As Heard on Entertainment Tonight on January 23, 2012:

“TV’s overweight chefs: can they cook healthy?

TV’s overweight chefs: Is it time they changed their fattening ways?”

Of course, this lovely little story came out because of Paula Deen’s announcement that she has Type II Diabetes.  One of the first phrases the story used was the “obesity epidemic.”  This was after sitting through part of the The Dr. Oz Show, which was about gastric bypass surgery.  The show felt like a paid infomercial, with doctors and patients absolutely beaming about the wonders of this surgery.  In addition, one of the main thrusts of the show was: WLS—it’s not just for the morbidly obese anymore!  Dr. Oz and Co. were absolutely thrilled that only slightly and moderately overweight people are now getting on board to have their stomachs amputated.  In fact, Dr. Oz repeatedly bemoaned the fact that only 1% of those eligible are actually getting gastric bypass.  The good news is that insurers are increasingly covering WLS for more and more people, even those deemed only “moderately” overweight.   Why?  Because it cures diabetes!  Or at least that was the gist of this fat-hating hour of American television guised in concern about “health.”

I think I am particularly sensitive to this (since it is more of the same, standard onslaught) because of the recent Strong4Life campaign. http://strong4life.com/default.aspx Strong4Life is a defamation project targeting youth of size in Georgia, relying on extreme fat-hate to drive home its alarmist messages.  This hate-campaign includes lovely little lines like this: “Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid.”  Hmmmm, maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t it fate-hate, fatphobic prejudice, and anti-fat bullying that make a kid of size’s life less fun, as any form of abuse or bigotry would tend to do?  Let’s replace “fat” with some other social identity categories, for comparison purposes.  I am not saying all of these identities are the same, but rather strategically deploying them to make a very obvious point:

Being Black takes the fun out of being a kid.

Being Disabled takes the fun out of being a kid.

Being Gay takes the fun out of being a kid.

Being Poor takes the fun out of being a kid.

Being a Girl takes the fun out of being a kid.

Being Transgender takes the fun out of being a kid.

Being Muslim takes the fun out of being a kid.

In case you didn’t catch my very obvious point, here it is: the problem is not with the kid’s disadvantaged social identity.  Being Fat, or Black, or Queer, or Disabled, may well make a kid’s life less fun.  But this is not the fault of the kid who is just trying to live their life.  It is the fault of the systemic weightism, racism, heterosexism, and ableism that are the norm in our social, cultural, political landscape.  The goal should not be to change the fat kid to make them conform to thin-supremacist ideals, but change the culture itself to stop shaming, bullying and oppressing its fat citizens.

The whole campaign is ass-backwards.  But, this is not surprising since this is the problem with the whole “obesity epidemic” to begin with.  The problem is not with the rising weight of the populace, but with the way in which the so-called obesity epidemic is culturally allowed to mask systemic anti-fat discrimination, ubiquitous cultural prejudice, and deep-seated disgust for fatness.  When, oh when, are we going to have a national conversation about the epidemic of anti-fat hatred and anti-fat bullying happening all over our nation and in most of our schools?  While we have yet another discussion about the “obesity epidemic” more fat kids will be harmed by hate.  More fat adults will ponder suicide because they face so much hostility.  More fat people will be denied employment, promotions and raises simply because of their size.  More fat people will receive bigoted medical care and risk never returning to the doctor because they are made to feel so awful from their providers.   More fat people will look to the media for positive images of themselves and be told they are ugly, sexless, and forever single and alone.  It is this epidemic, the fat-hate epidemic, that we must combat with full-frontal force, not some thin-supremacist desire to make everyone the same skinny size.  Hell, I half-expect the next Dr. Oz to take WLS even further:  how about EVERYONE just goes ahead and gets WLS, you know, as a preemptive strike against fatness.  That way thin folks can be assured of a lifetime of slenderness, and not have to eat barely anything to help keep that pesky fear of fat at constant bay.

HELL NO!  Some of us are standing up, and some of us are fighting back.   We will not allow this sick society to make us feel bad about who we are.  To end, I’d like to flip the script on Entertainment Tonight:

TV’s fat-hating media: can they stop producing images that promote prejudice, bigotry and low self-esteem?

TV’s fat-hating media: can they finally realize that people come in all shapes and sizes and stop running reports that stigmatize people of size and promote alarmist hysteria about fatties dropping like flies?  Can they promote Health At Every Size and join forces with the fat movement to fight this cancerous form of hatred known as fatphobia?

Today as I was flipping through channels, I saw that Jerry Springer had yet ANOTHER episode on to bash transgender and transsexual women.  The name of the episode is “Trannys Throwdown.”  The first little lovely vignette featured a trans woman who told her boyfriend of her birth status.  He proceeded to shout at her and physically assault her on the stage.  The angrier and the more abusive he became towards this woman, the more the audience cheered.  It was chilling.  For 20 years now, Jerry Springer has been in the vanguard of presenting defamatory images of transgender people to the world.  In his constructed world of hate and violence, we are deceivers, sex objects and freaks.  We exist to be laughed at, scorned, degraded and abused.  He presents these images for largely well-heeled, straight, gender-normative white folks.  In fact, his show seems to be a favorite with privileged college students.  But whoever is watching, they can always make themselves feel better by comparing themselves to us: the debased, abject, transsexual OTHER.  for 20 years, this hate fest has gone on uninterrupted, because as a community, transgender women DO NOT MATTER.  It was sister Octavia St. Laurent, may she Rest in Peace, who said in a speech long ago, and I paraphrase: “women have rights.  Gay people have rights.  Animals have rights.  But transsexuals?  We ain’t got shit.”

