"Natural"

"Natural‬" is meaningless. "Natural" is artifice. "Natural" is the greatest sham of the century.

I fucking hate when people act like the mind is not part of the body, nor the body part of society. Meaningless distinctions.

My gender is all in your head.

It's something I realized back when I finally stopped pretending to be female. It really is all up to the beholder what they think gender is in general, and what my gender is by extension. I don't mean they determine for me what my gender is; their gender of me has tangible consequences for me. I can be completely honest in my comportment, and that does have some influence, but ultimately I'm not the author of my gender in their minds. Each time I am observed, they are creating a new gender, a spectre in their minds which is real as every other thought or experience they have.

It's important to note that this is identical to the gendering conflated onto cis people. The only difference is some gender spectres have a revocable aura of "natural".

👌

Humanizing Genderqueer 4: Caleb

Humanizing Genderqueer: Lived experiences of non-binary people.


Gender Wins: Recall a happy memory of when you felt most comfortable in your gender or most accepted as your gender by those around you.

My roommate was throwing a party while I was working the closing shift at my job. When I returned home I opened the door to a room full of people shouting my new name at me. I didn't even realize they had all heard about the name change, but everyone was super accepting of it. It felt amazing to have my identity validated by my friends in such large numbers.


Gender Struggles: Tell about a time when circumstances would not allow, or you had to make sacrifices, to remain true to your gender.

I've truly had a very smooth social transition. My friends are overall very accepting, and I am planning on going by my new name my next semester at school. I am also going to hormonally transition starting in June. However, physically transitioning may pose its own problems. My appearance already causes some stares, but I expect it to get much worse in the coming months. I also risk being outed at work. I'm only going to be on T for a few months, but I don't know how fast my body will change. I am going to try to hide it as best I can at work, but they may figure it out. I also have to hide my gender identity from members of my family, and I know I will lose contact with my sister and possibly my father if they find out. But I know I need to transition, so these are risks I have to take.


Humanist Involvement: Suggest something the humanist community could do to make a positive impact on your personal quality of life.


To begin, I need some basic recognition that my gender exists. I have contacted some organizations in the secular/humanist community about making forms, memberships, and applications more genderqueer friendly with large success. Ideally, I would be able to type in my own gender identity, or be able to select non-binary or genderqueer. For the most part I have to select "male" or "female", and sometimes "other". While this seems like a small step, it would make me feel like I'm a valuable part of the community, and not someone who has to fake being another gender to be included.

Also, a push for unisex bathrooms would be cool.


How You Identify (optional): Name, age, gender, location, ethnicity, anything you deem relevant.

Caleb, 21, genderqueer, Iowa, white

Survey results shared with permission.

Transphobia Defined

Sometimes people use "transphobia" when they mean "bigotry toward trans people". But this post... this is pretty much the definition of transphobia, and honestly of paranoia in general.

Starting with the title: Are Boys Turning in to Girls Because of Man Made Chemicals? Wow. Total fearmongering here. Scary emasculation! Scary chemicals! Scary science!

Then the tagline: Cases of accelerated puberty in young girls and the "transgender" phenomenon) are occurring with increasing frequency.  Seriously? First, what's with the hovering parenthesis? Second, why is "transgender" in scare-quotes? Oh right, fearmongering. Cus it would be too much to admit that transgender people are real people living real experiences. Got it.

Then the image. It's so horrible I won't even post it here, but here's the URL if you dare: http://s3.amazonaws.com/readers/2010/09/01/a1_1.jpg Basically, it's a heavy-set balding hairy person wearing a corset and holding a cigar. They went out of their way to think of the least "mainstream attractive" male body-type they could imagine, then added breasts and female undergarments to it. Presenting this as their representative sample image is transphobic and dehumanizing to boot. (And seriously, who even walks around in their undergarments anyway?)

What follows is a lot of science mixed with pseudoscience jargon mixed with more transphobia mixed with plenty of the naturalistic fallacy. But don't worry, they have a bulleted list:

• Educate yourself,your family and friends about endocrine disruptors.
• Use organic pesticides and fertilizers.
• Do not give young children soft plastic teether or toys
• Buy organic food Whenever possible
• Do not store  fatty foods or water in plastic containers. Use glass article were ever possible.
• It is better to use natural estrogen replacement for men who require hormone replacement therapy.

You can hear the silent "or your girls will turn into sluts and your boys will grow up to be skirt-wearing fags!!1!" at the end of each line.  Someone pass me a barf bag.

Defending Sexism at The Reason Rally (or, Who's Exempt from Skeptical Inquiry?)

Reasons for God (RfG) has issued a response to the Friendly Atheist's post which is a response to various complaints about various speakers at the Reason Rally. RfG says "Mehta’s argument is that the documented sexism of some of the biggest speakers [Richard Dawkins, Penn Jillette, Bill Maher] is just not a big deal! ... Therefore, it is still worth having them speak because 'we need big-name celebrities to attend.'"

