feminist blogs

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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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.

The amazing Julia Serano has contributed a post to Feministing about this Philips ad for an epilator:

All of her points are great, and you should go over to Feministing and read them, and then follow the link from her fourth point to her essay on media depictions of trans women. Personally, I shave my legs about twice a year, and mostly so I don’t have to be aware of disgusted stares from random assholes. So I’m especially glad that Serano pointed out how myopic this portrayal of trans-feminine spectrum folks as hyper-feminine propagators of sexist stereotypes and beauty rituals is. (If you really want more examples of that, just click on the Youtube link and look at all the sex-objectastic “related videos.”)
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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.

A pregnant trans man tells his story of discrimination, mockery, hope and family. It’s a short piece, but well worth a read.

Lisa–as usual–has already devoted many paragraphs to responding to this post, but I’m adding my contribution here, because I read this comment and sorta went, “Hm.”

Here is my position in a nutshell:
1. Transwomen are people (yep! “people”) that have made some sort of *change* to be considered (trans) “women”
2. To have transitioned is to have supported the message that links what our bodies are to how we express them. That, to me, is gender. (That those expressions, however, oftentimes have binary influence-influence not carbon copy- is no accident.)
3. I don’t want body parts “expressible” (maybe you do? or don’t care either way)
To “express” womanhood/being a “woman” is to further define/perpetuate how those with the status of “woman” under Status Quo Norms should act or behave and, thusly, what people expect from them (for obvious reasons, you didn’t become trans to be considered translisa). Any positive re-enforcement of this, afaic, is problematic and oppressive.4. I recognize that my latter points are not appreciated by transpersons so I’m not going to go out of my way (across seas, lots of expense) to say those things to transpersons who already have a hard enough time with conservative values. Contrary to typical conflation radfems are not conservatives–our positions are wholly different and you are smart enough to discern.
5. All I would like, wrt to trans exclusive spaces, are enough places I may go, in one lifetime, on one hand, that allow me to speak comfortably about the points presented above.
6. I will always question the motives of trans who can in one breath call me transphobic (or bigot, or fundamentalist) and then ask “So can I come?”

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Like most Project Runway enthusiasts, I love and loathe Christian Siriano. A quick taste of Mr. Fierce himself, for those who are unfamiliar with the show:

Best part? “She’s really fierce. She’s like, one of the fiercest people I’ve ever met. And that’s a big deal, because I’ve met some fierce bitches up in my life.”

He’s entertaining, funny, obnoxious, and narcissistic as all hell. But, you know, entertaining. Except, as Margaret Price points out, what’s up with his use of the word “tranny”?

The first time he said it, it gave me pause. Then he started using it on repeat, and it rubbed me the wrong way too. So if Margaret is humorless, then I guess so am I — because Christian is indeed making a hot mess of the word “tranny.”

I don’t get the gay, gay gay Logo channel, but thanks to the power of the Internet, I was able to purchase and download their latest entry into the reality-dating show category: Transamerican Love Story, starring a trans woman and eight bachelors who vie for her heart. Before you slap your forehead, know that the setup is nothing like There’s Something About Miriam, a similar show where the entire “haw haw” gag was that the bachelors didn’t know the star was trans. The entire cast knows that Calpernia Addams is a transsexual, and they’re all up-front in the first episode about their own dating histories too. Interestingly, the cast is quite a mixed bag of sexual preferences and identities and experiences (or lack thereof) with trans women. Less interestingly, the guys are mostly a bunch of boring schlubs… but that sort of fits with the “frog prince meets princess” theme they keep subtly inserting.

(Some light spoilers coming up.) The most interesting thing about Transamerican Love Story is exactly how ordinary they’ve managed to succeed in making it. There are definitely more queers & trans people around than usual, and host Alec Mapa alone seems to be deliberately raising the gayness quotient of every episode by 300% percent. But as Addams said in an interview with ABC News, “When they actually see the show, they’re going to be surprised. They’re going to see a girl next door from the south living in L.A. and trying to date.” And that’s pretty much what the show is, more or less the same as “the Bachelorette,” but with a little bit of dealing with trans issues here and there–always getting an important mention, but never allowed to interfere too much. Heck, they threw the creepy “I only date pre-ops” car salesman, who used to have his own (failed) trans-porn site, off the show in the first episode. (And just when I was looking forward to being appalled by his fetishizing “best of both worlds” statements in a future episode…)

The “ordinary straight girl next door” at the center of all this is Calpernia Addams — who, it must be said, is far from your average “plucked off the casting couch” reality-show star. Although she’s certainly not a household name, she’s probably one of the most famous trans people in this country — first entering the spotlight in a brutally real tragedy, as the girlfriend of Private First Class Barry Winchell. Winchell was murdered by a fellow soldier in a fight originally sparked by the fact that he was dating Addams — a story later used for the film Soldier’s Girl. But wait, there’s more! Addams also wrote a book about her experiences, helped organize and performed in the landmark trans-inclusive Vagina Monologues in Los Angeles a few years back, and does activism and consulting related to media portrayals of trans people. And now she’s starring in a reality dating show.

I probably sound a little like a gushing fan. But what really won me over to liking Calpernia Addams was not her creative work or media activism. It wasn’t even the fact that she apparently named herself after Wednesday Addams’ great aunt, who was sentenced to dance naked in public for witchcraft–although that’s kind of awesome in its own right. No, it’s actually the fact that she cracks my shit up with stuff like this:

(hat-tip to Transadvocate)
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