A Letter to my Family

These days I'm a lot more prone to responding to the articles my family sends me now and then. Including this piece by Fake Andy Rooney (original by Frank Kaiser). I originally responded, with an, "Um, I'm in the group he's knocking here," being not yet 40 myself, but I was told I didn't get it. Well, then! Time to bust out the big guns!

... But seriously, folks, I object to this because it lumps all over-40 women into one group with the same characteristics. While there are no doubt many women over 40 that have and value these qualities (for instance, it sounds like Other Relative identifies with them), there are others that emphatically do not. I'd like to see you try to put bright red lipstick on Susan Herr, or tell Gloria Steinem that she's sexy because of her willingness to praise others!

And yes, Sending Relative, it is ragging on young women; I'd say "get with it" yourself! When the writer says "women over 40 are x," (s)he's implying that women not over 40 are not x: i.e., whiny, not dignified, ugly in red lipstick. Implying that younger women can't have these qualities is just as shitty as saying all older women do. It's true that men are criticized in the piece, but it's for their taste in women; they're not viewed as an alternative target for the sexual impulses of old men (which is really heteronormative, by the way). You can tell from all the gendered compliments: do you really get the sense that the writer thinks men, unlike women, will watch a sports game they don't want to watch out of timidity or that they wear unflattering lipstick colors? (Also, if you read the original, un-plagiarized version, Kaiser makes it even clearer that he's drawing distinctions between older women and younger women. Who he appreciates for their "occasional innocence." Vomit.) You can arrive at the conclusion that young women are being implicitly criticized in this piece even without acknowledging the cultural context in which older and younger women are constantly pitted against each other, which, honestly, adds yet more weight to my argument.

Anyway, if you all think the article is awesome, then I'm glad you're enjoying yourselves. But if you send a sexist, ageist, heteronormative, and gender-essentialist article to a feminist blogger, you get a lecture in return :D Have a great holiday, folks.

Love,
Kyrie

PS: If you send me any more lists of tips on how to prevent getting raped, I will send you long discourses on rape culture. Consider yourselves warned :)

It's worth nothing that the post is also very cisnormative and gender-binary-enforcing, and the original post is also ableist; "I still appreciate the 20-year-old for her ... vigor."

The way this culture tends to bookmark older women as matronly and unattractive regardless of their individuality is a huge problem. But lumping them all into one group and fetishizing a set of characteristics you've arbitrarily projected onto them is certainly not the way to go about fixing it.

Fortunately in my case, Sending Relative seems to kind of like the occasions when I argue them into a corner, though I always forget this and automatically tense up for a counterattack. Note to self: do not underestimate family. Happy holidays, everyone, and best of luck to you if you end up arguing with your family :)

PENIS MOM HAHA BECAUSE MOMS DON'T HAVE PENISES!

Except that some moms do. More on this in a moment.

First, a sidenote-style bit of business. I pulled my last blog, the one on Jane Ward's article about the relationships of trans men and femme ladies, because she wrote to me and said I mis-represented her. She offered, generously, to speak to me on the phone about it. I shall do that, once we set a time, and then revisit the topic.

Now, on to today's lesson. A person - Elizabeth, we shall call her, as that is her name - posted the link to this story on my Facebook wall. It's about a mom who objected to her school's solicitation of dads to help out with a construction project for a kids' activity. Go skim it, it's a quick read.

What follows is a summary of the conversation I had with Elizabeth. If I get her permission to quote her, I'll edit this and do so. Until then, I'll paraphrase.

I like the Penis Mom post all right until this part:

Ladies, this is not a situation of the men holding us back - we are holding ourselves back because we don't want to step forward if it is icky and muddy.

I think that's gross, and it's blaming women for hetero-patriarchal assumptions about gender norms, 100% of which are socialized. Some people like playing in the mud, and some don't, and the principal's assertion that SHE is a PROPER woman is ridic. But women aren't oppressed by the patriarchy because they don't like mud and to argue that they are is asinine.

Elizabeth pointed out that there's a lot of interesting stuff aside from that quote, including the fact that the word "penis" is somehow considered inappropriate for teenagers. She's right, I shouldn't just focus on that one sentence. Parents who think 13 year olds are too delicate to hear the word "penis" (imagine if the word had been "vagina") are probably totally terrified of sex as a concept and refuse to believe that their kids will engage in it and are probably also really into regulating the sex lives of strangers. Such people include those who are anti-choice and those who think that gay people are sinners. All three concepts are equally silly/awful.

Her larger point that it's intensely retro for anyone to argue that dads and not moms are the ones who should be invited to this is a good one. The concept the school folks were working with excludes anyone who doesn't come from a hetero two-parent household, really. And it tells the boys that they'd better be ready to set up a trébuchet and girls that they'd better never be into that. [And that no other people exist besides boys and girls.] Ugh. Heteronormativity for the win, again, some more. This is all gender training.

Also: I find it's much easier for us to get all up in arms about this kind of thing than it would be when dads are excluded from shit dealing with baking or whatever. You know? It's more acceptable for the weak to mimic the powerful than the other way around. I want to see this level of outrage around men not getting invited to after-school sewing shit and boys who want to wear dresses and whatever.

Elizabeth said she's not sure what to do about that, and I said: "About what? People who think that it's okay for women to, in at least some areas, tack to the more masculine activities, but it never appears to be okay for men to do things coded as feminine? Throw a fit about it. Like this lady did. And keep throwing fits about it."

There's also the issue that we can too easily erase people who are not male or female, or who are not men or women, or who are not masculine or feminine. If we can get rid of these ideas that people who were assigned one of only two options at birth must do certain things (and be with certain partners - again, homophobia alert) then we can more easily see, and accept, and cherish and admire and adore, the people who don't fit into our silly constructed gender binary in the first place.

Elizabeth made the argument that it's not really about "males and females," it's about power, and how, she says, Gloria Steinem argues that women should be looking for equal power, and that she (Elizabeth) is more interested in what as coded as weak or powerful.

Of course it has to do with "males and females." So many things are coded that way - almost everything, really. And things that are coded male/masculine are also coded as more powerful, and things that are coded as female/feminine are coded as weaker. And male/masculine and female/feminine don't even go together in nature, but in the cultural mind, they do.

It's an incomplete fight to say that women need access to the things coded as more powerful. That alone does nothing to upset the entirely constructed and fictional gender binary we live in. The trick to ending gender-based oppression isn't saying "women need to be invited to build machines in the mud," it's saying, "we need to stop coding things as masculine/powerful and feminine/weak." She's partly right that it's about power, but Steinem was working in a pretty limited second-wave context. I think we're beyond that now.

