Here’s a friendly, though odd and occasionally tense, interview on a local Bahamas TV show with a resident transsexual woman. She does seem to give as good as she gets, & stands up for herself in cool ways, but the interviewers – despite their joking, confusion & homophobia – do pretty okay with it. They seem genuinely astonished that a Bahamanian could be trans.
Tucker Carlson: Not Condoning Gay Bashing
The Larry Craig story just keeps going. Tucker Carlson, after saying that he & a friend roughed up a man who hit on him in a DC public bathroom, now says he & his friend only held the man until security arrived. He explains:
“Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men’s room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men’s room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.”
“Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That’s absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn’t angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.”
Not condoning the use of violence against anyone, much less gay men in public bathrooms (or the ‘not gay men looking for gay sex’ types like Larry Craig, even), but I do think it’s different when you’re not being hit on but assaulted, or when you’re not a peer to the person hitting on you but a minor.
Not that any of that makes Tucker Carlson any less of a bonehead.
Ruining India’s Women
A recent working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) of India has posited that rural women in India, who tend not to be literate, learn a lot if they watch cable:
Women who were exposed to cable television over a 6- to 7-month period in India were less likely to report a preference for sons or complacency with domestic violence, and more likely to report autonomy in household decision-making, according to the working paper. In addition, more girls enrolled in school and fertility rates dropped.
But of course they’re talking about Indian television, not American, so let’s not send them Baywatch.
“Stuff I Supposed After Meeting Some People in a Gay Bar”*
* quote by Mara Keisling, when providing an alternative description of what Bailey’s book could be described as instead of as “science.”
This NPR show out of the Bay Area about the whole Bailey controversy is good listening. Joan Roughgarden (author of Evolution’s Rainbow), Mara Keisling (executive director of NCTE), Alice Dreger (author of Hermaphrodites & The Medical Invention of Sex) & Bailey himself.
& A challenging phone call from Ben Barres, who I love & who does not let Bailey not answer a direct question (with textual backup from Roughgarden), specifically, whether or not Bailey feels trans people are suited to prostitution.
The only thing that no-one said that someone should have said is that Bailey now has a history & a record of turning (at best) weak science into “controversy,” such as with the bisexuality studies that came out a couple of years ago.
I’m upset by the idea of how or if Dreger’s status as a woman – not just as an academic or intersex educator – is coming into play here. That is, is a man not sexist because a woman says he isn’t? (I don’t think so, but I think that’s coloring her defense of Bailey.)
Dreger & Bailey, Again
& Now The NY Times has published an article about the whole Dreger/Bailey fiasco. It’s reasonably objective, even if the title of the article is ridiculously overblown.
Moreover, based on her own reading of federal regulations, Dr. Dreger. . . argued that the book did not qualify as scientific research. The federal definition describes “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation.â€
Dr. Bailey used the people in his book as anecdotes, not as the subjects of a systematic investigation, she reported.
Which makes it not scientific at all. Either that or someone owes me a Ph.D. for My Husband Betty.
Stardusted
Betty & I went to see Stardust for its opening last weekend because Neil Gaiman asked us to (not personally, of course, but via his blog) and we both really enjoyed the movie. It’s rare for me to like a movie – I find most comedies too mean-spirited, most romances too gendered, and since I don’t like movies all that much in the first place (which is something like sacrilege or anti-American to admit, even) as either entertainment or as an art form, Betty doesn’t convince me to go to many. I don’t find most of them deliver even $10 worth of entertainment.
But Stardust, I loved. I’ve long been a fan of Gaiman’s writing, for the fantasy, the sheer power & reach of his imagination, & the breadth of his research, but what I usually like about writers above all else is voice. You know, I was weaned on C.S. Lewis. I like a narrative voice that tells me a story in a personal way, and what comes across in Gaiman’s writing is not just a kind of bemused gentleness, but intelligence, a lot of compassion, & a kind of sly earnestness and respect for his characters that all adds up to good stories, well told.
I read the book Stardust a couple of years ago and didn’t re-read it before seeing the movie because sometimes you want to see if the movie will touch the kind of memory you have of the book – and with this movie version, I found it hit all the same notes as the book did, mixing a kind of whimsy with a remarkable wisdom. But mostly there’s that gentle compassion – for the dead brothers (despite their being power-greedy fuckers), for the star, & for the somewhat hapless young man who’s fallen in love with the wrong girl.
The only part I didn’t like was DeNiro’s performance, and that’s mostly because it was one long “poofter” joke. & For that to be in a Gaiman film – who is uncommonly sympathetic to his gay & trans & gender variant characters – it seemed out of character. As “poofter” jokes go, I suppose it was more sympathetic than most.
So go see it. Put aside the arch comments, the snarky sarcasm, the cruel retorts. Go see a story about naivety, stupidity, greed, vanity & ultimately, justice. But mostly go see a story about love, told well.
‘Doing Gender’
Do check out the website of a German artist, Martina Minette Dreier, and her portraits of people ‘Doing Gender’.
(Thanks to AO for the link.)
Cool for Cats
I woke up today to a cool, windy, rainswept kind of day, with a truckload of cats sleeping with me, one of them (my Aeneas) with his back curved around touching the curve of mine. What a lovely way to wake up.
& Tonight, because Neil Gaiman asked us to, we’re going to see Stardust.
The Soup
So are there any other The Soup fans out there? I don’t catch this show a lot, but every time I do it cracks me up. McHale’s delivery is spotless. He’s kind of bitchy but with a kind of post- post- take on the media and the stupidity of television.
A recent favorite, about Drew Carey being chosen as the new host of The Price is Right: “They didn’t have a problem with Rosie being gay, they were just looking for a butchier lesbian.”
But you can’t really get the full impact until you watch it with the clips. It’s just too damn funny. & He was just on my other favorite host’s show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
Curve Interview: Me & Julia
In Curve magazine’s current issue (Vol. 17, #8), there’s an interview with me and Julia Serano aptly titled “A Queer Three-way.” The interviewer was Curve editor Diane Anderson-Minshall.