We're getting there, believe me. (Image from femonade.)
The basic idea is that FCM has a well-formed piece that happens to not work, which is a shame because I actually agree with most of what she's written in her introductory matter. It also sounds like she's dealt with or at least heard about some shitty trans folks, which always sucks because hurt people hurt people & all that.
I mentioned the Cotton Ceiling in passing at the top of my second post on Transphobia Busting. Today I want to dig a little deeper. As I deliberately disregard the meta-gaming tactic of worrying about driving traffic to places I oppose (otherwise I wouldn't be able to get any real research done on opposing viewpoints), I'll just be directly linking to this femonade article, and addressing it will be the meat of today's post.
And this is the diagram I'll mostly be talking about. (Image from femonade.)
As usual, this is aimed primarily at people around middle age who have heard of trans issues but don't know a lot about them and don't have the time to bite deep into research & discourse. There will also be a good deal less cussing today. Maybe not any! As a final caveat, I'll be supplying some examples from my personal life, adding to the pile of reasons I keep a crowbar separation between this blog and my professional life. Let's get started!
TERF stands for "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism/ist," and is a term that was coined by a cis woman to describe a troubling trend in radical feminism that she had noticed for some time and decided to name: that some radical feminists ("radfems") were being super transphobic. This was weird, because second-wave feminism ("the one we don't talk about") was pretty trans-inclusive all the way in the beginning, and...
You know what? There's a lot to unpack just there, so I need to start earlier.
A bullet list of links will go here when I'm reasonably into this (looks like we've got Trans Thursdays going, which really makes me wish I'd chosen Tuesdays instead), but for now just know that a general introduction is below the cut.
These two are being combined, because they are both short and related. They're also probably the most straightforward of the two, as I don't have to get into our changing understanding of biological sex or the politics of lesbian dating, as in the first two of this series. In fact, if you've been reading along so far, you can probably answer the titular questions for yourself - but I wouldn't be a very good blogger if I left the bulk of my post as an exercise for the reader, so here we are.
The Cotton Ceiling is a fuckin' minefield. Bearing that in mind, I want to get a few action items ticked off right away. First and foremost, just so we're 100% clear, NOBODY IS EVER REQUIRED TO DATE OR FUCK ANYONE THEY DON'T WANT TO DATE OR FUCK. MOREOVER, NOBODY SHOULD EVER PRESSURE ANYONE ELSE INTO DATING OR SEX: RELENTING IS NOT CONSENTING. OK, is that good enough? Does anybody not understand that?
The idea that trans folks are irrevocably the sex assigned at birth is a myth, and a transphobic one at that. The fact is, "biological sex" is a social construction; but to understand why this is, we'll need to go beyond high school biology.
There are two ways to demonstrate this: the mosaic theory of biosex in particular, and the social construction of knowledge in general. Wait, three ways: a YouTube video of someone explaining the core concepts! Riley J. Dennis has made two such videos, the latter of which clarifies and expands on the former:
Trans women are not "biologically male," by Riley J. Dennis.
Male and female are binary, but people aren't, by Riley J. Dennis.
But if you're like me, you can read faster than people can talk, and you might be at work and thus unable to listen to a video, and you might want text that's machine-searchable and copypastable. That's why I'm here!
The Mosaic Theory of Biosex
We pretend most of the time in common parlance that biological sex is one objective and easily decidable characteristic of a person, but this is not so. The concept of biological sex, as used by biologists, is actually composed of five completely different things: chromosomes, genitals, gonads, hormones, and secondary sex characteristics. Gender has all these in addition to gender identity, gender role, and erotic preference, but these are subjectively experienced and performed, not objectively measurable - interestingly, it also means that the criteria of biosex are part of gender taxonomy. While the components of biosex are objectively observable facts, lay folks have this annoying habit of pretending A. they all go together (they don't, that's an erroneous oversimplification), B. they're supposed to go together (they aren't, that's bionormativity and it's dumb), and C. they can thus make valid inferences based on a quick glance on the street (they can't, but they rarely get corrected so the misconception persists). Let's take it by the numbers!
Chromosomes are what a lot of people lean on when stating "just the facts": that XX is female and XY is male. The reality is not that simple. In brief, people can be genetically XXX, XXY, X, or even XY and externally female, or XX and externally male. Moreover, while conditions such as infertility can result from such chromosomal arrangements, they don't always: there is a case of one XY female who gave birth to an XY daughter, which shows that the condition of being XY and female is unknowably prevalent without the costly method of at least karyotyping a huge number of people. While all known cases of XX males are linked to infertility, these individuals were only tested as a result of said infertility, which means that any fertile XX males could easily go their whole lives without karyotyping. The bottom line is that you just can't determine someone's genes by external observation, even if those people are cisgendered.
