The Patriarchy Doesn't Exist And Other Comforting Fictions For Hard Times

It's comforting to tell ourselves that a lot of the battles that feminists have fought are finally over, and we're in the mop up stage. It seems undeniable that attitudes have indeed improved since the days of the pre-Second Wave; one sees more and more female executives, attorneys, and doctors (though not nearly enough) than ever nowadays, and even my D&D book uses the female pronoun as often as the male pronoun in the text.

When D&D hops the equality train, that's progress.

So we can tell ourselves that women are finally (at least in the West) moving out of the shadow of men, begin to truly have autonomy: that what Elizabeth Gilbert says below is indeed happening, and more than that, is being successful:

...Gilbert says, we're still in the midst of a radical new social experiment.
"And the radical, unprecedented new social experiment is: What happens if we give women autonomy, education, finances, you know, control over their sexual biology?" she says. "What happens if we give you all this freedom? What are you going to do with it? … And we're all still sort of puzzling it out in a very intense way."

 And then you open your browser or flip through a newspaper and all that comes crashing down around you, and you see it for the papier-mâché construct it truly is. Like when you read this:

Before the first juror is selected or witness called, a decision allowing a confessed killer to argue he believes the slaying of one of the nation's few late-term abortion providers was a justified act aimed at saving unborn children has upended what most expected to be an open-and-shut case.

Some abortion opponents are pleasantly stunned and eager to watch Scott Roeder tell a jury his slaying of Wichita doctor George Tiller was voluntary manslaughter. Tiller's colleagues and abortion rights advocates are outraged and fear the court's actions give a more than tacit approval to further acts of violence.

''This judge has basically announced a death sentence for all of us who help women,'' said Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder, Colo., a longtime friend of Tiller who also performs late-term abortions. ''That is the effect of the ruling.''

Just so that we're really clear on this, just so that everybody gets on the same footing, just so we can skip past the language issues of calling fetuses "unborn children," understand this: Roeder's defense, basically, is that he had the right to kill someone based on his right to control what another human being does with her body.

He had the right to control you. And if you asserted that control (which is due to you, one would hope, as a member of the human race--at least the male half is supposed to have bodily autonomy) and enlisted the help of a medical professional, he had the right to kill that professional in order to remove your autonomy.

Of course, "yours" only if you're female. Which still seems to be a quasi-legal status.

Think of other cases where bodily autonomy might be involved, and wonder to yourselves if they would be able to be entered as legal justifications: But your Honor, I had to kill that abolitionist, she was helping my slave to escape.

If somebody had killed Dr. Kevorkian, would the court allow a justification defense? Even though it would be a lot more warranted than one in the case of the murder of a physician, a man who helped save the lives of many women?

Jill at Feministe has a good explanation of what's happening, though it hasn't quite gotten me off the ledge:

I will write more about this later as time allows, but the judge in the Scott Roeder case — Roeder is the man who shot abortion provider George Tiller at Tiller’s church — has ruled that Roeder may present a case for voluntary manslaughter instead of murder. Voluntary manslaughter is a less serious crime than murder, and subject to softer penalties. This doesn’t mean that Roeder is only being charged with voluntary manslaughter; my best guess based on the judge’s comments here is that he doesn’t want this case to be overturned on appeal, and so he’s allowing the jury to consider voluntary manslaughter as a lesser-included offense. Which makes sense.

Except that there are, of course, bigger issues at play. The judge at least rejected Roeder’s proposed “necessity” defense, but a jury will still have the option of giving Roeder a lighter sentence if the defense makes the case that Roeder had an “unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force.” If the jury does buy that defense — and you can bet that Roeder’s team will make the trial about Dr. Tiller and abortion — it lessens the disincentives for other would-be terrorists to take out abortion providers.

Indeed.

So there is no patriarchy, and justice is for all. Just not the all that includes you.

The Times, They Are A-Draggin'

Several years ago, back when I was still a crossdresser myself (and working as a man), I came across a picture on an old hard drive of my boss. Wearing tight leather pants, a low-cut blouse, and makeup. And written in a pink script on the picture was a feminine name that shared his first initial.

I was caught somewhere between completely weirded out and strangely relieved to know I wasn't the only trans person in the office.

Which leads me to events in East Cleveland, Ohio, where mayor Eric Brewer was recently defeated in a primary election. Unremarkable, right?

Well...except for the fact that like me and my boss, somebody found pictures that seem to look like the ex-mayor on his computer hard drive. Wearing lingerie.

I'm not going to reprint the photos here--you can find them easy enough, ducks--except to say that they do look like the mayor, and that they "vibe" crossdresser for me. (When you've been around as long as I have, you've seen this sort of thing before.)

And speaking of seeing this thing before, it reminds me of another crossdressing pol who was outed before an election: Sam Walls, a conservative Republican in Texas who lost a runoff election for the state House in 2004. Now, in Walls' case, you just have to wonder how he didn't think this would happen: not only (as the pics showed) had he been out and about while crossdressed, but for Pete's sake he seems to have been the treasurer of the local chapter of Tri-Ess, the national crossdressers' organization.

Cases like Walls' and Brewer's show some of the disturbing inequities of life under the transgendered umbrella. One may point out that people like Walls or Brewer retained substantial privilege and did not face everyday transphobia--something that MtF transsexuals often have to deal with every day. But. Even in Oklahoma, a trans woman can run for office and be open about her history, whereas neither of the crossdressing politicians felt comfortable doing that.

And that shows the relatively large gap in both visibility and acceptance between transsexuals and crossdressers. Television shows, news reports, books--all concentrate on transsexuals, not on crossdressers; and the leadership of many trans organizations is dominated by transsexuals. Now, again, some of this is because there is a greater incentive for transsexuals, especially trans women, to push for their rights. There is too what helen boyd once called the "fear of queer": crossdressers can look "normal" in their everyday presentation and can fear (or feel no need) to lose that part of their gender identity in service to activism.

But that obscures--just as crossdressers themselves are obscured; no one is really sure how many there are, since so many are relatively closeted--the very real pain and angst of being a crossdresser, of not having the comforting narrative of transition--a story that seems, at least, to have a beginning, middle and end. If people now seem to understand, if not accept all the time, the transsexual narrative--"you're a woman on the inside" or "born wrong" or whatever the current popular meme is--but how do you explain that you only need to be a woman part of the time? That you only seek temporary solutions? That you live in the shadow of, as helen has also said, the other shoe never dropping?

A crossdresser I used to know wrote about this once*:

[...]my transness will always be subordinate to other people's experience of either womanhood or transhood. Women can look down at me because I'm a "part-time" woman, who dresses in costume and "doesn't know what a real woman's life is like"; transwomen can throw the same criticism at me, with the added vector that my transness can't be serious because it doesn't manifest itself constantly or as urgently as it does for a transsexual.

But it isn't true; I'm trans all the time, and there are a lot of times that I feel trapped in an endless cycle of oscillation between femininity and masculinity with no way to end the cycle.

Sure, compared to transitioning, my problems are the difference between jumping off of a cliff and riding the kiddie roller coaster. But who the hell wants to ride on the kiddie coaster for the rest of their lives?

But let's not stay all doom and gloom...courtesy of Joe My God, here's Donna Sachet performing the national anthem before a Giants game in San Francisco--the first drag performer to ever do so! Rock on, Ms. Sachet!



*She later transitioned, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, it's a good sentiment.

Lies the Internet Told Me

Sady at Tiger Beatdown, who is having an awesome week, wrote an amazing post about the (false) rumors that Lady Gaga is intersex:

So, yeah. It will always puzzle me when cisgendered people don't see how the marginalization and oppression of trans people affects them. Because the fact is that there are a ton of trans people in the world, and you don't necessarily know who they are, and they're not required to tell you. But when people get a case of the Deceptive Tranny Fever, nothing - not decency, not tolerance, not basic fact-checking, not even Google - will get in their way.

So true. The whole "deceptive tranny" thing is the old double-bind in action as well, ergo: if you're trans, and you don't tell the whole wide world, aaaand you sleep with some cisgendered dude or lady, aaaand they find out, then you are a deceiver and deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out; but if you're trans, aaand you tell the whole world, then people call you a thing or refuse to use your correct gender, aaaand you deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out.

That is, you get it both ways: you're punished for both telling and not telling, because the culture punishes "deception" without rewarding "honesty."

Go read the post, because like most things Sady, it is awesome.

A Declaration of Rights and Responsibilities

I've been thinking about privilege lately. Not exactly a surprise, there.

One thing I've been pondering is this idea: that privilege is rights without responsibilities.

That's not completely accurate: another important definition of privilege--at least , you know, the oppressive kind--is that it is unearned. But they both point to important features of privilege.

That is, to accept something as given without any responsibility to pay for it is a privilege.

You can see this in action in one of the more pervasive defences of white privilege: "I'm not a racist, I never owned slaves, I didn't vote for Jim Crow laws, so why should I have to accept affirmative action/learn about African-American culture/give up one iota of what I have?"

The answer is, because you were robbed.

You were robbed, because your ancestors stole from other people and passed the bill along to you. You were robbed, because they got to have something without paying for it, and now the bill is come due. And you'll keep getting robbed, as long as people like Pat Buchanan still insist that great American experiment involved only hard-working, superior white folks--as if the very temple of democracy in this country itself, the U.S. Capitol, wasn't built with slave labor.

My post today at Shakesville has me thinking about another side of this question: when does a person have the right to claim membership in a group? Or more specifically, just who's a woman, anyway?

For me, the answer is simple: if you claim to be a woman, I'll respect that claim. It's not because I believe in some mystical gender essentialism and can recognize a "spiritual sister" because of my super-special Trannyvision^TM. I believe that there are about 6.75 billion genders in the world: that is, each of us has a gender unique to ourselves. That doesn't mean there aren't classifications that can be made, anymore than believing in human individuality means there aren't Buddhists or Frenchpeople or...women.

