Warning to Goddess-Worshiping Women in SoCal: The Goddess Temple of Orange County is Actively Transmisogynist

[TW: transmisogyny, misgendering/third-gendering, biological essentialism]*

Via The Wild Hunt's weekly Unleash The Hounds linkspam post, I found this blog entry by Tracie Welser, a pagan woman in Southern California, about her experience with transmisogyny at the Goddess Temple of Orange County.  The short version is, at a women-only service honoring Cybele - which gives this story an extra layer of fuckery, as several Hellenismos friends of mine have pointed out that Cybele had one of the most famous orders of trans priestesses in history** - the Temple's "Presiding Priestess" Ava (I don't see how that's different from High Priestess, but in comments to the linked post she disavowed that title, so I will respect her expressed identity, which is a damn sight more than she is willing to do for trans women) made a series of comments about "the truth of womanhood" that referred to trans women as "mutilated", "not truly women" and "denying the truth of who they are".  According to Tracie, who was at the service in question, it was spoken dogmatically by a person in a position of spiritual authority, and members were then asked to "meditate on this unreality [of trans-ness versus cis-ness]".  This was not a dialogue.  This was dogma.

So, with Tracie's permission, I am sharing this information for the benefit of any pagan female readers I have who are in that area, or who may be there at some point.  The Goddess Temple of Orange County is NOT a safe space for trans women or their allies.  It is headed by a 2nd-waver who defines womanhood by the possession of a uterus (apparently, even if you have had yours removed, if you were born with one, she considers you to have an "etheric womb", which begs the question of why she doesn't consider trans women to have the same sort of "etheric womb"...).

If you want to head over to Tracie's post and jump into the conversation, be warned that Ava has showed up in comments and is defending her bigotry with the usual litany of bullshit (which she asked me to post on here when I commented to ask Tracie if she would mind me blogging about this, lolno).

*I swear to fucking god I almost feel like I could TW for "2nd-wave bullshit" at this point, and it would be pretty easily understood.  Although it might be unclear as to whether I'm referring to their cis-supremacy or their racism, so...maybe not.


**Much like the fact that it was a rite to Lilith that was the site of transmisogynistic exclusion at PantheaCon 2011, which...just read this fantastic post about the absurdity of holding a trans-exclusionary ritual to Lilith in particular.  

Some Parallels Should Never Be Drawn. Ever.

Presented without comment: a snapshot of my Google Reader this morning, as I was going through catching up on everything I'd missed over the weekend:

[image description: A screenshot of Google Reader's interface, with two items displaying one right after the other, both from the same source blog, their headlines circled in red.  The first item's headline reads "Catholic Church In Sudan Torched By Several Hundred Muslims", and is a story about geopolitical tensions between mostly-Muslim Sudan and mostly-Christian South Sudan resulting in a destroyed church.  The second item's headline reads "National Catholic Prayer Breakfast Speakers Focus On Religious Liberty", and is a story about Catholic speakers at a prayer breakfast "drawing parallels" between violent persecution of Christians in other regions of the world and the recent refusal of various government entities in the U.S. to continue to accommodate and fund religiously-motivated  discrimination by Catholic institutions.]

Dick, Pussy, Cunt, and "Die Cis Scum": Why Some Insults Are More Equal Than Others

I see this issue make the rounds occasionally, on tumblr, on twitter, on feminist blogs, and it bugs the crap out of me.  Usually because it's someone trying to discredit or deflect requests that people not use misogynist insults like "pussy" and "cunt" by saying "well if that's bad then why aren't you asking people to stop using "dick" as an insult, too?!?"  Which is manifest horseshit on several levels.

Firstly, many of the feminists/progressives I know actually *do* frown on all genitalia-related insults.  I know plenty of feminists who don't use pussy, cunt, or dick as insulting terms.  Quite often, the person at whom the "But what about dick?" (henceforth BWAD) argument is being directed falls into this category already, and the person trying to defend their use of misogynist slurs just hasn't bothered to ask before making arguments based on their assumption.  Moral of the story: ask before you base your whole argument on an assumption.

Secondly, context fucking matters.  When the use of insults based on genitalia is taking place in a culture that systematically values maleness and denigrates femaleness, using slurs based on the penis (which our culture associates exclusively with masculinity) does not have the same damaging impact that slurs based on the vulva (which our culture associates exclusively with femininity) do.  Using "dick" as an insult does not contribute to longstanding, systemic oppression of men, because such oppression simply does not exist.  For the same reason that naked dude pictures are not the same as naked lady pictures, "dick" as an insult doesn't do the same kind of cumulative cultural damage that "pussy" and "cunt" do as insults.

Thirdly, are you (where "you" = someone who has asked or is asking BWAD) seriously trying to say that "dick" as an insult is of the same level of severity and carries the same connotation as "pussy" and "cunt"?  Really?  I'm sorry, are you some kind of pandimensional being speaking to me from an alternate universe?  Because that's really the only explanation I can think of for trying to treat all three insults equally.

"Dick" as an insult ranges from mild to moderate intensity depending on the tone of the speaker, and simply means mean or rude, perhaps overly pushy or aggressive.  "Pussy" is also mild to moderate, but has a more specific connotation of cowardice and weakness, and going simply on personal observation, a man will be far more offended/upset if you call him a pussy than if you call him a dick.  Especially considering that masculinity is actually *supposed* to be aggressive and, to a point, abrasive in this culture, "dick" can be the sort of insult that signals you're doing something to be proud of, in a fucked-up sort of way.  "Dick" is still an insult, but it's the sort of insult that leaves one's all-important Masculinity Cred intact.  "Pussy", on the other hand, is deliberately calculated to cut deeper by undermining said Masculinity Cred.

