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star-anise · 4 years

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An ask I got recently:

hi so i’m a transmed and i’m not sure if you’ll answer this because of that but i saw your post about transmedicalism and was wondering if you could expand on that? you seem like a genuinely kind and judgement-free person, thank you darling x

My response:

Heh, you call me “judgement-free” and ask for my opinion on a topic I’ve formed a lot of judgments about… I get it though, I’m not into attacking people for what they believe so much as providing FACTS. As a cis queer, my insight into transmedicalism isn’t really about the innate experience of trans-ness so much as using my education and professional experience to talk about social science research, diagnostic systems, and public health policy.

This ended up really long, so the tl;dr is, I think transmedicalism as I understand it:

Misunderstands why and how the DSM’s Gender Dysphoria diagnosis was written,

Treats the medical establishment with a level of trust and credibility it doesn’t deserve, at a time when LGBT+ people, especially trans people, need to be informed and vigilant critics of it, and

Approaches the problem of limited resources in an ass-backwards way that I think will end up hurting the trans community in the long run.

TW: Transphobia; homophobia; suicide; institutionalization; torture; electroshock therapy; child abuse; incidental mentions of pedophilia.

So first off I’m guessing you mean this post, about not trusting the medical establishment to tell you who you are? That’s what I’m trying to elaborate on here.

I have to admit, when you say “I’m a transmedicalist” that tells me very little about you, because on Tumblr the term seems to encompass a dizzying array of perspectives. Some transmedicalists believe in what seems to me the oldschool version of “The only TRUE trans people suffer agonizing dysphoria that can only be fixed with surgery and hormones, everyone else is an evil pretender stealing resources and can FUCK RIGHT OFF” and others are like, um… “I have total love and respect for nonbinary and nondysphoric trans people! I qualify for a DSM diagnosis of dysphoria but that doesn’t make me inherently better or more trans than anyone else.”

Which is very confusing to me because according to everything I’ve learned, the latter opinion is not transmedicalism. It’s just… a view of transness that acknowledges current diagnostic labels and scientific research. It’s what most people who support trans rights and do not identify as transmedicalists believe. But I kind of get the impression that Tumblr transmedicalism has expanded well past its original mandate, to the point that if a lot of “transmedicalists” saw the movement’s original positions they’d go “Whoa that’s way too strict and doesn’t help our community, I want nothing to do with it.”.

Okay so. Elaborating on the stuff I can comment on.

1. DSM what?

The American Psychiatric Association publishes a big thick book called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, called the DSM for short. This is the “Bible of psychiatry”, North America’s definitive listing of mental disorders and conditions. It receives significant revision and updates roughly every 10-15 years; it was last updated in 2013, meaning it will likely get updated sometime between 2023 and 2028.

The DSM lists hundreds of “codes”, each of which indicates a specific kind of mental disorder. For example, 296.23 is “Major depressive disorder, Single episode, Severe,” and 300.02 is “Generalized anxiety disorder.” These codes have information on how common the condition is, how it’s diagnosed, and what kind of treatment is appropriate for it.

Diagnostic codes are the key to health professionals getting paid. If there isn’t a code for it, we can’t get paid for it, and therefore we have very few resources to treat it with. The people who actually pay for healthcare–usually insurance companies or government agencies–decide how much they will pay for each code item to be treated. They’ll pay for, say, three sessions of group therapy for mild depression (296.21), or they’ll pay for more expensive private therapy if it’s moderate (296.22); they’ll pay for the cheap kind of drug if you have severe depression (296.23), but to get the more expensive drug, you need to have depression with psychotic features (296.24).

Healthcare companies, especially in the USA where the system is very very broken and the DSM is written, are cheap bastards. If they can find an excuse not to fund some treatment, they’ll use it. “We think this person who lost their job and can’t get off the couch should pay this $1000 bill for therapy,” they’ll say. “After all, they were diagnosed as code 296.21, and then saw a private therapist for five sessions, when we only allow three sessions of group therapy, and you’re saying they haven’t had enough treatment yet?”

A lot of the advocacy work mental health professionals do is trying to get the big funding bodies to pay us adequately for the work we do. (This is a much easier process in countries with single-payer healthcare, where this negotiation only needs to be done with a single entity. In the USA, it needs to be done with every single health insurance company in existence, as well as the government, sometimes differently in every single state, and then again on a case-by-case basis as well.) Healthcare providers have to argue that three sessions of group therapy isn’t enough, that Medicaid needs to pay therapists more per hour than it costs those therapists to rent a room to practice in, or else therapists would lose money by seeing Medicaid clients. DSM codes exist a tiny bit to let us communicate with each other about the people we treat, and a huge amount to let us get paid. The fact that their existence lets people make sense of their own experiences and find a community with people who share common experiences and interests with them is a very minor side benefit the DSM’s authors really don’t keep in mind when they update and revise different diagnoses.

So when it comes to convincing insurance companies to pay for treatment, humanitarian reasons like “they’ll be very unhappy without it” tend not to work. The best argument we have for them paying for psychological treatment is that it’s economical: that if they don’t pay for it now, they’ll have to pay even more later. If they refuse to pay, let’s say, $2000 to treat mild depression when someone loses their job, and either refuse treatment or stick the person with the bill, then that person’s life might spiral out of control–they might, let’s say, run low on money, get evicted from their apartment, develop severe depression, attempt suicide, and end up in hospital needing to be medically resuscitated and then put in an inpatient psych ward for a month. The insurance company then faces the prospect of having to pay, let’s say, $100,000 for all that treatment. At which point somebody clever goes, “Huh, so it would have been cheaper to just… pay the original $2000 instead so they could bounce back, get a new job, and not need any of this treatment later.”

