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.