Worker Bees and Caffeine, the Legal Drug

May 15, 2010 — Suzan

Here I am at six thirty in the morning facing another 9-10 hour day filled with stress.  Before me is a huge cup of coffee, the legal stimulant drug that gets me through the day.  Along with “energy drinks”.

I go to work where conformity is demanded and individuality suppressed.  Out on the floor the disgruntled murmur and anger runs skin deep. The name of the game is selling, pushing product with smiling enthusiasm even if the product has so much fat in it or so much sodium that it should wear a skull and cross bones.

Workers are treated like children and act out in a passive aggressive manner.

The stress of part time work in retail is brutal with its fluctuating hours meaning one can never count on a certain amount of pay when ones check come out.

Workers can be forced to pee in cups or the more modern swab instant drug test that gets so many false positives particularly in older workers who are often on a shopping list of medications.

Coffee is the perfect drug.  It helps the focus and boosts both energy and fake enthusiasm. Work turns us into corporate liars and caffeine helps us with the guilt.  We learn to project a false sincerity in order to sell and keep our jobs secure.

Insecurity is the life blood of the retail slave.  We eat insults and customer condescension with a smile knowing that many doing the condescending are but one more economic down turn, one more round of out sourcing or right sizing by the corporate raiders and junk bond peddlers, from joining us.  Welcome to Thomas Friedman’s globalized flat earth.  Welcome the race to the bottom when it comes to paying workers.

So lift your cup of coffee high in a toast to the death of the middle class.  Welcome to the world of the bottom line.

Welcome to the world created by the “free market” and the class war that created the super rich.  Thank the neo-cons and neo-libs who brought us here.

And if you are a straight person of color or a white LGBT/T person welcome to the world where we waste our time on horizontal hostility while those with the money who created this world use us as scapegoats to distract us from who the real oppressors are.

Posted in Classism, Culture, Discrimination, Employment, Politics, Questioning Authority, Uncategorized, Workers. 1 Comment »

Building A Culture Instead of Letting Others Portray Us

March 28, 2010 — Suzan

Many years ago, about the time I got my surgery I bought a camera.  It was a fixed lens rangefinder Yashica with aperture priority, 35mm.  It was the first decent camera I owned that was capable of easy accurate focus and the sort of operation that permitted me to start doing documentary photography.

I was a documentary photographer, photographing the culture of my friends.  Yet it was hard for many to take seriously what I was doing.

When a transsexual or transgender person produces art that reflects the reality that they live many of our sisters castigate us for being “professional trannies”.

Many of our biographies even if they have our name as author are actually ghost written.  Although not all are and even those ghost written are a telling of our stories.

I have a book case full of biographies ranging from the barely literate to some that are wonderfully written by sisters and brothers who have put the effort into learning the craft of writing.

I was inspired by both Lynn Conway and Andrea James’ web sites when I put up this blog.  I try to have it reflect my thinking but I also try to vary the topics as well because there are many things that impact our lives.

I’m bothered by this film “Ticked off…”.  But rather than censoring it or putting all this energy into protesting it I would rather see our energy poured into supporting our own and their art.

We actually have sisters who are musical artists.  We probably have enough to put on a festival of our own.

We have poets…  I think half of us have the souls of poets, filling note books and thinking, “Who would possibly want to hear us read our poetry?”

Who would want to hear our music or see our art.  And if we show it and explain the impact of growing up with transsexualism or transgenderism then is it about our art or about what we grew up with?

That is the dilemma of any artist who is not part of the straight white male dominant culture.  In effect we are minority artists and our art if it has integrity is the art of our life experiences.

I have heard sisters and some brothers too speak dismissively of art produced by us that shows us or reflects our lives.  As though the only way we can be successful is if we are so integrated into the dominant culture our own birth history vanishes.

Rather than just protest I think we need to take a different approach.  I remember the Gay Liberation Front picketing “Boys in the Band”, the Daughters of Bilitis , I think, picketed “The Killing of Sister George”.  And all the other films that garnered more publicity from the protests and became must see films due to the controversy.  It just caused more people to go.

We have a highly praised documentary, “Prodigal Sons” http://prodigalsonsfilm.com/description.html playing the same festival circuit.  Perhaps we should spend at least as much effort pointing out the positive as the negative.  Holding “Prodigal Sons” up as example of something for us and by us that shows the reality of our lives.

We also need to start putting our money where our mouths are.  Buy the CDs of artists like Namoli Brennet and Baby Dee.  We could buy the documentaries and write letters to Sundance Channel, Logo, IFC and Current TV thanking them when they put on a positive show.  Or even one that amuses us because sometimes the trashy and comedic entertain us by and not the straights simply by invoking those in group jokes.

We could actually buy the books of sisters and brothers.  I realize expecting y’all to be supportive of each other instead of trashing each other is asking a lot…  But if all we do is trash talk each other why are we surprised when the dominant culture trash talks us?

Instead of just protesting the negative, even though it needs to be done, perhaps we should put the same amount of energy into supporting the positive.

Posted in Culture, Film, Internalized Transphobia. 4 Comments »

Car Shows and Vegetarian Restaurants

March 5, 2010 — Suzan

On Wednesday evening we went to a Vegetarian Restaurant, The Cosmic Cafe, in the Oak Lawn/Cedar Springs area of Dallas. Oh yes, we have our own Gay Ghettos here too.  The decor is a wonderful melange of every cliche found in hippie guru tripping while seeking out the “wisdom of the East”.  In short it was “groovy” and brings a smile to our omnivore faces when ever we opt to eat there.

The food BTW is incredibly delicious and we have yet to order a disappointing meal there.

When we first got to Texas we were sort of appalled to discover the three meat combo that is all too common in BBQ restaurants.  My reaction was, “Meat is not a side for meat. Y’all might just want to scarf some veggies with that and French fries don’t count as a veggie.”

I’m not sure of the rest of the world outside of the US, but the corporate selling machine has helped program our eating pattern to such a space where obesity is the given and thin/healthy is the exception.

Now we should read out ingredients as well as the calories per serving as well as what constitutes a serving but many of us are uninsured until 65 since we are either unemployed or under-employed.  Not to mention how many of us have jobs that do not provide insurance.  This makes staying healthy a requirement.

Organic is important in some product like milk.  There are too many growth hormones and  antibiotics in the regular milk.  With other things the organic is not so important.  Look for the little green and white USDA Certified Organic label.  The corporations try to trip you up by using “Natural” or “All Natural”, which does not mean the same thing.

For me vegetarian meals are part of an over all pattern and not a way of life because I still like meat in all its various forms.  I just prefer to not get into the coronary care loop with stents and by-passes if I can avoid it through diet.

How does this bring us to the Auto Show? I often think that even in a hostile or indifferent society it is possible for each of us to do small things that in turn encourage others to do small things.  I’ve watched as cigarette smoking has gone from common to rare.  I see solar panels and power generating wind mills at a few houses within several miles of my house.  I have farmers and ranchers who were going to turn their farms and ranches into housing developments tell me that organic farming and  raising grass fed beef has  kept them going.

We have been looking at the Prius for several years now.  We aren’t in the market for a new car yet, our paid for Jetta only has 60K on it and is a wonderful car to drive.  But it only averages 28 MPG when I drive to and from work .

So the Prius is a given and so are the Volkswagen TDI clean diesel models.  Subaru is famous for its LGBT/T friendly advertising. Scions are cute and so is the Kia Soul and the not so LGBT/T friendly Nissan Cube.

But at this Auto Show the car company that most fascinated me was Ford with their brand new Focus Hybrid and their 34-40MPG Fiesta.  There is a certain allure to buying an American product as a statement at this particular time.  A way of rewarding an American company for getting the message that we want greener cars that get better mileage.

Not to mention the fact that the Fiesta is so fucking cute.

Green is a new song in the repertoire at events like these.  There were several side attraction vendors selling light tubes and solar powered attic fans because in spite of the climate change deniers there is a critical mass of people out there looking for small things they can do to live greener and reduce their carbon foot prints.

For me “alternative lifestyle” never had anything to do with having had to deal with transsexualism or even much to do with my lesbianism.  For me “alternative lifestyle” was more about what caused me to read beat poetry as well as listen to folk music.  It had to do with living consciously rather than consuming conspicuously.

Poverty played a role in my not consuming conspicuously and I like nice things as much as the next person even if the nice things I like are different. It is just that I would rather buy books than cosmetics, a new lens than expensive shoes or boots.

Posted in Culture. 3 Comments »

Just Kids and an Exhibit of Later Works by Andy Warhol

February 15, 2010 — Suzan

Last night I finished reading Patti Smith’s recent memoir of her friendship with Robert Maplethorpe in the late 1960s, early 1970s, titled Just Kids.

Perhaps it is nostalgia what with looking at photographs of that era and remembering friends who died.  But there was a time when we were less obsessed with why we were transsexual and spent more personal conversations about art and artists.

There is a retrospective of the later works of Andy Warhol showing at the Fort Worth Modern through May.  Tina and I are going tomorrow as our Valentine’s day celebration.

One of the movies I saw in 1967 that really influenced me was Chelsea Girls.  That year the Velvet Underground’s first album provided a darker counterpoint to Sgt. Pepper.  I was working at a shit job in a piss factory and like Patti Smith, I too had something inside of me called desire.

I was political and part of a movement that helped end the war in Vietnam and we were all “just kids”.

When I got to San Francisco and started the process of changing sex I was helped by an office that offered support for those changing sex.  It was started by people who had their “Stonewall” three years before New York City’s.  And they too were just kids.

I was best friends with a sister named Leslie.  We went to old movies together and dug the crowd that hung out at Andy Warhol’s Factory, perhaps because he actually used queens in films directed by Paul Morrissey. Candy Darling tragically dying young of cancer.

We spoke of the creating our lives as art projects, “I am an artist and my life is my art.”  Mostly we were escaping, running from as much as running towards.

Rock and roll with words that mattered from Dylan to Patti Smith, whose opening lines to her first recording “Hey Joe”, the A-side of “Piss Factory” were, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

We lost so many people along the way.  Too many to drugs and way too many to AIDS.  Andy Warhol died in 1987, over 20 years ago.  Robert Maplethorpe died about the same time.

