(Links NSFW. Depending on your workplace, I guess.)

Bechdel doesn’t seem too torn up about it, though.

From KSL channel 5 in Utah:

Time Magazine voted it the book of the year, but some students are calling it pornographic and asking it be removed from their curriculum.

Thomas Alvord, with the group “No More Pornography,” says, “The issue is exposing people to pornography.”

The issue is with “Fun Home,” a book assigned for reading in a mid-level English class at the University of Utah. The class introduces students to different literary genres. In the case of “Fun Home,” it’s told in the style of a comic book. The story centers around the author as she comes to terms with her own and her father’s homosexuality.

Drawings depicting sex acts are included in the 230 page novel. A student in the class was offended and approached the group “No More Pornography,” which made headlines earlier this year when it staged a successful protest of music videos shown a gym in Provo. The group has started an online petition in protest of the book. [...]

The student in question accepted an alternate assignment but would like to see further changes. The university has no plans make any. It says while a student has the right not to read the book, other students in the class have the right to judge for themselves.

“No More Pornography” hopes to continue talking with the University of Utah and will continue the online petition. The group is also asking that filters be installed on campus computers to prevent students from accessing explicit images.

I’m pretty sure these are Christian anti-porn activists, not Feminist anti-porn activists. But this still reminds me of one of my primary arguments against the MacKinnnon/Dworkin anti-pornography legislation, back when that argument hadn’t yet been made moot by court rulings that the M/D ordinance was unconstitutional: Any anti-porn legislation that isn’t extremely narrowly defined will be used by right-wing Christians to harass queer and feminist cartoonists.¹

Fun Home is, for those of you who haven’t read it, one of the best American comics of the last decade. I posted about Fun Home previously here.

Curtsy: Dykestowatchoutfor.com and Journalista.

Illustration beyond the fold is NSFW.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. And other sorts of artists, as well, I suppose. But it’s only cartoonists who are really important, needless to say. (back)

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), speaking to rally attendees in Medford, Oregon on Saturday, took issue with how recent political campaigns have used wedge issues to divide the electorate, but have ultimately done little to make a real difference, especially when there are more important things to worry about.

“I mean, think about what these last few election cycles have been about,” the Senator said. “We argue about immigration, but we don’t try to solve the immigration problem. It’s an argument that is all about people’s passions instead of trying to figure it out.

“We argue about gay marriage. You know, in the meantime the planet is, you know, potentially being destroyed. We’ve got a war that is bankrupting us. And we’re going to argue about gay marriage? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense.”

I have three responses to Obama:

1) It’s not an either-or choice. Caring passionately about equal marriage rights doesn’t preclude me from caring passionately about Iraq, or about the environment.

2) It’s too easy for heterosexuals to decide that equal legal rights for lesbians and gays is trivial. Obama has never been treated as a second-class citizen because of his choice of life partner. He doesn’t have to worry about whether the hospital will acknowlege him as a relative if Michelle is injured or sick. He doesn’t have to worry about his two girls receiving the message that their family is less legitimate and real than their peers’ families because of the sexes of their parents.

So of course he sees the issue as trivial. But that doesn’t mean it is.

3) Fuck you, Barack Obama. Seriously.

* * *

P.S. And a word to Clinton supporters: Try not to get smug over this. Clinton never has and never will lift a finger to support equal marriage rights for lesbians and gays, and she never will (until she retires from politics, a la Al Gore.) Clinton and Obama both suck on this regard.

But unless Obama clarifies his statement, I think he’s the suckier of the two.

UPDATE: By the way, an anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment, which is worded so broadly that it would probably effect civil unions, just passed out of committee in the Pennsylvania Senate. Since both Clinton and Obama are very concerned with Pennsylvania right now, let’s see if either of them has the guts to speak out against this. I bet that neither of them will.

From a post I wrote several years ago:

From early boyhood, men are taught that their masculinity must be protected above all else, or else it will be lost. Men who have lost their masculinity are objects of contempt, derision and violent abuse, and have lost the right to be loved or respected by their fellow men and by their fathers.

Boys are also taught that masculinity is fragile and high-maintenance; you work to get it and to retain it, and the slightest slip can cause it to be altogether lost. You can slip instantly, with no transition, from the most popular boy in the room to the butt of everyone’s jokes: all it takes is a moment’s lapse in which you say or do anything that can be interpreted as feminine.

This is essential: Masculinity is fragile. The man who has lost his masculinity is, in the eyes of male culture, less than nothing, worse than dead. Therefore, force in defense of masculinity - like beating up a boy who accuses you of being a faggot - can feel to boys and men like self-defense.

I was reminded of that post while reading a news story about Brandon McInerney , a 14 year old boy who murdered his openly gay and gender-anticonformist classmate Larry King:

In the days before the shooting, Brandon was hanging out around Silver Strand with his friends, doing what they always did: sitting on the jetty, hanging around the taco stand.

Brandon’s friend Lauren said the rumors about Larry “hitting on” Brandon were heating up. Kids were joking that Brandon must be gay if Larry was acting that way toward him. [...]

