I’ve heard of administrators or parents complaining when a trans speaker talks to a class, when a teacher comes out as trans, or even when a student does – but I never expected that the mere presence of a photograph would cause a similar reaction.
The photo exhibit, “Shared Community, Mixed Identities,” was not even about trans people, but about representing the diversity of backgrounds that multiracial people come from. My photo was among them, along with a small bio which mentions that I am trans. It was designed as a part of a community project and made available to whatever spaces wish to display it. And when a local elementary school requested to display it, it suddenly became a significant controversy. Yesterday, multiple local news outlets decided to pick it up as a story.
It was bad enough when the New York Post ran the transphobic article “Wedding Crashers” which erroneously describes a trans woman and her cis male partner, Kimah Nelson and Jason Stenson, as a gay couple and how they “duped” the government into giving them a same-sex marriage.
But then the Advocaterepeated the story uncritically parroting the same anti-trans message. After some complaints, they’ve removed the male pronouns referring to Kimah but rather than replacing them with female pronouns they opted for no pronouns.
However, the article still uses Kimah’s birth name rather than her preferred name, still describes them as a same-sex couple, still dehumanizingly describes the status of her genitals, and still claims that the couple “fooled” the officials, perpetuating the transphobic fear that trans people are “fooling” people when we say we are the genders we identify as — the very same fear that gives rise to the trans-panic defense for hate crimes and murders. The effect is clearly visible just by reading the comments this story is generating. Do we seriously need a GLAAD action alert before the Advocate will retract this anti-trans framing of the story or even just follow Associated Press guidelines for reporting on trans people?
Some readers might remember I had promised a follow up to my Porn For Education post that would go into the details of my more recent work in video. With everything going on this week, I’ve had to put it off, and a couple of submission deadlines next week might delay me even further.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share with you something fun. You may have wondered at some point, what activist pornographers do in their free time. This one at least, does embroidery — Although only one of the two completed projects I’m sharing here are erotic, I’m going to warn that these images may not be safe for work.
Bilerico Back-Posts: This was originally posted to Bilerico Feb 7th, 2009. http://www.bilerico.com/2009/02/abstinence_is_not_100_safe.php
I taught peer sex ed in high school. It was one of the most progressive sex ed courses in the area, covering queer people, healthy relationships, and setting and asserting boundaries. But despite being a comprehensive (i.e. abstinence-based while still teaching condoms) program, there were several restrictions that made it less than ideal.
For one, every time we said “use a condom,” we were required to follow it up with “but abstinence is the only 100% safe method to prevent pregnancy.” So I prepped my younger brother’s friend to take advantage of the pre-programmed responses.
When he heard such a statement, he would reply, “So if my boyfriend and I had sex, would he get pregnant or would I?”
On Monday morning February 1st, janitorial staff at the University of Oregon discovered the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Alliance had been broken into computer screens and the TV were spray painted over and a swastika had been spray painted on the carpet. Being former staff at the student organization, myself, I was one of the many people deeply impacted.
Students responded by swiftly organizing a series of rallies. Only one day after the vandalism was discovered, 300 community members turned out for a vigil and speakout – an impressive number considering Eugene’s relatively small size. Many community members came up to the mike to speak, including the mayor.
With only three posts in 2009, it makes sense to begin the re-launch of my blog with a little bit about what I have been doing in the past year. To begin with, in March I became one of COLAGE’s board co-chairs and in October, I became the chair. That has been taking up a big chunk of my time.
Additionally, I’ve been working on getting some of my writing published in the dead tree media and made my way into three books this past year! My essay “Race Relations in the Family” is about my personal experience being a person of color raised by white lesbians and examines larger issues of transracial adoption in the LGB/Queer community and it is in the anthology Who’s Your Daddy: and Other Writings on Queer Parenting. Another essay titled “Donor Mom” is in And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families where I discuss my relationship to my sperm donor growing up as well as my decision to become a donor myself. Finally, “Self Reflection” in Best Lesbian Erotica 2010 poses an interesting story when a young trans woman who identifies as non-op meets a time traveling future version of herself who is post-op. All three, as well as the two other books I’ve been in, are available in a handy dandy amazon.com widget at the bottom of the sidebar. Although I get a minor referral fee when you purchase through the link, I won’t mind at all if you order the books through your local bookstore instead.
I’ve dedicated a huge amount of my time this year to a certain video project some of you may know about which has faced set back after set back. With luck, I hope to wrap things up in the next month or so — in which case I will unveil it here you will all get to hear about the in detail.
Late summer/early fall, I decided to migrate this blog to it’s own domain name and revamp the design. It’s taken quite a bit more technical learning then I had expected, and while I was working on it I decided to stop updating here. However, I also didn’t entirely stop blogging. I’ve recieved a paying writing gig from Eden Fantasy’s online sex magazine, SexIs — you can see they are also paying for an ad on the sidebar of this site. And I continued posting to Bilerico.com. In the coming weeks, I’ll be reposting my articles from Bilerico as well as tid bits from SexIs. And I’ll be challenging myself to have something new up at least once a week, including cross posts for all my future bilerico posts as well as tid bits from any new sexis articles.
I consider myself really blessed to have such a strong queer family. Recently, I got a chance to interview one of my moms about being a lesbian mom of a trans daughter for the public radio program Story Corps. A 4 minute version aired locally, but you can listen to it or the entire 50 minute interview from my mom’s website. If you’ve got the time, it’s quite interesting.
PFLAGers have long known that protective parents can be a powerful force advocating for their LGBT children. My parents weren’t 100% on board from day one, and were initially concerned that my being trans would be seen as a failure of lesbian parenting. But once they played through the usually negative reactions their experience fighting for LGB rights translated perfectly into their new work as trans advocates. My mom who works at the local hospital has found herself in charge of crafting a new policy for the treatment of trans patients after she complained about the current treatment trans patients face. My other mom, who is a writer wrote an article for the local paper giving her take on the backlash to the mixed race photo exhibit I took part in.
This is my vision of a what a queer family can look like.
This is a topic that has been vital to my understanding of the world over the past few years, but it’s still relatively unknown outside certain circles of activists. When I mention it as an area of my work, I almost invariably have to explain what it is. The short answer is that it is the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that specifically targets trans women. But that dry academic answer never communicates the visceral and intense experience that it is.
Here’s a limited list of examples of what transmisogyny looks like. Every example on this list has a story (or dozens of stories) behind it.
A year ago, I was joining the cast of a personal theater show, Body Talk, which was designed to provide a similar opportunity for empowering women as the Vagina Monologues, but with the freedom to write our own pieces. Despite only knowing about a dozen trans women in my town, at our first cast meeting 4 out of the 12 women present were trans. Apparently I wasn’t the only one needing this outlet. We spent a couple months working together on individual and group pieces, and I recorded mine. For a while, I was afraid to share it online, because I discuss my work in the sex industry. Watching it now, I’m self conscious about my slip ups, or when I accidentally said “exploitation” instead of “exotification.” But as my activism around sex work has become more important, so has sharing this performance.
No Designation is a blog focusing on the political issues of gender and sexual minority communities. This includes discussion of transgender rights and internal community dynamics, as well as discussion of lesbian, gay, bisexual movements, sex-positivity and sexual freedom movements, and the intersections these issues have with other identity politics concerns.
It is written by Tobi Hill-Meyer, who is a writer involved in the organization and function of several LGBTQ organizations and is currently board chair for COLAGE - a national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more LGBTQ parents.
