Tag Archives: sex and gender

Private Manning’s Next Battle: Gender Transition in Prison

by Toni Tolve Posted on August 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Shortly after being sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning announced a decision to live as a woman and switch to the name Chelsea. Manning released a letter to the Today show Thursday morning that said, “As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.” Manning requested being referred to with the feminine pronoun, except with official mail sent to her at Fort Leavenworth, the Kansas prison where she will serve her sentence.

Manning now faces some unknowns with gender transition, including what will likely be a difficult battle to receive hormone therapy, which she indicated in her statement she wants to begin as soon as possible. Officials from Fort Leavenworth confirmed they do not provide transgender inmates with treatment beyond psychiatric care.

Manning’s attorney, David Coombs, told Today he hopes Forth Leavenworth will decide to provide Manning with the hormone treatment; if not, Coombs said he will “do everything in his power to force them to do so.” Coombs did not provide details to Today about his plans for legal action, but during a press conference yesterday following Manning’s sentencing, he said he is “going to become the smartest person on ensuring that a soldier who is in confinement, who has gender dysphoria, gets appropriate medical treatment.”

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Private Manning’s Next Battle: Gender Transition in Prison

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Maureen Dowd Twists Yet Another Quote Just Because She Feels Like It

by MatthiasA Posted on August 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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Maureen Dowd has been an embarrassment for a long time. Today, though, she raised her personal bar even further. Here’s a quote in today’s column from an interview she conducted with Chirlane McCray, wife of New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio. McCray is talking about one of de Blasio’s rivals, Christine Quinn:

She’s not the kind of person I feel I can go up to and talk to about issues like taking care of children at a young age and paid sick leave.

Since Quinn is openly gay, this seemed like an obviously insensitive slam, an interpretation that Dowd encouraged by spending the next several paragraphs talking about McCray’s and Quinn’s sexual orientation. But here’s what McCray actually said after being specifically asked why Quinn wasn’t catching on among women:

Well, I am a woman, and she is not speaking to the issues I care about, and I think a lot of women feel the same way. I don’t see her speaking to the concerns of women who have to take care of children at a young age or send them to school and after school, paid sick days, workplace; she is not speaking to any of those issues. What can I say? And she’s not accessible, she’s not the kind of person that, I feel, that you can go up and talk to and have a conversation with about those things. And I suspect that other women feel the same thing I’m feeling.

Dowd seems to think she’s the cleverest writer on the planet, but this doesn’t give her a license to twist quotes and elide context to serve her own purposes. Enough is enough. This isn’t the first time Dowd has done this, and the Times needs to put a stop to it.

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Maureen Dowd Twists Yet Another Quote Just Because She Feels Like It

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The Pentagon’s Transgender Problem

by oliwia_konarzewska@o2.pl Posted on August 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Ever since she was a boy growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, Zoey Gearhart had “tendencies that were odd.” Raised as Robert Gearhart, she would identify with female characters in books and on TV, in video games and movies. She would also wear her mother’s fake nails, or make her own out of clay. “I was told to stop in no uncertain terms by my father,” she said. In 2007, at the age of 19, she decided to join the Navy. “I thought maybe joining the military would just help straighten me out,” she said. “Make me into a normal individual.”

At first, Gearhart tried to prove her machismo by applying and becoming accepted into the Navy SEALs program, the elite force that killed Osama bin Laden. “I used to be in incredible shape,” she said. She did preliminary training with the SEALs, but after an ex-fiancé pleaded with her not to continue on to BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition School) training, Gearhart decided to become a linguist instead. The first known transgender SEAL, Kristin Beck, first came out on her LinkedIn profile earlier this year and in her tell-all book, Warrior Princess. On the cover, she sports a long, bushy beard from the days she went by “Chris.”

While in the Navy, Gearhart kept her female identity a secret, hiding it from a Marine staff sergeant roommate whom she described as a “cave-dwelling dude-bro.” After her enlistment term expired in March, she decided not to reenlist so that she could begin her transition to womanhood in earnest. Had Beck or Gearhart revealed that they were trans while still in uniform, they would have received a medical or administrative discharge. Even after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 2011, the military still officially forbids openly transgender people from serving. The end of DADT, Gearhart said, “is this landmark for the LGBT movement. But there’s that hanging T. Trans service was not even addressed.”

