Scheherezade's Sister

The Skin That I Live In

2011-12-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

Some of my longtime followers might like to know that the new Almodovar movie is another of his forays into transgender themes. I posted a review of the film over on my movie blog if anyone is interested. Beware, though: there are heavy spoilers in my post. Also, if you've got a mind, Gina at Skip the Makeup wrote about the movie a month ago and said a lot of the same things I do. Damn her. She's too sharp.

Why are Atheists Angry?

2011-11-29T11:46:00.000-08:00

Because we have a few legitimate beefs:

I was in the audience for this last week. It was electrifying.

So Very, Very Tragic...

2011-07-26T20:52:00.000-07:00

I've had this message sitting at the top of the heap in my OK Cupid account for a couple of weeks now. Every time I look at it, my jaw just drops at the presumption of it. It reads:

"Hi, All I want to say to you is your very beautiful and I know how hard this change must have been for you. Take care Gary...."

On the one hand, I AM very beautiful, thank you very much, but the rest? This is so wrong in so many ways that I thought I'd count some of them.

This is built on two assumptions. The first is that, because I am trans, my life has been hard. Tragic perhaps. Certainly filled with obstacles. I mean, that's the narrative, isn't it? That life is so unbearable that I HAD to change my sex or die? That in doing so, I've alienated my friends and family and consigned myself to a marginal economic existence? I don't want to diminish people who actually live that narrative--I have a great many friends who do--but the notion that ALL of us live this narrative is presumptive. And, well, I don't live this narrative. Here's my dirty little secret: transition was fun for me. My life before transition wasn't bad, and my life afterward has been a never-ending delight. It hasn't been "hard" at all. In fact, once I gathered up the nerve to actually pull the trigger, it was easy. Not only was it easy, it was joyous. It gave my friends, old and new, the chance to show me their quality and they've ALL been absolutely fabulous. It's lifted the weights that were dragging down my artistic aspirations. It's made me positively giddy.

I won't say that I'm typical. I'm luckier than most, I know. But I'm not alone. Jos over at Feministing wrote about the same thing a few months ago.

It's the second assumption, though, where the wheels truly fly off. "I know how hard this change must have been for you," my suitor writes. To which I have to ask: HOW do you know this? Have you lived this? Have you experienced the loss of privilege and economic opportunity that goes along with being trans (to say nothing of being a woman)? Have you ever had to suffer the countless slings and arrows of casual and not so casual sexism? Have you really? Have you been beaten by a sex partner because he thought you deceived him? Have you had to make your living with sex work because nobody else would hire you? Have you been treated like a feral cat and driven from shelter? And you "know how hard this change must have been." Obviously, you've kept some deep, dark secret from the ones you love, a secret that gnaws at your every waking thought. Obviously, you've lived through awkward family gatherings where every eye is upon you. Surely, you've had that long dark tea time of the soul when the only option is to plunge ahead or die? So, yeah, you must know how "hard" it is. Do you know what? I don't. I've never had that crisis of identity. I've never found myself sitting in a car after midnight holding a gun in my hands wondering if I shouldn't just end it all. I've never been expelled from my family home because my religious parents just can't accept me. I've never tried to drown the pain in booze and drugs and dangerous sex. So if I don't know how hard it is, having gone through the crucible of transition--which is obviously composed of all these traumatic experiences great and small--tell me sir, how the fuck do YOU know?

Notes of an Absentee Landlord.

2011-06-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

Wow. Okay. It's been a while. Here are some things that are going on with me.

I'm participating in a queer film blogathon over on my other blog. Not just trans-themed films. There's also the odd lesbian vampire and roman soldier or two. Feel free to come check it out.

I've joined the board of directors for TransHaven Missouri, a trans advocacy group dedicated to social justice issues and their impact on the trans community. Right now we're doing a survey of the needs and issues facing trans people in Missouri, so if you fall in to that category, feel free to cruise on over and fill it out. This will augment the data collected by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force trans discrimination survey. Hopefully, we'll be able to use this info to better target issues with our state and local governments. It's important work. I'm happy to be doing it.

I've also signed on to contribute a comic story to a comics anthology created entirely by women, hopefully to be published by IDW. I don't have the details of what I'll actually be doing, but whatever it winds up being, it'll be awesome. All of the people who have signed up to do stories--famous comics creators down to nobodies like me--are insanely talented and creative people. Only good can come of it. I'll have more details soon.

This last item has rekindled the cartooning bug in me. I may post the fruits of this here in the near future. Stay tuned, true believers.

On Transamerica

2011-04-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

I posted a review of Transamerica over on my movie blog this morning. I know I've been letting this blog kind of lapse, but if any of my trans readers are still following me in their RSS feeds, let me direct you to the content there.

Also, I'm gardening again this year. I'm putting in raised beds this year, which is new for me. I'm hoping to grow a variety of veggies, but so far, the only plants I've gotten to germinate have been tomatoes and orange bell peppers. I took the seeds for the tomatoes from an Amish heirloom tomato I bought at the farmer's market over the winter, while the seeds for the bells came from an orange pepper I got at the supermarket. For some reason, nothing else came up. No coriander, no rosemary, no jalapenos, no regular bells. I'm probably going to buy some eggplant and okra plants in a few weeks. I may look for some other varieties of hot peppers. Or, hell, maybe I'll try again with seeds for the jalapenos. We shall see.

Bullying Town Hall

2011-03-31T17:23:00.000-07:00

Some of the people working with Missouri's Safe Schools Coalition (a group trying to get anti-bullying legislation passed) contacted me a couple of weeks ago about doing a flyer for them. After much gnashing of teeth, this is the end result. I made this in Adobe Illustrator over a pencil sketch. Unfortunately, I can't attend the event. D'oh! Will this lead to more freelance work? I don't know. Maybe, but I would have done it anyway. It's a good cause and it's a way to contribute my volunteer efforts in a way that utilizes my talents. I mean, booth sitting and lobbying are necessary, and I do that stuff, too. But give me something like this, and I can friggin' go to town. Anyway, click this to make it bigger.

...and, why, yes. I AM proud of this. Not just because it's using my powers nobly, though that's all well and good. I'm also proud of this because it didn't turn into a big pile of crap before my very eyes, which is what so many of my projects seem to do. I had almost forgotten what it feels like to get genuine pleasure out of what I do.

On Social Networking

2011-03-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

I went to a horror movie convention this weekend. You can read about most of my adventures there on my movie blog, but I wanted to comment here about an element of my weekend that had nothing whatsoever to do with horror movies or horror culture.

A friend of mine used to think that you couldn't make friends on the internet. She eventually changed her mind. When I finally met her in real life, we were already best friends without any face to face interactions necessary to seal the deal. This weekend was that writ large for me. I was jazzed to meet the horror celebs attending the convention. I took a picture with Barbara Steele, who I've adored for years. If the only reason to go to the show was to meet horror celebs, though, I wouldn't have gone. It was, instead, an opportunity to meet people with whom I've been corresponding on the net for years without ever meeting in meatspace.

I should mention that one of my main concerns with transition was the ability to make and keep friends. Would the process isolate me? This turned out to be a baseless worry. The people already in my life and the people I have met subsquently have been completely awesome. This trend continued with my horror friends this weekend. To a one, they were warm, open-minded, kind, funny, and generally a joy to be around. Any awkwardness I might have felt evaporated almost immediately. These were, after all, people with whom I share a common passion, and common passions should not be underestimated as a unifying force.

The signature message in E. M. Forster's Howard's End is "Only connect."

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

This strikes me as the wisest thing anyone has ever written.

Lobby Day 2011

2011-02-16T13:13:00.000-08:00

So, I went to our local GLBT lobby day at the state capitol yesterday. Missouri is a deep red state, so I normally end up talking to Republicans at these events. This time, the group I was with were assigned a "conservative Democrat." I think I would rather have drawn another Republican. I won't name him--I still want his support for the non-discrimination law and safe schools act we were pushing--but, lemme tell you, when he launched into a spiel about how conservative his district is and how he's obligated to represent all of their views, I started getting pissed. And when he suggested that the non-discrimination bill might result in "reverse racism," it was all I could do to keep from slapping him. I held my tongue. Did I mention that this guy was a Democrat? Yeah. Really. My forbearance was epic.

From now on, the phrase "conservative Democrat" will be my code for "political coward." No wonder these people keep losing elections.

For the record, our bill has no provision for any affirmative action measures. All it would do is add "sexual orientation and gender identity" to the list of people covered by the existing non-discrimination laws in my state.

We thanked him for his support. We can be two-faced, when it serves us, I guess. But, man, that left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm glad I don't make my living as a lobbyist.

A Short Update

2011-01-30T05:12:00.001-08:00

It's been forever since I updated this blog. I'm not abandoning it, per se, but I've been occupied with other things lately. Even though I never really intended this blog to be a chronicle of my transition, that's what it turned into. I'm pretty much done, so there's not much else for me to write on the matter. For that matter, I haven't really been engaging in the trans-o-sphere lately, either. I resigned from being an admin over at T-Central last week. They need someone who is engaged with their mission, and, really, I'm not anymore. I wish them well.

When I do resume posting here, it will probably be art and comics and recipes and politics, which is all stuff I've done before. It won't be THAT different. Hell, I may even dip my toes back into the cesspool of trans politics and experience. Don't hold your breath on that one.

I'm still drawing these days. Pretty much every day. I've been lax about putting most of what I draw online because, in my mind, I'm not really producing finished work at all. Here are a few of the sketches I've uploaded to Facebook recently. My apologies to anyone who has already seen this stuff:

365 Days Later

2010-12-06T12:57:00.001-08:00

"And to think, I hesitated."--Hellraiser II.

I'm done with the Real Life Experience. Basically, it's all over but the crying. And since there's a strong possibility that no sane surgeon in the world would risk putting me on the table even if I show up with a wheelbarrow full of money, that's probably all she wrote. The end. Everything else is in the rearview mirror.

The so-called "Real Life Experience" used to be called the "Real Life Test," basically as a kind of gauntlet to see if the individual plunging into gender transition was really serious about it. The word "test" turned out to be a misnomer for me. There was no Greek agon involved. No series of obstacles to overcome. No real difficulty or hardship at all. It was easy. I could have done it standing on my head.

The best part? I've been completely flabbergasted by how awesome the people around me have been. I was a little concerned at the outset of this process that the strangeness of what I was doing would interfere with my ability to find, make, and keep friends, but that hasn't been my experience at all. If anything, the opposite has been true. One friend of mine claims that I've "blossomed" over the last year, though that's a bit more maudlin a description than any I would have used. But she's right.

I've never had a better year. I love my life.

Here's a sampling of a recent wedding I went to. The theme was steampunk. I think you can get a feeling for how much fun I'm having these days and just how completely awesome my friends are.

Day of the Dead

2010-11-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

My local LGBT center is staging a TDOR observance this weekend. This is the first such observance in a hundred mile radius from me, so this is an event. Naturally, I'll be out of town and I'll miss it. I don't feel TOO guilty about this, really. I helped plan our observance and I made my plans to travel to Skepticon before I even had an inkling that there would BE an observance, so my conscience is clear. In truth, these events drag me down. They give me survivor's guilt. Many of my trans friends have been trying to get a Transgender day of celebration off the ground, but that hasn't happened yet. When they do, I'll be delighted to dance like an idiot or gyrate with my rainbow hula hoop. This weekend, though, I'm going to hang with some skeptics and atheists, which is kind of a celebration of life in and of itself, given that the focus is purely on the material world. My brand of existentialism doesn't allow for life after death, so if this is all we have, I'm damned sure going to enjoy it.

I made a cartoon for TDOR last year. I'm going to run it again here. (Wait! Aren't leftovers supposed to be for AFTER Thanksgiving?) Hopefully, the necessity for TDOR will vanish in the years to come. It probably won't, but hope springs eternal. (Note: the stats provided by HRC are wonky. Caveat emptor. They're still horrifying.)

Crumbs and Dirt for You, Missy!

2010-11-09T10:24:00.000-08:00

Picture totally stolen from Susie Bright's Facebook page. I hope she doesn't mind.

The bad news from my endo last week was that my triglycerides are still dangerously high. Like, astronomical. I should drop dead of a stroke any day now. Well, not quite that extreme, but you know.

Soooooo.....in addition to a more aggressive drug treatment, I have a new diet. No fat. No sugar. No meat. No cookies. No cake. No chips. No pie. No pasta. No fun. That last part is an exaggeration, but, dammit! It's all about the quality of life! One thing that I could do to lower my triglycerides is give up estrogen, and to that, I say "No fucking way!" When I posted this news to my Facebook profile, one of my cousins chimed in with "Welcome to the family! It's crumbs and dirt for you now!" (I wish; bread is a no-no now, too.)

Sigh.

Fortunately, I'm a creative cook, and I'm working my way around it. Rather than dwell on what I can't eat, I'm more interested in what I CAN eat: Vegetables--especially dark green ones, fish, fruit in moderation, beans, nuts, peppers, broccoli, some whole grains (oatmeal, for one; brown rice for another; again, in moderation). I've been adjusting to this all week. I think I can do this.

Things that are going to make this process bearable: cranberries, hot sauce, soy sauce, edamame, squash (acorn and spaghetti), salmon, oatmeal, apples, oranges, strawberries, okra, chickpeas, blueberries, and so on. There's still a lot of food in the world that I can eat, it's just stuff that, from a cultural standpoint, I've never thought to make for myself. That's got to change.

Take oatmeal, for instance.

I've always eaten oatmeal for breakfast. My preferred way to prepare it is to use old-fashioned oats (never instant), cooked per the instructions, then add unsweetened applesauce, brown sugar, walnuts, cinnamon, and blueberries to it. It tried this without the brown sugar this week, and it just wasn't the same. The thing about oatmeal is that it's more or less flavorless, though, so instead of making it sweet, I'm starting to experiment with savory oatmeal. The first attempt at this was pretty simple, an idea borrowed from food writer Mark Bittman: oatmeal with soy sauce and scallions. It wasn't bad, but it lacked...something. The day after I tried this, I mixed some left-over Spanish okra that I made the night before with my oatmeal and doused it with hot sauce. That was yummy. This morning, I cooked it with garlic, garam masala curry, soy sauce, and tuna. That was yummier still. Next up is a curried oatmeal with carmelized onions. It's a good thing I'm open-minded when it comes to food.

Meanwhile, I'm on the hunt for vegetarian cookbooks. I see a LOT of fish in my diet, too. Pity I live where fish is expensive and the selection kinda sucks. Alas.

There's a payoff to all of this: I've lost four pounds since my doctor's appointment. I'm actually below (mumble mumble) pounds for the first time in several years. I can deal with this. Oh, I'll fall off the wagon for Thanksgiving and Christmas--one day of eating yummies won't kill me (she said, confidently...)--but I hope to have made a big dent in my triglycerides by then. And my waistline.

For real veggie food porn, check out this borscht recipe I found through sex writer Susie Bright. I'm going to attempt this next week.

Whys and Wherefores

2010-10-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

So, I've been reading up on DES, or Diethylstilbestrol, lately. It's been a while since I've had a burning need to know why my gender identity and birth sex don't match, but I ran across a passing mention to DES on Zoe Brain's site a few months ago and it set off a firework show in my brain. Here's the gist, if you don't feel like following links: DES was a synthetic nonsteroidal estrogen that was sometimes prescribed to pregnant women between 1940 and 1970. It was originally withdrawn from use for pregnant women because it was shown to cause a type of vaginal tumor in female children exposed to it. Later, long after it was withdrawn, it was shown to have deleterious effects on male children, too, including infertility and epididimal cysts. Oh, and a "high prevalence of individuals with confirmed or strongly suspected prenatal DES exposure who self-identify as male-to-female transsexual or transgender, and individuals who have reported experiencing difficulties with gender dysphoria." One statistic I ran across a few months ago suggested that as many as one in five male children exposed to DES in utero develop some variety of gender dysphoria. One in five. To put this in perspective, the most liberal estimates of the incidence of gender dysphoria top out at 1:250 or 1:500.

Holy shit.

Anyway, as I said, this lit up my brain like the fourth of July. My mother was almost certainly prescribed DES during her pregnancy with me. Mom had a miscarriage during the pregnancy prior to my birth. DES was a drug prescribed to prevent miscarriages. In addition to gender dysphoria, I also had pre-transition problems with fertility that made my little deposit at the fertility clinic before I started HRT a bit of a challenge. I can do the math.

My initial reaction to this information was "OF COURSE! It all makes sense now!" That thrill of discovery has been tempered a bit since then, though, as I've thought hard about what it actually means.

I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't mean a hill of beans. What this experience reminds me of are those transsexuals who cling to some kind of claim to intersexuality, much to the annoyance of many IS people. Being IS doesn't have quite the stigma that being TS has, so it's understandable, I suppose, but I don't want to be a person who claims an identity because it's less shameful than the one I actually have. IS people can legitimately point to the medical facts that support the reasons they are the way they are. For a short period, I had the same kind of legitimacy in my own head: it DIDN'T just happen. There's a reason that I can point to. Hell, it might even be useful if I ever find myself suing my insurance over any denial of care they might impose because of my transsexuality. But as far as defining why I'm the way I am, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter because I don't need a reason. Here's the great gift of feminism: if my body is my own I should damn sure be able to do anything I please with it regardless of the reasons for it. It doesn't matter, because whether it's all a delusion or if there's an identifiable medical source, there is no moral excuse to deny the rights of any individual to determine and express their own gender identity (or to deny anyone any other rights based on that identity). And, frankly, it doesn't matter to the rest of the world. They'll treat me how they'll treat me regardless. If my employer fires me for being trans, they aren't going to care that it was all caused by some prenatal drug.

So, basically, this obsession has been fruitless beyond the brief illusion that there's an explanation. It's a nice illusion, but like any respectable fata morgana, it vanishes once you get close to it.

Sigh.

A Need to Know Basis

2010-09-24T07:04:00.000-07:00

So, we're coming up on another holiday season and my partner and I are once again discussing whether or not to tell her family about me. Mind you, I don't care one way or another, because I see them at most once a year (they've never come to visit us, which I find insulting, actually), so one less day of seeing them is no big thing to me. Besides, none of them really knows how to cook, so it would give me the opportunity to do Chrismas dinner right. That's probably not a good reason for telling them, but there it is.

Last year, we attended her family's big Christmas dinner about three weeks after I went full time and I butched myself up as much as I could for it and nobody seemed the wiser. I don't know that I'm going to be able to do that again, truthfully, but I'm willing to make the attempt. Felicia pointed out that I don't have man boobs anymore, so was I willing to bind them? Sure.

She, on the other hand, doesn't want to be in a position to lie to her family, and I can certainly understand that. The downside of this is that there's a fair chance that it will drive a wedge between her and her family. Her mother is abusive under the best circumstances and this information is almost sure to be used as a bludgeon. Couple this with the fact that she already has people in her life that have encouraged her to get out of our relationship and you have a cocktail for a serious amount of bullshit. Given the other strains in her life right now, I'm not sure she can endure it all.

So, basically, I'm concerned with the effect it will have on her. On that count, I would prefer that she NOT tell them, because we both know what the consequences will be. It's not an easy choice for her.

Decisions, decisions.

All Politics is Local, 2010 edition

2010-09-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

I got another call from the Boone County Democratic party this week, asking if I would like to canvas for them this weekend. I thought about it. I did. I mean, I'm more politically active and engaged than anyone I know, so it's not like I'm shy about this sort of thing, and I certainly want to make sure my current rep in congress, the Honorable Blaine Leutkemeyer, finds another job after November. But, as with the last time the Dems got in touch with me, their timing was impeccable. The same day they called me, this piece ran over on Questioning Transphobia. In abstract:

"The Trans Murder Monitoring Project has published its Interim Update of July 2010, which states that 93 murders were recorded in the first six months of the year. According to their press release, this means that:

"every second day a homicide of a trans person is being reported""

So, basically, the Dems are asking me to go knock on the doors of perfect strangers. I don't get the choice of who or where to canvas. Combine this with my own relative lack of "passing privilege" and I see this as a risky activity. I mean, sure, maybe nothing would happen, but I'm not so confident of the intentions of my fellow citizens. It only takes one wrong door to put me in a bad situation. So, I think I'm going to decline their invitation.

Another invitation I'm going to have to decline this year is a Transgender Day of Remembrance observance in St. Louis. I'd like to attend this, but unfortunately it conflicts with Skepticon and we've already booked a room for that. I'll be there in spirit, and I'll post another cartoon for the occasion.

A Spiritual Safety Tip

2010-09-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

So I found this graphic online yesterday:

I just about laughed my ass off when I stumbled across it.

For what it's worth, the grumpy atheists I've known (myself included) have been grumpy or depressed for reasons having nothing to do with an absence of meaning in their lives. In fact, most of the atheists I know are happy and well-adjusted (this also includes myself these days). I think whoever created this graphic must have never actually met an atheist.

Swiping from Greta Christina's blog:

"So what if you're working to make life a skosh more joyful for people who'll be dead in a few decades anyway, and whose descendants will be boiled into the sun in a few billion years? Don't those people matter? And don't you matter? The odds against you personally having been born at all are beyond astronomical. Beating your breast in despair because you're going to die someday is like winning a million dollars in the lottery and complaining because it wasn't a hundred trillion. You're here now -- and those other people are here now. Experience your life... and connect with theirs."

And:

"Atheists have meaning, hope, and joy in our lives. We simply focus that meaning, joy, and hope in this life, not in a hypothetical afterlife we think is implausible and have no reason to think exists."

All of this is true! I know some people hear the word "existentialist" and think of angst and gloom, but as a pure existentialist, let me tell you, it's enormously fulfilling to make my own meaning for life. The world is too full of wonder and the human capacity for experiencing that wonder--emotionally or intellectually--is too large for a meaningless life. The world is too full of wonder and the human capacity for experiencing that wonder to waste it longing for something that is probably an illusion.

