I’m still alive. Truly! The last three months have been whirlwind. I finished a draft of my thesis in January. Then I took off to San Francisco for six weeks to see loved ones and friends and somewhere in there made it across to the other coast for Lavender Languages. The trip was also to test the waters a little about opportunities in the US for post-PhD life. Nowhere has ever quite felt so much like a cultural home as San Francisco, and I’m having a hard time missing it now I’m back.

At any rate, post-PhD. In the belly of the beast. I know exactly what I want — to keep working, writing, thinking — and an idea of where I might do that, maybe. Or how. But it’s fascinating to learn how to negotiate a whole new academic labour market (not that my knowledge of the Australian one is really so extensive, more spectatorial.) I’ve re-written my CV a few times and am working on a “statement of teaching philosophy”, etc. The latter especially is pretty odd. Well, the cultural disjuncture is odd. My dear friend S. likens the standard Australian teaching philosophy to this pithy sentence: “I try not to turn up to class grumpy and I don’t drink too much when I’m marking essays.” Whereas those I’ve read, American style, take it seriously, or rather one must perform an earnest interest in pedagogy — and why bother to perform that earnestness when maybe you could actually teach better if the philosophy framing your work were on paper?

Anyhow. I have a thesis submission date. And the feedback on my work so far is that it needs some minor revisions, a very little restructuring, footnotes all formatted correctly and a conclusion. So if nothing goes wrong between now and then, I will hand in on May 10. And by June I’ll be back in the US for their summer, having a real and actual “proper holiday” with roadtrips, adventures in the South and gay Christmas. In the meantime I have three part-time jobs and two article deadlines to meet. Working working working. Probably not much time for blogging. But I feel the space in my head opening up to blog again…

Maybe about this: an ad for an Argentinian bank. In it, a bank’s “acceptance” of a transwomen client helps others around her become more accepting. A lot of people are apparently thrilled at it. I’m really not so sure. Capitalism and rather cliched tolerance discourse, all in one neat package. Ugh.

Here are a couple of paragraphs of what I’m working on right now. Comments please!

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In this part of the chapter, I want to explore the logic behind posing, as I’ve done, a distinction between two subtly different ways of articulating resistance to gender variant patient subjectivation. On one hand, as we’ve seen, a sense of disempowerment frames the experiences of subjects who come into tension with modes of gender variant patient subjectivation in Australia, but have no other option to fall back on. On the other hand, the transwomen interviewees who obtained GRS with Thai surgeons enunciated their disposition to gender variant patient subjectivation in terms of dissatisfaction. Initially it seems obvious that of course, gender variant individuals who were able to do what they wanted were happier with the overall outcome. This is the case even given that many of the transwomen I interviewed in Thailand and Australia, intent on journeying to Thailand, were either midway through a number of surgeries and revision work, or had yet to undergo any procedures at all. (more…)

In a bar the other night someone was explaining how some Duke University psychologists in the 1930s developed this instrument for measuring how happy people were. The instrument was a Euphorimeter, and they called the units of potential happiness ‘euphors’. Apparently, when people with very low euphor levels were shown how lots of people had really high euphor levels, the low-euphor people suddenly stopped being as depressed.

Maybe this is not the best metaphor to describe the last week, but it does come close. Transsomatechnics was by far the best conference I’ve ever been to. So little of the usual competitiveness and depoliticised intellectual wankery; so many people humbly offering their ideas in the spirit of collaboration and shared resistance. It was especially refreshing for people not to have to do the ‘trans 101′ spiel at the start of papers; here was a space in which some things were already known, and critical conversations could begin right away (rather than question time being full of random people whose contribution is “OMG that is so INTERESTING!”). A lot of fruitful things will come out of this conference, I think.

And then there was the brilliant high school dorkiness of the after-party, which was just like Trans Prom, and hanging out in Vancouver parks and streets and this tiny slice of beach, and catching up with people I never ever see enough, and making a whole crew of new beautiful friends. Seriously, if someone could measure my euphors right now, I might break the machine.

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.

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.

The man’s age doesn’t matter. He can be very old or very young. The important thing is that he doesn’t know where he is, and wants to go somewhere. That’s why he always catches a moving train, the way they do in American Westerns. Without knowing where he comes from (origin) or where he’s going (goal). And he gets off somewhere along the way, in a four-horse town with a ridiculous railway station in the middle of it.

Saloon, beer, whiskey. ‘Where d’ya hail from, bud?’ ‘From a long ways off.’ ‘Where ya headed?’ ‘Dunno!’ ‘Might have some work for ya.’ ‘Okay.’

