Genderful

Apr. 17th, 2025 03:21 pm
lb_lee: a kludge of the wheelchair disability sign and the transgender symbol, adorned with the words Trans Gender Cyborg (cyborg)
This was the comics winner for this month's poll! Before I share it, let me tell you how it got made.

Recently, my local senator had a Town Hall meeting, and I was determined to go. I ran the gauntlet of Trumper protesters ranting about trans athletes (I recognized them from the library bomb threat back in October and waved to them), suffered through two plus hours of technological difficulties and clustering around smartphones in an overflow room, and then had to deal with one of my fellow citizens ranting about how she didn't want trans people around her children, we were just going to kill ourselves anyway.

The feelings that meeting gave me, I could not express. So I went home and drew all the genderful people who came before and alongside me, and I wrote their words instead--their joy, their survival, their power. And I converted that rage into fierce joy and shoved the local free libraries with them, and sent them to Florida, and disappeared into the night.

Mani Bruce Mitchel, an intersex person with breasts and beard, stands topless with the words I AM NOT A MONSTER written across the chest. A halo radiates.
'This is the issue that we need to deal with in this century: what are we going to do with difference on this planet?' )
lb_lee: a kludge of the wheelchair disability sign and the transgender symbol, adorned with the words Trans Gender Cyborg (cyborg)
We're a Cyborg, and So am I
Series: Essay
Summary: "When I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto.' Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. [...] The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors." --the Cyborg Jillian Weise, "Common Cyborg"
Word Count: 3100
Notes: Winner of the December 2024 fan poll by a landslide! If you want to support my work and help me keep uploading stuff, hit me up on LiberaPay or Patreon. Mentions of violence, ableism, and racism, but this isn't an intense essay.

Rogan: Our vessel became a cyborg when we were seventeen, more than half its lifetime ago. That was less than a year after my individual creation, so I have been a cyborg for basically all my life. My cyborginess is important to me, more so than the others here, because far as I know, I was the only one there for the whole process.


lb_lee: A colored pencil drawing of Raige's freckled hand holding a hot pink paperback entitled the Princess and Her Monster (book)
During the pandemic, we discovered the Chuangqi Trilogy by Lydia Kwa: Oracle Bone, the Walking Boy (which we read first), and (just now we discovered) the third book is in preorder, A Dream Wants Waking. (We have just now ordered it. QUEER ROBOT GHOST FUTURE YESPLZ.)

Oracle Bone and the Walking Boy both take place in Tang Dynasty, China--specifically, the capital city of Chang'an. Kwa (who's both a poet and a psychologist by trade) has a gift for delineating the complexity of human relationships, both good and bad, in this beautiful quiet way. She makes this ancient time in a faraway land feel so real and alive; we totally recommend these books if you're interested in queer, character-relationship-focused magical realism of the Chinese variety.

This post is NOT about any of that though. Instead, it's about the OTHER book we found THANKS to her books.

Learning about a transgender group in India who marry and are possessed by a goddess. )

EDIT: more quotes:

Read more... )

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