Trans healthcare can be kind of expensive, since it often involves counselling, years of hormone therapy, medical garments, and multiple surgeries. Health insurance companies hate paying for anything, and have traditionally wanted not to cover any of this. “This is ridiculous!” they said. “These are elective cosmetic treatments, it’s not like they’re dying of cancer, these people can pay the same rate for breast enhancements or testosterone injections as anyone else.”

So when the APA Task Force on Gender Identity Disorder (a task force comprised, as far as I can tell, entirely of cis people) sat down to plan for the 2013 update of the DSM, one of their biggest goals was: Treatment recommendations. Create a diagnosis which they could effectively use to advocate that insurance companies fund gender transition. Like when you go back and read the documents from their meetings in 2008 and 2011, their big thing is “create a diagnosis that can be used to form treatment recommendations.” So that’s what they did; in 2013 they made the GD diagnosis, and in 2014 the Affordable Care Act required insurers to provide treatment for it.

A lot of trans people weren’t happy with the DSM task force’s decisions, such as the choice to keep “Transvestic Fetishism,” which is basically the autogynephilia theory, and just rename it “Transvestic Disorder”. The creation of the Gender Dysphoria diagnosis, basically, was designed to force the preventive care argument. They didn’t think they could win on trans healthcare being a necessity because healthcare is a human right, so they went with: Trans people have a very high suicide rate, and one way to bring it down is to help them transition. One of the major predictors of suicidality is dysphoria. The more dysphoric someone is, the more likely they are to attempt suicide (source). Therefore, health insurers should fund treatment for gender dysphoria because it was cheaper than paying for emergency room admissions and inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations.

I have spoken to trans scientists about what research exists, and my understanding is: The dysphoria/no dysphoria split is not actually validated in the science. That is, when you research trans people, there is not some huge gaping difference between the experiences, or brains, of people With Dysphoria, and people Without Dysphoria. Mostly, scientists haven’t even thought it was an important distinction to study. The diagnosis wasn’t reflecting a strong theme in the research about trans experiences; that research showed that trans people with all levels of dysphoria were helped with medical transition. The biggest difference is just that dysphoria is a stronger risk factor for suicide. Experiencing transphobia is another strong risk factor, but that’s harder to measure in a doctor’s office, so dysphoria it was.

(I’ve seen some transmedicalists claim that dysphoria’s major feature is incongruence, not distress. And I’ll just say, uh… in psychology, “dysphoria” is the opposite of of “euphoria”, literally means “excessive pain”, and is used in many disorders to describe a deep-seated sense of distress and wrongness. As a mental health professional, I just can’t imagine most of my colleagues agreeing that something can be called “dysphoria” if the person doesn’t feel real distress about it. If you want a diagnosis that doesn’t demand dysphoria, you’d need Gender Incongruence in the upcoming version of the ICD-11, which is the primary diagnostic system used in Europe, published by the World Health Organization.)

2. Doctors are not magic

Medicine is a science, and science is a system of knowledge based on having an idea, testing it against reality, and revising that knowledge in light of what you learned. We’re learning and growing all the time.

I don’t know if this sounds painfully obvious or totally groundbreaking, but: Basically all medical research is done by people who don’t have the condition they’re writing about. Psychology has a strong historical bias against believing the personal testimonies of people with conditions that have been deemed mental disorders, so researchers who have experienced the disorder they’re writing about have often had to hide that fact, like Kay Redfield Jamison hiding that she had bipolar disorder until she became a world-renowned expert on it, or Marsha Linehan hiding that she had borderline personality disorder until she pioneered the treatment that could effectively cure it. Often, having a condition was seen as proof you couldn’t actually have a truthful and objective experience of it.

So what I’m trying to say is: The “gender dysphoria” diagnosis was written and debated, so far as I can tell, by entirely cis committee members. The vast majority of psychological and psychiatric research about LGBT+ people is written by cisgender heterosexual scientists. Most clinical and scientific writing has been outsider scientists looking at people they have enormous power over and making decisions about their basic existence with very little accountability.

And to show you how far we’ve come, I want to show you part of the DSM as it was from 1952 to 1973. It shows you just why so many older LGBT+ people find it deeply ironic that now the DSM is being held up as definitive of trans experience:

302 Sexual Deviation This category is for individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily toward objects other than people of the opposite sex, toward sexual acts not usually associated with coitus, or towards coitus performed under bizarre circumstances as in necrophilia, pedophilia, sexual sadism, and fetishism. Even though many find their practices distasteful, they remain unable to substitute normal sexual behavior for them. This diagnosis is not appropriate for individuals who perform deviant sexual acts because normal sexual objects are not available to them.

302.0 Homosexuality 302.1 Fetishism 302.2 Pedophilia 302.2 Transvestitism […]

Yes, really. That is how psychiatry viewed us. At a time when research from other fields, like psychology and sociology, were showing that this view was completely unsupported by evidence, psychiatry thought LGBT+ people were fundamentally disordered, criminal, and incapable of prosocial behaviour.

My favourite retelling of the decades of activism it took LGBT+ people and allies to get the DSM to change is from a friend who did her master’s thesis on the topic, because she leaves in the clown suits and gay bars, which really shows how scientific and dignified the process was. The long story short is: It took over 20 years of lobbying by LGBT+ people who were sick and tired of being locked up in mental institutions and subjected to treatments like electroshock training, as well as by LGBT+ social scientists, clinicians, and psychiatrists, to get homosexuality declassified as a mental illness. And that was homosexuality; the push to change how trans people were listed in the DSM is very recent, as seen in the latest version listing “Transvestic Disorder”, a description very few trans people ever use for themselves.

Here are a few more examples of how people with a condition have had to take an active part in the science about them:

When HIV/AIDS appeared in the USA, the government didn’t care why drug addicts and gay people were dying mysteriously. Hospitals refused to treat people with this mysterious new disease. AIDS patients had to fight to get any funding put into what AIDS is, how it spreads, or how it could be treated; they also had to campaign to change the massive public prejudice against them, so they could be treated, housed, and allowed to live. Here’s an article on the activist tactics they used. If you want an intro to the fight (or at least, white peoples’ experience of it), you could look into the movies How to Survive a Plague, And the Band Played On, and The Normal Heart.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a little-understood disease that causes debilitating exhaustion. It’s found twice as often in women as men. Doctors understand very little about what it is or why it happens, and patients with CFS are often written off a lazy hypochondriacs who just don’t want to try hard. There are basically no known treatments. In 2011, a British study said that an effective treatment for CFS was “graded exercise”, a program where people did slowly increasing levels of physical activity. This flew in the face of what people with CFS knew to be true: That their disease caused them to get much worse after they exercised. That for them, being forced to do ever-increasing exercise was basically tantamount to torture, so it was very concerning that health authorities and insurance companies began requiring that they undergo graded exercise treatment (and parents with children with CFS had to put their children through this treatment, or lose custody for “medical neglect”). So they investigated the study, found that it was seriously flawed, got many health authorities to reverse their position on graded exercise, and have made strides into pointing researchers to looking into biological causes of their illness.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare but debilitating disease that isn’t researched much, because it affects such a small portion of the population. The ALS community realized that if they wanted better treatment, they would need to raise the money for research themselves. In 2014 they organized a viral “ice bucket challenge” to get people to donate to their cause, and raised $115 million, enough to make significant advances in understanding ALS and getting closer to a cure.

A common treatment for Autism is Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), which is designed to encourage “desired” behaviours and discourage “undesired” ones. The problem is, the treatment targets behaviour an Autistic person’s parents and teachers consider desirable or undesirable, without consideration that some “undesired” behaviours (like stimming) are fundamental and necessary to the wellbeing of Autistic people. Furthermore, the treatment involves punishing Autistic children for failure to behave as expected–in traditional ABA, by witholding rewards or praise until they stop, or in more extreme cases, by subjecting them to literal electric shocks to punish them. (In that last case, they’ve been ordered to stop using the shock devices by August 31, 2020. That only took YEARS.) Autistic people have had to campaign loud and long to say that different treatment strategies should be researched and used, especially on Autistic children.

So I mean… I get that the medical model can provide an element of validation and social acceptance. It can feel really good to have people in white coats back you up and say you’re the real deal. But if you get in touch with most LGBT+ and transgender groups, they’d say that there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to researching trans issues and getting scientific and governmental authorities to recognize your rights to social acceptance and medical treatment.

Within a few years, the definition you’re resting on will turn to sand beneath your feet. The Great DSM Machine will begin whirring into life pretty soon and considering what revisions it has to make. You’ll have an opportunity to make your voice heard and to push for real change. So… do you want to be part of that process of pushing trans rights forward, or do you just want to feel loss because they’re changing your strict definition of who’s valid and who’s not?

3. Scarcity is not a law of physics

One of the major arguments I see transmedicalists push is that there’s only a limited number of surgeries or hormone prescriptions available, so it’s not okay for a non-dysphoric person to “steal” the resources that another trans person might need more. This makes sense in a limited kind of way; it’s a good way to operate if, say, you’re sharing a pizza for lunch and deciding whether to give the last slice to someone who’s hungry and hasn’t eaten, or someone who’s already full.

When you start to back up and look at really big and complex systems–basically anything as big, or bigger, than a school board or a hospital or a municipal government–it’s not a helpful lens anymore. Because the most important thing about social institutions is that they can change. We can make them change. And the most important factor in how much the world changes is how many people demand that it change.

I’ve talked about this before when it comes to homeless shelters, and how the absolute worst thing they can have are empty beds. I used to work in women’s shelters, which came about when second-wave feminists started seriously looking at the problem of domestic violence in the 1960s and 70s, It was an issue male-dominated governments and healthcare systems hadn’t taken seriously before, but feminists started heck and did research and staged demonstrations and basically demanded that organizations that worked for the “public benefit” reduce the number of women being killed by their husbands. Their research showed that the leading cause of death in those cases were when women tried to leave and their partners tried to kill them, so the most obvious solution was to give them someplace safe to go where their partners couldn’t find them. Therefore the solution became: Women’s shelters. When feminists committed to founding and running these shelters, local governments could be talked into giving them money to keep them running.

(Men’s rights activists, the misogynist kind, like to whine about “why aren’t there men’s shelters?” and the very simple answer is: Because you didn’t fight for them, you teatowels. Whether a movement gets resources and funding is hugely a reflection of how many people have said, “This needs resources and funding! Look, I’m writing a cheque! Everyone, throw money at this!” In other news, The BC Society for Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse does great work. People should throw money at them.)

When the system in power knows there are resources it wants and doesn’t have, it finds a way to make them appear. For example, in Canada, the government knows that it doesn’t have enough trained professionals living in its far North, where the population is scarce and not very many people want to live. Doctors and teachers would prefer to live in the southern cities. But because it’s committed to Northern schools and hospitals, they create incentives. For example, the government offers to pay off the student loans of teachers or health professionals who agree to work for a few years in Northern communities.

