Here I Am Composing A Burlesque

So, here's a night that's steadily become more and more familiar to me as I've gotten older and stayed in college. Tomorrow I put my ass on a plane and head back to the good, old college, this time around for my senior year. And man, much as thought finding myself a senior in high school was a trip and a half, being a senior in college is about a thousand times more intense. The realization that I'm rapidly coming up on true adulthood is enough to make me want to throw up in my mouth.

I'm the kind of person who still wears Batman boxers for Christ's sake. Surely that has to disqualify me from responsibility and shit. Given the choice, I would spend most of my days watching reruns of Gargoyles and eating cereal from tupperware.

I remember being an eighteen year old trying to fit as many years of life into suitcases. It was so hard back then to sort through all the things I owned and decide what I needed to take and what I could leave behind. The essentials were easy (obviously I was taking my jeans and my undies), but it was the knick knacks and detritus and the stuff that was hard. I think, in a way, we can be described as the sum of the little things that are important enough to keep near.

Three years later, it's weird to realize that I can fit everything that's important to me in one big duffel bag and one small duffel bag. There's a even the annual pile of stuff since deemed unnecessary that now belongs to my sister. Tee shirts I haven't worn and jeans that I've outgrown. Right now the big, heavy, ugly pink bag is packed and what's left are the odds and ends that go in the small one. It's a weird realization.

I want cuddle this vlog to my bosom.

Charles is one of the most awesome people I've discovered on my forays into the trans internet-sphere. The vlog he and Red (another awesome transwoman vlogger), 2 Hot Transsexuals Finally Give Some Answers, has become one of my standard links to anyone who asks those kind of questions.

GODDAMN RIGHT PROP 8 IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL.

Most beautiful words I've read all day.

Honestly, I think this trans thing is becoming more of a rebellion teen fad than anything else. It makes me sad for those who are truly feeling the stress of knowing that they are in the wrong bodies. They are misrepresented AND undermined now.

Whoo, boy.

This is actually an attitude that I've seen crop up a couple times in the past couple months in the trans/queer circles that I frequent. And every single time I stumble over these little transphobic gems, they make me want to go punch a wall. There's literally no way to make these kind of blanket policing statements about "fake" transpeople without being a transphobic ass, because the core of them is belief without reason that people are lying about their genders and that you (in the general sense) know better than they.

The thing is, I cannot imagine a single reason for anyone to pretend to be LGBTQAI when they're not. Seriously? What kind of possible social, economic, or legal benefits would someone be seeking in pretending to be queer? I don't buy it.

This crap reenforces a problem that already exists in the trans community of creating arbitrary standards of transness. You must be this dysphoric to be trans. You must have known from this age to be trans. You must be a manly man or a womanly woman to be trans. And if you fail at any of these bullshit markers, then obviously you're just confused and faking and need to get the hell over yourself. All these standards do is tell people that they're wrong, that artificial benchmarks better know their genders than they do. And, as a community, trans people need to knock this shit off.

You know, just as a suggestion, maybe it's not that all these teens are jumping on the trans bangwagon. Maybe it's that we've reached a place where more and more teens feel comfortable talking about their genders at a young age. Maybe we've reached a place where the information is getting out there to teens so they can do something about it at a younger age. Maybe a perceived increase in people identifying as trans and transitioning instead of being a sign of STUPID TEEN REBELLION is actually a goddamn sign that trans people have the information and resources at their disposal to deal with the gender. Maybe, just maybe, it could be seen as a good thing for all those trans kids who might have otherwise spent years trying to figure out why they felt wrong in their bodies.

No? Yeah, of course. It's way more likely that all these teens are pretending to be trans as a way to rebel.

There's a post up at feministe, shorter, cuter, more honest people, talking about the expectations that exist of a division between adults only and child friendly spaces and how there is no right to childfree spaces. I read it with my head cocked and a frown on my face, through I couldn't articulate for certain why. Fortunately, there's another post at Order of the Gash, ageism and me, that very well sums up the big issue I had with regards to framing children as an oppressed class on par with people of color, queer people, disable people, etc.

The Littlest Gay London Street Tough

I do this thing whenever I watch a movie that I particularly liked that also features an ensemble cast where I go searching for every fucking minute any of the involved actors have ever been on film. Post-Inception, this manifested as getting my grubby hands on copies of 10 Things I Hate About You, Mysterious Skin, Brick, and Stop-Loss because of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I downloaded that one episode of That 70's Show he was in where he played the Buddy, the gay friend with the great car. I sat through two entire fucking hours of G.I. Joe for five minutes of him in army blues and another viewing of Latter Days. (I hate that movie so intensely. So. Intensely.)

After I ran out of JGL movies to plow through, two things happened. One, I realized I'd already seen everything with Ellen Page and two, someone, somewhere said something about Tom Hardy playing Gay Bob in a Guy Ritchie movie. Now, I'm not a particularly huge fan of Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes notwithstanding), but I walked out of Inception as a fan of Tom Hardy's mouth and I am always a fan of queer characters. There was only one thing to do and that was to get my hands on a copy of Rocknrolla.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm an American kid hailing from smack dab in the fucking middle of the country in a town with an actual population of cowboys, where people say y'all unironically. And Rocknrolla is intensely British, to the point where I almost turned the subtitles on because there were points where I was convinced that the characters had stopped speaking English.

