My Generation

When I think about my generation of gifted friends, we had this ongoing in joke. “I’m going to get world domination.” “No, I am, because it’s my plan.” We totally jockeyed for position and went off and did what we could to find some piece of it. So I think I just went off to find the opposite plan, which is this. If you read it properly no bad things happen. But you have to be compassionate, or you can take really bad directions. And it’s not really in any order, and some of it is just fiction but I thought the stories were interesting. It’s a boy story, which is why it is so awful, but girls are in it too. And they’re pretty interesting. But I don’t want the boy story to overwhelm everyone else’s story. Anyway, I hope the friggin girls start talking on this thing, because they are so amazing. I love women. And everyone else.

Aden Bowman

Aden Bowman Collegiate, besides having been the high school of Joni Mitchell, had one other unique feature to it’s courses. If you were an enriched student, you probably took the psychology class. And that was the best class, because it was so weird! And Ms. Beatty could always find some way to relate the subject matter to her own life, which was so awesome because then you wanted to know more about her, she was trippy! She put a quarter to her head one day for like, fifteen minutes, just to prove she could, and then she talked about how.

I remember she started teaching us about cults and MPD and all kinds of weird mind control shit, and how to get people out of cults, and how brainwashing worked. It was a weird month, she’d show us a movie, she’d be like “And now class, part one, of Sybil!” And we’d be like WTF? And then she’d come back next class “Part two, of Sybil!” And we’re like what the hell is with Sybil? Poor Sally Field, man, was a weird movie. But we got it, it was such a rare sounding phenomenon though. And then when we learned about cults, it was another movie with some girl getting involved in some goofy cult. And there was one part in the movie where they were just jumping up and chanting over and over, and it didn’t make any sense, the chant, not for us anyway. And Renee was like “Are they chanting “Juicyfruit Juicyfruit?” And that was such an awesome idea, because if you wanted a cult of free thinkers you would make them chant about something that made no sense what so ever.

“Juicy fruit, juicy fruit, ra ra ra!”

Anyway, I remember some friends of mine and I were bored and had nothing to do and Heather just got a new crappy car and someone, probably Chris, said “Let’s go bother that cult outside of town!” And we were like, yeah, that is like such a good idea! And we drove out there and were snoopy little assholes and they chased us down the road in a truck. And we were all “OMG! Like, you guys, they were so mad! What do you think they’re doing? They’re freaks!” Anyway, I think since then that whole generation has been trying to figure out if Sybil really exists.

Madame Rosa

by Mirha-Soleil Ross

Madame Rosa is a 1977 French film adaption of the novel La Vie devant soi, written by Romain Gary under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar. Through his double identity, Gary, who had already received the Prix Goncourt in 1956 for Les Racines du ciel, received it again, in 1975 for La Vie devant soi, becoming the first writer to be twice attributed the highly coveted award. The film adaptation was directed by Moshé Mizrahi and produced by Daniel Pomerantz. It stars Simone Signoret as Madame Rosa, a frail, aging, retired Jewish prostitute and Auschwitz survivor who earns a meager living by caring for the children of younger sex working women, as well as Sami Ben Youb as Momo (short for Mohammed), a young Arab boy on the verge of adolescence. Momo hasn’t seen his parents in years. Him and Madame Rosa struggle to make ends meet, and as her body and mind start to fail, it becomes clear that Momo is the only person she has left in the world. Despite his young age, he has to help Madame Rosa who refuses to be hospitalized. He will stay with her as she faces her ultimate fears, prepares for her last and most difficult voyage. The story of Madame Rosa and Momo unfolds in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural community. The profound emotional bond between the two main characters, one an old Jewish woman and the other a young Arab boy, is what drives the film emotionally from the beginning to the end. The film also emphasizes the compassion and empathy that can be found in such a disadvantaged community context through the helping gestures of the secondary characters. Madame Lola, for example, while being bluntly described by Momo as “a transvestite” who had been “a boxing champion in Senegal”, is depicted in both the book and the film without any sensationalism. To the contrary, she is presented as a compassionate human being who is concerned by the poverty of Madame Rosa and Momo, giving them food and money without expecting anything in return. Momo says of her that “she’s really somebody”, that he “likes her”; Madame Rosa declares, “She’s a Saint, I don’t know where we’d be without her”. The dynamic represented between Madame Rosa, Momo and their transsexual prostitute neighbor, Madame Lola, stands as a good example of the type of deeply humanistic values and respect for human difference, whether that difference is of a sexual, religious, or racial nature, that is embedded in Romain Gary’s written text and further successfully emphasized through Moshé Mizrahi’s cinematographic representation of the story. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 1977. The book has been translated in English, but the same translation has been published under two different titles: The Life Before Us and Momo.

