Well Miriam, I used to think that I knew the answer to that question.
But today? I sure wouldn't bet my Aunt Bonnie's bundling board on it.
The good news is that at my age, and since I'm in a very happy
relationship with one of them, it doesn't matter if I can tell or not.
The Bad News is that at my age and in my current happy relationship,
it doesn't matter if I can tell or not.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/5/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ah yes, but in this situation, the question appears to be, "Who are
women?".
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2017 11:42 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Battle Over What It Means to Be Female
"Freedom of association is especially important to the oppressed," Alice Lee
said.
Furthermore, as they do gather together to develop definitions of who is a
woman, men, including the so called enlightened men, need to stay out of
this vital process. In fact, Men should be preparing to embrace whatever
comes out of such a process.
Our state organization of the blind was fortunate to have an organizer with
a background in building unions. Al Fisher was a Master Teacher, too. But
Al was a sighted man, and knew that he could not allow himself to be thrust
into a formal leadership positions. Of course in this situation, he did
lead from the back row. I believe that there is an abundance of highly
capable women skilled in leading a movement, without the need of even the
best intentioned men.
I used to ask my students, "Which is America's largest minority group?"
After some guesses, I would say, "The answer is Women". This usually
produced the comments that women outnumber men, so they can't be a
minority.
But I would point out that women are oppressed, and like blind people, the
women are seen as weaker, and need male support. Women continue to face
discrimination, no matter how it is dressed up. Until women gather together
and develop a process that opens a way to equal status with men, they will
remain a minority.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/4/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
First, this is one piece in which Hedges doesn't take sides and if you
read it, you'll understand why.
Second: It took me hours of trying for two days, to access this
article. My Truthdig newsletters keep disappearing and I keep
resubscribing. I haven't received one for two weeks. The website is a
bitch to deal with. Then I tried to send a message to the webmaster
through their contact us link about my newsletters, but there was a
captcha. Finally, yesterday, I stumbled on an email address for the
webmaster. I wrote an email. I also re-subscribed.
I received a thank you for the subscription today, but no newsletter.
I went back to the website an played around with it again until I
could get this article because I knew it would be controversial and
interesting.
Miriam
Truthdig
The Battle Over What It Means to Be Female
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_battle_over_what_it_means_to_b
e_fema
le_20170702/
Posted on Jul 2, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Patriarchy, across the globe, plagues humankind. In some regions
female fetuses often are aborted because they are considered less
valuable than male fetuses. Girls are sometimes smothered in infancy.
Many women and girls are sold to men as rape and breeding slaves. Many
endure genital mutilation.
Many are trafficked and forced into prostitution. Many are denied
abortions and access to birth control. Many, to survive economically,
sell their eggs to donors or hire their wombs out to couples who
cannot produce babies. In some countries, including Saudi Arabia and
parts of India, women are considered the property of male guardians.
There are villages in India where women have only one kidney because
their husbands have sold their other one.
Women are often denied education and, even in industrial countries,
are paid less for carrying out the same work as men.
How, in an age in which some born with male bodies self-identify as
women, can those born female define their unique oppression based on
their experience? As laws in Europe, Canada and the United States are
rewritten to broaden the definition of what it means to be female or
male, how will such change affect the struggle for equality by those
born as females?
The debate over gender identity pits the trans narrative against
radical feminists. It is one of the most bitter and acrimonious
battles on the left.
Radical feminists are castigated by many on the left as reactionary
for their insistence that those born female hold a unique and separate
identity as an oppressed group, one that requires them to form
protected spaces and organizations.
"Freedom of association is especially important to the oppressed,"
Alice Lee, a co-founder of Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution
(http://awcep.org/ ;) , said when I reached her in Vancouver by phone.
