shmeards:

quadzebub:

A collection of videos showing instances of the great liberal heroes, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Daily Show correspondents, being transphobic.

Trigger Warnings on every post!

jesus christ im going to be sick

I stopped watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report a while ago because I wasn’t liking their jokes or angles on some things, but seeing all these together here is really upsetting

dopeanarchist:

knowhomo:

LGBTQ* Privileges (or lacking privileges) You Should Be Aware Of

30+ Examples of Cisgender Privilege

(following text from: Its Pronounced Metrosexual )

Following is a list of cisgender identity privileges.  If you’re not familiar with the term, “cisgender” means having a biological sex that matches your gender identity and expression, resulting in other people accurately perceiving your gender.  If you are cisgender, listed below are benefits that result from your alignment of identity and perceived identity.  If you identify as cisgender, there’s a good chance you’ve never thought about these things.  Try and be more cognizant and you’ll start to realize how much work we have to do in order to make things better for the transgender folks who don’t have access to these privileges.  If you’re unsure of what it means to be “transgender” you can read about it in our gender identity guide.

1. Use public restrooms without fear of verbal abuse, physical intimidation, or arrest
2. Use public facilities such as gym locker rooms and store changing rooms without stares, fear, or anxiety.
3. Strangers don’t assume they can ask you what your genitals look like and how you have sex.
4. Your validity as a man/woman/human is not based on how much surgery you’ve had or how well you “pass” as non-transgender.
5. You have the ability to walk through the world and generally blend-in, not being constantly stared or gawked at, whispered about, pointed at, or laughed at because of your gender expression.
6. You can access gender exclusive spaces such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Greek Life, or Take Back the Night and not be excluded due to your trans status.
7. Strangers call you by the name you provide, and don’t ask what your “real name” [birth name] is and then assume that they have a right to call you by that name.
8. You can reasonably assume that your ability to acquire a job, rent an apartment, or secure a loan will not be denied on the basis of your gender identity/expression.
9. You have the ability to flirt, engage in courtship, or form a relationship and not fear that your biological status may be cause for rejection or attack, nor will it cause your partner to question their sexual orientation.
10. If you end up in the emergency room, you do not have to worry that your gender will keep you from receiving appropriate treatment, or that all of your medical issues will be seen as a result of your gender.
11. Your identity is not considered a mental pathology (“gender identity disorder” in the DSM IV) by the psychological and medical establishments.
12. You have the ability to not worry about being placed in a sex-segregated detention center, holding facility, jail or prison that is incongruent with your identity.
13. You have the ability to not be profiled on the street as a sex worker because of your gender expression.
14. You are not required to undergo an extensive psychological evaluation in order to receive basic medical care.
15. You do not have to defend you right to be a part of “Queer,” and gays and lesbians will not try to exclude you from “their” equal  rights movement because of your gender identity (or any equality movement, including feminist rights).
16. If you are murdered (or have any crime committed against you), your gender expression will not be used as a justification for your murder (“gay panic”) nor as a reason to coddle the perpetrators.
17. You can easily find role models and mentors to emulate who share your identity.
18. Hollywood accurately depicts people of your gender in films and television, and does not solely make  your identity the focus of a dramatic storyline, or the punchline for a joke.
19. Be able to assume that everyone you encounter will understand your identity, and not think you’re confused, misled, or hell-bound when you reveal it to them.
20. Being able to purchase clothes that match your gender identity without being refused service/mocked by staff or questioned on your genitals.
21. Being able to purchase shoes that fit your gender expression without having to order them in special sizes or asking someone to custom-make them.
22. No stranger checking your identification or drivers license will ever insult or glare at you because your name or sex does not match the sex they believed you to be based on your gender expression.
23. You can reasonably assume that you will not be denied services at a hospital, bank, or other institution because the staff does not believe the gender marker on your ID card to match your gender identity.
24. Having your gender as an option on a form.
25. Being able to tick a box on a form without someone disagreeing, and telling you not to lie.  Yes, this happens.
26. Not fearing interactions with police officers due to your gender identity.
27. Being able to go to places with friends on a whim knowing there will be bathrooms there you can use.
28. You don’t have to convince your parents of your true gender and/or have to earn your parents’ and siblings’ love and respect all over again.
29. You don’t have to remind your extended family over and over to use proper gender pronouns (e.g., after transitioning).
30. You don’t have to deal with old photographs that did not reflect who you truly are.
31. Knowing that if you’re dating someone they aren’t just looking to satisfy a curiosity or kink pertaining to your gender identity (e.g., the “novelty” of having sex with a trans- person).
32. Being able to pretend that anatomy and gender are irrevocably entwined when having the “boy parts and girl parts” talk with children, instead of explaining the actual complexity of the issue 

