Where is the room to write thesis, when I’m so busy thinking about everything else? I’m replying on my ability to draw things together fast, because this week the deadline is Wednesday. 3000 words, assembled from notes. Whatever. At 4am, unable to sleep and now entirely nocturnal, I listen to The Pointer Sisters’ “Send Him Back”, Pilooski edit, courtesy of s0metim3s, and it mirrors a thrust into thought I’m enacting, arms windmilling in 60’s dance moves, or was that boxing…? And the new email list I’m moderating (which has a name I think, and maybe we’ll even get some institutional support at some point) is finally in flow. But all I can do is read people’s article recommendations and chew over stuff in my head.

Tonight I attended a HREOC sex and gender diversity project public meeting. I’m glad I went, although my horoscope for today said I’d be annoyed by a business outcome, and to “strategise, don’t nark off.” So right. Based on the initial submissions they received, HREOC has already decided that their project will focus on the question of identity documents: recommending federal legislation to make gender marker changes on birth certificates and passports consistent/coherent. So, defer thinking about affordable healthcare, Medicare subsidies, and forget removing gender from identity documents altogether. (S. suggested this latter solution at the meeting and a lot of people laughed, as if it was absurd.) So, the big question the HREOC people wanted to ask: “What line in the sand do we draw?” Because we have to draw a line somewhere, for people to change their document permanently from M to F or F to M. Surgery and hormones? Psychiatric or psychological assessment? Two years or one? Which legislation is better, Spain’s or the UK’s? Oh, so limited. So frustrating.

But the actual comments, the meeting itself, ran so far outside the bounds of this question that I started to feel better, optimistic. Trans legislative questions always run aground on these immense philosophical rocks that simultaneously connect very material every day existence with the whole epistemology of gender as a central category organising bodies violently, and why we find it so difficult to think without it. So, yes, why is it that someone’s gender is M at such and such an institution but F at another? Why is it that one can change one’s birth certificate, but when one gets pulled over by a motorcycle cop on a deserted country road, the cop can check one’s entire police record with previous names and genders and call one ‘Sir’, and throw in a few transphobic slurs as well? Why is it that in the Family Court, a transwoman suing for partial custody of her children could be denied it on the basis that she was upsetting her children by wearing women’s clothing around them? How do we think about these children’s desires to have a ‘normal family,’ and the violence that enacts against this woman, who has a life-threatening disease, and who just wants to be a ‘normal woman’? How do we think the crazily proliferating deployments of ‘normal’ in this context? How do you even think, when the story is so heart-breaking?

What really surprises me is the intensity of a lot of transfolks’ desires to gain recognition, preferably on an important looking piece of paper with a government seal. So much so that this validation forms a kind of fetish. If we have the piece of paper, everything will be okay. But what the meeting really demonstrated is that no, a piece of paper cannot make everything okay.

My favourite moment was when A. started talking about the costs of outing oneself as trans, and how much safer it is to be stealth. But staying stealth has to break whenever you witness violence erupt against another transperson. You have to stand up and tell people that’s not on, he said. “Do we stand up for each other? Can we have solidarity with each other, even if it means outing ourselves? This is the only line in the sand I want to draw.” What a beautiful intervention.

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.

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?

“I have the feeling of always wandering around, kind of alone, irresponsibly, while you’re sweating over capitalism. How could I possibly help you?”– Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers

This weekend there’s a convergence in Melbourne to discuss the formation of an oceanic anarchist (+communist? +autonomist?) federation. Oceanic as in the region of Oceania, but there are likely to be some oceanic feelings involved as well, a la Freud. A bit of desire for transcendence, a bit of a lean towards hanging onto the skirts of Mother Anarcho with a capital A.

I do tend to wander alone, irresponsibly, while other people do the sweating bit (well, who’s to say wandering irresponsibly isn’t its own form of sweating over capitalism?) but I’m kind of in a mind to attend the convergence. And maybe put in a word for the impossibility of a ‘common politics’, and against the federation being made in the name of anarchism. And get shot down, obviously, but hey…

For a few moments on Wednesday, I thought maybe I was being a bit too cynical about the apology. I slept in on Wednesday morning, so missed an opportunity to engage in the national screen-mediated moment of apology. I didn’t miss everyone talking about the event, though. It seemed important on Wednesday, in social interactions, to say where you were at 9am, to voice your opinion about how great Rudd’s speech was, and to lambast Brendan Nelson for missing the point. (Awesome post on that note here.) And, yeah, if the apology makes some indigenous folks feel better about the conditions of dispossession, I’m glad. Because who wouldn’t want to to feel better?

