June 1, 2012
CAN WE PLEASE GET THIS CIRCULATING (Debunk Re: Trans girl institutionalized in Germany)

[tw: discussion of (thankfully debunked) cissexism, institutionalization]

amydentata:

inflateablefilth:

t-r-a-n-s:

About the petition:

First off, Alex is not going anywhere. Yes, Alex’s mother tried to regain custody of her child after she initially lost it and failed, but her father doesn’t have custody either.

The court ruled that way because they feared keeping it with either her parents while they argued would delay therapy and damage Alex’s health. Custody has been given to the child welfare services who will help Alex and make sure she can receive proper treatment like hormone blockers and such.

The official ruling also stated that Alex is not going to be institutionalized - permission for a forced admission has not been given by them and so Alex cannot be admitted against her will.

Also, the TAZ posted a correction underneath the original article where they correct the claim that the court ruled that “Alex can now be forcibly institutionalized”, saying that the court did not allow this at all and that she cannot be admitted.

They further more posted a statement by the Berliner Charite, the psychiatric ward Alex was supposedly meant to go to, in which they stated that they will not institutionalize Alex without her permission or that of her mother. They also couldn’t forcibly treat her without court permission and such has not been given.

In conclusion, Alex is not at risk to be forced to conform. She will be able to express her gender freely.

Sources:

The court ruling (sadly no English version): http://www.berlin.de/sen/justiz/gerichte/kg/presse/archiv/20120329.1450.368160.html

The TAZ article, untranslated version, first two paragraphs underneath the “Berichtigung” heading: http://www.taz.de/!90229/

(Translated version as linked in the petition, look for “Correction”.)

Oh yay :)

That is a relief.

(via heliotropo)

9:30pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcdIGyMYyIg1
(Notes: 811)
  
Filed under: signal boost institutionalization cissexism whew 
March 27, 2012
It’s really not about calling us “uterus-bearers” and then patting yourself on the back: these are [some of] the things your pro-choice organization needs to do to be an “ally” to trans people

kiriamaya:

fuguestasis:

  1. Teach everyone you work with to give trans people basic decency and respect. Especially trans women/transfeminine people, especially trans people of color, especially disabled trans people and especially trans people who don’t “pass” or who don’t have a binary gender to “pass as.” No harassment, no intrusive  questions, no slurs. This should go without saying, duh.
  2. If you need a legal name, allow people to give you their chosen name as well. Moreover, give them a space to indicate when you should use this chosen name and when you should not. Make sure everyone on your staff knows how to handle these things gracefully. Make sure that trans people have their actual, chosen names respected. But also make sure that no one winds up accidentally outing a trans kid to their parents by using the wrong name.
  3. Ask for preferred pronouns! With patients, with colleagues, with volunteers. Make sure everyone you work with knows to how pronounce and respect gender-neutral pronouns, as well.
  4. Anyone who is providing medical care should know about trans-specific dysphoria and should be mindful of their patient’s potential discomfort. Make sure no one is pressured into a medical procedure that they’re not consenting to (this is sadly not even a trans-exclusive issue…).
  5. If you teach sex ed (in a classroom or a workshop or a counselling session or during a doctor’s appointment), make it inclusive. Make sure you have information/materials about safe sex from trans activists on hand, hire trans presenters, make sure that you never forget there might be a trans person in the room.
  6. Involve trans people in the decision-making processes of your organization. Involve trans people of color. Involve disabled trans people and working-class trans people and involve transfeminine people.
  7. If you have a website, be sure to specify what kinds of services trans people can expect. If you’re putting up information about gender or gender identity (*cough* planned parenthood *cough*), you should definitely involve a diverse group of trans people in developing the content of that information so that it isn’t horribly inaccurate and cissexist.
  8. Understand that trans people absolutely have barriers to accessing gynecological care (including abortion), birth control and applicable safe sex supplies/information. But also know that our fight includes many, many other issues. Stand against forcible sterilization, stand for affordable sperm-banking, stand for trans parents’ custodial rights, and stand for our economic equality so that trans people can provide for the children they have and want. 
  9. Stand against eugenics and capitalism and nationalism and racism and all kinds of injustices everywhere. If you’re “pro-trans,” but really only pro-trans-citizens or pro-trans-men or pro-trans-white-people, they you aren’t an “ally” at all. None of these issues are disconnected.

Yes. So much yes.

Also, if you’re gonna theorize about gender, take the existence of trans* people into account!

(Source: poorlifechoicesblog, via threshermaw-deactivated20120804)

4:30pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcdIGyIed7Mw
(Notes: 462)
  
Filed under: cissexism trans* gsm feminism pro-choice signal boost 
September 23, 2011

shonecakepastrypie:

thecuntmentality:

tummydearest:

combat—wombat:

[TRAUMA WARNING FOR ANTI-TRANS AND RACIST VIOLENCE AND HATE SPEECH]

SUPPORT CECE MCDONALD! 

