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!
Thanks to Ally S, LBT, and the other trans people on WHTM for taking the time and effort to educate us.
But the last thing I want, as a scientist, is to have an overly complicated method for describing subjects, or trying to model data. If I’m getting medical advice, I want it to be in plain English and as simple as possible, and to understand how it relates to me. The last thing I want is a flowchart just on human biology alone when I’m trying to decide on treatment options and I’m already working with a flowchart of options, outcomes, and side effects.
I know there isn’t a sex binary anyways, because nature plus identity.
What I’m not seeing is how this reconception of human biology will work in practice. How many categories are there, and who determines what they are? Because a bunch of people in diverse fields are all going to need to use them.
@pallygirl
Those are questions for biologists to answer – at least those who care to not presuppose the sex binary. I’m not providing any suggestions for an alternate knowledge of biology. I’m just saying that the one we have isn’t intrinsically necessary in any sense.
This may be too personal for me to continue to comment on. I’m having treatment now, for a health issue that’s been picked up via a screening program for women, that the MRAs are complaining diverts funds from male-centric screening programs. We’ve fought so hard to get this screening in place, and the age threshold lowered (which is how my health issue has been picked up, I would likely be dead before I reached the initial lower age threshold) that I’m really sensitive to anything that might negatively affect female healthcare.
We still haven’t got things right (symptoms of illness in females, drug testing) with assuming mainly two sexes,and there’s also some evidence of (unconscious) systematic differences in treatment when a sex*ethnic group model is used in the literature. Things are a problem now, with the relatively simple groupings that we have.
I guess one possible discourse of biology could erase the sex binary through the semantic bleaching of the current sex binary terms we have. In other words, although we may be still using terms like “male” and “female”, they will have nothing to do with gender and will only be used to mark certain bodily distinctions. It’s kind of like how the terms “man” and “woman” may remain in a post-gender society despite the absence of a structure of oppression that they used to exist in.
@pallygirl
It’s not like you alone can change the entire discursive framework of biology. It’s a process that may happen as patriarchy withers away, probably long after MRAs and similar reactionaries would lose all of their social influence. So when I say that the framework of biology should do away with the sex binary, it’s not an attack on you and your devotion to important issues, and I’m sorry if I came off that way.
Anyway, the MRAs you speak of are spewing bullshit talking points that wouldn’t receive a shred of more validity with the universal adoption of a biological framework in which the sex binary is absent. They fail to realize (or care about the fact) that it’s an issue that is affecting women. Any theoretical gripes they may present won’t change the issue that women deserve the funding because they are faced with unique institutional problems as you have alluded to.
Lastly, there is no reason to assume that an alternate understanding of biology will necessarily block progress for certain women’s issues.
In any case, if it helps to know, even within this system it’s completely acceptable to just refer to bodies as male or female depending on the genders of the individuals. If the patient is a trans woman, her body is female, and if she is instead cis, then her body is still female.
Ally, I do enjoy your explanations of these topics. They combine lucidity with concreteness in a very accessible way.
Also, when you state that it is reasonable to assume that the existence of our bodies is prediscursive but that our interpretation of our bodies IS discursive – very well put, and understandable even to someone like me, with relatively limited exposure to gender theory.
That said, I am still agog (and aghast) at people who insist on perceiving being referred to as ‘cis’ as a slur. If that’s the worst thing you’ve been called, you are definitely playing the game on the Easy setting (hat tip to Scalzi).
@Artic ape
Um, I mean, why would it need to be a binary?
Maybe I’m not understanding you here, but that seems kind of…off? I mean, why would you want the identiity stuff to disappear, but the biology stuff remain?
Sorry for the random post. I feel like lots of this conversation flew straight over my head.
RE: Leum
What about sex assignment for medical purposes?
I have no problem with it in theory, except it gets pretty limited once people like me enter the picture. Using your argument, I am female, with no breasts, with a body that has been affected and changed by testosterone use. I still have to go to an OB/GYN, but if they think I’m just a usual cis woman, that’s going to throw them off. Cis women would be concerned if they didn’t have a period for a year; for us on T, it would be alarming if we DID.
The sex assignment for medical purposes has limitations, is what I’m saying. And it can get really horrific if, say, your doctor refuses to treat you because your gender presentation doesn’t match your health issue. (Watch Southern Comfort if you’d like to see an example of this in the wild.) A lot of trans people I know, myself included, really resist going to the doctor for as long as possible because of gross treatment by medical personnel. (And I don’t mean just constant misgendering, I mean shit like taking a phone call in the middle of your pelvic exam, threatening to slap you, outright saying they can’t help you because Reasons…)
I would be a lot more okay with the sex assignment with my doctor if it didn’t bite me in the ass so much.