And somewhere along the line we stopped caring so much about art as something that really matters and be came obsessed with why we are this way.

As though the existential answer of, “I am this way because this is the way I am” is insufficient response to bigotry and psychiatric abuse.

Posted in Art, Culture, History, Uncategorized. 2 Comments »

Tom Joad

February 6, 2010 — Suzan

This Blog is nearly one year old.  It has been through some changes.  Lots of people who came here at first are now denouncing me on their own blogs and over on TS-SI.

They are saying I betrayed them because I don’t embrace “classic transsexual” or HBS.  People are upset because while I think transsexualism is a form of intersex I haven’t believed Ayn Randian, individualist claims of special exemption due to “I’m not really like other transsexuals, I’m really intersex”” since Agnes story turned out to be a manufactured tale that got her SRS in the late 1950s.

I have been attacked as a traitor because people expected WBT to expend a lot of energy attacking transgender people and I refuse to. Transsexualism and transgenderism are different but when it come to oppression we are all “trannie queer gender trash”.

A lot of the expectations of my taking some sort of militantly anti-transgender stance and throwing the same shit at transgender folks as the Christo-Fascist right comes from where I was at for a short while about 9-10 years back when I was getting sober and in the aftermath of 9/11 and not reflective of a lifetime of left wing activism on my part.

I moved back to the left thanks to reading people like the late Howard Zinn and from revulsion towards the hate that was being spewed by the “classic transsexual” faction. Tina also played a major role in telling me how unbecoming my involvement in the near Fascism of the conservatives was and in reminding me of my basic working class New Deal Democratic roots.

When I am asked why I believe certain things and why I am a militant lefty, an anarchist, I joke and say, “It’s all Pete Seeger’s fault.” But I could as easily blame it on Joe Hill or Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck.

A couple of years ago Tina and I watched the move Grapes of Wrath, and I recalled Tom Joad’s soliloquy.

Now Woody Guthrie saw the movie and wrote the following song.  After hearing it Steinbeck said, “Woody managed to tell the story that took me some 400 pages in about 6 minutes.

Some times on a lot of matters I think this might be a better world if  instead of asking “What would John Galt do?” we asked “What would Tom Joad do?”

Posted in Classism, Culture, Economic Issues, History, Human Rights, Questioning Authority, Social Justice, Unequal Treatment. 27 Comments »

Male Dominance and its origins in our present society

February 4, 2010 — Suzan

by
Andrea Brown

In our present society which is dominated by a set of financial cults masquerading as spiritual cults which worship a social construct known as man, transsexualism has no place for the following reasons. We do not pay large amounts of wealth to these cults or give them large amounts of influence therefore we are attacked for the following reasons.

Women born transsexual people are getting rid of penises, which the religiously dogmatic, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, fanatics and transgender all worship as the supreme organ. In the eyes of the religious cults, psychiatrists and other deranged sociopath’s, which is seen as a grave sin. They worship the penis as the giver of live. They have not figured out it is just an organ that the body can live without and in fact is the same tissue as the vagina, just differently arranged in the womb.

Sex reassignment surgery just rearranges the penis tissue into vagina for transsexual people, although not as well as what would occur in the womb. The organs that life comes from are the womb, ovaries, vagina and testes with some minor assistance from the penis. The womb is the safe place for life and the vagina is the releaser of life into the greater world, from the safety of the womb. The womb is the protector of life.

Present day male dominance comes from pre-christian Roman male supremacy. They would never allow a female emperor or a woman to hold any position of power. When a roman emperor Elagabalus who reigned from 218AD to 222AD ordered his surgeons to change him from male to female, the Praetorian Guard murdered him as an affront to Rome. Roman emperors were notorious for there excess’s, but wanting a vagina was to much for the Roman’s, due to there hatred of women, but everything else, such as Trajans genocide in Dacia (Romania) was completely acceptable and celebrated as a great event.

Trajan’s column is seen as a cultural exhibit. It celebrates the deaths and enslavement of millions as well as the destruction of an entire language and culture, previously known as Dacia, which was a comparable civilization with the Hellenistic Greeks.

The coliseum may have had as many people die in the arena as in Auschwitz. How can such a place of evil were people died for the amusement of mobs be seen as a cultural icon?

The Roman’s had a very anti-female attitude to the point that if a woman was raped, the rapist was only charged with an affront to her husband. A woman was the property of her father until marriage, upon which she became the property of her husband. If her husband died her oldest son or male relative became in effect her owner. Basically in plain language a woman was subhuman and merely property in Roman eyes at the same level as a horse or cart.

Strangely today a lot of people keep trying to promote Rome as some sort of basis of civilization. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini both tried to emulate the Roman Empire, although Hitler was closest due to his genocide of entire groups in society, just like the Roman’s. They exterminated the Dacians (Romanians). They also killed one third of the French, wiping out their language and culture, then replacing it at the point of the sword with Latin, which evolved into modern French over the last 2000 years. The ancient Gaul’s, spoke a mixture of Basque in the south-west, Celtic in the central part east and west, Hellenistic at the mouth of the Rhone and Germanic languages in the north of France as did the Belgae. The roman’s in their genocidal rampage, which stripped every piece of gold, destroyed all of this European cultural heritage and cultural richness, and silver it could from every country.

It is good to see the modern day European Union funding so many language and cultural issues, groups and events all over Europe, in some cases even leading to strengthening of local culture.

All the Romanesque languages are descended from Latin, which was imposed in those countries at the point of a sword by the Roman army. Countries such as Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, north Italy, Bulgaria and Romania, all of who had their language and cultures wiped out and replaced by Latin and roman woman hating. Those countries lost their languages and their cultures. The loss to society is incalculable.

The southern Germans got it from the Romans from 15BC to 13BC, although they got even in the battle of Teutoburg in 9AD, the 2000th anniversary of which was this year. That battle checked the Roman Empire, slowing the spread of roman woman hating, which in turn slowed down the spread of Christianity to Northern Europe until 1000 to 1300. Without that, the reformation may not have taken place, as older ideas still existed in some places in common memory and story telling in parts. Arminius (Herman the German) may have given all of us our present freedom, without even realizing it. If Arminius had not checked the Roman Empire, Scandinavia, Scotland and Eastern Europe would have fallen soon afterwards, leaving the Romans to only face the Partheons/Persians on there eastern side, instead of always defending there northern borders. That would have condemned the European world to permanent decay, eventually leading to a religious take over, that would have been permanent inquisition.

A lot of Christian historians still do not even mention the battle of Teutoburg, yet it was one of the most, if not the most decisive battle’s in history. The site of the battle has been found and it appears that the roman tale of ambush may have been exaggerated. The latest research indicates it may have been a straight out battle. Military tacticians study that battle, due to its sheer decisiveness and the fact that the Germans literally had been in the Stone Age 20 years before, yet completely and utterly annihilated the most modern roman army of the time. No commander of an army, before or since has achieved such a victory.

The worst act by the Roman’s may have been the destruction of the Hellenistic civilization. Leaving aside the horrific toll in human lives, the Antikythera mechanism gives a good idea of what the roman’s really did. They destroyed technological advances, setting us back farther than anyone realized, until the Antikythera Mechanism was studied. Now a horrible truth is starting to dawn on people studying the Hellenistic society and Rhodes in particular. The roman’s were the destroyers of technological development and scientific thought, all of which the roman’s considered unmanly, therefore beneath them and to destroyed.

I was once tried to build a replica of the Antikythera mechanism as I have a casual interest in older technology. It is the only ancient creation I had to give up on in the early stages. When 3D printers become available in the next few years, I will print one from the lithographs that have been taken, as it is almost or possibly as complicated as Charles Babbage’s machines. I asked an engineer for advice on building it. He initially laughed, making jokes about building it in an hour, saw the nature publication on the antikythera mechanism, said it is impossible, he sat dumb struck, when he realized it was a real design from the 2nd century BC. He couldn’t build it either and passed the links to it around his engineer friends, who were all in disbelief. If it had not been published in the scientific journal Nature, neither they or myself would have believed it was real and would have dismissed it as something from a new age nut job.

http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/node/35
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7119/abs/nature05357.html
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/system/files/0608_Nature.pdf
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/system/files/0608_Nature-Supplementary.pdf
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/data/ptm/full-resolution-ptm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrfMFhrgOFc

The Catholic Church took over from the roman emperors after Attila the Hun was bought of in 452 when Pope Leo 1 brought the richest man in Rome to meet Attila. The spin the Catholic Church put on it was that the social construct which the Catholic Church uses as a societal control mechanism called God had defeated Attila the Hun. By bringing ex-consul Avienus, the richest man in Rome and Trygetius, a diplomat. Leo had the perfect team to negotiate with Attila the Hun on behalf of Valentinian. Avienus had the gold to bribe Attila and in effect would have meant no gold left in Rome, so pointless destroying from Attila’s point of view. Trygetius was a great diplomat, who would have smoothed over all negotiations. Leo was completely fearless. He had an ego as big as any megalomaniac in history, believing he was directly protected by the protection of the holy trinity. Leo was perfect to bring as he would have been able to play on Attila’s fears, as Attila was superstitious.

In effect that meant Attila had all the gold, so there was no point in invading Rome. Leo in classic Catholic Church spin-doctor mode, used this event to add even more control over the dying remains of the Roman Empire from the Emperor. Leo extracted a letter from Emperor Valentinian formally recognizing Leo as leader of all the catholic Church as he was holder of the keys of St. Peters in 445 AD, the same year that Attila took over control of the Huns from his uncle Rugila. Leo then went on to declare in 452 AD that a miracle occurred upon meeting Attila and that the Catholic Church had driven back the Huns with the help of God, when in fact it was a massive gold bribe.

That event led to a deranged belief taking hold in the Roman Empire, that the Catholic Church could save them from Earthly dangers. A belief, which is ingrained into almost a billion people today, worldwide.

The roman empire was then a white hot crucible in which there was a mindset of slaughter in the Coliseum for amusement, slavery, extermination of perceived enemies, anti-science, anti-technology, anti-women, anti-disabled, male supremacy at all costs, destruction of all other cultures and replacement of other languages with Latin. All this was occurring in an empire in its death throws, at its most dangerous time.

In the all-consuming firestorm, that was the Roman Empire at the time. Catholicism violently defeated other forms of Christianity such as Arianism. The birth of Christianity at the time in the Roman Empire was as violent as the birth of Islam, shortly afterwards.

The attacks on women were particularly violent. A good example of the violence towards women is Hypatia of Alexandria.

Hypatia of Alexandria was a tall, very strong-minded woman, who rode a chariot, who taught the following statements to her students of mathematics, engineering and astronomy.

“All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final”.

“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all”.

“To teach superstitions as truth, is a most terrible thing”.

The fact that she was tall, glamorous, would not be subservient to men, outspoken against religious dogma, rode around in a chariot and was a mathematician would have really pissed of the Christians at the time as they were anti-science, enforcers of religious dogma and only saw woman as existing to give birth to more men and to serve men as slaves.

In 412 AD a group of catholic monks known as the “Parabalani” led by Saint Cyril, dragged her from her chariot and into a church. There Cyril and his followers sliced her to pieces with oyster shells and when in her last breath, burnt her. Saint Cyril was made a saint for this act and he declared his followers in the Parabalani to be saints for this Christian act of butchering an innocent woman.

The term Parabalani means student, as does the term Taliban. Now you know where the Taliban get their inspiration.

Cyril is still revered as a saint. For those of you who wonder what it takes to become a saint, the Vatican is in the middle of creating another saint. His name is Cardinal Stepianic or ‘beloved’ as nazi apologists now refer him to. According to the former Yugoslavian government when they tried him in 1946 for war crimes, he and his Dominican monks followers were responsible for the deaths of up to 750,000 Jews, Serbian orthodox, gypsies and others in the area covering modern Croatia and Bosnia. His followers had a thing for slitting the throats of young children. Pope John Paul 2 started the process of making that nazi war criminal a saint. Joe Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict who wears dresses and red patent shoes, formerly of the Hitler Youth, is now finalizing the process of making a nazi war criminal a saint.

The allies choose not to try Stepianic at Nurnberg, as they did not want to embarrass the Vatican, instead having Tito take on the task. Tito had to deal with the Catholic Church setting up martyr committee’s in every country, forming campaigns stating that Stepianic was a prisoner of conscience, when in fact he was a genocidal murderer. He should have been hanged at Nurnberg along with the rest of the nazi’s. He was seen as a good Dominican as was Miroslav Filipović who was hanged in his friar’s robes.
Miroslav Filipović was a true Dominican friar, upholding its highest ethics. He slit the throats of young girls stating he and his followers were doing gods work. In doing so, he has proven there has been no change since Saint Cyril in how the Catholic Church operates.

The Ustaše were against industrialization and democracy, just like the modern day Catholic Church and the earlier Roman Empire, which they inherited. The basic principles of the movement were laid out by Pavelić in his 1929 pamphlet “Principles of the Ustaše Movement”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_clergy_involvement_with_the_Usta%C5%A1e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miroslav_Filipovi%C4%87
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac

Over the next few centuries the cult of ultra male dominance slowly spread all over Europe. Mostly it was by the sword, not by consensual belief as most think.

The crusades were one example of how it spread. Most think the crusades only happened in the Middle East. There was a crusade to destroy the Saxon religion in Germany and Netherlands. Part of this was forced conversion to christianity and then execution. They then tried to crusade against Denmark but got beaten back. The crusade against the Slavs to christianise them was particularly violent.

When the Normans entered Ireland, most do not realise that the Normans considered all christians there to be heretic. The Pope at the time said that the Irish were heretic, due to some limited freedom of ideas.

After each crusade women had less rights and freedom of movement.

Now Rome is on a new crusade. The present Pope is calling for no rights for gays and transsexuals.

After all the dominance of the penis must be protected at all costs.

Posted in Christo-Fascism, Culture, History, Male Privilege, Misogyny, Religion, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Male Dominance and its origins in our present society

Why I like the Term, “Transsexual” Better Than the Alternatives

January 6, 2010 — Suzan

Too often those espousing the identity politics of “Transgender as Umbrella”, in order to enlarge their numbers from being  a small minority group within world of L/G communities, set such broad factors for inclusion in the transgender label that it appears that only a small minority of people aren’t transgender.

This of course erases transsexuals to the point where GLAAD’s style book and folks like Autumn Sandeen appear to think that it is appropriate to change transsexual to transgender when ever the word appears in print. The same goes for pre-op, post-op and sex change operation which enter the Orwell New Speak Morphing Machine and emerge as the nicely euphemistic and neutered “transition”.

Since when did “transsexual” acquire the same sort of stigma as a word like “nigger” that requires its being euphemized?

For me transsexual means changing sex or physical sex characteristics.   Not to mention living 24/7/365 in a manner consistent with the sex you are becoming.

At its core transsexualism is about the deep seated need to change sex from that assigned at birth.  Arguments as to why change with the seasons and are almost matters of faith.  Reasons are all legitimate to those doing the changing.  No matter the strength of evidence as to a physical nature there is no argument that will ever convince the bigots.

People with transsexualism have struggled to put words to what they feel ever since we started putting pen to paper and trying to relate our stories in the 1950s (I am currently rereading Roberta Cowell’s autobiography) The language lacks the words to relate what we feel inside and so we are forced to use metaphors.

At its core transsexualism is about having an operation to change one’s assigned at birth sex, that is why it is sex reassignment surgery.

Transsexualism has several common narratives.  Those narratives distinguish us from others who appear similar but who do not have the same desperate drive to actually have an operation to change their sex.

To placate the bigots we have desexed transsexualism to the point where it seems that wanting to be able to have sex as female or male bodied people (depending on the direction of change) no longer plays a part in our wanting SRS.

We have desexed transsexualism under the rubric of transgender to the point where wanting our bodies to look consistent with our gender of presentation when we are naked is looked upon as elitist rather than consistent with our changing sex to have our bodies match our core sex identity.

I view gender as suspect. Over thousands of years gender roles have been used to keep women as second class humans.  Substituting gender for sex reifies gender roles that keep women as second class humans deemed inferior to men.

What is gender identity if gender itself is an abstract construct that shifts over time and location?  Gender identity makes sense in the claims of transgender people as they are claiming that acting the role makes them real.  Indeed they denounce the “body essentialism” of those of us who point out that women are adult females and that men are adult males irrespective of their  presentation.

But I am a woman born transsexual and not a woman born transgender so I do not have to stake claim to womanhood based on my ability to adhere to an abstract gender role that I claim such an intensity of identity to, that it allows me to deny my actual body.

My femaleness in all its mix of masculine and feminine hippie anarchist feminist elements is confirmed every time I squat to pee, shower, make love or masturbate.

Now there are some who feel the need to add “Classic” to their transsexual.  I generally find these people to be conservative and heterosexist if not down right homophobic.  It especially sends them into a tizzy when two sisters form a lesbian bond.  It also seems as though “classic transsexual” is the latest incarnation of BBLZ etc’s AGP/AP model.

I am vaguely amused when lesbian sisters who initially embraced the term discover that it doesn’t mean those of us who have had SRS .  That it isn’t a substitute for post-op the way WBT was initially envisioned and instead it requires the embrace of a heterosexist stance that says post-SRS women who are lesbian should work for the protection of heterosexual marriage for post-SRS women. While lesbian sisters are expected to  settle for civil unions for themselves because same sex marriage would denigrate the heterosexual marriages entered into by “classic transsexuals”  At the same time “classic transsexuals” refuse to recognize the validity of lesbian relationships within the post-op transsexual community.

You know there was a time when those of us who had sex change operations were rare, indeed. When I got mine there were maybe a few thousand people who had the same surgery I had.  But now there are hundreds of thousands of us and the only thing that unites us is having had sex reassignment surgery.

Now I’ve know post-ops who have been perfectly flawless in every way and others who can’t live outside the ghetto.  But the vast majority of them who didn’t flat out lie and deceive the screeners had elements of that basic set of early established narratives as part of their life experiences and that makes all of them “classic transsexuals” in my book, which means I can dispense with the classic modifier.

If you want to say transsexuals who actually get sex change surgery then say it.  Don’t beat around around the bush.  When you start using “classic transsexual” in any other context than post-op then you are as much as saying there are many different kinds of transsexuals.  With many comes validation of the claims of transgender people to being “non-op transsexuals”.

I am also not a fan of HBS.  I liked Dr. Benjamin.  He was nice in an old school liberal, paternalistic sort of way but like most of those who study us he leaped to many many erroneous conclusions.  But even more so syndrome isn’t much of an improvement on disorder if any.  It is as though we are making Dr. Benjamin into some sort of definer of us rather than a facilitator who learned from what we told him.

We existed in ancient times and in every culture.  I perfer the term transsexual.

Now the argument can be made that it is tainted by association with sex workers.  Yet long before the emergence of IFGE, NTAC and other Transactivist groups, sex work was often the only means of survival we had.  It still is for way too many people.

By the same token isn’t the transgender argument for the use of transgender instead of transsexual based upon transsexual being the term of choice for so many trans* sex workers?

To me WBT, transsexual, post-op, woman of a transsexual history, classic transsexual all pretty much mean the same thing.  They all mean that the person to whom those various terms are applied had an operation that changed their genital from those of one sex to another.  All the other stuff is just window dressing that tries to hide the fact that having sex reassignment surgery is what defines us as transsexual.

Not having it and talking about gender as though it is more than clothing and mannerisms is a transgender thing, not transsexual.  We don’t transition, we get sex change operations hence the term transsexual.

Posted in Classism, Culture, Gay, Innateness, Lesbian, LGBT/T, Questioning Authority, Same Sex Marriage, Transgender, Transsexualism, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Why I like the Term, “Transsexual” Better Than the Alternatives

I Will not Mourn Mary Daly

January 6, 2010 — Suzan

I am disgusted with some of the blog posts I have read regarding the death of that vile bigot, Mary Daly.

