Tracing this Body. Transsexuality, pharmaceuticals & capitalism is one of the most (if not the most) amazing, complex, and intersecting articles I have read. A must-read written in 2003 by Michelle O’Brien and still holds true and how. Seriously, I'm making a crime just quoting a bit, you have to read it (if you haven't already):

These battles over HIV, transgender health and drug use are real, with millions of people's lives on the line. Politics is changing fast around the world, as old resistance movements have disintegrated, and new forms of domination are deepening their entrenched authority. Capital flows more and more rapidly around the globe, while access to health care is strictly limited and regulated. Wars of healthcare, over the terrain of our bodies, are among the most significant political battles in the world today. Healthcare is a major site in defining, and transforming, what race and class domination mean in our day to day lives. This fight is so profound, so real, so important, precisely because it is the place where the three levels of flows come together: 1. those flows of T-Cells and hormones, of viruses and antivirals, of methadone and heroin, within our own bodies; 2. those flows of our communities, families and lives through our communities; and 3. those flows of capital and institutional power across the globe.

[...]

The politics of our bodies - as trans people, as drug users, as people living with HIV - require a sophisticated grasp of multiple contradictions. We are dependent on the very systems that oppress us. We make demands for change, and appropriate the refuse of capital for our own survival. We live in the flows, suffer in the flows, envision a new world in these flows.

Many theories of power and politics offer little to grapple with such a struggle of bodily survival. I grew up working in radical environmental movements in Oregon, using direct action to defend ancient forests. The anticapitalist analysis of many such activists relied on a fanatical commitment to purity and an attempt at a total refusal to participate or be complicit in any form of corporate rule. Veganism, do-it-yourself punk ethics, buying natural and local, Lesbian-Feminist separatism, back-to-land self-sustaining agriculture and especially eco-primitivism and other movements common around Eugene, Oregon, all frequently rely, to various extents, on a commitment to non-participation in global capitalism and certain idealized notions of purity. Since then, I've encountered similar phenomena in many political spaces, from AIDS denialists working in animal rights organizing to the MOVE family of Philadelphia, from genderqueer denunciations of medicalized body modification to the glorification of drop-out travelers by the anarchist writing network known as CrimethInc.

[...]

These languages of purity and non-participation are frequently counterposed by the glorifying ideological cheerleaders of capitalist domination. Every major U.S. newspaper, every president and senator, every corporate trade journal is aggressively advancing the absurd notion that capitalism is the best avenue to manage and stop human suffering. Believing that state power and corporate tyranny will somehow make a decent world have a major impact on the popular discourses of science, technology and industrial production. Such pro-capitalist perspectives are of no use to me.

Instead, I've tried through this paper to trace other ways of thinking through the relationship between my body and capitalism. Each step, I've tried to simultaneously recognize my participation and complicity, and trace the possibilities of resistance and liberation. In trying to describe the complexity of these relationships, I've found inspiration in Donna Haraway's essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." A truly remarkable text, Haraway's essay brilliantly cut through polarized debates characterizing science as either a wonderful tool of capitalist improvement or the evil bane of patriarchy. Instead, Haraway describes the figure of the cyborg. The cyborg is the bastard child of the patriarchal realms of capitalism, nature and technoscience. Rather than reproduce their systems of command, control and communication, the cyborg ran radically challenge, undermine and resist domination. The cyborg is a new vision of feminist consciousness, a radical means of relating to technology and science. The cyborg is never pure, never free of the systems it subverts, never belonging to a realm before or outside of capitalist technoscience and patriarchy. But the cyborg is also a revolutionary, an effective, empowered, conscious being that reworks, redirects and restructures the oppressive systems that birthed it.

This vision of the feminist cyborg has been very useful and inspiring to me in understanding my own body and in struggling to the liberation of trans people. Like the cyborg, we are both complicit in and a challenge to the biomedical industries. We are drastically rebuilding our bodies with the aid of technology, surgery and drugs. And we are doing this all on our own terms, committed to our own well being, striving to our own liberation. Far from dupes of doctors or the crude escapists of ecoprimitivism, we are living amidst the systems we are always subverting. Trans people live in that hybrid edge of technology, science, nature and capital that Haraway correctly and brilliantly identifies as a tremendously power space of resistance and movement.

