Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

My letter to Michael Savage

Dear Mr Savage,

On the 26th of February, you stated on your radio show, “You say there are people who are sexually confused, who think that they’re men when they’re women. They’re not normal.” These comments were in regards to explaining to a child how it was that Melissa Ehteridge was thanking her wife.

I would like to comment to say that you seem to have confused lesbians with female-to-male transsexuals. While it’s true that some lesbians do eventually decide to transition to male, the vast majority do not. As Etheridge has given absolutely no indication that she plans to do so, I think you are in error regarding her gender identity.

Furthermore, while you are right to insist that transsexuality is unusual, “normal” is something of a loaded term and not one that’s easy to agree on. For instance, it’s more typical to be right handed than left handed, and for a long while it was considered “unnatural” to be left handed. Now it’s just considered to be less common. This word is even more in dispute when the “natural” (non-human) world cannot even be taken into consideration. As far as I know, there are no other mammals with the ability to change their sex and certainly none that have to power to do surgery or produce artificial sex hormones or even any that wear clothes. One could therefore conclude that since transsexuality as currently understood by humans is unavailable to animals, this somehow clinches it’s unnaturalness. But /all/ wearing of clothes is unnatural and I certainly wouldn’t use the nudity of animals to argue for general human nudism. Furthermore, as we do not understand the communications of animals, it could be quite possible that some have managed to transition from one gender to another within their animal communities and we would be completely unaware of it.

I hope this letter has cleared up some confusion for you regarding transsexuality and lesbianism. If you would like some recommendations for books that could clear this up further, please don’t hesitate to reply.

Thank you very much for your time,
Les

There are people who are not normal, who have a confusion in their head, and they think they’re a man even though they look like a woman.

SAVAGE: Portland, Oregon, [caller], KXL, you’re on The Savage Nation.

CALLER: My wife was sitting on the couch with our 7-year-old daughter when Etheridge got up and did her piece thanking her wife and four kids, and our daughter looked over at our — at Mom and said: “Was that a man?” And how do we answer our kids when we’re forced to [sic] — this homosexuality upon us?

SAVAGE: I will tell you how you answer it: You say there are people who are sexually confused, who think that they’re men when they’re women. They’re not normal. Normal people are not like that. Normal people are like Mommy and Daddy. Mommy and Daddy are normal. There are people who are not normal, who have a confusion in their head, and they think they’re a man even though they look like a woman. That’s what you have to say to them otherwise the child will grow up confused.

Previously on the same broadcast:

ETHERIDGE: I have to thank my incredible wife, Tammy, and our four children, Becky and Bailey and Johnnie Rose and Miller, and everyone —

SAVAGE: Turn it off. Get her off my show. I don’t care what her name is. I don’t like a woman married to a woman. It makes me want to puke. How’s that? I want to vomit when I hear it. I think it’s child abuse. That’s my opinion — one man’s opinion. If it’s illegal, tell me it’s illegal to have an opinion in America. Maybe I can be excommunicated for having an opinion.

I want to puke when I hear about a woman married to a woman raising children because, frankly, I think that it’s child abuse to do that to children without their permission. What does a child know? Ask them when they’re 16 whether they want to be raised by two lesbians or two men. What are the two men doing behind the other wall? You think the children don’t hear it?

http://mediamatters.org/items/200702270015
It’s fair to wonder why I am reprinting hateful garbage on my blog. Before I answer that, I’m going to add even more hateful garbage:
“The only thought that pops in ur head when u think ‘feminist’ is a fat, manly, tall lesbian who wants to take control over everything….” http://forum.armenianclub.com/archive/index.php/t-1386.html
” I don’t want this blog to be about the fact that I’m NOT one of those angry, hairy, lesbian feminists.” http://happyfeminist.typepad.com/happyfeminist/2006/01/index.html
“Maybe she had some notion that feminists are all lesbians, have hairy legs, and hate men.” http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/22/20500/1686
“Despite how ‘feminists’ have been portrayed, most of us don’t hate men. We aren’t hairy, unwashed, bosom sagging, shrill harpies who want to destroy families.” http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/woman/entries/2006/10/12/is_third_wave_f.html

Well, that was fun

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a hairy-legged lesbian.
What’s the common thread here? Gender normativity. Lesbians want to be men. Feminist are lesbians and want to be men. None of these people are conforming enough to gender stereotypes. I’m not going to go dig up comments on the other side of this, but it wouldn’t be hard to find examples of men getting called “fags” regardless of their sexual orientation, but because the speaker feels they insufficiently conform to gender stereotypes. Men are men and women are women and people who seeks to redefine or expand those roles clearly want to change their sex and that’s a bad thing.

