… my dearest Kit did a commissioned piece for a friend and is doing a limited print run to sell on Etsy.
This is for a little girl’s wall. One print has been sold, and the buyer commented thusly: “I decided upon seeing your piece that the Disney Princesses poster Had. To. Go.”
This, kids, makes me Very Happy Indeed.
Having read Thinking Girl’s first guest post on Slant Truth (which boils down to “if you have privilege where another person doesn’t, and they feel marginalized, demeaned, etc.: shut up, listen and believe them. It’s their experience, not yours”), this thought ran across my head while catching up on the Twisty archives:
I believe a rape allegation because I wasn’t there, and she/he was, and that was her experience. If a woman says she was raped, the case needs to be taken seriously. Let the courts/judge decide, based on actual evidence, presented fairly.
Virtually everyone calls the reliability of a rape victim into question. The general consensus by the ugly side of the media machine (FOX News, I’m talking about YOU), once the declaration of insufficient evidence has been made, suddenly nothing has happened and ‘the girl’
made it all up.
Just because the prosecution couldn’t get up enough witnesses / the witnesses were not treated as credible doesn’t mean nothing happened.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Defense rests.
This was originally going to be a comment on the Twisty blog, but as it grew and veered off topic, I decided here might be a better place for it.
Twisty’s patience with Newsweek is a limited, and that patience decided not to put up with lame-pseudo-newsiness (my evaluation, not necessarily Twisty’s) typical of Newsweek, which was this time applied to the ‘transgender question’ (I would more likely call this a “the patriarchy-brainwashed don’t get it” question).
So here are my somewhat random reactions to this thread; with any luck I’ll have it somewhat organized and intelligible.
A thought, provoked by wren’s comments:
The term ‘transgender’ exists because there is some strange (to me) concept that because a person has certain bits they are theoretically then programmed to act a certain way, because they’re male/female.
Post-revolution (when we all get to be human beings) we’ll have it figured out that what a person looks like has no bearing on his/her character, actions, feelings or state of being a ‘him’ or ‘her’.
Sound about right?*
*I second wren’s caveat. I haven’t been faced with this ‘choice’ (yet?) ∴ this is an attempt to understand, nothing more.
It is the position of this blog that femininity and masculinity, as well as “woman” and “man,” for that matter, are synthetic constructs imposed by the dominant culture to bolster a class hierarchy that favors dudes.
Okay, so you took me that next step, placing values on the ‘two’ ‘choices’ (or being relegated to one construct or another).
I do get it that there are slight physical differences (the aforementioned bits) but why there’s a value placed on having one type of bits, and getting a lifetime supply of free cookies because YOU were selected to be born with those bits, this does not make sense to me.
Then Madeline quoth:
More important is to eliminate the gender dichotomy all together. Have female sex organs, want to behave any way you please? Great. Just don’t be oppressive. Have a good time! Have male sex organs, want to behave any way you please? Great. Just don’t be oppressive. Have a good time!
Can I live in your world, please? Geez I want that. I’m (technically) female, (generally) attracted to (technically) males, but I don’t really think of myself as a woman. I’m just a human, really. I feel like I was socialized female, but I have never really felt all that feminine. Not particularly masculine, either, mind you. I’ve just felt like me, and then I’ve felt like I’ve had to fit myself into a mold to be ‘right’ with the world; molds which never fit.
(Aside) I once took a “what gender is your brain?” quiz and scored exactly in the middle. Apparently my excellent spatial orientation is a ‘male’ trait. IBTP.
More Madeline:
I don’t believe, of course, that even if the gender dichotomy were abolished there wouldn’t still be some people who felt they were wrongly sexed. I don’t see what’s wrong with those people attempting to alter their biological organs. It seems to me that at that stage, altering one’s genitalia and taking hormone therapy would be more of a cosmetic change than anything. It would be like choosing to get breast reductions because you are made uncomfortable by your large breasts, or like choosing to get a tattoo (though obviously more extreme than either). At this point the question wouldn’t be about gender identity; it would be about whether you think drastic elective surgery is okay (I think yes; there’s plenty of reasons people think no; it’s off-topic to argue right now).
Okay, this gets me. I don’t see how altering one’s primary sex organs is “more extreme” than altering one’s secondary sex organs (i.e., breast reduction/augmentation) or, for that matter, stomach stapling and weight-loss surgery.
The difference between a transgender person getting the bits they feel they should have been given in the first place and a person who gets their stomach stapled is that the latter is catering to the patriarchy, and the former isn’t. Stuff that’s fully supported by the patriarchy (breast augmentation, cosmetic/weight loss surgery) is somehow ‘okay’, when a transgender people getting the bits they feel they should have is ‘wrong’ or ‘unnatural’?
