Good evening, everybody, and welcome to our panel this evening.
I'm Gina Bigup.
I am the curator of the Translounge Program here at the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
I'd like to welcome you to this event.
Your moderators for this evening, Amelia Jones and Lea Mosta-Woy.
Is this working now?
Yes.
I'm Amelia.
I'm super glad to see everyone here, not the least, this amazing group of panelists.
I'm super happy to have Talia Betcher, Zachary Drucker, Sabelle Simone-Loreca, Hina Brian,
Bambi Solcedo, and Addison Vincent.
And the first thing we're going to do is just have you guys each introduce yourselves, however
you would like to do that.
And then Leon and I will have a little bit to say just about how this panel came to pass.
And then we're going to launch into a set of questions, very organic, very open, and
we're hoping at that point that the House selects can be on and that we can open up
to discussion as soon as possible because we're eager to really make this a casual and
interesting event.
So, Addison, do you want to start introducing yourself and then just go down the board?
Either way.
Well, hi there.
Okay, so hi there.
My name is Addison Vincent.
I am 23 years old.
I live in Orange County.
I work at Disneyland.
I am a friend of Feminine Gender Queer, with they, them pronouns, and a recent graduate
from Chapel University.
For me, you know, our trans movement and feminism are the same.
I mean, just the trans movement and trans activism is just another subcategory underneath
feminism.
I think that the roles are the same and it's not about abolishing gender.
I think it's about gender liberation and gender justice.
I think that we should all be celebrated for our gender identities and them to be negated.
Hi, my name is Sebel Samoa-Loreca.
I also go by my AKA, which is Ms. Blackie Mova, and it's a reason for that.
So, I am a commissioner for Los Angeles County Commissions on HIV.
I'm also a madam co-chair for the consumer caucus.
I am 49.
Well, I'll be 49 years old in August.
I'm 29 years of being HIV positive.
I've gone through hep C treatment and been cured, and I'm also living with cancer treatment.
So, there's a lot going on when you talk about things.
I work in the community and have been a spokesmodel within the community.
I've been working with the trans community around HIV positive and working with trans folks
to better themselves and learn how to live with HIV positive.
So, that's kind of like this.
Well, I was trying to fix this, but that's not good.
Well, first of all, I want to thank my superior power for giving me the opportunity to be here with you.
For those of you who are not able to understand, I just honor my higher power for giving me the opportunity to be here with all of you.
I also want to honor your presence, so thank you so much for taking the time to be here.
My name is Bambi Sancedo, and I am the president and CEO of the Trans-Latina Coalition.
My definition of a CEO is a community-elevated officer.
And I say that to say, because I am a community investment,
the community has the one who has uplifted me for me to be who I am today.
One of the things that we're asked to do is to talk about what we do and things like that.
And I don't even know where to begin.
I am a student, you know, I lead this organization, of course.
The Trans-Latina Coalition is a national advocacy organization, and we have a presentation on the 11 different states.
And we organized, obviously, to address the specific needs and issues of trans-Latinos who live in the United States.
However, last year our group came together, we had a strategic planning meeting with the support of different organizations.
And we decided that we were going to do both advocacy and also direct service provision to our community.
Our mission is to empower the trans community as a whole.
And, you know, I'm happy to report that the Trans-Latina Coalition now started to provide direct services to trans people who are getting released from detention centers.
Any frustration?
So, yes, thank you very much.
Obviously, you know, we work, a lot of the work that we do is for the liberation of our people.
But we also know that that is not going to happen any sooner.
And so we're trying to sort of like work and try to address the specific needs of our community.
And again, the way we envision the Trans-Latina Coalition, we are going to be an organization that supports and provides leadership development and economic development for trans people.
And so I'm in the process of developing the Center for Violence Prevention and Transgender Wellness, which will be a multi-profess, multi-center space where trans people can come to and access the different services that they may need.
Or if they just wanted to simply be, that would be the place where they will be.
So that's just one of the things I have to think of.
Yeah, and I'm a student, I'm graduating this June.
And, yeah, I don't know how much I can say.
I'm Keen O'Brien.
I'm transgender-identified.
He, him, pronouns.
I'm an educator.
I'm a community organizer.
I work as an activist, as a white anti-racist, activist, anti-judgmentification, anti-prison.
Those are the things I really care about a lot.
