Originally a comment by Salty Current* on Living in the box [guest post by Seth].

There are so many other things going on here. Survival. Solidarity. Empathy. To me those are the keys… not making sure everyone is on the same page theoretically. Imagine one person saying, “I’m just trying to breathe here” and receiving the answer, “But what does that mean for ME?”

This strikes me as a strange argument. Taking into consideration how our actions affect others who are oppressed and struggling, listening to their concerns and taking them into account, is pretty much the definition of solidarity.

There was a great interview by Chris Hayes of Brittney Cooper several months ago, at the time the hidden-camera street harassment video went viral. I think he expected Cooper to basically side with those arguing that the video contributed to racial bias, if inadvertently, and leave it at that. Instead, she recognized the validity of that argument (and expanded it: the reception of the video also tended to sideline the vulnerability of black girls and women to street harassment); but then went on to suggest that black men, rather than focusing on this exclusively, could find their solidarity with women by seeing the problem within a shared framework of wanting to occupy public space and not be harassed – in their case, by police, in women’s, by men. It wasn’t a rhetorical game, but an accurate framing of the problems that could allow people to see their struggles in common terms rather than being set against each other.

It seems to me that this shared frame for solidarity has been missing from the current discussions, but it certainly exists. I’ve been arguing for a while that we can look at these struggles in terms of freedom, specifically freedom of self-definition and self-determination. The existential freedom to craft our identity and our own path rather than being chained to a false essence. The claim to that freedom unites all struggles for liberation, and those who oppose it with essentialist arguments, be they feminists, trans activists, or those hostile to these movements, are opposing liberation.

By the way, I think Lady Mondegreen’s suggestion on the other thread about asking some trans people who want to have a real discussion to write some posts was a good one. I think there are people who for whatever reason want to divide and sow hostility between our groups and movements, but that our goals are actually the same and we can better realize that through dialogue that focuses on what unites us rather than divides us. (And, in purely selfish terms, I’m sure I could learn a lot from it.)

*Yes two in one day. What can I say? She’s on a roll.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Zinnia has a terrific post from last December explaining how and why trans people got shoved into hyper-gendered boxes.

When it comes to transitioning, many people seem to equate living as a woman with being stereotypically feminine. It’s a common assumption that trans women express their womanhood via conventional or even excessive femininity. Movies and TV shows often depict trans characters as far more feminine than most cis women – at times absurdly so. Tabloids focus on conventionally attractive models and actresses; when Christine Jorgensen became one of the first widely known trans women in 1952, front-page headlines described her as a “blonde beauty”.

Sound familiar? It sounds to me exactly like the reactions to Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover. It sounds exactly like that patronizing “ooooooh great job of being a gorgeous woman!!” commentary, as if that were the whole and only meaning of being a woman.

A 2002 study in Poland used a derivative of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory to evaluate 132 trans people and 438 cis people. Among the cis men, 4% were classified as feminine, 48% as masculine, 24% as androgynous, and 24% as undifferentiated. In comparison, trans men were more likely to be rated feminine, less likely to be masculine, and more likely to be androgynous. These results don’t really align with the suggestion that trans men exhibit stereotypical or excessive masculinity. And among cis women, 34% were rated feminine, 16% masculine, 28% androgynous, and 22% undifferentiated. While no trans women were classified as masculine, only 52% were rated feminine, with the remainder being androgynous or undifferentiated. Trans women were actually more likely to be rated androgynous than cis women.

A 2012 study in Spain used the inventory to examine 156 cis people and 121 trans people, with somewhat different results. Here, trans women were less likely to be rated feminine than cis women, and more likely to be rated androgynous and undifferentiated. Trans men were, again, more likely than cis men to be classified as feminine, and less likely to be masculine.

Neither of these studies supports the idea that trans people are any more extremely masculine or feminine than cis people. Instead, we see that trans people express their gender in diverse ways, much as cis people do.

So, she asks, why do the stereotypes persist?

To understand this, it’s necessary to look at the history of how gender dysphoria is defined and diagnosed.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, the medical community finally began to recognize gender dysphoria as a treatable condition. They now faced the questions of how to determine if a person is trans, and whether transition treatments are appropriate for them. At a time when the very idea of medical transition was widely unfamiliar to the public, therapists and doctors aimed to make the process seem legitimate and unchallenging to social norms.

How to do that? By “ensuring that any trans people who were accepted would conform closely to gender stereotypes.”

In a 1973 paper, Dr. Norman Fisk of the Stanford gender clinic listed certain factors pertaining to “the overall team decision as to acceptability for sex conversion”. Among these were “appreciation of core gender principles” and “physical passability” – the degree to which a trans woman was perceived as indistinguishable from a cis woman.

So what exactly were those “core gender principles”? A 1971 paper by Stoller contains a lengthy description of what he believed to be the defining features of trans women and trans men. As children, trans women are depicted as “developing a feminine gracefulness of movement”, drawing “beautiful women”, identifying with feminine women in television or movies, and enjoying “trying on jewelry and makeup”.

And so on.

Trans people had a powerful incentive to meet these clinical standards: their ability to transition was at stake. The problem, of course, was that these criteria were based on archaic gender norms. Women were expected to be feminine, conventionally attractive, interested in jewelry, straight, emotional, lacking sexual interest, and married to men. Men were expected to be masculine, interested in sports and construction, and take straight women as partners. Dr. Fisk actually stated that the Stanford program offered “grooming clinics where role-appropriate behaviors are taught, explained and practiced”.