Genitals are externally visible, but sometimes ambiguous. They are also the primary means of assigning a baby's sex at birth: for a long time, doctors decided that an "acceptably long phallus" meant "male," and anything else was "female," because it's easier to give someone a mostly-working vagina than an even partially-working penis. In the 20th century, when such cases arose, doctors would approach the parents with heavily loaded language and say that there was a complication that would result in social difficulties later in life, but there was a medical solution! Let us do surgery on your kid, and they'll be fine. (Source: lecture notes from Sex, Values, and Human Nature, taught by a professor with joint appointments in biology, philosophy, and WGS.) The doctors would then attempt to surgically normalize the infant's genitals, sometimes with follow-up hormone prescriptions without the patient's knowledge or consent. Sometimes this went fine, but sometimes it went horribly wrong, as in the case of David Reimer*: a botched circumcision led to doctors recommending vaginoplasty and hormones, which the parents accepted, and later in life David strongly identified as male and transitioned to reflect his identity; due to a number of issues, however, he ultimately committed suicide. The point is that often such birth determinations need to be later overturned, so genitals are also out as sole determinants of sex. Moreover, due to intersex conditions and surgical procedures, you simply can't tell what someone's genitals are without seeing them naked anyway; you have to guess, and while you'd be correct a large percentage of the time, it's still a guess and you can't tell when you're wrong without further examination that would constitute a huge privacy violation. In other words, you assume and almost never get your assumptions corrected, so you have no idea how often you're wrong.
Gonads are the sex-cell-producing glands (such as testicles and ovaries) that are needed for reproduction. These are sometimes streak or infertile, though, so they are also not a foolproof guide. Additionally, you cannot tell the presence or state of gonads simply by observing someone on the street, and most people never get their gonads checked in any but the most cursory of ways, unless some issue comes up that requires such a check. The point here is that, while gonads typically develop in certain ways, there's no deriving normativity from these bare statistics (which remain largely unknown due to the cost and non-necessity of diagnostic procedures) without smuggling in a whole pile of values that will predetermine such analysis.
Hormones are molecular messengers in our blood and other fluids that can do all kinds of things. In humans, males typically have high testosterone and females typically have high estrogen. However, these cannot be measured except through bloodwork, which again isn't free or common without a need to investigate**. Women with PCOS report feeling crappy in ways that sound lots like gender dysphoria, and low testosterone predicts depression in men. I've read anecdotes about similar dysphoria-like symptoms in cis people who take hormones for medical reasons unrelated to gender identity, and about rampant self-harm and suicide in female Soviet athletes injected with testosterone in the 70s and 80s, but haven't yet been able to turn up citations on those (will update if/when I do). The point being that, to all indications and the best of our ability to tell so far, it looks like a mismatch between hormones and gender identity can cause problems, and transition is the best and only recognized treatment for resolving this mismatch (at least, according to the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American College of Physicians, National Association of Social Workers, Royal College of Physicians, and National Health Service - among others!).
Secondary sex characteristics are a pile of traits like facial hair, Adam's apple, muscle mass, body odor, and so on. Quite frankly, these are a complicated pile and while they're affected by hormones, everyone's a shuffled mish-mash of 'em. Moreover, on pretty much every single such trait, there is more variation within each group than between both groups: e.g. men on average tend to be taller than women, but most men and women are in the same height range.
The tiny distance between the bell tops is just obviously more important than the massive
overlap between their bases and their overall extent - right? From Perry Street Palace.
The point is that while general trends exist and are measurable, they're not useful in determining individual status.
Putting it all together, if you were to draw a line down the center of a piece of paper, and put male-typical biotraits on one side, and female-typical biotraits on the other side, you would have a whole pile of biotraits that could actually go either way. Any trait a cis woman might have, another cis woman might not have, and a cis male might also have. And vice versa: any trait a cis male might have, another cis male might not have, and a cis female might also have. Some cis women are born with XY chromosomes or ambiguous/atypical genitals; some don't have a uterus, ovaries, or breasts; some have never menstruated and won't give birth; some have thick facial/body hair, large frames, big muscles, or high testosterone & low estrogen; some look androgynous or like cis men; some take hormones or get plastic surgery to improve their quality of life; some are even raised & socialized as boys, or new info comes up to make doctors rethink their birth sex days-to-years later. In other words, none of these traits "go together," it's completely normal for every person to be a shuffled mish-mash of them.
The simple fact is, there is only one thing that all cis women have in common, and that's that they identify as women. Any cis woman might have any number of the above conditions; trans women just have the misfortune of having more of them than average (some cis women have more than some trans women, though!). If you're gonna say trans women are biomales, then you have to say why they are ("they just are" doesn't count); that reason will necessarily bring a lot of cis women into the biomale category (and cis men into the biofemale category) as well; this is an absurdity, so you have to do something to resolve the absurdity. You can reject the idea that trans women are biomales, or you can decide there's a special rule that only applies to trans people, thereby engaging in special pleading just for the purpose of excluding trans women (i.e. textbook transphobia).
The Social Construction of Knowledge
The very idea of biosex is a social construct. Importantly, "social construct" doesn't mean "total BS," it just means that humans decided where to draw dividing lines, and we're not "cutting nature at its joints." Nature doesn't have joints. Also, everything we care about is a social construct as well, so it's not a knock, just a fact: we decided that certain differences were important enough to warrant an ontological distinction (i.e. "this difference makes a different kind of thing, not a different example of the same kind of thing"). These distinctions are very useful all the time, but they are made, not found. In summary: differences are found in nature, but all distinctions & categories are cognitive inventions.
So let's just take the category "human" as primitive ("human" is also a social construct, but we're not gonna worry about that right now). We've got a pile of humans, all the humans who ever have or ever will exist. They have differences, but so what? These differences don't matter to us right now. But then you say, "We should actually make two piles out of this one, and call them Male and Female." Like, why? Why do we need this distinction? Whatever reason you give to motivate the distinction, that makes it motivated reasoning ("Well, this is what it takes for reproduction to occur." OK, so you're reproductively motivated - but why is that important?). We could pick any criterion we wanted to divide people into piles, the list is literally endless. So that's Problem Number One: any distinction is inherently motivated reasoning, and therefore not impartial/objective reasoning.
