holiday greetings, layout updates and mistaken genders..

First of all, happy holidays everyone. The Gendered Lex crew is spread out across the country at the moment. I myself am recovering from some intense family time and enjoying a full week off from work. With all my free time I figured I better get some blogging in. You may have noticed that the blog layout has changed a bit. I've been playing around with some of our options. Don't be alarmed if it changes again. :)

On to the actual post..

I am very rarely read as any other gender besides female. I am a cisgendered, female identified person so I guess that works out for me. However, for many people that is not the case. Particularly for people who fall somewhere on the gendered spectrum in a place other than "male" or "female." Being mistaken for a gender other than your own can be a source of shame, embarrassment, and frustration for people, and even worse, can result in violence.

In a perfect world it I suppose it wouldn't matter if someone made a mistake and called you out of your gender. You would correct them, they would apologize, and everything would be fine. In an even MORE perfect world, maybe gender wouldn't matter at all and we wouldn't be so obsessed with trying to put people into certain categories.

Unfortunately in this world, we're only given two options and we have to conform to them. I really got to thinking about this recently after someone left me a crappy comment on my you tube channel where they referred to me as male.

To give it a little context, I made a video about what comes inside the Tofurky vegan feast package. The video is maybe about three minutes long and is intended to be light and silly. Here is the comment that I received:

"More proof that being a veegan is just a fad. Look at this guy's pseudointellectual glasses... multiple piercings... rebellious short hair... and flanel. Str8 Tool. So egotistic they record themselves because they think people want to watch. Well, i enjoyed calling you out, dear sir."

So yeah. I mean, I know that there are a lot of ignorant creepy people trolling around in internet land, and trust me, my feelings aren't hurt. I had a good laugh about all of the misspellings in his comment and his obvious lack of knowledge about veganism. But I think what really struck me the most was that he thought I was a guy. I guess I'm just not used to it. It just seemed so ludicrous to me that he couldn't see that I'm female. Then it struck me, that this may be similar to what transpeople and genderqueer people experience on a daily basis; people who can't seem to see their gender identity for what it is.

I want to hear about your experiences with being mistaken for a different gender. What happened? How did it make you feel? How was it resolved?

De Las.

I agree with Feministing on this one... Genderfail: Livejournal to change code to binary choices only

Check this out.

WHY do people HAVE to choose one or the other, especially on a journal site? Really?

Feminist/Womanist/Mujerista book club?

So I've been thinking lately that it would be nice to be a part of a feminist book club. As far as I know there doesn't seem to be one in central KY (by all means let me know if I'm wrong). I haven't been in school for several years now and I really miss having discussions where we dissect themes about race, class, ability, sex and gender in various books and articles.

So who is interested? The more the merrier, but we need at least 3-4 people I think for it to work. I know that everyone is huber busy too, so maybe we read a new book and meet every three months or so? I figure that would also be enough time for folks to order said book from the library if they don't want to buy it.

If you're interested, then post in the comment section that you are and include a book that you would want us to read! Once I have enough people I will try and coordinate us.

De Las.