Doing a quick check of things happening in the coming month, I discover that the theme of this year’s Pride London is “Fairytales, Myths and Legends”. Goodness, they are playing our tune. It seems to be that we ought to be able to help out with this, though ideas as to precise mechanisms are currently eluding me. Anyway, if I can sort of somewhere to stay, I’m hoping to at least be there for the parade.
Gender
International Rainbow Roundup
My congratulations to the New York State Assembly for passing an employment protection bill for LGBT people by a whopping majority of 102-33. This is, of course, the same sort of bill that the Democrat leadership felt had no chance of passing congress because it included protection for transgender people, and which President Bush said he would veto even if it only protected homosexuals.
Congratulations also to the British Embassy in Riga for lending their support to the beleaguered LGBT people of Latvia.
The less said about Turkey the better. They clearly have real problems (and not just over LGBT issues).
LGBT Family Blogging Follow-Up
Checking back with Mombian today I discover that there are already 159 posts for LGBT Family Day. I’m not going to have time to read them all by any means, but do feel free to dip in. Some of them are really heartwarming.
What did surprise me, however, was to find the Daily Telegraph getting in on the act. Well, they are a day late, and I don’t think they did it deliberately, but it is lovely anyway.
Gender and Biology
I have been pointed (thank you Kendall!) at an interesting article about homosexuality and genetics from Clarkesworld magazine. It is written by Ekaterina Sedia who, in addition to being a wonderful fiction author, is also a biology professor at Rutgers. Such articles, however, tend to fill me with dread, and while this one is better than many I’ve seen, it still worried me.
Continue reading
Synchronicity
Checking my RSS feeds this morning, I discovered that quite by chance I had done a post for Blogging for LGBT Families Day. It wasn’t June 2nd in blog time (i.e. PST) when I did the COLAGE post, but it was June 2nd in the UK when I posted it. For further reading, here is the excellent Helen Boyd also plugging COLAGE. I’ll keep an eye out for other interesting posts that turn up during the day.
Introducing COLAGE
My apologies for doing yet another queer politics post, but I’m assuming that there will be a fair few LGBT folks and their allies popping in as a result of the “Phone Arnie†post and the various follow-ups and this seemed like a good opportunity to plug some people who I think are rather important.
Continue reading
Scott Has a Fan in Hollywood
The feminist web site BlogHer is running a series of podcasts called “Letter to My Body” which is designed to inspire self-esteem, realistic body perception and open discussion on body image amongst women. Obviously it talks about being fat and the like, but today’s podcast was with actress and transgender activist, Calpernia Addams. I’m impressed that BlogHer is willing to include a male-to-female transsexual in its campaign – that’s a much more enlightened attitude than certain other feminist organizations have. But the reason that I’m writing this post is that slap in the middle of the interview Calpernia starts talking about this wonderful YA book she’s reading all about body image. Yes, you are right, it is Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. So there you have it: SF and gender in one post. Now I’m going to write to Justine and ask her to pass on the good news.
Oh, and the interview is pretty good too. The BlogHer journalist has a bunch of very on-topic questions. Calpernia kind of muffs the Autogynephilia question, and it sounds like the questions were more pointed than she was expecting, but there’s lots of good stuff in there.
Lesbian Albatross?
Here’s a story guaranteed to set off alarm bells in fundamentalist churches. The albatross is a famously monogamous bird, with pairs staying together for years to raise chicks even though they spend much of their lives roaming the oceans on their own. But what is a girl albatross to do if there are not enough guys around? On the island of Oahu, female Laysan albatross outnumber males by almost 2:1. Does this stop the girls breeding? No it does not. Raising an albatross chick is hard work, and normal couples only ever manage one per year, so this isn’t a single-parent scenario. So the female albatross pair up together, and raise the chicks between them. Currently around 31% of baby albatross on Oahu have two mommies. Obviously the girls need to find a male to get pregnant, but aside from that the commitment to monogamy appears to hold, with female:female pairs staying together for years and raising each other’s chicks. More details here.