On Facebook, after viewing this hate-fest, I read a FB friend, a white trans man, defend the use of the term tranny:

“How dare any of us in the community police what we can and cannot call ourselves. What have we come to when trans person A says to trans person B the way you describe your own identity is harmful. I have been trans for 16 YEARS and I will call myself whatever I damn well please. I expect others in my community to respect this, as I do for them.”

Later in the comment thread, another white trans man had this to say:

“I’m really fed up with transwomen dictating to the entire community what we can call ourselves and then crying trans-misogyny when things don’t go exactly their way. I think that these particular transwomen have always had the power (ie, patriarchal) and then they carry this notion over to their new role in life and then keep wanting to have it all their way. Truth is that no one gets everything their way all the time man nor woman, and if my brothers want to call themselves trannies we are ALL part of the trans community and what this does is erase transmen from the community which is just another form of patriarchy rearing its ugly head where it really should not be. I have seen it too many times in gender drop-ins, where we guys sit quietly and don’t make a fuss and the women shout and rave and tell us who we are and where we belong, mistake us for biomen who are there for a good look, etc, and we need to readdress the balance by saying that all we want is to be recognized as equal, by that, taking back the term tranny and saying that we can use that.”

Tranny is a term of absolute hate, degradation, misogyny and abuse.  The Jerry Springer episode encapsulates the current U.S. usage of the word—to render transgender and transsexual women as inferior, as Other, as objects who deserve scorn and hostility and violence.  Do a simple Google search of the term and see the lovely things that come up:

Spicy Tranny Tube

Tranny Best Galleries

Younger Trannies

Hot Shemale Movies

Free Tranny Porn

Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives

Abused Black Trannies: The Most Extreme Black Tranny Sex

Still not convinced:  Try reading this: Tranny: An Evidence Based Review by Cristan: http://www.transadvocate.com/tranny-an-evidence-based-review.htm

Or how about irrelevant 90s drag queen RuPaul defending the term and the outrage it has caused amongst trans women: http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2012/01/17/rupaul-believes-trans-people-should-f-off-if-we-object-to-being-called-tries/

But I don’t know, maybe there will never be enough evidence to convince some people.   So to the first FTM posters comment: yes, you and whoever can call yourself “tranny” to the cows come home.  And I will not understand nor support your use of the term for yourself or for others.  Furthermore, I will be hard-pressed not to think the following of you:

1. You are callously insensitive.  You are using a hate word that people have been beaten to, degraded by and abused with.  Just as people who use the term “nigger” you are obviously unmoved by the suffering of others.

2. You are a sexist and a trans-misogynist.  Many of the people reclaiming “tranny” are trans men, and they need to be called out again and again for their blatant disregard for their trans sisters.  That is because most trans men are passing as privileged men and therefore do not have to live with the horrific fallout from the use of this hate word.  They do not have to hear cis men taunt them with the term when they are trying to simply walk home from work.  They do not have to turn on the TV and hear about another trans women being murdered and her perpetrators using hate language like “tranny” against her, or open the paper and see supposed-journalists use the term to refer to their friends and comrades.  They do not have to wade through thousand of images of cruel and degrading pornography with their group being objectified and abused when trying to find out basic information about themselves.  They do not have to turn on the TV and see Jerry Springer defame them as liars and freaks or LOGO create “comedy” sketches like “Are You Smarter Than a Tranny Hooker?”  They do not have to listen to cis women exclaim: “Oh my god, she looks like such a tranny!” and know that they are meaning in the cruelest and most hateful way possible.  For trans men to remain oblivious to all this means they are luxuriating in their male privilege.  It means they are wallowing in sexism and facilitating the oppression of their trans sisters.  Thanks for the support, guys!

3. You are selfish.  Yeah, I know we like to think in terms of “individualism” in the U.S.  We all get to choose what we say, and how we identify, and what we intend a word to mean.  But the reality is that we are not just little islands unto ourselves.  We are are living in a social realm where language has real repercussions.  It has never been an issue of whether you have a “right” to say tranny or a “right” to call yourself one.  It is an issue of whether you SHOULD do so, you know, the whole moral-ethical thingy?  Whether you SHOULD when right now, countless trans women are being hurt by that word, oppressed by that word, demeaned by that word.  It is a question of whether your self-involved need to be “edgy” or “cool” or “ironic” or whatever takes precedence over the scores of real, flesh-and-blood trans women who are being hurt, damaged and devalued because of the use of that loaded little word.

The second comment by the trans man above needs little analysis from me, since his hatred of trans women is so obvious and blatant.  What he does, of course, is a classic patriarchal reversal, transforming trans women from victim into victimizer.  But anyone with half a brain has been able to witness how trans men have so thoroughly risen to a hegemonic position within trans and queer circles, especially academic and activist ones.  And the defense of “tranny” is a great example of how we are all supposed to get in line and kiss their “tranny boy” asses.  I, for one, refuse.  Just as I refuse to kowtow to cis men, I will not kowtow to trans men.  TRANS MAN: Just because your foot is smaller, doesn’t mean it’s not still on my neck.    And to trans women who are thoroughly trans-male-identified, I paraphrase a quote from Madeleine Albright: There is a special place in hell reserved for trans women who do not help other trans women.

This is not about those of us who renounce the term “tranny” wanting to “get our way.”  I have no inherent opposition to the word: like other words, it is just a bunch of letter strewn together.  it is not about the word, per se, it is about the climate the word helps to create.  And that climate, for trans women, is one of danger, isolation, hatred, violence and hopelessness.  You see, as a trans woman and a trans feminist, I don’t wish to leave part of my community behind in the dust in order to score hipster points.  So, if you are still unconvinced, say “tranny” all you want.  Knock yourself out.  But don’t forget, for me and many of my sisters: them there is FIGHTING WORDS.  So you best be ready to fight!

Oddee.com touts itself as a Blog that “features the odd, strange and bizarre things of our world.”  Well, what could be more odd, strange, and bizarre than transsexual men and women?  This week the sensationalistic Blog published two lists: “10 Handsome Men (Who Were Born Female)” and “10 Gorgeous Women (Who Were Born Male).”