Of course, I'm pretty sure there's an ulterior motive for warning Christian children away from us grumpy atheists. We wouldn't want them to hear an alternative explanation for the world, now would we?

My Big Fat Geek Weekend

2010-09-07T09:11:00.000-07:00

My partner and I went to Dragon•Con this weekend. For the uninitiated, it's a ginormous science fiction/pop culture convention held every year in Atlanta, GA. It attracts upwards of 40,000 to 50,000 people every year, many of them dressed as Stormtroopers or slavegirl Princess Leias or what have you. It's a lot more than that, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Felicia and I used to go to sf cons fairly often, but I kind of got bored with them over time. I usually spent time hanging around the dealers' rooms hunting for books and perusing the bootleg video tables, which are both activities that I can do without paying a registration fee for the privilege. I normally didn't take in much of the programming, which is my own fault as much as it is the fault of the programming itself. This has mostly been at small cons. Felicia has always enjoyed cons a lot more than I do, so she has mostly attended them without me in recent years. Prior to this weekend, the biggest con I had ever been to was Archon in St. Louis. That con is dwarfed by Dragon•Con. We chose to go to DC this year because it was a vacation we could take together instead of my usual solo trip to the Southern Comfort Conference (coincidentally, also in Atlanta starting two days after we left). So we drove to Atlanta, stayed in an overpriced hotel, and mingled with the hordes.

Dragon•Con doesn't make a good first impression. Apart from being overwhelmingly large, the two and a half hour wait for convention badges that we endured was NOT something you want to inflict on people who have just driven for 13 hours. The lingering exhaustion from this one-two punch kind of put the kibosh on a lot of the fun we were hoping to have. I suffered from muscle cramps the entire weekend, and it kind of pissed me off that by Saturday night, I could barely walk anymore. I would have liked to have gone to more of the parties, but we called it a lot earlier than I would have ever dreamed. I must be getting old.

In a multitude of other ways, Dragon•Con tends to be impersonal. That initial sense of overwhelming humanity takes a while to overcome, and it's entirely possible that that abates if you've been to the con before. We didn't have that experience, being greenhorns and all. It took us two days just to figure out where the hell we were from time to time. I'm convinced that at least one of the dealers' rooms was actually a suburb of Brigadoon, because once I found it once, I was never able to find it again.

But apart from that, we had a splendid time.

I said that Dragon•Con is more than a sf con, and I thought I'd expand on that: I took in a LOT more of the programming than I expected, and almost all of the programming I took in was on the "skeptic track" (which even has its own website!). Part of this stems from the fact that the two celebrity guests I really wanted to see speak were James Randi and Adam Savage. Part of this is the fact that I knew where the hell it was and could find my way to their area on a consistent basis. This is a powerful incentive to attend. I was surprised that Felicia, being the pagan that she is, spent so much time with me (and without me) at the skeptic panels, but I think this is partially explained by the generally engaging nature of the panels, the relevance to her own career as an educator, and the fact that, to a one, the panelists on the skeptic track had a superb sense of humor. Plus, they were all REALLY smart.

I think the highlight of this programming track was the "Raising Skeptical Geek Children" panel, which was the only chance we had to see Adam Savage speak (his main program was so packed that there was no way to get into it). Interestingly enough, Savage was completely upstaged by his other panelists, particularly by Laura Phillips, the mother of 10 year old Will Phillips, the kid who made headlines by refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance until GLBT people are all equal under the law. She was seriously quick-witted, and you can tell that that kid has had some a-MAY-zingly good parenting.

The other small highlight occurred while I was waiting for a panel on atheism and skepticism to begin. I was poring over the Dragon•Con programming guide trying to figure out my agenda for the rest of the evening and I glanced up to see a woman wearing a leather nun's habit taking a seat. It's a good thing I wasn't taking a drink, else I might have launched it through my nose.

Related: I took in a panel on the great space telescopes (including, but by no means limited to, the Hubble). That panel provided me with my requisite "ooh" and "ah" moments. The imagery presented in that panel was astonishing, as was the science that was dumped into my head. The science track had a solar telescope set up on one of the pool decks, and had an after-hours feed from the telescope at Kit Peak observatory.

All told, I think I came away smarter from the panels I chose to attend, with my occasionally jaundiced faith in humanity enriched. We're a pretty great species some of the time. I also came away healthier. The Skepchicks--who are awesome--were promoting a vaccination clinic at the con. This was partially as a counter to the anti-vaccination nonsense that has sprung up in recent years (in part due to Jenny McCarthy). It was also partially because you need to get a whooping cough booster every ten years. I didn't know this, so this was a seriously valuable service. I got vaccinated.

Here's a segment of Penn and Teller's Bullshit on the anti-vaxxers:

I did get to meet James Randi, who is awesome. I also had a long conversation with Rene Auberjonois about his work with Robert Altman (he asked me: "If you're interested in Altman's work, what are you doing here?" I countered that Altman made at least two science fiction movies). As I was waiting for a ride from one of my friends in the area, I looked over to my right only to see Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman, and Bill Daly waiting for their van. When they embarked, they revealed Tia Carerra standing behind them. And as she left, a van pulled up with the two guys who played Gowron and Martaugh in Star Trek, in full Klingon regalia. It was a surreal weekend.

Oh, and I saw tons of cute costumes. Here are a couple that I particularly liked:

I didn't get pics of some of my favorites, but there are probably a ton of pictures being dumped on the net as I write this, so there you go.

Will we go back next year? At this point, we don't know. Maybe.

A Post about Nothing

2010-08-06T16:47:00.000-07:00

At some point, the urgency fades.

I had an appointment with my therapist a couple of weeks ago and I seem to be nearing the finish line with the therapeutic element of transition. My visits to her have dwindled to once every three or four months. In between those times, I'm caught up in the quotidian process of living. I used to think about transition all the time, almost to the point of monomania. Now, I rarely think of it at all. It's in the rearview mirror. It kind of reminds me of something a friend of mine told me about riding one of those crotchrocket racing motorcycles: "What's behind you doesn't matter."

For what it's worth, this blog will not be going gentle into that goodnight. I suffer from scribomania, so this will continue in one way or another, but the posting will be much more general in nature. There will be more art. Maybe a comic strip or three. Recipes, even. The trans stuff? As needed, I guess, and probably more political in nature than personal, but it was never my intention to focus on that stuff anyway.

In the mean time, here are some cute puppies to tide you over:

Corporate Malfeasance

2010-07-20T10:51:00.000-07:00

Renee Knipe is one of my best friends in the world. She's going through a tough time right now, having recently joined the ranks of the unemployed. In some ways, this is a blessing, because when she was working for her former employer, she was being subjected to systematic discrimination. She's been documenting it on her blog. If you want to see why there needs to be an Employment Non-Discrimination Act, I suggest reading it.

Part one.

Part two.

Part three.

Part four.

"It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us. The lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” --Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

I Missed Bastille Day...

2010-07-18T08:40:00.000-07:00

...or, I've been slacking on this blog. Sorry about that. At some point, I stopped being interested in documenting my transition, so this blog has suffered. This, in spite of the fact that I never intended this as a "trans" blog in the first place, just a blog by a trans woman. It's a shade of a difference, I know. I've been writing like a demon over on my movie blog, though, and occasionally and increasingly often about transgender-themed movies. I also accepted a gig writing a weekly post (usually about movies, imagine that!) over at the trans feminist blog, The Second Awakening. So I'm still writing, I'm just being bad about writing here.

As for transition, things are just ducky. Nothing new to report, which is pretty much the way it oughta be.

Pebbles Rolling Downhill

2010-07-09T14:28:00.001-07:00

I had this waiting for me in my inbox today:

Saint Louis Board of Aldermen Pass Gender Identity Protections
Saint Louis City now joins Kansas City and University City in offering basic protections in housing, public accommodations and employment.
In late May at a town hall sponsored by PROMO and TransHaven, Alderman Shane Cohn announced Board Bill 67, inserting gender identity into the list of protected categories which already includes sexual orientation. The bill gained many co-sponsors and moved swiftly through committee and passed with unanimous support of the Alderman.
"Extending basic protections has been long overdue," stated Cohn. "In order to remain competitive in today's marketplace and respect every member of the Saint Louis community, I am proud to have sponsored this bill." Please send Saint Louis Alderman Shane Cohn a "Thank You" for helping secure these protections atcohns@stlouiscity.com.
The Bill will go into effect immediately upon signature by Mayor Slay, which is anticipated by early next week. Enforcement will be the requirement of the Civil Rights Enforcement Agency (CREA) who can be reached at 314.622.3301.
PROMO Executive Director A.J. Bockelman adds, "This is a great step forward not just for Saint Louis, but for all of Missouri. As we increase the number of people covered by basic protections, we will reach a tipping point where the Missouri Nondiscrimination Act, extending these same protections to all LGBT Missourians, becomes the natural next step."
PROMO urges everyone who finds themselves the victim of discrimination to also file a claim with the Attorney General's office. You can find the form to file that complaint on our website at www.PROMOonline.org.
PROMO is Missouri's statewide advocacy organization promoting equal treatment under the law for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community. www.PROMOonline.org
TransHaven is an advocacy organization dedicated to the Transgender community of Missouri. www.TransHaven.org

Congrats to both PROMO and TransHaven and thanks for the hard work. I think that in the absence of a "fierce advocates" at the national level, this is how it's going to have to be, the activist version of island hopping or dropping a pebble from a precipice to shake loose other pebbles. It's going to make for a crazy patchwork of safe havens for TBLG people, but something is better than nothing and those safe havens have room to expand. It's just going to take time.

In other news, Vandy Beth Glenn won her employment discrimination case against the Georgia General Assembly, though not without some drawbacks. And a federal judge has ruled that DOMA is unconstitutional:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It almost takes the sting out of Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle's veto of their domestic partnerships bill.

Pebbles, I say. The avalanche is coming.

6 Months Later...

2010-06-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

So I barely noticed that this past weekend marked the six month point after going full-time. For the most part, this has been a cakewalk. The hardest part was pulling the trigger. Everything after that has been easy. I don't regret a minute of it, and nary a thought of going back has even crossed my mind. This is totally right for me. If I ever had doubts--and I did--they're all gone now. Full speed ahead.

It hasn't been all ducky, of course, but when I weigh how my transition went with how other people's have gone, the minor crap like co-workers getting the pronouns wrong and my ongoing battle against facial hair seem very small beer. I've got it good.

One side effect of all of this is that my past life seems like it happened to someone else. I remember all of it, but it doesn't feel like my own experiences. It's hard to explain the disconnect. It's like a veil has been drawn across the boundary between my old life and my current life.

I don't know what comes next. I had a tidy little plan, and I'm through most of it. There's the surgery in the future, but that's nebulous and always has been. For the first time in my life, I don't have some burning need driving me forward. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with myself now. I can't wait to find out, though.

Reflections on a Crummy Day (or, Now With 100% More Whining)

2010-05-26T19:08:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of weeks, I've been obligated to sit in on marketing meetings at my workplace to discuss a blogging initiative that we are undertaking. I suspect that these meetings are being held just for the sake of meeting, because there hasn't been a written agenda at one yet, and some of us are betting in a pool on how long it will take for our higher-ups to lose interest in blogging. I have it at four months. One of my co-workers thinks that's optimistic. But we're pressing on.

I don't know about you, but I think meetings are demoralizing. Another of my co-workers is fond of saying "Each of us is smarter than all of us," if you know what I mean. The lack of an agenda means we sit in awkward silence for disturbingly long stretches in these meetings and don't really accomplish much that couldn't be accomplished without a meeting.

And I usually have to pee. It's uncanny.

In any event, today's meeting was bad news for me. I have electrolysis at the end of the week, so given my druthers, I'd MUCH prefer to hide in my cubicle while I'm growing the beard and not see anyone the whole day long, especially not co-workers. For that matter, I'd rather be at home. I didn't think that growing the beard for electro was going to have the kind of impact on my psychological well-being that it has, but there are a lot of things that I hadn't counted on.

So I was in a right mood when I got a call from my boss telling me that there was an online "Employee Discrimination Training" whatzit that I needed to take. I spent 40 minutes going through the material, and all the way through, I couldn't help but think: Fuck this shit, I'm not protected by any of this!" The state where I live, the city where I work, the employer I work for, NONE of these entities protects transgender workers from discrimination. I'm entirely at the whim of my bosses (who, I should say, have been great, but bosses can move on and who's to say that the next person will be as understanding). By the time I finished, I just wanted to leave work and not go back for a few days. It sucked. It's a good thing that Memorial Day is this weekend. I need the time to decompress.

The woman who empties my trash and vacuums my office asked me why I was so glum today--this immediately after I finished this "training." I told her. Her eyes got as big as saucers when I told her that GLBT employees can be fired or otherwise discriminated against with no recourse to the law. She couldn't believe it. She's young. I like to think I was looking at the face of generational change when I was talking to her. She's totally fine with everyone. Live and let live. This seems so reasonable. I wonder why so many people think that it's not.

Panic in the Bathroom

2010-05-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

As promised, this week's cartoon. Not a funny one, unfortunately, but the way that Rep. Frank is monkeying with ENDA is no laughing matter. Mind you, no one has seen the final language yet, but the rumors are depressing.

Click to enlarge.

It should be noted that the specter of "men in dresses invading the womens' bathroom" is a wholly invented fear of the religious right. In places where the most liberal non-discrimination ordinances covering trans people hold sway, there has never been an instance of a trans person harassing someone else in a bathroom. The galling thing about separating out trans people for special treatment in bathrooms is that it creates a special class of people against whom it will be legal to discriminate in a bill designed to end discrimination.

Ugly.

Lunchtime Sketches

2010-05-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

I'm going into "art blog mode" for a while here. Here are some recent sketches. I usually do these really quickly over lunch. My apologies for anyone who has already seen all of this stuff on my Facebook page. First up, some Batman villains:

These were done, respectively, in blue prismacolor, a run of the mill pencil, and a brush pen. The Riddler has no underdrawing. I'm trying to wean myself from erasable media and give myself the freedom to make mistakes while I draw.

This last was drawn with a brush pen and a Sharpie. Again, no underdrawing. This last drawing also fills the last page of my sketchbook. Time to go buy another one.

I should have a new cartoon about the whole ENDA debacle in a day or two. Not a funny one, unfortunately.

Godblind

2010-05-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

This is a coming out story of sorts. Bear with me.

It is the nature of things that, one day, a kid will discover that her parents don't know everything. Indeed, that her parents are just as prone to feeding her a line of happy horseshit as the rest of the world. When that realization sinks in, the process of becoming one's own person begins.

My mother used to tell me that women see color better than men. She arrived at this conclusion because far more men than women are colorblind. This piece of data is true. Men are more prone to colorblindness than women. My mother's conclusion is dead wrong, though. Men and women who have functioning color vision see color equally well. Some people DO see color better than others, but this has nothing to do with the normal function of their vision, so much as it does a reprogramming upgrade to the software in one's brain. I probably see color better than my brother, even though his vision is generally much better than mine. I have the benefit of upgraded software, given to me by several college classes in color theory, design, and painting and by years and years of creating color images in paint and pixels. Anyone who has normal color vision can learn to do this. It's not a matter of gender.

Color blindness is caused by a recessive sex-linked allele on the X chromosome. Its location on that chromosome is on the tail that is absent on the Y chromosome. Therefore, if the gene is present in a male, there is not corresponding dominant allele on the paired chromosome and the trait will manifest itself. In women, the trait can still manifest itself if the corresponding alleles on the matched X chromosomes are both recessive, but it is much, much rarer in women than in men. If you ever took a biology class in high school or college, you may remember the chart for matching dominant and recessive genes that came up when studying Gregor Mendel and his peas. If you do, you get the picture. At a maximum, only a quarter as many women than men with the gene for colorblindness will have the disorder.

Anyway, the point of this is that this particular set of facts was not available to my mother, who never studied Mendelian genetics. When I explained it to her after learning it in the 9th grade, in a vain attempt to tell her why she was wrong, she just shrugged it off. I think it was at that point that I stopped taking my parents word for, well, anything. My parents weren't the only thing that science knocked from the center of my universe.

I was a science-obsessed kid. My parents indulged me in this, and most of the childrens' books my parents bought for me were oriented towards science. They bought me a chemestry kit, a microscope, a telescope, and one of those home planetariums at various points in my childhood. When I was ten, I wanted to be an astronomer/oceanographer/paleontologist. I loaded up on science classes in junior high school and high school. I liked biology classes best, in part because my biology teacher, an amiable guy named Mr. Haaman who also coached the basketball team, had a genuine zeal for his subject. One semester, he decided that it would be a good experience to raise fruit flies as a demonstration of Mendelian genetics. The school year was too short to grow successive generations of pea plants, I guess, but drosophila melanogaster has a 28 day life cycle, which was ideal for growing at least a few generations of fruit flies. We fed them bananas and when each successive generation was mature, we would select them for eye color. Pretty soon, the population that had started with predominantly red eyes had predominantly white eyes. Mr. Haaman didn't explicitly tell us what was going on in this process--he was asking us to do statistical analysis to support Mendelian genetics--but for me, he didn't have to. We were watching evolution in action. It wasn't theoretical.

I think that was the nail in the coffin for my belief in Catholicism, the religion in which my parents raised me and my brothers. My brothers, for their part, both profess themselves to be Deists these days, but I went whole hog into atheism, because science was demonstrating to me in concrete terms that what was taught to me by the Church about the way the universe worked was complete bullshit. The universe as it was being described to me by science worked really, really well with the hypothesis that there was no guiding hand behind it. No divine watchmaker. Best of all, I could see this for myself rather than rely on the myths of Bronze-age tribesmen.

For a while, this freaked me out. The idea that one day, I would simply cease was a frightening one compared to the idea of some variety of immortality for one's consciousness as described by most religions. It took me a long time go get comfortable with this idea. It took me a long time to get over the fallacy of wishful thinking ("An afterlife exists because I really, want it to exist"). I wish the current raft of books on atheism had been around back then, because it would have saved me some time in coming to grips with it, especially once I realized that the Christian afterlife is a horrible crapshoot, where even the slightest misstep results in an eternity of punishment out of all proportion to the offenses involved. Even if he's real, the Abrahamic God is such a fucking bastard that I would take an eternity of punishment for not following him and call it a worthwhile trade.

Anyway, as I said at the top, this is a coming-out story.

I never told my parents that I was trans. I think my mom may have suspected, but she never said anything to me about it. I did tell her that I was an atheist, though. I kind of regret it. My mom died of cancer in 1988, and at some point during the long illness that preceded it, the subject of what I believed came up. I told her that I thought the Catholic mass was great theater, but that I didn't believe in God or the Church. I think she was hurt by that. I think she fretted about it in the short period afterward. I don't think it was a comfort to her in the end. I regret that, but I think she appreciated that I didn't lie to her about it. I kind of wish I'd had the strength of will to tell her the rest, but part of me is glad that I didn't. It's not all about me, sometimes. Sometimes you have to leave people to the comfort of their beliefs.

As a post script to this, my older brother repudiated Catholicism for very different reasons than I did. He had information that I didn't. My mom had two pregnancies before I was born. The first was my older brother. The second was a miscarriage. My mother was a devout Catholic to the point that when she was told that her second child was stillborn inside of her, she followed the church's teachings and bore the child to term at the risk of her own life. Anything else would have been an abortion. My brother was appalled by this, and swore that he could never be a Catholic. I can't say I blame him.

Comics

2010-04-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

This didn't come out quite the way I wanted it, but what the hell. Here's the finished product, anyway. Click to embiggen.

Enjoy.

Some Thoughts on This Year's NFL Slave Auction and Meet and Greet

2010-04-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

I grew up, more or less, in Colorado, so when it came to being socialized as a football fan, it was the Broncos who were my team. This is doubly true because I really started to be aware of the national pastime (sorry baseball) in or around 1977, when the Broncos went to their first Super Bowl. The allegiance stuck with me even after my family moved first to South Dakota (the eastern part of which is still Bronco country), and then to Missouri. My dad never really had any strong allegiances to football teams. I have a picture of him from 1977 wearing an Orange Crush sweat shirt at some event or other, but shortly after we moved to Missouri, my dad bought Chiefs season tickets. If my dad had any sports allegiance, it was to the Boston Red Sox, who he rooted for until his death. An unrequited love, unfortunately. They never won the World Series during his lifetime. They finally broke the Curse of the Bambino the month after his death. I started resenting them then. But I digress.

The Chiefs sucked when we moved to Missouri, so season tickets were easy to get and relatively inexpensive. My family still has those tickets, though they're my brother's now, rather than my dad's. Arrowhead Stadium is a nice place to watch a game, too, and the parking lot is heaven if you have a taste for barbecue. I've been to a couple of dozen Chiefs games over the years, but that early allegiance to the Broncos remained. In recent years, the Chiefs (and the Rams at the other end of I-70) have sucked. They've sucked in epic proportions. Because of this, my interest in the Broncos has been on the rise. I've been following them more or less faithfully for the last several years.

All of that ended last night.

After wheeling and dealing to get the ammo to do it, the Broncos managed to trade into the first round of the draft for a second pick (their first pick was wideout Demaryius Thomas) and they took Tim Tebow. Tebow is a player who I cannot root for. Tebow has been praised in the press for his high "character," which means that he's a squeaky clean Christian boy, but the media's definitions of "character" and mine don't necessarily mesh. Now, there have been other players who I can't in good conscience root for--Ben Roethlisburger currently heads that list, along with Michael Vick--but Tebow is different from them. While Roethlisburger is undeniably a douchebag and probably a rapist to boot, that's a distant issue from me. Same with Vick (who at least has paid a societally mandated penance for his crimes). Tebow, on the other hand, is my mortal enemy. I mean that literally.

