Category: gender

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Employment Non-Discrimination

On Twitter, Gunner Scott of GenderCrash directed me to the new Obama-Biden administration’s employment policy, which says:

The Obama-Biden Transition Project does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or any other basis of discrimination prohibited by law.

Note the bold print.

Feministing points out that the CT Employment Law Blog has stated that this “signals a dramatic shift in the hiring practices of the executive branch because current law does not prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity.”

So not only is this a proposed change or ideological shift, but an actual policy change has already happened with the Obama-Biden administration.

I told y’all they were hip to gender!

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Weiss Woman

More and more we’re starting to see some very serious venues take on some aspect of trans issues, whether it’s 20/20 last year with GID and trans youth or The Atlantic Monthly’s current article on the same topic.

But I didn’t really expect Harvard Business Review to publish an article about workplace issues, or rather, I wouldn’t have if I didn’t know how fantastic Jillian Todd Weiss is.

I had transitioned from male to female in 1998, and my new employer neither knew nor suspected that I was transgender. Now I was receiving the condescending treatment that some of my female colleagues had complained about all along. After several such incidents, I quietly left the practice of law, never to return. As a male attorney, my competence had never been questioned so harshly by my employers, so I assumed that reports of gender discrimination were bogus complaints brought by females who didn’t measure up. As a male, I had been privileged, though I didn’t know it at the time, to avoid much of the harsh treatment reserved for females in a male bastion.

I didn’t know Ms. Weiss before her transition so I can’t say “I told you so” but I’m going to anyway! No, women aren’t blowing smoke up anyone’s ass about this stuff. I appreciate her honesty in admitting she thought they were “bogus complaints” and am pleased to know that transitioners, as I expected, are turning out to be the last tool in the feminist toolbox.

It’s one of the reasons I find the slogan “equal pay for equal work” problematic, because so much of the struggle is getting people to see your work as equal to your male peers’ — even when it’s superior.

(via Bilerico)

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Growing Up Stupid

This study, about how Americans discourage the highest level of math genius, is far more interesting than all the ink we waste on the differences between boys’ and girls’ math skills. To me, this is the great American tradition of anti-intellectualism at its worst. My guess, of course, is that the lower you go on the socio-economic scale, the more pervasive these ideas are.

I had friends stomp on my report cards. Me and other smart working class kids weren’t exactly encouraged. I feel very lucky that my emotional needs to be smart outweighed all the discouraging influences; as with other kids from big families, being smart got me attention from my teachers, attention that was a little lacking at home. Because otherwise, being good at math came with major social stigma, and most of the young women I’ve met at colleges seem to have developed a reflexive “fuck you, I can do math” kind of attitude that keeps them safe.

That they should need it is the sore point. We celebrate athletic prowess, the people who make the top 1%, but not in intellectual arenas. Oh, this country. Maybe having an actual smart guy for president will change that & start to filter down, & kids might want to grow up to be something other than an NBA star.

De-gendering this stuff really points up actual real problems that need to be dealt with.

(h/t to Lena for sending me the article)

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Gendered Dining

I really do love the NYT. They put me in touch with rare tribes of people & exotic types of lives I wouldn’t know otherwise: in this case, the fine dining set, who worry about whether women are served first.

I didn’t even know that was the tradition, prole that I am.

Five years ago, she said, she often had to fight to get servers to let her be the point person for a group of men and women dining together. Servers had a stubborn tropism toward the men.

But lately, she said, that hasn’t been as true, especially downtown, where she has noticed that if she makes the first eye contact with a server and seems the most inquisitive and purposeful, the server notices, and responds to it. “Body language is recognized in a way it wasn’t before,” Ms. DeLozier said. “I think it’s possible for a woman to take the lead now.”

Those nutty folks downtown, treating women & men as equals. Still, a point I’ve made in the past & which this article shores up is that the more formal you get, the more gendered things are. My usual example is formal clothes – traditional tuxes/suits vs. gowns and LBDs – but dining, and wine selection, are apparently other good examples. What interesting to me is that when the restauranteurs have tried to de-gender things, the diners have asked that they serve ladies first. You can lead a snob to water…

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Albanian Sworn Virgins in Decline

The tradition of Albanian Sworn Virgins is dying out, & the implication is that it’s dying out because women can now do things that women weren’t allowed to do before:

This is the last generation of sworn virgins, according to Aferdita Onuzi, a professor at Tirana’s Cultural, Anthropology and Arts Research Institute. In Albania these days, women enter parliament, government ministries, and the police force.

But I wonder if it’s as simple as that, since homosexuality became legal in Albania in the 1990s, too, and surely this was one path for a woman who didn’t want to marry the man chosen for her – either because she didn’t like him or didn’t like men.

(Much thanks to Caprice; we have a few other posts about the tradition on the MHB boards.)

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Felinity

I can honestly say I’m baffled by this New York Times article, because I’ve grown up with men who like cats, from my brother to my friend Peter to many other guys I’ve known over the years, most of whom aren’t gay, if you need to know. I had a friend when I was 20 or so who always said, “Never date a man who doesn’t like cats” (which I found to be pretty good advice, actually, even if I didn’t always heed it).

So have I just been in some alternative universe? (Yes, I know I have. But still. Do people really know guys who won’t admit to liking cats?)

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Genderqueer Vid

Has anyone watched this genderqueer video called Gender Rebel that was on Logo? You can watch the whole thing online (which is good, since we don’t get Logo).

The middle part, where Lauren and her partner try to explain genderqueer to Lauren’s aunt, and how they don’t think of themselves as a lesbian couple, is really interesting. The aunt is a lesbian in Howard Beach – notoriously macho, Italian, racist Howard Beach – who doesn’t get it, but I love that she says “I’ll fight to the death for you.” Which to me is mostly what counts.

There are more episodes planned, but I suspect every person who identifies as genderqueer will define it – and present it – differently than the next.

At 19, had this term existed then, I probably would have identified as genderqueer, though I’m still waiting to find a natal female who is genderqueer that dates boys. That is, it still seems a term used by those in the lesbian community, which is why I understand Lauren’s aunt’s confusion. To an “old school lesbian” genderqueer just looks like butch by another name. Even if it isn’t.

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Gendered Policy

Dorothy Samuels wrote a great Op-Ed for The NYT on the whole issue of Wasilla charging rape victims the cost of their rape kits and forensic exams.

In the absence of answers, speculation is bubbling in the blogosphere that Wasilla’s policy of billing rape victims may have something to do with Ms. Palin’s extreme opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape. Sexual-assault victims are typically offered an emergency contraception pill, which some people in the anti-choice camp wrongly equate with abortion.

My hunch is that it was the result of outmoded attitudes and boneheaded budget cutting.

Mine too, but that’s still not an excuse, and we deserve an explanation. As Tony Knowles said:

“We would never bill the victim of a burglary for fingerprinting and photographing the crime scene, or for the cost of gathering other evidence,” said Alaska’s then-governor, Tony Knowles. “Nor should we bill rape victims just because the crime scene happens to be their bodies.”

And in case you’re wondering if there was any Federal effort to keep states from charging the victims, here you go:

That’s why when Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, drafted the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, he included provisions to make states ineligible for federal grant money if they charged rape victims for exams and the kits containing the medical supplies needed to conduct them. (Senator John McCain, Ms. Palin’s running mate, voted against Mr. Biden’s initiative, and his name has not been among the long list of co-sponsors each time the act has been renewed.)

This is probably the best example of why having a woman in office means almost nothing if her policy is blind to the needs of women.