What started this

I heard the Michael Savage rant and I winced. Yeah, there are lesbian-IDed folks who do want to be men. Augh, it’s all true! But then, I thought of the lavender menace. Some feminists really are lesbians. Augh, it’s all true!
The problem isn’t that some feminists are lesbians or that some lesbians are ftm or anything like that. The problem is the insistence that there’s something wrong with this. The insistence that gender normativity is right and good and natural and all transgressors, no matter how small or minor their transgression are unnatural and bad and wrong.
Lest this all be too obvious to justify the mad amount of quoted text, I want to go on to address radfeminists. (Doesn’t it sound like it should be the “fun” kind of feminism what with “rad” and all. It’s not.) Some straight women thought the way to address the charge that all feminists were lesbians was to throw them out of their groups. The lavender menace had to go. Not that there was anything wrong with lesbians, just their experiences and socialization was so different, they should respect the space needed for straight women and butt out. This is why lesbians are not allowed access into the Michigan Women’s Music Festival.
The same reasoning is used to exclude mtfs from women’s spaces right now. When you classify trans people as their assigned-at-birth sex, you’re agreeing with Mr Savage. Because you are denying the legitimacy of transition. Saying that mtfs are men who want to be women is awfully similar to saying that lesbians want to be men. In both cases, the possibility of successful, intention transition is dismissed. In both cases, transition is condemned. In both cases, gender is seen as essential. And really, when Michael Savage and radfeminists are agreeing on something, there’s is something going woefully wrong. This guy makes Rush Limbaugh look moderate. I used to joke that if Reagan said that oxygen was important for breathing, I would start demanding definite evidence for the oxygen thing, because he’s wrong so much of the time. I can’t agree w/ him on anything. Double that for Savage.

Le week-end à Paris

Last weekend, Nicole needed to take the LSATS and the closest place that they’re offered is Paris. In a tremendous display of selflessness, I agreed to accompany her. I took over a hundred pictures, which I’ll be shortly posting along with a narration. Rather than replicate that, I will type here instead the unphotographed sections of my journey and, at the end, some useful advice.

Soldes!

It’s that time of year when Paris stores are allowed to unload their unsold inventory. If last weekend was not the end of it, next weekend will be. At this point, their goal is not make profit, but to minimize loss. This means cheap french clothes for me. I was all over the soldes like vinyl car seats and bare legs in the summer.
For the most part, buying clothes is a chore for me. I have a hard time finding my size, or something I like or a non-hostile place to shop. None of this is true in Paris. I can let my inner metrosexual run amok. On the train there, I read a copy of GQ, looking for trends. Of course, upon arrival, I ignored all of their advice. Loafers? No, I want shoes just like my old shoes, but less old or more functional. (Ok, my inner metrosexual isn’t very metro.)
I walked into a store that sells suits and tweed. They only had a couple of things in my size (which really is as small as certain tweedy shops in The Hague have informed me). Green tweed? I was leaning against it, but then the shop guys were gathered around. «C’est magnifique!» “Wow,” they told me. “Fabulous!” These were old, grumpy suit store guys. At that moment, I began pondering when I could next live in Paris. Sometimes, I kind of like capitalism. These guys wanted my money. Concerns about my foreignness or whatever were entirely secondary. Maybe I do look as fab as they say in the jacket. A distinct possibility, I think, as my self-esteem has climbed to it’s normal Trump-like levels from this encounter. (yeah, ok, see if I didn’t keep telling myself how great I was, hostility would squish me, but in the absence of hostility it over-compensates.)
Yeah, I got TWO pairs of shoes. Neither with goretex or vegan, but I don’t want to wait until I’m in San Francisco to get new shoes. Extravagant. Nicole says it’s reasonable to have many pairs of shoes. Also, two pairs of pants, two shirts, a bow tie (which either says gay republican pundit or high school science teacher. I hope for the former.). So I think I’m good for clothes until 2008.

