Grey – The Definition of Scam (and how the levamentum project scammed me)

Continuing on after my definition of slander post I thought I would talk about the definition of scam, the inspiration for this came not from the queer community but from this video from the minecraft community. To summarize it’s about a minecraft convention where the organisers were accused of scamming people, akin to many stories about fandom/communities being taken advantage of through the organisation of conventions that are not worth the paper the tickets are printed on. The one I linked to earlier in the paragraph promised giveaways of minecraft lego and PS4s and instead they gave away pens and the convention was ended after 2 hours. The definition of scam is something that comes up in many of these conversations as people debate if a failed event is a scam or if there has to be some sort of malicious intent that is clear from the start. It has personally affected me when I tried to purchase packers and a STP from levamentum and they… lets start with “failed to deliver”

Grey – A Toast

Here is to all the people who are slyly trying to call out their facebook friends on using the word tr*nny in their latest facebook post.

Who then doesn’t do that great.

And the comment thread diverges from holiday plans to why people are not allowed to use tr*nny to describe anyone, let alone a thai woman on the cover of a travel brochure.

And another drink to the lone defender who doesn’t use the word privilege once, when trying to explain that tr*nny is not their word to use.

Who continues to explain that just because there are lots of ladyboys in thailand doesn’t mean that everyone in thailand is one.

Who resists the urge to then say, maybe if you have these attitudes, thailand might not be the best place for you to holiday, how about bali?

Who keeps their calm when they start confusing bisexual people with trans* people. (I’m not sure how either)

And who then tries to quietly point out that just because angelina and brad are together that doesn’t mean angelina is not bi.

And this time avoids using the term “bierasure” because they know that this person’s cousin will get them confused with the synthpop duo erasure.

And they know that if that cousin mentions erasure again, they will have to tell them that Andy Bell is gay.

But even the next time that cousin brings up Erasure they don’t, because that is a weak, weak move.

Oh but they totally do the time after, cause really, who is a homophobic erasure fan who doesn’t know that Andy Bell is gay.

He even has HIV, it’s like being a Queen fan and not knowing anything about Freddie Mercury.

Urg, and here’s to that person, ’cause that was just last week.

Grey – Do you have to want medical transition to be Trans*?

As I have touched on before many of my inspirations for informative posts come from the communities I am involved with on facebook, I often save comments and replies I make to then form them into posts for here, at the moment I have quite a backlog of them.

This issue was originally raised by a TERF who was putting down a trans* person who did not plan to medically transition, they also likened it to mental illness and compared it to their own battles with anorexia. To me this discussion raised many important points on what others think of trans* people who do not feel a need too or do not want to medically transition, in short take hormones and get gender reassignment surgery. And some of the mental illness stigma about trans* people.

Grey – Ghosts

WordPress has a feature called “inspire me” this feature makes a prompt for a post, So Jay thought that this week we could use that prompt and see if we could make it fit around a trans* issue, I got:

Italo Calvino said: The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts. Describe the ghosts that live in this house:

Image credit: “love Don’t live here anymore…” – © 2009 Robb North – made available under Attribution 2.0 Generic

Grey – Trans vs Trans*

I am involved in a queer group (it’s where jay and I met) and this debate keeps coming up. It mostly revolves around tumber posts like these I love the asterisk and today I’m gonna talk about why.

Jay – Die Cis Scum?

Please note that my university focused mind wanted to use credible sources for this post but as not a lot has been written on the topic this is simply just my opinions

 

Flick – Porn has not TRANSitioned

Ed: This week our guest writer is Flick, They are an arts and politics student with a strong grounding in feminism, socialism and Judeo-Christian faiths. This week we invited Flick to talk about an issue within the spheres of feminism and trans* issues, they chose the topic of transgender pornography, in particular “shemale porn”.

Grey – Why do rad-fems hate trans* people?

This post will talk about trans* exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). Many radical feminists support LGBT rights, but trans* issues often run against some strong rad-fem ideologies. This post is not claiming that every rad-rem hates trans*people or to be a rad-fem you need to hate trans*people.