Tag: money

Gendered Policy

Posted by helenboyd – September 27, 2008

Dorothy Samuels wrote a great Op-Ed for The NYT on the whole issue of Wasilla charging rape victims the cost of their rape kits and forensic exams.

In the absence of answers, speculation is bubbling in the blogosphere that Wasilla’s policy of billing rape victims may have something to do with Ms. Palin’s extreme opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape. Sexual-assault victims are typically offered an emergency contraception pill, which some people in the anti-choice camp wrongly equate with abortion.

My hunch is that it was the result of outmoded attitudes and boneheaded budget cutting.

Mine too, but that’s still not an excuse, and we deserve an explanation. As Tony Knowles said:

“We would never bill the victim of a burglary for fingerprinting and photographing the crime scene, or for the cost of gathering other evidence,” said Alaska’s then-governor, Tony Knowles. “Nor should we bill rape victims just because the crime scene happens to be their bodies.”

And in case you’re wondering if there was any Federal effort to keep states from charging the victims, here you go:

That’s why when Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, drafted the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, he included provisions to make states ineligible for federal grant money if they charged rape victims for exams and the kits containing the medical supplies needed to conduct them. (Senator John McCain, Ms. Palin’s running mate, voted against Mr. Biden’s initiative, and his name has not been among the long list of co-sponsors each time the act has been renewed.)

This is probably the best example of why having a woman in office means almost nothing if her policy is blind to the needs of women.

Trans Finances

Posted by helenboyd – September 25, 2008

Nina Smith over at Queercents is doing a series on ‘Transgender Finances’ – covering issues like Social Security, marriage, etc. She has already interviewed me, James Green, Jenny Boylan, Jay Sennett and a few other trans people & allies. This series is a great, cool idea, & I’m glad to see someone’s doing it. Thanks, Nina!

Now on DVD

Posted by helenboyd – September 15, 2008

GenderVision, who are Nancy Nangeroni and Gordene MacKenzie formerly of GenderTalk, did an interview with us in November 2007. Two parts of it you can watch online, but then there’s other conversations we had, with both of them, that you can only get by buying the DVD. I got mine today, and it’s nice to see professional packaging. We don’t make any money from it, but they do good work up there, so do support them. It’d make a good DVD to pass around within a support group, or to watch bits of at a meeting, even.

Tell them Helen sent you!

This Time Around

Posted by helenboyd – July 13, 2008

On hearing about the closing of Indymac Bank, my thoughts went like this:

  • What the hell kind of name is that for a bank?
  • Who has more than $100k in savings?
  • I will probably never have to worry about having more money than the FDIC insures.

Which is, in these proto-depression days, something like reassuring. In case you don’t know, the FDIC guarantees accounts up to $100K. So if you have more than that, you need to spread it around if you want it guaranteed. The FDIC was invented after the last runs on banks, after the Great Depression. It’s nice to know, so far, that it’s working, but apparently there’s another 90 banks that are at risk of closing due to this whole mortgage disaster.

Of course, if you just have too much money in the bank, you should feel free to donate any extra you’ve got to the hundreds of organizations that need it.

This financial post brought to you courtesy of my sister Kathy’s birthday, who bugged me & bugged me to take economics courses in colleges & who I thoroughly ignored. (Sorry, Kath. Modernism seemed so much more pressing at the time. Happy Birthday!)

Trans for Obama

Posted by helenboyd – July 8, 2008

The National Stonewall Democrats are doing a cool thing: trying to track transpeople’s donations to Barack Obama. The letter they sent out not along ago is reprinted below the break in full, but the basic idea is that, if you’re trans, & you want to donate to Obama’s campaign, you donate through their website, so that the donations can be “counted” as a bloc.

Excellent idea. Go do it.

More→

“Non-Essential Services”

Posted by helenboyd – July 1, 2008

A friend of ours works with a theatre out in IA that’s lost almost everything as a result of the recent floods, and like many others – they had no flood insurance. Worse yet, FEMA considers theatres “non essential services” and so they will receive no funding whatsoever to help them rebuild.