I want to make it clear that while I am critiquing the list, I am NOT critiquing the trans men and women who comprise the list.  I am critiquing the website, the author of the lists, and the mode of representation.  In addition, I am critiquing aspects of the trans community that uncritically herald these types of things (and hold them up as “progress” or steps forward) rather than speak out about the ways in which they are complicit with the furtherance of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism and body/beauty fascism.

Let’s start with the men: In addition to the overwhelming whiteness and nondisabled nautilized thinness/muscularity of this list, the uniformity of gender expression (hyper-masculine) makes this a very limited representation of FTM identities.  Trans men come in all colors, shapes, sizes and abilities.  But you would not know it from this homogenous sampling of ten different people.  As someone who studies trans images in the media, I am continually amazed at just limited representations of our community continue to be.  The message seems to be clear: being transsexual is so beyond the pale, that you had better be hyper-normative in all other aspects of identity.  This is why there is such a plethora of white, well-heeled, conventionally attractive gays and lesbians on TV.  Since their queerness is so culturally transgressive, Hollywood makes them more palatable to the mainstream by de-centering their gayness in favor of their conformity to white, upper-class, nondisabled, thin, physical attractiveness, i.e. “normalcy” in every other way.  So for this list, these men may be transsexual, but they are white, masculine, muscular, nondisabled etc. and so therefore their dominant identities effectively “make up” for their socially and culturally defined “deviance” that is perceived as inferior by the status quo.

The list reminds me of an episode of a tabloid talk show.  Look at these men—they are studs!  You would never know they were born female!  Isn’t it cool (and strange, and sexy) that such a strapping and realistic specimen of manhood began of life as a girl?  That is why I titled this diary entry as “Oddee’s Transsexual Circus Side-Show.”  The way they treat the very ordinary subject of transgender people is to turn us into objects worthy of gawkers at a peep show. “Step right up and behold!  These men were once women!  Can you believe it???”  I think Maury Povich would be excellent as the hired barker.

And to start the list off with: “These ten men are all successful, handsome, and accomplished in their chosen fields. They were also all born as women!”  Is anyone else as sick as I am of this discourse of people who were “born men” and “born women”?  Like we just fly out of the room as fully-formed, adult, cookie-cuter Barbies and Kens.  I don’t know about you, but I was born as a BABY, an INFANT.  Human, yes.  But neither a man nor a woman, not even a boy or a girl yet: A BABY!  And then when they go to the first man and the first thing they tell us is his birth name!   Really?  It’s all down hill from there…

The women’s list is just as bad.  While there is slightly more racial. ethnic and national diversity, the emphasis is on slenderness, hyper-femininity conventional attractiveness, and slavish devotion to patriarchal beauty standards and fashions.  Seven of the chosen women are models, two are pageant queens, and one is an actress.  Cuz, you know, that’s all us trans women are good for is getting all dolled up and looking pretty!  And if we fall short of these narrow standards of beauty, we truly have no value.  That is the message being disseminated by these lists: that our value lies in our appearance, and our claim to our gender lies in how “real” we appear to the straight, cisgender observer.

There will be those who read these and claim I am “hating on” these people because I am jealous or because I don’t measure up to their good looks.  Neither is true.  I am approaching the list as a cultural critic and as an activist.  I want to see all trans and gender nonconforming people represented, and I want the people with multiple, oppressed identities to also feel that they have worth, value and that they are beautiful.  These lists elevate the people who are already the most privileged in our community (“sub-lebrities”) and serve to construct and solidify a hierarchy of value that does real harm and damage to people to feel that they don’t measure up.

My first tip-off was reading RuPaul’s silly autobiography “Lettin’ It All Hang Out.”  As an activist and a very politically-involved person, I found RuPaul’s politics to be lacking, if not downright offensive.  While this person was driven to be a success, clearly he had no interest in social change.  He was concerned in “getting over” and lining his own pockets with cash, but not in using his platform as a method of bringing about real, substantive social change.  His is a “politics of fabulousness” that has absolutely no substance behind it, except to further regimes of consumer capitalism, depoliticized and de-raced gay politics of “acceptance” and fascist notions of body and beauty conformity.

I saw RuPaul speak in public several times, as well as a concert performance in some dive gay bar.  As a speaker, he was uninspiring, and meeting him in person I found him to be shady, aloof and perfunctory.  Nothing at all like the warm, loving. larger-than-life persona he was always trying to project in the media.  This was about getting a check and moving on, not actually making a difference in real people’s lives.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when RuPaul came out publicly, and repeatedly, in defense of one Chuck Knipp, a white gay man who does a racist drag persona IN BLACKFACE known as “Shirley Q. Liquor.”  As progressive queers, trans folks and allies were mobilizing against Knipp’s campaign of racial terrorism across the country, RuPaul, a personal friend of Knipp, came out in full support of Shirley Q. Liquor and the use of racist, blackface drag.  RuPaul was quoted as saying:

“Critics who think that Shirley Q. Liquor is offensive are idiots. Listen, I’ve been discriminated against by everybody in the world: gay people, black people, whatever. I know discrimination, I know racism, I know it very intimately. She’s not racist, and if she were, she wouldn’t be on my new CD…I am very sensitive to issues of racism, sexism and discrimination. I am a gay black man, who started my career as a professional transvestite in Georgia, twenty years ago.”

Apparently all that purported discrimination he experienced did little to alter his consciousness or de-colonize his mind.  Any liberated person would see the obvious damage of Knipp’s antics and use the power of their celebrity to renounce such behavior.  But not RuPaul!  This is in addition to the many People of Color who have spoken out over the years to assert how white-washed RuPaul is and out of touch with the lived realities of African Americans and other People of Color in our society.

