As if cancer wasn’t hideous enough already

Here’s your piece of Carnivorous Surprise for the month: BREAST CANCER IS NOT SEXXY. It’s an awful disease that kills people (men AND wimmins) and causes them to sometimes have parts of their body cut out, off, and around. Mount Franklin would like you to know that not only is chestal carcinoma the flavour of the month (or the flavour of the godfucken YEAR if the LENGTH of this STUPID CAMPAIGN indicates), it also signifies a whole lot of messages about the attractiveness of women, boobs, women with boobs, and women without boobs. All of them about as palatable as having a malignant growth in your left tit should be.

Back in ‘94, me mam had breast cancer. I was of a squidgy, eeny kind of age, where the main things I gained from the situation were blind panic about my mother’s life hanging by a thread and a weird, inexplicable taste for hospital food, nurtured by stealing bites of her “mashed potato” when I visited her, feverish and sweaty, on the cancer ward (I was a kid with my priorities straight, what can I say). This means two main things for me right now: one, I very much understand the horror, from a precocious but nevertheless childishly impressionable perspective, of having someone you love in danger of popping their clogs due to a bit of rogue cell gunge in their body, and two, I very much understand the fear of contracting this disease myself.

So let me say this: I do not care about saving my funbags. Fuck my tits. My tits, apart from their possible spatio-temporal involvement in the growth of tumours, are the absolute last thing I would be worried about if I happened to contract breast cancer. This may come out of left field for the few of you in the audience who are unutterably misogynist prickfaces (hi there!), but I would first and foremost be worried about MY CONTINUED FUCKING EXISTENCE. My ability to skip gaily through life making fun of everything is not going to be affected by chopping off a few fat cells and milk ducts, but the condition of pushing the daisies certainly would. This is not to say that women who are extremely attached to their breasts are wrong, simply that some faceless advertising wolverine trying to figure out how to suck three bucks out of me for a product which will inevitably destroy the planet and whose pthalate-enriched packaging is probably carcinogenic, does not get to decide what is most important to people with (or who might get) breast cancer.

And another thing: women without breasts can still be attractive and worthy human beings, you tit-centric boobonormative ogres. Women who decide that their life is worth more than their boobs, or maybe decide not to opt for reconstruction, have just as much right to relate on a sexual or attraction-based level to their chests as women who have congenital boobs, non-congenital boobs, reconstructed boobs, or boobs made out of fucking breeze blocks. Losing your boobs does not have to equal losing your mojo. Conversely, this stupid ad also does the opposite side of the objectification coin, sexualising ALL women’s breasts, women who may not feel that catching attention with their boobs is their God-given highest purpose in life. I certainly don’t feel comfortable with the idea that some schlub drinking a bottle of water is imagining they’re suckling from my teat, although that image is funnier when you remember that men get breast cancer as well, I suppose.

I haven’t even broached the subject of the overwhelming and nauseating dominance of the colour pink in breast cancer activism, or the dubious purposes toward which your pink titty-dollars are put, or the even creepier suggestion that breast-checking is a mandatory activity which a representative of patriarchal dominance is entitled to perform for you if you don’t do it yourself. Basically the whole thing is a clusterfuck which makes me wish I didn’t even have boobs, and lived in a state of hermitude on the tit-free planet of Mars.

Not the left wing paradise I was led to believe

Where does Eleanor Carnivore do Gender Studies? The Australian home of inter-collegiate rape, of course!

‘They can’t say no with a c–k in their mouth” read the hand-drawn graffiti in the Salisbury Bar, part of St Paul’s residential college on the University of Sydney campus.

It has since been painted over, but the sentiment remains.

”Any hole is a goal” stated other graffiti. ”Free entry” yet more announced, accompanied by an arrow pointing to a sketch of a vagina.

