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!
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.
This is a pretty weird statement to me. A post-gender-role society would be really different from today’s society, and obviously I don’t know what it would look like. But I think that either people would still have gender identities that were pretty independent of their bodies, as people have today, or gender identities would just dissolve and disappear. That gender identities would still exist, but be strongly connected to biological sex, seems weird. Why would that happen?
I think that if gender identities would disappear in the future, then so would terms like “male” and “female”, because in most cases people would consider it completely irrelevant whether someone had XY or XX chromosomes, whether someone had a penis or a vagina and so on. In certain biological or medical contexts where it is relevant, people would use words like “XX-chromosomed”, in a discussion about chromosomes, or “those who have vaginas” in a discussion about something vagina-related, and so on.
Regarding privilege, I have a friend who’s a trans man who’s blogged quite a lot about privilege and oppression… He’s written that there’s no contradiction in claiming that he’s oppressed as a trans person (gets hate for being openly trans, is at a high risk for hate crimes, was forcibly sterilized because trans and so on) but that he’s also got various male privileges (when people who don’t know who he is sees him, they just see an average middle-aged white man, and there’s all kinds of privilege that comes with that – such as being taken more seriously, not sexually harassed and so son).
I think lots of people gets a bit confused about privilege when it comes to trans people because they confuse cis-privilege/trans-oppression with male privilege/female oppression, and although they interact in important ways, they’re not the very same thing.
Regarding gender, you might say that I also identify as “meh”, because being misgendered really doesn’t bother me if someone just assumes that I’m a man. It’s happened online quite a few times, and I don’t bother to correct people or anything, because it doesn’t matter to me. Happened a few times when I worked as a practical nurse as well, and really not bothered by it. I wouldn’t even be bothered a bit if the entire world started calling me “he” tomorrow morning.
I do get pissed off though, when some random dude comes up to me and demands to know my gender, because that’s fucking rude and transphobic (see open thread for personal stuff…)
I’ll always say that I’m “cis” though if anyone asks. Afaik, if you’re assigned a female gender by society and it doesn’t bother you that you are, you’re a cis-woman. (Sorry for making so many posts in a row – I kept posting and then coming up with something new that I ought to add to the discussion…)
They do that to people?
🙁
Lea, yeah, until last year trans people were forced to undergo sterilization (and they were not allowed to freeze eggs or sperm either) in order to change their legal gender. I know, it’s completely fucked up. It was eventually deemed unconstitutional (hm, not quite sure whether this is the correct legal term in English, but whatever). Defenders of this sterilization law kept claiming that it’s wasn’t forced, it was a choice, since if they didn’t want to be sterilized, trans people could just continue having the gender they were assigned at birth their legal gender and have that gender in their driver’s license, passport and so on. So totally voluntary! The European Supreme Court had already criticized Sweden for years for this law, claiming that it is forced sterilization when the government goes “either you get sterilized or you…” following some consequence that the person addressed is desperate to avoid, and it was finally deemed unconstitutional to force trans people to be sterilized in a Swedish court last year.
Also, I know another trans guy whose doctors kept pushing him to get sterilized a couple of years ago. They were like “they’re never gonna change the law, you’re never gonna get a new legal gender unless you do it, come one”, but since he was pretty active in the trans movement and knew how things were developing he knew they were wrong and chances were that the law was gonna change. So he never caved in to the pressure, and still got eggs.
If you mean “in violation of one’s constitutional rights” then yes, it’s correct.
Emilygoddess: I’m not quite sure since the Swedish “grundlag” (literally “basic law”) is not quite comparable to the US constitution, but… sort of like that.
The “master argument” from conservatives defending the sterilization law was pretty much this: “If we don’t force trans people to get sterilized, then it might happen that a MAN becomes PREGNANT and OMG that would be SO STRANGE!”.
I like how a series of angry responses to a TERF sympathizer has turned into a meaningful discussion about gender abolition. You folks are awesome. <3
Dvärghundspossen — if your “basic law” as you put it, is the laws the nation is founded on, then unconstitutional might not be truly an accurate translation word wise, but concept wise it probably is.
I do wonder if there’s a non-US-centric word for that though.
Is it really US-centric? Lots of countries (and states and other smaller entities) have constitutions.
Ally:
Obviously I’m culturally biased, but I can’t see how any society could avoid constructing sex as binary in mainstream understanding. Maybe in my scenario intersex kids would be assigned as “not quite usual” or something.