We need to do these things:
1. Realize that gender is constructed, and that there is nothing unnatural/aberrant/deviant/threatening about people not living up to the gender they were assigned at birth. Here's the thing: NO ONE lives up to the gender we were assigned at birth. Some people are just more obvious/visible about it, or disinterested in even trying.
2. Following from that, we can see that everything coded as masculine/powerful and feminine/weak is a lie based in bigotry and misogyny. And we can stop coding shit according to whether assigned-at-birth men or assigned-at-birth women do it.
3. AND THEN we can see that we're all just performing our genders (see #1 above), and I think life will get a lot easier for trans and genderqueer people, who get the shit kicked out of them in all kinds of literal and figurative ways for not conforming to the lie of the binary.
4. AND THEN we won't bat an eyelash if a girl comes to school in "boys' clothes" or a boy comes to school in "girls' clothes" and people will be free to be as masculine or feminine or whatever that they want, ANDDDDD masculine and feminine won't be the only choices. People will just be free to express themselves however they want and a lot of violence will end.
5. And we will, I fucking hope, stop having gay panic every five fucking seconds. I realize that a lot of comedians will be out of work, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

Misogyny in a Can

It's been a long time since I was a regular consumer of soda, and now I can barely stand the idea of drinking it. I used to be kind of addicted, and I don't like being addicted to things, so I quit. I was a real bitch for a couple of weeks, I'm sure.

For some reason - and I'm sure someone out there has done an analysis of this - soda companies seem to be marketing diet sodas to men more. Pepsi One started it off, taking the word "diet" out of the name - diets are for ladies, after all - presumably to attract a wider customer base. We can't have men feeling emasculated by their beverages, after all.

Now Dr. Pepper is in the game, with this ten-calorie can of soda that we all need to be aware contains BOLD FLAVORS. No wussy flavors for dudes. On the Facebook fan page, you can - if you want to add the app - learn what the Ten MANMENTS are. I did not do this. I cannot handle giving my information to Dr. Pepper, but Google helped:

Dr Pepper’s 10 Man’Ments

1. Thou shalt not OMG. If it’s not exploding, it’s not exciting.

2. Thou shalt not pucker up. Kissy faces are never manly.

3. Thou shalt not post pics of your outfit. Unless it’s battle armor and you have a giant sword and/or small bazooka.

4. Thou shalt not post furry animal videos. Exceptions made for beasts fighting to the death and bears destroying idyllic picnic scenes.

5. Thou shalt not make a “man-gagement” album. That is all.

6. Thou shalt not share your horoscope. Daily.

7. Thou shalt not Instagram your lunch. Real men each lunch, not tweet it.

8. Thou shalt not untag unflattering pics. We know you were there.

9. Thou shalt not end a comment with a =).

10. Thou shalt not make a Facbeook profile for your pet, baby and/or imaginary friend.

So... men - the men Dr. Pepper wants to market to - have no feelings, have a really conflicted relationship with photography, and only like animals if they're destroying each other. Sounds healthy!

We already know how much I hate this prescriptive bullshit. It's coaching men to be more "masculine," and in the process commenting on what women can and should be. It is also putting femininity down as clearly inferior. It's gross.

As Nic Bravo said, "Don't forget to never drink this again."

Femininity and Masculinity in Television

Linda Holmes at NPR's Monkey See is pretty brilliant, y'all. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I totally have a crush on her. Call me, Linda.

The story that prompted this particular outburst of hearts is her dissection of masculinity in television. While allowing for the idea that there are extremely problematic representations of women and femininity on television, she argues that the current crop of television sitcoms might be even worse for men. She discusses How To Be A Gentleman, Last Man Standing, Man Up, and Work It in particular.

Sarah Haskins, the brilliant person who brought us Target Women, has pointed this out before in her skit on doofy husbands.



Holmes makes a whole bunch of good points, and you should just go read her column. I'll wait!

Back? Okay. So one of the things Holmes talks about here is the concept of "realness." These horrid new shows are talking about what it means to be a "real" man. It's my sense that we've been in a crisis-of-masculinity moment for awhile now. If not, we wouldn't be panicking about a mom painting her very young son's toenails pink in a J. Crew ad. We wouldn't have to be aware that Tim Allen still exists. So these shows seem to be about showing their male characters how to be Men. And, because I'm an educator and think everything has pedagogical implications, they're probably teaching American men how to be "real," too. But they're not looking at masculinity through any kind of queer lens, so they have a defined vision of manhood that is based in a straight and cis view of it. Best not be too dapper, or one might be associated with femininity (which is bad) (I mean, duh).

So, the fact that women might be getting better representation on the screen doesn't strike me as a triumph of feminism. I'm thinking that instead of the power dynamic shifting in women's favor, there's a (perhaps subconscious) attempt at asking for a reassertion of the culture of masculinity, which is defined in clearly specific ways. Now, I don't think that all the men involved in these shows behave in the way men are portrayed on screen, and I think that a lot of the times they're probably saying something about how idiotic these men are. But there's something going on, and I don't think they shows are trying to make a point about how we've been too rigid about gender norms in our cultural history. You know?

Here's the thing: Even if the people involved in the show aren't endorsing this view of masculinity, they're still putting it out there, and there are going to be plenty of people who watch it and laugh knowingly and incorporate it - again, perhaps subconsciously - in their ideas about gender and how to properly perform it.

I don't think I can even get into how repulsive I find the concept of Work It, the show in which men dress in drag because they feel it is the only way to get ahead in the work force. I'll just say this: It's a fucking disaster. I know they're not presenting as trans people, they're dressing in drag, but in real life people who crossdress or are known to be drag performers often face a certain amount of revulsion from their bigoted cis straight colleagues. And I've talked about it before, but it bears repeating: trans people are underprivileged in the work force, get mistreated by the police, and generally have a harder time dealing with institutions like the health care industry than cis people do. To say that men should just "dress like women" and then they'll get ahead in the work force is to erase any discussion of trans issues. It's also making a pointed case for the fact that men feel so very disadvantaged that they'll do something horrifyingly misogynistic just to get a job they seem to feel entitled to. Which they are not.

