The boycotts are increasing my political capital in Wellington, and that's partly because I'm literally like the symbol for rainbow tolerance since those 2020 stunts. People like seeing me out and dressed up etc. -- it makes them feel like Wellington is the type of place where people can do that and largely survive unscathed. That's the front, though, and at a certain point I felt it was more important to be real. Plus the legal pressures really heated up in 2022, so the memos were actually necessary. - Pressure over my dick. Pressure over the occupation of Parliament. Pressure regarding Riddell Productions and the survival of the channel. Then, after I started my new channel, there was pressure to detransition. To be fair, that pressure had been there since 2021, but it really kicked up a notch after I slagged off Barbara for claiming that I flashed her. Rich people ... that's my enemies list in Wellington. People that live in the suburbs and visit town in the weekends. Oh, and teenagers ... maybe that's just me being paranoid. It turns out - unsurprisingly - that I'm quite good at music criticism, plus my life isn't just some boring academic life and I'm distanced enough from the scene that the criticism is seldom personal.
While in the world of film, plays and drama, I'm too well-known and embroiled in a number of personal feuds. Easy enough for reviewing films: one of my critiques of the theatre scene is that the reviews are always far too nice ... my review of Chronosthesia might've been tough, but I got some pretty forthright reviews of my films during 48Hours. -
I try to encourage people to tell me what they think. Like, Eilish took a swipe at my AI art, saying that it was lame and fake and not art because it was generated by a computer.
It doesn't bother me much. She often lashes out at me when she's not doing well, and the criticism is better than inarticulate, monosyllabic people too afraid to cause offence!
Re: lashing out -- so much more fun when it's a two-way street. -
As Carmen says in her memoirs, it's important to have that ability to choose to do it as a queen or a trans person, even in the face of widespread opposition.
The support is somewhat hollow. People are ultimately uncomfortable with the oddity of somebody dressing in women's clothes that has never been pegged and isn't just some closet case transvestite, but a full-on transgender personage (that was how Georgina described Carmen in a documentary). To most people, it's like their private life is suddenly staring them in the face.
I wasn't diagnosed with anorexia, but my doctors are aware that I fast and go through periods where I eat comparatively little. There was a certain body shape that I wanted to have in my early twenties, and a lot of effort went into maintaining that.
Fairly sure there's some dysmorphia as well as dysphoria, as I often think that I'm fat. Filming myself helps to reassure me that I'm not.
DP/DR isn't the kind of dissociation that I feel. It's really all about ASC's, and a conscious effort to build different modes of myself. This winter, I started to feel like my body wasn't responding as well as in the past, but it was like being trapped in the prison of my body, rather than floating above it. - Nerdy stuff: In The Groove is gone, sadly, as is the Facebook cut of my Transtasia. Unlike Riddell Productions and the Wellington Stories trilogy, AMPP wasn't built for posterity: that was my crash-and-burn phase. From my POV, the fact that those Dropbox files of the Dakumentary exist is a minor miracle, given how quickly I had to move after hearing of Newshub's closure. Took up most of the last 6 months of my life. The pirate station was just a random whim, but I really enjoyed programming all those movies and essentially showing my working to all these film buffs and professionals that are into my movies. It's more than a whim now that Marama has cancer, of course, which is why I've found alternatives to uploading the entire files.
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