Moreover, whatever trait(s) you do pick to make the distinction, just aren't gonna line up cleanly with how you want the categories to go (see the mosaic theory of biosex, above). You're going to drag some cis women into the biomale pile as an inevitable consequence of trying to get all the trans women into it. There just isn't a single trait or group of traits that will get all the trans women, and only the trans women, into the biomale pile. You can't pick "transness," because we haven't even made our "male and female" piles yet, so there's no cisness or transness to do that with - in other words, sex comes ontologically before cis or trans, and thus has to be decided without referencing any categories we make later. This is Problem Number Two: our dividing lines can't be made clean, no matter what we do, because everyone's a shuffled-up mish-mash of traits.
Finally, we can draw up these distinctions however we want (and quite frankly, we're going to get arbitrary if we're gonna decide all cases; picking which cases to decide or not is also arbitrary; and ultimately, even deciding to make any decision at all is also arbitrary). So let's be trans-inclusive, because trans folks are people too. Oh, you don't want to be trans-inclusive? OK, that's transphobia. If you say, "Well, women are supposed to be this way," stop right there - says who? There is no "supposed to," that's imposing normativity on nature; we're just talking about what is, there is no "should." Here we find Problem Number Three: there's just no Platonic standard to appeal to, we have to decide and monitor our motivations in doing so, without appealing to normativity in the process.
The bottom line here is that any way of deciding what kinds of things exist and how to group them (i.e. "ontology") is going to be necessarily motivated at root, so we have to decide what we let motivate our decisions. We can go with permissive and inclusive ontologies if we want to be permissive and inclusive; saying No We Have To Go With THIS Ontology And It Excludes Transes Sorry I Don't Make The Rules It's Just A Fact, is plainly and obviously transphobic, because you're making a choice and then insisting that everyone has to make the same choice as you, and it's perfectly clear that you're making the choice that way because you don't want trans women to count as "real women."
* - I am reluctant to use Reimer as a political football, however the case is simply too instructive and concrete to ignore. As Reimer's case was used in his lifetime to validate the malleability of gender, I feel that undoing that damage by working against those misconceptions is a worthy purpose to which his legacy may legitimately be put. Thus, Reimer joins the uncomfortable list of Inherently Problematic Yet Socially Invaluable Knowledge, alongside the likes of Henrietta Lacks, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the Milgram obedience experiments.
**I, however, did need to get bloodwork done when I got my hormone consultation, and as it turns out my testosterone was way lower, and my estrogen way higher, than a typical male's. While I was hormonally closer to a male than a female, I wasn't really clearly either; and as my dysphoria significantly reduced on starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and then went into remission after 18 months, as well as significant reduction in my already mild bipolar tendencies that multiple regimens of antidepressants and mood stabilizers exacerbated, I call that a winning outcome. Hormones are part of biology, and so hormonally I am more female-typical, and in this respect I am biologically female.
Being a good Social Justice Warrior, I occasionally wade out into the trenches of the intertubes to do battle with small minds and big, uhh, bigots alike. I mostly try to fight my own battles (women, LGBT, atheism, etc.), though I do occasionally call-in those I know for problematic statements out of my field, and recently I did a whole bunch of Arguing on the Internet over a transgender greeting card.
I found myself trotting out the same handful of arguments against the same handful of misconceptions, so I thought it would be useful for future arguments to have a series of posts I can link instead of boiling copypasta from previous comments. Handily, I also ran into the following comic at about the same time.
been updated (see link), but this is what I shared and what I'm arguing, so there.
I shared it to the Faceborg and found myself arguing all over again, so I'm going to tackle the following transphobic tropes in a short series of posts:
Links to follow as the posts are complete. Wish me luck!
EDIT: We are wrapped up and all done! Links are updated, and if you're reading this in the next hour, the final post will drop just before midnight. I may or may not update this later with new installments in the event of other trans-related controversies, we'll see. Cheers!
My new computer, which wasn't "supposed" to show up until the 16th, actually got delivered today. Hooray! But now I'm moving everything over, which is gonna take for-god-damned-ever. It's easy, thanks to the aptly named Easy Transfer, which more or less amounts to a magic spell: I wave my hands around and say, "You! New 'puter! Be just like my old 'puter! Go!" But Christ on a bike, this spell has a long-ass casting time! I'm gonna be watching the progress on my sweet fuckin' 23" monitor until the wee hours, and until then I'm instructed, "Do not use this computer during the transfer." Huh. I sure hope blogging and blasting mp3s doesn't count as "using this computer." :\
Anyway, I'm not up to any super-creative writing. I'd meant to write another vignette for Tooth & Claw, I have it all planned out (more or less), but I just can't stop wanting my new 'puter to be ready. So here are a few neat tidbits with no central organization. First, scientists are hard at work decoding the visual experience of dreams from brain scans. Here's a link to one article, focusing mainly on Japanese research. And here's another one from Gizmodo, focusing mainly on what's been done at UC Berkeley (with video!). An important note is that the constructed video is not a reading of the visual cortex, but actually a composite constructed from pre-existing video clips. I caught the headline over lunch in USA Today (I think). Those articles above are just what I was able to dig up in two minutes, but I have some more to say below the cut.
Second, here is a cool little infographic submitted to me by Allison on the visual IQ of Americans, showing how well (or poorly) we can identify certain people, symbols, and geographic regions on sight.
