Feminism

An Interesting Big Idea

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

Today’s installment of John Scalzi’s “The Big Idea”, in which he gives fellow authors a chance to talk about their new books, features Lauren McLaughlin talking about her debut novel, Cycler. Scalzi describes the plot as follows:

Jill McTeague discovers that during her time, her body goes through entirely different changes than most girls — specifically, four days a month, she becomes Jack, right down to all the appropriate plumbing.

And here’s what McLaughlin has to say about it:

Gender is a prison. That was the Big Idea behind Cycler. I actually wrote it in sharpie on a piece of white paper and taped it above my desk as I worked. I wanted this story, about a girl who turns into a boy four days out of every month, to be an examination of gender as a cultural construct. I wanted to explore the ways in which gender identity constrains us, shapes us, limits is.

My first impression reading Scalzi’s post is that McLaughlin doesn’t have much understanding of gender identity – she is assuming gender is entirely socially imposed. On the other hand, she does say:

But one thing I wanted to avoid in Cycler, was replacing one Theory of Gender with another.

So maybe there’s hope. And it is definitely a book that belongs on my “to read” pile.

Danger, Terrorist Boobs

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

Here’s the news story that every editor has been waiting for – underwired bra sets off security alarms at airport!

So now we women all have to make sure that we don’t wear underwired bras when flying, because yes, the detectors may be that sensitive.

I do, however, have a plan. I want you all to spread a rumor that the TSA is full of lust-crazed lesbians desperate for any excuse to feel up the boobs of good Christian women. That should give the Defenders of the Patriarchy something to think about.

Convention Anti-Harassment Policies

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Kevin and I spent a fair amount of time yesterday discussing this new web site which calls on conventions to adopt specific anti-harassment policies. As Jed Hartman notes, one of the first things that comes to mind is, “But why would cons need an anti-harassment policy?” I guess if you are used to going to conventions full of old people it might be less obvious, but some of the goings on at Comic Con this year appear to have been quite horrible. Besides, there are good reasons for having such a policy.
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Judging People By Appearances

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today I got directed at this LiveJournal post by a Disabled person pointing out that just because you happen to have one disability that doesn’t mean that you are totally helpless and of no use to your fellow humans. He also tries to draw a distinction between the medical issues that he has and his identity as a person. It is a useful distinction to make. If someone has ‘flu we don’t regard them as a “‘flu person” and make all of our judgments about them on that basis, but if some has a more serious (and generally that means incurable) condition then they become a “sick person”, with all of the negative connotations that carries.

When the email with that link came in I happened to be reading this superb post on Daily Kos about the currently ongoing employment case of Diane Schroer. Colonel Schroer is a former US Special Forces officer with a wealth of experience in both battle zones and security. The case is about her being denied a job at the Library of Congress because she is transgender. The Washington Post coverage of the case notes that Schroer was denied the job because Charlotte Preece, a manager at the Library, was:

concerned that Schroer “might be unable to maintain high-level contacts in the military intelligence community” and “might not be viewed as credible” by members of Congress

Unfortunately for the Library’s case, Colonel Schroer is so well regarded in military intelligence that she has had no trouble setting up her own business and winning contracts. The Library, however, preferred to judge her on appearances, and even more so on the fact that it assumed other people would do so as well. The Daily Kos post has this to say about the case:

In the America of the past, we’d likely have said that Charlotte Preece’s assumptions were enough to justify taking away the job. In the past, failing to live up to society’s expectations about who men are and who women are, would surely have been taken as a sign of instability. But in the America we aspire to be, we won’t be willing to accept stereotypes as shorthand for capacity. Knowing how wrong that kind of shorthand has been, and how much people have been hurt by it, we’ll insist on keeping our eyes on what really counts: ability.

And that, I think, applies equally to people who have many useful skills but also happen to have a specific disability that sometimes means they can’t do everything that “able bodied” people can do.

Gender Link Round-Up

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I’ve seen a bunch of interesting gender-related links in the past few days, so I’m going to commit one of those awful link-dump posts.

To begin with here is Jennifer Ouellette talking about why it shouldn’t be necessary to abandon femininity to be a scientist (complete with a fabulous XKCD comic to reinforce the point).

In a similar vein I was pleased to see via Jed Hartman that there is now such a thing as a Femme Conference. What is more, they had Julia Serano as a keynote speak. I wish I had been in Chicago this weekend.

While the Femme Collective appears to be happy to be fully inclusive of transwomen, Roz Kaveney blogs about the vicious transphobia that too often manifests itself amongst feminists. Roz says this stuff far better than I ever could, and has far too many battle scars than anyone ought to have to put up with.

And finally, at Pharyngula, an excellent guest post about the evils of “normalization” surgery performed on intersex children.

X-Men in San Francisco

~ Cheryl

Who knew? Not me. I gave up reading them after Chris Claremont did such awful things to Jean. But apparently everyone’s favorite mutants are now based at Starfleet Academy on the Marin headland. It makes a lot of sense. As this Chronicle article explains, San Francisco is the one place in the world where social outcasts can hope for a welcome.

So in coming plot lines we will see furious demonstrations in San Francisco because Barney Frank and the HRC say they might be able to swing enough votes to include transgender people in ENDA but including those weirdo muties would give Congress a fit.

