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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
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| Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | 4:24 pm
[jacknotjill]
 |
| | Friday, February 13th, 2009 | 1:08 pm
[perplexions]
 |
EVENT: Bodies of Knowledge Symposium
WHERE: USC Upstate, Spartanburg, South Carolina WHEN: Monday, March 23, 2009, 7:00 p.m. & Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 4:00-8:30 p.m. PRICE: USC Upstate students/faculty/staff: Free Non-Upstate students/faculty: $5 early registration*, $10 general registration Non-Upstate attendees: $20 early registration*, $25 general registration * Early registration fees will not be accepted after March 1, 2009 SPEAKERS: E. Lynn Harris (prelude event), Julia Serano, Kirk Read, Jennifer Baumgardner ( details behind the cut )
REGISTRATION LINK: http://www.uscupstate.edu/bodiesofknowledge/form.aspx?ekfrm=14248
If you have any questions, send me an e-mail: perplexions@gmail.com | | Thursday, January 29th, 2009 | 6:50 pm
[pandapajamas]
 |
US; CA: 2009 Queer Women of Color Film Festival - Call For Films
2009 Queer Women of Color Film Festival - Call For Films Deadline February 13
Posted by: "Madeleine Lim" director@qwocmap.org madbullfilm
Tue Jan 27, 2009 6:17 pm (PST)
dear friends,
much appreciated if you would please help us
forward this to folks who may be interested.
many thanks!
mad
======== CALL FOR FILM SUBMISSIONS from Queer Women of Color Filmmakers for "Queerly Irreverent" for our 5th Annual Queer Women of Color Film Festival QWOCMAP, the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, invites queer women of color film- makers to submit your satirical, hella funny and thoughtful short films to QWOCMAP's 5th annual Queer Women of Color Film Festival, to be held at the Brava Theater, San Francisco, June 12-14, 2009. ( Read more... ) | 9:33 am
[loneboi]
 |
Trans Queer Feminist Poets Read in February in Southern California
Thursday, February 19th @ 7pm Poetry Reading by Ely Shipley (Boy with Flowers; Barrow Street Press) and Ching-In Chen (The Heart's Traffic; Arktoi Books) Riverside Public Library Riverside, CA Friday, February 20th @ 7:45pm Poetry Reading by Ely Shipley (Boy with Flowers; Barrow Street Press) and Ching-In Chen (The Heart's Traffic; Arktoi Books) Skylight Books 1818 N. Vermont Ave. Los Angeles, CA Info: http://www.skylightbooks.com | | Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | 2:14 pm
[perplexions]
|
Book hunting.
Hello everyone!
My name is Sarah and I'm trying to find some books that make the connection between feminism and transgender issues. What I'm really looking for are books or articles that explore male privilege and how it affects the lives of MtFs, FtMs, genderqueers, and other trans* people. If anyone could point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it.
*I use trans as a more inclusive term, but if anyone is offended then you have my sincerest apologies. | | Saturday, December 6th, 2008 | 8:29 am
[equality_parity]
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Equality & Parity II: list of workshops and presenters
Equality & Parity II: list of workshops and presenters This is a list of the workshop and roundtable abstracts and presenters. This list does not include the Plenary Talks or entertainers. If you want to register for the conference, go to www.equalityandparity.org. You can register in English or Spanish. If you reside in California please apply for a scholarship. The conference is free, but scholarships cover, if live 50 miles from the conference location, transportation, food and lodging. If you live less than 50 miles from the conference location, scholarships can't cover lodging. And if you live outside of California, you are not eligible for a scholarship, but you are welcome to attend the conference. Hotel registration deadline is January 5th, so get your registration in ASAP!
( Read more... )
| | Sunday, November 30th, 2008 | 7:07 pm
[bodyimagedoc]
 |
New Post.
Hey Everyone! A new post is now up on my journal. Please check it out. :] If we are not friends, friend me!!!! I am making a doc about body image and need everybody's help in getting our message out! :DDD | | Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | 12:03 pm
[bodyimagedoc]
|
Documentary.
I hope this is not to off topic:
I am a 16 year old high school student and am in the process of making my first documentary. It will be about women and the negative affects on body image and poor self esteem that the media produces. I believe every woman/girl has a story and, I want to here it! Please add me to learn more. It would be greatly appreciated!!! :DD If you have any questions, comments or concerns you can e-mail me at: skydoc92@yahoo.com Again, I apologize if this is too
off topic for this forum however,
I want to here from every type of woman
and their daily struggles of body acceptance/
self esteem. I thought in this forum, this idea would be
well recieved.
