Support Women's Right To Choose, You Coward

I'm a little late and I don't really know if this counts as a platform but here we go;

Abortion bills are almost always used to control women. But also yes, the supporters thereof actually do care about abortion, it's just one of their favourite ways to control women because their morals can drive their own outrage.

There are plenty of arguments to be made for a pro-choice stance but there are people better at making those arguments so I'm just going to say this about the anti-choice side;

It's not only old white men.

A popular talking point from intersectional feminist circles is that white women are just as guilty of electing Trump into office. While it's mostly old white men who sign, write and pass these bills, they're pandering as much to a supporting base of conservative women as they are to white men.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that old white men in power are blameless because, no, they certainly have to shoulder a lot of the responsibility but we often miss the bigger picture, and that's that there are enough women out there who empathize more with a fetus than with fellow women and their opinions are the ones that the men in power will consider, even if less so than with their fellow men.

And yeah, it is up to leftist men to signal boost, support and vocalize the hell out of our stance on this. We have enough clout and most of us have at least some form of platform. Now is the time to make your voices heard in solidarity with women, especially if it's unpopular in your circle because that's probably who needs to hear it the most.

Also, tell all your friends to go watch or read The Handmaids Tale. There's a piece of media that'll have a profound effect on your worldview and yeah, it's the kind of  fucked up thing that hits a little too close to home right now and maybe that's exactly what we need, a reminder of how bad things can get so we know to preemptively prevent things from ever reaching that point.

In conclusion, yeah, I'm with the women on this point, and not just with women, with trans men, NBs and anyone else who has a uterus. I'm not okay with the regulation of their bodies and it frightens me to see how many people are okay with that. This is not okay, this is not normal, we shouldn't let it be.

We're supposed to be better than that, right?

Read More

Gender. Let's Educate Ourselves.

"Gender is like the twin towers. There used to be two of them, but now it's a really sensitive topic."
~Meme that showed up on my Facebook feed

I admit I laughed when I first read that little nugget of wisdom. Gender seems to be one of the most contentious issues of the last few years or so and we still haven't found much of a productive way around talking about the issue. Adding to the confusion is the lack of proper differentiation between gender and sex, and the conflation of the two by the layman's definition.

Transgender rights are also one of the core focuses of the modern LGBTQ+ movement but much like gays and lesbians, the fight for equality has been an uphill one for trans people. Trans people also make up an even smaller portion of the population than cisgender gays, lesbians or bisexuals, and thus even within the movement had their fights lose priority to whatever was the more pressing matter, something I've been guilty of in the past. It reminds us that activism isn't perfect.

But if we want to learn, we have to make the choice to educate ourselves. So let's do just that.

For the sake of thoroughness, I want to do a quick recap on the current state of things. Historically, gender and sex have been conflated and used interchangeably. Within that definition of gender, it was and still is widely accepted that there are only two genders corresponding to two biological sexes; male and female. This is what's known as the gender binary; you are either one gender or the other. There is no state in between.

A common way to view gender is by the XY Sex Determination system. Your DNA carries a pair of sex chromosomes which define your biological sex, either a pair of X chromosomes (resulting in XX chromosomes, or homogametic sex) which would make you female, or a pair that includes an X and a Y chromosome (resulting in XY chromosomes, or heterogametic sex) which would make you male.

Another way to view gender (and this is the weakest in my opinion) is by primary sex characteristics, or as the few folks who actually view it this way, by whether or not ya'll got a penis or a vagina.

You can live your whole life by these definitions. Hell, you can meet transgender people and fit them within the gender binary just fine, because humans are pretty good at putting things that are vaguely alike into neat little boxes.

Real life, however, is much more complex.

Debunking most of these are pretty easy. I'm s firm advocate for dropping the gender binary, but many people might not feel that way. If you're still with me, and if you're one of the people on the fence, maybe I can say a couple things that'll make you rethink your position.

First, let me debunk all both previously mentioned forms of gender binary;

Through the XY Sex Determination System we know that men are born with XY chromosomes where as females are born with XX chromosomes. However, there are several documented cases of babies born with  XXY chromosomes, also known as Klinefelter Syndrome. Those affected produce less testosterone and develop smaller testes. XYY Syndrome which affects a small percentage of men, symptoms can include becoming taller. In the past, men with XYY syndrome were referred to as "super males". Turner Syndrom, in women, occurs when one of the two X chromosomes is missing.

