Wiscon report

[redbird]

I talked to lots of cool people about interesting things, introduced adrian_turtle to many of my friends so they could see how cool she is, got too little sleep, occasionally felt disconnected from things, but mostly had a good time.

I arrived Thursday, a clever plan to avoid missing half of Friday. Perhaps too clever, since there wasn't much morning or afternoon programming (just the Gathering in the afternoon), and Thursday through Monday is a long convention.

Part of feeling disconnected was, paradoxically, because there were so many people there (over a thousand, significantly larger than the usual Wiscon). Lots of my friends had made lunch and dinner plans well in advance; I tried to do so as well, but with less organization and less success. Not only that, but most of my pre-planning was for breakfasts, meaning 8:30 wakeup calls for 9:00 dates with brisingamen and peake on Friday, wild_irises on Sunday, and Donya and Allen (WANOLJ) on Monday. Brisingamen, Peake, and I have run into each other so often at Michelangelo's that it made sense to make it a plan this year. oursin's journal for that day says that she had tea and a sticky bun with me, and we were then joined by them, but I'm fairly sure the three of us rendezvous'd in the hotel lobby, and in fact I spent some time during the con regretting not having gotten to sit down with Oursin (every time I ran into her, she already had plans). If I completely forgot a deep and meaningful conversation, I'm sorry. I do remember Brian Attebury coming over after a bit, and them talking about sf criticism.

When I asked wild_irises if she was free for a meal with me and Adrian, she said yes, observing that she always likes to meet people who make her friends happy. The three of us had a nice long conversation, and then Laurie Marks and her wife Deb walked past (Michelangelo's is like that), Wild Irises introduced us, and within 60 seconds Deb and Adrian were geeking happily about hand tools. In my weekend role as Adrian's secretary (scribe as well as social secretary) I made a note of Deb's contact information, and gave her both mine and Adrian's.

I tend to aim for meal groups of four to six at cons; there were more fours than sixes this time, some threes, and Sunday night Adrian and I had a quiet dinner by ourselves after I admitted to feeling somewhat overwhelmed. Thursday night was six plus a baby: Janet and Matt, their infant daughter Alice, two British friends of theirs, bookzombie and pennski his partner Penny (not on LJ AFAIK), and one person I cannot call to mind. We went to a French restaurant that someone remembered from the year before: good food and good conversation. We got back to the con a bit after ten, and I found the OddCon party uninhabitable (the OddCon people are very fond of flashing lights, which hurt my brain), and the con suite close to empty, so I went to bed early. That would have been useful, if I'd gotten to sleep reasonably quickly. It was a strange bed, and (as Adrian pointed out after she arrived on Friday) I'm not used to sleeping alone, even in my own bed.

Friday the two of us had dinner with kate_schaefer and Glenn Hackney, who are good company. Kate said that my love life was complicated; I immediately disagreed, because for the most part it doesn't seem so, unless scheduling counts as inherently complicated. It took me a long time to get Kate to admit that cattitude is real, but I don't think she'll be claiming I made up Adrian.

One aspect of spending the weekend saying "This is my girlfriend Adrian isn't she cool?!" was that I was talking about polyamory more than usual, and with friends who aren't themselves poly (rather than relationship-geeking with poly friends). Lenore asked about how my relationships work. I told her that if she wanted a more useful answer than "very well" I would need a more specific question. She clarified, and I told her a bit about my/our relationship structure (though not in great detail). rdkeir said that he didn't think he could be polyamorous, because one relationship is difficult enough, and mentioned that there are probably people who assume that a close friend whom he visits moderately often is his girlfriend. I told him that, from what he's posted, and told me in the past, it seems closer to a brotherly than a romantic relationship. I noted also that it might be easier for me to read it that way, because I expect people to be straightforward about such things; someone whose paradigm is cheating quasi-monogamy might assume he's doing that.

Mostly, I was enjoying showing off Adrian to Wiscon and to the people who've been reading me burble about her for the past year, and Wiscon to Adrian. Partway through the weekend it occurred to me that, even if I were going to more cons, I'd picked the right con for the purpose, because Wiscon is definitely queer-friendly. At another con, I'd still expect my friends to be cool about it—someone who has a problem with same-sex relationships, or for that matter bisexuality, wouldn't be my friend—but the con as a whole might be less so, and we'd probably stand out more as a same-sex couple. (My friends are poly-friendly, whether or not they're poly themselves, but I only had one partner with me, so I don't know for sure whether we'll get weird looks if I manage to get Adrian and Cattitude, or one (or both) of them and Q, to the same Wiscon with me.)

I spent quite a bit of time hanging out in front of elisem's table in the dealer's room, both to talk to her and because she attracted other interesting people. Sunday afternoon I was chatting with Emma Bull, and someone (I don't remember whether it was Emma) started to reintroduce me to Will Shetterly, but I smiled and said "I haven't seen you since you were running for governor." We proceeded to happily talk about trains, people, and other stuff for a while, including him expressing surprise when I mentioned that zorinth is now taller than I am. I was vaguely disconcerted to see both Will and Emma with short hair, but that was less startling than nnaloh, who has shaved half her head while keeping the dreadlocks on the rest. Nalo still looks good, but different enough that I blurted out "you shaved half your head" instead of "hello" on Friday afternoon. I suspect she's been getting that a lot.