Tebow, as I've said, is an evangelical Christian, and his father is a big-nosed evangelical preacher. Ordinarily, I don't care about the politics of a given sports figure. Hell, Mike Shanahan was a big supporter of Bush during the last decade, and I didn't really care about that. As I said, Tebow is different. While there are certainly a fair number of evangelicals in the NFL (hello, Kurt Warner), Tebow is a proselytizer of a particular sort. He's a spokesperson for Focus on the Family, which runs the Family Research Institute in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Family Research Institute is listed as a hate organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and no surprise, given Dr. James Dobson's various hysterical tirades about homosexuals. This branch of Christianity would be just ducky with things if people like me were wiped from the face of the earth. Though they are constrained by social approbation (for the moment) from advocating the kind of measures being considered in Uganda right now, the Family Research Institute is actively engaged in efforts to strip me and all other GLBT people and most women, of the basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By advocating on their behalf, Tebow makes himself my enemy and I can wish only ruin and failure to all of his endeavors towards this end. By becoming the face of the Broncos--and make no mistake, a first round quarterback is intended to be the face of the Broncos--I find myself wishing for the organization to fail. And that, as they say, is all she wrote.

As a football move, Tebow is an obvious choice, in spite of the haters and the criticisms of his mechanics. The fact that he comes from a spread offense rather than an NFL-style offense is overblown, given that a number of NFL offenses are drifting towards the spread. If you want an example, look at the 2007 New England Patriots, the most explosive offense any NFL team ever fielded, and one authored by Tebow's new coach, Josh McDaniels. For pure numbers, Tebow is the best collegiate passer to come out of the SEC in well over a decade, better than either of the Manning Brothers, believe it or not. And all he does is win. I don't see that ending just because he has to adjust to the pro game. I think he'll be successful. It's a bitter pill.

So, it's the Chiefs for me, now, like it should have been for the last couple of decades. The Chiefs are going to suck for a while yet, but taking safety Eric Berry is a good move. It'll be fun watching Berry torment Tebow twice a year. I also have the luxury of rooting for the Cleveland Browns, too, given that that's the landing place for Scott Fujita this year, and Fujita is the kind of "high character" guy I can really get behind. But for the Broncos, it's a bitter parting of the ways.

Funnies

2010-04-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

I drew this over lunch today. It's too big to post on Facebook with any kind of legibility, so I'm posting it here. It's very sloppy. My pencils are always very sloppy when I'm cartooning. I'll ink this either tonight or over the next couple of days, and maybe do it in color. Not a bad gag. I'll probably forward this over to Antonia's call for fiction once it's done, in addition to the hard-boiled crime story I'm writing.

Short and sweet, anyway. No continuing story here (yet). I'm not even sure where the hell this came from. It just appeared in my head fully formed. I wish I could bottle that.

I'm In a Right Mood Tonight

2010-03-31T19:31:00.000-07:00

When I checked my RSS feed this morning, I found this story being linked by various bloggers and Facebook friends about another trans woman found murdered in Queens, NY. The New York Daily News, called out for being complete pricks about the use of pronouns and the deceased's former name, have thankfully corrected their story. Unfortunately, the damage is probably already done.

I had a fairly busy day, and on at least two occasions this story and the plight of trans women it represents resurfaced in my mind. A couple of other incidents, while not directly reminding me of this, were fairly annoying.

I started the day with two errands in which my old name--which I haven't legally changed yet--marked me as a 'sir', which the people I was dealing with dutifully used when talking to me. One of my errands was dealing with mechanics, so I wasn't in any mood to correct them. Wrong space for that, methinks. The woman at the fertility clinic, my second stop this morning, was another matter, and at least she took it with some good humor and wished me well in my transition (what was I doing at a fertility clinic? I stored some sperm samples prior to starting hormone therapy as a hedge against the future. The clinic requires an annual consent form, which I was dropping off with my check for this year's storage fee). Anyway, after nearly two months of getting ma'ammed by people when I engage the world, I get "sirred" at my first two stops. I got "sirred" later in the day at the grocery store, too, which only blackened my mood. I didn't get "sirred" at the pharmacy, luckily, but the pharmacy gave me a new problem. It's spring break and packs of teenagers were about today and some of them were giving me sideways glances, and not friendly glances, either. This was my first reminder.

After I got off work, I decided to go see Shutter Island before it leaves town (probably this weekend). I like Scorsese and I give him the benefit of making an effort to see his films in an actual theater, though, after The Departed (which I hated), he's doing a penance, so no first night showings for him this time. A bargain twilight show should absolve him, assuming the movie is okay. Now, I've been going to movies alone for decades. It's unavoidable when you have a movie habit as severe as mine. This has never bothered me. Until now. Scorsese is not a filmmaker who appeals to a female audience, and lo and behold, all of the audience's other members--seven in all, I think--were men. And here's where things get weird for me. I started to feel mildly threatened by this. Would I have felt this way if I hadn't read that horrible story this morning? I don't know. But I did read it, and being alone, in a very out of the way corner of the multiplex (the movie was on one of the screens where movies play out the string rather than one of the premier screens) with several youngish men I didn't know did a number on my head. Without quite intending to, I had put myself in a position to be a victim. Now, obviously nothing happened, and I'm sure that I'm being unkind to the guys in the audience, none of whom even noticed me, I think, but that doesn't matter, because however well-meaning they were, we live in a culture where bad things happen to women and even worse things happen to trans women.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that one unexpected result of the RLE is that it's turning me into a fairly strident feminist, which is something of a shock to me. Mind you, I've always identified with the stated aims of feminism so long as those aims were equal protection under the law and equality of opportunity. But my first experience of codified feminism was at the hands of second wavers like Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly, who went a good deal beyond that and into very dark places (not the least of which is a positive hatred of transsexuals), so it took me a while to find schools of thought I like.

Anyway, I don't have a point to any of this. I mostly write to hear myself think. I see my therapist tomorrow, so this helps organize what I might want to talk about. I know one thing, though: the weather is gorgeous right now, and I'm wearing a friggin dress. Call me "sir" while I'm wearing THAT, mother fuckers. I dare you.

Little Miss Activist

2010-03-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

That's what Renee called me last night when I started up a chat with her. I threw it back at her, since she's as active as I am in the struggle for trans rights. I'm a small fish, truthfully, but I'm trying to do my part. This includes participating in the process.

Promo is our GLBT rights organization in Missouri and they sponsor a lobby day every year in Jefferson City. This is the first time I've gone, and it was exhausting work. After checking in, I was assigned a team from my area to pressure two specific legislators who Promo has identified as "persuadable." We generally weren't sent after easy marks: most of the our legislative allies actually spoke to us at the rally that began the day. We dropped in to thank these people, but they were secondary to our purpose.

Missouri's legislature is dominated by Republicans, so any movement on the two initiatives being pushed by Promo this year has to be sold to some number of them to even get a hearing. This year's bills are MONA (Missouri Non-Discrimination Act) and a Safe Schools bill. Of the two, I think the Safe Schools bill probably has the better chance. More on that later. After much walking, we never did get to see our two targets, but we did talk to their staffers and we left them with a couple of fact sheets. We did actually SEE my state senator, but he was walking very fast and didn't stop to talk to us. In their defense, yesterday was an unusually busy day for our legislature. Be that as it may. We DID get to talk to a couple of OTHER legislators who weren't our targets. One of them was the representative for the district where I work (rather than where I live), who is fully on board. We took a couple of minutes of her time to thank her for her support. We also talked to Rep. Cynthia Davis, of whom some of you may have heard. She's one of the wingnuttier members of our legislature, and, apparently, she hid from the Promo delegation last year and threw us out of her office the year before. This year she actually talked to us. It went surprisingly well. She was polite and she seemed particularly receptive to the Safe Schools bill. Who knows? Maybe she meant it. We'll see how she votes.

Here are some general thoughts about this year's Lobby Day.

The Missouri capitol building is a beautiful space. I had never been there before and I was very impressed with it. I was particularly impressed by all the Thomas Hart Benton murals. Benton is an artist whose work I've always thought of as being a bit hokey, but it turns out to be ideal for public spaces. God bless the old WPA.

That said, our more junior legislators have their offices in warrens that remind me of a beehive, or that scene in Brazil where two bureaucrats share a desk divided by a wall. Rank hath its privileges. By contrast, the governor's office--we only saw the reception area--is palatial.

Speaking of the governor, Jay Nixon got a LOT of support and money from the GLBT community. If he knows what's good for him, he'll act on an executive order protecting state employees from discrimination (full disclosure, I'm a state employee). We left him a mountain of postcards to that effect.

I wish Jolie Justus was my representative. She's awesome. I didn't get to see my own rep, but he wasn't a targeted legislator, either.

Lobbying is hard fucking work. By the time 2:30 rolled around I was completely knackered. Promo's executive director suggested to me around that time that I could get the sergeant at arms to pull my state senator off the floor to talk to me, but by then, I didn't have the energy to do it. Plus, most of my team had vanished by then and I think I would have preferred to have back-up.

Sensible shoes next time. To my friends who suggested heels: I'm not listening to you anymore.

I mentioned Promo's executive director. He's a guy named A. J. Bockleman and I'm completely amazed at what he does. Seriously, he's the right guy for the job. I couldn't do what he does. I don't have the energy.

Genderqueer youth are (is?) going to change the world. Seriously.

Anyway, I'll go back next year for sure. The trans presence this year was apparently up from previous years, but it was still too small.

A note about my last posting: I spoke too soon. Apparently GLAAD has decided to act on Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives. Good for them. Here's their call to action if you are so inclined.

Outrage Fatigue and the Angry Inch

2010-03-23T08:18:00.001-07:00

So, there's this movie scheduled to premiere at the Tribecca film festival called "Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives", a transploitation revenge film in which a couple of "trannies" take revenge on the guys who have abused them. If you want a rundown of how offensive this is, I would direct you the excellent entry on Skip the Make-Up. I don't expect GLAAD to get involved because the perpetrators of this particular cinematic crime against humanity are gay themselves and that might be biting the hand that feeds them. Cis gay men are often worse than straight cis people, so the tenor of this isn't terribly surprising, even as it disappoints. But I'm not even going to blame the individuals for this. The problem with depictions of trans people in media is systemic and even trans people themselves sometimes turn a blind eye to this. Calpernia Addams once memorably described the stock depictions of trans people as the four "P's": psychos, prostitutes, pathetic, and punch line, which has the depressing ring of truth. So we have this "film," which has a terrible title to start with--I mean, substitute "Pissed-off Niggas with Nines" to get an idea of how offensive this is--and an even more offensive storyline. The filmmakers should have gone for the trifecta and debuted their film on TG Day of Remembrance for the full effect.

And yet, I haven't joined the chorus calling for the filmmakers' heads. Why is that?

I think I'm numb to this sort of thing anymore. I'm suffering from what I'm starting to call "outrage fatigue." Every day, there's some new horror designed to piss me off, and, frankly, I'm tired of it. But also, this isn't really all that worse than other depictions. Let me give you an example:

Hedwig and the Angry Inch postulates the pernicious stereotype of the gay man who gets a sex change in pursuit of an indifferent lover. It further includes a surgery scene that equates the sex change operation with quack butchery. The lyric "...and now I'm stuck with a Barbie doll crotch" is designed to portray GRS as mutilation and to cast Hedwig as a pathetic freak. At one point in the film, Hedwig takes to streetwalking, thus perpetuating the stereotype of the trans prostitute. The final insult comes at the end when Hedwig integrates his personality as Hansel and repudiates his trans identity. The end of Hedwig is a muddle, it must be said, but it does reveal that the film has nothing whatsoever to do with transgenderism because Hedwig isn't really a transsexual to start with. Further, the film itself is another example of a cis gay man--John Cameron Mitchell--appropriating trans imagery and invisiblizing the trans experience in the process.

Purely on the substance of its content, is Hedwig and the Angry Inch really any less offensive than Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives? I submit that it is not.

And for the record, I love Hedwig and the Angry Inch in spite of its affront to my identity, because it's made by accomplished filmmakers with a fair level of empathy and a whole lot of artisty. As a movie, it's terrific and it has an absolutely killer soundtrack. It manages to avoid the snuff-movie approach to transness of some other, dire depictions like Princessa or In the Year of 13 Moons. My only defense of this is that sometimes, the power of art trumps good taste. I'm sure John Waters would probably agree with me there.

Anyway, without actually seeing Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives, how am I to know that it doesn't accomplish the same thing? Obviously I can't, but the tone-deafness of the title puts me off and I'm not holding my breath.

Day to Day

2010-02-27T17:37:00.000-08:00

Day to day, my life isn't a whole lot different than it has ever been. I get up. I go to work. I go home. Occasionally, I get together with friends, but I don't do that nearly as often as I would like, in part because I live out in the sticks and in part because so many of my friends are so geographically distant now. This happens to everyone, I suppose. People move where their lives take them. The internet softens this blow some, but I still miss them. My friend, Anna, is moving out of the area soon, and this loss is harder than most, but I'll get over it. I need a job that lets me jet around the country so I can visit my scattered friends. Either that, or I need to win the lottery. I guess I would have to play to win.

I got my hair done again yesterday. I never used to enjoy getting a haircut, but nowadays, boy howdy, is it nice. Part of this revelation is the salon I go to, which is an upscale salon/spa. I pay extra (a LOT extra), but it's worth it. I think it's worth it, anyway. I'm pretty satisfied with my results, and the process--including a wonderful exfoliating scalp massage as a warm up--is extremely relaxing. Anyway, I dyed my hair a darker shade of brunette this time, and when we were done, my stylist made me up by way of selling me cosmetics. Oh, the horrors. As I was checking out, I let go the fact that the MAC store in St. Louis had closed. This was like dropping a rock in a pond, as ripples of this spread through the salon. I hope I didn't cause a panic. One of the receptionists tried to sell me on tanning, because I have pale skin (made to look even paler by darker hair). I told her that there was a reason my skin looks like it does at my age. She just laughed.

Anyway, this is what I look like these days:

Afterwards, I paid a visit to the local game store to pick up some Girl Scout cookies (the folks who run the store have a daughter who sells them--she's adorable). It was interesting going from a realm dominated by estrogen into a place dominated by testosterone.

After complaining about the randomness of how people perceive my gender expression at the beginning of the month, I haven't been "sirred" since. Yesterday, I got hit on at the grocery store by the guy handing out salmon samples. He was cute, but it was obvious he was trying to charm me into buying some salmon. Still, I doubt he would have used that tactic with a male customer. It was funny. The upside of this is that I'm settling in and becoming socialized. This is a good thing.

Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T08:40:00.000-08:00

We celebrated Valentine's Day a day early. Felicia has to get on top of her grading today, so we did it yesterday in an abbreviated manner (she had to work yesterday). I got her some flowers and some chocolate covered strawberries; she got me a book. We watched the last two episodes of season one of True Blood. It was a nice night. A month from now comes the anti-Valentine's Day celebration: Steak and a Blow Job Day. I'm not making that up. It's March 14th. Mark your calendar.

Otherwise, I spent yesterday hanging out with my friend, Anna. We went to see The Wolfman (which was better than I expected it to be), went to the candy store so I could get Felicia's strawberries, and had ice cream. It was fun. On the way back to our cars, we passed a guy carrying a HUGE bouquet of flowers and some kind of gift box. Anna turned to me and noted "That guy is so getting laid tonight." I said: "I hope his boyfriend appreciates him." Perhaps we're being unkind. It's almost spring, after all, and spring is for lovers.

A quick shout out to my friend, Lori Davis, who just had surgery. Get well soon, hon. I hope it works out to your satisfaction.

Hey, Why Does Netflix Ignore the T?

2010-02-04T07:40:00.000-08:00

I re-started my Netflix this week (quite by accident, actually, but what's done is done). While I was sorting through the Instant Watch tab, I clicked on their Gay and Lesbian category. This is what they list in the sidebar:

Gay & Lesbian
Gay & Lesbian Comedies
Gay & Lesbian Dramas
Gay & Lesbian Romance
Foreign Gay & Lesbian
Indie Gay & Lesbian
Gay
Lesbian
Bisexual
Logo

No trans. Not even a mention of the initials "GLBT."

Look, I know that trans people comprise a tiny minority, but would it kill them to label the category itself "GLBT?" I mean, there are TONS of trans-related titles in this category; would it kill them to at least acknowledge that?

Scattershot

2010-02-01T21:14:00.000-08:00

Some bits and pieces.

I re-read The Silence of the Lambs last week. I wanted to see the movie again, too, but I couldn't find a copy in the original aspect ratio, so I made do with the book. I can't believe that this book is more than 20 years old, but I'll spare you the "I'm getting old" angst. The thing that stood out for me in a way that I never really noticed before is the way that Thomas Harris changes tenses from paragraph to paragraph. It started to get on my nerves, actually, even after I figured out the deliberate pattern behind it. Screenwriter Ted Tally won an Oscar for his adapted screenplay for the movie version, which seems wrong to me, because, really, is straight-up transcription a creative act? It's all right there in the book. The movie invented very little.

This week, I'm listening to Jonathan Carroll's The Ghost in Love, which has been a revelation of another kind, because it never dawned on me that some of big Stephen King's books over the last fifteen years or so really want to be Carroll novels when they grow up. I'm thinking in particular of Rose Madder, Insomnia, and Lisey's Story (it's no coincidence that these are fairly weak books). The sort of surrealism one finds in Carroll requires a lightness of touch and a verbal dexterity that are both beyond King. Hell, sometimes they're beyond Carrroll, but since he more or less inhabits these kinds of narratives all the time, he knows what he's doing.

In other news, my perceived gender expression seems to be obeying no rhyme or reason right now. Saturday, I was "sirred" at the checkout at the grocery store in spite of the make-up and earrings I was wearing, while on the very next day, wearing no obvious gender markers at all, the cashier at Target calls me "ma'am". Weird and annoying.

We're going on a short vacation at the end of this week. We'll be off to visit some friends in Cincinnati. Felicia tells me that she was hoping to visit WKRP, only to realize that WKRP never actually existed. For the most part, we'll be cooking and eating and watching movies and probably watching the Super Bowl. I don't really give a damn about either team in this year's game, but I do know that if the Colts win, I'll be seeing Peyton Manning's face in every damned commercial on television, and I already want to punch it. So, go Saints, I guess.

Identities

2010-01-25T17:30:00.000-08:00

This wanders a bit. Forgive me.

A couple of years ago, when I first started meeting with her, my therapist asked me, "How do you think your life will change after transition." I think I surprised her a bit when I told her that I didn't think it would change all that much. I'd live in the same house with the same partner, I'd have the same friends, I'd have the same job. I would still be "me," so to speak, and I kept telling people that. The person I told that to the most was my long-suffering girlfriend, who was and remains uneasy with my transition. "I'll still be me," I told her, time and again, just like countless other transsexuals have told THEIR partners. Hell, I even believed it.

Boy, was I wrong.

We were discussing the matter a few weeks ago and I said to her, almost by reflex now, "I'm still the same as I always was." To which she replied: "No, you're not." While she granted that I was obviously happier (insufferably happier, actually), she also noted that I'm flightier than I used to be, and infinitely more vain, and surprisingly insecure. For that matter, several of my offline friends have noted that the difference in my personality before and after is like night and day. More than one of them has told me that "You're not even the same person anymore."

For all my faults before transition, that was the person my partner fell in love with and it hurts me no end to watch her struggle with the person who has taken his place (nevermind the gender dynamics). I like to think that she would prefer a partner who is happy and in love with life rather than the withdrawn, angry, and shy person I used to be, but there's no guarantee of that. It could be that I just trigger her own insecurities (well, there's no "could" about that: I DO trigger them--to the point that she needed to talk to my therapist about it). You love what you love. She has a right to that.

In any event, for those of you in transition or contemplating it: beware of telling the people you love that you'll still be the same person, because chances are, it's bullshit.

I also find my identity changing in relation to being trans. I always used to be annoyed at those transsexuals who treated "mere" crossdressers badly in chat rooms and on message boards, but lately, I find myself becoming disconnected from that particular identity and more in sympathy with the TS's that I used to dislike. I'm kind of surprised by this because I remember being a little freaked out about it when a couple of my other TS friends expressed the same disconnect. I have a friend who I've met at the Southern Comfort Conference the last couple of times I've been there who is typical: she's one of the "let's get dolled up, hit the down, and shoot a shitload of pictures" crossdressers, and while I like her, and remember that I was of that ilk once upon a time, I find that I can't really muster the excitement over that anymore. That category of trans people uses photography as a kind of validating commodity, one typified by The Vanity Club and its ilk, in which taking pictures and ooh-ing and ah-ing over the latest sets is a kind of cathartic endorsement of self, or at least, a facade of self. I don't mean to look down on that. I don't. If that makes people happy, then, by all means, indulge.

But it's not me anymore, really.

I don't remember the last time I got dolled up JUST to take pictures of myself. I don't need that anymore. I don't need the photographs and the fuck-me pumps and the outfits to tell me that I'm a woman (a woman, not a girl or a grrl or gurl or tgirl or whatever). I see that in the mirror every day when I wake up. I can't take it off. I don't get to stick the boobs back in a box at the top of my closet. I live it all the time. It is me.

Lately, I've been wondering if completing transition actually puts one on the outside of the transgender umbrella. For the most part, I don't think it does, because I'll still have this horrible history behind me, and that will always shape my identity in ways that even I don't fully grasp. But still, even though I never wanted to go stealth (and I don't think I can anyway), I understand its siren song. I wonder what it must be like to be cis-gender, to not even be aware of being cis-gender, to not feel that sense of wrongness with my body. I envy that a little.

