Pakistani transgender candidate to run for office
A member of Pakistan’s transgender community is to contest upcoming general elections on a ticket of equal rights, saying the community has more to offer than begging or dancing at weddings.
Black Girl In Suburbia (documentary trailer)
Black Girl In Suburbia is a feature documentary that looks into the experiences of Black girls growing up in predominately white communities. This is a different look into suburbia from the perspective of women of color. This film explores through professional and personal interviews the conflict and issues Black girls have relating to both white and Black communities.
Black Girl In Suburbia intends to spark an open dialogue about race, identity, and perspective among all people, in hopes that these discussions will allow us to reconsider perceptions of ourselves, others and the communities in which we live and share.
Release date 2014
http://www.blackgirlinsuburbia.com
Your support is appreciated!
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Black-…
Not Your Ex/Rotic: Creatrix Tiara gets busy in May - come check me out :)
I’ve got a string of gigs happening in the Bay Area in early May, all exploring different types of art, so come say hi:
Women’s Rock Camp Showcase + Queen Crescent
The New Parish
579 18th Street (at San Pablo), Oakland, CA 94612
Sunday 5 May 2013 : 2pm to 5pm
$5 - $15, under 18 FREE; no one turned away for lack of fundsWomen’s Rock Camp is a program of Bay Area Girls Rock Camp (BAGRC). BAGRC is a nonprofit dedicated to empowering girls through music, promoting an environment that fosters self-confidence, creativity and collaboration. Participants learn instruments, form bands, write an original song, attend workshops, and perform in a live concert…all in three days. Women’s Rock Camp tuition and all showcase proceeds benefit the Bay Area Girls Rock Camp Youth Programs.
I am one of the participants in this year’s WRC and am pretty excited to relive my rockstar dreams ;)
LGBT Center
1800 Market St, San Francisco CA 94102
Thursday 9 May 2013 : 6pm Visual Arts, 7:30pm Videos and Performances
FREE!Giving a definition to gender variance is tricky. As is defining chronic illness. People tell themselves “I am not sick enough or queer enough or whatever enough” to identify these ways and this hesitance stops us from forming communities and connections. We isolate because our experiences are not talked about or validated and our unique and varied lives don’t lend themselves easily to group formation. Definitions are inherently constraining which is why many gender variant and chronically ill folks resist identity categories that often hew to normative binaries. With this in mind, SICK will bring folks together to make beautiful complicated art about our intersecting experiences as gender variant and sick people.
I don’t usually class myself as a visual artist, so my piece in SICK is going to be an interesting visual/performance/interactivity hybrid experiment. I’m the pre-show before the performances and videos, so come early enough to check me out and say hi (in a manner of speaking).
Mother Funder! A Mother’s Day Cabaret Benefiting White Lies
Club 21
2111 Franklin St (at 21st), Oakland CA 94612
Sunday 12 May 2013 : 7:30pm
$10; no one turned away for lack of funds - 21+White Lies is a new production to debut at the 2013 National Queer Arts Festival on June 23rd. A multiracial cast of queer musicians, filmmakers, poets, writers, and actors will explore whiteness to dismantle racism in our queer communities. Our production aims to bring humor and hope to conversations about race and racism by blending together many mediums in a night of performance and conversation. Our cast is composed of many movers and shakers in the San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ arts scene including nomy lamm, StormMiguel Florez, Jezebel Delilah X, Eli Conley, Susie Smith, Jolie Harris, Mel Chen, Meredith Fenton, Kentucky Fried Woman and Open Mike. This benefit cabaret is to help us fund our world premiere performance and cover the costs of ASL interpretation, venue rentals, and paying our cast and crew.
The Polyester Girl Army is likely to make a comeback amongst some awesome Bay Area QTPOC names!
“So, what am I?” [submitted by anonymous]
Actually, I don’t feel a desperate need for a label. There’s a whole collection that could apply to me and not one of them nor the whole collection would actually describe me.
For today I’m mostly interested in the label Sissy.
