Tag: queer

Queer Theory

The Queer Art of Failure by Halberstam is a key text for queer clowning and also is an excellent example of 20 year old queer theory with all its strengths and weaknesses.

The book suggests a political programme as much as a meant to analysis. ‘“Legibility,” writes Scott, “is a condition of manipulation” (1999: 183).’ (p 10) so we cope with that by becoming illegible. ‘Resist mastery. Here we might insist upon a critique of the “all-encompassing and global theories” identified by Foucault. In my book this resistance takes the form of investing in counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity; we might read failure, for example, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing. Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowing.” (p 10-11)

But could this be both dated and kind of passive? ‘I do believe that if you watch Dude, Where’s My Car? slowly and repeatedly and while perfectly sober, the mysteries of the universe may be revealed to you. I also believe that Finding Nemo contains a secret plan for world revolution and that Chicken Run charts an outline of feminist utopia for those who can see beyond the feathers and eggs.’ (p 21)

No, but really, there’s a lot here to unpack.

‘Chicken Run is different from Toy Story in that the Oedipal falls away as a point of reference in favor of a Gramscian structure of counterhegemony engineered by organic (chicken) intellectuals. In this film an anarchist’s utopia is actually realized as a stateless place without a farmer, an unfenced territory with no owners, a diverse (sort of, they are mostly female) collective motivated by survival, pleasure, and the control of one’s own labor. The chickens dream up and inhabit this utopian field, which we glimpse briefly at the film’s conclusion, and they find their way there by eschewing a “natural” solution to their imprisonment (flying out of the coop using their wings) and engineering an ideological one (they must all pull together to power the plane they build). Chicken Run also rejects the individualistic solution offered by Rocky the Rooster (voiced by Mel Gibson) in favor of group logics. As for the queer element, well, they are chickens, and so, at least in Chicken Run, utopia is a green field full of female birds with just the occasional rooster strutting around. The revolution in this instance is feminist and animated.’ (p 32)

Of course, Halberstam was writing in the Bush years, when they said, ‘And yet if we must live with the logic of white male stupidity, and it seems we must, then understanding its form, its seductions, and its power are mandatory. Dude offers a surprisingly complete allegorical map of what Raymond Williams calls “lived hegemony.” ‘ (p 60)

The Bush years were indeed defined by an intentional ignorance, and a feigned benign folkiness, which sought to mask the violence. The ableist framing of stupidity, in retrospect, feels like the wrong analysis for then and especially now. Instead, one thinks not only of a good ol boy, but also Sartre writing about verbal play, by antisemites. Knowledge, ignorance and understanding is a game to them. This intentional ignorance is a privilege because truth doesn’t matter and reality need not touch them. Their unknowing is an assertion of power. They don’t need to know.

In his book On Bullshit, Frankfurt differentiates between lying and bullshitting by noting that liars are being deliberately unthruthful in particular points that they have to keep track of. Liars care about truth. Bullshitters, on the other hand, have no regard for truth or falsehood whatsoever and will fake whatever context is required.

Trumpism is grounded in bullshit. The knowledge gap shows that one is either pledging allegiance to the bullshit of others, or creating bullshit oneself. Lack of knowledge is power and facts are treason.

Halberstam goes on to talk about generational transmission. “De-linking the process of generation from the force of historical process is a queer kind of project…. We may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place, not the place where the old engenders the new, where the old makes a place for the new , bit where the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and usable pasts.” (p 70)

The problem of lgbt people is sometimes articulated as too little history and a lack of intergenerational transmission. Whereas the problem of Judaism is too much history propagated as intergenerational trauma. So where does that leave the queer Jew? Groups like Queer Yeshiva, where I first heard this contradiction stated, seek to claim the history and by action, cause the old to make space for the new. Every generation reinvents Judaism.

Halberstam, also Jewish, accepts the queer blank state as given and seeks to use it as a model to divest themselves of all the burden of history.

But we have the same amount of history as anyone else. Catholic schools also transmit history, including a history (but not a present) of prosecution. And queers do have elders, histories and stories which are subject to an intentional erasure. We do not forget Oscar Wilde, but section 28 sought to impose amnesia. I think we can take it as given that Halberstam does not wish to copy that.

