Women Born Transsexual

From The Advocate: http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/07/29/equality-michigan-petitions-michfest-end-exclusionary-policy

A perennial source of controversy, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s ‘womyn born womyn’ intention comes under fire from one of the state’s largest LGBT advocacy organizations.

BY Parker Marie Molloy
July 29 2014

Equality Michigan launched a petition urging organizers of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival to put an end to their ‘Womyn Born Womyn’ intention on Monday. The rule, which festival organizers insist is not an official policy, has been described by many as transphobic.

“[W]e reject the premise that transgender women are lesser than, we reject that this belief is a tenant of feminism, and we will no longer respect the ‘intention’ or that ‘leaving the onus on each individual to choose whether or how to respect it’ equates to inclusion,” Equality Michigan wrote in a blog post. “To us, this sounds like the arguments we heard around ‘don’t ask, don’t tell‘ — and like that policy, this one just doesn’t work for us.”

Later, the organization calls upon lesbian, gay, and bisexual people to “stand up, even if it is to our own, and make it clear that transgender women deserve to be treated as women in all settings,” and adding, “The time has come, we are drawing a line in the sand, this ‘intention’ can no longer stand.”

The petition calls for an end to the “womyn born womyn” intention, for festival cofounder Lisa Vogel to meet with leaders in the transgender community, for vendors and workshop leaders to publicly voice support for an end to the policy, and for artists and attendees to boycott the festival and instead perform at and support trans-inclusive women’s events. Additionally, the petition calls on performers already committed to this year’s festival to denounce the current policy from the stage, and commit to not participating in future years.

Michfest performer Crystal Bowersox told The Advocate in May that the she believes “in equality for everyone, and I do hope that in the future the Womyn’s Fest will choose to include transgender women. In your heart, in your mind, in your lifestyle, in your body — if you’re a woman, you’re a woman. That’s that.”

Bowersox continued, saying that she remains torn on the issue, and understands the festival’s current stance. She followed this by asking festival management to “open their hearts and minds a little more.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/07/29/equality-michigan-petitions-michfest-end-exclusionary-policy

From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-backlash-against-smartypants-neil-degrasse-tyson

Conservative elites delight in tearing down smart, educated people.

By Amanda Marcotte
July 30, 2014

If there’s one belief that binds the disparate factions of the American right together, it’s the belief in American exceptionalism, both for the nation and for individuals. The mythology that conservatism is about promoting excellence and encouraging strivers is found throughout conservative media and literature, from the story of John Galt in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged to Reagan’s description of America as a “shining city on a hill.” While it often manifests as contempt for the poor and the vulnerable, in the abstract this conservative enthusiasm for doing better could, in theory, be channeled productively toward actually pushing people to achieve.

So why are so many conservatives abandoning this enthusiasm for the exceptional in favor of what can only be described as jealous sniping aimed at people who are actually trying to expand the world creatively and scientifically? There’s a lot of high-falutin’ talk on the right about supporting the strivers, but in practice, the conservative response to someone who tries to stick his head above the crowd is to beat it down with a hammer. Conservatives may think of themselves as lovers of excellence, but in reality, “Who do you think you are?” is swiftly becoming an unofficial right-wing motto.

It’s easy to see why, despite their supposed enthusiasm for excellence, conservative pundits would offer up liberal scientists, journalists, and artists as hate objects for their base. This is a time of economic instability and ordinary people are seeing their fortunes declining. It’s easy to turn that anxiety into rage at people conservative audiences think have easy, charmed lives as coastal elites.

But in doing so, conservative pundits are exploiting their audiences, turning their class-based anger away from the people who are actually causing their economic problems, such as the Wall Street elite, and toward people who may be successful but who are not doing any harm to other Americans and are often trying to help them.  If you can get your audiences to hate journalists and scientists, they won’t hate the wealthy bankers who actually screwed them over.

From Bilerico: http://www.bilerico.com/2014/07/new_yorker_shamefully_cites_anti-lgbt_researcher.php

From Julia Serano: http://juliaserano.blogspot.ca/2014/07/two-articles-related-to-femininity-and.html?spref=tw%22

By Julia Serano
Monday, July 28, 2014

Reposted with permission

Two things happened today:

1) I have a new article out on Ms. Magazine blog today called Empowering Femininity, wherein I revisit some of the ideas I initially forwarded in the chapter of Whipping Girl called “Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism.” Check it out!

2) Some of you may be aware of a New Yorker article by Michelle Goldberg that came out today entitled “What Is a Woman? The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism.” It is basically about how Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists (TERFs) are increasingly becoming marginalized within feminism, and it is mostly written from their perspective (e.g., about ways in which they have been personally attacked or “censored” by trans activists). Let’s just say that it is not the piece that I would have written on the matter.

I do not have the time or energy to write a formal response to the entire piece, but since I am one of the few trans voices included in the article, I feel compelled to make a few points “for the record” as it were:

1) When Goldberg interviewed me for the piece, I talked extensively about TERF attacks on trans people: About the hatefull speech I (and other trans women) regularly receive from TERFs on my Twitter feed, blog comments, etc., and how much of it is of a sexualizing nature. I talked at great length about Cathy Brennan who is notorious for her personal attacks and outing of trans people, her various websites where she engages in smear campaigns against trans women (once again, usually of a sexualizing nature). I mentioned how, after my appearance at a SF Dyke March forum on AGE DIVERSITY AND GENDER FLUIDITY – which was designed to build bridges between trans-positive queer women and those (often of older generations) who are trans unaware, and which resulted in respectful and constructive dialogue on all sides – several TERFs crashed the Facebook page and spewed so much hateful speech that they had to shut the whole thread down.

