what makes this add so precious to me is it actually stars a transwoman (activitist) Meera Singhania Rehani
[Image ID:
Advertising in India has, at snail’s pace, been inching towards inclusivity. We are still eons away from seeing strong representation from the LGBTQ community in our communications. Therefore what makes Bhima’s ad special is the fact that it features a trans-woman and activist, Meera Singhania. It gets it narrative right, its casting is brilliant and the product fit is great.
Let’s take this day to celebrate all the transgender community and the people you might know who are trans. Take this day to inform ourself a little more the issues that still exist in our society that we need to adress in order to make this world a better and safer place to all transgender folks out there. They absolutely deserve it Today is a day to celebrate who you are, whether you are out or not, whether you haven’t started your transition or are already fully transitioned, whether what you like or wear isn’t socially or culturally related to your gender, you are extremely valid and should only feel proud of the journey you took so far to become who you truly are.
Our Star Trek podcast has arrived! We’re joined by special guests Laura Hudson and Steve Shives to recap what has happened so far, including the introduction of Star Trek’s first trans character and what looks to be a promising season. Listen now!
Quick reminder! Both the First and the Dark Edition of the Pride Deck have been now reprinted with USPPC with higher paper quality!
Now they’re suitable for both magic tricks and cardistry! This is to all my new followers and the older ones from my 2020 Kickstarter who might have not seen the update on the new product description ;)
Let’s take this day to celebrate all the transgender community and the people you might know who are trans. Take this day to inform ourself a little more the issues that still exist in our society that we need to adress in order to make this world a better and safer place to all transgender folks out there. They absolutely deserve it Today is a day to celebrate who you are, whether you are out or not, whether you haven’t started your transition or are already fully transitioned, whether what you like or wear isn’t socially or culturally related to your gender, you are extremely valid and should only feel proud of the journey you took so far to become who you truly are.
Posting will start today and go on for the next few weeks. We’ll be posting two or three works a day, according to schedule.
We’re looking at all sorts of pairings & triads, as well as gen fic, podfic, and art, from G to E rating! It’s going to be a fun and diverse fest, with works for all tastes.
In the middle of the school day yesterday I received a text from a friend that I rarely talk to. She works at a high school in a very conservative state and she has recently discovered that a few of her students identify as trans. She was asking for recommendations for books she should buy for her classroom library to help her students feel represented. I quickly ran over to my LGBT Lending Library and grabbed a few titles.
This is no way represents all of the trans-centric stories on my shelf, but I thought it was be a good start.
While taking the picture I remembered that I had an extra copy of When the Moon Was Ours at my house…I also had a pile of books that I had reserved for filling free little libraries around my town. Sooooo! I made her a teacher care package! With a book for her trans students, five other books that will help all students feel represented, rainbow swag, and some teaching tolerance materials.
I wish there was a way all teachers could receive FREE books and resources for students who feel underrepresented. I am just happy I could help one.
“Greet death with sword in hand.” That’s the flavor text on the card Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, a legendary creature from the card game Magic: The Gathering — and if this sentence is already too nerdy for you to handle, buckle up.
Alesha was printed more than three years ago as part of the game’s Fate Reforged expansion, and she’s maintained her fan popularity over time thanks largely to one major distinction: She’s the first canonically transgender character in the game’s 25-year history. Though many trans players have flocked to Alesha’s macabrely beautiful representation, Gamergate holdouts and other reactionaries still regard her and real-life trans people with hostility. And as Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC) moves to dominate online card games with their newly-launched Arena platform, it’s still unclear how welcome — or safe — trans players are in one of gaming’s oldest fandoms.
In all honesty, I stumbled onto this myself by sheer coincidence. I began playing Magic back in 1997, when the expansion Tempest had just been released, and instantly became hooked. Everything about it appealed to me: the competitive, ever-shifting gameplay; the social aspects of trading and bartering; and particularly the lore, packed full of complicated characters that grew with every set. But while I had plenty of opportunities to play with my friends in high school, college proved to be less receptive, and I drifted away from the game for a number of years as I graduated, figured out I was a girl, and tried to get my life together. Sure, I played a few games here and there, but I stopped considering myself a “Magic player” until recently.
A few months ago, I traveled back to my hometown for my high school reunion. (My trans friends sometimes express surprise that I wanted to attend; to be frank, you couldn’t have paid me not to go and flaunt how cute I am now.) Late in the evening, I mentioned to one of my oldest friends that I’d been thinking about getting back into Magic. Her eyes brightened: “Oh, I’ve got a bunch of those lying around,” she told me. “Do you want them?”
Flabbergasted, I accepted. I had no idea my friend had ever even touched a Magic card, and I’d known her since the fourth grade. But this wasn’t the only surprise awaiting me. Rifling through the cards on my long bus ride home, I gasped inwardly as I stumbled across her: Alesha, Who Smiles at Death. Even after being out of the game for nearly a decade, I had heard of her and who she was. Clearly, this was a sign that my old beloved hobby was calling for my return, and I was only too happy to oblige.
At the time of this writing, I’ve just re-started hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
I’m nonbinary, but not everyone knows what that means — especially not in the context of medical transition. If you’re assigned male at birth, people assume that the “point” of transitioning is to get to female; to move from box “M” into box “F.” But the more I compared myself to a hypothetical woman, the more I felt stuck.
From the waitlist to the waiting room, I told people I wanted to be a woman. I thought that if I adhered to that script, it would keep doors open for me in terms of receiving medical care. But the truth is, I didn’t know what I wanted — I wasn’t trying to become a woman, but I didn’t know what I was trying to be. I wanted to transition, but I didn’t know how. I quit taking my hormones in January after starting only a couple of months prior. The physical changes began happening too quickly, and it left me feeling like I was losing my sense of control. Still, I knew that permanently stopping HRT wasn’t the right choice; it felt like failing.
