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By Rebecca, March 20, 2010 12:26 am

I spoke to a high school health club on Friday – the one who emailed me the questions I’ve been answering the last few days – and had a really good time. They weren’t too knowledgeable about queer/trans issues, but I much prefer well-intentioned and open-handed ignorance to feigned understanding… And they were all willing to learn, which counts for a lot in my book.

Most of the chat was pretty expected, with me going over my (abridged) life story and transition, talking about how hormones have changed my experience of emotions and sex, and so on. I did have one student ask, “So, if you did get…the surgery, and you like women…how would you have sex after?”

One of the other students waved her fingers in front of his face, which made me laugh. I also directed them to Early to Bed, which is actually only a few blocks away from their school. I hope, for the sake of his current and future partner(s), that he learns about the options available beyond penis/vagina.

Continue reading 'Talking to high schoolers'»

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By Rebecca, December 28, 2009 9:52 am

I saw a 3D showing of Avatar last night, and really enjoyed it. I thought it was beautiful and relatively engaging. I’m not positive if needed to be almost 3 hours long, but it did allow for a lot of room to establish the world and the characters. That said, it was a really racist, colonialist movie that also fit comfortably within the sexist paradigm of Western culture and storytelling.

Continue reading 'Dances with Avatars'»

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By Rebecca, November 12, 2009 2:32 pm

I was reading an article recently – well written and respectful – about transgender issues, and couldn’t help but notice the use of transgender as “transgenders” (as a noun) rather than “transgender people” (as an adjective).

Many identity labels can be used as nouns or adjectives, but others can’t. A hypothetical article that said, “Lesbians polled at the Health Center said XYZ,” wouldn’t raise my eyebrows, nor would “Lesbian women polled at the Health Center said XYZ.” (Other than being a little awkward, since ‘lesbian’ implies ‘woman.’) (But lets not get into that again!)

At the same time, saying, “Blacks polled at the Health Center said XYZ” seems awkward and dated. Using “Jews” or “Italians,” though, doesn’t seem problematic. (I’m picking examples pretty much at random, here.)

What about “transgenders” versus “transgender people”?

Continue reading '“Transgenders” versus “Transgender people”'»

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By Rebecca, November 8, 2009 8:24 am

Mattie said, in a recent comment:

I think also some of my mixed feelings [on passing] are to do with how I dislike the idea of passing politically. It is so loaded with ideas of deceit and dishonesty. I would far rather consider the time I spent appearing to be male as passing – as I was indeed then seeming to be something I was not.

I really like that as a concept, and I’m not sure it’s something I’ve heard expressed before so clearly. I don’t have any further thoughts right now, although I’d like to expand upon this idea at some point in the future. I just wanted to highlight the comment, for those who may have missed it.

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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, September 18, 2009 11:08 am

Last month, Daisy posted about straight people – usually women – “in a relationship” with people of the same gender. From the comments:

I’m quite sure that these women aren’t trying to trivialize lesbian relationships — I just think that’s the result. In order to have people I don’t know well take seriously my listing on FB as “in a relationship” with my girlfriend, I need to also list myself as “interested in women.” I find this annoying, because I’m not interested in anyone but my girlfriend. If the majority of female/female relationship pairings on FB weren’t jokes, no one would assume mine was a joke too.

While I hadn’t really considered the nature of Facebook relationships before, I agree that placing non-romantic same-sex relationships on Facebook on the same footing as romantic relationships has the ultimate effect of diluting those actual romantic relationships.

Earlier this week, I was at a bar with some friends and one of them had to go outside for a few minutes for a phone call. Someone asked who she’d been talking with and she said, “Oh, my wife.” She and I had talked about this a while ago, before Daisy’s post, because I noticed on Facebook that she and this friend were listed as “Married.”

She’d said that their relationship was really that close, that they were much more intimate than mere friends, and that – no – the weren’t actually romantically involved; they both identify as ’straight.’

I didn’t really give it much thought at the time but, because of Daisy’s post, I’ve reconsidered. This friend and I are actually on pretty close footing in terms of how we view feminism and sexism in American culture, and have had good discussions about how to deal with sexist jokes made by friends (or friends of friends). I’d kind of like to bring this discussion up, and maybe I will when I see her this weekend, but I’m not sure how, or what specifically I’d hope to accomplish.