We are all in the midst of structures of tremendous violence, oppression and exploitation. There is no easy escape or pure distance from them. Our ability to resist, in this world, at this time, is deeply inseparable from our ongoing connection to these very systems. But resist we do. Every day, in so many ways, we are all struggling towards a new world of liberation, healing and respect.

Here is Donna Haraway's 1991 essay: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, if you want to read it.

Via Kynn: Glee wins GLAAD award when it fails epically with its transmisogyny. And the comments at ONTD feminism brings the derailment to the house.

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I'm in a Reborn's mood thanks to the latest chapter (I'm easy, okay) and was about to make icons of these. But then I liked them too much in this size I guess.

So have some Suzuki Adelheid's coloring, soon to be icons maybe:

( Cut for your convenience )

Via jhameia:

End Discrimination Against Transgender Women – The Marla Bendini Incident.

Marla Bendini, a transgender woman and an established artist and pole dancer was thrown out of a popular nightspot on Clarke Quay, Singapore, even though she was part of a group engaged to perform at the club. To add insult to injury, she was insulted by the club’s management. Her distress was visible and it was also witnessed by her fellow pole dancers.

[...] As Founding Working Group member of the Asia-Pacific Transgender Network, I will investigate incidents of abuse against transgender women in Singapore and the region. If the incidents are proven to be true, we will pursue further action against the organisation involved.

If you support the right of transgender women to be treated with respect and dignity, be a fan of our facegroup page here.

And Monica Roberts at Transgriot has received an email press release from Leona Lo:

A group of transgender women in Singapore have rallied to issue a joint call to Clarke Quay night spot operators to stop discriminating against transgender women. The latest incident involving a transgender patron has sparked outrage among the long-suffering community, drawn close to 500 supporters on Facebook, and sparked the launch of a first-ever anti-discrimination campaign entitled "Sisters in Solidarity" (SIS).

The SIS campaign will be launched on Wednesday, 5 May 10, at 2 pm at Post Museum on Rowell Road. Ms Marla Bendini Junior Ong, a Singapore transgender woman will be present to share her experiences at Clarke Quay witnessed by her dance instructor who will also be present. Trish, a transgender pioneer, will speak up for the first time about her personal experience with workplace discrimination. The campaign will include a series of education activities throughout the year.

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I don't think I will be around much this week, I got two exams next week, Monday and Tuesday, one of them is Biochemistry and I have to take the two no matter what. Just letting know the people I mod stuff with. (Sorry, the_future_modernes, I don't think you will have a lot of problems for just a weekend at politics, right? Just to be safe.)

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My two months LJ paid-account expired today, and I'm really grateful to the anonymous who gave it to me, I really enjoyed it. I also think the only thing I will really miss is the option of editing comments. I'm not such a sucker for icons, personalizations and stuff. I think I got to 25 icons, and not even used much of the other options. Yeah, I'm a free-account person.

Via Sociological Images (WARNING: SI's with problematic language on the headline, comments full of transphobic fail). A Series of Questions: pictures showing questions that dehumanize and objectify trans people.

Many documentary photographic projects that deal with trans issues exploit the genders of their subjects, pointing to an "otherness" or inappropriately exoticizing their bodies. "A Series of Questions" seeks instead to make visible the transphobia and gender-baiting that can become part of everyday interactions and lives, forming a fuller picture of the various lived experiences. In so doing, this work contrasts with the dehumanizing approaches that predominate the images made of transgender and transsexual people, which often focus solely on their trans status or use them to further a specific point about social construction and gender.

And okay, I have a lot of problems with Renee and she has shown some ugly privilege towards trans people. Now, thought, she wrote an article that I find very interesting about gender attitudes. ETA: Please read Keeva's entry where she explains how Renee's post really falls into the trope of "gender binary as a tramp for cis people everyone;" and how it erases trans people, trivializing their experiences..

When you Transgress the Gender Binary.

Boy, we tell ya! We spotted this picture and thought it couldn’t get any worser...until we spotted the one below of him turned around!!!

Pop the top and peep fruity-pops’ backside

The sole purpose of posting these images was to hold this man up to ridicule and the Bossip commenters did not disappoint.

Socially we are very invested in maintaining the gender binary and the moment someone does not perform gender to match the constructed norms they are disciplined. How does this man posing for a picture really become threatening, unless we have decided that certain bodies are abnormal specifically to maintain underserved privileges?

