shoring up the levees

Okay, so Blackamazon and Brownfemipower have thrown up their hands in pretty understandable frustration at the Various Messes going on right now.
I know things will chill out soon, but in the meantime, if anyone wanted to continue the conversations going on in their threads--I know BFP's place was developing what I thought was a very interesting discussion of postcolonial feminism and the impact of colonial history on trans issues and multiracial identities--please feel free to continue in comments on this entry.

I am not interested in reproducing the bickering going on in both those threads, involving a certain commenter, that is scuttling those excellent discussions. You know who you are: you're welcome here, but I will be moderating this thread.

In the meantime, BA, BFP, put your feet up, seriously, and have a drink on me. You've been heroes here. Let me host some mess at my place for a while so you can catch a breath, if you want. Thank you.

Look, guys, we've already lost a really excellent blogger recently, probably for good. (And kudos to her for doing what she has to to take care of herself.) I don't want the pressure-cooker doing any other ones harm.

So. Talk amongst yourselves.

phone booths

So I've got more substantive posts in the works right now, but it occurred to me, having spent the last hour doubled over with cramps, nausea, and violent gastric distress:

I see a lot of arguments about trans people that seem to think sex changes and gender transition are speedy, capricious, or impulsive decisions. That there is quick or easy switching back and forth, or nothing lost in the change.
And as I'm sitting here arguing much more esoteric and abstract stuff all day about rights and space and roles, I'm suddenly reminded that most people, even allies, have no idea of the basic, physical realities that affect us.

Physically, I'm fairly early in the transition, even though socially and emotionally I'm way past the point of no return. So I thought: would it be interesting or helpful to those of you reading for me to catalogue some of those basic things?

Because nobody really told them to me when I wasn't experiencing them yet myself, even though I expected it to be hard; here on this bodiless Internet we're always talking about the big-picture, societal, identity-and-rights stuff, and it occurs to me that I had to do a lot of digging, once upon a time, for the nuts and bolts--including the unpleasant, vulgar nuts-and-bolts. And maybe that's why all these arguments about bathrooms don't connect--because one person is talking about who has what abstract claim on what space, and another person is going, look, I really have to go.

The other stuff is important, maybe more important, but somehow I think the point doesn't get across, sometimes. As I said to my partner not long ago: it's funny, knowing the statistics of sexual assault and violence directed at the demographic I'm entering, considering what I know about my basically taking a massive pay cut for every other job I'm ever going to have and practically waiving insurance, knowing about my future health risks and social attitudes, knowing the price I'll have to pay in travel I can't do, places I can't go and be safe, people I'd like to know who'll assume they don't want to know me, knowing I'll be dependent on medical technology and its attendant costs for the rest of my life, knowing all the theory there is on the subject, that what brings it home is, well,
the nausea. the aches. the nosebleeds. the cramps. the inability to eat some of my favorite foods, or drink like I used to only a few months ago. the ebbing strength and increasing fatigue. the bumping my breast with my elbow while I'm brushing my teeth and feeling like someone has jabbed a knitting needle into my chest.

The little, real, blood-and-bones things a person who's never met one of us--or someone who has, but not intimately enough to be told--wouldn't know about, and wouldn't know to account for in their ideas about who we are and what our lives are like.
Would folk want to hear more about these things, or is this enough?

allies and friends

I will expand on this later; it's certainly worth my posting on, and soon. But in the meantime, there is something important to say:

Brownfemipower is a goddamn gleaming lioness.

Siempre la solidaridad, hermana.

five things

Okay, I'm game, having been tagged, sorta, a couple of times.
I may be an Oh God I'm So Serious All the Time Blogger, but I can cut the pretension here and there and meme it.
Five statements, four true.
I grant that your definition of "true" and mine might not, precisely, match up.

1. I am descended, recently, from not one but two different guerilla leaders. You haven't heard of either of them. My family in fact happens to be in America because they were chased out of the Old Country by survivors of a rival faction, partially thanks to a clever ruse where they pretended to have died in a mining accident.

