In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: April 2006

Through a Byline Darkly

Older left this comment on the thread about Max Wolf Valerio:

I remember reading about one of the earliest F2M transexuals, and I was mightily offended by the fact that all his relatives thought the transition was a good thing because of how — well, how unpleasant he’d been as a woman. And reading the story, I thought “Oh great, she was an asshole, and now he’s an asshole.” Apparently, at that time (over 40 years ago) all men were understood to be assholes, and that was okay. But I was sure that something else was going on there, though I couldn’t tell what exactly, because of the assumptions and generalizations. Maybe he was just tired of all the trash that had been talked about him.

I commented on bitch/lab’s blog that every time I see a mainstream-press article about transsexuals, I think, “Die! Die! Fuck off and die!” (Not about the subject of the article, I should probably take pains to make clear.) And it’s true. Just seeing the word “transgender” outside of “… Tapestry” or “Other” magazine or the FTMI international newsletter is enough to make me tense up.

I’m not entirely sure why that is. The Max Wolf Valerio article carries with it a few problems:

1) It pretends that his experience is representative, that “Max Wolf Valerio” is a good standin for “everytranny.”

1a) Conversely, his experience is presented along the Transgender Template that anyone who’d been obsessively seeking out references to transpeople for several years would notice:

Born as a girl named Anita, she thought she was a boy and only reluctantly accepted being a very tomboyish girl. She grew into a tall and exotic redhead – part Hispanic, part Blackfoot Indian – who favored black hair dye and motorcycle jackets.

(…)

But at 32, she started injecting testosterone directly into her thigh. In the next few months of injections, her jawline and waist filled out, a beard grew, and her muscles hardened and bulked up. She developed a ravenous appetite and her voice changed to a natural male one.

2) It uses Valerio, albeit in a less ball-peen fashion than other articles I’ve seen, and with some cooperation from Valerio himself, to ponder the Riddle of Gender. Transpeople are not coelacanths.

2a) Brief but concluding references to unspecified scientific findings that prove what we thought all along.

3) The author, although I would guess not so much Valerio himself, believe that behaving or desiring in a traditional/conventional/stereotypical male way are objective proof of being male. What if Valerio had up and gotten pregnant? Would the author have elided that, excused it on grounds of desperation, or taken pains to point out that Valerio was male despite having given birth?

4) The author implies that success by conventional criteria is proof that Max was right to transition:

Still, friends thought she was crazy to consider a sex change. Few had heard of female-to-male transsexuals in the early 1980s. She was good looking, they insisted. Why risk ending up looking like Julie Andrews in a fake mustache?

Living In Human Scale

As a resident of a neighborhood chopped up and made far less functional by Robert Moses, I read with great interest the obituary of Jane Jacobs, author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” a 1961 book in which she argued, contrary to the dominant, automobile-centered (thanks, Robert Moses!) ethos of urban planning at the time, that what made cities great were their people, and their people should be encouraged to mix with one another in dense, pedestrian-based urban centers.

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Ever Get that Not So Fresh Feeling?

…Far be it from me to speak harshly of others, but thank you, Amanda!

I’m with Chris:

But Heart’s analysis of the word “godbag” is irredeemably daft. It’s the kind of whingey reaosning that causes people to forward emails with spurious definitions of the phrase “rule of thumb” or the word “picnic.” It’s a creationist-style argument from incredulity: “I can’t imagine any definition other than the one I just made up, and so therefore that differing definition by the person that popularized the word is meaningless.”

Something was really bothering me about Heart’s argument that “godbag” must be derived from “douchebag” or possibly “old bag,” but I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t realize exactly what it was until I read the comments threads at pandagon and at Heart’s own blog:

“-Bag” could very well be the most popular insult suffix in the English language. Must be the testosterone, because the only one I’d been able to remember was “bag of shit.” But no! Scumbag, dirtbag, windbag, shitbag, the unisex co[lostomy]bag, and chunderbag, which is a new one on me. We love to call people bags of various unpleasant substances, and that’s precisely the linguistic tradition carried forward by the first woman ever to tie it round the neck of a bible-thumping scum/dirt/wind/shit/co/chundersack:

I am the spinster aunt responsible, rightly or wrongly, for inventing the word “godbag.” It does not, I’m afraid, derive from any of the sources you cite. A godbag, if you will permit me the impropriety of quoting from my own rather extensive body of work on the subject, is “a bag full of hate and self-loathing wearing stage makeup that makes it look like a televangelist.” The suffix “-bag” alludes, not to a douche or to a woman whose countenance does not conform to patriarchal beauty standards, but to a “sack” or other sort of carryall.

See? Twisty, patriarchy-blamer extraordinaire, is not terribly fond of god, particularly not the one the fundies roll around in their mouths. In fact, I would venture to say that she sees that brand of godliness as the most toxic, noisome substance ever to fill a figurative bag.