I'm a curator.
I got my MFA from KillArts.
Yeah, that's me.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Zachary Drucker.
I am a trans person, trans woman.
I was a gender queer person even when I was really young and decided that I was always going to be Zachary Drucker.
So I kept my name.
And with the Gandhi quote, the chain to wish to be in the world in mind,
I'm a proud sister to all of my trans and gender nonconforming community.
I had a proud participant of the LA LGBT Center and Translound.
I'm so excited to be here with all of you.
I'm an artist, a producer on a TV show, and a human, most of all.
Thank you very much.
Hi, my name is Palliott Betcher.
I'm a trans woman.
I know for sure.
She, all the way.
I am a professor and chair of the philosophy department of California State University of Los Angeles.
My scholarship is at the intersections of trans studies and feminist philosophy.
I'm currently working on a book entitled, A Person Who Does Intimacy in Trans-Feminist Philosophy.
Much of my philosophical inspiration comes from my connection to trans communities in Los Angeles.
I've done activist work, I've been on and off since the mid-90s.
I was involved in recommendations on LABP interaction with trans individuals,
and I currently sit on the City of Los Angeles Transgender Advisory Council.
I am the mother of two wonderful daughters.
Thank you so much.
So Leon, you're on.
Can you tell us a little bit about where this panel came from?
Hi, I'm Leon Mostavoy.
I'm very excited and honored that you are all the audience and have this wonderful panel here.
Thank you so much for coming and my distinguished co-moderator here that I'm so pleased to choose.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about how it kind of all happened in around actually a million and nine meeting.
I had my photography from the 1980s to 2000s was inducted in the One Archives last year in January and January 2015.
And the opening exhibition was my Market Street Cinema series that was shot over six months period in San Francisco in 1986 and 87.
I met Amelia at the opening night.
The series documented group of mostly queer strippers, an intimate look behind the scenes, sex positive, queer, gay and straight women who were like creating financial independence.
Sex work and displays of femininity and feminine sexuality was really frowned upon in the feminist world at that time.
It was really a pretty radical series when it came out in 1989, straight, gay, feminist.
Most people really deemed sex workers as politically interactive at that time.
And Amelia as one of the most respected academics and feminist at the time.
The fact that she was even there and took interest in my work I was like surprised and honored.
First thing I'm going to tell you, it was Amelia, I was walking around with Amelia exactly.
And I was so starstruck and I gotta say I grew up in LA next door to the director of Dynasty.
I grew up next to the stars and I don't care at all.
And I was so starstruck by these two women and I really was just such an Indian.
I didn't say anything at all.
And I thought I gotta be deemed myself.
I mean, I really have to.
And so a woman, a critic had just written an interview about the series.
The Market Street Cinema series.
I thought I don't really sound like such an idiot.
Maybe I could send it to Amelia and ask her if she wants to come back for a second to the closing.
And she was generous enough to spend her time and do that.
And we started focusing not so much on the past debates of fens and sexuality so much.
But on what was more confounding and more interesting to me and what I was talking about exploring
was how then as a transsexual male, I was perceived so differently in the same feminist queer community
and with the same artwork.
And how my physical appearance had now shifted so much.
And now it's sort of right about sort of a question like just the rights of me having a voice.
And just this sort of physical thing that was happening.
And Amelia and her partner had just briefly mentioned that she sort of saw that.
And I wanted to say that this first happened at my retrospective at Temple University in 2011.
It was a two-day seminar and the students had missed the first day where I had done all my trans identification.
What they saw the second day was what appeared to be was like a cis man just talking about lesbian pornography.
What's I missing? It's a really bad look.
I did not go over well.
And I was like, oh wow.
Okay, I really have to start reassessing how I appear in the world here.
So the conversation between myself and Amelia and other friends and allies over the last year
has really been about the visibility of trans people and trans politics being all inclusive.
And how to me we can change the face of feminism through all of this gender nonconforming and trans people.
And how we, just to be ourselves, just the fact that we exist, changes the conversation.
And then really just opening up and discussing just the many phases and diverse theories and stuff that are going on.
It's so vast and it's so fraught.
We thought it's not just for us.
We really have to bring this into this whole panel.
And that's how it really just all kind of opened up and started was this idea of doing that.
