Reblogging in support/solidarity.

whencylonsdream:

Like, even from people that are fucking awesome about everything else.

It never seems to cross peoples minds to be inclusive towards trans women.

It never seems to cross peoples minds to acknowledge trans women.

It never seems to cross peoples minds that without inclusive and acknowledging…

So the amazing Reina has a beautiful blog that I encourage all of you to check out. Recently, she’s been posting a lot of archival & historical interviews & articles about Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). This history is vitally important to know and to remember.

And I know we live in the internet age of FAST! FAST! FAST!, but I’d encourage you, as much as possible, to read this blog like you’d read a book you were savoring. Sit the hell down in a comfy chair, pour yourself a cup of tea or coffee. Take your time. Let the words sink in.

Above all, don’t skim it! This work matters way too much for skimming.

I am pleased as punch to announce this year’s Girl Talk cast. Please spread the word, and come to the show on March 29th!

Girl Talk: A Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
7:00pm - 10:00pm
San Francisco LGBT Community Center - Rainbow Room
1800 Market Street between Octavia & Laguna
Tickets: $12-$20 (no one turned away)
WEB: http://queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/HealthyC/girlTalk12.html
BUY TIX HERE: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/223538 (We strongly recommend that you get tickets in advance — we sold out very fast last year.)
FACEBOOK INVITE: http://www.facebook.com/events/217563091671401/

Curated by Gina de Vries, Elena Rose, and Julia Serano.
Generously supported by the Queer Cultural Center Healthy Communities program.

Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. Trans and cis women are allies to each other every day — from activism that includes everything from Take Back the Night to Camp Trans; to supporting each other in having “othered” bodies in a world that is obsessed with idealized body types; to loving, having sex, and building family with each other in a world that wants us to disappear.

Girl Talk is an annual spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships. Trans and cis women will read about their relationships of all kinds – sexual and romantic, chosen and blood family, friendships, support networks, activist alliances. Join us for a night of stories about sex, bodies, feminism, activism, challenging exclusion in masculine-centric dyke spaces, dating and breaking up, finding each other, and finding love and family.

Performer Bios

Charlie Anders hosts and organizes the award-winning Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco, which was namechecked in Armistead Maupin’s latest Tales of the City novel. She’s had stories in Best Lesbian Erotica 2010, Sex For America: Politically Inspired Erotica, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009 and 2011, and Tor.com. She co-founded other magazine: the magazine for people who defy categories, and currently blogs at io9. She won the 2010 Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

Dominika Bednarska is a postdoctoral fellow at U.C. Berkeley, where she completed her PhD in English and Disability Studies.  Her writing has appeared in Wordgathering, The Bellevue Literary Review, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, What I Want From You: An Anthology of East Bay Lesbian Poets, Ghosting Atoms, and Cripping Femme. She is currently working on expanding and revising her solo show, My Body Love Story, that will be performed this spring and summer. For more information, go to dominikabednarskaspeaks.blogspot.com or become a fan on Facebook.

Gina de Vries founded and co-curates “Girl Talk” with Elena Rose and Julia Serano. She’s thrilled that the show is still going strong after 4 years. Gina has taught Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop since 2008, and you can find her work anthologized all over, from the San Francisco Bay Guardian to Coming & Crying. A graduate of Hampshire College, Gina is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing and Master’s in English at San Francisco State University. The Record, her experimental fiction novel about sex, adolescence, music, San Francisco, and growing up queer, should be hitting bookstores in 2013. Find out a whole lot more at ginadevries.com. Twitter: @queershoulder. Tumblr: queershoulder.

DavEnd is a tenderhearted, genderqueer, costume designing, accordion wielding songwriter, performing artist and designer based in San Francisco. Ms. End has released two studio albums (How To Hold Your Own Hand, Fruits Commonly Mistaken For Vegetables) and for the past 5 years, has been touring extensively in the U.S., performing at queer teen centers, festivals, colleges, theatres and backyards. DavEnd’s current project, Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical!,brings together the worlds of music and radical performance art in a theatrical extravaganza, exploring the effects of heterosexism and street harassment on the development of queer identity.  

Thea Hillman is a mother, writer, and performer. Her book of poetry and fiction “Depending on the Light,” was published in 2001. Her Lambda award-winning memoir, “Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word” came out in 2008 and is taught at universities around the country.

