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Sounder » Fri Feb 12, 2016 10:53 am wrote:Thanks much for this Alice Dreger vid.
Alice got to the good stuff at about the 17:00 minute mark when she referred to caring and protecting.
It does not serve the general community to have certain expressions that happen to express themselves differently across gender, to have their value undermined in the name of gender 'equality'.
Resist social engineering.
jakell wrote...
Sounder » Fri Feb 12, 2016 10:53 am wrote:Thanks much for this Alice Dreger vid.
Alice got to the good stuff at about the 17:00 minute mark when she referred to caring and protecting.
It does not serve the general community to have certain expressions that happen to express themselves differently across gender, to have their value undermined in the name of gender 'equality'.
Resist social engineering.
That's sort of the central issue.
Sounder:
Or at least an attempt to start circling around actual rather than manufactured issues, but I need help.
The 'levelling' of humans, whilst lip-service may be paid to such notions as 'serving the community', actually seems to be more about some elusive higher ideal subscribed to by a subset of humans.
This Sex Which Is Not Two
By AZEEN GHORAYSHI
Challenging the biological basis of sex and dispensing with the nature vs. nurture opposition
ANNE Fausto-Sterling is professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University. In books like Myths of Gender and Sexing the Body, Fausto-Sterling pioneered the application of a feminist critique to biological studies of gender, adding to the growing literature on the social construction of scientific knowledge. We spoke about our current cultural moment and its movement away from binaries of sex and gender, and the ways in which science has shaped and sometimes lagged behind this conversation. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
How did your academic path lead you to studying the development of sex and gender?
My original start was as an embryologist in developmental biology and not developmental psychology—that was a long path. But I basically got my start in college. I took an embryology—a development—course, and I saw a 1930s film of gastrulation. It basically blew me out of my chair. I said, This is what I’ve got to study. It was so phenomenal watching these cells flow in sheets and turn themselves into these three-dimensional topographies where they basically refolded themselves from a ball into a gut tube and then a mesoderm and then an epidermis and a neural tube and all of the things that went to form the basic body axis.
Basically I did embryology, and then I got involved in feminist theory. Then I wrote Myths of Gender, which was sort of aimed at trying to use my skills as a biologist to look at scientific claims about what women can and can’t do. I was also teaching embryology, and one of the things you teach in embryology is the development of the urogenital system, and that led me naturally into intersex and the work of John Money, because that’s part of how you lecture on the development of the urogenital system.
Only, at some point, with feminist theory in my head, I began to look at that story more critically. I began thinking about well, how does science actually work? It moved me away from being able to claim that science was sort of neutral and objective, because here I was finding with Myths of Gender, all these ways in which that clearly wasn’t true, in which culture became woven into the fabric of scientific knowledge.
And that was the same thing people were finding in other fields of women’s studies. Gender was neglected or treated in particular ways in science, gender was neglected or treated particular ways in history, and so on and so forth. The people who were doing feminist science studies, of whom I was one, began looking at gender as cultural knowledge that became part of scientific knowledge.
That was through the 1990s. There was a huge amount of intellectual ferment going on then in terms of the theory. I was interacting with Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, and all these people, half a dozen of whom I’m leaving out, who were doing feminist theory.
By that time my lab seemed to be winding down because I was just more engaged with the feminist theory, but I knew I had to write Sexing the Body because I had to show how it was that prevailing ideas about gender became unconsciously woven into biological knowledge.
In the process of doing that, I discovered Esther Thelen and dynamic systems theory, and I became very irritated at the constant reiteration of the nature versus nurture paradigm. I thought, Well, this is what has to happen to the study of gender and development.
Can you walk me through what exactly the dynamic systems model is?
It has several pieces to it. First, it’s developmental. Bodies always build on what’s come before. So if you find that women and men in their 30s have a different disease pattern, you can’t just say it’s because one group is male and one group is female, you have to ask, How did that disease pattern come into being? One of the experimental tenets of dynamic systems is that you study patterns or difference as they emerge, so you start before there’s a difference and then you watch it emerge, so that you can begin to see what the components of it are. A dynamic systems approach always has to be developmental and longitudinal. A cross-sectional bit of data is just the starting point to ask where does it come from.
Another piece of it is that the body is always understood as being embedded in the world, and it’s a social and sensory world. You can never partition the body from the world it’s embedded in. One saying among people who do developmental systems theory is that everything is always 100 percent nature and 100 percent nurture at the same time. You can’t do the kinds of things that geneticists like to do where they say it’s 50 percent due to genes and 50 percent due to the environment—that’s a false way of looking at what the body is and how it works.
Bound is a 1996 American neo-noir crime thriller film written and directed by The Wachowskis in their feature film directorial debut. Violet (Jennifer Tilly), who longs to escape her relationship with her mafioso boyfriend Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), enters into a clandestine affair with alluring ex-con Corky (Gina Gershon), and the two women hatch a scheme to steal $2 million of mafia money.
....
Bound received positive reviews from film critics who praised the humor and style of the directors as well as the realistic portrayal of a lesbian relationship in a mainstream film.
The second sibling of the filmmaking duo known as The Wachowskis has come out as transgender.
Lilly Wachowski, 48, sibling of Lana, 50, came out in a statement to Windy City Times, after being threatened with outing by other media.
Here is her statement:"SEX CHANGE SHOCKER—WACHOWSKI BROTHERS NOW SISTERS!!!"
There's the headline I've been waiting for this past year. Up until now with dread and/or eye rolling exasperation. The "news" has almost come out a couple of times. Each was preceded by an ominous email from my agent—reporters have been asking for statements regarding the "Andy Wachowski gender transition" story they were about to publish. In response to this threatened public outing against my will, I had a prepared a statement that was one part piss, one part vinegar and 12 parts gasoline.
It had a lot of politically relevant insights regarding the dangers of outing trans people, and the statistical horrors of transgender suicide and murder rates. Not to mention a slightly sarcastic wrap-up that "revealed" my father had injected praying mantis blood into his paternal ball-sac before conceiving each of his children to produce a brood of super women, hellbent on female domination. Okay, mega sarcastic.
But it didn't happen. The editors of these publications didn't print a story that was only salacious in substance and could possibly have a potentially fatal effect. And being the optimist that I am, I was happy to chalk it up to progress.
Then last night while getting ready to go out for dinner my doorbell rang. Standing on my front porch was a man I did not recognize.
"This might be a little awkward," he said in an English accent.
I remember sighing.
Sometimes it's really tough work to be an optimist.
He proceeded to explain he was a journalist from the Daily Mail, which was the largest news service in the UK and was most definitely not a tabloid. And that I really had to sit down with him tomorrow or the next day or next week so that I could have my picture taken and tell my story which was so inspirational! And that I really didn't want to have someone from the National Enquirer following me around, did I? BTW—The Daily Mail is so definitely not a tabloid.
My sister Lana and I have largely avoided the press. I find talking about my art frustratingly tedious and talking about myself a wholly mortifying experience. I knew at some point I would have to come out publicly. You know, when you're living as an out transgender person it's … kind of difficult to hide. I just wanted—needed some time to get my head right, to feel comfortable.
But apparently I don't get to decide this.
After he had given me his card, and I closed the door it began to dawn on me where I had heard of the Daily Mail. It was the "news" organization that had played a huge part in the national public outing of Lucy Meadows, an elementary school teacher and trans woman in the UK. An editorial in the "not-a-tabloid" demonized her as a damaging influence on the children's delicate innocence and summarized "he's not only trapped in the wrong body, he's in the wrong job." The reason I knew about her wasn't because she was transgender it was because three months after the Daily Mail article came out, Lucy committed suicide.
And now here they were, at my front door, almost as if to say—
"There's another one! Let's drag 'em out in the open so we can all have a look!"
Being transgender is not easy. We live in a majority-enforced gender binary world. This means when you're transgender you have to face the hard reality of living the rest of your life in a world that is openly hostile to you.