I was able to identify Boehner purely based on hatred of him as a person,
pick out the Euro, the Star of David, and the Twitter logo. That... was it.
Third, Amina Tyler recently went missing after posting topless photos of herself on the internet in order to show that her body was hers to do with as she chooses. The going speculation seems to be that her family kidnapped her, in direct contravention to Tyler's thesis, out of some bass-ackward idea of honor where "tits is bad" and it's somehow less embarrassing to abduct a member of your family than to let her do her own fuckin' thing. Because Tyler's disappearance is probably going to be tragic, but it might not necessarily be just yet, (NSFW photos!) FEMEN recently organized a load of topless protests at a bunch of European mosques in order to say, "You think photos on the internet are bad? Wait'll you see this all up in your fuckin' streets!" OK, I was paraphrasing there, but here is an actual quote: "We're free, we're naked, it's our right, it's our body, it's our rules, and nobody can use religion, and some other holy things, to abuse women, to oppress them... And we'll fight against them, and our boobs will be stronger than their stones."
Actions such as this were described as "evacuating" protesters. Boy, those men
with truncheons sure evacuated the living daylights out of those half-naked protesters.
Fourth, some scientists seem to believe that they're on the cusp of experimentally confirming the existence of dark matter, which would quite frankly be rad as Hell. What gives me pause for thought, however, is that they're looking at positrons in space - and positrons are antimatter. The difference, briefly, is that antimatter is normal matter with its polarity reversed (protons become antiprotons, same mass but opposite charge; electrons become antielectrons or positrons, same mass but opposite charge). We use antimatter in routine medical procedures - the "PET" in PET scan stands for "positron emission tomography." Dark matter, on the other hand, is simply stuff that has mass and takes up space, but "doesn't shine" in the way that everything else in the Universe does - it's there, it exerts gravitational forces upon whatever's around, but we just can't detect it since it's not shiny like "normal" matter. However, this positron/dark matter connection gives me faint and tenuous hope that Douglas' exclamation that dark matter (rather than antimatter) cancels out regular matter is actually oddly prophetic rather than a stupid fuckin' typo on my part. Whatever, I'll probably change it anyway because I also have a few other infelicities to remedy for the next edition. They're the scientists, I'll trust 'em until I hear better. :)
OK, by way of wrapping up, here are some of my thoughts on the decoding of the visual elements of dreams.
My first thought on the subject was, "Shit, I am the last person who should be advising teenagers about sex." My second thought was, "Wait, I have a fourteen-year-old brother and an eleven-year-old sister. I will probably be talking to them about sex at some point." So I decided to get some thoughts together in some semblance of order, and here they are.
I was totally planning on writing some Tooth and Claw tonight. But as I lay in bed this morning, drifting in and out of sleep among interminable Snoozes with NPR talking at me, I had something of a dream. I was in an academic setting, probably informed by whatever was on NPR, and I realized at some point that I wasn't actually going to be able to talk to people about this in an academic setting. At least, not right then. So I'ma talk about it here.
In my dream - and maybe, possibly on NPR, I was half-asleep and I'm not sure - they/we were talking about societal happiness and well-being. In my head, regardless of the scenario, I rifled through a pile of half-remembered statistics and surveys, as well as multiple pieces of writing on the two subjects and how they seem to maybe be the same thing but really aren't. I mean, to a certain point, happiness and well-being are correlated. If you're in a truly shitty situation, nothing going your way, everything flushing down the tubes, you're not going to be happy. And if you're on a hot streak, yeah, you're probably going to be happy about that.
It's the middle thing that's kind of the problem here.
My best friend bought me Guild Wars 2 so we could play together (because I bought my best friend Torchlight and Torchlight II so we could play together... it's a vicious circle...). I've been doing that quite a bit, lately; which is unfortunate, because I feel like I really turned a corner in chapter five. In any event, I've been playing vidjamagames and catching up on the internet, so here are the highlights.
I'd like to say two things up front: first, that I definitely sympathize with those who suffer from ennui, from wanting more out of life, from a numbing dissatisfaction with the way things are going; second, that I don't know these women from Eve and their situations are probably more complicated than they've even openly and candidly admitted.
The cockles of my heart are not nearly so opening to Lloyd (and that ain't much to begin with), probably for this bit alone:
...here's what we ate: cold pasta covered with leftover Tikka Masala sauce (tomato sauce inexplicably AWOL in kitchen cupboard), some soggy carrots cooked four hours earlier for kids' dinner, and the coup de grace: canned sardines. Yum.
This may not strike you, General Reader, as particularly infuriating, but what you have to consider is context, which at present means, "whatever the Hell I was thinking about five minutes earlier." In this situation, the context is that I had just woken up from dreaming about snowmobiling, which I have never done but long to do, and I marveled at the fact that our intellects have afforded us as a species the opportunity to transform what would normally be a difficult and harrowing experience (i.e. trekking across harsh, snowy landscapes) into leisure activity. Awesome! And while thinking of this, I assembled for myself a breakfast of leftover chili with fried eggs and Tabasco sauce mixed in, topped with cheddar cheese and green chiles for garnish. It was delicious, and it was reheated leftovers.
So I hope you understand what I mean when I say that I find Delia Lloyd's attitude comparable to a moist, aromatic pile of dogshit. It's unpleasant to step in, to look at, to smell, just to be around in general.
