ghosts are good company

i mentioned a bit ago having taken diversity: transphobia. the course was a saturday course, taught by lydia sausa.

i’ve had some trouble with the “diversity:” courses in the past, so i was feeling fairly trepid, but it went well - really well. sausa offered a class that catered to people with all ranges of experience around trans issues - managing to both engage people who were new to trans experiences and also to offer relevant information for people with pasts in trans organizing and education. yay.

i’ve gained more resources to use in my education, and (hopefully) folks newer to these issues will have found an impetus to their working with them further.

perhaps my favorite part of the class was when sausa brought up different theories of gender. one of them was dylan vade’s concept of a gender galaxy… and the other, my favorite, comes from my favorite genderqueer rockstar, lynn(ee) breedlove. this is the “nesting doll” theory of gender, which i was immediately attracted to - if just because the czech parts of my family inundated me with matryoshka dolls as a child. so, this theory revolves around there being many layers of gender. in a sketch, breedlove suggests that hir tiniest inner gender is “peter pan - a young boy, always played by a woman” and that on the outside they’re unka lynnee, who is made up of all of those inner parts. of course, there are seven or eight other gender identites in between those - and for everybody, there is a different set of dolls. this concept makes me want to do art, to do paintings or molds or mini-statues (um, figurines?) of my own gender makeup. apparently breedlove was in class last semester to do their comedy routine about this. it’s probably the best thing that i wasn’t there for that one, as breedlove makes me fairly weak at the knees.

umm, where was i going here? oh! one of the folks in the class was touched by a lot of the exercises, to the point where they realized that they really did need to come out to their family. the wistful “i wish my parents could have been here!” made me realize that - hey! maybe their parents could be there… the course is going to be repeated on january sixth, from 10:00am to 6:00 pm. you should take it! it’d be something like $15 for california residents, $80 (i thiiink) for non-residents. thoughts?

City College of San Francisco:
IDST 80G Diversity: Transphobia 0.5 37954 W01 Lec SAT 10:00-06:00PM 01/06 BNGL Accessible: The classroom is fully ADA code compliant. Sausa, L

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