Gender 3.0

How I Was Outed By the Nike Swoosh, and Other Tales of Sort of Passing

2011-10-17T23:20:00.000-07:00

I recently started a new job in Palo Alto. I assumed during the interview process that, like previous employers, they saw me as a bulldagger who wanted to be called he. But when I started working there, not a single person made a pronoun slip. I am passing at work!

In addition to making me wonder whether I got the cock markup in my salary negotiations, this development has led me to reassess my assumptions about how others perceive me. Now I strut a little more as I walk into the gym (incidentally, it may be true that testosterone has made me enjoy sports a little more) — then suddenly I arrive at the door to the women’s locker room — no way can I pass naked — at which point I put on my best I’m-a-girl-I-don’t-know-why-you’re-staring-at-me face and dive in.

Obviously, it’s time to have top surgery done. I also know it’s time because I’ve been “losing” sports bras at an alarming rate. I hate those things — not least because they’re expensive. I’ve only got three or so at a time and yet I somehow have to preserve at least one that’s not soaking wet or rancid smelling. When you’re transporting clothes to and from the gym 7 days a week and you’re a total dude, it’s no small task.

The other day I swaggered into a sporting goods store. Athletic socks: check. Now for another $45 quick-wicking sports bra. I went to the usual place. They weren’t there. I looked around and spotted an employee. As I approached him, I thought about how I was passing at work and made a mental note to act as if I were buying the thing for my girlfriend. First I try to call it a “triathlon top.” Blank look. Then I describe it — dismissively, like a guy might his girlfriend's lady stuff, which isn’t a stretch — as a black sports bra thing with the Nike swoosh on it. Except I make the swoosh pointing towards me, from my right to my left.

Will I ever stop making this kind of mistake? Or is it a mistake? I’m not undertaking to pretend to be someone I’m not, and I don’t want to lose the complexity of gender that I’ve been flagging for the last 15 years. But shouldn’t I be in charge of what I disclose to whom? Then again, how can you casually insert signposts like “when I was female” into idle chit-chat? I’m not ashamed, but I really don’t want to conjure up graphic visual images of my tranny cooch because that is goddamned private.

Except to the women in the locker room to whom I offer to show it, like a scar, to fend off their assertions that I must be in the wrong place. It’s the place that’s messed up, not me.

If you enjoyed reading this post, please consider making a small donation for my surgery or buy a photograph with proceeds going to the surgery.

A homeless man notices my transition

2011-06-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

Ask your friends if you look different and you come up against a really strong social tabu against making dispassionate observations about someone's appearance. Should they admit they notice that whisker on my chin? Should they acknowledge that my neck is twice as wide?

You know who's not afraid to say you look different? Your neighborhood homeless guy. Mine is sweet and harmless and has lived on my block for as long as I have. He sees me going out, coming home, going out, coming home. It's a perfect opportunity to observe someone's physical appearance without any of the emotions or preconceptions that blind us to it.

A few weeks ago, he stopped me to ask a question. I thought he was going to ask me for money for the second time ever. But instead, he started to tell me about his friend Jet who was going through a change from a woman to a man, and — was I?

My answer was, I take testosterone, yes.

The other day he wanted to chat about it again. This time the case study was a lady cop he used to see who's now such a handsome man cop that he almost thought he should go for it. (Me: You should!: Giving encouraging dating advice to a 60-something guy who lives in his car.)

Then he asked, Are you a man stuck in a woman's body?

I didn't know what to say. But later, I came up with this: I'm a mostly masculine person in a fairly feminine body in a very gendered society.

Postscript: I just went out on a sailboat where the captain told us it was okay to use toilet paper in "the head" but please not to use feminine hygiene products. Then, looking at me and my gay male housemate, he added teasingly, "You got that, guys?"

Is trans the new gay?

2011-06-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

We’ve all heard about the tragically closeted homosexual of the 1950s or ’60s. It is hard to feel anything but pity when imagining what drove gay and lesbian people to marry, submit to blackmail schemes or abuse at the hands of police officers rather than be outed — or any one of a hundred other incomprehensibly self-hating acts we’ve heard about.

But recently I found myself in conversation with a trans man who is afraid to shower at the gym for fear that people in the locker room will challenge him for his lack of penis. I myself am wondering which locker room to use, and whether I should go to a different gym for a while so I don’t go directly from the women’s to the men’s at the same gym. Is this equally tragic?

Perhaps gym-going can never quite be tragic: point taken. But another trans man I know was driven from his job when his co-workers learned what was in his pants. Trans people are making choices every day, however small or large, about whether they can safely come out to people who have no frame of reference for transsexuality. It’s one thing to tell someone that you belong to a group that’s considered less than ideal: Imagine confessing that you may have to declare bankruptcy. But it’s another altogether to confess to something unspeakable, something that puts your very humanity in question.

Judith Butler wrote that the language that introduces your existence on this earth genders you (It’s a girl!) and when your gender is in question, your humanity may as well be, too. Am I a person or am I a Frankenstein? If I transition completely, will friends and family outside my queer bubble be able to see me as still me, with some important but ultimately cosmetic changes? Or will they see me as a costumed Cameron, an ersatz human being?

It’s easy to wonder how gays and lesbians of a bygone age could fail so tragically and so prolongedly to acknowledge what they so clearly (in retrospect) were. But that is only because we can’t imagine what it would be like to be so close to mainstream society’s damning view of us that we didn’t see it as a misguided absurdity.

As homosexual identities become increasingly socially acceptable despite pointed efforts by social conservatives to compare them to pedophilia and beastiality — things that clearly aren’t okay — transsexual identities have come to occupy the borderlands of what’s okay. At a recent talk, the black activist Angela Davis hammered on trans liberation as an urgent civil rights issue. She sees the historical pattern in which somebody is always left out.

Since 1970, the mainstream view has continued to judge gay identities, but it cannot pretend not to see them as human. Trans identities are just beginning to be seen as human in the Bay Area. Elsewhere, transsexuality remains a sad — and exotic — joke. I look with envy on trans men and women in their 20s, who have the luxury of never having known another way. They wonder aloud how their parents could possibly fail to support them; I marvel silently at the parents who somehow do.

I can still see quite clearly the image of trans people as hardly human. The ready accessibility of that image — the knowledge of how others may see me — makes it hard to find the causal self-confidence required to say, with feeling, that I am human, that being trans is not a tragic attempt at self-effacement but a simple gesture towards being myself, like cutting my hair short or refusing to work a corporate job. It is not a lie or a regret; it is a complex reality.

Gender is either a tragedy or a comedy but it can’t be both.

People always talk about how huge a decision transitioning is, and how permanent. But is it really any bigger than a tattoo you don’t much like, or a scar that resulted from something foolish? Every decision comes with the possibility of regret, but parents and other spokespeople for yesterday’s order of things wield the catastrophic permanence of particular decisions over us. The narrative evokes death just enough to engage in a dangerous echo chamber with the idea that trans people aren’t human.

There’s a certain biological inability to see yourself as something less than human. If you’ve been taught that trans is less than human, it’s fairly difficult to see with clarity that you are trans without also seeing with clarity — and serious mental health consequences — that you are sub-human. Look at me saying this so painfully clearly and still not being able to find an emotional way out of the paradox. Isn’t this the battle fought by early homosexuals who knew they were human even as they wanted sex and intimacy with people of the same gender — and even as they were forced into dangerous situations to get it?

The image was so powerful that the word homosexual had to be overthrown before real activism could take root. Just as now we are jettisoning the word transsexual (with its implied adjective, tragic) for its friendlier versions trans and tranny and for more specific (though still somewhat cyborg-ish) appellations like MTF and FTM.

But re-appropriating the word queer might have been the most important move of all, defining the queer ethos of irony, dark humor and welcome perversions. Will there be a defining twist be for trans people that renders the old views of them comic, absurd and harmless — mostly?

If you enjoyed reading this post, please consider making a small donation for my surgery or buy a photograph with proceeds going to the surgery.

In which the curmudgeonly blogger goes to an FTM support group

2011-05-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

I went to an FTM support group last night for the first time.

There were a lot of amazing things about it: About 30 people showed up, ranging in age from 17 to 50-something and equally diverse in how they’re transitioning and where they are in the process. One guy was from Scandinavia and another was from the Middle East. As we went around the room, several mentioned that their families were supportive of their transition, which kind of blew me away.

But, being by character far more predisposed to criticize than to join into any kind of group ethos, there were also inevitably several things that bothered me.

I went to this group in the East Bay because I’d been told the average age was significantly older than in the San Francisco group. I also hoped the bro-down coolness factor would be lower, which it was. But despite a range in age, there were several people there who had not yet graduated from college — and one who hadn’t graduated from high school. They were the biggest talkers in the group, airing their grievances with their parents. (What it is about youth that makes one take up so much space?) I felt compassionate but had a hard time identifying with them, since when I was their age it was still very difficult to come out as gay. I’d never even heard of transsexuality.

In fact, as a person whose friends are having babies, I found myself identifying more with the parents (who, in one case, were merely insisting that the youngin’ get regular gender therapy and come to the support group). I am, I’ve had to admit, kind of transphobic, which makes it that much easier for me to see where parents are coming from. In hindsight, I see how my parents, who grew up believing it was shameful to be gay, could have responded to me coming out by saying they worried my life would be awful and lonely. It seemed comically stupid to me at the time, but now that I keep running up against the image of the tragic transsexual in my head it seems less non-sensical.

Seeing the parents’ point of view made me realize that I want to approach the gender issue with my mother from a place of compassion, which made me feel good. But it also made me feel old — which isn’t unrelated to my ambivalence about making such a big change in my life.

The thing that really bugged me about the group was that two trans guys talked about their partners needing and demanding things from them emotionally in a way that really seemed to invoke the old “you know how women are” canard.

I was angry enough to compose a response in my head as I rode my bike to a doctor’s appointment (unrelated) earlier today.

Whether, as individuals, we think about it this way or not, transmen are one front in the war on the hierarchical gender binary. If we want support for our fight, we can’t be assholes to people holding down another front.

There is a stereotype that transmen become assholes, almost as if testosterone caused it directly. Like all other negative stereotypes, it’s hurtful to individuals — myself included. I am not suddenly the enemy — and I sure as hell haven’t gotten a promotion or a pay raise! Let’s not throw fuel on the stereotype that burns us.

A lot of the guys in the room talked about people in their lives blaming their transition for every annoying thing they did. I haven’t experienced that, but it scares me that I might. Imagine if every time you did something shitty or something that somebody you cared about didn’t get, they said it was because you’re gay. Ouch, right? But, to the extent that the people in the group were kind of rolling their eyes at women being women, they were doing exactly the same thing!

I guess I keep coming around in my thinking to a conflict between individuality and cultural norms. If you want to be read as masculine in our culture, you have to be read as male. So to be seen as who you are, you have to tithe at the altar of social conformity by altering who you are.

The most empowering stories of trans identity for me are those that don’t conform to the standardized narrative we’ve come up with to explain trans-ness: I was always a man; I’ve hated wearing dresses since I was a toddler; my boobs feel like somebody else’s. (I've never been girly, but none of these is exactly true either.) It’s like difference is a little oasis in a desert of sameness: I thirst for it, and I’m grateful when I find it.

If you enjoyed reading this post, please consider making a small donation for my surgery or buy a photograph with proceeds going to the surgery.

Misogyny Runs Deep, Even in the Gay-Lesbian-Trans Community

2011-03-21T12:09:00.000-07:00

Scene 1: I met a young trans woman recently: a new-school tranny whose model of "woman" is a young radical who treats gender irreverently. I liked this person's style, but I found myself wanting to call her he. I wasn't sure why because I really didn't think of her as a man. A friend nailed it: After hanging out with trans men and butch dykes, he had probably become the pronoun I use to signify gender queer.

Scene 2: The same friend said she was experiencing a new world of pronouns — who ever knew this humble part of speech was so important? — in a group of gay men who sporadically referred to each other with the gay male she. As we talked about it, we realized that they were using she to signify cattiness, sluttiness, uptight bitchiness: all negative forms of stereotypical femininity.

Leaving the GLBT world briefly, let's talk about the workplace, where, because we don't really know one another, biases flourish unacknowledged and unchecked. My working hypothesis about my workplace relationships is that I get into political hot water because I act like a man when bosses expect me to act like a woman. A man can be more direct, more certain of his competence and right to exert it. A woman who acts the same way clearly doesn't respect authority and/or has a difficult personality.

Scene 3: My A-Number One worst experience with this was with a self-declared feminist boss who was consistently wowed by men who were no more impressive than any of the women in the office. I fantasized about making a silent movie of her interactions, showing how she barely made eye contact with female employees and giggled like a schoolgirl at everything the early-20s male intern said.

This boss, I'll admit, has some sort of gendered personality disorder: She is as "victimized" in her own mind as the most novice feminist and yet as oppressive a boss as the most old-school old boy. But her case is different only in degree from other female employers'.

Scene 4: I currently work at a large nonprofit whose ED is a woman who inherited the job after being the second-in-command to the organization's founding director, a man. She has hired a senior staff person, a man, who is utterly and completely incompetent at his job but makes up for it by being a first-class bloviater. About nine-tenths of what he says is name-dropping of one sort or another.

His role is to undo good decisions my immediate boss, a woman, has made, to hold up good work indefinitely by citing vague bureaucratic concerns, and to force bad decisions on us periodically. The ED has been told of his unprofessionalism and incompetence repeatedly, by several people (women). But his position is safe because he is her toady.

My boss was prepared to hire a new public policy consultant, an accomplished lesbian lawyer. The Bloviater wanted to split the policy work into two parts and give one part of it to a Chicano man, who comes from an activist background. (Incidentally, the nonprofit is decidedly, even proudly, more milquetoast than the Sierra Club.) My boss objected because it seemed unnecessarily complicated. The Bloviater responded by calling a meeting with both the lesbian lawyer and the Chicano man. Awkward!

It immediately became clear why The Bloviater favors the man: He's also a smoke-blower, and the two name-dropped each other into oblivion while the lawyer, my boss and I sat by. There was a quick reprieve in which work was accomplished when the ED walked by and waved for The Bloviater to step out and consult with her for a moment. He looked like a schoolboy tripping on his seat to get out of the conference room.

Now back to the GLBT world. It bothers me that one of the two most compelling reasons pushing me to transition is that I feel unseen and belittled when people out in the world call me she. As if she were less than he. But I think it's lesbians and some evolved, self-confident FTMs and straight women who know — really know and believe — that women are not less than men. To wit: my boss, the lesbian lawyer and I in that conference room, I'm sure, all saw the boys' antics as no more than comical.

And it's the knowledge that men aren't superior, I think, that makes trans men who pass continue to feel at odds with themselves: They benefit from a privilege that they know is absurd. A trans man recently told me that he didn't feel like "A Man," and was going off testosterone again. He'd been off and on it six times. Am I a Man, benefactor of a privilege based on false assumptions, or am I a Woman, belittled and unseen based on false assumptions? It's another version of what my worst female boss must experience.

Some women take the opposite tack, believing that women are better than men. I don't find this way of thinking helpful or accurate.

Scene 5: I go to a boxing class once a week. It's a friendly class with no face or body contact. The instructor is a femme-ish lesbian who, despite good intentions, has trouble calling me he. Her butch girlfriend is also in the class. The other regulars include a slightly butch Italian lesbian, a balding straight man and a really tall Pacific Islander woman, who's apparently straight though I initially mistook her for an MTF. The girlfriend and the straight man are the best boxers by far; the girlfriend is more standoffish and seems to feel more inconvenienced by lesser pugilists.

One day as the class was winding down, the instructor remarked that she was sort of glad the straight man wasn't there because it was nice to have just us —. Here she stopped and looked at me, and then defended what she was going to say since I'm open about not having been born a man.

But what did she mean exactly? If we'd been talking about oppression or gay culture, I would give no argument that a straight man would have been unpleasantly out of the loop. But we were boxing. I can only deduce that the instructor must have meant that in some way the class was more collegial or supportive that day. But it wasn't. How is it that the assumption that women are gentler than men persists in a class filled with biological females who run the gamut of gender identities and even continues to be seen as a good thing in a class where the explicit goal is to learn how to beat the shit out of someone?

That putatively "feminist" view of women also seems to transcend fact. When I commented to the instructor that both her girlfriend and I were more macho than the straight man, she agreed. So who exactly was praised by her remark? How does it support the cause of women's political and physical empowerment?

For me, the real claim of feminism is that women are equal to men — neither better nor worse nor all that different as a class of people. Making the difference smaller makes transitioning seem like a much more individual, personal act, and it's in that frame that it makes sense to me. I can't be asked to hold the fate of the binary gender structure on my shoulders and to have my particular shrug signify something in particular as it echoes through a series of subjective — contradictory, overlapping, emotionally charged — assumptions.

If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation for my surgery or buying a photograph with proceeds going to the surgery.

The Bathroom is Like a Superhero's Phonebooth, but I'm Not a Superhero

2011-02-27T23:54:00.000-08:00

I spend more time in the bathroom now that I’m trying to be a man than I ever did before. It’s weird because my utterly pragmatic approach to appearance, not even to mention home decorating, is one of the strongest suits in my masculine credentials.

The shot itself takes time. I don’t want any infections, so I’m careful. On a paper towel on the counter, I lay out the syringe, cotton ball and two needles — large to load up the oily testosterone, and small to inject it. (I tried to use the big syringe to inject once and I couldn’t even get the thing in. A doctor said, "Yeah, you have to harpoon it in.") I have to feel around to make sure I'm injecting in the magic safe triangle on the side of my derriere. Wipe off vial lid and injection site. And hold a cotton ball on the spot for a second afterward.

There’s a cleanup process, too (note: It’s tacky to leave your needles and vials around for housemates to see). The needles go in their special sharps container. Of course one recycles the vials. On a good night, I might even compost the (100% recycled) paper towel.

All in all, this takes about 15 minutes once every two weeks, significantly nosing upward my average-time-in-the-bathroom stats. Don’t be fooled: These stats are a more important measure of masculinity than any sports data ever was.