None of this made it into the story, which will likely lead uninformed readers to presume that trans people are simply mean and out of control, rather than reacting to the transphobia/trans-misogyny/sexualizing comments we constantly face from TERFs.

2) I am very disappointed with the way that the issue of “autogynephilia” was handled in the piece. I understand that Sheila Jeffreys cites the concept in her book in order to engage in a form of transgender slut-shaming (i.e., citing trans women’s sexual histories as a way to entirely dismiss them and their opinions), and that this fact could be relevant to the story. But to have a paragraph detailing Jeffreys’s and Blanchard’s views of “autogynephilia” without any counter argument or mention of the fact that THE THEORY HAS BEEN DISPROVEN here and here and here, or that cisgender women experience analogous sexual fantasies, is downright reckless. When (later on in the piece) Goldberg mentions that Jeffreys paints me out to be an “autogynephile,” I am sure many uninformed readers will believe that to be true, because no counter argument to the concept had even been mentioned.

And Goldberg’s omission here is not for lack of knowing: I discussed my concerns about this matter with Goldberg in two follow up emails – to clear the record, I will paste those emails at the bottom of this blog-post.

3) I would not exactly describe my interactions with MichFest attendees when I attended Camp Trans in 2003 as “cordial.” There were some good, positive interactions, but others were tense and somewhat hostile. I discuss this “mixed bag” of experiences in chapter 2 of my book Excluded.

4) Seriously, can we finally put to rest the “one in 10,000/one in 30,000” people are transsexual statistic. It is ancient and it has been repeatedly debunked.

That’s it. Now here is what I emailed Goldberg regarding “autogynephilia”

++++++++++++++++++
first email:

Hi Michelle,

I mentioned this recent Vice Magazine interview with Blanchard in our phone conversation the other day and said I’d send you the link. Here it is if you’re interested:

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/heres-how-the-guy-who-wrote-the-manual-on-sex-talks-about-sex

Also, I know you said that you will be referring to autogynephilia as “controverial.” I do think that it’s fair to say that multiple lines of research by numerous researchers have shown that while the fantasies are a real phenomenon, Blanchard’s theory (specifically, that there are two “types” of trans women, and that the fantasies drive transsexuality/transition in one group) does not hold true. Also, the two researchers who actually used cisgender female controls in their studies both found that analogous fantasies are experienced by a significant number of cisgender women. 

All this research is summarized in my review:
http://learningtrans.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/serano-agreview-ijt.pdf

and Charles Moser’s review:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20582803

both were published in peer-reviewed journals in 2010.

The evidence is clear that the theory Blanchard created to explain these fantasies, and his assumption that such fantasies are transsexual-specific and cause transsexuality, are both untrue. That may not move you. But I wanted to share that with you, because it concerns me when the term “controversial” is used to give a disproven theory some legitimacy (e.g., as it is in climate change debates).

One last thought: I talked before about how the theory is often used (e.g., by Jeffreys) to sexualize trans women, thereby invalidating us. In my paper, I make the following analogy to illustrate why this is such this problem:

“Many natal women have rape fantasies. It is one thing to respectfully attempt to explore and understand such fantasies. It is an entirely different thing to insist that there are two subtypes of women – those who have rape fantasies and those who do not; to use the label “autoraptophiles” when describing women who have such fantasies and to insist that they are primarily motivated by their desire to be raped; to include “autoraptophilia” as a modifier in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; and to encourage the lay public to actively distinguish between those women who are “autoraptophiles” and those who are not. Such actions would undoubtedly have a severe, negative impact on women (who are already routinely sexualized and marginalized in our culture). Yet, proponents of autogynephilia have argued that transsexual women should be viewed and treated in an analogous manner.” 

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to add.

Best wishes, -julia

++++++++++++++++++

second email: After speaking with the fact checker from the New Yorker, I found that there were several passages from my book Whipping Girl where I discussed certain aspects of my sexual history that were going to be included in the article – I believe that they were meant to show “my side” of the story in relation to Jeffreys painting me out as an “autogynephile.” I am thankful that Goldberg did not include those passages in the final draft. But given that Jeffreys’s views and the specter of “autogynephilia” were raised in her article with regards to me and without any counter argument, I believe that it is worthwhile sharing what I wrote to Goldberg about the potential inclusion of those passages:

Obviously, I haven’t seen the whole article yet. And I understand that, as an interviewee, journalists I speak with will come to their own conclusions, and may portray me in ways that don’t necessarily jibe with how I see myself. And I realize that I am (to a certain extent) a public figure who has put myself out there via what I have written, and that people may use that in ways that I didn’t expect or do not want. So you are obviously free to write what you want. 

But I would like to share an analogy: Imagine a feminist author who writes seriously about gender and society, and whose ideas are well regarded in certain circles. And imagine someone who has very different views about gender and society – perhaps they are a religious conservative, or a men’s rights activists, or an evolutionary psychologist, or whatever. And let’s say that they wrote a book challenging feminism, and their central premise was that feminist women are primarily driven by their sexual desires (rather than out of a sincere concern about gender-based oppression or society). And when taking on this particular feminist woman in their book, they didn’t focus much on the ideas and theories she has forwarded, but instead dissected her sexual history (which maybe she wrote about in the past because, you know, women have sexualities, and gender-based-oppression is designed to make some of us feel ashamed about our sexualities, and sometimes we have to speak openly about our own sexual experiences in order to debunk heteropatriarchal assumptions that others make about our sexualities).

