biyuti:

(rebloggable by request)

Anon asked: How is being transgender different from being transethnic? I’m sorry, this may seem like a trolling question, but I genuinely want to know.

My reply:

I’m sad that this is confusing :(

Mostly ‘cause it means that the awful transethnic people have been doing too good of a job in appropriating the term and co-opting trans narratives.

First. Transethnic was (before this recent fad) used to describe the experiences of PoC who have been adopted by white families. It is theirword. Which should also make it very clear how and why it is massivelydifferent of an experience than being transgender.

Second. Now that the term is being appropriated by a group of white people who claim to be a different race, often using language that invokes and co-opts and abuses transgender narratives, this is likely where your confusion comes from.

Simply put: race and gender do not work in similar ways. At all. They serve different purposes.

White people invented race as a means to justify stealing and murdering and colonizing PoC.

Gender is something that exists in most cultures, as close to being a universal trait of human life.

When we say that gender is socially constructed and that race is socially constructed (which is were this false equivalency comes from in the first place) we are not talking about the same thing.

Race only — now and forever — serves white supremacy. Which is why it is sooo disgusting for white people to, after stealing and murdering us for so many years, try to colonize ‘Asian’ (like in that recent reblog ). When ‘Asian’ is something white people made up in the first place to deny our humanity and occupy our countries.

Gender doesn’t work like that.

It is also interesting, no? that only white people ever claim to be transethnic but gender has always been plural and of great diversity in many cultures?

Anyway. This is my vague and disorganized explanation for why they aren’t the same thing. And never will be.

This is the most succinct explanation I’ve read on the subject thus far. Thank you.

(Source: biyuti)

asiansnotstudying:

It was obvious to me from my first erotic dream at the tender age of seven. From that first secret and shameful stirring deep within my lower body, I knew that I was destined to be an easy lay. And it must have been obvious, though perhaps a little later, to my peers as well. I was fourteen years old the first time one of my classmates called me a “gay cocksucking [sic] whore.” This would become a trend amongst my friends and acquaintances over the next half-decade: from the barrage of anonymous internet insults in the tenth grade to the random man last week who grabbed my ass and attempted to pull me into an alley, it seems that my sexual availability is common knowledge to the wide world.

So if I am such a slut – if this Asian, transgendered, feminine body of mine is such an easy mark – why is it so dang hard to get laid in this town?

There is no shortage, of course, of men on the streets, in clubs, bars, and grocery stores, who, alerted by the swish of my skirt or the sheen of my lipstick that I am “that kind of boy,” catcall from their cars at night and leer at my legs as I pass by. On any given weekend, I can don a tank top and tight jeans, go to Unity, and shimmy my hips for a few hours until a white man approaches me and says, “Ni hao, I love Chinese boys, and by the way are you a bottom?” But if what I am looking for is a liaison of the flesh that also respects my mind, body, and choices, I had better prepare my heart for a long and lonely hunt.

For most of my life, I did not know the difference between sexual objectification and sexual intimacy. I believed that being valued or loved meant the same thing as being fuckable, and as an Asian boy-child who wanted to be a girl, I knew that my body was less lovable by far than those of the beautiful white men I fantasized about. (How many times have I heard those fateful words: “I’m sorry, I’m just not into Asians?”  How many Craigslist ads and dating site profiles proclaim: “No femmes, no fats, no Asians or Blacks?”)

Yet these men who move so easily and fearlessly through the sexual realm are not sluts. Their bodies – white, cisgendered, born with all the physical abilities that society favours, masculine, valued above all things – are not construed as something constructed for the pleasure of others, that can be bought and sold, summoned, or dismissed at a whim. No, the body of the slut is feminized and racialized; the slut’s face is the face that dares to gaze back without deference at the judgement of a world that deems it ugly, unlovable, devalued below all things.

Marginalized peoples are not meant to have access to sexual capital – we are not allowed to take pleasure in other people’s bodies, or in our own. If we are of colour, then we had better not presume to make love to whites – except to please them. If we are queer, we dare not desire straight bodies. And if we are women, we should not want to make love at all. In being combinations of these identities, our access to sexual pleasure, to that blurry line between objectification and intimacy, diminishes ever more.

It is in the wanting that we become sluts. It is our desire, even our capacity for desire – that secret-shameful stirring deep in our bodies – that threatens the hierarchy that keeps our bodies enslaved in sex. In surviving rape, in showing pride in our beauty, in wanting to be lovable and fuckable and everything in between, we challenge the domination of those who hold the keys to sexual power. And so we are insulted, assaulted, leered at on the streets and dragged into alleyways. Beaten down that we might submit once more.

