Willkommen, Welcome, Bienvenue, Bienvenid@. At my primary and personal site.
Do you know me? Then you will know what I am and who I am.
I am the first vreer. Later on you wil see what it means in all its complexity.
Since I am also a person, some more personal stuff also.
Here's where you can find out.
I am Judith. I am Micha. I am Vreer. I am me.
I change, I changes. I am a
lesbian, I am gay; I am queer. I love.
Below the first picture, others at the Noodles site
In my opinion the best equivalent to my (dutch) word "vreer"
(pronounced as 'vreir') is the epithet "gender blender". A
friend of mine made up the word "mistiz"... which is a cute
word, I think. Since mistiz doesn't directly ring a bell with
most english speaking folk, maybe "merman" is a better epithet.
A
vreer is a particular kind of gender blender. But not your average
gender blender. Nor is every transgendered person a vreer. As not
every TG is a gender b(l)ender. A vreer however is someone living
(voluntarily) in between the acknowledged sexes of our western
society.
So it does not mean an ordinary transexual, but a vreer surely is transgendered. In my case it means a vreer is a kind of transexual, former man, former woman, grown into something else entirely, somewhere beyond the ultimate frontier of gender. Essentially however, there is no essence to me. I am me and how to call this me is subject to change. I boldly go where no vreer has gone before. On my continuing mission to seek out new identities and hitherto unknown gender expressions. (free after StarTrek)
You may wonder if there are more vreers around on the Internet. Hardly. Thanks to Google you can find forums I'm on, you can even find the music I listen to. A great deal of my online network can be traced, gone is my privacy!
So, the only vreer that calls hirself "vreer" is me, but there are other vreers out there also. See my links. Some don't call themselves a vreer, but are anyway by my standards.
I recently returned from an almost four months during bike trip to Chile and Patagonia, in which I also gathered information on how life is for genderqueers like me and my friends. I already wrote some details on my weblog (in dutch).
I went from Arica (near the border with Peru) down to Puerto Williams, the southernmost village in the world with permanent occupation. Though that partially is because of the naval base there.
For more than six years now I work at XS4ALL, the oldest consumer ISP in the Neherlands. I am tech support staff and since I don't speak customers that frequently any more, I like it all the more. I like more puzzling out problems and helping out colleagues. ADSL stuff is my specialty, followed by networks.
Outside (and inside) I like to queer around. With the Noodles I want to queer existing LBGTs and make society a better place for us to live in.
Vreers have may be new to history, but history is not new to vreers. We have our roots. And as real human beings, not all of our roots are the same. Here are some of mine. A slightly random choice of stuff I think to be important.
I feel akin to the 19th century hermaphrodite Herculine (Abel) Barbin whose history has been recovered by Michel Foucault. In his English language edition of 1980 he added a preface, discussing herein the 'nature' of gender. An interesting historical fact is that until the 18th century in France it used to be possible to change your gender if it didn't fit you. Only: just once and you had to be 18 yrs or older. I'd prefer the absence of sex/gender registration for census or other registration. Still it helped some.
Another interesting figure to me is the biblical Judith. Though I do not associate as a woman any more I still kept
the name: I like powerful women. The story goes as follows: Judith lived in the Jewish town Bethulia during the reign of Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar, about 200 BC. Because the leaders and/or inhabitants of Bethulia weren't faithful to G.d - they thought it better to surrender than probably be slaughtered - they were punished with drowth. And to top it all of course the assyrian army was threatening to take their town.
Judith being a pious and beautiful widow took care of this (with permission of the elders of course), made herself as beautiful as she could and went up to the assyrian camp wth important information for the general Holofernes. Holofernes had never encountered so beautiful a traitress, invited her to a banquet gets drunk and falls asleep in his bed. At which occasion Judith takes his sword en beheads him. She
then goes back to Bethulia and in the morning when the final battle would take place, she shows the head of Holofernes to his soldiers
who flee in confusion. And thus victory and justice rule.
That's more or less the story as it goes. The biblical version is probably not the 'historical' truth, was never intended to be either. The resulting story however still is very pleasant.
Literary gender queers are also an important inspiration source to me. How they live (in the books), the way they try to tackle conflicts, their struggle, be it personal or political: it all matters. Although I do't know of much serious tranny fiction; the best I know is by one author: Leslie Feinberg, the Transgenderwarrior. Another lovely novel is about Trumpet, kind of fictitious biography inspired by Billy Tipton. If you know of non-English fiction: let me know.
In dutch some brilliant stories have been published by the la Renate Stoute. When still living a s amn, she wrote a brilliant novel on a (rather frustrated and obsessed) transvestite. The dutch title is "Het Grimmig Genieten". Other work by Stoute is a kind of autobiography, and a collection of poems and stories.
Other books I deem important or interesting you can find at my book page. (Needs some updating though)
From time to time I associate as a (positive) multiple personality. Being me means acting like a "man" sometimes
and at other times more like a "woman". At other times I am just a contiguous (alas not contageous) conglomerate of
genders.
Although performativity is not performance, and the gender performance one lives is learnt at young age and reenacted
constantly, I see and feel there is space to change the scenery and the script you are to perform. So I call myself also a gender
multiple or multiple gender. A friend
of mine is inspired by 7 of 9 and calls herself Seven. I feel more like 1 through 9. I am a collective. Of genders. And preferably of
sexes. But these two are intertwined anyway.
At other times I feel like a kind of masculine woman, but only in part. Kate Bornstein has taught me a lot with her "Gender Workbook" Although to her book 's ratings I already was a gender freak already before having taken the "course". Here you can take the test yourself.
I also recognize aspects of my feelings on gender in the work of Judith Butler. I think, I feel, that bodies do matter, for they are material, but they are also text. Bodies are textualized matter and materialized text. In short Butler's point is that gender, as everything, is learned by imitation since our earliest days. From the moment you recognize that, you have opportunities to change your gender to what suits you. It helped me to find my way out of gender as we know it. To me gender isn't that important. I don't care if you sir or madam me; though you best mistiz me.
Some years ago a book has come out, in which I figure. It's in dutch. Translated it would be titled: "Man or Woman, More or Less. Conversations about an infrequent sex." It is by Tim de Jong, one of the founders of the Dutch TG group "Het Jongensuur" (The Boys' Hour; Dutch site). The Boy's hour refers to the swimming pool schedule in the 1950s that divided swimming times for boys and girls. In particular it refers to a famous dutch book by Andreas Burnier, openly lesbian author also in the days that was quite scandalous.
The group gathers people born with female morphology who want to explore their more masculine feelings, though not necessarily feel transexual.
Although my paid job at XS4ALL Internet doesn't really give me the opportunity to be queerly active, I can surf the net rather unlimited (since the Web is part of my tools ;o). Together with truly hard queer work with the Noodles I am trying to do more with the human rights interests of queer work: following the situation of LBGT-people in the frontline that now lies in former Soviet republics located in the Caucasus and in Eastern Europe. Together with my active interest in Latin America and general interest and knowledge on human rights I hope to be able and find a job in human rights related stuff.
With the Noodles I make a monthly radio show on themes that are interesting to the dutch transgender population. Participating and managing the webforum also takes some time. We'd better have some non-dutch pages avilable soon witha all these international contacts ;o)
There used to be a vreerfemme also, my s.o., my g.f., my brilliant paper surgeon. At the moment we don't see each other very often, but that doesn't make her a less interesting person. That's what being away for travel and changing interests brings. On her site (in dutch) you can read more about her and her business. At that site under interviews (in english) you can also read about me.
I'm interested in finding a new vreerfemme, so yes I do recruit ;o)