Brandon joined the Young Marines — the Marine Corps’ equivalent of a JROTC program — several years ago and became a leader in the group, which disbanded last summer. [...] His hours in a martial arts studio helped trim his physique into a lean, muscular one.

I’m not saying this alone drove McInerney to murder — it’s almost certainly significant that McInerney’s family life was disfunctional and one or both of his parents were abusers. And it’s possible that McInerney is just essentially a bad person in some way. Nonetheless, I doubt this murder would have happened if McInerney’s friends hadn’t been teasing McInerney by calling his masculinity into question, making McInerney feel that he had to do anything — anything at all — to defend his masculine image. (His hobbies — Young Marines and martial arts — imply that masculinity is important to McInerney.)

From Holly at Feministe:

Seriously, when you think about this kind of situation in all its disturbing dimensions and possibilities, which is more likely? That one of the school bullies decides to take it a step beyond name-calling and shoving, pulls out a gun, and shoots this kid? Or that the killer felt personally threatened for some reason, to the point of bringing a gun into a middle school classroom and shooting someone in the head, first thing in the morning? With the few details that have emerged, it’s impossible to say.

But I fear the worst — and the worst would not just be that some homophobic asshole killed a child. There’s an even worse worst: that a child is dead, and the other child who pulled the trigger did so because he couldn’t deal with his own feelings. And now that second child will be tried as an adult, and another life destroyed.

From the NY Times story:

The gunman, identified by the police as Brandon McInerney, “is just as much a victim as Lawrence,” said Masen Davis, executive director of the Transgender Law Center. “He’s a victim of homophobia and hate.”

McInerney is being charged as an adult and, if convicted, faces a minimum of 53 years in prison (25 for the murder, 25 for the gun, 3 for the hate crime). The Transgender Law Center is opposing trying McInerney as an adult.

I agree with the TLC. Nonetheless, typing this entry, I kept on having to correct my wording to refer to King in the past tense, and McInerney in the present tense. I feel terrible about McInerney being tried as an adult, and I agree with Masen Davis that McInerney is a victim (although “just as much a victim as Lawrence” is going too far for me). But still.. it’s so fucking unfair that King is the one of them having to be in the past tense.

From Patricia Nell Warren:

The fact is – when school administrators find bullying going on, they often refuse to see the speeding train coming straight at them. Yet they usually get advance warning on a bully or clique of bullies and who the victim is. But they fail to act immediately — to suspend the problem students and get them out of the school without any delay. Why? Because they don’t want to deal with the angry parents of one bullying kid, or the parents of an entire bullying clique, especially parents with political juice. They also don’t want to deal with local church conservatives who insist that protecting LGBT students is equal to saying that homosexuality is OK. Not to mention the fact that every student not in school that day is ADA money that the school doesn’t get. Teachers, too, are often afraid to speak out against bullies, because they know that teachers are assaulted at school as well.

Big Mouth at Big Queer Blog on the non-mysterious way that no journalists ask, in anguish, “why?,” when a gay kid is shot:

Look, I don’t think for a second that music or clothes make a killer. I also realize that there are plenty of bipolar folks in the world that wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s not that I want these connections to be made; it’s just that they always are except when it’s a gay kid getting killed. How can we not see the silent implication here?

Meanwhile, from the insano-Christian Right: Michael, in the comments of California Catholic Daily, wrote:

What an incredible tragedy for all concerned. However, as Bishop Fulton J. Sheen has noted, “Love is not tolerance” and, “a cry for tolerance never induces it to quench its hatred of the evil philosophies that have entered into contest with the Truth.” This situation calls for so much more than “tolerance” . At a time when young people are becoming aware of their own sexuality, a confused, apparent young teen aged boy is allowed to come to the school environment dressed suggestively as a member of the opposite sex. Who allowed this? Was it the home where he was being cared for, the school,etc. Obviously,he was troubled and needed help..indeed his behavior cried out for it. That this behavior was confusing and threatening to other boys, going through the so-called latency period of their own sexuality is not unusual or unexpected. He should never have been allowed into the school environment in the first place. His apparent dress was begging for a confrontation, it appears, and the home and the school allowed this to happen. Why? This situation should not have been “tolerated”. It should have been addressed and stopped before it led to this tragedy.

To be fair, several other comment-writers there scolded Michael for his comment. Then “John L. Sillison” wrote:

I don’t see homosexuals going after the killers of American troops who are fighting and dying while trying to protect the free world. I don’t see homosexuals organizing to keep old people from being euthanized. Where are the homosexual lobbying efforts to stop abortion? There is a kind of political alliance between homosexuals and blacks … but what about alliances between homosexuals and Mexicans, Asians, Indians, Native Americans? Why can’t homosexuals stand up for themselves? Why is it so hard for them to persuade so many other people that they deserve to have greater political power than anyone else?

