Jamaican-born Shanniel Hyatt, then a 17 year old father of one, was arrested on 29 November at his flat in south east London and charged with her murder.

On 17 November, Mr Hyatt had met Ms Telesford outside Norbury train station. His girlfriend was visiting family with their baby that night. Ms Telesford had told colleagues at the salon that she had met a 'handsome light skinned guy'. After meeting, the pair headed to the victim's flat - in a police interview Mr Hyatt first claimed he had gone back to her flat for drinks and to watch a DVD, and that he left after 10pm after she had performed a sex act on him. Mr Hyatt admitted taking the phone, but no other possessions.

In further interviews he changed his story several times but insisted he left the flat late that night and went 'robbing people' with his friends in South Croydon. CCTV images and mobile telephone records show that Mr Hyatt used Ms Telesford’s Oyster card to catch the bus from her home in the small hours of 18 November. He was carrying a "big bag, probably containing other items that he had stolen". Mr Hyatt insisted Ms Telesford was alive when he left her flat, although he changed the time he first told the officers he had left, the court heard this week.

Mr Hyatt was been found not guilty of murder and an alternative count of manslaughter, but was remanded in custody on separate immigration matters.

Throughout the trial, Mr Hyatt's barrister, Joanna Greenberg, has made a case for the defence by means of a sustained attack on Ms Teleford's character. This victim-blaming has been a successful form of defence because - obviously - Ms Telesford was not available to give her side of the story to the court. Ms Greenberg said that, although Mr Hyatt was a "cheap and nasty thief", Ms Telesford was "fit and well" when he left her flat.

She suggested that Ms Telesford may have died during a consensual sex game which went wrong, or even that she may have inflicted her fatal injuries herself: yet the Old Bailey heard that when paramedics found her body, the scarf was tied so tightly around her neck they could only get the tips of their fingers inside.

Further, Ms Greenberg posited that the alleged consensual sex that took place involved "kinky sex". Even though "kinky sex" doesn't seem to have been clearly defined - and even though the idea that Ms Telesford died from a sex act that went disastrously wrong was denied by Dr Kenneth Shorrock, who examined the body.

He told the jury: "There was nothing which suggests this was a sex act.

"There are usually sex toys, mirrors and pornography.

"This is just an ordinary rather cluttered room with a body.

[...]

"To put it simply, there was no evidence of kinky sex. If you take that out of the equation, you just have a strangled body.'

I wonder what the inclusion of the idea of "kinky sex" says about the attitudes of both the mass media and certain sections of wider society. As has been suggested elsewhere, this defence strategy could conceivably be applied to all similar cases, especially within the queer community. For example, the media depiction of lesbians inevitably seems to focus on sex aids and strap ons: the implication being that they are, somehow, indulging in "kinky sex".

In other words, women who partake in a varied and experimental sex life are somehow threatening the established order and therefore inevitably leave themselves open to victim-blaming accusations, such as "What did she expect? She was asking for it wearing that miniskirt", or as in this case, "If she hadn't been indulging in 'kinky sex', she wouldn't have died". In my opinion, this mysogynistic mindset, which attempts to give credence to the idea that Othering is acceptable, is the reason that Mr Hyatt's defence was successful - despite there being "no evidence of kinky sex".

And, of course, this result distinguishes this trial for the murder of a black trans woman from many other similar trials, because it means that there was no need to use the more common trans panic defence.

Links:

• Man in court over woman's murder (BBC, 16 January 2008)


• Man denies transgender killing (BBC, 5 August 2008)


• Teenager denies killing transgender woman (Worthing Herald, 5 August 2008)


• Thornton Heath transsexual "died in kinky sex game", court hears (Croydon Today, 8 August 2008)


• No direct DNA link to teen accused of murdering Thornton Heath transsexua (Croydon Today, 12 August 2008)


• Some news stories... (The F-Word, 5 August 2008)


• Man cleared of Kellie Telesford murder (Bird of Paradox, 15 August 2008)


• Bull. Shit. (Sexual Ambiguities, 15 August 2008)


• Kellie Telesford (The Partial Muse, 15 August 2008)


• Kellie Telesford’s Killer Goes Free (Questioning Transphobia, 15 August 2008)

A gentle reminder: As usual comments are enabled and will be moderated by the post author before publication. Please remember there may be a delay between comments being submitted and their appearance on the blog.

