Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Oh, they’ve got to be kidding. Next up: men prefer having muscles. Men show a preference for titties. Women like babies and chocolate.
But wait, there’s more news from these researchers: “Red was the color of a good ripe fruit,†Hurlbert said.
No! Surely not! Wait – does this mean that men prefer unripe fruit?
Enough, already. What I want to know most is how these people get funding.
(Thanks to Eileen for the link.)
Amazingly enough, getting larger breasts does not solve other psychological problems a woman may have.
You can read way more commentary about this than you’d ever need to at Feministing.com.
Do check out the website of a German artist, Martina Minette Dreier, and her portraits of people ‘Doing Gender’.
(Thanks to AO for the link.)
A woman on Hardball keeps referring to Hillary Clinton as a “radical feminist.” Um, for the record, Hillary Clinton is not & never was a radfem. Nope. Not. At. All.
What’s interesting is seeing an African American woman defend the use of the word “girl.” Interesting because I can’t imagine her defending an African American man being called or calling himself “boy.” For damn good reasons.
If Chris Matthews says “spunky” one more time I’m going to stuff a bra in his mouth.
I don’t care what Hillary calls herself. It was her vote on the war in Iraq that’s the problem.
So it seems that numbnut J. Michael Bailey has gotten more press, this time in a New York magazine article published in June that’s just now been picked up by feministing.com. Apparently Bailey, this time around, can tell whether someone’s gay by measuring their ring and index finger.
Next up: J. Michael Bailey gets taken seriously for telling people that they have the sissy gene by asking people whether they look at their nails by holding their hands palms down or if they bend the tops of their fingers over with their hands palms-up.
There’s a small clip about Samoa’s Fa’afafine third gender on a current episode of National Geographic’s Taboo. I haven’t seen the whole bit yet, but it’s an interesting slip.
(Thanks to Eileen for the lead.)
From The New Yorker:
(thanks to Joanne for sending it.)
A reviewer recently misquoted me as having written that I was called a “dyke” when I was a kid, when in fact the word I used was “butch.”
That mistake, while minor on the surface, has got me thinking.
The difference between the words is that essential difference between sexual orientation and gender presentation, which are often conflated in the first place, but which I tried to dissect in She’s Not the Man I Married. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t issues like this that cause some of the rift between the gay/lesbian community and the trans community; I’d imagine, for many masculine-leaning lesbians, “butch” and “dyke” are pretty much the same slur. But the thing is, “butch” bothered me – because it was true. I was butch. Being called a dyke never had the same effect, exactly because I knew myself to be heterosexual.
Of course reading that kind of error made me wonder about how much the critic could have actually gotten out of my book, or how much she might have been willing to get out of it. I’m fascinated by the ways gender variance is allocated to gay & lesbian people but not to heterosexuals; it’s a big theme of the book. For someone for whom the words “dyke” and “butch” are the same thing, I must seem like I’m splitting hairs. But the review, alas, did end:
(I)t’s an earnest book that might appeal to those questioning the nature of gender identity, marriage, and social attitudes about both.
& I did learn, quite a long time ago, the vital importance of being earnest.
While I was poking around project playlist last week in order to bring you a few of my favorite inspiring tracks, I found a reference to some gender-bending of the 80s. A b-side of a Dead or Alive single I don’t care about (although of course Pete Burns is still around & doing hir thing), but the other b-side mentioned was “Greta X” by Adam Ant. The song was written in the late 70s but only produced/released in the mid 80s, and it’s about crossdressing:
I’m a joyous glad TV
Why don’t you come TV with me?
I know a girl who loves to dress me
Up like this and then caress me
To remind me of the way
I used to go both night and day
In femininity there’s pride
We’ll marry soon, I’ll be the bride
& People wonder how I wound up this way, listening to such things at the tender age of 15!
& Yes, I have wondered if Adam’s a CD. I doubt it – he wrote songs about people into rubber and BDSM, too. (Though of course he could be into those things, as well, as far as I know; Amanda Donohue knows for sure but I bet she’s not talking.)
How do we know with transness that there isn’t just something in the brain that’s mistaken? I don’t mean that in a bad way. I say that from the position of someone whose body was gender variant due to a hormone imbalance. When I see people’s before/after photos, I see FTMs who are physically quite feminine (i.e., normatively physically gendered), with no excess body hair, few large jaws or big hands, who get regular periods, etc. Likewise with MTFs: pre transition can be quite masculine, with very male skeletal structures, musculatures, a lot of body hair. I see such externally “gender normative” bodies I’m even jealous, though of course there are trans people whose bodies are gender variant, in various ways, too, who have ovaries or testicles that don’t function right, or make too much of the “wrong” hormone, etc.
It’d certainly be simpler if trans people all had physical evidence of their gender variance but obviously that’s not the case. All people who have physically gender variant bodies due to hormone imbalance are not trans, either, of course. But when I read that a lot of FTMs have PCOS like me, that makes perfect sense. Or when MTFs have gynecomastia or no body hair. Continue reading “Princess Amygdala”