I consider myself a feminist of the left.  Not a cultural feminist of the nature espoused by Daly.  She started out a Catholic theologian.  She was full of crap and mythology when she was a Catholic. She was full of crap and mythology as a feminist.

I for one never believed in ancient matriarchal cultures usurped by a later patriarchy.  I always put her writings regarding the non-supported by archeological finding ancient matriarchies  in the same garbage pail where I put Von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods” and the Atlantis myths.

But women born transsexual have a particular reason for not mourning Daly.  The woman was a hateful bigot, the only difference between her and  a KKK Grand Dragon is that she wore academic robe instead of Klan robes.

Daly helped create the language that is used by all anti-transsexual bigots.  In Daly’s book Gyn/Ecology she labeled us as “Frankensteinian”, preaching that transsexualism was a “male problem” (conveniently erasing our T to M brothers).  She is the one who started the bullshit about our existing in a contrived and artificial condition.”

Many of the worst enemies of transsexuals both female and male have been highly respected academics.  Just as often we forget that Universities are factories that serve the same corporate masters as well as governments by generating “facts” (often of dubious nature) and prostituting their reputations to further forces of bigotry and oppression.

Just as highly respected academics in the past have generated research showing people of color to be inferior so to have people like Daly contributed to the oppression and worsening of the lives of people born with transsexualism.

However, Daly’s worst offense, one reported by numerous sources, is in the role she played in furthering the academic career of Janice Raymond.  It is alleged that Daly was conducting a sexual relationship with Raymond at the same time she was serving as adviser to Raymond on her Ph.D. thesis that eventually became “The Transsexual Empire.”  If these charges are true they would call into question the legitimacy of both parties.

Such a challenge to the credibility would call into question the academic standing of both party.

I have read both Daly and Raymond in the past and consider Daly to be at best a minor intellect and her work to belong more in the mythology section than in the feminst section.

Do not expect me to mourn.  In fact I am glad we are rid of the old bigot.

Posted in Culture, Feminist, Gender, Hate Crimes. 2 Comments »

Avatar

January 6, 2010 — Suzan

It’s official…  The holiday season is over.  The Christmas crunch and post-Christmas crash retail season of selling cheap crap from China is over for at least seven and a half months.

Now is the time for us peons who work the retail sales floor to get some hard earned R & R.

Tina, my honey, love of my life and I have been committed to see Avatar at the local IMax 3D  theater since it opened some two weeks back.

Well…  This afternoon we took the plunge.

This is perhaps the most visually stunning film I have ever seen.  The glasses for the viewing were magenta and green rather than the red and blue of yesteryear suggesting  a refinement in the process for producing the 3D imagery.  It is gorgeously real instead of cheesy.

The story like many of the better works of science fiction and fantasy uses an alien setting to explore themes of current political and social import.

Corporate greed, imperialism, the genocide of native peoples, environmental destruction for the sake of financial reward obtained by the mining of a rare mineral, referred to as “unobtainium”.

It is reminiscent of “Dances with Wolves” The badly wounded soldier rediscovers life from the very people he was sent to control and oppress.  In the process he comes to see his own people as the oppressors and like John Brown commits totally to the struggle of the people he was sent to oppress.  Like the character portrayed by Kevin Costner in “Dances with Wolves” he joins the native people in their fight against the genocide being committed against them by his people of birth.

Some right wing critics have slammed this movie for numerous reasons.  I suspect showing the military as genocidal maniacs in support of corporate greed is but one reason.  The painful analogy to the US losing wars to people with vastly inferior military forces tweeks them.

I loved it because the John Wayne type brutal white guy gets killed by a Na-vi woman.  The same Na-vi woman who has become the mate of the hero who has become one of the Na-vi.

I suppose that if I weren’t so tired I could add that I enjoyed the manner in which the hero assimilated and became one with the Na-vi.

It has been years since I went back to see a film a day or two later but Avatar is so visually rich (I compared it to tripping on acid) and so multi textural that I really want to see it again while it is still 3D and at the IMax.

I am an atheist yet I relate to the Gaia concept of oneness with the universe and an interconnectedness. Of how we are a part of nature and how by destroying nature with over population and the destruction of the oceans and rain forests we are committing the supreme sin against ourselves.  The Na-vi have that same sort of godless spirituality that places them in relationship to all their world both plant and other animals that live in their world.

There war is against the invaders who have come to destroy their world and with it their Gaia.  It requires us to ask of ourselves if profits are worth the destruction of our world.

Posted in Culture. 3 Comments »

Exemptions allowing churches to refuse to employ gays to be scrapped following pressure from EU

November 23, 2009 — Suzan

Proof that Europe is much more respectful of freedom and equality than the US and its kowtowing to Christo-fascism.  Time to eliminate “faith based initiative funding” at tax payer expense that discriminates against LGBT/T people.  It is no different than the government funding the KKK.  While we are at it de-license groups like the Catholic adoption services, who have actually acted like extortionists recently by threatening to end services in Washington DC if DC recognizes and legalizes equal marriage rights.

By Staff Writer, PinkNews.co.uk • November 22, 2009 – 16:37

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2009/11/22/exemptions-allowing-churches-to-refuse-to-employ-gays-to-be-scraped-following-pressure-from-eu/

The European Commission is putting pressure on the British government to drop the exemptions from equality legislation by religious organisations who currently have the right to refuse to employ LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) staff.

The opt out allows churches and other organisations to refuse to employ gay people in order “to avoid conflicting with the strongly held religious convictions of a significant number of the religion’s followers”. Although there have been successful cases at employment tribunals questioning the implementation and interpretation of the opt-out

The Observer reports that the Commission wrote to the British government to warn that it has not fully implemented EU directives that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexuality.

The National Secular Society had complained to the commision saying that the current exemptions “illegal discrimination against homosexuals”.

The Commission reportedly agreed with the complaint saying “exceptions to the principle of non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation for religious employers are broader than that permitted by the directive”.

EU equal opportunities commissioner, Vladimir Špidla, told the Observer: “We call on the UK government to make the necessary changes to its anti-discrimination legislation as soon as possible so as to fully comply with the EU rules.”

The ruling means the government will be be forced to place new clauses into the Equality Bill which is currently making its way through parliament. But it will still allow churches to refuse to employ a gay man as priest for example.

“This ruling is a significant victory for gay equality and a serious setback for religious employers who have been granted exemptions from anti-discrimination law,” gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell told the Observer.

“It is a big embarrassment for the British government, which has consistently sought to appease religious homophobes by granting them opt-outs from key equality laws. The European Commission has ruled these opt-outs are excessive.”

Christian charity Care told the Observer: “If evangelical churches cannot be sure that they can employ practising evangelicals with respect to sexual ethics, how will they be able to continue?”

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Hate Crimes, Human Rights, LGBT/T, Religion, Social Justice, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Exemptions allowing churches to refuse to employ gays to be scrapped following pressure from EU

I Guess Women Aren’t That Good At Writing After All

November 7, 2009 — Suzan

As a blogger and writer still working on my first book I receive mail from “She Writes”, a mailing list for women writers.  And I just know many of you think the struggle for women’s equality has been won and that male privilege is a thing of the past but…

From She Writes:
Wow, did I feel good yesterday. 5000 women writers here. A depth and breadth of talent that takes my breath away. We write fiction, we write memoir, we write scifi; we are bestsellers, we are award winners, we are just starting out; we are working hard, we are writing well; we are…not as good at it as men are.

Or at least that seems to be the opinion of Publishers’ Weekly, which published its “Best Books of 2009” list on November 2nd and could not see its way to including a single book by a woman without destroying its integrity or betraying its unassailable good taste. Apparently books by women just aren’t as good. Sorry, girls! Poor PW, they felt really badly about it. According to the novelist and journalist Louisa Ermelino, the editors at PW bent over backwards to be objective as they chose the Best Books of the year. “We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the ‘big’ books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.”

It “disturbed” you? In what way exactly? Like, did it make you think, “we are insane?” Try to imagine if they had come out with a list of the Best Books of 2009 and it had included ZERO MEN. Try to imagine if Amazon had released its Best Books of 2009 and it had included only TWO men. I know it’s hard. But just try.

And in case you think ALL men got the star treatment from PW, you should also know that only ONE of the men on the list isn’t a white dude. Naturally he is the dude on the cover. (More on that in a post to come.)

I have never felt clearer about why I started She Writes. It is time to start making our own lists. On that note I am issuing our first She Writes call to action. Tell us what YOU believe are the top ten best books of 2009 thus far. Written by men or women, please — fiction or nonfiction. Be as objective as you can, with the awareness that lists of the “best” anything are subjective in the end. We are not trying to generate a list of books only by women. I’m guessing there will be some overlap with the lists Amazon and PW put together. I am also guessing we will somehow, some way, find a book or two by a woman that can stand on its own two feet.

Click here to give us your list of the Top Ten Best Books of 2009.

We will announce our She Writes Top Ten list two weeks from today.

In the meantime, I will be featuring posts from our membership on this subject. Please feel free to share your lists and alert me when you do. Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu, co-founders of the much needed new literary organization WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts), will be discussing their reaction to PW’s list (and Amazon’s) in a conversation we will post on She Writes in the next few days.

A parting thought: my friend and colleague Gloria Feldt, who also happens to be one of the most inspiring and important thought-leaders on women and leadership in the country, likes to cite a pair of statistics that speak volumes: women make 85% of the consumer buying decisions in this country; women are 17% of Congress.

Here’s another one for you: 65% of books sold in the U.S. are purchased by women; women wrote 0% of the Best Books of 2009. Really

Posted in Culture, Feminist, Gender, Male Privilege, Misogyny, Sexism, Social Justice, Unequal Treatment. 1 Comment »

Must Read Book Recommendation: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

November 7, 2009 — Suzan

On Thursday I picked up Gail Collins book: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

I am about 80 pages into it and I am constantly going yes I remember.  I was born in 1947 and came of age in 1965 so I entered adulthood at the same time as the anti-war movement, the birth of second wave feminism and the gay and lesbian liberation movements.