An open letter to cis feminists

The article has been reposted in full at Fetch me my axe

In addition, further commentary can be found on these blogs:

• Questioning Transphobia
• Renegade Evolution
• Burning Words
• Monster’s Creed
• Ideologically Impure
• The Corvid Diaries
• Bird of Paradox

Thank you.

Mike says that the idea of this kind of analysis is far from new and he points out that Xerox actually made an application to patent the process.

Of course there are potentially not-so-nice social engineering uses for a script like this - although most webby social engineering trickery pales into insignificance if you believe even a zillionth of the rumours about the amount and type of data collected by a certain well-known search engine. And don’t even start me on the potential information disaster in waiting that is a famous social networking site...

So click over to Mike’s and have a go. Put your results in the comments here and let’s all have a bit of a smile at the foolishness, waste-of-time-ness, predictability and bah-humbug-ishness of it all...

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 87%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 13%

Yeah baby! I’m (nearly) all woman! Rawrrr!

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

Well, now a court in Athens has decided: there is no justification for the islanders' contention that they felt slighted, because the word does not define their identity.

The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, had claimed that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violated the human rights of the islanders - who call themselves Lesbians - and disgraces them around the world.

He argued it caused daily problems to the social life of Lesbos's inhabitants.

Andrea Gilbert, spokesperson for Athens Pride 2008 and a member of OLKE, drew attention to the amount of money from tourism that lesbians bring to the island when visiting Eressos, the birthplace of Sappho.

"The claim is based in serious prejudice and hatred, a ridiculous claim that most Greeks find laughable", she said, "However, the underlying homophobia and reactionary sentiment is no laughing matter."

The court ruled that the islanders do not have sole claim to the word and ordered the plaintiffs to pay court expenses of 230 euros (about £180) - although they can appeal against the decision.

(Via Pink News and BBC websites)

The gist of her argument is that, if we consider the characters as Butch and Femme instead of male and female, then they can be assigned any gender. So they could be a lesbian couple, or a gay couple: as Kate says: "You’re the audience. You get to decide.".

Pixar and Disney made a great many anatomical choices when they designed EVE and WALL•E to be as close to human as they can possibly be and still be robots. They didn’t give us one single anatomical clue to the gender of these cute li’l robots, but they knew we’d see WALL•E as boy and EVE as girl.

Kate thinks that this isn’t the first time that Disney has used gender variant characters.

Mu-Lan is a film about a female to male cross-dresser. And what about Pinocchio? An animated block of wood spends an entire movie trying to become a "real" boy - aided by a blue fairy and an asexual cricket. And what gender exactly was Ariel (a non-gender specific name, by the way) when that little mermaid had a fishy tail? Did she go through a gender change when she grew legs which (presumably) had something between them so she could be a "real" girl? And getting down to basics, can anyone prove that Mickey and Minnie Mouse are male and female?

Behind the humorous tone of the piece, there’s quite a thought-provoking deconstruction going on. Okay, so there’s an implied acceptance of Disney’s anthropomorphism of technology - but I'm keeping Coleridge’s phrase suspension of disbelief firmly in mind...

(Cross-posted from bird of paradox)

The retailer said that the additional cost is "standard industry practice".

The policy has drawn protests from 300 people, who have joined the Busts 4 Justice group on Facebook.

It’s argued that it is unfair to charge less for smaller bras, when the same logic doesn’t apply to other clothes.

The full story is on the BBC News website - link here.

...Way to boost consumer confidence when your sales and share prices are falling anyway...

It is reported that the baby was not delivered by Caesarean section, but no other details about the birth were given.

"The only thing different about me is that I can’t breast-feed my baby. But a lot of mothers don’t", Mr Beatie was quoted as saying.

