What We Missed
The Daily Mail considers the health implications of the evolving female body size.
Dan Brown, "transgendering" is not a word. You suck.
Rush Limbaugh acts like the crazy nut he is and says we should return to racially segregated buses.
To add to the list of really screwed up things about our current health care system, a previous c-section can be considered a pre-existing condition.
The National Women's Law Center has more on the health care reform bill released by Senator Baucus yesterday.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: What We Missed.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/16040
Justifiable racism?
Oh go fuck yourself Rush.
I do not understand why Dan Brown sucks just because he used the word 'transgendering.'
He sucks because he writes terrible books.
Not only is it not a word, it's also a offensive misuse of a term referring to transgender folks.
His editors suck too.
I'm not quite sure who you are to decide what is a word and what isn't a word...
...but regardless of that fact it takes 2 seconds of Googling to discover that it is not something Dan Brown made up off the top of his head. The first page of search results gives:
- a book on Amazon, "Transgendering Faith: Identity, Sexuality, And Spirituality"
- an article called "Narratives of Body Transgendering" from gender.org.uk
- the title of an upcoming book by the same authors, "Tales of Transgendering"
- "Transgendering care: Practices of care within transgender communities"
- "The ethnography of transgendering in the South Pacific : Anthropological case studies of fa'afafine in Samoa"
and so on.
He equates it with addiction like bulimia.
He basically used a made up word, and then said that people who are genderqueer/transgender/transexual are doing it for a "thrill." That is one of the most suck-y things a person can do.
Transgendering is a perfectly cromulent word. Lumping it in the same category as bulimia is just wrong.
That's just it. Yes, it's possible to use genderplay to exert ownership over your body, and get euphoria from that. but that situation =/= being transgender. the word was already in use, and mr Brown just failed to notice that? really?
This is the wrong way to defeat people like Rush. He's obviously being sarcastic about segregating buses. Pretending that he's serious just feeds into his game.
The real point is that he's setting up a red herring...over and over again, and by doing so, he's encouraging the fears of main-stream-white-people who are terrified that they're losing their grip on power.
We shouldn't let him get away with that.
Since Rush has stated proudly before that conservatives believe in a "color-blind society," I suspect your hypothesis is correct.
I get the impression that part of his intent was to mock the idea that homosexuality is acceptable because it is "inborn," by making a faux claim that the same principle could be applied to racism.
You both bring valid points. My concern with Limbaugh's comments is some jackass out there will take them at face-value and use them to promote truly racist ideals.
“I think the guy’s wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America.”
and maybe the first part is supposed to be some reference to the erroneous idea that all white people by the "left" are considered to be racist and therefore are unfaily branded. Conservatives are so freaky sick, its unbelievable. But the end part that this is 'Obamas America' makes me think he believed a bit more than simply being sarcastic. He would never call Bush out if a white kid beat up on a black kid as being 'Bush's America.' He seems to be going along the whites, heteros, males (and xristians) are victims meme that alot of dipshit conservatives believe.
It's actually gotten to the point where nothing Rush says surprises me anymore. It's digusting but not surprising.
Another article that picks apart women's bodies under the guise of "caring about women's health".
The subtitles are weight/waist, hips, feet, breast--and somehow that all leads to *life expectancy*. What about lungs, heart, brain, kidneys, lifestyle etc.? Oh right, no one cares about them--as long as we still mantain and "hourglass shape"!!
Wonder why we never see articles examining the "changing shape" of the male body.
God - I generally cringe when I see articles like the one on women's figures because they're contributing so much noise and actually prevent good conversations about health & diet in America/Britain/etc. Somewhere, buried in that article, is a point similar to what people like Michael Pollan or Jill Richardson are making but it's mired under faux-horror that today's women are shaped like "barrels" - oh the scandal of it all!
To be more blunt:
Discussions of health, affects of processed food on the human body, etc. = Good
Discussions of "are women fat and ugly now?" = Bullshit
I was especially shocked by this gem of a caption to the photo of a cheerful and be-aproned '50s housewife: "Post-war women also expended many more calories through housework." If only women spent more time alone at home doing housework we'd be fitter...?
