Science and Politics

The Biotic Woman: The Dirty Politics of Coal

Brittany Shoot — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:17:10 -0500

Let's get something out of the way right now. My great grandpa, a mean, abusive old man named Everett, was a coal miner. So were other members of my family alongside and before him. (Everyone after him became a minister or worked for Ford in Detroit.) All the relatives on that side of my mother’s family lived and worked in West Virginia for generations. I grew up hearing stories about how before grandpa was allowed inside the house, he had to change out of his coveralls in the side yard shed and hose off. He did not die of black lung, but even if he’d had it, he would have lived forever. Everyone in my family does.

Coal mining is a filthy business, and I have no nostalgia for the environmental havoc it wreaks. The damage to people working in coal processing is bad enough, but the larger environmental complications from leaking coal ash from landfills and retention ponds are seemingly incalculable. Working in equal disgusting parts, coal ash is made up of fly ash from chimneys and bottom ash from coal furnaces. Coal ash contains an incredible amount of toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and mercury that cause serious health problems for adults and can lead to severe complications during pregnancy. For you pop culture junkies, fly ash also contains, among other horrific toxins, chromium VI, that carcinogenic crap Erin Brockovich helped fight in real life, as documented in the movie bearing her name. Not surprising, these kinds of health issues affect some of the poorest people in the country—often folks without access to health care or without the option to pick up and move away from the affected areas.

Perhaps that's why I'm particularly offended when I see commercials like these:

General Electric has been promoting "clean coal" for years, with varying types of ridiculous ads aimed at making us think coal can not only be clean; it can be beautiful! Like a model in a coal mine!

Wrong. Here's a much more accurate set-up, brought to you by ThisIsReality.org and directed by the Coen Brothers.

Here’s a reality check the next time someone wants to tell you about clean coal: They're still cleaning up the biggest fly ash spill in U.S., which occurred at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant in December 2008. A dam holding back tons of slurry burst in the middle of the night, dumping more than a billion gallons of coal ash slurry into Tennessee River tributaries. The sludge leveled entire communities with a four-foot-deep layer of coal ash slurry and killed off an unbelievable number of fish living in the rivers. The spill has been said to be one hundred times as large as the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

Despite this obvious example and well-known widespread problems coal ash spills can cause, West Virginia governor Joe Machin said last month that the Environmental Protection Agency should halt plans to regulate coal ash as a hazardous material. Isn't it the governor's job to look out of his constituents, not advocate for policies that could harm them?

Last week, the Christian Science Monitor reported that contamination from coal ash waste is even worse than the EPA has expected. For anyone who has ever lived beyond city infrastructure, you know, for example, how harmful it is to have sludge contaminating your groundwater. CMS reports:

"While the catastrophic spill at TVA's Kingston plant has become the poster child for the damage that coal ash can wreak, there are hundreds of leaking sites throughout the United States where the damage is deadly, but far less conspicuous," said Jeff Stant, who led the investigation for the Environmental Integrity Project, in a statement.

I’m not sure which part of the coal mess is more upsetting: that so many people seem totally unaware of the ripple effects of coal mining or that elected officials work against efforts to protect some of the nation’s poorest citizens from environmental hazards.

Further reading:

United Mountain Defense (my personal fave, includes detailed info for contacting the EPA)

Tennessee Coal Ash Survivors Network

Still unresolved, Tennessee coal-ash spill only one EPA hurdle, The Washington Post

Your Moment of Ew: Brought to you by the Daily Caller

Kjerstin Johnson — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:10:38 -0500

CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) is wrapping up its 2010 conference in DC today. It's kind of like the Coachella festival of Conservative politicians. (So Mitt Romney's on stage 2 right now, but then at three we have to pick between Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft!)

But these riveting speakers aren't the only exciting draw this year. Nope--there are some fly honies at the conference, and The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson's conservative news site, has put this video together (equally poor in editing as in taste) documenting the earth-shattering revelation that there are women at CPAC who aren't named Ann Coulter or Michele Bachmann.

He basically goes up to women (whether or not they're interested, as one clearly is not) and proceeds to have a conversation like this:
Daily Caller: What brings you to CPAC?
Women: ...You mean besides the obvious fact that I'm interested in conservative activism?

The camera basically pans around for CPAC T&A, and upon finding some, proceeds to ask them questions that border on pickup lines. Lousy pickup lines. ("So, you're a first-timer, huh?" "What do you ladies do when you're not at CPAC?"). By asking these women superficial questions, including "seen any cute boys?," it's clear that women at CPAC are thought of as purely ornamental---there to find husbands and compare pearl necklaces. At 1:17 he bothers a young woman clearly busy doing something work/promotions related. That he's "REJECTED" implies that she's not even seen as an activist but as a possible date.

