Trans* Success
Concerned?
Worried about the future?
Scared you won't be able to succeed?
By trans people about trans people.
These are our role models.
Welcome to trans* success.
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Hey everyone. My name is Jack and I am a senior at Montserrat College of Art. I’d like to invite everyone in the Boston area to come to my gallery group show, Some Things Take Time.
I am a photographer, videographer and sound artist whose work is consistently presented in a provocative manner and engages the viewer to participate. My thesis work is a multimedia instillation that explores gender issues through a series of personal artworks, conveying the life of someone who is transgender.
Some Things Take Time is the senior thesis exhibition of seven Montserrat College of Art graduating students. It features the work of artists Jon Bolles, Brittany Carr, Hannah Imbesi, Jack Moffitt, Elizabeth O’Toole, Tamara Trudeau and Amanda Woronecki.
Where:
301 Gallery
301 Cabot Street
Beverly, MA 01915
Exhibit Dates:
March 26, 2012 – March 30, 2012
Artist Reception: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5-8pm (Refreshments will be served)
Gallery hours: Monday through Friday 10am-2pm
The exhibit is free and open to the public.Hope to see you there!
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Marci L. Bowers is an American gynecologist, and is viewed as an innovator in the field of transgender surgery, as well as a pioneer, being the first transsexual woman to be performing the surgery. Bowers graduated from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1986, where she was president of both her class, and the entire student body.
Bowers later went on to study under the late Dr. Stanley Biber, a surgeon who performed over 4,000 transgender surgeries, who is credited for giving Trinidad the title of “Sex Change Capital of the World.” She also operated a surgical practice in Trinidad, Colorado. Though has more recently moved her practice to California in December 2010.
Before moving to Trinidad, Bowers had a successful practice at the PolyClinic in Seattle, and has delivered over 2000 babies. Served as Obstetrics and Gynecology Department Chairperson at Swedish (Providence) Medical Center, and was named the only physician member of the Washington State midwifery Board. She was also named one of America’s Best Physicians for the 2002 to 2003 awards, and is a member-elect of the European Academy of Sciences.
When Biber retired in 2003 at the age of 80, Bowers took over his practice, and since then, has done over 300 sexual reassignment surgeries, performing about five operations per week at Mt. San Rafael hospital. Bowers says her surgeries bring an estimated $1.6 million per year to the hospital; she performs an average of 130 surgeries per year and charges $21,500 per MTF genital reassignment surgery, a substantial portion of which covers hospital costs. She also puts her expertise in vaginoplasty at the disposal of victims of female genital mutilation, whom she does not charge for surgery. -
Jason Robert Ballard is a 24 year old from all over New York State. He first discovered his need to present male when he was 13 in a chat room. At age 17, he came out to his mother and then soon the rest of his family and for his 18th birthday received new pronouns and cards directed at male genders. He’s currently been on testosterone therapy for 3 years and underwent male chest reconstruction Fall ‘10 with Dr Kevin MaGuire of Cooperstown, NY. He has gained experience speaking through being out and open about being transgender. Having opportunities to put a friendly face to the cause where ever he goes and the conversation happens to come up. Whether it’s in front of 100+ people at a panel, or privately to a co-worker, sharing his experiences with the world has started to come naturally.
As co-founder of a quickly growing resource for the Trans* community, The Self Made Men - Jason spends almost all of his time taking baby steps toward goals of wide spread public education and Trans* awareness. Uniting resources, advertising for funds toward future engagements and speaking at transgender panels, lectures and class room discussions.
Jason has attended a few different colleges, landing finally on Nazareth in Rochester, NY. He is an advertising major, focusing on brand identity and public relations and therefore is in charge of the look and feel of The Self Made Men as well as the website and advertising. The Self Made Men actually started as a graphic design assignment meant to educate his classmates. When the professor said “design a logo and brand for your company and run with it…” even she herself says she never dreamed he’d have taken it this seriously, and this far. The Self Made Men became more than just a brand or logo. With over 700 people using it’s new pen pal system, about 250 daily views and an ever growing list of transgender links and resources, he definitely received an A on that assignment.
Jason goals are to finish his degree in advertising and one day take The Self Made Men to a point where it can pay it’s employees. A solid, building location full of local resources and the ability to open smaller chapters around the world. The staff as a whole believes that their first goal is toward public education, and that sales and traffic and being widely known will all follow that as long as they continue to do what they do with all of their heart.
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Maki Yamazaki is a musician, artist and activist living in the UK. She is the creative mind behind Dr. Carmilla, a retrospective-futurist cabaret about a lesbian vampire in space, and also works as a producer and head of Silvana Studio.
Dr. Carmilla tells the twisted tales of a dystopian future following WWII having ended very differently. Her unique blend of dieselpunk cabaret and visual kei defies conventional classification and has been compared to the likes of Amanda Palmer, David Bowie, Nick Cave and Pink Floyd. From jazzed-up ballads of nuclear fallout, to the ever-unfolding, multiple-song stories of infection and love, her music invites audiences to laugh, cry or cringe in amusement.
- From The Uplink
Possibly the first openly out trans retrospective-futurist (ie. steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk, etc.), Maki Yamazaki post blogs and vlogs about social justice concerning trans, feminist, disability and asexual issues.
She has also been interviewed recently by Bolt Magazine (date TBA) where she discusses some of these issues, and about her upcoming documentary ”All About Us (Art, Activism and People I Love)” in which she aims to raise awareness and promote art art and activism from members of minority groups, including a number of trans-identified individuals from across the world.
