Angry, Concerned Student is Angry, Concerned

[Content note: trans bigotry]



You might have seen some conservative "anti-PC" types enthusiastically praising University of Wisconsin grad student Jason Morgan for his rant against, basically, political correctness gone awry.



His letter to the University's Graduate Director, which he (in true conservative outrage, shit-stirring style!) also sent to various news outlets, seems to have been inspired by the University's mandated diversity trainings that teaching assistants have to attend.



So, you can imagine it already.



In addition to railing against rampant leftism and expressing outrage at the trainings' "overriding presumption" that attendees might be racist, he takes particular issue with the sessions on transgender issues.  He writes:

"At the end of yesterday’s diversity 're-education,' we were told that our next session would include a presentation on 'Trans Students'. At that coming session, according to the handout we were given, we will learn how to let students ‘choose their own pronouns’, how to correct other students who mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, and how to ask people which pronouns they prefer ('I use the pronouns he/him/his. I want to make sure I address you correctly. What pronouns do you use?'). Also on the agenda for next week are 'important trans struggles, as well as those of the intersexed and other gender-variant communities,' 'stand[ing] up to the rules of gender,' and a very helpful glossary of related terms and acronyms, to wit: 'Trans': for those who 'identify along the gender-variant spectrum,' and 'Genderqueer': 'for those who consider their gender outside the binary gender system'. I hasten to reiterate that I am quoting from diversity handouts; I am not making any of this up. 

.... It is an honor and a great joy to teach students the history of Japan. I take my job very seriously, and I look forward to coming to work each day. 

It is most certainly not my job, though, to cheer along anyone, student or otherwise, in their psychological confusion. I am not in graduate school to learn how to encourage poor souls in their sexual experimentation, nor am I receiving generous stipends of taxpayer monies from the good people of the Great State of Wisconsin to play along with fantasies or accommodate public cross-dressing.

In this instance, while Morgan may get lots of standing o's from like-minded, close-minded types, he actually, quite sadly, demonstrates pretty well why such trainings are and should be required for public employees who have to interact with a diverse student body.



I mean, the very way he discusses gender issues is largely an ignorant mischaracterization. Referring to transgender and/or genderqueer people (it's not super clear how or whether he even distinguishes the two) as "poor souls" who engage in "cross-dressing" "fantasies" does a pretty good job of diminishing his credibility as an informed academic who is so enlighteningly-above needing to learn more about gender.



Wanna-be intellectual freedom crusaders further lose credibility when they treat discussions that in any way diverge from their own provincial "Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus"  thinking about gender as so self-evidently absurd that they don't even require rebuttal.  With his sneering "I am not making any of this up," it's as though he's confronted, for perhaps the very first time, thoughts about gender that differ from his own and that, mistakenly, everyone else is a n00b to gender issues as well.



Yet, transgender people actually exist in the real world even if Jason Morgan doesn't know, doesn't want to know, or doesn't think he knows, any!



Genderqueer people actually exist in the real world even if Jason Morgan doesn't know, doesn't want to know, or doesn't think he knows, any!



Most people want to be addressed by the gender pronouns they identify with and it's generally good manners to call people what they want to be called.



So, what's the fucking problem, dude?



The other day, I read a piece at Salon about (other easily-offended white people might want to close their eyes now) white privilege in the debate about naming mascots after Native American caricatures. In it, Steven Salaita (or his editor) notes in the sub-title that there's "nothing scarier than a nervous white man."



Indeed.



The way that white people angrily defend certain mascots of their ballsports' teams seems similar to the way that some people angrily defend their "intellectual freedom" to remain ignorant and close-minded about diversity and transgender issues. To be a white cisgender man in the US used to be something very, extremely important compared to being other types of people. At least, that seems to have been the promise made to many such folks: that they were, would be, and deserved to be the real movers and shakers in the world, with other people relegated mostly to supporting, subordinate, and awestruck roles.



As white cisgender men increasingly confront the brokenness of that promise in an era of increasing civil rights and awareness, everyone else has to increasingly deal with the angry, anxious white man fallout of them periodically stamping their feet about it while other dudes cheer them on at, say, the Wall Street Journal.



Salaita continues that the perpetuation of offensive mascots are "products of an American will to name what has been conquered and to maintain power through a refusal to reconsider traditions of naming." Just as masses of white people scream, and I do mean scream, about PC gone awry in the mascot debate, cisgender people often refuse to reconsider naming transgender people what transgender people want to be named even as these cisgender people evidence not even an iota of understanding of transgender issues.



Again, I reference Morgan's "I am not making this up" snark as though he, rather than transgender people or people who study gender for a living, is the real namer of whether transgender lives are authentic or not.