2. After getting my undergraduate degree, I spent about a year hauling garbage, yard debris, and junk appliances and driving a seven-ton dump truck in order to make ends meet. By the time I quit, I could lift and throw a clothes dryer. At one point I and one other woman moved, with no resources but a couple of small hand-tools and a broken dolly, an eight-hundred-pound naval stove out of a backwoods Christian retreat's kitchen, including negotiating stairs, doorways and corners. Nobody was hurt.

3. I think bustles are really, really hot. Basically the steampunk aesthetic makes me giddy and swoony. I would probably try to pull off goggles as a fashion accessory if I thought I could get away with it.

4. I parlayed my youthful spelling-bee championship and participation in the school mathletics team into a tongue-in-cheek persona as a nerd-chic spoken-word artist, affecting thick glasses as part of the joke. Unfortunately, going to dark coffee-shops in glasses I didn't need, during my teenage growth spurts, ruined my eyesight--now I have a truly ridiculous prescription, and I will always think it was my fault.

5. I think bats are cuddly and wonderful. I used to work with them when I helped take care of the animals at the nature center where I grew up, and learned to associate them with the few breaths of fresh air I got, taking the trash out for the night from my stifling first teenage job, and with the sunset over the river on my way out home. I studied their habits so enthusiastically that years later I was able to exploit them in a medium-complex romantic scheme that ended in first-rate cuddling with an artist from abroad.




Guess away. Post your own in comments if you like.

fixes and fast talk

Well, goddamn.
You know those ads before the movies about random acts of kindness and helping out strangers--or the billboards about compassion and overcoming adversity and integrity? We have 'em all over, here. They're done by the Foundation for a Better Life, in cooperation with the Ad Council.
Honestly, I'm enough of a sap to like most of them. I think people need more reminders in their daily lives of their connections to each other and their moral potential. Call me an old-fashioned preacher that way, I guess.

Well, the Foundation for a Better Life has a very shiny website. They showcase all their billboards and such, and they talk about their core values, and they leave a contact email if you want to donate. What they don't do is tell you where all the money comes from, who they are, who founded them, or what their greater goals are. I dug for months, trying to figure out who the hell was funding all these expensive ads apparently in the name of nothing but altruistic fellowship. They made themselves hard to find.
Someone else did the necessary digging where I couldn't, though, and any ideas I had of maybe working for them at some point are gone now.

This may not be news to you-all, but the Foundation is funded by billionaire Philip Anschutz, and he's bad news. Really bad news. As in, his other campaigns to change society are, well--frankly, they read like a rapsheet of the current American poisons, from corporate predation to institutionalized homophobia to fundamentalist anti-intellectualism to environmental destruction to neoconservative politics. His contributions are huge.
Read that article I linked if you're in any way on the fence about it.

No wonder they keep it so well concealed. Whatever president Gary Dixon's intentions, the Better Life they want isn't for me.

industrial revolutions

So I'm watching this amazing interview with Marlo Thomas, who starred once upon a time in the landmark sitcom "That Girl," which I'd never heard of until a few days ago. And it's blowing my mind.
I look at the dated aesthetic in the clips, and I see things I never expected. It's about an assertive single woman with a career and opinions and an unmarried romantic life and reasonably complex relationships--it's ahead of a lot of the stuff I see on TV today, honestly, though you can see the work of the censors. There's PSAs the star clearly thought were necessary about daycare co-ops in Watts.
Apparently they wanted her for a star (it's no surprise, as she's enormously appealing onscreen, and clearly talented), and she found all of those wife/mother/secretary/pretty face roles insufficient. So she mailed the producers a copy of "The Feminine Mystique."

It really gets at the meat of things, for me, though, when Thomas starts talking in interview about the women's movement, about how she wasn't on the phone with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, that it was a feeling, a "wave," that these things all began happening at once and swept everyone along whether or not they knew that what they were doing was connected. There were letters to her from young women saying they used her TV character to justify to their parents striking out on their own.

