Since it’s already a couple days into the week without any posts up, I’ve been thinking it might not be such a bad idea to just take the rest of this week as a short semi-break.
I have several posts I’m working on right now, TWO of which are all about sexy-sex times, another that’s all about some super trans-positivity, one that’s a short meditation on the yearning for faith and spiritual belief and how I often find renewed commitment to skepticism and atheism through such yearnings, and a few ideas pertaining to wonderful geeky fun like comic books (and tarot cards?). Also there’s a big pop culture and media theme week coming up soon. So I’m not slacking, just doing my best to get myself back on a regular schedule after the last few erratic weeks.
Things have calmed down, I’m feeling a lot better than I was during that one particularly rough month, and I won’t be doing much travelling for a few weeks, so things should be a lot more consistent soon.
By “semi-break”, I mean that I will get a few things up over the next couple days, including a summary of my time at the Imagine No Religion 2 conference and some of the thoughts that came to mind over the weekend, a collection of the links I’ve been gathering up over the last week and a half, and one last recap post.
Since I’m in the process of shifting to a lighter, more manageable schedule (one post per day, if I can finally actually get my routine back together), the recaps aren’t really going to be necessary anymore for making sure things don’t fall between the cracks. As a replacement organizational tool, I’ll be setting up an alphabetical archive and an archive organized by sub-topics.
Anyway, I’m sorry for the lack of warning. I wasn’t quite expecting the conference to have been as busy as it was, nor as exhausting, and didn’t anticipate this big chunk of downtime. But while scrambling to finish up some writing this evening it occurred to me that this might be a nice opportunity.
I want to sincerely thank everyone for being patient with how spotty my blog has been these past few weeks, with there being at least one missed day almost every week since mid-April. Obviously I had a lot going on, but being a “professional” writer does mean having to be able to work through the tricky times as well as the easy times. I’m also very, very aware of how annoying unreliable blogs are, and that one of the things that keeps readers coming back is knowing that new content is going to be available on a regular basis. So the fact that you guys have stuck by me and supported me through this stuff has been fantastic. I still feel like I won the internet readership lottery. I’m immensely lucky to have you all.
Please know I’m doing my best to try to get things running smoothly and reliably again. And this little semi-break is intended to help get there, not perpetuate the spottiness.
So… yeah. Stay tuned for my INR2 recap, some linky links, and then a whole bunch of sexy next week!
…but about to check out and head back to Van. I tried to find a spare couple hours yesterday to get something ready for today, but just nothing doing.
I’ve ascertained that PZ Myers and Matt Dillahunty are total teddybear cuddlebags and the whole “atheist firebrand” thing is only ever a compensatory act.
I’m kicking it up in Kamloops, BC at the Imagine No Religion 2 conference and having a blast. Desiree Schell is amazing (and I might secretly declare her my new skeptic-feminist BFF), I’ve met a bunch of readers and fans (and am kinda tripping out on the whole fame vibe), was given a big ton of chocolate from an anonymous donor/fan, have lots of friends around, and am generally doing well.
Sadly, it’s gotten a bit late, I need sleep, so no recap and wombats today.
This post is part of a collaborative Crossover Event with the famed and deadly Dolphin Assassin, Monica Maldonado. We’ve both written on the same general subject today. Please head over to her blog, TransActivisty, and check out her thoughts.
In the absence of positive representation in one’s culture, when one feels invisible under its appraisal of who does or does not count or deserve acknowledgment, when one is starving for any figures through whom you can see yourself, you find them where you can. You build them out of subtle hints, possible (and often unintended) suggestions, little cracks in conventional characterization… or you recontextualize the negative representations. Turn perspectives around. While those in society’s privileged interiors have trouble understanding marginal perspectives, we understand theirs entirely. We need to. It’s a necessity to survival. But we don’t have to play along, and we certainly don’t often see things exclusively through their terms. You find your pride where you need it, even in the hatred.
