Gender

Department of Not Getting It

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

The latest issue of Steven H Silver’s Argentus (PDF available here) opens with an article by Paul Kincaid. The bulk of the article is a bit confused because it takes a very interesting suggested distinction between hard SF and space opera, and then tries to map that onto the much more complex spectrum of left v right politics, thereby leaving itself open to all sorts of pointless nitpickery. However, I want to take issue with just one short section, which talks about Tom Godwin’s (in)famous story, “The Cold Equations”:

What is significant about the story is not the misogyny. The fact that the victim is a little girl ratchets up the emotional impact, but the stowaway could as easily have been a little boy, the pilot’s wife, the first alien ever encountered. Who she is, is irrelevant.

Well, precisely who she is is irrelevant, but the fact that she is a young girl, not so much. Indeed, Kincaid himself admits as much earlier on when he says:

The little girl would not, could not, harm a fly

In other word, the character of a young girl was chosen as a representative of ineffectual innocence. I suspect that if the stowaway had been “the first alien ever encountered” then John W Campbell would have insisted that Godwin find a way to save it for the good of science. Had the stowaway been the pilot’s wife, a romantic plot might have been acceptable. But a young girl is disposable in a way that another character might not have been.

And if you still think that’s irrelevant, check out this article from yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News on gender selection:

Steinberg, the medical director of the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles, uses PGD to harvest fertilized embryos, identify their sex after a few cellular divisions, and implant the chosen gender. Chinese and Indian couples from the Bay Area, who pay up to $18,000 per attempt to have a boy, are a major source of his clients, Steinberg said.

The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a trend to abort female fetuses in the US.

Yay for Europe!

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Politicians are not always bad. Kudos is due to Thomas Hammarberg, the EU’s Commissioner for Human Rights, for this public statement released today. The key point is as follows:

There is no excuse for not immediately granting this community their full and unconditional human rights. Council of Europe Member States should take all necessary concrete action to ensure that transphobia is stopped and that transgender persons are no longer discriminated against in any field.

That’s nicely unequivocal.

(And to comply with the EU’s rather odd copyright policy: “Also available at the Commissioner’s website at www.commissioner.coe.int”)

Ms. Doctor?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Gosh, a Doctor Who post! Whatever has prompted this?

Well, I have absolutely nothing to say on the subject of Matt Smith. However, over at Biology in Science Fiction Peggy asks whether there are any good scientific reasons why the new Doctor could not have been black or female. On the gender issue, she’s unusually lightweight, pointing only to a Wikipedia article that claims all of a Time Lord’s cells regenerate during the process of growing a new body.

If you are one of those people who thinks that determining sex is easy then perhaps you’ll be happy with this, but actually it should have been a marvelous opportunity to explore some of the weirdnesses of human biology.

There are, as I understand it, over 70 different intersex conditions currently recognized by science. The Intersex Society of North America lists many of them. One that I would particularly like to highlight is Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. This affects around 1 in every 20,000 people. What happens to these folks is that the cells of their bodies are “male” – that is they contain XY chromosomes – but due to a problem recognizing androgen, a masculinizing sex hormone, their bodies look to be those of normal females. Someone with AIS will almost certainly be declared to be a girl at birth, but they have no uterus or fallopian tubes, so they can’t get pregnant.

So actually it is entirely possible for something to go wrong with the creation of human bodies and make them look female even though they have XY chromosomes. Obviously Time Lords are aliens, but they might suffer from similar problems. Goodness only knows what sort of gender identity problems they might have as a result.

Rugby Romance, Anyone?

~ Cheryl

According to The Guardian‘s Book Blog, the RFU and Mills & Boon are to team up to raise the profile of rugby by producing rugby-themed romance novels. It didn’t take Alison Flood long to work out that this was a pretty dumb idea for a sport where one of the players is known as the “hooker”. But really, why stop at romance? Who knows what goes on in the England scrum? And as for Stade Francais… Rugby slash, anyone? Butler/Moore?

(Actually, come to think about it, the slash thing might work better with the NFL. I mean, Troy & Buck? It is almost is if they were designed for it.)

On a rather more serious note, Nigel Owens talks to The Guardian about being the only openly gay top flight rugby referee.