From about 1960 onward my parents knew of my transsexualism.  Our lives were like a Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee drama as they came to see that my being a teen queen transkid was not something I was going to grow out of.  It speaks highly of my parents working class liberal values that they did not throw me to the wolves by kicking me out and instead let me finish school.  Even encouraging me along with the yelling.

My mother read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique as soon as it came out in paperback.  When she finished it she handed it to me and said, “You really think you  want to be a woman.  You had better read this and learn what it really means to be a woman, maybe you will change your mind.”

It didn’t change my mind but it prepared me for the reality sandwich I had to eat when I came out in 1969.  The glow lasted perhaps a few days and then the analysis set in and I was on the path to becoming a full blown feminist as the alternative was unacceptable.

I can start fights among people with either transsexualism or transgenderism simply by mentioning the phrase “male privilege”.  Oh the denial and gnashing of teeth and the wailing claims of never having had male privilege, when simply not being made in to a little princess and being raised to be the subject and not the object is male privilege.

Buy the book.  Read it.  It is a Red Pill that helps you to see reality in a world where mass media fills our heads with bullshit aimed at selling us oppressive gender roles along with the cheap crap from China.

Posted in Culture, Feminist, Gender, History, Misogyny, Sexism, Social Justice, Unequal Treatment. Comments Off on Must Read Book Recommendation: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

Dennis Kucinich: Why Is It We Have Finite Resources for Health Care but Unlimited Money for War?

November 7, 2009 — Suzan

Why Is It We Have Finite Resources for Health Care But Unlimited Money for War?
by Dennis Kucinich, OpEd News

Friday 06 November 2009

Washington – Following a statement on the Floor of the House of Representative, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:

“Why is it we have finite resources for health care but unlimited money for war?

“The inequities in our economy are piling up: trillions for war, trillions for Wall Street and tens of billions for the insurance companies. Banks and other corporations are sitting on piles of cash of taxpayer’s money while firing workers, cutting pay and denying small businesses money to survive.

“People are losing their homes, their jobs, their health, their investments, their retirement security; yet there is unlimited money for war, Wall Street and insurance companies, but very little money for jobs on Main Street.

“Unlimited money to blow up things in Iraq and Afghanistan, and relatively little money to build things in the US.

“The Administration may soon bring to Congress a request for an additional $50 billion for war. I can tell you that a Democratic version of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is no more acceptable than a Republican version of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Trillions for war and Wall Street, billions for insurance companies… When we were promised change, we weren’t thinking that we give a dollar and get back two cents.”

Dennis Kucinich is a congressman from Ohio and a 2008 presidential primary candidate. http://kucinich.us/

Posted in Culture, Health Care, Human Rights, Politics, Questioning Authority, Social Justice. Comments Off on Dennis Kucinich: Why Is It We Have Finite Resources for Health Care but Unlimited Money for War?

Friday Night Fun and Culture

November 6, 2009 — Suzan

The Waitresses singing their big hit “I Know What Boys Like”

Posted in Culture, Gender, Questioning Authority, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Friday Night Fun and Culture

A Modest Proposal: The Future Role of Private Health Insurance

November 6, 2009 — Suzan

Over the past few days several articles have appeared that have simply given me pause to ponder moments.
One WTF moment was caused the following Headline from Raw Story

Democrats’ healthcare bill would pay for ‘prayer’ treatment

http://rawstory.com/2009/11/democrats-healthcare-bill-pay-prayer-treatment/
What the fuck?
Yet on Tuesday 11/03/09
By John Byrne reported

What do Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) have in common?

A soft spot for Christian Scientists.

The three senators have quietly inserted a provision into the Democrats’ healthcare overhaul that would allow the Christian Science church to receive remuneration from the federal government for prayer treatments as medical expenses.

Why are liberal Democrats teaming up with a conservative senator for a provision that would normally be the bane of the Senate’s liberal elite? Because the headquarters of the Christian Science church is in Boston.

“The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine,” the Los Angeles Times’ Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger, who found the measure, write. “While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against ‘religious and spiritual healthcare.'”

See the full story at the above link.

The news this week has been full of these What the Fuck stories of government kowtowing to the Christo-Fascists and helping them to install the Christer version of Sharia.

The same day the Washington Post ran the following:

Democrats’ concerns over abortion may imperil health bill

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/02/AR2009110203232.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Bloc could withhold support over fears of a governmental role

By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 3, 2009

While House leaders are moving toward a vote on health-care legislation by the end of the week, enough Democrats are threatening to oppose the measure over the issue of abortion to create a question about its passage.

House leaders were still negotiating Monday with the bloc of Democrats concerned about abortion provisions in the legislation, saying that they could lead to public funding of the procedure. After an evening meeting of top House Democrats, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) said, “We are making progress,” but added that they had not reached an agreement.

The outcome of those talks could be crucial in deciding the fate of the health-care bill. Democrats need the vast majority of their caucus to back the bill, since nearly all congressional Republicans have said they will oppose the legislation.

“I will continue whipping my colleagues to oppose bringing the bill to the floor for a vote until a clean vote against public funding for abortion is allowed,” Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said Monday in a statement. He said last week that 40 Democrats could vote with him to oppose the legislation — enough to derail the bill.

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, cast Stupak as “attempting to ban abortion coverage in the private insurance market.”

We already have Health insurance companies that will pay for dead dick pills for men whose gluttonous consumption of greasy fast food and obesity has led them to take medications that all have impotence as a side effect.  These same “Health Insurance” companies routinely refuse to fund not only abortion but birth control for women.

Any bets on their willingness to fund sex reassignment surgery?

I have an answer on that one courtesy of Brenda Lana Smith’s news mailing list.

US – Social conservatives are working to ensure that federal funding for sex change operations will be banned in the health reform bill.…

[2009-11-04 Politico]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29164.html

Conservatives shop sex ops ban to GOP

By JONATHAN ALLEN

11/04/09 9:00 PM EST

The federal government would be banned from funding sex change operations and other services for transgender individuals if social conservative activists get their way.

There’s no sponsor yet for an amendment to the health care overhaul – and it may remain in the dustbin of unrealized wedge issues – but culture warriors are shopping the proposal to Republican senators.

The language is written: “None of the funds authorized or appropriated under this act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be used to cover any part or portion of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of” any sex or gender reassignment procedure,  surgery related to such a sex change, hormone therapy for a sex change or pre- and post-operation treatments for a sex change.

A senior aide to a Republican senator said that a public insurance plan could easily end up covering sex-change procedures if that’s not specifically banned in the bill.

Follow the link above for the full article.
The misogynistic, homophobic neo-Nazi bigots of the Republican Party and their lynch mobs of bigoted thugs want the enforcement of Christo-fascist Sharia through the government in a manner that is the complete opposite of the intent of the framers of our Constitution.

Remember Jefferson posited a wall of separation between Church and State.  The Nazi like Republicans want the state to not only endorse their superstition based bigotry but to institute Christian Sharia in the process.

They embrace Confederate family values to the point where they ignore the 14th amendment to the Constitution.

I have come to see their “conservative” movement as growing out of the same ideological well spring as the KKK, the John Birch Society and Father Charles Edward Coughlin.  Nazis or Nazi sympathizers one and all.

They hated Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and later the “Fair Deal”, the War on Poverty even though it helped thousands rise above a life of poverty and despair.  They have warred against unions to the point where unions no longer protect the vast majority of workers who have seen their lives reduced to virtual slavery, subjected to the indignity of involuntary searches in the form of drug tests.

Employer provided health insurance is a luxury enjoyed by the rapidly dwindling middle class while many of us are on the stay healthy or die program beloved by both the rich elite scum who run the health insurance corporations and the Republicans alike.

But you can always trust the Nazi like impulses of the Republicans to attack women’s right to control their own bodies and now to attack the new sacrificial lambs, transsexual and transgender people.

And you can always trust the cowardly Democrats to cave to this as they cower in fear of being called socialists or communists.

So we see Democrats offering to include “Prayer Care”

I promised a modest proposal. Here it is.

Get the private health insurance companies out of the business by instituting National Health Insurance funded by taxes paid by everyone.  So what if the rightwing Christian Republicans object that they do not to fund this plan.  There have been a whole lot of imperialistic wars and worthless war toys I would have rather not helped pay for but I did because that is the price of citizenship.

Let the Republicans and Christians who hate National Health insurance opt out and buy private insurance that we could call, “Christian Care”.  Christian Care could cover make your dick hard pills and treatment with the money saved from not providing health and reproductive care for women.  They would of course cover all costs of quiver full artificially induced multiple births with the money they save from treating older women.  Since the only function many of these ultra right wing Christians see women as having is the pleasing of men and bearing of children they could save a bundle of money by cutting off care for women past the age of menopause unless their husbands buy supplemental “Christian Care” packages.

Since everything is in “god’s hands” in the first and last place (alpha and omega babble) Christian Care could use prayer teams instead of expensive surgery and trained specialists.

There was a reason why the right wingers of the 19th century formed the Know Nothing Party.

Posted in Atheism, Classism, Culture, Economic Issues, Employment, Feminist, Health Care, History, Human Rights, Male Privilege, Misogyny, Questioning Authority, Religion, Sex Change Surgery, Sexism, Social Justice, Socialism, Unequal Treatment. Comments Off on A Modest Proposal: The Future Role of Private Health Insurance

Nasty Girl

November 4, 2009 — Suzan

It appears the Christo-Fascists have managed to deprive their fellow citizens of their Constitutional right to equality once again.

The equal rights of citizens of a scapegoated minority group should never,  ever be put to the vote the way they were last year in California or this year in Maine.

About 15 or 20 years ago I saw a German film titled “Nasty Girl”.  It was about a young woman who set out to write a high school paper that would show how the people of her town were different from the rest of the Jew murdering Nazi scum.  Because they were nice people, kind, friendly and god fearing.

They had once again clothed themselves in denial and righteousness.  They had hidden their history, forgotten their recent past.