Via Fetch Me My Axe, this interesting article in Colorlines Magazine:

Trans people of color are finding that they have an extremely different relationship to gender transition than white people. London Dexter Ward, an LAPD cop who transitioned in 2004, sums it up this way: a white person who transitions to a male body “just became a man.” By contrast, he says, “I became a Black man. I became the enemy. “

In short, people of color know that racism works differently for men and women, and transgender people like Mitchell and Ward are getting to experience this from both sides of the gender equation. [...]

Louis Mitchell expected a lot of change when he began taking injections of hormones eight years ago to transition from a female body to a male one. He anticipated that he’d grow a beard, which he eventually did and enjoys now. He knew his voice would deepen and that his relationship with his partner, family and friends would change in subtle and, he hoped, good ways, all of which happened.

What he had not counted on was changing the way he drove.
Within months of starting male hormones, “I got pulled over 300 percent more than I had in the previous 23 years of driving, almost immediately. It was astounding,” says Mitchell, who is Black and transitioned while living in the San Francisco area and now resides in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Targeted for “driving while Black” was not new to Mitchell, who is 46 years old. For example, a few years before transitioning, he had been questioned by a cop for simply sitting in his own car late at night. But “he didn’t really sweat me too much once he came up to the car and divined that I was female,” Mitchell recalls.

Now in a Black male body, however, Mitchell has been pulled aside for small infractions. When he and his wife moved from California to the East Coast, Mitchell refused to let her drive on the cross-country trip. “She drives too fast,” he says, chuckling and adding, “I didn’t want to get pulled over. It took me a little bit longer [to drive cross country] ‘cause I had to drive like a Black man. I can’t be going 90 miles an hour down the highway. If I’m going 56, I need to be concerned.” As more people of color transition, Mitchell’s experience is becoming an increasingly common one…

Box Turtle Bulletin tells a bit of fascinating history: One magazine, a gay rights magazine¹ published in the 1950s.

The occasion was the Post Office deciding that One was not criminal to send through the mail, a decision that greatly improved One’s prospects. The editors declared their lack of gratitude in an editorial printed on the cover:

Your August issue is late because the postal authorities in Washington and Los Angeles had it under a microscope. They studied it carefully from the 2nd until the 18th of September and finally decided that there was nothing obscene, lewd or lascivious in it. They allowed it to continue on its way. We have been found suitable for mailing.

…But one point must be made very clear. ONE is not grateful. ONE thanks no one for this reluctant acceptance. It is true that this decision is historic. Never before has a governmental agency of this size admitted that homosexuals not only have legal rights but might have respectable motives as well. The admission is welcome, but it’s tardy and far from enough. As we sit around quietly like nice little ladies and gentlemen gradually educating the public and the courts at our leisure, thousands of homosexuals are being unjustly arrested, blackmailed, fined, jailed, intimidated, beaten, ruined and murdered. ONE’s victory might seem big and historic as you read of it in the comfort of your home (locked in the bathroom? hidden under a stack of other magazines? sealed first class?). But the deviate hearing of our late August issue through jail bars will not be overly impressed.

God, they fucking rocked.

Click through and read the entire Box Turtle Bulletin post — it’s fascinating stuff, including the first pro-gay-rights Supreme Court decision in US history (fifty years ago last week), and brief mentions of John Gielgud and (shamefully) the ACLU.

1. Judging from the tiny snippets BTB quotes, it seems that they were very much focused on gay men, not on lesbians. (back)

I just received a phone call from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), who wanted to ask me an important poll question: “As a Republican, are you willing to cede the White House to Hilary Clinton in 2008?” I told them no.

The call also featured a recorded message from Representative Tom Cole. According to Cole, “True conservatives in Washington have been quiet for too long” when it comes to criticizing Hilary Clinton and the liberals, but they’re going to stop being so reticent in 2008, if I help by donating some money. It strikes me that Cole himself is a conservative, and he spends most of his time in Washington. Why does he need my money to cease being quiet — couldn’t he just, you know, start talking?

Also, Cole says Clinton intends to legalize gay marriage. I wish! Not for the first time, I find myself wishing that the fantasy Democrats conservatives argue against existed in real life, so I could vote for them.

From Rozk:

All of the religious factions and militias and Kurdish nationalists and government police in Iraq have one thing that they can agree on, which is killing queers.

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

From M. LeBlank at Bitch PhD:

Both fat people and gay people who are trying to fight bigotry spend a lot of time arguing that their condition is genetic. It’s pretty easy to see why: it seems like a very obviously bad thing to hate or discriminate against someone for something that is not within their control. So if you can just show someone that it’s genetic, or “it’s not a choice,” then you will show that they are being an asshole for judging you on that basis.

The thing is, I think this argument is selling the concept of “acceptance” really short. [...] Arguing that things are out of someone’s control, and thus beyond criticism or bigotry, is a seductive tactic because it mirrors the arguments that are used against race discrimination. But the problem is, it’s the wrong metric.

“Choice” or “environment” is the wrong way to determine what reasons are good reasons to hate others. Discriminating against or hating someone for being fat or gay makes you an asshole because there’s nothing wrong with being fat or gay. Not because it’s not a choice.