Men who cheer on Morgan's rant are likely those who treat diversity training as though it viscerally pains them, and is an assault on their intellectual freedom, to be confronted with the reality that people who aren't like them both exist and do not all go waiving around "White Men Are #1" foam fingers all day long 24/7/365. From reading his letter, one might think that the diversity training is mandating that he personally clothe transgender women in poodle skirts each morning, whilst then donning pom-pons and megaphones, perhaps with the added humiliation of being forced to apply a couple of layers of mascara as well.



Yet, all he, or anyone, really has to do to be even just a halfway okay person is call someone by their preferred pronoun and not, like, physically assault someone because they're trans. And that's a pretty fucking low bar when you think about it.



His letter doesn't seek so-called intellectual freedom. It demands the power to name reality and asks the rest of us to participate in the charade of white male supremacy.

On Trans-Inclusive Feminism

I'm committed to it.



In Whipping Girl, Julia Serrano issued a call to challenge gender entitlement, which she defined as  "privileging one's own perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations of other people's genders over the way those people understand themselves."



Frankly, I'm repulsed and angered by the gender entitlement, misgendering of trans* people, and policing that some feminists orchestrate both in the name of feminism and in the name of allegedly protecting cis women. By doing so, they contribute to the marginalization of transgender people and align themselves with gender traditionalists who audit people's own lived experiences of themselves.



Details and background information about what spurred this post can be found here.



At this link is information on how you can sign on, as well.

Men Are Simple v. Women Are Complicated

It is a truth universally acknowledged among the feminist hivemind that Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus thinking is the stuff of really bad stand-up comedy straight from the Golly G. Shucks Skool of Gender Common Sense where everything a woman is, a man is the opposite.



So, I read the following two articles back to back, and got some serious whiplash.



Over at the Good Men Project, Noah Brand (or his editor) claims, "It’s true, men are complicated and confusing." He then proceeds to tell his audience five "important things" that women purportedly don't know about men.



Over at Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative, he approvingly highlights and agrees with a commenter who asserts, "Honestly, ladies, men are pretty [emotionally] simple. Women are more complicated than we are, and so you assume that we are complicated, too. Sorry to disappoint you!"

To be clear, I'm not confused by these two contradictory statements. Men aren't a monolithic hivemind any more than women, the gays, or the feminists are, actually. Which, you know, actually does seem like it'd be a big Newsflash to lots of people. Today, though, I want to delve into that we men simple, women complicated, ooga booga grunt grunt thing that's so tiresome and not-reality-based. 

For one, I'm not surprised that the "men are simple, women are complicated" narrative is one that the conservative Dreher buys into, as his religion fabricates sex differences, roles, and hierarchy. What is mildly amusing, though, is the way his own everyday writing subverts the very pop gender psychology he promotes.



I've been reading his blog for a good year now, and compared to the incredibly-diverse range of blogs I read, I find his posts to be about as navel-gazey and emotional as they come. In the midst of writing about bullying, "Campus Feminist[s]", Imaginary Racism, and other assorted topics, he regularly displays anger, sadness, disgust, disapproval, grief, happiness, ridicule, and pleasure. I would even call the way he writes about food, and his Christian religion, to be effete.



Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just that while I rarely agree with him, his posts are what could be expected from an emotionally-complex human being, rather than an emotionally "simple" robot-man, posting stuff on the Internet.

Which brings me to my larger point. As appealing, romantic, and reassuring as these Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus stories might be to some people, men and women aren't monolithic categorical groups. Meta-analyes consistently show that men and women are actually similar on most psychological variables, indicating that we aren't, actually, "opposites" or "complementary" and that it's inaccurate to portray men and women as being inherently, essentially in contradistinction to one another. In other words, average differences between men and women might exist at a group level, but at an individual level, it would be inaccurate to assume that any given man is a woman's "opposite" based on gender alone.



Indeed, just because it was amusing I input the text of Dreher's "men are pretty simple" commenter into the also-kinda-essentialist Gender Guesser, which estimates a person's gender based on word usage. Mr. "men are pretty simple" came back as "weak male" with so-called male word usage coming in at 53%. Dreher's recent food post, here, came back as "weak male" at 54% (for formal writing, it would have been "weak female"). 

One of my most recent blog posts came in as "male" at 60%.



I'm adamantly not using these numbers for purposes of invoking shame or humiliation. Anyone who thinks that I think there's something embarrassing about a man's writing being categorized as "weak male" (ie- like a woman) or "weak female" doesn't know the first thing about my opinions. Rather, the take-away is that talking about men and women as categorical opposites, or very very different and possibly even alien species compared to one another, is of marginal utility in describing reality where most people display both stereotypically masculine and feminine traits, despite their gender identity.



Yet, narratives claiming otherwise persist.



