 Hi everybody, thank you for sticking around this long, I know it's running a bit over. I'm here to talk about a project I'm working on right now, which is a book. It's an anthology about trans people's experiences and lives and how to intersect with the internet. This project started last May, so May 2014, as a brainchild between me and my brother We're both trans, he's a book editor and author and I'm an application developer and we were like, what can we do together with our powers combined? And we came out for this book. Given we're both from similar backgrounds, literally, we had a trans-feminine editor join us. She had to leave the project recently, so if you know any really cool trans-feminine people out there with interest in editing and the internet, I encourage you to reach out to me, my contact information is on the website. But I have a treat for us here tonight because we've received the first round of essays, so I've taken excerpts from some of them with the permissions of the authors, and we'll actually be reading content that will later be edited and published in the book. So yeah, I don't know how long these will run, so I'm just going to go through as many as I possibly can. And I hope you enjoy it. So this first one is by an author named Michael Fluffy Robinson. It's called How Do Tamed Dragons. This is a story. This is a true story. It's not pretty. There's a land of dysphoria you touch through before you find yourself in the pit of overcompensating misogyny. You come to your first respite, but quickly the world will be plunged into darkness again. You must run quickly with your new comrades to avoid a new surge of hatred, spurred by knowing what you are missing by living online. You won't make it. Lowly will seep into you. You'll sink into it like quicksand until one shining friend reaches across the continental USA through their computer to save you. You'll rest again before setting off on new adventures into the forest of presentation experimentation. We'll encounter some people who will see you for who you are, familiar with those who will not. You'll find your clothes that fit, but they're mostly invisible. Unfortunately, that's kind of where the tale ends. But remember, dear reader, that's part of the story. In the hero's journey archetype, which every enterprising storyteller should know about, the hero comes upon a mentor, someone who propels them and leads them into greatness. For me, that mentor was the Internet. I imagined that it was a hunched, sugesious old crone with a nose nearly as long and crooked as an old tree branch. I awake, not a magician, as I've been, but as a warrior. Weapons I could hardly name, let alone use, were strapped to my body all over, and the old crone laughed in what some would call a wicked way. Come. And I did. For a long time, the Internet was a home, an escape, and an adventure simultaneously. It was there I first learned about the existence of the transgender experience. Imagine a confused teenager about to enter the war that is high school, as a little sissy without so much as a pair of knife for protection, suddenly being noticed and given a proper sword and shield. To be sure, the old crone didn't know. Those I played with, talked to, and took solace with on the Internet only knew that I both enjoyed what we did and that I was good at it. I became so good at slaying dragons that I was buried underneath their corpses, suffocating and alone. I was in college, I had a boyfriend, I had a job I loved. No one, and not even my boyfriend knew that I was non-binary. The only person that knew were the select few of my transgender friends online. I read stories, I spoke with them, and as I continued to compartmentalize my life, the longer I thought what I was doing was working, the more I crushed myself with my own issues. And I found out that even a dead dragon can still kill you. It was an epic battle. The Internet didn't save me from the battle, but it saved me every day since. The creation of community, even one as tenuous as I follow them, her, here, him, ooh, etc. on Twitter, has been what's kept this tomb tomb alive. A friend reached out to me and healed me. A whole community was built without my noticing. I began to wear makeup, something I'd only ever done in high school fervently, secretly, quickly taking it off after applying. I began to experiment with my presentation. I began to love my body. As others told me, it was something worth loving. I began to accept my commonality as intrinsically tied to who I am. The Internet helped me learn how to tame my dragons instead of slaying them. So that's one piece. And that's a bit on the magical real inside. So I thought I juxtaposed that with a more analytical piece from a scholar named Alexander Burrill, a Francophone scholar from Canada. This is called Anglo-Norativity Goes Viral on the Internet. Information access issues for Francophone trans people. I began my transition in 2008 when the Internet was already firmly implanted in modern life. As an academic, my first instinct after I realized I wanted to transition was to use the Internet to gather basic information. I was shocked to find what little information was available on the topic, even on Google. Then I realized my keywords were in French. As a scholar working on gender, queer, trans, and disability issues, I am used to searching in English. In fact, most of the literature related to my research and teaching interests are in English. However, when it comes to something that touches the deepest, most intimate, most emotional parts of your life and yourself, these default behaviors often conform to ideas patterned to behaviors learned long ago. Language fields are among these. Because my linguistic identity is that of a Francophone Canadian living in the province of Quebec, I first conceptualized my awakening trans consciousness in French. Five years later, 2013, I underwent bottom surgery in a country where neither English nor French is widely spoken. Imagine my surprise when my partner informed me that semi-conscious after general anesthesia and under the influence of powerful pain medication my first words and subsequent communications with the medical team were in English. I had so internalized the idea that receiving appropriate care after my