And then, of course, there's "cunt".  One of the Big Bads of the insult dictionary.  Widely acknowledged as the worst thing you can call a woman - or, really, anyone.  One of the very few cuss words that is still unacceptable among most people, even people who regularly pepper their (our, cause I'm totally one of them, in case you couldn't tell) speech with "fuck".  The one you pull out when you really want to make your point that you have an epic amount of disdain and hate for someone - usually a woman.

One of these things is not like the other ones...

[TW: implied/verbal violence against trans* people]

This is actually an old draft that's been kicking around the Unfinished Thoughts black hole for awhile now, until this post on tumblr revived it the other day.  Because it basically expresses the same context-free viewpoint that makes the BWAD argument specious, and I just could not let it go without comment, especially given it dovetailed rather well with an already-mostly-written post.  Behold:

Two identical Venn diagrams stacked on top of each other, with blue and red circles and overlapping purple section.  Text used to read (it doesn't show up against this background, sorry) "If this is okay" over the first diagram, where the circles are labeled "cis" and "scum" and the overlap "cis scum", then "Then so is this" over the second, where the circles are labeled "trans" and "scum" and the overlap is "trans scum"

For those who don't know the "die cis scum" history, it's a phrase that many in the trans community on tumblr have taken to use as a rallying cry/pushback against ciscentric culture that literally kills a whole fucking lot of trans people.  I'm not going to lie, the phrase makes me mildly uncomfortable, but I absolutely understand where it's coming from and am not going to begrudge anyone their anger against a vastly more powerful group that stands a much-higher-than-is-comfortable chance of killing them, because it's not my place to police people's expressions of anger against oppression.  It was said in a moment of frustration and anger, got picked up by a lot of people, and became A Thing, with the inevitable result of a whole lot of cis people having very hurt fee-fees over it.  A backlash developed, with far too many cis people saying that Die Cis Scum makes the trans* people who use it "just as bad" as the cis people who murder and abuse trans* people.  (O rly?  Just as bad?  You have an...interesting morality scale.)  The response from many trans* people has been "It doesn't say "die cis people".  It says "die cis scum".  Are you cis, but not scum?  Then you're safe, now shut up."  Of course, backlashing cis people couldn't let it rest there.  Hence, this graphic.

Apparently, there are a whole lot of people in this world who have never heard of context before.

Following the same logic, and for the same reason, as the argument against comparing "dick" to "pussy" or "cunt" as insults, "die cis scum" and "die trans scum" are not insults that carry the same social weight.  One is an oppressed group basically shouting "fuck you" up at their oppressors, while both groups know full well they don't have the power to do much harm.  The other is the group in power, shouting "fuck you" back down the ladder as they continue to kick the people below them in the face.  They are not equivalent.  They are not equal.  Just because they use the same syntactic structure does not mean they are expressing the same kind of sentiment, because the power differential changes things.

Or, to quote an acquaintance of mine on tumblr: When we say "die cis scum", you have your feelings hurt.  When you say "die trans scum", we literally end up dead.

Not.
The.
Same.

PSA: Rape Culture

[Crossposted from my tumblr]


Dear everyone,

When someone says you are doing something that is perpetuating or upholding or contributing in some way to "rape culture"?  Here is a list of things they are not doing:

• Accusing you of being a rapist
• Comparing you to a rapist
• Saying you don't think rape is bad
• Saying you don't care about rape victims
• Claiming that your actions will literally cause someone to go out and rape

If you think being accused of upholding rape culture means any of these things, you are wrong, and it is because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what rape culture means.  Here is what they are actually saying:

Your words and/or actions are in some way participating in the creation and maintenance of a social climate in which consent is minimized and/or mocked, the bodies of all people who are not men are considered public property/disposable commodities, the boundaries of people who are not men are routinely violated in ways large and small, people who are not men are actively discouraged from having and holding firm on personal boundaries via negative social feedback ("bitch", "frigid", etc), and an ever-shifting and -increasing set of required behaviors are shoveled onto people who are not men in order to prevent themselves from being raped, and if they are raped it is presumed to be because they failed in some way to meet every single one of the required behaviors and therefore they are at fault.

Or, to put it more concisely, your behavior is contributing to a cultural phenomenon that hurts and even kills a lot of people.  This is a Bad Thing.  You don't want to contribute to something that harms people, do you?

Nobody is saying, or even attempting to imply, that you are singlehandedly responsible for this social climate.  Your actions or words may be small enough that you think they are insignificant in the grander scheme of things.  But that's how these things work - a million, billion small actions, jokes, words, tropes, media depictions all act together to form a wider social climate, in much the same way that an avalanche is made of billions of individual snowflakes and a sand beach is made of billions of individual grains of sand.  Your contribution may be something as small as a lip gloss with a rape joke for a name.  Your contribution may be as eyeroll-worthy as some creeper running a public opinion poll to try to manipulate his ex into taking him back.  The size of your personal action is not the point.  The point is that you are, in some small way, contributing to the creation and maintenance of this toxic culture that really fucks people's shit up, and we are going to need you to stop doing that now, for our own safety and for the safety of others.

No, stopping you from doing your one little thing won't magically erase rape culture.  We know that.  But that's how such huge things are dismantled.  One tiny bit at a time.

This public service announcement brought to you by defensive jerks Not Getting It.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast.

If you're going to lecture me on my lifestyle, you could at least use facts.

