There's Beauty in the Bellow

We visited family recently and one member had a borrowed copy of "Tranny" by Laura Jane Grace. Grace was formerly a male and frontman of a band I had never heard of (in an angsty genre I never listen to). So I had no preconceptions when I picked up the memoir, other than the title was intriguing. Plus, the title and front matter gave no indication as to whether the epithet was owned or disowned. (There was no dust jacket.) It opens with the writer as a very young child, idolizing and aping Madonna. It's not immediately clear whether it's not a girl pretending to be said Madonna. I mention this only because I have a problem with anyone wanting to be like Madonna at all. She's not worthy of emulating, although she is talented at least as a performer. (I've only heard a few of her songs and she's mostly posturing, so I have no idea of her vocal talents.) I read the first section about her childhood and the last bit where she transitions. Apparently most o...

In a rather odd episode of Falling Down the Rabbit Hole, I discovered this quote of quote quoted by Rod Dreher : In a recent piece for  n+1 , the feminist and trans theorist Andrea Long Chu argued that the trans experience, contrary to how we have become accustomed to think of it, ‘expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire’. Being trans, she says, is ‘a matter not of who one  is , but of what one  wants ’. She goes on: I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my make-up in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, an...