Anyway, imagine all that already happened. And someone outside of the situation decided to write about this controversy for a mainstream publication. How would you prefer that they cover it:

1) Spend a lot of time discussing “both sides” of the woman’s sexual history: describing the religious conservative’s/MRA’s/evolutionary psychologists’s/etc.’s depiction of her sexuality, along with passages of her describing her own sexuality (which, while in her own words, is *more discussion about her sexuality*, and which is not germane to challenging gender-based oppression and other societal issues – the major focus of her work).

or 2) Simply say that, rather than seriously engaging in a debate about the feminist woman’s ideas or theories, the author resorted to sexualizing her instead. And as feminists have shown, this is a tried-and-true method for smearing people’s authenticity and credibility (as I discussed at great length in our last phone conversation). 

You initially asked to interview me about the “tensions between trans activists and some radical feminists” (which I provided my thoughts on over the course of the interview process). I honestly don’t understand how sexual thoughts that I had over twenty years ago (as a young trans person trying to sort out my identity) has any bearing on these tensions, other than the fact that Jeffreys stoops to the transgender equivalent of slut-shaming in her book.   

Anyway, I haven’t seen the whole article yet, so I will reserve judgment on the totality of it until it finally comes out. But I did want to share my concerns about this particular aspect of the article ahead of time. As a woman and a public figure yourself, I’m sure you can understand why having one’s sexual history litigated in the pages of a mainstream magazine might seem troubling (to put it extremely mildly). And if you had/have ever written about your previous sexual experiences in a publication that primarily targeted your own demographic in order to help folks better understand, and not feel ashamed about, their analogous experiences, I imagine that you too might be worried about how those same passages might be misinterpreted by lay audiences if excerpted in a major mainstream publication (especially one your relatives, potential future employers, etc., regularly read).

I am a feminist, just not that kind of feminist.

You see I actually believe in freedom and think there is nothing feminist about the TERFs.

I have Julia Serano’s permission to repost her response to the Goldberg hate screed.

I’m not even going to dignify the original article with a teaser.

It can be found at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2

My personal politics defy easy categorization.

Many would like to see me as an ultra Left Winger based on my support for environmental causes, workers rights, feminism and LGBT causes.

That evaluation is spot on.

I am also a militant atheist.

A stone Yankee from the far north mountains of upstate New York I militantly embrace the concept of personal freedom/liberty.

As a woman who survived rape and dealt with it by plunging into the martial arts I champion the rights of women to defend themselves including the use of weapons, most notably knives and handguns.

My embrace of the idea of gun rights causes many on the Left to stereotype me as a Right Winger.

Back in 2001 on September 11 I was stunned and outraged by the murderous terrorist attack upon my country.

I remember the images of the Palestinians dancing for joy in the streets, how they labeled the United States as the great Satan.

I was ostracized by people on the Left for my gut reaction to both this attack and to the Palestinian celebration of the deaths of nearly 3000 American people that resulted from these attacks.

In 2002 I lived on Long Island and often went into New York City for classes and to visit museums.  I had last been in NYC in 1967 so I never saw the World Trade Center.

I avoided going to the site of the attacks, I was already boiling over with anger.

Then one day I went to a free Photoshop seminar.  I took the East Side subway down to the station nearest to where the seminar was being held.

I was early and realized I had never been to that part of NYC so I walked around a little.

I  came upon the church near the foot print of the WTC, the fence with all the grief messages upon it.

Had you asked me what to do at that moment I would have said, “Turn the countries of those who attacked us into glass.”

I understand the gut reactions of the Israelis to the acts of Palestinian terrorism.

I am Polish-American on my father’s side, third generation, close enough to the immigrant experience to feel a connection to family in Poland.  Some three million Catholic Poles died at the hands of the Nazis along with the six million Jewish people.  I feel a certain “Never Again” solidarity, an outrage against the antisemitism too prevalent on the part of so many on the far left.

As a woman and as a member of the LGBT communities I see Israel as the only nation in the Middle East where women and LGBT people have any real rights.  Indeed the only nation in the Middle East where women and LGBT people do not regularly face the grossest violations of their rights as human beings.

I am well aware of Israel’s love of the United States and how it is one of several nations in this world that we can count on as a wholehearted ally.

I have watched the ultra left attack both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren because of their support for Israel.

I do not celebrate the current fighting in the Middle East.

Indeed I wish there would be peace between Israel and its neighbors, there have been far too many deaths to go around.

The stress of nearly 70 years of living with terrorism has grievously harmed the heart and soul of the people of Israel.  But they were not the ones who started the wars.  They built the walls to protect themselves from numerous suicide bombers and other acts of terrorism on the part of the Palestinians.  Israel was not the nation sending those suicide bombers.

Palestinians and their allies including Egypt, Syria and Jordan repeatedly launched attacks upon Israel.

Fortunately the efforts aimed at annihilating Israel were doomed thanks to the courageous IDF.

So I guess I fail the test.

I support Israel and the Israeli people.

Even as I wish for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

If that makes me a Zionist or a supporter of Zionism so be it.

