I too am Gwenyth Paltrow!
Props go to the steadfast activists against the exclusion of transwomen at the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. Transwomen are now allowed to attend, although the organizer will still be a bitch to them. Check it out at www.camp-trans.org
Interesting news, when Condoleeza Rice was at Stanford, she was a champion to some transpeople there.
I just finished reading S/He by Minnie Bruce Pratt, which was so lovely in it’s description of life as a butch femme couple, gender, homo/transphobia, etc. I found out the most intriguing, saddening thing in it about the Montreal Massacre. When Lepine seperated the men and the women, there was one butch woman who was assumed by him to be a man and sent over to stand with the men while she watched all the women get gunned down. Obviously it’s left her with a LOT of survivor issues. And it also made me wonder, why wasn’t this mentioned in the press? The entire thing was about gender, about men and women, but evidently there was no room to talk about someone who had survived because they were genderqueer. Not only that, but the fear she must have gone through, if he’d figured out she was female, she might have been singled out for even worse treatment (I shudder to think how it could GET worse) simply because he would assume she was trying to be a man, yet another feminist trying to make men powerless by usurping them.
I think I would like to make some work about Femme-Butch couples. I find the whole idea of butch and femme so erotic, and I think if there were no men, there would still be masculine women. Plus I think there are strange pockets of butchphobia in the community, even femmephobia. And then I think about how intense and powerful all my butch-femme relationships have been. There is something very complimentary about those roles working together.
Okay, this made me crack up and will keep me going for the rest of the day. I highly recommend blackademic.com for good blog reading.