It started in November when Xtra refused to honour artist Elisha Lim’s request to be referred to by the pronoun “they.” Although the magazine did run a story quoting Lim saying these words, it would not honour the pronoun switch. A few weeks later Xtra interviewed Lexi Tronic, a trans and sex worker’s rights activists. Edmontonians may remember her for the time she spent hosting weekly drag shows here and others might have caught her as one of the original stars of Showcase’s breakthrough sex series KinK. The story’s editor, Danny Glenwright, decided to share the story on his personal Facebook wall and when he did so he added Tronic’s birth name. Tronic was naturally uncomfortable with this, especially since it turned out the two had known each other since childhood in Winnipeg and shared many acquaintances. Glenwright, an editor at an LGBTQ paper, claimed he didn’t know sharing the birth name of a trans person was a faux pas, which would mostly be OK if he had just removed it after Tronic asked. Instead he defended himself profusely, used the creepy “some of my best friends are trans!” argument and basically reacted in a variety of transphobic ways.
Among the excuses offered for this faux pas has been the argument that singular they isn’t good English, an ugly neologism that’ll confuse readers. Something that, as the Wikipedia article on singular they shows, would be news to some of the greatest English language writers:
Eche of theym sholde … make theymselfe redy. — Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489)
Arise; one knocks. / … / Hark, how they knock! — Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595)
‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech. — Shakespeare, Hamlet
I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. — Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
That’s always your way, Maim—always sailing in to help somebody before they’re hurt. — Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Caesar: “No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed.” / Cleopatra: “But they do get killed”. — Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1901)
Even if this argument did hold merit, surely a basic politeness should trump a rigid adherence to inadequate grammar rules? If it is all that confusing, just explain it up front. There seems to be a certain mulish willingness here to cause offence, an anger at people being so awkward as to insist to want their identity represented a certain way, something a bit surprising in a magazine for people who quite likely have some experience at being misrepresented… It’s not active malice perhaps, but more the sort of stupidity you get when you do something dumb and insensitive, get called upon and get angry about being shown your errors. It’s a trap progressive people especially can fall in when we do say something unwittingly racist/sexist/othering, because it’s obvious we’re not bigots and how dare people assume we are!
It shouldn’t be hard to be polite and respect the wishes of others about how they would like to be addressed, but we can get right nowty when we do get it wrong and are corrected, something I still struggle with myself.
It’s been somewhat depressing to see how fast a Metafilter post on the obstacles put in the way of (young) transgendered people wanting to start transition can dissolve into a food fight about the use of “cisgendered” as the opposite of “transgendered” and how unreasonably angry it makes some people. I expected different from MeFi, which is both fairly liberal and hip and open to all kinds of people.
It all started with a post paying attention to a problem many young transgendered people face: continuous societal pressure not to start transition, to start living life as a member of the gender they feel themselves to be. As one commenter put it, “the entire foundation of transsexual health care is to protect cis people from making a terrible mistake, rather than to help trans people transition with as little added pain as possible”. It is a huge problem, because it means many more trans people are stuck with the wrong gender for longer than necessary, all to avoid the much rare false positives, those cases where somebody believes they are trans, but are wrong, before they’ve made an “irrevocable mistake”. It’s not necessarily done out of malice, more out of a sort of twisted interpretation of the Hippocratic oath of first do no harm.
A nice meaty and important subject for Metafilter, but within a few posts it was disrupted by people annoyed at the use of the terms “cisgendered” and “cis” to mean non-transgendered people. Some just objected because it was supposedly bad English, or because they disliked neologisms, others because they disliked having politicalised language forced on them, or because it “othered” them or they didn’t recognise themselves in the label. It really was derailing 101 in action.
Truth of the matter is that yes, while but “cis” and “trans” are imperfect labels (for starters, they imply a binary opposition between themselves, rather than a spectrum of possibilities between being fully trans or fully cis gendered), they are the closest we have to non judgmental, neutral terms for these conditions. Anything else is either a slur, or unwieldy to use, or both. And of course we’re all special little snowflakes unable to be caught by any label, but it can be very handy in political debates to have these kinds of easy to understand, easy to use, non-insulting terms to use to groups of people that have something in common important in the context of the debate. Nobody should feel insulted by being called cis.
