Online Gender Workshop: Teaching Gender Attribution for Skeptics and Scientists

Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.

In a recent thread, Okidemia posed a question that many parents have these days: When and how should I teach my child/ren about trans* folk?

Okidemia framed it this way:

…kids have not been told about transpeople yet, because we don’t know any. Thus an important educationnal question:
at what age would you* speak about it to kids? (certainly, you* should begin before they meet psychologically transgendering acquaintances –as opposed to biologically transitioning which certainly happens later in life.

One of the reasons this question seems so confounding is that, like many confounding questions, it is the wrong question. [Read more…]

Have they shut ’em all down yet?

womanhaters

On my previous post about the horrific fraternity/rugby team chants at the University of Mary Washington, I neglected to mention the most horrific part of it all. A woman, Grace Mann, was murdered. As Dave Futrelle explains today:

The rugby team was suspended in March. Mann, a prominent member of the group whose activism led to the team’s suspension, was murdered in April. The suspect, a returning student named Steven Vander Briel, was a former member of the rugby team.

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Ashamed of atheism

What’s widening the rifts? The fact that growing diversity within movement atheism is tearing away from a bitterly misogynistic core. A core that is becoming the fringe.

Harassment and excluding people from your movement will be your downfall, atheism. Please take this as a warning, and an attempt to right the wrongs within your movement before it collapses. From now on, I’m a secular humanist, feminist, mangina-loving, vegetarian socialist, and nothing else, until you clean up your act.

Jenny McDermott

“Offensive” doesn’t begin to cover it

womanhaters

Soraya Chemaly describes the fraternity scene on college campuses.

Feminists United, a group at the University of Mary Washington, has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education asserting that their school did little or nothing to address death and rape threats made on Yik Yak [an anonymous social media app] after they protested a rugby team’s sexist chant and argued that there was a connection between Greek culture and sexual assault. Sexual assault ranks second in fraternity insurance claims, men in fraternities are three times more likely to rape than their non-fraternity peers, they consume more objectifying content and are more accepting of rape myths. The connection is entirely valid and well-documented; it’s just that no one likes the information.

Oh, those feminists. Complaining about a song? About idle chatter on social media? It’s harmless! They’re just venting! Free speech! Get a thicker skin!

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How not to market your software company

killthefaggot

You think you’ve seen it all, and then along comes someone to dig even deeper. A company called Skaldic Games came up with a little game they had up on Steam, before it got pulled. It was called Kill the Faggot. It was appalling, as you might guess from the title.

It was a pathetic little arcade style shooter: you moved a crosshair around the screen, clicked a button, and shot whatever was under the crosshairs. Only the targets were running groups of people, some of whom were stereotypically gay, and others were cartoonishly transgender individuals. And you got points for killing them.

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#gamergate: the nexus of self-obsessed sociopaths

manlyessence

What awful people. Boston Magazine has a run-down of their obsession with Zoe Quinn, and it’s sick and disturbing. This Eron Gjoni guy who started it all just keeps talking, and making himself look worse and worse with every word, and he won’t shut up. That’s the thing that disturbs me about these people: they aren’t smart enough to realize when their own words are more devastating to their reputation than anything anyone else can say. Or perhaps they’re so vain or so lacking in empathy that they can’t imagine anyone not siding with their perspective.

And there’s yet another example of their habit of unlimbering Schwerer Gustav and aiming it at their own foot.

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