After being nominated for homecoming queen, 18-year old Andy Moreno is being told by her Dallas high school that she can’t run for the title because she’s transgender.
Not-so-shocking News of the Day: Republican “Young Guns” show a disturbing trend of contempt towards young women.
Check out DoubleX’s “Who Gets to Be a Feminist?”
Sharron Angle’s most recent racist advertisement.
It’s been a tough few weeks for queer youth. We’ve had five (at least that we know of and have gotten media attention) gay youth take their lives as a direct result of bullying or harassment based on their sexual orientation.
It reveals a truth we all know–it’s really hard to be different, especially as a young person. Middle and High School are hard as hell for anyone, let alone someone who is singled out for being different–especially being gay. While I was never bullied about my sexuality growing up (I wasn’t out after all, although that didn’t stop a few people from calling out my queerness way before I ever admitted it) I suppressed it for the very same reason–I knew that it wasn’t okay. I knew it wasn’t okay that I had a crush on my math tutor and thought about kissing her sometimes. So I went through the motions of trying on heterosexuality–all the way until three years into college when I finally felt safe enough to be real to myself.
This kind of self-protection isn’t accessible to everyone. Some folks are just too different to pass under the radar. Some choose not to pass, and have to deal with the completely unsafe environment created by many of our schools and communities for queer kids. I think it’s important to note that all of the kids who’ve passed in this recent weeks were male-assigned. That’s not because it isn’t difficult to be a female-assigned LGBT person, but there is a different (and often more brutal) policing that happens to young boys and male-assigned kids. Any hint of femininity is targeted, where as girls can get away with being a bit of a tomboy, at least sometimes. Homophobia is also related to sexism folks.
Every time a kid feels unsafe, gets physically hurt, takes their own life, is a win for the homophobes and bigots who use fear and intimidation to get what they want.
We’re fighting back because our lives depend on it.
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The LA Times reported last night that they had obtained audio of Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor in California, talking with one of his aides about the Republican opponent Meg Whitman. In the exchange, the aide suggests calling Whitman a “whore” for having made a pension deal during her campaign and Brown appears to approve the label. From the LA Times:
“Do we want to put an ad out? … That I have been warned if I crack down on pensions, I will be – that they’ll go to Whitman, and that’s where they’ll go because they know Whitman will give ‘em, will cut them a deal, but I won’t,” Brown said.
At that point, what appears to be a second voice interjects: “What about saying she’s a whore?”
“Well, I’m going to use that,” Brown responds. “It proves you’ve cut a secret deal to protect the pensions.”
According to Talking Points Memo, the Whitman campaign “jumped on the issue in an attempt to drum up sympathy from female voters,” calling the use of the word “an insult to both Meg Whitman and to the women of California.”
(In case you’re wondering how the audio was recorded in the first place, apparently Brown thought he had hung up the phone properly after leaving a voicemail… but he had not. So next time you see that in a movie and think, “yeah, right,” remember this moment.)
Barack Obama’s birthday was a few months ago, on August 4th, and I spent the day putting together a “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” calendar, for which I posed as Marilyn Monroe, only instead of wearing a fur stole and a gold evening gown, I wore my sexiest blogging outfit – sweats and a clean hoodie. Ok, I did no such thing, and if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t tell anyone about it.
But not everyone feels that way, apparently. The NYT’s Lede blog reported yesterday on some interesting student activism in Russia. In honour of Vladimir Putin’s birthday, two groups of student journalists have produced calendars:
The first calendar, which features 12 racy photographs of lingerie-clad students and come-hither captions like Miss February’s “How about a third time?” went on sale on Wednesday… On Thursday, another group of students responded to the pro-Putin calendar — “Vladimir Vladimirovich, We Love You! Happy Birthday, Mr Putin!” — with one of their own. The anti-Putin calendar shows six students with their mouths taped shut asking questions like, “Who killed Anna Politkovskaya?” in reference to the muckraking journalist who was gunned down on Mr. Putin’s birthday in 2006.
I know that American politics has gotten a little ridiculous lately, what with the radical anti-choice candidates and the rise of the political celebrity and, oh yeah, the witchcraft. But you know what? To date, as far we know, no one has made a pro-Obama pin-up calendar – so things could be worse, I guess. That said, there’s always next August.
The Feministing Five: Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune
The book began with Redfern and Aune’s confusion at the constant refrain, in the press and in politics, that feminism was dead, dying or that we were living in the post-feminist age. As Redfern and Aune saw it, that wasn’t the case at all; The F Word was a vibrant community of online feminists, and it certainly wasn’t the only one, and there were plenty of feminists organizing offline, as well. And as for post-feminism, well, as they put it, “I’ll be post feminist in the post-patriarchy.” So Redfern and Aune set out to write a book that would take stock of the state of feminism in the UK today, tackling a wide range of issues, from sexism in popular culture to the role of women in religion. They conducted a survey of 1300 self-identified feminists, asking them how they felt about the current state, and the future of feminism. The full results of the survey are in the book, but you can read more about what they asked, and how people answered, here.
And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune.
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