-Shiv
Against the Grain
How many intersections can you cram in one feminist?
-Shiv
When I first began volunteering for LGBTQ+ social resources, one of the first rules I learned was to Never tell a dependent youth that they “need” to come out to their parents or guardians. By now, those parents concerned about Alberta’s student run Gay-Straight Alliances (alternatively Queer-Straight Alliances) are likely aware that professionals and volunteers affirming LGBTQ+ youth tend to follow this rule, and now we have a law written by the New Democratic Party setting the same as policy for school administrations. The leadership of both the Wildrose and the Progressive Conservatives have gone on record to disagree with this policy, stating that they think students joining the student-run GSA clubs ought to result in a notification for their parents, along with hundreds of other community organizers stepping into the conversation to concur.
Women’s Liberation Front, the supposedly radical feminist group that filed commentary opposing Gavin Grimm’s Title IX case for transgender students, is actually financed by the anti-abortion/LGBT James Dobson.
Content Notice: Advocacy for violence, aggressive misogyny.
I gather that some of the arguments made in favour of abolishing Alberta’s parallel-to-public Catholic education system are about costs–there’s a redundancy in management, so amalgamating the two services would find the public budget a few extra million after restructuring. And Adriana LaGrange writes a cheery “alternative reality” for the Edmonton Journal about the state of Catholic schools, arguing–among many other things–that the costs probably wouldn’t be lower if we were to amalgamate.
There are a few statements which get a good giggle from me, considering the context of the ACSTA splinter group scandals.
Compare LaGrange’s words here:
Rae Rosenberg wrote some commentary on the This American Life episode featuring a trans man who used testosterone as an excuse for his misogyny:
Ira Glass introduces an interview of a trans man named Griffin Hansbury with producer Alex Blumberg halfway through Act I of the episode. Ira tells us, “A warning to listeners that they talk about looking at women and wanting sex during this interview”. Provided with this statement, I brace myself for an onslaught of misogyny, but still find myself appalled at how bad it becomes.
Griffin explains how he used to identify as a butch lesbian and came out as trans during his sophomore year of college. Kind of like me, minus the butch, so I relate to that. Alex asks Griffin to explain some of the changes he experienced after taking testosterone, to which Griffin answers an increased libido. Sure, this is a thing that many folks who take testosterone experience, of course to varying degrees. But Griffin elaborates that taking testosterone made him understand adolescent boys and men much more than he had previously. How, you might ask? Well, testosterone seems to have made Griffin empathize with why boys and men objectify and sexually harass women.
Griffin explains that due to his increased libido from testosterone, even the sight of an “unattractive woman’s ankles” would “flood [his] mind with aggressive, pornographic images”.
Even the sight of an unattractive woman’s ankles would lead him to aggressively sexualize a woman. Oh, God.
Griffin then tells a story of walking behind a woman wearing a “tiny” skirt and shirt, and how he kept on staring at her ass. He continues, “And I, I walked past her and this voice in my head kept saying ‘Turn around to look at her breasts, turn around, turn around, turn around.’ And my, my, you know my feminist female background said, you know, ‘Don’t you dare, you pig, don’t turn around.’ And you know, I fought myself for a whole block and then I, I turned around and checked her out.”
A whole block! Imagine the strength it took to walk a whole block without sexualizing a woman. Talk about self-control, because testosterone sure makes it hard to be a respectful and decent human being. You sure this is all because of testosterone, Griffin?
But y’all, it gets so much worse.
Read more about it here. I’ve also previously written about how estrogen is turned into a fable for the perceived increase in emotions for transfem folks when traumatic incidences are the likelier culprit. Causation is such a tricky thing to tease out in this scenario, because taking hormones is something that concurs with a larger psychological event–transitioning. So I am immediately suspicious of the claims that hormones can be safely linked as the cause of these massive attitude shifts when they happen at the same time as an upheaval as meaningful as a transition. In the case of misogyny, everyone learns it to some degree, so it makes sense that trans masculine individuals will know the misogynistic attitudes before they can express them as men.
-Shiv
“When you find yourself in one, stop digging.”
Early last month, in a speech focused on highlighting the need to track federal spending on indigenous issues, Beyak said “good deeds” came out of Canada’s residential schools.
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission spent six years examining the legacy of the government-funded, church-operated schools, infamous hotbeds of abuse and mistreatment that operated from the 1870s to 1996.
The senator’s comments touched off a firestorm inside and outside the upper chamber that divided her own caucus, which ultimately decided to remove her from the Senate committee on Aboriginal Peoples.
READ MORE: Senator who defended residential schools urged to leave committee
Beyak said in her statement that she believes this experience has revealed to her how difficult it is to have a “balanced, truthful discussion about all issues affecting Canadians.”
Here’s your balance, Lynn Beyak: European colonials committed genocide against the First Nations. Canada, the institution that arose from that atrocity, continued that genocide through the residential school system.
