In which I cut the last line for the academic version...

Below is a paragraph excerpted from the final paper I am currently writing for my Women, Culture and Society class.  I chose to analyze the trans denying/hating/phobic arguments of radical feminists vs post-modern gender theorists who are trans-positive.  See as I tear Janice G. Raymond (of "The Transsexual Empire: The Making of a She-Male" fame) a new one.  As the title suggests, I pulled the last line for the version I'm handing in.  Feminist theory is, as one friend put it, a blood sport when done well and I left some language in like this when the poor arguments truly warranted; this one, I admit, was purely emotional and had to go.  Except on this here internet thingy, where I let the rage fly.  And it sounds a little like:  DON'T FUCK WITH MY FAMILY, YOU INSENSITIVE TWATWAFFLE.  Enjoy:

Raymond also makes the attempt to bolster her argument for a binary history by invoking discussing individuals born biologically intersexed.  Because, she states, they are typically “altered” after birth to fit into a binary sex category and then raised as that gender “have the history of being practically born as male or female and those who are altered later in life have their body surgically conformed to their history.  When and if they do undergo surgical change, they do not become the opposite sex after a long history of functioning and being treated differently,” (Ryamonds, pp. 114-115).  This argument would logically mean that not only is gender socialized, but so is sex.  It is once again a display of astonishing arrogance and blind dedication to social constructionism to state that a person may not authentically determine for themselves that surgical procedure performed on them without their consent produced an unfavorable result, purely due to their history of being socialized in a different sex and gender role.  In this line of thinking, perhaps Ms. Raymond would also suggest that wrongly accused criminals should not, even when exonerated, be released from prison, because their history as a prisoner, regardless of that role being wrongly foisted upon them, cannot ever have a history that didn’t include socialization as a criminal.  This would certainly fit both her inflexibility and her utter lack of compassion for the lived experiences of human beings with a history that varies from her own.

National Poetry Month

In case you haven't been aware for the last five days, today is the sixth day of national poetry month.  I have to say, I like a fair amount of poetry and I hate it when people claim to dislike it categorically .  To me, that's like saying you hate all vegetables when you've only ever had peas and carrots.  There is Swiss chard, broccoli and many a variety of pepper, ya know?  There are ee cummings, Ben Lerner, and Matthea Harvey (in case you hated Shelley, Chaucer, and Shakespeare in high school.)  I like poetry because of, well, the poetic license.  You don't have to describe something like you would for a detective's report or a scientists observation.  A good metaphor is a beautiful lie or even an ugly one that tells more Truth than the truth, and I like that.  I'm blunt and I'm a Virgo, but that doesn't mean I'm always such a literal motherfella every moment of the day.  Poetry is unshackled and unshackling. 

Some of my favorite kind  poetry has rhythm and often assonance but not rhyme, which is pretty common in slam poetry, so for today I'm posting one of my all time favorite slams, performed by two women speaking as the internal and outward voices of a trans man, often in perfect unison.  Incidentally, if you've ever tried to perfect a vocalization like that, you can appreciate the unbelievable amount of work that went into this perforance, to say nothing of the unbelievable emotional rawness of it. 



I used to get great praise from teachers for my poetry; now I'm out of the habit and I feel like I'm writing complete shit.  But, I am writing again, precisely because it's National Poetry Month, which lots of Twitterers have turned into national poetry *writing* month.  I'm a lot more prepared to commit to a poem a day than I was to commit to writing a 50,000 word novel in November for National Novel Writing Month and I think the practice of writing whether I feel "inspired" or not is an excellent one.  Creativity is a discipline which requires regular practice like anything else and I don't really care that I'm writing shit.  It feels like turning water on in a summer home; it comes out it nasty rusty spurts until it gets flowing again.  There's no other way to get it flowing than to just do it.  Perhaps some of you will participate, or interact with others on Twitter tracking their month with the #NaPoWriMo hashtag.

Cheers, and happy reading, writing and watching
Xoxo
Pistol

Judith Butler gave me gender euphoria & all I got was this lousy blog post.