Seriously. This is my university. The university that thinks it’s funny to publish columns in its student pubications advising college men how they can marry a student at Women’s College. The university where I avoid events, balls, parties, and pissups like the plague because everyone knows they exist solely so that idiotic imitation frat boys can drag off a drunken college woman and rape her. The university where homophobic insults get daubed over queer-positive messages in the legal Graffiti Tunnel. This is where I do Gender Studies.

Dear students,

 

Many of you will have seen the articles in today’s Sydney Morning Herald relating to behaviour in our residential colleges.

 

I want to assure everyone in our University and the wider community that I regard the issues raised in these articles with the utmost seriousness.

 

I am appalled by the reported behaviour and apparent attitudes of some students. There can be no excuses for sexual assault. Binge drinking is at odds with our commitment to rational behaviour.

 

There should be no additional protection of any kind for students who break the law. They must be accountable for their actions and should be treated just like every other member of the community. Indeed, being a student of the University arguably carries with it an additional obligation to uphold its values.

 

The University and the residential colleges have been working hard to bring about a change in attitudes and behaviour. Obviously we still have much to do.

 

Dr Michael Spence

Vice-Chancellor and Principal

The University of Sydney

Yeah, Spence, you have a lot to do. Get on it. How about some rape prevention programs for the men at college? How about you try to stop rapes from happening to drunk first-years at intercollegiate pissups? How about no more naked runs through Women’s College, how about some more security, how about you try to make sure Paul’s boys turn out to be decent human beings instead of another round of fascist rapist investment banker anti-citizens? How about you  end the Old Boys mentality at the colleges, tear them down, and make them free, entry based on academic potential, proximity to the university, and socioeconomic disadvantage?

While we’re on shit you need to do, how about you build some decent low-cost housing for international students and poor students, how about you get international students their fucking travel concession? How about you lobby as hard as you possibly can to make university free and Youth Allowance enough to live on, so that all universities stop being strongholds of unit production for the kyriarchy and start producing some real goddamn people?

I am so disgusted and scared, I can barely speak.

Neutral Greedy McSlutbag: Coming Out Post

Coming Out Day was the other day (I forget which day, but this will be a retroactive post in its spirit, ITS SPIRIT OK). So here is my coming out: I am queer and pansexual and I think I am polyamorous. I will theoretically have relationships with anyone who has the inclination to have one with me. This, I am sure of. The polyamory part is new to me. It’s kinda like I’ve just woken up wearing a hat: a large, flowery hat that I cannot remove, and because people will tend to notice this kind of thing, I have to come up with a name for the hat and buy a hat box to keep it in. I am also a woman, but because my sex-‘n’-gender are readily socially intelligible to the average schmuck, I don’t think that counts as coming out.

So pansexuality. I don’t use that word very often because it is scary to me. Every time I use it aloud I adopt a defensive posture, ready to shout ‘well YOUR FACE IS A BOGUS POSTMODERN CONSTRUCT’. Because saying ‘bisexual’, which was my word du jour until very recently, is scary enough. Slutty, greedy. (Both true, yay!! Oops. I mean, WHAT A SHAME.) Fickle, naïve, fake, poseur, really gay, really straight, trendy. (Not true).  But saying ‘pansexual’ is scarier because most people cock their heads sideways and go to the place in their minds where there are images of orgies with happy cartoon squirrels blocking out peoples’ naughty parts. Pansexual is scary because it does not, as far as I can tell, imply attraction that adheres to a binary construction of sex-‘n’-gender. It implies potential attraction to people who are neither male nor female, or both, or one and then the other.

I am fine with this, deep inside my identity place. Men are good. Women are good, Genderqueer people are good. Bigendered people are good. Everyone is pretty fucking good.  I do not see a WRONG WAY GO BACK sign anywhere here. Do you see a fuss here? There is no fuss, except other people’s fuss. Other people’s fuss sucks. I don’t use ‘bisexual’ any more because it DID fuss me inside, it fussed me because it was inaccurate. It also fussed me because it makes me think of binarily gendered toilet doors and a small group of people standing outside looking excluded and sad. I didn’t want use a word that was those toilet doors, especially when it wasn’t even the most correct word. I am not those toilet doors, damn it. I’m going to stop saying ‘toilet doors’ now.

