The gender badge vs. the gender vadge

Dear Females,

I apologize for travelling along the third wave feminism road.  It was the road called equality and it seemed to logically follow the road my mother and grandmothers fought for. I apologize for calling it equality and erasing liberation from the nomenclature of feminism.

I apologize for believing that in the 21st century women had a right to choose to sell her body. I apologize for thinking porn helped further sexual liberation. I apologize for thinking pro-choice = reproductive justice.

I apologize for thinking that women and men were wired differently and I somehow won the genetic lottery by earning the right to call myself a mathematician and an engineer despite being born female.

The road to my enlightenment was long and twisted and admittedly, privileged.

My privilege came from a mother determined to not award gender badges to her daughters. A mother who allowed me firetrucks and my sister cowboy regalia. A mother who encouraged a love of learning and a love of math. And a father who 'allowed' this freedom and even (gasp) changed our diapers in the late 1960s. A father who 'allowed' my mother to be the primary wage earner and he even cooked our family meals during the week and took us to lessons and medical appointments. There were no gender badges awarded in my family growing up. And when my sister came out as a lesbian in her early twenties in the early 90s, my parents embraced her despite their catholic upbringing and a church determined to erase her reality.And we did not seek to give her the gender badge of butch dyke or femme lesbian. She simply loved women and we accepted that without needing to label her beyond lesbian.

And now my privilege is being slammed because I also have the audacity of having a gender vadge. I am a female that calls herself a woman and I happen to also have a vagina. The fact that my parents tried so hard to eliminate the gender badge from my life - as did other freethinking parents who saw the harms of boxing in their children into prescriptive gendered roles while children - is now considered irrelevant and even dangerous to third wave feminists. Flaunting the fact that I have a vagina and others born with one need liberation is deemed cissexist. Saying that someone born with a vagina is more likely to be penetrated in a violent act whether for money or torture is called sex-phobic. Telling people that I want access to female only space is pronounced transphobic.

The only thing that seems to be relevant today is what gender badge you feel like you have and the quicker you identify your gender then the quicker your "problem" can be solved if you don't have the right body parts to match. The solution ultimately  involves lots of drugs and genital mutilation surgery. But, if caught early enough, the gender badge will be awarded.

My vagina is not gendered, it is female. My brain is not gendered, it is human. My feminism is not gendered, it is about females. My privilege is not gendered it is about socio-economic class and education and race.

Ultimately I am sorry that it took me so long to wake up to our female born reality and what the true liberation of females entails. The road behind is only a couple of centuries old and I fear the road ahead is much steeper than it was before gender badges and gender vadges become priority #1 in First World Feminism.

The penance for my own third-wave feminism fiasco will be that for the remainder of my life I will cry every time I see another female shame another female for anything.

And I'm crying a lot these days.

Sincerely,

A 46 yo womens liberationist.

Womyn Warriors: Seeking to actually liberate women

Exactly one week ago I approached a small group of womyn standing outside Beaver Hall Gallery.  I expected to see hate accusing protesters and was relieved by their absence. I was committed to attending the first ever Toronto Radical Feminist conference and the weekend was going to be my first experience in nearly three decades of face to face discussions and speakers about women's issues such as violence, reproductive justice and human trafficking in a womyn's only setting.  As I sit here writing this I can not comprehend how little I knew last Friday morning about the state of oppression towards women on this planet. It was like I was in a bubble and now it has been burst.

It was a smaller gathering than expected because of the threats of violence faced by the organizer's and the venue. Women get scared. Systemic oppression does that. Rape victims don't want to be triggered. Exited sex workers don't want to be outed. For conference attendees who brought children there was a feeling of enormous guilt about exposing their offspring to possible violence. All of us are still processing this ugly side of our event. Here is a short description by one fellow attendee. Here is another attendee's writeup.

Last fall I met a young man who lived in Yugoslavia during the country's breakup. His family eventually refugeed to Canada. He discussed his childhood back in a land under war. His recollection, as a child, was that of many family members being around and supporting one another. He had siblings and cousins about all the time. They played while the parents pulled together to survive. These are his happy childhood memories and he spoke of this fondly. In his new country families are disjoint: including his own. His story comes back to me as I try and capture the experience I had last weekend. Because that's ultimately how I will remember this gathering. An infant played while the womyn pulled together to work towards liberation.

But make no mistakes about it: we were terrrorized. Anyone dismissive of that reality for a group of a couple of dozen women is oppressing my reality. You were not there.  You did not live through what we experienced.  And while we were terrorized we managed to listen to many speakers from all across Turtle Island tell us about the state of oppression towards women:  in this country and around the world.  The facts are frightening. From toxic/rape/porn culture that leads to youth suicide to human sex trafficking that the pornstitution is behind. Aboriginal women and the Pickton house of horrors. The centuries long ongoing process of eroding womyn's reproductive justice. History lessons that revealed the true sources of any societal change that has occurred in the last few hundred years. And finally, actionable items that will help mobilize a few more womyn that are actually interested in liberating women rather than mere empowerment.

