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Marital Biology

This brief but mostly accurate article about Philly-area politics and same sex marriage summarizes the issues of how we define man and woman.

The only problem, of course, is that we do define man and woman legally, and judges can do so when it comes to marriage and divorce. Just because there are more than two sexes when it comes to biological or cultural gender doesn’t mean judges can’t legally define only two. Trans people especially have had their sex defined for them – and usually not in the way they wanted.

So while her argument is valid, and imho, true, it isn’t any kind of protection against having our genders defined legally in ways we don’t like.

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GLAAD Action Alert: KRXQ

TAKE ACTION: Demand that KRXQ Radio Hosts Rob Williams and Arnie States Apologize for Encouraging Violence Against Transgender Children

June 2, 2009— In a lengthy May 28 tirade on the Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning radio show heard in Sacramento, California on KRXQ 98.5 FM and Reno, Nevada on KDOT 104.5 FM, hosts Rob Williams and Arnie States verbally attacked transgender children. While discussing a recent story about a transgender child in Omaha, Nebraska and her parents’ decision to support her transition, the two hosts spent more than 30 minutes explicitly promoting child abuse of and making cruel, dehumanizing and defamatory comments toward transgender children.

You can listen to the entire segment beginning at 4:48 by clicking this link:
http://robarnieanddawn.com/newsite/a…%20America.mp3.

Among the comments made by the hosts:
ROB WILLIAMS [11:12]: This is a weird person who is demanding attention. And when it’s a child, all it takes is a hug, maybe some tough love or anything in between. When your little boy said, ‘Mommy, I want to walk around in a dress.’ You tell them no cause that’s not what boys do. But that’s not what we’re doing in this culture.
ARNIE STATES [13:27]: If my son, God forbid, if my son put on a pair of high heels, I would probably hit him with one of my shoes. I would throw a shoe at him. Because you know what? Boys don’t wear high heels. And in my house, they definitely don’t wear high heels.
ROB WILLIAMS [17:45]: Dawn, they are freaks. They are abnormal. Not because they’re girls trapped in boys bodies but because they have a mental disorder that needs to be somehow gotten out of them. That’s where therapy could help them.
ROB WILLIAMS [18:15]: Or because they were molested. You know a lot of times these transgenders were molested. And you need to work with them on that. The point is you don’t allow the behavior. You cure the cause!
ARNIE STATES [21:30]: You got a boy saying, ‘I wanna wear dresses.’ I’m going to look at him and go, ‘You know what? You’re a little idiot! You little dumbass! Look, you are a boy! Boys don’t wear dresses.’
ARNIE STATES [29:22]: You know, my favorite part about hearing these stories about the kids in high school, who the entire high school caters around, lets the boy wear the dress. I look forward to when they go out into society and society beats them down. And they end up in therapy.

To her credit, co-host Dawn Rossi stood up to Williams and States during the segment. Despite her apparent lack of familiarity with transgender issues, Rossi repeatedly defended transgender people and made an on-air apology for her colleagues’ defamatory remarks.

TAKE ACTION NOW!
Please contact KRXQ management in Sacramento, California, where the show is produced and demand that radio show hosts Rob Williams and Arnie States publicly apologize. Call on KRXQ to hold Williams and States accountable for their remarks and establish clear standards to ensure their media platform will not be used to condone or promote violence against any parts of the communities they serve.

John Geary
Vice President & General Manager
KRXQ-FM
(916) 339-4209
jgeary@entercom.com

Arnie States
On Air Personality
KRXQ-FM
(916) 334-7777
rad@robarnieanddawn.com

Rob Williams
On Air Personality
KRXQ-FM
(916) 334-7777
rwilliams@entercom.com

Please use the share page functionality at the top of this page to alert any of your friends and others who may also wish to take action. When contacting KRXQ, please ensure that your emails and phone calls are civil and respectful and do not engage in the kind of name-calling or abusive behavior.

About GLAAD
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is dedicated to promoting and ensuring fair, accurate and inclusive representation of people and events in the media as a means of eliminating homophobia and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. For more information, please visit www.glaad.org.

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Five News Stories

Fairfax High School elected a male student Prom Queen.

Tom Ackerman, a gay man, has vowed to call his friends’ wives their girlfriends, because he’s decided his religious views don’t allow him to recognize opposite-sex marriage.

The New Scientist tells you everything you ever wanted to know about female ejaculation (& maybe a few things you didn’t want to know).

A woman named Brenda Lee got dragged bodily off of Air Force One when she tried to give President Obama a letter asking him to stand up for heterosexual marriage.

Publishers Weekly reports from the BEA that US Publishers have vowed to fight digitized piracy.

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Dear Abby

Check out this answer by Dear Abby (now known as Jeanne Phillips!) about whether or not a woman should tell someone about another person’s trans gender.

Well done, Abby. I’m wondering when we can work this out as a Right to Privacy issue. Anyone?

(h/t to Dawn.)

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Remember Them as Soldiers

What bugs me about this NPR story about a Civil War soldier is that the people who live in the town Albert Casher, nee Jennie Hodgers, are embarrassed by who s/he was:

Dina says some residents believe that embracing the story of Jennie Hodgers will help bring tourists to town. “Other people, I think, frankly, would rather everybody not know we had a cross-dresser in Saunemin,” she says.

