Category: Gender studies

“On Being a Trans Abortion Provider” (MedPage Today):

“I’m so glad it’s all women in here.”

As a family doctor and abortion provider, I hear this all the time. I know how important it is for many of the patients I care for to be seen by someone who shares their experiences. But I am not a woman.

I am trans. Getting dressed for every shift, I put on my they/them and he/him pronoun pins. Like many trans folx, I use multiple pronouns. Often these go unseen. People assume my gender based on what they’ve been taught about which bodies look like a woman and which bodies look like a man. I get it though. Patients have a lot on their minds when they come to see me. The middle of someone’s abortion doesn’t feel like the right time to talk about the difference between gender identity and gender presentation anyway.

I can make space for patients misgendering me. I believe abortion can be a very empowering experience, and for many of my patients, the solidarity between women is a part of that. People with uteruses suffer so much violence from men. Invasive exams and procedures can trigger that trauma, especially when performed by men. A great deal of what we, as medical providers, do to people in gynecological care was developed through violence, intentional abuse, and oppression of women of color. This legacy, rooted in white supremacy, is especially on my mind when providing reproductive care. So I choose not to correct the women who misgender me while voicing their appreciation for my presence out of respect for their experience and comfort.

But what I cannot make space for is being misgendered by my colleagues. It is a daily occurrence. Sometimes followed by over-apologizing, asking me to excuse the mistake to assuage their discomfort at my own expense. It happens despite the pronoun pins and Zoom name. Despite me talking about how weird it is to give myself testosterone injections. Despite the they/he in my email signature on that email I sent months ago announcing my pronouns and asking for some basic inclusion. All of the efforts I am asked to take on to become a part of a “more just” and “more diverse” workforce and movement are for naught if the very people they are trying to include are continually made to feel othered, a hassle, or forgotten.

The author’s name is Quinn Jackson. According to baby name web sites, this is roughly equally prevalent for boys and girls. Therefore, I’m not sure why Dr. Jackson believes that putting their/his name on Zoom will cue others on the call that they/he wants to be referred to with “they/them and he/him”. Zoom lets a user pick his/her/zir/their preferred pronouns for display, but the pronouns show up in a smaller font than the name. From https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/4402698027533-Adding-and-sharing-your-pronouns

“Your pronouns will appear next to your display name in your participant video or thumbnail and next to your display name in the Participants list.”

What would work, I think, is if Zoom users could specify how prominently to display chosen pronouns. Dr. Jackson, for example, could show theirs/his in boldface 48 pt. type smack in the middle of the video image. A virtual face tattoo, essentially. Fellow participants in a Zoom call wouldn’t miss that.

(Separately, if “[p]eople with uteruses suffer so much violence from men,” as Dr. Jackson says, why is they/he injecting themselves/himself with testosterone, a hormone that leads directly to violence? (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3693622/ )) Shouldn’t trans folx who abhor violence refrain from using this hormone?)

Related:

• Achieve college student skin color diversity via image processing?
• Zoom should treat baldness electronically?

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From CNET, originally a source of information about technology, “Women aren’t the only people who can get pregnant”:

Not everyone who gives birth is a mom. Trans, non-binary and intersex people can and do get pregnant, too, and they have a place in the parenting world.

Though it’s hard to fight the centuries-old idea that womanhood and childbirth are inextricably linked, the ability to get pregnant doesn’t automatically make someone a woman. Many of the issues that affect women can affect trans, non-binary and intersex people, too, and that includes pregnancy.

Yet fight we must!

Some helpful vocabulary:

Chestfeeding: Some trans and non-binary parents choose to feed their babies with their own milk. You can swap out “chest” for “breast,” and “chestfeeding” for “breastfeeding.” Refer to the milk as “chest milk” or “human milk.”

But don’t men have breasts? (After 1.5 years of coronalockdowns, sometimes pretty significant in size!)

Earlier this month, CNN celebrated two apparently healthy guys who didn’t give birth occupying one of the hospital beds that CNN also said were scarce to the point that Americans were dying for want of a hospital bed. I like the implication that the depicted individuals had actually pushed the babies out themselves (is there no limit to the credit that white men will steal?) and also that the browser renders this with a “99% acceptance” ad. Let’s hope that not even 1% of Americans would be sufficiently Deplorable to object to these guys getting credit for baby production.