"We never know what it is we’ve got until the cold city wind blows it all in our face,
With a humbling disgrace.
How do you deal with a story like this?
We’re writing our names in the lives of the ones we miss."

Bettie Serveert, "You've Changed" (Link for my Facebook friends)

Wow, That Was Fast

2010-01-11T09:33:00.001-08:00

I was talking to a friend of mine who is about to head to Thailand for her surgery, and one of the things she said to me was "Transition happens so fast!" And, you' know? She's right. I can't believe how fast it has happened for me. I was looking at a couple of picture I snapped of myself a year and a half ago and I totally don't recognize myself. It's not just me. Another friend, one who actually met my awkward evil twin over the summer (the one who was withdrawn into himself), recently told me that that person wasn't me, wasn't the person she had gotten to know. Interesting.

The most interesting thing about this whole process has been re-integrating myself back into ordinary life, outside of the insular cocoon of the trans/GLBT community. This, too, happened really quickly, and for that, I thank social networking on the internet. While it's true that all of my real-world friends have been awesome, I think my Facebook experience (even more than this blog) has been the instrument that has facilitated this. The walls between the two online personae I used to maintain completely obliterated themselves within a couple of months of joining Facebook. I've made a ton of very real friends (particularly the Dreams in the Bitch House conspirators), which is gratifying for someone who was worried that being who I am might make me a pariah in the world. Frankly, more people love than hate. It's easier.

The world has changed.

_________

In other news, I had a fine holiday season. On the drive back from Christmas dinner, Felicia turned to me and said that I had "spoiled" her for food. Her family really doesn't know how to cook, and while Christmas dinner wasn't awful, it wasn't particularly inspired. Fortunately, I had a pork shoulder (that I turned into pulled pork) and a city ham on tap at home, so we haven't gone without good food this season. Heh.

Yesterday, we had another "Christmas" dinner with my brothers. This was considerably better, because my younger brother and his wife DO know how to cook. I probably ate too much, but screw it, it's the holidays. Then we retired to his living room to watch the Green Bay/Arizona game. Wow. Just wow. I don't remember ever watching a more entertaining football game. If they were all like that, I'd consider getting cable.

Spirals of Paranoia

2009-12-24T21:42:00.000-08:00

So my first three weeks of living full time have been joy and rapture, except for one small detail...

As usual, Leith/Riftgirl was there first:

The Politics of P from Riftgirl on Vimeo.

All Politics is Local (Winter Solstice Edition)

2009-12-22T18:35:00.000-08:00

I was wearing my activist hat this week. I went to a meeting of our local board of aldermen last night in order to lend my voice to a proposed anti-discrimination ordinance (or, rather, three of them, covering housing, employment, and public facilities, respectively). I recount the circumstances in this video blog:

I left out a bunch of stuff in the video, stuff that I want to comment on here.

First, I cannot believe the blithe and callous way the first speaker from the general public--the pastor at the First Baptist Church in my fair city--could compare GLBT people to prostitutes and crackheads. "You wouldn't rent to a prostitute," he said, apparently equating the "immorality" of prostitution with the "immorality" of homosexuality. It was worse than that, actually, because he conflated this with setting up a brothel in a rental property. My alderwoman rightly shot this down with the simple fact that prostitution is illegal here and that anyone who didn't want to rent to such a person would be within their legal rights to refuse. I found it singularly odious.

But that was nothing compared to the guy sitting two seats down from me who had a problem with transgender people. Apparently, so concerned was he that we might be fraudulently claiming the identity, he wanted to compel the issuance of status identifiers, akin to the pink triangle if you get the reference. This was generally beyond the pale for more than just me--one of the audience members was Jewish and spoke up fairly vehemently--but it disturbs me just the same.

A common theme among the opponents was: "Is this a problem? Have there been complaints?" This is a rhetorical trap, of course. Why would anyone complain if there is no legal redress? Not much point, is there? For the most part, employment discrimination is hard to prove anyway, especially in Missouri, which is a so-called "right to work" state. You have to look at the problem indirectly. Is discrimination against trans people a problem? There haven't been any complaints on record. But, of course, trans people have a ridiculously high unemployment rate (Dr. Jillian Weiss pegs it at 35%, with 60% making less than $15K annually). There is no other possible cause but discrimination on the part of employers.

Someone else asked how many people would be covered by this and was it even worth talking about? Of course, there's no way to know this. The census doesn't ask about a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. Gay organizations often claim that 10% of the population falls under the umbrella of GLBT. I don't know if I trust their numbers, but it's beside the point. Someone who has MS is protected from discrimination by the Americans With Disabilities act. MS occurs in 1 in 30,000 people. It's entirely possible that there isn't anyone in my little town (population 3800 people) who benefits from that law, but it still protects them. I know that there are at least two transsexuals in my town (which corresponds to the estimate that TSs are 1 in 2000 people or thereabouts). Hell, there were two transsexuals in the council chamber last night. The numbers don't matter. Equal protection for all means ALL, no matter how small the subset of "all" might be.

For the most part, I don't understand why someone would want to discriminate against anyone, so last night was fairly depressing for me. I had an email exchange with my alderwoman today in which she said: "As for those who spoke against it: don’t assume that they speak for the bulk of Centralia. I don’t believe that they do." This is optimistic, and I think she's probably right. But right now, my mind isn't communicating very well with my gut, which is telling me that I am a pariah in my town.

What a nice thought for the holidays...

Last Rites

2009-12-13T08:37:00.001-08:00

I went to a funeral this week. I barely knew the deceased, but his daughter is one of my best and oldest friends and I wanted to be there for her more than anything. One thing that funerals do to me is cause me to think about my own funeral at some nebulous point in the future and how I want it to play. I categorically refuse to allow any religious observance to be associated with my send-off, and I really don't want my mourners to have to listen to an elderly woman playing an organ in the back of the funeral chapel singing off-key hymns. My own funerary desires are decidedly quirky.

I want a viking funeral.

Ideally, I'll have a funeral in which I'm laid to rest on top of a cord of wood that has been floated in a dinghy, liberally doused with gasoline or lighter fluid, set alight, and pushed off towards the rising or setting sun. I'll be wearing a fabulous gown in this scenario, as well as a viking helmet with horns. Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries" should see me off.

Of course, this country has some funny funerary laws that might prevent this, but the beauty of this is that it can be performed ten miles offshore in international waters, where those laws don't apply.

Prior to this "main event," I want a wake. Not a visitation, mind you, but a wake, with a huge bowl of sangria and a loud sound system. I even know what music will be playing. Here's a tentative song list:

"Many Rivers to Cross" by Jimmy Cliff
"Time" by Pink Floyd
"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" by Bob Dylan
"The Dimming of the Day" by Richard and Linda Thompson
"Is That All There Is?" by Peggy Lee (I may substitute the version performed by PJ Harvey and John Parrish)
"Angel Eyes" by Frank Sinatra

The placement of this last one is important, because it allows me to shuffle off this mortal coil to Ol' Blue Eyes singing "Excuse me while I disappear." You can hear it on Youtube:

And here's a cool version of the same song performed by Bruce Springsteen:

In any event, it's all about the grand gesture, and it's all about making my exit in a way that's at peace with the world and with death. I'm not afraid of death. I like the idea that I'll be rendered back into stardust eventually ("We are stardust, we are golden...") and that death is merely a part of that process. But I'm not in any hurry, either.

Over the High Wall

2009-12-09T08:49:00.000-08:00

I'm six days in to the RLE. After I left work last Thursday, I bid my old self a fond farewell and got on with the business of my new life. So far, it's not a lot different from my old life, but I'll come back to that.

I took off work last Friday so I could spend some time preparing. I spent the morning sorting through the clothes I want to throw out or give away and then went to get my hair done in the afternoon. I go to kind of an upscale salon, so I had more than just my hair done--cut and color, sure, but I got a brow wax and a massage, too. It was nice. I'm completely delighted by the results my hair stylist was able to get. This is what it looked like just out of the salon:

Those of you who've known me for a long time--especially those of you who knew my evil twin for a long period--will understand my complete amazement at how good that looks. I was resigned to a life of wearing hair pieces, and here I am in my first week of my new life sporting my own hair. Astonishing.

At this point, I was experiencing a prolonged euphoria that began when I left work on Thursday. It lasted well into the weekend, when I discovered that it was indeed possible to have too much happiness. I had a raging headache on Sunday, caused, I think, by my body exhausting the endorphins and neurotransmitters that had me so wired for the previous three days. The good feeling returned on Monday, but it wasn't nearly as intense. As an aside, I've never felt like that before, and certainly not for so long a period. I could get used to that.

On Saturday, I had what I was calling a "debutant party." I invited my family and all of my local friends (and some of my not so local friends) to have dinner at a sushi restaurant where I could introduce myself to the ones who hadn't met me yet, and to torment them with really bad karaoke. My brothers were completely nonplussed, and everyone else had a great time. Here are my brothers with their new sister. They're totally accepting:

I've been saying this for a while: the old paradigm for transgender transition was that one should prepare to lose everything--friends, family, job, home, everything--because, frankly, the lot of trans people in western civilization has been dire for most of history. It's a mark of how dramatically things have changed in the new millennium that I've done this without losing anything. I'm closer to my family than ever, I'm closer to my friends than ever, and my ability (and desire) to make new friends has improved dramatically. In any event, in a blogosphere full of dire warnings, I'm here to tell any trans people who are weighing transition that it doesn't have to suck. It can actually be a dramatic improvement. Of course, I am well aware of how lucky I am in this, and I'm also willing to state that my atheism has been a powerful source of strength (my more spiritual readers will recoil at this--hi, Lori--sorry, but it's true). Without the burden of religious guilt, or the burden of religious scorn, my problems have been eminently manageable, and I can shrug off whatever barbs come my way as the result of ignorance.

Anyway, my first day at work was almost an anti-climax. I had to stop by the DMV before going to work because my driver's license was about to expire--I haven't changed my name yet, so it was mainly a matter of changing photos. One of my trans friends warned me that I might be hassled, but the woman at the counter was very nice, and was very amused at the difference between my old appearance and what I looked like that morning. She agreed that I look better now than I did then.

At work, I wasn't the new exhibit at the zoo; there were no gawkers. It was a more or less normal workday. And when I went home after work, there was a mountain of laundry to do and dishes in the sink. This is where reality sets in. RLE stands for "Real Life Experience," and guess what? Transition doesn't suddenly give a person the ability to fart rainbows and butterflies. The bathroom still needs to be cleaned, the dishes still need to be done, clothes still get dirty. This is where whatever we TS's may have fantasized about comes smack dab against reality, and when it ceases to be a fantasy at all. Which, I guess, is the point.

Sketch for Tuesday November 24

2009-11-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

A lunch-hour sketch. I don't have anything to say about this one, really.

Sketch for Monday November 23

2009-11-23T14:49:00.000-08:00

I took the weekend off from posting sketches, mainly because I didn't much care for what I drew. But I'm back for the next couple of days, anyway.

I'm not entirely sure why I got it into my head to make a drawing of J. Edgar Hoover, except that I'm interested in faces that aren't particularly beautiful. Hoover was a whole box of ugly. Anyway, I hope you like it.

Sketches for Thursday, November 19

2009-11-19T10:55:00.000-08:00

These are (very) rough layouts for a web comic I'm working on. This should eventually run to about 15 pages or so. This is pretty emblematic of the way I go about creating comics. I rough in the general placement of figures in the panel and place the dialogue and captions more or less simultaneously. I don't worry about tight pencils at this stage (obviously), but occasionally I'll work tighter than I have to. Anyway, this is the first page and a half. I drew the first half of the second page over lunch today. I know generally where the whole thing goes, but I like to improvise panels as I draw, so there's no guarantee that this is what the final product will look like.

Anyway, clicking them will make them big. Enjoy.

Sketch for Wednesday November 18

2009-11-18T14:37:00.000-08:00

I did this from memory. I could have sworn that Bob Dylan was wearing a scarf on the cover of Freewheelin Bob Dylan, but I guess I was confusing it with Blonde on Blonde. I substituted my own characters for the main figures, though.

Enjoy.

Sketch for Tuesday

2009-11-17T11:08:00.000-08:00

Hah, it really IS a sketch a day this week. Woot.

This isn't part of another project, really. It's just something I drew over my lunch hour. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention to the borders of my page. This would look a lot better if it wasn't cropped. Believe it or not, I don't usually avoid drawing feet. I think feet can be very expressive (it's about the only thing I really took away from Burne Hogarth's anatomy books) so I enjoy drawing them. Anyway, this was drawn with a run of the mill #2 pencil (not even a fancy art pencil). It was fun.

-------------

In other news, I'm participating in a communal blog/podcast about horror movies (my first true cinematic love). It's called "Dreams in the Bitch House" (a name that some of you Lovecraftians might like). Check it out if you've got the time.

Art Monday

2009-11-16T09:18:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to get over my shyness when it comes to showing my art to people. It's weird: I have oodles of ego and self-esteem in every other area of my life, but when it comes to showing people things that I've drawn or painted, I'm shy to the point of dysfunctional. I need to get over it.

Anyway, nothing too spectacular today. Two sketches from the weekend, one fairly dirty.

The first is a resolution to my troll problem. This is for the app I'm developing. I'll post the finished version when it's done, but this is the basic rough sketch. I think I finally found the right combo of menacing and dopey.

Second is a for an erotica project that I'm beginning to work on. The whole thing as currently imagined is verrry dirty. The upside of this is that the process of doing last week's TGDoR comic has whetted my appetite for doing comics. This is one of the first images for that project, mainly getting my legs back under me with drawing human beings out of my head. Realistically, I should find a live model, but given the nature of the project, it's probably best that I don't.

Anyway, enjoy.

In Honor of Transgender Day of Rememberance

2009-11-12T15:43:00.001-08:00

Transgender Day of Remembrance is next Friday. It's a time to reflect on the hatred and violence directed towards the people in my community just before a day devoted to giving thanks. The stories that characterize TGDoR are horrifying and tragic, and again, I'm struck by just how lucky I've been. It's a quirk of fate that I've had it easy. Don't think for a second that I'm not aware of my good fortune.

I don't normally get to attend any Transgender Day of Remembrance gatherings. Part of the penalty for living in the sticks is that I have to commune with the trans community from a distance. This year, I thought I'd contribute a web comic (in part at the unwitting urging of Jayna and Mila Pavlin at Trans-Ponder.com). This is the result. I had originally planned to do this with brush and ink, but circumstances conspired to force me into doing it digitally. As usual for me, this was done in Adobe Illustrator. I hope you all like this. Enjoy.

Rummaging Through my Closet and Life

2009-11-09T11:50:00.000-08:00

One month and counting. Less, actually. The day I bid my old self a fond farewell is rushing up at me like the water greeting a cliff diver. I spent part of the weekend laying the groundwork. This mostly consisted of rummaging through my closet and dresser to see what clothes I'm going to pitch. All of the male clothes will go. This is the equivalent of colonists burning their ships upon arrival in the New World. There won't be any going back. A goodly amount of the female clothing will go, too, either because it doesn't fit well, it's in bad condition, or I'm not entirely sure what the hell I was thinking when I bought it in the first place. I also have a lot of items that were given to me by friends (one of the best parts of coming out a decade ago was that some of my female friends started giving me clothes) that I've never worn. If I had any sense, I'd get rid of some of the slutwear I collected as an irresponsible youth, but I think Goodwill might look on that askance. Besides, that shit was expensive, and, well, who knows when it might actually come in handy.

I've been surprised by some items that I didn't know I had. I found a really cute black dress that I don't remember buying. It fits exactly, so it must have been one of my own purchases--stuff that was given to me almost never fit--I just have no idea of where it came from. Fortunately, the older version of me apparently had pretty good taste. I'll be keeping that dress.

I have more memory associations with my wardrobe than I thought I did. The horror movie t-shirts from the video store days are all ready to be binned (with the lone exception of the Ms.45 t-shirt, which I'll be keeping, actually, since it screams "riot grrl" and because I never wore it much). I don't have a lot of movies left from the video store fiasco--I've slowly sold or given away most of the VHS tapes over time, though I'm still sitting on some of them because the market for them has pretty much dried up--so the t-shirts are the only remaining souvenirs. I'll be sad to see them go, particularly the Night of the Living Dead shirt, but they're way past their life span. Also going away are some of the first clothes I bought for myself after I moved out of my parents' house. I never purged, the way some trans people do, so I still own almost everything I ever bought. Well, not for very much longer.

Getting rid of all of this stuff is probably a good thing . I'm starting a new life, after all, and part of that means leaving the old life behind.

-------

In other news, I almost set my house on fire burning leaves this weekend. Note to self: build the next fire farther away from the house. Although the house never actually caught, some of the siding on the northwest corner melted. Doh! Fortunately, that's neither expensive nor difficult to fix. A project for my next paycheck, methinks.

I'm also participating in a collective blogging/podcast project with a group of my horror movie loving friends. After a false start under another name, it's called "Dreams in the Bitch House." It's mainly a bunch of horror-loving women talking about horror movies, and other stuff, plus there's an accompanying blog, that'll have material from a number of people (not just me). The second podcast episode should go up tonight, and one of the subjects we discussed--the bodily functions of women--was something that has application for some of my trans friends. Bear with me for a second.

Lately, I've been getting a lot of friends requests on my Facebook page from trans people--mostly crossdressers--who are members of a group called "Femininity Secrets for Transgenders" or some such, and all I can do is laugh at that. The biggest "secrets of femininity" that I've stumbled upon are these: womens' bathrooms are as nasty as mens', if not more so because a LOT of women need to learn to sit the fuck down to pee instead of hovering over the damned toilet; women talk more frankly and more specifically about sex than men do; and women fart and masturbate just like men do. I think any trans woman who actually gets to the downhill slope of transition has those romantic and totally sexist ideas of the feminine mystique pretty thoroughly debunked, and good riddance.

The Good with the Bad

2009-11-03T13:37:00.000-08:00

I haven't been in a mood to blog lately. Things haven't been going well for me at home, and I've been pretty down. This has spilled over to my other blogging projects, too. I'll get over it, I imagine. I don't generally get down for long. This is a pretty frustrating stretch, though, coming as it does after a relatively terrific weekend two weeks ago. None of this has anything to do with my impending big switcheroo, oddly enough, though that weird mixture of impatience and apprehension is still there. The apprehension is silly. I know it's silly. I mean, I rarely present as male outside of work anymore, so it's not like I'm not already engaging the world. But it's still there.

In any event, some very good things have happened to me recently. I had a terrific visit with my friend, Anna, two weekends ago. We had Thai food and then went to see a Korean horror movie at our local art house. Anna has also been part of a project that I've been working on with several of my online friends from the horror movie community. That's been taking some of my mind off of everything else. Later that same weekend, I did my first volunteer stint at our local GLBT center. It was a pumpkin carving party for queer families, and I helped a couple of really nice kids carve their pumpkins. I left that on top of the world (...looking down on creation...). Now if I can only bottle that feeling.

Unfortunately, the less said about my Halloween, the better.

Sigh.

Lazy Sunday

2009-10-18T13:35:00.000-07:00

For the most part, I'm a homebody on the weekends. I don't go out carousing on Friday and Saturday nights. I usually stay in, cook, read, watch movies, what have you. Today, I should be raking leaves, but instead, I'm lounging around on the bed with the dogs and noodling with my guitar. I have a good life.

One of the things I've been doing today is sort through some of my clothing to toss the stuff that I'm never going to wear again, either because it no longer fits, it's too worn out to wear, or because I won't be wearing male clothes at all for very much longer. At some point, all of the male clothing goes, but right now I'm pitching the stuff that I'm just not using. I'm also throwing out some of my female wardrobe for similar reasons. I'm a pack-rat by nature, so this process comes with some regret.

Six weeks and counting. Scary. Exhilarating.

I bought a hat this weekend. I've been meaning to buy a hat for some time now, mainly as a hedge against hair that's still really too thin for my tastes, but I've had a hard time finding one that's big enough for my head. I can probably get away with my own hair now, and we'll see what my hair stylist can do with it sometime next month, but a hat is a pretty good solution, too, and I like it more than I like the idea of wearing a do-rag or some similar solution. It doesn't look bad:

And here's a rare photo of me wearing my glasses:

These are pretty good photo therapy for me. Even without make-up, I think I look okay. My beard shadow is almost all gone now, which makes a HUGE difference, and I have cleavage now. Sometime next year, I'm going to have to get a mammogram. My mother died of breast cancer. She was diagnosed at 49. She died two years later after it had metastasized into her brain. I'm 43 this year, barely six years shy of my mother's fatal illness. I can't wait to try to get my insurance to pay for the mammograms. I'm sure I'll be denied on the basis of my transgenderism, because, of course, I wouldn't be at risk if I hadn't switched genders and nevermind that I'm saving them the risk of testicular and prostate cancer. Ingrates. Any excuse will do. I probably shouldn't bitch about something that hasn't happened yet, but it weighs on my mind. Breast cancer, in this scenario might be a death sentence. It has me a little bit paranoid.

Anyway, that's my weekend. It's not high drama, but it's a living.

Art Morning

2009-10-08T12:39:00.001-07:00

I probably should have spent my day off watching horror movies for the October Challenge, but instead, I spent the morning making concept drawings for My Little Dungeon. I've been trying to figure out what I want a troll to look like. This was the first pass:

I like this drawing, actually, but the subject doesn't look evil enough. He has kind of a kindly expression on his face. So no.

This was the second pass:

I think this guy looks pretty malicious, but I realized that he didn't read as a troll to me. He reads more as an orc. I'm also not real happy with the anatomy, which often happens when I'm working completely out of my head.

Ah, well. Back to the drawing board.