"It is absolutely necessary for oppressed people to be able to group
together. It allows us to dare to identify and vocalize our shared
experiences and find ways to effectively strategize to overthrow our
oppressors. The formation of such civil rights groups, anti-racism
groups, women rape crisis centers and shelters, caucuses, clubs,
associations and religious organizations is a hallmark of a democratic
civil society. Decisions about group membership must be a process of
self-determination. Having the criteria dictated to us by the state,
or by those who belong to the oppressor groups, means defeat at the
outset."
"The neoliberal approach
(http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376)
centers on individual feelings and choice at the expense of shared
group experience," Lee continued. "It is a deliberate strategy to
prevent the development of any effective challenge to male supremacy,
white supremacy, heterosexual supremacy, and rule by those who control
capital. Forcing us to open our groups to those who do not share the
basic experiences of our reality cuts off the potential for revolution
at the root."
Many members of the trans community strongly disagree. One is Misty
Snow (http://www.mistyksnow.com/biography/ ;) , a Utah Democratic
candidate for the U.S. Senate in last November's general election and
the first transgender woman to run as a nominee for such a seat.
[Click here
(http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/robert_scheer_interviews_misty_s
now_fi
rst_major_20161007 ) to read and hear an interview of Snow that
Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer conducted for his KCRW podcast,
"Scheer Intelligence," in October 2016.] She recently announced her
candidacy
(http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/328733-transgender-senate-candida
te-mis
ty-snow-announces-house-bid) for the U.S. House of Representatives.
When I spoke to Snow by phone, she said:
The argument that the inclusion of trans people in spaces
traditionally reserved for girls and women somehow infringes on the
rights of girls and women presupposes a collective sisterhood that does
not exist.
Women of color, who have long been marginalized by white feminists,
face different forms of oppression, in the same way trans people face
different forms of oppression.
This recycles the old feminist argument from the 1950s when women of
color were excluded from the feminist movement. A lot of this is about
privileged women, especially white women, clinging to the status quo.
The equal rights of girls and women in the United States are protected
under Title IX
(http://www.aauw.org/what-we-do/public-policy/aauw-issues/title-ix/?gc
lid=Cj
wKEAjwvr3KBRD_i_Lz6cihrDASJADUkGCaI81LgAwiP3T9LVkcQ6CRLLexXFrGAshya9Ln
vZqOpB oCH9rw_wcB ) , but new laws are blurring the lines of what it
means to be female. Feminists say these laws, passed in the name of
inclusivity, amount to an erasure of what it means to be female. They
charge that such change is a gift to patriarchy and the corporate
state, which seeks to turn everyone, especially the most vulnerable,
into disempowered, atomized commodities. As societies break down, it
is girls and women, along with children and the elderly, who bear the
worst abuse and violence. The need for collective strength, given the
global unraveling of civil society and the rise of authoritarian and
protofascist governments, is vital, these feminists say.
"Patriarchy is a millennium-old system of male supremacy by which
male-bodied people are exploiting female-bodied people for
reproductive, sexual and domestic labor," feminist MaryLou Singleton
(https://www.facebook.com/marylou.singleton ;) told me during a
conversation in New York. "When power and property are held by men and
passed to the heirs of men, men need to police and control women's
bodies to know who their heirs are. Now it's global in scope, where
women don't have control over their own reproduction and are dependent
on men in terms of having and raising our children."
The consumer culture grooms women through female socialization, which
it defines as gender, to participate in their own subjugation.
Prostitution and pornography, for example, are sold by patriarchy as
liberating and empowering for women. Those who meet the rigid
standards of female socialization are rewarded and celebrated. Those
who do not are dismissed, marginalized and often attacked.
"Capitalism thrives on promoting extreme individualism and this idea
that we are all separate, unique individuals," Singleton said. "We are
at a point in late-stage capitalism where identity is for sale. People
take on consumer identities. I believe this particular [trans]
identity is being marketed to our young people who are at an age where
they experience a lot of questioning naturally about their identity.
It's always been acknowledged that children and teenagers and young
adults question who they are and what they want to be."
