My Tranifesto

It’s been a couple weeks since I last wrote here, in large part because I’ve been too sick/in pain to do much. I’ve also started going back to school, and one of my classes this semester is a history and theory of activism class. This coming week, we’re doing readings over a number of famous and infamous manifestos of other groups. These include The Woman-Identified Woman (an early lesbian-feminist manifesto), the SCUM Manifesto (an extreme pro-female anti-male manifesto), and the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto. One of our ongoing assignments through the class is to have an “activism journal” where we discuss our learning from the class as well as our experiences with activism/volunteering over the course of the semester. So this week, I’m going to do my first post of such, a manifesto of my own (a tranifesto if you will, in honor of the late Matt Kailey).

Things Best Left Unsaid

So yesterday, I was reading Matt’s post over at Tranifesto, and he was talking about a workshop a friend of his went to where there was an activity where the participants were to turn to one another and share something they wish they would never again hear in their lives. Matt thought it was a fun idea and played along, asking his readers to contribute as well.

This topic ended up coming up again later in the day as my friend Dori was telling me about the cissexist privilege she had to deal with in her women’s studies class that morning. Their final project was to interview a woman a certain number of years older than themselves, and a few weeks back, one of the girls in her class was bragging that she was going to interview a trans woman. The sheer level of cissexist privilege in that conversation prompted Dori to come out, which left her open to questioning, but she was completely ignored. This infuriated her so much that she blogged about it, and yesterday was the girl’s actual presentation.

Evolving Sexuality

About a week ago, an acquaintance of mine asked me a question about how being asexual works with being in the leather lifestyle. This is an interesting question with multiple levels that I could answer, though I only addressed one level when answering this person. The thing that I explained was that the question being asked was a sort of variation of the “how do you have sex?” question that a lot of trans people and lesbians receive. There’s this assumption that being leather is all about kinky sex, the play aspects that everyone sees in movies and books and TV.

National Coming Out Day 2012

This one’s quite a bit late, but I wanted to make sure I did my homework first. This Thursday, October 11th, is National Coming Out Day (NCOD), a day dedicated to celebrating our abiliy to be out and open about ourselves as well as raise awareness of LGBT issues with others. This is an excuse for some to dress up in as much pride gear as they want without going overboard like they might at pride parades. But it can also be so much more.

Locally, we’re encouraging people to use this day to come out to their elected officials, national and local, and make them aware of their constituency and just how many of us there are. And I encourage this, not just for local level, but for all people around the world. If you live in a country where being LGBT is not against the law, why not tell your leaders that you’re here, and you’d like some of the same rights as everyone else?

It’s a Wonderful Life in Gattaca, Or is It?

Last week, Matt Kailey discussed a new experimental procedure to prevent female babies form being born with “behavioral masculinization,” in otherwords, reduce the “risks” of intersex, lesbian, bisexual, and tomboy children being born. The sad thing is, he quotes that last bit from an actual article on the topic. He also raises the fear that looking into the cause for something such as homosexuality or transgender can lead society to want to “cure” it. I commented on his post, referencing the movie Gattaca as an example of what this kind of thing can lead to, in the same vein as he was discussing.

The Skinny on Asexuality

Today is two posts. Go read the other here.

Alright, so lately I’ve been running into a lot of confusion from others as to what being asexual means and what it stems from. People literally do not understand it; it’s so far outside their scope of understanding that they cannot comprehend it. My therapist thinks it stems from forgotten sexual abuse as a child. My roommate thinks it’s just being celibate and that one day I’ll find the right person and want to jump their bones constantly. My friends and associates at the local trans youth group (who are all extremely sexual) had no clue what it is. The VA psychiatrist I saw yesterday (more on him in the other post for today) didn’t understand it and had a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that I’ve never had attractions, and was about ready to make the “how do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never had it” argument until I explained that I have had it before. My grandparents were boggled that I’ve only ever had a handful of relationships in my life. Since so many people are confused by it, I thought I’d try to explain it a bit better.

Asexual in a Sexual World

A reader asks, “what’s it like to be an asexual woman in such a sexually focused world?”

This is a simply asked question, but with a few levels to it that make it more complex. How do I know I’m asexual? What does it mean to be asexual? How does the sexual nature of our world make me feel? How do others react to me being asexual?

I think British born Australian writer and game critic Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw summed it up quite nicely in his blog about 3 years back: