MRAs seem to think that they can spin their way out of pretty much anything. And on the internet, particularly in their own little echo chamber, they can kind of get away with it. It’s when they venture out into the real world that they run into some trouble.
Take, for example, the mad spinning that accompanied the implosion of the Canadian Association for Equality’s “E Day” concert scheduled for last weekend. CAFE, you may recall, is a Canadian Men’s Rights group that’s probably most famous for organizing a series of talks by Men’s Rights-friendly folks on Canadian campuses that, well, caused a tiny bit of a stir.
Oh, sorry. The group says that even though its “focus is currently on men and boys … [W]e do not consider ourselves a Men’s Rights Group.”
Anyway, so this non-Men’s Rights group decided to hold a concert on Toronto Island celebrating “Equality Day,” a holiday they made up just for the occasion. They found a venue, got some sponsors and even managed to convince a bunch of bands to sign on.
Everything was ready to go until a few days before the concert was scheduled to happen, when some of the people who had been roped into the event discovered just what they had gotten themselves involved with.
A headline from the Huffington Post sums up what happened next with admirable succinctness:
The exodus from E-Day kicked off after a post appeared on the lefty Canadian news site Rabble.ca pointing out what CAFE was really about. Musicians and sponsors quickly distanced themselves from the event, and CAFE lost its venue as well.
CAFE’s response to all this? A press release stating:
CAFE received overwhelming support from musicians, sponsors and the general public for Equality Day. After several months of productive collaboration, the original venue Artscape Gibralter-Point cancelled the use of their location after receiving a small number of misinformed complaints.
That’s a rather … odd way to describe what happened. According to a good number of those who had originally signed on for the concert, it was CAFE that was actively spreading misinformation about their own event and hiding its Men’s Rights agenda.
The musical group Giraffe posted a statement on Facebook saying:
We feel that we were not fully informed about what it was that is being supported here, and also that calling it a festival that celebrates “equality” as opposed to “men’s equality” was intentionally misleading to us in it’s effort to entice us to play this show.
Hogtown Brewers, one of the sponsors, offered a similar explanation for why they pulled out. “We’re kinda surprised that an event that built itself on being for equality turned out to be anything but that,” the president of the company told the The Star. “The minute that it came to our attention that it wasn’t a concert in line with our values, we moved to remove our support. We regret any involvement.”
Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Artscape, the venue that was to have originally held the event, told The Globe and Mail that
[t]he premise of the event as it was given to us was a fair and equitable event that was family-friendly and a lovely music festival. It has since turned political and we anticipated that there could be health and safety concerns as well.
Perhaps the most amazing revelation: Jagermeister, which had been listed as a sponsor on CAFE’s publicity materials, said it had never agreed to be part of the event in the first place:
Thanks @amirightfolks for bringing this to our attention. We did not approve a sponsorship to this festival nor approve the use of our logo.
— Jägermeister Canada (@jagermeisterCA) May 30, 2014
CAFE’s creative, er, spinning continued in an interview the group’s outreach director Denise Fong gave to NowToronto. I’m not even going to summarize this one. Go read it.
A scaled down E-Day celebration of sorts did go ahead last weekend. It consisted of some CAFE volunteers standing on a corner handing out pamphlets and talking to passersby about their support of “boys, men and families.” (That’s a strangely limited notion of equality, huh?)
In their press release last week, CAFE announced that
Equality Day musical activities will be postponed to next Sunday, June 8. Details to be announced.
So far no details have been announced. But, hey, they’ve still got a couple of days to go.
On a totally unrelated note, I will be holding “E-Kwalitee Day” in my apartment sometime this afternoon. I am proud to announce that I have managed to book some outstanding musical acts for this extravaganza. They don’t know it yet, but I have written their names down in my appointment book.
Here’s the headliner:
I support kittens, cats and families. Ask me why!
I hope Just Give Up will talk to us soon 🙁
@kitteh
It’s all right. If you want, you can also compare our oppression with that of lesbians in the closet. Sure, no one knows they’re not straight and so some people may think she’s straight, but she does not navigate the world as a straight woman.
[frivolous derail]
I was thinking about the different ways people navigate the world, with or without passing privilege, and how I never thought of myself as anything but heterosexual until relatively recently (never having heard of asexuality, f’rinstance). Then it struck me: my own designation is Lsexual! Much pithier than calling it single-target sexuality, which sounds like an archery contest.
[/frivolous derail]
@Ally S:
I’m confused by this. Wouldn’t a post-gender society by definition not have people with gender identities?
Post-gender-roles, maybe?
Identities would still exist, but not the grid of identities that facilitated the gender oppression. So labels like “man” and “woman” might still exist but they won’t have any significance as symbols of domination.
Of course there can also be a society without even the categories men and women, but it’s just one of many possibilities in a post-gender society.
Note: Massively ignorant post follows
What would the role of gender identites be though? Like, as far as I can tell, their main purpose now is related to dysphoria. Cis men and cis women don’t experience it, trans men, trans women, and non-binary people do, and the nature of that dysphoria determines their gender identity. If gender was completely divorced from biological sex, what purpose would it have?
Like, the reason I identify as a man is because I have the phenotype associated with the term “man” and don’t experience dysphoria. I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t bother identifying as a man if the term had no connotations wrt biological sex.
@Leum
Transness doesn’t depend on dysphoria, as many trans people don’t have dysphoria at all.
Anyway, you’re right that gender wouldn’t actually have any purpose in such a society. They would be devoid of associated roles.
I can try to elaborate further on my views, but it might be a lot to explain since my ideas on gender are inherently tied to my views of capitalism, disablism and white supremacy as well.
Leum — you’d identify as “meh”? Only thing I can think of that it might matter for would be pronouns, if you wanted to use ones traditionally associated with men?
