The media when your mere existence is a political act

I’ve signal boosted before some of the horrific consequences imposed on transgender folks just for being themselves, and today I have another great piece by Katelyn Burns on the media’s part in that:

But Maines is a pioneer of sorts: In 2009, his family filed suit against their school district for the right for their then-nine-year-old trans daughter, Nicole, to use the girl’s bathroom. They were the first family to successfully sue in a state court for such a right. But along with the lawsuit—and their subsequent advocacy against a bathroom bill proposed in the Maine legislature—came a lot of media attention.

Maines says the bathroom bill kickstarted his activism, and since then he has risen to the forefront of advocacy for families with trans kids, getting involved with GLAAD and serving on the Human Rights Campaign’s Parents for Transgender Equality National Council. He’s written numerous op-eds, writing of his decision to leave the GOP for TIME and getting involved in public speaking on trans rights with his daughter.

“When you get pushed into a corner you start to do things that you really should be doing, anyway,” he says. “It’s a release to finally say in public, ‘Yes this is my daughter, and we need to protect her, and everybody else like her.’”

For many parents of trans children, the impulse towards self-advocacy pulls the whole family into the media spotlight. And with trans people targeted by conservative politicians and radical feminists alike who seek to exclude them from public life, it’s getting harder to separate trans identity from activism. Often a trans person’s mere existence is a political act.

Read more here.

-Shiv

Sex addiction is not real

Or so sayeth Dr. Chris Donaghue. Psychiatry’s sordid history with pathologizing ordinary sexual behaviour sees its continuation with the term “sex addiction,” cited often by sociopaths attempting to justify their actions:

Last week Harvey Weinstein announced he was checking himself into rehab for sex addiction. His behavior is clearly problematic, but so is the use of the term “sex addiction.” And as a sex therapist, I’ve been battling this misunderstood and misused term for over a decade.

Not only is calling someone a sex addict a convenient way to write off being a sexual predator and lacking empathy, but it’s also an attempt at trying to rehab a career. Sex addiction is not real.

In the media, sex addiction is a relatively new concept, and is used as a culturally sanctioned shaming mechanism for people whose sexuality makes others anxious and eager to eradicate. It allows us to avoid exploring why our partner cheated on us, why we no longer have sex, why we hate pornography, or why sex scares us. If our partner or friend has sex more frequently than we are comfortable with, or in ways that upset us, we can just call them a sex addict and make the problem about them.

Read more here.

-Shiv

Don’t accept scraps from the rich

While Canadian media are busily fawning over pictures of Trudeau bottle-feeding an orphan otter, we’re catching wind from the latest rich people leak showing that Liberals are not exempt from the same greed Conservatives exhibit, they’re just better at hiding it:

A key aide of Canada’s PM is linked to offshore schemes that may have cost the nation millions of dollars in taxes, the Paradise Papers show.

The revelations may embarrass Justin Trudeau, who has campaigned against tax havens.

The leaks pose questions about the actions of Stephen Bronfman, chief fundraiser for Mr Trudeau’s Liberal Party as well as ex-senator Leo Kolber.

Lawyers for them said no deals had tried to evade tax and all were legal.

Canadian broadcaster, CBC, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) have been spearheading this investigation as part of the Paradise Papers leaks.

They said a trove of documents found in the files of Appleby, the offshore law firm that is the main source of the leaks, suggested that Mr Bronfman’s investment firm, Claridge, had for more than 20 years moved millions offshore for the Kolber family.

I’ll concede that there is a difference between the Kicking 500 Puppies Party and the Kicking 1000 Puppies Party–500 puppies, to be precise–but that doesn’t change the fact that the Kicking 500 Puppies Party has been banking on the thoroughly uninspiring talking point that it kicks 500 fewer puppies than the other guy.

How many trolleyology experiments do you have to run before you start asking who is tying people to the rails?

