Learned a New Term I Wish I Didn't Know

Today I learned a new gay slur from supposed gay-positive punk rocker and part-time lefty radio pundit Johnny Angel Wendell, who, in asserting that Michele Bachmann may be a lesbian on facebook, used the term "daggery." A trip to urbanurbandictionary.com provides a lot of scatological associations that I really could have done without.

Now, I know the standard defense of this behavior, which runs something like this: "It's not actually homophobia, it's meant to be a calling-out of that particular homophobe's hypocrisy, by using their own homophobia against them."

That argument would make a lot more sense to me if I hadn't just been schooled in a new homophobic term by someone who is supposedly anti-homophobe. I singled out Wendell, because he's the latest repugnant example, but this behavior is rampant across the lefty bloggoshpere. If you suspect someone on the right of being a self-loathing gay, poke him or her with sarcastic mock-homophobia.

In my opinion, this does nothing to break down homophobia. It doesn't encourage the supposedly closeted person to open the door, it just sends more hate their way. You are not making an ally, you are not helping that person in any way. Ancillary to that, you put anyone who doesn't know you're being ironic or sarcastic on the defensive as well. There is no positive value in making slurs against any TLGB person, out or closeted, that I can divine. All it does is drive the wedge of hatred and division in deeper.

Cost

48,000 American dead and wounded, 650,000 dead in Iraq, uncounted more the world over, all to supposedly get 1 guy who is *allegedly* responsible for 3,000 deaths. Remember that proof of Osama bin Laden's responsibility for those attacks was promised, but has never been provided.

Survey Says...

Here's an article discussing a survey released just in the past week regarding the level of discrimination faced by transpeople in the US.

Seriously, who could think it was a joke or a lark to live this kind of life? Having seen first hand the consequences for many of my sisters and brothers, I find myself wanting to do every bit of educating I can on what it means to be trans. I have been extremely fortunate. I think that a good part of why is because those who have come before me have done the work of informing the people in their lives as to what it means to go through life this way.

I need to remind myself to pass along that good work. I am trying.

vlog for 1:29:11 Magic, Murder, and the Weather

Screed

I am feeling more than a bit cynical this morning. It looks to me like, instead of using this lame duck session to put through as much of a rational, forward-looking social agenda as possible before the end of the session, or at least fighting for some of the changes we need, the Democrats in congress and the administration are going to spend this valuable time compromising with a majority in one of two houses in congress that isn’t even seated yet. This galls me. I am beginning to think some very cynical things. Here are the two main points:

1.) If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.
2.) The Democratic Party is the sucker wing of the Corporate Oligarchy.

If the Dems were a serious party looking towards the future, it is my belief that they would be fighting tooth and nail for certain specific things:

1.) Making sure that the world will not be an ecological nightmare when our grandchildren are our age
2.) Finding ways to end America’s status as the world’s leading incarcerator of its own citizens
3.) Changing the tax structure so that we are not in debt and so that we are able to maintain and improve out crumbling infrastructure.
4.) Creating a British-style National Health Service
5.) Reducing our military to rational levels. We have been on “war footing” since World War 2 and we can’t afford it any more. We cannot afford any more foreign adventures that cost in lives and resources to the extent our two current ones do.
6.) Dismantle the TSA. NO POLICE STATE!!!

We do all of things my above list opposes for the benefit of the corporatocracy. We do not support our people, we support the rich. The Democrats talk a mediocre game and deliver basically in the range of weak tea to absolutely nothing.

A committed left would not tolerate being represented by lackeys.

Voted

So it was, as usual, a great feeling to go out and vote this morning. It was a little warmer today than I had expected, which was pleasant. I even actually felt OK with walking though piles of leaves to get to the polling place (usually not a fan of fall, because it means summer is over.)

I generally dress up a little bit on Tuesdays and Thursdays because I have class those nights and I have made a bit of a deal about being trans in both classes. Today I put a little extra effort into my looks so I could go to the polls and express myself as a transwoman in that context as well. I wore my new calf-length beige skirt and a purple top, my black jacket with a sparkly purple scarf, my purple houndstooth print socks & my black mary janes. I didn't feel intimidated at all, I think I'm finally over the shyness, and said my name (still legally my old boy name) and took my card and went to the booth. I would like to acknowledge that the poll helpers were all cheerful and helpful. That made me smile.

As to how I voted -- I don't mind saying. I voted straight D, I think in my district that was the right thing to do. There's a trans voting guide being circulated by MTPC and for me, the Ds were pretty uniformly in favor of the trans rights bill that has been hanging around our state congress for a while now. As someone who's pretty lefty anyway, I was actually mostly OK with those choices.

