feminist blogs

If you have not read it, Autumn at Pam’s House Blend linked the decision in In re Marriage Cases, the California Supreme Court case that made marriage equal for all Californians irrespective of sexual orientation. She has up a long quote which I will not repeat. I liked this part from page 6:

[W]e conclude that … the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish – with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life – an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage…

(Emphasis in original.)

What might get overlooked, I wanted to highlight under the legal maxim of est majorifico fuckin dealio:

[W]e must determine whether sexual orientation should be considered a “suspect classification” under the California equal protection clause, so that statutes drawing a distinction on this basis are subject to strict scrutiny. As pointed out by the parties defending the marriage statutes, the great majority of out-of-state decisions that have addressed this issue have concluded that, unlike statutes that impose differential treatment on the basis of an individual’s race, sex, religion or national origin, statutes that treat persons differently because of their sexual orientation should not be viewed as constitutionally suspect and thus should be subjected to strict scrutiny. The issue is one of first impression in California, however, and for the reasons discussed below we now conclude that sexual orientation should be viewed as a suspect classification for purposes of the California Constitution’s equal protection clause and that statutes that treat persons diffeently because of their sexual orientation should be subjected to strict scrutiny under this constitutional provision.

(Opinion at pp. 95-6, footnotes omitted.)

This isn’t “just” marriage equality. This is full equality, as far as California law can effect it.

So often, our nation’s, our people’s and our institutions’ reach exceeds their grasp; we fail or refuse to live up to our promise and potential. But on this, in one state, on this day, we did the right thing.

(Thanks to Holly, Jack & Co. for letting me guest-post occasionally. I very much appreciate the privilege.)

INCITE! is one of my favorite feminist organizing projects and I’m excited to spread the word about their gorgeous new website. If you don’t already know about their amazing anthology, The Color of Violence, I highly recommend picking it up (especially since I helped craft the chapter that intersects with trans issues, toot toot.) Even if you don’t have a copy, the website is right at your fingertips, right now. Go check it out!

I especially want to draw your attention to one of the centerpieces of their website launch, the Organizing Toolkit To Stop Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color & Trans People of Color. If you have any doubts as to whether police brutality is a feminist issue, their analysis does a much better job of explaining than I have recently. Their toolkit highlights the fact that law enforcement violence against women and trans people often becomes invisible, while at the same time stressing the need to work in coalition with other organizations that struggle against the police state, institutionalized violence against people of color, immigrant rights, and so forth. (See in particular the joint statement put out by INCITE! and Critical Resistance, the prison abolitionist organization founded by Angela Davis and others.) They’re simultaneously working to integrate a gender analysis into conversations about police brutality, and also raise awareness that this isn’t just a problem that happens to young, straight black men.

INCITE!’s toolkit addresses everything from law enforcement violence against marginalized women and trans folks on the streets to violence in immigration practices and against native communities, police brutality against sex workers, and strategies for community accountability — which could be an alternative to calling the police, especially for people and communities who can’t always do that. I’ll quote a couple of my favorite sections after the jump.

Also, check out this sweet poster version.
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“I didn’t know what to do. My own dad was so tough on us — always saying things like “Be a Man!”

My father’s voice cracks with grief as he continues. “I thought I had to — like he used to say — whup the sissy out of you.”

His eyes are watery, and I feel hot tears rolling down my face too. I’m surprised by how sad I feel, for both of us. I never thought, before that moment, that I’d be able to forgive him for all the yelling, the anger, the bullying. Especially for the few times he paddled me hard–much harder than he ever whacked my sister. I didn’t even understand why until that day; I didn’t even know that there was a why behind the way he acted towards me when I was growing up. It never occurred to me that he felt an overwhelming, internalized pressure to make sure I conformed; to make sure I stopped screwing up my gender so badly.

That moment when we sat looking at each other in my living room was almost five years ago now. It was the first time he came to visit me, the first time we saw each other, since I started going through life as a woman. I remember the complex play of emotions on his face throughout that weekend: as we went out to dinner, while he was buying me a dress, when I gave him a goodnight hug. A startled mix of confusion and relief, struggling with the feeling he was tying to describe to me in that conversation, the feeling like he had failed as a parent not once but twice. First, at his traditional duty of raising me to be a man — obviously, that didn’t work out so well.

