Month: July 2013

Republican congressman Steve King recently said this about undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children:

For [every DREAMer] who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that — they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act.

Amy Davidson parses King’s words:

King speaks as though he thinks that if he could just convey the figures and shapes of these young people, their sheer physicality, others would recoil, just as he does, at the idea of letting them be American. What he asks is not that we listen to their stories, or add up their accomplishments, or read the history of this country, but just that we look at them, like he does. At their legs, arms—anywhere, it would seem, but in their eyes, where he’d have to acknowledge their individuality.

Chait notes that rebukes have only caused King to dig himself deeper:

John Boehner dutifully castigated King’s comments as “deeply offensive and wrong.” But if you take a shot at the King, you’d best not miss. And by “miss” I mean “fail to remove his larynx.”

Alex Altman expects for Democrats to raise King’s profile:

Democrats will try to make King a GOP anchor, much like they used Todd Akin to paint the party as hostile to women. Already operatives are pointing to the comment of Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for Virginia governor, that King was one of his “very favorite Congressmen.” Republicans can call King’s comments “hateful” and “ignorant,” as Speaker John Boehner did Thursday. But they can’t shut him up, and they may not be able to erase the perception that he speaks for the rest of the party as well.

And Josh Marshall thinks that King’s views represent a sizable part of the GOP base:

King is speaking for the raw, undomesticated voice of that slice of the electorate for whom these social and population trends spell a basically non-stop state of white panic expressed through Obama conspiracy theories, fears of marauding Mexican hordes, hyper-opposition to primarily Latin American immigration and so much more.

Yes, King is more intemperate, voluable and perhaps more hateful than most. But he does speak for that relatively small slice of the electorate which makes up a pretty big slice of the GOP electorate and keeps the GOP anchored in opposition to immigration reform and to policies which put most of the non-white population off-limits to the party indefinitely. That’s why the whole plan to ‘double down’ on the ‘whites only’ strategy now increasingly favored by Republicans isn’t so much of a strategy as a recognition that it can’t break free or discipline that mammoth part of its voter base.

The famed author just got some major face-time:

[Bank of England governor Mark] Carney’s announcement [that Jane Austen is going on the £10 note] was aimed at quelling a three-month storm of protest unleashed when [former Bank governor Sir Mervyn King] announced that the only woman to appear on an English banknote other than the Queen–the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry–would be replaced by Winston Churchill, probably in 2016. She and Florence Nightingale are the only two women, other than the Queen, to have appeared on English banknotes since they started portraying historical figures in 1970. Campaigners threatened to take the Bank to court for discrimination under the 2010 Equality Act and launched a petition on the campaign site Change.org which secured more than 35,000 signatures.

Public reaction seems to be largely positive, but Belinda Webb isn’t impressed by the pick:

Jane Austen as a choice of woman to be on the £10 bank note would be fine, if we were in the 18th century. I can’t help but feel she is the safe, bland, acceptable, middle-class choice. Austen is the woman men don’t mind giving us as a representation because she is no threat to the prevailing order whatsoever.

But Austen scholar Bharat Tandon objects to the popular conception of “dear old Aunt Jane”:

[I]t may be that the top brass at the Bank of England have been cannier than they imagined, for Austen was, in her time, one of the most elegantly hard-headed chroniclers of the pressures of money on women. …

It cannot be a coincidence that both of her earliest published novels begin with women suffering under the inequities of the inheritance system. The Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility are suddenly made reliant on their brother and his penny-pinching wife Fanny (“people always live for ever when there is any annuity to be paid them”), and the Bennet girls’ prospects in Pride and Prejudice are constrained by the entail of the family inheritance to their male cousin Mr Collins. It’s hard to read the subsequent romances without feeling the pressure of money, which becomes an invisible but powerful agency, almost a character in its own right, just as it does in later 19th-century novels by Dickens and Trollope.

Meanwhile, Katherine Connell notes that “amusingly, the quote from Pride and Prejudice selected for inclusion on the bill seems to have been chosen by someone who didn’t read the book”:

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” were the insincere words spoken by the affected Miss Bingly to Mr. Darcy in a futile attempt to attract his attention:

Miss Bingley’s attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr. Darcy’s progress through his book, as in reading her own; and she was perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking at his page. She could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her question, and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

Austen would no doubt appreciate the irony.

And sometimes blue is too. A female reader quotes Alice Dreger:

But the truth is, as Sarah was suggesting, that a lot of “gender nonconforming” kids don’t have a simple story of being “trapped in the wrong body.” They are expressing more subtle, more complex, and more varied messages of self. What they need isn’t therapy; what they need is to know that it’s OK to be gender non-conforming.

That’s me in a nutshell, and I would imagine there are more of “us” than there are of strictly transgender children/people. The lack of understanding of those kinds of kids was probably the most traumatic part of my little butch childhood and remains a source of some pain and loneliness to this day. I still find myself seeking distance from others when I see their confusion and/or fear about what I look like and how I carry myself.

At nearly 50, I can suss out how desperate people are to have clear guidelines for what defines male and female.

This strict binary understanding provides them with a lot of comfort, though I might add that nearly all of the ideas of male-typical or female-typical interests are cultural understandings and not biological ones. Pink is always just a color, folks. But as a very butchy-looking child, who was better at sports than all of the neighborhood boys save my own brother, who was always competitive, never wanted to wear dresses and wore my hair short since I was little, I was never confused by what I liked and wanted to do.

But everyone else was, and they were extremely angry about the confusion I raised in them – when I was four damn years old. To have strangers, teachers, school peers ask me, angrily, “What’s wrong with you? Do you wish you were a boy?”, “Are you a boy or girl? Answer me!” or “Why are you here at the ball park, this is for boys?” always raised the same thought in my head, “What in the hell are you talking about? Of course I don’t wish I was a boy. I’m just a good athlete and hate dresses.” With those thoughts also came a deep fear for my own safety and utter embarrassment that I was somehow disappointing everyone by simply being who I was naturally. Fortunately, I was big and strong and only got physically threatened a few times as a kid.

I’ve never felt what’s described as gender dysphoria. I still don’t want to be a man, even though some still think I look like one. I don’t consider myself transgender, no matter how hard people try to pull this butch woman into that camp. I know I’m not easily definable, that I reside on the outside, but I can’t be anything other than I am now anymore than I could when I was four. I also know that who I am still confuses and angers many people and that I need to be very aware of when that’s happening so that confusion doesn’t turn into violence against me. With all of the progress on LGBT rights and understanding over the years, that part most certainly hasn’t changed.

Thanks for listening. It’s funny how your blog pulls so many of us to tell really deep stories about our lives that we haven’t shared with very many people. Until I wrote this post, I think I’ve only ever told of my childhood experiences to one other person – my partner. So, truly. Thank you for the outlet. It feels strangely safe when so many other places both virtual and real don’t.