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The day I mistook myself for a human being

It was a chilly day in November and I remember it well, the fog creeping in over the seawall and the air so heavy with water that everything felt saturated with it even though it wasn’t actually raining. The dull weather stood in sharp contrast to my bright mood; I was on top of the world that day, developing an identity and a career. I was young and competent and unafraid, because I had seen my own potential, and I wasn’t afraid to grab for it.

She came to my house uninvited, trailing along behind someone else, and promptly took time to comment on my house (‘surprisingly clean for a young person’) and my person (‘I wasn’t expecting you to be so fat’) and then she promptly delved into what I did. And I told her, and a little sneer started to creep across her face as she proceeded to tell me how to do my job. A job, I note, that she had failed at before, forcing her to transition to a different career, and then another, and another.

She, a failed writer, wanted to tell me how to be a writer.  (Continued)

People in Glass Closets: Anderson Cooper and Straight Responses to Coming Out

So Anderson Cooper officially came out, writing in a post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that “the fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.” To many people who’d been paying attention, it was a not a surprise. Cooper, like many other celebrities had long lived in a glass closet – known (or suspected) by many to be gay, but not publicly “out” as a gay man.

Many of the reactions from heterosexual progressives that I observed around social media in response were, to be blunt, really fucking annoying and entitled. The salacious shock, the studied boredom and cynicism, the jokes, the questions about why he took so long or why he needed to come out at all. And on and on.

(Continued)

#Noshame

I’m not sure when I first understood that my brain worked differently from other people’s, and that the feelings I experienced weren’t like the feelings other people experienced. There was no defining moment I can point to, no instance of ‘aha,’ just a slow sense of deterioration, interrupted by periodic visits to counselors and doctors and medications that came in rattling bottles.

And a sense of embarrassment about this thing I had that required fixing, and should be hidden. My father ducking his head in the doctor’s office, me taking my pills on the sly on sleepovers so no one would ask me what they were for. If I pretended it didn’t exist and compressed it down as much as I could, everyone would think I was normal; but I was so blaringly, obviously, glaringly not normal. It blew up in my face over and over and over again until I came to the realisation that the only way to survive was to live openly.

Because silence no longer worked for me. And silence, the gaping hole that surrounds mental illness in society, leaves people with mental illness in a void, whether they want to come out or not. It makes it harder to realise that you are not alone, to seek help, to articulate your experiences to friends and family. It perpetuates the stigma that makes it dangerous to live openly with mental illness, isolating people at a time when what they need most may be support. (Continued)

We cannot have it all because we no longer have dreams

This has been the week of backlash against feminism. In fairness, it is always backlash week against feminism but Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece at The Atlantic, Why women still can’t have it all, has revived some of those sentiments. Feminism has failed us, she implies. We were promised a balance between career and private life. We were told that if you worked hard and juggled between your work, your children, your spouse and your social life, you too, could be successful. If your spouse embraces this model of cooperation and takes on their fair share of housework and child rearing then you could also reach the highest echelons of power and, in the words of existential philosopher Mr. Spock, live long and prosper. All it took, we were told, was commitment and creativity.

All of this is, of course, pure unadulterated bullshit.

(Continued)

This may be the most patronising attempt to get girls involved in science ever

So, the European Commission has just started a campaign to get girls interested in careers in the sciences: Science: It’s a Girl Thing! I found out about this on Twitter on Friday morning after the campaign released a truly revolting teaser video that honestly kind of beggared belief. Someone, somewhere, approved this video and thought it was a good idea. A bunch of people were involved in shooting, editing, and distributing the video. And apparently at no point did anyone stop and ask themselves ‘wait, is this really such a good idea? Maybe we should consult some women scientists. Or like, just not do this.’

The video opens with a geeky guy sitting behind a microscope, when suddenly, bam! Catwalk music, and three babes walk in, strutting their stuff. There’s some shiny stuff and bright lights. Lots of vamping poses and meaningful sunglasses removal/replacement. Random flasks bubble while the girls giggle. Lipstick tubes. Everything comes over all pink. Science! It’s a Girl Thing!

’cause girls, you know, they’re into the pink. And scientific labs are absolutely environments where you wear heels and slinky clothes while giggling to yourself and wowing all those dudes behind microscopes. This video taught me so much about women in the sciences, and all the possibilities for girls interested in pursuing careers in science. I hope every girl gets to see it!

Not.  (Continued)

The Zimmermans, Perjury, and The Aid of White Supremacy

From this morning’s Los Angeles Times:

“Oh, man, that feels good,” he told his wife, “… that there are people in America that care.”

“Yeah they do,” she answered. So many tried to log onto his website the day of his arrest, she said, it kept crashing. A few moments later, she said, “After all this is over, you’re going to be able to have a great life.”

“We will,” he said.

This is a transcript from a prison phone call that took place between George Zimmerman and his wife, Shellie. The two were discussing the $204,000 Zimmerman raked in from PayPal donations leading up to his trial. Over the course of this phone call and others like it, they discuss how to move the money around to hide it from the court so they wouldn’t have to waste all that hot racist cash on legal fees. They took special care to speak in code, making bank transfers under reporting limits and shuttling the money into different accounts belonging to his wife and family:

[She] was charged Tuesday with perjury, a third-degree felony that is punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. She was released on bond herself.