From Slate: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/07/25/a_butch_lesbian_rejects_a_non_binary_identity.html

By Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart
July 25 2014

From Salon: http://www.salon.com/2014/07/21/clueless_rich_kids_on_the_rise_how_millennial_aristocrats_will_destroy_our_future/

Today’s wealthy are far more likely to have inherited their fortunes. Here’s why that’s going to doom our politics

Tim Donovan
Monday, Jul 21, 2014

Prevailing neoliberal ideology, which perverts capitalism as an economic system into capitalism as an unyielding political ideology, lurks in the shadows of almost every major issue in America, though nowhere is its influence more obvious or profound than in the spiraling rise of income and wealth inequality today.

From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/americans-are-leaving-religion-behind-and-it-scares-hell-out-christian-right

Conservatives are getting more frantic and repressive by the minute, in response to America’s growing secularism.

By Amanda Marcotte
July 16, 2014

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about the increasing political polarization in America , which is at historically high levels. There are a lot of reasons for it, including changing demographics, women’s growing empowerment, the internet, the economy and cable news. But religion and religious belief plays an important role as well. There’s no way around it: America is quickly becoming two nations, one ruled over by fundamentalist Christians and their supporters and one that is becoming all the more secular over time, looking more and more like western Europe in its relative indifference to religion. And caught in between are a group of liberal Christians that are culturally aligned with secularists and are increasingly and dismayingly seeing the concept of “faith” aligned with a narrow and conservative political worldview.

That this polarization is happening is hard to deny, even if it’s harder to measure that political polarization. The number of Americans who cite “none” when asked about a religious identity is rising rapidly, up to nearly 20% from 15% in 2007, with a third of people under 30 identifying with no religious faith. Two-thirds of the “nones” say they believe in God, suggesting that this is more of a cultural drift towards secularism than some kind of crisis of faith across the country.

But even this may underrepresent how secular our country really is getting, as many people who say they belong to a church don’t really go to church much, if at all. While Americans like to tell pollsters they go to church regularly, in-depth research shows they are lying and many of them blow it off, putting our actual church-going rates at roughly the same level of secular Western Europe.

Even when people identify with a label like “Catholic” or “Methodist”, that doesn’t mean they consider it an important part of their identity in the way that people used to. Take, for instance, the way that weddings have quietly changed in this country. It used to be that you had a wedding in a church, and only people who were eloping got married by someone other than a minister. Now, outside of very religious circles, it’s more common to see weddings on beaches or at country clubs, and very often officiated by friends of the couple rather than clergy. Indeed, state laws are slowly beginning to change to reflect this reality, allowing more flexibility for people to have the secular weddings they increasingly desire.

But of those who remain religious, being affiliated with a fundamentalist or conservative religion is becoming a little more common. The same Pew research that found while all Christian faiths are slowly receding, mainline Protestant churches are shrinking a little faster and have fewer followers, at 15% of the country, than white evangelicals (19%) or Catholics (22%). This comports with other research that finds evangelicals have a bigger piece of the shrinking pie called “Christianity.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/americans-are-leaving-religion-behind-and-it-scares-hell-out-christian-right

From Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/24/iraqi-jihadists-order-genital-mutilation-of-four-million-women-and-girls/

By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, July 24, 2014

Jihadists in Iraq have ordered that all women between the ages of 11 and 46 must undergo female genital mutilation, which could affect up to four million women and girls in the war-ravaged country, a UN official said Thursday.

The UN’s second most senior official in Iraq, Jacqueline Badcock, said, “It is a fatwa (or religious edict) from ISIS, we learnt about it this morning. We have no precise numbers.”

The Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), took over large swathes of the country last month and has begun imposing its extreme Salafist interpretation of Islam.

Badcock said that if you took UN population figures as a guide, around “four million girls and women could be affected”.

Female genital mutilation is unusual in Iraq and is only practised in “certain isolated pockets of the country”, she added.

Complete article at:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/24/iraqi-jihadists-order-genital-mutilation-of-four-million-women-and-girls/

I’m really tired of the banning of words. I’m really over the passive aggressive bullshit about trigger warnings from people who use their ultra sensitivity as a club and a way of demonstrating their superiority.

Yeah I grew up poor, working class and bullied.

Yes I have been raped.  On more than one occasion I have had my life threatened by people who had weapons in hand and were quite capable of murdering me.

I have been subjected to slurs and discrimination.

When I have been knocked down I got up again.  I have grieved for my losses and celebrated my personal victories.

In Texas we call that Cowgirling up.  It means getting back on a horse after having been thrown.

Words are not the problem.  Banning words does nothing to change the reality of discrimination.

It is action with out real results.  Sort of like Occupy.

Directionless wankery.

Activist image polishing and brand building, a way of demonstrating one’s political sensitivity creds.

The following is a post that appeared on Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership:  http://jpfo.org/articles-assd04/not-my-problem.htm

By Susan Callaway, aka Mama Liberty
July 15th, 2014

Not my problem. I’m sure a lot of people would consider that a harsh thing to say, but if you’ll stay with me a bit you should easily see that it is the only real answer to the whole “politically correct” thing sweeping this country and, incidentally, the world.

“You made me mad. You didn’t make me happy. I’m offended.” You can probably add a hundred more such phrases people use to control what you do, say and even what you believe. That’s exactly what happens when a few people can choose any word or object, assign a specific (often NEW and ugly) meaning to it, and then demand that nobody use that word or object because it “makes them feel”… whatever.

