This… individual is named Blush. (I think.) I have no idea what her music sounds like*, but there sure was a long line for her signing.
*My cultural references for tranny entertainers begin and end with disco. And Divine.
Update: it appears Blush is about fashion. Now that makes sense.
Back to the parents’ tent.
Rana said on July 20, 2011 at 4:00 pm
That is apparently Jeffree Star, who has both a Twitter page and a Twitpic page. That said, I’m not quite sure what Jeffree does for a living – make-up artist perhaps?
…
Ah.
According to Jeffree’s fan page, “Jeffree Star, is an American model, fashion designer, make-up artist, DJ, and singer-songwriter residing in the Los Angeles area.”
Aren’t you happy to know all this?
586 chars
Rana said on July 20, 2011 at 4:02 pm
Too many links in the previous comment, I assume?
49 chars
alex said on July 20, 2011 at 4:48 pm
Blush? Good heavens, you couldn’t make her.
43 chars
Peter said on July 20, 2011 at 5:00 pm
I will never criticize my son’s clothing again. Ever.
54 chars
brian stouder said on July 20, 2011 at 5:25 pm
Honestly, the fetching young lady in the foreground distracted me enough that I didn’t even notice that the individual to her right was a tranny….
the person in the foreground IS a girl, yes?
Aside from the entertaining photo of people who march to the beat of their own drums, here’s a little funny from a guy who marches in lockstep to the beat of his own “facts” (from today’s Letters to the Editor of the Journal Gazette):
The oath every president takes includes the phrase “to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” We all agree, I am sure, that that responsibility is key in understanding the duties of any president we elect. Sadly, the current protector and defender does not know enough about the document in question. On multiple occasions President Obama has misquoted a key part in the opening lines of our most important protection from tyranny. His reading is “…all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights…” If you are unclear on the difference between his “inalienable” and the proper word “unalienable,” consult a good dictionary. The obvious and repeated omission of “by their creator” as the source of our unalienable rights is obviously intentional because the teleprompter scripter would have found and corrected the error by now.
Etc
So, leaving aside the writer himself, who clearly “does not know enough about the document” to be able to distinguish our Constitution from our Declaration of Independence, I was intrigued by the (utterly opaque) reference to the “difference” between “inalienable” and “unalienable”. And (of course!) it turns out that many oddball websites are dedicated to this very subject, which is a classic example of a distinction without a difference.
(and by the way, I bet the editor of the JG editorial page enjoyed a pleasant, if somewhat cruel chuckle as that letter went into print)
1913 chars
LAMary said on July 20, 2011 at 5:29 pm
Off topic. $P is going to be a grandmother again. Her son who got married two months ago is going to be a father. There are baby shower photos showing his bride who is a lot more than two months pregnant. I don’t care if people get pregnant before they get married, and I don’t really care if they get married at all, but when there is so much talk about abstinence going on in this family full of unplanned, conceived out of wedlock babies, it gets on my nerves. Not a lot, but enough.
486 chars
Dexter said on July 20, 2011 at 5:42 pm
Divine. Simply Divine. And you gotsta KNOW what this link is gonna show ya!
So don’t click it already!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMfW2X2IB-4&feature=related
173 chars
Julie Robinson said on July 20, 2011 at 5:49 pm
The Palin kids are just following their parents’ example.
57 chars
MichaelG said on July 20, 2011 at 6:35 pm
Pink Flamingos was fun but I lurved Lust in the Dust. I recommended it to my very Catholic parents. What the hell, I thought it was funny. They didn’t speak to me for a month. My wife was all “I told you not to recommend it.”
229 chars
Scout said on July 20, 2011 at 6:37 pm
Keep the pictures coming! I love to people watch vicariously through other’s smart phones.
LAMary, it gets on my nerves too. Pretty much anything Palin-related does that. I could be wrong, but my impression of Track and his new bride is that they themselves are not the spotlight whores that $arah PayMe and Bristle the Abstaining Pistol are.