Radical feminism is a form of feminism that’s, to put it politely, black and white in its view of the battle of the sexes, black and white enough to be able to use that outdated term with a straight face here. Radical feminism attempts to reject all gender roles and anything that smacks of sexual essentialism — men drive like this, but women drive like that — and argues that all such roles are socially defined, part of an overarching male dominated value system that defines women as inferior and which glorifies those characteristics that are stereotypically male and pillorises those that are stereotypically female. The breakdown of these structures and existentialist gender roles is what radical feminism attempts to do.
And if anything breaks down existentialist gender roles, it should be transgender people, shouldn’t it? What after all shows the idiocity of gender existentialism more than somebody who by their very existence shows that physical sexual characteristics does not a man or woman make, that you can be born and raised a man yet know yourself to be a woman or vice versa, let alone those who know themselves to be neither, or both, or something else entirely?
Yet radical feminism has huge problems with this. On the one hand, it insists that transgendered people are victims of exactly the patriarchial society they’re fighting against, confused by the gender essentialist social roles that insist that if you like pink dresses and My Little Pony you’re a girl, to the point that you’d use dangerous hormonal therapies and even surgery to change your physical gender, yet on the other hand it also insists that there’s no such thing as transgender women, just men masquarading as women (and vice versa). Both views are insulting and repulsive to say the least. Either you’re a duped and confused victim of social brainwashing, or you’re a hideous freak trying to fool real women you’re one of them.
This poisonous attitude is even on display in the writings of more moderate radical feminists, of those who have found that it is no longer possible to ignore or laugh off the “problem” of transgender. Which brings me to what inspired this post, radical feminist Nine Deuce’s sincere attempt to find some way in which transgender can be reconciled with radical feminism. She does this by stating her own position on the issue and seems to believe this should offer some way in which radical feminists can positively engage with transgender “activists”. Yet the bigotry is still palpable:
That there are people who feel so uncomfortable with the difference between their sexed bodies and their socialized conception of themselves that they would choose to risk deformity, death, and disability is to be deplored. Women have been conditioned to harm their own bodies in service of a social gender role grounded in misogyny and male supremacy. Radical feminism seeks an end to this practice. Women seeking surgery in order that their bodies will appear like male bodies, or men who undergo surgery in order that their bodies will present as female bodies, face huge psychological and physical risks and social ostracization. Adamantine gender roles are the source of the demand for these medical procedures and the dangers that attend them. Radical feminism also seeks an end to this practice.
That’s the idea of transgender women –transgender men not being of much interest to radical feminism, other options rejected entirely — as brainless victims having to be saved from themselves.
When trans activists bully radical feminists and attempt to force their way into women-only spaces, women should be angry and should speak up — and should express anger when they do speak up — but should do so responsibly and intelligently, so that the radical feminist perspective won’t be written off.
That’s the idea of transgender women as intruders, as charlatans pretending to be female in order to infiltrate “women-only spaces”. There’s a bit of projecting going on here as well, in an earlier comment Nine Deuce made:
Men absolutely loathe and fear trans people. Transmen are seen as intruders, but transwomen are seen as traitors. Men cannot understand why someone born male would choose to take on what they see as a subordinate position in society. It threatens their sense of order in a fundamental way.
Note that this is men, not some men or many men, but men. In Nine Deuce’s worldview, we all hate and loathe transgender men and women.
Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear that this whole exercise is more about a way to improve radical feminism’s image as an ideology that is bigoted towards transgender people, without actually wanting to lose this bigotry, viz:
What cannot be allowed is for the public face of radical feminist theory to appear reactionary, and right now it does.
I think radical feminism has lost that battle. It was a product of second wave feminism, a separatist ideology that has long outlived any merit it once had. For younger women, who grew up in a world in which the ideals second wave feminists fought for have been largely realised and for whom gender and sexual identity has always been a much more fluid thing than radical feminism thought possible, it’s just not an attractive ideology anymore. It battles the wrong things and seems to have no answers to real problems facing women today, welded as it is to a view of gender that’s just as existentialist as the patriarchial system it tries to overthrow.
