feminist blogs

(Via feministe 2008-05-05.)

From a long post by PortlyDyke at Shakesville on the closet and PDAs (I mean Public Displays of Affection, not Private Defense Associations):

When ABC news did their second social experiment about Public Displays of Affection (PDAs) by having a gay male couple and a lesbian couple kiss and cuddle in public (the first experiment used straight couples), the reactions were varied.

There was the woman who called the cops:

Operator: Birmingham Police operator 9283

Caller: We have a couple of men sitting out on the bench that have been kissing and drooling all over each other for the past hour or so. It’s not against the law, right?

Operator: Not to the best of my knowledge it’s not.

Caller: So there’s no complaint I could make or have?

Operator: I imagine you could complain if you like ma’am. We can always send an officer down there.

And they did … . The officer told our couple that the police dispatch received a call because the two of them were making out.

Just don’t do that in public, he told them before leaving the scene.

There was the woman who said:

I would actually want our kids to grow up in a place where they would see various types of people engaging in behaviors that [are] loving.

And then there were the people who took a whole different think of teh childrenz! tack:

I don’t really find it inappropriate, especially during the day when schoolchildren aren’t running around. They might get confused and want an answer for what’s going on, bystander Mary-Kate told us. The majority of the people who spoke about children seemed to echo Mary-Kate’s feelings.

Which means, basically, these folks are fine with Gay PDA — as long as they don’t have to face the uncomfortable, icky business of explaining to their children that not everybody on earth is like mommy and daddy.

[…]

I doubt that most straight, cisgendered people think about, or notice, how frequently they touch their partner in public in ways that are not necessarily sexual (in addition to kissing, cuddling, and the odd bum-squeeze) — ie. holding hands, walking with an arm around the waist, smoothing the other’s hair back out of their eyes — nor do I think that most straight, cisgendered people are probably aware of the fact that when I touch my partner in public, it’s nearly always a considered act.

I don’t obsess about this — as in — it doesn’t eat up my days and nights — and I’m probably about as out as a queer can be in this country — but every single time I take my partner’s hand on the street, or toss my arm over her shoulder or around her waist, hug her goodbye or hello, I do a little, tiny security sweep.

[…]

This friend is the sister I never had. I loved her (and love her still) dearly, and her inability to see how the Measure 8 (which was passed that year) was likely to affect me and my family was incredibly painful to me. I remember weeping in her living room as I tried to explain something that was, to her, completely invisible. I talked to her about how scary it had been to come out publicly after having led a fairly comfortable life as a closeted queer, and she just didn’t seem to get why it should be a big deal at all.

So, I issued her and her husband a challenge (and I’ll issue the same challenge to any straight coupled allies here who want to raise their awareness of LBGTQ issues):

Spend an entire week pretending that you’re not a couple. Don’t write a check from a joint bank account. Hide all the photographs in your home and office which would identify you as a couple. Take off your wedding rings. Touch each other, and talk to each other, in public, in ways that could only be interpreted as you being friends. Refer to yourself only in the singular I, never in the we. When you go to work on Monday, if you spent time together on the weekend, include only information which would indicate that you went somewhere with a friend, rather than your life-mate. If someone comes to stay with you, sleep in separate beds. Go intentionally into the closet as a couple. For a week.

They took my challenge.

They lasted exactly three days.

My friend returned to me in tears on day four and said: I’m sorry. I had no idea what it is like for you.

—PortlyDyke @ Shakesville (2008-04-29): Take My Arm, My Love

Read the whole thing. It’s a simple point, but it’s important, and powerful, and beautiful.

Shorter DiLorenzo: Don’t vote for Alan Keyes because he used to hang out with a bunch of fags.

DiLorenzo may be the single most embarrassing figure associated with radical libertarianism today. If he were a covert agent trying to rehabilitate disgusting politicians by deliberately making their critics look foolish, then he couldn’t act like any more of a perfect ass than he already does.

From the Opelika-Auburn News (2008-03-07):

Westboro Baptist Church, a group known for protesting and picketing funerals and memorials of fallen soldiers, is planning to picket at the Sunday afternoon funeral of 18-year-old Auburn freshman Lauren Burk, according to the group’s Web site. Burk was killed Tuesday night. Police are investigating her death as a murder.

