Category: gender
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Two weeks till Fringe, and The Land of Gender
By Rebecca, August 18, 2010 12:27 pm
Two weeks from today will be opening night for Uncovering the Mirrors at the Chicago Fringe Festival. Please buy your tickets today or find it in your heart to donate!
As a teaser, here’s some text from my upcoming show:
The Land of Gender, part one
Once upon a time there was a complex and mysterious land: the Land of Gender.
Gender was a dense place, thick with hidden secrets. The terrain was unknowable, the wilderness untamed: brambly groves, swirling rivers, deep canyons, towering forests. The Land resisted any attempt to understand or define it.
Explorers embarked on great journeys to survey Gender, to make sense of its breadth and variety. Because the terrain had an infinite number of vistas – expansive deserts, lofty mountains, cresting oceans – each explorer came away from the Land of Gender with a different understanding of the landscape. But none of these vantage points proved any more complete or detailed than any other; no explorer had any better view of Gender than any other.
For untold ages, attempting to put the Land of Gender to paper, to capture its shape, was impossible. Cartography was useless, inadequate. The land refused to be charted or unified by a singular map. It continued to exist in only the experiences of those who ventured into the unknowns, their disparate accounts and partial understandings.
While most explorers were content with the mysteries and fluidity of the Land of Gender, one explorer in particular wished desperately to strip the Land of its relentlessness. Where other explorers would enjoy the mysteries of the Land of Gender, this explorer found fear and panic. And so He set about developing a map which could measure, manage, and master the Land of Gender once and for all.
Searching for something that fits
By Rebecca, July 22, 2010 3:04 am
Circumcisions. Bar Mitzvahs. Mourning ceremonies.
My whole life, I have been in search of a way to validate my identity through ceremony and ritual. I recognize the importance of
Some – my circumcision, my Bar Mitzvah – were imposed by a religion and a culture to which I did not voluntarily join. They established my gender as something existing outside of myself, and yet integral to myself: there wasn’t anything I could do to deviate from its course, or reject its structure.
Some were my early own attempts at discovering what worked for me. Burning papers with my male name. Throwing out male clothing. Writing a blog to record my thoughts, feelings, and emotions throughout my transition. Using performance and theatre as a way to tell my story.
Questions on being trans, from highschoolers (pt 6)
By Rebecca, June 29, 2010 8:23 pm
Just when you thought it was over, there are a few more questions to answer!
- Did you dress like a girl before you considered yourself transgender? (Dress in drag, I guess?)
Occasionally, but not a lot. And that’s due in large part because of that language: it felt like dressing in drag. And the last thing I wanted, the last thing I ever wanted, was to feel like a boy in a dress. So while I did experiment every so often with sneaking something from my mom’s wardrobe, it was never that satisfying. (I denied taking her clothing the one or two times she confronted me about it. Maybe, in retrospect, if I’d come clean – and talked about my desires to not be a boy – my life might have turned out very differently.
Once I was able to put a name on my discomfort – I was trans, not a crossdresser – I was able to start experimenting with ways of feeling more feminine. Things like growing my hair out, shaving my legs, and so on. That eventually turned into buying women’s clothing, but by that point I’d say I was actually transitioning and not just experimenting.
Continue reading 'Questions on being trans, from highschoolers (pt 6)'»
Circumcision
By Rebecca, June 28, 2010 7:19 pm
Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu al ha-milah. Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu lihach-neeso bivreito shel Avraham aveenu.
Blessed are You, O Lord Our God, Ruler of the universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments, and has given us the command concerning circumcision. Blessed are You, O Lord Our God, Ruler of the universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments, and hast commanded us to make our sons enter the covenant of Abraham our father. (Source)
Eight days after birth, Jewish boys are supposed to be circumcised as part of the covenant between God and Abraham (in Genesis), as specified in Leviticus. In this way, Jewish boys are supposed to continue the line of the Children of Israel, fulfilling the obligations and duties laid out for them in the Torah.
There are no required rituals or ceremonies to mark the birth of a girl.
Snip snip!
Morning Routine
By Rebecca, June 22, 2010 5:22 pm
This is a writing exercise from my director. Enjoy!
Materials Needed (generally in order of use)
- Alarm, with remote
- Phone
- Computer
- Robe
- Clothing
- Bathroom scale
- Shower door
- Shampoo
- Mirror
- Shaving cream and razor
- Face wash
- Conditioner
- Loofah and body wash
- Detachable shower head
- Towel and head towel
- Blow dryer
- Tooth brush
- Pills
- Comb
- Hair product
My alarm goes off. It’s a beep that begins quiet, and slowly gets larger. It used to be music, but I became trained to listen for soft music, and so things in the next room our outside were waking me. My alarm is a Bose stereo, undoubtedly overkill for the simple jobs of telling time and waking me, but I like it.