I've Been Slimed

2009-10-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

I was doing some maintenance on my Flickr page this morning when a new message appeared in my inbox there. This is what it said:

"im mr.max and im from california here and i would like to seriously have u work for my porn label which is maxhardcore entertainment...if u do have a yahoo i.d where i can contact u at..pls do give me ur yahoo i.d so i could have a conversation with u and explain all the things in detail and also get to know you..the deal is becomeing a movie model for 200thousand u.s for a years contract..the rest i;ll explain later when u hve replyied with ur yahoo i.d if u have one..
Thanks a lot
Max Hardcore
(pls pls do reply back,u are really the type for my porn movies,my yahoo i.d is ••••••••••@yahoo.com.add and reply me back on flickr,so waiting to talk with you)"

This isn't the first offer I've had to do porn (Hah! If they only knew what I REALLY looked like without all the props). It seems to be the lot of any transsexual who is half-way attractive to supposedly hetero men that the porn producers will come a-sniffing. But this is the most disturbing offer I've had. When I searched for Mr. Hardcore's web site, I discovered that it had been seized by the US Government. He has other sites with variant domains that all appear to be online, but rather than look at them, I decided to look on Wikipedia, instead. Here's the entry:

"Max Hardcore (born Paul F. Little on August 10, 1956 in Racine, Wisconsin, U.S.A.) is a former male porn star, producer and director whose films usually featured him engaging in a variety of sexual acts with women who dress like prepubescent girls or their enraged older sisters or mothers.^[1] He is currently in prison appealing against a 46 month prison sentence for multiple obscenity offenses.^[2] He has one son, Andy Beck."

Lovely.

I should note that, based on this abstract, it seems that Mr. Hardcore is some kind of child pornographer. The full entry says that he is not, just to be clear. I also looked at his Flickr page, which is festooned with sex acts of a kind that I have no interest in ever trying.

I was writing yesterday about being a sex positive feminist. I'm also a First Amendment absolutist. So I don't really care what Mr. Hardcore does so long as it's consensual inside the law, but I found this offer to be pernicious, too, and I imagine a lot of other transsexuals in my position would feel the same. $200,000 would pay a LOT of medical bills. Hell, I could transition completely, pay off my house, and have a nice little nest egg if the offer is real. Would I be willing to let someone piss on me for that? Would I let myself be fisted for that? What price do I put on my own degradation?

I need to take a shower.

The Face in the Mirror and other stray thoughts from a long weekend.

2009-10-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

I think I may have reached some kind of watershed moment in this whole gender transition thing. When I woke up on Friday morning, I couldn't see the boy in the mirror. I more or less saw this (bad hair and all):

This picture has none of the usual impedimenta. No make-up. No hairpiece. No dressing up. And it still reads "girl" to me. My reflection has started saying the same thing to me. This is new.

Yesterday, I had to run out to the store to get some Italian sausage for the pasta sauce I was making. I went more or less as I was, in jeans and a sweat shirt. I got "ma'ammed" by the checkout clerk. That's never happened to me before unless I've done something specific to accent my gender identity.

It's like, somehow, the timer has gone off and I'm more or less fully cooked. All of which makes me happy that I took my time, because I got the date more or less right. Two months off, but close enough. At this point, I don't think there's any going back, even if I wanted to (and I don't).

It's kind of unfamiliar just the same.

So, I've noticed that some of my fellow TG bloggers have enabled the "monetize" option on their blogs, and they're running ads. I don't blame them for this--transition is friggin expensive, after all, and every little bit helps, I suppose. Unfortunately, Google Analytics is spitting out some reprehensible shit when weighing the contents of trans-oriented blogs. The one that really frosts me is the one for something called "ladyboys.com", a site that promotes sex-tourism. This is all kinds of wrong. Sex tourism is a particularly malign form of oppression, one that contributes to human trafficking and exploits desperate people. I can't believe this shit gets advertised through Google. Now, I don't know if Google gives you the option to block certain kinds of ads--if I monetize my blog, it'll be with a tip jar and Amazon links, so I haven't looked into Google's service--but if they do, and if you're a TG blogger who has noticed this particular ad showing up on your page, please please please block this shit.

Speaking of exploitation, I found this verrrry interesting post from a young trans woman who is also a sex-positive activist, talking about her own encounter with sex work. The YouTube videos are worth watching. I think of myself as a sex-positive feminist, so this has a great deal of interest for me. I think the conclusions she draws are completely valid: shemale porn has as much relationship to the sex lives of transsexuals as lesbian porn has to the sex lives of lesbians, and both are horribly sexist. I like her idea of DIY porn by and for transsexuals rather than the commercial stuff that makes our lives so horrible, but it's a hard sell to denounce sexist exploitation in porn on one hand while suggesting that alternative models might have value. It's hard being a sexual radical sometimes.

I'm doing The October Horror Movie Challenge this month. I'm tracking my progress over at my movie blog. If you like movies, pay me a visit. I don't only talk about horror movies.

Speaking of horror shows, the Kansas City Chiefs play the New York Giants today. I'm almost glad I don't have cable anymore, else I'd spend the day averting my eyes.

Radio Daze

2009-09-30T10:29:00.001-07:00

Ordinarily, I try not to listen to the radio. Radio in my fair city, frankly, sucks. True, we have two public stations, and a couple of college stations, but I can only take so much of NPR news and classical music, and the college stations have always been uneven to the point of unlistenable. So I tend to program my own music, or, more often, listen to audiobooks. Not this week, though. My car is in the shop right now, so I'm car pooling with Felicia. Felicia likes her classic rock, and her car's radio is locked on the local classic rock station. It has been an education. I don't think I've listened to a classic rock station in (mumble, mumble) years, and I don't remember having the reaction I'm currently having.

For the most part, I'm appalled.

First, it's obvious to me that the standards and practices for advertisers have loosened quite a bit, because in the span of an hour and a half of listening, I've heard ads for Trojan condoms, a sex toy shop, and one of those penis enlargement schemes. All three were seriously slanted toward men, as if women have no interest in condoms and sex toys. But that's another discussion. The slant of these ads fits in quite nicely with the format, because it was two days before I heard a female artist on this station (for the record, it was Heart's "Barracuda"). Now, I've always known that a LOT of the music in the classic rock genre is ridiculously misogynist (really listen to the lyrics of Don Henley's "The End of the Innocence" for an example of the form's casual and troubling misogyny), but I hadn't realized that the radio format itself was such a sausage fest. I mean, ONE female act in a two day time period? Really?

Well, whatever. Radio, it seems, is yet another mass medium being abandoned to teenage boys. They can have it. But none for me, thanks.

Thoughts on an Admirer

2009-09-26T11:02:00.001-07:00

I posted a new video blog last night, the first in, like eight months. As usual, the sound sucks. For those of you reading this as a Facebook note this is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwrf0m9yQiU

For everyone else, enjoy:

All Politics is Local

2009-09-16T11:29:00.000-07:00

So, I open up my email this afternoon and there's a message from The Human Rights Campaign. Never you mind that I'm still on their mailing list. I'm not sure why I'm still there, myself--if Joe Solomonese was on fire, I wouldn't cross the street to piss on him--but be that as it may, this particular message was very well targeted:

Dear Chris,

The Board of Aldermen in Centralia is considering a proposed ordinance that would prohibit discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations based on sexual orientation or gender identity. This is important legislation that would help ensure people are judged on their merits.

Please make sure your voice is heard. It's crucial that the Board hears from constituents who support this ordinance — please also ask your family and friends to take action too. Contact your alderman or alderwoman and ask him or her to vote in favor of the proposed ordinance — just copy and paste the following message into an email to your alderman or alderwoman and be sure to include your street address at the end:

Dear Alderman/woman _________,
As your constituent and a supporter of the Human Rights Campaign, I am writing to ask that you vote in favor of the proposed non-discrimination ordinance that would prohibit discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
No one should face discrimination simply because of who they are. People ought to be judged on their merits, on whether they put in a hard day's work, whether they are qualified to rent a home, not on their personal lives, on something completely unrelated to their abilities.

This is more than just another issue, it's something that means a lot to me. I hope that the proposed ordinance will become law, and we will take an important step toward making sure that no one faces arbitrary discrimination.
Respectufully,
Your Name
Your Street Address

Click here to find your alderman or alderwoman's email address. If you don't know who your alderman or alderwoman is, you can use this site to determine your ward.

Be sure to put your street address at the end of your email and make the subject line clear. For example, put "Please prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity" because some aldermen or alderwomen are getting so many emails that they may not have time to read them all.

Warmly,

Joe Solmonese
President

Interesting. I wouldn't think that they would be following a little flyspeck like Centralia, but what the hell? I'm game. So I follow the link to find out who my alderman is. I'm in Centralia's third ward, and....well, damn, it's Jessica Orsini. Ms. Orsini is one of the few openly trans city council members in the country. I guess I don't get to try to change someone's mind after all.

Hah.

In truth, the shocking aspect of this is that there's a proposed ordinance. Centralia must be more liberal than I thought.

A Member of the Wedding

2009-09-13T04:42:00.000-07:00

My friend Brian came back to Columbia from New Orleans this week. Brian has been a long-time opponent of mine at tabletop wargaming, and like most of the people I used to play against, he wasn't someone I was inclined to "come out" to, but he's also been a long time friend. He would have found out eventually. He called me out of the blue on Monday and asked if I was up for a game. Sure, I said, and on Wednesday night, he dutifully kicked my ass all over the table. It was fun. Afterward, I let him know my big news, to which he replied, "About damn time."

I didn't know he knew, but that's okay. It made things easy.

Anyway, he shagged a ride from me back to where he was staying, during which he told me why he was here in the first place. He was getting married again. This kind of surprised me, given that, after his first marriage, he said many and varied disparaging things about the whole institution, but be that as it may. I congratulated him, and he invited me to the wedding. Let me restate that: he invited ME to the wedding. Not the facade I still show to the working world. I said, sure! And drove home.

A couple of days later, on Friday--the day before the wedding, in fact--he calls me up again and asks if I'm going to show up to the wedding. I said that I was planning to. So he asks me if I'd like to be IN the wedding. Sure, I said, mentally adjusting what I was planning to wear.

I've known Sara, the bride, since she was a teenager. She used to spend hours in my video store hiding out from the world when her dad would drop her in downtown Columbia. It hurts my brain to think that she's in her thirties now (or damned close to it). Nothing emphasizes the yawning gulf of time quite like kids growing up. My participation as a member of the wedding was apparently her idea. She's known my little secret for a long time, now, having met me at various clubs from time to time. When Brian relayed my impending permanent transition, her reaction was "About damn time."

Speaking with her after the (very non-traditional) ceremony, she said that she knew I would transition eventually the first time she ever saw me in drag. The giveaway, she said, was that I was smiling then, and that I was smiling every other time she saw me. Apparently, I never used to smile much. I usually have a big goofy smile on my face these days, so the change is bloody obvious. She thanked me profusely for not wearing an outfit that would show her up on her day, and then revealed her continuing plot to steal my green corset. She was beaming most of the evening.

Anyway, here's hoping that they have many happy years together.

*****

The other component of my weekend was a trip to visit my therapist. For the most part, this was uneventful, but I mentioned to her that my last outing with Anna was educational in so far as I was indulging in a fair bit of androgyny then and noticed that I felt far more exposed doing so than I ever have presenting myself in either a masculine role or in a high femme persona. She told me that this was actually pretty normal, and when I spoke about it with Renee, she said that she had experienced the same thing in the months and weeks leading up to her full-time transition. So it's not an experience that's unique to me.

I'm apparently at that stage where my friends ask me how, exactly, I'm still presenting male. It's getting to be difficult. I had an occasion to show my id to a cop on the way home, and it hammered home the need for me to change my identification soon, because the cop pointedly noted that I didn't look at ALL like the picture. And he's right. I don't.

Any Response is Better Than None, I Suppose

2009-09-09T09:52:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure when it happened, but I've kind of turned into a genderqueer radical. Maybe that's a bit over-dramatic, but I'm certainly a LOT more engaged with politics than I used to be. One of my co-workers pointed out that "politics is personal" and "the personal is politics" the other day, and I can't say he's wrong, particularly in my little corner of the social order.

Anyway, engagement with politics has led me to a kind of dialogue with my congressional representation, mainly lobbying on behalf of ENDA. I sent letters to all three of them a couple of weeks ago. One of them finally got back to me. Here's the email I just got back from Senator Claire McKaskill:

September 9, 2009
Dear Ms. Benedict,
Thank you for contacting me regarding the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). I appreciate hearing from you.
While federal law protects people from firing based on race, religion, national origin, gender and/or physical ability, no federal law exists to protect people from workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. As a result, our nation is a patchwork of laws - it depends on which state a worker is in to determine if he or she is protected from certain kinds of discrimination.
As you may know, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act has been introduced in Congress. This legislation creates no "special rights," it simply mandates that working men and women be judged solely on the basis of their job performances, not prejudice. I support this legislation and do so when it is brought to the Senate floor.
Again, thank you for sharing your concerns with me. Please feel free to contact me if I can be of any further assistance.
Sincerely,
Claire McCaskill
United States Senator

Okay, it's a form letter, or at least reads like one. But I DO like the idea that Senator McKaskill is listening to the likes of me. It gives me the illusion of having a voice. I haven't heard back from Rep. Blaine Leutkemeyer or Sen. Kit Bond, but I don't expect to, really.

Lessons from a Weekend at the Park

2009-08-24T08:01:00.000-07:00

We had absolutely glorious weather this weekend, so it would have been a shame to stay indoors. My trip to the park with Miss Daisy--one of my dogs--on Saturday was instructive. These are the lessons I learned.

1. Cute dogs are a powerful social lubricant. So many people came up to us and asked if my dog was friendly (she is very friendly; a slut dog of the first order) with the intent of petting her. The little old ladies at the hamburger joint just off the park were positively fawning over her. She hated every minute of it, too. You could tell by the stupid grin on her face and the way she rolled on her back.

2. If your gender appears to be ambiguous at first sight, boobs (or lack thereof) will tip the scales. I was called "sir" by someone who immediately corrected themselves when I turned around. "Sorry, ma'am." I knew there was a reason I grew them. Heh. As a side note, this person was asking about the dog to see if her toddler could pet her. See item one.

3. It's a small, small world. I was meeting my friend Anna at the park. Anna was in town from St. Louis to visit her dentist, and she had her friend, Natalie, in tow. As I was waiting for them to arrive, an acquaintance of mine showed up at the park, walked over, and struck up a conversation. It was obvious that I was waiting for someone, and he asked if I was waiting for "Natalie." I said Anna's friend was named Natalie, and lo and behold, that's who HE was waiting for, too. Go figure. This fades a bit into the next item...

4. You deserve what you tolerate. My acquaintance is not someone I particularly like. At all. In fact, I was kind of annoyed that he was there. I hope it didn't show much, but my ire bubbled to the surface every time he got the pronouns wrong, which was often. He never got them correct, actually. Eventually, I whipped him on the chest with the leather handle of my dog's leash and gave him the glare of doom. I hope it hurt, I do, because he was being an ass. He's good at that. In any event, I won't tolerate it, which is funny because I never used to think that sort of thing would bother me. It bothers me a lot, actually. Imagine my surprise.

Sunday at the park was a bit better. It was Felicia and I and both of our dogs, Digit and Daisy. This was the park down the street from our house, which has a big dog run at the back of it, where we let the dogs off-leash to run around like mad fools. After Digit got tired of chasing Daisy (Digit is seven years older than Daisy), Daisy decided that chasing butterflies was great fun. It's days like this that make life good.

This Bodes Well...

2009-08-19T09:56:00.000-07:00

In a continuing series of posts about transgender artists....

One of my favorite blogs is The Golden Age Comic Book Stories, which is a repository for cartooning and illustration (it's not all stories). A couple of days ago they posted a reprinting of Purple Pictography, a cartoon series by Vaughn Bode` and Bernie Wrightson. Although they originally ran in a men's magazine (so they're NOT safe for work), these are completely charming in an underground comix sort of way, and are particularly easy on the eyes, whether they were drawn by Wrightson or Bode` himself.

After I stumbled across this in my RSS feed, I took a look at the Wikipedia entry for Bode` only to discover that no mention is made of his fluid gender identity. He claimed the title of "transsexual" on occasion and was known to crossdress. Most photographs of Bode`, including the one I swiped from TGACBS at the head of this entry, show a striking androgyny, sometimes in the vein of the glam rockers of the early 70s.

Bode`'s work was of a very specific time and place. I wonder what he might have produced had he lived longer. I wonder if he would have responded to punk rock or the new romantics of the 1980s. Unfortunately, he died in 1975.

Celestial Navigation

2009-08-17T20:48:00.000-07:00

Another August, another Perseid meteor shower. I know that the peak of the shower was a couple of days ago, but I didn't really have anything to say about it until tonight. I've been a stargazer since I was little. I live for this kind of thing. When I was out walking the dog a couple of nights ago, I saw a scattering of meteors. It was awesome.

I usually walk my dogs at night. Felicia gets the pleasure in the morning. Most nights, I tend to look up as I walk them and trace the constellations I recognize in my mind. I'm amazed at how much I remember about the layout of the stars, most of which I learned in elementary school. I remember, for instance, that Scorpio and Orion are enemies and never share the sky (in actuality, they are on opposite sides of the sun on the plane of the ecliptic), and that Orion's dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor precede him into the sky in the late summer (the so-called dog days). I remember that you find the pole star by following the line of the two rightmost stars in the Big Dipper until you find the end of the tail of Ursa Minor. I was the beneficiary of good science teachers when I was a kid.

In any event, while I was out with the dogs tonight, I got to wondering about mankind's compulsive need to name everything. All of the visible stars have names, which seems to be a perverse kind of OCD on the part of our species. I mean, we don't name the grains of sand on a beach, after all. Of course, the stars have been held up as gods, or as aspects of God, by the civilizations of the past, and the positions of the stars--and thus, their names--are essential to navigating the watery parts of the world.

I'm pretty sure that my interest in astronomy and science in general was a contributing factor in my being an atheist. It used to infuriate me no end that I would get the answer "because that's the way God made it" whenever I asked adults why some element of the world was the way it is. There IS an answer to the question of why the sky is blue. I just never got it when I was a kid. Blaming things on God seemed like a dodge to me then and it seems like a dodge to me now. Unfortunately, it's a dodge that is taking firmer root in our society than when I was a kid. A couple of months ago, one of my co-workers asked me whether I found my worldview to be bleak or depressing. Quite the contrary. I enjoy my world view. We live in an elegant universe, and there are manifold beauties to be seen. I don't need a god to see them. I'm fond of telling people that I'm more or less a pure existentialist. I believe that the world around us is all there is--no heaven, no hell, no purgatory, just the world and the flesh--and that we make our own meanings out of it.

Dear Sarah Palin

2009-08-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

Madame ex-Governor, contrary to what you may have heard from the transmissions beaming down from Beta Centauri, liberals do not want to feed your baby to dingoes. Liberals do not want to turn grandma into Soylent Green. Liberals do not want to require everyone who gets preggers to get an abortion so they can use the fetal tissue to build an army of superliberals to take everyone's guns away. So cut it out.

Now, I know that in order to gain any traction with what remains of the Republican base, you may have to look crazier than Bobby "The Exorcist" Jindal in the race for the 2012 nomination, but enough is enough. Stop. Please. You are hurting America.

What's Next?

2009-08-03T16:39:00.000-07:00

It seems like it's all downhill from here. I've run most of the gauntlet and I'm more or less healthy and happy. I remember those initial trips out of the house like they were in another lifetime; I can't even connect to the terror I felt then. Now it's no big deal. Normal even. Hormones have given me most of the body that I want. I'm out at work now, and scheduled to leave my old self behind even there once this year is over. I'm still employed. I'm still respected by most of my co-workers. My family is accepting. I'm having some problems with my partner, but nothing like what many people go through. All told, I've been ridiculously lucky.

So what's next?

Transsexuals spend so much time and energy (and money) on transition that we seldom see much beyond it. For myself, I'm trying to expand my social circle with friends who are interested in things other than being trans (and all the bullshit that goes with it). For a long time, I've been worried about my ability to do this. I've had no problems so far.

And I have a LOT of other interests. It's high time I got over this awkward fact about myself and explored them. I have a novel to write. A screenplay to author. A film to make. Paintings to paint. Causes to champion. Torrid affairs with lovers who are bad for me. I want to see the world, and the world alone is not enough. I'm coming to all of this late in life because of this one stupid flaw in the way I came into the world, and I've wasted so much time. Well, screw you, flaw. I've taken your measure. You hold no more terrors for me.

Time to live.

The Deep Breath Before the Plunge

2009-07-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

So, I had "the meeting" this week. The one where I was asked when I was going full time, and where my co-workers who didn't already know I was a transsexual found out. Hoo-boy. For the most part, it went well. The development staff meetings are a good deal more informal than the all-staff meetings in my department, so there was a good deal of joking about it. Our administrative assistant looked at me funny and said: "You're kidding, right?" I said: "No." She said: "Oh please." My boss said "he's not kidding." (Note, since I still present male at work, I can live with "he" for the time being). The poor woman looked gobsmacked, but not in a bad way. She'll be fine.

This does, however, kick things up a notch. I need to make sure my wardrobe can accommodate living full time. I don't have a summer wardrobe, really, so I'll need one by next summer. Fall and winter will be fine. I've got lots.

I also need to make sure that I don't slack off on the electro. I need to make hay with that while the sun is shining. I hope my money holds out. And there are a thousand other things to do, too. I'll probably get rid of my remaining male clothes the weekend I make the jump. Kinda like the colonists burning their ships. It'll be a nice motivation.