The article (and some Daily Mail readers) were particularly hung up on the difference between the "barrel-like" women of today, and the hourglass figures of the women of yesteryear. What they seem to be forgetting is that up until the sixties, women would habitually wear girdles and other restrictive "foundation garments" in order to create the rigid silhouettes thought to denote "respectability", and to imitate the wasp-waist central to Dior's "New Look" (which heavily influenced styles at the time).
I totally agree. There were so many problems with this article, it was hard to keep track of them all.
By showing how the 'average' British woman was like the 1950s Hollywood ideal, the article seemed to be hinting that the 'average' contemporary woman could take her fitness cues from Hollywood -- which, of course, is not true.
Also, the article failed to mention how an 'average' person doesn't really exist, or at least exists very rarely. The 'average' woman isn't based on any real woman or real body type -- she's a compilation of average measurements and shouldn't be thought of as representing any significant portion of British women.
Gah. The Daily Mail is made of fail.
I loved how every single section in that article tried to explain how the change in women's figures means we're comparatively unhealthy and will die early, and then at the end mentioned that we now live 11 years longer. Yeah!
Yeah, and it also manages to imply that living longer is actually a bad thing anyway! So I guess maybe it's better to be fat and unhealthy (the two conditions are synonymous in Daily Mail Bizzaro World) after all, instead of being healthy and a drain on the NHS?
People like to verb nouns. To google something, Feministing, etc. As an English purity partisan I'm not thrilled about it, but that ship sailed long before Dan Brown.
Today I cisgendered myself for awhile before I got bored and decided transgendering is just more fun?
Busy day! I biked around town, babied my dog and did math with kids at the jr high.
Yeah, I guess I also don't understand why its so bad. Is there some specific meaning to it that's wrong? If its just because its "not a word" ... well, how long ago was it that "transgender" was not a word either?
The linked article quotes a passage from Brown about people feeling empowered by doing various things to their bodies, and includes transgendering on the list along with tattooing and bulimia. That's pretty dismissive, I think. But for Feministing to point out that adding "ing" to a noun doesn't make it a legit verb is hilarious.
I didn't follow the link, and it sounds like he said some offensive things. But that's not what they chose to call him out on. They chose to go with "transgendering is not a word. You suck." instead of something like "equating transitioning your gender to getting a tattoo is offensive. You suck." As someone pointed out above, there are already several other books using "transgendering" in the title. It is a made up word, sure, but so are a lot of other words we use these days. (It does seem a bit less awkward than saying "transitioning your gender" or "transitioning to match your true gender" or anything like that.) That's how language evolves. English is especially open to turning nouns into verbs (or verbing nouns?). I can google you while I bike to your house instead of running a google search for your name while I ride my bike to your house. And, of course, there's "feministing", like you said. And someone with more knowledge could probably tell us what year the word "transgender" first came into use?
Ask and ye shall receive! :-)
I actually don't have much info, just an OED reference. The first citation in that collection is:
"1974 D. CORDELL in Rep. First National TV.TS Conf. 16 There is a tendency among trans-gender people to encourage each other. This precludes the very careful self-analysis which must take place in everyone who is proposing to undergo this therapy."
From the context I'd say that "trans-gender" wasn't a new word in 1974 because it's used so casually. If any scholars in the field want to update the OED with an earlier citation I'm sure they'd really appreciate it.
The hyphen makes me think that it was at least a relatively recent word, even if that wasn't the very first time it was used. The hyphen makes it look like someone cleverly put together two words that made sense in the context, and over time it became something that was considered one word and doesn't need a hyphen anymore. It may not be 1970s, but at some point "transgender" was a new word.
I lost half of my friends and the connect of a family member because of a thrill? Thanks for informing me of that Dan Brown, I guess I was just too idiotic to get the tattoo. /end bitter sarcasm.
Dear Rush,
I guess what you're saying is we may not be equal, but we'll always be separate.
I always love your eloquent posts!