I think the most telling clip comes at the very end:
Daily Caller: Have you seen any cute boys?
Woman: We're not here for the boys, we're here for polit-- Click! Movie's done! Thanks, sugar.

The video ends with "Congrats to CPAC for attracting women!" Daily Caller, here's some free advice. The reason you have to find dates at CPAC is probably because back home the ladies dislike you for supporting a party that places restrictions on their bodies and celebrates traditional gender roles. Now that you've come across women who share these beliefs with you, I'd advise you to start addressing them as more than a piece of meat.

But then again, it is CPAC.

(On a different note, I hope Be Your Own Pet joins the ranks of bands who sue for conservative organizations for using their tunes without permission.)

Girls hit CPAC for the boys? [Broadsheet]

Open Thread: Health Care Reform and the Stupak Amendment

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:25:04 -0500

On Saturday night the House of Representatives narrowly passed a health-care reform bill, changing the way Americans will access health insurance.

Included in the bill was an amendment from Bart Stupak (D-MI), which "prohibits federal funds for abortion services in the public option." Women seeking insurance coverage for abortions must seek a plan outside the enrolled companies. Sixty-Four Democrats
voted to include the amendment.

While the bill is heralded as the biggest step in health care reform since the New Deal, the Stupak amendment serves as a monumental setback for reproductive justice.

Read on for thoughts from other bloggers, but please share your thoughts on the bill, the amendment, and the future of health care below.

Representative Barbara Lee from California's 9th District:

Excerpt:

I remember the days of back alley abortions and this amendment takes us one step back to those dark days. This amendment goes way beyond the Hyde Amendment that denies federal funds for abortion and attempts to dictate to women how to spend their own money. It's simply outrageous.

From Amanda Marcotte:

This amendment will do nothing to reduce the abortion rate, but it will increase the suffering of women seeking abortion. The real goal is and always will be punishing sexual women, at least scapegoating the ones who have the misfortune to have unintended pregnancies.

From Shark Fu:

The health care reform bill vote brought those in power closer to denying those in need the secure, affordable care that is our right. It was also a demonstration of how real progressive change is never made on the backs of the oppressed.

Even after last year's election, many politicians still think that the old formula of saying one thing to women’s faces then doing a different thing when it comes time to vote…after we work our asses off to get them elected so that they could TAKE A MOTHERFUCKING STAND when it counted…would be enough to keep everyone happy.

Now, they're about to learn a lesson…because women intend to make it crystal clear: the old rules have changed -- and we will not be ignored.

From Frances Kissling:

If nothing else happens as a result of this defeat, complete and total dedication to overturning Hyde must be the centerpiece, indeed the single objective of our movement. It is not clear if the effect of the Stupak Amendment will be that the door will close on ever restoring federal funds for abortion, but every effort to make sure that does not happen must be made. We must convince enough people that the only immorality is using poor women as a way of expressing one’s moral outrage. Either we all have the right to choose or none of us has it.

President Obama has always supported overturning Hyde and we now need to insist that having achieved his political objective with strong support from the women’s movement, he must take up the true moral cause – giving women with no or low resources the same right of conscience as those with sufficient money to pay for their own abortions have always had.

From Nancy Keenan, NARAL President:

This vote is a reminder to America's pro-choice majority that, despite our gains in the last two election cycles, anti-choice members of Congress still outnumber our pro-choice allies. It is unconscionable that anti-choice lawmakers would use health reform to attack women's health and privacy, but that's exactly what happened on the House floor tonight. Even though the bill already included a ban on federal funding for abortion and a requirement that only women's personal funds could pay for abortion care, Reps. Stupak and Pitts took their obsession with attacking a woman's right to choose to a whole new level. We will hold those lawmakers who sided with the extreme Stupak-Pitts amendment accountable for abandoning women and capitulating to the most extreme fringe of the anti-choice movement. In short, the fight is not over. That's why we will continue to mobilize our activists and work with our allies in Congress to remove this dangerous provision from the health-care bill and stop additional attacks as the process moves to the Senate.

From Women & Politics:

The Stupak amendment passed 240-194. How many women voted for it? 19. (2 Dems, all Repubicans). Allow me to do a little math: Out of 435 members, we currently have only 73 women in the House. We should have 217.5. (OK, round that up to 218 I suppose). So, that means we need 145 more women to make it equal.

What do you suppose would happen with the anti-choice, anti-woman Stupak amendment if we had gender equality in Congress for this vote? I dare to say that not only would it be defeated—it wouldn’t have even a whisper of a wish of passing. (That is, if it was even introduced at all).

