The other day I said something on Twitter that roused the ire of a mob of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) who proceeded to lecture me on how having two X chromosomes definitively makes you a female. I have no idea what I said to provoke them, but now one of them has announced that I am an MRA.
The Sad Puppies are what the gomers who undermined the Hugo nominations are calling themselves. I’m interested in seeing how they defend themselves…or was, until I read their arguments. And all I can conclude is that these are really pathetic, brainless people.
For example, this guy Brad R. Torgersen. He tries to explain their cause by first setting up an analogy.
Perhaps the memory of this story will fade. Or perhaps our esteemed state legislature will get around to making ejaculating in other people’s coffee without their knowledge illegal. Maybe. The state actually has a case like this, with a man secretly ejaculating into a co-worker’s coffee, but the initial charges were dismissed because, apparently, that’s not illegal in Minnesota.
The original charges against Lind were dismissed in November by Ramsey County District Judge Patrick Diamond, who said the crime required nonconsensual touching of the victim’s intimate parts.
The city of New Brighton then charged Lind with a misdemeanor charge of engaging in lewd or indecent behavior in her workspace at the Beisswengers hardware store in New Brighton.
On April 17, Chris Kluwe will be speaking at the Morris Area High School at PFLAG’s Break The Silence day. Good news! This area is dreadfully homophobic — the most interaction town had with gown was the time the student body elected a gay man to homecoming queen, and just try getting local schools to attend UMM plays that touch on gay issues — and I’m actually impressed that he gets to speak at the high school. Normally the district would melt down at the slightest hint of a pro-tolerance speaker.
Redundant posts are redundant
Except when they aren’t.
Here your gender-workshop-taskmistress Crip Dyke encourages you to revisit the douchegabbery of the Minnesota Child Protection League. PZ did an excellent job of illuminating just that in “Two steps forward, one step back” in December of last year, and the discussion on that thread when it was current included a great many useful comments.
I want, however, not to merely rehash criticisms of MCPL (criticisms well-deserved and well-made the first time around) but to use that example to talk a bit about what “centering” and “marginalized” really mean. In the post on the need for transfeminist critiques of other feminisms, I focussed on Katha Pollit and identified places where, quite frankly, I think she employed some bad thinking to construct some bad feminism. I suggested that marginalization had something to do with this bad thinking on Pollit’s part. Here you can learn more about exactly what marginalization has to do with it …and the extent of my criticism of Pollit, rather than merely Pollit’s column.
I didn’t pick Pollit because her work is low hanging fruit. She has written excellently on many topics. She clearly has the writing chops to be clear about the distinctions between political theorizing and political rhetoric. Yet the only reasonable inference is that she was, in fact, talking about rhetoric when she was using the phrase “political analysis”. She also has the analytical skills to make the distinction between gendered terms like the French pronouns ils and elles, and gender neutral words like people. Yet here, too, she fell down.
So what is the problem with this Katha Pollit person anyway? The problem is the same as one in our community: the inability to think like you’re not. [Read more…]
Yes, he does. I’ve had to put it below the fold just in case it might blister my readers’ eyeballs.
Many of us are familiar with The Brick Bible, retellings of Bible stories using Lego bricks. The author made a stunning announcement on facebook today.
It’s full of fierce independent women. Adda Þóreyjardóttir Smáradóttir (also, full of great names) demonstrated for equality by posting a picture of herself bare-breasted on twitter — if men can do it, women ought to have that privilege, too — and as you might expect, immediately got a rash of misogynistic comments. So what did other Icelandic women do? They posted pictures of their breasts in solidarity.
For your perusal, a new Gender Workshop post by Crip Dyke. Herein we discuss how feminists, in particular Katha Pollitt, can fail to recognize feminism when it comes in the form of transfeminism. The readers themselves will have to judge the applicability of the title. For more active exercises in the workshop series, this here is a link back.
CaitieCat, a regular commenter here, recently brought to my attention this article, which discusses trans* persons’ reproductive rights in the context of feminist reproductive rights activism.
Along the way, it mentions a recent Katha Pollitt piece in the Nation. Together, these pieces have created a good opportunity to explore transfeminism’s role in current feminisms.
Transfeminism, as I have defined it in my teaching, is the integration of feminism into trans* advocacy simultaneously and in coordination with the integration of trans* advocacy into feminism. It is of necessity something that is often labeled “intersectional feminism” (though we’ll critique that in another post). Here I won’t go much further into what transfeminism is. Rather, we’ll take a look at how current feminism demonstrates the need for a strong transfeminist response. [Read more…]
