US Government rules on Gender Identity

[Luther Blissett]

Jack Riddler wrote:

…(and by the way I support their right to not be discriminated against in housing, jobs, their safety, 100%).…

This is what I'm here for, except safety and access to healthcare first since those are the two most immediately under attack.

Though of course the rampant hiring discrimination is part of what leads directly to health and safety issues.

[American Dream]

Here is more from P. Valentine:

GENDER IN CAPITAL

TC and Gonzalez both agree that, once capital comes on the scene, there is a shift in the material basis for the appropriation of women, because “In the capitalist mode of production, the principal ‘productive force’ is the working class itself.”15 If the production of woman emerges from a situation in which the increase in the population is the principal productive force, this means that the production of woman fundamentally changes in capitalism. They argue that “the determination of a public sphere” is actually the ‘source’ of the sex difference, and we may infer that this is because the public sphere formalizes the appropriation of women in/as the private sphere. Due to capitalism’s absolute distinction of labor as separate from ‘”reproductive activities in the private sphere,” we find that “the cleavage between production and reproduction, of home and workplace, is perfect, structural, definitive of the mode of production.”16 TC writes:

The sexed character of all categories of capital signifies a general distinction in society between men and women. This general distinction ‘acquires as its social content’ that which is the synthesis of all the sexuations of the categories: the creation of the division between public and private [...] the capitalist mode of production, because it rests on the sale of the labor power and a social production that does not exist as such on the market, rejects as ‘non-social’ the moments of its own reproduction which escape direct submission to the market or to the immediate process of production: the private. The private is the private of the public, always in a hierarchical relation of definition and submission to the public. As general division and given its content [...] it is naturalized and it actually exists in the framework of this society as natural division: all women, all men. It is not enough to say that all the categories of the capitalist mode of production are intrinsically sexed. It is necessary also that this general sexuation is given a particular form: the distinction between public and private where the categories men and women appear as general, more general even than the differences of class which are produced as ‘social’ and ‘natural.’ The distinction between men and women acquires its own content at its level, specific to the level produced, which is to say, specific to the distinction between public and private: nature (that which the social has produced at the interior of itself as non-social and which actually comes to appear as obvious, natural, because of the anatomical distinction).17

We agree that the categories of the capitalist totality are sexed; that this sexuation arises from a distinction between the realm of wage labor and that of something else. But is the distinction that grounds the hierarchical gender binary that between ‘public’ and ‘private,’ or between ‘production’ and ‘reproduction,’ or between the ‘social’ and the ‘non-social’? This ambiguity of the real, material and historical nature of the separate spheres betrays a further ambiguity concerning the real material construction and reproduction of the gender distinction, before and during capitalism. How are women produced and kept in such a relation of hyper exploitation and appropriation? What are the material mechanisms that enable men to reproduce themselves as men, the appropriators?

Because capital does not consistently face dwindling populations (and in fact, the opposite is often true) both TC and Gonzalez agree that we cannot maintain the same theory of gender when capital comes on the scene. Baby bearing can no longer be the functional reason for appropriating women in their totality, because it is no longer the principal productive force. Here, Gonzalez and TC part ways, Gonzalez positing that baby bearing remains the ground of gender but, because it no longer plays the same social function, it is ‘more or less ideological,’ while TC defer primarily to the ever more materially distinct separation of spheres necessitated by the wage-relation as the material ground for gender in capital.18 Gonzalez’ relegation of gender in capitalism to ideology ends up drawing her argument closer to those Marxist feminists who have argued that capitalism more or less mobilizes a historical echo of past material relations of oppression, and this is the reason for persistent patriarchy.

WHITHER SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Sexual violence and rape are consistently displaced or left out of a schematic account of the gender relation within TC and Gonzalez’s theories. Gonzalez effectively draws the notion of separate ‘spheres’ of activity into more concrete terms, where we are able to talk about the real patterns of employment women experience, and the real concrete ramifications of pregnancy and childrearing on the appropriation of women inside and outside the wage relation, but she ends up treating the relation between actual men and actual women of similar classes in an abstract space where violence does not occur. It is impossible to accurately theorize the feminized ‘sphere’ without referring to sexual violence, and so this represents a serious oversight in the existing theory. Women’s subordination in the home; women’s experience in waged labor; baby-bearing – all these things are produced directly through sexual violence as a mechanism of control over women’s bodies. Sexual violence is not an unfortunate side effect in the appropriation of women – it is a necessary element of that appropriation. Sexual and domestic violence (‘private’ violence within intimate family or friend relations) are the types of violence that are constitutive of the gender relation.