:]
Feel free to e-mail/add me! | | Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | 6:14 pm
[auntysarah]
 |
Sick to my Stomach
Crossposted from my own LJ, hence the lack of assumptions about the audience's prior knowledge of some of this stuff: There are certain people out there in Internet-land who spend much of their time writing very unpleasant things about trans people, usually trans women. They tend to come from the same sort of ideological background as Julie Bindel, where trans people represent an obstruction on the road to a kind of "Soviet Town Planner" vision of how the multi-faceted thing we call gender should exist in society. In this vision of the world, the elite of a decadent society wield a bankrupt ideology in order to retain the status-quo, thus preventing underclass from taking their rightful place in society. There's pretty much a direct mapping: | Soviet ideology | transphobic feminist
ideology | |
| The elite | The bourgeoisie | Men | | Bankrupt ideology | Capitalism | Gender | | Underclass | The proletariat | Women |
The allegory continues. The existing system must be overturned in order to realise an egalitarian alternative. Anything that stands in the way of such a goal, or appears to support the existing system, is counter-revolutionary and almost certainly a tool of the oppressors. Sadly, the would-be-liberators end up being "just like the old boss", as The Who might say, replacing one elite willing to resort to very unpleasant lengths to enforce their orthodoxy with another, which is often even more brutal and oppressive with what went before. In the cold-war Soviet world, everyone got to live the same grey identikit life, devoid of any form of cultural expression which wasn't ideologically pure and officially sanctioned. Individualism was regarded as something very suspect and the true believers in the revolution ensured an eye was kept on anyone who might be "dangerous". If they presented too much of a problem, they were to be branded enemies of the people, disgraced in show trials where they were revealed as agents of capitalism, before being "dealt with" more permanently. In the transphobic radfem dystopia, everyone will adopt the same vaguely masculine flavour of androgyny. Personal expression, especially when it comes to ones sex life, must be of a strictly approved type (any form of kink, for example, is right out - indeed, it would be better is people refrained from sex for anything other than procreation at all, and they certainly should try to avoid enjoying it. Bisexuality is a great evil which must be stamped out). Bodily autonomy is problematic, as it has traditionally been used to keep women down, so your hair gets to be regulation length, you don't get to do piercings, cosmetic surgery is pretty much high treason, and so on. Trans people represent a fundamental problem in this world, so we have to be explained away. Either we are deluded dupes of the medical industry (the Bindel view), or we are infiltrators of the patriarchy (the Janice Raymond view). The people who hold these views tend to end up being quite appallingly unpleasant to trans-people (and queer people, the kink community, sex workers, all women who don't share the same cultural background as these "theorists", which is overwhelmingly middle-class and white anglo-saxon, etc.). One can't expose oneself to trans-feminist thought for long without coming across these people and their vitriol. I thought I'd mostly become immune to it. They tend to trot out the same stuff all the time anyway, and there's an expectation that they're going to be gratuitously offensive. However, what I read earlier today represented a low I hadn't seen before, and made me feel physically sick. On the f-word blog, a blog for "contemporary UK feminism", an article was posted about Thursday's Transgender Day of Remembrance. This is the day each year when trans people remember those who have lost their lives simply because they were trans. This includes the ones whose names we know, and the countless ones who died in obscurity, murdered at the hands of someone who decided they were going to "teach them a lesson", or through medical neglect, or at their own hands, unable to cope with their gender dysphoria, isolation, or the stares and abuse that can be relentless for some trans people. It's a day for mourning and remembrance, a day for reflection, a day for remembering our dead. The first comment on that blog entry was from one of the people I talk about above - a prolific transphobic Internet troll who goes by the name of "m Andrea". You don't have to google for long to find some of her worst excesses. This was her Westboro Baptist Church-style response to a post made in memory of people who were brutally murdered because of who they are: Normally, we consider people who use their emotions in place of reason to be utter fucking morons.
The basic premise of transgender ideology is that girl and boy brains exist, and are different from each other. Girl brains luv pink, and are rilly soft and gentle. Boy brains luv blue, and are rilly hard and aggressive.
The basic premise of feminist ideology is that no such difference exists. Oops, we have a discreptancy!
