Allies in opposition

13Feb12

For a large part of the twentieth century, as trans people and gay people (et al) both emerged as large cultural groups, they tended to see each other as a distinct threat to their own interests, and the relationship between them was rather more hostile than the current, supposedly all-inclusive LGBT initialism would lead you to believe.

Because, by most people, trans and gay were two sides of the same coin – heteronormativity demanded that the only relationships that could be seen as real and valid were those between a man and a woman, and in a strictly gendered (and grossly sexist) culture, being attracted to the “opposite sex” (a vile phrase, but that’s another issue) was seen as a fundamental part of being one’s own sex. As a consequence, homosexuality and transsexuality were not distinct, but different manifestations of the same kind of perversion. Trans women and men were not really women and men, they were just gay people who took their homosexuality to its logical conclusion.

As a consequence, gay people and trans people took great pains to distance themselves from each other – trans people aggressively re-asserted their heterosexuality, gay people their cissexuality, and gay trans people were left in the unfortunate crossfire to be riddled with the holes of conflicting allegiance and the judgmental incredulity of ignorant bystanders.

And I bring this up because I think this is roughly the relationship asexuality has with the rainbow band of non-heterosexuals, albeit on a smaller scale.

Filed under: asexuality, asexuality in fiction, LGBTQetc.   |  1 Comment

Asexual people aren’t “a challenge.”

29Jan12

This showed up in my inbox this morning, and I don’t have a lot to say because it is so self-evidently awful, but perhaps it bears repeating that asexual people are not a “challenge,” and if you had any respect for someone who tells you they are asexual, you would not treat them like one.

If someone tells you they are asexual, they are stating something very clear about themselves – they do not experience sexual attraction. Usually this means that they do not want to have sex – often it means the idea of having sex is uncomfortable or even disgusting to them – and if it does not, they will most likely make that clear.

Trying to trick or coerce someone into having sex with you, or into wanting to have sex with you, is unreservedly unacceptable. Not all asexual people are absolutely disinterested, and many are not even necessarily averse to it, but many are, and ignoring when they tell you that – ignoring their hesitation, disinterest, or discomfort – betrays a fundamental disrespect for their ability to define for themselves what they are or are not willing to do. If someone tells you they don’t want to have sex, do not try to make them have sex with you. 

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This is where a title goes.

23Jan12

I have reasons for not having posted anything in months, and they go, in order

1. College has had exactly the effect on me I expected, and that effect isn’t good.
2. Also apparently university courses require investing time? It’s wild.
3. Puberty is no more fun the second time around.
4. I have more or less run out of things to talk about.

To be frank, as the days go by and I see ever larger numbers of handsome and well dressed men in a city whose primary resources, I’m pretty sure, are poutine and beautiful men (in that order), I’ve felt my allegiance to asexuality slipping somewhat. It is not that I can no longer claim any association, but simply that it feels less pressing, and although I still think about asexuality a lot, it’s mostly in the context of other things than by itself.

That said, I do have something to say on an issue that is kind of a running tug-of-war in fandom (how I came to spend so much time in fandom-oriented places is an enduring and horrifying mystery), which is between two sides which are frustrated by how extremely close friendships  (usually between two men – for example, Sherlock and Watson, Abed and Troy, Merry and Pippin, Sam and Frodo, etc. etc.) are often betrayed, claiming that leaving them as “only friends” is an exercise in heterosexism, and thus stand in opposition to those (frequently asexual) people who wish that everyone would leave well enough alone, between the absence of platonic – and only platonic – relationships prioritized over those which are romantic/sexual is frustrating.

Neither side is really wrong, I don’t think, and the problem is that nigh-transcendentally close friendships are often used as a substitute for actual gay/bi/pan/etc. representation. They exist instead of canonically homoromantic/sexual relationships, rather than alongside them, and so it is a common impulse for LGBQetc. consumers of media to interpret those relationships as being romantic or sexual rather than just platonic (ignoring the common impulse of commonly straight female fans who interpret male/male relationships as sexual just because it’s hot) as a kind of a shot in the dark for representation.

And this then annoys asexual/aromantic people who cling to those relationships as rafts in a sea otherwise full of sexual and romantic relationships unthinkingly, and almost invariably, prioritized over those which are not. Nobody comes out ahead and everyone is angry.