She fought from start to finish in the Civil War. She went on to live as a man for the rest of her life, having gotten used to the freedom, the income, & the friends she made as a soldier.

“The women who went to war,” she says, “who disguised themselves as men and carried a gun, were overwhelmingly working-class women, immigrant women, poor women, urban women and yeoman farm girls.”

Surely not! Women couldn’t have chosen to live as men because the rest of their choices sucked!

So this Memorial Day I’d like to honor all the transgender people who fought in their nation’s wars: the trans guys, the trans women pre-transition, the crossdressers of all genders.

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NYS GENDA Call-In Day is TODAY!

The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) has been passed by the Assembly and has enough support to be passed by the Senate. Get on the phone and call the lead Senate sponsor Tom Duane and your Senator to tell them that you want them to bring GENDA to the Senate floor and pass it. It is vital that they hear from you.
You can reach Senator Tom Duane at (518) 455-2451 and you can find your State Senator’s Albany phone number here.
GENDA would amend the state’s human rights law to include anti-discrimination protections based upon gender identity and expression, providing crucial civil rights protections for transgender New Yorkers by banning discrimination in housing, employment, credit, public accommodations, and other areas of everyday life.
With more than half of the Senators indicating their support for GENDA, we know that we have enough votes to get it passed in the Senate if it comes to the floor for a vote. So now is the time to call Senator Duane and your State Senator!
Talking Points:

  1. Reach Tom Duane at (518) 455-2451 and find your Senator’s Albany phone number here. Call their offices on Wednesday to tell them that the time is now to end discrimination against transgender New Yorkers. Remember to give them the number of the GENDA bill (S.2406).
  2. Ask your Senator to vote for GENDA, and ask lead Senate Sponsor Tom Duane to bring the bill to the floor for a vote now.
  3. Tell them about the broad support for GENDA statewide, including:
  • 78% of New York voters
  • Unions representing 2.1 million working New Yorkers
  • 27 Fortune 500 companies based in cities like Rochester, Corning, New York City and White Plains.
  • 344 clergy and lay leaders, representing over 20 different denominations

Do it! Don’t just Twitter it!

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“Straight-Acting”

The article itself is kind of teh suck, but the comments are interesting.
A young boy who acts in a feminine way isn’t a faggot; he’s a sissy.

Still, it’s interesting to see a conversation about male genders from another community’s POV.

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New Study on Poverty & Education

Taylor said frequently textbooks in primary and secondary schools and in higher education do not address issues like poverty fully and often are reduced and oversimplified. “Far too many schools continue to endorse a curriculum of the absurd that encompasses ‘heroification’ of primarily white males, while the contributions of women and people of color appear in pop-out format in textbooks,” she said.

I wish I were even a little surprised by the results and her conclusions.

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Hoyden

The precursor of “tomboy” is hoyden, which Michele Ann Abate describes as follows:

First appearing in the late 16th Century, the term shares a similar etymology history: it also referred to rambunctions boys and men rather than girls and women. Ineed the Oxford English Dictionary provides the following definition for “hoyden”: “A rude, ignorant, or awkward fellow; a clown, a boor”. By the late 17th Century, however, this meaning shifted and the word began referring to like-minded members of the opposite sex: “A rude, or ill-bred girl (or woman): a boisterous noisy girl, a romp.” Unlike a tomboy, a hoden was more closely associated with breaching bourgeous mores than female gender roles.

She adds later:

Wen the concepts of “tomboy” make its debut during the mid-19th Century, it supplanted “hoyden.”

I think I’ve found the answer to my “what do you call a grown-up tomboy?” question: hoyden.

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Femmes

I’m not one & I don’t understand them, somehow like a teenager who doesn’t understand the boys or girls he ogles. They are a mystery: a perfect, empowered, complicated mystery.

I have had, like so many tomboys and masculine spectrum and androgyny-leaning and genderqueer sorts, the kind of frustration with femininity that is about me & about the world & its expectations, but one day while listening to a femme talk about intentionally trying to look like a dyke so that others would know she wanted to date women, I had one of those revelatory moments. I explained why I was smiling to her: that I had experienced the reverse, trying to fem up my naturally dyke-spectrum gender even though i wanted to date men. We both had a moment of why is this shit so absurdly stupid along with a little and why are there always uniforms and prescriptions that go along with desire?

I don’t know the answer but I do know I have mocked femininity like the injured tomboy I can be, but this book – so full of longing and coolness and love and desire and girlness and attitude that I feel once again something like that teenaged boi or grrl utterly confounded but this time, a little in awe.

This book Visible: A Femmethology Parts 1 & 2, edited by Jennifer Clarke Burke and published by Homofactus, is full of the narratives of the people who call themselves femmes, and they ponder such a range of questions: the obvious ones about invisibility and identity – especially relevant to readers here when that (in)visibility relates to having a trans-masculine partner — to the femininity of a self-confessed “stopped pretending to be a male to queer to femme female” trans person. They are full of gender theory, concerned about community, biphobia, butch-femme dynamics and too many other things to mention. It gives me hope that even I, one day, can overcome being a jerk and punching those girls I like in the arm instead of just telling them how awesome & fabulous they are.

Thanks femmes, for making me look again at femininity. You can read more at www.Femmethology.com.