Why do all the NZ culture vultures want me to open for Don or sing at open mics? Because that's a fairly low-status activity, and they can continue putting on airs of superiority which suit their reductive opinions of me as some autistic spaz. That's not possible if you factor in my vocal works and my other classical compositions, or my many films. I majored in composition, not voice or guitar, and that is why it's my strongest suit. It's almost impossible to make a career in composition without becoming an academic, but I'm still a well-known composer based on the quality of my songs and guitar pieces. The Amanda that composed Portrait of a Knight and These Words Are Meant For Someone was a cisgender male - though everyone's claiming that they always knew I was trans - and, as a cisgender male, was respected as a composer and director.
Nobody was seriously asking me to act until after I came out. They need to begin to demonstrate the basic respect of acknowledging that I made a trilogy of features and a three-season streaming series. They don't have to like them; they just have to respect that it's a hell of an accomplishment, particularly given the lack of resources or support that I was given until Season 3. - If they always knew, btw, then their behaviour towards me when I transitioned is far more unacceptable than if they were wilfully blind or didn't know. That's exactly my point: it's fine to be trans if you present as a passable man or woman in all professional contexts, and if you don't everyone calls you a fetishist and a paedo.
The Dakumentary and my fantasia have the distinction of being films that I made AFTER I came out, which proves that my 'Amanda mode' is equally capable of producing, directing, editing and taking notes - yes, I got shitloads of notes on the dak film, and addressed them in a professional and prompt manner.
Ask anyone who has worked with me on the RP or AMPP films, or anyone that's hired me for another purpose, and virtually all of them will tell you that I'm very professional, and that I listen fairly well. - The NZSM folks basically thought that I wasn't even notating music as Amanda, which says it all about their reductive assumptions. How they could've ignored that Pan's Preludes obviously had to be notated in order to create that synth track is truly and completely beyond me, or the fact that I was obviously reading music in the Tristezza video. Bigots, Barbara: those are the people you aligned yourself with in this fight because you had selfish desires to sing with me. How you can justify singing for the military machine is something that I'll never truly understand. Despite Shipwrecked, I'm very much a pacifist.
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For the armchair psychiatrists:
Wasn't diagnosed with DID, and it's transphobic to suggest that all transvestites are somehow split personalities like Norman Bates. GMA had a whole pamphlet about trans representation in movies that I read back in the day.
Wasn't diagnosed with autism. It's never even come up as a potential diagnosis, except for me bringing it up after the dickheads that spy on me called typing like this 'stimming' when it's actually diagnosed as an outgrowth of mania (or hypomania, which is probably more apt for my current emotional state).
They haven't considered ADHD either. All of the subsequent stuff has been outgrowths of bipolar disorder or gender dysphoria, and was explainable within those frameworks.
Haven't been diagnosed with PTSD, though I do get flashbacks.
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