Women Born Transsexual

From The Guardian UK:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/23/liberal-elite-its-time-to-strike-a-deal-with-the-working-class

Coalitions need compromise. But it’s coalitions that win, writes Joan C Williams, the author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

Joan C Williams
Wednesday 23 August 2017

Abortion rights are central to my identity. As an ambitious teenager, I wanted to have both a vital career and a vibrant intellectual life, and I felt that having a baby at the wrong time would doom me. I went on to a both a full career and motherhood. It all worked out for me, but only because I could control my fertility.

My life has centered around what the sociologist Mary Blair-Loy calls the “norm of work devotion”. Work has provided me with joy, social status, dignity, and financial stability. To me, the image of the stay-at-home mom epitomized oppression and thwarted self-fulfillment. Abortion rights are crucial to the logic of lives like mine, which is why I and about two-thirds of college grads support them.

But only about half of Americans without college degrees do. The logic of their lives is different. They fault white-collar professionals for unhealthy work worship and a failure to understand that “family comes first”. Elites think they are so high and mighty, but it’s we who keep the world in moral order, the working class believes.

The demise of blue-collar jobs means that many families face a daily scramble between two not-very-fulfilling or well-paid jobs, with Mom working one shift and Dad working a different shift, and with each parent caring for the kids while the other is at work.

Tag-team families are under such pressure, and these parents see each other so rarely, that they have three to six times the national divorce rate. In the light of this harsh reality, it’s no wonder they look back with yearning at the breadwinner-homemaker family, supported by the husband’s blue-collar job.

This helps explain why abortion rights look different to those with good jobs and education and those who are struggling. To women like myself, they are the bare minimum of human rights. To working-class women, who often see motherhood, not work, as the key source of social honor, obsession with abortion rights among well-off women is selfish, exemplifying lack of an adequate devotion to family. Seen in this light, opposition to abortion rights becomes, for high-school educated women, a way of claiming social honor.

That’s why research since the 1980s has found class differences in the levels of support for abortion rights. The fight over abortion becomes a fight over what it means to be a good person. That’s why things get ugly really fast. When elites dismiss abortion opponents as mindless misogynists and non-elites dismiss abortion rights advocates as selfish careerists, class conflict becomes acute.

Debates over guns and gun control are similarly visceral, again because identities are at risk. To me, the ready availability of guns is associated with killings among young black men without a future, struggling to find dignity in a society that offers them precious little. Guns mean Sandy Hook and other horrors, and living in a country where mentally unstable kids regularly murder their classmates.

But even as I feel so strongly, I understand how other Americans feel differently. If the abortion debate involves ideals of femininity, guns involve ideals of masculinity. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of women but less than half (43%) of men support stricter guns laws.

Continue reading at:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/23/liberal-elite-its-time-to-strike-a-deal-with-the-working-class

I personally support people’s rights to keep and bear arms for the purposes of self defense.  I don’t advocate first strikes or being the initiator of violence.  But rather measured response to threats of physical violence.

From TransAdvocate:  http://transadvocate.com/on-the-ethics-and-utility-of-violence_n_20587.htm

Aug. 23, 2017

After the property damage at the University of Berkeley by protesters opposed to Milo Yiannopolous speaking there, many within the movement have condemned the violence. They argue that the violence plays into a narrative constructed by white-nationalists, and damages the moral legitimacy of the progressive movement that opposes everything he is calling for.

Others, such as Katherine Cross, have strongly argued that violence against fascist movements (“punching Nazis”) and leaders is not only justified but necessary and a moral imperative in order to preserve democracy. She opines that “Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter. There is nothing about the ideology or its practice that is anything but corrosive to democratic institutions. Fascism is a cancer that turns democracy against itself unto death.”

This essay does not propose to achieve a definitive answer to how, when, and where violence is justified. It attempts t o analyze the effectiveness of violence and the threat thereof as a tool used by factions to influence systemic change. This includes how it can positively and negatively create change, as well as change societal attitudes. While this may seem like a “listicle”, it does tie together by the end.

