Roads to Safe Places

I always feel bad for laughing so much and so gleefully at US idiots and being glad that we didn't have many comparable people over here, but now I can proudly present this guy. A person who thinks that Jewish people are smarter because of genes and Muslims are lazy and stupid and it's impossible to integrate them, among many other points that make the mind boggle.

He decided it'd be a good idea to give a BBC interview. If I can be bothered I'll supply choice quotes later.

• "The lack of economic and integrational success of the Damascan people are due to cultural features which are due to the Muslim faith."
• "Most of them [Arabs and Turkish people] don't feel discriminated against."
• "If you're discriminated against if you wear a headscarf that's your own choice. [...] You could as well live in the United States or in Turkey." 
• "The Turkish woman which lives in Germany told me some weeks ago, 'Please don't take these mental aggravations seriously, oriental people tend to play with their emotions and love to raise guilt in others.'" 
• "I have alienated nobody. I have just stated facts, and that's alienating nobody."
• "I think if the United States would be better off if they were careful with having two different languages in one country."

So, to sum up, we have a powerful white male German saying, "You Muslims are stupid underachieving welfare leeches, possibly because of genetics, but I'm going to mumble a bit over that point. If you're discriminated against, you're exaggerating because of your emotional nature or have chosen the bed you lie in and are welcome to move to another country if you don't like that. Gee, why don't you people integrate better and insist on keeping to yourselves?"

There are such a lot of discussions on art and violence these days which make my skin crawl so much I can't speak about them coherently and this probably clouds my judgement on them. Still, I'd like to say this: art can be harmful to people who didn't consent to be a part of it.

( Recent sexual violence in what people say is art, trigger warnings )

If people use one oppression as a ~metaphor~ for another that is harmful to the party whose experiences it exploits to express yourself. It's the limit of freedom of expressing yourself - the moment your freedom touches that of another person and you take on their voice to speak about experiences you made, and I'd like to see more self-limitation at work.

I guess the question I'd like to put to people who argue that things like these are important enough to be made regardless is if they consider the message or artistic value of this particular piece to be more important than the problematic content and exploitation of others and why.

Because I don't see it.

"Breeder" is a derogatory term for a cis heterosexual person.

Because, you see, man + woman = babbies, and because no self-respecting queer person would ever be caught having a baby. I have no idea where this term originated, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say within certain fringes of the cisgay community, given the nice focus on the reproductive organs of ciswomen there, though I am not sure if the main association is meant to be husbandry there. I can't really make myself care, either.

As someone who wants to have children, this term pisses me off incredibly. Not only is it misogynistic, it also completely erases any queer and/or non-cis couples who do have or want to have children, dehumanises children and parents alike and just generally makes you look like a fucking ass if you use it. 

I want children with Crocky. I am not sure how yet, or when, or however we'll be able to afford that, or what kind of bureaucratic nightmare that's going to be, but at some point in my life, I want to raise children with this woman I am married to. And fucking hell, this is not going to be easy, and a lot of it will be every bit as dehumanising as the term "breeder" suggests.

First, getting one half of our child's genetic material united with the other is very likely going to be done in a laboratory, or by a doctor the way it's routinely done by real life breeders on farms. Since it's "sittenwidrig", "against public policy/immoral" under German law, we'll either have to go abroad, where the cheapest ~breeding~ session still costs about €5000 (and there's no saying if this takes off the first time around).

And then, once that genetic material has happily united with its other half and my bank account lost a small fortune and we are reasonably certain that it's going to stay where it's growing, the next nightmare begins - adoption. The process takes at least a year, though stepchild adoption is the same for both heterosexuals and homosexuals. You file for it, and then someone comes round to examine your relationship, as you have to be found capable of taking care of a child by the state. Officials come into your home and interview you to see if you are fit to parent, what your emotional relationship to your child is like, how healthy you are, what your financial situation is.

For all of this, you have to have the all-clear of the errant biological parent. If they're not known, you get a waiver, though, again, the case has to be examined by officials.