There is this image set that makes its way around tumblr every so often, generally being thoroughly debunked (which may not speak to tumblerites as a whole, but simply that I follow some very quality people), comparing the price of a fast-food meal for four people to how many! groceries! you! could! buy! for the same amount.  The prices they cite are unrealistic to the point of ridiculous, and the whole thing has that finger-wagging, paternalistic tone to it, as if poor people are just children who don't understand how to food and need to be taught so they can Make Proper Choices.  So it annoys the crap out of me every time it goes around, but I usually just reblog it with ranting of my own appended and let it go.  But this time, I saw the whole set go by - I'd only ever seen one or sometimes two of the fast-food meal ones before.  The whole series, I discovered, also includes shamey comparisons between types of grocery-store food, frozen/processed versus fresh ingredients, produce, and meat.  And that pushed me over the edge.  It's not enough that they misrepresent fast food eating on a budget (because no, nobody buys the fucking whopper meals when you're eating cheap, okay?  You buy four burgers off the dollar menu.  Or you go to Taco Hell and get a dozen tacos for $10.  When the point is to eat cheap, you eat fucking cheap, not the overpriced meals.), vastly underprice a basket of groceries, and say SEE YOU SHOULD DO THIS INSTEAD.  Now, even if you're shopping at the grocery store instead of getting fast food, you will still be judged, this time on exactly *what* you're getting!

So I decided on a whim to see what their grocery lists would actually cost if I tried to live by them.  I wrote down what all was on these lists, and today I went to the store and pretend-shopped for all of it.

For context:  I live in a smallish town on the outskirts of the Bay Area, California.  This is widely (and correctly) regarded as a really fucking expensive place to live.  The particular town I live in is a middle-to-upper-middle-class old-white-people town that sits cheek-to-jowl beside one of the poorest primarily-PoC towns in the area.  I don't shop at expensive grocery stores, however.  This is not Whole Foods or something.  I do my grocery shopping at Raley's, which is a midrange grocery chain common in this region.  (I might have done this experiment at the Safeway that's also nearby, as Safeway is generally considered to be the more bargain grocery store, but I have found over time that I spend about the same at both for the same amount of food, and often actually save better at Raley's, so.  Also I know the Raley's better and it would have taken me much longer to do this at Safeway.  What?  My time is valuable, y'all.)  So we are looking at prices at a mid-range grocery store in a middle-class area of a region that has a very high cost of living.  These grocery lists may actually cost closer to what the graphics quote them at in other regions - they feel less inaccurate to me when I consider what that would have cost when I was living and buying groceries in Tennessee, although I still think they're vastly underpricing the meat and produce.

With all that said, here are the comparisons; in the lists, their price is listed first, with my price following in parentheses; when my price includes a range, it encompasses the cheapest store-brand price or sale price, up to the brand name or non-sale price:

Image 1: Four Burger King Whopper meals ($21.76) versus this grocery list:

• 1 box Morningstar Farms meatless burgers, $2.98 ($5.29)
• 1 lb 96% lean ground beef, $2.98 ($5.49)
• 16 oz cashews, $4.18 ($7.99-11.96)
• 1 lb strawberries, $1.67 ($2.50-4.99)
• 10 lbs potatoes, $2.97 ($5)
• 1 gallon 100% orange juice, $3.26 ($3.88)
• 1 lb bag frozen vegetables mix, $0.98 ($2.00)
• 1 bunch broccoli, $1.58 ($1.99)
• 1 lb bag dry pinto beans, $1.08 ($1.69)

Their total, $21.68.  My total, $37.83-42.29.  Literally as much as two times as much as they're claiming!  It's not a perfect one-to-one comparison: my grocery store doesn't carry Morningstar, so I used the price for an equivalent box of Gardenburgers; the highest lean percentage beef they had was 93%, not 96%; and there were no 16-oz jars of cashews - my price range reflects, at the low end, a 16-oz bag of almonds (which tend to be cheaper than cashews, judging by equivalent packages of the two at other sizes), and at the high end, 2 8-oz jars of store-brand cashews.  Strawberries were on sale today, 2 for $5, but are normally $5 per one-pound package.

Image 2: A large pepperoni pizza from Domino's with an order of breadsticks ($19.98) versus this grocery list:

• 1.25 lbs sweet Italian turkey sausage, $3.82 ($5.49)
• 1 lb frozen tilapia filets, $3.98 ($4.99)
• 1 lb 93% lean ground turkey, $1.98 ($3.98-5.49)
• 1 16-oz jar Smucker's Natural Peanut Butter, $2.38 ($3.89)
• 1 box (40 bags) green tea, $2.58 ($3.79)
• 1 lb bag dry lentils, $0.94 ($1.59)
• 1 box Kashi Heart to Heart crackers, $2.98 ($2.99-3.79)

Their total, $18.66.  My total, $26.72-29.03.  Not as dramatic as the first one, but still definitely not in the under-$20 range.  My store didn't have frozen tilapia filets, so I substituted a 10-oz bag of frozen flounder, which was the cheapest of the frozen fish filets.  The Kashi crackers were on sale this week.