I just had one of those "Eureka!" moments when something you've been mulling over for years shifts in a big way.  It's like the first time I understood the double slit experiment in particle physics.  It was so simple and yet so difficult, like a yoga pose that you can't seem to muscle in to.  There's all this work that you have to do - it's action, it's yang energy, it's whatever you want to call it - but what's important to not lose sight of is that all of that outward force is just to make you strong and flexible enough to achieve the pose by submission.  Suddenly you fall into it rather than shove into it.

I'm in the process of the most intensive research and thesis writing of my life. I'm exploring femininst theories of transsexual women's experiences and the way that these theories are reflected in medicine, psychology, and society, as well as trans women's theorization and explanation of their own experiences.   I was skimming a scholarly article and came across a quote from Judith Butler, whose work I intend to analyze, but which I have not yet read or frankly even accessed from the library.  The quote, from her 1990 book "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity," argues that gender overwrites sex and is as follows (as quoted by Schrock, Reid, & Boyd in Gender and Society, Vol 19, No 3):  "perhaps is was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all'."  Now this is only a fragment, and it's presented in a paragraph that looks at a number of Butler's ideas and presents partial quotations.  Therefore, I should point out that my response isn't so much to the article or to Butler's idea which seems a bit out of context, though I can't be sure without the original text.  The point is more about what this triggered for me.

I was momentarily, for less time than it takes a thought to fully form, apoplectic.  First of all, the sex/gender difference has taken years to establish and articulate from Harry Benjamin, M.D. using them interchangably in his landmark "The Transsexual Phenomenon," to post modern sex/gender/sexuality and/or feminist theorists differenting between the two.  Basically, that sex is body and that gender is socialized performance of behaviors attributed two which of the two versions of socially accepted bodies we live in.  The idea that a post-modern feminist would come and say that there's not only no difference but that it's all about gender would seem to invalidate transsesxual experience because one can choose to embody different gendered behaviors without transitioning one's physical sex.  However, I 1) don't think that's what she meant and 2) at least for the moment don't care because that's when it hit me:

THERE IS NO GENDER.  Not in any concrete, measurable way.  There are behaviors we've arbitrarily classified as masculine and feminine and then arbitrarily attached to male and female bodies, respectively.  Sure, gender is still a useful term because it describes a set of behaviors that have significance in our culture.  But this doesn't happen in other instances.  For example, there is no linguistic way to describe the set of expected behaviors attached to race, yet these clearly exist (basically as racism and racist stereotypes).  I've had articulate African American friends with advanced degrees told to stop "acting white."  If their peers were telling how to act based on their biological sex, we'd refer to those behaviors as gender, but here it's based on race and called....nothing.  (Clearly it's also fucked up.  The idea that there's a way to act white, or male...back to the apoplectic place I go.)  There is no word, which is odd because essential differences in mental and physical capacities based on race were in play  and shaping the law up until my parent's generation (and sadly linger in lots of places today).  Still, there is no way to describe the set of behaviors expected from a group based on a born trait of race, while we describe the gendered behaviors of a born sex.

This would have flown right past me years back when my understanding of sex and transsexuality was rooted in a patriarchally enforced binary sex system where it was natural for girls to be feminine and boys to be masculine.  My first encounters with gender non-conformist transsexual people was substantially more confusing than gender non-conformist people who maintained their birth sex.  Something along the lines of "why become a woman if you want to be a butch woman?  Why not be a man?"  I learned to unravel sex and gender, and even view both as continuims or dimmer switches rather than a binary variable.  But tonight, I moved from "We're born with a physical and a mental sex which may or may not align, as well as a gender which is seperate" to "we're born with a physical and mental sex that may or may not align, and then we behave."   The idea that gender is socially created and performed is one I've believed all along, but I couldn't see the forest through the trees.  I thought we had a *real gender* somewhere deep inside and had to learn to express it.  I think there's just a real *person* that we have to learn to express, and may struggle to do so when it flies in the face of convention, and that goes far, far beyond gender.