And I don’t really have a point to this, except that, especially the past month (as BBC’s Sherlock returned with three new episodes, re-igniting the age-old “but are Sherlock and John fucking” argument) I’ve seen a lot of this kind of argument, and it’s exhausting, and also has the problem of turning the blame on each other rather than the producers, who are pretty awful.

Actually, that is my solution. We all turn on Steven Moffat, because apparently he doesn’t care for interpreting Sherlock as asexual or as gay. And that’s the real problem –  a character who very well could be either, for whom there is canonical evidence for being very decidedly not straight, he has taken time, more than once, to re-assert as unreservedly heterosexual.

But besides that, there should just be more shows that show actual romantic/sexual relationships between people of the same gender (and including people who are not binary-identified, since the last time I checked there is no representation of any such people in any widely consumed media), as well as platonic but nevertheless extremely meaningful and important relationships.

And to be honest I’m posting this here mostly because I don’t want to wade into these murky waters on Tumblr, where

everyone is angry and

no one wins.

Filed under: asexuality, asexuality in fiction   |  2 Comments

(A)sexual

24Oct11

One of the benefits of going to university in a Large City is that sometimes things happen within walkable distance, and such was the case last Thursday, as a screening of (A)sexual, the asexuality-related documentary we’ve all been hearing about for several years, was put on by several different groups in conjunction at my university. And I went to see it.

And it was… okay.

There was a very large focus on David Jay, unofficial helmsman of the good ship Asexual Community, particularly on his experiences, initiative in starting AVEN and unflagging spokesman, and relationships, including documentation of his daily life, the first AVEN contingent in the San Francisco Pride Parade several years ago, him talking about coming to the realization he was asexual, etc.

Between stretches of David Jay were personal accounts from different asexual people –  Barb, a Texan woman who’d had sex with several dozen partners and never felt any differently about it (I really liked Barb – to be frank, I think it’s worth seeing just for her); a woman whose name escapes me, who found someone online who didn’t mind her asexuality (their marriage was shown at one point); and Swank Ivy, a thirty-some year old woman fairly well known within the asexual community for her Letters to an Asexual videos on Youtube.

There were also moments of different “experts” talking at different points – good ( Anthony Bogeart, the researcher/professor who conducted the 2004 study which is most widely cited in defense of the 1% figure), neutral (a sexologist from San Francisco who mostly talked about the Great and Beautiful Rainbow of Human Sexuality), and bad (Dan Savage, who needs no more explanation for why he was bad than the simple fact that he is Dan Savage).

And in fact, when we all found out that Dan Savage was to appear in (A)sexual there was collective shock, bewilderment, and disgust. Which, now that I think about it, may have more to do with the kinds of people I know than Dan Savage’s general reputation, but … he’s terrible, and he has been known to say rather ignorant and often hurtful things about people who definitely are or may be asexual, namely that there’s something wrong with us and we don’t have any real problems. And that, unsurprisingly, continued. He mentioned that he thought us gathering together or trying to spread awareness was pointless, adding that lots of people – either because of not being heterosexual or having general frowned upon kinks or unhealthy perspectives from childhood, etc. – would benefit from being asexual instead, and concluded saying that asexual people should only date asexual people, and to date anyone with any interest in sex at all was not only ill-advised, but absolutely cruel.

Stay classy, Dan.

And the documentary itself was framed by short Man On The Street-type moments, where those with no credentials or ties to the asexual community voiced ill-informed opinions on a subject they knew nothing about, presumably to give context for the asexual community and the “movement,” as far as it exists. These moments were spaced throughout the documentary, and served as both a beginning and an end.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly taken with it. It wasn’t bad, by any means, and I have enough of a lingering crush on Anthony Bogeart to have had some reason to continue watching, but as entertainment it falls flat, as education it’s not perfect, and as a supplement to The Asexual Experience it comes off as incredibly limited. There were a few moments that made me swell with a kind of weird pride, like when they featured a short stream of users on AVEN whom I’ve known and liked and been friends with, but all-in-all it didn’t really cover much of anything that makes the asexual community what it is, which would be fine, if indeed it is meant as more of an educational resource, but it’s so limited in its scope that those who go into it without knowing much about asexuality or the people who claim it will probably come out not much more knowledgeable.