348 chars
LAMary said on July 20, 2011 at 7:29 pm
It’s a drag that the only female candidates for the GOP nomination are Bachmann and Palin. There are GOP women who aren’t pandering, hypocritical, flag waving, bible thumpers. I probably wouldn’t vote for them but I wouldn’t be embarrassed by them. Having said that, pretty much all the GOP candidates are embarrassing. Jon Huntsman hasn’t said anything that made me cringe/laugh/throw stuff at the television yet.
414 chars
Joe Kobiela said on July 20, 2011 at 7:53 pm
Just to confirm,
Thats not Kate right!!
lol
Pilot Joe
56 chars
Dexter said on July 20, 2011 at 8:33 pm
I was thinking, do I know, ever have known a tranny? Sorta kinda…when I was a boy I lived in “the country” for a while, between Waterloo and Auburn, Indiana.
Several times our neighbor, a teen girl, had her belongings raided when the family were away.
They caught him when a watchful neighbor saw the boy break in again and head for the creek bank. A sheriff’s deputy caught the boy, 16, in what was described as this scene, as I recall: he was “prancing around wearing the girls’ bra and panties”.
Well, I was a boy of ten, a real country boy at that, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of this phenomena; he was doing WHAT? !!
The offending boy had to go through the court system but that’s all I ever knew. He was a tad quirky as an adult, known for riding his Harley Davidson mc all over the place all year round.
The other night Craig Crawford was on Current TV with David Shuster, and he answered David Shuster’s question about how gays factor in politically these days, and Craig Crawford said “politically speaking, being gay is like being left-handed these days.”
Well, OK, but trannies still sort of command attention, as we see with Blush here today.
1174 chars
Deborah said on July 20, 2011 at 9:30 pm
On the streets of Chicago trannies are just part of the everyday scene. There’s a place in Boystown called the Center on Halsted, it’s a community center for the LGBT folks. The company I worked for designed it and I designed the signage for it. One time I was there checking on the installation of some of the signage and I went to the restroom. There were about 5 or 6 trannies in there and I have to say that was the most fun I’ve ever had in a restroom. They were hilarious, we had a great conversation while I was sitting in my stall peeing.
546 chars
coozledad said on July 20, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Blush reminds me of a guy who used to wait tables at 7th Street in Durham. He and my wife had a long conversation about the near unavailability of women’s 11+ shoes.
165 chars
Jen said on July 20, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Trannies don’t even phase me anymore after going to IU for school. There were trannies, drag queens and cross-dressers of all sorts there. It threw me off a bit the first time I walked out of the bathroom stall and realized that the woman washing her hands probably wasn’t born a woman, but I enjoyed the diversity. Plus, going to the Miss Gay IU pageant – a drag queen pageant – four years in a row were some of the best times I had in college.
I’ve actually found that it’s been harder for me to get back to small-town living, where people aren’t as open and accepting of GLBTQ people.
591 chars
alex said on July 20, 2011 at 10:21 pm
Jen, I found the same was true living in Chicago. In fact, they blended in so harmoniously in the workplace I started doubtin’ my gaydar.
One place I worked one went through (the motions, anyway) of a pregnancy. I thought for sure she was trying to throw the dogs off the scent and she did a damn good job of it. Even I had to question my assumptions, as I have known a few six-five females with big Adam’s apples and small misshapen bazooms. In fact, she might well have been born with baby-making equipment, near as I can tell, but the first time I saw her I could have sworn she was a fellow traveler who got it lopped off.
630 chars
ROGirl said on July 21, 2011 at 5:19 am
“fellow traveler who got it lopped off”
Gotta be the thread winner.
71 chars
Dexter said on July 21, 2011 at 6:41 am
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html
Where do they go now?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cynKaa2vMAM
128 chars
brian stouder said on July 21, 2011 at 10:06 am
Gotta be the thread winner.
Agreed!
45 chars
prospero said on July 21, 2011 at 10:24 am
As Boner said, “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” Just auto-tune it, put it on a loop with a picture of his orange ass, and run this list of legislative initiatives over it.These aholes actually get a salary and health insurance for idiotic bullshit like this. It’s very hard to believe (admit?) that there are American voters stupid enough to vote for ignoramuses like this.
ROGirl: It’s like what Roberta Muldoon said: “That poor boy Michael Milton. I mean, I had mine removed surgically under general anesthesia. But to have it bitten off in a Buick.”
