This is what I meant to share
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/caitlyn-jenner/still-so-much-to-learn_b_8806712.html
:))
Please donât try to condescend to me, skyoverme. I understand the article perfectly well, and it has nothing to do with caitlyn jenner. In fact, saintfan just explained that they meant to post a different article. But I am rather curious as to what you thought the connection was.
Saintfan, thanks for clearing up my confusion. I liked that apology. Whether she wrote it herself or not, I do think itâs sincere, and that she means well, despite clearly not being the most thoughtful or articulate person in the world. I do wish that she would give up that reality show â it isnât as if she needs the money â and more time just living and learning
I wish she would give up the reality show, all along I thought she made a big mistake with the show and the way she threw herself out there. They always say transition is a process, one that takes some people a short time, others a longer period of time, and it is all about learning, finding where you fit into things, and also in some ways unlearning other things. Caitlyn to me is kind of like the singer who has potential, who has suddenly found a passion to sing, who suddenly decides to rent out Carnegie Hall and give a recital and invites critics and 2000 people, and comes off as aweful, whereas if the person had taken the time to polish their singing, might be impressive.
I understand the criticism of her with her obsession about the looks, the designer gowns, the makeup, the stylists, etc, it is very easy to see that as portraying (in her case) being a woman as being a barbie doll. First of all, given her age, and also quite frankly having been around the Kardashian clan with their obsession about looks and so forth, it is not surprising she focused on that, but there is another factor, too. For those who have grown up male, there is a period of time when it is kind of like a young or teenage girl playing dress up or experimenting, and I suspect because Caitlyn kind of jumped out there we are seeing that phase of things as well. Again like my singer analogy, it is seeing a rough draft of a person rather than a finished product, it would be kind of like comparing a teenage girl going through what friends of mine with daughters called âthe difficult yearsâ with that person later on as an adult:).
I think she is sincere, but again I think she really hasnât opened herself up to the reality of things. For example, in her apology she mentions that she is aware that the kind of facial surgery and such that can help someone who is transgender fit in better, that can get rid of adamâs apples and soften features and such, is often not affordable to those who may need it and insurance companies refuse to cover it. Yet time and again she is still promoting the ideology basically that if someone needs care, they should pay for it themselves, or leave out that the people she supports politically and the policies the support have often deliberately excluded trans people, whether it is more the cosmetic, or basic things like hormone therapy, therapy and the GRS (aka gender reassignment surgery), or while saying what a hard time many transgender people have, saying that transgender people get dependent on social services and donât have incentive to work, which is a contradiction because it leaves out those same transgender people, because of discrimination and socioeconomic factors, have a hard time finding work. She alludes to the fact that she herself is blessed with the fact she has resources to do the things she does, but then seems even now to forget that for most it isnât like that, that transitioning when you donât have to worry about where to live or where the next meal will come from or if you will even have a job, is very different when you donât have that privilege, whether it is a person of color already behind the 8 ball, or a middle class transgender women facing transition, with all its costs, financial and otherwise, and consequences while having a family. I donât think she has to become an acolyte of Bernie Sanders, but she needs to show a lot more curiousity about how âthe other half livesâ and realize that the political positions she often champions are often diametrically harmful to many in the transgender community and that while they may benefit her personally, they harm a lot of others, not to mention the social positions of the politicians she supports.
Caitlyn Jennerâs Secret-Sharer
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/fashion/caitlyn-jenner-alan-neirob-crisis-manager.html
Interview with the publicist.
âquite frankly having been around the Kardashian clan with their obsession about looks and so forth, it is not surprising she focused on thatâ
Well, and she didnât end up in that family at random. Thatâs who she is in terms of taste and values. Not my cup of tea, though I think she executes fashion well.