Gonzalez’ mention of violence against women in general is confined to two footnotes, and only one mentions sexual violence. The first reads: “[…] violence against women, sometimes carried out by women themselves, has always been necessary to keep them firmly tied to their role in the sexual reproduction of the species.”19 It is significant that the text to which the footnote refers discusses ‘violence against women’ in terms of women’s death through childbirth and the taxing experience of bearing upwards of eight children in a lifetime, not direct violence against women by men. In the footnote itself, the violence Gonzalez mentions has no immediate perpetrator. Gonzalez’s use of the passive voice omits the agents of violence from the discussion entirely. The only thing to blame is the system in general. Even though violence against women is almost always at the hands of men, Gonzalez immediately reminds us that it may be carried out even ‘by women themselves.’ She distances violence on women’s bodies from the structural relation between men and women, effectively sanitizing the relation between men and women by shifting violence to the abstract social totality. Globally, including in the US, women are more likely to be raped by a man than to have high levels of literacy. Women in the military are more likely to be raped by a man than to die in combat. Women are raped at home and at the workplace by men. Rape and sexual assault function, among other things, to keep women confined to their duties which either benefit men of their own class or a higher one (their unpaid work – be it sex, emotional labor, cleaning, etc.) or capitalists who employ them (under threat of rape and assault, women are coerced into working longer, harder and to not complain or organize in the workplace).

Gonzalez’s only other reference to violence against women comes in a second footnote, where she states:

Radical feminism followed a curious trajectory in the second half of the 20th century, taking first childbearing, then domestic work, and finally sexual violence (or the male orgasm) as the ground of women’s oppression. The problem was that in each case, these feminists sought an ahistorical ground for what had become an historical phenomenon.20

While her comment here is ambiguous, Gonzalez again seems to be dismissing the centrality of sexual violence in the reproduction of patriarchal gender relations, in addition to rejecting “radical feminist” theories (radical feminism here flattened into homogeneity), suggesting that sexual violence is an “ahistorical ground” for a theory of gender, though she does not make a case for why it should be considered as such.

In the “Response…” TC makes several references to violence and to sexual violence, and even to rape, as mechanisms of the gender relation, but in their formally published texts on gender, in Théorie Communiste Issue 24 and SIC, TC do not mention rape or sexual violence.21 They do put a strong emphasis on the direct physical violence that proletarian men inflict upon proletarian women, when those women attempt to struggle in a way that problematizes the separation of the spheres. They draw from accounts of Argentina’s piquetero movement:

There are female comrades who declare in the assembly: ‘I couldn’t come to the ‘piquete’ (road blockade) because my husband beat me, because he locked me down.’ For that, the women-question helped us quite a bit… because you’ve seen that it was us, the women, who were the first to go out for food, job positions, and health… And it brought very difficult situations – even death. There were husbands who did not tolerate their wives attending a meeting, a ‘piquete.’22

It is meaningful that rape and systematic sexual violence make no appearance in the formally published texts of TC on gender, nor in the entirety of SIC, nor Communisation and its Discontents. The neglect of rape and sexual violence as structural elements of the gender distinction, and thus of the capitalist totality, leads to an account of gender that cannot make sense of an enormous amount of gendered social relations. Some have argued correctly that some strains of feminist emphasis on rape have served a racist or classist function within struggles and analysis, but it is also true that the neglect of rape and sexual violence is just as easily used in racist or classist attacks.23 If they are not rooted in a systematic structural relation, rape and sexual violence are ‘bad things’ that some ‘bad people’ do, and on these accounts, those bad people blamed by law, media and white supremacist popular opinion, are more often than not poor and of an ethnic or racial minority. We observe some beginnings of structural theories of rape and sexual violence in Kathy Miriam’s elaboration of Adrienne Rich’s concept of ‘sex right,’ which she articulates as ‘the assumption that men have a right of sexual access to women and girls [which] allows for specific acts of coercion and aggression to take place.’24 This theory also grounds Miriam’s expanded theory of compulsory heterosexuality. Although too philosophical and non-material/historical to immediately cohere with a structural communist theory of capitalist social relations, Miriam describes processes that must be included in our accounts. To ignore sexual violence and compulsory heterosexuality in an account of structurally gendered capitalist social relations is equivalent to ignoring the way in which the threat of unemployment and the growth of unemployed populations structures the relation between labor and capital.

