Mind-Boggling Stupid From The Reich... I Mean Right

Round-up of stuff I learned today!  Because the opportunity to write a bunch of crap into a survey selling frozen meat products wasn't cathartic enough...

1.  The National Organization "for" Marriage is still pulling that arcane slander out of their asses that queer people are more likely to abuse children than opposite-sex people... while citing a study that clearly says a child's biological parents are responsible for the vast majority of abuse.

2.  CBS gave the green light to a commercial spot during the Super Bowl from Focus on the Family which promises to totally patronize women everywhere while rejecting "controversial" ads from gay dating sites, animal rights organizations, and tolerant churches.  Of course, ads bashing gay people like that Snickers commercial are totally cool, too.

3.  A Virginia school has decided to stop assigning a version of "The Diary of Anne Frank" because it has "homosexual themes."  My favorite part is the Freeper comment... as if adding Anne Frank's diary to the classroom curriculum was just a way for people to indoctrinate their kids into homosexuality.  More proof:  Freepers are stupid.

4.  This one isn't a "right-wing stupidity" round-up, but in Nepal the number one cause of death for women is suicide.  Yes, suicide.

5.  Oh, and according to some of my (white) Twitter buzz, saying that you forgot Obama was black during his speech as a compliment is so totally not a racist thing to say.  *Snrrrrk*

In Honor Of Blogging For Choice Day...

This is an old post of mine which I am reposting in honor of Blogging for Choice Day.  It is called Why Abortion Is A Queer Issue.  It is an unchanged article that came from a couple years ago, therefore some of the language is problematically ableist and therefore different than I would have used today.  My belief that abortion is a queer issue, however, remains the same.




You'd be surprised how much oppression in the world is based on misogyny (hatred of women). In fact, Queer oppression, not only oppression against gays and lesbians but against transgenders and all sorts of others, is fundamentally based on the oppression of women. Men and women who do not "act their gender," in other words, who have sex with their own sex, are not following the world order of man dominating woman (look at any theological argument for homophobia and you will see this theme).

So how come there are so many gays out there who blatantly ignore misogyny, even enter into it when it seems to benefit them? And that's exactly what this essay is about: The commitment of many gays to misogyny.

This is not new. Back in ancient times, when we like to think it was a grand old time for homosexuality, being homosexual was connected to gender roles. You were expected to play the role of either a man or a woman. A young man could be the "wife" of a much older man, but the roles had to retain a certain amount of heteronormativity. For two older, masculine men to have sex was viewed as really kind of weird.

In later times, gender roles were viewed as more rigid in that they began to be even more connected with your biological sex. Men had to act as men, women as women, and to go against that was going against God. No longer could you necessarily get away with becoming a top or power bottom, although those roles still existed, mainstream society didn't accept that so much anymore.

Why? Because with women's roles and men's roles changing, we as a society needed to ensure that there were men to do the dominating and women to be the dominated. If you were the aforementioned power bottom/wife, you were violating your duty to overpower a woman by being overpowered. And if you chose said "wife" over a woman, you were leaving a woman undominated. For shame! And if you were a woman who loved women, you weren't being dominated by a man at all, how DARE you, sister of Lilith!

Why do I choose to focus on abortion? Because no sane Queer is going to try pulling off the "women need to stay in the kitchen" bullshit. We (metaphoric "we") need something that, in our (creepy) vision of a perfect world, shouldn't do anything to destroy our vision of our man/man or woman/woman household with a white picket fence and 2.5 kids. I choose to talk about abortion specifically because out of all the women's issues out there, it is probably the most in danger of being stripped of its title as an important women's issue, which is a damned shame. Not because I have some dead foetus fetish, which I certainly do not, but because if I can connect abortion rights to Queer liberation, what can't I connect to it? It's controversial. It gets under peoples' skin. But regardless of this, it is a Queer issue and that's what I'm going to demonstrate.

Now, I've already gone into a sliver of the history of gaiety in which being Queer in places like ancient Greece wasn't nearly the fun fuck-fest we picture it to be (unless you're a power-bottom, in which case, more power to you, pun unintended), but the history of the anti-abortion movement is just as obscured. See, for a very long time nobody gave a shit about abortion. It was considered an issue between a woman and her midwife. There were sexist issues at play here, of course, such as the whole obligation-to-bear-a-son bull, but when talking specifically about abortion, there really wasn't much of an obligation to keep conceiving, especially if you already had kids to look after. Abortion was tricky. It consisted of things like abdominal pressure, poisoning yourself, and witchcraft. But it wasn't a moral issue for most people until quickening, that is, when the woman can actually feel her unborn moving about inside her belly. That was when the unborn was considered to have a soul. Before then? Not a baby, not a problem.