So that is my attraction-gradient: queer and pansexual. Usually now I just use ‘queer’, but ‘pansexual’ is the smoothly engineered term. The aerodynamic one that I would use more if my defensive posture didn’t hurt my lower back.

Polyamory is my new hat. I have two partners and I’m not sure that there is anything else for it but to call a hat a hat. Or to call having two partners ‘polyamory’. There’s just a hat, okay? It’s new and I’m scared of it. I’m scared of having to explain why I’m wearing this hat. I’m scared of having to explain that it’s not even the average kind of polyamory hat, because one of my partners is asexual. I’m scared that I won’t be able to fit through doorways with my hat on (not really but youknowwhatImean).  I feel as if this label has been thrust upon me. Though I have known since forever that I am a greedy enough slutbag* to potentially want multiple partners, it has never been in the forefront of my consciousness enough to demand its own checky box. I am uncomfy and I don’t know whether I like this word enough to keep it and pet it and call it George. (I think I just changed my mind in one paragraph. Keep your expectations of coherency low and you won’t be disappointed.)

So that is my coming out. I asked someone once if I could refer to myself as Neutral Greedy McSlutbag, but they said no.

…

*Slutbag here used in an affectionate and reclaimed manner to refer to myself. SLUTBAGS UNITE!

This is for the new kids in the class today

Here is part of a rebuttal of my anti-gay marriage post, by a guy I know only as ‘Dan’:

And, yes, the gay marriage movement ignores the rights of transexuals and polygamists. That’s because gays are not transexual and gays are not polygamists. Eleanor’s really going to oppose expanding rights to a group of people just because that group of people isn’t also fighting for the rights of a completely different set of people? Then we also shouldn’t pass gay marriage because gay marriage advocates aren’t fighting to pass UHC, or gun control legislation, or any of my other pet causes. Eleanor’s inappropriately mixing causes here.

This makes me spit fucking chips.

Hey, guess what? There’s no such thing as ‘inappropriately mixing causes’. The gay people you’re fighting for ARE TRANS* PEOPLE. They are also women, poly people, people of colour, disabled people, neurodiverse people. The gay marriage movement fights for causes that predominantly concern wealthy, white, middle class men, a group that constitute a tiny minority of the privileged upper crust. Being gay, fighting for gay marriage, does not give you license to ignore issues affecting gay people that do not affect you personally. You might not be a person with a serious mental illness who has to negotiate the medical and justice establishments refusing to acknowledge your basic humanity, but SOME OTHER GAY PEOPLE ARE. They have to worry about being oppressed for being gay, AND being oppressed for being a undocumented immigrant or a person with a disability.

Acknowledging the everyday concerns of your fellow gay people is called ‘intersectionality’, and mastering it is the only way that any social justice movement has a snowflake’s chance on my tongue of achieving any kind of truly liberated society. Gay people are not just gay people exactly like you, and ignoring the importance of other oppressions that they experience is racist, sexist, transphobic, ableist, all of the above. As someone primarily identifying as a feminist, this is something I should be thinking about every day, and as someone who advocates queer rights, the same thing applies. It’s not okay for feminism to pay attention only to privileged women, and it’s not okay for the gay rights movement to pay attention only to privileged gay people.

We should be trying to mix our causes MORE, not less. THAT is what bourgeois means: not a promotion of the ‘ordinary’ or ‘base’, but the privilege to ignore issues that do not affect you personally. People’s lives do not reflect a neatly segmented pie of different oppressions, and this is one of the huge problems with privileged anti-oppression academia and activism: we deny the lived experience of people who experience multiple oppressions. I include myself in this, because, as an aspiring member of government and academia, I am complicit, through my involvement, with perpetuating this enormous fucking problem. We should be listening to the voices of people who are oppressed in different and multiple ways, and implementing their suggestions within our ‘different’ movements. Heard of ‘safety in numbers’? This is what we should be trying to achieve.