In the course of our baptism into radical feminism we forged bonds through personal stories and sharing of insights. And I had many tears. Tears of rage when hearing of a mother dropping off her own daughter and grandchild to a homeless shelter because the mother's boyfriend was inconvenienced by the baby. Tears of horror when hearing of torture survivors struggling to communicate their story with drawings: they can not talk of it. Tears that were triggered when I saw, for the first time,  how thoroughly patriarchy had brainwashed me into the liberal feminist narrative and how damaging that might have been for newly adult Daughter. Tears for the direct violence I experienced in my own life yet did not clearly recognize until last weekend. Tears of gratitude that a group of womyn continually risk their safety so that womyn like myself can learn more.

Yes I cried a lot. And if you are not crying about the continuing state of oppression of women in our world then I really think we can no longer be friends.  There is a war on women. I've chosen to work towards liberation.

Nigerian dwarf goats: also discussed at RadFemRiseUp
(to be explained later)

Words are not Wordz

Lately I find I often grapple with the words to describe things.

For example, I worked long and hard on this sentence:  "The idyllic days of youth are more closely strung together whilst in our elder years the moments are."


I intended the quoted sentence to be a central theme to a blog post and I guess it is but not in the way I had originally jotted down my thoughts.


And that's the gist of this post.  Words are often not used as they were originally intended.  This post is going to be about two particular words that are pervasive in our culture and have acquired meaning beyond their original one.  I am not going to name them as yet because I'd like my thoughts to be digested before evoking a reaction from you, dear reader.


When Daughter was around six years of age we had our first meaningful sex education moment.  I think she already knew the birds and the bees (or birds and birds or bees and bees, I've been quite liberal in my approach to these issues, much to her chagrin as she got older).  I think she had probably just discovered, on her own, the pleasures of touching yourself 'down there' and she was doing this around me, at home.  I think she was doing it over her clothes...and perhaps even subconsciously, I don't really recollect the specifics.  At any rate, once I was certain of my observations I said to her that she needed to stop doing that in public because yes, it feels good, but there are things that we do in private and this was one of them.  I told her that what she was doing was called masturbation and it was a very pleasurable activity, yes, but it was something that each of us did in private.


The clearest part of my memory of this rather ordinary yet quite significant parenting moment is that her eyes widened at some point during my mini-lecture and she said, with incredulity in her voice:  "There's a word for that?  Wow!".


Hopefully you'll think that story was as cute as a button because that's what she was, in that moment, to me.  Absolute innocence.  It is also a stark reminder of the power we parents have, eh?

When people talk of their maiden names I always wonder (and sometimes voice) whether they were a virgin before they got married.  Not so long ago, women were property and men married virgins as unspoiled property and calling yourself a maiden harkens back to that time.  So why do most women still do this whole name changing thing again?  It truly baffles me the number of people that do and refer to themselves as maidens.

Anyways.  Back to words.  They have power.  Using the words masturbation or maiden in 2012 is, for the most part, uncontroversial despite my hatred of the word maiden due to the patriarchal culture it reinforces.

But these other words, the words I have in mind, used to be ones that caused no controversy and yet in the last week one of them has been tossed out into our cultural landscape without regard to the legions of mostly silent people that are most offended by it's use.


Have you guessed them yet?  Before I let them out of the hat let me talk about a speaker I heard at TEDxStJohns, Philip Riteman (pictured below).  In the photo I've posted from the event he is holding up his arm to show the audience something.  His Auschwitz tattoo.  His permanent reminder of the horror of losing each member of his immediate and most of his extended family.  His tale was powerful.  It took him forty years to tell his story, the pain was that great.  He choked up numerous times during his talk and it humbled each of us in attendance, I'm sure.  He put it best:  "Each of you live in heaven."


Now imagine Mr. Riteman attending a stand up comedy show and the comedien saying "some very generalizing and declarative statements about nazis always being funny."  Imagine Mr. Riteman then shouting out from the audience: "Actually, nazi jokes are never funny."  Would the comedian responding with "Wouldn't it be funny if that guy got taken by nazis.  Like right now.  And his whole family too." get a laugh out of the crowd?


Is that funny?  To anyone?  Would it be funny if he was not a holocaust survivor?  Why?  


A comedian in the States thought that using the word rape in almost the exact same context this week was appropriate and his attack was met with laughter. Note that I have no idea if the person who shouted out from the crowd has been a rape victim.  And I don't care.  I applaud her actions and hope that I would be as brave in a similar situation.  The ensuing 'controversy' over this guy's remarks (and the number of supporters he has) has made my head hurt.  Note that he has apologized.


So suffice it to say that these two words:  rape and nazi, are words whose uses are almost sacred to me and to many people that it has affected either directly or indirectly.  I dream of an age where these words will just be ancient relics of a barbaric society that also used terms like maiden to describe a human being with a high market value.

Today's culture is full of mostly wordz it seems and it saddens me to think that after the events that went down this week, rape is one of the new wordz on our radar joining other ones like nazi and feminist and maiden.  Do you have any others to add?

Holocaust survivor Philip Riteman showing his Auschwitz tattoo.
Click on the photo to go to the TEDxStJohns fb page where this was originally posted.