Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Part 72

August 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Shown: A preview of the next Republican scare tactic; "Socialised Medicine turns ambulances into chess boards, just look at Britain!"

Your less-than-humble correspondent has been on holiday, drinking exotic water and visiting strange and mystic locales like her shower as well as phoning far away lands to sort out problems with her bank account. Which is actually a perfect segue into today’s topic: Healthcare. It’s back, baby. So how did I get from phoning Bengalooru to Healthcare Reform? Well, let’s start skipping down the yellow brick road here. Recently I went through a bit of a legal process, a name change, and in the wake thereof I had to start to change documents to keep them up to date. The three big places I’ve made changes at so far are the following: The Social Security Administration, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and HSBC Bank. Now, which took the longest? Give up? In the order of fastest to glacial it is as follows: Social Security: I spent 30 minutes at the office. Name change was processed on the spot (i.e. entered into the database) and I got my new card in a … [Read more...]

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Penney For Your Thoughts

August 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

So, I decided I’d take a holiday from the trans-politics for a bit as immersing one’s self in that for prolonged periods can leave one suffocating after a while, and then my writing just gets all like a sweaty squid trying to unhook a corset. Nobody wants that. Thus I sit here with my nifty umbrella drink, maxing and relaxing, and along comes this load of bollocks in a sock. [In the interest of full disclosure, 90% of my wardrobe is from JCPenney, for reasons that’ll become relevant in a moment.] Let’s analyse this bit by bit using my usual restrained, sensible, and sobreminded reasoning. “Why would this dowdy Middle American entity waddle into Midtown in its big old shorts and flip-flops without even bothering to update its ancient Helvetica Light logo, which for anyone who grew up with the company is encrusted with decades of boring, even traumatically parental, associations?” What the fuck is wrong with you, woman, seriously? Ahem. Now to the reasoning … [Read more...]

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The City of Cis

August 13, 2009 By 3 Comments

Endeavouring as ever to prove the veracity of the sentiment behind this journal’s title, reality dealt another interesting pinprick the other day. Apparently the trans-sphere exploded over a series of posts and comments made on Pam’s House Blend, a blog way more popular than this one and with more employees. This link is a very good place to start. Another nuclear situation exploded in the blog-O’Sphere apropos us damn bitchy trans people and all our irritating talk about oppression and what not. Apparently the terms “cissexual” and “cisgendered” are now offensive according to one professional gay man and Autumn Sandeen deigned to agree, fundamentally, with him and his ideological fellow-travelers in a very long blog post meant to rationalise the fundamentally fallacious idea- saying over and over that the term was “weaponised.” At first, I will admit, I wanted to empathise with her. But as I read her links and really absorbed the meaning behind her post, that … [Read more...]

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Invisible Woman

August 10, 2009 By 2 Comments
Dr. Zucker, seen here trying to melt his arch nemesis, Barbie, with his mind.

“This is a bill that begins to confuse the gender differences between men and women to the point of trying to allow men to use women's restrooms, and, of course, that means sexual predators going after young children,” Tom Minnery, senior vice president of public policy at Focus on the Family Action, said... (Source.) There are things that words often fail to describe adequately. My reaction to the above quote was one of those things. But I will take a good stab at explaining why this is wrong using my usual flawless logic. First of all, the onus is on the Christian fundamentalists to demonstrate using anything other than tautological bullshit that gender-identity discrimination protection empowers sex offenders. I like to think of myself as a fair minded woman, willing to walk in another person’s shoes for a while (they’re probably less painful than heels for sure). But for the life of me, looking through the eyes of these Christian radicals I still can’t see what they … [Read more...]

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The Trans-feminine Mystique

August 9, 2009 By 1 Comment

When I first began writing this journal/blog thingy I wondered in my very first post if I should come out or not; if I should restrain myself from letting that little dirty secret slip into a Google-searchable journal. In the end I realised something rather important, so I just said “fuck it” and wrote that into the very first post. I knew I couldn’t hold that back. It’s in the DNA of this journal’s name, as the first post explained. But what I also realised is that there are still so precious few outlets for trans people to get the message out there. There are certainly more than ever. The Internet has been a remarkable help in this regard. Many books are now on the shelves that are autobiographical, political or both, and that’s a wonderful thing. Yet even so, none of us can name a really good movie that portrayed a trans person sympathetically, seriously, and non-stereotypically, much less a TV show. We are shown as crude caricatures, or with our high heeled legs … [Read more...]