Still, as long as we're in a world where we're expected to choose I'll fall in line.  As I said earlier this week, *my* gender....is glamour.  ;D

xoxo
your hairy, Virgo, masculine-bodied, gender-transcended Transit Faerie,
Pistol

Ronald Gold - Patriarchy & White Male Privilege

In my previous post on Ronald Gold's insensitive, inaccurate, and offensive "'No' to the Notion of Transgener" blog at the Bilerico Project, I rebutted specific points.  Today, let's get right to the root of the problem:

Mr. Gold is a white man with white male privilege and his incoherent, factually inaccurate blog, which sites no research or even anecdotes yet purports to speak for the mental and physical experience of all transsexual and transgender people, neither of which he identifies as, reflects the fact that he is an active participant in institutional patriarchy and racism and the belief that his whiteness and maleness give his opinion automatic authority.

I have it too, that pesky white male privilege.  Whether I want it or not, my voice will automatically be heard more often, and given greater credit, whether I've earned it or not.  It's not fair, but I don't deny it or feel guilty about it like I once did, because I can't change it.  Guilt and denial won't help, but I can at least acknowledge it and refuse to actively participate in it  or actively use it to my (further) advantage.

Because I'm aware of my privilege, I'm never going to say (in the way that Mr. Gold did) that "transsexual people experience X, Y and Z," because I do not and cannot know from experience.  I might say "my transsexual friend told me that his experience was..." or "a study showed that 95% of transsexual people reported X."  However, for me to  say "transsexual people are/do/should/etc." would mean that I have stopped listening to the experience that I cannot have had and I have stopped pointing people back to the first person sources.  It would mean that I had become an active participant in my white male privilege, believing that my opinion mattered without any factual backup or shred of compassion for the non-white/male/cisgender experience simply because it has always been reinforced that that is my white male right to do so.

We will never make progress until we check our own privilege before we open our mouths, and before we open our mouths we need to do a whole lot or opening our ears and hearts first.  It's not easy, and it hurts, and too bad because it's the only way we're going to grow.  However, I can tell you that in doing so, I have come to love myself and others so much more.  I used to have myself for being fat, for not being butch enough to prove that not all queers were effeminate stereotypes, and all sorts of nasty, polluted thoughts that hurt me, my community and the world.  When I stopped hating and punnishing the "other" in myself, I was able to better hear and love all members of my communities.

We must stop, listen, hear, and love as it is our only hope for progress.  In love and soliarity,
xoxo

"No" to the proliferation of transphobia

This blog is in response in Ronald Gold's post at the Bilerico Project entitled "'No' to the notion of transgender." (If the link goes dead, we can assume that Bilerico has pulled the post.)

Update: Bilerico did indeed pull the post, but over at Pam's House Blend they have the original article in PDF  that you can view and even download in case you missed it.

Interestingly, the blog opens with a few paragraphs that deny biological sex as behavioral destiny, which is an idea that is vital to breaking down patriarchy and the related misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and all other systems of sex and gender based violence and oppression.  Mid blog he seems to come to an underwhelming crescendo of post-modern gender theory, writing

Let me state it categorically. There is no such thing as a male or female personality. Personality is not a function of gender." (Emphasis original)

On a queer blog in 2009 this is hardly revolutionary; regardless, I see no harm in rehashing that notion, even if it seems to be preaching to the choir.  Where things become outlandish, disturbing and offensive are in his very next statement:

So where does that put the concept of transgender? In my view, down the tubes! And that leaves the further questions of how transsexuals got to think the way they do, and what to do to resolve their dilemmas.

I won't repost his theory in its entirety here but he essentially states that transgender people are simply reacting to early societal and parental admonishment for transgressing traditional gender norms.  Additionally, he hopes to be "forgiven for rejecting as just plain silly the idea that some cosmic accident just turned these people into changelings."  He goes on to suggest that transgressing gender taboos such as clothing, hairstyle and have same-sex relationships can all be achieved without changing one's sex.

