 February 22, 2012 at 9:00 am  Natalie Reed
There’s two things you should know, which kind of make this story a tad less dramatic and awesome and fun to tell than it would otherwise be:
1) My family are scattered all over the place. We currently live in Vancouver, Alaska, Montreal, North Carolina, England, Scotland, Ethiopia, Thailand, Boston, Canterlot, New York and Toronto. I’m the only one in Vancouver, and I made one of those up.
2) At the time all this happened, I had only recently moved to Vancouver, and didn’t yet have any friends in the city. Except for Mittens, my cybernetic velociraptor.
This means all my coming out as trans didn’t happen in person, which makes the story a whole lot less cool and exciting than most people’s stories. Sending e-mails doesn’t quite have the same dramatic force as speaking to family in dim 1am kitchens over glasses of port. Nonetheless, I can hardly do a series all about coming out without talking about my own coming out. It’s times like these that I regret my policy of telling the truth about my experiences.
“No seriously, guys! I totally killed a Tigerman warlock with an allen key and a pack of mint skittles!”
February 21, 2012 at 1:00 pm Natalie Reed
Hello to all Vancouver and Vancouver-ish people!
This is just a friendly reminder to let you all know that I’m giving a little Skepticamp-style talk tonight at Skeptics In The Pub, downtown at The Railway Club, sometime after 6:30pm-ish.
For more details, and some directions, please see my first post about it (which also includes an awesome video by Reeders Ariel Silvera and Aiofe O’Rierdan).
The talk is entitled “Getting Skeptics To Think Skeptically About Their Skepticism”, and is about the difficulty of learning to apply skeptical and critical thinking to your own assumptions and biases, as well as the value of skepticism incorporating social issues like feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQ rights into its mandate.
So please come down, and buy me a beer and some food. In return I’ll sign the book of your choice and declare it officially “found poetry”, written by me. And if you buy me two beers, or give me mardi gras beads, I will show you my beautiful, sexy fingers.
Oh yeah, and you can listen to the talk.
Right!
xoxo
Natalie Reed
February 21, 2012 at 9:00 am Natalie Reed
One of the many problematic aspects of treating gay and lesbian (mostly just gay) experiences and narratives as the archetype against which all queer experience is measured is how it causes particular models and tropes of queer lives to be applied indiscriminately across the many varying identities that comprise our community All kinds of important nuances, subtleties and distinctions can get lost in this process, and entire identities erased. Concepts, issues and experiences which are complex or problematic in very particular ways for certain kinds of queer lives end up being expected to fit into the same patterns, and have all the same implications and meanings and values, as how they operate in relation to gay lives.
There are lots of issues that end up being treated as exceptionally meaningful and central to queer experience, often being sort of central rallying points for the LGBTQ rights movement despite their lack of universality, and how they really don’t have nearly the same implications for everyone. Marriage equality, for instance, is treated as sort of the priority objective in the push forward for legal equality even while the narratives used to support it can be dismissive of other queer identities, such as those who are polyamorous or asexual. Non-discrimination bills will be structured around sexual orientation while choosing to leave gender identity and gender expression out of the wording. The “born this way” narrative is pushed in increasingly dogmatic terms at the expense of bisexual, pansexual and gender-fluid experiences. Narratives of gay self-acceptance often hinge themselves on the idea of bisexuality not even existing. The “just like normal people” narrative pushes aside butch, effeminate, drag and transgender identities entirely.
And the concept of coming out, its significance and what it means, is applied indiscriminately across the queer spectrum, failing to consider the vastly different implications it carries for people who are not gay or lesbian… such as how it means something almost wholly different for transsexual experience.
February 20, 2012 at 1:00 pm Natalie Reed
Those of you who follow FTB as a whole, or were keeping up with the Target Audiences comment thread, are probably already aware of a rather nasty remark John Loftus made insinuating that I’m not really qualified to be writing for this network and was only brought in for the sake of diversity.
This post is not going to be another discussion of Loftus or his remarks. There’s not really any need to carry that any further, I feel comfortable with how this resolved and like there isn’t much left to be said. I also feel for the most part that his comments speak for themselves, and my colleagues at FTB have already done a great job of defending my worth and discussing why his diversity-hire comment was not okay and crossed the line.
But I do want to talk about the issue of diversity, and “tokens”, both as a general thing and within the skeptic, atheist and humanist community. The issue goes well beyond Loftus’ remark, of course, and has been coming a lot lately, most notably perhaps in the Staks Rosch “Hitchie award” controversy.
February 20, 2012 at 9:00 am Natalie Reed
This piece was originally posted at Queereka. I am re-posting it here because it had originally been intended as part of a series, which I will now complete this week. Please visit Queereka for all kinds of awesome LGBTQ stuff, from a secular, skeptical angle!
For me, being a skeptic, and the personal importance skepticism has for me, almost entirely boils down to one thing: knowing that I’m an irrational, crazy idiot capable of incredible cognitive distortions and amazing feats of self-deception. Skepticism is a safety precaution and coping mechanism. My intellectual emergency brakes.
The initial crazy that led me into discovering and understanding the enormous importance of doubt and hesitation was managing to convince myself during my first year of college that the world was secretly being run by a cabal of occult-oriented secret societies. I was approximately 2.5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms away from buying into the shape-shifting reptile people. Snapping out of that snapped me into skepticism.
But the conspiracy theories, in terms of personal significance, is dwarfed in irrationality, cognitive distortion and self-deception by how I convinced myself for twelve years following the initial revelation of my transsexuality that that wasn’t what was really going on, that I must have made a mistake (over and over and over), that I couldn’t possibly be the T-word and…
…ultimately convincing myself that I was really just gay. So I came out as such.
February 19, 2012 at 9:00 am Natalie Reed
Yeah, totally can’t be bothered to actually come up with a title today.
Anyway, just some meta-reporting and fun thing things…
February 18, 2012 at 9:00 am Natalie Reed
Another week, another recap, another set of adorable animals!
February 17, 2012 at 1:00 pm Natalie Reed
And to finish up a bit of a hectic little week, here’s a few interesting things I found scattered around this endless web of ours…
February 17, 2012 at 9:00 am Natalie Reed
Disclaimer: this post is not specifically inspired by or directed towards ANY of my friends, family, colleagues, readers or fans. I am very appreciative of all of your kindness and support.
A couple weeks ago when I posted about how to ask trans people questions without doing so in an insensitive or invasive way, I made a point about unintended implications or underlying assumptions. I also used as a brief example the compliment mentioned in this title. I wanted to explore that a little bit more, focusing on the context of compliments and support.
February 16, 2012 at 1:00 pm Natalie Reed
So last week, after making my little post about the upcoming film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, some people asked if I’d be willing to do a little list of some of my favourite or most recommended books. Well as it happens, I am more than happy to oblige!
So here is a list of ten books that are either really really good supplements to the kinds of subjects I talk about here at SNR, or are just particularly near and dear to my heart.
|
|
.png){kind=logo}
Recent Comments