On the Map: One Day, One Struggle: A Campaign for Human Rights in Muslim Societies

Mandy Van Deven — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:15:00 -0500

Today over twenty organizations in eleven countries will hold "simultaneous events and public demonstrations on topics like protesting customary practices such as honor killings and FGM/C, overturning discriminatory and life threatening laws like stoning or lashing of women, and calling for LGBT rights, the right to sexuality education and the right to bodily and sexual integrity of all people." The One Day, One Struggle campaign is a joint effort organized by the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR), a solidarity network comprised of NGOs and academic institutions in the Middle East, North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia that work to promote sexual and bodily rights as human rights in Muslim societies. The CSBR emerged in 2001 from the “Women, Sexuality and Social Change in the Middle East and Mediterranean Symposium” organized by Turkey's Women for Women’s Human Rights (WWHR), a global nongovernmental organization (NGO) interested in gaining legal reforms in Muslim societies worldwide. On the eve of the campaign initiation, I spoke to WWHR campaign coordinators Pinar Ilkkaracan and Irazca Geray, as well as Vizla Kumaresan from Malaysia's Women's Aid Organization (WAO), about the goals of the premiere advocacy event.

What is the purpose of One Day, One Struggle?

WWHR: Issues around sexuality and sexual and reproductive rights display a huge variety in different Muslim societies. For instance, so-called honor crimes continue to be a widespread violation of women’s sexual and bodily rights in the Middle East, but it is almost unheard of in Southeast Asia or the Sub-Saharan Africa. And homosexuality, for instance, is punished as a criminal offence in many countries of the Middle East, but it is widely accepted in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Despite all these differences, there is a common fact shared by all participants of this campaign: the attacks on sexual and reproductive rights are escalating, which is a result of rising conservatism that is fueled by militarism, increasing inequalities, the politicization of religion, and Islamophobia in the post-9/11 context. All this has strengthened the patriarchal and extremist religious ideologies that use sexuality, especially women’s sexuality, as a tool of oppression.

Our efforts to reverse this tide constitute the basis of the One Day, One Struggle campaign, which aims to make the struggles of sexual and reproductive rights advocates in Muslim societies visible at the international level.

Why is it important to have a coalition of people organizing for human rights across Muslim societies?

WWHR: Coalition building across various regions and between NGOs and academic institutions on various themes related to sexuality has been extremely useful for our struggles. We have been able to inform and update each other on how human rights violations in the domain of sexuality are being legitimized in different countries. This gives us the information and experience needed to build the necessary strategies against the misuse of religion as an instrument of control and sexual oppression in our individual contexts and regions. We have been able to support each others' work by producing and disseminating reports and publications on the legal reforms in our own countries and by holding the very first high-level, international meetings on sexual and reproductive rights in countries like Lebanon and Tunisia, where previously sexuality had been a taboo.

The CSBR is not a coalition working for the rights of only Muslim women, it is not a religious or faith-based network, and we are not working only in Islamic countries. The coalition also does not just have Muslim members. It includes people who are Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, and other religious minorities from Muslim-majority countries, as they are also affected by various practices that violate human rights related to sexuality. The CSBR includes both women and men and has a very diverse membership ranging from women’s human rights NGOs to LGBTQ organizations to groups that work on HIV/AIDS to academic institutions and departments.

What do you hope to achieve with this event?

WWHR: We hope to show that even if we are in different countries and even on different continents, when working on issues related to sexuality, we are united in our struggle to realize sexual and bodily rights in Muslim societies. The One Day, One Struggle campaign aims to raise public awareness on sexuality and sexual rights in our national contexts and to draw international public attention to issues around sexual and bodily rights in our regions. In each host country, the CSBR members are focusing on the pertinent issues within their own context.

For instance, CSBR member organizations in Tunisia are focusing on the urgent need for sexuality education, while in Indonesia they have come together to make the public, media, and health care providers aware of the fact that the practice of female circumcision is a form of violence against women. Another CSBR organization in Indonesia is trying to mobilize against the recently passed law on stoning as a punishment for adultery in Aceh. In Palestine CSBR members are holding a week-long campaign against femicide and the impact of the Apartheid Wall and house demolitions on women. In the Sudan they are coming together with public figures and Ministry of Health representatives to discuss how to work towards women’s empowerment and also contribute to campaigns to end female genital mutilation. Campaign activities are also varied, ranging from conferences to artistic performances to book launches.

WAO: The Malaysian campaign to abolish Section 498 of the Penal Code involves the participation of four organisations--namely All Women's Action Society (AWAM), Empower, Sisters in Islam (SIS) and Women's Aid Organisation. We joined this campaign to draw attention to the increased "successful" attempts to control women's bodies in Malaysia, thus restricting their bodily autonomy. This campaign allows us to highlight our cause and to garner international support for it.