I have no idea where to even start, other than sending Mr. Gold to a gender studies 101 course at any decent liberal arts college.  He fails to clearly differentiate transgender (an inconsistency between a person's perceived/assigned birth sex and their gender presentation) and transsexual (alteration of one's physical sex via hormonal and/or surgical intervention.)  By including gay sex as a fading gender based taboo he would seem to imply that all transsexual people are actually gay but are altering their gender so that the sexuality would instead be straight.  This not only fails to properly disentangle notions of sex and gender from sexuality, but is also flat wrong, given that some transsexual people identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer in their sexuality.

His bizzare closing paragraph supports legal protections for "cross-dressers and post-op transsexuals" but closes with this statement:

I would, however, get after the doctors - the psychiatrists who use a phony medical model to invent a disease that doesn't exist, and the surgeons who use such spurious diagnoses to mutilate the bodies of the deluded.

My only response to that is to ask Mr Gold, have you ever listened to a transsexual person tell their story?  He is not the first person I've heard put forth an opinion about transsexual people being delusional about their bodies.  I've heard a physician compare performing gender affirming surgery on a transsexual person to stapling the stomach of an anorexic.   Again, you have to wonder who or what these people are listening to.  I would submit it is their own internalized ideas and fears about sex, gender and sexuality because from where I stand, most transsesxual people whose stories I've taken the time to listen to describe a journey of greater and greater harmony between mind and body by way of their transition.

The question now becomes, aside from addressing the fallacies and offensive statements, how do we repsond?   The post is already prefaced by a standard editor's note/disclaimer.  Additionally, the tagline to the Bilerico Project is "daily experiments in LGBTQ."  This is clearly a failed experiment, but any scientist worth hir/her/his salt will tell you that a failed experiment doesn't get trashed; rather, it's mined for the invaluable data that will move you forward to the correct answer.

So yes, if Mr. Gold refuses to reconsider or apologize to those he hurt, then boot him from Bilerico.  With transgender and transsexual people the group most targeted for hate crimes and  trans women of color being disproportionately attacked and killed, we cannot continue to promote transphobia from within the queer community.  But before his dismissal or a boycott of Bilerico or anything else happens, let's make sure that the course of action we take is one that moves the dialogue forward and makes this world a place more loving and safe for our transgender and transsexual brothers and sisters.

With love and solidarity

xoxo

Another One Bites the Dust - Queer Bookstores Fading Fast

I was extremely disappointed to read that Lambda Rising, a queer bookstore with two locations serving LGBTQ communities in Washington DC and Rehoboth Beach, DE, will be closing its doors.  This comes less than a year against the closing of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in NYC, then the oldest independent queer bookstore in the nation.  However, this blog is not intended to be a lament, but rather a call to action.

Here in Philadelphia, we still have Giovanni's Room.  While I'm sure they were suffering due to the economy and the decline in print media just like everyone else, Giovanni's Room has been especially hard hit this year because they've had to replace a structural at a cost of over $50,000.  They continue to host a variety of fund raisers, but I intend to use this blog, other blogs, Twitter and our combined social networks to keep them open.  They have served the LGBTQ population of the Philadelphia region for decades and are one of the only independent, queer bookstores left on the East coast.  Here's how we're going to pitch in together:

1.  I'm going to post three books below that I really love, with links to purchase them directly from Giovanni's Room online.

2. I am asking all queer & ally bloggers, Twitterers, activists and artists to help me out and do the same.  Ideally, to reach the most people, I would like you to guest blog here and post a link it on your blog/Twitter.  We will have network overlap, but you'll also likely gain new audience posting here.  The format should be: A) Introduce yourself and a 2-3 sentence plug for your current show, project, your blog, whatever B) Your 3-5 favorite queer books, hyperlinked to be purchased directly online from Giovanni's Room.  Alternately, if it's not something they usually carry, link to their contact info and let the readers know that they can special order pretty much anything at all, even if it's not queer related!

