kivaqblog-blog

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I’m a sparrowfox with swannish aspirations, i think

Non-binary Presentation Terms

Although words like butch, femme, masc, and fem have been applied to nonbinary folk since their inception, they don’t always meet the needs of non-binary people in comfortably describing the way we look. 

So here are a new additional set of options! We’ve considered two different “axes” here – one that relates most closely to the masc—fem scale, and one that considers “effort”, or a level of… drama or ostentation in a look. They can be combined as one pleases or used individually! 

Additionally, please apply them at will to yourself based on your own ideas about what it means to dress femininely or dramatically or androgynously etc. These words are not to be held hostage to cissexism or gender roles. These words also describe presentations that are inherently not binary – the only reason we’re using words like “masculine” and “feminine” to describe them at all is for ease of communication. They can and should describe particular looks, including those that people are inclined to gender, without actually gendering them. 

Note: These are not coined with the intention of being gender identities. They have nothing inherently to do with gender identity. You can be a demigirl stag, etc. (That said, if someone wants to use them as a gender because you feel it’s tied closely to your presentation, we’re certainly not stopping you.) 

Here they are!

Stag: A “masc”, “butch” or “tomcat” equivalent, describing a presentation one considers to be associated with ideas about masculinity, or a presentation others might consider masculine. 

Fox: Describing an androgynous, fluid, or combined presentation; can be applied to any presentation a person feels doesn’t resemble the other sides of the spectrum.  

Swan: A “femme/fem” or “doe” equivalent, describing a presentation one considers to be associated with ideas about femininity, or a presentation others might consider feminine. 

Sparrow: A casual, minimalist, muted or low-effort presentation. For example, for those folks who just roll through their closet and go. 

Crow: For presentations that are in-between, combined, or fluid along a scale of effort/ostentation. 

Peacock: For presentations that are high effort. Glam, dramatic, flashy, flamboyant, attention-drawing, etc. Dressed to the nines, so to speak! 

so anyway tag urself

(chart meant purely to be silly and fun, not to suggest actual criteria or associations. Disregard entirely if you resonate with the terms but not these goofy tidbits.)

Keep reading

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Trans Women on Bandcamp

I spent the last couple hours compiling this list. It is by no means the entirety of trans women/trans feminine folks on Bandcamp, it’s just the ones I could find. Reblog it, add to it, buy their music. Lich Witch House/IDM

Jane Doe and the Misery Loves Co Folk Punk

Ashby and the Oceanns Folk/Punk/Indie

Bella Trout Folk/Punk/Indie

Little Waist Punk/Pop Punk

Hazagussa Black Metal/Noise Metal

Lyskoi - Alyssa Kai Folk/Folk Punk   -Do not know for sure how Alyssa identifies, but there’s a good chance that Alyssa fits here.

Calliope Wong Instrumental/Classical/Electronic/Noise

Venus Selenite Spoken Word

Stars on a Bedroom’s Wall Tremendously Varied

Trrtle Nation Experimental Electro Noise

Ellie Rose Instrumental Synthpop

Skeletor Rising Electronic Harsh Noise

Hot Noisy Mess Electronic Harsh Noise/Experimental

Mya Byrne Folk/Americana

Pain Wife Electronic Harsh Noise/Death Industrial

Bog Witch Doom Noise/Noise Metal

Virtual Intelligence Cyber-Goth/Industrial/Neon Metal

Through Waves World Fusion/Darkwave

Ellah a Thaun Lyrical Dissonance

Toxic Delirium Gutter Punk/Noise Grunge

HIRS Speedcore/Thrash/Grind

Noize Pervertz Harsh Noise

pinkclaws Ambient Electropop

Ruby Price Pop Punk/Mumblepunk

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❤️💛💚💙💜

You are valid

Happy Pride Month!!

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Taking a Break

I need a break. It’s been eleven months’ HRT, I’m about to have my first Pride Month that feels real. I need to do a lot of personal maintenance, emotional and physical, and writing will be part of it. I’ll probably give little open-mic readings because I need immediate feedback IRL. But I won’t be posting anything else for a while, maybe a long while. We’ll have to see what comes next.

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Did You See That? (excerpt)

this is an excerpt from the thing I’m working on, just wanted to post it:

beginning of excerpt

Did You See That? or, Trans in Public

It was a genuinely lovely day, for a change, and Kathleen and I went to shop at Coming Soon Market, the little twisty-aisled hipster-focussed supermarket on Fifth where the old El Faro Market used to be before it burnt. (The signs were up for so long, “Coming Soon! Market”, that I call it Coming Soon.) We tried to find parking spots at Steve’s on 9th Market, but nothin’ doin’: on this sunny Sunday morning in May, after all the shit weather we’ve had, everyone’s out and about. Including lots and lots of tourists, for reasons which remain truly obscure to me; at least the double-deckers don’t come down here. But tourists are here again now that it’s almost warm, and I am trying to accept that they aren’t going away.

____

~ What might have just been a journal entry about going to the supermarket seems to have turned instead into a description of the crap I put up with as a trans woman in public, largely but certainly not entirely from guys, and what the crap is like when it happens and after it happens. This is, in other words, a Trans Rant. ~

____

I looked around at a pleasant day in the South Slope: very sunny, a bit windy, the trees now filling in with leaves. I was standing with the cart of groceries we’d bought, waiting for Kathleen to bring the car around to the curb (the Coming Soon supermarket, like most New York City supermarkets, has no parking lot), so we could load it up. I was getting a lot of cursory glances, which realistically is to be expected, since we humans, of New York or elsewhere, do that to each other a lot anyway. The point, especially in New York, is not to overdo it. But no one seemed overly “starey” (adj., to be prone to staring at others; to do so to excess; e.g., men who stare at transgender women on subway trains; coinage, 21st c.). …

end of excerpt

so you just know something simple is about to go sideways. watch this space.

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I Will Fucking Be Cinderella! ⚢ ⚧ 🏳️‍🌈

I am Fucking Cinderella! For a whole weekend, I will Fucking Be Cinderella! I’m printing out the tickets for the dances on Pride Weekend, “Teaze” and “Femme Fatale.” I wonder idly who makes up these names, then there they are in my hands and I think, I’m going too! I get to go too! I finally get to go to the ball!! I think of Cinderella. 

And I think of the Lesley Warren TV version of Cinderella from when I was like seven, and how beautiful she was, and my 33 years here in New York, and connectedness and memory, and who I was when I was seven, and ever since, and goddammit for once Pride won’t suck!

And we’re going to go drinking at Ginger’s on Brooklyn Pride Night (the 11th, if anyone wonders). I have, I swear, never been. Sort of like living here and having never been to the Statue of Liberty, Ginger’s is the lesbian/queer women’s equivalent. Never saw the point before. But we’re going, this time.

