Posted on

It Was Rape

I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Jennifer Baumgardner’s new documentary It Was Rape. Eight women tell their stories about their experiences with sexual violence.

These experiences are so complicated, and even for these interviews you can hear all the women trying to make it less of a deal than it is and than it was. Why?

It’s entirely worth watching, but make sure you’re in an okay head space if you’re someone who has had this kind of experience – or even if you haven’t.

One of the women is told by one of her friends that “any time anyone has sex out of someone out of fear, it’s rape,” and that’s a good reminder, for everyone. And oh – this isn’t just for women. Men should watch this, too.

 

Posted on

6 Year Old Transgender Menace?

I love this graphic. Love it. (For those of you who don’t know, Transexual Menace is/was one of the first direct action trans rights groups, & it was formed in response to the transphobic screed written by Janice Raymond called The Transsexual Empire. Moving on…)

www.facebook.com/TransRights

As I like to point out in my workshops, I am firmly convinced that we have a national, if not international, obsession with penises. OR, some people are just walking around with penis on the brain all the time.

(& You know, not in the good way.)

If you haven’t heard the story, TLDEF has filed a complaint on behalf of a six year old whose parents and teachers and fellow students recognize as female. She’s been using the girls’ bathroom for a long while, and first told her parents she was female at about 18 months old. But for some reason, she was recently banned from using the girls’ bathroom and told to use the boys’ bathroom.

Which is, yes, ridiculous. So let’s all get over this problem with genitals, can we? Genitals do not determine gender. Rinse and Repeat.

Posted on

“Trolling for Good” & Trans Inclusive Healthcare

Dana Contreras was named in this cool article by The Advocate about “the 10 most innovative companies and the LGBTs who got them to the top” – basically, she’s a smart one. So smart that she gets a lot of recruiting emails from potential employers, so she’s decided to take this otherwise awkward outreach from them to ask an important question, namely, if they offer trans inclusive health insurance.

Why? Because “this is some heinous bullshit and you need to know about it.”

Most places don’t. Even liberal institutions that should know better don’t realize, or don’t care, that their health insurance suppliers actively exclude coverage of even the basics of healthcare. I’m not talking about genital surgeries, but just hormones prescriptions and labs, and therapy. That is, a trans person can go to a therapist for depression, if that’s covered, but they can’t go to a therapist to talk about being trans, a pending transition, or even to process the enormous changes that come with transition.

Contreras calls it bullshit and I’ll second her. That is, a woman of a certain age who might be on HRT because it’s recommended by her doctor will have these blood tests covered, but a trans woman – who is usually on much higher doses of estrogen – won’t. And that, friends, is discrimination: when the exact same perks are offered to one kind of person and not to another kind of person for no apparent reason, no difference in cost, no anything but ignorance and prejudice.

 

Posted on

Two Tune Tuesday: The Bad Plus

I saw these guys about a month ago here at Lawrence and they were amazing.

Only now did I discover this hour-long video of a performance of theirs from before 2004, and you can imagine – if they were this good then – how much better they’ve gotten in the nine years since.

(Props to my friend Veronica for making sure I knew about it and had tickets.)

Posted on

Howard University Files Amicus Brief on Behalf of Same Sex Marriage

Wow, this is cool news. Howard University’s Law School has filed an amicus brief in support of same sex marriage. (An amicus brief is filed by an amicus curiae, or “someone who is not a party to a case who offers information that bears on the case but that has not been solicited by any of the parties to assist a court. . . a way to introduce concerns ensuring that the possibly broad legal effects of a court decision will not depend solely on the parties directly involved in the case.)

from the Summary of Argument:
Today, public debate over interracial unions ha sgenerally died since this Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967 such that we are now long past the time when anyone would seriously claim that race-based marriage equality threatens the moral fabric of our civilization, is contrary to nature, or is harmful to children. Yet these arguments, however discredited, have not disappeared altogether.Instead, they have been recycled to oppose same-sex marriage.

This brief demonstrates that there is nothing new about the arguments marshaled to oppose same-sex marriage; the very same arguments – eventually categorically rejected in Loving v.Virginia — were assembled in opposition to interracial marriage. As a society, we have rightfully come to embrace full human dignity for interracial couples and individuals. We should do no less for same-sex couples.

To which I can only reply: YES. This is especially cool, coming as it does, from an historically black university.

Posted on

Hitler Worse Than Hitler (Really)

So this is horrifying:

As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found . . .

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

and this:

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

which doesn’t surprise me one bit. It’s still atrocious and terrifying, that so many people have either lied about them or somehow blocked them to such a degree they don’t even know they were lying. (I think it’s the former, for the record.)

Posted on

Homophobic Policy

SpaWorld, a Fairfax, VA spa openly denies trans and queer clientele. I have always been a little amazed by people who will not even accept our money – I mean, that’s real hate.

The worst part? It’s their policy, not an accident or an overzealous homophobic employee, AND it’s perfectly legal.

“It is our policy to not accept any kinds of abnormal sexual oriented customers to our facility such as homosexuals, or transgender(s).”

“Also, for the safety and the comfort of young children at Spa World, we strongly forbid any abnormal sexual behaviors and orientation in our facility. Despite the controversial issue of homosexuality and transgender, it is our policy to not accept them.”

Wow. I assume there is no actual policy against child molesters, however.

Posted on

New(ish) Fausto Sterling Book

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.