Esther Williams, the swimming movie star, or the Million Dollar Mermaid, died yesterday. I’m not really a huge fan & like a lot of people find those movies kind of bizarre, but she is otherwise known for having outed her ex husband, Jeff Chandler, as a crossdresser. From what I can tell, she never recanted, but no one ever verified it, either, and plenty of people denied it. For me, though, her comment that he only felt “happy and secure” in women’s clothing rings true, no?
How cool is this? This cardinal is a gynandromorph, where an animal is actually split – usually along a midline – and expresses sex characteristics of a male on one side & of a female on the other.
So to get gynandromorphs in flies, all that has to happen is that one X chromosome gets lost in one cell when the initial cell in a female (XX) zygotes divides in two. One half of the fly then becomes XX, the other XO, and the fly is split neatly down the middle, looking like the one below. But gynandromorphs don’t have to be “half and halfs”. X chromosomes can get lost at almost any stage at development, so flies can be a quarter male, have irregular patches of maleness, have just a few male cells, or even a male patch as small as a single bristle.
I’m not sure what the genetic similarity is between these birds and people who are intersex at birth, but some smart biogeneticist out there will let me know.
Today is LGBTQ Equality & Justice & Day in New York. It’s long overdue.
Back when they passed SONDA, they promised they’d come back. So tell our legislators it’s long over due: include gender identity in New York State’s non-discrimination act.
Here’s a really sound article about men and hormones – specifically testosterone. It’s not perfect, but it’s closer than most of these articles that are written for general consumption are.
Although I have no idea why it’s written for women, since, um, guys should know this stuff too.
This is Frida Kahlo.
Frida Kahlo
You’re welcome.
(It’s from an article about her wardrobe being putting on display in Mexico City, at long last. I really hope it travels somewhere closer so I can see it.)
So it turns out that Thomas Beatie is not being granted his divorce, for the worst possible reason: his marriage has been declared invalid, and a marriage that never existed can’t end in divorce.
This is one of the many reasons trans people need marriage equality: so that we do not have to exist in a this legally unclear environment where a judge can decide whether or not we were ever married, even if we were for 20 years, like Christie Lee Littleton was.
That said, Beatie’s case is a little different – not that it does him much good – in that what Beatie had or had not done to establish his identity as male at the time of the marriage was unclear:
“The decision here is not based on the conclusion that this case involves a same-sex marriage merely because one of the parties is a transsexual male, but instead, the decision is compelled by the fact that the parties failed to prove that (Thomas Beatie) was a transsexual male when they were issued their marriage license,” he wrote in Friday’s ruling.
What’s more interesting to me as a gender studies person is this detail:
Beatie is eager to end his marriage, but the couple’s divorce plans stalled last summer when Gerlach said he was unable to find legal authority defining a man as someone who can give birth.
precisely because it involves the definition of a “man” – which, as any good gender studies student knows, is a cultural construct in the first place. (So is male, but far fewer people seem to understand that sex, or biological gender, is also culturally constructed.) As a feminist, I’m particularly concerned when the ability or inability to bear children starts getting involved in definitions of who is or isn’t a woman or a man.
But same sex marriage would, at least in some way, prevent this kind of bullshit at least in part, as it wouldn’t matter if Beatie was or was not a man at the time of his marriage. The issue of whether he could be a man and also give birth to his own children is, effectively, a different issue altogether.
(Interestingly, Beatie lives in AZ, where he could also, very shortly, be facing the fact that he may be legally required to use the ladies’ room, depending on what it does or doesn’t say on his birth certificate.)
… Arizona legislators want to make it illegal for people to use the “wrong” bathroom, and to make the offense punishable with fines and jail time. They’ve raised the usual bugaboo of pedophilia – which, if anyone has noticed, we don’t seem to care one whit about when it’s done by straight men – and which Mara Keisling clarifies:
“These (anti-discrimination) laws are in effect in more than 160 cities and 16 states,” said Keisling, and that the problem of sexual predation on minors that the discriminatory policy alleges to address, “isn’t happening anywhere. It just doesn’t occur. It’s one of the terrible things that opponents of equality always raise in hopes of scaring people.”
Oh, and by the way? “Birth gender” is an oxymoron. Pass it on.
Kate Bornstein is fighting cancer. Help her kick its ass by donating something to help her pay her bills and for her treatment.