It was always the worst time of the year to be a girl, but only on the inside, who also liked girls, yada yada. But I never got to be one. In this city where Gay Liberation was born. FFS. I was always on the outside looking in.

No more. 

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⚢ ⚧

A lot of my work probably should have content warnings, this does: discussion of sexual assault at a sporting event, current news story.

So, the Rangers are going to win Game 4, 4-1. A blowout, sort of; they pulled Anderson from the net for the third period and replaced him with Condon. After a really shaky first in which they managed to score -- well, someone one twitter, a beat reporter I think, noted that Anderson looked shaky, uncertain, something, during the warmup. And sure enough, he had a meltdown. Goes back to the Nation’s Capital -- the other nation’s capital -- for G5, then if they win it’s all set up for another Game 6 home win.

But on my feed, about halfway through the third, Greg Wyshynski retweeted Josh’s story. People think of Wysh as a party boy, maybe he does himself, but he’s put together an operation at Yahoo that’s made Puck Daddy Blog a serious journalistic operation, plus he hired Jen Neale, and they’re also the only place (in the US) that will carry this kind of story that Wysh retweeted. His frankness is not the kind of thing the League always appreciates, and the feeling is reciprocated. Certainly, this time, someone has called Bettman by now.

Because the Pittsburgh P-I reports tonight that a woman was raped at the last Pens game. In the women’s restroom. She screamed for half an hour, but no one heard. I suppose he expected that. She arrived at the nearest PPD district at 12:01 am and filed her report. I wanted to vomit. I still feel like throwing up. Vomit ideation.

I looked at the stands, or at the suits who had the expensive seats in the 100s, the celebs. Susan Sarandon was there, she’s a known hockey fan. I wondered if there were any other famous communists in the crowd, earlier in the game. She left early. I wondered how many of the fans there were men. I wondered how many of them were potential rapists. I wondered how many of them were rapists. If the president of the Untied States is a rapist himself, and, well, I read the Daily News in the 90s, it’s not a secret. He’s bought his way out of several sexual assault suits of various kinds.

So what am I supposed to think? I found a trans lesbian hockey player in Toronto, she liked something I retweeted the other day and she actually had ⚢ ⚧ on her nameplate. I’ve never much liked the Little Martian, my name for the trans symbol we seem to be stuck with until someone comes up with something better, while I’ve always been fond of the double womansign, obviously. But I was so grateful to see them together with a stick-and-puck that I tweeted to her tonight, just before the game, to let her know, gee, thanks, me too. Fan, anyway. A world away, she plays in the amateur “beer leagues” that are so popular in Southern Ontario. The women’s leagues; one woman was trying to explain on Farcebook why she won’t play in the men’s leagues even though she’s that good (Canadian Olympic, I think): the men are assholes. Some of them go out of their way to injure her, simply to chase her off “their” ice. They may be all polite and shit, but that’s really half the country. The other half voted for Rob Ford or would have. It’s complicated.

Like liking hockey if you’re really a lesbian separatist, if you were to write a SF novel or something where you could make everything come out the way you wanted. I hate men. I say that, or think it, a dozen times a day, most days. Yet I’m watching men’s hockey. Which, obviously, is faster and more violent than the women’s game, although when Canada plays the US (Russia isn’t that good, result of phallocentric cishet patriarchal bullshit priorities reflected in the obsessions of Poutine and the sad majority that apparently votes for him), it can be hard to tell. And lots more people watch. That’s why the Rivs play at Aeroflot (Aviator), out at Floyd Bennett Fucking Field, and the Rangers don’t. (The Isles are literally and figuratively halfway between, in terms of facilities suitable for hockey.)

But, hey, at least no one’s been raped at an Isles game. At least that we know of. Why, the League’s PR office might be tempted to point out, at the vast majority of hockey games, over the 99.9 years since the League’s creation in 1917, no one has been raped. Even though so many of the fans are, y’know, men.

So, I went into Twitter and changed my profile to put the ⚢ ⚧ on my nameplate too. They look nice together, and you don’t see it a lot, and you should, really. And added a link to my blog, shortened George Tirebiter to G. Tirebiter -- can’t let go of the old profile entirely, with the archaic Firesign Theater references, Kathleen and I bonded early over Firesign references -- and added the glyphs. I guess I’ll put the Little Martian on my blog, too. Next to the double womansign. And I changed the profile color to purple, goddammit. And wondered yet again. 

Someone tumblr’d an affirmation a while ago: trans men who still like needlepoint are still trans men and are still valid. I applied that to hockey, in my case, in reverse. I’m femme but there are butchy things I like. Okay, one butchy thing, which I’ve been following since I was ten, for unusual reasons, and know more about by now than is healthy: hockey. The only sport I follow. My sister lives in Chicagoland, she’s a Black Hawks fan, no one questions her femininity or feminality or whatever as a consequence. Kathleen is handy with tools, that doesn’t make her less femme. I shouldn’t constantly question my own shit, especially during the playoffs. I tried telling myself that not everything is political.

I tried telling myself during the last game -- this shows how long I can avoid politics -- that it was like Congress: everyone hates Congress, but most voters seem to like their own Congresscritter. I hate men. But not all men. Hashtag NotAllMen, Hashtag WyshForExample. Who was willing to tweet this during the third period of a playoff game, because it matters. Who has assembled a staff of professionals who pay attention to all of hockey, including the horrible parts, because it matters. And a few players have done some horrible things. For some reason, this horrified me more. Because it’s during an important playoff game? Because I’ve been horrified by men lately more than is necessarily good for me? Because it’s different now? Because it happened at a game, in a women’s room??

Hashtag NotAllMen, Hashtag ButMostOfThem. It’s a joke I tell. Do I add a question mark, when it comes to shit like this? What happens next? What the fuck are we supposed to think, really? Why would any woman now go alone to the restroom there? Is there any other way to go? Most women fans, it seems to me, come to games with men, not with other women or in a larger group including women. 

It’s a hockey game, ffs.

When does testosterone stop being entertaining and become repulsive? How much is too much? What kind of purse weapons should you bring into the women’s room at a hockey game? Should you even be there? I’ve assumed I’d have to go “undercover” to the goddamn Garden if I go to a game with Corrin from now on, because we sit in the nosebleed seats and it wouldn’t be safe. Not by the third period. Not being sure who the potential rapists are. I wouldn’t dare go into the men’s room. I don’t anyway at games, it’s a fucking zoo, but now, I’d rather go armed alone in the women’s room and take my chances with any guys in there. It’s sitting in the stands, wearing earrings and a bracelet, that would be really dangerous.

Jesus. I’m just going to post this and try to calm down.

