Not a Single Lady?
(what i love is how the dad reacts)
ENDA Petition
Sign the petition to Speaker Nancy Pelosi from the Courage Campaign and GetEQUAL.
Dear Speaker Nancy Pelosi —
With health care legislation passing, now is the time to institute workplace protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people by passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Rep. Tammy Baldwin says she believes that we have the votes to pass ENDA, and Rep. George Miller has said the bill is ready to come out of committee now that the health care bill has passed. As Speaker of the House of Representatives, we call on you to act boldly and decisively and bring ENDA to the floor for a vote now.
All Wood Paroxysm
Here’s a cool article about women being sports fans AND consumers. The way she describes things is exactly the way I feel, as a musichead, reading something like Rolling Stone, which is still aimed at the guys.
It becomes a vicious circle: you have female fans of whatever sport/band/computer game, but when they go online & try to find more information, or community, they’re smacked down with some incredibly sexist image of women that puts them off. So they don’t join the forums, and the only woman who got past the stupid sexist image of women on the main page feels like she’s the only one around.
Brizendine Brain
It’s part of my job to read stuff about genders and brains. Sadly, however, I have to slog through articles where the author, while talking about sex drives and teenagers, says this about teenage boys:
“This fuels their sexual engines and makes it impossible for them to stop thinking about female body parts and sex.”
As soon as I see a line like that, what any of my Gender Studies 100 students would call heterocentric bullshit, I know that I”m dealing with someone who is a gender essentialist – someone who believes in binary gender, that women are always female and always feminine, too.
But then I see something like this:
All that testosterone drives the “Man Trance”– that glazed-eye look a man gets when he sees breasts. As a woman who was among the ranks of the early feminists, I wish I could say that men can stop themselves from entering this trance. But the truth is, they can’t. Their visual brain circuits are always on the lookout for fertile mates. Whether or not they intend to pursue a visual enticement, they have to check out the goods.
I don’t doubt that plenty of men love breasts a lot, or that some of them get kind of stupid around them. But the assumption that women don’t do the same thing around breasts, if they like breasts, or in response to – let’s say big hands or broad shoulders – seems ridiculous, too.
What bothers me most is how insulting this idea is to the men I know. I love men with high libidos, and I love people with high sex drives. They’re my people. But the idea that any kind of lust is somehow uncontainable because of a person’s gender – please. Men are not apes; they can be subtle, use discretion, and get in a sidelong glance in when a woman isn’t looking. Actually drooling near cleavage is not required. That’s not asking a man to be less of a man – that’s just asking him to have some manners.
As I often like to say at the beginning of Trans 101, most of my job is undoing what people think they know about trans identities. Gender Studies 100 is all that x2, because sadly, these kinds of articles are everywhere, all the time.
Anyway, forget what Louann Brizendine has to say about “male” brains and “female” brains. The important thing here is that Brizendine brains come to whopping, unfounded conclusions about male and female behavior based on very little evidence. So be thankful you haven’t got one of those.
Wrong Picture
Wow. Just wow. I’m not even sure I can articulate how offensive this is, & in how many ways.
On a Landing
Not too long ago I went to what’s called “the Big Gay Conference” which is a conference for LGBTQIA ETC students who are attending colleges in the midwest. On Friday night, after we’d checked in and gotten Miss Bornstein checked in, I went down to register. As it turned out, there was a wedding going on the same weekend as the conference, so I found myself, name tag and schedule in hand, standing on a landing.
To my left, a cocktail party of the heteronormative variety: men in suits, women in cocktail dresses, hose and heels.
To my right, blue haired, pierced kids; boys in cigarette leg jeans; girls in ties, starched button-downs; trans people of many types.
I stood there for a while, hoping I had Moses’ staff, or at least his gumption, to ask for a parting of the waters that would provide a third, middle path. My life has been spent on that landing, really, popping back and forth between groups, hanging out in one because it’s where I feel more comfortable, but hanging out in the other because it’s the way I desire. Like Superman, I had to change clothes pretty often, and often with my clothes, my gender; I still long for a heterosexual space where I could be a het woman in a suit & tie, or for a queer space where I could be a woman who loves sex with men.