Thanks Ally S for explaining more. I wish we lived in a world where gender and ethnicity and sexual orientation and religious belief (including absence of) and age and mental health and physical health weren’t connected with poisonous ideas. I just wish we all celebrated diversity and welcomed the fact that it makes a more (in a very positive way) elaborate embroidary in our lives.
There’s enough crap that people with physical and mental challenges have to go through, without all this BS based on gender and ethnicity and religious belief etc piled on top.
I wish our societies focussed on ways to include diversity in more areas, instead of fear mongering and power-base protection.
Ally, LBT, I really appreciate your thoughts. This issue is incredibly confusing to me as a biologist and EMT, and it’s good to hear your thoughts.
The biggest problem for me is that male and female bodies (in the strictly medical/biological sense) tend to present differently for some conditions, due to hormones and other physiological factors. It’s definitely a spectrum, and some patients defy the norm.
The best example is heart attacks. People with male physiology tend to present straightforwardly, with diaphoresis, radiating chest pain, feeling like there’s a “weight on [their] chest, and shortness of breath. People with female physiology (and the elderly of both genders) tend to present more with upper abdominal pain, nausea, and anxiety.
This different presentation makes figuring out what’s going on a lot more difficult, because so many things for both sexes look that way. To a large extent, that’s why there are so many cruddy diagnoses fails when it comes to female heart attacks.
EMT skill sheets and newer text books have specific warnings about heart attack presentations, to try and reduce those fails. I’d love to hear your opinions on how medical personnel should handle gender in this context. Should we ask what physiological or hormonal gender?
Once we nail down the correct medical response, how do we make the terms common knowledge enough for people to give EMS teams the proper definition without creating a social gender binary, trinary, quaternary, or however many medical distinctions chosen?
As a female who really doesn’t feel like either gender, but defaults to woman because it’s the more simple route, and because people telling other women they can’t do things drives me up a wall and I want to support women who feel like women and want to do the same things I like. I’d love to crate a gender less society, because I would finally feel like I’d be in the right place.
It would be great.
But I can’t figure it out, and I don’t want to enforce genders, but I don’t want to treat someone for the wrong thing (treating an upper gastric bleed with aspirin because assuming heart attack because the last thing a GI bleed needs is aspirin, or not think cardiac because upper gastric) and I don’t want to hurt anyone emotionally by grilling them on “Really? No, tell me your REAL sex”
Sorry I’m rambling. Last night was really busy, a if I nap anymore today my circadian rhythm will be completely shot to heck. I really, really hope this doesn’t hurt anyone on the thread. I’d really like to know your opinions on this, though.
It’s been on my mind every time I write M or F on run reports…
@contrapangloss, It’s not that I have any intelligent thoughts on this, but my male cousin died because he had a “female” heart attack and neither he, his wife, or the EMTs they called (after waiting WAY too long, because they thought it was just really, really bad indigestion) recognized it as what it was. So I feel like medical personnel should be educated in the broad range of symptoms that could indicate ____ and reminded that what they think of as gender isn’t always a bright dividing line.
I guess the closest you can get without misgendering is to ask them “What was your assigned gender at birth?” That way you can, in practice, understand their body within a particular discourse you need at the time while simultaneously respecting the fact that they are not their birth-assigned gender.
That’s something that will be figured out within the alternative medical and biological discourses that don’t rest on the sex binary. For all we know, discourses of human biology could do away with the category of sex altogether and still be capable of producing a body of knowledge helpful for EMS teams. But until the disciplines undergo major discursive shifts, we can’t really offer any concrete solutions.
I mean, in general, all of these questions are difficult to answer – not because they don’t have answers, but because dominant medical and biological discourses have not evolved to the point of abandoning the sex binary. Our understanding of biology is currently so constrained by a cis-centric scientific framework that it’s currently difficult to seek these answers. It’s definitely possible to stop using the sex binary, as it’s not unheard of for scientific disciplines to undergo major discursive shifts, but the specifics of alternative theoretical frameworks are difficult to think about at this time. I hope I’m making sense.
“Should we ask what physiological or hormonal gender?
…and I don’t want to hurt anyone emotionally by grilling them on “Really? No, tell me your REAL sex””
EMTs deal with hypotheticals in training right? Appearance — middle age male, symptoms — upper abdominal pain and nausea. Asked gender, answers male. Dx’s?
And if he said trans man?