In short, these clinics seemingly aimed to produce only people who were as stereotypical in their gender as possible, perhaps not realizing that cis women may also be tomboyish, sexually outgoing, or attracted to women. There is evidence that this kind of selection process is still occurring: a 2004 study of 325 trans people seeking treatment in the Netherlands found that patients were more likely to be referred for hormone therapy when their appearance was perceived to align more closely with their gender.

Boxes boxes boxes. Rigid hard immovable boxes.

Cis people set these stereotypical standards. We conformed to them against our own inclinations. And cis people now have an entrenched stereotype of us as overly feminine. Well, whose fault is that?

I’m gonna guess cis people’s?

For trans women, transitioning tends to involve a reduction in attributes perceived as male, and an increase in attributes perceived as female. On our own, we can grow our hair out, change the way we dress, and practice altering our voice and how we walk. Medical treatment can change our facial appearance, give us a more feminine body shape, reduce our body hair, and enhance our breast growth. If the Kessler and McKenna study on gender cues is applicable to everyday life, this suggests a newfound abundance of female cues could mean we don’t have to pay as much attention to maintaining all of them. Once many of them are solidly in place, it might start to feel less like we have to push our gender cues to the maximum.

In my experience, the difference has been substantial. Before, I felt like I was walking a tightrope, constantly making sure my presentation was in perfect balance to avoid being misgendered. But after two years of transitioning, I’ve realized that I just don’t care – and now, neither does anyone else. Nowadays, makeup is a rare indulgence. I’ve shaved half my hair off because I just felt like it. I don’t need padded bras anymore, and I don’t usually bother with bras at all. I have a huge trans tattoo on my chest. For me, transitioning didn’t mean turning into Bree from Transamerica – I’m more like some kind of frumpy dubstep housewife. That’s because my gender is finally for me, not for everyone else.

I used to get mistaken for a man occasionally – but the difference is it didn’t matter. That was my privilege.

[This is a long and brilliant piece, with illustrations; read the whole thing.]

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Salty Current on Nail polish.

I think part of the problem is the conflation of identity with all of the cultural baggage that’s come to be associated with being a man or a woman. I’ve always felt that I’m a woman, felt that my woman’s body was “right,” and this has never had anything whatsoever to do with my preferences, interests, emotions, or abilities. I didn’t question whether I was a boy because I liked sports and math and had no interest in dolls or having children. I wasn’t confirmed in my girlness because I nurtured (stuffed and real) animals or liked playing with other girls or dancing. The thought that I might actually be a boy simply never occurred to me, and in the years since, as I’ve learned about people whose experience was very different, I understood them but still never shared that experience. And I believe this is true of everyone: people understand their identity, however complex that might be; they don’t develop that identity on the basis of what they like or what interests them. I’m sometimes a man in my dreams, but I don’t wake up confused about my identity.

I just don’t think there’s a connection – I don’t think trans women know they’re women because they like nail polish or weddings or whatever is associated with women in their culture. I think they know they’re women, and then, like everyone else in the culture, often have (stupid) ideas about what that entails.

None of the nonsense associating women with some things and men with others is the fault of trans people. They can reproduce it, as we all can, but the problem is with the culture generally. So when I as a feminist challenge some aspect of patriarchy – including the media or public response to a trans woman – I’m not trying to lay the problem at their door.

I didn’t read the Jezebel thing, or your post about it, Ophelia, or any of the surrounding arguments, but I did read Alex Gabriel’s post here at FTB, and in general I don’t think I agreed. I almost commented at his blog, but pretty quickly decided it was a bad idea given the probable appearance of the asshole flash mob. You’d think they’d have enough spaces what with Pharyngula, the Pharyngula FB group, the Atheism+ forum, all of their own FB pages, etc., etc. But no – they have to swarm comment threads everywhere they can (where have I seen that before…?) to squelch discussion by launching attacks and throwing out misrepresentations. I’m not at all happy with Gabriel for giving them another space in which to do it.

Anyway, I found his post strange and unconvincing. He asks at one point something like “Are compliments only acceptable for cis white women?” It’s a bizarre question. The point isn’t about compliments, but about a culture we inhabit as women. Women raised as girls,* from the very moment we’re born, are responded to based on our appearance. We’re looked at, watched, assessed, compared, judged, commented on in our presence or absence, chastised, warned about our fate as we age, instructed on how to be properly decorative, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. And we see this happen to other women. There’s no escape, and it’s unimaginably tedious. We all have one life, and we have to put up with this bullshit?

Compliments aren’t something separate from this problem – they’re part of it. Within this system, every compliment carries several messages to women: “I have the right to assess and comment upon your appearance,” “You should heed my opinion,” “Your value is in how you look,” “You should respond positively,” “You can always face a different judgment,” and occasionally “I’m threatening.” In this perverse environment, some compliments I outwardly greet with a smile meet with an internal “Go fuck yourself.” But like almost every woman, I’ve been shaped by this culture – of course I can’t just leave it behind practically speaking, but I also can’t just erase all of my responses to it.