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www.lagalipote.wordpress.com

Trans Liberation

I would get the hardest assignment, wouldn’t I?

Kate had already drafted a battle plan by outlining the forces at work keeping in a police state and the binaries. And I knew even though I was the most boy of boys, I was still trans, and that meant my natural enemy was the police state. And like anyone, I wanted to be free. But I knew if I transitioned soon, I could get co-opted into upholding the police state through my own arrogance and ignorance of the true meaning of women’s lives. And I watched trans guys get co-opted by that force, not all, but enough to decide to avoid it until I could work out the puzzle. But this was a tricky puzzle, because now to liberate my friends I had to take on fascism in any form. And that was fucking scary because I knew I would be alone for most of the time. And I had no idea what torture I was courting, although I knew I was courting it. I made the assumption that I would be tortured in psychiatric care, so I started asking people about that just so I would know what to expect. But the mundane details still don’t adequately convey the horror, ever, and the pills were something different all together. I had not thought of myself before as someone who had an advantage because both sides of my brain could work at once.

The psychiatric care I recieved WAS torture, because it imposed an identity that wasn’t mine and I knew wasn’t mine. But it was so vast, that branch of power, and then I had to find out where it came from and how it operated and how to trump the mental health act, which was enormous.

I think by the end of my struggle to get out of it, I had forgotten I was on my trans liberation mission. Because when I started switching back into guy I was still on anticonvulsants, which meant I went through Asshole territory, something I’d been hoping to avoid. And my natural 2 sided brain wasn’t able to give me my morals yet, because I didn’t have my own female empathy to keep it even keeled. It was horrible, and I was like, fuck, guys really are jerks.

A number of trans men are on anticonvulsants by the way.

Men aren’t jerks if they know how to use both sides of their brains at the same time, but so few do, because that one sided brain makes it seem like you actually have power, even when a bunch of women are talking about trying to take you down because you’re being a dickhead. And they will take you down. I mean, I grew up with women, I know how intensely fierce they are, especially the generation I grew up with, because I helped them take insane risks and land safely on the ground. And they taught me to look for hidden messages, because that’s how girls talk since they can’t talk openly about a lot of things.

And believe me, sometimes when I was studying shit I would be like “Fuck, I could just be having sex right now, I SHOULD just be having sex right now.” But then I would see all my friends being terrorized and it let me put my own needs aside for years and years. And I would go back to researching something I didn’t even know existed for sure, but I operated on the leap of faith that something that crazy WAS possible. Because if someone as wild as me could exist on the planet, then obviously this shit had to as well. And I knew it did because every time I tried to make friends they would all start saying “Triggers, triggers.” And I’d be like, what the hell? I was just being silly. Why do I keep hurting you? What the hell happened to you guys?

I mean, a global Stonewall is pretty intense. But I think we have help now because lots of people hate that system, not just the trans folks. I mean, EVERYONE knows it sucks, and most of them forgot what fun people do live on the planet all over the place.

Anyway, I am a guy. And I think now that we know what guys can do when not properly supervised, maybe we can go back to fighting for equality across the board instead of just drips and drabs. I mean, you DO know who the enemy is now don’t you? They’ve been so obvious.