Nomy Lamm is a writer, musician, performance artist and voice teacher.   Her band, nomy lamm & THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, is a flexible platform for collaboration with everyone and everything, including other musicians, artists, poets, puppeteers, spectators, and the moon.  She performs regularly with Sins Invalid, creating musical dreamworld performance art about disability, sexuality and social justice.  She is currently working on her MFA thesis, a collection of short stories called “515 Clues,” and writes an advice column for Make/Shift magazine called “Dear Nomy.”

Emily Manuel is a Greek-Australian becoming-Jewish writer, blogger, editor, sometime academic, musician, partner, mother to four cats, and beekeeper.  She found a bee and she kept it - that’s the first rule of beekeeping.  She is editor-in-chief at Global Comment magazine, and her work has also appeared at Questioning Transphobia, Tiger Beatdown, Billboard magazine, Bitch magazine, and many others.  She has a PhD in English from Murdoch University in Australia gathering dust in the corner.

Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza, rode stories out of rural Oregon and hasn’t stopped making words since.  In her second year co-curating “Girl Talk” and fourth as a performer, she writes online as “Little Light,” travels the country as a preacher and poet, and has dedicated herself to the work of radical love, queer theology, and justice for those who live at the edges.  Her work has turned up everywhere from college classrooms to bathroom mirrors to protest marches, in magazines including Aorta and Make/Shift, and on the acclaimed spoken-word album It Is Better to Speak!  Rose is currently finishing her first book, Mountain of Myrrh, forthcoming from Dinah Press, and attends seminary in Northern California, where she resides with her wife and a small but well-loved pomegranate tree.

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, performer and activist. She is the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, a collection of personal essays that reveal how misogyny frames popular assumptions about femininity and shapes many of the myths and misconceptions people have about transsexual women. Julia’s other writings have appeared in anthologies (including Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Word Warriors: 30 Leaders in the Women’s Spoken Word Movement and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape), in feminist, queer, pop culture and literary magazines and websites (such as Bitch, AlterNet.org, Out, Feministing.com, and make/shift), and have been used as teaching materials in gender studies, queer studies, psychology and human sexuality courses in colleges across North America.  juliaserano.com.

Jos Truitt is a Boston native and recent transplant to San Francisco. She joined the team at Feministing.com in July 2009 and became an Editor in August 2011. Jos attended Hampshire College where she coordinated the school’s annual national reproductive justice conference. After college she worked in the reproductive health, rights and justice movements in Washington, DC. Jos has spoken and trained at numerous national conferences and college campuses about trans issues, reproductive justice, blogging, feminism, and grassroots organizing. Jos is currently pursuing an MFA in Printmaking at San Francisco Art Institute.

Pidge Vera is a mixed-race queer femme writer, performer and choreographer, living an awesome and strangely grown up life in Oakland, CA. Her interests and activist work include, but are not limited to: self-care, feminism, sexual assault and interpersonal violence prevention and advocacy, storytelling, dance, queers, femmes, fashion, baking killer peanut-butter cookies, and passionate karaoke performances. She is currently adapting her research thesis on eating disorders, narrative construction, and embodied practice into a book, and will talk about it at length if you let her. Pidge resides with her wife and Cleis, the littlest of pomegranate trees.

jackrad:

remember how it was a thing in the late 1990s to early 2000s that people thought of trans guys as underrepresented in terms of literature about trans folks and so white trans guy college students who started transitioning around that time started talking about themselves in these really…

powerful & important. read it.

transcreature:

[TW warning: anti-trans bigotry and violence]
The following is a piece I wrote for a zine, QUAC , about the topic of Queer Violence

Queer People Not My People

I expected to lose a lot transitioning from a gay identified boy to a trans woman. I’ve lost family, once-called “best friends”, and the ability to find a man on A4A for some anonymous one night stands. What I didn’t expect was the loss of queer communities as a safe space for me. I once idolized queer spaces, now I always enter them in trepidation, even the ones I’ve helped build and maintain. I write this piece still reeling at how much anger I felt last night, still picking out the tear-dried clumps of mascara from my eyes. It’s the slow realization that I am often the only trans woman in the room, and that queer people love throw around my identity as part of their little acronym, but would rather not hear from me.

Read More

I love all of this. Especially this passage right here. I’m not trans, so I can’t speak to what it is to enter into trans activist spaces as a trans sex worker and hear this stuff. But I’ve experienced a very similiar dynamic in many queer activist circles and reproductive justice activist circles. It’s “cool” if I do queer, feminist porn (which, for the record, I have done & like doing — but it’s not the only kind of sex work I’ve done). It’s very much NOT cool if I talk about my other experiences working in the sex industry.

