Time travelling

[rozk]

On Saturday, I went to the second meeting of the London Trans Reading Group, which is not the least of all the fab new bits of social and intellectual life that I find myself with after meeting so many cool young men and women at Transfabulous back in June. I perhaps have not stressed enough just how much this has meant to me - well, I know I've stressed it quite a bit, but I need to stress it some more.

So, we were looking at Janice Raymond's vile bible of transphobia The Transsexual Empire which I hadn't read for thirty years. Since I reviewed it.

When we decided to do Raymond, I mentioned my piece and was asked to bring it along. The scary thing is not how good it was - because even thirty years ago I was pretty sharp and pretty sussed - or how it stands up to the test of time -even then I noticed Raymond's assumption of white privilege. It was the occasional bits of it that reminded me of how young I was back then, just a year or so into transition, pre-surgery, living in a squat full of Soho street hustlers in Dalston, only a couple of years away from being raped during my first trip to Chicago. And still assuming that my sexual future was with men - I actually got into a snit about Raymond's assumption that all feminist transwomen identify as lesbians.

Walking over the grave of your younger self is the spookiest thing we have to do - and I was glad to do it in the company of Christina, Kat, Tessa, Val, Teht, Ej, Jin, Ben and the rest of them.

And this evening someone on Facebook mentions using my piece in Reclaiming Genders in a Sexual Politics class at University.

I get old. More worryingly, I get canonical.

Enough of this - off to work on novel.

Comments

[jinxremoving.livejournal.com]

The Trans Reading Group sounds fantastic. And I have also not stressed enough how much Transfabulous meant to me.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

There's a Facebook community already, and there is going to be an LJ community real soon now...

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Could we also have the piece? Pretty please?

[rozk.livejournal.com]

There is a problem with that which is that it is faced newsprint which scans moderately OK but does not do text recognition very well. I have a very garbled text file that I need to clean up - sometime but not imminently.

[time-freak.livejournal.com]

I love reading your posts when you go nostaligic about your youth! It's very interesting reading for me. I already harp back to "my days in that squat in camberwell with Claire and Shelly" and I'm only 24 lol.

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

Sounds like an excellent afternoon was had. 'Tis a shame I couldn't make it.

[x-mass.livejournal.com]

really really annoyed I missed it - I had done my reading as well though I found your article hard to read, guess I shouldn't have printed it out and read it as a pdf
However
V&D kept me awake all night and I was still ill by 6pm so I would have been useless.
empire really stuffed me up at school I remember telling teachers and students back in 1980 and all i met was a wall of hate. The weird thing was that until just recently I had assumed I was the only ts lesbian in the late 80's early 90's, principly because hwne I did go ft nobody was open about it. This is despite janice having written a whole chapter about us.

oh well be there next time hopefully

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Unlike a lot of people, I didn't start identifying as lesbian until a few years into transition and that was in the mid-80s. I knew one other TS dyke and she had a terrible time, getting fired from Gay News after a campaign against her; gradually I met other but it is only recently that I have met lots. Some of my friends would have identified as bi but felt that the hostility to us was so intense that there was no percentage in it for them - any time they slept with women had to be so sub rosa that they were better off keeping quiet.

I lost a couple of lovers because of serious pressure being placed on them - it was not a good time. And I owe it all to Janice Raymond...

[rozk.livejournal.com]

I should probably post about this, shouldn't I?

ON Being Canonical

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

Don't woory untill the workmen arrive to put that little blue plaque outside your house.

Trans Reading Group

[christinaalley.livejournal.com]

Hiya Roz,
it was great having you in the reading group when one of the texts we were discussion was written by you. Obviously, we were all careful not to embarrass you by saying how wonderfully written, insightful and razor-sharp it was - and obviously devastating to Raymond's argument.

BTW there already IS a livejournal for the Trans Reading Group, called:
treadinggroup

See you tonight at the TransLondon meeting?
C xx