3. Spread this blog and all the subsequent blogs in the series every way you can.  Email it to friends and family, put the books on your wish list if you are one of the many people celebrating an upcoming gift-giving winter holiday, tweet about it, etc.

Without further ado, here are my three recommendations.  In a nod to Twitter's #transtuesday, all three books are trans or genderqueer related.  Click on the titles to buy them online from Giovanni's Room!

1.  GENDERqUEER - This is a fantastic anthology edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, this book was a huge stepping stone for me in understanding gender.  The arrangement of stories, essays and interviews represents a diverse culture within the genderqueer, transgender and transsexual communities and is a great place to start examining gender in small bites, as it were.

2. Girls will be Boys will be Girls will Be... - This delightful queer coloring book is appropriate for kids, adults and tribal elders aged 2 to 102 and was created by Jacinta Bunnell and Irit Reinheimer.  Along with a genderqueer short story, each page has one illustrated statement such as "Stanley Spends Superbowl Sunday Sewing Slacks," and "Enough about our forefathers, let's learn about some revolutionary women," with an (adorable) accompanying illustration. I cannot pick up this book without smiling.

3.  Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us - By Kate Bornstein, this is a staple of trans writing, and a great book on gender overall.  If you can put this one down without learning something new, congratulations, you must already have written your doctoral dissertation in post modern gender theory!  Pass go and collect $200!  In all seriousness, Kate is an outstanding author, performer and mentor.  You wouldn't be hard pressed to find people in the trans community who count this book as the first time they saw their reflection in someone else's experience, or even the thing that facilitated their transition.

If you are interested in writing a blog to help Giovanni's Room and are willing to cross-post here, please contact me. jrudyflesher[at]gmail[dot]com.

With love and hope for our community, and supporting the queer spaces that support us. xoxo

UPDATE: Want to share this on Twitter?  Simply copy and paste this text and tweet away: RT @njrugger45 Another one bites the dust. The demise of queer bookstores & how to save Giovanni's Room http://tinyurl.com/ygjcp6j

New & Improved ::headdesk:: worthy Catholic Commentary

From the religion that has brought us over two millenia of patriarchy and all of the related opression - misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and complete lack of compassion for those suffering with and dying from AIDS, to name just a few - come especially hurtful, insensitive words from one Edward Egan via the New York Times.  The NYT, along with three other newspapers, spent seven years in court compelling the Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, CT, of which Egan was then Bishop, to release reams of documents related to lawsuits against the diocese for the moelstation of children parishoners by priests.  Here are a few gems highlighted in the Times editorial:

Responding to one accusation involving 12 children and a former priest, he stated “I am not aware of those things. I am aware of the claims of those things, the allegations of those things. I am aware that there are a number of people who know one another, some are related to one another, have the same lawyers and so forth.”

How enlightened of him.  Like so many women who have been raped, like so many people who have been oppressed by sexual or other violence, Bishop Egan responded not with Christ-like compassion or an attempt to get to the bottom of things and solve the problem, but cast aspersions on the victims instead.  He suggests some sort of conspiracy or assault against the Catholic church and uses the relationships between victims, logical since they attended the same church parish, to frame them band of con-artists in cahoots with one another.  Despicable.

Additionally, he gloated, “It’s marvelous, when you think of the hundreds and hundreds of priests and how very few have even been accused, and how very few have even come close to having anyone prove anything.”

I don't even have words to respond to that.  I did enjoy the reaction from Father Tony over at Farmboyz; he recommends a Christmas eve call to action in which parishoners stop making donations and start placing pebbles in collection baskets instead, and do so until the church reforms itself.  (Side note - Father Tony is a very cool blogger and I had the privilege of getting to know him while we were both working as extras on the set of Bear City this past August.)

In an interesting parallel story, the Catholic Church has also been reaching out to conservatives in the Anglican Communion who oppose the Episcopal church's move towards ordainging gay and lesbian ministers and bishops and to blessing gay and lesbian marriages and unions.  Having been raised and confirmed in the Episcopal faith, I continue to watch this unfold with great interest.