But I actually did really enjoy it. I am total sucker for movies with that dirty, gritty feel to it, especially when there are working class characters. I recognize those people from my life in a way that I don't usually, with the drinking and smoking and swearing and bad life choices. Plus, the soundtrack was fucking awesome and the one guaranteed way to make me like even the shittiest movie is to get a great soundtrack going on.

But hey, for the purposes of this, Tom Hardy was indeed there playing Bob, who was the youngest, littlest, blondest, and dare I say, oddly twinkiest little street tough I have ever seen. And it was actually really great. There is very little that will get me to like queer characters more than them having a sense of humor about their sexualities and being little shits about it, particularly when it's done in the service of making non-queers uncomfortable.

The one scene that most stuck out to me with Bob was the scene in the car with One Two, in which Bob thinks he's going to jail for five years in the morning, One Two tries to cheer him up with a promise of escorts, and Bob comes out.

I've been mulling over in my head a lot since I finished the movie what it was exactly about the scene that I liked so much. Because One Two's reaction isn't instantly positive and supportive; he's actually a real fucker about it, pulling out the usual stops that Bob can't be gay, because he's handsome and because he's a ladykiller and because if he was gay One Two would know, goddamnit. And he almost instantly comes around and apologizes, but if you've ever come out, you know that nothing is going to stick so much as that first immediate reaction that comes from the gut.

And despite this, I still rewatched that scene four times because it seemed so completely and totally real to me.

I think the honest answer is because of recognition again. Man, I have been in that seat with Bob way too many times before, listening to someone freak their shit out because they never thought of me as One Of Those People and it fucks with their world perception. There's a brutal honesty in One Two's immediate reaction and there's an honesty in his apologizing for it immediately afterward. The sense that he loved Bob was there and raw and that shit happens when people disconnect between who they think you are and who you really are.

What really made the whole thing for me was Bob's reaction, which managed to cut a little bit closer to home than it seemed at the time. He's not furious and he's not sobbing in agony, he treats it like he made a mistake. He was resigned more than anything else, and disappointed and apologetic and that screwy mess of emotions is way too fucking familiar.

And aside from the car scene, there were a bunch of other moments that worked for me. Bob flirting with the lawyer dude was fucking hilarious and anyone who thinks otherwise has clearly never been macked on by an older person. The little exchange with, "I'm going to bed" "Can I come with?" made me actually love Bob a little because I seriously fucking love people who go out of their way to make their friends squirm. It's one of my favorite things.

So yeah, Rocknrolla. I hope the card before the credits wasn't fucking around about their being a sequel. Because if Bob is there, I'm there.

Why Can't We Be Frieeeends?

Your Experience Isn't Mine, And That's Beautiful via The Spectrum Cafe

Man, let's talk about how much I needed to read this right about now.

Back in that dark, misty time when I first questioning whether or not this whole female body was going to work for me on a long term time frame, I got a lot of my initial information by typing "transgender" into Google and clicking on whatever popped up. Of course, I know from long experience on the internet that ninety percent of anything you find is going to be crap and a good portion of that has the potential to be dangerous crap, but it was the only resource I had at my disposal that I felt comfortable using.

Most of what I found was what I think is the very traditional trans narrative in cis-land. It's the story of the trans woman, who knew from birth that she was a female despite what she had been assigned at birth. It was a story of spending a long childhood and adolescence in agony, knowing that she was in a body that expressed the totally wrong sex for her gender. It's the story of having every available surgery, and hormones, and becoming a very typically feminine lady.

And hey, down the line, I know that this narrative is true for some trans women and I have all the respect and love for them in the world.

But man, reading only that story did a hell of a number on my feelings at that time. Because there I was, a queer little FAAB kid who had only begun to really question hir body after puberty. I spent most of my childhood not even thinking about gender, partially because I was lucky enough to have a family that didn't too stridently enforce gender roles and partially because it was just something that never occurred to me. I had a female body, therefore I must be female. It seemed logical in the way that 2+2=4 seems logical, even if I can now trace the dissatisfaction with that equation that would grow and grow to where I am now.

But even now, I don't really ID as a man. I ID as a boy or a boi or a transmasculine genderqueer human kid type person. I'm lucky, too, to have found a community of people who share a portion of my experiences and prove every day that I am not alone, I'm not invisible, and I'm not fake.

But this policing shit is a problem and I think it's something that so very much needs to be worked on within the community. And that in and of itself isn't a completely unproblematic thing to say, because with it comes the awareness that a whole lot of the crap that trans people have to deal with is our own internalized crap that comes from a fucked up cis medical establishment that wants neat boxes and consistent narratives, not fluidity and shifting perspective. It comes from there only being one acceptable narrative of being trans, when that narrative is told at all, in the cis media. And it comes from the whole damn world wanting us to sit down, shut up, "fix" ourselves, and disappear.