CeCe McDonald is a young African American transgender woman charged with “second degree murder” after an incident that began when she was violently attacked because of her gender and race.

DROP the charges and FREE CeCe!

CeCe is a creative and energetic person who, before her life was so unjustly interrupted, was studying fashion at MCTC. She had a stable home where she lived with and helped support four other African American youth, her family. CeCe’s family describes her as a leader, a role model, and a loyal friend. She is known as a wise, out-spoken, and welcoming person, with a cheerful disposition and a history of handling prejudice with amazing grace.

Around 12:30 am on June 5, CeCe and four of her friends (all of them black) were on their way to Cub Foods to get some food. As they walked past Schooner’s Bar in South Minneapolis, a man and two women (all of them white) began to yell epithets at them. They called CeCe and her friends ‘faggots,’ ‘niggers,’ and ‘chicks with dicks,’ amongst other things.

As they were shouting, one of the women smashed her drink into the side of CeCe’s face, slicing her cheek open, lacerating her salivary gland, and stinging her eyes with liquor. A fight ensued, with more people joining in. What happened during the fight is unclear, but within a few minutes Dean Schmitz–one of the attackers–had been stabbed.

CeCe was later arrested, and is now falsely accused of murder

For a month, CeCe was kept in solitary confinement “for her own protection”; she had no say in this matter. Finally, she was transferred to a psychiatric unit in the Public Safety Facility. It was nearly two months before she was taken back to a doctor to check up on the wound on her face, which by then had turned into a painful, golf ball-sized lump.

Later on, CeCe’s friends were harassed on the street by people they recognized from the scene of the fight. Individuals circled the block that CeCe’s friends were walking on and called them ‘niggers’ and ‘faggots’ and told them to ‘go back to Africa.’ When they attempted to wave down a passing squad car for assistance, the officer driving the car said he would not help them.

Help us fight for CeCe, and for an end to racist, transphobic violence in our communities! Visit our What You Can Do page and find out how to get involved.

REBLOG THIS NOW.

Please help free her or signal boost if you can

(via wundy-deactivated20120102-deact)

9:37pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcdIGy9rjSix
(Notes: 3,070)
  
Filed under: cissexism prison industrial complex queer racism transgender transmisogyny signal boosting 
July 28, 2011
Hey, everyone.

wundygore:

I know we all want more female characters and creators at DC, and we’re rightfully upset about the terrible stuff from the con, but can we try to be careful about perpetrating casual cissexism and binarism?

When you say that “half the readership is women” (implying that the other half of the readership is male), or otherwise frame it was being only a female/male issue, you are erasing non-binary/genderqueer folks. They read comics too. They are in fandom too. They matter and should be visible to DC too.

So just. :v Let’s not oppress other people while trying to fight oppression ourselves! ‘Cause that doesn’t work very well.

(via wundy-deactivated20120102-deact)

1:07am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcdIGy7baL1g
Filed under: comics dc comics cissexism transbigtry gender binarism kyriarchy recommended reading 
June 1, 2011

hezaakun:

She Thinks Too Much [Such Girls Are Dangerous]: oh yeah & this other thing i’m mad about

Angry girl who posted this needs to watch: Doctor Who, Torchwood, Being Human, and needs to read Tales From Earthsea, Magic’s Pawn,Saint Germain etc. There are plenty of women, gender queer, homosexuals, and non-white people represented as heroes if you look for it. Sure there could be more, and if you wish to balance the scales, WRITE A BOOK! :D

soft-intelligence:

I’m getting so tired of historical/fantasy/sci-fi pieces that are basically (cis/straight/white) dude-centric without nod to anyone else and getting the justification back, “But it’s historically accurate that the women don’t do anything/that queer people are erased” or “in this society men still dominate for some strange and miraculous reason!!

(Sorry, re-reblogging this so the post shows, uh, what I’m actually responding to.)

Holy facile condescension, Batman!

1) soft-intelligence is a guy, not that it would be any less patronizing to refer to him as “angry guy who posted this.”

2) I’m not sure why you think he isn’t aware that works with strong representation of minorities exist, given that he listed sixteen of them in his original post. The issue here is not that minority-friendly works don’t exist at all in Western media. The issue is that they’re underrepresented, that white/cis/straight/male protagonists are the default, and that questioning why a particular work just has be dominated by white/cis/straight/male protagonists gets met with a great deal of defensiveness and appeals to tradition. (You said yourself that minority-led sci-fi/fantasy is out there “if you look,” but you don’t have to look for sff starring white, cis, straight dudes; it’s everywhere!)

