Quote
January 10, 2013
568 notes
"Lately I’ve been considering how “slut shaming” grew – unacknowledged – from the experiences and intellectual contributions of sex workers who first identified “whore stigma.” Slut shaming exists now as a critique external to sex worker feminisms and politics, applied mostly by women without sex work experience to describe the loss of social capital they suffer when assumed to be whores. What’s been lost is the centering of people who are marked as whores, in the assumption so common within attempts to resist “slut shaming” that being a whore is the worst thing to happen to you. So long as we cling to that notion of the slut or whore as the ultimate outsider, we reinforce whore stigma. This should be obvious."

— On whore stigma and slut shaming | postwhoreamerica (via ardhra)

(via aragingquiet)

Tags: sex sexuality whore stigma slut shaming gender teaching materials

Quote
April 10, 2012
11 notes
"I’m a genius, and I’m confused."

—

A cisgender character named Temperance Brennan on the tv show Bones, when told she ought to use female pronouns for a deceased trans woman. (via southcarolinaboy)

I watch Bones regularly, but it’s getting a lot more difficult for me to enjoy the show. At its heart, it is deeply normative about sex and gender—puritanical about the former and essentialist about the latter.  (I’m assuming this quote was pulled from last night’s episode, which I haven’t seen yet.)

Tags: bones gender sex sexuality

Text
April 04, 2012
88 notes

genderbitch:

widdershinsgirl:

genderbitch:

widdershinsgirl:

freedominwickedness:

Minnesota Court Makes Historic Trans Rights Ruling

In a landmark ruling which is being completely ignored by not only the mainstream media but also the gay-centric LGb(t) media, a federal court ruled yesterday that a trans person may not be treated differently than a cis person of the same legal gender for the purpose of marriage. It might seem downright frivolous, but local courts in New York, Kansas, Ohio, Texas, and Florida had all previously ruled that trans people still count as their birth-assigned gender for the purpose of marriage regardless of their legal gender.

In this case, a union health insurance fund sought to establish the same bigotry in Minnesota by cancelling a couple’s joint health insurance after discovering that the wife was a trans woman. The fund claimed that Minnesota’s anti-same-sex marriage law should be interpreted to also prohibit opposite-sex marriages in which one partner is trans. The court emphatically rejected this reasoning, declaring,

“The Fund’s interpretation of Minnesota law was unreasonable and wrong. Minnesota law recognizes the Radtkes’ marriage as a marriage between a man and a woman because Minnesota law recognizes Plaintiff’s sex as female… . It was not the Fund’s role to impose its own definitions of gender and marriage upon its participants. In this case, the Fund ignored all evidence of the State of Minnesota’s view of Plaintiff’s sex and marital status. The Fund’s decision was not only wrong, under a de novo review, it was a flagrant violation of its duty under any standard of review.”

What makes this ruling totally historic is that it is the first time a federal court has ever ruled in favor of trans marriage equality, and only the second time any court has ruled in favor of trans marriage equality. Furthermore, it is the first break in a decades-long streak of hostile court rulings, and the first ruling which broadly upholds legal gender rather than examining private parts; the previous favorable ruling was explicitly based on “sexual functionality” and therefore only applied to post-op trans people.

This is a huge step forward for LGBT rights, and the fact that it’s being widely ignored is a sobering reminder that the “gay rights first and only” agenda has complete control of the established LGb(t) political movement.

“The Plan was unambiguously written to allow all persons who are legal spouses under Minnesota law to be eligible family dependents. The Fund’s role was to ascertain Minnesota law. It was not the Fund’s role to impose its own definitions of gender and marriage upon its participants. In this case, the Fund ignored all evidence of the State of Minnesota’s view of Plaintiff’s sex and marital status. The Fund’s decision was not only wrong, under a de novo review, it was a flagrant violation of its duty under any standard of review. In sum, the Fund erred when it terminated Plaintiff’s participation as an eligible family dependent. The Fund’s termination of Ms. Radtke is reversed and she is reinstated as a participant as of April 19, 2010.”