Since some women are quite the aggressive fuck, they must be a boy. Therefore, they are transgendered. Amazingly enough, wanting a penis is not required for women to be an aggressive fuck, so something is quite illogical regarding your theory.
Perhaps insanity is the answer. |
That dogmatic adherence to an ideology can lead someone into a position where they abandon the last vestiges of their basic humanity comes as no shock - history has proven time and time again that humans are more than capable of this. Seeing it like that still makes me feel sick though. | | Saturday, November 15th, 2008 | 8:25 am
[foibey]
 |
Oh FFS. What the hell is it with Press for Change (high profile trans rights lobby group in the UK). They seem determined to give Julie Bindel a serious platform every time there's some controversy about her transphobic bullshit. And in this case they're probaly giving her a big wedge of cash with her platform. Trans issues aren't even her field. She's just an anti-porn/sexwork feminist with a lot of time under her belt on abuse/trafficking issues who's got an obsession with eradicating transsexualism from modern society. ( Press for Change present A Feminist Perspective on the Transsexual Debate... )What's the betting that Bindel will be pitching this as a debate between feminism and trans liberation (as if there's some massive dichotomy between the two)? I can't believe Press for Change. They'd be the ones who talked to Julie Bindel after she wrote this piece and then started trying to persuade the trans community that she was sorry when all she ever offered was an apology for the tone of the piece rather than for everything else that was wrong with it. The ones who agreed to share a platform with her for a Hecklers radio debate about whether or not society should eradicate transsexuals (resulting in them, being the trans people counterbalancing her side of the debate, having to defend their mere existance as if it were all just a matter of friendly disagreement). Enough of shouting down Julie Bindel, can't we just disown PfC and save ourselves some time? | | Saturday, November 1st, 2008 | 7:05 pm
[natalie_456]
 |
Bindel's Response
Posted below is Julie Bindel's response to the whole debate of the past month, reposted from facebook... ( Text under the cut... )So, in summary, she's somehow shocked we targeted her, 'cause, really, shes fighting the same system as us, apparently, but still failed to get informed. Oh dear. Current Mood:  annoyed | | Sunday, October 19th, 2008 | 4:19 pm
[transamazon]
 |
Campus News Column
This is a guest column that was posted in my campus newspaper, The BG News, on Friday: http://media.www.bgnews.com/media/storage/paper883/news/2008/10/17/Forum/Transgenders.Are.Still.Women.Too-3492726.shtml Transgenders are still women, too By: GUEST COLUMNIST Posted: 10/17/08 On Tuesday evening, Vision hosted an event as part of their annual Coming Out Week. This event was a performance by spoken word poet Alix Olson. I am a staunch supporter of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) rights and I support the work of Vision and the goals of Coming Out Week. However, I did not attend the Olson performance for a very specific reason. Alix Olson is a regularly featured performer and ardent supporter of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MWMF). This is a yearly festival held every August in rural Michigan which features performances by female musicians. It attracts thousands and has been held annually for over 30 years. In 1991, Nancy Jean Burkholder, a male-to-female transsexual woman, attended the festival. When it was found out she was a transsexual, she was viciously expelled. The main organizer of MWMF, Lisa Vogel, enacted a policy to ban transsexual women from attending MichFest. She named the policy the "womyn-born-womyn" (WBW) policy. In this policy, only biological females are allowed to attend MWMF. This outrageous, divisive and essentialist policy has been fought against for nearly two decades, and yet Vogel and her cabal of lesbian-feminist ideologues refuse to budge. Why the resistance? Transgender/transsexual women are one of the most hated, disrespected and devalued groups in contemporary American society. We face huge unemployment rates, culturally-incompetent health care, constant street-level harassment and hostility and staggering rates of violence, including hate-motivated homicide. Due to constant employment discrimination, many of us are forced to work in the sex industry or to work in jobs we are over-educated or over-qualified for. While the average person has a 1 in 18,000 chance of being murdered, for transgender people this jumps to 1 in 12. Many of the victims are young, transgender women of color. Transgender women are regularly placed in men's prisons where they are raped and denied medical care. Transgender women have been denied the ability to stay in women's homeless and domestic violence shelters. Vancouver Rape Relief even barred a transgender woman named Kimberly Nixon from volunteering for their agency. One would assume transgender women would receive support from the lesbian/gay and feminist communities. Unfortunately, all too often we have also faced discrimination from these groups as well. The fight over the WBW-policy at