Adrian and I had made a date with Elise for tea, Saturday afternoon. We went into the dealer's room to collect her, and she apologetically explained that she was cancelling all her social plans for the weekend, because of family stuff that had just come up. She then asked if we'd like to show up early to help her set up for the Haiku Earring Party, and a chance to talk. We accepted, of course. We sat in her room and talked while she finished her dinner, including about some of the family stuff. A few other friends showed up a bit later, and we all went up to the sixth floor to set up for the party. Elise hadn't had time to make enough earrings even for a typical Wiscon, so I and several other people made earrings as the party started. I'm not skilled with the pliers yet, so I got to have fun selecting and arranging beads, and other people bent the wires to make them into earrings. Meanwhile, Elise sat at the head of the table and gave people titles. I think that went a little slower than usual, because she was titling earrings she hadn't made herself or seen before. I didn't select a pair and write a haiku this year; it didn't seem to fit with having been one of the earring-makers. On Sunday, I found Elise, thanked her, and asked if she knew how much fun I'd had, and she told me that yes, she could see it at the time (I was sitting right next to her as she named earrings).

We didn't get tickets to the Dessert Salon. I never do: it seems not really worth the money (partly because the hotel doesn't really grok hot water for tea), and since they always sell out, I assume there are people who want to be there more than I do. Instead, Adrian and I had a quiet dinner together (I'd gotten over-stressed and needed to hide in the room for a little while, then be with just her (my other sweeties not being in Madison)), followed by a brief soak in the hot tub. We were downstairs again a little before 8:30, grabbed slices of cake that were left on the dessert buffet (the other reason I don't buy tickets: the hotel caters two desserts per ticket, and some people only want one), walked into the big ballroom, and discovered that Kate Wilhelm had already started her Guest of Honor speech. She talked about her life as a writer, always writing in many different genres, as she had read when she was growing up, with a small nearby library that sorted things only by the Dewey Decimal system (the first story she sold was "The Mile-Long Spaceship," to John Campbell, but she also wrote mysteries, westerns, romance, mainstream fiction, probably other things). Near the end, she described telling stories to her granddaughter, who at age 4 told her one evening that the ending she'd come up with was wrong, and provided a better one.

Scott Custis came up to the podium long enough to apologize for the glitch that had them start the GoH speeches early, and introduce Jane Yolen. Jane also talked about her writing career, and about her much-loved husband David Stemple, who died a few months ago. She wrote poetry while he was sick, and some after his death, and read some of it to us. She also speculated on writers seeking/working with a somewhat scruffy Muse (she had a better adjective than "scruffy"), the bad-boy Imagination, and the Time Fairy. But there is no Time Fairy, if there were someone like her would have written a hundred books. [laughter, because she has]. Then she told us that while she couldn't provide a list of everything she's written without going through assorted paper or computer records, if someone mentions any of her books she'll remember where she wrote it.

Next was the presentation of the Carl Brandon and Tiptree Awards. As soon as the Carl Brandon Society board came up to the podium, huge numbers of camera flashes started going off. I fled after a minute or so. I gather I missed two good ceremonies, including the chance to see Geoff Ryman in a tiara. I do hope that none of the people who were up on stage found the flashes painful.

The panel on "The Myth of Class Mobility" included some useful discussion of what class is, and where the boundaries are: in particular, the significant overlap between the working class and that part of the middle class, including the intelligentsia, who are living on wages/salary, possibly with lower income than someone with a decent unionized factory job. Panelists provided statistics as well as anecdotes: among the latter, as evidence that there is some class mobility, Chip Delany pointed out that his grandfather had been born in slavery, and he's a tenured professor at Temple University.

The one panel I was on, "Shaping the Culture of SF/F Fandom," was a bit chaotic, as such panels generally are. People talked about inclusivity; about the expense of travel making it more difficult to get to cons (marykaykare pointed out that she's been hearing that particular complaint/doomsaying for thirty years), about whether some parts of fandom are too isolated from each other, and of course about the Internet. Someone in the audience asserted that the net was a substitute for "real" contact; I said "I beg your pardon! I met two of my partners online." [That's a slight fudge: I met two of my partners in person, but through a friend I met online, and I believe she'd met both of them online as well.] There were a lot of other panels I'd thought looked interesting, but that I didn't know the right things to volunteer to be a panelist.

The panel on "Both/And in an Either/Or World", looking for ways to encompass both sides of a variety of cultural dichotomies (including race and gender) and to claim the middle ground, included Ursula Le Guin introducing herself with "I'm the heterosexual grandmother on this panel." Aron Lichtov talked about doing presentations to college classes on transgender issues, asking the students to raise their hands if they had grandmothers or aunts who did the heavy physical work on the farm, and then saying "Grandma was a tranny" as a way of making trans people "us" to the students. I disagree with him on the specifics—I don't think women who do what is called "men's work" are necessarily or usually transgendered—but think he may be onto something useful in shaking perception. Pamela Taylor said some interesting things about being simultaneously a feminist, a Muslim, and an American. She gets pressure from people who share one of those identities to choose that one rather than the others, or at least to declare a primary loyalty, and pressure from some non-Muslim Americans who don't believe she can really be American if she's Muslim. She has a stronger sense of identity as American than I do, I think: her family has been here for 13 generations, so while we share loyalty to American ideals, she has much deeper roots on this continent than I do.