My father was a little too unorthodox to simply accept that socially-mandated responsibility that rode along in his unconscious baggage. By the time I came out, he was no longer a young and scared first-time parent and now feels like he failed me more by not noticing and understanding that I was different. My parents both feel guilty about this, and I still don’t know how to set their minds at ease about it. “I should have known,” my mother said. “If I had paid attention I would have seen all the patterns. I could have made it easier for you to talk to me.” I can’t blame them for this; who expects to have a transgender child? Who wants to? I grew up in the 80s and the 90s, long before Barbara Walters started her own misty-eyed coverage of the subject.

All this came flooding back to me when someone sent me a link to this NPR story about two families struggling with their kids’ gender non-conformity. I realized that there was something different about me, that I didn’t fit right into what I was supposed to be, before I ever went to preschool… I guess I must have been three or four. But I realized just as quickly that I was in big trouble if anyone found out. I quickly became terrified and secretive. These two kids, Bradley and Jona, are not like I was. For whatever reason, they wear their gender differences on their sleeves. It’s hard for me to see that as a bad thing, especially since I don’t think I’ll ever fully heal all of my own scars — the ones a child gets when they internalize the notion that they, as individuals, are monstrously and fundamentally flawed.

It was very hard for me to read Bradley’s story — about a kid who’s basically being straightjacketed into a designated gender, and growing increasingly distressed, sad, and burdened. But I’m glad NPR told these stories side by side, because their Q&A with each child’s psychologist illuminates a vast divide in how gender non-conforming children are treated. Ken Zucker of Toronto’s Clarke Institute represents the widespread, traditional approach, where the goal is to eliminate cross-gender behavior and the desire to be a different gender. He basically describes his success rate as the number of kids he’s managed to steer away from becoming an adult trans person; as he’s said elsewhere, he wants to “help these kids be more content in their biological gender.”

Which sounds all right on paper, but how far do you go in denying a child’s perfectly innocent inclinations? Diane Ehrensaft, on the other side of the continent in Oakland, sees Zucker’s methods as “trying to bend a twig”:

I would say that I think that there is a subgroup of children who, if we listen to them carefully, will tell us, “I know who I am. And if you let me be who I am, I will be a healthy person. And if you try to bend my twig” — which is what I think Zucker does — “then I will be a repressed, suppressed, depressed person who will learn to do what other people expect of me and I’ll hide who I really am.”

No shit, Diane.

Here is the upshot: the American Psychiatric Association has just put Ken Zucker in charge of delineating the official diagnosis applied to trans people in the DSM-V. (Hat tip to Lisa.) That makes this NPR special a very timely political piece indeed.
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VERY STRONG TRIGGER WARNING

The story of Romona Moore’s murder is horrific, not only because of the terrifying brutality involved, but because of the terrifying apathy that allowed it to occur. Moore is dead because she and those who tried to help her were ignored. It’s a really shitty consolation, but the very least we can do, to pay attention now. If you think your mental health can handle it, I urge you to please read the full story.

You know, I’m one of those feminists who thinks that racism is indeed a feminist issue, just like poverty, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and much more are feminist issues, simply because these are factors that oppress women on a daily basis and prevent them from living lives freely, safely and to their full potential. I’m sad that so many seem to disagree — but even if you do disagree on the basis outlined above, I don’t know how anyone could read Romona Moore’s story and not see how racism is a feminist issue, when racism is allowing and assisting the unspeakably violent rape, torture and murder of black women. As for the lawsuit, I hope like hell that her mother wins it.

The failure of authorities to care about the unexplained disappearance of a black woman is not an isolated incident. Not by a long shot. And neither is average people failing to do the right thing when given the chance.

All that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

There are many reasons that people do nothing, and sometimes they are justified. It may be believed (often very rightly) that doing the “right thing” will result in more violence or more severe consequences than turning a blind eye. Sometimes one’s own life is on the line. But I don’t see that this was the case here, either for the police officers that refused to even open an investigation, or for the man — probably numerous men — who saw Moore after she had been tortured raped and was probably about half-dead, and did nothing. Not even an anonymous phone call . . . that is, not before it was too late.