Also, my preference for the insult is what Samantha Vimes said:

Douchebag is only sexist if you presume that douche is *good* – if, like the Dungeon Master from Wet Hot American Summer you rationalize that it’s a hygenic product and therefore positive, and the insult is that the douche *has to do with the vagina*. Since douche, from what I understand, is at best worthless and at worst causes infection, a douchebag merely accurately describes someone who on his best day contributes nothing positive and on his worst spreads irritating bacteria.

I grew up believing that douches were bad for you. They were the gynecological equivalent of tight-lacing. I do not equate them with vaginas any more than I equate the corset with women’s torsos; they are rather a damaging patriarchal interference therein. What do you all think?

Also, am I the only one who worries that colostomy bag might be a wee bit ableist? It’d be like calling someone a decubitis ulcer.

ETA, “The clean clue to what we need:” Like Ron Sullivan said, I shouldn’t have used decubitis ulcers in an analogy that implied they were natural or inevitable. Perhaps a better example would be a feeding tube or oxygen tank: no more deserving of disgust, marginalization, or arbitrary separation from the human body than a fork or a lung.

Converts’ Zeal

Both Dawn Eden and recent bannee Deep Thought really stuck in my craw. I realized that what really bugged me about them was their converts’ zeal and their preachiness on Catholic doctrine — their insistence that they knew it all about Catholicism, that they had all the answers, that only people who hewed slavishly to their views on could claim the name Catholic. And on. It doesn’t help that both are very quick on the “you just hate Catholics” thing when challenged.

Um, folks, I was raised Catholic. I’m of an ethnic group (Irish) where I am presumed to be Catholic. My aunt is a nun. Anyone who hears that there are six children in my family almost invariably mentions Catholicism. Even though I am officially an apostate now (ask me how!), I still have trouble not thinking of myself as Catholic, and I know that others assume I am still one. I know that piny comes from a Catholic background, as does Magis, another one who got tarred with the anti-Catholic brush. I’m not sure about Jill, but I’ve never seen her write anything anti-Catholic.

But I have been subject to anti-Catholic bullshit in my life, including in law school, by a professor (who not only let a role-play exercise on the Church’s AIDS policies devolve into Catholic-bashing, he participated with cracks about the wine during Mass, complete with “drinky drinky” hand gestures, which I took as a slam against Irish Catholics, because nobody gets on the Italians or Latinos for drinking). My uncle was denied admission to a medical school he was qualified for because they already had enough Catholics, and my grandfather couldn’t even consider going anywhere but Georgetown for dental school. I know very well that Catholics are going over the wall right after the Jews, the atheists and the gays when the Republic of Gilead is established. I know these people never considered me and mine Christians.

So, yes, it sticks in my craw when people who fucked around through their 20s and then found the Catholic Church swan around telling everyone else — including lifelong Catholics — that they have found the One True Way. These are people who idealize the Church because they have no institutional memory of the way things used to be.

But anything I could say on the matter just pales in comparison to PHLAF’s comment in the Choice for the Kids post, so I’ll just put it here:

Actually, many parishes do indeed admonish their newly converted members to sit back and live as a Catholic for some time before they start preaching, especially at the members of the parish who’ve lived as Catholic all their lives and who’ve also lived with many of the negative issues the Church has dealt with over the centuries.

The main reason why I no longer attend a Catholic Church and now attend our lovely Episcopalian Church is because of the nature of recent converts. They have all but destroyed our parish.

Dawn may be technically correct in what she is writing, but she never grew up seeing how the Church’s teachings on sexuality and contracpetion, filtered through the particularly uptight and freakishly weird Irish cultural views on sexuality and women (a cultural viewpoint driven almost exclusively by the Catholic Church, since Catholicism and Irish culture were one and the same for so many centuries) , were responsible for the early deaths of many women, and were also responsible for alcoholism, depression, and a variety of other psychological issues running rampant throughout Ireland and the solidly Irish Catholic communities in the US.

The culmination of the Catholic Church’s teachings in Irish culture was the establishment of the Magdalene laundries. Add to that the seriously sick and abusive treatment many young Irish boys were getting at the hands of the Christian Brothers’ institutions, and you will see why some of us consider Saint Dawn The Born Again Virgin’s preaching extremely hurtful, ignorant, offensive and insulting.

Had Dawn had to watch her mother die because her body had been forced to bear one pregnancy too many, or one miscarriage too many, she might have a slightly different view on things. Or if she’d grown up with a father who believed daughters ought to be silent at the dinner table and only the sons should be allowed to speak. Or if she’d been raised to believe the only purpose she served on this planet was to marry and have children and that to dream of anything else was sinful. And so on and so on and so on.