Seems to me the strange thing about transvestites is that they do not necessarily identify physically as the opposite sex. It’s a frequently heterosexual obsession with wearing women’s clothes. I find this as incomprehensible as OCD or any other mental condition or fetish. In many ways it’s easier to understand transgendered people. When my ex-wife and I lived in a condo in the South End in Boston, there was a group of transvestites that congregated on the grate next to the laundromat in the basement of our building for warmth in the winter. They were very friendly, and we sort of presumed they were plying the oldest profession. One Christmas Eve, we brought them a basket of food and Cook’s champagne (we didn’t have a lot of money). It was a pretty rough neighborhood and they were the toughest denizens, and very protective of my wife who was pregnant at the time. (The grocery store across the street had armed guards.)
1614 chars
Rana said on July 21, 2011 at 11:13 am
Um, y’all do know that “tranny” is a word about on a par with “nigger,” right? Whatever your feelings about transgender people, you might want to be aware of how that word sounds to people who are sympathetic to them, or who are transgender themselves.
260 chars
nancy said on July 21, 2011 at 11:42 am
Everything I know about the term “tranny” I learned from gay people, some of them transvestites themselves. Also, I’m at the end of my patience with the letters; it’s up to LGBT and growing — I’ve heard some insist that you include “transvestite, transgendered and questioning” in there, too, for LGBTVTGQ. Good lord, I support you! Can we pick one simple term for the sake of brevity?
(I generally use “gay” for everyone, and the day a lesbian corrected me on it, I knew she wasn’t my friend.)
498 chars
Rana said on July 21, 2011 at 2:21 pm
But that’s the thing, Nancy. Learning about “tranny” from gays and transvestites is a bit like learning about “Jap” from Italians and Jews – that is, their sharing the experience of being targets of bigotry doesn’t mean that they’re experts on all of its forms: they’re not members of the group being so described, and so it’s not reasonable to take them as the final authority on what’s correct any more than you could justify using “chink” as a reasonable way to identify a person simply because your Hispanic friends use it. Nor is it correct to assume that even if transmen and -women use the word themselves that it’s appropriate for straight, cis-bodied people to use it (see the parallels with “nigger.”)
The transgender individuals that I know prefer to be described as men and women (because that is what they are), with “transgender” being used only when it’s necessary to explain the disjuncture between their bodies and their gender identity.
And it’s not as hard as you’re making it. Take Jeffree Star up there. I don’t know if this person identifies as male, or female, so it’s simply a matter of not using a pronoun. If I did know, I’d use the appropriate pronoun, and describe him as a man or her as a woman. So male cross-dressers are he, regardless of the clothing or make-up they are using. I mean, we are all people who appreciate good writing, right? Doesn’t precision in word choice and connotation matter?
As for the simple term? How about “people”? (I’m only somewhat joking, there.)
1533 chars
Maggie Jochild said on July 21, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Gay means lesbian to the same degree that mankind means women. My generation (feminist in particular) sees no reason to avoid precision or moan about political correctness except to maintain a certain comfort level and status quo — as my Uncle Vern complains when we ask him not to use the term colored. (He points out it’s still a step up from how his chosen Prez candidate David Duke refers to those people.)
If you must use generic, go for queer. Except, ah, it’s still a perjorative some places, right? Yes, and while some queers use tranny, it is likewise a perjorative in some circles. As is dyke (which I claim with pride) and fag (which gay men of my generation prefer). Some women (like me) utterly reject ladies with its faux class upgrade and some Cheneys don’t want to be called dicks.
What to do? Ask. With polite interest. A friendly person will tell you what label they claim and trust you more instantly. An asshole will reveal themselves instantly. A teenager will go red and awkward. There are no shortcuts in genuine human connection.
There really is time and reason to exert care in how we refer to one another, as long as we are not on street corners shouting it at strangers.
