Sneak peek and discord link

nonbinary trans person here. just showing up to say: thanks Beau for helping educate other cis folks. and to say, that it is really hard to be constantly hated by a large group of the population... targeted because of how i dress or what i look like or yeah... yesterday was international nonbinary peoples day. and i didn't really post much because i was sad or mad or done or i don't know... i've had 2 nonbinary friends in the last 2.5wks kill themselves. i've known so many trans, especially non-binary trans friends who have been murdered or who have killed themselves... or who have been attacked... i think about killing myself all the time. i've been assaulting multiple times. i barely leave home anymore and when i do i am packing (double meaning) because i don't want to deal with all the bs. and when i do go out, it is almost always exclusively with other trans and/or queer folks. i really wish more cis folks would just read a book and/or get over it. i don't need to see someone's genitals before i treat them respectfully... i don't get it. i ask everyone what their pronouns are, because even people who might look like what you think gender x is supposed to look like can be non-binary. we aren't all super androgynous. i know we as humans are always trying to categorize things and put things into boxes, but reality is messy and beautiful and doesn't fit neatly into boxes... i don't need to know the sex and breed of a friend's dog to get down on the floor and be absolutely delighted playing with it. i don't even need to know it's name most of the time because it's just a baybeee with the cutest bark ever. but seriously, why does it matter? just let people be. especially people you aren't close with... like why does it matter? anyway, i am rambling. point is... maybe examine why it bothers you and just let people be... we've always been here and we will always be here.

AL Genaro @ The OCD Maker

Rule 303. If you have the means to help, you have the responsibility to act.

InfamousK

may I ask? I bought your tshirt evolve. spelled 3v0lv3. What is the 303?

Teresa Davis

I have many friends in the LGBTQ+ community and hang out with them all quite often. They have inquired about why I don't participate in Pride events, and I tell them that most, not all, events tend to have the extremes of the community present and do not represent the actual community. Though the main reason why I do not participate is that I think it should be unnecessary. Humans are humans, or they should be.

It should be noted that the approach to digital-logic chip design still used today was pioneered and made the norm almost single-handedly by Lynn Conway (with some publicity help from Carver Mead). Her earlier career at IBM, where she invented the method still used to enable sane out-of-order execution, was blighted by bigotry. Sophie Wilson created the ARM CPU architecture in your and everybody else's phone. The world would have been substantially poorer without them.

Nathan Myers

🤔passing privilege is a thing in every marginalized community.

To my knowledge, the issue of trangender was first publicly discussed on TV many decades ago in a factual presentation (as opposed to Klinger on MASH) when Christine Jorgenson, a trans woman who'd had (perhaps the first) gender reassignment surgery, appeared on one of the late night talk shows. It was a serious discussion where she explained her experience of gender dysphoria and why she'd undergone the surgery. The issue was framed in the context of "the miracles of modern medicine." Ironically, it was not presented as as a challenge to traditional gender roles, but rather an affirmation - Ms. Jorgensen desired to live the life of a conventional heterosexual woman and this was made possible by modern medical science. In other words, a person who was not "normal" was able to become "normal" through medical treatment. It was barely possible to discuss any sexual topic on TV at the time, but the interview managed to get across the idea that because Christine felt the desire to marry a man, she was therefore a woman in a man's body. It was not a challenge to conventional gender norms or laws (being gay was still a crime) - it rather reaffirmed heterosexuality as the only option. My reaction at the time was not discomfort, it was bafflement - I could not understand why a man would willing desire to assume the oppressive social status of female, to spend your life in stupid uncomfortable clothes vacuuming the floor while pondering which fucking Betty Crocker cake mix to prepare to please your lord and master when he arrived home from the wide world from which you were excluded because you had a vagina.

Clinger was a character who was a walking plot device. In the long line of 60’s and 70’s plot devices. Consider Jethrine (Jethro’s sister on Beverly Hillbillys) or other doppelgänger characters, Samantha’s dark cousin Sabrina, or Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot, or Divine, or Tom Hanks in Bosom Buddies…as long as there was a wink at the audience for (mostly) comedic effect, those currently clutching their pearls were only wearing them. But the minute a person declared that they were in the wrong body and tried to act upon that knowledge to their benefit, many in this country turned away and refused to look at people who very badly needed to be seen. It may be that Jethrine and Clinger accidentally set up some of the populace to become blind if comedy was no longer the point.

