If this protocol really did inexorably guide every child into a more permanent medical transition, this period of extended consideration would not be standard clinical practice. This time specifically serves to identify those youth who will stop experiencing dysphoria and will not want to transition. While Julie Bindel and others may speculate at length about how they “might” have pursued a medical transition, there is every indication that even if they had ever received puberty blockers, they would have had ample opportunity to recognize that transitioning wasn’t what they wanted.

The other is a confrontation of one of the most galling behaviors of America’s next top misogynist, and the attitudes among men that he dangerously normalizes:

Men will often persist in these opinions for the rest of their life simply because they don’t know better and never learned otherwise. Donald Trump is what happens when that 14-year-old reaches age 70 without our society teaching him to do better. We end up with a man who chiefly seems to acquire sex via rape, a man who resembles a large hog that’s been stuffed in an ill-fitting suit and had its head shoved in a lint trap, a man who isn’t going to let any of that stop him from judging his accusers as too unattractive to be the target of his sexual predation.

Read more at Gender Analysis!

The post New at Gender Analysis: Youth transition myths, and Donald Trump appeared first on Zinnia Jones.

I had nearly 11,000 followers on there and some were concerned at my sudden cold-turkey disappearance. I really appreciate that very much and it was incredibly kind of all of you who’ve reached out to me. So: Yes, I am okay. I’m more than okay, because its absence isn’t actually a deficiency in my life at all. This has been an unambiguous improvement – removing the Damnation Site has freed not just my time, energy, and moods, but in some ways even my self. Within a couple days after leaving, I just started to feel so much more like the old me. Resources that had been dedicated to optimizing some performative incessant outrage were now available once again, and new ideas for my actual content suddenly started appearing almost effortlessly. It’s been so much easier to see things that really should have been obvious, like various ways of optimizing my assets online, expanding the resources I make available to others, and just improving my productivity generally. Of course it would have been such a better choice all along to invest in building what matters and what I enjoy and what comes naturally to me — but the platform had constantly occupied so much of my brainspace that I just never really had the time to think about it all.

It’s almost as if I needed to be reminded: I can do things simply because I want to, because they are good ideas, because I’m allowed to take time to invest in myself and my own life. There is no sense in which I was ever obligated to exist only as a conduit to funnel perpetual negativity to thousands of others. If people were choosing to follow me, it was because they were simply interested in who I am and what I choose to bring to the world — not just another to-the-minute feed of the awfulness that saturates nearly everything else. And if that many people want to follow me, I want to do so much better for them.

Altogether, there’s a great deal lined up here, and I feel like I finally have the personal resources and stability of health to carry it out. I feel like I have so much more to look forward to. And I hope I can give you something to look forward to as well. Thank you, to all of you.

The post Yes, I’m okay, and even better than that appeared first on Zinnia Jones.

I’m sure you all have seen those electoral maps that have been floating around. You know the ones. The “If only men voted” and “If only women voted” maps that show landslides. These ones:

The thing about these maps? I’m not surprised. They reflect everything I’ve been taught about white cishet culture. Nor am I surprised about the #repealthe19th hashtag or whatever nonsense that’s evolved into. I mean really, should any of us be surprised by this?

I sometimes joke and say I knew I was a lesbian before I knew I was a woman, and this is something I’ve heard from a lot of trans people I’ve spoken to. And a large part of it is the same reasons I’m not surprised by those maps. I’ve never once identified with either half of a cishet couple in pop culture. They’re portrayed as inherently adversarial, as working against each other at least as often as with, as enemies who have managed to forge a peace treaty out of necessity rather than two people who actually want to be around each other. Hell, the only straight couple I’ve ever come close to identifying with is Gomez and Morticia Addams, and their whole schtick is being as weird and abnormal as possible. That’s what we write as horrifying and unnatural: a loving straight couple.