Let’s look first at the premise that someone can actually “make” another person FEEL anything. How does that work, exactly? Vulcan mind meld? Is it not a fact that each person simply REACTS to outside stimulus, and the perception of sad, mad, happy, etc. is actually their own response? That response can most certainly be painful, even harmful psychologically in vulnerable people, but the person who supplies the stimulus is not, therefore, actually responsible for the feelings because he/she has no control over what another person perceives or what their response will be. The person with the feelings is actually the responsible person and, to a great extent, chooses the response based on their own beliefs and preferences. History is replete with every kind of race, tribe and ethnic conflict, but none of it can shift true responsibility from the person with the feelings to someone else.

A great many people have lost sight of that fact, and the new privileged classes have managed to politicize their hurt feelings into actual laws, criminalizing the words and actions their feelings and perceptions find objectionable. Criminalization of ordinary words and inanimate objects does not seem like a good path toward a polite and peaceful society. Recent history seems to support the more rational conclusion that attempting to force people to do and say things results in escalating resentment and even hatreds.

But of course, the shoe does not fit at all on the other foot. I think it is clear to most people how many screeds and threats come from the mouths and pens of certain “protected” persons (and those who shill for them) against anyone they perceive as not obeying their demands. Somehow, it is impossible for them to be “racist” or “hateful,” and their written and spoken threats are never seen as damaging to those they say should be caged, murdered or worse.

For some reason, the privileged one believes he/she should be able to dictate how others speak or act, yet totally rejects any limitations on their own behavior. How does that work? If mere words are seriously harmful, why doesn’t that work both ways?

I never have, and never would, deliberately say or do anything intended to harm, insult, demean or harass any other person, always seeking to be courteous and non-threatening. I simply don’t ever intend to have someone else define that for me… especially with threats and violence under color of law. I absolutely refuse to accept any false guilt for speaking my mind, especially when that false guilt is predicated on things my long dead ancestors did, or might have done.

Seems to me that responsibility for “feelings” has to be handed back to the people who actually own it.

From Whipping Girl:  http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/07/regarding-generation-wars-some.html

By Julia Serano
Sunday, July 13, 2014

Jack Halberstam recently published an essay called You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma, and it’s been making waves on the activist internets over the last week. It felt like a bit of a “kitchen sink” article to me, in that it discussed a plethora of different matters (including Monty Python, historical debates between second- and third-wave feminisms, current controversies surrounding the word “tranny,” the recent proliferation of trigger warnings, supposed connections between expressions of trauma and neoliberalism, safe spaces, “It Gets Better” campaigns, and concerns about millennials being hypersensitive) and attempted to weave them into one nice neat coherent narrative. This narrative could be summarized as follows:

queer & trans culture and politics circa the 1990’s was strong, progressive, and fun!

whereas queer & trans culture and politics circa the 2010’s is frail, conservative, and a killjoy.

While Halberstam’s essay made a few points that are certainly worthy of further exploration and discussion, it also overreached in a number of ways, especially in its attempts to shoehorn a potpourri of recent events and trends into the aforementioned overarching narrative. Some concerns that I have about the essay have been addressed by others here and here and here and here (sorry, original posting of that response was here) and here.

I generally do not respond to every essay that I disagree with on the Internet (as that would be a full time job!). But I wanted to add a few thoughts to this discussion because, while the essay in question is uniquely “Halberstamian” in its style and themes, the overarching narrative that holds the piece together is remarkably similar to the one recently forwarded by Andrea James, and resembles recent comments made by RuPaul. Indeed, it seems as if queer and trans folks who came of age around the 1990’s (ostensibly my generation, give or take a few years) are increasingly invoking this as the “go-to” narrative to explain why a younger generation of queer and trans activists behave the way that they do. And I think that the assumptions that prop up this narrative are in dire need of unpacking.

on having to walk uphill, both ways, in a foot of snow, everyday, on your way to school, back when you used to be a kid

I think that a useful place to start is with the “four Yorkshire men” Monty Python sketch that Halberstam invokes as a metaphor for the “hardship competitions…among the triggered generation” (which is to say, how young people today are supposedly constantly complaining about how hurt and oppressed they are by relatively minor things, such as “a cultural event, a painting, a play, a speech, a casual use of slang, a characterization, a caricature and so on”).

Now personally, I always understood that Monty Python sketch as making fun of how people, as they get older, tend to glorify their own past: imagining the hardships they faced as being especially challenging or severe, thereby allowing them to self-conceptualize themselves as being especially resourceful, righteous, cunning, and perseverant for having survived despite overwhelming odds. And this human tendency has historically enabled older generations to outright dismiss younger generations as being misguided, or especially soft (because “they have it so much easier than we did”), and so on.

The notion that queer and trans people of my generation were somehow stoic and resilient, whereas the younger generation of queer and trans people are a bunch of oversensitive crybabies seems to be quite a stretch. I can attest to the fact that we too complained about how oppressed we were, and we often expressed our hurt feelings in public, and we often became outraged about particular language choices or media depictions that we found problematic. The main difference is that we (in glorifying our own past) tend to believe that the causes that we fought for were righteous and justified, whereas the younger generation’s causes and concerns may seem misguided and frivolous to us.

One blatant example of this sort of hypocrisy can be found in RuPaul, who with one hand dismisses concerns of a younger generation of activists who find the word “tranny” problematic, while with the other hand types angry Tweets at people who use the word “faggot” (which he considers to be a “derogatory slur”). The logic here is totally inconsistent. Such actions only make sense if he (and those who agree with him) privileges political stances taken by his own generational cohort over those taken by a newer generation.

