Girl Talk tickets selling like hotcakes!!!

Hey folks, a quick reminder to purchase your tickets for Girl Talk 2012: a Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue *as soon as possible*, as over half the advance tickets are already sold! Every year the show has sold out, so we highly advise you to get your tickets right away - all of the show info (including a link to purchase advance tickets) can be found below...

Hope you can make it! -julia

ways to pass time when you have pneumonia...

sleep.

eat, or not eat. (mostly the latter.)

fondly reminisce about oxygen.

make up lots jokes along the lines of “Oh my god I can *not* believe that I fucking have pneumonia. how the fuck did this happen!”

stop for a minute to catch my breath.

unleash cunning trans woman sense of humor when chest-xray-technician repeatedly asks me: “so you’re absolutely sure your not pregnant, right?”

recall how, as a young child, I thought that the medical condition pneumonia and the chemical ammonia were somehow interrelated.

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.

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)...

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.

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).

Ten years ago today...

So I have been a bit lax with regards to blogging lately. After a bunch of September and October posts, I became swamped with a number of out-of-town university presentations and local panels & book readings. I have also been trying to focus in earnest on book number two. It had been going rather slowly, in a somewhat piecemeal fashion. So I have committed myself to waking up extra early (5 or 6am) each day to get a solid 2 or 3 hours of writing in before heading off to work (that is how I managed to write Whipping Girl). On the bright side, I have been making good progress! The downside has been less sleep and less time for blogging...

julia events update november 2011

Hi folks, I hope this update finds you well!

So like I said in my last update, I have a veritable slew of events (both SF Bay Area & out of town) this November! here they are:

two upcoming events!

hi all, for those interested in catching my readings, performances and/or presentations, you may be in luck, as I have two out-of-town college presentations this month, and a slew of events (both out of town & local Bay Area) in November. here are links to the two October events. In the next week or so, I will post a second update that will list all the November events...

Seeking quotes from queer women who partner with trans women and/or cis men

As a bisexual femme-identified trans woman, I have long been interested in (and concerned by) how the borders of queer women’s communities are policed - where certain people, actions and ways of being are seen as legitimately queer while others are not.

In my own community, I have found two different recurring complaints along these lines that I wish to chronicle for an essay I am working on:

My adventures in sexology (plus a Call for Submissions!)

My life has taken a number of interesting turns over the last ten years. And I am not talking about my transition here - if you would have told me 20 years ago that I would eventually transition to female, I would not have been especially surprised. However, if you would have told me back then that I would someday spend a great deal of my free time writing about feminism, and that some of those writings would be taught in gender studies classes, I never would have believed you in a million years.

The same holds true with regards to me being taken seriously in (some) sexology circles. I first became interested in the field as I was beginning to work on Whipping Girl (WG). Specifically, I saw a connection between how trans women and others on the trans female/feminine spectrum were sexualized in the media and how we were similarly sexualized in certain sexology & psychology theories. So, I did a lot of research on those theories and critiqued them in WG (specifically in Chapters 7, 14 & 17). At that point, I felt like I said what needed to be said, and I was ready to move on.

But after WG came out, I had a Michael Corleone-like moment: “Just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in.”

WPATH releases new Standards of Care

Over the weekend I received an email from the group TransActive that announced the WPATH (aka, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) just released the latest Standards of Care. For those not in the know, basically these are guidelines for healthcare providers to consider/follow to address the needs of trans clients, particularly in situations where social/physical/legal transition is involved.

For those interested in perusing them, they can be downloaded at this link:
http://ugcs.net/~irene/drop/soc.pdf

I am too busy the next few weeks to thoroughly go through them, but I will certainly be interested in hearing other people's thoughts in the days/weeks that follow...

Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue 2011 video

Hello again, welcome to day three of "link week" (I missed yesterday), where I share links related to my writing and activism. Today's installment is quite overdue...

So as many of you know, over the last three years, I've had the honor of working with Gina de Vries and Elena Rose (aka, Little Light) to co-curate the annual spoken word event Girl Talk: a Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue. Unfortunately, the show has only occurred in the SF Bay Area so far (although we are hoping to bring the show to other cities & towns next year!). To date, the only way people from other places have been able to experience the show is through an mp3 audio recording (of questionable quality) of the 2009 show (a link to that recording can be found here).

upcoming anthologies!

