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

Month: November 2007

Why I love my daughter’s dance class

Because they’re having an “informal performance day” next week instead of a recital.

Because there’s no dress rehearsal.

Because the performance costume is a pair of black pants and a black leotard for tap, and the same black leotard and pink tights for ballet.

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Posted in Fun

He’s such a boy

Saw a new patient yesterday who apologized for bringing her three-year-old son to the appointment with her. He did pretty well; she brought a bunch of toys and a coloring book and a box of snacks, and she told him in advance that he could have the snacks when I came in the room, so he settled down with his crackers while we talked.  It’s never a surprise to me when kids start to wiggle or wander around during Mom’s exam. It’s hard to sit still when you’re three.  But it does still surprise me when mothers – whether they’re patients or friends – say the kind of thing this woman said to me:

I’m really sorry about him {child is doing nothing unusual, just climbing on and off the chair} My older one, she’s six, and she’s an angel. But he’s all boy.

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Some mildly good news

… so it turns out that U.S. employers are not going to be forced to fire millions of employees. The Department of Homeland Security is trying to crack down on anyone whose records don’t match up properly, which is like firing a shotgun into a crowd because you think there might be a bad bad man hiding somewhere in there. Who cares if some other misfits and collaborators get hit? Oh wait, that’s standard operating procedure for our government already, isn’t it? From the National Center for Transgender Equality:

The DHS rules would have required employers to either fire employees or face stiff penalties when employee records do not match information in the Social Security Administration (SSA) database, such as name, Social Security number, or gender. Transgender employees who are listed as one gender in SSA records, but who live and work in another gender, would have been one of the groups at greater risk of losing their jobs as a result of the DHS enforcement procedures.

Of course, the DHS is not actively trying to get trans people fired; they couldn’t care less about trans people. They’re going after immigrants who are working with false or fudged records. Trans people are just collateral damage. Still, with so many trans people out there unable to change their “official” gender because of absurdly strict federal policies, it makes sense that NCTE and other trans groups signed onto efforts led by immigration and labor groups to stop this madness. Forcing employers to fire people? Last month, a judge agreed with the concerns brought up in the lawsuit against these rules, and now the DHS is retreating to come up with new policies that they hope will stand up better under legal scrutiny. Let’s hope that doesn’t mean some end-run that allows them to require firing or fines, but I’m sure that’s their intention.

This saga, along with other stuff around the federal “Real ID” and other broad-crackdown measures following the lead of the PATRIOT Act, is a really good example of why we all need to band together to fight against increasingly totalitarian “security” restrictions. It’s not just intersectionality, although there are definitely a ton of trans immigrants out there, for instance, who have a doubly difficult time making their way through the system. It’s that the jackbooted “security sweeps,” even if they’re just bureaucratic maneuvering and fines at this point, are squarely aimed at anyone whose papers aren’t in order. At any sign of unorthodox activities or behavior. That’s a shotgun firing at a whole lot of us.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that these new harsher rules were blocked, the Social Security Administration still has a policy of sending out “no match” letters to employers when there’s some mismatch between federal government records and an employee database. I’m not sure what the regulations are around how large an employer must be before having to submit employee records (is it all employers who file W-4s?) — and I’m one of the lucky few who has all of my records in matching order. But this is the kind of thing that keeps many immigrants, along with trans people and others, working in the cash economy. A letter to an employer can out a trans person when details of their gender are not relevant to their job at all, and some employers think it’s completely fine to just fire a trans person for this kind of mismatch. Other trans people have had their drivers’ licenses revoked due to this kind of federal-overmind “make sure nothing fishy’s going on” procedure.

The default option

I just created a new chart on my electronic medical record. I typed in the patient’s name, her date of birth and her phone number, and then I chose from the dropdown menus for sex and marital status. The blanks are automatically filled in, but this patient is a married woman so I had to change both, because the default option is male, single. And I can’t change the defaults.

Why do I have a feeling that the people who designed this program are male, single? It’s a small thing, but every time I create a new chart I am reminded that “female” is considered an aberrant state of being.

The Best Thing About Europe?

When class is cancelled at the last minute, I can hop on a train to Prague for the end of the week, and then on to Munich for the weekend.

