Bari Weiss | Real Time with Bill Maher

November 12, 2019 — Suzan

Posted in Uncategorized. Comments Off on Bari Weiss | Real Time with Bill Maher

Celebrate Your Kid’s Transition. Don’t Grieve It.

November 12, 2019 — Suzan

From The New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/gender-transition-death-grief.html

We didn’t die.

By Meredith Talusan

Shortly before my gender assignment surgery in 2002, my father told me that he was grieving the loss of his first-born son. My first impulse was to comfort him. We talked about his feelings one afternoon and I reassured him that he wasn’t losing me. I thought this was my duty; after all, he had supported my transition, defending me against bigoted relatives (even as he stumbled over my pronouns and told me I needed to be less argumentative if I planned to live as a woman).

Still, I counted myself lucky that he and other members of my immediate family didn’t reject me, which an estimated 50 percent of trans people have experienced. So I listened, even as his words were tough for me to hear. He lamented that I could no longer bring honor to our Filipino family or be his rightful heir — gender expectations I couldn’t fulfill and had grown to resent.

It was also hard to listen to because I was dealing with the losses of real relationships of my own: my then-partner, close friends, work colleagues. But I couldn’t tell him or the rest of my family this because I didn’t want to lose their tenuous support.

I’ve heard other trans people tell similar stories of absorbing their loved ones’ grief, of seeing the depiction of such grief in media, of having the eerie feeling that they are providing solace to people who mourned as though they had died.

There was the trans man whose parents continued to display pictures of him as a beautiful girl all around their house, or the trans woman who described how her transition was a celebration for her but was a funeral for her wife. There are personal essays, podcast episodes and articles that focus on the reactions of spouses, partners and family members of trans people grieving over their transitions.

What is often left unspoken is that a trans person is expected to provide emotional support through this grieving process. My father has repeatedly said I should always be grateful he supported me when other parents wouldn’t. Yet I’ve come to find it deeply unfair that trans people are often left with the burden of assuaging their loved ones’ grief.

Not only does this expectation posit that being transgender is a trans person’s fault, but it also fails to account for the fact that transitioning is likely to be many times more difficult for the trans person than for any loved one. Most important, grief as a reaction to transition is a form of transphobia; it reduces a person’s very being to their gender, and reveals that a loved one cares more about a phantom image than for the trans person they supposedly love, who is right in front of them.

We often have to tolerate these expressions of grief, knowing well that we would not receive the same level of empathy for our struggles, because we live in a world that affirms the feelings of cisgender people while rejecting our own.

Continue reading at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/gender-transition-death-grief.html

Posted in Uncategorized. Comments Off on Celebrate Your Kid’s Transition. Don’t Grieve It.

Smashing the patriarchy: why there’s nothing natural about male supremacy

November 12, 2019 — Suzan

From The Guardian UK:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/02/smashing-the-patriarchy-why-theres-nothing-natural-about-male-supremacy

Psychologists such as Jordan Peterson argue patriarchal society is the ‘natural order’, but it is a relatively new development.


Sat 2 Nov 2019

Fathers are happier, less stressed and less tired than mothers, finds a study from the American Time Use Survey. Not unrelated, surely, is the regular report that mothers do more housework and childcare than fathers, even when both parents work full time. When the primary breadwinner is the mother versus the father, she also shoulders the mental load of family management, being three times more likely to handle and schedule their activities, appointments, holidays and gatherings, organise the family finances and take care of home maintenance, according to Slate, the US website. (Men, incidentally, are twice as likely as women to think household chores are divided equally.) In spite of their outsized contributions, full-time working mothers also feel more guilt than full-time working fathers about the negative impact on their children of working. One argument that is often used to explain the anxiety that working mothers experience is that it – and many other social ills – is the result of men and women not living “as nature intended”. This school of thought suggests that men are naturally the dominant ones, whereas women are naturally homemakers.

But the patriarchy is not the “natural” human state. It is, though, very real, often a question of life or death. At least 126 million women and girls around the world are “missing” due to sex-selective abortions, infanticide or neglect, according to United Nations Population Fund figures. Women in some countries have so little power they are essentially infantilised, unable to travel, drive, even show their faces, without male permission. In Britain, with its equality legislation, two women are killed each week by a male partner, and the violence begins in girlhood: it was reported last month that one in 16 US girls was forced into their first experience of sex. The best-paid jobs are mainly held by men; the unpaid labour mainly falls to women. Globally, 82% of ministerial positions are held by men. Whole fields of expertise are predominantly male, such as physical sciences (and women garner less recognition for their contributions – they have received just 2.77% of the Nobel prizes for sciences).

According to a variety of high-profile figures (mainly male, mainly psychologists), bolstered by professorships and no shortage of disciples, there are important biological reasons for why men and women have different roles and status in our society. Steven Pinker, for instance, has argued that men prefer to work with “things”, whereas women prefer to work with “people”. This, he said, explains why more women work in the (low-paid) charity and healthcare sector, rather than getting PhDs in science. According to Pinker, “The occupation that fits best with the ‘people’ end of the continuum is director of a community services organisation. The occupations that fit best with the ‘things’ end are physicist, chemist, mathematician, computer programmer, and biologist.”

Others deny societal sexism even exists, insisting that the gender roles we see are based on cognitive differences – spoiler: men are more intelligent. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence,” Jordan Peterson has said, for instance. His reasoning suggests that women would be happier not railing against it but instead observing their traditional gender roles. Such theories have been demolished by a range of scholars, including neuroscientist Gina Rippon and psychologist Cordelia Fine.

There are certainly biological differences between men and women, from their sexual anatomy to hormones. Yet even this isn’t as clear cut as it seems. For instance, around one in 50 people may be “intersex” with some sort of atypical chromosomal or hormonal feature – that’s about the same as the proportion of redheads. Men’s brains are on the whole slightly larger than women’s, and scans reveal some differences in the size and connectedness of specific brain regions, such as the hippocampus, in large samples of men and women.

Continue reading at:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/02/smashing-the-patriarchy-why-theres-nothing-natural-about-male-supremacy

Posted in Uncategorized. Comments Off on Smashing the patriarchy: why there’s nothing natural about male supremacy