I would not recommend Digg to anyone interested in queer, trans, or any gender topic, actually. The results I got were so incredibly all over the map that it would have taken hours of frustrating work to find a substantial amount of useful material. If that means I did something wrong, well then Digg is not as user-friendly as it could be!
Del.icio.us, despite having a name that is too involved to type out regularly (what's with all the dots?), is very easy to use. All you do is type in search terms, and viola! you have more fun stuff than you can shake a stick at! I found the following under "transgender":
Amazon.com: Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category: David Valentine: Books (one of my personal favorites)
Tales from the Green Island - the perfect number - a fairytale (what appears to be trans fiction)
Medical Therapy and Health Maintenance for Transgender Men (medical guide for health care providers)
eTransgender (a forum site for trans topics, where I just found out Jude Law is playing a transgender supermodel - wow! yum!)
Del.icio.us allows the user to search multiple tags and also will suggest related tags on the right side of the page. Some unexpected tags that popped up while I was looking at the transgender results were law, children, and libraries. Adding this tag to my search produced 146 results on legal projects, resources, cases, immigration issues, etc. At this point, I noticed targeted ads where the related tags had previously been. They were for trans law books on Amazon, a couple for breast options, trans dating, and an employment law specialist advertising to help with wrongful termination. Well targeted ad placement - from what I have learned about the trans community, these links address common concerns (some quite problematic) for many trans people.Back to the related tags for a moment: I fully expected trans, gender, equality, and sexuality to be among them, and they were. However, one that I did not see, and I can't understand quite why, is queer. "Queer" is a frequent companion of "transgender," and not just because of the recent inclusion of transgender into gay and lesbian organizations. Queer has historically been applied to many groups who now are frequently placed under the transgender umbrella (drag kings and queens, cross-dressers, fairies, butch lesbians, androgynous people, the list goes on quite a ways, and is hotly debated). Beyond the historical associations and categorizations, there is also Queer Theory, which I can best summarize in a few words as post-modernism applied to gender, sexuality, and even biological sex. Yes, you can deconstruct sex. No, I'm not going to try it right now. Maybe later.
So why, when "queer" regularly pops up all over the trans terrain, is it not among del.ico.us's related links for transgender? This will require more exploration. It baffles me, truly.
I went on to remove the transgender tag, leaving "law," and added feminism. 828 results, with many of the recent bookmarks on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. "Feminism" and "queer" turned up 1147 results, with Judith Butler turning up as two of the most recent three, not at all surprising: Butler is a huge star in Queer Theory and feminism.
Del.icio.us is a resource that can be mined endlessly on gender/trans/queer issues, for the number of relevant bookmarks increases daily. The greatest difficulty would be maintaining enough self-discipline to not get lost following all those links, drinking up endless amounts of nectarian information.... Okay, maybe not everyone would love to consume a library's worth of knowledge like me, but still, you could get lost in this corner of the net, for sure!
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