YO I LITERALLY LOST A CHILDHOOD FRIEND OVER SHOWING HER THIS A MONTH AGO LMAOOOOO

(via bitterbrujita)

(via topmetesla)

anirishginger:

sinidentidades:

Eric Fehrnstrom, a top aide and political strategist to presumptive Republican presidential candidate former Gov. Mitt Romney (MA), made headlines earlier this year with a gaffe comparing Romney in the primary fight to an “Etch a Sketch” that you can flip over and shake and start over with as a blank slate in the general election. Before he was an adviser to Romney, Fehrnstrom was a political columnist for the Boston Herald. According to a profile in GQ, in 1992, he outed recently-elected Massachusetts Rep. Althea Garrison (R) as a transgender woman, effectively ending her political career.

To Mara Keisling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, the malicious outing and the presence of Fehrnstrom on Romney’s staff is simply unacceptable.

“Privacy for transgender people is a matter of survival, physical and economic survival,” Keisling said, “Once you out a trans person, you can’t just ‘Etch a Sketch’ it away.”

Fehrnstrom made his name in Boston as a “blue-collar conservative” columnist whose hard-hitting style got him moved from sports reporting to the political beat at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Herald, which was the splashy, tabloid-style counterpart to the more staidBoston Globe. He and his fellow reporter Howie Carr brought what GQ called a “nasty and resentful” tone to the paper’s political reportage, making the Herald a kind of perfect weapon against the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, gormless former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

It was for a local official, however, that Fehrnstrom reserved one of his nastiest political hits. Althea Garrison was a Boston politician and activist who was elected as a Republican to the Massachusetts state House in 1992. Two days after her election victory, Fehrnstrom published an article in the Herald announcing that Garrison had been born male.

“I can remember his glee when he found the birth certificate,” said a former Herald reporter named Robert Connolly.

Garrison’s career in politics was over. Speculation had previously gone around the community about Garrison’s gender status, but after Fehrnstrom’s story, it became her defining characteristic to the media. In every mention of her name in the press, her performance as a House member was overshadowed by her gender identity. Howie Carr, who is now a conservative talk show host, wrote in the Herald not long after the outing, “I’ve always liked Althea. She has a big heart. Not to mention big feet. And very, very big hands.”

(via paxamericana)

(Source: transinboots, via my-ass)

sketchamagowza:

MARRIAGE

its even more confusing for bigots when a transman and transwoman want to get married because either way works according to them

(Source: sketchamagowza, via adriofthedead)

damnitdisney:

youarenotyou:

supermattachine:

I’ve been feeling conflicted lately about Chaz Bono’s relationship to the media.  On the one hand, he’s being unfairly vilified by bigots like Keith Ablow and so many others.  He’s being misgendered, called by his assigned name, pathologized, threatened with physical violence, had medical abuse advocated as “treatment” for him, and treated in other unforgivable ways.  Presumably he went into this knowing that that would happen and believing he was strong enough to take it.  That’s brave.  I admire that.  And when people say fucked up things about Chaz, I am moved to defend him, because he’s a transgender man and I am a transgender man.  We both want full recognition of transgender people as human beings.  We are meant to be on the same side.  The hell of it is, we aren’t.

Chaz has appointed himself as the representative of a group of people who are not all like him.  He has said misogynistic and prescriptivist things about gender.  I take particular issue with his comments on trans embodiment and on women.

Here’s a link, for example, to an interview Chaz did with ABC.

Here’s something he says in that interview:

“If you are a man and you have breasts, any man would want to have them removed,” Bono said. “It is scary for a woman to think about it because it is something that they are really attached to. Being male and having breasts is about the worst thing I could imagine.”

