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star-anise · 5 years

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why would your social environment affect if you identify as a woman or nb?

I don’t know if you meant it to be, but this is a delightful question. I am going to be a complete nerd for 2k+ words at you.

“Gender” is distinct from “sex” because it’s not a body’s physical characteristics, it’s how society classifies and interprets that body. Sex is “That person has a vagina.” Gender is “This is a blend of society’s expectations about what bodies with vaginas are like, social expectations of how people with vaginas do or might or should act, behave, and feel, the actual lived experiences of people with vaginas, and a twist of lemon for zest.” Concepts of gender and what is “manly” and “womanly” can vary a lot. They’re social values, like “normal” or “legal” or “beautiful”, and they vary all the time. How well you fit your gender role depends a lot on how “gender” is defined.

800 years ago in Europe the general perception was that women were sinful, sensual, lustful people who required frequent sex and liked watching bloodsport. 200 years ago, the British aristocracy thought women were pure, innocent beings of moral purity with no sexual desire who fainted at the sight of blood. These days, we think differently in entirely new directions.

But this gets even more complicated, in part because human experience is really diverse and society’s narratives have to account for that. So 200 years ago, those beliefs about femininity being delicate and dainty and frail only really applied to women with aristocratic lineages, and “the lower classes” of women were believed to be vulgar, coarse, sexual, and earthy, which “explained” why they performed hard physical labor or worked as prostitutes.

Being trans or nonbinary isn’t just or even primarily about what characteristics you want your body to have. It’s about how you want to define yourself and be interpreted and interacted with by other people.

The writer Sylvia Plath lived 1932-1963, and she said:

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars–to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording–all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.”

She was from upper-middle-class Massachusetts, the child of a university professor. A lot of those things she was “prohibited” from doing weren’t things each and every woman was prohibited from doing; they were things women of her class weren’t allowed to do. The daughters and sisters and wives of sailors and soldiers, women who worked in hotels and ran rooming houses, barmaids and sex workers, got to anonymously and invisibly observe those men, after all. They just couldn’t do it at the same time they tried to meet the standards educated Bostonians of the 1950s had for nice young women.

Failure to understand how diverse womanhood is has always been one of feminism’s biggest weaknesses. The Second Wave of feminism was started mostly by prosperous university-educated white women, since they were the people with the time and money and resources to write and read books and attend conferences about “women’s issues”. And they assumed that their issues were female issues. That they were the default of femaleness, and could assume every woman had roughly the same experience as them.

So, for example, middle-class white women in post-WWII USA were expected to stay home all the time and look after their children. Feminists concluded that this was isolating and oppressive, and they’d like the freedom to pursue lives, careers, and interests outside of the home. They vigorously pursued the right to be freed from their domestic and maternal duties.

But in their society, these experiences were not generally shared by Black and/or poor women, who, like their mothers, did not have the luxury of spending copious amounts of leisure time with their children; they had to work to earn enough money to survive on, which meant working on farms, in factories, or as cooks, maids, or nannies for rich white women who wanted the freedom to pursue lives outside the home. They tended to feel that they would like to have the option of staying home and playing with their babies all day.

This is not to say none of the first group enjoyed domestic lives, or that none of the second group wanted non-domestic careers; it’s just that the first group formed the face and the basic assumptions of feminism, and the second group struggled to get a seat at the table.

There’s this phenomenon called “cultural feminism” that’s an attitude that crops up among feminists from time to time (or grows on them, like fungus) that holds that women have a “feminine essence”, a quasi-spiritual “nature” that is deeply distinct from the “masculine essence” of men. This is one of the concepts powering lesbian separatism: the idea that because women are so fundamentally different from men, a society of all women will be fundamentally different in nature from a society that includes men.

But, well, the problem cultural feminism generally has is with how it achieves its definition of “female nature”. The view tends to be that women are kinder, more moral, more collectivist, more community-minded, and less prone to violence.

And cultural feminists tend to HATE people who believe in the social construction of gender, because we tend to cross our arms and go, “Nah, sis, that’s a frappe of misused statistics and The Angel In the House with some wishful thinking as a garnish. That’s how you feel about what womanhood is. It’s fair enough for you, but you’re trying to apply it to the entire human species. That’s got less intellectual rigor and sociological validity than my morning oatmeal.” Hence the radfem insistence that gender theorists like me SHUT UP and gender quite flatly DOESN’T EXIST. It’s a MADE-UP TERM, and people should STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. (And go back to taking about immutable, naturally-occuring phenomena, one supposes, like the banking system and Western literary canon.)

Because seriously, when you look at real actual women, you will see that some of us can be very selfish, while others are altruistic; some think being a woman means abhorring all violence forever, and others think being a woman means being willing to fight and die to protect the people you love. As groups men and women have different average levels of certain qualities, but it’s not like we don’t share a lot in common. The distribution of “male” and “female” traits doesn’t tend to mean two completely separate sets of characteristics; they tend to be more like two overlapping bell curves.

So, like I said, I grew up largely in rural, working-class Western Canadian society. My relatives tend to be tradesmen like carpenters, welders, or plumbers, or else ranchers and farmers. I was raised by a mother who came of age during the big push for Women’s Lib. So in the culture in which I was raised, it was very normal and in some ways rewarded (though in other ways punished) for women to have short hair, wear flannel and jeans, drive a big truck, play rough contact sports, use power tools, pitch in with farmwork, use guns, and drink beer. “Traditional femininity” was a fascinating foreign culture my grandmother aspired to, and I loved nonsense like polishing the silver (it’s a very satisfying pastime) but that was just another one of my weird hobbies, like sewing fairy clothes out of flower petals and collecting toy horses.

Within the standards of the society I was raised in, I am a decently feminine woman. I’m obviously not a “girly girl”, someone who wears makeup and dresses in ways that privilege beauty over practicality, but I have a long ponytail of hair and when I go to Mark’s Work Wearhouse, I shop in the women’s section. We know what “butch” is and I ain’t it.

But through my friendships and my career, I’ve gotten experiences among cultures you wouldn’t think would be too different–we’re all still white North Americans!–but which felt bizarre and alien, and ate away at the sense of self I’d grown up in. In the USA’s northeast, the people I met had the kind of access to communities with social clout, intellectual resources, and political power I hadn’t quite believed existed before I saw them. There really were people who knew politicians and potential employers socially before they ever had to apply to a job or ask for political assistance; there were people who really did propose projects to influential businessmen or academics at cocktail parties; they really did things like fundraise tens of thousands of dollars for a charity by asking fifty of their friends to donate, or start a business with a $2mil personal loan from a relative.

And in those societies, femininity was so different and so foreign. I’d grown up seeing femininity as a way of assigning tasks to get the work done; in these new circles, it was performative in a way that was entirely unique and astounding to me. A boss really would offer you a starting salary $10k higher than they might have if you wore high heels instead of flats. You really would be more likely to get a job if you wore makeup. And your ability to curate social connections in the halls of power really was influenced by how nice of a Christmas party you could throw. These women I met were being held, daily, to a standard of femininity higher than that performed by anyone in my 100 most immediate relatives.

So when girls from Seven Sisters schools talked about how for them, dressing how I dressed every day (jeans, boots, tee, button-up shirt, no makeup, no hair product) was “bucking gendered expectations” and “being unfeminine”, I began to feel totally unmoored. When I realized that I, who absolutely know only 5% as much about power tools and construction as my relatives in the trades, was more suited to take a hammer and wade in there than not just the “empowered” women but the self-professed “handy” men there, I didn’t know how to understand it. I felt like I was… a woman who knew how to do carpentry projects, not “totally butch” the way some people (approvingly) called me.

And, well, at home in Alberta I was generally seen as a sweet and gentle girl with an occasional stubborn streak or precocious moment, but apparently by the standards of Southern states like Georgia and Alabama I am like, 100x more blunt, assertive, and inconsiderate of men’s feelings than women typically feel they have to be.

And this is still all just US/Canadian white women.

And like I said, after years of this, I came home (from BC, where I encountered MORE OTHER weird and alien social constructs, though generally more around class and politics than gender) to Alberta, and I went to what is, for Alberta, a super hippy liberal church, and I helped prepare the after-service tea among women with unstyled hair and no makeup who wore jeans and sensible shoes, and listened to them talk about their work in municipal water management and ICU nursing, and it felt like something inside my chest slid back into place, because I understood myself as a woman again, and not some alien thing floating outside the expectations of the society I was in with a chestful of opinions no one around me would understand, suddenly all made sense again.

I mean, that’s by no means an endorsement for aspirational middle class rural Alberta as the ideal gender utopia. (Alberta is the Texas of Canada.) I just felt comfortable inside because it’s the culture where I found a definition of myself and my gender I could live with, because its boundaries of what’s considered “female” were broad enough to hold all the parts of me I felt like I needed to express. I have a lot of friends who grew up here, or in families like mine, and don’t feel at all happy with its gender boundaries. And even as I’m comfortable being a woman here, I still want to push and transform it, to make it even more feminist and politically left and decolonized.

TERFs try to claim that trans and nonbinary people reinforce the gender identity, but in my experience, it’s feminists who claim male and female are immutable and incompatible do that. It’s trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people who, simply by performing their genders in public, make people realize just how bullshit innate theories of gender are.. Society is going to want to gender them in certain ways and involve them in certain dynamics (”Hey ladies, those fellas, amirite?”) and they’re going, “Nope. Not me. Cut it out.” I’ve seen a lot of cis people who will quietly admit they do think men and women are different because that’s just reality, watch someone they know transition, and suddenly go, “Oh my god, I get it now.”

Like yes, this is me being coldly political and thinking about people as examples to make a political point. Everyone’s valid and can do what they want, but some things are just easier for potential converts to wrap their minds around.. “I’m sorting through toys to give to Shelly’s baby. He probably won’t want a princess crown, huh?” “I actually know several people who were considered boys when they were babies and never got one, and are making up for all their lost princess crown time now as adults. You never know what he’ll be into when he grows up.” “…Okay, point. I’ll throw it in there.” Trans and enby people disrupt gender in a really powerful back-of-the-brain way where people suddenly see how much leeway there is between gender and sex.

I honestly believe supporting trans and enby people and queering gender until it’s a macrame project instead of a spectrum are how we’ll get to a gender-free utopia. I think cultural feminism is just the same old shit, inverted. (Confession: in my head, I pronounce “cultural” with emphasis on the “cult” part.)

I think feminism is like a lot of emergency response groups: Our job is to put ourselves out of a job. It’s not a good thing if gender discrimination is still prevalent and harmful 200 years from now! Obviously we’re not there yet and calls to pack it in and go home are overrated, but as the problem disappears into its solution, we have to accept that our old ways of looking at the world have to shift.

#staranise original #lgbt discourse

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 3 years

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A look at Sean Moon’s “The Constitution of the United States of Cheon Il Guk.”

Right Wing Watch

A project of People for the American Way

Steve Bannon Tells Messianic Gun-Toting Conspiracy Theorists That the Left Wants to Steal Pennsylvania From Trump

By Peter Montgomery | October 23, 2020 3:10 pm

Steve Bannon speaking at CPAC 2016. (Flickr.com/Gage Skidmore)

Former White House adviser Steve Bannon made a virtual appearance earlier this month at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in Pennsylvania, The Trace’s Champe Barton reported Thursday. The Rod of Iron rally was organized by two sons of the late Sun Myung Moon, a messianic Korean religious leader who founded and bankrolled the right-wing Washington Times newspaper. Bannon delivered a message seemingly meant to incite the several thousand attendees:

“What the left intends to do — and you’re seeing it in Pennsylvania right now,” Bannon told the crowd. “Use the courts, use social media, use the mainstream media to try to make sure Trump is not declared the winner that night.” He said falsely that “uncertifiable” mail-in ballots would be used to “steal the presidency” away from Trump. “Look we’re going to win this thing,” he said. “Pennsylvania is the key that picks the lock for a second Trump term.”

