Tag Archives: LGBTQ

Aug 29 2020
Theatre

Autonomy and Disability on Stage: The Seeing Place’s Midsummer

Pictured: The poster for the show depicts the silhouette of two women, facing each other closely, with a rainbow-colored rose covering where their lips meet.

The Seeing Place’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays August 28 at 7PM EDT and August 29 at 3PM EDT. For tickets, click here.

Yesterday I sat down (virually) with Erin Cronican and William Ketter of The Seeing Place Theater in New York to talk about their upcoming production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opening tonight! The production is, of course, on Zoom, so wherever you are, you can still grab a ticket and attend. I’ll be attending this afternoon’s performance (7PM Eastern; 4PM Pacific) and doing a longer write-up later, but I wanted to give you some highlights about why I’m excited to see this piece and give you a chance to see it with me before the piece comes out. (If not, one of the live performances will be recorded and posted online after the show closes).

First of all, it’s a benefit production for homeless LGBTQ youth. To quote their site: “This play is being presented as a benefit for The Ali Forney Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting LGBTQ youths from the harms of homelessness and empower them with the tools needed to live independently.” What’s not to love about that?

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The Ali Forney Center is located in New York. Learn more about them by clicking here. 

But here’s what really hit home for me: This production of Midsummer is part of their 10th season, themed around “The Body Politic.” They’re presenting Midsummer as a story about the fight for autonomy and self-determination.

In this production, Lysander and Hermia are a lesbian couple, foregrounding the difficulties faced by LGBTQ youth in accessing the community acceptance needed to support self-determination. You can only determine your own destiny if people with power are not hostile to that destiny and using their power and privilege to disrupt it.

Hermia is given the choice to marry the man her father chooses, become a nun, or die. And while this play is 400 years old, many LGBTQ youth are forced into similar choices. Some legal progress has been made, but LGBTQ youth are still 140% more likely to experience homelessness than their peers. Parents are still throwing their transgender kids out into the street, or abusing them because they can’t perform their gender or sexuality according to parental specifications, driving LGBTQ youth to run away to seek a safer environment. The Ali Forney Center has a waiting list of over 100 kids a night just looking for a safe place to sleep.

While LGBTQ-focused productions of Midsummer are admittedly no longer rare, what is rare is The Seeing Place’s understanding that these issues are intersectional in casting two actors with disabilities: Erin and William.

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Erin Cronican is also the Executive Artistic Director of The Seeing Place. (Source: seeingplacetheater.com)

People with disabilities, especially PWDs whose intersectional identities include other marginalized aspects, such as queer PWDs and BIPOC with disabilities, face enormous roadblocks to bodily autonomy and self-determination. Youth with disabilities must struggle against an ableist society that relentlessly seeks to infantilize PWDs, deny our self-determination, deny our autonomy, and frame us as sexless beings whose primary purpose is to provide a framework for able-bodied people as they perform “generosity” and “gratitude.”

Disability is routinely– even aggressively– shut out of discussions of privilege and marginalization. In my last teaching job, I pointed out that we had disability mentioned as part of our “commitment to diversity,” but that we had not even done any information gathering around disability, let alone begun anything approaching equity and inclusion work. Instead of committing to beginning that work, they responded that they would just remove disability from the list.

Disability is almost invisible in discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, exacerbated by the fact that PWD representation in media is almost nonexistent, and when we do appear, it’s mostly inspiration porn.

So I’m very excited to see how they approach this play with these issues in mind! I’ll be posting a longer write-up about it early next week. See you at the theatre!

Theatres! If you would like to me write about your Zoom production, contact me at bittergertrude@gmail.com. 

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Jan 02 2019
Culture

We Have Some Questions for Louis CK

2017 Summer TCA Tour - Day 16

Photo: Getty Images

Dear Mr. CK:

As the mothers of young transgender, gender-neutral, non-binary, and genderqueer people, we have some questions about your new stand-up that we were hoping you could answer.

In your feisty new set, you complained about our children, stating:

“They tell you what to call them. ‘You should address me as they/them, because I identify as gender neutral.’ Oh, OK. You should address me as ‘there’ because I identify as a location. And the location is your mother’s cunt.”

Far be it from us to deny you your self-identification, but as a means of supporting you in your transition from garbage man to our cunts, we will need some clarification.