1. “Punching Nazis” is depicted as virtuous in popular culture, and we accept it

In comics and cinema, gratuitous punching of oppressors by the “good guys” is depicted as right and justified.  Indiana Jones, Superman, and Captain America all used violence in the defense of liberty, with the understanding that Nazis were the bad guys. Who didn’t want to cheer when Hermione Granger punched out Draco Malfoy, the vicious spawn of Death Eaters (basically magic Nazis)?

One could argue that these are all fictional characters. They are, but that is beside the point.  These movies are a mirror of our own societal attitudes, beliefs, and values. They reflect what we believe is good, moral, and ethical. We are supposed to empathize, identify with, and agree with the motivations and actions of the protagonists. Hermione Granger is supposed to represent the moral center or conscience of three main protagonists.  Were we to find her motivations and actions contrary to our own values, we would not want to cheer her when she punched out Draco Malfoy.

2. Violence in the face of an existential threat is nearly universally seen as justified

Preemptive violence against a clear and present danger, where there is a clear intent of existential harm is generally accepted by our society. Whether it involves Jews participating in insurgency during WWII, or home-defense “castle laws”, or even pre-emptively blowing up the second Death Star, we culturally believe that using violence, at some level, is acceptable to avoid levels of violence and oppression that are far worse.

Milo Yiannopolous and the ideas he espouses are seen by many within the transgender community as an existential threat. He advocates harassing, bullying, and mistreating transgender people until they self-deport back into the closet, and encourages that they should be forced into the harmful and ineffective practice of reparative therapy. In short, he is advocating a form of crowd-sourced cultural genocide.

Thus, attempts to remove a platform for his advocacy of this can be argued to be a form of collective self-defense.

Continue reading at:  http://transadvocate.com/on-the-ethics-and-utility-of-violence_n_20587.htm

From The New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/opinion/cultural-appropriation.html?ref=opinion

By Bari Weiss
Aug. 30, 2017

I haven’t watched MTV’s annual Video Music Awards since Bill Clinton was president. I was wearing a plastic choker and Alanis Morissette won for “Ironic.” But I wish I had tuned in this Sunday night. The award show was a veritable orgy — not of sex, but of cultural appropriation.

First up was Kendrick Lamar, whose backup dancers wore ninja outfits as they scaled a wall of fire. While the popular rapper went home with an armload of trophies, he was criticized for borrowing Asian dress. Later, Katy Perry, who just recently finished an apology tour for her previous sins of cornrows and kimonos, “snatched” off her long blond wig — a bit that was torn apart for caricaturing African-American women. Luckily for Ms. Perry, the floodlights lingered longer on her nemesis, Taylor Swift, who unveiled a new video that was immediately blasted for appropriating Beyonce’s “Lemonade.” Speaking of Queen B, I’m just waiting for the charge that she’s exploited Persian culture by naming her new daughter Rumi after the 13th-century Sufi poet.

And that’s just the rap sheet from a single night in pop music. Charges of cultural appropriation are being hurled at every corner of American life: the art museum, the restaurant, the movie theater, the fashion show, the novel and, especially, the college campus. If there’s a safe space left, I’m not aware of it.

The logic of those casting the stones goes something like this: Stealing is bad. It’s especially terrible when those doing the stealing are “rich” — as in, they come from a dominant racial, religious, cultural or ethnic group — and those they are stealing from are “poor.”

Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of “cultural appropriation” is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism — the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones. In other words: the most natural process in a melting-pot country like ours.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered some of the most sublime speeches of the 20th century. In them he used a mostly Latinate language to evoke the trials of the Israelites while quoting the writings of a slave-owning founding father. Irving Berlin, the songwriter who wrote “White Christmas” and “God Bless America,” was a Jew born in a Russian shtetl in a home with a dirt floor. Jessye Norman, one of the greatest opera singers of our time, is a black Southerner who is famous for her Wagner repertoire. Hamdi Ulukaya is a Kurd born in Turkey who now runs the most popular Greek yogurt company in America.

The point is that everything great and iconic about this country comes when seemingly disparate parts are blended in revelatory ways. That merging simply doesn’t happen in places where people are separated by race and ethnicity and class. And it’s not only what makes American culture so rich, but it is also a big part of the reason America is so successful. When we see a good idea, we steal it; when we have a good idea, the rest of the world is welcome to it as well.

Continue reading at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/opinion/cultural-appropriation.html?ref=opinion