The group is continuing to promote Trump. A group of South Korean and Japanese members of the Moons’ Rod of Iron Ministries—based in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, about 25 miles south of Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton—showed up outside an early-voting location in Wilkes-Barre on Thursday. Researcher Erin Gallagher called attention to Rod of Iron’s Pennsylvania activities in a Twitter thread Friday.

Tom Dunkel profiled Rod of Iron Ministries and the affiliated Sanctuary Church for the Washington Post Magazine in 2018, complete with photos of worshipers reverently carrying assault rifles. Pastor Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, who says the 9/11 attacks were a “false flag,” had decided that a passage in the New Testament book of Revelation referring to the returning Christ ruling the Earth with “a rod of iron” was a reference to an AR-15. Pastor Sean’s sermon denounced the Democratic Party, George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Pope Francis—who he called “a socialist, communist devil.”

Shortly before the 2016 election, Pastor Sean’s brother Kook-Jin “Justin” Moon called Hillary Clinton the “Fallen Eve” and Donald Trump an “Adam-type figure.” In Dunkel’s story, Justin sounds like a QAnon believer, saying there are “a lot of pedophiles in the Democratic Party” and they “realize that Trump is coming to get them. Literally. Round them up and put them in prison and execute them.”

Rod of Iron Ministries offers training to “equip 2nd Amendment Christians with the tools and training that enable Patriots to grow closer to God while defending America’s founding principles.” The two brothers happen to own a gun manufacturer.

According to the ministry’s website, Sean hosts a three-hour YouTube broadcast six days a week offering “spiritual guidance and political and social commentary from a biblical viewpoint.”

The website also includes a link to “The Constitution of the United States of Cheon Il Guk.”

The preamble to the constitution explains that “Cheon Il Guk, The Kingdom of God (and/or Heaven), a sovereign and actual nation does not yet exist in this world, but is the long awaited culmination of the End of Time as prophesied in the Biblical Scripture.” It continues:

This Constitution is not an ecclesiastical Constitution of a church or religious body, but is a Constitution for a real and sovereign, future nation, being the literal fruit of God’s Providence. All history longs and awaits this future Kingdom of God.

At the end of the preamble, Hyung Jin Moon asserts a kingly and messianic role inherited from his father:

Now as I, Hyung Jin Moon, take my rightful place as King of the Second Kingship of the Kingdom of God, Cheon Il Guk, as the Crowned Successor and Representative Body of the Cosmic True Parents of Heaven and Earth and full Inheritor of the Kingship of God, with all the authority endowed in me by my Father, Sun Myung Moon—The True Father, Messiah, Lord at the Second Advent and King of Kings, hereby declare the following Immutable and Unchangeable, “Constitution of Cheon Il Guk,” that shall NEVER be abridged or added-to, in their enumerations.”

The “Constitution of the United States of Cheon Il Guk” borrows the structure of the U.S. Constitution, adapting the Bill of Rights, before the inclusion of sections explaining the authority of the king and the first “principle” focused on maintaining a “pure lineage” of God:

The Constitution of the United States of Cheon Il Guk

We the People of the United States of Cheon Il Guk (CIG), in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish in Heavenly Father’s name this Constitution for the United States of CIG.

Principle I: Maintain the Pure Lineage of God

The division of the sexes being ordained by God where man is the subject partner and woman is the object partner, congress shall pass no law that contradicts this divine edict. Faithful marriage between a man and a woman being the ideal of God’s creation, the government of CIG will pass no law which interferes with or contradicts this Divine Law. The fruit of faithful marriage being the conception of children, congress shall pass no law which permits the injury to all persons born or unborn. Sexual abstinence before marriage being the ideal condition for newlyweds, congress shall pass no law supporting or giving aid to alternative life styles.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/steve-bannon-tells-messianic-gun-toting-conspiracy-theorists-that-the-left-wants-to-steal-pennsylvania-from-trump/

______________________________________________

Sean Moon: “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” are bankers, the CIA, China and Islam.

Far-Right Gun Festival of Sean Moon and Justin Moon Boosts Election Conspiracy Theories

In Pennsylvania woods, church in 'spiritual battle' to re-elect Trump

#Sean Moon #CIG constitution #sanctuary church #Hyung Jin Moon #Kook Jin Moon #Justin Moon

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ruminativerabbi · 5 years

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Awakenings

For some reason, I’ve always been drawn to Rip Van Winkle-style stories about people who fall asleep for one or many years and then wake up to find themselves in whole new worlds. First of all, there’s Rip himself—a fictional character who first made his appearance in Washington Irving’s collection of stories and essays, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which came out exactly 200 years ago in 1819. The book has long since been forgotten by most, as unfortunately also has been its author: one of the true giants of American literature in his day, Irving has for some reason not joined the authors he himself encouraged in their careers—writers like Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—in the pantheon of American authors still read other than by people to whom their books have been assigned in American Literature classes. And he really was one of the greats! I believe that I’ve read all his stories, certainly most of them, and “Rip Van Winkle” is one of my favorites. His other still-famous story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” turned into a whole series of Hollywood movies—most memorably Tim Burton’s 1999 film, Sleepy Hollow—and television shows, is also a terrific piece of writing that deserves to be more widely read in its original format. But I digress: I wanted to write here about Rip van Winkle himself and not the author who dreamed him up.

The story is well known and easily retold. One day while wandering deep in the woods near Sleepy Hollow to escape his wife’s endless nagging, Rip runs into the ghosts of the sailors who in their day manned Henry Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, and promptly joins them in a game of nine pins and in drinking a lot of liquor, whereupon he falls into a deep sleep. Then, when he awakens twenty years later, he discovers that his son is now a grown man, his wife has died, and that he missed the entire American Revolution while he slumbered away. He makes his peace with being a widower easily enough (the Van Winkles don’t seem to have had too happy a marriage), finds it more challenging to abandon his native allegiance to King George, and finally ends up settling in with his grown daughter as he tries to figure out the new world and his place in it.

There are lots of parallel stories to Irving’s tale. Third-century (C.E.) Greek philosopher Diogenes Laëterius, for example, wrote about a man named Epimenides who fell asleep for fifty-seven years and then had to negotiate an entirely new world when he awakened. Jewish literature has its own version of both Rip van Winkle and Epimenides in Honi the Circle-Drawer, a wonder-working rabbi of the first century (or thereabouts) who fell asleep for seventy years and awakened to find a man tending to carob trees that Honi himself had witnessed the man’s grandfather planting just (it must have felt like) a day earlier. Other cultures have their own versions, but what makes them appealing—and also slightly terrifying— is the fantasy that this could possibly happen to us readers, that we too could possibly get into bed tonight, turn off the light, drift off into sleep…and then awaken not tomorrow morning but a century from now. Nor is it hard to explain why this is such an arresting theme to so many. We all like to think that the world is so sturdy, so substantial, so there, after all…and then an idea like this takes root and suggests that it’s all a chimera, all a fantasy, all an elaborate illusion played out against an equally illusory dreamscape, that what feels so real is only an elaborate set that the stage crew will take down the moment we breathe our last. And why shouldn’t the theater of life mimic the way things work in real theaters? The show closes, the crew strikes the set, the actors return their costumes, and everybody goes home. And, on Broadway, that is that!

And now it turns out that it really is so that people fall asleep and awaken decades later. Some readers may have noticed a story in the paper a while back about one Munira Abdulla, a woman from a small town in the United Arab Emirates, who was in a terrible automobile accident in 1991 when she was only thirty-two years old. She fell into a coma, but was kept alive by her family in the hope that she might one day awaken. And she did just that, awakening, apparently on her own, after twenty-seven years. Technically speaking, Ms. Abdulla was in the state technically called “minimal consciousness,” which is less bad than being in a full coma (i.e., in which the patient shows no sign of being awake) or in what’s called a persistent vegetative state (in which the patient appears to be awake but shows no signs of awareness). It is, however, still extraordinarily rare for patients possessed of minimal consciousness simply to awaken.

It’s happened closer to home as well. Terry Wallis, for example, was nineteen when his pickup skidded off a bridge near his hometown in Arkansas, which accident left him in a persistent vegetative state. Doctors told his family that he had no chance of recovery. But then he somehow managed to move up a notch into the same state of minimal consciousness that Munira Abdulla was in. And there he remained for nineteen years, domiciled at a nursing home near his parents’ home. And then one day in 2006 his mother walked into his room, whereupon he looked up and said “Mom” out loud, the first word he had uttered in almost two decades.

Donald Herbert’s is a similar story. A Buffalo fire-fighter, Herbert was injured on the job in 1995 when debris in a burning building fell on him and left him in what doctors called a state of “faint consciousness” for a full decade. And then, in 2005, after a full decade of silence, he opened his eyes one day and asked for his wife.

These are rare stories, obviously. Most comatose people—including people possessed of faint or minimal consciousness—do not suddenly wake up and start talking. Indeed, in every real sense, these people I’ve been writing about are the rare exceptions to an otherwise sad rule. But the fact that such people exist at all is very meaningful: even if the overwhelming majority of comatose patients do not spontaneously wake up, some apparently do. And in that thought inheres the huge problem for society of how to relate to the somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans who exist in states of partial, faint, or minimal consciousness. Most will never recover. But some few may.

Many readers will remember Penny Marshall’s terrific 1990 movie, Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, and based on Oliver Sacks’ 1973 book of the same title. (Less well known is that Harold Pinter wrote a short play, A Kind of Alaska, based on Sacks’ book as well, which is often performed as part of a trilogy of the playwright’s one-act plays.) The story of the book and the movie (and presumably the play as well, which I’d like to see one day) is simple enough: a doctor working in 1969 at a public hospital in the Bronx is charged with caring for a ward of catatonic patients who survived the world-wide epidemic of encephalitis (specifically the version called encephalitis lethargica) in the 1920’s. The doctor, very movingly and effectively portrayed by the late Robin Williams, somehow has the idea to try using L-Dopa, a drug used to treat Parkinson’s Disease, on these patients and gets astounding results; the movie is basically about one of those patients, portrayed by Robert De Niro, whose “awakening” is depicted in detail. It doesn’t work in the long run, though; each “awakened” patient, including the one played by De Niro, eventually returns to catatonia no matter how high a dose of L-Dopa any is given. The movie thus ends both hopefully and tragically: the former because these people on whom the world had long-since given up were given a final act in the course of which they sampled, Rip Van Winkle-style, the world a half-century after they fell asleep; and the latter because, in the end, the experiment failed and no one was cured in anything like a long-term or fully meaningful way.

Why do these stories exert such a strong effect on me? It’s not that easy for me to say, but if I had to hazard a guess, I think I’d say that the concept of dying to the world briefly and then coming back to life to see what happened while you were gone is what draws me in. (Fans of Mark Twain will recall Tom Sawyer’s wish to be “dead temporarily.” But even Tom and Huck only manage to be gone from the world long enough to attend their own funeral and enjoy the eulogies they hear praising them, not to vanish for decades and then come back to life.) I’m sure there would be surprises if I were to go to bed tonight and wake up in 2089. Some would be amusing—seeing what model iPhone they’ve gotten up to or what version of Windows, or if anyone even remembers either—and some would be amazing: if the President of the United States in 2089 is sixty years old, then he or she won’t have been born yet. But mostly it would be chastening, and in the extreme, to see how all the various things that seem so immutable, so permanent, so rooted in reality in our world, have all vanished from the world, as will probably also have all of the houses in which we live today, the banks in which we store our cash, and even the shore lines that mark the boundary between the wine-dark sea and the dry land upon which we live in safety or think we do. Depending on a wide variety of factors, that thought is either depressing or exhilarating. But in either event, it makes it easier not to sweat the small stuff or allow our own anxieties to impact negatively on the pleasures life can offer to the living.

I will bring all these thoughts with me as I prepare for Israel in a few weeks’ time because the Rip Van Winkle and Terry Wallis stories are Jerusalem’s own as well. The vibrant center of Jewish life for more than a millennium when the Temple was destroyed in the first century, the city was suddenly emptied of its Jews by its Roman overlords who renamed it and forbade Jews from living there. And yet…some small remnant always remained in place while the city slept. And then, just when the Jewish Jerusalem’s faint consciousness seemed poised to flicker and die out entirely…just the opposite happened as Jews from all over the world built a new city on the outskirts of the old one and breathed consciousness and life itself into its ancient alleys and byways. As the patient came back to life, she didn’t only re-enter history either—she began to be a player in her own story, stepping off the stage to become her own play’s playwright and director. It felt like a miracle then and it feels like one to me today too.