And hey, fuck if I know exactly how to fix it. But I agree with the lovely linked post said. A damn good first step could be for all us trans people to decide that instead of breaking each other down, we're going to lift each other up.

Throw Me a Feminist Bone, Chris Nolan

There will be spoilers for Inception in this post! I repeat, there will be spoilers!

So, yeah. I, like many others, went to see Inception. I walked into the theater expecting to really, really dig it, because all signs pointed to it being exactly the kind of movie that hits all my buttons. Mindfucks! Team dynamics! Secrets! Intelligence! Plus, I really liked the way that marketing managed to be engaging, viral, interesting and not annoying. Snaps for the build up, Chris Nolan. And, not gonna lie, the fact that the cast was hotter than the face of the sun helped a lot. (I'll refrain from talking about how Ken Watanabe and Ellen Page should be in every movie ever.)

Oddly enough, I wasn't actually let down by the movie itself. I tried to bank my expectations before the movie started, because hype cometh before the disappointment. But man. Man. Inception turned out to be smart and layered and engaging without falling so much in love with its own cleverness that it stopped making sense. (I'm looking at you, back half of the Matrix trilogy.) There's some debate over this on the internet, but it hit just right emotional notes the whole way through, even with Mal and Cobb's scenes. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is not someone I would have pinned as successfully being able to play a stick in the mud, but he did it well and looked great in all those sharp, sexy clothes they had him dressed in. And Ellen Page was a thousand times more enjoyable, charming and compelling provided this kind of exposition than she was in Juno.

Basically, I would say it's definitely worth the ten bucks for a ticket. And hopefully this could serve as a signal to Hollywood that summer audiences are actually a whole lot smarter than we're given credit for. Give us a little bit more intelligent fare and we will go see it and see it again.

But, because the world we live in is sadly not perfect, I do have one bone that I need to pick with Inception. Or more specifically, a bone that I need to pick with Chris Nolan.

Inception has two female characters with a significant presence in the film. One is Ariadne, who is the architect and has one the best referential names I've seen in film. She's the new person on the team and serves as the audience's in to the world, asking all the questions that we're asking in our heads. I don't have issues with Ariadne, other than being potentially too fond of her character. (Though there is legitimate criticism to be made about her being less developed than her male counterparts.)

The other female character is Mal, called the shade in marketing for the film; she's the wife of Leonardo DiCaprio's main character, Cobb, and serves as a kind of dangerous bogeyman in the dream world. What's particularly interesting about Mal is that she is never not seen as a construct of Cobb's guilty mind. Her purpose is largely to give Cobb angst and catharsis, and to serve as the concrete "bad guy" in the film. Granted, that doesn't change the fact for me that she is one of the more interesting characters and Marion Cotillard did a wonderful job with the role. If this were the one example of Nolan using this trope, I wouldn't mind (as much).

The problem is, Nolan has a long established habit of fridging the wife. In Batman Begins, the mother dies. In the Dark Knight, the girlfriend dies and Commissioner Gordon's fantastic canon daughter, Barbara, is replaced with a son. In Memento, the wife dies. In the Prestige, the wife and the girlfriend both die.

On the level of my brain that doesn't have a social conscience (the same level that watches Supernatural) I love Nolan's filmmaking style. I think the dude has a really incredible talent for telling smart, sharp, tight stories that don't assume the audience is incapable of following plot. His visuals are consistently incredibly compelling, but still natural to the setting of the story being told.

But I do have a social conscience. So, Nolan, let's make a deal. In your next film, you won't fridge a single female character. Deal? I want to like your films and I do, but it would be great if I could do that without feeling guilty.

You Are Ethically Obligated to Inform Me of Your Bigotry

So, this ethics writer at the New York Times thinks all trans people are required to disclose as much on a date.

Personally, I think cissexist idiots should be required to disclose their transphobia on a first date, that way I know right then and there that this person isn't someone I want to waste any more of my time on. That seems much fairer to me, since any kind of -ism is legitimate grounds to not want to get involved with someone that doesn't have a basis in fear and bigotry.

See, the thing is, there's this pervasive, fucked up idea that transpeople's bodies are common property. That they don't have a right to privacy, because they're not "normal" and, as everyone knows, people who are normal have a right to know about, gawk at, and pass judgement on that kind of shit. That's how the world works, doncha know? If you're different, you better be prepared to drop trou, strip down, and let the whole world take a damn good look.

It's all about cheap fucking thrills at the expense of human beings by a society that already does just about everything it can to shit on them, other them, and make life just about as hard as possible. And this panic and insistence on disclosure comes from cispeople realizing, hey, transpeople come in all shapes and sizes, colors and genders, classes and places and there is no magical detection radar that lets the cis known when they come within five feet of one of us.

Basically, it comes down the fact that whatever I've got hanging out in my pants is no one's goddamn business but my own. There are a lot of reasons why I do and don't let others know, but the key point to remember is that they're my reasons. And, honestly, that should be the end of it.

001

Just a small town birl, living in a lonely world.