I will not be at 14th and Broadway tonight at 6:00. I will be meeting other obligations in another fight that I genuinely believe makes the world a better place. I’m thinking of you all and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for all of your safety.
Update: I was totally there.
I’m a day late. I won’t make an excuse.
Happy birthday to one of the people I admire most in the world.
Thanks for all you have done for us.
Girlfriend and I watched both Tombstone and Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp in the past few nights. This morning we were discussing the fact that someone should make a movie centered around the adventures of Doc Holiday.
We were thinking that this would be a natural for Johnny Depp. Not sure who to cast as Big Nose Kate; Isabella Rossellini could do it again and we would be quite happy.
If anyone reading this knows any Hollywood types, please pass the thought along.
I love the fourth of July. I’m conflicted about parts of it, but uncomplicated relationships are for uncomplicated minds. I loathe the standard fare patriotism and invented right wing history that this date invokes, but the negatives associated with this date don’t outweigh the positives for me.
Historically, July 4 is the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. A bunch of moneyed white men got together to complain about their taxes. That doesn’t sound too unfamiliar. Does it? They selected a passionate writer and speaker, slaveholder, rapist, inventor and rabble rouser Thomas Jefferson to draft a declaration of their distaste for being told what to do by other moneyed white men.
In spite of all his shortcomings, Jefferson penned (literally) the foundational document of the American Revolution and, perhaps more important, the foundational document of what we now think of as social justice and human rights.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed (snip) with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
This was a declaration of the rights of people to govern themselves for their own well-being, benefit and purposes. This was the assertion that the rights of individuals were greater than the power of monarchy. This was the beginning of not just the American Revolution, but of many revolutions to come. Over the next fifty years, monarchies all over Europe would fall. Later, the promises of freedom in the Declaration would inspire progressive political thinkers such as Karl Marx and Emma Goldman. It is the promise of the Declaration that inspired abolitionists in the mid nineteenth century in the USA, and anti-colonialists all over the world in the mid twentieth century.
Ho Chi Minh quoted the American Declaration of Independence in his own and sought support for throwing off his French colonial rulers from the United States, who he assumed would be sympathetic because of our history as an exploited colony. Unfortunately, like Fidel Castro, his requests for assistance in establishing independence and freedom were denied and he was forced to seek support from the Soviet Union. The same segment of the Declaration was quoted by the Black Panther Party and they too were seen as an enemy by the US government.
On the Fourth of July, I celebrate the moment at which the political ideals I subcribe to, those of individual freedom and collective effort and sacrifice for the collective good, were set in motion for the first time in a way that is recognizable to people struggling in our time.
Jefferson himself predicted that rights should be ever-expanding and that it would be correct for future generations to look back on his age and see barbaric suppression. We do. I expect the same to be thought of my current ideas in the future, or at least I hope for that.
In the mean time, I also really like fireworks.
It’s my birthday again.
Since the last one, lots of nice things have happened. Some of those things have been big and some have been small. I’ll skip a specific inventory. Suffice to say that it has been a good year with a few major events in the realm of personal sustainability.
In United States politics, things have gotten uglier. I worry about it a little. I always expected that capitalism would eat itself, but now I think I may see it happen in my lifetime.
I’ll be having a party up to my usual high standard of decadence, but not today. Today I get a special present; my girlfriend graduates from her MFA program and that feels like the best birthday present I could ask for; I get her back.
Overall, for me, better and better and better.
Cross posted at Body Impolitic
I’m starting work on a new project and I plan to share some of my process here form time to time. I expect this project to take a while, maybe a year but I’m just guessing. This is the first installment.
I intend to make estrogen pills. I’ll probably only make a couple of pills, but the art is in the making rather than the pills themselves. Estrogen pills aren’t all that special otherwise. The bottom of my purse is littered with them.
One of the first commercial preparations of estrogen in a pill was Premarin, which is composed of a mixture of conjugated estrogens isolated from the urine of pregnant mares. That’s where the name comes from; PREgnant MARe urINe. Initially marketed in the 1940s, the drug development work was done in the 1930s and based in science that goes as far back as the turn of the 20th century. Premarin was the first estrogen I was prescribed in the 1990s, but has largely been replaced among trans women with estradiol, which is cheaper and seems to have a lower incidence of depression as a side effect.
Here’s where the art in my project will begin to become apparent. I will not be collecting the urine of pregnant mares. I will be collecting the urine of trans women on estrogen regimens. Otherwise, as far as applicable (lots of research to do here), I will be duplicating the isolation and purification processes developed in the 1930s for Premarin.
There are many independent pieces of this project that will be presented in various ways. There will be lab notebooks. There will be photo and film documentation of the various chemistry work. I am enlisting the help of a friend who is an analytical chemist, to determine the purity and composition of the final product. I will be asking the trans women who donate urine to write or otherwise express their thoughts and feelings about the whole endeavor (likely in a dedicated separate blog for the project). I might publish an instruction manual for anyone who would like to duplicate my work. In my wildest fantasies, I would be able to make enough pills that I could switch them for the pills I currently take for a week or a month or whatever. It might be even better to make pills that could be the first week or month worth of estrogen for a trans woman starting transition.
There are implications to all of these things. A trans woman starting transition by taking estrogen derived from the bodies of other trans women is an especially powerful possibility, with resonances in community and politics and biology.
The visual record of the work is open to many possibilities. I can decide not only how to record the work, but what the work will look like for the sake of recording. Will I work with plastic buckets from the hardware store and solvents from a paint store? Will it look like a meth lab? Will I use fancy kitchen implements? Will it be done in a proper laboratory? Will it be presented as a corny Ask Ms Science educational program? Will it be presented as though it were found footage of a clandestine bomb-making workshop? If I publish a how-to, will it be a scholarly work or the Tranarchist’s Cookbook?
With all of these possibilities and layers, the one thing that is clear to me is that the process is the most exciting part of this. I generally work (in any medium) in a way that presents a polished complete product, that seems to have been born that way. This project is very different for me. Because of that, I have chosen to share from the beginning. I hope some of you will have as much fun following along as I will in the doing of it.
I will be the executive of this project, but neither the only hands nor the only mind. It is common in the art world for someone in my position to take full authorship. I do not intend to. This feels like something bigger than that. In that spirit, I would like to thank Jerome Reyes for the title, Panning for Gold. Jerome is an accomplished artist who has done some amazing social practice work and has already been invaluable help in the early brainstorming portion of this project.
Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard but…
The screeching unpolished voice that danced with the sour saxophone. A friend I never met.
There seemed to be traces, for a moment, of a horribly transphobic feminist posting on line under Poly’s name. I don’t know if it was her or not. I prefer to think not, but even if it was her, she did me more good than harm overall.