CCTV Has Its Uses

~ Cheryl

One of the things that fell by the wayside during Worldcon was monitoring my friends list on LiveJournal. As a result I am rather later on reporting a new response by the Metropolitan Police to ToiletGate. Roz has published the whole thing.

As Roz says, this is definitely progress, even if there is still a lot of weaseling going on. One item of interest is that CCTV actually proved its worth for once. Commander Allen writes:

It has been claimed that the demonstrators assaulted stewards – examination of CCTV evidence demonstrates that these claims are mistaken.

Of course there is still the question as to how such a “mistake” could be made, and whether in fact it was not a mistake, but rather a deliberate lie made by people trying to cover their arses. But it is nice to know that the billions of pounds that the UK spends on monitoring its citizens can occasionally provide dividends.

Jed on Marriage

~ Cheryl

Getting away from Worldcon posts for a moment, Jed Hartman has produced a lovely essay attacking the idea that marriage has been unchanged for millennia until those awful gay people came along. Of course this should be a no-brainer. Anyone who knows a little about the world knows that marriage customs (and gender norms) vary significantly between cultures and through history, but is it always nice to see it so well put.

Gender at the Olympics

~ Cheryl

Today’s New York Times has a superb article on the idiocy of “gender testing” at the Olympics.

If transgender athletes are now allowed to compete officially [in their chosen gender], and if gender testing has been shown frequently to render false results, then what exactly are the Chinese authorities testing for?

In practice what they are testing for is a rare (1 in 20,000) medical abnormality that can cause people who are physically female, able to bear children, and have been raised female from birth, to be mis-diagnosed as “men” and be thrown out of the tournament. One Indian athlete has already had her life destroyed by this absurd test. I cannot for the life of me understand why it is still happening.

Reasons for Marrying

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

So why do same-sex couples want to get married? To destroy American democracy? To give Orson Scott Card apoplexy? Well no, according to a study by the University of Illinois, same-sex couples are most like to want to get married (as opposed to just live together) if they have children, or if they have strong religious beliefs. Just like opposite-sex couples, actually.

Worrying Development

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Via Joe Gordon I find this BBC article about a special toilet for transgender people in Thailand. In this particular case it is probably the right move because it is only for MfF school kids, all of whom will presumably be pre-op and still exploring their gender identity. More generally, it is not a good idea.

There are, of course, some transgender people who regard themselves as a separate gender, neither male nor female. Those people have as much right to their own gender identity as anyone else. But many transgender people, and most transsexuals, do not see themselves as “third gender”. They regard themselves as either male or female. Requiring such people to use a separate “transgender” toilet explicitly denies their right to determine their own gender, and eventually leads to nonsense like ToiletGate where someone who is physically (if not chromosomally) female and has been living as such for 30 years is suddenly denied access to a women’s toilet because some buffoon in minor position of authority assumes the right to tell someone else what gender they are. It will also, of course, end up with MtF and FtM transgender people being required to use the same toilet, thereby creating exactly the sort of mixed-gender toilet experience that Toilet Panic is supposed to prevent.

A Call for Revolution

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

In the Mormon Times, Orson Scott Card publishes a strident call for revolution against governments that allow LGBT people to get married:

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

Presumably the Department of Homeland Security will be taking note.

Tampere At Last

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

The gang is all assembled. Farah and Edward have been here for a day already. Mike and I drove up from Helsinki this afternoon. Charles Vess and his wife, Karen, arrived while we were having dinner. The hotel is very comfortable, and the wi-fi is free. Sadly there will be no direct blogging from the con as it is in a convention center and the wi-fi there is €200/day. That’s convention centers for you.

Tomorrow morning is the academic session, and tomorrow afternoon the Finnish SF Writers meeting. After that, sauna.

On there way here Mike and I were chatting to Marianna, our con chair and Supreme Queen of Everything, about various things, including translations. Apparently Finnish does not have separate gendered pronouns. There is just one word that means both “he” and “she”, though here is a separate word for “it”. I can see that I need to sit and chat to Johanna Sinisalo about this.

Progress of a Sort

~ Cheryl

I’m a sucker for online surveys. I figure that if I don’t give people feedback then their products will never get any better. The good news on this is that I’m seeing an increasing number of surveys that are looking to ensure that they get feedback from LGBT folks so that they can, if necessary, tailor products accordingly. The bad news is that these almost always assume that the terms “heterosexual”, “gay”, “lesbian”, “bisexual” and “transgender” are mutually exclusive. Still a long way to go, I guess.

On Girly Brains

~ Cheryl

Today’s Independent has a feature highlighting a story from the latest issue of New Scientist. It is the latest shot in the ongoing war over whether men and women have “different” brains. Are men aliens from Mars who are incapable of understanding shopping or asking for directions, or are they just crippled by their upbringing? As the Indy rather breathlessly puts it:

The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.

Well maybe. Or maybe not. The actual New Scientist article is subscriber-only, but I’m sufficiently interested to stump up the cash when I have time to read it. I don’t, however, expect the study to be at all definitive, and the comments listed at the end of the Indy article are pretty much indicative of what I expect in the way of reactions.

By far the most important point here is that there is no binary. If the development of human brains is affected by chemical balances in the womb, and by your environment, then the resulting mix of human beings will not be all either “male-brained” or “female-brained”, they will be on a probability distribution that is weighted strongly to the extremes, but doesn’t fall to zero even in the middle. And in some cases “brain sex” and “body sex” won’t match up.