Point here is that assuming the various gendered symptoms/illnesses cut neatly on gender lines is already fucking with trans people’s medical care. Asking about more specific things — could the lower abdominal pain be pregnancy related, testes/ovaries // what hormones are you running on — probably more useful.
Would it make research more complicated? Yeah, but how many things are actually a matter of hormones (either current or during development) that we assume are due to the catch all of “biological sex”? Wouldn’t knowing exactly which component of that catch all is the key factor also be useful in treating intersex patients?
Excellent points, Argenti.
Cloudiah, I’m so sorry for your loss. That’s absolutely awful, and I can’t imagine how frustrating and painful that would be.
You definitely make a really important point; I try to keep my mind open, and I didn’t mean to imply that gender should be treated as a strong dividing line. I absolutely wish everything could always be diagnosed perfectly, and that things weren’t such a guessing game.
I’m so sorry.
Argenti, you are absolutely correct about the hypotheticals, and specific questions. I’ll also admit that EMT classes don’t cover nearly as much about this specific type of stuff even a quarter as well as it should, which is why I really appreciate your feedback.
Asking for all medications (and purpose if we aren’t familiar with it) and medical history is already a standard of care. Altered levels of consciousness, or distracted patients can make getting answers extremely difficult.
I want to become the best tech that I can be, and you’re helping.
Thanks, Argenti.
I’m mostly thinking aloud, glad it’s of use 🙂
As for only asking the purpose of meds if you don’t know it…one of mine is a blood pressure med, for PTSD nightmares, my sleeping pill is seroquel. Last thing my 90/60~ BP needs is the assumption I actually need high blood pressure meds!
Totally.
At my level, collecting medications is mostly so I can tell the ER doc, and so that the mess don’t make me miss things like atypical shocky BPs because someone’s on (or hasn’t taken their prescribed) BP meds.
Also, so I don’t accidentally do bad things, like give a dose of nitro to someone on ED meds (bad, bad, bad drug interactions, there).
Another really, really good reminder, Argenti! Thanks again. Putting this on a sticky note for my med patient assessment chapter, so I can beat it into my head.
Cloudiah, I’m also copying your comment and sticky-noting it in, before I collapse into bed and forget the world. No one should have to lose someone like that.
Thanks for sharing, and I’m sorry for your loss.
Don’t forget drug addicts! There are very recent cases of women being “voluntarily” sterilized or put on BC as a condition of parole or of being allowed to keep their current kids. There’s a book called Our Bodies, Our Crimes that goes into this.
Speculating over someone’s gender and labeling them “cis” needs to die already. It’s not for an observer to decide.
That’s not speculating about someone’s gender. That’s simply giving a definition for a person whose gender identity is the same as their assigned at birth sex.
Why do you have cis in scare quotes?
Angry for no real reason. I wonder how you would react to someone who actually was transphobic rather than just asking questions in an attempt to learn more, but some how that makes me racist, misogynistic, imperialistic, and against trans people having medical care. K.
I was not implying that trans people do not experience discrimination or that it wasn’t a problem. Maybe you’re getting different info than me but when I read so-called “TERF” blogs I don’t see any hate for trans people, but rather for the feminists who are reporting on it. They’re highlighting instances of trans women stalking and calling for violence against feminists, or trans women with penises saying lesbians who don’t want to fuck them are transphobes for not wanting to fuck someone with a penis, and even trans women accusing feminists of transphobia when we discuss menstruation online, which NO ONE has any right to do, to invade feminist spaces and tell us not to discuss things that affect women.
Is it wrong for women’s rights and trans rights to be separate movements with unique challenges, just like Black civil rights and gay rights are separate movements? I understand that there is some overlap in these groups, but people can support all of them.
Ha ha ha, no, I’m not. I’m a woman and feminist. I’m not going to bow down to the hate that some angry trans people have for radfems. The horrible things you say TERFs do to trans people, which I can neither deny nor confirm because I haven’t seen it, but I have seen trans people attacking feminists, such as calling for murder and violence against them. Perhaps both sides are doing it, I don’t understand why, and it’s not productive. I know of one feminist who has “outed” trans people… who were stalking and harassing her online! I can’t fault someone for defending themselves.
I would never be ashamed of my feminism and standing up for women no matter how stigmatized, mislabeled, and hated we are by MRAs, YouTube, gamers, the general public, and even some people who call themselves feminists (liberal feminists). Feminists aren’t excluding you. You exclude yourself and you’re not truly committed to feminism.
I’m no expert on Janice Raymond but even if people object to some of her problematic criticisms that still doesn’t make her a bad feminist since she has done plenty of good things for women. That’s like saying Edgar Allen Poe is a ‘bad writer’ because of his creepy personal life.