Gender is something that is a concern for everyone because we are all disciplined. Women can be attacked for not being suitably feminine, gay men are called swishy and effeminate, the trans community faces various marginalizations including but not limited to discrimination in employment and housing, and even heterosexual cisgender men can quickly find themselves the center of ridicule, the moment they admit they are not he-men.

We spread the social lie that everyone is allowed to pursue happiness as long as it is not damaging to others, but clearly this is not the case. Even though we know that the gender binary is a false construct and damaging to so many people, we continue to perpetuate it in many aspects of life.

Gender continues to be a very important area to organize around, specifically because it effects millions of people across the globe everyday. And when we ignore it’s significance because it may not seem readily apparent, we set the stage for our own maginalization.

Neil Gaiman's fail caught Will Sh****ly and his faithful bigots attention. So as you can imagine, it has all the racist and creepy stalkerish (looking for information about some people's real lives) fail you would expect from these people. But now they are spending their time also attacking Kynn's gender identity (in the entry where he apparently is teaching Pam Noles about Malcolm X by the way, yeah I'm not capable of reading that but just needed a laugh today). [Edit because Jesus Fucking Christ: Oh for fuck's sake, I removed the link because Sh****ly is making use of the attention that thread is receiving to keep outing and showing his stalkerish tendencies towards coffeeandink, his favorite target, who has no relevance in the discussion at hand. No relevance, I tell you. Damn creepy man. I don't think his blog is that hard to find on google if you so want to see it, but not going to link it here. You can go and read coffeeandink's explanation of the issue, which, by the way, still has nothing to do with the original discussion we are having here, but the man just saw this like an opportunity to bring it back.]

Here at some of the quotes on that thread about Kynn's gender identity:

Some shitty human being in Sh***ly blog:

Yeah, I'm not going to be nice to Kynn about that, especially as I have to imagine he thinks he's a girl dragon inside or some shit. That's about his speed.

Sh****ly:

When did Kynn become a woman? I refer to her as a woman because I believe in common and uncommon courtesy, but when speaking of the time when she was male, that male pronoun has to be appropriate.

Those who knew Kynn as a male might well think of her that way, just as someone's mental image of a person may be of a dark-haired person, though the person is now gray-haired. Identity is tricky. I don't get bent out of shape when old friends call me Bill.

Yeah, the brilliance is mind-blowing. I know.

Oh, nothing is anyone's business. But if you knew Kynn as male, it seems to me it's right to refer to him then and her now. And if you don't know when Kynn transitioned, that would suggest any reference to Kynn in the past should be male, while Kynn in the present should be female.

As for your second point, yes and no. A mind is a mind, no matter what the body, unless you're a sexist asshole.

Shitty human being again:

Yeah, well, having had to deal with the asshole for a long time, I prefer to believe he just strapped on being trans because he really, really, really, really always wanted to be a persecuted minority. And now he is one, presto!

Fuck that guy, right up his missing vajayjay.

Also, shitty human being is being all "I do not like Kynn, so obviously Kynn isn't trans. So I'm not transphobic, I met a trans woman who liked me once."

For the record, DO NO ENGAGE WITH ANY OF THESE PEOPLE.

I just want to show that this is what happens when marginalized people dare to talk against oppression. You see how vulnerable trans women are and how their bodies and identities are ridiculed by cis, white, straight men when they denounce privilege and problematic behavior.

Kynn is a white woman, so these people used part of her identity they could attack without any guilt to show superiority towards her anti-racism discourse. Because we know that mocking trans people's identities is not only acceptable, but encouraged and rewarded in today's society.

ETA: Something that I think is very important to notice is how Kynn talking against oppression was such a great threat for these people that they decided to put her in danger. We all know how the "man in a dress" rhetoric is used in today's world. (People may said I accuse them of putting there "things they aren't saying," but really how much in a bubble you have to live to think this couldn't end in transphobic violence, specially when these people say they personally know her. Heck, they just need to talk about a trans woman that way for someone more violent to hear it and the situation could be really dangerous. That's why everything we do has an impact, our actions never interacts with vacuum. But you know how Kynn just want to be oppressed. Like, right, how many cis women do you know who are "claiming" to be trans women even online? As you can see, people like these specimens make society a really hateful place for trans women.)

Relevant: stoneself: the cost of speaking up.

Via Feminist SF:

Pffft. Do you know who invented fanfic? John Scalzi invented fanfic. Like, right now. He is inventing it as we talk.

