I Love The Golden Girls.

Update: I watched it, and I stand by my assessment I am tol spooky metalhead fren who's name I now know is Glam

The perfect couple doesn't exi-

all queer history on here is just US-American or maybe sometimes some UK history as well and it makes me sad that there’s so little information about other countries’ queer history on here :(

Trans history: whatever happened to the other T?

I don’t know how universally relevant this is (I guess no part of queer history ever is) but I wonder how many trans people know the history of T&T groups.

Like, in the 90′s and 00′s in the Netherlands almost every trans related groups was a T&T ‘Transsexual and Transvestites’ group and that seemed to also be a quite common thing in other north-west European countries for as far as I can see. Maybe beyond Europe too? I’m not sure.

People who called themselves transsexual and transvestites at the time felt that they had many experiences in common that made organising together valuable and many agreed that there was a large grey area of overlapping identities. With very little information available, a lot of trans women identified as transvestites first, before identifying at trans women (in that period often using the term Male-to-Female transsexual and transwoman without the space between the words).

Then, in about 2007-2012, things changed. Transgender became more popular than transsexual and crossdresser largely replaced transvestite. In those early days, the term transgender was often understood to include crossdressers. The transgender umbrella is from that time:

Back then, the word transgender was seen by many as the umbrella term that would unite all the struggles against gender roles. But that grouping together was far from uncontroversial and a lot of heated debates took place over how broad or narrow the transgender umbrella term should be. Some feared too wide an umbrella would take attention away from transsexuals, others feared it would be confusing, some groups that had previously only had transwomen and transvestites did not appreciate the new presence of transmen and transmasculine people in their transgender community, some felt that it was very important to distinguish binary-identified transsexuals from all sorts of weird non-binary identities.

Those who took part in the debates probably remember the specific standpoints in more detail. For me, I just remember how in 2008-2012 all the T&T groups started changing their names to ‘transgender groups’ and then slowly but surely focussing more on only those transgender people that wanted some kind of transition, physical or social. Eventually, transvestites (or crossdressers, as the common term was by then) disappeared entirely from the transgender groups and a lot of transgender people forgot about the earlier wider meaning of transgender as an umbrella term.

Within that same period, there started to be a LOT of new and fairly positive media attention for transgender issues, specifically transition related atttention. The media was no participant at all in the ‘what does transgender mean’ question but the questions they did ask were ‘are you on hormones yet?’ and ‘did you have the surgery’? Since that was a lot better than ‘so are you mentally ill because you want to be a woman?’ a lot of people who fitted the hormones + surgery narrative eagerly accepted this ‘positive visibility’ and did not question the narrow focus. This further cemented the view that transgender meant transition.

And the transgender activists? Well, let’s just say many of them, knee deep in a struggle against terrible health care and cruel human rights violations, leaped at the opportunity to seize the momentum and finally make some changes and many didn’t really give much thought to the slow disappearance of transvestites from the newly named ‘transgender’ community.

So where are we now, in 2018?

The transgender community seems to have largely forgotten about their T&T history. The terms transvestite and crossdresser both seem to be in decline, as are the communities that meet around those identities. Younger people who don’t fit the gender binary but also do not desire social or physical transition, are now more likely to identify themselves as some kind of genderqueer and nonbinary or just ‘not into labels’ or just to wear whatever they want and rock it. Some of them find their way back under the transgender umbrella after all. Which I guess is some kind of a happy ending.

But then theres the question of recognizing our legacy. I don’t think a lot of these young people realise that, had they been born 20 years earlier, many of them would probably have found a home in the transvestite community. I don’t think a lot of young transgender people recognize older transvestites as their elders, who paved the way for them. I often get the impression that they view the dwindling groups of 50+, 60+, 70+ transvestites with an element of disdain, as people who held on to a regressive binary identity, instead of as like - their badass grandfather-mothers who build parts of trans history.

My gender today is THIS picture of my cat, Wednesday.

My gender today is maleficent's headpiece

My gender today is a young adult cowering from a sizzling bacon pan behind an open fridge door

My gender today is a cookie tin that actually holds cookies, not a sewing kit. Surprise.

My gender today is half man, half loaf of bread.

TIL that the English word “Lord” in the sense of the head of an estate comes from an Old English word of Germanic origins, hlāfweard, later hlāford, later lord. 

Normally I wouldn’t remark on my romps through etymology, but “hlafweard” is a compound of hlaf, or loaf, and weard, which means guardian (see also Ward or Warden, etc). Meaning that when you call someone a lord you are calling him an esteemed keeper of the bread. 

HEY THERE BREADBOX PETER WIMSEY. LOAF GUARD PALPATINE. BREAD CLIP VETINARI. 

Lady also derives from hlaf, but in this case hlafdige or bread kneader. She makes the bread, he monitors it. Women have to do all the work as usual. 

Now, the reason I was looking this up was that I wanted to develop a gender-neutral analogue to lord/lady; there are analogues already out there naturally, but the Shivadh must be different and anyway I didn’t like the ones I’d seen suggested online. 

Given that the origins of Lord and Lady aren’t all that strongly gendered anyway (they’re about what the person does, not what their gender is), I decided that if a woman is a bread-kneader and a man is a bread-guarder, a nonbinary person should be A BREAD EATER, which would be Hlafetan.  

Thus I present to you the gender-neutral analogue to Lord or Lady: Ledan.  

DOES THIS SAY MUTUALS I HAVE TO KNOW

???

...no? It just says Anon? I hope that helps?