I picked up this story and movie trailer from the Advocate.com: The film is called Turning with Antony and the Johnsons and centers around Antony Hegarty and other transgender and androgynous artists:
" It started as part of the 2004 Whitney biennial, when Hegarty joined forces with Charles Atlas, the filmmaker behind The Legend of Leigh Bowery, to make Turning, a stage show that featured Hegarty singing, while various women, many androgynous and transgender, like Hegarty himself, climbed on stage. The women stood on moving platforms as video cameras, guided by Atlas, captured close-ups of their faces and projected them on giant screens. Hegarty describes it as a “hypnotic journey through this panorama of different meditations on feminine presence.” After bringing Turning around Europe and Hegarty’s homebase of New York in 2004 and 2006, a film version debuts Friday night at Manhattan’s IFC Center for a week long run."




 

"In the film, many of the women describe feeling connected through their associations with the nightclub world or other facets of city life that introduced them to like-minded people who allow them to be the women they’ve always desired to be. One transgender woman speaks eloquently of shedding her skin and bravely entering into a new identity. “It’s being asked of us as a species to undergo a radical transformation in the way we see ourselves and our relationship to the world,” Hegarty says. “The stakes have never been higher, we’ve never been more alienated in terms of having a sense of our impact on the natural world.” Both Turning’s director and star believe now couldn’t be a better time to bring Turning to a larger audience. “Charlie was reminding me that Turning was done in 2004 and 2006 which was in the depth of the Bush years. There was a strong sense we were swimming against the tide at the time and there didn’t seem an end in sight,” Hegarty says, pointing out that the stage show opens with a booming speech from Martin Luther King, Jr. Says Atlas,“I’m thrilled we’re releasing it when there’s a glimmer of hope coming back to our society." For more information on Turning, click here.

Uniquely German Gender

In 1972 Liza Minnelli headlined Caberet, a Bob Fosse directed movie about a female girlie club entertainer in Weimar Republic era Berlin who romanced two men while the Nazi Party rose to power around them. One of the other main characters was actor Joel Gray who entertained in partial or total drag.  Not drag as we know it in America but a German form of the era.

Recently, Bettina Rheims "Gender Studies" which essentially again presented a German look at androgyny and gender..not drag this time but still unique. Compare the pictures.

Take a look at one of the examples to your left.

For more go here.

Do you know "Art"

The "Art" I'm talking about is the "Art of Purging".
As I write on my book projects (I'm a hoarder of words), I discover aspects of my past that I have totally forgotten. What's that saying "I have forgotten more than most people know?"  In my case I'm pretty sure I've forgotten more because of my age!
For whatever reason all of the sudden I began to think about "purging". If you don't know, the term refers to the disposal of your feminine articles.

Looking back on the process, I came up with about three possibilities of how purging worked:
1.- Private. You took it upon yourself to throw your stuff away.
2.- Semi Private. You tossed a portion of your things out for someone else to see and kept the good.
3.-Total Dispersal. You took all of your feminine belongings and heaved them out of your world for someone else to see.

Regardless of the method one overriding memory came through to me-euphoria! I truthfully never purged much and never totally but the mere act of stuffing some of my girl stuff into trash bags and sending them to the trash was symbolically wonderful. I had finally faced the monster, beat her like a drum and was ready to resume a total masculine existence...Yeah right!

My fondest memory of a purge was when a friend of mine cleared out his storage unit of feminine contraband and gave me the pick of what I wanted which included my first real set of breast forms.

Of course the "tragedy" of purging is it doesn't work in the vast majority of cases. The euphoria and the great resolve to to separate one's self from the gender confusion departs quickly.

Estrogen Intensive Therapy

Today was visit number two to the hair salon to get my hair color "freshened".
A nice way to say-out with the gray roots.
This visit was yet another "first" in that I was totally feminine when I went today.
When I made the appointment last week, the receptionist changed my name from the male version my daughter originally gave them.  As you might remember I was told to come with about three days worth of beard growth to be evaluated for hair removal for my first visit.