Part of why trans healthcare resources are so scarce is that for a long time, trans people were considered too small a part of the population to care about. Like, “Trans people exist, but we won’t have to deal with them.” Older estimates said 0.4% of the population was trans, which meant a city of 100,000 people would have 400 trans people. A single family doctor can have 2000 or 3000 clients, so the city could have maybe 1 or 2 doctors who really “got” trans issues, and all the trans people would tell each other to only go see those doctors because all the rest were assholes. And the cracks in the system didn’t really seem serious. A couple hundred dissatisfied people not getting the healthcare they needed? Meh! Hospital administrators had more to worry about!

But the trans population is growing. A recent poll of Generation Z said 2.6% of middle schoolers in Minnesota were some kind of trans. which is 2,600 per 100,000. That’s enough to make hospitals think that maybe the next endocrinologist or OB/GYN they hire should have some training in treating trans people. That’s enough to make a health authority think that maybe the state should open up a new gender confirmation surgery clinic, since demand is rising so much.

Or well, I mean. Hospitals have a lot on their minds. This might not occur to them as their top priority. They’d probably think of it a lot sooner if a bunch of those trans people sent them letters or took out a billboard or showed up by the dozens at a public meeting to say, “Hello, there are a fuckload of us. Budget accordingly. We want to see your projected numbers for the next five years.”

When you’re doing that kind of work, suddenly it hurts your cause to limit your number of concerned parties. Sure, limited focus groups or steering committees can have limited membership, but when you put their ideas into action, to protest something or lobby for political change, you need numbers. If you want to show that you’re a big and important group that systems should definitely pay attention to, you don’t just need every trans or GNC or NB person who’s got free time to devote to your campaign, you also need every cis ally who can pad out numbers or lick envelopes or hand out water bottles or slip you insider information about the agenda at the next board meeting. You need bodies, time, and money, and you get them best by being inclusive about who’s in your party. Heck, if it would benefit your cause to team up with the local breast cancer group because trans women and cis women who have had mastectomies both have an interest in asking a hospital to have a doctor on staff who knows how to put a set of tits together, then there are strong reasons to do it.

Basically: All the time any marginalized group spends fighting over scraps is generally time we could spend demanding that the people handing out the food give us another plate. If you don’t think you’re getting enough, the best answer isn’t to knock it out of somebody’s hands, but to get together to say, “HEY! WE’RE NOT GETTING ENOUGH!”

That kind of work is complicated and difficult! It’s definitely much harder than yelling at someone on Tumblr for not being trans enough. But if you do any level of getting involved with activist groups that fight for real systemic change, whether that’s following your local Pride Centre on Twitter or throwing $5 at a trans advocacy group or writing your elected representative about the need for more trans health resources, you’re pushing forward lasting change that will help everyone.

#staranise original #transmedicalism tw #transphobia tw #homophobia tw #my problems with sj let me show you them

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unmistakably · 7 years

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In 2017, Jenna Maroney Is 30 Rock's Most Relevant Character

Ali Goldstein

News that the cult favorite 30 Rock left Netflix this month sparked a series of frantic reactions on certain corners of the internet. 30 Rock Is Leaving Netflix and People Are Furious wrote the Daily Beast. The New York Times offered 5 Things to Cook While Watching 30 Rock Before It Leaves Netflix. Last week's subsequent announcement that it was moving to Hulu mitigated the loss, although the switch in streaming platform also changes how effortless it is to watch a show usually experienced on a loop. Created by Tina Fey, 30 Rock, which aired on NBC from 2006 to 2013, revolved around an SNL-like variety show. With its mile-a-minute joke delivery and irreverent takes on pop culture, it became a critical hit, rejuvenated Alec Baldwin's and Tracy Morgan's careers, and marked Fey's ascent to comedy A-lister.

Netflix does not offer viewer statistics on its shows, but between all the elegiac write-ups and the sad texts from my friends that say they will have to talk to some food about this, I gather that constantly streaming 30 Rock is a common experience. I know I'm not alone in saying that I have forged more than one friendship based on a shared language of deep cuts like the old leather pumpkin or very wool. For me, the threat of losing the constant company of 30 Rock means not getting to spend time with the character that makes me feel like it's okay to be a human woman. I'm talking about Jenna Maroney. Though ever-exasperated eyeroll master Liz Lemon (Fey) has been the source of many viewers' it me moments, the histrionic train wreck Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) is the character who resonates most with me. In the hyperbolic Trump era, it is Jenna's outlandish reactions that feel appropriate. And after a decade of thinking about Liz's self-interested feminism, it is Jenna's relationship to feminist concerns like misogynistic violence and discrimination against gender nonconformity that are most salient today.

Giphy

Liz and Jenna are old friends on the show, each serving as a foil to the other's deeply ingrained hang-ups. Liz is a frowning brunette killjoy; Jenna is all blonde ambition and horse glue. The two are more negative images of each other than opposites, with Jenna's self-aware fakeness cutting through Liz's tone-deaf self-righteousness. Throughout the show's run, Liz's feminism was subject to rigorous debate. Ten years after the show's premiere, essays are still being penned about Liz's feminism and whether it sufficiently registered on the subjective barometer of what a feminist should be. Why Liz Lemon Was The Flawed Feminist We Needed 10 Years Ago & Still Need Today, claimed Bustle in an article from last year. On the Huffington Post, Zeba Blay wrote that 30 Rock, while myopic and dated in its white feminist worldview, also made apparent the need for women who aren't white, straight, and middle-class in comedy.

