This is just cruelty: students walk out of class to protest a trans student’s use of the girls’ restroom.

More than 100 students at Hillsboro High School, about an hour south of St Louis, walked out of class on Monday in protest.

“I’m hoping this dies down,” said Lila Perry, the 17-year-old who began identifying as a girl publicly in February. “I don’t want my entire senior year to be like this.”

Ms. Perry, who began feeling “more like a girl than a boy” when she was 13, said school officials gave her permission to use the girls’ facilities as the new school year began.

It’s not just kids feeling squicked out – there’s something more sinister behind it. I bet you can guess what.

“My goal is for the district and parents to have a policy discussion,” said Derrick Good, a lawyer who has two daughters in the district and wants students to use either facilities based on their biological sex or other gender-neutral facilities.

He worked with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian advocacy group, to draft a “student physical privacy policy” and submit it to the district, which has about 3,500 students.

Uh huh huh – the god squad is behind it. It’s god’s plan for people with dicks to use the BOY cans and that’s the end of the story. It’s in Deuteronomy somewhere – thou shalt not use the toilet facility designated for the sex that is not thine own from birth.

The protesting students assembled outside the school for about two hours. Mr. Cornman said he did not believe any of them were penalized.

Ms. Perry, who dropped out of the physical education class that prompted her use of the girls’ locker room, spent the two hours in her guidance counselor’s office.

“I was concerned about my own safety,” she said.

She said she knows of other, younger transgender students in the district and wants to open a dialogue so they have a better high school experience.

“It feels really awful that people are going to these extremes against me, not just in school but all over the Internet,” Ms. Perry said. “But I’ve also received so much support. It feels really surreal to be in the middle of all of this.”

The Missouri Gay-Straight Alliance Network will host a rally supporting Ms. Perry on Friday.

Everybody should relax. The “activists” who spend their time monitoring heretical bloggers should relax, and the people who persecute trans teenagers (and adults) should relax. We put a rover on Mars, we can figure out this restroom thing. I say put in cubicles and be done with it.

From a 2013 piece by Delilah Campbell at Trouble and Strife about the [cough] tensions between feminism and trans activism:

It is notable that the policing of what can or cannot be said about trans in public is almost invariably directed against women who speak from a feminist, and especially a radical feminist, perspective. It might be thought that trans people have far more powerful adversaries (like religious conservatives, the right-wing press and some members of the medical establishment), and also far more dangerous ones (whatever radical feminists may say about trans people, they aren’t usually a threat to their physical safety). And yet a significant proportion of all the political energy expended by or on behalf of trans activism is expended on opposing and harassing radical feminists.

It is indeed; it’s very notable, and alarming. Religious conservatism and the right-wing press roll along happily, unbothered by trans activism, while feminism is being plowed up and sown with salt. It’s just barely possible that this is not entirely healthy for feminism.

But this isn’t just some misunderstanding, Campbell says. It’s basic.

When trans activists identify feminists as the enemy, they are not just being illogical or petty. Some trans activists refer to their feminist opponents as TERFs, meaning ‘trans-exclusive radical feminists’, or ‘trans-exterminating radical feminists’. The epithet is unpleasant, but the acronym is apt: this is very much a turf dispute, with gender as the contested territory.

At its core, the trans struggle is a battle for legitimacy. What activists want to get accepted is not just the claim of trans people for recognition and civil rights, but the whole view of gender and gender oppression on which that claim is based. To win this battle, the trans activists must displace the view of gender and gender oppression which is currently accorded most legitimacy in progressive/liberal circles: the one put forward by feminists since the late 1960s.

Aaaaaaaand that’s what I (for one) think should not be displaced.