And this is terrible. We all like compliments. In all cultures, people work to make themselves attractive (and this can be fun when it’s not felt as an obligation or necessity or impossibility), and enjoy it when others express appreciation for their efforts. But our system of appreciation of physical beauty is so distorted in so many ways, and especially when it comes to women, that we can’t separate even an ostensibly complimentary focus on a woman’s appearance from it. I would trade never being on the receiving end of another compliment for an end to this system, for a culture in which equality reigns, in which appearance is just one part of how everyone is seen, in which tastes aren’t shaped by commercial interests, in which “dressing up” is for special events, in which no one is derided or held back for not measuring up to anyone else’s standards of attractiveness.

So…the cover. I’ll say at the outset that I’m thrilled for Caitlyn Jenner. I hope she lives in happiness every moment of her liberation, with her family by her side. I’m also thrilled for the innumerable other trans people her brave decision will help. I’m not interested in her political views, which, judging by the Sawyer interview, are fairly conservative rubbish. But I honestly had forgotten even that she was an Olympic athlete. When I googled and was reminded, I had a memory of the 1976 Olympics, at which Bruce Jenner won the decathlon. I was glued to the gymnastics, where 14-year-old Nadia Comăneci received a perfect 10 and the gold. I was awed. When they had a tour of the gymnastics Olympians across the US, my best friend and I went and were enthralled. They were strong, athletic, and impressive girls. Not once did I think they were boys, or that we were boys for thinking how fantastic it was. It was just another step in the “this is part of what it is or can be to be a woman – we’re not restricted” advance.

I won’t judge Caitlyn Jenner on her choices; nor do I think she’s responsible for all of the commentary that surrounds the VF cover. I’m not saying she did it wrong. But she was a world class athlete. It would have been amazing had the cover shown her running (does she still? does she have injuries?) or doing something athletic. It would have been great had she contributed to the understanding that “woman” is expansive, not an essence but an existence, not a corset but a leap.

* Obviously the identity-experience issue is complicated: men raised as girls and women raised as boys, for example, have more complex experiences.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Seth on We need to talk.

I think Ian Cromwell (www.crommunist.com, formerly of this very blogging nexus) has made some very cogent analyses of race that can, mutatis mutandis, be appropriated to gender analysis with respect to gender identity and gender expression. To paraphrase Ian, race is a social construct, and as such is equal parts ‘how one sees oneself’ and ‘how one is seen by everyone else’. (There is more involved, to be sure, but Ian’s archives are free for the perusal of the curious.)

Similarly, I think gender can be described as a confluence of ‘how one sees oneself’ and ‘how one is seen by everyone else’. Ophelia, MrFancyPants, and I are more-or-less comfortable with the gross dynamics of how we’re seen by ‘everyone else’ in regards to our genders, though indeed we all have some very strong disagreements of the specific assumptions that come along with that assignation. None of the three of us particularly identify with being men or women very strongly, in the same way that Ophelia and I don’t particularly identify with being white people. We understand that that is how we fall under the social classification system, we acknowledge it, and we don’t feel misidentified when other people look at us and say ‘Oh, there goes a [woman/man/white person]’. (Of course I’m being a bit presumptive, but I think it’s a fairly safe presumption, given my familiarity with Ophelia’s archive; I’m open to correction.)

Indeed, this is the very definition of what it means to be cisgender: when society (aka ‘everyone else’) looks at us and shoves us into a box, we do not grumble about the label on the lid of the box. We don’t feel a fundamental wrongness with the overall shape of the box. We could take or leave it, really. For many people like us (and, indeed, for the three specific people I’ve named here, including myself), we might disagree with the colour of the box, or with some of the other items that get shoved into the box along with us that we’re expected to contort ourselves to accommodate, but the box itself isn’t the issue.

For transgender people, however, the box is very much the issue. When they get shoved into their box, they cannot recognise the shape that it contorts them into. Or, more analytically and less analogously, their self-identification does not match with how ‘everyone else’ identifies them. And, when you know that EVERYONE ELSE is wrong about you in such a fundamental way, when you feel it in the marrow of your bones, it is very, very tempting to build up mental systems wherein your own perception of yourself is the only valid and acceptable perception. The seeming alternative is self-invalidation and self-alienation, wherein you try to conform to the society’s identification of you instead of the truth you know about yourself…and I don’t need to spell out how that tends to work out, I hope.

Currently, some transgender people are staking the claim that their own perception is the only one that should matter in the social construct of gender. To descend into analogy again, they are climbing out of the boxes that other people have shoved them into and are crawling into boxes that they feel more comfortable in. The more comfortable boxes are very important to their self-identity, and their broader mental and emotional health.

One of the goals of modern feminist critique, as I understand (and attempt, in my own inept way, to practice) it, is to liberate everyone from the necessity for the (gendered) boxes entirely. To build a world in which the only relevant box is ‘human’ or even, perhaps, ‘sentient creature’, into which more-or-less everyone should be able to find a corner that fits them well without causing anyone else harm. A world in which people are ‘just folks’, where there isn’t a such thing as ‘people’ as opposed to ‘female people’. The more proximate goal is to make all of the individual boxes more accommodating, looser, so that each person in their own box has freedom to shift around without being packed so tightly by all of the objects (read: gendered expectations) that are also shoved into the box with them. To someone with such goals, the fact that someone else wants to crawl into a box, with all its constricting objects, can be somewhat incomprehensible.