There was a disclaimer on the con web site, the pocket program, and every issue of the newsletter:

WisCon 30 is funded in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the State of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Humanities Council supports public programs that engage the people of Wisconsin in the exploration of human cultures, ideas and values. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Also, water is wet.

I'm very glad we got to have lunch with annafdd; that was at Kabul, the furthest I got from the hotel all weekend (my heel still not being happy). Kabul had the duck strudel on the special board, which pleased me (a fond memory from previous visits), and we all liked the cardamom iced tea. More to the point, we had plenty of time to talk, and Anna seemed more cheerful than she had at the previous Wiscon.

I missed a lot of good programming, I know. There's a note in my journal that says "All those readings, and I went to none of them." [Most if not all of the returning Guests of Honor gave readings.] I also completely spaced the Bake Sale until after it was sold out.

(This is almost certainly incomplete, but it's also already very long. I may post more later.)

Comments

[heyfoureyes.livejournal.com]

Now that I have met you, while looking at the art on display, I can read your journal and definitely hear your voice in it!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

The good thing about Wiscon - meeting lots of people in person.
The frustrating thing about Wiscon: never seeming to have enough time to spend with said people or just having schedules that don't mesh well.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I didn't even realize you were there until I read some con reports!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think we did get introduced at one point - in Michaelangelo's? - but maybe that wasn't you. Even if it was me.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

If you were with peake and brisingamen, we DID meet! Cool!

[naomikritzer]

Aron Lichtov talked about doing presentations to college classes on transgender issues, asking the students to raise their hands if they had grandmothers or aunts who did the heavy physical work on the farm, and then saying "Grandma was a tranny" as a way of making trans people "us" to the students.

Huh. I wasn't at the panel and am thus responding to this out of context, but this kind of bothers me. First, this is a really American / European perspective. (I need a better term for this -- when your own culture gives you a set of blinders where you just assume that everyone does stuff your way.) In much (most?) of Africa and Asia, heavy physical farm labor is the ESSENCE of "women's work."

But also, when I look back at the heavy farm labor done by my maternal grandmother, what strikes me is that she was 1950s womanhood every bit as much as those who embodied the delicate feminine stereotypes that we think of as the norm (mostly because of 1950s TV, I think). She wasn't behaving in a transgendered manner -- she was the norm for her subculture of the U.S., for one thing. What this says to me is not that our grandmothers were transgendered, but that the 1950s had a hell of a lot more diversity than the decade's image suggests. (She also ran an in-home day care where she cared for a number of children from two-income families, which I like to mention whenever someone starts claiming that mothers with jobs outside the home were some weird invention of 1970s feminism.)

But, I wasn't at the panel, so I may be missing some context here.

[redbird]

It's definitely a North American perspective--which I'll forgive because he's trying to reach North American college students who think he's the first transgendered person they've ever seen. But more broadly, I think you're right, unless I missed a point he was trying to make.

Maybe I should dig up his contact info and ask him if he's read Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman?" speech.

[naomikritzer]

It sounds like we're thinking along the same lines.

I'm not an expert on trans issues, by any means (though I've read books by trans people about transgender issues, out of curiosity, so I'm not completely ignorant, either). But this seems to me to kind of support one of the worst stereotypes of transgendered people -- that they're so bound up in stereotypes that they can't figure out a way to be who they are in he body they're born with. That they think that they MUST be a woman in order to be sensitive, kind, and interested in fashion; that they MUST be a man in order to be tough, physical, and interested in sports.

From what I've understood from my admittedly limited perspective, it goes a hell of a lot deeper than that. The author of Read My Lips (who's a MTF tomboyish lesbian) talks about how you just know. That there's this terrifying disjunction of knowing on one hand that you're one thing, and yet somehow you have all these weird birth defects that are all anyone else sees.

And regardless of the work my grandmother did as a young woman, that was not her experience. Given the context of her subculture (Appallachian farm wives) it would not even be fair to say that she was genderqueer: she was absolutely fulfilling the feminine role of the Appallachian farm wife. (My mother has said that she got a lot more attention than her brother from her relatives, because she was the firstborn DAUGHTER, and that subculture was strongly matriarchal. Property was passed from mother to daughter, because men were expected to become alcoholics, and thus couldn't be trusted with it.)