It’s also worth noting that Halberstam’s analysis predates the gayby boom. Childless queers were the norm when this was written, whereas now, it’s far more common for queers to visibly have kids, with their queer partners in their queer relationships. Indeed, it’s also much less common that a parent would lose custody for queerness, which was absolutely the case in the US before Lawrence v Texas. Blue laws in California weren’t enforced, but they were on the books. Every queer in a custody dispute was guilty of regular felonies.

“Edelman uses this sense of the queer in order to propose a relentless form of negativity in place of the forward-looking, reproductive and heteronormative politics of hope that animates all too many political projects. … The queer subject, he argues, has been bound epistemologically to negativity, to nonsense, to antiproduction, and to unintelligibility, and instead of fighting this characterisation by dragging queerness into recognition, he proposes that we embrace the negativity that we anyway structurally represent.” (106)

But if “the heteronormative political imagination propels itself forward in time and space through the indisputably positive image of the child,” (ibid) what about now, 20 years later, when that child asserts gender-nonconformity and non-heterosexual yearnings? Of course, the heteronormative imagination also, “projects itself back on the past through the dignified image of the parent, the queer subject stands between heterosexual optimism and its realisation.” (ibid) Which is necessarily complicated when the child, themselves, asserts the agency that scuppers heteronormative continuity. If no adult queer stands there, creating the barrier, then one must be invented to be excluded. If the kids are catching ROGD off of twitter, then social media must be banned.

But what does it mean for queerness as failure when my queer friends are having or adopting children and when those kids themselves come out? IS an eight year old who is certain of their nonbinary status really groping about in the dark like a lesbian at a 1930s Paris nightclub? Or have they found a new queerness on the daylight playgrounds they inhabit?

Can this, itself, be a form of hope in the midst of such intense repression and looming fascism? Are fighting for these nonbinary kids to have unimaginable queer futures in a somewhat less climate-fucked world? If so, how does the engagement of imagination within the play-failure of the clown enable this world building? Is it our adult world with it’s self-important reproductive drive that must be shown to have failed? Or is this failure so self-evident, so catastrophic, that the time to dwell on it is long past. Leave the navel gazing to the gerentocracy as it dies.

The forward looking hope of the previous generation of Nazis, confidentially singing “the future belongs to me” in ‘Cabaret’ is, itself, a historical projection. The Nazis of a century ago killed others. The current branch yearn also for their own demise, as they burn petrol like there’s no tomorrow, like they wish there to be no tomorrow.

Halberstam rejects optimism as a programme. “to simply repudiate the [social and systemic, rather than essential] connections between queerness and negativity is to commit to an unbearably positivist and progressive understanding of the queer, one that results in the perky depictions of lesbians in ‘The L Word’ or the reduction of gay men in film and on TV to impossibly good-looking arbiters of taste.” (p 98)

However, I would argue that what disrupts the reproductive child is not a shadowy queer blocking a hetero transmission, but rather a teacher shining a light on history, context and the skills of self articulation. This sounds optimistic, but it is not.

When this liberatory programme detours into optimism, we get the baggage and responsibilities dumped on to Gen X youth. We were informed, from basically the age of 10, that we would fix climate change, fix racism, fix all the world’s woes, thus relieving our elders from the burden of acting. Witney Huston sang this as an anthem:

“I believe the children are our future /
Teach them well and let them lead the way”

This heroic / optimistic abdication of responsibility could be accomplished by building up our self-esteem with empty puffery:

“Learning to love yourself
/ It is the greatest love of all”

An actual program of world improvement should empower youth to escape heterocapitalist structures, but they certainly can’t be left to do this alone. It’s not enough to fail to transmit normative power structures, but necessary to collaborate on their overthrow.

Is a revolution a queer failure? Is being ungovernable a failure? Or is a queer failure an act of sabotage of the machine that tries to crush us? Under the rubric of neoliberalism, solidarity is failure.