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By Rebecca, September 9, 2009 8:18 pm

I’m now just about three months out from my solo performance, Trans Form.

And I’m still not entirely sure what the show is about. Which is starting to stress me out.

Obviously, the general performance is still about me, my transition, thoughts on being trans, gender, and so on. But that’s not really a show.

Which isn’t to say Trans Form needs to have a strong linear narrative, or a “plot,” per se. But audiences watch shows from beginning to end and I’m not quite avant garde enough to stand on stage for another without some sort of arc or feeling of completion or finality at the end.

So what is my show about?

Continue reading 'So what is this show about?'»

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By Rebecca, September 6, 2009 5:11 pm

Daisy and Mattie chimed in on the discussion of this recent post about about the best way to describe an individual’s gender, gender identity, status as cis/transsexual, and a few other related concepts. Following some discussion at Daisy’s blog, Dear Diaspora, I came up with three spectra:

1. Gender Identity as it relates to Self Presentation
2. Gender Identity as it relates to Assigned Sex
3. Subconscious Sex as it relates to Assigned Sex

Spectrum 1 was coming from Daisy’s use of cis/transgender at her above-linked post, Spectrum 2 is the commonly-used definition of cis/transgender, and Spectrum 3 is the commonly used definition of cis/transsexual. (If that doesn’t make sense, please take a look at my previous post for a more in-depth explanation of these concepts.)

Basically, Daisy got me thinking about how the commonly-used definition of cis/transgender and cis/transsexual are based off of a a person’s identity as it related to their assigned sex, whereas the definition she was using for cis/transgender was based off a person’s perception of itself as it related to their gender identity. That’s the long-story-short of where the three spectra came from.

With that background out of the way, I have a few more things I’d like to clarify before moving on with this post:

• After hearing Mattie’s thoughts, and thinking things over more myself, I agree that trying to change the definition of cis/transgender is ultimately tilting at windmills
• Perhaps more importantly, it would force people who do identify as transgender to have to massively rethink their own self-identification in a way I’m not comfortable with
• As such, I’ll continue to use the Spectrum 2 (commonly-used) definition of cis/transgender rather than caveating it all the time with phrases like “commonly-used.” Starting….now!

But I still do think there are two big issues which came up in this discussion that are worth examination by anyone at all interested in gender politics and identity issues, and the transgender and transsexual populations in particular:

1. The value of having something along the lines of Spectrum 1 as a more widely-understood concept.
2. The sloppy and problematic nature of the standing definitions of cis/transgender and cis/transsexual

Continue reading 'Linguistic troubles with cis/transgender'»

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By Rebecca, September 4, 2009 12:35 am

(Brace yourself, this is going to be a long post.)

An Introduction

As usual, Daisy had an interesting post over at Dear Diaspora. (Although I think I found it more interesting than she may have originally intended!) She set the post up as intending to clarify some terms surrounding gender and identity (cissexual, transsexual, cisgender, transgender, etc) so that she could use the terms in later posts. She assumed that her readers were generally familiar with cissexual and transsexual, but used the following to define cisgender:

- cisgender: not transgender, not genderqueer; having a sex that aligns with one’s social gender (i.e. female/feminine/woman or male/masculine/man)

I had to read that definition a few times to make sure I understood, because it’s not the definition I’m familiar with. That definition would look something more like:

- cisgender: not transgender, not genderqueer; having a gender identity that aligns with one’s assigned sex

That is, the definition of cis/transgender I’m familiar with – and what I think is the more commonly accepted definition – is concerned with how one’s gender identity relates to assigned sex. Conversely,  Daisy’s definition is concerned with how one’s gender presentation (“social gender”) relates to one’s gender identity (as I think we determined in the comments that she meant by “sex”).

Interesting.

Continue reading 'The ideas and language of gender and identity'»

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By Rebecca, August 18, 2009 11:24 pm

Think B4 You Speak is a recently launched campaign aiming to eradicate the use of ‘gay’ as a slur or an insult:

Penny Arcade makes a counter-argument (click for the original):

Continue reading 'That’s So Gay'»