#of only claiming so because ’they think saying they have male privilege is gender affirming’ ??

[rivetgoth]

What is with the weird movement of trans guys rn who are like . “Trans men are never and will never be treated like cis men. Trans men will always ultimately be viewed and treated as women. Misogyny is an inescapable facet of transmasculinity. Male privilege is unattainable for trans men.” We are NOT experiencing the same transgenderism.

[southeastasianists]

Carolyn* can never get out of her head the memory of her parents bringing her to conversion therapy. The transwoman from South Sulawesi was 13 then, and society expected her to identify as male in accordance with her biological sex at birth.

“Deep inside, I kept telling myself that I’m not sick, that I’m okay,” she recalled.

Carolyn experienced ruqyah firsthand, a form of conversion therapy imbued with Islamic exorcism that is common among Muslim communities in Indonesia. Carolyn’s parents explained away her feminine expression as the work of a malevolent female demon.

At the time, the teenager did not fully grasp the situation she was in. She agreed to go along with her parents’ wishes due to her deeply embedded fear of sin.

Carolyn was taken before the local cleric, who prayed to expel the female demon in her body. The cleric also asked her parents to leave her with him for a few days so she could undergo several rituals.

“But at that time, I refused. I wanted to go home and didn’t want to be there. I was fine, I cried and said to my mom, ‘Mom, I want to go home, I’m fine,’” she said.

After begging her mother, Carolyn’s mother finally agreed to send her home on one condition: she had to stop expressing feminine traits and stop hanging out with her female friends. Carolyn repressed her feminine expression for several years after that day.

“To be honest, I felt very tortured. I felt very tortured mentally,” Carolyn confessed.

Carolyn said she placed a lot of pressure on herself over the years. She never felt that she was a man. She was always more comfortable expressing herself as a woman. In the final year of high school, Carolyn decided to stop lying to herself and her family. She ran away from home and learned to become a hairdresser at a salon that accepted her gender expression.

In the early days of Carolyn’s emancipation journey, her past and concerns over her identity continued to haunt her. Not a day went by that she didn’t fear persecution, socializing with others, fully expressing herself, all the while saddened by the irreparable burned bridge with her family.

Even now, at the age of 32, Carolyn is still traumatized by her conversion therapy experience. She gets easily triggered by watching religious TV shows or films that feature ruqyah scenes.

But ultimately she believes that she made the right choice, because nothing can take away her freedom to fully express herself as a woman and her achievement of becoming a fully functioning adult in a society that generally does not tolerate her people.

“I also feel comfortable and feel very relieved that in the end, I can accept myself as a transwoman. I feel like I have found myself. This is me, I am a transwoman,” she stresses.

In contrast to Carolyn, Sofia*, a lesbian living in the capital, was encouraged by her family to undergo ruqyah when she was old enough. By that time, she was mature enough to make her own decisions; and so she ran away from them.

“At that time, I was 25 years old and I was studying for my master’s degree. My position was quite privileged, right?” Sofia said.

Living in Jakarta, Sofia was more exposed to open discussions on the issues of gender and sexuality. When her mother asked her to go to therapy, Sofia was already certain about her sexual orientation. Furthermore, she had been involved in the advocacy for gender and sexuality issues.

“So I think there was nothing to lose at that time, and my identity is the core of my life,” she said.

However, Sofia’s refusal for therapy did not sit well with her family. She said they still pressured her “recover” to the point that they used violence against her.

“But I didn’t want to. I insisted because they already know me as a lesbian, so why do I have to back off?” she said.

Sofia believes that her knowledge of diversity in gender expression and sexual orientation was one of the biggest sources of courage that emboldened her to emancipate. If LGBTQ+ people are exposed to the same knowledge, Sofia said, they will be able to accept their identities and acknowledge that they’re not the problem — homophobia and conversion therapy are.

“We must fight together to convince the world that being gay is okay. You need to learn about yourself. You’re not sick. It’s society that’s sick,” she added.

Ika*, a transwoman from North Sumatra, experienced conversion therapy when she was 13, 17, and 18. The methods that she went through were quite diverse, ranging from ruqyah, to burial rituals, admission to Islamic boarding schools, and goat sacrifice.

None of them worked. And she said she had to live with the constant pressure from her parents to get rid of her feminine expression, which, according to them, was also the work of a demon.

“What should be removed from my body? Because according to their assessment, there is an evil spirit who made me like this,” Ika said.

“In my opinion, conversion therapy is bullshit.”

Ika now works for an NGO advocating to end HIV discrimination and stigma suffered by trans communities.

‘Individual will’

Conversion therapy is not a new phenomenon in Indonesia, but the matter was hotly discussed recently when several Indonesian queer activists, including Lini Zurlia and Kai Mata, received targeted ads on social media encouraging them to undergo conversion therapy.

“It feels like I was targeted by a group of people. It made me upset, especially because this is very sensitive regarding LGBTQ+ rights in Indonesia,” Kai Mata said.

“What I think the government should do is to make it illegal. I also think that LGBT people in Indonesia deserve the right to live in this country without fear.”

Attempts to contact the conversion therapy service through the ad failed as of the time of this article’s publication. Another conversion therapy center in Jakarta, which claims to use hypnotherapy as one of its “healing” methods, did not come across like it has a vendetta against LGBTQ+ people despite providing the harmful service.

“When does sexual orientation become a problem? It happens when the values that are taught ​​[by people’s environment and family] are different from their sexual orientation,” therapist Adrianto Darma Setiawan said.

Adrianto claims to have treated around 2,500 patients in the last 12 years. About 20 percent of these patients are (or were, if he succeeded) gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The standard therapy to “heal” sexual orientation consists of about about five to six hypnotherapy sessions lasting around three hours per session.

Adrianto said that some of his patients underwent therapy out of their own accord, but most were there due to encouragement or pressure from relatives. The therapist did not say how many of his patients he managed to convert, but said that “recovery” depends on the will of the individual.

The government’s failure

Imam Nahei, a commissioner at the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), said that LGBTQ + groups in Indonesia still have a long way to receive adequate protections from the government. For as long as homophobia prevails in Indonesia, conversion therapy will remain as one of the most harmful and real threats that haunts people from minority sexual groups in Indonesia.

Nahei said that conversion therapy is an obvious human rights violation, yet the state, which should be responsible for protecting all of the country’s citizens, has not done anything to protect LGBTQ+ people from the practice.

“The state has not done anything because, in Indonesia, this issue is still very controversial as it is associated with dominant religious views,” Nahei said.

There’s little hope for progress in this regard when homosexuality and alternate forms of sexual expression are still seen as a deviation or a disorder by the country’s lawmakers, such as House of Representatives (DPR) Commission VIII Deputy Chairman Marwan Dasopang.

Marwan supports the existence of conversion therapy in Indonesia. Not only that, he wants DPR to eventually pass legislation allowing the state to provide the service to the public. If conversion therapy was normalized, he argued, patients would not experience extreme psychological trauma, such as from being forced to “recover” by their parents.

“It needs to be regulated,” Marwan said, adding that discussion on the regulation of conversion therapy are still in their infancy.

Indonesian policy makers, and even psychiatrists, have long gone against the scientific fact that homosexuality and other sexual identities are not a disease or disorder. Their stance have emboldened homophobia, which, in turn, has fostered the continued existence of conversion therapy.

Riska Carolina, director of Advocacy and Public Policy from the Support Group and Resource Center on Sexuality Studies at the University of Indonesia (SGRC UI), said among the many forms of conversion therapy in Indonesia, most are performed with ruqyah. Others who aren’t forced to go the conversion therapy route are still made to see shrinks who practice with heavy religious influence, hypnotherapists, or admitted to religious boarding schools.

“[Conversion therapy] is a threat to the LGBTQ+ community. It is persecution to the LGBTQ+ community. It violates their basic human rights. LGBTQ+ people are not a disease,” she stresses.

Riska believes that regulating conversion therapy would violate the minority groups’ rights even more than they have suffered. Even if the therapy is carried out based on patients’ willingness, Riska argued that it still validates the idea that LGBTQ+ people have mental disorders.

“Conversion therapy must be banned. It is more necessary to provide protection, even though I know that protection is still a long way off. So I prefer that, at least, [the government] treats us equally and gives us affirmative action,” she said.

“I’m ashamed to know that Indonesia is very late in terms of acceptance and it’s already 2021. You don’t need to like LGBT people, but you also don’t need to discriminate against us, especially to the level of torture. What you do with conversion therapy is torturous.”

*Carolyn, Sofia, and Ika’s real names have been omitted, at their request, to protect their identity.

[a-room-of-my-own]

Four years ago, I wrote about my decision to live as a woman in The New York Times, writing that I had wanted to live “authentically as the woman that I have always been,” and had “effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities.”

Three years ago, I decided that I was neither male nor female, but nonbinary—and made headlines after an Oregon judge agreed to let me identify as a third sex, not male or female.

Now, I want to live again as the man that I am.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Despite participating in medical transgenderism for six years, my body is still intact. Most people who desist from transgender identities after gender changes can’t say the same.

But that’s not to say I got off scot-free. My psyche is eternally scarred, and I’ve got a host of health issues from the grand medical experiment.

Here’s how things began.

After convincing myself that I was a woman during a severe mental health crisis, I visited a licensed nurse practitioner in early 2013 and asked for a hormone prescription. “If you don’t give me the drugs, I’ll buy them off the internet,” I threatened.

Although she’d never met me before, the nurse phoned in a prescription for 2 mg of oral estrogen and 200 mg of Spironolactone that very same day.

The nurse practitioner ignored that I have chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, having previously served in the military for almost 18 years. All of my doctors agree on that. Others believe that I have bipolar disorder and possibly borderline personality disorder.

I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.

I’d learned how to become a female from online medical documents at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital website.

After I began consuming the cross-sex hormones, I started therapy at a gender clinic in Pittsburgh so that I could get people to sign off on the transgender surgeries I planned to have.

All I needed to do was switch over my hormone operating fuel and get my penis turned into a vagina. Then I’d be the same as any other woman. That’s the fantasy the transgender community sold me. It’s the lie I bought into and believed.

Only one therapist tried to stop me from crawling into this smoking rabbit hole. When she did, I not only fired her, I filed a formal complaint against her. “She’s a gatekeeper,” the trans community said.

Professional stigmatisms against “conversion therapy” had made it impossible for the therapist to question my motives for wanting to change my sex.

The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (Fifth Edition) says one of the traits of gender dysphoria is believing that you possess the stereotypical feelings of the opposite sex. I felt that about myself, but yet no therapist discussed it with me.

Two weeks hadn’t passed before I found a replacement therapist. The new one quickly affirmed my identity as a woman. I was back on the road to getting vaginoplasty.

There’s abundant online literature informing transgender people that their sex change isn’t real. But when a licensed medical doctor writes you a letter essentially stating that you were born in the wrong body and a government agency or court of law validates that delusion, you become damaged and confused. I certainly did.

Painful Roots

My trauma history resembles a ride down the Highway of Death during the first Gulf War.

As a child, I was sexually abused by a male relative. My parents severely beat me. At this point, I’ve been exposed to so much violence and had so many close calls that I don’t know how to explain why I’m still alive. Nor do I know how to mentally process some of the things I’ve seen and experienced.

Dr. Ray Blanchard has an unpopular theory that explains why someone like me may have been drawn to transgenderism. He claims there are two types of transgender women: homosexuals that are attracted to men, and men who are attracted to the thought or image of themselves as females.

It’s a tough thing to admit, but I belong to the latter group. We are classified as having autogynephilia.

After having watched pornography for years while in the Army and being married to a woman who resisted my demands to become the ideal female, I became that female instead. At least in my head.

While autogynephilia was my motivation to become a woman, gender stereotypes were my means of implementation. I believed wearing a long wig, dresses, heels, and makeup would make me a woman.

Feminists begged to differ on that. They rejected me for conforming to female stereotypes. But as a new member of the transgender community, I beat up on them too. The women who become men don’t fight the transgender community’s wars. The men in dresses do.

Medical Malpractice

The best thing that could have happened would have been for someone to order intensive therapy. That would have protected me from my inclination to cross-dress and my risky sexual transgressions, of which there were many.

Instead, quacks in the medical community hid me in the women’s bathroom with people’s wives and daughters. “Your gender identity is female,” these alleged professionals said.

The medical community is so afraid of the trans community that they’re now afraid to give someone Blanchard’s diagnosis. Trans men are winning in medicine, and they’ve won the battle for language.

Think of the word “transvestite.” They’ve succeeded in making it a vulgar word, even though it just means men dressing like women. People are no longer allowed to tell the truth about men like me. Everyone now has to call us transgender instead.

The diagnostic code in my records at the VA should read Transvestic Disorder (302.3). Instead, the novel theories of Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling have been used to cover up the truths written about by Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Alice Dreger.

I confess to having been motivated by autogynephilia during all of this. Blanchard was right.

Trauma, hypersexuality owing to childhood sexual abuse, and autogynephilia are all supposed to be red flags for those involved in the medical arts of psychology, psychiatry, and physical medicine—yet nobody except for the one therapist in Pittsburgh ever tried to stop me from changing my sex. They just kept helping me to harm myself.

Escaping to ‘Nonbinary’

Three years into my gender change from male to female, I looked hard into the mirror one day. When I did, the facade of femininity and womanhood crumbled.

Despite having taken or been injected with every hormone and antiandrogen concoction in the VA’s medical arsenal, I didn’t look anything like a female. People on the street agreed. Their harsh stares reflected the reality behind my fraudulent existence as a woman. Biological sex is immutable.

It took three years for that reality to set in with me.

When the fantasy of being a woman came to an end, I asked two of my doctors to allow me to become nonbinary instead of female to bail me out. Both readily agreed.

After pumping me full of hormones—the equivalent of 20 birth control pills per day—they each wrote a sex change letter. The two weren’t just bailing me out. They were getting themselves off the hook for my failed sex change. One worked at the VA. The other worked at Oregon Health & Science University.

To escape the delusion of having become a woman, I did something completely unprecedented in American history. In 2016, I convinced an Oregon judge to declare my sex to be nonbinary—neither male nor female.

In my psychotic mind, I had restored the mythical third sex to North America. And I became the first legally recognized nonbinary person in the country.

Celebrity Status

The landmark court decision catapulted me to instant fame within the LGBT community. For 10 nonstop days afterward, the media didn’t let me sleep. Reporters hung out in my Facebook feed, journalists clung to my every word, and a Portland television station beamed my wife and I into living rooms in the United Kingdom.