Then something started to happen. Women started to get rights. No longer were all women automatically going to be mothers at an early age. And those people I was talking about... the ones who want man-dominates-woman to be our primary social structure... freaked-the-fuck-out. Wait, did I say man-dominates-woman? I meant man-dominates-woman and white-dominates-black. That's more like it. See, part of the issue here was that suddenly white women started giving birth to fewer children. Black women and other women of colour didn't. People started freaking out, not JUST because women were choosing not to be babymakers, but because they were irrationally afraid those uppity white women were going to destroy the white race.

So they do what any white-God-fearing-idiot would do. They start issuing religious proclamations which institute motherhood as a woman's primary duty. Suddenly, any woman who doesn't have a ton of babies is unChristian and destroying white society. Abortion and many other forms of family planning are outlawed, and no Christian woman would be caught using some sort of birth control, even the ones invented to prevent abortion. Because in today's Christian world, every shot of sperm should be done specifically to keep your woman pregnant.

Note my obvious omission of the whole idea of the personhood of a foetus. See, the thing is, that was never really the issue when this shit started going down. The issues were, clearly, racism and misogyny. We needed to propagate more good white Christians. We needed to keep women having more babies. The idea that it was a life issue, that we were trying to protect babies, that came much later. In fact, modern pro-lifers try to distance themselves from this by trying to make abortion advocates look like we were trying to exterminate black people. However, neither abortion advocates nor opponents were free of such racist tendencies.

Every shot of sperm should make a woman pregnant. Everything that gives a woman pleasure should get her pregnant (ahh, just kidding, women shouldn't be having pleasure). These were the underlying reasons for the sudden crazed addiction to anti-abortion legislation and thought. So wait, this is a Queer issue?

Of course it is! Anti-abortion advocates as a whole have never been interested in preventing pregnancy, they have been interested in preventing abortion. The whole dead-baby thing has always been a coverup. Now, you'll get the odd baby lover, and those types are increasing because of the mythology surrounding abortion, but the basic issue which makes abortion a problem for them is that they believe women should be getting pregnant and men should be making them that way.

That's not how Queer society works. In the Queer world, people are not the sum of their baby-making capacity. Queers can and do have children, and we make damned good parents, but that's not the function of our relationships. Our relationships are, in theory, based on love and mutual understanding and sexual pleasure. That's what the white straight society was heading for, and the anti-abortion movement came out of it.

Queer people need abortion rights because many of us can get pregnant without wanting to be. I mean, look at me. I am a pre-T FtM. By the definition of really conservative anti-abortionists, I've already had an abortion which I do not regret (it wasn't an abortion, but like I said, dead babies have never been the issue anyway). Still, the fact that many of us need abortions and procedures demonized in the same way as abortion is not the issue. The insistence that our bodies are mere breeding stock is, and because of it, abortion is and always will be a Queer issue.

On Outside Observations of Trans Men

I try to avoid making assumptions about the MtF side of the trans community.  It isn't because I don't have them (I'm human, humans make assumptions, assumptions are often mistakes), but because I just know I would make statements that look as bad to trans women as the statements Rachel Dunn makes in this essay, "Transmisogyny" & "Faggots", which as a trans man make me extremely uncomfortable.

Is it any wonder why many F2M transmen remain connected and accepted by the lesbian community, and seem more accepted by the larger gay community? They are not viewed as interlopers by the women, because many F2M's were once 'one of them,' and this is further reinforced by the butch/fem paradigm pervasive in the lesbian community - which emulates heteronormative behavior, so I suspect F2M transition is not a stretch for many.

Unfortunately, the relationship between trans men and lesbians is not necessarily "acceptance."  I have never been a lesbian.  My journey was from masculine straight woman to gay trans man to bisexual trans man.  When lesbians consider me a part of their community as lesbians, it makes me excruciatingly uncomfortable, and I know I am not the only one who feels this way... including many of us who were lesbians at some point.  And lesbians who identify as FtM chasers and FtM-loving andromimetophiliacs are not accepting me, they are fetishizing me.

That is not to say that there aren't FtMs who are still involved with the lesbian community or who even consider themselves dykes, lesbians, butches, or some other label, but the fact of the matter is, when a non-FtM lesbian considers me a part of her community and is uncomfortable with MtFs, she is saying that I am not a man and is erasing my identity.  It isn't that I cringe with misogynistic fear when people call me "ma'am" at the supermarket or that my parents still can't bring themselves to call me "he" after six years, but when somebody who really proclaims to know my identity and respect my identity decides for me that I am a part of a female community, that is woefully cissexist even if it does show they want to claim me as "one of them."