And then, there's only the everyday misunderstandings and nightmares when encountering a system in which families like ours are not common (there are around 13k children living with queer parents in Germany), the stereotypes, the idiots who want to debate calmly as to whether it's a good idea at all that people like me have children, and queer idiots who think that the term "breeder" is a good choice of words when referring to heterosexuals.

I have to admit, this abstract really leaves me wanting more and raises some questions, especially about what the point of this is, really. It may be my headache, but I really feel as though I'm not getting something here.


1. Post-closet era. Post. Closet. Era.
2. How, pray tell, do you "use appearance to attain a sense of authenticity"...? I mean, I'm guessing here that they're aiming at the struggles that femme women face to "look gay enough" in the eyes of some people and the backlash that butch women get for "embodying a negative and harmful stereotype", but I'm still left with the feeling that I need to find myself a pansexual outfit ASAP. Maybe some bisexual pants? Does that mean that Crocky has to cut her hair? I just... yeah.

Also, I am not sure why they went for a qualitative study here, and I'd really appreciate if someone enlightened me. And also, the point of this. So twenty people say that they use their appearance to signify their identity ~authentically~. And now?

After initial scepticism towards these rather rigid models I have to say that I can really see part of my experience in those stages.

Cass Model of Gay and Lesbian Identity Formation (1979)

"Coming out is a life-long process of exploring one's sexual orientation and Gay/Lesbian identity and sharing it with family, friends, co-workers and the world. Coming out is one of the most significant developmental processes in the lives of Gay and Lesbian people. Coming out is short for the phrase "coming out of the closet." Coming out means recognizing, accepting, expressing and sharing ones' sexual orientation with oneself and others."

( Read more... )

If I was a heroine in a story in whatever medium I'd never, ever want to have children. That seems to be the safest way to either be disposed unceremoniously before the story even starts, or to die for my offspring, while, or shortly after my offspring are born. While having a daughter has mothers dying in childbirth to make way for the evil stepmother (especially in fairy tales), having sons seems to doom mothers to tear-jerky demises saving said sons from their future nemises.

These are the five dead movie mothers that drove home this point to me most in chronological order.

1. Bambi's Mother (Mother)Reason: tries to divert some hunter's attention from her son.
Role: I don't think she's more than an end-of-innocence boost for the story, really.


2. Littlefoot's Mother ("Mother")Reason: saves her son from his nemesis-to-be.
Role: again, she seems to be little more than a reason to kick off the plot, and an extremely tear-jerky red-shirt to show how very very dangerous Sharptooth is.


3. Quasimodo's mother (nameless)Reason: wants to save her son, instead gets wrongly accused of her son's nemesis-to-be and killed by him, though by accident.
Role: underlines how very heartless Frollo is and to show that our hero's mother, whom he never met, didn't abandon him but really cared for him. Another pointless tear-jerk moment.


4. Harry's mother (Lily Potter, née Evans)Reason: dying instead of her son, who is about to be killed by his nemsis.
Role:  supplier of backstory, subplot and hero's special superpowers. And secondary villains' love interest, much like: 


5. Leia and Luke's mother (Padmé Amidala)Reason: underlines how truly evil her husband is?
Role: dead love interest, mostly - and she's still better of than Shmi, who, in terms of plot, seems to be Reason for Revenge as well as tear-jerker.

Who is your favourite dead movie mother?

Not being an Apple user I have to admit that I never got Apple Apps, and I'm kinda hoping that this is a bad joke and the only reason that our broadsheet press picked up on it is that they're as tech-illiterate as their readers (me being one of them, occasionally), but.

Just. Wat.

Kudos on the assumption that all men are heterosexual and idiots who can't read facial expressions or, failing that, can ask for clarification.

Yeah, I'm procrastinating.

You know, if you start your Master thesis by saying that you're only going to consider male homosexuals in your study because they clearly have it worse (oh god I wish this was more of a paraphrase) as well as because there's so little data on female homosexuals (well, fair enough), because there are so many men writing about homosexuals (...?), that doesn't make you look that good to start with, but I was willing to read your paper, anyway.