Along Came Jones

2009-07-22T19:54:00.000-07:00

Sometime in the early 1980s, I was given a copy of The Studio, an art book devoted to four of the fantasy artist who came to prominence in the 1970s, both in illustration and comics. The four were Berni Wrightson, Barry Windsor Smith, Michael Kaluta, and Jeffrey Jones. Of the four, the one that blew away the teen-age me was Wrightson. He was a horror artist, after all, and I was in complete awe of the brush and ink work he had employed on his rendition of Frankenstein. I didn't know his influences at the time, but I've come to appreciate the illustration history behind his work. I see Gustav Dore` and Franklin Booth and Joseph Clement Coll all over these illustrations, and a lot of human misery, too. I've worked with brush and ink. It's unforgiving. This is just beautiful:

The one I had the least connection with was Jones, whose work was poetic and oblique in a way that I couldn't get into at the time. This is odd, actually, because a lot of Jones's more commercial work looks like very good Frazetta, and I loved Frazetta. Over time, my preferences have changed. I'm still in awe of Wrightson, but I connect more with Jones. Not only because I see the influences beyond Frazetta--Jones samples Waterhouse, Whistler, and Alma-Tadema in ways that don't seem derivative--but also because there's a certain otherness that I still can't put my finger on. I had more in common with Jones than I knew when I was a teen. Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, Jones had a breakdown and transitioned from "Jeffrey" to Catherine.

I wish Jones had left her web site up and running, because it was a fabulous repository of her work. Still, you can find it scattered across the web, from the weird and lascivious comics she did for men's magazines and undergrounds, to her frankly astonishing one-off paintings, of which my favorite is this one:

Jones is still alive and, so far as I know, still working. If I had the money, I'd love to commission something from her. Nothing too fancy. A drawing would do. For the nonce, I'll just admire her from a distance, and marvel at the astounding people in my community.

Ungendered*: Fassbinder's A Year of 13 Moons. A Dialogue

2009-07-20T16:09:00.000-07:00

So, I finally got a round to watching Fassbinder's A Year of 13 Moons. It was recommended to me on the IMDB's Classics Board earlier this spring after I was outed as a transsexual. Well, not recommended, per se, but I was asked what I thought of it. Here, many months later, is the conversation I've been having about it. The asterisk in the title of this post? To remind me to give apologies to Julia Serano.

My initial, knee-jerk reaction:

I'm still sorting out my reaction to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons (1978). It's been a while since I was more conflicted over a movie. On the one hand, the cineaste in me recognizes a keen cinematic intelligence behind the film. But another part of me, the transsexual who is completely fed up with the way transsexuals are depicted by cisgenderist media, is completely appalled by it. I mean, DEEPLY offended by it. She wants to take the cineaste part of my mind, tie her to a chair and make her watch Jess Franco movies A Clockwork Orange-style as penance for even suggesting that this is a worthwhile movie. Well, you can see my dilemma. I'm sure I'll have a LOT more to say about this when I actually sit down to write an in-depth analysis. I'm going to watch it again, first. But for now, I have this to say. First: while it's striking from both a cinematic and symbolic standpoint, this film's tour of a meat packing plant is probably what most pissed me off. The suggestion is that our heroine--if you can call her that, rather than "our object of pity"--is a piece of meat, not a human being, mutilated by her desires and ultimately disposable. That the film ends the way that it does reinforces this idea. Frankly, this sucks on so many levels that it has an event horizon. Second: I can see this film's influence on European cinema's depictions of transsexualism ever since (which is NOT a good thing). Three: when I was sorting through critical reactions to the film, I stumbled across Ed Gonzalez's review of the film for Slant. I rarely agree with Gonzalez under the best of times, but he's never written a review that actually offended me before: from his occasional tendency to put the words "she" and "her" in quotation marks, to his egregious use of the phrase "she-male" (which is more or less equivalent to the "N" word when you're talking about trans people), to his condescending sympathy with our object of pity, this is the work of someone who has bought in to the kinds false truths Fassbinder arrives at by setting up a false set of conditions under which to examine his characters.

A response to this assessment from "Rigor":

Isn't part of Fassbinder's point that the central character Elvira went to Casablanca to have the sex change operation because of the offhand comment made by a straight man (and a rather horrid one at that) that he had fallen in love with. This suggests that Elvira is not really transexual in terms of her own identity and therefore would not have been able to make the transition under acceptable psychological/medical care? Granted this scenario is pretty "out there" in terms of anyone's reality but I think it pretty clearly isn't attempting to be representative of transexual/transgendered or intersexed experiences. If this really has over determined the way cinema has represented transexual and other gender non-conforming people I am not sure that this is really the fault of the film as much as of the ignorance/prejudice of the viewers of the film.

It seems to me that the film is clearly supposed to be a highly stylized rendering of reality in the same way that Whity or Ali: Fear Eats the Soul are highly stylized renderings of their social contexts. Nobody really takes Ali: Fear Eats the Soul as realistically representing Moroccan Immigrants do they? And maybe this is the point that with nationality/race we can deal with the stylization and understand it as such but with gender non-conformity many viewers will buy into the stylization as reality (something you seem to suggest Gonzalez does in his review). You may be right but I am still reticent to blame Fassbinder for that. I probably need to see the film again before writing anymore about it. I look forward to reading more of your comments on the film.

A response to this assessment from "zolaar," who originally pointed me at the film:

Rigor is right, it's not a film about transsexuality per se, it is rather about a person losing/destroying his identity.

I don't know if you are familiar with the film's background on Fassbinder's part. Fassbinder's boyfriend, Armin Meier, committed suicide that year after a very difficult relationship between both and a letter where Fassbinder broke up with him. This death left the director deeply disturbed and in shock. 13 Moons was kind of a way to find back into life for him; it is his most personal and radical work (although it's not autobiographic; rather a document on the shock that was caused by the lover's suicide.) Fassbinder is director, author, producer in one person, responsible for cinematography, art direction and editing. He even speaks from the off as the "Seelenfrieda" and in one key sequence in the film we can see an authentic interview with Fassbinder on an overhead TV-screen with excerpts that have some sort of a confessional character.

What we see here his merely the "Passion" of Elvira/Erwin - her five last days in life. She's a deeply broken, shattered, depressed, hopeless person who is left alone with the pain. She's neither man nor woman, her transsexuality (or her sex change for the love to a straight man) has not found a new identity for her, but has destroyed the old one. The film is the process of Elvira's self breaking off completely where the suicidal act at the end remains to be only a physical act. On balance, I would say that 13 Moons is perhaps the saddest, most hopeless film I've seen all my life.

And I agree with Rigor a second time: You have to be familiar with Fassbinder's uncomfortable style and his real life (somehow) to really appreciate this film.

The suggestion is that our heroine--if you can call her that, rather than "our object of pity"--is a piece of meat, not a human being, mutilated by her desires and ultimately disposable.

With what is said above, Elvira is the projection of Fassbinder's boyfriend, her characterization being the attempt to come up with a reason/motivation that lead to his suicide. The hate rants towards Elvira (by her "lover", who has a way more significant role than it probably seems) are exaggerated as hell, but in retrospect, Fassbinder apparently had huge feelings of guilt and self doubts - in his relationship he was the dominating part as well and thought that his behaviour was the reason why his (ex-)partner committed suicide. So, it is rather a pay off with his own self.

My response to them both:

Let me preface this with a couple of things: I mentioned in my initial comments that the cineaste in me is very sympathetic to the film (and, yes, I am aware of the background behind the film's making--Fantoma's disc does an excellent job of putting it in context, as do most reviews of the film). When I note that there is a keen cinematic intelligence behind the film, there is a certain amount of admiration involved. Have you read George Orwell's essay, "The Benefit of Clergy," about Salvador Dali? My reaction to 13 Moons is one that Orwell might have recognized. For whatever reason, I'm not able to divorce my experience as a transsexual from my reaction to this movie. I'll try to articulate some of the context.

First of all, you're right. This isn't a film about transsexuality per se. Elvira is clearly not a transsexual. And this constitutes a huge part of my problem with the film, because in appropriating transsexual imagery and context for such a purpose, this film and others like it have a tendency to invisiblize the experience of transsexuals. This is not uncommon. Regarding this film, this mostly centers around the pernicious fantasy of the gay man who gets a sex change in pursuit of an indifferent or unavailable lover. This film is not the root of this fantasy. It had already surfaced in mainstream cinema as a minor part of Dog Day Afternoon. The same year as 13 Moons, the television sitcom, Soap, presented the exact same narrative in its first season (Billy Crystal's character intends a sex change for his gay lover, only to be rejected in the end; he attempts suicide at the end of the season). Hedwig and the Angry Inch, one of Fassbinder's inheritors, also uses it. These stories displace the narratives of actual transsexuals and replace them with constructs by people who have no idea of what transsexuality actually entails. I call this a pernicious fantasy because it is one that has had actual, real-world consequences, in so far as it has formed some of the pseudo-science that informs some corners of the theraputic instrumentality that treats--or rather deals with--transsexuals through reparative and conversion therapies, in spite of the fact that there is no shred of clinical evidence that they work. But I digress.

So this is not a film about transsexuality. Neither is Some Like it Hot, or Victor/Victoria, or Hedwig, or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or The Crying Game, or Psycho, or La Cage Aux Folles. Where, then, are the films that ARE about transgenderism? Where are the transsexuals qua transsexuals? Honestly, they don't really exist in the cinema.* The films that are most famous for it appropriate the trappings without actually telling the stories, privileging cisgender notions of transgenderism while squeezing out countervailing transgender narratives. This irritates me.

13 Moons shares with most of these films another trait that's even more offensive, though. Part and parcel of the "pathetic transsexual" archetype--which this film presents, regardless of what else it's actually about--is a mode of hyperfeminine presentation that casts transsexual identities as inherently artificial (and, for that matter, inherently sexualized). This is usually contrasted with an actor or actress who is NOT particularly feminine, which exaggerates that perceived artifice. This is EXACTLY what this film is doing. One need look no farther than the outfit this puts Volker Spengler into for Elvira's tour of the meat packing plant to know that this is true. This kind of depiction completely negates any notion that transsexual identities are authentic. 13 Moons compounds this with the notion that Elvira got a quickie quack sex change in Casablanca, which feeds yet another derogation of transsexual identities as artificial constructs of mad science and quack medicine (if you want a particularly destructive explication of this idea, I would refer you to The Transsexual Empire by Janice Raymond, which is notorious among genderqueer theorists for sheer hatefulness). Even if 13 Moons ISN'T about transsexuality as such, it presents these images as representative of transsexuality as the filmmakers themselves understand it. Which is to say, they don't understand it at all, and don't understand how destructive their misapprehensions are.

I think I articulate my opinion of the narrative arc of Elvira's story in my initial posting, but I'll expand on it by noting that, as a transsexual, I have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered. Had I remained a white male, with all the bullshit privilege that entails, my chance of being a murder victim would be 1 in 18,000. I have a similar chance of committing suicide. This kind of Sword of Damocles makes me a bit oversensitive to depictions of transsexual lives as disposable, because in the culture at large, it's very easy to adopt that viewpoint as an instrument of violence and self-hatred.

*Of course, this is an exaggeration for effect, but it's not much of one. Even though Boys Don't Cry is about a real transsexual, even that film will inculcate in some members of the audience an attitude of "she" should have known better and "she" got what she deserved. Another example: TransAmerica indulges in the hyperfeminine fallacy, all the while filming Felicity Huffman with a series of short lenses that tend to project her facial contours into high relief and otherwise depicting her identity as inherently artificial. I know a lot of transsexuals and I've never met anyone like Bree. One of my friends called this depiction "the trans version of blackface."

Rigor responds:

Points well taken. I understand your aversion to these kinds of representations.

In terms of mainstream examples of trans/gender queer experience you are correct that most are unsatisfactory. My problems with BOYS DON'T CRY actually relate to the way the film eliminates one of the real life victims (an African-American heterosexual disabled man) from the narrative entirely. In someways this is done to create a more "purely victimized' Brandon. It has extreme political ramifications on the film in terms of race and class. It suggests that Brandon has virtually no community and certainly no male community that can accept him for who he is. It also doesn't allow the audience the opportunity to make connections between white supremacy, heterosexism, patriarchy, and class exploitation.

A good example of gender queer cinema might be BY HOOK OR BY CROOK (2001). I think it is a mistake to think that advances in the representations of trans/gender non-comforming people will be created by gender conforming/commercial artists. They will have to be pushed forward by Trans/intersexed and other gender non-conforming artists making their own work.

A last word from zolaar:

I certainly do know where you're coming from, and I kind of understand your anger (as far as I can dig into), and there's really not much to argue, but...

13 Moons shares with most of these films another trait that's even more offensive, though. Part and parcel of the "pathetic transsexual" archetype--which this film presents, regardless of what else it's actually about--is a mode of hyperfeminine presentation that casts transsexual identities as inherently artificial (and, for that matter, inherently sexualized). This is usually contrasted with an actor or actress who is NOT particularly feminine, which exaggerates that perceived artifice. This is EXACTLY what this film is doing. One need look no farther than the outfit this puts Volker Spengler into for Elvira's tour of the meat packing plant to know that this is true. This kind of depiction completely negates any notion that transsexual identities are authentic. 13 Moons compounds this with the notion that Elvira got a quickie quack sex change in Casablanca, which feeds yet another derogation of transsexual identities as artificial constructs of mad science and quack medicine.

We're still talking (also) about Fassbinder here. He's the ultimate cinematic exaggerator and the master of cool abstractions. His films are all and without exceptions highly artificial. And they are all meant to be like that. What we see on the surface of his films are just medial techniques.

As Rigor pointed out, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul uses the immigration problem as only a backdrop in depicting an unusual love in a world of bourgeois intolerance, as does Katzelmacher. The immigrants in both films, being the "subjects of pity", too, are abstracted as rather dim-witted, rootless sex machines from another planet with a huge virility. In Fassbinder's theatre production "The City, the Trash and the Death", the play was even accused of being anti-Semitic and put down in consequence. But why does Fassbinder so blatantly play with these clichés? And why do people rub him the wrong way all the time? Maybe because he takes exactly the standpoint of the majority of the people (in Germany); he quasi looks through their eyes and speaks with their tongues. And believe me, that is exactly the way we Germans see the world, it's either black or white, although nobody would ever admit it. Fassbinder debunks this falseness in holding a mirror up to us, grabbing our nose and sticking it right into the dirt that we excreted.

And that's what Fassbinder does with 13 Moons, too. He depicts Elvira exactly how most of the people perhaps see a transsexual: depressed, broken, pitiful, without identity. That this is far away from the truth inside knows the director, but doesn't matter for his medium. He brings all the artistic freedom of avantgarde theatre to the screen. And he scrapes on the surface, the hotbed of intolerance and prejudices, without any judging. Fassbinder, because of his own sexuality and lifestyle, did know the milieu very well. He had many transvestite and transsexual friends, especially in Frankfurt, where the story takes place and where there is a huge community... and where the rate of committed crimes against homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals was higher than in any other German metropole (it should be surpassed by Berlin by now, I'm not sure). With everything you said about the false conception of transgenderism, I'm completely sure that he was aware of that. Fassbinder was radical in every way, as an artist and as the private man.

Other than that, I can see easily why you are offended by the way 13 Moons transports the image of transsexuality. But if you could put the film in context to Fassbinder's art, it might be easier to understand his intentions.

Where, then, are the films that ARE about transgenderism?

What about Beautiful Boxer? Or Potter's Orlando? Or Derek Jarman? Apart from those there is not much. But what should one expect from mainstream cinema? Underground on the other hand...

My response to zolaar:

We're still talking (also) about Fassbinder here. He's the ultimate cinematic exaggerator and the master of cool abstractions. His films are all and without exceptions highly artificial. And they are all meant to be like that. What we see on the surface of his films are just medial techniques.

The trouble with this line of argument is that Fassbinder's depiction isn't an aberration. It's the norm. He doesn't skew his depiction any more broadly than, say, the transsexual characters in any given Almodovar film, and his depiction is on the tame side when compared to transgendered farces (the first ten minutes of, say, Too Wong Foo, for instance, or The Birdcage).

But if you could put the film in context to Fassbinder's art, it might be easier to understand his intentions.

Oh, I understand what he's up to. I just object to the means he uses to pursue his intentions.

What about Beautiful Boxer? Or Potter's Orlando? Or Derek Jarman? Apart from those there is not much. But what should one expect from mainstream cinema? Underground on the other hand...

Beautiful Boxer isn't bad. Orlando isn't about transsexuality, nor do I think its title character is a transsexual. It's interesting as all get-out, but it also avoids most of the pitfalls I'm talking about here. I don't have an appetite for Jarman, so I'll leave that without comment. I think it's interesting that both you and Rigor arrived at the conclusion that no good representation is going to come from the mainstream. Rigor goes further--and I agree with him--when he suggests that transsexuals and transgenderists need to speak for themselves. New media has made that possible, and it IS happening, thankfully. Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda is no longer the only example of a trans person wielding the cinema's bully pulpit on their own behalf.

And that's where it stands right now.

Fourth of July

2009-07-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

So, last year, my partner and I decided to have a shindig at our house. We bought a ton of food, I fired up the grill, and nobody showed up. We have some sucky local friends. This year, I wanted to have a quiet fourth. No party. Just grilling for ourselves, and then a walk down to the park for the fireworks. I don't even have to park for this; it's right down the street.

Unbeknownst to me, my partner decided that we were having a party this year, and suddenly, I'm cooking for ten people. I can't say that I'm happy about this, but I'll get over it. I hope they show, because we have a LOT of food. I don't know if I have room in the fridge for the leftovers if we get last year's turnout, but I think I can get creative. I'm cooking pulled pork this year. I've never made pulled pork. I'm trying it two ways, one with a crock pot, the other with the oven. I don't have a smoker, unfortunately, but I've been tempted to build one a la Alton Brown's homemade smoker on Good Eats. The process of making both of these is a two day affair. Right now, in the home stretch, the house smells divine. I'm also making "atomic baked beans," which are actually chili without the chili peppers. Kind of baked beans on steroids, with a serious kick. I'm mainly making this for me, because nothing else I'm making will have a zing to it. Felicia doesn't like hot food. I love hot food. Compromises have to be made.

I'm probably going to be tasked with picking a movie, too. I wanted to watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly last year, but the folks who DID show up don't like Westerns. Their loss. I'm thinking The Dirty Dozen this year, or maybe I'll just go back to last year's plan. TGTB&TU is one of those Westerns for people who don't like Westerns, after all.

In honor of the date, here's a couple of blips for you.

A quick shout out to a couple of my friends who are going through some trouble in their lives. Let me know if you need anything from me. I'm always here for you.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

2009-06-25T17:54:00.001-07:00

We interrupt our usual angsty transgender shit for this bulletin...

The inimitable Man...or Astroman?

Oh, and for what it's worth, I'm taking a short break from blogging after last week's Japanese film blogathon on my movie blog.

On the Downhill Side

2009-06-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

After a long period period of feeling amazingly good about things, I've been kinda down this week. Actually a lot down. It's the summer. It's hot. I hate hot weather. There are other things, too, but not that I'm willing to discuss in public. For the most part, I've been feeling very awkward in my own body. I'm well past due for making the change in how I face the world, and I'm getting more and more anxious as days go by.

Time is my enemy.

Keeping Up With the Joneses

2009-06-12T17:42:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting lunch with my boss on Tuesday. She, my co-worker B, and I were pretty much keen to get the hell out of the office, so we went to a local microbrewery for lunch. They both had vanilla bean ale, while I had a super yummy bacon cheeseburger. And we spent the hour bitching about some of our co-workers.

Like most everyone else, our office is feeling the economic pinch, and some of the conversation revolved around who would be on the chopping block if things head south. Our entire IT department is vulnerable, it seems. One guy in particular hasn't endeared him to our management. We'll call him D. I'm not going to regale you with D's misdeeds. It's beside the point. D has several character flaws that make him just a JOY to work with, but for my purposes, this is the one that's relevant: he measures himself against other people by their possessions. If you let on that you're going to buy a spiffy TV, he'll buy a spiffier TV before you. Or, rather, one he deems to be spiffier, because, frankly, he doesn't know what he's looking at half the time. He's a dilettante. He's the kind of guy who picks up a copy of The Killer and thinks he knows something about Chinese movies. A lot of people are like this, and for the most part, they're harmless. I don't think this is true of D. D is a single parent by choice. He has two foster kids that he's trying to adopt (I presume). Why? I'm not really sure, but my boss suspects that he's doing it to one-up her and her husband, who have had two children in the last three years. Which, of course, is a completely psychotic reason. She and B speculated as to why he wasn't trying to have kids the old-fashioned way, but I don't want to go there. Anyway, that's all preface.

At this point in the conversation, I wonder aloud: "I wonder if he'll want to get a vagina when I get mine."

B: "Oh, if he does, he'll want a better one than yours."

Me: "Hah! Maybe he'll do some research and go for the multi-orgasmic model from Thailand that he can get for cheap."

My boss: "--" She was trying to keep from spewing vanilla bean ale through her nose.

After that, after hearing the various misdeeds of our IT department, I thought, "Okay. What I'm planning this year seems completely insignificant in comparison." And a second after I thought it, I said it aloud.

So, I guess my boss knows now. I think it's WAAAAAY down her list of worries.

Human Resources

2009-06-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

I always cringe at the words "Human Resources." Is there a more dehumanizing phrase in the English language? Every time I hear it, I think that I'm a pristine mountainside about to be strip-mined. Ugh.

Unfortunately, we all have to deal with the HR department eventually, and today, I did exactly that. I walked in and asked to speak to someone about my impending on-the-job transition. I should probably back up for a minute here.

One of the many things that resulted from my vacation last month was the setting of a date for me to transition totally, everywhere. December 7 is the the date I picked. Far enough off to be an abstraction at the time, but now within the next six months. I think I'll be at a point with the physical stuff by then that I can step into the role without a hiccup. It also has some symbolic value to me.