Lavinia

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Lavina is beautifully written, as we expect from Le Guin, but it had me puzzled while reading it. The Afterword solved a lot of my confusion because it became clear that the book was Vergil fanfic. What I mean by that is that Le Guin is a big fan of the poet and wanted to write more fiction set in his “universe” and using his characters. That’s essentially what fanfic is, but of course Vergil is way out of copyright and Le Guin is a much better writer than most fanfic practitioners. It does mean, however, that the book will probably mean much more to you if you too are a Vergil fan.

The other thing that puzzled me was that the book is very strong on traditional gender roles, and in places rather negative about gay men. Obviously there’s the setting to consider, but Le Guin is smart enough to know that you don’t have to match history if you don’t want to. Anyone else find the book strange from the gender point of view?

Daft Religious Behavior

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I had been intending to ignore the Pope’s recent rant on saving humanity from “homosexual or transsexual behavior”. It is, after all, rather difficult to take lectures on gender conformity seriously when they come from an old man with a habit of wearing dresses in public. However, I then discovered this entertaining article in The Guardian.

From it I learn that homosexuality only became a crime in England because Henry VIII was looking for some sort of dubious behavior that was common amongst Catholic clergy so as to have an excuse for persecuting them.

And the article leads off with a magnificent quote from HL Mencken who described puritanism as the, “haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.”

I note, however, that the The Guardian cites Mencken as being specifically critical of religious puritanism. What little I know of the man suggests to me that he took a rather broader view of what puritanism was, and would be just as critical of the sort of political puritanism of which Guardian journalists (and indeed journalists in general) are all too fond.

I’ll leave you with a rather longer quote from Mr. Mencken:

The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses—in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.

I like to think that he would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

10,000 Dresses

~ Cheryl

Our trip into San Francisco yesterday evening passed through Borderlands and consequently I was at last able to get a copy of my friend Marcus Ewert’s book, 10,000 Dresses. This is probably the world’s only children’s book about a transgender child. Quite why the Forces of the Patriarchy are not calling to have it banned I don’t know – I’m sure that Marcus would sell a lot more copies if they did, but for now you can still buy it from Amazon (click on the cover image).

Being a kids’ picture book, 10,000 Dresses is very short and heavy on the art. There’s also a lot of repetition in the text, again as you’d expect. The basic story is as follows: Baily spends her nights dreaming of fabulous dresses, but her mother, father and brother keep confusing her by telling her that she’s a boy and isn’t allowed to wear dresses. Of course there is a happy ending, and the art (by Rex Ray) is lovely. Here’s hoping that a lot of kids get to read it.

So, where can I buy a crystal dress that shimmers with rainbow colors in sunlight?

An Endangered Gender

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Today’s Independent contains a classic science scare story. It alleges that, because of certain types of chemicals that have been commonly used in recent times, the male gender is under threat, throughout the animal kingdom. Some of this is doubtless traditional journalistic scaremongering, but some of the studies on animals are quite startling, for example:

Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40 per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing lesser feminisation.

Fish are apparently the worst affected types of animals, but the effects have been noted all through the animal kingdom, including in otters, deer, antelope and polar bears. The report on which the story is based concludes:

Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans.

Hard line feminists will doubtless continue to suggest that there is no biological component whatsoever to gender identity, and I’m not qualified to pronounce one way or another. However, here is an article by a qualified doctor who also happens to be a male-to-female transsexual and who was exposed to one of these “gender bending” chemicals in the womb.

I should note, by the way, that exposure to chemical pollutants is by no means the only possible cause of gender confusion. However, if it happens then it provides firm proof that biological mechanisms can be a contributory factor. And if that is the case then it is further reason to give short shift to those who prefer to believe that all gender variance is a form of sexual perversion.

More Genetics Nonsense

~ Cheryl

Today’s Guardian has another of those articles about finding a “genetic” cause for homosexuality. To be fair to whoever wrote it, it doesn’t claim that genetics is the whole cause of sexual orientation, and it does quote views that suggest that things are much more complex. However, us humans have a tendency to see such things in binary terms, and that can be very dangerous. So sure, having a biological component to sexual preference could help enshrine legal protections for LGBT people. But ideas about “genetic” causes can also lead to parents wanting their children screen for “gayness” prior to birth, and you can bet that would be one case where the fundies would suddenly become all in favor of abortion.