Views of gender are already contested, Campbell concedes, but all the same –

But in fact, the two propositions about gender which trans activists are most opposed to are not confined to radical feminism: both go back to what is often regarded as the founding text of all modern feminism, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 classic The Second Sex, and they are still asserted, in some form or other, by almost everyone who claims any kind of feminist allegiance, be it radical, socialist or liberal. The first of these propositions is that gender as we know it is socially constructed rather than ‘natural’; the second is that gender relations are power relations, in which women are structurally unequal to men. On what exactly these statements mean and what they imply for feminist politics there is plenty of internal disagreement, but in themselves they have the status of core feminist beliefs. In the last 15 years, however, these propositions—especially the first one—have become the target of a sustained attack: a multi-pronged attempt to take the turf of gender back from feminism.

Among the prongs are gender essentialism (e.g. Simon Baron-Cohen and Steven Pinker) and libertarian ideas about choice.

Across the political spectrum, it has become commonplace to argue that what really ‘empowers’ people is being able to choose: the more choices we have, and the freer we are to make them, the more powerful we will be. Applied to gender, what this produces is ‘post-feminism’, an ideology which dispenses with the idea of collective politics and instead equates the liberation of women with the exercise of individual agency. The headline in which this argument was once satirized by The Onion—‘women now empowered by anything a woman does’—is not even a parody: this is the attitude which underpins all those statements to the effect that if women choose to be housewives or prostitutes, then who is anyone (read: feminists) to criticize them?

So choosy choosers choose their own flavor of gender, and if that’s being Michelle Duggar, well that’s their choosy choice.

Current trans politics, like feminism, cannot be thought of as an internally unified movement whose members all make exactly the same arguments. But although there are some dissenting voices, in general the views of gender and gender oppression which trans activists promote are strongly marked by the two tendencies just described.

In the first place, the trans account puts little if any emphasis on gender as a power relation in which one group (women) is subordinated to/oppressed by the other (men). In the trans account, gender in the ‘men and women’ sense is primarily a matter of individual identity: individuals have a sovereign right to define their gender, and have it recognized by society, on the basis of who they feel themselves to be. But I said ‘gender in the men and women sense’ because in trans politics, gender is understood in another sense as well: there is an overarching division between ‘cisgendered’ individuals, who identify with the gender assigned to them at birth, and ‘transgendered’ individuals, who do not identify with their assigned gender. Even if trans activists recognize the feminist concept of male power and privilege, it is secondary in their thinking to ‘cis’ power and privilege: what is considered to be fundamentally oppressive is the devaluing or non-recognition of ‘trans’ identities in a society which systematically privileges the ‘cis’ majority.

That. That’s the idea that’s been swallowed whole by The Community of Trans Allies, and it’s verkakte.

I gotta go. More later.

Sometimes being a feminist is a strain, because there is reality and then there is feminism and there can be a quarrel between them.

Michelle Goldberg points out the trap this can lead to.

Because sexism is so interwoven with how we live our lives, it sometimes feels like the transformation of our personal lives is demanded by feminism. This is extremely exhausting, leading to a neurotic level of analysis and justification of our own preferences, motives and interpersonal relationships. Two kinds of personal essays, repeated with nearly infinite variations, manifest this neurosis. One is confessional: I’m a feminist, but I enjoy X, in which X is some traditionally female thing like not working, wearing makeup, being submissive in bed, or doing all the housework. The other is tautological: don’t judge me for doing this traditionally female thing, because it makes me, a feminist, feel good, and thus must be more feminist than it appears.

We live in the real world; sometimes doing the feminist thing is too damn much work, so we don’t. That’s life.

Often doing the conventional thing is the path of least resistance. (That’s why it’s the conventional thing.) It is not easy—it might be impossible — to live a productive life while bucking social expectations at every turn. It’s too bad that so many young women have gotten the idea that feminism expects them to.

Or even that feminism expects them to apologize for failing to. (I expect that, but that’s not feminism, it’s just me. I’m a shithead.)