Trans people are often mocked for being confused and emotional in regards to the choices we make with our bodies. For the sake of the trans community, I feel like I’m supposed to know what I want and who I am. But there are no roadmaps for me to follow. After all, how do you embody a category of experience that many people don’t even believe exists? How do you make sense of your body and how it’s changing when all available narratives feel too gendered to apply?
I talked about this over the phone with my friend JP, a 26-year-old self-identified dyke living in New York. JP has been on varying dosages of HRT for years. Their initial plan was to try hormones out by going on them long enough to see physical changes, and then stop taking them in order to assess how they felt. They weren’t sure how long they’d take them, but felt they needed to do something. I can relate. But JP’s doctor at the time (who no longer works at the same clinic) had a different idea.
“My doctor took it as some sort of failed experiment, rather than a person making choices,” JP says. “They didn’t understand what I actually wanted from HRT. She put me on hella spiro [spironolactone] and estradiol, and when I didn’t take as much as I was prescribed and my lab results reflected this, she prescribed me more.” JP began to hoard their hormones, taking their estradiol as close to appointment dates as possible in hopes of throwing off their blood test results.
The idea that every trans person has a unique relationship to their body seems intuitive, but can be an oddly foreign one to healthcare providers. The drug regimen JP was prescribed is by no means unusual, but it completely misaligned with what they actually wanted in terms of transitioning. JP does a lot of physical work, and in some cases, high doses of spironolactone can cause side effects like mood swings, fatigue, and muscular atrophy. They don’t see any merit to shrinking their muscles to fit what they consider a Eurocentric beauty ideal they don’t adhere to as a Black butch person. Over and over, JP would tell their endocrinologist that the spironolactone was affecting them negatively, but felt the doctor was dismissing it as unfounded or irrelevant to the goal of “feminization.”
As American cultural consumers of film and TV, many of us are all too familiar with the heralding of white men as knights in shining armor while people of color and LGBTQ+ people are portrayed as manipulative, homicidal, or just plain cruel. From Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs to Melissa Robinson from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; White Rose on Mr. Robot to CeCe from Pretty Little Liars,media has too often reduced trans women and transfeminine people to nefarious antagonists who are one-dimensionally over-invested in threatening cisgender men’s lives and heterosexuality. The imperative for nuanced queer and trans characters in film and television needs no new argumentation — we deserve to be seen as multifaceted and complex human beings.
However, the hyperbolic trans villainess is needed now more than ever. She challenges the accepted norms often set by glorified heroes. And as queer social movements receive increasing attention from mainstream media, the imaginary of what queer life and community can and should be becomes pacified. What a thought, that cinematic representation does not have to be realistic or naturalistic, gesturing to lives already lived in the world! What if trans women were afforded the cultural space to be unbelievable? And how can that trans fever dream speculate emergent tactics for reshaping our present despotic reality of police violence and U.S. empire expansion?
With mainstream turns to “multifaceted” female characters in film and television, the value of an overstated character has been collapsed to its consideration as a shallow pleasure pump. To be fair, such exaggerated representations often reduce trans women to props that only exist to drive the narrative development of other characters. And while hyperbolic characters can be read as unidimensional and reductive of the complexity of lived experience, the characters I am interested in are the ones whose lives, desires, and flaws are inflated beyond the stratosphere — to the point that they are alien to the social order audiences expect to see.
In a particularly queer fashion, camp is one such style that intentionally explodes reality in its oversignification of behaviors, situations, desires, and loves. Campy villains can resist assimilation by virtue that they are necessarily strangers to friendly neighborhood dinner parties, subjects that glitch any attempted uploading to a LinkedIn profile. And assimilation is worth challenging not necessarily because dinner parties and LinkedIn are the worst things in the world, but because it homogenizes difference. Beyond the party being a total snooze, the campy, disruptive guest is needed to stoke the mutant energy that corrupts a vanilla get-together into a rager to remember.
Some of the most campy, obscene, repulsive, and aggressively subversive trans villainesses, from Babs Johnson in Pink Flamingos to Myra Breckinridge in the self-titled Myra Breckinridge to Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, stunk up the silver screen in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall riots — before Smirnoff apocalyptically sponsored Pride Parades. The characters of Myra, Babs, and Frank-N-Furter are crafted with a purpose that is scarcely seen today: an unapologetic commitment to enfleshing transsexuals, drag queens, and transvestites that do not and cannot exist off-screen due to their simple refusal to adhere to the laws of physics and/or the state. Myra pursues the destruction of manhood itself in a Hollywood stuck in the Golden Age of film. Babs terrorizes Baltimore with her sadistic desire to assume the throne of filthiest person alive. Frank-N-Furter, hailing from Transsexual Transylvania, captures the secret to life itself, engineers a golden-haired hunk, and comes out as an alien.
Just as actual trans women are too good to be stuck portraying the same, dull representations of the gruel of everyday life, these villainesses are too bad to be true: They bust open the wardrobe to a Narnia of worlds that The Cisgenders have monopolized for far too long.
what makes this add so precious to me is it actually stars a transwoman (activitist) Meera Singhania Rehani
[Image ID:
Advertising in India has, at snail’s pace, been inching towards inclusivity. We are still eons away from seeing strong representation from the LGBTQ community in our communications. Therefore what makes Bhima’s ad special is the fact that it features a trans-woman and activist, Meera Singhania. It gets it narrative right, its casting is brilliant and the product fit is great.
