Reaching Out

I'm sorry to have to say this, but if you're going to write a review about Evelyn Evelyn and dismiss the criticism from the people who are facing the oppression that our horrendously ablist culture is bringing up as being "too angry", you're missing the point of feminism, which is, you know, at its very base, anti-oppression. And after days and tens of comments of people pointing out to you how accessibility issues are very real and have effects on lives of actual people, you know, much like how sexism has very real effects on women, which is what feminism addresses, you do not get to say this:

I’d say you’re all more than welcome to come and kick my ass, but I’m afraid my house isn’t wheelchair accessible.

Saying this to people who identify as PWD? This is schoolyard bullying. This is pushing a person smaller than you down to the ground. This is not levity. As a lover of humour, I am deeply insulted and incensed you even call this levity. How dare you? Throwing sand into a person's eyes and laughing is not levity.

It is cruelty.

I'm stumped that the mod of a site called Feminist Review has the gall to allow such a cruel person run rampant. But after all the shit that has broken out in the feminist blogosphere recently, I'm not surprised. Feminists are not free from the sociopathic conditioning that the larger kyriarchal culture breeds in us. This is just another bit in a long line of evidence.

So... this post doesn't actually have a point after I refused to engage in that thread after the mod's first response to me (which amounted to, "oh, but we want to have a dialogue! we just can't make people hold back, that wouldn't be fair! which really means I won't be holding people accountable for playing into oppression!") but I just wanted to say to the FWDs who've been fighting the good fight, you are awesome. And I am so sorry you had to even fight.

Before coming to Canada, I had very little inkling of the Montreal Massacre, of December 6, 1989.

Because I know some of you are not Canadians and thus would not have had the same exposure to this incident as my Canadian friends are, the plain facts, boiled down as I understand them, are this:

On December 6, 1989, a man walked into a classroom of 60 at the l'École Polytechnique. He had a gun. Many bullets. He told the class to separate into men on one side, women on the other. He said, "I only want women." Once this was done, he asked the men to leave. Then he started shooting the women, shouting, "You're all feminists." He killed 14 of them. He injured several more students, both men and women. Then he killed himself. In his suicide note, he exhorted others to finish the job, blaming feminism for his problems.

This was an engineering class. The young women were 23. That's just two years younger than I am now. They were looking forward to careers in engineering, which was, and still is, a male-dominated field.

The killer had applied to get into the engineering degree the year before and failed. He blamed feminism for robbing him of his rightful place - after all, if women hadn't been given the chance, they wouldn't have taken his place. It is, of course, a situation that is several layers of Fucked Up.

Because it's just emotionally exhausting to talk about it some more right now, I have links for you:

What Was The Impact of the Montreal Massacre?

CKA News

audrawilliams shares with us a speech.

CTV Toronto

Montreal Gazette

City TV

Jezebel.com

CTV.ca

CBC News

Julia Coles shares how she remembers.

CBC Archives containing video and radio clips covering the event in 1989.

>_>

Anti-Racism: What Went Wrong? (Namely, too many white people took over. Oh irony!)

Columbus, Go Home!

PhDork fisks this "feminine-ist" article

A timeline of Geocities services. Epic.

The Pornography of Non-Rejection, or, why the fuck is Twilight so goddamn popular?

Ten Webcomics You Should Read and more recommended in the comments!

In Defense of using the term "Douchebag" as an insult, because you know, women aren't allowed to choose insults we use.

John Cho goodness. John Cho totes gives my Asian brothers hotness cred <345678

What is "authentic" Americcanness?

Ian McKellen on religious bigotry, out actors, and his epitaph.

Shakers of Shakeville had varying but great conversations on the Nova Scotian forms

Cripchick warns allies about the term "professionalism".

This just in: Family Friendly Workplace Politics Enhance Competitiveness. NO REALLY?