Obviously, the pitfalls ahead are something I haven't reckoned on, so I have no idea what they'll be, and I'm pretty sure that they'll be work-related. So today, I let my employer know what I'm planning.

I went to the office and told the woman at the reception desk what I wanted to talk about and she steered me to a woman under whose aegis I fall. I told her when I'm planning to make the change, what my issues are, and I asked about their policies concerning what I'm planning.

It turns out, there ARE no policies.

Hrm.

Well, okay. So we discussed the current non-discrimination language in the employment policies, as well as their human rights statement, and we both kind of agreed that "sexual orientation" sorta covered me, but not really. Some of the language in the human rights statement seems like it goes even further:

"It is the expectation of the University that all employees and potential employees will be treated on the basis of their contribution or potential contribution without regard to personal characteristics not related to competence, demonstrated ability, performance, or the advancement of the legitimate interests of the University."

That's fairly encouraging.

And then I asked the bathroom question. The woman I was talking to offered an eminently sensible solution: "When you're presenting male, use the men's room; when you're presenting female, use the women's room." She's young. She doesn't have some of the ingrained prejudices some people have. My response was "I hope it's that easy." I know that it won't be. There isn't a unisex bathroom in the building where I work, and I'm sure that I'm going to make SOMEONE uncomfortable. We shall see.

In any event, I told her that I would forward the employment guidelines recommended by HRC to her (bitch all you want about them--I do too--but their employment guidelines are actually really useful). She recommended some on-campus resources. And I left it there. I still need to tell my immediate supervisors, and she assured me that it would be me, not them, who would initiate that when I'm ready.

All told, a baby step forward. Here's hoping it goes as smoothly in the future.

I'm Not Old Enough for This, Dammit!

2009-06-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

So, one of the students in our office wasn't even born when I graduated from college.

Sheesh, time flies.

I went over to the house of some friends of ours who we haven't seen in a while. I was greeted, as expected, by their very friendly chocolate lab, but she wasn't walking so good and she wasn't nearly as full of piss and vinegar as I remembered. It dawned on me that it has been almost ten years since we sat in their living room watching the election returns in 2000.

Sheesh, time flies.

Maybe this is why the first fifteen minutes of Up had such an effect on me. But you can read about that on my movie blog. Life? It's what happens while you're busy making other plans.

Vacation Reveries

2009-05-21T17:20:00.001-07:00

All things considered, I think my vacation went better than it had any right to go. Let me explain. Last Tuesday, two days before I was scheduled to hit the road and travel to Michigan, I started to come down with a cold. In past years, I used to shrug off colds in a couple of days, but this bastard hung on. I still have the remnants of the cold and I still wake up sounding like a lunger trying to heave up the last pieces of her useful lung tissue. Not fun. And for the first day or two of the vacation, this colored my experience. I felt like crap. I looked like crap. I had no confidence in my presentation to the world. Couple this with the awkwardness of getting to know my friend, Renee, as something more than a pattern of phosphor dots on a screen or a voice on the phone, all the while living in her home, and you have a situation that could have been terrible. Braining myself on the soap dish of her shower and shattering it in the process on the second day certainly didn't help things, either, and I feel awful about the prospect of her losing her deposit if her landlords are dicks when she eventually moves out.

But all of that was really for naught.

I was NOT going to have a sucky vacation. I wasn't. And Renee was a big part of the reason why. It's always hard to get a feel for a person over the internet, even people who talk and correspond with each other as often as the two of us. People edit their behavior on the net and you don't get the body language and the subtle changes in facial expressions. You don't FEEL them. Not really. Renee went to great pains in the weeks leading up to my visit to somehow deride herself so that she wouldn't be a disappointment of some sort when I met her in the flesh. She often describes herself as Godzilla. She thinks she is gigantic. And, well, she IS tall. She's a foot taller than I am. She had to bend over to hug me when I arrived and for a moment, I felt like I was being hugged by my mother when I was seven years old and only 4 feet tall. She welcomed us to "the Land of the Giants," because her furnishings are scaled to her and bid fair to swallow us up. In the pictures we took, we have a kind of mismatched Mutt and Jeff or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser look to us. But, really, Felicia and I are small people to start with, so whatever she believes of herself shouldn't be measured against my petite frame. Beth, Renee's roommate/soon-to-be-ex-wife is tall, too. You'd think she'd get the hint from living with someone who's in the same range. As I always say, we all have our crosses to bear, but she did herself a disservice. She's a lovely woman, and she has put herself back into society in a way that I admire to pieces. It's a testament to how much we liked each other that, after living together in fairly small space for a week, she wasn't ready for us to leave and I wasn't ready to go. I say "liked," but that's totally insufficient, because I've loved Renee as the sister I never had for a while now, and this trip only served to cement that.

Anyway, our original plan was to lounge around and watch movies and cook and talk for five days. We had a gathering of her friends for a gaming party to go to on Friday and Saturday, but beyond that, I had no ambitions to do anything else. The gaming party was great fun. It was interesting being introduced to Renee's friends and acquaintances with no preface as to my status. I was treated very nicely, and no one I met got the pronouns wrong (about which I will have more to say somewhere below). These are people who have no frame of reference, no image of the "before" me, only the after. It's a valuable lesson. Watching movies was great fun, too, though I'll refrain from discussing this because I'll be writing about all of it on my movie blog sometime this weekend or next.

The only kink in this plan is the fact that I wasn't alone. This was Felicia's vacation, too, and even though I told her that this wasn't going to be a sight-seeing vacation for me, she had her expectations and I'm sure that the prospect of sitting around with both of us while we watched horror movies and talked about transgender shit was not appealing. This was exacerbated by the fact that SHE was sick, too, and not in the same way I was. She was vomiting sick. Bad. Fortunately, that cleared up for her in time to do some of the things that she wanted to do. One of those things was a visit to the Detroit Zoo, which had a pretty cool dinosaur exhibit that inspires a horror-movie kind of mind like mine to imagine a true conflation of Westworld and Jurassic Park in which the dinosaurs are killer robots run amok. Felicia also wanted to do some shopping and we went into Ann Arbor for a visit to a pretty swanky used book store. I could have dropped a LOT of money there.

If I Ran the Zoo:

The zoo provided us with what turned out to be our only real photo op and we made the most of it. Renee suggested that she needed a picture of her zebra print jacket with a real zebra in the frame:

And, of course, the dinosaurs were irresistible:

You can see the difference in our sizes in that picture.

This one was the most fun:

There are a lot of other things about our trip to the zoo that I could write about, from the kids that snickered at us (I don't mind being clocked, but don't be an asshole) to the penguin porn, but I'll leave that for another time.

Pronoun Trouble:

In spite of the fact that I've been telling people that pronoun usage isn't important to me, or that it "wouldn't bother me much," it turns out that that isn't really true. As I mentioned above, none of Renee's friends got it wrong. The person who consistently got it wrong was Felicia. I feel a little bad for her in this regard, because she's trying her best and she has ten years of me being someone else to contend with. But it still irks me. I like to think that it wouldn't irk me as much as it does if something else hadn't happened to me prior to leaving on vacation.

Some of you may remember the video I made with my friend, Kevin Lee, and that that video was shown in Berlin last month. Kevin posted the introductions he made while he was in Berlin on his web site. He filmed them and posted them to YouTube. While he is very complimentary to me (for which I'm thankful; thanks Kevin), he consistently genders me male:

Coming on the heels of this, getting gendered wrong by the person I live with began to grate on me. Renee had her own issue with this, but I'll leave that for her to explain.

"How long have you been an activist?"

Felicia asked me this on the way home. This kind of blindsided me for two reasons. First, it points out to me that even though we live together (and have for seven years), there are a lot of things about me that Felicia doesn't know. I'm not exactly surprised by this--we really don't spend as much time together as we would like--but it's a shock none the less. Second, I'm not entirely sure I am an activist, though I've given money to the usual suspects and there's an argument to be made that the act of being an openly transsexual woman--a publicly transsexual woman, no less--is an activist act. Visibility IS activism in some ways. This question arose because Felicia was questioning me on some of the things that Renee and I discussed during the week (the use of the word "cisgender," for instance, a word which she had never heard). Inevitably, my interest in politics intersects with my queer identity, and I suppose there's an activist element to many of my beliefs. Perhaps I should act on them more often than I actually do.

Book Club:

The capstone to the trip was a stop in the Chicago area to meet my friend Shelly, who I know from the IMDB horror boards. She's only the second contributor to the IMDB that I've met in person, and I wish I could have spent more time with her and maybe watched a movie or two. Instead, we had lunch at an awesome Dixie Kitchen in Lansing, IL. I had jumbalaya. Shelly is a contributor to an eighties nostalgia blog, and one of the first things she told me when she arrived was that she had given me a shout out for ideas on her latest post. If you like horror movies, check it out, because she approaches the subject with the rigor of an academic and the enthusiasm and love of a fan.

Oddly enough, we didn't discuss horror movies all that much.

We talked about my transition, we talked about politics, we talked about books. She and I are reading Moby-Dick together this summer as a kind of book club (others are welcome to join, but right now it's just us). She's a huge fan of Melville and so am I. We also found one of those lacunae in my knowledge of culture. I have a big blind spot for the important black women writers. I've read one book by Zora Neale Hurston and I hated Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I do love Toni Morrison, although I had to work at it. I suspect that once we finish with Moby-Dick, we may move on to Their Eyes Were Watching God. This is probably a good thing, because one of Felicia's areas of academia is African American lit, so this can be a bonding experience for us, too. And I hate not being able to talk knowledgeably on, well, anything, but that's my egomania for you.

The visit was fabulous, but it was all too short. Soon enough we were back on the road, Shelly back to Michigan (we had to go to Chicago to meet; go figure) and us back to Missouri.

So, all told, it went better than it should have.

Addendum:

I mention the word "cisgender" above. It's not a word I particularly like, even though I understand, and even approve of the motivations for its coinage. The reason I don't like it is because I think it sounds awful. It's a clumsy word to say when measured purely in the realm of rhythm, cadence, and pronounceability. And even if it fixes itself in the transgender lexicon (and all those glossaries that inevitably wind up at the beginning or end of books on transgenderism), if the rest of the world doesn't understand it--which it doesn't--it's all for naught. Why do I mention this? Because Blogger's spellchecker kicks it out. That says something to me.

Namaste.

King of the Road

2009-05-13T20:11:00.000-07:00

Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let...fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain't got no cigarettes
Ah, but..two hours of pushin' broom
Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I'm a man of means by no means
King of the road.

--Roger Miller, "King of the Road"

I'm off on vacation tomorrow. I'm traveling up to Michigan to visit my friend, Renee Knipe. I've never met Renee face to face, and I'm very excited about it. I'm all packed. Felicia is downstairs packing her stuff. We'll head out tomorrow just after eight, just after we drop the dogs at the vet to be boarded while we're gone. I doubt I'll be posting anything on the internet before I get home next Wednesday, but you never know. Renee has an internet connection, after all, and I'm sure we'll be taking pictures. We'll be driving through Chicago, where a nest of my online correspondents live. I wish I could stop there. There are awesome things to do in Chicago. Some other time, I guess. At the very least, I'll stop there to have lunch on the way back with my friend, Shelly, who I met through the IMDB. I've never met her face to face, either. This is going to be an interesting trip.

Still more art stuff...

2009-05-08T10:21:00.001-07:00

Well, here's the finished version of the drawing I did a couple of days ago. He came out more or less how I saw him in my head, which is ALWAYS satisfying. This is pretty much pure vector. It may look like I've indulged in some Photoshop-y effects, but believe me, I haven't. This was a gas to draw.

Enjoy.

Sketching Over Lunch (Again)

2009-05-06T09:50:00.001-07:00

I drew this guy to get an idea of what I want a character for my secret project to look like. He more or less looks like what was in my head, which is a victory. This is an unusually tight sketch for me (I'm notoriously sloppy when I use physical media). I'll ink and color this in Illustrator, probably tonight.

Negative Space

2009-05-06T08:02:00.000-07:00

I've done a fair amount of cartooning, so I'm always interested to see the nuts and bolts of how other people approach the art of making comics. Now, I've never worked on a production line, which is the way that the major comic book companies like to make their books, so there are a lot of things that they do that are flat-out alien to my process. I was thinking about this when I stumbled across a page of DC's new Metal Men strip for their Wednesday Comics book, set to debut in a couple of months. This page is by the very, very good Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, who I've admired for some time (you can click to make it bigger):

This page is really elegant, old-school superhero stuff. Clean and unfussy. But one of the things that just floors me is the fact that Garcia-Lopez doesn't include the word balloons in his layout. Mind you, I know why he doesn't, but that doesn't change the fact that not designing around the word balloons and captions is completely alien to the way I do things. When I lay out a comics page, word balloons are often the first thing I draw so I can integrate them into the design of the page and the flow of the narrative. This is fairly common among people that are creating comic as a kind of one-person band, but it also has some benefits. My favorite letterer in comics is Dave Sim, who also wrote and drew every issue of Cerebus the Aardvark. Here's a panel that's characteristic of some of his wilder lettering fancies:

This sort of thing is, to say the least, verrrrry difficult if you design and draw your pages without the balloons and captions. Sim makes the words integral to the image. This idea really comes from Will Eisner, who used to put a ton of verbal information into elements of the page design, like in this splash page for a Spirit story:

In any event, going back to the Garcia-Lopez page: this way of doing things forces the artist to guess where the balloons and captions are, and it requires an act of faith that the letterer is going to do a good job of adapting his work to the design provided by the artist. I've seen some good comics pages go horribly wrong at this stage, but it's usually invisible. Still, I can't help but think that it's limiting.

Not that I think anyone reading this gives two hoots about any of this, but I think it's interesting.

Cheers.

Some random musings for the start of May

2009-05-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

It took a while, but I finally got a message from someone asking me what the meaning of my blog's title is. "Scheherezade's Sister" is taken, obviously, from the 1,001 Nights. Scheherezade was the clever storyteller who forestalled her death and the death of her sister by telling her husband, the Sultan a story every night, ending before the end so that the Sultan would have to spare her to hear how it came out. She did this under the pretext of telling a story to her younger sister, Dunyazad (which is a user name I occasionally use, in addition to "Dr. Morbius"). I'm a sucker for the Arabian Nights, and Scheherezade is one of my very favorite fictional characters. I mean, sure, she's a framework for gathering together hundreds of stories, but her own story outshines almost all of the tales she told. In any event, when I first got a home computer, I named it Scheherezade and when I got on the internet, I realized that I was in the position of Dunyazad. It was telling me stories. The super jumbo computer I use at work these days is NOT named Scheherezade. It's named Colossus, after the computer that takes over the world in the movie, Colossus: The Forbin Project.

While I'm at it, "Dr. Morbius" comes from Forbidden Planet. He's the Prospero character who conjures monsters from the id, which is the name of my movie website (which I've been neglecting). My sister blog, Krell Laboratories, predates this blog, and since it was linked in with my original web site, you can see where the name comes from. Anyway...

I've also had a couple of conversations about why I don't seem to write about TG issues much. Well, I write more than I thought I would, but the simple fact of the matter is that there's no drama for me in this. Oh, sure, I could catalogue the physical stuff, but to what end? For the most part, my transition has been as smooth as you could imagine, so I don't know that my experience is terribly useful to anyone. I mean, I read a lot of TG blogs, and their experience is drastically different from mine. As a result, I'll probably continue blogging about art and movies and politics and just about anything else but angsty tranny shit. 'Cause I'm just not feelin' it.

I'm greatly looking forward to going to visit Renee Knipe next week. I've known her for four years now and she's one of my very best friends, but we still haven't met face to face. That's social networking for you, I guess. We're going into business together, so hopefully I'll be able to write this trip off on my taxes next year. We need to make some money first, I suppose. Felicia is wondering what there is to do in Detroit, because she's not terribly down with our plan of cooking, watching movies, playing games with some of Renee's friends, and so on. We'll probably visit a museum or two, and maybe the zoo. But I don't have any set itinerary right now. I'm just looking forward to meeting Renee. At some point in time, I'd love to stage a huge week-long party for all of my scattered friends on the net, but my house isn't really big enough for it. I'm sure the dogs would have a gas. If this business venture goes off and I suddenly find myself wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, I'll have to take up the idea for real. For now it's just a pipe dream.

Ah, well.

Imp of the Perverse

2009-04-25T12:23:00.001-07:00

I've actually been productive this week for the secret project. This came out better than I hoped. Once again, this is a vector, created in Adobe Illustrator. The pose is vaguely inspired by Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare." All those art history classes come in handy sometimes. Heh.

Pirate Queenie

2009-04-24T22:32:00.001-07:00

I like this one. Just a quick sketch I did at lunch today. Since I was at work, I had the scanner handy, so voila! Valara the Pirate Queen. I'll probably do more with this drawing down the line. Enjoy.

More art

2009-04-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of pieces for my not so secret project. The first is a gargoyle.

The second is a clay golem. I added the Hebrew word for life--"emet"--to his forehead. You deactivate a golem by obliterating the first letter, turning it into "met," which means death. This is what's known as in-depth research. Heh.

As usual, these are vectors created with Adobe Illustrator.

Enjoy.

Out, Out, Brief Candle

2009-04-16T12:53:00.001-07:00

I have a new profile picture, and it's one that bears some explanation.

I've been following the Allen Ray Andrade trial this week--mostly through Autumn Sandeen's reportage from the courthouse in Greely, Colorado over on Pam's House Blend. This is better known in transgender circles as the Angie Zapata trial. Andrade stands accused of murdering Angie Zapata with a fire extinguisher after discovering that she was a transsexual. I won't recount the details here, except to note that this was a crime of extreme brutality, and when I first read about it last year, it sent me into a crying fit. I don't DO crying fits, but this crime opened the floodgates.

I never knew or met Angie Zapata, but I know a number of people who have been targeted by violence. I'm extremely thankful that I've never been targeted myself, but as I move farther and farther into my preferred gender, I know that it is a possibility. It makes me rather rethink some of my previous positions on the necessity for statutory hate crime penalties.

I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of hate crimes. To my mind, it really makes no difference whether someone bludgeons you to death because you're gay or black or because the perp wants to steal your money. The crime is equally brutal. By classifying it as a "hate crime," you're criminalizing thought. The action is the same. This bothers the hell out of me. The Angie Zapata murder gives me pause. This is a case where the perp actually had to go find a fire extinguisher to use as a weapon. The defense is sure to claim that this is a crime of passion, that Allan Ray Andrade was suffering from "transsexual panic." Such defenses have been successful in the past in other jurisdictions. I find this outrageous. So I've been re-thinking what should and should not be done about so-called "hate crimes," and I've come to the conclusion that any crime so classified should default to premeditation. No lesser Murder 2 or manslaughter convictions allowed. Murder One all the way. Does this penalize thought? Maybe, but the legal system already makes a distinction between pre-meditated crimes and those that are committed in the heat of the moment. It already looks at motives. A hate crime law should simply clarify this. It should classify hate and prejudice as premeditation. I can live with this. In fact, I like this idea a lot.

In any event, the candle.

There's a cause over on Facebook urging users to light a candle for Angie Zapata. I never used to participate in these kinds of demonstrations before, but the farther across the gender divide I go, the more I realize that silence may, in fact, equal death.

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
--William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Fun with GLBT Politics

2009-04-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

You may or may not have seen that hysterically clueless ad from the National Organization for Marriage last week (as well as some of the parodies and smackdowns). Well, they're at it again. I'll let the always awesome Rachel Maddow explain.

I used to work in a very conservative industry in the sales and marketing department. At some point, one of the higher-ups decided to rename our weekly meeting the "S&M" meeting. When I suggested to her that she might want to choose a different name, she looked at me like I had antlers growing out of my head. One of the reasons the right is losing the so-called culture war is because they don't even know what it is that they're inveighing against. In any event, I wore a t-shirt to my first "S&M" meeting that read "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Nobody got the joke. Oy.

On a more ominous note, Amazon has started to drop the sales ranking from so-called "adult" books, including just about all GLBT-themed books. Jennifer Boylan has a more in-depth commentary on her blog. There's an Amazon Associate widget over on my sidebar. I do a lot of business with Amazon, both as a customer and as a link whore. But if they're going to persist in this policy, I'll be terminating all of it. I suggest anyone reading this do the same. Why haven't I taken down the widget? Well, there's a good chance that they'll come around and it's a pain in the ass setting things up. If things persist as is past the next week or so, I'll take it down.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a happy Zombie Jesus Day.

Getting a Life

2009-04-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

Renee posted the gist of an IM conversation she had with me last night, in which she lamented that when she was dining with a new friend, it seems that all she had to talk about was trans-ness and transition. It is my great horror that I'll fall into that trap myself. So here's what's going on with me outside of all that.

I'm currently in the middle of Dan Simmons's Drood, which is a fanciful account of the last years of Charles Dickens as viewed by his friend, the laudanum-addicted Wilkie Collins. This is taking me longer than I expected to read--Simmons usually provides books that fairly speed by--in part because Simmons has written this in the style of Wilkie Collins (Collins is most famous for The Woman in White and The Moonstone, two seminal mystery novels). It's not a "fast-reading" kind of idiom, and this is added to the density of details about the living hell that was London in the mid-19th Century. This last part reminds me a little bit of Melville's Redburn, but that's another conversation. In any event, I'm enjoying the book immensely, just as I enjoyed Simmons's last book, The Terror. But, like that book, it's a slow burn. After this, I'm slated to re-read Moby Dick with Shelly, my online friend from the IMDB Horror Board. I started the audio-book about a month ago, then suspended that when she reminded me that I had agreed to read it at the same time. She teaches the book, so she probably has interesting things to say that have escaped me in my reading-for-pleasure trips through it. I'm looking forward to it.