@hanna:
I donât know if she executes fashion well or if she has the luxury of having stylists and tailors and so forth that allow her to execute it with expensive fashions tailored to her body. One of the things that helps transgender women is the lack of hips, if you think about it, the high fashion industry often has as models women with âboyishâ figures:). Personally I think she has a right to dress as she pleases, and I find some of the objections to her dressing to be part of the culture wars in the womenâs community where somehow dressing femininely is considered being a sellout and so forth (it is the old 1970âs feminism in its worst form IMO, not surprising given that the same type of feminist also hate transgender women, read up what such âiconsâ as Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinhem had to say and still have to say about transgender folks.
musicprnt, I think your description of âoldâ feminism is over-simplified and inaccurate to a large degree. You are in fact participating in the put-downs of women to do not habitually dress and act in a matter calculated to please the male gaze. I donât think you should go there.
There are plenty of women who âdress upâ and primp in one style or another just for themselves having nothing to do with the male gaze. Enjoying that kind of thing does not make one a sell out.
Musicprnt, although obviously bone structure doesnât change, youâd be surprised by how much fat redistribution takes place after many years of hormone therapy, combined with anti-androgens or appropriate surgical procedures to eliminate most testosterone production â none of which Caitlyn has yet had, breast augmentation notwithstanding. And she hasnât been on hormones very long at all, after her brief experimentation with them in the 1980s. (Personally, after 15 years, Iâd like to think thereâs no longer anything âboyishâ at all about my appearance! Not that I was ever tall and willowy or otherwise model-like in the first place.)
Consolation, of course there were good things about second wave feminism. But thereâs nothing remotely inaccurate about characterizing the vast majority of its proponentsâ writings about trans women, beginning more than 40 years ago, as a vile cesspool of deliberate and vicious transphobia. Mary Daly? Janice Raymond? Robin Morgan? Germaine Greer? Ti-Grace Atkinson? The so-called Redstockings? Gloria Steinem, before her recent change of heart? (And I donât consider âOh, it was the times; they just didnât understandâ to be a valid excuse. They were blinded â and many of them continue to be â by the inherent constraints, and circular logic, of their own rigid ideology.)
Ironically, given her reputation, Andrea Dworkin was the most sympathetic of all of them to trans women.
@donnal:
Even among cis women the bone structure of the hips and such varies a great deal, most fashion models kind of have the body of racehorses. I have seen the affects of HRT over long periods of time, it does shift the fat into the butt and such from what I have seen, and also does make the hips pull out a bitâŠbut Caitlyn, as you point out, hasnât been on HRT that long, plus being the athlete she was, she kind of has that long, lean look. I kind of wonder if the surgeons created âhip padsâ, I have read about that, to give trans women more of an hourglass figure.
âmusicprnt, I think your description of âoldâ feminism is over-simplified and inaccurate to a large degree. You are in fact participating in the put-downs of women to do not habitually dress and act in a matter calculated to please the male gaze. I donât think you should go there.â
No, I am not, and I wish you wouldnât put words in my mouth. First of all, I didnât knock anyone for the way they present or what they wish to wear, I would be the last person to do that, what I am objecting to is that people like Gloria Steinhem assumed that if a woman likes to wear more femme clothing, they are selling out or they are giving in to patriarchy or the like, I have read enough of what they have written, and continue to write, that I donât think I am mistaken. That is as bad as the 1950âs âA woman shoulld dress to please the man in her life, and should focus her life on being married and having childrenâ, it is just as myopic and authoritarian, whatever the intents were. The real problem is that like too many into the identity politics game, they want to make rules about âwho is authenticâ and who isnât, to decide for others what is real, what people like the types I am talking about remind me of is an old Moody Blues lyric, when they sing ârevolution is just another gun, to do to them what has been done to youâ. Feminism was supposed to be about allowing women to determine their own way of living, to be the people they want to be and not live by the rules that society and such put on them for far too long, it wasnât supposed to be about creating a new orthodoxy based on what some women saw as being âthe right wayâ.
