So, over at Mano’s house there’s a thread that baffles me and makes me sad. The post itself details dynamics largely within the Democratic party (Sanders being the notable exception, we’ll get to that) and praises progressives at the expense of neoliberals.
Over on the PZ post “Let’s Smoke Out Some More TERFs” a discussion developed in which Susan Stryker & Sandy Stone were mentioned. In that thread, I mentioned being one person of, I am sure, many who were forced independently to coin “transfeminism” when the “trans-” prefix trend was emerging. From people like Sandy Stone and Sylvia Rivera who were adult activists while I was too young to control my bladder to youngsters like, well, me, a lot of work had been done incorporating feminism into trans* activism by the 1990s. However, it was always in a haphazard, highly individualized way. There wasn’t a broader and explicit call to make our trans* activism feminist or our feminism trans* inclusive. The movements were largely separate, both nominally and functionally, even if philosophically they were closely related in myriad ways.
In response to this observation that I was doing transfeminism before there was a word (or at least a publicly recognized word) for transfeminism, HJ Hornbeck asked if I was involved in the early transfeminist movement, even if neither I nor anyone else could ever be called a single originator or even indispensable to the movement. In response, I wrote a small personal history that after some thinking I decided I might want to be able to find again. So, I’m preserving it here in its own post even though both of my readers have probably already seen it on Pharyngula. Call it an exercise in personal vanity. Or call it oral history of an interesting time of transition. Call it whatever you like, but if you haven’t read it, here it is.
Over on a post of PZ’s, zenlike has a particularly insightful comment. The OP is criticizing some bullshit commentary on Fox News about how trans folk are destroying the entire species of Homo sapiens:
We’re not talking about people who want to simply do a bit of reform here and there, add a new category. They want, they must, in fact, destroy whatever is in order to replace it with what they think should be.
…
[T]he trans people have taken it one step further because by abandoning gender altogether, not simply re-writing it, they’re basically trying to use social engineering to create a new species.
[presented out of order, because I think it’s easier to follow the logic that way – cd]
So, in the grand tradition of never having done this before, I offer you this quote of the day. In large part because I don’t want to lose track of it again:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
– James D. Nicoll
My BFF just asked me about Nicoll a minute ago, so later today I might read some about him and add that here, but for now I ask you to simply enjoy the beauty of a well-turned metaphor.
Truly political correctness has gone amok!
says Megyn Kelly, political savant terrible hosting NBC’s Today show. What is the great calamity this time? Well, universities’ fascist policing of student behavior, of course!
Okay, but what, precisely, today, is so much more fascist than universities’ behavior on other days? Megyn Kelly lets us know:
There are strict rules on what you may and may not wear issued by someone who thinks they’re the boss of you.
Oh, joy, this sounds fun! What are the rules? Who are the horrible victims here? Could it be white people? Why, yes! Yes it could!
I have determined that I’m $5 Canadian and a purple gel pen.
What’s your gender?
Or Andy Lewis or mariamaclachlan or Maria MacLachlan (if those latter two are different people).
Sometimes I despair of getting this world right. I walk a pretty thin line in refusing to condemn self-defense specifically while abhorring violence generally. If we eliminated all violence except that which occurred when someone legitimately thought they were acting in self-defense we would still have far too much violence.
Existentialist radical feminists, the main feminist group from whom the categorical statements about defining women in ways that forever exclude the possibility of trans* self-determination regularly flow, do indeed spread a bunch of bullshit. gmcard, for instance, says that the definition of women has been “people without penises” since time immemorial. This is, decidedly, not true.
I rarely do this outside of classrooms, but I’m going to give folks here some definitions that are in common use among people that seriously study gender. Why? In part because Andy Lewis seems to think that there is no coherent definition of gender generally and woman specifically because gender is an inherently incoherent concept while sex is an inherently coherent concept and that to the extent that we use the words gender or woman or man we should use them only in reference to underlying, coherent categories of sex. The Andy Lewises of the world appear to believe that this definitional challenge – and the poor response most people give when asked to meet it – proves the fundamental rightness of an anti-trans*, pro-TERF feminist philosophical position.
So, I deliberately stayed out of PZ’s When humanists go bad thread. But y’know, I didn’t realize it had gone on quite this long. When I saw a spate of comments all directed to that thread, however, I had to check in again just to know what is keeping that thread alive.
The answer? Andy Lewis.
Matt Dillahunty of Atheist Experience fame has more than once asked a caller, “How did you determine that God is the good one and Satan is the bad one?” That question was made particularly relevant after I was sent this picture (from, interestingly, Texas):