I've recently completed a non-stop four day visit to Philadelphia as "visiting scholar," guest of the Pennsylvania State Higher Education Women's Coalition. Six colleges and universities in three days. On the fourth day, I was to deliver a keynote address to the Women's Consortium's annual shindig being held at West Chester University. I wrote the address the night before I delivered it at the Consortium's luncheon (pictured here), so the talk was about as close to extemporaneous as I allow myself to get while I'm out speaking. I promised my Twitter twibe that I'd post it here if it worked. It worked, so here are my notes for that talk.
I'm going to keep this short and sweet, to keep myself from wandering off intoMobius stripsof postmodern theory. I've been paying attention to some trans activists who are using the word cisgender.According to its very own Wikipedia page:
"The word has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis, meaning "on the same side" as in the cis-trans distinction in chemistry. In this case, "cis" refers to the alignment of gender identity with assigned gender."
Who knew? Not me. I'd only begun to hear the word about a year ago but according to its own Wikipedia page, cisgenderhas been in use on the internet since 1994. So this is me trying to play catch up.
Here's what I've got worked out so far.
1) Cisgender/Transgender is a valid gender binary. I don't like the prefix cis, but that'smyproblem. A global binary exists that is worthy of examination for its impact on the quality of our lives.
2) Identifying people with fixed gender identities as sex partners is key to both the identities and desires of cisgender lesbians and gay men, as well as to heterosexual men and women. Bisex,Polyamory,Asexuality,et albreak cisgender rules of fixed desire.Trans,Genderqueer,Drag et albreak cisgender rules of fixed identity.
3) To hold on to any power gained thru classimilation, middle class cisgender lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual men and womenmustdefend their desires/identities as both correct & natural.
4) Cisgender people who are sex positive & gender embracing are more than allies, they're family. That's where the idea of any othering of trans by some monolithic cisgender identity ultimately falls apart.
5) Sex positivists and gender anarchists are simply too sexy for inclusion in any middle class arena, including the current "LGBT" movement whose agendas are set by mostly middle class cisgender lesbian women and gay men.
OK. That's as far as I've gotten. Ithas not been my intention to offend anyone. This is a theory in progress.I believe thatno valid theory of identity, desire, or power can other a single sentient being. If you feel offendedI was wrong.I'll do my best to right the wrong.I'm talking about this on Twitterso if you've got a comment please tweet me. I've got faster and more frequent access to Twitter than I have to this blog.
I'm an old fart—a curmudgeon and a crone—so I get to say things like "Back in my day…"
Like: back in my day (which was the '60s), we knew how to protest. Back in my day, we did street theater to fight the war in Viet Nam. And back in my day, we marched the streets in the very first Gay Pride parades, and we said things like "We're just like you…" which went over well with people who wanted to think they were worth us wishing we were just like them.
All these actions sort of worked back then… before the right wing conservative think tanks figured out how to counter us. Bad news: the right wing has succeeded in countering old-fashioned activisms. Good news: there are new forms of activism they don't know how to fight yet.
This evening, I saw the film The Yes Men Fix The World. Please go see this movie if you can. It's the face of a new activism. It's an activism that the right wing think tanks haven't got a hold on yet, and I find that exciting.
What do The Yes Men do that works? They lie. They lie BIG. They lie in a way that makes us wish they were telling the truth, and the right wing think tanks don't know what to do with that. Like this phony issue of The New York Times. Click on it to see it big, or download the full PDF.
Am I saying that activism in the form of big protest marches and street theater and shouting "We're just like you" are bad actions? No. I'm saying that these are your grandpa's activisms and they're not as effective as you might like them to be.
The right wing has learned how to carve up the radical left wing into virtually separatist groups working hard to achieve equity in ten seemingly disparate arenas: race, age, class, gender, sexuality, looks, ability, religion, citizenship, family status, and age. Any truly radical 21st century activism must effect a coalition of all ten vectors of activism.
The Yes Men are pointing the way to a new activism. Like Michael Moore, The Yes Men are pranksters. Like Stephen Colbert, The Yes Men tell great big lies. Like Jon Stewart, they're smart. The Yes Men throw wrenches into corporate America's well-oiled machine. They're not alone. My friend Andrew Boyd, founder of Billionaires for Bush makes us laugh, makes us cry and makes us get off our butts and actually do something. If you're looking for a new activism—one that has a chance of succeeding beyond your wildest dreams and the planet's deepest needs—check out the links on this page.
