When Trans-Inclusivity Goes Wrong

Well now… this kind of gets weird. Remember all the awesome surrounding Girl Scouts lately? With them accepting MtF scouts? And standing behind their decision, despite the Conservative backlash? And not flinching at Bob Morris’ claims that the Girl Scouts of Indiana are promoting an evil liberal agenda?

It seems those same Girl Scouts, the Indiana ones, have gone a bit past the tipping point in turns of the awesome. Awesomeness has gone awry. They have hired a trans man as a counselor. [Read more…]

On Being A Feminist, A Trans/Queer-Rights Advocate And An Atheist/Skeptic At The Same Time, Or: How To Be Hated By All Your Friends & Allies

On Friday, Russell over at The Atheist Experience, aware of how nervous I was about the potential backlash my God Does Not Love Trans People post could receive (due to the hostile reaction I received on Twitter just for mentioning the possibility of writing it), put up a little post asking his readers to help support me in the event that I did get trolled or attacked by religious believers or apologists.

That’s not quite what happened. [Read more…]

God Does Not Love Trans People

He doesn’t love anyone. He’s not there at all.

I’m sorry.

Lately there have been a number of posts circulating throughout the trans blogosphere making statements to the effect that God loves and accepts His transgender children, and that being trans is not necessarily in conflict with being a religious believer, or even a Christian, Muslim or Jew. While I perfectly understand the motivation behind these posts, and why people feel such a strong need for this message, I nonetheless find it very deeply problematic, and kinda sorta feel a bit of a compelling need to address it. See, I honestly believe that religious faith is inherently dangerous and harmful, that we, the queer community, often are especially victimized by it, and especially ought to understand its potential harms, that the danger is an element of the underlying definition of religious faith itself rather than simply particular sects, beliefs or institutions based upon it, and that we are doing ourselves a pretty big disservice in constructing apologetics (or encouraging them) designed to ease the dissonance between our identities and the belief systems we hold dear.

That dissonance is a gift. [Read more…]

The Abridged “Sincerely, Natalie Reed”

Sorry, I’m a bit busy with some important stuff for tomorrow (that will probably alienate whichever readers I didn’t already alienate by linking “Die Cis Scum”) and don’t quite have time for the post I’d had planned for this afternoon. So instead I’m going to offer a little something for all the “tl:dr” folks who can’t be bothered to slog through my prose.

[Read more…]

“Shut Up, That’s Why” – A Follow-Up

So having a bit more fun with taking things Greta Christina said really, really well and beautifully in regards to atheism, and applying those concepts to things I’ve observed in terms of how other minority groups are treated, like in my Catches Twenty-Two post…

I’ve been thinking for awhile that it would be interesting to talk a bit about how the “Shut Up, That’s Why” non-arguments she once elegantly described being used against atheists also show up in tactics used against other unpopular ideas and movements, like feminism, queer rights, or social justice.

“Shut Up, That’s Why” was right away one of my absolute favourite things Greta had ever written. Given how much I adore her work, and how she has been possibly the single most influential atheist blogger for me, personally, that’s pretty high praise. But in all honesty, the kinds of tactics she was describing I had come across far more frequently in the context of feminism than atheism, and resonated with me on that level more strongly than on the level of being an atheist. Maybe it’s just because I do a generally lousy job of being truly outspoken as an atheist, but still… I always thought it would be interesting to explore that a bit, and talk about how “Shut Up, That’s Why” shows up in other contexts. So this is me doing so. [Read more…]

Why I Love Doctor Who

You know, I hate to admit it , but despite appearances my geek credentials aren’t nearly as solid as they look.

(who am I kidding? I don’t actually mind admitting it at all)

I’m just not really all that into it all. I’m a mac user, and not a particularly talented one, and generally find computers and technology an uninteresting sort of bewildering. I read very few superhero comics, mostly prefer “indie” / “alternative” comics like Chris Ware, Lynda Barry (go Geoducks!), James Kochalka, Dame Darcy, Charles Burns (go Geoducks!) and Daniel Clowes, and my impressive knowledge of DC and Marvel canon is just because I’m freakishly good at remembering trivia and go on lots of wiki walks (though I really do adore Dr. Strange, and loved the X-Men when I was a kid). I’ve seen very little Buffy, only a couple episodes of Firefly, and don’t think Joss Whedon is all that impressive, really. Just pretty good at what he does. I’ve never seen the Battlestar Galactica reboot at all, and may never really bother getting around to it. I hate Kevin Smith, and The Big Bang Theory, with a fiery passion. I’ve never ever read Orson Scott Card, David Eddings (except for the first few chapters of the first Belgariad book when I was 10), Terry Pratchett,  Suzanne Collins, George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling or Isaac Asimov. I really love basketball, fashion, high art, punk rock and poetry. I’m really just a sort of culturally omnivorous sort so I just end up really liking some random things that happen to be part of geek culture (like Douglas Adams or tabletop roleplaying) and have the aforementioned weird memory thing that lets me memorize lots of canon even from franchises I don’t particularly care about…. which then lets me hang out with people who do love those things, and carry on friendly conversations with them about it, even though I don’t actually care. [Read more…]

Seven Things About Being Trans That Are Actually Kind of Awesome

You know what?

