So there has been a heated dialogue this past week, partially in response to the comment thread on my post about Focus on the Family last week. Queen Emily at Questioning Transphobia wrote an initial response to it, voz responded to the larger issue of how trans women's issues are treated at Feministing and Feministe, and Cara responded at Feministe yesterday.

I've been doing a lot of listening, and hearing, and reading. I have a lot of thoughts brewing about all of these threads.

There are two discussions I think need to come from this. One is a discussion about comment moderation and Feministing. It's a discussion we as bloggers often engage in, and one that crops up all of the time, as each of us find strategies for how to manage comment threads.

Moderating comments is probably the part of this work that I feel least adept at. I do agree that moderating is a part of our role as bloggers. It's a conversation that we plan on continuing at Feministing, and writing more about as a group. This is a group blog, and while we each moderate our own threads, we do have a collective comment policy. So more to come on that.

The other conversation is around gender identity related writing and activism. This is a conversation I am highly invested in, which is why I really appreciated reading Queen Emily's thoughts about the comment conversation and my original post. I'm invested in it because I'm a feminist, because I identify as genderqueer, because I have a strong agenda around gender. I have all sorts of thoughts and ideas about how feminism needs to evolve it's beliefs and interaction with the gender binary--including what trans inclusion looks like. At the WAM conference this year, Julia Serano, Jack Aponte, Kate Bovitch and I were on a panel to discuss these issues. I hope to post the video soon, but these are conversations I'm engaging in elsewhere as well.

These two conversations need to continue and I plan on further engaging. Unfortunately because of how life works, particularly my life where I have other responsibilities outside of this blog, I can't engage in that dialogue with all of you tonight, or tomorrow, or in the next few days. To acknowledge the fact that much of the criticims of the original thread revolved the comment moderation, I'm going to turn comments off on this post.

I'm going to be back on Monday, with more thoughts about this. I'll post a new thread then, with comments open.