announcing Girl Talk 2012: a Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue

Hey folks, so over the weekend the official Girl Talk 2012: a Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue details were announced! Here is the official Facebook invite and here is the official QCC website. All the details also appear below.

Past shows have sold out, so we encourage folks to purchase advance tickets from Brown Paper Tickets. Please save the date and/or spread the word wide and far!!! -julia


Girl Talk: A Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue

Thursday, March 29th, 2012
7:00pm - 10:00pm
San Francisco LGBT Community Center - Rainbow Room
1800 Market Street between Octavia & Laguna
Tickets: $12-$20 (no one turned away)

curated by Gina de Vries, Elena Rose and Julia Serano

cast includes: Charlie Anders, Dominika Bednarska, Gina de Vries, DavEnd, Thea Hillman, Nomy Lamm, Emily Manuel, Elena Rose (aka Little Light), Julia Serano, Jos Truitt and Pidge Vera

Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. Trans and cis women are allies to each other every day — from activism that includes everything from Take Back the Night to Camp Trans; to supporting each other in having “othered” bodies in a world that is obsessed with idealized body types; to loving, having sex, and building family with each other in a world that wants us to disappear.

Girl Talk is an annual spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships. Trans and cis women will read about their relationships of all kinds – sexual and romantic, chosen and blood family, friendships, support networks, activist alliances. Join us for a night of stories about sex, bodies, feminism, activism, challenging exclusion in masculine-centric dyke spaces, dating and breaking up, finding each other, and finding love and family.

performer bios

Charlie Anders hosts and organizes the award-winning Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco, which was namechecked in Armistead Maupin's latest Tales of the City novel. She's had stories in Best Lesbian Erotica 2010, Sex For America: Politically Inspired Erotica, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009 and 2011, and Tor.com. She co-founded other magazine: the magazine for people who defy categories, and currently blogs at io9. She won the 2010 Emperor Norton Award for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason."

Dominika Bednarska is a postdoctoral fellow at U.C. Berkeley, where she completed her PhD in English and Disability Studies. Her writing has appeared in Wordgathering, The Bellevue Literary Review, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, What I Want From You: An Anthology of East Bay Lesbian Poets, Ghosting Atoms, and Cripping Femme. She is currently working on expanding and revising her solo show, My Body Love Story, that will be performed this spring and summer. For more information, go to dominikabednarskaspeaks.blogspot.com or become a fan on Facebook.

Gina de Vries founded and co-curates “Girl Talk” with Elena Rose and Julia Serano. She’s thrilled that the show is still going strong after 4 years. Gina has taught Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop since 2008, and you can find her work anthologized all over, from the San Francisco Bay Guardian to Coming & Crying. A graduate of Hampshire College, Gina is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing and Master’s in English at San Francisco State University. The Record, her experimental fiction novel about sex, adolescence, music, San Francisco, and growing up queer, should be hitting bookstores in 2013. Find out a whole lot more at ginadevries.com.

DavEnd is a tenderhearted, genderqueer, costume designing, accordion wielding songwriter, performing artist and designer based in San Francisco. Ms. End has released two studio albums (How To Hold Your Own Hand, Fruits Commonly Mistaken For Vegetables) and for the past 5 years, has been touring extensively in the U.S., performing at queer teen centers, festivals, colleges, theatres and backyards. DavEnd’s current project, Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical!,brings together the worlds of music and radical performance art in a theatrical extravaganza, exploring the effects of heterosexism and street harassment on the development of queer identity.

Thea Hillman is a mother, writer, and performer. Her book of poetry and fiction "Depending on the Light," was published in 2001. Her Lambda award-winning memoir, "Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word" came out in 2008 and is taught at universities around the country.

Nomy Lamm is a writer, musician, performance artist and voice teacher. Her band, nomy lamm & THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, is a flexible platform for collaboration with everyone and everything, including other musicians, artists, poets, puppeteers, spectators, and the moon. She performs regularly with Sins Invalid, creating musical dreamworld performance art about disability, sexuality and social justice. She is currently working on her MFA thesis, a collection of short stories called "515 Clues," and writes an advice column for Make/Shift magazine called "Dear Nomy."

Emily Manuel is a Greek-Australian becoming-Jewish writer, blogger, editor, sometime academic, musician, partner, mother to four cats, and beekeeper. She found a bee and she kept it - that's the first rule of beekeeping. She is editor-in-chief at Global Comment magazine, and her work has also appeared at Questioning Transphobia, Tiger Beatdown, Billboard magazine, Bitch magazine, and many others. She has a PhD in English from Murdoch University in Australia gathering dust in the corner.

Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza, rode stories out of rural Oregon and hasn’t stopped making words since. In her second year co-curating "Girl Talk" and fourth as a performer, she writes online as “Little Light,” travels the country as a preacher and poet, and has dedicated herself to the work of radical love, queer theology, and justice for those who live at the edges. Her work has turned up everywhere from college classrooms to bathroom mirrors to protest marches, in magazines including Aorta and Make/Shift, and on the acclaimed spoken-word album It Is Better to Speak! Rose is currently finishing her first book, Mountain of Myrrh, forthcoming from Dinah Press, and attends seminary in Northern California, where she resides with her wife and a small but well-loved pomegranate tree.

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, performer and activist. She is the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, a collection of personal essays that reveal how misogyny frames popular assumptions about femininity and shapes many of the myths and misconceptions people have about transsexual women. Julia’s other writings have appeared in anthologies (including Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Word Warriors: 30 Leaders in the Women's Spoken Word Movement and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape), in feminist, queer, pop culture and literary magazines and websites (such as Bitch, AlterNet.org, Out, Feministing.com, and make/shift), and have been used as teaching materials in gender studies, queer studies, psychology and human sexuality courses in colleges across North America. juliaserano.com.

Jos Truitt is a Boston native and recent transplant to San Francisco. She joined the team at Feministing.com in July 2009 and became an Editor in August 2011. Jos attended Hampshire College where she coordinated the school's annual national reproductive justice conference. After college she worked in the reproductive health, rights and justice movements in Washington, DC. Jos has spoken and trained at numerous national conferences and college campuses about trans issues, reproductive justice, blogging, feminism, and grassroots organizing. Jos is currently pursuing an MFA in Printmaking at San Francisco Art Institute.

Pidge Vera is a mixed-race queer femme writer, performer and choreographer, living an awesome and strangely grown up life in Oakland, CA. Her interests and activist work include, but are not limited to: self-care, feminism, sexual assault and interpersonal violence prevention and advocacy, storytelling, dance, queers, femmes, fashion, baking killer peanut-butter cookies, and passionate karaoke performances. She is currently adapting her research thesis on eating disorders, narrative construction, and embodied practice into a book, and will talk about it at length if you let her. Pidge resides with her wife and Cleis, the littlest of pomegranate trees.

Upcoming queer trans women & cis women events!

First, SF Bay Area folks, save the date: On Thursday, March 29th, me & my co-curators Gina de Vries and Elena Rose will be presenting the fourth annual Girl Talk, a cis and trans woman dialogue! Rest assured, I will be posting more details in the very near future. (more info about Girl Talk more generally, including video clips from the 2011 show, can be found by following the above link)...

Also, speaking of events that foster dialogue between queer cis and queer trans women, last week I tweeted about the following conference, but for those who missed it:

this Saturday (January 21) in Toronto is an awesome day-long event called: No More Apologies: Queer Trans and Cis Women, Coming/Cumming Together! All the details are available in that link.

Yay, lots of awesome art & community building! more to come! -j.

Femme conference call for submissions

Hi folks, just figured I would pass this along, as some folks who follow my blog might be interested. It is a press release from the Femme 2012 conference, which will be in Baltimore this August. Not sure if I will be there, given that it is kinda sorta on the other side of the country from me. But if you have an interest in attending or presenting in some capacity, I encourage you to check it out... -j.

.......................

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

National Call for Submissions & SF Event!
Call for Workshops, Papers, Panels, Films, Performance, and Visual Art Femme2012: Pulling the Pieces Together
Baltimore, MD
August 17-19, 2012
www.femmecollective.com

Femme2012: Pulling the Pieces Together is a multi-threaded conference and forum for those who think about, talk about, and create Femme as a queer gender and identity.

Following our Femme2006, 2008, and 2010 conferences in San Francisco, Chicago, and Oakland, where hundreds of femmes and allies gathered for workshops, panels, films, visual art galleries, and performances, we again invite femmes of all kinds and their allies to continue the conversation by participating in Femme 2012 as presenters and participants.We are invested in having Femme2012 continue to reflect the diversity and complexity of femme gender, identity, and contributions. We hope for this conference to be a community-building event, as well as an exploration and celebration of what it means to build and live queer femme identities.

