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I really hope he doesn't vanity google.
Today's theme at 14valentines is transgender, and I wish I could say more about it, but I would probably say too much, and badly (I probably said too much, and badly, for body image yesterday, but part of why I'm doing this is to make myself actually talk about difficult things a little..)
I first learned about the idea of gender reassignment at a very young age, and it fascinated me, the idea that what being born as a girl or boy didn't mean you always had to be one forever, that sex was something you could change, that sex was something complicated and fluid. I thought about it a lot. I made up stories. I looked for books where the heroines cross-dressed (or just crossed gender roles. Or weren't male or female at all.*) Being able to think about it that way - to conceptualize gender as a choice - was a large part of what helped me when I was trying to find my own identity as a person and a female.
Then I actually started reading about transsexuality in the real world, and ran up against the fact that so much of the dialogue about it makes gender binary and fixed. And that I needed to re-stir my thinking all around again. I'm still working on that. I'm fairly sure that I have, at times, been fairly horrible to some of transpeople I know, because I just don't *get* the feeling of being that committed to one gender, and I want to do better. (When one's high school friend finally admits to one that he's always known he was a girl, and that he had always looked up to one as a model of femininity, "You've got to be kidding. Me? Femininity?" is probably not the most supportive thing one can possibly say.)
And while I try to figure out how to be an ally on that side, the part of genderqueerness that is about fluidity and many pathways remains something very dear to my heart.
By which I mean, I love exploring alternatives to gender binaries and I wish more people would write stories that do that, thoughtfully! I wanted to have one to post today, but it insisted on going all deep and stuff, and then there was Unexpected Accounting (Quickbooks is far worse than the Spanish Inquisition, when it descends on one without warning) so instead,
Here is fanart of Keith as a girl (after he has let Rachel dress him for a night on the town.)
(This was me trying to re-learn how to do computer coloring with a touchpad rather than a tablet, since my stylus is still AWOL. Hint: it uses a great deal of the smudge tool.)
*None of them, unfortunately, impressed me greatly, even at the time, though Rosalind from As You Like It was a personal idol for a time (she was even my avatar on JF for awhile), Ranma 1/2 gave me really interesting dreams, and everybody in the universe should read Their Majesties' Bucketeers.
I first learned about the idea of gender reassignment at a very young age, and it fascinated me, the idea that what being born as a girl or boy didn't mean you always had to be one forever, that sex was something you could change, that sex was something complicated and fluid. I thought about it a lot. I made up stories. I looked for books where the heroines cross-dressed (or just crossed gender roles. Or weren't male or female at all.*) Being able to think about it that way - to conceptualize gender as a choice - was a large part of what helped me when I was trying to find my own identity as a person and a female.
Then I actually started reading about transsexuality in the real world, and ran up against the fact that so much of the dialogue about it makes gender binary and fixed. And that I needed to re-stir my thinking all around again. I'm still working on that. I'm fairly sure that I have, at times, been fairly horrible to some of transpeople I know, because I just don't *get* the feeling of being that committed to one gender, and I want to do better. (When one's high school friend finally admits to one that he's always known he was a girl, and that he had always looked up to one as a model of femininity, "You've got to be kidding. Me? Femininity?" is probably not the most supportive thing one can possibly say.)
And while I try to figure out how to be an ally on that side, the part of genderqueerness that is about fluidity and many pathways remains something very dear to my heart.
By which I mean, I love exploring alternatives to gender binaries and I wish more people would write stories that do that, thoughtfully! I wanted to have one to post today, but it insisted on going all deep and stuff, and then there was Unexpected Accounting (Quickbooks is far worse than the Spanish Inquisition, when it descends on one without warning) so instead,
Here is fanart of Keith as a girl (after he has let Rachel dress him for a night on the town.)
(This was me trying to re-learn how to do computer coloring with a touchpad rather than a tablet, since my stylus is still AWOL. Hint: it uses a great deal of the smudge tool.)
*None of them, unfortunately, impressed me greatly, even at the time, though Rosalind from As You Like It was a personal idol for a time (she was even my avatar on JF for awhile), Ranma 1/2 gave me really interesting dreams, and everybody in the universe should read Their Majesties' Bucketeers.
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(Anonymous) 2009-02-03 07:43 pm (UTC)(link)