Contrariwise, to someone who’s spent their whole life railing against the confines of their box, it can feel like any criticism of their decision to find a more personally-accommodating box is the same as saying ‘Your ill-fitting box shouldn’t bother you so much! In fact, you should stay in it and make it fit you better, and help all of us eventually destroy the boxes!’ Even if that isn’t what the critic is implying, or even intending to imply. Even worse is the all-too-frequent ‘You aren’t even in the box you think you’re in; you’ve just redecorated your own box, badly, into a parody of what our box is supposed to look like.’

After enough time having to battle those kinds of perceptions, of having your own self-identification invalidated by (almost) everybody, it is not surprising that so many transgender people are not only claiming the fact of their boxes, but championing them, and using what few means are at their disposal to try and reframe the narrative to support their self-identification. At the same time, this seems like an invalidation of literally centuries of work that have gone into deconstructing gender roles.

The boxes need to be destroyed, but that is going to take a lot of hard, long, slogging work. In the doing of that work, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the boxes still exist, and must be made as comfortable as possible for as long as that’s true. I hope there is a way to unite the seemingly-disparate goals of gender critique and transgender activism. Both goals are worthy, and necessary, and I firmly believe the conflicts within them are mainly topical and surmountable.

Trans people are people. One day, “people” will have to be enough for the lot of us. Until then, though, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Jane Clare Jones at Trouble and Strife puts it this way:

Feminism, as a political movement aimed at the liberation of women, has long theorized gender not as an innate essence, but as a hierarchical system enforcing women’s subservience. Characterizing certain personality traits – compliance, nurturance, the desire to be pretty or objectified – as ‘natural’ to women, is, according to feminist analysis, a primary mechanism for maintaining gender hierarchy. As a result, many feminists have genuine questions about trans ideology’s assertion that ‘gender identity’ is both natural and universal. It comes perilously close to naturalizing the oppression of women.

This is not trivial, and it needs to be discussed. But it has been decreed that it cannot be discussed, because to discuss it is to ‘deny the right of trans people to exist.’ Trans ideology collapses the fact that trans people exist into the theory of why trans people exist, and judges anyone who questions the theory to be a transphobic bigot intent on denying the very existence of trans people. Indeed, even those trans women who persist in existing despite subscribing to the feminist critique of gender are denounced by many in their community as self-hating or treacherous. This is argument by non-argument, and it functions to close down discourse by rendering feminism’s long-held analysis of gender unsayable.

Well it doesn’t make it unsayable in general, I think – but it makes it unsayable in a context of discussing trans issues. Maybe cis feminists shouldn’t be discussing trans issues. But then again trans issues are becoming more mainstream – which is a good thing, right? More visibility, thus (eventually, one hopes) more understanding? But the more mainstream the issues are, the more influence they have. That’s why I felt the impulse to do a very brief post asking questions about Jezebel’s commentary on Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover, certainly – because it was out there.

Undergirded by an appeal to boy-brains and girl-brains, trans ideology’s core commitment is that a person’s gender is nothing other than their gender identity. Gender resides entirely in an individual’s private experience of ‘feeling like’ a man or a woman, and therefore, if an individual declares that they feel like a woman, then they are a woman, and moreover have always been a woman, in exactly the same way as non-trans women have always been women.

Ahhh but that’s just it, you see. I never have straightforwardly “felt like a woman” – and neither have many of the women I know. For all I know none of them have. It’s not like that. It’s much more muddled than that. Most of the time I don’t feel like anything in that way – I just be; I exist. I don’t just straightforwardly identify with being a woman; I never have. I can more easily say I identify with being a feminist than I can with being a woman.

Maybe that itself is cis privilege – not identifying that way because you don’t have to. But it’s not always a privilege, certainly. Much of the time I would rather just be a human. That’s part of the appeal of gender-neutral nyms, isn’t it.

From a feminist perspective what is lost in this account is the entire structure of gender as a system of oppression, a system which functions by identifying a person’s reproductive potential and then socializing women to fulfil the role of a member of the reproductive class. For many non-trans women the idea that the essence of being a woman resides in ‘feeling like’ a woman, is not so much wrong as incomprehensible. Our experience of womanhood is not an internal feeling, but a lifelong process of being subjected to – and revolting against – very specific social sanctions and expectations. Be quiet. Look pretty. Make yourself small. Smile. Don’t be too demanding. Accommodate other people.

Quite. That’s not something women necessarily identify with, or something they “feel like.” It’s something imposed.

I don’t for instance “feel like” the Bravo TV conception of women, which is a series of “Real Housewives” and other brands of wives or girlfriends or other related-to-man categories. That’s not my idea of women and it’s sure as hell not my idea of myself.

But it’s also the case that I don’t feel wrong or not at home or anything like that about my gender, but other people do. People vary. That’s fine.

But we need to be able to talk about it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Elinor Burkett wrote a think piece for today’s New York Times.

She asks if women and men have different brains, and notes that an affirmative answer to that question has been known to elicit heated dissent.

But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.

“My brain is much more female than it is male,” he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender.

This was the prelude to a new photo spread and interview in Vanity Fair that offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner’s idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup. Ms. Jenner was greeted with even more thunderous applause.