I can be only what I am destined to be: an Asian man who dresses and has sex like a woman. Who wants sex, fears it, who still searches long and lonely nights for that hook-up, affair, relationship, in which I can be whole. It isn’t easy. It never is. Still, I want it. Still, I search.

Ryan Thom’s Memoirs of a Gaysian is a column about life, love, and intersectional oppression. Ryan is a writer, performance artist, and lifelong slut.  Contact them at memoirsofagaysion@mcgilldaily.com.

Source: (McGill Daily)

KOKUMO on Original Plumbing! 

Read the article here!

KOKUMO is a trans artist, advocate, and all-around amazing person. She is the founder of KOKUMOMEDIA and TGIF, the Transgender, Gender Non-Conforming, and Intersex Festival for Youth of Color and their allies.

Photography by Kiam Marcelo Junio, 2012

iamkiam-photography:

Mister Junior, 2012

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” 
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Photography by Kiam Marcelo Junio

This weekend, my dear friend Alberto / Mister Junior was assaulted, robbed, and left bloody and unconscious in an alley near Wrigleyville and Boystown.  Words can’t express my fear, sadness, and anger over this terrible situation, but I am glad that despite the hateful act he has experienced, Mister Junior is alive and well, recovering and continuing to  love others. 

Please send him your love and support: TUMBLR /TWITTER/FACEBOOK /OFFICIAL WEBSITE

S. Bear Bergman, 2006

Butches are always tops, they always fuck the girls and for that matter their partners are always girls; there is no such thing as a butch who is attracted to men. Well, transmen, but that’s just butch-on-butch repackaged as faggotry. But no non-trans-men. Unless the butch in question is a non-trans-man, then it’s okay. Except that non-transmen cannot be butches, because butch is a queering of gender that assigned-male people cannot embody, unless they occasionally can, in which case they have to be gay men. Or  the partners of femmes. Or not. But no one with an assigned-female body can be a butch and do it with assigned-male men. Unless they’re femmes. Or butches. I’m really putting my foot down on this one.

I know what butch is, and butches definitely, absolutely, do not get fucked, even if it feels so good to have someone slide in sweet and hard and rock them just right. They might eat pussy but they never suck cock, because licking pussy is chivalry without pants and of course any butch would want to do anything to please the femme in hir life, if there is a femme. Which there has to be, in order to be a true butch, except if there does not have to be but you cannot be a misogynist about it either, which a lack of interest in femmes and their attendant delights may be read as, if there is a lack which there shouldn’t be. But anyway cocksucking is about ownership and dominance, so butches must always be the ones having their cocks sucked, unless the owner of the cock being sucked by a butch is tied to something, but if a butch was tying down someone with a cock of some variety then the above rule would quite likely be violated, and I think I’ve been very clear about that so never mind.

“I believe that Prides are superfluous. Because for me, we already are proud. We woke up this morning proud; we stepped out of our house this morning proud, but we don’t always go around this world powerful, and that’s what I’m here to do. I’m not here to let people know I’m proud. I’m her to remind people that I’m powerful.”

- From an interview with KOKUMO, a Chicago-based trans artist, activist, and media mogul (via Huffington Post) 

Photography by Kiam Marcelo Junio 

READ THE INTERVIEW! It’s very informative, well-articulated, and thought-provoking.

Only hours left to join in on the Chicago IRL Kickstarter!

Donate and get awesome prizes, including a curated selection of original Polaroids by me!

This is a cause that I highly believe in, and I believe you should too. <3 

chicagoirl:

We’re approaching the end of the runway for Chicago IRL #4’s telethon with less than 69 sensual hours to go! We’ve got a few exciting last minute additions.

*All levels at $12 and above include the fourth issue. This is the best way to pre-order a copy! Orders made after the Kickstarter won’t have such an exciting set of bonus options to choose from.

*All levels at $15 and above include the set of artist postcards featuring work from Chicago IRL contributors. The set now includes issue 2 contributor Vincent Chevalier’s HYPER-REAL (and hopefully a few more before all is said and done).

*All levels at $30 or above that mention the choice of artist prints or jockstrap now also include a curated selection of issue 3 contributor (and soon to be issue 4 cover model) Kiam Marcelo Junio’s original polaroids!

All of the funds raised go directly towards paying printing costs for the magazine and production costs for the rewards. We provide free copies of the issue to every contributor whose work appears, and we also donate copies to local archives and other lgbtq libraries and institutions.

We’ve opened our phone lines, played the ukelele, and put on a puppet show. So please, donate maybe?

Preview: 
Mister Junior (of Vaudezilla Burlesque fame) for iamKiam Photography
Chicago, IL