“You Look Great! I Never Would Have Guessed!” And Other Acts Of Well-Intentioned Cissexism

Disclaimer: this post is not specifically inspired by or directed towards ANY of my friends, family, colleagues, readers or fans. I am very appreciative of all of your kindness and support.

A couple weeks ago when I posted about how to ask trans people questions without doing so in an insensitive or invasive way, I made a point about unintended implications or underlying assumptions. I also used as a brief example the compliment mentioned in this title. I wanted to explore that a little bit more, focusing on the context of compliments and support. [Read more…]

Preserving Choice: Lupron And The Medical Ethics Of Treating Transgender Children

Over the past year or so, there’s been a curious and sudden surge of awareness in the general public consciousness about the issue of transgender children. While their existence is something that has been going on for… well… forever, and the trans community has certainly been aware of the likely fact that gender identity is typically developed very early in life (even if not always precisely articulated and negotiated until later) and have been aware of the issues related to it, it seems that it wasn’t until 2011 that it was all that discussed or considered in the general imagination.

Yet now we’re beginning to find it in the news. The actual, mainstream news. There was Storm, the child in Ontario who was not openly assigned a gender by hir parents, the story of the identical twins Nicole and Jonas in Boston, one a trans girl and the other a cis boy, and the issue of Bobby Montoya, a young trans girl, being included in a Colorado Girl Scout troop. Last week a 10-year-old trans girl from England who has faced significant exploitation, dehumanization and misgendering by the media (I wonder which paper, possibly beginning with the word “Daily” and ending in the word “Mail”, may have been involved?), appeared with trans media activist Paris Lees on BBC Breakfast. I found out about this through the shower of horribly transphobic tweets that followed. And recently there’s been a controversy surrounding a father in Berlin’s efforts to have his 11 year old transgender daughter involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital so as to ensure that she cannot follow through on her wish to prevent a masculinizing puberty (and ideally, in his view, “cure” her and have her somehow become a typical cisgender boy).

There’s a very key thing to remember: prevention. [Read more…]

Cloud Atlas and The Lana Wachowski Wiki War

There’s a beautiful, wonderful, intricate novel I love called Cloud Atlas. I’d probably be willing to put it in my top ten novels list, if I had a top ten novels list. Do I have a top ten novels list? Maybe I should have a top ten novels list. I’m going to write one more sentence ending in top ten novels list.

It’s structured as six separate stories, nested inside one another like Matryoshka dolls. Each story hops across genres, and moves forward through time. The first is a 19th(?) century journal of a man sailing in the south Pacific, then an epistolary set of letters sent from a bisexual composer exiled in Belgium in the early 20th century to his ex-boyfriend back in England as he becomes embroiled in a complicated love affair and struggle to complete his own masterpiece, then a sort of mystery thriller in the mid 20th century as an investigative journalist unravels a cover-up of flawed safety precautions in a nuclear power plant, then a comedy of errors in present(ish) day as a publisher finds himself mistakenly imprisoned in a nursing home, then a dystopian ultra-corporate future cyberpunk version of Korea where a cloned slave for a fast food chain develops self-awareness and rebels for freedom, and finally a post-apocalyptic (very post, no one even remembers what happened) distant future Hawaii where industrialized civilization has long since collapsed and the few surviving humans are living tribal, pre-agrarian lives.

The stories move forward, getting cut off at crucial points and revealed as a story being followed by a character in the next section, until the middle of the novel, at which point the last story is told completely through, then we start moving backwards into the completions of each story until finally ending on the one we started with: The Pacific Journal Of Adam Ewing.

It’s absolutely, staggeringly, breathtakingly awesome. You should read it. Now. Right away. Before something I’m about to tell you about happens. It’s written by David Mitchell. [Read more…]

Conservatives In Baltimore Up In Arms Against Trans Rights Law

I am a bloody idiot.

I spent all day lying around in bed watching Sherlock and eating junk food. It’s now quarter past midnight and I have absolutely nothing scheduled to go up in the morning. I am now going to attempt to crank out three posts before my brain shuts down from sleepy.

-sigh-

First we have this awful business coming out of Baltimore. A new law is being proposed in Baltimore County that would outlaw discrimination in the workplace, housing and public spaces on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Effectively, it’s a “bathroom bill”, the kind of legislation designed to allow trans people to access basic services, rights, opportunities and necessities without our lives being needlessly complicated by the irrational fears of others. It protects us from the instiutionalized discrimination we typically face on a daily or near-daily basis, such as the inability to rent apartments, land a job or go pee in a safe, non-humiliating space. [Read more…]

“Reiki For Trans People”

So I was fucking around on Twitter the other day, as I am often wont to do (@nataliereed84, hint hint hint), and happened to catch a re-tweet from some place called trans-health.com. This site has existed since 2001, but sort of fell under the radar for awhile before recently being purchased by transguys.com and re-launched this past December with some very spiffy, slick, professional-looking, doctor-y science-y medicalish graphics. [Read more…]

“I Am The Lorax. I Speak For The Gender Binary.”