In 2009, Maki Yamazaki founded Trans-script in association with the Oxford City Amnesty International group. This event ran for Oxford’s Pride festivals during 2009 & 2010, where she ran and performed these events in collaboration with a number of other trans individuals, including the author, Roz Kaveney. The show inspired others to create another event for the London Pride festival by the same name in 2010.She also is involved with the queer, feminist burlesque collective, ‘Lashings of Ginger Beer’ which, although she now is locationally a lot further from now, she hopes to get more involved with again in the future.
Regarding issues of being openly out, Maki Yamazaki has to say in her own words:It’s not always easy being openly trans. You’re almost certainly going to run into some sort of trouble now and then, but this is something that is so incredibly important to me. After all, how am I supposed to have the same freedom and rights that cisgender people enjoy without those who have come before me as out trans people?
Stealth can really be important for a number of trans people, but personally? I can’t sit quietly and watch others suffer, especially not folk of my own community, and pretend that it’s all fine and dandy. The world is not okay and some of us have an opportunity to make a huge difference. It’s Transgender Remembrance Day today and we should think about how we’re going to protect those alive and prevent these tragedies from happening to anyone else. We can’t do that if all of us have our heads buried in the sand, even though, as I mentioned before, there are definitely those who, for various reasons, cannot be out.
Still, in my life I’ve seen the wonderful effect that being open can have. I’ve met a number of trans people who’ve been able to find the strength to transition through meeting me, which is one of the most fantastic things I can think of. Living your life the way that you need to is important.
I’ve also seen things change legally for the better, which is rarely, if ever, solely the work of cisgender individuals.
Maki Yamazaki is signed to Gilded Age Records and her website for Dr. Carmilla can be found here.
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Mirha-Soleil Ross is a video and performance artist, a transsexual and sex worker rights activist. Her work has been presented at festivals in Canada, Australia, Hungary, France, Ireland, Germany, England, Spain, Holland, and the US.
From 1992-1995, she edited and published, with Xanthra Mackay, GENDERTRASH, a political magazine for transsexual and transgendered people. In 1997, she founded COUNTING PAST 2, (Canada’s first multidisciplinary art festival dedicated to the presentation of music, dance, film, performance, and spoken word created by Canadian and International transsexual and transgendered artists. During her 3 years as curator and producer of the festival, she presented the Canadian premieres of such work as Christopher Lee’s Trappings of Transhood, Alley of the Tranny Boys, Sex, Flesh and Blood; Alec Butler’s Adventures’ of Pussy Boy, Hans Scheirl’s cinematographic hand-crafted masterpiece DANDY DUST, The Intersex Society of North America’s groundbreaking Hermaphrodites Speak Out!, as well as live performances by Mohawk performance artist AIYYANA MARACLE, Blackfoot/Latino/Sephardic Poet Max Wolf Valerio and Chicago-based intersex-leatherdyke activist Lynnell Stephani Long. Ross has also curated programs of literature, performance art and video work for festivals, MAYWORKS (Working the Screen: Sex Worker Films and Videos), literary series, CLIT LIT (Trans-Sex Fictions), and for artist-run centres such as Ed Video and Media Arts’ Centre (Trans-Canada, co-curated with James Nattal).
In 1998, she joined the staff at the 519 Church Street Community Center to found MEAL-TRANS, Toronto’s first publicly funded multi-services, peer-run program for low income and street-active transsexual and transgendered people in the city. At the outset of her two years as Coordinator of MEAL-TRANS, Ross had managed to secure funding for a TS/TG sex worker HIV/AIDS Prevention program, for a TS/TG peer-run counseling Program, as well as help a local trans man activist Rupert Raj start a support group for trans men. From 1995 to 2000, she conducted educational workshops for the front-line and managerial staff of over 50 social service and health care agencies in Toronto and the surrounding region and served as consultant for various researchers investigating transsexual and transgendered people’s experiences within the homeless and battered women’s shelter system, TS/TG people’s experiences with human rights violation, police brutality, addiction, incarceration, and especially, transsexual sex workers’ experiences with violence.
From 1996-2000, she also hosted ANIMAL VOICES, a weekly animal rights radio on CIUT 89.5 FM, and also produced numerous radio shows on topics such as Lesbian sexuality and disability, transsexuals’ experiences with the Canadian Immigration system, and AIDS advocacy.
In 2001, she was elected Grand Marshall for the Toronto LGBT Pride Parade, becoming the first transsexual in Canada to be granted such an honour, in recognition for her work on behalf of the transsexual, transgender and sex worker communities. Her work is featured in The Romance of Transgression: Queer Sexualities, Nations, Cinéma by Thomas Waugh (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), as well as in the NFB documentary In the Flesh (directed by Gordon McLennan, 1998).
Mirha-Soleil has lived with her partner Mark Karbusicky since 1997. They met at an anarchist-run bookstore called Who’s Emma where Mark was volunteering. They both got high on some strong organic coffee called “Body Mind & Soul” and Mirha-Soleil invited him to walk her dog OLGA and meet ALICE and LANGSTON… We could say she is sneaky! Mirha-Soleil grew up in a cambouse on the south shore of Montréal with lots of cats and dogs, an illiterate but resourceful father, and a colorful, foulmouthed Metis maternal family originally from Maskinongé (Eastern Québec). -
An up and coming Trans Male vocalist. A local rising talent in the Southern California area. With the release of a Dec 2011 EP, I hope to reach a wide and diverse audience with my music.
Performing for various clubs, venues, LGBT events and organizations, I have just begun my journey into the music business and would love nothing more than to have the support of my brothers and sisters.
Just started with Tumblr and would love to connect with everyone
