“You Look Great! I Never Would Have Guessed!” And Other Acts Of Well-Intentioned Cissexism

Disclaimer: this post is not specifically inspired by or directed towards ANY of my friends, family, colleagues, readers or fans. I am very appreciative of all of your kindness and support.

A couple weeks ago when I posted about how to ask trans people questions without doing so in an insensitive or invasive way, I made a point about unintended implications or underlying assumptions. I also used as a brief example the compliment mentioned in this title. I wanted to explore that a little bit more, focusing on the context of compliments and support. [Read more…]

Target Audiences And Playing Nice

There’s been some really interesting discussion in and around FTB lately about the issues of different approaches to blogging and different kinds of target audiences. A lot of this came up in response to our new blogger Libby-Anne (of Love, Joy, Feminism) making a post in which she requested that the FTB natives maintain an extra level of civility when commenting on her blog as she feels the people who will most benefit from her work, and a group she is specifically trying to engage, are those who are still involved in religious and patriarchal communities and beliefs. She feels (and I agree) that if the same take-no-prisoners approach that’s adopted at a blog like Pharyngula were applied at her’s, it would intimidate or drive away most believers, or simply shut down the dialogue and make it impossible to communicate with them. This would be directly detrimental to Libby-Anne’s goals for her work.

I’m completely and totally with Libby-Anne on this. It’s her blog, her house, her rules. If she has certain goals, and needs to set a certain tone in order to pursue those goals, she has every right to ban or moderate commenters who aren’t willing to adapt to that tone. See, one of the main things that bugs me about accommodationists like Chris Stedman is their insistence that there is only ONE possible way to go about atheism… their way. The rest of us, to them, are doing it wrong. I believe our movement is strongest when we recognize the value of multiple approaches, multiple specific goals or priorities, and multiple perspectives. Even if we focus strictly on the micro-issue of attempting to deconvert individual believers, different believers are going to respond best to different kinds of approaches. It’s kind of like how a bio-diverse ecosystem is a whole lot more likely to survive than a homogenous one if there’s a significant change in the environmental conditions.

It’s one of the things I love about Freethought Blogs. We have an extremely diverse set of writers, each coming to this from different angles, with different backgrounds and specializations, different identities, experiences and perspectives, different priorities and interests, different skills and styles and tones, and each doing certain things particularly well in particular ways. It’s like a good, functional Dungeons & Dragons party. You’ve got your fighter, your wizard, your thief and your cleric, each playing different roles… killing goblins, lighting darkened passages, picking locks, and healing the goddamned fighter.

So why am I commenting on this, if this is just one of those little happy things I’m totally cool with? Well, lately things have gotten kind of strange. John Loftus, former FTB blogger, has recently written a number of vague and somewhat nasty (in the JREF Steve Cuno “sea monkey” kind of way) comments over at Camels With Hammers about the “mean-spirited” atheists back here at FTB and has openly threatened to “turn his guns” on such atheists. This is where things stop being cool for me. [Read more…]

Fun Video On Cynthia Nixon’s Choice, And An Announcement (I’m giving a live talk!)

This is a little late, and a little less than topical, but as many of you may have heard, earlier this month Cynthia Nixon (an actress known for her role on Sex And The City) made a very open declaration that for her, being a lesbian was in fact a choice. This directly challenged the currently prevailing queer narrative, and the increasingly dominant mantra of “Born This Way”, and she received some pretty significant negative backlash.

Kind of creeps me out. The fact of the matter is, we don’t yet have much conclusive evidence as to what exactly determines sexual orientation or just how innate it really is. For most people who are queer, our identities feel quite fixed and immutable, and we often fought very, very hard to make them conform to social expectations and went through a long period of hating ourselves and desperately wishing to be “normal” before ever accepting that this is who we are and is who we need to be to be happy. But that experience is NOT universal, and many people have a far more fluid and shifting experience of sexuality and/or gender.

And what really stands out for me is the fact that the Born This Way debate really doesn’t matter unless we buy into the concept presented by the religious right that queer identities or acts are somehow immoral, sinful, disgusting, inferior or otherwise undesirable (“But we can’t help it!”). Even if it is a choice, it’s a choice we bloody well have the right to make for ourselves.

Anyway, a couple really great ladies I know from Teh Twitterz put up this incredibly cute, insightful and fun video last week, which articulates these issues wonderfully (and with wonderful accents) and I happened to watch last night and found too awesome not to share: [Read more…]

A Matter Of Survival

The other day I was archive-binging at the fantastic (and alternately hilarious and deeply depressing) tumblr Yo, Is This Racist? and came across this interesting exchange:

Anonymous asked: Is it racist that my science teacher sucks balls?

Yo, science education in the US is a fucking political mess of a tragedy, but it’s worth sticking around and at least trying to learn how to apply evidence and logic, because bastardizations of science are basically the favorite tool of the modern racist.

I loved it.