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Getting Warmer

I seem to do better in warm weather generally. I grew up wearing shorts most of the time, in Texas. And warm weather means it’s clearer that I’m not dressed like a guy. I have a lot of clothes that work in warm weather, I figured that’s when I’d be coming out. Then, February happened. Came out of the closet like a rocket. But I don’t have much of a winter wardrobe yet. And I don’t like leggings. So for now, on chilly days I still have to wear my pair of guy-pants, which is uncomfortable in both the physical and the emotionally dysphoric sense. 

I don’t wear makeup. I may get my facial hair lasered this Fall, I hate my facial hair and no amount of estrogen or spiro will make it go away. But I hate makeup too, and I wouldn’t wear it if I’d been born cis, except for a special occasion. It would have to be pretty damn special, like a wedding. I don’t give a fuck about my nails either. I never learned to wear women’s clothes when younger because I was busy reading radical feminist books, so now I have both an opportunity and a challenge: I get to wear all sorts of new kinds of clothes which, it turns out, I love, and feel happier wearing, plus I’m learning all these terms, like “marled cotton” and “X-straps.” Males are taught maybe a dozen nouns for articles of clothing -- pants, shirt, socks, tie, t-shirt, you get the idea, it’s boring -- and now I have all these charts saved on Pinterest with the terms for all the different kinds of collars, scarf knots, skirt styles, etc. It’s fun. (When this is fun, believe me, it’s really fun. I’m finally living my life!)  

But I’m also still dropping things in public -- I dropped a porcelain plate at that fundraiser after about ten seconds, it shattered quite dramatically and embarrassingly on the tile floor and why the fuck did the Bowery Hotel give porcelain plates to people standing around drinking free alcohol and trying to eat sandwiches, ffs? -- and I’ve dropped cardigans like three times now, trying to take them on and off in public, and it’s all because I’m out, in public -- finally! -- and I love it but it just does make me nervous as hell. If sheer will were enough, I’d have done this decades ago. 

When something has terrified you for decades and then you finally start doing it, there’s a learning process. I call it my awkward phase. Like, it’s tricky learning to wear my purse -- walking comfortably with it, and finding things in it without, e.g., spending twenty minutes, in need of a flashlight, an entrenching tool, and a mission statement, trying to fish out my pocketbook and pay for something. And just getting it on and off, without knocking things over in restaurants and other tight spaces. I dropped the damn thing yesterday.

And this is New York, they’re all tight spaces. But it’s so much better than dragging that backpack around. Now I only use the backpack when I actually need it. The backpack does have the advantage of being button-friendly, so I can use it for quick self-ID. Right now it has a button I had made that says “Lesbian and Trans” and a button with a picture of Alex Danvers from Supergirl. That covers a lot of ground without me having to say anything. A more specific way to be visible: I am a trans lesbian nerd, more specifically one who watches Supergirl. Voilà.

A friend on FB said that this was the “tumultuous” part of her transition. That sounds like me right about now. But it is infinitely better than wearing those damned guy-pants every day.

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My wife and me at The Prom, a fundraiser for the Center for Anti-Violence Education in Brooklyn. That’s me on the left. 

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It’s Never Too Late, or, Wishing Upon a Star

This one isn’t literature or memoir, it’s something for people who may be landing here for the first time, especially if you’re trans and you think it’s too late to start. (Hi!) Or even if you’ve been here before. (You know who you are.)

It’s never too late. I thought it was, but it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean it won’t feel that way sometimes. There are days, like a lot of you, when I literally cannot leave the house. This was one of them. A day wasted inside, writing and crying, or neither, or playing with my new tarot deck.

I try to imagine what I’d wear if I went out: it certainly wouldn’t be this shirt, white cotton marled in purple. Or this bracelet I made myself, from those big European glass beads, I’m afraid to go out alone with that on. Just because I don’t want to attract attention. Last week I went to see my shrink wearing a black turtleneck and black workout pants. I go again in two days and I have a feeling it may be a sleeveless version of the same basic idea. I’m not afraid of not passing, because I’m not trying. I fucking hate makeup, so I don’t wear any. (I know, I’m lucky I live in New York City, sometimes I forget. Not for long, though.) 

I’ll bring the bracelet. I’ll wear it during therapy.

I’m looking out the window, it’s warm, it’s sunny, my old birthday is in a week….

I don’t feel old, exactly, just sore. I’ve felt more alive than in years since I started HRT last June 28th. Which turns out to be Stonewall Anniversary Day as well—it can be easy to forget since the day of the march is always Sunday and moves around the end of June—and my wife calls it my birthday. (Yes, I’m ridiculously lucky in love. Once I found her, of course; and that took years. But we’ve been together nearly 26 years. We have a wonderful son who’s in college now. I realize only lately, looking back over it all, how much Goddess has blessed me.) 

It was only lately that I was sure she really saw me, or at least that her followers did. Thirty years ago I was taking a course that changed my life, Women and Religion, at Hunter College. From Dr. Serinity Young, she’s at Queens College now. (She is awesome, btw.) While in that class, I learned just exactly how badly I wanted to find Goddess, to follow the Dianic tradition. And I found out how badly the Dianics, the only trad I was interested in -- because no men, and no gods -- that they hated women like me, back then. Trans women, I mean. Transsexuals, we were called then. It was 1987, and I decided that if I had to wait, I would wait. 

I finally attended a Dianic open circle for women last month. I can be awfully patient, if I have to be. 

So I’ll be 59, in June. One year of HRT. Woot.

But when my birthday was in April, about now is when I’d start to get really depressed. Which is happening this year, too.

I literally don’t know how to ask for help. I don’t know if you’re the same way, maybe just because you’re afraid you won’t get it. I don’t know if you’re a survivor of any kind of abuse, although a lot of us are; I am.

I have PTSD. This may be something I should mention at the top of the blog. I don’t even like writing it in upper case, lower case is safer: ptsd. See? But it’s as important as anything else in understanding what’s happened to me, and to a lot of us. It’s part of why I’m afraid to leave the house even if I want to; beyond violence and cruelty, it’s everyday, minor-league humiliation that terrifies me. 

I hate being laughed at. I don’t want to be on display. I’m not in the sideshow. I want to go out, I just want to not be so fucking noticed. That won’t ever happen. 

Unless I don’t go out.

___________

My wife Kathleen’s bff is in town, they went to lunch and for a long walk. They don’t get to see each other often, her bff lives in Wellesley, Mass. The last time I saw one of my besties was after Thanksgiving last year, she happened to come through town. She lives in Greenfield, Mass. My other bff lives in Medford, which is near Boston. I’m at least four hours away, on a good day, from either of them. Five, more like.

They dropped by, and I chatted with her for like five minutes. But she’s staying with her family in Williamsburg, which takes nearly an hour to get to on the subway from here even though it’s in Brooklyn, technically. It’s easier to get to Newark from here, and that’s in another state. So Kathleen drove her back there.

