Someone sent me a link to this short TED talk by Paula Stone Williams
It’s very good.
The key quote I took from it was “What do any of us really know about the shoes in which we have never walked?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrYx7HaUlMY
Category Archives: Opinion
I’ve been a long time fan of the manga Battle Angel Alita, known in Japan as Gunnm (銃夢 Ganmu, literally “gun dream”), by Yukito Kishiro.
Alita’s search for identity has been something extremely special and personal to me, and it is probably my favourite manga.
I have been aware of James Cameron’s love project to turn this into a live action film, and have followed its progress through Development Hell with interest.
So when the film finally hit cinemas, I approached it with some trepidation.
Here are my thoughts on it, now that I have seen it.
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This article was published a year ago, and is still utterly superb.
The fight for transgender rights is an urgent battle against what some have called the last bastion of socially acceptable bigotry. If we take the notion seriously that all humans are due equal rights, as many of us do, we must care about the rights of transgender people. We are currently in a situation where transgender rights are so far behind other groups in society that it should be considered a crisis.
Read on…
tomsimsblog.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/what-you-need-to-know-about-transgender-rights/
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I read an article in The Guardian today about “Selfie Dysphoria”
Photograph: Linda Nylind/Elle Hunt/The Guardian
It’s an interesting article about how selfie filters are driving many people to use cosmetic surgery to make their face look more like their selfies, and how in the past people would bring photos of celebrities to a Cosmetic Surgeon whereas these days they are more likely to bring selfies with filters applied.
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It’s been recently reported in the Media [1][2] that there is a new female-only motorsport series being launched called “W Series”.
British IndyCar driver Pippa Mann calls it a “sad day for motorsport” and that it will segregate women drivers. I agree with her.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Just after Wimbledon Men’s Final, fans everywhere learned what they had been waiting till the end of the match for. Not who won, but who would be the new Doctor Who.
To the shock of few, the new Doctor is to be a woman.
This could raise some really interesting gender pronoun questions and bring them into mainstream discussion. How will people refer to the Doctor’s previous incarnations? And will it inadvertently, even by implication, address some of the issues that a transperson faces being mis-gendered when people refer to their old gender?
Of course, it does nothing to change the perception of gender binary as The Doctor has merely transitioned from one gender binary to the other, but it could rather ironically be a positive step as the issue becomes part of pop culture.
It will be interesting to see how things go. Will they will just whitewash it by having everything refer to the Doctor as “she”, and nobody ever getting it wrong, even if they are a recurring character who doesn’t know about the transition? Or will they will play on it by making her suffer the same awkward situations that many transpeople face of people using the wrong pronoun for them?
Pop culture has a habit of altering language and perception, so it will also be interesting to see what, if any, wider ramifications there are to this in society in general.
One thing is for sure, the internet will be awash with misogyny and transphobia right now.
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As a genderfluid / two-spirit / 3rd gender person, I sometimes present as female and sometimes present as male. I’ve covered this several times in the past.
Often I see fellow t-girls referring to their girl side in the third person, even going as far as to say things like “Susan wants to come out today, and I can’t stop her”. Frankly talk like this scares me – it is surely inviting split personality. Or perhaps they feel guilt or shame about their transgenderism and it is a way for them to externalise it and compartmentalise it? I don’t know, but I’m certainly not comfortable with the idea.
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I was in my local Co-Op the other day and they had Binky nail varnish on special offer at £2 a go.
Having really enjoyed wearing my best friend’s “Countess” by Barry M that we both wore during a weekend away with her recently, I was drawn to the glittery purple “Purple Shimmer” in the Binky range, and also to “Pink Crystal”. I figured that for a fraction of the price of an OPI nail varnish, they were cheap enough to give it a go.
As an aside, I have to say that “Purple Shimmer” and “Pink Crystal” sound like characters in ‘My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic‘ which made them even more appealing to me. 🙂
I haven’t tried Pink Crystal yet, but I have worn the Purple Shimmer.
It went on very thick and gel-like. One coat was almost enough, but I did two coats to get a deep even coverage. It dried very quickly between coats.
However, it took three coats of clear top coat before it stopped feeling like sand paper, and I fear it’s going to be as hard to take off as the Barry M was.
Purple Shimmer by Binky
Durability is good so far, and I haven’t had any chips yet after 5 days. I’ll update this post in a few days with further information, including how easy it was to remove.
Update:
Well, as expected it was an absolute nightmare to remove! But before that, it lasted a good 10 days before it had to come off, and that was mainly because it was growing out. So I call that rather good value for money.
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(Photo by Gaye Gerard/Getty Images)
Well… wow. What do you make of this? Richard O’Brien responding to Germaine Greer’s comments on transgenderism.
