Category: The Dish

Milo Scanlon reflects on his experience as a trans male sex worker. He describes how he’d “only used crack a few times when I [began] letting my dealer, easily 30 years my senior, fuck me in exchange for more”:

Gender identity and sex work intersected strangely. Though my crack dealer sometimes misgendered me, he also referred to me playfully as his “boyfriend,” putting his arm around me as I sat on his lap, hoping he would shotgun me a hit. I probably “passed” as male, with my shaved head, bound chest, hairy legs, and skinny physique, leaving no body fat for feminine curves. However, naked from the waist down, letting some guy stick his dick inside me, I didn’t feel particularly masculine. I didn’t feel particularly anything, besides bored, in pain, and craving my next high.

Many trans people experience “gender dysphoria”, a feeling of disconnect or discontent between our bodies and our minds. I believe this is part of why some trans people do sex work. It’s not our body, even though we’re stuck inside of it. We don’t feel like it’s ours. So exchanging sexual access to it for money, especially if we’re struggling to pay for drugs, hormones, surgery, or even food or rent, doesn’t seem so outrageous. We’re already disconnected.

Scanlon’s post is part of The Toast‘s excellent series on trans issues.

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano muses:

The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether beauty work is coded similarly to other forms of inconspicuous consumption. Education is a prime example of inconspicuous consumption—higher education costs money, and while financial aid makes it possible for plenty of bright, poor high school seniors to go to Ivy League schools, you’re also unlikely to run across a whole lot of Rockefellers at the local community college. And going to the sort of schools where you do find Rockefellers gives you a level of cultural capital you’re going to have a harder time finding in other ways—you pick up on certain language patterns, cultural references, experiences, and fashions that mark you as having access to a certain social class, regardless of what your paycheck says.

Prestigious education is a long-term investment, in other words, and we understand such forms of investment as being correlated with wealth, even more so than we correlate it with being merely rich. (As Chris Rock puts it on wealthy vs. rich: “Here’s the difference: Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his checks is wealthy.”)

I don’t want to lapse into stereotypes about Upper East Side housewives with their plastic surgery and expensive hairdos. But the fact is, there is a marked difference in the faces of women walking down East 86th Street in Manhattan and 86th Street in Queens, you know? Wealth enables you not to buy expensive foundation, but to buy the kind of skin creams, personalized skin care and access to the world’s best dermatologists, and long-term know-how that enables a wealthy older woman to have the sort of look that marks her as a wealthy older woman. That is: Wealth enables you to treat beauty as a long-term investment.

“The stories of women in war remain woefully undertold by journalists—as well as by the women who lived them,” writes Vanessa M. Gezari in a review of Helen Thorpe’s Soldier Girls. Gezari calls the book a “welcome corrective”:

The book follows three women serving in the Indiana National Guard through deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan—and, upon their return to Middle America, chronicles their difficult readjustments to civilian life. Thorpe’s narrative inevitably addresses large, systemic issues such as women’s changing roles in war and the ever-present danger of sexual assault. But her book is laudable for its clear focus on individuals and their idiosyncratic life stories. Her subjects are real women, sometimes likable, sometimes less so, who grapple with many of the challenges their male counterparts face, such as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. Thorpe’s subjects also struggle with more gender-specific dilemmas, such as reacclimating to motherhood after deployment and mollifying boyfriends who feel occasionally unnerved by the close bonds the women have formed with male soldiers who served alongside them. …

The three women at the heart of Thorpe’s story share a tender, familial bond that, like so much else in war literature, is generally ascribed to men. When Desma Brooks gets back from Afghanistan, neither her boyfriend nor her children greet her in the crowded gym filled with balloons and flags; instead, Michelle Fischer and another guardswoman have become her closest kin: “‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ Desma said. They drove to a hotel and they ordered take out food and they did nothing but watch movies on TV for two whole days.” This homecoming scene, short on conventional family sentiment, is an eloquent reminder of how women’s experiences are transforming military lore. Like the rest of the tale recounted in Soldier Girls, it also suggests how much of their story remains to be told.

Much more Dish on women in the military here.

(Photo: A US female soldier from Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment secures the area during a joint house-to-house search operation between Iraqi and US forces, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, on April 15, 2007. By Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images)