It is nothing new, it is the same old dodge you saw in religion, in politics, and it is something men still continue to live with, that locked many men into a world where either you conformed, or were queer or whatnot (want an example? Talk to young men who are figure skaters or ballet dancers or gymnasts about the way they are treated, what people say about them). I donât think a woman who likes slacks, comfortable shoes and doesnât wear makeup is any less a woman or a person than a women who dresses the other way, what I donât like is people who want to define orthodoxy for others and claim to know âthe truthâ. And before you or anyone else accuse me of being in league with people like Rush Limbaugh, donât go there, Rush Limbaugh and his âfeminazisâ stuff is as repellant to me as the kind of feminists I was talking about, both have as their underlying attitude that what they know and believe is the only way to live. I have seen up close and personal the kind of thing I am talking about, I am not talking as some random person who listens to talk radio or read right wing blog sites, and nor am I someone who thinks women have to do something to âplease menâ or vice versa, I simply call out those who think that somehow because there have been horrible things done to them, that that gives them the right to define how others should live or what they should do. I get on Caitlyn Jenner, not because she is transgender or because she has this kind of over the top public personna, but because she lives in the clouds and is oblivious to the reality of her political positions and how harmful some of the things she has said are to others; I am not against feminism, exactly the opposite, what I am against is people who treat feminism as a personal experience in dictating to others what their truth is.
I am very glad that I missed out on the old feminism wars. That is, of course, not to say that theyâre not going on. But I think theyâre going on with my generation in a very different way.
It makes my skin crawl that women are often harder on the way other women dress than men are. Often, men are to blame but Iâve gotten way more comments from women about how I dress than men. Of course, this is just my experience. For many in my generation, these wars play out in schools with sexist dress policies. I was fortunate not to really experience that in high school (K-8 had sexist uniform policies but that was a Catholic school and another can of worms.)
Iâve never understood the war around womenâs clothing. Good grief, wear what makes you comfortable. Who cares what anyone else is wearing? (Adds another reason why Iâd never survive in a corporate job to my list)
^ me too. Iâve been feeling that thereâs been sort of a backlash against âwearing what makes you comfortableâ but I think it only masquerades as feminist. I went to college in the âjeans and whateverâ days, so I feel sorry for my students who sometimes feel judged if they donât âmake enough effort,â and I just donât get that.
Like they recently wrote papers about social media, and several referenced the acronym OOTD, which stands for âoutfit of the dayâ which is posted online, and critiqued. What pressure!
@romanigypsyeyes:
It has to do with how the kind of people we are talking about view the world, and specifically women and their role in the world. They rightfully see how women have been oppressed, how society and religion put them into a position where they often were powerless, were not allowed to achieve who and what they wanted to be, and wanted to change that. The problem is they assume certain things that may not be true, it is kind of like how some who push for racial equality see racism in everything, or how some facets of the LGBT community saw the push for same sex marriage as pushing for the rights of the privileged, white LGBT community over the interests of letâs say people who were black or hispanic.
There is kind of an analogy to what we are talking about with how women dress in the gay community, there are more than a few gays who saw the same sex marriage push as âselling out to the world of heterosexismâ, of somehow getting married destroying the essence of being gay. The kind of battles over presentation is based in the idea that a woman who wants to dress in letâs say a dress and heels, is âgiving in to patriarchyâ or worse, are doing so to âplease menâ, rather than maybe admitting that the woman in question likes to present like that. A lot of it IMO is about control, authoritarians always want to force their ideas on others, and will find a ton of ways to do it.
In the 1980âs there was a push by certain feminist groups, allied with the religious right who were nearing the height of their power, to ban pornography as being exploitive of women and violating their rights (if you want a chill, read some of the writings by Catherine Mackinnon, who ironically is the daughter of a law professor known as an expert on the constitution). The laws they promoted, thankfully, were thrown out by the Supreme Court as violating the first amendment, in large part because such laws were so broadly worded it could ban a lot of things that were not pornography. However, Canada passed those laws, and those promoting the law there found what others were saying about be careful about authoritarian laws, that you donât know who will make the rules, and in canada it led to things like Lesbian erotica and writings being banned from being transported via the mails, and things like sex toys and the like became difficult to get, because the law was hijacked by the religious right and conservative party into banning those things and things like books about gay and lesbian sexuality.
The sad part is that their heart was in the right place, and they had good points about things like porn, but they ended up hurting freedom, rather than helping it, by de facto trying to declare what it meant to be a woman and to be fully engaged/enabled as a woman. It is much like those who look down on woman who chose to be SAHM, claiming they have âopted into the patriarchyâ, rather than figuring out that maybe women have complex reasons for what they do, and how they do it.
