Super Queer Open Mic, June 22 at the Center for Sex and Culture
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: shows Leave a comment »
“I was born at the Queer Open Mic”- Dana Morrigan.
Nothing says milestone like your first feature—featuring for the first time anywhere; Amy Dentata and Dana Morrigan! Both of these writers and performers have been regulars at Queer Open Mic for the past couple of years and have work shopped and strengthened their writing chops at our shows. We couldn’t be prouder of giving them their first gigs.
Come celebrate QOM’s 8 years of unearthing & empowering new queer voices in this Super Open Mic Anniversary show! Also don’t miss special guests, from past host/founder Cyndi Emch to Daphne Gottlieb and Regie Cabico – professional queer artists that have changed the world of spoken word, who have also featured at our show! Might you be the newest discovery? Sign up at 7:30pm to get a 5 minute slot and show us what you got!
BUY TICKETS! Brown Paper Tickets Link: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/246331
Only in San Francisco
Posted: May 3, 2012 Filed under: blog, spoken word Leave a comment »For most people, riding public transit is an annoyance. But when you’re trans, it’s an ADVENTURE…
My first-ever real performance away from the open mic scene! I performed my bit Only in San Francisco as a part of That’s What She Said. Check out the site for info on future shows. It was great opening for the supremely talented Entirely Talia, Liz Green, Caitlin Gill, and co-host Wonderdave.
After the show we drank together at a tavern, and I’m pretty sure I leveled up. All without slaying a single giant rat.
The Sandbox
Posted: April 27, 2012 Filed under: blog, disability, essays, writing Leave a comment »I communicate from two worlds. The first world is the one I started with. I was born with it. Most of my thoughts are blocks of sensory data. No words, but colors, textures, sounds, smells, shapes, spaces… Which makes it very hard to translate my thoughts for other people. It makes it hard to talk to other people. I know now this world is the world of the “nonverbal thinker”. Dyslexics like me tend to use nonverbal thinking. I don’t know how it works for other people, but most of my thoughts are indescribable.
When my body was a child, I lived in that world of indescribables. I existed inside myself. But I couldn’t communicate. Nothing inside me had a word. It’s gobbledegook. It’s plaster fence airways. Spence pensers. The most I can do to describe myself is throw random words out as they come to me. They never quite fit, and they don’t make sense to other people. Gravity sharks. These feelings are so intense they are everything. There are no words. I am either silent, or I say things that don’t make sense to other people. I learned this is a bad thing, I learned people on the outside don’t like it. They were frustrated by my incomplete, jittery sentences. Seemingly random jumps in thought. And unconventional use of words. I learned that in grade school. They wanted me to talk right.
I had to learn a second language. Or maybe more accurately, I had to learn *a* language. But let’s call it a second language. Over time I created a second space inside my head that consists only of words. But it’s separate from my natural thought process. It doesn’t connect back to my natural thought process. It’s its own universe. It’s words I don’t really understand. But I learned them, and I can parrot them easily in ways other people like. Like I’m doing right now. When I write prose, it’s like alien writing. I call this second world the sandbox.
If You Haven’t Noticed
Posted: April 26, 2012 Filed under: blog, writing Leave a comment »I’m on a bit of a blogging hiatus. Working hard on finishing my chapbook in time for my upcoming performance in the Queer Arts Festival in June, writing (and drawing, and composing) a visual novel, and editing porn for Courtney Trouble. Phew! All while trying to figure out how to boost my productive hours without running out of spoons/melting down.
I created a body of work that will be encapsulated in Bite, and now I’m finding my voice for the next phase of work as Amy D. My writing has been deeply personal, and my personal life is changing in ways I don’t quite understand yet. Rest assured there’s more to come.
Upcoming Show: That’s What She Said
Posted: March 28, 2012 Filed under: shows Leave a comment »See me perform true-life hilaribad stories as part of That’s What She Said, a variety show that celebrates the creative work of women!
