tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88763829357671310982024-02-07T02:49:04.365-05:00Queering the LineThoughts on social justice, race, politics, and the gender binarySumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.comBlogger70125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-19197523780334988642023-02-23T00:57:00.006-05:002023-02-23T00:58:18.441-05:00New Project: Beyond the Binary Podcast<p>I'm not doing much blogging these days, but I've got a new podcast project going over at <a href="http://beyondthebinarypodcast.com"><b>beyondthebinarypodcast.com</b></a>. The podcast, Beyond the Binary, looks at the ways non-binary, trans, and gender non-conforming folks navigate spaces that are heavily gendered. </p><p>Our first series of five episodes focuses on parenthood. You can listen to the podcast's trailer and the first full episode at <a href="http://beyondthebinarypodcast.com">beyondthebinarypodcast.com</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beyond-the-binary/id1672164397" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/3H9eICwSbpNs8Ve9qhwKvS" target="_blank">Spotify</a>, or anywhere you get podcasts. You can also follow Beyond the Binary on Instagram: @beyondthebinary_podcast. </p><p>Join us!</p><p><br /></p>Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-67173805485859109902016-08-18T07:00:00.000-04:002016-08-18T16:38:21.368-04:00Toeing the Testosterone Line: Sex, Sports, and Semenya at the Rio OlympicsThe first round of the women's Olympic 800 meter race was Wednesday. The semifinals are tonight, followed by the finals on Saturday. Caster Semenya of South Africa won her preliminary heat and placed sixth overall in round 1. She'll run in heat 3 of the semis. She is expected to advance through the semis and is favored to win gold.<br />
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In 2009 and 2010, Semenya endured a year long ban from international competition due to her elevated testosterone levels. Though she has never spoken about it publicly, the organization governing international track competition reinstated Semenya supposedly after she agreed to undergo treatment for her testosterone levels. Much was made in the media of the ban on Semenya and whether or not she was intersex, and her return to track after her reinstatement. The ban took an apparent toll on Semenya. Leading up to the 2012 Olympics, she seemed unable to repeat the success she'd had before being barred from competition. But in London, Semenya looked great in the 800 meter final. She took silver, losing to Russian runner Mariya Savinova. Savinova was one of the runners who questioned Semenya's participation in women's competition at the 2009 world track championships, just prior to Semenya's ban. Savinova later somewhat ironically admitted to doping and has now herself been banned for life from Olympic competition (she has not yet been stripped of her 2012 gold medal, but if she does, Semenya would be declared the 2012 winner). Semenya ran a fast race in London and looked so relaxed in the home stretch that some speculated she'd held back on purpose to deflect any additional scrutiny that might have come from winning gold.<br />
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Semenya is now running as fast as she ever has and assuming she makes it through the preliminary rounds and the semifinals, she's likely to win on Saturday night. NPR's Melissa Block aired a short segment on Semenya's story yesterday, with the title "The Sensitive Question of Intersex Athletes" (listen <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetorch/2016/08/16/490236620/south-african-star-raises-sensitive-questions-about-intersex-athletes"><b>here</b></a>). I'm glad NPR did the story and that the piece included multiple perspectives, but Block fell prey to common pitfalls regarding discussions of athletes and the sex binary. One is the notion that any athlete (or person) who does not fit the male/female binary is, as Block puts it, "anatomically and genetically ambiguous." But Caster Semenya's body is not "ambiguous." Her body is what it is. NPR failed to really unpack the typical assumption that it isn't "normal" for so-called male and female physical characteristics to overlap, when in fact many individuals - not just those who claim (or are assigned) the label "intersex" - have a variety of bodily characteristics we might describe as both masculine and feminine.<br />
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Semenya's ordeal is largely about testosterone, but whether or not testosterone is the thing that makes male-bodied people faster sprinters than female-bodied people is not universally agreed upon in science. Recent case in point: Dutee Chand, like Semenya, has "elevated" testosterone, but unlike Semenya, she's not a superstar in her event. After the first round of the 100 meter dash in Rio, Chand was in 50th place. She did not even make it to the semifinals. Though her time of 11.69 was not her best, even Chand's personal record of 11.24 is nowhere near the top of the field. The women's 100 meter leaders in Rio all ran under 11 seconds in the final. Elaine Thompson of Jamaica ran a 10.71 to win gold, almost an entire second (an eternity in the 100 meters) faster than Chand's 11.69. Yet Chand had to fight like hell to for her right to compete internationally. Like Semenya, she was banned from international competition in 2014 due to naturally-occurring high testosterone levels that officials worried gave her an "unfair" advantage. She too was ultimately reinstated, thankfully with enough time to still make an attempt at Olympic qualification (for more see this recent article from <i><a href="http://www.outsports.com/2016/8/14/12475190/caster-semenya-dutee-chand-intersex-olympics"><b>Out Sports</b></a></i>).<br />
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Still, the NPR piece includes soundbites from Ross Tucker, a scholar whose work has looked closely at sex, sports, and intersex athletes, but who insists that testosterone is the "proven reason" men and women compete in different categories. Tucker affirmed recent rules for international track competition that women with "high" testosterone levels must undergo treatment that brings their testosterone below the lower limit considered "normal" for males before competing against other women.<br />
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Tucker acknowledges, like others have, of course, that testosterone is not the only thing that might give one athlete an advantage over another. Michael Phelps has an extraordinary advantage in swimming because his hands and feet are large and his wingspan freakishly long. Is that advantage "unfair"? Probably. Should men of average wingspan not be forced to compete against him because it might be impossible for them to win? What if Phelps had another biological characteristic that people associate with improved athletic performance, like naturally elevated testosterone? Would Phelps be required to bring his levels within the "normal" range in order to compete? No. Most folks would say that's as preposterous as requiring him to surgically shorten his limbs so that he can "fairly" compete with humans of average proportion. What about wealthy nations' disproportionate presence at the top of the Olympic medal tally list? Right now five of the top ten countries on the Rio medal count list are European countries with relatively small populations that shouldn't, by sheer math, be able to produce as many elite athletes as they do. Great Britain is currently second in the medal tally (behind the United States, also over-represented). Brazil is 15th on the list. Despite having a population roughly three times GB's size, Brazil has won only one fifth the number of medals that Great Britain has collected thus far. Why? The same reason that wealthier countries always win more medals than poorer countries - it takes tremendous resources and time to be a professional athlete and in countries where fewer financial supports are available to athletes, there is less guarantee of being able to make any kind of living. U.S. soccer star Alex Morgan has talked about how her father hired her a personal trainer as a teenager so she could "bulk up" a little - he worried she wouldn't be competitive at the international level without such a boost. Is that an unfair advantage? Yeah, it is. But no one's talking about it like that - no one's saying Alex Morgan is only as amazing a player as she is because she grew up rich. It might be partly true, but it will never cost Morgan her spot on the U.S. roster, even if it does cost someone else, with equal natural talent, but fewer resources, a spot. Rather, we place the focus of our preoccupation with "fairness" squarely on those "advantages" we associate with sex, a focus that has unfortunate consequences.<br />
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Our focus on "advantages" associated with sex obscures the fact that physical sex characteristics, like gender, probably exist on a spectrum much more so than in binary form. Greater understanding of nature's complicated relationship with sex categories might ease fears and harassment of athletes like Chand and Semenya, in addition to any other athlete or person who doesn't fit social or physical norms. Indeed, the brightest spot in the NPR piece was American runner (and peer of Semenya) Hazel Clark's comment towards the end calling for fairness for all athletes, including Semenya.<br />
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Finally, it places limits on female athletes. How good and how fast can male athletes like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt be before they're "too good" or "too fast" or before the competition becomes so unfair that Phelps and Bolt must be moved into separate categories from their peers? There is no such limit. But by scrutinizing the performance of Caster Semenya and athletes like her, we put limits on all female athletes by extension. The 800 meters is a brutal race. We can never know if it's testosterone, excellent training, high pain tolerance, good muscle fibers, or just sheer guts that make Caster Semenya so good, but by saying that hormones make it "unfair" for her to compete against other women assumes that women aren't supposed to be that good. And to be clear, women <i>are </i>that good. Semenya has yet to break the world record in the 800 meter (though she might do just that this week). In 2009, when she was first flagged for gender tests and then banned, her fastest time was 1:55.45, a blistering pace for sure, but still slower than the times posted by Kenyan runner Pamela Jelimo on several occasions just the year before.<br />
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If the women's 800 meter record is broken this week, some people may try to cling to the old record. Semenya may be maligned in the press as "not really a woman." But women have run faster than Semenya in the past and whatever time she posts this week, future women will beat it. She is doing the thing that all elite athletes do - breaking barriers and propelling herself, and her sport, forward - really effing fast. My high school cross country and track coach used to tell us to "toe the line" before a race, as in, go up there and get your butt on the starting line. So toe the line, Caster. And then break it wide open.<br />
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<i>I <a href="http://www.queeringtheline.com/2012/06/policing-femininity-gender-and-sports.html"><b>first wrote </b></a>about Semenya before the 2012 Summer Olympics. More recently, I included both Semenya's story and that of Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, who underwent a similar ordeal and who also competed in the Rio Olympics, in a chapter published in Teaching Sex and Gender (Springer, 2016). The book is geared towards college faculty. Link to the book and an excerpt from my article - lucky me, I'm the first chapter - is <a href="http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319303628#aboutBook"><b>here</b></a>.</i><br />
<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-27143924514094778122015-11-20T06:00:00.000-05:002015-11-20T06:00:03.534-05:00Transgender Day of Remembrance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-56067611818603806002015-10-21T07:30:00.000-04:002015-10-23T14:02:51.781-04:00Genderblind Parenting: Telling kids gender doesn’t matter when everything else tells them it does<div class="p1">
If I had a dollar for every person who has told me they didn’t truly believe there were real, fundamental differences between males and females until they had kids and couldn’t get their sons to play with dolls or dissuade their daughters from amassing collections of sparkly princess dresses, I’d be rich. </div>
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Left-leaning, progressive, feminist parents will say they had such grand ideas before having kids that they would create for their children a gender-neutral paradise in which neither boys nor girls would be confined to the stereotypes that so rigidly separate masculinity from femininity. <i>But none of it seemed to work, </i>they'll say. This part of the narrative is oddly uniform and almost always includes some anecdote about a feminist family’s young son chewing his toast (or sandwich, or saltine cracker, or cookie…) into the shape of a gun and pretending to shoot it, to the utter bafflement of the parents, who thought they had done everything possible to keep both toy and real guns and associated brands of masculinity out of the house. <i>We don’t watch TV, </i>the parents will say. They didn’t allow toy guns, they didn’t allow violent play. They encouraged him to be nurturing. They gave him dolls<i>. It must be ingrained</i>, they say. <i>Maybe boys and girls really are different</i>. They shrug their shoulders and sigh.</div>
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My generation came of age during the rise of “girl power.” Post-Title IX babies, we were told that girls could do anything boys could do. We were taught - much more so than any American generation before us - that gender didn’t matter. For the first time, there was growing public emphasis on the notion that you could be a girl and also be an athlete, a doctor, a business-owner, a politician or a rocket scientist. We were also the colorblind generation. Post-Civil Rights era babies, we were taught that race didn’t matter either - that anyone could do anything. Years later, our girl-power, colorblind cohort has come of age and women of all races (though particularly women of color) and men of color are still dramatically under- or mis-represented in everything from sports to politics to science. </div>
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Anti-racist activists have spoken loudly and clearly on the dangers of “colorblindness” (see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Racism-without-Racists-Color-Blind-Persistence/dp/1442202181" style="font-weight: bold;">this</a>,<b> </b><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/racism-without-racists/245361/" style="font-weight: bold;">this</a>,<b> </b><a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/white-millennials-products-failed-lesson-colorblindness/" style="font-weight: bold;">this</a>, and<b> <a href="http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-36-fall-2009/feature/colorblindness-new-racism">this</a></b>) - that teaching folks that race doesn’t matter, when everything around us tells us that it does, is not anti-racist at all, nor does it do anything to dismantle the institutional racism that still permeates our social, economic, and political lives. There are parallels between colorblindness and the idea of gender-neutral parenting. If our idea of gender-neutral parenting is to simply present male children with dolls and female children with trucks, provide some “diverse” clothing options, and assume that children will not absorb - or that they will be equipped to confront - any of the other cultural messages they receive about gender from movies and television, teachers, classmates, relatives, and books and toys, we have become “genderblind.” Genderblind parenting is teaching our children that gender doesn’t matter, all the while failing to name and confront the fact that gender is embedded in nearly every aspect of our daily lives.</div>
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Social norms are powerful and small children are deeply attuned to the world of the adults around them. Their brains are rapidly forming and strengthening synapses - the connections that allow them to function, but also to learn about the culture and people to whom they’ve been born. We can - and frequently do - tell preschoolers that boys and girls ought to be treated equally, and that gender doesn’t matter, but nearly everything else we do to or with children says otherwise. </div>
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<span class="s1"><a href="http://queeringtheline.blogspot.com/2013/04/gender-and-sex-101-theres-no-such-thing.html">Gender is a social construct</a>, yes. It is also a fundamental element of social organization. The first thing we want to know about newborns is whether they’re male or female. Adults and children alike often refer to non-family members as “Miss/Ms.” or “Mr.” based on perceived gender. Parents typically belong to one of two groups - moms or dads. Though most adults in the United States frequently wear pants, it is not uncommon to see adult women also wearing skirts and dresses while we have strong social taboos against men or male-identified individuals wearing skirts. Similarly, while many parents dress both male and female children in pants, even parents with a commitment to gender equality might hesitate to dress a male child in a skirt. Department store children’s clothing sections are divided into areas marked “Girls” or “Boys.” In public, boys and girls and men and women do not share spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms, even though most of us do share such spaces in our own homes. While young children sometimes play on co-ed or all-gender sports teams, most youth, college, and professional sports are segregated by gender. </span> Cis-male athletes are vastly more visible and occupy more privileged social space than female and trans or queer athletes. Children either join the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts. Action movies typically feature male superheroes and are marketed to boys while fairy-tale movies typically feature hyper-feminine princesses and heterosexual romance and are marketed to girls. While women have gained much ground in terms of workplace equality outside the home since the 1970s, when it comes to division of labor at home, women still do a disproportionate amount of child care relative to men. </div>
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All of these practices convey the message to children that gender is a profoundly salient element of our social structure, and that belonging clearly to one group or the other is important. Children can recognize the kinds of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity associated with being male or female, and despite also frequently being aware of a wide spectrum of ways to be human, peer pressure and perceived adult pressure can be a powerful tool keeping the boundary between “boy” and “girl” rigidly clear - a line that even when inadvertently imposed by adults, is often heavily policed by kids themselves. We take this as evidence that perhaps there are elements of gender or sex that are essential - that boys and girls really are different. </div>
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We must stop doing this. Gender socialization starts at the moment of birth and it shapes the brains of young children as they move through their most formative years. The differences we think we see at age three, or age five, or age ten, are not biological or fundamentally related to being in possession of a penis or a vagina, but reflect the extent to which children have absorbed gender norms. If a boy refuses to play with a doll, it doesn’t necessarily mean that human males are “naturally” less nurturing than females. It may mean that he has been ridiculed - or seen other boys ridiculed - for expressing interest in dolls. It may mean that he identifies strongly with the adult males in his life and has not seen them interacting with infants as often as women. </div>
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We so readily accept that early childhood experiences account for the many differences we see between individual children, and later, adults. We acknowledge - and much early childhood research confirms - that things like screen time, being read to, being exposed to music, being frequently spoken to, having good or poor nutrition, discipline style, exercise, and play shape the developing brains of young children and can influence their interests and personalities. Why shouldn’t we assume that the gendered language and culture we’ve built around infants and children similarly shapes young brains and accounts for the gender differences we see as babies become toddlers and then preschoolers and so on? </div>
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The point is that gender socialization is extraordinarily pervasive and disrupting it might take more than simply offering our sons dolls and our daughters trucks, though that’s a good start. When preschool-age girls refuse to wear any color but pink, or when preschool boys gravitate towards all things super-hero, I don’t think feminist, binary-disrupting parents should worry they’ve failed, nor should they default to the conclusion that these differences are biologically fated. A number of resources exist (<a href="http://feministpigs.blogspot.ca/2012/02/childrens-gender-self-determination.html"><b>this</b></a> and <a href="http://www.dailylife.com.au/life-and-love/parenting-and-families/how-to-start-talking-about-gender-diversity-with-kids-of-all-ages-20151005-gk1q5k.html"><b>this</b></a> are both good places to start) to help parents talk to children about the gender binary, introduce them to the notion of gender fluidity, and encourage them to explore a fuller spectrum of human expression. Binary sex and gender are all around us. Gender matters, but that doesn’t mean that we have to reinforce its boundaries. </div>
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Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-50782911543776649172015-10-09T16:27:00.000-04:002015-10-10T10:56:19.326-04:00Invisible Queer: The shift from getting "Sirred" to getting "Mom'd"<div class="p1">
Ever since I cut my hair short - almost ten years ago, I have become accustomed to regularly being addressed as “sir” by the vast majority of strangers I encounter. It’s partly because of how I dress (and the fact that I do not, and have not ever, had boobs of any noticeable size), but mostly, I think it’s the hair. I don’t mind being “sirred” most of the time - as someone who claims a genderqueer identity, I don’t tend to enjoy being referred to as “lady” or “ma’am” - so given the choices, “sir” is not the worst thing. It’s awkward on occasion - usually more so for the folks with me, or for whoever’s doing the “sirring,” than it is for me. I don’t love awkwardness, but again, it’s not the worst thing. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhRgUg_M5QtcOhAFtedLSjCl2AQc6CTUwVoFemCbCpXu0fVsG3OPr8hcy5xRDsCLXt2shTzkfixHVuX9PMSkLM_xwm84LzPxWKZgfGq6a74aCG7MQg0N3l5Y0qdU-SjATAU0I2MwqrY3w/s1600/IMG_4605+-+Version+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhRgUg_M5QtcOhAFtedLSjCl2AQc6CTUwVoFemCbCpXu0fVsG3OPr8hcy5xRDsCLXt2shTzkfixHVuX9PMSkLM_xwm84LzPxWKZgfGq6a74aCG7MQg0N3l5Y0qdU-SjATAU0I2MwqrY3w/s320/IMG_4605+-+Version+2.jpg" width="214" /></a>What I didn’t realize, is that not only is being sirred not the worst thing, I think part of me really likes it. I came to this realization during the near eleven months I recently spent as a stay-at-home parent, during which time I was not sirred a single time. As long as I was with the baby, everywhere I went, I was “mom’d.”</div>
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<span class="s1">We are not planning for our baby to call me “mom” - we’ve been referring to me as “papa” (read </span><span class="s2"><b><a href="http://queerdadsblog.com/2014/03/24/whats-in-a-name/">more about that here</a></b></span><span class="s1">). But it’s not the fact that folks are calling me “mom” when I don’t claim that title that throws me off - there’s no way people would know I prefer “papa” if I don’t say so and there’s no need to have that conversation with every grocery store clerk on the planet. Rather, I’m feeling thrown off by the dramatic shift in how I’m being read. I’ve gone from being predominantly read as masculine in public to being predominantly read as feminine. It’s jarring, in part because it has changed how people treat me, and in part because I completely didn’t expect it. Perhaps I’m naive to have been surprised, but since nothing about my appearance or expression changed - hair, clothes, mannerisms - save for having an infant strapped to my chest most of the time, I assumed people would still read me as masculine, as they always had.</span><br />
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Because I was frequently read as a very young man in the past (young enough that perhaps nobody would expect me to have a kid), the fact that I now frequently have a baby in tow leads to the immediate conclusion: Mom/woman. In the past people either confidently addressed me as sir, or hesitated and waffled back and forth between “ma’m” and “sir” as they tried to figure me out. What’s fascinating to me now is that there is absolutely no hesitation when I’m with the baby. I am “mom’d” without question every time. The truth is, people still don’t expect to see men or boys with children. I think it’s also possible that people don’t expect to see queer and genderqueer folks with children either. Perhaps people now see the baby in my arms, or the stroller, or the diaper bag over my shoulder, and don’t see anything else. </div>
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It’s been an uncomfortable shift, as I feel less comfortable with the title “mom” than with “sir,” though neither is really right. This shift in perception has also illuminated the limitations of the gender binary in ways I hadn’t considered before becoming a parent. Before, I was “sir.” Now, I am “mom.” As a queer-identified person, I am invisible either way.<br />
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<i>This blog entry also appears at <a href="http://queerdadsblog.com/">Queerdadsblog.com</a>. </i></div>
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Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-16055904946831429312015-04-09T07:00:00.000-04:002015-04-09T11:05:06.036-04:00Let Me Call An NWSL Game. Please.<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Dear National Women’s Soccer League,</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The start of the 2015 season will be upon us tomorrow - a time of year I look forward to like a giddy kid on Christmas Eve. As a Washington Spirit season ticket holder, I try to get to as many live games as possible, but was also happy to be able to follow Spirit away games and other games around the league via live stream last year. Still, there's an issue. While a number of the game announcers on the live streams were fantastic, many left much to be desired. I know sports announcing is tough and the </span>league is just getting started, so may have difficulty finding folks with lots of experience and knowledge of the players, but still I found myself pressing mute on a significant number of occasions, mostly because announcers were talking - A LOT - but not about the game. As follows are a list of things NWSL announcers talked about during the 2014 season (other than the game at hand that they’re, um, supposed to be calling):</div>
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<span class="s1"><b>1. The weather in Nebraska</b> (where there is, incidentally, no NWSL team). At length. I’m not even kidding.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b>2.</b> <b>The age of EVERY. PLAYER. ON. THE. FIELD.</b> It’s not that age is irrelevant, but it’s really only interesting to mention if there’s something extraordinary about the player’s age in relation to the game. I don't think this announcer said ANYTHING else about the players aside from their date of birth.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b>3. The men’s U.S. national team.</b> At length. (At such length, actually, that both announcers in one particular instance got so wrapped up in talking about the U.S. men that they forgot to continue announcing the NWSL game still going on for a decent chunk of the half. One of them finally seemed to snap out of it enough to say he supposed they ought to “get back to the women’s game.” Thanks. And sorry to interrupt you). </span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW5ArGvrzMGDgwbz-NwjmgIuuVJe4dwHrmq_e4fYpKcJtw_HHiLQxNJu_H_n7U_JgxRHVTREpEdrO3EB8wtvtE3DVe3EHubmUtFjYUT42ZczwqzxQRJpbXoU2JNKNYyXwsKMUUfO_YMYI/s1600/Spirit+and+Reign+2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW5ArGvrzMGDgwbz-NwjmgIuuVJe4dwHrmq_e4fYpKcJtw_HHiLQxNJu_H_n7U_JgxRHVTREpEdrO3EB8wtvtE3DVe3EHubmUtFjYUT42ZczwqzxQRJpbXoU2JNKNYyXwsKMUUfO_YMYI/s1600/Spirit+and+Reign+2013.jpg" height="195" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Washington Spirit v. Seattle Reign, August 2013</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>4. The height (or lack thereof) of certain players, </b>which wouldn’t be a problem in itself, except for that time one announcer referred to a particularly short player as a “midget.” Only a little problematic.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>5. Hashtags.</b> Again, I’m completely serious. You know there’s a problem when one announcer flatly tells the other announcer (who will not stop babbling on and on about said hashtags - in relation to what I honestly cannot remember), “I’m watching the game.” #announcethegame </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">So, NWSL, here’s my resume: I played youth soccer. I can identify pretty much every single player in this league without a cheat sheet and can come up with something interesting to say about most of them aside from their birthdays. I have zero announcing experience but I like to talk. A lot. I REALLY like to talk about NWSL soccer (there are witnesses). I love the U.S. women's team to an absurd degree and I can pretty much guarantee I won’t talk about Nebraskan weather. </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">If hired, I will accept an Ali Krieger jersey as payment. You may reach me via my twitter handle: @Queeringtheline. I look forward to hearing from you.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Sincerely,</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Sumner McRae</span></div>
Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-548174757629875142015-01-05T09:45:00.000-05:002015-01-05T09:46:34.994-05:00New Year, New URL (Again): Queeringtheline.comSo here's the thing... When I first registered the blog's old domain name, transcenderblog.com, I discovered that there is an IT company by the name Transcender. They had already bought up nearly all of the related domain names, meaning that transcender.com or the like could probably never be mine. I picked transcenderblog which was the only thing left, but recently I've been wanting to do some minor (and major) updates to the site, including choosing a domain name that more clearly describes the blog (and doesn't get search results confused with an IT company).<br />
<br />
Here's the major change: the blog can now be found at <a href="http://queeringtheline.com/">Queeringtheline.com</a>, which matches my blogspot URL, <a href="http://queeringtheline.blogspot.com/">queeringtheline.blogspot.com</a>. Transcenderblog.com is no longer registered to me and the link is dead, to my knowledge.<br />
<br />
My Twitter handle is also now @Queeringtheline. If you were already following @Transcenderblog, you're fine - it's the same account, just a new handle. You can also now email the blog at <a href="mailto:queeringtheline@gmail.com">queeringtheline@gmail.com</a> if you have questions, suggestions, or would like to submit a guest post.<br />
<br />
Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-9188327630154911102014-12-10T13:01:00.000-05:002015-01-17T16:43:07.578-05:00Readings on Ferguson, Gender and Queer Black Activism<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">A few readings from around the web on police violence and the intersection of race, gender, and gender identity in the wake of the Ferguson decision:</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Black Girl Dangerous:</b> <a href="http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2014/12/whose-lives-matter-trans-women-color-police-violence/">Who's Lives Matter?: Trans Women of Color and Police Violence</a> (By Princess Harmony Rodriguez)</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">"</span>We are often reminded, however, that what are normal occurrences for the general public, are crimes for trans people of color. “Crimes” that make us targets of police and police violence. Trans women of color are stopped, harassed, assaulted and murdered by police with impunity. The conversation about police violence must include us, because our bodies, too, lay dead at their hands."</div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>The Feminist Wire:</b> <a href="http://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/">A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza</a> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">"It is appropriate and necessary for us to acknowledge the critical role that Black lives and struggles for Black liberation have played in inspiring and anchoring, through practice and theory, social movements for the liberation of all people. The women’s movement, the Chicano liberation movement, queer movements, and many more have adopted the strategies, tactics and theory of the Black liberation movement. And if we are committed to a world where all lives matter, we are called to support the very movement that inspired and activated so many more. That means supporting and acknowledging Black lives."</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>The Audre Lorde Project:</b> <a href="http://alp.org/wake-rise">Statement: Wake Up, Rise Up</a></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">"The murders of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley and Eric Garner prove that Black lives are seen as dangerous and expendable. For those of us that are Queer, Trans, Black and People of Color, our bodies, our gender expression and who we love puts us further away from the "norms" and has falsely perceived us as the most threatening, less than human, and even more dangerous of all bodies."</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><i>Further reading on Ferguson and gender:</i></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Colorlines:</b> <a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/08/black_feminists_respond_to_ferguson.html">Black Feminists Respond to Ferguson</a></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>A collection of pieces by Black feminist writers, scholars, educators, and activists.</i></div>
Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-25942412559151409752014-10-23T15:47:00.002-04:002014-10-23T15:47:32.301-04:00Queer Obsession: Why I Love Women's Soccer<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Earlier this week, the U.S. women’s soccer team was in Washington, DC to play Haiti in the CONCACAF World Cup qualifying tournament. My partner and I and several friends were there - with our two collective babies in tow. Next summer, my wife and I hope to fulfill a several years-long dream of attending a women’s World Cup in person. Since Canada is the 2015 host, we’re planning a soccer-crazed road trip to Montreal. </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">If you cared, I could probably name for you every player in the U.S. women’s national team pool right now. I could tell you where most of them played in college, where all of them play professionally, and I could probably ballpark their individual stats (national team appearances, international goals, yellow cards, goalkeeper shutouts, height, typical cleat color… you get the picture…). My wife and I have season tickets to the Washington Spirit, DC’s pro women’s soccer team, which plays in the NWSL (National Women’s Soccer League). During the spring and summer, going to the Spirit home games is one of the highlights of our week. When they play an away game, we watch them streamed live on Youtube - grainy, jumpy, unreliable feeds with terrible announcing (this past season, among other things, we suffered through one announcer going on for what felt like days about the weather in Nebraska. There’s no NWSL team in Nebraska, just FYI.). Still, we watch every game. We took our then three-week-old baby to the Spirit’s last home game in August. When they made the semifinals, the game was played in Seattle and didn’t begin on the east coast until 11:00pm. Due to newborn-induced sleep deprivation, I fell asleep before kick-off and couldn’t be roused to watch (my wife tried twice), but loyal fan that she is, my spouse stayed up for the whole game (they lost to the regular season champs), watching on our computer in bed. All summer, I took part in an online NWSL fantasy league and finished 182nd out of some 1,500-plus other soccer-crazed folks. The fantasy league ran a special playoffs challenge at the end of the season in which I tied for 18th place out of 445 participants.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">I wasn’t always this kind of sports fan. I’ve always been involved in athletics and have always enjoyed watching pro sports, but I’ve never been the kind of fan who buys season tickets, amasses encyclopedic knowledge of favorite players, or drives hours out of the way to see a game. With most other sports teams I follow, owning a t-shirt or a baseball hat with the team logo on it and catching a couple of live games per year more than satisfies me. </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">So what makes this so different? One thing is that it’s not just the sport itself. I love watching soccer in general, but I really love being at NWSL games. Player stereotypes aside (though there are several out queer female pro players in addition to a handful of others who are not explicitly out, but still readily recognizable to those of us looking for them), women’s soccer has a tremendous queer - and specifically, queer female - following, that really shapes the fan environment at games. The atmosphere at NWSL games and U.S. women’s games is different from other pro sporting events. Where else do you go to a pro game and see giant rainbow flags draped over the bleachers? Where in pro men's sports do you see a critical mass of visibly queer folks all around you - on the field, on the team staffs, and in the stands? The games feel celebratory and inclusive in ways that men's sports do not - often for both players and fans.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Professional sporting events are not always the most welcoming environments for female people and/or queer and trans people. Any of us could probably come up with dozens of examples of sexist, homophobic, and transphobic men's sports experiences, but one case in point - I play on a women’s recreational ice hockey team and a few years back, we sold programs at a Washington Capitals NHL game to raise some money for our club. My teammate sold a program to one lady who upon hearing that the funds were supporting our team said, “<i>Women’s</i> hockey? You have <i>got</i> to be kidding me.” She asked for her five dollars back and huffed off. Here we were at a <i>hockey</i> game, working our tails off and hopefully raising a little bit of money in large part <i>to grow the sport of hockey</i>, and this person not only didn’t like that idea, but was so offended by the thought of a women’s hockey team that she decided not to buy a program she otherwise would have. I was pretty taken aback by it, but I think that episode says a lot about the attitudes towards gender that folks commonly encounter at men’s sporting events. Being a male athlete in our culture so frequently becomes about embodying the quintessential elements of conventional masculinity - mental toughness, bravery, aggression, and showing physical strength. Being a female in the male sports environment revolves largely around being a spectator (or “eye candy”). </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The dynamics at women’s sporting events offer a refreshing change from the toxicity that can accompany men’s sports. It’s not that female athletes are all actively challenging the gender binary, proclaiming themselves feminists, and coming out as queer (most are not), but being a pro female athlete in our culture is still subversive by its very nature because it turns the traditional relationship between sports and notions of masculinity and femininity on its head. This is exciting, and also important work, especially as teams deal with the prospect of next year's women's World Cup being played on artificial turf rather than natural grass (no men's World Cup game has ever been - nor, I suspect, ever will be - played on turf. A number of high-profile international female players are suing FIFA for sex discrimination over this issue - <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/sports/soccer/womens-soccer-stars-sue-world-cup-organizers-over-artificial-turf.html">read here</a> for more). I also think this dynamic, in addition to a love of soccer, is what has fueled my addiction to the women’s game over the past many years, and my excitement for the future of the sport. </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /><span class="s1"></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><i>The world cup qualifying tournament for North and Central America and the Caribbean continues with two semifinal matches this Friday, October 24 (Fox Sports 1). The final, in which the U.S. is likely to play will be Sunday, October 26 at 6pm (also Fox Sports 1). And just FYI, 2015 season tickets for most NWSL teams are already available… </i></span></div>
Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-60863780976373292952014-03-31T07:30:00.000-04:002014-05-08T22:10:53.567-04:00Queering Taylor HansonIt's finally spring (or almost spring, if you're among our long-suffering Upper Midwestern kin). The days are longer, the air is warmer. People are starting to regain that sense of carefree hopefulness buoyed by the fresh air. It's a season perfectly suited to putting all of your favorite bubblegum pop songs at the top of the playlist and blissing out in the sunshine. And on that note, I have a confession to make. I am, and have long been, a Hanson fan. Many people in my life already know, and even embrace, this fact. Others may have come into this information at some point prior, and depending on personality, filed it away in one of three mental folders: "Things I Wish I Had Not Learned," "Things I Will Not Speak of In Order to Spare My Friend Shame," and "Ways to Shame Friends." In my case, the potential for shaming is quite extensive given that I can't excuse my love for this band as a phase I merely passed through in junior high. Nope. I still listen to them. I went to my first Hanson show not in 1997, but in 2007. I own post-MMMBop Hanson albums that most people probably don't know were ever made (you should really check out their third album, P.S...). <br />
