I was a smart, educated child in an affluent household. I read a lot. My father had subscriptions to the National Geographic and Scientific American, and at one point a bunch of Discovery magazines came into the household. The National Geographic is very artistic and literary. The Scientific American is somewhat dry. Comparatively, Discovery is -- well, basically tabloid science.

Now, it is important to note at this juncture that my household was semi-nudist. ( Anatomy, the reading of tabloid science, and gender anxiety. )

(Sometimes) A Moving Target is Good for You

in which Tony Stark exhibits various sexist behaviors, including:

* making a really degrading remark on purpose
* making a really degrading remark by accident
* various mildly degrading and/or objectifying things
* what he dearly thought was a compliment
* protecting someone who (really) didn't need to be protected
* automatically excluding women from a thing that some of them ought to have been included in
* not thinking to invite some women whose skills suggest that they should be included, because they were women
* god knows what else, Tony's just being Tony

I like Tony. I think some of this is actually out of character for how I see him regularly, because I think he usually does see people by their aptitudes before he thinks of gender, unless some of the aptitudes are an itty bitty waist and a round thing in [his] face. (Also the Tony I think of is cheerfully bisexual, so it's an equal-opportunity lech zone.) But due to the chain of screaming, I get to scream about men in power and sexist comments that they didn't even realize were sexist today. And I'd rather think about someone who has his head up his ass, but means well, and can be taught if Cap and/or Pepper look disappointed in him, than someone whose good intent I jolly well don't trust.

I have observed some oopses in more than one place relatively recently.

Rather than yell about individual lapses, which would probably be counterproductive and generally more woe than I signed up for, some ettiquette tips when dealing with communities where gender is complicated! Particular attention to gender-neutral stuff in this edition. These may not be the most universal, but in a community with a lot of genderqueer or gender-neutral folks, it helps to not default to binary gender.


Pronouns are complicated but important. You may be used to looking at a person and being able to tell what the right ones are, but that does not always work in this community. If you suspect you will not remember it if told once, consider making a note in your address book, or preparing to apologize for your poor memory for pronouns.

If you don't know someone's correct pronouns, gender-neutral is generally more polite than guessing. Either way, people will be upset, but in a less whole-day-ruining kind of way.

If someone who goes by gender-neutral pronouns in general shares what parts/the gender assigned to them at birth, continue using their gender-neutral pronouns, in both public and private, thereafter. If the person you're talking to in private doesn't know or shouldn't know, that would be bad. At best it's dreadfully tacky.

Keeping track of who has what information about whose gender identity (say, the trans* guy who is out to his friends, goes gender-neutral online, and totally in the closet to the transphobic parents he's financially dependent on) is a terrifying social juggling act. It gets slightly easier with practice, but still nerve-wracking.

Using the correct pronouns in your own thoughts (if you can manage it) helps prevent embarrassing slip-ups.

Getting other people's genders wrong in a binary-biased or birth gender assignment essentialist fashion to someone whose gender is complicated is a sign to them that you cannot be trusted to get these things right, even if your intentions are good.

No matter your gender identification, I respect your right to find transphobic language in any venue, including the internet, hurtful, offensive, triggering, and many more gnarly things. Transphobia is hardcore scary shit. People get brutally killed and beaten within an inch of their lives for just being -- or being seen as -- trans*. Transphobic violence doesn't only affect actual trans* people, it also affects anybody who gets perceived as trans*, and the whole community of friends, family, and allies.

I respect your right to say, when you have found some transphobic shit on the internet, that it is indeed some transphobic shit, and to ask that it should be taken down, and to tell the person who put it up that they should be ashamed of themselves. I respect the hell out of your right to go into incredibly fine detail about exactly how it was transphobic, because by detailed analysis we learn.

I respect your right to avoid the hell out of the person who put it up, even if they express remorse at having done it, no matter how far in the past the incident happened. Caution, in general, is often a sensible reaction, and tends to help keep people alive; see above about how transphobia is some fucking scary shit and people die because of it. I respect your right to tell other people about what went down.

I do not support death threats. Death threats are not protected speech in the US. They are illegal. I don't mean "die in a fire" even though I side-eye at that one too, I mean scarily specific shit including information on people's actual location. That shit is not cool. It is possible for multiple things to be true at the same time without being in conflict, and transphobic shit and death threats are both simultaneously immensely uncool. Someone saying transphobic shit does not make death threats cool. Death threats do not magically make transphobic shit cool. I am very glad that I am mostly getting summaries of what is going down in other parts of the internet right now from friends, because me adding my voice to the complete zoo of fucknuttery over there would be the opposite of helpful.


Right now at work, one of my colleagues is doing something incredibly brave. Over the past month, she has gone from talking privately with HR, asking them to consider including transition/gender affirmative medical expenses under the workplace health care plan, to speaking about the topic in the workplace LGBTQ* forum, to bringing the topic up in another internal forum with even more company-wide attention.