I read stories like these, and I find myself wondering where the hell the good people who do something are. And sometimes I wonder how “good” we can really call the people to do nothing. SAFER has an excellent post about bystander training and learning to be the person who does something. Despite our hunches and hopes for ourselves, I don’t think that any of us truly know if we are that person until put in the position. But at the very least, I want to believe that we can learn from the fatal mistakes of others.

Story via What About Our Daughters?

My apologies that I didn’t get to this sooner, but I’ve been alternately busy and dealing with various personal shit. I can’t say that it has been the best week. But even though my memory is slightly less clear than it was when I should have written the post, I did still want to write about Equality and Justice Day.

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Happy May Day. As people around the world celebrate the struggles of laborers, and as many immigrants and supporters of immigrant rights set off on protest marches around this country, I wanted to link you to one of my favorite blog posts of the last week: Sudy’s explanation of kyriarchy, a concept coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza.

It’s a useful neologism for an idea that comes up a lot: multiple, overlapping, shifting pyramids of power. Try to focus too hard on just one, try to figure out with some kind of precision exactly which individuals are at the top, and you lose sight of the entire awful kyriarchy, that has any number of ways to crush people. It’s another trick that power structures play to distract you. I’ve heard this kind of concept discussed before — some people I know just use the word “hierarchies” to talk about this, and in some feminist writing this is what “patriarchy” means. But I like the word kyriarchy, not least because it doesn’t just focus on “fathers” as the top of the pyramid.

For me the word summons up a bizzare image of holographic, floating, disappearing and reappearing ancient step pyramids. Because that’s how complex the overlapping of power can be, and how surreal. Sometimes we talk about this stuff like patriarchy, white supremacy, or homophobia is a bunch of craggy old white guys having a meeting down the street where we can kick the doors in and turn over the table piled high with money and blood. Too bad that the history of oppressive cultural attitudes, social enforcement, the accumulation of religion and greed and control and security is never that simple. But don’t think I mean it’s all ideology either. Kyriarchy kills. Don’t let it get behind you — or under you.

There are several things that bug me a lot about this NY Times article on a married couple that stayed together through one partner’s transition as a transwoman. There’s referring to the transwoman, Denise, by masculine pronouns and her birth name to reference past events where she did identify as female but had not yet had sexual reassignment surgery. There’s the very equation of surgery with transition — one is accepted as a woman only through virtue of a vaginoplasty, not only with regards to the law, but also in terms of how her gender is treated by the newspaper (and vice versa for a transman). Since not all transgender people choose to have surgery, and since not all people determine their very identity based off of their genitals, it’s insulting and obnoxious, and a big part of the problem that the paper is trying to examine. (Not to mention how the story is run, of course, in the Fashion and Style section.)

But with all of that being said, there’s some interesting material in there about the legal status of transgender individuals who are married.

The Brunners were already married when Donald became Denise. Transsexuals who marry after surgery pose a different set of questions, and there have been a number of custody, probate and other cases with decisions all over the legal map.

Urging the United States Supreme Court to tackle the issue in 2000, lawyers for Christie Lee Littleton, a Texas male-to-female transsexual suing her husband’s doctors for wrongful death, noted the confused landscape: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Texas, is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Texas, and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

The Supreme Court declined to take the case.

The New Jersey reference stems from a 1976 case in which an appellate court ruled that a man needed to pay support to his ex-wife, who was born male, essentially saying that sex is determined by current status, not DNA. But a 2004 Florida case took the opposite tack: a female-to-male transsexual who married a woman and then divorced lost custody of the children, as the marriage was declared invalid since both were born the same sex.

In other words, these couples face huge legal hurdles from spousal rights over property and medical decisions to parental rights over the children they help raise. Overnight, they can go from being a legally married couple with full spousal rights to legal limbo. And overnight, two people can go from unable to become legally married to entirely free to fill out a marriage certificate.

Of course, this wouldn’t be an issue if there was marriage equality. While marriage equality certainly wouldn’t solve all transgender issues (or LGB ones for that matter), and wouldn’t solve the problem of ensuring that the government recognizes the correct gender identity of all people, it would help protect already-married couples like The Brunners just as much as it would help same-sex couples who want to become legally married and same-sex couples with civil unions that occupy a legal gray area.