(Quick lesson: The Anglican faith formed when King Henry VIII couldn't get a Papal anullment.  The Epsicopal church is the American arm of the same and they partially broke with the Church of England, though they remained a part of the Anglican Communion, at the time of the American Revolution.  The Episcopal church has ordained female minsters since the late 70s whereas Anglicans still don't.  The Episcopal faith elected their first openly gay bishop in 2003.)

My question is, why doesn't the Episcopal church launch a similar campaign?  They are the most politically liberal Protestant faith in America and are dogmatically and theologically closer to Catholicism than any other faith.  If I designed the billboards they might say "The Episcopal church welcome you and your family....not to be diddled and cornholed by some creepy old fuck during youth group."  Then again I'm a little heavy handed and will never be asked to manage a political or advertising campaign.  Bottom line, if you're Catholic and you don't hate women and LGBT people, or you're a female and/or LGBT Catholic person and have moved past your internalized guilt and opression and don't hate yourself - please, stop giving them money.  Stop trying to reform from within.  There are already Christian religions that encourage Christ-like behavior (imagine that!) and they will weolcome you with open arms.

A More Radical TransTuesday Post - Eradicating the Binary from my Life

In last week's post I talked about the ways in which I came to have a rudimentary understanding of the world of transsexuality, but my journey through sex and gender certainly didn't end there, nor can I imagine it ending in my lifetime. It seemed that not long after I was able to put my head around transitioning from one discrete sex to another, there were suddenly new options to understand. There were transgender folks who didn't necessarily feel the need to transition their sex to transition their gender, or to transgress gender entirely. There were folks who were genderqueer, whatever that was. There was the fabulous Kate Bornstein, writing "I know I'm not a Man...and I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not a woman, either. The trouble is' we're living in a world that insists we be one or the other."

Aside #1 - I've chatted with Kate on Twitter, met her in person, seen her perform in a theater, seen her perform in a book store, and shared a wildly cool dinner with her and some other lovely Twitterati and assorted geeks. Additionally, she once saved my ass whilst stranded in Manhattan waiting for a call time and directed me to some cool museums. Her fabulosity has been confirmed, reconfirmed by independent lab analysis, notarized and announced publicly, here and many other places as well. So huzzah to her books, lectures and performances that have given so many the reassurance that they weren't alone and the bravery to transition.

Aside #2 - Yep, all quotes from books and names of books/films are going to link you directly to buying said items from Giovanni's Room which you should run, not walk, to do. They are the oldest independently owned queer bookstore on the east coast and recently had to replace a structural wall to the tune of $50,000 so they need your support more than ever. Please shop there for Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Michaelmas, any Pagan holidays whose names I haven't learned yet because I've been lazy, and pretty much any holiday, rainy day or Tuesday that you can think of. Do it!

Back to our regularly scheduled blog: Here are a short list of things that helped me leap from "Yes, there are two genders/sexes and sometimes people are born in the wrong one" to "There are many sexes in nature, although all but the predominant two are considered pathologies in most cultures. There are as many genders as there are people, it's all a social construct, and people are WAY TO FREAKING UPTIGHT about deviating from the predominant two in almost every culture I'm aware of."

1. Watching more of those programs on Discovery Health, I discovered intersexed people. They'd pretty much all had surgery performed on them at an age long before they could consent of even express what sex or gender they felt like they might be, and were none to pleased about it. My initial thought was "they ought to wait until at least puberty and then let them pick one, with of course "one" being one of two options. It was a process of years and bits of information here and there before I realized that some people might be more than fine with living as a third, fourth, or fifth sex beyond M or F.

2. I saw a documentary on Kinsey. A lot of science focuses on either/or, mainly because it's easier to teach than "maybe," "nuance," or "depending on fetal conditions, resource availability, or diet," etc. We learned Mendelian genetics in high school. Peas were smooth or wrinkled, yellow or green, dwarf or tall, in a regular predictable pattern. We didn't learn about genetic aspects with multiple gene influences, gene expression inhibited by environmental factors, etc. We certainly didn't examine sex and gender: an almost unintelligible ballet of infinite genetic, hormonal, environmental and societal influences. So yeah, Kinsey. He looked at some insects and saw thousands of iterations of variation on one attribute and thought, hmm, maybe nature is not so often down with either/or. I can dig it.

