Trans Talking

Sometimes, the good part about reporters/journalists is that they do things you might be interested in, but for whatever reason, can't or won't do yourself.

Like attending five-hour school board meetings or listening to long-winded speeches by the reigning leadership. Or even participating in a sub-culture.

(I'm a huge fan of Slate's human guinea pig column where Emily Yoffe does all sorts of interesting things such as becoming a papparazzo, performing as a drag king, nude modeling for an art class — basically all the things you might want to know what they are like, but that you would probably never, ever do yourself.)

At the Flyer, our resident sub-culture expert is probably Bianca Phillips. She has gone ghost-hunting on a number of occasions, spent time at The Farm, a commune in Summertown, Tennessee, and who could forget her weekend at the annual Furry Convention.

Last week, we sent her to a lecture entitled "How to Talk to a Tranny" (for you regular Flyer readers, that means her story will be out Wednesday/Thursday, depending on your favorite pick-up spot).

The next day, we were talking about the dos and don'ts of talking to transgendered people (tranny is one of the don'ts). I had a lot of follow-up questions (I generally have a lot of questions about everything!) and, as is also often the case, Bianca told me that most of them would be considered offensive. (Oops.) So that's good to know for the future.

The piece is pretty interesting. It cleared up a couple of things I was uncertain about — it's definitely worth a read if you get a chance later on in the week.