Have I mentioned that shaving your face is hard? My femme friend assures me that “electric razors are where it’s at,” and I know that if shaving ever becomes a real necessity I will succumb to the utter unsexiness that is the electric razor.

I may in the not-too-distant future also find myself obliged to groom body hair. There’s an electric razor designed for that, the femme — who's Jewish — tells me, which I imagine is a hot-seller in the Walgreen’s on Castro. It’s got some boring name with the word “Norelco” in it, which reminds me of my weird father, so I’ve already decided I will call it The Manscaper.

Thanks to the testosterone, I’ve also become a regular user of antibiotic gel to keep the pimples at bay. The gel has changed my life by eliminating — yes, eliminating — a long-standing skin problem which shall remain nameless but that really wore on my self esteem while naked. For years, I suffered in silence believing it was pure vanity to ask a doctor about something so minor, but now I’ve learned there’s nothing too small to ask a doctor about. And now that I’m on testosterone — and the magic gel — I feel much more comfortable changing in the women’s locker room at the gym.

The gel is delightfully easy to put on my face. But since I’ve been taking T, I’ve developed some minor but vanity-dampening folliculitis/acne on my chest, which means I have to apply the gel after bathing and before putting on my binder. Incidentally, the binder is another life-changing purchase, but it’s tight and made from thick-ish material, so the gel really has to go on first. I’m down to one tube at present and it always manages to be in my bedroom when I need it in the bathroom, creating the perfect scenario in which to walk from one room to another with no shirt on — which I can’t do because I have a housemate, but even on the incredibly rare occasion that she leaves the house, walking from room to room with my tiny breasts exposed just begs the question of how utterly satisfying and erotic it will be to walk about freshly showered and shirtless with my future man chest.

Assuming the man chest happens before I've hardened my contours and furred up my exterior (if I ever suck up the humiliation of being furry like an animal), I may find myself acquiring yet another bizarre girlish bathroom ritual: changing in the toilet stall of whichever locker room I decide to use at the gym.

If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation for my surgery or buying a photograph with proceeds going to the surgery.

Photo Fundraising: Urban Landscapes

2011-02-21T17:46:00.000-08:00

I'm selling 12" x 18" limited-edition prints of some photographs of mine to raise money for surgery. Each costs $45 plus shipping and handling. If you're interested, leave a comment with your name and which image you want. Then buy the photo using the PayPal button.

Also, share this link with friends who might be interested.

The Monkey on Your Back That Defines You

2011-02-17T22:47:00.000-08:00

I could list a hundred reasons why I like working out enough to make it to the gym pretty nearly everyday, but let's be honest: The most pressing thing that gets me there day after day is vanity. Just a few extra pounds and my ass goes from that high-up defined arch that I like to a jiggly mass of womanliness — or so it seems to me. And if I neglect my muscles long enough I cease to look like a powerful block of bulldagger and start to look like a wee wisp of baby butch.

The other thing that spurs my gym addiction is a sense of accomplishment: Every day, I set goals that I can meet without depending on anyone but myself. If only the rest of life were so easy and gave such immediate satisfaction! The overarching goals of lean, mean fitness and big, defined muscles in my upper body — bulking where no woman dares to bulk — have given me purpose for the last decade.

Then I started injecting myself with testosterone, and the trapeziums that I haven't been able to work out much thanks to a nagging shoulder injury are piling up like snow drifts on my shoulders. The abs I never bothered to work too hard — knowing they'd always be hidden behind a soft belly that I'd have to become a full-time aerobics instructor to pare off — are peaking out in two faint but thrilling lines.

This is good news. But I find myself wondering: What will I do if vanity doesn't drive me to the gym everyday? Will I still work out? And who would I be without my fitness addiction?

In my own mind at least, I'm someone who has to work and work and work to make any progress at all toward my life goals, so I've begun to see the work itself as progress. I'm not one for inspirational aphorisms, but one that struck a chord with me went something like: Success is getting knocked down 18 times and getting up 19.

Testosterone is like instant goal attainment when it comes to physique. Or at least it seems that way initially: I imagine that if I ever get to a point where I'm passing as a man, I will start thinking about how short a man I am, and how my hands are too small and I wish I didn't have to limit myself to European-cut shirts and a shoe size small enough not to be available everywhere. Who knows, maybe I'll become a meathead with a Napoleon complex to compensate. Right now, I know I should just enjoy the goal-in-a-syringe thing that I've got going on.

But it's this kind of seemingly unimportant, and maybe even a little wonderful, shifts that signal just how much rests on the gender identity each of us queers has built — and that, in my case, I feel like I've built with no small amount of elbow grease. Who are we, after all, if not our habits and the familiar tracks of self-criticism playing in our heads?

If you like this post, or you just want to help me pay for top surgery, please consider a small donation. 100% goes to the surgery.

About a Whisker

2011-02-04T23:59:00.000-08:00

Hair on your face is creepy, if you think about it. Born men don't think about it much, I imagine, since they have no choice in the matter, anyway. But given precisely the choice to grow hair out of my perfectly nice face or to leave it be — well, with the amount of straggly facial hair I see on trans men, this has been serious barrier to committing to a regular regimen of testosterone.

But here I am taking the stuff again, partly because I've decided that it could be workable to be a clean-shaven transman and partly because I looked at my brother and my father and realized it's pretty unlikely I'll become anything remotely resembling a yeti anytime soon.

I have a whisker. It's smack in the middle of my chin. Alright, I tell myself — it's just one whisker. It doesn't lock me in to a full transition — even though lots of facial hair probably would: it's got to be better to be a transman than to be a chick with a beard, right?

I decide the whisker provides a good opportunity to practice shaving, which is one of those erotic ritual behaviors of masculinity. Except it's really hard. How can I explain? If you have experience shaving your legs, imagine that every part of your leg is the most difficult curve in your ankle and that missing a patch is not an option because it will show. And cutting yourself will also show. Maybe it's because my skin is the most delicate ladyskin ever, but shaving also gives me itchy, painful razor burn that lasts for two days. Fortunately, at this point, I really don't need to shave, certainly not every day.

But once you start shaving, you notice the hairs on your face growing in — not even to mention the single stiff whisker in the middle of your chin, which drives you absolutely insane. Even the soft blond hairs grow in all stubbly, and I find myself stroking my chin feeling them stand up against my hand. (Is this masculine, or just weird and gross?)

At one point, I see something that looks like it could be a second whisker just beneath the surface of my skin. Here I will pause to say that just as straight/gay and male/female are important binaries that give structure to our social interactions, so, too, is picker/grown-up. And, alas, if it's not already all too obvious, I am a picker. Give me a pimple and I will double its size daily until I have a disfiguring scab across half of my face. Give me an ingrown hair and I will confront it with bigger and more sophisticated tools until I've forced it to unravel and reveal itself, even if it brings a stream of blood with it. At that point I will say something like, Ha ha, I got you, you fucker.

And so it was with the potential second whisker, which turned out (I think) not to be a whisker at all, just the suggestion of something dark under the skin. Of course, once I was picking, I decided to try to pluck whisker #1. This did not work, because it wasn't long enough to grab with tweezers. End result: two small scabs on my chin that looked much worse than two whiskers, or probably even three, would have.

But until the scabs heal, I can't shave again because I will just nick them off.

They are, fortunately, small scabs. I sure as hell don't plan on telling anybody I was trying to dig out whiskers (or potential whiskers), so I head out with a poker face about the whole thing to meet my friend E. for a movie.

E. is a good friend, and therefore obviously also a picker. She has a big scab on her chin. I don't mention it.

Losing My Religion

2010-12-15T20:44:00.000-08:00

I was watching the Glee episode where Finn sings Losing My Religion. It's a cheesy show, to be sure, but somehow the episode captures just how terrifying it can be to lose something so big it's hard to measure.

I've said too much. I haven't said enough. I didn't feel scared when I was coming out; I felt like I was gaining a secret code rather than losing the selfhood I'd built up. Losing My Religion was the perfect song to revel in my secret/revealed feelings.

Consider this the hint of the century; consider this the hint that brought me to my knees.

Experiencing for the first time feelings strong enough to bring you to your knees was a gift, a discovery. I didn't imagine in the moment that I finally acknowledged — with relief, joy and sly smile — that I liked women, that it would eventually cut off a part of myself and truncate the relationships I'd formed. But of course it did. There was no predicting which people in my life would feel alienated by my new identity — or maybe it was I who suddenly felt alienated from them — but my friendships, my priorities and my social standing were all, eventually, changed.

Changing my gender feels more like losing a religion. That's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight. Am I a dyke anymore, savoring that complexity, if I'm a man? Do I get to keep the people who love me as I am if I'm not the person they remember? What pronoun will we use to talk about our memories? Will I float off into some foreign realm of experience, losing the understanding that I share with my dyke friends?

Transitioning would mean coming out all over again, except this time I know what's coming. I'm frankly not sure I have the energy to go through it again.

There's no neat ending to this line of thought. I feel like I have to choose between trailblazing selfhood – the brave choices I admire in others — and the selfhood that comes from stability, which I've always envied: like a kind of religion.

I want to be seen as the man I know I am — a gentle, unaffected masculinity — but I also want to be recognized as code-shifting and self-made. That sly smile has gotten me through a lot over the last 15 years.

Life is bigger, it's bigger than you — and you are not me. The lengths that I would go to, the distance in your eyes.

Somehow it's easier, at least in our pop-driven, Hollywood-emulating culture, to imagine going to the lengths of gambling your self out of love for somebody else than doing it out of grief and frustration at the limits of selfhood.

What if all these fantasies come flaming aground?

Kickin' It Up a Notch

2008-05-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

I gave myself a 150 mg shot day before yesterday. The pace seems absurdly slow, but there are a few inklings of changes: hints of more hair on my thighs and my mom asked me if I had a cold when I called her on Mother's Day (answer: "Uh...allergies?")

I'm going to the doc in the next week or so to make sure there aren't undesirable invisible side effects, like too many blood cells in my blood or high cholesterol.

I'm Ready for the Next Thing

2008-04-27T19:38:00.001-07:00

I just gave myself my third 100 cc shot. Like 24 days ago when I gave myself the first 100 cc shot, I'm finishing my period. Meaning that my period is not only regular despite the hormonal havoc I am doing my best to inflict on myself, it's coming in four days under the requisite 28 days. Combine that with the fact that I've still got a couple (very minor) zitty patches and my voice came back perhaps a half step lower but no more, and I'm starting to wonder what the hell I'm sticking myself with a needle for. On the bright side, I'm not going bald, and I'm feeling if anything more solid in my desire to butch up physically.

Even though I'm not talking about the testosterone much, it feels right to be back in a position at the cutting edge of gender. The noblesse oblige of supporting a range of decisions from the most radical spot is more comfortable to me than constantly having to argue the point that not altering one's body physically to correspond to society's norms of maleness is also radical (which I continue to believe).

The irony is that plenty women have facial hair and lack curves: People just don't see them because those women spend lots of time and money trying to conform to the norms of their assigned gender. Meanwhile, the health care and beauty industries are raking in the bucks—mine included. The bad news is that through the wonders of advertising, they also get money from women who don't have facial hair, but are nonetheless convinced that their blond peach fuzz makes them look like veritable cavemen. It works like the penis enlargement spam campaign: I've gotten so many emails telling me to "enlarge my wonder worm" and "stop settling for mediocrity in the bedroom" that I've started to feel like maybe I do have a "microscopic manhood," which is absurd because $100 would buy me the most horse-like piece of equipment out there. But the first step is to sell low self-esteem. The second step is to sell a product that will never fully resolve the self-esteem problem but will keep you spending.

In many ways, I feel like the trend among butch dykes toward taking testosterone has the same phases. As more butches took testosterone, those of us not taking it were left feeling somewhat feminine by comparison—a new and undesired feeling. Seeking a solution, we do the American thing and spend money on a prescription.

Worst of Both Worlds, Part III

2008-04-07T17:21:00.000-07:00

For the second month in a row, I've spotted between periods...which sounds like something my mom should say, or all my lesbian friends who are trying to get preggers.

And within an hour of my third shot, I got my period a couple days early. This is not how it was supposed to be.

And by the way, if you've never heard Margaret Cho on men with their periods, you should.

Another Victim of the DOJ's Abuses

2008-04-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

Hitting the news today is a report of still more wrongdoing at Alberto Gonzales's Justice department. Prosecutor Leslie Hagen was fired despite an "outstanding" performance evaluation. How is this news? Well, Hagen's loyalty to the Republican party agenda is not in question. She was a good Republican, who was also rumored to be a lesbian.

The DOJ could hardly stoop lower than it already has. But while I definitely don't believe Hagen should have been fired for her rumored homosexuality, I hesitate to paint her as a victim. After all, she eagerly embraced a party that has made absolutely no bones about publicly slandering homosexuals and opposing their right to protection from employment discrimination. So if Hagen's as good a lawyer as they say she was, she should have seen this one coming.

Shot Accompli

2008-04-04T17:38:00.001-07:00

100 cc's and still no crazy rage fits or humping people or objects against their will.

Worst of Both Worlds, Part II

2008-04-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

Am I fat? Because I've put on about 8 pounds since I started taking testosterone. I can't tell if it's fat or bone density. I know it's not muscle because I'm still struggling with the same weights at the gym.

This was one of the things I was hoping to avoid. Fat is not a transman's friend—not when it tends to gather on the ass and hips. When I weigh too much, I look like a girl as I walk along a building and catch myself in the reflection. That is, in fact, how I define weighing too much.

In an effort to avoid having the "that's no lady, that's my ass" moment of recognition, I have been trying to figure out how to monitor if I'm gaining muscle or fat for some time now. It's totally humiliating to have to ask for help in this endeavor, because I really just seem like a girl who's convinced she's fat no matter how much I explain that I really do want to gain muscle weight. But it's equally pathetic to deprive myself of delicious foods, which inevitably leads one to talk about how one has to deprive oneself of delicious foods, which, yet again, makes one sound like a girl. Do straight biomen not have to watch their waistlines, or do they genuinely not care how fat they get? (They do a pretty fantastic job of looking terrible, so maybe they really don't give a rat's ass.)

And in the end, it's always fat anyway: Building enough muscle to gain weight without manly quantities of testosterone is well nigh impossible. And so far, testosterone hasn't been much help, because I think it's fat now, too. My ass is not looking any manlier. I hold on to one small hope: I don't think I've gotten so much fatter that all of my T-shirts should be cutting into my armpits like they are (and sports bras always do because I have pecs), so I may possibly—maybe—be getting a little bit wider in the shoulders.

Worst of Both Worlds

2008-03-30T20:52:00.000-07:00

I'm scheduled to give myself a shot today, but I'm afraid of what it will do to me. I've got my period, and as a not-intended-to-procreate female, I get horniest just before and after my period, when there's absolutely no chance I'll get pregnant. (Which would be a nifty trick of nature if menstruating didn't suck so bad.) Before I started taking testosterone, I would find myself lolling about thinking about sex all day at these times, and usually wind up masturbating at some point. But now, the testosterone is amplifying the effects of whatever lady hormone it is that causes me to be so non-utilitarianly randy (I'm just playing dumb: I know it's progesterone, whatever that is). Now, I'm an internet porn bandit and I actually woke up the other morning with my pants down, as if I'd clawed them off myself in the middle of the night.

(Aside: Would somebody please put out for me? I'm not that bad. I'm actually kinda hot.)

Point being, I'm not sure I can handle the perfect storm generated by the confluence of my female and male randiness. If I could grow two heads and two nether regions, it could work out, but barring that I'm going to wait several days to give myself the shot.

I'm also going to increase my dose from 50 ccs to 100 ccs, since after 5 shots all I've got to show is a constellation of little zits on one side of my face. (The laryngitis persists, and since it began on Easter, I'm thinking that I may simply be reborn with a lower voice.)

Before You Go Getting Any Ideas...

2008-03-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

Somehow I need to say that my story isn’t that I’ve always been a man, born in the wrong—clearly wrong—body, and that I’ve hated my “breasts” (such as they are) since the moment they first appeared. I don’t want to live my life as a straight man. I’m ambivalent about facial hair—except sideburns, with which I’m obsessed. And I don’t want to go bald. I’m not sure a dicklet—i.e., large clit—will be any better than what I’ve got now, unless it makes it insanely easy to come while I molest some sweet young thing.

I do want people to stop making all kinds of assumptions about my likes and dislikes, my history and how I want to be treated based on the fact that they associate “biological female” with all kinds of other things that don't follow logically. (To take one particularly annoying example, my housemate really felt like it should be him who changed the lightbulb in the high-ceilinged hallway, even though I swear to god, he looked like he’d never done it before.) (Or the guy who called me baby at the gym.) I do want to stop having waitresses refer to my gorgeous femme date and I as "ladies." And I wanted to experience for myself what biological attributes of masculinity might come in a bottle.

Find Your Voice (It’s Multiple Choice!)

2008-03-24T22:37:00.000-07:00

I came down with laryngitis on Sunday night. It’s the final farewell of a cold I thought I’d outsmarted. Being more than a little bit verbal, I don’t find laryngitis much fun. But this time, I find myself wondering if my old voice will ever fully come back.

I’m ambivalent. I don’t love my voice, but I don’t hate it and I’ve had it for a long time. I’m psyched to have a lower voice—I think this will be the coup de grace that finally defeats people’s impulse to call me ma’am. It’s just a question of how it will happen. Will I sound like a teenage boy (which I figure could be kinda fun because I could bat away questions by saying "My voice must be changing," which is sort of Dada)? Or will I just feel it fill with more and more reverb (which is mostly exciting, but a little bit uncomfortable because I find myself sometimes having a visceral man-hating reaction because some guy’s voice is so loud and penetrating)? Or will I get laryngitis—which caused my (cool) coworkers to observe that my voice is "awesome," and my boss to make an uncharacteristically bizarrely sexualizing/feminizing remark that it’s "husky" (italics indicating the tone of insinuation, tampered by his lack of skills and practice at being inappropriate)—and recover with a whole new voice?

All this to say, I should be recording myself everyday...but it feels entirely too self-absorbed. And how awkward is it to talk into a tape recorder when you’re alone in your room?

Doctor, Make Me a Man!