Image 3: An 8-piece KFC fried chicken meal bucket, with four biscuits and two sides ($19.61) versus this grocery list:

• 2 lbs chicken breasts (fresh, not frozen), $1.96 ($6.49-9)
• 10 lbs potatoes, $2.97 ($5)
• 8 ears of corn, $2.00 ($4-12)
• 1 lb of peaches, $0.98 ($2.99)
• 1 gallon skim milk, $2.00 ($2.79-3.29)
• 1 lb 96% lean ground beef, $2.98 ($5.49)
• 32 oz tub Yoplait fat-free yogurt, $2.27 ($3.59)
• 18 oz rolled oats, $1.18 ($1.98)
• 2 lbs frozen sweet peas, $1.98 ($5)
• 1 lb dry kidney beans, $1.22 ($1.99)

Their total, $19.54.  My total, $40.92-47.82.  More than twice as much, this time.  There are a few interesting disparities in this list, too.  The chicken breasts at my grocery store were available either in 1-lb packages for $6.49 per pound (ouch), or in a "family size" package for $1.88 per pound, but with a total price ranging from $8-10.  The corn was even worse, because the options were prepackaged four-ear-packs for $6 per pack, or the pick-and-choose selection, which was only $0.99 (per pound or per ear, it wasn't clear), but which was really gross-looking and meager (I'm not even sure there were eight ears available, total, and most of them were off-color and had chunks of corn missing from them) because it's very much not in season.

Image 4: A box of TGI Friday's jalapeno poppers and a bag of breaded cheese sticks ($10.76), versus the following grocery list:

• 1 box Morningstar meatless burgers, $2.98 ($5.29)
• 1 lb dry pinto beans, $1.08 ($1.69)
• 1 lb dry kidney beans, $1.22 ($1.99)
• 1 lb brown rice, $0.72 ($1.35
• 2 cans Hunt's no-salt diced tomatoes, $1.84 ($3.90)
• 18 oz jar Jif Natural Peanut Butter, $2.18 ($3.89)
• 4 ears of corn, $1 ($2-6)

Their total, $11.02.  My total, $20.11-24.11.  I also discovered that their price estimate for the two frozen food items was about a dollar higher than I'd have paid for those same things here.  Which is...interesting, given that everything else has been more expensive for me than their graphics claim.

Image 5: A box of Delimex frozen chicken taquitos ($6.87), versus the following grocery list:

• 1 loaf Brownberry (Oroweat) 100% whole wheat bread, $2.50 ($3-4.99)
• 1 lb chicken breasts, $0.98 ($6.49)
• 1 lb baby carrots, $1.44 ($1.58)
• 1 lb bananas, $0.47 ($0.68)
• 4 ears of corn, $1 ($2-6)

Their price, $6.39.  My price, $19.74.  I substituted Oroweat bread for Brownberry, because I recognized the packaging as it's the brand I normally buy; Brownberry must be the brand name in another region (why do companies do that, anyway? Dreyer's ice cream here has another name I've forgotten out in TN, Carls Jr. is Hardee's.  I've never understood why).  It's definitely not the budget bread, anyway - it's usually $5 a loaf, but you can catch it on sale for $3 or sometimes 2-for-$5.  Again, I found that their price for the "bad" food was actually higher than what I found; at my grocery store, Delimex brand taquitos were only $4.99, and the off-brand was $3.99.

Image 6:  A bag of Ore-Ida brand "golden crinkle" frozen french fries ($5.44), versus the following grocery list:

• 1 lb frozen mixed vegetables, $0.98 ($2)
• 10 lbs potatoes, $2.97 ($5)
• 1 lb bananas, $0.47 ($0.68)
• 1 box whole-wheat spaghetti, $0.88 ($1.69)

Their price, $5.30.  My price, $9.37.  Again, their price for the "bad" food was higher than what I found; I could buy a bag of Ore-Ida fries, same size as the one pictured, for only $3.50.

Image 7:  A 1-lb bag of Twizzlers ($1.68) versus a 6-oz bag of dried cranberries ($1.68).  I found the Twizzlers for $2.69, and the dried cranberries were either $2.59 for a 5-oz package of Ocean Spray, or $2.87 for a 6-oz bag of store-brand.  So they were still pretty close to equivalent, although I'll point out that you're getting less than half the total amount of product for the same price if you go with the "healthy" equivalent (which speaks to the sad state of food politics in this country), so if you're looking to get a tasty snack that will last you the whole week without running out, fuck it, Twizzlers it is.

Conclusion:  Their price comparisons may be accurate, if you are shopping at Walmart for all your groceries (Great Value is Walmart's store brand), and if all produce is magically always in season, and if you live in a region where the cost of living is this low.  But when you have to tack that many conditions on to make your admonition, which is addressed to the general public without any of these qualifiers, halfway believable, maybe you shouldn't be trying to generalize quite that far.

This is especially true when you're making a comparison between the price of fast food, which remains relatively constant across regions (those prices for BK and KFC ring pretty true to what I'd be paying if I bought the same stuff - maybe a few dollars cheaper, but not much), to the price of grocery store food, which is much more variable.  Under one particular set of circumstances, buying the listed groceries might actually be cheaper than buying the listed fast food meals.  But what about everyone else?  And it's in especially poor taste to chirp "No excuses!" when you put these images on your blog, without taking into account the variation in human circumstance that may make this completely implausible for a huge chunk of your audience.

And then there are all the other criticisms to be made of this approach...

1:  There are no cooking necessities included in these lists.  Not at all.  No butter, no oils, no spices, no vinegars, no cornstarch or dressings or heavy cream or flour or any of the things people use to make raw food taste *good* when it's done cooking.  Even if someone does shop off these lists, unless your kitchen is pre-stocked with accessories (which are fucking expensive to get started with, those little bottles of spices are at least $5 a pop, which adds up fast when you want a basic variety of things like garlic powder, onion powder, italian seasoning, thyme, rosemary, seasoned salt, etc.), anything you make from these ingredients is going to taste like shit because you had no way of adding flavor to them or enhancing their natural flavor.

