Dina’s Diner 5/9/16

IT’S BECOMING A YOUNG MAN’S GAME

Liam as Cruella

I found a news article I saved from last Halloween that I never used. The item was about a nine year old boy who had dressed up as Cruella deVille (from the 101 Dalmatians story). The boy’s father posted some photos of son Liam in Cruella drag on his Facebook page and some people criticized it as “unnatural” and worse for a young boy to be dressed as a woman for Halloween.

As you can see here, the final result is pretty amazing. A couple of months ago, I had an item here about another young boy who had a professional makeover with stunning results. A couple of years ago, a teenager named Cassidy Lynn was named the homecoming queen of his/her high school. Cassidy has a series of YouTube videos where she shows herself doing makeup, dressing sexily and vamping around convincingly while still barely old enough to drive. Actually, there are several You Tube videos of teen crossdressers/transgender teens doing makeup and transforming before the camera with remarkable skill.

When I got heavily involved in crossdressing, I was already in my thirties. Most of the fellow crossdressers I met through the Renaissance support group in the Philadelphia area were in the mid-thirties to mid-forties age bracket. It was fairly unusual to have a young-ish person show up at meetings or outings. This was the decade before the Internet exploded. It seemed that it took crossdressers a while to find each other — sometimes years. It took guys who wanted to crossdress a long time to figure it all out, get it together enough to actually become their feminine selves. For whatever reason, crossdressing (separate from trans or drag queens) involved a maturing period that didn’t reach full flower until somewhere around the big four-oh.

But now, things move faster. The Internet made crossdressing and transgenderism visible in all its many forms. The fast march of popular culture and trans acceptance is reducing the age at which people begin to identify and participate as transgender, crossdresser, or gender-queer. So now we have grade school age boys interested in cosmetics, trans kids becoming prom queens and kings, and androgynous twenty-somethings becoming runway models. This is not to say that middle-aged crossdressers are now dinosaurs. But the “minimum age” requirement is a lot lower than it used to be.

TRUE GRIT

Angela Duckworth

A week ago, I saw a CBS Morning News interview with Angela Duckworth, who has written a book out now titled, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. She has also done one of those TED talks about the subject of “grit,” what my parents’ generation called “stick-to-it-iveness.”

Duckworth’s research (she’s an Ivy League Ph.D. and former management consultant who gave it up to go teach grade schoolers) found that the qualities that she identifies as grit “beats the pants off I.Q., SAT scores, physical fitness and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will be successful in some situations.” She noticed this while teaching seventh-graders in New York. She developed a scale to assess the multiple factors that go into grit and measure it by individual. Some of those factors are courage, endurance, long-term outlook, confidence, and resilience.

In the CBS interview I saw, she pointed out that many talented people do not achieve the pinnacles of success that are often reached by people of lesser innate talents — but who had the grit to persevere, rebound from setbacks, or transform themselves to keep moving forward. We can probably all think of people like that — and others who flamed out, perhaps because they had a more lightweight approach to life.

In the item above, I mentioned that crossdressing is becoming a place where younger and younger practitioners are excelling where formerly it seemed more of an older demographic. And here is a case where grit can hold it’s own against youthful talent. I’ve seen a lot of Internet photos of pretty twenty-something crossdressers who don’t seem to be putting much effort into their transformations. And I’ve seen some older crossdressers who make a much better appearance because they “try harder.” They need to work harder in order to pull it off at all. Of course, appearance isn’t everything. Like “grit” it is just one factor in many that contribute to personal success.

AROUND THE WORLD

Hector Medina in Viva

The New York Times had a review of a film titled Viva in the Weekend Arts section, April 29, 2016. Viva is a movie about a Cuban drag queen in Havana but the film’s director is an Irishman, as is its screenwriter. The Times review was positive, feeling that the performances overcame some of the cliches of the story line which includes the macho father (a boxer in this case), the star-struck gay son, and the wise, protective Drag Mother.

I may never see this film but the review made me think (for the hundredth time) about the persistence of drag as a theatrical device. This is still true in cultures that are not very amenable to transgenderism, crossdressing or drag. Several years ago, I wrote an item about the prevalence of violence against trans people in Latin American countries. The film shows a lively gay/drag nightclub scene in Havana. A quick Internet search confirmed that Central and South American countries are high on the list of places with crime against trans people.

The Huffington Post website had an item (A Heartbreaking Look At The Struggle Of Cambodia’s LGBT Sex Worker Community) about a documentary film titled Lives Under the Red Light about LGBT sex workers in Cambodia. It appeared on the site May 4, 2016. As one might expect, things are not swell for sex workers in Cambodia. The HuffPost referenced a short clip with, “As the clip above shows, many…have experienced intense discrimination, assault and even gang rape.” The clip features a transgender prostitute who tells about a john who didn’t realize his “date” was not a biological female. It’s easy to be oblivious of the challenges and dangers for trans people in that part of the world given the omnipresence (it seems) of pretty, smiling ladyboys and all manner of Asian trans women on the Internet.

Many trans people in other parts of the world wished that their biggest problem was being banned from certain restrooms. Unfortunately, the same emotional forces are at work here as abroad.

PRINCE OF HEELS

Prince in Heels

The New York Times had an article in the April 24, 2016 Sunday Styles section headlined Prince’s Style was Rooted in Heels. As the article pointed out (and a subsequent Google search confirmed), Prince often wore shoes and boots that had high heels — not just “lifts” or stacked heels as many showbiz men wear — but real women’s-style three-inch heels.

Some attributed this to Prince’s short (5’2″ some said) stature but The Times article chalked it up simply to personal style preference. “He wore them, he said, not because he wanted to be taller but because ‘women like ’em.'” The Times article also said. “he assumed the tropes of kitsch femininity — lace, ruffles, sequins, peekaboo, and high heels — and transformed them into an in-your-face masculine sex appeal.”

That’s an interesting idea and one that I often puzzled over about the “hair bands” who also used feminized hair and makeup to promote their masculine sex appeal in a counter-intuitive mashup. The first time I saw Prince in a very early video, he was wearing (as I recall it) a bikini bottom and thigh high boots with pouffed up hair. Definitely some mixed signals, it would seem at first. Of course, we soon found out that Prince was nothing if not a world class ladies man who brought us Vanity, Apollonia, Carmen Electra and others.

The lesson here is that if you are remarkably talented, have a slender, athletic body, and are slight of build, you can wear ruffles and high heeled shoes and get away with it. But you and me, not so much.

Tags: crossdressing, featured, Identity, Transgender

Category: Transgender Fun & Entertainment, Transgender Opinion