Advice

If you are getting over a cold, don’t try to smoke a pipe, even if it makes you imagine yourself as Hemmingway-esque. If you do smoke a pipe, don’t accidentally inhale. If you do inhale, get plenty of sleep that night. If you don’t get plenty of sleep that night, at least get some the next night. If you are short on sleep and coughing, don’t stay up to all hours of the night, even if you are dreading an appointment early the next morning. If you do stay up too late, at least get up early so you don’t need to sprint 8 km to your appointment. If you fail all of these, skip having beer with your friend on his birthday that night. Even if you feel guilty about it. I can follow at least the last bit. bah.

Jacked

Yeah, so I can get Ardour to display on a remote machine, but forget about making sounds thus displayed. Run it in VNC and it’s fine. Run with ssh X tunneling, and there are problems. What kind of problems, you ask?

allocate_mach_clientport: can't find mach server port
Can't allocate mach port

For the longest time, I thought that error was originating within Ardour. So I downloaded the source. Man, you need a ton of libraries to compile it, several of which are either in Fink’s unstable tree or not present within fink at all. Ardour developers use Darwin Ports, I guess. Anyway, the fink version of jack absolutely does not work for me. So I was giving up on the project, when I looking at console logs revealed that the problem seemed to be coming from Jack.

Maybe if I could just discover the name of the jack sever, there exists an undocumented command line argument to pass to Ardour to tell it which server to use! Fortunately, there exists a utility for just such discovery: jack_lsp. So after learning of it’s existence, I typed in the command and got:

allocate_mach_clientport: can't find mach server port
Can't allocate mach port
jack_client_open() failed, status = 0x

aha! So I downloaded the JackOSX code and it was a terrible mess. So I downloaded the Jackit code, but it doesn’t play well with core audio. There’s some goofy thing on mactel computers such that you have to create an aggregate device or else in and outs are treated differently. There’s probably a command line argument to fix this, but I like the nice JackOSC GUI, so I went back to their messy, messy code and started banging away at the core audio driver, since that seemed like a possible culprit.
Several hours later, after learning about some macros in C that I’d never heard of and borrowing some code form JackIt and otherwise swearing, I got a new library for coreaudio to build and link. Hooray. That was way too much effort. And I fired up the JackOSC GUI and everything worked. Yay!
And then I typed jack_lsp and got the same error again. grrrr. The code for jack_lsp is not in the Jack OSX source repository, as far as I can tell. It is included with JackIt, but it’s clearly not the problem. The problem is some Jack library that they ship out as a binary. Perhaps using my special sekrit powers, I can build the JackIT kit to use my core audio library, since it’s got a bunch of jackit code in there now anyway. Or maybe I can give up and just use VNC.
Anyway, this is why I haven’t written any music the last few days, nor implemented a very, very fast pitch tracker that just uses the samples around zero crossings.
In other news, the weird mole on my back was not cancer. Wonder why it itched so much.

Securely Using a Macmini as a remote controlled audio workstation (or media center)

Let’s say you have a mac mini and a laptop and you’re too cheap and/or lazy to buy a screen, keyboard and mouse. You don’t need to! The answer lies with your laptop. It is possible to control a macmini (or any other type of mac) with another computer of nearly any variety. I happen to use a mac, but it is also possible with windows and linux.

VNC

To start off, you will need to borrow some peripherals, so you can do the initial setup. After you register and whatnot, You will want to setup VNC. This allows you access to the minimac’s desktop from your laptop. Open the minimac’s system preferences. Open sharing. Click the “Services” tab. Click the checkbox next to Apple Remote Desktop. After that, you want to set Access Privileges. This should open automatically the first time you turn remote desktop on, but if it doesn’t, click the “Access Privileges…” button.
On the left, you will see a list of users. Select yourself. On the right, you see a list of actions. If you want to allow remote control (which you do), select all of them. Below the line, there is a checkbox which says “VNC viewers may control screen with password:” Check that box and then give it a secure password. Click “ok”
You are back on the sharing – Services window. Check the box next to “Remote Login”. Ok, now click on the firewall tab to make sure your firewall is on. While you’re there, also give your computer a name that’s different from your laptop’s name then quit the user prefs.
Ok, now go to your laptop and get a VNC client. If your laptop is a mac, Chicken of the VNC is perhaps the most popular. It’s what I use. If you’re on another kind of computer, just search the internets to find a VNC client. Download and install to your laptop.