MichFest is a great example. Proponents of this bigoted policy assert that trans women have "male privilege" and do not have the experience of girlhood or possess biological femaleness. Some believe WBW possess a special essence that trans women can never attain and that our presence in women's communities taints them with "male energy." Many of the second-wave feminists who throw bitter vitriol at trans women are amongst the most privileged members of society: white, middle-class professionals. They have reaped the benefits of the women's movement and then pick on a group with infinitely less power than them to stomp on. The LGB-fake-T movement is similar. In 2007, gay representative Barney Frank revealed transphobia when he removed support for transgender people from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). One of the biggest and most powerful gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, supported this hateful move and threw the transgender community under the bus. While elite white gays strive for marriage rights, transgender people struggle for the most basic of rights, dignity and survival. The gay and feminist movements have been glaringly shameful in their disrespect and exclusion of transgender women. Alix Olson profits from an institution which deliberately discriminates. Period. Can you imagine the uproar if the group so blatantly excluded from attendance were Jewish, Latina or disabled women? But for some reason, when it comes to transgender women, it is still open season. People still act as if it perfectly acceptable to "debate" whether trans women really are women and should be admitted to women's spaces. In my life as an activist, I have had to fight not only against dominant, gender-normative society but also against transphobic feminists and gays. We will only win true victory if we unite for progressive change, and that must include everyone. We can't afford to leave anyone behind. Joelle Ruby Ryan is a graduate student in the American Culture Studies Department. © Copyright 2008 BG News | | Saturday, October 18th, 2008 | 11:48 am
[paulathomas]
 |
Linda Bellos OBE
I have been asked by my friend Linda Bellos OBE to publicise her support for our campaign about Julie Bindel's nomination. Linda and her partner Caroline Jones sent a joint email to Ben Summerskill yesterday calling for Julie Bindel's nommination to be withdrawn. Read about Linda on wikipedia Paula Thomas | | Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 | 10:44 pm
[zoeimogen]
 |
Sold Out
Most people are probably aware by now of the fuss over the well-known lesbian feminist and transphobe Julie Bindel being nominated for a Stonewall award. ( Behind a cut, because it's crossposted to a few places )I, for one, am calling the Gender Trust out on this. Why have they so quickly done a U-Turn and sold out the community they are supposed to be representing? One can only assume politics are involved somehow. Someone knows someone, or someone put pressure on someone on the Gender Trust board and they turned their back on the community they were supposed to be helping over the one issue that has the community the most incensed it's been since I've been a part of it - and all without doing any basic research on the issue at all. It's clear there's a growing grass-roots movement against many organisations that inadvertantly act transphobically. It's sad that it seems that the "grass roots" are also turning against many of these groups that claim - but fail - to represent us. Current Mood: angry | | Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 | 1:37 pm
[auntysarah]
|
Second Letter to Stonewall
After getting their form letter back in response to the first letter I sent, I responded:
Dear "Info"
I think your form letter is missing the point by a considerable margin. I am a lesbian, and I resent the suggestion than Julie Bindel is "representing a lesbian perspective in the press". Julie Bindel has made it a matter of public record that she feels that "ex-gay" style treatments should be used to eradicate a portion of the GLB community that she does not feel is idealogically pure. I am upset that
Stonewall would consider nominating someone who would side with the US homophobic religious right on this issue, and the damage this risks doing to the cause of GLB rights.
Julie Bindel does not represent the perspective of this lesbian, for one. Quite aside from the trans issue, I am ashamed and embarassed that an organisation supposedly fighting for my rights, as a gay woman, would nominate for "Journalist of the Year", someone who would so readily side with those who would deny us those rights in order to further her own career.
Please, please, please reconsider.
Sarah Brown
I am hoping that this approach will have more currency with them. They don't care about trans issues, that much is obvious, but Bindel harms the GLB community as well, and I don't think a gay rights organisation should be honouring her for it. | | Monday, October 13th, 2008 | 8:55 am
[fall_of_sophia]
 |
i think this is what you call a brush-off
Dear Sophia,
Thank you for your email.
Julie Bindel was shortlisted for a Stonewall award in recognition of her journalism during the last 12 months which often brings a lesbian perspective into the mainstream press.