But then you proceed to make your case, saying that those pesky foreigners, especially muslim foreigners, hate gay people, want to steal from them and beat them up. What the hell. I was looking for a sensitive insight into sex ed aimed at muslim students regarding homosexuality in Germany, not xenophobic garbage.

The first drafts of the DSM-V are out.

I can't say that I wouldn't have expected some of what's in there. Still. WOW. 

Let's start with something positive: I'm glad they're including Binge Eating as an eating disorder now. That's a good thing. I'm torn on Non-Suicidal Self Injury and wonder why they didn't also list this under paraphilias.

Other than that... Wow.

Let's begin with the fact that they've chosen to dispense with listing "distress" in their criteria as a measure for whether something is a disorder or a mere deviation from an abstract norm. I am not sure what is going to take its place - the way things are looking now, there is no telling where the boundary between clinical condition and deviation from the norm lies, really.
Zucker suggests that the likelihood of social ostracism is supposed to be the boundary for the norm here for his field, and my impression is that it will be really down to the estimation of the psych rather than the patient whether they have a condition that ought to be cured than the patient's distress with their situation.

Nearly all of the criteria regarding GI in children  that aren't related directly to the child's experienced gender still don't make sense and are deeply rooted in sexism, though the change in terminology is a good one. WTF is "typical masculine/feminine clothing" for children? What's wrong with cross-gender roles during fantasy play? WTF are "toys, games, or activities typical of the other gender", and what's wrong with rejecting games considered "appropriate" for your own gender?
Also, the shift in focus when it comes to the basis of this diagnosis from Gender Incongruence in adults does not make any sense to me - if behaviour appropriate to a person's gender is irrelevant in adults, why enforce it in children to this degree?

Zucker's paper... where to start. I am not an expert and I'm probably missing many things that are noteworthy, but there is still enough that is really anoying. He fails gender 101 ("if there was a social reason for girls to want to be boys, the same reason would apply to boys wanting to be girls"), it's creepy how he has as test subjects of one study comprised 500 boys who were referred to his clinic and only 79 girls - which to me seems to speak volumes of the inherent sexism of the entire enterprise and the femmephobia it engenders - his insistence that GID is a condition that ought to be cured by changing the individuals gender expression because that will cause their problems to disappear because they won't be socially ostracised anymore... there is so much that's troublesome in that paper, but his insistence that if you fix yourself, your situation will be better because your peers will react more positively to you is probably one of the least sensible I have ever heard. Would he maintain that that's applicable to other condition that cause children to be ostracised by their peers, I wonder?

Gender policing is creepy and superfluous, and it doesn't get better if people start even earlier with this nonsense. I want more freedom to experiment, especially for boys, not less. Most of my childhood friends presented with at least for of these criteria, in girl's cases five. I want back what I had when I was younger. More androgynous clothes for children, more toys that were coded as androgynous rather than marketed towards a specific gender, more room for experimenting. When I was small, nearly all of the male friends I had in kindergarten played more with their dolls than I did - my best friend, a boy called Sebastian, had a dolly that he used to take along everywhere and that was usually integrated into our games, usually in the role of his baby. Most of the girls I was friends dressed in androgynous clothes that would be perceived as "boy clothes" today because they're not sexualised, they played with androgynous and toys coded as "for boys" today, many had more friends who were boys than friends who were girls, and we all wore trousers with tears on the knees. I haven't seen any of that during my internship in kindergarten, and it's a fucking shame.

Edit: another thing I'm wondering here is what the benefit of having those extra criteria at all. I can't imagine that there many people who say that they don't feel their assigned gender is correct for shits and giggles, so surely, that ought to be enough for the medical gatekeepers...?
I guess I ought to shut up about this. I'm a cis ex-psych minor and really not informed enough to join the discussion of these issues.

So. Paraphilias.