I am one of the lucky ones. Having the support of my family and the means to afford doctors and therapists has given me the chance to actually survive this process. Transgender people without support, means and privilege do not have this luxury. And many do not survive. In 2015, the transgender murder rate hit an all-time high in this country. A horrifying disproportionate number of the victims were trans women of color. These are only the recorded homicides so, since trans people do not all fit in the tidy gender binary statistics of murder rates, it means the actual numbers are higher.
And though we have come a long way since Silence of the Lambs, we continue to be demonized and vilified in the media where attack ads portray us as potential predators to keep us from even using the goddamn bathroom. The so-called bathroom bills that are popping up all over this country do not keep children safe, they force trans people into using bathrooms where they can be beaten and or murdered. We are not predators, we are prey.
So yeah, I'm transgender.
And yeah, I've transitioned.
I'm out to my friends and family. Most people at work know too. Everyone is cool with it. Yes, thanks to my fabulous sister they've done it before, but also because they're fantastic people. Without the love and support of my wife and friends and family I would not be where I am today.
But these words, "transgender" and "transitioned" are hard for me because they both have lost their complexity in their assimilation into the mainstream. There is a lack of nuance of time and space. To be transgender is something largely understood as existing within the dogmatic terminus of male or female. And to "transition" imparts a sense of immediacy, a before and after from one terminus to another. But the reality, my reality is that I've been transitioning and will continue to transition all of my life, through the infinite that exists between male and female as it does in the infinite between the binary of zero and one. We need to elevate the dialogue beyond the simplicity of binary. Binary is a false idol.
Now, gender theory and queer theory hurt my tiny brain. The combinations of words, like freeform jazz, clang disjointed and discordant in my ears. I long for understanding of queer and gender theory but it's a struggle as is the struggle for understanding of my own identity. I have a quote in my office though by Jose Muñoz given to me by a good friend. I stare at it in contemplation sometimes trying to decipher its meaning but the last sentence resonates:
"Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world."
So I will continue to be an optimist adding my shoulder to the Sisyphean struggle of progress and in my very being, be an example of the potentiality of another world.
Lilly Wachowski
GLAAD and other LGBT organizations strongly condemn the outing of a transgender person before they are ready to tell their own story.
The Chicago-born Wachowskis are among cinema's most prolific filmmaking duos. Lilly is a film and TV director and producer, plus screenwriter, comic book writer, video game director and writer. She has been married to Alisa Blasingame since 1991.
The Wachowskis first film together as directors was 1996's Bound, still known as a lesbian film classic. They are perhaps best known for their three-film Matrix series. Among their other films are V for Vendetta, Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending and the beautiful sci-fi series Sense8.
The siblings attended Kellogg Elementary School in Chicago's Beverly neighborhood, on the Far South Side, and graduated from Whitney Young High School in the city's West Loop.
After Lana Wachowski came out as a trans woman, she received the 2012 Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award, and in 2014 she received the Equality Illinois Freedom Award. Lana said about her HRC award: "there are some things we do for ourselves, but there are some things we do for others. I am here because when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn't find anyone like me in the world and it felt like my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others. If I can be that person for someone else, then the sacrifice of my private civic life may have value," as quoted in The Hollywood Reporter.
At the 2014 EI gala Lana said, "Fear is not something I let rule my life, but gratitude is."
See Lana's 2014 EI speech below.
See the GLAAD Media Reference Guide on Transgender Issues here: http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender .
Also see http://www.glaad.org/releases/tip-sheet ... -wachowski .
semper occultus wrote:Mums who refuse to let their girls wear anything pink - no matter how much they wail and beg!
Annie Ridout, 30, owner of parenting website The Early Hour, has never bought her two-year-old daughter Joni a dress
Dani Stockwell, 34, from Dartford, Kent, is a stay-at-home mother to five-year-old Matilda - who she has only ever bought one doll for
These parents are bringing up their children to be 'gender neutral'
By ANTONIA HOYLE FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 02:21, 19 May 2016 | UPDATED: 03:44, 19 May 2016
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3598047/Mums-refuse-let-girls-wear-pink-no-matter-wail-beg.html
There's nothing 'neutral' about refusing to buy your little girl a pink dress, just 'neurotic.'
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