Saturday, May 28, 2011

Black to White: The Next Transition?

The upcoming documentary Dark Girls deals with the shame and self hatred dark skinned black women often feel growing up, a shame and self hatred amid an almighty and highly valued white culture backdrop. A shame that runs so deep and dates so far back, black people themselves often value lighter skins over darker skins, especially black females.

As a white person, it had never occurred to me that skin color within black culture had a hierarchy. I certainly was aware it did with regards to whites, but it didn't dawn on me black people measured worth similarly. At least not until about 10 years ago when talking with a black male co-worker/friend about his ex g/f. He and her had been a couple for about 10 years. I asked him why they never had kids together. He looked at me like I had said the most awful thing, then said, "Didn't you ever meet Cheryl?" I hadn't. He then said, "She's darker than me." I didn't quite know what to say. He then said he would only have a child with a woman with a complexion similar to another female co-worker who had a black mom/white dad, i.e. very light skinned.

Over the years since this conversation, I've educated myself as best as a white person could on the subject, and quickly discovered upon that education that color was another area of shame, self hatred and body dysphoria in women. I learned of black females using harmful products that promised to bleach their skin. Not coincidentally that came on the market shortly after film came into being, male media that still primarily features light skinned (and now primarily thin) black women only. 
 
Like the backlash against feminism that has dieted; breast augmented, lipo suctioned, cheek implanted, labia plastied and all around carved women into the perfect hyper feminine white male approved size zero, the backlash against civil rights has allowed similar repercussions against black women with equally devastating  results. Less than 30 years ago, anorexia was a "white girl" disorder. Today, as black females are shoved through the male media grinder and measured against the unnatural barbie-like white female backdrop, eating disorders are claiming more and more black female victims.

There are ever greater demands for black women to do whatever it is possible to fit themselves into a white woman mold, and ever greater means with which to do so- from copious amounts of bleaching kits, hair straighteners to various forms of plastic surgeries which thin lips and narrow noses. All informs black females at younger and younger ages that there is something wrong with them. As can be seen in the video clip, dark skinned black girls thought at their most earliest ages something was wrong with them, many thinking they should have been born white and many blaming themselves that they weren't. 
 
With all the negative messages females are bombarded with from birth, there are no shortage of reasons that female children of all races find themselves thinking that they should have been born in a different body- one of a different sex, one of a different race or one of a different height and weight. In Sylvia Plath's prophetic poem Brasilia, the female speaker ponders the super people with torso of steel...awaiting masses of cloud to give them expression. But we see right here on this very blog with female transitioners, that we need not wait for something so drastic as a nuclear holocaust to give them expression. The male medical machine is doing so every day. Instead of their thick fat fingers on "the button," they have them instead on the plunger of a syringe or the end of a scalpel.

In Dark Girls, we see that female self hatred, confusion and the desire for female body modification isn't limited to "sex changing." If we do not take a long hard look at how misogyny is (mis)shaping females, with a little medical advancement, white America is going to look a whole lot whiter.

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Friday, May 27, 2011

The "Gender-less Child" a Discussion

I chose not to do a post about the "gender-less child" because it seems to have been posted about to death. But I will open up a discussion for those interested.

Personally I'm fervently against.

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ps I admit that this made me lol 

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Trans Trending-Who is Transitioning

Anothing week of new self hating female victims of transition...
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Let Us Now Excuse Famous Men: Schwarzenegger, Strauss-Kahn and Male Entitlement (an article)

Click here for full article


From the article:

Sadly, both Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn have benefited from the long running trend of excusing bad behavior by men on the grounds that it’s simply what men do, and can’t be expected to change. This trend is helped along by a stiff undercurrent of largely unquestioned and unexamined misogyny in our culture, which makes offenses committed against women seem unworthy of serious outrage. Some of the inability to understand the treatment of women may also be attributable to what scholar Russell K. Robinson calls “perceptual segregation” : members of a relatively privileged group (e.g., men) interpret acts of discrimination toward a less privileged group (e.g., women) as being less serious than members of the disadvantaged group do (6). Put together, these factors create a culture that either actively, or through unawareness, sustains attitudes of male entitlement and misogyny, which in turn sustain the assumptions of the culture that created them. We get the both the belief that everything men do is by definition what they had to do, and that if they do it to women, it really doesn’t matter much anyway.

 This culture, our culture, is one in which misogynistic language and comments rarely attract much attention – where in fact, the abuse of women by some famous men is seen as a sign of virile righteousness. In this culture, somewhere between ¼ and 1/5 of women consistently report that men have raped them, and yet it is women who are lectured to about the need to prevent rape – usually by restructuring their entire lives so as not to attract those uncontrollable male urges we’re always told about. It’s a culture where it’s common for male sales persons to entertain clients by taking them to strip clubs, giving their female counterparts the choice of either coming along despite possible objections, or not going and thus being disadvantaged in the quest for clients and for the all important perception of being a “team player.” In fact, recent reports indicate that a German insurance firm rewarded top male salesmen by giving them access to prostitutes at a corporate-sponsored orgy (7). Ours is a culture where women still are not paid equally to men for equal work, are still disproportionately saddled with childcare duties, and still lack autonomy in reproductive health and choice. It’s a culture where male elected representatives can vote to redefine rape in order to deny abortions to rape survivors – one legislator even proposed to eliminate all abortion coverage on standard insurance plans, even for female rape survivors, and then went on to suggest that women should “plan ahead” by buying supplemental coverage just in case someone rapes them one day. Finally, it’s a culture in which the continuing existence of sexism is enabled by the fact that so many men dismiss suggestions that it still exists, and that something they have just said or did may perpetuate it, with reactions ranging from defensiveness to condescension.