Adorable little video on the fall of empires

Horrible advice given to a woman who got ditched by her husband after she decided to keep her baby conceived when she was raped by her boss. Because, you know, men are assholes, apparently. Hugo Schwyzer, M. LeBlanc, Amanda Hess and Amanda Marcotte weigh in.

Here's a random academic sentence generator! Still Life with Cat has a an interesting take on what it does.

How Not To Be An Asshole, by the Czech

A quote on the loss of 'membership' to a group once you start speaking out against its -isms.

Zuzka on some academic chick who excludes feminists even though feminism is what gave said woman the right to belong in academia in the first goddamn place.

It's back to a relatively normal schedule of writing for me! The Acting Out Edition will be back with the Asian Women Blog Carnival and then it's back to my regular rambling.

From Racialicious earlier this week, California apologizes to Chinese-Americans, for their abominable treatment when building those railways, way back when. Bit late, but better late then never, eh? And Obama depicted as the Joker. Which is almost as heinous as Obama depicted as Hitler.

Linked from Racialicious is an article from Stuff White People Do (which is different from Stuff White People Like) which illustrates a subtle kind of discrimination that even the most well-meaning white people do not notice. This is closely to what is now termed "micro-aggression", wherein a marginalized person feels discriminated against, but they can't overtly point out and say "this is -ist" without sounding "oversensitive".

Laurendhel of Hoyden about Town bring a disturbing, but all-too-often ignored perspective to the euthanasia debate. It should be obvious, but clearly it is not.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville clearly states for many of us why it's the men we love the most who hurt us the most.

And now, for something completely different: the recordings of one Stephen McGreevy, who recorded "electromagnetic emissions in the very-low-frequency band caused by massive discharges and their after-effects in lightning storms and by the solar wind buffeting the earth's magnetic field, visible as Aurora Borealis and Australis". The entire album can be found here.

In the same vein, here's how Jupiter sounds like, as recorded by NASA's Voyager:


I also found this on Hoyden About Town, where TigTog noted she got it from Colin Mochrie's FB, the latter of who introduced this with "This is what you can do if you apply yourself":



Finally, a delicate sand animation performance which tells a story and comments on war. I've seen such sand animations before, but they're usually just clever. This one moved me to tears:

Salon Broadsheet has an article called "I Sunk Your Abortion Ship!"

As founder of the Dutch group Women on Waves, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts has faced more than her share of tough challenges. You see, her organization operated a ship called the Aurora, which docked off the shore of countries where abortion is illegal and invited women on board to terminate their pregnancies. Women on Waves was able to skirt national abortion bans by docking in international waters, where boats are subject to the laws of their home countries. Of course, Gomperts has faced everything from legal battles to death threats. When she arrived in Portugal in 2004, the government greeted her with a fleet of warships.

She's like a fucking REAL LIFE PIRATE VIGILANTE! Man, the lengths that people will go to prevent women from taking ownership of their own bodies. Warships? Wouldn't all that money be better spent on education programs and free birth control for all?

Tiara: ...WOW
I have heard about this abortion boat
but I never really realised it was real
me: ....
the Abortion Boat
OH MAN
Tiara: ha, sorry
me: That is BEGGING to be made into a novel

Not Victorian capitals but there you have it.

The Vancouver Women's Health Collective opened a new women-only clinic.

Sounds good so far! What's wrong with this?

The pharmacy doesn't serve all women, that's what's wrong. You see, apparently, to be a woman, you have to have been born a woman, lived your whole life as a woman, had specifically woman problems, and who the hell knows what else is essential to being a woman. Mercedes Allen gives a nice rundown on the pre-requisites of being a woman.

Queen Emily, guest-blogging at Feministe, takes on this issue, and rightly points out that there is no solid reasoning to exclude transwomen from receiving services at this women-only clinic. I also highly recommend reading the comments, as Holly within them point out the classism inherent in the reasoning as well.

More from gudbuytjane

What a great idea, a women-only pharmacy!