<br />
At times I have kept my Hanson love deeply closeted, due to obvious fear of social stigma. Still, it comes up from time to time, and the more it's come up over the years, the more I have discovered the extent to which a vast number of genderqueer folks, lesbians and trans guys of my generation share this obsession. I won't name names (apologies to those who are found guilty by association. Feel free to unfriend me on Facebook. Save yourselves. I'll understand), but it's uncanny - almost person to person, folks I know across the transmasculine spectrum who are around my same age are Hanson fans. <br />
<br />
Why is this, you might ask? It's possible us genderqueer/lesbian/trans dudes just have a super heightened appreciation of stupidly catchy hooks and three-part harmony. But I think it's because we secretly identify deeply with one Mr. Taylor Hanson. How could we not? When he and his brothers first hit it big, his high-pitched voice and long hair made everyone think he was a girl. Unlike elsewhere in the U.S., Hanson was not in vogue at all among my junior high classmates and Taylor's androgyny was one of the reasons. Taylor Hanson brought out the best in sullen teenage America's homophobia and transphobia. But girlish as he may have been, Taylor's tomboyish streak, arguably queer masculinity, and overall gender ambiguity mesmerized me. <br />
<br />
After MMMBop, Hanson largely faded from the mainstream. Taylor is still down in Oklahoma somewhere with a wife and a bajillion kids and counting. I'm pretty sure he's a conservative and/or some kind of born-again Christian. But for a while in 1997, he performed a lovely kind of gender non-conformity in the public eye, without flinching, and for that, I suspect, he has forever endeared himself to lesbians and genderqueers the world over. Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-5196225438061039552014-03-09T19:56:00.001-04:002014-03-09T19:56:27.973-04:00Invisible Queer Gets Carded at the CasinoThe adventures of the invisible genderqueer continue! This weekend I went out to Delaware to play a hockey game. Afterwards, some of my teammates wanted to grab a beer and some food before heading back to DC. A guy at the rink told us the only place around to get drinks was the sports bar in the casino around the corner, so around to the casino we went. <br />
<br />
With my jeans, t-shirt, faded sneakers and hot-mess-post-hockey hair, I thought I was coming across pretty much dyke, though I have no doubt that in rural Delaware, I was looking more disheveled teenage boy. Obviously, you have to be 21 to enter a casino. I'm sure you can imagine what happened next. We had to walk through the casino itself to get to the bar. As soon as we walked in and I saw the ID check lady look me up and down and then throw me the stink eye, I knew I was likely in for a hassle. She went straight for me and said "You look pretty young, let me see that ID." As I was getting out my wallet, she continued, half like she was trying to joke with me and half like she was irritated, "You look like a kid walking in here." I handed her my driver's license. She looked back up at me with a skeptical look on her face and shook her head. She either didn't notice the fact that my driver's license says "female" or did not seem to draw any obvious conclusions from that fact. <br />
<br />
"You don't look that old." She said flatly.<br />
<br />
A lot of folks might take something like that as a compliment, but in this case it came across more like an accusation. What was I supposed to say? I shrugged and took back my ID as she reluctantly waved me in. It didn't become a real issue - clearly, she let me through - but what if she hadn't? I suppose I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. And then rant about it on my handy gender blog.<br />
<br />
Where will Invisible Queer go next? Who knows, but I do have a work conference coming up next month. Maybe someone will mistake me for my colleague's son or <a href="http://queeringtheline.blogspot.com/2011/10/cases-of-mistaken-identity.html">Justin Bieber's </a>union organizer alter ego again. Won't that be fun.<br />
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Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-10999324965246258642013-12-22T17:30:00.003-05:002013-12-22T17:30:23.827-05:005 Ridiculous Gender ThingsHere are five ridiculous things for no reason at all. Some related to the holidays, some not. All related to gender, of course. <br />
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<b>5. The "Mancave"</b><br />
This term seems to have become a buzzword that nobody (or at least all the straight guys on any episode of House Hunters ever) can stop saying. Specs for a proper "Mancave" can vary, but generally include a large, preferably windowless, room in the basement; a gi-normous television; and a healthy assortment of pro sports team fan paraphernalia. Admission limited to those with a penis. Heterosexuality required.<br />
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<b>4. Teen vitamins "for girls" and "for boys"</b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmAbr4w6adRsSUZIls00FBlf6ev6I6AUk7InMXcuacrht1mmcVyIshxQNekVbJSIU6Bbob_8ZVzDWxRQ5YVNVpCfndDXIhx1jLLdSu9JB-s3JtV65XCTbFM0MRDwGSu-KLfNsBuoz4pBw/s1600/teen_vitamins+one+a+day.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmAbr4w6adRsSUZIls00FBlf6ev6I6AUk7InMXcuacrht1mmcVyIshxQNekVbJSIU6Bbob_8ZVzDWxRQ5YVNVpCfndDXIhx1jLLdSu9JB-s3JtV65XCTbFM0MRDwGSu-KLfNsBuoz4pBw/s200/teen_vitamins+one+a+day.jpg" height="198" width="200" /></a></div>
This phenomenon is nothing new, but the marketing associated with
these things is so offensive, I experience shock anew each time I see
them. First, there's this well-known brand, advertising support for
"healthy skin" for girls and "healthy muscle function" for boys:<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
And then there's "Power Teen," with packaging reminiscent of Monster energy drinks, and that appear to feature something called "Feminine Complex" in the girls' version (the boys' version comes with blue instead of pink-themed packaging and does not include "Masculine Complex," but rather "BlemishShield Complex." Very complex indeed).</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6jUR1CpWeRRniQSk9O9fUwyOZYcX0gyIhppYU64TE-bOqvzYsueKgbfpyP3mvXaT0Hc5aADHV1wBYPipjgRBpezubC3wzrWJzchGSgu8sb4LBGsmhBrpkV6WGWPuDHPURaqtqhzqtHFY/s1600/Natures-Plus-Source-of-Life-Power-Teen-for-Her-Chewable-Multi-Wild-Berry-097467300040.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6jUR1CpWeRRniQSk9O9fUwyOZYcX0gyIhppYU64TE-bOqvzYsueKgbfpyP3mvXaT0Hc5aADHV1wBYPipjgRBpezubC3wzrWJzchGSgu8sb4LBGsmhBrpkV6WGWPuDHPURaqtqhzqtHFY/s200/Natures-Plus-Source-of-Life-Power-Teen-for-Her-Chewable-Multi-Wild-Berry-097467300040.jpg" height="200" width="110" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
One thing's for sure - I feel like I'm getting a feminine complex just from looking at this shit. Maybe it's a good thing we all just learned that vitamins are slowly destroying our livers. Maybe next they'll offer us "his and hers" cirrhosis medication.</div>
<br />
<b>3. Those "He went to Jared" commercials:</b><br />
All jewelry commercials are pretty bad, but these take the cake - and since the holidays are nigh, it feels like every other commercial is one of them. If there's something on TV these days more reliant on traditional gender roles to sell a product, let's hear about it. The thing about these commercials that I can't get over - besides the sickening heteronormativity - is that lately, they've been advertising the weirdest things, like rainbow-colored diamonds and charm bracelets for adult women, which the commercials seem to suggest should be worn to things like formal work events. Who is actually wearing this stuff? Does anyone even want these things? I can't even.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>2. This totally unfortunate greeting card:</b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe-NJN2V_XjDjbIS8gi8GIsgCmw3qbOS-Zg5DGofMBjJMkVdxLv_kHuWHiO4VpnGoLgV5a0bxPQ_4mEmgQKwcrfuIO68vLH0GKWmLKul11TwZbyp7rGW8RYmPyuvXWgfEPyFvvfzfoMFw/s1600/Cowardly+Lion+both.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe-NJN2V_XjDjbIS8gi8GIsgCmw3qbOS-Zg5DGofMBjJMkVdxLv_kHuWHiO4VpnGoLgV5a0bxPQ_4mEmgQKwcrfuIO68vLH0GKWmLKul11TwZbyp7rGW8RYmPyuvXWgfEPyFvvfzfoMFw/s400/Cowardly+Lion+both.png" height="274" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
Not only is this card horribly transphobic, homophobic, and sexist, it also takes aim at the Wizard of Oz, which has so many delightfully queer elements, and is an all-time favorite movie of mine. This card is utter sacrilege. Don't worry, Lion. You flaunt those curls. I've got your back.<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
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<b> 1. The "what your guy is really thinking" category of magazine articles and self-help books:</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5VlO72ErgcjUwQaB8wMQLnA8yVsafwcH9hserjKMRd70htbARRAjRy3ONefHHqHdx1Uu-335KfUfUq7Pnr4gxgajWmm-voEEffrPxIt5cSHuW256cEvuVpQs9rHpnXyTtwvEjco5e9oY/s1600/what+your+man+really+thinks+formatted.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5VlO72ErgcjUwQaB8wMQLnA8yVsafwcH9hserjKMRd70htbARRAjRy3ONefHHqHdx1Uu-335KfUfUq7Pnr4gxgajWmm-voEEffrPxIt5cSHuW256cEvuVpQs9rHpnXyTtwvEjco5e9oY/s1600/what+your+man+really+thinks+formatted.png" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheHzAiM9us_9BqQ1u2DrHPCRVclRwXBXTVIB8lEagUFJd7eb7FRwlS8Xz2n9zijBg-jMhbYYquSgwraNVib-jKbWgZO_L7GUbUoYPPE_3AIfWI3flnMO-XWhkje7lUIu4EKQiZ4NQDqn8/s1600/manology+formatted.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheHzAiM9us_9BqQ1u2DrHPCRVclRwXBXTVIB8lEagUFJd7eb7FRwlS8Xz2n9zijBg-jMhbYYquSgwraNVib-jKbWgZO_L7GUbUoYPPE_3AIfWI3flnMO-XWhkje7lUIu4EKQiZ4NQDqn8/s1600/manology+formatted.png" /></a>See above re: sexism, heterosexism, and related topics. Found in everything from Cosmo to all parenting magazines ever, these articles can advise you on how "your guy" wants to have sex, how "your guy" is adjusting to parenthood, or what communication styles work best for (you guessed it) "your guy." Because god forbid you could just ask him. Or that he would just tell you. But that, of course, would then prevent anyone from marketing "men's secrets" to women. There must be some major conspiracy afoot in which monogamous heterosexual relationships are valued by the culture at large more highly than other kinds of relationships and the people in said heterosexual relationships are subject to immense social pressure to conform to traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, which include the supposed inability of male and female people to properly communicate with one another without the aid of advice literature meant to help women read men's minds and which they must pay good money to obtain. Oh wait, there <i>is</i> such a conspiracy. It's called capitalism. See also: patriarchy.<br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-90904527134743076442013-12-14T09:00:00.000-05:002013-12-14T15:53:25.540-05:00The Gender Book<br />
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There's a gender-tastic new book coming out, hopefully in the spring, called <a href="http://www.thegenderbook.com/home/4553374745">The Gender Book</a>. The project is the work of Mel Reiff Hill and Jay Mays along with, in their own words, "a whole big beautiful community." This "whole big beautiful community" of folks have contributed both content and financial resources to the book, which is being funded via an <a href="http://igg.me/p/the-gender-book/x/5727819" target="_blank">Indiegogo campaign</a> (you can join in the effort <a href="http://igg.me/p/the-gender-book/x/5727819" target="_blank">HERE</a>). </div>
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How I did not know about this project until this week is beyond me - I must have spent this whole fall with my head under a rock - but I know about it now and I have to say that I am pretty stoked. I have been waiting for something like this for a long time.<br />
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The aim of the project is to make gender theory and concepts like performativity accessible to everyone. The book uses original artwork along with text to convey its message that gender and sex are complex, fluid, and culturally specific. The authors explain in plain language - but without unnecessary over-simplification - how gender is constructed, how gender differs from physical sex, how gender socialization happens, how different people express gender identity, and so on.<br />
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The Gender Book will be important for lots of reasons, but I'm most excited because I often feel that the complexities of gender theory fall exclusively within the purview of academics. I finished my master's degree in 2009 and since then have done relatively little academic reading and writing, but some months ago I pulled a feminist studies reader from the bookshelf and starting slogging through an article on gender identity and performativity. Having not exercised my scholarly prose muscles for a while, I was a little rusty and found myself doing that thing where you read the same sentence over and over again without absorbing any meaning. In the end, my brain warmed up and I was able to get through it and pull out the main arguments, but not without some effort. I sat there wondering if I - a person ostensibly trained to decipher such texts - struggled with this, how on earth would we ever convey these ideas to the mainstream? I was worried because this stuff is so important and yet almost everything written about it sounds like academics talking to each other and nobody else. Academic work is important - it helps push the limits of our understanding of history, culture, power, and the assumptions we take for granted, but that work is enhanced when it is also accessible to everyone. Projects like this invite everyone into the conversation. <br />