SSH Tunnelling

Ok, now it’s time to test this out. First, open a terminal on your laptop (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app). Then type:

sudo ssh -X username@macmini.local -L 5900/127.0.0.1/5900

(Use your username and the mane of your macmini.) It will prompt you for a password (and may quote Spiderman at you.). Type the password for your account on your laptop. (It may ask you if you’re sure you want to connect, etc. Yes, you’re sure.) Then it will ask you for a password again. Type the password for the account on your macmini. You should see a unix-type prompt. Hooray, you are logged into your macmini.
You are logged in securely, which is even better. Don’t dispair, the graphical connection is coming next, but first an optional, brief explanation of the command you just typed: Ssh is a secure way to connect with another computer. In this case, it’s also doing something called port mapping. This makes a secure connection between a port on your computer and a post on a remote computer. If you connect to that port on your local computer, it will actually, really form a secure connection with the remote port. What this means for you is that nobody can eavesdrop over your connection (an issue if you’re wireless). The reason you type sudo is because you need root privileges to tunnel on important ports.

Back to instructions

Ok, open Chicken of the VNC on your laptop. A login window will open and there will be a list of servers, hopefully with your macmini on the list. However, you are not going to click on it. Instead, click on the + button in the lower left. A new server name will come up. Type in something like “secure minimac”. On the right hand side, type in your password. Don’t change any of the other info. You want it to connect to localhost on the default port. You can tell it to remember the password if you feel like your laptop is not going to be “borrowed” by non-trusted people. Don’t click any other checkboxes. Click connect.
A window should open with a view of the screen of your minimac. If this doesn’t happen, try the following:

  1. Do you see the name of your mac in the list of servers? If not, make sure that you’ve turned on Apple Remote desktop on your minimac.
  2. Can you connect to the remote server directly, not via the secure connection? If so, you’ve got weird problems and will need to ask for help from somebody else, like your network administrator.
  3. If you cannot connect at all, the problem may be a firewall. Make sure that the firewall on your LAN allows connections on port 5900. You may need to talk with your network administrator.

Now that you have a window open onto the remote computer, try doing something. Start itunes. Play a tune! Your minimac can be a remote controlled media center. woot.

X Windows

I like free software. Therefore, I want to use Ardour, which is free. My minimac has a large, external disk. Therefore, I want to run it on the mini, but control it with my wimpier laptop. First, you must install X11, which comes on the operating system CD from Apple. Install it on your laptop AND on your macmini. Also, install the developer kit on both (or at least the mini). Then, install Ardour on the macmini.
Ok,you may have noticed that sometimes VNC has a bit of lag. Because Ardour is an Xwindows application, it’s possible to reduce the lag by not using VNC. Instead, you can tell it to run on the macmini and to display on your local machine. However, this requires a smidgen of additional effort.
Apple has a bunch of information on X. It’s a good thing to read if you’re having a problem or just want to understand what’s going on.
First, you need to tell your macmini what you’re up to. Go back to the terminal ssh connection that you made from the laptop to the macmini. (If you closed the connection, reopen it). Then cut and paste the following commands to the terminal window:

sed 's/#X11Forwarding no/X11Forwarding yes/' /etc/sshd_config > /tmp/sshd_config
sudo mv /tmp/sshd_config /etc/.
sudo chown root /etc/sshd_config

You will need to type the password for your account on the macmini. These commands tell the ssh daemon to allow X forwarding. You may need to restart the sshd (or, if you don’t know how to do that, just reboot the whole computer by typing “sudo shutdown -r now” (without the quotes)). It would also probably be a good idea to repair disk permissions at this time.
Now, reconnect to your computer, using the same ssh command above. The -X flag allows X forwarding. That one typed command enables all your secure communications! Open X-windows on your laptop. Type into the terminal connection to the minimac:

/usr/X11R6/bin/xeyes

If all is working, a pair of eyeballs should open on your laptop. If all is not working, you’re going to have to look at some apple documents to figure this out.