And so our friend Nikos goes to work. He’s a Greek by birth who immigrated to the USA like so many others before him, and he doesn’t have a penny in his pockets. He works hard, and, a year later, marries the prettiest girl in town. He scrapes together a little stake and buys the first cattle in his herd. Thanks to his intelligence and knack for picking out young livestock (horses, cattle) he ends up with the best bunch of animals around — after ten years of hard work.

The best bunch of animals = the best bunch of categories and concepts. He competes with the other landowners, but peacefully. Everyone admits that he’s the best and that his categories and concepts (his herd) are the best. His reputation spreads throughout the West, and then the whole country.

From time to time, he catches the moving train in order to see, talk, listen — like Gorbachev in the streets of Moscow. Besides, one can catch the train wherever one happens to be!

More popular than anyone else, he could be elected to the White House, although he started out from nothing. But no, he’d rather travel, go out and walk the streets; that’s how one comes to understand the true philosophy, the one the people have in their heads and that is always contradictory.

This is when he reads the Hindus and Chinese (Zen), as well as Machiavelli, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Cavaillés, Canguilhem, Vuillemin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and so on. Thus, without having intended to, he becomes a quasi-professional materialist philosopher — not that horror, a dialectical materialist, but an aleatory materialist.

He attains the level of classical wisdom, Spinoza’s third kind of ‘knowledge’, Nietzsche’s superman, and an understanding of the eternal return; viz, that everything is repeated and exists only through differential repetition. Now he can engage in discussions with the great idealists. He not only understands them, but also explains the reasons for their theses to them! The others sometimes come round to his views with great bitterness, but, after all,

Amicus Plato, magis amica Veritas!

–Louis Althusser, “Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher,”
from Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

So Alexander Downer signed an order back in May to change the regulations governing provision of Australian passports. It used to be that transpeople could obtain a passport designating one’s reassigned rather than ‘biological’ gender for temporary use: helpful if you were already passing as something else but hadn’t changed your birth certificate, for example, and certainly used by many people who travel overseas to obtain surgeries. Under the new regulations, transpeople can no longer obtain a passport in any gender except the one assigned at birth, until one’s birth certificate has been changed. You can obtain a Document of Identity with no gender marker instead of the birth-assigned gender, but no new gender-designated passport. Here’s the relevant bits from the Passport News in July:

On the 31st. May 2007 the Foreign Minister signed Australian Passports Amendment Determination(2007 (No. 1), which spells out that a person’s identity for passport issuing purposes comprises four pieces of information; That is name, gender place and date of birth, as recorded on the applicant’s cardinal document. This amendment particularly affects the issue of travel documents to transgender people and new policy instructions are being drafted and will be released shortly via the content Management System (CMS)

Transgender people travelling overseas for gender reassignment surgery will no longer be able to obtain a limited validity passport reflecting their intended sex. Instead, they may be issued a limited validity passport showing the gender recorded on their cardinal document, which may be replaced gratis after the gender reassignment is completed (i.e. produces a cardinal document in their assigned gender). Alternatively a limited validity Document of Identity (DOI), which does no include a gender field, may be issued, letter 10 must be given to the client explaining the limitations of the document and Letter 11, acknowledgment of receipt of the advice must be completed by the client.

Transgender clients are often supported by active advocacy groups and passport applications should be handled sensitively. Any client issues should be documented carefully. Only cases that meet the new policy may be issued a passport in the assigned gender.

Apart from how this really messes up a lot of people’s ability to travel freely without harassment or suspicion, this makes me really really angry. The regulations went through sneakily without community consultation or advice. Although the advice from anyone would be that a lot of transpeople cannot access reassigned ‘cardinal documents’ for some time, because legislation on this issue is different for each state and often really conservative, so this effectively will prevent some people from travelling at all. And I can’t really imagine that DFAT would want that kind of advice, anyhow. It’s often a lot more difficult to obtain a birth certificate than it used to be to obtain a reassigned passport, too. And some people don’t ever obtain birth certificates in a reassigned sex, or want to: which doesn’t mean that they don’t pass as something other than their ‘birth gender’ and need a travel document that reflects that.

(I’m also kind of worried about my own documents. I can’t get a birth certificate that says I’m male unless I have a whole bunch of surgeries I don’t need. And I was resisting getting a male birth certificate anyhow; I would like my identity to be incoherent and I don’t often use my birth certificate. But I applied for a male passport last year on the basis of a letter from a surgeon, and got one. Now, apparently, it’s legally invalid. Thanks a million, Alexander.)