surgery meant speaking English to the surgeons, nurses, and anesthetists, and other professionals that I spoke English as soon as I woke up, apparently disregarding the instincts and expectations regarding first language use in exceptional situations. Place side by side, these two experiences provide an interesting starting point for intersectional critical reflection on the different identity dimensions interlocked with trans bodies' identities practices. I would like to look briefly at how the linguistic dimension of identity intersects with trans identities. I offer critique of the English normativity that characterizes our contemporary world in a variety of spheres, cultural, epidemic, economic, including the internet. I argue that despite the desire of social movements, most social movements in Anglophone contexts remain completely unaware of the fact that being Anglophone also represents an unmarked identity, as with other dominant identities. We already know that the internet has been and is still a powerful tool that empowers and provides access to information for trans communities. It is important to consider the consequences of the ubiquity of the English language for those who do not speak it, for whom it is a second, third, or fourth language. I assert that Anglin normativity places a burden on trans people for whom English is not their first language. And I thought he had an interesting conclusion. At a time when Anglin normativity has gone viral on the internet, it is fair to say that my transition consisted not only in masculinizing my body, but also in a way of anglicizing my identity and language. I have a mortuary. This is by a writer named Evelyn Deshaigne. Queer, time, and place, gender identity, fan fiction, and music. When I was 18, I got on a tiny plane so small I had a propeller and went to Maryland. Where are you going? The border guard asked me. Massachusetts or Maryland? Maryland, Maryland. I'm so sorry, I've never gone before. So why are you going now? A friend. How did you meet this friend? Don't say the internet, I told myself. Don't say you met them from writing homoerotic fan fiction online. Don't. Through school, she moved out here last year and now I'm going to see her. The border guard was still unimpressed, but at least my nativity about this, that unity about the states, made a bit more sense. And what are you two doing? Going to a concert after catching up, obviously. Everything I told the border guard was true. We were going to see a concert, but catching up with one another and catching up with one another. But Monica or Victoria had never set foot inside Canada in their lives. We only knew one another from our live journal icons, which were never the real us. And then from awkwardly positioned Myspace photos. But those images, in addition to the story I told, was all we needed to feel close. Victoria's house was huge. I was staying with her, but she and Monica went to school together and I known each other for ages. So Monica was always at Victoria's too. Are you excited for tomorrow? Monica asked to see them. I nodded. I really was. But I was more excited to see the band with these two, plus another live journal friend called A. Because I had never done that before. No one liked the way I liked music when I was in high school. No one liked the band. I had liked the way I liked the band until I turned on my computer and left the real world for a little while. I would later learn that this divide between the real world and the online is something that Elizabeth Freeman calls chrono-normativity. When I was young, I liked to spend my time online and I liked to write fan fiction while I was there, which in itself isn't productive for. More than that, I liked to be someone else while I was online, a writer, and more often than not, a boy. Many theorists have discussed fan fiction in a critical academic manner, but hardly anyone talks about music fandom, especially music fan fiction. This gap in fandom knowledge has fueled most of my current academic interests, but I would be lying if I didn't say that most of my need to know wasn't also fueled by that week I spent in Maryland with Monica Victoria and A. A lot of people see music fan fiction since it's written, it's a story written about real people from the band as really creepy. No one studies it because the main theory on why people write fan fiction is because it subverts a source text. Fan fiction allows writers to take Kirk and Spock from Star Trek or Dean and Cass from Supernatural and make them gay because they crave the queer representation they never received on the TV show. But with real people, slash fan fiction, there is no source text. So what could fan writers be subverted? And why do it? I'll come back to this question for years until it finally occurred to me. There is a source text for these fan fics, but it's not a tangible narrative we used to see. The source text is their bodies, the band's vaguely masculine but still cisgender male bodies. The audience writing their fan words sees the potential for the band's bodies that manipulates them in whatever way they can in their stories. Fan writers see the bodies as something they can relate to, but also adopt and play with. This is the Ruth article about slash fiction. She makes the start of the discovery that by writing my body out of my stories I had, somehow written myself back into my body. In the same way Ruth uses the male body to discover her sexuality, many fan writers in fandom use cisgender male body as a way to discover their gender identity. I think I have time for one more. I guess I'll hold up. I didn't know how many I'd have. I have a lot. I have a ton of essays. We've received over 90 essays, which is amazing. We are right now in the process of editing the first and second rounds. We opened a second call to gather more trans women and more diversity in the author pool. We're looking to publish this work in spring of 2016. I encourage all of you to keep an eye out for that. It's currently called trans underscore. Don't have to simulate a cursor. The name might change, but please keep an eye out for it. If any of this interested you, those are some of the... a few of the many, many topics that are covered in this volume. So, thank you for your time.