But people who refuse to ‘mix their causes’, and it is usually the privileged among us who do this, delay, obscruct, kill off this objective. We fixate on our own pet issues to the detriment of the humanity of others. I cannot be a feminist who does not listen to women of colour or fat women or disabled women or women who are sex workers. Their problems are MY PROBLEMS. By ignoring them we foster their fully deserved resentment and hatred toward us. When I hear someone say something that is racist, and I do not try to counter it, I am being racist. Is that not completely fucking obvious? I get shat off massively when the male left ignores feminist issues, and I’m sure gay rights activists feel the same way when it’s gay rights that falls by the wayside when we all cluster under the leftist umbrella.

This is a shitty excuse for an Intersectionality 101 post, but if it made you angry or confused, do some research, for the love of humanity. I am not attacking here; I am defending. Read about intersectionality.

We are not completely different sets of people.

I’ll term in your ology

O hai guys.

I have been really busy being unconscionably lazy, but I have a very serious question that has been bugging the shit out of me for some time. It’s a language limitation question, and it is of a Personal Nature. I am so open to suggestions about this issue, you have no idea. I am like a sweet wrapper after an overexcited six year old has carefully torn it into a long, single strip, tied the ends together, and got all his other sugar-hopped pals to jump through it. I am a giant ear, waiting to receive your ingenious solutions to my irritating terminology gripe.

So here’s the thing. There is a person. Most of my readers, all 25 of you, know this person. For those of you who don’t, she is taller than the average circus freak, likes to cut up the dead into chunks, and her head currently has a pleasingly shaven texture. We love eachother very, very much. If she wanted to convert to ascetic mysticism, move to Yemen, and live in a bark hut, eking out a living by catching local birds and weaving their entrails into baskets, I would whip out my viscera crochet hook and go with her. She is asexual; I am not. I am in a sexual relationship with someone else, whom I can handily and accurately describe as my boyfriend. She’s not my ‘friend’, because that word does not cover the commitment, intimacy, and occasional pirate wenchitude involved in our relationship. ‘Girlfriend’, ‘spouse’, and ‘partner’ all have misleadingly sexual connotations.

What I want is a word that doesn’t have to involve an extended conversation about our personal histories when I describe our relationship to other people. These conversations usually result in me (and her) feeling a combination of ignored, scrutinised, disbelieved, laughed at, infantilised, objectified, or slightly violated. I need a word for what we are, or even a phrase, I’m not shooting for the Moon here, that describes transparently the state of the union. We love eachother, we are in a relationship. We want to ‘build a life together’ (this is the point where I officially abandon any effort to sound less like a Centrelink pamphlet) that involves all the things that long-term partnerships usually do, without the bonking. I have/will have other partner/s that I will probably sleep with. She is not ‘single’, and I am not in an ‘exclusive relationship’ with her or my boyfriend. Ideally it would also involve some implied imperatives: saying ‘this is my girlfriend’ usually also means ‘do not mack on her while I am around’ and, even in polyamorous situations, ‘the other one of us will probably be involved in any relationship you wish to pursue with her’. We do not sleep together, but we are together.

This is generally compounded by my stick insect mortician partner’s asexuality, which most people characterise as nonexistent, pathological, or SO INTERESTING OMG that it magically obliterates her/our privacy. Or there’s the occasional person who paradoxically finds it a massive turn on. Unfortunately for their various projected issues, she is just a normal person who doesn’t want to have sex with you.

So there is the situation. I don’t want to resort to ‘co-pilot’ or ‘life partner’, please Jesus God no, and not many people grok ‘hemiasexual queeromantic marriagelike cuddlefest’ upon first hearing. Are there any words that connote anything similar to what we’re doing here, or am I grasping at asexual lesbotronic domestic partnership straws? Currently I’m using ‘hemiasexual queeromantic partner’ for her on facebonk, and ’sexual heteromantic partner’ for my other squee-ee-eeze. Are you smrter than I am with words? Give me other options.