Becoming a woman had gotten me into The New York Times. Convincing a judge that my sex was nonbinary got my photos and story into publications around the world.

Then, before the judge’s ink had even dried on my Oregon sex change court order, a Washington, D.C.-based LGBT legal aid organization contacted me. “We want to help you change your birth certificate,” they offered.

Within months, I scored another historic win after the Department of Vital Records issued me a brand new birth certificate from Washington, D.C., where I was born. A local group called Whitman-Walker Health had gotten my sex designation on my birth certificate switched to “unknown.” It was the first time in D.C. history a birth certificate had been printed with a sex marker other than male or female.

Another transgender legal aid organization jumped on the Jamie Shupe bandwagon, too. Lambda Legal used my nonbinary court order to help convince a Colorado federal judge to order the State Department to issue a passport with an X marker (meaning nonbinary) to a separate plaintiff named Dana Zzyym.

LGBT organizations helping me to screw up my life had become a common theme. During my prior sex change to female, the New York-based Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund had gotten my name legally changed. I didn’t like being named after the uncle who’d molested me. Instead of getting me therapy for that, they got me a new name.

A Pennsylvania judge didn’t question the name change, either. Wanting to help a transgender person, she had not only changed my name, but at my request she also sealed the court order, allowing me to skip out on a ton of debt I owed because of a failed home purchase and begin my new life as a woman. Instead of merging my file, two of the three credit bureaus issued me a brand new line of credit.

Walking Away From Fiction

It wasn’t until I came out against the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children and transgender military service members in 2017 that LGBT organizations stopped helping me. Most of the media retreated with them.

Overnight, I went from being a liberal media darling to a conservative pariah.

Both groups quickly began to realize that the transgender community had a runaway on their hands. Their solution was to completely ignore me and what my story had become. They also stopped acknowledging that I was behind the nonbinary option that now exists in 11 states.

The truth is that my sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific fraud.

Consider the fact that before the historic court hearing occurred, my lawyer informed me that the judge had a transgender child.

Sure enough, the morning of my brief court hearing, the judge didn’t ask me a single question. Nor did this officer of the court demand to see any medical evidence alleging that I was born something magical. Within minutes, the judge just signed off on the court order.

I do not have any disorders of sexual development. All of my sexual confusion was in my head. I should have been treated. Instead, at every step, doctors, judges, and advocacy groups indulged my fiction.

The carnage that came from my court victory is just as precedent-setting as the decision itself. The judge’s order led to millions of taxpayer dollars being spent to put an X marker on driver’s licenses in 11 states so far. You can now become male, female, or nonbinary in all of them.

In my opinion, the judge in my case should have recused herself. In doing so, she would have spared me the ordeal still yet to come. She also would have saved me from having to bear the weight of the big secret behind my win.

I now believe that she wasn’t just validating my transgender identity. She was advancing her child’s transgender identity, too.

A sensible magistrate would have politely told me no and refused to sign such an outlandish legal request. “Gender is just a concept. Biological sex defines all of us,” that person would have said.

In January 2019, unable to advance the fraud for another single day, I reclaimed my male birth sex. The weight of the lie on my conscience was heavier than the value of the fame I’d gained from participating in this elaborate swindle.

Two fake gender identities couldn’t hide the truth of my biological reality. There is no third gender or third sex. Like me, intersex people are either male or female. Their condition is the result of a disorder of sexual development, and they need help and compassion.

I played my part in pushing forward this grand illusion. I’m not the victim here. My wife, daughter, and the American taxpayers are—they are the real victims.

[sophieakatz]

Thursday Thoughts: “They” Is Not A Neutral Word

My mother sent me a link to a Slate podcast interview with Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times op-ed writer who recently began going by “they/them” pronouns. In the interview, Manjoo states that they are a cisgender man, but they no longer want to be referred to with “he/him” pronouns. They talk about the negative impact that forced gendering has on people – citing their young daughter’s stubborn belief that presidents must be men – and posits that everyone should be referred to as “they” instead of as “he” or “she.”

Manjoo’s idea is initially intriguing. As a society, we slap gender onto our children right away. When a child is born, the first question anyone asks the parent is, “Is it a boy or a girl?” And as innocuous as this may seem, a lot of baggage comes along with this early labeling. Studies show that adults will treat a baby differently if they are told that the baby is a boy than if they are told that the baby is a girl – describing the same baby behavior as “angry” if they think it’s a boy or “happy” if they think it’s a girl, and allowing supposedly-boy babies to take greater risks than supposedly-girl babies. Adults don’t realize that they’re treating the babies differently based on their assumptions, but they are.

Additionally, cross-analyses of studies of the human brain indicate that there is no significant difference between male babies’ brains and female babies’ brains – but there are significant differences between adult male brains and adult female brains. Along the way, the way the children are treated changes them, and Manjoo’s anecdote about his daughter’s early political opinions shows one of the negative results of this differential treatment.

In a world where we didn’t really care about gender at all, where we didn’t tell a baby right from day one the kind of person that they should be, perhaps everyone would be truly free to explore our own gender and figure out our personalities without the impact of stereotypes. If we didn’t split up sports into “men” and “women” categories, and instead had everyone compete based on physical ability, then athletes like Caster Semenya would not be mistreated by the highly problematic sports institution of “sex testing.” We could move on into a world that cares more about individuals than categories. The idea is appealing.

What gives me pause is Manjoo’s assertion that the “just, rational, inclusive” thing to do here is for everyone to go by “they.” Manjoo seems to think that the “they” pronoun is not only a gender-neutral pronoun, but also a completely neutral concept. They also seem to see nothing wrong with a cisgender man telling other people what pronouns to use.

It troubled me that this podcast did not have any voices from the transgender community contributing to the conversation. It further troubles me how difficult it was to sift through the Google results of cisgender people arguing over whether singular “they” is “grammatically correct” (language changes based on the needs of the speaking society, and is not forever beholden to the rules of the past – deal with it) and find a non-cisgender writer commenting on the deeper moral issue here. It isn’t surprising to me that the loudest voices in this conversation about pronouns are people who have never struggled to get other people to use their proper pronouns, because privilege comes with a platform, but that doesn’t make it right.

I finally found Brian Fabry Dorsam, an agender writer. Where Manjoo claims that gender is a cause of “confusion, anxiety, and grief,” Dorsam points out that gender itself is not the cause of these negative things. Misgendering is.

When someone refers to Dorsam as “they,” it is not a neutral statement. For Dorsam, “they” is an acknowledgement of their pronouns, of their identity, of the way they want the world to see them. It is an affirmation, a positive act, a specific act.

Manjoo may not care about their gender – again, they say that they are still a cisgender man, and that they do not mind being called “he” – but Dorsam does, and so does an entire world of transgender people. Manjoo has never had to struggle to get people to take them and their gender seriously. People have always looked at Manjoo and assumed their gender correctly. Perhaps that is why Manjoo thinks that it is no big deal to give up their pronouns, and why they think that everyone should go by the same pronouns.

Manjoo’s mistake is assuming that treating everyone “the same” is the same as being “inclusive.”

If we were to take Manjoo’s advice and slap the same pronoun onto everyone, then we would be treating everyone “the same.” But if you call a transgender man who uses “he/him” pronouns “they,” you are not making a neutral statement. You are saying, “I do not recognize you as ‘he.’ I will not call you what you want to be called. I know better than you what pronouns you should use.”

This is not being inclusive. This is not treating someone with respect. This is being oppressive.

“Nothing is inclusive when it is forced,” says Dorsam. “True inclusivity is the recognition of each individual’s humanity on their own terms. Anything else is erasure.”

Dorsam suggests – and I agree – that there are two things that we must do instead.

First, we must do everything we can to raise our children in a gender-neutral manner. This means recognizing our subconscious biases about gender and putting an active effort into providing our children with access to all kinds of clothing, toys, stories, and role models. This will allow them to develop their own ideas about who they are.

Second, we must stop assuming other people’s pronouns. Instead, when we meet someone, we should ask for the person’s pronouns.

“Hi, I’m Sophie! My pronouns are she/her. How about you?”

It can be as simple as that. “What are your pronouns?” or “May I please have your pronouns of reference?” are other ways to phrase the question. You can also ask a mutual friend about someone’s pronouns, if you don’t yet feel comfortable asking the person directly.

If you do not know someone’s pronouns, it’s okay to use a gender-neutral term – such as “they,” “my friend,” or the person’s name – until you learn the proper pronouns. Once you do know the person’s pronouns, you must use those pronouns.

While chatting with my mother about the podcast and the surrounding issue, she pointed out that having everyone use “they” is the easy way out. Treating everyone the same, she said, is “less work than to care about individuals.”

She’s right. This takes work. Respect and inclusivity always take work. Manjoo is encouraging the easy way out, the way of erasure, the way that lets them feel above the “gender problem” while in reality they are causing more discomfort for people who face a daily struggle to have their genders taken seriously.

I think it’s worth the effort.

[mailakue]

A response to John Piper’s response: “Is there a place for female professors at seminary?”

Dear John Piper,

My fellow Wheaton alumni: Your article quickly made its way around Wheaton College’s campus within hours of its release. What was most intriguing to me was to observe everyone’s response. You see, attending a nondenominationally affiliated Christian institution grants me the privilege to see a whole spectrum of responses, from affirming nods in agreement to your thoughts to fists in the air outraged from the article you published. And while I do not associate myself with either extreme, I do find myself reading your article with a few thoughts that I’d like to bring to surface.

Disclaimer: I, for one, am no theologian. My concern with this article has nothing to do with the hot-topic debate on complementarianism versus egalitarianism. There is still so much I need to learn about this before I feel I can even adequately engage in this dialogue with biblically sound conviction. For now, I have come to realize since attending Wheaton that I abide to the complementarian views and therefore agree with your thoughts on that topic in many ways.

As you noted, your statement is based on the assumption of complementarianism. Therefore, the concerns that I raise are not an emotionally-charged debate on women’s rights and authority or of being offended at the risk of feeling lesser or demeaned. I do not associate with these feelings whatsoever. Not to mention, that conversation is completely irrelevant to the nature of the article itself. I want to make that clear so that my reactions to your statement are disassociated with the common lens that one may read and interpret this pushback with – since I am well aware that I am writing this as a female student attending a Christian institution.

There are two key concerns that I have with your response:

1. As I interpret your response, it seems to assume that today’s seminaries are primarily teaching and training up men in the pastoral office.

This is simply not true. In fact, I’d like to argue that that population is only a small reality of the demographic of those who attend seminaries. Wheaton College recently announced the discontinuation of their M.A. Christian Formation – Church & Parachurch degree because fewer students are enrolling into programs that specifically focus on working inside of the church (therefore, not in pastoral or leadership positions). While Wheaton may not be considered an accredited seminary, I don’t think this trend is the anomaly amongst a large majority of Christian institutions and seminaries today.

Perhaps the larger question I’d like to get at is this: Are seminaries and Christian institutions (in all of its design, function, purpose, and role) comparable to the local church? If so, then your position of consistency in gender roles from the institution to the church holds valid. To my knowledge, seminaries were established primarily to educate and train men to become vocational ministers. In this way, seminaries used to closely mirror the local church in its purpose and design. If this were still the case in 2018, and if seminaries were primarily a ‘feeder’ of leaders into the local church (which I understand may be what you’re getting at), then I’d be less concern with your statement.

However, this is no longer the reality of what seminaries are today. (The discussion of what seminaries should or should not be is a conversation to be had another time). I say all this to make the point that seminaries are no longer just a training facility for pastors and leaders for the local church. They are now also training and shaping and mentoring both male and female students to contribute to all spheres in the world by becoming counselors, missionaries, spiritual directors, exegetes and biblical, historical, and systematic theologians – many of which have no intention of becoming a vocational pastor.

If seminaries and Christian institutions were comparable to the local church, and if it was solely raising up pastors and leaders who would serve only the local church, then it would make sense to uphold consistency across both mediums. And in this case, I would agree with you on the necessity of consistency. However, this perception of seminaries today is simply not true.

Therefore, seminary cannot be synonymous to the raising up of pastors. We must answer the question on the basis of a broader understanding of what a seminary is today. It is the raising up of the Body in every societal sphere so that we may equip individuals who will contribute to every sector of society and I’d like to argue that because of that, female teachers are by no means inconsistent with Scripture. Women in so many of these sectors should be models, mentors, and teachers to both male and female students attending seminary. With that being said, I find your response to be outdated when considering the function of seminaries today, as your claim assumes a reality that is not actually realistic.

2. Your response seems to indicate that a pastor’s education is restricted to other male pastors and teachers.

Again, I emphasize my concerns on the basis of what your response seems to indicate. Perhaps my interpretation is inaccurate, which I’m well aware is totally possible.

Let’s pretend seminaries today did mirror the local church in-and-out. That it only existed to raise up individuals called to the pastoral office. That its primary function was to ‘feed’ into the local church. If this were true, it still would fail to put my concerns to rest.

You see Mr. Piper, as you stated, “seminary is not just the transfer of information.” Seminary professors do much more than that. It is more than getting an education. It is learning. As you mentioned, sufficient professors should be mentors who can “shape [a man’s] mind and his heart for vocational pastoral ministry.”

Perhaps my contention with this is it suggests (perhaps unintentionally) that learning that is deemed sufficient for an aspiring pastor is learning that comes only from academia via another pastor or elder or male professor. It limits the shaping of a man’s mind and heart to a few qualified individuals, which is where my concern lies. To my understanding, the Earth and everything in it has the potential to contribute to our learning as well as our sanctification – including those who are called to vocational pastoral ministry.

Mr. Piper, has your heart or mind ever been shaped by the revelation spoken to you from your mother? Are you not a better man, a better pastor, because of the mere lessons in life that has shaped your mind and heart – many of which were not taught to you by a pastor, an elder, or a male professor? Did not the sunset ever shape your heart and bend it towards the Creator? Did not your children ever speak a word that renewed your mind to better understand our Heavenly Father? Was not Noël one of your greatest teachers when it came to learning about the love of the Bridegroom? Did not most of life’s learning come from a source other than a male professor or a qualified leader of the church?

If our seminaries are to do more than transfer information, and if the goal of our seminaries are to shape the hearts and the minds of the next generation so that they can bring the Kingdom of Heaven to all of society – both inside and outside of the church – then I believe men, women, children, and all of creation is qualified to teach our future pastors.

