Tag: health

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Five Questions With… Richard M. Juang

Richard JuangAlthough Richard M. Juang is an otherwise studious English professor, I came to know him through my participation with the NCTE Board of Advisors, and increasingly found him to be gentle and smart as a whip. We got to sit down and talk recently at First Event, where he agreed to answer my Five Questions.

(1) Tell me about the impetus that lead to writing Transgender Rights. Why now? Why you, Paisley Currah, and Shannon Price Minter?
Transgender Rights helps create a discussion of the concrete issues faced by transgender people and communities. Our contributors have all written in an accessible way, while also respecting the need for complex in-depth thought, whether the topic is employment, family law, health care, poverty, or hate crimes. We also provide two important primary documents and commentaries on them: the International Bill of Gender Rights and an important decision from the Colombian Constitutional Court concerning an intersex child. Both have important implications for thinking about how one articulates the right of gender self-determination in law. We wanted to create a single volume that would let students, activists, attorneys, and policy-makers think about transgender civil rights issues, history, and political activism well beyond Transgender 101.Transgender Rights

One of the things the book doesn’t do is get bogged down in a lot of debate about how to define “transgender” or about what transgender identity “means”; we wanted to break sharply away from that tendency in scholarly writing. Instead, we wanted to make available a well-informed overview about the legal and political reality that transgender people live in.

Oddly enough, Shannon, Paisley and I each did graduate work in a different field at Cornell University in Ithaca NY. (Apparently, a small town in upstate New York is a good place to create transgender activists!) The book represents a cross-disciplinary collaboration where, although we had common goals for the book, we also had different perspectives. The result was that, as editors, we were able to stay alert to the fact that the transgender movement is diverse and has many different priorities and types of activism.

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UNICEF Reports: Equal Women Raise Better Children

Okay, that’s not exactly what they reported, but to my mind, it pretty much is:

“Gender equality and the well-being of children are inextricably linked,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “When women are empowered to lead full and productive lives, children and families prosper.”

For some people I guess the idea that women need to be equals and to make important decisions about family resources still needs to be made, and for them, UNICEF has created a report that delineates exactly how and why:

The State of the World’s Children 2007 report finds that equality of women produces a “double dividend,” allowing empowered and healthy women to have empowered and healthy children, according to the report (PDF).

I think I can safely add that the opposite is also true: people who prefer women not to be equal are not “pro child.” Somewhere in here I think I can also conclude: feminists are actually the real “family values” set!

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When I’m Not a Feminist

We all read a lot about women having babies and not having careers as a result, and some feminists tend to present women’s inability to have a career and have children as a form of gender discrimination.

But you know, I don’t think it is. I thought that was the point of choice – that women who choose to have babies can, and women who don’t choose to have babies, don’t. The women without babies are then able to work the ungodly hours required of the top strata of high power jobs, and the women with them aren’t.

& I know that’s an unpopular opinion, but I thought that was the whole “revolution” birth control brought with it: that women can CHOOSE whether to have children or not. I wonder often if this assumption – that women need to have babies – isn’t a result of all that “women are nurturing” bullshit. I don’t know. I’ve wanted to be childfree my whole life, and what I see are a lot of women in my life who wanted children – wanted them more than their careers – and made that choice. So why the bellyaching? We all make decisions, and we all have to live with them. To me it’s such a fantastic thing that women have been freed from having to have babies, that there are healthy ways to prevent pregnancy and plan to have a family (or plan not to have one).

I have a funny feeling there’s a privilege thing in here somewhere that might blind me some. I just can’t imagine walking into the universe expecting the world to allow me everything I wanted. I mean, imagine if I wrote an article claiming that it was “discrimination” because I can’t hold a high power job *and* write novels – which I can’t, because of the time required of both. I’d be laughed right off my blog, and well I should be if I made that argument. But some feminists portray having a baby as some requirement of woman-ness, and I thought the whole point was – it’s not. We’ve freed women up to have careers if they want. Or to have babies if they want. & That’s all cool.