I can say for one thing: I don’t know that I’d be around without her. Please let’s keep her alive. She blew the roof off this trans thing for so many of us; she continues to do amazing work year in and year out, and her heart is about as big as they come. I know that every time I see her, or talk with her, I have a renewed sense of my own dedication to this movement.
So give until it hurts. Masochist that she is, she’ll love that.
Somehow, I missed Anne Fausto Sterling’s newest book, Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World, which sounds like a more accessible but still scientific take on the science of gender. Her Sexing the Body is, in my opinion, without peer.
Just recently she spoke at Tufts on early childhood gender development:
Using data from lower middle class families in Rhode Island, Fausto-Sterling has discovered that parents’ differential treatment towards male and female infants tends to result in gendered behaviors.
She played four videos where mothers played with their children, rewarding them for certain behavior more than others. For example, the mothers’ tendency to coddle girls and reward fine motor behavior contrasts with their focus on activity-related attention to boys, she said.
“Infants experience gender from before birth and via the minutiae of everyday care, but they also bring their own individually differentiated physiological systems to the table,” Fausto-Sterling said. “Infants assimilate the world.”
Infants experience gender from before birth. Not surprising, but I’m glad someone said it.
These guys just made me smile: one of their frat brothers needs chest surgery, so they’re raising the funds - and the awareness – so he can get it. Awesome.
This is more a photo essay, but it’s a good one, with pretty great photography of these women who live as men. Burrnesha is the term in Albanian.
This is a great short article on the ambiguities of sex as expressed by humans, mammals, fish and various other creatures, and covers topics like chromosomal variety, embryonic sex determination, and reproductive strategies. It’s a nice Sex 101 – and by that I don’t mean sex as in f*cking, but sex as in male/female. A lot of reasonably smart and educated people seem to think that gender is variable but sex is “natural” and binary when in fact that’s not nearly as true either.
You’ve had your turkey. Now get your learning back on.
A friend just wrote:
Just wanted to give you a heads-up about a cool work of trans fiction with lots of stuff from a partner’s perspective. It’s the best queer young adult read I’ve seen since Julie Peters’ Keeping You A Secret
Anyway, it’s Rachel Gold’s Being Emily
I haven’t read it yet personally, but I thought I’d pass the good word on. My thanks to Natasha for the tip.
Okay, she’s my new hero.
Some jackass took a photo of her and posted it on Reddit in order to mock her appearance. A friend saw it & told her about it. So Ms. Kaur wrote to the jerk:
“Hey, guys. This is Balpreet Kaur, the girl from the picture. I actually didn’t know about this until one of my friends told on facebook. If the OP wanted a picture, they could have just asked and I could have smiled
However, I’m not embarrased or even humiliated by the attention [negative and positve] that this picture is getting because, it’s who I am. Yes, I’m a baptized Sikh woman with facial hair. Yes, I realize that my gender is often confused and I look different than most women. However, baptized Sikhs believe in the sacredness of this body – it is a gift that has been given to us by the Divine Being [which is genderless, actually] and, must keep it intact as a submission to the divine will. Just as a child doesn’t reject the gift of his/her parents, Sikhs do not reject the body that has been given to us. By crying ‘mine, mine’ and changing this body-tool, we are essentially living in ego and creating a seperateness between ourselves and the divinity within us. By transcending societal views of beauty, I believe that I can focus more on my actions. My attitude and thoughts and actions have more value in them than my body because I recognize that this body is just going to become ash in the end, so why fuss about it? When I die, no one is going to remember what I looked like, heck, my kids will forget my voice, and slowly, all physical memory will fade away. However, my impact and legacy will remain: and, by not focusing on the physical beauty, I have time to cultivate those inner virtues and hopefully, focus my life on creating change and progress for this world in any way I can. So, to me, my face isn’t important but the smile and the happiness that lie behind the face are.
The bold is mine.
And that is just too amazingly cool. I wish I had half the nerve, the confidence. I never even found out how much facial hair I might have been able to grow, and now I kind of wish I had. That said, I’m gonna guess she might have PCOS too, in which case she should be careful about being pre-diabetic.
But damn.
The cooler thing still is that the jerk who posted it actually had his opinion changed and apologized for being an asshole. And now, if you really need to, you can go look at the photo.