And just to then briefly describe myself and if I have to label myself, I'm a lot of these distinguished people
and my co-moderator, I'm not an academic.
I would label myself as a radical queer artist.
And my relationship to feminism is through my heart.
I'm a photographer.
And these my artistic voices of political and feminist vehicle to sort of push against the heteronormative paradigm out there.
I've always done that.
I'm sort of more like an humanitarian.
I've photographed sort of queer world around me to give understanding the same way I used to pour over National Geographic as a child.
Like, what are these people about?
Let me find out what they're about and get to know them.
And hopefully I do that to the world outside my own world.
This brings some understanding.
So just to say, you know, my public works, historically, it's really always been about feminism.
You know, female queer erotica, as I said.
Women sex workers, as I said, I did a lot of work around acta, women acta.
Myself and Susan Forrest, as it's always part of this, is actually doing videotaping this for us. Thank you.
Susan, we did this big project that was shown for the Women's Caucus at the International AIDS Conference in Geneva and stuff.
So it was really sort of a women's AIDS and all that.
And then after I transitioned, I would say that my first project, definitely my daughter tackles really that dilemma of being socialized,
female, and the social and familiar expectations that are put on one.
And then what does that look like as you are now coming into being seen as this male privileged person?
For me, it's sort of like, I have the keys, but I can't find the lock.
So, that's me.
But, you know, the pictures, they're diapictics.
And one picture, first, is transgender one, and they're in a coffin, just as the female side,
but he got arrested and then they're male first one and the other one.
And then next was sort of gender performativity and sort of gender performativity, but transphotography.
And then my last project, I just want to say, which is really bringing people together, I feel I am now with this panel,
it's really based on, it's called Transfigure Project.
And it's based on an old fashioned children's flip-flop.
They had and torso in other regions are all separated and you flip them around and nobody matches up.
And then that's really just to kind of show that you really can't tell.
And if you really can't put the bodies together and you're really not going to be able to put a person's sex or gender together,
then really what are you fighting against and you're with?
You don't really know what you're up against.
And with all that, that's sort of me.
Thank you very much.
So yes, figured out I'm Amelia Jones and I am just very briefly going to say something about my feminism.
Then I'm going to read a few sentences from the initial call that I sent to everybody on the panel
just to give a sense of kind of what we were trying to generate dialogue with.
And then I'm very happy to say I'm going to channel Sandy Stone, who was invited but couldn't come,
but meticulously went through all of our questions and answers in a hilarious and extremely intolerable fashion.
So that will then set the stage for the panelists to start thinking about those same questions.
So I am a feminist, serious curator and art historian. I am an academic.
I'm sorry that's become somewhat of a negative these days, but I can't disclimate.
I do have a job in an academic institution.
I would say that I don't feel radical at all in this setting with the kinds of struggles people here have had,
but I'm radical enough to have felt the effects of being marginalized within my field and the related fields that I work in,
just by virtue of the kind of work I do.
I've long felt the need for feminism to be more responsive to questions of power that don't necessarily connect
to the white, straight, identified, mold-class brands of the discourse that tend to dominate academic and mass media debates about feminism.
So I think nothing is more important to a vital social justice feminism,
as far as I'm concerned, as listening and broadening and forming new coalitional alliances to fight the power.
Feminism must structurally be anti-racist, queer, pro-trans, class-critical, among other films.
So I'm going to read, as I said, just a few sentences from the original email through which we invited these illustrious panelists here.
The relationship between feminism and trans.
And when I say trans in the email, I always indicated trans slash trans asterisk, but I'm not going to try to say that.
Just when I say trans now that we were trying to open up both possibilities.
The relationship between feminism and trans discourse has been complex and often fraught,
aiming in its most basic forms to redress inequities and oppressions based on perceived gender identity.
Feminism, in most of its second and third wave forms, has long been based primarily on a coalition of people recognized to be women.
Newly visible expressions of gender sex identification that cross over the binary lines, so central to normative culture, but also to some feminist challenges,
has put enormous pressure on the structure of political engagement.
Just reading ahead, on what can feminism be based in an era of complex gender sex identifications,
particularly those now articulated as trans.
This panel seeks to debate the relationship of feminist politics, which we take for granted to be essential to any critical discourse of about or around gender sex subjects,
to trans identifications, discourses, and expressions, which we also seem to be extremely valid and worthy of understanding and attention, et cetera.