Works Cited

Please see: https://www.celesteh.com/blog/2026/03/09/organs-clowns-and-queers-delete-as-appropriate/

I’m using Firefox because it’s great in programming and politics

Update: Eich has stepped down.
Yeah, so OkCupid says I should switch to a Google product because it’s better on LGBT rights. Um, have they been paying attention to anything? The new Mozilla CEO gave $1k to overturn marriage quality in California, whereas Google sponsored a national conference of prominent right-wing politicians who want to overturn all LGBT rights everywhere.
You know what, I love having equal marriage rights in California, really I do. And like most LGBT people, I thought prop 8 was terrible. But what I don’t like is ‘pink washing’, where some company makes some lame claim to be a sponsor of LGBT rights, (usually by having a health insurance policy that is vaguely equal or, thse days, by supporting something that a large majority of American agree with anyway (how bold!)) and then we’re supposed to forgive them all their other sins. Even if Google weren’t sponsoring CPAC, they’d still be in bed with the NSA.
We don’t hear much about ‘don’t be evil’ these days, because, alas, Google is making a fuckload of money by being evil. Mozilla never needed a corporate slogan like that because their mission has always been to do good from the very outset. I agree with this queer Mozilla employee who doesn’t want the open internet to get caught up in the American political football match of left vs right wedge issues and distraction. Open internet and NSA spying is more important than a relative small donation to an odious cause, which, by the way, does not mean we should be ‘tolerant’ of some asshole’s concrete political actions to take away rights from a minority which includes some of this own employees. If every other browser was also open source and pro-open standards and on the right side of LGBT rights, then this would be worth switching browsers over, for sure, but that’s not what’s going on here. The CEO says he won’t resign, which is a poor choice, but, again, really not worth a boycott. Especially when the other choices are closed source or blatantly on the side of evil.
So keep Firefox, and install Lightbeam if you want to see just how bloody much Google is spying on your every move. And if you’re an ally or whatever like OKCupid, how about doing a tiny bit of research and not telling LGBT people what to think or do? LGBT people and Mozilla employees can all speak for themselves/ourselves. Because, hey, we’ve got the internet, which is still open, thanks largely to the efforts of Mozilla.
Disclaimers of various sorts: I used to work for Netscape and I got the first same sex divorce in the state of California.

Dating

Because life goes on and that, I posted a personal ad on a dating site that I’m not going to name here. And so I went on a date. With a straight woman.
She seems like a nice woman and may one day read this, so I’m not going to talk about her here, but I do want to talk about the evening.

Yes, seriously

Back when I was a lesbian, I knew to stay away from straight girls because of straight girl syndrome. Some straight women will treat lesbians as a lark or an experiment or a distraction, which can be bad if you get your feelings caught up in. Better to stay away.
But I’m not in that position anymore. I’m a man who likes women. And I’ve limitted myself to bi women, but that’s a small population of people, in comparison with the larger pool of all women who like men. There are just a hell of a lot of straight women around; many of them are good looking; many of them are good people, so why not give it a go?

Did she know?

So, when to disclose? There are a lot of people who have never knowingly met a trans person. And there’s a whole lot of negative stereotypes, misunderstanding and transphobia in society. I suspect that many people would reject a trans person out of hand, motivated by ignorance, rather than malice. (Of course, these two things can be hard to tell apart.) Therefore, I decided I’d rather be evaluated on my merits or lack thereof and thus not disclose on my personal ad. And If I say something on the first date, it would overwhelm any other get-to-know-you blahblahblah. So my current plan is to disclose on the third date or before serious snogging, whichever comes first.

What happened

So I was sat across from my date and we were talking about our pasts. But this thing about who I was and who I am runs through my past like a mighty river. My queer identity is fundamental to my sense of self. And yet, apparently, I’m also straight.
The jacket I wear most often (but not that night) has a badge on it that says “transgender.” I hate discolsing. But more, I hate not disclosing. It’s unnerving. And it’s even more unnerving, when I try to talk about what I’m doing with my life. I joined the London Gay Winds, because, um, I wanted to play tuba, and um. I go to a queer bar because it’s fun and um, my band has played there a few times.
I feel that my presentation of heterosexuality is not credible. And so I was unnerved.
Both I and my date have both been divorced and so we talked a bit about that:
Me: So I was married too.
Her: You got married in the States?
Me: In Canada, actually.
Her: Why did you get married in Canada?
The real answer is because same sex marriage was legal there but not at home. Which I probably should have remembered before automatically saying “in Canada.” Normally, it’s a pretty good story. It ends with the first same sex divorce in the state of California. But, since I’m not discolsing, I now need a dfferent answer to something that I shouldn’t have brought up.
Me: For the Elvis impersonator!
It felt like lying. And probably made me look like a nutter. But, I mean, that chapel employs the best Elvis impersonator in Canada, so . . . yeah, I looked like a nutter.
And because we had been talking a bit about how marriage interacts with legal residency status:
Her: Was that valid in the states, then?
Hahahaha, well, it should be according to international law, but the Defense of Marriage Act had been interpretted to mean that the US can ignore international same sex marriages, which, since it’s a treaty violation, makes that application of DOMA unconstitutional. But it was good enough for a divorce, so:
Me: More or less