The Malaysian media campaign will start with a press conference to draw attention to our call to abolish Section 498: "Enticing or taking away or detaining with a criminal intent a married woman.” This law is offensive and violates a woman's right to sexual and bodily autonomy. We aim to generate public discussions through the media around the issue of women's bodies, marriage, and sexuality.

What challenges have you faced organizing One Day, One Struggle?

WAO: Part of the challenge for us is the lack of understanding of how Islamophobia, which took a nasty turn post-9/11 and whose effects continue to have ramifications today, influences our work and how we understand what kinds of challenges Muslim women face. Muslim women, like non-Muslim women, face challenges on a number of fronts and discrimination occurs on multiple grounds, not all tied to one's religious identity. We know all women experience similar controls and misogyny by religious right elements within their communities.

WWHR: It's been a challenge to get the press not to interpret “Muslim societies” simply as “Islamic countries.” Stereotyping of Muslim women has been a big challenge as well, but this is also why we are doing this campaign: to show that even though it is not covered as such in the Western media, there is not one single definition of what it means to be a “Muslim society.” Practices and issues are very diverse and a lot of courageous work is being undertaken by the sexual and reproductive rights advocates in Muslim societies.

Logistically, it was not easy to organize this campaign in eleven countries spread across such a wide geography. Things that may seem like small details--such as time differences and the fact that all organizations have different capacities to access internet--can be very problematic. It was definitely very encouraging to create such a link across boundaries, languages, and themes.

Will this be a one-time event or do you plan to repeat it annually?

WWHR: We wish we could say this will be a one-time event that will help achieve all our aims, but obviously the likelihood of that happening is slim. Depending on the outcomes of this campaign, the CSBR will decide if and how to turn this collective effort into an annual campaign.

Swine & Dandy: What if we did as much to prevent rape as we do to prevent H1N1?

Meg Stone — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:05:25 -0500

I spent most of this past spring and summer rolling my eyes every time I heard a news story about the swine flu. Almost every day local reporters got hysterical about 5 or 10 or 20 confirmed cases. Entire schools closed in response to a handful of kids with fevers, and as if there were no war in Afghanistan, no economic crisis, and no other epidemics claiming ten times as many lives, newscasters talked about H1N1 (the proper name for swine flu) for hours.

I have a degree in public health and my work focuses on preventing rape and other acts of violence and supporting survivors in healing from abuse. When I see all the attention swine flu is getting, I’m jealous. Other than intermittent news stories about sex offenders on the loose or why women who accuse professional athletes of rape are lying, sexual violence rarely gets any widespread coverage. Certainly no state of emergency declared by the President of the United States.

Now, I don’t want to diminish the grief of those who have lost loved ones to H1N1. I don’t even want to question the scientific validity of the Center for Disease Control’s decision to declare it a pandemic. But the fact remains that the impact H1N1 has had on our country to date is far less than that of other public health crises that receive a fraction of the attention and resources. The CDC reported just over 43,000 cases of H1N1 between April and July of this year and estimates that it affected a million people in that time. Compare this to the 2.5% of women and 0.9% of men who reported being raped or sexually assaulted in the past year. That’s more than 2.5 million sexual assaults in a three-month time period. The most recent statistics about rape available from the CDC are from last year. Swine flu? Last week. (Editor's note: A few sentences from the above paragraph have been updated to reflect statistical changes since this post was originally published.)

What would our media, our public discourse, and our institutional responses look like if people cared as much about rape as they do about H1N1?

I imagine the federal government urging colleges to stop the epidemic of rape by developing protocols for quarantining students who have tried to use drugs or alcohol to incapacitate women who would otherwise not consent to sex. Or university officials directing students to stay off campus or out of public areas until they are free of the belief that they are entitled to sex any time they want for a full 24 hours. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

I dream of public health departments so inundated with the demand for educational programs that teach kids about healthy relationships that they can’t keep up. Of public outrage that there are not enough doses of self-defense training to inoculate everyone against rape, and of medical experts having to go on television to reassure people that more of these self-defense vaccines are on the way.

Then I wake up to a phone conversation with a principal who tells me there is no dating violence in his school and another with a teacher who desperately wants to offer rape prevention resources to her high school classes but can’t because the entire budget for health education in her district was cut. So much for the dream.

But if I stop resenting H1N1 for getting so much attention for a moment, I realize that what I’m complaining about is actually public health at is best. It is probably true that the coordination of government urgency, media attention, medical system mobilization, and common sense precautions will succeed in thwarting a pandemic. We will probably not look back at 2009 and say it was the beginning of a swine flu crisis that devastated a generation.