Not to piss on a good parade (cuz hey, marriage equality for trans folks is great and all) but I’m not liking the whole “this is a huge step forward for LGBT rights” line in there considering all the poverty and homelessness faced by queer and trans* youth (especially women with disabilities of color in those two groups, most often in the trans zone) and the ridiculous levels of lethal violence faced by trans women of color specifically. A huge step would be combating that shit with the level of tenacity people throw at marriage equality.

Cuz yanno, people are starving, turning to crime, committing suicide, being assaulted and fucking dying and all. But marriage and pageants. Huge deal, right? “Huge steps”.

The more important thing that was buried in this decision that we didn’t get to right away is Judge Davis’ formally defining what should have been obvious all along (but wasn’t): That trans people’s changed legal sex is their sex, period, and previous statuses are irrelevant.

Ahhh, I see. That’s a lot bigger than marriage. 

(via exceedinglytrans)

Tags: trans* sex gender lgbtq teaching materials legal rights court cases marriage rights marriage equality

Quote
March 31, 2012
96 notes
"The Dianics are upset that we’re challenging their practices and they are protesting that they have a perfect right to build their religion around cisfemale experiences such as menstruating and childbirth, and no one who is not a cis woman could possibly understand. Some of this is true - they have a perfect right to do that. However, that no one but a cis woman could understand these experiences is NOT true. A trans* man could understand them. A cis woman who had a hysterectomy would likely feel excluded (and several such women have been trying to talk about the exclusion they feel when they try to participate in such ‘feminine’ mysteries). What about one of my best friends, who has Cogenital Adrenal Hydroplasia? She’s assigned female, genderqueer, and her chromosomes do not match her assignment, but she has a womb and a vagina. She menstruates irregularly and trying to have a child would probably kill her. Where does she fit in? Where do men with XXY chromosomes or XYY chromosomes fit in? Think that’s too rare to matter? It’s not. 1 in 300 men who are assigned male at birth and identify as cis men do not actually have an XY chromsome. Does Z. Budapest even know SHE is a genetic woman? Has she had a DNA test to find out? When you peel back the thick skin of human ignorance of sex and gender, when you see the wondrous diversity of human sex and gender and how it absolutely does NOT fit neatly into two easily-labeled boxes, you begin to see how phrases like ‘genetic women only’ are ludicrous, ignorant, and hurtful."

— Sonneillonv of Dreamwidth, about a ritual at Pantheacon that was restricted to “genetic women only” (via ragnell)

(via evelark)

Tags: paganism gender sex

Link
January 20, 2012
7 notes
Go Where? Sex, Gender, and Toilets

carrawayeffect:

Women’s and men’s washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.

As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.

I present here for your perusal, a typology and analysis of various washroom signs.

Interesting stuff.

(Source: gutterowl, via kataklysm)

Tags: gender teaching materials lgbtq bathrooms toilets sex

Photoset
December 20, 2011
16,046 notes

wifwolf:

lookoutsideyourself:

Still Not a Joke — Good Awareness Campaign From Just Detention International

THIS IS IMPORTANT.

(Source: brute-reason, via radicallyqueer)

Tags: sex gender rape rape culture incarceration prison industrial complex criminal justice system state violence teaching materials

Photo
September 26, 2011
1,310 notes
maritsa-met-esq: boehnertroll: thelefthandedwifeisundercover: celluloidlove: glossylalia: kyssthis16: brandnewjones: Fact #666: Girls don’t actually have periods. They hide the bloods of their victims in their underwear. So don’t fucking cross us. I pubesced/began menstruating at 12. I had two major, constant father figures present in my life up until age 19 or so. A good friend of mine didn’t really hit puberty until 15 or 16. Her dad died when she was young, and her mother never remarried. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Bullshit. My dad died when I was 6 and my mom never remarried. I had my period until around my 14th birthday. While this isn’t a “fact” there have been studies done that suggest this. Clearly that doesn’t mean every single girl who grows up without a father figure will have early menarche. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15603289 “There was little or no evidence, however, that suggested a direct causal relationship between these variables… Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that father absence is associated with a developmental trajectory characterized by earlier readiness for reproduction and parenting.” It’s likely that a major confounding variable in this study was poverty, since single female-headed households are much more likely to be below the poverty line, and poverty is associated with a host of environmental factors that are in turn associated with early menarche.

maritsa-met-esq:

boehnertroll:

thelefthandedwifeisundercover:

celluloidlove:

glossylalia:

kyssthis16:

brandnewjones:

Fact #666: Girls don’t actually have periods. They hide the bloods of their victims in their underwear. So don’t fucking cross us.