We’re the bad guys. You don’t get to claim credit for the good shit Canada did while eschewing credit for our bad shit. We own that history, you hare-brained narcissistic twit.
-Shiv
It’s back! I said I was serious when I said I could predict which doctors transantagonists would quote (or in the case of Cecilia Dhejne, misquote).
Me on November 14th, 2016: Five years later and they still haven’t read That Fucking Swedish Study.
Error #1: The study found that gender affirmation increased/didn’t reduce rates of suicide, therefore gender affirmation is ineffective/harmful.
The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.8–4.3) than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide (aHR 19.1; 95% CI 5.8–62.9). Sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for suicide attempts (aHR 4.9; 95% CI 2.9–8.5) and psychiatric inpatient care (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 2.0–3.9).
“For controls of the same birth sex” ought to be printed on a giant neon billboard, as that unfathomably important comparison is lost in this error.
In other words, this only supports that trans people, even if they access gender affirmative care, are a higher risk of suicide than cisgender controls. Indeed, the study itself points out that it is not a comparison between trans folk who have and haven’t received affirmation care:
It is therefore important to note that the current study is only informative with respect to transsexual persons health after sex reassignment; no inferences can be drawn as to the effectiveness of sex reassignment as a treatment for transsexualism. In other words, the results should not be interpreted such as sex reassignment per se increases morbidity and mortality. Things might have been even worse without sex reassignment. As an analogy, similar studies have found increased somatic morbidity, suicide rate, and overall mortality for patients treated for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. This is important information, but it does not follow that mood stabilizing treatment or antipsychotic treatment is the culprit.
IT’S RIGHT THERE IN THE STUDY. AND PEOPLE STILL THINK THIS STUDY SUPPORTS THEIR CONCLUSION THAT GENDER AFFIRMATION IS HARMFUL OR INEFFECTIVE. A;RKEHAEKTH;ALJET;LJ
That’s it. There isn’t some elaborate maze to guide you through, a slog of logical fallacies to hack apart as if their argument were the untamed wilds of an inner Brazilian jungle. They. Literally. Didn’t. Finish. Reading. The. Paper.
Glenn T. Stanton on April 4th, 2017:
A 2011 Swedish study, a long-term follow-up of men and women who underwent gender reassignment surgery, indicates that cutting bodies and administering hormonal treatments are not as ameliorative as many think.
Me on March 11th, 2017:
Check out RationalWiki’s article on BOLD AND DETERMINED.
-Shiv
Thanks in part to Marcus, I’ve begun a process that questions many of the functions of the State that I take for granted, even if I am unlikely (or at least less likely) to be affected by most of them. Around the same time that I began this questioning, there was a particular term used by xenophobes on the topic of immigration–“illegal”–that began to strike a particularly unpleasant chord in me. Though written, it struck me as a venomous slur, something you spit at someone. Immigration, sovereignty, even the idea of the State–all these lofty ideals seemed to clash with the gritty details once you stop seeing people as immigrants first and human second.
It’s hard to stomach complicity in these ideas, because once you actually take the time to look, you notice the blood tribute they require. (Content Notice: Violence)
Quick! The conservative persecution media circuit has gone like, an entire month without mentioning Jordan Peterson! WE NEED TO FIX THIS!
Jordan Peterson–who, by the way, is making close to $250,000 per year on his Patreon–immediately went to the news to whinge about his latest grant funding application, which was recently denied.
TORONTO — University of Toronto psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson has had a federal research grant application denied for the first time in his long and distinguished academic career.
And he’s certain that the rejection from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the government agency that supports post-secondary research, is linked to the controversy surrounding his stand on gender-neutral pronouns such as “zie” and “zher,” and the modern notion of gender as being fluid.
That his application was also rated so poorly is telling, he said, meaning that if the proposal had just missed the mark, it might have been a credible critique, but the proposal failed abysmally.
Julia Gualtieri, spokeswoman for the council, said in an email Monday that grants are awarded through a merit review process, and that “past funding is not a guarantee of further funding.” Names of the peer review committee members will be publicly posted once all applicants have been fully notified, she said.
Were this any other academic, they would likely be disappointed, take a few moments to rant to their peers before rallying, and move the fuck on.
But Poor Persecuted Peterson isn’t just any academic.
“I think that it’s (the controversy) provided someone with a convenient opportunity to make their displeasure with what I’m doing known,” he told Postmedia in a recent phone interview. “I can’t shake the suspicion.”
Just to remind you–this man is a personality psychologist, not exactly a field renown for its watertight methodology. I mean, a reasonable person might just assume that they’ve swung and missed–it’s fine, we’re all human, it happens to all of us. But NO! It’s all part of the ebul freeze peach hatin librultard conspiracy!!! because the only reason anyone could object to his argument is that they’re ess jay double yoo beta cucks and not because he’s literally pulling it from his nether quarters.
Maybe I should consider a career in nailing myself to the cross for profit.
-Shiv