I did have some great aunts who genuinely defied the gender roles of the time: one was a lawyer who joined the WACS after WWII started. Another I never met, but -- well, I was looking at pictures in an old album with my grandparents, and she kind of leapt out at me in a "hi, I'm your butch lesbian great aunt" kind of way. She was very masculine looking. I asked about her, and my grandfather said, "That was my half-sister Zelma. She was really independent. Never married. Owned a bar. Had all these ... female friends. Who also never married." Now, Zelma might have been transgender, or she might have been a lesbian. (Or for all I know, she was an independent heterosexual woman who stayed single to protect her independence, but you know, just to wildly stereotype from the photo -- I doubt it. I do not have the world's most finely tuned gaydar but she sent it into overdrive.)

I find the lives of the women in my grandmother's generation to be really fascinating, honestly. They were an amazingly diverse and interesting group, and many of them used World War II to completely re-script their lives from what society and/or their own families had planned for them. Including my paternal grandmother, who was the woman who most embodied what we think of as the 1950s ideal (housewife with kids) -- she had been raised in the south and used the war to escape her controlling mother and run off and marry a Yankee. And lived happily ever after in Ohio.

[redbird]

Someone on my friends list came out as trans recently. She's not doing stereotypically gendered work (she's a cartoonist), and said that in addition to just knowing, one thing she hopes for from this is "never to be called Mr. Simpson again." It feels wrong to her, in ways that it doesn't to me--I suspect because nobody has ever argued with me, and tried to convince me that I really am male.

(I have a number of other transgendered friends, but until recently, they've all been people who were already in transition, or in their desired/felt gender, when we met.)

[redbird]

"It" meaning "being called Mr." If someone called me "Mr. Simpson," I wouldn't answer beause I'd have no idea they meant me, though I did pick out the mangling of "Rosenzweig" the airline person at O'Hare came up with when they were handing seats to people who'd missed our original flights because of bad weather.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The author of Read My Lips (who's a MTF tomboyish lesbian) talks about how you just know.

That seems so weird to me.

My body's just where I happen to live at the moment. Its physiological and chromosomal configuration really don't feel like part of my identity at all.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

All the MTF women I know seem to be much more sure of their femininity than I have ever felt -- comments like "I felt like a woman every minute of every day" when I only really feel like a woman when putting my bra on.

But I suspect feeling aware of your gender and how it matches your body is one of those bellcurve things.

[redbird]

I think you're right, with rysmiel definitely an outlier, you and I somewhat closer to the center (though maybe not in the same place), and so on.

It seems likely that someone with the attitude rysmiel stated isn't going to care about gender enough to conclude that hey, wait, I'm not the gender everyone is saying.

For what it's worth, someone I know online has said that he feels he has both male and female gender, as distinct from feeling that he grew up with/is being treated as the wrong gender. Which is an aspect of not fitting the standard gender norms, but not one that can readily be labeled as "transgender". Nor can my friend whose preferred gender is neuter, which the relevant "experts" deny exists.

[N.B. Gentle readers, If I'm talking about you and getting things wrong, please correct me. Anonymously or using your logins, your choice.]

[naomikritzer]

Yeah, I would agree, I'm with you on that. The context of the comment in the book is someone asking her how she knows she's a woman, and then a discussion of whether you'd check for breasts and a vagina. She says that even without these things, women-born-as-women would still just know. Whereas personally I look at my equipment and see "woman," but if I woke up one morning with the other set of equipment, I'd be startled and it would take some time but I think I could accept myself as male and adjust. But this is totally hypothetical; I was born with girl parts, and except for a period in childhood where I very much wanted to be able to pee standing up, I've always been okay with what I was born with. It may be that I am far more attached to my gender identity than I realize, since I have a brain and body that match reasonably well. It may also be a continuum: there are a lot of people out there with a much more strongly gendered identity than I have.

Regardless of my own sense of my own gender (or lack thereof) I certainly believe transgendered people when they say that they just know. No one goes through something as physically arduous (not to mention expensive) as gender reassignment surgery just for shits and giggles.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

The context of the comment in the book is someone asking her how she knows she's a woman, and then a discussion of whether you'd check for breasts and a vagina. She says that even without these things, women-born-as-women would still just know.

Huh. Whereas I sort of forget, relatively frequently. Most people would call me a woman-born-as-woman. Yet there's an odd sort of incomprehension I get, usually when I have to fill out a form or choose a bathroom; it takes me a minute to remember what gender I am. Not that I think I'm something other than the one I seemingly have. It's just... this is not an intellectual position, or a political stance: it's a second or two or ten, almost every time, of saying, "OK, wait a minute, now, which was I? Um, oh! OK, right. This door, then, I guess."

Whereas personally I look at my equipment and see "woman," but if I woke up one morning with the other set of equipment, I'd be startled and it would take some time but I think I could accept myself as male and adjust.

I had a dream about that once. Was walking down the street with a friend (who happened to be MtF, actually, though it wasn't particularly relevant in the dream just then), and suddenly realized I was male. I felt a sudden sense of missing something, and said, "Hey, I wasn't done with.... oh, well, OK." And was mildly bummed about some clothes I had been planning to wear in my other body, but apparently the time for the new one had been moved up a bit without me being notified, so there I was. I figured I'd adjust. I took my friend's arm and kept walking.

In the dream, there was a strong sense of continuity over many lifetimes of different bodies, as well as changes in body within any particular lifetime.