I, for one, wish the Beatie family good health and every happiness for the future, and await with interest, not only his forthcoming book about the experience, but also the ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ kneejerk reactions and hate speech which is likely to reappear once the mass media wake up to the ‘newsworthy’ aspects of the birth (see, for example, the comments after this article in The Times and this one at ABC News.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

In her first post Yo NAACP, NBJC...Where Y’all At?, Monica reminds us that not only was the victim African-American, but so was the nurse who attended the scene and went directly to the white attacker to see if he was OK; ignoring Ms Johnson who was handcuffed, lying on the floor and clearly in pain.

After the video footage was made public, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) declared a state of emergency about how police treat African-Americans, but, as Monica pointed out, no NAACP local, state or the national chapter spoke about either this case, or the verbal and physical hate attacks on African-American trans* people in general.

She expressed her disappointment at the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC): "I have yet to see one syllable written about it on the NBJC website, the organization that’s supposed to represent me as an African-American transperson".

By the time of her update post (Nation’s African-American Civil Rights Groups Denounce Beating of Transgender Woman) two days later, although the NAACP remained silent, the NBJC had been joined by the Black Leadership Forum (BLF), an alliance of over thirty national African-American civil rights and social service organizations, in denouncing the incident. (Link to the statement on the NBJC website).

We are deeply troubled by the continuing pattern of incidents across the country - hate crimes, police misconduct, and racial intimidation - that are all-too-often tolerated and ignored by local law enforcement officials and courts. Moreover, despite significant progress in the treatment of LGBTQ people, the targeting of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals for police abuse and misconduct remains a persistent and widespread problem in the US.

It is also worth remembering that trans* people of colour get a ‘double whammy’ in terms of a heightened probablity of abusive behaviour being directed at them because of both race and gender identity issues. Writing in Boston’s New England Blade, the Reverend Irene Monroe says that the real story is about how the intersection of racism and transphobia triggers the violence meted out to trans* people of colour. Rev Monroe considers why this isn’t reported and believes there are at least three reasons:

• The first reason is an unspoken ‘politics of silence’. Rev Monroe says, "All too often members of the GLBTQ press, especially of-color members, will opt not to report when we are attacked by someone else of color to ensure we don’t look like a race traitor".
• Another reason is the ‘politics of avoidance’, which occurs "when black media outlets opt not to cover hate crimes against its LGBTQ population for fear that the white media view violence as synonymous with people of color".
• The third reason suggested by Rev Monroe is that "there just aren’t enough openly GLBTQ of-color reporters". She cites the fact that only this month, and for the first time in its history, a Boston-based African-American newspaper wrote a piece on black queer culture. "Why? Because Katherine Patrick came out. Katherine is the daughter of our governor, Deval Patrick, the second African-American elected governor in the US".

Crimes against trans* people in general often go unnoticed, and the fact that we call Ms Johnson ‘lucky’ for surviving the attack (since violence against trans* people of colour often results in death), shows how far we still need to go as a society.

As Ms Johnson explained, Officer McRae attacked her because she refused to respond to the pejorative names he called her:

"Actually he was trying to get me to come over to where he was [to be fingerprinted], and I responded by telling him that wasn’t my name - that my mother didn’t name me a ‘faggot’ or a ‘he-she’, so he got upset and approached me. And that’s when it started."

Some trans* people find that getting others to address them by the correct pronouns is difficult enough, but issues of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation frequently trigger a violence against trans* people of colour that the media should not let go unreported. Not reporting what is happening to members of the LGBTQ community risks leaving unchecked the constant violence we all risk facing. In the words of London Dexter Ward, an LAPD police officer who transitioned in 2004, "A white person who transitions to a male body just became a man. I became a Black man. I became the enemy".

Many trans* people are routinely subjected to hate speech and street harassment, and that can sometimes be hard to take, but add racism into the mix as well as a mass media that is reluctant to report it, and the situation becomes completely unacceptable.

For further reading on the links between race, gender identity and the part they play in the levels of abuse that trans people suffer when they come into contact with the justice system, see the Amnesty International USA’s report Stonewalled: Police abuse and misconduct against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the US. (Direct link to PDF download of the full report here).