This confusion sucks up a lot of mental energy, leading to guilt and defensiveness. It turns feminism—the demand that women be recognized as full, equal human beings, legally and socially—from something libratory into another thing for women to feel like they’re failing at. It becomes, ironically, a source of gender inequality, since men, by and large, don’t spend so much time second-guessing their romantic decisions and aesthetic preferences. Changing your name is not a feminist act. You have not betrayed feminism if you change your name. The same is true for staying home with your kids, wearing high heels, or getting Botox. Women live in a sexist system, and contort themselves to negotiate it, picking from a menu of mostly bad options and then hating themselves for choosing wrong. The problem is the system, not the women. That’s what the personal is political is supposed to mean.

I feel better about these pink socks I’m wearing now.

This is a terrible story from two years ago.

A Belgian man has chosen to die by euthanasia, after his sex change operation turned him into “a monster”.

Nathan Verhelst, 44, was administered legal euthanasia on Monday afternoon, on the grounds of “unbearable psychological suffering”, by the same doctor who euthanized two deaf twins last year.

Shortly before he died, he told Belgium’s Het Laatse Nieuws: “I was ready to celebrate my new birth. But when I looked in the mirror, I was disgusted with myself.

“My new breasts did not match my expectations and my new penis had symptoms of rejection. I do not want to be a monster.”

Verhelst was born the only daughter in a family of three boys, and admitted that he had been “the girl that nobody wanted”.

There’s a new study of changes in the brain caused by hormones. I find it rather disturbing. Rachel Gross reports for Slate:

Research has shown that women have the advantage when it comes to memory and language, while men tend to have stronger spatial skills (though this too has been disputed). But due to ethical restrictions, no study had been able to track the direct effect that testosterone exposure has on the brain—until now. Using neuroimaging, Dutch and Austrian researchers found that an increase in this potent hormone led to shrinkage in key areas of the female (transitioning to male) brain associated with language. They presented their findings at last week’s annual meeting of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology in Amsterdam.

Shrinkage. Just plain old shrinkage. It sounds very drastic. (And I can’t discuss it without thinking of that Seinfeld episode about swimming and shrinkage…)

For the study, researchers scanned the brains of 18 individuals receiving high doses of testosterone as part of female-to-male gender reassignment surgery before and after hormone treatment. After just four weeks of receiving testosterone, participants had lost gray matter (which mainly processes information) in the regions of the brain that are used for language processing. That change amounted to a “real, quantitative difference in brain structure,” said researcher Rupert Lanzenberger of the Medical University of Vienna.

Sobering, isn’t it.

Originally a comment by Kevin Hutchins the Bellinghamster on Left to the Church and its tribunals.

My HIV physician is continuing her private practise, but because so much of the work involves the hospital, she might be actually moving her practise INTO the hospital by the end of this year. She said it’s a trend in Infectious Disease specialists.

It’s a Catholic hospital which has already almost killed me before.

When I try to tell her i’m concerned about this, she says she doesn’t see anything improper happening, she assures me she’ll keep taking good care of me the same as always. I didn’t have a chance to press the issue with her because we were too busy talking about medical physiological issues for me to even have time to get into these more abstract things. I told her I’ve always trusted her because she’s helped keep me alive for years, but I have so much paranoia being an AIDS patient in a Catholic building with Catholic crucifixes in the alcoves and Catholic crucifixes on the desk staff and Catholic prayers over the intercom… and almost entirely Catholic employees… employees who are very likely to be looking less favorably on the fag with AIDS who comes into their hospital, than they might look towards some other kinds of patients, good Christian faithful patients.

The paranoia is unproductive, I try to stop myself from going overboard, I don’t want to be afraid of Catholic boogeymen, the way that some Christians get their panties in a bunch around queer boogeymen.

But they’ve already demonstrated poor decisions during my previous inpatient stays at that hospital and one time it almost killed me (but I survived, but it was incredibly torturously painful what they were doing wrong for a few days continuously) so I have shaky confidence at best. The only thing that keeps me from giving up on the situation entirely is knowing that my partner will stick by my side if I have to be at the hospital. If I had to do any more of this ALONE, I would just be too paranoid and scared and I would give up.