Dunno what that says about anything, but your comments made me remember it. This discussion is interesting. Especially the interlocking and overlaying bits with class and culture stuff....

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I have a wonderful book, Generations, which is a collection of interviews with women of three American generations about their lives. One of the things that struck me most in it was how much diversity there was in the interviews with the oldest women (born 1900-1920) in their expectations, the lives they ended up having, and the social mores in their different areas.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

That statement by Aron Lichtov offends me. I don't think it's a North American perspective so much as the perspective of the upper middle class during moderately prosperous times. That *might* apply to some of his students. Or their grandparents. Or some of his students might think it apt to lie in one direction or another, about whether it applies to them or their grandparents. (One narrative: My grandparents were poor but honest. After 3 generations of hard work, I achieve prosperity. Other narrative: My grandparents were stifled by middle-class sensibilities. After 3 generations of consciousness-raising, I achieve enlightenment. As you know, it's always more complicated.)

Ain't I a woman? Poor women have *always* done manual labor, when they had to. The trappings of femininity are for those who can afford them. Some women, some times, push themselves right to the edge of being able to afford them. But a woman doing rough work in hard times to feed her family is acting like a poor woman, not like a man. There's nothing masculine about walking on unbound feet.

I will rant more about this in my journal in a few days.

[redbird]

I look forward to reading it.

[nnaloh.livejournal.com]

It was an oddish comment, but to me, it came out quite differently in the context of the panel, where it felt framed as a deliberate exaggeration meant to jar people into realising that they have more of a frame of reference for tg/ts issues than they think they do.

I'm going to attempt to say something complicated about the practice of reframing language and concepts meant to shame us and recognizing when our own biases get in the way. If I claim and reframe the word "fat", then I might use it about myself and about others as a simple descriptor, not as an insult. I'm quite aware that another person may use the word "fat" as an insult, and in those cases I would take it as such, but I can generally perceive or discover in the moment the difference between descriptor and insult, and between someone whose phrasing comes from being politicized about an issue, rather than someone who's never thought about it and doesn't care. I did attend most of that panel, and I'd have a really difficult time making a strong case for Aaron as the latter.

Besides, after being on a few panels and hearing the weird things that can come out of my mouth when a few hundred eyes are on me and I have a split second to respond, and I'm sitting ohmygod beside Ursula K. Le Guin, I tend to cut people a bit of slack who are in the same position.

Yes, it's an exaggeration

[redbird]

I agree that Aaron cares. I suspect, though, that he cares so much that he may be misleading people: not every woman (or man) who does work associated with the other gender is trans.

Yes, that comparison can jar people into seeing that they have a frame of reference for this. I'm concerned, though, that he might be confusing rather than enlightening, or lead some people into trivializing the matter. If they think being trans is just about being physically strong or doing what we (two generations later) consider men's work, they're going to miss a lot.

The key, of course, is where he goes from that comparison. But I think it would be a lot easier to use grandma doing that sort of farm labor to make feminist points in other areas. To my (cisgendered feminist) eyes, it seems to be more useful as a way of pointing out that gender roles aren't absolute, and that what counts as feminine in a city in 2006 isn't what counted that way on a farm two generations earlier, and that neither is inherent to the female body [however we define female], than to help cisgendered people understand that some people have a strong sense of gender identity that contrasts painfully with their body shape or how other people see them. [Corrections or elucidations from my transgendered friends and readers welcome here.]

I may try to find Aaron's contact information and see if I can get him to elaborate on this.

In terms of reframing: if I say I'm fat, it's a neutral descriptor and possibly a political act. If someone who is thin enough that her doctor won't let her give blood identifies herself as fat, it might conceivably be meant as political (rather than be evidence of a distorted self-image), but it's not a neutral descriptor. "Cisgendered" is both a descriptor and an attempt to reframe the question.

[It's early, and I may rephrase this comment later, in which case this version might vanish.]

Re: Yes, it's an exaggeration

[nnaloh.livejournal.com]

The key, of course, is where he goes from that comparison.

Ah. Agreed. Because yes, it did strike me as an odd comment.

To my (cisgendered feminist) eyes, it seems to be more useful as a way of pointing out that gender roles aren't absolute, and that what counts as feminine in a city in 2006 isn't what counted that way on a farm two generations earlier, and that neither is inherent to the female body [however we define female]

And I figured that's exactly what he would do. Partly because of what he said before and after that comment, and partly because I've had a couple of long conversations with Aaron about precisely these types of issues, so I'm getting a sense of how he approaches them.

If someone who is thin enough that her doctor won't let her give blood identifies herself as fat, it might conceivably be meant as political (rather than be evidence of a distorted self-image), but it's not a neutral descriptor.

Certainly. I have quite deliberately been describing myself as fat for a few years. But I've recently lost some weight; enough that I have to rethink how I use the word to describe myself. By many mainstream standards, I still am fat. In those contexts, I could continue to use the word as a way of challenging what people mean when they say it. But when is one ever in a purely mainstream context? I personally flinch when someone thin calls themself fat, so that's not a thing I'd do. But neither am I thin. So perhaps one way to challenge my own thinking and others' is to start calling myself thin. (Man, I enjoy the way this kind of stuff just messes up nice neat binaries!)