But on the other hand, I’m wary of the mass sentiment this has provoked. It’s not new for non-indigenous people in Australia to express sorriness on Sorry Day. But it is new for this to be a government-mediated matter, where it becomes necessary to echo the terms of the Rudd apology in order to articulate one’s disgust at the past and present effects of the Stolen Generations. And the Rudd apology is still insufficient, even if it weren’t subject to the critique below. Nationalist calls to end one bad epoch and start a new good one always are. (more…)

So there was this one moment at the Transdestinations “Trans Law” panel on Sunday when I seriously considered the tactical sense of walking offstage in a dramatic funk. I didn’t, because it would have looked like I was spitting the dummy. (I talked about this afterwards, I can’t remember who I was talking to, but I said this and they responded, “Yeah, Az, you would have been spitting the dummy AGAIN!” Oh.) But it would have short-circuited the falsely nice sense that all the panellists agreed on the definition of what was politically important. Plus it might have shut Jamie Gardiner up for more than a half-second. Three things about Jamie Gardiner: a) he was the only non-trans person on the panel; b) he wears knee socks; and c) he’s from the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission and is now trying to sell the merits of the new Victorian Human Rights Charter. It’s sort of vague how transpeople can benefit from the charter, but as Jamie says, “change is incremental and we don’t want to try too hard, but just write lots of letters to your local member.” Since he spent 50% of the session talking, this dominated discussion totally. He seemed blithely ignorant of how bad this made him look.

The amazing thing is that people did, in fact, intervene on the great non-discussion of the Human Rights Charter. Crystal Johnson intervened. Crystal is a sistagirl from the Tiwi Islands. I guess one of the only great things about being nearly the only Indigenous person at a trans conference is that the facilitators’ white liberal guilt will make them give you the microphone (nearly) every time you want it. She said something brilliant, which was, “Where are our human rights? We don’t have any. We’re getting raped and beaten up and having stones thrown at our houses. What does this thing mean to us?”

At this point, Tracie O’Keefe, a hardnosed Sydney trans therapist, spoke — directly to Crystal. She said, pretty much, “It’s up to you to stop them. Wipe the blood from your face and keep getting up in the morning.” There was no sense of solidarity, it was basically, “You have to do it yourself.” It’s one of the most offensive things I’ve ever heard someone say at a conference.

It’s not really possible to communicate how fucking angry that panel made me, and how frustrating the entire conference was. Politically, it could have been much more powerful and useful. I don’t think these are teething problems; I think they have to do with what political concerns motivate conferences, and how the people organising them imagine and design the space allocated to talking about politics. Just getting a bunch of trans ‘public spokespeople’ in a room together does not result in anything worthwhile, necessarily. Good conference design is all about figuring out which conversations need to happen, and why, and how they might intervene in a broader framework where the most important conversations are hardly ever heard. Facilitators have to be on the same page about what’s important, so they can direct proceedings.

I feel bad making these criticisms, because most of the organisers are my friends, but it feels even more important to say, given this. Next year might be better. I hope so.

On the other hand, the arts and performance quotient of the weekend was terrific. Lots of great shows, especially Byrne and Erge doing a slapstick wrestlers’ bout depicting transmasculinity as scarcity, and Crystal’s performance/autobiographical rant. And while I’m linking to pics, you can also spy a picture of me doing my dirty Dr Seuss poem here.

Wednesday I’ll be back in Melbourne town. Probably I’ll already miss the hum of the air-conditioner and the goldish fug of Bangkok smog, even as I cough up the residues of said smog all next week. I’m certain to miss the smells and the tastes of this place, particularly som tum on demand, menthol inhalers, cooling powder and sweet-sweet-sweet iced coffee. Also, I will miss people. Especially B. — we’ve been working together a lot, but we’ve also become great friends. She says all her friends leave Bangkok, and I hate to reinforce a stereotype. But I guess, after all, that this means I’ll be back sooner rather than later.

Anyhow, I’m going home to a huge week. Even apart from how first of all there’s an airport reunion to be had with an enchanting giver of Wizz Fizz, who has been missed like crazy. This would be huge and exciting enough on its own. But wait, there’s (a lot) more. On Saturday, Midsumma fun begins with Transdestinations. Transdestinations is the first ever trans-dedicated symposium in Melbourne.