Of course, I'm not really a Democrat, so there were a couple of races where I felt like I wanted to vote differently, but circumstances forced me to just vote the straight ticket against my own desires in three races in particular. I voted for Patrick for governor, in spite of having a strong preference for Jill Stein. Grumble, grumble. Jill is an acquaintance and I like her a whole lot. She has fought hard for a number of issues that I stand strongly in favor of. One of those issues is to change the way we vote from "either / or" to a more "first choice / second choice" model, which I think would be very democratizing and would ultimately serve the people much better. I was really wishing for that this morning.

I also held my nose and voted for Martha Coakley. I am not sure she's very good at her job, and I am so angry with her about the egregious senatorial campaign she ran last year that I really wanted to just leave her office's race blank on my ballot. Once again, there was a scary "R" next to the other name in that race, so Martha got a gimme. I think she counts on them, actually.

There was a Green / Rainbow candidate in the State Auditor's race, named Nat Fortune, who I was going to assuage my guilt and vote for, but ultimately, there was that scary "R" again. grrr.

There were 3 questions on the ballot related to reducing taxation & regulation, and I voted against all of them. There were 2 non-binding human rights questions that I wholeheartedly voted for. As a transwoman and a Buddhist, I absolutely believe health care is a right, and that no government should be making laws supporting one religion in detriment to another.

So there you go. I do feel like it was a great thing to get to the polls, it does make me glad I'm living in a somewhat-democracy when I go to the polls and feel like some of my candidates have a chance of getting in, and that my voice is being heard. I hope you voted today, too.

An Aspect of Transition I Hadn't Thought Of

I have been thinking about how my social status has changed since I've been transitioning. I definitely notice some changes, which I will think about and talk to you about later, mostly related to how my relationship with women in general has changed and improved, but one of my subscriptions at youtube brought up a subject that really drove home something interesting and weird about American society in general. First, here's a video from Mel, who lives in Detroit, I think, or at least somewhere in urban southern Michigan:



And here's a response video from Angela, who lives in NYC. It's really interesting to me to see American attitudes through these two different perspectives.

Son: A Reflection on My Identity and Values

(Note: This is a paper I just submitted for an American History course I'm taking. I thought it pertinent enough to include here in the blog. I have no idea how it will be graded, but I like it.)

This past week was my birthday. My mother sent me a card in honor of it, which was nice. I saw it on top of my mail pile and noted it was in a pretty blue envelope. I like blue. It’s one of the colors I feel that I wear well, so when I saw her handwriting on the front, I smiled. I opened the envelope. At the top of the card, in letters about an inch and a half tall, it said,

“SON.”

The card itself was, of course, also blue. There was a drawing of a very happy looking puppy dog (complete with wagging tail.) Beneath the emphatic gender identifier, it said, “Here’s a card you’re sure to like—It doesn’t lecture, advise, argue, pry, or disapprove…” and when opened, shows the puppy again, holding a banner in its teeth. Above the pup it reads, “It just sits in your hand and says” and on the banner: “Happy Birthday, with lots of love!” and it was signed, simply, “Mom.”

My mother has been here to visit me from Texas, where she now lives, earlier this month, and we spent a pretty enjoyable ten days together. There was a bit of tension around my newly revised public persona as a woman, but in general we had a good visit. Along the way, she gave me some advice about posture, went shopping with me for clothes, and did not object to me being en femme pretty much the whole time she was here. At one point, she made her position clear: “I’m still not sold on this, though you seem to be. As far as I’m concerned, you are still my son.”

Fair enough, but the card still felt a little like having salt rubbed in an open wound.

I have always been taught to be honest. Even when it seems like it will put me at a disadvantage, I have the tendency to tell the truth, because I believe that in the end, honesty is its own reward. Concerning my lifelong desire to be female, however, I would have to say that I haven’t lived up to that ideal very well, at least until recently.

I think, historically, that the culture I come from tends to compartmentalize in this manner. It shows up in our history and our thinking in both large and small ways. It shows up in crashing, dramatic contradictions in our behavior; how is it that we are able to make weight loss aids a huge industry in our culture and yet have the highest incidence of obesity in the world? How is it that we can, many of us, follow a religion ostensibly based on love and the golden rule, and yet be involved in two wars of choice, having built our country on two major genocides, and currently spend more money on the machines and methods of war than the rest of the world combined? All the while we wonder why we are feared and despised in the world. We can do this because we don’t consistently apply our philosophies across the board. It seems we can’t be trusted.