Continue reading at:  http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/07/regarding-generation-wars-some.htm

From Salon:  http://www.salon.com/2014/07/08/this_is_a_religious_civil_war_hobby_lobby_only_the_beginning_for_new_religious_theocrats/

The Tea Party controls the House. Religious extremists run the Supreme Court. We’re approaching a very scary time

Paul Rosenberg
Tuesday, Jul 8, 2014

The United States is still a democratic republic, formally, but what that actually means in practice is increasingly in doubt — and the Hobby Lobby ruling, deeply disingenuous and sharply at odds with centuries of Anglo-American law, exemplifies how that formal reality is increasingly mocked in practice. It is a practice best described as neo-feudalism, taking power away from ordinary citizens, in all their pluralistic, idiosyncratic diversity, and handing it over to corporations and religious dictators in both the public and the private realm. The Supreme Court’s actions are not taking place in a vacuum — though they are filling one: As Tea Party Republicans in the House increasingly bring democratic self-government to a halt, contracting the power of we the people to act as a cohesive self-governing whole, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority shifts ever more everyday power into the hands of private dictatorships.

Hobby Lobby handed for-profit corporations religious rights for the first time in history — a radical break with all previous precedent, and yet a part of a recent pattern, as Norm Ornstein rightly pointed out:

[F]or the majority on the Roberts Court, through a series of rulings that favor corporations over labor or other interests, it is clear that corporations are king, superior to individual Americans—with all the special treatment in taxes and protection from legal liability that are unavailable to us individuals, and now all the extra benefits that come with individual citizenship. Call it the new Crony Capitalism.

The expansion of corporate power in Hobby Lobby has gotten too little attention, and I’ll return to discuss this further below. But the advancement of theocracy — religious dictatorship — is even less clearly seen through the fog of right-wing propaganda about “religious liberty.”

First, however, an important highlight of a neglected aspect of the Hobby Lobby case, the fact that Hobby Lobby’s self-professed belief appeared out of nowhere just in time for them to file suit, as Stephanie Mencimer noted in March:

The company admits in its complaint that until it considered filing the suit in 2012, its generous health insurance plan actually covered Plan B and Ella (though not IUDs). The burden of this coverage was apparently so insignificant that God, and Hobby Lobby executives, never noticed it until the mandate became a political issue.

In short, Hobby Lobby’s “deeply held beliefs” claims are transparently bogus — as well as being scientifically invalid, since none of the methods involved are abortifacients, as Hobby Lobby claims. These would not matter if they only guided individual private conduct; that’s precisely what religious freedom actually means. You’re free to be a religious hypocrite, because letting someone else judge your sincerity can lead too easily to real religious tyranny. But when you’re already in a position to tyrannize others — as Hobby Lobby is — that’s a whole different ballgame. The tyrant’s freedom is everyone else’s slavery.

Historically, theocracy meant top-down religiously sanctioned dictatorship, exemplified in Western history by the divine right of kings philosophy. No one reads John Locke’s “First Treatise on Civil Government” anymore, because it is a refutation of the divine right of kings — one might as well read a refutation of four element theory in physics class. Locke’s “Second Treatise” provided a sharply contrasted legitimate foundation for civil government — the social contract and the consent of the governed. This is the air we breathe, and have been breathing ever since America was born.

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2014/07/08/this_is_a_religious_civil_war_hobby_lobby_only_the_beginning_for_new_religious_theocrats/

From Salon:   http://www.salon.com/2014/07/02/police_out_of_control_7_horrifying_examples_of_americas_militarized_state/

Senior citizen killed at home watching baseball. Infants, pregnant women mistreated. SWAT cops, way out of control

Ian Blair
Wednesday, Jul 2, 2014

Last week, Alecia Phonesavanh penned an essay for Salon called “A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son,” describing the nightmare she and her family suffered during a Special Weapons and Tactics raid that left her toddler in critical condition.

“After the SWAT team broke down the door, they threw a flashbang grenade inside,” Phonesavanh writes. “It landed in my son’s crib.”

Three weeks later, Phonesavanh’s son, Bounkham (fondly nicknamed “Bou Bou”), remains hospitalized, still covered in burns and with a hole in his chest that leaves the white of his ribs exposed. His injuries are said to be life-threatening.

The shock of the incident still lingers:

I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn’t see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he’d just lost a tooth. It was only hours later when they finally let us drive to the hospital that we found out Bou Bou was in the intensive burn unit and that he’d been placed into a medically induced coma.

The trauma inflicted on the Phonesavanh household is part of a growing trend taking place in police departments across the country: Law enforcement is increasingly deploying paramilitary forces to raid and terrorize neighborhoods.

According to a recent study conducted by the ACLU, “American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight.”

The use of such tactics, according to the ACLU, drastically increases the risk of needless violence and the unnecessary destruction of property, while completely undermining constitutional protections for individual liberties.

The report outlines more than “800 SWAT deployments conducted by 20 law enforcement agencies during the years 2011-2012.” Often times, law enforcement is using SWAT to search people’s homes for drugs. According to data released by law enforcement agencies, 62 percent of deployments were for drug searches. Not surprisingly, many of the casualties of such raids have been suffered by communities of color.

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2014/07/02/police_out_of_control_7_horrifying_examples_of_americas_militarized_state/

From Mother Jones:  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/hobby-lobby-bill-gothard-institute-basic-life-principles

The crafts store chain and its owners gave millions in backing to controversial evangelical Bill Gothard and his Institute in Basic Life Principles.

