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SL Seasons Greetings!
Some holiday snapshots from Second Life, in part to commemorate my first rezzday as well as the slew of holidays this season.
And because I’m becoming such a virtual fashion plate, here’s where I got the bits of my outfit.
Crop, Santa hat/jacket/corset: ~Vanilla Pleasures~by Madame du Couturier
Candy cane dispenser belt: Lusty Sexy Fashion
Candy cane dispenser belt: Lusty Sexy Fashion
Boots, latex garter girdle: VvB Design (available inworld only)
Fully fashioned stockings: No.9 Nylons (available inworld only)
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Show Me Your Scars
N.B.: I posted this to Twitter this morning as a series of separate tweets, and have made only minor changes.
Listen well.
So many of my loved ones have scars & wounds & think they aren’t beautiful.
But those scars & wounds are WHY you’re beautiful.
Show me a person without a single scar or wound and I’ll show you someone who has nary a thing of value to offer anyone.
I say this because everyone I know that has something of worth to offer has had it taken from them or has been rejected violently. This world is full of perils for those of us who have something to give. None of us escape unscathed, although some are wounded worse than others.
Show me your beauty. Show me your scars.
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
Amen.
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Who Exactly Wants A Period?
There has been a fair amount of controversy over an ad for Always sanitary napkins that Proctor & Gamble, the manufacturer of Always, has disclaimed. The ad thoroughly misgenders and erases trans women through equating us with drag queens—some of which have taken off their wigs, or are in a clearly-marked “Gentlemen” restroom. It also mocks trans women for the genuine distress of not being able to menstruate. I could go at length about what exactly is wrong with this ad, but others have already done so, and I advise you check out their take on the matter, here and here among other places.
I’m including the ad below, with a trigger warning since this is pretty offensive to trans women:
Aside from the disgust and outrage I feel over the ad, I also paused and reflected on one of the assumptions of the ad—and I found it no longer rang true.
There was a time when, yes, I desperately wished I could menstruate—but not for menstruation’s sake. To wit, I wanted to be a mother, badly. This desire, and the belief I could never conceive outside of some futuristic biotechnology, fueled a fair portion of the self-loathing I felt when I first realized I was a trans woman. The despair over never being a mother was so crushing that it shocked a couple of otherwise stoic therapists into passionate pleadings that I not give up hope, that there were other options. But that didn’t take the pain away.
But then I found myself becoming a mother anyway—in two senses.
One, I was a stepmother to a young cis man I sometimes jokingly call my favorite red-headed stepchild. Helping to raise him has done much to fill the void—to have someone call me momma, to seek comfort and advise and love from me, to be nurtured and shaped into someone I am truly, humbly proud of having raised.
Two, while it took years to realize it, I was also a mother to myself. All trans women are, really. The woman who is denied by the outside world can only be allowed to grow up, to be nurtured and loved and cherished and protected, when we recognize the mother inside us. I’m not saying we’re all great mothers—a lot of us have to learn how to be mothers at the same time that we’re developing as trans women, and a lot of us (myself included!) make mistakes while doing so. But if we rise to the challenge, and learn how to be loving and kind to ourselves, to feel proud of ourselves and to encourage ourselves to reach further, we may find that the burning urge to be a mother will be well satisfied.
That said, I do not need any sort of essentialist notions of motherhood to determine whether or not I can be a mother. I am a mother, and a damn proud one at that.
And if you don’t like that, you can shove your sanitary napkins down your throat. Always.
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Just How Many Trans Folk Are There? Pt. II—Why It Matters
About three months ago I addressed the fact that more contemporary statistics and analyses show that there is a much larger number of trans people than the classic “1-in-10,000” number still bandied about by so-called transgender experts. What I didn’t do at the time was explain why it matters how many trans people there are. I am remedying that lack in this post, because it matters big time.
Note that below I am explicitly presuming a cisgender audience and that all references not qualified by “trans” are cis. This is depressingly common in cis writings, and I usually try to avoid such, but in this case, I am specifically speaking to you cis readers. My trans readership is a bit more likely to know what I’m about to spell out below.
Let’s suppose that you are the administrator of a hospital—or, for that matter, a medical school—and there is a proposal to provide training on transgender health care needs. Let’s further suppose you don’t have any specific biases against trans folk, despite having been exposed to cissupremacist ideas about sex and gender from your parents’ first clumsy attempts to explain boys and girls all the way through your own medical education. (A big supposition, I know, but work with me here.) You consider yourself a good person and want to provide help to everyone you can, including trans folk. But you’re also looking at your budget and having to make hard choices about what to add, what to keep, and what to cut. Now, bearing all this in mind, are you more likely to support the proposal if you think only one out of 10,000 people are trans, or if you saw 0.3%—three out of 1000—are trans?
Never mind that, as I pointed out before, 0.3% actually sounds like it might be still too small, based on Lynn Conway’s analysis of trans-related operations. Never mind that there’s open debate of whether Dr. Conway’s own numbers are too conservative.