And some doubts or questions or amplifications, from Laverne Cox for instance.

And from Burkett.

A part of me winced.

I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.

There’s a tension. I’ve said that before, and I might say it again. There’s a tension between the idea that gender is socially constructed and we get to shape it any way we want to, and the idea that it’s firmly binary and we are one or the other with no overlap or shaping allowed. This whole thing is just riddled with tensions, and it’s not transphobic to try to think about them.

That’s the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries. But the desire to support people like Ms. Jenner and their journey toward their truest selves has strangely and unwittingly brought it back.

It has, and that’s one thing that some feminists feel uneasy about. It’s not transphobic or trans-excluding to say that.

Brains are a good place to begin because one thing that science has learned about them is that they’re in fact shaped by experience, cultural and otherwise. The part of the brain that deals with navigation is enlarged in London taxi drivers, as is the region dealing with the movement of the fingers of the left hand in right-handed violinists.

“You can’t pick up a brain and say ‘that’s a girl’s brain’ or ‘that’s a boy’s brain,’ ” Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist at Britain’s Aston University, told The Telegraph last year. The differences between male and female brains are caused by the “drip, drip, drip” of the gendered environment, she said.

Along with a bunch of other drip drip drips. The gendered environment is obviously not the only one, but it’s equally obviously one.

THE drip, drip, drip of Ms. Jenner’s experience included a hefty dose of male privilege few women could possibly imagine. While young “Bruiser,” as Bruce Jenner was called as a child, was being cheered on toward a university athletic scholarship, few female athletes could dare hope for such largess since universities offered little funding for women’s sports. When Mr. Jenner looked for a job to support himself during his training for the 1976 Olympics, he didn’t have to turn to the meager “Help Wanted – Female” ads in the newspapers, and he could get by on the $9,000 he earned annually, unlike young women whose median pay was little more than half that of men. Tall and strong, he never had to figure out how to walk streets safely at night.

Those are realities that shape women’s brains.

By defining womanhood the way he did to Ms. Sawyer, Mr. Jenner and the many advocates for transgender rights who take a similar tack ignore those realities. In the process, they undermine almost a century of hard-fought arguments that the very definition of female is a social construct that has subordinated us. And they undercut our efforts to change the circumstances we grew up with.

In other words, some trans women embrace the very definitions of “woman” that feminists have been trying to shake off for (I would say) well over a century.

The “I was born in the wrong body” rhetoric favored by other trans people doesn’t work any better and is just as offensive, reducing us to our collective breasts and vaginas. Imagine the reaction if a young white man suddenly declared that he was trapped in the wrong body and, after using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair into twists, expected to be embraced by the black community.

I have; I have tried to imagine that. It makes me cringe every time. Why would it be so cringe-worthy? Because the young (or old) white man (or woman) would not have had the experience of being seen and treated as a black person.

But that ship has sailed. Fine; I wish it a safe voyage, a safe and happy and scenic voyage. But I would like to go on being able to ask searching questions about gender and the status of women. I would like to go on being able to talk about women.

Even the word “woman” has come under assault by some of the very people who claim the right to be considered women. The hashtags #StandWithTexasWomen, popularized after Wendy Davis, then a state senator, attempted to filibuster the Texas Legislature to prevent passage of a draconian anti-abortion law, and #WeTrustWomen, are also under attack since they, too, are exclusionary.

“Abortion rights and reproductive justice is not a women’s issue,” wrote Emmett Stoffer, one of many self-described transgender persons to blog on the topic. It is “a uterus owner’s issue.” Mr. Stoffer was referring to the possibility that a woman who is taking hormones or undergoing surgery to become a man, or who does not identify as a woman, can still have a uterus, become pregnant and need an abortion.

Accordingly, abortion rights groups are under pressure to modify their mission statements to omit the word woman, as Katha Pollitt recently reported in The Nation. Those who have given in, like the New York Abortion Access Fund, now offer their services to “people” and to “callers.” Fund Texas Women, which covers the travel and hotel expenses of abortion seekers with no nearby clinic, recently changed its name to Fund Texas Choice. “With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans people who needed to get an abortion but were not women,” the group explains on its website.

I think it’s ok for people who provide services to make sure they’re not accidentally excluding trans people. It’s when we’re talking about (and/or working on) the politics of abortion that I think we really need to go on talking about women, because the politics of abortion is inextricably linked to the subordination of women.

The landscape that’s being mapped and the language that comes with it are impossible to understand and just as hard to navigate. The most theory-bound of the trans activists say that there are no paradoxes here, and that anyone who believes there are is clinging to a binary view of gender that’s hopelessly antiquated. Yet Ms. Jenner and Ms. Manning, to mention just two, expect to be called women even as the abortion providers are being told that using that term is discriminatory. So are those who have transitioned from men the only “legitimate” women left?

Are trans women better (truer) feminists than cis women?

The struggle to move beyond such stereotypes is far from over, and trans activists could be women’s natural allies moving forward. So long as humans produce X and Y chromosomes that lead to the development of penises and vaginas, almost all of us will be “assigned” genders at birth. But what we do with those genders — the roles we assign ourselves, and each other, based on them — is almost entirely mutable.

