Mike Tidmus

Becoming Dragon, 3 Minute Documentation — transcript at the link
(Video: Micha Cárdenas, aka Azdel Slade, via Vimeo)

Walking in Hillcrest Monday afternoon, the cover of the San Diego Reader caught my eye. On a bright yellow background was a photograph of the back of a human being, topped with what appeared to be a papier-mâché rabbit head, seated at a desk while talking on a red telephone. I groaned when I read the headline “My Gender is Bunny,” because I knew that particular issue hit the stands just in time for the Transgender Leadership Summit that took place in San Diego last weekend.

I kept walking. The truth is, I’d sooner choke to death on a Dominos pizza than pick up a copy of the Reader, and neither prospect holds much appeal. Dominos founder Tom Monaghan is a well-known backer of the radical religious right and its anti-woman, anti-GLBT crusades — including Operation Rescue and the Thomas More Law Center. The Reader’s local rival, CityBeat, niftily summed up Jim Holman, the owner of the Reader, in an editorial a couple of years back:

The Catholic Crusader of Coronado is at it again. Jim Holman, the reclusive publisher of the San Diego Reader and San Diego News Notes (a rabidly religious publication that rails against Planned Parenthood and gay people), and his pro-life gang have been given the go-ahead by the state to gather signatures once again for a ballot measure aimed at keeping teen girls from having abortions until their parents have been notified.

That evening I got an email from San Diegan Autumn Sandeen, a respected, transgender blogger at Pam’s House Blend, who asked me to take a look at the Reader article and possibly respond by writing something. It took a couple of readings to understand what was going on. Between sections that read like a third-hand retelling of a William Gibson short story, the piece was peppered with nasty asides and innuendo about the subject of the article — an accomplished, transgender artist working on her MFA at UCSD named Micha Cárdenas and her work, Becoming Dragon, that is performed in an online virtual world known as Second Life.

The anti-transgender asides are hardly surprising given the folks behind the article.

Ernie Grimm, the writer of the Reader article, has worked for publisher Jim Holman since at least 1998. In addition to editing the fundamentalist Catholic monthly San Diego News Notes, Grimm also wrote movie reviews “from a Catholic perspective.” He continues to write for the conservative California Catholic Daily, the current incarnation of San Diego News Notes and another Holman enterprise.

San Diego’s own Savonarola, James Hartline, has called publisher Jim Holman “the leading supporter and financier of the pro-life movement in California.” Hartline adds, “Homosexual activists and radical abortion activists have, for years, martyred Jim Holman in the liberal press for his stand on family values.”

In fact, Hartline listed Ernie Grimm and Jim Holman among his annual San Diego Christian Activists of the Year awards in 2006, along with Holocaust revisionist and hate-preacher Scott Lively and Christianist attorney Charles LiMandri, who claims to have learned of the right-wing Thomas More Law Center, of which he now serves as West Coast Director, in the pages of Holman’s San Diego News Notes.

When a gay San Diego nightclub owner, John McCusker, was denied a Catholic funeral in 2005, Ernie Grimm, then editor of Holman’s San Diego News Notes, told the Union-Tribune that he supported the San Diego bishop’s decision, and said, “To have a man with such a public record of sin memorialized in the Catholic Church would be incongruous with the teachings of the church.”

To say that Grimm has an anti-GLBT bias is an understatement. Still, he was ostensibly interested in doing an article on Cárdenas and her Second Life project, Becoming Dragon. 

Second Life, for the uninitiated, is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab in 2003. The world, referred to as the grid, is entered via the internet with a client called a Second Life Viewer. Users interface using representations, frequently of their own creation, called avatars, and individuals can interact, create, and trade or sell property and services in much the same way things happen in what we think of as the real world. There are over 15 million registered accounts, to give a sense of Second Life’s popularity.