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<a href="http://www.thegenderbook.com/communities/4/004/009/184/734//images/4584114963.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" class="fancybox-image" height="206" src="http://www.thegenderbook.com/communities/4/004/009/184/734//images/4584114963.jpg" width="320" /></a>The finished book will be available online for free in its electronic version, but if you want to get your hands on some hard copies, you can pre-order via the Indiegogo campaign (see link above). The campaign runs until the end of December, so there are only a couple of weeks left to contribute. The book is projected to be completed and ready to print by March 2014. I'll be counting the days.<br />
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For more info (and more previews from the finished book!), visit:<b> <a href="http://www.thegenderbook.com/">www.thegenderbook.com</a></b></div>
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-23256922388416648702013-12-12T18:00:00.000-05:002013-12-13T10:40:54.973-05:00Let's Speak QueerThe English language does not make things easy on genderqueer folks, or on anyone who prefers the gender neutral over the gender specific (as in "mailman" vs. "mail carrier" - they mean the same thing, but "mailman" rolls so easily off the tongue that despite thinking about this stuff constantly, even I have to take a second every time to remember to say "mail carrier" instead). English pronouns are tricky. The sir/ma'am binary makes addressing strangers feel like traversing a social etiquette minefield (at least any cashier/waiter/clothing store clerk who has ever encountered me seems to think so). <br />
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As a matter of fact, I got called "ma'am" and "miss" about seventeen million times the other day while buying a sandwich (Yes. Seventeen million times. By precise count of the official binary-O-meter, patent pending.). It threw me off a bit because that happens to me so rarely. I've let my hair grow out a little bit in the front and I was all bundled up for winter, so I'll blame it on that. Still, it got me thinking about how we could address strangers using words less gender-charged than "sir" or "ma'am" without resorting to the less-than-polite "Hey you," which most people tend not to appreciate. Here's my food for thought: <br />
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1. <b>"Friend"</b> (In place of sir/ma'am). <br />
You go to order a sandwich and instead of asking you, "What are you having today, ma'am?" the cashier would say "What are you having today, friend?" This is also helpful for catching the attention of someone whose name you do not know, i.e., "Excuse me, friend! You've dropped your wallet!" Added bonus: In addition to being gender neutral, the use of "friend" allows you to avoid the more condescending/potentially offensive "sweetie" or "honey-pie," the awkwardly formal "sir," and the age crapshoot associated with deciding between "ma'am" and "miss." <br />
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2. <b>"Good-lookin"</b> (In place of he/him/she/her/they/them)<br />
Unfortunately, I can't take credit for this one. A good friend of mine came up with this brilliant idea as a means of talking about folks in the third person without using gendered pronouns (and getting to compliment everyone you're talking about to boot). Example: "Joe is headed to the store. Good-lookin is going to pick up a few groceries for us." Plural use is also encouraged: "My relatives are coming in for a visit. Good-lookin are the best houseguests ever."<br />
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3. <b>"People"</b> (In place of women/men)<br />
I know this one seems obvious, but hear me out - this one is less about language itself and more about gendered language as a marketing ploy. I cannot even explain to you how excited I would be to find myself at the pharmacy and suddenly see in place of all the bodywash "for women" and deodorant "for men" a display advertising "Soap! For people!" I mean, seriously, since when did male-bodied and female-bodied people start needing different soap? When I was a kid, we had one bar of soap in the bathtub at a time. Everybody used the same soap. Everybody got clean. This is apparently no longer the case for many people. Now, I do understand that some people like soap that smells like coconuts and daisies. Some people like soap that smells like industrial-strength laundry detergent. Still others prefer a hint of fake mountain air. Although soap-makers assume these preferences fall along gendered lines, none of this means we must have gender apartheid in the soap aisle. I think soap companies should consider marketing their products in ways that would expand their target audiences. For instance, a conventionally masculine guy who likes the delicate scent of lavender probably won't buy lavender bodywash "for women," but he might buy lavender bodywash "for people who enjoy lavender," thus expanding the potential consumer base for lavender soap. I'll be waiting by the phone for that marketing consultant job offer from Suave anytime now.<br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-54300770851891055362013-11-17T08:00:00.000-05:002013-12-12T15:08:08.834-05:00Homelessness Awareness Week: Queer Youth<b>Queer Homeless Youth</b><br />
This week is Homelessness Awareness Week. We all know that LGBT youth are at higher risk of being bullied, harassed, and attacked. LGBT youth are more likely than their straight and <a href="http://queeringtheline.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-social-justice-dictionary.html" target="_blank">cis-gender </a>peers to suffer from depression or attempt suicide. LGBT youth and young adults, and particularly trans adults are more likely to be unemployed, impoverished, and unable to access stable housing. These aren't uplifting facts, but they're important facts to remember this week and every week because LGBT youth are also at higher risk of experiencing homelessness than their straight and cis peers. When we're talking about homelessness, it's easy to forget about the kids. We think of the homeless military vets, and we know disability plays a big role in homelessness. We think of homeless families struggling with unemployment or lack of affordable housing. We forget, or at least I do, that there are kids who are homeless and all on their own. As many as 40 percent of those homeless youth identify as LGBT. <i>40 percent</i>. <br />
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There are a lot of reasons that young people find themselves homeless. For queer youth, the reasons often tie back to bigotry. It's not uncommon that kids who come out to their friends, families, or churches are either kicked out or made to feel so miserable about themselves that leaving seems like the only option. All LGBT youth, homeless or not, have a challenging road to travel. They might experience teasing and harassment from classmates at school. They might experience exclusion, both purposeful and inadvertent, from activities and social events that are easy and welcoming to straight and cis kids. If they come from a religious family, they might be made to think that who they are and what they feel is an affront to god. Worst of all, they might be told by a frustrated, angry, or fearful parent that if they are gay or lesbian or trans or queer that they aren't welcome at home anymore. <br />
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Here are the facts:<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*</span><br />
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<li>As many as <b>40%</b> of homeless youth are LGBT.</li>
<li>62% of homeless LGBT youth have attempted suicide.</li>
<li>58% of queer homeless young people report being sexually assaulted. </li>
<li><b>63% of homeless queer youth cite conflict at home as the reason they are homeless.</b></li>
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That last stat is the most frustrating because it's the most preventable problem and often the most heartbreaking. There was <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-robertson/just-because-he-breathes-learning-to-truly-love-our-gay-son_b_3478971.html" target="_blank">a story in the Huffington Post</a> several months back written by a woman whose gay son had struggled with drug addiction in his teens, got clean, but then had a relapse as a young adult. He overdosed and died. His mother describes how for years after her son came out (he told her he was gay when he was 12), she and his father tried to make him change. They were sure he could be straight, or at least not be gay. They were a Christian family and she admits that she and her husband used their son's faith to manipulate him into trying to "overcome" his sexuality. They told him, essentially, that he would have to choose between Jesus and being gay. Their son loved Jesus and his mother now acknowledges the agony that this false dichotomy must have caused him. In telling her story, the thing she says that is most important, I think, is that at the time, she and her husband believed they were acting out of love for their son. They did not physically threaten or hurt him. They didn't ask him to leave the house. They told him they would always love him. But they quietly, carefully wore him down until he came to the conclusion that because he could not be himself and practice his faith simultaneously, god must not want him. He turned to drugs. Much time passed when his family didn't know where he was. Though they later reconciled and his parents came to embrace him - everything about him - with open arms, unfortunately, we know the story has a tragic ending. </div>
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There are some problems that families can't always solve for their LGBT kids - being bullied at school, or making sure that school officials are sensitive and accepting to LGBT youth, or ensuring that there are education policies in place that reflect the experience of all kids - queer, trans, gay, straight, cis, and everything else. Families can work to make those things better, but there's no immediate fix. There is an immediate fix for feeling unloved, unwanted, or uncertain at home. When children come out, families must make their homes a haven of safety, peace, and love. It doesn't mean the topic can't be discussed, or parents can't ask questions, but parents can approach the situation respectfully and lovingly. Don't bully or manipulate. If you're having a difficult time, share that with your partner, or a friend, or adult relative. If your child is a teen, you might be able to say something like, "I feel a little scared about this because it is new to me and I have a lot to learn, but I'm sure everything is going to be fine and we can do this together." Anything else is probably a conversation you should have with another adult and not your child. </div>
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<b>Fake it 'Til You Make It</b></div>
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<a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/news/2013/05/29/64583/3-barriers-that-stand-between-lgbt-youth-and-healthier-futures/" target="_blank">The research shows that LGBT youth</a> who feel their families accept them are much less likely to experience negative outcomes like homelessness, drug abuse, suicide, and HIV infection. <a href="http://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_full.pdf" target="_blank">The following stats</a> reflect the experiences of transgender folks, but the trend holds true for those across the LGBT community:<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*</span></div>
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<li> Among trans people who have experienced family rejection, <b>26% </b>have also been homeless. </li>
<li><b>48% </b>of transgender folks who have experienced domestic violence report having been homeless.</li>
<li><b>Among those who experienced family acceptance, only 9% reported experiencing homelessness.</b></li>
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This will be hard for some parents, especially those who hold religious beliefs that homosexuality is a sin, for instance. In this case, <i>fake it 'til you make it</i>. Seriously. Fake it. Because eventually, you probably will start to change your mind about things. At the very least, you'll want to be part of your child's life as they become an adult. You'll see that being happy for your child makes them happy. You'll see that LGBT folks aren't really that scary. You'll see that your child is the same amazing person they always were. And you'll want your child to be around for that, I'm pretty sure. </div>
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<i>*Sources</i>: </div>
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Center for American Progress, "3 Barriers that Stand Between LGBT Youth and Healthier Futures." <a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/news/2013/05/29/64583/3-barriers-that-stand-between-lgbt-youth-and-healthier-futures/">http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/news/2013/05/29/64583/3-barriers-that-stand-between-lgbt-youth-and-healthier-futures/</a></div>
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"Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey." <a href="http://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_full.pdf">http://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_full.pdf</a></div>
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Upworthy, "INFOGRAPHIC: One of the Biggest Challenges Facing Gay People Isn't Marriage Equality." <a href="http://www.upworthy.com/infographic-one-of-the-biggest-challenges-facing-gay-people-isnt-marriage-equali?g=3">http://www.upworthy.com/infographic-one-of-the-biggest-challenges-facing-gay-people-isnt-marriage-equali?g=3</a></div>
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Linda Robertson, "Just Because He Breathes: Learning to Truly Love Our Gay Son." <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-robertson/just-because-he-breathes-learning-to-truly-love-our-gay-son_b_3478971.html" target="_blank">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-robertson/just-because-he-breathes-learning-to-truly-love-our-gay-son_b_3478971.html </a><br />