Submissions of all kinds are welcome, particularly submissions by Femmes. We are committed to having our presenters reflect as many different voices from within our Femme community(ies) as possible. We aim to prioritize and centralize the experiences of historically marginalized groups, including but not limited to people of color, working-class people, fat folks, trans and gender-non-conforming people, elders, youth, previously incarcerated individuals, people without documentation, and people with dis/abilities. Femme2012 will continue the community dialogues from Femme2006, Femme2008, and Femme2010. In particular, we hope that the intersections of femme with race, region, class, access, dis/ability, privilege, oppression, and marginalization will be talked about, given space, meditated upon, constructed, and deconstructed.

In addition, we encourage submissions based on this year’s theme: Pulling the Pieces Together.

We began this conference in 2006 out of a desire to see femme explored and discussed from a variety of perspectives. We wanted a conference that held the complexities of Queer Femme as its central focus, while building community. Building on the dialogue and momentum of past conferences, in 2012 we hope to explore how femmes pull the pieces together. Through discussion and performance, we hope to explore both our individual and shared journeys to femme and how we honor femme in ourselves and others. How do we arrive at our femme/inine identities? How do we celebrate the joys and challenges along those journeys? Please join us in 2012 as we share our stories of pulling the pieces together.

We hope to draw participants from across disciplinary, medium, and social boundaries. We encourage submissions from anyone interested, regardless of gender or sexual identity. We are interested in solo submissions, as well as groups, panels, and collaborations. We are looking for well-thought-out, well-planned submissions that recognize and respect the array of Queer Femme experience, and we are interested in work that challenges systems of oppression.

We are soliciting contributions from anyone interested, including (but not limited to):
> workshops
> panel presentations
> performances
> research presentations
> skill shares
> activist & organizational topics
> visual art
> video or film (please see below for the film call for submissions)

The submission deadline is April 15, 2012. For information about specific submissions requirements and to submit your proposal, please visit www.femme2012.com.

To learn more about us, to read our mission, and to contact us with any questions, comments or concerns, please find us at www.femme2012.com or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/groups/femmeconference/.

2012 FEMME FILM FESTIVAL at FEMME2012
In addition, this year the Femme Collective encourages all femmes (regardless of experience) to consider making and submitting a short film to the 2012 Femme Film Festival that will be taking place at Femme2012. We want to challenge you tell your story from *your* eyes. All you need is a camera (even an iPhone is good enough!) and we'll even help mentor you along the way! It could be narrative-based, documentary, animated or some kind of in-between. How you choose to make it is yours - but the film must be made by a femme (or group of femmes) and about being femme. In order to help you get started, please include one or more of the following prompts in planning your femme-tastic short film:
- What does Femme mean to you?
- How did you come to / learn you were Femme?
- Misconceptions of Femme and how to change them
- Femme Invisibility
- Being Femme because *we* are Femme (and not because our body looks a certain way)

Submissions for the Femme Film Festival must be under 12 minutes in length. The shorter, the better --- so we can fit more films into our final program! All film submissions are due July 15, 2012, to give you ample time to finish your film. Do not let your lack of experience stop you from making a film! We will not be judging films based on fancy equipment - we're looking for honest, brave and real stories about *your* experience of being femme. So break out that iPhone or Flip Camera and start shooting! If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail Ellie (our film chair) at ellieheartbeth@gmail.com.


Attn: Bay Area Femmes & Allies! Special Femme Con Happy Hour at El Rio THIS FRIDAY!
Join us at El Rio this Friday, Jan. 20th, from 4-6pm for a very special Femme 2012 Conference Happy Hour! For every drink ordered at the bar during these two hours, 100% of the proceeds will go directly to funding the conference! Come drink & be merry with friends and loved ones all while supporting the all-volunteer run Femme Collective and the wider Femme community!

Need more incentive? How about free oysters, amazing drink specials, and FREE ADMISSIONS to the Red Hots Burlesque show starting at 7:30pm? Order up your Pink Lady or your Shirley Temple, then watch Dottie Lux, Isis Starr, Ava Lavendar and more shimmy-shake for the Femme Con crowd!

Come on down and support the Femme Conference! It will be the easiest fundraiser you attend all year!

El Rio is located at 3158 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA. - www.elriosf.com

Adjustments (a 2011 personal retrospective)

Happy new year everyone!

So back in the early fall of 2010, I set a goal for myself: I promised myself that I would finish writing my (currently untitled) second book by the end of 2011. It was a new years resolution of sorts, albeit made several months in advance of Janurary 1st. However, sometimes in life, things do not go quite as planned.