And what often feeds an even more dire necessity for recontextualizing what few (typically negative) representations is the need to understand oneself, who you are, what you’re feeling. To articulate your experiences back to yourself. This is painfully true of young (in all senses of the word) trans people. Our culture doesn’t (or at least didn’t) hand us any tools for understanding what we were going through and defining it for yourselves, or understanding our needs and the options for having those needs met. But we found them anyway.
You find your identity where you need it, even in the hatred.
Is my shadow showing? Am I wearing too much concealer? It’s not caking, is it? Does this top make my shoulders look broad? Oh fuck, I need to pluck the little hairs on my collarbone. Fuck fuck I shouldn’t have left the house without checking that. I’m such an idiot. My voice just dropped, didn’t it? My Adam’s apple is protruding when I swallow, isn’t it? God everyone can tell. Shit. I shouldn’t be out with another trans person. They’re all staring. I shouldn’t be ashamed of this. I’m so fucking stupid and pathetic for being ashamed of this. I just wish I looked like her. Or her. Or any of them. Anyone but me.
Hi! Welcome to the wonderful world of a trans woman’s interior dialogue!
It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to anyone that trans women lug around a huge and cripplingly heavy amount of self-consciousness. If you find yourself surprised by this, I appreciate your extremely high opinion of us, but you should probably learn a bit more about how human beings tend to feel about things. What often seems lacking, though, is much critical engagement with this fact. It seems to just be taken as a given “well, yeah, of course” without much stepping back to think about what it might actually mean.
Common exchange-
Me: “Ugh. I totally feel shitty about [insert aspect of my body here] today!”
Well-Meaning Friend (Usually Cis): “That’s not personal, that’s just what all women feel!”
No. I know what you’re trying to do, I know you’re trying to reassure me that there’s nothing uniquely wrong with me in feeling bad or self-conscious about my body, and that’s true, such feelings aren’t even remotely unique to me or to trans women, and I also know you want to couple that reassurance to validation of my gender. That’s cool. But I don’t think it’s fair to assume that how self-consciousness operates in a trans woman is simply the same thing that cis women experience.
Apologies for lateness again. I made a super last minute decision to ditch the half-finished post I was working on and write on this topic instead. Also apologies for any typos or sloppiness. This was written in one-sitting one-draft. I’ll come back in and clean it up later, but right now I just want to put it up. Enjoy!
Cultural representations of trans women are painfully rare. Cultural representations of butch, or simply less-than-femme trans women, are functionally non-existent.
While cis people like Chloe Sevigny and Germaine Greer do continue to openly denigrate the “exaggerated femininity” or “gross caricature” presentation that “so many” trans women possess, and use that to mock us as nothing more than men playing dress up, a presentation that falls short of expected feminine norms will be used to outright strip a trans woman of even the claim to a “false” womanhood. You’re not even trying, dude.
Gatekeeping structures continue to break down piece by piece in certain locales and medical communities, but in others it continues to be demanded that you meet expectations of presenting as female as the practitioner understands it, rather than as the patient herself understands it. The consequences can be an obligation to play along with imposed standards of proper feminine womanhood until such a time as all needed or desired treatments have been accessed and put behind you. Then, and only then, do they get to wear jeans and sneakers.
While in some queer or feminist trans communities, spaces and dialogues, femininity has ceased to be considered a requisite aspect of a trans woman’s expression and presentation, and the dotey housewife image of what a proper trans woman is to be lingers mostly in older generations or transsexual separatist / HBS communities, for many more individuals, often living in isolation, one of the only ways to assert one’s womanhood and have it be perceived by others is through claiming totemic representations of it through that which is most aggressively culturally coded as feminine, girly, for her.
And, of course, trans women’s gender presentations are consistently scrutinized under a microscope by a cissexist gaze that constantly seeks to place us where they want us, somewhere as non-threatening as possible, and held to hopelessly strict standards of what is proper or “correct” for a woman to wear or do that would never, ever be applied to a cis woman. Not without being met with ridicule.
Tell me the last time you ever saw the validity of a cis woman’s gender called into question on the basis of dressing too casually or imperfectly feminine.
