Dec. 1st, 2016

sistawendy: me in profile in a Renaissance dress at a party (contemplative red)
Two memoirs, which I recommend to different degrees and for different reasons.

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock - A trans woman who's now a writer in New York writes about growing up poor and mixed-race in Oakland, Texas, and Hawaii. She ended up getting some of the best and the worst in her life: poverty, childhood sexual abuse, a drug-addicted and macho father, selling sex to pay for SRS, but also an astounding number of supportive family members on both sides of her family in two parts of the country, plus the trans sex worker community in Honolulu. She sometimes digresses into Trans 101, which I'm sure most of her audience needs, but I'm the amen chorus for those parts.

Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded by Hannah Hart - Hart is a YouTuber who found success through, among other things, a channel called "My Drunk Kitchen". I'd seen a few of her videos, and I expected something similarly light from the book. Nope. Hart's mother has been debilitated by schizophrenia for most of Hart's life, and Hart herself didn't exactly escape psychologically unscathed. Oh by the way, Hart's a lesbian whose birth father is a Jehovah's Witness. Fun times, right? But what astounds me is just how tough and how smart - emotionally and otherwise - Hart has been in handling all this. And through it all you can still see some of the self-effacing charm that made her a success. I found it inspiring. If you only want to read one of these two books, I almost hate to say it being trans myself, but this is the one.

Yup, still sending off letters to electors. I'm about halfway through Texas, and I'm a little tired of writing my return address on envelopes.

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sistawendy: a head shot of me smiling, taken in front of Canlis for a 2021 KUOW article (Default)
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