"we are young / heartache to heartache we stand / no promises no demands"

[larryhammer]

An interesting analysis of the visual rhetoric of the opening of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Good discussion in comments, too. (via)

A useful comic explaining the transgender experience with a simple analogy. (via)

An awesomesauce alt.country cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice." (via)

---L.

Comments

[galeni.livejournal.com]

I read the middle link and confess I remain confused. The genders are not as far apart as dogs and people, and maleness and femaleness are broad spectrums with androgyne in the middle. I must be missing something. People are risking death in order to look more like the person they feel they really are? Can't they just be the person they are regardless of plumbing?

Or is it so society sees an outside that matches their inside and so gives them less hassle?

[larryhammer]

That is part of it. But also, the disconnect of feeling that strongly different from one's physical appearance is itself a source of pain. It feels wrong.

---L.

[galeni.livejournal.com]

I can relate possibly to the disconnect of being dismissed as stupid female when I was a physics major, so thank you. It's making more sense.

[janni.livejournal.com]

(lj ate my first response, so apologies if this one is more rushed)

It took me some time to understand this as well, because I'm someone who doesn't fit into traditional gender roles myself, but what it comes down to is, there's a difference between how one feels about the roles one plays and how one feels about one's physical body.

I personally often don't fit into traditional female roles, but I am comfortable with my physical body. Being physically female feels comfortable and right for me, for all that while I'm comfortably living in a female body I don't always act in what are considered female ways, nor feel a strong desire to. So for ages I thought, well, we can be whoever we want. Why does the body we do it in even matter?

Except I was saying that as someone who had the luxury of being born in the right skin. It wasn't intuitive for me to think beyond that; I had to work out what thinking beyond that even meant. But what I eventually realized was that for other people it's different: whether someone is comfortable with the gendered behavior they were born to is different from whether their comfortable with the body they were born too. Someone who acts traditionally female can be comfortable or uncomfortable in a female body; someone who acts traditionally male can be comfortable or uncomfortable in a male body. (And there are also those who could be comfortable in either body, or wish they weren't limited to one or the other, because body-rightness can be as fluid as behavior-rightness.)

The distinction I sometimes see made is that a transsexual person is someone who's been born into the wrong body, while a transgender person is someone who's been born into the wrong roles, though the terms also other times get used interchangeable and so the distinctions get muddled.

[galeni.livejournal.com]

Okay....it's starting to make more sense. I'm more mid-range than any end of that bell curve, so it's the folks on either end that have more disconnect.

Thank you.