Westboro Baptist Church, established in 1955, is an Kansas-based organization lead by Pastor Fred Phelps.

The group is also planning to picket the funeral of Eve Carson, UNC student body president who was killed Wednesday morning.

Both funerals are listed on the WBC site’s online picket schedule for Sunday.

First the Phelpses came to picket the funerals of men murdered by gay-bashers.

Then they came to picket the funerals of AIDS patients.

Then they came to picket the funerals of soldiers killed in combat.

And now, having given up any pretense of having a particular target other than humanity and simple decency, they’re just showing up to any old random funeral, so long as they know that the news media will be in the area.

What they are doing now is no more, and no less, evil than what they did to Matthew Shepard’s family. I would say that the cruelty here is more bizarre, but it’s not, really, when you understand some basic facts about the Phelpses. They have shown repeatedly, by their words and their deeds, that they thrive on being hated and provoking reaction. There is literally nothing at all that is beneath them, as long as it gets their names and their websites in the news yet again. And it will.

(Story via Holly @ feministe 2008-02-17. Video thanks to GLAAD 2008-02-13.)

There are a couple of different points to make about conservative reactions to the recent story of a government elementary school in Douglas County, Colorado making some accommodations for a transgender girl in the second grade. Both are well illustrated by the ridiculous discussion of the story by professional blowhard Neil Cavuto on Fox News.

The first point to make is about the first-order issue — how to run an elementary school and what to do if a kid who has been living and attending school as a boy decides that she wants to live as a girl instead. As far as this goes, Cavuto’s reaction is based on a tissue of nastiness, nonsense, and a few plain lies. As far as I can tell, for example, the claim that any student other than this little girl will be using unisex bathrooms is simply false — the school will have its normal girls’ and boys’ bathrooms; the girl in question just won’t be forced to use them. The claim that it will cost millions of dollars also seems to be something that Cavuto just made up out of thin air; the school already has plenty of bathrooms, doesn’t need to build more, and is just reclassifying a couple of already-existing bathrooms — which from the sound of it are probably single-stall rooms in the teacher’s lounge, or something similar — for this girl’s use. More broadly, the entire discussion is premised on the positively bizarre notion that the school should be ragged on for bending over backwards to suit this girl’s delicate sensibilities, just so long as they don’t follow the Genital Correctness Busybody Blowhard Brigade in deliberately trying to make the kid’s life more unpleasant, e.g. by refusing to call her by her chosen name, or by forcing her to use the boys’ bathroom when she doesn’t want to use it, or by refusing to intervene against bullies as they would with any other child being bullied for any other reason, or by harassing her, punishing her, or throwing her out of school for wearing the wrong set of clothes. Apparently it’s the acme of liberal hypersensitivity and authoritarian political correctness run amok, and indeed it’s robbing children everywhere of their childhood (!), if you should ever fail to go out of your way to be as obnoxious as possible toward an eight-year-old kid, who never did anything to you, all in the name of heteropatriarchal gender-role social engineering.

The second point to make is about a second-order issue — whether or not the local government in Douglas should be taking a role in promoting one way of running a school or interacting with transgender students over others. Cavuto tries to invoke the issue implicitly by repeatedly referring to tax dollars, and although his specific claims about millions of tax dollars are obvious bullshit, there is a legitimate point buried under it. It should not be the local government’s business to promote either a tolerant or a punitive school environment for this kid — because while I think it’s stupid for any school to harass this kid or try to force her into the right gender identity, I also think that it is tyrannical for any government to force local taxpayers to pay for projects that they personally find abhorrent (whether because they are being forced to pay for violations of their own religious beliefs, or for any other reason). Nor should local parents be forced to enroll their kids in a school that allows openly transgender students to participate in classes. Again, I think that’s a stupid policy to make, but is tyrannical for the government to force parents to put their children in environments that they deeply believe that their children shouldn’t be in.