I just so happen to be lobbying at in Albany tomorrow for Equality and Justice Day, and marriage equality is on the table, along with an expansion of anti-discrimination legislation to include gender identity. I’m excited to be going and optimistic that we have an LGBT-friendly new governor in NY. There will be some cool stuff going on, so hopefully I’ll have something interesting to report when I get back.

Once upon a time I wrote about this woman, who fought back. Inevitably, some guy showed up to defame her and defend her oppressors. Time passed and the comments closed. But last night, she apparently found what was said about her, found another thread to put in a comment on, and spoke for herself.

It’s been a year and a half since Sean Bell and his two friends were shot 26 times by five NYPD officers. Bell was to be married later that day. He and his friends (who both survived) were unarmed. It seems likely that they didn’t even realize they were being confronted by plainclothes police officers, as opposed to being carjacked at gunpoint.

This morning, all of the police officers got off scot-free. They didn’t even receive a token “reckless endangerment” conviction, perhaps because the presiding judge was of the opinion that “Carelessness is not a crime.” Really? Somehow I thought that’s what reckless endangerment and manslaughter charges were all about. I guess police can’t commit those crimes. If shooting 31 times — including pausing to reload — into a car full of unarmed men doesn’t qualify, I’m not sure what does.

There was no jury, just the judge, who acquitted the three cops on the grounds of faulty prosecution.

Justice Arthur Cooperman said he found problems with the prosecution’s case. He said some prosecution witnesses contradicted themselves, and he cited prior convictions and incarcerations of witnesses.

He also cited the demeanor of some witnesses on the stand.

In other words, how dare you bring witnesses to testify against police officers who have run afoul of the criminal justice system before? They’re too sketchy to be in my courtroom. Seriously… isn’t this the crux of the problem? A blatant example of who is listened to in our courts and who gets the shaft? This is exactly why it’s horrifyingly unsurprising that cops walk.
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Good news:

Disability rights advocates and medical ethicists praised a precedent-setting ruling Friday by the Illinois Appellate Court denying a bid to sterilize a mentally disabled woman against her will.

The woman, identified only as K.E.J. in court records, isn’t capable of raising a child on her own, but her guardian failed to prove that sterilization would be in her best interests, a three-judge panel in Chicago ruled unanimously.

[ . . . ]

The ruling was the first appellate opinion on the issue in Illinois.

 

“It’s extraordinarily significant” because it guarantees the disabled a court hearing, said Katie Watson, a Northwestern University professor who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on behalf of about two dozen medical ethicists.

[ . . . ]

K.E.J., 29, suffered a brain injury as a child when she was struck by a car. As a result, she cannot be left alone to operate a stove or perform most household chores.

The woman lives with her aunt, who was appointed as her guardian in the mid-1990s. In 2003, the aunt filed a “petition for tubal ligation” in Cook County Probate Court, arguing that her niece had a bad medical reaction to other birth-control methods.

At a bench trial in 2005, K.E.J. testified that she hoped one day to have children. “I will love taking care of them,” she said. “I will love, you know, to see how they grow.”

Seeing our atrocious history on forced sterilization in this country, I’d say that this ruling is oh, several decades overdue. I personally found both Pregnancy and Power and Killing the Black Body to be excellent primers on this subject as well as great books (but I’m sure that there are other great books I haven’t read that focus primarily on this issue — if you know them, leave the titles in the comments). But the simple version of the facts is that for many decades, America participated in and promoted forced sterilization of those who were deemed unfit to pass on their genes. That included women of color, the poor and those who were referred to as “feeble-minded” — disabled women (the phrase was also used to justify sterilization of other socially-scorned women, like those who were promiscuous or sex workers). Many people believe that this is still happening, like with the Norplant situation several years back (also covered in Killing the Black body), and there is more or less undeniable evidence that it is still happening to non-English-speaking women and the disabled.

We often treat disabled people as though they are undeserving of certain things in life, and sexuality and parenthood are pretty high up on that list. I do not think that being unable to raise your children on your own makes you unworthy of giving birth to and raising children. And I certainly don’t see any justification for a forced-sterilization of a woman who has made it clear that her wishes are otherwise; we need to see it as equally heinous to forced-birth and forced-abortion. By it’s very nature, a fundamental right is not conditional, and believing in reproductive justice means believing in it for all. And so I applaud the court and congratulate disability activists on this win; I can only hope that the success continues.

via FRIDA