Perhaps my biggest concern is that we may be quick to misinterpret what you said, thus believing that there is a hierarchal preference of learning for the aspiring pastor, with the most qualified form being that of male seminary professors. I do not assume this is what you believe. Nor am I claiming that this was your claim. I am simply saying that your response could easily be misinterpreted by the readership to mean that on the basis on complementarianism, only male teachers are qualified to contribute to the learning that will shape an aspiring pastor’s mind and heart for ministry. This is the basis in which I raise my concern. 

Mr. Piper, my response is not to disagree with your statement as much as it is to seek for clarity in what was said – so that I and everyone who reads your response may gain a clearer biblical understanding of who is qualified to train, teach, and guide the heart and mind of this next generation of ministers.

[vulvapeople]

For the last few days, we’ve seen the headlines about Randy Stair and his murderous rampage all over our news feeds. We’ve learned about Stair’s bizarre obsession with a Nickelodeon cartoon character. We’ve learned about his unapologetic admissions of racist, sexist, and homophobic prejudice.

We’ve also learned that Stair was a transgender woman; a male who claims to “feel” like a woman on the inside, somehow trapped in the wrong body.

On any other occasion, an admitted racist, sexist, homophobic white man who planned and executed a murder-suicide would illicit the publishing of several liberal op-eds on the same day. Yet, there seems to be an incredible reluctance when it comes to discussion of Stair’s transgender identity as it relates to his crimes.

It turns out that claiming a transgender identity is a coat of armor against justifiable criticisms of male violence. In a way, it’s magical. Even a homicidal bigot can be insulated from the wrath of social justice criticisms if he claims to be trapped in the wrong gender. Randy Stair is only one example.

In 2016, Dana Rivers, a transgender-identified white male, made headlines for murdering a black lesbian couple, Patricia Wright and Charlotte Reed, as well as their teenage son, Toto M. Diambu. Where was the liberal outrage? It seemed that when liberals did step forward to express their indignation, it had more to do with anger at Rivers being misgendered. The homicide of a black family at the hands of a white male didn’t seem to warrant a national discussion about transgender identity politics and male violence against women. It certainly didn’t inspire a conversation about liberal sexism, liberal racism, or the ridiculous reasoning behind the prioritization of a murderer’s identity preferences. Instead, the story faded into the ether almost as spontaneously as it came.

There are several others.

In 2014, transgender woman Donna Perry was charged with three counts of first-degree murder. His victims were three women known to law enforcement as prostitutes. Where were the liberal think-pieces on protections for sex workers? In 2016, charges against Julianna Fialkowski, a transgender woman who was accused of raping and choking a female victim, were dropped because of supposed inconsistencies in the victim’s story. Where were the liberal protests against disbelieving the victim? This year, Patrick “Tara” Pearsall was convicted for sexually assaulting two pregnant teenagers. Where were the liberals? Perhaps a better question to ask would be:

Why do transgender-identified males consistently receive the utmost sensitivity from liberals, even when they harm women?

Consistently, liberals will claim to promote women’s rights—perhaps even toss around some woke-sounding, intersectional feminist rhetoric if it helps them validate that claim. Yet, those same “woke” liberals don’t have a problem tossing women directly under the proverbial bus if it means preserving their social justice street credibility. I’d say this is especially true for white liberals, most of whom are very well-versed in the language of white guilt.

In a political paradigm in which virtue signaling carries as much social capital as oppression itself, the worse thing a white liberal can do is sacrifice his standing as an ally to the marginalized by offering criticism of any group over which white privilege is supposedly wielded. This means that transgender-identified males, even those who are responsible for harm against females, must be prioritized over the “cis” women whom they claim are oppressing them. Somehow, refusal to do so will elicit accusations of racism or some other privilege nobody knew that white liberals had in the first place.

…but what does this mean for women?

It means that we must suspend all reason and pretend that women have the social, political, economic, or cultural power to oppress males for our own benefit. By extension, it means we have to pretend that transgender women who threaten females with violence are just oppressed people raging against their oppressors—–not violent males doing what violent males have always done to females.

It means that a black woman who expresses skepticism over the call to respect Dana Rivers’s pronouns can simply be dismissed as an agent of “white feminism”. By extension, it means that a black woman can never have a legitimate cause for complaint at being told to respect a white male who brutally murdered a black lesbian couple and their black son.

It means that liberals will take issue with whether the mainstream media is acknowledging Randy Stair’s gender identity before they take issue with the heinous nature of his crimes. Better yet, it means that liberals will have to remain silent about the fact that transgender women have the same rates of violence as any other male. It turns out that these inconvenient truths might give us cause to question the wisdom of allowing males to identify their way into female-exclusive accommodations.

Even more than all of that, it means that liberalism can no longer be presumed the political home of feminism as males will always be affirmed and validated over females—even males who harm females. Ultimately, there is little debate over whether or not transgender women who commit violence acts are wrong. There are very few liberals in this world who believe that a transgender woman’s anger justifies murder. However, liberal silence on abuses against females sends us all some very clear messages about how liberals prioritize females.

That is to say, they don’t prioritize females, at all.

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Why are you against feminism? From what I can see of your blog you are just as judgmental and rude as you accuse feminists to be. I don't know much about your fundamental beliefs but at least feminism is built on the basic idea of equality and justice. I think you might feel like feminism is obnoxious? Or maybe that feminists attack people to much? But my issue with that is that it seems like you are attacking feminists with just as much fervor and less of a moral basis.

I’m going to go easy as you’ve probably only just discovered feminism and you admit in your other messages that you have only read a few of my posts. But why didn’t you read more before asking why I’m against it? 

If you did bother reading any of my posts, you’d understand my critique goes a lot further than “feminists are rude.” I can tell you are used to debating people who really don’t know what they’re talking about, so all you have to do is throw around the whole “supporting feminism is the moral thing to do and if you don’t then you are immoral” tactic and you’ve won. 

In your second message, you affirm this by saying, “Feminism is about equality between men and women, and if you claim to be a moral person, all of those are objectively good things.“ You did the same in this message as well, saying I attack feminism with little moral basis. Well, you asked why I’m against feminism and you’ve just provided a perfect example. 

It’s these sly, sneaky manipulations which feminists have successfully used to shame and silence opposition for years. If you don’t agree with feminism, you hate women, equality and morality. If you don’t agree with Black Lives Matter, you hate black people. If you don’t agree with illegal immigration, you hate all immigrants. It’s all the same and it it only ever comes from one side. So for someone who believes feminism is the epitome of morality, what exactly is feminism doing that justifies this belief that supporting feminism makes you a moral person? 

You repeat over and over that feminism is about equality for men and women which I’m sure you often whip out the cute dictionary definition to prove it. Though you have to realize the gig is up, that used to be a convincing way to pull the wool over eyes, “how could you possibly be against equality between the sexes” but forty years later and we’re still waiting to find out what exactly feminism has done that benefits both men and women. Years of crooked actions cannot hide behind a dictionary definition. 

Let’s look at feminism’s most common grievances, better known as lies, and you tell me why you think we are immoral for not playing along: 

Wage gap myth: Where misogynist businesses are deliberately breaking the law and losing billions in profits by paying men more than women, simply because America hates women. Also, you’d think if women were being unfairly underpaid, they would sue their employer since there’s already two major laws that are enforced to prevent pay discrimination and they would be perfectly in their rights to sue, yet they can never find evidence of it once facts and honesty become a requirement, I wonder why that would be? The myth also collapses the moment you realize the entire framework of it is not comparing an apple to an apple, it’s the obvious difference in wages between a male accountant and female cleaner instead of comparing a male accountant to a female accountant and a male cleaner to a female cleaner. 

Male privilege myth: Where despite the fact men are less educated, less graduate, have shorter life expectancies, commit the most suicide, the majority of victims of all violent crime, make up nearly all workplace and service deaths, nearly all those incarcerated, have less legal rights, do society’s most disgusting, dangerous and backbreaking jobs, expected to give up their life for a woman and receive little to no support or charity for men’s issues and diseases, no shelters or protection, no grants or gender-based scholarships, males are still born into a world of privilege where they can sail through life with a breeze while being responsible for women’s oppression by merely existing.

Toxic masculinity: Where the behavioral differences and the core identity of being a male is toxic and not only affects all boys but it’s also responsible for harming women. This framework allows feminists to contextualize all of the bad experiences they’ve had with men under a broad umbrella of “toxic masculinity.” It’s the best way to blame men as a whole without directly pointing the finger. If masculinity is really toxic, then what’s the remedy? We already know the answer. Stripping, or feminists would call it liberating men from their masculinity and then they go on to encourage women to be ass kickin, beer drinkin bosses who’s life is work and having onenightstands with a whole bunch of weak men. 

Rape culture myth: Where America supports and tolerates a “rape epidemic” known as ‘1 in 5′ (which is a myth itself) and the only way to overcome it is to pull young boys aside in class and tell them over and over that they are potential rapists and rape is wrong. Have you noticed all of these injustices perfectly sums up life under Islamic law by the way. Instead rape culture in America is statues and Blurred Lines. RAINN, the largest anti-rape organization in the country, says “In the last few years, there has been an unfortunate trend towards blaming “rape culture” for the extensive problem of sexual violence on campus. It is important not to lose sight of a simple fact: Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.” 

Then we have manspreading, mansplaining, the male gaze, heteronormativity, crush the patriarchy. Does any of this scream “equality between the sexes”? Or does it have a nasty whiff of deceit, lies and attempts to demonize men and provoke an oppressor-victim paradigm that helps give feminism the power it needs to continue to entice more impressionable young women and continue to rake in the masses of donations and funding? 

And yet you still pretend to have the moral high ground. You have to understand, most people who oppose feminism were once a feminist. You’re under the naive impression that we have no real reason for not supporting it and we “just don’t understand.” Here’s the problem, the majority of women aren’t feminists and it’s because they do understand feminism. Indoctrination only works on an empty mind. That’s the problem. There’s nothing you can “teach” or “explain” to us that we didn’t once say ourselves. 

I understand you’re probably used to arguing with anti-feminists who just shitpost and troll feminists as they have nothing better to do. But the next time you spam my inbox with dumb messages saying I’m immoral and I don’t understand feminism, please come equipped with something a little better. 

All you’re doing is proving my point: Feminism is an emotion-driven scam with no evidence, no facts or credibility. It’s a girls club where only those who agree are allowed membership, if you’re a conservative woman, Trump supporting woman, a pro-life woman or a woman who even slightly steps out of the ideological party line, you join the straight white men as the enemy. Feminism stopped standing for equality a long time ago. 

I already have a feeling you’re not going to reply so I won’t go on. Though if you want to talk more or you’ve managed to find a solid argument against anything I’ve said, please feel free to message me at any time :) xx 

[dgrwomenscaucus]

Oppression is not an attitude, it’s about systems of power.

by Lierre Keith / Deep Green Resistance.

At this moment, the liberal basis of most progressive movements is impeding our ability, individually and collectively, to take action. The individualism of liberalism, and of American society generally, renders too many of us unable to think clearly about our dire situation. Individual action is not an effective response to power because human society is political; by definition it is built from groups, not from individuals. That is not to say that individual acts of physical and intellectual courage can’t spearhead movements. But Rosa Parks didn’t end segregation on the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. Rosa Parks plus the stalwart determination and strategic savvy of the entire black community did.

Liberalism also diverges from a radical analysis on the question of the nature of social reality. Liberalism is idealist. This is the belief that reality is a mental activity. Oppression, therefore, consists of attitudes and ideas, and social change happens through rational argument and education. Materialism, in contrast, is the understanding that society is organized by concrete systems of power, not by thoughts and ideas, and that the solution to oppression is to take those systems apart brick by brick. This in no way implies that individuals are exempt from examining their privilege and behaving honorably. It does mean that antiracism workshops will never end racism: only political struggle to rearrange the fundamentals of power will.

There are three other key differences between liberals and radicals. Because liberalism erases power, it can only explain the subordinate position of oppressed groups through biology or some other claim to naturalism. A radical analysis of race understands that differences in skin tone are a continuum, not a distinction: race as biology doesn’t exist. Writes Audrey Smedley in Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview,

Race originated as the imposition of an arbitrary value system on the facts of biological (phenotypic) variations in the human species.… The meanings had social value but no intrinsic relationship to the biological diversity itself. Race … was fabricated as an existential reality out of a combination of recognizable physical differences and some incontrovertible social facts: the conquest of indigenous peoples, their domination and exploitation, and the importation of a vulnerable and controllable population from Africa to service the insatiable greed of some European entrepreneurs. The physical differences were a major tool by which the dominant whites constructed and maintained social barriers and economic inequalities; that is, they consciously sought to create social stratification based on these visible differences.3

Her point is that race is about power, not physical differences. Racializing ideology was a tool of the English against the Irish and the Nazis against the Jews, groups that could not be distinguished by phenotypic differences—indeed, that was why the Jews were forced to wear yellow stars.

Conservatives actively embrace biological explanations for race and gender oppression. White liberals usually know better than to claim that people of color are naturally inferior, but without the systematic analysis of radicalism, they are stuck with vaguely uncomfortable notions that people of color are just … different, a difference that is often fetishized or sexualized, or that results in patronizing attitudes.

Gender is probably the ultimate example of power disguised as biology. There are sociobiological explanations for everything from male spending patterns to rape, all based on the idea that differences between men and women are biological, not, as radicals believe, socially created. This naturalizing of political categories makes them almost impossible to question; there’s no point in challenging nature or four million years of evolution. It’s as useless as confronting God, the right-wing bulwark of misogyny and social stratification.

The primary purpose of all this rationalization is to try to remove power from the equation. If God ordained slavery or rape, then this is what shall happen. Victimization becomes naturalized. When these forms of “naturalization” are shown to be self-serving rationalizations the fall-back position is often that the victimization somehow is a benefit to the victims. Today, many of capitalism’s most vocal defenders argue that indigenous people and subsistence farmers want to “develop” (oddly enough, at the point of a gun); many men argue that women “want it” (oddly enough, at the point of a gun); foresters argue that forests (who existed on their own for thousands of years) benefit from their management.

With power removed from the equation, victimization looks voluntary, which erases the fact that it is, in fact, social subordination. What liberals don’t understand is that 90 percent of oppression is consensual. As Florynce Kennedy wrote, “There can be no really pervasive system of oppression … without the consent of the oppressed.”4 This does not mean that it is our fault, that the system will crumble if we withdraw consent, or that the oppressed are responsible for their oppression. All it means is that the powerful—capitalists, white supremacists, colonialists, masculinists—can’t stand over vast numbers of people twenty-four hours a day with guns. Luckily for them and depressingly for the rest of us, they don’t have to.

