Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance. While I personally have my issues with participating in it, due to the intersectional nature of trans murders, I feel it would be remiss not to acknowledge it. Natalie Reed has a blog post of a similar nature. It contains links to voices of trans women of colour instead … Read more
On Tuesday night, I wrote and published this piece on transphobic feminism, and how it’s inherently part of the patriarchy.
On Wednesday morning, I woke up to find out about a comment piece written by LSE student Jason Wong that was printed in London Student on the subject of gender-neutral toilets:
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.
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?
“Homophobia”, cried Conservative Future on Friday, the day after the Lib Dems won the Grove Ward by-election in Kingston. “A return to 1983!”, cried the Lib Dem bashers around the internet (including famous opponent of equal marriage Ben Summerskill, but that’s for the next post). Why? Because the election was described as a “straight fight”, when the Tory opponent just so happened to be gay.
Please consider supporting campaigns such as Out4Marriage and the Coalition for Equal Marriage.
It was World Pride Day in London yesterday and I’m stuck in Yorkshire. So I thought I’d do a few posts over the following days about LGBT stuff. This is the first one. It’s something I think I should’ve done a long time ago but I didn’t have the words to explain it all. I still don’t, really, but I’ll try.
“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.
Another blog post about trans issues, bear with me. 🙂
One thing that really annoys me about Wikipedia is that it’s really progressive about LGBT issues (thanks to the very well-organised LGBT WikiProject), except where it really matters. And where it really matters is in the case of Breanna Manning, although you probably know her better as “Bradley”. Yes, I’m talking about the Wikileaks whistleblower. Her gender incongruence has been known to her counsellor and CO for at least two years, and confirmed by her defence lawyers six months ago, so why do Wikipedia still refer to her as a man?
Just a short post, based on something I came across today while waiting for an appointment at the GP’s today. As you would, while waiting for the appointment I had a flick through some of the leaflets on display, and one of the leaflets was rather conspicuous in what was – or was not – present: