Category: gender

Posted on

Ausperger’s: Girls Express Differently

I admit that this article really weirded me out, not becuase it’s a surprise that the medical commuity has failed to understand or diagnose Ausperger’s in girls particularly because their symptoms present differently (as the same for true for many years for women & heart disease, for example) but because her description of the way Ausperger’s presents in females is a little too close to the bone for me. I’ve already come out as an introvert, after all.

Girls slip through the diagnostic net, said Attwood, because they are so good at camouflaging or masking their symptoms. “Boys tend to externalise their problems, while girls learn that, if they’re good, their differences will not be noticed,” he said. “Boys go into attack mode when frustrated, while girls suffer in silence and become passive-aggressive. Girls learn to appease and apologise. They learn to observe people from a distance and imitate them. It is only if you look closely and ask the right questions, you see the terror in their eyes and see that their reactions are a learnt script.”

Girls also escape diagnosis, said Attwood, because they are more social than boys with the condition. Their symptoms can also be missed because it is the intensity of their interests that is unusual, and not the oddity of what they do.

“The impairments to their social life or interests tend not to stand out in the same way as boys’ do,” he said. “They might have one friend, while boys with the condition won’t have any. Also, boys hyperfocus on facts and certain interests, such as trains or weather. Girls escape into fiction. They have imaginary friends, live in another world with fairies and witches, obsessively watch soap operas or become intensely interested in celebrities.”

Hrm. The boldfaced bits pretty much describe my childhood & teenaged years in a nutshell. Frightening.

Posted on

A Kind of Love Letter

From the Best of Craig’s List Toronto, a kind of love letter from a straight guy to every “hot/nerdy/self-possessed/athletic/capable/charismatic lesbian” he’s ever met.

I guess we could just be buddies. I can resign myself to the friend-zone if you promise to go girl-watching with me once in a while. Maybe then you’ll see that I don’t want to “turn” you (for the sake of either ego or Jesus). I just want to get physical in a way that would make a straight girl’s over-sized purse explode. I fully trust you’ve got some knowledge to drop.

Don’t judge me, oh hot diggity dyke, if I don’t fit into your worldview. Just hold me once in a while and tell me that I’m simply another colour in our glorious rainbow.

Another queer heterosexual trying to work it out.

Posted on

TSA Wants Your Gender

& Unlike the million other times when calls went out that TSA might be especially suspicious of anyone who crossdressed, now it’s real: your gender is supposed to match your ID.

Their explanation, according to Polymorphous Perversity, goes as follows:

Many names are gender neutral. Additionally, names not derived from the Latin alphabet, when translated into English, do not generally denote gender. Providing information on gender will reduce the number of false positive watch list matches, because the information will distinguish persons who have the same or similar name. Consequently, TSA is including gender as a required element of the SFPD, which covered aircraft operators must request from individuals and which individuals must provide to the covered aircraft operator.

So theoretically, this is only about them telling the female Jordan Teller who lives in AZ from some male Jordan Teller who is a terrorist.

Theoretically.

Betty is already regularly hassled by the security people at airports, but not disrespectfully. She just knows in advance she’s going to get pulled out of line to explain why she looks like a woman and has an M on her license. Her attempts at butching up are downright pathetic these days, so that doesn’t really work either.

Posted on

High Heel Hob Playing

& A 1930 article about the high cost of high heels:

What that two inches off the ground means is a proportionate habitual displacement both of the foot, and of the whole body, in standing, walking, or running. Another thing it means is that any shoe which lifts the heels very much above horizontal has to be tight in front in order to hold back the foot that slides down into it by way of a thirty-degree slope. The foot either has to fetch up against something, or go through the front of the shoe. Anything that will stop it from doing that has to cramp the front of the foot, force the toes out of place and into grotesque positions, and play hob with what is already a bad business.

“Play hob” isn’t a phrase I’ve heard before, & I’m going to guess it’s short for “hobgoblin” and means something like “wreak havoc” or “make worse.” Anyone know the expression who can clarify?

Posted on

Pitiful Spectacle

This vocational guide for girls was published in 1919, a year before women got the right to vote. Note that they’re talking about adults or young adults, and hardly children. I love this passage:

“We have no right to interfere with the woman’s instinct to make herself beautiful. Rather we should encourage it, and should carefully instruct her in her impressionable years as to what real beauty is. It is almost safe to say that at present the principle by which the modern woman is guided in deciding the great questions of feminine attire is imitation. Incidentally, we may remark that nobody profits by such a mistaken foundation except the manufacturer, who moves the women of the world about like pawns on a chessboard merely to benefit his business. The society woman brings the latest thing “from Paris.” The large New York establishments sell to their patrons copies of “Paris models.” The middle-class shops and the middle-class women copy the copies. The cheap shops and the poor women copy the copy of the copy. Every copy is made of less worthy material than its model, of gaudier colors, with cheaper trimmings, until we have the pitiful spectacle of girls who earn barely enough to keep body and soul together spending their money for garments neither suitable nor durable—sleazy, shabby after a single wearing, short-lived—yet for a few ephemeral minutes “up to date.””

90 years later, & nothing has changed, has it?

Posted on

Money & Gender Stories

Here are some things that have crossed my path in recent weeks that I didn’t have time to blog about in any depth, but they are things that might interest you:

  1. A NYT article about lesbian communes:

    Behind a locked gate whose security code is changed frequently, the women pursue quiet lives in a community they call Alapine, largely unnoticed by their Bible Belt neighbors — a lost tribe from the early ’70s era of communes and radical feminism.

  2. The DABA Girls’ blog (DABA stands for Dating a Banker Anonymous. Briefly, this blog is the whining of women who are used to dating rich guys whose dates are a lot more broke than they were a year ago.)
  3. Why Natalie Dylan is selling her virginity
  4. Queercents’ series on transgender finances

(thanks to Joanne for the first three)

Posted on

Holly Would (Play with Gender)

Just got this cool press release which makes me wish I was anywhere near West Hollywood:

Grrrl, boi, lezbo, butch, femme, lipstick, drag king, trans, dyke, bulldagger, tomboy, genderqueer, one-way, kiki, power femme …

Each generation of lesbians uses new and different terms to describe how we present ourselves and what attracts us. GenderPlay in Lesbian Culture is the first ever Los Angeles exhibit to talk about labels and explore gender and its boundaries.

The OPENING EVENT, at the One Museum on Saturday March 14, will feature singer Phranc, emcee Marie Cartier and performance art from Latina trio, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan. Continue reading “Holly Would (Play with Gender)”