Trans activists, however, dispute the idea that being trans is a
manufactured identity.
"Being transgender is not a consumer identity pushed on us by a
capitalist system," Snow said. "Transgender people have existed long
before capitalism and will continue to exist. Pushing the narrative
that trans identities are simply a 'consumer' rather than an authentic
identity only reinforces rigid standards of what it means to be
female. Trans women are often dismissed, marginalized and attacked for
failing to meet these rigid standards of what it means to be female.
So-called 'feminists' who wish to label trans identities as being
inauthentic are actually doing the patriarchy's work of enforcing rigid
standards and ideas of what it means to be female."
There is a billion-dollar industry built around gender reassignment
surgery.
Pharmaceutical companies provide drugs and hormones that block puberty
and the secondary sex characteristics
(http://www.dictionary.com/browse/secondary-sex-characteristic ;) of
children. In our courts we do not try children as adults, recognizing
that they do not have fully developed brains, yet children are
permitted to ingest potent drugs that will affect them for life. Those
who change their minds about a gender identity decision often must
cope with permanently altered bodies.
"Pediatric medical gender transition is being pushed extensively in
the medical field," said Singleton, who is a nurse practitioner
(http://www.nursepractitionerschools.com/faq/what-is-np ;) . "Every
conference brochure I get has something about transgenderism. It's a
huge money-making experiment on our children, where children as young
as toddlers are being diagnosed as being in the wrong body and taken
to these gender clinics where they are first socially transitioned to
live as the opposite sex. I find that problematic too. I think
children should be able to do whatever they want [without having to
make gender decisions]. What does it mean to live as a boy or live as
a girl, other than sexism?"
"After social transitioning, when those children get close to puberty,
they're placed on very strong drugs that suppress puberty," she said.
"They're called puberty blockers. Those drugs have many long-term
dangerous side effects that we already know about from children who
have been put on them in the past. Once they hit young adolescence and
their peers are starting to go through puberty and they still have a
child's body, the pressure is to give them cross-sex hormones
(http://www.issm.info/sexual-health-qa/what-is-cross-sex-hormone-thera
py/)
.
If you give a child puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones before a
natural puberty, that child will never develop normally as the sex
they are. They will be permanently sterile and permanently dependent
on synthetic hormones because their ovaries or testes never developed
and cannot make their own hormones."
Is there such a thing as a "female brain"? Or do men and women-and
girls and boys-act differently because society has conditioned them to
behave according to male and female stereotypes? Is a boy who dresses
as a girl and plays with dolls a girl, or simply a boy who dresses as
a girl and plays with dolls?
"The idea that transition-related care is being pushed on people to
simply make money is absurd," Snow said. "Capitalism has actually been
a barrier and not a promoter of transition-related care. Throughout
most of the 20th century and even into the 21st century, transgender
people have struggled to get even the most basic transition-related
care due to many doctors and hospitals being unwilling to treat
transgender people for fear that it could harm the reputation of their
practice and hurt their business. Furthermore, there have been,
historically, lots of restrictions on who is even allowed access to
such care, with mental health professionals serving as gatekeepers
often delaying or denying transgender people the care they need.
Transition-related care is not some 'money-making experiment'; it is
treatment that has been proven to be effective for those who have
gender dysphoria (https://www.google.com/#q=gender+dysphoria ;) . It is
not treatment that is prescribed by doctors on a whim or pushed on
people in the interest of making money."
