In an article about the Independent on Sunday ‘Pink List’ (which recognizes people within the LGBTQ community), Nat Titman writes:
I would love to read other people’s Inspiration Lists, especially international lists and lists covering queer and trans* communities of which I’m not a member. I encourage you all to thank everyone who’s inspired you, made it easier to be queer, trans* or gender nonconforming or helped you or your communities in practical ways.
Right, so...
To a large extent I've already mentioned many of my own inspirations here, so I'll make this list a bit more specific, noting a few personal reasons – while not discounting other things they may have done – these people have my gratitude.
In no particular order, they are:
Eddie Izzard – for doing so much to destigmatize transvestism.
Vicky Lee – for opening the pre-internet door to the tranny subculture.
Richard O'Brien – for the song Sweet Transvestite (especially as performed by Tim Curry – such attitude!)
Julia Grant – for the BBC documentary ‘A Change of Sex’.
Ian McKellen (famous relative) – for coming out on Wogan in 1988.
Leslie Feinberg – for hir prideful book Transgender Warriors.
Kate Bornstein and Riki Wilchins – for their playful gender theory.
Dorothy Allison and Patrick Califia – for the courage of their writing.
Stephen Whittle – for his activism and intelligence.
Okay, I could add many more names to this list – many more femmes, for instance – and perhaps at a later date I will. But for now, those eleven will do. Thank you to every one of them.
I remembered the George/Julia program - it kinda scared me at the time- mostly because the psych seemed to have a really critical disdain for Julia (the tone implied mental illness/deviance) and partly because the rules for being a transsexual were presented as very rigid and I wasn't sure I qualified (not least because I didn't find guys attractive and they weren't up for creating a lesbian transwoman). Julia's story post surgery is possibly even more extraordinary than the part we saw in the documentary.
ReplyDeleteI too am grateful to Eddie Izzard for showing that femaleness can be presented on a male frame in a way that is aesthetically pleasing. Izzard of course would have self defined in a time before 'transgender' properly existed as an available identity.
Hi Alex :)
ReplyDeleteYes, the psychiatrist (John Randell) was dreadful, wasn't he. So dreadful that we all still remember him 30 years on.
But those original programmes... Damn. I can still feel how important, how necessary, it was to me at the time that I watch them, which I did upstairs in my bedroom on a small portable black and white telly with the door closed. Julia's story never spoke to me directly (I'm not transsexual); it was just that it was something about — to my sheltered, teenage perspective — a man "changing" to a woman and I was desperately hungry for anything along those lines.
As for Julia's later life: I watched all the follow-up programmes in the 1990s of course; and I have her book too.