When I’m in Jerusalem, I myself feel my consciousness expanding and becoming in equal parts rejuvenated, reconstituted, and revivified. I never run out of things to do, to write, to read, to experience. I can’t imagine being bored in Jerusalem, even on a hot day in mid-summer when I could just as easily be on the beach in Tel Aviv. I love the beach! But there is something about the air in Jerusalem, and the light, that is the spiritual version of L-Dopa that Robin Williams gives his patients in Penny Marshall’s movie. Except that it doesn’t wear off with time and, if anything, only gets stronger and more powerful as the weeks I spend in Jerusalem pass one by one until the time comes to come home and begin a new year in this place we have all settled.

#Jerusalem #Rip Van Winkle #Honi the Circle Drawer #Awakenings

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phroyd · 6 years

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

“This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone.

The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from a 2020 census survey and a national survey of elderly citizens.

For the last year, health and human services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, declined to answer detailed questions about the memo or his role in interagency discussions about how to revise the definition of sex under Title IX.

But officials at the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that their push to limit the definition of sex for the purpose of federal civil rights laws resulted from their own reading of the laws and from a court decision.

Mr. Severino, while serving as the head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity, which he called “radical gender ideology.”

In one commentary piece, he called the policies a “culmination of a series of unilateral, and frequently lawless, administration attempts to impose a new definition of what it means to be a man or a woman on the entire nation.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has called on the “Big Four” agencies that enforce some part of Title IX — the Departments of Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, and Labor — to adopt its definition in regulations that will establish uniformity in the government and increase the likelihood that courts will accept it.

The definition is integral to two proposed rules currently under review at the White House: One from the Education Department deals with complaints of sex discrimination at schools and colleges receiving federal financial assistance; the other, from health and human services, deals with health programs and activities that receive federal funds or subsidies. Both regulations are expected to be released this fall, and would then be open for public comment, typically for 60 days. The agencies would consider the comments before issuing final rules with the force of law — both of which could include the new gender definition.

Civil rights groups have been meeting with federal officials in recent weeks to argue against the proposed definition, which has divided career and political appointees across the administration. Some officials hope that health and human services will at least rein in the most extreme parts, such as the call for genetic testing to determine sex.

After more than a year of discussions, health and human services is preparing to formally present the new definition to the Justice Department before the end of the year, Trump administration officials say. If the Justice Department decides that the change is legal, the new definition can be approved and enforced in Title IX statutes, and across government agencies.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the draft health and human services proposal. The Justice Department has not yet been asked to render a formal legal opinion, according to an official there who was not authorized to speak about the process.

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s previous decisions on transgender protections have given civil rights advocates little hope that the department will prevent the new definition from being enforced. The proposal appears consistent with the position he took in an October 2017 memo sent to agencies clarifying that the civil rights law that prohibits job discrimination does not cover “gender identity, per se.”

Harper Jean Tobin, the policy director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group, called the maneuvering “an extremely aggressive legal position that is inconsistent with dozens of federal court decisions.”

Health and human services officials said they were only abiding by court orders, referring to the rulings of Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth, Tex., a George W. Bush appointee who has held that “Congress did not understand ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity.’”

A 2016 ruling by Judge O’Connor concerned a rule that was adopted to carry out a civil rights statute embedded in the Affordable Care Act. The provision prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in “any health program or activity” that receives federal financial assistance.

But in recent discussions with the administration, civil rights groups, including Lambda Legal, have pointed to other court cases. In a legal memo presented to the administration, a coalition of civil rights groups wrote, “The overwhelming majority of courts to address the question since the most relevant Supreme Court precedent in 1998 have held that antitransgender bias constitutes sex discrimination under federal laws like Title IX.”

Indeed, the health and human services proposal was prompted, in part, by pro-transgender court decisions in the last year that upheld the Obama administration’s position.

In their memo, health and human services officials wrote that “courts and plaintiffs are racing to get decisions” ahead of any rule-making, because of the lack of a stand-alone definition.

“Courts and the previous administration took advantage of this circumstance to include gender identity and sexual orientation in a multitude of agencies, and under a multitude of laws,” the memo states. Doing so “led to confusion and negative policy consequences in health care, education and other federal contexts.”

The narrower definition would be acutely felt in schools and their most visible battlegrounds: locker rooms and bathrooms.

One of the Trump administration’s first decisive policy acts was the rescission by the Education and Justice Departments of Obama-era guidelines that protected transgender students who wanted to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

Since the guidance was rescinded, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has halted and dismissed discrimination cases filed by transgender students over access to school facilities. A restrictive governmentwide definition would cement the Education Department’s current approach.

But it would also raise new questions.

The department would have to decide what documentation schools would be required to collect to determine or codify gender. Title IX applies to a number of educational experiences, such as sports and single-sex classes or programs where gender identity has come into play. The department has said it will continue to open cases where transgender students face discrimination, bullying and harassment, and investigate gender-based harassment as “unwelcome conduct based on a student’s sex” or “harassing conduct based on a student’s failure to conform to sex stereotypes.”

The Education Department did not respond to an inquiry about the health and human services proposal.

Ms. Lhamon of the Obama Education Department said the proposed definition “quite simply negates the humanity of people.”

Phroyd

#civil rights and liberties

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dandelionpie · 6 years

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Okay @mentalwires all I can say is you fucking asked for it. This is

Madeline’s Lengthy and Mostly Very Positive Track-by-Track Review of

Off to the Races

by Jukebox the Ghost

(feel free to follow along at home on your Personal Listening Device; it’s all on Spotify or wherever)

(and I’m not going to follow any formatting rules because this isn’t being graded so fuck it quotes are in italics)

I don’t know if it’s just because I listened to it over and over again, but this album is an album. Friends, there are motifs in this album. There are themes. There’s something that’s not quite a narrative, but a strange awakening to the crises that plague people who have reached a certain stage of human development just beyond the beginning of real adulthood.

1. Jumpstarted

Our speaker is awfully self-aware for someone who admits to a chronic lack of self-awareness. This song is like the “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You” by Tom Waits for a new generation, except instead of tragic it’s just, like…incredibly goofy. It also follows in the footsteps of many other songs (the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” springs to mind), it rehashes a very familiar theme: Young Man sees Young Woman*; young man becomes instantly fixated on an imagined future with her; young man admits that his imaginings are the product of his deranged imagination but, though he fully admits to his own emotionally compromised state in great detail (and your gravity / my depravity / won’t take my advice), he refuses to relinquish the fantasy and face reality, even as he does so in the utterance of the lyrics. Rather, he accepts his eventual heartbreak to be as inescapable as the laws of physics - what goes up must come down, after all, and as foolish as his infatuation seems, it’s even more foolish to try to change something as immutable as that. It’s too ridiculous to be properly sad, but we feel for him all the same.

There’s definitely a gender element happening here. I’ve been that guy, but far more often, to greater and lesser extents, I’ve been that girl. We have this idea in our culture that women are obsessed with love and will throw themselves into relationships with men at the drop of a hat, but I’ve seen it played out far more often the other way. In my (limited! human! biased! don’t @ me!) observation, women may throw themselves into the emotional side of a relationship, but the planning part (this person fulfills everything I want from a spouse/life partner/parent of my anticipated children) and therefore it must be Fate)…well, I haven’t done that since I was about ten. I’ve seen grown-ass men do it on multiple occasions, to me and many of my female friends. So like…make of that what you will.

The song also does that cute thing where it name-drops the title of the album in the lyrics, and I love that.

*the object of the speaker’s affections in this particular song remains mostly ungendered except for one she pronoun in the bridge. If you ignored that one tiny “she” (or changed the gender of the speaker), it would be easy to make this song about a very real and serious problem facing today’s LGBTQ Youth: Queer and Here syndrome**. That is, when you see another person of more-or-less your persuasion and they are around your age, breathing, and moderately attractive, you tend to fall in love with them regardless of actual chemistry or lack thereof. Again: I have been the speaker, and I have been the object.

**EDIT: Ben Thornewill, who wrote the song…might be queer? I can’t find any info either way, except for he helped with a fundraiser for Everyone is Gay one time. Someone with a longer attention span should google this for me.

Enjoying this nonsense? Click below for the rest!

2. Everybody’s Lonely

This track continues the theme of powerlessness in the face of one’s own self-awareness (dragged into another heartbreak / like a moth into a flame) while implicitly making the way for a gentle interrogation of the music industry. Are we programmed for broken romance? Probably, but we’re sure the hell not going to stop singing about it. And we have to admit, it’s more than a little diverting. The singer is having a marvelous time with the vocals for how much he’s complaining, and the track switches up the speed and time signature more than once (there’s some sophisticated musical term I’m failing to call to mind here, but dammit Jim I’m an English major not a music doctor).

The title itself is a simple statement on the nature of humanity, and a somewhat comforting one (to me, anyway). It’s hard, but if everybody’s lonely, then…well, no one is, right? And, of course, the lyrics could also be read (heard?) as a comment on the content of this very album, as well as the greater Jukebox the Ghost canon, which, self-admittedly, mostly concerns either love or drinking too much (and often both). Lampshading? Probably a little, but I think it works.

3. People Go Home

I will admit: I hated this song until I saw the album performed live. It’s just so damned cynical, and at the same time describes a lifestyle (car! boss who wears a watch! wife and children and a house and a dog!) my generation seems to have given up on aspiring to. Because the American Dream is an illusion, etc. But the thing about it is, despite its dour outlook on the life of its subject, the song itself is just so much fun.

The metaphor of the calendar pages being torn off and thrown away would be a bit too cliché in a more serious track, but the irrepressibly catchy beat makes it work somehow. The repetitiveness is really artful - of course it’s repeating itself; it’s a song, but it also evokes the passage of time and the subject’s own mortality (the tick of the clock / and the tick of the clock / mark the moments ’til the ticking stops). And the abrupt end of the song is…well, actually a little unsettling in light of its lyrical content.

Another motif arises: are we becoming who we hate? Is it inevitable that we should do so in growing up? And, again - if there’s nothing we can do about it, should we perhaps make an effort to enjoy the ride?

4. Fred Astaire

First, a confession: this song is primarily for me about the Blupjeans pairing in The Adventure Zone, so like…I’m gonna do my best to ignore that aspect in my analysis but no promises.

I love this song.

I think it’s the strongest track on this album From the very first bars, it’s psyching you up for something, and the powerful opening vocals do not disappoint. This is an excellent showcase of Ben Thornewill’s raw vocal power.

I’m also a huge sucker for the “man who has landed the partner of his dreams hardly daring to believe his luck” trope (cf: Blupjeans, Jake/Amy from B99, tons of other cute pairings I can’t call to mind just at the moment). There’s something so beautifully pure about watching someone realize how fortunate they are to have someone great in their life. In this case, the speaker seems almost playfully resentful as he wonders at his partner’s inexplicable admiration of him - “what are you even doing with a dork like me?” he seems to ask.

But in the bridge, he contrasts that playful exasperation with a genuine admiration of his beloved’s clarity of insight - when I lose myself / there is no one else / who ever sees through me quite like you, he points out, and something about his tone feels genuinely grateful. So for me, this resonates on a personal level as well - in my life, I’m continually astounded by the people who have seen me at my worst and continue to refrain from telling me I suck.

Well, that was distressingly sincere. Don’t worry; I turn back into a snarky pumpkin in just a sec.

5. Time and I

If previous tracks have hinted at themes of growing up and having way too many feelings about it, this track drives those concepts home with a freaking sledgehammer. I have less trouble with it than “People Go Home,” but it’s still a bit too relatable if you ask me. There’s a deeply sympathetic undercurrent of frustration (try as I might / it ain’t no friend of mine) - this guy’s been making an effort, and he’s announcing a sort of surrender, even as he continues to beg time to slow down for him.