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Besides, after being on a few panels and hearing the weird things that can come out of my mouth when a few hundred eyes are on me and I have a split second to respond, and I'm sitting ohmygod beside Ursula K. Le Guin, I tend to cut people a bit of slack who are in the same position.

I have a lot of sympathy for saying inane things under pressure, having done it so many times myself. I don't think it means a person is an idiot or an enemy. It doesn't even mean the person is clueless about the issue at hand, or grossly insensitive, or anything like that. But cutting a person slack doesn't make me agree with what is coming out of his or her mouth. When a friend makes a mistake, the friend is still a friend, but the mistake is still a mistake.

I wasn't at the panel, so my thoughts about it are all based on secondhand reports. I do understand that it was not made in isolation, that it was intended to reframe basic questions of gender, but I think it reframed them in ways that are fundamentally wrong. Hard work is not necessarily "man's work." Strength and courage are not necessarily masculine. Trying to redefine* them as such leads to the kind of sexist bullshit as a woman saying, "the butchest thing I ever did was give birth without drugs." I'm sure she thinks of herself as feminist, but how feminist can it be to define strength, courage, motherhood, labor itself, as masculine virtues? Even if she, as an individual, is trying to claim some for herself?

I see it as redefinition, not definition. It was only after World War 2 that my family became prosperous enough that women could afford delicacy, squeamishness, dependence, and the other characteristics my grandparents considered "feminine." My GREAT-grandparents, those who lived in cities or shtetls as well as the ones on the farm, had more sense.

I'm going to attempt to say something complicated about the practice of reframing language and concepts meant to shame us and recognizing when our own biases get in the way. If I claim and reframe the word "fat", then I might use it about myself and about others as a simple descriptor, not as an insult. I'm quite aware that another person may use the word "fat" as an insult, and in those cases I would take it as such, but I can generally perceive or discover in the moment the difference between descriptor and insult, and between someone whose phrasing comes from being politicized about an issue, rather than someone who's never thought about it and doesn't care. I did attend most of that panel, and I'd have a really difficult time making a strong case for Aaron as the latter.

I don't think he was being casually insulting. I think he was making a deliberate attempt to raise consciousness, in a way that has the strong potential to backfire and teach people to be more closed-minded and sexist. I saw something similar yesterday on someone's LJ (maybe Peg Kerr's?), in the context of someone trying to raise consciousness about sexual orientation, saying something suspiciously like, "sexual orientation is deeply ingrained in a person, like alcoholism, so there's no point in making a person go against what is natural and right for that person." I think someone who meant well either got tangled up in rhetoric and tripped, or is just tone-deaf to connotations. Such things happen. As you say, they happen more often under stress and time pressure.

[nnaloh.livejournal.com]

*nods* fair enough.

As to this: sexual orientation is deeply ingrained in a person, like alcoholism


*blink* at the first half of the phrase, and *blink* at the second. Yes, I see what you mean about getting tangled up in rhetoric.

[miirica.livejournal.com]

I wasn't at the panel, so my thoughts about it are all based on secondhand reports. I do understand that it was not made in isolation, that it was intended to reframe basic questions of gender, but I think it reframed them in ways that are fundamentally wrong. Hard work is not necessarily "man's work." Strength and courage are not necessarily masculine. Trying to redefine* them as such leads to the kind of sexist bullshit...

I think the discussion here is intensely interesting. I will have more to say later, probably. I'd just like to suggest moving it away from one statement given from memory to a more general discussion instead of basing discussion around someone's report of a statement in a panel and other people's reports of that same panel. Memory's a funny thing, and a panel by necessity of time contains a lot of short-handing.

I cannot speak for my friend Aaron, nor would he approve of my doing so, but I must say that the friend I've known for more than 10 years has never in word or deed implied that hard work is "man's work". He is, in fact, someone who has made it safe time and again for any gender presentation and identification I express in this woman-looking body. He does that both through personal interactions and through his activism. One thing I enjoy is that he strives not to make assumptions about qualities intrinsic to gender and challenges others to do the same. I'd be very surprised if techniques he uses in presentations would have the opposite effect - he has been at this awhile.

I mean to sound like a cheerleader (I am, after all, his friend), but I don't intend it to sound like dialogue or any other folks opinion is being dissed here, so I hope my comments won't be taken as such.

[heyfoureyes.livejournal.com]

Dang, an FtM friend visited the Con and he would have been thrilled to go to that.

[redbird]

It wasn't only, or even primarily, a panel on transgender, though Aron described himself as "a one-trick pony on panels." But I think he would have found quite a bit of value there.

Ursula said some interesting things about writing, and gender, and some odd questions people ask her, notably "how would you write The Left Hand of Darkness differently now?" to which her reaction is "Why would I want to write it now? I've already written it."

[heyfoureyes.livejournal.com]

LOL to Ursula's comment.

