Okay, this guy is amazing. I’m listening to an interview with Byron Hurt (will be available on the website this evening) on NPR right now. He’s produced a documentary about black masculinity and the misogyny, violence, and homophobia in hip-hop, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, that’ll air on PBS tonight. This guy knows what he’s talking about; he’s obviously educated about race and gender issues and isn’t afraid to use specific, perhaps academic, sometimes loaded terminology (like “socialization”!) that people giving interviews for the media tend to shy away from. I’ve never heard of him before, but this interview blew me away.

It’s so, so rare to run across genuine, self-professed male feminists, especially one who really gets it and is going to an effort to attempt to educate other men about sexism. (And those of you reading this who do, seriously, thank you. I love you guys.) Feminism can only do so much as a white, female movement. We need allies. We need men who aren’t afraid to confront other men about their sexism. We need people of color who aren’t afraid to work within their own communities to challenge sexism and who will fight racism within progressive movements.

This is something I and a lot of feminist bloggers don’t talk about or address much…but it is important. Men have a role to play in the feminist movement, too; sometimes it’s hard to communicate what that role should be, when we’re busy focusing on what it should not be. I know a lot of us get angry when we feel men are diverting attention from our issues and therefore minimizing them. But the truth is that (most of us) recognize and understand that sexism hurts and affects men too in different ways, and most of us find it deeply troubling.

Byron Hurt is doing what feminist men should be doing. He is challenging oppression, bigotry, and intolerance in his own community. Feminist men need to be able to organize and effect change independent of feminist women. There are many issues we can and should work together on, but at some point our interests and abilities diverge. A woman will never be able to explain why sexism is bad for men to men as effectively as another man. A man who attempts to get too involved in a women’s movement runs the risk of using his privilege to reproduce exactly the same unbalanced power dynamics which make women turn to feminism to begin with (and experiences like this, I think, and the reason so many of us are so leery of progressive men interested in the movement). Feminist men need to organize their own movements and focus on the areas where they can have the most positive impact, areas which often diverge from those of primary concern to women. Feminism cannot be an effective movement by focusing only on half of the population, but, frankly, women only have the time, energy, and ability to focus on our own half. There are so many issues which only affect women that we’ve really got our hands full. It’s very hard for our influence to extend beyond that. What we don’t need is men trying to take control of those aspects of the movement. What we need is men to focus on the issues which concern them instead of expecting women to work on men’s issues, too. They can do it better than we can, anyway; that’s their territory.

I don’t know if I’m getting my point across effectively; I’m having trouble articulating exactly what it is I admire so much about this guy. Just take note, feminist men: Byron Hurt is doing something right. I’ve been asked before by men what exactly they should do to fight sexism, and now I can point to this man as the answer. What he’s doing. That’s where you’ll help us the most; that’s how you can be effective.

Yup, the blog’s been around for over a year now. This would be much more impressive if I had posted consistently for more than a few months during the last year.

That is all.

A transwoman in Vancouver has just had a discrimination suit dismissed by the Supreme Court of Canada. Heart actually has a detailed overview of the case posted at her place, but I refuse to link to it due to the disgustingly transphobic remarks she and her readers have made in the comments. (Yeah, um, don’t bother trying to argue about this. This is a queer blog. It won’t go over well.)

So instead, I’ll quote this article:

The Supreme Court will not hear arguments about whether a women’s service organization erred in excluding a trans person from working with the Vancouver-based group.

The Feb 1 decision denying “leave to appeal” to the Supreme Court Of Canada leaves Kimberly Nixon without further recourse for her exclusion from Vancouver Rape Relief.

The battle began a decade ago when Nixon filed a human rights complaint against the organization over her treatment.

The BC Human Rights Tribunal found that Nixon had been discriminated against on the basis of her trans identity and ordered Rape Relief to pay her $7,500 in damages.

But the victory was short-lived. Rape Relief appealed to the BC Supreme Court, where the tribunal’s decision was overturned. At that time, Rape Relief did not dispute the allegation that it rejected Nixon because she is trans, but argued it was allowed to do so. Nixon appealed to the BC Court Of Appeal, who upheld the province’s Supreme Court decision in 2005.

The argument here is that a woman raised with male privilege has such a different experience that she can’t relate to or counsel cisgendered women who’ve suffered violence. (Well, that’s the relatively benign argument. We won’t get into the paranoid “feminist” arguments about “appropriation” and “infiltration”, or the otherwise outright offensive arguments.) The reality is far from this simple.

The reality is that there is no universal, essential experience of womanhood. The mainstream American feminist movement has often and rightly been criticized for ignoring the experience of women of color, queer women, poor women. None of us have grown up or been raised the same way. None of our experiences have been exactly the same or meant the same thing to us, impacted us in the same ways.