Once you take either of these positions, you lose all rights to be treated as if you might possibly have anything interesting to say. You lose all rights not to be cursed at. You also lose all rights for others to assume that you are a human being and not, say, a shit-covered paramecium.

1) Homosexuality is linked to pedophilia.

2) Black people are less intelligent than whites.

Feel free to comment on this, but guess which two positions you shouldn’t take unless you want to be banned? Pleas for civility will also be ignored.

From Feministe:

Projection, anyone?

A boy scout leader who opposed allowing gay men and atheists serve as troop leaders — and who even sued the city of Berkeley over it — has been arrested on felony sexual abuse charges. For sexually abusing boys in his troop.

But at least he kept the gays and the atheists out.

Negotiations between Philadelphia Boy Scouts and the city government have ended; the Scouts are being evicted.

For three years the Philadelphia council of the Boy Scouts of America held its ground. It resisted the city’s request to change its discriminatory policy toward gay people despite threats that if it did not do so, the city would evict the group from a municipal building where the Scouts have resided practically rent free since 1928.

Hailed as the birthplace of the Boy Scouts, the Beaux Arts building is the seat of the seventh-largest chapter of the organization and the first of the more than 300 council service centers built by the Scouts around the country over the past century.

Municipal officials drew the line at the Beaux Arts building because the city owns the half-acre of land where the building stands. The Boy Scouts erected the ornate building and since 1928 have leased the land from the city for a token sum of $1 a year. City officials said the market value for renting the building was about $200,000 a year, and they invited the Boy Scouts to remain as full-paying tenants.

Jeff Jubelirer, a spokesman for the local chapter, said it could not afford $200,000 a year in rent, and that such a price would require it to cut summer-camp funds for 800 needy children. [...]

So they’re saying that if a group does some sort of good, they should be exempt from anti-discrimination law? “Well, it’s true we fired all the Jews, but we also built a home for stray cats, so we should be exempt from the law!”

I’m sorry for the decent scouts and boys this hurts, but the city did the right thing, and dealt the Scouts an important symbolic loss. It’s right that the Scouts suffer some consequences for their decision to support bigotry. The Scouts will be much better off in a few decades, when enough of the yahoos currently running the organization have died that their homophobic policies can be removed.

I’m not sure if discrimination against atheists was also at issue in this conflict.

(I previously posted about this conflict in August of 2006.)

Via Language Log.

This is the best thing I’ve read in probably a month, and it’s am absolute must-read for anyone who’s ever wondered about the political and theological confluence of events that became the religious right.

It’s 3 years old, but I just read it this afternoon, so it’s new to me. Also, it’s long, but I found myself entertained and interested all the way through.

It is, of course, of special interest to those among us who would like to live by Biblical principles, since there’s a fair amount of talking about just exactly what those principles are.

It’s broken up into 5 parts:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The author, bradhicks, is awesome in several other ways as well. It’s worth poking around his LJ, especially for some of his political writing.

PS. This was originally posted at my LiveJournal page, but I decided to repost it here for the general quality of conversation.

Well, this is interesting. (Hat tip Lawrence Schimel)

On October 20, J. K. Rowling read from book 7 at Carnegie Hall in New York.

After reading briefly from the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds “true love”.

“Dumbledore is gay,” the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. “Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling said of Dumbledore’s feelings, adding that Dumbledore was “horribly, terribly let down”.

Three basic reactions:

1) Huh.

2) That fairly cool.

3) Well, damn it, why the hell couldn’t you have told us that during the series?

Recently, there was a kerfuffle (has anything other than blog wars ever popularized that term?) on the popular blog of military science fiction writer John Scalzi. Scalzi, responding to discussions of how and when race is deployed in science fiction, revealed how he wrestles with the issue.

My way of dealing with spec fic’s racial lopsidedness (on the writing side, at least) is somewhat passive-aggressive: I avoid making any sort of overt racial identifiers at all with my characters unless it’s required by the plot, which for my books it generally isn’t. This is not the same as actively specifying minority characters in my books, which is a point no doubt many will be happy to make, and they’re right. But it’s not excluding them, either, which is not trivial.

Scalzi went on to indicate that he had imagined a main character in one of his series to be non-white, although he had never left any racial markers on the page.

This is the moment when I say “I heart Scalzi” before launching into intense criticism. Kameron Hurley of Brutal Women summed it up well:

As a writer, you may write colorblind. You may pull out all the color and race and cultural tags for every single one of your characters, and thereby prove that they could be of any race!

Sure. Let’s go with that. Nobody in your book has a skin color, or any sort of physical description at all.

You really believe your reader’s not givng your characters a physical description? You think that one of the first markers they make, after size and gender, won’t be color? Pigment?
…

The problem with writing in “race-neutral” (what is that? Gray? Beige?) terms is you get the same problem you run into when you write in gender-neutral terms. As people raised in a racist, sexist, society, we’re going to norm a lot of stories, a lot of people, as white males. There are certainly ways you can code this differently, and every reader brings their own unique set of indicators to the reading experience, but I think the vast majority of people are going to sit down and code your world in whitewash unless they get some indication that it’s otherwise or they bring something non-majority to the table.