These shows leave no room for a discussion of queerness, or the idea that being a feminine man (regardless of sexual orientation or trans status) is awesome. They are making life harder for people with non-normative expression because they are reifying gender normativity. Trans people, gender queer people, butch lesbians, etc., are also harmed by this. If there is a limited idea of what is acceptable for a man, it also limits what is acceptable for a woman, because if women are masculine, then what happens to masculine men? They can't stake out their ground on a constantly shifting landscape.

These television shows are being gender police, is what I'm saying. I advise against watching them. Does anyone have any shows they'd like to suggest as having less problematic views of gender, for those of us who do occasionally enjoy watching the teevee?

The Pronoun Problem

Last week I complained about Google+'s restricted options for gender: male, female, or other. Since then, they have added the option not to declare one's gender, citing "privacy" as the primary reason. This is an improvement, but still not good enough.

First of all, I am dubious that pronouns are really the reason social networks ask you to put your gender front and center. I suspect it's more about data collection and targeted advertising, which is why I focused on ads in my last post on the topic.

But if the whole issue does really boil down to pronoun choice, then why not simply ask users which set of pronouns they prefer? Heck, some people who identify as "female" simultaneously prefer "he" as a pronoun, so it's a simpler and more accurate approach. Many people will choose "he" or "she," I would choose "they," still others will choose pronouns like "zie." And one of the choices on this drop down menu should be "define your own." Some people would love that chance to provide correct pronouns, and yes, others are going to take the opportunity to be smartasses and comedians. And that's fine. Your profile should express who you are, and if who you are is a smartass, then fine.

I don't know enough about other languages to predict all the gendered language issues that can arise. But do you know who I bet does have a good idea? Non binary-identified people who speak those languages. And those individuals will also usually be the ones with the best solutions.

Gender is complicated. It necessitates a text field. Get with it, internet.

Oh Google, Why Can't You Just Let Me Love You?

Jess and I have complained before about the lack of options for one's gender choice in Google profiles. (FYI, Alsica's gender should be "fembot.") Now they've done it again (with even fewer options) in their new social network, Google+, which requires you to choose from "male," "female," or "other."

This is a logistical problem for me; I am female-gendered but refuse to enter this information on social-networking sites. I feel that should be my prerogative. It's also extremely shitty that anyone who does not identify as either "male" or "female" is forced to identify themselves with the flavorless catchall of "other." Obviously, that is explicitly othering.

A whole bunch of people, including some who do not usually blog about gender, have pointed out why this is a problem; check out The Mary Sue, Randall Munroe (yes, he of xkcd!), Sarah Mei (I may have to check out this Diaspora thing), and Dopp Juice. Their arguments against the mandatory gender field include allowing women to mask their gender in a potentially hostile online environment, not being dicks to non-binary-identified folk, and just plain rethinking gender.

As faithful readers may guess, the last reason is the most important to me. First of all, my online presence does not have a physical body, and it is absolutely absurd that gender is considered its single most important characteristic.

Second point: on every social site I've used, people like to get creative with their profiles. People tweak names, nicknames, relationship statuses, interests -- you name it -- to reflect their personalities and senses of humor. Why not gender? I would love to see even those who adhere to the gender binary get creative with that field. (And for that matter, Facebook, why will you not let me declare my relationship with Mathematica? YOU CANNOT STOP OUR LOVE.)

I can only assume that sites like Google+ wish to know my gender for the purposes of targeted advertising. Now, I'm not totally anti-capitalist. I don't begrudge Google the opportunity to make money off the services it provides. But I question the effectiveness of using gender to try and target ads. How about instead of a mandatory gender field, you have a mandatory interest field, like a list of a hundred or so common topics of interest from which you have to choose five? Instead of constantly getting ads for yogurt, cleaning products, and weight loss tips, I could instead get ads for hiking gear, computer peripherals, and booze. Do you realize how many more ads I would click on in that kind of advertising utopia, internet? Do you? Please, take this idea for free, from me, and fucking use it.

Book Club: Wilchins's Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender

Time for the first book club post! Our goal is to write an even less structured post than usual; we want to start a conversation rather than summarize the book.

Kyrie: One thing of the main things that struck me reading this book is how the author displays clear resentment towards the women's movement and even, at times, to cis women (e.g., calling herself "a swan among the platypuses", p. 54). I am not saying this is a bad thing (an angry tone does not invalidate an argument!), but it was not something I had been exposed to before. And it made me think about the way cis women treat trans women; I feel like we let the male privilege trans women may or may not have briefly experienced win out over the need to support our fellow women. As a result, we do a lot of bullshit to try and justify their exclusion.

Jess: I picked the quote below as a good starting point, because it’s about feminism and this is a feminist blog. If we are going to be honest with ourselves about feminism and its benefits to society, we also need to look at its shortcomings. If Wilchins believes that feminism has excluded her and other trans people, then it has. Audre Lorde similarly criticized the movement for leaving out lesbians and women of color, and people are still talking about similar issues regarding indigenous cultures. Feminism has long been the domain of middle class cis white women, and that needs to change, pronto. But I’ll just let Wilchins tell you.

Moreover, just as feminists have charged that patriarchy made women's bodies a site of contested meaning, and then appropriated women's flesh an experience as a tabula rasa upon which to inscribe their constructions of a subordinated Other, just so, you have made of our bodies a site of contested meaning, and then appropriated transexual flesh and experience as a tabula rasa upon which to inscribe your constructions of us as subordinated Other. Once again you are reenacting the very oppressive mechanisms from which feminism is seeking emancipation (p. 60).

Jess: Wilchins has another quote on page 60 that goes along with this: “Heterosexism requires binary and opposing sexes and genders: if there were a hundred genders, ‘heterosexuality’ could not exist.” Well, exactly. I tend to think there are as many genders as there are people, because I enjoy thinking that everyone in the world is queer. If gender is performative, as Judith Butler would have us believe - if it is an imitation which has no original - then we are all performing gender in unique ways. People might appear to approximate similar genders, which is how we come up with the idea of “man” and “woman,” but if we are all different, are our genders all different also? And if that is the case, how is feminism meant to represent a class called “women”? Have we robbed it of any meaning? And might that be a good thing?


Kyrie: Wilchins’s discussion of the fluidity of gender and the limitations of labels (see, for instance, p. 85) has me thinking a lot about how I would like to define gender. What appeals to me right now is a “style”-like approach, in which masculine and feminine are like “nerd” and “jock;” i.e, kind of a binary, but one in which you can identify with either, both, or neither label. Like “nerd” and “jock,” “masculine” and “feminine” don’t seem to me to be actual characteristics, but rather a shorthand for a collection of characteristics, and hence someone with a lot of one of those particular sets of characteristics can come close to embodying one of those labels, but in general people will not fit perfectly into these molds.