I mean, if women want babies and don’t want to give up their careers, adopt and marry a house-husband father type.

Of course it is expected that women raise their children once they have them, & that’s the problem, as far as I’m concerned. The expected gender roles are unfair, because fathers are and can be parents as much as women can be mothers. Is it “fair” that men can have children and expect their wives to take care of them? No. But I don’t see why women can’t decide to have children and expect their husbands to take care of them – especially if the women is the one making the higher salary.

But in speaking to a feminist friend recently, she told me she’s having an absolute blast raising her son and not working so much – but still somehow sees it as “wrong” that she can’t be a litigator at the same time. I just don’t get it. She not only chose to have a baby but to raise the baby; she could have gotten a nanny and gone back to work at that high-powered job. She didn’t. And again, that’s all good. But I don’t see it as discrimination; I see it as a decision. Would she catch some flak if she went back to her fulltime job and left a nanny and her husband to raise her child? Sure. But she could do that, if she wanted.

It’s not like those of us who are childfree don’t catch flak. Or that those who decide to stay home with their kids don’t catch flak. The thing about being a woman is that nothing you do is right: someone, somewhere, will have a problem with whatever choice you make. But for me, being a feminist is in supporting any woman in her choices, and that includes calling her out when she’s complaining about having to make them. Having a choice doesn’t mean you get everything; it means you get one thing & you have to live without the other.

But then again, I was raised by Devo.

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Helen’s Holiday Gift Guide

So. I’ve noticed that two lovely women, Rachel Kramer Bussel and Tristan Taormino, have put up their holiday gift guides, and while they cover our erotic lives, I know every year I’m a loss for what to buy people that won’t stink of consumerism and waste.

That is, I seek to assuage my own guilt about being an overeducated person who lives in a Western country with clean water and half-decent healthcare (unlike most of the world’s population).

As a result, I’ve found a neat list of places who sell cool stuff for good causes:

For you doggie types, Schmitty is a Yorkie whose proceeds to go an organization called Dogs Who Care. The North Shore Animal League, on the other hand, has stuff that makes us cat types happy: Betty and I are getting new PJs courtesy of them! And if you can’t find anything at either of those two places, the Animal Rescue Site also has a store with lots of animal-inspired gifts no matter what types of critters you like.

It’s also easy to go from that site to some others with cool stuff, like the Rainforest Site’s store, where you can get anything from Fair Trade products to Brazilian art works. (Did I mention they have lots of pretty jewelry?)

For lower-impact, good health types of gifts, try gaiam.com for things like yoga videos or light therapy for the depressive in your life. (Just don’t look at their shoes. Only me and a couple of other partners would wear any of them.)

And to round things out, NOW’s store has a bunch of groovy t-shirts and you can buy one that says “Question Gender” to help support the student-run TIC conference.

So go do some good with your money, okay? Just about every organization out there sells cool stuff. If you find anything similarly cool, please post about it in the comments section.

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Act NOW

Health and Human Services is considering appointing Eric Keroack, a doctor who is not just anti-choice but anti-contraception, to be in charge of the US’ birth control funding. Basically, he’s an “abstinence only” type – which is, as most of us know, the worst form of birth control around. You can get more information about him from NOW’s site.

NOW has a petition up that you can (and should) sign, and is also asking people to write directly to their reps to get them to keep him from this appointment.

Lunatics running the asylum. This is like us appointing someone hostile to the UN to represent the US… oh, wait, we did that one already.

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Five Questions With… Max Wolf Valerio

max wolf valerio

It’s been a while since a Five Questions With… Interview, but I can’t imagine a better re-entry interview than one with Max Wolf Valerio, the author of The Testosterone Files. Max and I “met” as a result of us both being published by Seal Press, and because we were both friends with the late, great Gianna Israel. His Testosterone Files are a fascinating account of his move from his life as a radical dyke and poet to being a ‘straight guy.’