 

Chaz is erasing the experience of trans men who don’t need top surgery.  He needs to realize that “men” is a more inclusive category than he seems to believe.  He’s reinforcing the cissexist idea that having breasts that you intend to keep equals being a woman, which we know from the experiences of many non-op, non-binary and intersex people is just not true.  Chaz is ignoring the needs and lives of many people who belong to the very group he purports to represent and to fight for.

Here’s another prescriptivist quote:

“I think of it as hormones that, you know, went in the brain but not in the body, and that’s all being transgender is. It’s just that the sex of your body and the gender of the brain don’t match up.”

 

Reading this, I think first of my non-binary transgender friends and comrades in arms.  Chaz is defining transgender in a way that excludes them completely from the category.  That is wrong.  I know so many trans people who saw rhetoric and metaphors like this early in their lives and immediately assumed that transgender could never refer to them, that they were outside the purview of even transgender issues, completely freakish, completely alone.  I am a binary trans man, and I do not want Chaz, another binary trans man, representing me and simultaneously mistreating my non-binary comrades in this way.

And here’s the interview that finally made me decide I was done with Chaz.  It’s with the New York Times.  Here’s a link.

“There’s a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they’re mismatched. That’s all it is. It’s not complicated, it’s not a neurosis. It’s a mix-up. It’s a birth defect, like a cleft palate.”

I do not have a birth defect.  If you feel like you have a birth defect, fine.  That’s how you feel.  Go feel that.  Do not put it onto me.  Do not define me that way, and do not define other trans people that way unless they claim that label.

It’s beyond that, though.  Chaz is a misogynist.  He is a trans man who seems to believe that his female-assignedness and his female socialization makes him immune from being a misogynist, and he is manifestly wrong.  Look at this quote about testosterone, from the ABC article again:

But an added benefit of the hormone injections, the couple said, is that the testosterone has improved their sex life.

“[It’s] just a higher sex drive, like all men,” Bono said.

All men do not have higher sex drives than women.  The idea that women have inherently lower sex drives is sexist and sex-negative.  Plus, what about asexual men?

Now this little excerpt is the kicker.  If I hadn’t abandoned Chaz before, I would have after reading this.

“I never really understood women before, to be honest, but I had a tolerance for women that I don’t have now[…]No, really.  There is something in testosterone that makes talking and gossiping really grating.  I’ve stopped talking as much.  I’ve noticed that Jen [his partner] can talk endlessly.”  He shrugged.  ”I just kind of zone out.”

“You just don’t care!”

“I just don’t care!”  He laughed.

I was floored  by reading this.  Can the guy really lack self-awareness to this degree?  Does he really not realize that this is a variation on saying, “Women should shut up and let the men do the important things men do”?  Does he not realize that there are women in the trans community that he claims to represent, women who are offended by this kind of sexist bullshit?

I can speak to what the experience of being on testosterone is like.  I still gossip just as much as I used to.  I still love to listen to my female friends and I love to gossip with them.  I don’t think they’re “grating.”  And I don’t want any rich white straight trans guy going out there into the world and telling the media that testosterone made him into a misogynist.  If this is how he feels about women, I can tell you as a trans man who takes T, it is not because of T.  It is because he has some deep seated misogyny to work through.

This man doesn’t represent our community.  He especially does not represent those of us who are non-binary, non-op, women, or feminist men.  Chaz needs to do some hard thinking about what it means to appoint oneself representative of a whole group without considering the desires of all the group’s members.

And yeah, the guy didn’t spend his formative years in communities where people were actively talking about trans men and male privilege.  (They were too busy having useless radfem dialogue about trans women and their “male privilege.”)  But he certainly did spend his formative years in a world that was thinking hard about women, feminism, and misogyny.  He spent his formative years with a ton of class privileged access to education.  Any guy Chaz’s age, who’s had that many opportunities to educate himselfand is still going around saying that he finds it “grating” when women talk, is a misogynist.

