Category: gender

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“Curing” the Sissy: Anderson Cooper Tonight

Tonight, Anderson Cooper 360 is doing a show on the reparative therapy offered one male child to “cure” him of his effeminate behavior.

Box Turtle Bulletin has a complete breakdown of the events of Kirk’s life as well as information on the doctors who were responsible for this “therapy”.

Activist Abigail Jensen adds that she is upset “about the erasure, at least in the headlines of this & Anderson Cooper’s upcoming special report, of the fact that this story is as much about treating children who may be transsexual, as it is about children who may be gay.”

His brother Mark says the therapy “turned his light switch off”.

I fully expect more and more families will step forward about this kind of therapy as a result of this documentary, and I’m thankful to Anderson Cooper and team for doing it. This is NOT a historical issue; reparative therapy is still “offered” to gender variant children. For a more recent take, do read D. Scholinkski’s The Last Time I Wore a Dress

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The Revolution: Taylor Mac

Lawrence King was killed in 2008 and Taylor Mac performed this piece that same year – the very first year I taught Transgender Lives at Lawrence. Ever since then I’ve shown this video, but somehow failed to put it here.

I love this piece so much, and it’s so good to see Taylor Mac getting credit from the likes of PBS. He’s a very old friend of ours who acted with Betty in an era that seems like a lifetime or two ago now.

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Writing About Bodies

Dean Spade recently wrote a short piece about how we might use language to de-gender bodies. It’s smart and concise – just as you’d expect from Dean Spade.

About Purportedly Gendered Body Parts

I have been thinking about how much I would like it if people, especially health practitioners, exercise instructors and others who talk about bodies a lot, would adjust their language about body parts heavily associated with gender norms. Lots of people who identify as feminists and allies to trans people still use terms like “female-bodied,” “male body parts,” “bio-boy,”and “biologically female.” Even in spaces where people have gained some basic skills around respecting pronoun preferences, suggesting an increasing desire to support gender self determination and release certain expectations related to gender norms, I still hear language used that asserts a belief in constructions of “biological gender.” From my understanding, a central endeavor of feminist, queer, and trans activists has been to dismantle the cultural ideologies, social and legal norms that say that certain body parts determine gender identity and gendered social characteristics and roles. We’ve fought against the idea that the presence of uteruses or ovaries or penises should be understood to determine such things as people’s intelligence, proper parental roles, proper physical appearance, proper gender identity, proper labor roles, proper sexual partners and activities, and capacity to make decisions. We’ve opposed medical and scientific assertions that affirm the purported health of traditional gender roles and activities and pathologize bodies that defy those norms. Continue reading “Writing About Bodies”

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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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DOL Adds Gender Identity to EEOC

Good to see.

TLDEF applauds the United States Department of Labor’s announcement yesterday that it has taken steps to protect its transgender workers from employment discrimination. The Department of Labor added gender identity as a protected category in its equal employment opportunity statement. The policy applies to all hiring, promotion and disciplinary practices for the approximately 17,000 employees of the Department of Labor.

“Whether in private or public employment, what matters is not who you are, but how you do your job,” said TLDEF executive director Michael Silverman. “The Department of Labor now joins the many public and private employers that have recognized that discrimination is bad business. We applaud Labor Secretary Hilda Solis for her leadership on this issue.”

Transgender people face tremendous discrimination in the workplace. In a recent survey, 47% of transgender people reported being fired, or denied a job or promotion, just because of who they are. In a recent case, TLDEF filed a lawsuit on behalf of a transgender man who was fired from a male-only job solely because he is transgender.

“Employers like the Department of Labor set an example for other employers to follow. It is a great day when diversity is embraced and discrimination is rejected in the workplace,” added Silverman.

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Pakistan Allows Third Gender

Pakistan has recently adopted a new law that allows people who don’t identify as male or female to choose another gender on identity documents.

Allows is the key word. They don’t require it. It seems like a good thing – not just for those who are third gender, but for those during transition, and for those who don’t have passing privilege.

If only we could manage something similar here.

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Survey: By & For

There’s a new cool survey out for – and more importantly, by – trans people. Non trans people can take it too: it examines attitudes about self, gender, & relationships. The researcher explains:

My advisor and I are painfully aware that most surveys in psychology are not inclusive of—or even recognizing of—trans spectrum identities because we ourselves have trans spectrum identities. Specifically, I am genderqueer and Professor Tate is a transgender woman (who is also genderqueer as butch-presenting). Thus, we do not see ourselves and our experiences represented very well in the status quo of psychology research. We are therefore personally as well as professionally motivated to change the way psychology studies transgender and genderqueer identities. Yet, we need your help to do this well. We need our voices to be heard.

More below the break.

Continue reading “Survey: By & For”

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Passing Privilege and Maine Politics

Last week, Jennifer Finney Boylan spoke to the Maine legislature over gender inclusion in Maine’s non discrimination laws. She writes:

Yesterday, I spoke to the Maine legislature’s Judiciary committee. A bill has been proposed to “exempt” transgender people from protections under the Maine Human Rights Act, which went into effect six years ago. Currently, Maine protects GLBT people from discrimination, and this includes a so called “public accommodations” provision of the very sort that was, in part, the deal breaker in the Maryland law that was shelved last week. (Although I should make it clear that the Maine law has been on the books for six years without problem, and the proposed legislation is to REMOVE the protection for trans people; Maryland currently has no such provisions and the shelved legislation would have put these protections into place.)

She made some lovely remarks to the Maine legislature’s judiciary committee, which she’s reprinted in full on her blog, but the issue that comes up is that of passing privilege: how people are more than ready to have trans people who pass in their transitioned gender protected and welcomed in gender-specific spaces, but that the people who don’t pass are suspect.

That’s obviously a problem, since it’s exactly the trans people (and cis people, for that matter) who don’t have “acceptable” or culturally legible genders that need the protection most. No one asks for anyone’s ID on the way into a public bathroom after all; we are carded by our gender expression, and if our gender isnt normative, there’s often trouble, whether the person is trans, butch or some other gender that doesn’t stick closely enough to “man” or “woman”.

A quick thanks to Boylan for the heads up and for speaking up, too.