Jess: Furthermore, some people opt out entirely. Some people are punk, or preppy, or - like me - don’t really have a good definition for their style (or identity. I round up to a lot of things so that I can be intelligible, as I believe we all do). On p. 85, which Kyrie points you to also, Wilchins talks about how fluidity and inventing new labels or identities can work for us. I think that is the real revolutionary potential for feminism: if we can push ourselves to get beyond the idea that there is anything like “realness” when it comes to gender beyond what people feel about themselves, then maybe we can get to the point that we are advocating liberation broadly, and not just the end of one particular kind of discrimination while replicating that same form of oppression on other people.

I like the way Wilchins uses Foucault, and the Foucault-inspired question she asks on p. 39 is provocative: “What kind of system bids us each make of our bodies a problem to be solved, a claim we must defend, or a secret we must publicly confess, again and again?” I’m not sure where I’m going with this exactly, but I’d like the revolution to include the possibility of never feeling bad about one’s body or identity. As Wilchins also says, no one is ever trapped in the wrong body. We’re trapped in the wrong society. If society weren’t so terrified of gender transgression, and surgery were available on demand, more people could have it if they want it, and more people could, I hope, feel liberated.

Kyrie: One part of the book that really resonated with me was the chapter in which Wilchins talks about seeing her female relatives’ bras, and how she immediately recognized the symbolism behind them. It reminded me of the first time I went shopping with my mom for a “real” bra, and how I hated it. My discomfort stemmed from a similar realization that these weren’t just objects, there were symbols, and I desperately wanted a utilitarian bra in plain white with no padding, no flowers, and no lace. My 12-year-old self wanted nothing to do with that sort of performance of femininity, but it also wasn’t something I was able to articulate, so I ended up with the little bows and flowers. [Jess: I am also not a big fan of lace or anything, and certainly didn’t have reason to wear a bra when I was 12, but I think it’s kind of funny that Kyrie is the straight one here. Just another bit of evidence for my whole “we’re really all queer” argument.]

This is partly because the type of bra I wanted did not exist, at least not in my size. And this is symbolic of the whole gender problem. There should not only be plain, utilitarian bras in every size, there should be beer label bras, and dinosaur bras, and so forth and so on. This lack of choice in expression which is tied to your anatomy is a huge fucking problem.

Jess: I just want to say that I really loved “17 Things You Don’t Say to a Transexual.” I read it to my brother and my sister-in-law when we were all tipsy. It’s brilliant and hilarious, but I have nothing to add, so, you know, noted.

We’ll carry on this discussion in the comments, so please jump in. Also, we’re reading Stone Butch Blues for next month, so get your Kleenex out and get to reading.

On "Honor"

Reader, your faithful blogger is kind of flagging, so today you get an unstructured, but blessedly short, rant about "honor." Ready?

I've had dudes tell me, straight to my face, that men have "honor" and women don't. This is so antiquated, and I hate it. I especially hate it because I'm rather invested in trying to be an honorable person myself. For me, this mostly means "you do the shit that you say you're gonna do," which is related to a whole bunch of other things. Not being a hypocrite. Being punctual. Not trying to get away with shit I know I shouldn't be doing. Checking with friends before I date their exes. Washing and ironing cloth napkins for the rest of my life because I convinced my mom to switch from paper when I was a kid and it just seems fair that I should have to do so as an adult, too. That sort of thing.

None of this should be gendered; women are quite capable of being honest and conscientious in any aspect of life, and if you disagree you are profoundly misogynistic. Also, dumb -- why would we (on average) entrust the less honorable sex with raising our children? Yet this particular combination of reliability and ethics that we call "honor" is peculiarly gendered, and I don't understand why. It's something that we should all strive to embody, regardless of our gender.

What is a Woman?

Like I've said before, I am thrilled to be making friends and influencing people through this blog. Thank y'all for reading. I've noticed that this blog is serving as a point of introduction to trans issues for some of you; I've been frequently asked to explain terms like "trans man" and "cis."

So, first of all, I am not an expert in trans issues. Not not not. I hope to heck all of you read the book club book, because Wilchins is an authority on the topic. Nevertheless, I would like to say a few things on the subject, because

1. It's difficult to explain "trans" without defining "man" and "woman," and
2. People seem to want to rephrase what I do tell them in cissexist language.¹

It really is difficult to define "man" and "woman." Yes, many humans have either an XX or XY genotype. Many, not all. It is also possible to be XXX, XXY, XYY, one of several other variations, and to have mosaicism. Even if you fall into either the XX or XY category, these chromosomes may not necessarily determine your sex. For instance, individuals with androgen insensitivity may be XY yet develop a vagina and, later, breasts. Such individuals are usually raised as female and consider themselves women, so it makes little sense to call them "men." Physical characteristics are also not useful for creating a strict binary, as somewhere between a tenth of a percent and two percent of newborns (depending on what criteria you use) have so-called "ambiguous" genitalia (i.e., genitalia that do not fall neatly into one of the two favored categories) and may be considered intersex. These issues were highlighted recently by the ridiculous farce over Caster Semenya's "biological" sex; really, there is no medical test on Earth that can determine a person's sex.

Even if there were a perfect biological binary, we'd still run into trouble, because we've layered so much cultural meaning onto "man" and "woman" that nobody fits into either mold. I'd try to separate sex and gender, but the reason that evolutionary psychology studies are so damn popular with the media is that we are heavily invested in the idea that culturally constructed gender binaries (boys like trucks! girls like dolls!) are fundamental and important and purposeful. So, since nobody else wants to separate sex and gender, I'm not going to either. I think both binaries are bullshit.

"But," you may say, "this is a feminist blog! You talk about women's issues all the time. How can you do that if you don't have a definition for 'woman?'" As it turns out, I do have a definition for "woman." And it's actually really simple. It is "a person who calls themself a woman."²

Any attempt to label some of these women as "real women" or "bio women" is cissexist. We're all real women. If you're a woman you're a woman, and your body is your body: therefore, your body is a woman's body. Now, I'm not trying to tell people how to identify themselves and their bodies; if a someone identifies as both "woman" and "man" (or neither!) we should be able to deal with that, and if someone identifies as a "woman" but calls their body "male" that's their choice, too. But if someone identifies as a woman and you insist on calling their body "male," that is not okay.

