Trans/plant/portation

Every single Republican who threw their hat into the 2012 Presidential election season has been mocked mercilessly by the press and the general public. Many of them *cough Pawlenty cough* have looked like little more than a deer in headlights or like a raving lunatic (read: Herman Cain), with ideas either too bland to capture anyone’s imagination, or with statements so fringe nobody could take them seriously. The litany of horrible one-liners that came out of the nonstop GOP debate schedule made all of these contenders look completely unqualified or incapable of running the White House office supply order, much less the country. And poll after poll showed President Obama significantly ahead of not just the field of self-named candidates, but ahead of a generic Republican opponent.

Many of us have asked, what is going on here? Surely there are informed, reasonable Republicans with solid experience who could be in this campaign–not that anyone comes to mind in the ten seconds I’m willing to think about it. But out of 313 million Americans, isn’t there someone with foreign policy experience, a non-reductive reading of the Constitution, and a willingness to work in a bipartisan way in Washington, DC? Read More…

Setting: Pajama party, 1985, East Windsor, New Jersey, in the suburbs. About six or seven teenage girls are hanging out in a family room, watching racy movies and nibbling at chocolate chip cookies and potato chips. It is something like 1AM. The movie ends and conversation starts up, mostly about who’s dating whom, which teachers at school are the worst, nothing terribly unexpected as topics go. And then someone arrives at the bright idea of playing truth or dare. Dares are written down on scraps of paper and tossed into a hat, should a game participant select dare over truth for their turn. Dares seem to be winning out as the choice of the night, and quickly all of the dares are exhausted.

I figure that we’ve gone through the worst of them, so when it’s my turn, I pick dare and consider myself the cleverest person of the evening. It only takes about five seconds to reconsider handing over my mantle.

“Put this chip clip on your boob.” She held it out to me. It was all bright yellow and innocent-looking. Read More…

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Erm, maybe not happy. We are, after all, thinking about a civil rights leader who was assassinated. But hey, it’s a great day for a furniture sale! Or a quick trip to KMart to see what’s been price-slashed.

I mean, we’re post-race in this country, right? So there’s nothing race-related about calling the First Lady “Mrs. YoMama.” There’s no race in any of the billboards that have popped up across the nation of President Obama in a turban, or in the incessant, it’s-been-proven-wrong notion that he was not born in the USA. There’s no racism in saying that black city kids should become janitors so that they can learn a work ethic. Of course Rick Santorum wasn’t racist when he went on the stump and said he didn’t want to give black people taxpayers’ money. They were “blah people,” he said in a correction. Read More…

Several years ago, Cookie Monster himself declared that cookies were a “sometimes food.” What a disappointment. After a childhood of thinking the way to eat a cookie was to mash it into my felty mouth, now I was supposed to eat apples and celery?

At least we had the annual Girl Scout cookie drive, the largest fundraising activity for the Girl Scout organization. There’s a proper emphasis on cookies. Who doesn’t like buying a couple of boxes of these to help support one of the biggest woman-run organizations in the US?

Taylor, a teenage Scout from California, that’s who. In her YouTube video, she calls for a boycott on Girl Scout cookies because a troop in Colorado let in a trans girl as a Scout. Taylor thinks this 7-year-old is a danger to the other Scouts, and unravels the entire “for girls” mantra in the organization. Read More…

At 41 and a half years, I am still an optimist. After a bout with a major depressive episode, I am still an optimist. Sex change? Optimist. I’ve grieved for people lost, had some horrendous relationships, been mugged, chased out of an apartment by a closeted roommate, had to fling myself away from a falling ceiling in some flophouse I called an apartment and still, optimist.

Perhaps it’s time to admit that I’m hard-wired for a positive lens on life. Or I’ve got some darn stubborn tendencies.

Most of my most important lessons I’ve learned the hard way; popularity is never as important as doing the right thing. Half of Brooklyn’s queers won’t speak to me because I refused to let someone start a brawl in a Philadelphia bar during a transgender conference, for example. They called it “silencing,” the most disingenuous argument I’d come across in LGBT circles at the time.

I never made it to the A-list crowd in high school because I was also friends with geeks and outcasts. (I’m pretty sure I was a geek myself, but I don’t think I saw it that way at the time.) Read More…

On any given day, I need to get a lot of stuff done. Most of us do, after all. I’m living off from my to do list at the moment, because I tend to lose lists these days, what with half of my consciousness preoccupied with WHERE IS BABY IS BABY OKAY kinds of questions.

Also affecting my ability to get all of my stuff done is the baby himself. Emile is omnipresent in the house, mostly due to the fact that this winter, he does not prefer alone time. So he comes around with us as we operate in each room of the house. Yes, this slows down progress–for instance, I am making it through this blog post one sentence an hour.

To further entertain him but also to increase the odds that I can get stuff done, I talk to him, explaining whatever is going on around us. It’s banal for the most part, and when I do it while cooking I feel a bit like a chubby, trans Rachel Ray. But sometimes I surprise myself with the things that come out of my mouth. Read More…

Once upon a time the title to my memoir was the vague and mildly misleading, “Jersey Boy.” Then that awful movie came out, and the cringefest that is Jersey Shore debuted on MTV. I recognized that in addition to these two negative contextual cues, it didn’t really matter that I am originally from the Garden State, becuase the whole memoir takes place in Washington, DC, and only people who know me personally could remotely care that I hail from the mid-Atlantic state.

Worse, it didn’t say anything about what the book was about.

So I came up with Bumbling into Body Hair: Tales of a Klutz’s Sex Change. That title spelled out everything I thought needed explanation. It’s a funny book. It’s about trans people. It shares the tone and a snippet of the protagonist’s voice.  Read More…

There’s something about looking at a fresh, crisp trade paperback book that belies the messiness of the publication process, and writing itself. Books have bright covers, a little bit of heft when you pick them up, sharp edges, and lovely summaries on the back or inside covers–what a perfect little package of enjoyment. And oh, what it took to get there.

An idea, a cast of characters, copious hours spent writing, rewriting, ripping out words and inventing new ones. Then there’s the swaths of time just getting into writing mode, which I personally need to decrease this year, what with an adorable infant vying for my attention and all (and he gets it, no problem). After so many revisions and passes through the manuscript, beta readers come in and make the author rethink everything they considered perfect or innovative, or interesting. More rewrites. Boil down everything into a synopsis, fret over the book’s query letter, and email those lucky agents who could decide the manuscript is a gem. Handle the rejections, revise the synopsis, pitch it in person at a conference, dust off other projects and get started writing something new. And finally an email appears that someone wants to represent or publish the book.

And that’s just the beginning. I haven’t even mentioned publicists and press kits yet. My point is, if all of this goes into making a book happen–or its cousin, the ebook.

Writers don’t need any distractions or dead weight in this process of inspiration to printing press; bad habits are the one thing we can identify on our own and work to eliminate. And yes, I’ve exhibited or performed nearly every bad behavior in the following list. Read More…