2:  Can we talk about how much more time and effort is involved in cooking?  Especially when you're talking about things like dry beans and lentils and raw whole potatoes!  Beans and lentils have to be soaked, often overnight, and then cooked for hours on end to make them soft enough to eat.  Potatoes have to be washed, peeled, cut up, boiled, and then mashed (for mashed potatoes), washed and cut up and coated with spices and oil and roasted (for roasted, and the kind of bulk potatoes you can get cheaply don't really turn out well that way), or put in the oven for like a fucking hour to make baked potatoes.  Take those frozen crinkle fries, for example - they are the same price or less than a big-ass bag of potatoes, and you can pop them in the oven for fifteen minutes and have hot food ready to eat, where raw potatoes will take you *at least* half an hour to render suitable for consumption - and that's half an hour of actively working on them, peeling and cutting and such, while the fries you can just spread on a cookie sheet and pop in the oven to bake while you work on making your main dish.  If you are a person with a busy life - like, say, someone who works multiple jobs or has children to care for or both, and who would be the kind of person who would need to shop most cheaply in the first place - time and effort are major factors in what kinds of food are viable for you.  Sometimes you just need to throw food at your family and fall into bed, which is a situation which does not lend itself to peeling potatoes and soaking beans and cutting up chicken (and then doing all the resulting dishes, which I've always found to be the more time-consuming, exhausting, and annoying part of "real" cooking).

3:  Produce goes bad quickly.  If you use a lot of produce in your cooking, you will need to go to the store several times a week to get fresh stuff.  If you work multiple jobs, or have to take public transit to go shopping, for example, that would be a gigantic pain in the ass and frankly not worth it when combined with the amount of extra effort raw ingredients require before being able to eat.

4:  I want to know on what planet the maker of these graphics is buying their meat.  Because I have NEVER, not even on the best sales in the cheapest area I've ever lived, seen fresh chicken breasts for under a dollar a pound.  Thighs, maybe.  Not breasts.

5:  What about people with food aversions?  Either for sensory reasons (many autistic people, for example, have strong sensory aversions to certain foods, to the point where trying to eat or even handle them will make them throw up) or simply because a certain food tastes gross to you.  Bananas make several appearances here, because they're reliably the cheapest fruit you can get, and they're reasonably good for you.  However, I hate bananas with a flaming passion.  I bought some this week, actually, because Ozz has been having muscle cramps and bananas are high in potassium, which helps with that.  I forced myself to eat one on the logic that I could probably use the vitamins too, and the other three of the bunch of four are turning brown on my counter as I type this, because neither of us likes them.  Peppers and onions often appear on "healthy on a budget" types of grocery/meal lists, because they're very flavorful and can be used to impart that flavor into a wide variety of dishes.  Problem being, I can't eat anything that's got peppers in it, because the taste disgusts me so badly.  I would never buy baby carrots or nuts if I were trying to stock my mom's house with snacks, because she's allergic.

People are different, is what I'm trying to say here, and many "cheap and healthy" foods are not an option for a lot of people.  Finger-wagging graphics pitting "good" food choices versus "bad" food choices are ridiculous for about eight billion reasons, but they all pretty much begin and end with "You have completely failed to take into account the lived realities of people who are not you."

Of course, this is not something the makers of these graphics want to consider, because having to consider the actual facts would mean that there is no pithy oversimplification that looks good on a poster that they can use to shame people into doing what they think is Right and Good.  And where would the diet/food-policing industry be without their pithy oversimplifications?*

*In the dust bin of history where they belong, that's where, and good riddance.

NOM Uses "Some Of My Best Friends Are Black!" Excuse

Yesterday morning, some documents were released as part of an investigation into the National Organization for [Hetero Christian] Marriage's campaign financing, which showed explicit divide-and-conquer strategizing that revolved around pitting Black and Latino communities against the gay community (because, I guess, there are no queer Black people or queer Latinos? lol your intersectionality failure) in an effort to break apart core Democratic constituencies.

Well, after such damning evidence of their unethical race-based manipulation strategies emerged, they had to respond, didn't they?  How could they spin this to come out looking, if not like the good guys, then at least not like total and complete assholes?

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) was formed in 2007 and has worked extensively with supporters of traditional marriage from every color, creed and background. We have worked with prominent African-American and Hispanic leaders, including Dr. Alveda C. King, Bishop George McKinney of the COGIC Church, Bishop Harry Jackson and the New York State Senator Reverend Rubén Díaz Sr., all of whom share our concern about protecting marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

NOM used My Best Friend Is Black!  It's not very effective...

Pokemon references aside (I don't even play Pokemon.  I never have.  Goddamnit, internet memes, what have you done to me?), this is basically the organization-level version of "...but I have black friends [therefore this racist thing I said/did can't possibly be racist]".  It's name-dropping certain PoC who are anti-marriage equality, as if to make the case that they do, or should, speak for all of their community (oh, look, that old trope of minority-groups-are-monolithic), while continuing to further erase the existence of PoC who are also part of the LGB community, and their allies.

So I have to wonder: how, exactly, was this supposed to make the case that NOM is not a bunch of terrible, racist assholes, in addition to being homophobic bullies?  Put down the shovel, kids.  You're in deep enough as it is.

Edited to reflect which day stuff was released.  Self, please remember that if you're queuing a post, you need to make sure the conditional references are accurate for the scheduled post time, not for the time when you were writing it.  >.<

What About The Doctors' Rights?