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Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-32172155352283397372013-10-19T15:31:00.001-04:002014-03-09T19:46:03.062-04:00Invisible Queer Buys a DrinkHere's another one for both the "Cases of Mistaken Identity" and "Your Unsolicited Commentary is Annoying the Shit out of Me" files. We were at the Washington Capitals game last Wednesday when I was approached by a complete stranger apparently very committed to doing his part to enforce the drinking age. I had bought two alcoholic beverages and was carrying them back to our seats when I realized I'd forgotten my ticket at the cash register. I turned around to retrieve it and some guy got in my way and insisted on knowing if I was old enough to drink. Still focused on getting back to my accidentally abandoned ticket, I said, "Yes, thanks," and tried to continue on my way. He fell into step beside me and said, "Because you look younger than me and I don't think-..." I cut him off and said, "I'm twenty-nine, actually. Thanks." He <i>still </i>wouldn't leave me alone, though he expressed surprise at my answer. I couldn't tell if he was trying to recover from his obvious first assumption that I was a teenage boy, or that he still didn't believe me. Either way, he looked genuinely shocked at how short I was with him.<br />
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Seriously. WTF. One, I had obviously been sold the alcohol already, meaning someone whose business it <i>is</i> to ask whether I am of age had already determined that I was, in fact, plenty old enough to purchase drinks. Second, what was this guy planning to do about his false assumption that I was underage? Make a citizen's arrest? I'm just not certain what the point of this conversation was. It felt like harassment.<br />
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I have no doubt that this entire situation transpired because the guy in question had read me as male and could not seem to re-calibrate to read me as female when I informed him that I was an age that wouldn't make much sense if I were male-bodied (namely, my voice). To me, this indicates, <a href="http://queeringtheline.blogspot.com/2013/08/invisible-queers-age-and-ambiguity-in.html" target="_blank">as I've said before</a>, that people just aren't looking for queer folks. People see males and females and expect these to be two (and of course, only two) easily distinguishable categories. Being able to see people who bend the binary, including adult masculine-presenting female-bodied folks, requires <i>expecting</i> those people to exist. I've found that many people do not have this expectation. If I see someone who looks like they could be a boy or young man, but who is exhibiting signs that are incongruent with that assumption (i.e., wearing a wedding ring or using the women's restroom or openly carrying alcoholic beverages in a manner that indicates she or he is confident in her or his legal right to purchase and consume such beverages), I would not continue to assume that such a person is a teenager. I'd assume this person is queer or otherwise gender non-conforming. I'm still not sure that my "friend" at the hockey arena understood what I was trying to convey to him - that I'm an adult female, not an underage male. And if he did get the message, he seemed offended that I hadn't provided this information to him more compassionately. I'm so tired of this. Can we revive the old "We're here, we're queer" slogan, perhaps adding the addendum, "And some of us are not teenagers. So stop bothering me, you irritating asshole." Yeah, I know, it doesn't rhyme. I'll keep working on it. <br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-70554153805808041472013-09-22T15:37:00.002-04:002013-09-22T15:37:47.305-04:00LGBT: At the Intersection of T and LA blogger at <a href="http://www.villageq.com/" target="_blank">Village Q</a> (which you should absolutely check out, by the way...) wrote a <a href="http://www.villageq.com/2013/07/26/glbt-vs-queer/" target="_blank">post</a> this summer about her preference for the term queer over "GLBT" or its numerous variations. Although this is something I've articulated myself on numerous occasions and though I have long embraced "queer" over "lesbian," somehow, this particular piece still hit me like a ton of bricks. <i>Yes</i>, I thought. <i>There is someone else out there speaking my language</i>. Because that's how I frequently feel as I try to navigate a world that resists the kind of fluidity I'm seeking at every possible turn. When I'm around non-queer or non-LGBT identified folks, I sometimes feel that while I'm fluent in their tongue, I'm speaking the language in a way that nobody understands, though many are eager to learn a few words here and there. When I'm in a lesbian-dominated space, I still feel like the outsider. I don't use the right words. I can't quite grasp the dialect. Though I've been thinking about this for months, it's been difficult to get this post written. I don't want people to misunderstand. I love lesbians. I just think I'm something else, despite having difficulty at times articulating why. <br />
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I'm often uncomfortable in lesbian spaces and in lesbian community. Despite the fact that I am female-bodied and have a woman-identified female partner, I don't embrace "lesbian" as a means of describing myself. Queer, yes. Lesbian, no. I don't feel a strong connection with woman-ness and "lesbian" has always felt all wrong whenever I've used it in reference to myself. I also don't identify as transgender in the sense that I don't intend to physically transition my body, though I often feel a greater affinity and sense of identity with trans folks than I do with lesbians. Still, my community is largely composed of people who do identify as lesbians. The world at large (when not lumping me in with teenage boys) also tends to read me as lesbian. This feeling of being at a crossroads of identities is what led to the creation of this blog.<br />
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The past two summers, my partner and I have spent a number of weekends in Rehoboth Beach, which is a pretty gay-friendly place. There are a bunch of gay and lesbian bars and hangouts that we've occasionally dropped by. I feel so out of place in these places. I'm always there with my partner and with our friends, so it's always fun. It's not a feeling of being out of place that is always unpleasant, but it does feel like there's the expectation from strangers and acquaintances that I'm part of what's going on - that I'm fluent, so to speak, in this language and culture. And I'm not. There are land mines to avoid, too - like my masculinity. I'm not butch at all, but rather place myself somewhere on the trans-masculine spectrum in a way that feels very different to me than being a butch lesbian. While not generally an issue, this is sometimes problematic among lesbians who prefer exclusively female company, or women-only spaces. The assumption is that I'm on board with that and I'm not. It makes me feel a bit like panicking. <br />
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This is what feels problematic to me about "LGBT" as an acronym for the group of people that all of us queer, gay, trans, etc... folks are. Where am I in there? When I say it all together - "LGBT" it feels maybe OK, but take apart the letters and I'm lost. I'm not L. I'm not G. I'm not B. I'm not T. Or at the very least I'm not <i>only</i> any of those things, though my life experiences reflect all four. I've been part of many communities of both largely queer-identified and straight/cisgender-identified folks where I have not felt stuck at this particular crossroad. I feel stuck at it now and it's caused me to do a lot of thinking about how to navigate this and how to be clearer about what I feel and what I want out of community with others in a way that's not off-putting to people who feel very differently about their identities than I do. I want to be in community with lesbians, but not at the expense of my sense of self. Like the Village Q blogger, the simple thing that feels most right to me is to clearly identify myself as "queer" rather than lesbian, or some variation on "LGBT." The language of identity is complex and it's my hope that we can strive to become a more multi-lingual community - keep on talking.<br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-25654505975808987082013-09-22T14:44:00.000-04:002013-09-22T14:44:44.074-04:00Rethinking the Definition of "Cis-gender"I recently came across the <a href="http://eminism.org/blog/entry/399" target="_blank">following piece</a> from Eminism.org blogger Emi Koyama. Although I find some of the ways she articulates this idea problematic, Koyama presents an intriguing call to rethink the definitions of both "trans" and "cis" and the divide we sometimes create between them. These categories, along with experiences of both sexism and transphobia, are often more complex than we imagine. <br />
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<b>Find the full post here: <a href="http://eminism.org/blog/entry/399" target="_blank">"'Cis' is real - even if it is carelessly articulated"</a></b><br />
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What do you think?<br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-57978530908079785632013-08-26T11:20:00.000-04:002013-08-26T18:26:58.509-04:00Work DragSometime ago I heard an acquaintance use the phrase "work drag" to describe another friend's professional attire (which was much more feminine than her regular not-at-work clothes). Other friends in earshot, mostly lesbians and older than me, seemed deeply familiar with the term - and at the fact that the friend in "drag" wanted to go change immediately before joining us. I got the meaning but was also fascinated by the concept - I'd never heard the work clothes conundrum described in this way. <br />
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At the time, I was privately struggling with work and interview wardrobe issues of my own. I recently wrote <a href="http://queeringtheline.blogspot.com/2013/05/gender-codeswitching.html" target="_blank">a post on gender codeswitching</a> - the ways in which queer folks often must adapt their behavior to the circumstances they're in, either to protect their physical safety, or for professional or other reasons. Clothing is a substantial piece of this, since clothes play a hugely symbolic role in our social interactions. Regardless of sexuality or gender identity, everyone uses clothes to send signals to others - about what sports teams we favor, what kind of work we do, how much money we have, whether we're outdoorsy or bookish, or both. We use clothes to convey personality - an outgoing person who likes to experiment and bend the rules might wear loud, mismatched colors together. Someone who prefers to blend into the scenery might choose more muted colors. In addition to conveying information with our own clothing, we also try to gather information by observing what others are wearing. Uniforms often indicate an official role in public safety or health. People often interpret dirty or torn clothes as a sign of poverty or homelessness but the same could also mean the person has a job as a painter, carpenter, or gardener - occupations in which fancy clothes would be inappropriate.<br />
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For queer folks, clothes can simultaneously be a haven of self-expression and our worst enemy. In relation to work, I've found this to be true especially in situations where I have to dress up - interviews, fancy dinners, meetings with Important People. I'm fortunate to have a job at the moment where relatively casual attire is the norm - jeans or slacks and a button-down shirt fits the bill for pretty much any day. <br />
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Dressing up is another story. I don't mind it - and have actually come to enjoy it - when I'm dressing up for an affair with good friends. They get me and aren't usually surprised when I show up in a tie or the like. At a fancy work event, or worse, at an interview, what to wear requires a delicate calculus. A couple of years ago, when I was applying for full-time permanent positions in earnest, I spent a lot of time agonizing over how out I wanted to be when going in for an interview. I'm always out in the sense that I don't hesitate to refer to my partner and I don't purposefully hide things, but clothing also conveys a certain message. If I go to an interview in a men's suit and tie, that's a very different way of being "out," especially in terms of gender identity than going to an interview wearing a more gender-ambiguous outfit. <br />
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I don't think this is an issue with simple answers - it's part of the world queer and gender-non-conforming folks must navigate. For those of us who feel we're at a crossroads or identities, there are few places where the gender binary becomes more obvious than when it's time to dress up in nice clothes. My partner is an attorney and has found that some judges are very particular about this. Some essentially require female attorneys to wear skirt suits in their courtrooms (rather than pantsuits). I've never worn a women's pantsuit and imagine I'd be fairly uncomfortable in one. But a skirt suit? No way. I don't know what I'd do in a profession like that. Where do those of us in the middle fit? If a skirt is "dressy" for women and suits are "dressy" for men, what about the rest of us? Who gets to be told they look nice? So much of that is gendered. When we're surrounded by other queer folks, it's easier. In the wider world, not so much. <br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-91573042864770752502013-08-19T07:00:00.000-04:002014-05-31T15:47:05.921-04:00"I'm Not Racist, But": Colorblindness, Privilege, and Humor (or lack thereof)<b>"I'm not racist, but..."</b><br />
If I had a dollar for every time I've heard someone start a story with that caveat and then go on to say something completely offensive and inappropriate, I'd be rich. What gets under my skin most about this turn of phrase is that, at least in my experience, it is largely used by white folks while in the company of other white folks to give some example of their discomfort with people of color (or immigrants, or neighborhoods where the white population is very small or "in transition," or people for whom English is not a first language, and so on...) while still following the social rules of the <a href="http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-36-fall-2009/feature/colorblindness-new-racism" target="_blank">colorblind era</a>. Even while following the "rules" of colorblindness, these kinds of stories convey a sense of uneasiness with colorblindness. I can't help but feel when this happens that white folks are trying to create a space for themselves to say things that they know are a little (or a lot) inappropriate - things they wouldn't say if people of color were within earshot. It makes me feel like white folks in exclusively white company believe themselves to be in a momentary White People Club and are testing whether those around them are also members. It's white folks' code for "I want to say this really problematic thing that is questionably funny and almost certainly not OK, but you're white, too, so you won't mind that I say this." But I do mind.<br />
