Travel: the time when you reflect on what happens when you’re at home. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of days about what I want to do when this trip is over. About what’s important, politically. I had this feeling in Thailand in January — a sense of dissatisfaction, maybe some regret about not giving energy to the political practices that I feel are most important. But then I came home and everything resumed. A good example of this: last year I wanted to start an autonomously-run gender/trans drop-in centre, and so did other people. That vision was rejected by some of those who got involved, leading to a huge conflict (as yet unresolved) about the vision, but the project itself has kept running, even in the absence of a clear manifesto. What I originally envisaged was a shopfront with genderfucked banners everywhere, a zine library, skill shares on all sorts of crazy shit, art making, computers for people to use, a one-day-a-week counsellor and a space for ‘activism’ to incubate, initiated for and by the lumpen queers and trannies. A place where bodies can be temporarily free from gender regulation, but which acknowledges that gender regulation is all about other forms of regulation, too. A lot of the other people involved in this gender centre project envisage something really different, something far less politically confrontational. Most recently, it looks like the project will be moving into an office space rented out by one of Melbourne’s mainstream gay and lesbian charities. This is not a bad thing, but it may not be what I want to make.

Perhaps part of the issue is that within identity-based organising, it’s hard to have conversations about class, or race, or strategies for coalitional resistance, or gentrification, or how and why the state sucks and should be avoided if possible, or how we need to rethink the concepts we use to talk about healthcare itself. (This is so even within ‘trans*’ networks, despite making an effort not to police participation along identity-based lines.) But maybe I need to be working on a project that deals with those larger issues, as well. Maybe I need to work with more people who can challenge me, rather than me trying to challenge others.

This is all a bit vague, but I just know that I’m not sitting right with my current level of political engagement. It’s not a panic along the lines of ‘omg we’re not doing enough, we have to act or die!’ either. What I’m feeling doesn’t issue from that black, icy despair everyone expressed around 2002 when the War of Terror really got started, that sense of absolute hopelessness. The world is getting more fucked up by the day, it’s true. But there are already so many people working in the cracks of the glittering cold machine-edifice. I just want to make more cracks. Sex-positive, genderfucked, sequiny, ebullient, hard-edge marxian cracks.

Anyhow, here are some things I’ve been doing in North America so far: talking trash in fag metal bars with new friends; taking a tour of Mattilda’s beautiful 7th floor view and comparing our experiences of global gentrification and rent craziness; cooking up ideas for kink skillshares back home; getting my tarot read by a posse on a ridiculously expensive kitchen floor in the Mission; meeting people I’ve known online for years who tempt me into eating amazing icecream, and having great conversations; not writing conference paper much, but feeling like I have my shit together enough to wing it.

Finally, have an awesome May Day. When I arrived in Seattle this morning I noticed big signs on the airport bus — apparently on May 1st a large march will be disrupting downtown traffic. Yeah like that. Or maybe like this: hundreds of topless taxi drivers converging on the city, demanding an end to [often racially-motivated] violence:

From Saturday morning in Melbourne to Saturday midnight in San Francisco: 36 hours of Saturday? Something like that. Nixwilliams and I entertained each other, did yoga in Auckland airport, watched old movies and slept, a lot, remarkably.

Crossing the equator in the middle of the ‘night’ the plane ran into massive turbulence. I’m not afraid of turbulence anymore. A little of it rocks you to sleep, like you’re in a train. A lot makes you contemplate sleepily how powerful are the forces outside the thin walls of the plane, much more powerful than your tiny body inside. You can’t fight those forces if they hit, so you just think about how great your life has already been. And you enjoy the adrenalin.

Once in LA, Nix went off to his friend’s house and I waited for my connecting flight to SF — whereupon my exhaustion from jetlag and a week of sleepless nights bounced off the LA vibe and turned into energy. I caught a courtesy shuttle around for a while, found a shower in a gym near some hotel.

