Category: feminism

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Pro Choice

Due to an emergency injunction, there is now one Planned Parenthood clinic that will remain open in Kansas. The plan, of course, was for there to be none.

I know there are a lot of people who think it should be that way, or who think that maybe that’s for the best. Most of us don’t like abortion. All of us, actually.I’ve never, ever met anyone who is “pro abortion”.

The deciding factor for me was that women who had money and means have always gotten abortions. It’s the poor women who can’t. Morality should not be bought so dearly. If women can get abortions quickly and easily, they get first term abortions. The more expensive and the further away the clinic, the more likely they will get 2nd term abortions. The more birth control they have access to, the more likely they won’t get pregnant.

It’s not really that hard to understand. Most of us don’t want to see second term abortions because the mother’s health is at risk and the whole conversation about when life starts gets more complicated. But you can’t force people to only get 1st term abortions if they don’t provide them with the means to do so.

Keep abortion legal and safe (which means keeping it local and inexpensive).

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WI Next to Defund Planned Parenthood

Good news Monday, bad news Tuesday night: Walker is planning on de-funding Wisconsin’s Planned Parenthood, taking a note from Indiana’s governor.

First: this has nothing to do with money. The cost of additional pregnancies, cancer care, & the like, will absolutely cost more, and the governor of Indiana has already said that publicly.

Second: the government already doesn’t pay for abortions.

Tiresome, hateful, short-sighted, and arrogant bullshit.

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Curves

I really liked this rant from a plus-sized woman about advice from Lucky magazine on how to hide/diminish her curves:

What I really want and enjoy is shopping for clothes that look good on the body I have. Although it might sound astonishing for some, looking GOOD doesn’t necessarily equate to looking THIN/SMALLER to a lot of us plus sized women. Curves aren’t an embarrassment that we need to wear pieces to diguise’em or use accessories to divert peoples attention from noticing my wide hips. They are there and I find no reason to disguise them…

I’m pleased to see a new generation telling fashion advisers where to stick it.

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JAC Stringer on Chaz Bono

“And speaking of wake up calls, he needs one about misogyny. He blatantly talks about how he believes in “biological differences” in men and women because T made him dislike small talk and has lost a lot of his “tolerance for women.” That’s not T, dude, that’s your misogyny! Lots of people get irritable for a couple months when they first start T, so if something kinda annoyed you before T, those first few months it might make you super annoyed or worse. Chaz probably just never liked certain things and now his “tolerance” is gone cause he’s got hormonal mood swings. He’s claiming its some “biological differences” in men and women, when really it’s his sexist stereotypes. Feministing gives Chaz the benefit of the doubt, assuming they were taken out of context via a known to be transphobic interviewer. But he wasn’t taken out of context when he repeats himself almost word for word on Oprah. Dudes got some demons over there, and none of them are feminists. Thanks for making all of us transguys on T look like macho jerks, Chaz, but at least it bought to a ticket as a socially acceptable “normal” guy.”

I couldn’t agree more. You can read more at Midwest Genderqueer.

Check this other critique by Nick Krieger, author of Nina Here Nor There.

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Coontz on Mothers

For Mother’s Day, a cool piece by Stephanie Coontz about moms. Coontz’s Marriage, A History is a great introduction into how our cultural memory of marriage is more wishful thinking than fact. So is her NYT article:

For their part, stay-at-home mothers complained of constant exhaustion. According to the most reliable study of all data available in the 1960s, full-time homemakers spent 55 hours a week on domestic chores, much more than they do today. Women with young children averaged even longer workweeks than that, and almost every woman I’ve interviewed who raised children in that era recalled that she rarely got any help from her husband, even on weekends.

In the 1946 edition of his perennial best seller, “Baby and Child Care,” Dr. Benjamin Spock suggested that Dad might “occasionally” change a diaper, give the baby a bottle or even “make the formula on Sunday.” But a leading sociologist of the day warned that a helpful father might be suspected of “having a little too much fat on the inner thigh.”

I’m not even sure what exactly that’s supposed to mean: can any of you explain that expression? I’m guessing it’s a bit of gender baiting, in the sense of more fat = less muscle and less muscle = not sufficient masculine, but it’s not familiar to me.

