Women Born Transsexual

In the 1970s I took some writing classes at both UCLA and at the Women’s Building on North Spring Street.

One thing people talked a lot about was journaling, the practice of keeping a journal.

Anais Nin was one popular example and Christopher Isherwood another, of people who kept journals while living in interesting times.  Emma Goldman’s Living my Life, is another.

Memoir and oral histories have become a way of documenting the people’s history.  The small stories that are so often overshadowed by the major events of the time.

But journaling and writing a memoir can also be a path to understanding your own past and your role in history.

As I have been writing my memoir I have had to remember not only what I did but what my motivations were for some things that wouldn’t make much sense otherwise.

I’ve found myself to be inclined to be more forgiving of the foibles and shortcomings of others.

I’ve rediscovered ideals I once held, values I had lost touch with.

Now that I am old perhaps I don’t care quite as much about my image and what others think of me.

Maybe I have grown courageous again like I was when I was young and idealistic.

Perhaps the last thirty years of neo-con/neo-lib bullshit has finally caused me to say enough.

Perhaps the self-exploration required to write a good, honest and true memoir, in spite of all the short comings of subjectivity that are inherent to the structure requires one to be true and honest with themselves.

I’ve always found our stories far more meaningful than anything the so call academics and professionals have ever written about us.

Here is a suggestion for TS/TG and Gender Queer Folks whose appearance may not match their present Identification Papers this Election Cycle.

If you still have time apply for an absentee ballot and vote by mail.

Regulations may vary according to location.

The Republicans are trying to deprive you of one of your most basic rights as an American Citizen.

Don’t let them!

Oh and by the way consider how the Republicans are scapegoating LGBT people when you do vote and vote accordingly.

From GLAAD:  http://www.glaad.org/news/california-becomes-first-state-nation-ban-so-called-ex-gay-therapy-teens

Press Release
Sunday, September 30, 2012

From The New Civil Rights Movement:  http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/bishop-i-dont-think-hell-exists-religion-is-in-the-control-business/news/2012/09/29/49997

by David Badash
on September 29, 2012

John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal Bishop, says in this interview that Hell does not exist, the Church aims to control people, and God is not a Christian.

Needless to say, Spong is very controversial, and has been condemned for his views, some of which are contained in his Twelve Theses:

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The Biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

From The New York Times:   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/opinion/krugman-the-real-referendum.html

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 30, 2012

Republicans came into this campaign believing that it would be a referendum on President Obama, and that still-high unemployment would hand them victory on a silver platter. But given the usual caveats — a month can be a long time in politics, it’s not over until the votes are actually counted, and so on — it doesn’t seem to be turning out that way.

Yet there is a sense in which the election is indeed a referendum, but of a different kind. Voters are, in effect, being asked to deliver a verdict on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, on Social Security, Medicare and, yes, Obamacare, which represents an extension of that legacy. Will they vote for politicians who want to replace Medicare with Vouchercare, who denounce Social Security as “collectivist” (as Paul Ryan once did), who dismiss those who turn to social insurance programs as people unwilling to take responsibility for their lives?

If the polls are any indication, the result of that referendum will be a clear reassertion of support for the safety net, and a clear rejection of politicians who want to return us to the Gilded Age. But here’s the question: Will that election result be honored?

I ask that question because we already know what Mr. Obama will face if re-elected: a clamor from Beltway insiders demanding that he immediately return to his failed political strategy of 2011, in which he made a Grand Bargain over the budget deficit his overriding priority. Now is the time, he’ll be told, to fix America’s entitlement problem once and for all. There will be calls — as there were at the time of the Democratic National Convention — for him to officially endorse Simpson-Bowles, the budget proposal issued by the co-chairmen of his deficit commission (although never accepted by the commission as a whole).

And Mr. Obama should just say no, for three reasons.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/opinion/krugman-the-real-referendum.html

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/28/todd-akin-ladylike-comment-gop

Todd Akin’s gaffes over ‘legitimate rape’ and ‘ladylike’ are not accidental: they encapsulate Republican attitudes to women

Jill Filipovic
guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 September 2012

Todd Akin has issues with women. And so does his Republican party.

Akin, of “legitimate rape” fame, is now complaining that his Democratic opponent, Claire McCaskill, had the nerve to actually campaign against him. McCaskill’s decision to run a standard political campaign was apparently not properly “ladylike”, and Akin is offended at her aggressiveness. No, really; here’s the quote:

“I think we have a very clear path to victory, and apparently Claire McCaskill thinks we do, too, because she was very aggressive at the debate, which was quite different than it was when she ran against Jim Talent. She had a confidence and was much more ladylike [in 2006], but in the debate on Friday she came out swinging, and I think that’s because she feels threatened.”

Personally, I think it’s a good thing for women to come out swinging, whether they’re facing down a “legitimate rapist” who thinks he has the right to violate women’s bodies, or a misogynist political opponent who thinks he has the right to control women’s bodies. And it’s some pretty sweet irony to hear the man who says women can’t become pregnant from “legitimate rape” also suggesting that women shouldn’t fight back when they feel threatened because aggressive self-defense is unladylike.

Ladies, apparently, should lie back and take it.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/28/todd-akin-ladylike-comment-gop

From YES Magazine:  http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/why-green-consumer-choices-cant-win-climate-justice

Middle-class people are often socialized to believe they are responsible for improving their neighborhoods, their communities, and the world itself. Helpful as that often is, it creates a blind spot when it comes to global warming.

From The Independent:  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/now-climate-experts-warn-that-every-house-in-the-country-is-at-risk-of-flooding-8190500.html

From Mother Jones:  http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/bpa-cans-its-messing-your-ovaries

By Tom Philpott
Thu Sep. 27, 2012

Ordinarily, I’d object to the practice of knowingly subjecting fellow primates to a harmful substance, even for the sake of science. And that’s exactly what researchers from Washington State University and the University of California-Davis did for a study just released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (abstract; full study): They fed female rhesus monkeys low doses of the industrial chemical Bisphenol A (BPA).

But I’ll give these researchers a pass. That’s because most of the US public gets its own tiny daily dose of BPA—the stuff is widely used by the food-packaging industry, and traces of it leach out through metal cans and other food and beverage containers. A 2003 survey (summarized here) conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found detectable levels of it in 93 percent of urine samples in Americans six years old and older—and these findings are “considered representative of exposures in the United States,” the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences states.

What is this constant exposure to BPA doing to us? That’s the legitimate question the WSU/UC-Davis team was examining when they spiked the diets of gestating female rhesus monkeys—a species with a reproductive system very similar to humans’—with levels of BPA equivalent to what most Americans get through their diets. And what they found is disturbing: “New evidence that the plastic additive BPA can disrupt women’s reproductive systems, causing chromosome damage, miscarriages and birth defects,” as the WSU web site put it in a summary.

What’s more, the changes they identified affected not only the mother, but also the female offspring’s own ovaries—meaning that BPA exposure can cause trouble across generations. Here’s how WSU geneticist Patricia Hunt, who coauthored the study, put it on the WSU web site:

Continue reading at:  http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/bpa-cans-its-messing-your-ovaries