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By Rebecca, December 14, 2011 12:54 pm

This weekend, I’m participating in a project called Re-Frame: A Gathering at Links Hall. Tickets are available here.  I’ll be one of the featured performers on Friday, 12/16, and a supporting artist on Saturday and Sunday. For those of you who can’t make it, here’s the current draft of what I’ll be performing.

OCCUPY WALL STREET

All enter, chanting, Rebecca leading call-and-response. Chants include:

• Tell me what democracy looks like / This is what democracy looks like
• The people united will never be defeated
• The whole world is watching

Everyone but Rebecca fades off to the sides

I’ve been following the Occupy Wall Street movement with some interest. I have friends who live in New York City who are pretty involved. I have friends in Chicago who are regularly across from the Federal Reserve Building at Jackson and LaSalle, as part of Occupy Chicago. And I love the concept of the Occupy movement: of grassroots democracy, of consensus building, of acknowledging the wealth and income disparities which have been growing in the United States for years. Continue reading 'Re-Frame: A Gathering'»

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By Rebecca, December 12, 2011 1:34 pm

No one looks like they're enjoying this situation, to be honest

In Which A Question Is Asked

What does it mean to be a sexual trans person? A sexual trans woman?

Sidenote: I’m looking for my copy of Fucking Trans Women, an awesome e-zine available at http://fuckingtranswomen.com/. I know I bought and downloaded it, but am having trouble finding it. I emailed the site owners, tho, and hopefully they’ll be willing to send me another copy. At the very worst, I can spare another $5 for their great project.

Back on topic, I think being trans and sexual is tough for me (gonna try to use ‘I’ statements in this post, and not make generalizations) in part due to the huge variety of mixed messages I’ve received over the last 27 years. I’m sure I’m missing some categories, but here’s what I’ve come up with:

• Messages about male sexuality, even though I didn’t identify as male
• Messages about female sexuality, which I picked up even though I wasn’t yet presenting as female
• Messages about heterosexual sexuality, mainly from when I was presenting as a straight male
• Messages about queer sexuality, both before and after I came out
• Messages about specifically lesbian sexuality, again from both before and after I came out
• And last-but-never-least, messages about specifically trans sexuality, limited primarily to ‘chicks with dicks’ and ‘she-male’ porn

Continue reading 'Sex, sexuality, and surgery'»

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By Rebecca, December 8, 2011 6:12 pm

“CHIP will not pay for any expense or charge:” (pg 31) ”for services, drugs or supplies that are for, or resulting from, surgery or surgeries performed in connection with sexual reassignment or gender transformation;” (pg 32)

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By Rebecca, November 29, 2011 1:52 pm

Not the kind of race I mean

I was recently having a conversation with a number of artistic peers, discussing the impact of our personal and community histories on our art and artistic process. I don’t remember who the question was raised by, but the group consisted of a mix of racial/ethnic/gender/sexual identities, making for good conversation.

In general we all agreed that our various personal and community histories – of religion, race, ethnicity, language, geography, class, sexuality, gender, and so on and on and on and on – played a factor in how we approached creating art. While it was a great conversation, and fodder for more discussion, I’m less interested in that than in something which happened after.

During the conversation, I said, “It’s been interesting going from presenting as part of a strong, privileged group – white, heterosexual, male – to an oppressed group: queer, trans, female.  I try to both be conscious of and artistically honor that oppression while being aware of the privilege I still do posses.”

Then, while giving someone a ride home – who identifies as black, female, lesbian – she turned to me and said, “Your comment really surprised me, since I don’t think of you as white.”

What?

Continue reading 'Race identity'»

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By Rebecca, November 7, 2011 3:12 pm

A while back, I was able to participate in workshops around Jaclyn Friedman’s creation of her latest book, What You Really Really Want. The book has been released (WOO!) :  and this post is a stop in Jaclyn’s blog tour. The full title of WYRRW is What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety. Be sure to check out her next stop tomorrow at Tiger Beatdown.

REBECCA KLING: For how long has this book been bouncing around in your mind? In the introduction to WYRRW, you talk about an interview surrounding the release of Yes Means Yes (released in 2008) which you co-edited with Jessica Valenti. In that interview, a reporter asked how women are supposed “to figure out what we want to say ‘yes’ to in the first place.” Would you place the creation of this book around that time, or further back?

JACLYN FRIEDMAN: That was definitely the question that first planted the seed. Honestly, I didn’t give a very complete answer at the time. I think I said, basically, you have to try things, and follow your intuition as to which things to try and who to try them with, and then learn from your experiments. And that it had taken me, personally, a long time to figure things out, and that in some ways I still was, and might always be. Which I still stand by, but is wildly oversimple. And then when I started hearing it over and over from different women as I toured for Yes Means Yes, I realized that I had a lot to share about what I’d learned along my own sexual journey, through personal experience, reading and talking with other people, all kinds of things. That’s when I realized that the answer to this crucial, recurring question was really a book.

RK: WYRRW is by no means aimed exclusively at young women, but throughout the book you discuss the cultural messages aimed at young women. How has what you “really really want” when it comes to sex changed from when you were growing up to now?