Here are some of the dumbass things you’re probably going to hear regularly when you enter non-sex working trans spaces, especially trans activist spaces (and these activists will, of course, lament the lack of involvement from sex workers in their efforts).

Sex work is perfectly fine as a choice, but we need to talk about how survival sex work and “trafficking” are hurting our community!

What they’re actually saying here is that sex work is fine if you have an MA in Women’s Studies and work in queer feminist porn (which they can happily jerk off to without feeling like bad feminists). These same people usually have only a tenuous grasp on the concept of trafficking, probably don’t have any sex workers in their close circle of friends (unless they have the aforementioned MA in Women’s Studies). They are quick to become angry if you suggest that coercive sex work is actually rare, statistically, or that you chose street sex work because it made sense for your life at the time.

All sex work is survival sex work, in exactly the same way that I could describe all jobs at McDonald’s as survival food service jobs.

I’ve got a piece in Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica, which is Tristan Taormino’s new anthology. It is very cool to open up a book that features the work of so many friends I love and authors I admire. I’m honored to be sharing space with alla y’all.

My piece is called “Cocksure,” and it is easily the tenderest smut I have ever penned. It’s a sweet & dirty age-play fantasy involving teen angst, rock & roll, and Times Square porn theaters… and I’d keep talking, but I don’t wanna give any more away. I wrote “Cocksure” a couple years ago; I’m very proud that it’s finally in print somewhere.

But the point of this post: Imagine my surprise when I got my contributor’s copy and found myself right at the beginning! WHOA! I’ve never had a piece kick off an anthology before. It’s an honor. Thanks, Tristan. <3

Read it, now. I love this whole article, but the Guided Visualization at the end really hits it home. IMOGENIUS. :)

I love Red Durkin, and I love Topside Press. Trans authors, check out their awesome Call For Submissions — short works of literary fiction are due August 31st. People who are neither trans nor authors? Make sure you still spread this video around, and tell your trans writer friends!

This is Part Two of my & Elena Rose’s collaborative performance at “Girl Talk: a trans & cis woman dialogue” (here is Part One). I just noticed that in my post linking to all the Girl Talk 2011 videos, Part One got posted twice, and Part Two didn’t get posted at all (it has since been fixed). :/ So in case you missed it when you read that post, here’s Part Two!

This one is very scary for me to post — but it’s also my favorite of the two. Enjoy!

I am very pleased to announce to that Girl Talk 2011 is now up on YouTube! Big warm thanks to Handbasket Productions for filming the event & getting it up online. You can see the entire show, from start to finish, right over here. I’m also embedding my own performance and the show in its entirety into the text of this post. Reblog! Send it your friends! Let us know what you think!

And in case you don’t know about Girl Talk, here’s our schpeal:
Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. “Girl Talk: a trans & cis woman dialogue” is a spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships.

I co-curate Girl Talk with the fabulous Julia Serano & Elena Rose. Julia and I have been putting the show on since 2008 (our first show was in 2009, but we’d been developing the concept for about a year at that point). We were very honored to have Rose join us as a co-curator this year.

For the 2011 show, Julia MC’ed, and Rose & I did a collaborative piece together to kick off the night and get things rolling. Our other amazing performers were Mira Bellwether, Tara Hardy, Tobi Hill-Meyer, Marlene Hoeber, Sadie Lune, and Ray Rubin. 

It was an absolute pleasure to work on a collaborative piece with Rose. I don’t know if people know this, but before Girl Talk this year, I’d never collaborated on a piece of creative writing or a performance with another person. And I can’t think of a better co-conspirator than Rose. In addition to being an artistic colleague, she’s also a dear & close friend. I’m really proud of what we came up with: a four-part piece addressing both the origins of Girl Talk and the process of curating Girl Talk 2011, and the intersections and overlaps between trans experience and intersex experience. This was an extremely personal and vulnerable piece for me to perform, but I’m really proud of the results. Take a look:

Part One:

Part Two:

And here’s the whole show (about 2 hours) from start to finish:

Enjoy, all. Do let us know what you think.

If you’re interested in bringing Girl Talk to your town, campus, or community center, please write to TalkToGirlTalk[@]gmail.com! We’re in the process of planning a tour, hopefully for this summer. :)

Good stuff, this!