See also “Why that tired ‘men v. women’ line won’t work with Texas’ new abortion law” (Arizona Central):

Harvard Medical School agrees, using “birthing person” to include “those who identify as non-binary or transgender because not all who give birth identify as ‘women’ or ‘girls.’ ”

And the apology from Harvard:

The webinar panelists used the term “birthing person” to include those who identify as non-binary or transgender because not all who give birth identify as “women” or “girls.” We understand the reactions to this terminology and in no way meant for it to erase or dehumanize women.

Women will not be erased, but let’s also not forget that men might be better at giving birth.

Not every corner of the CDC is up to date on this, despite energetic efforts. An August 24, 2021 page doesn’t mention using “birthing person”:

• not inmate, but “People/persons who are incarcerated or detained (often used for shorter jail stays or youth in detention facilities)”
• not disabled but “People with an intellectual or developmental disability”
• (great news here) not alcoholics, but “Persons with alcohol use disorder”
• not homeless people, but “People experiencing homelessness”
• not the poor, but “People with lower incomes”
• not crazy, but “People with a diagnosis of a mental illness/mental health disorder/behavioral health disorder”
• not foreigners, but “Asylee or asylum seeker”
• not illegal immigrants, but “People with undocumented status”
• not elderly or frail, but “Older adults or elders” (also, not Elizabeth Warren, but “Native American elder”?)
• not Afro-American, but “Black or African American persons”
• not Eskimo, but “American Indian or Alaska Native persons/communities/populations”
• not rural people, but “Residents/populations of rural areas”
• not Using MSM (men who have sex with men) as shorthand for sexual orientation to describe men who self-identify as gay or bisexual, individually or collectively, but “Using MSM (men who have sex with men) to mean people who report being male at birth and having had sex with a person who was male at birth, regardless of self-identified sexual orientation”
• not homosexual, but “Two-spirit”

(To the above I would add, in light of Maskachusetts law and the 69 governor’s orders, not pothead, but “Person who smokes healing essential marijuana every hour.”)

We’re in a fight to the death (ours!) against an unprecedented respiratory virus that has caused a global pandemic, but taxpayer-funded workers at the CDC had time, at least on August 24, 2021, to write up the above.

Related:

• “The Culture War Over ‘Pregnant People’” (Atlantic): Last year, a brand-new labor-and-delivery hospital opened on the well-to-do Upper East Side of New York City. Its name, the Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns, might strike most people as innocuous or straightforward. But to some people, the suggestion that a hospital where babies are born is for women is offensive, because transgender and nonbinary people who do not identify as women can also get pregnant and deliver babies. … I called Louise Melling, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who leads projects on women’s rights and LGBTQ rights. Louise Melling: First of all, if we’re talking about “pregnant people,” that language says to people—to transgender men and to nonbinary people—“we see you.” It should do a fair amount of work to help address discrimination. If we talk about “pregnant people,” it’s a reminder to all of us to catch ourselves when we’re sitting in the waiting room at the GYN that we’re not going to stare at the man who’s there. We’re not going to be disconcerted. … It’s interesting to me, for example, that the CDC website now speaks of “pregnant people.” With every passing year, it’s more pervasive. My GYN just talked to me about this: “Oh, I just learned this,” and was really working to change her language. … I work on LGBTQ rights. My colleagues are people who are in pain. … They are threatened because of language. [i.e., some language is far more painful than childbirth and potential birthing persons who are concerned that childbirth will be painful should know that it won’t be any worse than hearing the term “pregnant woman”]

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“The Elizabeth Holmes Trial Is a Wake-Up Call for Sexism in Tech” (NYT, 9/15/2021) is a delightful intersection between two of the greatest gifts to this weblog, i.e., Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame and Ellen Pao. If you need a refresher on Pao-ology, see the following:

• Review of Ellen Pao’s book (see also What should Ellen Pao’s forthcoming book be titled? and Ellen Pao writes something kind of interesting)
• Ellen Pao is a “woman of color”
• Will the New York Times like their own plaintiff as much as they liked Ellen Pao?
• Love for Ellen Pao
• MIT built its own Ellen Pao before the Ivy League did: Gretchen Kalonji
• Global douchebag circuit: Aspen Institute, Ellen Pao, and Buddy Fletcher
• Litigious Minds Think Alike: Divorce litigators react to the Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins lawsuit (Pao could have made $227 million tax-free merely by having sex with her billionaire boss and harvesting via the California child support formula)
• Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins wrap-up
• Ellen Pao case shows how the moral landscape in the U.S. has changed
• What do readers in Silicon Valley make of the Ellen Pao case against Kleiner Perkins?