Seriously, this whining fuck-stain goes through a busy day doing things that most people regard as hallmarks of success, and complains at the end that she wants someone else to go through the boring parts so she doesn't have to. What is this happy horse-shit? She engages in a day's work of her chosen career path, has the resources to meet the wants and needs of her children, spends some quality time involving herself in her children's lives, then does a little more work before having a late dinner with her husband. Note that she does not reheat it at her option. And rather than just, oh, hire someone, she pines after someone to do the extra business of cooking, cleaning, and clothes-shopping for free? I am simply baffled by the... the... I dunno, the presumption of affluence, I guess? Maybe just the laziness.
To be fair, I'll bet she wasn't thinking about the day-to-day lives of our genetic ancestors as she went about her business. I'll bet she wasn't thinking as she prepared that day's meal, as I had been, of the marvels found in nearly every kitchen that allow us to prepare and store food from miles away, grown and prepared by someone we'll probably never meet, for consumption whenever we fucking feel like it. And I'll bet she also wasn't thinking about how children were our first retirement plans, about how the shotgun approach to child-rearing is regrettably still a necessity in certain parts of the world, or about how indulging the desires of said progeny is a luxury afforded to a precious and relatively modern few in the grander scope of our shared history.
In short, to understand Mrs. Lloyd's perspective, I have to concede an awful lot to general thoughtlessness. It's just a goddamned shame that she can't be more thoughtful in appreciating her life.
Then again, I guess I'm fucking lucky. I mean, my father taught me how to clean floors and sinks, but he also taught me the art of hinokishin. When I punched a hole through my bedroom door, he disciplined me by teaching me how to cut a door to size and hang it, making me fix the mess I had made. He taught me to thank lightning-struck trees for the wood they gave us for carving walking sticks, and to leave campsites better than I found them because it's the right thing to do and I'm not any more important than the next person to come along. And I guess Rant is Off now, because I find myself feeling sorry for these sorts of people who fantasize for something more without appreciating the full value of what's right the fuck in front of them.
I think that we need to get laid. Like, every single one of us. I'm talking specifically here about the USA, but I suppose a good deal of this would apply to large chunks of Europe, as well as the "first world" in general. Consider how much our culture is steeped in sex, and how little we talk about it: advertisers make their money by literally preying on public perceptions of "sexy," underwear models adorn our buses, and we think nothing of the dating service ads and sex shops we see every day of our lives; but at the same time, we have people convinced that pornography is waging war on the human vagina, that breastfeeding in public is motherfucking dangerous, and that some people shouldn't be able to get a certain kind of contract signed by the state because of how they like to stick it in the naughty place.
This is fucking stupid.
Look, Humanity: Sex was here before we were, and it's got squatter's rights. We absolutely have to concede that point, or we're not going to make any progress on this one. But nooo, some people get all squeamish about the S-word, or the P-word, or the V-word, or the I-word, or whatever fucking word you want to use to talk about fucking. The truth of the matter is that porn is not intrinsically exploitative of women (though many men are - and so are some women, for that matter!), otherwise sites like (SUPER NOT-WORK-SAFE WARNING!) Men in Pain, Bound Gods, Naked Kombat, and Butt Machine Boys wouldn't exist. (And that's just one porn company!) The myth that seeing a breast is bad absolutely stupefies me - everyone has nipples, OK? And ain't nothin' wrong with a tit - it causes no harm, there's no such thing as "moral fiber" for it to damage, and if someone gets a little tickle in their "down there" because of it, I say good for them! As for our culture being stuck in the mud when it comes to recognizing homosexual relationships as legal, ugh, I don't even know where to start on that one. I'll just say I fucking hate Utah and leave it at that (and if you're reading this and happen to live in Utah... umm... well, OK, you're an exception). We really need to get over our bad selves - and I know just how to do it!
Here's my plan: we make a fucking float (i.e. "a float that fucks," I'm not just being foul-mouthed here) and put it in the Macy's Day parade. I mean one man, one woman, missionary-style reproductive intercourse. 1v1PVI. We do it this way so that nobody can claim it's not as God intended - we're pandering to the Fanatical Wrong now, we just don't let them in on the Master Plan. And there's no way they'll find out, because there's no way they're reading my blog. Anyway, if they say they're offended, we can just slap them and ask what's offensive about the act that brought them into the world. Then we'll ask how they feel about their relationships with their mothers.
Think about that: everyone's parents fucked. Even yours. Your friends, too: ever meet a friend's parents? They fucked. Oh, they got it on! In fact, they probably tried everything you've ever tried - and since they're older than you, they've had more time to try more things. Please, take your time in pondering this.
Oops, got a little side-tracked there. OK, so we've got our fucking float, and now we just wait for it to become de rigueur, and then we start putting in a fucking gay float, and a fucking bondage float, and a fucking threesome float, and so on and so forth. We'll have all these fucking floats and as soon as anyone complains, we'll just slap them and say that people come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors, and we've had the first fucking float for forever, so everyone else needs to be represented here, too. Turn it into an equality/inclusion issue, that will almost guarantee a victory. OK, so that's phase two. Also, I may or may not be making this up as I go.
Phase three is "a miracle happens" and phase four is "victory," and those are pretty self-explanatory. I actually think my problem is in phase one, since people think they'll be harmed by seeing a naked body or a clear representation of the physical act of love (it doesn't harm them to have a naked body, such as their own, just to see another one). So, sure, maybe some people are offended by the sight of a nekkid body. So what? I'm offended by clothing: the proposition that there is something wrong with the human body which needs to be covered up is morally offensive to me, and I can't bear to see a human body hidden from plain view. But people's bodies are their own, so we should be able to do as we like, says I. Problem is, that's a rational conclusion, and people well and truly aren't rational about sex. I don't think they're capable of it, in fact, for what I think are some pretty embarrassing reasons.