This is part of why i think Ophelia’s blog is so important. It helps remind the queer atheist feminist gender-nonconforming vegan pacifist that there are people who care and people who have overlapping problems, and we can all look at them and discuss them together. No matter what our gender or personal characteristcs are, no matter how weirdly different, this blog is good for making people feel like they have somewhere to voice concerns that would get them into serious trouble if uttered in most other places.

Coming out as trans-everything.

https://youtu.be/BMUl6w1efXI

Another excellent post from Diana at Neopythia.

I want to talk about something I find offensive and morally repugnant.  It is the notion that trans women, who have arrived at a gender critical position, or simply accept certain realities are self hating.  I know this is a popular meme.  It’s an easy rationalization for those who hold certain political ideologies, or those too consumed by irrational fear to think.  It is completely without merit and harmful [to] women and trans women alike.

I think I know what political ideologies she means, and I think I know of several people who hold them.

Literally nobody identifies as a terf*. It is a term which has moved far beyond whatever usefulness it once had, if it ever had any.  It is a slur thrown about indiscriminately to silence those certain people disagree with.  I wish it was just a twitter thing, confined to largely meaningless internet squabbling, but increasingly there are real world consequences. Mostly it is women who pay the price, but isn’t that usually the case? Anyway, I don’t even label myself a feminist. I wouldn’t presume to, though I ally myself with women to the extent I am able.

*Going forward where others would use “terf,” I will use “women” to illustrate just how ridiculous this is.

That’s something I’ve been wondering about a lot, especially over the past few weeks – the fact that mostly it’s women who pay the price. Why is that? Why is it women, and specifically feminist women, who get trashed and shunned and demonized over this issue? Why is so much fire and brimstone called down on women while men are left alone? Why is feminism the enemy? Why do so many women join in with this pattern? Why do so many feminist women join in with it? Why don’t they notice the gender imbalance and the bad effects on feminism?

The self hatred meme goes something like this: a trans woman regrets her transition and is consumed by self hatred. Devious women, always preying on the weak and disillusioned, pounce, exploiting this self hatred to turn them into token women. The newly minted tokens parrot all of the hateful rhetoric and work from the inside to bring down transwomen.  What the token gets out of this, I don’t know.

Aside from sounding like something out of a horror story, I hate all of the implications of this. It is puerile, delusional thinking.  It removes any personal agency from any individual transwoman and lays the blame squarely at the feet of women.

And laying the blame squarely at the feet of women is just the same old shit – the same old misogynist patriarchal shit. Why would trans women want to perpetuate that? It’s sort of like wanting to join a club so desperately that you fight with every single member before you join.

Nobody lured me.  Nobody preyed upon my weakness or insecurity.  I made the decision on my own. I chose to listen to women, really listen.  I read their words and witnessed their testimonials.  I read books and blogs that challenged the way I think, not just those that reinforced it.  I read these with a critical, but not defensive mind. I started to look honestly at who I am, about my past, and how the world shaped me.  For the first time I talked honestly with others, and myself. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes the truth is painful to confront.  But the truth is this: I was born male. I transitioned to live as a woman. I am legally and socially accepted even if I am still learning what that means and still struggling to bury my male socialization.

It’s supposed to be the height of terrible to say that trans women have had some male socialization…and yet in all other contexts we agree that gender socialization is pervasive and unavoidable, even for people who reject it at a conscious level. If that’s true…how can it be anything but true that trans women have had some male socialization?

If you listen to transwomen, you’ll hear how dangerous and poisonous testosterone is.  What you won’t hear is how dangerous masculinity is, except in purely descriptive terms such as dress.  Gender is insidious.  It shapes us from birth in unseen ways.  It can be toxic to the way we think, especially in how we view women.  Socialization is very difficult to unlearn. We are unaware the extent to which it permeates us. To believe [that because] we have transitioned, started to transition, or “feel like a woman” we are immune to our male socialized thinking is dangerous and delusional. While not immutable, it will forever be part of our experience.