She was a nice girl when she started, everybody loved her and wanted to help her in her wonderful project that show how they were innocent of genocide.

Her high school paper was praised and won her a scholarship.

But then the cracks started to appear and she obsessively dug deeper and found her wonderful neighbors one and all had participated, had been Nazis who actively or tacitly participated in the shipping of their fellow citizens of the Jewish faith to death camps where they were murdered in a horrific act of genocide against which all other genocides are measured.

She was called a, Nasty Girl and became an object of hatred for telling the truth and exposing the core Nazism of her neighbors.

The genocide of the Jewish people of Europe started years before the active murder commenced.  It started in laws that officially made the bigotry against Jews the law.  It made them second class citizens in the eyes of the law.

Christians, particularly Catholics called the Jews “Christ Killers”.  When in point of fact, if historical fact and not mythology is at play in the Christ story,  it was the Italians then called Romans who arrested Jesus, put him before the mob, then murdered him.  Then like all good people blamed someone else.

Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine as well as Ethan Allen and others who founded this nation were Free Thinkers, basically  atheists and agnostics who saw religion as being used as a tool of oppression by popes and kings alike.  This is why Jefferson wrote of the need for a wall of separation between religion and state.

The world has seen way too much faith based genocide and horror.

In the 20th century Upton Sinclair, author and muckraking journalist wrote a book called The Profits of Religion, exposing the greed and hypocrisy that are the foundations of religion.

It has been said that if fascism comes to America (it already has) it would be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.  I might add it would start calling our nation the “Homeland”, institute a department of “Homeland Security”, engage in secret arrests and torture etc.

LBJ said when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “I fear we have just lost the south to the Republican Party for a generation.”

Nina Simone sang, “Mississippi Goddamn” and the good people decried the racism of Mississippi and the south with its Jim Crow Laws yet America was then and is now an Apartheid nation with ghettos and barrios set aside for black and brown people, especially of the poverty class.

Yet as bad as things are the Civil Rights Act of 1964 put on record the equality of African Americans and abolished the Jim Crow Laws.

The right wing shift of America has not been the triumph of conservative free market thinking. It has been the triumph of racism and bigotry.  Fascism wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross they have become smart enough to not publicly burn.

So now we live in a nation where corporations and big religion (as though religion is not just another money making enterprise) and Nazi values rule the nation.

A nation where the working class is reduced to the status of wage slave working to pay the loan shark credit card companies that made life possible and comfortable in a nation of stagnate wages and a falling standard of living.

A nation of people afraid of everything that would make their lives better from National Health insurance to unions and reindustrialization along with requiring the ultra rich elites to pay for the damages they have done to this nation’s economy and people.

I have watched the dumbing down of the people of this country with action movies guaranteed to generate fear and the demands for cops who step outside the law to protect us.  The creation of a world view so frightening that it sometime seems as though ever forth person has a concealed carry permit and is packing a gun.

Yet the creation of fear is not new. The same Christo-Fascists who are now scapegoating LGBT/T people in places like Maine came here as the Puritans bring with them the same harsh superstitious religion that made them anathema in their home land.  The drove Roger Williams from Massachusetts and killed a number of people in Salem because they thought they were witches.

In more modern times we had the first talk radio demagogue, Father Charles Edward Coughlin, an ultra right wing racist and Nazi sympathizer, who ranted about FDR being a communist.  In the process he became the role model for every right wing bigoted talk show host since then.  He spawned Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, Dobbs and their ugly harpy female counter parts Ingraham, Coulter and Malkin and the rest of the fear mongering peddlers of hatred and Nazism that has come to plague this nation.

I am a nasty girl.  I ask who the fuck is Godwin, some sort of Nazi symp or something?  Why should I not call these bigots and Nazis for the hate peddling whores that they are?

These pieces of right wing human garbage have called me a commie queer for  most of my life.  I am an atheist, not a Christian.  I do not turn the other cheek I fight back and I call upon others to stop mincing words.  Stop playing nice to the bigots.  Call them on being the un-American bigots they are.  Tell the world that they represent the Confederacy not America.

Speak up and denounce them as not representing American values but rather ugly fascist values and of being the same sort of peddlers of superstitious religious garbage as those Imans who have made the Middle East a hell hole.

Posted in Culture, History, Human Rights, LGBT/T, Religion. 4 Comments »

Assimilation Happens

October 27, 2009 — Suzan

One thing that should be obvious but often isn’t is that “transsexual” really doesn’t belong in the LGBT/T category once one is post-SRS.

It is there because of how laws and politics work rather than how lives are lived.  Discrimination in matters of employment and access to medical care are obvious issues.

WBTs have been called “separatists” for just going off and assimilating.  Calling people who post all over the place “stealth” is a bit of a joke considering how easy it is to track ISPs even when folks use sock puppet e-mail. But let’s assume that most people who have assimilated  are only out in the world of 3D to a select circle of friends or for certain purposes.

It isn’t some separatism for most of us.  It is lack of common interests.  I have known a number of sisters who were involved in the bar and even ball cultures, who found themselves excluded from those scenes once they had SRS.

Once you have had SRS queens no longer relate to you as being one of the gang.  If you do not limit your involvement in their scene they will ask you why and you find yourself labeled as both odd and having made a mistake.

Having a vagina others you to people who live as women but keep their male parts.  Queens put their post-SRS friends they used to see as sisters on pedestals and tell them how brave they are while gossiping behind their backs,  “Well, she got her surgery and thinks she is better than us (forgetting that they put us on the pedestal to begin with) so why is she still hanging around us?”

The message is that we no longer belong there.  Time to move on with our lives.

Of course the activists then accuse us of separatism and deserting the community while conveniently forgetting how every year at Pride Day the same dozen people show up and how most of the “community” is dressed in sequins and riding on one of the bar/club floats.

After a few years even when one is an activist being part of that same dozen people starts to feel like being part of a severely marginalized Trotskyite Faction.  What is the point?

Perhaps it is different for those who come out through the IFGE route but I suspect it isn’t.

I know it isn’t if one is part of Tri-Ess and actually comes out as transsexual, I’ve read Tapestry in the past and have heard the stories at gender groups of how old CD friends are uncomfortable and nasty towards anyone who realizes they are not transvestite but are actually transsexual.  I’ve had transgender friends tell me the same thing about how they were put on a pedestal when they went full time.  Told how lucky they are that they can now dress full time. Never mind that the transgender sister has taken the down elevator on the socio-economic scale.  Comments like that are why transgender sisters who live 24/7/365  call episodic transvestites fetishists.  It isn’t so much that they fetishize the clothes as they hegmonically covet the lives of sisters willing to pay the price in order to live their lives according to their inner needs.

The main reason I believe “transgender” should be limited to only those living 24/7/365 is because, like transsexuals they have their lives colonized and objectified by those of the transvestite class.

At the same time people who are transgender either  because that is where their internal compass has landed, or due to economic issues, face conditions the majority of post-SRS sisters are less likely to face such as violence, ghettoization and denial of both economic opportunity and social safety nets.

The Day of Remembrance will soon be upon us.  I post articles regarding the murderous violence and senseless slaying of TS/TG sisters even though it isn’t a part of my world where violence more often takes place in the form of denial of health insurance, loss of work due to layoffs and fraudulent financial practices on the part of corporations.

While I will mention DOR the likelihood of my going to an event is very slim.  Not because I am afraid of “outing myself” or because I am disinterested but more out of a sense of futility and having to work.  The same reason I missed Pride Day.  Going to something like this requires planning and the arranging of time, a commitment that conflicts with day to day life in a Nickel and Dimed world.

As time passes after SRS the world of TS/TG is less an active part of life.  Even for those of us who blog and consider ourselves activists.  It takes little effort for me to be transgender inclusive on so many issues.  I learned that while working towards adding gender and perceived gender to the hate crimes laws of California.  It isn’t like adding a few phrases that protect transgender folks to any bill aimed at protecting gay and lesbian folks really makes that bill harder to pass.

Yet there are so many causes, so little time and most of my causes are bigger than the identity politics of the “Transgender Community”.  Part of why I have called a moratorium on  name calling, other than feeling like it is sort picking on people who have a harder life than I do, and not wanting to add to their oppression, is that engaging in name calling takes energy away from more important causes.  Like universal health care, hate crimes laws, ENDA, Same Sex Marriage, defending the environment, women’s rights etc.

Of course my working for any of a menu of causes that are positive for me means automatically extending those protections to all.  See I’m not some Ayn Randian right wing moron who is all hooray for me, fuck you.  I actually believe in equal treatment and the right to human dignity.

But as I said assimilation happens…  Even for activists who step beyond identity politics.

It happens for most post-SRS folks without them even trying, indeed it sometimes seems that folks who remain crusaders almost have to constantly make an effort to make themselves visible as transsexual.  The exceptions to this are those who are physically obvious although working retail and having encountered many people whose appearances are different, even odd.  It sometimes seems that facial hair is the only real give away.   I don’t know about some folks but for most of us assimilation seems inevitable.

Particularly if you are authentic and not pretending.  The goal was to be a woman, SRS removes the ties that bind one to those who stay transgender and time does the rest.

Posted in Culture, Gender, Socialization, Transgender, Transsexualism. 6 Comments »

More about Infant Sex Assigning Surgery vs. TS Alien Space Abductions

October 24, 2009 — Suzan

Recently I received an e-mail from On the Issues magazine one of the many left wing and feminist publications I read.

And y’all thought I was brilliant enough to think up all the stuff I write and report on myself but I actually do quite a bit of research regarding some of the things I write and call upon a number of sources beyond the internet.  This one fell into my lap as I was pondering how to follow up last week’s major post.

I came to some pretty radical conclusions once I realized that both Tree and Laurent were compulsive liars who poisoned the entire pool of information regarding intersex people in a way that Agnes never did.

Remember Agnes didn’t let the doctors keep on thinking the conclusions they had come to regarding her.  I’ve been around long enough to recognize there are all different levels of honesty and ethics among those of us who were born transsexual but none the less I am saddened by the blatant liars whose sheer lack of ethics cause them to think nothing of creating a whole level of fantasy that both harms actual people with physically apparent intersex conditions and allows them to trash people born with transsexualism, a less obvious form of intersex condition.

