Okay. 3.5 cups of coffee have been consumed, along with a carrot-spice muffin, and I just got back from getting my 75 ml methadone (dissolved, as always, in a sickly bittersweet orange tang solution) and that should kick in shortly. Should be able to hunker down here for awhile.
Also, it seems my dream was somewhat prescient of today’s actual weather. Dreary, wet, drizzly, gray… absolutely nothing to compel me to wish I was outside instead of in here blogging. What luck.
I guess? [Read more…]
Hello!
Today is my blogathon, for SSA week, benefiting the Secular Student Alliance! [Read more…]
One of the creepiest things resulting from the apparently growing conflict between radical-feminists and the trans community is periodic agreements and alliances between trans women and MRAs (“mens rights advocates”). [Read more…]
I’ve been mentioning a bit lately the tendency within the trans community for trans people to operate as our own most committed, passionate gender police. The front lines of a system that sets up rigorously strict standards of what is necessary to qualify as a woman or a man, and what kinds of things will result in that identity being stripped from you. [Read more…]
A few days ago, The Telegraph posted this apparently innocuous little article entitled “The 50 Signs You’re A Grown-Up“.
Normally, I don’t take things like this particularly seriously. But this one kind of hit a nerve. Mostly because it sort of calcifies a rather horrible message I’ve been getting my whole life.
Namely, that to be an adult, a grown-up, you have to conform to a VERY specific kind of life. A life that is furthermore almost wholly defined by hetero/cisnormative expectations. Appearing on the list? Get married. Have kids.
What of those of us who can’t? [Read more…]
I’m very open about a lot of highly stigmatized aspects of who I am. I speak more or less freely about the fact that I have a transsexual body, that I was assigned male at birth, that I suffered from a severe heroin addiction for several years, that I’m still dependent on a daily dose of methadone to remain functional, etc.
I’m an open book.
But not really. In each choice to be open about a particular aspect of who I am, or who I was, I made the decision deliberately, intentionally, with individual reasons for each. There are a variety of motivations, and sacrifices, beneath each choice I made to be “out” about something, be it transsexuality, addiction, atheism, sexual orientation, whatever. The reasons behind each choice were particular, and some were harder choices than others.
All that, though, has the somewhat undesired effect of obscuring the fact that there’s a great deal I don’t talk about.
Some of my books are closed. [Read more…]
I’ve been talking an awful lot about the tension between trans-feminism and certain branches of radical feminism lately. Now I’m going to talk about it some more! It seems like a topic that demands attention at the moment, given the conferences being organized, or attempted to be, in Portland and London, and Sheila Jeffreys upcoming hate screed (available soon from Rutledge University Press!).
There’s a flip side to this all that I don’t think does get talked about enough, though. Which is that periodically, beneath their burning, biased, clearly irrational hatred and fear, the transphobes organizing themselves into these “radical” cliques occasionally touch on points that do deserve to be addressed. The truth is that the trans community, and certainly it’s main stream, often do espouse anti-feminist principles, and suggest creepy, essentialist things.
We need to talk about that. Dividing ourselves into strict camps, circling wagons, and refusing to ever perceive any fault amongst our own is not going to help move anything forward. How can we ask cisgender feminists to examine their own statements, beliefs and assumptions, and hold the hateful, oppressive voices of their community accountable, if we’re not willing to do the same? [Read more…]
So this is the first in a new series of shorter, unpolished posts based on my frequent twitter rants.
Yesterday, some webcomic writer dude named Aaron Diaz (@dresdencodak) made the assertion on twitter that superheroes, as a genre, are fundamentally at odds with representations of disability.
Say what? [Read more…]
In the first two parts of this series, I talked a bit about some of the things that has been holding feminism back from being able to speak to the fact of gender variance. In part one, I mentioned the way that a considerable amount of feminist theory, radical feminism in particular, based itself on a binary dialectic, with a male oppressor class and a female slave class. Not unlike how marxism reduced all oppressions and social ills to consequences of the tension between the bourgois (property owners) and proletariat (workers), and envisioned a world where everything would just be dandy if we could get rid of private property, considerable swathes of feminism imagined a world where patriarchy was the defining oppression, all others simply consequences of it, and everything, perhaps, would be just dandy if we could just get rid of gender.
Obviously, such a utopian vision reads a lot more like a nightmarish, brutal dystopia to me. The world they propose creating in their Rad-Fem 2012 conferences, a world where gender transition is outlawed and called a “human rights violation”, is a world I would fight as hard as possible to prevent being realized.
And in part two I talked a bit about the degree to which much of feminism, again radical feminism in particular, has staked far far far too much on an absolutist, social-constructivist view of gender. This is a vision fundamentally at odds with the evidence, and if feminism as a whole can’t learn to resolve the “nature vs. nurture” debate (a debate trans-feminism got over years ago) then it’s going to doom itself to becoming discredited and irrelevent. Which isn’t good for anyone, given the degree to which we all depend on the sustained presence of a strong feminist movement.
But these problems don’t simply create an inability for feminism to address the needs of people who don’t fit into a cissexist, binary vision of gender and sex. They’ve furthermore steered feminism into a dead-end alley, careening at top speed towards a great big brick wall marked “intersectionality”. [Read more…]