As an old fart activist, I'm asking you: please, create or contribute to a new activism that fights for equity across the boards—including whatever might be your own oppression, as well as the systems oppressing others. That would make your activist grandma and grandpa proud. I promise.
And I promise to do whatever I can to help you make that happen. Really. Tweet me, and let's see how we can build a shiny new coalition of activists.
With curmudgeonly and cronely love, respect, gratitude, and best wishes for success, I remain…
I’m feeling pretty damned good about ground gained in western culture by transgender people. I was there at the beginning of this loosely-knit yet somehow united movement, and things are a whole lot better for trans people today in Western culture than they ever have been.
There are many people who are claiming and living lives far beyond man or woman. There are many people who live fluidly gendered lives. There are many people who know the dangers of gender when it plays itself out as an unconscious social binary.
It’s not Mission Accomplished, not by a long shot. But talented trans people are scaling the walls of political power and artistic genius. There are deeply compassionate trans people who are religious scholars and clergy. Transdora's box is wide open and we're never going back. I am tranny, hear me frakking ROAR!
And then along comes Germaine Greer—genuine warhorse and goddess of feminism—on 20 August, 2009 with an Op-Ed piece in The Guardian she calls Caster Semenya sex row: What makes a woman? In this new piece, Ms. Greer refers to transwomen—me and my brave sisters and mothers and daughters—as “ghastly parodies” of women.
I’m not going to talk about Caster Semenya’s dilemma beyond saying that she’s being treated with intolerable rudeness and disrespect by the media. It’s the same savagely uncaring journalistic strategy used against Dr. Renée Richards when she was so rudely outed to the world in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes, yes. Ouch. It hurts to be called a ghastly parody. And that kind of talk feeds transphobia across the world. So, shame on The Guardian for printing these hateful words. But who is Ms. Greer to be hurling these invectives, and why? Greer is no one to dismiss as an idiot or complete jerk. Through her relentless work, Ms. Greer has raised the volume of women’s voices in the world. She got people around the world to start taking women more seriously.
And here's the problem: all the time she was doing that great social activism, Greer believes to the core of her being that woman is an essential identity. The gender battleground on which Germaine Greer fought and learned her political strategies was gender-as-man-and-woman-only. On that battlefield, it's easy to attack transgender people as freaks.
The good news is that Germaine Greer's transphobia is more the exception among todays scholars, artists and activists. They work as tirelessly as Greer herself on issues of gender rights, freedoms, parameters, and dignity. Postmodern gender theory has been taught in colleges and universities around the world for over fifteen years. It's over-spilling the walls of academia. The battlefield/playground has shifted. Nothing is essential any more.
Germaine Greer's tragedy is that she has not considered as even possible the theory of gender fluidity. For her kind of activism to work, MAN and WOMAN can and must be essential as well as easy to tell apart from each other. Greer is a fierce warrior, but to nail down the gender binary, she concludes her op-ed piece by saying,
“People who don't ovulate or menstruate will probably always physically outperform people who do.”
Ms. Greer is claiming that biology is, in fact destiny.
The price of being a writer of vitriol is that it reveals your most private fears, which you've penned in the form of an attack on someone else. And sadly, that makes Ms. Greer a ghastly parody of herself. What she wrote was painful and destructive. But the loss of her fierce presence on the front lines of feminism is more to be mourned than scorned.
And the point of all this is to assure you: it really has gotten a lot better for transgender people. There's a long, long way to go. But it's much, much better. I promise.
This is Doris Fish, San Francisco's pre-eminent drag queen in the 1980's. She died in 1991 from AIDS-related diseases. She was generous, flamboyant, kind, and ultra talented. Her charisma rating was off the top of the chart. She'd moved to San Francisco from Sydney, Australia—then (and some say now) the undisputed home of the world's most fabulous drag queens. Doris took me under her delightfully feathered wings.
I was afraid of her raw sexuality, but bowled over by her courage. Doris was amused by my quest to become a real woman.