I give you mansplaining in action.
Iâm trying to recall posts in which white posters told black people how they should think and feel about civil rights and the various permutations of the movement.
Wait, who exactly are you accusing of âmansplainingâ? (Pardon my sensitivity on that issue.)
Not you.
Although I do think that you should reconsider your tepid acknowledgement of the accomplishments of the second wave of feminism. I know that you were experiencing your own struggles at that time, but you were not living as a woman in 1950 through 1990 or so, if I am not mistaken. Iâm sure that athletes who lived and competed as women during that era have a very different experienceâand thus opinionâof Title IX than Caitlin Jenner.
1990? The second wave was over by then, and we were well into the third wave! (I wasnât alive yet in 1950 or for a number of years thereafter, and took no position on feminism at the time.) But thereâs nothing tepid about my acknowledgement of the accomplishments of every wave of feminism, including the second. Including Title IX; I stopped paying attention to anything Caitlyn Jenner says quite a while ago! I even used to read Ms. Magazine from the time it first came out in the late 1960s, because my mother was an original subscriber, and I always considered myself a feminist. The reason I didnât discuss it more in this thread is that that wasnât what I was addressing; I was addressing your challenge to the accuracy of Musicprntâs characterization of second wave feminismâs transphobia.
So I wish you would acknowledge â tepidly or otherwise â the rampant, hateful transphobia expressed by almost every prominent second wave feminist (âghastly parodiesâ of women; âall transsexuals rape women by appropriating female bodies,â and so on ad infinitum) , all of which had real effects on real peopleâs lives â including, among many others, the explusion of trans women like Sandy Stone from feminist organizations like Olivia Records, the strenuous efforts by Germaine Greer to have a trans woman physicist removed from her position as a Fellow of Newnham College (one of the all-women colleges at Cambridge), and the decision decades ago to stop Medicaid coverage for trans women based on efforts by certain feminists such as Janice Raymond. If you donât think I was paying attention back then, and was continually disappointed by the hostility expressed towards people like me, youâre quite wrong. You should understand why a lot of trans people havenât felt exactly welcomed by organized feminism until fairly recently, in pretty much the same way that a lot of black women and other women of color felt unwelcome. (Have you ever read the letters from Audre Lorde to Mary Daly?)
The gains of second wave feminism were still being realized in the early 90s. As a woman, you and all of the girls who say they arenât feminists are benefiting from them now.
This is an interesting article:
http://www.transadvocate.com/sex-essentialism-terfs-and-smelly-vaginas_n_14924.htm
So is this:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-terf
Iâll acknowledge a couple things about the sorts of statements and/or questions that you label âtransphobiaâ: I think some of it is hateful, and some of it raises real questions. Germaine Greerâwho has been a renowned eccentric for decades, known for her passions and colorfully-expressed opinionsâpoints out that trans women do not appear to be clamoring for uterus and ovary transplants. Instead we have people like Cait Jenner opting for breast implants and plastic surgery and stylists to make her âprettier.â Because apparently thatâs what she thinks it is to be a woman. Or at least a woman that one would aspire to be? Not an unreasonable question. OTOH, GGâs effort to have a trans physicist expelled from Newnham is obviously suspect. It could have been sheer prejudice, and certainly looks like it. Iâve only read about Janice Raymond, not read any of her books. I have always found radical lesbian feminists of the type who say that all heterosexual sex is rape eye-roll-worthy; she seems to be one of that ilk, and I suspect that her extreme views on transexuality, which definitely rise to the level of transphobia, spring from that.
Frankly, the POV of a radical lesbian feminist is one that I do not share. They tend to be hypersensitive to male âintrusion,â as they see it, into âfemaleâ spaces, especially spaces created specifically to be female only. This was even more extreme in the 60s and 70s, when such things were comparatively new and had been recently hard fought for. In fact, the battle for any degree of legitimacy was still going on.
Do you remember the media coverage and routine ridicule of âfeministsâ at that time? Do you remember how Gloria Steinem became the official face of feminism because of her good looks?