Records show that in the days before an April bond hearing for her husband, Shellie Zimmerman, 25, transferred $74,000 in eight smaller amounts ranging from $7,500 to $9,990, from her husband’s credit union account to hers, according to an arrest affidavit. It also shows that $47,000 was transferred from George Zimmerman’s account to his sister’s in the days before the bond hearing.

(Continued)

This is a post about Bunheads. Deal with it.

People people people, can we talk about Bunheads on ABC? Because holy moly, I have been on pins and needles all week waiting for tonight’s episode. I have been wanting to watch it since about halfway through last week’s episode, honestly, because it was poppin’ fresh, as the kids like to say, and I’m really excited to see Amy Sherman-Palladino back in the saddle, kicking ass and taking names. Seriously, usually I hate pilots and force myself to sit through a few early episodes to let a show establish itself, but Bunheads was delicious right out of the gate, and I’m fervently hoping it only gets better from here.

If you’ve been living with your head under a rock or something, Bunheads stars Sutton Foster as Michelle, a former ballerina who became a Vegas showgirl. The show opens with her in the revue struttin’ her stuff, making snarky comments to another dancer in the lineup, and from there we see her getting married to her creepy stalkerfan (more on that in a minute) and moving to a postage-stamp sized small town on the California coastline called Paradise.

There are a couple of things going on with this show that I am really excited about, and then some things that I am less excited about; no media can cover all possible bases and sometimes things are not addressed in ways that are ideal. Bunheads is so new that it doesn’t really need to be called on the carpet to answer for its sins just yet, because it has considerable room for growth and it could go in some really interesting directions. I’m just taking note of some of the problems I observe to see if they’re resolved, or if they get worse.

(Continued)

Let Us Colonise Your Wombs: Surrogacy In India

Two years ago, Mother Jones had a great feature on surrogacy in India. It didn’t receive a whole lot of traffic at the time but it’s come back up into the public eye, because this is an issue that has not gone away. In fact, it’s gotten a whole lot worse, and there’s a big pile of racism and colonialism all snarled up with it. To see the media actually starting to confront this is heartening, but it’s unfortunate that most media outlets aren’t directly tackling the deep, deep issues embedded within the growing trend of surrogacy tourism in India.

There are lots of reasons why couples might want or need a gestational surrogate, and they enter contracts with surrogates with the knowledge that this is shaky ground. This is new to all of us and we’re constantly encountering new ethical and legal tangles in the world of surrogacy. That doesn’t mean surrogacy shouldn’t happen, but it does mean that it needs to be closely watched, especially because it involves a very intimate and complex exchange. Surrogates are helping people have children, which is awesome.

But they’re also coming along with some very loaded social, cultural, and political baggage. Incubation metaphors often come up with surrogacy, because people who provide this service are effectively allowing other people to rent their wombs, though the exact specifics of the contract vary. They are agreeing to carry a fetus for someone else, and as part of that contract they agree to potentially invasive medical testing, significant lifestyle changes, and the experience of labour and delivery. At the end, they have to give up the infant, no matter what kinds of emotional attachments they may have developed. Expecting parents have a lot riding on this as do surrogates. (Continued)

Fertility, Gender, Sterilisation, Womanhood

I chose to get sterilised for many reasons, but one of them was the overarching association between fertility and femaleness that runs like a dark bloody thread throughout our society, no matter how much people push back against it. If you have a uterus and ovaries and fallopian tubes and they are capable of producing eggs, nudging them to fertilisation, sheltering a developing fetus, providing it with nutrients and a safe space to grow for 40 weeks, you are a woman. And if you do not, you are something else. You are not-woman, you are not-quite-woman, you are fake-woman.

The reproductive rights debate in the United States swirls tightly around the uterus, putting those who have reproductive capacity at the middle and those who do not somewhere else. Some of us are swept up into the eddy and labeled as women; we are part of the right’s ‘war on women’ even though we are not women. Others are coldly shut out because they lack fertility, because they are fake-women, because they had hysterectomies or are post-menopausal and thus aren’t fertile or because they have some other anatomy altogether.

These is such a tight linkage between fertility and womanhood, an association that dates back over thousands of years. The roughly monthly production of blood as evidence of sexual maturity but also womanhood.  (Continued)

This Is What Makes Us Girls

(with apologies to Lana Del Rey.  Trigger warning for misogynistic, transphobic violence)

when men open doors for me
yearning for my smile

and my lover cups my hips, pulling me to her
whispering “mine”

and

when my mother looked at my skirt and said “you’re not going out in that”
and my father said I was dead to him,
an embarrassment to the family

and  they gave him a job instead of me,
and again, and again,

and when they spoke over me, boys and beards alike,
wrote their words and theories on my skin
called me hysterical, unreliable, psychotic,

and

the psychologist asked me what underwear I was wearing,
and the doctor told me to get undressed
while another refused to treat my impure body at all

and strange men pulled at my crotch and my breasts, groping, reaching, tearing,
or the taxi driver said I could pay with sex
and I ran like hell
stumbling in the darkness
wishing I’d worn flats

and their fists hit my chest, and my body crumpled
they call me slut, whore, cunt
and everyone blamed me, anyway.

And you, my sisters, you closed the doors to shelters
and my bruises healed alone

organised conferences and
wrote books
while my words went unheard

and you told me die tranny bitch
called yourself radical

and never once realised how much

you are like the men

you hate.