What feels like hysteria or over-emphasis is actually the way prevention is supposed to look. It is supposed to be widespread and coordinated. Messages about the importance and seriousness of the public health threat are supposed to be so pervasive that they are almost impossible to ignore. I’m so used to caring about public health crises that don’t get the attention and resources they deserve that I almost can’t recognize what the public health system looks like when it does work.

This kind of focused attention is my wildest dream for our society’s response to HIV, rape, domestic violence, drug addiction, racial health disparities, cancer-causing corporate pollution, food system injustice and every other area of public health that is marginalized.

So why is the public health infrastructure working so well? Because it’s not being undermined by shame, stigma, and denial (you know, the way rape and sexual assault are). Even in the highest drama evening news stories there is almost a complete absence of victim blaming. Personal choices and individual behaviors spread the flu, but our government, our health workers, and our media understand that this crisis is too serious to waste time arguing over whether people who don’t wash their hands or share cubicles with co-workers who fail to stay home from work the recommended 4 to 7 days deserve what they get.

It would be unthinkable for a person to avoid seeking treatment for swine flu because s/he’s afraid that if s/he tells her/his doctor s/he’ll be blamed for touching her/his eyes and nose or lose her/his housing because no parents want to raise their children in a neighborhood where people don’t sneeze into their elbows

As if invoking the finale of High School Musical, when it comes to H1N1, we’re all in this together. Swine flu is not concentrated in any population that people already hate or devalue, so raging debates about whose immoral lifestyle caused it don’t get in the way of an effective public health response. (Even Fox News is posting stories that are sympathetic to people whose jobs don’t have paid sick leave and the hardship they face in missing work as the authorities direct.) Wouldn't it be nice if other health crises were treated the same way?

In watching the rapid mobilization against this virus I know that the public health infrastructure works when our government, our media, and our medical leaders are motivated to mobilize it. H1N1 is not getting any attention it shouldn’t – it’s getting the attention all public health crises should.

The Body Electric: Sick Bodies--Health Care and the Body-As-Machine

Page McBee — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:05:43 -0400

Nothing gets a person thinking deeply about health care faster--it turns out--than being home sick with something that started out looking an awful lot like H1N1.

I am newly-insured, and my policy is partialy subsidized by my part-time employer. As a working writer and teaching artist, I am rarely in a position to visit a doctor outside of a clinic or--in more serious circumstances--the emergency room of whatever local hospital has sliding scale fees. When I got sick this week I was able to say "better not chance it"--and what a position that is to be in! As I waited over an hour past my scheduled appointment time to see a medical resident at my enormous HMO, I surveyed the waiting room and thought about the irony that I pay a (relative to my paycheck very large) fee to be provided this sort of "care"--and that I was lucky.

This was my second time in as many weeks to visit my HMO. The week before, I showed up for an unrelated and recurring medical issue that led to an extremely bizarre interaction with the doctor who examined me. When I explained early on in the process that I no longer had breasts, I thought she was going to flee the room (which she eventually did--she did not return with a promised prescription, though I waited for her for fifteen minutes. A nice nurse eventually found me and told me that the doctor had called it in instead).

The doctor's tongue-tied response was not completely unexpected, unfortunately, but stranger still was--in the wake of all the media coverage of insurance companies denying chemo due to a "preexisting" acne condition--the intensity in which I found myself directing her to please please please note in the computer system that my bilateral masectomy was cosmetic, voluntary, and not indictive of any medical condition.

How frightening, how little we trust the people charged with caring for us--from insurance companies who are supposed to be our advocates, to the doctor's who barely know so many of us.

I have long had a tense relationship with the medical community. Pathologizing the bodies of queers and transfolks (Gender Identity Disorder, for example, is still a medically-recognized "problem" that requires a "diagnosis" by many doctors before folks can be "treated" with surgery/hormones/etc.), not to mention women, is a disturbing historical fact that has been getting a lot of attention in recent years.

But, more fundamentally, I find it problematic that the entire set up of a hospital is about the production of health care, not the recipients of that care. Long after being shuffled into a room filled with equipment and posters not designed with my challenging body in mind, and as I watched the doctor treating me struggle to find words beyond, "Well, I've not actually met anybody who has done that," I wondered seriously about what could possibly be done to fix a system that has so little respect for the bodies of the individuals it treats.