People withstand oppression using three psychological methods: denial, accommodation, and consent. Anyone on the receiving end of domination learns early in life to stay in line or risk the consequences. Those consequences only have to be applied once in a while to be effective: the traumatized psyche will then police itself. In the battered women’s movement, it’s generally acknowledged that one beating a year will keep a woman down.

While liberals consider it an insult to be identified with a class or group, they further believe that such an identity renders one a victim. I realize that identity is a complex experience. It’s certainly possible to claim membership in an oppressed group but still hold a liberal perspective on one’s experience. This was brought home to me while I was stuck watching television in a doctor’s waiting room. The show was (supposedly) a comedy about people working in an office. One of the black characters found out that he might have been hired because of an affirmative action policy. He was so depressed and humiliated that he quit. Then the female manager found out that she also might have been ultimately advanced to her position because of affirmative action. She collapsed into depression as well. The emotional narrative was almost impossible for me to follow. Considering what men of color and all women are up against—violence, poverty, daily social derision—affirmative action is the least this society can do to rectify systematic injustice. But the fact that these middle-class professionals got where they were because of the successful strategy of social justice movements was self-evidently understood broadly by the audience to be an insult, rather than an instance of both individual and movement success.

Note that within this liberal mind-set it’s not the actual material conditions that victimize—it’s naming those unjust conditions in an attempt to do something about them that brings the charge of victimization. But radicals are not the victimizers. We are the people who believe that unjust systems can change—that the oppressed can have real agency and fight to gain control of the material conditions of their lives. We don’t accept versions of God or nature that defend our domination, and we insist on naming the man behind the curtain, on analyzing who is doing what to whom as the first step to resistance.

The final difference between liberals and radicals is in their approaches to justice. Since power is rendered invisible in the liberal schema, justice is served by adhering to abstract principles. For instance, in the United States, First Amendment absolutism means that hate groups can actively recruit and organize since hate speech is perfectly legal. The principle of free speech outweighs the material reality of what hate groups do to real human people.

For the radicals, justice cannot be blind; concrete conditions must be recognized and addressed for anything to change. Domination will only be dismantled by taking away the rights of the powerful and redistributing social power to the rest of us. People sometimes say that we will know feminism has done its job when half the CEOs are women. That’s not feminism; to quote Catharine MacKinnon, it’s liberalism applied to women. Feminism will have won not when a few women get an equal piece of the oppression pie, served up in our sisters’ sweat, but when all dominating hierarchies—including economic ones—are dismantled.

There is no better definition of oppression than Marilyn Frye’s, from her book The Politics of Reality. She writes, “Oppression is a system of interrelated barriers and forces which reduce, immobilize and mold people who belong to a certain group, and effect their subordination to another group.”5 This is radicalism in one elegant sentence. Oppression is not an attitude, it’s about systems of power. One of the harms of subordination is that it creates not only injustice, exploitation, and abuse, but also consent.

Subordination has also been defined for us. Andrea Dworkin lists its four elements:6

1. Hierarchy

Hierarchy means there is “a group on top and a group on the bottom.” The “bottom” group has fewer rights, fewer resources, and is “held to be inferior.”7

2. Objectification

“Objectification occurs when a human being, through social means, is made less than human, turned into a thing or commodity, bought and sold … those who can be used as if they are not fully human are no longer fully human in social terms.”8

3. Submission

“In a condition of inferiority and objectification, submission is usually essential for survival … The submission forced on inferior, objectified groups precisely by hierarchy and objectification is taken to be the proof of inherent inferiority and subhuman capacities.”9

4. Violence

Committed by members of the group on top, violence is “systematic, endemic enough to be unremarkable and normative, usually taken as an implicit right of the one committing the violence.”10

All four of these elements work together to create an almost hermetically sealed world, psychologically and politically, where oppression is as normal and necessary as air. Any show of resistance is met with a continuum that starts with derision and ends in violent force. Yet resistance happens, somehow. Despite everything, people will insist on their humanity.

Coming to a political consciousness is not a painless task. To overcome denial means facing the everyday, normative cruelty of a whole society, a society made up of millions of people who are participating in that cruelty, and if not directly, then as bystanders with benefits. A friend of mine who grew up in extreme poverty recalled becoming politicized during her first year in college, a year of anguish over the simple fact that “there were rich people and there were poor people, and there was a relationship between the two.” You may have to face full-on the painful experiences you denied in order to survive, and even the humiliation of your own collusion. But knowledge of oppression starts from the bedrock that subordination is wrong and resistance is possible. The acquired skill of analysis can be psychologically and even spiritually freeing.

Once some understanding of oppression is gained, most people are called to action.

Read more from the Deep Green Resistance book online.

[chipotle]

Cotton, hay, and rags: giving bias the veneer of rationality

As you’ve surely heard by now, a mid-level engineer at Google—he’s anonymous, so I’ll call him Mr. Rationalface—wrote a memo called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” in which he argued that “differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.” (His words, not mine.) In response, recently former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger wrote the simply-titled “About this Googler’s manifesto,” in which he argues it’s manifest bullshit. (My words, not Zunger’s).

Between the time I started writing this and now, news has come out that Mr. Rationalface has been fired. I’ll come back to that.

I’ve been thinking about responses I saw on Hacker News to Zunger’s piece. The most common defense of Mr. Rationalface’s thesis was to restate its core premise: This whole drive for diversity rests on the premise that there’s no difference between men and women, but the falsehood of that is apparent to even the most casual of observers.

This is a common rhetorical trick I see in this particular corner of the internet (i.e., rationalists who want to rationally prove that PC SJW WTFery is irrational): restate the opposing premise incorrectly, then commence a full frontal assault on the restatement. Of course there are biological differences between men and women; who claimed otherwise? Mr. Rationalface proceeds from here to assert the following totally objective, non-sexist truths:

Women are more open toward feelings and aesthetics, while men are more open to ideas.

Women have more empathy than men, while men have more interest in systematizing.

Women are gregarious and agreeable; men are assertive!

Women are more neurotic, with higher anxiety and lower stress tolerance.

Women are irrational, that’s all there is to that! Their heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags!

Whoops! While the first four are from Mr. Rationalface, that last bullet point was from noted academic rationalist Henry Higgins.

A fairer way to state the “pro-diversity” case is more like, some perceived differences between men and women used to justify associating higher-paying professions with men are rooted in dubious stereotypes. And we can test whether there’s prima facie evidence for that by looking at the actual history of software engineering. In the early days, it was women’s work: it was seen as more like filing and typing than math and logic—the hard stuff was the hardware. But by the mid-1970s, it was men’s work. But the work hadn’t changed. What changed was the perception of the work: society started to consider it high-status white collar work rather than low.

I know that—irony of ironies—I’m trying to rationally analyze an argument that is, at its heart, not about rationality at all. It’s about reclaiming ground in the Great Culture War. If the gender disparity in the engineering workforce at Google reflects something broken in their culture, it demands a solution that involves taking action one might call “affirmative.” PC! SJW! Cthluhu fhtagn! So don’t even allow the possibility that the problem is in the culture. If the problem isn’t in the culture, it must be in women. The solutions offered must involve working with and around Essential Feminine Nature.

But it’s the argument style that leaves me fascinated, the same style employed by many of his defenders, and a style that echoes through GamerGate, the Sad Puppies and other geeky outposts in the Great Culture War. If I may engage in some stereotyping myself, it’s an argument style beloved of folks who are mostly white, mostly male, mostly under 30, and mostly a little too sure of their razor-sharp logic. I don’t think this kind of guy gets redpilled because of deep-rooted anxiety over losing white male privilege—I think they get redpilled because it’s just effin’ cool to be told you’re one of the few people smart enough to see reality as it is, rather than buying into the conventional wisdom that traps all the other sheeple. This is why so many fringers, from anti-vaxxers to white supremacists, construct elaborate, nearly-logical theories built on a stack of unexamined premises. This is obvious to the most casual of observers, so let’s move on, they say, while the rest of us sheeple are making the time-out signal and saying wait, what?

Isn’t it obvious when premises are false? Isn’t this willful—and malicious—ignorance? Sometimes. If we’re honest with ourselves, more often than not. But the more boxes you tick on the cis-het-white-male line, the more advantages you get for no actual work on your part. You have, if I might be so bold, a rational self-interest in supporting arguments that those advantages are immutable nature, and attacking arguments that they’re uncomfortably squishy social constructs. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his social status depends on his not understanding it.”

So about Mr. Rationalface’s firing. If I were his manager, would I have canned him? I admit I’m not comfortable with hey, it’ll only chill the speech we don’t want; you can’t know that only the “right” group of people will take away exactly the message you intend to send. (Exhibit A: Hacker News.) But as Yonatan Zunger noted, a substantial number of Mr. R’s (former) coworkers were likely furious; he might as well have scrawled Does Not Work Well With Others, Especially Wimmen across his face with a Sharpie. From a—dare I say it—coldly rational standpoint, Google HR gets a firestorm no matter what, but keeping him risks a second, bigger firestorm when he shoots his mouth (or text editor) off to a coworker again.

I looked back at Hacker News briefly on the day of his firing and saw, well, what I expected. This is an outrage! This proves all the author’s points! This was not the anti-diversity manifesto the SJWs are claiming it is, it’s a well-written, polite, logical argument! It definitely had the appearance of logic, and it was debatably civil. But from its mischaracterization of the “pro-diversity” arguments through its “you’d agree with me if bias wasn’t blinding you to my truth” conclusion, it was precisely what its critics claimed it was. It’s easy to say Mr. Rationalface lost his job for not kowtowing to liberal groupthink, but sometimes a burning bridge is just a burning bridge.

[bornpurple]

So I realize that Rachel Dolezal is this really dated topic but my friend recently posted a story regarding cultural appropriation. And in our discussion on it I referenced the difference (from a black perspective) in the participation of Eminem vs Rachel Dolezal in "black culture" and community and how one came off as pretty acceptable and okay by black people and another came off as offensive. And I stated that intent + owning up to your [white] privilege is a big factor in what's okay vs not okay. Eminem for instance knows and states that he's taking a part in and profiting off of black culture/a black art form (one can reference some of his early lyrics) while also knowing that he's specifically non-black. Rachel Dolezal on the other hand is offensive because she does NOT acknowledge nor recognize that as a fact.

My friend then asked a very good follow up question (since he's cis and Desi/Singaporean and I'm trans and black) what the difference is between being trans racial (in the way that Rachel Dolezal states it, not the use of the term for trans racial adoptees) vs being transgender. After a bit of searching I realized that I couldn't find any good articles on it so I thought I'd just dissect the nuances myself. And after a bit of thinking I thought I'd copy/paste it here as well.

The initial question: “ Zade, great points, but I have to ask..in this world where we are having more and more conversations about the gender people identify with, are transracial people to be taken less seriously about the race they identify with?”

My response:

I wrote a long response but then my phone ate it so let me see if I can rehash. In summary I was saying that though race and gender are both a mixture of socially constructed concepts and biological markers they're also two separate things. Speaking of gender, it is a socially constructed class that is formed by both genetic and biological influences (nature) and experiences in the world (nurture). Though gender is socially constructed it seems to have some biological influence to it. Children often get a sense of their gender identity at around two or three. This is the age where they separate themselves into different play groups based off of who they view as similar to them and who they view as other, often prefer a certain set of toys, and usually model off of one parent or another. In cis people this aligns in the way you would expect it to, so for a cis boy it could look like him declaring that girls have cooties, only preferring to play with other boys, preferring trucks and trains over dolls, and wanting to wear his father's ties and hats. For trans people it could appear in a number of ways, such as not really understanding why their peers are separating themselves into alternate groups or mixing up preferences at different times if nonbinary, or preferring things seen as opposite to their assigned gender if binary trans (and probably getting shamed for it as in the case of young trans women which is why so many go through a hypermasculine period before coming out to overcompensate and remain safe and hidden). Though not every trans person experiences a strong gender identity in their youth and many only develop words for their internal feelings of dissonance later on in life or after several experiences have made it clear about the way they prefer to live, it is often thought that there is some sort of a genetic basis that ties into the formation of their identity in the same way there is for cis people even if it doesn't show up until later on. There's also the fact that majority of gender non-conforming kids actually grow up to be cis rather than trans, which is probably explained by the fact that existing as openly trans and transitioning in society doesn't have many benefits. It leads to unemployment, harassment, discrimination, and being beaten, raped or killed (especially for trans women of color). It's similar to being gay in society but with further chances of being ostracized. The majority of trans people come into their trans identity and their transition after many instances of being alienated, shunned from their families/friends/communities, recovering from suicide attempts, and constantly being belittled and disrespected along the way. Being gay is much more accepted now. Most people just see gay people as the same as them outside of their sexual preference. Trans people are still seen as aberrant, deviant and strange or criminal even within the lgbt community. There is no benefit to being trans in the eyes of society and despite how much media attention it's gotten now, the actual reality of being trans in the world has not yet shifted. In order for the identity to be held it follows that it would have a stronger genetic marker than a social one because if it were mostly socially based there would be no logical reason to exist in a trans space rather than a gender non-conforming cis space. It would be a lot easier and the risk of being a target of serious abuse, rape and death is lessened. Race on the other hand exists a bit different. Race is made up of both phenotypical differences (common features, skin color, common ancestry) and social experiences (shared history, common experiences of bigotry, communal "in" vs "out" group). There are some black people who do not feel a strong connection to the black community, usually due to ostracization within it (like multiracial people, black people with albinism, black geeks and queer people who are not seen as "black enough" due to not conforming to cultural norms and stereotypes). And there are of course several non-black people who feel a strong connection to the black community due to similar experiences or similar interests or what have you. The difference is that race was a socially constructed category devised to isolate and subjugate us, which was then flipped on its head and turned into a category to build common community and strength to fight back against oppressors. (When you think WHY black identity is brought up in society by black folk it's usually used in a way to uplift black people and bring them together against some sort of injustice being leveled against them. Think Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights Movement during the era where black people re-embraced afros and were re-exploring their historical African roots. Prior to that black people were forced to assimilate into white culture, straighten their hair, lighten their appearance in order to achieve the same boons. Now black people were embracing the very characteristics that were held in detest by the social class in power and fighting for equal rights at the same time. Similar to the Black Lives Matter movement. Black identity is embraced not only as phenotype and shared experiences but as a political weapon to combat societal injustice. If one hasn't experienced those things then how can they call themselves black? How can they be a part of the NAACP as a BLACK person and claim to have the same experiences and history as the other black people in the room? If Dolezal recognized her whiteness while also being frank about the fact that she identified with the black community and its struggle this would be a non-issue. But she treats blackness like a costume rather than an actual identity that has been formed based off of societal injustice done to people of our heritage. You could argue what TERFs do and say that trans women for instance haven't experienced what it's like to be a woman in the world and thus they can't call themselves a marginalized class. However these TERFs are ignoring the reality of what it is to be trans. The transfeminine experience is entirely different from the cis male experience. Even in a feminine cis male he could theoretically find community and shelter within certain groups of the cis male community who could bolster and affirm his identity (think metrosexuals and femme gay men). Transfeminine people are even ostracized from that and shamed as a part of those communities for being aberrant and weird. They are alone even within those communities because their sense of self is not validated as a man not on the same axis. Being a woman posits a very different experience than being a man, even a feminine one. There are many trans women who have written on the subject of how the socialization is different. I'm not exactly an expert on it since I haven't experienced it. But there are many articles on the internet. Basically the issue is trans women have not received male privilege during any time of their being misgendered as male. Thus while it is not the same experience as being a cis woman in society, it IS the experience of being a woman in society albeit a trans one, and that is what makes it very different from being a man.