Now you get to hear much more interesting of Sandy Stone.
I said this is the original list of questions, which I modified a little bit, but basically the ones will be addressing them.
Dear Amelia, you know I would love to come down there and be part of this because it sounds wonderful.
The reality is that unless the LGBT Center chooses to bring me down for something they want me to do in conjunction with it, I can't do it.
And then she goes on to say why she has to limit the number of events she does.
So instead of travel, I've tried to answer your questions as best I can.
I found them engaging and had fun doing it.
Please don't hesitate to write if you have more questions or comments, or just want to yell at me for some reason.
And I had, mistakenly, I had put her name twice on the list of panelists.
So the first thing she said was maybe the other Sandy Stone was in Connecticut.
And I said, well, it's just that I want to do so badly to put you down there twice.
So in answers to your questions, here we go.
Rejarian Therapist meets Zippy the Pinhead.
The first question is, do you identify whether or not the goals and interests of the feminist movement, the transgender or trans movement, are answered way?
There's a trans movement?
Question number two, how do you situate yourself in the different generations of feminist theories?
The feminist theory and debate and or trans theory and debate?
Her answer, well, people seem to care more about how they situate me than how I situate myself.
How much time do you have to talk about this?
The next question, do you feel women still exist as a coalitional category?
Sandy's answer, yes, if they didn't, everyone I met read, heard about or stumbled over in the dark alley would have to find something else to fight over.
The next question, which is actually two questions.
Does trans discourse make debates about gender, sex rights more or less essentializing?
Is there still a point in strategic essentialism or should we be attending to the mutability of sex, gender and identification instead?
Her answer, some scholars and others use strategic essentialism to fight oppression.
When you're back to the wall, you can exert energy to push yourself away from the wall to get momentum to attack.
That's one of my favorite answers.
Should gender sexuality be foregrounded in any feminist or trans politics rather than the more intersectional model of understanding gender sexuality in relation to other key identifications?
Sandy, when you're talking to a person who can see only red or green, it may help to describe the world in those terms before suggesting it.
There's stuff out there they can't see.
If you want more specifics, the fact that I may not believe in an authoritative category doesn't mean I won't carefully set one up before I blow it up.
The next question, who's allowed to speak for whom?
At your event, I'd probably be allowed to speak for whatever category I choose.
The Southern Baptist Convention, however, may be not so much.
In Mumbai, hejras are allowed to speak for hejras and Kerala may be not so much.
Of course, trans binary identifiers should be allowed in your favorite hot-button locale.
Some will blend in.
Your problems are going to come from the corner cases.
There will always be people who self-define as category A who appear to a certain percentage of others as member of category B.
It will always make some people uncomfortable because fast binary decisions are hardwired survival factors.
If a few million years ago you were quietly mooching around in the forest looking for tasty morsels,
and you heard a rustle behind you and you paused and thought,
now I wonder what that might mean?
Chances are none of us are your prejudice.
So we're fighting some very basic shit here.
Is this like the right sense of the top of your head?
Next question.
How has your physical transition, the metamorphosis of your body to F to M or M to F,
changed your relationship to the feminist movement?
Her answer.
While it's complicated, I'm still alive, so that's something.
Next question.
At what point, if any, do you think transgender people, physically, metamorphose in or out of the feminist movement,
trans actively, publicly speak on behalf of women in the feminist cause?
Answer.
Not quite sure what you mean.
Do you mean the points at which they are visible or invisible as trans or accepted or rejected for some reason or another?
Trans people who have carefully considered their reference frame vis-a-vis the concepts of woman and man and feminism
and still want to stick their necks out and sometimes do good by so doing.
But frequently, their analyses of their positionality are so in variance from how those self-same positionalities are perceived
by whatever segment of the demographic they're addressing, that the real-time results can be completely unpredictable.
Truth is, maybe nobody should ever speak about anything with a political component, which is to say anything at all.
That's what Gandalf advises Pippin, but everyone does so many things.
I'm almost done.
What do you believe are the present goals of the feminist movement and how does this affect you as a trans person?
Where do you see yourself situated in the movement moving forward?
Answer.
Oh, hell.
There is no feminist movement except as a media illusion.
There are a myriad of feminist movements and you can pretty much choose one or more and make up your own version of how they will affect me
and chances already will be right.