This is not just a personal thing, though.  There are FtMs who want that community, and I don't feel it's my right to take it from them.  But the co-opting of FtM stories into lesbian contexts is a ruthless form of non-acceptance.  The book "All She Wanted" by Aphrodite Jones, about the trans man known popularly as "Brandon Teena," is a sore example of this which refers to Brandon using female pronouns throughout the whole book.  That is not acceptance.  The story of Dr. Alan Hart was used as a namesake for an award given out by the Right to Privacy PAC using his birth name.  That is not acceptance.  When Diane Middlebrook refused in her book "Suits Me" to acknowledge Billy Tipton was a trans man and not a lesbian, that was not acceptance.

And that's just assuming that she is automatically right that FtMs meet acceptance in female contexts.  Sometimes we do, but sometimes we are met with malice.  An essay I quoted when I talked about the exclusion of trans women from Dianic rituals referred to us as "women who self-identify as men" and, although their focus was on excluding trans women, it was only because trans men would not--according to the essay--join an all-female coven to begin with.  We have been painted as all manner of patriarchal concept, from reject lesbians who gave up on being women to a female version of a "House Negro" to traitors against the cause.

Although many F2M's may not be viewed as 'real men' by the gay male community, perhaps the glimmer of heteronormativity offered by such a relationship might serve to further sublimate a gay man's distress at his own gender transgression - despite the masculine appearance of their transman partner. (Because I want to concentrate on our common gender issue, I'm not even going to attempt to address the quagmire of who's got the privilege in a patriarchal society - and why M2F's are considered "downwardly mobile.") (Emphasis hers)

This is one of those theories that sounds great on paper if it's not about you.  "Maybe the reason [insert observation here] is true is because [insert random theory here]."  The problem is, her observations about what gay FtMs go through are just not accurate.

I have met men who want to experiment with me because they're bicurious and "not ready" for a "real man," but gay men who want trans men as some weird sort of secret heteronormativity (remember that after hormones nobody's going to know but the two of them in most situations) are apparently so rare that I have yet to hear of one.

I get more of this:  "I would never be able to date you, because I am gay."  Which is even worse considering I have yet to ask a question that would prompt this response.  My existence simply appears to prompt the response from gay men that they would not date me... just in case, I guess.  And when I mention my former partner, who is gay, he is erased from their minds as well in a fit of cissexist gay confusion because according to them no real gay guy would ever want to date me.  These aren't random people I've met, these are friends and people I have organized with and people I have gone to parties with.  As far as acceptance goes, though, it's only superficial... not because they have no interest in me, but because by their very language they have dismissed me as a man.  None of them have tried getting in my pants to make momma proud or put away some of their shame, and if they did, it would still not be acceptance, it would be exploitation.

You know what has been more common for me?  Gay guys who get crushes on me and then go through a whole load of terror and awkward self-discovery because they didn't know they could be attracted to a trans man, much less a pre-T one.  They're horrified of their attraction to me.  A few get a hold of themselves later, but until then it's certainly not acceptance.

I must reiterate that I'm not saying her experiences about herself are wrong, and I am not saying that trans women aren't getting the brunt of anti-trans sentiment put out by queer people, but trans men just aren't as accepted in the communities as she seems to imply we are.

Oh, This Takes Me Back

My reasons for writing this are a combination of two independent infections I'm suffering from right now as well as the lack of sleep, alligator skin, and headache which are symptoms of the medication.  With that in addition to world news and other variables, I was already in a bad mood before this bullshit started.

There are some video games I play where the generally-early-teen-aged populace had it in their heads that if they pressed the "report" button on somebody it would magically cause their account to be deleted.

There's a problem with that logic, though: There are usually real people who read those reports first.  So if they find out the reason you're reporting somebody is because you were begging for game goods and they wouldn't give them to you, you are the one who is going to get in trouble.

So there's this conservative.  I'm not going to mention his name for reasons which will be obvious soon.  A rumor started that he had dropped the n-bomb to somebody through a Twitter DM.  Did he really send it?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I can't see anything conclusive from looking at it.  People were saying stuff about the background of the text being too gray, but that's a common problem that happens with image compression.  I am going to assume, though, that he did not really send the message.