Down Your Way
This week’s Economist tackles the California Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriages. The most interesting part of the article is where they talk about how gay couples can increasingly be found in all parts of the US, even Utah:
Indeed, of the 34 states with above-average increases in the number of gay couples, 21 voted for Mr Bush in 2004. This does not mean there has been a sudden outbreak of homosexuality in conservative states; rather, it means gay couples in such areas are swiftly becoming more open about their relationships.
Becoming part of the scenery is important, and it looks like gay people are achieving just that. Progress.
CA Judges Show Sense
Looks like there is some good news from California on the subject of same-sex marriages. Jed has more details, but this is the important bit:
we determine that the language of section 300 limiting the designation of marriage to a union “between a man and a woman†is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available both to opposite-sex and same-sex couples.
I think “Woo Hoo!” is an appropriate reaction. 🙂
DSM-V on Facebook
If anyone is interested in following the campaign to get sensible treatment of transgender issues in the American Psychiatric Association’s Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders (as first mentioned here), there is now a Group on Facebook to help keep you up to date. Follow this link.
I’m also reminded that this Saturday is International Day Against Homophobia.
Spike!
The data I was getting in on links suggested that not a lot of people in the blogosphere picked up on the child psychiatry post. Many thanks to those of you who did, but I was still mildly disappointed. Then I looked at my Google Analytics stats for yesterday. Spike! Over 600 readers. WTF? Well, not all links get reported back to you. Clearly someone was sending traffic. And lo, turning up in my referrals data, almost 500 people from a one-line mention on Making Light. Thank you, Patrick!
Petition Follow-Up
Those of you who read my post about psychiatric treatment of trans children may be interested in this article from a Toronto web site. Kenneth Zucker’s clinic is in Toronto, and the article was inspired by an NPR documentary comparing Zucker’s treatment with that of another gender specialist who practices acceptance of children’s beliefs about their gender. The journalist, Marc Lostracco, comes down pretty clearly against Zucker:
Many experts are now beginning to believe that allowing this identity to form early in a supportive environment could dodge much of the societal anxiety that comes with an intergendered identity. People like Zucker think it merely creates more transgendered people where there otherwise wouldn’t be as many, and because society doesn’t readily accept it, it’s a peg that therefore must be tamped down as soon as possible. This dangerous view also effectively normalizes the aforementioned schoolyard bullying, whilst demonizing gender-dissonant toys and innocent role play. If impulses can’t be smothered or denied, ostracism, mockery, and violence ultimately become part of the “treatment.”
However, he is also painfully aware of why people like Zucker are able to continue in practice:
Which then raises the question of what society finds more alarming—a kid who wishes to live quietly as the opposite gender, or 10-year-olds dishing out bloody street justice in a playground? Given the choice between the two, most parents would likely prefer their child to be the violent playground thug.
It is an excellent article, making the pain suffered by trans kids very obvious, but at the same time understanding why these things happen.
Platypus Sex
Many of you will have seen the news reports last week about the amazing new discovery that the duck-billed platypus has not two (like humans) but ten sex chromosomes. So human females are XX and human males are XY (and yes, some people do get born with XXY) but a platypus is what, ABCDEFGHIJ?
Well, I was too busy to follow it up at the time, but now I’m starting to, and like most science stories in the media this not really something new. The platypus has five pairs of sex chromosomes (sort of XXXXXYYYYY). Its close relative, the echidna, has something very similar. Here, for example, is a paper from 2007 on the subject. Clearly the prospects for intersex monotremes are enormous, though as with humans such developments are very rare. What really interested me, however, was finding out that birds have an entirely different system of sex chromosomes to mammals. Birds, apparently, are either ZZ or ZW. Nature, as usual, is far more weird and wonderful that most people are aware.
And just to prove how weird and wonderful it is, here is Jennifer Ouellette on why a platypus isn’t a chimera but some humans are.
Saving Kids from Psychiatrists
Listen up people, I am about to ask you to sign a petition. This is not something I do very often, and I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t think it was important. My apologies if some of you are offended by this, but so it goes.