The awards nominating panel are not endorsing everything she has ever written. A nomination in any category does not mean that the awards panel agree with all of someone’s opinions. Stonewall recognises that some people may disagree with shortlisted nominees.
Regards,
Stonewallinfo@stonewall.org.uk To Whom It Concerns, I appreciate you taking the time to send me a response. I did not simply point out that I have disagreed with her writing in the past, or that her "lesbian perspective" does not represent the views of much of the lesbian community with which I am acquainted. The issue is that her writing has been consistently transphobic. It has shown the public that right-wing bigots are not alone in wishing to deprive trans people of necessary health care - that privileged members of our own community are willing to throw us under a bus for their own gain. Regardless of whether or not Stonewall may shortlist nominees who those on the awards panel may sometimes disagree with, as I see it there is nothing one can celebrate about Julie Bindell's journalism career without taking her transphobia into account - and this reads as an endorsement regardless of intent. Respectfully, Sophia Kiernan x-posted. | | Friday, October 10th, 2008 | 11:47 pm
[tj_writer75]
 |
!www.brotheroutsider.org! Now Online
Hello Friends: Brother Outsider: International Literary Collective & Forum is now online. Please head over to the site www.brotheroutsider.org and register, comment on the stories, jump into the forum, check out the photojournal and prepare for a month full of surprises. The site will continue to grow as we grow. Please help in making this site a preeminent resource of literature and social networking for FTM, male spirited, Transmasculine, masculine Genderqueer, et al. writers, activists and other members of our widespread community. JOIN NOW! SUBMIT TODAY! TELL A FRIEND, TO TELL A FRIEND, TO TELL A FRIEND! TJ Fleming Editor-in-Chief www.brotheroutsider.org | 1:53 pm
[auntysarah]
 |
Transphobe Bindel Nominated as Stonewall's Journalist of the Year
LGB campaigning organisation, Stonewall are hosting a glitzy event on November 6th at the Victoria and Albert in London, where they will announce the winners of their annual awards. Nominated under the "Journalist of the Year" category is Julie Bindel, who is well known for her transphobic writing. In 2007, I sat in the audience of Radio 4's "Hecklers debate" on sex reassignment surgery and listened to Bindel explain how she wanted hormonal and surgical treatment of transpeople replaced with reparative therapy (which she euphemistically referred to as "talking cures"). Stonewall, despite being named after a riot in which trans people were instrumental, has achieved a certain notoriety within the UK Trans community for the apparent low regard in which it holds trans issues, but nominating an actively transphobic journalist for this award could be seen as a direct slap in the face for the UK's trans community. Stonewall can be contacted by email on: info@stonewall.org.uk | | Monday, September 29th, 2008 | 9:06 pm
[klgenderoutlaw] |
| | Monday, September 22nd, 2008 | 10:58 pm
[auntysarah]
|
London Transfeminist Group: Pre-Zucker Protest Meeting
The London Transfeminist Group is meeting this Thursday, 25th of September, in order for those planning to protest the invitation of controversial American-Canadian doctor, Kenneth Zucker, to keynote the Royal Society of Medicine's discussion on treatment of transgendered adolescents on October 1st. Kenneth Zucker is infamous within the trans community for using what many feel to be aversion therapy on children as young as three, who show "gender variant" behaviour. Some of us feel that subjecting any child, yet alone those so young, to "treatment" which involves confiscating their favourite toys and forbidding them contact with their best friends amounts to psychologically abusing these children. We further feel that in engaging with this treatment, Dr Zucker is pandering to the homophobic and transphobic fears of the parents of these children that they might "grow up gay", or "grow up to be trans". We further feel that the Royal Society of Medicine brings itself into disrepute by inviting someone who subjects children to treatment which harkens back to a dark age of abuse of queer and gender-variant people by the mental health community. Regardless of whether Dr Zucker is sometimes in favour of trans-positive treatment for adolescents, such as the use of puberty blocking drugs, inviting this man to present the keynote shows a woeful lack of respect for trans and queer people in the UK, and sends the message that "doctors" who are prepared to engage in reparative and aversion therapy against queer and gender-variant people are still tolerated and respected amongst their peers. Please join us for a pre-protest discussion of this issue, as well as collaborating in producing leaflets, placards, etc. for the protest at Gays The Word Bookshop, Marchmont Street, this Thursday at 7:30 pm. |
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