Proving Skeptics Wrong, Urban Outfitters Successfully Stoops Even Lower

Apparently no longer content with simply ripping off designs from independent artists without paying or crediting them, clothing a generation of hipster misogynists, pulling their “I Support Same-Sex Marriage” tee off store shelves after just one week (citing non-existent “bad press”), selling packages of ramen noodles for $5.00 USD a pop, drastically marking up products cheaply manufactured in overseas sweatshops in order to make heinous profits, funneling exorbitant sums of said heinous profits to finance Rick Santorum’s presidential bid, and their infamous “eat less” women’s long v-neck, Urban Outfitters have decided to continue their campaign of branding themselves the hippest purveyors of pure evil on the corporate high street by engaging in cheap tranny jokes! [Read more…]

“Trapped In A (Wo)Man’s Body”

Okay darlings, let’s get this cleared up, please. Because I’m sick of dealing with this.

You know the whole “woman trapped in a man’s body” / “man trapped in a woman’s body” thing? That is a metaphor.

Okay? Do you have that? Do you understand? I’ll repeat: It’s a metaphor. A simplification. A way of putting transsexuality into terms that are easily explained to a cis person. That is why it exists, that is its job. Helping you understand something very complex (and very alien to your own experiences), in a way that is quick and easy, for contexts where a full and nuanced explanation is not feasible, and for people who wouldn’t understand those full and nuanced explanations.

It does NOT accurately reflect actual trans experience, is NOT intended to, and is DEFINITELY NOT the entirety of our thinking on the matter.

So when you mistake it as what (and all) we really believe, and decide to mock or discredit our identities by joking around about “what if I think I’m a penguin trapped in a human body?”, “what if I’m a black guy trapped in a jewish guy’s body?”, or “what if I’m a robot trapped in an organic body?”, you are making an ass of yourself. You haven’t dropped some wicked awesome truth bomb that totally proves how crazy and irrational trans people are. All you’ve successfully managed to do is point out that a simplified, dumbed-down metaphor is simple and dumb (which, I might add, is simplified and dumbed-down for the purpose of helping out simple-minded dummies like you). Congratulations!

When trans people use this metaphor, it is not because we don’t understand the complexity and nuance of gender and sex and how they work. It’s because we need to cope with how many of you don’t understand it. [Read more…]

Why I Bother

So I’m enjoying the glow of victory today. Last night, our team, The Gallifreyan High Council, emerged as Time Lords Victorious in the Vancouver leg of the Cross-Canada Skeptical Smackdown quiz night. In addition to myself, the trans-feminist skeptic-ish atheist blogger, we had Joe Fulgham, co-host of the Caustic Soda science and pop-culture podcast, Xavier MacDonald, who bears a striking resemblance to The Green Arrow, and Lars Martin, both a nuclear astrophysicist and the cuddliest, most loveable German in the world. Pics will probably be forthcoming at either Skeptic North or Confessions Of An Asshole Skeptic, probably around the time we also figure out our national standing.

But that isn’t the only bit of pride I will oh-so-immodestly strut around today!

Because you know what this is?

This is my 100th post at SNR! [Read more…]

Birdo, Poison And How To Construct Trans-Pride From Transphobia

I’m not really a gamer. I don’t own any consoles. It’s been a long, long time since I did. I’m usually pretty okay with that. Life is too big and expansive to fit all its subjects and media and passions into one little brain and lifetime. With some things you just have to accept “okay, I guess I’ll just be mostly oblivious about that particular thingy” or “okay, I guess I’ll just accept this particular gap in my education”.

(which is fine as long as you remember not to start acting like you are an expert on those things)

But every once in awhile, something comes along that makes me think yeah, I really kind of wish I did have a console or two, and was a gamer.

Like the recent release of Street Fighter X Tekken.

Why? Because I could play as Poison, the semi-iconic (and tediously “controversial”) transgender character originally from Final Fight. I could play as a beautiful, femme but totally badass trans woman, and spend all day kicking the will to live out of a series of virtual cisgender assholes. Kick back and harmlessly vent my increasingly pent up rage at a non-virtual world where all too often we’re the ones who get hurt. [Read more…]

The Gendering Of Children, And Raising Trans Kids

There are a couple interesting things going on on twitter lately. There’s the hashtag #ididnotreport, where women (and men, and members of other genders) describe circumstances of rape or sexual assault that they did not report to police or authorities, and why. It’s a very, very chilling look at the intense social pressures that enable rape and sexual assault, and burden its victims with guilt and shame, and pressure them into silence.

Then there’s @NiceGuyBrianG, an apologist for rape and general non-consensual sexual acts, who has mocked and derided the #ididnotreport trend.

But beneath this, there’s been seething a subtler little trend that speaks volumes about where we still are as a culture in regards to homophobia and attitudes towards sexual variance, and the degree of violent (and frankly incomprehensible) hatred that is still openly stated towards homosexuality.

Recently, another hashtag, #ToMyUnbornChild has been trending, where people speak messages to their future children. And an alarmingly large number of these messages are along the lines of “If you’re gay, I’ll beat the shit out of you / kill you / disown you / etc.”

Yes. People are taking the opportunity to make their feelings towards their future children not as a chance to talk about offering them a better world, or treating them with love, or trying to suggest some scrap of wisdom they’ve managed to eke out of our confusing and strange world, but instead as a chance to iterate that they are so frightened, disgusted or hateful of homosexuality that they’ll threaten a child who does not yet exist, their child, with rejection, violence or death if they should end up happening to be gay.