If you’re a theatre person, and you can help, you can contact them:

to see if you can make a donation, of money or stuff, to help them out. Right now they’re performing out of the local high school’s auditorium, as of course, the show must go on.

You May Now Kiss the Groom (in CA)

Posted by helenboyd – June 17, 2008

A very happy wedding day to all the Californians who are finally able to get married to the ones they love.

It’s unfortunate how much a basic civil right has to be fought for, & unfortunate in so many ways (and not even the ones Mattilda goes into).

And I know many people are bothered by it because it’s not an economic issue, and that more than anything, LGBT people need employment non-discrimination protection. And we do, we do. But I’ll make this argument, as a legally married queer: marriage is also an economic pact. It’s not romantic, but it is something. It’s about being able to be a dependent on your spouse’s health insurance (which saves you money). It’s about being able to live together (which saves you money). It’s about getting Social Security benefits. Amongst other things.

So congratulations, bride & bride, and groom & groom: you may now fight with your spouse about money, & forever have your credit record linked to theirs.

Not Marrying Money

Posted by helenboyd – May 10, 2008

I was so happy to find this article on being a woman who is planning to marry a man who is deep in debt and who actually called off the wedding – at least temporarily – until he got this finances in order. It’s an issue no one ever talks about – debt in general, & money in relationships too. I’ve seen money listed as one of the top five things a couple should make sure they agree about (the other four are having children, dealing with family, sex, and religion) before they get married. Historically women end up with a lower standard of living after divorce, for instance, than men do, despite all the jokes about how women “get rich” via divorce. Those with children, even moreso.

I’m waiting for her to outline how exactly he managed this 53% reduction in so short a time. It’s encouraging.

SVU

Posted by helenboyd – April 17, 2008

The “John Money” episode of Law & Order: SVU is was on USA right now at 9PM EST tonight.

Race + LGBT

Posted by helenboyd – April 17, 2008

I heard Jasmyne Cannick speak at the Bodies of Knowledge conference at USC Upstate, and the focus of her talk was race and the LGBT community. She made a couple of important points about the failures of the white LGBT set in dealing with black LGBT people. I use “black” because she did; she mentioned that she dislikes the phrase “people of color” but didn’t explain why exactly.

One of her main issues was that minorities are often used to trump up “diversity” numbers for primarily white LGBT organizations but aren’t then given any real power to choose issues within those organizations. Gay marriage in particular was way down on her list of priorities, after things like universal healthcare, jobs, access to education, immigration, access to power/politicians, and other issues of poverty. Her point was that in LA, it’s the white LGBT who live in West Hollywood, but that black LGBT people tend to live in their neighborhoods of birth: Compton, East LA, etc., exactly because of the issues of dicrimination and access.

As she put it: “Just because someone doesn’t agree with you that gay marriage is the most important issue doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be at the table.” More→

Stop the Democrats

Posted by helenboyd – March 27, 2008

(I thought that might get your attention!)

20 big Clinton donors tried to bully Nancy Pelosi for saying that superdelegates should let the voters decide who becomes the Democratic nominee. This is the worst kind of insider politics, and it has to stop.

Do we really want to elect people who think their money gets to call the presidency, or the guy who managed to raise more money from small donors than anyone ever has before? Hmm, let’s think about that. A lot of money from few sources, vs. a lot of money from many.

Let’s look up that definition of democracy again, shall we?

Sign the petition.

Accepting Change

Posted by helenboyd – March 27, 2008

A partner who calls herself Madame George and who regularly posts on our message boards wrote this piece about growing up in a small town and about how similar that can be to watching your husband transition. I thought it was a beautiful piece, wistful, affirming, full of love but also change.

Growing up in a small town has its perks. Small town shop owners know you by name. In fact most times they know your family and your entire life story. That’s how it was growing up here. It’s one of my fondest memories of growing up in a small town. It has changed over the years and many of the shop owners that I knew are now gone. The store fronts now boasting dazzling electronics, plastic knick knacks, and country crafts. Gone is the independent pharmacist, the neighborhood greasy diner, and the ten cents store. Gone are the comforts of the past.