Sometimes, in rare moments, that third space appears: in the music scenes of the late 80s in NYC was one. Fetish clubs are sometimes another. But mostly I have had to decide between being with my people as a queer woman or pretending to be more gender normative than I actually am when I’ve had boyfriends.
NYS GENDA Call-In Day!
From TLDEF:
Last week, the New York State Assembly passed the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA). The only remaining obstacle to the bill becoming law is the New York State Senate. The time is NOW to take action and make our final push to get the Senate to vote to end discrimination against transgender New Yorkers.
GENDA would amend the state’s human rights law to ban discrimination in housing, employment, credit and public accommodations. It also expands the state’s hate crimes law to explicitly include crimes against transgender people.
We need you to call your Senator and the lead Senate sponsor Tom Duane at their Albany offices to tell them that you want them to bring GENDA to the Senate floor and pass it. We’re at a crucial moment and it is vital that they hear from you.
NYS Assembly passes GENDA
From the Empire State Pride Agenda:
The New York State Assembly has passed the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) for the third time. The Pride Agenda thanks the Assembly for once again taking a stand in support of transgender rights. We will post the final vote tally on “The Agenda” blog tomorrow.
Now, it’s time for the Senate to act! The Pride Agenda will be launching a GENDA Call-In Day to Senators statewide next week. Click here to tell your friends to sign up for our Action Alerts today so that they will hear from us next week when it’s time to take action!
The Pride Agenda just released the following statement regarding the Assembly’s passage of GENDA:Today the New York State Assembly voted by an overwhelming bipartisan margin to amend the state’s human rights law to include anti-discrimination protections based upon gender identity and expression. The bill (A.5710), known as the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), bans discrimination against transgender people in housing, employment, credit and public accommodations. It also expands the state’s hate crimes law to explicitly include crimes against transgender people. The Assembly has now passed the bill by large bipartisan margins the past three years; Governor Paterson has also said he will sign GENDA into law should the Legislature send it to him.
“Transgender New Yorkers shouldn’t have to live in fear that they lack basic protections and could lose their job or be denied a lease on an apartment or service in a restaurant just because of who they are,” said Interim Executive Director Joe Tarver. “In passing this bill, the Assembly continues to demonstrate its leadership on civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) New Yorkers. We thank Assemblymember Richard Gottfried for his sponsorship and support of this bill, as well as the Assemblymembers who voted to pass it.”
“The State Senate remains the only obstacle to passing GENDA. It is now time for the Senate to follow the Assembly’s lead and end discrimination against transgender New Yorkers once and for all by passing GENDA,” said Tarver. “Transgender New Yorkers can’t—and shouldn’t have to—wait any longer.”
Transgender people face severe discrimination in New York. A 2009 needs assessment of New York State’s LGBT community conducted for the Pride Agenda found that 20.7% of transgender New Yorkers have incomes of under $10,000 a year, and one-third are or have been homeless at one time; 28.4% have experienced a physical or sexual assault motivated by transphobic or homophobic violence that was serious enough to require medical care.
Twelve states and the District of Columbia have comprehensive laws banning discrimination based upon gender identity and expression, covering public and private sector employment as well as other areas of everyday life. Eight additional states including New York have executive orders covering public employees only.
According to a March 2008 Global Strategy poll, 78 percent of registered New York voters support passing a bill to protect transgender people. This support is strong across the state, including upstate (74%), New York City (79%) and the downstate suburbs (82%); and among Democrats (86%), Republicans (67%) and Independent voters (78%) alike.
Gender Normative
I had a student tell me of a new terminology that seems to be making the rounds: gender normative privilege, which would be, of course, the privilege of normative gender over non-normative ones.
It may be the excellent response I have been looking for to contend with the way cisgender often seems to mean transphobic to some. What I’ve noticed is that this cissexual has “dyke” yelled at her out of car windows and my lovely partner does not. It’s nice to have a word for her being normal, despite being trans, and me being odd, despite being cis.
Of course the idea of gender normativity isn’t new, nor is the idea of normative genders being privileged over non-normative ones. What is new is the idea that it further complicates that whole cis/trans binary I dislike so much.