We all carry our scars, surgeries, allergies, broken bones, memories, genetics, blood, hopes, and guts with us wherever we go. We are stunning in our uniqueness, and our bodies are the seat of who we are. Of course, we all have the same basic parts, but I wouldn't take a car to any old mechanic or my pet to any vet---I want someone who understands the particular quirks of my engine or that my cat needs to be coaxed gently out of her hiding spot.

We are a country of factories, and factories are not about complexity or the spirit or even quality--they are about quantity. We are a mired in a system that reflects back to us the basic problems of our culture: greed, inequity, and a lack of real integration of all aspects of who we are. The people who embody the diverse faces of humanity from sexuality to gender to race to class--are the least acknowledged, to everyone's detriment. Until we address the root of our ills, we are just cogs in a runaway machine with only degrees of luck to protect us from what is surely a disaster on our collective horizon.

The Body Electric: New Normal--More Reasons to Love Radiolab

Page McBee — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:22:19 -0400

I am a teaching artist, and I work every year with high school creative writing students at the San Francisco School of the Arts. The unit I've designed this year is on the topic of hybrid text, which really is a way to talk to a bunch of brilliant young people about more than just that. This week, we explored questions collectively like: why are people afraid--rather than curious--about the unknown? Why do we equate hybrid with "monster" or "progress" more than anything else? The socio-political topics covered so far have included people transgressing the gender binary as well as multiracial identity politics.

I love teaching, mostly because I love the almost physical process of a young person opening their mind.

And, walking home from school this week, I caught up with an October 2nd episode of WNYC's Radiolab podcast. Radiolab, an amazing show that explores big, philosophical science questions, described this episode on their site as follows: "How do you tell the difference between a sea change and a ripple in the water? Is a peacenik baboon, a man in a dress, or a cuddly fox a sign of things to come? Or just a flukey outlier from the norm? Is there ever really even a norm? In this hour we examine three stories that reframe our sense of normalcy."

Yes, man in a dress was listed as a topic. And, as far as I can tell, Stu Rasmussen--born male and lifelong resident of conservative Silverton, Oregon and our country's first transgender mayor--identifies as both "he" and trans. In what might be the most public example of gender subversion ever, Stu is my new hero. On his site, he addresses his doubters and gawkers with a generous dismissal:

"If you just stumbled on this site you may be asking yourself "Is this guy for real?" or "Is that really a guy?" I'm Stu Rasmussen. I own and operate several small businesses in Silverton, Oregon. I have also served 20 years as an elected official in local government, as City Councilor, Mayor and member of the Silver Falls Library board. I am currently completing my third 4-year term on the Silverton City Council. Now I'm running for Mayor of Silverton (population 9,588). It's a position I have already been elected to twice before - in 1988 and 1990. I just happen to be transgendered - something I didn't even know the word for until I discovered it on the Internet. I've been a crossdresser or transvestite my whole life, only 'coming out' recently and thereby discovering that life goes on very nicely."

Stu! I would vote for him in a heartbeat. What a testament to what happens when you commit to be your most authentic self.

And Radiolab! Radiolab focused this portion of the episode on the question of what happens when people are challenged in their understanding of what normalacy is. They explore what happens to the townspeople--who are generally a little wary of their mayor's "flamboyance" but whose attitude is that Stu is "just Stu"--when a bunch of evangicals from the plains come to town and march in their streets with that special brand of hateful nutjob zeal that we all know so well i.e. "Your Mayor is Going to Hell and So Are You." "God hates fags" (Stu, by the way, is in a thirty year relationship with a woman. And I'm pretty sure that, if God exists, s/he doesn't hate anybody but that's beyond the scope of this blog). Anyhow, they were charming, as per usual.

The important part is that the townspeople--get this--retaliate by crossdressing and staging a response protest of their own in Stu's defense!

WHAT? Yes. Big, burly Oregon men in dresses, standing up for their transgender mayor because he is their friend. This confirms my long-held theory that, in a certain way, the revolution will begin in smaller communities. I am from a small town, and my best friend and I were openly queer around the time that Ellen's coming out episode shocked the world. And--though often uncomfortable to varying degrees--people were kind to us, by and large.

In this episode of Radiolab, Stu cries when recounting his amazement at people he'd known his whole life--people who seemed to tolerate his "eccentricities" but not quite understand them--marching down the street in dresses and suits in solidarity. I got choked up, myself. What does this say about what is possible?

If people in Silverton can remember that a person is defined by their spirit, by their history, by their generousity and bravery and by every incarnation of what they have been--than maybe everybody can be given the room to grow into who they are. For the sake of the youth I work with, for my sake, for yours--I really want to believe that that is true.

The Body Electric: California Versus Uruguay on Queer Issues--Guess Who Wins This Week?