When: Saturday April 21st at 8pm
Where: The Garage (975 Howard St, San Francisco, CA)
Diversity of Language
Posted: March 26, 2012 Filed under: blog, trans Leave a comment »[TW: Slurs, some censored so I could write this out]
One of the common criticisms the trans community makes of cis feminism is in regards to the myth of the “universal female experience”. I personally am realizing that I have unknowingly subscribed to a myth of a universal trans female experience. This myth is based on my own, genuine experience: I knew I was female since the beginning. I disown most established trans language in favor of terms like CAMAB and CAFAB. I don’t believe in pure sexual dyadism or terms like “male-bodied”.
While these parameters genuinely fit most trans women I know personally, they don’t apply to everyone. Applying them to everyone else isn’t helping me interact with the greater trans community. It’s causing unnecessary arguments and unproductive battles of trigger versus trigger. It is still important to debunk the myths surrounding the binary essentialism of “male” and “female”. It’s important to deconstruct cis language and find our own. It’s important to empower ourselves. But it’s also important to recognize the trans community has a wide range of perspectives. What’s most important is that we respect each other, and define ourselves without projecting onto others.
Just as some people knew they were trans since birth, some didn’t. Some trans women are also genderqueer or female non-gendered. Some binary-identified trans people consider themselves “gender variant”. Some people identify as MtF. Some people describe themselves as male-bodied. Some people identify as transmisogynistic slurs, including she**** and tr***y. Some people identify as transmen and transwomen, regardless of how intensely that lack of a space sets off my OCD (I’m sad to say that is not hyperbole).
I’ve failed to handle these truths many times, and some of them I still struggle with. But my perspective is becoming a very strong “let people identify themselves”. I’m adjusting my rhetoric to accommodate this. Rather than telling others what to say and what not to say, I find it more helpful to explain the range of experiences trans people have. Some trans women aren’t “born male”, but some are. Some find MtF insulting, others don’t. A similar range of experience (on different subjects) exists among cis people regarding their own genders. What’s important is that we respect the individual and support each other as a community. The message changes from “Don’t make x assumption about me, because trans people aren’t like that”, to “don’t make x assumption about anyone, because people are individuals”. If there is one truth with the power to disarm stereotypes, it’s how different we can be from each other, even those of us who use the same labels.
This shift in perspective is hard. It’s possibly one of the hardest challenges I’ve faced when writing “for the community” and not just myself. This process is also messy. While I am learning the theory, in practice I am certainly no expert. Most of us have sore spots, sensitive topics, and certain words we just cannot bear to hear. Words that have been weaponized so many times we can’t take it anymore. We get angry at each other, we get triggered, we fly off the handle. Sometimes because the offending person is intentionally malicious, other times unintentionally malicious, and sometimes it’s just a plain old misunderstanding. Regardless, the pain is real. The problem often is that, even if we all speak the same language, we don’t necessarily speak the same language. Sometimes we use the same word to mean different things, or use different words to mean the same thing. These mismatched meanings become layered on top of each other, creating a confusing glut of mixed messages.
Admitting Defeat
Posted: March 25, 2012 Filed under: atheism, blog | Tags: ableism, ageism, anti-theism, atheism, femme hatred, privilege, racism, trans, triggers Leave a comment »(This post originally appeared on my Tumblr)
Call-outs. They’re anxiety-provoking. They’re rage-inducing. They can break friendships and communities. A lot has been written on how to call out privilege. We have detailed analyses of power structures, derailing tactics and why they are broken, the tactics of choosing your battles and how it’s not a requirement, determining trust levels and how they affect one’s likelihood to educate, the responsibilities of the privileged, why recognizing privilege is hard because of the experience of power loss.