I pubesced/began menstruating at 12. I had two major, constant father figures present in my life up until age 19 or so.

A good friend of mine didn’t really hit puberty until 15 or 16. Her dad died when she was young, and her mother never remarried.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Bullshit.

My dad died when I was 6 and my mom never remarried. I had my period until around my 14th birthday.

While this isn’t a “fact” there have been studies done that suggest this. Clearly that doesn’t mean every single girl who grows up without a father figure will have early menarche. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15603289

“There was little or no evidence, however, that suggested a direct causal relationship between these variables… Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that father absence is associated with a developmental trajectory characterized by earlier readiness for reproduction and parenting.”

It’s likely that a major confounding variable in this study was poverty, since single female-headed households are much more likely to be below the poverty line, and poverty is associated with a host of environmental factors that are in turn associated with early menarche.

(via maritsa-met)

Tags: social inequality gender sex puberty menarche environment pollution

Link
August 10, 2011
130 notes
soon we shall live in the past: Science, sex, and reproduction: why sex and babies aren't inextricably linked

robot-heart-politics:

  1. Having sex doesn’t automatically yield babies. Sex must occur shortly prior to or during ovulation for babies to happen. Considering sperm can survive around 5 days in a vagina, and most people with a uterus have ~30-day cycles, That means most of the time, having sex…

Most of this is good information, but the claim that “with perfect use, modern birth control pills have a failure rate of .3%” is highly misleading.  Most people think of “perfect use” as something that is within their control.  However, even if you take your pill in the same half-hour window every day (a requirement of “perfect use”), it can still be completely neutralized by antibiotics—or any kind of stomach or intestinal problem.  If you experience diarrhea, you cannot assume protection from the Pill for at least a couple of days.

The Ring also has some serious issues with placement.  I’ve known two people to get pregnant on it a total of three times, and one of them at least was a dedicated and intelligent BC user—you can’t depend on common sense or even careful self-education to avoid problems with its placement, apparently.

Basically, the fewer intermediary steps in a BC method, the more dependable it is.  The pill is prone to disruption because it has to be absorbed through your stomach lining—not an efficient pathway at all.  The Ring releases chemicals that still have to be absorbed through the mucus membranes of the cervix.  Better than your stomach lining, but still vulnerable in some cases.

The shot goes directly into the bloodstream, avoiding most potential pitfalls.  The IUD is in the uterus, and works at least partially by creating interference in the uterine environment that prevents implantation from occurring.  It’s right there, so it’s always working.

(The main difference here is that if you want something easily reversible, you should get the IUD and not the shot.  The shot can take up to a year to wear OFF, as I can attest from personal experience.)

This isn’t to say that some people don’t have issues with these BC methods (although if you’re concerned about IUD safety, the problems that arose decades ago are NOT an issue with the current generation, and the refusal of some doctors to give them to nulliparous women is rooted in folklore and puritanism, NOT research science).  But in terms of overall efficacy, there are real, important differences between types of BC.

(via whatgodzillasaidtogod)

Tags: biology medicine reproductive rights science sex sex education sex positivity sexuality birth control contraception

Link
July 15, 2011
5,754 notes
cabulous rhymes with "fabulous": Reblog if you have the guts to admit you masturbate.

thestoutorialist:

cabell:

brainpicker:

lookoutsideyourself:

afunnyfeminist:

I don’t usually reblog this sort of stuff, but this was just a must. :)

I talk about it pretty regularly on this blog, I don’t give a shit.

I also own about a billion times more pornography than my husband does.

When we…

All I have to say is I’ve burned out the motor in more than one Hitachi Magic Wand and I’m proud of it.