This blog is a fucking downer a lot of the time.

Now, I do what I do for some pretty specific reasons.  We’re at the cusp of a very exciting shift in the trans rights movement. Over pretty much just the last year and a half, we have quite suddenly become visible. Cis audiences are finally noticing we exist, and being open to discussing the issue. 2011 saw an amazing wave of steps forward… the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, Chaz Bono on Dancing With The Stars suddenly putting a trans man in the living rooms of mainstream America, Harmony Santana giving an amazing performance as a transsexual character in Gun Hill Road finally being portrayed by a transsexual actress, the United Nations openly including gender identity in its LGBT human rights declaration, Andrej Pejic becoming one of the most talked about and coveted models in the fashion industry, Bobby Montoya being permitted entry to the Girl Scouts, My Transsexual Summer, the Canadian trans-rights bill, etc. etc. etc.

We’ve gone from the point in the struggle where they ignore us and laugh at us, and are now moving into the part where we fight. But we’re visible. We’re here. People can no longer pretend that trans people don’t exist, or that we don’t matter. They can no longer ignore our suffering and our dead.

Two years ago, would an internet blogging network that wasn’t specifically LGBTQ in nature, even the progressive ones, have considered a trans voice and perspective to be an important addition? Would anyone have noticed its absence?

Being a part of this movement means taking advantage of that visibility. Now that people are paying attention, we need to grab hold of the discourse and use it. We need to use our newly acquired voice to say “hey! What is going on is NOT okay!”. We need to speak our truth, and show what’s been happening to us, how we’ve been treated. We need to talk about the rates of suicide, murder, violence, sexual assault, workplace harassment, homelessness, addiction and survival sex work. We need to make sure this is heard now, while we have a chance. Before they begin fighting back and whitewashing everything. Before they begin trying to wrest control of the discourse away from us. We need to use this window to shine a light on our little corner of this world, and on the pain, brutality and oppression that has been going on just beneath society’s notice.

I believe that doing this work, calling attention to the completely unacceptable manner in which trans people have been treated within our society(ies), is important, especially now, in this particularly pivotal moment in our movement’s history.

But it makes for some depressing reading sometimes. And some depressing writing.

I often worry whether the image I’m presenting of what transition is, and what being transgender means, is one-sidedly bleak. That I’m neglecting talking about everything about it that is joyful and empowering and beautiful and wonderful. I worry most about the image this all presents to people who are questioning their gender, or at the cusp of transition, and whether I’m making it all seem really hard and terrifying, like that it means forever sacrificing the goodness in this world and condemning yourself to a life of struggle and discrimination. I worry that I’m playing into a bit of a trend in which the trans community has been defining its identity in relation to our victimization; which incidentally perpetuates our identities being defined only in relation to cis people, as other. It’s not much of a self-determination.

I’m not going to lie… there’s a lot of sacrifices. And a lot of struggle. And it’s never, ever easy. And we are victimized. But it certainly beats the alternatives: suicide or a life of sadness, regret, pain and desperation. Being trans is just something that happens to you. You can’t NOT be trans, and choosing not to transition isn’t going to get rid of the shittiness of that circumstance. But what it does do is deprive you of everything great that can come from this. And there are such things.

So I’m taking a tiny bit of a break from my usual M.O. and taking a moment to appraise those aspects of being trans, and transitioning that have been, at least for me in my own limited experience, a joy and a blessing: [Read more…]

Bio-Essentialism, Social-Constructivism, And What Hormones Do And Don’t Actually Do

One of the often jarring things about being a trans feminist, or even just being a trans person who enjoys participating in discussions of feminism and gender theory, is how you’ll sometimes come across cis people using the existence of trans people to prove some point or another. One way or the other, any theory of gender will ultimately have to account for us, and the simple fact that there are such a thing as trans people, people whose gender identity is in conflict with their assigned, physiological sex, and that there always has been such a thing as gender variance, ends up having significant implications for our understanding of human gender and sex.

A lot of the time, people will just try to ignore us, or awkwardly force us into their existing framework somehow, or develop really elaborate, creaky, intellectually acrobatic theories to try to get us to fit and explain how we can exist without threatening whatever theory of gender they’ve decided to put their stake in. But when things get weird, and sometimes insulting, is when they decide to just go right ahead and use trans people as a tool for pushing their theory forward. Most of the time, you’ll seen this done by one of two groups: the extreme social constructivists, who argue that gender isn’t really real, and is sort of only in our heads, who will suggest that the existence of trans folk indicates that clearly biological sex doesn’t determine gender. And also the extreme bio-essentialists, who say that men and women are fundamentally different, and behavioural differences between the sexes emerge from underlying neurological or hormonal or genetic or evolutionary differences, and the fact that trans people exist, or behave in ways different from the gender they’ve been socialized to be, and that gender identity disorder is thoroughly unresponsive to therapy or cultural pressures and stigma, indicates that there is clearly some kind of underlying human trait that drives gender and gender differences.

Two sides of a debate, each holding contradictory theories, each claiming trans people as conclusive proof of their position. [Read more…]