Image via Wikimedia Commons, used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

Ms Harman defended plans to make it legal for firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minorities job candidates and said firms should be able to choose a woman over a man of equal ability if they want to.

When asked whether the proposals would lead to discrimination against white men, she said companies would not be forced to use positive discrimination.

Female part-time workers still earned 40% less per hour than their full-time male counterparts, Ms Harman said. "Do we think she is 40% less intelligent, less committed, less hard-working, less qualified? It’s not the case. It’s entrenched discrimination. It’s allowed to persist because it’s all swept under the carpet."

The Equalities Bill will also seek to stop people being denied NHS treatment because of their age, and age discrimination will be outlawed in the provision of goods and services, such as holidays and insurance.

The full story is over at the BBC website; there’s also coverage at Reuters UK.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

And as Natalie says, there’s "a veritable cornucopia of feminists posts". And she’s used an interesting way of organising the links: they’re in the order in which the nominations arrived.

I notice one or two familiar names: our very own Kate Smurthwaite’s post on her Cruella blog, Trouble in Comedy-Land is linked; as are several women who, in addition to being excellent bloggers in their own right, also manage to make the time to contribute to the comments here at TFW, so a big hello to you, it’s great to see you getting credit...

There really are loads of links here; Ann Bartow recovers some feminist history from the archives with a clip from an interview of Margaret Sanger in 1957... Agent of Desire has a thought-provoking post, The Female Sex Agent, which outlines an exercise to help women claim back our sexual agency - "it will feel a bit strange, but is very empowering"... Deborah’s post Where did I learn my racism? explores the intersection of racism and sexism, and Marcella Chester considers Why Rape Survivors Go Online.

The next CoF (No 60) will be on 9th July at Unmana’s Words, and the Carnival of Feminists website, with all the details on how to nominate a blog post, can be found here.

A Department of Health survey released to Labour MP Sally Keeble shows that, despite official recommendations that all infertile couples should get three cycles of treatment free, clinics are increasingly making free IVF treatment conditional on not smoking.

Tobacco use is listed as a ‘non-clinical access criteria’ in the survey - in other words it’s not a medical requirement for treatment to work. Other lifestyle choices known to reduce fertility, such as drinking more than one or two units of alcohol a week, are not reasons for refusing treatment.

A spokeswoman for Infertility UK, which represents patients, said: "It’s another way of rationing treatment. PCTs are looking at different ways to cut down the amount of treatment they give people."

In the light of the recent news about such things as the ban on co-payments (topping-up one’s NHS treatment with private care) for palliative drugs by cancer patients, and the denial of access to medication and surgery for a transsexual woman in Nottinghamshire - one can only wonder why these cutbacks are suddenly considered necessary, apparently across the board. Is the NHS really so comprehensively underfunded - and if so, where are our taxes going?

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

Sexual violence in war is nothing new. Accounts of women being raped by conquering armies as "spoils of war" go back centuries. But the resolution says rape is not just a by-product of war, but a military tactic. In recent times, the Balkan wars of the 1990s alerted the world to the use of rape as a weapon of conflict.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council that violence against women had reached "unspeakable and pandemic proportions" in some places recovering from conflict.

The resolution was welcomed as a "historic achievement" by Human Rights Watch, which said the world body had all too often ignored the problem.

These days, the problem is worst in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Major General Patrick Cammaert told the meeting he witnessed the impact of rape as a UN peacekeeping commander in eastern Congo. He described such violence as a "particularly potent tool of war", as it dehumanizes its victims. "It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict", he said.

It’s not just warring factions that are accused of rape. UN peacekeepers themselves have been accused of sexual offenses in several countries. The resolution calls for more vigilance in stopping and preventing such abuses.

Its practical impact, however, remains unclear. Ban is expected to report back on its implementation in a year.

(Via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

Image via Open Clip Art Library, used under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

The CCTV footage (click here to see the video on the WMCTV Memphis website) clearly shows Officer B. McRae walk over to Ms Johnson and hit her in the face several times with his handcuffs (wrapped around his knuckles). During the attack, Ms Johnson was held down by the shoulders by another police man, Officer J. Swain.