Happy Mother’s Day, moms and non-moms and dads. For me, to be honest, this day is a very pleasant reminder of why I’m child-free.

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What Does a Feminist President Look Like?

Oh yes: Not just Obama, but his VP Joe Biden, who in a recent interview on NPR about rapes on college campuses, said plainly:

Look, folks, rape is rape is rape.

Among the points made by the administration, are:

— When a woman brings a complaint that she was a victim of assault, a school cannot punish her for using alcohol or drugs. In most allegations of sexual assault, alcohol is involved. Laws in every state say when a woman is drunk to the point of passing out, she can’t give consent. But some women have complained that when they went to school administrators to say they’d been sexually assaulted, they ended up getting punished for breaking school rules on drinking or using drugs.

— Schools must fully inform a person who brings a complaint of her or his (men are victims in about 6 percent of assault cases, according to federal officials) rights to an investigation and then they must be told the outcome of the investigation. Some schools thought they could not tell the victim the result of an investigation because it would violate the privacy of the alleged perpetrator.

— Even if a student is said to have assaulted another student in off-campus housing, the school must investigate.

— Schools must investigate in a timely manner. Some schools told women they could not get involved until after local police completed a criminal investigation. That often left a woman on campus — and even in the same dormitory or classrooms — with the man she said had assaulted her.

I would like to see this same points used to investigate accounts of hate crimes, too.

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Missing Girls

News from that radical feminist magazine The Economist states that Indian females seem to be missing:

NEW data from the 2011 Indian census show that there are now 914 girls aged 0-6 years old for every 1,000 boys of the same age, or 75.8m girls and 82.9m boys. A cultural preference for sons and the increasing availability of prenatal screening to determine a baby’s sex have helped contribute to a worsening in the ratio (from 927 in the previous census in 2001), which has been deteriorating rapidly even as the ratio for the population as a whole has improved. A decline was recorded in 28 of the country’s 35 states and territories, among which there is wide variation; from 830 in the northern state of Haryana to 973 Meghalaya in the east.

The articles goes on to point out that the Chinese are facing a similar problem.

& Here, my dear trans readers, is the problem with being born with a vagina: too often, it means you don’t get to be born at all. Granted, if transness were viewable in the womb, most trans people wouldn’t get to be born, either.

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Women’s History Month: Sylvia Rivera

For the last day of Women’s History Month, I give you Sylvia Rivera, proud, out, trans woman who participated in the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, and only a year later watched as gender and trans rights were disappeared from the new Gay Rights’ movement’s agenda.


On June 27, 1969, Rivera was in the crowd that gathered outside the Stonewall Inn after word spread that it had been raided by police. The sight of arrested patrons being led from the bar by authorities riled the crowd, but it was Rivera who threw one of the first Molotov cocktails that actually initiated the riots and sent Stonewall into the history books.

In 1970 Rivera joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) and worked on its campaign to pass the New York City Gay Rights Bill. She attracted media attention when she attempted to force her way into closed-door sessions concerning the bill held at City Hall. In spite of Rivera’s (and other drag queens’) participation in the GAA, the organization decided to exclude transgender rights from the Gay Rights Bill so that it would be more acceptable to straight politicians.

Rivera was shocked and betrayed by this decision. She also became disillusioned with the gay rights movement in general and dismayed by the backlash against drag queens that had developed by the mid-1970s.

Perhaps already sensing that transgendered people could not rely on the gay rights movement to advocate for their civil rights, in 1970 Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson had formed a group called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.). The members of this organization aimed to fight for the civil rights of transgendered people, as well as provide them with social services support.

At this time, Rivera and Johnson began operating S.T.A.R. House in the East Village, which provided housing for poor transgendered youth. S.T.A.R. House lasted for two years, but was then closed because of financial and zoning problems. Although in existence only a short time, S.T.A.R. House is historically significant because it was the first institution of its kind in New York City, and inspired the creation of future shelters for homeless street queens.

Shelters seems like an exaggeration, since the only other I know of is Transy House (which was around the corner from where we lived in Park Slope). I’m pleased to see the Day of Silence and GLSEN are honoring her as well this year.