I also started my garden a couple of weeks ago. I usually get a seed starter--and given the variability of the weather this year, I'm just as pleased as punch that I follow that practice--and everything I planted seems to have germinated. I'm growing two types of basil again this year (I love me my pesto), rosemary, and cilantro. I can't believe how fast cilantro grows. And I thought basil was fast. Wow. I'm probably going to do some variety of cherry tomato later, as well as garden salsa peppers. Maybe cukes, too, but I didn't get good results with them last year, so maybe not.

I'll refrain from discussing my movie habit, which is the other thing I talk about ad nauseum. I have an entire blog devoted to that, so I'll just direct all interested parties there.

Finally, I'm enjoying the hell out of blip.fm. It has greatly expanded my musical horizons in two short weeks. I'm finding stuff I didn't even know existed. Here's a good example: a cover of Richard and Linda Thompson by later-day punks Sleater-Kinney:

Anyway, I'm taking a vacation next month and then the summer sees me doing some home projects that I've been putting off. I'm sure my life will be plenty full.

Simpsonized

2009-04-02T04:22:00.000-07:00

So, I got home from my electro appointment on Tuesday and Felicia tells me that I look like a Simpsons character. Unfortunately, it's true. With my upper lip all swelled up, I look like a member of Matt Groening's family of slack-jawed troglodytes. This is the first electro I've had in months, and it's really the first substantial work I've done on my upper lip. It wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected. Maybe I'm just getting used to it. In any event, I'm glad to be getting back to the process. It makes me feel like I'm taking baby steps forward again.

I think I've seen everything...

2009-03-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

I mean, can there be something beyond The Silence of the Lambs performed as a musical and animated with Legos? I think not:

A link for subscribers to this page that strip out the video (I'm looking at you, Facebook).

Note: NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!

...and Then We Take Berlin

2009-03-13T10:06:00.001-07:00

In spite of my relative silence and my protestations of being down in the mouth, some interesting things are happening to me right now.

Some of you may remember that video essay I narrated on The World According to Garp a couple of months ago. Today, I got an email from my collaborator, Kevin Lee, informing me that the video, along with several others that he's made with various film people, will be screening at the Filmmuseum in Berlin. Here's the email:

Dear Kristin, Jonathan, Girish, Nicole and Christianne,

I'm happy to share the exciting news that the video essays that I produced with each of you have all been selected for an ongoing series of "Films About Films" at the Arsenal Theater in FilmMuseum Berlin. The monthly series also includes works and talks with folks such as Harun Farocki, Alexander Horwath, Alain Bergala, Tag Gallagher and Jean Douchet. The program that features our work is focused on video criticism and internet culture. It takes place April 17. You can view the program here: http://blogs.indiewire.com/kohn/archives/kevin_lee_and_matt_seitz_to_screen_films_in_germany/

I'm incredibly pleased with the recognition of this work and your specific contributions to it. I hope we'll have the opportunity to collaborate on others. Thanks again for taking a valuable role in this work as it continues to evolve.

Kevin

I am, to say the least, gobsmacked. "Jonathan" is critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Kristin" is film historian Kristin Thompson. In film circles, this is fairly rarefied company. Frankly, I'm shocked that they chose to screen my film from amongst all of the video essays Kevin has made. I mean, it's purely an accident that I did it at all. But be that as it may, something I made is going to be showing in an actual theater and examined by a discriminating audience. This is both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Anyone who is as deeply immersed in film as I am dreams of this sort of thing, and now, for me, it's real.

More than that, it's real beyond the confines of both the internet and the transgender communities. This last is worth some comment. I've privately expressed the opinion that in order for transgender people to take the next step into full participation in society, we need to stop letting other people tell our stories. We need to tell them ourselves. This is the great boon of the internet--it gives us a forum to do exactly that. Unfortunately, the nature of the internet is that it creates tribal bubbles. What use is it if we tell our stories to an audience of the converted? Not much. So stepping out of that bubble is important. I'm glad I'm getting the opportunity. It also has me itching to make more clips like this one, but about movies more generally, not necessarily about transgender issues.

This has another more personal impact for me. This puts me out into the world as an "out" transsexual in a far wider set of circumstances than I ever imagined. Mind you, anyone who knows what to look for can find this blog. It's not a secret. This is a little bit different, though. This is the genie getting out of the bottle. If I ever had any hope of living my life in stealth, this pretty much snuffs it out. That's fine. I don't mind. I never wanted that to start with, and if I DID want it, I never would have agreed to do the video in the first place.

I'm actually very excited about all of this.

---------------

One other thing that's been happening to me lately is a side effect of joining Facebook. I've always kept a fairly rigid divide between my "Chris" persona and my "Christianne" persona online. "Chris" is the movie fan. "Christianne" is the transsexual. Most of my friends offline mainly know "Chris" (I'm out as trans, but they almost never see it yet). I haven't created a Facebook account for "Chris," as a result, the divide between the two personae is dissolving. This was going to happen eventually, but having it happen now has been unexpected. It's ahead of schedule. I wonder how many other big changes in my life will be similarly ahead of schedule.

Bleh.

2009-03-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

Nothing new is going on in my life. I'm still kinda down. I'll get over it. The new puppy is wearing me out. In lieu of actual content, here's another piece of art for the not so secret project. As usual, this is a vector, created in Adobe Illustrator.

Cheers.

A Dog's Life

2009-03-05T10:02:00.000-08:00

We have a new dog. This is Daisy:

Daisy is a six month-old yellow labrador. She's purebred, which is something I've never had before. She's also the second dog in the household. Our black lab, Digit, is still with us and is as puppy-like as ever. Adding the second dog to the mix has exaggerated that. Digit outweights Daisy by 50 pounds and, right now, is using that advantage to assert her dominance. Daisy is taking it with good humor. It's all play to her. She has big feet, so I'm sure she'll grow into them and she'll be able to stand up to Digit eventually. She's still a baby, after all.

I've never owned two dogs at once before. For that matter, we've had Digit for seven years now, so it's an adjustment getting to know a dog that doesn't have Digit's habits. Fortunately, Daisy is like Digit in one important way: she's very sweet. Unlike Digit, she's very shy, too, and when we walk her, she tends to stay so close to our legs that she sometimes almost trips us. But she'll come around, I think.

Digit, for her part, is having a grand old time.

On the other hand, Miss Oreo, the cat, is NOT amused. Not at all.

Favorite Albums

2009-02-26T13:37:00.000-08:00

Ronnie did a similar post, and I'm not shy about swiping ideas from others. Here are some of my own favorite record albums, in no particular order.

London Calling by The Clash
Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan
To Bring You My Love by PJ Harvey
The Harder They Come (Original motion picture soundtrack) by Jimmy Cliff
Los Angeles by X
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight by Richard and Linda Thompson
Horses by The Patti Smith Group
Marquee Moon by Television
Radio City by Big Star
Let it Bleed by The Rolling Stones
One Nation Under a Groove by Funkadelic
More Songs About Buildings and Food by The Talking Heads
My Aim is True by Elvis Costello and the Attractions
Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen
White Blood Cells by The White Stripes
Van Lear Rose by Lorretta Lynn
Live at Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash
Countdown to Ecstasy by Steely Dan
Rock 'n' Roll by The Mekons
There's A Riot Goin' On by Sly and the Family Stone
Astral Weeks by Van Morrison
Blue by Joni Mitchell
The King of the Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale
Ray of Light by Madonna
Star Time by James Brown
Parallel Lines by Blondie
Superfly: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield
and lots more that I'm probably forgetting.

I should probably mention that the "shuffle" feature on iTunes has pretty much annihilated the album as my default listening unit. This is compounded by the sheer number of singles on compilations that I've collected over the years. A more accurate picture might be provided by a look at the first 25 songs on any given shuffle playlist. Today, it looks like this:

"Touch the Hem of His Garment" by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers
"Four or Five Times" by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
"Star-Crossed Lovers" by Duke Ellington
"Mister Grieves" by The Pixies
"Mountain Oysters" by Eddie Davis with the Bill Doggett Trio
"Call Me" by Aretha Franklin
"Rub Til It Bleeds" by PJ Harvey
"Call My Name" by Them
"Big Iron" by Marty Robbins
"Vietnamese Baby" by The New York Dolls
"That Lucky Old Sun" by Ray Charles
"Heroes" by David Bowie
"Sailor" by Rod Stewart
"Brother Rap/Ain't it Funky Now" by James Brown
"Waking Up" by Elastica
"Second Hand News" by Fleetwood Mac
"Washed My Hands in Muddy Water" by Charlie Rich
"All the Good is Gone" by Jerry Lee Lewis
"Complete Control" by The Clash
"The Midnight Special" by Creedence Clearwater Revival
"Bring the Noise" by Public Enemy
"Christine's Tune (Devil in Disguise)" by The Flying Burrito Brothers
"Hoochie Coochie Man" by Muddy Waters
"Hey Jude" by The Beatles
"California Sun" by The Ramones

What can you deduce from all of this? Not much, I would think.

In Which I Post About Nothing In Particular

2009-02-23T07:59:00.000-08:00

My life is pretty boring right now. Nothing big is happening to me and I'm not actually doing anything specific. It's got me in kind of a funk. I finally got around to adding some new content to my neglected movie review site this weekend. I don't know how many people reading this even care about my insane passion for movies, and of those who do, even fewer probably share my passion for horror movies. According to Google Analytics, I get practically no traffic from here. Still, I rage in the vacuum. I write for myself, to frame my thoughts for my own edification, so if I don't have an audience it's still a worthwhile endeavor. Same with this blog. I'll probably vanish from the online community this weekend. The True/False film festival runs this week, and I'll probably gorge myself again, assuming I can get tickets to the movies I want to see. Still and all, the festival turns downtown Columbia into, well, a festival in the truest sense of the word, so it'll still be worth attending. Our town is mighty proud of its festival. It drew 18,000 people last year.

I'm still in the doldrums with my transition, too. I'm kind of stuck, though I had a conversation with Lori D last night in which she pointed out that I don't have any of the kind of barriers that people usually have in their way: family, work, friends. That's all hunky dory. With me, it's my own sense of physical presentation. I still have too much beard. I still have too little hair on top of my head. Until this is otherwise, I'm hesitant to take the leap, in spite of the fact that recent photographs are testament that I CAN pull the whole thing off, if I have a mind. I imagine that this is what I'll look like day to day (though, probably in better focus):

I mean, there's a perfectly attractive woman staring at me out of this photograph. And this isn't a picture I cobbled together in my living room from a flattering angle, designed to minimize my bad points. This is a picture taken on the fly at a Thai restaurant.

I need to get out of my own way. But that's true of everyone, I think.

Everything is Amazing

2009-02-17T12:56:00.001-08:00

I've been listening to Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel in the car on my way to work this week. This book was originally published in 1953 and in the intervening years, its predictive value has gradually diminished. Dr. Asimov, like most science fiction writers, tended towards conservatism when it came to imagining the future, and the future--1,000 years from now--presented in this book is positively quaint. We already live in a future far stranger than anything the grand old masters of science fiction ever imagined. It's not an accident that William Gibson transitioned from writing about a cyberpunk future into writing about a cyberpunk present with no detectible change in idiom.

If you want an idea of just exactly how far out the present has become, a good place to start is ted.com. This site archives talks by a hugely diverse selection of people talking about where we stand in the world. "TED" stands for "technology, education, and design," and while it surely does cover those subjects, I think they're more like a snapshot of the human race on the cusp of an even stranger future just around the corner. In any event, the TED talks are my current internet crack of choice. They appeal to the intersection of design geek and science geek that makes me tick. Here are a couple of my favorite TED talks.

Here's Jennifer 8 Lee talking about Chinese food:

Here's Blaise Aguera y Arcas talking about the absolutely astonishing Photosynth project:

And here's David Carson talking about grunge design:

And here's George Dyson talking about the Orion starship project:

Like I say. Crack. These talks cover just about every field of human endeavor, and watching them, I have to say that we're a pretty awesome species.

Friends

2009-02-13T12:20:00.000-08:00

Every so often, one of my correspondents will suggest that no one ever made a lasting friendship online. I don't believe this.

I got a call yesterday from Renee. When I picked up the phone, she said: "Thank god you answered." She had been worried that I hadn't phoned her back after she left messages on my phone both of the previous two days. She was apparently worried that something had happened to me, when, in reality, I had been otherwise occupied the previous two nights. I talk to Renee on the phone every couple of days. She's closer to me than my nearest relatives, like she's the sister I never had. I share everything with her. This is, in fact, a kind of friendship I never had as a male with another male. I suspect it's a kind of friendship that only women form, and that only amongst themselves. Best friends forever. BFF. And I believe that, too.

I've never met Renee face to face.

How, exactly, did I form this friendship? I'm not exactly sure. We both share some of the same interests. We were both at more or less the same point in our respective transitions when we met (she is far ahead of me now), and comparing notes about the process involves fairly intimate details. These surely helped. But I think it's mostly the willingness to take a leap of faith. I gave her my phone number fairly early, and placing a voice with the phosphor dot images helped a lot. I have several other very good friends scattered across the internets who have my number, too, and I love talking to each and every one of them. And if they were someday to need a hand, I'd send them a ticket and take them in. I hope that they would do the same for me. Because they're my friends. Really real friends. Even if I've never actually taken their hands in mine or shared the same space (I'll meet them all eventually, I hope). The internet is the ultimate annihilator of distances, both geographically, and between people.

As a side note, I love the folks that I HAVE met, too, though I wonder sometimes about the fabulous Ronnie Rho, who I've met in person in four different cities. At what point does friendship become "stalking," I wonder...

Let the Right One In

2009-02-10T09:31:00.000-08:00

Ordinarily, I would post this over on my movie blog (you haven't visited? Why ever not?), but this may be of some interest to my TG friends. I went to see Let the Right One In last night. This is a Swedish horror movie about the dawning friendship between a lonely, bullied little boy and the little girl who moves in next to him. The girl happens to be a vampire. If this sounds a bit like Twilight, disabuse yourself of that notion: Let the Right One In is the polar opposite of that film. This is a movie that draws from a deep well of loneliness. It's not afraid of violence. And it's not afraid of an ambiguous sexual undercurrent. It's not afraid to explore what it is to come of age. Visually, it's a bleak and austere movie, composed in the main of long takes and snowy drabness. It's a film where you can feel the chill of winter radiate from the screen.

I didn't know going in that there was a transgender subtext to the movie. When Oskar (the boy) asks Eli (the girl vampire) to be his girlfriend, she tells him that "I'm not a girl." You can take this literally, if you like--that she's not a girl, but a vampire--but the movie clouds the issue considerably by showing a scarred wound where a penis would have been, NOT a vagina, in one fleeting shot towards the end of the movie. In the book on which the movie is based, Eli is apparently male. So add this to the canon of transgender movies. It's subtle, but it's definitely there.

Is the movie good? Oh, yes. It's VERY good. If you enjoy movies like Pan's Labyrinth or The Devil's Backbone, add this one to your Netflix queue (it hits DVD next month). Here's the trailer, should you have an interest:

In any event, consider this highly recommended.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

2009-02-09T08:27:00.000-08:00

I was visiting a friend in Quincy, Illinois this weekend who decided to take me on a tour of the town's haunted spots. One such was this awesome graveyard overlooking the Mississippi River:

Nestled back among the gravestones were several ornate mausoleums. Being a latent goth girl some of the time, I couldn't resist taking pictures, this one being my favorite:

I also like this one:

Very Hammer Horror, I think.

Two things strike me about this: One, I wish I had known about this locale. I wasn't planning on a photo shoot, and this place SCREAMS for me to be wearing a black corset and Victorian gown. Next time. Two: my boobs have gotten bigger than I thought. That's all me.

For the most part, this weekend was a bit of a relief. Getting out and about as Christi helped soothe the bout of intense dysphoria I've been experiencing this month. I'm getting impatient, but I don't know how to speed up my transition process. The money isn't there, and the physical stuff can only happen so fast in the first place. In any event, it's making me cranky, despite the fact that I can look at myself in the mirror and I KNOW that the changes have been profound. I have a ghastly picture of myself taken shortly before I started HRT (and I'm NOT willing to show this to you, by the way) that stands in stark contrast to what I look like now, even when presenting male. It doesn't even look like the same person. Which is good, actually, because it's NOT the same person. Not really.

On a lighter note, here's something I never thought to hear uttered in my home: "Honey, the ShamWow works as advertised."

That's right. We have a ShamWow. We have a Magic Bullet, too, which doesn't quite work as well as advertised, though it does some things tolerably well. We didn't spend any money on these. I sometimes think our house is a graveyard for lame gifts.

Red of Fang and Claw

2009-02-04T11:47:00.001-08:00

Our cat, Oreo, is confined to the laundry room right now. She's not happy, but she appears to have yet another UTI, based on her penchant for pissing on my furniture. So she doesn't get the run of the house right now. Normally, Felicia helps hold the cat while we give her the antibiotics, or, rather, I hold her and Felicia does the honors. We got pills this time because the pink amoxicillin makes an ungodly mess and gets all in her fur, and we have a pill gun to shove it into the back of her throat. Felicia left this morning before helping me give the cat her pill. So I did it my self. This is like juggling chainsaws. Fortunately, she did not disembowl me, though not for want of trying.

Ah, pets. It's a good thing that she's often cute, because every so often she auditions for a sack to be thrown into the river.

In other news, here's another piece for "the not so secret project." This guy is the equivalent of Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings movies. A vector, as usual, drawn with Adobe Illustrator:

Odds and Ends

2009-01-27T11:05:00.001-08:00

Some random thoughts from my currently-boring life:

There's an abandoned Dairy Queen sitting on the north end of the town where I live. Every time I drive by it, I envision a huge pig sitting on the roof with an equally huge neon sign that says "B's Back-country Barbecue." Oh, for the capital to start it. I can see it now. Pulled pork from the pit every day, whole chickens smoked for the dinner menu, a wall of hot sauces, my own freshly-made BBQ sauce (with NO friggin high fructose corn syrup) in both KC and Southern styles, french fries made with olive oil (have you ever had french fries made with olive oil? My god, you haven't lived if you haven't), cole slaw made fresh. Damn you, poverty!

Ah, well. It's a nice dream, anyway.

The senior senator from my fair state, the Honorable Christopher "Kit" Bond is retiring after his current term, leaving an open senate seat in 2010. I can't say I'm sorry to see him go. He's pretty much the most worthless politician I've ever had represent me. Don't let the door hit you on the ass as you leave, and I DON'T want to see you in downtown Columbia on football weekends again hitting on 19 year old co-eds. Some decorum for your retirement, please!

The likely GOP candidates for his seat are Jim Talent and Sarah Steelman, who are both an improvement. Steelman is a pretty tough politician, and though in most respects, Talent is just as worthless as Bond (who he cites as a mentor), he at least has the basic courtesy to answer his mail. In the first part of his first stint in the Senate, he did this both respectfully (given that he was talking to a raving liberal) and personally. I respect that. I still won't vote for him, but I appreciate it. All I've ever received from my other senator, Claire McKaskill, is a form letter. Ditto my former House Representative, Kenny Hulshof (I have yet to write to his successor, Blaine Leutkemeyer--I somehow doubt he'll be receptive to me). Bond's office has never bothered to write me back. So fuck him. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Among other candidates: Roy Blunt has a lot of power in the House right now, so I don't see him trying for the Senate (and his son, our former governor, had a Bush-like approval rating when he left). Hulshof doesn't have the statewide exposure, in spite of his failed bid for the governor's mansion. We shall see. Should be fun to watch.

The democratic nominee for this seat looks like it will be Robin Carnahan. She's a clear front-runner, known statewide, and possessed of a famous name (she's the daughter of former governor Mel Carnahan, who defeated John Ashcroft for the Senate in spite of being dead at the time; I'm going to love it when I'm old and gray when I can tell young whippersnappers that I actually voted for a dead man). There might be other statewide dems in the mix, but I don't think any of them will give her much of a primary run. I should probably think about looking for her web site, to see if she's taking on volunteers yet. I would love to turn that seat blue.

So, basically, you have a divided GOP on one side, and a relatively unified Democratic party on the other side. Has this ever happened in my lifetime? If it has, I don't remember it. I still hear echoes of Will Rogers in my head, who said: "I'm not a member of an organized political party, I'm a Democrat."

So the Pope, hot on the heels of pissing off every gay and lesbian person in the world last month when he said that being gay separates you from God, has welcomed the Society of Pius X back into the fold of mainstream Catholicism. These are the guys who deny the Holocaust and don't accept the Vatican II tenet that absolves Judaism of the "blood curse" for deicide. Add this to the multitude of reasons I'm not a Catholic anymore. I wonder how my mom would have reacted. She was as Catholic as they come, but she had a low tolerance for bullshit. I really wish Cardinal Ratzo had picked another name for himself, and not one that I share with him. "Innocent" perhaps. Most of the Pope Innocents were corrupt as hell. A fine name for a regressive troglodyte.

Sigh.

I got my renewal form for my fertility storage this week. I have to sign a consent annually and pay them $50. I'm wondering if it's worth it. Realistically, I can't ever see my partner consenting to undergo artificial insemination, given her pathological fear of doctors, and I don't ever see myself being able to afford a surrogate. Still, I told myself I'd store it until I was 45. If I haven't used it by then, I'll donate it to a nice lesbian couple who wants kids.

Here's something amazing I found on YouTube:

Thanks to Lori D.

Take care, everyone.

Ask Dr. Morbius Part 3: The Final Chapter

2009-01-25T05:15:00.000-08:00

Here's the last of these videos. I'm going to take a long break from talking about trans-ness on video after this. In the meantime, enjoy, and feel free to make comments either here or on YouTube.