Dolezal's position in society is as a white woman. She has not experienced the same issues that black people have simply by virtue of existing as black in America. She has not been shamed for identifying with or participating in black culturally rooted things. In fact white people are usually hailed and praised for participating in things outside of their culture. They are seen as creative and unique vs black people for instance who participate in those things and who are seen as "too ghetto" or "too militant" or "unprofessional". In the case of a trans woman there are no boons for her to participate in the social class of women. In the case of a white person participating in the social class of being black? They get all the affirmation, love, respect and attention while black people still get nothing. It's very strange. Also gender (aka gender identity) is a social construct mostly based off of gender norms (which are a social construct and change in accordance to their culture). Sex (aka genitalia, reproductive organs, chromosomes, hormonal makeup) is a biological reality but it is far more complicated than it's usually stated (it's not binary; intersex conditions and intersex people exist). Gender is often treated as the same as sex but actually it is only a social category based off of sex but entirely separate. There is some biological influence to what social category of gender you will or will not identity with but everything else is rather superfluous and can be put on or taken off at will. There is discrimination against people based off of gender and male privilege does exist but cis people by far have tons of privilege in comparison to trans people. And thus the scale goes more like cis men>cis women>trans men>trans women and nonbinary folk. (Some of these categories are intersectional and fluid though; for instance a stealth trans man might achieve equal privilege to a cis man until his trans status is announced) Trans women do not jump from cis male to cis female status nor are they trying to attain it. They jump from closeted transfeminine to out transfeminine status with all the danger that does entail. And even in closeted transfeminine status they don't have full access to the same privilege that men do by any measure due to ostracization and attacks. Race is a social category based off of phenotype primarily but shared discriminatory experiences secondarily. And in this way it is separate from the class of men or women. The class of women is expansive enough to include those experiences of both cis women AND trans women because they are both not seen as male and not treated as male in society and share the discrimination of being non-male and feminine-gendered in society. The class of race (at least in America) can ONLY be concluded based on existence of class of "other" with "other" being defined as having access to privilege that the initial racial class has been denied AND not being subject to the same bigotry that the initial racial class is often affronted with. Outliers include people who "pass" as the oppressor class (aka pass as white), people with albinism and multiracial people whom may not be usually read as black but as soon as their black status is noted are immediately relegated to the class of substandard racial status and treated accordingly. And thus due to common ancestry and experience they too have full access to the category of "black". A transracial white woman does not have this same hold on identity due to lack of commonality in experience/bigotry and lack of denial of privilege. With Dolezal she faces the opposite effect. Though she might pass as black and be accepted into the community due to phenotype, once it is found out that she is really white and has white ancestry, she will once again be relegated to the white class and be given privilege once more and affirmation and acceptance by society at large. To compare this with trans women. When trans women are found out to be non-cis/assigned male-at-birth they are NOT given cis male privilege and affirmed or accepted by society at large. They are taken down a notch in status yet again and treated as inferior and lacking humanity. Often times if a trans woman has not come out to her partner yet and her trans identity is exposed, her (statistically in these cases, usually cis male partner) will beat, rape or kill her simply by virtue of being trans (male-assigned-at-birth rather than female-assigned-at-birth). If she is in a circle/community of cis women and her history is exposed, she is also not relegated back up to cis-male privilege and status. She is seen as inferior and aberrant and as a threat and shunned from the community or treated as criminal. She does not have a safe circle where she can obtain male privilege again and be affirmed and accepted for her decisions and internal identity (as in the case of femme gay men or straight metrosexuals). Her status is forever inferior. Does this better denote why these classes are different? They're both defined slightly differently with different emphasis on certain aspects of the experience and they’re not equal in respect to how one is perceived when one's "true history" is exposed in contrast to their identity. There's also some sort of genetic basis for gender identity where there is none for racial identity [though there is the basis of phenotype] and racial identity is instead formed based off of common experiences with bigotry and injustice.

[emma-what-son]

Emma Watson: I've always said, 'forget the engagement ring, build me a library!'

From Independent.ie March 2017: She's playing "a Disney princess gone rogue", but after the backlash to that photo shoot, actress Emma Watson is walking a carefully plotted line between art and politics. Here, our reporter meets the guarded Beauty and the Beast star.

"Dan brought such a tenderness and dry humour to Beast, which made him all the more relatable," she gushes. He responds with an equally fawning: "Emma's chief motivation was being able to tell the kind of messages that are pertinent across generations. Not just about wearing Belle's yellow dress."

The largely sycophantic back and forth continues with words on Emma's immeasurable kindness and Dan's boundless generosity. There are tales of Steven's "hair-raising" adventures on stilts to achieve Beast's height, and Emma comparing her singing to legendary off-key chanteuse Florence Foster Jenkins, played by Meryl Streep in last year's eponymous biopic. How watching Katharine Hepburn screwball comedies provided huge inspiration for their characters.

Altogether, it's a perfect puff exercise in promotional Hollywood chit-chat orchestrated by Watson's team of rigid representatives.

Before today's audience with the former Harry Potter graduate, journalists had to sign a clause-filled contract. The immovable interview terms demanded no personal questions of any kind; no questions about her background; no mention of La La Land (Watson reportedly turned down Emma Stone's Oscar-winning role). Basically nothing beyond the fairy tale.

There were no such conditions for talking to former Downton Abbey star Stevens.

Now, "no personal questions" is a frequent request delivered by the movie PR folk but usually comes as a verbal, quiet warning not to venture down the path of messy divorce or criminal activity. 

A binding contract this inflexible, however, is something else entirely - something I have never encountered before.

'Brand Watson' is a carefully master- minded machine: one which boasts nearly 50million social media followers. Unfortunately for the 26-year-old star, a grey area exists between her unrelenting, admirable crusade for gender equality and her acting career.

In playing Belle in the €150million live-action revamp of the childhood classic, Watson has intentionally blended her politics with her art. The feminist campaigner has become a Disney princess. Which, in promotional discussion, invariably forces her to reveal herself, just a little.

"Innately at the centre of Beauty and the Beast was this heroine who went against the crowd, marched to the beat of her own drum," Watson tells me. "Fearlessly independent-minded, defiant. Nothing around her is affirming her choices. She's incredibly curious and learned and does things her own way. And I connected with her sense of defiance. She's a Disney princess gone rogue.

"I watched a lot of films as a young woman that I felt gave me less choices and constricted me, as opposed to making me feel that the world was limitless and possibilities were endless. And I also knew how important Belle is as a symbol because of how important she was to me as a young girl. She was my idol - my own personal heroine - so I know how important it was to get it right."

Getting Belle right in 2017 is indeed important, lest it jeopardise the work that Watson has done - and the reputation she has built as an intellectual and feminist crusader - previously.

Her public campaign for equality began with an impassioned address in front of the UN in the summer of 2014, heralding the HeForShe campaign, which calls for men to advocate for gender equality. In speaking out, the actor became both a symbol and a target. And her words and actions are now microscopically scrutinised as a result. For example, that same year, her criticism of fellow feminist Beyoncé's music videos for the Lemonade album - which Watson said in an interview exhibited a "very male voyeuristic experience" - was met with overwhelming backlash. Those quotes were resurrected this month when Watson's own shoot for Vanity Fair featured a photo (below) of her with her breasts partly exposed.

In the furore that followed, Watson was forced to defend the photograph. "It just always reveals to me how many misconceptions and what a misunderstanding there is about what feminism is," she said in an interview with news agency Reuters.

"Feminism is about giving women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women. It's about freedom; it's about liberation; it's about equality. I really don't know what my t**s have to do with it. It's very confusing." It's left Watson wedged firmly between a rock and a hard place. And today, when I push her on that difficult position (and much to the horror of her stern publicist), she delivers an uncharacteristically human response.

"To be that public about my opinions and feelings, you can't say something like that and not walk the walk. If you're going to do that, well, I have to live by this. And taking a stance on things doesn't make life easier - it definitely makes things more complicated."

She pauses for thought, perhaps sensing a vulnerability to her words that she then attempts to counter. "You know, the battles I fought and I fight make what I do feel much more worthwhile and it gives me much more of a sense of purpose. And I'm glad that I get actively involved. But it's not easy. Ultimately, I follow my heart because that's all I can do."

There's no doubting that Beauty and the Beast is a passion project for Watson. Directed by Bill Condon - the man behind Dreamgirls and Chicago - the lavish epic is a beautiful spectacle, largely modelled on the 1992 classic, the first animation to receive a Best Picture Oscar nomination. Alongside Stevens and a starry cast including Ewan McGregor as Lumière, Emma Thompson as Mrs Potts and Ian McKellen as Cogsworth, Watson shimmers as Belle, the wayward outsider, stifled by her insular village surrounds.

When she stumbles on the Beast's castle where her father, played by Kevin Kline, is imprisoned, she sacrifices herself and takes his place. She soon learns that Beast and his servants are cursed by a spell which can only be broken by true love.

"It's literally your childhood fantasy," Watson explains, in her signature clipped tones. "I watched that film with a sense of wonderment probably a thousand times, much to the annoyance of my parents. And to actually be in that dress, riding Philippe [the horse], to be wandering around that beautiful castle set, it was amazing. I also felt an immense responsibility. While it was me playing the role, there's a huge pressure because Belle - she's an archetype, she's a symbol, she's every girl. If I do my job well, she belongs to everyone, not just to me."

Watson claims that much modernisation was needed to bring the new version up to date. "The original was released in 1992; now it's 2017: things have moved on a lot from then. I think the film would fall flat if they didn't speak to the times we're in now."

Director Bill Condon says Watson (who today is clad in a monochrome bustier and trousers by Carmen March, one of the many ethically sourced outfits worn for the Beauty promotional tour and documented on her new Instagram page, @the_press_tour) was at the heart of Belle's feminist reinvention.

"She was involved in everything having to do with Belle's environment and costumes. She was so meticulous in the meaning of every costume change, about wearing the appropriate boots and about the dress she wears in the village having pockets.

"Also, Belle was as much an inventor as her father, which was hinted at in the animation. Here we have her doing her own calculations. Emma suggested we could do more with her alone in her own specific world, which led to a washing machine in a well. That was all Emma."

Belle's love of literature is something Watson was also keen to play up. And small wonder, since she founded an online feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf, which boasts nearly 175,000 members. "When Belle enters Beast's library, that's not just her dream - that's mine," Watson says. "I love how she swings along on those wheelie ladders, climbing these elevated storeys of books. And, you know, I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library."

For both Stevens and Watson, Beauty and the Beast marks an opportunity to finally eclipse their signature roles in Downton and Harry Potter, respectively. Do they relish that thought?

Her publicist's nostrils flare slightly, while Watson shyly squirms in her seat. Stevens, however, gratefully responds.

"It's certainly not a burden," he says. "Downton changed my life and I know [Harry Potter] changed Emma's. The privilege of that and to carry forward with roles like this adds to the canon."

"And Emma?" I ask. She hesitates slightly. It's a perplexing display for a question so tame. "I think that I just feel really lucky. For me, Belle was my childhood heroine; [the film] came out two days after I was born. And then, in my early teens, it was about idolising Hermione. So to be given the chance to play my two childhood idols is probably a very unique and rare experience for an actress.

"And I think," she continues, "I think I came out of this with more confidence, with more skills. And more belief in myself. Because when I came off Potter and decided to go to university, that wasn't a career decision the people I worked with were pleased about. But I kind of… I try to stay true to whatever whisper I'm getting from myself and I hope that will see me through. That's all I can do really. Otherwise, if I don't listen to myself, I'd feel a bit lost in it all."

Difficult to imagine Emma Watson, the twentysomething movie mogul and ambassador for human rights, feeling lost. And given the rigorous conditions attached to today's interview, one could easily question whether these humble claims are just part of the act.

Meeting the star today, however, it seems that, under the shiny veneer and terse brand control, lies a grounded spirit and decent human being trying to do some good. Hopefully, she'll stay the course as a campaigner and not become a total princess.

[mrlnsfrt]

Turning the Hearts of The Fathers

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” - Malachi 4:5-6 ESV

I know that many interpret this text to mean that Elijah will once again walk the earth before the end of times. However, texts like, Luke 1:17, and Matthew 11:14; 17:12-13 clearly indicate that John the Baptist fulfilled this prophecy with regards to preparing the way for the earthly ministry of Jesus. With this in mind, I find it perfectly appropriate to interpret this prophecy found in Malachi 5:5-6 to God’s people who are expecting Jesus to come again. I don’t think it is difficult to believe that there will be an ultimate fulfillment of this prophecy before the second coming of Jesus. I believe that we, God’s followers, are called to go out in the power and spirit of Elijah and proclaim God’s message to the world. I would say this goes hand in hand with the three angelic messages of Revelation 14:6-12. There is a tendency to make Revelation about the distant future, or the middle east, but I believe that it applies to our lives today. Angels are messengers, and we are God’s messengers, called to proclaim the eternal gospel to everyone!