Right? How could that not be true? Nobody is immune to socialization (unless raised by wolves).

Trans women share a venn diagram of experience with women. Our experiences overlap, but are not universal.  To use a poor analogy: Even if you live in another country for decades, you will never experience it in the same way as someone who is from there. You can learn the customs and the language, even pass as a native, but there remains a level of experiential knowledge which is unobtainable, and that’s ok.

I know this. I’ve spent a lot of time in the UK, I’ve lived there for extended periods, I’ve learned a lot of customs and idioms, but that’s not at all the same as being born and growing up there.

The dirty secret is that, far from hating myself, I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.  By accepting certain basic, biological truths, and accepting how much about “being a woman” I don’t know, and can never know, I’ve found peace.  I cannot tell you how liberating this is.  I never realized how much energy I spent maintaing the delusion until it was gone. I look back and am able to reconcile the person I was with the person I am.  I don’t have to pretend. I haven’t always been a woman.  I’m a transwoman, and I’m fine with that.

I hope soon things can shake out so that that will be the usual and available way of thinking about it.

A trans woman wrote a post about Caitlyn Jenner back at the beginning of June, when the Vanity Fair cover was all over the place.

The post says many things I thought at the time (and continue to think when I catch a few minutes of “Meet Cait” on cable tv) but didn’t dare say – things about how odd it is to treat a rich privileged self-absorbed conservative as an icon of both trans rights and feminism.

Friends sent me notes of congratulations as if I’d done something, as if I cared. An aging reality star spent more money than I will see in my lifetime to make himself into a pin-up queen and this is cause for celebration? I didn’t respond to any of them. I watched my progressive male friends police the words of others.  “It’s She not He!” “It’s Caitlyn not Bruce!” I suppose they think they’re helping, but I’ve never asked for it. All of them are more concerned about their progressive bona fides over my actual feelings.

I see that a lot – progressive male types policing words to demonstrate their progressive bona fides at the expense of…so many, many things.

I couldn’t get away. Every twitter refresh, every website, every television commercial, there she was. I sought refuge with my friends. Their words supported me even as the ground shook beneath me. I felt as if piece of me was torn out, stomped on, and left bleeding on the ground. I could not comprehend why, and then a friend, a friend who has taught me so much about what it means to be a transwoman, wrote this:

I want to be able to have my own story, to be who I am. To be a person, but what becomes more and more clear each day is that I will not have this small, small privilege. I cannot be a bird. I must be the kite on a string, defined by the wind…am I an object? Am I a human? I will forever after today be described to people as “Like Bruce Jenner.” I am no more.

I broke.

Tears streamed down my face as I read and re-read her words. I couldn’t read any longer.  I turned off the computer, picked up my headphones and crawled into bed.

This is part of what I was thinking about that cover all along. Why on earth set the bar there? Why make it look as if that’s what transition is supposed to be? Why make it a beauty contest?

Everything we are. Everything we were.  Everything we struggled for, fought for, and hurt for is gone. We are eclipsed by our own shadow. Whatever we were, we are no more. We are all reflections of an aged wealthy conservative living out his own personal gender passion play. Like a perfumed Pontius Pilate, he has condemned us all.

Did I misgender Caitlyn? Honestly, I don’t care anymore.  None of it matters. I have spent the last twenty years in transition. Jenner has enough money and fame as to be insulated from everything. Jenner will never experience what it is like to live as a woman in society, or even what it’s like for most to transition. Yet Caitlyn is now our queen; the standard all transwomen will be measured against henceforth. I feel as if my life and struggle has been ripped from beneath me, tarted up, and paraded about for the world to gawk at. It is the Real Housewives version of the transgender experience.

Brilliantly put. I loathe the whole “Real Housewives” whatever-that-is for the way it defines the female experience, so why should I think the trans version is any better? Both are insulting.