I learned from Doris that in Australia, from the 1960's through the 1970's, most all of the male-to-female spectrum of gender outlaw began their transition in the fabulous world of sexy, over-the top drag performance. Like me in the late 80’s in San Francisco, the majority of MTF transsexuals just wanted to live their lives as closely as possible to whatever their notion was of "a real woman." They considered drag queens beneath them. The drag queens were amused by the MTFs pursuing the dream of real woman.
No matter what ideas you might have about transsexuals or drag queens, if you were M headed toward F in any fashion at all, you moved into, through, up and out of the drag queen community. So there was always a bond between the drag queens and the MTF transsexuals in Sydney. The bond was so strong, they invented a name for the identity they shared: tranny. It was a name that said family. Doris Fish taught me that she and I were family.
Years earlier, when I went through my gender change from male to female, I glided through life under the commonly accepted assumption: I was finally a real woman! That worked for me until I ran into a group of politically smart lesbians who told me that I wasn't allowed to co-opt the word "woman." Woman was not a family word that included me. My answer to this exclusion was to call myself a gender outlaw: I wasn't a man, I wasn't a woman. By calling myself a gender outlaw, I had unknowingly reclaimed the right to name myself outside the language generated by the bi-polar gender system. Under that system, each of us needed to fit neatly into a pre-fab sex/gender identity.
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and The Rest of Us was first published in hardcover by Routledge in 1994, just over 15 years ago. The book hit the world of academics, feminists, and sex and gender activists at a critical time—feminists were getting tired of being alone as gender's only activists. Gender Outlaw made it okay for more and more people to name themselves outside of a system that would rather see them dead for disobeying its rigid binary rules. The people who stepped outside their lines early on added a new energy to feminism by giving feminists allies and resources to tear down the sex and gender system that was—and still is—oppressing all of us.
Over the past decade and a half, people have been using Gender Outlaw as a stepping-off point on their personal gender odysseys. People of all sorts of birth-assigned genders have been naming themselves, and they've been getting together with groups of people who've done the same sort of self-naming. And now we’ve arrived at a time when the next generation of gender outlaws get to call the shots. To that aim, Seal Press has commissioned what we hope will be a ground-breaking new book: Gender Outlaws, the Next Generation, edited by S. Bear Bergman and yours truly, the older generation.
Four weeks ago, Bear posted a call for submissions on his blog. In the interests of keeping the call as open as possible, we agreed to include as many trans-identities as we knew, so we used the word "tranny." And that's where the activist shit hit the postmodern fan base. People have been pissed. Here's their argument: FTMs are co-opting a word that belongs to MTFs. The word "tranny" belongs to MTFs, reason those who were hurt by our use of the word, because it was a denigrating term reclaimed by MTFs—ergo, only MTFs could be known as trannies. I spoke with Bear, and we agree that’s wrong on several counts:
Tranny began as a uniting term amongst ourselves. Of course it’s going to be picked up and used as a denigrating term by mean people in the world. But even if we manage to get them to stop saying tranny like a thrown rock, mean people will come up with another word to wound us with. So, let’s get back to using tranny as a uniting term amongst ourselves. That would make Doris Fish very happy.
It's our first own language word for ourselves that has no medical-legacy.
Even if (like gay) hate-filled people try to make tranny into a bad word, our most positive response is to own the word (a word invented by the queerest of the queer of their day). We have the opportunity to re-create tranny as a positive in the world.
Saying that FTMs can’t call themselves trannies eerily echoes the 1980s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word woman to identify myself, and the 1990s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word dyke.
At one phase in the evolution of transpeople-as-tribe, it was the male-to-females who were visible and representative of trans to the rest of the world. They were the trannies. Today? Ironically true to the binary we’re in the process of shattering, the pendulum has swung so that it's now female-to-males who are the archetypal trannies of the day. The generation coming up beyond the next generation, i.e. my tribal grandchildren are the young boys who transition to young girls at the age of five or six. They’re the next trannies. None of us can own the word. We can only be grateful that our tribe is so much larger than we had thought it would be. How to come together—now that’s the job of the next generation of gender outlaws.