For Holmes, see Theranos was an immigration and H-1B story and Management lessons from Theranos.

Let’s see what the glorious Ellen Pao gives us via her platform on the NYT:

When she founded the unconventional blood-testing company Theranos in 2003, I was relieved to see a woman finally benefit from the hyperbole that dominates venture investing, a world I worked in for nine years, total. Why shouldn’t a woman show the same single-minded confidence that her male peers did?

But after it was revealed that Theranos was not transparent when its blood-testing equipment failed…

Holmes’s psychotic belief that she knew something that the PhD chemists at Siemens and Philips didn’t know was “single-minded confidence.” Diluting blood samples and then running them in the European machines because the Silicon Valley geniuses couldn’t make it work yielded incorrect results for patients (just like the European PhDs said it would), but that was only being “no transparent.”

… as Ms. Holmes’s trial for fraud continues in San Jose, Calif., it’s clear that two things can be true. She should be held accountable for her actions as chief executive of Theranos. And it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing or bad judgment.

This is where I can agree with Pao. David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner was on the Theranos board and his firm was the chief enabler, according to the excellent book Bad Blood, of the continuing Theranos fraud. Yet he is not being charged with any crime.

Though never charged with crimes, WeWork’s Adam Neumann and Uber’s Travis Kalanick hyped their way into raising over $10 billion for their companies, claiming they would disrupt their stagnant, tired industries.

Remember the accusations of harassment, privacy violations, price gouging, misleading advertising and any of the other dozens of scandals at Uber? How about the genocide incited on Facebook in Myanmar, or its engagement-centric approach that led to the proliferation of anti-vaccination propaganda on the platform? Neither Mr. Kalanick nor Mark Zuckerberg has faced any significant legal consequences.

Meanwhile, a Tesla employee reportedly described part of a Tesla manufacturing plant as a predator zone for women.

Hmm… what is different about a Tesla that you can drive, admittedly at the cost of neighbors thinking that you’re a sanctimonious douchebag, compared to a blood testing machine that doesn’t work? And you could drive that Tesla or take an Uber to an actual functioning cubicle at WeWork where you could distract yourself from the pain of working by posting on Facebook some righteous hatred for the young people who refuse to get vaccinated against a disease that kills 82-year-olds.

This article is a bit of a letdown, but it is great to see these two female-identifying giants on the same page in the newspaper of record.

(What else do Ellen Pao and Elizabeth Holmes have in common? Nobody would ever have heard of Ellen Pao if she hadn’t been having sex with Ajit Nazre, a married junior partner at her Kleiner Perkins office. That was the basis of her story in the courtroom when she was seeking to extract cash from KP. Elizabeth Holmes’s story in the courtroom is that all of her apparently bad actions were a result of having sex with Ramesh Balwani, a guy in her office. Is it too much to ask that the New York Times devote some space to a woman who didn’t have sex with anyone in the office?)

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Apple News thought I would love “Singing songs of praise for our non-binary family” (The Sunday Times (not one of the tabloids!)) and the robot overlords were certainly correct. From the article:

The broadcaster Carrie Grant and her presenter husband once had three daughters. Now she is the only female

Carrie, 56, and her husband David, 65, the Songs of Praise presenter and former pop star from the band Linx have four children. The three oldest were born girls; now all are “trans/non-binary”.

This raises the question… if all of your children have changed gender IDs, what project remains open? Perhaps the family dog can be persuaded to get on the LGBTQIA+ bus?

Readers: if we can convince Mindy the Crippler to identify as non-binary or as a “male”, what should his/zir/their new name be?

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