We have a default setting we’ve been programmed with, and it’s the default setting we’ve been pumped full of since birth: stories about bands of white brothers, fathers and sons, heroic male conquerors, Columbus, rich white presidents, men of Science, great white male writers; the men who run the world are white. The important people are white. We’re reading about important people, right? Unless we’re reading some kind of hippie women’s story set in some jungle where people don’t speak plain English.

As Kameron Hurley acknowledges, Scalzi has provided himself a little bit of an out here: he works in a far-future world which may no longer share our politics of race. (But really, do they have nothing to replace it? Nothing?)

Scalzi himself argues that he’s not writing colorblind (because he knows what colors his characters are), but that readers are reading colorblind. He goes on to say that this doesn’t of necessity reinforce a white default. As a first step, he says that while he envisions characters is novels as being “people like me,” whiteness is not part of that profile. Honestly, I have a big problem accepting that — but, let’s accept it anyway. Scalzi’s politically aware and not, IMO, given to lying to trump himself up. Perhaps, through deliberation or coincidence (I trend toward postulating the former, even if not on a conscious level), Scalzi has trained himself not to view race as a default.

The mistake he makes is in assuming that it’s responsible for writers to assume that readers will be able, or willing, to do this. Scalzi:

Now, you may ask why I didn’t just note all this [stuff about race] in the book; the answer is because I didn’t want to, because it never came up as part of the story, and because I’d rather have people imagine Harry Creek to be who they were comfortable with him being. If they see him as white, that’s their karma, although I will say I’m sorry that their default is white.

Kate Nepveu, who also wrote a separate post on the subject, responds in comments:

This entry is built around a big misunderstanding, to wit:

“The people like me” != “the cultural default.”

The default in our culture is whiteness — and, to get back to Rowling, heterosexuality. When sexuality and race are not mentioned, most authors mean to indicate whiteness and heterosexuality. Scalzi is not subverting this paradigm by refusing to mention race; he only plays into it. The world in which he’s writing has certain politics, which certainly he needs to write to, but in other ways he acknowledges that he’s working for his audience. As an author who belongs to the joking group the “New Comprehensible,” Scalzi puts an emphasis on writing fiction that is accessible to the mass of our population. Our population has certain tools for analyzing texts. These include a white default as much as they include certain assumptions about nanotechnology — the latter of which Scalzi overtly navigates. When he introduces the basic rules of his world in the first chapter of his novel, he exposits them. He exposits them because readers need to know. Why does he assume we don’t need to know about race?

Perhaps because he says that readers should already know enough to know to vary their default. But then again, maybe they “should” know stuff about physics which he has to explain. We don’t. He’s stuck with the reading population he’s got, and we don’t live in a futuristic utopia.

Niall Harrison said something I thought was smart on the topic of writing about marginalized or non-default characters:

If “straight white male” is the default, then anything else indicates that a choice has been made — or at least, it implies that a more conscious choice has been made than the one made by Stanley’s author. Even if the motive behind that choice is, perfectly validly, “why not?”, the choice is there.

And when it’s not textually present — that choice is, in a real way, not there.

This scenario is even clearer with Rowling, who does not have a utopic science fictional world to pose as a hypothetical. It’s neat that Rowling has a homosexual character, but could we have seen this in your series, please? Could we have seen Dumbledore with a real, living lover? Or, failing that — if he spent his life pining — why couldn’t we have learned about that? We got to learn about the long flaming heterosexual torches, including much more twee whining about Snape and Lily than I was interested in.

Yes, I know Rowling has to deal with the reality of her audience, just as I said Scalzi does. And of course, writing for children means accepting certain boundaries. I can understand that she didn’t want to ask for more textual trouble from Christian conservatives than she’s already got. As the interview relates: “Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason.”

Of course, that leads me to say: they hate you anyway. So, why pander to them?

Most texts only appear as themselves. Books are a finished form. We, as writers, are often told we have to send them into the world without our excuses, without our explanations. When we go to workshops where other people critique our manuscripts, writers are entreated to stay silent. Because our justifications don’t matter — the text becomes what the reader makes of it, a combination of their experiences and the tools you give them.

Neither Rowling nor Scalzi gave their readers the tools that they needed in order to pry this information from the text. It’s an afterthought, left to discussion by only the most devoted fans, only the people who happen to read the blog. Why should it have to be the non-white characters and the homosexual characters whose marginal lives are illuminated not even in the marginalia of the text, but in the essays and justifications afterward? Once again, they get the short shrift.

For Rowling, there’s one redemptive silver lining: the fact that her books have, outside her hands, a vital textual life of their own. As the article reports her saying, “Oh, my God,” Rowling concluded with a laugh, “the fan fiction.”

–

UPDATE: Several people of my acquaintance have mentioned that their central annoyance with Rowling’s reveal is not that she didn’t mention the gay character’s identity in the series, but that she is playing off of an old and poisonous stereotype that gay people are doomed to heartbreak.