-Shiv

Meghan TERFy licks a frozen pole

Alternatively: Bites off more than she can chew, etc. Meghan Murphy, the intellectual bankrupt fountain of bile running Feminist Current, recently took a swipe at trans historian Cristan Williams. Williams is no stranger to trans exclusionary feminist bullshit, however, and published a comprehensive fact-check of Murphy’s nonsense:

I began encountering the “TERF is a slur” slogan in 2013, around a year after the political Right experienced a measure of success with its 2012 “homophobe is a slur” campaign.

The case was made that when discussing anti-queer hate in the news and anti-bullying efforts in schools, the term “homophobia” should not be used to describe the very specific type of anti-queer hate and oppression faced by LGBTQIA people because the term was an offensive slur.

By the end of 2012, the Associate Press banned the term “homophobe” from its news coverage and right-wing religious groups were working to ban the term in anti-bullying school materials because, they claimed, “homophobe” was a “made-up” term that promotes “hate and contempt for Christians.”

Without terms like “homophobe” and “homophobia,” the queer community’s ability to communicate and reference a specific anti-gay culture is hobbled, caged inside of rhetorical parameters defined by those who work to empower anti-gay culture. After “homophobe” and “homophobia” were deemed by a heteronormative culture to be too toxic to use, the queer community’s languaging of the hate it faced each day disappeared from most mainstream media use.

…

Around this time, TERFs began pushing the false history that “TERF” was coined by trans people as a slur. Note how this rhetoric closely mimics the 2012 right-wing rhetoric that “homophobe” was a “made-up” term that promotes “hate and contempt for Christians.”

Makes ya think.

Read more here.

-Shiv

 

Ethical analysis of racialized sexual fetishes

There are a lot of people who would rather their sexual habits and porn consumption be infinitely separated from ethical analysis, but we are unfortunately products of our time and place. Cico Three has an excellent, if somewhat technical analysis on interracial porn, examining the historical themes and consequences of white/black pairings depicted in pornography:

Skin Diamond notes that, “Interracial is only ‘interracial’ if it involves a Black man and a white girl.” Sexton concurs writing, “to be considered interracial, especially in the U.S. context, [a relationship] must involve a Black person. This is not always the case, of course, and there are myriad historical examples of hysteria prompted by the prospect of sexual encounter between whites and nonblack people of color. What I sense, however, is that within the racist imagination, relationships with blacks, whether the other is white or a nonblack person of color, constitute interracial relationships par excellence.”

Diamond continues, “Technically, most of my porn is interracial but because I’m a Black chick, it doesn’t count. People only wanna see the taboo of a Black man with a white girl.” Diamond’s analysis of her scenes with white or other non-Black men ‘not counting’ speaks again to the inviolability of Black women and has two meanings. “It doesn’t count” in both marketing and accounting. This plays out in different earning potential for white and Black women performers.

The higher earning potential happens in two ways. White women performers, especially successful ones, often follow a progression of roles. Lexington Steeledescribes it, “There are situations where it could be the industry, whether it’s her boyfriend, her husband or management that suggests she either doesn’t do [interracial] at all, or waits until a certain time when her rates can appreciate over time. Where it’s: girl-girl to boy-girl to anal to DP [double penetration] to, and then the ultimate she can charge her most is when she finally does interracial.” This is career path is unavailable to Black women performers whose scenes are always already “racial” but never “inter” from an earning perspective, even when explicitly pointed out as such. For example Nyomi Banxxx recalled about a scene with a white male performer, “I had this conversation with my agent. I had this conversation with a director, because we were arguing about rate. I said, ‘I need to get paid for an interracial rate, IR.’ ‘No that’s not IR.’” This is one reason why Misty Stone says, Black performers “do the same amount of work but [white performers] get different opportunities.”

It’s a bit of a dense read but I recommend you check it out here.

-Shiv

 

“Ridiculous straight panic” is my new band name

Take it away, Samantha Allen:

Remember how I joked that that there aren’t enough of us—something like 1.4 million transgender people in the United States—to go around? Our rarity also makes the internet a lifeline for us—just as it is for any other minority—allowing us to connect with each other across great distances and feel less alone.