I loved the days when my mother would need something from the neighborhood drug store. There was a small one nearby that was complete with a soda fountain. It’s how I met Mr. Reider. An independent pharmacist whose shop was not far from my school. I knew him well. He knew my entire family well. He had a great store and seemed to always be adding unusual finds into his display cases and racks on a daily basis. It was probably more like a monthly basis, but to my young eyes I seemed to always find new items to wonder over. A favorite of mine was a metal bank depicting a monkey with it’s arms stretched wide. The one where you put a coin in one hand and you gently pulled the other one down and the coin would roll down its arm into a slot hidden ingeniously in the side of its head. Another favorite was the little porcelain nesting dolls with their funny looking painted faces. I remember well his gentle words of warning each time I would pick a set up. Never scolding, just a friendly reminder to be careful. More→

Tillie Olsen

Posted by helenboyd – February 2, 2008

I didn’t know she died last year. I’m feeling a bit like a door just hit me in the face. I came to know her through her work at CUNY’s Feminist Press, and it was like a revelation: a working class white woman writer, brilliant and often neglected. Her book Silences was then, & is now, a revelation.

The NYT notes, in her obituary, that when Margaret Atwood reviewed it when it came out, she said:

“It begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long, circumstantially enforced silence,” Ms. Atwood wrote. “She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.”

The books she helped bring back – like Life in the Iron Mills and Daughter of Earth (Agnes Smedley’s autobiography) were some of the first reflections of where my people came from I’d ever read.

How frustrating not to have known.

Even More Decline of NYC

Posted by helenboyd – December 16, 2007

Becca Tucker is clueless, of that I’m sure. This article she wrote – about stalking Claire Danes – is about as low as low gets. & Ignorant. To me, it’s typical of this new breed of New Yorkers who come here to be near the money and the fame and the art & who don’t understand the premise: that we, as New Yorkers, get to live around the talented, the rich, & the famous BECAUSE WE DON’T BOTHER THEM.

Celebrities come here in order to disappear a little, without hiding behind walled gates and guards. A lot of creative people want to be around people living, going to work, waking up in time to make the donuts. It’s why, I think, there are so many film-makers and writers and poets and performance artists here; we thrive off of each other’s ideas but also off of the buzz of life around us.

The point isn’t that you can stalk Claire Danes. Tons of famous people live here and would be easy enough to stalk, and that includes people who are famous for anything and everything you can imagine. But they live here because New Yorkers are famously cool and relatively unimpressed with fame; it’s a sign of your own couth, here, to not be so overwhelmed with seeing someone famous that you can keep your cool. You might smile, or even politely ask for an autograph if the person is an especial hero, but for me, the real joy has always been in watching someone I admire show up at an event I went to (like watching a Buster Keaton move with David Byrne, or seeing a Bill Irwin show while seated a couple of rows behind Robin Williams, or even seeing Rufus Wainwright with David Bowie en scene).

I mean, *of course* famous people are here, and accessible, and sometimes they even buy their own groceries. This is New York, and hello! – that’s the fucking point. It’s perfectly acceptable to wait to meet celebrities when they’re on – like at a stage door or a premiere, or a book signing or lecture or performance – but not when they’re walking their dog.

Get some manners, people. Or go back to where you came from.

(via Feministe)

It’s World AIDS Day

Posted by helenboyd – December 1, 2007

from avert.org:

According to UNAIDS estimates, there are now 33.2 million people living with HIV, including 2.5 million children. During 2007 some 2.5 million people became newly infected with the virus. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 and are killed by AIDS before they are 35.

Around 95% of people with HIV/AIDS live in developing nations. But HIV today is a threat to men, women and children on all continents around the world.

Started on 1st December 1988, World AIDS Day is not just about raising money, but also about increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education. World AIDS Day is important in reminding people that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done.

