In response to the spam commenting issues i've been having, and thanks to Lindsay for telling me that the relevant settings exist, i have now changed my comment settings to moderate all comments on posts over the (fairly arbitrary) limit of 50 days old (as it only seems to be posts over approximately that age which recieve spam comments).
I'm also working on writing a better comments policy than the minimal one i've got up at the moment (although it certainly won't be anywhere near as restrictive as those that many, especially feminist, blogs seem to have, as i have major ethical problems with the level of (what i can't think of any better word for than) censorship of comments exercised on many blogs [and not the simplistic "free speech" ones either; i'm going to write about this when i can verbalise more coherently about it] - it's more an exercise for myself in working out what exactly falls into the category of "spam" and what doesn't, after i recieved some short and to-me-incomprehensible-and-irrelevant-but-possibly-not-actually-spam comments on a recent post, which i deleted, but then felt a bit unsure if i was right to do so when they didn't strictly fit into my existing deletion criteria. (If the anonymous person who posted them is reading this, isn't a spammer, and is able to explain in greater detail what ze was trying to say, i apologise, and i welcome hir to respond here.)).
There are also two pieces of functionality that i'd like, if possible, to put on this blog, but which i've only seen on non-Blogspot blogs so far: the first is the sidebar widget which lists and links to the N most recent comments (as opposed to most recent posts), as seen on blogs hosted at ScienceBlogs (e.g. Tetrapod Zoology or Respectful Ignorance, on both of which it can be seen on the left sidebar just below the "recent posts" widget. I think i've also seen WordPress blogs use that feature; IIRC, Ballastexistenz had it before the most recent theme change. [EDIT: Questioning Transphobia also has it.]) The second is a rather nice feature which FWD/Forward has, where commenters can choose to include a link to their most recent blog post at the bottom of their comments; i think this is a really good way of enabling networking and outreach between blogs, considerably better than the Blogger profile system. I suspect neither of these is possible to put in a Blogspot blog, but i am going to investigate to see if it can be done; if anyone reading this knows a way it can be done, i'd appreciate telling me. (Yes, i know i'll get replies saying "switch to Wordpress", but there are also good reasons why i'm keeping this blog, at least for now, on Blogspot: i like the way tags work on this platform, and really don't like the way they seem to work on Wordpress, for example.)
At some point, i'm going to start work on the header image i've got planned, too (thanks to Urocyon for letting me know how to do that), but that may not be particularly soon.
Anyway. Off to respond to comments on my last post now (apologies for not responding sooner, it was due to being away for Christmas and having only intermittent internet access making thinking about responses somewhat difficult. One of my new year's resolutions this year is to try to reply to blog comments more promptly...). May do a "proper" post tonight or tomorrow if i have the energy...
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Gender Identity, Revisited
I've been meaning for quite a while to revisit this post (which, i note, i wrote nearly exactly 2 years ago now) - since, in fact, Luke aka AnarchoAspie included it (along with this one) in his zine, for which i inexplicably can't find a link (which i would have sort of liked to have been given the opportunity to do a slight edit due to things like hyperlinks not showing up in a printed format, but never mind) - because i had a creeping feeling that i would no longer agree with parts of it. The desire to revisit it was increased when Urocyon posted her own response to it, here, and even more so when Amanda Baggs then referred to that in her post on intersectionality (which i need to write a further response to the class part of). (I'd like to note here that both Urocyon and Amanda are much better at writing clearly and concisely than i am...)
On re-reading, there's actually not that much that i feel differently about now. One thing that stands out is a terminology issue - throughout, i was using the phrase "trans people" to exclusively mean transsexual people, whereas i'd now go with a much wider definition of the term "trans", to tentatively even include the likes of myself (although it still feels a little potentially-appropriative, as someone who neither desires to physically transition nor transgresses gender in any visually-obvious-to-a-passing-stranger way (well, unless long hair counts, but i really don't feel like, at least combined with a beard, it does)... but i've been told by visibly-trans, transitioning-transsexual friends that i "should" use it, so...) There's also the uncritical use of the term "primary" to describe the subset of transsexuals who are aware of their transsexuality from early childhood, which i probably wouldn't use now because of the possible unpleasant connotations of a hierarchy of who is "truly" transsexual and who isn't (although, it has to be said, i'm not aware of any less-loaded terms to distinguish between those who know they are transsexual from an early age and those who come to realise it later in life - if such terms are needed at all, which they might not be).