All she knows about the people who are reading her plea for better trans*-specific health coverage is that they work with her. She has been supported by her immediate co-workers over the course of her transition so far, which has given her the courage to speak up about the need for more comprehensive health coverage more widely. She's still taking a risk, and there's no guarantee that she'll get the coverage. There have been a few co-workers chiming in that this is the right thing to do and the company should include that coverage, but nothing like the universal support she should be getting.

Lamda Legal runs down some of the myths; pdf is mirrored elsewhere as the original seems to have vanished. One of the big myths is cost. It costs a lot for any individual to fund their own transition-related medical expenses. In a health care plan the size of work's, my colleague estimated it would not add more than a dollar to everyone's plan. The city of San Francisco originally had a surcharge, but dropped it after four years, because it just wasn't costing that much.

I think that it would probably improve my workplace's chances of having transition-related medical care covered if there was clear and overwhelming support for it. Is there? Well. A couple of the most active threads in the forum got over a hundred comments over the course of a day. (That's nothing on the busy parts of the Wider Internet, but this is an internal forum where people are ostensibly working.) Even in the larger forum, comments are only coming in at a rate of about one per day, and the majority of them are coming from people already in the LGBTQ* interest group. I would not actually describe that as overwhelming support.


My colleague is, without a doubt, brave and exceptional in many ways. She is also not some kind of metahuman superhero. She is a relatively ordinary person doing what she feels it necessary to do. She felt it necessary to speak out and ask for what she needed from work. I felt it necessary to add my voice as a genderqueer person and an ally in support of her: at work, and on the wider internet.

Does your country support the legal right for a transgender person to exist? Does your country offer access to gender identity/transition-related medical services to anyone with need for them? How easy are those services to get access to, and what steps are necessary to demonstrate need? Does your country support a trans* person's choices about what level of medical services to use? Is access to transition-related medical care controlled by private medical providers in your area? If you work, and your workplace has health care, does your workplace offer transition-related medical care through their health plan?

Would asking HR about whether your workplace's health plan includes transition-related care put you in danger for your physical safety or your job?

If you would be safe asking in your workplace, please consider it. It's awkward and possibly scary, and changes aren't likely to happen until a whole train of corporate decision-makers get on board (months, years, decades), but it's real and it's helpful. AND BETTER THAN DEATH THREATS, JESUS SPITTING COBRA.

The following is a long, rambling narrative of personal discovery on the topic of gender. Relevant to the topic: how my parents very carefully shielded me from everything they could of the sexism inherent in the world, and restrictive gender roles. They tried for gender-neutral options when they could (I think there is *one* photoset of me as a baby in pink and frills, which ends with me assertively untying the bow and drooling on it), and did not attempt to discourage us from any interest based on presumed gender-appropriateness.


( In which I discover that the major problem with BJ was the gender binary, as well as the abusive asshole dumbass stupid stuff. )

But. There but for the wisdom of my parents go I. I'm not allergic to being called 'she', and prefer female pronouns when I'm not plural, but I might well have been if I'd been subjected to the worst of it at a tender age.

22 Things We’ll Teach Our Sons About Women And Relationships ... dear me! How heteronormative!

So let's see what I think of these.

1. Pick your battles.
Yes. This really goes for everyone, not just men.

2. Going down is more intimate than sex, but it shouldn’t be scary.
Uhhh. It shouldn't be scary, and it is intimate. But going down is sex, and it's also less of a pregnancy risk. And turn about is fair play.

3. Walk on the outside (closer to the street) of your female companion.
Say what? Is this one of those etiquette guide things that matter if you're into the heavy gender roles scene? I'd say read up in a Miss Manners manual if you're shaky on social norms, and then suit yourself and any companion you're with on whether anyone will be performing gender roles tonight. But if both of you are doing the strong gender roles thing, you owe it to both of you to know what they are.

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I have two major requirements for cartoon barnyard animals.

1. Chickens do not have teeth.


2. Cattle are gender-appropriate.

The character design for Otis from Back at the Barnyard makes as much sense as tits on a bull. OH WAIT.

ataniell93: "Is this Harry/Harriet genuinely transsexual?"

I hadn't actually questioned this before. I knew that it started out as a joke, but then when Harry actually embraced the role of Harriet, I was surprised that I hadn't seen this coming. Of course Harry was not good at being a boy, and since being Harriet made her actually be happy, of course she thought of herself as female, then.

But is Harry/Harriet actually a woman?

My response:

---

I'm not sure, as yet.

I actually get the feeling that Harry/Harriet would be parasexual (not asexual, but something transcending mere male and female) if society allowed. It doesn't, really, but female's a more comfortable mask to hide her tender spirit better, and Harriet can be a happy girl, a popular girl, with the same traits that made Harry an unpopular and bullied boy (and just a little bit of coaching).

