My Therapist Talks To My Spirit Guides, Also Dreams

So, I am a Pagan spiritualist.  Did I mention that already?  Well, it's true. Mostly I work with rocks because my God is a God of infertility and I can't work with plants very well.  But anyway, this came up at my therapy session and my therapist, who is an energy worker, said she wanted to try some energy work with me.  And I consented.

I'm not saying I regret it, and I like her a lot as a therapist, but honestly pretty much everything she told me was stuff we'd talked about at my third session.  Namely that I have been trying to transition into a different clothing style, but I trip up for... well, pretty silly reasons.  So basically a lot of "pay more attention to your personal appearance" stuff which was actually kind of my idea.  But, well, I'll take it as motivation to continue on this quest anyway.

Some relevant recent crap.

It's been kind of stressful lately what with the ridiculous amount of transphobia out there and the ridiculous amount of people saying they aren't transphobic because women are incapable of oppression.  My favorite recently was that somebody had made a comic that used trans women as a punch line... not the worst punch line I've ever seen, but a punch line nonetheless.  The author was all upset that people called her "privileged" because people were using the word "privilege" as a weapon against her.  The fact that you can say this, by the way, without most people thinking it is an unreasonable request, is because you have privilege.  Zing!


Recently of course the big issue was a trans woman who was assaulted in a Baltimore McDonalds bathroom while an employee did what any upstanding US citizen would do and taped it to put online while people sat by and laughed.  Of course, talk to most people and it's trans women who are the bathroom predators, so how come I'm not hearing more stories like this in which trans women are the ones doing the beating?  This is not a particularly rare occurrence, either.  But noooo, we need to "protect" cis women because they are perpetual victims.  You know what just put the icing on the cake here?  When the story first broke it didn't mention she was a trans woman because the reporters weren't sure about it, and people were commenting on trans-positive blogs with comments like "The article says she was a woman, not a trans woman!"  Seriously.  People on trans-positive blogs commented that.  Of course the articles said she is a woman.  She is a woman.  And even if she were cis, which she is not, she was clearly assaulted because of a perception of being trans, which is still anti-trans crime.

I believe there is also a petition to McDonalds to hold people accountable (last I heard at least one of the employees was fired, good riddance) at Change.org, but it's been down for me so, well...

(Trans) Male Privilege

You ever get pissed about something and then you sort of do a 180 over it later once you calm down?  So, white female privilege.  Bring this up and  it seems like scores of people come out of the woodwork to yell "there is no female privilege!"  I never actually said anything, but yes, my brain went there.  I've identified as a feminist for a long time, and there are some themes within feminism that are pretty much drilled into your head, largely that oppression is one-way and therefore things like "female privilege" or "black privilege" are considered nonexistent.  Which also makes me think about several times in which certain trans women have railed against trans men for various things, like the existence of trans male only support groups.  So I thought about how ludicrous I thought the idea of "trans male privilege" was.  I believed (as I continue to do) that I have male privilege, but trans male privilege seemed a stretch.  So I was looking at the idea of white female privilege, as well as black male privilege and some other various phrases used, with that lens.

Once I cooled down, though, I realize that it's not as problematic as I thought.  Including the concept of trans male privilege, which I'd like to keep the focus of this simply because I am a trans man and don't want to be telling women what's what.  Also, the way people fight against this usage is I think sort of indicative of the same attitudes that drive some groups (particularly people of color groups) away from feminism.

Please contact WYFF4 and tell them this is not acceptable.

Does this look like a man to you? Me neither.

So I just learned about this through I think TransGriot but from Google magic I learn they've had this problem for quite a while.  WYFF4, a South Carolina station, is reporting on the disappearance and later discovery of a trans woman not only as a "transgender man," but as "a 22 year old Hispanic man who dresses as a female and has breast implants."

What the fuck, WYFF4.  Seriously.  So I am inviting anybody who reads this to please contact them politely to get them to change this.  It is both offensive and against established reporting guidelines to refer to trans people in this way.

Fun with Google Analytics...

Not many people come here through search engines.  Most come through my church (oddly enough) and Trans Queer Nation (not even a little odd, actually).  Only six visits recently, in fact, are from search engines.  On an aside, one of my other blogs gets visits mostly from people trying to figure out if that story with the woman suing the family of a dead man for child support because she had sex with his corpse and got pregnant is real.  So only six visits on this site does not unsettle me.  Go back to December and there are a few more, but anyway...

It is interesting though to look at what search cues people used to click in and which ones made people stay.  In the case of this blog, "dont use the word tranny" got a hit from a person who didn't stick around.  Whoever got here through "transitioning without testosterone" probably hit my essay on how I distrust Natural Transitioning and also did not stick around, "my gender transition" and "i hate being trans" also left hastily.  Somebody came here after searching "dianic trans pantheacon" and stayed for a few minutes, and "dianic trans exclusion" got a hit, too.

My favorite, though, is that somebody who got here with the interestingly non-trans-related "things I hate about being a man" and then surfed a total of 32 pages for a total of 28 minutes.  Maybe I need to re-think my audience.

Or not.