READ THIS FIRST

12th June 2009

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Chastity and Sex

CELEBRITY UPDATE: Chastity Bono is now Chaz Bono! Cher’s child is undergoing FTM gender transition and has announced this publicly.

Predictably, the Daily Mail have written an abusive and most likely defamatory article on him.

Referring to his client as a ‘he[‘], Chastity’s publicist Howard Bragman said …

The AP’s article (via stuff) is only a little less bad - his preferred name isn’t mentioned once in the article and the journalist insists that he’s “Cher’s daughter”, emphasis mine. Thankfully, ill-gendered pronouns are avoided in the article - but the journalist seemed to think it was important that Bragman is firmly in the male camp, referring to him (pointedly? or is that just me?) as Chaz’s “spokesman”.

Why do shitty newspapers insist on deciding for themselves what pronouns - let alone what genders - befit the subjects of their dreary articles? Most depressingly of all, Bragman

ask[s] that the media respect Chaz’s privacy during this long process as he will not be doing any interviews at this time

No dice, Bragman - and no kudos, Daily Mail. Like I say, however, predictable - this is the rag that has a section called “Femail”, articles solely concerning celebrity sex scandals and weight loss advice.

Tagged: gendermediafeminism

21st May 2009

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Put your organ inside me, Ignacio.

Zelda Lily asks whether this is offensive or not:

I say …

• offensive? yes.
• good advertising? yes.
• trite? a little.
• makes me want to donate organs? no more than I already do (which is a lot, according to my driver’s license).

I suspect this would leave me more keen to donate my organs:

Tagged: mediaadsgendersexorgan donationmecs

21st May 2009

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You are who you give birth to.

via five thirtyeight:

Warner (1991) and Warner and Steel (1999) study American and Canadian mothers and fathers. The authors’ key finding is that support for policies designed to address gender equity is greater among parents with daughters. This result emerges particularly strongly for fathers.

I’m a little suspicious about the research methods, but this is rather interesting. The findings don’t really seem surprising, as people I meet who “don’t know any gay people” in general are a lot more ignorant of what it is to be gay and as such tend to express more homophobia. Similarly, the people in my theatre class who haven’t met any transpeople don’t have any problem voicing massively-transphobic opinions - “You can’t really change your sex if it’s what you were born as” etc..

Raising someone, though, is a far more intense relationship than “knowing” or “having met” someone - so the differences in tolerance, acceptance and understanding are correspondingly more extreme in the case of parents.

The actual paper is here.

… I wonder whose minds (and politics) I’ve broadened in my time.

Tagged: genderpoliticsscience

19th May 2009

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Comments I write on pages that are actually worth looking at II

They say:

OMAHA — A west Omaha couple says their 8-year-old son has asked for years to wear dresses and change his name, so they’re enrolling him in a new school where he can live openly as a girl.

The parents say their middle child is transgender, and he’s asked to be called a girl since age 4.

“One night she said, ’Every night when I go to bed, I pray my inside will match my outside. But it never happens,“’ the mother said, recalling a conversation with her child.

The family, which is not being identified to protect them from possible harm, met with therapists and gender experts before deciding to switch the child’s gender affiliation.

Ellie Hites, an Omaha therapist who’s worked with more than 200 transgender people in the city, says it’s healthier to live as one’s chosen gender when there’s a discrepancy with the biological gender.

“It’s like they arrive here with one biology but the mental set is counter to that,” she said.

Many of Hites’ transgender clients have suffered from nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts and deep depression because they’ve been forced to hide their true identity, she said.

As the 8-year-old explained: “It’s kind of like you’re trapped somewhere and you can’t get out.”

He’s been allowed to dress as a girl at home, but has had to dress and act as a boy in public. The family says that will soon change.

The child recently completed second grade at a local Catholic school. His parents agreed to allow him to enter third grade as a girl, but the Rev. Joseph Taphorn, chancellor of the Omaha Archdiocese, won’t allow it.

Taphorn said it would be disruptive to other students who’ve come to know their classmate as a boy.

So, the child will be enrolled in public school — as a girl.

“Now I can wear nail polish, get rid of all my boy clothes and not worry about that name,” the child said. He’s also looking forward to growing a ponytail and getting his ears pierced.

I say:

To the author:

You could have done the child the honour of using appropriate pronouns! Pronouns refer to gender, not sex. The “son” is a girl (in gender), if male (in sex). The discrepancy between the two may be confusing to some (hence the necessity of the term ‘transgender’) but is irrelevant in using correct pronouns. It is shoddy reporting - especially given what the AP Style Guide has to say on the matter - to insult the girl in question and make her life even more difficult by insisting on using “he” and “his” and him”, acting as though you know more about her identity than she does.

At least it was reported; genderqueers seem to be a bit of a surprise to most of the people who’ve commented on this, citing “moral decline” and other absurdities. Sad that it has to be “news” though.

Am I fighting a losing battle here?

Tagged: commentsgenderfeminismqueer

19th May 2009

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Women’s rights round-up; or, ad feminam

First - firsts, three:

1. Dalia Grybauskaitė is elected as President of Lithuania. The Thatcher of the East. The Shipley of the North. The (Indira) Gandhi of the West. Anyway, now the Lithuanians get to say “women hold the most powerful economic/political positions in our country. Feminism is no longer needed.”
2. Kuwait sees its parliamentiary elections usher in four (4 [iv]) women MPs. A first, a second, a third and a fourth for Kuwaiti women’s rights. Still, the PM’s the emir’s nephew and the parliament is essentially a religious institution. BUT…
   

   The master’s tools will never tear down the master’s house.
   