J. Jack Halberstam’s new book, Gaga Feminism, is out, and it is a fascinating read; I highly recommend it. For those of you who are turned off my academic writing but like gender theory, give this a try. It’s funny, first of all, but it’s also the kind of book that leads you to think in new ways and to ask new questions. I had a revelatory moment thinking about the inter-generational quality of queer culture, and honestly, that’s only mentioned in passing. This one sends off really useful sparks.
I asked the author to comment the intersection of basic legislative issues that have been in the news – saying “vagina” in the state house, “legitimate rape”, issues of choice/abortion, etc., in the context of gaga feminism, and here is Halbe
rstam’s response:
When did “vagina” suddenly become a fashionable term? First Lisa Brown, a state representative for Michigan, shocked her Republican colleagues when she used the word “vagina” to try to debate anti-choice legislation in her county. When Brown and another colleague were silenced for supposedly turning a polite conversation into one lacking in decorum, Eve Ensler pulled into town to save the town with another long speech on vaginas – The Vagina Monologues!! Meanwhile, Republicans got into their own hot water while debating vaginas – Republican Rep. Todd Akin called upon an apparently vast and deep reservoir of knowledge about the female body and its reproductive potential when, in defense of his indefensible position that rape victims should not have access to abortion, he suggested that in a “legitimate” rape, the female body would mysteriously reject the offensive sperm and protect itself from pregnancy. And then of course, feminist writer Naomi Wolf put out her own take on the suddenly hot topic and provided us with a “biography” of the vagina.
Wow! How to make sense of all these vaginas, some of them with brains (Wolf), some of them with primal prophylactic powers (Akin), some of them with so much to say (Ensler). In my new book, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal, I do not use the word vagina at all! Instead of pitting bodies with vaginas against bodies with penises, I argue that we are living in a new world where the categories of male and female are rapidly being updated all around us. In this world of sperm banks, IVF, queer families, butch daddies, transgender men and women, heteroflexible women, pretending to be offended by the use of the word “vagina” in a public speech or making insupportable claims about rape and pregnancy are not just quaint and old-fashioned, they signal a deep ignorance about the world we live in and the enormous changes that have taken place within it in the last two decades. So rather than making the vagina talk back to the idiocy of Christian or Republican hypocrisy by giving it a biography or a monologue, it is time to move on from simple, genital genders and start actually engaging the many forms of gendered embodiment that are moving us out of the age of normativity and into a new era of going gaga!
The next stop on the tour is at Queer Fat Femme, who is generally and specifically amazing, so do go check that out.
Oh, you now I love this:
What I don’t like is that apparently American audiences have been deemed unready (unworthy?) as it’s not being shown here.
(h/t to the irreplaceable Diane Frank)
I wish when people wrote stories about gender they actually knew something about gender.
The new Barbie is what’s called a Faux Queen. Not a drag queen, not a crossdresser. She doesn’t have to be male-bodied to be a queen, nor does she have to be in order to be fabulous. She could, as well, be high femme.
With all of this blather about financial bottom lines, I’d just like to point out a small fact: the majority of the poor people in this country are women. So any budget plan that cuts funding for the poor is cutting funding for women, especially single mothers with children.
It’s embarrassing that we have the largest gap in poverty rates between men & women in the Western world.
Here are some other useful facts the next time someone starts going on about budgets and bottom lines and how there’s no need for feminism:
Why? Not just because of the wage gap, which is still significant – 77 cents on the dollar these days – but also because
So how about we actually work on a plan that eliminates sexual violence against women to balance the fucking budget, instead?
(h/t to Dylan.)
A few years ago it looked likely that we’d discover a drug that might be taken prenatally by mothers whose children might have a high risk of CAH – in order to prevent it.
Since CAH is the only intersex condition that can necessitate medical treatment, and specifically might prevent an “adrenal crisis” that can be life threatening to a newborn with CAH – this development could have been a good thing.
Except that it’s off-label use it intended to prevent lesbians and tomboys. And career women. Depending on how exactly you’re going to define female masculinity.
It’s nice to see Slate finally reporting on it, despite the dumb-ass & sensationalist title of the article, & I’m hoping that means this question gets put to a much wider range of parents and potential parents.
Here’s the paper by Dreger, Feder and Tamar-Mattis.
Here’s a summation out of Northwestern.
