I’m fucking angry. And if you were in my position, you would be too.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, it’s been filled with an onslaught of articles from the nominally liberal paper The Guardian against the transgender community. And finally, thank god, it looks like it’s reached a point where cis people are saying it’s gone too far.
This is a follow on from Erica‘s brilliant piece on trans-exclusive radical feminists, “Doing the Patriarchy’s Work and Calling it Feminism“, which I highly suggest people read before reading this. It’s a brilliant post and should only take you a few minutes.
Finished it? Okay. (more…)
Yes, I know I’m writing this… four? weeks late. Deal with it. Truth be told, I’ve had a problem putting the words together.
Something that has really come to a head in the skeptic community recently is its intersection with other social justice causes. Especially feminism, but also, to an extent, anti-racism, LGBT activism, and other related activism. And how we, as skeptics, treat those other activists. As an LGBT activist and feminist as well as a skeptic, along with quite a lot of other people, this causes tension.
For an example, at the beginning of last month, Paula Kirby released an open letter “The Sisterhood of the Oppressed“, which was… wow. Basically tearing into feminist skeptics and female skeptics for acting like “feminazis” – a term borrowed from Rush Limbaugh – and claiming that they had a victimization complex the size of Soviet Russia. And what really started this? Well, DJ Grothe, the president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, had a public falling out over several bloggers including half of the FreeThoughtBlogs and Skepchick networks, over harassment policies at The Amaz!ng Meeting. Grothe had stated there was really no reason for a harassment policy because he’s never received a report of harassment happening at TAM. Despite at least one prolific female blogger saying, yes, actually, she was harassed.
What the fuck? (more…)
“Again with the trans related posts!”, I hear you say. When you spend so long hanging around with feminists and trans people, you can’t help but think about trans issues and feminism a lot. And one of the issues that came up quite a bit while I was at a party with some cool trans people and feminists earlier this week was RadFem 2012, the upcoming “radical feminist” conference in London. But however good it sounds, it has a horrible policy:
In turn we ask that RadFem 2012 be respected as a space where women born women living as women are able to meet and share information in a peaceful and safe environment.
Radical feminism, as it’s commonly understood these days, is a continuation/evolution of second-wave feminism separate from third-wave feminism. This, in turn, belies a problem: coming from the strong roots of the second wave (indeed, some view the third wave as revisionism in the Marxist sense), it can’t adapt itself well to the ideas of the twenty-first century (as opposed to the ’60s through ’80s). One of the most obvious flaws is the reaction to men in the movement. And when I say men, I generally mean anyone born with a penis. (more…)