2008-03-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

I got my first three shots at the doctor’s office. First I’d tried the patch, which resulted a few weeks into it in 11 perfectly round, itchy, blazingly red welts on my ass. Before the allergic meltdown, I felt very private about telling anyone I was taking testosterone. But the reaction made the story feel somehow more mine, and less like Lexington pulp fiction.

The fourth shot I gave myself, after being coached sufficiently by the nurse. I came home from work, wound up on X Tube, jacked off, then realized I should give myself the shot before my utterly un-gendersmart straightboy housemate got home. So I did, and it went perfectly—no fuckups, no blood, no pain (the trial run at the nurse’s hadn’t been quite so textbook).

And I felt a wave of kindness toward myself wash over me, and I thought: Somebody has to do it. (For all the feelings among the rest of the dyke community—including, not so long ago me—that trannyboys are the ultimate manifestation of the dyke who thinks s/he’s awesome and takes up a lot of space to prove it, it doesn’t feel particularly privileged to be sticking a needle in your ass all alone to become a bit of a Frankenstein.) Then I watched Law & Order, and all felt right in my private little world.

Breaking News on Women's Sexuality: Men Don't Understand It, or Care

2007-04-11T18:00:00.000-07:00

Your bloggerbot comes out of semi-retirement to express his dismay at this latest finding, cited in a New York Times article that pretends to break the latest scientific discoveries on sexuality and gender:

Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women's brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children.

It's not completely the Times' fault, but you'd think they'd at least observe that science is seriously skewed toward studying men's sexuality. But the article accomplishes the reverse, claiming to shed light on sexuality for both sexes when it mentions only men. After quoting a thinly researched observations about how sexual orientation seems more fixed in men than in women, the article concludes, "Sexual orientation, at least for men, seems to be settled before birth." The "at least for men" drips with condescension and dismissal of female sexuality—making the articles supposedly reported conclusions that women don't have a sexual orientation that much more suspicious.

Yes, I'm serious about the claim that women don't have sexual orientation. The article quotes J. Michael Bailey, an expert on sexual orientation at Northwestern University: "I'm not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men." That's right, they pick men because men are objectively the best candidates! Bailey goes on to claim that the systems for sexual orientation and arousal make men go out and find people to have sex with, whereas women are more focused on accepting or rejecting those who seek sex with them.

Here we are in an article by a man, that quotes only male scientists and deals only with studies focused on men, and—shocker!—it concludes that women's sexuality is a mystery that nobody really gives a fuck about anyway. The one thing we do know about them is that they're passive.

That's right: all male scientists, male writer, all studies about men. Yet the article has the balls to introduce its rundown of research on homosexuality as follows:

Researchers have devoted considerable effort to understanding homosexuality in men and women, both for its intrinsic interest and for the light it could shed on the more usual channels of desire," the article gives examples only of studies on male homosexuality.

The article concludes with no evidence whatsoever that male and female sexuality are utterly different. It also seems hell-bent on arguing that male and female brains are completely different. Yet this is the best they can do:

Widespread regions of the cortex, the brain's outer layer that performs much of its higher-level processing, are thicker in women. The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a larger fraction of the female brain.

Or this:

Techniques for imaging the brain have begun to show that men and women use their brains in different ways even when doing the same thing. In the case of the amygdala, a pair of organs that helps prioritize memories according to their emotional strength, women use the left amygdala for this purpose but men tend to use the right.

This one is my favorite. Listen to how many weasel words it uses to conclude that straight men are turned on by women and gay men are turned on by men:

Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.

Do I need a smart conclusion after that? Because I just feel done.

TransBack

2007-03-26T20:26:00.000-07:00

I've never heard of a transguy deciding to go back to being female, but I bet, given the popularity of transitioning among those in their early 20s, it will become more popular. But maybe, just maybe this is first-ever account of (and by) a person who came to regret the decision to become a man. (There are a lot of verbs in there, but I think that's appropriate, if clunky.) Which makes blogs feel a little worthwhile again. (In my opinion, they make more sense as vehicles for voices otherwise unheard than anything else.)

Do you know of more such man-interrupted stories? What do FTMs who have fully transitioned think of them?

Gates on Gays in the Military: I'm Too Busy for this Crap

2007-03-19T17:33:00.001-07:00

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared that homosexuality, like adultery, is immoral and the Army shouldn't allow any immoral behavior. I have a few questions left about that. First of all, immoral according to what standard in a secular state? The Bible? Even the Bible takes adultery to be the bigger issue: It made the top 10; biblical pronouncements on homosexuality are tucked away in odd places and not especially clear. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" is pretty clear. And yet, there's no word from the DoD that a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on adultery is forthcoming.

None of these obvious questions has been asked. The media has, however, tackled likely '08 Democratic candidates Obama and Clinton and asked for their opinion on the morality of homosexuality. They hedged. (Clinton had asked for the gay vote just days before at an under-the-radar speech at the Human Rights Campaign.)

Finally, someone has gotten around to asking the Secretary of Defense what he thinks. Robert Gates veritably brimmed with substance and insight when he said, "I think we should just move on at this point." Asked whether he thought Pace should apologize, Gates said no. Gates went on to say that he was too busy to evaluate whether "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"—which less than half the nation supports and which costs a strapped military 4,000 soldiers a year—is an effective policy.

Tale of the First Two Transsexuals

2007-03-19T17:27:00.000-07:00

In an article I wrote for AlterNet that was meant to serve as an introduction to the many-splendored world of queer identities—about which, more later—I claimed that male-to-female gender reassignment surgeries have been around for longer, and consequently so have MTF transsexuals.

Well, slap my ass and call me Sally! It turns out the first ever transsexual was Michael Dillon, né Laura. He fell in love with a man who wanted to become a woman, and did—making her the first male-to-female transsexual. (Their love was predictably ill-fated.)

All of this is in a book reviewed in the New York Times, called The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution, by Pagan Kennedy.

The review is pretty interesting, but I'm a little disturbed by this pronouncement by the writer (Mary Roach, of Stiff fame):

I wanted to stand by [Dillon] through all 200 pages, but I fell hard for Dr. Gillies. It is no small feat to make a romance between the world’s first two transsexuals seem ho-hum, but Gillies almost manages…Gillies was altering not merely faces and bodies, but the very nature of surgery.

See, surgery that affects everyday people is more interesting that the intense plight and bravery of the first ever transsexuals, who served as Gillies' guinea pigs in order to live the lives they needed to. Or am I just being hypersensitive? And hypersensitivity is precisely the subject of my next blog post (OK after the one on Gates that I'm cross-posting from Mother Jones), so stay tuned.

In Which My Hands Tremble with Anger at Homophobes Who Think They Know More About Gay Issues Than Gay People

2007-03-15T20:37:00.000-07:00

When I blogged about Garrison Keillor's ridiculous stereotyping of gay men as camped-up, self-obsessed, effeminate jerks, I got a lot of comments like "can't you recognize satire?" and "lighten up." I'm really baffled by these. No, actually, I'm pissed.

I think, and hope, if you've been reading my blog, you'll know that, yes, in fact, I do have a sense of humor. About queer issues. It is that same sense of humor that tells me Garrison Keillor's remarks weren't funny. Sure, I think they were meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but all in the service of saying, let's go back to that peachy simpler time when men were men and women were women and children were important. First of all, much to my chagrin, gender norms are still firmly in place. Go to a random person's house: Who's cooking? What does the husband watch on TV? Who quits to raise the baby? And children, sweet mother of God, children are still fetishistically important—especially to gay parents who pay good money and put lots of time and thought into the matter.

(Now just a quick aside, Mr. Keillor is a fine one to blame others for the passing of that sweet, simple time of the nuclear man-woman family. He has cheated on at least 2 of his 3 wives.)

But how is it that people are so totally ignorant about discrimination? Here's a primer:

Jokes are a big part of the problem!

They seem to be an especially big part when it comes to queer stuff. I've had more people make jokes in front of me in that "I'm only laughing at this because I know you know I'm too sophisticated to be a biggot, but you've got to admit the stereotype is really true (or else you have no sense of humor)" kind of way. Let's just say if I pooped the tiniest turd in the world for each of these remarks, I'd have taken a mighty big shit.

The funny thing is, these people—and Keillor is especially guilty of this—think the stereotypes are true because, well, because they think the stereotypes are true. If you aren't gay sensitive, it's likely the only gay person you'll know is gay is the one that fits your stereotype. Meanwhile, non-stereotypical gays are moving all around you. Now I myself am a fairly stereotypical homo in many ways--certainly the way I look. But does that mean I'm no more than the sum of my stereotypes? That's kinda demeaning, don't you think?

And then there's this comment: "I don't think that Garrison has evil intent or wants to hurt anybody. Just like Chris Rock when he says unkind things about EuroAmericans. If we are offended by what Chris Rock says, just don't watch him and/or Comedy Central shows." Pop quiz: How is a black man making fun of white people different from a straight guy making fun of gay people? Answer: Either the humor supports real-world oppression (and if you don't think there's any of gay people, are you dead?), or it challenges those oppressions.

By the way, that's also why "there isn't this kind of outrage when straight White men are lampooned, denigrated, and presented as the stereotypical bumbling moron white man daily in TV shows (Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, Friends, etc.), ads, and in countless articles and blogs." Oh, and those shows are produced and written by the people they mock. Oh, and one other thing, the purpose of these shows is not to deprive straight white men of anything.

Military Man in a Pickle Over Anti-Gay Remarks

2007-03-14T19:00:00.001-07:00

Comments made by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune may make his, from a PR perspective, one of the most disastrous interviews ever given.

Pace said he believed homosexuality was immoral and that he doesn't "believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way." He compared homosexuality to adultery, I suppose to avoid the obviously delusional comparisons conservatives such as Rick Santorum have made. But his comparison raises the question: Will the military institute a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy with regard to adultery?

Of course, Pace was only saying what most military men think—but the military, led by Colin Powell, carefully crafted an alibi for its homophobia when it demanded in 1993 that Clinton not allow out gays to serve in the military. It's not that we're homophobic, the brass said; it's that the grunts are so homophobic they'd sooner fight a gay platoon-mate than the enemy—and that's OK.

Pace also violated another military stance in speaking the truth that dare not speak its name. The military is, at present, desperate not to revisit the gays in the military issue, because commanders know now would be an opportune time to repeal the rule. Homophobes can get down with the idea of sending gays and lesbians off to die for them, as evidenced by the drop by half in the annual number of soldiers discharged for being gay since 9/11.

John Warner, a Republican on the Armed Services Committee, suggested that the policy will at least be reviewed when he said, "I respectfully but strongly disagree with the chairman's view that homosexuality is immoral." A Republican! This could only happen with the military desperate to boost its numbers.

Why is Salon Running a Bigoted Anti-Gay Column by Garrison Keillor?

2007-03-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

In a column called "Stating the Obvious" no less, Keillor spouts:

The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men -- sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That's for the kids. It's their show.

Does Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva who fought and was wounded in Iraq fit this stereotype? Does John Amaechi, a retired NBA player? Keillor is just vomiting up his own homophobic impressions.

Write Salon and ask why they're giving bigotry a platform.

Largo City Commissioner Becomes Trans Activist

2007-03-12T22:43:00.000-07:00

Steven "Susan" Stanton has protested being fired as Largo City Commissioner after coming out as a transsexual (she is being represented by the National Center for Lesbian Rights). The Saint Petersburg Times ran this kind, human portrait. The Saint Petersburg Times, y'all. It always does take someone pretty mainstream who's cried a lot about who they are to break through the walls, but it's still great when it happens.

Military Will Institute "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Policy for Adultery

2007-03-12T22:19:00.000-07:00

General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke out against proposals to loosen the "don't ask, don't tell" policy today in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. He said he believed homosexuality was immoral, much like adultery is immoral, and that he doesn't "believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way."

City Employee in Florida Transitions, Gets Canned

2007-03-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

Transsexuals in the national news, Oh my! But the news isn’t good. Steven Stanton, a city commissioner in Largo, Fl., went public with his intention to begin living life as Susan (she has been on hormones for more than 2 years) and was promptly fired.

It’s unclear whether Largo has adequate antidiscrimination legislation to bolster a case against, err, itself, and Stanton says she hasn’t decided whether to fight the move or not. (Stanton claims the city shot down a measure to bar discrimination on the basis of gender identity, but the Human Rights Campaign suggests otherwise.) The media has been all over it. Newsweek is featuring an interview, in which Stanton seems so raw and human it’s painful.

A transgender woman recently fired by a Michigan Christian university said today she does plan to fight the dismissal.

Here's a little good news. You knew it already but the girls in the Go-Go's go go both ways!

The End of the Castro?

2007-03-01T15:44:00.000-08:00

The Castro—the world's gayest neighborhood at 95 percent gay and lesbian—is heterosexualizing, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. As I found the article, my immediate responses were sadness and resignation, because it's a pretty mainstream neighborhood anyway. (But if the Castro Theater goes, I will chain myself to the organ!) In fact, the end of gay enclaves might even signal the beginning of true acceptance.

I was surprised to find myself a more offended than simply resigned as I read the article. Here's one married woman's account of her recent move into gay Oz: "The only thing that meant anything to me was the area would be nice"… At first, [she] wondered if her family's presence would provoke a backlash from gay and lesbian residents...She rejects suggestions that families like hers should live in other neighborhoods. "You could also say this neighborhood used to be full of families."

Sounds a lot like "this land is my land, and this land is my land, too." (And, yes, Dorothy we are still in Kansas!) I would suggest it is still full of families, though they may not have children.

The article also suggests, convincingly, that the Castro's visibility has contributed to San Francisco gays and lesbians' political power:

"Having a specific neighborhood politicians can point to, can go to and shake hands or kiss lesbian babies, has really solidified the gay vote, our political muscle," said longtime community activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca.

San Francisco is one of precious few places where politicians worry about the GLBT vote. That may be because the Castro has become an affluent neighborhood, but it could also be because the Castro is, as Mecca indicates, a visible reminder of how may gay people live in the city.

The Castro is also an exception in that dykes and fags—usually white ones—are often the agents of gentrification. We are the first to move into undesirable neighborhoods, which we then make culturally vibrant in those white, middle-class ways that bring white heterosexuals in. (Case in point: San Francisco's Mission.) The process is difficult on both ends: I don't like being the beacon to people of color that their homes are about to become unaffordable or that their neighborhood is about to lose its individuality. Nor do I like having straight people move in behind me, making my home unaffordable. But then, that's kind of the predicament of the queer in America: It's better than being a racial minority, but the straights will squeeze you out in the end.

Advocates are proposing that the city's gay institutions (including its Gay and Lesbian History Center) be permanently housed in the Castro, which seems reasonable. But I did get a little misty when I read that Don Reuter, a historian of gay enclaves, says "I think the only gay neighborhood that is going to survive is the Castro. In every city this is going on—we're unraveling. Our gay neighborhoods are unraveling."

Scientists Say Enough to Right-Wing Manipulation of Their Work

2007-02-27T14:45:00.000-08:00

The religious right defends its intolerance towards gays and lesbians by generating misleading statistics about them. For example, groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council claim that gay men are more likely to be pedophiles than straight men simply by calling men who abuse boys "gay," rather than pedophiles. A greater proportion of child molesters choose victims of the same sex than consenting adults choose partners of the same sex, so there you have it: Gay men molest boys. (Confused? You should be.)

They also claim again and again that children do best with a mother and a father. That's not what the research says. Research says that kids do better with two parents than one, but parents' gender and orientation have no effect. Just as their bogus studies make a mockery of science, so does their success getting their views reported by media outlets trying to be balanced make a mockery of that basic journalistic tenet.

Well, at long last, the scientists whose professional studies are being cherry-picked and distorted to bolster the religious right's claims have created a website to refute the misuse of their work. The site, RespectMyResearch.org, lists the studies that have been distorted and explains how. It also has a portal researchers can use to report misuse of their findings.

If only mainstream media outlets will check it before they publish bogus claims fed to them by right-wing think tanks, maybe some intelligent public dialogue about GLBT issues will follow.

What Is a Dyke to Wear to Host the Oscars?

2007-02-26T13:59:00.000-08:00

So Ellen hosted the Oscars ceremony and Melissa Etheridge won one. Dykes have made it right? Maybe not. The media has its panties in a wad about Ellen's bad--er, dykey--fashion. I posted on this at Mother Jones. I could repost here, but half the fun is seeing it there.

In Which I Pump You Up, Only to Bring You Back Down Again

2007-02-24T17:33:00.000-08:00

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports today that two breakthrough bills for gays and lesbians are likely to be passed by the new Democratic Congress. Both possibilities have me on the brink of tears of joy, they are so overdue and yet still seem so implausible. The first is an employment discrimination ban. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) projects that the bill will even include gender identity—which, to have any teeth, it must, lest employers say “it wasn’t that Cameron sleeps with women that bothered us, it’s that Cameron stomps around acting like a man!” (Let's translate this argument: "It's not that Cameron is a dyke that bothers us, it's that Cameron acts like a dyke!") A gender identity clause would also stop harassment of men who are perceived as effeminate whether or not they are actually gay.

The only problem with this bill—and it’s a major one—is that churches and small businesses would be exempt. Churches: Feh—I don't have the energy to wade into the constitutionally murky waters of whether they should be exempt or not. But small businesses, which is to say most businesses? Why should they be exempt? No one is talking about a quota; the issue is whether GLBT people are turned away from positions for which they are qualified.

The other bill would include GLBT identity among those covered by hate-crimes legislation. That's right, nearly 10 years after Matthew Shephard was executed there is no national hate-crimes protection for GLBT people, who make up 14 percent of all victims of hate crimes. If that's not reason enough to support it, here's what Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has to say: "It's taking us to the point where anyone who opposes the sexual behavior of homosexuals will be silenced." Now, he's probably exaggerating (he also claimed that gay-rights groups exaggerate the extent of discrimination as a means of accomplishing their broader political agenda...to not be discriminated against), but just for a moment imagine the utopia of slapping lawsuits on groups like Perkins' who invent slanderous anecdotes and statistics about GLBTs and spend millions lobbying against their civil rights. The sweet, sweet silence of it.

But, before you get too hopeful dear reader, remember in whose hand the veto pen rests.

Rampant Abuse of GLBT Students in US Schools

2007-02-21T16:37:00.001-08:00

A study released last week by Human Rights Watch reads, in part:

In the United States, only 55 percent of students say they feel safe in school. Human Rights Watch found that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth in many U.S. schools are particularly vulnerable to unrelenting harassment from their peers. Despite the pervasiveness of the abuse, few school officials intervened to stop the harassment or to hold the abusive students accountable; in fact, some teachers and administrators encouraged or participated in the abuse. Over time, verbal harassment often escalated into sexual harassment and other forms of physical violence.

Turns out all the drumming up of anti-gay sentiment Republicans have been doing to win elections has real consequences. For kids.

In the "It's About Time" Department...

2007-02-21T16:06:00.000-08:00

A lesbian couple staged a non-violent sit-in at Focus on the Family today, after they were refused permission to talk with founder/leader James Dobson. More! Bigger! Better!

Anglicans Make Big Show of Homophobia...Yawn.

2007-02-17T19:21:00.000-08:00

This whole Peter Akinola homophobia thing is getting kind of tiresome, so I'm not going to write much about it, but Akinola, the leader of the Anglican church of Nigeria, and 6 other church leaders from developing countries refused to take communion with the U.S.'s bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, at an international church meeting in Tanzania, the Washington Post reports.

I've written elsewhere about what a raging homophobe this guy is, and how the American Episcopalian churches that have spurned Jefferts Schori's leadership for his are completely nuts.

But what I haven't said elsewhere is that the rift in the Anglican/Episcopalian church actually began when women were allowed to join the clergy, so it's especially fitting that Jefferts Schori be the one to hold her own against the secessionists.

Blogging about this same issue for the fourth or fifth time, it also occurs to me that perhaps the press could do a better job of covering gay issues than to have their coverage focus on churches that reject homophobia. Yes, it might take a little bit of work and may even involve a tiny bit of an agenda to decide to cover something rather than letting events wash over you in Zen fashion, but it's ignorance about gay people that allows hate crime and bogusly unconstitutional legislation to bloom—and journalists either care about the constitution or they like to use jail stints as street cred.

Now this second part isn't ground for the Washington Post, but has anyone done a really good analysis of what the Bible actually says about homosexuality? Because the Bible says a lot of shit, and I know it includes coveting thy neighbor's wife and taking the Lord's name in vain in its top 10, from which gay sex is markedly absent. Since those two seem more sinful and are also more common, maybe we should stamp them out before we even consider homosexuality? Just a thought.

Texas Lez 3, Texas Leg 0 (Or, My Grudge Against Warren Chisum)

2007-02-16T16:32:00.000-08:00

Way back in 1999, a ridiculous Texas lawmaker named Warren Chisum was on the record defending the state's sodomy ban (which applied to hets as well as homos, prompting one sane and humorous lawmaker to ask Chisum if she should go to jail if her husband happened to slip during intercourse [and by the way, we're laughing with her husband, not at him: it's easier to do than you might think!]). Chisum also supported a law that would prevent gay couples—and all households of which any member is suspected of homosexuality—from adopting.

Wow, I was one pissed off little baby bulldagger those days, since I was living in Texas and had just been thrown out of a creative writing class because my queer politics were disruptive—about which the University of Texas said, "Wait, are you calling this sexual harassment? Because it's not, and that's the only way we could make a case against it."

But I digress. Chisum. Yes, Chisum continues to be the world's biggest asshole, claiming—gosh it seems like yesterday, but it was actually a whole week ago!—that Jews invented the theory of evolution (and the Copernican revolution), making it a religious theory that cannot be taught in public schools. (Silly reader, Christian theories are OK, because, well, the people that made them up didn't have big noses!)

Nigeria: Homosexuality Is "Barbaric and Shameful"

2007-02-14T14:52:00.000-08:00

Nigeria's parliament moved a step closer to passing the sweeping anti-gay legislation supported by Peter Akinola, the leader of the rogue U.S. Episcopalian churches. Supporters of the law say it upholds the country's cultural values, which is confusing to me because I thought "culture" was what the people made it, not what the government dictated. Good news (?): One sane MP mentioned that it would be a good idea to "remember to protect people's rights even if they are a minority."

Hey, Hey, What Can I Do?

2007-02-13T13:41:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's because the camp gene is right next to the gay gene, but I heart tribute bands. I'm not sure how I feel about Rolling Stone reviewing them, but it is. Still, I can't help but be titillated by their mention of transgendered bands like Lez Zeppelin and (male) Madonna. I've been giving Klezbians and Isle of Klesbos CDs for gifts for years, for the name alone! But the idea of some dykes rocking out to "I've gotta little woman but she won't be true" is just too fantastic. I love the underground, irreverent humor, especially as it pertains to gender, about which we tend to be sooo reverent. But if Rolling Stone is covering it, does that mean it's already over?

Update: Buzz-kill, I got some PR photos of Lez Zeppelin and, oops, it turns out they aren't using the word "lez" ironically. Their T-shirt says "All Women, All Zeppelin," and they would so not be hot singing "I gotta little woman..." Meanwhile, I was repeatedly scolded for not pimping AC/DShe, which I didn't pimp because of the whole "she" thing. Just goes to show, you can't judge a band by its name. I will say that Zeppelin is, in my opinion, a better band on balance. But go see AC/DShe, OK?

WWTD (What Would Tzara Do)?

2007-02-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Dada activism. So are the folks at the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. Following the state of Washington's high court ruling [PDF] last summer that it was fair to limit marriage to heterosexuals because marriage serves the purposes of procreation, the group has decided to call the state's bluff. They are proposing legislation requiring married heterosexual couples to procreate within three years--or have their marriage forcibly dissolved. In principle, I like this approach, and I seem to have good company. But I don't think I would actually sign a petition supporting it. Gay groups trying to earn respectability have balked because they don't want to "be seen as taking anyone else's rights away." My problem is that there's too much Dada in the law already, particularly when it comes to sexuality, so I think the joke would be lost. (Is requiring the would-be bride and groom to promise that they "are capable of having children with one another" that different from requiring them to promise that neither is a transsexual, as one county in Ohio does?) I think proposing the measure is a winner, but unless I created a funny alias, I wouldn't be signing any petitions.

P.S. Tristan Tzara, author of the "Dada Manifesto," was a huge misogynist and homophobe, so the question is actually a puzzler.

Flow Chart: Gay? --> No

2007-02-03T20:11:00.000-08:00

Supporters of Michigan's amendment refusing to recognize same sex marriage "for any purpose" claimed in their campaign that they did not intend or expect the amendment to revoke benefits.

THEY HAD THEIR FINGERS CROSSED!

A Michigan appeals court ruled yesterday that the wording means that employers cannot provide benefits for same-sex domestic partners. The suit was filed by the ACLU after the state attorney general issued a legal opinion that public employers could no longer offer benefits to same-sex couples shortly after the amendment was passed.

Call me naive, but shouldn't the attorney general have called the amendment's supporters' bluff when they lied about the content of the measure put before voters? Is there no provision anywhere in our legal system demanding that the voters know exactly what they're voting on when they vote on it?

Now take the statements made by the executive director of the Michigan Family Forum, (wait for it) Brad Snavely. "No one knew for sure what the language would mean," said Snavely. But, now that a court has determined that the language denies gays benefits, he hopes judges in other states will follow suit.

Let's recap what Snavely is sniveling about. Queers cannot marry because it's a sin. Straights can. If straights choose not to marry (which is also a sin), they still get benefits. Queers cannot, under any circumstances, get benefits.

Part of me is tempted to say that the situation has gotten so absurd, that surely the ACLU will win on appeal, and may even have other broadly worded amendments deemed unconstitutional (or is that impossible, since they've been voted in to the constitution?). But I said that in my last blog post. And I recently watched a truly amazing (seriously) movie about Anne Frank, which drove home the point that millions of Jews in Europe didn't leave when they had the chance because they thought surely things would get better.

Gimme Shelter!

2007-01-31T21:20:00.000-08:00

A report on LGBT youth homelessness released yesterday by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Coalition for the Homeless is, put simply, a shit show. It finds that 20 to 40 percent of homeless youth in the U.S. are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. (About 4 percent of youth are GLBT.) Discrimination makes the youth more likely to be turned out and it also makes it harder for them to access shelters. Less than 1 percent of the $105-million budget for the federal Runaway, Homeless and Missing Children Protection Act goes to organizations that work exclusively with GLBT populations. Even San Francisco, a destination for many homeless queer youth, has just 25 public housing units set aside for them. I'm morbidly curious to see if Congress will turn a blind eye to the study, or if legislators will set their homophobia aside long enough to deal with the massive problem it documents.

¡Ay, Caramba!

2007-01-26T13:36:00.000-08:00

In Mexico, transgender rights have about as much chance of succeeding as, say, a comprehensive political ethics package. Or maybe just a basic social safety net.

Researcher of Gay Sheep Claims He's Misunderstood

2007-01-26T12:20:00.000-08:00

Like many other bloggers, I picked up on a story in the Sunday Times of London about researchers working on homosexuality in sheep. Today, the New York Times is reporting that the researchers objected to being portrayed as abusing animals and potentially contributing to medical "cures" for homosexuality in humans.

It should be said that the Sunday Times article was wrong about devices being implanted in the sheep's brains. But, after reading the scientists' rebuttal, I'm not convinced that much else about the article was wrong. Sheep are, in fact, killed in the experiment. To which the researcher, Dr. Charles Roselli, responds: "Why would you pick on a guy who’s killing maybe 18 sheep a year, when there’s maybe four million killed for food and clothing in this country?" OK, sure, he's not a flagrant example of animal cruelty, but he's still killing animals for less-than-necessary research.

To charges that their research finding a fix for homosexuality in sheep fuels the idea that human homosexuality should be fixed, rather than accepted, Roselli responded that they had never claimed their research would help find a cure for human homosexuality. When he wrote that the research "has broader implications for understanding the development and control of sexual motivation and mate selection across mammalian species, including humans," he was using "control" in a scientific way that we laypeople couldn't possibly understand. And, he said, he only mentions human implications because scientists are "forced to draw connections [to humans] in a way that we can justify our research."

Now that is the weakest claim of all. It essentially says that, however disturbing the potential human use of his research might be, you can't blame Roselli for doing what he has to do to get money. That argument wouldn't even stand if the research were more vital than increasing sheep fertility.

The Times article is way too sympathetic, making gay activists look too stupid to understand science, and letting Dr. Roselli off the hook without even asking him if he would reject grant money from the mad scientists at, say, the Foundation for the Family.

Baaaad Times.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

2007-01-24T20:37:00.000-08:00

That book pretty much describes my day today. (Let's just say it started with my dog eating an enormous and particularly unhealthy-looking human turd in the park as I watched in horror, unable to catch her.) When I got home I found this article in my inbox, via Google Alerts. It reports that a recent, fairly credible poll found that 51 percent of Americans favor a law banning gay marriage. So not only have I had a brutally crap day today, but these randomly selected Americans would like to tell me that they hope I never find love and happiness. In fact, they'd like to see legislation preventing me from finding love and happiness.

But then it struck me: That's what this is all about. The whole idea of banning gay marriage is to make gay people feel that they don't deserve happiness. And whoever is polling on gay marriage right now is on their side. Hasn't gay marriage been polled enough? Wasn't there just a spate of polling in November? Is there any new legislation to prompt new polling?

Nope. Gay marriage is quite definitively illegal (in many cases by both law and constitutional amendment) in all but one state, where the wheels are already in motion to make it illegal again.

New Insult: "You Kiefer" (Meaning You Immature, Hypocritical Loser)

2007-01-24T15:10:00.000-08:00

Parents in Farmingdale, Minnesota, are opposing the school district's No Name Calling Week. That's right, they're fighting for their right to call names. Specifically against GLSEN, the moderate, respectable gay-lesbian group that helped organize the week—which bans all name calling with no particular emphasis on GLBT issues. Michael Monroe Kiefer was one of a group of parents who stormed a meeting this morning to air their grievances. His petulant and hypocritical rant was interrupted when he attempted to name—and out—a particular teacher. That's right, he was exercising his God-given right to call names. What a grown up! Thankfully, Kiefer was thrown out. You can't make this stuff up, people. I just wonder how these parents can possibly delude themselves into thinking they're setting a good example for their children. I would love to see one of their kids say, "No, I'm not going to clean up my room because that man you work with is a poopy-head!"

In England, When the Pot Calls the Kettle Black, the PM Listens

2007-01-23T17:59:00.000-08:00

Catholic priests hardly have a reputation for rugged heterosexuality. Remember the worldwide scandal, which continues to bear strange fruit, about priests molesting kids in droves?

No matter: Do as I say, not as I do. Catholic priests are demanding exemption from a new British equality law that demands that gays not be discriminated against in adoption proceedings.

They say the law would force Catholics to go against the teachings of the church. Never mind that the priests are hardly in a position to criticize any group when it comes to the treatment of children. And, needless to say, they don't generally ask potential adopters if they covet their neighbor's wife or take the Lord's name in vain.

The shocker is that T.B., who's wife and children are Catholic, is rumored to be thinking about granting the priests an exemption—as is his Opus Dei (read: Loony Tunes of the Mel Gibson variety) communities secretary, Ruth Kelly. However, Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, gave reason a voice when he said, "If we take the view as a society that we should not discriminate against people who are homosexual, you cannot give exclusions to people on the grounds that their religion or their race says 'we don't agree with that.'" I mean, I know British law isn't exactly the same as U.S. law (they don't have a constitution), but the reason for granting basic rights through foundational law of whatever sort is to pre-empt people claiming that, for whatever reason, they have the right to treat a particular group badly.

The Grey and the Gay

2007-01-22T13:57:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has also picked up the story about Grey’s Anatomy actor Isaiah Washington calling his cast-mate, T.R. Knight, a "faggot" on the set and again (indirectly) at the Golden Globe awards. The story is on the most emailed list.

Do Americans just love a clebrity smack-down or are they actually concerned about the use of epithets? I have a hard time believing the latter given that, even in San Francisco, I hear "faggot" used as an epithet at least once a week. (See update below.) Perhaps the story has gotten big because the entertainment industry wants to make a show of its tolerance. The number of gay actors in Los Angeles is so high that if networks develop a reputation for crapping on them, they won’t be able to stay in business.

More compellingly, the Times is running an article on GLBT opposition to Harold Ford’s nomination for chair of the Democratic Leadership Council. Ford lost his bid for Tennessee’s Senate seat largely because he was just as conservative as his Republican opponent (that and he’s black). Ford was one of just 34 votes for a national constitutional amendment barring gays from that precious institution of marriage.

As Democrats try to portray Ford as one of them, conservatives are frantically trying to defend Mitt Romney from charges that he is a closet gay-lover (these charges come despite the fact that after Romney had exhausted all legal options for halting gay marriage as governor, he filed suit as an individual.) Both dust-ups suggest that gay rights advocates will have a voice in the 2008 election, rather than being just an easy smear target as they have been in the last three elections.

Update:
Statistics on use of epithets
GLSEN, a group focused on creating GLBT-friendly educational policies, reports that in 2005 three-quarters of all GLBT high school students often heard derogatory remarks such as "faggot" or "dyke," and nearly nine out of ten frequently heard "that's so gay" to mean "that's so stupid." Meanwhile, only nine states and the District of Columbia have comprehensive anti-bullying laws that include sexual orientation and only three include gender identity.

Lesbians Only

2007-01-21T18:07:00.000-08:00

I went to a lesbians-only party this weekend. I thought maybe it was time to bring back the lesbians-only idea. It felt like 2000 again, when people started to bring back the 80s—maybe lesbian-only space had been "out" long enough to bring back in.

Maybe not.

I met a woman there, a lesbian journalist, who greeted my claims of male-identity first with "but you do identify as a lesbian, right?" To which I said, teasingly, "of course, or else I couldn't be at this party." Then I gave a more earnest answer and she said "that's so interesting."

I'm guessing it was an "interesting" like those my colleagues and I at Mother Jones utter when pro-life activists and American Enterprise economists tell us about their views. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The conversation began by being about gay and lesbian journalism. She made a point about it being a male-run show. (I've made a similar point here.) She attributed that to women not having had enough chance to put their sistahs in power. I added "or they don't always hire women." That's where the fun began. She claimed that women are better than men; women help a sister out.

I wanted to make the point that women can be real assholes too. They don't always run the show in a feminist way. (I've made a similar point here.) And I wasn't sure that shoehorning your friends into power was a particularly good quality to emulate. I said prioritizing your people over another people never really helps anybody on either side. She disagreed. She said she was a "radical feminist that way" because she didn't give a shit how white men felt. She said that, as an Asian woman, she had suffered double oppression for thousands of years, and if evening it out meant turning the shit-stream the other way for a while that was fine by her.

So I decided to make it personal, too. I said that as a trans-identified dyke, who was ever going to take me under their wing? This isn't just about white men.

She encouraged me not to see myself as such a victim. Up to this point, dear reader, I had been very friendly in my disagreements. But being told I was acting like a victim by someone who, at age 30, was claiming thousands of years of double oppression was just too much. I called her bluff. She didn't like it much, replying "I think we should end the conversation, Cameron, because it's getting really fucked up."

She needed to see my disagreement about the nurturing benevolence of women as sexism. If I didn't identify as a "woman" and I didn't agree with her 100% about the sweet superiority of women, I must be a sexist. And sexists really piss her off. It was a fascinating experience—and one I probably wouldn't have gotten to witness had my interlocutor not been drunk—to watch someone construct a box around me and then work herself into a frenzy that yet another person fit in that box.

My question is, who is teaching her to hold so true to an outmoded ideology that isn't working for her? And how can she steer so clear of third wave feminism when she (a) lives in San Francisco and (b) works as an online journalist?

I don't know many women under 30 who still think that way. (To support my woman friend Ann, I send you to Feministing.) Sadly, those who do are usually lesbians.

Just to be snarky (it must be the man in me), I will add that this woman works for a lesbian entertainment website, and I work at Mother Jones. Maybe she thought that was a maternity magazine?

Times, They Are a-Changin'

2007-01-19T20:45:00.000-08:00

ABC pressured Isaiah Washington to apologize to T.R. Knight for calling him a faggot. (Twice.)

And the Washington Post ran the story.

D-D-Delinquent

2007-01-18T15:22:00.000-08:00

In another disastrously-Deirdre ditty, Dee Deirdre Farmer is being returned to jail this week after being sentenced for identity theft and fraud. Dee Deirdre Farmer is a transgender woman who chose her name. She scored a landmark victory for trans people in 1994, when the Supreme Court ruled that prison officials could be held responsible for her gang rape while in men's prison. Ms. Farmer was a pre-op transsexual at the time.

But it seems Ms. Farmer's interest in changing identities goes farther than her sex change and subsequent selection of the misfortunate name Dee Deirdre:

Farmer was sentenced in 1986 to 20 years in federal prison for credit-card fraud and 30 years in state prison for theft. While awaiting sentencing, she was caught participating in a telephone jewelry theft scheme from jail.

After being released because she was dying of AIDS, Farmer again indulged in identity theft. In order to avoid prosecution, she presented a forged court order in an attempt to "change the death certificate of a man named Charles Smith, who died June 6, 2006, to reflect that Dee Farmer had died on that day instead."

Lesbian Judge is Out

2007-01-18T11:42:00.000-08:00

Superior Court Judge Diana Hall, who is a lesbian, was removed from the bench last month and has missed the deadline for appeal. The charges against her sound reasonable, at least on their face. Among them: Her then-partner—wait for it—Deirdre Dykeman, failed to report a $20,000 contribution she made to the judge’s most recent campaign. Always expect scrutiny when you are a dyke named Deirdre Dykeman.

Grey's Anatomy Gets Even Gayer

2007-01-18T11:09:00.000-08:00

Isaiah Washington, the Dr. Benton--make that Burke--character of Grey's Anatomy, reportedly called T.R. Knight, who plays Dr. O'Malley, a "faggot" in an on-set fight. Knight is, in fact, gay. Washington denies using the word, but Knight claims "everybody heard it." It reminds me of the time a girl on my soccer team called someone on the opposing team "dyke" because she was playing rough. You can't just throw these words out like you would "asshole" or "bitch." It's not the same thing. (I toy with the idea of finding an equally troubling name to call the name-caller to illustrate the point. I wouldn't go there with Washington, but it does sort of beg the question as to how he could delude himself into thinking slinging epithets is OK.)

I'm not sure the exchange is newsworthy enough to qualify for A.P. coverage (not to mention Knight's appearance on the Ellen DeRidiculous show). After all, this kind of name-calling happens every day. But I am perturbed that the gay actor has been type-cast as a no-balls loser nicknamed "Bambi" (or is that the no-balls loser doctor in Scrubs?)?

You'll Never Think of "Gay Adoption" the Same Way Again

2007-01-14T19:33:00.000-08:00

Gay people aren't allowed to marry each other to ensure hospital visitation, life-or-death decision making or inheritance rights. And, in several states, gay people aren't allowed to adopt children, because that would be wrong. But, at least in Maine, gay people are allowed to adopt each other to ensure that their partner inherits from them.

Now the heir to an IBM fortune, Olive Watson, is trying to un-adopt her ex-partner Patricia Spado so the partner won't have access to a grandchild's share of her ex's parents' inheritance.

It just gets more fucked up. Watson is claiming that the adoption was never valid because the two were in a sexual relationship. Which is why they undertook the adoption. There is nothing as repulsive as a gay person using the homophobia of the law to their benefit when it suits them. (Sure, the money-grabbing ex is no saint either, but could you resist a stab at the IBM fortune if it came your way?)

Watson's lawyer is also claiming that allowing her ex-partner to inherit would set a dangerous precedent: Gays, prevented from marrying, would flock to Maine to adopt each other instead. Right, because we're all a bunch of sick fucks—except Watson, who adopted her lover and is just now getting around to crying "Ew!"

Last paragraph of the New England News story: "Advocates for same-sex marriage told the newspaper that gay and lesbian couples aren't likely to pursue adoption in any state because the arrangements do not always work as intended." You can say that again.

Just in case the story isn't freaky enough, the editors paired it with a picture of a woman holding a little Chinese girl. That is obviously the best way to mark someone as a lesbian without her, say, looking like a lesbian. Never mind that it's been illegal for queers to adopt Chinese babies for some time.

Straight UK Scientist: Gay Sex Sucks

2007-01-14T16:41:00.000-08:00

All these years, when you've seen your homo friend glow after sex, you've been seeing things. And when said friend says s/he loves sex, s/he has been fudging it. Yes, it's true, an English study has found that only man-woman sex has physical and psychological benefits. Homos have just been dicking the public around all this time.

The religious right has pounced on the study's findings, but those of us pushing the homosexual agenda have our doubts. Is it because we "put maintenance of [our] ideology above science," as the study's straight author claims, or because (a) the study may have examined the effects of homosexual sex among heterosexuals and (b) we have at least on occasion found ourselves stuck to the sheets, semi-catatonic and really fucking happy?

Bulldagger Buddha

2007-01-13T18:09:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's hard to believe how little straight people know about sex and relationships. A relationships-for-dummies guide has been on the New York Times most emailed articles list for nearly a month! Read the questions: It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that maybe you should talk about kids, money and in-laws before you get married. The funny thing is, the last article up for a comparable period of time was a piece about how to train your husband using the same techniques you would with a wild animal. Seriously.

Last night I met a straight couple at a bar. They asked me something about oral sex and why some men didn't like going down. To which I replied, measured sage that I am, especially under the influence of a couple mojitos, "You either like pussy or you don't. Those guys have a problem."

The straights roared with laughter. But then they raised the point that some women weren't so good at getting gone down on either. To which I said, again with composed wisdom, "They really have a problem! They've taken society's shame over pussies to heart."*

They looked at me as if to say, "Say more, wise bulldagger, say more!"

So I did. I said, "Have you ever met a guy who's embarrassed about liking to have his dick sucked?" They still looked enthralled (I'm actually fucking serious here), so I said, "Let's go one further. Have you ever known a guy who says, 'It's OK if you suck my dick, but don't touch my balls--I get embarrassed'?"

This story was repeated with awe at least three times. I mean, Christ. I was loaded.

*I'm not an expert on flesh-and-blood cocks or anything, but in my limited experience I recall that they also have a distinctly genital odor and have also been known to ooze. So what is our problem?

Update: The Times story on "training" your husband is back on the most emailed list. And a piece breaking the news that more women are now unmarried than married has joined it. If married life is so bad, I'd say not getting married is a more rational response than learning exotic animal training techniques.

Queer Domestic Violence

2007-01-08T16:17:00.000-08:00

Today's Guardian features a brief report on domestic violence in the GLBT community. The Guardian is usually one of my favorite newspapers, but this is one strange article.

A quarter of GLBT couples fall prey to domestic violence, the article says--about the same as among straight couples.

But talking about domestic violence among gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people is, to paraphrase Rick Santorum (loosely), like talking about domestic violence among people, dogs, snakes, and supernovas. The statistics require parsing to reveal anything at all. About two-thirds of the way through, the article finally notes that domestic violence is more common among gay men than among lesbians (the picture at the top is, however, of a woman, and obviously comes from stock "domestic violence" footage). That's a start, but in an article on any other topic, statistics as murky as these would end up in the editor's blue file.

Note to MSM: GLBT is an acronym that refers to four different groups of people.

The article makes a worthy point in highlighting that domestic violence programs are so heavily geared toward heterosexual women that gay, lesbian and transgendered victims may not get the help they deserve. True enough, but Mother Jones reported in 2005 that 15 percent of domestic violence victims are male, suggesting that there are more than a few straight men who also can't access social services. (Imagine the reception they would receive at a safe space!) Our public dialogue and services surrounding same-sex domestic violence are in the larval stage, to be sure. But it's not clear that underreporting is any more of a problem in the queer community. After all, 70 percent of all domestic "incidents" go unreported, and heterosexual women, like the GLBT folks in the article, fear unsympathetic ears at the P.D. To practice what it preaches, the article should give more information about underserved populations. By lumping GLBT together, it ends up giving us less.

This article is so tongue-tied in trying to talk about queer issues that it exacerbates the problem it is trying to point out. The Guardian clearly needs a queer reporter, yo. (Wait, was that a bilingual pun? Why yes, yes it was.)

Don't Go Back to Rockville High

2007-01-06T20:20:00.000-08:00

This creepy article from a religious right site found its way into my Google Alerts. But it tells an interesting tale, so I'm going to give it a post (with the hope that the people at LifeSite will find it and be as repulsed as I was when I found their propaganda in my inbox).

The Montgomery County, Maryland, school district developed its most recent sex-ed curriculum with some input from PFLAG. The curriculum would have taught that gayness is just another way to be. It would also have included at least a brief mention of transgenderism. Before the curriculum could be taught, a religious right group with the ironic name "Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum" sprang up and made a stink.

CRC was especially angry that the material contained "no mention of the increased risk of sexually transmitted disease inherent in homosexual sex." It's funny that the group should defend science with a scientifically incorrect statement. (Well, actually it's not because these people have made it pretty clear that they have absolutely no regard for science, which is why they just make it up.) In the world called reality, women who have sex with women are at extremely low risk of getting STDs. If STDs are really the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum's main concern, the best thing they could do is tell pubescent girls to become lesbians. The next best thing would be to tell them to use condoms, which they don't. (Is their true agenda protecting or killing the children?)

As yet another example of total disregard for science—of which this curriculum forms a part—the group complained that the curriculum did not address "that a homosexual 'orientation' could be changed." That's because the preponderance of evidence that it can't is almost as crushing as the evidence suggesting that Darwin was right.

Get this: The curriculum was then redesigned with the participation of its critics. The revision adopted 69 of 83 changes recommended by the religious organization. But they're still not satisfied. Once you start including religious ideas in science curricula, there is no good stopping point.

CRC's remaining complaints reveal that members won't be happy until the only mention of homosexuality in the unit says that it will kill you. The group takes issue with several statements suggesting that queers feel better when they come out. Because homosexuality can't be changed, it's cruel to teach a roomful of students--some 5 percent of whom are immutably gay or lesbian--that they are destined to be as miserable as they probably are at that moment. Oh yeah, CRC also takes issue with the inclusion of material meant to lessen gay-bashing. The statistics on bias, the website scolds, are "provided by a non-medical, gay advocacy group GLSEN." Generally, it is advocacy groups like GLSEN—certainly not medical doctors!—who conduct large-scale issue-focused social research.

The group is up in arms about passages in the anti-bias section, such as “Homophobia may be shown in ways as mild as laughing at a gay joke” and “Children are not born hating; they learn to hate and fear from messages they receive growing up." That just speaks for itself.

Trans Kids in the Salon

2007-01-05T15:08:00.000-08:00

Salon's Life page features an interview with Chris Beam, lesbian author of Transparent, a book about transgender street kids in Los Angeles. It's a whirlwind tour with a visually-impaired guide, but it's worth a read.

How Does It Feel, Hets?

2007-01-05T14:57:00.000-08:00

The Family Foundation, the group which led the charge against (the possibility of) gay marriage in Virginia, is now setting its sights on curtailing abortion and heterosexual divorce. Give 'em an inch and they take a mile, those religious fanatics. The group wants to require consent from both parties for divorce. It also wants to force abortion clinics in the state to show clients an ultrasound of the fetus before conducting the procedure. Maybe I'm just naïve, but I don't think any woman or girl feels good about terminating her pregnancy; showing her an ultrasound just seems cruel. (And if we do that, shouldn't we also require medical and cosmetic researchers to watch videos of adorable animal behavior before proceeding with their research?)

Much as I don't identify as a Democrat, you gotta admit it's better to have them in power than the alternative. Take a look at the bills addressing gay rights already under consideration. My favorite is ending employment discrimination.

On the other hand, John Edwards came across as a typical sell-out Democrat in a campaign stop yesterday, trying to sound tolerant while also being pretty explicitly homophobic. How else can he explain finding it a "challenge to him personally" to wrap his mind around gays getting married?

Could Gay Marriage Withstand a Popular Vote in Mass.?

2007-01-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

The Christian Science Monitor has an in-depth article about the current state of gay marriage in Massachusetts. The most recent polling indicates that 62 percent of Massachussans oppose amending the constitution. But there's an odd thing about polling related to discrimination: People lie. They are embarassed to tell a pollster that they will vote to quash the rights of minorities, but in the privacy of the polling booth the temptation to do so can be great. In the days just before the November election, an Arizona pollster told me that only 30 percent of those surveyed supported the Arizona anti-gay marriage amendment. The amendment did fail--becoming the first ever to do so--but only by a few percentage points. Popular support at 62 percent is not enough to be free of this phenomenon.

The sound byte for gay marriage supporters in Massachusetts has been that the civil rights of a minority should not be put to a popular vote. After all, as Equal Marriage puts it, "This is the basic guarantee of our constitutional democracy."

Massasuckthis

2007-01-02T16:40:00.000-08:00

As for the Mass. legislature's vote: FUUUUUUUCK.

The vote is, however, only the first of two needed to put an anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot.

Homo Webians

2007-01-02T16:34:00.000-08:00

Breaking news: Homos love the internet—this from a recent Harris Interactive poll. I'm not sure if this is good news—you know, the old optimism about using the internet as a tool to create communities (and more readers!)—or bad. Let's just say I felt a little queasy when I read that "Excluding email, nearly twice as many gays and lesbians (32%) say they are online between 24 and 168 hours per week, compared to 18 percent of heterosexuals." On the one hand, that number could simply indicate that queers are more web-savvy (a fifth of us use Craigslist, compared to a seventh of hets), especially if it includes workday hours. On the other, it could suggest that many of us are terrified to leave the house or can't find dates in the real world. Or even worse: We're lazy slobs.

Change of Heart about Gays in Uniform

2007-01-02T16:17:00.000-08:00

The next big debate related to gay rights might just be allowing gays in the military. Retired general John Shalikashvili, who, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was established in 1993, was influential in developing it, writes in the Op-Ed section of today's New York Times that he no longer supports the policy. Shalikashvili argues that the military has changed such that "gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers." A recent Zogby poll supports the retired general's claim.

But the real issue is that our military needs more soldiers, and queer soldiers are better than no soldiers. "Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East," Shalikashvili writes bluntly, "We must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job."

The military has already lowered many of its other standards, so don't be too flattered. The most interesting thing to come from a possible policy shift will be that legislators will have to debate gay issues again, this time with pressure on them to include gays in our national cultural institutions.

New Year, Same Old Sheep

2007-01-01T18:42:00.000-08:00

Scientists at the Oregon State University are researching the causes of homosexuality in sheep. It seems about 10 percent of rams prefer to mount other rams, rather than ewes. The research initially focused on maximizing reproduction rates. Researchers have discovered that opening the rams' skulls and injecting hormones into them provides "considerable success" in getting the rams to get on the ewes.

Gay rights activists are outraged. While it's a bit silly to defend sheep's "right" to be "gay," as Martina Navratilova did, there is talk of applying the research the humans by giving pregnant women the option to receive an injected hormonal cocktail to nip their son's homo tendencies in the bud. A Northwestern neurologist—not ethicist, not ob-gyn, not psychologist—tells the London Times that "Allowing parents to select their children’s sexual orientation would further a parent’s freedom to raise the sort of children they want to raise." (So, it's OK to mutilate your child in utero but not to abort a child you can't care for?) Udo Schuklenk, who is an ethicist, expresses concern that such technology could wind up "in the hands of Iran.…It is typical of the US to ignore the global context in which this is taking place." It seems to have slipped Dr. Schuklenk's mind that the U.S. has consistently voted with Iran when gay and lesbian issues have come before the United Nations.

Perversely, it's PETA that sounds the lone sane note of the article, condemning the study as "a needless slaughter of animals, an affront to human dignity and a colossal waste of precious research funds."

The research appears not to address ewe behavior in any way--which is odd, because their willingness is at least somewhat necessary to the mating process--or whether the hormone shot would be likely to keep human girl babies on the straight and narrow, too.

And, in yet more bad news from Iraq, this article tipped me off that gays and lesbians have been targeted for kidnappings and killings in Baghdad. Though, with the number of murders in Iraq, it's hard to say what it even means to be targeted.

On a lighter note, lesbians in Bangkok have partied through the recent coup in that country. The scene there is surprisingly vibrant, given that the country has a seriously spotty human rights record. This is how lesbians get their very own article in the New York Times? How very odd.

On the Causes of Lesbianism in the Feminine Female

2006-12-30T14:45:00.000-08:00

A common theory regarding the causes of lesbianism, particularly in otherwise "pretty" girls, is that some negative experience with men has sent them into a rebellious tailspin, or that having sex with women is the only thing they can handle. If the "women" they have sex with look suspiciously like men, that only adds to the evidence against their genuine lesbian identity.

I would like to counter with another theory. Femmes turn to lesbianism because they are sick of looking for guys with huge dicks which they can keep up long enough to truly indulge their lady friend. I have developed this theory based on my own experiences with femmes. Show them a dildo which falls within the parameters of average penis-size (about 5.5 inches long and 4.75 inches around) and they look at you like you're stupid. That's about as small a dildo as you can find. My lady friends and I generally start with something about 6.5 inches long and 5.5 inches around, but within a month or so, they express interest in something bigger, like this—which is easily bigger than 95 percent of men's penises. This makes femmes' statistical chances of finding the right lesbian for them at least as great as those of finding the right man, since lesbians make up at least 4 percent of the biologically female population. Add to that that dykes can keep it up literally forever and that only a statistically negligent percentage of us are afraid to go down, and well, there you have it.

While I'm on the topic of femme identity, I feel I must express my confusion about femmes' frustration with what they perceive as their invisibility. I understand that straight people must constantly be reminded, and that men continue to approach femmes even after they've been told (often with a "confession" that they "find it really hot"). That part sucks, I'm sure.