We do sometimes distinguish cis women from trans women here at NWF, usually when we want to discuss transphobia in general or cite the experiences of a self-identified trans person. But when we say "women," we mean all women.

¹I am far from perfect in avoiding cissexist language myself. While I feel like I did a reasonable job in my post on birth control, I failed miserably in my post about matrilineage. For what it's worth, you have my apology and my assurance that I am working on it.

²This is admittedly a cyclic definition, but, as Jess quoted Judith Butler to me earlier today, "Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original." In this situation, what kind of definition but a cyclic one can possibly be given?

Don't Look Now, It's 1860

Today in "let's all remember the good old days when only white dudes were people," we have Catholic University reminding all of us that while women have the right to vote, they certainly don't have the right to make decisions for themselves! Not when there's a man around to do it for them!

I believe this is the perfect moment for the Sad Trombone.

So very concerned for the virtue of the young ladies under his surveillance is President John Garvey, Patriarch, that he is converting his campus back to single-sex dorms over the course of the next several years.

Here's the thing: President John Garvey, Patriarch, is an idiot.

He says that he thought that by having women and men in the same dorms, women would have had "a civilizing influence on young men." Alas! Women started to drink alcohol too! To keep up with young men! Who were plying them with the demon rum so they could get laid!

Now, this is not President John Garvey's original idea. President John Garvey, Patriarch, is only part of a long line of ridiculous patriarchs who believe that women would never drink or have sex or do drugs or climb water towers or whatever if men weren't around to trick them into it. Because those things are fun, and women don't like to have fun. Women like to do dishes and nag their doofy husbands. However, I will do him the favor he will not do me and assume he is a sentient being able to make his own decisions and judgments. As such, I believe that he is able to question the "logic" of this kind of thought and realize that women are people with impulses and hormones. Just like, you know, men.

I don't need to tell you, gentle reader, that women are just as likely to sincerely want to get drunk or laid as men are. Furthermore, men are just as likely to do things they don't really want to do because they feel peer-pressure as women are. You are an evolved human, so you know this.

President John Garvey, Patriarch, does not make the case here that he is only worried about the virtue of his female students, but he contributes to the myth that women are the gatekeepers of morality in society. It reifies gender essentialism by claiming that there are inherent differences between men and women, and I object to that premise. It also puts the blame on women if they can't fulfill the role that has been foisted upon them, so now women can't win for losing. Because, yes, many men are going to do things that President John Garvey, Patriarch, would consider uncivilized. That's their business, not the business of their female hallmates, partners, friends, parents, or siblings.

Image via.

Friday Drinkin'

Feministing's Maya has a post up about how women should be able to get drunk if they want. To which I give a hearty "amen."

Generally, those lists of tips on how not to get raped your older relatives are always forwarding you (or is it just me?) are bullshit. Spare me your ruminations on ponytails and properly wielded car keys. The majority of rapists are known to their victims; your parking lot defense tactics are not going to be particularly relevant.

However, said rapists are known to often use alcohol as a weapon.* This is no doubt partly because it renders their victims somewhat more vulnerable. However, I am convinced that it is also because (and perhaps primarily because) inebriation plays the leading role in victim blaming. For reasons I cannot understand, we view women who get drunk as participants in their own rape. Would-be rapists, living in the same culture as the rest of us, know that if they choose a drunk victim, society will look the other way.

So, as a feminist and an enthusiastic drinker, I would like to say fuck that. I will not be judged for participating in an activity as integral to our culture as drinking is, and I will not be complicit in crimes committed against me while inebriated. Neither should anyone else.


*You should really, really read this link.

Roller Derby Is Better Than This

The roller derby community is supposed to be a place where people can be themselves, express who they are, and engage in a really fun contact sport. It's a subculture built on including those of us who often find ourselves outside the mainstream - that is why I was drawn to it in the first place. It looked like a place where I can be whoever I am, and for me, with my team, that has absolutely been the case. I have tested the bounds of my team's supportiveness and never once found it lacking.

Unfortunately, not every team is as great as mine. Last weekend, members from one team, along with their coach, security guard, and fans (including the parents of one of the skaters) ganged up on and humiliated an NSO from the other league. In brief, they were policing her gender identity, calling her a man and asking her to lift her skirt to prove that she is a woman. They harassed and harangued her, and humiliated her in front of the entire audience. The NSO in question is a woman and had therefore used the women's restroom. Apparently the people who harassed her felt it was there place to be sure she had peed in what they thought was the right place, "for the sake of the children." Both the NSO and I are wondering what children have to do with it.

The offending league issued a milquetoast statement on Facebook saying they are "sorry for any inconvenience" the events of the evening caused the derby community. Excuse me? Any inconvenience? This is not a question of convenience. It is a question of civil rights. She has the right to her identity, her humanity, and to not be violently harassed in public.

The statement also said they hope to host "safe" and "family-friendly" events. I cannot for the life of me imagine how raising a ruckus, harassing an innocent person, and behaving like bigoted asshole fucks is "safe" or "family-friendly." I know I'm not a parent, but I'm pretty sure that treating people as inhumanely as the harassers did is not setting a good example for the kiddies. It's just making the world a less safe place.

There is no excuse for this behavior. None at all. I hope the people in question are deeply ashamed of themselves and that they are no longer invited to be part of their league. I will certainly never participate in an event with them. I expect the larger community will have all kinds of things to say about this.

Pronouns

We live in a world in which people do not always fit into neat little boxes. (Hooray!) And that is just as true for gender as it is for any other label. Unfortunately, the English language forces us to try to smoosh everyone into a box through its insufficient supply of pronouns. And I assume it's one of the reasons everybody gets so worked up when a caring set of parents quite reasonably refuses to report the gender of their baby.

There's "he" and "she" and that's about it. "It," of course, is inappropriate for a person, which forces us to try and assign a gender to everyone regardless of whether we know a person's gender or whether or not they even have one; some individuals self-describe as agendered or non gendered.

This has been an irritating problem for some time, and there have been many attempts to rectify it, none really catching on. Using "he" as a gender-neutral as well as gendered pronoun is confusing and problematic, given that it reinforces our perception of male being the default and all other genders being deviations from the default. "He or she" is cumbersome, and "(s)he" is unpronounceable. Constructed pronouns like "zie" would work quite well ... if we could ever get people to use them.