While I was completely done with RuPaul Charles at this point, just as the public was as evidenced by his career being in the toilet, he would pop up in the media sometimes to say something mean and offensive.  Ever the darling of the un-evolved white gay male  establishment, he came to be one of the most ferocious defenders of the word “tranny” and told those of us ACTUAL transgender people that we needed to lighten up and stop being so offended.  Why the media held him up as the spokesperson for transgender issues is beyond me, given his obvious disdain for transsexuals.

This megalomaniac came back into the public eye with the tired drag show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” on the even tireder gay network LOGO.   Recently, he again came to defense of his favorite anti-transsexual epithet “tranny”, upset over Lance Bass’s decision to apologize for using the slur, and defended the horrible, defamatory, cancelled-after-2-episodes train wreck sitcom “Work It.”  (Which he also allowed to use one of his songs.) RuPaul actually said: “And no one has ever said the word ‘tranny’ in a derogatory sense.”  WHAT WORLD ARE YOU LIVING IN MR. CHARLES?  Cuz it does not bear any resemblence to the world I live in.  And saying Lance Bass has no negative intent in using the word is ridiculous.  Why, because he identifies as a gay man?  Give me a break-o.  The whole painful interview is here:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/13/rupaul-on-rupauls-drag-race-obama-tranny_n_1205203.html?ref=gay-voices

“Don’t take life so seriously,” RuPaul commented. “We live in a culture where everyone is offended by everything.” The whole “you’re too sensitive, lighten up, get a sense of humor, stop being chronically offended” nonsense is straight out of the neo-conservative handbook. They have been telling us that for years because they can’t address the legitimacy of our actual arguments, so they use these “lighten up” comments to try to foist blame on us who want to create change rather than those who recycle racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic ideology and try to claim it as an edgy movement against political correctness.  RuPaul is like the gay mainstream’s version of Howard Stern, trying desperately to remain “edgy” and relevant, but really just cashing in on society’s most hurtful, dmaagin and toxic stereotypes.  He recently appeared here in NH to state that he is nor Ron Paul and he is not running for President.  Maybe a run as a republican or a libertarian would actually be a good fit for this politically-unevolved clown.

So to end this Blog, let me quote what Mr. Charles says at the end of his show when he dumps yet another drag queen: “Sashay, Away!”  The transgender and transsexual communities do not appreciate your antics, nor will we be silent in the face of them.

One of the things I dread about New Years is New Year Resolutions.  Part of this is because so much of New Year Resolutions center around weight loss.  The usual weight loss corporation giants count on this and can’t wait to make a buck off of people’s desire to slim down.  As per usual, there is zero discussion of health and becoming healthier, and loads of discussion of looking “better” and vanity-based appeals to taking off pounds.

Watching Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rocking Eve, which features the annual ball drop in Times Square NYC, I was annoyed to see that the main commercial sponsor for the evening was Weight Watchers.  Clearly, they are trying to capitalize off of the New Years Resolution frenzy when tons of people will declare “war on fat” and undertake all manners of dangerous and ineffective diets to lose weight.  Weight Watchers, like hundreds of other diet plans, relies on people’s fate hate and fat shame to rake in the annual 60 billion dollars the industry as a whole makes each year (even though 98% of diets fail.)

Weight Watcher’s new motto is “believe.”  They featured the typical stupid ads like people who have lost weight holding pictures up of their formally repulsive fat selves.   But WW took it to a whole new level with one of the Jennifer Hudson ads.  The creepy and weird ad features a fatter 2004 Jennifer Hudson (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ddTNsv6R4) who is then joined by the newer 2011 Jennifer Hudson who had apparently dropped 80 pounds.  She is singing the song that helped to make her famous on American Idol entitled “I Believe in You and Me.”  But what has changed?  She had a beautiful voice then and she has a beautiful voice now.  She was very attractive then and she is very attractive now.  The only thing that has changed is her weight (and hairstyle/dress.)  So basically the ad is saying that the new Jennifer is better than the old Jennifer.  And the new Jennifer is better because she is thinner.  Thus, the ad is an ideological example of thin supremacy.  Thin people are better than fat people.

Seeing that horrible ad played over and over again on New Year’s Eve was degrading and upsetting.  I see it as straight up defamation against fat people.  Unlike other oppressed groups, it is always open season on people of size.  And if we complain we are called crazy and jealous.  I hope that Jennifer Hudson’s pay day is really impressive, because she is making that money off of fat-hate and fat-shame.  To participate in such an overtly fatphobic and thin-supremacist ad is particularly galling.

What if a black or brown skinned entertainer used a product to lighten their skin (we’ll call it “Whiten Up!”) and then a TV ad showed them before using the product and then 5 years later after becoming significantly lighter. The message of the ad would clearly convey that being lighter-skinned is better/superior and Whiten Up! is the product to help change you from darker to lighter.  What is a gay or gender-variant male media personality was shown in an ad before being feminine and stereotypically swishy and queeny.  Then, they follow a program called “Man Up!” for several years that features DVD trainings and vitamin and hormonal supplements.  In the new version he is shown being manly and conforming to hetero-normative scripts.  Do either of these ads pass muster?  Or would they be seen clearly for the ways in which they perpetuate white-supremacy and sexism/heterosexism?

In 2012, I hope to continue to work on what I eat to increase the eating of fruits and vegetables, and to strive towards eating a balanced diet.  I also wish to move my body in ways that feel good and that promote health and wellness.  I do not wish to obsess over the number on a scale.  Nor do I wish to enrich or legitimate an industry which depends on the promotion of fat-hatred and fatphobic prejudice. Jennifer Hudson recently revealed that she was more proud of her weight loss than her Oscar win for playing in Dream Girls.(! WTF?)  This statement alone proves that thin supremacy is a virulent form of bigotry and we need to continue to call it out to this society.

