61 posts tagged bigotry
Americans’ views flipped on gay rights. The reason why gives us the key to a transgender victory.
In 2004 polls showed that 60 percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage, while only 31 percent were in favor. Today 61 percent support same-sex marriage, while 31 percent oppose it.
Support for same-sex marriage has increased among nearly all demographic groups, across different generations, partisan lines and religious faiths.
Samantha Schmidt argues in the Washington Post that the main reason for this reversal is that gay and lesbian people started to come out in great numbers. At the same time gay and lesbians became much more visible in the media.
But there was something different about the gay and lesbian community, compared with other minority groups. They were in every socioeconomic and racial group, every generation, in small towns and big cities. Unlike other demographics, “sexuality is a dimension that is everywhere,” [psychology professor Mahzarin] Banaji said. “It is not segregated.”
The more connections Americans made with gay or lesbian people, the more positive their attitudes toward them became — a trend social scientists call “the contact hypothesis.”…
What might be different about the gay community, Banaji speculated, is that even before a person came out, “love was in place.” A parent or a co-worker already knows and loves a gay person, and then discovers a person’s sexuality, which is often not obvious right away. “That, I think, is very different from something like age, or race, or body weight that just presents itself immediately upon seeing a person for the first time.”
This is an important lesson for the T part of the LGBTQA community. One of the reasons transphobes – being those radical feminists or right wing fundamentalists – are panicking about trans people and trans kids right now, is because trans people are becoming more visible and more accepted.
Even if we do see examples of TERF and right wing “Christian” women invalidating their own children, more and more parents come out fighting for their trans kids, protecting them against the bigots who attack them.
It is so much harder to demonize and pathologize someone you know, and someone who who is clearly loved.
In other words: We can fight this toxic TRUMP/TERF backlash, by showing the world the human face of trans people, over and over and over again.
The Unholy Alliance of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists and the Right Wing
Here’s a must read piece by Esther Wang on the recent developments within the trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) camp.
The extreme transphobic right is now actively supporting TERFs politically and financially.
The article presents the story about Julia Beck, a 26-year-old lesbian, self-described radical feminist, and a member of the group Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF. She is now actively collaborating with Republican members of Congress in order to stop trans-positive legislation.
Beck is the latest trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF, to become the darling of right-wing media and conservative politicians who, in recent years, have cloaked their transphobia by embracing the talking points of radical feminists like Beck.
These seemingly odd bedfellows united publicly during the Equality Act hearing, where Republicans like Doug Collins and Louie Gohmert voiced their opposition to the Act in the name of women’s rights. The Equality Act, Gohmert said, represented “a war on women that should not be allowed.”
Collins, an opponent of gay marriage and abortion rights, spoke approvingly of WoLF, before charging that the bill’s protections of trans people “would demolish the hard-won rights of women, putting them once again at the mercy of any biological man who identifies at any moment as a woman.”
The transphobic right wing is now strategically and deliberately making use of TERF literature and terminology i order to use them to forward their own transphobic objectives.
The TERFs are willingly going along with this, clearly not grasping that the extreme right wing agenda is not only to get rid of transgender people, but also suppress lesbians and gay men, and any woman who steps outside the boundaries of old fashioned gender roles.
Emma Thompson signs open letter in support of trans rights in Scotland
The open letter calls to put an end to attempts to ‘roll back the rights that trans people already have’.
The letter, penned by Rhiannon Spear, a Glasgow City Councillor and Chair of Scottish charity Time for Inclusive Education (TIE), has been signed by 78 women.In the letter the women argue that the trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” are not representative of the women of Scotland:
“As a collective of women, we urge that trans-exclusionary writers do not suggest that their narrow and archaic arguments are in any way representative of the women of Scotland. They do not speak for us.
"This is not an issue of Freedom of Speech. Both sides have a plethora of platforms to outline their position. However, it is imperative that these platforms should not be used to spread misinformation or misrepresent the law or the facts in this area.
"Trans people have played an integral role in every civil rights movement to date; from LGBT equality to women’s causes. Attempts to airbrush trans people from conversations regarding equality and human rights, or to exclude them from advancements for LGBT and women’s rights, have happened before.
