Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: It's Beginning to Look a Lot…, in reply to Moz,
I think it's more that if you work a bit on making a less dramatic event you will find it easier to get through. Maybe think of 'don't do christmas" as the aspirational slogan and take small steps in that direction when you can?
I think when the suggestion is "maybe men could pull their weight and help out a bit more", the reply of "Well let's just not do it at all" is... unhelpful. Why? Why is it somehow more reasonable to Destroy Christmas than to spread the load?
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Yeah, I was very aware when I was writing this column how heterocentric it was. One of the people I was talking about this to early on on Twitter was Scout, and they were saying how their family-of-birth still, when it comes to stuff like this, codes them as female, even though they've been really supportive of Scout. It's just ingrained. For myself, I am pleased to find that my expectations of my sons are both the same, even though I raised one of them as female. (But those expectations are also... really low. I mean, they're "Yes I will help but you have to ask me to do stuff.") And I also know that some of it is me being all "Look, just stay out of my way so I can this properly".
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I agree that it's well possible to change this situation, of course it is, but the FIRST step is to acknowledge that the imbalance exists, and that the social pressures around it are real. THEN work out, together, with discussion, how your particular family is going to navigate it. And don't be all, "Well, you want me to help more? Just ask. Just tell me what to do." Because that is entirely missing the point.
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Up Front: It's Beginning to Look a Lot…, in reply to Carol Stewart,
Cheers Carol. I remember, but cannot find, an old Bogor cartoon with a bunch of female hedgehogs taking their kids to see Hedgehog Santa. One of them asks why they do all of this, and the other says it's so they can bring it all crashing down when they tell the kids their beloved Father Christmas isn't real.
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Hard News: The Midterms, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It is a very interesting history, Governor Elbridge Gerry saw a way of manipulating a system designed to be fair and ran with it.
Governer Elbridge Redistricting, Bart.
Still, I think the essential difference is that here, our attitude is "People can vote unless" and in the States it's "people can't vote unless".
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The whole American ingrained attitude to voting just... astounds and saddens me. We're the greatest democracy in the world! But generally we do not give a shit about voter suppression!
The guy who makes one of the podcasts I listen to is off to a reservation this week as an observer to make sure people are allowed to vote. Here, making sure people can vote is the job of the Electoral Commission. Nobody's dragging people out of queues and challenging their right to vote. Nobody's making sure you have exactly the right kinds of IDs, where your names exactly match and your signatures are identical. Machines broken and you've run out of ballot papers? GET SOME MORE FUCKING BALLOT PAPERS. Jesus.
Sorry. I have lost all sense of proportion.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Neil,
What do you make of the gender pattern of perpetrators of mass killings and hate crimes in the US?
Social conditioning.
There is no such thing as brain gender.
Across the sample, between 0 and 8 per cent of people had “all-male” or “all-female” brains, depending on the definition. “Most people are in the middle,” says Joel.
This means that, averaged across many people, sex differences in brain structure do exist, but an individual brain is likely to be just that: individual, with a mix of features. “There are not two types of brain,” says Joel.
Brains, especially infant brains, are incredibly plastic. Your brain is shaped by the things that happen around you just as much as by your genes. So we teach boys that it's not okay for them to cry, but that it IS okay for them to be angry or 'play rough', because Boys Will Be Boys. And then we say it's not their fault, it's testosterone.
My younger son is trans. For about six months now, he's been injecting testosterone. You know how his behaviour has changed with increasing levels of T? Not one bit.
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Up Front: R.O.A.R., in reply to mark taslov,
Thanks, Mark. I had heard quite a lot about Stewart, but only in a private group, so I didn't really want to mention it. He has another piece up on Stuff today, making the same non-sensical division between "feminists" and "trans activists". The same quote from one of the admins of our group, Sharyn Forsyth, is used as he was given last time: they didn't come to us for comment. The article talks about harassment of TERFs, but not the tactics they have used - stealing the names and photos of women of colour to set up sock-puppet accounts, setting up a Change.org petition under the name of Feminist Mothers Aotearoa because that group (which I belong to, and of which one of the founders is a trans woman) have opposed them, and have been ripping down those horrible stickers around Wellington...
Thing is, Renee Gerlich is rather like Lauren Southern: she thrives on the publicity public opposition brings, so what do we do?
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Up Front: R.O.A.R., in reply to SHG,
huh? what does that even mean?
It's a reference to an older column.
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Up Front: R.O.A.R., in reply to BenWilson,
I don't think any long time regular can fail to notice the lengthy absence of prominent female voices in PAS. Is due to change in the world, or is it a long run inevitability for any cohort of people that the women eventually drop out due to sheer exhaustion from dealing with the imbalance Emma speaks of?
I can't speak for "women", but I can say what's happened to me. In part it's time; this year I have started retraining as a medical transcriptionist. I am also doing transcription work for a journalist again, and between those and my kids and my new-ish relationship, the last couple of months have just been... there is no time. I wrote this on Thursday evening because my normal role-playing session fell through.
Also, I feel like... I've been writing here for ten years. I've said everything. Either things have changed - the dominant voice of NZ feminism has hugely changed, for instance - or they've remained the same, and what more can I add?
And there is the exhaustion, there absolutely is. When you have skin in the game, it drains a lot more energy than if it's all just intellectual. This Trumpian post-truth, lying has no consequences age has just completely sucked out my will to engage.
We don't have quite such a groundswell of visceral outrage for homegrown transphobia, though. It must be galling to hear one form of bigotry eloquently and violently opposed by people who then turn around and display another towards you. People you thought were sympathetic, turn out to make an exception for you.
I think these people - I haven't used the term "TERF" because TERFS search for it to find people to attack, but they're TERFs - are absolutely taking deliberate advantage of the fact that they're women, and largely lesbians, to deflect or silence criticism of their views. But lesbians, particularly white middle-clase lesbians, have huge privilege over transwomen, and I recognise the dynamic because they also have and exercise privilege over bi women.
Also they almost never talk about trans men. My younger son socially transitioned about a year ago. He desperately wants top surgery, not so much because of dysphoria but to lessen his chances of being outed. For safety. I have zero time for anyone who, for whatever reasons, doesn't accept him as his affirmed gender.