But… for some reason my mind immediately snapped back to the awful Be Scofield scuffle of a couple weeks ago. And the years I’ve spent hearing repeated accusations that science, maths, reason, education or any kind of intellectual pursuit (take your pick) is somehow inherently an imperialist or patriarchal or racist or heteronormative force of oppression. I’ve heard it so many times, it’s hard for me even to be all that angry about it anymore. But every once in awhile I encounter something inspiring like the beautifully concise response above, or the sheer audacity of Scofield’s accusations of the “purest form of evil”. In short, I want to address this. [Read more…]

Whitney Houston: “Just Another Dead Drug Addict”

As you’ve all undoubtedly heard by now, pop star Whitney Houston passed away on Saturday in Beverly Hills, likely as a result of a drug overdose.

When I heard this news, I braced myself for the inevitable. I knew exactly what I was about to be subjected to, because it happens every time a celebrity dies as a result of an ongoing addiction. I was going to hear, over and over and over, variations of “just another dead junkie”, “yeah, I saw it coming”, “she deserved it, brought it on herself”, “hard to feel sympathy for someone like that”, “threw her whole life away”, etc.

Happens every time. [Read more…]

Preserving Choice: Lupron And The Medical Ethics Of Treating Transgender Children

Over the past year or so, there’s been a curious and sudden surge of awareness in the general public consciousness about the issue of transgender children. While their existence is something that has been going on for… well… forever, and the trans community has certainly been aware of the likely fact that gender identity is typically developed very early in life (even if not always precisely articulated and negotiated until later) and have been aware of the issues related to it, it seems that it wasn’t until 2011 that it was all that discussed or considered in the general imagination.

Yet now we’re beginning to find it in the news. The actual, mainstream news. There was Storm, the child in Ontario who was not openly assigned a gender by hir parents, the story of the identical twins Nicole and Jonas in Boston, one a trans girl and the other a cis boy, and the issue of Bobby Montoya, a young trans girl, being included in a Colorado Girl Scout troop. Last week a 10-year-old trans girl from England who has faced significant exploitation, dehumanization and misgendering by the media (I wonder which paper, possibly beginning with the word “Daily” and ending in the word “Mail”, may have been involved?), appeared with trans media activist Paris Lees on BBC Breakfast. I found out about this through the shower of horribly transphobic tweets that followed. And recently there’s been a controversy surrounding a father in Berlin’s efforts to have his 11 year old transgender daughter involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital so as to ensure that she cannot follow through on her wish to prevent a masculinizing puberty (and ideally, in his view, “cure” her and have her somehow become a typical cisgender boy).

There’s a very key thing to remember: prevention. [Read more…]

Secular Addiction Recovery Part Two: Alternatives

I’m rather sick today. Lungs full of gravel again. That’s twice now over the past few months… grrr. I didn’t get sick at all last year while I was all super unemployed and idle, but now that I have a (fake) job and (fake) responsibilities, it’s all WHOOO! VIRUS PARTY IN NATALIE’S MUCOSAE! BRING YR FRIENDZ!

So I’m afraid I’m going to just take it easy and initiate lazy weekend mode a day early.

Anyway, I’d like to revisit the theme of dealing with addiction from a secular standpoint, mostly to remind you all that I am totally keeping this as one of the recurring topics here, and didn’t suddenly change my mind and decide this blog will be exclusively about trans-feminism and ponies. So I just wanted to quickly assemble a little list of alternatives to 12-step for atheist and secular addicts in recovery. [Read more…]

Cloud Atlas and The Lana Wachowski Wiki War

There’s a beautiful, wonderful, intricate novel I love called Cloud Atlas. I’d probably be willing to put it in my top ten novels list, if I had a top ten novels list. Do I have a top ten novels list? Maybe I should have a top ten novels list. I’m going to write one more sentence ending in top ten novels list.

It’s structured as six separate stories, nested inside one another like Matryoshka dolls. Each story hops across genres, and moves forward through time. The first is a 19th(?) century journal of a man sailing in the south Pacific, then an epistolary set of letters sent from a bisexual composer exiled in Belgium in the early 20th century to his ex-boyfriend back in England as he becomes embroiled in a complicated love affair and struggle to complete his own masterpiece, then a sort of mystery thriller in the mid 20th century as an investigative journalist unravels a cover-up of flawed safety precautions in a nuclear power plant, then a comedy of errors in present(ish) day as a publisher finds himself mistakenly imprisoned in a nursing home, then a dystopian ultra-corporate future cyberpunk version of Korea where a cloned slave for a fast food chain develops self-awareness and rebels for freedom, and finally a post-apocalyptic (very post, no one even remembers what happened) distant future Hawaii where industrialized civilization has long since collapsed and the few surviving humans are living tribal, pre-agrarian lives.

The stories move forward, getting cut off at crucial points and revealed as a story being followed by a character in the next section, until the middle of the novel, at which point the last story is told completely through, then we start moving backwards into the completions of each story until finally ending on the one we started with: The Pacific Journal Of Adam Ewing.

It’s absolutely, staggeringly, breathtakingly awesome. You should read it. Now. Right away. Before something I’m about to tell you about happens. It’s written by David Mitchell. [Read more…]