Watching the show in 2017 is to be frequently confronted with a liberal feminism that considers success to be personal and professional contentment - having it all to yourself. Liz Lemon is the kind of individualist feminist who likes to stick it to the man while playing it safe, who knows that being a woman is the worst because of society, but does not seem concerned with making that society better for anyone else. Liz leaned in - and was rewarded with the G.E. Followship Award. I would have been a Nazi, she muses about her willingness to collaborate with her CEO boss Jack's machinations in spite of her nominal objection to them. In critic Sady Doyle's blog post from 2010, she correctly identified this strain of Liz Lemonism as privileged semi-feminism. Emily Nussbaum, TV writer for the New Yorker, aptly characterizes Liz as a George Costanza more than a Mary Tyler Moore, pushing back against the idea that she should be considered a role model of any sort. But in this post-sheet cake moment, it is harder for me to sit with this shallow feminism.

It's clear that Liz's concerns were meant to be relatable whereas Jenna's were ridiculous. But what about those of us whose lives have taken an odder turn than Liz's has, who are not baby-crazy, who cannot afford to buy our own apartments, and who do not even have the option of settling, even if we wanted to? And those of us for whom feminism helps queer our lives, rather than serving as a belief set that reconciles us toward marriage, motherhood, and the workplace?

Giphy

Early in the series, Jenna's problems are more typical. A struggling actress upstaged on her own show, she deals with a pathological need for attention along with more universal female complaints such as weight gain and ageist beauty standards. Her issues, however, become less normative as the show continues. Instead of revolving around the tragedy of an old crone yearning for the spotlight, her storylines in later seasons consider how to pair love with kink, and the need for attention with the desire to please. Whereas Liz gets to have it all by the end of the show, giving the audience that relates to her the happy ending they ostensibly want, Jenna's life takes a turn for the weird and wonderful. Jenna is so dramatic, she is radically unrelatable; it is difficult to identify with someone who exclaims, Stop being dramatic. That's my thing. And if you steal it from me, I will kill myself, and then you. It is a given on the show that Jenna is unlikeable and not to be taken seriously. Even in Doyle's nuanced critique of Liz, Jenna is written off as a shallow, unstable narcissist. But in 2017, I find Jenna's issues more resonant, her outlandishness a better balm against the outrageous misogynist currently in power.

Jenna spends her adult life dodging death at the hands of dangerous boyfriends, most famously, Mickey Rourke. While Liz's worst (but funniest) ex, Dennis Duffy, constantly threatens into come back in her life with his promise, You'll be back, Jenna's exes are considerably darker. On 30 Rock, when trauma resurfaces, it is always treated as a moment of wild comedy. Other main characters on the show have moments of unearthing repressed trauma and are somewhat better off after talking it out. Jenna, however, never has her breakthrough on the couch, not because she is too shallow to bury anything deep, but perhaps because she does not repress that much. Her asides about her own traumas have the horrifying buoyancy of a woman who walks away with a stride of pride. You should have killed me when you had the chance, she sneers about Rourke. Violent exes are her specialty, including but not limited to O.J. Simpson, a mob boss, and a sniper who would never shoot her because he was afraid of his own mother - there is perhaps no greater kiss-off for an ex. It is fitting that the rom-com Jenna was supposed to star in, Take My Hand, gets turned into a torture-porn flick. Jenna is a final girl in her own right. And that's why it is all the more satisfying when she finds The One.

Will Forte (left) and Jane Krakowski as Paul L'astnam and Jenna Maroney

Courtesy of NBC

In the end, Jenna's secret weapon - her sexuality - allows her to become a more self-actualized person by the end of the series. When she finally finds love, it is with someone who shares her profession, the female impersonator and performer Paul L'astnam, played by Will Forte, a both decent and perverse person (#RelationshipGoals). The campiness with which Jenna always approached gender is perfectly complemented by Paul's drag performance of her.

On the surface, her relationship with Paul exists merely to make two obvious points: Jenna is a narcissist, and gender is absurd. This reminds me of a remark of Fey's during her sheet cake manifesto: You know what a drag queen still is? A 6'4 black man. Drag laughs in the face of the idea that who you really are exists under the makeup and clothes. I've struggled with whether or not Paul as a character hints at suspicion toward nonbinary identity. Am I laughing at the small-mindedness of those who would mock Paul? Or is his character a wink of acknowledgment at those who think, Oh brother, people sure do take this stuff too far? Even if I can't shake the feeling that this line was written with an eyeroll at such a nonconforming identity, it is to Forte's credit that the character is played with such earnest compassion, joyful in his expression of how he identifies as gender dysmorphic bi-genitalia pansexual (pronounced sex-u-AL). As someone who regards gender both as a category that tries to exclude me from normalcy and, paradoxically, a playground with no rules, Jenna and Paul's relationship might be the most relatable on the show.

Sexuality, let alone complicated sexuality, so seldom gets an open-hearted and curious treatment in any rom-com plotline. Together, Jenna and Paul figure out not only how to make it work, but how to make it weird and keep it that way. Though they initially struggle to define what their normal might look like, they settle on a deliciously campy parody of heterosexual couples getting surprise married and going to Bed Bath & Beyond. Eventually, she has a coming-out of sorts and stands in her own truth in front of the Wool Council to let them know that her relationship with Paul is also based on love and warmth. And chafed skin.

