Women Demanding Change Now: The Dehumanization of Transsexual Women through the Gay Male Hollywood Lens

July 13, 2010 — Suzan

MAGNET’S Panel Discussion:

Women Demanding Change Now:  The Dehumanization of Transsexual Women through the Gay Male Hollywood Lens

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July 15th- 7-9:30pm

Plummer Park Community Center,Room#6.

7377 Santa Monica Blvd.(Cross street is Martel)

West Hollywood, CA 90046
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Media Advocates Giving National Equality to Transsexual & Transgender People (MAGNET)

MAGNET is an anti-defamation organization dedicated to educating the media about transsexual and transgender issues, as well as pushing for more authentic and positive portrayals of trans people in the media.

Event will be filmed, so attendees must be okay with this.

Some topics which will be discussed:

• Finding solutions to build authentic unity and trust within LGBT community

• Mental/physical violence incited by messages in film and TV

• Gay males producing stigmatizing, over the top & unkind images of transsexual women

• Gay Inc. and some transgender activists co-opting the medical condition transsexualism

• Inaccurately depicting transsexual women as “drag queens”, “caricatures of femininity”

• Dangerous propaganda that mis-educates public and assaults transsexual women

There will be an opportunity for the audience to ask the panelists questions.

PANELISTS:

– Kiana Moore (transsexual woman, Hollywood producer- VH1,MTV, Bravo,
Oxygen, Logo)

– Talia Bettcher (PHD (trans woman, Philosophy Professor, author)

– Cary Harrison (gay male, radio personality, award winning journalist.)

– Mannee McMurray (LGBT activist, writer, MAGNET volunteer)

– Hannah Howard (trans activist, Gender Justice LA board member)

– Matt Palazzolo (gay male, Equal Roots co-founder)

– Arianna Davis (transsexual & intersex woman, Gender ID Empowerment Coalition (GIEC) co-founder)

– Vanesa Camara (transsexual woman, activist for transsexual liberation & feminism)

– Libby Freeman ( queer woman, outspoken ally for trans people, GIEC & MAGNET organizer)

Moderated by Ashley Love (trans rights advocate, writer and an organizer with MAGNET)

Please let us know your thoughts on this epidemic so we can include them in the planning and discussion.

FOR INFO, contact MAGNET Organizer:

Ashley Love – Email: magnet_right_now@yahoo.com.

MAGNET WEBSITE: www.TheMAGNETSource.blogspot.com

Ashley Love’s blog: www.TransFormingMedia.blogspot.com

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Come Back Soon, Tuli

July 13, 2010 — Suzan

As an atheist it might seem weird for me to use Buddhist ideas of reincarnation and return to this bardo yet with Tuli Kupferberg it somehow seems appropriate.  The Fugs were the Bards of Alphabet City in the 1960s. As much Beat as hippie, just plain Zen crazy.  I saw them at the Cafe Wha on McDougal Street.  They were there at the March on the Pentagon.

From the New York Times

Tuli Kupferberg, Bohemian and Fug, Dies at 86

By BEN SISARIO

Tuli Kupferberg, a poet and singer who went from being a noted Beat to becoming, in his words, “the world’s oldest rock star” when he helped found the Fugs, the bawdy and politically pugnacious rock group, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86 and lived in Manhattan.

He had been in poor health since suffering two strokes last year, said Ed Sanders, his friend and fellow Fug.

The Fugs were, in the view of the longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, “the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.” They were also perhaps the most puerile and yet the most literary rock group of the 1960s, with songs suitable for the locker room as well as the graduate seminar (“Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,” based on a poem by William Blake); all were played with a ramshackle glee that anticipated punk rock.

With songs like “Kill for Peace,” the Fugs also established themselves as aggressively antiwar, with a touch of absurdist theater. The band became “the U.S.O. of the left,” Mr. Kupferberg once said, and it played innumerable peace rallies, including the “exorcism” of the Pentagon in 1967 that Norman Mailer chronicled in his book “The Armies of the Night.” (The band took its name from a usage in Mailer’s “Naked and the Dead.”)

Continue reading at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/arts/music/13kupferberg.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

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The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism

July 13, 2010 — Suzan

From Truth Out: http://www.truth-out.org/the-disappearing-intellectual-age-economic-darwinism61287

Monday 12 July 2010

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

We live at a time that might be appropriately called the age of the disappearing intellectual, a disappearance that marks with disgrace a particularly dangerous period in American history. While there are plenty of talking heads spewing lies, insults and nonsense in the various media, it would be wrong to suggest that these right-wing populist are intellectuals. They are neither knowledgeable nor self-reflective, but largely ideological hacks catering to the worst impulses in American society. Some obvious examples would include John Stossel calling for the repeal of that “section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that bans discrimination in public places.”[1] And, of course, there are the more famous corporate-owned talking heads such as Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, all of whom trade in reactionary world views, ignorance, ideological travesties and outlandish misrepresentations – all the while wrapping themselves in the populist creed of speaking for everyday Americans.

