So this is the cover of this week’s New York magazine about CEO Martine Rothblatt: her in a masculine suit, shoes, even a blue button down, hair pulled back. What’s more interesting is that she was not “butched up” for this shot but defines herself as not binary, and has echoed a lot of genderqueer sentiment:
Hence, the legal division of people into males and females is as wrong as the legal division of people into black and white races.” Instead, she suggested people might better express their gender and sexual identities on a spectrum…
Because of course this woman is someone who was declared male at birth. And the whole “used to be a man” phrase is getting old and even, I’d argue, a little passe. For someone like Rothblatt, who did spend a considerable number of years in the world as a man, that point might be relevant. Relevant why? Because there is such a death of female CEOs and even the ones there are don’t get paid nearly as much as the male ones. From the aricle:
On a recent list of America’s 200 highest-paid CEOs, only 11 were women, and their median pay was $1.6 million less than their male peers.
So yes, there’s even income inequality at the very highest levels of pay. She is also still married to her wife of 33 years who stayed with her through transition and describes herself as “Martine-sexual” (which sounds amazingly familiar, as I used “bettysexual” forever & ever). Here’s a bit I found amazing, and it’s kind of tossed off in the telling of the story of how Rothblatt came to create her company:
Raising money from her friends was easy. Martine’s transgendered status may even have been an asset, for it burnished her status as self-made, a pioneer.
And I just LOVE that, the idea (finally!) that trans is perhaps an ASSET, that it implies an individual’s ability not just to be self-made, but to be determined. Overall, interesting article about a highly eccentric person – eccentric because she’s rich, natch – and some passing mention of cyborgs and AI and the robot she made of her wife.
I guess I’m a little disappointed that a trans woman who’s that incredibly wealthy seems to have no interest — at least, none that’s mentioned — in using some her wealth to help other trans people, rather than devoting her efforts to building robot heads of her wife and attaining immortality.
Wow. She’s like the poster child for intersectionalism. She shows that if you’re white enough and wealthy enough, with all the right connections, teh trans isn’t much of an issue.
Rather depressing from a purely feminist perspective though. One could easily surmise that the reason she’s better paid than al the other female CEOs is that she’s not, well, particularly feminine. And that she carries a huge pile of male privilege from before transition.
well that’s the whole thing about being out as trans, too. sometimes i get the feeling that means people think of a trans woman as *really* a man, and treat her accordingly.
other than the piles of privilege, yes. but i do like that she makes a point of saying that her own experience is not like other women’s, & honestly, i like smashing that glass ceiling no matter who does it.
You may want to change the “death” to “dearth.” “Because there is such a death of female CEOs and even the ones there are don’t get paid nearly as much as the male ones.”
As for the article. I’m fine with Martine Rothblatt. How she identifies is not any of my business. I have a problem with people questioning her identity because she doesn’t look stereotypically female. When are we going to get past thinking that men and women are supposed to look a certain way? And, when are we going to quit thinking about how one may have been assigned at birth has anything to do with the authenticity of their gender identity?