After taking several blows to the head, one of which split her skull and drew blood, Johnson stood up and swung back. But then she sat down, and Officer McRae hit her in the face again. Then he maced her. On the tape, other people in the room are seen turning away and fanning their hands because of the smell.

To add insult to injury, when a nurse (employed by the Sheriff’s Department) finally comes into shot, she goes directly to Officer McRae to provide medical care - for a scratch on the back of his head. You can see it in the video: she walks right past Ms. Johnson, who by now is handcuffed, lying on the floor and clearly in pain.

And what was the cause, the justification, for this horrifying brutality? Ms Johnson refused to respond to hate speech from the officer:

"Actually he was trying to get me to come over to where he was [to be fingerprinted], and I responded by telling him that wasn’t my name - that my mother didn’t name me a ‘faggot’ or a ‘he-she’, so he got upset and approached me. And that’s when it started", Ms Johnson said.

The Memphis Police Department has since confirmed that Officer Swain (a probationary officer) has been "separated" from the Memphis PD. And the attacker, Officer McRae has been given a desk job pending an administrative hearing.

As Pam Spaulding says in her post: "It’s an enraging reminder that while each civil rights gain in the LGBT community is meaningful, we cannot rest until we are all safe, all free from discrimination."

Later edit: Alex Blaze at The Bilerico Project has an update post which carries the perhaps surprising news that Officer McRae has filed an assault charge against Ms Johnson.

In his report, McRae said Johnson swung at him and threatened to shoot the officer in the head. He said he was punched repeatedly in the head and neck by Johnson, whose first name is listed as Dwayne in the report.

Also, note that although Ms Johnson was arrested for prostitution, the charges were dropped. There is no evidence and no reason to believe that she is a sex worker.

Click here to read the full post over at Bilerico.

Image via Wikimedia Commons, used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

A statement issued by LUMC said, "[She]’s the first woman in the world and the first European whose DNA sequence will be made public".

Gert-Jan van Ommen, head of the team that carried out the study, added, "The sequencing of a woman[’s DNA] allows a better understanding of the X-chromosome" (the gene thread associated with female characteristics).

Four other human genomes have been mapped previously - all of them men. Van Ommen said, "It was time, after the sequencing of four men, to balance the sexes". (Via The Great Beyond).

Wikipedia: "In biology the genome of an organism is its whole hereditary information and is encoded in the DNA"

Image via Wikimedia Commons, used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

It’s often said that, to many people, trafficking is about the forced relocation and coercion of women into sex work, so it’s interesting to note that there are actually more cases of trafficking into forced labour. (Link here). The report adds that a common denominator in labour trafficking and sex trafficking is that, for many victims, their "ordeal started with a migration in search of economic alternatives". It’s also worth remembering that forced labour can, and does, happen without necessarily requiring the victims to be relocated. Exploitation and control of people comes about through force, fraud or coercion, and the movement of people is not always required for this to happen.

However, on the basis of the contents of the report, it seems fair to say that sex trafficking does comprise a significant proportion of people trafficking overall, and makes up the majority of transnational modern-day slavery. It is a fact that sex trafficking would not exist without the demand for commercial sex, which seems to be flourishing globally.

The section of the report called Topics of Special Interest is certainly likely to challenge some preconceptions. For example, it is often overlooked that "[f]emale trafficking victims in Europe and Central and South Asia are frequently recruited and trafficked into prostitution by other women, sometimes women who were themselves previously trafficking victims" - and who are then coerced a second time. The report says this is sometimes termed ‘Happy Trafficking’, with the word ‘happy’ referring to the "victims-turned-traffickers’ practice of claiming to have had an ideal experience in legitimate jobs in the West or elsewhere", even though the reality is likely to be the complete opposite.

The trafficking of migrant workers is of particular concern, especially when one considers the collusion of so many different agencies as well as the failure of governments to enforce initiatives (such as Memoranda of Understanding) and the abuse of legal systems by employers to coerce migrant workers into employment on terms to which they did not originally consent. Indeed, the situation of migrant workers is particularly shameful when one considers a 2007 UN study which estimated that "approximately 150 million migrant workers from developing countries around the world produce over $300 billion in annual remittances to their countries of origin".