If that’s the ultimate message of the mainstream of the trans community, we’ll happily, lovingly welcome them to the fight to create space for everyone to express him-, her- or, in gender neutral parlance, hir-self without being coerced by gendered expectations. But undermining women’s identities, and silencing, erasing or renaming our experiences, aren’t necessary to that struggle.

Bruce Jenner told Ms. Sawyer that what he looked forward to most in his transition was the chance to wear nail polish, not for a furtive, fugitive instant, but until it chips off. I want that for Bruce, now Caitlyn, too. But I also want her to remember: Nail polish does not a woman make.

Nor does the absence of nail polish make a man. I was fascinated by the paraphernalia of Being a Grownup Woman when I was a child, but once I was old enough to start deploying it for real, I got sick of it in a heartbeat. Some women like it; some don’t. Drip, drip, drip.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by chrislawson on It’s up to individual pharmacists.

As a fellow of the RACGP, I’m extremely proud that they’ve taken this stand after many years of not addressing it. An observation for those of you outside the medical field or Australia (I don’t know how applicable this is in other countries)…

Most pharmacists I know dislike stocking all the natural remedy stuff. The problem is that, much as I love Australia’s socialised medical system, one of its deep flaws is that governments keep trying to save money in the system where it’s easier to make cuts rather than where it’s sensible to make cuts.

One of these flawed money-saving approaches is that the government has completely gutted the payment pharmacists receive for dispensing prescriptions, so instead the pharmacies make their money off their retail sales — which is why our pharmacies are full of dodgy remedies, perfumes, cosmetics, gifts, etc. Australian pharmacies can only just tick over on the income from doing what they’re supposed to do — that is, give people health advice and dispense prescriptions while performing the essential task of checking that the prescription is correct and safe — and the reason why owning a pharmacy is lucrative is that the prescriptions act like a loss-leader that attracts customers into the shop where money can be made from impulse buys.

The allowed markups for PBS medication (that is, most of the drugs that are prescribed in Australia) run like this:

Up to and including $30.00 15%
Between $30.01 and $45.00 $4.50
Between $45.01 and $180.00 10%
Between $180.01 and $450.00 $18.00
Between $450.01 and $1,750.00 4%
Over $1,750.00 $70.00

For prescriptions the pharmacy also gets a dispensing fee of around $7. So while the pharmacy is earning money from this, it’s hardly lucrative, especially since some drugs require refrigeration or other special storage conditions and all of them require extensive record-keeping and frequent audits. I’m not trying to make pharmacy owners seem like poor downtrodden proles as they earn a pretty good income and the markups listed above may not be generous but aren’t subsistence-level either…but the current funding model encourages retail income over professional service income, and I think that’s a mistake.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

How ironic…or maybe it’s not, maybe it’s classic rather than ironic. Or both. Being marginalized doesn’t prevent the marginalized from marginalizing others, which is perhaps both ironic and classic. (Yes, that applies to me too. Yes, you alone among mortals are immune. Please sit down now.)

The Human Rights Campaign is a white guys club.

A new internal diversity report reveals the Human Rights Campaign has a sexist work environment where only ‘gay, white, male’ employees advance into leadership positions.

Well you see it’s like this – having a leadership position isn’t a human right.

Bullet dodged!

“As a woman, I feel excluded every day,” says an employee of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group and political lobbying organization, in an internal diversity report released Wednesday.

The report was compiled by The Pipeline Project, and commissioned by HRC through focus groups and surveys with employees of the company. The report revealed that the organizational structure of HRC perpetuates sexism, while leaders have failed to establish a “real push for diversity,” which has created a “homogenous” leadership culture that is “gay, white, male.”

What could they do? It just turned out that all the really talented people were white and male. What could they possibly do about that??

A third of all staff in the report called HRC’s working environment is “exclusionary.” More than half of multiracial and Latino people, and 83 percent of genderqueer people working at HRC said they feel they are not treated equally based on their identity.

…

Straight women and lesbians experience sexist treatment from gay men.

Employees surveyed reported experiencing “femophobia,” where “feminine men and women are not considered as important [as more masculine staffers].” Another survey respondent claimed to have witnessed “visible misogyny,” which the staffer described as “cutting women off, [and] only addressing other white men.” The report notes that complaints about sexism and a “good old boy’s club” were cited 32 times in open-ended answers.

Now, working for an organization of that kind is bound to sharpen everyone’s perceptions of such things, so there could be some false positives, so to speak – or some debatable examples, or whatever you want to call them. That’s always possible, and it’s that much more so in organizations whose entire purpose is to do with equal rights and equal treatment. On the other hand if all the people at the top really are pale males, it’s hard to get that part wrong.

At an organization that claims to represent more than 1.5 million members, people of color, transgender staffers, and employees from a lower socioeconomic group claimed they faced institutionalized discrimination that played a part in their salary. Employees at the company claim that “a lot of folks are personally invested in diversity inclusion, but their voices have been smothered or pushed away.”

The report reveals an understanding that the way to succeed and advance in the company is to be a “young white gay male, who socializes with staff and especially senior staff.” Doing so ensures “there is a greater likelihood that you will advance sooner,” claimed one respondent. Another employee quoted in the report said they were discouraged from speaking up about such issues, because “raising concerns is not your job … Concerns are to be tasked by people who are more experienced, less radical, more conservative, more mainstream.”