This seems, to me, to be a valid concern. However, in the context of the novels, it seems to me like Rowling is often eager to split up romantic and family relationships. I guess I’d read Dumbledore/lost-love as parallel to Snape/rejection. That doesn’t excuse the stereotype, though, since there are no positive examples of gay romance in the novels.

Still, my primary concern is erasure. From Kat Allen’s blog, I learn another thing Rowling’s said: “Rowling remarked that if she had known that (applause) would be the response, she would’ve revealed her thoughts on Dumbledore earlier.”

That kind of gives me the shivers. Gay people are only worth writing about if the reaction is applause.

From today’s SF Chronicle:

“Leading gay rights organizations, with the pointed exception of the Human Rights Campaign, withdrew their support Monday from a landmark gay civil rights bill after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., pulled transgender people from the legislation that would protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination.

The intense backlash by the gay community surprised House Democratic leaders, forcing them to postpone what had been intended as a big House vote this week to include gays and lesbians in the nation’s job discrimination laws for the first time in American history.

The debate playing out between gay rights activists and two of their biggest supporters in Congress raises a classic political question: Are activists better off compromising and accepting progress or continuing to fight for everything they want?

Gay rights groups have been waiting for a decade for the bill to pass, and many say a few more months to try to build support for including gender identity would be worth the wait. They say transgender people will have little chance of winning protection from discrimination if they aren’t included in this bill.

Pelosi and Frank, however, fear the inclusion of gender identity will kill the overall bill - again denying gays and lesbians protection against job discrimination.

I can understand the fear that if lesbians and gays don’t take what they can get now, perhaps they won’t be able to get anything at all. How many years more will it take?

Nonetheless, opposing a Federal anti-discrimination bill that excludes transgendered people is the right thing to do. The reason that it’s harder to pass a bill including transfolks — which is that open bigotry against trans people remains entirely acceptable for bosses, corporations, governments, and congresscritters — is the same reason legal protection for transgendered people is essential.

I’m thrilled to my bones that the queer rights groups have refused to sign on to the Democratic Party’s compromise. It’s solidarity in action. And it’s fucking great.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings suggests that us blog readers can show a little solidarity, as well:

If you think that people should not be fired because they seek gender reassignment surgery, or have some other sort of gender misalignment — if the very idea of choosing one of the toughest parts of a person’s already tough life to take away his or her livelihood for no good reason makes you as mad as it makes me — then now would be a good time to write your Representative and ask him or her to support the extension of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to transgendered people.

UPDATE: I must quote “Edward,” from Obsidian Wing’s comments:

As a gay man, I don’t mind saying, I have no interest at all in becoming a “first-class citizen” if it comes at the expense of someone else’s status. I’ll happily take my chances with the current law before I’ll passively support the hideous assertion that gays and lesbians are kind of ok now, but transgendered Americans are still very much not ok. That folks can’t see why that’s so offensive to many gay folks suggests to my mind they don’t see why the current lack of protection is offensive to us either. It’s not about us. It’s about what’s right.

What this boils down to, quite frankly (no pun intended), is that I trust the motives of the transgendered community in this battle much, much, much more than I trust the motives of those among general public who are coming around and now ready to condescend to suggest I might be worthy of some of the same civil liberties they take for granted. In other words, if the sh*t hits the fan again, I’d rather stay aligned with the folks who’ve shown me constant, genuine support, regardless of how small a minority they may be, than be worried my new allies are still harboring bigotry and might turn against me again.

Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested and pled guilty to disorderly conduct after he was caught propositioning an undercover police officer for sex in an airport bathroom.  Pam has the run down on his votes on key gay/lesbian policy issues:

* Voted YES on constitutional ban of same-sex marriage. (Jun 2006)
* Voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes. (Jun 2002)
* Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Jun 2000)
* Voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage. (Sep 1996)
* Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation. (Sep 1996)

This would be funny is this guy didn’t wield so much power, but at least he didn’t say a black man scared him into offering a blowjob like the last Republican who was caught doing this.

Is anyone keeping count of how many Republican politicians have been caught in gay sex scandals this year?

I’m going to organize this as bullet points for each episode. 

Gods Jewish Warriors

• I thought this was the best one of the series. 
• It was balanced in showing both the extremist settlers, and the more mainstream Jews who were opposed to the extremists.
• They gave ultra-orthodox Jews a free pass on the sexism issue, which was unfair.  They noted the treatment of women by Muslim and Christian fundamentalists, but mentioned nothing that I recollect.
• I was also impressed with how they discussed the international dimensions of the settler movement, and the fundamentalist Christians and right wing Jews who provided money and support to the settler movement.
• They also discussed the changes throughout history and covering the various peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors.  One of the most disturbing parts of the special was the discussion of the killing of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.  If you don’t know the story, you can click on the link.

