Transcreature

Note: We are working on French and Spanish translations of this document, and seeking volunteers to translate into other languages. Please contact us at: [email protected].

International Trans Women of Color Network Gathering @ Allied Media Conference 2014, June 19th, 2014 Call for Participation/Submissions

We know that trans women of color are magical, powerful, skilled and wise, yet there is still no international network joining us together to address the struggles we face. This network gathering seeks to change that. We are looking for people and organizations willing to…

- lead workshops and skillshares - give short talks - facilitate discussions - lead visionary exercises

…to work towards building an international network of trans women of color! This will include discussions online and in your home town in the months leading up to the gathering where people can work towards a shared vision and goals statement for the network for participants to agree on.  

We encourage submissions that are media-focused such as:

- Blogging Against Borders - Social Media to Connect Us - Theatre of the Oppressed - Fashion Politics and Wearable Electronics - Community Building through Performance

…although we welcome submissions of any topic relating to Trans Women of Color!

The formats and content is being left purposefully open, since we want the content to be driven by the people who can attend. More than anything… this network gathering is about creating space for us to build bridges and make connections. The organizers do not want it to be just about what we are interested in. However, we do think that having a day to centre the people who need it the most is a great way to start. This means, we want proposals about ways of using media and technology in campaigns about sex work, violence, incarceration / prison abolition, health services, employment, immigration, rural experiences, disability, decolonization and more. The organizers of this network gathering are committed to creating accessible space by fundraising for travel costs, ASL interpretation and language translations as people indicate they are needed. This network gathering will have a safety team and safety plan to demonstrate, in a visionary way, the world we want to see. The emotional and physical safety of participants will be a central concern in our organizing.

Ways to submit: Apply through this Google form by Sunday, April 13th.

Please indicate if you need support for travel funding or if you work with an organization that can fund your travel. We will be fundraising and will be able to provide some travel support, but we are not sure how much yet. We are also looking for people interested in joining the coordinator team and helping to raise funds.

Three individuals wrestle with the decision to work in the sex industry to survive. They struggle physically, emotionally and spiritually to find legitimacy..

Martin Luther King Jr. in Letter From A Birmingham Jail (via thisiseverydayracism)

my frustration with white feminism in two sentences

(via ethiopienne)

my ex

"Dr. King’s Error", New York Times editorial, April 7, 1967

The white liberals at the New York Times, in the White House, and at other elite white agenda-setting institutions, never forgave Dr. King for speaking out against the Vietnam War. They considered it a betrayal — after all, they had supported the Civil Rights movement, they had sung “We Shall Overcome” with trembling lips and teary eyes, but for a Black leader to step out of his prescribed role and actively oppose US imperialism was out of line, even ungrateful. In typical white liberal fashion, it made them want to roll back Civil Rights out of spite.

  Storify 

"Sober In Love"

A series of tweets on feminism and the concessions that women have to make in loving men who are often the major site of our oppression. As people who desire men in romantic partnership, how can we balance our politics with love & make sense of the perilous landscape we have to find it in?

I have come to this conclusion after reading these posts and doing more research on the topic:

http://queertheoryissexy.tumblr.com/post/67511694887/mycatisananarchist-jackaldope-someone-sent

http://biyuti.com/blog/on-transasterisk/

i saw this post yesterday (i wish i had grabbed the URL) about how this trans woman’s brother was being a shitty transmisogynist about some trans woman he felt wasn’t putting enough effort into ~being~ a woman or some such nonsense.

why? because she didn’t work on her voice or something.

it is an issue i know i’m pretty sensitive about. i get no dysphoria from my voice ‘cause, well i don’t have much in the way of physical dysphoria. i do, however, have a lot of social dysphoria and my voice makes a really big fucking difference for how people read my gender.

the thing is…

is that i don’t want to change my voice.

my voice is a woman’s voice because i am a woman.

end of the fucking story.

despite all this…….

i still feel like i’m being robbed of my voice

nowadays, when i’m in public and i can see that people are correctly reading my gender…..

i try not to speak aloud because i don’t want to ruin it.

because i don’t consistently read as a ~real~ (re: cis) woman. and it isn’t a goal of mine. so the relatively rareish times when i’m encountering someone who doesn’t misgender me, i just want the moment to last.

but not only then… just like in general. i feel this urge to either modify my voice or just stay silent.

it is funny/not funny when cis women talk about how they are figuratively silenced (in most cases) by misogyny and the expectations that women are silent or defer to men….

transmisogyny

literally steals our voices1

literally silences us2

‘voice’ and the discourse around being heard and silencing

is a central idea to liberatory discourse

but in most of the discussions of this as abstract idea, as metaphor

rarely take into account things like the embodied, physical realities of trans women

for whom the very act of speaking could mean violence, assault, death

For those who were coerced into modifying their voices according to cisnormative standards.↩

So I worked on my voice, like a lot, because I've wanted a voice I can be confident with. When I was young, I used to get "mistaken" for a girl a lot, especially when I was on the phone. After watching some videos of myself growing up I realized that I used to talk in really feminine ways, but I learned how to disguise a lot of that as I grew up. For me, changing  unlearning a lot of the defense mechanisms I had to learn growing up was a huge thing and actually changed the way people perceived me. 

But also, when I'm hanging out with trans women, I notice that most of us actually code switch. There's the comfortable voice that I use around my friends and family, which I don't see as all that masculine but it is kind of clocky. And then there's the voice we use when we're trying to not get clocked. It's kind of instinctual now, I can notice I do it but I really don't have to think about it that much. 

CeCe McDonald on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show, 19 January 2014.