Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
All We Need Is Love...
here is the March 26, 2008 Advocate story.
My thoughts = I think this is amazing in the most positive way. Unfortunately, the response to this story has been overwhelmingly negative with people saying that "these people are mentally ill" and replying to online message boards with other words of hate and judgement. To date, Gender Identity Disorder has not been classified as a mental illness within the scientific community.
Instead of reacting with judgement and hate to thing that are unknown to us or different from us I truely wish that people would respond with compassion and an open mind. Here again I lean towards the idealist however, I am so bothered by the growing examples of hatred and hypocrisy. If more people were driven by love and this type of determination I wonder what kind of world we would live in. I applaud the Beaties.
Below is a NYTimes story from yesterday.
June 22, 2008
He’s Pregnant. You’re Speechless.
By GUY TREBAY
WHEN Thomas Beatie gives birth in the next few weeks to a baby girl, the blessed event will mark both a personal milestone and a strange and wondrous crossroads in the evolution of American pop culture.
Mr. Beatie — as anyone who has turned on a television, linked to a blog or picked up a tabloid in the last few months is aware — is a married 34-year-old man, born a woman, who managed to impregnate himself last year using frozen sperm and who went public this spring as the nation’s first “pregnant father.”
That this story attracted attention around the world was hardly surprising. Who, after all, could resist the image of a shirtless Madonna, with a ripe belly on a body lacking breasts and with a square jaw unmistakably fringed by a beard? For a time, clips of Mr. Beatie’s appearance on “Oprah,” where he was filmed undergoing ultrasound, as well as shirtless images of him from an autobiographical feature in the Advocate magazine, were everywhere, and they were impossible to look away from.
Partly a carnival sideshow and partly a glimpse at shifting sexual tectonics, his image and story powered past traditional definitions of gender and exposed a realm that seemed more than passing strange to some observers — and altogether natural to those who inhabit it.
“This is just a neat human-interest story about a particular couple using the reproductive capabilities they have,” said Mara Kiesling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington. “There’s really nothing remarkable” about the Beatie pregnancy, she said.
Yet as the first pregnant transman to go public, Mr. Beatie has exposed a mass audience to alterations in the outlines of gender that may be outpacing our comprehension. In the discussions that followed his announcement, what became poignantly clear is that there is no good language yet to discuss his situation, words like an all-purpose pronoun to describe an idea as complex as a pregnant man.
“When there’s a lot of fascination around a figure like Thomas Beatie,” said Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California, “it points to other changes already happening elsewhere in the culture.”
Among the changes Ms. Halberstam noted are medical innovations that have expanded the possibilities for body modification. There are also studies that indicate, as Ms. Halberstam noted, that women respond sexually to the individual, before differentiating by sex. And the broadening legal scope of marriage has also had its effects on people like Mr. Beatie, who says of himself, “I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy,” but who might have trouble holding on to some of those assertions if he did something as simple as moving from Oregon.
Americans, Ms. Halberstam said, have long been fascinated by narratives of sexual transformation, at least since the era of Christine Jorgensen, an early male-to-female transsexual (born George Jorgensen Jr. in the Bronx) whose sex change, performed by doctors in Sweden, prompted The Daily News to run a front page story under the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty” and made Miss Jorgensen as tabloid-notorious then as Mr. Beatie is, the man who “went abroad and came back a broad.”
The Jorgensen case in 1951 was treated as groundbreaking, just as Mr. Beatie’s was on “Oprah,” despite the well-established fact that physicians at the German Institute of Sexual Science had performed successful sexual reassignment surgeries decades before. If Miss Jorgensen’s story prefigured Mr. Beatie’s, it also pointed toward a future in which gender continues to change in response to changing laws and mores and, as important, new technology.