Contrast this with a lot of what you get from queer relationships in pop culture, which is usually subtext and fanfiction… And you get people who actually want to be around one another. People who have to work against those same cultural norms that force the cishet people together seemingly against their will half the time. That’s just always seemed more right to me, why would I ever date someone who worked against me any percent of the time?

And so I really have to ask this question of cishet white America: are you really surprised? You’ve built this culture, been taught this since you were young and started teaching it yourself. Men, are you surprised at how horrified the women around you are? Are you okay with that? With voting for someone who considers half the population disposable sex objects? I mean, the fact that they’re human beings makes it terrible enough but let’s go with that fox news caster logic that finally got some of them to admit this is horrific, the majority of you either plan to or are already going to spend the rest of your life with a woman, so why treat them like your enemies and not your partners? I don’t understand.

(If you’re going to #notallmen me you can fuck right off)

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I haven’t written in a long time. Far too long. I always meant to start again but something inevitably would get in the way, usually my health. I’ve been hospitalized repeatedly, sometimes as frequently as three times in a month. I’ve dealt with pain and anxiety and depression. I’ve spent all my energy on trying to get better, but all that I’ve really accomplished is to hold off on getting too much worse.

I met Niki last year and very quickly felt close to her. As a couple of disabled women in activism we had a sort of connection that I very much appreciated. Going to Skepticon with her especially was a wonderful experience. We looked out for each other. Had a sort of sense of the little things that made big differences, the stuff that you just never can understand without having a chronic illness.

There’s one moment in particular that I keep replaying in my head. It was late on the drive back from Skepticon, after a huge weekend and probably ten hours at least in the car. We were at a rest stop for fuel and the bathroom. On the way out, she washed her hands, left her cane standing and took two steps to the hand dryer. I could see how excruciating for her it was, and recognized that look of regret when she knew it was two steps back to get her cane. I just whispered and asked her if she’d like me to move it next to her, and the nod and expression she gave spoke of such genuine relief.

Niki wrote. She wrote because it was important to her, because it made a difference to both her and the world around her, and she was amazing. And now I’m going to write, because it’s the most positive thing I can take away from this. I’m going to stop getting tripped up by hospital visits and several thousand page blog posts detailing my health care not being absolutely perfect. Writing is hard, but so is living with disability. She did both, and so will I.

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I’ve just published an update and sequel to last year’s Gender Analysis episode “Trans Passing Tips for Cis People”, which explored how perception of gendered features can vary between individuals due to the influence of a number of documented factors. This episode examines further evidence for various biases in gender perception and attribution, and considers what this means for trans people in the context of widespread cis assumptions about “passing” and the intensifying debate on restrooms:

In everyday life, interactions between the expression and interpretation of gender are so diverse that whether someone “looks like a woman” isn’t always entirely predictable. This naïve model of gender perception treats gender as a property emitted from an individual, with all others as passive receivers who simply accept this expression at face value. Yet this is precisely backwards – expressions of gender are not objective and singular; they are subjective, interpretative, and multiple.

The same trans person, on the same day, with exactly the same appearance, can still have their gender read entirely differently depending on who’s looking at them. Why does this happen? At least in part, it’s because many of the variables involved here aren’t located within the one person being observed, but rather the multiple people observing them.

Keep reading at Gender Analysis >>

The post Gender Analysis: On the science of gender perception and misgendering appeared first on Zinnia Jones.

In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding the withdrawal of the nomination of “Galileo’s Middle Finger” for a Lambda Literary Foundation award, I’ve reviewed the book’s sections on J. Michael Bailey and autogynephilia (a proposed sexual etiology of gender dysphoria):

The central theme of Galileo’s Middle Finger is the importance of the scientific pursuit of truth to the wider social pursuit of justice – to Dreger, these aims go hand in hand, with factual accuracy as a necessity for effective advocacy. Her recounting of the disputes surrounding this sexual theory is just one of many vignettes intended to support these principles. Unfortunately, her uncritical acceptance of questionable science, and her dissemination of a misleading impression of trans women’s lives, cast doubt on the book’s value in advancing the very justice she prizes most.