The paraphilia-related changes in many areas actually seemed to make things worse rather than improve them. They apparently want to make a distinction between paraphilias and paraphilaic disorders - one being merely ascertained for study purposes, the other being diagnosed.

Not sure what the benefits of ascertaining something in a medical context are, especially in a Diagnosis Manual for Disorders, but fine, if they must. Still, the change in the wording for this is failtastic: for masochism, for example, according to the revising people, the difference between "real, not simulated" harm and ... well, harm, simulated or not, is pointless enough to just drop it altogether. Which means that  a lot more people now ought to go see a therapist, because there is no difference between sexual games and reality any more, if I'm reading that correctly.

Also, we have "autogynephilia" (and the continuing absence of autoandrophilia as well as notes to whether ciswomen experience autogynephilia, which they do) rear its ugly head again under "transvestic fetishism". As far as I can see from Blanchard's paper there is no reason for the inclusion of this "condition" at all, really, apart from Blanchard's own fucking creepy obsession with studies on the sexual fantasies of trans women.

Also, asexual people need to get their heads checked, and so do people who don't enjoy being penetrated, or those people who just like their vanilla sex too much.

Who else needs chocolate cookies?

EDIT: and I'm still trying to get my head around the necessity to list the symptoms of healthy paraphilias in a diagnosis manual for disorders under the title of the disorder it's supposed to diagnose, and I'm still drawing a blank.

Can anyone help me out? I must be missing something here and I hate that.

What we learned from this movie:

• we live in a post-racial society, and cultures are the same and totally equal - like Western cultures and whatever passes for culture among those weird savages who run around naked and worship sky jellyfish.
• women have to look after men. In any species, on any planet, women look after men. Until it gets dangerous. THEN the mighty male white saviour rescues the savage females.
• men make decisions. Women may disagree with these decisions, but that's clearly wrong.
• women (in this case, all-powerful nature goddesses) are resilient and need to get told what to do by foreign male saviours interfacing with them.
• heterosexuality is a natural norm.
• mother-characters are only in the story to take care of their men and then die and through their death make a powerful statement about how their men can live better.
• men get to choose women. On any planet, in any society, men get to choose women. Also, everybody mates for life.
• on any planet, women are the ones who cry, and the men are the ones who harden their features in response to grief.
• minorities have to instruct hostile foreigners in their weird ways for the benefits of the foreigner.
• white Americans can easily learn the ways of a noble savage race within a couple of weeks.
• "tribal" music that fits a Westerners idea of African music is the only appropriate score for a movie about blue Aliens. Until there is large-scale genocide, that calls for a full orchestra. Until we reach personal tragedy, then we need a sad, shapeless lament sung by the Universal Voice of Grief™, a sad alto.
• James Cameron is a huge gamer dork. Even the quest progression of the avatar in question is like that of any MMORPG. Even the order in which he gets mounts follows that (riding mount, flying mount, EPIC flying mount!!!11), and did we see the floating mountains of Outland on the horizon? Also: good to see that other people are looking forward to the Cataclysm expansion pack. Oh, yeah. Also, we know, James, we know, gaming addiction can be a real pain.
• we know that the main character is a Real Man because a.) he really showed that pterodactyl who's boss by sticking his body parts into its body and restrains it physically, and b.) his manly rugged behaviour throughout the rest of the movie. 
• unobtainium. Unobtainium. Yeah, we got nothing.
• white invaders are hurt by warfare, too - their love told them to piss off, imagine how that feels! They all make really sad faces. The complete obliteration of what passes for culture among the nekkid tribe pales in comparison.
• no genocide can be quite as bad as Grace dying (grace, get it?). So let's have a huge-ass ceremony all about a white woman.
• savages will trust a complete stranger who absolutely cannot be bothered to learn their language just as long as he boinks their  princess and has their biggest ride to lead them into battle that will cost most of their lives.
• there is a good military and a bad military. The good military are benevolent colonialists who are willing to put up with some heathen mumbo-jumbo in order to rise to the top, and the bad military do the same, only that they're willing to make sacrifices among enemy lines and just take what they want.
• Intentions really, really matter - the hero (eventually) didn't mean to hurt anyone.Yes, fine, he told everybody everything about all of the savages secrets, but he didn't mean to do any harm!
• Oh yeah, protect trees!.