Also I blame the beehive hairdo, and shoes with pointy toes.

French government supports study of burqa wear

What is it with the French government and thinking that the solution to ensuring women aren’t being forced to cover their body in a particular way, is forcing women to cover their body in a particular way? Seriously, people, even if you think religious clothing for women is inherently and universally oppressive (which it’s well fucking not), how, tell me, HOW is the solution to impose different limitations on women’s clothing?

“Well, see, those damn Ismuhlamics were telling you nice ladies what to wear, but because we don’t like what you’re wearing, it’s now mandatory that you wear something of our choice instead. Ok?”

If they think it’s a breach of women’s human rights that they’re being forced to wear the burqua, why don’t they work on the problem instead of issuing a blanket ban on an item of clothing that women may be freely choosing to wear? Furthermore, how is banning an item of clothing ever a solution to anything?

Come on, French government, get creative. Find something else to blame as the supreme hellmouth of all antifeminist evil. Like … the Pussycat Dolls! Blowjobs! Pink! See? All on about the same level as blaming the burqua itself.

Sexism in the Workplace: Barnaby Joyce Edition

Toddler’s Senate Eviction ‘A Stunt’

Senator Hanson-Young says she was humiliated when Senate President John Hogg ordered her two-year-old daughter Kora to be removed from the chamber before a vote.

One of the most interesting things I’ve learnt about during my subject on masculinities this semester is how the historical model of a worker assumes that the person is a male head of household, and is therefore in possession of a full time domestic slave, ie a ‘wife’. When one is not in possession of this domestic slave, the standard full time work week becomes essentially beyond the capabilities of a single human being. It’s the consummate example of the supposedly ‘neutral person’ being a dood.

So Sarah Hanson-Young, not being a dood, and also being a mother, was probably bound at some point to be fucked over by her workplace. That sucks. Her child shouldn’t have been ejected from Parliament; Kora wasn’t running amok, crying, or doing anything else that could possibly have been construed as disruptive. It sounds like a combination of the Senate’s standing orders being a sexist fucking mess, and John Hogg having a huge goddamn stick up his arse. But, as with many stories about women in public life, this one has an xtra-special bonus round, where somebody wins a giant stuffed animal for impugning a woman’s disposition after the fact:

“There were definite alternate courses of action that could have shown you were more genuine in trying to not create a media event, because you don’t want to trick people’s emotions, you want people honestly [to] believe you were in a genuinely difficult position,” Senator Joyce said.

“If it was from a party that never effected stunts, you’d say ‘well, maybe it was a one-off’, but this is a party that is known for its stunts.”

He says Senator Hanson-Young should remember how important a senator’s job is.

“There are 21 million people who rely on the way that Senate votes, you’ve got to take that job seriously,” he said.

“Within that Senate are votes for things that might send people to war, that might get people killed. Do not ever lose sight of how important it is, the job inside the rails of that Senate chamber, and so this requires certain sacrifices.”

Oh, Bananaby, you absolute charmer! Being a woman who has a child is emotionally manipulative, unstable, uncommitted, flaky, stupid, and making a scene! I don’t know Senator Hanson-Young, but unless she’s a poorly programmed automaton, the suggestion that she would cause her baby distress to score a political point is fucking absurd. Maybe she was trying to make the vote on time, since Senators are only given four minutes from when the bell rings to assume their place? Maybe she doesn’t have a specially-built soundproof cage with feeding trough installed in her parliamentary office, in which she can deposit her inconvenient spawn at a moment’s notice during the days she sits?

Maybe Bananaby is a particularly egregious misogynist asscrunch, who’s never been the primary caregiver of a child and enjoys talking out his arsehole in order to score a political point off the back of a distressed baby girl. Maybe he needs to go back to Not Being a Sexist Dickmonger 101, issue a formal apology to Senator Hanson-Young and every working mother in the country, and get a fucking clue before he opens his spewhole.