We're a race of sex-crazed maniacs. People, that is. All of us. Every single one of your genetic ancestors had to lie, cheat, steal, charm, and/or muscle his and her way into the next generation by fucking. Fair enough at that: natural selection being what it is, those who are best at something will tend to keep on doing it, and sexual reproduction is certainly something one may be good or bad at. To that end, so much of our lives has been brought into the courtship, mating, and child-rearing rituals we've needed to survive; our lives are tied up in sex, it is an essential part of who we are and our instincts have been formed accordingly.
There's a problem with this, though, and like so many other problems, it is not inherent in the situation but arises from a mis-match between two things. Intellectually and technologically, we're beyond this sexy nonsense. Culturally and psychologically, we most definitely are not.
This needs some unpacking. OK, so sex is the way by which genes are able to ensure their transmission into the next generation - by "the way," I mean simply that there are plenty of other ways to improve one's odds, but sex is necessary in a way that other things just aren't. A horse can be as strong, fast, or intelligent as it likes, but without a mate and some offspring, that horse's genes won't propagate themselves into the next generation. Animals, accordingly, often act as if the genes inside them are taking calculated steps to increase their likelihood of continued propagation; this is just so, for the simple reason that those genes which have a tendency to cause their hosts to act in such fashion will, in the long term, win out over those which do not.
But the goals which may reasonably be imputed to genes are so far removed from the goals that humans choose in their individual lives, this often isn't worth thinking about - yet this mis-match is exactly what's at issue here. In fact, if we were not able to intellectualize our lives and consciously reject what our genes would say we "ought" to do, then nobody would ever adopt a child and all men would seek to become prolific sperm donors. Each of us is a collective of dead-end somatic cells with two tenuous glandular connections to the germ line, and as such we have all these instincts clustered around maintaining these connections and seeing to it that they do in fact convey our patterned base pairs to the next generation.
Intelligence changed this - sort of. Once we were able to realize our place in the greater scheme of things, we were on to the game and could see sex for what it is. And, well, it turns out that we need to be a little sex-nuts to win at genesmanship; more precisely, those individuals who are sex-nuts will tend to win at sex for the same reason sports nuts tend to be better at sports than non-enthusiasts, and so genes and culture "for" being sex-nuts get propagated. But being sex-nuts is just like being any other kind of nuts, insofar as it's fucking crazy. We have all these cute little ideas about sex: it's a private thing, it's special, it's only for two, you're a loser if you don't get any, a whole bunch of truly legendary nonsense about the hymen, and so on and so forth. These are all myths and contrivances - they're complications we add to sex because we're complicated, and we project those complications upon things that matter to us.
Sex had good reason to be private back in the day when someone could fuck with your fucking - especially if you were the fucker fucking with some other fucker's fucking. But honestly, there's no reason it can't be out in the open - we know enough about it and can keep it safe enough that there's just no reason we can't fuck in the street. I'm not saying we should, and I'm not saying you won't get arrested for it; I'm saying that there's no purely rational reason outside our own ad hoc psychology that prevents sex from being a wildly public thing. The idea that it "ought" to be private is only in our heads. That in and of itself is sufficient reason to make it private, but what I'm saying is that we're not rational for being this way in the first place - we're simply programmed to be that way, it's not a reasoned conclusion we arrived at after any deliberation. It's simple fucking insanity to have this idea for no reason and with no support, and most people never fucking question it their entire lives. It's much the same story for how many partners a person ought to have at one time or throughout a lifetime, who those partners ought to be, how regularly those partners should be replaced, and on and on and on. We are all naturally insane about this, and it will never be diagnosed as such until it's tremendously unpopular, because questioning this insanity, ironically, is what will make you dysfunctional.
We can make sex safer from STDs than ever before, we have the luxury of terms like "unwanted pregnancy" which would make no sense in the wild, we can check our DNA against that of our alleged offspring, we can fertilize an egg with a sperm in a test tube, we have mapped the human genome and we're hard at work demystifying embryonic development. We know so goddamned much about sex and we've made it safer and easier than ever before, yet while nobody bats an eye when a man wants to jam his peepee in a vajayjay, a lot of those same people absolutely lose their shit when a man wants to shove his wing-wong into another dude's manhole, or when a woman wants to do anything to another woman's hoohoo (this last one's way more popular on the internet, though). For the sake of social cohesion, we should call all of these activities "normal," as well as anything else that consenting adults care to do to each other; but in reality, it's all fuckin' weird. All of it. We're all just as weird as everyone else, only some people are weird in popular ways and other people are weird in unpopular ways. "Normal" is an invented, bullshit term.
This is exactly what I'm talking about: the fact of the matter is that people come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and flavors, and they have all sorts of desires and perversions and proclivities, yet we think sex "ought" to be this or that way because that's how we like it or that's how we were taught. That's fucking nuts! What is wrong with people? Worse still, we go and pass fucking laws about who's allowed to pair off with whom, and how and when we're allowed to stick it in the naughty place. We need these strictures, in the "just-so" sense that of fucking course we'd go and make rules about sex; but we need them because we can't be rational about sex, and these rules show just exactly how much we can't be rational about sex.