You can read the rest at Gender Analysis (or as a PDF here), including factual inaccuracies in the stereotype-laden caricatures attached to this theory, issues with the half-dozen epicycle-like excuses that have been proposed to explain away data inconsistent with the theory, and a look at some of the surprisingly personal attacks that have been made in the course of promoting the concept of autogynephilia. Many readers have been asking me to cover Blanchard’s typology and autogynephilia for a while, and the book presented an excellent opportunity. At almost 7500 words, this is the longest article I’ve published, but it’s mostly due to how much was wrong here.

The details of the relevant scientific research are obscure enough that there’s very little chance the average cis reader would be sufficiently familiar with the literature to recognize the full extent of the flaws in “Galileo’s Middle Finger”. Sadly, this lack of awareness leads to puff pieces and glowing reviews from otherwise reputable outlets, praising her values of “solid data”, “empirical research”, and “true scholarship” without the slightest recognition of the book’s stark inadequacies in those areas. The vast majority of cis people simply have no reason not to take her words at face value, and it’s disturbing how easily one high-profile source’s slanted coverage of this topic can filter down to a believing media and influence the wider public. My review-slash-scientific-critique is intended to remedy this. The science, the trans people who are the subject of this research, and the cis people who are interested in learning more about this, deserve better than the narrow and incomplete portrayal offered by Dreger.

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I’ve just finished a wonderful interview at Victoria Darling’s TransEthics blog, covering topics like public awareness of trans issues, support for trans youth, barriers to healthcare access, controversies within the community, and more. A quick preview:

TE: Is it your goal with the series to make trans people more relatable to the general public?

ZJ: This is a theme of the series, but more than that, it’s a theme of all of my work. I’ve found that this is often a matter of actions more than words. Simply existing publicly as an out trans person means creating opportunities for people to become familiar with us – when they see me, they know one more trans person than they did before. They know about my life, my history, my motivations and ambitions, my unique and defining features and interests.

This is what it means to humanize a group of people in the eyes of the larger public. It’s easy to make quick and uncharitable generalizations about who we are when you have a near vacuum of actual knowledge about us as real individuals. Unfamiliarity reduces us to an abstract concept for the wildest array of misconceptions and fears to be projected upon, rather than actual people who are a lot like you and are sharing a world with you. My series more narrowly serves to highlight specific issues facing trans people – aspects of our lives that can be quite challenging, but that cis people would otherwise have no reason to consider or be aware of in the usual course of their lives. These are experiences that I want to convey to cis people – I want more of them to have a deeper and more meaningful grasp of what this is like for us.

You can catch the rest of the interview at TransEthics.

The post An interview at TransEthics: Public outreach, healthcare, and community dynamics appeared first on Zinnia Jones.

For those of you who are new to this blog, I’m Zinnia Jones. I’m a professional writer and researcher, a radical feminist, a secular activist, a trans woman, and a mom, living in Florida with my partners Heather and Penny. As a former Christian, I’ve been vlogging on YouTube since 2008, addressing faith issues and political developments with a focus on LGBT topics. After transitioning in 2012, I’ve increasingly covered trans-related subjects with an emphasis on the experiences of trans people and the impact of structural prejudice on our lives. These themes have featured prominently in my web series, Gender Analysis. I’ve written at Freethought Blogs from 2012 to 2015, spoken at the Florida Secular Rally and SF Pride, participated in panels at Women in Secularism III, and made appearances on Al Jazeera America and CNN to discuss trans healthcare access in prisons.

