In an effort to both allocate space for and document the existence of masculine women, photographer Meg Allen created a powerful series of portraits for an exhibit at Cafe Gabriela in Oakland, Calif.
Entitled BUTCH, Allen’s series not only represents genderqueer women for a broader, heteronormative audience, but reaffirms butch identity within the queer community at a time when “butch flight,” or gender transitioning, is arguably becoming more and more commonplace. It is, as Allen says on her website, “an homage to the bull-daggers and female husbands before me, and to the young studs, gender queers and bois who continue to bloom into the present.”
A middle school in Achille, Oklahoma is closed following violent threats by parents on social media against Maddie, a 12-year-old transgender student who identifies as female and used the girls’ bathroom.
Maddie had been using the staff bathroom at her old school but used the girls’ bathroom at the new school because she wasn’t sure where the staff bathroom was. She was then accused of peeping under a bathroom stall. Her mother said it was probably because she “leans very far forward to use the bathroom.”
Then the threats began on a private parents’ Facebook group for the school. The parents called Maddie “it” and “thing”, suggested that her genitalia be mutilated to make her female (“a good sharp knife will do the job real quick”). One said it was “hunting season on them kind” and said there was “no bag limit.”
Maddie’s mother Brandy Rose said she fears for her life: “These are adults making threats– I don’t understand it. She’s an awesome kid. To see any fear in her, I can’t explain how bad that hurts me for them to hurt her.”
KXII reports: “The sheriff said the mother filed a protective order against one parent but no other arrests have been made, however several agencies including the FBI are stepping in to see if any comments constitute a hate crime.”
See the screenshots:
Sorry to say this but if we have to think about whether or not threatening to cut a 12 year old child is a hate crime means there is no hope for us. What has this nation become when it’s citizens feel they have a right to threaten minorities with no fear of repercussion. The only ringing heard now is the death knell of freedom..
like, being visible as lgbt is rarely even a good or nice thing let alone a privilege. at best it’s uncomfortable and at worst it’s actively dangerous, bc, u know, homophobia and transphobia!
and yeah sometimes visibility can be a good thing!! like if i was going to a gay club and i wanted other women to know that i’m a lesbian then being read as such would be handy, but i don’t have that level of control over my visibility – if i want to be read as a lesbian to women in a gay club i can’t choose not to be read as a lesbian by the men there, the people outside, my taxi driver, etc. etc. my visibility can be very dangerous! it’s a constant mental maths of who is and isn’t safe to let know and even then they might read me as a lesbian anyway! and that’s only talking about personal aesthetic types of visibility let alone the visibility of lesbians as a whole in culture and media which i have no control over and often sucks!!!
this issue is v important for trans women especially bc being closeted and passing as a cis man or being out and passing as a cis woman can be so important for their safety and survival, be that in emotional, physical, or mental health.
so basically if you’re asexual or similar and you’re complaining about lgbt people being privileged or oppressing you bc they have more visibility actually think for a second about what you’re saying and the violence you’re idealising.
this goes for non-binary people as well!! i’ve met dozens of NB people who are under the impression that somehow trans women have it easier than them because people “know what we are” or “know that we exist” and honestly it’s the opposite of the truth; that’s what makes it that much harder for us.
i know it’s exhausting to not be recognised for who you are but you need to stop and think about what would happen to you, and what IS happening to people because bigots DO know
Transphobia is a lot more complicated than “terfy” and “not terfy.” Trans exclusionary radical feminism is only one facet of transphobia, and definitely doesn’t encompass all transphobia in the world like some people on this site treat it like it is. The reality is, that violent transphobic men are a lot bigger of a threat to trans people in our daily lives. This shouldn’t be ignored just to streamline all social transphobia onto terfs, which a lot of people do on this site. Terfs are awful, but by regarding terfs as the primary agent transphobia allows shitty people to ignore their own personal transphobia and never hold their selves accountable for it.
ugh ugh ugh some stupid fucking dumb shit anime blog I follow reblogged this huge nasty thread about trans people and FEMALES and MALES and having SUCH AND SUCH GENITALIA BUT PRESENTING AS WHATEVER IN PUBLIC and it was all about sexual assault and everything about it was disgusting and I NEED TO BLEACH MY BLOG I’M SO MAD I FOLLOWED THEM
this is just because i’ve been having some conversations about kids and gender and transition and puberty-blockers and so on. and having some feelings about that.