And

In the bad old days, being trans was like joining the witness protection program. You had to change your name, leave town and lie about your past. You weren’t supposed to tell anybody, or doctors could retaliate by taking away your hormones, which has serious health consequences. In these more enlightned times, the NHS just makes you change your name, but you don’t need to move or be stealth. And, god, how could I? I went to a women’s uni for my undergrad.
But really, I don’t know if the unnerving bit is trying to pass for straight. Or that I seem to be succeeding at it. Or that it’s what I might be now.
A man and a woman out on a date. What could be more heteronormative than that?

Gay Marriage Fails in Maine

“If you put it up to the vote of the people, we’d have slavery again.” —Jesse Ventura on CNN, 11/3/2009
I don’t much care for Ventura, but he has a point here. Most civil rights protections in the states have been expanded via case law, not by the ballot box. In fact, I think the whole concept of civil rights is at odds with voting on them. The idea is to protect minorities from majorities. When we say something is a civil right, we take an abstraction of principles that we mostly all agree on and then apply them to the specific. Most Americans think freedom of religion is a pretty good idea, so that must also apply to Mormons and Muslims and Pagans. Our agreed-upon principles lead us to protect actions and people who would not necessarily receive such protections if things were put up for a vote.
Interracial marriage became legal with the court case Loving v Virginia, decided by the Supreme Court. This decision was not popular, but it wasn’t unpopular enough to amend the Constitution over. If it had been put up for a vote even five years after it became law, it would not have passed. Honestly, I would be worried about what people would vote on this even now. In that decision, the court found that marriage was a fundamental right, something I think we all agree upon. And we’re all supposed to be equal under the law. And there’s not a compelling state interest to keep people of different races from marrying. Therefore, it must be allowed.
The SCOTUS needs to rule on gay marriage. This is not a battle that’s going to be won by voting. It needs to be a combination of activism and case law. That winning combination is what desegregated buses and then later protected our speech. March and sue!
Eventually, gay rights will be a settled question, but right now, it’s still legal to discriminate in several states and on a federal level. We don’t have ENDA (nor have we been added to the Civil Right Act, which would give us full protections. Even after we have ENDA, we won’t be done.). We can’t serve openly in the military. Hate crime legislation is less than a month old. It’s not surprising that people feel comfortable discriminating against us in the ballot box, when they’re fully allowed to in other contexts. Indeed, these other contexts are somewhat more vital for many LGBT people. I’m certainly in favor of Same Sex Marriage, but even more, I’m in favor of not being fired from a job for being trans.
I think there’s more resources going towards marriage right now, and that might be because people who have enough resources to pay for political campaigns are not worried about losing their jobs. There are people who are still in the closet at work, who are afraid to come out or to transition. If they get fired for being LGBT, they have no recourse and they can kiss their health insurance goodbye. A legally recognized marriage is not the top agenda for people in that situation and I don’t know if it should be top agenda for the LGBT community in general. Let’s pass the gender-inclusive ENDA, make it clear that discrimination being wrong is a matter of law and then sue for marriage. Or hell, let’s sue to get rid of having legal sexes at all, then we’ll get marriage by default.

Hexing

I went to a hexing this afternoon. In the past few months, I’ve made it a point to say yes when somebody asks me to do something that I wouldn’t normally do. So when an old friend forwarded me an email about a hexing ritual, open to “both women and men,” once I found out the targets were hate crime committing rapists, I said ok.

We went to Ceasar Chavez park in Berkeley, which is also an off-leash dog area, so I’d been there loads of times before. We were in a stone circle, built to be a solar calendar, with the waters of the San Francisco Bay on three sides of us. Nearby, there were a million happy dogs, kids flying kites, a guy with a remote controlled glider. The grass was green from the recent rains and there was a cool breeze blowing from the West. It was all rather lovely.