Then I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth—to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people— saying with a loud voice, “Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment has come; and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water.” - Revelation 14:6-7 NKJV

I find that this message is one that helps us remain focused on our mission, to proclaim the gospel. It is also a message that promotes unity since the message has to go to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people. It also provides unity because it reminds us that God created us, and as His creatures we are of equal value, not to mention that the gospel is all about Jesus’ death for our sins, making our lives of infinite value. If we focus on our role as messengers of God to proclaim the gospel to the whole world it would destroy racism.

On a side note, I just learned that the entire title of Darwin’s Origin of Species is actually

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Does that title make you a little uncomfortable in light of current events? Does the idea of a favored race make you uncomfortable? It should. So many christians have turned their back on the biblical account of creation, and now they want to claim how we are all created in God’s image. How can you embrace evolution and want to quote Genesis 1:27.

God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. - Genesis 1:27 NET Bible

Back to my main line of thought. We ought to busy ourselves with the prophetic proclamation of the gospel in the context of God as our creator and Jesus as our redeemer and the soon return of Jesus in power and glory! Of course, we can only do this through the power of the Holy Spirit. On this post, however, I want to focus on the words of Malachi 4:6

And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” - Malachi 4:5 ESV

I have been reading about privilege and systemic racism and trying to better understand the history and the forces at play in our current situation here in the United States. I am aware that this is a complex issue and I am not going to address it now. But one point that I read and heard repeatedly is how detrimental the absence of a father is for children. Being reminded of this is what got me thinking about this passage. Could it be that part of proclaiming the gospel and preparing the world for the second coming of Jesus involves encouraging fathers to be involved in the lives of his children? I know you can read the text as a general calling for parents, but in light of Father’s Day being this Sunday I would like to take this opportunity to address fathers specifically. I don’t want anyone to feel left out, and much of what I will say should be beneficial for all to consider, but I will repeatedly address fathers on this post and I hope you can be understanding.

God as a Father

The Bible repeatedly refers to God as Father.

But now, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. - Isaiah 64:8 ESV

Fathers.

Think about this.

The way you treat your daughter, the way you treat your son, will shape how they view and relate to God. If you forget everything else I write remember this point. This is a massive responsibility!

I had the opportunity to listen to William Paul Young, the author of The Shack, and he shared how it took him a long time (30+ years? I don’t remember exactly) to wipe the face of his father off of the face of God. That hit me hard. I was not a father at the time, I was a student. That was the first time that I realized the incredible responsibility fathers have. When a father is abusive or absent, it may take the child decades to learn to see God as loving and involved.

The Importance of Fathers

Fathers do not only have a significant impact on how their sons and daughters view and relate to God. Fathers play an extremely important role in a child’s well-being and success. 

Statistics suggest that children in father-absent homes are more likely to be poor. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 44% of children in mother-only families were living in poverty, compared to only 12% of children living in a household headed by a married couple.

The U.S. Department of Health has reported similar statistics that connect absent fathers with poverty. In a 2012 report, they found that children living in female-headed households with no spouse present had a poverty rate of 47.6%, over 4 times the rate of married-couple families. (source)

There is no question that fathers do play an important part in their children's lives: the majority of studies affirm that an involved father can play a crucial role, particularly in the cognitive, behavioral, and general health and well-being areas of a child's life; having a positive male role model helps an adolescent boy develop positive gender-role characteristics; adolescent girls are more likely to form positive opinions of men and are better able to relate to them when parented by an involved father; it is generally accepted, under most circumstances, that a father's presence and involvement can be as crucial to a child's healthy development as a mother's; and experiencing validation of their importance in the general parenting literature has made fathers much more conscious of their value, which, in turn, leads to their greater desire to be involved. - Psychology Today

Fathers, you have the power to grant to your children “privilege” by being present and involved in the lives of your children. My goal here is not to discourage families where the father is absent, but to encourage all the fathers who are reading to become more involved in the lives of their children. If you are thinking about becoming a father, think through this carefully. If you are going to do it, be prepared to give it your all.

Responsibility

‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, And the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ - Ancient Proverb quoted in Jeremiah 31:29

The book of Jeremiah quotes an ancient proverb about fathers eating sour grapes and the children being born with sensitive teeth. Jeremiah is actually arguing against this proverb by stating that each person will die for their own iniquity and not that of their father (parents). But I find this to be an interesting proverb. Though God does not hold the sins of our parents against us, we do suffer because of the sins of our parents.

Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.” - Exodus 34:5-7 NKJV

God is able and willing to forgive, but your sinful behavior affects those around you. The sinful behavior of parents affects the next generations. The sinful behavior of fathers causes children to suffer. A father who chooses to abuse alcohol, to be violent, to lie, cheat, and steal, to do drugs, etc. are dooming their kids to a much more difficult life.

Here is my take on this. This is my opinion. But I believe that mother’s day is much more popular than father’s day because, even though mothers are not more perfect than fathers, they tend to stick around more often. There are always exceptions, I know. I had a whole post on mothers and the guilt they constantly feel. Mothers are not born better at raising children, they often just get more practice. I believe father’s day is not as popular because, as a rule, fathers are not as present.

With this in mind, this is my appeal to fathers. Fathers, I am not asking you to be perfect. I am not asking you to always know what to do. I am not asking you to make a ton of money. I am asking you to be present. Yes, work, yes, have a job, yes have a hobby, but make your presence in your family a priority. Overworking does not excuse your absence. Your kids prefer to have you than more money. Work enough, keep a job, put in your hours, but also put in your hours with your kids. Support the mother of your kids.

Remember earlier when I mentioned Genesis and creation as the best argument for equality and dignity of every human being. The same book establishes marriage and the family. Same God. You really should not cherry-pick. Don’t mention God as creator if you are going to reject His plans for the family. God created you and He knows that a family with a father and a mother is ideal. Be there for your wife. Be there for your children. You don’t have to be perfect. Just be present.

I don’t want to beat anyone up with the Bible. I don’t want to heap guilt over anyone’s head. But I do want to encourage every father who is reading to make an effort to be more present.

But you might argue that you’re having to work extra hard. Maybe you’re starting your own business. Maybe you’re extra busy due to COVID-19, maybe you’re working full time and taking classes online. If you are struggling to find time to invest in your kids I have good news for you. And this might surprise you, but it’s also found in Genesis. Genesis 1-2 presents us not only God as our creator and provider, not only does it give us the marriage of one man and one woman as God’s ideal for those who want to have a family, it also gives us the Sabbath. God gave us a day, 24hrs, to rest from all our labor and to invest in our relationships. Maybe because of your schedule or current condition you have limited time to spend with your kids during the week. Take advantage of the Sabbath. Spend time with your kids, teach them about God, share stories of what God has done for you. Tell your kids about what it was like when you were growing up. Tell them about how you overcame challenges and difficulties. Play with your kids, wrestle, laugh together, read together, tell jokes.

Be present.

You can do this. And you will be happier for it. Realizing that you are a role model for your children will motivate you to make better decisions. As a father you extra motivation to be kind, to listen, to play, to exercise, to eat healthily, and to avoid harmful substances and dangerous behavior. God wants to help you be a better father. There is every reason under the sun for you to become a better father.

Jesus is coming soon. Part of our mission as we wait for His return is to go out in the spirit and power of Elijah and turn the hearts of the fathers to their children. I hope you can join me in this mission.

For further reading:

Psychology today collection of articles on the power of Dads https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/collections/201206/the-power-dads

The Art of Manliness post On the Importance of Fathers https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-importance-of-fathers-according-to-science/

Father Absence Harms Children https://www.fatherhood.org/father-absence-statistic

[jackelyntam]

Research Nature; Nurture.

Sources for character nature versus nurture.

1.     “What does it mean that grit is “heritable”? Although an estimated 99.9% of your genes are exactly the same as mine and your neighbor’s and literally everyone else you know, a tiny fraction of human genes differ. And these genetic differences among people are correlated with differences in our physical and psychological characteristics.” “Our genes are chemically switched on and off throughout life, and in fact, most of the time, most of our genes are switched off. Until a gene is switched on, it doesn’t do anything. It’s like a script that sits, inert and unread, on an actor’s shelf. Epigenetics refers to changes in which genes are expressed.” https://characterlab.org/thoughts-of-the-week/nature-versus-nurture/

Angela Duckworth:  

Medium: web

Date accessed: 9/17/2019                    

“Nature versus Nurture.” Character Lab, 1 Mar. 2019, https://characterlab.org/thoughts-of-the-week/nature-versus-nurture/.

 Sometimes we think that character and “grit” are from nature, meaning that these qualities come from genetics, which is mostly true. From the genetic point of view, alike from what Angela said, we are all practically genetically the same. Now, here is the trick to this. Most of our genes are turned off. Angela compared our genes like a switch that is turned off. When that certain gene is turned on, let say for example a gene that causes “grit” like qualities, that person will have that ability to overcome challenges; to use this quality of grit to become a better person. Therefore, the main question we all have been wondering is, how do we turn it on? How do we turn on the gene’s that are on “off pilot”? In the point of view of the nurture side of things, the way to turn on is simply through experiences. Experiences and environment triggers something inside of us to “turn on” the gene that has been “off pilot”. Things that happen to a person will trigger a character that maybe unlikely, considering his/her background, to achieve. We may be born with character or attributes that may already be “turned on”. Yet, we may also have the ability to change or gain more attributes and qualities into our genetic pool. Therefore, nature versus nurture: it goes both ways. We are not born with nothing but we are also the creators of more. Creators to change and create more of who we are.

  2.     https://www.simplypsychology.org/naturevsnurture.html

 Saul McLeod, updated 2018

McLeod, S. A. (2018, Dec 20). Nature vs nurture in psychology

Medium: web article thing

Date accessed: 9/18/2019

“Characteristics and differences that are not observable at birth, but which emerge later in life, are regarded as the product of maturation. We all have an inner “biological clock” which switches on (or off) types of behavior in a pre-programmed way.”

Side: nature…. This quote is the side on nature. It contradicts nurture. They have a set gene already from genetically from the parents and linage…. And they are set in order already from the genetic side of things and are turned off… but will turn on at a certain time…. Not by environment but by genetics… like you have a set of genetic characteristics inside your DNA and some are turned off, but they will turn on. And each person don’t have the same.  

 Nature vrs nurture….McLeod says that they are in two side groups that are too the extreme with either one side or the other and they are called nature: nativism    nurture: empiricism believe that you are born with a blank slate… and you achieve more characteristics as you grow

 “A modern proponent is the American psychologist Arthur Jenson.  Finding that the average I.Q. scores of black Americans were significantly lower than whites he went on to argue that genetic factors were mainly responsible – even going so far as to suggest that intelligence is 80% inherited.”

yet, he goes on to say that most of the claims and results were biases because of the social norm during that time period.

This is nature point of view

Nurture point of view on this thought:

“More fundamentally, they believe that differences in intellectual ability are a product of social inequalities in access to material resources and opportunities.  To put it simply children brought up in the ghetto tend to score lower on tests because they are denied the same life chances as more privileged members of society.”

 The characteristics of intellect, on the nurture side of things, variable vary dependent on the environment of a person. This guy gives an example of children who are raised up in a environment that has a low income and low parental support. This example shows how different characteristics and personality might differ on the level of nurture. It shows record of children receiving low scores because of their lack of education and lack of support. The environment effecting the children.  

  3.     https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/1954-fuller-natureandnurture.pdf

By: John L. Fuller research associate division of behavior studies R. B. Jackson memorial laboratory Bar harbor, Main

Title: Nature and nurture: a modern synthesis

Date accessed: 9/18/2019

  “an affirmative answer to this question must be based on evidence that nature plays a part in forming the human personality. Nature, when contrasted with nurture, is generally considered to be equivalent to biological heredity.”

Today’s society paper that was written for the modern society….

 10/2/2019

From what I read.. so far… this subject of nature versus nurture has been guessed and researched everywhere and every time period. However, some of the researches are biases because of the social environment at the time period. Or the scientists have their own opinions at the start of their research. Making the science experiences biases. Therefore this article he wants to make more of this article not biases.

He gives an example of the importance of and the interest of knowing whether our personalities and character and future is based on parent’s nurture or on genetics. He gives a wonderful example of two boys fathers and their careers and he explains how it is easily explained that it might be the parents nurture and how they raised them… he goes on to say it’s easier to explain this through experiences of animals.

Looking the experiments of animals… rats and mice…

Looking at the diseases passed down by genetics and the affects by genetics down to how that affects personality and one’s future.

The genetic chart, the recessive and dominant characteristics and how genetic plays a big part because of disease disabilities causes affects to intelligence... and only side-effects are in the future… also that there might be a middle recessive and middle dominant recessive gene… that could affect what characteristics one may poses…. How there are a lot of factors that could go into estimating what genes from the parents can pass on to the child… factors like genes and the environment… the experiments varied..?

Environment and the heredity are intertwined…

 4.     https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19420889.2019.1592419

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uvu.edu/eds/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=9d355204-62de-4c3b-94e7-62e6b30c0c06%40sessionmgr4006&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#AN=edsdoj.641b8a94cfb24186be6cc5a5c6e2f316&db=edsdoj

Focuses on the nature: nature versus nurture…. Sexes….gender… is it possible that we are born one gender but raised with environment to promote the opposite gender… change genders? Are there other genders? Biologically are there other genders… like homo… more scientifically proven… biological…

 Comparison of animals and humans… evolution… as we look at the way animals are it helps us learn about ourselves as humans. The animals respect and define themselves as their genetic from. “a male is a male and a female is a female” and that animals have to play by their genetic sex role type. Humans fight for equality. For roles and characteristics that a man has. Is there a way where nurture and overcomes nature?

 In history of humans there is results where we find humans like animals playing as their genetic roles as male and female. However, as of now, over time humans are found that they want to be equal qualities; roles with each other.  

 Paraphrasing… : nature and nurture. They both have a play in creating one’s character. However, which one plays a dominant role in building character.

 Females and males… asexual and sexual… meaning sex is a mutation… xy chromosomes… xx… whether female or male are dominant… makes a claim that males are dominant because of the y… which is a gene called SRY however it isn’t all of the y but it is part of the y chromosome. Exactly it is the small short hand of the y chromosome. making the claim that since males have this SRY gene they are apparently more dominant. However, on the other hand, he claims that females might even be more dominant because of the extra x chromosome… leading back to the ancient days where they say that humans only had xx chromosomes rather than y… sex is a mutation creating the y in the x chromosome… creating women to more dominant because they still have the old ways of using both xx chromosomes.