The part I don't get is that femmes often say butches and transmen mistake them for straight. It's not like the femme-lovers among us don't know that sometimes femme dykes look straight. So if we see a girl we like, we make the effort to suss it out. All it takes is the tiniest bit of flirting and voilà. (If you don't know how to flirt, I'm sorry, you have no business being a butch-loving femme—that's the unspoken deal, girlie girls plant the seed, and dudes take the risk of saying it out loud. )

I've met most of the femmes I know in explicitly queer settings—dyke clubs, dating sites, parties. But even if you're a femme who's not "on the scene" enough to have lots of face time in such settings, surely you have a few friends who are dykes. Those friends, in turn, each have a few friends who are dykes. And dykes like to gossip, so it won't be long before a big chunk of the community knows you like the bois--or the ladies, as the case may be.

And finally, there are those little signals to send off. Your attitude. A leather bracelet or a studded belt. A coded T-shirt or a foxy tattoo. All of these options make me wonder if the femmes who complain most about being invisible in the dyke community are completely devoid of sexual energy and personal style. Is that just wrong? Chime in, femmes.

Breaking News, Breaking Balls

2006-12-30T13:37:00.000-08:00

Alaska: Giving same-sex partners access to insurance and other benefits would save the state about a million dollars a year.

I remain baffled by the Massachusetts high court decision calling on legislators to vote on a citizen petition to put an anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot, but CNN offers this bit of explanation:

The high court in its ruling rebuked lawmakers for [tabling the petition], saying drafters of the provision that allows citizen petitions "did not intend a simple majority of the joint session to have the power effectively to block progress of an initiative."

I suppose I'll have to take their word for it, but don't constitutions generally specify when a two-thirds majority is required?

The same decision that exhorted lawmakers to vote also rebuffed the attempt by the gay-bashing group Massachusetts Family Institute to sue lawmakers personally. The Advocate reports that the group's president has now turned to threatening legislators personally. "Lawyers take an oath to uphold the constitution," he said. "Any legislator who’s a lawyer should be very attentive to the ruling."

Battle to Write Discrimination into the Constitution Heats Up in Alaska

2006-12-29T18:04:00.001-08:00

The governor of Alaska vetoed a bill that would block the state from giving partner benefits to its gay and lesbian employees. Good news, right? Not really. The legislature was reacting to a court decision [PDF] that denying same-sex partners benefits violates the constitution's basic premise that "all persons are equal and entitled to equal rights." Governor Palin went out of her way to say that she agreed with the blatantly unconstitutional legislation, but said she still couldn't sign it because it was blatantly unconstitutional. Instead, she would like to amend the constitution to state not only that marriage is the union between one man and one woman (as it has since 1998) but also that none of the legal benefits or protections offered to married couples can go to those who cannot legally marry. In other words, Palin would essentially like to put an asterisk after "persons" in the constitution, which would define them at the bottom of the page as heterosexual people. Is that the next wave in constitutional amendments, or will there be an end to this blatantly unconstitutional madness, which also wastes the time and money that, as I understand it, Republicans favor?

The bill's sponsor, by the way, was Rep. John Coghill, R-North Pole. I hope he freezes to death. Or falls into the Artic as a result of global warming.

Homo News Review

2006-12-28T20:27:00.000-08:00

The Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that legislators are, in fact, obliged to vote on a proposed amendment banning gay marriage. Opponents of the practice have been in a snit since the same court ruled in late 2003 that excluding same-sex partners from the institution of marriage ran afoul of the constitution. They gathered 170,000 signatures in order to put an amendment to the vote. Now they need only the approval of 51 legislators in two consecutive sessions. The legislators dodged the issue with a procedural vote, prompting Gov. Mitt Romney and a specially formed group called VoteOnMarriage.org to sue. VoteOnMarriage went so far as to sue the legislators personally. Romney also sued as an individual, giving a real whiff of how absurd his claims were. But, for reasons I can't understand, the court has decided that the legislators are obliged to vote—even though killing legislation with a procedural vote is far more common that voting on it. That, and a majority of Massachusetts residents support gay marriage. The court added that there is no legal remedy if the legislators do not vote. The only day remaining in the session is January 2, so stay tuned.

The outgoing Wisconsin attorney general submitted an opinion today arguing that the state's recently adopted amendment banning gay marriage does not invalidate domestic partner benefits or protections. The opinion is only advisory, however, because the state's high court has final say in interpreting the amendment.

Because Pope Benedict is so easy to dislike, I'm linking to this little ditty, which passes on Italian rumors that the pontiff is a homo (on the basis of his rather swank shopping habits) and quotes some real gems of pontifical homophobia.

Guest Blogger: Am I a Man?

2006-12-27T16:21:00.000-08:00

My friend Danna Zeller, an aspiring writer lately of Brooklyn, wrote this. I think it's a work of art and genius.

Yesterday I went to Marshall's, a discount department store right on the border of Danville and San Ramon, because my coworker Alice said they had a great sale on ceramic bakeware. Department stores have always depressed me partly because of the lighting, partly because of the blistering motion of careless mass production, partly because of the chemicals they put on the clothing. Nevertheless, there was an entire clearance rack of men's pants and i found some exciting lemon yellow Tommy Hilfiger golf pants for 8 dollars and a really nice dark reddish-brown pair of thick dress corduroy slacks-- a style which I've never understood conceptually, but which would be perfect for work--, and for only 11 dollars some bright orange cargo three-quarter length shorts which i thought would be a great addition to my wardrobe if i ever got top surgery and then decided to go back to Waikiki. Anyway, on my way into the ladies dressing room something happened which had never happened to me before. Usually if someone thinks I'm going into the wrong room they say "um, this is the LADIES room" or "are you SURE you're in the right place?" or they look around panicked wondering if perhaps they're in the wrong place, as if they are on a ship that's just hit a wicked jerk of waves and they're wincing for the storm. But yesterday, as i was heading into the ladies dressing room with my ridiculous pants the apparently female employee who chatted with me for a minute and gave me my plastic thingy with the grand total number of my pants not to exceed 6, stopped me and said accusingly: "Are you a MAN?!" Well, I was stumped. No one had ever asked me this before and it sounded like a rhetorical question. Am I a man? What separates the boys from the men? For once it didn't seem to be a question about gender or how far i can throw a football, but about the direction of my life. Have I learned anything in the last decade or do i keep making the same mistakes over and over again? If I am finally a man, am I a mensch? And am I never to be a boy again? Does being a man mean I will suddenly start to do things right for a change, or that I will handle my ongoing bushels of fuck-ups with more grace and less vanity? Rites of passage as an inquiring, slightly paranoid, and often remorseful butch are vague and troubling and here I was being faced with a question I'd only toyed with in those joking with myself moments. But surely it's about time I take myself seriously. I stood still for a minute holding on to my pants. Stammered a little. Said "no." Walked right on into the Ladies Changing Room feeling strange and proud. I will have to add the term butchlekeit to my yiddishkeit slangishkeit. I am a man and I'm not a man and this knowledge is rich and complex in ways which i hope the intellectual butter of life will always be churning-- and yet is that because I'm an emotional masochist or because in my heart of hearts I feel we should all be confounding the most difficult questions with simple answers, and asking ourselves the most simple questions and making the answers harder than the pecs I get to imagine flexing above the hot waistline of my new orange shorts.

Can Somebody Please Give Me One that Works?

2006-12-27T13:43:00.000-08:00

In this week of slow news and recovering from our national consumer frenzy, I choose for my topic products for the transgendered man.

For the non-consumers among us—and I think we are pretty strongly represented in the transgender community—it is odd to depend on products to supply one’s identity and sex organs. It leaves no doubt about how successful sex is at moving merchandise. It doesn’t matter how little money a guy has; if he or his partner want a phallic upgrade, one will be obtained. And, generally, it reminds us how deeply products—the newest thing—are an inextricable part of existing in this culture.

But because this week is also returns week, I would like to gripe about the poor quality of tranny products. The transman needs two things: something to flatten out his chest and something to fill out his pants.

Let me remind the newcomers to this brave new world of gender that a penis has three separate functions. I’ve already said it fills out the pants to bewilder probing eyes trying to determine if it’s a he or a she. It also works as a sex organ. And, finally, it pees.

Problem is, there is no single artificial penis that can reasonably perform all three of these functions. It seems “an enterprising FTM transsexual” has recently designed a dick that works for both all-day wear (packing) and peeing. I have yet to try this one, but I have doubts that it's comfortable enough to wear all day, every day (look at that pokey little nozzle thing!). And the lovely people at Good Vibrations tell me that chubby people can't get the angle to work for them (think wet pants).

Most transmen opt to wear a non-peeing flaccid penis in public. Ideally, one should also have a special harness made for comfort as opposed to the stability needed for sex.

Packing and playing, or having sex, with the same implement is a problem that has yet to be solved even by the most enterprising transsexual. Some folks wear dildos made for sex when they go out, but an hours-long erection is painfully uncomfortable and, in my opinion, looks absurd. The only other choice is changing cars mid-race. It's no fun: You lose any illusion of authenticity and, more importantly, spontaneity. (This dildo, made of soft material with a wire inside, has been around for a while. It allows you to fold down your erection while you're out and about, but the wire breaks so quickly that San Francisco's Good Vibrations doesn't even sell it.)

A dildo made for sex (silicone is a must) runs about $70, and a harness (leather is a must) about $75. So our tranny's total outlay for a dick can be as much as $145.

Now he must also buy a chest binder of some sort. The ones I've tried don't get you flat enough to pass and succeed in making me, a feminist transguy, feel like a Victorian women in a corset. I need a fainting room at the top of the stairs. Not only does most health insurance not cover top surgery, but (and I'm sure I'll take heat for this from some happy breastless men out there) I think they do a shitty job. The massive scars the surgery leaves are a neon TRANNY sign flashing in any locker room. If I can't pass significantly better than I do with my current manboobs, I'm not going under the knife.

My question is: are these problems really so insurmountable? I'm on board with the notion that constructing a truly (triply) functional penis for transsexual FTMs may be impossible. But the pack-and-play and surgery problems seem utterly solvable; the real problem is that transfolk are considered too small a market with too little disposable cash. And yet, what we do have, we spend on too many partial solutions.

P.S. For a hilarious Onionesque story on butch lingerie, click here.

Use the Colonizer's Hate Against Him. And Merry Christmas to You.

2006-12-25T11:10:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has taken a lot of heat from liberals since the invasion of Iraq. But in the kind of coverage that makes me a loyalist, the Times has chosen Christmas Day to run a profile of Archbishop Peter Akinola, the notoriously homophobic leader of the Anglican Church in Nigeria who was tapped to lead the Virginia Episcopal churches that recently seceded over the appointment of an openly gay bishop.

The story begins with Akinola telling the story of the only time he has knowingly shaken a gay person's hand and how "he sprang backward the moment he realized what he had done."

But it doesn't lapse into crude caricature of Akinola. No, it puts his gay-hating in a post-colonial context. Akinola is using American churches' paranoid homophobia to fuel his grab for power in the global Anglican church, whose center is Canterbury, England. Church leaders from developing countries have long felt marginalized, the story says.

Indeed, Akinola's rabid intolerance of homosexuality is close to the cultural norm in Nigeria, a country that is debating laws that would punish any expression of gay identity—including two gay people sharing a meal in public—with jail time. The article quotes Archbishop Drexel Gomez of the West Indies saying the Christian church in Nigeria "is in the midst of Islam. Should the church in this country begin to teach that it is appropriate, that it is right to have same sex unions and all that, the church will simply die."

So homophobia is a weapon against the colonial power—which is itself fairly ambivalent on the issue—in a battle to hold onto the colonizer's faith. The seceding Virginia churches have allowed Akinola to colonize a little on his own. But those churches have a long, distinguished political history in the U.S. (George Washington attended one), and it seems quite obvious that Akinola's power over them will end as soon as it becomes inconvenient. But for now, they are more comfortable aligning themselves with Akinola's views of homosexuality than with the Episcopal church's.

This is the Times' Christmas coverage of religion. Peace on earth and goodwill to men. And women.

The Loophole

2006-12-24T15:24:00.000-08:00

Gay marriage is almost universally opposed by Republicans and Democrats alike. But transsexualism has somehow slipped through the cracks. It's not OK for a butch dyke to marry hir partner, but said butch dyke is awarded a marriage license if s/he takes testosterone and cuts off hir boobs. It seems odd that the same state governments that trip over themselves to ban gay marriage in as many ways as they possibly can (22 states ban it by both statute and constitutional amendment) allow people to change their gender on official documents, tacitly accepting the idea that gender doesn't always match sex.

At least one county in Ohio has sniffed out the loophole and closed it. You must solemnly swear not to be a transsexual to get a marriage license in Clark County, whose county seat is Springfield.

The Springfield News-Sun reporter thinks the policy is a real hoot, because people obviously know if their partner is transsexual. Not only is that not necessarily true, but the reporter assumes that no one would knowingly want to marry a trans person. Maybe that's for the best.

In Which the True Biological Difference Between Men and Women Is Revealed

2006-12-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

Marga Gomez made a joke at the Castro Street Fair that was so obvious it wasn't even funny. She said the Women for Women section of Craigslist should be renamed Women Fight Women. Here we are in the largest lesbian population in the nation (The Gay Atlas is the first place I've seen lesbian populations studied separately from gay male populations), and the personals site has at least as much in-fighting as it does date-seeking. Butches are gross. Transmen have no business in the Women for Women section. Bi women have no business there either. Of the few ads that are actually posted by someone in hopes of finding a date, I'd say 70 percent of them are people looking to date, not just have a one-time sexual encounter.

Now go to the Men for Men section, and you will find brief posts requesting specific sexual acts, often at specific times or locations. And often, you'll find a cock shot. As in, like what you see?

Is this evidence that men are innately, biologically different from women? It's hard to deny that possibility. There is the cultural argument that men are taught to value their desire more than women. The other cultural argument that springs to mind—that women need to fear for their safety more than men—doesn't hold water for same-sex encounters.

Do gay men really have more social approval for their desire than dykes, who have often (though not always) mutinied against the social limitations on women? I would argue that they do indeed. It's a complicated issue, but I think homophobia is stronger against men because most men, in the cockles of their balls, know that, in a pinch at least, they would have sex with another man. And I'd venture that a lot of straight men—and god knows this transman—are jealous of the easy access that gay men have to sex, for which Craigslist can serve as Exhibit A. Meanwhile, lesbians can't overthrow 20-some years of being taught to suppress and mistrust their desires by just waving a Magic Wand. Although they do try, repeatedly.

But there's another difference between the Men for Men ads and the Women for Women ads. PNP, or party 'n' play. It means crystal meth will be part of the encounter.

Drugs decrease inhibitions. Many dykes I know would love to be able to have sex on the fly the way gay men do, but they worry about being able to get it up for someone they've never met. I wrote in a previous post that I desire more like a man than like a woman. The caveat is, there has to be some energy between me and a potential sexual partner, and you can't determine that over the internet. There's also the issue of your would-be partner's ability to let go of their inhibitions, and sometimes dykes aren't able to do that. Anonymous sex should be fun athletically, rather than emotionally. When I have looked into anonymous sex (I won't say if I've done it or not), it has been with butches or FTMs because they seem more likely to be able to provide that.

Men are able to objectify sex partners in a way that women generally can't—it doesn't matter if a guy is ugly if he has a nice cock, or if he's a douche if he's good looking. That skill makes anonymous sex much easier. Maybe it's the macho athleticism specifically of (trans)man on (trans)man sex that makes it good for anonymous play. But, then again, I'm pretty sure I could get it up for a good-looking girlie girl, even one who was completely brain-dead, if I had crystal meth coursing through my veins. So is crystal meth the biological difference between biomen and biowomen?

If this were Sex and the City, we would cut to me typing, and by the end of the episode I would have an easy, heart-warming answer. But this is not so easy or heart warming. Gay men engage in self-destructive sexual behavior, and too many dykes still have trouble enjoying sex. And even thoroughly sex-positive dykes still wish they could have more sex in the bathroom.

Christmas Coverage: Mary's Miraculous Pregnancy

2006-12-23T12:11:00.000-08:00

I love Mary Cheney. That’s right, the Republican activist, corporate vice president of AOL, and daughter of the vice president known as "Vice" and "Dick."

Her pregnancy has finally forced some mainstream coverage of gay families.

William Saletan has a fantastic piece in Slate today, debunking Mary's conservative former friends' criticism of the family she hasn't even had yet. (The Washington Post also features a package on sperm-donor families today, including one that uses Mary Cheney as a jumping-off point. Apparently the package includes another version of Saletan's Slate article, but I can't find it.)

Saletan gives an overview of the scientific literature on gay parenting. He says that even though many studies have set out in bias to find evidence against gay parenting, none has ever succeeded. In fact, the strongest evidence suggests that kids of gay or lesbian parents are probably better off (horror of horrors, they are more likely to have experimented with same-sex relationships—but few actually turn out to be gay).

But the religious right is no more willing to admit this than Grandpa Cheney is to admit that there are no WMDs in Iraq, says Saletan.

If the direct evidence doesn't bear you out, look for indirect evidence. So conservatives have developed a subtler argument: On average, children do best when raised by their two married, biological parents.

Let's take this argument a piece at a time. It's true that two parents are better than one. It's also true that married parents are better than unmarried ones. But those aren't arguments against gay parenthood. They're arguments for gay marriage.

Saletan gives a crash course in how bogus the arguments of bogus religious groups like Focus on the Family really are. (I call it a bogus religious groups because, having looked at its 1099, I learned that Focus on the Family spends 4 percent of its budget on direct service, and 96 percent on bullshit studies and selling James Dobson's products, whose profits don't disqualify it from nonprofit status because they go to him as an individual—never mind that he then "donates" them back).

-- Biological parents are better, because they are less likely to abuse. Sure, if we're talking about biological fathers versus stepfathers or boyfriends.

-- Lesbians make bad parents because so many have been raped. Come again?

-- Kids of gays will associate with gays, and gays are more likely to have STDs, criminal records and pedophilic predilections. Saletan doesn't get into this one too much, because all of the statistics, to the extent that they exist at all, refer to men. And Mary Cheney and her partner aren't, as far as anyone knows, men.