In short: holy shit, this is a bad movie.

BAD. Really BAD.

I have never seen aynthing quite as bad in a long, looong time. Just how can anyone be involved in that movie and not realise how fucking bad it is?

Also, the worst thing: it is so obvious that in thousands of cinemas everywhere, people are going, "Wheee, flying dinosaurs!! Wohooo! BOOM, explosions!!" rather than, ".... what is this shit?!"

Trawling the internet in search for an article (which I'll have to pick up at the uni library. No e-copies for this one), I found this workbook that is supposed to up the readers' vocabulary in preparation for US standardised tests:




Now, I agree that this series is God's Gift to ESL teachers because everybody, or at least every single one of my wee tutees over the age of fourteen, have read it in English - even if they're really weak learners, so I agree, this can be a powerful teaching tool and motivator to get kids interested in reading a book in a foreign language. Learners.

I didn't know native speakers needed to revise their knowledge of the meaning of "marble", "murmur", or "butterscotch" for their SAT scores so badly that there needs to be a workbook.

In the documentary "Guys and Dolls", this one guy shares (at about 4:50, I think) that:

So tell me internets, why is the desire to be called by your name a radical feminist issue? I am thinking about changing my name, and I never realised that there was still such a heated debate about this.[Poll #1413059][Poll #1413059]

I tried to find articles on the matter, and pretty much all sources I've found and read after a lazy Google search make it a front-line issue of modern-day extremist feminism to be attached to your own family name. This should probably teach me to be more careful about my sources, but the degree of conviction that women should change their names confounded me.

The articles I found stress that while most women don't even think about it, there are "some" for whom it is a "struggle" and that "more and more women" are keeping their name (and that's still only 10% in the US, apparently, not sure here about the numbers in the EU and Germany). On the whole, it seems to be an option that only the self-and/or career obsessed consider, or those who want to Make A Point. The writers (fair enough, we're talking writers on US "women's sites" dealing with marriage here, what did I expect?) make excuses and long explanations for those women with the quirky desire to hold on to their name ("They are very invested in their career", "they are uncertain about the wedding", "their husband's name doesn't go with their first name").

They also paint those husbands who change or even hyphenate their names and their fates in a very negative light ("that would be as oppressive to him as it would be to you to change your name! Would you want that?" - "He would be ridiculed by his peers!" - "His family line might be lost!" - "People would get confused!" - "It would mean that he's a feminist-brainwashed weakling!" - "It would be difficult for him to introduce you!" - "Think of the children!" - "He would think you are more attached to your father than to your husband!").

The consensus is that keeping your maiden name is bad, selfish and confusing, changing your name is the desirable default because of family lines and social acceptance. The rationalising strategies these people use to explain why 90% of women change their names are stellar, too. It's all their own, free choice, they don't mind their new identity, names don't matter, anyway, they want to belong to their husband's family, they want to fit in, it's more convenient for the insurance company/strangers/the family/children/the dog, they want to give up their ugly maiden name. Since everybody is equal now, there is no point in not making the convenient, traditionally and socially accepted choice. You have the freedom to choose between a right and a wrong option, apparently, and it's interesting that 90% of couples make the same free choice.

Some of the articles I found: 
Maiden Names ( have an excerpt - caution, rage warning )
Married or Maiden Name - Behind the Last Name Change
Should I keep my maiden name?
The Pros and Cons of Keeping Your Maiden Name
The Reasons Why Women Keep Their Maiden Name

Recently, an article in Die Zeit on the role of German fathers in time of post-feminism sparked a lively discussion  gender wank in the comment section that is still going on a couple of months later. I occasionally read the comments only to find that people seem to be following this guide to the letter: Derailing for Dummies. Read it. It's brilliant.