The rules aren't right, they're not rational, they're not just, they're fucking crazy. But so are we. I guess what I'm saying is that we need to accept that we're all bat-shit loco and just live with that - but then again, part of our butt-puckering insanity is that we can't just live with it, we angst over it and primp and preen ourselves and try to put on a show and act like we know what's what, when we're all just as confused as anybody else. Welcome to the human race, where nobody knows what the fuck they're doing, but everybody acts like they do, anyway. People are fucking complicated, The End.
My vitriol gland just ran dry, so I guess rant is off now. I don't really have a solution to any of this, I just wanted to yell and holler about how we're all necessarily crazy about this one stupid thing, because it was driving me batty. But I'm done now. Y'all have a good one!
Fun Fact: I used the words "fuck," "fucked," "fuckers," and "fucking" a combined total of 37 times in this post. All were legitimate; not one of them was necessary. As Penn and Teller put it, sex is an end in itself and everything around it is what's gratuitous.
Sergio Garcia of Fairfax High ran for Prom Queen after noticing that the qualifications did not include sex. After giving a speech that convinced students he was not trying to pull a stunt, Garcia won in what I can only call a remarkable display of permissivity.
"I didn't really know if the school approved. I thought 'Why can't I do it?' " Garcia said. "I see myself as a boy with a different personality. . . . I don't wish to be a girl; I just wish to be myself," he said.
Some teachers and students were encouraging, others told him not to "stir things up," he said. But his close friends continued to support him, and after his speech, the campus community seemed to be coming around to the idea.
Well, way to stir things up! Way to challenge the status quo and raise the bar for our cultural standards! After winning the election, Garcia said, "I feel invincible." Savor it, Sergio: you've earned it.
In other news, Adam Lambert seems to be standing pat with the genderqueer card. Rockin'! As society continues to make room for different sexualities (hetero, homo, bi, celibate, etc.), it looks like our sex (male/female) and gender (masculine/feminine) categories are due for expansion as well. This is another strike against the "tyranny of the discontinuous mind," Richard Dawkins' term for the manner in which essentialist inclinations drive us to shove everything in the world into these discrete little boxes whether they fit or not:
Of course, there are those who seem to need a definition of his sexuality nailed down. "Calm down," Lambert says, and "keep speculating."
Lambert knows that such an ambiguous role model is unlikely, and he's glad he had the chance to add something unexpected in this year's competition. "It feels really amazing to be able to try and pass that on to kids and young adults who don't have a role model like that," he says. "It feels great because I never had a role model like that."
Sure, we might have some good boxes that hold lots of stuff, but there will always be things that just don't fit, and we need to be comfortable with those things just being what they are and resist the temptation to demand that they go into this or that box.
On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court decided that the citezenry's passage of Proposition 8 was a legal maneuver. Fair play to them - the challenge was based on whether or not such a change to the state's constitution could be made by a general vote, or whether it had to be done by the legislature, so we kind of have to give it to them. I need to stress here that the judges were not voting on whether or not Prop 8 was good, but whether its enactment was done in proper legal fashion. Proposition 8's supporters - or, if we wish not to mince words, anti-gay bigots - had a few choice words to say about it. There is so much that is horribly wrong with this:
At 1:22 in the above video, one Nadia Chayka said, "I want my children to know that there is a mom - a woman - and there is a man - a father - and that's where children come from, from that union. And I don't want them to be confused about where children come from." That's right: this dumb shit is glad that the rights of millions are being held back so that her children can learn a biology lesson.
Shame on you, Nadia. You have missed the point entirely. You simpleton. You fool. You loathsome, disgraceful, unthinking twit. I don't care what your IQ or level of education is, you are an idiot for being unable to see past your own prejudice on such a clear-cut moral issue, and for allowing such thin rationalizations to gain any foothold upon your mind.
First of all, if this is what Nadia wants her kids to think, then she can damn well explain it to them. You don't need the state to uphold your prejudice in order for your children to learn about the birds and the bees. Additionally, if what she means is that she wants to pass on her bigotry to her kids, then that's an entirely different matter and her children are quite frankly able to make up their own minds on that.
Furthermore, the lumping together of these two things, marriage and sexuality, is nothing but an artifact of the lingering confusion that marriage is "about" hetero sex or "about" making babies. Marriage isn't about sex any more than a cell phone contract is about talking to your friends. Sure, it's something you do within the scope of the contract, but lots of people were doing it before they signed their contracts and that's OK, too. I don't even understand why religious ideas are even brought to the table here, because marriage isn't even a religious practice! Sure, plenty of religions have marriage rituals, but that doesn't make marriage into a religious issue any more than books are religious just because religions have those. And if marriage were about children, as it's been said countless times before, then infertile persons would not be allowed to marry, either. They clearly can, so it's clearly not.
And don't even bother trying to tell me that sterile couples are capable of having children in principle - I know that, and you know that, and we both also know that for the "in principle" to become "in reality," you'd have to mess about with the plumbing of at least one of those persons. But any two persons could reproduce sexually if you only messed about with their plumbing, so this distinction is meaningless, as there's no principled way of deciding upon a privileged method of messing about with a hetero couple's plumbing that could not also be applied to homo couples for the same results. (Pro tip: it's because excluding homosexual couples is always an arbitrary choice, since you must rely at some level on personal, cultural, or religious prejudice in order to have any reason to do so in the first place.)
