Adventures in Gender

After today’s session with my therapist, it came to my attention that I had not yet shared the story of The Hustler Who Fails At Gender.

So, there is a local man who is known to go down to the local university hangout, The Strip, and run a “gas money” hustle. Though I knew of him, I had never actually been hustled. Last Sunday, I went out to get dinner before newspaper staff meeting/my birthday party. As I’m crossing the street, he calls out to me. I stop, thinking he wants to know the time. As soon as he says, “Ma’am,” he catches himself, stops, and says “Sir.” Then he changes again, calling me “ma’am,” but then comments after that that no woman would have my haircut (which is, admittedly, at the moment very scruffy).

Eventually he gets close enough and begins his hustle. I keep trying to get out of it, because this time he wants me to go with him, which is a big red flag. Throughout the conversation, he keeps switching honorifics, to the point of flat-out insulting me. Finally, he asks me, “What are you, a boy or girl?” I say rather stiffly that I identify as male. After which he laughs at me. Laughs at me and uses the presumably proper pronoun once or twice before switching back to feminine honorifics.

At this point, I rather rudely got rid of him (in itself unusual, because I’m very bad at being rude and usually try to at least provide some cash, as possibly unethical/unhelpful as that is), because dammit, it’s my birthday and you’re insulting me while attempting to hustle me for cash.

I have the best adventures.

Astro Boy, Now Guaranteed Not To Hit Like A Girl

Awhile back, I was asked by Ariel of the wonderful if sporadically updated blog Prepare for Trouble if I would submit a guest column on the new Astro Boy movie – with her permission, I have republished it here.

Recently, I was linked to an article on the Hollywood animated movie adaption of Osamu Tezuka’s classic Tetsuwan Atom, known in America as Astro Boy: Astro Boy’s makeover.

When [the Tezuka estate] saw the initial designs for Astro Boy in the upcoming computer animated flick, the one thing that the Japanese owners did not fancy was the size of his rear end.

They found it too small.

At first, it seems impossible – a battle over rear ends? Really?

Really. And it’s but one in a line of gender-normative changes applied to the iconic Tezuka character, as I found out. Astro now has less “feminine” eyes, has been aged up to the appropriately rambunctious age of 12, and wears a light blue shirt.

Repossessing Normal

queenemily’s Questioning Transphobia post on the “self-narrating zoo exhibit” really struck a chord with me. For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about an experience I had while doing yet another diversity training, a duty which I have decided ends the minute I leave for graduate school.

While I don’t have the most experience with public speaking, I’ve done a good share of diversity trainings in my day. I’m not unused to once again trotting out my story for public consumption by total strangers. But I go into every training with a policy to be honest when telling my story. Which means I do, in abbreviated terms, mention that for most of my childhood I was emotionally abused and manipulated by my mother, with serious consequences.

At one talk, however, this abuse became the crux on which the discussion turned, to the point that my cisgendered listeners felt comfortable passing judgment on my own, very personal life choices. This isn’t exactly uncommon—when other, non-“trans” factors become part of a trans person’s life experience, all previous context does an acrobatic swan dive out of the collective windows of cisgendered listeners’ minds, and the entire conversation shifts to how one’s past has “contributed to” or “caused” their transness.