Reloaded. Relaunched. Revolution.

I have decided to relaunch this blog since it seems that, despite having a very full and engaged life, body issues remain for me (and I am imagining others) an inescapable personal, political, and cultural priority. The normative remains deeply entrenched and in spite of growing awareness around its damaging discourses, shows no sign of surrendering. Why? Who keeps it alive and to what purpose? How is it maintained? Who does it sustain?

A brief Q & A in the name of transparency:

 - Let's get this out of the way first: I am a transitioning male-to-female transsexual. Now I have never seen a single person remain ambivalent to that;  even those who shrug it off as if to say "No big deal," belie their politics. (Because that you would feel obligated to make that supposedly benign declaration is actually responsive to an ongoing controversy.) Needless to say, body issues take on a special importance. That does not mean that they are any more or less important than someone else's concerns. You may even find some equivalency.
As the name implies, this blog is about bodyism - an internal bias towards a physical normative which tends to reward adherents and punish - punitively, often cruelly - those who question or resist it. If you have issues with transsexuality or transgenderism, this is not that forum. I have no patience for attacks whether it comes from the cisgendered or transgender community. There are other wonderful online battlegrounds to practice scorched-earth politics. This blog will not be one of them.

 - "F**k My Bodyism" was the title of a diary entry I wrote in a college seminar called Gendered Bodies. It dealt with coming across my own bodyism while observing someone - at the time a friend - scrambling about in a tree. I was pretty ashamed, appalled, and agitated at myself when I came across this. But I think all of that uncomfortable cognitive dissonance leads to both Awareness and a continuing Evolution.

 - While this is not a hard-and-fast blog rule of mine, I tend toward more dialectic than a debate. I am not about needing to feel right/righteous by proving you wrong. I think truth is more often than not found in the dialogue.

Hope you join in the discussion,