Labels aren't all that bad when they're used consciously, but a major downside of using labels to describe an identity—even the labels we wear proudly as badges of courage—is that lables set up us-versus-them scenarios. The next generation of gender outlaws is seeking to dismantle us-versus-them. As a people, none of us deserves to hear the words “You’re not welcome here,” or “You’re not good enough,” or “You’re not real.” My Goddess, we just have to stop saying that to each other, all of us whose identity somehow hinges on gender or sexuality. We have to stop beating up on each other. The Sydney drag queens and transsexuals knew that when they came up with the word tranny to encourage mutual respect.
What’s more, the time has come for those who are coping with sex and gender oppression to raise ourselves up to a level of respectability of other marginalized groups—those working for equity along the lines of class, race, age, looks, religion, ability, family status, and citizenship. We’re not taken seriously precisely because our focus is on sex and gender. In the eyes of this culture that makes us morally suspect. What the fuck does our sex or our gender have to do with our morality?! We need to de-Puritanize this fucking culture, that’s what we’ve got to do. It's time to reclaim more than names. It's time to reclaim the moral high ground.
Those are the sort of topics I’d like to see in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. The first generation of gender outlaws made themselves known in the world. The job of the next generation of gender outlaws is to weave all of us gender and sex positivists together as a globally recognized tribe. I'd like to be around to see substantial progress made along those lines.
TO BE CLEAR: Nothing I've said here or anywhere else should be taken as permission to call another person tranny until you know that's a word they use for their own identity—some people find the word extremely hurtful. So, please err on the side of caution and compassion.
kiss kiss
Kate
"Tranny," revisited by me five years later (2014), here:
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation Submission Details
Submission Deadline: Sept 1 (early submissions are encouraged). Submissions should be unpublished; query if you have a reprint that you think we’ll swoon for. While we hesitate to list a maximum, please query first for pieces over 4,000 words. If you have an idea and need help writing it out, contact us to discuss an interview-style piece or other accommodations.
Submit as a Word document or black/white JPEG (no files over 2MB). Please include a cover letter with a brief bio and full contact information (mailing address, phone number, pseudonym if appropriate) when you submit. Submissions without complete contact information will be deleted unread. Payment will be $50 and 2 copies of the book upon publication in Fall 2010. Contributors retain the rights to their pieces. Send your submission as an attachment to genderoutlawsnextgeneration@gmail.com.
I graduated Brown University in 1969. I’m only the 2nd woman in the world to hold a diploma from Brown University prior to 1970. Before that, women were enrolled in Pembroke College AT Brown University. Even though there was NO difference in our classes or curriculum, women graduating Brown prior to 1970 were awarded diplomas from Pembroke College AT Brown University. Except me. And Wendy Carlos before me.
I was a hippy-dippy actor/director and stoner during my days at Brown, and this year I got an email from our class president. I’d been identified, he said, as among the most accomplished, illustrious, and interesting members of our class. Hah! And, he continued, there would be a panel discussion about how attending Brown in the 60s effected my life, and would I participate? Would I?!
So, this past Memorial Day weekend, I travelled up to Providence, Rhode Island to attend my first ever college reunion in forty years. My partner, Barbara Carrellas, did all the driving and courage-building. Other panel participants included: Ira Magaziner, chairman of the William J. Clinton Foundation’s international development initiatives; Cornelia Dean, writer and editor for The New York Times; John Rizzo, past and current Acting General Consul for the CIA; five other classmates: a banker, a scientist, a philanthropist, a judge, and me. I didn’t find out until the day of the panel that John Rizzo was referred to as the “Architect of Torture.” Yikes.
So, this is me talking to over 200 classmates and their families. They asked me to speak for 5-7 minutes. I came in at 6 minutes, 56 seconds. Barbara Carrellas flipped the video. Enjoy.
Three years ago this month, I was turning in the final copy for Hello, Cruel World to my editor, Crystal Yakacki at Seven Stories Press. One of the earliest interviews I did for the book was a 45 minute show out of the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts. The show is Madness Radio. Will Hall is the host, who's got ties to The Icarus Project, a peer-to-peer support group for youth diagnosed with bipolar and related disorders. I'm a big fan of both The Icarus Project and Madness Radio.
Last night, I had the chance to recommend Icarus to a friend who's going through some hard times, and today I got an email from Will Hall. Oooooh! Synchronicity! Wil was writing to let me know that after three years on the web, the episode just got its first ever comment. LOL! In celebration of this event, I'm opening the vaults. Enjoy the listen.
