Gender is a light board not a switch

reading response to "The Gendercator"

When I walk into a dark room the first thing I look for is a light switch. On means light. Off means it's dark. There is no nuance to the lighting. In theatre we can have up to hundreds of lights with different colors and intensities. They can have moving designs. They can move where they are pointing on the stage. All of this information is stored on a massive board that looks like something you would see in a recording studio or Star Trek.

As a lighting tech I appreciate how a lighting design in and of itself is art. The changes in brightness and color and the speed with which the lights shift, the addition of movement, subtle shifts, all of these add up to a symphony of light. It sounds lame but it's so beautiful. Lighting is so amazing and beautiful and makes so many things what they are and no two lighting designers will design a show or a cue the exact same way. In theatre the lights vary for each person. Gender is the same way. There are more than two options in gender and people so often miss that fact. We are not all Barbies and GI Joes.

In reading about how the blogosphere responded to "The Gendercator" I noticed a split into two camps. One group was furious that the LGBT community would turn on its own members and the other group agreed with the concepts and felt that trans individuals were bringing unwanted masculinity or male-ness into strictly female spaces and that lesbians were succumbing to what males wanted when they chose to bend their genders.

This is what I was ranting about in the beginning: the accusation that people of alternative genders are sometimes not welcomed in "feminist" spaces because they are neither feminine nor masculine. There is almost always an accusation of bringing male-ness into female space when feminists argue against acceptance of transgender individuals. This pisses me off because feminists are arguing for the equal rights and protection of women but arguing that transgender indivudals do not deserve the same rights. WTF?
I think that's against the rules of logic.

I am constantly stunned by the amount of bias in a community of "outsiders" who want "equal rights". There is both a hatred of Trans people and of Bisexuals in the LGBT community. Which, I suppose, would make it the LG community. It's outright prejudice and discrimination and stuns me everytime I see it. I'm infuriated that my own "community," that "my family" would turn against me like this. I would like to not be pigeonholed plzthx.

I think the blogosphere has the ability and the obligation to expose this ugly discrimination in the LGBT community and help push for more acceptance and tolerance the way people did in reaction to "The Gendercator".



If a tool can be used for good then it should be used for good.

ManPants: the project that ate my life

So I finished my project about spending a day dressed as a man. Holy Cheese it took me over 10 hours to finish editing the video and I did a pretty shoddy job of it and then wrote one of the worst papers I've ever written. It was one of those wow-this-doesn't-make-a-lot-of-sense-but-I-don't-have-time papers. Awesome.

Here's hoping that 20% of my grade didn't just vanish into nothing.

To be honest the project became half for my soc class and half for this class looking at gender and how it's constructed and how it relates to me. It was incredibly important to me to take it seriously and give it everything I could.

Interestingly my parents and my sister literally laughed at me and my efforts and refused to recognize that this was personally emotionally significant for me. As a result I'm still mad at them and they're confused and annoyed. This should be fun.

In case you're wondering I'm very aware that I didn't manage to pass and I look really bizarre in the photo.

I decided to prepare it in the form of a video diary because I can get my thoughts out much faster that way. I was annoyed that youtube made me split it into two parts because of the length. It essentially comes out to 17 minutes of gender based navel gazing but whatever.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you "ManPants: A Day as a Dude"!!

Is it wrong that I think "rationale" is a boring word?

I don't for a moment blame people who use it; I understand that there aren't really any other options as far as nouns encompassing an explanation of controlling principles of opinion, belief, practice, or phenomena but I always feel slightly cheated when I see it, like someone needed a word for this and just said "I know! I'll just take 'rational' and put an 'e' on it! Brilliant! No one will ever know." We have a big language can't someone come up with a better word?

I will put my qualms with the word "rationale" aside to now explain, well, the rationale of my blog.

I suppose I can't claim that this blog will be strictly topical as I know myself and my inability to focus on anything that is not directly in front of me or shiny. I will say that my blog won't be limited to women's rights because I find it to be cissexist to argue for the equal rights of one particular gender without including those people who are alternative, trans, or non gendered. Equality should apply across the board.

As a "woman" who feels more gender queer than femme my blog will most likely focus on what it's like to be in a female body unsure of what it means to be a woman or a man and where I fall in respect to the dominant gender dichotomy. There is also the question of how the feminist movement feels about transgender individuals at the movement.

There are big questions I want to ask like:
Do women's rights include individuals who are MTF?
What about FTM?
What about individuals identifying as Gender Queer?
Is it feminist for a woman to actively seek to be submissve to a male a-la "Secretary"?

As a woman with multiple health problems I would also like to look at the way women's health is handled including the way treatment of PCOS is handled in relation to gender and feminism, the way mental health issues are handled, Doctor/Patient relationship dynamics, and other aspects of healthcare in relation to gender and feminism.

I also desperately want to look at women in politics (or lack thereof) and how some of them, like Senator Claire McCaskill of Missourri are using technology to reach their constituencies more readily.

Fun fact: Out of the 99 people serving in the US Senate (Minnesota is still being indecisive) only 17 are women. Think about that for a second 17 of 99 and the 100th will be male.

Fun fact part II: In the more than 200 years The United States of America, and subsequently the Senate has existed we have had a total of 38 women serve as Senators. One of them served for only 24hours.

Those two facts are stunning in the jaw-dropping-WTF?! sense.

Anything you think I might want to consider adding?
I *heart* feedback. (If I try to use the less-than-three version of "heart" the XML/HTML get's really wonky.)

My Hair = My Gender Identity

Right about now someone reading this blog is saying wtf? And to be honest I completely understand where they're coming from.

It's hair. It grows. You cut it. Other than styling it to look one way or another what possible effect could your hair have on your life?

I can't speak for other people but for me it turned out to be a huge piece of who I am and my gender identity. I didn't realize just how huge until today when I was having difficulty coming up with a good way to style my hair so my sister recommended that I style it a certain way which feels particularly femme: the front half of my hair plastered down and the back a little spiky and teased. It's still short and still too butch for my mom (but what isn't?) but it felt wrong.

My hair felt wrong and it bothered me all day. I felt physically uncomfortable because my hair didn't match how I feel about myself, about my gender, about my sexuality, about how I feel about how I look.

I've spent a lot of time over the past few months thinking about my gender and who I am. This is probably because I'm in a Contemporary Sexualities class that addresses gender within sexuality but there have been a lot of other things. Needless to say I've been looking for resources to help me sort out exactly who I am or come to terms with not knowing the answer.

In this quest I have come across two invaluable tools.

• The first is the gender pioneer Kate Bornstein who authored the amazing "My Gender Workbook" which I feel should be required reading for the world. It pushes people to completely re-evaluate the way the gender dichotomy works and how we exist within it. I consider that to be somewhat profound.
  
  As I learned about Bornstein I wanted to read more of hir work and sought hir out on the internet and discovered ze has a blog! It's updated sporadically but the observations ze makes are well worth the wait. http://katebornstein.typepad.com/
  

• The second resource I discovered was a random blog I found through a Google search, The Sugarbutch Chronicles. Authored by Sinclair Sexsmith, the observations about gender from the perspective of a butch lesbian versus someone who is transgender or non-gendered are a brilliant reference. I will warn that gender is not her only focus. The blog can be very sexually explicit and involves reviews and discussion of sexual topics. It's definitely an 18+ blog but that doesn't detract from it's brilliance.

Without these two blogs I would undoubtedly be wandering around with my hair in an uncomfortable ponytail not knowing why I was unhappy with the world.

It turns out it starts with my hair.