So it’s especially unfortunate that we can’t talk about a vast swath of human experience without being surveilled by people who are obsessed with hating us.

Those haters act as if we’re complaining that no one wants us when what we’re really complaining about—more often than not—is that the people who do want us can’t seem to be chill about it.

The same survey that found that 27 percent of Americans wouldn’t be friends with a transgender person also found that four percent of Americans said that they had been on a date with a transgender person in the last year.

Considering that just 0.3 percent of the population is estimated to be transgender, that is staggering. Unless there’s a small handful of transgender people who are cleaning up while everyone else stays home, it means that a great number of us are dating. But tellingly, the survey also found that over 25 percent of people wouldn’t tell anyone if they did have sex with a transgender person.

The fact that transgender people are desirable is one of society’s worst kept secrets. And people are still trying to keep that a secret because they’re worried what other people would think about them if they slept with us.

I’m so over this panic, too.

Read more here.

-Shiv

A misogynist by any other name would smell just as putrid

On August 10 earlier this year, I concluded that the weakly supported theory of autogynephilia (AGP) remains popular among a certain subset of sexologists because of its utility for dismissing trans women. A careful look at the methodology that produced the theory quickly demonstrates its fatal flaws, and yet the theory is, to this day, occasionally cited as a reason to dismiss a trans woman’s opinion as unreliable. In brief review, the theory posits that there are two (and only two) etiologies by which gender dysphoria is produced in trans women: The first, the bizarre and easily falsified notion that it is easier to be a trans woman than an effeminate gay man; the second, sexual arousal at the thought of oneself as possessing culturally female attributes. The former are confusingly named “homosexual,” (as in women attracted to men), the latter “heterosexual” (as in women attracted to women). Science!

Ray Blanchard was only able to propose this conclusion by ignoring vast portions of his data and framing his subjects as liars, thus rendering his theory unfalsifiable when tested with his own methodology. The theory, naturally, doesn’t pan out when investigated by Blanchard’s peers.

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Why are Christian colleges exempt from academic freedom?

If there’s anything that has demolished any patience I might have had for conservative discourse, it’s the sheer amount of projection that occurs. The whole “universities churning out fragile snowflake pee-see wimps” canard is painfully ironic considering how strictly controlled students, teachers, and the curricula are for conservative faith-based colleges:

Places like the College of the Ozarks have made the choice to erect barriers around their students in pursuit of comfortable sameness. They ensure that no student will ever be forced to encounter a significantly divergent idea in the classroom, and they preserve unity of thought by means such as requiring prospective faculty to submit letters of recommendations from their pastors. Such practices are common among evangelical universities, including at Wheaton College in the Chicago area. Sometimes called the “Harvard of Christian schools,” Wheaton tried to fire professor Larycia Hawkins last year for writing on Facebook that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Hawkins, an African-American political scientist, had clashed for several years with Wheaton authorities over her refusal to conform her personal theology to the confines of the Wheaton statement of faith and educational purpose. Here it’s not merely required that one be a Christian, as Hawkins is, but that one profess a specific set of theological principles.

To be clear, the hundreds of colleges that impose doctrine on their students are well within their rights to do so. Moreover, many religiously affiliated institutions rely on their spiritual identity as a foundation for engaging the broader world, rather than as a means to erect barriers around their students. Dominican, where I taught, is one of those. Somehow, though, America’s extensive discourse around academic freedom, political correctness, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and snowflakes never extends to talk about the explicitly exclusionary, safe, trigger-free (except on rifles), snowflake-ridden campuses like the College of the Ozarks.

Read more by David Perry.

-Shiv

 

Speaking different languages

Yesterday I recommended a humorous and justifiably salty piece by Sex, Drugs, and Mental Health regarding the predictability of anti-trans claims. Today I want to switch modes to one of their more serious recent pieces about the problem of ignorance. The author writes a good blag:

[Read more…]