Too bad it had to be tarnished with transphobia, and it had to start off excluding the most marginalized subset of women.

amandaw of three rivers fog has put out a call for submissions of stories by disabled people about sex. Contributions are preferrably anonymous to encourage more contributions, although video and audio contributions are welcome. She writes:

'I am working on a post about ableism in “liberated” sexual culture (including feminism, but not limited to it). And I really think there is no better way to illustrate this than with real words, real experience.

Do you have, or have you had, a disability (or, if you do not identify as disabled, do you have a condition which results in some sort of mental or physical impairment)? If so: Tell me about your experience in the bedroom.'

Spread the word.


Cross-posted to the Acting Out Edition

Each year, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (the “IDAHO”, as it is usually called), will see actions and initiatives take place in many countries and contexts and on many different issues.

All these activities and initiatives are a very strong signal to all, decisions makers, public opinion, civil rights movements, human rights defenders, etc. throughout the world that our fights for our Rights as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, intersex, etc… is vibrant!

The Day provides all different kind of actors with a very powerful opportunity to express their demands and to advocate for their case. Each year also, the IDAHO aims at using the extra public, political and media attention that it provides at all levels to highlight one specific aspect of the struggle for sexual rights.

This year, we chose to highlight the often neglected but important issue of Transphobia.

Here's the appeal for the rights of trans people all over the world in PDF format.

And here's where you can sign the appeal. This is an international initiative, so anybody can sign.

And yes, the chosen acronym, IDAHO, has an invisible T for Transphobia. I've said it before, transpeople tend to be the ones least thought of among the alternatives to the heterosexual norm. Even those identifying as homosexual will quite easily fall into the trap of discriminating, in some form or manner, or just plain insulting, denigrating, or dehumanizing, transfolks.

The issue of transphobia is a feminist issue. The bottomline of transphobia is a very subtle kind of misogyny, and even ciswomen will gladly participate in hatefulness against transwomen (just as women will gladly participate in hammering in patriarchal norms against other women). Let me outline it for you:

- Transgenderism itself is seen as an act of "transgressing", crossing between boundaries which many societies teach should not be crossed.

- These gender boundaries should not be crossed because
a) women should never aspire to be higher than what they are (i.e., men),
b) men should never aspire to be lower than what they are (i.e., women) and
c) it is notoriously difficult to socially control people who will not fit into neat little boxes and follow the rules of their own sandbox.

In order to maintain this social control, we are given the narrative that men are men and women are women (plus all accompanying myths, such as men are animals who cannot control themselves, or women are less capable of leadership positions, and to be something other than what you are is an act against God and thus, unnatural), with implicit social consequences if we do not follow prescribed rules of behaviour.

- Thus, when a woman wishes to transform into a man, it's quite understood why, because the Big Boys' Club gives one lots of perks, and she is despised for having a vagina and finagling her way in there.

On the flip side, when a man wishes to transform into a woman, he is despised by men because women are a lower lifeform, objects to be consumed, whereas men are active do-ers. He is also mistrusted by women who hold any man's wishes to enter the female realm as suspect.


You'll note that this reasoning, too, ties in with the reasoning behind homophobia:

- woman, passive vessel, bottom, lower.

- man, active agent, top, higher.

Keep in mind these other points:

- Sexually anxious people are neurotic about their position in society and easily manipulated. e.g. hypermasculine young men who're constantly trying to outdo each other with sexual exploits even at the cost of loving relationships with women.

- Sex is a commodity. See: common ideas of sexual purity (female virginity is a rose she gives to her husband on their wedding night), sluttiness (if she'll sleep with one guy, she'll obviously sleep with just anybody), marital exchange (you owe your partner sex when you're married to them, even if you don't want it).

- A woman, as passive vessel, submits to sex / takes it.
- A man, as an active agent, penetrates / invade / conquers.

(I know, you might think, "this is all very archaic", but your next-door neighbour / family members / friends / partner might believe this, shocking eh!)