I think how we refuse to let this guy speak for us is that we actively and loudly contradict the messages he sends—that being trans is always a “birth defect,” that testosterone is an excuse for trans men to behave in sexist ways.  I think other visible trans people (like James Green, Rocco Katastrophe, Calpernia Addams) should be speaking out about Chaz’s misogyny and binarism.  (The reason this isn’t happening—and I’m not aware of it happening—is probably because Chaz has a lot of money, and queer rights organizations need a lot of money.)

The next time you hear Chaz’s name brought up in a conversation about trans issues, point out the things he’s said about surgery, “birth defects,” and women.  Because I don’t want a single person thinking this guy is the best of us.

OH GROSS. Fuuuuuuuuck this asshole.

This was sad to read.

(via topmetesla)

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

transfeminism:

These are graph from “Injustice at Every Turn” showing rate of sexual assault in jail/prison. The first graph is the rates of sexual assaults for trans women by race. The rates break down as follows:

• Nineteen percent of all trans women who went to jail/prison
• Thirty-eight percent of Black trans women
• Thirty percent of America Indians trans women
• Twenty-five percent of trans Latinas
• Twenty-four percent of multiracial trans women
• Twelve percent of White trans women
• Too small of a sample to report for Asian Pacific Islander trans women

According to “Injustice at Every Turn,” a report of institutionalized discrimination against trans people: “Transgender women of color were particularly vulnerable to sexual assault in jail/prison. Thirty-eight percent (38%) of Black [trans women] respondents reported being sexually assaulted by either another inmate or a staff member in jail/prison.”

Multiracial, Latina, Black and American Indian trans women are twice to more then three times as likely as White trans women to be sexually assaulted in prison.

This is the only statistic in the report that simultaneously accounts for both the race and gender of participants. Taken by themselves trans women and trans people of color experience higher rates of discrimination than trans men, nonbinary and white trans people.

The second graph shows sexual assault rates in prison/jail by gender. The rates are for trans women:

• Eighteen percent by inmates
• Seven percent by staff
• Twenty percent by anyone

For trans men:

• Two percent by inmates
• Four percent by staff
• Six percent by anyone

For all trans people:

• Fourteen percent by inmates
• Seven percent by staff
• Sixteen percent by anyone

Gender nonconforming people:

• Six percent by inmates
• Four percent by staff
• Eight percent by anyone

Trans women in jail/prison are three to nine times as likely to be sexually assaulted by inmates, nearly twice as likely to be sexually assaulted by staff, and about three (2.5 - 3.33) times as likely to be sexually assaulted by anyone when compared to trans men and gender nonconforming people in jail/prison.

The third graph shows sexual assault rates in prison/jail by race. These break down for all trans people who went to jail/prison:

• Thirteen percent by inmates
• Six percent by staff
• Fifteen percent by anyone

American Indians (sample size too small for reliable analysis):

• Twenty-seven percent by inmates
• Eighteen percent by staff
• Twenty-seven percent by anyone

Asian Pacific Islander (sample size too small for reliable analysis):

• Six percent by inmates
• Six percent by staff
• Eleven percent by anyone

Black:

• Thirty-two percent by inmates
• Nine percent by staff
• Thirty-four percent by anyone

Latin@:

• Twenty-one percent by inmates
• Seven percent by staff
• Twenty-four percent by anyone

White:

• Seven percent by inmates
• Four percent by staff
• Nine percent by anyone

Multiracial:

• Fourteen percent by inmates
• Eight percent by staff
• Sixteen percent by anyone

With a similar break down to that of the first graph showing race and gender, trans people of color in jail/prison are significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted when compared to White trans people in jail/prison.

well what do you know it’s exactly what i was talking about this morning

and looky who’s at the top of the list

(via pseudo-tsuga)

youarenotyou:

There are a shit load of radfems attacking trans women on tumblr right now and y’all are fucking SILENT. 

And you call yourselves allies. I am disgusted. 

This ENTIRE THREAD (TRIGGER WARNING for transphobia and ableism) needs you to come collect your fucking people. The radfems are fucking monsters. The following hateful pieces of shit are encouraging violence against trans women in that thread alone:

firstwavefeminist 

killyourenemies

hedonisticparadise 

notexactlycosmo 

nanathefrog 

hereticallyyours 

bugbrennan 

no-kowtow

magneticsoul 

WHERE ARE YOU, CIS ALLIES?

(via topmetesla)