If we had an argument to the effect that local taxpayers should be able to withhold funding from schools that establish policies they consider wrongheaded, or to the effect that anti-trans local parents should be free to withdraw their kids from this school and make other arrangements (homeschooling, parochial schooling, or whatever), without having to jump the government’s normal punitive bureaucratic hurdles, and without being forced to continue paying for a school that they no longer feel to be fit to educate children, then I would be perfectly willing to take their side on that one — I may disagree with everything that they want to teach kids, but I’ll defend to the death their right to teach it. But, of course, principled small-government conservatives that they are, Cavuto and the rest of the GCBBB are constitutionally incapable of making that kind of second-order argument. Instead, we find a lot of phony-concern hand-wringing from letter writers about local government and school authorities promoting gender confusion, deviance, professional help, a lifetime of pain, etc. (As far as I can tell there’s no evidence that the girl is at all confused; she seems to be pretty clear on what she wants. And there’s no reason to believe that her decision to live as a girl promises a lifetime of pain, unless and except to the extent that other people, i.e. these same busybody blowhards, go out of their way to make it painful. There’s no promise here; only a threat.) But it is no more the job of government authorities to promote conformity to traditional gender roles and their assignment based on biological sex, than it is their job to promote the opposite; it would be just as immoral as them to force me to pay for harassing and penalizing transgender children who would otherwise be happy as clams until they fit back into their proper gender, when I consider that abhorrent. Cavuto, meanwhile, shows his principled conservative bona fides by arguing that no matter how many transgender kids there may be in elementary schools, they are far from the majority. We live in a country where majority rules, which apparently, to his mind, means that when 99% of kids follow traditional gender norms for the sex they were assigned at birth, it must be the government’s job to direct school authorities to treat the remaining 1% like shit, so as to spare the 99% from the terrible confusion of possibly learning something. The majority rules, the minority drools, and if you don’t like it they’ll force you to pay for their Right-wing social engineering anyway. And, oh yes, you will pay.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-12-08: Lazy Linking on Liberatory Learning
• GT 2005-10-07: Small-government conservatives
• GT 2005-03-09: The Most Depressing Photograph in the World
• GT 2001-12-10: Gender terrorism in Nashville

Besides availing itself of my favorite quotation from Edmund Burke, this recent post by Shiva at Biodiverse Resistance is also pretty much right on from beginning to end. Thus:

The headline of this recent BBC story is Stroke victim was misdiagnosed as mad. While reading it was pretty scary (especially as temporary aphasia can also occur in autism, and in fact i experienced it (albeit only for a few very brief periods) in my teens), it follows a certain pattern that annoys me: in describing the horrible treatment that Steve Hall experienced when misdiagnosed, it implicitly suggests that the same treatment would be appropriate and acceptable if he actually was mad.

It reminded me of this case of a woman who was put in a men’s prison because she was percieved to be a transsexual woman (and, therefore, in the eyes of the police who arrested her, really a man) - and of similar cases i’ve heard of where gender-ambiguous-looking women have been refused entry to women’s toilets or other single-sex spaces where they were thought to be MTF transsexuals. As nodesignation says:

The police don’t question the practice of regularly placing trans women in situations where they will be raped. They only lament that they accidentally subjected a non-trans woman to the violence that they regularly subject trans women to. I would assume that as this story gains traction the emphasis will be about how horrible that a woman who was not trans received such mistreatment. That much is clear already from the fact that there are so few stories on trans women receiving this mistreatment despite being its being a regular occurance.

It’s not the inherent wrongness of the treatment that is discussed, it is the supposed horrible mistake of subjecting someone to that treatment when that person actually turned out to be not a member of the category of people that it’s considered acceptable to do this sort of thing to. No thought is given to why it’s supposedly acceptable to do it to people who are in that category, despite the fact that, in both cases, the reporting of the incident blatantly begs the question: if it was horrible and inhuman and inacceptable to do this to one person by mistake, what is it to do it to a whole Othered class of people deliberately?

It was, and in some places still is, common for autistic people (particularly those who don’t fit certain aspects of the commoner autism stereotypes) to be misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, leading to institutionalisation, forced drugging, etc. Similarly, many non-verbal autistic people (who are/were nonetheless capable of communication through other means) are or were misdiagnosed as mentally retarded, again leading to institutionalisation and other abuses justified by the fact of their supposed incapacity for rational thought or communication. On autism message boards and other communities, these cases tend to be talked about primarily in terms of the horribleness of the misdiagnosis, often with comments to the effect that I/you/ze should never have been treated like that, because I’m/you’re/ze’s autistic, not schizophrenic/mentally retarded/whatever, or seeing the case similarly to someone who was acquitted of a crime after new evidence proved them not guilty, as if to be found to be autistic rather than some other diagnostic category after all is what makes all the difference. Even if the people making these sort of comments don’t realise it, they’re implying that it would be OK to do all those things to someone who actually is schizophrenic or mentally retarded.