And I felt irrationally, or maybe rationally, jealous that her best friend was here, and I haven’t seen one of mine in months either, and I’m afraid to go out alone on days like this and I’m afraid to cry. For some reason I can’t tell her this. The brutal conditioning of everyday life as a boy, I suppose. It reminds me of Leslie Feinberg, who wrote Stone Butch Blues, although I’m not like that. Because I’m not butch, much less made of stone, I can cry; but I don’t want anyone to know. I hide. That’s bad, I know, but I do it anyway. Some kind of half-assed defense mechanism. Because we came from cultures where big boys don’t cry, didn’t we?

I wish I could tell you it was happy times every day, but it’s only on some days. I mean, there are wonderful days, I had some last week. Let me be clear: I’m so much happier now. A low bar to clear, but I so am happier. Then there are days like this, too, where it’s just fucking unrelenting sad and awful, and I don’t know how to ask for help even though Kathleen is in the living room. So I ordered Indian food instead.

But before I resumed my transition (first one was 1995-2001, had to pause my transition but I have a lot of material to write about, at least), there were weeks on end where I was unrelentingly depressed, just as depressed and a lot angrier, just losing it at random shit like a MetroCard dispenser that won’t take my card. Estrogen saved my life, I’ll tell anyone who asks. Taking estrogen, for me, is like finally taking my finger out of a live light socket after having it stuck there for years, so long I forgot (or never knew) that it isn’t normal to feel a constant electric current running through you. Taking spironolactone finally got the testosterone out of the way -- spiro is a miracle, we didn’t have it in the 90s and I can tell the difference -- and after a few months I started having feelings, even difficult ones. It didn’t kill me. And finally I was able to be happy, too, ffs. Sometimes. Now and again. Used to be, it just didn’t happen. I felt spent, consumed with anger, and kind of waiting to die. Not so long ago, either.

Since I started HRT I feel like I have the emotional energy, and emotional vulnerability, of a teenager, to be specific of the most unpopular, geekiest girl in her high school grade. “Even if I’d been born cis” is a game I try not to play with myself; but I have a feeling that even if I had been, some things would still be problems. I’m a nerdy recluse who likes to meet people travel, an introvert who can’t shut up once she gets going, the girl who can’t dance, the girl who didn’t get invited to the party everyone else in tenth grade went to anyway so who cares if you can dance or not? Some things never change.

There are lots of days I am able to reach out to people. I just have to open Facebook, right? Some days are like this one, though. I have this button pinned to my calendar of physical changes, what should happen and by when. It has the trans flag colors behind the words: “Sometimes, courage is the little voice that says I will try again tomorrow.” When I feel like I’m stuck, I look back at where I was this time a year ago, in astonishment, and try to keep in mind that I’m human. I can’t do five things at once, I’ve tried. But I can do a lot more than I thought was possible.

Because a year ago, we’d just gotten back from a conference that happened to be in Anaheim. I wished I could go to Disneyland when I was seven, more or less, but I grew up in Texas. That was that, I figured. And it didn’t happen until I was 57; but it happened. We stood there and watched the fireworks behind Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, like I’d always wanted, and I just kept thinking: It’s never too late. 

So, I’ll post this now.

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Posted this on the old blog (wrong browser), so reblogging it here. You’d think it’d come with the tags but it doesn’t. 

My Dinner with Pauline

Here’s the Authorized Version (v.3):

My Dinner with Pauline

It was called the Swing Space. For The Center, the lgbtq community center, the first one ever; thus the venerable web address, gaycenter.org. It was the Gay & Lesbian Community Center at first, I think, then the Lesbian & Gay Etc. But Not Bi, Dammit, then the alright, already, NYC Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Etc. Something like that. The fight over the B and T took up years of argument and effort which could have been expended on something other than fighting other queers for the right to be bi, or trans, or agender, everything and anything. But that was all over and done with, I think even the T had finally been added then, giving us (and the world?) the popular acronym LGBT, of which the media is so fond these days.

I was paying attention, but not close attention. It was 1999, and I was focussed on both being the mom of a two-year-old, and trying to transition at the same time. (I tend to go off in at least two directions at once, sometimes up to five.) The Swing Space was called that because the beat-up old school, of which I was rather fond, was being transformed into the sleek, elegant, and confusingly laid-out miracle of welcoming wifi and socially conscious caffeine we find now on West 13th Street. I actually went there a few days ago simply to get a cup of chai, and left again for therapy. (This is a very gay thing to do. It is because I say so.)

Anyway, the Swing Space was meant to provide a cramped but modernish alternative center while the miracle was happening at The Center. It was like two or three floors, and only one elevator, so nearly everyone who went in or out was headed for the elevator. I ran into or met all sorts of interesting people, waiting for the single elevator. Once I’d made my way unasthmatically through the tobacco smokers in front of the single entrance, of course. They were still allowed by the City to smoke right in front of the entrance back then, so they did. There was a constant cloud of blue-grey smoke hovering outside the doors, every day. I used to hold my breath to get through it when it was really bad, usually hot days with little or no wind).

And since I was the stay-at-home mom, which actually meant running around town a lot, going to play dates, shopping, trying to get everything I was trying to do done, I had Corrin with me most days. One generally didn’t find toddlers running around the Swing Space then, or at least whenever I went there he seemed to have the place to himself. 

This is why I had him with me the day I ran into Pauline Park — who was coming out of the elevator, of course. We were still relatively few, we out trans people, and even fewer made good public speakers on the topic. My own attempt at visibility usually extended to wearing the “Trans Dyke” button I’d found, as if put there by the Goddess, in a cigar box of handmade buttons in an alternative bookstore in Montréal. In 1998, ffs. Almost no one even acknowledged that concept, much less made a button saying it. I wasn’t really up for being a Public Transgendered Person, it was complicated enough being me already, so I wasn’t one then.

But Pauline was one, even then. I met her when she came to do a presentation at a tiny, congenial lesbian community center in Brooklyn, with a few young, friendly dykes with nowhere else in particular to hang out and be gay. I came mainly to hear Pauline, it was my only trip up there. It was just off Flatbush Avenue, and it no longer exists, certainly the group and probably not the building. She did a presentation with illustrations on large cardboards – for there was no PowerPoint in the land in those days – and answered some questions. We chatted amiably afterwards, and exchanged phone numbers, probably.

But I hadn’t run into her after that presentation until now. We three stepped out of the elevator flow and into the large, reasonably well-lit lobby itself. There was a counter, of course, and the space in the back had some tables set for later, for a fundraising dinner. Service for six at each, they’d even gotten out the linen tablecloths and napkins (which aren’t very absorbent but look great). There was a padded bench running along one wall, the curvy wall, where some of the diners would be sitting. There were some people in the back of the room doing some kind of prep before the main event, I think. It was about five pm on a warm day.