Personally, I like the singular "they." It's already sort of in use; it just needs to be accepted as grammatically correct. It could be potentially confusing, but since "they" already refers to an indeterminate number of people I think we can reasonably add single persons to the list. And I believe it's how Facebook refers to me since I refuse to report my gender, so we already have that behemoth on our side. It's the usage I'll generally be using on this site, though I may throw in the occasional "zie" so we don't forget about it.

Our language reinforces the gender binary, but mostly through pronouns. With occasional exceptions (like "blond" and "blonde"), nouns and adjectives are not gendered. Some languages gender everything male or female, others don't, and others have more than two genders. It makes me wonder how trans experiences vary across cultures from language issues alone.

Breasts and Chests

The latest issue of Dossier -- an arts and culture journal I must admit I'd not heard of before this week -- features model Andrej Pejic styled in a manner that does not adhere to the gender binary. Pejic's curled hair and makeup have a classic feminine look, his shirt and trousers are more traditionally masculine, and his exposed chest ... well, here's where people get tripped up.

Pejic doesn't appear to have large breasts, bulging muscles, or chest hair; i.e., his chest does not display any of the sex-signifiers that we are accustomed to seeing. Apparently, that is too much for people. The Good Men Project's Adam Polaski reports that both Borders and Barnes & Noble have insisted on covering the magazine like they do Playboy. Polaski argues that this is due to our discomfort with what he terms androgyny*, and I think he's right.

Specifically, this photo makes us confront one of our most basic assumptions about sex and gender: that women have breasts and men have chests. If we can stare directly at a person's bare torso and be uncertain about which we see, then the line between the two really isn't all that sharp.

It is also telling that despite the model's apparent lack of breasts, the book chains have chosen to cover the journal because customers might mistake him for female. By this logic, a woman with a double mastectomy posing topless would be similarly censored. This would seem to indicate that we don't prohibit toplessness in women because women have breasts, but rather just because they are women. I can't decide if that's more fucked up, or just differently fucked up.


*A term which can be problematic.

Roller Derby and Gender

Happy Thursday, folks. I'm doing my best to stay on top of life, so this is going to be a quick blog post. All about roller derby!

I'm about a month behind on this, but the Women's Flat Track Derby Association has adopted a new gender policy. On the whole, I think this is more of a good thing than not. They are considering that gender is not so simple as "man or woman," something easily determined by one's genitalia. Trans inclusivity is something I believe in and promote. I'm delighted that WFTDA is on board with that project.

Of course, even the WFTDA version is a bit oversimplified, and in some ways problematic. When talking about queer issues, this will almost always be the case. As Judith Butler says about feminism, how can we really define "woman"? Once we try to define it, we're excluding someone, and if we take all comers, then who are feminists advocating for? Or, in this context, who gets to play women's flat track derby? Identity politics is awfully complicated. So WFTDA says that they are considering anyone who considers herself a woman, lives as a woman, and has hormones consistent with medical definitions of woman. That's... tough. What if a trans person calls herself "femme" or something else instead of "woman"? Further, what does "lives as a woman" mean? All the time - at work, at home, with family? That's not an easy thing for very many people to do. What are the requirements here?

Finally: I'm skeptical of the medicalization aspect of this. Getting doctors involved seems unnecessary to me. I don't believe in "real" genders - that someone is "really" a woman or "really" a man "underneath" some exterior presentation. It seems to me that women probably have a pretty wide range of hormone levels, as do men, and that some cis women might have more testosterone than some cis men. WFTDA makes clear that they are not asking for preemptive proof of anything here - the captains don't have to show the papers of the trans players before the game can happen. But I'm not sure I like this idea of testing the hormone levels of only some players. What do we learn from that, exactly? There is such a wide range of sizes, athletic ability, aggressiveness, whatever, within any given gender that it, in my mind, renders arbitrary the differences between genders in contexts like these.

Look, I get that this is a sport, and therefore we will be looking at bodies. And I do appreciate that WFTDA is having this conversation. But the minute we get into trying to determine how someone else identifies and what they "really" are, we are in a lot of hot water.

That's Bullshit: Internalized Misogyny 101

So I was tooling around the internets trying to figure out what I want to write about, exactly. That took two seconds, because I found this gem on CNN.

In it, a woman freaks out that her husband has decided to start cooking. Specifically, he's cooking lots of red meat. In her kitchen! The nerve of that guy.

This is my favorite part, when the lady is thumbing through the cookbook her husband just put in the kitchen:

I was studying the corned beef recipe, which called for boiling up your own brine and then submerging the meat in it for 12 days, when Bill came back in and made a complicated spousal throat-clearing noise. "Uh, that's for me," he said. "My cookbook."

I might have been more startled if Bill had said "My mascara," or "My pedicure kit," but I doubt it.

I remain unconvinced that cookbooks, mascara, or pedicure kits are the sole domains of women. This woman is seriously invested in the idea that women cook and men do things that require getting dirty. They can maybe barbecue, because that involves manly things like coal and fire. But in the end it's okay, because he made her something he knows she likes (although not quite up to her specifications), so... she won't chase him out of the kitchen with a butcher knife?

I'm not even sure what the point of this column is. Is she telling us we can all relax now because sometimes when men cook the world doesn't blow up? I've heard similar stories to this before, about women who were irritated with their husbands for cooking. It seems as though people think it's a violation of the domestic spheres we've agreed on since the mid-19th century. Here's what I think it is: Not a big deal at all. Something we need to get over. It is not a violation of your femininity if some dude cooks dinner, you know? Just like it's not violating a guy's masculinity if his wife changes the oil in the cars. We've invested way too much in the gendered division of labor - in gender as a concept - if fucking CNN has to run a story called "Husband quietly takes over the kitchen." What about men who don't have wives? Who, perhaps, are single, or have husbands, or non-female partners? Will they starve to death? And if there are two women in a relationship, HOW WILL WE EVER KNOW who is supposed to do the cooking? The mind boggles.

You will be delighted to know that you can find a link in that story to another one about a chocolate cake that will totally catch you a man.* Because that is what you need to be most concerned with, above all, if you are a lady type. There are only about sixteen different kinds of privilege blinders at work there, right?

* Unless he has celiac disease, diabetes, food allergies, is vegan, hates sweets, or doesn't get an insta-boner at the first sign that a woman is a domestic goddess because he's an actual human being and not some pre-formatted penis owner.

Let's Call a Truce on the bin Laden Death Reactions, Okay?