…

Whether or not we want to adopt an overarching political/philosophical label like anarchist, however, all of us who fight, with actions or words, for any oppressed groups and against oppression need to actively oppose the hypocrisy of outrage at people being mistakenly treated like they are members of a supposedly OK to exclude, abuse or oppress category, when the real outrage should be that such a category even exists. The thing itself is the abuse…

—Shiva @ Biodiverse Resistance (2008-01-03): The Thing Itself Is The Abuse

Read the whole thing.

Jane Rule, a feminist before the Second Wave and a pioneer lesbian novelist before Stonewall, died last month at the age of 76. She was born an American but moved to Canada with her lover Helen Sonthoff, where they would live for the rest of their lives, in order to escape the persecution of the McCarthy era. In her novels, she was known for her nuanced and sympathetic portraits of lesbian characters’ lives—one of the first novelists to write books about lesbians in which her characters lived through ordinary human problems, were not punished for their sexuality, and were not treated as psychological freaks. Her essays, columns, and correspondence were notable for her generosity, patience, and also vigorously independent thought. Although she wrote passionately and movingly about her own life-long love affair with Helen, she was sharply critical of the gay rights movement’s efforts to win State recognition for gay and lesbian marriages. Here is what she wrote for the Spring 2001 issue of BC Bookworld; while I’d urge a radical people-power solution to problems of welfare, based on mutual aid between workers rather than State redistribution, the rest of the essay is almost entirely right-on. The solution is not to lodge same-sex relationships firmly under the eyes and the bootheels of the marital State; it is to free everything that’s valuable in both straight and gay love, intimacy, and commitment from the State’s stifling embrace.

The Heterosexual Cage of Coupledom

Over thirty years ago, when homosexual acts between consenting adults were decriminalized, Trudeau said that the government had no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

Until a few months ago that privacy was respected.

Now the government has passed a law including gay and lesbian couples as common-law partners with the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual common-law partners. Any of us who have lived together in a sexual relationship for over two years must declare ourselves on our income tax forms, or we are breaking the law.

With one stroke of the pen all gay and lesbian couples in Canada have been either outed if they declare or recriminalized if they do not. Our bedroom doors have come off their legal hinges.

Why then is there such support for this new law among gay people? Svend Robinson spoke in favor of it the House. EGALE, the national organization for gays and lesbians, encouraged its passing.

It is celebrated by all of them as a step along the road to total social acceptance, to a day when those of us who wish to can be legally married, our relationships just as respectable as those of heterosexuals.

But common-law partnerships were never about respectability. They were forced on couples as a way of protecting women and children from men who, by refusing to marry, were trying to avoid responsibility, free to move on when they felt like it without legal burdens of alimony and child support, without claims on their property or pensions.

There are some gay and lesbian couples raising children who, because they are not allowed to marry, may find a common-law partnership useful for benefits in tax relief, health benefits, pensions, if they can afford to expose themselves to the homophobia still rampant in this country. The law may also protect those who are financially dependent on their partners from being cast aside without financial aid.

But the law, far from conferring respectability, simply forces financial responsibility on those perceived to be irresponsible without it. What about those poor who are unable to work because they are single parents or ill or disabled?

The single mother on welfare has long had her privacy invaded by social workers looking for live-in men who should be expected to support her and another man’s children. Now single mothers must beware of live-in women as well. The ill and disabled will also be forced to live alone or sacrifice their benefits if their partners have work.

Over the years when we have been left to live lawless, a great many of us have learned to take responsibility for ourselves and each other, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, not bound by the marriage service or model but on singularities and groupings of our own invention.

To be forced back into the heterosexual cage of coupledom is not a step forward but a step back into state-imposed definitions of relationship. With all that we have learned, we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there.