I’m intrigued by we’re not the way we used to be - is he talking to a third party, or to time itself? If the former, the feeling t is one of those universal heartbreaks we all go through at this point. People don’t just change - relationships do too, and that can be even more frustrating and harder to pin down. And if it’s the latter, isn’t there something too beautifully futile about the act of begging an abstract concept to act against its nature?

This whole album is so wonderfully human.

Overall, the lyrics feel a bit weaker than the rest of the album to me, but I love the way it sounds. The vocal tracks in the bridge layer on top of each other one by one in this really evocative way, piano is perfect for a track like this - since it’s both percussive and melodic, it invokes bittersweetness of the inexorable passage of time. Maybe? I dunno, just spitballing here.

6. Diane

I hadn’t actually paid much attention to this track until I saw it performed live and the singer got the audience to sing part of the chorus for him. Neat trick, dude. I still didn’t like the song all that much until I saw @mentalwires spin very enthusiastic rope dart to it. Anyway - like many songs by Jukebox the Ghost, it would be downright obnoxious if it weren’t such a jam.

What really grabs me about this song is the line about not being able to focus. Maybe it’s just an ADD thing, and it’s certainly not an original thought - of course you can’t focus, dude, you’re basically worshipping this chick - but it’s true that people we like are distracting, and it is highly inconvenient. And it’s way more fun than most of the other inconvenient things that afflict our little species, so that doesn’t help matters. I relate similarly to I can’t sleep / why even bother, although that probably has more to do with my insomnia than anything else.

Damn I love power pop.

It’s another self-imposed tragedy — our dude doesn’t know how to let go of the idea of this girl, but how well do they actually know each other? The bridge (You make me feel like I’m alive / you make me feel like I’m the only one) brings home what the speaker’s been hinting at since the start of the track - it’s much more about how he feels than about the person he feels it for. Sometimes / I don’t even think you know my name could be read two ways - either she knows him but acts like she doesn’t (rude), or they’ve never even actually met.*

All the while, he begs her to tell him her thoughts, but does he actually want to know? And if they haven’t met, then how could she tell him she’s thinking about him at all? How is she even going to hear what he’s saying? Well, of course, she can’t - the classic futility of the pop ballad returns. So much in this song is about being unheard, and that fascinates me.

An observation: Songs in this vein hardly ever give any detail about the ostensible (usually female) subject. This is probably at least a little bit to make it easier for everyone involved to identify with them, but it also makes it clear that the speaker’s love has far more to do with his own hang-ups than with the supposed object of his affections. And doesn’t the way we love say so much about us? Maybe that’s why I’m such a sucker for romance.

*The tertiary Queer and Here interpretation makes itself available yet again. I mean, the whole bit about sweaty palms goes all the way back to Sappho, you guys.**

**Fuck I’m such an English major send help

7. See You Soon

Imma be real with y’all for a sec - I couldn’t handle this song at first. It’s about losing a person, and not even in a way that’s final. It gives me sort of the same feeling as “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop (read it; it’s short and will tear your little heart from your chest). In both that poem and this song, the ambiguity of the addressee’s identity makes the loss all the more poignant - is the speaker addressing a lover or a friend? Is it both? And which is worse?

The painful wisdom imparted by the passage of time is another motif that keeps coming up in this album. Our dude used to get mad at the small things, and he’s realized what’s actually important, but like every lesson learned the hard way, it’s too late to apply it to the situation in question. And perhaps he never would’ve come to that revelation without the accompanying loss, but that doesn’t make it any less excruciating.

Remember when your life felt like it would be never-ending - if you enjoy the particular kind of masochism brought about by that sentiment, I’d encourage you to check out “I Wanna Get Better” by Bleachers. Not to get too philosophical, but grown-ups have this thing where they lecture kids about how they think they’re immortal. And we don’t believe it when we’re kids, at least I didn’t - I wasn’t particularly inclined to take dumb risks, or so I thought. But (dammit) somewhere, we actually do realize that life isn’t permanent, that the place we grew up isn’t the entire world, and that there’s so much of that world that we’ll simply never experience. Wondering how a relationship could have gone differently is more than just a painful (and arguably necessary) experience - it also calls to mind all the different directions our lives could take, and forces us to watch as all those paths converge into one.

It’s another special mid-20s crisis - by that age, we’ve had a few close friendships and relationships, and we’ve experienced the end of some of them. And after that end, we have to change, both as a result of the loss and - you guessed it - the unstoppable, unbending passage of time. If I say it enough it might come true, the speaker says as he leads into the final repetition of the chorus, and we get the sense that he almost believes it. Is it denial, willful self-delusion, or genuine hope?

8. Boring

This is the track that really got me thinking about this album. If “People Go Home” stands on a soapbox wagging its finger at The American Dream™, this song drunkenly embraces it in a bar a few hours later. And, like “People Go Home,” I sort of hated it until I noticed what a great time Tommy Siegel was having with it.

We begin with the inexorability of time again - the seasons are changing / but my world always stays the same. Of course, the use of “lame” to describe undesirability is crummy for obvious reasons, but it also reads as delightfully teenage - our friend is desperately clinging to whatever vestiges of youth remain to him. There’s also a charmingly youthful tendency to exaggerate - I guess they’ll procreate until they die / everyone is boring / everything is lame / everybody thinks they’re not the same could have come straight from the mouth of a fourteen-year-old in the back of a car on a family road trip.

What I love love love love about this song is how smoothly the speaker seems to come around over the course of it. He begins with a distressing observation: all my friends are having kids / but nobody’s sure why. And by the end of the song, he’s worked out exactly why. He’s a little ashamed to say that he’s figured out just what the big deal is. And he’s going through some internal conflict, but that doesn’t mean he’s got to be shy about how he feels.

After wondering for a minute how he got this way (I webmd myself but somehow nothing’s ever wrong has to be one of the most #relatable lyrics I’ve ever heard), he smoothly switches from lambasting the Nuclear Family™ to flattering his addressee:

Baby let’s get boring

Let’s get old and lame

Let’s get a house and kids and change your name

‘ cause I don’t think you’re boring

I don’t think you’re lame

Let’s get a house and summer up in Maine

(kind of a lazy rhyme there at the end, but still sorta cute)

While he acknowledges his frustration with his desire to become that which he most detests, he also acknowledges that the alternative is much worse: I’d rather rot in hell / than watch you become someone lame with someone else.* And yeah, growing up resolves a lot of exciting questions into formulaic predictability, but if you find someone to share it with who’s interesting, you can enjoy it anyway. It’s either a cute little bit of poetry or the most adorably fumbling marriage proposal in the history of time.

We could be so boring, he promises his intended, and he sounds, well, sort of excited about it. Because if everybody else thinks they’re not the same, he asks, why should we bother pretending? It’s not important if we’re actually boring. It’s that I don’t think you are. And I think I agree - the most important parts of any relationship only matter to the people in it.

I’m not sure what he’s doing to that guitar at the end there, but he sure is doing it.

*There’s another reading that he’s settling but I’ll go with the optimistic one thank you.

9. Simple as 1 2 3

I found this to be sort of a weird tone shift, but the more I listen to it, the better it fits. The lyrics are all about how you can’t fall in love without taking chances - a played-out theme that still meshes beautifully with this track’s youthful simplicity. When I saw this performed live, the singer literally counted on his fingers while he sang and played the piano, and it managed to be incredibly charming. Or maybe it was just his pretty pretty eyes.

When you feel your pulse / knock you over like an animal is so simple but so vivid and I’m not sure this is going anywhere; I just wanted to point it out.

The second verse,

So take a risk

and find a little love

hidden where you didn’t see it

‘cause the time you have is all the time you’ve got

briefly brings it back to the existential crisis that dominates most of this album, but it’s somehow much more optimistic with this new spin - life is short, so you might as well give the whole falling in love thing a whirl. And if it goes badly, hey, there’s always Track 7.

Lyrically, the bridge doesn’t do a whole lot, but I like how it just sort of sits there building on itself - it increases the tension, like, well, the moment of waiting in a corner before going over to talk to someone - and when the musical track drops out to leave only the singer’s voice, it’s like the strange silence that seems to accompany a difficult utterance, and okay, I’m definitely reading way too much into this. Whatever. Death of the author.

10. Colorful

So this is gonna get pretty sentimental, because that is the sort of track this is, and for that I halfheartedly apologize. In an album full of glibness and cynicism, this song stands out relatively devoid of artifice or dire warnings of death.

This song, to me, is about being an artist, and an aggressively happy one at that. I dunno if you’ve seen my art, but, well, it’s downright obnoxious. I mean - Wanna feel like a light in a dark place? Why yes, as a matter of fact; where do I sign. And For the lovers and the broken-hearted feels almost like a call to action - it’s important to bring out the beauty of the world for the people who want to revel in it and for the ones who might be too sad to notice it. All that stuff about trying to paint the world in a new way is probably meant to be a metaphor, but I like taking it literally. It makes me feel better about how I’ve chosen to spend the vast majority of my free time, dammit.

And while this track is pretty repetitive, it forms a perfect conclusion to an album that’s just as much about the ways we talk about romance as the romance itself. It’s one more frame to fit around the first two, if you like.

The bridge is a blatant and transparent excuse to show off Thornewill’s vocal range, for which I can hardly blame him. That man sings like a god.

Bonus Notes:

Stay the Night (single)

I know this one didn’t make it onto the album but I fucking love it. It’s so catchy, and I love that it doesn’t sound like “Pretty Woman” or “Come on Eileen” - I don’t feel like the guy is being coercive or weird. Sure, he’s lamenting that he can’t sleep with the object of his affections, but it’s very much a lament of circumstance - he can’t stay the night because they don’t have time, or they’ve got work in the morning, or it’s only their first date and they’re taking things slow, and you get the sense that he understands from the second verse - I’m singing Journey on the highway / I’m still believing; I’m still believing / that I’ll wake up beside you one day - it almost feels like a reassurance.

It also brings home a lot of themes that come up later in Off to the Races. We’re not getting any younger, and yeah, we might as well have fun with it. But again - I’m not getting a “To His Coy Mistress” vibe here. It’s feels much more along the lines of “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Perhaps it’s just the evolving sexual mores of our society, or perhaps it’s that the speaker spends absolutely no time convincing his date - he simply states the obvious. It’s that universal thrill of something starting, and I am, as they say, here for it.

Anyway that was approximately 2.73 million times longer than I meant it to be. I guess I like talking about poetry? Who could have predicted this? (Really, I actually had a lot of fun with this, so if you liked it, let me know and maybe I’ll do it again sometime. Although, fair warning, it is liable to be about Fall Out Boy.)

#mentalwires #music #jukebox the ghost #music reviews #are apparently a thing i do now #sort of #i dunno if i'd call this a review

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the-mira-life-project-mtf · 6 years

Text

‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a government wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

For the last year, the Department of Health and Human Services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the department, declined to answer detailed questions about the memo or his role in interagency discussions about how to revise the definition of sex under Title IX.

But officials at the department confirmed that their push to limit the definition of sex for the purpose of federal civil rights laws resulted from their own reading of the laws and from a court decision.

“Transgender people are frightened,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, which presses for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “At every step where the administration has had the choice, they’ve opted to turn their back on transgender people.” After this article was published online, transgender people took to social media to post photographs of themselves with the hashtag #WontBeErased.

Indeed, the health and human services proposal was prompted, in part, by pro-transgender court decisions in the last year that upheld the Obama administration’s position.

In their memo, health and human services officials wrote that “courts and plaintiffs are racing to get decisions” ahead of any rule-making, because of the lack of a stand-alone definition.

Since the guidance was rescinded, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has halted and dismissed discrimination cases filed by transgender students over access to school facilities. A restrictive government wide definition would cement the Education Department’s current approach.

But it would also raise new questions.

The department would have to decide what documentation schools would be required to collect to determine or codify gender. Title IX applies to a number of educational experiences, like sports and single-sex classes or programs where gender identity has come into play. The department has said it will continue to open cases where transgender students face discrimination, bullying and harassment, and investigate gender-based harassment as “unwelcome conduct based on a student’s sex” or “harassing conduct based on a student’s failure to conform to sex stereotypes.”

