Tarpé Mills (1918-1988) was one of the first major US female comics artists. She is best known for her action comic strip, ‘Miss Fury’, the first
female comic hero (image above).
Her full name was June Tarpé Mills, but she published her art without her first name in order to hide her gender, as female cmic artist were unheard of. She had tremendous talent and s known for a style of action,
glamour and fashion, and sexiness that was unheard of until Miss Fury.
In 1904 Gerda Gottlieb met fellow artist Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener at the Royal
Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. They married at the ages of 19 and 22 years old. Einar would later become globally known
as Lili Elbe.
Artists in Paris
Gerda graduated in 1907, and the couple set out to travel Europe,
eventually settling in Paris. She hoped that there
would be artistic opportunities for her in the world of fashion. Gerda’s
work was shown at several exhibitions and she made a
living creating posters.
Along with her partner Gerda soon became well acquainted with the dancers,
intellectuals, fellow artists and bohemians in Paris.
It was at this time that Einar began to present as Lili. Like
Gerda, she had also worked as an illustrator and had been a
successful landscape painter.
A secret relationship
Gerda often used Lili as model. Her viewers admired the colorful paintings without knowing the story behind her most favoured new muse.
They had a strong bond both on a personal and artistic
level. The couple continued their close relationship for many years, often explaining Lily as a cousin of Gerda’s.
Gender reassingment
In 1930 Lili became one of
the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery. She was celebrated as a pioneering transexual.Sadly, due to complications from experimental surgery,
Lili died.
Lily Elbe’s autobiography was published posthumously in 1933. The story of Gerda and Lili recenty inspired the film ‘The Danish Girl’. Gerda’s work has also been praised
for her bold depictions of independent women, including lesbian erotica,
created from the female rather than typically male gaze.
Bit is a new vampire movie about an all-female nest of undead who will bleed out boys and never resurrect them. The movie has a transgender female lead, Nicole Maines (known from Supergirl).
The man who has made the movie, Brad Michael Elmore, is cisgender and straight, but he has clearly done his outmost to present the trans and queer characters in a realistic light (if the word “realistic” can be used to describe a transgender vampire).
“Laurel is trying to decide whether or not she wants to join this nest of vampires, but she knows the hard rule against boys and is suddenly unsure if she’ll be welcome as a trans girl. But Duke very dryly welcomes her without condition.”
So now you know that TERFs are worse than vampires!
Nicole Maines is the one in the middle in the sofa below.
Masculinity does not belong to men. A behaviour, a look, an attitude, women and non-binary people have as much right to masculinity as men do. In my own life, particularly as a queer person (and as a soft butch, apparently), I am surrounded by butches, daddys, zaddys, studs, stems and masc femmes. These women embrace their masculinity and wear it with pride, but face misgendering, abuse on the street and endless presumptions from strangers.
In a world that still, for the most part, expects women to dress like that that little triangle-skirted logo on toilet doors (as a butch I know once said, “what’s that triangle, my c*nt?”) it takes bravery to present yourself like a man. And you’re likely to get chucked out of said women’s toilet if you do.
For these reasons, it can take a while to feel comfortable expressing your masc side as a woman. It can be a journey. We often think of the feeling of dislocation between inner self and outer self as particular to trans people, but you don’t have to be transgender to experience this.
A woman does not have to be trans to express masculinity. Nor does she have to be a lesbian.
Just to make this absolutely clear: The use of the color pink to represent girls and blue to signify boys is a 20th century invention. In the early 20th century European and North American parents often used white dresses for both girls and boys. Indeed, earlier pink was often associated with boys (red fire and aggressiveness) and blue with girls (as in the calm blue sky and the Virgin Mary).
Perhaps we should ask whether the power of the pink tide has a biological basis. In 2007, a team of vision scientists suggested that this preference was linked to an ancient need for the female of the species to be an effective ‘berry gatherer’. Responsiveness to pink would ‘facilitate the identification of ripe, yellow fruit or edible red leaves embedded in green foliage’. An extension of this was the suggestion that pinkification is also the basis of empathy – aiding our female caregivers to pick up those subtle changes in skin tone that match emotional states. Bearing in mind that the study, carried out on adults, used a simple forced-choice task involving coloured rectangles, this is quite a stretch, but it clearly struck a chord with the media, who hailed the finding as proof that women were ‘hardwired to prefer pink’.
However, three years later the same team carried out a similar study in four- to five-month-old infants, using eye movements as a measure of their preference for the same coloured rectangles. They found no evidence of sex differences, with all babies preferring the reddish end of the spectrum. This finding was not accompanied by the media flurry that greeted the first one. The study with adults has been cited more than 300 times as support for the notion of ‘biological predispositions’. The study with infants, where no sex differences were found, has been cited 61 times.
Up to the age of about two, neither boys nor girls shows any kind of pink preference. They do not care. The pink princess craze starts when some cis girls and some male to female transgender kids seek ways of expressing their gender identity. They want to have their gender affirmed, and for them it makes perfect sense to make use of the stereotypes provided by society.
In other words: Culture uses the pink and blue color coding to discipline kids and encourage them to live up to the gender stereotypes.
When the Bømlo municipality in Norway decided to raise the rainbow LGBTQA flag in support of the Pride parade in the municipality next door, Stord, the right wing Christian Party (Partiet De Kristne) reported the incident to the Police.