Maybe we’d all make up our own terms, or not use any, idfk. Regardless, it’s moot as to whether people with dysphoria would still want medical solutions.
@Argenti:
As a concept, gender has become nearly meaningless to me except in discussions of power and privilege or dysphoria. I identify as male solely because I have no reason not to; I’m not particularly attached to the designation, but it’s convenient and I have no objections to it.
In terms of pronouns, I don’t like being gendered as female, but mostly because that creates inaccurate impressions with respect to my physical appearance and position within the kyriarchy (e.g. I don’t want to people to have the impression that I don’t experience male or cis privilege because that could disturb them if they needed a safe space for women or trans people only and assumed I belonged there).
@Leum
Believe it or not, there are tons of cis people just like you.
I also identify as “meh.”
I never thought about it, growing up, or in my younger adulthood. I identify as female because I have a woman’s body* and all the damnnuisancethingsthatgowithit (yes I’m looking at you menstruation), and I certainly don’t identify as anything else, nor as far as I know have any reason to. As far as playing out gender roles goes, I don’t consider myself particularly feminine, regardless of wearing dresses and makeup and, yes, pink.
*She hasn’t asked for it back yet.
I think I am the same as kitteh. It’s like I’m-female-because-there’s-female-things-my-body-has-and-does-and-I-would-like-to-see-the-day-that-none-of-this-matters-in-society.
For example: I had terrible dysmenorrhea for years (the pain was awful, let alone the bloating) and now I get not-uncommon estrogen-related migraines. I’m also dealing with another sex-related health problem at the moment.
I’m torn on the idea of a post-gender society. Will healthcare be better for women in that society, because most medicinal drugs on the market have been mainly trialled on men, there’s stuff all medicines that are known to be safe for pregnant women, and even what appears to be good health advice (e.g. what are the signs you are having a heart attack) are male-based (women have different symptoms, and therefore tend to not detect when they have had mini-heart attacks, which increases the risk of a major attack later because they don’t seek treatment).
And then, heck, I assume (please correct me if I’m wrong) that things are even worse for trans-people because I don’t notice their inclusion in many (any?) clinical trials.
So I’m stuck. Maybe I’ve misunderstood what a post-gender society would be like?
Pallygirl – yes, it’s too easy from here to think that post-gender would revert to cis dudes as the default, and everyone else just … well, variations on them, at best.
I had dysmenorrhea in my teens and twenties; it was the main reason I stayed on the pill so long. Never had migraines, that sounds awful.
Back in the 80s we had to fill in medical slips at work stating what was wrong when we’d had a sick day (privacy, what is this thing?). I took great pleasure in writing dysmenorrhea, because my slightly prurient boss probably guessed what it meant, but didn’t dare ask.
A bit of good news from today’s Age for one trans girl. At least some schools have a clue.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/when-the-dress-fits-carrum-schoolgirl-leaves-gender-definitions-behind-20140606-39osp.html
That sounds like a great school. I get a happy whenever I read about a school taking a firm stance against bullying and doing really positive actions to prevent it. Those teachers sound awesome, as well as the principal!
When I try to imagine a postgender society, I imagine people people just dissolving gender roles as much as biologically possible. Then, what gender identity people had left would be strictly biological, based on what your sex is or what you feel it should be. While biological sex isn’t strictly binary, it would be likely perceived as binary in general discourse, despite some people being inter or trans. Then again, many people’s biosex would be obscure in casual encounters and nobody would care anyway. Trans people wouldn’t have to transition socially, only medically.
Language would likely have a minimal amount of gendered terminology and no grammatical gender structure. Like, men and women or stallions and mares would be just male and female humans or horses, if you need to specify that much. Brothers and sisters would be just siblings. Parents would be usually just parents, although you could specify them biologically as mothers (womb and/or egg mother), fathers or adopters. Grammatical gender (like different pronouns) already doesn’t exist in all languages.
Eh, what a confusing topic. I could spend all weekend writing out this thought experiment.
That depends on whether such a society would still have the coercive birth assignment of sex. I think that a non-patriarchal society would have to do away with such a thing because coercive sex assignment is a practice rooted in the discourse of patriarchy i.e. these are “male” genitals, those are “female” genitals, etc. I think that instead of people being told what sex (and therefore gender) they are, they should be left to come to terms with and understand their gender on their own.
I mean, coercive sex assignment is the same mechanism by which intersex people are oppressed, and in general it sets up a dynamic in which people are inevitably forced to be one gender or the other (even though many people conform to their assigned sex). Sex is a social construct just like gender, and its main purpose in my view is to establish a material division and an ideological justification for patriarchy.
pallygirl, yeah, I was chuffed to read that article – yay school, yay principal and teachers, and yay parents!
Yeah, ideally biological sex should only exist for medical related reasons, and then be far more broad. Almost the way I try to use uterus-haver for those seeking (not) to get pregnant, and similar. So instead of “female” it could be “has the anatomy to need pap smears”.
And maybe it would largely do away with identity related terms after awhile — would I ID as neither man nor woman if neither concept existed? Idk. Would I still want a surgery or two? Most likely.
That would be wonderful!
This thread is interesting to me because I’m cis, but I’m not even a little “meh” about my gender. And it’s not about a feminine presentation, though sometimes I do present in very traditionally feminine ways; nor is it about my body and how it behaves. It’s just… I’m a woman. If someone were to misgender me I would feel very uncomfortable — but of course nobody misgenders me, and even if they did the potential consequences would be nothing like what trans people, particularly trans women, face, so I’m definitely not trying to say that I can directly relate to how trans people feel if/when they are misgendered.
I don’t mean to blather on about stuff nobody cares about, it’s just I find it interesting how much variation there is in experiences of gender.