I’ve been on both sides of the call out. I’m queer, trans, disabled, poor, dyslexic, dissociative, and a survivor of extreme childhood abuse. I’m also white, mostly-binary-identified, have sporadic cis privilege/”passing privilege”, and while the home I grew up in was filled with abuses that most people are only exposed to in works of fiction, that home was still upper-middle-class. In other words, I have a very broad mix of privileges and oppressions. I don’t just have a little privilege, I have quite a bit. On the other hand, the same can be said of my oppressions. One doesn’t cancel the other out, however, and the mixture has been confusing and difficult for me to parse.
I quite easily go on the defensive, which can probably be attributed to both extremes of experience I’ve had. I have a shitload of ignorance because of my privileges, and in arguments I sometimes reflexively defend myself as if being attacked by my abusers. On many occasions, triggers have put me in a Bad Place where I start lashing out. Long story short, I have failed quite regularly at handling the situation appropriately when being called out.
I failed when genderbitch called me out on ageist bullshit about a year ago. I failed when feminine men called me out for using the problematic term “cissy”. I failed when, more recently, several indigenous people called me out on racism when I wrote a post criticizing religion. In all these cases (and many more), I was triggered by the subject matter and had a wealth of ignorance.
In each instance, after I calmed down, I did my best to write a sincere apology without qualifiers. I avoided apologizing for “offense” or using phrases like “I’m sorry if I offended you”. I apologized straight-up for being an asshole. I tried (with mixed results) to frame my apology not just in a way that avoided shirking responsibility, but explained exactly what I had failed to understand. Each time I did it, my face flushed as a feeling of shame and embarrassment washed over me. Like a punished child writing on the chalk board, I tried to write in my apology exactly what I did and why it was wrong.
Here’s the thing: It doesn’t just feel embarrassing to open up like this, it also feels good. I don’t know if it’s just me. I don’t know if it’s just my submissive side finding pleasure in the resulting shame and guilt, the perceived loss of power, or what. I’m pretty sure it’s just normal to feel good when making a sincere attempt at amends and trying to connect and build trust. I’m pretty sure it’s normal for honesty to feel good. But I haven’t seen any writing on this. All I’ve seen is writing on how hard it is to accept privilege but must be done for the greater good, how hard it is to let go of power, or even admit there’s something to let go of. And that leaves me feeling like the odd one out on this.
White Savior Atheism isn’t Exactly Full of Love, Either
Posted: March 14, 2012 Filed under: atheism, blog 15 Comments »(I’d like to thank blackenedbutterfly and several others who recently educated my ignorant white ass on this topic. I have made the same mistake outlined in this article, myself. Consider this post a primer for white people. If you want the real story, go to those who know best–PoC themselves.)
Natalie Reed recently wrote a blog post on her views regarding religion and the trans community. Or rather, her views regarding religion and the trans community, people of color, indigenous people, and so on. She claims that her target is “religious faith itself”, not Abrahamic religion. She claims that she isn’t racist or ethnocentric in her perspective because she condemns all religion equally.
She’s not the only white atheist to push this kind of argument. So has Greta Christina. In one of her more nuanced posts, Greta says that her main argument against religion is that atheism is more correct, not that religion is inherently harmful. That is all and good, except that we white atheists don’t leave well enough alone. Let’s be honest: Maybe we keep our opinions personal on an individual basis, but on the whole we stick our noses into places we don’t belong. Take, for instance, the recent billboard by American Atheists in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that targeted the black community.
This is where “I’m just more correct” goes horribly wrong, as Sikivu Hutchinson explains. Secular “reasoning” has driven well-meaning white activists to Africa, where they have done more harm than good (while pushing ulterior motives, to boot). Secular “reasoning” has driven well-meaning Western feminists into Islamic communities to tell women there the proper way to empower themselves. Guess what, that didn’t go as planned, either.
The takeaway lesson is that we do not empower other people to make better decisions by invading their cultures and telling them they’re wrong. When you dictate what others should believe from a position of privilege, all you do is kick people who are already down. White people already make ourselves into patriarchal authority figures; telling people of color what they should believe just amplifies that reality.