3. Yet another Discovery Health special. This one included a FTM trans guy who was at that point pre-transition and performing as a drag king. However, unlike every other Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, butch cowboy/mechanic/miscellaneous male archetype drag king that I've ever seen, this dude was, a huge, flaming QUEEN. Now there's gender confusion, or at least it was confusing at the time. I could handle changing your sex, and being queer myself I understood people who were gay after transition. (It still astounds me how many people vaguely get both gay & trans but then say "but if you're going to sleep with women, why not stay a guy?! But of course, sex and sexual attraction of nothing to do with one another.) Alright, so I've got all that, but a person born female who wants to become a feminine gay man, lisping and swishing in a boa? That was a big leap. I'd already disconnected penises and vaginas from man and woman and already realized there were other options for genitalia anyway, but now to disconnect masculinity from man and femininity from woman? It was a big pill to swallow, which if you've ever met my inconsistently moderately butch, mostly flitting self, is deliciously ironic.

4. I read GENDERqUEER, an anthology edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell and Riki Wilchins. You should read it to. It is full of great stories, trans history, and ideas that will so liberate you from so many "shoulds" and "ought to bes" that I'm sure it's terrifying and fabulous and just will send gooesbumps right up and down your spine. Go read it! After, of course, you've bought it from Giovanni's Room! ;D

That's one blog for me, one brief summation of my losing the idea of binary gender for you. If I left something out or you having something to add, a question, something you'd like me to address with regard to gender - please leave it is a comment and I'd be happy to respond in next week's post! Until then, happy TransTuesday!

For Twitter's TransTuesday, A Blog

I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't have some awareness of transsexuality. My cousin Erica is a male to female (MTF) transsexual person. (Aside: Some people just say "a transsexual," including some trans people that I know, but in the same way I wouldn't say "a black" or "a gay" I will generally use transsexual as an adjective that modifies an aspect of a person's humanity rather than as a noun.) She is a somewhat distant cousin from me and her immediate family wasn't initially so accepting so I never met her until another cousin's 90th birthday just a few years ago. I don't know exactly how to describe the ways I heard about her talked about other than to say that she was the butt of some jokes except that everyone is the butt of some jokes and embarrassed stories in my family so it didn't seem malicious even if it wasn't optimal. Additionally, I was so fascinated by the idea of someone that would change their sex that I didn't really care what anyone else thought. I just wanted to meet her for as long as I can remember.

The other way in which I became aware of transsexuality was through programs on the topic on Discovery Health that I watched in high school. They were typically told as biopics on individuals, more often MTF than FTM, that were altering their sex through some combination of hormones, SRS , nd lessons on how to appropriately modify their voices and body movements. To me, this was a pretty straight forward thing. My understanding was that they were people who felt that they were born with the wrong bodies and they took action to rectify their spirit with their body. It wasn't my experience but it wasn't hard to understand. One program even discussed a study on the post-mortem study of the brains of 6 transsexual women demonstrating that a substructure of their hypothalamus called the BSTc was the same size of that typically seen in people born female. There was debate over whether this was a born variation that explained these women's transsexuality or whether it was a result of hormone therapy, but it seemed possible that there was a simple biological explanation for their transssexuality. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that should invite vitriol and even hate crimes to me. I never understood that.

That was a great primer for me, but there was a lot not being answered. Were the little boys who wanted to play with dolls longing for that because it was inherently a girl thing to do, or because that's what girls were doing and they knew they wanted to be girls? Where was nature in nurture in gendered behavior. Beyond that, there was a whole lot more learning to get me from that limited-but-valuable understanding of being transsexual and transgender to the gender queer, gender fucked, gender what/what gender? place that I live today. But that is all for another blog on another #transtuesday.