#evolvingmatter

[nbdirk-blog]

evolvingmatter answered your question “so in 2 weeks my professor is having the woman who runs rethreaded,...”

the first thing that comes to mind is grilling them about salaries versus sex work income (i.e. if minimum wage); also about how they find people (and grill them on their answers, that could go a few ways depending on what they're up to)

this is helpful, thank you!!

[marginalutilite]

I love everyone else, too, but seriously, I feel like I go on tumblr solely to read @evolvingmatter, @bitterpunktrash, and @whoremoantherapy‘s posts. 

[folieassdeux]

evolvingmatter replied to your post “the-detective-from-gallifrey replied to your post “i just love life on...”

I'd forgotten about this show and all your posts reminded me - just had to stop myself downloading it because I'll never get any study done if so.

oh noo never forget it! it can be a reward once your studying is done :)

[leighalanna]

as someone who has very few irl sw friends, and is not out as a sw to 90% of people i know, having found your blog, and other sw blogs like evolivingmatter and clarawebbwilcutoffyourhead, has felt like coming home, or waking up, or some other silly simile. just.... thank you.

evolvingmatter and clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead, you two should see this! 

SW community has been so important to me too, and I’m honestly shocked how much sexwoblr has meant to me in the past year, so I’m glad I’m not the only one.  Drop by my inbox anytime, anon or not. (I’m happy to keep things private, just say “private” in the message, because I’m bad at making inferences.) 

[brinconvenient]

Transparent

I initially wrote this as a response to this conversation between evolvingmatter, smartassjen and canonicalmomentum, but it got really long and I think it became less an actual contribution to their conversation and more one of my patented rambles (patent pending). You should definitely go read that conversation though, especially if you like intelligent trans women, and most especially if you like intelligent trans women speaking intelligently (and passionately).

I alluded to my feelings on this show a while ago, but I'd not really explored them yet. I'm in the "trans women who have watched it" group and I was thoroughly disappointed and frustrated with this show.

I spent a long time avoiding it, mostly because of Jeffrey Tambor's casting, but another friend of mine was one of the trans extras (morgan-red is one of the models on the webcam site, but they flew her to LA and treated her well) and she had a lot of great things to say about the production and the show.

So I watched it ... I kind of felt like it was sort of my duty? Not just because my friend was in it, but because I'm a vocal trans woman and people have asked me about it and I felt like I was supposed to have an answer... 

And I was uncomfortable every minute of it. I alternated between hating the characters, wanting to crawl out of my skin and being angry at the portrayals. 

I felt like this was a show made for people-who-hate-people by people-who-hate-people. There's not a redeemable human being on the show, with the possible exception of Davina (Alexandra Billings' character). Everyone is selfish, hateful, rude, and just ... inhuman. 

I thought that the show was called Transparent because it was going to focus on a trans parent, but the vast majority of the focus was on the cis children of a trans parent and THEIR issues and their lives and their acceptance, or lack thereof, of that trans parent. 

Frankly, I could never again see Josh or his sex life on-screen again and I'd be a happy woman. Did we really need to center the one man's life in this show? I couldn't give a shit about his mangst. I spent every minute he was on screen yelling at him to grow the hell up!

Ali's entire characterization is "messed up for the sake of being messed up." It's this mid-twenties upper-class white woman existential angst nonsense that doesn't reflect any real person I've ever met, probably because it requires a certain level of privilege and wealth to spend your life angsting about the ways that you spend your life angsting.

Sarah ... Sarah goes through her own crisis of the closet and I think her story arc is actually mostly ok. It's not often you see a (presumably?) bisexual woman go through her own realization, although she does her best to firebomb her partners' lives along the way... I truly felt bad for Barbara and for all of the children involved. Then the show ends with hints that she may go back to her husband? IDK. 

Even Maura, once they get to talking about Ed's end-of-life care, just crossed the line into unrecognizable inhumanity to me. I was just so disappointed in her cheating on her wife and then in her support of killing Ed.

Up to that point, she'd been showing doing a number of disagreeable things, but I at least was able to see elements of them in my own past. I think a lot of white, middle-class trans women who came to realization before the internet age probably saw a lot of themselves in Maura's backstory. The hidden purchasing and purging, the secrecy and shame, the rapidity with which she cancelled Ali's Bat Mitzvah so she could run off and live a fantasy for a weekend, the way the crossdressers at the retreat distanced themselves from the trans women they threw under the bus - that kind of denial was a tool of survival and a way of life for so many trans women I met on het CD/TV mailing lists and websites.

I hated watching her in those moments because it reminded me of how much I hated myself for all the similar or resonant moments in my own life.

I was accused by my ex-wife of stealing years from her because I spent that time in denial, or at least denying to her, of my trans status. Even after I could admit to myself that I'm trans, I held onto the lie to try to preserve my marriage for as long as I could. So that accusation cut me to the bone, and as time has gone on, I have seen it over and over again with other trans women who married while in denial or pre-realization. Then there's the peculiar selfishness, spotlight-seeking, and ignorance of the feelings of those closest to us that seems to occur with frustrating regularity after initially transition or coming out. The support sites and mailing lists used to call it "Gender Euphoria" I think. Not every trans woman does it, certainly, but I have watched it (and to my embarrassment, perpetrated it myself) over and over.

So a lot of Maura's backstory hit home with a lot more reality than I've seen in other trans media ... and, if I'm honest, seeing cis men portray all of that felt like a betrayal. Like a portion of my life was laid bare for others to gawk at. I felt like I was behind glass for cis peoples' study.

Yes, it's a credit that this series, written by cis people, managed to strike such a raw nerve, but it was so very uncomfortable tp see my story and the story of people like me in the hands of people very much not like me and I was distrustful of their motives the whole time.

I just really felt like I was being pointed at, inspected, condescended to and excluded. Maybe I'm just a midwestern goober and I'm not cool enough to enjoy a show about terrible people being terrible people, but I really didn't want the biggest mainstream show with a trans main character to be that kind of show. 

Hell, Orange is the New Black is a show explicitly about incarcerated criminals and every one of them feels like a real human being, especially Sophia. Of course, that's in large part because Sophia's played by an actual trans woman. Maybe that's why Davina feels like an actual human being and not a caricature. 

I think what it all really came down to was that, despite my reservations and attempts not to, I must have gone into the series with the subconscious hope that it was at least partially FOR a transgender audience, but it was clearly written for, directed for and targeting a cis audience whose prurient curiosity about trans people needed satisfaction.

I guess it's kind of a relief that the characters that feel the most like people are the trans characters while the cis people are the monsters, but I'd have loved to have a show where I could care about the characters instead of watching through my fingers, fighting back fear of what they were going to do to the people most like me. 

I think what it all really came down to was that I must have gone into the series with the hope that it was at least partially FOR a transgender audience, but it was clearly written for, directed for and targeting a cis audience whose prurient curiosity about trans people needed satisfaction.

At the end of it, I don't feel like I watched "Transparent" so much as survived it.

[notafuckingwizard]

evolvingmatter replied to your post:Are you seriously using the death of a 17 year old...

this person can go fuck off. this is crazy triggering for so many trans women, of course it’s fucking personal

thank you, they were starting to get in my head a bit

[vladtheunfollower]

evolvingmatter replied to your post “I want to indy escort but I’m worried I’ll fuck up the client...”

are you US-based?

I live in a major Canadian city