Harry/Harriet's problem is that Harry's mother, instead of helping Harry cultivate a social mask that didn't chafe too much and choose his battles carefully, decided that there was no problem with him going about sharing everything he held most precious and dear with the entire world with no correction on anything other than items of fact. She would correct him if he spelled something wrong or wore shorts and sandals out in the snow, but not if he picked his nose in public.

When he didn't make the connection between "I smell funny" and "I get beat up on", she didn't help him make it. She went railing off about individuality and how society does not accept the true individual, and never helped him find the little ways to hide and compromise that most people who can function in society wind up finding. It would be great if we could all go about naked, mentally and physically. It would be wonderful. But we can't, so we hide those parts of us that can't bear to be touched. No one taught Harry about this, so he grew up inside-out.

By the time he hit his teenage years, I'm not sure anyone could have taught him how to be a socially acceptable young man, but Sally (a girl his age, the little sister of our heroine) saw that she could teach him how to act like a socially acceptable -- even popular -- girl. He accepted the challenge on a dare, but grew to identify with the role, and to a large degree, with the gender.

I think Harriet will continue to act, and almost be, female, at least until s/he reaches middle age, at which point s/he will have developed enough of a sense of self to uncover which, if any, gender s/he actually is. I don't think that her current identification with the gender is indicative of her true nature; I think it's more along the lines of a drowning person clinging to any possible source of rescue.

---

I think Harriet is somewhat more transsexual than Dono Vorrutyer.

Dono made the change because it was politically advantageous, and because one of Dono's defining traits is a need for/love of power. Donna/Dono will not want to be a woman on Barrayar unless/until being a woman on Barrayar has as much capacity for overt, socially-accepted power as being a man has. (On Beta Colony, it doesn't matter.) I think Donna would have made the transition to Dono with 20th Century Earth medicine if doing so gave her male status in the current Barrayaran gender-sociopolitical climate.

I think Harriet would not make the medical transition from male to female with current Earth medicine; Harriet would be more than happy to make the medical transition with Betan medicine. However, Harriet would not need to make the transition with Betan therapy and Betan gender-role ambiguity. Harriet wants -- needs -- social acceptance without compromising too much of who s/he is. And right now, that means looking like and acting like a woman.

A friend's mother sent this article to her. It's filled with all sorts of those little things that some women like to think apply to all women. In reality, women vary; I'm probably about to do a near polar-opposite of my friend's deconstruction of the article.


(Of course, "my man" in this case is my dear somewhat-platonic partner; this is not just any generic man. I should do this for $MAN at some point.)

---

1) My best friend knows everything. She knows all of your vitals -- from the size of your bank account to the size of your other, um, holdings -- and she knows how both compare with those of every other man I've ever dated. I have done a hand-comparison measurement so I can divulge size and girth with a high level of accuracy. When my friend smirks at you knowingly, you are not imagining it. She knows. So just know that she knows, and deal with it. (It's not going to change.) Ask her about me, or chat with her about our relationship, at your own risk. She will tell me. Even -- in fact, especially -- if she promises not to. This is not always a bad thing (e.g., if you happen to be telling her how much you love me). But, in general, remember that she is my confidante first, and yours never.

Of course I babble incessantly about you to my friends. If the topic comes up, I will burble about your charms at nauseating length. I will probably vent about your weaknesses as well, the ones that really bother me. But anything that I know you've meant me to keep confidential, I will keep so. Like that thing you told me that I think you've never told anyone else. That one. Yeah. Not sharing that. I like having secrets with you. You are my best friend, and I will often tell you things about my chick-friends, and if some female acquaintance of yours tells me things about you behind your back, I do not feel myself bound by any female confidentiality contract, because you are my best friend, and some of those bitches don't get that.

I'm aware that you're friends with both my virtual big sisters, and my virtual big brother. This is a good thing. I trust them to keep silent anything you've told them in confidence, just as they'd do for me, and I'd do for them. I'd like you to be comfortable enough with me to tell me everything, but I'm glad you have them as well, and I'm glad we're enough alike that we can be friends with the same people. If you want to know something about me, or get their take on our relationship, they're the best people to be asking, because they know you, they know me, and they already know most of the details because I've been overflowing to them, or crying on their shoulders.

(Response for $MALE: I probably haven't gotten to know you very well yet. Just because we may be dating does not yet mean that I know you as I know my friends. Since my friends are my friends, I will tell them things that I might not dream of telling you until you have been part of my party long enough for me to trust you as I do them, until you earn that same level of trust. If you ask them about me, be aware that they are my friends, and may not be yours, and so will probably tell me that you've been inquiring, and what you've been asking, and their opinion of you. )


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