In the overwhelming tide of anti-choice legislation (honestly, don't these people have ANYTHING else to do?), we've seen a trend of being focused on legislating what goes on in the exam room, what words are exchanged between doctor and patient, what specific techniques the doctor has to use.  As Melissa over at Shakesville has pointed out a few times, these "state-sanctioned rape" bills (laws mandating transvaginal ultrasound prior to abortion) not only enforce a requirement of coerced penetration on the patient, they require that the doctor administer said non-consensual penetration.  In essence, they victimize the doctor as well as the patient, by coercing them both to engage in an act of penetration to which neither has the option of not consenting to.

We've also recently seen a rise in striking-back bills - ones that declare "sperm persons", ones that would require a person seeking medication for erectile dysfunction have a variety of invasive medical tests before receiving care, etc.

So here's a fun one that combines those two angles:  A doctor in Alabama has crafted a piece of legislation that would declare that the physician's judgment and medical necessity supersede any legislation requiring specific procedures or services.  Here's the text:

No physician or health care provider licensed to practice in the State of Alabama shall be forced by state or local regulatory authority to perform any medical service or component of medical service if the service or component of service is not medically necessary or would be harmful to the patient and the patient does not desire the medical service. The right to practice within the scope of a medical license supersedes any existing or future legislative act.

It's basically the good twin to the "conscience clause" bills that allow people working in healthcare (often including not only the doctors themselves, but everyone from the intake and discharge nurses, to the person who cleans the room or preps instruments or fills prescriptions in any way even tenuously related to abortion or end-of-pregnancy care) to refuse to participate in any level of the abortion process.  If they're allowed to refuse to do certain medical procedures because of their conscience - and even, in many cases, allowed to refuse to refer for those services - why shouldn't doctors of a different ethical bent be allowed to refuse to do other medical procedures that they find offensive?  I think this is a fantastic idea, and every state plus the federal government ought to have one.  And if they vote it down, we should play "zombie bill" with it and keep bringing it back over and over until it passes.  ^_^

I wasn't able to find bill-tracking information for it.  RH Reality Check said that it was offered as an amendment which was voted down after only 10 minutes of debate, but also said to check the legislative calendar for the Judiciary Committee to see when it comes up, so I'm unclear on the status.  (If anyone knows more, please let me know in comments.)

Also, I found this sentence at the end of the RHRC piece to be hilarious in a lolsobby sort of way:

...action is needed to protect the rights of [people] seeking reproductive health care in statehouses across the country.

I know "in statehouses across the country" is meant to modify "action is needed", but I'm cracking up at how the proximity to "seeking reproductive health care" implies that they are seeking reproductive health care in statehouses across the nation.  Well, shit - if this trend keeps up, it may well be the only way to *get* reproductive health care.  You'll have to petition your representative for a permission slip.

Caturday!

My apologies for not posting all week - I have been in the grips of a very dense "grey fog" type of depression, wherein everything is boring and nothing is interesting, even the things I intellectually know and remember loving to do, like blogging, writing, gaming, etc, and I have no energy and no willpower to get shit done with.  And it's been compounded by a constant barrage of fucking horrible news that I just have not had the energy to write about.

So as an apology, kitteh!

[video description: Mara, a small calico tabby shorthaired cat, lays across my laptop's keyboard, biting at a large bag of Cheetos laying beside the computer, which rustles pleasingly.  I laugh and ask "Are you having fun with that, sweetie?"  She pauses to lick her paw, then returns to chewing on the bag.  "Yeah?  You're enjoying trying to destroy my snack?"  She ignores me.  "Rawr."  More nomming, holding the bag down with one paw, as I pan out a little so you can see all of her.  "So we've taken over my entire computer, and we're trying to destroy the bag I'm trying to eat out of.  She's very - " Mara suddenly gets a good grip on the bag and starts to stand up and back away across my keyboard with it.  "Oh!  Oh.  Where are you going with that?  Hey, hey, hey.  No.  You can't go anywhere with that, give it back."  I pull it out of her mouth and set it back down, where she promptly returns to chewing on it.  "Yeah, no.  That's not for you, kitty-cat."]

She loves to sit on my keyboard whenever I will let her.  I've stood up to go do other stuff for awhile, and come back to find her snoozing on my computer, with the screen showing a dialog box asking if I want to allow some program to make changes to my computer!  She's also helpfully tried to write blog posts for me. Thankfully I've always caught it before she hits "publish", but if a nonsensical post of random text strings pops up one of these days, it's entirely her fault.  I let her keep hanging out on there anyway, both because it's so cute, and because she gets cranky with me when I try to stop her...

[video description: my hand, hovering over my keyboard, with Mara leaning on it with both front legs wrapped around my wrist as she bites my hand.  "Ow, ow, ow!"  She stops and untangles herself to sit next to my keyboard; I leave my hand hanging there to stop her in case she tries again.  "This is what happens when I try to stop her from stepping on my keyboard.  She tries to step over my arm, and then when I don't let her do it, she starts biting."  I pan the camera over to focus on Mara, who is now busy grooming her chest and belly.  "Of course, you would just completely fail to provide a demonstration of this, now that I have the thing going."  I nudge her side a little bit with my knuckles, and she immediately whips around to face my hand and clamps right back on, biting.  "Ack!  Oh god.  Ow.  Apparently poking it was all that was necessary!"  She chews on my fingers a few more times.  "You're so cute."  She decides she's done eating my hand and re-untangles herself, giving my fingers a last couple of licks before turning away.  "Yes, I'm sure I has a flavor."]