As the series progresses, Jenna learns not only how to feel but also how to express her emotions. For a woman who was taught to identify sadness through flash cards, she makes incredible strides by the end of the series. She accepts Paul's need to dress as another woman (Cher) and even turns down his televised marriage proposal - her dream - to compromise with his needs for intimacy. But she's still our girl. Don't interrupt, she says to Liz during a reconciliation. The pill that lets me feel emotion is gonna wear off soon. The moment is again played for laughs, but as someone who takes pills like that, I can relate.

We have a clear enough picture of what Liz Lemon feminism looks like. The Liz Lemon of today wears a Nasty Woman T-shirt; Jenna sells them on her website, Jennas-Side.com, profits going to benefit a scholarship in her name at the Royal Tampa Academy of Dramatic Tricks. Liz Lemon keeps her maiden name and would point out the sexism behind the term maiden. When Jenna and Paul marry, he takes her first and last name - good praxis! If there could be such a thing as Jenna Maroney feminism, it would be queer, unruly, and untraditional, and it would not define itself in relation to normative benchmarks of adult life like marriage or children. But I don't want to reclaim Jenna as a feminist antihero. She is a hero for those of us who are fatigued with the question of whether a pop culture figure is a feminist.

Whereas Liz sees the patriarchy as her personal stumbling block, Jenna, who truly suffers at the hands of men, seems blithely unaware that she exists within it. It's not so much that Jenna is a feminist figure; it's more that she becomes proudly anti-heteronormative. She is at turns both delusional and self-aware enough to know that prettiness is a facade, and that portion control and exercise won't heal a broken heart. 30 Rock excels when it treats gender as a performance of the absurd, and perhaps I watch it again and again for this absurdity. I am not a Jenna Maroney, because no one but Jenna can be a Jenna. But I do see myself in her. Not so much, however, that I would steal her thunder. You cannot steal her thunder. Her whole life is thunder.

Natalie Adler has a PhD in Comparative Literature and works in disability advocacy. She is currently writing a novel on obsessive thinking and feminist disillusionment.

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allmybadmemories-blog · 7 years

Text

this doesn’t fit with the theme of this blog but i don’t have any other place to write anonymously and i just feel like hashing this out and it’s stuff that’s pretty rude to talk to the applicable people about, i don’t want to be rude to people.

wtf is the point of claiming to be nonbinary when you completely present as your assigned-at-birth gender? i just don’t get it? i have read so much stuff from binary or genderfluid people like this and not found anything that really explains the things i don’t understand. i want to be respectful so of course i go along with their preferred pronouns and everything but i just don’t get it. of course i don’t NEED to get it and can just treat them like people regardless and i think i do ok, but. i just.... you know, i just want to understand. i guess it’s ok if i never do. lots of things, i can just let go. so i’m not going to jeopardize relationships by bringing this up. but yeah, i just don’t get it.

“i don’t feel male OR female” but wtf is “feeling” male or female? i don’t feel female either. there’s no absolute definition of female to feel. so here’s the rude thing i shouldn’t say. are they just like, “i don’t feel like i align 100% with the typical gender presentation/stereotype, so i guess i’m something else”? because... NO ONE DOES. or maybe only super shallow people do. i mean i guess i’m cis because i never felt strongly that i WASN’T female, having been born in a female body, but i never really felt strongly that i AM female either. so i guess never “struggling” with my gender identity allows me to say what i have to assume is a very cis-privilege thing to say: i don’t think gender really matters. what’s the big friggin deal? but clearly it is a big deal to the people who felt strongly enough about their gender identities to say, “hey this is different than the apparent body i was born into or the gender i was assigned at birth.” but i’m like, who cares about the label, you can do the things you like and make your appearance how you like and have your unique set of interests and character traits that makes you YOU and you don’t have to claim you’re “not a girl” to do it.

but surely that isn’t why they feel nonbinary, right? it has to be more than that or it wouldn’t be such a big deal?

i wish i could find some metaphor or parallel to describe what nonbinary feels like, and not like, “well there’s nike vs. adidas, but what about reebok amirite” what makes you decided you’re not male or female?

i’m not doubting the existence of more than 2 gender possibilities. i guess i just don’t know what make a person realize they aren’t one of the two “defaults”.

and like, i know a few people like this (on the internet), they are clearly female-bodied, but claim to be nonbinary or a combination of nonbinary and trans, but they totally present as female all the time, even experimental masculine phases are like, not even approaching androgynous, they’re still so femme, i mean, there’s no right or wrong way to present, but like.... are you sure you’re not female when you do all the typical female things AND have a default female body already. what makes you not female? although, what makes you female? i don’t know. and what even is trans when you’re happily presenting as your assigned-at-birth gender with no effort or desire to do otherwise.

should i say i’m nonbinary because i don’t ~FEEL~ like a woman even though i’m totally ok with having a vagina, letting people interact with my vagina for sexual activities, and using my female reproductive system to bear a child... but you know, that’s just the equipment my body came with, it doesn’t define ME. because i sound facetious but i 100% don’t think that my ability to develop a fetus has anything to do with me, my identity, my consciousness. and neither does wearing a dress, heels or makeup, loving clothes shopping, giggling about rom coms or whatever we think is “girl” stuff (i hate 90% of the things i just said.) i don’t know how to interact with other women in the way they seem to expect, or how they do with each other. but i’m also not like “i’m such a tomboy teehee, i use power tools to subvert expectations teehee.” i don’t know how we’re supposed to define “female” but i don’t strongly identify with any of the ways that we can, beyond what genitals are on the body you inhabit. but i would never have to audacity to claim to be nonbinary, because i don’t feel strongly that i’m ~not~ female either.

i don’t know why i can be like “yeah, that makes sense” about a trans person knowing they are the other gender despite their body but not a nonbinary person. i guess it’s the same thing, there’s just more options than “the other ‘one’”. just, what are they options? what do they feel like? it’s just a huge mystery to me.

if you look and act totally female, it just seems like you’re trying to be difficult when you insist on different pronouns and get offended that people would dare assume you are female. what’s the point?