Final question.
As a trans person or trans ally, how do you think trans helps or hinders the feminist movement?
Answer.
Essentially the same answer as above.
Wait.
Essential is a really bad thing to say.
More or less the same thing as above there.
That's better.
So yeah, the first question that we asked everyone to think about and feel free to change the question if you want.
Or to answer it in any way that you like.
The question that we threw out at the beginning of the list kind of combined some of those questions Sandy was answering.
Basically what is your relationship to what you see as the goals of the feminist movement?
Do you identify with or not the goals and interests of the feminist movement and the transgender or trans movement?
I don't know how you guys want to begin.
Does one of you feel like leaping in?
Sure.
Okay.
You taste it on my tongue.
So I was speaking earlier when I said there's a reason for Miss Lady Muffin and so the reason for Miss Lady Muffin is kind of my alter ego in a sense.
She's from the 40s, she's a housewife.
She loves that whole tattoo.
I mean the emulation of a pen of pearl.
You know I love my homosexuality.
I love who I am as a woman as a trans woman and bringing that in.
And I love the whole 40s and 50s.
I don't say talk about me.
I don't consider myself in any kind of way being a feminist.
I love her man to open the door.
I love to have all of that in the sense at the same time.
I think as, you know, I was speaking to someone earlier and I was talking and stating that as an African American trans woman and when I look at being trans and cis women, my issues come up in the African American culture as we don't have those privileges to look at whether or not we work feminist or not.
Because if you look back from historical point of view, African American women were the caretakers, they were the providers.
They kind of helped a role of both mother and father during the times of slavery, during the same 70s because a lot of black men were doing things that put them in jail or in situations where they were fighting for certain rights where they were being put in jail.
So when I look at it from that perspective, it isn't, you know, culturally, I don't see being a feminist movement helping the African American culture and it doesn't affect the African American culture.
But when we talk about evolving that a little bit more than today and how it is a woman, you know, I heard a comment being said that can a trans person speak for women?
Can women speak for trans people or who can speak for each other and how we can speak for each other?
You know, and one of the things I was doing today was speaking for women's rights as being HIV positive and speaking for the rights of women around healthcare for their babies when they have newborns or in the process of having a baby and wanting to know how to better take care of themselves around HIV and AIDS.
And often you don't see a trans person in that position speaking because most women would say, how do you know what I'm going through in dealing with my newborn or how do you know what I'm going through in dealing with pregnancy?
But as in a sense, I can't speak in the sense of knowing what pregnancy is like and I can't speak in the sense that one of that resembles having a child. But I can speak on the health, in certain levels you can speak on the healthcare rather than as in what medications better work for you that doesn't work for the average child.
And when we talk about it from that point, I think there are some issues that come up and I think we have to almost kind of like pick our battles when we talk about the separation.
Because in the other sense, you know, it's one of those things where I don't often want to always speak, I'm going to speak for me real quick, because I mean this from people up.
As a trans woman and as an African American trans woman, I often don't want to always be considered put in the category of women.
And what that entails as healthcare and everything else that's me. As an African American trans woman myself, I have issues that I don't feel other trans women may even recognize that we have to deal with in that sense.
Coming from the early ons of transitioning, I transitioned during when we didn't have all these benefits and these regulations and the Constitution, all these privileges we have today.
I come from a time when trans wasn't even, you were still called a chick with a dick or a drag queen.
So when I look at it from that perspective, I have to say in the African American trans community women of color, we identify as women.
We don't look at it any further than that. But with today's youth and everything going on and the evolving of trans community, I think it brings a whole other issue of what that means and what women think means to each and every one of us.
Because to some degree that's changing and when you talk about women being changing, you have to look at what this feminist means again because you're separating and you're asking for certain rights and certain privileges and certain care where the equality of it is not always the same.
If I come from my culture as myself, I don't have the opportunity or the benefit of the doubt to say, well, I want this over that or I deserve this because the next woman's getting this.
Or as an African American woman, we're used to getting what we fight for and most women Caucasian women are put in a position to where the issues I had to deal with, well, the issues my mother would have to deal with aren't the same issues you deal with as a Caucasian or your female.
So when I look at it from those point of views, it's different for me and it's hard to, I have to take that step back and say, no, that's not how we look at issues.
Thank you.