As you can see, there are people who don't adhere to conventional chromosomal pairings that are still referred to as men or women. Chromosomes are the determinators of biological sex, but by that definition, sex can vary wildly through different chromosomal pairings.


Next is primary sex characteristics. This one is a lot easier to debunk because it doesn't take much of a logical leap to conclude that some people can be born without or with an excess of primary sex characteristics.

This is where intersex people come into play.

Intersex people are born with any variation of sex characteristics, which can also include a chromosomal pairing that isn't XY or XX. Intersex people can also develop genitalia that fits somewhere in between male and female genitalia.

If one wanted to, one could describe intersex people as the third gender. The gender that is neither male, or female, but is either somewhere in between or both. Once upon a time, we used the word hermaphrodite, but this has become stigmatized and can be misleading. As of writing, the preferred term is intersex when referring to humans. For animals, however, the word hermaphrodite is still mostly used.

Because we observe hermaphroditic qualities in animals. Mostly invertebrate such as worms or slugs exhibit hermaphroditic qualities. And there are several species of hermaphroditic animals that reproduce asexually (talk about being told to go f*ck yourself).

I think it's telling how complex gender is since all I've so far done is shown that biological sex is complex and that one can be born perfectly healthy but not perfectly fit any definition of male or female. But biological sex is only part of the equation since one's biological sex can be incongruent with one's gender.

Basically, when your biological sex and your gender identity are incongruent, you would be transgender.

Gender is also more of an umbrella term encompassing one's gender expression and one's gender identity. These two may seem the same but they're fundamentally different concepts.

Gender identity is your own personal experience of gender. Your gender identity can correlate with your biological sex or it can be incongruent. But gender identity is internal. It's how you feel on the inside.

When your gender identity is incongruent with your biological sex, you can sometimes experience what's known as gender dysphoria. While it affects most transgender people, being transgender does not immediately equate to having gender dysphoria. Some transgender folk can live their entire lives without ever feeling it. Gender dysphoria is also much like depression, in that it can be a mood or state of being, but it can also be a diagnosable mental illness.

Gender expression is the final term on the list. This is the one I think people are least familiar with. Gender expression is how we outwardly express our gender. How we physically manifest our inner gender identity. From clothing to pronouns to hair to voice to the way we stand. It's any way we outwardly express what we feel. What we do, how we do it, how we look, and how feminine or masculine we present any part of ourselves.

Your gender expression, however, can run entirely incongruent to your gender identity.

That's an out there concept, isn't it? But think of it this way. Transgender people who are closeted for any reason have to present themselves as cisgender. They have to express themselves in a way that does not correlate with their gender identity, but rather their biological sex. Some may choose to simply not express extreme versions of said gender identity. These would be your demigirls or demiboys. Sometimes you can express an incongruent gender just for the fun of it. We basically built the entire drag subculture around incongruent gender expression.

And if you've made it all the way here, I want to present my case. If your Sex, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression can all be incongruent, then by doing some simple math, we have at least 3 (male, female, other) times 3 (Sex, Identity, Expression) different types of people! 9 different combinations of people! That's weird and cool and great! Humans are diverse things and we can be born with not a goddamn thing wrong with us and come out so different.

Why not express that through our language?

I've avoided using the term Gender Spectrum. The term has a lot of stigma attached, but honestly, it's what describes us. We exist on a spectrum. And no position on it makes you better or worse than anyone else. It just makes you different. And if you were born a boy who identifies as a boy and expresses himself like a boy, like I do, then... Well, I suppose it makes no damn difference, doesn't it? Sure, maybe it might mean someday I'll have to tick a few more boxes while filling out census forms but really, you're unaffected by it.

However, it's life changing for someone else.

Having a set of words to describe your experience is like learning how to spell your own name. For someone, this is a tool to describe their everyday experience, a way to normalize how they feel. That's important.