   ¡Viva la revolución!
3. Ruth Padel is “elected” (read: drawn out in an Oxbridgian raffle, kind of how they decide on the next Pope) to the post of the Oxford Professor of Poetry, the first woman to have this done to her. She’s crazy looking which is kinda refreshing:
   

   
   

   Mind you, she is English. As you probably guessed, my cynicism extends hither also; she probably only got the post because of the sexual harrassment charges levied against her competition. Whether true or not, they’re conceivable. That said, I wouldn’t mind Byron, cad that he was, having a post like this. Hmm. To Virginia then:
   

   “Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
   - Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
   

   Ruth, don’t forget your mothers. You’ll never be told not to forget Shakespeare, Milton, Sophocles, Wordsworth, Shelley, Pope … But you may just need to be told not to forget Eliot, Sand, and Jane, Charlotte and Emily.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, a prison inmate gives birth in her cell. Alone.

“Around 7 a.m., a guard came in and asked me if I wanted breakfast. I was crying and holding my stomach and said that I needed a nurse, but he only said, ‘Do you want breakfast or not?’

“And that’s when it hit me — I’m going to have this baby on my own.”

The beat goes on …

Tagged: feminismpoetrypoliticsjusticegendervirginia

28th April 2009

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Stuffbusting I

Stuff has yet again posted a bizarre story with no analysis at all of the facts it questionably reports. There are almost limitless problems with this article. Time for a list.

A drunk woman barged into a young mother’s home and tried to grab her three-month-old baby in a random incident described by police as bizarre.

• So far so good. Still, wtf?
• On second thoughts, I’ve a bit of a problem here. The “home” and the “three-month-old baby” in question are both described in the same terms in relation to the “young mother”. That is, once we’ve established that the baby is the “young mother“‘s and not the “woman“‘s (the baby’s parent in this case being ambiguous). Both home and baby are referred to as possessions of the “mother”. Which they may well be. But a home, as opposed to a house, is surely defined by people, those who make it up. (Consider: can a home be unoccupied in the same way in which a house can be? This is contestable, though, I’m saying this as a native speaker of English not as a lexicographer.) So why is the “mother” the possessor of the “home” and her “baby” another possession, existing on the same plane as the “home” for the “mother”?
• So I thought for a third time. Why is this poor lady being referred to only by her motherhood? Surely she is a person, not just a mother.

The Asian mother in her early twenties answered a knock at the door of her and her husband’s home in Montgomery Place, Masterton, about 4pm on Friday, to be confronted by a heavily intoxicated woman.

• What exactly is an “Asian mother”? And why is her ethnicity OR her continent of origin (or if “Asian mother” means “mother of an Asian”, her child[ren]’s ethnicity or continent of origin) at issue when all that is important as far as the “woman” is concerned is her lack of sobriety? Oh, of course. Because the “woman” is white and white people don’t have ethnicities. Being white is normal, neutral. Ta, stuff.
• Why do we need to know her age? Does this impact on the story at all? This isn’t so bad as the previous point, but it still suggests that stuff would have reported the story differently if, say, the “mother” was middle-aged or, heaven forbid, post-menopausal.
• Ah, so here we have clarification at last. It’s not just “her” home, it’s “her husband’s” home too. Thank God. She might be Asian (might being the operative word; see above) but at least they subscribe to marriage. Who knows, they might even be Christian!
• Why do we want their address? I don’t know how many young Asian mothers live with husbands and three-year-old children on this street, but I’m suspecting that there are few. Maybe just one. Are stuff trying to tell the whole street just which neighbour let them down enough to have their street shamed in the Dominion Post?

Senior Sergeant Caroline Watson said the intruder pushed her way into the house and started asking questions about the woman’s baby girl.

• Oooh we have a fact! The “woman“‘s property is female. The story makes so much more sense now.

“We are lost for answers really. There doesn’t seem to be anything sinister or any obvious kidnapping attempt. Maybe she just heard the baby crying as she passed by and, in the state she was in, went to have a look.”

• Sage words, Caroline.

The intruder, who was then inside the house, asked to hold the baby then reached out to grab her, Mrs Watson said.

• If Watson were a man (and, yes, still a Senior Sergeant) we would never found out about Watson’s S.O. Why do we need her marital status - or, for that matter, her gender as defined by the Dom Post? Call her Sergeant Watson. Or just Watson. it’ll look like you did less work by having four characters fewer in your article, Tanya, but the characters that are left would be more useful.

A neighbour visiting the house shoved the drunk woman back toward the door and slammed it shut.

• Tanya, darling, in New Zealand we say (and write [and type]) “towards”. Write the way we’ll read it.
• Am I the only one concerned at this point that the “drunk woman” is STILL INSIDE THE HOUSE?!?!??!?! If you don’t want me stressed, Tanya, please confirm that she wasn’t just “toward [sic] the door” but outside of it when the slamming occurred.

Police are still searching for the woman, described as short, with short hair and last seen wearing dark clothing.

• C’mon, what are they really going to do to her?

General trends, then.

1. Irrelevance. Lots and lots of information that’s useless in the context of the story. In fact, the whole story’s only very tenuously news. Not that I don’t like gossip.
2. The implications these irrelevancies give to the article. Ethnicity, race, marital status … how much do we judge these chaps because of this extra information? Those figuring in news stories move from agent to object - the homeowner is an “Asian” “young” “woman” “mother”, a configuration of categories. This is no
   

   instrument in the shape
   of a woman trying to translate pulsations
   into images for the relief of the body
   and the reconstruction of the mind[;]
   

   this is a cheap character divorced from humanity and reality filling a role in a story constructed by a shitty reporter. In a word, an exploitation.

Tagged: adriennepoetrycrimestuffgenderfeminismmediaracehypocrisy