERT from the National Center for Transgender Equality

On Thursday, the Senate will be voting on Senator Kennedy’s Hate Crimes amendment to the Defense Authorization Act (S.1105). We need you to call your Senators now to urge their support of this critical bill, which would extend hate crimes protections to transgender people.

Please, call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 right now; let them know what state you are from and ask to be connected with your Senators.

The language of the amendment is identical to that passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 3, 2007 (H.R.1592). It is vital that you contact your Senator today or tomorrow. As you read this, the Radical Right is mobilizing to oppose the federal hate crimes bill and attempt to prevent its passage in the Senate. They’re using scare tactics and flat-out lies in hopes of killing the amendment. Make sure that your Senators hear your voice and how important this bill is to you and our community.

The Hate Crimes bill would:

  • Extend existing federal protections to include “gender identity, sexual orientation, gender and disability”
  • Allow the Justice Department to assist in hate crime investigations at the local level when local law enforcement is unable or unwilling to fully address these crimes
  • Mandate that the FBI begin tracking hate crimes based on actual or perceived gender identity
  • Remove limitations that narrowly define hate crimes to violence committed while a person is accessing a federally protected activity, such as voting.

Find your Senators’ contact information.
Background information about the hate crimes bill is available on NCTE’S webpage.

Call your Senators today and urge your friends and family to do the same.

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Dinner and Conversation

Last night I was taken out to dinner by a partner who is local to where I’m teaching during the week. She told me she was surprised I was willing to go to dinner with someone I’d never met before, & as she was saying it, I thought, ‘If only I had a trust fund, I wouldn’t do anything but meet with partners and give them someone to talk to.’

Because her story was like so many stories of partners: her trans person didn’t like to talk about it, only one friend knew who even kind of understood, and everyone else in their lives, she feared, would completely freak out if they knew.

So it is nice to go out and just listen to someone who needs to talk, to validate their experiences in whatever ways I can, & really, more than anything, provide a real flesh & blood person instead of a cold computer screen.

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How the World Was

Betty & I recently went to a ‘family-friendly’ kind of amusement park while we were in Pennsylvania with my family. We were going to celebrate my grandaunt’s 85th birthday; since no one’s explained the situation to her & she adores ‘Jason,’ Betty decided to go in guy mode to keep things simple. We had a nice day at the park, especially the walking around hand in hand & being able to kiss in public for the day bits. At some point we were talking to my mom about how it was to be a straight couple again for a day, and my mom, being the loving, naive woman she can be, said something along the lines of how we should feel comfortable anywhere. Of course we aren’t, & I had to explain that in places where I see a lot of people are wearing Jesus t-shirts, WWJD stuff, etc., I often feel especially uncomfortable and not welcome. She was unfortunately not surprised but finds it a sad commentary on American christianity.

(Hey, queer-friendly Christians! Take your religion back from the haters!)

Later the same day I was waiting online for the the merry go ’round with my youngest niece, & a girl who was a little developmentally disabled was waiting on line next to us. She asked us which animal we wanted to ride on, and pointed out that she was set on the big gold carriage. We had a nice chat about the park, & who had brought her, & about my family. After the ride was over, I had this moment that I realized it took a really long time for people like her to be able to go to a family park, too. We used to keep “people like that” out of the public eye, you know?

& In some small way that gave me a moment of hope.

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Friday Thoughts

Aeneas, in a moment of contemplation. This moment had to come before he & Aurora got into a kerfuffle, which left him with a torn ear, & her with an abscess in her paw. He went to the vet yesterday, where we found out he also has an irregular heartbeat, which sucks, & she goes tomorrow (when we find out she hates the vet more than having an abscess.)

Multiple cat homes come with occasional cat fights. & Of course cats are smart enough to have them when you’re not around.

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What Men Do

In the ‘astonishing, but not surprising’ category: CNN does a report on Iraqi women who have ended up prostituting themselves due to the war, asking sometimes as little as $8 a day. The point of course was to do a human interest story, or a feminist story, or a reality of war story, but some guy, dick in hand, instead wants to know if it’s true & how he can get in on the action. Another comments:

You are a fortunate man to find ass here in the IZ so quickly. I live here and it took me 4 months to get my connections. We have a PSD team contact who brings us these Iraqi cuties but dangerous it is.

Now that’s class. Don’t keep reading that message board if you’re an actual person with actual compassion, please.

There are days guys wonder why women hate them en masse. This is why, sensitive New Age guys. Please do something about these fuckwads & then get back to me about your problems.

(via The Cunning Realist.)

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If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say…

More occasionally than I’d prefer, I hear MTFs bemoaning the style faux-pas of their fellow trans women. Sometimes it’s the transitioning women commenting on a crossdresser’s appearance, & sometimes it’s the other way around. But you know, style is a very personal form of self-expression, and should be respected as such. A person may intend to look exactly like how they appear, & do not feel any need for anyone’s “help.” That, & you may not know what their reasons are for looking the way they do.

Some of you may know Trankila, who is a regular at events like FanFair & IFGE & who keeps her full beard when she crossdresses. People who don’t know her/her story just think she’s insane or has no sense of style. But the reality is that her wife loves her beard, & happens also to be specifically attracted to cross-gender presentation, Trankila keeps it even when she crossdresses. (Trankila & her wife talk about their experience with Trankila’s gender on an old GenderTalk show.) For the record, there are also women raised female who can grow their own beards, & who do.

Likewise with something like pantyhose: (1) plenty of people wear hose because they’ve say, made a deal with their wives not to shave during the summer or other times (or through the year, depending on the deal they’ve made, and (2) other people use hose to help tuck.

Having a mohawk makes me more suspicious of “style policing,” in general, but also, as a partner advocate, I’ve heard from too many wives who were comfortable with whatever deal they made with their partner, who then comes home from a conference where people told her not to wear necklines that covered her collarbone (which she was doing so as not to shave chest hair her wife loves) or not to wear hose in the spring/early fall (which she was wearing to keep her leg hair because there’s a family BBQ the next week), etc.

& Frankly, I’ve had my own feelings hurt so many times by people insulting what I’m wearing at these MTF conferences/events that I’m thinking of having t-shirts made up that say Being a Catty Bitch Does Not Make One a Woman. Grow yourself some manners, & if you don’t have anything nice to say about someone’s appearance, then STFU. (Okay, that’s not the way our mothers taught us that Golden Rule, but consider it updated for the internet generation.)