…and then they came for the transpeople… June 13, 2013

As readers will know, Greece is suffering as a result of the global recession. History has shown us time and again that with recession comes social unrest, and repression. Well, things are currently looking pretty ugly in Greece right now.

Operation Zeus in August last year marked the start of an ugly reminder of a European past that we thought we had long buried. Nearly 60 years after the end of the Second European War, migrants were round up from the streets of Greece and shoved unceremoniously into internment camps. In May, women working in the sex industry were pulled from the streets, forcibly tested for HIV, publically humilitated and imprisoned. In March, they rounded up drug users from the streets of Athens and put them too into camps. Last month in Thessaloniki they came for transgendered people.

You can read more from Second Council House of Virgo.

Recognition for Australians who identify as neither sex June 1, 2013

Cool!

Australian judges have ruled that people do not have to be registered as a man or a woman on the register of births, deaths and marriages.

The New South Wales Court of Appeal overturned an earlier decision that a person’s sex could not be listed as “non-specific” under Australian law.

The court ruled that sex does not bear a binary meaning of “male” or “female”.

(Thanks, DW!)

‘Mx’ in Brighton May 27, 2013

Got all excited when I read a student essay telling me that Brighton is introducing ‘Mx’ as a title and making it the only title to be used in all council paperwork. Sadly, it seems they decided not to do that. Instead, they’re adding it as an additional title for those who reject the gender binary. Still good, but not as good to my mind as dropping all titles that tell you gender or marital status. It does, however, come along with a broader commitment to being trans-friendly, and that’s great.

Picking Our Battles: The Paradox of Power & Social Justice March 26, 2013

Yesterday I was watching the Melissa Harris Perry (MHP) Show and legal scholar  Kenji Yoshino talked about a possible paradox at play in regards to the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruling on Prop 8 (and the other case that no one seems to reference by name).  He brought up the following point: a group has to have a significant amount of political power in order to even make it to the Supreme Court, who will rule on whether they are being discriminated against.  This can be restated as,

“A group must have an immense amount of political power before it will be deemed politically powerless by the Court.”

I can’t find the exact clip, though here is Sunday’s MHP show.  And since I was forced to search the internet for another mention of Yoshino’s quote, I stumbled across a law review article he wrote on the topic (no pay wall!).

Today I was reminded of this paradox as I logged onto Facebook and was greeted with a newsfeed awash in red and pink:

a pink equals sign on a red background

(more after the jump)

Don’t Buy Transphobia March 25, 2013

Don’t Buy Transphobia is a campaign to force the Daily Hate Mail to change its transphobic ways by putting pressure on companies that advertise in its pages.

For those who have not been keeping up with recent events, Lucy Meadows was a primary school teacher in Accrington, who was transitioning from male to female. The school were supportive, Lucy was just getting on with her life, but then the Press found out and hounded her until she killed herself. Chief amongst them was Richard ‘National Disgrace’ Littlejohn of the Daily Mail, whose column is one hate-filled rant after another – each one aimed at those the Daily Hate has deemed the enemies of Modern Britain (the LBQT community, immigrants, etc.).

If you’ve had enough of this, then don’t buy from companies that advertise in the Mail, and write to let them know why.

You can also sign the petition calling for Littlejohn’s dismissal here.

Student unions and misogyny March 7, 2013

“Misogynist prick” runs for UCL Women’s Officer.

A male student who “self-identified” as female before running for the women’s officer position at his university claims he is being persecuted after being censored by his union following a backlash.

Kirk Sneade, an undergraduate at the University College, London (UCL), and his campaign team have been branded “misogynist pricks” by fellow students following his controversial run for candidacy.

The UCL student uploaded a video of a woman being punched by a man and a photo with the slogan “memes are gay” as part of his campaign. Sneade, who is now claiming discrimination, reportedly likened his plight to the communist persecution in Nazi Germany.

What did his self-identification amount to?

Sneade’s original manifesto stated:

Kirk Sneade has self defined as a woman ever since he realised it gave him legal access to the women’s changing rooms at the Bloomsbury gym

And then there’s this tale from women debaters at the Glasgow University Union.

During the debate, a select number of male students, including former committee members and even an ex-president, made sexual comments about our appearance, shouted “shame woman”, booed loudly and questioned “what does a woman know anyway?”. This was not mere heckling, and not related to the content of our speeches. None of the male speakers faced the same treatment. After the debate, a member of this group shouted “get that woman out of my chamber” as my partner Marlena passed.