Transgender soldiers and sailors largely fly under the radar, but they are hardly uncommon. In a recent survey (PDF) by the Harvard Kennedy School’s LGBTQ Policy Journal, 20 percent of transgender people contacted said they had served in the military—that’s twice the rate of the general population. A 2011 study estimates there are nearly 700,000 transgender individuals (about three people per thousand) living in the United States. Meanwhile, the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) is scheduled to release a report today, which draws from Department of Veterans Affairs data, showing that the number of veterans accepting treatment for transgender health issues has doubled in the past decade. (While viewing the full report requires a subscription, an abstract should be available online as of today.)

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The Pentagon’s Transgender Problem

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Unpaid Intern? You Probably Aren’t Protected Against Sexual Harassment

by rezhh8j Posted on August 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on ProPublica.

In 1994, Bridget O’Connor began an internship at Rockland Psychiatric Center, where one of the doctors allegedly began to refer to her as Miss Sexual Harassment, told her that she should participate in an orgy, and suggested that she remove her clothing before meeting with him. Other women in the office made similar claims.

Yet when O’Connor filed a lawsuit, her sexual harassment claims were dismissed because she was an unpaid intern. A federal appeals court affirmed the decision to throw out the claim.

Unpaid interns miss out on wages and employment benefits, but they can also find themselves in “legal limbo” when it comes to civil rights, according to law professor and intern labor rights advocate David Yamada. The O’Connor decision (the leading ruling on the matter, according to Yamada) held that because they don’t get a paycheck, unpaid interns are not “employees” under the Civil Rights Act—and thus, they’re not protected.

Federal policies echo court rulings. The laws enforced by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including the Civil Rights Act, don’t cover interns unless they receive “significant remuneration,” according to commission spokesperson Joseph Olivares.

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Unpaid Intern? You Probably Aren’t Protected Against Sexual Harassment

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Comics About Feminism’s Big “Buts”

by hrzy86j5 Posted on August 3, 2013

Mother Jones

“Feminist, adj” by MariNaomi

For their new comics anthology, The Big Feminist But: Comics about Women, Men and the IFs, ANDs & BUTs of Feminism, editors Shannon O’Leary and Joan Reilly enlisted a group of artists and writers ranging from their mid-20s to mid-40s to submit comics dealing with their ideas, experiences, and impressions of feminism. The artists’ ages place them as having come of age during or after the “Third Wave” of feminism that emerged in the ’90s. Accordingly, the book’s title refers to the often-heard phrases “I’m a feminist, BUT…” and “I’m not a feminist, BUT…” and the resulting work utilizes a range of forms to both explore and critique traditional feminist themes and even question the idea of doing a feminist comics anthology now.

No one theme or approach dominates here. There are first-person explorations of some fairly classic issues done in ways that attempt to defy certainty: In “Boy’s Life,” Bitch magazine cofounder Andi Zeisler says, “I definitely don’t have any illusions about raising the perfect feminist son. I’m not sure what that would even look like,” while the accompanying drawing wryly undercuts her message by depicting her son asking his enthralled mom, “Can I learn to bake?” Many of the artists appear to be looking for ways to address traditional feminist topics and gender roles without being subsumed by them. “Queer, Eh?” by Virginia Paine, is about a young woman who’s looking for a word to describe her sexuality, and is delighted to find that “non-identifying” is indeed “a thing.” And in “Prostitution: for Teens” by Jen Wang, the main character explores the ramifications of writing a non-judgmental young adult novel whose heroes are teenage prostitutes.

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Comics About Feminism’s Big “Buts”

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Inside the Washington Sexual Assault Scandal Rocking a Chinese Media Empire

by RupertxMcmillan Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

One of China’s largest and most prominent media companies—12 percent of which is owned by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox—has been rocked by a major sexual harassment and assault scandal. A lawsuit filed on July 19 in federal court against Phoenix Satellite Television contains a series of jaw-dropping allegations concerning its onetime Washington, DC, bureau chief, Zhengzhu Liu. The Chinese journalist is accused of a litany of offenses, including encouraging job applicants to meet him in hotel rooms for interviews and then groping them, attempting to coerce the wife of a cameraman to have sex with him to preserve her husband’s job, telling a job candidate about the “gigantic and powerful penis” of his black friend, and attempting to rape a reporter.

