Another Effing Sarah

Over the weekend there was a clip played on Fox News that went viral, as most things to do with Trump and the impeachment hearings have been. This clip is a little different; it plays into a narrative that others have been cautiously tapping into soundbites and rhetoric; this idea that Donald Trump is somehow ordained by God, or “the chosen one”. It’s been something he himself has dropped into interviews and press conferences, he was the chosen one to deal with China, even though he walked back any connotation to him being some kind of messiah. The damage was done, the well was poisoned, and the already religiously obsessed conservative evangelicals and Pentecostals had celebrated it with religious fervor. Rick Perry’s clip (because few people would follow up on what the interview actually was), would affirm the religiously republicans’ beliefs that Trump was some sort of religious figure. Normally anyone would say “listen to the whole interview or find the transcri...

New Marilyn Manson single drops by surprise: Curiously, some of Manson's best work has been his covers of others' work, like Gary Numan's "Down in the Park", Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams", Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus". Though, his attempt at covering Patti Smith's "Rock n Roll N*****" was absolutely a song any artist trying to be edgy should have stayed away from, I guess if anyone was going to throw themselves on that particular sword, it was going to be him. Having been thinking about this, Patti Smiths responses to being asked about the song, and wondering if I'd been  too critical in my assessment of his choice to cover it, I thought it deserved a brief context: it was a talking point by Smith around an essay being discussed at the time entitled "The White Negro" by Norman Mailer, where the derogatory term was talked about by way of applying it to a demographic of outsiders. She used the term to identify...

NB: LGBT+ because it's exhausting, not because of disrespect. You know what I mean, I know what I mean, I'm not leaving anybody out. Also, while this focuses on a particularly negative experience of LGBT+ media, I will follow it up on some amazing experiences of LGBT+ media, so keep your pitchforks on the wall for the time being, k? "You haven't seen RuPaul's Drag Race?!" Sometimes I feel like questions and expectations like this are going to form a recurring theme through my blog, because it's inevitably a recurring theme through my life (and later, my transition). It's like I'm expected to, as "part" of the community, supposed to be pro-everything that in some way depicts the community. Whether I agree with it or not. My support is supposed to be there 100% and I'm expected to engage with queer media with utmost devotion because that's "the cause". If I were to tell you that I kind of approach queer media in a si...

Edit: There's no identifying information within the post to identify you or point anyone in your direction. You have right of reply, but going by what you've put forth in text messages since, issuing something that would look even remotely transphobic wouldn't be the best thing for someone in your position to do. Don't bully me into shutting up. --- "From the mouth of you,  You tell your truth.  From the mouth of me,  Softly...  Hear me." - Dark Dark Dark - Hear me. One of the things that's been an interesting part of the last few weeks is this concept of juggling priorities. For anyone who has been even casually following on Facebook, I've had some issues with suddenly stopping one antidepressant at above maximum dose to switch to another, on top of severe exhaustion from lack of sleep, trying to keep on top of my mental health, juggling a relationship, as well as everything that goes along with transitioning. I say interesting, it impli...

... she's not. So, it’s been a little while since I have been spending time in the world as myself, and one of the questions or assumptions I get the most is around how this changes me as a person, or the things that I do or am into. It’s funny because it assumes that I am now, all of a sudden, a completely different person and that the person I used to be is discarded. I’m suddenly into dress shopping (WHY CAN'T I FIND PLAIN BLACK SKIRTS ANYWHERE?!), reality TV, and all the stereotypically girly things that go with being female. I did recently discover getting sheetfaced and the ritual of staying up, getting drunk, doing your nails and inflicting Heathers on your best friend during a sleepover (honestly, I don't think she was prepared for that  movie). Not going to lie, it’s perfectly valid. But here is a list of some of the things that interest me or I use to describe myself: Theology nerd David Lynch fan A little bit goth Artist Feminist LGBT...

Note: Part 5 got overwritten... by this post. Completely by accident. I'll rewrite it at some point, but oof. I was not thinking... Anyway. Let's jump back to part 1 for a moment. Not the whole post, just the part where I said it took thirty-eight years to feel comfortable in my own skin. I remember that day like it was yesterday... even though it was like three weeks ago now: M and I had traveled up to north of the bridge to retrieve Bx from under her desk; we got some KFC and sat on the beach and argued the ethics of feeding magpies chicken and whether it constituted some kind of cannibalism; and we listened to stories from Bx' grandfather and some pretty dreadful jokes. Then we packed a picnic dinner of assorted cheeses, leftover KFC, and some other swanky things and made our way down to a park by the river. Now, there are things that really kill me when travelling to new places, and it's the stupid things I take notice of that next to nobody else would pay a s...