OMG!

I can throw a couple eggs in a freezer in case I want kids later with my DNA. Aaaah! What the hell, that would creep me out, like something out of a Ridley Scott film. Sarain eggs. Oh man, I dunno. And apparently they can grow penises in petri dishes now! At least they’re not growing penises on the backs of mice or something. I don’t think I could handle that. That would be too weird!

I’m stoned almost all the time while these drugs finish getting out of my system, as per the psych nurse instructions. It’s pretty nice, it makes things very silly and not so scary. Boys are silly! Really.

Dinner conversation

My family is reacting weirdly, some better than most. My mom doesn’t want to talk about it but she suddenly started cleaning, and cooking, and that was scary! My grandparents are over tonight and they talked non stop about the various things we were eating. They look really tired. My cousin sent me an email saying she had a dream I was a boy and she was all “OMG!” Because that’s the statement of the century. OMG!

No, she’s cool about it. I dunno, it’s funny. I think it makes sense to people, even if they find it unusual or whatever. I mean, I’ve always been a boy to them really. In my weird way.

Learning to date is weird though, that is so weird! Probably because of the unspoken gender thing, I mean, I’m sure I did confuse a lot of people as to why someone so guy like would not have come out already. And obviously I knew something was up. But mostly I didn’t want to be a guy without honestly understanding the problems inherent between men and women, and everyone else on the spectrum. I thought it would be a better idea to hold off until I could try and occupy every gender on the spectrum before deciding. And it was weird, because some of those genders would turn out to be just archetypes and not really correspond to an actual identity. I mean, the underlying tension of gender identity can be lost sometimes, because it is always this tense negotiation between your gender and the larger world.

Moon

I was like, eleven when i got my period. That was weird. I had to figure out how to survive my adolescence and I read the required girl books, including the classic “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret.” Which is about getting your first period. And it’s really dated now, I mean, her sanitary napkin was like some kind of paratrooper harness, so extreme! So I had to make a big fuss over my period.

I thought conceptually it was interesting, but aside from that it was just a pain in the ass. Suddenly I had to carry sanitary napkins and be discrete, and that is just beyond this boy’s capability. I also was made to care for a bag of flour for a week in case I got accidentally knocked up. I mean, everyone did. But what the hell, it was a bag of flour! That doesn’t teach responsibility, that just makes everyone feel dumb. How would you like to carry a bag of flour on the bus with you for a week. But it made me paranoid of having children, because now children weren’t much more complex than bags of flour, except noisier. And who wants to raise some powdered grain? No one!

Anyway, that theory about if boys had periods their bedrooms would look like crime scenes? True. All true. Tragic to be so obvious.

I used to write all my protagonists in the male position, I mean, up until I was twelve and decided to write about girls for a while. And it was weird, because I always thought of my characters as men, but I had to switch them and see if there was any truth to that. And there was, which made me happy. But that’s still not as complex as it really is.

When you are trans, sometimes it seems there are always two worlds going on, one that respects you and another that hates you. And finding your way through those two worlds is scary as shit! I could have come out ages ago, but I didn’t want to see history repeat itself and I didn’t want to live through the last Weimar Era. So I tried to hang on to it as best as I can and figure out how to be myself and live up to some code of ethics. But I lost them on the way. I think they’re back now.

Stupid Boy Tricks

Being politically aware in high school still didn’t stop me from achieving new and greater heights of male stupidity. I think my favorite by far was the time I spent jumping on a trampoline with Heather and Erin in the middle of a thunderstorm. Outside, of course. I don’t think we clued in to the dangers until a huge bolt of lightning snaked down and cracked right as Heather was suspended in mid air. I remember we all asked “Are you okay? Did you get hit?” And she really didn’t know, I mean, she could have been hit, her hair went all funny for a second. She’s a 911 dispatcher now. She used to drive us around and around on the speedway in her second hand car. Anyway, after jumping up and down on a trampoline in the middle of a thunderstorm, we ran across the neighborhood to my crushes house, and I remember she gave me this weird look like “Why do you do stupid shit? What the hell?” But I was also in a wet t-shirt, so that “You nitwit” look didn’t last long.