OK, welcome to day two of "link week," where I share links related to my writing and activism...

So today, I want to let folks know that I have pieces included in two anthologies being released this fall, both of which are about trans love/sex/relationships!

Link week!

OK, so after spending 2 weeks ago blogging about, and replying to, my whole "transsexual vs transsexual" intervention, and taking last week to recuperate from all that, I figured that this week I would ease back into blogging by sharing a bunch of links related to my writing, performance and activism.

I will start today by sharing this link to an interview with me that appeared Friday on Persephone Magazine.

more to come tomorrow... -j.

Postscript for my “TS-vs-TG-Intervention” piece

So in the couple days since my blog entry A “Transsexual Versus Transgender” Intervention came out, I have spent a big chunk of my free time pouring over all the responses - both comments made on my own blog, plus all the comments that appeared when it was cross-posted on The Transadvocate and tagged on numerous Facebook threads. I knew I was writing about a hotly debated topic, so I am not *too* surprised that the piece generated interest (both positive and negative). But I am a bit overwhelmed by how many responses there actually were.

While I have read all of the comments, I don’t have the time to reply to each comment individually since there have been so many. So here, I will respond more generally to sentiments that seem to have come up on more than one occasion. Occasionally I will cite or quote specific individuals, but other times I will discuss some of the sentiments/reactions more generally.

A “Transsexual Versus Transgender” Intervention*

[note added January, 2017: This essay now appears as a chapter in my third book Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism]

Over the last year or so, I have read a number of blog entries and Facebook rants about the so-called “transsexual versus transgender” issue. For those who are unaware of this debate, it stems from a subset of transsexuals who feel that the transsexual community is not served well by being included under the transgender umbrella (some even go so far as to insist that there is a mutually-exclusive dichotomy between transsexual and transgender people). Along similar lines, these transsexuals also argue that inclusion under the LGBT umbrella does a disservice to the transsexual community, as it conflates two very different issues (i.e., sexual orientation and gender identity), and emboldens many cissexual LGB folks to appropriate trans identities and experiences, and to claim to speak on our behalf.

I have purposefully tried to avoid entering into this debate, primarily because many (albeit certainly not all) of the umbrella critiques that I have read invoke horrible stereotypes, and sometimes even hate speech, to help bolster their case. I have seen blatantly homophobic and biphobic remarks made by some anti-umbrella advocates. One post I saw described bisexuals as sexual predators who fetishize and prey upon transsexuals - this comment draws on a long history of monosexist stereotypes of bisexuals as “sex crazed” and desiring “anything that moves,” and it deeply offended me as a bisexual trans woman.

on returning to blogging...

Since I am now re-entering the so-called "blogosphere" with my new blog, I figured that it would be worthwhile to briefly mention why I took a hiatus from blogging in the first place, and what my hopes are for this new blog.

So from 2007 through 2009, I was a semi-regular blogger, mostly on my old LJ site, sometimes on the Trans Group Blog, and as an occasional guest poster on Feministing. Blogging is a wonderful medium for getting thoughts, ideas and essays out there quickly, which I definitely appreciated. Also, during that span, I was introduced to the work of countless amazing writers and activists blogging on other sites. So in many ways, my relatively brief foray into blogging was a rewarding experience.

However, there were also negative aspects to that experience as well.

I was not aware...

...that August is apparently "Psoriasis Awareness Month" until just now. I am somewhat active on psoriasis message boards, and yet even I did not find out that this was our month to shine until August 26th! If I didn't hear about it until now, I highly doubt that the public at large has received the message...

Anyway, in the spirit of awareness: psoriasis is a chronic auto-immune type of condition that primarily affects the skin, although it can also affect other tissues (e.g., in psoriatic arthritis). I wrote a bit about my experiences with psoriasis last winter. I have since been doing much better. I began to write a long follow up post on that, but I haven't quite gotten around to finishing it. someday soon, perhaps...

anyway, now you are aware. Have a great day! -j.

Honey Money

A friend passed this onto me:

"Catherine Hakim: charm school marm – interview"

This has got to be the funniest book review-slash-interview that I have ever read. It totally titilated my erotic capital... ; )