For those of you who already know me, this will be the new location for my blog. All of my content from Freethought Blogs has been moved here, and those links will now forward to The Orbit. Readers can expect a renewed vigor to my blogging activity as a member of this exciting and dynamic new platform. The network features plenty of familiar faces, like Brute Reason, Almost Diamonds, Greta Christina, Heinous Dealings, En Tequila Es Verdad, Ashley F. Miller, Consider the Tea Cosy, Biodork, Black Skeptics, Godlessness In Theory, and Lousy Canuck. We’re also joined by some new additions from around the web, including Trans and Godless, Alyssa and Ania, Seriously?!?, Benny Vimes, Literate Perversions, The Progressive Pub, The Eternal Bookshelf, and Missives From The Ether, with many more on the way. Luxander, who previously wrote here as a co-blogger, has now moved up to their own blog at Metaphorical Penis. I’d highly recommend taking a look around and getting to know this unparalleled community.

If you have any questions, are still getting your bearings here, or just want to know more about all this, leave a comment below or reach me at [email protected]. Welcome to The Orbit!

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Transcription below the fold!

Hey there, Internet! I’m Luxander and today I want to talk about abortion.

Let me clarify that I am pro-choice and I consider abortion to be a human right. This is not a video where we’re discussing the ethics of abortion. If my commenters want to have a discussion about that, we can do a different video and have that debate on a separate forum. That’s not what this is for.

As you may be aware, there was a shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado very recently. Three people died and several others were injured. This has reignited the American political flame war about abortion. Many pro-choice people have said that this reoccurring series of terrorist attacks on Planned Parenthood and on abortion clinics constitutes a war on women’s reproductive rights.

While I do agree that this constitutes a war on reproductive rights, I absolutely have to denounce the idea that this is a war on women’s rights. Why, you might ask?

First of all, not all women are capable of getting pregnant. Trans women can’t get pregnant, and a lot of cis women can’t get pregnant because of various health reasons. But they’re still women. Second of all, many non-women can get pregnant, such as trans men, non-binary people, and some intersex people. (Some of whom may or may not identify themselves as women.)

For example, I am a transmasculine person who was capable of getting pregnant before I started hormone therapy. If I were to stop taking T at this point, I would be able to get pregnant again. I would be a trans person who might need access to abortion. My rights would be under attack just as much as those of cis women who are capable of getting pregnant.

Centering our pro-abortion rhetoric around women is inherently erasing of the existence and needs of trans individuals.

What’s interesting is that in certain trans-aware spaces, using gender-neutral terminology to talk about this can result in backlash. (For those of you watching [reading] this on Freethought Blogs, I apologize, it’s a little bit redundant because you probably already know what’s going on.)

Abortion provider Dr. Leah Torres posted some tweets back in September discussing the importance of bodily autonomy in relation to access to abortion. She used neutral phrases like “people who can get pregnant,” which is ideal when you’re discussing who may need abortion access. “People who can get pregnant.”

Former FTB blogger Ophelia Benson called out Dr. Torres on Twitter saying that she was erasing women (read: cis women) from the topic of discussion. There’s a storify of this exchange which I’ll put in the link below which basically shows Ophelia aggressively “correcting” Dr. Torres’ tweets by repeatedly saying “women” and “the word you’re looking for is ‘woman’.”

What Benson failed to understand is that the entire discussion around abortion is already centered on women. It’s only in really small spaces that trans people are even acknowledged in this.

In this particular discussion, cis women have the privilege. They’re the ones whose rights are being discussed and talked about, and it’s not their existence that’s being glossed over and swept under the rug.

Using gender-neutral terminology the way that Dr. Torres does is actually the most accurate and correct way to talk about who needs access to abortion. “People who can get pregnant.” Because not all women can get pregnant, and a lot of people who aren’t women can get pregnant.

I cannot repeat this enough: Centering the pro-abortion rhetoric around the rights of women is inherently erasing of the existence and needs of transgender individuals. Using gender-neutral terminology in no way hurts cis women and is actually a step in the right direction.

I ask you to please like and share this video because this is a topic that needs to be addressed. Trans erasure is an issue, it’s very important, and it needs to stop.

If you enjoyed this rant, feel free to subscribe for more content like this and you can check out my older videos about gender and all the wondrous things that I’ve had to say about it.

So, thank you all so much for watching, and have a day!

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