In a media scape and public sphere that view criticism, dialog and thoughtfulness as a liability, such anti-intellectuals abound, providing commentaries that are nativist, racist, reactionary and morally repugnant. But the premium put on ignorance and the disdain for critical intellectuals is not monopolized by the dominant media, it appears to have become one of the few criteria left for largely wealthy individuals to qualify for public office. One typical example is Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who throws out inanities such as labeling the Obama administration a “gangster government.”[2] Bachmann refuses to take critical questions from the press because she claims that they unfairly focus on her language. She has a point. After all, it might be difficult to support statements such as the claim that “the US government used the census information to round up the Japanese [Americans] and put them in concentration camps.”[3] Another typical example can be found in Congressman Joe Barton’s apology to BP for having to pay for damages to the government stemming from its disastrous oil spill.

Continue reading at:  http://www.truth-out.org/the-disappearing-intellectual-age-economic-darwinism61287

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Gender Socialization vs. Gender Indoctrination

July 13, 2010 — Suzan

I am currently reading, “Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media” by Susan J. Douglas.

She is talking about the cultural sea of influences that shape how one looks at being female or for that matter male.  When she mentions the influence of certain obscure movies like “A Summer Place” or “Susan Slade” I remember going to these movies, which were the “chick flicks” of their day and how they shaped my world view of what it meant to be female.

When she writes about singing along to the hits of the Angels, Shangri-las, Ronettes, etc I remember singing along to those songs.  I was after all an obvious transkid who sort of learned that being called a sissy and queer didn’t hurt as much once I admitted to myself that I was transsexual and yes I did want to be a girl.

Right on the heels of having my ideas of teenage girlhood influenced from these sources and others like reading Glamor Magazine, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen came the Folk Book.  I wanted to be like Mary Travers or Joan Baez.

I tend to see the general cultural influences as the socialization that anyone can learn or be influenced by.

There is something else at play that I call gender indoctrination. This is the forced indoctrination that sticks a blue blanket on boy babies or more likely now days a camo blanket and football t-top, or a pink princess blanket and “born to shop t-top on baby girls.  Heaven forbid that some one might confuse the sex of the baby prior to the development of enough encouraged gender differences. Why that could turn a child gay/lesbian or even trans.

Never mind that gay/lesbian/trans etc are just something people are born just like the majority are born heterosexual.

You see gender has very little to do with sex or sexuality it is about the indoctrination in to the proper role expected of people who are a certain sex.  All males, gay included are supposed to be masculine/all females including lesbians are supposed to be feminine.  And both sexes are supposed to reify the idea of male supremacy.  Girls and women are indoctrinated to accept their proper place.  Their proper role is generally determined by such things as religion and its fuck buddy, psychiatry, which is just religion dressed in pseudo scientific drag.

Lately I have been witnessing the disapproving tizzy directed towards Angelina Jolie and her life partner Brad Pitt for their permitting their daughter Shiloh to dress and act any way she pleases.  It seems to me a very 1970s attitude on the part of the parents, like they might have actually read Marlo Thomas’ material from the “Free to be You, Free to be Me” school of child rearing instead of the bullshit of the closeted homosexual George Rekers and his fuck buddies over at NARTH.

I see a difference between the indoctrination part which so often fails with transkids and even with many gay/lesbian kids and socialization which I place in a different category.

Julia Serano in “Whipping Girl” avoids the confusing of gender as social role with gender as answer to the question, “What sex am I?” by the usage of “core sex identity” rather than “core gender identity”.

Having a core sex identity that is counter to the assigned sex offers an explanation as to why the gender indoctrination is such a failure while at the same time many transkids (particularly those who come out young) are socialized into the gender role to the point that there is no gender transition.

When people talk about having to learn these things many who came out young are surprised because so often our transition of presentation was more a matter of changing clothes and the way we wore our hair.  Our peers looked at us and said things like “You are the same person, only a girl now.”  It took a while for me to wrap my mind around the idea that the same thing happened with people who came out in middle age.

They weren’t so much changing their gender as their presentation and their physical being.  Actually it was probably more obvious. Although many who come out in middle age seem faced with a steeper learning curve when it comes to internalizing the socialized gender part.  Probably due to learning to shun the girl socialization as part of the development of the mask while trying to embrace the often counter intuitive (for them) boy socialization.

Posted in Innateness, Socialization, Uncategorized. 1 Comment »