John Caywood

I think there may be confusion about the Klinger character on MASH. He only dressed in women's clothes in the hopes of securing a Section 8 discharge from the army. An underlying theme from this aspect of Klinger's character, in the context of the 70s and 80s when the show was written, was not that a man wearing women's clothes was normal, but that Klinger was faking an "abnormality" to get discharged. Klinger was always trying to get someone in authority to declared that he actually was a transvestite and should therefore be discharged as unfit for service under the rules at the time. That's different, I think, than the meaning implied starting at 3:08 in the video. Anyway, very much agree with the points in the video, but just pointing out a possible misinterpretation of Klinger's character.

John Saalwaechter

Please use the term "Lesbian" in place of "dyke". The latter is still considered rude when used by cisgender heterosexual people at the very least.

Bryan Schmidt

Just a lil addendum about what you said about passing privilege. It was great, also if you ever bring it back up it might be nice to mention a lot of people that wish they had it don’t pass and may never pass. When people tell those folks to go back in the closet, it sounds an awful lot like when I was a child in Sunday school the type of stuff that they’d tell us the atheists wanted us to do. “They’ll make it so we have to live in secret, where we can’t pray in public, where we’ll be persecuted for our faith, where in schools they’ll indoctrinate you into atheism” Lol, I was taught grisly details about people being martyred for Christianity before 2nd grade but in the same church school I was taught that homosexuality was evil, of the devil, and that they *had a demon* The same people that told me that as a child rant about how the lgbt is “too public, is putting it in our faces, they want to indoctrinate our children!”

Heather

Thank you, Beau, for such clarity. Two historical factoids to support everything you say: 1. re: "passing" (as "acceptable"): In the 1960s (and before), a pretty routine comment about "acceptable" Black people: "s/he almost passes for white". That meant: lightened skin, straightened hair, no slang in their speech. Easier, comfortable, almost acceptable. 2. Martin Scorcese's film "Gangs of New York" (historically accurate): see the scenes in the Five Points neighborhood with men in dresses and makeup seeking male dates at the local dances. Known as: the "she-he's". As you say: evident (but ignored) since at least the 1860s.

I want to share an experience that I had about 30 years ago about gender identity and discomfort. At the time, I was working as a private investigator and would go interview witnesses regarding some legal proceeding. I arrived at this house to encounter 2 people that clearly seemed to be a couple. One of them was a woman, the other was a person who, for the first time in my life, I was unable to determine whether that person was a man or a woman. The name was ambiguous. I was too embarrassed to ask the person, especially because their gender was not relevant to the issue I was there to investigate. The discomfort was not that they might have been a lesbian couple - I had many queer friends (none of whom had ever been ambiguous - they were obviously gay men or dykes)- the problem was this person was not obviously one thing or another. In my life up to that point, it seemed a guaranteed social offense to mistake a person for the wrong gender, and not wishing to cause offense, I did my best as to act as if I had noticed nothing unusual. In those days queer couples were struggling to even be out, and so many people would have been mortally offended to be thought they were a lesbian couple when they were a heterosexual couple with a man who had an unusual appearance, The person was doing a job that was commonly associated with men at the time, also. The woman was sitting there the whole time and I kept hoping she'd say something, use a pronoun (LOL) that would give me a clue. That didn't happen. The person was wearing "work clothes" that were the kind of thing either a man or woman would wear. The clothes were too loose for me to get any clues from the chest area. You see, I had once before encountered a man with an unusual appearance - he was one of my profs in college. He was introduced as a man, had a typical male name, so we thought of him as a "weird looking little guy" but the gender was never in doubt and caused no confusion. Mostly, what grabbed my attention was how cool and interesting a person he was. But because I'd had a prior experience with a man that looked more like a middle aged elf than a human, I was aware that there might be another such man who would be offended if I thought he was dyke. There is no resolution to this story. I never found out. Remembering this because of your video here made me realize that the way we talk about the spectrum of people relative to sexuality adds to the confusion. It's the same as what we do with race. Any person who is not cis in some way is lumped into this category LGBTQ+ just as anyone who is not caucasian is called "a person of color." But a person of Nigerian descent is no more similar to a person of Korean descent than they are like a person of Irish descent. The only thing a gay man and a trans woman have in common is that they are persecuted by intolerant cis people.

Beautiful. Thanks Beau 💙🐪

alumpyhorse

Beau, when is the gardening video coming out?

Jake Slater

I think it is wonderful that people feel comfortable asking you questions. You do a great job answering.

Jennifer Parker