The police argued that the municipality could not raise the rainbow flag, as the Pride event was taking place outside the district.
The leader of Storapride, Anna Sofie Ekeland Valvatne, disagreed, arguing that the major of Bømlo would take part in the parade, as would many others from that district.
The local population of Bømlo, didn’t care much about the legal technicalities. On Monday the whole municipality was decorated with rainbow flags.
Carine Sønstabø Halleraker and her mother Marthe Karine Sønstabø Halleraker told the Norwegian Newspaper Bergens Tidende that they were convinced the majority of the citizens of Bømlo support the use of the flag:
“As far as I am concerned, this is not a matter for debate,” Marthe said. “You either accept people, or you don’t.”
The “Christian Party” is a small party of the kind of destructive, dark, “evalgelicalism” you find in the US. The much larger Norwegian Christian People’s Party supported the decision to raise the rainbow flag. All the major parties of Norway, right wing or left wing, support LGBTQA rights.
Ironically the slogan for the Christian Party is “Freedom and safety for all”. Queer and trans people are clearly not included in their “all”.
She has been on hormones for four years. Her presentation is femme. She uses she/her pronouns. But she considers herself nonbinary, neither male nor female.
In other words: A feminine gender expression does not necessarily mean that someone is a woman. Nor do nonbinary people have to appear androgynous.
She writes:
When we create and enforce these stereotypes in the trans community, we risk playing gatekeeper on who is trans or not. But just like there is no “right” way for men or women to present themselves, there is not a “right” way for nonbinary people to present themselves.
There is a similar stereotype that all nonbinary people prefer “they” pronouns. But pronoun usage does not define whether someone is “really” nonbinary. There is no logical entailment between what pronouns you prefer and whether you’re nonbinary.
Furthermore, not all nonbinary people even identify as trans. Some do. Some don’t.
Nor is there a direct link between gender dysphoria and the need for hormones and surgery, Rachel Anne argues.
She refers to the story about Maurice, and American man who killed himself after a video of him being abused for loving a trans woman went viral.
It is a toxic combination of transphobia and homophobia that causes men to fear coming out as someone who is dating a transgender woman.
There is some kind of evil feedback loop between the shaming of trans women and the shaming of men who fail to live up to the bigoted standards of hypermasculine “real men”.
Owl puts it this way:
Men like Maurice are constantly punished for passionately loving trans women in a world that largely thinks trans women are not worthy of love. But they shouldn’t be seen any differently than any other man who loves a woman. Because trans women are women. They shouldn’t be punished, nor should they be automatically celebrated. They should be respected all the same, as well as their desires and sexual orientation.
The leading cause of death for young men across the world is suicide. I’m not surprised. Men are mocked for openly displaying emotion and belittled and abused if their sexual desire isn’t according to some glorified sexual fantasy they saw in straight mainstream porn.
Maurice may have died by suicide, but what really killed him was one of the worst forms of toxic masculinity. And if we don’t eradicate it, everyone will continue to suffer the consequences, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
The New York Times report on a new large scale study on how genetics may affect same-sex behavior. The study confirms what many of us have argued for some time now, that sexual orientation and behavior are most likely caused by an interaction between genetic, hormonal, environmental, social and psychological factors. I suspect the same is true for transgender and nonbinary identities.
Pam Bullock writes:
An ambitious new study — the largest ever to analyze the genetics of same-sex sexual behavior — found that genetics does play a role, responsible for perhaps a third of the influence on whethersomeone has same-sex sex. The influence comes not from one gene but many, each with a tiny effect — and the rest of the explanation includes social or environmental factors — making it impossible to use genes to predict someone’s sexuality.
The study analyzed the genetic data of 408,000 men and women from a large British database, the U.K. Biobank, who answered extensive health and behavior questions between 2006 and 2010, when they were between the ages of 40 and 69. The researchers also used data from nearly 70,000 customers of the genetic testing service 23andMe, who were 51 years old on average, mostly American, and had answered survey questions about sexual orientation. All were of white European descent, one of several factors that the authors note limit their study’s generalizability. Trans people were not included…
There might be thousands of genes influencing same-sex sexual behavior, each playing a small role, scientists believe. The new study found that all genetic effects likely account for about 32 percent of whether someone will have same-sex sex.
In an op-ed Steven M. Phelps and Robbee Wedow (gay men and researchers in biology and sociology) argue that it is important not to overstate the role of genes:
The study found that genetically related people tend to be similar in their behavior, which tells us that sexuality has influences buried somewhere in the DNA. But when the researchers tried to add up the contributions of each DNA variant they examined, they could predict less than 1 percent of the variation among study participants.
Many LGBTQA activists have argued against this kind of research as it may be used by transphobes and homophobes in their attacks against rainbow people. Phelps and Wedow discusses this problem, but concludes that “bigotry needs no data”:
No facts will sway those who want to police the intimacies of consenting adults. Rather than consign ourselves to ignorance out of fear, we should use these powerful new data ethically and thoughtfully to arrive at a fuller understanding of who we are.
I collect and reblog news and stories about LGBTQA, particularly trans, genderqueer and non-binary. A little feminism thrown in.
I am: Vampire Slayer, Jedi Knight, Gryffindor, INFJ and SO to a transgender spouse.