I've also since then become more aware of the range of terms used to describe gender identity or lack thereof: while Amanda uses "nongendered", which works for me, i've also encountered "agender" and "neutroi" (although the latter seems to be used primarily by/for agendered people who wish to physically transition to a "gender-neutral" or "undifferentiated" form: i'm also not sure if it's singular "neutro" and plural "neutroi" (which sounds vaguely Greek), or singular "neutroi" and plural "neutrois", or singular and plural "neutrois" (which sounds vaguely French), nor how to pronounce it, so i wouldn't use that one for me). I've even discovered a forum which includes specific discussion areas for agendered/nongendered/neutroi(s) people, although i haven't got round to registering or posting there yet... so i'm no longer feeling quite as much like i did when i wrote another piece which somehow never made it into a proper blog post:
*I don't want to "do gender" at all. I feel like i don't have a gender, and more than that, don't want a gender. I want to live in a world where the concept of gender was never even thought of.
And that's never bothered me on an internal level - but then i see all these conversations about gender and genderqueerness all over the web, and they're all awesome, but the implication of them seems to be that everyone is supposed to have a gender identity and a gender presentation, even that it's impossible not to - and i just want to scream "BUT I DON'T! Am i a complete unperson?"
But then, maybe i'm deluding myself - maybe it is true that everyone has a gender presentation, whether they think they do or not... but in that case, what is mine? I say that i choose clothes purely for comfort and practicality - but then, is that *entirely* true? Aesthetics does play some role, because there's a range of colours that i buy clothes in - black and earth tones (brown, beige, khaki, dull greens), occasionally red or yellow, but almost never white, and absolutely never blue - that has to be aesthetically motivated, or else i'd buy clothes absolutely without regard to colour, right? But does gender have anything to do with that? Is my dislike of blue because of its association with masculinity, because of its association (in the UK) with political conservatism, or just because i think it's a visually ugly clash with the colour of my hair and skin?
I look unambiguously male because of my facial hair, but the only reason i have it is because i don't like the sensation of, and can't be bothered to spend time on, shaving. Likewise my hair is long mainly because i don't want to pay for a haircut. I have never worn any form of make-up, nor wanted to. This kind of not-caring seems to be culturally gendered "masculine", but i find it hard to see how not caring about appearance can be gendered any way at all, rather than being at a neutral, equidistant point on the scale (if a scale even exists). It strikes me, in fact, that not-caring-about-presentation equalling "masculine" is a sign of institutionalised misogyny - the male/masculine is seen as the "norm", and the female/feminine as the "deviant" "other", to the extent that whether you are male or female, not doing anything about one's appearance or presentation gets one gendered as "masculine".*
I do still often feel that fundamental level of confusion, though, due to the fact that i don't (and probably never will, based on the principle that personal experience is the only true and full understanding, or "who feels it knows it") really know what "gender identity" is - as Amanda says:
Gender is a concept that, while I understand intellectually that it is greatly important for other people, is entirely absent and incomprehensible to me. I imagine that it must be some collection of aspects of a person’s identity that all cluster together in most people’s minds, whereas I’ve spent my life oblivious to how they are connected or why I would want to connect them, and innocently trampling all over people’s ideas of what it means to be masculine, feminine, or even any particular point in the middle.
While i can completely get my head round (even tho i've never experienced it) the idea of feeling dysphoria about one's physical sex, on the level either of "body-map" issues or of needing a certain balance of sex hormones to function "right" physically and/or mentally, and i am aware of (and can perceive at least some of, even if i thoroughly disagree with, the cultural reasoning behind) the personality qualities regarded culturally as "masculine" and "feminine", it's the bit somewhere in between that i feel like i'm missing - the idea of being "a man" or "a woman", rather than being (or wanting to be) physically male or female, or choosing to present oneself as masculine, feminine, butch, femme, androgynous, or whatever. I'm not sure if this is completely a function of being agendered myself, or if some people might lack a gender identity themselves, yet understand in a more solid way what it is for others to have one - in which case, i'd need an additional term to agendered/nongendered, perhaps something like "gender-blind" (analogous to faceblindness, perhaps? although i'm not, or at least not strongly, prosopagnosic)? Gender-impaired? I don't know; i do know that i'm way over my head when reading, for example, discussions like the one between Trin and Elizabeth here, and, likewise, find it incredibly hard to get my head round the "conceptual sexual orientations" discussed here (since i don't know how "to gender" anyone...)
Anyway, yes, i'm back to posting now, and aiming to post a bit more regularly, but as i'm off for 5 days tomorrow to do the Family Christmas thing (which, as there's... interesting... family stuff going on at the moment, might be rather more preoccupying than usual), it might be a week or so til the next one. Hope everyone is surviving the weather, not having to deal with too much non-accepting-of-identities crap from their families, and enjoying whatever (if anything) you choose to celebrate at this time of year...
