Two pictures

Having come to the conclusion that I can't post meaningfully on sisterhood without making certain things about my process clear, two pictures, fairly new ones that I try and put over.
So imagine a place where all the inhabitants speak either french or german together with an inbetween slang dialect. The germans are mostly tall, blonde, blue eyed, and wear lederhosen ; the french smaller, dark-haired and wear strings of garlic over striped tops.
You're german, but a bit atypical. You've spent more than usual time talking with the french, and your slang forms reflect that.
Then one day you wake up and everything's changed. You understand french, and your german starts to fade. In ways you don't clearly understand, french makes sense. And germans...those pointless drills, those martial endeavors, that ridiculous allergy to wearing garlic...how could you ever have been locked up in all that germanness ?
And you wait for it to go away, and it doesn't.
And you know you have to be german still in some ways, so maybe you need a dual passport or something...but then you understand that you WERE german and german stuff just doesn't work anymore.
You read about born germans who could never really speak the language, but tried in various ways to speak french, thereby changing their nationality. And you read the stuff about how such germans go against the will of Wotan, and are nothing but secret garlic lovers. And you read how language is just a constructed social interface and that the roots of language, which are now part of everything you do and see, aren't really there. And you change inside, because german throats can't pronounce french. And you change outside, and try to change yourself more, because you know you can't live in a world where everyone speaks the wrong language to you.
And you start to learn to speak french, because whilst you understand it as your native tongue, speaking the forms still have to be learned. And the spirit of french gradually grows in you, altering you in ways that only a french child knows.
You know you'll always be a bit tall and blonde, but the clothes can maybe alter. And though its hard for germans to understand, really its the french and their recognition and support that are important.
And though a new passport will be useful, to go with the clothes, they're really not that important. It's the language and the way that changes you through use that's the thing, not 'identity' as in a passport, but to speak the world as it now is in the shapes that now have meaning for you.

Then there's a picture which goes somewhat further into the ground of gender. Try to imagine, as seems indeed to be the case, and is a striking perceptual change as far as I'm concerned, that women have a significantly finer discrimination as regards colour, compared to a male vision where the differentiations of shape are more foregrounded.
Confront these extremes with a jigsaw puzzle and the proto-woman might adopt strategies for initially sorting pieces by colour grouping, whilst the imaginary male might sort by lines. As time and puzzles presented, both learn the others strategies and in the end it may not be too easy for the outside observer to tell which way either is biased.What price gender then ? But for the participants and their journeys, it's totally different for each. The finished players may even have identical strategies in the end, but the foundations and building are anything but identical. There is not anything like the shared commonality that the finished articles suggest. And the lessons learned along the way, they too are separate and distinct.
My condition, and I believe the condition of most transexuals, relates to those basal layers, the heart and ground of gender rather than gender in the world.

I don't know how far these are representative purely of my own experience or not. I put them forward as that, and potentially as reasonable descriptions of processes and distinctions that might be common in certain ways to other trans people. Feedback on this specific aspect would be deeply appreciated.

Bits and bobs and slack and shame and sistren

So according to statcounter I'm getting 4-600 a month at the moment. When I see repeats I tend to think that such people are sort of serious about gender, or else that they know me. So just to hope that those in difficult countries for questioning / trans people are finding that you can extract something of value here, and all good wishes.
Apart from that, there's this nerdy collection thing, like I've got 4 balkan states, Capetown, and a general scattering outside old Europe and N.America which are all solid. And Ho Chi Minh city and Ulan Bator ; yay Charlotte, you rock, keep on checking in while you travel.

I need to organize the blog somewhat, so I'm just down to definitely ruling out converting to wordpress before excuses run out for doing so.

Am somewhat more mobile personally and hope for better in the next month or so. I don't have to use crutches whilst cooking the friday meal and overall my health doesn't seem too impaired, no visible changes at least, though pain relief is problematic. I'm not looking forward to summer that much - skin deficiencies and limits on liquid intake.

I am thinking about a wedding dress, and how many charity/thrift places I'll need to haunt. I've got the rough notion to get something that's also performance gear, after some spray paint. A veil or mask, but I'm not sure about flowers in my hair.

Before the wedding , a wake. It'll make a good farewell to a male persona, and also it's about now when I should be dead, if my initial readings had persisted.
And maybe I should now apologise to the person at the trans group in London who I met when I was still fairly confused about gender identity. When they sympathized with me about what a difficult thing it must be for me, I rather unthinkingly responded by saying that no, being told you've got 3 years to live is hard and this was simply gravy. It definitely isn't gravy, but that comparison still helps me through.

Shame. Someone asked me ( in a positive context ), whether I felt any shame about being trans. I said not, but on reflection that wasn't quite right. Maybe it's a bit like the feeling you'd get when telling an unfriendly co-owner of a car that despite the fact that in some ways you've been an unconventional driver, this particular accident had absolutely nothing to do with you. It would be true, but maybe still somewhat embarrassing.

