What “(fe)male bodied” does is try to avoid the messiness of respecting our identities and categorizing us solely that way and find an “objective” way of talking about people that you can use just by looking at them or by knowing their histories. But this Cartesian mind-body dualism is bunk–my body is still my body, and defining it as male or female is still defining me as male or female, and my body is not this thing that exists wholly separate from my mind, that cannot know or feel things or from which my sense of self can be divorced. My sex and my body are my self determination, don’t try to pry in with the crowbar of coercive language.
Part two is that not only do some people use the term to classify me as “male bodied” and others use it to classify me as “female bodied”–but that there’s a reason for this ambiguity. This “objective” “neutral” “real” body that they want to jump to just isn’t there. Some people mean chromosomes, some mean presence or absence of a penis, some people mean hormone levels and how your body appears socially, some people just aren’t thinking about trans and intersex people’s bodies. But the assumption of using the phrase is that people will have half a clue of who you mean, which positions all bodies as belonging to pre-acknowledged sexed categories unambiguously and objectively. Regardless of what categories persons are placed in and how transphobic that placement is, by “empowering” the listener to do the placing, the term nullifies self-definition of sex/embodiment, and undermines resistance to the binary medical model for being trans.
So while I fully support all people speaking of their bodies as male and/or female (and/or other possibilities), don’t use “(fe)male bodied” as a category of people (based on body parts) as opposed to an individual’s self definition–even if you’re trans.
My body is my identity, my identity is my body. Don’t try to separate them, I went to a lot of effort to help them learn to play nice with each other.
happy (almost) bday to me...
i absolutely adore my job in non-profits, but i have heart-wrenching, sweaty-palmed fantasies of academia. i scour program sites for syllabi and reading lists. i buy books and read them like they’re required. i’m constantly editing papers only i will ever read. it’s an obsession i’m no longer really living but just can’t shake.
In the time since, I’ve reported three comments. (It would be more, but e-mail takes more spoons than I can spare.) One of them was IIRC about something sexist, one of them was about a classic derail on a post about trans issues, and one was about this incredibly ableist comment. One of the three has vanished in the interim, two are still up and no mod has touched them. Guess which is which.
Zailyn at meloukhia’s Open Letter to Feministing.
Seriously, this is so pervasive there that I wonder how the hell they justify it to themselves. At least someone who makes an effort can say “But I’ve been trying.” But they never make it that far. They, apparently, just don’t give a shit about anybody who’s not white, cis, upper-middle-class, straight and fully abled.
(via amandaw)
beautiful cervix project
The North Star: it ain't privilege, it's injustice
the fact that most white students at yale (or in this nation) do not think critically about the relationship between their whiteness and social power does not mean that those white, self-professed progressives who recognize their social and economic privilege have accomplished anything more than a certain degree of honesty about history….
and so the white Leftists who think they are down because they have got the courage to lamentably declare, “We’ve got White Privilege,” it would be more accurate and truthful to say instead, “We are beneficiaries of racism,” or “We participate in a racialized system of oppression.”
how much more reluctant is the race conscious white activist to admit that his “privilege” has a consequence, that his whiteness is more than merely a personal reality about his own social power but is also an agent of violence.
the decemberists, athens ga 9-26-09
Prelude
The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won’t Wrestle the Thistles Undone)
A Bower Scene
Won’t Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)
The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)
The Queen’s Approach
Isn’t it a Lovely Night?
The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid
An Interlude
The Rake’s Song
The Abduction of Margaret
The Queen’s Rebuke / The Crossing
Annan Water
Margaret in Captivity
The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)
The Wanting Comes in Waves (Reprise)
The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)
The Sporting Life
Billy Liar
Engine Driver
On the Bus Mall
The Bachelor and the Bride
Shankill Butchers
Dracula’s Daughter—>O Valencia!
Crazy On You
Crane Wife III
Sons and Daughters
For Caster Semenya
We must understand how the medical industrial complex and science are being used to profit off of our bodies and medicalize our genders, our abilities, and render, in this case, an 18 year old intersex South African black woman a spectacle for the world to stare at, gawk at, and examine—at her expense. We must see how this spectacle is connected to the spectacle made of disabled bodies everyday behind closed doors, in sterile white rooms, under florescent lights, in homes, at family dinners, birthday parties, a trip to the mall, to the park, down the street.
As reproductive justice activists, we must challenge the notion that women are only as valuable as our wombs and the children we are expected to produce. We must challenge definitions of “woman” and “reproduction” that exclude intersex people and work to create a movement and framework that integrates an intersex analysis in to our work….
To close, we want to invite everyone reading to look within themselves and ask yourself how do you know what gender you are? How do you know what sex you are? How does your race, nationality, ability, class, etc. impact how you experience your gender and your body? What are the messages you receive about your body and how it should be? Where or who did those messages come from? Ask these questions of your friends and family. Read. Learn. Open yourself up to a discussion you may not have had before this moment. Stop saying hermaphrodite! Everything in society that we think of as static is something we created and we don’t have to support ideologies that aren’t useful to us. We can create a world where all bodies, where all people, are celebrated, loved, and cherished.