Die Zeit is supposed to be a German quality paper but the comment section is a gathering of tabloid brains who use their college vocabulary to discuss issues that were relevant back in the nineties and say things that I usually only hear from particularly dim YouTube users.

The gist is: we have achieved equality, the pay gap is a thing of the past, all feminists hate men, and where are my rights and my "boy's day"? It is women are damaging men because there are so many of them in our educational system, so that's one way how women oppress men: by forcing men out of the educational system. Also, evil women force their weak partners to be a "New Man" and then leave them for the "old" kind, leaving their poor partners battered and broken - which only goes to show how much more powerful women are these days.

People are spouting things like these:

• "How dare you call me misogynistic! I was only saying that women are clearly better suited for child raising and men for studying physics, it's in their nature, and everything else would be denying basic facts of biology."
• "You do realise that your tone is not helping your cause, don't you?"
• "How is it not oppressive that boys don't have Girl's Day!"
• "Since we have equality, the only role in life that men have left is that of impregnating the women who choose them, how come women aren't conscious of that immense power they have over men? They can choose them! They are more powerful than men, who have to fight for women."
• "Oh, sweetie, that is so typical for a radfems like you. Really, it makes me laugh, how can you expect us to take any of this seriously?"

To make it worse, it's all in the awkward, letter-to-the-editor-style my countrywomen and -men use when conversing online, and it's in my mother tongue, so that comfy linguistic and emotional puffer zone I have when I read idiots discuss these things in English is non-existent and ten minutes and three pages into the discussion I feel like strangling someone. It's not only the sheer small-minded ignorance of the arguments, it's the vocabulary. If people use words like "radfem" or "feminazi" in English, it's just a word, it doesn't have any of the playground-humiliation connotation "Kampflesbe" or "Kampfemanze" have (although nowadays I think that "Kampflesbe" [militant dyke] is pretty cool).

The way the mostly upper class users don't realise that in this world, not everything is about them and that there are plenty of people, like, for example, "working class" girls and boys or people with a background in migration who still do NOT have the opportunities they themselves had is truly baffling, not unusual, judging by the experiences I had in education courses with gender topics at my university. When they do discuss people Not Them, they do so with a detached, generalising arrogant ignorance which is not much better. Gnah.

It's a bad outlook when discussions I have with xenophobic High School dropout teenagers from the US about why LGBT people should all be locked up in jail are less threatening for my faith in mankind than merely reading discussions among supposedly educated, self-proclaimed "liberal-" and "open-minded" Germans. 

The Church of.... Body Modification?

Really?

According to our exam registration office, the title of my final paper is [sic!]:

"Event and Performativity in John Donne's Snaps and Sonnets and Divine Poems".

Needless to say, the title should be, "Event and Performativity in John Donne's Songs and Sonnets and Divine Poems" - at least that's what my professor said he'd hand in, and I sincerely doubt he'd make such a big typo. I have no idea what's up with the random text style of the title, nor what the fuck "snaps and sonnets" are supposed to be, but I do know one thing: officially, titles can't be changed after they are handed in at the registration office, especially not once they are sent out.

So I might end up writing 60-80 pages on snaps, which, according to Wikipedia, is:


Or, of course, the plural of snap:


I think I may need some snaps now...

Stupidity in the Sidney Morning Herald brought to my attention by feminist_rage :

( Your partner wants sex but you don't? STFU already and put it on the to-do list! Your sex therapist wants you to! )

I don't know what bothers me more, the lack of earth logic, or the fact that this is the opinion of a sex therapist. Who works with real patients.

There is a site here on which you can upload pictures of you and your partner/friend/Snape to generate a picture of prospective babies.
Good in theory, the programme is about as accurate as the Sims baby generator and has not incorporated even the most basic facts of genetics. When I compared myself to the picture I received after submitting my parents I can't say that it's good for actual baby planning, but it's an excellent toy.