More blogging on the subject here; Sydney trans advocacy group SAGE’s take here; sign the SAGE petition demanding that the regulations be changed back here.

At Somatechnics back in April, I was lucky enough to meet the fabulous Susan Stryker and hear her present about her latest research project, on Christine Jorgenson’s career-cum-hobby as a film maker. The project relates Jorgenson’s visions of herself behind the camera, making films, with her production of a public self as the ultimate, perfect, man-made woman. Along the way, Stryker makes some great links to the racialisation of that vision of Ultimate [Trans] Womanhood, and talks about the production of ‘transgender whiteness’. Really exciting stuff. I also met Eliza, who’s writing on trans pornography at the Uni of Amsterdam and has been making queer/trans porn with various collaborators all over the world forever. Along with Zoo, we went swimming at Coogee Beach, just as a thunderstorm was breaking overhead, in the craziest downpour. Eliza gave this quite stunning paper relating Walter Benjamin to transness, with the result that maybe we can talk about ‘gender affinity’ as a concept rather than ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender role’ or gender… binary? Affinity as in affinity groups, but also affinity as in a space permitting the micrological difference of everyone to each other. Pretty damn fun. Actually, the number of trans theorists at Somatechnics was really heartening — it’s the first time I’ve ever felt surrounded by people who were at least on a pretty similar wavelength, politically and theoretically, and I’m hoping to be enjoying conversations with them for a long time to come.

Eliza also alerted me to the awesome, AWESOME cinematic talent of Oakie Treadwell, director of Phineas Slipped and a feature called Maggots and Men. Maggots and Men is a trans/masculine re-telling of the Kronstadt sailor rebellion. Gender anarchy, alright. Phineas Slipped, a short, is about an English class in a boy’s school. As the teacher asks questions about a homoerotic novel, the boys/bois flit off into porno fantasies about Phineas and what happened when they met him.

Finally, an article by Emi Koyama from Intersex Initiative about the change from talking about ‘intersex’ to ‘disorders of sex differentiation’, covering the intersections between intersex activism, disability rights work and disability theory. I’m not sure I agree with her on some points — ie, it seems a mistake to return to a model of activism that works mainly for people who feel they embody a ‘normal’ gender, rather than taking gender apart altogether. Then again, different battles, different strategies.

PS I accidentally closed the tab I was writing this post in just now, and thought I’d lost it. Then I realised Firefox has a ‘recently closed tabs’ option in the History menu. It’s like a magic ‘restore’ spell. One more reason to convert to Firefox, folks. I also have a ‘light’ bout of pneumonia and have been mostly bedridden since Friday. Bedridden and rediscovering the internet. Wish my lungs luck with their struggle against the nasty bug.

It’s been a strange week, full of stress about job offers that either didn’t fulfil the required money/time co-ordinates or failed to materialise entirely. May I register my utter disillusionment with the academic employment market just once more, with feeling?

I’m about to head to Sydney on Saturday for the Queer Space and Queer Asian Sites conferences. I’ve been trying to write part of Chapter One this week, and the paper I’m presenting at QAS (on which I’m also working) is from Chapter Six. You’d think this would mean a clever kind of book-ended, broad perspective on the whole project, but instead I feel torn in two different thinky directions at once, able to give neither my full attention. But the conferences look promising, and loads of people are coming — from as far as Bristol, even! I’m particularly keen to meet Bond, a Thai postgrad who I missed the pleasure of meeting in Bangkok back in June because her wallet was stolen on the day we were supposed to hang out.

Meanwhile, I’ll be absent from the blog. Not that I wasn’t absent already, but you know what I mean.

Back in full-blown thesis mode. In an effort at treating this blog like the laboratory it was once intended as, I’m going to explore some ideas here. Feedback and questions are welcome, as always.

At the meeting to confirm my candidature a year ago, one of my supervisors suggested I dig deeper into historiography in answering the question of how (I think) discourses of travel are central to the emergence of practices of transsexuality. At that stage — at the initial stage of rejecting transhistorical narratives that place transsexuals in every era and locale — it seemed fairly obvious that transsexuality was a specifically ‘modern’ thing. The particular technologies that enabled hormonal and surgical transition were only just developing in the early 20th century; they didn’t become legitimate medical practices until the 1960’s. And it was only at the beginning of the 1920’s that European sexologists split off same-sex object choice from cross-gender identification, arguing that just as there could be homosexuals who did not present as inverts, there could also be ‘transvestic’ persons who were not to be categorised in the same class as homosexuals. Hirschfeld locates what he refers to once as Transsexualismus on a continuum with homosexuality, but argues it’s a fundamentally different order of identification/desire to homosexuality. This is part of what enables ‘transsexuality’ to emerge as its own sexological category, with its own set of diagnostic procedures and (at that time, extremely speculative) treatments. (more…)