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I am white. As a result, despite the fact that I try on a regular basis to make clear that I am in fact not "colorblind," but actively anti-racist, white folks still try to tell me their "I'm not racist" stories so that I can be in the White People Club and, I can only imagine, assuage their fears that what they're saying might actually be racist. <i>But you know what I mean</i>, I can almost hear them say. I can't do it. I don't want to be in the club. It's easy for folks to say they're not racists when they define racism as outward expressions of prejudice, a la the KKK or Bill O'Reilly, but in truth we're all racists in that we were raised in a systematically racist society (see the following re: <b><a href="http://newjimcrow.com/" target="_blank">race and mass incarceration</a></b>, <b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Black-Kids-Sitting-Together-Cafeteria/dp/0465083617" target="_blank">segregation in the cafeteria</a></b>, <b><a href="http://www.nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf" target="_blank">white privilege</a></b>, <b><a href="http://www.timwise.org/2013/02/tim-wise-on-cnn-newsroom-racial-typecasting-in-hollywood-advertising-21613/" target="_blank">race in the media</a></b>, <b><a href="http://www.westviewpress.com/book.php?isbn=9780813343860" target="_blank">American perspectives on the "third world,"</a></b> and for good measure, I think it never hurts to re-read the <b><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Autobiography_of_Malcolm_X.html?id=NlkifTXux_cC" target="_blank">Autobiography of Malcolm X</a></b>.). <br />
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We may strive as individuals to combat inter-personal prejudice and we may find overtly hostile expressions of racism like violence, name-calling or legal segregation repugnant, but we are steeped in a culture of bias and marginalization. Escaping that isn't impossible, but it will take more than hoping that having a black president has erased systemic discrimination, or folks like Paula Deen tearfully begging us all to understand that despite what she said in the past, she's not racist. We struggle with this. I think the recent internet "meme-fication" of African-Americans being interviewed on local news stations is a prime example (Think Antoine Dodson, Sweet Brown, or Charles Ramsey). These things have a tendency to go viral in a way that suggests we've lost track of the line between humor and mockery. A while back, Slate posted an article called <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/05/07/charles_ramsey_amanda_berry_rescuer_becomes_internet_meme_video.html" target="_blank">"The Troubling Viral Trend of the 'Hilarious' Black Neighbor"</a> exploring this notion, and it's been a <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/05/09/182622613/what-we-can-learn-from-the-viral-spotlight-on-charles-ramsey" target="_blank">topic of discussion on NPR</a>, as well. What's most troubling about some of these "memes" is that the gravity of the stories is forgotten. Dodson and Ramsey were both doing good deeds under frightening circumstances - Dodson by helping his sister fend off a rapist who had broken into their home and Ramsey by helping three trapped women and a child escape imprisonment in his neighbor's house. Brown, of course, was the victim of a house fire. As children we're taught that a joke is funny when folks laugh with you and cruel when folks laugh at you. I get the distinct feeling that neither Dodson, Ramsey, nor Brown are laughing. <br />
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This post doesn't have a neat and tidy feel-good ending. There's no easy way to wrap this up with some kind of simple, here's-how-we-fix-this message. The obvious things to do are, for white folks, to abandon the "I'm not racist" caveat. White folks or other folks in positions of privilege can also challenge these stories when people tell them. There are lots of ways to express discomfort - I try to accomplish this by either refraining from laughing at jokes that aren't funny even if others are laughing, or explaining why these kinds of stories and jokes make me upset, or simply getting up and walking away to indicate I'm not interested. But I've also engaged in things I'm not proud of. After the Antoine Dodson auto-tuned video came out, I certainly watched it more than a few times. I laughed. I showed it to others. I've learned a lot since then. I've done some self-reflection about why I thought that video was so funny. I've stopped watching. I've stopped singing the song. I think we could probably benefit from more interrogation of things like this both inter-personally and on a national level. We divide things into rigid categories - racist, or not racist. As individuals, most people do their darndest to separate themselves from any notions of outward racism. Because it's much harder to identify, we rarely consider our contributions, whether explicit or implicit, to systemic racism. We're easily offended when anyone suggests we do participate in such a system. This isn't helpful and we can do better. So let's stop saying we're not racist. Let's stop taking it personally when someone points out that the past and present marginalization of people of color in the U.S. and elsewhere globally has something to do with us. Let's forget colorblindness and set ourselves on a path towards actual equality. They say admitting you have a problem is half the battle. I have a problem. I benefit from a racist system. If you're listening, I'd love to tell you a story about that.</div>
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Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-49696793157182222632013-08-06T19:50:00.004-04:002014-03-09T19:45:49.528-04:00Invisible Queers: Age and ambiguity in the gender binaryI've mentioned before that I'm often mistaken for younger than I am. Just a few years ago, being mistaken for a teenage boy was a common - sometimes near daily - experience for me. More recently, that's lessened a bit, which has been a relief. Still, it happens often enough to be frustrating, and the ways in which it happens lead to further frustration, since people's assumptions often come across as awkward at best and rude or insensitive at worst. <br />
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Just the other night, I was out with my partner and a friend of ours and our friend ordered a bottle of wine for the table. The waiter said nothing to any of us about our ages when we ordered the wine, but when she was bringing us glasses, she hesitated to give me one. As she was putting the glasses down, she looked at me and said, "Um, do you get one, too?" Exasperated and totally out of patience for this kind of bullshit, I provided a rather curt response (which I later felt bad about - the result of my Midwestern upbringing and my sympathy for the fact that food service is hard, hard work...). The waiter fumbled for words and ended up telling me I look young in an attempt to turn her faux pas into a compliment. After my table-mates and I got over the awkwardness of the moment, my partner pointed out that her approach to the situation was not only awkward and offensive to me, but also had the backhanded effect of implying that my partner and our friend looked old (or at least too old to be carded). All bad. The unfortunate waiter could have easily solved any doubts she had from the get-go by asking everyone at the table to show ID when we had first ordered the wine. Perhaps it's not common practice for her to do so, but given our waiter's confusion about me, doing so in that case seems like an obvious solution.<br />
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In other posts I've expressed frustration about this same sort of "mistaken identity" that I'm often the victim of. I've been mistaken for my younger brother by friends of my parents, mistaken as the son of more than one co-worker by others, and mistaken for a "kid" in all manner of places. I've come to realize that aside from the fact that there are usually simple solutions folks could employ to determine my status as an adult before inserting both feet directly into their mouths, the real reason I get angry when this happens is that people might more readily see an adult when they look at me were they expecting to see queer bodies in their midst. When people look at me and see a boy or a "kid" it's not just because I look young or chose to wear a baseball cap or a t-shirt that day (plenty of other adults look youngish and wear hats and short sleeves everyday), but because they aren't looking for genderqueer folk. It's almost hard to get mad at the individual people who do this because their brains are on autopilot. They are looking for adult masculine (enough) men and adult feminine (enough) women. Anyone who does not fit obviously into either category must be a child or youth. Even people who know and love LGBT people don't always seem to have interrogated their assumptions on this. People just aren't looking for gender non-conformity. So where does that leave us gender ambiguous folk - especially those of us who have yet to earn the wrinkles and gray hair that come with age? For the time being, it seems to leave us relegated to the margins of adulthood. I used to largely ignore people who mistook me for a teenager or kid, but I've resolved to stop doing that in an effort to signal that not only do I exist, but that they should be on the look out for me and others like me. <br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-82698417020819668962013-07-31T11:05:00.000-04:002013-07-31T11:22:57.929-04:00Post-Wedding Industrial ReflectionsI got married earlier this summer and it was lovely. I wasn't a great sport about the planning process (and had great fun mocking <a href="http://queeringtheline.blogspot.com/2013/05/surviving-wedding-industrial-complex.html" target="_blank">all of the wedding-industrial pitfalls </a>we encountered), but it was great. For the most part, all of <strike>our</strike> my wife's careful planning went off just as we'd envisioned. Still, there are always a few things that pop up right at crunch time that you realize you didn't think all the way through. You can add these to the list I started earlier this year...<br />
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<b>We kind of had flowers after all </b><br />
So, this falls into the category of not thinking things all the way through. After our initial hullabaloo about not wanting cut flowers at the wedding, we started brainstorming about what else we could put at the center or the tables. We came up with the brilliant (we thought) idea to fill mason jars with different veggies. We felt very warm and fuzzy about this idea for many weeks. We bought the jars. We bought some rustic, twiney-looking ribbon to decorate the jars. We talked about putting candles around the jars. We talked about what vegetables should go in the jars. We forgot to talk about what to do with the vegetables afterwards. Our wedding was in Ohio. We live in DC. Neither of our parents live in the city where we had our celebration. Most of our friends and family were from out of town as well. Unless we were going to just waste a whole bunch of random vegetables, our idea was sunk. We already had a purple theme going, so ended up having the (actually) brilliant idea to use lavender instead of veggies. After being talked out of a plan to go to a lavender farm and harvest our flowers myself, I ordered some dried lavender bunches from a lovely old man who has a farm somewhere in Washington or Oregon (those two states blur together in my brain. I seriously can't tell you the difference). Thing is, you apparently need to notify folks when an order is for a wedding. Or a set deadline of any kind. A few days before we were set to leave for Ohio, our lavender had still not arrived. I called the farm. The sweet old man said "Ah, yes, I marked that order as shipped, but we had some problems that day and nobody made it to the post office." Problems? A whole slew of them apparently. He described to me a perfect storm of bad weather, flat tire on the pick-up truck and somebody quitting their job all on the day our lavender bunches were supposed to be mailed. Wonderful fellow that he was, he sense my distress and asked me if this was for a wedding. I said it was. He ended up overnighting us another box of lavender for free. As luck would have it, both boxes arrived the same day. On that note, if anyone needs any dried lavender, um, let me know.<br />
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<b>Follow up on the name game... </b><br />
A friend recently asked me for advice on this, which motivated me to write about it. This is another item in the "not thought all the way through" bucket. I think I've mentioned before that I typically go by a different arrangement of my birth name than the one I grew up with, though my parents and family still call me by my given name. Which means I have two names, kind of. Prior to the wedding, I had some anxiety about this - I couldn't decide which name to use on invitations, for gift registries, at the ceremony... We ultimately went with what my partner and I were both most comfortable with, which is the name I use now. I was worried my family would be confused. As it turns out, it wasn't much of an issue at all and nobody really batted an eye. Most of my family members are friends with me on Facebook where I use my "common use" and not my given name, so they knew who people meant when they called me "Sumner." What I didn't think of pretty much until zero hour, was friends who had never known me by my given name. It suddenly occurred to me that people would be using my given name - I assumed my dad would make a toast, for instance, and call me "Lindsay" and folks would think he was nuts, or talking about the wrong person, or something. We had always planned to put a little note in the program explaining the name thing (that I am called by two names and that both are fine), but we had imagined it more for the benefit of family. It turned out, I think, to be more for the benefit of friends. Go figure.<br />