For those who have not heard it, ABC is set to roll out a new sitcom in early January called “Work It” about two out-of-work straight men that don dresses and find employment as women.  And then, you guess it: hilarity ensues.  Except to women and transgender people, there is nothing funny about it.  And it should not be funny to any cisgender man with anything resembling a conscious.

One of the things that has really, really irked me about the internet and Blogosphere discourse that has emanated in the wake of “Work It” is all the people who have said some variation of the following: But, but, but… “Work It” does not even feature REAL transgender people.  Those characters are not transgender people.  So how can the show be mocking and defaming transgender people if the two main characters are just straight men throwing on a frock for laughs?

Sorry, but I am going to be brutally direct and blunt here.  If you believe the above argument, you fail at critical thinking.  Two years ago, I completed my dissertation on images of transgenderism in film and media.  If you are really bored, or want some reading material to put you to sleep, you can read it here.  But within this magnum opus of academic discourse, you will read about a variety of movies, including gems (ahem) like Sorority Boys, Just One of the Guys and Tootsie.  But those are not transgender characters, you may assert.  They are just people assuming the role of the “opposite” sex for comic appeal.  And you would be right.  BUT, and this is a big and pivotal BUT, in the context of this cultural climate: IT DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER.

I remember this debate was raised about another character in a film entitled The Silence of the Lambs.  Some minimized the impact of the character of Jame Gumb by stating that s/he was not really a transsexual, and they even made it clear in the book and film that s/he didn’t really have Gender Identity Disorder.  Do you really think that most cisgender viewing audiences are that keenly hip about all of the nuances of transgender and transsexual identity?  That they would say: Oh yeah, I am not going to buy into this linking of gender variance with sociopathic behavior, because, after all, Jame Gumb has not been actually diagnosed with GID or transsexualism?  If you believe that audiences are that smart about trans issues you must live on a different planet than I do.  Mediated Images of cross-dressing and sex-changing BLEED into perceptions of real-life, flesh-and-blood transgender and transsexual people.  They affect how people see us, how they perceive us, how they make sense of our lives and how they relate to us.  Images MATTER.  As Leslie Feinberg states in the documentary Outlaw, the way transgender people have been portrayed has made it harder to walk the streets.  While films like Silence of the Lambs, Psycho and Dressed to kill portray gender-variant people as killers, in real life we are killed over and over in brutal hate crimes.

Some might say that “Work It” is at least a comedy, and thus is less damaging than the above-named slasher pics.  Male-bodied people dressing as women IS NOT FUNNY.  Our lives are not a joke, and we do not exist to be made into a mockery.  Further, trans women facing unemployment is a serious problem with egregious ramifications.  As Ethan St. Pierre said, for transgender people, losing a job is a potential death sentence.  For them to switch genders and easily obtain a job reverses reality!  It’s like Chuck and Larry getting the benfits they need by becoming a gay couple.  Excuse me?  So in addition to the misogyny and transphobia of this show, there are profound anti-affirmative action messages as well.

In the final analysis, as I discovered in my dissertation, all of these transphobic images belong to a continuum or arc that is remarkably similar.  The archive of images pertaining to gender variance portrays REAL trans people as monsters, pathetic jokes, jolly drag queens and mammies, deceivers and criminals.  The common thread is that transgender people are denied our humanity.  It is no accident that at the end of the brilliant documentary Diagnosing Difference, every documentary subject exclaims: I want the audience of this film to know that trans people are human beings.  Each interview was obviously done separately.  They didn’t know what the other interviewees were saying.  That they all said the same thing is unbelievably powerful.  The first time I saw it I literally wanted to get up and cheer.  WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS.  How sad, that in 2011. we must continually say this over and over and over again.  How sad that that we have been so assailed by this society, so defamed and denigrated by the media, so despised by this culture, that we must assert our most core, basic humanity, to demand that others see us as the people that we are rather than as he horrific caricatures that have proliferated in the media for decades and decades.

ABC—You have blood on your hands.  More transgender people will DIE because of the mean-spirited propaganda you run on your channel, because you put profits before people, because you think it is funny to heap yet more shit onto a group that is always already suffering mightily in this broken nation called America.  Every dime you make from advertising during this show will be blood money because your programming is going to help encourage bullies, embolden right-wing bigots and cajole religious fundamentalists to fight tooth and nail against our rights and against our legal protection.  That these two characters don’t identify as trans is a moot point and will continue to be a moot point as long as we live in a culture in which transgender people are routinely dehumanized and as long as we live in a society that does not afford trans folks even the most basic human rights.

But to end on a more positive note:  we will not be silent.  We will speak truth to power—and we will win.  Because unlike in 1980, when Bosom Buddies was born, we are now much more powerful as a community than ever before.  In the last thirty years, our movement has not only been born, it has fucking kicked some serious ass.  While others may make light of our struggle against shows like “Work It” (“It’s just entertainment—lighten up!”) we know that our lives depend upon our speaking out and acting up.

Good evening and welcome.  My name is Joelle Ruby Ryan and I am one of the organizers of the Gender Identities Awareness (GIA) week.  I’d like to begin by talking a bit about the Transgender Day of Remembrance and its history.  The Transgender Day of Remembrance is a yearly, international event held on or around November 20^th each year to memorialize those who have died due to anti-transgender hatred and violence.  The event is on or around November 20^th to commemorate the death of Rita Hester.  Rita Hester was a transgender, African American woman who was murdered in Allston, MA on November 28, 1998. In response to her murder, an outpouring of community grief and anger led to a candlelight vigil held the following Friday, December 4, in which about 250 people participated. This vigil inspired the “Remembering Our Dead” web project and the international Transgender Day of Remembrance.  Both were started by San Francisco transgender woman and activist Gwen Smith.  In recent years, the project has been continued by Massachusetts transgender activist and radio host Ethan St. Pierre, an FTM, whose own aunt, Debra Forte, was brutally stabbed to death for being transgender in Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1995.   Since its inception, the Transgender Day of Remembrance has been held annually on November 20th, and has slowly evolved from the web-based “Remembering Our Dead” project started by Smith into an international day of action. In 2010, the Transgender Day of Remembrance was observed in over 185 cities throughout more than 20 countries.