The plaintiffs, two of whom are US citizens, claim at least one high-ranking Phoenix executive knew about this conduct for years before the company fired Liu last December. They also say that after Phoenix ousted Liu, the media conglomerate installed a new bureau chief who proceeded to retaliate against employees who had complained about the alleged abuses.

Four of the five plaintiffs—Meixing Ren, Ching-Yi Chang, Taofeng Wang, and Haipei Shue—are men who say that Tao Lu, the current bureau chief, punished them for speaking out about his predecessor’s alleged conduct by downsizing their job duties and firing one of them. The fifth plaintiff is a former Phoenix intern who alleges that Liu repeatedly groped her. Another former Phoenix intern filed a separate lawsuit in New York earlier this year making similar allegations. Mother Jones interviewed three of the male plaintiffs and four of Liu’s alleged female victims.

Phoenix Television, which is based in Hong Kong, is one of few private broadcasters permitted by the Chinese government to operate in mainland China. The multimedia empire maintains bureaus around the world, covers more than 150 countries, and is worth about $1.9 billion. In 2008, the company’s current CEO, Liu Changle, won an International Emmy for being “one of Asia’s leading broadcast entrepreneurs.”

The lawsuit is “full of inaccuracies and false statements about the Company,” Wu Xiaoyong, the CEO of Phoenix’s American subsidiary, told Mother Jones in a statement. “We have retained counsel to defend the Company’s interests, and we will have no further comment regarding this case.” Mother Jones left messages at several phone numbers associated with Liu; he did not respond to these repeated requests for comment. Both Xiaoyong and the law firm representing the plaintiffs said they do not know the ex-bureau chief’s whereabouts. Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox declined to comment.

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Inside the Washington Sexual Assault Scandal Rocking a Chinese Media Empire

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It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know. Seriously.

by london Posted on July 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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You know the old saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Well, Kelly Shue of the University of Chicago has found an intriguing way to test this. At Harvard Business School, students are randomly assigned to sections, where they presumably build strong friendships. (Stronger than the average friendship from just being at Harvard, anyway.) So what effect does this have on success later in life?

I test whether executive and firm outcomes are more similar among section peers than among class peers. I find evidence of significant peer effects in firm investment, leverage, interest coverage, and firm size, with the strongest effects in executive compensation and acquisition activity. Section peers are 10% more similar than class peers in terms of compensation and acquisitions.

In other words, if you get randomly assigned to a section with successful peers, you’re more likely to go along for the ride. I don’t have access to the article itself, and there are several possible explanations for this effect, but the most likely one is that friends help friends, and it’s nice to have friends who are successful. I hope there’s some followup research along these lines. It has some pretty obvious implications for diversity in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces.

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It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know. Seriously.

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Chart of the Day: For a Girl, Janet Yellen is Pretty Good With Numbers

by Aaron Stone Posted on July 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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Compare and contrast. Here is the Wall Street Journal editorial page today:

As an economist with long experience at the Fed, she doesn’t lack for professional credentials. But her cause has been taken up by the liberal diversity police as a gender issue because she’d be the first female Fed chairman….That led our friends at the New York Sun to wonder if they had somehow missed the creation of “the female dollar” given that they thought the Fed’s main task is to preserve the value of the currency.

Golly. According to the Journal’s editorial board, it would be little more than pure gender pandering if Yellen were somehow chosen to lead the Fed. Let’s see what the Journal’s actual reporters have to say about that:

Predicting the direction of the U.S. economy with precision is impossible. But the Fed must forecast growth, inflation and unemployment to guide its decisions on interest rates….The Wall Street Journal examined more than 700 predictions made between 2009 and 2012 in speeches and congressional testimony by 14 Fed policy makers—and scored the predictions on growth, jobs and inflation. The most accurate forecasts overall came from Ms. Yellen, now the Fed’s vice chair.

The Fed can’t do its job unless it has a clear view of what direction the economy is heading, and Yellen has the best track record on that score—better than the current chair, Ben Bernanke, as the chart below shows, and way better than the hard-money cranks the Journal seems to like so much. She’s also enormously well qualified on practically every other measure. The fact that the smarmy frat boys at the Sun and Journal editorial pages are in such a lather over the fact that breaking the glass ceiling at the Fed is also a point in her favor tells you everything you need to know about how they view the world.