The question remains how the insidious and increasingly pervasive activity of people trafficking can be stopped; it is clearly a huge transnational business which keeps millions of people in various forms of servitude, and which has at its root, imbalances of power and wealth (to mention but two factors), not to mention abuses of human rights. It seems that the primary motivation of many traffickers is financial greed, whilst many victims are seeking to escape extreme poverty and hardship. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems clear that to stop all these contemporary forms of slavery, an intensively focused and long-term effort by all governments is required.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

And Tanya White’s crime, the reason she was confronted? She "looked too masculine". The discrimination (on the basis of apparent gender) shown by the three male security guards is bad enough - as is a major hotel condoning such discrimination by its employees.

As Autumn Sandeen says in her commentary over at Pam’s House Blend:

"Many members of the public believe it’s okay to be bigoted towards people whose gender presentations don’t fit within societal norms".

And this is at the heart of the problem. Tanya White presents in the ABC video in a way that, at first glance, suggests that she is indeed male. And she says that she was dressed in an almost identical way at the time of the incident. On the basis of her appearance alone, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the security staff would question her going into a women’s restroom. What is unacceptable is the conduct of those security guards. After "proving she was a woman" (what does that mean?) she should have been left alone.

The really discouraging thing is the number of aggressively hostile comments left at the ABC site. If nothing else, they are indicative of just what a long struggle we still face, if we truly want to see an end to the socially-constructed aspects of gender.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

As a transsexual woman, I - like many other gender variant people - have a keen interest in the details of the appointment of the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Work Group, which has been tasked with revising the entries for Gender Identity Disorder in preparation for the release of next edition of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which "is expected in May 2012".

The letter has been drawn up by AlbertaTrans, a network of communities in Calgary, Edmonton, and rural Alberta and voices the deep concerns felt about the appointment of Messrs Zucker and Blanchard. The professional histories of these men has produced "a model in which one form of treatment [...] is advocated for transgender youth, a second [...] for a small number of transgender adults with a particular sexual orientation [...], and a third [...] for transsexuals of other sexual orientations — and this still leaves a few unexplained anomalies".

The letter continues:

"This combination of philosophies threatens to bring about a situation in which surgical intervention is mandated for non-consenting and non-aware infants with indeterminate genitalia, while surgical intervention is opposed for a significant number of consenting adult transsexuals."

Such a situation is clearly topsy-turvy and anyone (be they gender variant or not) with even a passing interest in the administration and implementation of fundamental human rights in the context of medical treatments for GID (Gender Identity Disorder) will be deeply concerned about the possibility of this outcome being enshrined in the revised DSM.

----------

Update, 5 June: Miriam at Feministing has blogged about the DSM-V situation; most notably she says that she’s received an email from one of the two most controversial of the appointees to the GID review board, psychologist Ray Blanchard. The gist of his message is that (a) he is not transphobic and (b) that he does not support reparative therapy ("the attempt to change homosexual orientations to heterosexual orientations").

I, for one, welcome these two clarifications but am disappointed to note that he remains silent on the contentious issue of autogynephilia. In the absence of a rebuttal of his belief in this laughably insulting concept, I can’t help but wonder if he still believes in it; if so, perhaps this is likely to colour his views and contributions to the DSM-V review process.

It is interesting to note the arrival of this email so soon after another email (posted in full at Quench Zine, link here from Marshall Forstein (Chair of the Work group on Practices Guidelines on HIV Psychiatry for the American Psychiatric Association), which seeks to clarify the differences between the DSM-publishing APA (American Psychiatric Association) and the other, non-medically oriented APA (American Psychological Association).

Clearly, the American Psychiatric Association is aware that there are many concerns regarding the controversial appointment of the members of the review panel. Unfortunately, it will take more than a couple of carefully-worded emails to allay the fears that many trans* people have regarding the future definition and classification of transsexuality in the revised DSM, and the impact of those changes on the lives of all of us who have been diagnosed with - and are undergoing treatment for - this condition.