On re-reading, there's actually not that much that i feel differently about now. One thing that stands out is a terminology issue - throughout, i was using the phrase "trans people" to exclusively mean transsexual people, whereas i'd now go with a much wider definition of the term "trans", to tentatively even include the likes of myself (although it still feels a little potentially-appropriative, as someone who neither desires to physically transition nor transgresses gender in any visually-obvious-to-a-passing-stranger way (well, unless long hair counts, but i really don't feel like, at least combined with a beard, it does)... but i've been told by visibly-trans, transitioning-transsexual friends that i "should" use it, so...) There's also the uncritical use of the term "primary" to describe the subset of transsexuals who are aware of their transsexuality from early childhood, which i probably wouldn't use now because of the possible unpleasant connotations of a hierarchy of who is "truly" transsexual and who isn't (although, it has to be said, i'm not aware of any less-loaded terms to distinguish between those who know they are transsexual from an early age and those who come to realise it later in life - if such terms are needed at all, which they might not be).
I've also since then become more aware of the range of terms used to describe gender identity or lack thereof: while Amanda uses "nongendered", which works for me, i've also encountered "agender" and "neutroi" (although the latter seems to be used primarily by/for agendered people who wish to physically transition to a "gender-neutral" or "undifferentiated" form: i'm also not sure if it's singular "neutro" and plural "neutroi" (which sounds vaguely Greek), or singular "neutroi" and plural "neutrois", or singular and plural "neutrois" (which sounds vaguely French), nor how to pronounce it, so i wouldn't use that one for me). I've even discovered a forum which includes specific discussion areas for agendered/nongendered/neutroi(s) people, although i haven't got round to registering or posting there yet... so i'm no longer feeling quite as much like i did when i wrote another piece which somehow never made it into a proper blog post:
*I don't want to "do gender" at all. I feel like i don't have a gender, and more than that, don't want a gender. I want to live in a world where the concept of gender was never even thought of.
And that's never bothered me on an internal level - but then i see all these conversations about gender and genderqueerness all over the web, and they're all awesome, but the implication of them seems to be that everyone is supposed to have a gender identity and a gender presentation, even that it's impossible not to - and i just want to scream "BUT I DON'T! Am i a complete unperson?"
But then, maybe i'm deluding myself - maybe it is true that everyone has a gender presentation, whether they think they do or not... but in that case, what is mine? I say that i choose clothes purely for comfort and practicality - but then, is that *entirely* true? Aesthetics does play some role, because there's a range of colours that i buy clothes in - black and earth tones (brown, beige, khaki, dull greens), occasionally red or yellow, but almost never white, and absolutely never blue - that has to be aesthetically motivated, or else i'd buy clothes absolutely without regard to colour, right? But does gender have anything to do with that? Is my dislike of blue because of its association with masculinity, because of its association (in the UK) with political conservatism, or just because i think it's a visually ugly clash with the colour of my hair and skin?
I look unambiguously male because of my facial hair, but the only reason i have it is because i don't like the sensation of, and can't be bothered to spend time on, shaving. Likewise my hair is long mainly because i don't want to pay for a haircut. I have never worn any form of make-up, nor wanted to. This kind of not-caring seems to be culturally gendered "masculine", but i find it hard to see how not caring about appearance can be gendered any way at all, rather than being at a neutral, equidistant point on the scale (if a scale even exists). It strikes me, in fact, that not-caring-about-presentation equalling "masculine" is a sign of institutionalised misogyny - the male/masculine is seen as the "norm", and the female/feminine as the "deviant" "other", to the extent that whether you are male or female, not doing anything about one's appearance or presentation gets one gendered as "masculine".*
I do still often feel that fundamental level of confusion, though, due to the fact that i don't (and probably never will, based on the principle that personal experience is the only true and full understanding, or "who feels it knows it") really know what "gender identity" is - as Amanda says:
Gender is a concept that, while I understand intellectually that it is greatly important for other people, is entirely absent and incomprehensible to me. I imagine that it must be some collection of aspects of a person’s identity that all cluster together in most people’s minds, whereas I’ve spent my life oblivious to how they are connected or why I would want to connect them, and innocently trampling all over people’s ideas of what it means to be masculine, feminine, or even any particular point in the middle.