Having looked at some research by Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, I would bet that by STDs, they mean HIV: Allow a disease to go untreated in a minority population for years, and then bash the minority for being contagious. Nice. I've debunked their data on pedophilia here. If they use the same logic for criminal records, they call anyone who's had sex with a man in jail gay, and thereby prove that gays are more likely to have a criminal record. One Family Research Council study co-authored by former actor Kirk Cameron and someone who appears to be his brother, compares the charges against homosexual and heterosexual parents in custody suits. First of all, these are just assertions made in a custody case. Secondly, if you read the fine print, you'll see that the homosexual custody suits were found "systematically"—i.e., looking for the claims they later claim to have proven—while the heterosexual cases were found "randomly." It's that easy to tear these guys down.

Mary Cheney's pregnancy shows two things. These people have no shame and will bite the hand that feeds them sooner than turn the other cheek. And, even Mary Cheney, Republican activist and corporate hack, doesn't think there's anything wrong with gays and lesbians having babies.

Once and Future Daughter

2006-12-22T15:19:00.000-08:00

Lesbians and gay men have traditionally looked to China to meet their baby needs. (Although many lesbians nowadays prefer artificial insemination to adoption, some discriminatory fertility clinics turn them away.) China has a huge supply of orphans as a result of its long-standing practice of limiting families to one child, and, because most families wait for a boy, most of the orphans are girls. One couple I know refers to their hypothetical progeny as Mei Lin.

China, meanwhile, allows just 8 percent of the roughly 12,000 orphans that get adopted each year to go to—ahem—"single-parent" homes. And, even so, all applicants must sign a statement saying they are not gay.

Guess what? Things just got worse. As China relaxes the one-child rule, fewer and fewer babies are available for adoption. China announced stricter eligibility requirements yesterday. And by stricter, I mean draconian. Those who will no longer be eligible to adopt in China include not just unmarried people, but also obese people, disabled people, those over 50, those whose net worth is less than $80,000, and those who take medication for anxiety or depression.

I've always imagined that any babies in my life would come from China. Apparently, they won't. Goodbye, sweet Mei Lin.

The Kids Are Alright

2006-12-21T17:31:00.000-08:00

If I ever had to go to prison, you can bet I'd call myself a woman to escape the horrors men face when they do time. Especially trans men, or small or effeminate men. But detention for women and girls brings its own torments. Most notoriously, women are raped by guards. And, according to a story from 365Gay, the girls at the two female facilities in New York State are subjected to constant, if smaller, abuses such as strip searches, verbal abuse and overuse of handcuffs.

Just as an aside, I have a hard time thinking that prison time isn't cruel and unusual punishment when we know that people are abused in these ways and denied decent health care. Doesn’t imagining yourself in jail for a year seem so awful as to be basically unimaginable and worth avoiding at all costs—even, say, pleading guilty to something you didn’t do, or turning on a friend who doesn't deserve it (which can be a real issue when drugs are involved—read Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness)?

The 365Gay story mentions a recently settled suit in Hawaii and reports by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU on the New York facilities, which suggest that things are especially bad for trannies and queers. In Hawaii, several youth sued after being repeatedly threatened and humiliated, and in one case smeared with semen. The kids won. In New York, Alyssa Rodriguez was put in a boys ward, refused the hormones she'd been taking for years and punished for her feminine behavior. Now, she has sued and won. The facilities will enter a five-year agreement with Lambda Legal in which they will be schooled in LGBT sensitivity.

In a sense, though, the Hawaii decision is more exciting because it shows that even in states other than the few, the proud, the tolerant (California and New York) some baseline of regard for LGBT people is now considered normal. And mandatory. Maybe it's because I just started getting Google Alerts on trans issues, but it seems like a quiet trend is forming. New Jersey passed anti-discrimination laws for trans folk with its sell-out civil unions bill. And Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico and Rhode Island also include gender identity as a protected category.

The Bulldagger, the Bustier and the "Baby"

2006-12-20T19:43:00.000-08:00

When people first asked me about my "pronoun preference" about a year ago, I didn’t know what to say. For me--and I think this is at least partly generational--female pronouns weren’t especially offensive. After all, I recognize that I am biologically female, and since I call my (spayed) female dog "she," the pronoun must not be all that loaded.

I tried to explain to my sensitive employers that the issue for me is not pronouns, but nouns and assumptions. I wasn’t very good at explaining it, and ultimately decided to go with "he," hoping it would serve as a constant reminder to people that they shouldn’t assume that I feel women things, or am interested in women’s activities, or have what they assume are universal women’s experiences.

Of course, there are still people who slip up. Looking right at me—let’s just say that I get called sir fairly regularly and haven’t purchased anything in a women’s department in over 10 years—people will actually say things like "Your mom taught you how to knit, right?" When I look at them like the angry bulldagger that I am in that moment, they will even insist, "Oh, come on! At some point in your life you’ve knitted!" They’re sure they’re right and I’m just trying to be something (a man) that I’m not (because I do have the booblets).

Once, a coworker was telling me about a good coffee shop. She leaned in and said conspiratorially, "and, there’s a great little bustier store right next door." (I’ve never been entirely sure if she was implying that I would buy a bustier for myself or for someone else.)

When this happens, I feel my phantom penis cinch up back to my belly button. It’s also like I’ve found myself with a huge—huge—chunk of spinach in my teeth. Like, oh my god, maybe I’m not a man after all. It’s not like I secretly do want to buy a bustier (for myself, anyway) nor am I afraid that my closeted love for the color pink will be revealed. Somehow masculinity, I think because we privilege it so much, is inherently competitive, inherently something you find yourself trying to do better.

Of course, I also get really irritated with the person who’s made the weird feminizing assumption about me. Sometimes more than others. There’s a kind of hierarchy of who deserves an ass-whipping and who doesn’t. I think the "bustier" girl gets a low score. She didn’t explicitly insult me, certainly not on purpose. The knitting offender gets a higher score, and probably a chastising remark. The winner is a 5’5" guy with tribal tattoos from the gym (I know, I should’ve holla’d back!). When I asked him to hurry up on one of the two benches he was alternately using, he said patronizingly, "We’re doing supersets, baby." Here, the "baby," mixed in with some high-tech gym vocabulary, was intended to scare biological females away.

Alas, because I didn't even fully process the baby right away and was more focused on the bench than anything else, I didn't give the jerk the lesson he deserved. I said only, "I don't care what you're doing. We're both here to work out, and we have to share the equipment…and don't call me baby, that's just rude!"

Immediately after the incident, the supply of come-backs that queers develop over years and rarely ever use came flooding in. (The best ones: "You could call my girlfriend baby if you could even imagine someone so hot!" and "Your girlfriend calls me baby when I'm fucking her with my 10-inch cock, you midget!") Seems the hierarchy is a little complex to be utilized on the go.

But I did manage to resolve the mystery, at least partly, of why people say such apparently nonsensical things to a tranny dyke. The tribal-tattooed midget jerk obviously had a pat answer that he would use with any biological female challenging his right not to share equipment. Which made me realize that the "bustier" comment was also probably an autopilot remark. A neuron fired in my coworker's brain that said "biological female" and then out popped "bustier." Our cultural thinking about gender is that tangled up with our a priori need to determine whether people are male or female. Wouldn't it be better if we thought about people like dogs—I mean, who really cares what their sex/gender is?

Trannydyke Messes with Texas

2006-12-19T14:10:00.000-08:00

It matters which state you live in, and whether that state offers any protections for minorities and the poor.

Quick example:
Minimum wage in Texas, place of your bloggerbot's previous residence: $5.15
Minimum wage in California, state where he now blissfully resides: $9.14

Unlike Texas, California also protects its citizens from discrimination on the basis of gender identity. So does New York City. Protective laws, or lack thereof, will likely determine the outcomes of two cases hot off the wire. A transgender woman in New York was refused admittance into Loehmann's dressing rooms. She is suing, and will almost certainly win because the store's policy violates city law. A woman in Texas had an employment offer rescinded when the would-be employer, River Oaks Imaging and Diagnostic, learned she was transgendered. She has sued. According to the suit, the company claimed "she misrepresented herself as a woman," brazenly announcing the reasons for its actions because there are no laws against them.

Go west, young man, go west. (Or move to New York, but I hear there are no butches there.)

Mainstream Media Advocates Third Gender

2006-12-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post has weighed in on the Santhi Soundarajan scandal. I'm disturbed that the coverage is in the "Off the Beaten Path" blog, whose author claims to "scour the far reaches of cyberspace to find the oddest news from around the world." But the Post's Executive Editor, Jim Brady, contributed to the piece, giving it some credibility. The Post clarifies that, indeed, Soundarajan's condition was in no way self-induced. It doesn't indicate whether her condition may have given Soundarajan a leg up, as it were, on the competition. Amazingly, the Post proposes testing all athletes and creating a third, gender neutral competitive classification for those whose test results are ambiguous. We just hit the mainstream through the back door, as it should be.

Follow Up: Bulldagger in a China Shop Gets All Dressed Up with No Place to Go

2006-12-18T15:24:00.000-08:00

I can't believe it: I forgot to mention sex where it was relevant. Thanks, ghostis, for the reminder. Yes, indeed, sex is a powerful motivator of much of what we do. Try being gay for a day: I bet you'd find that your desire affects larger swaths of your life than you think it does. Without question, a large part of going out to bars is window shopping for potential mates, which isn't so fun when there's nothing in your size or style. (Or woe is me if there is something I like!) My point in describing social outings with the straights was that it's not just sex itself but the whole way that the genders interact in social settings that feels uncomfortable to me. Those normative interactions have sex buried within them; it's just buried deep enough to be socially acceptable. I think that's a major part of why homophobes think gays are hypersexual--when social interactions stop looking familiar, you see the sex at the root of them again.

Well, and, fags maybe are a bit oversexed. To be continued.

Things That Go Huh? in the Night

2006-12-18T14:13:00.000-08:00

Two D.C.-area Episcopal churches seceded yesterday, establishing themselves as a jerry-rigged Virginia branch of the African Anglican Communion under the leadership of Archbishop Peter Akinola. Akinola is Nigerian, and supports that country's laws prerventing gays from meeting in public and sentencing them to jail time for their private encounters. The churches' votes were a reaction to Episcopalians' growing acceptance of homosexuality, which culminated in the 2003 election of an openly gay man, Gene Robinson, as bishop--a move which was obviously more extreme than joining a ravingly homophobic church from another continent.

Santhi Soundarajan, 25, took the silver medal for India in the women's 800-meter track event at the Asian Games last week. Afterwards, she submitted to a voluntary gender test. What exactly a gender test is remains a mystery, but Sports Illustrated reports that "a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist and internal medicine specialist" conducted it. An Indian official indicated that Sounderajan appeared to have (quoting SI) "more Y chromosomes than allowed."

Where to start on that one…than allowed? By whom? It's not clear what the Asian Games' standards on gender are. And it seems that the chromosomal abnormalities that more or less resemble the official's descriptions do not have any bearing on how fast someone might run. (Research, thanks to Wikipedia, here and here.)

However, South Asian Media Net quotes former International Olympic Committee member Ashwini Kumar saying that “the prize money is so high that athletes take to shortcuts to win." So perhaps there is some chromosomal abnormality which is both a cinch to bring on and makes you incredibly fast.

Bulldagger in a China Shop

2006-12-17T16:17:00.000-08:00

Being a bulldagger in the workplace is a lot like being a bull in a china shop. After working for years outside conventional office spaces, I hadn’t realized how, by refuting mainstream, middle-class assumptions, the alternative worldview I’d come to hold was actually a point-by-point rejection of the way you need to act in an office. (My office is cooler than most, but it’s still got fluorescent lighting and a cubicle city.)

You're wearing that to work?

First and foremost, to fit in at the office, you need to look middle class: The office is the cathedral of the middle-class. The less style you have, the better. The goal is not to be so individual that people have to confront the raw fact that you have a background and a personality that you embody even at work. (This is the limit on our tolerance of difference: It’s OK to be gay or black, it’s just not OK to act gay or black, because that makes mainstream folks realize that they, too, are just a sub-culture.)

The best way to show that you fit in is to opt for clothes from the Gap, preferably khaki, or for preppy classics like wool sweaters and corduroys. The worst way is to wear vintage clothes. Vintage is the essence of alternative culture: You buy from a separate market, and you don’t spend all of your disposable income buying things—new couch, new leather jacket, new dishes, tsotchkes by Pottery Barn. Vintage clothes look great on the street, but in the fluorescent light of the office—where most people don’t recognize the look you’re going for anyway—they just look poor. And poor says, you don’t belong here. The other half of butch fashion is working class uniform chic. Also not a good way to remind your bosses that you're not, in fact, the janitor and that you would like to be considered for that exciting new editorial position. Butch fashion is, overall, a good way to put your name at the top of the layoffs list. Which is likely why butch dykes make, on average, much less than femme dykes (preliminary data, according to the Williams Institute).

That's just inappropriate.

I've spent years finding a way to be my brainy self and my butch self at the same time. San Francisco is, as far as I can tell, the only place where there are enough butches to make the project more viable than, say, being a vegetarian polar bear. Because I work at a progressive publication, I've actually found a job where I think both parts of me should be of professional use. However, I've found that, on the surface personality level, my brainy butch balancing act relies on mixing advanced vocabulary with obscenity. For example, "That is just so fucking disingenuous!" I get away with my profanities at my present job, barely, but I can't get away with my irreverent references to sex and sexuality.

In queer culture, including GLBT nonprofits, it's pretty normal to talk about sex (sans details) and make sexual jokes. Sexual jokes are not acceptable in the straight workplace, and your coworkers let you know by giving you that pinched-mouth, eye-rolling look that says "What you're saying isn't refreshingly naughty, it's frighteningly beyond help." Suddenly your hip, smart, progressive coworker is looking and acting a lot like a church mom. And yet, the straighter the environment, the more I feel the need to say something that marks me as queer; it's hard to do that without being sexual in some way.

Advancing the homosexual agenda

Of course, butches also face the same hurdles that other minorities do. If you're the only woman on the board, you don't want to focus too much on women's issues for fear of being dismissed as a stereotype. Likewise, if you're the only dyke—which is always the case everywhere but San Francisco, and often the case here, too—you risk ghettoizing yourself if you talk about queer issues. I'm a journalist, though, and I think the media is doing a terrible job of covering queer issues despite the fact that the culture is obsessed with queers. I think there should be some way of harnassing queer sensibility as well as simply covering GLBT issues. I have opted to make comedy out of my efforts in that direction at my current job by announcing pretty regularly that I'm a mole, there to advance the homosexual agenda. (Do we have an agenda? Because if we do, we're even worse than the Democrats at advancing it.)

Even at a publication where people are by and large not homophobic, it's hard to get gay issues covered. Gays make up just 4 to 9 percent of the population. So when I proposed a graph looking at how being mainstream pays—men earn more than women, straight men earn more than gay men, married heterosexuals earn more than cohabitating heterosexuals, and preliminary data suggests that gender normative queers earn more than gender deviant ones—the greatest interest was in the comparison between the two kinds of heterosexuals. The concern was legitimate in its way: Most readers are heterosexual and middle class. Facts about other groups aren't as interesting to them about facts about themselves. Yet, the idea that they have pruned their personalities to fit in the workaday world is not an idea that they can capture; they can't see the forest for the trees.

In which I impersonate that feminist who has no sense of humor

And even well-meaning non-homophobic coworkers occasionally fail to see that gay jokes simply aren't funny. Most homophobia, at least of the quotidian variety as opposed to the getting-tied-to-the-stake-and-lit-on-fire variety, comes in the form of jokes. Often the humor behind the telling is meant to be something like "of course I don't really believe it, but you've got to admit it's funny." Larry David, with his endless "not that there's anything wrong with that" shtick, is the worst at this. If there's nothing wrong or titillating about queer sexuality, why are we talking about it ad infinitum?

Now, if I were to point out either of the previous two points to my coworkers, I call the phenomenon that would ensue "Hell hath no fury like privilege called out."

We’re all getting drinks after work.

There are a lot of really great straight people out there. Just do not put them all in a room together! They start to speak another language. Suddenly, the smart, powerful, feminist women I work with reveal that they, too, love to talk about clothes. Words I don't understand occur about 2.3 times per sentence. My coworkers don't understand why I never get drinks with them, but that's why. The one time I tried, I was introduced to the word cougar, and learned that my young male coworkers were so easily impressed by the mere sight of a pair of boobs, that they almost went home with said cougars. (This brings out the "boys, let me tell you how it's done" side of me, which I think ultimately doesn't help advance the homosexual agenda.) The 35-and-up crowd, which is technically my age group, busies themselves talking almost exclusively about real estate. (People who spend their days keeping their personalities to a minimum in tiny office cubicles compensate for it on the weekends. They sprawl out in enormous vehicles and take to the open road. They head to the largest store they can find, with the biggest things: Home Depot. There they buy things to fix up their homes, to personalize the one space they can.) I have nothing to contribute to the real estate conversation, because being butch and middle class eerily resembles being a vegetarian polar bear—I keep looking for the foliage.

Just a quick note to let you know I do my research: The Human Rights Campaign has done a study of employment realities for GLBT people. They find that everything is peachy, and getting peachier every day. But their survey is voluntary and there are only a few states with discrimination laws covering sexuality, much less gender performance, so HRC has only a carrot to use. Read between the lines, though. HRC sent the survey to more than 1,500 companies. 446 responded; 203 prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

Neanderthal Rule Prevails in New Jersey

2006-12-15T10:50:00.000-08:00

The New Jersey supremes were supremely right in their unanimous decision in October calling for civil unions or gay marriage in the state. What does equal protection mean if not that laws apply equally to all people, regardless of who they fall in love with?

Legislators took the cowardly course yesterday, opting for civil unions. I can't get too riled up about that personally because I don't believe in marriage anyway. But I do think the people who defend the institution of marriage are starting to sound a lot like Neanderthals.

Bush called in 2004 for "an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of man and woman as husband and wife."

The day after the New Jersey decision, Bush said, "We believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman."

The same day, racist George Allen said, "I’m for marriage between a man and a woman while my opponent is against it." Actually Democrat James Webb, who won, does not, in fact, oppose heterosexual marriage; he does, however, oppose gay marriage.

The Arlington Group, a creepy coalition of congressional Republicans and Christian right organizations which has been one of the most powerful forces behind anti-gay marriage amendments, defines its mission as "Protecting the traditional institution of MARRIAGE being between 'one man and one woman.'" Perhaps they got a little self-conscious about the caveman-like repetition of "one man and one woman," and so included the quotes. Or then again maybe they have no basic understanding of punctuation.

In a creepy twist, Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, who beat Harold Ford, said "I voted...to prohibit same sex marriage because it protects...the sanctity of marriage between a man and women."

And finally, New Jersey Senator Robert W. Singer, a Republican who sponsored an amendment to yesterday's civil unions bill that would define marriage as—you guessed it—the union between a man and a woman, explained, "I believe the foundation of our state is families, marriage, one man, one woman."

The problem is, when you try to add any substance to the the caveman formula, you quickly get into trouble. Len Deo, the president of the New Jersey Family Policy Council, made that mistake yesterday, saying "People have rights, but they don’t have a right to redefine an institution that’s served us well for 2,000 years."

Which institution would that be?

Trannydyke Shrugged

2006-12-14T20:38:00.000-08:00

I never cease to be amazed at how many people express earnest concern that butch/femme dynamics and FTMs reaffirm normative gender roles. Admit it, dear reader, you've been worried that Gender 3.0 is doing the Man's work.

The criticism of masculine identification comes from many directions. There are lesbians on Craigslist (I'm a dyke looking for someone else who looks like a dyke; I'm not interested in butch/femme), old-school feminists and crunchymen.

As for old-school feminists, read Dorothy Allison and others. I don't have the energy to go through it again (although, unfortunately, lots of young lesbians seem perfectly willing to recreate 70s politics again and again).

It's hard for me to understand why some lesbians of my generation get so outraged by butch/femme. Butches and femmes single-handedly created lesbian culture. They fought at Stonewall, literally. But nothing is better than theorizing about what you don't understand. And because I don't know any butches or femmes who judge and criticize lesbians who identify as andro or resist gender categorization altogether, my theory is this:

(1) Lesbians who don't find butch/femme hot are irritated that it takes up so much of their cruising space. There is a scarcity problem in lesbian culture, so their concern would be perfectly understandable if they would just be honest about it. But butches and femmes are actually minorities in the lesbian world, so why all the tweeners feel like an oppressed majority is perhaps the subject of another post.

(2) Some lesbians who resist categorization do so because they're really not clear on who they are. The presence of butch/femme dynamics has created a language of gender in the lesbian community—not just butch and femme, but tomboy femme, femme-of-center, soft butch, faggy butch, andro, lipstick lesbian and so on—with which fluency is expected, so these uncertain lesbians feel pressured to define themselves and get grouchy.

Now crunchymen are, in my experience, some of the worst, most insidious sexists out there. They don't clean up after themselves; they have a creepy sense of entitlement and inflated self-importance that they will never admit has to do with their gender. And they accuse me of reifying gender norms.

Let's imagine for a moment that I do just that. I believe I deserve special treatment because I identify as male. How far do they think I'd get with that? Do they think bosses and cops will bow down before my grubby tranny self? Because they don't. Cops treat me like any freak who needs to be controlled: Wear Lesbian Avengers shirt; get arrested. Bosses pretty much treat me like a girl, who, like any girl, has no right to take herself so seriously. But then they justify their sexism by claiming to think of me as a man—and one who, obviously, reaffirms normative gender roles. And just so we're clear that I don't subscribe to normative gender roles, let me make explicit that women bosses are every bit as bad about this as men. And lesbian bosses can be the worst, because they feel a little castrated.

But if I did hold pretty conventional views of masculinity and femininity, why should I take the fall for those norms? I mean, wouldn't it be more productive to take one's complaints to centers of power like the military and the boardroom? Is one lone trannydyke doing more to affirm gender norms than to break them down? And why do I have to explain what I think masculinity is and why I think I'm more masculine than feminine before people will accept my choice to identify as male?

That's like asking someone to define the meaning of life before giving them a birth certificate.

Murphy's Law

2006-12-13T11:41:00.000-08:00

If you're trying to pass as a man, people will call you ma'am. In my case, sometimes it's "sir" [long pause as eyes roam frantically around my body, looking for a clue; relieved, catch on the booblets], then, with self-satisfaction, "excuse me, I'm sorry, ma'am!" [because clearly any biological woman would be offended to have someone mistake hir for a man, even if s/he'd been shopping in the men's department for 15 years]). It's funny because I don't recall anyone ever looking at my booblets before I started trying to pass.

Special note to fags: stop calling butches ladies. It's annoying, and we're a lot stronger than you.

When I break down and go into the women's room (usually at the airport), some woman-passing-as-a-transvestite will shriek and pronounce that I'm in the wrong restroom. (I'm embarrassed to admit it, but someone once told me to tell my mother I was too old to be in the ladies' room. But that was years ago.)

Restrooms are the only trans topic anyone could call overdone, so I won't dwell there for long. But I do have a few quick complaints about the men's room. No one likes to be presumed guilty until proven innocent—of crapping. Oh, and guys, did you know women's rooms sometimes have fancy fountains and stuff? That's because they're not always filthy.

But back to Murphy's Law. When you identify as butch, somebody will say "you're not that butch." Let's call this butch denial, which is a lot like climate change denial—it's not that hot! Denial in both cases is an attempt to remain on the firm ground of the status quo, without having to change the way you think or act. (Pretty much just to be mean, I'm linking to Senator James Inhofe's [PDF] magnum opus of climate change denial. And to Mother Jones' proof that ExxonMobile funds the scientists Inhofe cites.)

To get butch deniers to admit that it's possible to be genuinely masculine in a female body, you'd have to be a catastrophe of butchness—6'5" with a body builder's physique and mean to boot: Hothead Paisan on meth and testosterone. But at that point, it's no longer a question of masculinity in a female body; the body has been brought in to line. And, what's more, this Incredible Hulk/Hothead Paisan hybrid would be such a laughable stereotype that the deniers wouldn't have to take hir seriously. So no need to change one's thinking--or lack thereof--about gender after all. Phew.

As for femmes, Murphy's Law says that no matter how many times they come out to straight people, said people will "forget" that they are, in fact, lesbians. Now, lady-lovin' butches and trannies might not forget repeatedly, but we've been known to assume the worst (heterosexuality) until told otherwise. Sorry ladies.

And now, for two "user-driven content" opportunities (it's the interweb, after all!): femmes, post comments with your experiences with Murphy's Law of Gender and Sexuality. And, butches/transmen, in the spirit of Holla Back, send me pictures of the women-passing-as-transvestites, Midwestern butch straight ladies, and others who have challenged your right to be in the women's room. Or wiener dudes who've challenged your right to be in the men's room. (Let's face it, at this point, you all have my email address!)

Soy homosexual. ¿Y tú?

2006-12-12T15:06:00.000-08:00

Eating too much soy turns men gay, reports WorldNetDaily, a conservative news site run by Joseph Farah, a member of the vast right wing media conspiracy masquerading as a defender of the First Amendment.

This article has less scientific evidence than it says a "soy-damaged" man has testosterone, so there's no need to argue with its thesis. But let's look at it as an example of what's wrong with the right-wing media's case against queers.

-- It says "homosexuality" when it means male homosexuality. I've written about that elsewhere, so I won't repeat myself.

-- It never actually talks about homosexuality at all. What it does say is:

In fetal development, the default is being female. All humans (even in old age) tend toward femininity. The main thing that keeps men from diverging into the female pattern is testosterone, and testosterone is suppressed by an excess of estrogen.

Setting aside the obvious problem that gender performance and sexuality aren't the same thing, the article presents a worldview in which masculinity is under constant assault by femininity and must therefore be defended. Is this really a problem we should be devoting time to?

-- The big scary word "homosexual" also diverts attention from the real problem with soy, which is caused by the big businesses whose metaphorical dicks Christian conservatives love to metaphorically suck. (Our industrial agriculture system forces farmers to grow too much corn and soybeans, which big companies buy cheap and put into every processed food they can sell.)

-- The article attempts to generate more essential behavior differences between men and women. Women eat soy; men cease to be men if they do. That's almost as dumb as having men's coats button one way and women's another.

-- Most right-wing writing about gay issues uses facts as loosely as this one: Soy simulates estrogen; estrogen is produced by women (though it's also produced by men, just as testosterone is produced by women); therefore soy causes men to be like women, a.k.a. gay.

-- And, finally, the piece never says what's wrong with being gay. I mean, for a reactionary publication, couldn't they do better than the meak claim that "homosexuality is always deviant," especially if it's so easy to catch? Pussies.

Bad Religion

2006-12-12T11:46:00.000-08:00

Today’s New York Times has an article on gay evangelicals, who, instead of leaving the church when they come out or throwing themselves into bogus gay "recovery" programs, are standing by both aspects of their identity.

Your butchbloggerbot is up on current events. So what does he have to say about gay evangelicals? Given his propensity for in-betweenness, he's of two minds (and from this point forward, he promises to stop using the third person).

On the one hand, you go, guys! The GLBT community is diverse, and ought to be tolerant of all things except hate. The view of religion that the men and women (mostly men) in the article embrace is ostensibly not one of hate. As such, it is a move in the direction of dismantling the false marriage of conservative hate politics and religion. An extreme reading of religion has allowed the right to get away with too much crap for too long, including having pastors tell their parishioners how to vote. That ain't in the Bible, people—and it sure as hell isn't in the Constitution!

On the other hand, orthodox religion lends itself to this kind of abuse. (Religion has a long history of justifying ill treatment of infidels—just a quick glance at the Middle East will do, where Jews abuse Arabs and vice-versa and Sunnis abuse Shi'ites and vice-versa. Lots on Sunnis and Shi'a on the MojoBlog these days).

In order to keep people in line with its rigid logic of us vs. them and right vs. wrong, religion tends to shun sexuality. All sexuality—hence the absurd condemnation of contraception among Catholics and some religious-righters. That's because people in touch with their sexuality quickly learn that (a) attraction can’t be explained or changed, (b) what’s taboo is hot, and (c) it’s possible to take something taboo and do it consensually, making consent the only right/wrong issue in sexual behavior. Being in touch with your sexuality might also lead you to get intimate with people who don’t share your ideas or your background, forcing you to take a crash course in empathy for the other. Sunnis falling in love with Shi'ites, Christians falling in love with Jews: not good for orthodox religion. If gay evangelicals are actually bringing sexual love back into the religious equation, props. But at least one of the men in the Times article has made a purity vow, so I question whether there's not still a healthy dose of self-hate and mistrust of sexuality going on.

The Hipster Army

2006-12-10T09:28:00.000-08:00

The hipster army—the 20-something with the Beatles cut, a 60s suit and sliver tie with awkward dress shoes, and his friend with the form-fitting black jeans and low-rise Converse sneakers with thick, longish hair—is what gets to me. These guys wear gender with such light irony. They embrace the strength of masculinity, but wear strength’s concomitant burdens as a grief of sorts, not belligerence. To their wash-and-wear masculinity, they bring the politics of nonconformity and the sheer aestheticism of androgyny. These guys are hot. They’re the men I want to be.

There’s no comparable way for masculine or transgender dykes to ride the line of gender. Instead, we gear up with Harley-Davidson T-shirts, big boots, shaved heads—at worst, all three together—and, of course, the de rigueur baggy jeans. These hide our asses and hips. You see, I can’t wear tight black jeans. I would look like one of those creatures that’s one thing on top and another on the bottom: a butch upper body soldered onto the lower body of a hipster girl who’d suddenly gotten too big for her pant size. (It’s key to the hipster look in either gender to be skinny and have absolutely no muscle tone.)

I could take testosterone, and my body fat would shift, like magic, away from hips and ass and onto belly. That would be great, except I’d also turn into a bushy-bearded short man, possibly bald, definitely dickless. That hardly feels like a solution to my particular gender dysphoria. Then, after my voice changed—if it did—and I developed body hair, I would have to lower my dose only to have my fat distribution—the very thing standing between me and gorgeous, casual masculinity—return to its feminine default setting.

At least I could let my hair get bushy and wear tight T-shirts, right? Tight T-shirts wouldn’t work. And bushy hair on a female face doesn’t impose the same irony that it does on a male one—the boxy strength of the face violated by messy long hair, which is usually a little greasy. The softened face that says mainstream masculinity—pig-faced, fist-pumping spectator sport—is dumb. And says, I’m not confused, or filled with some stereotypical, irrelevant rage; I’m just waiting for something better to come along.

He's a Dyke

2006-12-09T16:44:00.000-08:00

I’ve been told several times in the last few weeks that I’m a dying breed. I’m a butch dyke of 35, living in San Francisco. I am one of just a handful of male-identified dykes at or under 35 who do not take testosterone and don’t insist in every situation on being referred to as a man. It’s not that I’m ambivalent or unsure about my masculinity — tell me “you go girl” and you’ll likely get a fist in your face. Or at least a look that packs as much punch.

But gender is a funny thing: It’s all relative. I thought being a dyke had taught me that lesson — I notice who’s more butch, who’s more femme, and a million permutations thereof. But the boom in testosterone-taking ex-butches has revealed how butch itself is a relative category. The more tranny boys there are, the more not taking testosterone seems like an expression of some unacknowledged allegiance to femininity. No, I don’t feel any connection to the word woman, but feeling awkward in the women’s bathroom doesn’t mean I feel like I was born to use the men’s room — especially when, testosterone or no, I will always have to sit to pee. I can’t bring myself to think that making my body adhere to the man category is the answer when, after over ten years of queer life, the gender binary (woman = feminine, man = masculine; woman ≠ man) strikes me as comically clumsy — naïve and absurdly autocratic.

Don’t panic: I’m not going to argue that all FTMs take us back to overly simplistic ideas of gender. Such generalizations are useless and don’t ultimately advance the ideal of gender chaos. But the physical trappings of manhood — except one or two that testosterone can’t give — have not been the things I have aspired to or identified with. I may walk and fuck a lot like a man, but mostly I am masculine in the ways I feel: I am tough and fiercely self-sufficient and find myself in pissing contests, even though I think they're stupid; I go awkwardly rigid when it comes to tenderness and vulnerability; I feel completely entitled to experience desire without guilt, shame or obligation and to speak my mind as I see fit. At times, I do want to feel testosterone running through my veins, like a drug I was meant to have, to give these feelings physical form. Would a low dose (one too low to change my voice or body hair) make me more of a man, in society’s view? I don’t think so, because society cannot see gender anywhere but on the physical body. I think I would still be seen as a mannish, militant lesbian who doesn’t know her place by those who disapprove of me, and as some version of butch by those who get it.

But I’m not a woman who refuses to accept her place; I’m not a woman — for me, personally, the word is irredeemably steeped in its connotations of motherhood and nurturing. (For this, I blame the Second Wave feminists.) The constitutive thrill of being a male-identified dyke is feeling like those prescriptions simply don’t apply. Problem is, femmes and other gender-savvy dykes tend to be the only ones who recognize this basic fact of masculine gender identity.

People, in my experience, have a strong desire to be seen for what they are, or, at least for the good things they are. That’s why the thought of injecting testosterone crosses my mind at times — say, when I’m sweating my balls off picking up trash for the city to work off parking tickets. I’m in Dickies and an old T-shirt. It’s me and the homeboys; there are no straight women or femmes or even middle-class folks doing it. Then somebody comes up (with the class-blind expectation that because I “work for” the city, I will have handy information at my fingertips) and addresses me with “Miss!” Miss? I may have the tiniest hint of breasts, but doesn’t the combination of actions, attitude and attire speak louder? People who call me “miss,” or who apologize profusely after calling me “sir,” mistake me for some poor old frump who can’t help but look mannish. But I am more in charge of my gender than they are: I have negotiated it; I know who I am and I like it.

Some butches probably transition because they’re tired of dealing with these situations. Their choice may be politically retrograde or politically radical or neither — only time will tell. But nobody said it would be easy to overturn social expectations, and it’s really no surprise that society willfully misreads attempts to loosen its categorical shackles. One such attempt comes in the form of folksy advice: It’s best not to give a fig how others see you. Aside from the fact that no one is comfortable being misread profoundly and negatively — they may not have experienced it, but I’m quite sure they wouldn’t like it — this advice ignores the basic fact that refusing to see people in all their complexity furthers the cause of discrimination.

But that same tone deafness is what has allowed the category of butch to exist at all. “Butch” is a space between the poles of gender and would play quite differently if the poles disappeared. The current explosion of FTMs is already shifting how it plays, and what it's called. As a dyke dude, I could feel emasculated by FTMs’ ballsier embrace of masculinity. Sometimes, say when I see them at the gym lifting twice as much weight as I can, I do. But sometimes I feel ballsier than they are for pushing the gender envelope in a more active way that FTMs who pass — or at least for walking away from a potential pissing contest with them. Being butch is a claim that can be rejected (unlike, say, being biologically female), and some butches and tranny boys respond by needing to be more masculine than the next dyke to feel masculine at all.

I will admit to being uncomfortable with the popularity of transitioning to the extent that at least some people are doing it to win at that game — a perfectly reasonable desire for your early twenties, but not one worth shaving a few years off of your life for. (Testosterone is hard on the liver and may be linked to various kinds of cancer--no one knows because no one researches it.) But because male-identified dykes are also often judged harshly for reaffirming patriarchal biases, I’m inclined to abstain from judgment. I generally think it’s better not to fret that FTMs are limiting the scope of gender play in the dyke community. The decision to transition or not to transition can be a reflection of which aspects of masculinity different people connect with, or which strategy they employ to break through the walls of binary gender. Or maybe the polarity that has resulted from some butches’ choice to transition reveals what most lesbians already knew: Gender is so complicated that sleeping with biological females is not a very strong glue with which to hold a community together. (Note to homophobes: It’s our shared experience of oppression that really connects us as a community.)

Whatever the case, testosterone isn’t a magic key to a brave new world where gender diversity — and perversity — are valued. That should go without saying. Meanwhile, some of us are still holding down the butch fort, which is — in case it’s never occurred to you that butches look working class because we can’t get better jobs— still very much under attack. Now it’s also on shifting ground.