So when a man consents to being penetrated, he takes the position of the woman in the relationship. And because our society has run so long on the idea that woman = inferior not-quite-human, any man who would submit to that is lesser than a man, and every man should reject being asked to submit to being penetrated.

In fact, a man should show his rejection to being the 'lower' by proving that he is the 'higher', more powerful agent within this interaction, and the best way to prove is by doling out violence.

Homophobia and transphobia are feminist issues, because their roots lie within the ever-pervasive misogyny that drive our society's interactions with gender.

And like misogyny, transphobia is pervasive - it lies in our inquisitiveness on any transgendered person's motives to change their sex, in our disregard for their opinions on gender. It lies in our willingness to express transgenderism as unnatural and wrong. It lies in our mistrust of transwomen and in our calling them "men" despite how they identify themselves, and in our insistence to call transfolk by their "real" names, identifying them by their biological sex rather than chosen gender, or using insulting words like "tranny", "fake", "liars".

The flip side of actively hating them is our objectification of them - finding them sooooo exciting because they're, like, totally two genders, and so daring, and so unnatural, and so different, so transgressive. Instead of seeing them as full human beings, they become our idols for the Other, the Difference that we want to participate in so we, too, can rebel against the Establishment. We project our desire to be different onto them, all the while ignoring their efforts to be normal human beings.

If we neither hate nor lurve them, then we dismiss them, think they're less important, or "too much" for mainstream society. We saw this when an LGBT group removed items from a Bill regarding transfolk, with the excuse that "if we put in transpeople's rights in there, this document will be rejected outright. Let's work on homosexual rights first. We can't ask for everything upfront."

Even when we try to support them, very often we're so damn busy trying to speak for them and advocate for them, we ignore their true needs which may be very different from what we think their needs are. A ciswoman can never speak for a transwoman, because being cis will NEVER amount to being trans, and being cis is having privilege over a transwoman. And when we are called out on our lack of awareness for their needs, we get defensive, resentful that they're not appreciative of our efforts, because dammit, we deserve that cookie for even giving a shit.

And then there're some of us who're just plain ambivalent about it, who just don't think about it, that trangender politics don't matter to anyone who's not trans. This is a logical fallacy. Transgender politics is about the right to be recognized as human, a right that everyone deserves. If you give one group that right but not another, it stops being a right.

We can't all be perfect, and I've used terms I never realized was transphobic before and been called out on it. Being called out on ignorance and privilege is not an attack nor a reason to stay silent when it comes to issues as important as human rights.

Today is International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

Other reading:
From Questioning Transphobia:
On Questioning Transphobia
How To Check Your Cis Privilege

From Shakesville:
Life As A Transwoman Ain't Easy by Guest Blogger GallingGalla
Take My Arm, My Love by PortlyDyke
There's No Good Way To Use "Fag" by Melissa McEwan

Little light's essay on fairness. A repost, sure, but good for the soul.

Excerpts of Beyond Inclusion, an essay by Cedar (you can get the whole essay with a donation! It's a 26-pager and still in progress, because transphobia still exists.)

Feel free to leave links you've got on the issue as well.

Cross-posted to the Acting Out Edition

When I first heard about it, I thought, how does one blog against disablism? Being disabled isn't some grave injustice that can be fixed socially.

So I used my brain a bit harder and realized they were really talking about the troubles the disabled face, whether or not their disability is visible.

I suffer from mild depression, which in no way debilitates me nor affects my life adversely. However, if it did, I have no doubt I have upper-middle-class money privilege to back my ass up.

Other people shouldn't have to face the troubles they do, but still they do, because there just aren't enough resources for them. And there aren't enough resources for them because people without disabilities just don't care.

So some disabled people end up in poverty. In the streets, sometimes. And because some of them don't have visible disabilities, we pass by them and dismiss them as bums who should be getting a job.

I wasn't sure if I was going to blog today about this. Disability is not one of my issues. It's not my forte. I couldn't talk about it if I had to, not very well. There are so many problems even just discussing disability (and yes, words DO matter) that I was hesitant to write today in case I fucked up. The last thing I want is to unintentionally hurt an entire group of people.