There’s a standard narrative about the way feminism has affected relationships between men and women – especially in heterosexual relationships. It goes something like this: A long time ago, men and women fell in love.  Their relationships weren’t perfect (what in life ever is?), but they worked, because men and women each had distinct, well-defined roles. But women’s liberation changed everything, and made women aware of desires and needs they never knew they had, and bewildered men didn’t know how to respond. This narrative is broadly accepted, even across the political spectrum, but there are elements missing from it. It either directly or implicitly blames a movement to end inequality for problems that were caused by inequality, for starters. But it also ignores the fact that the happy days of male and female relationships weren’t equally happy for women, as well as the sense of male entitlement that frequently has caused the unhappiness. This is the attitude that unquestioningly assumed that women existed to be helpmates and sources of spousal and maternal wisdom, rather than to live for their own purposes. It’s also an attitude that rationalizes different, unequal roles for women and men based on assumed essential differences, including differences in sexuality, and uses these assumed differences to gloss over disrespectful or even violent behavior. Men who are unfaithful to their wives couldn’t help it, based on this model, because they simply have a greater need for sex than women do. The time-honored tradition of bachelor parties also is based on this idea – it frames the man’s commitment to one woman as a supreme sacrifice because of the man’s presumably greater sexual appetite, and such a noble sacrifice surely entitles him to an evening of doing whatever he wishes to women’s bodies. 


Yes, it’s true that there are differences between some of the behaviors discussed here. The use of sexist language is, of course, not the same thing as rape. But both behaviors are made possible by the culture of entitlement, and the way it shapes and then excuses the masculinity of many men. A culture in which many men see nothing wrong with making misogynistic remarks, with subsuming the rights and feelings of women to their own, or excusing the sexist behavior of other men is exactly the kind of culture where high frequencies of sexual violence will occur. The behaviors lie on a continuum that is more fluid than most people may want to acknowledge. Many rapists have previous histories of other sexual offenses including groping and street harassment, and studies have shown that men who profess belief in various “rape myths” (such as that women dressed a certain way are “asking for it”) are more likely to commit rape themselves.

Ironically, Maria Shriver recently wrote a blog post titled “Is the Model of Masculinity Changing in America,” in which she wondered if new models of masculinity would replace the swaggering bravado of much traditional masculinity. Let’s hope so, Maria. The kind of masculinity that defines itself by subordinating women is full of shit, and it’s time to stop making excuses for it.


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Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Being OUT-A Responsibility of Every Person in the GLBT

From the first gay and lesbian political factions that formed directly after the Stonewall Rebellion, one of the core directives was being "out," and gays and lesbians realized the power of the old adage "strength in numbers." Going a step further, those early political gays and lesbians realized that the general public had no idea just how many gays and lesbians there were, nor did they realize that they knew or were even related to a gay or lesbian. Being out to family, friends, schoolmates, teachers, co-workers, and bosses would not only crystallize our numbers, but most importantly would solidify how most gays and lesbians are just like everyone else. We're your teachers, students, grocer, police person, doctor, friend, cousin, aunt or uncle and the list goes on and on.

From the time the Gay Liberation Front formed, through our political triumphs and political losses, always at the top of the list of priorities were slogans such as: "OUT and proud," "We're here, we're queer and we're NOT GOING BACK" right down to "SILENCE Equal Death!" Even having top gay and lesbian political leaders encouraged us to "out" closeted public figures who were gay or lesbian. Unfortunately directly after the AIDS crisis, "queer theory" was born from postmodernism's muck funnel and swiftly ushered in a warped conservationism in drag as feminism!

As group after group began attaching themselves to the gay and lesbian movement post queer theory, many of our early core strategies (that are still necessary to gay and lesbian rights today) began to go by the wayside in favor of a political agenda that had nothing to do with gay and lesbian issues whatsoever. Gays and lesbians now find ourselves under a queer umbrella or mixed into queer alphabet soup, unsure where we begin and the incessant additions end!

Which brings me to my most recent post regarding the likes of Jen and "Aiden/Aydian" and any post such as the "Trans Trender" posts. Seems these types of postings stir up such anger from the trans community with the main gripe being that I am somehow "outing" the females in question. Aydian herself, along with many other ftMs, have bitched and moaned, how could I (a member of the queer alphabet soup) stoop so low as to employ critical thinking regarding fellow queers and potentially "out" those same queers! Queers that are gleaning the benefits of straight privilege and a tidy closet, while gays and lesbians continue having what little rights we have gained be slowly taken away.

If we're all a part of the queer soup mix, then being OUT is as essential as it was in 1969! It is up to every single person in the queer soup bowl to not only be out but STAY out, instead of reaping the benefits of the closet or worse, hetero privilege, while other queers continue to suffer and go without!

dirt

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Straight Female Fetishizers who Pressure Females to Transition

The screen caps below were emailed to me yesterday, I have verified that all pics and info contained in the pics have been previously made public by the female/s within the pics. 

That said, I find the transition pressuring made by the clearly straight "g/f" in this video, linked in the screen caps, absolutely abhorrent! Not surprisingly, the female transitioner featured first, has since deleted her YT account.


Two young women down, how many more to go before Miss ftM Fetishizer gets bored and winds up married with children with a male?

If a female claims to love and care for you, then enables you in an form of female self hatred, she really doesnt love/care for you. If someone truly loves you, they will love you enough to help you love yourself just as you are.

dirt