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Natalie Reed: Coming Soon To A Meatspace Near You! May 8, 2012 at 1:00 pm  Natalie Reed Hi hi everyone! So the summer convention / conference season is beginning, and I thought now might be a good time to let you all know about my plans for appearances over the coming months, so that you can spend all your hard-earned moneydollars coming to see the actual, flesh-and-blood Natalie Reed, as she lives and breathes! And poke her with a sharp object! (she leaks sticky red stuff. Sometimes salty water stuff from her eyes, too, if you make the right sounds with your mouth at her) Protect Traditional Marriage! May 8, 2012 at 9:33 am Natalie Reed By now, you’ve probably seen a certain political cartoon. It comes in several variants, but the basic premise is always the same. Basically, it juxtaposes a straight person’s adamance in “protecting” his or her marriage from same-sex marriage with obliviousness or willful laziness in regard to those more realistic and immediate threats of their own making, such as adultery, drinking, abusiveness, emotional distance, poor sexual intimacy or compatibility, getting married far too soon or too young, or just the overall rate of divorce amongst straight couples. One version contrasts the “threat” of same-sex marriage against the supposed threat presented by quickie celebrity marriages, such as those of our sacrificial pop culture whipping girls like Kim Kardashian or Britney Spears. Funny how they’re always mocked for this, but not their husbands. Slut-shaming writ large. You may have also seen a witty political outreach campaign asserting the message “same-sex marriage does not threaten our marriage” alongside images of happy, committed, loving straight couples. Stephanie and Ben Zvan contributed a particularly adorable image in this series. The message being conveyed in these cartoons, jokes, and campaigns is that it’s simply absurd and silly for anyone to believe that allowing men to marry men, or women to marry women, poses any kind of threat to a straight person’s marriage, especially when held in contrast to the much more direct threats that are born of their own flaws and vices. This is often followed, in the easy, self-congratulatory tone of the mainstream Whole Foods and NPR liberal, that we’re smart enough to recognize this. We’re much less clueless than those homophobic right-wingers who rally together under the banner of “protecting” the institution or “sanctity” of marriage. We’re smart enough to recognize an actual threat to our marriage, and thus we won’t mistakenly invest our energies in the wrong places and will consequently have much happier, and ultimately more successful, unions. They’re just taking their own miseries out on a vulnerable minority because they can’t accept responsibility for themselves. We’re better than that. This is to make a fundamental misunderstanding in what is meant by threat. Honestly, not once have I ever seen an organization like NOM (National Organization for Marriage), or supporters of DOMA (Defense Of Marriage Act), or even your everyday, ground-level homophobe ever once advance the opinion that same-sex marriage is a threat to their marriage in the direct sense of potentially contributing to a divorce. The idea that this is the argument being advanced by opponents of same-sex marriage is a ridiculous, groundless, and dangerous straw-man, that leads us away from where the actual ideological battle is taking place. The idea that would substantiate a campaign like “same-sex marriage does not threaten our marriage” would be that this is meant as an informative, educational tactic, designed to help spread the message that heterosexual couples have nothing to fear from same-sex unions threatening their own, with the image of healthy, “normal” straight couples accompanying the message to help drive it home. But it’s trying to address a belief that no one actually holds, and is thereby wasted effort. Misdirected energy. No one needs convincing that same-sex marriage won’t lead to a divorce because as a general thing, no one is actually worried about that. The “Gender Atheist” vs. The Transgender Atheist May 7, 2012 at 1:00 pm Natalie Reed The morning of my birthday, April 5th, began as always. I recognized waking reality, assessed the relative pain in my back and neck, stretched, and paused to stare blankly out the window for a moment or two before fumbling for my glasses and, per my ritual, reaching to the coffee table by my bed for my laptop to check my e-mail, facebook, twitter, and the blog’s moderation queue. That morning’s twitter, though, was not like most morning twitters. That morning, I was greeted by tweets from Cathy Brennan. Brennan, in case the name isn’t met by you with immediate, horrified recognition and a shiver down your spine (as thunder claps and the horses whinny), is one of the most vocal, adamant and bitter of the transphobic wing of radical feminism. She has effectively devoted the entirety of her “career” to her obsessive hatred of us and her inability to reconcile her worldview with the fact that we exist and are, well… human. One of the most odious of her actions, and the one that most succinctly sums up what she’s all about, was co-spearheading an initiative to lobby the UN for removing gender identity and gender expression from their 2011 LGBTQ human rights declaration. She failed. I hope that stings her. Fourth Wave: Part Two May 7, 2012 at 9:00 am Natalie Reed
There are so many theories. The theories of the sexologists. Theories of the Christian right. Of the psychiatrists and psychologists. Of the academics and philosophers, even literary theorists. Of the average person watching a documentary, “here’s what I think it is…”. Of the people punching into google questions about what kinds of chromosomes or “chemicals” we have. People (without any education in biology or genetics, but who happened to catch some TV show somewhere about intersexuality) suggesting chimerism in the brain. And feminists’ theories too, of course. Lazy Sunday: Lady Godiva’s Operation May 6, 2012 at 8:01 am Natalie Reed A bunch of times I’ve heard this song being described as about a botched “sex change operation”. Whoever thinks that obviously wasn’t listening very closely and doesn’t know their queer history very well. It is indeed about a botched surgery that was often performed on trans women once upon a time. But it’s not about SRS.
