Trans Bodies Trans Selves – Montreal Forum

Hi readers! If any of you are in Montreal, you should come to this event that I’m co-organising! We’ve already gotten some awesome press about the event here. The event is tied to the Trans Bodies Trans Selves resource guide project so if you’re not in Montreal, you can still check out the site to see if they are having an event in your area.  No matter where you are, there is a survey you can fill out online if you want your voice to be heard for this project!

(Un)Heard: Transmasculine Men of Color Speak

Check out their call for participants here.

Thanks to your support and love (Un)heard Transmasculine People of Color Speak! has been funded through our kickstarter.com page. Now its time for us hit the road!  Transmasculine POCs we want your stories! If we get enough participants, the project may become a book!

If you are interested in being interviewed/photographed for the project please email us at transunheard@gmail.com.

FYI for people living in central Canada, they might be in Toronto July 1-3 according to the info contained on the list.

2012 Trans Calendars in the works!

They are still looking for models and other collaborators. Check it out here or on Facebook.

TopSide Press Call for Submission

Thought this would be of interest to readers:

http://topsidepress.com

I’m not dead! I will probably have another blogging spurt soon….lots on my mind!

Living Semi-Stealth. Sort of.

OK, so the whole posting every week thing lasted a grand 2 months. Not out of lack of things to say, just out of a lack of energy. As some of you know, I’m in the midst of doctoral research in a small community in Northern Quebec. Lately, I’ve been more and more involved in the community and have very little time to myself. And the little time I do have I (mostly unsuccessfully) try to keep as Jacky self-care time.

But I thought I would drop a line about how interesting it has been living “semi-stealth.” Back home, everyone who knows me knows that I’m trans. For the most part, it’s because they knew me before. But even knew people that I meet find out soon enough because I frequently like to joke around about “that time when I was in the girl scouts” or “when I was in labour” and so forth. Also, most new people I meet are some flavour of queer, or close enough, so that transngess and GQness is something that is pretty usual to talk about.

Living in a small community where there are few queers and where those who are queer tend to stay fairly quiet about it, it’s not something that has come up very often. People that knew me from prior visits know but, since they didn’t see me through the transition, memories of Nancy are far back enough to be somewhat irrelevant to them. An exception is a former lover who doesn’t really want to communicate too much out of discomfort because “OH MY GOD he had sex with a woman who then became a man, does that make him GAY?!?!” But I knew that this was going to happen before I transitioned, and I decided to transition anyway. I loved him, and still do, but chose self love over his love. So his reaction doesn’t really phase me. Other than that, my son, as always, calls me Mommy, which leads to some confusion, but most people have simply taken it in stride. The few people I’ve come out to, because it just came up, have taken it in stride as well. So…no big deal really.

Now, I don’t really care if people know. But since I don’t bring it up unless it comes up (like if someone actually asks me why my son calls me “Mommy” or the time someone actually mentioned a film by one of my trans idols, Lazlo Pearlman), I don’t wind up bringing it up very often. So most people in town believe that that A) I’m a guy, through and through – as opposed to a blend, which is how I actually feel and identify with people that matter – and that B) I’ve always been one. It’s a strange feeling for me, because I’m not into being stealth at all and I’m not used to people just assuming that I was once a little boy.

I am quite surprised that gossip hasn’t gotten around more…or maybe it has. Two of my students were conversing in their own language one time and I heard the term “sex change” pass between them but they didn’t look at me. So it might be that there have been rumours, but since people (students, their parents, colleagues) like me well enough, it didn’t wind up mattering.

Who knows. I still have a few months left here so all kinds of things could happen in the meantime. We’ll see.

 

Tr@nz – January 2011 issue

The latest issue of Tr@nz is out! Tr@nz is a bilingual (French and English) online magazine about local (Montreal/Quebec/Canada) and international issues affecting trans folks. Scroll down after following the link to download the PDF file for the latest issue. You can also subscribe to the magazine and get an email from Maxime every time a new issue comes out.

 

We need to keep fighting! Bill C-389

I strongly urge all readers who are residents of Canada to check out this link.

It contains a sample letter and an easy “copy-pastable” list of Canadian senators who will soon be deciding the fate of Bill C-389. If you didn’t already know, this bill would ensure rights for trans people in Canada by adding gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination in the Canadian charter of human rights. (More on this issue here.) You are free to write your own letter of course but if time is short and words fail you, 2 minutes of your time is all it takes to copy and paste this sample letter and list of senators into your email and click send.

Right now, the people who have the government’s ears are the extreme right-wing nuts who think that all trans people are pedophiles out to get into the showers of little girls. So if we don’t speak up “en masse,” this bill will die and who knows if trans people will have official rights in Canada any time in the next 50 years.

Thanks in advance for any little thing you can do to help!