I am not what most people would expect of a sissy. I’m 6’3” and weigh in at about 240 lbs. I am a well paid professional, a father, and a craftsman. I am renovating my house with no professional assistance, including doing all my own plumbing and wiring, and no - this is not your average DIY disaster - I know what I’m doing. I regularly lift beams weighing up to 150 lbs and have on occasion lifted structures weighing in at over 300 lbs. I am - to use the Australian vernacular - built like a brick shit-house. I enjoy bungy-jumping, white water rafting, rock-climbing (My best is an Australian grade 22 lead climb - equivalent to a US 5.11a), bushwalking, caving, snorkelling (With a best free-dive to 60’) and scuba-diving (PADI advanced license - planning to train as a dive medic). I am at home in the australian bush, and have frequently handled snakes and spiders. I have performed a minor operation on myself using a scalpel to cut deep into damaged flesh. All in all, by many measures I would be seen as quite macho. I do try to make sure I am broadly skilled, and I can cook a meal, bandage an injury, change a nappy, talk with some confidence on politics, religion, or most science topics. I have a lot of privilege and am working to understand how it impacts those around me, and how best to grant as much privilege to them as well (I don’t think it’s a zero-sum-game).
I would like to think that in my own way I am reasonably broadly able.
So where does being a sissy come in?
Well that’s the thing - I am a sissy - it’s not part of what I do generally, but its a lot about what I feel. I’m not going to burst into tears if you push me. I learned a long time ago to stand up to bullies.
For me being a sissy is about wishing I could comfortably express a more feminine side. It’s about loving lace and soft fabrics. It is about wishing I could be cute and sexy and innocent and delicate. It is about wishing people instinctively wanted to look after me (rather than to be looked after by me)
Anyone with a basic psych 101 will be seeing all the macho stuff as compensation, and some of it is, but in practice I’ve come to understand that that comes from other sources altogether.
I’m posting this today, because I’ve read some other sissies posts and I want to be clear that what works for them isn’t good for all sissies.
(I am not saying they are wrong to want what they want - that’s them not me)
I don’t want you to cum in my face.
I don’t want you to bend me over the end of the bed and take me till I scream.
I don’t want you to humiliate me.
Most importantly - you DO need my permission to do anything to me - I may be a sissy, but I have the right to your respectful treatment.
Now if you talk with me, explain your desires, and enquire about mine, then we might find a way to play that we’ll both like.
I often wear pretty panties, and I’d be very happy to talk about good places to buy them it larger sizes (or even to show them off to you). I have a lot of cute dresses, and would love to play dress-ups. For the right girl, I’ll bend over the end of the bed and take it till I wet myself. But only after we negotiate like adults about what we each want and how we will play safely.
In other words, while I am always and I expect I will always be a sissy, I am also an adult, with the right to sovereignty over my body, just as I expect you are and have over yours.
My nature grants no-one any rights over me.
These days sissy is a badge I wear with quiet pride. I hope you can wear your chosen labels in the same way.
Robust research findings indicate that when families encourage self-assertion, permit disagreement, and respect others’ views, adolescent identity exploration is greater than in families where individuality is not encouraged.” Libby and Thomas Blume, “Toward a Dialectical Model of Family Gender Discourse: Body, Identity, and Sexuality. (via delarealidadd)
![emotionalexhib:
tonytoggles:
fuck the gender binary
[an illustration of a person with the speech bubble from out of view asking “Are you a boy or a girl?” The person answers “No.”]
Can I just tell you how gratifying it was to be able to circle “other” in the gender choices at Planned Parenthood yesterday?](http://24.media.tumblr.com/4e3ab7d95d0ec1e25100605f23eb63c8/tumblr_mleoqlPxvw1rgerj6o1_500.jpg)
fuck the gender binary[an illustration of a person with the speech bubble from out of view asking “Are you a boy or a girl?” The person answers “No.”] Can I just tell you how gratifying it was to be able to circle “other” in the gender choices at Planned Parenthood yesterday?
Unlimited Girls :
Director: Paromita Vohra | Producer: SAKSHI
Genre: Documentary | Produced In: 2002 | Story Teller’s Country: India
Tags: Asia, Gender, Relationships
Synopsis: “Of course, girls should progress -as long as they do it within limits. But when they become..un-limited, then something bad is bound to happen…” So, still want to be a feminist? That’s the question Fearless is asked and in turn asks others in the film Unlimited Girls. Starting accidentally in a chatroom, she embarks on a journey where she encounters diverse characters - feminists who remember the songs and actions of the Indian women’s movement, yuppies who discuss their modern marriage, a policeman writing films for “women’s upliftment”, women shopping at a bra sale, college kids practicing a dance, teachers who feel girls must not take injustice - or break a home; a woman cab driver, a priest, academics, activists, and unseen but much-heard women like Atilla_the_Nun, ChamkiGirl and Devi_is_a_Diva, in a feminist chatroom - all talking of their engagements with feminism and its place in their lives today. Using a personally reflective tone and playfully eclectic form, mixing non-fiction and fiction, the film follows Fearless’ conversations: about why women must always lead double lives, being feminist but not saying they are. How do we remain politically engaged as individuals who will not join groups? If feminism changes the way we live, then do we change the meaning of feminism as we live it? And then how do we separate true feminists from false ones? Will X-ray vision work better, or female intuition - or is there a common set of principles in this multiply interpreted philosophy? How do we make sense of love and anger, doubt and confusion, the personal and the political, in this enterprise of pushing the boundaries, of being un-limited - the enterprise we call feminism
Dueling Dualisms, Fausto-Sterling
if you want a link to a pdf of the chapter, message me, its really interesting. i’m reading it for my beyond heterosexuality class.