More Education, Less Sex

Posted by helenboyd – November 10, 2007

Yet another report has been published that proves that comprehensive sex ed keeps kids from having as much sex, as many partners, and from getting STDs. Despite that, of course, our government is still throwing money at abstinence-only sex ed:

“Congress is currently considering a funding bill which includes $141 to fund these programs, an increase of $4 million over President Bush’s request.”

So we’re paying more to educate kids less. Isn’t it counter-intuitive to spend so much money to keep kids ignorant? That’s never cost anything in the past.

Is everyone else tired of reporting this?

Source: Feminist Daily News 11/9

Kids These Days

Posted by – October 25, 2007

At least here at Merrimack, they’ve got it good, even though they probably don’t know what’s right under their noses.

They get free films, for instance. I’ve been going to see them, which is kind of funny considering I don’t like most movies most of the time & don’t go see them – not American movies, anyway, or anything contemporary. They’re rarely worth the $10.

But Tuesday night I saw Deepa Mehta’s Earth, which is about the Partition of India in 1947, into India & Pakistan, and which came with Independence. It’s a stunning movie, & I’ve been thinking about the plot and themes and scenes and characters since I saw it. It’s a terrifying film, but deeply moving as well.

Last night I saw one of the earliest Theda Bara films, A Fool There Was, in which she plays her legendary vampire character, and afterwards they’re screening a documentary about her. A Fool There Was made so much money that it helped launch Fox Studios. It’s such a lovely rare treat to get to see a silent film on the big screen.

& In a couple of weeks, they’re screening a film about Dorothy Day, though it’s not the one that I missed when it played at the Brecht Forum in NYC.

Make Your Own Money

Posted by helenboyd – October 17, 2007

A woman recently posted an ad on Craig’s List here in NYC asking for advice on how to find a rich – and by rich she means really rich – husband. She’s found guys who make $250k a year, but

“$250,000 won’t get me to Central Park West,” she said, asking questions like “where do rich single men hang out?”

A rich guy responded:

“Your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity … in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!” the banker wrote.

“So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset,” he said. “Let me explain, you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!”

“It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease,” he said.

Both posts have since been removed from Craig’s List, but the lesson is indelible.

(Thanks to Lena for the tip!)

We Need the Money for Iraq, Apparently

Posted by helenboyd – October 6, 2007

President Bush vetoed a bill that would include an additional 4 million more American children in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. It’s the 4th veto of his presidency, and nearly got the votes to override, but didn’t as a result of the House vote.

There will be an attempt, on 10/18, to try the override again. Female politicians were in favor 72%, with male politicians coming in at a bare majority of 51%.

Carnival of Bent Attractions

Posted by helenboyd – October 2, 2007

This month, I get the pleasure of hosting the ongoing Carnival of Bent Attractions, and there’s a nice sampling of interesting LGBT Bentness to be had:

First, an interview with no other than sex-positive educator Susie Bright from the financially-minded set at Queercents, where we find out Ms. Bright worked in a cathouse but wasn’t getting paid for sex amonst other things;

Then, a review of a Thursday night Transvestite party in Buenos Aires, written by Oliver Hartman and posted on the Argentina’s Travel Blog site. Mr. Hartman didn’t know what to expect, and didn’t seem to know what was what (or who was whom):

I’m not entirely sure when the show ended, but there was some sort of conga line and crazy swan costume involved.

I wonder if it wasn’t a chicken.

Further still, a commentary on Craig’s wide stance on The Agonist, which tries to understand the likes of Craig and how they can claim not to be gay:

Perhaps it’s because many or most of them, like Craig, genuinely think they aren’t gay, despite enjoying gay sex?

& Finally, to wrap things up, SF Brawny Bear answers the question, “What does Bear Pride Mean to You?” on the blog Bear Bones. (But who does Bear bone, exactly?)

Nice roundup. Next month, our various Bent Attractions move on to a new ride at the Carnival.