----------

Further update, 7 June: Autumn Sandeen has posted links to a collection of four documents forwarded by Dr. Drescher, who is an appointee of the same DSM-V workgroup as Drs. Zucker and Blanchard. The documents are from a variety of sources and include an overview of the GID review process released by the American Psychiatric Association on 9 May - see also PFC’s News Archives.

The biggest surprise to me, though, is not in any of the contents but in the fact that the whole controversy only began on 1 May - not even six weeks ago. It already seems like the whole sorry state of affairs has been dragging on for ever.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

Carrie recently made a technology-related post (link here) which captured my geeky attention. She was looking to buy a new USB memory stick and her search turned up, amongst other things, a model which had as its unique selling point the fact that it was pink and "designed specially for women of all ages". As Carrie rightly pointed out, the only real consideration when buying something like this is that you get the highest storage capacity for your price range, and not what colour it is. She also questions the manufacturer’s apparent interpretation of the word ‘feminity’ to mean ‘pink’.

And while I agree that the advert is sexist and an insult to the intelligence to make that suggestion, I must confess that I find it really hard to understand why the colour pink has these connotations. I don’t believe that any colour is inherently equated with any one state or condition: ‘pink’ certainly does not mean ‘feminine’, but neither is it oppressive of itself. It doesn’t have any particular significance for me when I, for example, wear a pink T-shirt. I’m not making some coded political statement; the chances are it was just at the top of the stack of clean laundry that morning as I dressed, the first thing I grabbed and nothing more sinister. Am I to assume that, because I also like to wear black - like the Puritans did - that I am a moralising killjoy with an irrational belief that a mythical being has complete authority over humankind? No, Helen, now you’re being silly...

Society attaches meanings, yes, I know about that: this is the familiar territory of constructs and social/cultural conditioning, isn’t it? But why do we seem to accept unquestioningly those artificially attached meanings, at the same time as we rail against them? By which I mean: surely the connotation will only persist as long as we let it? "Oh Helen, it’s so anti-feminist of you to wear pink". Oh really? Why’s that, then? You see, I wear pink because I like the colour; I think it looks well on me. Accuse me of vanity if you like, fine. But I really don’t understand how wearing pink oppresses me, or how I’m participating in the continuing oppression of women by doing so.

However, I can understand the argument that I’m perpetuating the exploitation of cheap labour in manufacturing sweatshops, and that that perpetuates capitalism; not to mention the environmental costs of cash crop economies and the polluting effects of transporting the finished articles from factory to shop. But then, that applies to pretty much every item of clothing in every high street chain store and, let’s be honest, the colour of an item is pretty much irrelevant in that context.

If I wear a pink top because I like how it looks, maybe I’m just paranoid, but I feel I’m leaving myself open to being criticised for breaching some apparently unwritten feminist rule, which is - well, I don’t really know. The meme seems to be "pink = girly = bad". As far as I can tell, because pink has come to be irreversibly associated with women (for whatever reasons), it can now be used as a cipher, a symbol, a shorthand way to label women against their wishes and is therefore a form of insitutionalised oppression. Which, actually, I can understand in principle. So why don’t we reclaim it for ourselves, strip it of its symbolic (negative) meaning and give it a new (positive) one?

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Okay, so pink is a girly colour, and I’m a bad feminist because I like it - we’ve established all that. But I think there’s a parallel thread to this argument, too, a trans* subtext, but I’m still working out how it ties in... Consider this timeworn criticism: by transitioning, trans* women simply cross from one ‘side’ of the gender binary to another and are therefore upholding that same binary, which is, as we know, a patriarchal construct used to subjugate and oppress women through sexism.

This hypothesis is then extended to add that trans* women are Teh Most Evillous because not only are we actively embracing our new-found femininity but are revelling in being ‘ultra femme’, thereby adding insult to injury by presenting to the male population a false stereotype of woman. Truthfully, I don’t doubt that there is an element of truth here, in that some trans* women do present in a very femme way. I’m not going to make excuses; I can even relate to it in a small way. But I don’t think it’s the heinous sin that some make it out to be; I think it’s simply an over-reaction, and quite possibly only transient (no pun intended). If you’ve spent most of your life repressing your identity, when you finally do ‘come out’, there is - along with the sense of a huge weight lifted - a wish to explore things which were previously denied you. I myself have never been that upfront about it - I don’t like trowelling on the makeup and doubt I could ever walk in a 4" spike heel - but maybe there’s an element of that over-compensation in me that manifests itself in liking the colour pink. I just don’t think that necessarily makes me a bad feminist, per se.