While i can completely get my head round (even tho i've never experienced it) the idea of feeling dysphoria about one's physical sex, on the level either of "body-map" issues or of needing a certain balance of sex hormones to function "right" physically and/or mentally, and i am aware of (and can perceive at least some of, even if i thoroughly disagree with, the cultural reasoning behind) the personality qualities regarded culturally as "masculine" and "feminine", it's the bit somewhere in between that i feel like i'm missing - the idea of being "a man" or "a woman", rather than being (or wanting to be) physically male or female, or choosing to present oneself as masculine, feminine, butch, femme, androgynous, or whatever. I'm not sure if this is completely a function of being agendered myself, or if some people might lack a gender identity themselves, yet understand in a more solid way what it is for others to have one - in which case, i'd need an additional term to agendered/nongendered, perhaps something like "gender-blind" (analogous to faceblindness, perhaps? although i'm not, or at least not strongly, prosopagnosic)? Gender-impaired? I don't know; i do know that i'm way over my head when reading, for example, discussions like the one between Trin and Elizabeth here, and, likewise, find it incredibly hard to get my head round the "conceptual sexual orientations" discussed here (since i don't know how "to gender" anyone...)
Anyway, yes, i'm back to posting now, and aiming to post a bit more regularly, but as i'm off for 5 days tomorrow to do the Family Christmas thing (which, as there's... interesting... family stuff going on at the moment, might be rather more preoccupying than usual), it might be a week or so til the next one. Hope everyone is surviving the weather, not having to deal with too much non-accepting-of-identities crap from their families, and enjoying whatever (if anything) you choose to celebrate at this time of year...
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Comments and spam
I've closed comments on a few old posts on this blog because, for some reason i can't work out, they've been attracting *huge* amounts of spam (like several spam comments a day). The majority of them are probably ones that no one is likely to want to post a "genuine" comment on anyway (they're either reposts of now-long-gone calls for papers, or my embarrassing ramblings about my emotions at the time), but there are a couple which people might concievably want to comment on if they newly discover them, so, for now, if you find a post you want to comment on, but comments appear to be closed, email me and i'll turn commenting back on for that post.
(I can't think of any other viable way to do it, to be honest: using word verification to prevent spam is inaccessible for people with a lot of impairments, and i don't really want to require moderation for all comments, because it puts me in a position of having to approve every single comment, which i might not be able to do immediately, and as i would like commenters to be able to debate and respond to each other, i'd like comments to appear straight away when people post them. Also, if i disagree with something someone says, i want to debate them publicly, not just delete it (blatant trolls being the only exception, but i haven't really had many of them, with the possible exception of the anonymous person who just repeatedly posted "please tell me where can i buy a unicorn?" as a response to several posts... i can't quite work out if that was an ineffective troll or an even more ineffective spammer...) and moderating comments feels uncomfortably like censorship, which i feel angry enough about at other blogs to feel it would be totally inappropriate to do on mine.)
I have no idea why those particular posts have been attracting spam. There aren't any obvious words in the titles that spammers might be looking for (and some others that do have words, like "sex", that you would expect spammers to look for in their titles haven't attracted anywhere near so much spam), nor do they have many backlinks. (A couple of the "call for papers" ones have email addresses in them, which could be why, but other posts that have been getting it don't.) Any suggestions, please let me know...
(I can't think of any other viable way to do it, to be honest: using word verification to prevent spam is inaccessible for people with a lot of impairments, and i don't really want to require moderation for all comments, because it puts me in a position of having to approve every single comment, which i might not be able to do immediately, and as i would like commenters to be able to debate and respond to each other, i'd like comments to appear straight away when people post them. Also, if i disagree with something someone says, i want to debate them publicly, not just delete it (blatant trolls being the only exception, but i haven't really had many of them, with the possible exception of the anonymous person who just repeatedly posted "please tell me where can i buy a unicorn?" as a response to several posts... i can't quite work out if that was an ineffective troll or an even more ineffective spammer...) and moderating comments feels uncomfortably like censorship, which i feel angry enough about at other blogs to feel it would be totally inappropriate to do on mine.)
I have no idea why those particular posts have been attracting spam. There aren't any obvious words in the titles that spammers might be looking for (and some others that do have words, like "sex", that you would expect spammers to look for in their titles haven't attracted anywhere near so much spam), nor do they have many backlinks. (A couple of the "call for papers" ones have email addresses in them, which could be why, but other posts that have been getting it don't.) Any suggestions, please let me know...
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Regeneration: phase 1
As you may have noticed, i've changed the layout of this blog (some may have seen several changes). This is essentially phase 1 of the regeneration i was talking about.