We were discussing my availability, or rather Pauline was discussing my availability, while I was considering my lack of same. After Corrin was born, well, if you have kids you know, and if you don’t, you’ve heard the stories. It was intense, being the go-to mom, the one who went to the park and the playspace with him, watching Teletubbies (my idea) and distracted enough to hold still and eat whatever organic baby food I was trying to feed him at the time. I miss those days, the little hand in my big one, wherever we went. I was busier then, too, in trans terms; I was trying to write, and trying to transition. Plus trying to mom. It’s a learning curve.

I was in and out of the Swing Space a lot, and that generally meant Corrin coming with; the grands were 300 miles away, and he stayed at the daycare while I was at work. I still had jobs then, this one was writing creative distractors (wrong answers) for multiple-choice questions on a fifth-grade-level reading educational software package, still a novel idea at the time. I was well-suited for the job, temperamentally. The job was probably 20 hours a week, like everything else, so I was in at 10 and out at 2 or 3 pm, four days a week. I went to pick him up that day at Jack’n’Jill Playspace, across from the school, and we headed into Manhattan on the subway. I’ve forgotten why exactly, but we were headed for the Swing Space again.

All this mom-ing (momming?), it turned out – not that I wasn’t warned – left little room for things like developing enough confidence in myself to talk about the trans* community. Aside from the fact that I was terrified of leaving the house dressed as a “woman,” it was almost impossible for me to do it well enough to pass, because the penalty for not passing then — a friend of mine told me she used to end up bleeding on the sidewalk about once a week back then.

I was fully aware of how dangerous it is, more than fully because I have ptsd; I don’t just have issues, I have back issues. I was absolutely terrified of not passing then. I had to go to enormous lengths, applying makeup with a trowel to try to conceal my facial hair dots, buying fake boobs, even a pair of those goddamn shoes. Not a particularly elevated heel either, but I’d simply never tried to wear a pair before. I walked one block before I gave up and changed back into sneakers. I might as well have been walking down the street on ice skates.

I told her that I wasn’t available for anything at all right now. “When do you think that you might be available again for community work again?” Pauline asked. I looked at Corrin, running happily around the lobby, did a brief mental calculation. “Maybe, I don’t know, like, 2012?” (It was more like 2015, as it turned out. Being a mom keeps you busy.) She was clearly disappointed, and I thought I could see her mentally crossing me off a list of some kind.

We chatted a bit more. It was the first time Pauline had actually seen me with Corrin. All this while I’d been watching Corrin with one eye, running around, laughing. Finally he sat on a cushioned bench that ran curvily along one wall, behind one of several tables set up for a fundraising dinner that evening. He looked like he was going to stay put for a bit. I asked him to stop playing with the silverware, then I turned my attention fully to Pauline, telling her again that I really did have my hands full, between transitioning and being Corrin’s primary caretaker….

BOOM!! crashcrash! ka-thunk rattle rattle rattle….

The tables each had six place-settings, the aforementioned linen napkins and tablecloths, silver-looking silverware, they looked perfect. The plates and glasses and champagne flutes were all plastic — the people running the dinner weren’t dopes, or maybe I just want to remember it that way, but I don’t remember freaking out over broken glass near Corrin — but it still made an unholy noise, and mess, when it went over.

There was a silence. He looked with amazement upon the whole thing, the half-collapsed table, linen and plates and silverware everywhere. “I knocked it over,” he said, with wonder in his voice. Even he was surprised. He wasn’t a kid who got yelled at, so he didn’t lose it and cry, which you might have expected given the circumstances. He just looked at it from where he sat on that buffet-style bench running along the wall. He was impressed. Me, too: Of all the damage he’d managed to do up to that point without intending to, this was easily the most chaos he’d managed to create at one time. And the most high-profile. I was all OMFG, no…!!

What could I say? I just looked at the mess, and at him. “Yes, I guess you did.”

Then one of the people in the back spoke up, someone who’d been sitting a few feet away and saw it all. “Uh, actually, that table leg was giving way already, it wasn’t locked properly. It just fell over when he touched it.”

I was all,“Oh! Gee! Thanks! Sorry about, I mean, etc.” But at least that meant it officially wasn’t his fault, which made me feel better. I probably apologized a couple more times anyway.

Pauline by this point was fully convinced that I in fact had no time for the kind of work she was doing, speaking engagements and other things, trying to explain to the rest of the world who were were. That was basically the end of the conversation, I think, and we parted ways.

My transition would screech to a halt a year later anyway. And not because I had a kid on my hands, although that kept me busy; it was because I was scared to death of being beaten or killed. Worse, that it might happen while I was out with Corrin, and he would see it. And as it turned out I needed more therapy first (about eight years’ worth, to clean up most of the broken glass left over from the abuse and consequent ptsd). And there weren’t supposed to be any trans lesbians, or so many people still thought then, meaning it was awkward just to say that some of were dykes anyway. I’m a big ol’ dyke. It’s ok now, somwhat. Times change, in fits and starts.

I waved Corrin over. It was time to go.

“I knocked it over!” he said again, proudly.

“Yeah, you sure did!” I took his hand, and off we went, back to Brooklyn.

[kivaqblog-blog]

Before she died I said to her “Sylvia (Rivera), it just drives me crazy when people say to me ‘now was Stonewall a gay rebellion or was it a transgender rebellion’”. And I told her “I just tell them yes”. “Sylvia, what do you say? What would you say if somebody says ‘did you fight back that night because you were gay, because you were a self-identified drag queen, because of police brutality, because you were a sex-worker, you had to turn tricks in order to survive, because you were homeless, because you knew what it meant to go to jail, because you didn’t have a draft card when the demanded to you that night?” And I’ll never forget her answer it was so succinctly eloquent, she said: “we were fighting for our lives”. And the fact is that oppressions overlap in people’s life, as they do in this room. There are people in this room who are carrying heavier burdens of discrimination and oppression. There are people who had more dreams that have been deferred. There are people who have less opportunities, more doors slammed in their face. And that was true at the Stonewall too … But the fact is that when they all came together, shoulder to shoulder, to fight back against a common oppressor that night, they made history. Not in spite of their differences, but because they came to understand the need to fight together against a common enemy. And that was the most important lesson of the Stonewall rebellion for so many of us, that was the power of what we could do when we all came together.

Leslie Feinberg www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaRF0Ohb1mg (via grossefem)

[kivaqblog-blog]

Like & Reblog  if you’d like “Peach Fuzz” to become a DAILY STRIP.

I’m organizing my schedule and I would love to interact with all of you more often. Please! 