Are you identifying as the location where our cunts reside? For example, right now, are you identifying as the crotch of an old pair of Darth Vader pajama pants, a pair of Hanes Her Way in Rocket Red, a lacy thong from Hips and Curves, a bubble bath, etc, etc, all at once? Are you planning to set up some kind of mechanism whereby we can all report the locations of our cunts to you at all times? It sounds stressful, but we are here to support you!

Or perhaps you’re identifying as all our actual cunts at once? If so, welcome! Having a wealthy celebrity suddenly announce that he is now identifying as part of our bodies comes as a welcome relief as you will of course begin contributing to your own upkeep. We look forward to your ongoing, regular contributions to the maintenance of our mutual cunts. Tampons and pads cost money! On any given day, at least one of us is menstruating, so you’ll be menstruating daily along with us. (You also . . . seem like the kind of man who might need some basic information about women’s bodies. This 1946 Disney short, “The Story of Menstruation,” will be a big help.) Additionally, some of our cunts have expensive medical issues. Everything from cervical cancer to a simple yeast infection puts financial pressure on women, and knowing that you will be there, Louis CK, every step of the way alongside us, is heartwarming.

Clitoria-Ternatea-Vine-15-Seeds-Butterfly-Pea-Asian

The beautiful clitoria ternatea. Photo by BT Wursten, Flora of Zimbabwe

Given the grammar of your sentence, it seems quite unlikely that you meant that you planned to have sex with all of us, but the possibility does need to be addressed. If that’s the case, please amend this joke to make grammatical sense. If you “identify” as the location of all our cunts, you’re talking about BEING us (or where we are located– hoping for clarification soon!), not being IN us. Also please amend your expectations. The man who had to force unwilling women into sexual encounters at the height of his fame and power is not up to the task of landing every one of us at this point. There will always be a few that will do it for the story, but I doubt you could crack more than 0.07%. We do, however, wish you the best of luck.

We have one final question, though. You seem very emotional about the fact that some young people are telling us how they wish to be addressed, and distressed that they are not like you were when you were young. Yet they are precisely like you. You were born “Louis Szekely,” and have told us all to address you as “Louis CK.”

Of course, given your new vaginalian identity, the point is now moot. I’m sure you will be taking on a more appropriate name, one that reflects your newly-revealed inner truth. From now on, we will respect your truth and refer to you as “The All Cunt.”

With Love,

Moms

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Dec 21 2018
Culture

Transgender? The California DMV Has Some Questions From 1972 For You

My daughter is transgender. Like many of the kids in our area, where so many walk or use public transportation, she doesn’t yet have a driver’s license. When she turned 18, she needed a California ID. Sounds easy, no? Not for trans folks.

We had already gone to court and had her name and gender legally changed in the state of California. It’s an involved process. You need several official court forms and a letter from your doctor attesting that the petitioner is undergoing “medically appropriate treatment” for the gender change. California wisely leaves the definition of “medically appropriate treatment” up to the doctor and petitioner, as there are so many different options available now, and what is an appropriate medical approach for one person may not be appropriate (or even safe) for another. The filing fee is $435, and the court date is set after the clerk reviews all your completed documents, making sure everything is in order. You must appear in person on the court date, whenever it is. The court here groups all the name and gender change people together, and the judge we drew was a sweetheart, so our court appearance was a memorable day of various families and friends hugging, weeping, and laughing. The judge was clearly enjoying himself (“Don’t cry, Mom,” he smilingly said to me as I wept while he genially and casually changed my daughter’s life by affirming her identity.). We immediately went to Records and got several original copies of the court order, knowing we would need them.

Getting a new Social Security card was a breeze with the court order. We didn’t even have an appointment. We popped by, waited about 20 minutes, showed the very sweet woman behind the counter the original court order, and my daughter had her receipt in hand (and a warm congratulations) within five minutes of our number being called. The re-issued card came in the mail a week later.

Getting a new birth certificate was a breeze with the court order. We filled out the proper forms, enclosed a $23 check and one of the original court orders (which is why you need several– they keep it), and within several weeks, the new birth certificate came. My baby girl bearing my grandmother’s name. So precious to me, and much, much more precious to her.

Down the line, everything we needed was a breeze, smiles and congratulations, stamp, stamp, “That’ll be $27.50” and you’re done. The DMV was another story.