Prague is gorgeous, although it’s freezing cold here. And, since my greatest talent in life is attracting weirdos (the bad kind, not the quirky interesting kind), I’ve already spent one night in a sketchy old woman’s Jesus-festooned flat on a rock-hard bed (she found me at the train station, offered me a room, and it was late and I didn’t have a place to stay so I took it, even though I could tell she was nutty), and I’ve already gotten almost-kinda-sorta-robbed by a young Ukrainian man. The story: I was on the tram, and the ticket-checkers came on. I had asked the young Ukranian man if the tram went to the stop by the National Museum; he didn’t speak English, and he knew I didn’t speak Czech. The ticket-checkers checked him and I at the same time (there were two of them). He said something to them, and they asked me for 500 crowns (about 30USD). I figured that I had done something wrong — purchased the incorrect ticket or something — so I gave it to them. As they wrote out my receipt, I started to figure out that something was sketchy, so I asked them in English what I did. One replied, “He is with you, right?” Uh, no. Basically, homeboy told the checkers that he was my friend and that I’d pay his fine. At this point, I’ve gone two tram stops past where I was supposed to get off (I was headed for a walking tour) and I’m generally irritated. The officer gives me my money back, and I get off and start walking. I get a coffee, I continue on, and all of a sudden the Ukrainian dude is standing next to me — he’d followed me from the tram. He follows me for the next 15 minutes, saying something in Ukrainian over and over and asking if I speak Russian; then he starts accosting random people on the street, asking them if they speak Russian and English. No one does. Eventually I get to the tour meeting place, and someone waves him off — and then my Czech tour guide tells me that this occasionally happens to her, and that he’s been trying to ask me to marry him. So, sadly, I lost my chance at scoring a fine young husband.

Perhaps I’ll have better luck in Munich. At the very least, there will be decent beer.* But Prague is lovely, and thanks to Ele’s suggestion in the comments, I’m going to try and hit up some of the synagogues while I’m here, in addition to the usual touristy stuff.

In other words, I probably won’t be posting or moderating comments for the next few days. Enjoy the fabulous Jay, and I’ll see you on Monday.

*Yeah, yeah, I know, Czech beer is the best in the world, blah blah… but I hate pilsner, so it ain’t for me, even if the name Pilsner Urquell cracks me up every time. (Remember the episode of Family Matters where Steve Urkel because super-smooth Stephan Urquell? Anyone? Well that’s what I think of.)

Thank the AMA

Live in the US? Uninsured? Underinsured? In the Medicare donut hole? Stuck in a job you hate because you need the benefits? Thank the AMA.

Medicare was proposed in the 1930s when Social Security was enacted. You may have noticed that Medicare didn’t actually exist until the 1960s.  That’s in large part because the AMA spent millions of dollars fighting it. Can’t have the government telling doctors what to do, or how much they can charge. It’s an article of faith with the AMA that doctors must be allowed to do their work without any pesky oversight at all.

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Here I am

Jill suggested I write an introductory post and I’m generally an obedient sort, so…

No, not a good idea to start out by misrepresenting myself.  I’m not usually obedient. I am, however, a bit nervous about stepping onto this so-much-wider stage.

Deep breath.

OK, let’s try this again. I’m Jay, and I’ll be guest-blogging at Feministe this weekend and next.  I usually hang out over at Two Women Blogging, and Jill’s been kind enough to let me crash here while she’s out of town. The other woman at TWB is a real-life friend of mine who has her own blog at A Room of Mama’s Own.  I asked her to join me because I was too chicken to start out blogging by myself, and I had no idea what my blog would be “about”.

Turns out it’s not “about” anything in particular. I blog about whatever catches my attention at the moment, especially the topics and experiences that rouse my passions.  It appears that I’m passionate about feminism, parenting/family/relationships, and the practice of medicine.  I’m all about the relationship – relationships with my patients, my colleagues, my daughter, my family and with the larger world.

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What trans means to me

Well, it seems like we’re in need of another Trans 101 post. Feministe has had them before but still, every time a contentious post is made about trans issues (like Jill’s recent post) the same basic issues are brought up: why are people trans? How do we approach trans stuff as feminists? What does this all mean? What is it like to be trans? Is transitioning actually an acceptable thing that we can approve of? And what the hell does “cis” in cisgendered mean? (It means “on the same side of” as opposed to trans, “on the other side of.” Literally suggests that someone has not changed genders.) These aren’t bad questions, in fact I’m glad that folks like asdf are curiously asking things like:

Changing the definition of gender into something other than a biological descriptor, into something innate in a person’s personality, does that not require buying into the concept of innate differences between the sexes?

… because I think these things should be discussed and answered. But maybe not in a thread about how many transgender women have been killed this year, and how some people exploit the remembrance of that? So let’s start a new discussion.

Opening up a post for questions with very little content to riff off of can feel kind of like staring at a blank piece of paper. So I thought I would write a little post with my own personal thoughts on the subject, inspired by queen emily’s recent post as well as drakyn’s. I usually don’t get into this level of detail regarding my personal feelings, my own take on gender and trans-ness… it’s always safer to keep it a little more abstract, about material conditions and institutional forces and community response. But here we go. Everyone else, feel free to chime in with your own perspective and add your thoughts. Keep in mind this is intended as a Trans 101 thread, so all questions and inquiries are welcome. If something seems confusing or raises questions in your mind, ask them and people who have experiences with the topic at hand will hopefully answer.

I’m trans. For a while, especially when I was in the process of what they call “medical transition,” I used to identify as transsexual. When I was searching for community and commonality and a politic to link together common experiences of oppression, I started to use the word transgender more. And I’ve used words like genderqueer or “of trans experience” to describe myself too.

But mostly, I just don’t like gender. I really don’t, I wish it would stay away from me. Of course, nobody in this world has such luck. Everything is gendered.

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