I ran into a friend the other day. He suffers from muscular distrophy disorder and gets about in a motorized wheelchair. He's pretty happy with himself (and he has a wicked wheelchair). Right now I'm recalling the times I've talked to him about cool places to go and he can't go, because they're not accessible.

My able-bodied privilege has really only slapped me in the face once: a year or two ago, I was being my usual chirpy Municipal Liaison self for NaNoWriMo and our events are mostly held at Paperchase. It's a cafe above a magazine store of the same name. I got a private message asking if the cafe was wheelchair accessible. I said no, but if said member really wanted to attend, I was sure I could get some people to help.

That was a MORON MOVE, as I would discover later, because even though such a gesture was just my way of offering the member inclusion, it also highlighted the disability in a way that would inevitably have pointed out to hir's Different-ness.

I hesitate even to write about my depression, because it's so mild and really so little compared to the challenges that other people face.

Once, during the Very Angsty Time when I was arguing with my mother, I told her I was suffering from depression, and irritatedly, she demanded, "Is there something wrong with you? Do you need to see a psychiatrist??"

She said it to me in a way that told me that I should be ashamed to have depression, how dare I be different and have all these troubles and disturb others so.

I stared back at her and said, "YES."

She said nothing to me. She walked away.

Yet, even there, I was privileged. I have no doubt that if I had pressed the issue further, I would have gotten to see a psychiatrist. But I never pressed the issue. My parents were clearly uncomfortable with the idea that Something Was Wrong with this troublesome child they raised, and I was already feeling guilty for being such a fuck-up. My mum ignored my depression and dismissed me as being rebellious. My dad gave me pamphlets on depression to read, as if I didn't already know what it was I suffered from. He's gotten significantly better about this issue - somehow, as I grew older, I also grew braver to talk to him about my problems, because I'm not the only one in my family who has it: my brother does, and so does my mum. It affected the way we treated each other. And we didn't fix it because we were too scared to admit that there was Something Wrong with us. (OK, it still does affect us, but I'm not home much to get on anybody else's nerves, my brother works too-long hours, and my mum's in a better place in life now.)

And there's the crux of disablism - of the discrimination, silent or otherwise, of those folks who suffer from something or another, whether it be a chronic physical condition, or a mental illness: those of us who don't suffer from these problems ignore those who do, because those who do serve as an uncomfortable reminder that we, too, could potentially be in their place. Cara says this better than I do.

We could all be doing just a little bit more to be kinder and more helpful to those with disabilities. Even if it's as something as simple as not using words like "lame" or "retarded" to say something is bad. It could be as simple as realizing that living free of pain is a privilege many of us enjoy.

Or, if you have a lot of time and/or inclination to learn more about disability issues, check out the link roundup at Diary of a Goldfish. The articles are even divided into categories so you might be able to find something of interest there more easily.


Thanks to troubleinchina for giving me the impetus to write this.

Cross-posted to the Acting Out Edition

So the jury was expected to deliver a verdict on Allen Andrare's murder of Angie Zapata.

They only deliberated for two hours.


Thirty-two-year-old Allen Andrade is charged with murder and a bias-motivated crime in the death of 18-year-old Angie Zapata.

From the #justiceforangie Twitter:
At 4:00 PM MDT, Allen will be sentenced to mandatory life without parole. #zapata


I feel so relieved.

And yet, Cara makes a damned fine point: "When a woman is dead and nothing can bring her back, I don't think there is such a thing as 'justice' anymore".

And, I'm sad, that Angie had to die, just to keep someone as dangerous as Andrare off the streets. Also, I'm glad, because people recognize she didn't have to die, and are acknowledging it in the verdict, that she was human and had the right to live, and that was stolen from her.

It's not a happy feeling, but any long shot.

He got life.

That doesn't cancel out the fact that for Angie's family and friends, they have lost someone dear. And that a young woman was killed.

=(