Remote Ardour

Ardour, by default,opens windows on the machine that launched it. This means that if you launch it on your macmini, you can control if via VNC right away. But this is not efficient. It’s better to close VNC and just use X for this process. There are a few ways to make this happen. The one I’m describing is not the best, but it does work (hopefully). Note that the following assumes that you put Ardour.app in /Applications. If you put it someplace else, you will have to modify the path below
On your macmini, type:

cd
mkdir bin
cd bin
cat > ardour
#/bin/sh -l

/Applications/Ardour.app/Contents/Resources/bin/exporter

type control-D. Then type:

cd
cat >> .profile

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

export PATH

Type ctrl-d again. What you’ve done is create a tiny executable file that uses the right path to open Ardour and added that path to your shell. You could also do this with an alias.
Logout. (type “exit”). Then log back in (with the long ssh command way above). Open X-windows on your laptop. Type “ardour” (without the quotes) at the terminal prompt. A window should open on your local machine.
Hopefully this all will save somebody else a lot of time.

Happy Dog

Xena has fully recovered from airplane trauma. Almost. She’s become incredibly obedient, which is strange, but she seems very happy, running around and sniffing at things. The only things that freak her out now are loud noises and hurricane force winds. I had kind of forgotten how cute she is, like when she runs her forehead into my feet to show affection. What a great dog.

In other happy news, I went to a film festival going on Rotterdam, but which is not the official city festival. It’s the Reject Film Festival and they’re showing a bunch of short films by my friend Nick. It was great last night. A bunch of films and a three course meal for 10€. It’s still going on, so everybody who can should check it out.
I will go to the official festival later this week, but tonight I have lab time.

Errands in The Hague

Ok, I like some things about The Hague. It reminds me a lot of Middletown, Connecticut, but has many more things going for it. And the music and school communities are both really great. I know a lot of people, I have friends. It’s a good time. And it’s less than an hour to Amsterdam, but in many ways it’s also a small town.

All the sales are going on now. I keep seeing goretex shoes for sale. Some of them are adequately formal to replace my current everyday shoes, which are leaky. So I went into a shoe shop and asked about the shoes I had seen in the window. The shop keeper lead me to the women’s shoes, which were clearly not what I had indicated. I said I preferred men’s shoes. She said that they were often too wide for women’s feet. “I have wide feet.” She took me to the men’s shoes and gave me no information whatsoever about which were waterproof and kept brining me women’s shoes. “How about these?”
I feigned being late to an appointment and escaped. She wasn’t hostile, but she was employing passive resistance. I was not going to succeed in finding what I wanted and lack of respect for my identity gets old really fast. This is the second Sunday in a row in which I’ve failed to run an errand because service employees don’t want to give me access to gendered-male stuff.
On the way to the park with my dog, I noticed an underwear store had a poster up of a woman in boxer briefs shaving her face. She was topless and had long hair and was extremely sexualized in a feminine manner. You know, in case there was any question about whether biology is destiny. Clothes might make the man but feminine is female is inescapable.
I got a bunch of shrink stuff in the mail yesterday. It’s got pamphlets explaining something or other. I can probably guess at what they say, but they’re in Dutch. I could ask somebody to translate them for me, but I’d rather hide under my bed, thanks. I don’t know how this is going to help cure my anxiety, since the paperwork is making me want to flee. Cola says that if I disappear and then call her from a pay phone at a North American airport, she’s keeping the dog. She’s fiendish. I guess flight response isn’t the way to go with this one. Maybe I’ll fight the letter. Or the doctor. That would go over well.
In completely unrelated news, I’ve volunteered to start doing sound FX for a Dutch fan-produced Star Trek. I’m a huge geek. I’ve been wanting to work more with video and this will give me experience. I never thought of myself as a trekkie before, just a viewer, but uh yeah. Lately, I’ve been looking at where my life has taken me (and is taking me) and thinking “How did I get here exactly? Which way is this train going?” I swear if somebody appeared to me ten years ago and said “in ten years time, you will live in Holland, whine about shoe stores to your blog, and be a trekkie.” I would have said, “What’s a ‘blog’?”

Shrink

Before I begin, I want to clarify that the Dutch are actually pretty ok as far as restroom etiquette goes. Best are the French, then the Dutch, then a tie between Californians and Germans (I think CA might be a teeny bit better) and at the very bottom is Spain. (Also: waa, waa, waa, nobody understands me.) Ok, so on to our story.