People RTed it.  A lot of people.  And this is what he did:

1.  Send the messages to the @spam account multiple times.  Irony?

2.  Threaten to sue Twitter.

3.  Threaten to sue the guy who wrote the message.

4.  Threaten to sue everyone who RTed the message.

5.  Recruit his conservative friends to send messages to the @spam account multiple times.

6.  Continue harassing people who had deleted the message.

7.  Reassure people, after criticism, that he was once an AOL moderator and knows what he's talking about.

Ironic that this guy seems to think sending three messages to @spam isn't... uh... spam.  Which again reminds me of the former... are people just that self-centered that they think spam isn't spam and abuse isn't abuse when they do it?  How can one complain about terms of use infringement when one is clearly infringing on the terms of use?  I know, I know, a lot of people don't read those, but if you're going to quote regulations you'd better not be breaking the same regulation while doing it.

But I digress.  I needed to say something because if I wind up sued I am going to be pissed.

Lesbian/Bisexual Woman of the Decade Call for Publicity

I'm linking this because I think it's important.  Raising My Boychick, in response to After Elton's "Gay/Bi Man of the Decade" is creating a "Lesbian/Bi Woman of the Decade" and needs nominees.  Women of color and trans women nominees are encouraged.

Click here for the post.

Time for a "When I Was A Little Girl" Story

When I was a little girl, I was terrible at math.  I distinctly remember some particular instances that cemented this hatred of numbers.  I counted on my fingers, and still do, using patterns, and my teacher thought this was weird and unusual and also did not make sense that I could count on them past ten (don't ask me why she thought this, as far as I'm aware plenty of people can).  She made me hide my hands while I was counting in class.  My performance suffered.  Rather than help me, she reassured me that girls were bad at math.

Isn't that reassuring?  And I keep thinking, you know, this wasn't exactly that long ago.  I'm only 24, I'm not talking about what we would know as the gender-inequality-dark-ages.  It was like that all through high school for me.  Psychology class, in particular, pounded it in my head that my feeble female brain was ill-equipped for math and I should stick to language.

And I love language now, but back then it was not my favorite subject by a long shot.  In fact, in those same schools I was constantly writing my English assignments in shorthand, I hated writing that much.  But you know what I loved?  Science.  Speaking of English, I remember getting in trouble because we were supposed to be reading fiction books during "reading time" but couldn't get enough astronomy and biology.  Our library was divided into halves, one fiction and one nonfiction, and I had been using the library for three years before I ever stepped foot in the fiction section.  I filled myself with so much science that my teacher regularly thought I was cheating on tests in sixth grade.  I justified my hatred of writing and love of science with my increasing discomfort with being a girl, but somehow the math never did that.  There was no real rhyme or reason for it.

It wasn't until college that I realized I wasn't bad at math.  Six years ago, the one math class I needed for my degree, and my professor (who wanted to be called "Steve") was so excited about the subject and so into helping us all succeed in it that I got an A in a class I had never pulled a C in in my entire life.  And before you ask, no, this wasn't remedial math, and even if it were, I suddenly realized that my mathematical abilities always had that cloud of "you can't do that, you're a girl" looming over it.

Which is why I am re-posting this:
Worldwide Study Finds Few Gender Differences in Math Abilities

Which I intend to send to everyone who thinks they can't do math because of something as arbitrary as their gender or sex.

Rush Limbaugh: Twitter Wants Him Dead, Apparently

I am apathetic about the death of Limbaugh (he's not dead yet, but even if he lives another decade I am still apathetic about his death).  I hate that man.  I don't wish him death.  He ain't worth the candle.

Then I started reading the conservative tweets and I just got pissed off.  There are already articles out there talking about how hateful liberals are because people aren't acting miserable over somebody who, quite frankly, has built a career on hate speech.  The worst part?  This collective Twitter "fuck you" just isn't as big as they're making it.  I'm sure a lot of people want him dead, they have for a long time because he has hurt a lot of people.  But you get just as many if not more light-footing "I don't wish him dead!" messages from liberals before you're pounded by the conservative response to it.

This was the statement I left at some of those places:

I'm annoyed but not surprised that conservative Twitter users are using this to paint liberals as a bunch of violent hatemongers. To find really vile things about Limbaugh on Twitter you need to do some looking, it's dominated by statements by liberals saying they don't wish Limbaugh death and conservatives who are complaining that so many liberals have been so consistently berated by that man that we can't be bothered to cry over him.

There is nastiness. But you know what? Rush Limbaugh is a nasty man. He's a hateful man. He made a career on being a hateful, angry, and violently-thinking person. That conservatives would point to this as some proof that liberals are hatemongers rejoicing at the death of an innocent human being is an utter joke, at best!

It also seems to presume that, were it a liberal who were in the hospital, conservatives wouldn't be all over that. You can't tell me there wouldn't be the same kind of hate messages there if Michael Moore was in the hospital. When George Tiller was murdered, Twitter had all sorts of statements from conservatives speaking openly about feeling his death was a good thing!

Vengeful thinking is not a politically-based emotion.