If you truly care about the harm religion causes in cultures outside of your own, then learn about those cultures. Sacrifice your own resources to help them–not to tell them the Right Way to do things, but to empower them to make their own decisions. First and foremost, keep quiet and listen. A proper scientist walks into new territory with humility. You step gently, you take careful measurements, you leave no trace. Atheist crusaders, by comparison, hack and slash their way through other people’s communities with no regard for who they crush in the process.
Do you think atheists are absent from non-white cultures? Do you think they want white people bursting into their world to tell their families what is right and what is wrong? Do you think the white atheist invasion of marginalized spaces helps atheists living in those spaces, or hurts them? Do you think your “rightness” on the subject of religion gives you the right to preach to communities you don’t belong to? Let atheists in Islamic countries speak for themselves. Let atheists in black and latin@ communities speak for themselves. Let African atheists speak for themselves. This is how we build community. An actual community, rather than a kingdom run by whites.
I’ll leave you once again with a person of color who says it better than I ever could, Kavita Ramdas on the related subject of authoritarian Western feminism.
We Need to Drop “Passing” from the Trans Lexicon
Posted: March 14, 2012 Filed under: blog, trans | Tags: cissexism, passing, trans, transgender 2 Comments »Note: Historically it was important for black people to pass as white to get ahead, just as it was important for Jews to pass as non-Jewish during Hitler’s time. For more on the history (and sometimes present state) of passing beyond the trans community, read this article from Transadvocate.
“Passing” is an inherently broken concept. You can only “pass” as something you’re not. To say a trans woman “passes” as a woman, is to say she isn’t really a woman. It is much more accurate to describe how one is read, not if one passes. “I was read as female at work today” is a lot more accurate than “I passed at work today”. Think about it: When cisgender people are misgendered (which happens often), is it accurate to say they weren’t passing? Does anyone ever hold cisgender people to the gold standard of passability? It never happens. Why do you think that is?
Gendering is an active process done by the observer, not the person being observed. When someone is gendered, they are being read as one gender or another by the observer. It is the observer’s beliefs, socialization, and cultural norms that decide how they gender someone when looking at them. Social gender is a collaborative act. Society constantly redefines which cues mean what, and its members adjust their appearance to fit the norm. The language of “passing”, however, unfairly places the onus of “proper” gender presentation on the person being observed. It says to trans, intersex, and gender non-conforming people, “if you’re harassed, it’s your fault!” It falsely describes gendering as a passive, natural process and encourages victim-blaming. It is never a trans person’s fault for being misgendered or victimized, but “passing” makes it so.
Check Out My (Chapbook’s) Backside!
Posted: March 12, 2012 Filed under: writing Leave a comment »That’s right folks, work on my first chapbook continues. I am 90% there. The manuscript, weighing in at a decent 33 pages, is formatted for print. I’ve chosen a printing service–CreateSpace, a subsidiary of Amazon, which means I’ll also get a listing on their main site. (Provided they don’t deem my material obscene, or too short to bother.) Pretty snazzy! All that’s left now is to finish the cover art, check a proof or two until everything is in order, publish, and then advertise.
I surprised myself and wrote a piece of ad copy I’m actually proud of:
Neither a titillating tell-all autobiography nor a cry for loving acceptance, Amy Dentata’s first chapbook defies the stereotypes of transgender women’s literature. Through poetry, short stories, and mini-essays, Bite tackles the intersection of child abuse and gender politics with a voice that is simultaneously shocking, hilarious, and provocative.
Fake (Yet Accurate) Praise for Bite:
“That was powerful! Life-changing! Now please go away so I can cry in a corner for a week.” - General Consensus Among Live Audiences
“I am a trans person or ally with a decent grasp of feminist and activist terminology, despise anti-trans bigotry, and think Bite is a must-read.” - The Author Just Described Her Target Audience
“What does ‘cisgender’ mean?” - Most Cisgender People