The catalyst, the motivator for the original article was a “spazzer”* on a GID reform list who had loudly accused Dr. John Money of surgically mutilating her and making her into a boy.  This person posted from New Zealand.  This immediately set off my bullshit detector.  John Money wrote thousands upon thousands of pages reporting on research regarding the development of sex and gender.  He was in the nurture school but even he postulated that sex/gender identity was fixed before 18 months.  John Money didn’t do the circumcision in the David Reimer case that went awry.  For that matter, while John Money probably observed surgeries preformed on intersex/transsexual people it is highly doubtful he ever wielded the knife as he was a psychologist and not a surgeon.

Further his career as a professor and professor emeritus was at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and a world away from New Zealand. The story told by the spazzer combined both elements of ignorance regarding actual intersex with geographic improbability.

Nonetheless there non-consensual surgery is routinely performed on male infants, circumcision is at best of questionable medical value but considering the rarity of actual adult SRS prior to 1970 I found myself asking the question.  “What sorts of non-consensual sex related surgery are historically the most common?  The answers were circumcision, female genital mutilation and castration.

I also have the feeling that one of the more common cases dealing male infants is probably bringing down non-descended testicles along with hypospadias repair.

Many other forms of intersex are not apparent at birth.  Forms such a CAIS, extra x or y chromosomes or conditions such as those alleged of Caster Semenya have something in common with transsexualism in that they are not discovered until the person is later in life.

This brings us back to those basic procedures:  Male circumcision is perhaps the most widely practiced in the Western World.  It was initially circumcision gone awry that led to the unfortunate case of David Reimer, not surgery aimed at correction of an intersex condition.  While Dr. Money appears to have acted unethically and far too enthusiastically  regarding the opportunity to study some one with the potential to prove or disprove some of his theories regarding gender identity development, this was not dealing with an intersex person. Further, even though male circumcision is considered a simple procedure it quite probably has more consequences than commonly thought as well as more complications.

Female circumcision is a euphemistic name for a barbaric practice once far more wide spread than it is today.  While it is now most commonly found in Muslim as well as non-Muslim African nations it is still practiced in certain circumstances in the West.  As misogynistic and monstrous as this is this is not where I am going in this article.

Male castration is another practice that is limited in Western society.  Freud aside, males including male Doctors tend to view castration on someone else with the same horror with which they would view it if it were performed on them.

In the late 19th and early 20th Clitoridectomies were performed on girls and women as a way of curing masturbation.  Freud’s misogynistic theories may have inadvertently furthered this practice as he ascribed to the idea that clitoral orgasms represented an immature form of female sexuality and that wholesome mature female orgasms were vaginal.

As I said in the earlier piece on this subject in adult sex reassignment surgery it has always been easier to surgically reassign people from male to female.  Interestingly enough many of the early male to female procedures were aimed at creating a “sensitive vagina” rather than a clitoris and often left people like myself without a clitoris.

Male doctors place a high value on the role of women being to please a man, so much so they ignored the fact that natal female’s vaginas are not the source of orgasms and that their clits are.  What were they thinking?  Oh well this was before Our Bodies, Ourselves and feminist writings about the “myth of vaginal orgasms”.  On the upside as a result of the work of Lonnie Barbach and Betty Dodson as well as consciousness raising sessions at the Women’s Building in LA helped me find the remaining nerve bundles and with the help of a Hitachi Magic Wand I learned how to reach orgasm.

When looking at the probability of a number of alleged infant intersex procedures given the taboos that were until recently in place regarding adult transsexuals one has to assume that most of these procedures were aimed at placing the infant in the category they were perceived as truly belonging in rather than “reassigning the infant” based on arbitrary factors.

That brings us to the following article first published in On the Issues

The Tyranny of the Esthetic Surgery’s Most Intimate Violation
by Martha Coventry

Big clitorises aren’t allowed in America. By big, I mean over three-eighths of an inch for newborns, about the size of a pencil eraser. Tiny penises, under one inch, aren’t allowed either. A big clitoris is considered too capable of becoming alarmingly erect, and a tiny penis not quite capable enough. Such genitals are confounding to the strictly maintained and comforting social order in America today, which has everyone believing that bodies come in only two ways: perfectly female and perfectly male. But genitals are surprisingly ambiguous. One out of every 2,000 babies is born with genitals that don’t elicit the automatic “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” Many more have genitals that are perceived as “masculinized” or “feminized,” although the child’s sex is not in doubt.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends surgically altering these children between the ages of six weeks and 15 months to fashion their bodies into something closer to perfection. Everyone can then breathe easier, except for the child, who may well spend the rest of her or his life trying to let the breath flow easy and full through the fear and shame created by such devastating surgery.

On a November night in 1958, I was playing in the bathtub in the cheery, country home of my childhood. I was six years old. My mother came in and sat on the edge of the tub, her kind face looking worried. I glanced up at her, wondering, “Time to get out so soon?” She told me that I had to go to the hospital the next day for an operation. I knew this was about something between my legs. My chest felt tight and there was a rushing sound in my ears. I begged not to go. Please. But my mother told me only that I must. Not a word was said about what was going to happen or why. The next day, it took the surgeon 30 minutes to make a U-shaped incision around my half-inch clitoris, remove it, and put it in a specimen dish to send to the lab. He then closed the wound and stitched the skin up over the stump.

Take no comfort in the fact that this took place 40 years ago. Today, most parents and doctors in this country are still unable to see that a child has a right to her or his own sexual body, even if that body is deemed “abnormal” by their standards. If a parent is uncomfortable, a doctor can be found who will be willing to make irreversible changes in the child’s body, in order to ease that discomfort. My gynecologist told me about a case in which he had been involved the year before: A woman brought her five-year-old daughter to his office in Minneapolis; the mother felt that the child’s clitoris was too big. He examined the girl and assured the mother that her daughter would grow into her clitoris, which was no longer than the end of his little finger. The mother left. A few weeks later, he was called into an operating room to help another doctor who had run into trouble during a surgical procedure. On the table, he found the same little girl he had seen earlier. She was hemorrhaging from a clitorectomy attempted by the second doctor, from instructions he had read in a medical text. My physician stopped the bleeding, and managed to keep the girl’s clitoris mostly intact.

Continue reading full article at:
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/1998summer/su98coventry.php

Yet when one looks at all the “intersex” narratives in Transworld one rarely sees mention of this most common of all procedure and instead one hears all sorts of fantastical stories that there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of coverage of in medical journals.

Given the temptation to plead intersex surgical treatment as a reason for my less than perfect genital with their lack of a clitoral structure along with the graft site scar as a way of avoiding suddenly becoming “Transsexual Suzan”** in the eyes of someone I was hoping to develop a serious relationship with I can empathize with someone exercising that option.

However once that story gets repeated too many times by too many people giving into the same temptation we find ourselves faced with a fictitious monster of a transsexual created myth.  All created due to shame of admitting the truth about ourselves.

Call it stealth, call it compartmentalization of information or what ever you want but too many of us have lied out of shame and have created a myth that goes far beyond the harmless sweet loving lie of intimate relationships.

Further these trans-created fictions threaten to prevent serious research that may show a real biological cause from being taken seriously.

I promise that this is not the last post regarding this subject and that more will follow.

* “Spazzer” British slang for a person who fakes being learning disabled or simply fakes terrible ignorance to which they are firmly attached.

**”Transsexual Suzan”  One of the realities of our lives and one which encourages us to be stealth is that our medical histories supersede all other factors in our lives.  We could win a Nobel Prize and yet were our medical history to come out the piece of information that would precede our name would not be “Nobel Prize Winner” but rather “Transsexual” or worse “Transgender” ______ formerly _____ would  be deemed the most important aspect of our entire life and all our accomplishments.

Posted in Culture, Gender, Health Care, Intersex, Sexism, Transgender, Transphobia, Transsexualism. 5 Comments »

Pinked

October 21, 2009 — Suzan

Yesterday was my day off and we went to see the Michael Moore’s film Capitalism: A Love Story down at the Magnolia Theater in the Village.

Afterward we went to a Borders Books so I could use one of the discount coupons they bombard me with.  Among other things I picked up a paper copy of Mother Jones Magazine.

From Mother Jones Magazine

Articles like this one are reason enough to support the independent muck raking and nay saying publications such as Mother Jones and In These Times

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/09/code-pink

Code Pink

By Lauren Sandler | Mon October 12, 2009 7:00 AM PST

WHEN MY DAUGHTER WAS BORN about a year ago, I was suddenly buried in pink. The only gender-neutral clothing appearing on my doorstep was the brown uniform of the guy delivering piles of packages containing untold yardage of powder-pink cloth: pale-pink blankets to swaddle pale-pink diaper covers, monochromatic onesies and rompers that redundantly announced “baby girl” in contrasting embroidery. (Thank God my generous gift givers did not send any of those bow-festooned headbands designed to confirm the femininity of a bald infant.)

We’ve come a long way from my early-’70s childhood. Those were good days to be an ungirly girl: I wore work boots while sharing a sandbox with the progeny of some of the authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves. In those circles, it would have been absurd to suggest that girls’ clothing be exclusively stitched with butterflies and blossoms or that boys be clad in T-shirts emblazoned with something requiring an engineering degree to build. Such totalizing distinctions were seen as defunct at best, and at worst, harmful. Yet many of the self-described feminists who had dressed their own children in primary colors and overalls were now deluging me with enough pink to adorn a Barbie convention. What happened?

Maybe they were just buying what’s out there. Kids’ clothing stores are sharply divided into boys’ and girls’ sections, with no demilitarized zone in between. Healthtex touts its toddler boys’ line as “rich with fun, rough and tough images of cars, dinosaurs and animals in vivid bright colors”; its girls’ line is “adorable with flower art and embroidery in light and airy colors.” Restoration Hardware’s nursery designs are exclusively pink or blue, as is almost all of Pottery Barn’s kids’ line. Everywhere you look, American kids appear to be waging a national color war.