As it happened, I was the only guy to go. All but around two of the women were Baby Boomers. Most of us were white, also. I went to Mills – a woman’s college, so I’d dabbled in wiccan stuff and been to a few rituals, but didn’t go on to do it after that. So I’d been to do pagan stuff a few times before and had mostly found it empowering, but not enough to overcome my atheism.

Despite this atheism, I was raised in a superstitious household and come from a superstitious country, so I couldn’t help but think that going to a hexing might be marinating myself in some bad energy. What goes around, comes around. If I wish ill on others, it’s going to come back to me, I guess I believe. I wonder if this sort of thinking is to keep women from being angry or from stewing in it. In any case, I was taking the negative energy seriously, as were the women there.

However, once things were under way, my mood changed from trepidation. The organizer had a bunch of 8.5×11 sized printouts of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She had cut eye holes in them to sort of function as masks and she passed them around with string. So I tied a sheet of paper with a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary to my head. And they set up some banners of her also.

I spend all day yesterday with a member of the Catholic clergy, so the sacrilege was actually getting to me, as much as feel goofy wearing such an odd non-mask. But also, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a symbol which belongs to the Hispanic populations of California, of which, as far as I was aware, nobody was present. My biggest negative issue with wiccans is not that it violates my unbelief, but that it appropriates the beliefs of others. And borrowing this symbol is cultural appropriation. So I felt kind of goofy and awkward and the only guy there and guilty for violating a heritage that both belongs to my people and belongs to others.

We formed a circle and she set up two very small cauldrons. We started by smudging everybody with incense. The woman who did the smudging sang a song while she did it. I didn’t know what to think when she singingly called me her sister. I don’t think she did it in response to me not passing, but because I did pass. Because if a guy was going to come into this space, he could deal with being left out of the language like women have to deal with it too, more often and in more places. Or maybe as she sang that I belonged, she sang the opposite also.

After we were all smudged, we hummed and then the leader invoked the four “grandmothers” of the four cardinal directions. Some coals were put into the cauldrons. She put frankincense on one of them. She had some yarn which represented the four rapist gay bashers who we were hexing. And their younger brother who knew about their crimes and was going to rat them out. I think she had a psychic vision of the brother. She cut the yarns and put them into the empty cauldron. And then she put in extremely foul incense. And we chanted about how they were bad people who were going to get caught and have bad things happen to them, while holding out our arms towards it.

Some of the dog walkers stopped to watch this, but only for a few moments. And also, one of the women had a movie camera with which she was documenting us. It’s Berkeley, so I don’t know if people thought we were making a fictional film or if a bunch of middle aged women dancing in a circle around the BVM, hexing rapists in the dog park is just entirely unremarkable.

The yarn she used was bright red. I don’t know what it was made of, but it was clearly treated with some sort of flame-retardant chemical and wasn’t burning as quickly as expected. So this required dumping on additional incense and some flammable stuff while we clapped and walked in circles around the altar thing.

At the end, when it finally, burned, we were to go around the circle and give blessings. Because calling for justice is positive. So even though it was a hexing, it was a positive thing to do. Thus neatly sidestepping the problems of calling up negative energy or other unseemliness. The first women to give a blessing was the smudger and she went on at length about womyn, and the womyn of the circle, etc. The next was my friend, who made a point of saying “people.” Then it was my turn, so I said “queers.” We all said something and afterwards, people said “blessed be” and then, thank goodness, it was time to remove the Virgin Mary from my head.

My friend and I took off right about then, without helping to tear down, as my friend could tell I wanted to escape. She said, “I swear they said ‘all genders.'” I wondered if I felt more uncomfortable about being in a women’s space or wearing such a goofy mask.

I think the most striking thing about the whole proceedings was that it was not symbolic for the women involved. It was not a protest. It was taking action. They believe that they’ve done something concrete in response to a terrible hate crime.

When I got home, I washed my face and hands, to get the smell of incense off of me, but it also felt like a kind of ritual, getting the previous ritual off of me. And it felt concrete too.

Fortunately, there is more concrete action that can be taken. There’s a fund set up to help the victim. Unfortunately, this kind of hate crime is way more common here than you might guess. What’s unusual is how much attention this one is getting. Gay and lesbian people are especially politicized since the election. Hopefully this energy continues. And as people take away our rights and and say we’re like deforestation and literally assault us, hopefully, our protests and our actions create change, so hate crimes become uncommon, our rights are restored and people are ashamed that homophobia was once so apparent.