I agree with Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries. You can’t be a woman. You can be an idea of a woman. You’re in the middle and there’s nothing wrong with that. I certainly wouldn’t have the wedding tackle taken off. That is a huge jump and I have all the sympathy in the world for anyone who does it but you aren’t a woman.”
~~ Richard O’Brien
My opinion on this is that I think Germaine Greer is a fairly abhorrent person with regards to her views on transgenderism, but I think Richard O’Brien is kind of making a fair point, although it comes across rather badly.
As a “third gender” person myself I can see what he is saying – if I had surgery then it wouldn’t alter the person I am inside, it would only affect my outward appearance.
Your gender identiy is a state of being – an internal state of mind – and physical genitalia have little bearing on that. The difference between him and Greer is that he appears to suggest that he thinks it is possible to be a woman even if you weren’t born one genetically, and she emphatically does not.
I don’t understand how she can campaign for equality, acceptance and inclusion, and then say that trans women are not women but are men trying to usurp and subvert feminism. What an abhorrent thing to say!
By contrast, Richard seems to be saying that you can be a woman inside and no matter what you do (or don’t) to your genitals, who you are remains. As in, still a woman. And I can totally accept that.
If that’s not what he meant, and instead he really is in agreement with Germaine Greer’s bigotry, then obviously I don’t endorse that. However, what *I* am saying is that who you are inside is what is important and your physical attributes less so.
That isn’t to say that gender reassignment surgery is wrong, or unnecessary; it’s perfectly natural to want your physical appearance to match your gender identity should you genuinely need to transition. But by the same token, no matter how much surgery you have you will never reach the nirvana of being exactly the same as if you had been born differently. And, further, there is immense pressure on transgender people to transition from one society-endorsed gender binary to the other, and as I’ve observed many times in this blog, there are more options and states of being than that.
So, in conclusion, my interpretation of what Richard O’Brien is saying is that he is advocating finding contentment in being yourself rather than feeling pressured into transitioning. And that is a world away from agreeing with Germaine Greer.
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A month ago, I posted a reaction on my public Facebook page to Ted Cruz’s comments on North Carolina’s decision to pass a law which makes transpeople use the public toilets (restrooms) of their birth gender rather than their identified gender, particularly his rather horrific comment that ‘Men should not be going to the bathroom with little girls’
A friend recently told me that my posted reaction was very good, but that since she isn’t on Facebook she would have never have seen it if I hadn’t mentioned it to her and linked her, and suggested that I repost it here.
So, here it is:
America’s intolerance really saddens me. But this is a country that only relatively recently moved away from institutionalised state-sanctioned racial segregation, and where interracial sex is still seen as a “kink”, and where racism and homophobia are still a real issue. As is gun crime, of course. So it’s hardly surprising that transphobia is also a real issue in the USA.
For me, as a transperson, the biggest insult is the insinuation that I would be a danger to women when in girl mode. I mean, seriously WTF? I would be at far more danger from looking like an attractive woman and being forced to go into the men’s loos and having some bloke assault me.
Also, is Ted Cruz really saying that if they let him into a female toilet he would be unable to stop himself from assaulting women and young girls? Or is he saying that it’s just all transpeople that are rapists?
I’m genuinely terrified for America’s future.
Since I posted that, the U.S. Department of Justice and North Carolina are now involved in a lawsuit over this (not my Facebook post! I mean the law that NC passed), with the DOJ taking a very robust and heartening stance, and not only condemning it utterly but making reference to the Civil Rights Movement.
An article by Mark Joseph Stern on Slate calls this the “‘I Have a Dream’ moment of the Trans movement”, and goes into it in far more detail than I will here.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch is quoted as saying:
This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry. That right, of course, is now recognized as a guarantee embedded in our Constitution, and in the wake of that historic triumph, we have seen bill after bill in state after state taking aim at the LGBT community. Some of these responses reflect a recognizably human fear of the unknown, and a discomfort with the uncertainty of change.
And, further, she says:
But this is not a time to act out of fear. This is a time to summon our national virtues of inclusivity, diversity, compassion, and open-mindedness. What we must not do—what we must never do—is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human. This is why none of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not, or invents a problem that doesn’t exist as a pretext for discrimination and harassment.
This restores my hope in America somewhat. I’m gladdened that people in power and authority are prepared to stand up for what is decent and fair.
I fervently hope that this will continue, and that decent open-minded people will continue to remain in power and authority. Right now, this is by no means certain with the current Presidential Election circus but as an outsider looking in, all I can do is hope that decency and common sense will prevail.