Sisterhood. Again, someone asked about how I find it, how accepting, how open, how different. So that's what I'll post on next.

And lastly, DO NOT VIEW THIS if extreme violence, especially in a form of state/victim nature gets to you. It's no longer on You Tube - really view with care...

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

It's politics...again

This is an attempt to amalgamate the last 2 posts, due to lack of originality and not yet being ready to do a piece on fashion semiotics, amongst other things.
So my politics in the 60's and 70's were not entirely untypical of the epoch. Low level volunteer stuff for anti war projects,hanging around anarchist groups, getting thrown out of school for passing out stuff on racist exam marking,( the joys of an english public school education). But when the UK counter culture essentially split into straight left politics and the weird consciousness/ community crowd, I definitely went with the latter. For many years I've tried to put some money and energy into alternative community frameworks and ventures on the margins of conventionality.
So its somewhat strange to feel myself back in a sort of life where identity is a political statement, and what I am is so much a pawn in other's games.
When it comes to something like TOTWK, I really feel that I must have slept for most of the intervening period too. It is just so hard to understand much of the campaign against the film.
I truly don't either understand or particularly sympathise with debates on whether or not the word tranny is pejorative and I don't feel that attempts to get the film withdrawn from the festival, or finding educative moments for panel discussions are particularly worthwhile.
Because it's simply a piece about drag queens with 'trannies' as a fig leaf for it's lack of originality, an exploitative piece of sleaze which Tribeca should be deeply ashamed of promoting. The Mercado / Zapata references were just utterly disgusting, and the only piece of moderate decency shown by the director has been to let it's semi-literate 'star' spectacularly fail to excuse it, rather than burden the world with his own more culpable attempts at justification. I know that by most accounts it's a bad, trivial movie, but that simply compounds Tribeca's idiocy in selecting it. I know it's non-deliberate hate speech, and maybe one should applaud the fact that no halfway socio-politically aware student film maker would make the many evident mistakes that this self opinionated clown has done. And I know that there are a number of far more serious topics for activist energy.
But...it could have been a good point to organize around. It could have been a time to make the point as forcefully as possible that we're not all freaks*, or victims, or people who generally live up to the bigoted stereotypes retailed by such as Greer, Bindel or Luna.
It wasn't.
And because such moments come along rarely, maybe we should be questioning why the comparative failure. Overwhelmingly I see these as proceeding from a lack of a reasonably unified approach with clear objectives, of too much distraction in trying to get some amorphous T agreement on issues and, frankly, of too much holding back because the director is well known in gay / drag circles. It hasn't come from the zeal, intelligence and industry of trans activists, which has been exemplary, but there is an issue of planning. Just as Luna had a year to consider, after being called on his use of 'trannies' in the projected title, so there could have been a year of working out options for how to deal with the movie. (I'm leaving out GLAAD from consideration, because that's a whole other issue than getting our own activist shit together).
I understand that my approach to activism is somewhat antique, and maybe there's a rose-tinted 'back in the day ' thing , but I do fantasize about other possible actions like, for example, the seat slitting thing that happened with ' Cruising', or the more normal emptying of appropriately red liquid. Especially as it would be only too easy to draw support from de Niro's own statements about sacrosanctity of expression, ( my art is rage, to recoin a phrase). And instead of arguing the toss about whether anyone would promote a film titled 'ni**ers with knives', a small blackface demo handing out watermelon slices and stuff asking how would afro-americans feel about being portrayed in a comedy / revenge /lynching film by a white director using all the old racial stereotypes AT A TIME WHEN LYNCHINGS WERE STILL COMMONPLACE. You don't need to be a weatherman to know about the killings of the last weeks.
Now I realise that these sort of play power street theatre things don't work as well with a minority such as the trans community. But are reasonably sympathetic media voices so hard to find that these sorts of tactics are unworkable ?
Then there's something which I really do think needs discussion for the future, namely what price would we, the trans community, see as acceptable for distributing this community slandering rubbish. Getting any substantial modification in the film itself, or expecting a principled stand by Tribeca when they can garner cheap publicity around a controversy, were always non-starters, and getting some sort of panel discussion seems totally inadequate. And frankly if the real murder references hadn't been withdrawn,( after being an effective stalking horse ?),then no price at all would have been worth it.
I simply don't know the kind of things available. I've always loved the video at the end of this post, though, and, for myself, including a trans version of that as part of every showing of TOTWK would be something of a win. I'm sure there must be loads of other possibilities, but the time to examine them is now, rather than when another such massive fail occurs again.
*I realise that the above may be seen as confrontational and unwomanly. At times, though, I find myself with something in common with Kate Bornstein, though hopefully I'm considerably more media aware. I was always a freak. And , like her, I think freaks always know that . But that's in spite of being trans, not because of it.