Disengaged

I don’t feel engaged on the Prop 8 thing. Some of this is distance, certainly, but not all of it. I mean, I have benefited personally from Same Sex Marriage. My (now ex) wife and I got married in Canada in 2003. And then, alas, got divorced in California in 2005, in what was likely the state’s first ever same sex divorce.
The value of divorce as a civil institution is extremely high. Unfortunately, things don’t always work out and couples need a structure to disentangle their finances and lives. As divorce is usually an adversarial process, having things like precedent and laws protects both halves of the divorcing couple. Otherwise, the stronger half of the ex-couple would steam roll the weaker half, whether that strength be emotional or financial. Divorce is an important right for that reason and also for tax consequences. If you own property, as in land or a house, it’s going to most likely change ownership status during a divorce. If it’s a divorce, the state doesn’t ask for taxes on this transaction, which is good because splitting up is already incredibly expensive.
So my disengagement with this isn’t because I don’t see the value of gay marriage. I’m very much aware of how it has helped me. But when they started same sex marriages in California, the larger gay rights groups put out word that a ballot measure was coming and asked gays to please look presentable. Which meant: no men in dresses. Because people like me are embarrassing.
Obviously, LGB people should have all the same rights as straight people. But this battle for marriage is incredibly normative in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable. No, I am not just like you, Mr. Cis Hetero, and I refuse to pretend that I am. Which means that I’m not really invited to the party. And despite that exclusion, we lost anyway.
We can’t have ENDA protection for trans people because we’re too weird and gays come first. We can’t have marriages for visibly-trans people because we’re too weird and gays come first. Not that we have either of these things, mind you, but just in case let’s make sure trannies are out.
The support-gay-marriage “cause” on Facebook, which is a pseudo charitable thing one can join, is attached to the HRC, a gay rights group which actively lobbies against trans people and gives assloads of money to Log Cabin Republicans. Are you fighting to be included in the right wing? Is it your dream to be an oppressor instead of oppressed?
I want our side to win. I want the State Supreme Court to decide that narrowing the Equal Protection clause of the state constitution, or declaring marriage not to be a fundamental right, would be a major revision and not a minor amendment, as this would seem logically to be the case. I want marriage for everybody, including me. But can we stop pretending that all queers are just like straight people except we happen to fall hopelessly in love with people of the same normative gender? Because I’m tired of being told to keep quiet and these kinds of normative lies leave too many of us unprotected.

Why we lost on Prop 8

The SF Chronicle wrote a bit about campaign strategy:

That allowed Prop. 8 opponents, worried that many voters were not enamored with the idea of same-sex marriage, to run a TV campaign that almost never mentioned gays or lesbians or showed them in an ad. Instead, the ads charged that Prop. 8 supporters wanted to take away rights from a single, unnamed group of people, which just wasn’t fair.

If we’re not even willing to name ourselves as citizens, why on earth would anybody want to support us? If we’re ashamed of being LGBT, then why are our rights valuable? If this strategy NEVER WORKS, why do the mainstream campaigns keep using it?!
If we want rights, then we have to be gay and proud, not weirdly lurking and hiding. Same sex couples deserve the right to marry! Stand up and say it!
In other news, holy cow, Obama won. oh my god.

LambdaIstanbul

this group was declared immoral yesterday. It’s an LGBT Solidarity Association founded in 1993. And a cultural center since 2000. Grassroots, non-hierarchical, volunteer based. They are anti-military.
They have commissions within the org. Trans, Women’s Group, Pride, Performance, Family, Human Rights Violations Reporting. Alas, the police have a lot more power recently and raid groups, including this one. The government insists that human rights are not violated. They work a lot with trans people including sex workers, trans women in feminism, etc. They do also legal aid for trans women harassed by the police.