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Sex: F. Love, The State

August 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment
If only it were that easy.

There’s a stinging duality to validation-by-document. On the one hand, when I hold a letter from my doctor, or a state ID that affirms I am female and has my proper, womanly name in all its glory, I feel empowered. I feel alive. I feel validated. I was taken seriously enough for those official categories of consideration to be changed, for the State to smile on me in its own strange, distant way and favour me with the constructs of a ‘legal name’ and ‘ID’ that act as the keys to getting me seen in society as I want to be seen. That doctor’s letter affirmed that I was indeed gender dysphoric, that I was truly a woman whose ‘psychological gender predominated over her physical/birth gender.” Those affirmations made my heart sing. They also make it sink sometimes. Because I know that I should never need any of those things to ‘prove’ myself to anyone ever. I remember how I held up the Greatest Doctor’s Note Ever to my father and told him “See?” Yet … [Read more...]

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I’m With You

August 5, 2009 By 1 Comment
That sign does come in handy now and again.

Having been inducted into the Femmisphere by my good friend over at FemmEssay it is perhaps worth meditating once again on the unicorniness of the whole Nuclear Unicorn thing. So let’s get down and funky with it while I drop some serious verbal groove. Or funk. Or whatever. The point is that as the convenient illustration to the left shows, I am a woman. But we wouldn’t be here if it were that simple. I think that if I had to give a piece of advice to transsexual people who were just coming out, one that would be regarded as a rare gem of insight, it would have to be a warning, I am sad to say. We expect our enemies to come from the religious right and from the social conservative movement, and we are often reminded of why we must always be wary of them. But a trans person also must look over the left shoulder as some of our worst enemies are unabashed liberals. That’s been very hard for me to swallow, without question. My own ideological commitments, as the rest of this … [Read more...]

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Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Part II

August 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment
This is the bureaucrat between you and your doctor *now*

Remember that time your cable company had you on hold for a half hour and routed your call, finally, to someone who was thoroughly unable to assist you with your problem? Let’s back up a step here. If your cable company or ISP is anything like mine you probably had to go through a dozen asinine automated steps where you had to verify your computer was plugged in as well as turn it on and off at the recording’s prompting. Or when that voice helpfully advises you to go to the company website... after you already indicated via the touchtone menu that your Internet is out. Efficiency at its finest. Or how about the time your credit card company did this to you? Or the time your airline bumped you for little to no reason? Or lost your luggage? How about the time your computer manufacturer charged you hundreds of dollars to pay for their expertise of getting you to open up your own computer and see inside? I’m sure you have your own horror stories of dealing with any number of … [Read more...]

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Drawn Into Failure

August 4, 2009 By 3 Comments
Big Eyed Slug

Quick, how do you draw a political cartoon? If your snarky answer is “very, very carefully” then you’re demonstrably wrong. If your answer is “with an eye towards elucidating complicated subjects in a visual medium” then I will have to laugh most heartily for thou art a silly one. Ultimately, political cartooning is one of the most addicting, unedifying, and destructive media in the press at large. Some webcomic authors, all of whom are young people, are already mocking the so-called art. It’s not a slight against the artistic talents of the men and women who draw them, mind. Some are quite good. The problem lies with the almost self-satirising silliness of the medium they’re forced to work in. One that uses almost comically overdone visual metaphors that fail so much they have to be brazenly labeled in order to be intelligible to the reader. Ever since the peerless British satire programme The Day Today (a sort of forerunner to fake news shows like The Daily … [Read more...]

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Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Part I

August 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I have a knack for being snarkily dispassionate about politics, taking a leaf from George Carlin's playbook about being a disinterested observer with no investment or stake in political horsetrading. The current debate about healthcare, however, is one time where I have to trip and stumble back into the abyss of giving a shit. It's too personal for me not to. My own personal stake in the healthcare crisis as an uninsured woman is irrelevant. It's the people I know personally who lack insurance despite health problems that are eminently treatable but for want of money that drive my feelings on the matter. I've been told that I'm unusually passionate about this issue. Well, so be it. If I'm going to be vitriolic and passionate about anything it might as well be this. When you know someone who is being slowly murdered to support a wealthy business interest or an ideological point of discussion that tends to get one's dander up just a wee bit. So let's get started. This week … [Read more...]

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