For those who always wondered what Minerva's and Snape's dreamchild would have looked like:



( Other offspring of various pairings (MM/SS, RL/SS, RL/NT, SS/LV, SS/PW, SS/PD, SS/LE, HP/GW, HP/DM) )

( Edward/Bella )

So, now back to some actual work.

Apparently, I'm pregnant.

Or Crocky is. Or my brother is. Or his secret girlfriend is. Take your pick.

My mother just forwarded an e-mail she had received from a second-degree cousin who was told by her daughter that she was told by another second-degree cousin that my mother is going to be a grandma. Much humorous mind-racking ensued, and that none of us has been in contact with the source of this information just made this all the more mysterious.

Maybe they know things I don't know?

Around 1 a.m. everything is a good idea, including making graphs of the most popular books used as an inspiration by fanfic-writers based on the number of fanfics written for those books on FF.net.

Here are the (fairly unsurprising) results:





I can't express how thankful I am that Discworld fics came in last, nor how appalled I am by the fact that there are so many DW ficcers in the first place. I don't know why, but for me, there is something extremely wrong and sacrilegious about the thought of people sitting down to write Vimes/Detritus cross-overs or whatever.
Although, considering how many fanfics there are for the Bible, I probably should not be surprised at the fact that they do exist.

Especially considering that there are 80 Minesweeper fics out there.

Anyway. Good night!

This is more than slightly old news, but I only found out about this today and I am rather worried about this. The DSM (Diagnostic Standard Manual for Mental Disorders) series are standard manuals that every psychologist uses. It is originally a US American manual, but has become the international standard diagnosis manual, Europe as well as in the USA, from what I know. It's the one we've used in Scotland, it's the one we use here, it's the diagnosis bible.

There have always been scandals surrounding the DSMs, the last one was about the 1994 edition when it became clear that some of the scientists on the board's interests had been possibly affected by being on the payroll of pharma companies, if I remember correctly.

Now, the APA is working on the DSM-V. So far so good. What does not seem so good is the choice of people they've put in charge of the sexual and gender identity disorders section:

Now, whom do we have here?

The chair, Zucker, is fairly well known for his work in the Clarke institute and his work on children and gender identity disorders. I found something on what Zucker proposes for Gender Identity Disorder in Children - diagnosis and treatment on NARTH, although the "National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality" is not a very objective choice.

Here's a blog entry on an example case and what Zucker would propose vs. what another doctor would propose. And here's the backstory.

I can't understand why they have chosen this man. From what I have read on Zucker, his studies are concerned mainly with treatment of, of course, the cause, diagnosis and treatment of gender identity disorders in children, but also with establishing correlations for cross-dressing behaviour in males and homosexuality, poor social conditions and GID in children as well as later homosexuality, depression in the parents and homosexuality/GID, unattractiveness in girls and GID, and a significant correlation of depression and GID.
Altogether his studies are not methodologically convincing to me, but then, my view is as biased as his.

A.E. Brain has a rather good summary of who else is on the board and what they are doing at her blog, here is a shorter summary:


Obviously, LGBT activists are less than happy about the influence that Zucker is could have on the group. Someone who seems to reinforce the gender binary, pathologises gender deviations and links gender deviation with later homosexuality in a way that makes clear that he most likely does not even recognise that sexual orientation and gender are two entirely different things is not likely to have a good effect on the symptoms listed in the DSM-V, or the "disorders" these will indicate. 

I always thought that the people who advocated the kinds of therapy Zucker recommends were, well, a minority on the outer fringes of the scientific community, and it is shocking to see what kind of power they suddenly received. It's bad enough to see that there are still people in there with a Freudian background. I wonder why the APA chose them, as their concerns do not seem to be the pathological varieties of SGIDs and sexual orientations, but the pathological nature of sexual and gender deviations.

Maybe I am overestimating the influence that Zucker and Blanchard could have on any section that deals with gender identity disordered people and their diagnosis, but since the other members on the team have such different areas of expertise it is likely that their influence will be rather important.