I thought, "It must have been so exciting." And then paused. I'm not sure it was, at the time, in the thick of it. I'm not sure how many women in the movement thought of themselves as in "the movement," how many knew that their efforts would join an aggregate and change the whole of society--from comic TV actresses to authors of theory to working women with shoes on the ground. How many of the authors we now treat as touchstones and foundations saw themselves as connected to each other? How many people watching "That Girl" really processed everything going into it, and how many just laughed at a sitcom displaying current trends that seemed like background? I sure didn't think "Roseanne" was funny when I was younger--it mostly made me uncomfortable--and now when I look back, I see it as making a difference, as being a part of the cultural watershed of the time, as setting precedents that mattered.
How conscious are we of these watershed moments? What will my efforts, and yours, be called on the whole, by our children? What "wave" are we caught up in?

Some of us have ideas about it. We're consciously part of movements, the way Steinem was and is, the way Marlo Thomas was and is, too. But those will be distilled and changed by hindsight. What we call "Third Wave Feminism" or the transgender movement or the antiracist movement, what we see as extensions of prior movements, will be seen as predecessors to future movements, movements who will be boggled by our limitations and nearsightedness. They'll see us as laying foundations for what they do, same way we look back at suffragettes and appreciate their legacy while deploring, say, their tendencies toward eugenics or their contributions to Prohibition. And I know I forget, and I think I'm not alone there, that they were thinking of themselves as the vanguard carrying flags handed to them by the people who went before, and could never have predicted what we are now. Some of them would have been downright horrified.
And then I add in pondering the self-consciousness and near-corporate organization of the current gay movement, for instance. How organic was "Will & Grace" in its inception, as opposed to "That Girl"? The Gay Games versus, say, the Special Olympics? I wonder what sorts of differences it will make, both for posterity and for these movements' function for us, here on the ground, right now. Are we co-opted, or better served? The more aware we are of our connections, our memberships and classifications, are we more served--better networked, better organized, better focused--or less, as we separate ourselves from people history will call our allies and cozy up to those that the ones who follow us will be confused that we did not see as opposed to our goals? Is the ascetic urge of activists to turn up our noses at sponsors and labels more likely to preserve or suffocate us?

I'm not rightly sure, myself, but watching this dated TV show and being amazed at how much it glows in the light of retrospect, I have to wonder what of ours they'll be looking at--with pride, and with horror--in thirty years.
"It must have been so exciting."
What's the exciting thing we can't see ourselves doing?

missed connections

You know, I keep hearing all this blather in the news about trans fat, and I have to admit my first reaction is an aggrieved, "Look, they're just love handles. I'm gonna work out next week!"
But then, it doesn't hold a candle to all the time I spent last year buying a used car and wondering idly whether I was an automatic or manual tranny. Huh.

Anyhow. Repurposing of words, as the man sort of said, weirds language. I'm reminded of the Gaiman short story "Changes," where a drug that was meant to cure cancer induces total physical sex change in patients. He deftly covers, in overview, the sweeping but ultimately subtle alterations to society that result. A party scene based on black-market recreational "rebooting." A slave trade in some parts of the world that has kidnapped boys forcibly changed into young girls because they make better money. Chinese families saving up to change their daughters into sons. One of the most interesting bits, though, is where he notes in an aside that, as "change" has become the slang for the process, loose metal money is now referred to as "coinage" and moving from one state to another is more often called a "shift" to avoid sniggering schoolkids who now laugh at the way the word is used in their older textbooks.
That's where the man is spot on.

It's the same as laughing at the old Batman comics about Joker's Boner--that is, goof-up--or "don we now our gay apparel."
We shape our cognition through words, in a lot of ways. The words we have available, the words we use. What happens when your car mechanic has to find new slang to describe your busted transmission--"tranny fluid all over the floor" just doesn't ring right in a society where transgender issues become commonplace discourse--and describing death as a "transition" elicits some truly weird mental images? Is this going to happen?
There's a thing going around blogsville about considering what our desired world actually looks like, what-if-"we"-win. I'm not just interested in the big brushstrokes. What will the subtleties be? What words will be ruined for schoolkids, or at least their befuddled teachers?
What will that queer world of tomorrow have to say to us, when we've changed the tongues it has at its disposal?