And just for the record, I never voted on or requested the alphabet soup for referring to anyone oppressed for genitals or sex acts. In particular, what I contend with as a lesbian is most similar to what straight women encounter, not gay men and certainly not vocal transsexuals who are hellbent on reinforcing a gender binary I find dehumanizing. The fact is, I don’t know a single woman who isn’t dumped on in some way for not being the right kind of woman; I have never talked with a honest man who wasn’t terrified of (some) other men with regard to having his masculinity judged. We are fucking ALL in this together, and most acts of oppression cover more than one category, impossible to quantify. We each create our preferred identity and request respect for it, and should be accorded it as long as our rights do not trespass on the equal rights of others.
2092 chars
David in Chicago said on July 21, 2011 at 2:50 pm
I remember a Miss Manners column I read a long time ago – the late 1980s, I’m thinking. The letter writer was going to host a neighborhood open house, and the household next door included a person who had recently come out as trans. How, the letter writer asked, should this person be introduced? Mr? Miss? Ms? Miss Manners replied, with real exasperation, that they should introduce their neighbor *by name*. The simplicity, elegance and humanity of that advice has always stayed with me.
489 chars
moe99 said on July 21, 2011 at 4:34 pm
My brother worked with another doctor who had a sex change operation. He determined he was lesbian and wanted his wife and kids to stay with him. His wife declined.
166 chars
Judybusy said on July 21, 2011 at 4:49 pm
Rana, thanks for bringing up the use of “tranny.” I questioned the use too, and wondered if it had been reclaimed. I myself don’t think I’d use it. Maggie, thanks for the succinct rebuttal to te use of political correctness. That phrase has always seemed to me a way to shut off dialog and not hear painful things from marginalized people.
moe99, I know of two lesbian couples in which one transitioned and the partner opted to stay. This wasn’t taken lightly, and there was much discussion of now having heterosexual privilege. Both opted to exercise it by getting married: oh, the absurdity of getting that piece of paper because one of the couple now had “M” after his name instead of “F.” I’m surprised the radical right hasn’t glommed onto to this national emergency and tried to pass legislation that only male- and female-born people can marry each other!
865 chars
David in Chicago said on July 21, 2011 at 4:56 pm
Coincidentally, the other night I read the following (from a link at Making Light:) http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=11073
I found a lot of food for thought in that piece, and one of the most interesting things I learned is that after transitioning, a lot of MTF people end up in passionate relationships with other women.
324 chars
piny said on July 21, 2011 at 5:50 pm
Tranny has a complicated history. Some trans people use it to refer to themselves. Many really dislike it. But a lot of transphobic people (including some gays and lesbians) use it as a slur, just like faggot. Standup comics make tranny jokes. Talk-radio troglodytes talk about beating up trannies. Websites hype tranny porn.
And otherwise nice people say stuff like, “I think that’s a tranny,” and, “OMG, you look like a tranny!” It’s kind of like “dyke.” It’s not okay with everyone, and it can very easily sound like a slur. It’s probably best to use a more generally accepted term. (And there is one: trans, as in trans person.)
Trans people often have to deal with gawking and laughing. I’ve had people loudly debate my gender while I was just a few feet away. Not the best feeling in the world. “Tranny” does sometimes carry that connotation: a Nelson Muntzy “HA ha, look at the tranny!”
916 chars
nancy said on July 21, 2011 at 5:55 pm
And here I thought it was just a simple slangy shortening of transvestite, like Chevy for Chevrolet — tranny for transmission, for that matter.
Ten thousand pardons, but I really don’t think this is worth arguing about.
223 chars
piny said on July 21, 2011 at 5:58 pm
Also, PC pet peeve: “reclaiming” isn’t like when we cordon off the beach and start scrubbing crude off of all the puffins. We have Dykes on Bikes and PROUD DYKE! buttons; that doesn’t mean that Adam Carolla got a registered letter in his mailbox informing him that he now has permission to make dyke jokes. Dyke is still a slur.
When you reclaim a word, you damage its status and weight as a slur by using it in a contrary way. It’s verbal civil disobedience. It doesn’t remove the original meaning, and it doesn’t mean that the word doesn’t still serve in its original context. It just means that there are some limited contexts in which hateful words can be used to dismantle hatred.
695 chars
piny said on July 21, 2011 at 6:08 pm
I can see that this is distracting and a little irritating, but if I started talking about the nice Polacks at the Polack festival, I would take it as a favor if someone showed up to explain that the preferred term is Polish.
225 chars