I love listening to the rain. Recordings are okay, but not the same as a
live performance.
* * *
I don't know if it's crazy of me, but I feel there's a lot I'm meant to
be doing in this life, like for a wider community outside of my family,
maybe something in the artistic realm. I don't feel especially inspired or
creative most of the time and at this point in my life my time is all
devoted to real (and rewarding!) responsibilities, so it's kinda weird that
I keep thinking about it.
* * *
About the 2018 Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference.
I went there this year for the same reasons I usually do, mostly to support
members of my family who were attending, to stay with our child during
sessions, &c.
The one thing I did actually attend myself was a workshop called "Being
Non-Binary in a Binary World", and it was good for me. I got there early,
and the room filled quickly; a few minutes into the session, people were
sitting in the aisle and standing behind the chairs. The presenter who
started the whole thing off was a very charismatic and capable University
of Delaware student named Joe Kim, who turned out to be 20 years old.
There were a number of audible gasps when fae revealed hir age in his
presentation; the gathered audience seemed to skew a little young, as much
of the conference does, but there were a number of attendees in their 50s
or 70s and ze just had a confidence and self-awareness that eluded many of
us at age 20. (Joe, like some other non-binary people, likes people to try
varying pronouns on em.) But the part that made it really cool for me was
that, after breezing through faer own presentation, ey used the rest of our
allotted time to solicit anecdotes from the audience, and that really drew
out a great diversity of experiences.
There were people whose gender experiences were informed by their immigrant
families' traditions, or by exposure to gendered anti-black racism. There
were young people who basically found their genders on Tumblr at age 14.
That's fucking fantastic, to be honest; I can hardly imagine what it would
mean for me to have that at age 14. There were veterans of the city's gay
scene who didn't even have the words to say they were trans early on. There
were young adults who had just lost contact with their parents because they
came out. There was an audience member in their 50s who had presented
themself as a straight man ever since they had a child, then found the
courage to explore who they were when their child came out as trans shortly
before the conference. There was a person who said they *would* have been
a man, had medical transition been available to them in their 20s, but they
came to see a part of themself as female when they became a mother to four
children. "I'm a mum, not a dad," they said. Another person talked about
how, when they first came out as non-binary, they felt they had to shave
their beard and start shoplifting O.P.I. nail polish they didn't even want.
This was a common pitfall people described, the feeling of an obligation to
*look* non-binary when really there is no non-binary look.
There was applause, constantly. We were driven to applaud and recognize
each other because for once we were in a room together, openly.
On the last day of the conference my spouses and I picked up new rings for
ourselves from a vendor selling a lot of pride-themed jewelry. We'd all had
matching cheap matching rings that had broken or no longer fit. This time
we all got different rings in a rainbow theme. Mine is, like, really
obvious. Not easily overlooked like the old one.
Some people who I think were from Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist
Party had this really obnoxiously signed table in the vendor area promising
an opportunity to take down "the Trump/Pence Regime". Most attendees seemed
to be studiously ignoring it as I did. (If you're not familiar with the
RCP, just know that this is about them, not about communism as a concept.)
As the last sessions of the conference were wrapping up, a few people from
the Westboro Baptist Church showed up outside the Convention Center to
cause trouble; I passed a few of them on the sidewalk as they were getting
their bearings. My spouse later found an Instagram video of them being
literally surrounded with trans flags until they could not be seen. From
what I heard they subsequently got into a scuffle with a conferencegoer and
were dispersed by police.
There's probably more I could write about, but this took a long time to
write and I need to sleep.