Only time will tell if wearing pink will turn out to be just a phase I’m going through. But to ease the boredom of waiting, I think I might just take something else to bits with my pink screwdriver... like the patriarchy...

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)

As Ren says, Playtex have been "long known for their attention to modesty and the use of the word in their advertising" but I wonder quite what this is really all about. Is it, perhaps, an attempt to ‘help’ women take another step closer to appearing about as anatomically correct as Barbie, further objectifying and curiously de-sexing us on the way? Or is it Teh Menz who are offended by our natural bodies’ reactions, and wish us to cover ourselves to spare their blushes? Whose modesty is it anyway, to coin a phrase...

I have a hunch it may actually be some kind of twisted amalgamation of the two. On one hand, women are being told that we may be embarrassed to discover - suddenly! - that we have nipples. On the other hand, perhaps it’s because of the risk of inflaming the manly-men’s passions, poor lambs: maybe they’re just unable to control their wild, animalistic urges if confronted with even the faintest shadow of a nipple through a bra and (presumably) top, and need to be shielded from this dangerously provocative sight.

Either way, it strikes me that underlying all this is probably yet another marketing ploy to make women feel worse about their bodies and spend more money we don’t have, on stuff we don’t need - purely to satisfy an entirely fabricated ideal, another fictitious norm to which we must all submit in the name of safe, unthreatening, homogenous conformity if we are to attain the goal of male approval. Assuming that’s what we’re seeking, of course...

Sorry if I’m ranting here but the fact is, the only time I am likely to feel embarrassed - and it’s not embarrassment for myself - is when I have to interact with those (very few) other people who insist on talking to my breasts rather than my face - and they, I suspect, would stare regardless of how well (or otherwise) my nipples were concealed.

Cross-posted at bird of paradox

Royalty-free image from www.freedigitalphotos.net.

And that’s just one subtext; I suppose it was fairly predictable that I would first of all pick up on the gender identity aspect. Although I don’t think that is the primary focus of the poster, it’s no less insensitive for that. It’s not acceptable to use any means to get your message across; the question of whether or not it may cause offence, to your target demographic or anyone else, should have been considered in more depth.

The poster is part of a publicity campaign by a public organisation whose website seems to have good intentions, the Drug and Alcohol Service for London, and I’m sure that they don’t believe that people with gender identity issues are a legitimate subject for a campaign about heavy alcohol use. Let’s face it, if you’re taking prescribed medications, such as HRT, then you shouldn’t be taking any alcohol, let alone drinking to excess on a regular and frequent basis.

So what is this poster about, then? My guess is that the advert is attempting to target the so-called ‘binge drinkers’ and is intended as a reminder of the long-term physical changes that heavy alcohol consumption can cause. But, rightly or wrongly, the media would have us believe that binge drinkers are predominantly young women; not middle-aged. This advertising campaign - no matter how well-intentioned - fails because it raises more questions than it answers by simplistically asserting that alcohol misuse will, of and by itself, cause aesthetically displeasing changes in a woman’s appearance. But this is problematic as the image relies on heavily stereotyped and very narrow standards of beauty, not to mention gendered norms of behaviour.

There is a degree of finger-wagging going on with this campaign which could easily be interpreted more as nagging than trying to be helpful. And the subject of alcohol misuse by women might have been more clearly understood if the poster had used ‘before’ and ‘after’ images. But a single image of what appears to be a badly made-up middle-aged woman above a caption about "drinking like a man" sends out a very different and specific message to someone like me who is daily grappling with her own identity issues, and for whom travel on public transport is already a necessary if unsettling evil without being unexpectedly confronted with a poster like this one.

(Cross-posted at bird of paradox)