Three out of 1000 versus one out of 10,000?
I would argue that most of you would be more supportive knowing the larger figure, whereas with the smaller figure you’re more likely to see us as anomalies, and with perhaps some hand-wringing, more likely to deep-six that transgender health care training.
Idealistically, it’s monstrous that trans folk’s lives could be compromised so easily by mere numbers, but in a world with competing priorities and an emphasis on cutting costs to the point of austerity, numbers matter—and it’s a lot easier to justify the health care training knowing that you’re reaching a fairly sizable population—in the US at large, .3% of the population is just over 921,000 people. Yes, nearly a million people, from what are in my opinion very conservative and likely inaccurate numbers.
Chillingly, this same logic applies to pretty much every area where trans folk need better service, more protection, and greater understanding. If you’re a state legislator, are you more likely to sign on to trans anti-discrimination laws if you know you’re protecting only a few individuals, or a sizable portion of your constituents? If you’re an HR director at a corporation, will you work harder to secure health care coverage if you think you have at most one or two trans employees, or if you have a few dozen? (Or, if you’re the size of Walmart, a few thousand?) If you handle housing discrimination cases, are you more likely to educate yourself on trans issues if you think you might encounter them once in a blue moon, or if you realize that by numbers alone there’s probably a lot more trans housing discrimination cases than you hear?
And what if you don’t have any such power—if you don’t make any decisions at all at your job? The numbers still matter. You’re more likely to care about the welfare of trans folk if you realize that the odds are very good that you know at least one trans person, whether or not they are out to you. Yes, no matter how conservative you are—there’s certainly conservative trans people. Yes, even if you live in a small town—although the trans person may have moved to find better opportunities elsewhere. Knowing this, you may be more likely to vote for laws that help protect trans people, or to encourage your charities to have an outreach that centers trans folks’ needs. Dare I hope, you may even be more likely to call out obvious transphobic behavior when you see it, less likely to laugh at jokes about “men in dresses”, more willing to open your heart and mind and start learning about us trans people.
Every fiber in my moral being screams outrage that, in this world, we may flourish or perish on a statistic. But those are the facts. As long as our numbers are minimized it’s easier to ignore our suffering and our need. But with knowledge that our numbers are far greater than originally realized, and that every cis person probably knows at least one of us, maybe more, attention must be paid.
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Seattle Slutwalk, Part I
I just completed the Seattle Slutwalk, where I saw lots of friends, lots of trans women, lots of attitude. The chest is mine. :)
Part II will be edited video footage.
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Cog Days of Summer: Aftermath
After the steampunk Hurricane hit, some tried to be strictly genteel
among the mayhem, while others… just gaped… in awe. Collars
popped, drinks guzzled, dollars worn, and through it all some of us
managed to, dare I say, smile anyway….
among the mayhem, while others… just gaped… in awe. Collars
popped, drinks guzzled, dollars worn, and through it all some of us
managed to, dare I say, smile anyway….
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Floozies & Fairy Tales: Aftermath
I didn’t take any photos of the burlesque show I was at last night—I was too busy working lights and sound—but I did get photos of a number of us performers, staff, and close friends afterwards. Not included: Pictures of lesbionic plate licking or fisting jokes.
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Growing Up in the Closet
TRIGGER WARNING: Frank, uncensored quotes of cissexist people and attitudes follow.
I was born in 1970. For perspective, that was roughly 18 years after Christine Jorgenson was outed in the press; eleven years after the Cooper’s Donuts riot; four years after the Compton’s Cafeteria riot; two years after Gore Vidal published Myra Breckenridge; less than a year after Stonewall.
I was too young for the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but that’s OK—it was still a cult favorite when I was in high school, and remember the call-outs my friends would sing in remembrance of their wild Saturday night fun: “In just seven days of oral sex, I can make you a fag, just like my dad!” And this was supposed to be a celebration of being transgender?
I was too young to remember the initial controversy around Renée Richards, but I remember Gallagher singing, years later, to the tune of “This Old Man”: “He can play mixed singles by himself!”
I was too young for pornography—but driven by curiosity in the taboo, I looked at it anyway. And thus I got introduced to the litany of objectification and othering that fill cis narratives of trans women. Women with something extra. Pussy on a stick. Girlyboy. He-She. Shemale. Perverse creations of medical science with unbridled appetites for all sorts of sexual escapades. The frank if humiliating portrayals of trans women in porn was in stark contrast to the near-absolute silence in polite society, save for the occasional joke. We existed to shock, to titillate, to arouse, to satiate, to submit—but we didn’t exist on our own terms, for our own reasons.
Just the bits I’ve mentioned so far was enough to keep me deep in the closet—worse, when my father discovered my stash of women’s clothing, I pushed myself so much deeper into the closet that I refused to even think about such things, and instead weathered accusations of being homosexual—irritatingly conflated with transgender behavior—through my formative years. The most ironic insult? “You’d get laid more if you dressed like a girl!”