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Chart of the Day: For a Girl, Janet Yellen is Pretty Good With Numbers

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Judge Says North Dakota’s Abortion Ban Is "Clearly Unconstitutional"

by Hedrick Lepsch Posted on July 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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A judge has blocked the country’s most restrictive abortion law from taking effect in North Dakota. The law, passed in March, would ban abortion at the point when a fetal heartbeat can be detected—which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The law is what earned North Dakota the championship in our Anti-Choice March Madness tournament earlier this year.

In his decision, US District Judge Daniel L. Hovland said the law would not pass constitutional muster:

The State has extended an invitation to an expensive court battle over a law restricting abortions that is a blatant violation of the constitutional guarantees afforded to all women. The United States Supreme Court has unequivocally said that no state may deprive a woman of the choice to terminate her pregnancy at a point prior to viability. North Dakota House Bill 1456 is clearly unconstitutional under an unbroken stream of United States Supreme Court authority.

There is only one abortion clinic in North Dakota, the Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo, and it has to fly doctors in from out of state to provide the procedure. Hovland’s ruling notes that the law would basically make it impossible to get an abortion in North Dakota:

Typically only women who have regular menstrual periods, keep close track of them, and take a pregnancy test promptly after a missed period at four weeks LMP, will know they are pregnant by six weeks. Because the Clinic only performs abortions one day per week, and cannot safely perform abortions before five weeks of her last menstrual period, the law will effectively limit a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion to a single day during the pregnancy’s fifth week.

North Dakota’s law is the most strict in the country so far, but last week Texas lawmakers introduced a bill that would also outlaw abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Today’s ruling in North Dakota is a preliminary injunction that stops the law from going into effect until the full case can be heard.

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Judge Says North Dakota’s Abortion Ban Is "Clearly Unconstitutional"

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The Supreme Court’s Next Big Abortion Decision

by daniel13stoko Posted on July 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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Roe v. Wade, watch out. The Supreme Court will venture into the abortion debate later this year when it considers the constitutionality of an Oklahoma law restricting the use of oral medications for abortions. The case could have major implications for the 16 states that have passed laws limiting the use of drugs that induce abortions.

Oklahoma’s governor signed the state’s medicine abortion law in May 2011, putting in place new restrictions on the use of RU-486 (also known as mifepristone or Mifeprex) and any other “abortion-inducing drug.” The law mandates that doctors follow the exact protocols for the drugs that are described on the Food and Drug Administration-approved label. Off-label use of drugs is legal and fairly common, and in the years since the drug was first approved for use in 2000, doctors have found that RU-486 and other drugs can be effective at lower doses and can be done with fewer visits to the doctor’s office than outlined on the FDA label. Doctors have also found that RU-486 is effective up to nine weeks into a pregnancy, not the seven weeks for which it was originally approved. Oklahoma’s law bans doctors from using that new knowledge to help their patients.

After Oklahoma’s governor signed the law, the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice and the Center for Reproductive Rights sued—and won. A trial judge struck down the law in May 2012. When Oklahoma appealed to the state Supreme Court, it lost again. The state then appealed to the US Supreme Court, which indicated in June that it would consider the case. Reproductive rights groups say Oklahoma’s law—and similar ones in other states—are a transparent attempt to limit access to medication abortions. The groups argue that the new laws would make medicine-induced abortions virtually inaccessible, since the drugs are so frequently used off-label. “What this law will do is deny women the benefits of nonsurgical options for terminating a pregnancy,” says Julie Rikelman, the director of litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “We think it’s an extreme law.”

In ruling that the law was unconstitutional, the trial court judge stated that it was “so completely at odds with the standard that governs the practice of medicine that it can serve no purpose other than to prevent women from obtaining abortions and to punish and discriminate against those women who do.” Now reproductive rights groups are hoping the Supreme Court will agree with the lower court’s ruling. There’s a problem, though: Most reproductive rights advocates believed that the justices would not take up the Oklahoma case at all, since the state Supreme Court had already agreed with the lower court.

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The Supreme Court’s Next Big Abortion Decision

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