By liking or reblogging, I’ll be able to gauge your interest and come up with new plans for the strip. 

[kivaqblog-blog]

Going to reblog & fix some typos.

Never Did Find that Book Again

This began as a comment on a trans history thread somewhere about Christine Jorgensen, the “First Transsexual”, or certainly the first one the media noticed. Boy, did they notice. 

I found her autobiography in the back of the garage in a box of old books, and was stunned. “You mean they can do that now???” I was 11 or 12, I think, and it didn’t last long, because my mom disappeared the book only four days after I found it. She was a real gender cop, and I’d made the mistake of leaving it lying around like a normal book, getting back, “why, no, I haven’t seen it"s for years afterwards when I asked about it. 

It confirmed everything I’d already felt inside anyway–I’m a classic case, my dysphoria was so bad that they had to keep telling me as a little kid that, for some reason no one could adequately justify, not only was I a boy, I’d stay that way: that you can’t change genders once you grow up. (This is a vaguely-remembered idea I’d come up with when I was little, to try to get past the dysphoria: "Well, so I’ll be a girl when I grow up.” Like it was up to me, like it was that simple. Until some time after age five, I had an invisible friend named Mary, who was probably really me, only without the dysphoria. And I always needed a second cookie “for Mary,” or so I’m told, so there’s the cookie angle; but she was a girl. There was a real me that wasn’t “me”.)

It was the year I turned twelve, 1970, when I found that copy. It was both dank-smelling and sort of dried-out, with waterstained page edges, and the whole thing puckery from moisture damage. And a cheap-glue spine, where the pages crackled when you opened them. I stared at the photos in the center for hours: “He kinda looks sort of like a guy,” I thought, trying to reason it out, “he was a skinny guy before, but also kind of like a woman, I guess,” trying to see the before in the after: all Fifties-looking, pearls and heavy makeup, eyemakeup and lipstick. And sitting like a girl, back when there was such a thing; and black-and-white pictures because of when this happened. I wanted him to look more like a woman than I thought she did, for it to have changed her more, for it to work. 

And they had just invented this technology a few years ago, it looked like. In Denmark, by a team of doctors. Something in the book discussed how it never would’ve been allowed in an American hospital, so it’s not a coincidence the doctors were Danish. I even thought that’s why her name was Danish. It was confusing. It wasn’t illegal, but no one would dare do it here. That’s how awful it was supposed to be. For a long time in the 1960s and 70s, “go to Denmark” was shorthand for getting your bottom (at least) surgery over there. There are many other options now, but once there was one. And only one book about it.

I read her story as fast as possible. Just another example of the miracles wrought by modern science, I thought, like rockets and computers and smallpox vaccinations. But they didn’t do it in the United States. Period. And it sounded expensive. "Maybe if I saved my money, someday…or made a lot of it…then I could do it. And you’d think you’d’ve heard of someone else doing it too,“ I thought.

And I managed to read most of it before it vanished, and I didn’t realize it but I just let it totally and thoroughly rock my world. Questions to grownups about doctors who could change you into a girl–"But I read a book about it! Really!”–were met with po-faced denials, accompanied by frowns meant to imply the entire idea was radical enough or even just plain strange enough that I shouldn’t keep pressing them on this. I remember startling grownups–parents, aunts'n'uncles, cousins and their friends who maybe were just teenagers but at least were old enough to drive–when I broached this idea I’d gotten from the book, looking for information. This was a few months into the Gay Liberation Movement, which no one was crazy about discussing with me either. I started to read the newspapers for myself and got my mother to drive me to the branch library on Saturdays, I think.

And this just as second-wave feminism was burgeoning as a social and political force. I felt totally spoken to in and pulled in by my heart, my mind followed happily. It was like sometimes it really didn’t feel like, inside, that I wasn’t a “real girl.” That I wasn’t a cis woman, as we say now. I did my best not to think about it when it did occur to me, but it was the pea under the mattress I couldn’t get rid of. Nonetheless, by 1972 and for many years after, I was busy reading about radical feminism and separatism, almost entirely thanks to library books. One more lesbian. 😊 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩

I don’t know if I ever would’ve had the courage to do all that, smuggling home books I’d checked out about radical feminism, stuck in the middle of a stack of books between science-fiction novels, and I let those rock my world, too. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but I started with Jorgenson’s autobiography, and that’s all the encouragement I needed. Because it meant that I could really be a woman, too. Maybe, as medical science advanced, it would get easier. It certainly felt like that inside, like hope. I didn’t have to be the unhappy girl inside me, the girl with her nose perpetually pressed against the window, the poor girl in all the stories with poor little girls in them. And I didn’t deserve the things that happened to me, just because it was me they were happening to, just because it was my mother, just because no one would believe me. I deserved to be inside where it was warm, as it always seemed to be in those stories. Her book explained me to me. It meant I wasn’t the only one. 

[kivaqblog-blog]

Will reblog this every time.

So this jerk says...

“I’d very much like to punch a feminist. I’d never, ever hurt a lady but I’d be happy to punch a feminist.” Some idiot who works out. I’ll spare you his selfies. He goes on:

“I’m 6’4” 228 pounds and have 9 years of combined martial arts training and 3 years of being a Line Backer in football. Just in case you are looking for variety.”

So Punchy the Line Backer gets this offer in return:

what about a lady and a feminist. warning, combatives certified soldier.

And then we get the best part:

im tiny, i’m like 5′4 and 130 lbs but u can fight me too Reblogging for the last one cuz that’s adorable 930,671 notes”

[kivaqblog-blog]

Reblogging this, it will change more but I like it.

Purple

1.

I’m trying to not use purple to excess. It’s not easy. I’ve always liked purple, lavender, violet, fuchsia even. Dressing as a male never afforded many opportunities for using purple, beyond some ties and maybe a dress shirt. But since I came out in May, and especially since I started my hormone treatment at the end of June, I’ve gradually been feeling stronger in my own identity, more confident, happier. Happy is something new. And pride is certainly new, pride is something I am able to feel now, in things I couldn’t manage to take pride in before, not in my heart. I was never sure what it would feel like, being proud of what I was, until now.

I never felt proud before, in the 90s. I felt broken. Not only did I fear getting attacked by men if and when I finally wore “women’s clothes” in public, I always felt like, even though everyone in the Slope was a friend or at least knew me, I was a lesbian with an asterisk, that I also had to always be afraid of someone unknown trying to expel me from womenspace. Some people call them Terfs now, we didn’t have a word for them then. When that actually finally happened, it damaged me profoundly, and permanently, too, it felt like. All I could feel was fear. All I could do was hide, and I hid for a very long time. I had failed. We had failed. We were broken.