LA is brown and dry and apparently it was hot yesterday there. LAX was full of middle Americans who were just like every reality television show you ever saw, except less white and with less money. Still, it’s so… American. Everyone fixing deals on their phones. On the flight from LA to SF, an indie boy in a black hoodie was talking on his phone all the way from the gate to the runway, trying to get his mother to arrange the donation of some hot $3000 display screen to their start-up without actually buying it from the friend/vendor: “This is not a joke, Mom. We might need your cash later on, so if we can get this hardware donated instead of buying it, that would be so much better….. I just don’t think you should be spending your money on this. Yes, we’re going somewhere. This is not a joke. We’re pitching ten concepts to Lego on Monday, ten concepts for the future direction of Lego. We just recruited a band in Los Angeles. We’re hiring a lawyer and a marketing director. We’re at a runway point, Mom, about to take off. We’re actually literally on a runway here. Listen Mom, I’ve gotta turn my phone off because we’re about to take off and I’ll get in trouble. Bye Mom. I’ll call you when we land.” Then he turned to his friend, in North Face gear: “Dude. This is exactly why I hate doing financial transactions with her.” In SF baggage claim I noticed the same guy was carrying what looked like a Ron Paul memorabilia poster in a covered plastic wrapper. Dude! You’re a walking cliche.

By constrast, SF is very laid back. It feels like Melbourne, except for the cars on the wrong side of the road. And how people talk funny.

I’m off to the US and Canada for two weeks. Yay.

Last week, Erin Kyan at Fat Sexy Gender posted a really anger-inducing account of his ‘treatment’ by Monash Gender Clinic. He is transitioning, and went on the clinic program to access testosterone and chest surgery. After having been on the program for some time, Erin has been told that he cannot access hormones or surgery until he recovers from CFS/fibromyalgia and loses weight:

I have been told (to my face) that I need to lose weight before I will be allowed to transition - and when I explained that I cannot exercise I was told that I can “take pills for it nowadays”. I have been told (to my face) that I should wait until my chronic illness that I have had for ten years gets better before I transition.

I’ve also been scowled at, looked down upon and scoffed at for being bisexual, polyamorous, and unemployed (even though, you know, I AM DISABLED.)

… So I go to the doctor. I tell him what the problem is. I tell him that I need to lose weight in order to receive medical treatment. I tell him why I cannot lose weight the “normal” way — I already eat well and I cannot exercise due to that whole disability thing.

He spends 20 minutes telling me that I am disgustingly overweight and it’s all my fault. Oh, and by the way, I’m not really disabled — I’m just fat. And that whole thing where I can’t walk? The cure for that is to walk, apparently!

Apart from how this is a really clear-cut case of discrimination, so clear-cut that it could easily be taken to the Equal Opportunity Commission, Erin’s story exemplifies the sheer incompetence of the Monash team. I was under the impression that taking amphetamines to lose weight went out of medical fashion some time in the 1980s.

It’s also just really infuriating and I am really pissed off that I don’t know what to do, at all, to make things better for Erin. Or for any number of people who call TMGP telling similar stories.

I’m really looking forward to the release of Fatih Akin’s new film, The Edge of Heaven. Akin directed the incredible Head On (or rather, Gegen Die Wand, not to be confused with Ana Kokkinos’ film adaptation of Loaded). The Age entertainment guide did a story on Akin today, burbling ridiculously about his ‘political humanism’ and how even if he wants to make films about American pioneers colonising the Wild West (the project he’s now working on), he’ll eventually have to return to speaking about the Turkish-German ‘cultural divide he springs from’. Because apparently, according to liberal white film critics, migrants are destined always only to talk about their experiences; that’s all they’re good for….

Never mind. From the same article I learnt that Hanna Schygulla is in Edge of Heaven. Even more reason to go see it pronto. Here she is, playing a German mother hanging out with her daughter’s new girlfriend, an activist without papers fleeing Turkey:

What a lovely moment of meta-commentary on European imperialism…

Divination for the postmodern worker….