Gay marriage: not as cool as you think it is

I’m probably already on the record somewhere as saying that marriage sucks, but I thought I’d have another go at it, given that some hatemongering scumracket judges in California decided that homos aren’t allowed to get married to eachother. As indicated by the first half of that sentence, I too do not think homos should be allowed to get married, although my sentiment is only coherent for a highly specific value of the word ‘marriage’ (and yes, I do happen to love discussing highly specific values of otherwise everyday words). I know saying that you’re against gay marriage, in the leftist world, is commensurate with vomiting into a large tub every day for five years and then flooding a happy rainbow unicorn land with your saved up puke, but give me a minute to make a list of some stuff.

1. Under the current system, all marriage sucks. It’s an inherently exclusionary way of validating one kind of highly specific relationship and awarding it benefits based on outdated criteria. It rests on a set of heteronormative assumptions (possibly the most heteronormative assumptions of all, unless you count the ones in ads for washing detergent), mostly to do with the production of children. Married hetero couples, it is assumed, produce the most and the best of society’s children; therefore, the union itself must confer special, glittery benefits upon its partakers. Of course, those of us with giant communist brains realise that unmarried hetero couples, unmarried homo couples, single men, single women, polyamorous people, and various combinations of the above all take care of children in our diverse modern society. Some would suggest that taking care of children may be the best criterion for assessing whether a person should receive benefits for taking care of children, but shh. Don’t tell Family First.

2. Marriage privileges some kinds of interdependent relationships over others. Namely, ones in which the participants are assumed to be fucking. This is a clever social fiction that I don’t fully understand, and which mirrors another, more deeply rooted (lol sorry) social fiction: if you don’t fuck eachother, it’s not a real relationship. It’s funny and/or absurd to think of two people getting married who don’t fuck eachother, isn’t it? To think of two people living together, declaring next of kinship, having children, and demanding social recognition of their interdependence, without fucking eachother? I find this attitude totally bizarre. What if two siblings, or three or four siblings, want to raise children together, or just live together? A group of female friends? A couple and their friend? A polyamorous relationship with three people, one of the partner’s parents, and a cousin from interstate?

All of these are de facto possibilities, and, I think, possibly better possibilities. Who knows how many people would be happier in some kind of alternate arrangement that didn’t involve a socially compulsory man-fucking-a-woman, or, in places with gay marriage, person-fucking-ONE-other-person. Hey, kids, guess what? It’s okay to  have kids with whomever you want. It’s okay to not fuck that person, it’s okay to not fuck anyone, and it’s okay to live by yourself, hate kids, and use your fertile years to build giant sculptures of zombie pirates out of Lego. 3… 2… 1… go.

3. Marriage at the moment is a weird, squishy consolidation of church stuff and state stuff. Instead of bitching about that, check this out: France has a pretty good solution, even if it’s in its infancy and has a while to go before you can let it out of the house on its own. The idea is that “marriage” is definitely a religious thing, and specific religions can impose whatever wacky norms they want on it. Civil unions, on the other hand, are definitely a State thing, and imply, socially speaking, nothing about whomever is seeking to be a party to one. You can have one, both, or neither, depending on what you had for breakfast this morning.

Obviously, the glaring omission in the French version is that only two people can enter into it at a time, and it suffers from conflating adult interdependency with caring for children. I think the solution is that someone smarter and more hard-working than me has to invent either a new kind of union, or a modified Civil Union, that specifically refers to the responsibility of spooning mashed veggies into a snotty infant after 1.5 hours of poor quality sleep.

4. The gay marriage movement ignores many of its own. It ignores many of the reasons gay people might want to get married. ‘Gay people can’t marry eachother for immigration status!’ Well, maybe you should think about reforming your shitty immigration system. ‘Gay people can’t access their partner’s health insurance!’ Stop me, but maybe you should reform your shitty health insurance system. etc. It ignores polyamorous people, and in fact seems to spend a lot of its time refuting the conservatives who say that it might lead to poly marriage. This is pretty stupid, because they’re right: consenting adults, blah blah blah. It ignores the rights of trans people, who might have a lot more complicated and traumatic legal bullshit than cis gay people if they want to get married. In short, it’s pretty fucking bourgeois.

So that’s why Eleanor Carnivore is against gay marriage. There’s another post in here somewhere about whether or not gay marriage can be seen as a kind of baby step on the way up to something that actually resembles equality, but I’ve got dinner to eat and an assignment that was due yesterday to write. Also: I’m officially asking for submissions for another Ask Aunt Carnivore, which appears to have been my most popular post. So, are you bored? Gassy? Lonely? Angry? Email me at shesacarnivore@gmail.com ! I want to turn your problems into a mildly amusing and ideologically motivated blog post help!

Australian Human Rights Commission hits a tentative home run on gender issues

How did I miss this? I blame you, my usually-diligent army of feminist informants! This is an essential document giving legitimacy to the fundamental rights of non gender conforming persons, a sorely lacking element of our supposedly liberal and accepting democracy! I realise that, like most sensible, inclusive, and just recommendations made by the Human Rights Commission it will probably languish in the margins of the government’s attention, but the fact that there is even a report about the blatant ridiculousness of official sex/gender recognition is really important. Every single time I go to tick the ‘female’ box it reminds me forcefully of the massive privilege I have as being someone whose sex and gender are a) congruent, and b) culturally acceptable and recognised.

Some of the recommendations of the report are relevant to areas of Australian law I didn’t even know existed, but which probably impact trans and genderqueer people every day of their lives.  I feel ignorant for not knowing, for example, that someone’s marital status could impact their eligibility for a legal sex change:

Recommendation 1: Marital status should not be a relevant consideration as to whether or not a person can request a change in legal sex.

Of course now that I read this, it’s obvious that the government would want to pour petrol over and set fire to any suggestion that two people of legally the same sex should be allowed to exist as married. I assumed that, if a person legally changed their documented sex, they wouldn’t be eligible to get married to someone of the same sex; but it never occurred to me that someone’s sex might be contingent on their being married already.  The level of fuckedness in that notion is just astronomical. ‘You’re married, therefore WE GET TO DECIDE WHAT SEX YOU ARE HAHAHAHAAAAA’ what the fuck? If I’m married, do you also get to decide my religion, or decide whether or not I identify as someone who’s likely to set you on fire with my mind? That is cisgender privilege on ‘roids.

Then there are the more obvious recommendations, the ones that address grindingly obvious bits of legal discrimination:

Recommendation 2: The definition of sex affirmation treatment should be broadened so that surgery is not the only criteria for a change in legal sex.

[...]

Recommendation 7: Documents of identity and processes required for the legal recognition of sex should not reveal personal information about a person’s past identity in relation to sex.

[...]

Recommendation 9: Where possible, sex or gender should be removed from government forms and documents.

NO REALLY?! People who are men or women shouldn’t have to undergo invasive surgery in order to be legally recognised as their correct or chosen sex or gender?! ‘WELL, you can be a woman IF YOU MUST, but only if you modify your genitals so that they look like something our tiny brains can easily identify as female.’ Sex reassignment surgery should be as easily available as possible for people who need or want it, but damn. You now have to be unmarried and surgically altered to change your sex. (And privileged in a million other ways that this report doesn’t mention.)

