Over on Fraser Sherman's blog, he has a collection of the appalling (and sickening) lies being pushed by the Right. I saw someone on FB just yesterday repeating the lie about litter boxes in classrooms because kids "identify as cats."
P.Z. Myers details his family's attempts to obtain the Real ID now necessary for air travel. I'm not flying anywhere anyway, not with airport security as over the top as it is at the moment, but you do have to wonder why conservatives are so intent on limiting the ability of (certain kinds of) people to travel.
Alas, A Blog gives us a visual aid:
Conservatives continue to think white people are the real victims. Well, and cis straight men. They're the real victims.
A cis woman gets kicked out of a Boston hotel for not performing her gender correctly. Conservatives insist it's just trans people they hate, but actually they hate anyone who doesn't fit their narrow definitions of what "normal" is -- in the case of women, that's skinny tiny blonde Christians who smile pretty and wear "nice" dresses. And are submissive to male authorty, of course.
4 comments:
urgh, this sucks so much. Makes me want to cut my hair short again and get a t-shirt that says “women can look like this too, asshole” or something (witty suggestions gratefully appreciated.
Our conservatives who are currently in government are jumping on the anti-woke, “let’s define a woman” bandwagon down here in Aotearoa/New Zealand now too. A bill similar to the recent UK one has just been proposed. We have elections next year so I’m hoping the anti-Trump effect lasts long enough for us to see the same reversal as in Australia and Canada.
Aurora
They want a narrow definition of what an acceptable way to be a woman is. It's another kind of control.
Ugh, ugh, ugh on the policing of women's bodies. Of course no one of any gender, age, race, etc. should be policed in that way, ever, for any reason, as long as they're minding their own business, not interfering with others doing the same, and doing the normal things people do in a restroom (especially one with individual stalls with locking doors!), but do people consider some of the reasons other than personal choice (which is of course completely valid) that a woman might have very short hair? Boston is, among other things, a city to which people travel to get more advanced medical care than they might be able to get at home.
There has, of course, been at least one similar episode on Capitol Hill, even though Rep. Sarah McBride has consistently been using the bathrooms in her own office or those of colleagues with offices closer to the House floor who welcome her. So some of her less-welcoming colleagues went chasing after some other poor woman who somewhat resembles McBride (which isn't hard, since McBride conforms pretty closely to conventional norms for her gender, as well as to current norms for professional dress, so a fair number of young women of about her age going about their business on Capitol Hill somewhat resemble her, and vice versa. That's the opposite/complementary problem of what the woman in the story encountered: people know there's a transgender person who passes easily in the vicinity, and they're convinced she's going to try to use the women's bathroom, so they start policing cisgender women who, like the transgender woman they're hyper-aware of, present in a pretty conventional way).
Even with the "pending" internal investigation, I know one hotel I won't be staying in when next I travel to Boston, which does happen every few years (probably too "high end" for my budget anyway, but I'll remember the name as one to avoid).
I transformed my drivers license into a Real ID pretty easily when it expired last month (I showed the expiring license, for which I had established my "legal presence" sometime in the past by showing a birth certificate, the passport I had recently renewed, and an electronic copy of a bank statement with my address). I do, however, still use the same name as is on my birth certificate, and no spelling or spacing variations show up on any of my documents, so I'm a relatively easy case. Friends who have had changes in last name and/or spelling of first name (one made some corrections to first name spelling as well as changed her last name when she married, *and* she's a naturalized citizen, fortunately post-marriage/name changes) had more difficulty.
So I believe I have the document necessary to fly, and will be doing so next month (though not without some trepidation, since I'll be using one of the airports that has experienced serious difficulties recently).
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