Announcing an easier way to purchase Bite!

Name your own price, no pesky PayPal. Because dealing with cissexism day-in and day-out is bad enough without shady conservative payment processors acting as middlemen between you and your community.

Check it out here.

Nevada in Nevada: A Review

If you’re white, somewhere in your late 20′s or early 30′s, and a feminist-inclined trans woman who discovered herself on the internet, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada will feel like The Voice of Our Generation. You will say to yourself, “This is amazing. It’s like I’m reading The Great American Novel, but for trans women like me.” You will then chastise yourself for buying into bullshit erasive monocultural concepts like “The Voice of Our Generation” and “The Great American Novel”. This will just amplify the effect.

I have a confession to make: I have never been punk rock. I grew up in a cush house in suburban Ohio with an acre yard. I was a trans girl trapped in sociopathic Normalsville, but it never drove me to drugs, to loud music, or to edgy acts of rebellion. Not that I conformed, either. I just disappeared into the cigarette-stained wallpaper as best I could.

It is this history that partly shapes the way I relate to Maria, the main character in Nevada. More accurately, it shapes the ways I don’t relate to her, yet still feel like I’m staring into a mirror when I read her excessive inner monologues.

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My Gender Timeline

Note: This post briefly mentions rape. Also, throughout this piece I use certain terms interchangeably, like “gender” and “sex”. I tried to be more accurate at first, but then decided fuck it, our language sucks, I’m just going to use whatever feels right at the time. For a more detailed deconstruction of gender, sex, and the way I actually define myself, check out the piece Disowning Labels in my chapbook, Bite. TLDR; I don’t actually have a gender, and for me transition is about fixing body dysphoria. I wish I had better words to use in the title. /pedantry

Oh and sorry to those who arrived via Google, this post isn’t a series of photos showing changes from HRT. You’ll have to look elsewhere for that. /unnecessaryapology

There are many trans narratives—the stories of how a person comes to know they are trans. There is no one single way we figure outselves out. Some know from early childhood, some figure it out later in life. Some transition from one binary gender to another. Some are one gender their whole life, just not the one people assigned to them. Some change their bodies, some don’t. It’s complicated.

The media, however, likes to portray a “standard narrative” of transness. The idea is that “real” transsexuals always know their gender from a very young age, always exhibit signs of being normative members of that gender, and later get “the operation” to join the ranks of the so-called “opposite” sex. My own narrative matches the mainstream one in a few superficial ways, but differs from it greatly in others.

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nfdystopian:

rjmakes:

The Fully Functional Cabaret is, at its heart, a love letter to trans womanhood. Take a step back, and you will see a familiar story of people seeking healing by shining a light all up in society’s dark places. Come for the camp, glitter, song, dance, shadow puppets, inflatable genitalia, a barbershop quartet, and hilarious good time and stay for the surprise profundity, magic, healing, and human connection we all crave.

You might remember me encouraging you to fund this show via indiegogo or encouraging you to go see this show but even if you did neither you are in luck, because the whole of this wonderful show’s opening night has been recorded and put online so far-away-from-SF peoples like you and I can watch it. And we should. Watch it and share it! I can’t say enough good things about it.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

This is showing in New York tonight and tomorrow. If you’re in the area, Do Not Miss It. It is *incredible*. 

It’s like, the women on stage ask you to give them your heart. You’re not really sure if you should at first, but there’s something there that’s familiar, and so you trust them with it. Then they take it and start ripping it open, piece by piece, showing all these little bits inside that you always kinda knew were there but never really thought you could see your own of. It hurts, a lot. But it’s not just your heart that they’re opening, but their own as well, showing you the similarities between us, and sharing in the pain. As the show nears its end, they put your heart back together and give it back to you and it’s the same heart as it was before but it’s better now, somehow. There’s a magic to it that you know is yours, and that you share with these wonderful people on stage.

This show was a spiritual, healing experience. I cried like a baby. This show cracked me wide open. By the end felt like a loving warmth had entered my wide-open heart saying “It’s ok. You’re ok.”