WHAT DOES GENDER FEEL LIKE? how do you know what gender you feel like you are? how can you tell you do or don’t feel male, female or otherwise? wtf does gender mean?

“According to the World Health Organization, gender is socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.” (quote pulled from some article i am reading to try to learn about this)

so.... it literally is whatever stereotypes you personally associate with it? i mean, what? gender doesn’t actually mean anything? so why does it matter..? like if you feel a strong drive to do the “roles, behaviors, activities and attributes society considers appropriate” for the gender you were not born as, then ok you’re trans. but is literally every female-bodied person who doesn’t like to go shopping for fun nonbinary?

if gender is just some list of stereotypical traits then why do we act like it’s something that even needs to be discussed... i think actually the idea that traits should be gendered needs to be abolished.

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blacklivematters-blog · 7 years

Text

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

Check out https://flipboard.com/@BlkLivesMatter

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

Healthcare is a human right.

No one should be denied the opportunity to see a doctor because of how much money is in their pocket or where they live.

Our loved ones shouldn’t die from easily curable diseases simply because they can’t afford medicine.

Black lives matter.

Why are these controversial statements? Why are we living under an administration that thinks it is politically expedient to rip away our access to basic healthcare?

Yes, denying people access to healthcare is the perfect way to accomplish your goals if your goals include severely restricting the flow of health resources to marginalized communities and pouring gasoline on the flames of white supremacy; making people of color too sick to earn a living, too sick to learn in school and too sick to raise families. But most of all, keep us too sick to challenge illegitimate authority. That’s exactly what we’re up against.

Unfortunately, this tactic isn’t new. During slavery, slave owners frequently offered only the bare minimum of healthcare and food to their enslaved people, keeping them barely healthy enough to work. And when enslaved Black women like Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were forcibly coerced into medical experiments, Black bodies were sacrificed in the name of white women’s health and because white men, feeding their own “scientific” curiosity, also refused to acknowledge that these women felt pain just like anyone else. The bodily violence these Black women experienced was never because anyone actually cared for the health and well being of Black women.

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare. In times of terror, like these, one thing we never lost from our ancestors is the necessity to dream. We know how to hold onto the belief that the arc of justice will eventually find its way home – we have to. In all honesty, as a reproductive justice activist, it’s the only way I know how to move forward, despite incredible odds and near constant political, physical, and personal attacks. Even under a friendly presidential administration, access to abortion care and the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare services have been decimated. Several women, particularly women of color, have been thrown in jail and charged with felonies because they needed abortions and couldn’t afford them, and those who were already in jail have been denied access. Our lack of healthcare access and protections is leading to incarceration.

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare.

Like the Movement for Black Lives, the movement for reproductive justice was founded by women of color, and women who believe that everyone, particularly communities of color, deserve high quality, culturally competent and compassionate healthcare, that the freedom to decide when to become a parent and how to grow their families is a basic right and that everyone has the right and ought to have the resources to raise healthy children free from violence, economic coercion and environmental harm.

When it comes to healthcare, abortion, transgender, indigenous and disability rights are the canaries in the coal mine. If you want to see the future of healthcare under this illegitimate administration, all you have to do is see what has happened since 2010 at the state level and who chose to look the other way as our rights were trampled. Access to abortion is barely a right in half of our states: Black people with mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be murdered by, as Marvin Gaye said, “trigger happy police,” the government refuses to acknowledge the sovereignty of indigenous people’s land and trans women of color are routinely murdered while our nation ignores their plight. I refuse to accept this. We have the ability to create something else, and are at a turning point where we must or we will perish.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

I choose to imagine a taxpayer-funded health center, founded on the needs of Black women, transgender and nonbinary people and based on the brilliance I’ve already seen across this nation.

As a taxpayer, I want the taxes I pay to reflect my and our nation’s values, and I believe we can find better ways to spend the Department of Defense’s nearly $600 billion budget currently allocated to raze Black and Brown communities around the world. Keeping people healthy and safe feels like the perfect way to do it. With the appropriation of this new budget, we’ll be able to raise the Medicaid reimbursement rate, which is important to ensure more people have access to care. However, my dream health center will take all patients, no matter their ability to pay, immigration status or health condition.

My imagined center will be named after Dr. Joycelyn Elders and will welcome all of you.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders was a fierce pediatrician and the first Black Surgeon General of the United States. During her tenure, Dr. Elders was outspoken on holistic approaches to healthcare, advocated for access to comprehensive sexual health education, called out racist health textbooks, advocated for abortion access and contraception in schools and famously supported teaching masturbation; a bold and unapologetic Black namesake for a brazen and dynamic dream health center.

The Elders Center will be located conveniently near public transportation. Inspired by the practical support program at ACCESS Women’s Health Justice in California, the Elders Center will also offer funding and complimentary rides on the Diane Nash rides program for those who need assistance arriving at their appointments When patients enter the Elders Center, they’ll be welcomed into an open space decorated by brightly colored furniture and painted walls, much like the Queens, New York, Planned Parenthood. Modeled after the Whole Woman’s Health abortion clinics, patient rooms will be named after Black feminist leaders like Harriet Tubman, Coretta Scott King and Ida B. Wells and inscribed with inspirational quotes by women such as Audre Lorde, Patti LaBelle and Sojourner Truth.