Page McBee — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:33:38 -0400

In this corner, California: home to the Bay Area, which is probably among the most queer-friendly places in the world. Though notoriously "pro-H8," California has relatively comprehensive domestic partnership laws and the Bay Area, in particular, offers a host of legal and health services to the GLBTQ community.

This week, our consistently inconsistent governor, the still-bizarre-to-me-former-action-hero Arnold Schwarzenegger, made headlines by signing two bills into law: a state-wide day to honor (watch the language: the state is not officially recognizing it as a holiday) gay rights activist Harvey Milk, and another confusing bill that further muddles the web of bureaucratic bullshit that is gay marriage in America by acknowledging the marriages of all queers who did so--in any state--before the passage of H8.

But wait! Schwarzenegger did not sign into law two bills relating to basic rights for queer and transfolks. One would have given transpeople in California the right to change their birth certificates--which seems to me a reasonable and basic final administrative change needed to create consistent paperwork for access to services and employment.

The other vetoed bill--a human rights bill, and the most disturbing veto I can think of in recent history--would have made gender identification and sexual orientation a consideration when placing prisoners.

Harvey Milk--who made amazing contributions on behalf of gay rights--is still a gay white man whose memory is being acknowledged (way too late) by another white man here in the land of the free, while many queer/genderqueer/trans prisoners are at risk for their lives every day in a state that benefits enormously from a prison-industrial complex that is deeply entrenched in all aspects of our culture.

In this corner: Uruguay, a Latin American country that also made headlines this week. Uruguay, which is primarily Roman Catholic, allowed for gay adoptions in September. In 2008, it legalized civil unions between queer couples.

This week, Uruguay's president was sent a bill, unanimously approved by the Senate, that allows for transpeople to change their name and sex on legal documents. The bill notes that, "Every person has the right to freely develop their personality in accordance with the proper identity of their gender..." Wow! Wish we felt that way here in America! Of special note: the bill would allow original documents to be amended.

Seems like a KO, California.

Uruguay has demonstrated over the last few years what is possible when the political leadership of a country stands up to the objections of bigots and zealots. If only America had lawmakers willing to fight for the freedom, safety, and dignity of everyone; not just the rights of the nutjobs with the biggest mouths and pocketbooks.

California: 0

Uruguay: 1

Elinor Ostrom Gets the Nobel Prize in Economics, and We All Win

Danny Hayes — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:16:06 -0400

These days everyone seems to be caught up in the Obama Peace Prize hullabaloo: He’s only been in office for 9 months! How do we know he deserves it? What if he surges the troops in Afghanistan? Personally, I couldn’t care less. By now, the Nobel Peace Prize is right up there with the Grammys in the respectability category (or lack thereof), and the prize has a history of rewarding American Imperialism. The original war-mongering president Teddy Roosevelt won one, for Pete’s sake. In the irony category, the prize in economics often seems to follow suit, so my jaded trust in the Scandinavian art of prize-giving was pleasantly proven wrong today when I read that Elinor Ostrom became the first woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

This prize is exciting partly because Ms. Ostrom is the first woman to win it, but not just because of that. Her winning this prize will hopefully help to highlight women’s voices in a field that is desperate for them, and the noble work this Nobel is rewarding will hopefully change the way we think about economics in general.

Anyone living through this shitstorm of a recession will probably agree with me that the economy is a big, bad, scary thing, prone to whims of violence and outrage that seem to leave our Bank of America accounts constantly overdrawn. What we often forget when thinking about the economy is that it isn't some all-knowing system handed down from the gods (or up from the demons), but instead a system constructed entirely by humans. Nope, scratch that: men. Nope, scratch that: straight, white, upper-middle class men. As the feminist economist Marilyn Waring points out in her book Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and Women are Worth (great book! Everyone should read it!), economics students can still look forward to studying the works of a long list of male economists whose ideas on society are regarded as science and help to shape every aspect of the way we live. “Wherever one of these students of economics looks, she will find women’s experience excluded or numbed by language,” she writes. “The writings of feminist economists Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman will not be part of the curriculum. Ritual bows may be made in the direction of equal pay or discrimination against women in the labor force or comparable worth (equal pay for work of equal value.) Yet even these are more likely to be found in ‘women’s studies’ publications than in mainstream economic journals.”