Maybe next weekend I'll see if I can get the video of her chasing her tail on the bed posted for y'all.  Until then, have a good weekend, keep fighting the good fight, and hopefully I'll have some more substantive content for y'all this week.

Fat Acceptance Is Not A "Passive" Act

Last week, Jen of Fat And Not Afraid linked to a post by a friend of hers, The Rogue Priest, about Fat Acceptance (FA), in which he voiced a couple of "concerns" about the merits of FA:

There are two concerns I have with the idea of fat acceptance:

• There are health problems associated with obesity. Some are exaggerated or imagined and advertisers definitely hit the button too hard, but I question whether people should be told to accept a higher-risk health condition.
• I tend to favor self-development. There is a type of happiness to be found in accepting circumstance, but also a type of happiness in overcoming adversity or personal obstacles and achieving something hard.

The first is the usual "fat is unhealthy therefore you're encouraging people to be unhealthy" BS, which commenters pretty thoroughly debunked, along with the notion that FA is "telling people to accept" anything, rather than presenting fat people with the novel idea that there is another choice outside of self-hate and celery sticks.  The second concern he voiced is less usual, and actually bothered me more, as a person who is deeply into self-development and who has also actually done the self-development work that FA requires of a person.  So I hopped over to leave a comment, basically summing up my own struggle with FA and how I count my increased self-acceptance and self-love and the stronger mental state that followed from that to be a big accomplishment from a personal development point of view.

To which he replied:

 [...] 

To me, having lived both of them, I do consider the proactive, demand-a-change, self development approach to be a very different kind of thing than the acceptance, self-love, take-me-as-I-am approach.

...way to completely sidestep addressing the point I just made, in favor of reiterating the point I was just debunking, but okay.  Let's take this point-by-point.

Look, here's the thing.  People don't just fall into FA, you know.  It is very much "proactive".  It requires dedicated work on rummaging through your preconceptions and your self-talk scripts and all kinds of internalized bullshit, to find it all and slowly, gently, without damaging yourself through further self-hate (OMG how could you have thought this for so long, STOP IT RIGHT NOW is not exactly the most productive way when the goal is long-term improvement of one's self-esteem), root it all out and replace it with healthier, more evidence- and reality-based conceptions of body size, weight, health, worth, and the relationship between those things.  (The short answer is, body size and weight are *sort of* connected, although not directly - some people pack a higher poundage into smaller space, simply by virtue of their build, and some people weigh less but take up more space, because of how they're built.  Health and worth?  Not even remotely connected, neither to each other nor to body size and weight.  Healthy fat people exist, as do unhealthy thin people, and all of us are worthy of dignity and respect because we are all people, the end.) Not to mention that because the anti-fat position is so vastly overrepresented in the media and culture, most people have never really been exposed to FA, so you have to search out blogs and books and people to talk to - again, very much a proactive thing.

So that takes care of the "proactive" assertion.  Next: you want to talk about demanding a change?  What do you think FA is and does?  As several other people pointed out in the comments there, FA as a movement is half self-acceptance and self-love, and half political/social activism to make it so that fat people don't NEED to undertake epic journeys of deprogramming and reprogramming their brains in order to stop the shame and self-hate!  We got Disney World to close its fat-shaming "exhibit" aimed at kids.  We raised over twenty thousand dollars to buy billboards countering the fat-shaming of children in Georgia.  Just because we're not demanding an unreasonable and unlikely physical change out of our bodies, and are instead demanding a change in how the world treats our bodies at the size they are, doesn't make it any less "demand-a-change".  

Lastly, given that my comment was explicitly describing how my journey from self-hate and disordered eating through to a fairly stable self-acceptance and HAES approach has been a massive accomplishment for my self-development, I find the contrasting of weight loss as a "self development approach" versus FA as a "take-me-as-I-am" approach to be deeply fucking insulting.  Look, bro, unfucking one's deeply dysfunctional culturally-ingrained mental patterns of internalized bigotry IS FUCKING SELF DEVELOPMENT, OKAY?  I consciously and deliberately sought out my mental patterns and slowly, painstakingly rewrote them to help me be a better person - stronger, happier, more fully myself in the world.  If that's not self development, I don't know what is.  Maybe you're working from a definition of self-development that reads "changing your external presentation to the world to increase public perception of your worth", but that is definitely not in the same realm as my definition, which reads roughly "consciously interacting with one's whole Self, mind/spirit/body/etc, in order to make deliberate changes that will make you happier, stronger, and healthier in every sense of the word"*, and I'm not inclined to grant that other definition any legitimacy as a valid meaning of "self development".

I cannot say enough how not-okay I am with this implicit framing of weight-loss as "active" self-development, versus FA as a "passive" approach.  It may have "acceptance" in the title, which is usually conceived as a fairly passive thing to do - accepting what you can't change, and all that.  But when what you're working on "accepting" is a trait inherent to your body, which is vehemently and violently reviled by the entire culture in which you live, "acceptance" is no passive, easy thing.  It requires work - a lot of it, and over a long period of time.  It requires struggle, as you chip away at internalized negativity you didn't even know was there - only to have the same issue pop up in slightly different clothing again a few weeks later, leaving you frustrated and angry because oh my god didn't I already work through this part how am I here again?  It requires strength - the kind of quiet, subtle strength that our culture never really talks about, because it's much more fun and dramatic to talk about and depict displays of overt, aggressive strength, but strength nonetheless.  It requires determination and persistence and consistency, especially during the awful, long slog through "well it's fine for other people to be fat but I still need to lose X lbs" territory - I'm pretty sure we all get stuck there for awhile, and the cognitive dissonance is nasty and yet still so hard to shake!  And above all, it requires courage, so much courage.  Because what you are doing, when you make the switch from a diet-and-thinness mentality to a FA mentality, is nothing less than flipping the finger to several very large, very loud, very well-funded and well-supported industries, which have conspired to build around you an entire culture which bombards you with repeated, painful, dangerous messages about your body and your worth as a human being.  You are explicitly rejecting the dominant narrative, openly refusing to participate in a game that 99% of the people around you are throwing themselves into playing.  Hell, in some ways, continuing to diet or attempt weight loss in some other way might actually be easier: less challenging, less personally-developing, because it allows you to go with the flow and it pretty much guarantees that everyone around you will support and encourage you in your efforts, while FA requires you to buck the trend and risk social backlash for it.