“The Beatie case seems like a way of having some of the Trans 101 discussions publicly, giving them one kind of a face and doing it in a way that’s not asking anybody for anything,” said Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a professor at the City University of New York graduate school of English who has written extensively on gender. “He’s pregnant, he seems happy. It’s not in happening in any kind of a judicial, let alone criminal, context so it’s not a matter of claiming a right. It’s a matter of exercising one.”
By bringing his story to the public and disclosing the particulars of his anatomical journey, Ms. Sedgwick added, Mr. Beatie is “making visible the fact that a lot of people’s experience of making these decisions isn’t about getting a penis or losing a penis.” For many transgender people, she said, “genital surgery is not what defines gender, and that will be news for lots and lots of Americans,” who may have trouble comprehending the idea that for some, anatomy does not define woman or man.
Mr. Beatie does not have a penis; his clitoris was surgically reconfigured to mimic a phallus. And the person born in Hawaii in 1974 as Tracy Lagondino also altered his body with chest reconstruction surgery, took bimonthly testosterone injections for years to suppress feminine sex characteristics, grew a beard and saw his hairline change. Like many transmen, he chose not to remove his female reproductive organs. And so, when it was clear that his wife could not have another child (she has two grown daughters from a previous relationship), Mr. Beatie stopped hormone therapy until he could conceive.
“Not a lot of transmen get what’s called ‘bottom’ or ‘lower’ surgery,” Ms. Halberstam explained, referring to procedures like the one Mr. Beatie had, and to yet more radical interventions like hysterectomy. “If they want a penis, they don’t want a micro-penis,” she said. If what they want is to be men, she added, they see no reason why that goal is compromised by keeping their ovaries.
Issues like these have made Mr. Beatie’s story so compelling; the sense that trans identity in the Webster sense of the prefix signifies some threshold state of being — “across” or “beyond” or “through.”
Ms. Sedgwick said that if you look at postings on Web sites like Oprah Winfrey’s and The Huffington Post, “It seems as though there are lots and lots of comments saying: ‘That’s not a man having a baby. That’s a woman having a baby.’ ”
Partly that reaction results from what Ms. Sedgwick calls a phobic response to changes in identities that for most people seem God-given and settled at birth. Partly it is a matter “of people having to go through the stages of figuring things out,” she said.
As Ms. Kiesling, of the National Center for Transgender Equality, noted: “The long-term benefit of this story is not ‘Pregnant Man Trims Hedge,’ ” referring to a widely circulated photo of a bearded and pregnant Mr. Beatie wielding a power tool. “The Beatie story raises questions we’re all looking at now, in a lot of contexts,” about the welter of new possibilities produced by a landscape in which legalized same-sex partnerships reshape traditional ideas about husband and wife and mom and dad.
Contacted at home in Bend, Ore., Mr. Beatie declined to comment for this article. He was resting, he said, and would reserve further comment until after the baby is born. A book that he was contracted to write has been shelved, according to his publishers, St. Martin’s Press. And so once the “pregnant father” delivers, he can return to being the person his neighbors refer to as “a quiet, regular guy.”
By then his story may have served its purpose, Ms. Sedgwick said. It will have showed us that: “People experience gender very differently and some have really individual and imaginative uses to make of it. That’s an important thing for people to wrap their minds around.”
Thursday, June 12, 2008
i'm not the only one
Below is an Op-Ed from today's NYTimes. See my last post to get some of my thoughts on this topic...
June 12, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Sex Speech
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
One of the missed opportunities of the primary season was that Hillary Clinton never gave a speech about gender comparable to Barack Obama’s speech about race.
That was understandable: She didn’t want to be reduced to the “woman candidate.” But such a speech might have triggered a useful national conversation about women in leadership, and so, Mr. Obama, now it’s up to you: Why don’t you give that speech? I’m helpfully offering some talking points:
Racism is deeper, but sexism may be wider in America today. In polls, more Americans say they would be willing to vote for a black candidate for president than for a female candidate, and sexist put-downs are heard more publicly than racial ones.