The Education Department did not respond to an inquiry about the health and human services proposal.

Ms. Lhamon of the Obama Education Department said the proposed definition “quite simply negates the humanity of people.”

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 21, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump May Limit How Government Defines One’s Sex. New York Times.

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doorsclosingslowly · 6 years

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disjointed notes about nightbrothers, sexual orientation and gender, since i’m apparently posting background reasoning today

[content warning for rape and transphobia, as was to be expected considering the canon information i’m extrapolating from]

my basic model of how nightbrother/Nightsister society works is:

a child is born. if She is a Sister[*][**], She is raised by Her Mother; if he is a boy, he is returned to his father’s village. he’ll be raised in the house his father belonged to, usually; occasionally, the Sister talks directly to the village elders, who then give the boy to his brothers by the same Mother; boys will also be taken in by other nightbrothers, if there is no identifiable blood relation. this happens too if a young boy loses his brothers later on. they’re mostly raised communally anyway: they are all each other’s brother. that’s what they call each other. direct blood relation is a difference of degree, not kind. they work together, keeping each other alive and paying tribute to the Sisters. (the Sisters keep detailed records of who is related to whom, but they do not share.) (this is basically the settlement that wrath reached with the Witch in the stories: allow me to raise my child. allow me to hold him, if only for a few years. obviously, it’s been twisted--now: give my son to my brothers. the father does not return.)

when a nightbrother has reached late adolescence, he will be made to stand in the square, for the Sister to choose--if She wants--to participate in the Trials. in the fight that follows, most injuries are not lethal, and the losers crawl back to their brothers to heal and stand in the square once more

when a brother proves his strength and remains the last man standing and is chosen by a Sister as a mate, he leaves with Her and lives in her own home and becomes Her personal servant. he sires Her children. he is totally isolated from his family, from other men, and from other Women. the degree of cruelty is Her choice.

some brothers are sent back, eventually, like stinger who shut down emotionally. the Sister who took him didn’t want to lie with someone who was as lively as a corpse, and She didn’t want to kill him. brothers who are returned become the elders of the village. (savage thinks: He needs to get out, get back alive, get back to his brother, and he will never see him again if She sees his abject fear. Because nightbrothers do come back sometimes from their trials, callous ones and kind ones and small ones and tall ones without rhyme or reason, limping home from the Sisters and falling into drink, and Savage has always wondered at the Elders calling their return a kindness. Calling their own survival merciful, when they have grown hard and cruel for it. and he’s kinda right: they are deeply traumatized, and all too often, they cannot forget the fate that awaits all the young brothers around them. they look at a young boy and see a corpse.)

alternatively, if a Sister tires of Her mate--or has too many sons and doesn’t like Her Sisters’ judgmental looks--She kills him. She might then take another.

i think savage is aroace, but in-universe, i don’t think any nightbrother has a concept of sexual orientation remotely comparable to ours. sexual orientation implies agency: conversely, why would it matter whether you are attracted to women, when it is your duty? when you cannot escape?

there are many nightbrothers who have sex with other nightbrothers, for reasons including sexual attraction and love and affection and the wish to share all their lives forever and the desire for closeness, and some that don’t, but:

it’s not an identity. also, notice this makes no reference to women whatsoever. there’s wanting to sleep with other men, and there’s not wanting to sleep with other men. nightbrother society (and Nightsister society) are pretty much exclusively homosocial. friendship, choosing to share your bed, rivalry, intimacy--that’s what you have with another nightbrother. cross-gender interaction is intensely regulated and unequal. it’s difficult to have a deep relationship with someone so far above (or below) you, and a nightbrother cannot refuse--cannot be honest to--a Nightsister. if there are man-Woman couples that genuinely care for each other, they’re looked at askance by both societies. (also it’s still dubious consent at best.)

nightbrothers do not see sex with men and sex (rape, though that’s not how they see it) with Women as acts belonging to the same category. being chosen by a Sister is mating, breeding, terrifying, duty, purpose--ultimately, death--whereas sleeping with nightbrothers is choice, a fact of life. bisexuality would be the most fundamentally incomprehensible sexual orientation: the idea that there is a word thats put those two actions together is as if there was an adjective for ‘likes bicycles and grass’. why those two things?

w/r/t gender -- physical appearance at birth ≠ gender ≠ exclusively man or woman ≠ presentation ≠ something immutable and so on and so forth, but to the nightbrothers there is no distinction. gender is a caste, inescapable, the most important fact about you, and it governs your whole life and decides whether you are slave or slaver. (Savage is caught, for a moment, by the thought of the Mother with a nightbrother’s face. It shakes him. How would he know who to trust, and who to serve?) it’s interesting for me to write, this claustrophobic exaggerated cisnormative pov, considering i have a difficult relationship with gender but the closest approximation is ‘no please don’t’

occasionally i’m tempted to think about nonbinary or intersex or transgender nightbrothers or nightsisters, but i know the consequences for them would be horrible--these borders must not be crossed, so the structure of society is not questioned--so i shy away. more seriously i’m playing with writing a conversation about gender between savage and socvumo (gender-nonconforming twi’lek woman) because she knows the violence of gender intimately but she knows it as something imposed from the outside--what is the use of a twi’lek woman if she is not pretty--whereas her own people’s view of gender are far more relaxed and fluid. or eldra (also a twi’lek, but she’s not my OC so i’m more constrained. as a Jedi--luminous beings are we, vessels of the force not mere bodies--she has an interesting perspective though)

[*] by the way, Sister and brother are also synonymous with Nightsister and nightbrother; usually i’m not talking about a sibling relationship. as with the capitalization pattern, this is wording i tend to use in savage’s pov

[**] i really don’t understand why they look so different. i’m way more interested in sociology than biology, though, so i’m just handwaving it. a couple of theories i’ve considered are: phenotypically nonstandard fetuses (i.e., dathomiri zabrak women, paleskinned men, mixed looks) are somehow unviable or the babies are killed at birth, they’re both hermaphroditic species though in that case why would you need the mating in the first place, the gffa is weird, none of the writers gave a fuck

#dimtraces makes things #runaways 'verse #nightbrother prince #1k more than you probably wanted to know about this half-thought-out dystopia

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lep-the-local-fool · 6 years

Text

DBD College AU

Professors

Philip (Wraith): English

Lovable, quiet, and sweet. A lecture with him makes it very clear that he's sensitive and thoughtful, winning over his students quickly and accidentally, although he rarely speaks outside of lectures.

Emails from him are always cheery and heartwarming. As universally agreed among staff and his students, must be protected at all costs.

While Lisa, the Student Welfare Officer, often times steals him away for gabbing - he’s a wonderful listener, she will insist, though purely because he’s so quiet - Philip most enjoys the company of Max, whose mild ways mirror his own, and whose complementarity of interests make for lots of learning opportunities. For example, Max comes to Philip’s house to fix his appliances, and Philip sends Max poems about nature and calm things - only a few are his original works, but they amaze Max every time. Unknown to Philip, Max collects every poem he has ever received in photo album that sits on his desk - including one Philip jotted down on a napkin during a long flight.

Max (Hillbilly): Mechanical Engineering

A kind, simple man who knows everything there is to know about his subject, but not much else.

Max is quite insecure about his appearance and intelligence, as he used to be bullied incessantly as a child and never truly recovered, as his parents didn’t believe in the existence of mental health issues and told him only to ‘man up’. He enjoys Philip’s company immensely, because he knows such superficial things mean nothing to him.

Is terrified by his assistant, Amanda. It's a wonder he took her on as an assistant, but he says it's because she showed passion.

A very understanding and patient teacher. New students are typically intimidated by his appearance, but learn very quickly that he's devoted to helping them succeed in any way he can, staying behind after lectures sometimes for hours to answer questions, and answering students’ emails at every given opportunity.

Herman (Doctor): Medicine

The simultaneously terrifying and hilarious lead professor of medicine.

His lectures are enthusiastic, active, and interactive, frequently calling students to answer questions and take guesses. He advocates giving your best shot, even if it's wrong, for the sake of innovation and creative thinking. Even when he tells students that they’re incorrect, he never makes them feel stupid or unappreciated, always coming back around to why they had a good idea. Students either love him or hate him, there's no in between - it just depends on their ability and motivation to keep up with him.

Admin

Lisa (Hag): Student Welfare Officer

The chatty, gossipy student welfare officer. Her job is office-based, but she can typically be found frequenting the college's famous café, having coffee and chatting with anyone she knows – and anyone she doesn't.

She has a strong, vibrant presence that scares off more timid characters, but if you can stand being interrupted when she's excited or her enthusiastic attitude toward everything, you'll get along with her fantastically. She loves to help the students, and has had a particularly close relationship with Nea, who sees her for moral support and a good chat, as she has mild depression and doesn't want to see a therapist. Nea has come to see her like an aunt, and Lisa is very protective of her.

Evan (Trapper): Chancellor

Evan is typically a playful, relaxed guy, but he can be incredibly stern and distant when he needs to be, making him a petrifying sight to deviant students. Despite this, he's a level-headed and understanding boss, and cherishes the way his staff embrace their roles and get involved with the goings-on of the college.

Bill: Disciplinary Officer

A grumpy old man whose playful side only shows itself in spurts. He's an advocate of swift and harsh justice, and often has to be toned down by Evan, the Chancellor.

Ace: Social Secretary

A fun-loving man who absolutely adores his job, putting on all sorts of events for the students both in the college and in other venues, including club nights, dances, social gatherings, and – upon receiving an anonymous email recommending it – stay-in nights for the quieter students.

Like Lisa, the Student Welfare Officer, he can hardly be contained in his cubicle, constantly roaming the college and talking to students, gauging their attitudes and personalities so he can arrange the ideal social environment of the college accordingly. While some students are put off by his ultra-charismatic ways and his confident-bordering-on-cocky attitude, he's generally well-loved and massively appreciated.

Staff

Sally (Nurse): Nurse

A lovely sight, whether you're about to pass out or otherwise. Sally is incredibly sweet and gentle, and very practiced in medicine. It's not uncommon for students to go to the infirmary for the tiniest things just to be seen by Sally.

She brings tea and biscuits out to Ana, the security guard, when there are no patients. Ana appreciates her immensely, but is incapable of expressing gratitude past a simple, 'thank you'. But considering Ana rarely speaks as it is, Sally is delighted to get even this from her.

Herman was Sally's old professor, and they catch up all the time. Their personalities are incredibly polar, but they get along incredibly well – though Sally occasionally slaps Herman's wrist when his proposed practices ignore a little thing called 'ethics'.

Ana (Huntress): Security

An incredibly stoic, chiseled figure that can typically be found at the front gates of the college, unless a student has worked up the courage to ask her to unlock a door. Otherwise she may also be dragging a student out of a lecture theatre or kicking trespassers off the property. Once in a while, when a noise complaint isn't sorted out for days on end, she'll go pay the dorms a visit, terrifying the many students who have never seen her off her post.

Is quietly infatuated by Sally, the nurse, who keeps her company and gives her refreshments almost daily. Ana is unaware that Sally is very single and would happily go out with her, figuring that as a slightly barbaric security officer, she'd have no chance with the incredibly sweet and intelligent nurse. Regardless, Ana is still a proud keeper of her role, and wouldn't think to let their status difference affect her confidence.

Has a wordless, friendly relationship with Jake, who often sits by the gates of the college, eating or staring off into space. They occasionally make eye contact, nod, and continue their day.

Michael: Security

According to the students, Michael is in constant competition with Ana for most terrifying person to see on campus. The two of them rarely speak to each other, sometimes not even exchanging a glance when they swap shifts.

While his stern, unmoving face might insist he's not a push-over, he uses his status to grant his sister, Laurie, just about any of her ridiculous whims – short of actually breaking any rules.

An insider’s perspective sheds light on Michael’s constant efforts to be a good brother, though they are constantly trampled by his immutably cold demeanor and distorted mental state; Michael wouldn’t think to try and understand other people, and seems completely apathetic to the struggles others. Laurie has been the only exception to this, and only because Michael puts very active, conscious effort into protecting her. The idea of being able to achieve sympathy for any given person is an exhausting and pointless concept to him.

Tapp: Head of Security

While he's Head of Security and should thus be considered the most intimidating person to see walking down the halls, students find it honestly a bit hilarious that he's the one in charge of the beasts that are Ana and Michael; either one of them could probably take his arm off before breakfast.

He's an understanding guy in general, but takes the upkeep of rigid college policy very seriously. Despite this, he is, without a doubt, the most likely member of the security force to negotiate; most students would rather be dragged off by Tapp twenty times over than get a sideways glance from Michael. Tapp isn’t unaware of this, either, and despite his outranking of Ana and Michael, struggles not to feel inferior, often overcompensating with volatile aggression. Ana and Michael are completely unaware of his predicament, both considering him very much their superior.

Amanda (Pig): Mechanical Engineering Assistant

An impatient, hot-headed woman, incredibly intelligent and inventive, but terrible for helping students. No one knows really why she decided to become his assistant, considering how much of her duties involve helping him in teaching.

She terrifies her mentor, Max, although as a previous student of his, she respects him deeply and takes his word as gospel.

Students

Apartment groups:

Nea + Jake

Feng + Laurie + Claudette

Meg + Dwight

David + Quentin

Meg: English

A strong, fiery personality, constantly restless, and more than a little hot-headed. She's incredibly social and loves to be around people. She can make a group of strangers feel like age-old friends, and makes any social gathering about twenty times more interesting.

Is best friends with her flatmate, Dwight, and Nea, whom she met on her course.

Heard the English degree would be easy, and is really only attending the college because of her track scholarship. She's not a fan of English, but Nea helps her out all the time, and Meg is constantly amazed by Nea's prowess.

She appears incredibly confident, never afraid to ask questions, make phone calls, or talk to strangers when the need arises. She doesn't particularly care what people think of her. She sometimes slips into uncertainty, particularly when it comes to coursework or struggles with track, but Nea and Dwight are always there to bring her back to herself.

Sometimes emails Phillip, her English lecturer, with random questions just to read his friendly, endearing response. She'd never admit it, though.

Dwight: Mechanical Engineering

One of Meg's flatmates, was more or less picked up by her when he was too nervous to start making friends. He's slowly getting used to her unbridled energy when she gets excited – he used to be more than slightly terrified of her, so he’s made a lot of progress. He enjoys her enthusiasm and admires her proactive attitude.

Is also good friends with Nea, although the two of them don't end up talking very often; typically Meg is the one to ban the three of them together. Dwight wishes he had more to say to Nea, but nothing really comes to mind, other than their mutual friendship with Meg.

He's very intelligent, and an incredibly efficient worker, coping with stress better than perhaps anyone, despite his anxiety-ridden exterior. What confidence he lacks in his social skills, he makes up for in confidence in his work.

He finds Jake, who is on his course, incredibly fascinating and attractive, but he's also very intimidated by him, hardly able to get a word out when he's looking his way. Meg can always tell when Jake has so much as glanced at him, as he comes back to the flat still pink in the face, and he immediately begins gushing about it at the slightest prodding.

Jake: Mechanical Engineering

Doesn't talk about himself – or just much at all – but a little pressing from Laurie has revealed that he doesn't have a good relationship with his family. He didn't continue past that, but an insider's perspective shows that his parents haven't been great in the way of emotional support, and would much rather him be studying medicine or law. However, pursuing the degree he really wanted has been his first step out of his parents' grip, and as such, he cherishes every lecture.

He's a very solitary creature, doing everything on his own: his work, leisure, etc. Dwight sees him alone frequently and wants to walk over and talk to him, but doesn't know if he'd be bothering him. Jake, however, would be flattered by the company; he enjoys being alone to a large degree, but he's also slightly convinced that even if he did want to make friends, people wouldn't really want him around. He seems confident in himself, and in many ways he is, but he kicks himself for not being able to open up more.

He thinks Dwight is incredibly cute, not unaware of the way he flushes red when Jake gives him a smile, but is convinced not to talk to him because he also believes Dwight is terrified of him (and he's not wrong).

Nea: English

She says she takes English because she heard it would be easy, but she's secretly very passionate about it. She used to have a lot of problems making friends and keeping up a good relationship with her parents, who always saw her as strange and distant. As a result, she took up reading as a way of feeling at home.

Best friends with Meg, and very good friends with Dwight. Is roommates with Jake, but they rarely speak, both of them generally keeping to themselves. Nea is, however, acutely aware that Jake pays far more than she for the flat, and although curious, has never asked him where the money comes from.

She has a punk aesthetic, and seems to live up to it: she disappears frequently, and can typically be found skateboarding either at the skatepark or around town. But when she really seems to vanish, she's hanging out behind the Physics building, reading. She's afraid Meg has seen her here once – she looked up and to see her crossing the street just a little down the way. But Meg has never mentioned it, so maybe she she didn't recognize her.

Although they and Meg hang out all the time, Nea knows Dwight is still a bit apprehensive around her. She knows they don't have much to talk about, but Nea thinks he's a cute little twink, wishes he didn't feel so nervous all the time.

Spends a lunch every once in a while talking to Lisa, the Student Welfare Officer, as she struggles with some mild depression and needs space to vent. Lisa has gently recommended she see a therapist, but she refuses, saying that having Lisa just to listen is more than enough – though it's clear that she mostly just doesn't want her friends to find out when she's struggling, as well as denying there might actually be a problem. Her friends aren't in the dark, however. Dwight would ask but knows she wouldn't say, and even Meg, despite her rash, superficial tendencies, has seen the sullen look in Nea's eyes when things get bad.

Claudette: Medicine

A brilliant student and an even better friend, beloved by her professors and friends alike (Herman isn't apologetic about his favorites). Roommates with Laurie and Feng, next-door to Jake and Nea.

Although Jake and Nea are both quiet people, Claudette always says hello to both of them, and makes conversation whenever possible. Neither of them mind, both finding her a very pleasant person to have around, although both struggling to reciprocate her openness.

On some occasions, Claudette will seem to sense something is off with Nea, and the genuine concern in her eyes when she asks how she's doing has nearly convinced Nea to stop and talk to her properly. However, as acquaintances and nothing more, Nea tells herself not to get Claudette involved.

Often times overworks herself, foregoing her social life and sleep to study, and has to be brought down to earth once in a while by Feng and Laurie. Feng is good for talking about managing high expectations and health, and Laurie loves dragging her out when she obviously needs to take a step back from her work.

Spends all of her free time in Sally's office as her assistant. Sally enjoys having her around as a trainee, a helping hand, and as company.

Feng: Computer Science

Simultaneously cute, sassy, and hot-headed, Feng brings people in with a fiery, protective personality, keeps them interested with her intelligence and wit, but simultaneously pushes them away with her icy barriers. She finds it neigh-on impossible to really open up to people, Claudette being to only one to get her to talk about some of her deeper feelings, usually late at night after Claudette has been venting about stress, or Feng has just gotten off the phone with her imposing parents.

Although a lot of people would find her hobbies incredibly lame or nerdy, Feng is incredibly passionate about the things she chooses to care about, and doesn't stand for injustice of any kind, particularly in the case of her friends. She often has to remind Claudette that she doesn't need to live her life pleasing people.

As one of, if not the only, girl on her course, she gets a lot of unwanted attention from the guys in her lectures and around her building. Luckily, Feng is more than capable of taking care of herself, though she at one point nearly broke a man's arm when he wouldn't back off. However, Laurie has to remind her sometimes that there are security guards to take care of these things, because she doesn't want Feng to get into trouble over something that wasn't her fault; as much as they both hate it, Feng and Laurie agree it's easier to prove that a guy's arm is dislocated than it is to prove that she's been harassed. Laurie has told Feng that she should get Michael if anything is wrong, as he's frequently stationed right outside the Computer Science building, and Laurie has told him to keep a good eye on her.

Feng's parents have had incredibly high expectations of her for a long time, and this used to weigh on her heavily. Ever since she moved away from home, however, Feng seems undeterred by their pressure, simply choosing to hang up whenever they get toxic over the phone. When it comes to academic success, she seems more preoccupied by competing with herself than to compete with her peers, leading her to become both a high-achieving student and a reasonably well-balanced person – although she wishes she didn't have to turn against her parents, the people whom she knows love her most.

Laurie: Children's Nursing

Fiery and strong-spirited, but kind-hearted on nearly all occasions, Laurie is the ideal college friend. She's there until the bitter end, always available for moral support and motivational speeches.

She's great friends with just about everyone. She's one of the few people to occasionally jump into conversation with Jake or Nea, just because they looked like they could use the company. Jake is charmed by her initiative and passion, but is worn down quickly by her enthusiasm. Nea considers her a toned-down version of Meg.

As the sister of one of the scariest figures in the college, Laurie seems to have free reign of the place, always just a phone call away from getting someone dragged out of class or getting the keys into any building she fancies.

Although Laurie feels a bit like the queen of it all – she's got all the friends, the scary brother, her course is easy and interesting – she oftentimes feels like she's missing something. Dwight and Meg have each other; Quentin and David have each other; Claudette and Feng have each other – Laurie... well, she sort of has everyone, but she feels like she's missing that unique, intimate friendship that everyone else seems to find. She doesn't feel like there's anyone that she can tell everything to. If she only had one phone call before she was carted off to jail, she could call anyone, but there wouldn't be one incredibly obvious answer that completely outshines all of her other great friends. She thinks maybe she's spoiled or ridiculous for thinking these things, but she can't help the pang of jealousy when she hears Claudette and Feng having their heart-to-hearts for hours on end, knowing there's no one she feels she could open up to so purely.

Quentin: English

In every respect, a gentle spirit. He's quiet and compassionate, happiest when waist-deep in a good book.

He can be quite easily intimidated by others; his flatmate, David, used to really freak him out, but he's gotten to know him well over the months, and now considers him a close friend. David has actually helped him out a lot when Quentin has sunken in on himself, reminding him to live in the moment and find the joy and energy in everything around him. If he was being completely honest, he finds David incredibly kind and very attractive, and would very happily go out with him, but he's miserably aware that David is probably the most straight-seeming guy on the market.

Quentin finds himself sitting beside Meg and Nea during many lectures, and ends up exchanging ideas with Nea frequently. They have brilliant discussions, and he's asked her if she'd like to meet up sometime to talk further, but she always shrugs him off, suddenly very nonchalant about the literature, as if she hadn’t had that impassioned spark in her eyes just a moment prior. Quentin has a feeling that she's embarrassed to admit her interest in her own subject, but he's not sure why.

Since childhood, Quentin feels like he's come a long way in being able to interact with other people and make legitimate friendships. As such, he treasures every relationship he has, though he feels a long ways off from being as comfortable with who he is as he'd like. He's made progress, surely, but he still struggles with his self-esteem and confidence on a daily basis. Thankfully, David steps in to help him out all the time when Quentin is making ridiculous judgements on the basis of his insecurity. While David doesn't seem like the most perceptive or sensitive guy, Quentin knows that without his help and encouragement, he wouldn't be able to keep himself presentable for over a month. He just prays that he won't be quite so much of a mess by the time David inevitably leaves the college.

David: Criminology

David can be a bit perplexing at times; to strangers, he can be harsh and crude – he has said it was the only way to survive his hometown – but to those he actually knows, he's an incredibly kind, dependable person. When he makes a promise, it's never broken, and when his friend is in trouble, he will drop everything to help. Simultaneously, he's also rash and impulse-driven, following his heart above all else. Perhaps it's his rough edges and wild eyes and their vibrant contrast with his kind, earnest words that make him appear perhaps the most genuine person to walk the streets.

Similar to Meg, David really only came to college to play rugby, but found his course interesting and is enjoying his time here immensely. This is actually his second time being enrolled for the sake of just playing sports – the first time he was badly injured and ended up dropping out. This makes him two years older than Quentin and the other students.

