Trans Symposium at Birkbeck – ‘Existing Otherwise’

As regular tweeps know, we never shy away, having said that, even we couldn’t help being a bit rabbits-in-headlights when facing down the agenda for the Trans+ Virtual Centre of Excellence ‘Existing Otherwise’, published on Bluesky.

Items were as follows:

a Meditation titled “We Are Here.”

a Creative Collage Workshop, titled “Remapping Masculinity.”

a collaborative dreaming matrix lecture, titled “‘The pink octopus beckons me’: trans social dreaming.”

a session titled “Acknowledging realities, and imagining alternatives: What does a good life look like to you?”

an echo paper titled “Reclaiming the Monster: Transgender Horror and Individual Legibility” …. [cont.]

IDAHOBIT* with The Love Tank

Participants could live, work or socialise in Tower Hamlets to contribute to the council’s ‘needs assessment’, meaning, if you’ve ever bought a matcha latte on Brick Lane, your opinion was as good as any. There were 25 research participants in total, 22 of whom attended a dinner party, with three additional interviewees outside of that setting. Sixty-eight percent identified as non-white and 80 percent as disabled (aka ‘neurodivergent’).

Keynote panel talk at the Barbican’s ‘Dirty Weekend’ takeover

One panel member had been scared off being her real self due to the conservative push back, affecting how she ‘showed up online’ and had been forced to take twelve months out to do an art residency so that she could regain her confidence. She wanted now to make pieces (dildos?, I really don’t know) that people can really connect with. Honestly, the comedy writes itself with these people.

Trans History (and why it matters to you) – training for NHS staff

Davison’s preferred term to discuss all things trans was the nebulous-sounding ‘transness’.  Really this was so he could go ‘ooh, that’s a bit trans’ about everything.  Material reality wasn’t really a thing, Davison told us, quietly introducing the concept of ‘cisness’ to the assembled horde of NHS workers, using the cryptic example of ‘some people having a much more complicated relationship with their bodies’.

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