Presumably in part because of sexism (and also because of self-selection), women today are still hugely underrepresented in the political arena. Women constitute about 23 percent of legislators in the 50 states, a proportion that has risen only slightly in the last decade. In addition, the political commentariat is overwhelmingly male, which is one reason that Mrs. Clinton’s supporters felt unfairly battered.
We aren’t always aware of our own biases. Some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are sure that she was defeated by misogyny, while those who voted against her invariably are dismissive: The reason I didn’t vote for her isn’t that she’s a woman. It’s that she’s a dynastic opportunist who voted for the Iraq war and ...
The catch is that abundant psychology research shows that we are often shaped by stereotypes that we are unaware of. Many studies have presented research subjects with the exact same C.V., alternately with a male name and a female name. Usually, the male is perceived as a better fit for executive posts — even among well-meaning people who are against gender discrimination, and even among women.
At the end of the day, none of this proves or disproves the thesis that gender bias played a role in the election. But if Mrs. Clinton was hurt by gender, her problem wasn’t misogynists so much as ordinary men and women who believe in equal opportunity — but also are conditioned to think that a president speaks in a gravelly voice.
A conservative may end up the first woman president. The first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, wasn’t “very Catholic.” In the same way, the first black president probably won’t be “very black,” either in complexion or in any personal history with the civil-rights struggle. And the first female president probably won’t be “very female,” in the sense of emerging from the women’s movement.
Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, both conservatives with no association with the women’s movement, offer hints of the kind of woman who may rise to the White House. Or consider the late Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman nominated for president at a major political party convention. She was a Republican.
Women make a difference in politics, but not a large one. When women first received the right to vote in 1920, the assumption was that they would be a big help to Democrats, who had been more sympathetic to women’s suffrage. Instead, Republicans won the next three presidential elections. Today, the best guide to a senator’s voting behavior is his or her political party and home state, not his or her sex.
Still, it has been disproportionately women in Congress who have championed issues like family planning and abortion rights, and they also seem modestly more attentive to concerns about gender discrimination. Less perspicaciously, women were crucial players in achieving Prohibition.
Politics can make a difference for women. If Mr. Obama wants to show that gender issues are on his radar, he could embrace an issue that no president has ever shown interest in: maternal mortality, the orphan issue of global public health. It’s a disgrace that a woman dies in childbirth once every minute somewhere in the world.
In some African countries, a woman has more than a 1-in-10 lifetime risk of dying in childbirth. If men were dying at such a rate for fathering children, the G-8 would be holding emergency summits.
Yet President Bush has actually proposed an 18 percent cut in 2009 in our aid agency’s negligible spending for maternal and child care abroad. Family planning, which reduces pregnancies and thus also prevents both abortions and maternal deaths, is perennially starved for funds.
What better way to repair America’s standing in the world than a major initiative on behalf of women hemorrhaging to death in remote villages — paid for by, say, two weeks’ spending in Iraq? Working with Britain and Norway, the two global leaders on this issue, we could together save 300,000 women’s lives a year.
That truly would be a noble legacy of this campaign debate about gender and politics.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog and join me on Facebook.
June 12, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Sex Speech
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
One of the missed opportunities of the primary season was that Hillary Clinton never gave a speech about gender comparable to Barack Obama’s speech about race.
That was understandable: She didn’t want to be reduced to the “woman candidate.” But such a speech might have triggered a useful national conversation about women in leadership, and so, Mr. Obama, now it’s up to you: Why don’t you give that speech? I’m helpfully offering some talking points:
Racism is deeper, but sexism may be wider in America today. In polls, more Americans say they would be willing to vote for a black candidate for president than for a female candidate, and sexist put-downs are heard more publicly than racial ones.
Presumably in part because of sexism (and also because of self-selection), women today are still hugely underrepresented in the political arena. Women constitute about 23 percent of legislators in the 50 states, a proportion that has risen only slightly in the last decade. In addition, the political commentariat is overwhelmingly male, which is one reason that Mrs. Clinton’s supporters felt unfairly battered.
