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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
This interrupts the yearly round up posts I still want to make. I don't know if many other trans people feel this. I don't think that in any way its a consequent of having a narrative of changing gender, as opposed to always having been a woman, more the other way around. Oddly enough, I think that, in a small way, it might be more of a general cis phenomenon. Its a memory thing, and how we colour recollection with emotion. The way that some childhood memories bloom in brightness through the sheer intensity of the feelings we had. Other times though it goes the other way, and memories are fainter because the emotional cues aren't there. But there's also another kind of fading that comes from no longer having an emotional repertoire that encompasses childhood. An example might be remembering the early 'Dr Who' series as a young child. I can recall the action, and the fact that I found it new and exciting...but how was I excited or why or at what particularly, that's back somewhere in the mist. I saw 'The Prisoner' in my adolescence and that's totally different. I remember relating to the allegory, to the style, to the place it attained in the culture around me and all the feelings associated with these. It happens with recalling relationships too. It used to be that whilst earlier relationships were slightly less accessible in that I grew in experience to an expanded, more complex emotional repertoire, I could recall quite clearly how I felt during them, ( 2 relationships over 10 years, a couple of dozen shorter ones and virtually no 1 night stuff ). I still see a couple of exes and get on better with them now, as friends, than I did before. I can still recall the events,the life styles, the changes they brought on. But in general, those parts of the past have turned alien. It's nothing to do with seeing things now from a female identity. It's got quite a lot to do with things that make me female, though. I can imagine myself falling in love again, but absolutely not in any way that I've been remotely familiar. The emotional conflation, the whole exogenous thing, the iconifying...Well, I suppose they could somehow spring up anew, but judging by their comparative absence from my emotional world it's not something I'd hold my breath waiting for. Most emotions are still recognisable, but as seen through a scanner darkly, and I inhabit a very changed set of emotional processes. I don't have much motivation to distance myself from a male past. I suppose I was never that closely identifying with my gender, but certainly far more than identifying female, a thought that never entered my head. And I did, in the main, have quite a satisfying life as a man. There's so many new and wonderful feelings and relationships now, and I'm so much luckier than the vast majority of trans people in having had no difficult struggle for self acceptance. But there are always prices. I remember a friend telling the story of a bass player at a party who put his hand on a hot electric plate for 30 seconds. After that it hurt, and the guy pulled his hand away, looked at it, smooth and lacking calluses, and said 'that's 15 years gone'. And just like that, I'm newly smoothed and sensitive with a past burned off. In that first rush of change, 40 years of memories have turned sepia.