(to get a few things out of the way as a preamble)
what i want in the world is for folks (of all ages) to be able to make and put into effect any decision they want about what to do with their bodies – which means, practically, working for there to be more and more possibilities available to more and more people. in the realms of gender and sexuality that includes access to all kinds of body modifications, whether towards or away from any particular socially recognized gender position, and also access to all kinds of options for reproduction, from permanently or temporarily preventing it to actively facilitating it. what’s important to me is the possibility of real, meaningful choice, and the removal of restraints on that.
probably because of coming up right before and after the arrival of antiretrovirals, i think about most of the access-to-medical-transition stuff as a “drugs in bodies” question, through the analogy of AZT. in the absence of much actual decent research on HRT drugs (either to learn more about their longterm effects or towards making better ones), we already know they’re generally shitty, but bad drugs in living bodies is better than dead bodies.
(and here’s the meat of the post)
so: in the current conversations, mostly things are framed as a fight in which advocates for kids’ access to puberty blockers face off against advocates of “reparative/corrective therapy” to normalize kids to their assigned genders. that’s how, for instance, julia serano sets things up in her mostly useful piece on Medium last year.
and that’s generally how things play out among trans community activists, parents, TERFs, and other folks outside the medical institutions involved.
but here’s the thing: that’s not a divide that exists among the doctors.
the best-known puberty-blocker doctors and the best-known “reparative” therapists work together, publish together, and generally see each other as collaborators rather than opponents. kenneth zucker and peggy cohen-kettenis, for instance, co-wrote the chapter on “gender identity disorder in children and adolescents” for a 2012 “handbook of sexual and gender identity disorders”. and that’s not an anomaly: even a mild bit of googling finds the two of them as co-authors on papers all the way from the late 1990s to the past few years (with at least a few also including ray blanchard in the credits). and that collaboration isn’t just on the page: well-sourced gossip tells me that before zucker’s clinic was shut down (finally!), he was known to send so many kids who didn’t respond to his “conversion therapy” bullshit to puberty-blocker clinics that he was considered one of their biggest referrers.
whether or not you agree with the analysis i lay out in the rest of this, if you care about trans lives, you need to think long and hard about that. not just the fact of the collaboration and mutual support, but also the fact that it’s not part of the public conversation (even the parts of it that well-informed folks like serano help to shape), and the amount of work that has gone into keeping it out of the public conversation.
I hope it’s ok to pull out one sentence from below the cut here, bc I really strongly recommend that folks read the whole piece:
what [these doctors] agree on is a vision of the world where there are as few trans folks as possible, and where the ones who do exist are as indistinguishable from cis people as possible.
So upon a bit of googling the TSA scan system literally just features a blue unlabeled start button and a pink unlabeled start button. There is something so morbidly and fascinatingly ideological about the fact that the buttons do not say man or woman, at the very least. They are just colors. And yet they import with them a whole set of assumptions about bodies. Blue cannot mean a body with breasts and pink cannot mean a body with a penis. This doesn’t even require a further level of semantic specification by labeling the buttons with man or woman (thus establishing an explicit link between the color and the gender) but rather assumes the ideological consistency of the meaning of blue and pink to be profound enough to speak for itself.
The immense violence that can be enacted by a simple button, with so little explication of its function is shocking; a mere direct correlation of color to a whole host of normative and ideological assumptions of what bodies are and ought to be. One almost loses the ability to contest their mistreatment by the system. “Well you should have scanned me as a woman” can be rebuffed with “well I didn’t scan you as a man, I pressed the blue button” and there is a whole step skipped in the ideological correlation of these signs and assumptions. Something simultaneously insidious and terribly acute occurs when two people, two buttons, and a host of unspoken (rendered unspeakable by the lack of labels, perhaps) assumptions come together and collide.
The United Nations proposed a law condemning nations who sentence people in the LGBT community, among other minorities, to death.
And the U.S. voted against it.
They refused to condemn countries who SENTENCE THE LGBT COMMUNITY TO DEATH!
The United Nations isn’t one of those gray areas. All of the laws and legislations are intentionally black and white. In this case, you either condemn killing the LGBT community for the sake of being gay/trans/etc. Or you don’t.
There’s no middle ground. There’s no interpretation. There’s no reading into it.
On October 3rd, 2017, the United States refused to condemn sentencing the LGBT Community to death. Which can only mean that they’re in favor of sentencing the LGBT Community to death.
alder-knight 