We aren’t always aware of our own biases. Some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are sure that she was defeated by misogyny, while those who voted against her invariably are dismissive: The reason I didn’t vote for her isn’t that she’s a woman. It’s that she’s a dynastic opportunist who voted for the Iraq war and ...
The catch is that abundant psychology research shows that we are often shaped by stereotypes that we are unaware of. Many studies have presented research subjects with the exact same C.V., alternately with a male name and a female name. Usually, the male is perceived as a better fit for executive posts — even among well-meaning people who are against gender discrimination, and even among women.
At the end of the day, none of this proves or disproves the thesis that gender bias played a role in the election. But if Mrs. Clinton was hurt by gender, her problem wasn’t misogynists so much as ordinary men and women who believe in equal opportunity — but also are conditioned to think that a president speaks in a gravelly voice.
A conservative may end up the first woman president. The first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, wasn’t “very Catholic.” In the same way, the first black president probably won’t be “very black,” either in complexion or in any personal history with the civil-rights struggle. And the first female president probably won’t be “very female,” in the sense of emerging from the women’s movement.
Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, both conservatives with no association with the women’s movement, offer hints of the kind of woman who may rise to the White House. Or consider the late Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman nominated for president at a major political party convention. She was a Republican.
Women make a difference in politics, but not a large one. When women first received the right to vote in 1920, the assumption was that they would be a big help to Democrats, who had been more sympathetic to women’s suffrage. Instead, Republicans won the next three presidential elections. Today, the best guide to a senator’s voting behavior is his or her political party and home state, not his or her sex.
Still, it has been disproportionately women in Congress who have championed issues like family planning and abortion rights, and they also seem modestly more attentive to concerns about gender discrimination. Less perspicaciously, women were crucial players in achieving Prohibition.
Politics can make a difference for women. If Mr. Obama wants to show that gender issues are on his radar, he could embrace an issue that no president has ever shown interest in: maternal mortality, the orphan issue of global public health. It’s a disgrace that a woman dies in childbirth once every minute somewhere in the world.
In some African countries, a woman has more than a 1-in-10 lifetime risk of dying in childbirth. If men were dying at such a rate for fathering children, the G-8 would be holding emergency summits.
Yet President Bush has actually proposed an 18 percent cut in 2009 in our aid agency’s negligible spending for maternal and child care abroad. Family planning, which reduces pregnancies and thus also prevents both abortions and maternal deaths, is perennially starved for funds.
What better way to repair America’s standing in the world than a major initiative on behalf of women hemorrhaging to death in remote villages — paid for by, say, two weeks’ spending in Iraq? Working with Britain and Norway, the two global leaders on this issue, we could together save 300,000 women’s lives a year.
That truly would be a noble legacy of this campaign debate about gender and politics.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog and join me on Facebook.
Monday, June 9, 2008
my little feminist self
The Women's Media Center recently released this video; watching it reminds me that the struggle for equality continues. I understand that this is an edited assortment of media clips, but the frustrating thing is, is that there shouldn't even be these clips to edit together.
Regardless of your political leanings I think it is fair to say that it has been an interesting couple of months. I know that for me, as a New York state voter, I cast my vote over 4 months ago, which at this point seems like ages ago. It was a struggle deciding who I would vote for - the bottom line is that I thought both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would be an excellent President. However, in the end, I chose Obama - the ultimate deciding factors weren't related solely to policy either. I thought about things as simple as having young children in the White House, a constant reminder of our future. As idealistic as it may sound, it seems to me that having children under the age of 10 around will help to keep our focus on issues that are important, healthcare for all, decreasing our oil dependence in order to preserve our shared planet, and improving our education system, to name a few. I believe that Obama is the best candidate to bring our country out of the depressed place it has fallen in the last 8 years under the Bush presidency.