I think there's sect of people who believe that kids online are making up genders to feel special, usually the same people who use the phrase "I identify as an attack helicopter" because it'll make stranger on the internet laugh or something. And I think it's that kind of person who really needs to ask themselves what would even be so wrong about that?

Making up words for things is how language evolves. A word for where you personally fit into the gender expression that might describe a different experience from someone else is important, because it might also describe the experience of another person. Imagine we got mad at music genres for inventing new subgenres (actually wait, we do do that. Anyone remember when the metal community lost their collective shit over metalcore made by teenagers who stood a little too wide, and then the glorious meme that was crabcore was born into this world?)

We don't lose our minds every time there's a new film genre, or videogame genre, or music genre. Why are we so mad at new people genders?

Either way you slice it, science doesn't support the gender binary, the human experience doesn't support the gender binary and why on earth would you want it to? The weirder and wackier we come out the box, the better. Humans aren't factory assembled, and diversity is great.

So let's all just be excellent to each other, okay?

Here's a great video with Emily who is an intersex person herself.

Read More

#MenAreTrash; A few thoughts

A new thing has been popping up on my social media feed, which is a collection of anecdotes, counter-culture statements, statistics and reactionary statements attached to the tag #menaretrash.

The air is poisoned, the ice caps are melting, and men are trash. Probably unsavoury, but in the general sense, it's true. Some are going to argue about it, and it's going to be mostly pointless because the arguing usually doesn't accomplish anything. If we all dropped everything and combined our human intellect and resources for a day, we could probably solve it all. But then we'd  all have to take a day out of our lives, and we only get so many of those.

My first thought was, well ,yes, I suppose, men have historically oppressed women, been violent towards women, subjugated women, sexually assaulted women, hell, men have done all of the above to other men for not being "manly" enough. You could swop out trash for any number of adjectives, including but not exclusive to garbage, shitty, genocidal, misogynistic, toxic, oppressive, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and in the most general sense it will ring true. Hell, you don't have to look far, there are parts of the world where women aren't allowed to drive, study, organize, choose who they eventually marry, show any parts of their bodies among other things. In the western world there's a gigantic debate about whether a woman is even allowed to make a choice about a fetus growing inside her. Men are literally bothered with the physical insides of a woman they can't see and subsequently try making laws to control those bits because God forbid women make their own choices.

In all this it did strike me to wonder if this will accomplish anything. The feminist side of me is revelling at all the butthurt manbabies with hurt emotions because a bunch of strangers on the internet called them a bad thing, and some of their friends kind of agree. The skeptic side of me did start to wonder if this isn't an exercise in futility. After all, it's hard to imagine this having any longevity apart from the initial traction it's already gained.

While I've read some genuinely rock-solid points in not only defense for the tag and it's users but definite reasons to support it, I've also read a bunch of defenses which can ultimately be summed up as "because you don't think men are trash, maybe you are trash". Sure, it's a clever way to put down a detractor and there are plenty people I don't want to debate the issue with because, let's face it, the ratio of people with something genuinely interesting to say on the matter versus special snowflakes who've never been insulted in their lives is disproportionate and well, at some point I have to get back to scrolling through memes and geeking out over stupid 90s videogames. But there is a culture of dismissiveness. They disagree, so they must be mostly conservative, which means the eventual argument that's going to break out from this will mostly be a waste of time. I'm not going to ask anyone to listen to every argumentative ass-whistle, because most of it is a steaming pile of crap. But there are valid criticisms. And you are going to run into one, eventually. And you're not going to want to, but I urge you to consider for a moment pushing aside doubts and trying to listen.

Another weird thing I've noticed happening is the defenders of the tag trying to almost deny detractors the right to criticism. And I'm not going to give any detractors credit here, as of yet the most nuanced thing anyone has managed to say is that generalizing is generally bad and calling half the people on the planet garbage is probably not the best way to get them on your side. Sometimes detractors devolve into criticisms of the far left, which is weird because it's not the far left that's saying this, it's actually normal women noticing terrible things and vocalizing an observation they've made. Your beef isn't with those darn leftists and their little feminist clubs, and it might feel that way because it is people with generally left-leaning political views propagating the tag, but just listen. You're going to have to tell real women who've been through real trauma why you think they're invalid for vocalizing an observation about their every day experience. And yes, perhaps the nomenclature is objectionable and you're perfectly entitled to that opinion, hell, it's a rather popular and valid opinion, you also have to try put aside your own personal objections and try understand why this isn't a viewed as a put-down on men and as a statement about everyday womanhood in South Africa.