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Via, of course, where else, QT:

My Dissonance Doesn’t Need to Make Sense to You.

My dissonance has absolutely nothing to do with what cis girls have. In fact, I am entirely indifferent to what cis girls have. You (you being directed at a hypothetical cis woman) could have a big bushy beard that birds live in and breasts flatter than a Plexiglas window for all I care. It is irrelevant (unless the birds were shitting everywhere, then it would be relevant to hygiene). Furthermore, and this goes back to all of this bullshit about how dissonance doesn’t make sense, who are you to expect a feeling, a deep psychological and instinctual feeling, regarding body structure, to be rational and easily explained? Last I checked, I didn’t have an awful lot to be sad about in my life (I actually do pretty well for myself, all things considered) yet I have depression. One could easily talk about how irrational my depression is. Yeah, except that depression isn’t rational. It just is. It’s a present internal feeling that has an effect on the mind and well being. It does not need to have a rational reason, just a cause.

This post, I think, is one of the most important that has been written lately.

C. L. Minou writes We Are the Dead: Sex, Assault, and Trans Women. Trigger warning, descriptions of sexual abuse.

But as the Kimberly Nixon case showed, even woman-positive organizations can be no haven for trans women, since those groups can, in Canada at least, refuse to hire a qualified rape counselor simply because she looked like a man in their eyes. Presumably they would do the same thing to a trans woman who had been the victim of rape or sexual assault (or domestic violence, as Nixon herself had been.) Even though a trans woman, like many other women who have been assaulted, might long for an all-female environment to aid her recovery, there is no guarantee that she’ll be accepted there. And often no guarantee that anyone else will have her. Even in large cities, finding a trans-positive or even trans-accepting victim center is likely to be impossible. There is nowhere to turn for many trans victims of rape or assault, which is why the sexual assault numbers for trans women–high though they may be–are almost certainly drastically underreported.

Also, something to say is how, even in the bloggosphere, the reactions to abuse of cis women by authorities is so very different to the reactions from outsiders to abuse of trans women by authorities. Compare this case to any case of trans women being victims of police harassment when reporting their rape and how the public responded. (Not to say Hannah's case didn't have their dose of misogynist bastards commenting, of course, but Hannah didn't even experience what Josephine Perez experienced. Had Perez been cis, people would be outraged all over the blogosphere.)

iambickilometer writes: Five+ Ways Being Transgender in Fandom Really Sucks, and Why I Stick With It Anyway.

There are almost no transgender characters. I can't think of any transgender TV personalities or celebrities. No sports stars, few "out" politicians. You know what sucks about being a transgender fan? There are so few people to identify with. I watch these shows and read these comics and books and I look for myself in the characters, because that's what makes them good stories, right? And I maybe see my personality, and maybe some of my experiences, but no one's feeling my gender dysphoria. No one's doing their damndest to pass every day. They're all wearing stylish tight-fitting shirts or tailored suits or (god forbid) all-revealing spandex so we can see they've got the bodies they seem to identify with. Maybe not perfect bodies, but they're not wrong. They're not wishing desperately that they could tear off their chests and make their genitalia just disappear. They're not afraid that their voices, their body language, their face, or their friends or family will give them away. Not like I am.

I love many cisgendered characters, mind. Just like I love many straight characters and many non-Latino characters. But I want to be able to love transgender characters, too. And I want other people to love them, to follow their stories and root for them and see them as people and interesting, complex characters that they can ship and analyse. I want people to feel like they can write trans characters even though they're not trans themselves. I want to be able to say I'm transgendered and have people know what that means.

The Elephant in the Room for cis fans.

ETA: I forgot, something I wanted to quote days ago when I was still busy and I read the article was the bit about the "gender-swap" thing going on in fandom. Seriously, go read the article.

the_future_modernes at politics: Iran fights Fifa ban on hijab.

instead of asking that adjustments be made to satisfy their safety requirements, they just banned religious symbols entirely. Which is in my view discriminatory and high-handed.

Seeing what some famous football players use while playing? I don't see why they don't try to make some adjustments for hijab to make it what they consider safer. Seriously, I don't think they will be such a big things, maybe some rules for rivals about touching the cloth and some other little things, these girls are probably very used to play while wearing it and I don't think there are more accidents than the ones involving t-shirts and shorts (considered obligatory because people can't go on naked, which is, you know, social construction also! Well, these girls have to use hijab).

