It always startles me just how popular trans still is; Shon Faye almost sold out the event, a thousand seater, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank. It was mainly young women but a fair few trans-identified males of various ages were dotted throughout. On the whole it felt like a cis-het crowd though, if you’ll pardon the lingo, one desperate to align itself to everything woke and a poke in the eye to its mums. Pre-signed books were available in the foyer, a neat way of letting us know that Faye was not to rub shoulders with us later. That didn’t bother Faye’s biggest fan though, sat next to me, who literally laughed, gasped, sighed, etc, non-stop in response to his asinine lispy utterances.
Journey through Del LaGrace Volcano’s archive
Two hours. Two hours of Del LaGrace Volcano (formerly Della Grace but Deborah Diane Wood originally) talking non-stop. You would expect an artist looking back over her massive oeuvre to spend at least some time speaking eloquently of her interest in portraiture and composition but no, all we got were anecdotes about all the people she had known.
Trans* lives, histories and activism
Setting the scene, Gust told us that day had been a day of action for Palestine against genocidal violence (aka Hamas refusing to release further hostages with no sign of the Bibas kids), puberty blockers had been banned for trans kids, there was an athletics ban for trans women, etc. All of this was ‘boring’ and ‘depressing’ and so Gust turned to history of trans people to cheer herself up. Namely, mermaids (or merfolk, as she mostly failed to remember to call them).
Academic talk: ‘Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday’
The book arose from ‘ethnographic* and archival research among queer-, trans people, feminists and sex workers’ and was about the ‘everyday troubles with transness in social and institutional life’ in Istanbul, Turkey, since 2016. She wanted to know how trans people dealt with such ‘state power’ in everyday negotiations. It was her claim that there were two currencies – violence and intimacy; hence ‘violent intimacies’ were an ‘entanglement’ that trans people were caught in. Therefore, the book offered a novel (i.e. stupid and cockeyed) concept and was obviously chosen in lieu of actual evidence of real violence, the traditional got-punched-in-the-face sort.
Nostalgia for the emo
Trans activist gives talk on being ’emo’ but tells bog standard transition story instead. Organisers As per usual, the Barbican hosted a trans activist on
In conversation event with ‘trans bearish man’
‘Fucking Myself Goodbye’ is the title of the last chapter. It was going to be the title of the book but she was persuaded otherwise by her publisher. Ben-Zeev did her reading, torpid prose indeed and also very confusing. Talia is the woman she wants to fuck, – as a man, as Avi. She wanted connect to the physical parts of the herself which caused her pain and self-loathing. She can’t really do this via her imagination so settles instead on finding a Talia-lookalike (another trope of AGP males, trying to imitate the women in their lives).
The Lies They Tell 
You must be logged in to post a comment.