When female students heard these comments, one confronted the male members and was told to stop being a “frigid bitch”. After the debate, a female Cambridge student rose to confront the perpetrators. The organisers of the tournament, and GUU committee members, begged her to sit down and not “cause trouble”. I myself confronted one of the male members concerned, and the GUU committee, only to be told that it was “to be expected” and “par for the course” that women would be booed in the GUU chamber. When I asked whether they would accept the treatment of racial minority speakers in the same way, I was told “they would be booed too, but we don’t have them here.” The committee accepted we were booed because we were women, not for any other reason, but refused to take action against their members.

Sigh.

The varieties of disability February 8, 2013

We’ve just put up an extremely thoughtful, thought-provoking post over at Disabled Philosophers. It begins like this:

My disability is, for many, also a marker of identity. In the parlance of pop culture, I was “born in the wrong body.” In the words of the DSM, I have “evidence of a strong and persistent cross-gender identification.”. . . I realize that there are others in my situation who would shirk this description, and I am do not mean to imply that any transsexual or transgender individual is thereby disabled.

However, this is a physical condition for which I must constantly medicate myself and for which I’ve had significant surgeries. I live with the fear that my colleagues will discover my past history, which is a source of some not-insignificant anxiety.

While I’m sure that there are many trans folk who would object to the description of a trans body as a disability, and likewise that there are many disabled folk who would object along similar lines, this post encourages us to think carefully about what we classify as “disability” and which experiences are experiences of disability. I’m leaving comments open on this post for the time being, but I’d ask that everyone be courteous and kind. The policy at the Disabled Philosophers blog includes allowing people to report and interpret their own experiences. People may disagree with how to interpret that experience, but it’s imperative that we all be respectful in that disagreement.

Speaking of Using Your Powers to Make the World More Better February 5, 2013

The Border House is a great blog about video games and social identity.

They have a recent post up entitled, “TransMovement: Freedom and Constraint in Queer and Open World Games”
(All the blockquotes here are from the Border House article by Samantha Allen)

When Bethesda Games’ Todd Howard previewed the open world role-playing gameSkyrim, he famously promised that the player would be able to traverse any visible geography. His breathless assurance of the player’s ultimate freedom has already come and gone as an internet meme: “You see that mountain? You can climb it.”

In it, the author mentions a video game (that you can play right in your browser without downloading anything) called dys4ia.

I want to contrast this ultimate freedom of movement with the mechanics of movement in Anna Anthropy’s much-discussed game dys4ia, which she describes as “an autobiographical game about my experiences with hormone replacement therapy.”

It’s articles like this that make me think there is lots of potential for philosophy and video games to get together and make sweet, sweet knowledge.  Especially in regards to social justice and oppression.

I’ll confess that I seem to enjoy the rampant freedom of open world games just as much as anybody. But, for cisgender gamers, the supreme motility of open world games often functions as an exaggeration of a freedom of movement that they may already enjoy in the physical spaces of non-game worlds.

In her 1980 essay, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young thinks through the style of movement typical of women in the United States. Women, in her view, do not “make full use of the body’s spatial and lateral possibilities” unlike men who are able to move freely, with long strides and swinging arms (Young 1980, 142).

I’m not arguing that all games should constrain player motion so that the much-stereotyped white, male, cisgender game-playing teenager can understand my experience as a transwoman. I do want to resist, however, game critics’ tendency to think of the open world, “ultimate freedom” genre as the evolutionary endpoint of video games as a medium. Different styles of movement produce different emotional effects and both should be available to us as players and as game-makers. To regard “fun” as the ultimate litmus test for the success of a video game is to sell short the emotive capacity of the medium itself.

I also want to call attention to the implicit masculinity of the open world genre, not to dismiss it entirely, but rather to point out the ways in which freedom of movement can be experienced differently by people outside the largely white, male cisgender realm of video game preview and review culture. [...] Because I don’t equate fiction with reality, I can’t hold Far Cry 3 accountable for neocolonialism. I can point out, however, that it’s a reflection of an implicit masculinism, the seductiveness of which is facilitated by the mechanics of movement in the open world genre of games. Let’s enjoy our fictional worlds and our innocent-because-virtual power fantasies. But let’s also try to be a little more nuanced and reflexive in our approach to going anywhere and doing anything.

Transforming Family Documentary January 15, 2013

 

Transforming FAMILY is a ten minute documentary that jumps directly into an ongoing conversation among trans people about parenting. It is a beautiful snapshot of current issues, struggles and strengths of transexual, transgender and gender fluid parents (and parents to be) in North America today.

You can watch the video here. (I don’t know whether vimeo is accessible everywhere though; apologies if it isn’t.)

Observer withdraws vicious transphobic crap January 14, 2013

Well, this bit of vicious transphobic crap anyway. And they’ve apologised too. Let’s hope this represents a turning point for them. As many have pointed out, they have a long history of publishing garbage like this. (Thanks, Mr Jender!)