My own family history, like that of many American families, is illuminated in certain specific areas, and shrouded in mystery in others. I have seen a family tree for a particular branch of my family that goes back ten generations, to a man who was born in Monmouth, Wales in 1695, and who was killed in North Carolina in an Indian attack late in life, shortly before the Revolutionary war. My grandfather on my mother’s side liked to claim he was a quarter Cherokee, but when asked which of his grandparents was full blood, he would back down from his claim. I have heard other members of this branch of the family suggest that he was telling the truth, though no one has been able to confirm the source of our supposed Cherokee blood. For my own reasons, I would like to know this information, because I would like to find that person on the rolls of Cherokee Nation and become an enrolled member of the tribe. I have asked my mom about this and she doesn’t know where I can find this information, though she did think that probably the direction to go was in through my grandfather’s mother. She also emphatically stated, “I’m white!”

On my father’s side of the family, the line back through to the past is really not clear to me. My grandfather on that side is not someone I ever met, and my grandmother raised 5 children alone in depression-era Los Angeles. The apocryphal family story is that for at least part of that time, she worked as a bootlegger’s mule, carrying whiskey in flasks attached to her legs underneath her skirt. I don’t know what else she did; there is much in that half of my family that is not talked about. What I do know is that my father was born in Cedar City, Utah and that at that time the family was Mormon. I don’t know why they left the church, but it seems to have been a less than amicable parting of the ways. I also have heard that supposedly my grandfather was chronically hospitalized with shell shock, which I believe he sustained in the First World War. It’s all very mysterious, somehow, there’s so much about how my Dad grew up that I don’t know. There’s also an aunt of mine whom I’ve never met, who is estranged from the family.

The dominant family attachment for me, therefore, has always been my mother’s side. Her mother was raised in southern Texas near Corpus Christi. Her family was a staunchly Southern Baptist family of tenant farmers who worked in the cotton fields. My grandfather on that side of the family had been raised in the Ozark Mountains, loved to play baseball and had a large repertoire of “old songs” that he knew and at one time loved to sing, though by the time I knew him, he had stopped singing entirely. I never heard him sing a note. It’s so strange to me that he cut himself off from these things that I find so interesting: his heritage, his singing. He and my grandmother struggled very hard to raise my mom and her brothers, having moved to the mountains in Colorado and lived on starvation rations for most of the Great Depression, my grandmother and her kids living in a one room cabin with a dirt floor, my grandfather travelling everywhere he could to find work, often riding the rails hobo style looking for migrant farm work. I suspect struggling as hard as they did to make a life probably caused certain things to seem unimportant.

My own parent’s lives were easier, as the country became prosperous after the Second War. My father had served in the Army Air Corps and following the war had become fairly successful as a car salesman at a Cadillac dealership in LA. My mother was pretty and smart and 12 years younger than my dad. She had left Colorado to escape her mother who had the frustrating habit of chasing off every man she became interested in. After meeting my father through mutual friends, she married him within three months in the fall of 1958. My father began an auto body repair business, which quickly failed. I was born in California within a year of the wedding. My next younger brother was born almost exactly two years later in Colorado, after my parents’ financial collapse and subsequent move to live with my mother’s parents.

My grandmother, predictably, hated my father. That never changed.

My own childhood was angst-y for my own reasons. I was female-identified right from the start; my best friends in my toddler and preschool years were little girls. When I started kindergarten, I remember an exchange from, I think, my first day. I had tried to start up a conversation with a girl who was a classmate of mine. I remember her yelling at me, saying, “You’re a boy! I don’t talk to boys!” and my troubles proceeded from there. I never had friends in school. I got beat up a lot. I always felt different from everyone else. To be clear, I generally identified as male, but I was never happy about it, and whenever something would happen that placed me in a female context somehow, I would secretly feel this intense joy, like the real me had somehow escaped into the sun. I can provide many examples of this from throughout my life, but I won’t do so here in the interest of space. I would have these revelations over and over again, and because I didn’t know what to do with them, and because I was ashamed of them, I would push that part of myself back into the darkness and forget. Even with my efforts to forget this part of myself, I always felt lonely and alienated. I had this strong feeling that there was no one like me. Further, I often had the experience of being with my extended family, feeling separate from them, thinking, “If you really knew me, if you knew who I was, you would hate me.”

I survived it all and grew up (sort of; I feel I am still very much a work in progress!) In my twenties I became a punk rock musician. I became a Buddhist. I am politically very much a leftist. For a long time I thought I must be gay, though I knew I was attracted to women. This is common among transsexuals who haven’t figured themselves out yet.

It’s another way to compartmentalize. I think that this inconsistency is something that happens when you live by an impossible moral code, and I think that Americans do this as a matter of course. I think we find it very difficult to accept each other and ourselves the way we truly are. I think we are an incredibly inwardly blind society.