My experience as a biracial, queer, ex-Mormon feminist can’t be compared to a straight, white, Christian woman. It can’t be compared to a woman who grew up in poverty, or another culture, or another part of the world. We are not the same. There is no unifying thread which connects us, nothing magical or spiritual binding us all in sisterhood with one another except those threads we weave ourselves, those bridges that we build, and our shared humanity, which, might I remind you, we also share with men.

What is this experience transwomen can never have or understand which makes them not “real” women in the social sense? We can’t argue it’s dependent on the presence or absence of female sex organs; there are women with birth defects and women without wombs. There are women who have been victims of Female Genital Mutilation. There can be women born with ambiguous genitalia. And, so, there can be women with male sex organs, too.

An appeal to blood is useless here for the reasons stated above: not all women, even cisgendered women, bleed. Some women have reproductive health issues. Some women have been through menopause. Not all of us bleed the same way. I can hardly relate to women for whom menstruation is a horrible, agonizing ordeal — for me, it is something I hardly even think about. Given the huge amount of physical variation, the ultimately subjective nature of our interactions with our own bodies, I hardly think a woman born with a penis can be much different from me than a woman with endometriosis. Both are foreign. Both are certainly women.

There is no biological congruence. There is no identical socialization. Even women who have endured the same event will process it differently, come to different conclusions. Nobody is an island, but neither are any of us the same. It’s been argued that no one can ever truly understand another person, and I agree. Given that, how can anyone really believe there’s anything essential that ties all women together? Even if we all emerged from the same common background, I don’t think that would be true.

Those who claim transwomen experience some overwhelming male privilege which makes them incapable of understanding women, empathizing with women, being part of women’s groups, I think are woefully ignorant of what it means to grow up gender-variant or queer.

Growing up queer means that you know from a very young age that you do not belong, that there is something wrong with the world or wrong with you. Girls who are tomboys are teased, discouraged from pursuing their interests, but in many ways are tolerated because it’s okay for a girl to want to be a like a boy, to be “better”, more “masculine”, as long as she understands that she can still never be as good as the genuine article. But effeminate boys? There’s nothing worse in the world; a boy acting like a girl? That’s a huge step down. Being “feminine” is wrong, bad, less. Women are flawed and men who resemble women in any small or superficial way are not treated kindly.

Male privilege looks very different when people think that you’re a fag (or, for that matter, a butch dyke). You’re a target, you are harassed and tormented, beat up, murdered, simply because you challenged some sociopath’s sense of propriety. Is that privilege? Is it a privilege to be gay-bashed? Certainly, most transwomen will have had some advantages in their upbringing, but I can hardly fault any woman who wasn’t raised thinking she was worthless, thinking she simply wasn’t as good, that she was dumber, more emotional, capable of less, an object for the pleasure of men. Any woman, trans or cisgendered, who has managed to escape these messages has nothing but my astonished pleasure for her good fortune (and it’s ignorant to assume that transwomen haven’t had some exposure at least by proxy before transition, and that they don’t experience life the same way any other woman does afterward, at least if they “pass” — if they don’t, I think their experience is much worse).

Kimberly Nixon is post-op. Any arguments revolving around the presence of a penis are at this point incorrect and irrelevant (although they’d be bigoted and wrong in any case). Any arguments about her experience as a woman, her ability to empathize with female victims of violence, are similarly flawed. Transwomen experience life as women, and are disproportionately victims of prejudice, discrimination, violence. This leaves only her experience growing up as justification for the actions of Vancouver Rape Relief.

None of us have had the same experience growing up. None. Most of us have trouble understanding the forces which formed other people, looking through that lens sympathetically to try to understand why people are the way that they are, or are not. Kimberly is no different from any other woman in that regard, and it is no excuse for this kind of shameful prejudice, especially at the hands of so-called feminists.

I have said it before and I hate that it’s necessary, but I will say it again, as often as I must: any feminist who does not fight for the rights of all women is no ally of mine.

From Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains:

An Abortion Ban Bill Comes to Colorado

Senate Bill 143 (Renfroe, Lambert), “End Freedom of Choice,” would ban all abortions in Colorado except those performed to save the life of the pregnant woman. There are no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. [Emphasis mine.]

This unconstitutional measure forces women to carry a pregnancy to term as the consequence of rape or contraceptive failure.

Colorado does not need extremist bills like SB 143 to distract us from the real solutions. We know that only increased access to family planning and comprehensive sex ed can reduce abortion. Our representatives need to look forward and find commonsense answers, like SB 60 “EC in the ER”, not backward to the dark days when women’s bodies were governed by the state, not themselves.

If you’re in Colorado, send a message to your representatives! I know a lot of women here who will fight tooth and nail against this thing no matter what. If you’re in Colorado, PLEASE take any action possible to help fight this terrifying bill.