For one, it seems that such narratives are simply appealing to many, on a romantic level - as though they want to believe they're bridging some great, inherent planetary divide, rather than traversing a boring continuum, among the genders when they engage in heterosexual relations.  Some people think that difference and mystery are sexy. Yet, how often is it, really, that what's most sexy, different, and mysterious (or even funny) about a person is that they are a man, rather than a woman, or vice versa?  

As writer Jane Espenson, who maybe knows a thing or two about such things, has noted, "A joke that pokes fun at a person is sharpest, funniest, when it finds that perfect detail, the most subtle observation of what sets that person apart."  And rarely is gender alone that sharp detail about a person that maybe tells us all we need to know about what that person is like.

Two, many people are simply benefit from the certainty of thinking of men and women as essentially different and/or opposite. While the "men are simple" thing has always struck me as demeaning toward men, it's also a backhanded compliment to women. It's dog whistle for "you're irrational." "Wrong." "Not credible." And, if a man is a woman's opposite, he is by definition, well, the opposite of those things.  So maybe Dreher, no fan of transgender advocacy and folks, perhaps needs to continue thinking of gender in the fixed way that he does to keep lots of other opinions from tumbling down.



So, while I don't often agree with things at GMP either, I can at least appreciate Noah Brand's subversion of the "men are simple, women are complicated" trope in his article. 

In some ways, I think his article speaks to a larger, more accurate point:  Namely, that while many men might think of themselves as being "simple" compared to women, actually many of us human beings, to ourselves, seem more simple and less complicated than other people, what with their own inner thoughts and all, seem to be. 

From that perspective it seems almost deeply self-centered to proclaim the people in one's own group to be "simple" compared to those other kinds of people. Indeed, maybe it's not so much that men as a group are emotionally simple, many of them just think they are.

Women's Sports No Haven For LGBT Athletes

Jessica Luther has written an important piece over at ThinkProgress, in which I'm quoted, about the perhaps-counterintuitive reality that women's sports, and female athletes, are not always super welcoming to non-heterosexual and transgender athletes.



In the piece, she references WNBA player Sophia Young's confused-seeming tweet regarding her opposition to marriage equality for same-sex couples. "Confused-seeming" because she tweeted an image of herself at a rally against an a anti-discrimination ordinance that, actually, wasn't a marriage ordinance.



Whoooops!



Anyway, the larger point is that women's sports, of all levels, aren't the haven of acceptance that mainstream audiences might believe they are. I was reading the recent obituary of a former player in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, the league featured in the movie A League of Their Own, and the player, a lesbian, recounted both the the league's firing of her for getting a "butch" haircut and its active exclusion of so-called "freaks" and "Amazons." (And, to its credit, League actually did somewhat portray this gender policing).



Even today, coaches at major colleges are widely known or rumored to engage in lesbian baiting of other coaches during athlete recruitment, trying to dissuade players from going to certain schools that are more accepting of LGBT students. Lesbian coaches are numerous, but rarely allowed to be officially "out" to players, parents, fans, and the media.



Girls and women often actively police the gender conformity and sexual orientations of their teammates and ridicule other players for not looking, or being, "sufficiently" feminine.



And, well, Anna Kournikova is, like, maybe okay, for the Male Gaze that purportedly comprises all of sports fandom, and it's a fun parlor trick for some dudes to watch Jenny Finch strike out professional baseball players. But, largely, male sports fans often demean female athletes of all orientations as being too manly, dykey, and/or sucky to warrant the status of an authentic athlete worthy of something other than ridicule and contempt.



I wonder, too, how a desire for mainstream and male acceptance plays into the bigotry expressed by some female athletes.  It's as though some female athletes view non-heterosexual female athletes as a lavendar menace of women's sports, hamstringing the ability of all female athletes to be taken seriously by the real power-brokers of sports - heterosexual men.



Luther notes:

"As I’ve written elsewhere, there is evidence to suggest that even if coming out may be easier for female athletes than it is for men, that doesn’t mean it is easy. Only 6 years ago, Penn State forced the resignation of their women’s basketball coach, Rene Portland, because of her known 'no-lesbians' policy. Three years before [out lesbian Brittney] Griner arrived at Baylor, Sophia Young was the star of that team. Young led her squad to the national championship in 2005. Unlike the WNBA, Young’s position on gay rights put her in a clear majority at Baylor, where Griner also won a national title but did it while living a less open life than she does now. Openly gay women’s college basketball coaches have said that homophobia hurts their recruiting. Sue Wicks, a former player, said she was asked to deny interview requests to lesbian publications while serving as an assistant coach. Others have identified a 'homonegative environment' as one factor in the decline of female coaches in women’s collegiate sports."

Have I mentioned before that I think Brittney Griner is awesome?



Welp, she is awesome.



And while I'm at it, Doris and "All the Way" Mae always struck me as being girlfriends. There, I said it.