By David Corn and Molly Redden
Wed Jul. 2, 2014

For a decade or so, Hobby Lobby and its owners, the Green family, have been generous benefactors of a Christian ministry that until recently was run by Bill Gothard, a controversial religious leader who has long promoted a strict and authoritarian version of Christianity. Gothard, a prominent champion of Christian home-schooling, has decried the evils of dating, rock music, and Cabbage Patch dolls; claimed public education teaches children “how to commit suicide” and undermines spirituality; contended that mental illness is merely “varying degrees of irresponsibility”; and urged wives to “submit to the leadership” of their husbands. Critics of Gothard have associated him with Christian Reconstructionism, an ultrafundamentalist movement that yearns for a theocracy, and accused him of running a cultlike organization. In March, he was pressured to resign from his ministry, the Institute in Basic Life Principles, after being accused by more than 30 women of sexual harassment and molestation—a charge Gothard denies.

The Institute traces it origins to 1964, when Gothard designed a college seminar based on biblical principles to help teenagers. The ministry says it was established “for the purpose of introducing people to the Lord Jesus Christ” and to give individuals, families, businesses, and governments “clear instruction and training on how to find success by following God’s principles found in Scripture.” The group, which operates what it calls “training centers” across the United States and abroad, says more than 2.5 million people have attended its paid events, which have brought in tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Gothard and the Institute have drawn support from conservative politicians, including Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. The Duggar family, the stars of the reality show 19 Kids and Counting, have been high-profile advocates of Gothard’s home-schooling curriculum and seminars. (One of Gothard’s alleged victims has called on the Duggars to break with Gothard and the Institute.) Don Venoit, a conservative evangelical who has long been a critic of Gothard, contends that Gothard’s approach to Christian theology emphasizing obedience to authority creates a “culture of fear.” In 1984, Ronald Allen, now a professor of Bible exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary, observed that Gothard’s teachings were “a parody of patriarchalism” and “the basest form of male chauvinism I have ever heard in a Christian context.” He added, “Gothard has lost the biblical balance of the relationship between women and men as equals in relationship. His view is basically anti-woman.”

According to the 79-year-old Gothard, the Greens and Hobby Lobby—which this week won a landmark Supreme Court case with a decision ruling that the firm does not have to adhere to the Obamacare mandate requiring companies to cover contraception in their employee health plans—have supported the Institute in Basic Life Principles for 10 to 15 years, primarily by obtaining four or five facilities for the ministry. In 2001, the Greens, through a family trust, sold Gothard’s group a 2,250-acre campus in Big Sandy, Texas, for $10. The campus, which has a landing strip and aircraft hangar, now houses the Institute’s International ALERT Academy, a boot camp where young men train in disaster response techniques. The academy also runs a program for girls 15 and older. The website for that program notes that “skirts are required to encourage the girls to remain feminine in an active lifestyle.” The application—under the heading “mental health”—asks girls if they are struggling with “day dreaming,” “fantasy,” or “lustful thoughts.”

In 2000, Hobby Lobby donated a 529,717-square-foot building in Little Rock, Arkansas, to Gothard’s outfit. The company had purchased this property, a former Veterans Affairs building, two years earlier for $299,000. The Institute now runs a prison ministry out of this location, providing curriculum to a faith-based Arkansas Department of Corrections program known as Principles and Applications for Life. For about a decade, according to Gothard, the Institute leased the ground floor of the building for $1 per year to the Little Rock Police Department for use as its downtown station. Now, Gothard says, the police are paying a regular rental fee.

Continue reading at:  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/hobby-lobby-bill-gothard-institute-basic-life-principles

From Think Progress:  http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/07/09/3458058/new-study-hobby-lobby-birth-control/

By Tara Culp-Ressler
July 9, 2014

Throughout the ongoing debate over Obamacare’s contraceptive coverage requirement, a common theme has emerged among many of Hobby Lobby’s supporters: the idea that ensuring access to affordable birth control is harmful to society because it leads to promiscuity and infidelity. Several right-wing groups filed amicus briefs in favor of the crafts chain arguing that women simply shouldn’t be having consequence-free sex. But where exactly does this idea come from? One research paper offers a theory.

According to new research published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, the attitude that women shouldn’t be having sex can at least partly be traced back to the idea that women are supposed to be economically dependent on men. The researchers suggest that this link may drive conservative religious communities’ insistence on sexual purity.

After surveying Americans about their attitudes toward promiscuity — asking them whether they agreed with statements like “It is fine for a woman to have sex with a man she has just met, if they both want to” — the researchers also asked them whether they believed women tend to rely on income from their male partner. They found that the people who believe that casual sex is wrong also tend to believe that women need a partner to support them financially. Within that worldview, sex outside of a serious monogamous relationship is simply too risky. If women don’t have “paternity certainty,” then how will they know who they need to rely on to support them and their future child?

The researchers conclude that this outdated attitude toward women’s pregnancy risks and financial needs hasn’t totally gone away, despite the fact that modern contraception, legal abortion rights, and greater workplace equality have created an entirely different society.

“The beliefs may persist due to cultural evolutionary adaptive lag, that is, because the environment has changed faster than the moral system,” the paper concludes. “Religious and conservative moral systems may be anti-promiscuity because they themselves arose in environments where females depended heavily on male investment.”

In response to the right-wing claims that women who support Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate are “sluts” who want the government to fund their sex lives, many birth control proponents have focused on the medical reasons that women need access to contraception. But there’s also a growing push to confront the deep-seated resistance to acknowledging women’s sex lives. “Women like sex. Stop making ‘health’ excuses for why we use birth control,” feminist writer Jessica Valenti argues in a Guardian column published this week.

