Category: gender

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Karl Lagerfield is a PotatoHead

He says women who are upset by models being too thin are just fat ladies who sit on the couch and eat chips. I mean, honestly.

There’s a nice blog post about it by Susan Wagner, who in turn quotes Sherrie Gulmahamad:

This raises a rather dicey question. Do the gay men controlling the fashion world also control the messaging about *our* bodies – and is it wrong, considering gay men aren’t really interested in our bodies in the first place?

Which reiterates an observation that I’ve made more than once: that when I experience misogyny spoken by a gay man, it’s often far more offensive than the misogyny I hear from straight men. Not always by much, but straight guys, usually, mostly, kinda, like to have sex with our bodies, whether or not they consider us human and people & all that.

But I shudder to think about all of us modeling our looks after Mr. Lagerfeld, who looks like death warmed over – and warmed by those hot lamps they use to keep the fries hot at McDonald’s. Eeek.

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Stupid Tests

In an article detailing how some of Ms. Semenya’s people knew there might be something up about her gender, a CNN article blithely describes the history of gender testing:

The process of gender verification has undergone big changes since it was first introduced for international competition in the 1960s, the IAAF said.

The first mechanism involved “rather crude and perhaps humiliating physical examinations,” which soon gave way to mouth swabs to collect chromosomes.

There were too many uncertainties with mouth swabs, so the IAAF abandoned them in 1991 and the International Olympic Committee discontinued them in 2000.

A proper test has yet to be found, the IAAF said, and the current tests are considered a good interim solution.

Apparently it’s not at all a good interim solution, if an athlete that just won a race is now on suicide watch. Well done, assholes.

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Gendered Recession

& Here’s some classist bullshit from The NY Times. The question put to me by my friend who sent it:

“So, was working for women always a dog walking on its hind legs sort of thing? News: Upper class educated w choices have fewer than they’d like right now, but, don’t worry, their friends will hire them. What about the women who never had the choice and had to balance the job and the commute?”

Exactly. So for the record: this article is not about how the recession is affecting women. It’s about how it’s affecting a tiny tiny tiny privileged minority of women.

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ENDA Hearing

Support the ENDA Congressional Hearing on Weds, Sept 23, 2009.

Join the “Hearing on Inclusive ENDA” Facebook group, and get info on how to contact the committee members in and near your state.

Go to http://bit.ly/1ji00k for more information.

We are rapidly moving towards a vote. Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their party.

Jillian T. Weiss
Co-Chair, Inclusive ENDA

More ENDA links:

US Reps ENDA Spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/Q5YMJ
US Senate ENDA Spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/14TDll

Unconfirmed US Reps contact info: http://bit.ly/NUFUd
Unconfirmed US Senator contact info: http://bit.ly/45WGMc

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Jeez Louise This Whole Cisgender Thing

Since Alex Blaze took it on, & since we’ve been discussing this whole “is it okay to call someone who isn’t trans cisgender?” question on the boards, I may as well put it down here.

First, I’m going to claim a difference between cisgender & cissexual. Cisgender, the problem seems to me, is not the easy opposite of transgender. Cisgender implies, or means, or could mean (depending on who you talk to), that someone’s sex and gender are concordant. So your average butch woman, who is not trans, or is, depending on how she feels about it (see Bear Bergman), is now somehow cisgender. So is someone like me. So is a femme-y gay man who maybe performs a more gender normative masculinity for his job. That is, those of us who have variable genders, who maybe are gender fluid or gender neutral but who don’t identify as trans, are now somehow cisgender.

& Honestly, that’s bullshit. There’s a reason I use GVETGI to describe myself = Gender Variant Enough To Get It, is what it stands for.

So there’s the first issue, that “cis” may stand for “cisgender” and it may stand for “cissexual” but no one knows for sure which it is when it’s abbreviated. Crossdressers, for instance, are cissexual but they’re not cisgender. For instance.

Then there’s that little usage/connotation/denotation problem.

Telling me, & other partners whose lives are profoundly impacted by the legal rights / cultural perceptions of trans people, that we are “not trans” implies that we are also not part of the trans community. I’ve been saying for years now that we are. When trans people are killed, harassed, not hired, fired due to discrimination, denied health care, etc. etc. etc., their loved ones suffer along with them. Their families, their lovers, their kids especially. We are not just “allies.” We are vested, dammit, & a part of the trans community, so when “cisgender” comes to mean, or is used to mean, “not part of the trans community,” we are once again left out in the dark.

(Somehow, I can’t help thinking of the muggles & mudbloods of Harry Potter, here. Partners are the equivalent of the kids born to magical families who are not themselves magical. In the books & movies, they are part of the magical community, & without question. Ahem.) Continue reading “Jeez Louise This Whole Cisgender Thing”

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Nurture vs. Nurture

Another cool article that puts the whole “everything is genetically pre-determined” argument into perspective:

Yet there are differences in adults’ brains, and here Eliot is at her most original and persuasive: explaining how they arise from tiny sex differences in infancy. For instance, baby boys are more irritable than girls. That makes parents likely to interact less with their “nonsocial” sons, which could cause the sexes’ developmental pathways to diverge. By 4 months of age, boys and girls differ in how much eye contact they make, and differences in sociability, emotional expressivity, and verbal ability—all of which depend on interactions with parents—grow throughout childhood. The message that sons are wired to be nonverbal and emotionally distant thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The sexes “start out a little bit different” in fussiness, says Eliot, and parents “react differently to them,” producing the differences seen in adults.

The book is called Pink Brain, Blue Brain, & it’s by Lise Eliot. I’m looking forward to checking it out.

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Sex Difference Studies Suspect

Kudos to Scientific American and Lise Eliot – who published & wrote an article on sex brain difference studies, particularly the ones involving emotional sensitivity & the SG size in brains.

However, in both studies, Wood and colleagues added another test that reminds us to be cautious when interpreting any finding about sex differences in the brain. Instead of simply dividing their subjects by biological sex, they also gave each subject a test of psychological “gender:” a questionnaire that assesses each person’s degree of masculinity vs. femininity—regardless of their biological sex—based on their interests, abilities and personality type. And in both adults and children, this measure of “gender” also correlated with SG size, albeit in just as complicated a way as the correlation between “sex” and SG size. (Larger SG correlated with more feminine personality in adults but less feminine personality in children.)

In other words, there does seem to be a relationship between SG size and social perception, but it is not a simple male-female difference. Rather, the SG appears to reflect a person’s “femininity” better than one’s biological sex: women who are relatively less feminine show a correspondingly smaller SG compared to women who are more feminine, and ditto for men.

This article is some of the best writing on science & sex difference I’ve read – especially for lay folks who don’t want to tackle the work of someone like Fausto-Sterling.

It happens so rarely, but it’s so lovely when it does.

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Wearing Pants in Sudan

Women couldn’t wear pants in lots of places in the US until at least the 1970s, but in the Sudan, they’re still fighting tradition:

Sudan is partially ruled by Islamic law, which emphasizes modest dress for women. Mrs. Hussein, 34, has pleaded not guilty and is daring the Sudanese authorities to punish her.

“I am Muslim; I understand Muslim law,” Mrs. Hussein said in an interview. “But I ask: what passage in the Koran says women can’t wear pants? This is not nice.”

Mrs. Hussein even printed up invitation cards for her initial court date in July and sent out e-mail messages asking people to witness her whipping, if it came to that. She said she wanted the world to see how Sudan treated women.

The issue there is tradition, even if it’s being explained as a religious issue; here I’m sure it was pretty much the same kinds of arguments, all of them sexist bullshit.