Argenti:
Well, that’s essentially what “female” would mean. I was maybe thinking in terms of my native Finnish, where you can’t apply the corresponding word “naaras” to humans unless you want to sound like a biologist gone rogue.
Dvärghundspossen:
I was thinking that most of the stuff forming our gender identity would indeed disappear, and the biological stuff would remain. I dunno if it would be substantial enough to be called “identity” any more.
Karyotype is rarely even discussed, but vagina and some other anatomical features correlate closely enough that people would likely conceptually lump them into “female anatomy”, I would think.
Now, if only the ESC would start pressuring Finland on this same issue…
RE: Leum
Wouldn’t a post-gender society by definition not have people with gender identities?
It’s the difference between being FORCED to ID something, and being able to make a free choice. I’d still be a man, regardless of my society, because it’s an intrinsic part of my identity. In a post-gender society, I just wouldn’t have to put up with truckloads of bullshit for it.
‘Male’ is a completely meaningless term to me. It seems amusingly appropriate that it’s a meaningless, MASSIVELY IMPORTANT term to me. I have never been ‘meh’ on my gender. However, in singlet presentation, I get uncomfortable being called ‘he’ because I feel like I’m shafting my system.
@Argenti, that’s the thing – the nation wasn’t funded upon the “basic law” as it looks like right now. It can be changed, although it’s a more complicated process than changing most laws. (For starters, Sweden wasn’t anywhere near being a democracy at the beginning.)
@Arctic, are you saying that you still have forced sterilization of trans people in Finland?
And you Americans, has that ever been the case in the states?
RE: Dvarghundspossen
And you Americans, has that ever been the case in the states?
Psh. We fucking nonconsensually sterilized cis female prisoners last year in my country. It’s one of those things that happens a lot that nobody talks about, mostly because it happens to folks in prison, black women, the mentally disabled… Google Ashley X if you really, REALLY feel up for a horrorshow.
It is only constructed as a binary today because it provides the basis for the gendered division of labor. Once that is no longer relevant to society, then sex will no longer remain a binary category that has political implications. That we find it easy to conceive sex as a male/female binary now doesn’t imply that it can only exist as a male/female binary. Like Argenti said, the relevance of sex in social discourse can be relegated to medical contexts and so on.
If we as a society do away with normative sex assignment for human bodies, then the relevance of sex to a person’s identity will disappear or become meaningless.
But that only happens because of the dominant discourses of biological sex. We code biological traits male or female only because we associate genders with specific bodies. Even if such correlations exist outside of the discourses of biological sex, there is no reason to subsume them under an unstable system of sex categorization like the one we have now. It can be reasonably assumed that our bodies are prediscursive objects, but the categorization of those bodies is purely a product of discourse and so it can be challenged and dismantled.
Yeah, and the thing is, there are way more variants of bodies than people think. I don’t just mean intersex either; I know guys with gynecomastia, and I’ll bet you do too. I know women with practically no breasts at all. I’ve seen photos of women body builders. And then you have bodies like ours, which even after $8000 worth of surgery and hundreds of dollars of hormones comes off as androgynous at best. But do you think my sister can pass as cis female entirely, after all that?
A lot of people mod out their bodies. Probably more people would, if there wasn’t such a stigma and cost to it.
Finland lags somewhat behind Sweden on every social justice issue.
Ally, I think we’re talking way past each other. I’ll stop cissplaining and go to sleep now, as my timezone dictates 🙂
@Ally S and LBT:
What about sex assignment for medical purposes? There does appear to be a difference wrt symptoms and treatment that falls roughly along the coercively assigned gender binary division. How would that be handled in your ideal world?
That kind of knowledge of sexed differences is a product of the discourse of coercive gender assignment. Just because our current understanding of biology yields theories that neatly adopt the assumption of a sex binary doesn’t mean that it’s the only valid and coherent understanding. In fact, it could be that a biological model that rejects the binary opposition of sex yields more insightful and accurate understandings of the human body.
Basically, what I’m saying is that we can arrive at a re-conception of human biology without the assumption of a sex binary. We don’t have to understand human bodies in terms of maleness, femaleness, intersexuality, etc.
@auggz
I don’t know anyone trans who objects to the general usage of “dude”, “lady”, etc.
All I can suggest is to just respect the wishes of anyone who has a problem with you calling them a “dude”, “lady”, etc.