When I made that commitment, what I did not know was that the minor “scalp problem” I was dealing with would eventually blossom into my first major full-on psoriasis flare up. At the time, I was unaware that I had the condition. In fact, I did not even know what psoriasis was, although later I would find out that it was the condition that was responsible for all the scabs that covered my grandmother’s legs, which I remember from back when I was a kid. And I would later find out that several other relatives on that side of my family had it too, although they covered it up by always wearing long sleeves and long pants. Even though it ran in the family, no one ever really talked about it (or at least they did not talk about it around me).

In early November 2010, after one of the most restless nights of my life (and I’ve had quite a few of those along the way), as my scalp literally felt like it was on fire, I made an emergency appointment to see my dermatologist. She told me that it was psoriasis. She prescribed me really hardcore topical meds for it, which helped ease the burning, but it did not make my psoriasis go away. In fact, as that month progressed, I noticed that P patches were appearing on other parts of my body.

This time last year (around new years 2011), I was absolutely miserable. Miserable, because my scalp still itched and burned—it was so red, that on Christmas day, my nieces kept asking me how I got sunburned on the top of my head. Miserable, because the scalp psoriasis, in combination with the plaque removal treatments I was prescribed, led to me losing almost half of the hair on my head (I am honestly not exaggerating). Miserable, because the cold and dry winter weather in Philadelphia (where my family lives) exacerbated my condition, and by the time it was over, I had patches (symmetrically, on both sides of the body) on my neck, chest, belly button, knees, shins, and fingers. I was miserable, because the P on my fingers made them so sensitive, I could not type for more than 5 minutes at a time. Miserable, because while paging through a Time Magazine at my Dad’s house, I saw an ad for Enbrel, the immunosuppressant my dermatologist suggested as the next potential step if my topical meds weren’t doing the trick (and they seemingly weren’t). The Enbrel ad was three pages long: One page for all the benefits of the drug, followed by two pages (in small print, of course) for all of the nasty side effects.

So this time last year, upon returning from my family Christmas visit, I decided I was going to take things into my own hands. I joined a psoriasis message board and began to consume all the posts. I did exhaustive internet and PubMed searches (a bonus of being a biologist at a university is that I have access to, and am familiar enough with the bio/medical jargon to understand, all the scientific literature on the subject). I sought out, and followed up on, every clue that I could find that might possibly lead to some way to send my P back into remission.

Over the last year, I cannot tell you how many articles I’ve read about psoriasis and auto-immune conditions; about how the immune system functions, and how it is affected by diet, stress and sleep; about the complex back-and-forth communication that goes on between the brain, the skin, the gut, and its microbial flora. Over the course of the last year, I tried all sorts of potential psoriasis remedies, both scientific and anecdotal: I changed my diet in various ways, took supplements of various sorts, exercised, slept more, took up meditation, took baths in Dead Sea salts and lemon Joy (seriously, some people swear by the lemon Joy), spent time in the sun, tried applying glycerol, oils and various sorts of lotions onto my skin, and so on.

Eventually, I found the right combination that seemed to improve my situation.* By March and April 2011, all of my P patches disappeared except for my scalp, which still persists, but it is not nearly as bad as it was. All my hair grew back. I am still reading, and still experimenting, in the hopes that I can drive my P completely into remission. But for now, it seems that we (aka, my will, my skin, and my immune system) have reached a status quo with regards to the whole P-thing.

So 2011 was a very different year than I initially planned it to be. I made very little progress on book #2. But on the other hand, I did learn more than I ever could have imagined about psoriasis, the immune system, diet, and related topics. And as a bonus, all the extra sleep I got in the first half of 2011 allowed me to really become well-versed at lucid dreaming! But most important of all, I learned a crucial life lesson in 2011, one that led to the title of this post: Adjustments.

So to explain what I mean by “adjustments,” I am going to have to briefly digress into a discussion of baseball (sorry sports haters! but I promise, this will be relatively painless, and well worth your patience).

So baseball happens to be my favorite sport—in fact, it is the only sport that I follow these days. When people ask me (sometimes incredulously!) why I like baseball, I often bring up how nostalgic it is for me. When I was a young child, I wanted to grow up to be a Major League Baseball player (who knows, under different circumstances, I may have turned out to be the first MLB trans woman middle infielder!). I also first decided to change my sex at a little league game, and writing and publicly singing a song about that experience became one of the very first somewhat “out-as-trans” moments in my life.