Rather, my feeling is that if someone wants to claim the title of "woman," I'm perfectly happy to agree. But then it is my feeling that I will apply to them the same standards I apply to other women (and myself.) Is she a feminist? Does she help break down oppression, or support it? Does she support other women, does she support sexist stereotypes, is she, in short, helping?

Just as I would never question the gender of a woman whose politics and personality I loathe--say, Sarah Palin--I wouldn't question the gender of a trans person. (That is, I wouldn't use bad woman to mean bad at being a woman. Heck, I wouldn't use bad woman at all, I think.) Or to put it another way, judge my claim for a right on how well I live up to its responsibilities: look at what I do and what I believe, what I fight against and what I stand for. And I'll do the same.

It's the only human thing to do.

Elizabeth Edwards and the Faux Double-Bind

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John Edwards (ex-senator from NC, ex-Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, ex-Presidential candidate), has a new book out. Edwards, in case you've forgotten, suffered a terminal relapse of breast and bone cancer during her husband's campaign.

Also, it turns out, during the time he was cheating on her with a "videographer" that he paid over $100,000 to. And had a kid with.

In her book, Resilience, she says that her husband should not have run, and that she tried to talk him into dropping out after he admitted to the affair. It also turns out that he was less than honest with her: he told her it had been a one-time dalliance, even while he had his mistress stashed away, and his staff scrambling desperately to cover up evidence of the affair.

So, for those of you playing at home, here's the scorecard: second bout of cancer turns out to be terminal; husband cheating on her; husband lying about cheating on her; husband still delusional enough to think he can be President.

All in all, that's pretty terrible, and I have a lot of sympathy for Ms. Edwards, who seems to have gotten the shortest of short ends of the stick. But what makes this story of interest to this blog is the backlash I saw today.

First, Michael Goodwin weighs in for the New York Daily News:

...the temptation is to shout, "Leave the poor woman alone."

That's easier said than done. After all, Elizabeth Edwards helped to perpetrate a fraud on voters, namely, that her husband was fit to be President.

She knew better and now says she told him to drop out because of the affair. He didn't and she tried to get him elected, raising money and stumping with and for him. She excoriated the media for giving "the Cliffs Notes" of the truth about candidates.

If only we had known the truth she was hiding.

Ah. Way to empathize. Let me ponder, what, exactly her choices were once John refused to drop out. Leaving the campaign trail would have been--no doubt about it--a major distraction. The question would have been why, after not stopping campaigning despite being diagnosed with breast cancer, had she suddenly vanished. It would have been a staggering blow to an already staggering campaign. And, if as seems to be the case, she didn't realize the extent of the affair, then maybe--maybe--she really did think he was qualified to be President. After all, many Democrats still think fondly of Bill Clinton, and he was a serial womanizer as well. (In fact, weren't many of us wringing our hands about how a person's personal life didn't have to reflect on his ability to do the job at the time?)

Goodwin winds up with:

"Her illness has put a halo over her head and it doesn't belong there," another reader posted. "If she were not sick, there would be far more criticism of her for hiding this kind of news . . . By participating in his charade, Elizabeth is mighty guilty herself."

Me? I second both emotions.

Which leads nicely into Maureen Dowd's column in the Grey Lady:

But now Saint Elizabeth has dragged him back into the public square for a flogging on “Oprah” and in Time and at bookstores near you. The book is billed as helping people “facing life’s adversities” and offering an “inspirational meditation on the gifts we can find among life’s biggest challenges.”

But it’s just a gratuitous peek into their lives, and one that exposes her kids, by peddling more dregs about their personal family life in a book, and exposes the ex-girlfriend who’s now trying to raise the baby girl, a dead ringer for John Edwards, in South Orange, N.J.

So, to update your scorecard:

Bill Clinton, serial adulterer, perjurer, and not as liberal as you think--the greatest President since World War II, at least according to Al Franken.

John Edwards, serial adulterer, class hypocrite, not as liberal as you think but unable to even be Vice President: lying cad.

Elizabeth Edwards, cancer survivor, adultery survivor, cancer victim, way smarter than her husband: whiner who is needlessly exposing her family to ridicule for unknown reasons.

What I'm getting at is that this is a completely fake double-bind, and I call sexism. Bill Clinton wrote an enormous autobiography, which talks about his affair, but because he's a Serious Politician (and Has A Penis), that's statemanlike. Elizabeth Edwards, who, as Dowd says, "would have made a wonderful candidate herself. But she poured everything into John[...]" writes a book about the most wrenching time of her life, and she's accused of dragging herself shamelessly back into the spotlight, not to mention her family, and O Won't Somebody Think Of The Children, and after all, she doesn't have a penis.

If she did, maybe she'd get more respect. Though if she did, her husband couldn't have run for President.

Hell, he'd not even be her husband.

Except in Massachusetts, Vermont, Iowa, and (yay!) Maine, that is.