Alexandra

The Basics

Name

Alexandra

Location

Brooklyn

About Me

About Me

I’m setting some ground rules for myself on here so that I don’t work myself into another breakdown.
Discussions I Will Not Engage With:
(1) Cis people discussing legitimacy of trans women’s genders (because duh);
(2) Cis people theorizing about what trans women experience in childhood (because there actually is quite a wealth of cis girlhood narratives (in all their diversity) and a near total dearth of comparably detailed and analytical trans female childhood narratives; also, massively sensitive area for me–minefield of psychological damage);
(3) Cis people discussing the ways in which trans women did/still do experience male privilege (we all did before transition and our internal feelings do not change that, but without the context of our transness and the absolutely excruciating tensions that those two factors create in us, it’s a silencing tactic and the power dynamic within queer communities is clearly not generally favorable toward trans women’s descriptions of our lived experiences–you can fuck right off with that).

All this in place, I think I’ll have a better time here and I’ll step on less toes at the same time. Win-win.

Check All That Apply

Lesbian, Trans Woman, Femme

Religion/Spirituality/Philosophy

Agnostic Atheist

Looking For

Queer Friends in my Area, Queer Friends on the Internet, Queer Friends to Make Out With, Business Contacts

Relationship Status

Single, Sleeping Around, It's Complicated, Damaged

Virtues

Diligence, intelligence, attention to detail, and is squirminess a virtue?

Vices

Whiskey, gin, insecurity, insecurity, and whiskey.

Are You Out To Your....

It's Complicated, Other

What I Like

Favorite Books

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” “Catch-22,” “Lord of the Rings,” “The Hobbit,””Ulysses,” “The Color Purple,” “Murphy,” “The Second Sex,” “Opened Ground,” “A Vindication of the Rights of Whores,” “The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas,” and “A Room of One’s Own.”

Favorite Queer Books

“Keeping You a Secret,” “Luna,” “Whipping Girl,” “Gender Outlaw,” “Normal Life,” “Gender Trouble” (We have disagreements on the extent of performativity, but I still like it a lot), “A Secret Woman,” “Secrets in the Stone,” and why yes, I AM a boring bookish nerdling.

Favorite Movies

“Once upon a Time in America,” “Nina’s Heavenly Delights,” “Brazil,” “Raging Bull,” “Better than Chocolate,” “The Evil Dead,” “Evil Dead 2,” “The Seventh Seal,” “The Seven Samurai,” and does “Doing It Ourselves” count? Porn is movies, right?

Favorite TV Shows

Pushing Daisies (I want to own everything Anna Friel wears in this, plus I think I had a crush on Swoosie Kurtz with an eye patch – it was a bit of a startling revelation, but not unpleasant!) Buffy (I don’t think I needed to say this), Angel, Dead Like Me, Mystery Science Theater, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Boston Legal, Ally McBeal.

Favorite Music

Basically everything from Irish folk through blues and bebop all the way to grunge: The Corrs, Cara Dillon, Blackmore’s Night, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, The Pogues, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, The Melvins, J.S. Bach, Isis, Boris, Cynic, Blue Oyster Cult, Primus.

Favorite Thing to Autostraddle

My pillow, apparently. But never consciously.

Favorite Thing on Autostraddle.com

Femme, trans*, and bi visibility? In my lesbian experience? Awesome!

Favorite Writers

Kim Addonizio, Alix Olson, Dean Spade, Maya Angelou, Julie Ann Peters, Julia Serano, Seamus Heaney, Rachel Pollack, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, John Donne, John Millington Synge, J.R.R. Tolkien, Geoffrey Chaucer, Virginia Woolf and this is getting hard to pare down…