And sadly, it should go without saying that this is not only a hypothetical put forward by some hateful twitter-users who have no idea what love for a child actually means. It is a staggeringly, heart-breakingly common story for queer people to have to choose between their families and their integrity, being able to be open about who they are. Those awful feelings of love for a child being conditional on their conformity to arbitrary cultural standards of sexuality and gender do not always go away when they finally look that child in the eyes or hold them in their arms. Far too often, they still hold that child and while thinking “I love you so much…” are still holding, somewhere in the back of their minds, “…as long as you’re straight, cis and meet my expectations.”

What this horrible little twitter trend has got me thinking about, though, is the number of e-mails (and sometimes comments) I’ve gotten with parents or would-be parents asking me for advice on how to go about dealing with the possibility (either concrete and suggested by present circumstances, or simply an abstract, as it always is) that their children may be gay or transgender. How do you assign a gender? Should you? How do you make sure your child receives the message that it’s okay to explore their gender (or later, sexual orientation)? How do you do this while not having them be bullied or alienated by other kids? How do you protect them from the gender-normative messages of society as a whole? And if they do begin presenting as transgender, how do we deal with that? What is the best strategy to take, and what will give them the best shot at happiness? How do we deal with all the people around us who will see any act of support for gender non-normativity in a child as “abuse”? Etc.

These parents, unlike the would-be practitioners of homophobic infanticide of #ToMyUnbornChild, are already getting it right. They’ve already accomplished the most important thing: putting the child’s happiness first, and thinking through and asking about how to ensure that happiness, and not letting these possibilities (or realities) compromise their love and support for their children. [Read more…]

A Transgender Manual Of Style

Hi folks!

So… I’ve been meaning to get some kind of glossary put together for a long, long, long while… but it occurred to me lately that also a lot of people have some additional trouble with knowing HOW to use trans terminology.

So I wanted to make a little go-to reference guide, which I’ll probably set up as a static page (and expand after receiving whatever input or questions come along in the comments). [Read more…]

Thinking Through The Sex Trade

I love when people say feminism is a monolithic dogma with a specific party-line that must be towed. It’s hilarious. Obviously they’ve never been around more than one feminist at a time when the subject of sex work or pornography comes up.

It’s pretty much an instant debate, really. You step in one direction and you’re slut-shaming. Step another direction and you’re genital-essentializing. Take another step and you’re sex-negative. Another and you’re supporting objectification and rape culture. Etc.

I don’t want to prop up the myth of the “hyper-sensitive” feminist and her hair-trigger temper, but it does get a bit frustrating how easily people’s positions on the matter get straw-manned, misinterpreted or used as a basis on which to make a litany of assumptions about what they think on a hundred disparate issues pertaining to sexuality and such. It’s often hard to find a chance to actually outline your position before someone has gone ahead and projected one onto you.

The reason for that, I find, is that the question of pornography and sex work involves a number of extremely important questions held in tension and conflict. It’s a loaded issue not only in terms of a particular set of implications for women’s rights, gender, sexual rights, etc. but several, spanning different considerations that may or may not be prioritized the same way by one feminist or another.

There’s the question of bodily autonomy I talked about yesterday, and what it implies to have an abstract state telling a woman she must not use her body in a particular way. There’s the question of representation, and what this means in terms of our cultural conception of what a woman’s role (sexual or otherwise) “ought” to be. There’s the question of the degree to which our perceptions on the issue are being muddied by outdated codes of sexual morality. There’s the question of how often a woman involved in such work actually is making a true and genuine choice, versus being forced (in varying degrees) into the sex industry through socio-economic circumstances or even outright coercion. There’s the question of slut-shaming and the intense degree of stigmatization attached to sex work that is almost certainly filtering our ideas of what sex work is and means through a heavy cultural bias. There’s the ways that pornographic representation plays into issues of intersectionality, and cultural concepts not only of male sexuality and female sexuality, but also how we understand race, disability, gender variance, homosexuality, and many other concepts through a lens of sexuality, and the immense potential for exploitation and othering.

And there’s probably a whole textbook worth of other issues I just totally overlooked.

Working through those concepts to end up arriving at some kind of definitive, comprehensive position on sex work and pornography is virtually impossible. There’s just WAY too many variables and implications to take into consideration to make any kind of grand sweeping general statement. But yet, the intense degree of cultural baggage attached to the issue ends up sort of insisting on that. I keep finding myself backed into corners where I need to proclaim myself definitively pro-legalization of sex work, or against the sex trade, or in sex-positive and in favour of pornography, or totally against the sexualization of women in media. Every time I have to make such a proclamation in order to spare myself the hassle of people projecting some OTHER definitive generalized position onto me (one they disagree with), I’m, at best, telling a half-truth. I wonder how many feminists are doing the same.

Do ANY of us actually have a definitive, all-encompassing position on any of this?

When you work through the individual considerations, what you arrive at is an ever-expanding set of complications and interlocking ambiguities. In so far as I have a position, it’s based on questions, not answers. [Read more…]

On A Hypothetical “Cure” For GID

So here’s a thought experiment that pretty much every trans person ever has been subjected to a good umpteen-dozen times by “curious” cis people…

“Let’s say there was a pill you could take, or like a certain kind of brain laser, that could make you, like, identify as your assigned sex, would you do that instead of transitioning? Like, it would be way easier, right? Because then you wouldn’t have to be, like, an incomplete man/woman, you could just totally have a body you’re cool with. Right?”

No matter how many times I hear this tedious and presumptuous question, it never really gets any less insulting and infuriating to me. Might as well get my thoughts down on pap-…uh… pixels. [Read more…]