The Melissa Harris Perry wing of the center will offer abortion, birthing and delivery, miscarriage management, adoption, egg freezing, surrogacy and infertility services all on the same floor. There will be no need to stigmatize or arbitrarily separate people. Midwives and doulas will be on hand for all pregnant people who want them. Elders Center staff will thoughtfully advise patients with uterine fibroids and offer holistic approaches to treatment, while maintaining fertility as patients desire. Like the Birthing Center of Buffalo / Buffalo WomenServices, the providers will be there for patients no matter what decision they make about their pregnancies. Lactation specialists on the Ella Baker floor will ensure everyone who would like to chestfeed their child has the education and tools to do so, including trans and nonbinary people.

Because it’s important that we treat whole people and not just their body parts, the Carlett A. Brown wing will offer reproductive healthcare services for people of all genders – everything from contraception and Pap smears to hormones and fertility preservation – similar to the Allentown Women’s Center in Pennsylvania. And because of the deep racial disparities in cancer diagnosis and treatment availability, particularly breast cancer, the Pauli Murray cancer ward will offer state-of-the-art screening and treatment. Inspired by SisterLove in Atlanta, the Alvin Ailey program will run a community bus that offers HIV testing, medication delivery and weekly support peer-led groups.

The Elders Center will also have a resource center for all pregnancy options, including a diaper bank, condoms, an abortion fund and counselors, like the All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center in Bloomington, Indiana. The Claudette Colvin program will engage young parents in policy efforts, and offer baby showers, childcare, postpartum support groups and pregnancy photoshoots to break stigma like the Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco. The Josephine Baker program will run support groups and activities for adoptive families, and the Marsha P. Johnson program will run them for transgender folks and their loved ones.

The Elders Center will run a number of counseling and resource programs, as well, to address historic issues and issues currently impacting Black communities. Counselors will be on hand in the Fannie Lou Hamer room to sit with patients who have been forcibly sterilized, and in the Rosa Parks room for survivors of sexual assault who need time to process their experience. Compassion and listening are key to healing. The Maya Angelou program will offer support and defense for sex workers when harmed by clients and law enforcement, and will ensure they are able to continue to work safely in healthy environments. SisterReach’s faith-based civic engagement programing in Memphis will serve as the structure for the Anna Julia Cooper advocacy program designed to increase voter enrollment, local political education and support for community members to run for office. We need people to be engaged now more than ever.

If we are going to withstand the destructive policies of this incoming administration, we’ll have to be even more creative. Our imaginations and grit will see us through a dark era, just like our ancestors showed they could do in the past and our friends are doing across the nation right now.

As we’re living in this nightmare of an administration, this is the future I’ll be working towards. This is my dream – my plan for resistance.

#BlackFuturesMonth #BlackFuturesMonth17

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/i-dream-healthy-black-futures_us_58b1a80ee4b060480e086615?hlleo4qiz50kb4vx6r

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

If we are going to withstand the destructive policies of this incoming administration, we’ll have to be even more creative. Source

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yes-dal456 · 7 years

Text

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

Healthcare is a human right.

No one should be denied the opportunity to see a doctor because of how much money is in their pocket or where they live.

Our loved ones shouldn’t die from easily curable diseases simply because they can’t afford medicine.

Black lives matter.

Why are these controversial statements? Why are we living under an administration that thinks it is politically expedient to rip away our access to basic healthcare?

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare.

In times of terror, like these, one thing we never lost from our ancestors is the necessity to dream. We know how to hold onto the belief that the arc of justice will eventually find its way home – we have to. In all honesty, as a reproductive justice activist, it’s the only way I know how to move forward, despite incredible odds and near constant political, physical, and personal attacks. Even under a friendly presidential administration, access to abortion care and the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare services have been decimated. Several women, particularly women of color, have been thrown in jail and charged with felonies because they needed abortions and couldn’t afford them, and those who were already in jail have been denied access. Our lack of healthcare access and protections is leading to incarceration.

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

I choose to imagine a taxpayer-funded health center, founded on the needs of Black women, transgender and nonbinary people and based on the brilliance I’ve already seen across this nation.

My imagined center will be named after Dr. Joycelyn Elders and will welcome all of you.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

As we’re living in this nightmare of an administration, this is the future I’ll be working towards. This is my dream – my plan for resistance.

This post is part of the Black Futures Month blog series brought to you by The Huffington Post and the Black Lives Matter Network. Each day in February, look for a new post exploring cultural and political issues affecting the Black community and examining the impact it will have going forward. For more Black History Month content, check out Black Voices’ ‘We, Too, Are America’ coverage.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from http://ift.tt/2lllgQb from Blogger http://ift.tt/2kWZXs8

#http://www.topwaytohappy.tk/2017/02/i-dream-of-healthy-black-futures.html

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imreviewblog · 7 years

Text

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

Healthcare is a human right.

No one should be denied the opportunity to see a doctor because of how much money is in their pocket or where they live.

Our loved ones shouldn’t die from easily curable diseases simply because they can’t afford medicine.

Black lives matter.

Why are these controversial statements? Why are we living under an administration that thinks it is politically expedient to rip away our access to basic healthcare?

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

I choose to imagine a taxpayer-funded health center, founded on the needs of Black women, transgender and nonbinary people and based on the brilliance I’ve already seen across this nation.

My imagined center will be named after Dr. Joycelyn Elders and will welcome all of you.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

As we’re living in this nightmare of an administration, this is the future I’ll be working towards. This is my dream – my plan for resistance.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2lGNCqN

#Healthy Living - The Huffington Post

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