summary: social norms influence what scientists look for - they place people in “male” and “female” as closely as they can because society says there are two biological boxes - not because these boxes actually scientifically exist.
when doctors choose to label, for instance, a visibly intersex baby, they typically do so by hazarding a guess at which organs it will eventually use to reproduce with. this is also how they label acceptably dyadic babies, though this doesn’t ever follow medical intervention. this reproductive labeling has nothing to do with the baby’s gender, and certainly doesn’t mean that said label implies any inherent gender biologically. doctors use the tools that society gives them - if we shout, “check a box,” they comply.
an easy example of how this manifests in society is how the olympics performs “sex testing” as a way to police gender. this was begun in an attempt to mollify those who feared that women’s participation in sports & competition threatened to turn them into “manly” creatures (its not actually based on “what if men get an unfair advantage,” fyi - the only time thats ever happened was when a male member of nazi youth tried it AND came in 4th behind 3 women anyway). initially they made competitors parade in front of a board of male examiners to visually check for the existence of a vagina and breasts. athletes complained that this was highly degrading, so they switched to chromosome testing in the 60’s.
however… they quickly discovered that sex is simply too complex to categorize medically. there is no either/or. rather, there are shades of difference. labeling someone either male or female at birth is an entirely social decision.
Intersex
Sex
- Designation based on biology
Gender
- Socially constructed and expressed
Sex and gender are inconsistent for transgendered individuals
Chromosomal Pairs
- XX
- XY
- XO
- XXX
- XXY
- XYY
- occasionally individuals have some XY cells and some XX cells
Intersexed
- Biological qualities of each sex
Sexual development is also influenced by hormones
Biology influences how we develop but doesn’t absolutely determine behavior, personality, etc.
Claudia Is Intersex, Let's Talk About It
Intersex people are born with a mix of sex characteristics – some traditionally considered male, and some considered female – in the same body. For example, I have a vagina and later developed breasts and hips, but I also have XY chromosomes, and had testes at birth. I’ve got some “male” traits and some “female” traits in the same body, so it’s not so easy to clearly assign me “male” or “female.” My own body is just one example; intersex isn’t a single category, and there are many different variations of intersex and, within each variation, a lot of diversity. Not all male or female bodies look and function the same, you know? Knowing that I’m intersex alone doesn’t really tell you much about me or my body.
Full article here
Just a little faith in humanity
I just wanted to share this little tidbit with you; It really made my work day better.
There was a sweet child in my work today, maybe 6 or 7 years old. They picked up a marshmallow gun and asked, “what’s this?”
I responded, “I don’t know, what do you think it might be?”
“Aren’t you supposed to know? You’re a trained employee. Anyway, I think it’s a marshmallow gun. You got any marshmallows?”
“No, I don’t think we do.”
There was a pause, and they put down the gun and picked up a bag of Hot Wheels.
“Who are you with?” I asked.
“My mom. She’s around here somewhere.”
“Do you want to go find your mom?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
We then started walked about the store, looking for the child’s mother. There wasn’t much talking going on until they stopped and turned to face me.
“Are you a girl?”
“Yeah, that’s how I identify.”
They looked at me and said, “That’s pretty neat. Don’t ask my mom if I’m a boy or a girl, okay? I was a girl when I was a baby but now I’m a boy. Just don’t ask my mom okay? ‘Cause I’m both and she’s cool with it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m cool with it too.”
They smiled and we walked to the fitting rooms, where their mother was talking to (I assume) a friend.
I couldn’t help but smile. The fact that the mother was so open with their child and allowed them to be just as open about who they are was such a beautiful thing to experience in my work place.
File Under State Mandated Emotional Abuse and Cultivation of Unsafe Conditions for Children
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/01/30/1514051/dont-say-gay-tennessee/?mobile=nc
