Thursday, 26th July, 2007

Family portrait

link art

Davis & Davis, The Ralphs (Dad, Mom, Baby, Sis) 1999 — (via we-make-money-not-art.com)

Second Opinions

money bastards

Maybes it's just me. Maybes every other single one of you is massively organised in your day-to-day lives, opening letters before they've even landed on your mat, paying all manner of bills — even the window cleaner — by Direct Debit, totting up your receipts and knowing to the penny how much cash is in your accounts.

Me? I'm shit.

I leave things to the last minute. I forget to pay things. Each month I get charged £30 for being overdrawn £30 from last month's charges.

But sometimes, I do pick up the phone and try and sort things out a little. I ring people up and say things like "Hi. Sorry, can't pay you everything I owe you. Can I pay you X and the rest next month?"

To which they reply "Yes, that's fine".

But I've noticed a pattern over the years, one that goes a little like this:

1. Phone company and promise to sort things out.

2. Get told by company that "that's fine"

3. Receive letter a few days later with a charge for not paying

4. Ring back, explain, and be told that whoever you spoke to first was wrong.

So, Curran's Law of Over-the-phone Account Thingies™:

The second conversation you have over the phone with a company you owe money to, will contain the words "I'm sorry, they had no right to tell you that", and cost you fifty quid.

A New Lexicon

language

I, as you well know, get angry at things. And one of the things I get angry most about, is the hideous language that bandies itself around the TrannySphere©™. For example:

Tgirl

I hate this word. Phonetically, it's appalling, but it's also probably the most un-descriptive nomenclature in the history of transvestism.

I mean, really. "Girl" — how many of us actually come within a decade of being able to age-identify with anyone legitimately justified in using the word "girl"?

And the "T" in front of it — it smacks of "tea party", and has a nauseously 'daintiness' resonance about it.

Every time I hear (or read) the word, my teeth (what's left of 'em) grate against themselves, and I place a massive Emily Howard Star next to them in my Mental List of All Trannies™

Anyone who uses the word "Tgirl" is one step away from saying "*giggles*" — a habit (I hasten to point out) that I grew out of four years ago.

Also:

Sisters

I'm on record, in several places, as being deeply sympathetic to feminist thinking. I may not always live up to my own expectations in regards to this (I'm a man, how could I?) but there's nothing that pains me more than to see clumsy appropriation of terms and political theories for the sake of 'appearance'.

"I see some women calling each other sisters, so if I use the word, then I'll be more like a woman"

Sopt it. Stopitstopitstopitstopitstopitstopit.

If you're going to hoik a word out of its original context, then at least take the time to research its context, so that you don't look like a completely insensitive clod.

...

Anyways though. I was thinking, earlier — prompted (perhaps) by coming into contact with the word "enfemme" just one too many times in an evening — that we need new words to describe the things that we do.

I know I've got my little dictionary of tranny terms going on, but I thought it would be nice (and potentially, politically powerful) to come up with words that redefine the transvestic landscape as a bolshier, and brassier place. Words that touch on an irony so lacking in the descriptive arsenal of 21st Century crossdressers. Words that poke a big stick in the eye of the Tutting Tory, or the Condescending Chav.

And with that in mind, I'm never again going to refer to myself as "going out enfemme".

I'll be "going out frocked-up" in future.

I can't see what is wrong with en femme, though.

Well, no — on the face of it. Foreign language terms for things is all fine and dandy — and, after all, what's "transvestite" if not a vague Latin for "cross dress"?

I think the thing that gets me about it, is the false affectation — the adoption of it because it holds certain "airs" about it. It's compensatory, or at least, it's often used in a compensatory context.

The other thing I dislike about it, is that it comes with (perhaps wrongly) attached notions of "femininity", and all the horrors of the usual bunch of men parading themselves around puporting to present a more true representation of what women should be like.

Although I'm probably reading far too much into it...

I think we wear words like we wear clothes

I like that

BTW — "mangina" anayone?

I must confess, BTW, that the main reason I like the word "frock", is because it sounds a bit like "fuck"

Er...

http://www.beckysweb.co.uk/beckysblog/2007/07/stiletto-flippers.asp