Understanding sexual violence as a structuring element of gender also helps us to understand how patriarchy reproduces itself upon and through gay and queer men, trans people, gender nonconforming people and bodies, and children of any gender. Gendered divisions of labor within the waged sphere, in conjunction with baby-bearing, do not account for the particular patterns in which, e.g., trans people are economically exploited within capitalist economies, which differs dramatically from cis-women, as well as the endemic murder of trans women of color which amounts to a sort of geographically diffused genocide.25 It cannot account for the widespread rape of children by male family members. But if we consider sexual violence as an essential material ground in the production of hierarchized gender relations, then we can begin to see how such patterns relate to the production of the categories women and man and the distinction between the spheres of waged/unwaged; social/non-social; public/private.

--The Gender Distinction in Communisation Theory

[JackRiddler]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/nyreg ... youth.html

For Transgender Youths in New York, It Would Be a Health Care Milestone

By JESSE McKINLEYOCT. 5, 2016

ALBANY — The New York State Health Department has signaled that it intends to allow transgender youths to receive Medicaid coverage for hormones that forestall puberty, wiping away prohibitions that have been criticized by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups.

The move, announced on Wednesday in a proposed rule in the State Register, would allow minors who are being treated for gender dysphoria to receive Medicaid payment for pubertal suppressants and cross-sex hormone therapy, which mimic the biological chemistry of the opposite gender. Previously, the state had covered such hormone treatments for adults, a change that took effect last year.

In the proposed rule, the department stated that its concerns about safety and efficacy were supplanted after it “had the opportunity to talk to a number of practitioners who treat minors” with gender dysphoria, who uniformly agreed that hormone therapies were medically justifiable for young people who feel that their birth sex is not their true gender.

“The proposed changes therefore would make Medicaid coverage of transgender care and services available, regardless of an individual’s age, when such care and services are medically necessary to treat the individual’s gender dysphoria,” the rule reads.

The change will not take effect immediately; the rule has a 45-day comment period, and the state can formally adopt it after that time.

New York is not the only state to allow Medicaid — a joint federal and state program — to cover such hormone treatments, said Sasha Buchert, a staff lawyer with the Transgender Law Center in California, which has long had such coverage.

But Ms. Buchert said New York’s move was a “significant step forward” in providing care for transgender people of all ages.

“These decisions,” she said, “should be made by physicians.”

The decision in New York came during a legal battle — and after victories — for advocates for transgender rights, both in New York and in other parts of the nation.

“Puberty is traumatic, or can be, for all people, but it’s incredibly traumatic for transgender people,” said Belkys Garcia, a staff lawyer with the Legal Aid Society, one of several groups that filed a federal suit against New York’s restrictions on payments for transgender treatments. She added that puberty suppressants, in particular, allow some young people grappling with gender dysphoria “time to figure themselves out,” even if they do not eventually transition to the opposite sex.

New York was among a handful of states that had enacted prohibitions on Medicaid payments for such treatments, a policy that dated back to the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki, a three-term Republican who left office in 2006. Since then, there were several failed legal attempts to overturn those rules.

But advocates have been emboldened in recent years by both a broader cultural acceptance of transgender people and actions by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, including in late 2014 when he instructed the Department of Financial Services to guarantee insurance coverage for gender dysphoria. Last fall, the governor also announced anti-discrimination measures for transgender people in housing and other areas, using his executive power to overcome a legislative logjam in the Republican-led State Senate.

In March 2015, the Health Department, already facing legal action, adopted rules that allowed for some coverage, including gender reassignment surgery for adults displaying “a persistent and well-documented case of gender dysphoria,” but stopped short of covering minors and certain treatments the state considered cosmetic, rather than medically necessary.

In July, however, a federal judge in Manhattan, Jed S. Rakoff, of United States District Court, ruled that such restrictions on the so-called cosmetic procedures were not legally defensible, but wanted a trial for the issue of whether treatment for youths was medically necessary. More legal arguments are planned for this month, but the proposed rule on youth coverage could satisfy the court.

The state’s action on Wednesday would also appear to be aimed at addressing the judge’s concerns, by clarifying the state’s intent to allow Medicaid coverage for a wide variety of treatments including mastectomies, hysterectomies and breast augmentations, as well as electrolysis — which is often expensive — in certain cases.