I went to see a Dutch shrink on wednesday. Over the summer, I got a book that said that therapy can cure anxiety. Zoloft can also cure anxiety, but it stops working if I stop taking it. Also, it has not been stellar for my concentration. I haven’t written much music since being on it. So a long-term cure that leaves me able to think would be very good.
“Why do you think you are anxious?”
If I knew the answer to that question, I would have a solution already. I dunno. I think there’s something bugging me that I’m not thinking about. When I have something that is really bothering me and I try to ignore it, I tend to have panic attacks. Maybe that’s the cause of all my panic attacks. I don’t know. Lyme disease was pretty stressful. Lack of sunlight might be a problem. I dunno.
I said “I dunno” a lot. She took copious notes and asked extremely open-ended questions. One of them was “how is your identity?” Ok, this was not out of the blue, since I was sort of without one right after I got divorced, but how does one answer such a query?
“Is there anything else?” she asked.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
She noted that it was open ended.
I took a deep breath. “I have a lot of friends who are transexual. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about.”
She started a new page of notes. “You know people who have had The Operation?”
Gah!!! The Operation. What operation would that be, exactly? Would it be the operation where folks take T (or E, since I’ve known folks going both ways) until they pass? Would it be top surgery? Would it be a hysterectomy? Would that be a medioplasty? A phalloplasty?
“Um, I know a guy who had a hysto?”
Did you mother know? Did your ex-wife know? Does your girlfriend know? How long has this been going on?
no. sorta, not really. yes. I dunno, a few years. You know, I’m not at all sure about this.
So you think you are denying your real self and that’s making you anxious and maybe having The Operation would fix that?
What?!! No, I don’t know! Augh!
Would you like to speak with gender specialists in The Hague?
“I don’t know.” I’m all wary now. Outside the window, a gigantic orange cat has climbed to the very top of a barren tree. It’s among the empty branches, looking around. It’s not acting uncertain, but I wonder if it must be stuck, up so high in the tree. Why did it go up there?
“You don’t have to make any decisions. It’s your life, you know. You can just talk about it. It’s an emotionally safe place to talk.”
That’s easy for you to say. I looked at the bookshelf behind her head. It was red and in the shape of a first-aid cross. “Um.”
“They can also help you with anxiety.”
“Ok, I’ll talk to them.”
“Your friends who have had The Operation- are they happy?”
“Um, as far as I know. I dunno.”
“Well, I think we’ve probably covered enough for this session. How do you feel now? Relieved to get everything out?”
No, that’s not exactly how I would describe my mood at all. How does it make me feel to talk about anxiety? It makes me feel fucking anxious!!
I speak virtually no Dutch. Her English skills are probably not high enough to be doing therapy sessions in English. No, I was not relieved. I left and went to class where I was all jumpy.
On the way out, I tried unsuccessfully to explain to the desk person that while I was happy to provide any insurance info they wanted, my insurance specifically excluded treatment for anxiety and regardless, they just reimbursed me for things, so it would be really better if I just paid cash now. The desk person went to ask a supervisor. Out the window behind her, I saw the orange cat running along the top of the fence, like it was on a mission, had a plan, had a place to be.

Complainments

Ok, it’s true that I play the tuba. And I bike around town with a sousaphone attached to my bike. While wearing men’s clothes. And I got to clothing stores to buy these clothes which requires trying them on. Despite all of these things that might lead one to a contrary conclusion, I do not enjoy being stared at. When I am trying to bike home in in the icy wind with a tuba attached to my bike via octopi (aka: bungee cords), and I hear the word “tuba” followed by squeals of laughter, it just annoys me. I’m grumpy that way. Other places I don’t like getting stared at: public restrooms. If you wouldn’t call me “sir” on the street, at a café or use male pronouns when describing the person you saw biking past with a tuba, then what on earth posses you to adopt them when I’m in the women’s room? Oh, but you’re Dutch, so you don’t say anything about my obvious out-of-placeness, you just stare. Well, stop it already. Sheesh.