Despite the aura of old-fashioned wholesomeness that surrounds it, the pink-blue phenomenon is actually a fairly recent one. Only in the last century have American babies worn any color at all: Throughout the 19th century, children of both sexes were dressed in long white gowns. When gendered palettes came into vogue in the first two decades of the 20th century, boys were assigned pink and girls blue. This was a nod to symbolism that associated red with manliness; pink was considered its kid-friendly shade. Blue was the color of the Virgin Mary’s veil and connoted femininity. In 1918, Ladies’ Home Journal advised mothers that “pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

By the late ’30s and early ’40s, the color code flipped. It’s not entirely clear why—Shirley Temple’s light-pink dresses? Navy-blue wartime uniforms?—but by the time the baby boom kicked in, the his and hers hues we take for granted were firmly established. Pop psychology and salesmanship intertwined as trade publications urged clothing store managers to segregate boys’ clothing from girls’ after age two, since little boys “feared” being perceived as girly. In 1959, the New York Times quoted a children’s clothing buyer, “A mother will allow her girl to wear blue, but daddy will never permit his son to wear pink.” Conveniently, the fashion split also meant that families with boys and girls had to shell out for at least two separate new wardrobes—for the rest of the kids’ childhood.

Fast-forward five decades, and the marketing of color-coded gender differences has entered a new phase—one that author Peggy Orenstein has described as the “relentless resegregation of childhood.” Whether fueled by anti-feminist backlash, third-wave feminists reclaiming their girliness, or the trickling down of the Juicy Couture aesthetic, bruiser boys and dainty girls are big business. The ITP—infants, toddlers, and preschoolers—apparel market is expected to be worth $20 billion next year. Disney recently announced plans to expand its $4 billion Princess franchise, originally aimed at three- to six-year-olds, into baby products. The brand’s head told the Wall Street Journal that the move was merely a response to “highly gender aware” moms who’d tired of cute yet asexual characters like Winnie the Pooh. The Princess line even has its own dedicated shade of pink: Pantone 241. As Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist and the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—and What We Can Do About It, wonders, “In today’s hypermarketed world, what niche is easier to exploit than male or female?”

Yet beyond sapping parents’ paychecks and offending feminist sensibilities, does the current wave of pinkness actually have any negative effects on kids? After all, it’s not as if gender equality defined the epoch when babes were all tangled up in the lacy hems of white gowns. Pink itself isn’t the problem; it’s the message it conveys. That troubling message, explains Eliot in her sharp, information-packed, and wonderfully readable book, is that girls and boys are deeply dissimilar creatures from day one. She argues that the pink-blue split shapes some enduring assumptions about babies’ emotional lives—at a time when girls’ and boys’ brains are almost entirely alike. Eliot notes a study in which researchers concealed infants’ sex by dressing them in gender-neutral garb or referring to them by a popular name of the opposite sex. When adults were asked to describe the babies’ behavior, the “boys” were often said to be “angry” or “distressed”; the “girls” were thought to be “joyful” or “quiet.” Throw in some pink headbands and suddenly baby girls are from Venus.

Kids quickly get wrapped up in the pink-and-blue world. In an investigation into what was termed the PFD—Pink Frilly Dress—phenomenon, a team of social psychologists from New York University found that as early as age two, children’s sense of gender is heavily based upon notions of color and dress, with little girls becoming adamantly attached to pink. One mother reported that she had to prove to her three-year-old daughter that every single pink article of clothing she owned was in the laundry—literally showing her the soiled clothes—before the little girl would agree to wear any other color. (To be fair, that’s pretty typical picky toddler behavior.) Likewise, kids latch on to gendered toys like Thomas the Tank Engine (blue) and Dora the Explorer (pink). When offered a choice of a typical “boy” or “girl” plaything, three-year-old boys are 97 percent more likely to pick a toy like a truck.

Plenty of arguments have been made for why children gravitate toward trucks or dolls—boys like motion, girls are nurturing—yet no one has reliably proved that kids are hardwired with these preferences. As Eliot points out, “neither trucks nor dolls existed a hundred thousand years ago, when the human genome stabilized into its current sequence.”

But the theory that the PFD is rooted in our evolutionary past dies hard. Two years ago, neuroscientists from Newcastle University suggested that women are drawn to pinks and reds because their prehistoric ancestors had to be attuned to ripe berries and feverish infants. Early men, on the other hand, were connoisseurs of blue—a sign of good weather for hunting. Fortunately, most academic responses to this study suggested that it was a shade of bovine-manufactured brown.

But no matter how dubious their results, the media buzz about such studies adds to the popular suspicion that we can’t defy our evolutionary urges, which feeds back into the idea that it’s harmless—and maybe even essential—to indulge our kids’ inner princesses and train engineers. “The more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies,” writes Eliot.

Yet is pink really the gateway color to painting your nails in science class or an appearance in Girls Gone Wild? Buried in the PFD study is the reassurance that the pink phase is just that; many elementary-school-aged girls told the researchers that they had outgrown pink and now refused to wear it. Does that mean that these girls have also shed the “math is hard” mentality that we fear lurks in the folds of crinoline? Perhaps: Notably, the pink tidal wave has crested at the very moment that girls have caught up with—and often outperform—boys in the classroom. Now pundits and parents fret that it’s boys who are getting left behind, victims of a new bias against boyishness.

Clearly, trucks and tiaras are not destiny. Despite the racing set in my childhood bedroom, I still can’t drive a car, much less fix what’s under the hood. My closet is stuffed with high heels and dresses with cinched waists. I’d like to think that I chose my girliness, not the other way around.

And I’m ultimately more freaked out about the prospect of my daughter wearing tween-size thongs than pint-size princess outfits. Besides, I’ll admit that bright pink lights up her cheeks, and I’m happy to pair it occasionally with some cargo jeans from the boys’ department or a charcoal shirt. I’ve had quite a few of those on hand ever since I dumped a mass of pink presents into a giant lobster pot on my stove top, poured in some dye, and turned them a lovely shade of gray.

See Also: https://womenborntranssexual.com/2009/04/26/green-blankets/

Posted in Culture, Feminist, Gender, Gendering, Male Privilege, Misogyny, Questioning Authority, Socialization. Comments Off on Pinked

Ridiculous Study Blames Feminism for Non-Existent ‘Happiness Gap’ Between Men and Women

October 14, 2009 — Suzan
From Alternet:  Original posting at:

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/143260/ridiculous_study_blames_feminism_for_non-existent_%27happiness_gap%27_between_men_and_women_

By Barbara Ehrenreich, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on October 14, 2009, Printed on October 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143260/

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.

On Slate’s DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that “the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women’s complaints disguised as manifestos… and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act — in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs.” Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: “[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach… [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”

But it’s a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone’s mood.

For starters, happiness is an inherently slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend, so what am I really?

In one well-known psychological experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire on life satisfaction, but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For a randomly chosen half of the subjects, a dime had been left for them to find on the copy machine. As two economists summarize the results: “Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine — clearly not an income effect.”

As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called “ordered probit estimates,” do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: “Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006 women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category.” Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness — well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report — somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine — “contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006].” Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple.

Another distracting little data point that no one, including the authors, seems to have much to say about is that, while “women” have been getting marginally sadder, black women have been getting happier and happier. To quote the authors: “… happiness has trended quite strongly upward for both female and male African Americans … Indeed, the point estimates suggest that well-being may have risen more strongly for black women than for black men.” The study should more accurately be titled “The Paradox of Declining White Female Happiness,” only that might have suggested that the problem could be cured with melanin and Restylane.

But let’s assume the study is sound and that (white) women have become less happy relative to men since 1972. Does that mean that feminism ruined their lives?

Not according to Stevenson and Wolfers, who find that “the relative decline in women’s well-being… holds for both working and stay-at-home mothers, for those married and divorced, for the old and the young, and across the education distribution” — as well as for both mothers and the childless. If feminism were the problem, you might expect divorced women to be less happy than married ones and employed women to be less happy than stay-at-homes. As for having children, the presumed premier source of female fulfillment: They actually make women less happy.

And if the women’s movement was such a big downer, you’d expect the saddest women to be those who had some direct exposure to the noxious effects of second wave feminism. As the authors report, however, “there is no evidence that women who experienced the protests and enthusiasm in the 1970s have seen their happiness gap widen by more than for those women were just being born during that period.”

What this study shows, if anything, is that neither marriage nor children make women happy. (The results are not in yet on nipple piercing.) Nor, for that matter, does there seem to be any problem with “too many choices,” “work-life balance,” or the “second shift.” If you believe Stevenson and Wolfers, women’s happiness is supremely indifferent to the actual conditions of their lives, including poverty and racial discrimination. Whatever “happiness” is…

So why all the sudden fuss about the Wharton study, which first leaked out two years ago anyway? Mostly because it’s become a launching pad for a new book by the prolific management consultant Marcus Buckingham, best known for First, Break All the Rules and Now, Find Your Strengths. His new book, Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently, is a cookie-cutter classic of the positive-thinking self-help genre: First, the heart-wrenching quotes from unhappy women identified only by their email names (Countess1, Luveyduvy, etc.), then the stories of “successful” women, followed by the obligatory self-administered test to discover “the role you were bound to play” (Creator, Caretaker, Influencer, etc.), all bookended with an ad for the many related products you can buy, including a “video introduction” from Buckingham, a “participant’s guide” containing “exercises” to get you to happiness, and a handsome set of “Eight Strong Life Plans” to pick from. The Huffington Post has given Buckingham a column in which to continue his marketing campaign.

It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia” — the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women have been found to suffer from “Female Sexual Dysfunction,” or FSD. Now, it’s unhappiness, and the range of potential “cures” is dazzling: Seagrams, Godiva, and Harlequin, take note.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 16 books, including the bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harper’s and the Nation, she has also been a columnist at the New York Times and Time magazine. Her seventeenth book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books), has just been published.

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Posted in Culture, Feminist, Questioning Authority, Sexism, Uncategorized. 1 Comment »
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