Everything is Amazing, Nobody is Happy

Honestly, this is the way I feel about Obama being president:

and within the LGBT community especially, as if I’m surrounded by people who can’t give it a minute to get back from space.

In five months:

  • Lily Ledbetter
  • funding the UNFPA
  • children’s health insurance
  • troops to Afghanistan
  • stem cell research funded
  • lifting Cuban travel restrictions
  • Kathleen Sebelius
  • signing the UN document decriminalizing homosexuality
  • creation of White House Council on Women & Girls
  • created Post for Int’l Women’s Issues
  • same sex partner benefits for Federal employees

Plenty to do, but all of these things were pipe dreams before.

Sexism & The Trans

On the Issues magazine has been around a long while, and over its history has published some very cool writers. Today I’m pleased to have joined the list, with an essay called “How a Feminist Found Her Sexism” for their summer issue which is entirely about gender.

From an article about sex selection & abortion:

While sex selection abortion allows women to make what is, in a sense, the ultimate in supposedly informed consumerism, it also can work to create a world where being female is viewed as the primary and most terminal of birth defects.


I’m very much looking forward to reading the whole of it.

#EA Fail

I’ve been Simming for nine years – played TOS (The Original Sims), Sims 2, & now Sims 3. I was even one of those people who test-piloted TSO (The Sims Online) because they apparently had my name on a list of people who really freaking loved the game. Betty & Bob Newbie and Mortimer & Bella Goth are all familiar names in our house.

& While I have reasonably successfully ignored Will Wright’s being a BOR (Big Old Republican), recently EA has just been teh suck when it comes to women.

I’m not even that offended by the “booth babe” idea, but what DOES offend me is the lack of recognition that someone might prefer a “booth boy” or that any of the people who might want to post with a “booth babe” might be women.

& All this while GLAAD is trying to get a conversation started about homophobia in gaming.

I am, sadly, setting aside my Sims playing until EA gets its shit together.

What bothers me even more about all this is that Wright is a right-winger of the Libertarian bent who should have no patience for this kind of heterosexist & sexist crap. As a capitalist, which I’m sure he is, he shouldn’t want to estrange any market. Sims always had the same-sex “woohoo.” Civil unions were in the first release of Sims 2, which came out in 2004, & they stayed put even through the great nudity scandal of 2005. Same sex marriage is possible in Sims 3… all of which all gave me the idea that this trans amorous het dyke was, um, welcome in the Sims community. Apparently not.

Will Wright, it’s time to issue a real apology to women, and to the LGBT communities, for encouraging this kind of bullshit. (& Yes, he’ll be sent a copy of this.)

(You can follow #EAfail on Twitter, too.)

GRS: No State Obligation

In an article posted on Law.com today, this news: Federal Judge Says State Not Obligated to Pay for Sex-Change Surgery.

Western District of New York Judge Charles J. Siragusa in Rochester ruled that Morgana Ravenwood’s constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment were not violated by the denial of coverage.

He also refused to order state Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines to rescind 18 N.Y.C.R.R. §505.2(l), the 1998 law prohibiting state Medicaid funding for “care,” “services” or “drugs” related to gender reassignment surgery.

My thought is that it’s all well & good as long as they quit requiring genital surgery for gender marker changes, then.

WI’s Blues

I received a missive from Fair Wisconsin Thursday morning about the lawsuit three board members of Wisconsin Family Action filed to challenge the constitutionality of the recently enacted domestic partnership protections.

Here’s the wording that blew my mind:

Fair Wisconsin is currently reviewing this lawsuit with our legal counsel, and we are prepared to defend domestic partnerships. We are hopeful that the State Supreme Court will recognize that domestic partnerships are not substantially similar to marriage, and will arrive at a fair and just decision that upholds these crucial protections for caring, committed couples.

Please read the boldfaced bit over. Basically, you want marriage protections for same-sex couples, but the bigots in your state are against that & have put an amendment into your state constitution saying that not only can same-sex marriage never be legal, but that no other law in the state can give those same people any benefits/legal standing that *looks anything like* marriage. As a result, same-sex people are hoping the State Supreme Court doesn’t view the partner benefits as anything like marriage — which, ironically for all the same sex couples – they are not. Not even close, actually, but it’s still like something out of Kafka.

Suddenly I don’t feel so welcome in Wisconsin, and while I know, in my heart, that it was ignorance and a lot of legwork by bigots that lead to these state constitutions, it shames me as an American that more people have not stood up & said ENOUGH. (I really do believe that most people want me & Rachel to be able to share each other’s health insurance, and mostly I do. )


Lady Painter & Hunger Striker

An old friend of mine wrote a cover article for the Times Literary Supplement about the first hunger striker, Marion Wallace-Dunlop. What interesting about his research is that it’s not about her alone, but about the way she understood media – in her case, at the time, painting – and its relationship to politics. He writes:

Wallace-Dunlop’s innovation was to create a kind of political theatre in a prison cell, its impact more dramatic than any she could have made on the image of women in art.

Very cool article about a very cool woman – whose life occupies a nice intersection of colonialism, feminism, suffrage, political strategy, art, and theatre.