Also, that the STR is also connected to TDF meaning the Testis determining factor… meaning the male reproductive cells… indicating that an organism is a male. Overall the y in a male meaning the STR/TDF is a protein that builds other genes that can mean dominance over a female.

This is related to nature and nurture because to tell whether females are dominant than males. Society has depicted that males by genetics; nature is stronger and dominant than females…

Having the xx chromosome may be depicted that are more dominant because was assumed that in the past all were xx chromosomes and that y was a mutation… meaning that the lasting longer xx chromosomes female features… which in turn causes females to live longer.

  5.     https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929317301196

“Development Holds the Key to Understanding the Interplay of Nature versus Nurture in Shaping the Individual.” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Elsevier, 20 June 2017, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929317301196.

(2017) in-text citations???

Accessed: 9/21/2019

Web article…

This article leans towards environment; nurture.

The most vulnerable stage in a human development is the adolescent stage of life. Adolescents who face hard environment events in their lives are mostly likely to have a great impact in their life to come.

An opinion on the vulnerable stage should be treated with environment effective treatment rather than medication… the adolescents is a stage of life that has a great impact on how a person will become physically and mentally.

This article…. Genetics versus environment effects to treating depression… examples are like medicated; genetics versus using the environment to cause the brain to improve depression in the brain.

The sensitive periods or stages in life are the important stages that define character. Or more like play a role in shaping a person. This is the out look of how the brain is the one that controls behaviors.

DNA is in the cells of ones body…

Brain: neuron science. Implied that genes and the experiences in a sensitive growth period trigger on other genes and rather say cognitive functions of the brain. Meaning that yes one can gain more intellect no matter what. One is not stuck in the same situation. As do babies grow do the brain develop… suggesting that the easer to develop and change cognitive behavior is the more likely to gain more intellect… meaning that at a younger age where it’s a sensitive time where the brain absorbs everything is the best time for increasing intellect. Not just intellect he says “wider range of cognitive behavior”

My thought: (however. Does one increase speed or easier to be more intellect based on genetics? In the end goal does one become like their biological family? In terms of increasing and the rate of building up more intellect? )

 (Mine own thought….: conscious thought own effort… and the natural man thought action… looking at animals… and how they is a difference between consciously doing something and just how natural selection to do something. Is it by who we are that we choose something or is by preference of consciously choosing. )

6.     http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uvu.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=9&sid=3b206ac1-9809-4b9a-9cfd-df7eb1deaa1a%40sessionmgr4008

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uvu.edu/eds/detail/detail?vid=8&sid=3b206ac1-9809-4b9a-9cfd-df7eb1deaa1a%40sessionmgr4008&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#db=pdh&AN=1936-01445-001

Journal type …. Pdf…. In documents in the labtop….

Shuttleworth, F. K. “The Nature versus Nurture Problem I Definition of the Problem.” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 26, no. 8, Nov. 1935, pp. 561–578. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1037/h0061615.

 “Do children resemble their parents in intelligence mainly for the reason that superior parents pass on superior endowments or mainly for the reason that superior parents provide superior care?”  

Taking IQ scores of a foster home and taking the variances… of which assumed that 64% where from heredity and #36% meaning that 8 IQ points heritable 6 IQ pints are environment.

… factors of environment… usually in the family… income. Status. intelligence from the parents having an effect on raising a child.

 Learning about how to control attributes based on hereditable can ultimately change our environment better. For example “better cattle, better plants” changing our animals organism around us. Scientists have been trying to find ways and work with lower animal studies on whether we are able to change the animals genes to become a better species. This can be applies to the workings on humans. Through breeding and test on organisms…

Eugenics:… he says that it really requires both environment and hereditable… to change the population to change the attributes of a generation… using the attack of eugenics… meaning they eliminate most of the population and leave the surviving one with great characteristics at which is wanted and let them breed.. he says once done with this eliminating most of the population of unsuccessful species then the environment comes into play to shape and form the next generation genes. So both are to play environment and genetics.

“One of general intelligence of the population is through a leveling-up of environmental influences.”

He looks at the change or effects as a whole group of people…. The differences in intelligence from one to another.. he says that the more effective the attack on environment on this group of the people the less difference there is on the intelligence on each person. Meaning the intelligence of each person has less of a difference between each person from a person.

The environment has a important role… in shaping a human. In their success. Even as a generation.

    7.       https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/teaching-holocaust-and-human-behavior/european-jewish-life-world-war-ii

 “European Jewish Life before World War II.” Facing History and Ourselves, https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/teaching-holocaust-and-human-behavior/european-jewish-life-world-war-ii.

Social public pressures on research… or rather conclusions or rather judgments on a person character or attributes based on genetics…

  “throughout history, many have sought to define Jews, incorrectly, as a single and uniform category of people with fixed characteristics, which racists and anti-Semites falsely believe are rooted in biology. But the lives Jews have lived around the world and throughout history can perhaps be characterized best by their immense diversity.”

 Paraphrasing…. Jews in realiaty are very diverse. There are Jews who are diverse in income and status. It isn’t because of birth that Jews are categorized as a sterotype. He explains that there are is stereotype going around based on race. He argues that there is a big diversity no matter where and whom you are born to.

Usually character was defined of who you were born to. And what race. That what race you were defined what characteristics you would have. Just like the Jew. Nazi has stereotyped them as a dirty race or rather a race that would bring down the society.

    8.     http://web.mnstate.edu/shoptaug/AntiFrames.htm

Untitled Document, http://web.mnstate.edu/shoptaug/AntiFrames.htm.

 “when Jews entered into Europe in large numbers during the Middle Ages, "they found themselves living among primitive Western people who were repelled by their superior intelligence and their clever business acumen.””

“An example of this type of prejudice can be found in the memoirs of a member of the slowly declining British aristocracy, who wrote that her social class resented the Jews "not because we disliked them individually, for some of them were charming and even brilliant, but because they had brains and understood finance."”

Paraphrase:

In this source they began to put blame and criticize the Jews on bad causes to their country. For example diseases unsuccessful business. They criticized and blamed Jews as a whole group of people in which can create misunderstanding… stereotypeing a race can result in accusing one person as something for their biological features rather than judging them based on their circumstances and environment in what made them who they are.  

  9.     http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uvu.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=9&sid=8233d836-93a5-4fcc-8751-f952a79f99e8%40sdc-v-sessmgr01

Brosnan, AnneMarie. “Representations of Race and Racism in the Textbooks Used in Southern Black Schools during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1861-1876.” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, vol. 52, no. 6, Jan. 2016, pp. 718–733. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1120017&site=eds-live.

This talks about how black people were portraited in the 1800’s ish… through the education at which was taught in the schools. Schools at the time were taught differently than the school we teach today. When teaching schools usually society would teach knowledge based on what they believed was right. At that time they believed that white people were significantly “superior” than the African Americans… They would design textbooks and book based on this knowledge that African American are less than the white race… in result of writing text books like this they would in reality they would try to have the African Americans stay in the fields and hard labor work areas.

 10.  https://www.verywellmind.com/experience-and-development-2795113

Cherry, Kendra. “How Different Experiences Influence a Child's Development.” Verywell Mind, Verywell Mind, 18 Aug. 2019, https://www.verywellmind.com/experience-and-development-2795113.

Intext (cherry, 2019)

She categories nurture side of things into categories… family, education, culture, peers, experiences, conditioning… She explains the how these factors can effect one’s character. During the times of child development is the most “crucial” time where one can be affected by the environment or experiences…

My thoughts: I agree…  that even in biological how one is formed or to who they are is the time period of growth and the time in which the gene gets turned on and off in the womb..

 However, she explains: peers have a major effect in changing character because of the impact on friends have to friends is a lot. How a child acts around some certain kids. And what kind of friend they make changes who they become.

[maxwellyjordan]

Symposium: Title VII did not and does not extend to sexual orientation or gender identity— in 1964 or today

Richard Epstein is the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Political and legal discourse has changed much since 1964, when sex was added, almost as an afterthought, to the list of forbidden grounds of discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. What seemed risqué in 1964 seems positively old guard in 2019. So one looming battle of the current Supreme Court term is whether Title VII covers the sexual-orientation claims raised in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia  and the gender-identity claims raised in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. EEOC. The short answer is: It doesn’t.

These two cases offer a stunning contrast in styles of judicial thought. Bostock affirms in a few short sentences a 1979 precedent that “discharge for homosexuality is not prohibited by Title VII.” The use of the term “homosexuality” dates the opinion. Harris, on the other hand, takes 35 dense pages to establish, first, that gender identity is a protected category under Title VII, and second, that the defendant’s religious practices and beliefs provide no constitutional refuge from Title VII under the free exercise clause.

Note the differences. Bostock takes stare decisis seriously. It is not willing to read any change in social mores into Title VII. Its implicit subtext is that only Congress, not the courts, should make fundamental changes in a venerable 55-year old statute. Harris takes the opposite judicial stance. Now, the longstanding Title VII rule is a liability, not an asset. The opinion’s constant use of such voguish terms as “stereotypical behavior” shows its real impatience with obsolete legal norms. Harris eagerly updates older statutes to reflect modern sensibilities.

One year ago, the odds were substantial that the Supreme Court would have followed the approach taken in Harris. The operative Supreme Court view on interpretation was encapsulated in Auer v. Robbins, a 1997 case that showed extreme deference to a federal regulator in the construction of a federal statute. In an opinion that he later came to regret, Justice Antonin Scalia held that deference was the norm, so that the latest interpretation of a disputed position trumped all prior ones. Auer migrated into areas of civil rights in Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit performed conceptual somersaults under Title IX to uphold the Office of Civil Rights’ conclusion that educational facilities should “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”

The temporal differences between Bostock and Harris reflect a deep difference in how to think about administrative — and indeed all — law. There is abundant evidence, as Professor Aditya Bamzai has shown, that the deference afforded to administrative agencies during the 19th and early 20th centuries was a deference to a consistent practice on such personnel issues as promotion and retirement benefits for government employees. This regnant theory tied in closely to the law of contract, which uses just these tools to construe open terms in various government contracts. On this view, it is the recent case — Harris — that deviates from the earlier practice, which makes it an apt target for a Supreme Court reversal. After all, judges interpret, not make, law.

The modern constitutional law under Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. and National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services reverses the flow of deference by privileging the most recent deviation from any consistent past practice, just as in Harris. The ability for trendy interpretations to remake the substantive law is evident in this move, and the question is whether the presentist version of administrative law can survive the all-critical recent Supreme Court decision in Kisor v.Wilkie, in which Justice Elena Kagan’s heroic efforts to salvage Auer from extinction resulted in a set of strategic concessions that should shipwreck today’s effort to expand Title VII. Her key passage reads:

First and foremost, a court should not afford Auer deference unless, after exhausting all the “traditional tools” of construction [citing Chevron], the regulation is genuinely ambiguous. A court must carefully consider the text, structure, history, and purpose of a regulation before resorting to deference. If genuine ambiguity remains, the agency’s reading must still fall “within the bounds of reasonable interpretation [citing Arlington v. FCC].”

But Auer stood for no such proposition. It sustained the narrow reading of the statutory exemption from the overtime provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act for “bona fide executive, administrative, or professional” employees, without once bothering to look at the text, structure, history or purpose of the FLSA. So just what is it that happens if we look at any of these issues in Bostock and Harris?

The basic statutory provision prevents discrimination “on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” The case of sex has always proved trickier than, say, race. There are so many legitimate reasons to discriminate on the basis of sex that Title VII acknowledges “bona fide occupational qualification[s]” (BFOQs) to limit the scope of that prohibition. And “good faith” did not impose strict scrutiny on the scope of the exception, at least in 1964. So actresses had no right to play male roles and men could be prevented from selling lingerie. BFOQs were part of a large tradition that allowed for sex differences in dormitories, athletics and the military. There is not a single word in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or in its legislative history or in contemporary social commentary, that cuts against the then-conventional wisdom that sex refers to the dichotomous division between men and women. The 1964 Act banned the use of “help wanted female” for secretaries or nurses.

The same conclusion applies, only more so, when looking at the attempt to read sex as sexual orientation. At the time of the statute, it was widely accepted that the state had the power to criminalize homosexual conduct, which it often did. In 1986, Bowers v. Hardwick read the history correctly when it accepted the old order, all to massive protests. But it becomes odd in the extreme to posit that sexual orientation both could have subjected someone to criminal punishment and simultaneously could have formed a protected category under Title VII.

The situation with gender identity is even clearer. In the context of Title VII there was no discussion of that topic at all in 1964. The issue jumped from nowhere onto center stage within the last decade or so—40 years too late to support the statutory claim in Harris. It cannot be that self-identification matters for sex, but is irrelevant for race or ethnicity. The statute just does not parse if identity claims carry over to race, color, religion or national origin.

I have little doubt that some form of statutory protection for gender identity will work itself into the law. But I am hardly sanguine that it will do so in a sensible way. The ease with which Harris condemns these sex stereotypes is deeply troublesome. The word “stereotype” is plagued with deep ambiguity because the conventional definition speaks of “a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.” To say “oversimplified” suggests that these hasty generalizations are wrong. But many so-called stereotypes are true generalizations, whether they deal with height or some psychological attribute of men and women. It is not that all men are taller than all women. It is true that the two distributions have different patterns, so that it is possible to set up a one-to-one correspondence by which each man is paired with a shorter woman.

The great danger today is that the state will find discrimination where there is none, because of its refusal to take into account these systematic differences. That same difficulty can apply to social attitudes. A funeral home is a sensitive locale, and it surely has some interest in the way in which its “public facing” employees appear to its anxious patrons coping with the loss of a loved one. It is fine for an appellate court to write coolly and acontextually that “the district court correctly determined that Stephens [the transgender worker] was fired because of her failure to conform to sex stereotypes.” But that court could not care less about the impact that Stephens’ dress could have on customers, and on the business success of Harris Funeral Homes. In this case, the Supreme Court should not put a match to the kindling, because no defensible mode of statutory construction, post Kisor, supports the claim of either plaintiff.

The post Symposium: Title VII did not and does not extend to sexual orientation or gender identity— in 1964 or today appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

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[gyrlversion]

10 Pictures That Will Redefine Your Expectations Of Gender

Soraya Zaman

“Caden is a beautiful and spiritual soul. He has an amazing calm way about him that shouldn’t be mistaken for shyness.”

Soraya Zaman is an Australian-born photographer whose work often highlights concepts surrounding gender and sexuality. As a queer nonbinary person who identifies with the pronouns they/them, Zaman’s work carries an added vitality and a deeply personal connection to their subjects and their subject’s stories.