So don't ever, ever tell me that FA is some kind of passive deal, less of a worthy challenge than weight loss.

Maybe I should cut the guy some slack - after all, in other parts of the thread and with reference to the whole fat=unhealthy thing, he actually did seem interested in learning more about what FA actually is, as opposed to clinging to his preconceptions.  But at the same time, even ascribing the best of intent to his comments, the most charitable conclusion I can draw is that he has no fucking idea what the hell he's talking about when it comes to this shit, and should really, really, really just step back and listen and read and learn before trying to pass judgment on us again.

*I've never really tried to define my approach to personal development before; that was both harder and easier than I thought it'd be.

What Rush Has *Not* Apologized For - And It's Not What You Think

It's all over the everywhere, this Rush controversy, sweeping up even those people who hadn't ever paid much attention to his outrageous racism and sexism before.*  And in an unusual twist for these sorts of situations, Rush's "apology" to Ms. Fluke has actually been seen and shown for the total non-apology that it is.  Which is pretty cool.

But most of the criticism I'm seeing about his nonpology is that he apologized "for the words" but not the sentiment, and/or that he called them "poorly chosen" even though he repeated the statement several times over the course of a few days, which rather gives the lie to any protestation that they were chosen in haste and he just hadn't thought it through, oops.  Which are absolutely valid criticisms of his piss-poor half-assed attempt to shut his critics up "apology", by all means.

What I haven't seen much of, on the other hand, are the aspects of the whole controversy and subsequent nonpology that I actually found to be far more insulting, infuriating, and offensive than the slut/prostitute/poor word choice bit.

Firstly, everyone is talking about the fact that he apologized very specifically for those two words.  Nobody seems to have mentioned his complete lack of an apology for the demand for a sex tape, as if having a hand in subsidizing someone's birth control (no matter how far removed - it's not like you pay your taxes by handing over $50 to the pharmacist and then hand the bag of contraceptives to the person taking them) entitles one to turn them into a porn star against their will.  Honestly, of the two parts of his horrible spew of misogyny, I found Rush's demand for a sex tape posted on the internet to be far more offensive, far cruder and far more vitriolic than calling Ms. Fluke a slut and a prostitute, because of the way it framed and highlighted the "women's sexuality as public property" trope that is foundational to rape culture.  Where is the apology for that?  Where is the outrage that he hasn't apologized for it?

Secondly, I have seen surprisingly little commentary** that repudiates his assertion that he, as a taxpayer, was paying for Ms. Fluke's contraceptive medication in the first place, the premise on which his testerical little rant was based.  Because it's flat out bullshit - bullshit that he actually reiterates in his nonpology, no less!  "I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability?"  Except that Fluke's testimony was not even remotely about being on taxpayer-subsidized insurance like Medicaid or any such assistance program that would mean taxpayer funds buying her contraceptives.  It was about private insurance that she and other students were paying into through their fees to the university.  That's their money, and the organization's money, not taxpayer money!  So his whole premise for demanding she produce porn for his enjoyment, as punishment for the audacity to want to protect herself from pregnancy***, was fallacious from the first word onward.

I'm glad Rush is finally getting the backlash he has so richly deserved for so long.  I'm frustrated that it took this long, that it only finally happened when he called a white woman a prostitute and not, say, when he called the First Lady of the United States "uppity", and that even in this backlash many people are allowing a goodly chunk of his true fuckery to go unacknowledged and unexamined.  So please, I am asking everyone who reads this: the next time you get into a conversation with someone - or an argument, or a screaming match, whatever, I'm not picky - about this, please, don't just argue that it was wrong to call Fluke a slut and a prostitute.  Remember that those words are only about a third of the real problem here, and bring these other issues to light for other people as well.

*Which says a lot about our priorities, as a country and in particular the media's priorities in never really covering his more outrageous racist attacks, often against women of color, up to and including the First Lady (calling her "uppity", speculating on her "authentic slave blood", etc), enough to ever provoke this kind of backlash.


**Lol.  So pretty much as soon as I finish writing this and hit queue to publish it tomorrow, I come across this on my tumblr dashboard.  Okay, so not everyone is letting him get away with the lie within the lie, which is good - but I've been following this since it broke, and this is literally the first I've seen of someone calling it out, so.  I still stand by my assertion that there's very little commentary calling out that aspect of it.


***Her testimony wasn't even about using birth control for contraceptive purposes, anyway - nor was it even specifically about her own experiences needing contraception.  It was a compilation of stories of other women she'd spoken to, about using it to control PCOS and other medical conditions that have nothing to do with having sex and not getting pregnant.  Moar fallacies!  Moar lies!  Bullshit for everyone!