With clarity comes hope ...

A well-written article by American therapist Lisa Marchiano:

http://quillette.com/2017/10/06/misunderstanding-new-kind-gender-dysphoria/

Fighting for the right to fight ...

The CBC is showering us with rainbow glitter in its news announcement of the historic presence of the Chief of Defence, Staff General Jonathan Vance, alongside Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau at the Ottawa Pride Parade.

Meanwhile, in the United States, President Trump tweeted he would reinstate a ban against transgendered people in the military.  The most cited argument against such a ban is from the Rand Corporation, stating that the presence of transgendered people in the military has:

“little or no impact on unit cohesion, operational effectiveness, or readiness.”

The main reason: Trans people simply aren’t that large of a population. Based on RAND’s estimates, trans troops make up around 2,450 of the 1.3 million active-component service members — a fraction of a percent of the US military. While some trans service members would seek treatment, RAND pointed out that only a small subset would: “Estimates derived from survey data and private health insurance claims data indicate that, each year, between 29 and 129 service members in the active component will seek transition-related care that could disrupt their ability to deploy.”

RAND concluded this will have a very tiny effect, if any, on military readiness, finding that “the readiness impact of transition-related treatment would lead to a loss of less than 0.0015 percent of total available labor-years in the active component.” In comparison, “in the Army alone, approximately 50,000 active-component personnel were ineligible to deploy in 2015 for various legal, medical, or administrative reasons — a number amounting to around 14 percent of the active component.” 

Note the rationale supporting transgendered people in the military is the small number of transgendered people in the military.

Also note that a major grantor of the Rand Corporation is the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation, and that a prominent member of the Pritzker family is the transgendered former military member, James/Jennifer Pritzker.

Not surprisingly, law suits have been launched on behalf of the "civil rights" of transgendered people who want to serve in the US military.

I would think the most important aspect of whether transgendered people ought to be allowed to serve in the military relates to their psychologic fitness.  What is a military's position on undiagnosed or misdiagnosed anxiety disorders regarding fitness to serve?  Are individuals with other untreated or mistreated anxiety disorders, disorders such as somatoform or eating disorders, allowed to serve?  If so, then it would appear inconsistent to ban transgendered individuals.  However, if untreated or mistreated anxiety disorders are considered to put individuals at risk, for themselves or their colleagues, when they serve in the stressful environment of the military, then it would be cruel and unethical to fight for the right for transgendered people to have the right to fight.

Conforming to the trans narrative ...

Another sad, misguided "born in the wrong body" narrative of a non-gender-conforming lesbian believing her "authentic self" is a gender-conforming man (full story and audio):

Friday January 13, 2017

​'I'm trapped in the wrong body': NWHL's Harrison Browne on becoming the man he is today

Harrison Browne, the first openly transgender hockey player, has struggled for most of his life to come to grips with his gender identity. For years, he lived in confusion and fear. It was a path that eventfully led him to the realization that he was trapped in the wrong body. And it wasn't long before he felt like he had no choice but to confront this, and come out publicly as a transgender athlete. 

Hear the story of Harrison's long, hard-fought road to self-discovery, and how he ultimately became a beacon of hope for the transgender community.

Creepy clowns and transgenderism ...

Beware the clowns: a lesson in moral panic

There are reports of clowns in the woods near South Carolina, though none have been photographed. (Fernando Vergara/AP)

 
Something strange is happening in South Carolina.
People are telling the media and police that they've seen sinister clowns near forest, offering children money and luring them into the woods.
The clown sightings have continued for days, but so far, there's no photographic or physical evidence of any malicious clowns.
Despite the lack of hard evidence, media in the United States, Canada, and overseas are running with the story.

Screen capture from Fox News in the Carolinas, and a story warning of sinister clowns (Screen capture from myfox8.com)

Stuart Poyntz, an Associate Professor in communications at Simon Fraser University, says the media may be contributing to a moral panic.

A moral panic is a way of telling stories in simple and straightforward ways that try to resolve larger problems. So in this case, children are under threat from an unknown. - Stuarty Poyntz, Simon Fraser University

Poyntz says the story, with its vague sense of reality, plays on people's fears that some universal insidious force is trying to lure or corrupt children.
To Poyntz, there's a fascinating resonance between the stock images of clowns used in media reports on the story, and a recent political debate in North and South Carolina. Recently, the Carolinas have hosted a debate over transgenderism and access to bathrooms, with bills proposed in each state to prevent people using the bathroom of their choice. A widely shared meme during those debates depicted a man wearing gawdy clothing, smeared makeup, and a wig. It warned of allowing this clown-like man near one's children.