Zaman’s new book, American Boys, is a collection of portraits capturing a state of flux — not just in terms of gender, but in lifestyle, location, and mentality. Zaman spoke with BuzzFeed News about their journey to produce this book and the importance of visibility among the gender nonbinary community today.

Soraya Zaman

“Aodhán identifies as a trans man and also as ‘Two Spirit’ within the Native American culture and comes from the Cherokee. He taught me that before colonization, there were no labels for gender-nonconforming indigenous people.”

How would you describe your book American Boys?

American Boys is a portrait series of 29 transmasculine individuals from big cities to small towns across the USA captured at distinct stages of their transition. Each series is accompanied by first-person accounts from conversations we had together.

These images show a glimpse into everyone’s life at a specific moment in time. Capturing their personality, their honesty, beauty, vulnerability, strength, and so on. They are affirmative images of everyone, and it is work that informs and expands upon understandings of gender identity outside of the binary and is real and validating.

American Boys looks to challenge people’s own perceptions of traditional binary gender roles.

Where did the portrait series begin for you, and when did you feel it was complete?

This project began back in the summer of 2016. At the time, I was looking to explore expressions of transmasculinity, as it was something personal to me and my own feelings and journey of gender identity. It didn’t take me long to realize that honoring and sharing stories, and validating and centering everyone I met and photographed in an affirmative way, was really important, especially in the now-changing political climate. There isn’t a lot of transmasculine representation in the media, and I wanted to create something that took these important narratives out of online spaces and put them into something more permanent.

Honestly, I don’t think this series is complete! The transmasculine community is rich, diverse, and deep — 29 people cannot adequately represent any community. There is definitely more to say and share, and I’m looking to do a second book.

Soraya Zaman

“Chella is an artist, writer, storyteller, and role model to many in the trans, nonbinary, and queer community. He’s also deaf, but in no way does this slow Chella down.”

How did you meet your subjects?

I discovered everyone in this project through Instagram. I mostly sorted out people who were using their online platform to express what was happening in their lives in an interesting way. To me, they were natural storytellers with a willingness to share for good or bad. That resonated with me.

I reached out over DM to see if they were interested. It was also important for me to feature transmasculine lives all over the country and to not just represent people who live in New York and LA and other places typically thought of as queer hubs. There is an extra level of bravery required to live and exist as a trans person in smaller towns where community and safety can be harder to find.

How important do you believe nonbinary representation is in the media?

For so long, we’ve all just been fed the same cisgender, heteronormative view of the world. When I was a kid, there was nothing in the media that reflected back to me how I see myself. The binary gender roles that have been constructed by the Western world confine us in a way that doesn’t leave any room for nuance or complexity. These rigid binary ideologies of what is expected are dangerous, oppressive, and toxic to trans and nonbinary people.

Soraya Zaman

“Lazarus laughed with me about having basically been every letter in ‘LGBTQ’ and now just wants to be identified as a unicorn.”

We are asked to fit into a box that ultimately can never contain our multitudes. It’s really only recently that we have begun to see queer, trans, and nonbinary people represented in a way that doesn’t feel tokenistic. So this work is personal to me because it forms part of the current conversation on expanding gender expectations and is contributing in a positive way. It allows people to be seen and feel proud of who they are, something that was missing for me in my youth.

What do you hope people will take away from these images?

The project is an intentional call to the nostalgic, internalized idea of American boyhood and the notion that masculinity belongs exclusively to cis men.

I hope that it helps people unpack the belief that gender identity must align with one’s sex assigned at birth and move away from these restrictive categories of gender. It’s also about an affirmative centering of transmasculine identity. I hope that people take the time to not only look at the images but also read the personal accounts. If people can’t “see” themselves in any of the images, then perhaps they can find a shared experience in some of the stories.

I want people to know that they are not alone in their journey. We are all in this together forging unique identities and the best possible lives for ourselves all across the country and globe, and there is power in that. Hopefully it helps move us all closer to a culture that welcomes, validates, and provides safety for all identities.

Soraya Zaman

“Russel is kind and sweet. He has a gentle way about him, although he told me that he hasn’t always been this way. Feeling dysphoria used to make him an emotional wreck, angry at the world, and he would get triggered by small things and lash out. There was a point though where he just kind of found more peace and got focused on bringing in positive things and how far he’s come, rather than thinking about how he maybe wasn’t where he wanted to be yet.”

Soraya Zaman

“Rufio! What an amazing bundle of body-building-bear–like brilliance! Rufio is so full of life and spirit. He’s also a staunch feminist, especially with his experience of white male privilege that came with passing.”

Soraya Zaman

“Elijah is a kind and compassionate quiet achiever. He grew up in South Texas in a Christian Baptist family. When he finally came out to his mother, she knew that their family might attack him with scripture claiming that being transgender is against God’s will. So they both studied the Bible and found verses to debunk what they might throw at him.”

Soraya Zaman

“When I met Justin, he was at a number of beginnings. He was beginning his life after top surgery, which he had one week earlier, and was about to start college. Justin was excited to leave his school days behind where he lived under the radar, quiet, and kept to himself, which really isn’t Justin at all. He’s actually very funny and well-spoken, self-confident, and embracing leadership roles both as a member of the Quaker community and at the LGBTQ center in Richmond, where he established a trans people of color group.”

Soraya Zaman

“Emmett is a transgender Mormon and a self-proclaimed rebel in his own way. Emmett has had to reconcile his faith in the Lord with his gender identity, and the road has not been easy.”

Soraya Zaman

“When I hung out with Jaimie, who btw is an incredible musician, he spoke to me about his experience with back-handed compliments. People saying to him, ‘Wow, you’re so hot…for a trans guy! Even I’d have sex with you!’ — like he should be especially honored these people find him attractive.”

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[summerphonic-essays]

Anti-Social Justice vs. Social Justice

The Anti-Social Justice movement is a movement that has gained momentum in response to the Social Justice Movement. It is based on the perpetuation of free speech (that social justice may silence) and a strong belief that social justice is a scam and hurts people more than it helps them.

It is impossible to talk about the Anti-Social Justice Movement without first discussing the Free Speech Movement, for purpose of contrast with today. Today, speakers are protested and banned from speaking at places like UC Berkeley due to the fact that people disagree with what they are saying. But in 1964, UC Berkeley was the birthplace of free speech. The Free Speech Movement began when Berkeley students protested a ban of on-campus political activities. This movement was originally driven by discussion of civil rights and later driven by those who opposed the war in Vietnam. Anti-social justice is, arguably, another wave of the free speech movement, because proponents believe they should be able to speak freely without violating a “safe space” or causing riots.

Followers of this movement today tend to be conservative, and they feel as if those who support social justice are just being over-sensitive to issues. They believe “social justice warriors” (SJW’s), a term coined to identify those who more radically fight for social justice, are all talk and no action. They highlight how people think tweeting or posting on instagram will make a substantial change regarding people's social rights. They believe SJW’s are silencing them and calling them names simply because they do not agree, and to a certain extent, they are right. There are many aspects of actual justice that modern social justice movements ignore or neglect.

SJW’s often engage in thought-policing behavior where they insist everyone should see things a certain way because that way is “just”, and if anyone so little as challenges that notion, the name-calling and discrediting starts. “Nazis”, “woman-haters”, “rape-apologists”; The majority of the time these accusations do not correlate with anything that was being said, they just unreasonably discredit the speaker based on assumptions, exaggerations, and stereotypes. Why should we censor the opinions we do not agree with? Many believe if these viewpoints are allowed by society it will provide a platform for hate, but is it not hypocritical to fight for the freedoms of some by suppressing those of others and anyone who disagrees? When you believe it is okay to silence and condemn a group, you lose the upper-hand when that group silences and condemns you.

Disagreement on subjects is healthy. If you are going to argue for something, you need to be familiar with and hear out counterarguments. Is your opinion really that strong if it does not hold up against alternate opinions? You do not have to agree with others, but you have to respect that they are allowed a voice just as much as you, and it will not be until we stop wasting time ostracizing each other for differing political beliefs and begin finding middle ground that we will see any true change. A documentary that explores these perspectives further is The Red Pill.

The Red Pill is a documentary made by filmmaker Cassie Jaye. Jaye is a long-time feminist who decides to explore the men’s rights movement - as it is, arguably, the opposite of the woman’s rights movement she identifies so strongly with. As she meets with leaders and followers within the men’s rights movement and falls deeper and deeper down the rabbit-hole, she finds herself questioning her feminist morals and if they are hypocritical. It is brought to her attention that when people speak about men’s rights, they are discredited on the basis of feminism. Feminism is supposed to be about equality between men and woman, but sometimes, modern wave feminists build women up by tearing men down. For example, in most feminist domestic abuse campaigns, people discuss women who are beat or show visuals of women alone. NCADV (National Coalition Against Domestic Violence) research shows that men are just as likely to be victims of domestic abuse as women, and that is before we even take into account that men are much less likely to come forward and report abuse due to how they are socialized. Men are the abusers, women are the victims, right? That is what we are taught our whole lives, but it is false according to statistical evidence which even still could be skewed. Bearing this in mind, there are about 2,000 domestic violence shelters open in the US. Almost all of them turn away men and only accept women due to toxic societal stereotypes. This is a shocking reality brought to light by the men’s rights movement and in The Red Pill.

While men’s rights activists do not negate feminism, they highlight some momentum the feminist movement lacks. The men’s rights movement stresses that we demonize men because they are “privileged” and when they struggle we tend to see it as a joke. It claims that when men are discriminated against we ignore it because they are men. Society caters to them, so they should just get over it. But when women struggle we protest it. “Every society that survived did so based on its ability to train its sons to be disposable… Disposable in war as warriors, disposable in work as firefighters, as workers on oil rigs and so on, coal miners, and indirectly, therefore disposable as dads. What happens in men's lives is that they are raised to believe they're worthless unless they're a provider.”

The point they are aiming to make is that if it is wrong for us, as a society, to base a woman's worth on her ability to keep a home and care for a family (because they do not always want to), then it is hypocritical of us to base men’s worth on their ability to keep a job/do the “man’s work” and provide/protect (because they do not always want to). Devil’s advocate would say we can not condition men to believe their only purpose is to be successful in the workforce by any means, and then get mad that they make up the majority of the workforce. When women work hard to become a CEO, and they do not make it, people say “that’s okay, at least you tried and made it this far” but when men work hard to become a CEO and do not make it they are considered a failure and are indirectly, or even directly, looked down upon. Men are held to a different standard regardless about what women say about wanting equality. Things will not be truly equal until we are willing to admit this and work to make it right.

Similar comparisons can be made for race relations. We know black people and minorities do not have the same opportunities as white people, but they are also often told growing up that they will never amount to much. We place these stereotypes on minorities that they just need to work harder, or conversely, we believe, because of affirmative action, situations are automatically fair. But affirmative action just compensates for diversity problems. In a perfect world, it should not be about compensation, it should be about actually leveling the playing field and accepting people based on merit, with fair testing and treatment. But because minorities know they are disadvantaged no matter how hard they try, they are often discouraged. Would it not be better if we looked at the roots of this problem - if we worked to empower minorities for being who they are instead of telling them to fight against another race and work twice as hard to succeed? And should we not be working to create a nation of genuine equal opportunity, instead of sticking bandaids over the injustice to compensate when it manifests in our institutions? The change begins with us.

The men’s rights movement and the anti-social justice movement have a core belief in common, they both feel silenced as a result of social justice. Another common argument against social justice is that its need to create “safe spaces” perpetuates injustice. Because only certain topics are allowed to be spoken about in a certain way, true discussion is hindered and those who have alternate opinions from the empowered majority feel unsafe to disclose their beliefs. The discrepancies between verbal harm and physical harm are also stressed by this movement. Anti’s would argue that someone being offended is not the same as someone being physically hurt, although sometimes we react as if it is. To treat it as such belittles the reality of those who have actually experienced physical harm for being “different”.

Someone is always going to be offended, and in a world where a large emphasis is placed on political correctness, anti’s believe that using the “wrong word” or hurting someone's feelings should not be our primary focus. Hate speech is defined as any speech that expressed hate for a particular group of people, but we throw it around simply because people are sharing opinions we do not approve of. Proponents of social justice believe “hate speech” should be censored because it hurts subordinate groups, anti’s would counter that anything could be considered “hate speech” if you are easily offended.

There are a lot of figureheads of this movement that people stand behind, namely Ben Shapiro, Jordan B. Peterson, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Shapiro is a conservative speaker that does not believe in many of the values that define social justice movements. For example, he insists that there are only two genders, on a basis of religion and politics. Peterson has gained momentum on YouTube, but his day job is that of a psychology professor at University of Toronto. He believes modern activism’s endgame is to criminalize free speech and install totalitarian ideals. Many dismiss alternative viewpoints as uninformed, but it is clear Peterson is educated in his beliefs and his videos have, of late, become a platform for a 90% male demographic who, it can be assumed, now feel as if they have a voice - since, of course, they would be destroyed if they spoke themselves. Yiannopoulos is probably the most well known because he has been involved in a plentitude of scandals as a result of his speech. He had a book deal revoked because his writing was, presumably, too provocative and controversial, and he has been banned from speaking at many colleges, one of which was UC Berkeley.

As aforementioned, UC Berkeley is the birthplace of free speech. How is it we have reached a point where speakers can not exercise their free speech because it most likely will cause a riot in response? It is now a safety concern due to political radicalism. What can be taken from this research is that social justice movement’s today are not what they were historically. We barely know how to communicate anymore due to social media and advancing technology, and hate has become so normalized we have lost respect for one of the values our country was built on - your voice is no more and no less important than someone else's - we are all equal. If we do not begin respecting free speech, and more importantly, respecting each other despite our differences, it is possible in the future we may lose the freedoms we have worked so hard to maintain up until this point.

Bibliography

Jaye, Cassie, director. The Red Pill. Gravitas Ventures (DVD), 2016.

“The Free Speech Movement.” Calisphere, University of California , 2005, calisphere.org/exhibitions/43/the-free-speech-movement/.

“Domestic Violence Statistics.” The Nation's Leading Grassroots Voice on Domestic Violence, NCADV, https://ncadv.org/statistics.

Chensvold, Christian. “YouTube's New Father Figure.” National Review, 17 June 2017, www.nationalreview.com/article/448714/jordan-b-peterson-self-help-guru-father-figure.