And because I suck at write-ups, here are two blog entries on the topic:
Kat Long: DSM-V Gender "Experts" Anger LGBTs -  Trans Groups Oppose Psychologists’ Background in Reparative Therapy
A. E. Brain: Transsexual Causation, the American Psychiatric Association, and Interpol

Again, I know that the NARTH is not exactly a wonderful source for unbiased material, but there are a few articles which include quotes from Zucker and details of his works in their gender section.

I'm really curious about what the DSM-V will look like.

Whenever I read about them, I find another reason to hate the asylum systems of most Western countries (probably because  I only ever read about stories where they tragically), but I had always thought that Canada and the UK sucked just a little less, were a little less scary.
Not so, I found after reading a post on queer_rage.

From the Independent, today: Gay man facing death due to impending deportation from the UK, to Iran - where he might face execution.

( Choice quotes, favourite being: The Home Office's own guidance issued to immigration officers concedes that Iran executes homosexual men but, unaccountably, rejects the claim that there is a systematic repression of gay men and lesbians. )

From the the Montreal Gazette, today: Gay man facing death due to impending deportation from Canada, back to Malaysia - where he might be sent to prison.

( Choice quotes, favourites being: 'His refugee claim was rejected, however, on the ground the panel hearing his claim did not believe it was credible.' [...] 'There have been women told they couldn't be lesbian because they have long hair and showed up for the interviews in high heels. These people have no training whatsoever in how to deal with these issues.'> )

I don't even want to think about what the German authorities would do in these cases. I can't shake off the nagging suspicion that the people in question would already be on the plane home and none of our daily newspaper could be bothered to cover the story. 

How scary is that?
Apparently a group of individuals (their blog)has been planning a protest against Scientology and fighting them online for ... maybe two weeks now, I'm not sure when it started, but I'm probably late as usual. The group - Anonymous - is planning a world-wide protest in front of Scientology churches on the 10th of February.

NBC News:
( NBC on Anonymous vs. Scientology )

The Tom Cruise video that prompted all this:
( Tom Cruise video )
"We are the authorities of the mind... We are the way to happiness."
( Tom Cruise on his cult )

Quoth Anonymous:
( Video 1 )
"Knowledge is free. We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."
( Anonymous 1 )

And No. 2:
( Video 2 )
"We want you to be aware of the very real dangers of Scientology. We want you to know about the gross human rights violations committed by this cult. We want you to know about Lisa McPhearson."
( Anonymous 2 )

And, in case you think about going, this is the code of conduct:
( Code of Conduct )

Anonymous's reaction to the News coverage:
( News )
( Anonymous on News )

Oh, and a video No.3

Whoa. This is so... Matrixy.
I kind of want to go to see what happens on the 10th.
Oh, also, they actually seem to have been able to access data from the Scientology servers. o.O
Here is a German article with a link list, and here's a German report on RTL.

Oh, here's a world map listing all the events. o.O

Ok, f-list, you are all very intelligent, well-educated people, can you do me a favour?

Can you tell me whether you think "privilege" exists? (As in, white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc., etc.)

I think it does. Never named, the concept was touched upon in nearly all our gender studies related courses at the uni. I think it is a rather good concept, and in keeping with other's theories on this (well. Just Connell and Bourdieu, really. I really never read into it that much). Being primarily a literature and now of late an education student, I don't know what the current positions are, of course, but I like it, it seems rather insightful.

It has happened rather often during the last half year that I brought up the term in a discussion and the people I was talking to put a lot of energy into convincing me of the fact that it does not exist, does no longer exist, or has never existed. When I insisted that yes, it does, the responses they gave me betrayed the level of incredulity they'd show with someone who is claiming that fairies exist, or the Easter bunny.

In the latest incident on a message board is not as though I rounded on them, accusing anyone personally and challenging them about their views, it was during yet another discussion on an HP forum about the women in the HP series. I argued that there was evidence of  male privilege in the book and was completely shot down by the others, called sexist for advocating reverse sexism, being an extremist feminist, a man-hating feminazi, accusing others of not seeing my point because they are men, the works.

So, please, does "privilege" exist?