1) I often joke that I only ever “passed” as a straight woman, and there were parts of The Testosterone Files that made me feel like you “passed” as as lesbian. Is that even close to right? How do you feel about your former identity now?

Yes, I definitely did “pass” for a lesbian, a dyke, whatever you wish to call it. I was dyke-identified for at 14 years, and more, if you count my adolescence. Early on, I realized I was attracted to women, and so, a lesbian identity made the most sense to me. It was all I knew to name myself. The idea of transitioning in 1975 and before, when I was a teen, was completely off the map.

I am proud of the person I was as a dyke, and I learned a lot in my years as a lesbian. I understand many of the finer points of feminism, in all its permutations. Through lesbian feminism, I also came to an understanding and empathy for other types of radical politics. It was quite an education, and an amazing immersion in female life. Ultimately, dyke life is about immersion in female life I think, and it provided an axis for me as well as a point of departure.

However, as I show dramatically in The Testosterone Files, I was much more than simply a lesbian feminist or dyke. I was, actually, just as involved in the punk rock scene, as well as in being a poet who crossed all lines of identity and just “wrote” and read for an audience that appreciated poetry as an art form period. So, this involvement gave me an “out” from dyke life and provided a portal to the fact that there is so much more out there in the world than simply lesbians or feminism. This portal would prove to be invaluable as I came into male life.

On the other hand, I think my perspective was a bit constrained anyway from being a lesbian all those years. I have had to re-examine many of my feminist beliefs and attitudes anyway, even if I was not entirely cloistered within the dyke perspective. Some of these attitudes no longer fit my male life, and I find them to be restricting. More importantly, I also have come to see that certain of these ideas were just wrong-headed, even if they served a purpose for me then. I mean, some of the anti-male attitudes, and anti-het attitudes that I absorbed. These attitudes and ideas not only do not serve my present life, they are not rooted in truth. I think I was often coming from a place of defensiveness, and I have learned, and am learning, to drop that.

Even so, I have many fond feelings about my past dyke life, and about lesbians in general, and will always feel related.

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Not Dancing

So I found this interesting article – way more measured and frankly, sympathetic, than most articles about transness that throw around the word “mutilation,” so instead of ignoring it as I’d normally do, I responded.

I certainly understand where you’re coming from, Josie, but tell me this: what do we do with the people who could be either? Who are both?

My husband is. She never knows what bathroom to use. We worry about someone disagreeing with the M on her license.

A lot of people who are innately gender variant, or androgynous, may transition only because more cards fall on the F than on the M when they fall from the sky.

And at the moment, the only way to get your ID changed is to get genital surgery.

I think a lot more of them would keep their healthy, operative genitals if that weren’t the case, but you try telling the DMV you want neither gender marked on your license.

Go ahead.

Or, just read some of Dr. Harry Benjamin’s work. People have tried to relieve transsexualism via therapy, spirituality, and all sorts of other non-operative means. But what Benajamin notices is that it doesn’t work. So he fixed their body (since their minds wouldn’t be changed).

There are plenty of us working within the trans community who would like to see people be able to peacably live as either gender, or both, or fluid. But living that way is, for now, brutally hard work. I’d agree with you, philosophically, if I didn’t see what my husband and other friends go through every day, all day long, day after day after day. The world just beats the crap out of them, puts them at greater risk for hate crimes, and insists on them being “ma’am” or “sir” when it comes to buying a cup of coffee to using a public toilet.

So, join us. Make the world safe for the gender variant, with us.

helen boyd
www.myhusbandbetty.com

There are a lot of other ways to respond, but this was the one that struck me. I’m sure some of you can add other important facts. Just please, be polite and be reasoned.

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NCTE’s Responding to Hate Crimes manual

Just in time for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, held annually on November 20th, NCTE has published a small manual called Responding to Hate Crimes: A Community Resource Manual, which, according to NCTE’s Simon Aronoff, “represents a holistic, community-based approach to responding to hate violence in a wya that aims to curb the number of attacks faced by transgender people.”