David's course gives him some hell, and once in a while his confidence will take a real hit, but a quick pick-me-up from Quentin and he's back on his feet.

The first week of the academic year, Quentin got lost in the middle of town at night, his phone nearly dead. He called David, the only person in the city whose number he had, even though Quentin was terrified of him. Quentin sent him his location, and within twenty minutes of sitting in the cold, David came sprinting around the corner to find him, and walked him home. Ever since, David has felt strangely protective of Quentin, a feeling which baffles him immensely, but not one that he's ever denied.

#dbd #college au #what do you think?#no i didn't include freddy #dont @ me #wasn't sure about some of their majors

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pegasus-knight-in-disguise · 7 years

Photo

I really, really love the Gadsden flag, but I feel that its original intent--to portray how we, Americans, will give more than enough warning before striking against those that attempt to do us harm--has been corrupted and twisted in modern use. Radical conservatives frequently use this flag as a symbol of their political motivations, which gives the flag a meaning which is more associated with the idea of attacking and removing others’ rights, under the guise of protecting one’s own. I’m not okay with this, not only given the flag’s history, what the flag originally represented, but also because of what’s currently happening in America.

Look at the current and most recent executive order to pass, the ‘Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom’ order, which:

Makes it so that an organization which “believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages of life.” is now considered to be a religious organization (private for-profit corporations, included) and gets the benefits which align with that (such as tax-exempt status)

Defines the “religious exercises” which these organizations are allowed to take as “any act or refusal to act that is motivated by a sincerely held religious belief, whether or not the act is required or compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.”

Allows for “religious exercises” to be executed “when providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living, seeking a job, or employing others; receiving government grants or contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.”

I feel it is necessary to take back the Gadsden flag and make it our own once again. We are being stepped on, as a people. Christian-oriented companies are given the opportunity to avoid taxes and avoid contributing to the society they thrive within, while companies of other religious origins or without any religious affiliation at all are forced to continue to pay their fair share (like the rest of us). This is something that hurts all of us in the long run, especially given that this is just incentive for companies to start pushing these ridiculously fundamentalist Christian-oriented beliefs onto the rest of us--the idea that marriage can only be between a woman and man, that trans people don’t actually exist, that birth control and abortions are nothing more than murders. This is on top of the fact that, with this, individuals can be denied absolutely anything--emergency health services, schooling, housing, employment--on the basis of literally anything so long as the other person or persons claims to have religious grounds for their discrimination. It doesn’t matter who you are: straight, gay, white, black, women, man; if you’re not identical to the other person, you’re fair game for being fucked over by them in the eyes of the law.

They say the old saying goes, “The right to swing my arms in any direction ends where your nose begins.” and I think it’s no exaggeration to say that this order completely oversteps the boundaries of what is morally appropriate to be able to deny a person. Not wanting to bake a cake for a gay couple is one thing--but to be allowed to deny things which are potentially necessary for someone to survive, is an entirely different matter.

#my art #gadsden flag

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omajishans · 2 years

Text

I posted 6 421 times in 2021

108 posts created (2%)

6313 posts reblogged (98%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 58.5 posts.

I added 253 tags in 2021

#lily koo - 45 posts

#danny phantom - 34 posts

#lmao - 34 posts

#same - 33 posts

#i love this - 21 posts

#this is amazing - 21 posts

#mlkoo wips - 20 posts

#floating stars au - 19 posts

#maji's wip report - 15 posts

#oooh - 11 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#but very sad that i can actually see it happening that danny wouldnt realize his parents are overshadowed even as theyre trying to kill him

My Top Posts in 2021

fun fact: Danny becomes super allergic to pomegranates after the accident.

Why? bc I thought it would be interesting as pomegranates symbolizes either death or life in a lot of cultures.

(I'm weirdly proud about this bit bc I'm a dork)

56 notes • Posted 2021-02-17 04:33:46 GMT

Day 5 - Death

AO3

The graveyard was empty.

No one has been there since two weeks ago, when a new casket was buried.

The funeral had been a somber affair, even for the cemetery workers. Only one woman crying, sobbing her heart out as the smaller-than-usual casket had been lowered into the ground. Everyone else had been gravely silent. Even her husband, usually cheerful and upbeat. Who had hugged his wife and daughter with all his strength as he was afraid they would disappear if he let go.

He didn’t speak a word.

All the cemetery workers remembered that day. They always did when they buried a kid.

Danny Fenton.

1990 - 2004

“May he rest among the stars.”

The kid’s sister, Jasmine, had been insistent about the star motive on the headstone.

He wanted to become an astronaut, she’d say with glassy eyes when asked, the least they could do is add stars to the headstone.

She kept trying to keep strong when her parents faltered throughout the process. Her mother more than her father.

Danny had always been a mama’s boy.

The more cynical cemetery workers never said to the family, how he wouldn’t grow up to be anything anymore, but they had seen enough dead bodies to think it.

The workers hated when it was a minor.

It wasn’t all that often that a kid died in Amity Park.

There was something protecting the children after all.

It always became a media circus eventually though.

A kid that would never fall in love. Would never graduate from college. Would never get married or discover who they are as their own person.

All deaths did, in such a small town. But children’s deaths especially.

Fred had seen the news on TV while on break one day. How a kid got struck by lightning in his own house and was headed to the hospital at the moment.

But when it did? It was devastating. To the workers, to the family. To anyone that knew the kid and more.

Fred had known then, they would be the ones to bury the kid in a week.

He had been laughed at the start, when he was new to the cemetery work and young.

None of his co-workers laughed anymore, as he told them about little Danny Fenton after break.

The kid had been 14 years old. His life cut too short.

The news had continued. For days afterwards, as the cemetery workers prepared a new smaller casket and the paperwork, it had said how the kid never reached the hospital. How he died in agony. What the family was going through. The reactions of the citizens.

Everything.

The town as a whole had been shocked when the kid died, kids just don’t die in Amity Park.

See the full post

63 notes • Posted 2021-08-05 04:20:35 GMT

Day 1 - Birth/Creation

AO3

Curiosity. A couple stray thoughts. Wonder. Some sparklingly new concepts. Certainty. A completely immutable theory no one will ever hear. Time. Countless ideas and feelings who travelled for days. weeks. seconds. eons. as if pulled towards somewhere. All of them coalesced into one point. one common sentiment.

Eternity always has a different start…

Ectoplasm swirled around the budding consciousness. Fused together and gave it shape. One moment there was nothing. The next, a small form huddled on the ground.

...and a different ending.

The newly formed ghost shook as they hugged their spectral tail. They retreated into their purple cloak, the only clothing that formed alongside them, but didn’t register it. Their mind lost on the infinity they were seeing.

They knew they would gain control over their sight. They saw it. Again and again and again. It was everything else that worried them. All the possible things that could happen to them right now. In their most vulnerable state.

They have seen countless themselves fade too, before they could truly start to call themselves C...

No matter what the little ghost saw, they couldn’t help themselves. Couldn’t scream or call for help. They wouldn’t have done it either. They knew that was the fastest way to fade in the Infinite Realms as it stood. They had seen it.

It wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

The Observants had noticed this particular ghost’s impact on the timeline as soon as they had formed. How devastating this ghost would become with their innate power.

In an effort to curb that future, they sought out that ghost with a plan in mind.

The Observants knew this ghost was a Coalition. It was obvious by the way their aura flickered and clashed violently with different colors. How they formed on the ground, unable to make sense of all the contrasting information they were getting from all the thoughts that had come together to form their being.

And like all Coalitions, this ghost had a weakness. They had to stabilize sooner rather than later or risk getting torn apart by their conflicting thoughts.

The Observants’ plan was simple. Give the new Coalition an anchor to stabilize and in doing so, they would be grateful and indebted to the Observants. It would make the ghost view the Observants in a positive light. More prone to heed their warnings.

It also gave them a backdoor of control over the ghost, so they could guide the ghost away from doing irreparable damage to the timeline.

It didn’t matter if it was frowned upon by the Infinite Realms as a whole for another ghost to anchor a Coalition. Not only was it necessary, the Observants always did things for the sake of balance. It was more than alright.

The Observants found the ghost just where their artefact had foreseen.

The little ghost, just a lump of purple at that point, never saw it coming.

“You are Clockwork” one of the four Observants said tonelessly.

And something shifted inside of them. Things they hadn’t known were missing. Things they hadn’t known were jumbled. Making it easier to see the infinity without losing themself. Just a little.

Now they knew, it had been inevitable in this timeline.

They would’ve eventually stabilized on their own. They would’ve known how to see and manage all the things they saw in time.

They would have the joy of discovering their own name, even with the advantage they had.

That’s not an option anymore. The Observants had looked far into the future of this timeline and seen their name, their fate. Giving them a name mere moments after his formation and stealing his complete freedom in the process.

Tiny little Clockwork knew as they had seen it, and stared hard at the Observants, vowing retribution.

“Come and we’ll give you shelter” said a different Observant, confident as all four of them could be, that it had all gone as planned. That another crisis had been averted.

And so it begun.

73 notes • Posted 2021-08-01 04:41:06 GMT

Remember this guy?

Well, that scene placed him next to Jazz so my brain says they're friends.

His name is Stephan Cook and he's a bit of a coward but still tries to warn off people during crises and ghost attacks. He considers Jazz to be his best friend. He's super short but actually in Jazz's year.

Dunno why but I'm super attached to him now tbh

98 notes • Posted 2021-02-16 02:53:38 GMT

Day 3 - Family/Friends

AO3

Danny Fenton has always been a freak.

He was the kid with the weird ghost-obsessed parents. The one who was too lazy, too eager, too different. Who chattered about space if given the chance and with friends just as freaky as him. Dash’s favorite punching bag.

He had a weak demeanor but somewhat good grades. Still, no one really paid too much attention to him. He was on the bottom of the social ladder for a reason after all.

Then he vanished. Didn’t show up for school day after day.

By the end of the first week some people had noticed and rumors floated about.

He got transferred to another school.

He ended up sick of his weirdo family and ditched.

He died.

He joined a gang.

His parents finally did something to him.

On and on and on. Tons of rumors and theories about why Fenton was missing. But no one was curious enough to actually ask the people who would have the correct information. The teachers, his freaky friends and his busybody of a sister.

Fenton came back one month after he went missing.

He looked the same as he always did. He didn’t seem sick or scarred. He wasn’t suddenly braver or more popular or any different from before. This made the most nosy of the students curious. Why had he been gone then?

Not even Star and Mia could find out what had happened, the self-appointed queens of gossip.

Everyone was silent on the matter.

It would take months for anyone to know what had happened that time Danny Fenton skipped school for a month straight. And by then, it wouldn’t matter. Not really.

Danny Fenton was the same meek freak he’s always been though.

Except he really wasn’t.

He got incredibly clumsy for one. A lot of people learned that every fragile thing he handled was bound to get broken eventually.

He got banned in Science, Art and got kicked out of the Astronomy club.

Sarah swore when asked, the moment Fenton had cried when he somehow broke the only telescope the club had, a freaky chill swept up the room.

No one really took it seriously.

He got even quieter. Only ever speaking up when Dash got into his business.

Mikey said his eyes glowed from time to time if Dash was too rough on Fenton.

It was just a trick of the light his friends told him.

Heightened nerves. Dropping everything in reach, even his clothes. Stress visibly piling up. The sudden, growing, distance between Fenton and his friends.

The little things would pile up in hindsight. Details that together, would’ve let anyone know the truth. If only they had looked closer. Cared a little more.

If only they knew the whole picture.