And of course there were movies, and the themes they draped over cis-supremacy’s fantasies about how trans women were. Tootsie. (Manipulators!) Bachelor Party. (Perverts!) Soapdish. (Villians!) The Crying Game. (Vomit-inducing!) Silence of the Lambs. (Psychopaths!)
So as you might imagine it took a while to disabuse myself of all these negative images and embrace the fact that I am a trans woman. One might wonder how much better off I would have been if I didn’t have to deal with such extreme cissexism. Never mind that—I wonder how many trans women would still be alive….
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The Nature of Black Metal
It is all too simple to imagine black metal is only about obsessions
with darkness and evil, with death and Satan. Resist that temptation. Despite the iconography and imagery that many (but not all) black
metal bands use, there is something far more basic at play here. Black metal is the weed, the bramble, the creeping vine—seemingly
doomed to stay underfoot. Ah, but let the creepers find some object
that dares in its hubris to reach towards the heavens! Then its
rhizomes will probe, seeking purchase, turning tiny fissures into
gaping crevasses, drawing sap from the evergreen, climbing
relentlessly over rock, rending branches from their trunks, eroding
stone walls, inevitably and eventually leaving naught but ruin in its
wake. Ah, but there are some things that the growth of black metal cannot
overrun. The mountain has too broad a base to be pulled downward by
mere tangles. The ocean is too vast and too briny to be drained. The
stars are too distant, with an abyss between us and them. To these,
the ancient ones that shall remain long after we and our works have
turned to dust, we bend our knees and bow our heads. Even the forest
brings us awe, even as individual trees are felled. Not that these are
any more eternal than we are, but they have earned our respect and
reverence. That is the true legacy of black metal. And those who fail to
understand surely will be choked by overgrowth.
with darkness and evil, with death and Satan. Resist that temptation. Despite the iconography and imagery that many (but not all) black
metal bands use, there is something far more basic at play here. Black metal is the weed, the bramble, the creeping vine—seemingly
doomed to stay underfoot. Ah, but let the creepers find some object
that dares in its hubris to reach towards the heavens! Then its
rhizomes will probe, seeking purchase, turning tiny fissures into
gaping crevasses, drawing sap from the evergreen, climbing
relentlessly over rock, rending branches from their trunks, eroding
stone walls, inevitably and eventually leaving naught but ruin in its
wake. Ah, but there are some things that the growth of black metal cannot
overrun. The mountain has too broad a base to be pulled downward by
mere tangles. The ocean is too vast and too briny to be drained. The
stars are too distant, with an abyss between us and them. To these,
the ancient ones that shall remain long after we and our works have
turned to dust, we bend our knees and bow our heads. Even the forest
brings us awe, even as individual trees are felled. Not that these are
any more eternal than we are, but they have earned our respect and
reverence. That is the true legacy of black metal. And those who fail to
understand surely will be choked by overgrowth.
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Cis Narratives Versus Reality
I’ve always known I was a girl.
(Er, no I didn’t.)
I hated playing with trucks and I loved playing with dolls.
(My Tonka dumptruck used to carry my GI Joes around.)
The moment I heard the word “transsexual” I knew that was what I was.
(I was terrified at the possibility—I knew what people did to trans folk in this culture!)
I left home at an early age so I could be my true self.
(If by “early” you mean “after I got a college degree”, sure.)
I worked as a prostitute….
(LOLWUT.)
…So I could afford surgery for my boobs….
(Home grown, baybee!)
…Face….
(No, really, this is my actual nose, I inherited it from my mom….)
…And, well, down there.
(That’s none of your damn business. In fact none of this surgery talk is your damn business, sirma’am.)
And now I’m a well-adjusted….
(Ignore these scars I got from living in a cis-supremacist world. Why change now?)
…Heterosexual….
(Ignore my girlfriend while you’re at it.)
…Content woman!
(Up yours!)
I’m no longer transsexual.
(Like hell.)
And I wish those troublemaking transgender people would just mind their business.
(TRANS LIBERATION NOW!)
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I’m Not Obsessed With Munchkin….
OK, maybe a little bit.
FINE. A lot.
Er, anyone in the Seattle area up for a game?
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Just HOW many trans folk are there?
According to a recent survey, 0.3% of the US population—3 out of 1000—identifies as transgender: http://www2.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/pdf/How-many-people-are-LGBT-Final.pdf And based on Lynn Conway’s analysis, 1 out of 500 people are transsexual—suggesting that 3 out of 1000 trans people may be still too low:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html
But despite all this, I keep seeing numbers, commonly cited by cis “experts”, that transgender people represent only 1 out of 10,000 of the population, or thereabouts.
Really, what are you afraid of? That maybe, if you’re so wrong about this number, you’re wrong about everything else you presume you know about trans folk?
Well, that’s OK.
Because, you know what?
You are.
And you should get over it now—and then start listening to trans folk and taking what we have to say seriously for a change.
Just saying.