If nothing else, it's a pretty interesting social experiment. The amount of men responding to #menaretrash by actively proving how trash men can be is astounding, like watching a bee repeatedly fly into a window. Furthermore, let's be real, we tolerate and even glorify song lyrics, television and media that actively call women bitches and hoes, but when men get called trash, we react like a bunch of precious snowflakes who've never been insulted in our lives. It's a little eye-opening, if nothing else.

Look, I'm not saying to not be critical of it, because let's face it, there is going to widespread use of this to backhandedly talk down to almost literally half the planet and you know what, yeah, that's a shitty way to do anything. No one wants to be scrolling down their feed on some idle Tuesday and be told their entire gender is trash, regardless of how well-intended it may be. I also don't know if I feel great about people putting the tweets on shirts and making money off them. I get it, bills to pay, capitalist economy, free market, if you're good at something don't do it for free. I don't care about what people wear on a shirt, wear what you want, none of us are going to escape the degradation of entropy anyway. But if it doesn't rub you a little wrong that the people making these shirts don't care about the message behind it and just want to make a quick buck off a social media trend, you're a more sensible person than I am.

I do think that if women can go through their entire lives being referred to by gender specific slurs, even when those don't apply to them (ie, being called a slut for wearing skimpy clothes despite not being especially sexually active, and this is of course not avocation to call a woman anything but her name) us dudes can take one for the team and deal with women calling us trash, even if we don't deserve it. If only to get one man to open his eyes and say, huh, so this is what women go through.

But all in all, the air is poisoned, the ice caps are melting, and men are trash.

Sure, the both the aforementioned and the responses to them ring true. Not all the air is poisoned, not all the ice is melting, not all men are trash. But despite repeatedly saying that a stupidly large amount of air is poisoned, a stupidly large amount of ice is melting, a stupidly large amount of men are trash, it's not like a lot of people give a fuck about poisoned air or melting ice caps if it's not happening right in front of them. Life is full of little worries. People have jobs to get up for in the morning, debt to pay off, taxes to do, groceries to buy, existential dread to keep at bay. If it's not my air that's poisoned, if it's not my ice that's melting, why should I give a fuck, and who are you to tell me that I'm a bad person for caring about my own issues over the issues of others?

Naturally this logic is a little flawed, because these issues affect everyone.

But getting people to care about the issues that don't directly impact them is hard. It's really fucking hard, trust me. And if you're saying you've never avoided or put down a good cause just because it was inconvenient at that point in time, you're lying. Hell, I'd wager as to say you probably do it on a regular basis. We've got limited time, we've got limited resources and honestly, limited fucks to give. And yeah, we've all at some point gotten made because someone called us out on it, and it does feel like bullshit because most of us are generally not bad even if we could be better. Sure, it's probably wrong of us to get mad and it probably isn't bullshit, but that's how it feels because life is hard and fuck it, we've got to keep ourselves entertained before we all fuckin die and our existence just ends and the more time spend getting called out is the more time that could have been used laughing at tasteful memes.

Maybe we won't ever understand each other, and me pretentiously trying to hold a higher ground while deriding both sides is just an attempt to feel better than everyone else and bolster my own ego. But truth is that the air is actually polluted, the ice caps are actually melting, and men are actually kinda trash. Not all air, not all ice, not all men. But too much air, too much ice, too many men.

And we're all going to get to that age where we're going to have to leave a legacy, plant trees we'll never sit under, fuckin leave something for our idiot great grandchildren we'll never meet. We probably don't want to leave them unbreathable air, melted ice caps and trashy men.

I don't wanna leave my great grandkids trashy men.

So I guess I'm just asking, hey, guys, going forward, can we try not be trash? If nothing else, can we stop sending unsolicited dick pics?