This is kind of a weird thing to say, maybe, so I want to offer a proof of concept: imagine a woman who, for whatever reason you like, has had her uterus and ovaries compromised; her entire reproductive tract is shot and needs to be wholly replaced to restore her fertility. Maybe she was born that way, maybe she developed cancer at a young age and had the organs in question removed. In order to become a good Christian baby factory, all she needs is a set of functioning organs, right? Except there's an immune complication - she can't accept transplants. Again, the specific reason is unimportant, but the result is that all potential donor organs will certainly be rejected. She cannot be made fertile due to contingent circumstances, though she could be in principle. If she can marry a man (and good luck finding someone to say she couldn't - she's still a woman), then so can any man, and here's why. If you could somehow get a functioning set of organs inside her body, then she could bear children; and the same goes for every male on the planet. Men wouldn't even need a birth canal, since in vitro fertilization and caesarean sections are common procedures. Therefore, all men are capable of reproducing in principle in exactly the same way as our hypothetical woman who would be allowed to marry men, too. Therefore, because infertile couples are allowed to marry and some infertile couples could only be fertile in principle by means which could also make homosexual couples capable of reproduction, marriage being "about" reproduction completely and utterly fails to exclude homosexuals, except on the basis of preexisting irrational prejudice. I win!
Prohibiting same-sex marriage is legalized bigotry, plain and simple. Every argument against gay marriage that holds any logical water is dependent upon unfair prejudice to do so, and therefore inadmissible in our theoretically egalitarian society. The End. Now grow the fuck up and come join us in the twenty-first century - the mere fact of other people doing the things you do in ways that you personally don't like to do them in no way prevents you from continuing to do them the way you've always done. Homosexuals have become the Trix rabbit - yearning so desperately for such a simple thing, but denied it at every turn by childish reactionaries who take that very same thing for granted and continue to withhold it for no good goddamned reason.
Imagine any other social privilege, and any other demographic ("children" don't count, because everyone starts out that way and grows out of it in the exact same sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-one years, depending on the privilege in question), and see how abjectly horrifying these statements are: [Group X] can't do [activity Y], because [activity Y] is about [non-group X] getting [benefit Z which has nothing to do with whether you're a part of X or Y]. Blacks can't drive, because driving is about white people going places. Jews can't live in apartments, because apartments are about gentiles finding affordable rental properties. Women can't watch porn, because porn is about men getting their rocks off. Six-fingered people can't be taught to read, since literacy is about five-fingered people learning things. Atheists can't hold public office, because public offices are about pandering to the masses. Oh, wait, that last one's actually true (in the USA, anyway). But now see that the statement, "Gays can't marry, because marriage is about straights contractualizing their love or whatever," and somehow people aren't as shocked and revolted as they would be by the other statements.
Why? Why?! I can't understand this for the life of me. Are "normal" people so impervious to cognitive dissonance that they can truly hold in the same frame of mind the two thoughts, "I oppose gays being able to marry," and, "I am a decent human being?" Or do they just not think, not even consider the ramifications of their ideas, not even doubt the justice of their actions, before trampling so deliberately and callously over the dreams of other human beings? And which of the two alternatives is worse?
The point, Nadia, is not that these specific statements are discriminatory and obviously awful, but that this entire class of statements should be seen as equally disgusting and barbaric and backwards and just plain wrong. So fuck you, and fuck anyone who thinks like you, you atavistic inhuman slime.
"Saddlebacking" should be the term for the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities. "After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she's saving herself for marriage." Please, please adopt this definition!
Colorful as some of the others are, I think that 5 strikes the perfect balance of irony and user-friendliness.
Reading through the archives, though, I was struck by a rather curious fact. A pair of facts, really: 1) Abstinence-only education has led to teenagers thinking that anal sex is not sex and has no risk of STDs, and 2) Gay teens, in an effort to prove how straight they are to their peers, are impregnating one another in record numbers. (Both issues discussed in the DTMFA-a-Thon.)
So, just to recap the effects of Christian prudishness: gay kids are having straight sex, and straight Christians are sodomizing each other. Clearly, not teaching kids about "bad things" stops them from doing those "bad things." Actually, in that light, maybe it's not so surprising that Christian methods are proving counterproductive to their goals, after all.
I feel a great swell of sympathy for the gay kids who feel the need to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they're not who they are. They're forcing themselves through acts which ought to bring with them the very height of human pleasure as some kind of twisted penance for being different from their peers - a penance which they should never feel the need to pay in the first place. Not only that, the children they bring into this world as a product of these unloved acts are... well... no, I can't say that they're all unwanted, and perhaps some of them will be loved dearly and raised well - but most of them are likely to wind up unwanted, in a dysfunctional house, in orphanages, or in foster homes.
As for the Christians, this is further evidence that abstinence-only education both does not work and is tantamount to criminal neglect. The idea of "virginity" is a primitive notion in the first place, predicated as it is on the genetically advantageous desire for a male to hedge against the risk of raising an unrelated child. We're beyond this, scientifically speaking, and ought to be beyond this, culturally speaking. "Never having had sex" is just not a virtue, plain and simple, and we as a people need to recognize this! Furthermore, the legalistic idea that anal sex somehow "preserves virginity" (by which Christians can only mean "leaves the hymen intact") is asinine.
Finally, on a lighter note, Dan's remark on the logical consequences of this view (that anal sex "preserves virginity") is fucking priceless: "I've been preserving the shit out of my boyfriend's virginity for 14 years now." Fucking. Priceless.