The Left Hand of Darkness was beautiful the way it is! Yes, there's some implied heterosexism and etc., but, what the hell? It's good enough as it is! :D

. . . this particular friend of mine is not particularly "out" as an FtM, now that he passes completely in society. As a result, he hasn't really met other transsexuals since moving to Madison. (He transitioned before moving here.) He's sort of caught in this place where, to meet others, he has to blow his cover. And he doesn't feel safe enough to do that -- yet, he shows a longing to meet other transsexuals. At the con, from time to time, he'd bop me on the shoulder and whisper "tranny!" when he saw someone who he thought was a transperson.

[heyfoureyes.livejournal.com]

p.s. does your info page say that you are from Ether, OR because of the short story?

p.p.s. I wish I had said something to U.K. LeGuin about her work, like how "Coming of Age in Karhide" almost made me cry during the last line, instead of that I named my cat after her.

[redbird]

Yes, that's why it says Ether, OR. (I'm actually in New York City.)

and here's a perfect example...

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

One of the things I love about WisCon is that so many of these are continuing conversations. Thank ghods for LJ so I can find out about some of what I missed, and see how the conversations continue.

As for people meeting adrian_turtle, I think I figured out who she was on Friday afternoon. It was either after the Coming Out panel or else when I saw the two of you holding hands? I'm sorry I didn't get a chance even to chat much with the two of you. Maybe next year.

Re: and here's a perfect example...

[redbird]

She went to that panel, and told me a bit about it; and yes, if you saw me holding hands with someone, it was Adrian.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I'm not really /irritated/ by Lichtov's statement, but it is pretty irritating if you think of it as sitting in glorious isolation.

It does sound as if he doesn't let it sit, though, but instead starts talking about gender roles and what is and isn't "women's work" and "men's work" and the historical context thereof.

[intelligentrix.livejournal.com]

Huh. I don't think you ever introduced me to adrian_turtle. That's a shame, as I would have liked a face to go with the name. Or if you did, my appologies. I seem to remember a very busy con, but people keep mentioning all these things that I didn't see and now I wonder if I was really there at all. (Well, not really, but you know.) It was nice to see you, for however brief a moment.

[redbird]

What I remember clearly is showing you my coelacanth tattoo; I don't recall whether Adrian was with me at that point. (Her only userpic is of a turtle, not of her, so I can't usefully point you at it.)

[intelligentrix.livejournal.com]

Yes, I remember the tattoo--beautiful!

[sdn.livejournal.com]

bookzombie's partner is indeed on lj: pennski.

[nnaloh.livejournal.com]

[info]nnaloh... has shaved half her head while keeping the dreadlocks on the rest. Nalo still looks good, but different enough that I blurted out "you shaved half your head" instead of "hello" on Friday afternoon. I suspect she's been getting that a lot.

*grin* I did, yes, and was kind of enjoying it. Frenkel said I looked like Sideshow Bob, which is when I knew that my Wiscon had started. I almost don't feel like it's a Wiscon if he doesn't say something dubious about my dreads.

I only saw you once or twice in passing! It feels as though that's how I saw everyone.

[redbird]

We should definitely try to make more time next Wiscon (or next time we're otherwise in the same city--but I haven't made it to Toronto in several years).

[nnaloh.livejournal.com]

Yes, we should. I have plans to be in NYC soon, but it's a story conference session (brainstorming for the next novel) with my agent, and I hesitate to make plans with other people, because I might essentially be cloistered. I need to find out whether that's so. Maybe I can get a night off to hang out with a bunch of friends.

I'll be in White Plains soon for the SFRA conference, too. Though I've not seen you mention planning to attend that.

[redbird]

I don't have plans for the SFRA, but White Plains isn't that far from where I live, so we might manage something nonetheless. (I'm staying home this month, because I was gone a lot of May; that doesn't mean no dinners out, but no weekends away.)

[nnaloh.livejournal.com]

Oo. Then let's chat offlist?

[redbird]

Sure. vr @ redbird . org or the @livejournal.com address works.

pick one

[(Anonymous)]

just a brief response to your disagreement about "grandma is a tranny." i don't think women who did/do "men's work" are necessarily transgendered, either. i told the reader's digest version of the story on that panel, so the important bits seem to have been glossed over. the point i try to make with that analogy is that grandma's behavior *transgresses the rules of gender* -- which is also what trans-identified people do, albeit differently and with different consequences. the point about making trans-ness less Other still stands, but i want to be clear that i'm not trying to claim people as trannies who don't want to be claimed (cf. 'virginia woolf was a lesbian. no, she was bisexual.' et cetera ad nauseam. :)

Peace-

Aaron Lichtov
<madcapricorn@hotmail.com>

Re: pick one

[redbird]

Thanks for clarifying, Aaron.

It did seem as thought there was probably more going on in that story than you told, or at least more than I remembered.

I would argue, as Adrian has, that those farm women may be transgressing our (urban, 21st century) expectations of what counted as feminine for our grandmothers, but not the gender roles that actually existed in their time and place.

It seems to me--and this is going afield from what you're trying to get through to those college classes--that there are multiple ways of transgressing the rules of gender, and that someone, cis- or transgendered, who says "I don't care whether that's men's or women's work, it's what I want to do" is doing something different than the transgendered person who says "yes, those are women's/men's things, and I am a woman/man, and want to be treated as such."