I have heard the argument that big-name speakers deserve to push out other speakers.  To me, that reeks of appeals to authority, and it's also a pretty effective "shut up, that's why" tactic.  (RfG claims that the Westboro Baptist Church was also officially invited to attend.  Frankly, that point is moot, since there's no way they wouldn't have planned to attend in any case.)

At this point, RfG takes the time to point out that anyone can be sexist (true) and that atheists attempt not to be sexist, in general (also true). They seem to imply that sexism is caused by atheism and sexism is in spite of Christianity. Ha!

Anyway, on to the main show.

Point #1: Is it true that Bill Maher, Penn Jillette, and Richard Dawkins have all made blatantly sexist comments?

In short, yes.

Moving on...

Point #2: Are these comments representative of a broader problem with the atheist movement?

Yes, but this is where the answer isn't a simple Google search away. Let's zoom out past the atheist movement. Let's even bypass Christian culture. Let's zoom out to any level of society, really, even the entire world. What do you see? Gender inequality to varying degrees, with very few exceptions. That means we should apply that skepticism we so often apply to religion needs to be turned onto ourselves when someone makes the claim that we've somehow uniquely (seemingly from magic) achieved a community free from sexism.

Point #3: So what does it say about The Reason Rally that an organizer of the event is arguing that a higher standard—such as “no sexism”—should not disqualify speakers?

These "questions as points" are getting irritating.

Anyway, RfG writes what sounds like an excellent intro to this issue, but then places it at the end of their post with an air of finality, as though we can dust off our hands and walk away from this issue.  The reason is, they don't really care about the success of the atheist movement, they're just looking for their "CHECKMATE, ATHEISTS" moments.

Screw them, here's where we get down to the heart of the matter:

Actual Point: Nobody is exempt from having the skeptical toolkit applied to their issues.

Nobody. Even when we're trying to get a huge group of people from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences together.  And you know what really says "lulz, I get an exemption, u mad bro?"

If we got rid of every speaker who held an irrational belief, there would be no one left on that stage.
So deal with it.

Oh okay!

No wait, no. I don't have to "deal" with it, I can talk about it and anyone else can talk about it and even RfG can talk about it, because it's there and it's not exempt. Maybe you're worn out.  Maybe you have listened to a thousand complaints and need to turn off your email so that you can get some work done before you address complaint number one-thousand one.  Everyone has their limits.  But atheists are as entitled to talk about atheism as atheist leaders are.

After all, this rally is about us. We're the ones the politicians need to represent and the media needs to understand.  We will not travel across the nation to be told that our experiences should once again be second-class status and that our voices should fall into the background.  We will not exempt anyone from skeptical inquiry.

So yes, the rally is going to bring a whole lot of differences together in ways previously unseen.  But it is our right to expect more from each other, from our leaders, and from our future.  We will not be silent.  We are atheism.

Why Do Vegetarians Get So Irritable, Anyway?

I am not a vegetarian evangelist, primarily because I don't have time, and only a mild passion for the topic.  But I do think that avoiding animal products is an action where the benefits increasingly outweigh the inconveniences as society moves in that direction.  So, I do a good deal of facepalming when I wander across bad arguments against avoiding animal consumption.

"But I don't want to eat a salad every day!"

Neither do I, so I don't.  Definitely not alone, or while laughing.

But this brings me to a surprisingly persistent argument against avoiding animal consumption, which I call the Entitled Prick Argument, but for the sake of diplomacy, I'll rename to:

The "But I Don't Like Veggies/But I Like Meat!" Argument

Most people don't realize the "I hate plants" argument is surprisingly sound.  The reason?  I can't prove your mental states wrong, short of having evidence that you do in fact gleefully consume a salad in your bedchambers every evening.  If you claim an anti-plant life stance, I really can't refute that.

The problem is, we have almost as convincing evidence that the meat industry is harmful to our planet as we have evidence for climate change itself, and that hasn't stopped multitudes of people from not giving a shit about either one of those.  Sometimes they try to summon the forces of selective skepticism against the evidence, but generally it all falls back to "but I don't want to ___", thus showing their hand as a matter of personal preference, not empirical conclusion.  They're literally saying that they see themselves as a person who is more entitled to eating meat than responsible for reducing their negative impact on everyone else.

And someone who is secure in being that kind of person with that kind of life stance isn't going to give a shit about rational arguments.

Remember the pepper spray incident at UC Davis?  (Of course you do, it just happened last weekend.)  The security personnel who mercilessly sprayed nonviolent people in the face without warning were clearly not taking the time to consider rational arguments for both sides and then go with the side which is supported by the best evidence for helping the most people.  Neither is the general public sitting down and consulting charts and statistics to try to convince them that they were wrong.  No, at some point we realize when someone just doesn't give a shit, and we move to public shaming, vegetarians included.

But for some reason, when vegetarians point out that "hey, you're actually hurting everyone by eating meat, so stop already!", they're the ones who are vilified.  As opposed to the people who are, you know, actually harming everyone.

PS: Yes, there exist good arguments for why a particular individual can't reliably avoid consuming animal products. That is not what this post is about.