Maybe that comparison is a bit extreme. It’s possible to see sexual reassignment surgery as something that improves the quality of life for the person who undergoes it, in the way that organ transplantation improves/extends life.
And Catherine Martell makes this part of my post thoroughly redundant:
It is quite different to change your body because a whim to do so strikes you, versus changing your body because society has shamed and intimidated you into doing so.
Either way, for the way things actually work, IBTP.
There are QUITE A FEW people born on this planet whose sexual “identity” has to be “assigned” at birth by, for lack of a better word, authorities.
Which is why I’m leaning more and more towards a home birth/birthing center with a doula/midwife. Even the remotest possiblity of my (not yet created, thank you) pregnancy being treated as a disease is something I want to avoid.
The thought of some doctor deciding what ‘gender’ my child will be (on the off chance there’s some doubt) is just infuriating.
This is right up there with not finding out the ‘gender’ of my child, to stave off, at least for a while, the inevitable influx of blue/pink from the rest of my family.
Speaking of, erin ambrose reports:
all this makes me think of a news story i overheard a few days ago about a great new test they’ve concocted where at 6 wks into a pregnancy you can know the sex of the fetus. Human rights folk are worried that this will cause a rise in the aborting of “girl” babies since most want “boys”…
on a lighter note, they joked that this test will allow parents plenty of time to paint the babies room pink or blue.holy crap…theres so many problems with this my head starts to spin.
but its a sobering example of the very real dangers of this ridiculous gender binary crap as well as the assumption/dictation that our sex organs predetermine our gender expression.
sad sad humans.
For some reason this reminds me of the assumption of, well, almost everybody, in the movie “Children of Men” that the child who would be born to finally save humanity from terminal infertility would, in fact/of course, be a BOY. Because important = boy. *rolls eyes*
I posted a little more at the Twisty blog, and maybe it’s worth reading. Other people’s comments certainly are. Thanks for stopping by. ^^
Nope, not dead yet. ^^
Since folks were kind enough to check on me after this last absence of three weeks, I figured I’d neglected ye blog long enough. Admittedly, I’ve had some good reasons to be gone.
Read the rest of this entry »
I wanna be an AlternaYuppie. That may be the funniest coined term ever.
David Simon of Crimson Dark did another photoshop tutorial, this time detailing how to do quick-and-easy explosion effects.
Yes, all his art looks like this. I am so completely jealous in awe.
Macro: Only if you’re Trek-geeky. [Bonus]
Someone do more of these, or I will.
*Grammarian: Shouldn’t that be “I L’DOL?” Netz: OMG ur stoopid shutz upz!!!11eleven
I know what I want to do.
I want to become a translator.
I went to talk to the M.A. adviser today, who, when we got on the subject of translation work, said “You know what might be very useful? Energy efficiency. This is becoming a very big deal, and there might be a call for translators in this field.” This caught my attention.
And the thought that cemented this idea was this: All during the M.A. program, what has kept my attention in every subject has been translation. I took myriad (almost literally!) courses that involved translation, and those were the classes I looked forward to the most. Old Saxon, Yiddish, Old French, Middle High German, Old Norse, Latin: They all got me, every one, and the other classes did not, with very very few exceptions.
So: Do What You Love. –> I Love Translating. –> Become a Translator.
That switch in my head went off today, and it said: “This is the difference between hoping I’ll become something and purposefully setting out to become something.” I am purposefully setting out to become a translator. For now I have a part time job, which will give me a place to be about half of the week, and get me out of bed early in the morning, when I’m at my best. On those days I’ll get physical work, be around people, and earn enough to live off of; the other days I’ll be dividing between my night gig (web design, because it’s fun) and Becoming a Translator.
I even have a plan on How to Get There:
I should reasonably be able to spend one day a week translating, even with a full time schedule. When my job goes back to official part time (after the woman who’s job I’m covering comes back from maternity leave), I should be able to up that to two days.
This feels right. This looks like a good plan, and what I need to do. More, as my father says, will be revealed.
Because this is my life lately. No, really.
If you’ve never read Devil’s Panties, go. I’m reading the archives as we speak.
*And ’cause she was so nice and signed a first issue at Megacon, and she let us interview her on the Gigcast a while back. I am *such* the geek.
So I’m checking my email…
The message that I was reading this morning was fairly simple: just a notice that a blog I had commented on had received another comment. This is pretty straightforward.
This resulted in the following Google Ads:
Okay, the X3 ad I get. The blog ad I get. Even moving to Brisbane I get. But Ann Coulter??? WTM??? Is this from… oh, I dunno, the word hoyden, maybe? Is Google browsing the material on pages linked in the email to get some of this info?
Strange strange strange.