I'm not claiming that those are the only two ways to transgress the rules; also, there may be significant differences between someone who ignores some of the rules because we don't even realize that we're coloring outside the lines, and someone who consciously decides that s/he dislikes them and is going to break them. Yes, I know that there's limited wiggle room for the not-getting-it before someone comes along and insists that there are lines here, and then a person has to decide whether to accept or argue. How limited depends on where and when, as well as on individual personality, family, phenotype, and probably a bunch of other things. But (small example) I can put on either pants or a skirt and it's just clothing; if dglenn puts on a skirt he's awre of breaking societal rules, and if he puts on pants he's specifically putting on "boy clothes" to satisfy those pressures. Same garments, but they're gendered for him in ways they aren't for me.

Another angle I want to drag in is that gender matters a lot more to some people than to others. I know trans people who have a strong sense of gender, which is different from the gender that their parents/the larger culture think they're of. I also know someone who identifies as trans, but has specific senses of both masculinity and femininity, and I suspect both of his gender senses are stronger than my one. There's someone else on my friends list who deliberately doesn't identify zir gender online, because zie feels strongly that "it matters that it should not matter": that gender isn't relevant to online interaction and shouldn't affect how people think of zir. Philosophically, I see the point, and if I hadn't dived into Usenet using my clearly gendered given name ("Vicki"), but it's not a priority for me.

I suspect this also ties into a discussion I'm having in email with a friend about whether she is a feminist (what she says, and does, feel clearly feminist to me, and I'm still trying to sort out the extent to which her discomfort with the identity is because she's run into particularly annoying gender-essentialists calling themselves feminist, and to what extent it's down to significant philosophical (as distinct from political) differences.

Re: pick one

[(Anonymous)]

vicki et al,

i'm just now getting a chance to catch up on this, and don't have the time/commitment to maintain long online conversations. i wish i did, but i don't so i'm saying it to clarify that if i don't keep up with the conversation after this, it's not for lack of interest.

i've pasted a few comments from above and responded to them. i'm co-chair of programming for WisCon 31 and will look with great interest at any proposals that examine/discuss this stuff further. ::nudge, nudge::

i also welcome the opportunity to have live conversations about any of this at WisCon 31. catch me at a party or in the consuite or something!

thanks,

Aaron

>framed as a deliberate exaggeration meant to jar people into realising >that they have more of a frame of reference for tg/ts issues than they think they do.

yes, exactly. the central thesis of the training I do is: everyone has a gender (not just trannies), and everyone’s gender is to some extent socially-constructed . . . even if everything about *you* happens to be normative.

>suspect, though, that he cares so much that he may be misleading people: >not every woman (or man) who does work associated with the other gender >is trans.

here you’ve mistaken me for the kind of tranny who needs *everyone* to be a tranny, and also (as throughout this thread) mistaken the point I was trying to make—which, lesson learned, falls flat on its face without sufficient context: that *in some cultural contexts* a woman doing hard physical labor is transgressing the rules of her culture about How Women Are Supposed To Behave. her behavior is gender-transgressive. the point of this exercise is not to make everyone be a tranny, but rather to shift people’s perspective so that they actually *see* the variety of kinds of gender transgression, and put people like me into a binary-deconstructing context that includes their hay-bale-slinging grandma, so I don’t seem like such a freak of nature—just another variation on the theme.

>I may try to find Aaron's contact information and see if I can get him to elaborate on this.

thanks for having thought of that. boy is it disconcerting to find one’s words hotly debated and misunderstood and to be coming late to the conversation! I know this is _de rigeur_ for lots of people but I am not a Public Figure of any kind, nor a blogger/LJ-er, so it's pretty new/odd to me.

>(Man, I enjoy the way this kind of stuff just messes up nice neat binaries!)

(quoting Robin Williams in ‘Dead Poets Society’) thank you, mr. Dalton, you just made my point.

>it was intended to reframe basic questions of gender, but I think it >reframed them in ways that are fundamentally wrong. Hard work is not necessarily "man's work."

which was exactly the point I was trying to make. *i* don't think hard work is men's work, but lots of cultures do. NB the distinction between a cultural phenomenon to which i'm calling attention and my own worldview. lesson to me about trying to wedge this into a conversation where there isn’t room to fully flesh it out. on the other hand: I think you’re out of step making assumptions about what I was framing or why since you acknowledge that you were not at the panel. there’s a bit of ruffled-feathers in those words—but I’ve no intention to escalate. we don’t know each other, and I’d rather proceed from the assumption that if we started clean-slate we’d probably have interesting and productive conversation since we share an interest in the general topic.

>I'm not really /irritated/ by Lichtov's statement, but it is pretty >irritating if you think of it as sitting in glorious isolation.

>cue the Irony: I’m pretty irritated about my comments sitting in
>[in]glorious isolation too. damn, I wish I could have a do-over. wait a minute—I’m co-chairing programming for W31; I CAN have a do-over!

thanks for participating in a conversation about gender,

Aaron