"Children and young adults are not deciding they are trans because it
was 'marketed' towards them," she went on. "There is a lot of science
that supports the fact that male and female brains are different and
respond to hormones differently, and children are often innately aware
of the fact that they are different as soon as they are able to tell
the difference between male and female and will start to identify with
the sex they know themselves to be. Far too often assertions from a
child about their gender identity are ignored by parents and other
trusted adults, which leads to shame, confusion and depression in the
child. These children often feel the need to hide their true
identities to avoid disappointment of their parents and bullying by
their peers. When they reach adulthood, only then do they feel they
have the freedom to live an authentic life. However, by then it is
often too late, as their bodies have already experienced the ravages
of puberty that made irreversible changes to their body. This is why
it is very important for transgender people to have the love and
support they need to express themselves authentically starting in
childhood. As they approach the teenage years it's very important that
they are able to access treatments that will allow them to avoid the
terrifying experience of going through the wrong puberty and allow
them to develop secondary sex characteristics that are typical of
their gender. Denying these treatments to children is cruel and can
leave them with lots of regrets when they reach adulthood and a
feeling that they were robbed of their childhood and ever being able
to live a normal life."
Laws passed to protect trans people from discrimination often do so by
expanding the legal definition of what it means to be a woman. The
trans community unquestionably needs legal protection. Transgender
people commonly are bullied, suffer violent attacks, including by the
police, and are discriminated against in much higher percentages than
the general population. The transgender community also has much higher
rates for attempted suicide, poverty and homelessness. But, some
feminists argue, these new laws, however well intentioned, effectively
eradicate girls and women as a uniquely oppressed group.
"There are two primary vehicles [for cutting back on women's legal
gains] being explored right now," said attorney Maya Dillard Smith,
who was pushed out of her position
(http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/2/maya-dillard-smith-geo
rgia-a clu-leader-resigns-ove/ ) as the head of Georgia's ACLU
chapter when she questioned the decision by the Obama administration
to allow male-born trans people to enter women's restrooms. "One is
through Title IX. Title IX is a
1972 legislative act that essentially prohibits all schools that
receive federal funding from discriminating against folks on the basis
of sex. One of the ways in which the law is attempting to be converted
is, under the Obama guidelines that were issued last year, it
basically reads into the prohibition against sex discrimination [that]
someone who self-identifies as male or female should be extended the
same protections as someone born a woman. That means, in the context
of schools, sports, housing, bathroom and locker room facilities, that
[trans] individuals would have access to those facilities." [Editor's
note: In February of this year the Trump administration rescinded the
Obama guidelines
(http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-lgbt-idUSKBN161243 ;) .]
"However," Dillard Smith continued, "in 1975, Justice [Anthony]
Kennedy essentially said that sex, like race, is an immutable
characteristic
(https://casetext.com/posts/obergefell-reflects-justice-kennedys-evolv
ed-vie
ws-on-equal-protection-and-opens-the-door-to-further-protections-for-l
gbt-pe ople ) . An immutable characteristic [means that], by no fault
of your own, just by an accident of DNA, you're either born with
melanin in your skin, like me as a black woman, or to be female or
male with your sex organs.
There is nothing that can mutate that."
"Another vehicle is through 'equal protection
(https://www.google.com/#q=equal+protection+clause ;) ,' " she said. "
'Equal
protection' is the [constitutional] basis on which this notion of
immutable characteristics first arose. It arose to protect
African-Americans against race discrimination. There's now a term
called trans-black or trans-race that is being highlighted,
particularly by the white woman Rachel Dolezal
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/25/rachel-dolezal-not-go
ing-st oop-apologise-grovel ) from the Northwest who passed as a
black woman and [was] a leader in the NAACP, and now identifies
herself as trans-black or transracial. So the implications of the law
will have the greatest consequence to the advancement of rights for
women but also have deep consequences on the advancement of people of
color."
"How do we explore these rights for transgender folks in a way that
does not undermine the rights of women or people of color?" she asked.
"There have to be accommodations. But how do we do that in a way that
does the least harm to the rights of others?"
Most trans activists reject the analogy between being trans and
defining yourself as a member of another race.
"Bringing up Rachel Dolezal to make a point is a false equivalency
that has no relevancy when talking about transgender people," Snow
said. "Gender dysphoria is a very real and documented condition with a
biological basis and very specific treatment guidelines and a long history
behind it.