An image circulated online during political debates over bathroom access in North and South Carolina (Screencapture, Facebook.com)

  Poyntz says the unproven existence of sinister clowns trying to lure children away, at a time when people are concerned gawdily dressed men will be in the bathroom with their daughters, is an example of how a moral panic can distract people from genuine and complicated issues.

The societal harms of moral panics are numerous. It does tend to focus our attention on the wrong kind of scapegoats that are meant to explain problems. It also tends to distract us from changes that are ongoing in the lives of those who we care about most. - Stuart Poyntz, Simon Fraser University

As for the media, he'd recommend at least trying to determine whether sinister clowns are actually in the woods of South Carolina before reporting on the story any further.
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http://www.cbc.ca/radio/the180/rethinking-jail-time-for-sex-assault-the-upside-of-opioids-and-a-defence-of-political-correctness-1.3744394/beware-the-clowns-a-lesson-in-moral-panic-1.3744921

Power sticks ...

Among the non-pathological conditions that get medicalized and for which interventions are invented and applied is erectile "dysfunction."  Erectile "dysfunction," except in the case of injury, is a normal senescent result of aging, often accelerated by lifestyle choices and conditions, such as smoking and and drinking alcohol and diabetes.  Not all men feel their lives are over if they cannot continue to have a robust erection, but many do, and they know all about the little blue pill that, on television commercials, will make them joyfully bounce out of their bedrooms and into the world.  All is right, the ad implies, in your manly ability to conquer the world if you have a worthy erection before setting out. 

I do not prescribe Viagra, or its brother Cialis.  If a man asks me for that prescription, I offer to refer him to a urologist, so he can be assessed for organic factors, if there is an underlying cause for his declining performance.

Previously I had tried to discuss with such men that waning penile prowess is natural, and that sexuality is broader than jackhammer penetration, that a couple can have satisfying intimacy in many ways that do not rely on penetration and that, in fact, navigating this can actually enhance intimacy.  Never once has this conversation been of interest to any man, so I gave up on this approach, realizing that for these men, erection is not about sexuality but about power.  I have maintained the informative part of my discussion with them that decreasing erectile function may be resulting from other health factors, and then I announce I will send them to a specialist, who will assess them.  I could do this assessment, but in the end, if all is normal, I will not given the prescription they seek, so I remove myself from the equation and send them on.  The referral option is also a test of sorts, to see how serious they are about their request as a health issue.  They usually agree to the referral, such is their want of the pill, but not without some griping for the ordeal they are reluctant to undergo, which is telling, I believe.

I am not professionally obligated to give patients what they want but I am professionally obligated to offer them access to what they want, if it is part of common medical practice.

Why do I not simply give the prescription?  Because there are already too many erections in the world, too many erections that are used to objectify women, too many as an endpoint to porn, too many that are in the service of rape in all its manifestations, and I have absolutely no way of knowing how any particular man will make use of his erections.  I refuse to risk abetting.

Though erections and abortions are not equivalent by any means, compare the ease of access to Viagra (everywhere, except from me, and often covered by drug plans) with the ease of access to abortions.

In Canada, it is thought we are legally and socially ahead on abortion access, but only in word:

Abortion has been legally unrestricted in Canada since 1988. Under the Canada Health Act, a federal piece of legislation that mandates how health care services should be provided for Canadian citizens, abortion is defined as a medically necessary procedure. This means it should be paid for by provincial health care, regardless of which province or territory a woman resides in, or whether she receives an abortion in a clinic or a hospital. Abortion, like any other necessary medical procedure, should be equally available to all women regardless of where they live in Canada.

However, this is not the case: provinces differ in many ways in regard to abortion. For example, some provinces have very few hospitals and clinics that provide abortions, or refuse to pay for abortions that take place outside a hospital.

It isn't, in word, much different in the US, but the vigor with which various states obstruct a woman's access to abortion can be astonishing:

Moments after the supreme court struck down a law threatening to close half the abortion clinics in Texas, a banner appeared outside the Austin headquarters of the lead plaintiff, Whole Woman’s Health. “We won!” the sign boasted in big block letters. “Our clinics stay open.”  Only this clinic did not.

The building, a low-slung facility just off the highway, is a symbol of how profoundly anti-abortion activists have reshaped abortion access in the US, even as they reel from a setback in the supreme court of historical proportions.

Until two years ago, this building was an abortion clinic. Then a new law – one of the nation’s harshest – required all Texas abortion facilities to meet expensive, hospital-like building standards, compelling all providers to have patient admitting privileges with a nearby hospital. The clinic was unable to satisfy either regulation and forced to close in July 2014.