Both at Questioning Transphobia:

( Two very triggering articles about violence against trans people. They also talk about cis privilege )

I have an appointment with the doctor on Wednesday because it will be an specialist. And I'm a worrywart.

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( Triggering and very graphic. Violence against trans women under the cut )

gudbuytjane writes, The Angry Tranny: Tone Arguments and Trans Women.

While they can be applied to any dissenting voice, tone arguments contain deeply transmisogynist implications when used against trans women. They imply that trans women aren’t just angry, but dangerous, feeding cissexual fears of trans women being threatening. In a number of comments cis commenters expressed fear for expressing their thoughts on the subject. This fear of trans women expressing themselves, especially in feminist spaces, is based on seeing trans women as men, and then applying to them the cis person’s expectations (while denying the lived experience of the trans woman). To suggest that trans women are in a position of social privilege which can silence cis voices is ridiculous on its face, as it is to suggest I had – as an unknown trans activist and blogger – privilege over the literally thousands of cis voices disagreeing with me. Like most derails in oppression politics tone arguments are riddled with doublespeak and knee-jerk accusations of the same behavior being pointed out in the first place. The anger against threatening cis dominance is projected back on those trans people speaking up.

[...] Taking away the middle ground suggests unreasonableness by focusing only on the extremes of one’s position. One of the common responses to my critique of Lady Gaga was the sense I was comparing her video to violent transphobes. By willfully ignoring degrees of transphobic and transmisogynist behaviours this allows any criticism by trans people to be waved away as unrealistic or unreasonable. In a similar vein, one LGBT blog reported on my piece alongside a homophobic FOX News segment, and this was picked up on a few sites. The implication there was clear, dissenting trans voice = right wing homophobes. The well was poisoned, and although I hadn’t explicitly been called angry (well, the commenters did, but that always happens) the blog succeeded in making trans people seem unreasonable by association.

Lady GaGa Talks About Queer Themes in “Telephone” Video

GaGa said of the video which, as we all know by now, features trans prison guards and a hot homo kiss: “There are transsexual women and transgender women and suddenly it becomes poisonous and something else because there are some people in this world that believe being gay is a choice. It’s not a choice, we’re born this way.”

Discuss. What do you all think? I'm off now. I swear.

This can be extremely triggering and I'm sure will be painful to read, but cis able-bodied people have to do it. Read it.

is a dream a lie if it don’t come true / or is it something worse

A little while ago, Melissa was crossing the street in front of her apartment with her roommate, bringing home groceries late at night from the store right across the way. They were struck by a car in the crosswalk in what appears to have been an innocent, freak accident. Melissa’s roommate was killed instantly. She, because there was an ambulance less than a block away at the time, made it to the hospital with a shattered leg, head injuries, and Gods know what else, comatose.

I didn’t know, when I heard Melissa’s roommate was killed on the morning news, because the news said she’d been with a man, and my first thought was oh, God, is Melissa okay, does she know what happened, she must be so worried. I left a couple of voice messages, but couldn’t get through, and it was only once I saw a report with Melissa’s old name on it that it hit me: there was not a man hit in that accident. She was comatose, with friends there, and family on the way. The prognosis was very, very bad, like “we don’t think she’ll make it till morning” bad.

She made it till morning. And the next night. And the next. We all started passing around updates of how she was doing and taking time to mourn the schoolmate who hadn’t made it. Family arrived, connected with each other, and everyone took a few deep breaths. Melissa started improving, against expectations–eyes opening, snapping fingers when asked, responding in small ways to the people present though she was semiconscious at best and could not move. They made plans to fix her leg and skull and there was talk of moving her to a specialist facility closer to home, one with real support for people recovering from comas, and against all odds she was fighting. It should have been no surprise: she was always a fighter. She was going to be okay.

[...]

They had ultimate power over her–her body, her brain, everything. She was disabled, and couldn’t speak for herself, and couldn’t express her own preferences, and they were next of kin, and they knew best, and the authority for medical decisions was in their hands. They loved her more than anyone, and had her best interests in mind, and were just looking to her recovery, just listening to the doctors.