This is the rough schedule:

• Gendermash on Saturday night, including performances by… Actually, the website doesn’t say who’s performing, but I can tell you that I am! I’m planning to read some porno stuff I’ve been working on specially over the ‘holidays’. (Also, Gendermash is hosted by the great PJ Fotiades, which is reason enough to attend even if you don’t like the sound of porn.)
• There’s an all day talkfest on Sunday, with loads and loads of amazing people, including visitors from interstate like Norrie May-Welby, and Julie Peters, and other denizens of awesomeness.
• Upstart Alley on Sunday night — featuring my favourite Aotearoan boys Tom Erge and Jack Byrne, plus Husny from Australian Idol. No I’m not kidding, he’s really going to perform! It’s gonna rock.

But the fun doesn’t end on Sunday, because Monday is the Big Day Out, and we’re seeing Bjork AND Dizzee Rascal AND the Arcade Fire AND LCD Soundsystem and possibly Billy Bragg or Spoon and finally, most unexpectedly, DR OCTAGON…. I never dreamed I would see Kool Keith perform as Dr Octagon live, it’s making me wheezy with excitement as I type this. Then on Tuesday, if I’m still alive, the Arcade Fire solo show. And then Thursday there’s some other spoken word thing I’m reading at, also featuring Ed Burger who I remember from distant Fitzroy spoken word days. Hopefully I won’t be dead from thrill overdose by then.

Some days the Internet is boring, and you skim through the RSS feeds with cursory attention. You know all these people, you already know how their new posts will read. More of the same. On other days you find yourself making beautiful discoveries at random, and whiling away hours. Here are two recent discoveries:

End Times, explorations on music and life out of Dorset, with a really lovely post about Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” as seen on Top of the Pops. (Via the also excellent and complex fangirl.)

Lauren Berlant’s blog, Supervalent Thought. As always, incredible.

‘9 in the afternoon’: a good way to talk about the odd machinations of my bodyclock. Last night I went to bed at 1am, woke up at 7am on the dot, read for an hour, went back to sleep, woke up again at 1.30pm. Morning in the (hot) mid-afternoon. Now it’s early morning and according to my bodyclock, well, just an hour or so after dinnertime. Weird.

Today I spent some time wrapping up loose ends for the Gender Centre project and TMGP. Over the last couple of weeks, people involved in the former project have been debating organising principles with some tension. Should we be a committee with a President and Secretary, or a working group with no defined roles? Do we need to be representative of the ‘trans community’, or can we try instead to be accountable to those people who might use the service we provide, without seeking to represent them? Do we need one media spokesperson and to broadcast a singular message, so that we gain credibility, or can we sustain difference of opinion transparently and non-representationally, even as we attempt to appropriate resources from bureaucratic state apparatuses of doom? Does it matter?

My answer is, yes, it does matter, but I had to scramble to articulate precisely why to people who felt confronted by the possibility that we might not care about our ‘public image’ or our credibility outside. This was an object lesson for me. I have spent years, now, working in a pretty intuitive autonomous/decentralised way on various projects. My intuitive explanations do sound vague, under-theorised and impractical. The upshot is, the working group is writing a document that says very clearly why it is important to organise autonomously, and how that will happen, and why we want it to happen. I feel reasonably optimistic. It feels good to be participating in the creation of a document that states our organising principles — autonomous, decentralised, non-hierarchical — and to already have found that writing this out clearly can result in a deeper understanding all round. (And to have won the battle against bureaucratic committee structures and community representation this time.)

At Recording Surface (back posting again!), Eric uses a Yo La Tengo lyric to prise apart the propertarian nature of intimate knowledge:

The get in the title of Yo La Tengo’s “Sometimes I Don’t Get You” should be taken in its double sense, as understand and as possess. The two are really inseparable. Complete understanding is an attempt to possess, just as possession requires a high degree of understanding. Under the rule of capital, the axiom of interpersonal relationships demands that the flows between intimates represent the totality of possible flows. Nothing should escape and nothing should stay a mystery. If some bit of history or a feeling remains a secret, if it is not shared or revealed, that is an infidelity. It is in fact the definition of unfaithfulness. Secrets are always dirty little secrets. In the Yo La Tengo song, the feeling of not understanding the other is also the sense of losing possession of the other and the discovery of something new only induces crisis:

Sometimes I don’t know you, it’s like we never met
The way it seems to me is that you’re having regrets
Am I clinging to something that’s past?
That was never intended to last?