Monday saw the supreme court strike down these requirements as unconstitutional. The decision emphasized the lack of medical evidence showing that such laws make abortion, a simple outpatient procedure, safer.

But Amy Hagstrom-Miller, the Whole Woman’s Health CEO and founder, is not sure if the former clinic in Austin, which Whole Woman’s Health and local reproductive rights groups use as an office suite, can ever again serve as an abortion clinic.

Abortion providers in Canada and the US alike have and continue to risk their lives in their efforts to provide access to abortion for women.  There is no threat to the life of a provider who gives a prescription for Viagra.

Again, access to erectile "dysfunction" medications and to abortion are not equivalent issues, but it does make plain the underlying political reality:  that men view it as their right to decide about both a man's erectile function and a woman's ability to abort the result of his erectile function.  Erectile function is about power; abortion is about a woman's autonomy to seek physical remedy for men's power.  Until there is at least an equality of access to abortion, there should be restrictions, if not an outright ban, on access to erectile enhancing aids for men who are medicalizing their senescing sense of power.  At the very least, erectile "dysfunction" as it pertains to power should not be legitimized as a medical condition.

What does this have to do with transgenderism, the theme of this blog?  These issues are all the same: male power over women.  Most of the men who believe they are women do not undergo a penectomy.  Women do not have penises.  If these men truly believe they are women, why are they hanging onto, in all senses, their power sticks?

Second first person account ...

This, from a lesbian:

I grew up when there weren't choices for kids.  What was on your plate was what was for supper.  What time you were told was time for bed was when you went to bed.  You wore what was affordable from the Army and Navy.  You did your homework and you never ever caused problems at school that meant your parents would get dragged in to deal with the teachers about you.  You toed the line and you kept your nose clean.

That went for between kids, too.  The kids I was at school with kept other kids in line, in the ways that parents didn't know about.  If you looked different or had weird shit in your lunch (me on both counts), the other kids would make fun of you and put you in your place.  You always knew where you stood in the kid hierarchy.  Sure, you could ignore them all you want, like I did, but that didn't stop them from pulling crap on you.  They'd smile when the grown-ups were around then smash your face in the mud on the long walk home.

Parents back then didn't have big honking SUVs to drive you to school and pick you up.  They also didn't have the time.  You were expected to walk to school and home because your parents, at least mine, worked, goddamn it, and you had a job, too:  to get yourself to school, be at school, then get yourself home.  Don't dawdle and don't take short cuts through the fields because bad men lurked there for the sole purpose of capturing wayward kids.  It wasn't made explicit what those bad men would do with wayward kids, but you could tell it wasn't good.

I am old enough that when I was a girl the only choice was not whether you would get married and have kids but whether you would be a secretary or teacher or a nurse before you got married.  It was implied that an attractive, successful woman would not need a "career" before she got married, that becoming a secretary or whatever was a make-do option for those of us who were funny-looking or didn't get knocked up before we graduated from high school.

I didn't like boys, but I didn't know what that meant.  I somehow did not consider that liking girls would conflict with getting married and having children.  It was just so imprinted in us that that was the way it was that there was no question.  I thought I would end up married, but in a vague way.  Like, it would just happen to me.  It wasn't something I felt any urge to chase.

I was funny-looking enough that I was one of those "career" women.  No boy wanted to date me.  I was not offended.  I didn't want to date any of the boys.  I wanted to learn things.  I decided I would rather be alone and independent and have more choices than being one of the three things women were allowed to do (four, if you count being married), even if it meant I didn't fit in.  I had never fitted in, so it didn't seem like a change from the status quo for me.

If "lesbian" was not said out loud when I was a kid, you can bet "transgender" wasn't, either.  While there was teasing about effeminate boys and tomboy girls, no one ever got teased about being transgendered.  Maybe there wasn't a bad word for it to use, like there was for gay or lesbian.  Kids aren't always imaginative in their hate; they usually bring it from home.  If transgender had existed when I was a kid, would I have thought it was a choice?  That is one of those questions I find ridiculous, one of those hypotheticals that seem a waste of time, but one of the young'uns, as I call anyone more than ten years younger than me, asked me that, so I gave it some thought.  I thought a few things in response.  I thought that when I was a young'un myself, I never would have had the nerve, the impertinence!, to ask an elder such a personal thing.  I thought that why was this young'un wasting time asking me what I might have done, in an imaginary time of imaginary choices.  I thought that this young'un was less interested in my answer than in looking for help figuring this question out for herself.

I thought about what to say.

