Free Floating

It astounds me how many crossdressers see themselves only as rugged indvidualists and don't understand how the possibilities of the closet have changed in the last 50 years.

The Prince made guests bring a bag to the first club, Hose And Heels, and made guests put on the contents before talking about transvestism because she thought no LAPD vice cop would put on stockings and high heels.

We didn't have the words and lanugage in the late 1960s when I was coming out, and we certainly didn't have the venues.

I think young trannies understand this, and people raised as women understand connection (though they often devalue manhood as something offputting, even if they claim it), but it takes so much energy to be a het man in relationship with a family & a job that even understanding the lay of the interlocking queer communities, let alone immersing in them, seems impossible & disruptive.

But it's when we understand that we are not free floating that we begin to have some kind of roots and know the limits. 

I recently read the comments of one doctor who recently had surgery who was complaining that being in Trinidad people don't treat her like a woman.  Apparently she didn't have to sign the disclaimer that reminds patients that all SRS buys you is genital reconstruction, not womanhood or anything like it.

Now, if she had immersed in the narrative, lore, history and connection of a community, she would know that, but as a rugged individualist on a solitary path, all she knew was what she wanted and what the creation myth she created in her head said: get the surgery, and everything changes. 

The surgery changes nothing, as anyone who has lived with it for a while can tell you.  It merely gives you another tool to change yourself. 

The stories are out there, and if you listen, the picture becomes clear.  

But if you see yourself as an indvidual in a closet who is separated from all those other trannys, well, then you are just a free floater.

And floaters are always the hardest to get in control.

Gay Transvestite, My Ass

Just saw Neil Jordan's "Breakfast On Pluto," based on the Patrick McCabe novel.

Cillian Murphy was fabulous as Kitten, but every review describes her as a "gay transvestite" and uses masculine pronouns.  By the end of the movie, when she can, she is living as a woman, and it's that simple.  She even is clear with the father: she is a woman.

One of my favourite scenes was when the school is having a puberty retreat, and the head priest says that you can put any question into the box, that there are no bad questions.  Jump to the priest hauling Kitten kitten by the ear and calling her a sick pervert — apparently the space wasn't safe enough to hold her question: "Do you know any place to get a good sex change?"

We know people don't really mean it when they say we are safe, and we know from early who we are.  But sometimes a friend can't make the choice to destroy "a disaster like us" because the love us, and that's potent.

Still, the message in this film, at least according to a few reviewers, is that the tentpole of the film is Kittens absolute conviction about who she is — a "gay transvestite" according to them.

How brave we are standing up to stigma and forming a lesson for everyone, all while they erase that very truth and reduce us to homosexuality and crossdressing.

We are symbols at the very same time our meaning is erased.  Gay transvestite, my ass.

Creepy, and in the end, hurtful.