It’s kinda embarrassing to plug something that turned up in my last.fm ’shoutbox’ unsolicited. But the Stereogum tribute to Björk’s Post beguiles me. Listening to Post for the first time was like learning to swim without breathing. In the front room of a terrace house in Carlton where for the first time ever I had a special writing desk, I would play “Hyperballad” over and over. I knew exactly what she was talking about: “I go through all this/Before you wake up/So I feel happier/ To be safer again with you.” So much labour, working on oneself in the cracks where no-one else notices, to be safer — happier.

Listening to the tribute album, I’m not so impressed with Dirty Projectors’ version of “Hyperballad”. It’s kind of cute, abrupt and hyperactive, exactly what the original wasn’t, with a gunshot bass drum going off every couple of seconds at seeming random. But the Final Fantasy/Ed Droste rendition of “Possibly Maybe” captures that submerged quality, how everything moves so slowly under water. Because of the pressure, you see. Which translates musically as tension, smooth tension. And I love Atlas Sound’s “Headphones”, although Atlas Sound are experts at submerged swirly dreaming music. This is their home team advantage…

(Play the tracks and download here)

I’m trying to write my paper for Transsomatechnics, which is in two and a bit weeks, and it’s going dreadfully. Some horrendous stomach bug is making me nauseous and unable to eat properly. On Wednesday I’ve got to pick up 70 essays to mark before I leave for the US. Worst, I brought some bad administrivial magic down on myself, which means that the correct paperwork approving me for a six month scholarship extension hasn’t been processed. It’s possible that my scholarship could stop this week, unless I act fast. Things feel overwhelming, exactly as if everyone were suddenly bursting into musical numbers every third minute and burning themselves up in the process.

(Yes, it’s only six months until I ‘finish’ my ‘thesis’, apparently. The arrival of which foreboding date is surely connected to my body packing it in.)

Therefore: time to get into blanket-couch formation and revisit the Scooby Gang, who always show me how to weather the world. It’s a bit soppy, but “I’ve Got A Theory” is exactly what I need to hear right now. There’s nothing I can’t face. Except for bunnies. And even bunnies can be stared down, with their little red eyes and that carrot fetish.

Today felt a bit like this. Except no-one died. Just a something.

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly New World Writing to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the Golden Griffin I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the Park Lane
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a New York Post with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 Spot
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

It’s actually impossible for me to watch this. I keep pausing it, switching tabs, going back to the clip only to be astounded by another of Oprah’s really fucking odd statements. Apparently until not too long ago, gay teenagers understood themselves as being ‘in the wrong body’, genderwise. There’s other stuff, which you can see for yourselves. Mostly, I can’t watch the clip because I identify with Thomas Beatie, his nervousness, his desire to please and be seen as sympathetic — even the attempt at which is sure to be coded as ‘feminine’, because a ‘real man’ never explains, never apologises. I relate to the attempt to tell a complex story publicly that in the soundbite logic of the medium, winds up seeming implausible. And I relate, more than a tiny bit, to his desire to bear a child.

Of course, while the mainstream media has a poke, ftm email lists and communities are going just as crazy, if not more so. First, you have the transmen who respond with pure disgust, rage and a flat dictate: “Men don’t have babies; therefore Thomas Beatie is a woman.” The more interesting arguments touch on the politics of visibility and invisibility. A lot of transmen seem to think Beatie should have just borne his baby quietly without making a stink. Some of these arguments are conservative: the logic that as long as a pregnant transman ‘does it’ in private, it’s acceptable; when it’s public, it becomes unacceptable, because it tarnishes the image of transmen as authentically male. The other argument against visibility is far more precise: given the swing of public aympathy against Beatie, law-makers will use this example as a way to argue for regulating access to change of gender markers even more than they already are, possibly requiring infertility as a condition of any rights. I am a fan of clandestinity, at times; I don’t think visibility or recognition is necessarily always the right answer. But I’m wondering how in this case, various transpeople’s desire for a clandestinity which facilitates more freedom seems to be collapsing into the logic that all ‘authentic’ transpeople desire to remain stealth, and that stealth (passing as ‘real’ men and women) should, in fact, be a condition of recognition. When does a radical clandestine politics mutate into a conservatism that simply preserves the status quo?