I said that I was always happy to be myself, even if I didn't always know what that meant.  I said I had never spent time wondering what that meant, who I was, "finding myself."  I said that I mostly thought about what interested me and followed that path, without wondering what box that put me in.  I said that I knew other people like to have boxes with labels set out for them to choose from, but for me that never was appealing, and I didn't see the point, because there are never as many boxes as there are people, and why waste time in a box that isn't yours.

I don't think that is the answer she was looking for, but I hope somehow I told her that she can be herself without doing anything more than being herself, without it sounding like I was serving up a big fat platitude.  I wanted her to know she doesn't need to change anything, she doesn't need anyone's permission, she doesn't need to be like anyone else.

It seems to me the more "choices" we are given, the less we are being ourselves.

Bridget jones for president ...

Dear New Yorker

I have read every issue since I began a subscription in the summer of 2000, and almost every page of those issues (I usually skip the poems; I simply don't seem to 'get' poems, like some people don't have a math brain; I have a math brain but not a poem brain).  Most pieces are solid; I especially enjoy reading the reportage, as the subjects are often not what I would have sought on my own, and I frequently learn something that gives me perspective on other lives or handy factoids when making small talk with a stranger.  Sometimes the profiles are inspiring, occasionally they veer towards infotainment, often they are depressing (how are some people so bloody wealthy??).  

Shouts and Murmurs, however, has been hit and miss for me.  I attributed this track record to it being humour, or, at least, intended humour, for that, I believe, is the crux of the matter:  humour is personal.  As such, I've been willing to make allowances.  Until now.
 
I've been most irked by the Shouts and Murmurs pieces which hinge on a male author writing in the voice of what seems a ditzy woman.  It is the particularly hi-lar-ious trope of Paul Rudnick (in the last year alone:  Ask Dr Jellowitz-Ressler; Melania's Diary; Mr Everything; My Demands).  Why is this funny? because it is a man writing as a woman? a man writing as a ditzy woman? is it the ditzy woman herself? no, for when a woman writes as a ditzy woman (okay, I'm stuck for citing an example from Shouts and Murmurs, but I am considering performances like that of Mindy Kaling on The Office) we read it as a parody of a male view of women as ditzy, and we laugh at the limited male, not at the woman.  Is Mr Rudnick's excellent humour too subtle for my ditzy woman brain?  Is that why it's funny - the joke's on me?  I don't even know what else to hypothesize about Mr Rudnick and his comedic technique.  Maybe that is because my ditzy woman brain is out-played by his eloquence

I find no way to see the male-as-ditzy-woman modus operandi as anything but misogyny, and until now I have decided, in the sense of picking my battles, that it wasn't worth objecting, because I extended to you, at best, the stance of no intended malice.

I do not recall any women published in Shouts and Mumurs (Mindy Kaling, Hallie Cantor, Patricia Marx, Cora Frazier, Lena Dunham, Jen Spyra, Jenny Allen ...) writing as men.    Is that because they are too ditzy to imagine how to write hilariously in the caricatured gender-stereotyped voice of men?

And lest you think I am a ditzy women incapable of laughing at fine male humour, I will tell you that I laughed out loud and re-read Simon Rich's piece on fooseball.

 
To be fair, there are women who write as ditzy women (eg Helen Fielding in her Bridget Jones series, Sophie Kinsella in her Shopaholic series), and it is not clear whether it is knowing parity or simply cashing in on the entertainment value of the ditzy woman.  After all, ditzy women are fun-loving girls, too brainless to threaten either men in their worldly ambitions or women in their calculations to catch those men (though they do seem to stumble, by the end of the story, into that "success", but who can begrudge them when they are so gosh-darn hapless?).
 
What is different now, why I am writing to you now, is the result of your election.  We - yes, we, because your election has wide-ranging repercussions - must be vigilant to the base hatred that has been frothing from Trump and his supporters.  Maybe, rather than a competent woman, a ditzy woman running against him might have won more votes, but nonetheless her ditziness would have kept her from being considered a serious candidate and she would not have won, unless in a lovable, hapless, harmless way, and in which case she would have then bumbled her way into marriage to a worldly man who who have rescued her in the performance of her new job.  How is a woman to successfully run for such a powerful position, if her intelligence is intimidating and her ditziness rules her out as a serious contender?  Oh, that's right! a woman is not supposed to run in the first place!  And there went your election.

None of us who know better can afford to be sloppy, even in our 'humour', about how we present our values, lest we be misread as endorsing the voices of hate.  There is no place for misogyny anywhere, including the New Yorker.

A safe guideline for humour, if you can't decide whether to publish something, is to make fun at your own expense, not at that of an entire class of oppressed people.