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By Rebecca, October 20, 2009 12:05 am

I have a love/hate relationship with Halloween. On the one hand, it’s hard to argue with candy, parties, and costumes. On the other hand, it’s the day before my birthday, which means I’m always obligated to be doing Halloween-ey things instead of whatever party I’d like to be having. I actually got Halloweened-out for a few years as a teenager, because I’d had Halloween birthday parties for the previous decade.

This year, my roommates and I are again having a Halloween party. It’ll be on Friday, the 30th, so planned to leave time for everyone to go out and/or go to the other inevitable parties on Saturday, the actual night of Halloween. I’m actually pretty psyched about the party; it should be good friends, and my roommates are indulging my ridiculous costume idea: one of them is dressing in a gold dress, and will be a gold-backed currency, I’ll be in a silver dress, as silver-backed currency, and the other is going to wear a shirt saying “What would you trade for me?” as a barter-based economy! (I’m a giant dork…)

The assumption seems to be, though, that we’re also all going to go out together on Saturday night. But I’m really not interested in going out to Wrigleyville again, even if this time everyone will be in ridiculous costumes. And, thus far, the only other party I’ve been invited to that I’d really want to go to is also on Friday…I can’t exactly ditch my party to go to another one. What I’d like to do is have my birthday party on the 31st, on the weekend of my birthday, and stay in with drinks, Rock Band, maybe some singing around the piano… But I’ve been told (repeatedly) that I’m not allowed to do that, and no one will come if I try. (Which isn’t unreasonable,  but does speak to the lousy birth date I have.)

This is also all part of the larger feeling I’ve been having, of a dearth of queer friends and an utter lack of queer community. And I don’t feel close enough to the few queer friends I do have – or, at least, the queer people I’m friendly with – to simply invite myself to whatever they’re doing for Halloween.

Continue reading 'All Hallow’s Eve'»

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By Rebecca, October 19, 2009 9:59 am

I’m starting to worry I won’t have enough material to hit an hour for Trans Form…

Aaaaaahhhh…..

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By Rebecca, October 18, 2009 3:38 pm

I was having a conversation with a friend last night about sex, and gender identity versus physical body. It got me thinking about how easy it is to get into circular reasoning, especially when it comes to something so emotional and sensitive as all that. The circular reasoning we were talking about goes like this:

1. I like sex, and being sexual
2. I identify as a woman
3. I was assigned “boy” at birth, and still have ‘boy bits’
4. Women can’t have ‘boy bits’
5. But I like sex…

(Rinse and repeat…)

Basically, is it OK to enjoy sex, even if your body isn’t what you really want it to be? Or, you have issues using your body in the socially/culturally expected way?

Continue reading 'Sexular Reasoning'»

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By Rebecca, October 17, 2009 9:12 pm

I just watched the season premier of 30 Rock, and it has a scene with Tracy Jordan wandering outside of NBC, trying to make friends with a “normal” person.

He wanders from person to person, being super-awkward, and finally goes up to a pedicab, saying, “Are you a pre-op trans-centaur?”

I don’t remember the last time a tv show has made me laugh outloud and, upon rewinding to make sure I got the joke, made me laugh out loud again.

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By Rebecca, October 17, 2009 2:07 am

What did you do last night?

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By Rebecca, October 17, 2009 2:05 am

I’ve been feeling queer this week. Unfortunately I don’t mean the good queer, of self-identification, pride, and a sense of community. I don’t mean queer. I’ve felt that way at times, and it’s definitely a feeling I want to foster and help grow. But right now, I’m feeling queer as in strange, odd, other. Like I don’t fit.

I think it’s something that’s been building all week. As I’m working on my show, I’ve been thinking a lot about my identity as trans, and the transition, and it’s reminded me how straight and heteronormative most of my friends are. Obviously that’s not a bad thing, but it’s made me feel a little alone being trans, let alone gay. We were watching How I Met Your Mother (a show that I’ve had issues with before) and they did yet another “man in drag as stand-in for ugly woman in a fantasy” sequence. The sequence wasn’t specifically about trans women, and there was no mention of “she’s a man” (as there has been more explicitly in the past), but it still made me upset. I’m not sure if I’m ready to give up on How I Met Your Mother, but I felt closer to calling it quits than I have before. (I know, I know, not watching a TV show isn’t exactly a huge deal, but it’s a show my roommate s and I watch together, and I’m the only one who has issues with it, so it’s feeding into my feeling queer.)