What I really want to complain about this evening is Pat. I’ve been thinking a lot about Pat lately. This isn’t a person, it’s a Saturday Night Live skit that was broadcast while I was in high school. SNL was a measure of coolness when I was a kid. It signified many things including being allowed by your parents to stay up late enough to watch it, since it started at something like 23:00 on Saturdays. So, therefore, you could talk about how funny the skits on it were at school on Monday, and everybody would know that you were allowed to stay up late enough to watch them. (If you complained about how the band’s second song sucked (it always sucked for some reason. I think the sound engineers fell asleep by then), then you were super awesome because that part didn’t come on until after midnight.)
So there existed a skit about a character named “Pat.” I was trying to remember the theme song of the recurring skit, but I couldn’t quite piece it all together. The internet was no help, but it did give me a few plot synopsi. Anyway, as best as I can recall, it went, “Is it a he or a she? A him or a her? Um, excuse me ma’am, um sir?. . . It’s time for androgyny, here comes Pat!”
The one I remember best involved Pat going to a drug store and trying to buy personal items of a gradually more intimate nature. The druggist is desperately trying to figure out Pat’s physical sex. Would you like T-Gel shampoo or VO5? Pert Plus, Pat says. Speed stick deodorant or Secret? Which is cheaper? Finally, Pat asks for condoms. The audience howls. The druggist asks Pat to chose between extra-sensitive or ribbed. The punch-line is when Pat says “I’m a very sexual being.” The studio audience responds with an echoing, “Ewwwwwww.”
Pat is repulsive. Ugly. Toad-like. Wears unattractive, unflattering clothes. Unkempt hair. Snorts through hir nose when zie laughs. Who on earth would have sex with such a thing.
One plot synopsis, found on the internet, had somebody who became so confused by Pat’s gender that they committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Yes, violence is the correct response to gender ambiguity. But who makes a better target? Self-inflicted, or the person ‘causing’ this desperation?
Did I mention this was on TV when I was in secondary school, on an enormously popular program that conveyed status to those who watched it? The year I graduated, it was made into a movie, which, thank gods, was a major bomb. IMDB refers to the titular character with the pronoun “it.”
I’ve known a fair number of genderqueer and trans people in my time. On average, those folks are about as attractive as the population at large. Many are sexy, some are not. This is in no way linked with their transition status. They’re just people, obviously. Pat is an ugly caricature, with no basis in reality. but zie lives in my head. Even if it’s clearly not true that trans people are ugly and horrible, well, there’s Pat in my head.
So let’s end this complainment with some true statements. Somebody like Pat doesn’t ’cause’ other people to commit violence, whether self-inflicted or hate crime. I don’t cause people to stare at me in bathrooms. Other people’s problems belong to other people, not to Pat and not to me.

but . . .

I was trying to buy a tweed jacket today and I went to the tweediest store I could find. Many of the stores here are kind of butcher than the same store is in Paris. Zara is way less twinky, for example. I’ve noticed that when I dress more casually, people don’t respond to me as well, so I’m going back to dressing like a swanky Parisian man. Anyway, I was in my casual Dutch hooded jacket, trying to find classier jacket and becoming paranoid. There’s that moment when people looking at me in the store realize that I’m looking for men’s clothes for me. This is Holland. nobody says anything. Probably nobody thinks anything of it, once the connection is made. Or not very much of it, anyway. But I’m paranoid and when the shop clerk volunteers that he thinks I’m a size 14, which they don’t carry, I don’t know if he’s being helpful in telling me the things I’m trying on don’t really fit, or if he’s trying to get me to leave his smart, tweedy shop. There’s really no way that I can know which it is.
When I was in France, for the first time in my life, I enjoyed clothes shopping. But now it’s gone back to filling me with dread. Things have returned to normal.

Blog For Choice Day

So I’m blogging for choice. As I see it, the anti-choice arguments that are stated tend to fall into a couple of camps. One is “accepting consequences for your actions” So if you accidentally cut yourself and don’t wash it and it gets infected, you should be denied medical treatment because it’s the consequence of your actions? Or does this just mean that unwanted pregnancy is a punishment for having sex? Babies aren’t punishment! Or at least, they shouldn’t be. Also, medical care is a good thing. Being able to interviene in the course to change the outcome of an earlier action is a good thing.