This year, there are 20 identified victims who were killed in this world because they are trans.  However, these numbers are vastly smaller than the actual number of victims.  There is a statistic that says that while the average murder rate for cisgender people is 1 in 18,000, for transgender people the average jumps to 1 in 12.  Transphobia, the irrational fear, hatred and disgust for people who cross, blur or transcend the socially constructed lines of male and female, masculine and feminine in our society, is a lethal and toxic force.  I have been involved in the Transgender Day of Remembrance since 2000, in Boston, in Ohio, and here in NH.  I will never forget one year in Ohio when I was creating posters for our Day of Remembrance and sitting alone in my apartment cutting out the pictures of those victims who had been murdered that year.  I was suddenly seized with overwhelming pain, grief and anguish.  Even before their deaths, there was so much sadness and hurt in many of their eyes.  As a transgender woman, I could relate to that hurt and sadness so well.  But in addition to that, I thought of the unbelievable gifts that had been prematurely taken from this world.  Transgender people are some of the most amazing, fierce, talented, creative, funny, intelligent and caring people that I have ever had the privilege of knowing.  How unfathomably tragic that these very people are taken from us by hate, bigotry and violence in the very prime of their lives.

There is a line in the poem “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde that states: “We, were never meant, to survive.”  From cradle to grave, the life experiences of many trans people are often ones of unending discrimination, prejudice, poverty and hostility.  I do not want one single person to emerge from this event and think: “Well there are just some bad people in this world who do bad things to other people.”  The green light comes from above.  This is not random violence.  This is systematic, and is it is condoned by every institution at every level of society.  A young trans person comes out, they are ejected from the home by their family, disowned and told never to return.  They sleep on the sidewalk like so many other homeless GLBT teens and they try to find a way to survive.  They sell their body to make money and are routinely harassed by police and treated disrespectfully by social service workers.  They apply for multiple jobs and are turned away for being trans because there are no laws in the city they live in to protect them from discrimination.  On one cold wintry night, a john picks them up who does not know their biological status.  After having sex with her, he kills her in cold blood because he is disgusted by her transgenderism and the thought that he might be gay.  The newspaper picks up the story and refers to the victim as a “he” as a “transvestite” and as a prostitute, and also prints their birth name in the paper.  The police relegate the case to the bottom of the pile and the perpetrator is never apprehended.  The families’ bigotry and the surviving friends’ powerlessness may aid and abet this complete lack of action.

Sadly, the above story, or a similar variation of it, is playing out in cities all over the country and has been for many decades now.  What I have come to understand is that all trans people are considered disposable people in this country.  Our lives simply do not matter as much as gender-normative, heterosexual people.  And often it is not just enough to kill us.  There is a level of unhinged maniacal violence to the hate crimes against us, what criminologists refer to as “overkill.”  It is not just enough to simply kill us, because we represent something much deeper than a living breathing body that must be stopped.  We represent an identity, a way of being in the world, a type of human being that must be annihilated.  Make no mistake: when these perpetrators take a life, they are not only killing one person, they are putting the rest of us, ALL of us, on warning: don’t cross, blur, or transcend gender, or you may pay for that transgression with your very life.

While I can relate to these victims in some ways, I am also very different from many of them.  I am white, I have a Ph.D., I work in a university, and I am middle-aged.  So many of the victims of these crimes are women of color, many are poor or working-class, some work in the sex industry, and many are young.  This, too, is not accidental.  My dominant identities give me privilege and immunize me from some of the most horrendous forms of bigotry and violence.   What happens to these victims is not only because of cissexism and transphobia.  It is also because of racism, classism, ableism, ageism, and anti-sex worker bias, among other forms of systemic and institutionalized discrimination.  While there are many victims in the U.S., in some other countries the situation appears to be even worse.  In some Latin America countries, for instance, trans women’s professional possibilities are routinely limited to prostitute, show girl or hairdresser.  Police harassment of these women is extreme and may involve outright murder that is swept under the rug.  So as we memorialize these victims, let us not forget that race, nation, class, age, disability and many other factors are as responsible for their victimization as gender and sexual identity are.

“We, were never meant, to survive.”  But for those of us who do survive, what are we to do?  How are we to make it better, to produce a world where the kind of violence we are discussing tonight would be unthinkable?  How do we create a world where every single life is seen as the precious star that it is, shining, glittering and twinkling away with love, with pride and with joy?  I wish I had more answers.  But I think of the words of Mother Jones, the American labor and community organizer, who extorted us all to “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”  Let me repeat: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”  Our survival, our continued existence, means that we have an option that the victims do not: we can keep on fighting.  We can keep on standing up for justice.  We can keep on speaking out, even if our voices shake.  We can re-member the dead and we can honor their legacies here on Earth.  What are you doing to make a difference?  What do you want to do?  The motto for Antioch College is: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”  There are so many victories to be won, so much suffering to eradicate.  How inspiring that none of us need wait one month, one day or even one minute to use our strength to fight like hell for the creation of a radically different world.  The people we memorialize here tonight, the people who fought with every fiber of their soul just to be who they were, deserve nothing less than our most valiant efforts.  Thank you.

I have attended the Translating Identity Conference (TIC) in Vermont at least four times in the past.  The Conference has now been held ten times and is held each October at the University of Vermont in Burlington.  I have presented numerous workshops there on a variety of topics.  I really want to continue to support it, but I can’t.  The reason?  While TIC purports to be for all trans/genderqueer people and allies, in actuality it almost completely caters to trans men, trans-masculine people, and allies of trans males.