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Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-32247015171096652652013-07-20T14:09:00.000-04:002013-07-20T14:09:26.554-04:00Respect TransThe DC Office of Human Rights has a campaign to improve general understanding of gender and gender identity, and in turn, the lives of trans and gender non-conforming folks. You can find out more here: http://ohr.dc.gov/transrespect. <br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-47911805581644925902013-07-13T23:47:00.003-04:002013-07-13T23:47:43.320-04:00The Cost of RacismTrayvon Martin's killer, George Zimmerman has been found not guilty of murder. He was not convicted of manslaughter, either. In fact, despite having shot and killed a person after an incident initiated by Zimmerman himself, the state of Florida did not convict him of any crime. <br />
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There has been a lot of talk about whether Martin and Zimmerman engaged in a scuffle or fist fight prior to the shooting. About whether or not Martin hit Zimmerman or whether or not Martin had pinned Zimmerman to the ground prior to Zimmerman firing his weapon. About whether it was Martin or Zimmerman who was heard calling for help. The problem is, none of that is the point. None of that is the story. <br />
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At its core, this is a story about an unarmed teenage boy traveling on foot who was followed and then approached by an adult male who was not only driving a vehicle, but was packing a weapon. Let me repeat that because it may take a moment to really comprehend the gravity of such words: <i>This is a story about an armed adult who confronted and killed a child walking alone at night. </i><br />
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I can think of three main circumstances in which it is appropriate for an adult to approach an unattended child whom they do not know:<br />
1) The child appears lost and is too young, or otherwise unable, to sort the situation out alone.<br />
2) The child is in imminent physical danger.<br />
3) The child's actions have the potential to place those in the vicinity in immediate bodily harm.<br />
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With a few possible exceptions, I can't think of any other reason why an adult would need to follow, speak to, or otherwise interact with a child or teenager they don't know, particularly in the manner that Zimmerman approached Martin. Put yourself in Trayvon Martin's shoes. You're seventeen years old, running an errand on foot at night. It's dark out, but you don't see any reason not to be walking through the neighborhood on your own. You notice an adult you don't know who seems to be following you in a car. The further you walk, the more you're convinced this guy is definitely following you. You might start feeling nervous, but convince yourself it's nothing and keep moving. Maybe you pick up your pace. The car keeps tailing you. You're on a call with your friend and you tell them you think someone is following you and that you're going to get off the phone. You hang up and the guy has gotten out of his car and is coming towards you. You're angry, and probably anxious. You ask why he's following you. He asks what you're doing here. <br />
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When I was seven years old, my best friend and I were playing in my front yard. We were approached by a strange man who asked us if we knew anyone named John. Being little kids and eager to help and not sensing any danger, we said we didn't know anyone named John, but that we had a friend Jonathan who lived across the street. The man left, but must have gone around the block because he came by again, from the same direction, this time to show us some pictures. We didn't know anyone in them. He came around the block a couple more times. My friend and I were getting irritated with him because he kept interrupting our game, but we weren't particularly worried. My parents were right inside and hers were just down the block. But the last time the guy came around he said the magic words that set off all the stranger-danger alarm bells in our little second-grade heads. He said he wanted us to meet him around the block at his car. Thankfully, he walked away again and we ran directly into my house and told my parents, who called the police.<br />
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When Trayvon Martin was approached by George Zimmerman that night in February of 2012, he was seventeen, not seven, and likely very aware of the potential threat he was facing. Martin was also a black male teenager, and had probably already experienced first-hand the realities of racial profiling - both by the police and by others around him. I have no doubt that as soon as he became certain that Zimmerman was tailing him, alarm bells were going off loud and clear in Martin's head. I have no doubt that he must have experienced an acute mix of emotions - fury, frustration, and fear.<br />
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Zimmerman and Martin may have fought. Martin may have lashed out. He might have indeed struck Zimmerman. Given the situation - being a seventeen year old black male approached by a strange adult with a gun - no one should be surprised if that's the case. Martin's options would have been pretty limited. He could run or he could fight. Either way, Zimmerman would still have a gun. And a car. <br />
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We don't know exactly what happened in the time between Zimmerman getting out of his car and the moment when Martin was shot. But we do know what happened first and what happened last, and I frankly can't think of anything except racism that explains how an armed adult can confront an unarmed teenager, end up shooting and killing the child, and get away with it. Those of us who had hoped for a guilty verdict spoke of "justice for Trayvon." Truthfully, even if Zimmerman had been found guilty, there would still be no real justice for Trayvon. He experienced the most egregious injustice there is - the senseless loss of his life. But there might have been justice for all the kids that will follow him - we might have found comfort in knowing that this jury, and this system, would protect children and young people - all people - from assholes like Zimmerman. I'm still processing everything that this verdict means, but I know what it means in terms of freedom - kids like Trayvon will have less of it going forward and guys like Zimmerman - grown men whose sense of masculinity and self-worth are found by "guarding" their neighborhoods with firearms - will have more.<br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876382935767131098.post-82594064354046141042013-07-10T07:00:00.000-04:002013-07-10T07:00:01.927-04:00A Social Justice Dictionary<b>Ableism</b> - Discrimination or prejudice towards people who are differently-abled, such as those who use a wheelchair or cane to get around, or who experience a developmental or mental challenges. Ableism often serves to isolate able-bodied people and people who experience physical and developmental challenges from one another. <br />
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<b>Cis-gender</b> - When a person's gender identity matches her/his/their perceived physical sex. <br />
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<b>Civil Disobedience</b> - A form of direct action, protest, or activism that directly challenges the status quo by breaking a rule or law, usually in a non-violent manner. Civil disobedience is often used to prevent something unwanted from occurring, or to draw attention to an injustice by prompting the mass arrest of those participating in the action. Civil disobedience has been used by social justice groups in the United States for many years. Examples include lunch counter sit-ins to end segregation in the South, anti-war activists blocking traffic or railways to stop delivery of military equipment or to otherwise disrupt regular life, or people occupying buildings or urban space to preserve things like affordable housing.<br />
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<b>Colorblindness</b> - Colorblindness is a dominant cultural ideology in the post-Civil Rights era that denies the significance of race in our lives. Some people point to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, the legal de-segregation of the South, and more recent events like Obama's election to the presidency as evidence that race no longer matters in the United States. When people say things like "I don't see race," they are engaging in colorblindness. This is problematic because both structural and inter-personal racism continue to be facts of life. Colorblindness prevents us from being able to meaningfully engage the problem of racism and come up with real solutions. <br />
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<b>Heteronormativity</b> - The assumption, either systemic or personal, that all people are heterosexual. Asking a male acquaintance about his wife, or a doctor asking a female patient how she's preventing pregnancy without finding out if her partner is male are examples of heteronormativity. Queer folks are likely to encounter heteronormativity at work, school, at the grocery store, while walking down the street, while planning a wedding, at the doctor's office, on the phone with utility service providers, while looking to rent or purchase housing, and while traveling. <br />
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<b>Inclusive Language</b> - Use of language in a way that fully reflects a diversity of human experiences and the contributions of many kinds of people to society. Examples of inclusive language include the use of "firefighter" or "mail carrier" instead of "fireman" or "mailman"; referring to children as "kids" rather than "boys and girls"; saying "parents" in place of "mom and dad"; the use of "spouse" as a general term for married partner rather than "husband" or "wife" and the use of gender neutral terms like "people," "folks," or "friends" in place of "ladies" or "you guys." In the context of religion, inclusive language can also mean referring to god using a mix of female and male pronouns, or without gendered pronouns at all.<br />
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<b>Intersectionality</b> - The idea that people have multiple identities and thus intersecting experiences of oppression and marginalization. For instance, African-American women may experience sexism differently than Caucasian women because black and white women have different experiences of racism and race privilege, and as a result, may have different experiences of being female. Intersectionality is important to acknowledge because posing situations as "women" versus "blacks," for instance (as was frequently the case during the Democratic primary campaign between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton in 2007 and 2008), serves to erase the experiences of women of color. <br />
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<b>Labor Union</b> - A labor union is a collective group of workers employed by the same company or organization who join together to improve or protect their working conditions, pay, and benefits. This is also called democracy in the workplace.</div>
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<b>LGBTIQQA</b> - An acronym that stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, and Allies. This acronym is more frequently used in its shortened versions, typically LGBT or GLBT. </div>
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<b>Love </b>- That which binds us and simultaneously propels us forward to seek peace, justice, and community.<br />
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<b>Pansexuality </b>- Refers to attraction to individuals of any gender expression and/or physical sex.<br />
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<b>Privilege</b> - Un-earned advantages accrued to people in positions of relative power. Common examples include white privilege, male privilege, cis-gender privilege and heterosexual privilege. Peggy McIntosh's <a href="http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/ele3600/mcintosh.html" target="_blank">"Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"</a> is a standard read for those wishing to better understand white privilege. Similar lists have been generated by others to illustrate the effects of male privilege, heterosexual privilege, and so on. Like oppression, privileges can intersect. For example, a queer male person of color will experience male privilege differently than a white, straight male (see above re: "Intersectionality").<br />
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<b>Queer </b>- A term used by some gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and gender non-conforming people to describe their sexual and social identity. Some prefer "queer" over "gay" or "lesbian" because it is not tied to the gender binary. "Queer" can refer to both sexual orientation and gender expression. In the past, "queer" used as a derogatory term, but has since been reclaimed by many LGBT folks.<br />
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<b>Reverse-racism</b> - This is not actually a thing. Racism is both inter-personal and structural and is intimately tied to power, privilege, and oppression. All people are capable of bias and prejudice, but because white privilege still means that whites disproportionately hold political office, high-paying professions, college degrees, and personal wealth in the United States, prejudices held by whites towards people of color carry different meaning than prejudices held by people of color against whites.<br />
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<b>Transgender</b> - A person whose gender identity or expression differs from her/his/their perceived sex or sex assigned at birth. Alternatively, a person who transcends gender boundaries.<br />
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<b>Xenophobia</b> - Fear or hatred towards people of different national origins or ethnicity than oneself.<br />
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<br />Sumner McRaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01949172226210854688noreply@blogger.com0