We should all accept responsibility for those who must be dependent, children, the old, the ill and the disabled, by assuring that our tax dollars are spent for their care. We should not have any part in supporting laws which promote unequal relationships between adults, unnecessary dependencies, false positions of power.

No responsible citizen should allow the state to privatize the welfare of those in need, to make them victims to the abilities and whims of their legal keepers. Human rights are the core responsibility of the government.

The regulation of adult human relationships is not.

To trade the freedom we have had to invent our own lives for state-imposed coupledom does not make us any more respectable in the eyes of those who enjoy passing judgment. We become instead children clambering for rule, for consequences to be imposed on us instead of self-respecting, self-defining adults.

Those of us who want to legalize our relationships for the protection of our children, for our own security, for whatever reason, should have the right to do so but not at the expense of imposing that condition on all the rest if us.

What we have now is neither the right to marry nor the right to remain private and independent in our relationships.

What kind of victory is that?

—Jane Rule, BC Bookworld (Spring 2001): The Heterosexual Cage of Coupledom

Via Women’s Space / The Margins 2007-12-02.

(Link thanks to feministing 2007-09-27.)

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies, and they routinely hurt people who pose no serious threat to anyone, in order to establish, maintain, or take control of the situation. People who complain about this kind of rough handling are treated like trash, as if any level of intimidation and violence whatsoever were obviously legitimate, and the victims are to blame for provoking whatever they get. This is especially likely if the victims have features that mark them as targets for the special concern of the police — if they are black, or poor, or young, or Muslims, or immigrants, or women who speak loudly and forcefully, or queer, or political activists, or for whatever other reason. And they are especially vehement and arrogant about this kind of behavior when civilians dare to watch, record, and/or object to how the cops are treating somebody else.

In New York City, a group of cops who were hassling a young black man were questioned by members of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project outside an East Village bar. The cops turned their violent attention on these peaceably assembled people, grabbing a couple of people for arrest and then spraying pepper spray, apparently without warning and without provocation, into the rest of the crowd. Here is what SRLP has to say about it:

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project is an organization that works on behalf of low-income people of color who are transgender, gender non-conforming, or intersex, providing free legal services and advocacy among many other initiatives. On Wednesday night, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project was celebrating its fifth anniversary with a celebration and fundraising event at a bar in the East Village.

A group of our community members, consisting largely of queer and transgender people of color, witnessed two officers attempting to detain a young Black man outside of the bar. Several of our community members asked the officers why they were making the arrest and using excessive force. Despite the fact that our community was on the sidewalk, gathered peacefully and not obstructing foot traffic, the NYPD chose to forcefully grab two people and arrested them. Without warning, an officer then sprayed pepper spray across the group in a wide arc, temporarily blinding many and causing vomiting and intense pain.

This is the sort of all-too-common police violence and overreaction towards people of color that happens all the time, said Dean Spade,founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. It’s ironic that we were celebrating the work of an organization that specifically opposes state violence against marginalized communities, and we experienced a police attack at our celebration.

We are outraged, and demand that our community members be released and the police be held accountable for unnecessary use of excessive force and falsely arresting people, Spade continued.

Damaris Reyes is executive director of GOLES, an organization working to preserve the Lower East Side. She commented, I’m extremely concerned and disappointed by the 9th Precinct’s response to the situation and how it escalated into violence. This kind of aggressive behavior doesn’t do them any good in community-police relations.

In the comments at Feministing, a law student who was there when it happens, elaborates:

From what I could tell last night: a group of queer and trans people, many of color, were gathered outside the bar where the fundraiser after-party was going on, talking and having a cigarette. Some of the attendees noticed a young black man being stopped by the police, who began arresting him. I am not sure if this man was part of the party or not. The police became agitated when the attendees (many of whom are lawyers, law students and legal workers since this WAS, after all, a fundraiser for a legal nonprofit) began questioning them on the nature of the arrest. The police demanded that everyone disburse and pepper sprayed an arc around them, leaving a number of individuals, including those who weren’t involved in conversation with police, crying, vomiting, and collapsed on the sidewalk. After this, some people ran to get water, and others attempted (and eventually received) the badge numbers and names of the arresting officers, and asked bystanders to write them down. After this, Dean Spade asked the crowd to go back inside, and I walked away since it was getting close to bedtime for me. This is as much as I could tell.