The legal team pushing for the changes — including Legal Aid, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — says it will continue to push the state for fast action on the proposed rule. “Without a judgment from the court, there’s nothing to say the state can’t make another change,” Ms. Garcia said.

Health Department officials characterized the change as another sign of Mr. Cuomo’s “commitment to equality in all areas.”

“These proposed regulations build upon existing science to ensure that youths who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria receive medically necessary care,” said James Plastiras, a spokesman for the department. “And render moot any claim that current standards don’t provide that care.”

Many surgical procedures would not necessarily be appropriate for minors — “It’s rare that people are getting surgery under 18,” Ms. Garcia said — though they could be covered in some cases under the department’s proposed rule.

But the major benefit for transgender youths would primarily be the hormone treatments, according to medical professionals.

Dr. Carolyn Wolf-Gould, a family practitioner at the Gender Wellness Center in Oneonta, N.Y., part of Bassett Healthcare Network, said that blocking the physical characteristics of puberty could offset the need for difficult surgeries, particularly for “youth that are assigned male at birth.”

“Once male puberty has occurred, it’s very hard to reverse those changes,” Dr. Wolf-Gould said, noting the genital and facial changes and hair growth that usually occur during that period, along with physical bulking.

She added that for birth-females intending to transition to male, mastectomies could cause “painful and unsightly scars.”

There is also, however, a major emotional benefit to allowing “a youth to go through puberty in their affirmed gender,” Dr. Wolf-Gould said.

“It provides tremendous psychological relief,” she said, adding that delaying puberty can provide “a sense that they suddenly have some control going on with their body.”

[Agent Orange Cooper]

Full blown idiocy, mass-poisoning, destruction of the human body's natural processes... now brought to you by you, the taxpayer!

[American Dream]

An anarchist feminism is an argument that heteropatriarchy is best dismantled through a radical attack on all hierarchical systems and structures of oppression and exploitation. A feminist anarchism is an argument that the successful abolition of all hierarchical systems and structures of oppression and exploitation, requires antipatriarchal tactics, visions, means and ends. The struggle for a world without domination and injustice continues on all fronts, and when considering the full range of intersectionality, emancipation has not yet fully occurred; anarcha-feminism is needed until all these aspects have been addressed.

...And finally, the utopian question: Can an anarchist revolution happen without feminism? What would an anarchist society look like that had truly transcended all kinds of gendered power structures, oppressions and exploitations? A society in which all kinds of relationships were equally possible, from polyamory to monogamous pair bonding? In which all kinds of healthy, freely chosen reproductive choices were supported? In which binaristic gender hierarchy could be broken down, while in the process celebrating what’s been subordinated and devalued by the construction of that hierarchy? In which alternative structures of family or community existed, not limited to blood kin or nuclear units, to provide for the mutual care of all, at every stage from infancy to the end of life, enabling the multigenerational proliferation of radical countercultures? In which capitalism couldn’t extract a double surplus from the unpaid care work and reproductive labor, and the underpaid wage labor, of female workers? In which infinite forms of gender expression and sexuality were available for any body, with no penalization in terms of access to resources, opportunities, respect?

--Anarcha-Feminisms, Introduction, by the Perspectives Collective

[Wombaticus Rex]

This thread was getting a little too serious and grim, thank you AD for that bucket of laughs.

I savor the image of an earnest collective of Anarchists, proud, strong Autarchs of their own souls, banding together once more in order to hash out the precise wording of the official statement.

Still sweeter the strange notions of an "Anarchist revolution" against the Archons of our day, yet nothing, I think, could beat the nectar of "What would an anarchist society look like...?" Yes, pray tell, comrades! WHAT INDEED?

[brekin]

Meet the new puritans.

Hillsboro High ends tradition of homecoming court, king, queen

http://www.oregonlive.com/education/ind ... river_home

At the urging of some student leaders, Hillsboro High has ceased its tradition of choosing a homecoming court, king and queen, the district communication director confirmed Wednesday.A majority of students elected to the school's student government succeeded in getting the administration to end the nomination of a homecoming court and the election of a king and queen, senior class treasurer Christian Duran said.