Many of you will know that homosexuality used to not only be considered a crime, but also a mental illness. As recently as 1973 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) listed homosexuality in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Thankfully that has now changed. However, what most of you probably don’t know is that the DSM still includes an illness known as “Gender Identity Disorder” (GID). While this is used as the basis for diagnosing adult transsexuals, it is also often used as an excuse to “treat” children whose behavior is seen as “abnormal” by parents and conservative doctors. And by “treat” I actually mean “torture”, because basically it involves beating and otherwise punishing the kids for “inappropriate” behavior until such time as they learn to conform to what the adults are expecting of them. The primary reason given for this “treatment” is often to prevent children from becoming homosexual, and naturally it appeals strongly to homophobic parents. These days, as gay rights have gained a certain amount of traction, it is often presented instead as preventing children from growing up transsexual, because while persecuting gays is now unacceptable in some circles, persecuting the transgendered is still very much a popular spectator sport. The effect, however, is still the same: kids get bullied into conforming to conservative views of appropriate gender behavior.
Given the overwhelming success of “treating” transsexuals by the novel method of taking them at their word and helping them to live in the gender they prefer, there has been considerable pressure on the APA to remove GID from its list of illnesses. However, a working group set up by the APA to look at revisions to the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders section of the DSM includes two of the strongest proponents of this sort of cruel “therapy”, Kenneth Zucker and Ray Blanchard. With these people on board (on Zucker is chairing the group) it seems likely that the new DSM will not only still include GID, it will also redefine transsexuals as dangerously perverted.
Obviously very few of you will have much close contact with actual transgendered people because they are a fairly small minority. But this is really just a symptom of something much wider and much more dangerous. The question to ask yourself is whether we really want to go back to a world in which social norms are enforced by declaring anyone who transgresses against them to be “mad”. Remember, it was not that long ago that a woman could be committed to an asylum simply for becoming pregnant outside of marriage.
There is an online petition, and you can find it here. It isn’t the best written petition in the world – it reads like it was written by someone who was upset and angry at the time – but it is the one we currently have to work with. This isn’t a matter of national politics, so you don’t have to be a US citizen to take part. I’ve signed it. I hope that some of you will consider doing so too. Thank you.
Just Before I Sign Off..
… I think I just found a brain cell, because I’ve been reading this. Excerpt:
What are the symptoms of homochromosexuality? The most salient characteristic is the rigid, irrational delusion that sex is dimorphic and that chromosomes determine the real sex of an individual. This obviously combines irreconcilable thought processes which are contradictory and causes those suffering from homochromosexuality to illogically manipulate data to fit their irrational need to refuse the fact that people are extremely diverse and that there is a spectrum of sex variations in the natural world.
The people suffering from this dreadful psychiatric disorder are in desperate need of help. If you can’t afford money, please send a pink feather boa.
A Brazilian on Brasyl
One of the things that always worries authors (and reviewers) is setting a book in a far away place and then discovering you got it all wrong. It is worrying for the author, because he may end up offending a lot of people, and it is worrying for the reviewer because she can’t tell if the author has done a superb job or is going to end up with egg on his face. Emerald City closed before I got to read Brasyl, but had I written a review I would have made worried noises about how the book would be received in a country that I know has a love of science fiction. Well, I need worry no longer. Thanks to the magic of Facebook, I now have a friend in Brazil, and he loved the book. Money shot:
Through three main characters, both believable an empathic, McDonald explores the nature of Brazilian people. Even if he hasn’t lived in Brazil, doing his research in a couple of visits to São Paulo, Bahia and the Amazon, and reading the few books about Brazil available in English, McDonald was able to capture, with amazing precision, the Brazilian spirit. And he did this without clichés, without hullabaloos, but with critical observations regarding the importance Brazilian people gives to beauty, soccer and TV. Besides, geographically everything is right and linguistically, it is better than most foreigners trying the language of Camões.
I note also this this is the only review of Brasyl I have read that acknowledges the fact that the hero of one of the three strands, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas, is both bisexual and a transvestite. Gary Wolfe noted one of them. Everyone else has either been blind to this or has chosen to ignore it.
Anyway, congratulations to Ian, Hugo voters please take note, and a small raspberry to the Clarke Jury.