Did you know American Samoa has a national football team? If, like me, you didn’t, you won’t be surprised to learn that it ranks absolutely last on FIFA’s world rankings and regularly does things like lose 31-0 to Australia. Or did, as with the arrival of new Dutch coach Thomas Rongen, they managed to book their first victory ever, against Tonga:
In October they agreed to loan Thomas Rongen, an Ajax-trained disciple of Total Football who had managed four Major League Soccer teams as well as the US Under-20 side for almost 10 years, for the duration of the tournament. The transformation after Rongen’s arrival was, says Brodie, profound. Within a week of the arrival of the “Palagi” – the Samoan word for white off-islanders which translates literally as “cloud-burster” – the improvements in organisation and discipline were extraordinary. Most significantly, though, was the change in mentality his coaching had brought, so much so that when they defeated Tonga 2-1 on Tuesday and drew 1-1 with Cook Islands on Friday there was no complacency – the players were frustrated at not keeping clean sheets.
Rongen has been with the team for less than a month and found the tactical reorganisation easier than the psychological one. “I am steeped in the Dutch football tradition,” he says. “The teachings of Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff and a technical brand of football is my motivation but what I encountered here was the exact opposite. So I had to adapt. I went from an old-style 4-4-2 to a more modern 4-2-3-1 because since it’s obvious that they give away too many goals, I thought four defenders and two holders would help. It’s easier to teach inexperienced players how to defend than to attack but we’ve made great strides in organisation and communication.
Thomas Rongen is not very well known here, having spent most of his playing career after having been trained at Ajax in the various US/American league. He later became a coach, working e.g. at DC United (did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?) and the US national U-21 team. Dutch football coaches in general are very popular for ailing national teams — Guus Hiddink has build his career doing this — and it’s nice to see Rongen do his bit for a national team of a country with a population barely enough for a small town.
Rongen and his coaching is not the only interesting thing about the team though: it must be the only national teams which has an openly transgender person playing:
The other breaker of barriers in the squad is Johnny “Jayiah” Saelua, a fa’afafine, biologically male but identified as a third sex widely accepted in Polynesian culture. She – and she prefers she – is the first transgender player to compete in a World Cup match and has formed a centre-half partnership with the Arizona-based Rawlston Masaniai, who along with other team-mates, calls her “sister”. “There is no discrimination,” she says. “I put aside whether I’m a girl or a boy and just concentrate on playing. I think I add a third dimension to the team, collect my energies and keep the team together, that’s my responsibility as the fa’afafine, the feminine.”
Sepp Blatter has reassured us that racism in football is non-existent, but homophobia is still rampant, with few openly gay players and fewer openly gay players still actively playing, even in supposedly enlightened countries like the Netherlands. And homosexuality is much more accepted (or so it seems) than transgender/genderqueer people still are, so it’s nice to see how matter of fact the American Samoan team is about their team mate’s gender.
Four leading web providers are to offer customers the option to block adult content at the point of subscription, the BBC understands.
BT, Sky, Talk Talk and Virgin will offer the protection for smart phones, laptops and PCs.
It comes as David Cameron is set to meet industry representatives amid concern over sexualisation of children.
The prime minister will also launch Parentport – a website to help parents complain about inappropriate content.
And he will back a ban on billboards displaying risque images near schools.
The new measures, aimed at helping parents protect their children from internet porn and other explicit sites, follow a report earlier this year by the Mothers’ Union charity.
It’s all part of the further childproving of society, where anything that potentially could be seen by children and “harm” them has to be packed off to some adults only ghetto. And the internet, being the newest, biggest and still scariest medium available to children of course has to be controlled the most. But you’d be stupid as parents to trust Sky or Virgin with making your internet feed child safe. If these filtering efforts are to be effective they have to be draconian, filtering out anything that talks about s*e*x* or mentions a naughty word — so much for Scunthorpe — and taking a lot of false positives down too. Sex education sites, rape support centres, GLBT blogs, those are all vulnerable to such filtering, because all too often already they’re blocked by net nanny software.
Either that or this sort of filter will be wholly ineffective and consist of only a token effort to block playboy.com… Remember, for these internet providers, this is just an added cost so they’ll be looking to do it as cheaply as possible.
Even in the context of the military-industrial complex. Only hours after the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, keep yourself in the closet and we won’t fire you from the army policy, one gay soldier prepares for the scariest moment in his life: telling his dad that he’s gay:
