A new year & a new cartoon memoir
Hello and Happy New Year!
I hope you are well during these challenging times. I feel like every day I’m either replying to someone that “I’m not leaving the house unless I must” or encouraging others to “take care and be safe.” I'm ready for Covid to become endemic.
Last year many of you responded to my question on preferred email frequency. The winner by one vote is biweekly. So, henceforth, I'll be sending out Across and Beyond the second and fourth Thursday each month.
Professionally, I love this time of year, including the cold (weird, I know). January is the perfect month to refocus my priorities, consider where I want to take my writing business, this newsletter, and set new goals.
This year I'll be releasing one new piece of writing (or more) each quarter. This quarter's release will be Moxie, Vol. 2: A cartoon memoir (with some self-help bits).
A cartoon memoir? Yes. In the aughts I drew out probably 50-60 cartoons as a way to release my frustrations and anger at the world. The initial cartoons were terrible. They got better with time as I practiced. I'm not sure why I stopped.
This year's professional goal is FINISH. With that goal in mind, I've collected together many of the cartoons and written short paragraphs. These words are consumable on the toilet, if that's your jam.
I'll be sending out more information on the book -- who I've written it for, the purpose, and so on -- in two weeks.
In the meantime, I'm including a draft of the Introduction and a few additional cartoons, sans words.
Until next time,
Jay
__________
Biphobia
My naiveté surprises me, still. All the years before I began hormones in 1996 I’d imagined a kind of easy slide into masculinity — testosterone shots every two weeks, facial hair, muscle, proper pronouns, and all would be well. Instead, I found contradictions, conundrums, and hostility.
I and other trans people bore the brunt of explaining gender, often to people who preferred disdain or mockery. What is your gender, they asked, not to understand but to affirm a fiercely held position.
What is gender?
For them: A riddle, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma—the cisgender sense of transsexual, transgender, gender queer, or nonbinary people as the other, an impossible-to-interpret threat looming over bathrooms and pronouns.
In the mid-2000s I affirmed cisgender peoples' hostilities by creating a series of cartoons focused on the stupid and course behavior they exhibited. Over time, as I explored my own stupid and course behavior as a white transsexual man, the cartoons shifted, both in content and skill.
The image that graces this page was the first cartoon I ever drew. I titled it “Biphobia” and threw it up on my Moveable Type blog. The images are rendered as those of a child and are laughable. The content and tone, however, still resonate.
Common targets that appear here — eco-feminist, trans hating women, binary thinking, and willful ignorance — appear again and again in my early cartoon days. Later I focused on stupid and course behaviors of white FtM transsexuals. Naturally, I interrogated my stupid and course behavior, too. The words weren’t exactly the same, but I’d embarrassed myself a number of times when confronted with my whiteness.
Humor is the antidote to overthinking, Bob Mankoff writes in his brilliant memoir, How About Never: Is Never Good for You. Life is paradoxical, he continues, and humor revels in its own, and the world’s, contradictions.
Humor offers the only way to I’ve been able to live with other people’s hostilities and the conundrums of being a former lesbian becoming a man. It's also been a way to protect my naive, younger self. Otherwise, it would be too easy to blame myself for the conundrums.
The pages that follow contain a cartoon with words about what I’ve learned or unlearned in my 25+ years living as a man.These are my opinions. I don’t speak for anyone else but myself.
If, however, you find yourself in these images and words, I have fulfilled my mission — to provide a stress release for the bombs we carry inside of us. We need to live, if for no other reason to continue being a huge pain in their asses.
Dildo Dilemma