Well, to some extent, yes. More experience is a valid criterion for many jobs, so you can see how that would play out.

Still, it’s interesting. Physician heal thyself etc etc.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This is cool.

Trans People Are Creating Their Own Vanity Fair Covers With #MyVanityFairCover.

Laverne Cox recently began a dialogue on her Tumblr concerning the beauty standards surrounding trans women in light of Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover.

“It is important to note that these standards are also informed by race, class and ability among other intersections. I have always been aware that I can never represent all trans people. No one or two or three trans people can,” wrote Cox.

So: more “Vanity Fair” covers.

Call me Crystal.

A lot of people have explained it better than me recently, but a large contingent of the trans community has engaged in a lot of dialogue the past few days, ever since Vanity Fair announced their Caitlyn Jenner’s cover story, most of which revolves around the idea that the world only seems to embrace us if we’re wealthy enough or lucky enough to adhere to white, cisnormative beauty standards. I’ve felt frustrated and useless and overwhelmed by opinions on transgender women and how we’re “supposed” to look if we want to be taken seriously.

But not all of us adhere to those standards. Not all of us want to. Not all of us can. Some of us do, but only out of fear. Some of us do but we aren’t sure why. And whether we fit those standards or not, we’re beautiful, and we all deserve tofeel beautiful, and be acknowledged by the world. Admiration and praise for trans women shouldn’t only come if we fit a narrow definition of beauty. As a good friend of mine said Monday “Where’s my Vanity Fair cover?”

Well, it’s here (in white) and here (in black). Please share these and the hashtag #MyVanityFairCover and show the world the myriad faces of the trans community.

So people did.

Tumblr users didn’t hesitate to create their very own cover images.

“Not all of us can or even want to adhere to western cisnormative beauty standards. This doesn’t make us any less beautiful, or any less valid as women,” writes Nadia.

Call me Nadia.

I’m a 28 year old pansexual, polyamorous, mixed race, Dutch trans woman. Most trans women don’t have millions of dollars and instant access to doctors, hormones and surgeries like Caitlyn Jenner has. And not all of us can or even want to adhere to western cisnormative beauty standards. This doesn’t make us any less beautiful, or any less valid as women. So here’s MY Vanity Fair cover!

One more – the article has several, and no doubt Twitter has even lots.

I think “MyVanityFairCover” is a really cool trend to showcase a variety of trans experiences beyond those of the very white, very wealthy, and very lucky. So, uh, here’s me!

he/him/his pronouns, no hormones or surgery, 20 years old, surviving

Rock on.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has told GPs to stop prescribing homeopathic remedies and says pharmacists must also stop stocking such products for the same sort of reason they shouldn’t prescribe/stock candy or kale or blueberries as medicine.

The official body for Australian GPs has asked pharmacists to strip their shelves of homeopathic products and warned doctors not to prescribe them because they do nothing.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has formally recommended GPs stop prescribing homeopathic remedies and says pharmacists must also stop stocking such products because there is no evidence they are effective in any way.

The RACGP’s position statement on homeopathy, released on Wednesday, follows recent findings by the National Health and Medical Research Council that homeopathy produces no health benefits over and above a placebo.

Homeopathic “remedies” are shelved in drugstores – at least in this country – next to actual remedies, with nothing at all to indicate that they are just pretend. People who don’t know better have no way of knowing that homeopathic “remedies” are not remedies at all. The whole thing is utterly fraudulent and I have never understood why it’s allowed.

Dr Jones said the lack of evidence about any benefits from homeopathy must prompt doctors and pharmacists to turn their backs on it.

“Given this lack of evidence, it does not make sense for homeopathy products to be prescribed by GPs or sold, recommended or supported by pharmacists,” he said.

RACGP noted all taxpayers were funding homeopathy through the federal government’s private health insurance rebate.

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia says it’s up to individual pharmacists to decide if they’ll stop selling homeopathic remedies branded useless by doctors.

“Branded” useless? As if it’s just an epithet, or insult, or opinion?

And why is it up to individual pharmacists to decide if they’ll stop selling fake medicine labeled as medicine? That’s fraud.

Oh well. Fraudulent sneakers or DVDs or tennis balls can do serious harm, but fraudulent medicine is no big deal.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A bat signal. The Indian Atheists Facebook page has been banned as unsafe. This needs to be reversed.

Sorry, are you trying to promote rationalism and secular humanism in India, you may be unsafe for Facebook.

The Facebook page Indian Atheists is an initiative by the Nirmukta community. Our mission is to bring together a community of Indian Atheists and to build a society based on science, reason and humanistic values.

Yesterday we found that content from this page could not be shared as it has been flagged as unsafe. Facebook policies are such that, in case of an objectionable content, the said post would be removed by Facebook. But we found that no specific post was removed as objectionable. Instead the entire Indian Atheists page has been flagged as unsafe and we are not able to share our posts or tag Indian Atheists in any post, not even as comments in closed groups.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Never forget, children: priests and bishops are better than the rest of us. They’re holy, good men who follow church teachings and serve God.

Except for the archdiocese of Minneapolis-St Paul, that is.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is facing criminal charges after US officials said church leaders ignored reports that a priest was molesting children.

It’s the archdiocese that’s charged, as a corporation, not people.