This morning I had a relatively early appointment and really didn't know or care how many others I would encounter in what serves as a lobby in this salon. As it turned out, when I opened the door and walked in there were about five or six young women around the front desk.
Now it's been awhile since time has stopped in front of me.  What I mean is during various points in my transition, certain situations seemed to stop all of the life around me. I was moving in slow motion and the world was stopped or looking at me. This morning though,  I again added a couple extra seconds to the day as all the women just stopped at stared at me. I almost said "I come in peace earthling women. May I come in?"

In reality I just smiled and said "Good Morning" and all was fine. For many of them I may have been the only transgender person they ever knew for sure they encountered. They indeed let me in and even got me a cup of coffee.

As I sat and waited for the stylist, I felt I shouldn't have taken my estrogen today. I could have overdosed with all of it in the air in the salon and I loved it.
Overall,  the pampering and the overall effects today were about the same as visit number one. The big exception was I noticed the three or four other women also getting their hair done were more or less resigned to the process. I wondered how many visits will it take before I join that club too?

Finally I wonder how long it will take for the novelty of having a transgender customer to wear off?  Especially one who is like a kid in a candy store?

Just Couldn't Resist It!

Normally I try to pass along new pictures and new people here in Cyrsti's Condo. 
However I had to break that rule this time!

Smell and the Trans Girl

Recently, I seemed to have rediscovered a long lost sense of smell. "Back in the day" before the EPA started to regulate certain industries, I worked a summer job in a plating plant.
Very simply, I cadium and chrome plated electric fan parts in various open hot acid baths.  No masks...just there doing it. For years I believed the whole process hurt my sense of smell, until now.
Quite possibly you have heard of the sense of smell as part of human sexual attraction - specifically the female.
Now I'm not saying I have any heightened sexual attraction when I'm close to certain men but I can say I have been noticing odors such as tobacco and other smells as they walk by. For example I can smell a guy who works as a car mechanic.
The only way I can explain this new set of senses I have are the hormones I'm taking and the transgender transition process.
I actually have been quite socially dense most of my life so all of this has been quite the surprise.
It's no wonder I've seen women recoil and run when a guy walks by who just took a bath in aftershave lotion.

Cross Dressing in the Old West

Being the "historical" not "hysterical" (most of the time) I am, I've heard of this book but never really read a review.
It's called Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past by Peter Boag.
Here's a bit of the review from Terri Schlichenmeyer:

 "For women, the frontier was a man's world. There was adventure and prosperity there, and becoming a man as much as possible was a way to seize opportunity. Safety was another reason for appearing masculine, cross-dressing could be scandalous fun, and it could help escape punishment for criminal behavior. There were also women who believed themselves to be boys from birth. For smooth-faced men, it was common to dress as women for dances and parties because biological women were scarce. Men impersonated women to entertain others. In some Native American communities, "berdaches" were encouraged to embrace femininity. Like some women, males took on girlish appearances to escape crime, and then there were the men who simply wanted to "be" women. But for those men, and their female counterparts, life wasn't easy. Being arrested for the "crime" of wearing clothes for the opposite sex was common and cross-dressers were often shunned. Interestingly, however, their partners (usually same-sex) were generally socially accepted. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past is good, but long. Boag offers lots of excellent examples to back up his reasoning behind why these stories are largely hidden from history, and what he found will set western fans (not to mention screenwriters) on their ears. This is fascinating stuff, on many levels. And yet, the book has its distractions. It's very scholarly and often reads like a dissertation, which occasionally makes it hard to read if you're just looking for a peek at hidden history and not a lecture. That aside, because it uncovers a wealth of stories that are overdue for telling, I liked "Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past" and I think you will, too. If you're a Western History buff especially, you need to outfit yourself with this book soon."

It's a little pricey in today's world of E-books. Read more of the review here.

Transgender Brides

Very few trans women or men actually make it to the alter...publicly at least for the world to see and even fewer can afford a dress such as this!

Shinata Sangha