“Such efforts may have re-energised, but they are nothing new, and we say as a collective of women: they are not representative of us. We support trans rights.”
Photo: Getty
Mississippi lawmakers propose ‘license to harass’ for transphobic teachers
We live in a time when so-called “Christians” channel the darkness of the Anti-Christ and where so-called “radical feminists” attack and humiliate women. Please keep in mind that these transphobes do not represent the majority. Good will prevail, if we show good people what kind of evil these activists represents.
Here is an example of what kind of actions they are willing to take.
Mississippi Republicans are now proposing a law that is to protect teachers who bully children and teenagers:
HB 1176 would update state law determining how school employees may be disciplined, adding specific language prohibiting their dismissal or suspension “for referring to any individual student’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.”School employees would be barred from being disciplined “despite the student’s preference to identify as the opposite gender after undergoing stages of transition as a pansexual, transsexual or transgender, whether through sex reassignment, gender identity transitioning, hormonal therapy treatment or other philosophical processes.”
We need to make this clear: This is not only about allowing teachers to harass transgender students. This is about a policy that allows teachers to harass children and youth in support of a specific political goal. These law makers are establishing a precedence for using the harassment of kids as a legitimate political tool.
That is pure evil, plain and simple.
The law is sponsored by Tom Weathersby, a Republican law maker. Send a polite email to tweathersby@house.ms.gov or a letter to this address and ask him to stop defending violence against young people. If you live in Mississippi send a copy to your own representative.
This is the face of a man who want to protect teachers who torment kids.
By the way: Tom Weathersby is also known for proposing a law that would lead to fines and even counseling for people who wear “sagging” pants, or a style in which pants hang so low that underwear is exposed. It seems to me that it is Mr. Weathersby who needs counseling.
This is an amazing text. Weathersby & Co seems to think of transitioning as some kind of “philosophical process”. They also seem to think that “pansexual” – which is a sexual orientation – means more or less the same as transsexual. They could at least bother to read up on the topic first.
Not both sexes, but all sexes.
The editor of the leading Norwegian medical journal – the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association – gives a good summary of current research on sex and gender in their latest edition.
“Biologically speaking, we all fall somewhere along a spectrum of sexes, of which male and female represent the extreme ends,” he writes and gives succinct summary of the current research front.
“…an increasing amount of knowledge is available with regard to the biological complexity of sex, and proof that the binary sex model finds no support in biology.”
He strongly attacks the current attacks against intersex and transgender people:
“The pattern is one of ageing, authoritarian, heterosexual men discriminating against minorities in a wish to appease their voters. There is no room in their world view for the human complexity that actually characterises the societies they are elected to govern; but the ideas of purity that are partly rooted in national conservatism and partly in religious fundamentalism are not echoed by science.“
1600 scientists sign letter condemning Trump's transphobic policy
Over 1600 scientists have signed a declaration against the Trump-administrations attempts at erasing transgender and intersex people.
The scientists, who include nine Nobel Prize winners, said that the leaked Department of Health and Human Services memo, revealed by The New York Times on October 21, was “fundamentally inconsistent not only with science, but also with ethical practices, human rights, and basic dignity.”
They write:
Millions of Americans identify as transgender or gender non-conforming, or have intersex bodies, and are at increased risk of physical and mental health disorders resulting from discrimination, fear for personal safety, and family and societal rejection.
Multiple standards of health care for transgender and intersex people emphasize that recognizing an individual’s self-identified gender, not their external genitalia or chromosomes, is the best practice for providing evidence-based, effective, and lifesaving care.
Our best available evidence shows that affirmation of gender identity is paramount to the survival, health, and livelihood of transgender and intersex people.
Given its scientific and ethical failings, we call upon the administration to withdraw this proposed policy.
Among the scientists signing the letter we find biologists, geneticists, psychologists, anthropologists, physicians, neuroscientists, social scientists, biochemists, mental health service providers, and more.
Trump set to abolish intersex people
The Trump administration’s attacks against trans people – arguing that the observation of genitalia and/or chromosomes will determine their legal gender for life – not only threaten the well being of those who are transgender, but also intersex people.