God’s Muslim Warriors

• I felt like this one was a little more predictable because we are quite accustomed to critiques of Muslim fundamentalists–people promoting violence, Jihad, etc.  I do wish they would have highlighted more of the moderate leaders, and more people opposed to Islamic fundamentalism.  They did interview a few people who left extremist groups, which was interesting, but I wish they would have talked with people who were fighting these extremists all along.
• I thought the scenes of the Iranian women protesting were the most moving.  Heart has several postings on the women’s movement in Iran; you can find them here.  Many of the Muslim countries in the Middle East have draconian anti-women policies, and these policies are often justified in the name of religion.  By far one of the most consistent trends with Muslim, Christian, and Jewish extremists is their disdain for the rights of women.
• They did very good at focusing on the international dimensions of the movement; in particular the growing movement in Europe.  What I also found interesting was how both the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists were obsessed with the “cultural decay” in the West, focusing mostly on the decline in traditional definitions of family, materialism, and hedonistic popular culture. 

God’s Christian Warriors

• This was by far the worst of the three.  First, they didn’t show any of the Christian fundamentalists who advocate murder and violence.  There was a brief mention of bombing abortion clinics, but I wish they would have had an in-depth interview with someone like American terrorist Eric Rudolph or any of these people who have engaged in violence at abortion clinics. What about the Christian Identity movement?  What about Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and his family?  They did talk with Christian fundamentalists, but they didn’t talk to the ones who engage in or promote violence like they did in the first two parts of the series.
• I was happy to see them discuss gender, and the treatment of women, especially when Christiane Amanpour told the one minister that the Taliban said the same thing as him. That was classic.  But they didnt get into the depth that they could have– discussing churches who barred women from being ministers.
• There were not enough interviews with people opposing Christian fundamentalism.  They had two ministers who stepped away from some parts of the movement.  I liked the Minnesota minister, who couldn’t figure out why these groups were so obsessed with homosexuality as a sin, but not materialism, greed, or gluttony.
• There was no coverage of the international nature of Christian fundamentalism.  You would think it is only in the US, but there are places like.  Several of the countries in the pink on this map prohibit abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, and Christian fundamentalists are responsible for promoting this in many countrries.  This list also includes some of the various Christian based terrorist groups around the world.

What do you think?

In her response to Barry’s cartoon, Seelhoff writes, “To compare radical feminists to the Religious Right is propaganda, it is a smear campaign, it is disingenuous, and it is transparently and hatefully misogynist.”

I disagree.

In some discussions of transphobia, I’ve seen radical feminists say things like what makes a woman is her ability to bleed and have children. Here’s one such comment, made by Sally C on I Blame the Patriarchy.

“Knowing that someone is a woman does not tell me anything about her fate, but it does tell me she knows what I know about what it’s like to bleed.”

I am a woman-born woman who experiences problems with mensturation and fertility. Sally C goes on to call women “the tribe that bleeds.”

I do not bleed.

What galls me about this logic — apart from the fact that it’s bad, as no one proferring this definition means to exclude me from being a woman (my existence is being ignored/erased, rather than repudiated) — is that it’s extremely similar to the logic, the specific logic, that I hear from the religious right who also claim that a woman is defined by her uterus and reproductive capacity.

I don’t know what defines woman. As commonly phrased, it is a boring and irrelevant question, as has been acknowledged. It is attempting to take a semantic concept — woman — and reify it in a way in which it can not be reified. The truth is that the concept woman is complicated. It is not binary, it is not either/or, it is not on/off.

When we add the concept of gender, the whole of it becomes even more complex.

The question of womanhood is interesting for class analysis. But we should always expect there to be outliers. There are children with ambiguous genitals. There are XX infants that develop with male external genitalia and uteruses. There are infants whose gender identity does not match their physical bodies. There are women who can happily don male clothing and live out a masculine life — and there always have been. Equally, there are women who could never bear that. I am not part of “the tribe that bleeds,” but I am feminine. I abhor the oppression of women, but I want to live as one.

My external genitalia can tell you certain things about me. It indicates likelihoods and probabilities. It indicates that I am part of the class that is likely to undergo sexual abuse or harassment, although I have been fortunate enough to live most of my life free of these things. It indicates that I probably was urged toward the arts and social sciences, instead of the hard sciences. It indicates I was probably touched less often as an infant than my brothers were; it indicates that I am likely to be paid .76 on the dollar compared to men in my profession.

It indicates these likelihoods, but it does not make them fact. I am an individual. Some probabilities apply. Others do not.

The idea that biology bleeding creates women is part of an essentialist stance — a stance that is shared by many sectors of the religious right. It reduces my varied experiences to the fact of my blood or lack thereof: an inadequate measure.

Sex is a continuum, with most people falling to one side or the other. Gender is a constellation.

I am feminine, and I am sexed female, but I do not bleed.

I have never been raped. I have never given birth to a child. I have dominated class discussions. I have been oppressed. I have been a bully. I have endured undesired sexual contact. I have slapped a sexual partner. I have come top in my class in math and science, as well as english and history. I have used my privilege to make asinine comments about other women to try to gain favor in social power structures where I was floundering. Equally, I have ridden on top of other structures.