See the full post

215 notes • Posted 2021-08-03 04:45:55 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #not surprised by any of this tbh #kinda embarrassed by the tags tho

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angrycollectordaze-me-blog · 5 years

Text

Paper代写：The aesthetic style of francois auzen's films

本篇paper代写- The aesthetic style of francois auzen's films讨论了弗朗索瓦·奥宗的电影美学风格。弗朗索瓦·奥宗的电影美学风格有多次转型，近年来，他更加注重于结合不同的类型电影特点进行自己的作者化私人表达，而唯一不变的是他执著于探究中产阶级平和生活下的暗潮汹涌进而探讨人性与生命。在一些人的笔下，奥宗被划分在psycho-sexual thriller这一类型中。篇paper代写由51due代写平台整理，供大家参考阅读。

Francois auzen's film aesthetic has undergone many transformations, and the queer elements have been gradually hidden. But what remains unchanged is his obsession with exploring the dark tides of the peaceful life of the middle class and discussing human nature and life. In recent years, aozong has paid more attention to combining the characteristics of different types of films to make his own personal expression. In the hands of some, ozon is classified as a psycho-sexual thriller. However, the author thinks that this can not be considered as a kind of genre, but more as a theme selection and style feature in aozong films.

The aesthetic characteristics revealed in the period of his most free short film creation are also continued in the future long film. In "all in the family," for example, where he photographed a family of four in an enclosed setting, with daily trivia, bed-to-bed relationships and emotional disputes, Mr. Ozong himself questioned the semblance of calm. Gratuitous killing -- the desire to commit a crime, the camera to take a picture -- freezing the moment and magnifying it, recombining it, morphing it, and staring at it -- these elements are typical of auzen's recurring themes. Later in the long film, aozong constantly adjusts the genre tradition and his own authoring expression to achieve a balance.

Dry fire is auzon's third feature film, adapted from the text written by fassbender, who incorporated Hollywood melodrama into his script, while insisting on alienation to achieve success. And the adaptation of ozon can not help but draw attention to the influence of fassbender on ozon and the role of genre in authorizing film production.

Before "kindling," Mr. Ozon's two feature films, "the lost family" and "provocative murder," had genre characteristics of sitcoms and thrillers, as the title suggests. However, in dry fire, his reference and application of the film genre entered a new field. Ozen is based on the original text written by fassbender, who is an admirer of Hollywood director Douglas seck. Auchan directed this melodrama film, which directly collided with the whole history of film genre. Rather than merely imitating his two previous feature films, Mr. Ozon emphasizes the continuity between different film cultures.

Back in the 1950s, when Mr. Seck was working at universal studios, there was more focus on masculinity and heroism. Later Laura Laura mulvey melodrama of plug g research points out an important characteristic of melodrama: "home, as a society place and space of myth", "to draw attention to provide internal and external confrontation with the order on the way, and for the urban, industrial, centrifugal/centrifugal force of capitalist living examples. Images of places and Spaces may link the sexual politics of class and popular entertainment in a myriad of ways." "The spatial dimensions of male and female Spaces reflect the economic and social aspects of gender differences. Popular entertainment is increasingly absorbed and brought into a orderly national unity. But its roots lie on the margins of society."

Fassbender focused on seck, drawing on the opportunities offered to critics by modernist and feminist theories. He succeeded by changing the hypocritical nature of melodrama in Hollywood by borrowing its universal code. And Mr. Ozen's inheritance of fassbender's melodrama tradition isn't a Hollywood studio one, but one that combines distinctive characters with highly stylized scenes to create his own melodrama. By referring to the genre tradition of melodrama, aozong makes the audience aware of and start to analyze the genre elements in it and examine the genre tradition so as to achieve the purpose of deconstruction.

Melodrama has traditionally been used as an expression of political and social problems with no rational solutions, but aozong USES it more to discuss human nature. He puts the characters in an unnatural and dramatic setting, and makes the melodramatic technique more extreme, so that the characters perceive their marginalization and sexual crisis in this environment. He is not a plagiarism of style type, but a reference to its production ethics. For example, the room ACTS as an enclosed space to condense the emotions of the characters. The framework of "interior" provides the whole, stable, closed and self-contained imagination and illusion, while the essence is divided, out of control, out of bounds and lack, which endowing the film with ironic effect and dialectical tension. The transmission of plague in the family of the lost souls takes place in the house; The hero and heroine of "provocative murder" are imprisoned in a hunter's hut; Four people in a room of passion; Eight women are trapped in a villa and torn apart. The actress in "pool murder" is vacationing at her villa in France. In enter the house, this closed space is used to the extreme. In the film, it even directly states that "this room is the most private place". Here, the house is no longer a pure enclosed space, but a maze of emotions and desires.

There were many stereotypes associated with genre films, which are related to the history of studios creating similar films to cater to audiences and reduce the risk of production and investment. But in fact, genre films are not vulgar cultural products, but have multiple values and no unified ideology. A critic for the cases of type elements in the recent film fully, in fact, there is no this needs, whether it be a melodrama, or suspense and singing and dancing, shows the pain of visibility is extremely obvious, the audience can still understand the new conservative attitude toward family and sex dominated the world of the difficulty of different identity.

The word "queer" has always been around ozone, but in his recent films, the queer element has become more insidious. He himself once said, "I focused on the difficulties of intimate relationships, not whether the partner was a man or a woman, a man or a woman." Judith butler proposed the kamp concept of so-called role playing, and she analyzed gender identity and desire as an act of performance, rather than being essentially immutable. That said, gays and heterosexuals are deeply connected. "Queer theory states that heterosexuality itself is a state of diversity and variety, and that it shares a lot with other sexual orientations in terms of behavior, behavior, and desires," lee states. Mr Okjong's inquiry fits this view.

The argument that ozon's films have a diminished queer element, and that this is a necessary way to get into the mainstream, is misplaced. The essence of queerness is a wandering identity and a desire to flow. The queer element in ozon's film just takes a more general form. The queer element is by no means embodied in the representation of non-heterosexuality, and if a gay couple chooses to imitate the straight and obey the straight system, then the real queer person is dead. On the other hand, the invisibility of queer elements also reflects that more marginalized people have more voices, and the middle class figures are more diversified, which is no longer the composition of the middle class in the past. The invisibility of queer elements is a more mainstream manifestation of queer. In 2016, ozon returned to the public with Franz after a two-year hiatus. The original script was a Maurice Rostand play, which liu bieqian adapted into the film the one I killed in 1932, and aozong turned the male perspective into the female perspective to tell the story at his best.

In fact, there is an element of gaze in many of his films. The term "gaze" has been interpreted by many philosophers and has gradually become the theoretical source of postmodernism, feminism and post-colonialism. Laura mulvey argues that "the gaze of the decisive male projects his fantasies on images of women stereotyped according to his needs." In male-centered films, female images are often reduced to projection points of male desire. In many of his films, male gaze is absent. He mainly USES objective gaze to film female youth growth experience and life experience, to break the inherent imagination and shackle of female image in the male-dominated society, and to expose a cruel fact -- class and exploitation can enter the family. For example, esther in enter the house is a concrete manifestation of the breakdown of romantic nature by patriarchy.

Mr Ozon's work in recent years has tended to be more nuanced -- many family tragedies happen not in violent form, but more slowly and quietly corrode daily life. However, marginal figures and vulnerable groups in the mainstream vision will be more independent, and women in families will overcome their weaknesses to find themselves. In sexual relations, women take the initiative and weaken the traditional male image.

Gaze is stratified into the gaze of the subject, the visible object and the other. This hierarchy is applied to the extreme in "enter the house" -- Claude peeks at the Raphael family, gilman and his wife read Claude's novels, and what the audience sees is their peeping, the two identities of the subject and the visible object merge into one character. After Claude went to gilman's house, gilman became angry from embarrassment, which really satirized the old middle class like gilman who kept strict moral compliance on the surface but actually indulged in the lust of prying, but could not stand the gaze of others. This peculiarity of middle-class hypocrisy and vulnerability is particularly in keeping with Mr Ozon's taste.

But in Franz, this fierce power struggle of viewing perspective is weakened, and the familiar aozong, who is keen on expressing gender, sexual orientation and eroticism, turns to make a solemn and elegant film full of classical poetry. Typologically, the film seems more conventional than Mr Ozon's previous work, but it remains faithful to his ideas.

He told film reporter Trevor Johnston at the 2016 London film festival that he made the film because he saw different possibilities in the material. "From the beginning of the film, you don't know what the relationship between Franz and Adrian was. There's suspense... Having this ambiguity at the heart of things is also a way to distance yourself from liu bieqian's version." In the end, adrien takes his place in the German family in place of his dead son, which should have been a happy ending, but for a modern audience, the irony is that Anna knows the whole story and her parents are kept in the dark. Okun realized that the key was the female role. "I want to know more about Anna's reaction when she learned about the secret, how she treated her parents, how she mourned Franz, how she felt about Adrian and how she reacted when she finally had to go to France to find her future." This is a complement to liu bieqian rather than a simple remake. "And, of course, a film about women's liberation." From the beginning to the end, Mr. Okjong has an accurate grasp of his past styles and new genres to try.

For aozong, who is highly authoring, different types have their own merits. He will not limit his theme to a certain type of paradigm, nor will he give up trying to get through new types because of his past experience of creative types and audience's expectations. Blending different genres to create their own films, while leaving key information blank, allows the works to retain the complexity of continuing in the audience's mind, without providing clear solutions, leaving the space for interpretation to the audience. To keep sensitive to the world, this is the consistent attitude of aozong towards creation.

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blogparadiseisland · 6 years

Text

Nature Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence

Nature Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence Nature Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence http://www.nature-business.com/nature-trump-administration-eyes-defining-transgender-out-of-existence/

Nature

Image

Protesting the Trump administration’s policies toward gender in New York last year.CreditCreditYana Paskova for The New York Times

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of sex in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing sex largely as an individual’s choice — and prompting fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from the 2020 census and a national survey of elderly citizens.

Image

Roger Severino, now at the Department of Health and Human Services, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity.CreditAaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

Image

A transgender flag outside a bar in Brooklyn. The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with.CreditAnnie Tritt for The New York Times

Indeed, the health and human services proposal was prompted, in part, by pro-transgender court decisions in the last year that upheld the Obama administration’s position.

In their memo, health and human services officials wrote that “courts and plaintiffs are racing to get decisions” ahead of any rule-making, because of the lack of a stand-alone definition.

The narrower definition would be acutely felt in schools and their most visible battlegrounds: locker rooms and bathrooms.

But it would also raise new questions.

The Education Department did not respond to an inquiry about the health and human services proposal.

Ms. Lhamon of the Obama Education Department said the proposed definition “quite simply negates the humanity of people.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html |

Nature Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence, in 2018-10-21 15:03:29

#Nature of Business in the Current Market

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magicwebsitesnet · 6 years

Text

Nature Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence

Nature

Image

Protesting the Trump administration’s policies toward gender in New York last year.CreditCreditYana Paskova for The New York Times

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from the 2020 census and a national survey of elderly citizens.

Image

Indeed, the health and human services proposal was prompted, in part, by pro-transgender court decisions in the last year that upheld the Obama administration’s position.

In their memo, health and human services officials wrote that “courts and plaintiffs are racing to get decisions” ahead of any rule-making, because of the lack of a stand-alone definition.

The narrower definition would be acutely felt in schools and their most visible battlegrounds: locker rooms and bathrooms.

But it would also raise new questions.

The Education Department did not respond to an inquiry about the health and human services proposal.

Ms. Lhamon of the Obama Education Department said the proposed definition “quite simply negates the humanity of people.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html |

Nature Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence, in 2018-10-21 15:03:29

#Nature of Business in the Current Market

0 notes

computacionalblog · 6 years

Text

Nature Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence

Nature

Image

Protesting the Trump administration’s policies toward gender in New York last year.CreditCreditYana Paskova for The New York Times

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from the 2020 census and a national survey of elderly citizens.

Image

Indeed, the health and human services proposal was prompted, in part, by pro-transgender court decisions in the last year that upheld the Obama administration’s position.

In their memo, health and human services officials wrote that “courts and plaintiffs are racing to get decisions” ahead of any rule-making, because of the lack of a stand-alone definition.

The narrower definition would be acutely felt in schools and their most visible battlegrounds: locker rooms and bathrooms.

But it would also raise new questions.

The Education Department did not respond to an inquiry about the health and human services proposal.

Ms. Lhamon of the Obama Education Department said the proposed definition “quite simply negates the humanity of people.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html |

Nature Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence, in 2018-10-21 15:03:29

#Nature of Business in the Current Market

0 notes