And if she woke up as from a deep sleep, she’d wake up into a world where her best friend was dead, where her body had been forcibly edited back to its pre-transition state and given a few more years of the influence of testosterone to boot, where her memory and self were hazy and confusing and nobody was calling her by the right name and pronouns, they were in fact pretending four years of her life, the four years she finally got to be honest and true to herself, those had never happened, and shh, she’s just confused, shhhh, calm down, let’s work on fixing your memory some more.

If she was–as many people deemed unconscious, or low-functioning, or unaware by medical professionals, as many many people with disabilities who can’t communicate the “right way” are–aware in any way of what was going on, laying there helpless and voiceless while her body and life and mind were edited and mutilated by loving people, wise professional people in complete control…I actually can’t finish that sentence, because I am shuddering too hard, because I have a hard time imagining a real scenario closer to Hell.

This is not an unusual scenario. It happens all the time, and in worse, far worse, forms. This is still practically standard in the history of how people with disabilities are get violated, and the intersection with trans status only magnifies it. If I got into a car accident tomorrow and fell into a coma, it could happen to me–I can’t marry legally, and my parents who are not part of my life could walk into the hospital and have my partner removed and do pretty much whatever they please with me, a possibility that gives me dry-heaving panic attacks.

Mako, como siempre, me mandó estos links geniales:

Transexualidad.com

Grandioso video con la actriz y activista Carla Antonelli. Muy bonito sobre datos importantes para la gente trans.

La página de Carla.

Par de videos sobre transexualidad masculina.

Entrevista y testimonios sobre transexualidad en España.

Gracias a Mako por pasarme este buenísimo blog:

ANIMA FRAGILE. Es de una mujer transexual que escribe sobre sus experiencias, y tiene un comic!

Es autora de Guía Didáctica Sobre Transexualidad para Jóvenes y Adolescentes. Muy, muy recomendado.

Gudbuytjane writes Day of Remembrance:

I used to distance myself from the Trans Day of Remembrance. It made me angry, and in ways I couldn’t discuss with my mostly cisgender community (as some of that anger was directed at them, inevitably). I would rail against the broader queer community only ever focusing on TDOR, and the implications that had for trans women. I found candlelight vigils a hypocrisy against the marginalizing and tokenizing that happens every day to us in queer communities, and I was infuriated that the only thing cisgender queer culture seemed to have as a comment on my experience as a trans woman was “You might die one day for what you are. Violently. Remember that.”

[...] The most important voices to be heard are our dead, and the responsibility for those voices lies with those of us who are still alive. Not for cis culture to consume, not even for ourselves, but for these women who are no longer with us; By giving them dignity we give ourselves dignity, and demand it from a culture which withholds it from us. Even if it is only knowing their name or a tiny bit of their story, it gives back to them some of the humanity their killers took.

Although cisdominant media inevitably focuses on the murders of these women, pieces of the stories of their lives nonetheless get through. This is how she died is supplanted for brief moments by This is how she lived. Amplify that. Know the stories of their lives, and tell the stories of your own. Not just on November 20th, but every day.

Today is Eleventh International Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Via Questioning Transphobia: More than 160 murders of trans people have been reported this year.

Gracias, Mako, por pasarme esto!

Disforia De Género.org es un sitio en español de información y discusión para todas las personas transexuales. Un sitio extremadamente necesario y útil.

Khaos Komix is a webcomic about queer people. I just started reading, and have only read the fifth story called Tom's Story. Which is great. It deal with trans issues without being tragic and melodramatic. It's humorous and realistic, I think it's very positive, but also can be very triggering.

Tom's story is the story of a trans man, we also see something of Charlie's story, a trans woman who is his friend. Trans people in fiction well depicted. I know. It may not be perfect, nothing is, but it's damn good. Fresh air since trans people are extremely disrespected in media.

( Tom's story, kinda spoilery )

I have to admit I haven't finished Tom's story, but it looks really good so far. Very recommended.

In other issue: Tsubasa fandom. Get over yourself. Entitled Fandom should be a second name for CLAMP's fandom. *rolls eyes to the infinite*

You know, since I'm not much into USA tv's show (and specially this kind), I just discovered, thanks to TransGriot, that America's Next Top Model has nothing more and nothing less than a black trans-woman contestant, Isis Tsunami. Before a white cis-woman says that those kind of shows are sexists, etc., I will say that yeah, but there will always be sexist beauty-standards that only white, able, cis-women can met. So things would be different if I was talking about some white cis-chick. (Heck, if you are a white cis-chick who can easily get representation? You know you shouldn't talk, no matter how awful you think those things are for you, women of color and trans-women aren't even considered desirable. Disabled women? What?). And it's pretty refreshing to see a trans-woman not being portrayed on the media as someone who needs to be ridiculed.