On top of the changing societal norms that ensure women don’t actually have to be guided by “paternity certainy” anymore, there’s also scientific evidence that increasing access to birth control doesn’t have any relationship to promiscuity. A large study published in the Obstetrics & Gynecology journal earlier this year found that giving women access to no-cost contraception doesn’t lead them to make riskier sexual choices. The researchers noted their results should dispel social conservatives’ fears that the risk of pregnancy is “the only thing standing between women and promiscuity.”

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/07/07-3

In face of historic drought, nation’s largest aquifers and reservoirs drying up

Lauren McCauley
Published on Monday, July 7, 2014 by Common Dreams

America’s food growing regions face a crisis of “catastrophic” proportions as historic drought continues to drive the nation’s largest water reserves to record lows. Amidst the shortages, private landowners are facing harsh criticism for seeking profits from this dwindling public resource.

“We’re headed for a brick wall at 100 miles per hour,” said James Mahan, a scientist at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service lab in Lubbock, Texas. “And, really, the effects of climate change are branches hitting the windshield along the way.”

Mahan was specifically referring to the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground reserve that spreads 111.8 million acres across eight states and provides water to much of Texas as well as to the millions of acres of farmland that make up “America’s Breadbasket.” According to NBC News, after years of “punishing drought” and chronic mismanagement, the Ogallala now faces “catastrophic depletion,” with profound implications for the millions worldwide fed by the farms which rely on the aquifer.

The draining of the Ogallala is also indicative of what is happening to water sources across the western United States.

According to the latest assessment by the U.S. Drought Monitor, huge swaths of California, Nevada, Texas and Oklahoma are experiencing “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. In June, nearly 80 percent of California was under “extreme” drought conditions while the area considered to be in the highest category of drought—”exceptional”—continues to grow.

This week, Lake Mead—the country’s largest reservoir which provides up to 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico with a portion of their drinking water—is also expected to reach a record low, according to estimates by the federal Bureau of Reclamation.

As reserves are drying up, reports of landowners “cashing in” on the water market highlight the dangers of granting private control to this essential public resource.

In California, where the price of water has increased tenfold in the past five years, private landowners and water districts alike are driving the cost up further and making millions by auctioning off their private water reserves, AP recently reported.

And as NBC highlights, the Ogallala crisis has been driven largely by Texas’ “right to capture” law, which has enabled wealthy landowners to capitalize on the crisis. The law—which essentially states that “If you own the land, you and only you own the water”—has reportedly enabled oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens to sell the water from beneath his sprawling 211,000 acre ranch to water-impoverished municipalities for $103 million.

“Here’s a guy selling a natural resource which is almost universally recognized – except in Texas – as a public resource,” observed Burke Griggs, Ph.D., consulting professor at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.

_____________________

From Truth Out:  http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24846-what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-dont-talk-about-abortion

By Sarah Grey
Friday, 11 July 2014

I had an abortion four years ago. I just recently decided to start talking about it.

I didn’t stay silent out of guilt; the abortion was very much the right decision. I didn’t talk about my abortion because one doesn’t talk about one’s abortion. It just isn’t done. You don’t casually drop it during a playdate. Women tell their birth stories in graphic detail, but abortion? It’s just not part of polite conversation.

And yet – I’m now “that woman.” Yup. I did it. And I’m going to keep doing it.

Will my in-laws disown me? My friends? Will I lose potential clients by writing this under my own name? Will I get hate mail? Maybe. I know, too, that I am speaking out from a position of relative privilege: as a white ciswoman with a college degree and a self-employed career, my abortion doesn’t fit me neatly into right-wing stereotypes. Nor am I in danger of being fired, beaten or murdered for having or for talking about an abortion – the stark reality for millions of women. I have considerable freedom to speak out. And I plan to use it.

Why? Because last week the Supreme Court decided that it is perfectly okay for employers to exert control over their employees’ birth control decisions. The week before, it decided to abolish clinic-door buffer zones in Massachusetts, allowing anti-abortion protestors more freedom to physically assault and intimidate women as they attempt to access reproductive health care. It was also reported that NBC refused to run an ad for the pro-choice romantic comedy Obvious Child simply because it contained the word “abortion.”

Not only are we not supposed to access abortions – or contraception, or any other reproductive health care – we’re not even supposed to breathe the very word in public. In 1973, the era of George Carlin’s “seven dirty words you can’t say on television,” it was a popular topic on shows like Maude, but today abortion is a four-letter word. Even in films about unintended pregnancies, like Knocked Up and Juno, the characters almost always either redeem themselves by deciding against abortion or fail to consider it at all.

That’s why I felt I had to say it.

I was out with some friends, all parents. Two of the other mothers, both in their mid-thirties like me, both extremely intelligent and accomplished, confessed that their recent second pregnancies had been accidental. They’d cried all through the first trimester, they said.

It made me remember terminating my own second pregnancy. My daughter had been four months old when we accidentally conceived. I had just returned to my workplace and was trying desperately to juggle nursing, child care and my job (and failing – I was on thin ice at the office). I read the pregnancy test with numb horror, so different from the joy I’d felt when I discovered I was pregnant with my Lucia. Then I’d jumped for joy. Now: “Shit!”

Continue reading at:  http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24846-what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-dont-talk-about-abortion