Guest post: A person, not an abstract

Next, a comment by besomyka.

We seem to conflate sex and gender in these discussions even though we know better. When we say I feel or don’t feel like a woman, for example. Do you mean woman in the social constructed sense, the stochastic physical sense? What?

When I say I’m a woman, I happen to mean both. I think that if you considered me a woman, that your mental shortcuts about what that meant would be more true about me than the other option. Is it perfect? No, of course not. I’m a person, not an abstract. But it IS more accurate.

I also mean it physically. I am quite sure that if we destroyed the concept of gender completely, that I’d still have dysphoria centered on my body. My heart would ache seeing a pregnant woman, knowing that it could never be me. I would have still felt so rigid hugging people without a bosom of my own. I know I’d still feel like a hollow mannequin when I looked in the mirror. [Read more…]

Guest post: That something just doesn’t fit

Now I’ve caught up somewhat after the conference, so I can do what several people requested and make guest posts of some of the comments from the Discomfort with the more social aspects of gender discussion last week.

I’ll start with one by AMM:

There’s something that a lot of trans people report and I’m becoming aware of in myself that doesn’t get mentioned in feminist discussions of gender.

It’s that feeling that at some fundamental level, you just don’t belong with the people you share a birth gender with, and in many cases you don’t feel right in your body. That something just doesn’t fit, no matter how perfectly you may seem to fit. And when you transition, medically and/or socially, you just feel right for once. [Read more…]

Mr Pinckney came from a family of civil rights activists and leaders

The BBC profiles pastor and state senator Clementa Pinckney.

A church pastor and a state senator, Clementa Pinckney spoke of his politics as an extension of his religious mission, as another way of serving the people around him.

“Our calling is not just within the walls of the congregation,” he said. “We are part of the life and community in which our congregation resides.” [Read more…]

In custody

Dylann Roof has been arrested. As many of my friends are pointing out on Twitter and Facebook, he won’t be tortured or raped or murdered in custody. He’ll be safe and sound.

The Post and Courier ‏@postandcourier 2h2 hours ago
.@FBI confirms that Dylann Roof, 21, of #Columbia area is suspect in #CharlestonShooting. #chsnews

Embedded image permalink
 The SPLC has been providing information:
2 hours ago

Photo of #CharlestonShooting suspect Dylann Roof shows patch of South African apartheid era flag

[Read more…]

Your yard is becoming RELENTLESSLY GAY

Update: this could be faked; see karmacat’s comment.

The butterfly on Taslima is no fake though. I was there, and they really were landing on people.

Another item from the Annals of Bigotry – the kind of bigotry that leads, at the extremes, to murders like the ones at the Charleston AME church, and the ones at Charlie Hebdo, and the ones in Bangladesh.


My friend found this note taped to her door after hanging some colorful jar lights in her yard with her daughters. She’s responding to this nonsense with whimsy and has started a campaign to paint her whole house in rainbows — is there any chance you might share her info? http://www.gofundme.com/x6dkw9h

— with Julie Baker in Baltimore, Maryland.

[Read more…]

Charleston

The New York Times is doing live coverage.

What We Know

  • A gunman identified by city and federal law enforcement officials as Dylann Storm Roof, 21, opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the nation’s oldest black churches, on Wednesday evening, killing nine.
  • The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state senator, was killed, according to the minority leader of the State House of Representatives.
  • The police said the other victims were six women and two men.
  • The Charleston police chief, Greg Mullen, called the attack a hate crime.

And then – a completely nauseating eyewitness account: [Read more…]

The end stage of a metamorphosis in which the idea took final flight

Now it’s just getting funny – all the bolts and sprockets flying off the “Secular Policy Institute” and landing in the middle of the banana cream pie.

Last week I was busy getting rid of a whole bunch of assholes so I missed Edwina Rogers’s comment at Almost Diamonds. I wish I’d seen it then, because if I had I would have known about it when I was accidentally introduced to her at the conference. (I did mention that I was accidentally introduced to her, right? I was. Her smile shrank quite a lot when she heard my name. I wasn’t very effusive myself.)

Rogers starts off by saying the post is fiction – which is amusing, given all the references in the post.

The blogger spins a story of the transformation of GSC into the GSI and its eventual emergence as the Secular Policy Institute (SPI). This is a breezy reconstruction of the actual events that almost suggests that the Secular Policy Institute is the latest incarnation of what began as the Global Secular Council, the end stage of a metamorphosis in which the idea took final flight. The account reads as an improbable and serpentine transformation of projects and organizations precisely because it is improbable and, well, untrue, too.

Oh yes? Then why is there so much overlap? So many of the same “experts” and “thought leaders” and “Fellows”? So many of the same photographs of the same people? [Read more…]

He’s done his time in prison and is now funding secular start-ups

Nostalgia time. Let’s look back at the first blushing days of the new Global Secular Council, later to be the Secular Policy Institute – by which I mean, let’s look back at what I had to say about it starting in May 2014.

In Global shmobal, for instance, the first whisper of its arrival.

Oops. There’s a thing called the “Global Secular Council.”

global

First? It’s not so global. They’re nearly all American or Ukanian, and the whole thing is clearly Anglophone.

Last? Its team of experts – 23 of them. Five women. Five. [Read more…]