I've been wanting a 3-column blog layout (with all the stuff about me, such as my profile, tags and blog archives, in one sidebar and all my links to other blogs and websites in the other) for a long time, so i am very, very pleased that Anne (of Existence is Wonderful) sent me the HTML for this one. :) (If you read her blog as well as mine - and if you don't, you should - you will probably already have noticed the resemblance.) I'm possibly going to tweak a few things so that it doesn't look like too much of a blatant clone of Anne's blog, as i think that's a little unfair on her - maybe some slight changes to some of the colours, and/or the little "arrow/bullet point" images (if and when i can work out how to do that), but i'm very happy with the basics of this layout - which means i'm happy enough with the appearance of this blog to start properly writing posts again.
(That's not necessarily to say that i will start posting regularly very soon, as aspects of my life are still in a significant state of upheaval - i'm potentially moving to another city either before or very soon after Xmas, which might leave me without internet access for a (hopefully short) period of time, and there is family stuff going on which is probably going to make Xmas itself... interesting. But my intent for January 2010, if not sooner, is to try to write more (and probably, much of the time, shorter) posts, and to cover at least some of the topics i've been meaning to, but not getting round to, blogging about for a long time - in some cases, since i started this blog, which is, unbelievably, almost 2 and a half years ago. What the hell happened to all that time?)
There's still more stuff i want to do - the link lists aren't quite finished yet (and here would be a good time to say - if you're reading this, and have a blog that i don't (yet) link to, but that you would like me to link to, and that fits into my general link categories, tell me about it! Or, for that matter, if you have a blog or website to recommend that isn't yours...), and at some point, i'd like to put together a custom header image, made up of a collage of a number of existing images (most of which i already have). For that, i need to learn how to use some image-manipulation software to do that, tho (i have GIMP, and am sure that that can be done with it, but for some reason how to do it doesn't seem to be in any of the easily findable online tutorials, so if you know how to do it and can explain it easily, then i'd like to hear from you...)
Also, i'd like feedback on the accessibility of this blog layout - does it work OK with screenreaders? How are the fonts and colours for people with things like Irlen's, colourblindness, or dyslexia? Are there any other accessibility issues that i have no idea about?
Anyway. Lots of posts planned. Hopefully will post some of them soon. I'll probably next do a link post to advertise some of the new-to-me blogs that i've discovered and been reading while i've not been actively blogging.
I've been wanting a 3-column blog layout (with all the stuff about me, such as my profile, tags and blog archives, in one sidebar and all my links to other blogs and websites in the other) for a long time, so i am very, very pleased that Anne (of Existence is Wonderful) sent me the HTML for this one. :) (If you read her blog as well as mine - and if you don't, you should - you will probably already have noticed the resemblance.) I'm possibly going to tweak a few things so that it doesn't look like too much of a blatant clone of Anne's blog, as i think that's a little unfair on her - maybe some slight changes to some of the colours, and/or the little "arrow/bullet point" images (if and when i can work out how to do that), but i'm very happy with the basics of this layout - which means i'm happy enough with the appearance of this blog to start properly writing posts again.
(That's not necessarily to say that i will start posting regularly very soon, as aspects of my life are still in a significant state of upheaval - i'm potentially moving to another city either before or very soon after Xmas, which might leave me without internet access for a (hopefully short) period of time, and there is family stuff going on which is probably going to make Xmas itself... interesting. But my intent for January 2010, if not sooner, is to try to write more (and probably, much of the time, shorter) posts, and to cover at least some of the topics i've been meaning to, but not getting round to, blogging about for a long time - in some cases, since i started this blog, which is, unbelievably, almost 2 and a half years ago. What the hell happened to all that time?)
There's still more stuff i want to do - the link lists aren't quite finished yet (and here would be a good time to say - if you're reading this, and have a blog that i don't (yet) link to, but that you would like me to link to, and that fits into my general link categories, tell me about it! Or, for that matter, if you have a blog or website to recommend that isn't yours...), and at some point, i'd like to put together a custom header image, made up of a collage of a number of existing images (most of which i already have). For that, i need to learn how to use some image-manipulation software to do that, tho (i have GIMP, and am sure that that can be done with it, but for some reason how to do it doesn't seem to be in any of the easily findable online tutorials, so if you know how to do it and can explain it easily, then i'd like to hear from you...)
Also, i'd like feedback on the accessibility of this blog layout - does it work OK with screenreaders? How are the fonts and colours for people with things like Irlen's, colourblindness, or dyslexia? Are there any other accessibility issues that i have no idea about?
Anyway. Lots of posts planned. Hopefully will post some of them soon. I'll probably next do a link post to advertise some of the new-to-me blogs that i've discovered and been reading while i've not been actively blogging.
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