Sunday, July 20, 2008

It made me happy to read this...

so I thought I'd share it. This is Susan Stryker recounting her thoughts before speaking at the 4th Annual Trans March and Rally in San Francisco, June 2007:

"Even after being in the transgender scene for so long, I found the crowd a bewitching spectacle: brilliantly tattooed, biologically female queer femme women and the trans guys who used to be their dyke girlfriends; straight-looking male-to-female transsexuals with nail salon manicures sitting side by side with countercultural transsexual women sporting face jewelry, dreadlocks, and thrift-store chic; lithe young people of indeterminate gender; black bulldaggers, white fairies, Asian queens, Native two-spirits; effeminate trannyfags and butch transsexual lesbians; kids of parents who had changed sex and parents who supported their kids' rejection of the labels their society had handed them. Some people walked around in fetish gear, some in chain-store khakis or floral-print sundresses from the discount clothing outlet; most wore the casually androgynous style of clothing that is the cultural norm. Vive la différence, I thought as I stepped up to the mike and surveyed the beautiful range of human diversity spread out on the grass before me. Live and let live."

From Transgender History, Susan Stryker (Seal Press, 2008) 29.

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