I am a trans person, a woman, a feminist and a queer.  While I care deeply about trans issues in a general sense, I also care deeply about women’s issues. feminist issues, and queer women’s issues.  Were it not for feminism, queer people and trans people would not be anywhere near as far along as we are.  While many like to seem to pretend that the “trans community” is one big happy family, it isn’t.  It is about as happy as the “LGBT” community is with one another.  The trans community is divided based on race, class, educational attainment, profession, sex work engagement, age, nationality, disability and body size, among many other factors.  In addition, it is also divided based on trans men vs. trans women.  There is no doubt in my mind that trans women are much more oppressed than trans men, and trans women of color are the most oppressed of all.  A conference that slights trans women and trans feminine people is really messed up because it is reproducing the very power structures of the patriarchy that marginalize and oppress all women in the first place.

This is not a new challenge for TIC.  As I have stated, this conference has been around for a decade, and it has always been highly slanted in favor of trans men, Female Assigned AT Birth (FAAB) genderqueers and trans-masculine concerns.  This is displayed not only in terms of attendance, but also in terms of workshop programming.  As a trans woman and especially as a trans feminist, I remember multiple times of feeling marginalized and ignored.  There is a lot of trans-misogyny towards trans women that is constantly perpetuated and displayed by trans men (and FAAB genderqueers) and their cis female allies.  When I saw the workshop programming this year, I was disturbed that far from getting better, this situation had gotten even worse.  How many trans-feminine specific workshops were there?  How many trans women presenters were there?  Where on earth was trans feminism in the mix of workshop presentations?   While there were multiple trans-masculine-specific workshops, trans women were basically shut out. (While there was a trans-masculine caucus listed, there was no equivalent caucus for trans-feminine people.)  This is par for the course for a conference in which trans women are regularly marginalized and outright excluded.

And no, bringing in Julia Serano, or other trans woman “star” speakers does not exonerate the conference.  From my perspective, it makes it even worse, because Serano is then set up as a token and the conference can falsely think they are being inclusive because of one speech when the very fabric of the conference itself is not balanced.  Any trans men or trans-masculine people who do not “get” why some trans women and trans-feminine people are mad as hell about our exclusion at their hands need to go buy themselves a clue.  The same misogyny and sexism that lesbians faced at the hands of gay men is now being served to trans women by their trans “brothers.”  And queer-identified cis females are often super-complicit in this hate and exclusion against trans women.  As a trans community, we need to do better than replicating the behaviors of cis gays and lesbians or cis straight men and women.  I would like to add this is especially true in the arena of sexuality, as well.  While many cis lesbians rush to trans men like ants to candy, their view to trans women is often: ewww!  penis!  male cooties!  yuck!  And trans men, far from challenging this, usually eat it up, reveling in their privileged position in the queer community. (As well as cis gay men who talk about how “cute” trans men are and then turn to us trans women and make looksist comments and give us pointers on how we can “pass” better.)  In addition, I would like to add that the whole “sex-positive” current that is so hegemonic in the LGBT community is often to the detriment of trans women’s wellness and survival.  I found this to be so based on the cool reception I received from doing a workshop on the exploitation of trans women in the oppressive “she-male” pornography industry.  While many queers and trans men can’t wait to gush about the supposed subversiveness and empowering possibilities of the sex industry, many trans women are forced to work the streets or perform in porn for economic survival at great risk to their personhood.

While this post is critical, I hope that the organizers of TIC take it in the spirit that is offered.  TIC now has a ten-year history and I hope it goes for many more decades.  My goal in writing this is to inspire change in the conference culture that puts diversity as a much stronger priority.  I have no problem with trans-masculine conferences.  Either TIC should explicitly become a trans-masculine conference, or it should make trans-feminine inclusion, as well as greater racial diversity, a top-level priority for future conferences.  They can’t continue to proffer the illusion of an inclusive conference without delivering on that promise.  I would suggest that TIC heed the example of Philadelphia Trans Health Conference.  While PTHC used to be much more lop-sided in favor of trans-masculine people and issues, the organizers took this seriously as an issue and worked to make the conference more diverse and inclusive in multiple ways.  I understand that Philadelphia is a huge metropolitan city and that Burlington is a rural and less-diverse place, which definitely makes it more challenging work, but I still think with the right organizational changes that TIC can become a conference that is much more accessible to many more types of people.

1.  I come out of the fat closet because weight and size diversity are natural human variations.  Fat should be as neutral a descriptor as blond, or brown-eyed, or tall, or near-sighted.  People come in all shapes and sizes.  They always have and they always will.  This size-zero crap all the time has got to stop—it’s killing people!  To step forward and say: I am fat and I am okay with it is a revolutionary act in this culture.  We are just verbalizing what is already visible, and telling the world we refuse to be ashamed, guilty or self-hating.

2.  I come out of the fat closet because I refuse to let the diet industry dictate to me what I should be eating or what I should look like.  Did you realize the diet industry rakes in over 40 billion dollars a year in profits?  Did you realize that 95-98% of diets fail?  Did you realize that chronic yo-yo dieting can have serious consequences for your health? Imagine if everyone came out as fat and proud and what that would do the diet industry’s power over our culture.  I refuse to give them my money because I know they do not have either my health or my self-esteem in mind when they sit around counting their money.  Do you really think the diet industry wants you to permanently lose weight?  Heck no!  They want to hook you in and make you a life-long consumer of their ineffective and sometimes dangerous products, just like the tobacco industry wants to hook us all on cigarettes.  I want to tell the diet industry: stop colonizing our bodies for your own profit.  These are OUR bodies and we are taking them back!