On Thursday night I went out to see The Muppets with a few friends. It was actually really, really good! Funny, cute, and clearly a sincere, heartfelt love letter to The Muppet Show and simultaneously an homage to Muppet fandom. It was fun seeing it with a pretty big group of really cool people too, Muppet fans all. I had a nice time. I even got a little bit teary-eyed when they sang The Rainbow Connection, which I honestly consider one of the greatest songs of the 20th century.

The quality of the movie, though, was just barely able to make up for the unspeakable Eldritch horror that was the trailer for the upcoming CG-animated adaptation of The Lorax. Yes, dear readers, it looks every bit as bad as you fear, and then some.

[Read more…]

How To Ask A Trans Person Questions Without Being Insensitive About It

Okay. We get it. You’re curious. You have questions. Lots of them. That’s totally understandable. Transgenderism is, to you, something really strange and hard to comprehend, and also intensely fascinating as it calls into question some of the fundamental assumptions about identity and gender. We’re rare, too, and a great many of us prefer to remain invisible. You don’t meet us very often, and when you do, it’s rare that it’s an occasion where you’re able to ask anything. There are very few trans people who are out there willing to make themselves available as sources of information. So you want to take that rare opportunity to ask some of the questions you’ve had floating around in your head ever since you first heard there were such a thing as people who change their sex.

What’s the harm, right? You’re only expressing interest and trying to understand. You’re reaching out, showing a desire to learn and grow. You’re demonstrating your acceptance through your willingness to engage.

Well.. sort of. Trouble is, you’re also often expressing entitlement, and reenacting some of the forces of oppression that make our lives a bit less than wonderful. Unintentionally, of course, but as we should all understand by now, intent isn’t magic, and consequences are consequences.

It’s important to understand that there’s a whole lot more of you (cis people with questions) than there are of us (openly trans people to ask). As such, we’re bombarded with questions all the time. It defines (and detracts from) a pretty significant chunk of our social interactions. And it’s virtually guaranteed that whatever your question is, this is not the first time we’ve been asked.

There’s a couple things that have resulted in this being on my mind. The FAQ and the questions sent in in response to my “Ask Me Stuff!” post are NOT amongst them. Those questions were solicited, which is a totally different kind of thing, and I’m appreciative of all the questions readers did send in. I’m talking here about unsolicited questions. There was the little interaction with commenter Eternally Learning in response to my post In Memory Of Another Natalie, based on some prior history at a skeptic web forum, and there was also an annoying little run-in I had yesterday where a stranger at a check-cashing shop asked me a series of very personal questions, such as when I first knew I was trans, whether I was on hormones, and how my family had reacted.

So I figured it might be helpful to put up a little guide for how to ask your questions in a respectful way. [Read more…]

“But I’m An Ally! I’m On Your Side!”

Lately I’ve been doing this thing where I make a point of trying to call people out on their cissexism and transphobia. Typically it’s not the big, nasty, evil, “you’re perverted and delusional and ought to be shot on sight” stuff, since it’s unlikely I ever end up interacting with such people anyway. Instead it’s usually the little things, the tiny little micro-aggressions that piece by piece help normalize a culture of intolerance.

One of the most common defenses I’ve been finding myself having to deal with, on a pretty frighteningly consistent basis, is people saying “But I’m an ally! I’m on your side!”. This can end up being expressed even by people trying to defend some horrendously cissexist views. Apparently, for them, all it takes to earn your “ally” card, be “on my side” and therefore magically above criticism is that you not think I’m a horrific sub-human who doesn’t deserve any human rights at all and, as mentioned, ought to be shot on site. That’s all it takes, apparently, to qualify as being “on the side” of trans rights, and immune to having one’s assumptions or preconceptions about gender and transsexuality, however vile, open to being questioned. [Read more…]

Updated Canadian Aeronautics Act Permits Discrimination Against Transgender Passengers

Even though I’m a little late on finding out about this, details concerning this story are a bit sketchy at the moment, and my google fu is sadly failing me to be able to find much (if any) reporting on the subject, but it appears that recent amendments to the Canadian Aeronautics Act, the laws and regulations regarding aviation in Canada, have added a regulation that permits discrimination against transgender passengers, entitling airline employees to refuse them permission to board. Specifically, this one:

Sec 5.2(1)(c) of the ID screening regs of Aeronautics Act: “An air carrier shall not transport a passenger if the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents.”

Oh hell no, Harper. [Read more…]