Then, on Wednesday, I went to a trans youth group in Chicago. I’ve been going off and on for over a year, and it’s – on the whole – been a positive experience. But I feel closer to the facilitators than I do to the other youth (the facilitators aren’t tons older than me). And I feel really bad saying this, but I sometimes think I’m the only youth coming to this group who has their shit together. That is, I know I’m super privileged – don’t have debt, have a full-time job, accepting friends and family and coworkers – and I’m definitely not faulting any of the other youth for having a harder situation than I do. But it also makes me feel like I don’t have much in common with them.

As I said, I’m also processing a lot as I try and get my show together. I’ve thought a lot about the idea of transitioning as being a teenager (self-discovery, figuring out identity and presentation, etc) and I don’t want to be a teenager anymore. I don’t have the time to be a teenager, and I feel stupid trying on new identities and modes of self-presentation to see what fits.

I also feel like all my posts this week have been whiny and obnoxious…

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By Rebecca, October 16, 2009 12:35 am

I work in a city-owned building, where artists and arts organizations rent out rooms. This morning, I went to the building office to pick up a replacement key for a door whose locks had changed. (Because the city is master of all locks, and in charge of keys.) I’m friendly with the building secretary, JS, and when I went to pick up the key she said she was annoyed with EU, a friend of mine who also works in the building and had put in the replacement key request for me. (Isn’t  bureaucracy awesome?)

I asked why, and she showed me the key request EU had put in. Specifically, my name.

“(Old name)/Rebecca”

That’s right, EU had put my male name -slash- Rebecca.

Continue reading 'One Step Back, One Step Forward'»

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By Rebecca, October 15, 2009 12:57 am

…life was so simple back then.

Musical quotes aside, as I’ve been working on my show I’ve been thinking a lot about transitioning, the parts of my life where I feel like I’ve missed something important as a result of waiting to transition, and how to recapture whatever those “missed” things are.

Along those lines, I had a conversation with a friend about dating someone who is transitioning. She said, very diplomatically, that it must be hard dating someone who is constantly trying to discover themselves, reinvent themselves, experiment with their identity and with their presentation. I laughed, and said, “It’s OK. You can say it: It must be hard dating a teenager whose in their mid-twenties.”

Because, to some extent, that’s what transitioning is. Our teen years (and, to some extent, our college years – hence the title of this post) are supposed to be a time of self-discovery, where it’s OK to dress outlandishly, experiment with your interests and social groups, declare radical new identities only to shed them days or weeks or months later…

In this conversation, my friend said, “But now you get a second chance to do all that!”

“First chance,” I replied. “My teenage years weren’t about finding an identity, they were about avoiding one.”

How do I find my identity this time around?

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By Rebecca, October 14, 2009 12:06 am

There’s a post over at Slashdot, FOSS Sexism Claims Met with Ire and Denial (warning: the discussion has gotten large, which means the page takes a while to load) that’s prompted some interesting discussion.  (FOSS = Free, Open Source Software) Basically, someone wrote an article about sexism within the FOSS movement, as well as a followup article about the responses to his first article, and was met with a…less than enthousiastic reaction:

Raise the subject of sexism, and you are met with illogic that I can only compare to that of the tobacco companies trying to deny the link between their products and cancer. Because I took a feminist stance in public, I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community.

As Slashdot is a mostly-male discussion site, I expected resistance to any claims of sexism, and wasn’t disappointed. To be fair, some of them were totally legit, indicating that the examples given in the article weren’t representative of the community as a whole:

If I haven’t seen it, and no around me has seen it, isn’t the onus on you to give some more proof other than, “Really, guys! Sexism in OSS is real!”

At the same time, there were a lot of people who missed the point, and trying to find examples of tactics listed at Derailing for Dummies quickly got old – there were just too many of them.

However, there were also some great comments in support of the idea that maybe, just maybe, the highly educated and libertarian individuals who tend toward FOSS can also be sexist, and that simply dismissing cries of sexism isn’t really helpful.

Continue reading 'La la la, I can’t hear you!'»

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By Rebecca, October 12, 2009 8:25 pm

With a nod to Texts From Last Night.

(Her) Advice: If you ever think it would be funny to run up the down escalator barefoot, you would be very very wrong. Very.

(Me) This would be hypotehtical information, I’m sure…

(Her) Yes, I did not bleed all over the floor at the HRC national dinner and get reprimanded by the Secret Service. Not at all.

(With apologies to the one who texted me, cuz I know you read this blog!)