April 7, 2008, 15 big police guys searched everything. They saw a trans woman coming in, so therefore they must be running a prostitution ring. (Because it’s really great for women to make prostitution illegal.) the government of Istanbul said the group violated public morality.
And then I had to g chase after my dog. Now the speaker is showing pictures from the pride parade. Apparently, this was an illegal protest? Last year, there were over 1000 people. Nobody is allowed to protest on the biggest street. But they were so small in the past, they were ignored. The police followed them last year, because of the size. It’s not a big party, it’s a protest march with chanting.
There was participation from some political figures, including a guy running for parliament and an italian politician.
she’s showing up a movie of another march which was stopped by the police and football hooligans. Turkey is not a great place to be queer.
and holy fuck. they were attacked by a giant mob, helped by the police and had to sit on the floor of a bus while people tried to break the windows while they escaped. mobs of men sang “die trannies die”

Coming Out?

Many trans people view being trans as a medical condition or a birth defect, which they had fixed. Why would run around telling people that you used to have an embarrassing medical problem? Most of these folks are stealth. Their trans history is nobody’s business.
Other trans people, especially genderqueers, see their trans status as a big part of their sense of self. These folks are usually out. This is a new phenomenon.
Not long ago, trans people were instructed to change their name, move out of town and lie about their past. Genderqueers did not have access to transition in that era.
Fortunately, thanks to the work of trans activists and also feminism, normativity is much less emphasized and I don’t need to go into hiding. I’ve got the moving far, far away part covered, but composing is a high-profile occupation. If you have to be stealth, it’s incompatible. I’m not willing to walk away from the years I spent learning my craft and “paying my dues” as they say. So from a practical standpoint, I’ve got to be out. From an emotional standpoint, I do terribly at being stealth anything. Secrets eat at me. So I’m out. Which means coming out.
Thus far, I’ve mostly been telling people who knew me before. That’s stressful enough. My strategy has been to try to tell the biggest gossips that I know, preferably via email, and hope they spread it around everywhere. They fill in all my other friends, and then I am spared awkward conversations. There’s undoubtedly extra commentary that goes with the news, but that would happen anyway. I imagine that in many cases, it’s a sarcastic, “big surprise!”
But I also meet new people. And I’m at kind of a loss on how to proceed. Do I want to be out? Probably. I mean, I’ve been in transition for less than 6 months. I don’t want to lie about the previous 31 years of my life. And it’s kind of a big deal. On the other hand, it’s a lot to lay on somebody the first time I meet them. I had gotten in the habit of subtly slipping my girlfriend into conversations to let people know that I’m queer, but that doesn’t work at all anymore. Also, people who knew me before are still tripping over pronouns and I can’t grow any more than the most very pathetic moustache. I’m passing, but not overwhelmingly, if you know what I mean.
Passing is great, by the way. But not without it’s own issues. I keep worrying that somebody is going to read me. The last time I was out with a crowd of strangers, I was gripped by a sudden fear that somebody would suddenly stand, point, and shout “fraud!” But this is Britain. People are so very polite. Maybe they had already worked it out and were just humoring me and I wasn’t passing at all? How could it be that my interactions with men were so totally unchanged if I was actually passing?
I’ve always gotten on well with men older than myself. I find it easy to establish a rapport. When I started to transition, I worried that I would lose this. But then I started talking to a bloke who seemed to be 5 or 10 years older than myself and it was the same as always. Exactly the same. How could this be? What was going on? Had he somehow read me? Was he gay and flirting with me? Had I always been acting like and treated like a guy? Was I acting like a girl and him responding to that without consciously following? I was completely unnerved.
Another bloke I was talking to kept bringing up balls. He didn’t know why he kept talking about them. His unconscious mind was nudging him. I guess I could have taken the opportunities to mention that (like Harry Partch) I don’t have any. But I was already unnerved. Also, is that something I really want to disclose the first time I meet somebody? I have no idea – probably not in those terms. A straight friend suggested that I “just be a guy” and not tell anybody. But then, that’s 31 years of my life. That’s this blog. That’s the last piece I posted to my podcast. That’s a whole lot of hiding.
I gave the ball bloke my card. He didn’t write. Maybe he lost my card. Maybe I should take it all down: the blog, the podcast, everything. Just be a guy. People who google me can know and people who don’t won’t. Is that what I want?
Some people tell me that I’m brave. I don’t follow their logic at all. I’m just trying to survive the best I can. If that’s brave, so is getting out of bed in the morning. Maybe we’re all brave. Maybe we’re all passing. We pretend to be the person we wish we were and come to create and inhabit that reality. So what is coming out, in that case? I used to be kind of an asshole? I used to be a software engineer? I used to be a girl?