But, when the Reader hit the streets, Micha Cárdenas had this to say:

I’m very happy, and very annoyed with this article on the cover of this week’s issue of the major San Diego weekly publication. I’m happy that the project is getting so much exposure. I’m very unhappy that the author chose to ignore my choice of pronouns, present the whole project as some mad scientist project “at tax payer’s expense” and put a ridiculous picture on the cover instead of one of the many photos and second life screenshots from the performance. At least the author had the courage to admit at the end of the article that I told him what pronouns to use and that he chose not to. Overall, I think that he quoted me at length, and accurately, on the core issues on the performance, which I really appreciate.

(emphasis: mine)

Given Grimm’s anti-woman, anti-GLBT track record and religious right connections, courage is hardly the appropriate word for such a deliberate and intentionally hurtful slight. Grimm waited until 26 February to inform Cárdenas that he did not intend to comply with her request for feminine pronouns. In an email to Cárdenas, Grimm said, “My belief is that none of us chooses our gender, that our genders are chosen by our creator.” He also indicated that his personal beliefs played no part in his article.

Grimm’s article, in Holman’s Reader, was clearly an attack piece intended to malign Micha Cárdenas, both as a transgender person and as a serious artist working in a world well beyond the cutting edge of art as most of us understand it. 

In addition to the Reader article, an appearance with Grimm had been arranged on KUSI’s Good Morning San Diego to discuss Cárdenas’ work. What transpired that morning, in Micha’s own words — at the Second Loop blog on Sunday 29 March, follows:

KUSI TV refuses to have me on because I’m transgender

I am so upset. The reporter from the San Diego Reader, Ernie Grimm, contacted me a few weeks ago to ask if I would do a television interview with him when the story came out on the cover of the reader. I accepted and the reader’s publicist contacted me about TV interview dates. They scheduled an interview with me for this morning with an 8:50 am arrival time for a 9:20 am live air interview. I arrive on time, conservatively dressed with a long skirt, tights and a scarf up to my neck. We chat cordially in the break room first and then move to the green room. The publicist goes to talk to the anchor, and returns at 9:18 am to say “Micha I have some uncomfortable news. I’m so sorry, but because of how you’re dressed, they can’t have you on the show.” She goes on to tell me how they want to cover the Second Life aspect of the story and not talk about transgender issues at all.

This is absolutely an act of gender based discrimination. Imagine if they had said “I’m sorry, but because you’re a woman, we can’t have you on. We just wanted to talk about Second Life.” It is also very similar to them saying something like “I’m sorry, but because of the way your face looks, we can’t have you on. We don’t want to talk about the fact that you’re black, just about Second Life,” if I was a person of color.

The Second Life aspect and the transgender issues are inseparable in Micha Cárdenas’ project, Becoming Dragon, as this statement from the recent Open Studios program at UCSD attests:

Becoming Dragon questions the one-year requirement of ‘Real Life Experience’ that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive Gender Confirmation Surgery, and asks if this could be replaced by one year of ‘Second Life Experience’ to lead to Species Reassignment Surgery. For the performance, Micha Cárdenas lived for 365 hours immersed in the online 3D environment of Second Life with a head mounted display, only seeing the physical world through a video feed, and with a motion capture system to map her movements into Second Life. During the year of research and development of this project, Micha began her real life hormone replacement therapy and wrote poetry and prose about the experience on her blog, http://technotrannyslut.com.

Please join me in honoring Micha Cárdenas’ request. Contact KUSI to let them know what you think of their transphobic, homophobic attitude:

Program: Good Morning San Diego

Email: news@kusi.com

Mailing address:
4575 Viewridge Avenue
San Diego, CA 92123

Main number: 858-571-5151
Sales: 858-505-5120
Newsroom: 858-571-NEWS (571-6397)
News tipline: 858-292-TIPS (292-8477)

You can also contact The Reader at E-mail the Editor.

Micha Cárdenas online:

• UCSD Open Studios: Micha Cárdenas
• Second Loop
• Techno Tranny Slut
• Becoming Dragon, a 3 Minute Documentation

GLAAD media reference:

• Transgender Glossary of Terms
• GLAAD Applauds Updated Associated Press Stylebook Entries