I'm having a really hard time with writing today - I'm completely exhausted on, like, an existential level. But you don't need to care about that, so here goes nothing. I'm just going to ramble for awhile, use Judy Blume's "Get words on the page" principle of dealing with writer's block, and see what happens.

So we all know that Osama bin Laden is dead. React to that however you want - not my business. I'm really over policing everyone's reactions to news like this. If you want to be glad, be glad. If you want to say that you can't celebrate the death of any individual person, that's fine with me. Do your thang.

It's curious, though, that this quote was falsely attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.:

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.

I'm not sure how this has become such a viral thing. It's really strange, I think, but there are a couple reasons I'm willing to toss out there for y'all to shred. The first is that it's part of what I've begun calling the Piety Wars. We all want to show that we're good people, and rejoicing in the death of another person might make us look like bad people, so we show that the guy widely seen as Maybe The Best Person Ever (to the point that even the right wing - the folks historically and sometimes also currently on the side of segregation - have co-opted his memory) agrees with us. It's comforting. Also, it makes it impossible to disagree with and not immediately have to begin defending oneself as a good person. Dr. King said it, so it must be true. Listen: I think the man was brilliant. I agree with what he stood for. But he didn't say this, so why are we all posting it all over Facebook?*

Maybe a second part of what's going on here is that there's this expected patriotic response that Glenn Greenwald talked about - yay America, we got the bad guy, we were right about this all along.** That people are chanting "USA! USA!" outside the White House seems to indicate that this is a response people are having. And if you want to go against that grain, by saying that maybe it's not so great after all, you have to line up something to defend yourself with, and Dr. King is a good person to marshal in those moments.

"What does this have to do with feminism, Jess?" Yeah, I don't know. It does feel like there's some kind of expectation of masculinity in the "USA! USA!" response to bin Laden's death. The military is conceived of as a masculine institution - or there wouldn't be so many instances of gay panic - and now that the military has taken out Bad Guy #1 we're all supposed to celebrate that. Which is fine, if that's what you're feeling.

The reason it's considered unpatriotic to not celebrate all military "victories" is that it's not celebrating the strength of America, right? And strength is dudely, in our weird binary-invested culture. Any "But what about the victims?" talk is "feminine" and therefore unworthy. So if you - no matter your gender - want to talk about the consequences of this in terms of human loss and not military strategy, you're just unpatriotic, is all. (Please note that I don't feel this way - I'm tapping into what I see as the narrative, here.) So finding a man who agrees with you is helpful, especially if it's a man people have to at least claim to appreciate lest they be called racist.

Anyway. Go feel however you want about bin Laden, or don't feel anything, whatever. I'll be over here hunting down some caffeine so that I can try to make more sense in the future.

* There's the "we don't always do our research when we post stuff" thing that everyone is guilty of sometimes, myself certainly included. I'm not saying that anyone who attributed this to him is dumb. I understand what they're trying to say.

** What were we right about all along, exactly? Bin Laden wasn't killed because of our overwhelming military force or because we put Afghanis and Americans in harm's way. He wasn't caught because we tortured people. He was caught because of intelligence and patient groundwork.

Why We Love Johnny Weir

Gender-bending has become A Thing that the news is all over. We've all heard about the little boy in the J. Crew ad whose mom painted his toenails pink, heralding the end of masculinity or humanity or whatever.

Now we have a story about a high school boy who wore high heels to school, until his principle talked him out of it.

There are several things wrong with this: That the principle thought he was doing the right thing by taking "the paternal role" and convincing the kid to cave to the demands of the bullies that he conform and not wear whatever shoes he wants. Paternal, indeed. The principal also said that you have to take whatever happens to you if you step outside the norm. What the hell kind of lesson is that to teach kids? Sounds victim-blaming to me, for one thing. But schools too often seem to have a vested interest in maintaining gender norms - in this way, they are a reflection of society.

As my friend Michael pointed out, this article also claims that the kid wasn't punished, but he was: the normalization IS the punishment. It's an assault on this kid's identity. The story here shouldn't be, "High school boy wears high heels to school." It should be, "Douchebag principal wastes a lot of time convincing kid not to wear heels instead of doing his job." Which, admittedly, might take up a lot of space on a page, but who reads print media anymore, anyway?

I feel the need to remind us all that there is a different way to be human beyond gay-straight-bisexual (all of which are also valid, of course). We can step outside of the boxes and move into an appreciation for queer genders, societally, if people stop planting their flags in the idea that gender is a public health risk.

You know who I think is just really amazing for his courage in gender-bending? Johnny Weir. A couple of caveats: Yes, he is a privileged person with access to resources most people (your humble blogger included) do not have. He has the freedom to push gender boundaries in a way many people do not, because of who he is. I don't think he would deny that. But he is, I think, making space for other people to engage in examination of gender identity. Here are some things that he's said:

One:

I don't really like to have rules for anything, I find it's not very freeing when you abide by rules of any kind... I'm not a big believer in tiny handbags. The jig is up, you don't only carry lipstick, a credit card and a phone. I carry big bags - it's not even a murse or a man-bag, I carry a straight up purse every day.

Two:

I've always been comfortable with who I am... While I don't believe in masculinity and femininity, I don't believe in a purely gay person or a purely straight person. I have a very clear opinion of my own sexuality.

Three:

Fashion is very inspiring to me and I almost go drag queen where I wear the heels, make-up on or a big fur coat. Those things get noticed. But today, for example, I have jeans and cashmere hoodie on. I change it up. Nobody really cared when I looked like a boy.

"Nobody really cared when I looked like a boy." Right. Because I think, at the heart of it, people aren't as freaked out by people who are gay as by people who fuck with the binaries (which gay people do, for sure). Just ask the Human Rights Campaign, who are working very hard to distance themselves from gender-nonconformists so that they can further privilege the already-privileged by ignoring the problems faced by people who aren't them. They are trying to make it all about sexual orientation, leaving out gender identity, which is still not seen as a valid civil rights issue.

I'm glad Johnny Weir is able to wear whatever shoes or nail polish he wants without being reprimanded by some paternalist principal. I hope that his example provides hope for other people who are gender-nonconforming but not international superstar athletes.

Gender Equity in Sports: Apparently WAY More Complicated Than We Realized

The New York Times reports that college athletic programs are being manipulative in order to meet Title IX requirements.

Essentially, what is happening here is that big schools are listing male athletes as rostered on women's teams in order to boost the numbers, allowing more slots for male athletes on male teams. They are also listing women on the roster who are not actually team members, and may not be aware that they are rostered. Go read the article, I'll wait.