Hedgehogerday And Two-Week Recap! May 5, 2012 at 8:30 am Natalie Reed Well, probably about time I do a recap, though the past two weeks still had less posts than most weeks. So it goes. To clarify, by the way, in regard to twitter conversations: the “Die Cis Scum” debate from last night was, relatively speaking, nothing. That wasn’t really upsetting at all. The nasty stuff was Wednesday and Thursday mornings. I also have some hedgehogs.
Resting May 4, 2012 at 9:58 am Natalie Reed Sorry again. This week has been a bit of a wash. I’ve had yet another deluge of bad days. I’ve decided to save the post I was working on for today (Fourth Wave: Part Two) and one from earlier in the week (The “Gender Atheist” vs. The Transgender Atheist: Why Gender Has Nothing To Do With Souls) for Monday, so I can get a bit of a head start and get back on a proper schedule. Anyway, thank you so so much for your patience these past three weeks. <3 you all. See you tomorrow, when I recap the (pathetically small) number of posts from the past two weeks. Sincerely, Natalie Reed
The Unspeakable May 3, 2012 at 8:41 am Natalie Reed Yesterday morning, on the third day of her trial, CeCe McDonald accepted a bargain for reduced charges and pled guilty to one charge of second degree manslaughter, with a probable sentence of 41 months. Three and a half years in a men’s prison, where she will undoubtedly be again subjected to exactly the forms of assault that landed her in this position, along with worse and more devastating forms, for refusing to die where so many women like her do. Like Brandy Martell. Like Paige Clay. Like Coko Williams. Those names are from the past month alone. CeCe had the will to survive an attempt on her life motivated by hatred of her gender and race, fundamental elements of her being. To them, she was simply the wrong kind of person, something that couldn’t fit into their worlds, and they wanted to make her go away. For daring to refuse the narrative of unremarkable- no, simply unremarked upon- death imposed by our present system on women like her, that system’s direct arm chose to punish her survival. The criminal justice system in the United States, and their media, had already sent a clear and horrifying message for years that the lives and deaths of trans women of colour simply don’t count enough to bother investigating or reporting. But now an even darker message has been sent: Don’t you dare survive, either. Yours is to suffer, and we will ensure it regardless of what you do. Different Dysphorias And Esoteric Embodiments May 1, 2012 at 9:00 am Natalie Reed By reader request! A couple weeks ago, one of my twitter followers wrote me saying they were having a hard time explaining the concept of non-op, non-binary and partial transitions to a friend, and was wondering if I could write a little something up explaining the basics. Although it took me a little bit longer than I’d hoped, I’ve finally gotten around to fulfilling the request. Enjoy! “Cheerleading” And The Dangerous Irresponsibility Of Jennifer Finney Boylan April 30, 2012 at 10:51 am Natalie Reed Us trans folks, tossed aside from society’s central mass and out into the margins, shunted into relative cultural invisibility, have a very, very hard time finding ways to see ourselves reflected in our culture. When trans people appear in television, movies, comic books and other media, we’re typically portrayed as jokes, psychotic villains or “shocking” plot twists. In the few occasions that these portrayals are meant to be sympathetic, they usually nonetheless end up being glaringly inaccurate, offensive, patronizing, misrepresentative and still damaging in terms of the myths they feed. Real life trans people in positions of success or power are likewise rare… not for a lack of existing, or for some kind of dearth of talent in our community (there are lots of really amazing trans folk), but due to the ways the usual forces of privilege, discrimination and bias operate to stack the deck against us achieving the recognition or visibility we deserve, and how recognition and success can often be conditional on keeping one’s gender status private. The net result is a community in desperate need of role models, figures to suggest that transitioning and living a trans life does not have to mean compromising your ambitions, interests or the rest of who you are, but for whom shockingly few such figures are provided. So when certain trans people do arise to relative prominence, we end up investing them with considerable attention and significance. These few public trans figures end up meaning the world to us, playing very key roles in our lives, and making a genuine difference for us, especially during the early stages of our transitions. In virtually every transition narrative there is at least one such role model, a touchstone that helped provide us with strength and a realizable goal when we needed it the most. We also look to these figures to represent us in the world as a whole, as they’re the only ones with the relative clout to not be shuffled into the general invisibility of our community. We depend on people like Kate Bornstein and Mara Keisling to do a good job on the Melissa Harris-Perry show. And we pour a lot of emotion into whether or not they do. “You’re us up there”, we think, “and we don’t get many chances. Please don’t blow it.” With the incredible degree of personal, cultural, social and political significance invested in these figures by the trans community, there comes a great degree of responsibility. What these people say gets taken seriously… by trans people and even by cis people. And what they say has meaningful, real consequences. As the only real guiding voices of our community, whether they’ve opted for it or not, when they speak, they speak to and for all of us. So considerable care is demanded. When they speak recklessly, without thought to the consequences, actual people get hurt. Lives can be damaged. Even destroyed. |
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