So before we start celebrating Professor Ostrom’s life work, let’s talk about the silver anniversary of an economics prize that was also a huge landmark for women. The 1984 Nobel Prize in Economics went to a British man named Sir Richard Stone for his work on helping to formalize the United Nations’ system of national accounting, a system that is now used in virtually every country in the world to calculate Gross Domestic Product. When international institutions like the U.N., the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund started becoming the beacons of international aid, they needed a way to determine how to distribute aid to the places and problem areas that needed it the most. This system of national accounting was their answer. Unfortunately, in addition to the charge that the system is a form of neocolonialism for its tendency to force developing economies to squeeze into its post-industrial ideas of economic production, it’s notorious for making women and the environment invisible. For example, it has no way of accounting for the unpaid labor that women perform all over the globe, nor does it find it necessary to account for the innumerable services that natural resources provide. So if aid is being distributed based on the data collected by the national accounting system, good luck to those invisible women and natural resources who are trying to get some of it. This is a huge problem, but the system’s supporters are large in number, and in a world where economics is treated as a science, the system’s shortcomings are written off as a minor by-product of an infallible method worthy of the highest honor.

Fast-forward to today, and what we’ve got is a woman being awarded the prize for her work on studying the ability of humans to care for the commons without the help of governments or corporations and finding out that we don’t do that bad of a job. In fact, according to Ostrom’s research, we often do a better job of taking care of nature’s gifts than institutions do. Who would have thunk it! A quarter of a century later, and the Nobel Prize in Economics is not only bringing women and the environment out of the woodworks, it’s putting them front and center. Ostrom winning the award is also noteworthy because her research falls decidedly into the field of social science. This is already pissing off people in the world of economics. Steven D. Levitt, professor of economics at the University of Chicago, which is coincidentally the college that has produced a slew of some of the douchebaggiest Nobel Prize-winning economists, said in the New York Times, “The economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom even more than Republicans hated the Peace prize going to Obama. Economists want this to be an economists’ prize (after all, economists are self-interested). This award demonstrates, in a way that no previous prize has, that the prize is moving toward a Nobel in Social Science, not a Nobel in economics. I don’t mean to imply this is necessarily a bad thing — economists certainly do not have a monopoly on talent within the social sciences — just that it will be unpopular among my peers.”

So this isn’t just a prize for Ostrom, it’s a prize for all of us feminists and environmentalists. This prize is dangerous! It means that all of those economics students out there might now be reading Ostrom in addition to Stone, and that means that maybe even Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Vandana Shiva and other feminist economists and thinkers could make their way into economics curricula and turn the field into less of a dick-waving meatfest, and more of what it should be: a social science that is supposed to be looking out for the rest of us.

The Body Electric-Bodies as Weapons: When the G20 Comes to Your Hometown

Page McBee — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:17:44 -0400

You know what? I get it. The G20 is a symbol of everything that's wrong with globalized capitalism. Protesting their gatherings makes a lot of sense to me. This year the G20 is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and we are once again awash in apocalyptic images of police-state riot gear and angry college kids in bandanas getting arrested.

But this year is different for me, at least. This year, the G20 isn't happening on the other side of the world: it's happening in my quiet, industrial hometown, where raucous whole-city events always involve a winning sports team and a celebration. Pittsburgh is a city rooted in the sort of pride that blooms most in insular, isolated mid-size cities with long, storied histories; a one-for-all, all-for-one sort of mentality. With this in mind, I have watched the updated Facebook status feeds of locals that I know: anxious, angry, and largely confused by the actions of all parties. Why is the G20 occupying their city? Why are the protestors throwing bricks through their restaurant windows?

As usual, I remain most interested in the protestors and here's why: I do get it. I get how frustrating it is to feel so small in the face of so much that is wrong, to only have your body and your hands as weapons, and to know that they are nothing next to a smart bomb. I get the rage about all that is wrong with the world, and I get the urge to do something about it.

But I don't get this:

This is Pamela's diner; a Pittsburgh institution with five locations. Pamela's is where my high school girlfriend and I had our first date. It's where you go for a hungover breakfast on a Sunday morning. It is not a symbol of greed any more than any small business; and it's certainly not Bank of America. So why did protestors break its windows yesterday? Because anger without direction in a protest ceases to be about the symbols. Because violence, perpetrated by a government or an individual, brings out the worst aspects of humanity.

Pamela's reopened for business today. Nobody has been killed in Pittsburgh, and the leaders meet on--likely ignoring all the fuss outside. Ironically, the whole situation has become virtually institutionalized at this point, like a grand political theater: the police in their outfits and with their rubber bullets and sound guns, showing the world how easily they are set off against the citizens they are supposed to serve; and the protestors, with their half-covered faces, on their stomachs in the road, handcuffs contorting their bodies in righteous rage.

The leaders lead, safely cocooned. The people of Pittsburgh get their coffees and orange juices and head off to work, a little bewildered maybe. The owners of Pamela's stay up all night and clean their restaurant so as to reopen it on time. How does that protestor feel, I wonder?

Is there any other way? I wonder that, too.