ANTM'S 11 SEASON SPOILERS: And of course, this girl already faced prejudice and bias from other contestants, mostly white cis-women. Googling about her, I just read things like yeah, Isis is male, and a priceless comment: as a biological female, I am somewhat taken aback that a transgendered person is being used to both illustrate an ideal female beauty and/or sell clothing to me. Check your privilege, don't you, miss?

And via the always wonderful Questioning Transphobia, here is something that everyone who knows english, can access to this, and is too brown, poor, disabled, trans-gendered, not-straight to be considered acceptable by our society, needs to read.

So let's admit it. Our lives? Our lives are an act of war. They are open defiance. They are invasion. They are insistent violation of the borders of a world that desperately pretends we do not exist. They are rude gestures and thrown rocks at the rumbling war machines of systems who choose to write us out of history, beginning only a moment ago and stretching back to the beginning of all things. By standing here and living, we defy the notion that we have no right to, and we scream out that no world where we are torn apart into nothingness can continue. Every seed we plant, lover we kiss, drum we beat is indeed a grave and mortal threat to the entire world as they know it, because our reality forces it to crash against us over and over only to find us still here. Even when we die of it, we are dead, but we are still here, we still are, we still were.

Some Foucault's book I have says that war is always fought inside every society, between powerful and less powerful groups, and every kind of classes. It's not exactly the same, but.

Y chau, gente corriendo! Hola... cosa marrón.

ETA: En español:

America's Next Top Model es un 'reality show' estadounidense en que un grupo de chicas que aspiran a ser 'top models' compiten unas con las otras, y son eliminadas, creo, semanalmente. En fin, en esta temporada hay nada más y nada menos que una concursante transexual de raza negra. Se llama Isis Tsunami y tiene 22 años. Me dirán que el programa es sexista y lalala, pero si sos una mujer cis-sexual blanca, pues, muy fácil hablar del 'sexismo que afecta a las mujeres blancas' e ignorar todas las intersecciones de opresiones que viven las mujeres de color transexuales. Y recordemos que los estándares de belleza, sexistas que sean, ni siquiera están hechos para ser alcanzados por las mujeres de color, transexuales, discapacitadas, etc. (Qué no me vengan con que 'a mi no me representan porque yo no me identifico, y cada experiencia es única, yo he sufrido siendo blanca/o, lala' porque... me conocen. Y si no, bueno: aunque NO te identifiques, eso no significa que toda una sociedad te asocia con tu raza, condición sexual, cis-género, capacidad, etc. Y tenés privilegios por eso. Punto, no hay nada que podamos hacer. Eso no quiere decir que no sufrís y que tu vida tiene que ser color de rosa, sólo que no pasas cosas por tu raza/género/capacidad/clase social que otras personas pasan. Esto parece bastante al azar, pero es que me recordó a una discusión con un hombre blanco que 'sufría' porque le decíamos que tenía privilegios masculinos porque cada experiencia es única, y a él le decían 'femenino o gay' porque era sensible! ¿Te acordás, Mako? En fin, nadie acá dijo nada como eso, pero tenía ganas de comentarlo. XP)

Además, es bueno tener una representación de una mujer transexual que no es ridiculizada por ser mujer transexual.

La chica ya ha sido víctimas de prejuicios por parte de algunas de sus compañeras, como muestra algún video de acá. Aparentemente hay una chica blanca (Hannah o algo) que empujó a Isis porque la tocó, o chocó con ella. Esto trajo la indignación de las otras participantes (especialmente las mujeres de color, aparentemente) que se molestaron con la tal Hannah. Todo esto lo he leído de bloggers o comentarios, así que no tengo idea. XDDDDD

Y por supuesto que, googleando sobre Isis, me encontré con cosas como (ya sé, nunca hay que leer los comentarios, pero...) ¿Es un hombre?, y una joya: ya que soy mujer biológicamente, me toma por sorpresa que una persona transexual se use para ilustrar un ideal de belleza y/o venderme ropa.

Ah, y descubrí que la bella Barbara Diop, que modeló representando a Zinbawe en la Copa Mundial de Cricket es una mujer transexual.