Okay, so I had this “Water Dancer” (basically a water-proof pocket rocket, but I never even used it in the tub because I try to avoid getting my hair wet) for ages, and it still worked, but it had started making some TRULY HORRENDOUS noises.  I would turn it on and immediately have to whack it against the bed frame to make it stop sounding like a lawn mower.

My spouse offered to take it apart and oil it, but given that it was a $20 item that was at least five years old, I elected to just replace it instead.

Tags: vibrators sex sex toys

Quote
June 10, 2011
1,812 notes
"Have we really become so unsexy as a society that you don’t even get to touch somebody for it to count as an affair? Here are the things Anthony Weiner didn’t do. He didn’t rape a hotel maid or a 13-year-old girl. He didn’t knock up a staffer while his wife was terminally ill with cancer, then misappropriate campaign funds to cover it up. He didn’t serve his sick wife divorce papers while cavorting with yet another staffer. He didn’t leave the maimed woman who cared for him after his release from a Vietnamese POW camp for a 25-year-old brewing heiress. He didn’t (with all respect) get his peepee sucked in the Oval Office by an intern. He didn’t rail against the evils of homosexuality while soliciting the services of a male meth-head prostitute (if you don’t remember exactly which one that was, it’s because there are too many to name). And he didn’t coerce his humiliated wife to stand next to him during a debasing press conference, which, as far as I’m concerned, almost makes him a feminist fucking hero."

—

BUST Magazine: Let’s all post our weiners (via deweydell)

I’m not sure I would call him a feminist hero for not doing those things but it certainly makes him an alright human being. All of those things listed have been done, yes, but not doing them doesn’t make you a hero for refraining from being a douche.

(via dandelionchild)

^^^ commentary.

(via bubonickitten)

Here’s my issue: You don’t have to touch someone for it to count as assault.  Sending an unwanted photo of your genitalia to someone is sexual assault.  It’s not equivalent to rape, but that doesn’t mean it’s “harmless,” or that the person who did it is an okay dude.

And certainly Clinton having an affair with Lewinsky was a HUGE power differential, and we’ll never really know what level of coercion was present there.  But we know for sure that this photo was unwanted.  So don’t ask me which is “worse,” because I really don’t know.

(via cabell)

There’s also… Maybe it’s just me because I haven’t seen it raised anywhere else. But, really? “Have we really become so unsexy as a society”? Really? The sexy imperative has extended to our conceptualization of society as a whole - no wonder rape culture continues to thrive when everything, including whether or not a person committed assault, has to be framed in a way that is titillating to the viewer.

Are we really so fucking bored as a society that we can’t take in information that isn’t trying to seduce us into excusing bad behavior?

(via therotund)

Soooooo this quote has been going around my dash a lot the last day or so and apparently no one else is going to say this, so, uhm: I find it deeply offensive to refer to a woman who has survived a devastating car accident as maimed. Deeply. Offensive. Like the first time I saw this I had to go take a time out so I didn’t just start SCREAMING. And I have been seething about this for the last day. ‘Maimed’ is not a word you use to refer to human beings unless you happen to know that they specifically identify that way. I have some other thoughts about the embedded attitudes in this quote currently going unchallenged, but I think I am just gonna leave this here for now.

(via meloukhia)

…and here are a bunch of other things wrong with that quote.

(Source: stfuconservatives, via se-smith)

Tags: gender rape culture sexism sex sexuality sexual assault consent weiner

Photo
March 21, 2011
952 notes
psychologystudentplatypus: [Picture: Background: 6 piece pie style colour split with red, orange, and yellow alternating. Foreground: a head-on photo of a platypus’s face. Top text: “Sex And Gender Are The Same Thing” Bottom text: “I Hate You”] We should just put this on the first page of the LGBTQ Studies syllabus from now on.

psychologystudentplatypus:

[Picture: Background: 6 piece pie style colour split with red, orange, and yellow alternating. Foreground: a head-on photo of a platypus’s face. Top text: “Sex And Gender Are The Same Thing” Bottom text: “I Hate You”]

We should just put this on the first page of the LGBTQ Studies syllabus from now on.

(via lgbtlaughs)

Tags: lgbtq teaching memes sex gender