#7 is a really important one, I think. It definitely strikes to the heart of this weird cis-predominant notion that trans people have to tell everyone they’ve ever met that they’re trans, otherwise they’re ‘lying’  or ‘tricking people’ into thinking that they’re cis. This notion is really, really fucking dangerous, and is the bedrock of the ‘trans panic’ defence which is often used by violent transphobes in court after they’ve murdered a human being. It’s bizarre enough that the dominant culture forces trans people to disclose their personal medical histories in order to parse them on a gendered level, but that the ‘failure’ of trans people to do this often results in violence is hideous. Get this: it’s not a trans person’s job to tell you shit. You assuming anything concering their trans status is your own weird problem, and refusing to list a trans person’s sex as the only sex on their personal documents is a clear indication of the illegitimacy that trans identities have in our society. That somehow the identity that cis society gave them without their permission is any of anyone’s business. Because trans identities need to be interrogated, like this: ‘LIKE I KNOW YOU SAID YOU’RE A MAN, BUT, LIKE … WHAT ARE YOU REALLY?!?! LOLOLOL@@!’ (read: ‘my identity as a cis person is realler than your identity.’)

#9 is relevant to trans people and genderqueer people in really important ways, like passports; if some ignorant customs official thinks your gender presentation isn’t quite up to scratch, it can seriously impede your ability to travel. Same for drivers’ licenses. And considering the extreme level of harrassment that trans people are subject to by various government agencies, having anyone doubt the veracity of your official documents can be a one-way ticket to Police Brutalitiesville.  I think it’s also relevant to the change of gender norms in society generally, as well; it signals that your gender is not necessarily the cornerstone of your identity. I wouldn’t be unhappy about my electricity company no longer knowing my gender identity, certainly.

In summary, this is definitely a positive step initiated by the HRC, and I would be interested in reading the submissions they received from individuals and trans organisations in formulating their recommendations. It looks pretty good to me, but you never know how much important shit they got told by people that might’ve been ignored or left out.

Like normal bread only more sexist

This will be, I think, the feminist issue of our time: gendered bread.

GENDERED. BREAD.

Women come in all shapes and sizes but one thing they all have in common is the way their bodies work.

[...]

A healthy eating plan is also necessary for women to maintain a healthy weight and to help take care of their hearts, bones, breasts and digestive systems. The optimal diet for women is one which is rich in wholegrains, legumes, fish, low fat dairy and fruits and vegetables.

So if you  are part of this mythical race of women, whose bodies are all EXACTLY THE SAME, this bread is specifically designed for your borgified, mass-produced meat bags. Especially your breasts. This bread will take excellent care of your breasts, and help you to stay exactly as skinny as your production blueprint specified during fembot manufacture. It may or may not give your rich prospective husband a blowjob in lingerie.

However, if you happen to be a normal woman, whose body is completely different from all other women’s bodies and may or may not have breasts, this bread is probably just going to taste ok with Vegemite.

 

These days, men want to take more responsibility for their nutrition and health.

Fundamentally, men need to know that their body is much like a motorcar. Their body has the potential to be like a Formula 1 racing car, or a burnt out wreck depending on how it is managed and treated.

[...]

The foods that provide substances with care and maintenance functions for the human body are vegetables, fruits and legumes such as soy, and it is important to eat broadly from these foods daily.

While your woman is counting her vertebra and sexually servicing you with her new breadfound energy, you can fill up on manly carbs while you drive around the kitchen in your imaginary car: steering with your pecs, changing gear with your penis, and going ‘BROOOOOM!!! BROOM BROOOOOOM!!!’.

So obviously the benefits of this nutritionally advanced mixture of flour and water are manifold, but here’s a few they didn’t bother listing on the label:

• Manufactures artificial physiological distinctions between men and women based on gender stereotyopes!
• Presents men as more deserving of robust nutrients and women as in need of being slimmed and beautified!
• Assesses men’s bodies as successful based on performance, and women’s based on appearance!
• Erases differences between the bodies of individuals of the same gender!
• Makes differences between products seem stark and healthful, when in fact both are virtually identical wholegrain loaves of fucking bread!

It just makes me wonder about the potential of this ‘different foods based on ridiculous stereotypes’ for making money. Queer bread, containing nine essential nutrients for the maintenance of a deviant and confused identity? Hetero bread, specially formulated to help you keep up the strenuous daily task of exercising straight privilege?! THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS.

Please suggest more stereotype breads. I will be sure to deny you loaf royalties when I sell the idea and make ill-gotten millions.