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A frighteningly high number of people google “Charlie the Unicorn porn”.

23Aug11

Or perhaps not frightening. We like what we like, after all.

I wouldn’t encourage you to actually try to have sex with a unicorn, though. Not only would it probably enrage the unicorn in question, but you would then no longer be a virgin and your partner would probably gore you halfway through.

An interesting way to die, but certainly not a pleasant one.

In other news, I apologize to anyone who cares for not having posted something new in a month and a half, and even then … it was porn.

I would like to have a good excuse, but honestly I’ve spent the last week, no joke, writing about animal sex.

No really.

I haven’t abandoned this blog by any means, but for now I’m kind of tapped out – I don’t have any relevant ideas and even if I did I probably wouldn’t have the motivation to pursue them. But stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Charles responds to wayward googlers: Porn

13Jul11

I don’t really like engaging with the kind of person I assume keeps googling in pursuit of porn featuring (trans) women (and you use some very bad words, porn searchers, and you should stop), but search terms relating to precisely that appears in the search terms which has led someone to my blog with such frequency (and I realize that some of these googlers may in fact be trans* people looking for porn that reflects the reality of their own existence) that I am caving and providing sources of porn respectfully featuring trans women.

Respectfully. 

I hope I don’t have to say this but if you are under eighteen or otherwise legally prohibited from viewing pornographic material, don’t click the following links. Because they’re porn. And it’ll be illegal. I am eighteen, and thus at perfect liberty to view and spread pornographic material, so this is totally legal. 

Anyway.

I don’t actually know of many porn suppliers, because I am not in their target demographic, which is, I’m assuming, “people interested in watching porn.” I do, however, know of these two sites:

Trans Lady Sex, a tumblr which posts pictures of trans women who run the gamut in regards to most things the gamut of which may be run (all kinds of bodies, at all stages of medical transition), and, for the retro fan,

T-girl Pinups, which is exactly what it sounds like and features porn of trans women as ’50s pinups, though I think you have to subscribe for the full experience

So I hope that satiates you, porn seeker of the world, and remember – trans women are women, and they deserve as much respect as any other group of humans. So stop using slurs and consume* respectfully.

*As in, watch/read/view

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Good books for asexuals … but actually not: On Chesil Beach

12Jul11

So far my short but, in my opinion, rather illustrious “good books for asexuals” series has consisted invariably of young adult books, which is because I am a young adult and I like the books written with me in mind. I also like books written for basically every other age-based audience, but I spend a lot of my time with young adult authors and their works, not only because a lot of those stories are immediately relevant to me and my astonishingly unoriginal problems, but because YA authors, as a group, may be among the coolest, most inspiring, funniest people in the world.

But anyway.

I figured that my audience, insofar as I have one, consists primarily of those who are around my age or slightly older, probably stretching up to about thirty before tapering off, and a lot of those people don’t like to read young adult fiction, so, in an effort to adult up my blog, I tried to read Ian McEwan’s (of Atonement and pompous, self-satisfied blowhard fame) On Chesil Beach, which is mentioned every so often in asexual circles as a short, simple book with an apparently asexual character.

And that decision was one of the worst decisions of my life.

Filed under: good books for asexuals   |  3 Comments

Asexuals in Fiction

09Jul11

This isn’t going to be a full-blown post (though I would like to write a bigger one – just not tonight), but I thought I’d alert anyone who’d be interested in a long and interesting discussion that went on earlier tonight on Tumblr about character who are ace in people’s headcanons, in response to this post I made. It’ll take a while to wade through all of the responses, but it’s definitely worth a look.

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Charles responds to wayward googlers: “i’m gay but i dont support trans”

29Jun11

You’re probably also a douche. Trigger warning for what follows.

I’m going to assume not supporting trans here means that you, wayward googler, don’t agree with the validity of trans identity, don’t think trans people’s struggles are worthy of attention or support, and are probably self-deluded people who took gender non-conformance a few steps too far, and that’s all bullshit. So you should shape up.