According to district communications chief Beth Graser, that decision was made on the grounds that a popularity contest that elevates a small number of students was not the best way to unite the whole school community.
But Duran said the main case for doing away with the court, made by senior class president Jennifer Mendez and student government adviser Sarah Cole, was that the titles of king and queen were too restrictive for students whose gender identity might be more fluid than fits the titles of king and queen. Duran said opposition from students and families who experienced loss at the ballot box when students chose past kings and queens also played a role. He said the elected student government members considered the issue for perhaps 20 minutes in early September then voted approximately 30-20 in favor of ending the court and royalty.
Mendez said late Wednesday that she needed to check in with Cole before commenting, and she did not get back to The Oregonian/OregonLive before 11:40 p.m. Cole also said she would answer questions by email before midnight but did not do so by 11:40 p.m.

The decision to end the tradition did not sit well with some students, particularly seniors, some students and parents said. Some seniors are circulating a petition to bring it back and have so far collected more than 200 signatures, according to senior Zack Fritzler, a football player and member of the school's symphonic band who helped write and circulate the petition. He and others say the whole senior class or student body, not just the elected student government, should have been consulted.

Most homecoming traditions will continue as before. The school will hold a homecoming assembly to generate school spirit. The football team will play a rival team at Hare Field. There will be a parade before the game, beginning at 5 p.m. on Friday. The school will hold a dance -- this year with the Halloween-related theme EncHAUNTed-- although it will be held the weekend following the homecoming game. Graser said she was unsure why the two events were scheduled for different weekends.

She said fewer Hillsboro High students are bothering to vote for homecoming king and queen, but she did not have specifics on the drop off in interest.
Duran, the treasurer and a bilingual Latino who excels academically, said much of the student body, particularly seniors, was really upset by the change. He signed the petition to bring the court, king and queen back, he said.
"People wanted the tradition to continue," he said. "As teenagers, we are so upset about being told what we can and cannot do."
Duran said he is sympathetic to any student who nominates him or herself for homecoming royalty and loses. After all, he ran for freshman class office and lost.

"I know it can be embarrassing to lose an election... I ran for freshman vice president and I didn't do a good job of campaigning and I lost." He learned from that and ran for and won the sophomore class presidency, he explained.
He said any issues that might have arisen with a student who does not strictly identify as a potential king or queen could have been worked out. "Hilhi is so open and welcoming to students from the LGBT community, would have worked something out," he said.
Any notion that snobby popular kids can win the honor and rule the school are invalid, Duran and Fritzler said. Only students who are all-around good people, nice to and liked by a broad spectrum of students parsed by race, socioeconomics, student activities and all-around Hilhi activities, can win the vote, they said.

Oh has the world changed, or have I changed?
Oh has the world changed, or have I changed?

[American Dream]

Some kind of lived experience is probably helpful in moving beyond the trap of privilege politics:

The Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977



We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. 1 During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.

We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows: (1) the genesis of contemporary Black feminism; (2) what we believe, i.e., the specific province of our politics; (3) the problems in organizing Black feminists, including a brief herstory of our collective; and (4) Black feminist issues and practice.

1. The Genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism

Before looking at the recent development of Black feminism we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. Black women’s extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. As Angela Davis points out in “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways. There have always been Black women activists—some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown—who have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique. Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters.

A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American women’s movement beginning in the late 1960s. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO).

Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and I970s. Many of us were active in those movements (Civil Rights, Black nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives were greatly affected and changed by their ideologies, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men.

There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black Feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives. Black feminists and many more Black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. For example, we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being “ladylike” and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. As we grew older we became aware of the threat of physical and sexual abuse by men. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening.

Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and practice that we women use to struggle against our oppression. The fact that racial politics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not allow us, and still does not allow most Black women, to look more deeply into our own experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression. Our development must also be tied to the contemporary economic and political position of Black people. The post-World War II generation of Black youth was the first to be able to minimally partake of certain educational and employment options, previously closed completely to Black people. Although our economic position is still at the very bottom of the American capitalistic economy, a handful of us have been able to gain certain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment which potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression.

A combined anti-racist and anti-sexist position drew us together initially, and as we developed politically we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism.

2. What We Believe

Above all else, Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.

A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. In our consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white women’s revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex. Even our Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political. We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters has ever been looked at before. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black women’s lives. An example of this kind of revelation/conceptualization occurred at a meeting as we discussed the ways in which our early intellectual interests had been attacked by our peers, particularly Black males. We discovered that all of us, because we were “smart” had also been considered “ugly,” i.e., “smart-ugly.” “Smart-ugly” crystallized the way in which most of us had been forced to develop our intellects at great cost to our “social” lives. The sanctions In the Black and white communities against Black women thinkers is comparatively much higher than for white women, particularly ones from the educated middle and upper classes.