3) While the works you listed (that I’m familiar with) are wonderfully progressive in some aspects, they aren’t free of -isms in others (heck, even in the same ones). Doctor Who is rife with sexism and racism (as fans of Martha and Mickey are well aware) and its queer-friendliness is intermittent and limited to the GLB part of the spectrum. Torchwood can be very heteronormative and reliant on Tragic Gay stereotypes, despite its creator/showrunner being a gay man, and again, its queer-friendliness is mostly in favor of white/cis/male queers; we still get evil lesbians and every queer character besides Jack is now dead. The Last Herald-Mage is (yet again!) laden with stereotypes of the fey, tragically doomed gay man, and I’m pretty sure if I were to read it again I’d be hugely uncomfortable about the treatment of the Native American counterpart characters.

4) “If you don’t like it, make your own!” is essentially a way to say “shut up and go away” under the guise of being supportive. First of all, not everyone wants to create fiction, and that doesn’t make their opinions illegitimate or even less valid than other creators’. Are restaurant goers only allowed to criticize the food or service if they work in the restaurant business themselves? Plus, you don’t even know soft-intelligence, so why are you assuming he’s not creating?

Secondly, the lack of minority-driven fiction doesn’t come from a lack of minority and minority-friendly creators creating that fiction, it comes from publishers’ unwillingness to by those works and sell them with the aggressiveness that they sell white/cis/male/straight-led fiction, without downplaying or erasing the minority-friendly elements of the work (see: the casting of The Last Airbender and The Hunger Games, among tons of others; the many recent incidents of minority YA protagonists being whitewashed on book covers; so on and so forth). When the problem is distribution, telling people the answer is to create is profoundly unhelpful.

(Source: maritimelegend)

8:15pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcdIGy5gFTAE
(Notes: 218)
  
Filed under: kyriarchy culture discussion concern trolling racism sexism heterosexism cissexism homobigotry EVERYTHING WRONG WITH THE WORLD 
May 30, 2011

ciscentrismsucks:

Transvestic Disorder: The Overlooked Anti-Trans Diagnosis

lucypaw:

pansexualpride:

On May 5, the American Psychiatric Association released a second round of proposed diagnostic criteria for the 5th Edition ofThe Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). These include two categories that impact the trans community: Gender Dysphoria (formerly Gender Identity Disorder) and Transvestic Disorder (formerly Transvestic Fetishism).

While GID has received a great deal of attention in the press and from GLBTQ advocates, the second transvestic category is too often overlooked. This is unfortunate, because a diagnosis of Transvestic Disorder is designed to punish social and sexual gender nonconformity and to enforce binary stereotypes of assigned birth sex. It plays no role in enabling access to medical transition care for those who need it, and it is frequently cited when care is denied.

I urge all trans community members, friends, care providers, and allies to call for the removal of this punitive and scientifically unfounded diagnosis from the DSM-5 The current period for public comment to the APA ends June 15.

The entry in the current DSM on Transvestic Disorder, like the former entry on Transvestic Fetishism, is authored by Dr. Ray Blanchard of the Toronto Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (formerly known as the Clarke Institute). Blanchard has drawn outrage from the transcommunity for his defamatory theory of autogynephilia, asserting that all transsexual women who are not exclusively attracted to males are motivated to transition by self-obsessed sexual fetishism. He is canonizing this harmful stereotype of transsexual women in the DSM-5 by adding an autogynephilia specifier to the Transvestic Disorder diagnosis.

Worse yet, Blanchard has broadly expanded the diagnosis to implicate gender-nonconforming people of all sexes and all sexual orientations, even inventing an autoandrophilia specifier to smear transsexual men. Most recently, he has added an “In Remission” specifier to preclude the possibility of exit from diagnosis. Like a roach motel, there may be no way out of the Transvestic Disorder diagnosis once ensnared.

What You Can Do Now

1. Go to the APA DSM-5 website, click on “Register Now,” create a user account, and enter your statement in the box. The deadline for this second period of public comment is June 15.

2. Sign the Petition to Remove Transvestic Disorder from the DSM-5, sponsored by the International Foundation for Gender Education.

3. Demand that your local, national, and international GLBTQ nonprofit organizations issue public statements calling for the removal of this defamatory Transvestic Disorder category from the DSM-5. So far, very few have.

4. Spread the word to your networks, friends, and allies.

More Information

Cross-posted with additional comments at the GID Reform Advocates Blog.

Please do this.  I’d appreciate it.  Thanks.

Holy fucking hell. Get on this everyone, please.

(via alliterate-deactivated20120901)

9:11pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcdIGy5cAPiC
(Notes: 256)
  
Filed under: signal boosting kyriarchy cissexism transbigotry gender normativity 
Liked posts on Tumblr: More liked posts »