New Transgender Screen Love Interest

From the Advocate:

"Jason Segel recently confessed to Rolling Stone that Simone, his character Peter’s love interest in the new deliciously surrealist AMC series Dispatches From Elsewhere, was not originally written as a transgender character. This is, until he met captivating Hollywood newcomer, Eve Lindley.

Jason Segel and Eve Lindley

“The only other time this has happened was when Russell Brand came in to read for [Forgetting Sarah] Marshall. I’d originally written his part to be a straight-laced British author, like a Hugh Grant type. Then Russell came in, and gave me something entirely better,” Segel told RS. “I felt the same way about Eve when she auditioned — Simone was not written as a trans character. She made Simone so much richer, more complicated, gave her so much more depth. It changed the whole project. The love story that emerges between Peter and Simone is…it’s one of the things I’m most proud of with the show. And that’s all due to her. But I didn’t want to make her gender identity her defining characteristic. It isn’t that way for Peter, or Fredwyn, or Janice, so why should it be for her?”

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Transphobia Lives On

Recently I read a story on Facebook from a person I know who is a transgender short haul truck driver. I have been fortunate enough to have been around her since her earliest struggles with coming out during the cross dresser - transgender support group meetings I have attended on and off for years now. I have seen her tentative steps out of the closet and into the world. It turns out yesterday, she had a very traumatic experience at one of her stops where she was delivering freight.  Being as family orientated as I can, the guy checking in the delivery went off on a loud tangent to other workers on how there was a tr-nny in the office who wanted to perform some sort of sex act on him.

My friend Vennessa  definitely  took it better than I could have. She calmly finished her business and left. I am fairly sure I would have asked to talk to his boss.

It's a shame transphobia still has to exist in the world today and I know I am speaking to the choir by bringing it up in the blog. Plus, it's probably true the guy in question also had a few dresses stashed away in his closet or watches gay porn.

As I go about my life in the little cocoon I have constructed, I am so fortunate to be accepted as my true self. It's rare when I go out without my partner Liz who contributes to some sort of normalcy to the general public. It's exceedingly rare when we encounter anyone who questions my genderality. Plus the groups of people we are involved with all accept me for who I am.

Even still, I am always on guard for the time again when I will encounter the hate of gender transphobia.

Phia Menard

From France:

Phia Ménard founded the Non Nova company in 1998. The name comes from two words of a Latin quote that is her motto: “We invent nothing. We just see things differently.” Her earliest works, halfway between juggling, the discipline in which she initially trained, and dance, which she gradually embraced, were immediately open to the world. But the decisive turning point came in 2008, when the piece PPP, for Position Parallèle au Plancher (“Position Parallel to the Floor”) premiered at Subsistances in Lyon. Phia Ménard called this solo, which she performed herself, her “first work about ice and identity”. Based on the transition of a natural element (ice into water), it was an artistic bombshell. 

I love the quote! "We invent nothing, we just see things differently."

Recently, Phia was at the center of a storm of controversy when her show was cancelled to make way for tRump's main Uncle Tom, Kanye West's so called prayer service.