Aside from nostalgia and the intersection with my trans experiences, there are other things that I like about baseball. I like the strategy, and how there is time between each play to consider what the next best move would be. I like the long history of the game, and how it has become the most diverse sport with regard to ethnicity and the size/shape/ability of players’ bodies. And it is one of the only sports where, no matter how badly you are losing, no matter how late in the game, you can always come back and win (because there are no time limits). All these aspects make the game enjoyable for me. But the thing that I find most amazing about baseball is (as baseball pundits often say) it is “a game of adjustments.”

What does that mean? Well, in pretty much every other sport, if you are a great athlete at your position, and if you have talent, and if you stay healthy, it is almost guaranteed that you will be great every year. But in baseball, you can come into the majors and have one or two great years. However, because it is a game where pitchers face batters one-on-one, over time, people will eventually figure out your vulnerabilities. They will realize that you can’t hit a certain pitch, or they will figure out how to hit your curve ball, or they will notice that you are prone to making some particular mistake, etc. And when they do find out your vulnerability, they will exploit it. Unless, of course, you compensate.

Many players have one or two good years, and then fade away. But the great players (as they say) make adjustments. Once other teams start figuring them out, and once they start slumping, they change their routine. Their batting stance. The way they throw the ball. Perhaps even their entire approach to the game. These are athletes who have played baseball their entire lives, and yet, sometimes they have to start all over from scratch, and learn how to do things in an entirely new way, all in order to compensate for their new situation. Making adjustments is what a baseball player needs to do in order to persevere.

So as I was saying, this time last year, I was in a bad place. I was miserable, not only because of my physical pain, but because at that time I was only able to view my situation in terms of loss—how having P interfered with my life, interfered with my writing, made it difficult for me to do some of the things that I like to do, and so on. But shortly thereafter, it struck me that life (to borrow the baseball saying) “is a game of adjustments.” So instead of seeing P in wholly negative terms, I began viewing it as simply a new life situation that I now needed to adapt to.

Today, as I contemplate the beginning of a new year, a couple thoughts spring into my mind. First, I am grateful for my relatively good health at this moment. But I know that this is something that I cannot take for granted. My P is in remission, but of course, remission means that it could come back at any time. I am at peace with that, because I know that if that does happen, I will simply make the adjustments I need to make.

But in addition to that, when I think about the upcoming year, I realize that I am viewing it in a somewhat novel way, at least for me. I always used to think of my future in a rather linear way. I’d make goals for myself. I would think about where I wanted to be one year from now, in my career, writing, performance, relationships, family, etc. I would think about all the places that I wanted to go, and the things that I wanted to do during that time frame.

But this year, in the wake of what has been a very transformative year for me, when I think about where I will be this time next year, and what all I will accomplish between now and then, I honestly do not know what to expect. I am not making any assumptions about where I will be or what I will be doing. I expect that my life will be somewhat similar to what it is now, but I also expect that a number of unexpected things will enter into my life. Hopefully most of them will be good. But some of them may be bad. And when they happen, rather than viewing them as potential obstacles or obstructions, I will instead see them as new life situations, and I will make the appropriate adjustments. And upon making those adjustments, my life will become different than what it is now. And I am OK with that.

I used to see my life as a linear path, and that perspective led me to view unexpected circumstances as detours or potential dead ends. But now, I see my life as having the potential to veer off in all sorts of directions. And if my life takes an unexpected turn, no worries, that will simply be the new path that I am on.

Having said all that, I am not completely without goals or direction. I am working hard to finish writing book #2 before the end of this year (hopefully sooner!). I suppose you could say that this is my new year’s resolution, in that I am working hard toward that goal. But unlike the previous year, this year, I am well aware that I may have to adjust that plan if my life situation requires it.

-julia

p.s., I promise that book # 2 will not have any baseball in it!

*So some people who read this may have psoriasis or some other auto-immune condition, and may be curious/interested in what precisely helped send my P mostly into remission. At some point, I plan to write about my self-care regime in more detail. But in short, most of the positive changes I made are described in Jack Challem’s book The Inflammation Syndrome. Basically, the book discusses the ways in which the modern Western diet exacerbates inflammation, and based on it, I decided to cut out/cut down certain foods, plus take certain supplements (especially those that adjust the omega 3/6 ratio (btw, GLA is the bomb!)). Also, my P flare up occurred not too long after I was on antibiotics for a month, and disturbances in gut microflora are known to send the immune system into a tizzy. So I’ve found that taking probiotics and other IBS-related remedies have been helpful for me as well.