Tag: organizations

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Five Questions With… S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman is the author of Butch is a Noun, a writer, theatre artist, and educator who tours regularly. Zie’s book, Butch is a Noun, is one of my favorites of the past year because it’s funny, self-ironic, but full of a kind of combination of sadness and love that I found meditative and energizing.

1) I have to say that it was the title of your book, Butch is a Noun, that first caught my attention. Tell me how you came up with it, and why you chose it.

It’s both one of my talents and one of my, er, little problems that I’m a huge language geek. I love words, I love language, and I am always deeply satisfied when I can talk about something well, with good words. But I had a hard time, talking about butch. I would say I’m a butch, and people would hear I’m a butch woman or I’m a butch lesbian. Neither of which is comfortable, or accurate. I kept saying No, listen, I mean that I am a butch, as a noun, all by itself – not a modifier but a thing to them be further described.

For a while, I referred to it as The Butch Book, but I never really liked that as a title, it was just sort of a characterization – an internal shorthand. Then one day, I was applying for some time at a writers’ residency to finish it and when it asked for the project title I somehow just knew: Butch Is a Noun. Continue reading “Five Questions With… S. Bear Bergman”

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Betty on All My Children

Betty and six other trans people will be the support group that the MTF character Zarf/Zoe goes to visit on two upcoming episodes of All My Children: March 9th & 12th. The other six were Tommy, Brigit, June, Andy Marra of NCTE, David Harrison, & as the group’s moderator, Jennifer Finney Boylan.

But the interesting thing about the episode is that each of these people are only playing themselves; each of them gets to speak about their own lives & their experience being trans. As far as I know, this is not just trans history in the making, but soap opera history as well.

Do tune in.

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Getting Clocked

Three months from now, on May 15th Lambda Legal and other LGBT organizations will be “clocking in for equality” – dedicated a day to educating people and companies on workplace discrimination and diversity. They suggest people sign on to do something – wear a button, create a “safe zone” for LGBT employees, put aside a day to lobby on LGBT workplace issues – and I was thinking that this is exactly the kind of thing trans people & their allies should absolutely do, since the discrimination trans and gender variant people face is often brutal.

Maybe we can do something as a group? If you’re not a “joiner” I’m sure there’s still something you can do individually. Think about it: you’ve got three months.

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Five Questions With… Mattilda

Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore is an insomniac with dreams. She is the editor, most recently of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. She’s also the author of a novel, Pulling Taffy. Mattilda lives for feedback, so contact her or check up on her various projects via her website or her blog.

1) I love the way you use the word “assimilation” – it always reminds me of the Borg episodes of Star Trek – but I wonder how that term plays in different audiences – say a gay male audience as compared to a trans one. How do people respond to your use of that term, and its sinister connotations?

Generally I’m talking about the way an assimilated gay elite has hijacked queer struggle, and positioned their desires as everyone’s needs. In this way, we see the dominant signs of straight conformity reimagined as the ultimate goals of gay (or that fake acronym “LGBT”) success, i.e. marriage, monogamy, adoption, gentrification, military service, etc. We can see this fundamental absurdity where housing and healthcare and fighting police brutality and challenging US imperialism are no longer seen as “LGBT” issues, but access to Tiffany wedding bands and participatory patriarchy is seen as the bedrock.

So when I articulate these politics, it’s generally the people I’m holding accountable — gay men and lesbians with power and privilege — who are the most scared. Most gay men wouldn’t know Feminism 101 if it hit them over the head, so it’s not surprising that they see getting rid of homeless people and people of color and sex workers from the neighborhoods they’ve gentrified as a wonderful service to the “community.”

Generally it’s more marginalized queers, and especially trans, genderqueer and gender defiant freaks and outlaws and misfits — as well as feminists of various formations — who are ready to challenge the cultural erasure that assimilation represents.

Continue reading “Five Questions With… Mattilda”

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Empowered Women Still Terrifying

… At least to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Three female journalists who are also feminist activists have been arrested for trying to attend a workshop on journalism in India. Trying to attend, because they never got to: they were arrested at the airport.

“The arrest of these online journalists demonstrates President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s security and ideological paranoia which prompts him to ban all contact between journalists and foreign organizations and media,” said Reporters Without Borders (RSF), adding that the incident reveals “the fear that the women’s rights movement produces within the regime.” The three journalists are members of the Women’s Cultural Center, which runs a “One Million Signatures” campaign aimed at repealing Iran’s sexist laws. Recently, the campaign’s website was reportedly blocked by Iranian authorities, according to the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders.

Good thing they’ve got a kick-ass lawyer.

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Five Questions With… Richard M. Juang

Richard JuangAlthough Richard M. Juang is an otherwise studious English professor, I came to know him through my participation with the NCTE Board of Advisors, and increasingly found him to be gentle and smart as a whip. We got to sit down and talk recently at First Event, where he agreed to answer my Five Questions.

(1) Tell me about the impetus that lead to writing Transgender Rights. Why now? Why you, Paisley Currah, and Shannon Price Minter?
Transgender Rights helps create a discussion of the concrete issues faced by transgender people and communities. Our contributors have all written in an accessible way, while also respecting the need for complex in-depth thought, whether the topic is employment, family law, health care, poverty, or hate crimes. We also provide two important primary documents and commentaries on them: the International Bill of Gender Rights and an important decision from the Colombian Constitutional Court concerning an intersex child. Both have important implications for thinking about how one articulates the right of gender self-determination in law. We wanted to create a single volume that would let students, activists, attorneys, and policy-makers think about transgender civil rights issues, history, and political activism well beyond Transgender 101.Transgender Rights

One of the things the book doesn’t do is get bogged down in a lot of debate about how to define “transgender” or about what transgender identity “means”; we wanted to break sharply away from that tendency in scholarly writing. Instead, we wanted to make available a well-informed overview about the legal and political reality that transgender people live in.

Oddly enough, Shannon, Paisley and I each did graduate work in a different field at Cornell University in Ithaca NY. (Apparently, a small town in upstate New York is a good place to create transgender activists!) The book represents a cross-disciplinary collaboration where, although we had common goals for the book, we also had different perspectives. The result was that, as editors, we were able to stay alert to the fact that the transgender movement is diverse and has many different priorities and types of activism.

Continue reading “Five Questions With… Richard M. Juang”

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52 Things

Here are the final entries into NCTE’s “52 Things You Can Do for Transgender Equality”:

  • #48 Collect and share stories of discrimination
  • #49 Set up a training in a hospital, nursing or medical school
  • #50 Help an organization become more trans-inclusive
  • #51 Write an op-ed
  • #52 Make a New Year’s Resolution to Advance Transgender Equality

It’s been 52 weeks; how many have you done? Did you do other things they didn’t list?

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After You Give Thanks

Here’s some other things you can do:

#36 Get involved in the political process: Volunteer for a Candidate
#37 Plan and conduct a Day of Remembrance event
#38 Support or create a radio show or podcast
#39 Hold a House Party for NCTE or another trans organization
#40 Make Jails Safer for Trans People
#41 Hold a Job Fair
#42 Support a Drag Community Event
#43 Engage Media Coverage of Transgender Issues
#44 Conduct a Community Needs Assessment
#45 Vote!
#46 Start a discussion group on gender related books
#47 Respond to Alerts from Other Organizations

For all of the 52 things (thus far!), go to NCTE’s website.

& Have a great Thanksgiving (for those of you who celebrate it today).