Hospital Stay performance video
Moving toward something?
By Rebecca, May 31, 2010 12:40 pm
Yeah, it's a little cheesey. What do you want from me?
Transitioning, for me, has primarily been an experience of moving away from things. At every stage, I’ve thought about how unhappy I was, not about how things would be better if I did XYZ.
I went into therapy because I was miserable, not because I was particularly sure I could be happy. I went on hormones because presenting and living as male fit me horribly, like an itchy and too-tight outfit, full of pins and needles. Not because I thought I’d succeed as living as a woman. I underwent hair removal because being hairy felt all wrong, not because I thought being smooth would be pleasant.
Fortunately, I was wrong about those things: When I reached whatever minor goal I’d set for myself it was better, not simply “less bad.” But my thought process was still about moving away from things – a false presentation, hiding something, masculinity – not moving toward anything.
I’ve been continuing to think about The Surgery. And I’ve realized that, for the first time in my transition, I’m interesting in moving toward something rather than away.
A perspective flip
By Rebecca, May 28, 2010 3:47 pm
No, I'm not pretending I'm the cute blond in the middle.
A few months ago, I was having dinner with some friends after our circus class. We were chatting about relationships – I was bemoaning my lack thereof – and someone mentioned how her boyfriend was an awkward geek. I said, “Well, as an awkward geek myself, I feel obligated to stand up for my fellow geeks.” Both of my friends turned to me, and simultaneously said something along the lines of, “You’re not awkward. And you may be a geek, but you’re a hot geek.”
I don’t say this to toot my own horn, because I didn’t (and don’t) particularly believe them. But I do bring it up to talk about a perspective flip I’ve had over the course of my transition: I’m now seen as the cool, geeky, girl.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this as I’ve been watching The Big Bang Theory. I think the show is pretty funny, as I’m a sucker for a show that makes good, accurate jokes about comic books, general relativity, Lord of the Rings, particle physics, video games and more. It’s funny even if you don’t get all the references, but their jokes are obviously well researched and even funnier if you know what they’re talking about.
At the same time, the gender relationships of the show are kind of predictable: four smart-but-awkward boys befriend their pretty-but-uneducated female neighbor. And I find myself very torn over who to sympathize with when they butt heads.
Vector Identity Theory
By Rebecca, May 25, 2010 9:21 pm
Hi all! This guest post is from Violet, a regular commenter at The Thang Blog and all-around awesome gal. Enjoy!
Hi. I’m Violet. Rebecca has been kind enough to let me have some of her blog space for a guest post, and let me dip my toe carefully into the world of writing for a wider internet audience. Identity-wise, I am a twenty-something white currently-abled trans-female-spectrum genderqueer and sexuality-queer tomboy geek engineer. Except to the extent I’m not. But this post is about identity labels, so bear with me. Rebecca has previously posted about identity labels as keywords here, which I think is awesome, and I wanted to add another different (and geeky) way of looking at them to the discussion. This post is adapted from something I wrote more personally last year.
By “identity labels”, what I mean are nouns and adjectives that you use to describe people — “woman”, “man”, “goth”, “punk”, “masculine”, “feminine”, “trans”, “queer”. These things are useful for communication. Labels can function as a shorthand to tell people about what your life is like. They allow people with attributes in common to find each other and compare notes. I use them a lot.
The problem is that they’re wrong. Or, rather, not quite right. Any time you have an identity, it comes with a pile of stereotyped behaviors that any given claimant of the identity might or might not share, and it tends to reduce the perception of the claimant down to those stereotypes. Oops. (Rebecca, in her keyword post, also got into the possible confining nature of labels imposed by others.)
Now for the geeking out. Don’t worry — if you don’t speak math, I’ll give an example in pictures below.
I often view labels as vectors in some huge or infinite-dimensional vector space. Given a set of labels — say, {male, female} or {straight, queer} or {gay, lesbian, bi, trans, queer, questioning, ally} or whatever — finding out how you identify is a process akin to estimating the projection of your personal self-vector onto the subspace covered by the basis of labels in the set. Of course, that basis is never orthonormal; that would be too clean. It’s not orthogonal or normal at all. It’s just a mess of huge-dimensional vectors that you have to try to match yourself up against, throwing away all those components of yourself that aren’t in directions available to you in that basis. Worse, the self-vector is a function of time. The way you project on to a certain set of labels changes over the course of your life, sometimes even non-continuously. Even the identity labels change over time. Does being a goth mean the same thing now as it did fifteen years ago?
For an example of how my thinking about labels works, people sometimes ask me “are you male or female?” What they mean is usually something like this:
Continue reading 'Vector Identity Theory'»
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