The fact is, trans people exist. We exist and it’s impossible to get rid of us – short of killing us, or making things so bad that we’re all driven to killing ourselves (which honestly isn’t that far removed from reality), there’s no way to rid the world of the scourge of trans people. Multiple studies over decades have shown that trying to rehabilitate us to fit our assigned genders, or rid of us physical dysphoria, is a massive exercise in failure.

So that leaves us with a minority which is far larger than anyone assumes – anywhere from 1-5% of the population could be trans, depending on how inclusivity of the definition in use – who have to deal with massive disdain and disgust from the masses, very real danger (especially for those who are on the transfeminine spectrum, as they are far more likely to the objects of harassment and hate crimes than transmasculine spectrum people or faab non-binaries), often massive amounts of physical dysphoria that will only be helped with very expensive procedures which are very difficult to gain access to, and bound by a bunch of extremely outdated laws set in place by cissexist people who believe in the policing of trans people and forcing people through a lot of (difficult, dangerous, expensive) hoops before they can get everything sorted out.

In many states (and other countries) it is impossible to get one’s birth certificate changed without proof of GRS (genital reconstruction surgery, which is what people generally think of as “sex change surgery”), social security requires proof of SRS, many states require SRS for changing one’s driver’s license, and until relatively recently so did getting a passport changed. SRS runs anywhere from 7-30 thousand dollars – a huge sum most people can’t afford, especially since almost no insurance policies will pay for them at all, considering them elective rather than medically necessary. So a huge number of trans people can’t afford to get the surgeries that will enable them to change their legal documentation, and with those still with the sex you were assigned, rather than the one as which you’re living, you will be continually and involuntarily outed – and that opens you up to awkward, dangerous, triggering, and unpleasant situations anywhere you might have to be identified.

Imagine living in constant fear of being “discovered” – and discovered in a way that may trigger depression or suicidal thoughts, that just reinforces something you may with desperately weren’t true, and which will label you a freak or pervert in the eyes of entirely too many. Imagine almost having a panic attack whenever you have to use a public bathroom. Imagine feeling condemned to profound loneliness forever because you believe that no one could ever love you, because you’ve been told repeatedly that your very existence sets you up as a joke and a caution, a threat to heterosexuality and a gross perversion. Imagine not being able to get medical attention because no one can get past how “weird” you are – imagine knowing that it’s very possible that you could get injured and then, once the ambulance got there, no one would bother taking you to the hospital and would instead leave you to die because your genitals are “wrong”. That has actually happened. More than once. 

I can understand being confused by trans people, because it’s not something people are taught about, and are instead taught to view any non-strictly-cis person as an oddity and a mistake. But rejecting trans people as fakes or freaks basically makes you a douche, and I would say especially from members of the LGBT community – who should understand what it’s like to inspire disgust just by your existence, to be widely hated, and to be reacted to with horror and thoughtless disapproval – but it’s not as if a cLGB person hating (or what have you) trans people is new, and that’s a shame.

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Charles responds to wayward googlers: “first man to become a woman – christine jorganson”

25Jun11

Today’s installment of Charles Responds to Wayward Googlers brings you a brief lesson on trans* history and etiquette. Buckle in!

Before I can proceed with today’s episode, I must note that “man becoming a woman” or “woman becoming a man” is an outdated way of phrasing transition which has largely fallen out of favor with the trans community (or if it hasn’t, it really should), not only because it’s awkward, but because it’s a very simple, kind of insidious way to de-legitimatize trans* existence. Saying that someone, through medical transition, “becomes” a man or a woman is the same as saying that anyone who has not, cannot, will not, or does not want to go through the “full” transition is not a valid member of their identified gender, and it ties another knot in the rope that binds sex and gender as somehow irretrievably linked ideas – which is what causes so much trouble (or a lot of trouble, anyway) for trans* people in the first place.

A much better way to phrase things is to say that someone was male or female assigned at birth, and is transitioning – because it is not their status as a man or women which is changing (and do forgive me for binary-specific language, but as of now there isn’t really much of a system or general recognition of non-binaries, so the languages, situations, and concerns are often considerably different), but because their appearance, and, often, social presence is. Medical transition too often becomes the axis around which trans* narratives revolve, which is, in many cases, an accurate portrayal, but certainly not universally. Respect diversity! and all that.

That said, the first “man to become a woman” was in fact not Christine Jorgensen, but a different woman entirely.

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