When I first came out to my mother, her immediate response was that she could point to any number of instances in my life that would make sense with the notion that I think of myself as female. I felt really good about that first conversation, though at the same time I had some doubt that she would stick to that level of approval, and it turns out that I was right to have my reservations. She has clearly retrenched along the lines demarcated at the beginning of this paper, though my perception of things is that she is having trouble with it because of her Christian worldview. If it were only a matter of whether or not I were happy, I think she would be having less of a problem with my transition from male to female. She never talks about it from the Christian perspective, but I perceive her as living in a very Christian place and social world, and so I think, though she won’t talk to me about this from a moral or religious point of view, it is in her mind that what I am doing is morally wrong. I know that she will never frame her feelings in that way for me.

If I am to have any hope of resolving this matter in a happy way with her, I am going to have to be consistent, firm, loving, and honest.

I think I can do that.

What Are the Odds?

Hmmm… It’s a month out from the elections, the Democrats are starting to tick up in the polls a little bit, the economic news is not as dire as might be hoped in opposition circles… Who would have thought that a vague but ominous-sounding terror threat would pop up of a Monday morning, just when most people’s stress levels are up anyway?

Something About Another Blog

I read the Princess Sparklepony blog on a daily basis. I like knowing what Peter, whom I've known since the early '80s, is up to, what he's thinking about. He's got a unique viewpoint and I see the world differently and more clearly for what I get from him.

So, a few days ago, he posted something about health care and it's gotten a lot of comments, largely long posts about people's experiences with the health care system. His own post was pretty much a health care experience he's been having, so it's fair game, but it just points out to me how exhausted the whole issue is making me at this point, but also how much this issue hits home for people.

I have been much more involved in the health care system over the last couple of years. I am going through a life change and part of how I'm changing includes wanting to take better care of myself, so I understand the hoops that this bureaucratic and messed up system puts people through. I personally support a nationalized health care system, and I'd be happy with either the German / Canadian model or the British model, as long as people can get the health care they need. It's a right to life issue.

I've gotten off track a bit, here, but I suppose my point is just that I am surprised, even still, at the depth of feeling around this issue. And also just to shout out to Peter for his lovely art & politics blog.

Political Limericks

I posted these at the Stephanie Miller Show's liveblog today. Thought I would share.

There once was a f***wit named Hannity

Whose hair was the source of his vanity

But underneath that

Was a cranial vat

Of rotten disgusting inanity

There once was a pundit named Coulter

Who listened to nothing you told her

The left thought her male

And her ideas would fail,

But dittoheads kept her pics in porn folders

There once was a Rick named Santorum

Who fouled air in our Senate’s quorum

He thought sex with dogs

Would rile up the trogs

Though most said “here Rover!”, and ignored him

Does Anybody Know...

Of music, art, film, etc. made by youthful (say, in their twenties) artists currently that is vital, well made, sincere, not celebrity-obsessed, not status-quo upholding, fun, positive, meaningful, poetic, subversive...

In other words, are the youth of today making art? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I'm kind of despairing at the moment. Everything I'm seeing seems like recycled fashion magazine fodder. No new ideas. No thought for the future. No imagining of anything that doesn't already exist.

Show me something, please. I need to know it's out there.

John McCain is so Suave

"I'm For Fighting"

Sent to me by Karen. I think the puppet itself is kinda brilliant!

Barack Obama on the Current Economic Crisis

This is yet another issue that Obama has been way ahead on (warning against the crisis we're currently facing as early as February 2007), and that McCain still hasn't caught up to.

Damn it! John McCain took my advice!

Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, originally uploaded by J Medkeff.

That guy is such a "maverick".

Edit: If McCain gets elected & dies in office, this is who he expects to be able to run this country.

Say yer prayers, folks.

Edit 2: Did you notice that the Palin pin is bigger than the sparkly flag pin? Do you think that means anything?

Latest Bad Political Idea

I think Barack should pick Jaime Pressly as his running mate.



Sorry, no explanation is forthcoming. It just seems like the last 10 minutes where you could possibly suggest that obscure but brilliant name no one else is thinking.

Rachel Maddow is Brilliant

The fact is, though, that she is just professional and organized and remembers recent political events well. Some of this stuff seems so obvious when she reports it. She just does the thing we all should be doing -- paying attention.

This is F'in Genius

A lovely song about Bob Barr... Seen on samsedershow.com.

Yah, Gibson, Yaaahhh!

Cool little song by Soulja Boy. It's not a pure rhyme, but it's close, and ya gotta love the scan -- preposterous / Stephanopolis...