I still do not know what the two attendees were arrested for, nor what the young black man was detained (and arrested?) for.

In an update to the original notice, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project adds:

We are getting word that the arraignments are likely to happen during night court tonight [Thursday 9/27] some time between 5pm and 1am. If you can, go to the court to show support!

The arraignment court rooms are at 100 Centre St (Directions: No. 4 or 5train to Brooklyn Bridge Station; No. 6 train, N, R or C train to Canal Street; No. 1 train to Franklin Street; M1, M6 and M15 bus lines are nearby. 100 Centre Street is one block north of Worth Street,three blocks south of Canal Street.) Ask for directions to the arraignment rooms at the info desk when you enter.

And:

If you would like to receive email updates, send a blank email to sept26-subscribe@lists.mayfirst.org

P - Pissed
O - Old
W - Woman
E - Engaged in
R - Revolution

Boo, Christina, and I volunteered at the Frameline screenings of Look Us In the Eye and Only In the Castro with Trevor Hailey this morning and they were great. I cried a few times, out of inspiration and appreciation, and especially since Trevor Hailey, passed away on the 13th. I wish I'd known her. She seemed like an incredibly vibrant and lovely woman.

Neither film is likely "coming to a theatre near you", but perhaps if you call your local PBS station they'll add it to their program line up. It's worth a call or letter to the station. You won't be disappointed.

Also, check out the Old Women's Project.

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT:

Old women must be treated as equal to other adults. We reject both contempt and "respect" on the basis of age, but rather celebrate honest exchange between generations. If we can have relations of equality, people can see for themselves whether we have "wisdom and experience." Some of us do. (Sometimes old women fall into wanting "honor and respect" just because women get so little respect throughout our lives that we feel we should at least get some pay-off at the end. Besides, we're aware that if we don't get special "respect," we usually end up with special contempt. But we also remember when "respect" for women was used as a reason to deny us the vote.)

Old women can and must speak out to demand this equality for ourselves and other old women. This breaks the taboo against old women asking for ourselves rather than for "future generations." But our own lives matter, and future generations of old women depend on us to end ageism.

Ageism disempowers all women. As long as younger women gain false power by distancing themselves from old women, the 35-year-old loses power by not being 25.

The word "old" is a statement of fact, not a matter of shame. We claim it, believing that as long as it is humiliating to be called old, it will be humiliating to be old.

They rule.

Finally!

Pride is just around the corner which means DYKE MARCH!!!!

June is gonna be a busy month and it's just getting started with Frameline Volunteer Orientation at the LGBT Center tonight.

I can't even begin to tell y'all how psyched I am to be surrounded by a whole bunch of dykes for the next six weeks.

I've yet to meet the girl of my dreams at any of these events but I haven't given up hope. Surprisingly, (obviously?) radical feminists aren't too popular with the lezzies either, but like I said, I haven't given up hope.

Anyhoo, I'm sure they still need volunteers for Frameline 31 so get your butt down to the Center tonight at 7pm. I'll see you there!

Thursday, March 8, 7pm-9pm

La Peña Cultural Center
3105 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA

Prominent scholars and activists from South, Central and North America will offer insight from the front lines of feminist and LGBT movements, share their current challenges and achievements, and compare their struggles across borders and boundaries of race, gender and class.

Speakers include:
Marcela Ríos Tobar from FLACSO (Chile)
Dinora Aguiñada from Las Dignas (El Salvador) and
Alejandra Sardá from Mulabi - Espacio Latinoamericano de Sexualidades y Derechos (Argentina)

A benefit for NACLA - Celebrating 40 years!
$5-$20 donation - no one turned away

Celebrating the release of:
How Pink is the ‘Pink Tide’? Feminist and LGBT Activists Challenge the Left NACLA Report on the Americas, Volume 40 Number 2, March/April 2007

Brought to you by:
University of San Francisco’s Center for Latin@ Studies in the Americas and the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)

For more information, visit www.nacla.org or contact Director Christy Thornton at 646.752.5507 or cthornton@nacla.org.

(muchas gracias por la información christina!)