The Daily Mail article has some interesting parts. Most interesting is what they don't really say. They say the average weight of women has gone up 7 pounds and BMI hasn't really changed since the 50s. They say these things but put emphasis on how women's bodies have changed a lot (more than you'd expect for 7 pounds of weight gain I think but they don't say that). The stats are interesting but it doesn't seem to make sense to talk about all these health consequences after you say the difference was only 7 pounds.
"The stats are interesting but it doesn't seem to make sense to talk about all these health consequences after you say the difference was only 7 pounds."
Actually, they do address that in the article, though they gloss over it pretty quickly.
From the article: "But although the average woman is only marginally larger than her Fifties counterpart, there are more women who are underweight, which can be linked to conditions such as heart disease, and also many more who are overweight or obese, which is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer."
What I find interesting is that the rest of the article chose to focus exclusively on the overweight individuals rather than addressing the fact that women are increasingly underweight as well.
Oh, come on. It's pretty explicit from the Rush quote that he's not advocating segregated buses and that, instead, he's disingenuously claiming that the people in question (whom he deems racist) advocated them.
In standard Rush fashion, he's smugly speaking from the point of view of his own concocted idea of specific black people -- as though they* believed the white kid "shouldn't have been on the bus anyway" and that they "need segregated buses." This is pretty obvious, even in the snipped quotes Media Matters provides.
There are plenty of valid things over which to snipe at Rush. (Believe me, I would know: Till I was out of high school, I was subjected to his program every time I rode in the car with my mom. Unless she was feeling awfully charitable.) Here, he's just trotted out the old conservative canard of black racists in the US.
* The assailants? Or black people as a bloc? Or Obama's staffers? Or liberals? Oh Christ, I can't follow Rush's bizarre train of blame.
That first article about "evolving female body size" is ridiculous, fatphobic, and centered on "keeping our women beautiful, like they were before." Was that article seriously posted without a critical comment?!!? Fail.
Pregnancy is a choice? There is so much wrong with that tidy little statement coming from an insurance company, I don't even know where to start. Last I read, a majority of women want to have a biological child at some point in their lives-- so while becoming pregnant may be chosen, it's not the same thing as choosing whether or not to go skydiving at some point in one's life. And I'm pissed that insurance companies will co-opt the language of choice-- especially because we still a long way to go on that front. There's a whole lot more work on the reproductive justice front to be done before I'd ever endorse the statement that pregnancy is a choice.
Moving on: C-section as a pre-existing condition. Obvious b.s. But maybe they're counting it this way because of hospital policy. In many U.S. hospitals, if you've had a C-section once, you are not allowed to have a subsequent vaginal birth-- despite the fact that it is quite possible and quite safe. If that's at all why C-section is being counted as a pre-existing condition then here's an erroneous hospital policy doubly punishing pregnant women-- first, in taking away the choice not to undergo subsequent C-section, and secondly, in influencing an insurance policy that will restrict the access that many pregnant women have to health care.
I am disgusted by the lack of reproductive choices we have-- whether we want to abort a pregnancy or continue one and give birth.
my comment was suppose to be an add on to you. this comment from the original link was spot on.
So, let’s recap:
Having had a C-section is a pre-existing condition, so they won’t cover getting your child out.
But having a child is optional anyway, so they won’t cover prenatal care.
But birth control isn’t fixing a medical problem, so they won’t cover that.
And if your husband beats you up because you won’t put out, that’s a pre-existing condition, so they won’t cover it.
They might as well just come out and claim that being female qualifies as a pre-existing condition.
and if they don manage to cover something of you, you'll get charged more for it.
Basically. I can just imagine the "logic" of the insurance companies: "Lookie here! Females need all these special treatments! We don't give MEN special treatment, do we????"
and i think it's already been established that very few woman actually "choose" a c-section - http://www.feministing.com/archives/009753.html
I think we should just stop spreading around what Rush is saying. You're just giving him what he wants. The more we take him seriously, the more his listeners will take him seriously.
After his comment about Sotomayor "cleaning up" the White House or whatever, any curiosity to listen what he has to say - just completely wiped itself out.
Just my two cents.
Take a deep breath. Rush was not being serious when he said he was in favor of segregating buses.
He was using this assault to make fun of a recent Newsweek article about babies being born racist.