I’ve been trawling through my Thailand fieldnotes over the last week, and along the way finding unrelated notes that I meant to blog about at the time, but didn’t. My friend Dion told me I should visit Siriraj Medical Museum while I was in Bangkok. Siriraj Hospital is a large public hospital on the left bank of the Chao Praya river, just opposite the Grand Palace and tourist precint. The hospital has a medical and forensic museum, in which the embalmed bodies of at least one serial killer is displayed, along with various articles of evidence, such as blood-stained knives, the clothing someone was wearing when she was stabbed, recontructions of murder scenes, and most famously, a room full of physiological exhibits: dead deformed babies, cancerous lungs, weak hearts. I’d left my camera behind, so took notes. Here are some of them.

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I’m wading through the statistics gleaned from the survey on trans travel I ran earlier in the year. Aside from doing a crash course in how to get what I need from Excel, I’m finding some interesting stats in there amongst the more immediately arresting answers to open-ended questions, like “Why is it necessary for you to travel in relation to gender identity?” It feels odd, sort of Enlightenment social science-y, to have this package of ‘data’ that can be caused to ‘reveal’ information. Except that with 300 participants, this is a tiny sample, and even then, I wouldn’t want to regard it as proper social ’science’. Plus, a surprisingly large number of people either got bored and didn’t finish the survey, or just didn’t feel like telling me the gender they’d been assigned at birth. Which is kinda great, actually. I would be disappointed if it was possible to neatly categorise everyone’s answers according to a binary system that I don’t actually believe in.

Anyhow, on to my ‘findings’… Tonight, pace issues with binary gender, I compared gender assigned at birth with limitations on travel, and in particular, financial limitations. Financial hardship is one of the biggest themes of the survey, in fact: about three quaters of the participants said their financial status would have an affect on their ability to be mobile. I was wondering whether there would be a skew towards male-id’d folks or female-id’d folks in this question, and there was: more of those who said they’d been assigned male at birth (70%) felt their economic status affected their ability to be mobile than those assigned female at birth (50%). Crazy, huh.

At some point in the next three months I plan on releasing some findings, statistical and qualitative. This will be independent of the thesis (which doesn’t use stats much — I’m more focusing on profiles of participants and their experiences.) Anyhow, I have a mailing list, so if anyone’s interested in reading the results, leave a comment here or email me.

At this website, medical tourism becomes Medical Tourism. It’s basically a global one-stop shop for any ‘overseas’ medical procedure: heart bypass, tummy tuck, root canal work. You can clock on the map of the world, to check out what particular regions have to offer, or you can just browse through the site, enjoying the peaceful, soothing layout and the photographs of fishermen and rocky beaches, deck chairs and cherubs. What fishermen and rocky beaches have to do with having an operation, I cannot say — let alone cherubs.

One amusing, small US-centrism: the flight times to particular regions are all calculated from LA and NYC. Thailand, for example, is “a very long flight.” You can also obtain an online quote, I guess for the cost of the trip, the surgery, hotel rooms and maybe a bus tour thrown in.

Heh.

Beautiful sketch commentary on the Middle East, via Amie through Ange.

Today I’ve been thinking about the intersection between tourism, affective work and economies of tourist affect, and memory/memorialisation. I’m thinking about it because of a particular clinic I visited in Thailand, where gender reassignment surgery patients were recovering in a kind of bubble. Outside the bubble was Thailand’s landscape: the main highway of a huge industrial town, a grimy smog-filled road only crossable by the pedestrian overpass, lined with scooter shops, mechanics’ workshops and the shopping mall with its imported chain restaurants. Inside the bubble — inside a pink, white columned building, appropriate colours, broadcasting both the feminised service economy operating inside and the objective of feminising its clientele — patients basked under air conditioning in tastefully decorated rooms, checking their email on the wireless internet service, exchanging tips about dilation. The patients are surrounded at all times by a bevy of female Thai employees, some nurses, some admin assistants, some present merely to fulfil the myriad needs of patients for cushions, water, check-ups, conversation, affection, support. There employees seemed to be on call 24 hours a day. The managers of the clinic (who were also women) described this arrangement as a family, and actually the atmosphere felt more warm and inviting than a ‘real’ family could ever be. However, the patients are all foreigners, and the workers are all Thai, with the exception of one manager.

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