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Actual, unretouched photo of our DMV clerk

The DMV was our first stop after we obtained the court order, as I naively believed it would be one of the easiest and would facilitate getting the rest done. It’s just an ID, right? She definitely is who she says she is. I had her original, official birth certificate and social security card with her deadname, along with an original, official, stamped court order and the entire packet of paperwork the court made us file, including the doctor’s note. I had several pieces of mail proving her address and my own, along with my own ID proving that I was the person listed as her mother on her birth certificate. I was, as usual, over-prepared. Or so I thought.

What would be good enough for the social security office, for the California Office of Vital Records, for the school system, for the passport office, for literally every other local, state, and federal government agency, was not good enough for the California DMV.

The California DMV has its own form, you see. The DMV will not accept an official court order. Instead they demand a special DMV doctor’s note, called a DL329. What information does the DMV insist transgender people collect that is so critical that an official court order is deemed inadequate?

You must get a physician or psychologist to attest that your “gender identification” is “transitional” or “complete,” and that you have a (check one) male or female gender identification and a (check one) male or female demeanor.

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The DL329. 

First of all, the California DMV does NOT need to know whether my daughter’s “gender identification” is “complete.” What the hell does that even mean? Because it sure sounds like the California DMV is asking my teenage daughter if she’s had bottom surgery. When I asked about this, they said it was “because it’s used for ID.” I use my driver’s license for ID all the time, and I have never once been asked by anyone to prove I’m female with my genitalia. Additionally, transgender people are precisely the gender they say they are. What procedures they may or may not undergo to change their bodies is no more relevant to their identity than it is when cisgender people have them. People have plastic surgery all the time, and the DMV makes nary a peep about it. What reason could the DMV possibly have for demanding information about the “completeness” of someone’s “transition”? It can’t possibly be for identification purposes. It seems that the demand is there for no other reason than to harass and abuse transgender people.

This also demonstrates a woefully outdated understanding of gender. EVERYONE’S “gender identification” is complete, even if you change your gender daily. Whatever your gender is in any given moment, as you experience it, is a “complete” gender. You may, like someone of any gender, choose to have various procedures to be happier with your body, but there is no such thing as a “transitional gender,” and even if you disagree with that, there’s no reason for the DMV to have that information to issue you a state ID in a state with picture IDs.

Do you reasonably match your picture? Great. Your genitalia does not need to be involved in this. No, sir, please do not show me your genital– SIR. Sir, please put that away. Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the building.

I suppose I understand male and female “gender identification;” at least, I understand what they mean by it. What I don’t understand is why they need a physician to confirm it and why there are only two choices. At least 1 in 2000 babies are born intersex, and there are plenty of people who are nonbinary. But sure. I’ll give them this one, provisionally, if only because I need room in this piece for the immense, mind-boggling nonsense that is the DMV’s demand for a physician to assess the gender of your “demeanor.”

The California DMV forces you to ask a physician or psychologist to check a box attesting that you have either male or female “demeanor.” There are only two choices, and I have no idea what either of them mean. I’m a cis woman and I would fail traditional “female demeanor” every day of the week. What does the DMV want the doctor to confirm? That transwomen can walk in high heels? Move daintily? Defer to men? Say “I love my career, but nothing is more important to me than being a good wife and mother”? What, specifically, does the DMV think it’s asking for when it’s asking for a doctor to assess the gender of someone’s demeanor?

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What the DMV is picturing as “female demeanor” (source: puzzlewarehouse.com)

Remember that this is in addition to the court order that I had in my hand at that moment proving that the human standing in front of them was legally female. Think about this: The DMV insisted that we force a doctor to attest that my daughter had a “female demeanor” in order to get an ID that reflected her LEGAL gender.

What made this all so much worse was that the staff at our local DMV were openly hostile. This is the Bay Area, and, naively, so very naively, I had expected them to be professional. Of course not.

We eventually got her ID. My daughter had me and my husband to fight for her. Imagine having to face that– and much worse– alone.

California, you’re supposed to be leading the way in these issues. Instead, the DMV is allowed to force transgender Californians to undergo humiliating, abusive treatment for no reason at all other than that they can, and no one in the state government has ever cared enough to stop them.

 

 

 

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