So before you take any of this seriously, you may want to read Ekaterina Sedia’s post on twin studies. You should also note that, this being The Guardian, the article gives a lot of space to J. Michael Bailey, who is possibly the last person on the planet who should be trusted to pronounce on issues of sexuality (see here for more about him).

Split Personality

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

As everyone else appears to have been posting about the ridiculous “Gender Analyzer” web site (which I refuse to provide a link to because it is clearly so bad) I decided to succumb and get myself “tested”. Despite my various posts about rugby and the like their system declared itself 95% certain that this blog was written by a woman. Being a suspicious type, I then fed it SF Awards Watch, for which my writing style is somewhat more formal. That, apparently, is 97% likely to have been written by a man. I rest my case.

In Memoriam

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

TDOR logo


Today is the International Transgender Day of Remembrance – a day devoted remembering the many people who are killed each year simply for being transgender.

You can find this year’s memorial list here. It isn’t obvious from that list as few of the entries give more than the basic cause of death, but many of those killings were executions. And I don’t mean state executions like the one in Iraq, I mean vigilante executions carried out in cold blood by people who believe that transgender people do not deserve to live.

Unfortunately things are unlikely to change in the short term. Social attitudes take a long time to shift. There are still too many people in the police who can’t be bothered investigating the killing of transgender people, and too many people in the judiciary and on juries who are happy to let the killers off if a case comes to trial. But we can at least spread the word. If you care about this issue, please make a post of your own today. The more people who speak out, the quicker social attitudes will change.

An Evening in San Francisco

~ Cheryl

Yesterday San Francisco was full of people demonstrating against Proposition 8. Kevin and I could not be there because we had to attend the SFSFC Board Meeting. However, we did arrive in The City at around 4:00pm to do some shopping at attend SF in SF. By some miracle of synchronicity, the readers for the evening happened to be Geoff Ryman, Ellen Klages and Nalo Hopkinson. We couldn’t have done better if we had tried.

As it happened, however, there was little about gay politics in the readings (though Geoff did manage to read one except about a lesbian couple and one about a gay couple). The discussion afterwards concentrated mainly on the craft of writing, with much being said about how to give information without doing obvious infodumps, how to make sure each character has their own voice in dialog, and how to convey character emotions without actually writing things like “she felt sad”. It was one of the best sessions we’ve had (and the place was packed out). There will be no more events this year, but a schedule for 2009 will be released soon.

Ships in the Night

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

While Gary and I were in the university bookshop in Chicago a woman came in to sign a few books. It wasn’t a public event, though Gary recognized the guy with her as a professional driver who often takes authors around the city. The staff were clearly delighted to get to meet this person, and from snatches of conversation I got the impression that she was signing graphic novels. From her clothes and hair I guessed she was probably a lesbian. I had a suspicion as to who it might be, and a search of Google images suggests that it probably was this lady.

It is probably just as well I didn’t try to talk to her. I would have been embarrassingly fangirlish.

On a Happier Note

~ Cheryl

From the Obama-Biden Administration’s employment policy:

The Obama-Biden Transition Project does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or any other basis of discrimination prohibited by law.

(Their emphasis)

Fortunately for Julie Bindel, it does look like they are still prepared to discriminate against cat-fanciers. She might have to put up with Obama hiring people who are androgynous, transgender or Satanists though.

Was She Drunk?

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Well, I did expect Julie Bindel to come out with something utterly stupid in response to the protests about her Stonewall Award, but she has managed to exceed my wildest imaginings. Not content with having another go at the transgendered people we already knew she hates, she has launched an attack on all forms of sexuality that she finds repulsive:

I for one do not wish to be lumped in with an ever-increasing list of folk defined by “odd” sexual habits or characteristics. Shall we just start with A and work our way through the alphabet? A, androgynous, b, bisexual, c, cat-fancying d, devil worshipping. Where will it ever end?

So there you are, people. Thankfully she didn’t get as far as P in the alphabet, but I’m sure we all know what she would have chosen there, don’t we.

Really, was she drunk when she wrote this? Maybe a little to much champers in celebration of the award? For once I’m not going to complain about The Guardian giving her a platform, because this petulant and selfish outburst has done more to damage her cause than anything I could have said.