As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness— that makes them what they are. As Black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We must also question whether Lesbian separatism is an adequate and progressive political analysis and strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class and race.

Continues at: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2866-th ... -statement

[Project Willow]

I'm sure my sample is skewed because of the circles in I travel in, but every single trans person I've ever met is a survivor of extreme abuse, without exception. I have a gender queer friend who is trying to raise money to remove her breasts. It breaks my heart, but I'm almost certain if I said anything it would only strengthen her resolve. Through our conversations, it is plainly obvious she is attempting to identify out of her pain and perceived physical helplessness. In these cases, medical transition is functioning as the institutionalization of cutting. Society always seems to offer some new side route around confronting trauma.

They committed suicide on Friday.

[JackRiddler]

Jack Riddler wrote:

…(and by the way I support their right to not be discriminated against in housing, jobs, their safety, 100%).…

This is what I'm here for, except safety and access to healthcare first since those are the two most immediately under attack.

Though of course the rampant hiring discrimination is part of what leads directly to health and safety issues.

By the way, that was not JackRiddler wrote. Not that I do not agree, it just was not.

.

[JackRiddler]

I'm sure my sample is skewed because of the circles in I travel in, but every single trans person I've ever met is a survivor of extreme abuse, without exception. I have a gender queer friend who is trying to raise money to remove her breasts. It breaks my heart, but I'm almost certain if I said anything it would only strengthen her resolve. Through our conversations, it is plainly obvious she is attempting to identify out of her pain and perceived physical helplessness. In these cases, medical transition is functioning as the institutionalization of cutting. Society always seems to offer some new side route around confronting trauma.

They committed suicide on Friday.

Fuck. I'm so sorry. There's nothing to say.

[American Dream]

Dear GOP, Trans People Aren’t Sick. You Are.

Transgender people aren’t mentally ill, ‘sick,’ ‘twisted,’ or any of the other names the GOP lobs at them.

SAMANTHA ALLEN 05.31.16

Transgender people are not mentally ill. Being transgender is not a mental disorder. And anyone who argues otherwise is directly contradicting current medical consensus.

These lines of anti-transgender argumentation were already common before the March passage of North Carolina’s HB 2, which requires transgender people to use public bathrooms matching their birth certificates.

For instance, when Caitlyn Jenner came out last year, conservative blogger Matt Walsh called her a “mentally ill cross-dresser” on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze. A long list of right-wing media outlets and pundits have echoed the “mental illness” language: The Federalist, Breitbart, TownHall, Rush Limbaugh, the list goes on. Check out the comments on any story about transgender issues and you’ll find it there, too.

But now that public attention is squarely trained on the bathroom debate, the “mental illness” credo is gaining traction once again, even among some state lawmakers. And with the Obama administration responding to HB 2 in full force, the psychological pathologization of transgender people is threatening to reach fever pitch.

This February, South Dakota state senator David Omdahl claimed transgender people were “twisted” in order to argue for bathroom restrictions. And in mid-May, Tennessee Representative Susan Lynn opined on Facebook: “Transgenderism is a mental disorder called gender identity disorder—no one should be forced to entertain another’s mental disorder and it is not healthy for the individual with the disorder.”

Just last week, former U.S. congressman John Linder argued on The Daily Caller that the Obama administration is “normalizing a mental disorder as a matter of public policy.”

Wherever Lynn and Linder got their information, it’s embarrassingly out of date. In fact, most opponents of transgender rights could stand to review some recent psychiatric history.

Continues at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... u-are.html

[Searcher08]

I'm sure my sample is skewed because of the circles in I travel in, but every single trans person I've ever met is a survivor of extreme abuse, without exception. I have a gender queer friend who is trying to raise money to remove her breasts. It breaks my heart, but I'm almost certain if I said anything it would only strengthen her resolve. Through our conversations, it is plainly obvious she is attempting to identify out of her pain and perceived physical helplessness. In these cases, medical transition is functioning as the institutionalization of cutting. Society always seems to offer some new side route around confronting trauma.

They committed suicide on Friday.

So very sorry to hear of the loss of your friend, Willow, this was one of the most harrowing posts I've ever read on R.I.

[Pele'sDaughter]

I'm so very sorry about your friend.

[RocketMan]

Very sorry to hear this.