Read the full press release from NCTE below the break, and read or download a copy of the manual at NCTE’s website: http://www.nctequality.org/resources/hatecrimes.pdf

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Playing Bully

The folks who brought us Grand Theft Auto are at it again, bringing kids (& one has to assume, some adults) a game called Bully – where the point is to bully or be bullied.

There are those who think that a game that makes “play” out of bullying is despicable. But in fairness it should be pointed out that this is not a shoot ‘em up game, and there are no guns or blood. Some experts believe it can be a healthy outlet for kids to get these sorts of fantasies out of their systems on the screen and not in the real world. On the other hand, the game shows that to survive the bully culture you need to become one.

I’m going to guess there is no way to bring about a peaceful solution to being bullied.

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Why I Stopped Working for Straight Guys

A while back I said I’d tell the story of how I decided not to work for straight guys anymore as a bookkeeper, & now I’m finally getting around to it.
A couple of years ago when I started doing freelance bookkeeping, I put an ad up on Craigs List, like you do, & so I got a bunch of emails from people who needed my help. Some offered to trade me for clothes or salon treatments or massages (tempting): you never know, with Craig’s List. But one guy I met with had started a small business doing interior remodeling after having worked on Wall St. a while. During the first phonecall I make clear upfront that I don’t work a.m. hours (because I write until 5am, though frankly most people don’t ask why), and we talk about what he needs & how far behind he is, etc. It seems like a do-able job so we meet for lunch and that goes well, too. He wants to hire me, but forgot his organizer, he’ll call. When he calls, he asks me to come in at 10am. I tell him again I don’t work in the am. He says okay, and we agree on a day & time. He calls me to cancel a day before that meeting, & we reschedule when he calls to cancel. He asks if I can come in at 10am. I explain again I don’t work morning hours, and ask him outright if he’s going to want to work on the books regularly in the morning. He says no, and we reschedule. So I go to our first meeting, look at his QB (QuickBooks, for the uninitiated) and then we discuss a regular time to come in.
& Yes, you guessed the end of the story: he suggested 10am.What a huge waste of my time.
That, of course, was after nearly 10 years working for Mr. Famous Author Man, who was f***ing his publicist and actually thought I didn’t know. He also decided at some point that I should work full-time for him without a 401k and health insurance (when the reason I worked for him freelance was so I could set my own hours and take time off to travel, which he was well aware of). But I can’t go into the rest of that story too deeply or my head will implode.
Then there was the guy who decided since the company wasn’t making any money the first person he’d get rid of was the admin/bookkeeper. When I first got that job, they were two years behind in billing clients – two years – which is a pretty solid explanation for why there was no money coming in, eh? So I got him up to date, and then I get laid off. I heard from clients of his that as soon as I was gone they’d stopped billing clients regularly again. Smart move there.
So, that’s why. Too many arrogant lunkheads. I thought before I hurt someone I’d try to make a point of specializing in minority clients, instead – specifically women and LGBT folks – and see if that was any better. And you know what? It has been. Way better. Like millions of times better. I don’t rule out straight guys; but I will ask now if they’re comfortable listening to/taking advice from a woman, if they’ve ever had a female boss, etc. Why? Because as a bookkeeper you have to tell people what to do sometimes, and there’s no point in being someone’s bookkeeper if they don’t listen to you. Now when I don’t think it will be a good fit, I often mention upfront that I don’t work morning hours because I write until the wee hours, which always gets them to ask the question: what do you write about? (or, anything I might have read? etc.) Replying, “a book about transvestites” is pretty much a shoo-in that the rest of the conversation will be awkward and they won’t want to hire me, and I can walk away without having to say, “I don’t think you’re ready for a female bookkeeper, so go pay your male accountant way too much to tell you the same things I would have.”