Wouldn't you just love to work with this woman to book your next campus, conference, or corporate queer talent?
More and more LGBTQ etc. artists, theorists, film-makers, performers, and lecturers are criss-crossing the globe with their cutting edge sex and gender positive work. For years, there's been no central booking agency for this work. That changes now: there's about to be one place where you can book a full rainbow of Talent: performers, authors, sex educators, activists, comedians, musicians, dancers, and more. We're not exactly a collective, but we're all working together to help get this project off the ground.
The woman heading this up is Seraphin (pictured here)—she's been booking talent for MTV, but she thinks we're a lot more fun!
Seraphin is putting a database together from all our contacts. She's also working on the website as I'm writing this. But we can't open the website WITHOUT A NAME?!
In the meantime, though… the agency is open for business! In the spirit of tribe, we promise to keep all our booking fees fair. None of the speakers or performers will be upping our fees to pay the agency a commission. We want all of us: the agency, you as producer, and us as talent—to do well in bringing queer talent out into the wide, wide world. The aim of the agency is to make it possible for anyone to find great affordable queer talent for their campus, company, theater, or conference.
The new agency is opening with these clients: Kate Bornstein, Barbara Carrellas, S. Bear Bergman, Midori, and Dr. Ducky Doolittle. But this is so just the beginning. The as-yet un-named agency is expecting to represent more and more talent over the next few months. If you want your act represented, please email Seraphin at and she'll talk over agency terms with you.
And if you want to book any of us, you can contact Seraphin with a click of the button. The agency already has it's own Twitter account: twitter.com/LGBTQ Bookings. And yes, it includes a LOT more than simply LGBTQ. As an agency, we aim to include any talent who's sex and gender positive.
HELP US FIND A NAME, PLEASE?
Please send us your ideas for the agency name. We want the name to be inclusive of ALL folks whose work is located on the matrix of sex positivity and gender anarchy. Make it sassy! Make it surreal! Make it sweet or serious or sensational. We can't wait to hear what your furry li'l imaginations come up with!
Over the next week, please send us your ideas either via Twitter or by commenting on this blog, or both. Enter as often as you like. We're working out prizes, and we'll be announcing them in a day or two.
Hurry! It's SO HARD TO LIVE WITHOUT A NAME! The entry deadline is April 29, 2009 and the winner will be announced May 1st, 2009 (which just happens to be my 23rd girl birthday!!!) Get your entries in fast!
This is an exciting development in the queer world, and I'm pleased and proud to be part of it. Please join on in.
Thanks to a Twitter heads up from Stand Up Southern Nevada, I heard about a couple of LGBT actions that are sadly more of the same, and I'd sure like to know more about both of them if you've got any information.
Can you believe it? There are still groups and political actions that are trying to divide LGBTQAAetc into smaller and smaller groups. How old-fashioned is that?
First off, there's something called In The Parade. I tried finding the name(s) of the people or organizations behind this brainstorm, but I haven't heard back from them yet. I'm being catty. In The Parade has a lovely premise: queer people have long been excluded as a contingent marching in the US Presidential Inaugural Parade. So, whoever's behind In The Parade is aiming at getting Lesbians and Gays represented. That's right. Lesbians and Gays. There are no bisexuals, trannies, genderqueers, SM players, queers or allies of any stripe. Just your garden variety lesbian woman and gay man. How 20th Century! Please, if you've got any more information on this bit of out of touch activism, please Twitter me or leave me a comment here. Thanks!
Secondly (and again, thanks to the vigilant watchdogs at Stand Up Southern Nevada), there's a protest day called A Day Without Gay. No, really. Everyone who's gay is supposed to stay home from work to show the world that they really won't get along without gays by their side. Unlike In The Parade, A Day Without Gay takes pains to explain that they don't really mean Gay only. In fact, if you dig down to the middle of their FAQ page, there's a defense of exclusionary political jargonizing:
It's terribly important to understand that on this one day, we're using "gay" as shorthand for the entire LGBT community strictly because of the universality of recognition for the movement both in American culture and worldwide as it's been covered in media ranging from Mexico, Canada, Austria, Germany, Italy, and beyond. You are SO SO SO included and necessary if you are bisexual, transgendered, intersexed, queer, or questioning…and straight allies are included as well.