Lately, fiction-wise, I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin. I’ve been working back through the canon, from Voices and The Telling to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. While the former feels as if it should resonate, in its experimentation with writing a differently gendered world through an interlocutor whose universe is distinctly binary gendered, The Dispossessed continues to fold me back into a consideration of its philosophical undertaking. It’s still the best fictional example I can remember of an attempt to think outside capital. But Le Guin attempts something more ambitious, as well: to critique the subjectivity of capital itself from a place entirely other. (more…)

On Friday I experienced the most hilariously bad doctor’s appointment ever.
(more…)

Those lovely folk at the FTM Australia website have just begun a new web forum to talk about identity in all its incredible shapes and forms. Readers may like to note the (unintended?) irony of the forum’s title: it’s called Borders.

That’s just what the world needs: more borders. More of a them and us approach.

I look forward to reading the flame wars. Which, no doubt, will be deleted even before they begin.

I haven’t had time to write a coherent response to Tampa 2007 yet, other than more expletives and hair-tearing. So let me direct you to more articulate commentary. Influxus has been drawing attention to some important points about the Cape York Institute, the militarisation of ‘aid’ to indigenous communities, and how that relates to contracts. S0metim3s has been writing similarly great stuff. Meanwhile, Wildly Parenthetical reacts to Howard’s plan for policing indigenous childrens’ bodies with her own affective register, talking about guilt and innocence.

There’s this article in the Village Voice this week about ‘the genderqueer scene’, featuring the story of a lesbian throwing a benefit for her top surgery. On one level, it’s kind of awesome that trans surgery stuff has become visible as a possibility for people who don’t want to go though a whole medico-legal transition, or who don’t see themselves as ‘changing sex’. On another level, I can’t quite bring myself to approve of the article itself without knowing whether people were misquoted or their pronouns were messed with. The NYC trans/genderqueer scene has been the subject of similar mainstream media attention before, with pronoun mistakes and associated errors, along a similar theme of, “Look at the crazy genderqueers! Whatever will they think of next?”

But the internal politics this article sets up are kind of weird. On one hand you have people raising money for surgery because they’re poor; you have genderqueer folks doing surgery; and then, as the voice representing the older, more conservative FTM perspective, you have Buck Angel:

Not everyone thinks the benefit parties are a positive—or necessary—thing. One of the world’s most prominent trans men, porn star Buck Angel, thinks that benefit parties only lessen the seriousness involved in transitioning to a new gender. “Ugh, don’t get me started. That’s my hugest pet peeve,” he says. “You wanna be a man? Act like a man. Men take care of themselves. Very rarely do they fucking beg for money. Get a fucking job and save your money, and save money like a man. Asking a handout for surgery—it really bothers me. It’s just wrong, and it adds to that element of trendiness. It’s ‘Let’s have a boob-removal party!’”

Sure, this is coming from a transman who commodifies his own body in porn films to make a living. I can see how the refusal to participate in gendered capitalist behaviours like saving money and ‘doing it all yourself’ would be galling to someone whose everyday life must totally enmesh consumerism/commodity fetishism with the fact of being trans. But it’s pretty odd how that ‘pet peeve’ — I assume addressed more to transmen and ftm’s doing surgery benefits, not merely genderqueers/dykes who don’t identify as men — sounds here like it’s making a more exclusionary point about how everyone getting top surgery should identify uncomplicatedly as a man. Later in the article, it turns out that Buck is ‘old-fashioned’ about gender and disapproves of the quote unquote ‘ftm fad’. Which as we know, is a ridiculous narrative used to differentiate ‘respectable’, ’serious’ transmen from those supposedly frivolous ‘genderqueer’ wannabes who are just playing with their genders and bodies when they articulate their own complex relationships to desiring or inhabiting masculinity. This makes me glad I never bought any of Buck Angel’s porn.

Reading:

• Wildly Parenthetical.
• Slaves of Academe on interracial marriage and miscegenation politics.
• Kpunk and Poetix on Lee Edelman, a crossover of theoretical fields (queer theory-freud vs high-philosophy mondopostlacanian-badiouism) that has resulted in some unintentionally amusing claims. Like, ‘the queer event’, assuming there was only ever one and we can know it: Stonewall, or Freud? People are seriously debating this.

  On the other hand, Kpunk’s musings on Rebecca are serendipitous (as well as interesting), as I’ve been rereading that novel this week, enjoying the slow build of our unnamed heroine’s desire for this hauntingly beautiful, but curiously also genderbent, object of desire: “I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the strong and clever hands.” Mmm, gotta go watch the film again soon.