Officials alleged that the archdiocese “turned a blind eye” to complaints about priest Curtis Wehmeyer for years.

Wehmeyer, now defrocked, was convicted of molesting two brothers in 2013.

`It is not only Curtis Wehmeyer who is criminally responsible for the harm caused, but it is the archdiocese as well,” said Ramsey County prosecutor John Choi at a news conference on Friday.

“This organization said it protected children when in reality it did not”, said Mr Choi who called the church’s monitoring program for trouble priests “a sham”.

In other words it told lies, in service of protecting itself while leaving children in its care unprotected. How holy.

Lawyers for the victims accused the church leadership of not acting on “numerous and repeated reports of troubling conduct”.

Had clergy acted more quickly, Wehmeyer would not have been able to destroy the evidence that he did.

But they did it all ad maiorem dei gloriam.

H/t Deepak Shetty

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I’ve squandered a lot of time today arguing (hello SIWOTI) with people busy claiming I’m a transphobe or a friend and helper of transphobes or at least someone who doesn’t point and hiss loudly enough when a transphobe walks by – and I was rewarded for my efforts by this staggeringly credulous and illiberal comment:

And you know what? Once someone points out her transmisogyny to you, congratulations. She IS a “known transphobe” to you. You thank them for helping you get yourself together…

After the ellipse there’s a stupid jibe about my getting my feelings hurt, which is not the issue at all.

The issue is the very thing denied by that ridiculous assertion. Oh right, once someone – anyone, everyone, it doesn’t matter who, and don’t you dare ask how that someone knows, or where that someone got the information – “points out her transmisogyny” to me, then I automatically know what that someone just told me, because there is no possibility whatsoever that that someone is wrong, or biased, or malicious, or passing on a claim passed on by forty thousand other people all of whom had no reason to believe it either. Listen up, atheists and skeptics: when someone tells you something, then you know that something, because someone just told you it. Believe what you are told, by anyone, no matter who; it’s the skeptic way.

Honest to fucking christ, what is the matter with people? Why am I supposed to take their word for this kind of shit, especially when they model such godawful epistemic practice themselves? What kind of politics do they think they’re creating, if we’re all just supposed to take everyone’s word for everything?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Jenora Feuer on The schools, financed by the government but run largely by churches…

never speak in your mother tongue to anyone, fellow student or staff, on penalty of a beating.

Yeah, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” was pretty blatantly the point of the system. Forced assimilation and conformity. Utterly destroy any sense of being different and actually deserving of respect. Eradicate the local cultures.

Titles like “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” reek of cover ups,

Well, despite Prime Minister Harper officially apologizing on behalf of the federal government at the time this Commission was set up, his actions in general over the years leave little doubt that he’d be happy if that apology were all he had to do and he could just ignore the results.

The fact that the Commission had no authority to offer amnesty in exchange for testimony meant, unsurprisingly, that almost none of the people involved in the school operations were ever interviewed.

Almost all the people heard from were the victims. (Which in many ways is the way it should have been, but the problem is that the abusers would have been the only ones who would have known about money trails and the like, so actively taking apart any remnants of the system is harder without them.)

It’s also notable that the commission was supposed to have finished last year; but the federal government had to be ordered to hand over some of the documents back in 2013, and going through all that required extending the commission.

As I said, I expect Harper was hoping that the formal apology and setting up the commission would be all he would be required to do, and he could just let the whole thing die in committee.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

About Canada’s residential schools…

The New York Times reports.

OTTAWA — Canada’s former policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families for schooling “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’ ”

That is the conclusion reached by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after six years of intensive research, including 6,750 interviews. The commission published a summary version on Tuesday of what will ultimately be a multivolume report, documenting widespread physical, cultural and sexual abuse at government-sponsored residential schools that Indian, Inuit and other indigenous children were forced to attend.

The schools, financed by the government but run largely by churches, were in operation for more than a century, from 1883 until the last one closed in 1998.

Oh no oh no oh no – those 11 words make up one of the most sinister phrases you can hear – the schools, financed by the government but run largely by churches. That describes the Irish industrial “schools” too, except that they weren’t even schools, they were prisons.

The commission documented that at least 3,201 students died while attending the schools, many because of mistreatment or neglect, in the first comprehensive tally of such deaths.

The report linked the abuses at the schools, which came to broad public attention over the last four decades, to social, health, economic and emotional problems affecting many indigenous Canadians today. It concluded that although some teachers and administrators at the schools were well intentioned, the overriding motive for the program was economic, not educational.

“The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to aboriginal people and gain control over their lands and resources,” the report said. “If every aboriginal person had been ‘absorbed into the body politic,’ there would be no reserves, no treaties and no aboriginal rights.”

But at least they gave the children a decent education, right?

The research and interviews conducted by the commission detailed a boarding school system that was woefully underfunded, inadequately staffed and largely ineffective at its stated aim of providing useful education.

Some former students interviewed by the commission cited school sports and music and arts programs as bright spots in their lives. But those programs were not generally part of the system, and most former students, even those who were not physically or sexually harmed or neglected, said their daily lives had been heavily regimented and lacked privacy and dignity. At many of the schools, students were addressed and referred to by number as if they were prisoners.

And yet we’re always being told that it’s Christianity that invented the idea of human dignity. Odd, that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)