Where I’m going with this is that feminist and trans-feminist movements aside, and even leaving general cultural progress out of it, femininity and femme presentations continue to be aggressively mandated to trans women. We have an intensely narrow range of behaviours and presentations that are available to us that even have a chance of being read within the wider culture as valid. Granted, under many circumstances, that range narrows into non-existence through the catch-22 of overlapping “too feminine”/”improperly feminine” and “not feminine enough” criticisms, but as a general rule? The trans woman that is to be acceptable, palatable, comprehensible, and representable to cis perceptions and standards must be femme. Full stop.
On Thursday night I got to sit at a table at The Elysian on Capitol Hill with four of the coolest, smartest, most badass trans people I know. Collectively, the five of us made for a pretty impressive little crew to roll deep into the unnerving Seattle late-night land of roving packs of drunken grues. I sat there, and knew enough about the assembled people to know that really (really) every single one of us had survived some horrific, fucked-up things in our lives. Things that absolutely can, and have, killed others. And yet, it dawned on me that all of us, on some level, were thinking “Compared to them? I had it easy”. I knew that at least a few such comparisons had been directly, explicitly drawn as such at some point in time, with that consequential feeling of invalidation of one’s own suffering. Like some kind of weird tragicomic inversion of the Monty Python “You had a shoebox? PURE LUXURY!” sketch.
I’m back from my little trip south of the border, and feeling much, much better. It’s funny how little it can take sometimes to make so much of a difference. Just a little of the right care in just the right places is often all it takes.
Well, the lead singer of Against Me, now going by the name Laura Grace, has now joined Mina Caputo amongst those with either the courage or brazen recklessness to transition in the public eye (not to imply that either really had much of a choice, mind). She’s announced her transition through Rolling Stone magazine. Keep an eye open for the HILARIOUS assumption that readers need to be informed that no, Laura is NOT the very first transgender musician ever.
I can’t help but feel things like this are pieces of a larger cultural shift. That they hint at something immense, and immensely beautiful. Would this have been possible even five years ago? Why now?
Let’s make the most of this now, everyone.
Anyway, I find the whole thing enjoyably recontextualizes a lot of her past work. For instance, this stark meditation on the mechanical repetitions of addiction, and the meaninglessness of statements of “I’m going to change things!” when you’re not yet able to address what really needs to be addressed. Something I understand entirely too well:
I’m going to be down in Seattle for a bit, and will be doing some decompressing, so I’ll be on vacation until Monday. I’ll be saving any writing I get done over the remainder of the week. Next week, I’m probably switching permanently to a new once-a-day schedule, as trying to get back on track with the old schedule hasn’t really been working out. I just don’t have the same time/energy I did when I started out.
Natalie Reed is a magical young woman who lives in the mists and pines of Vancouver, British Columbia, where she fends off the oppressive gloom and darkness basking in the warm glow of her laptop, thinking things about stuff and writing stuff about the things. Before moving to Vancouver she lived lots and lots of places, such as Nova Scotia's South Shore (where she grew up in a little village called Chester), the English West Midlands, the Sonoran Desert, the Carolina Piedmont, and the riot-grrl homeland of Olympia, Washington, where she earned a BA in something-erather in 2007. She can't quite remember. Her initial interest in skepticism was motivated by snapping out of a prolonged lapse into conspiracy theory. She got her start blogging at Skepchick, where she also established Queereka, the first ever skepticism blog devoted specifically to LGBTQ issues. Her many ridiculous interests include linguistics, feminism, gender theory, queer theory, human rights issues, poetry, neuroscience, biology, Doctor Who, Dr. Strange and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. You can contact her at sincerelynataliereed (at) gmail (dot) com, and if you find yourself developing a brain-crush on her, she can be followed at twitter, as @nataliereed84. She was born with a Y chromosome but totally kicked its ass.
Avatar and banner graciously designed by Shanna Cundal (www.shannacundal.com).
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May 23, 2012 at 9:00 am 
Natalie Reed 
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