Gee, I feel SO SO SO much better now that I know it's only on "this one day" that we're using gay to invisibilize everyone else whose identity depends on their desire. ARGHHHHHHHH! Right, so I'm cranky. I just do NOT want to start off the Age of Obama with more internal silencing of our own freakin' people.
So, to people who say they're speaking on behalf of LG, or LGBT (and letters as yet unmentionable), please consider this: President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama was voted into office on the basis of building coalitions. It's more than a lesbian/gay coalition these days. Really. Like, didja know that one of the National Co-Chairs of Obama Pride is Marcia Botzer, an out and proud and accomplished transwoman. Please, GROW UP! The rest of us have. It's a new age of politics. Please, divide us no more. If you're going to do anything in the name of Obama, do it in the spirit he stands for.
Okay, let's all go do important political action things and play nice with each other.
So okay, is the woman in this picture amazing, or what?
This is Wendy Chapkis, a mentor of mine and long-time crush. When I was a baby tranny in San Francisco—a two-year old girl in 1988—I ran across a copy of Wendy's book, Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance.
I was trying my best to be a woman. I was trying my best to be political. I was standing alone, scared, in the feminist aisle of a women's bookstore. I was keeping secrets, and I was obsessed with my appearance. Here was this woman writing proudly about sporting her moustache… what effect that had on her day to day life, and how she dealt with all the bullshit that comes with being a freak of beauty, a beautiful freak.
Wow! Shivering, I thumbed through her book and I saw it's brilliant theme: women do a lot of things in secret in order to make themselves look beautiful. Things they don't want you to know about, like their moustaches. Like my year-old newly constructed vagina. Wendy Chapkis wrote about how it's time to not keep secrets any more. In 1988, this was an astonishing idea. I left the bookstore with her book in my pocketbook. I felt the beginnings of personal liberation. And I was totally crushed out on this hot, strong babe with a moustache.
I worked selling subscriptions at the San Francisco Symphony. My arts writer pay from the gay paper, The Bay Area Reporter, didn't come close to covering expenses. The SF Symphony phone room was old school—we didn't use computers back then. We called names and phone numbers written on 5×7 cardboard cards. Well, two weeks after I found Wendy's book, there I was sitting in the phone room of the SF Symphony. I was holding a 5×7 card with Wendy Chapkis' name, phone number, address, and musical preferences. Oh. My. Goddess. Score!
I dialed. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Answering machine. Damn! Phone room policy mandated we return any unanswered calls to the common pile, not keep them for calling again later. It was a good policy. It kept folks from hoarding what they thought might be easy sales. But I kept Wendy Chapkis' card with me. I brought that card back to the phone room every day for a week, and was too afraid to call. Finally, I got my courage… It took two weeks of calling until I finally reached a live Wendy.
Hello, Ms. Chapkis? This is Kate Bornstein calling from the San Francisco Symphony about your… say-y-y-y-y-y, wait a minute… is this Wendy Chapkis who wrote the book, Beauty Secrets?
Our friendship has grown over the past 20 years. Wendy teaches at the University of Maine. Her partner way back then and to this very day is Gabe. Gabe makes great jewelry and gives great arts and political grassroots organizing. Wendy and Gabe were and still are the outest dyke couple I've ever known. I love 'em to pieces.
So… why'm I writing about this now? Wendy's got a new book! It's called Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine. I haven't read it yet, but… hello? What an amazing topic. Wendy's coming to New York City to read at Bluestockings Books on Monday, December 1st at 7pm. I'm going. I'll buy my signed copy—I still have that crush—and I'll set that book down on the night table next to my bed for a nightly read. If you're a New York area teen, freak or outlaw, please join me at the reading. And look for me. I'll be the tall redhead looking longingly at the author.
I've recently completed a non-stop four day visit to Philadelphia as "visiting scholar," guest of the Pennsylvania State Higher Education Women's Coalition. Six colleges and universities in three days. On the fourth day, I was to deliver a keynote address to the Women's Consortium's annual shindig being held at West Chester University. I wrote the address the night before I delivered it at the Consortium's luncheon (pictured here), so the talk was about as close to extemporaneous as I allow myself to get while I'm out speaking. I promised my Twitter twibe that I'd post it here if it worked. It worked, so here are my notes for that talk.