The problem with Dawn and most of her commentors is that they’re too young to remember when there was no NFP, there was just pregnancy after pregnancy after pregnancy. There was a baby every year and sometimes even two in a single year (as is the case with my brother and I). And then those babies were raised by over-stressed, angry, resentful parents who often took their (understandable) rage out on their kids, or hid it behind alcohol abuse, or sunk into paralyzing depressions. Kids were routinely abused and neglected in these families.

These converts come out of RCIA convinced that they know more, are better educated and are smarter than every single cradle Catholic on the planet. The fact is, many of them are as dumb as posts, have gotten teachings completely wrong, or have brought along a few things from their previous religion and added them to the package.

They also tend to be very legalist in their attitudes. They think because they know all the rules, they are perfect Catholics, but they’ve missed the heart and soul and spirit of the Church – they’ve missed the best of what the Church has to offer and latched on to the easy stuff – memorizing and spouting dogma and doctrine without any real sense of history or understanding of how that same dogma and doctrine has often been the source of great pain and suffering and even evil for the Church, which, btw, is her members, not a handful of dusty old documents, or a building, or a group of dried-up old men who don’t have any first-hand knowledge at all of what they’re asking of people when it comes to marriage and family.

Frankly, I think it would serve Dawn and her readers/commenters well if she’d lay off the chastity kick for a while and would focus more on humility and charity.

Imprisoned and Deported for Rape

For being raped, that is.

Sixteen-year-old Isma Mahmood was deported to Pakistan last month after serving six months in shackles and handcuffs in a prison in Saudi Arabia. Her crime: being raped by a Saudi man.

Some crime.

“It’s difficult for me to talk about what happened to me, from rape to prison and from prison to deportation,” Isma said in the office of a rescue trust in Karachi where she sat with her sister Muna, 18, who was also deported.

Isma’s parents, originally from the central Pakistani city of Multan, were trafficked to Saudi Arabia around 20 years ago. “Though both of us were born there, we are Pakistanis,” Isma said.

Human rights groups say that hundreds of people, particularly young women, are still trafficked from South Asia every year, with many going on to face a life blighted by physical and often sexual abuse.

This is a good example of how things like trafficking have generational impacts. Yet too many countries — including the United States — don’t have proper procedures for dealing with trafficking victims. Like in this case, they’re often charged with prostitution and then put through an unsympathetic criminal justice system, or simply deported. Of course, the criminal “justice” system in Saudi Arabia doesn’t even approach just.

The women prisoners were mostly Pakistanis, Indonesians, Bangladeshis and Nigerians. Most of them came to Saudi Arabia through trafficking networks and were charged with prostitution, she said.

“No one would believe what it was like,” Muna said.

“When I used to protest against the ill treatment they beat me on my back,” Isma added. “We were chained all during this period. The only time jail officials removed the chain was during lunch or when anyone went to the bathroom or at prayer time,” she said.

“Once a jail official offered me help and assured me I would be released if I agreed to sleep with him … There was a Pakistani woman who was over 40 years old and developed Aids in prison, but she remained in chains before she was deported to Pakistan,” she added.

Read the whole thing.

Owwww.

I just got back from my immigration physical, and my hand hurts. The doctor, a sweet old guy, had a hard time finding a vein in my arm so he had to draw blood from my hand. And he wasn’t entirely steady, and now I have a great big lump on the back of my right hand which means that it huuuuurrrrts to hold a pen.

The bit I was dreading, of course, was being weighed. I knew I couldn’t avoid it, given the nature of the appointment (when I’m being treated, I refuse to be weighed on the grounds that, unless you’re putting me under general anasthesia and you need to know, you don’t need to know. And neither do I).

I know I’m fat. Everyone can see that. I know what size of clothing I have to wear, and how much my ass spills over the subway seat. What I don’t need is to quantify the amount in pounds. I don’t want to get obsessive if my clothes fit fine. I don’t want to provide my internal judge and jury any evidence to punish me with. I don’t want to know how much ground I’ve lost in the last several years, after having had a triple-digit weight loss beginning in college.

So I closed my eyes and/or looked away while the doctor was weighing me, and was grateful that he didn’t announce the amount in pounds (although he didn’t zero out the scale, so I had to look at it while sitting on the table so I had an idea anyhow). The kilos he converted it to don’t mean anything to me conceptually; I have no sense of how much that is.

I was also grateful he didn’t judge, didn’t lecture. Perhaps it was just because he wasn’t treating me so it was no skin off his nose what I weighed. But it depresses me no end that I can consider that a small mercy.

Not a pretty girl.

I’m going to tell you a story that my parents told me and my sister. I’m not telling it to brag. I don’t know whether or not it’s true. I hope it’s not true. I’m telling this story so that you can understand some of what I grew up with.

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