But now, I have a much larger and more useful Internet on tap, and a whole new generation of amazing wonderful queer women, most of whom apparently don’t think attacking trans folks is acceptable. That may sound like a low bar, but that’s where it was set 20 years ago. I have my friends now via Facebook and Reddit, so I’m not as isolated as before. There are even a couple of Facebook groups specifically for trans lesbians. My identity isn’t being constantly challenged in my own mind by my own doubting inner voice. My identity is in my heart, where it belongs, and I am a woman, a lesbian, a, uh, transgender. The word “tr***y” has become so universally reviled it will get you banished from Farcebook, so clearly we were in need of at least one new noun; but the proofreader in me dies a little every time I see “transgender” used as a personal noun. Nonetheless, if that’s how it’s entering mainstream usage, I’ll roll with it. If I can get used to letting “they” agree in sentences with singular subjects and objects, I can do this. 

At least something is entering mainstream usage; in the 1990s, most people really didn’t know we existed, really real humans with lives and stuff. We were queer fear toys in horror movies. But we weren’t real people. Occasionally one of us got murdered. Anyone who was out got beaten a lot. And generally we were treated like shit, if we couldn’t pass, and we hid if we could. I was mostly terrified. And I didn’t feel proud of having what felt to me like a damaged identity. I didn’t belong. I had no identity. I tried to focus on work—2002 was the last year I had a full-time job, and I was the primary caretaker for Corrin.

Corrin tried to cope with a bully in Pre-K and eventually had to change schools four years later; I tried to protect him from other boys as they got older and meaner. I made a lot of PBJs. I tried to find other ways to be happy. Some worked for a while. I did work in therapy, got to go back to college, helped Corrin grow up and helped Kathleen get her PhD. I can read French now. We have different cats, of course. I miss the old ones a lot, especially Charlotte. We bought this house in 2002, we added to it in 2005-07. The rent from the two apartments helps pay the mortgage, minus the endless repairs, and we are also starting what will be our 147th mortgage refi in the last eight years, so that’ll be fun. We don’t have a lot of friends within walking distance anymore, or in the neighborhood at all for that matter.

Last year was 2016. The karate school has dwindled and is teetering on the edge of nonexistence; its heyday is part of Slope lesbian history now, like the rest of the 1990s, something people hear about. Kathleen is one of the teachers now, at last, and is trying to help save the school. A few women show up each class. If it weren’t for the panic attacks I’d consider joining them just to help, but after 2000 the dojo became a place that I was never comfortable in. One more visit recently confirmed that; it’s not even in the same building anymore, yet it intimidates me; and maybe it would’ve helped if anyone else had shown up for this meeting where once again I was the Only Tra***y, which I guess is a lot of the problem. Did I know how they could find more, to do outreach on things like self-defense? they asked. No, sorry, but it’s like [insert kitten-wrangling metaphor here]. I was squirmy and on edge the whole time: Am I being helpful or just telling them things they already know? Am I talking too much? Did I just interrupt? Am I doing that too much? Every question that can make a trans woman doubt herself and her right to be in women’s space flew through my head. Afterward I realized I simply can’t go back there again. It won’t get better. It’s just the way it is. I have dojophobia. I’ll have to learn self defense somewhere else.

The Slope keeps changing. We are still here.

And I finally came out again, for 3 or 4 reasons but mostly because it felt safe enough, not just for trans women but for trans dykes. We know who we are now, we’re not afraid to say it: we love and hope and care the same and as much as cis dykes, as cis queer women, as cis lesbians. We can have as strong an attachment to our gay identities as do gay cis women; I do. I know the L word has fallen somewhat out of favor, in some places more than others. For many younger queers, “Lesbian” sounds fusty and minatory, like a traditional radical feminist my age who stereotypically hates trans women. Somebody who comes along to tell you you’re doing feminism wrong, and probably doing lesbianism wrong, too. They find that kind of thing repulsive, of course, and I’m kind of relieved by that in a way. I also understand that “lesbian” is limiting and now almost archaic, unless we change our understandings of it to include, e.g., me, for one, but also trans men or enbys who were lesbian-identified before, who otherwise are lost to the queer women’s community. So the L word is in an apparently irreversible decline in usage.

But for me, it’s always been the word that explains who and how I love, which is most of who I am. It’s the word for the way I love and live with my wife, and for how we raised our son — how do you raise a boy in a way which is lesbian, you may ask. We were lesbian moms, and we intended to and after a while we did raise a kid with no gendered expectations, none, for himself or anyone else. And if you do that, they’ll be just fine, it turns out, happier and healthier IMHO. Some lucky girl will get him, I wish she’d hurry up and find him (he’s in college). — It’s the way I love other queer women and trans, other women, other queers, the world. My perspective on all the suffering and joy in human life, on socialism and democracy, war and peace, luxury and poverty, are all shaped by my autodidactic education in radical feminism, back at the branch library in the 1970s, looking for lesbians under 301.4157.

“Lesbian” meant strong women, with strong hearts and free minds. They were heroic, to me. Lesbian meant beautiful, a new kind of beauty found in women’s actual bodies, in their actual hearts. I looked at books of photography and artwork, I read poetry — I generally can’t stand poetry, maybe because I can’t write it, but this was different, poems written in words of fire. I read polemic and memoir, everything I could find. Everything. I read Ms. magazine, back when if it wasn’t radical exactly it seemed pretty close. I read about sex. I read about the Goddess. And my heart sang.

In 1984 I came to NYC, which had gay bookstores, so I read a lot of lesbian novels which I always felt extremely awkward buying at Oscar Wilde or Different Light. I loved coming-out stories and other novels about women who first love another woman, maybe girls in college (or a student in love with a teacher, a double no-no), or maybe someone who’d thought of herself as str8 suddenly falling for someone, from your bestie to the woman who ran the CR group, and then the swirl of romance: the swiftly changing emotions, the jumble of feelings, the newfound joy of loving another woman, how it’s different, why it’s different. Some had a science fiction setting, like Daughters of a Coral Dawn which I thought wasn’t that well-written, especially the lead character, but I fell in love with that lead character enough I remember the name of the novel. I tried to write stories like it, but I was 15 and living undercover as a boy, so my IRL lesbian referents were two bi women I knew. They were bad, like my other stories, convoluted and not enough dialogue, but I kept writing [and never finishing] them. The books at the gay bookstores were my romance novels, finished versions of what I wanted to write when I was younger. Like with SF, I was able to overlook bad writing for the sake of a good plot. A lot of them were published by Naiad, if that tells you anything.

Lesbian meant feminism, and feminism explained everything that was wrong with the world. Lesbian meant freedom to me: it was a silent freedom in my heart, but it freed me from feeling chained to maleness, freed me from allegiance to values and rules I despised, was a weapon I used to dismantle the customary patriarchal values (lite version) I’d been taught. I’d never believed it, but now I had something that explained why. My worldview comes from women, I see the world through a female lens, my values since I was a child came from women, and that is what feminism means to me. My love is first of all of and for women, and for one very special woman in particular, who long ago saw the woman within me, immediately, and fell in love with her, much to my surprise; and that is what lesbian means to me.

2.

Anyway, the point is, I feel proud of all that now. I feel pride in myself. I feel pride in other lesbians. I feel pride in belonging. And every time I see acceptance on tumblr blogs, the witches and sapphics and fangirls and loving, caring wlw all posting sweet and beautifully written affirmations of each other as we are, I feel stronger in my sense of myself. The surprise I feel is fading, giving way to a sense of reconnection, of re-affirmation. My story Why I Am Not a Pagan, which I thought no one had read, turns out to have accumulated 31 likes and two reblogs after I posted it, while I wasn’t paying attention. 

This novel sense of pride seems to be manifesting in a deeper affection for purple that is always on the edge of turning into a default setting. I have pink under control, that was easy; I got some pink pj’s, something I certainly never had after age two, and they’re nice. But I’m not going to, for example, turn our bedroom pink. Purple, however…I changed the text highlight color on my computer from blue to purple. My twitter app background is purple. My Facebook cover photo had an abstract rainbow pattern on it until recently, rainbows being something else it’s easy to overdo, aside from the fact that each one is one-seventh purple, two-sevenths if you count indigo.

I’m listening to WNYC on Bluetooth headphones, my big Christmas present. They’re purple. They are so purple it almost hurts to look at them. My Friendly phone app background is a sort of pale lavender. I looked at the other choices first, I really did. Every time I buy clothes now I have to ask myself, when I do decide on some kind of purple-spectrum choice, if I’m overdoing it. Will this lead, I ask myself, to a wardrobe with a dozen and a half purple outfits? I have a tab open right now to a “deep iris” (i.e., purple) chunky knit sweater I want. I like the pomegranate too, but I want this one more. This is all made exponentially more tempting at least for now by the “candy store” effect, where, when a trans woman finally gets to buy the clothes she wants but never was allowed to have, she’s like a kid in a candy store, and if not careful can end up with a lot of froufrou or slinky stuff, the kind of thing you linger over in catalogs, but end up with not enough leggings or pants, for example. And purple, it’s hard to match it with anything except with black, or white, or (some) other shades of purple.

The desktop background on my computer is purple. Until recently I was using one I’d found somewhere, purpley with early 60s-type squares and rectangles scattered randomly. I got tired of it, and it was hard to read the filenames against it. I tried something more angular in neutral colors but it was just fucking boring. So I found a better purple desktop, one with swirls that lets me divide up the screen, all in shades that show up emoji nicely. This is important because I seem to be using them more and more too, in directory names — sorry, folder names — on my phone and my ipad. A double-womansign character between two rainbow flags suffice to indicate “Queer/Women’s” to me on my phone, and it looks cool, and it fits more easily.

Symbols and signs, textures and colors. I want all the ones I wasn’t allowed to use before now, and I want them all at once. After six months of estrogen and T-blocker, I want to write in queer emoji, whatever that means—the two girls kissing, certainly, and maybe the double-womansign could be considered queer emoji now, and the flag is under “flags” now in Apple emoji which is an improvement—and what I really want is to buy purple everything. Purple notebooks, purple pens. Purple clothes, purple—not purple shoes, not yet. We only have one set of purple sheets, not three or four, and I bought those before all this even started. 

I can’t buy myself a purple winter coat because that’s not what we wear in New York. As soon as the temperature drops below 60, everyone wraps up in dark, hostile winter wear, and determinedly remain interred in such until Spring, and only wear short sleeves if and when the temperature goes back up over 70 and stays there. This gives me two opportunities: to simply wear something femme on top, necklace and everything, and cover it with my leather jacket which I can take off when I get where I’m going; or to just go for it and get an explicitly feminine (but dark) coat, and use the fact that bundled-up means harder to clock. I think. Which doesn’t help much on the subway, for example; but one step at a time. 

3.

My wife says we — trans people — are 20 years behind in acceptance, that we’re the second wave, viewing the les/bi/gay rights victories as the first wave. (Yes, she’s cis. I couldn’t find an elegant way to work that into the sentence.) This model has seemed more or less accurate for years now, even when I wasn’t really out — in the 90s we were barely tolerated or not at all, just like gay men and lesbians in the 70s, now we’re where mainstream gay rights was in the 90s, and so in 20 years …what? Before I maybe would’ve said, “then we’ll have the same protections and acceptance as other queers have now,” but what does that mean, now?

We sit here, waiting. It’s January 1st 2017. What will America be, a year from now? Will there be a free press, or even a scared press? Will journalists begin to die? I’m just asking about that specifically because journalists were the imperiled class of the day a couple of days ago, instead of us (i.e., queers), or women, Jews, Blacks, climate scientists, Mexicans, Muslims, Kurt Andersen. Whatever the fuck it is he’s on about that day. Will people die, who wouldn’t have died otherwise? Will cities burn? Will civil rights be suspended, will elections get “postponed,” will trials all be “closed for security reasons,” all because of the Satanic Cheetoh, ruling his empire from atop his Tower? What metaphor will we be using in 2018 to describe the Cheetoh’s first year in power?

If we’re lucky, and I mean really lucky, it’ll be “gridlock.” In this scenario, the GOP on the Hill, some of whom at least already know what they’re doing, will be at swords drawn with the White House from the moment all the noobs and fanatics who will work there stagger into their new offices on the morning of the 21st (if they want to get right at it on the 21st, even though it’s a Saturday and there will be protesters everywhere), sit in their pre-gorilla-glued chairs, and finally start trying to run the country. Or, in time, start trying to stand up to go and pee. Neither, it will turn out, will happen easily. Things will go downhill from there.

None of that of course will prevent that man from doing shit like, e.g., imposing martial law if he sees a propaganda tweet about minorities rioting and murdering police in a Midwestern post-industrial city. That just takes a signature. A lot of the scariest shit just takes a signature. Then we have to survive long enough to get Elizabeth Warren elected, or Booker or de Blasio even, somebody, anybody, and get them all reversed. How far out there will the Satanic Cheetoh go? As far as they let him? Will we spend four years in the streets?

If it’s in the streets, I’ll be there, probably wearing something purple.

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Note: I wish I could take credit for “Satanic Cheetoh,” but that was said first by hockey blogger Greg Wyshynski.

[kivaqblog-blog]

Reblogging from the old blog.

Protip: if a trans woman says she hates drag/drag queens it’s probably not because she doesn’t understand the historical role drag culture played in giving trans women/of color a conduit for authentic self expression ✨✌️