Philadelphia Trans Health Conference Report

[areyououtthere]

I moved to the house I did in Philadelphia, despite the random people and dirty kitchen, largely so I could be here in time to go to the trans-health conference. After moving, I waffled a lot--wouldn't I be disrupting other people's safe space, could my turning up there be interpreted as me doing the obnoxious "it's your job as an [insert minority

Comments

[carnap]

The world GID reform is kind of bizarre, because to get what they want trans advocates need transpeople simultaneously normalized and pathologized. Normalized because they want transpeople to be seen as normal and healthy, not as members of the stigmatized category "mentally ill." Pathologized because surgery is expensive, so a lot of transpeople need health insurance to pay for it. But to get insurance to pay for it they need gender reassignment surgery to be viewed as a "medical" treatment that people "need." If it's seen as a form of cosmetic surgery rather than a treatment for a medical condition, people conclude that insurance shouldn't have to pay for for it any more than it should have to pay for Botox. It's a weird dynamic.

[orawnzva]

It is a sign of my massive amounts of white privilege that it didn't occur to me how problematic this could potentially be until we had to start running our hands through our hair.Define "problematic". Every time I see this formulation of "privilege", it seems to suggest that one should have known better than to do that. Is every act of role-playing someone different from you a violation? If so, how can you ever actually learn about people different from you? Did you learn something from this exercise? (It sounds like you did

[orawnzva]

To clarify why that combination of ideas is problematic, by the way: It creates a situation in which (a) newcomers to the conversation are treated as uninitiated, (b) lots of people are willing to put them through an ordeal, but (c) nobody is willing to create any of the other conditions for a successful initiation experience.

I've seen this happen in thread after thread of RaceFail and related conversations. Examining one's privilege is an ordeal initiation, and initiations cannot take place unless a space is created that is safe for the intiate. Telling the (privileged) initiate that they don't deserve a safe space because they have the whole rest of society to be safe in is never going to help. It's not even true - there are all kinds of ways to feel unsafe, and no kind of privilege protects from all of them.

Transgender Bible characters

[anonymous]

Have you heard of Peterson Toscano? He's a performance artist who has a play called "Transfigurations: Transgressing Gender in the Bible," wherein he acts out Biblical stories and explains them and some wording etymologies that show things like "Joseph's 'amazing technicolor dreamcoat'? Yeah they didn't have a word for technicolor. Scholars will tell you the word used for that garment is of unknown meaning. It's used one other place in the Bible, though: princess dress." I definitely recommend seeing him perform that some time.

(Psst, he's also a Quaker. Oh, and I found your LJ from the Quaker group on Ravelry, looking for local-ish people.)

Re: Transgender Bible characters

[areyououtthere]

Y'know, I don't have my program from this conference anymore so I can't confirm, but I think it may have been Toscano facilitating that panel. Thanks for jogging my memory. Would love to see him again sometime--I recall him being hilarious, though I can't remember a ton of specifics now.

Where exactly are you geographically. I wrote this post while living in Philly, but I'm DC-based these days. If you're DC-local and comfortable identifying yourself, shoot me a ravelry message or e-mail songsaboutrainbows [at] gmail. Would love to do a Quaker knitting meetup!