dude at gay bar: so how long have you guys been together?
me: oh, just over 3 years.
dude at gay bar: wow, that’s like 10 in gay years!

…may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

we used to recite that verse when we were children, especially after someone else called us names. not because we believed it; in fact, we did, and still do believe that names can hurt us. but because we tried to convince ourselves and our oppressors that names couldn’t hurt us.

for trans people, certain names take on significant hurt. specifically our old names. many of us won’t mention them, and even when we see it, it hurts.

i come across my old name on occasion, on mail, on documents, in old photographs, when someone slips. and once in a while, when we have to deal with society, like government agencies or during job applications. when i applied for my current job, the application instructed me to list any former names. so i did. and just this past week, when i applied for an arizona ccw permit. so even now, 9 years after i legally changed it, it still rears its ugly head.

it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. although i never liked my old name. even as a child, i thought to change it when i “grew up”. little did i know that it would follow me around for the rest of my life. but i guess that’s something that every person, trans or otherwise, has to deal with.

there’s a rather long thread on feministe regarding some rather racist illustrations in a recently published feminist book. many others comment.

there’s been talk by some that this is another reason to abandon feminism as a movement. i’ve been told by a number of feminists that i can’t be a feminist, because i’m trans. and to some, that means i’m male, and suffer from male privilege, having been exposed to it for so long.

right away in the comments on the feministe thread, there are feminist type people talking about safe space. what i found interesting is that when feminists start talking about safe space, i, as a trans woman, can’t help but to think of the michigan womyn’s music festival, and space that specifically excludes me.

i guess when it comes to feminism, i consider myself a student, and not a feminist.

edited to add:
apologies ensue.

a new development on the search term scene. someone is looking for instructions in “how do you avoid being fooled by transgender”. perhaps he should asked the person who searched for “can feet tell the gender of a person?” further down the list.

“Feminists,” on the other hand, are not movement building, they are actively destroying women and blaming those women for the destruction. They are saying the point of feminism is “equality with men” without even thinking to acknowledge that “equality with women” is just as admirable of a goal and maybe even possibly the first step to achieving the goal of equality with men. They are saying, Just do it, just do it, JUST FUCKING DO IT.

And so I withdraw myself from this “movement”.

And I reject and rebel at the label “feminist.”

I reject and rebel at the label “feminist” because I reject and rebel against silence and erasure.

read her entire post here.

this is what nexy’s cocoon looks like on the first saturday of a one week holiday from work. two very dirty guns home from the range. the phoenix pink pistols had our saturday shoot today, and we all had a great time. i shot fairly well, and seem to be getting better with my s&w 637 revolver. i still love shooting my s&w 2206tgt .22 autoloader though.

we were hoping a few people would attend today that visited our booth last week at pride, though perhaps they are waiting to first attend our handgun basics workshop on may 3rd. a few minutes before i left for the range, i put together a little safety flier for anyone new to shooting (mostly from info i found at the gun zone, though “the four rules” are pretty well known and propagated) but it turned out to be not needed.

i’m continuously fascinated by the search terms that hit my site. i noticed that recently, the searches for “shemales” were outnumbered by the searches for “post op shemale” or some facsimile. a search i hadn’t seen before emerged this week – “world record shemale” (i have to wonder what would entail having a “world record”), and “bathroom facilities for transgender in hospital”.

i’m also surprised by the number of people searching for pink guns.

so, shemales (post op and otherwise) and pink guns. i never imagined that people would search for these in such numbers. and that they’d end up finding me. your friendly neighborhood shemale with a pink gun.

as i predicted, calpernia did the right thing, and chose shawn as the winner. as far as i’m concerned, he was by far, the best choice. he’s smart, witty, handsome, and tall. in other words, hot. congratz shawn!

now, for the next season, will andrea james find her beau?

so the phoenix pink pistols had a booth at the 2008 phoenix pride, which was very well attended. we had hundreds of visitors, and a very positive reaction from the crowd.

over a hundred people signed our email list, and we’re expecting many new attendees at the saturday shoot this weekend. more pictures are available on the ppp website here.

one of the ideas behind the pink pistols is that if enough lgbt people are armed, perhaps the bigots will be less likely to attempt to kill us. in an article on southern voice online, covering hillary clinton’s position on gun control, editor rebecca armendariz writes:

One of the steps towards eliminating hate crimes like [the death of Lawrence King] is obviously tougher gun control laws.

ummm, because they’ve been working so well up until now?

the only thing tougher gun control laws do is to keep guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens. criminals, by definition, don’t follow the law, so will not be effected by “tougher gun control laws”. one of the steps toward eliminating hate crimes against lgbt people is to be armed, so that the bigots will be less likely to act upon their hate knowing that their intended victim may be armed. another step is to strictly enforce current laws.