Another argument states that fetuses are people with certain rights. There are actually two halves of this argument, the first of which centers on the personhood of a fetus. Whether or not a fetus is human is absolutely not a question. But being a person is more of a philosophical issue. In the past, even babies weren’t really people and it was ok to leave them out to die of exposure. Now, I think we’re all pretty much agreed that babies are people and therefore have the rights of people. Some want to extend personhood back before birth. But how much before? In it’s article on the Immaculate Conception (of Mary), the Catholic Encyclopedia states,

The term conception does not mean the active or generative conception by her parents. Her body was formed in the womb of the mother, and the father had the usual share in its formation. The question does not concern the immaculateness of the generative activity of her parents. Neither does it concern the passive conception absolutely and simply (conceptio seminis carnis, inchoata), which, according to the order of nature, precedes the infusion of the rational soul. The person is truly conceived when the soul is created and infused into the body.

Personhood occurs with the creation of a soul. This occurs after fertilisation. In a reversal of course, Catholics have since decided that it happens at the same time as physical conception. More than 75% of conceptions do not make it to term. They imagine an afterlife full of “people” who never lived. Who never even got past a few cell divisions. This seems strange to me. Furthermore, if every conception does indeed create a person, then the rhythm method of birth control kills many, many people. It tends to result in conceptions that are either to early or too late in a cycle to survive. It’s one of the most zygote-killing methods of birth control. Given that, the church can’t possibly both believe, honestly, that personhood is conveyed at the moment of physical fertilization AND that the rhythm method is the only moral method of birth control.
At no point during a pregnancy is a fetus treated as a person by the church. No name. No ceremony. No recognition of death (by miscarriage). If they really thought it was a person, baptisms (necessary for admission to heaven – the unbaptised can only get to Limbo) would be given at the first positive pregnancy test. The church does not in any way act as if fetuses are people.
I’m inclined to argue that a fetus is not a person. Personhood occurs at birth. But this is moot, given the second half of the personhood argument, which is that fetuses, if they are people, have certain rights.
People who argue that fetuses have rights are not arguing that fetuses have the same rights as other (actually born) people, they want to argue that fetuses have a great deal more rights. Specifically, fetuses have the right, in this argument, to compel their mothers to provide them with use of her body and organs.
(the following argument is borrowed) Imagine that you’ve been kidnapped. You wake up in a strange place to find yourself hooked up to a lot of medical machinery. Lying in another bed next to yours is another person. That person is also hooked up to a bunch of equipment. Your captors explain that this other person has no liver and will die without access to a matching liver. Yours matches. Therefore, they have attached your liver to him through the medical equipment. You must remain that way until a liver donor can be found for him and he is able to survive on his own. they expect the wait to be nine months.
If the sick man is unhooked from you, he will die. Are you therefore morally obligated to provide him with use of your liver for nine months?
Some will point out that the kidnap victim had no agency in her situation and thus this differs from somebody who is accidentally pregnant. However, then the argument is no longer about the rights of persons, but rather is about accepting “responsibility” for actions and was addressed in the first argument. Legally and morally, no other person can force you to provide use of your liver. If fetuses had that right, they would have more rights than other people and their rights would drastically decrease upon birth. They would have far more rights than their mothers, who are unarguably people. Fetuses would not be people, they would be super people. This is obviously in error.
What could be the motivation that people might have in trying to confer fetuses greater rights and personhood than their mothers? One obvious answer is to seek to control sexuality. This again ties back into the “consequences for actions” argument. However, I think it’s only a subset of the answer.
There are those who firmly believe that people do not “own” their own bodies. In this belief system, (some) body modifications are a moral evil. Biology should be destiny. This world-view is strongly associated with sexism. If biology is destiny and pregnant women lose rights to their person, then male superiority is implied. Furthermore, people who use their bodies to do thing like have same sex encounters are defying their biological destiny and are thus also committing a moral evil. As are transgender people, crossdressers and especially transsexuals. Thus supporting choice and the body ownership it implies is essential for queers. If pregnant women don’t own their bodies, neither do we. None of us. Even straight men with very minor kinks or who have “illicit” sex are committing the “evil” of acting as if they own themselves.
Choice benefits everyone.
Finally, those who reject biology as destiny are people and should be treated as such. Rights to medical care. Rights to just try to get a damn haircut without being stared at. Etc. I’ll march for choice so my pregnancy-prone sisters can safeguard their rights and mine that are implicitly threatened too. Will they stand up for me?