I was a clumsy boy though. So clumsy. My body didn’t make any sense. I showed my cousins how I could bend my arms once and they were like “OMG! You’re a freak!” I had to stop hitting myself in the chest for fun and that sucked. And then all my tomboy girl friends suddenly started trying to be girly and figuring out how that worked, and that was really funny because they usually ended up thinking the whole world sucked. I remember I had one friend who just had this run on commentary on how people sucked and I was just like, yes, that has some factual truths to it. And then my masculinity model was James Dean of course, so it got more bizarre because suddenly I was a rebel and a girl. And I remember part of trying to understand femmes lead me to rent every Marilyn Monroe movie. And I thought, this sucks, all she does is stand around smoking! Is that what girls do? Of course Marilyn in real life had her own deep issues.

And then my cousin had a porn stash that the family tried to burn, but there was a prohibition on burning in the city so they had to put it out. And when I raked the leaves, which was always my job, I started raking up all kinds of hardcore porn. I was like, what the hell? Why do I get the weird jobs all the time?

When my model airplane paint spilled under my bed and got me high in the middle of the night, yeah, that was probably another really good stupid boy trick. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to clean up oil based paint while high, but it’s not much fun. I only ever finished one model, the Titanic. And that seemed good enough for me. Such a pain in the ass. I tried to make Kit, the car from Night Rider, but someone vacuumed up part of the internal combustion engine and I was so picky that I never bothered to finish.

Pronouns Disclaimer

I know some people have adjusted their pronouns recently, so I apologize if I haven’t kept up to date, but half my brain was shut down, so really, it’s weird. And from where I’m standing right now the actual names for genders don’t matter, but I know people like to pick where they are. So pardon me for any He/She/Ze slips.

Girls Girls Girls

I don’t know when I decided I was going to learn to be the perfect boyfriend, but it was way before puberty hit. I decided to start asking girls about their feelings and their hopes and dreams and all kinds of things because I honestly didn’t know what it meant to be a girl. I was so curious. And then puberty hit and instead of just being friendly, girls started falling for me. And that was so weird, because suddenly I wasn’t just another girl anymore. And I didn’t know how to relate to boys so I was stuck with all these girls asking about their feelings and running away from googly eyes.

The googly eyes freaked me out when I first saw them, they looked crazy! What the hell, why are you looking at me like that? Are you going to beat me up? And as time went on I started realizing I was a lady killer. And that sucked even worse because now all kinds of girls were getting super pissed at me and calling me a tease and feeling played, and I didn’t even know where they were coming from. No one taught me the dangers of becoming a lady killer. And I felt like all anyone wanted was sex, because they never said anything romantic before getting all crazy, that was shocking. And I wanted a relationship, and suddenly there were all these girls demanding sex that neither of us understood completely. Because I didn’t have a dick. And that was fucking bizarre, for anyone chasing me. Because I was trying really hard not to be a guy, and that was a mind fuck because then these girls had to deal with liking a female bodied person. So weird!

And it just continued on, almost all my best friends have had some unrequited thing go on with me, and I don’t know what to do about that. But it’s like, as soon as people get to know me they seem to fall in love. So I go really mean to get them to go away, because that kind of feeling baffles me. And I feel horrible for not wanting to go any further than whatever.

I hate being a lady killer, but being an asshole is worse. I don’t know. Maybe there needs to be way more perfect boyfriends in the world, ones who actually ask about someone’s feelings. Really, that’s how you get ladies, you ask them questions and listen. It almost never fails! Everyone likes to be able to talk about themselves, because so few people are allowed to.