3.  I come out of the fat closet because I reject the notion of the “obesity epidemic,” the medicalization of fatness, and the assault on people of size by the medical establishment.  If you believed everything you heard in the news, you’d think us fatties were dropping like flies.  You’d also think that being fat was this monstrous disease that needs to be cured by amputating part of your stomach.  Since when did “health” get weaponized to be used so hatefully against such a large group of people?  And since when did a number on a scale become the be-all and end-all of somebody’s physical, psychological and even moral well-being?  Now, I am not saying people shouldn’t be healthy—far from it.  But don’t assume things about my diet or exercise regime based upon my size.  In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret: many of the people of size I know exercise on a regular basis!  Some of them are vegetarian or vegan!  And yet, the medical establishment would seem to think we are all sedentary beings sitting around watching endless TV while consuming soda, cake, chips and fast food.  If we are going to talk about health, let’s talk about it for everyone.  How many skinny people do you know that smoke cigarettes, binge drink, have unsafe sex and yo-yo diet?  But they are automatically healthy because they are skinny?  I think not!  Don’t believe me?  Go home and Google “Health At Every Size” (HAES).  It’s a great movement that speaks truth to the fat-hating power of the medical establishment.

4.  I come out of the fat closet because people of size are mad sexy!  Yes, I said it.  Not everyone is attracted only to tooth picks.  There are plenty of people who love their partners thick, round and voluptuous.  And some of those folks need to come out of their own closet, because loving and being attracted to fat people is so ridiculously stigmatized!  As a culture, we need to stop the invisibility of bodies of size, and stop the never-ending advertising machine that forwards a vision of body fascism and fat-shame.  Where is it written that only thin folks are beautiful and only thin folks are deserving of love?  We need positive fat media visibility, including fat sex symbols, and a radical expansion of what beauty, attractiveness and empowered women look like in this society.

5.  Finally, I come out of the fat closet because self-love is a revolutionary act, and because loving yourself inspires and liberates others to do the same.  I look at little kids now and marvel at the love they have for themselves, other people and the world around them.  The excitement and curiosity they bring to their life every day, the spirit of adventure and freedom.  What happens to us as we grow up?  How do we go from being these self-loving little bundles of hopeful anticipation to cynical, jaded grown-ups who hate their bodies and judge those around them based on impossible, unattainable standards?  Where did we go wrong?  I don’t have all the answers.  But I do know one thing: life does not begin 50 pounds from now.  10 pounds from now, or even 5 pounds from now.  Fat or not, I am going to live my life, and I am going to be proud of the person I have become.  In short, I am going to rock it—so take that and stuff it, Jenny Craig!

It is beyond sad that some people, trans and non-trans alike, think that Chaz Bono’s upcoming appearance on the stupid reality show “Dancing with the Stars” amounts to anything more than a hill of beans.  As trans people suffer tremendously from systemic and institutionalized discrimination and oppression (alongside many non-trans people) the trans “issue du jour” (after Lady Gaga’s appearance in male drag on the VMAs…yawn) is the fact that D-list “celebrity” Chaz Bono has been offered a slot on the new season of this cheesy ABC TV show.  Big Fucking Deal!

The media has a great talent of ignoring important issues, and this is a classic example.  Trans people face unparalleled levels of oppression: job discrimination, homelessness, sex survival work, lack of health care, discriminatory health care, media defamation, familial rejection, substance abuse, suicidality, street-level abuse, bigotry, violence, hate crimes, police brutality, over-incarceration and placement in the wrong gendered prisons, juvenile detention centers, etc.  There are a plethora of significant, serious issues we are facing, and the best the media can offer us is this–trans kid of music icon on a fifth rate reality show.  Really?

Here’s the thing: some of us really don’t care about celebrities.  And we don’t think they are more important than regular, everyday people.  While the bigotry that Bono faced from the public regarding his upcoming appearance is obviously wrong, is anyone actually surprised?  I face that kind of bigotry every day of my fucking life.  So excuse me if I do not join the “Oh My Gawd Can You Believe the Hate Out There????” naiveté chorus.  This clueless club apparently knows little about the trans community if they think the zenith of oppression is what a rich, white, masculine celebrity faces rather than what poor trans people, esp. women and multiply oppressed trans people, esp. POC, face day in and day out in this deeply hateful nation called Amerika.

What exactly will Bono’s appearance on this insipid reality show actually give us in terms of tangible civil rights?  It is a symbolic victory at best, in that it gives us a smidgeon of added cultural visibility.  I certainly am not against him being on the show, but I get irritated with people who act like it is a radical step in our collective liberation as trans people.  It isn’t.

Let us not forget just what a conservative “family” show (and Disneyfied) network we are dealing with here.  The body fascism, sexism, gender role conformity and hyper-heterosexuality are all incredibly problematic on this show.  Chaz Bono, transsexual or not, added in to this conservative landscape is hardly ground-breaking.  In fact, I see the show as capitalizing on his transsexualism as yet another ratings-grab.  It will help actual trans people just about as much as Jerry Springer “let’s look at the freaks” shocksploitation format does.  And it is a great way to deflect attention away from much more pressing issues that face trans people in this discriminatory nation.  As a queer person, I do not enjoy the emphasis on gender conformity, not the expectations of heterosexual coupledom.  Nor do I enjoy the meta-narratives of the show about women’s outfits, bodies and overall physical attractiveness rated on a patriarchal scale.  Nor do I relish the fact that so many bodies of color, queer people, and now a trans person, are there to “entertain” middle-class, white, heteronormative, cisgender Americans.  This, while said “entertainers” do not even enjoy basic civil rights and social justice in our own society.  I do not judge people’s entertainment preferences and have my own “guility pleasure” viewing just like the next person!  But let us not pretend like this represents some big victory for the trans community.  The real work is too important to be overshadowed by mass media foolishness.