Char

Tonights guest Char is an academic of religion with a minor in ethics, essay writer in her free time, amateur philosopher, divorced single mother of two, a socialist feminist reading to get a broader understanding of her history, and finding as she read and talk on feminist boards, raids by self-proclaimed M2F trans people whom brow-beat, insult, label, and threaten women for daring to ask simple questions. Char is a female child of immigrants, and as such struggled greatly with her identity growing up in a foreign culture. She quotes: “I came from a socialist country to America during the cold war, a time of cultural hegemony fanaticism, where anyone "different" was assumed to be the red menace. And so I got mocked, daily, relentlessly, for having an accent and having to go to speech therapy class. I got made fun of for the foreign food in my lunch sack, for not dressing American style, for not adapting well to normative American cultural behavior. It wasn't just the kids, it was the teachers too.

When I would hear the lectures about socialism in which my teacher would say socialist countries are so bad that people wait in line for days for toilet paper and bread - i would raise my little hand and tell the teacher that was a lie, I just came from a socialist country, and not all of them are like that - she would call me a commie pinko and kick me out, encouraging the kids to laugh, most of my child hood memories were hiding behind coats in the hallway filled with shame at not being American.

Those six years of daily harassment led to an identity crisis from hell, a dysphoria concerning cultural identity, which is known as "trans ethnic" a term used for folks like me and adoptees from other countries that disassociate because they never feel quite American, nor quite foreign either...

All that dysphoria led me into studying the indigenous culture (that was my way of connecting to America, the empire was disgusting to me, but it's original history was something I could relate to because it reminded me of my own pagan nature dwelling ancestors that had an animistic belief system and life style).

But the identity crisis didn't end there. In addition to struggling to figure out what I was culturally, I also was questioning my femininity, since my ideal of womanhood was different than American women, and it my sexual orientation as well as kinks (which is something I still haven't even solved despite all these years!) It resulted in my becoming a big proponent of the underdog on a cultural level, and an advocate of the LGBT. By the age of 19 (I'm 39 now) I was surrounding myself with ethnic minorities, immigrants, gays and trans people because I couldn't identify with the middle class, privileged, non identity-crisis having wasps that dominated my neighborhood .

TELEVISION INTERVIEW

ABOUT CHAR

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT HER WEBSITE AND CONTACT HER

DETRANS

TELEVISION INTERVIEW