JF: I long ago stopped faking orgasms, so that’s a big change! In a funny way, I behave less “certainly” in my sexual interactions now than I did when I was first dipping my toe in those waters. Back then, I thought I needed to be “good at” sex in order to please my partners – and as much as I enjoyed sex when I was younger (and I really did, that’s for sure), I was heavily invested in pleasing at the expense of my own satisfaction. In some ways, I got lucky — my early sexual partners were decent people who also cared about pleasing, and honestly, everything about sex was so exciting then that I was getting a lot out of it without having to do much self-centering or self-reflection. But I’ve also just stopped caring so much about being magically, seamlessly “good” at sex, because I’ve learned two key things. The first is that that’s a meaningless concept to begin with: everybody likes different things, so the only real way to be a good lover is to get better at communicating with your partner(s) about needs, desires, preferences and boundaries. It’s really all about learning how to pay attention to yourselves and each other. Well, and it’s all about the other big thing I’ve learned since then, which is that the experimentation and discovery that you can only enjoy if you come to sex clear that there aren’t “answers,” and even if there were, you don’t know them, that sense of playfulness and co-creation is one of the best parts of sex. I wouldn’t trade it for all the certainty in the world. Continue reading 'Interview with Jaclyn Friedman, author of What You Really Really Want'»

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By Rebecca, November 3, 2011 4:51 pm

When I’m single, Every six months or so I’ll get bored and post something to the Craigslist Personals section. Nothing long-term has ever come of it, but I’ve had some fun dates and an amusing time writing the ads. I again posted something a few nights ago, in which I mentioned I’m trans, and one of the responses was this:

Uh…maybe, just maybe you aren’t getting any action because you are a guy posting on WfW board?

Ever think of that?

You have every right to feel that you are female…more power to you.  Go buy some heals and short skirts if it makes you feel better.

Anatomically though you are still a GUY.

I feel for you….really…you have my sympathy.

But no woman who is seeking another woman wants to date/hook up with anyone with your “equipment.”

Just a thought….

I generally try to assume good intent until proven otherwise. Also, I was bored when I received it, and willing to engage. (Perhaps foolishly so.) Here’s what I sent in response:

Thanks for the email. I’m going to assume honest ignorance, and that you’re really trying to help me out. While, as I said in my post, I haven’t had a ton of dating luck lately, I have dated (and hooked up with, and fucked) a number of women over the years. The majority of whom didn’t have a problem with my “equipment.” Many of whom identified as lesbian. And some of whom had never been with someone who had a penis. Part of the reason I’m open about my identity as trans in the CL post is to avoid people who aren’t interested in my equipment. Which is fine – I’m not trying to force myself on anyone.

But I do think you have a somewhat narrow definition of male and female (even if you’re looking at things anotomically). I’m not intersex, but why should my dick win over my boobs as determining my gender? Likewise, if I’m out in public, people perceive me as female, not as male. Would a straight woman want that? (In my experience, no.)

So I made a conscious choice to post in the wfw section. I’ve already gotten a few positive responses, some of which I plan to follow up on. Because I do think I posted in the correct section, anatomy be damned.

-R

You have a penis.

Therefore, you are a male.

Nobody sane would disagree with me.

Get off the women seeking women board.  You are not a woman by any definition.

You are clearly a queer guy.  You might not like it, but that’s what you are.

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By Rebecca, November 1, 2011 4:49 pm

Had a chance to see Kate Bornstein speak today at Chicago Kent College of Law, which was lovely. My dad teaches at the law school, and I found out about the event through him. My notes are kind of disjointed, since I was only jotting down things that struck with me and don’t have the whole arching narrative of her presentation. That said, here are some things that stuck with me.

Kate talked a lot about things which were familiar to me, even if much of the audience hadn’t been previously exposed. Things like identity politics, the importance of allowing existence outside the binary, and how hierarchical systems of identity (where this age/gender/race/religion/class/etc is better than that age/gender/race/religion/class/etc) inherently create problems.

I liked her Venn diagram about “why live?” a question she examined in Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide. Kate argued that our whole person-hood consists of overlapping components of Identity (sex/gender/race/all that other stuff), Desire (what we want) and Power (our ability to get what we want). More specifically, they’re all interconnected: Our ability to get what we desire depends in part on our power which depends in part on our identity which depends in part on our desires, and so on and on.

Part of the reason binary systems create problems, she said, is that they limit all three of those components of our personhood. As she put it (which I love), “To see in binary is to lose your imagination.” (That may not be word-for-word, but that’s the idea.)

Continue reading 'Kate Bornstein in Chicago'»

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By Rebecca, October 27, 2011 4:19 pm

Enjoy!

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By Rebecca, October 13, 2011 6:19 pm

Presented in partnership with The Qu. Enjoy!

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By Rebecca, October 4, 2011 9:49 pm

Just heard from my doctor. Turns out I was right: My testosterone is high, which led to increased body hair growth and…um…randiness. We’re going up to 150 mg/day of spironolactone, from 100mg, and 4mg/day of estrodiol, from 2mg/day.