Read More

Why being sex positive is so important

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that slut-shaming has to end. It's pointless, its tasteless, its offensive and has no real place in society today. It holds us back and prevents us from progressing as people, and slut-shaming stigmatizes sex and makes people self-conscious about something that in reality just isn't that big of a deal.

If you've never encountered the term before, here's a loose definition. Slut-shaming is the act of shaming, ridiculing or otherwise stigmatizing a person for having had many sexual encounters in the past, or being currently involved with several sexual partners, and extends to things even as trivial as dressing or acting provocatively. It's a little more nuanced than that, but it can range from anything from calling a woman slutty for wearing daisy dukes, or for actually just describing someone as slutty, loose, easy, whoreish, cheap or anything to that effect. Another unnerving common slut-shaming practice is to shame couples or people who have sex out of wed-lock.

If we have to go into the politics of it all, sluts-shaming is usually more of a problem in conservative circles, but every so often it rears its head in liberal circles. It's not really accurate to say it's a conservative or right-wing problem, because its symptomatic of another much larger problem, which is that its only recently that we've become more sex-positive as a society, and its largely only younger people who are very sex-positive. I was lucky to be raised in a house where sex wasn't treated like a taboo thing. My parents would often openly talk about it and joke around about sex and sexuality, and I think that very normalization is what made me the sex-positive person I am today.

On the opposite side of things, there might be some prude-shaming happening somewhere in some circles, and I've definitely seen in come up in a film or two, and I don't really want to dismiss it as something that doesn't exist but it is something that definitely happens much more infrequently. I still don't condone shaming anyone for the amount of sex they do or do not have, or how modestly or immodestly anyone dresses or acts, it's a deplorable act. There is no "right" amount of sex to be having.

And I think the blatant way we shame each other about the amount of sex we have is why we all need to be more sex-positive.

It's really hard for me to define exactly what makes any person sex-positive, but by sex-positivity, I don't mean actively having sex or seeking it out. Sex-positivity is about normalizing sex, openly talking about sex, viewing sex as a positive thing and not stigmatizing or demonizing sex. It's encouraging exploration of ones sexual identity and allowing for the growth of one's sexuality, but also not forcing anything. I want to make the very clear distinction that being sex-positive isn't about blindly advocating for anyone to have more sex, but that sex-positivity is about having a positive attitude towards sex.

The unfortunate truth is that not being sex-positive only creates issues. It isn't the 1800s anymore, and we aren't puritanical creatures by nature. We derive pleasure from sex, we have the ability to have sex for reasons other than pro-creation or the often toted "intimacy" that we're told to wait until our wedding night for, and honestly, sex is just kind of great (I do also advocate safe sex, please, do practice safe sex, and don't take unnecessary risks). But the thing is, when we limit sex to just being about procreation or intimacy with a married partner, we do some really harmful things, such as:

• Turning sex into something shameful, rather than personal.
• Reducing each other into things to be owned, like little children claiming presents that only they can open and no one else can.
• Using intangible and relatively inconsequential concepts such as virginity as a measure of any person's objective character quality
• Defining sex in such a way that it can only mean penetrative penal/vaginal sex, rather than as the complicated and broad conversation that sex really is
• Reserving intimacy only for those married, which for many people in the world, simply isn't a reality, such as gay couples who live in countries where marriage isn't legal, or widows who don't want to remarry, or anyone who has sex that is intimate that isn't married! 

Sex-positivity is also what allows for empathy with sex workers, men and women who are the least protected from sexual crimes. The unfortunate reality is that sex-workers endure slut-shaming from their friends, families, strangers and even their own clients. Sex workers are also very much at risk of experiencing sexual violence, and due to sex work being criminalized in most countries, they are also unable to report sex crimes committed against them and are sometimes unjustly arrested when they are in fact the victims. And without any sex-positivity, as a person, it becomes exponentially harder to empathize with sex workers.

Sex positivity is important. It is so, so important. I can't stress that enough. I can't argue it enough. I think it's one of the most humane qualities a person can have, even if one doesn't personally agree with having a lot of sex or numerous sexual partners.

And I think, as humans, we can sometimes very much lack humanity.

We should work on that.

Read More