Ireland is having a referendum on marriage equality this week, so Aoife is running a series of guest posts on why LGBTQ people deserve the same respect as others. It seems obvious how the vote should go, but I’ve been living in the US all my life and seen that human decency seems to be a struggle for a lot of people. Let’s all hope for good outcomes everywhere!
Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.
In a recent thread, Okidemia posed a question that many parents have these days: When and how should I teach my child/ren about trans* folk?
Okidemia framed it this way:
…kids have not been told about transpeople yet, because we don’t know any. Thus an important educationnal question:
at what age would you* speak about it to kids? (certainly, you* should begin before they meet psychologically transgendering acquaintances –as opposed to biologically transitioning which certainly happens later in life.
One of the reasons this question seems so confounding is that, like many confounding questions, it is the wrong question. [Read more…]
Remember that scene in Avengers 2 where the plane swoops in and opens a door it its belly and Black Widow comes barreling out on a motorcycle, scoops up Captain America’s shield where he lost it on the road, and flings it to him? Very badass. Don’t you want the toy? Every kid wants the toy! Here it is!
Something seems to be missing.
On my previous post about the horrific fraternity/rugby team chants at the University of Mary Washington, I neglected to mention the most horrific part of it all. A woman, Grace Mann, was murdered. As Dave Futrelle explains today:
The rugby team was suspended in March. Mann, a prominent member of the group whose activism led to the team’s suspension, was murdered in April. The suspect, a returning student named Steven Vander Briel, was a former member of the rugby team.
What’s widening the rifts? The fact that growing diversity within movement atheism is tearing away from a bitterly misogynistic core. A core that is becoming the fringe.
Harassment and excluding people from your movement will be your downfall, atheism. Please take this as a warning, and an attempt to right the wrongs within your movement before it collapses. From now on, I’m a secular humanist, feminist, mangina-loving, vegetarian socialist, and nothing else, until you clean up your act.
Jenny McDermott
Soraya Chemaly describes the fraternity scene on college campuses.
Feminists United, a group at the University of Mary Washington, has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education asserting that their school did little or nothing to address death and rape threats made on Yik Yak [an anonymous social media app] after they protested a rugby team’s sexist chant and argued that there was a connection between Greek culture and sexual assault. Sexual assault ranks second in fraternity insurance claims, men in fraternities are three times more likely to rape than their non-fraternity peers, they consume more objectifying content and are more accepting of rape myths. The connection is entirely valid and well-documented; it’s just that no one likes the information.
Oh, those feminists. Complaining about a song? About idle chatter on social media? It’s harmless! They’re just venting! Free speech! Get a thicker skin!
You think you’ve seen it all, and then along comes someone to dig even deeper. A company called Skaldic Games came up with a little game they had up on Steam, before it got pulled. It was called Kill the Faggot. It was appalling, as you might guess from the title.
It was a pathetic little arcade style shooter: you moved a crosshair around the screen, clicked a button, and shot whatever was under the crosshairs. Only the targets were running groups of people, some of whom were stereotypically gay, and others were cartoonishly transgender individuals. And you got points for killing them.
That paper with a grossly sexist review? We now know the journal: it was PLOS ONE. And they are on it.