The whole spread is an exercise in wealth, privilege, styling, and photo shop. This is what every young transwoman now has to strive for. Only after you have visited the facial feminization doctor will you be complete. Assimilation? Who cares! it’s all about the photo shoot.  It is the transformation salon fantasy played out across our media, with a societal stamp of authenticity; Narcissistic indulgence as political act.

And yet there are many who feel the Vanity Fair cover is empowering, that it “increases awareness” of trans people. To that I say, Fuck you. Come to the city and we’ll visit young transwomen, mostly transwomen of color, homeless on the streets because their families cast them out for living their “true authentic selves.”  They did not wait to amass personal and financial security, nor have millions of dollars of plastic surgery. Such a thing is impossible and yet I’m supposed to view Caitlyn’s actions as brave? Here’s bravery for you: For the past fifteen years, Bruce Jenner has been the member of a male only golf club.  So brave. So feminist.

Bam.

This is what I’ve been saying – trans activism is not the same thing as feminism, and not all trans women are feminists. I support trans rights, no question, but that does not mean I can’t disagree with particular trans women on particular subjects, including feminism.

Updating to add: The Independent reporting wasn’t very thorough. Tim Roberts seems to be pretty much on a level with the fans who trolled him.

Good grief.

The Independent reports:

A veteran stage technician, who worked in the West End for more than three decades, has quit his job after a social media row with fans of actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

Tim Roberts walked away from his position as a light technician for The Phantom of the Opera last week after a seemingly harmless tweet he posted on his own account escalated into a row with self-styled “Cumberbitches”.

His messages prompted Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatres (RUT), which runs Her Majesty’s Theatre where Phantom is staged, to threaten him with disciplinary measures.

Mr Roberts criticised the company for “suppressing freedom of speech” among employees and he now fears he is unemployable in the West End.

Guest post by Tigger the Wing.

I would be very upset if people as intelligent, thoughtful and educated as Josh and Ophelia were to stop discussing this extremely important topic because a tiny minority of people are loudly bullying anyone who dares to broach it.

This is happening in meatspace, too, and it is the older people who are being silenced yet again. Just one person can ruin an entire organisation by making it just too uncomfortable for anyone else to say anything.

And they are ruining things for trans people.

Just as we had been making headway, getting laws changes so that we didn’t have to conform to the gender stereotypes of a particular psych gatekeeper in order to be allowed to transition, because wider society is slowly coming around to the idea that gender expressions and restrictions are largely societal constructs (whereas being drawn to a particular gender performance, or repelled by it, seems to be a matter of personality) they decide that we can’t be allowed to discuss the very gender norms that we are trying to subvert.

Honestly, if I look at a crowded street, the most common clothing is a variation of T-shirt-and-jeans. Make up is more likely to be seen on apparently female people than male, but over here it’s not particularly prevalent. Hair length doesn’t map very well to gender, nor does jewelry. Perhaps that is at least partly why Ireland passed the gender recognition bill shortly after the marriage equality referendum.

We don’t want to go back to the mindset of the late 1940s, when governments realised that telling women to leave the workforce and become housewives was likely to create less of a violence problem than not having jobs for millions of returning soldiers. That, to my mind, is how recent the gender barriers were erected. Up until then, women worked.

In the 1950s, my mother had to fight to stay in work when she married, but did indeed give up when she had me and didn’t do paid work again until we had all grown and left home. She’s probably the only one of my maternal ancestors who didn’t work while raising children. Fragile femininity seems to have been if not exactly invented then certainly raised to a ridiculous level during the 1950s and 60s.

Why can’t we discuss this? Is it because the people raised in an era when many of the equality battles seem to have been won can’t see how vulnerable those gains are? Are they so blinded by the recent pinkification of everything that they cannot see what is lying behind it?

Don’t they see that questioning the premise of gendering of presentation and performance is NOT rejecting the rights of people to perform and present however they like, rather the opposite?

People have apparently become so used to living in boxes that they cannot see that what is important is the place that the box occupies; remove the boxes, the walls, and we don’t remove the places; we make it so that people can freely wander into any place they desire.