But back to the issue at hand, what did Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign achieve for women? In Sunday's NYTimes, Gail Collins wrote an op-ed piece in which she highlighted this very topic. I think it is difficult for many people to engage in this conversation because there is real hatred for the Clinton's, their political machine, their ablity to win at all cost and who can forget, their history. But the reality remains that history was made, no longer will the idea of a women running for President be laughed at. (in 5th grade I told my social studies teacher that I would be the first woman President - - - my campaign will never take off because I was born in England, so I'm disqualified ;))
As a country we have a terribly low representation of women in the US House of Representatives and the Senate. In the House, there are currently 365 men and 70 women. In the Senate, there are 16 women and 84 men. But yet 52% of the voting poulation are women. Where are the women in politics?
There is an excellent organization, Emily's List, that is seeking to address this very question. I encourage you all to check it out. Maybe the more women we have representing us not only in politics but as CEOs, and in the media we as women will not have to be subjected to comments concerning our outfits but rather people will be talking about the ideas we are promoting, the change we are advocating for and the achievements we have accomplished.
I applaud Hillary Clinton for her efforts; I appluad her work as my Senator; I applaud her drive, her passion, her brilliance; I applaud her for every glass ceiling she cracked, broke and shattered. I don't think that her losing was because she was a woman, she lost because Obama ran a better campaign and connected with voters. If you are interested, Hillary Clinton's concession speech from Saturday, June 7, 2008.
The take away, is that sexism is still prelevent, its not why Hillary lost, but the subtle ways that it manifests itself are clearly still alive and kicking. Its something we should start talking about...
"Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Regardless of your political leanings I think it is fair to say that it has been an interesting couple of months. I know that for me, as a New York state voter, I cast my vote over 4 months ago, which at this point seems like ages ago. It was a struggle deciding who I would vote for - the bottom line is that I thought both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would be an excellent President. However, in the end, I chose Obama - the ultimate deciding factors weren't related solely to policy either. I thought about things as simple as having young children in the White House, a constant reminder of our future. As idealistic as it may sound, it seems to me that having children under the age of 10 around will help to keep our focus on issues that are important, healthcare for all, decreasing our oil dependence in order to preserve our shared planet, and improving our education system, to name a few. I believe that Obama is the best candidate to bring our country out of the depressed place it has fallen in the last 8 years under the Bush presidency.
But back to the issue at hand, what did Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign achieve for women? In Sunday's NYTimes, Gail Collins wrote an op-ed piece in which she highlighted this very topic. I think it is difficult for many people to engage in this conversation because there is real hatred for the Clinton's, their political machine, their ablity to win at all cost and who can forget, their history. But the reality remains that history was made, no longer will the idea of a women running for President be laughed at. (in 5th grade I told my social studies teacher that I would be the first woman President - - - my campaign will never take off because I was born in England, so I'm disqualified ;))
As a country we have a terribly low representation of women in the US House of Representatives and the Senate. In the House, there are currently 365 men and 70 women. In the Senate, there are 16 women and 84 men. But yet 52% of the voting poulation are women. Where are the women in politics?
There is an excellent organization, Emily's List, that is seeking to address this very question. I encourage you all to check it out. Maybe the more women we have representing us not only in politics but as CEOs, and in the media we as women will not have to be subjected to comments concerning our outfits but rather people will be talking about the ideas we are promoting, the change we are advocating for and the achievements we have accomplished.
I applaud Hillary Clinton for her efforts; I appluad her work as my Senator; I applaud her drive, her passion, her brilliance; I applaud her for every glass ceiling she cracked, broke and shattered. I don't think that her losing was because she was a woman, she lost because Obama ran a better campaign and connected with voters. If you are interested, Hillary Clinton's concession speech from Saturday, June 7, 2008.
The take away, is that sexism is still prelevent, its not why Hillary lost, but the subtle ways that it manifests itself are clearly still alive and kicking. Its something we should start talking about...
"Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