After everything that had happened up until this point, it's safe to say I spiraled. Did I do it spectacularly? Was it a mess? Well... it was sex, alcohol, a lot of weed, a trip across to Auckland, experiencing sexual assault for the second time in my life, moving to Brisbane, getting engaged... and landing in the middle of a double murder investigation (which deserves a series of posts on its own). I managed to hit the ground in a way that only I could, but I also met a couple of genuinely amazing people through the absolute shit show I had found myself in. I think it was during all of the above that I was living as close to being Sarah than any other time in my life. The girl I was engaged to was someone I broached the topic of not feeling comfortable in my own skin with, and her response to it was to play with changing my name. Did I tell her that changing my name to something else that was masculine wasn't going to help the issue? No... but it did give me a bit of space...

The nineties were a curious time for transgender representation in the media. On one hand you had the brutal and destructive portrayals of transwomen especially in movies like Silence of the Lambs and The Crying Game , and then you had the other end of the spectrum in movies such as The Birdcage, Priscilla Queen of the Desert , and other outings that would prove to be problematic. But if you've been around any discussion I've taken part in that revolves around trans representation in film and media or Twin Peaks  (shameless plug: I reviewed it for Insights), you will inevitably hear me gush about David Duchovny who was somewhere beautifully in the middle with his portrayal of Denise. By this time the internalised transphobia had already set in and started chipping away at the idea of ever coming out as Sarah (look at me talking like a woke liberal special snowflake). Transexuals or transvestites were weird fetishists who got off sexually on wearing women's clothing. Buff...

Part 2 - Notes: First up: content warning. Second: not light reading Third: I couldn't find anywhere here for humour or something sweet, in fact this was utterly exhausting to write. I will make room in the next entry for something light, or a joke. I promise. Read gently. I wish there was an easy way of explaining how I understood myself and my predicament growing up. Sometimes it felt like something had gone wrong with my genetics and I was just the unfortunate girl caught in a meat-suit that didn't match her insides. Sometimes I thought I had done something disastrous in a previous life and this was my punishment. Like, really, want to know what I think "Hell" is? Spend every day seeing yourself in the mirror and feeling either disappointment, disgust, or that you were on the receiving end of a really bad cosmic joke. Sarah was the name I chose for myself in my imaginings of if I'd been born a girl instead. I saw myself as a redhead, pale, and always wi...

Let's jump back for a moment and rehash an explicit point I made in saying that myself as "Sarah", and myself as "Michael" aren't separate personalities, but presentations of the same person. "Sarah" is who I am and always identified as internally, and "Michael" is how I looked or presented to the world because... that's what I did and didn't know any better. Or there's my favourite analogy: Sarah is who pilots the meat-suit "Michael", but everyone thinks that the pilot is a boy, when in fact... the pilot is a girl. So talking about what comes next is easier to talk about these two aspects as different, but please understand... I'm perfectly sane (aside from PTSD, anxiety, depression, and a little paranoia... but you be me without acquiring these things, yeah?). So if this is confusing to you, then imagine how I felt? Do you understand how hard this is without falling back into philosophical talk, or theories o...

Read my review of Tool's album "Fear Inoculum" over at Insights  or read an expanded review here: Fear Inoculum  is the long awaited fifth album from progressive metal band Tool, an album that took 13 years to come to fruition, almost half the 29 years the band has been together. It’s an album steeped in psychology, theology, and social commentary set to a soundtrack that feels organic in the way it flows and breathes. Instead of pushing to create something entirely ground-breaking from scratch, Tool have worked to show how far they have come and what their past work would sound like if they were to revisit themes, and at times invoke the spirits of compositions past. This is partly where the contention lies; it’s not “new”, and at first listen this was what I walked away with. But that’s the trap I think they set with the recording, because inevitably, you’re going back for a second listen, because there was “something” you heard on the first pass and you want to ...

Thirty-eight years is how long it took me to be able to feel at home in my own skin. In all that time I lived with a secret that I couldn’t tell a lot of people, and the people I did tell I could probably count on one hand. How do you tell people that you were born wrong? How do you tell people that how you look is absolutely the antithesis of how you feel? How do you do this in a time growing up where people and members of your own family made jokes of you because you were the “gay of the family”, or when people in your social circles referred to people as “faggots”, “poofters”, and “fucking trannies”? It was always going to be a difficult task.  It’s ironic though, because in high school especially, it was later revealed that the people who had bullied me so relentlessly for apparently being gay (read: different, and them not possessing the capacity to even understand what the actual reasoning for this difference was), would be the ones who were having secret homosexual enc...