As staunchly pro-American as he is, it’s no surprise that Saakashvili ranks pretty near the top of Vladimir Putin’s very long enemies list. During the 2008 August War between Russia and Georgia, Putin famously told French President Nicolas Sarkozy that he planned to overthrow the Georgian leader and “hang him by the balls.” Saakashvili reportedly referred to the Russian president as “Lili-Putin,” a reference to his height. Things haven’t improved much since then. Saakashvili said last year that Putin “likes to lie.” And when asked in a televised Q&A this April whether he had really threatened to hang Saakashvili “by a certain body part,” Putin quipped, “Why just one?”
Many trans people are forced into sex work in order to pay for the medical aspects of gender transition, and often this puts them at risk of drug abuse and physical harm. I’ve been there myself. I live in Britain, where transgender people are entitled to surgery and psychotherapy on the NHS – but even here we have to pay for things such as laser hair removal, seen as a “cosmetic” luxury by the NHS, but essential for any trans woman cursed with thick stubble. In the US, health insurance varies from state to state, leaving some transgender Americans covered, others to fend for themselves.
That doesn’t mean Caitlyn Jenner’s transition isn’t significant. We need trans people from all walks of life challenging perceptions at every level of society. Transgender knows no boundaries when it comes to age, race or social class. As Laura Jane Grace, another American trans hero, pointed out to me on Sunday, Jenner matters culturally – and we need people who inhabit that space to complement the work being done at grassroots level to improve life for trans people.
Google is largely failing to diversify its workforce beyond white and Asian men even though it hired women to fill one in every five of its openings for computer programmers and other high-paying technology jobs last year.
A curiosity of the X-Men is that, in this era when identity politics are on an upswing, the X-Men are singularly unequipped to deal with it directly; they only seem able to approach it through the metaphor of mutant status. You can give your cast a wonderfully diverse range of back stories and beliefs, but in practice it all gets overshadowed by them being mutants – all the more so in the years since House of M, where the mutants have largely been holed up in big campuses trying to build their own separatist communities. This leaves depressingly little room for characters to actually express any individual back story they might have, or any other aspect of their identities – even though, for most of us, identity is surely something that stems from a combination of factors. For the most part, these characters have simply ceased to exist in, or at least interact with, anything approaching the real world.
June 1
I’m reading a book right now called Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has The Time, by Brigid Schulte; I picked it up as an impulse on Saturday, recovering from a Friday that entirely got away from me and left me feeling just like the title. The week had utterly gotten away from me, I’d been thinking that morning, throwing self-recriminations at myself; the month had completely gotten away from me. My concentration was feeling lost, and I was feeling overworked and exhausted. Something has to change was in my head, and so the discovery of this book seemed — if not a godsend, then at least a happy coincidence.
It’s a fascinating book, filled with pieces of information at once pertinent to my day-to-day existence and also horrifying (If you take a 30 second break from what you’re doing to answer an email, it takes five minutes to return to the state of concentration you were in before, for example — the number of times I do that each day explains why my concentration has been feeling so scattered lately) and something that makes me both concerned for the state of the world — everyone is overwhelmed! — and a little less like I’m fucking up personally, if that makes sense.
That said, I’m not at the point where the book suggests how to make things less stressful and manage my time better, merely the point where I keep being told how important leisure is (I knew that). I can’t wait to get further and learn what to do instead of my current predicament, but ironically, I don’t have enough time to do so just yet.