A difference in timing

So you've grown your hair out, put a bit of jewelery on and you're out on one of the major shopping streets of the city. One time you're wearing a silk/cotton shirt, powder blue velvet trouser suit and green leather 4 inch heeled boots. Another time you're wearing flat canvas shoes, denim skirt and beige silk sweater. A couple of nerdy guys pass you and one calls out asking if you're a man or woman. What do you do ?
In the second case, I simply answered transi,( the ethnic style here), which at least temporarily defused any possible escalation, in a way that answering 'yes' wouldn't quite.
The first case...well I managed that once to give the approved pc response, 'Why don't you suck my cock and find out?'.
The second case was here last year, though, and the first was in London's Kings Road in about 1970.
Plus ca change, plus ca something completely different...

DO NOT DO THIS with ticked off trannies

So there's this ex-New York gay guy who helps out here, who's something of a film buff. And he comes in here today and poked some fun at the trans/GLAAD reaction to that movie. After I rather heatedly explained about the Angie Zapata thing, he backed off a bit.
But then he said something, totally joking of course, about not understanding why there wasn't a protest in, what for him was, a more traditional way. Namely slitting open part of the seats and inserting a paper giving the reason for the action.
Now I'm sure no-one would take such a suggestion seriously. After all, the cinema that shows the film has no responsibility for it. New Yorkers in general are known the world over for their general diffidence, courtesy and respect for the laws on criminal damage, and I'm sure the trans community is even more so. And the empowering message of the movie is truly an example to us all. Not only that, but its a (not serious) suggestion by a gay man for trans action, and no trans person could ever take that seriously.
And there's one final, overwhelming reason not to do this. If any one were misguided enough to take such actions they'd be...like...ticked off trannies with knives...

The nation of T ???????????????

sometimes words are just...inadequate

A year of comments and femininity

It would be pleasant to get more comments. At the moment I get, per post, about 6 or 7 verbal ones, a couple via other electronics, and 1 or 2 to here. From those latter, most have some more direct communication that means I don't publish, and finally there are those that get through to fertilize the blog.
Most writing so far I see as more of a self introductory thing, which isn't that much to dialogue on,but which will be moving on to gender theory material later. However any comments on impenetrability of writing style, for example, would be interesting. Its been many years since I last wrote anything much in prose.

The rest of this post is an answer to a comment received following a recent conversation, and an expansion on something of a theme for the year.
In the conversation I'd referred to the problems in dealing with residual male privilege, partly because I occupy the central role in my place and the complex authority that derives from that.
She wrote back a consideration of that point and talked of her strong feelings that femininity and authority don't conflict with each other. She wrote of her experience, as a lesbian, of femininity being denied her, both systemically by men and by a close relative with whom she talked about being feminine. Then, with the latter, the discovery that they were separated by different definitions of the feminine, and that hers was distinct in that it encompassed, along with the stereotypic female areas, competence, empowerment, authority, independence and rationality. Therefore she wouldn't say that being in authority was in any way unfeminine.
And in substance, I'd be perfectly in agreement. At the moment its still going through an evolution in that my non-male strategies aren't in some ways well enough practiced to fully utilise the potential roles, so I'm left less altered than I should wish to be. And the authority is not so much power as how I fill a position.
Actually though, it's a good heads up. I do slump back rather too much at the moment. And the confidence born of those wide open male spaces of unchanging emotional weather is now firmly 'back in the day'. I need some girl genius kick ass stuff to get me out.
So many thanks to Claire for her observations.
There is another issue here, which has caused me problems most of the last year, that's focused around the words feminine and femininity. It's simply that I find them inaccurate guides to self definition, and too easily formed into kyriarchic complicities.
So I struggle with using the butch / femme duality instead, at least in terms of the philosophical basis for my present gender identity. I think I'm naturally fairly femme, at least in so far of those areas of identity I associate myself most, and are absolutely the most fruitful for me to explore. And clothes and other preferred styles are that way inclined*.And its in that mode that I'm closest to being able to simply relax in being female. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with some future sexual orientation, but may be influenced by the fact that well over 90% of my serious social interaction is with women. It could be something of a phase in that naturally the most interesting areas of myself to explore are those now clearly distinctive female ones, but even as a man I had relatively femme style in, say, fashion semiotics.
But style, performance, isn't really the thing. Its more in the emotional sensitivity and intensity where I feel closest to myself as a woman, in a femme vision of female. This is , for me, anything but going along with dainty femininity or passive receptivity or any category of female that depends upon the contrasting male. It's agency is not that of subject but of definition, of world, rather than actor.It does mean, however,that I'm far away from feeling able to use male authority strategies, and everytime I fall back upon such there's a pain of inauthenticity.
Growing pains, I suppose.


*At the moment I'm wearing a reasonably tight thin grey sweater, black and white bead necklace, black cotton chinese jacket with gold embroidery and long sort of goth skirt, black with bits of lace,applique and grey crinkled streaks with a bright blue leg cast. That's conservative for daytime wear. Generally I'm thinking of going more steampunk, but I've still got a major kimono habit. These sort of looks tend to work well as detargeting strategies: I look less weird as a woman if instead of just my looks, all of me is enclosed in a weird space. It's a purple thing.