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Higher education can resemble big business in a lot of ways, and athletic programs - men's in particular - are a money-maker. That's not quite good enough for me, though.

I have a few problems with this. First, I really detest this underlying assumption that women aren't as good at sports as men are. I know a lot of very athletic women who would have problems with that assessment.

But I don't think it's really about whether men or women are better athletes. It's about who people would rather watch in a sporting event. And the answer to that appears to be men, clearly. People always forget that the US has a women's soccer team that has been extremely successful - more successful, frankly, than the US men's team. But they get much less attention. Why?

I don't have the answer to that, but I suspect it has something to do with gender. There is an expectation that men are rougher, tougher, and more physical. Women aren't meant to be out there beating each other up. Fuck that, I say. Women aren't less able to handle contact sports than men. Any attempt to justify the greater attention to male sports based on feminine weakness is grounded in sexism, full stop.

Second, this whole ordeal is about manipulating women's sports to help men's teams. It shows how marginalized women are even in women's athletic programs. There is no argument made that women's teams benefit from having men practice with them (I can't see how such an argument would hold water, but if someone wants to point me to such a study, go for it). In fact, this is explicitly about using the women's teams as an end-run around Title IX, if you'll pardon the pun.

There is no way to justify this that isn't sexist. Women are considered to exist primarily to benefit men in far too many ways, from taking on the majority of domestic responsibilities at the expense of their professional lives to being expected to accept lower pay and crappy treatment by corporate employers.

Finally, I think this listing of men on women's rosters is just really weird from a gender perspective. The article says that women who practice with men's teams are counted as female athletes. This could use some exploration. For one thing, it's certainly buying into the idea of gender binaries that I don't subscribe to. For the purposes of college athletics, which are gender-segregated according to these unrealistic binaries, though, why are we okay with counting men as women but not women as men? There are plenty of people worried about the crisis of masculinity right now - are they worried about labeling men as women? Of course, it's FOR SPORTS which MEN PLAY [better than women]. And, of course, it wouldn't help men's athletic programs to roster women as men, when the whole point of this shell game is to make more room for male athletes. I wonder what the men themselves have to say about it, given the context of anxious gender-policing our society is just soaking in.

Anyway. What do you think?

The Transagenda: Lessons from the Oppressed Cis Majority

Today in "Let's All Remember to Breathe," we have this gem from The Washington Examiner. In it, author Stella Morabito loses her shit because now she has to consider whether gender is a thing or not.

Her problem is that the Maryland Senate will likely pass House Bill 235, adding discrimination protections for transpeople, essentially. Let's quote:

The most interesting and Orwellian thing about this bill – and so many like it across the nation -- is its stealthy use of language to redefine our humanity.

OH REALLY? Hang on a sec, folks. I need to go scream into a pillow so that I can write about this with some kind of rational thought.

The only way I can find into this is to go back to queer theory and gender theory and talk about how language has been used to define our humanity all along. That's Jacques Derrida's whole project, right? So this lady, Morabito, is hung up on the word "assigned." We'll come back to that in a minute. First I want to talk about "gender."*

Morabito is upset that this whole concept of assignment "requires everyone to accept the idea that our sex is a social construct, relative and changeable, and to reject it as a genetic or a physical fact."

Well, exactly. Some people separate "sex" from "gender," because "sex" implies "assigned at birth," or the reproductive organs a person has or doesn't have. This is clearly tricky for intersex people, so we already know it's not so simple. Then we have Gender, which is a language, a meaning system that comes with symbols and rules and punishments. Derrida criticized language's built-in problems, because it tends to favor sameness through naming the things that are common to a speech community. Therefore, anything unique or private goes unnamed. One of the most private things is our sense of our own bodies and our gender experiences, so language, with its inherent and deliberate limitations, can be inaccurate to many peoples' experiences.

But the thing is, language works through exclusion. By that I mean, we have created the meaning of "woman" by excluding everything that is non-woman - same thing for "man." Anything that doesn't fit into the templates for the entirely masculine or entirely feminine is excluded. Because the meaning of "woman" or "man" depends on excluding what is Not "woman" or "man," this binary is unstable. We know that it is unstable, because the things that signify masculine and feminine have shifted over time. It is now possible for women to develop ripped arms or carry guns and still be feminine. But because our social Discourse is so invested in these binaries, we have to move them and redraw the lines. [I'm using Gee's definition of Discourse here: basically, collective understandings or patterns of behavior - I posted more on that here, and also read Emma's amazing comment.] Now it's hot for a woman to have big muscles or, hell, play a contact sport like roller derby. In 1950, do you think a female construction worker could still find a space in "feminine"? No.

So we can see that these binaries are false, and that language already has been defining humanity. Morabito isn't picking up on anything new here, she's just demonstrating her straight cis privilege. She's never noticed how our social Discourses have been operating to keep people corralled into one gender identity or another, with only two acceptable options. It goes beyond this, though. Bodies that queer the act of gender through combining meaning are excluded altogether - people who identify as butch, trans, intersex, etc.

I think Morabito thinks that language just describes the real world. It's all out there, and we have these handy words to define things, but language is not so easy or transparent. There are no positive or affirming - or even neutral - words in the Discourse for those who don't fit the stereotypes or the binary. Language is political. It is meant to work against you in these circumstances. Riki Wilchins describes this "fascism of meaning" as "an assault of meaning that forces people to live as gendered impossibilities." If there is no language for you that affirms you, you don't really exist.

Morabito is worried about the word "assigned." She's really concerned because this means that it isn't inherent, has never been inherent, that M and F have been choices forced upon us. She's exactly right about that. She and I just differ as to our reactions to this. I think changing gender from a check-box to a text field is a great idea. She sees it as a threat to her identity, as though she couldn't continue to refer to herself as a woman. No one is trying to take that away from her, but she sees these things as zero-sum. If we get to have freedom from gender binaries, she loses the construct she is so invested in.

Her closing argument is this:

Most insidious about this legislation is that by acting to redefine the humanity of us all, it is a gross violation of the trust of the governed.

Again: The gender Discourses we already have define and redefine our humanity. And she does it here, too: the governed, in her mind, apparently only include the people invested in the binaries. Everyone else isn't among the governed, isn't among the people. Who is redefining humanity now?

* If this is all new to you, go read Riki Wilchin's Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, like right fucking now.