Dr. Cary Gabriel Costello puts it this way:
“The majority of intersex people in the U.S. today do not gender transition. But all of us have been fighting for social acceptance, for an end to infant genital surgeries that rob us of the capacity for sexual sensation, and against the stigmatizing and concealment of physical sex variance. Our battle as intersex people has been for recognition of the sex spectrum, and for respecting our physical sex diversity.
Think what will happen to us now. Consider, for example, those of us who have complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, born with female-typical genitalia but XY chromosomes. Virtually all people with XY, CAIS are assigned female at birth and are raised as girls–but suddenly, they’d be declared men. This would disrupt not only their lives, but those of their parents, their spouses, their neighbors, and friends. Or consider all the children born with intermediate genitalia. Doctors have forced surgeries onto so many, basing their decision on factors like gonads, or surgical convenience. Suddenly, many intersex people would find that the surgeries forced on them took away the parts of their bodies that the new HHS policy declares to be the ones that should have been kept under the new chromosomal standard. This will compound their trauma–and perhaps lead to a further round of unwanted surgical interventions.
For those of us intersex people whose chromosomes are XX or XY, this new policy would counter all of our efforts to push back against forcing sex reassignment surgeries onto us, mutilating our genitals. Instead, the policy would declare that these are not sex reassignment surgeries at all, because our penises are “false penises,” our vaginae “fake.” And for those of us who have one of the many other sex genotypes this policy fails to recognize–XXY, XYY, Xo, XX/XY, etc.–ironically, even if our bodies have appeared typical enough that we’ve escaped surgical mutilation or social stigma, suddenly, we become the “true intersex,” our lived genders falsified, leading to confusion, discrimination and shame.”
Now, more than ever, intersex and transgender people need to stand together and fight these evil policies, which are all clearly aimed at shoehorning all people into the Conservative Right’s narrow gender binary.
The Trump Administration's Proposed "Redefinition" of Gender Is Scientifically Absurd
Scientific American is one of the most well known science publications in the world. When they include a post saying that the Trump administration’s definition of gender is absurd, you know that it has nothing to do with science.
Kristina Olson and Sheri Berenbaum write:
According to a recent report in the New York Times, the Department of Health and Human Services is “considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth.”
While the department’s memo purports to be “grounded in science,” the arguments and conclusions are not. Specifically, the memo argues that sex should be determined by—at different points in the purported memo—birth certificates, genitals and genetics.
The problem with this argument is that none of these markers of sex is “definitive proof of a person’s sex” and in fact, nothing is. In reality, the course of becoming a “male” or “female” involves several steps, regulated by many genes and hormones.
Much of the time these processes all go in the same direction. But some of the time, they don’t. Seeing how that happens makes clear that the proposal, to define all people as male or female at birth, is scientifically dubious.
They give several examples of variations in sex and gender and transgender conditions, and conclude:
Whatever criterion we use—genitalia, chromosomes, hormone levels and even birth certificates—can produce conflicting categorizations with the other criteria. We are not policy makers, but we can say that any policy that divides the world into two sexes—male versus female—will not be “grounded in science.”
By the way, there is one American publication that has an even higher reputation than The Scientific American, and that is Nature.
Their latest editorial is equally clear:
The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour. Worse, it would undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.
Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is Pseudoscientific Woo
Michea B has written a very personal and to the point article about why the current talk about “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) and “a FTM surge” is yet another attempt to force transgender people back into the closet.
What we’re seeing isn’t a sudden rise in rapid onset gender dysphoria. We’re not seeing a sudden #FtMSurge of trans men popping up out of the woodwork due to sites like Tumblr and DeviantArt. What we’re seeing is trans youth feeling safe enough to come out early on instead of holding it in until they are past the point where things such as puberty blockers could have helped them while they dealt with coming to terms with their gender. We are seeing trans youth and non binary youth feeling able to come out due to having a pretty good feeling thanks to research as to what is going on with them so they can better explain it to their parents.
Here’s some important tweets by Michea pointing to some important facts about the ROGD study (which, by the way, has now been retracted by the journal that published it):