A transwoman may have a different set of experiences and privileges. Yes, she will have been raised with some version of male privilege — although, if the women I know are any indication, the male privilege they will have received will have been much closer to my memory of childhood than my fiance’s. They will have been bullied and abused for being too feminine, and sometimes treated as though they were girls because their sense of femaleness was present even when they were male-bodied. A transwoman I know well wrote female characters in our creative writing classes; where other men were petted and praised for “daring” to cross gender lines, her cross-gender writing was never highlighted; it seemed more easy and realistic than her male narrators.

A transwoman and I are different. She will have to struggle to overcome the male privilege of her childhood. But we are not different like on and off on a flipped switch; we have both had our turns at oppressor and oppressed.

More, we are not totally defined by our childhoods. How I act now affects my life. Someone raised with male privilege can repudiate it in part, if not in whole. A transwoman will have an easier time rejecting the social aspects of male privilege, as she likely will cease to be accorded them. Internally, she may struggle with ghosts of old experiences. But her childhood is not the whole of her experience. She will continue to be shaped.

Your rejection of her is based in biological essentialism and binary thinking. Your argument shares traits with segments of the religious right, who also view gender as binary and physically based. These are similarities. You may shudder under that comparison, but it remains. It’s legitimate to compare things that are similar.

True enough, that comparison doesn’t continue to hold true. Radical feminists are not like the religious right when it comes to acknowledging and fighting against the oppression of female subservience in the home. But the comparison does not need to be true in all points for it to be legitimate; it only needs to be true at the point of comparison. No one is claiming that radical feminists and the christian right are wholly indistinguishable. The only claim is that on the single point of transphobia based in biological essentialism, both transphobic radical feminists and transphobic christian conservatives sound the same. Transphobic radical feminists and transphobic christian conservatives are united in the biological essentialism that leads them to the bigotry of transphobia.

A note to commenters: I am locking this to feminists only. I would like this to be a safe space for radical feminists who are interested in seeking dialogue, and also for transsexuals. If it’s acheivable, I would like Daisy and Nexyjo to feel safe in the same discussion. Please avoid saying things like “this exemplifies everything that’s fucked up about radical feminism” — that’s incendiary and unfriendly. Please also don’t mistake my own positioning; I often agree with radical feminists over people who identify as sex-positive. While I don’t necessarily believe that oppression of women is the original oppression (I don’t see how such theories can ever be proven), I do have a number of philosophical points of connection with radical feminists, as well as great respect for radical posters here including (but not limited to) Bean, QGrrl, Bonnie, Ms. Xeno, Pheeno, and Ginmar.*

However, bigotry against transsexuals is intolerable to me. I have a close transsexual friend who avoids most feminist blogs because of the nastiness that happens in threads like these. I refuse to support the kind of hatred that pushes people like her, already subject to isolation and bile from the rest of the world, closer to despair or suicide. Please remember we are discussing real people and real people’s lives.

*My apologies if any of you don’t identify as radical. I’m making some guesses.

(The cartoon these folks are discussing can be read here.)

Laurie and Debbie at Body Impolitic (a blog I’m a fan of) argue that the cartoon is “the politics of hypersimplification.”

…The reason the two characters in the cartoon appear to agree is that their positions are hypersimplified. We seem to be living in a time where most political/social/gender opinions and expectations have been reduced not just to the sound bite but to the bumper sticker. Oversimplified opinions lead to false agreement and false disagreement.

Piny at Feministe responds:

Radical-feminist transphobia is not distinguishable from conservative Christian transphobia because they’re both transphobia. I hate to be as uncharitable as Amp here, but my experience has borne that out in many cases: tap the facade of philosophy and/or tradition and it cracks to reveal a deep and powerful current of simple hatred. All of the positions argued by the characters in the cartoon are shortened, but they’re not actually all that hyperbolic, and they don’t actually distinguish themselves in the longer version; take the “silencing/transsexual agenda” concurrence, for example.

Meanwhile, Littoral Mermaid suggests that I’m beating a straw radical feminist. She and I debate the question in her comments. Other comments on this post range from a smart criticism from Cellycel (whose blog I like, mainly because it’s well-written, but also because it includes references to role-playing games and “Avenue Q“) to impressively venal anti-fat bigotry from someone whose name I’ve forgotten.

Anyway, here’s a quote from my exchange with Cellycel:

Why compare it to the Christian right? Isn’t transphobia bad because of things like say, oppression and discrimination? Not “Because Conservative Christians thing it’s bad, so it must be good. Also radical feminists agree with conservative Christians. That makes radical feminists bad.”

I think this is the most substantive criticism of the cartoon I’ve seen so far. (A few people have made it, including my “Alas” co-blogger Maia). The cartoon would have been better if it had somehow closed off this interpretation.

My intent with this cartoon wasn’t “conservative Christians are bad, therefore anyone who agrees with them on anything is bad.” That would be a ridiculous argument (is giving to charity bad because Christians do it?), and it’s not what I believe.

My intended point was that transphobia is wrong no matter who the speaker is; and that if these arguments are bigoted when they’re coming out of a conservative Christian’s mouth, then they are still bigoted when they are spoken by feminists.