Transracial and trans-black are terms with no history that Dolezal
made up and cannot be equated with the experiences or realities of
transgender people."
Dillard Smith, returning to the intense issue of restroom access,
said, "It's really unfortunate that we're starting an entire national
narrative around bathrooms. But let's just start there. There are a
lot of folks who say that not allowing trans people to go into the
bathrooms of their gender identity is creating 'separate but equal'
facilities. They equate that to the 'separate but equal' facilities
that existed before the civil rights movement where we segregated
bathrooms on the basis of race. To which I say, when bathrooms were
separate on the basis of race, it was done so purely for
discriminatory purposes. The difference in terms of single-sex
bathrooms, bathrooms for men and bathrooms for women is that the
implementation of Title IX specifically permitted these things to
protect the privacy and safety rights of women. In providing them you
have to provide equal accommodations. There was a legitimate
justification that was not discriminatory."
Singleton said, "Women have sex-based protections under the law. Under
the U.N., there are certain sex-based protections. Female prisoners
deserve to be housed separately from men. If a prison contains both
sexes, the women need to be as far as possible from the men. That's
international law.
That's
also U.S. law. Now we have a situation where any male criminal can
self-declare himself as a woman (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39337805)
even if this is a serial rapist. These men are being transferred to
women's prisons. There is a lawsuit in California where women are
feeling unsafe with these violent male-bodied people in prison."
"Our crime statistics are changing," Singleton went on. "Men who
identify as women rape women with their penises, and these crimes are
being recorded as committed by women. Those are examples. If a woman
seeks shelter at a women's shelter, there may be male-bodied people
there. There have been attacks in those shelters by male-bodied people
on female-bodied people."
Snow rebutted the assertions of Dillard Smith and Singleton:
Trans people suffer more bullying, discrimination and violence than
almost any other segment of the population. These feminists seek to
portray trans people as aggressors, which is factually untrue.
It is not that there are no criminals in the trans community. There are.
But
using these criminals to characterize the entire trans community is no
different from white racists who use black criminals to characterize
the entire black community.
We as trans people need to be included in [women's] spaces because
when we enter male spaces we are harassed, threatened and sometimes
attacked. The charges these feminists make have no basis in reality.
Transgender people have the same needs as any other people, and they
need access to restrooms as much as anyone else. If a transgender
person is not allowed access to the restroom, how can they go to work?
How can they go to school? Banishing a transgender person from a
restroom, in essence, bans them from them from being able to participate
in public life.
Dillard Smith said, "My life's work has been about defending the
rights of all people. In so doing I am called to balance the rights of all
people.
What I'm exploring in raising the questions I've been raising is how
do you create accommodations for trans people at the same time that we
don't overly or unnecessarily infringe on the rights of others-like
women, or children, or parents? It's a delicate balance. To achieve
that balance, we must engage in healthy discourse and agree to
disagree to come up with the best public policy possible."
Singleton said, "I am fully supportive of the rights of transgender
people to be free of discrimination. Like Maya, I think we need a
national conversation on where those rights end and where women's
rights begin. From what I can see, the transgender narrative very much
reinforces patriarchy.
In our culture, gender is a synonym for sexism. It's the behavioral
caste system that says how men behave and how women behave. It has no
basis in material reality. It's completely based on sexual
stereotypes. I've never heard a trans narrative that does not rely on
sexual stereotypes to explain how someone knew they were actually born
in the wrong body. I'd like to return to the old feminist war cry:
Start a revolution and stop hating your body."
Snow said the issue is not about hating one's body. Rather, she said,
it is about allowing male-born people who internally are female to be
who they truly are.
"So-called 'feminists,' " Snow said, "are upholding a very patriarchal
[idea] of what a woman is. Protecting the rights of trans women and
allowing them to access women's spaces does not infringe on the rights
of women.
These fears are unreasonable and unfounded and are more about
protecting the privilege of certain women than protecting the rights
of all women."
