BBC One – The Big Questions | Should we have the right to decide our own gender?

~ Sarah Ditum

tbq

On Sunday morning, I took part in BBC One’s ethics debate show The Big Questions, where the topics were treatment of asylum seekers, child poverty and (the section I was booked for) the right to gender self-determination. There are a few interesting moments to pull out:

  • At about 00:22:00, transwoman Rachel Hoskins gives a personal account of dysphoria, including “the real visceral thrill” of “putting [my sister’s undies] on” at four years old.
  • At about 00:30:00, I give a brief account of the gender-as-class system position and why that’s not compatible with the principle of gender self-determination.
  • At about 00:38:30, a transwoman tells a story about being challenged on toilet access: “I said, ‘This is the way I’m dressed, I didn’t want to go into the gents and scare anybody in there.”
  • There didn’t appear to be any contributions from transmen. 
  • At 00:46:00 you can see gender in action as Nicky Campbell invites me to contribute to the debate and the man next to me (Ben Harris-Quinney) talks over me.

Watch the show on iPlayer (gender segment starts at about 00:20:00)

Independent | In Donald Trump’s America, women have no authority over their own bodies – Arkansas Act 45 proves this

~ Sarah Ditum

abortion-protest-getty

The heart of all moral and legal arguments about abortion is this: who owns a woman’s body? Is it the woman herself, or is it someone else? In the state of Arkansas, a new and brutal law has decided it’s the latter.

Arkansas Act 45, which was signed by the state’s governor Asa Hutchinson on Thursday, criminalises dilation and extraction, which is the surgical method used to perform most second trimester abortions. On its own, effectively banning abortion after 14 weeks would amount to a heinous attack on women, but Act 45 goes further.

It includes a provision for the pregnant woman’s husband, parent or guardian, or healthcare provider to block abortions by D&E – and there’s no exemption for cases of rape and incest. That means that a woman raped by her husband, or a girl raped by her father, has to go through her abuser to end any resulting pregnancy. And that means that Arkansas is siding with male coercion over women’s bodies. It means that women’s consent can be stolen from them twice: first in the act of rape, and again in the denial of abortion.

Read the full post at the Independent

Independent | No, it doesn’t make you a bigot if you want to be called a pregnant ‘woman’ rather than ‘person’

~ Sarah Ditum

pregnant-woman

I’m reading the British Medical Association’s guidance on inclusive language, subsection “pregnancy and maternity”. “Gender inequality is reflected in traditional ideas about the roles of women and men,” it says, and I nod firmly. “It is common to assume a woman will have children, look after them and take a break from paid work or work part-time to accommodate the family…such assumptions and stereotypes can and often do have the effect of seriously disadvantaging women,” it says, and my nodding steps up to a vigorous pace.

All solid, sensible and anti-sexist stuff. And then I get to this: “A large majority of people that have been pregnant or have given birth identify as women. We can include intersex men and transmen who may get pregnant by saying ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘expectant mothers’.”

Pregnant people. Pregnant. People. As though acknowledging a connection between femaleness and pregnancy was as crass and false as saying “little girls like pink” or “men make better leaders”.

Read the full post at the Independent

New Statesman | Why I find the prospect of an apocalypse comforting

~ Sarah Ditum

4955879565_7ab479ff09_o

“Cosy catastrophe” is the nickname the sci-fi writer and historian Brian Aldiss applied to the works of John Wyndham, author of The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids. Aldiss did not mean for it to be flattering: “The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off.”

In other words, the cosy catastrophe is a cop-out. It’s safe. Bad things happen, but they don’t happen to people like us. Whether it’s a fair way to describe Wyndham doesn’t really matter, because while the name caught on, the pejorative intent didn’t. Aldiss had reached for sick burn and accidentally struck deep truth: there is something comforting about the apocalypse.

Read the full post at the New Statesman

Spectator | Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta

~ Sarah Ditum

innocents-and-others

Brilliance is intoxicating, and from the first chapter, Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others goes straight to the head. Things start like this: with an article on a website called ‘Women and Film’, by someone called Meadow Mori. Meadow reveals that when she was fresh from her LA high school, she had an affair with a mountain-sized filmmaker, who ‘sounds like the voice of America’, and whose career was marked by genius and frustration. It is, of course, Orson Welles; but there’s more here than scrupulous cinematic referentiality.

Is Meadow’s relationship with the F is for Fake filmmaker a truth or an untruth? And if it’s an untruth, does that make it a lie? A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie, she says in the essay. Perhaps it is a kind of wish-story. This is a serious matter for Meadow, who has made her name as a documentary- maker — a kind of female Errol Morris, blending recreations with interviews in ways that fracture truth-telling but also establish irrevocable narratives about her subjects.

Read the full review at the Spectator

Guardian Review | Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine

~ Sarah Ditum

3648

Cordelia Fine is an optimistic writer. In her two earlier books of popular neuroscience (A Mind of Its Own and Delusions of Gender), the psychologist established a reputation for exemplary clarity on complex topics, pleasing wit, feminist principle – and beneath it all, the animating faith that people can be improved through knowledge. Testosterone Rex starts with a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists that establishes the Fine approach perfectly: “But in addition to being angry, I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of humans to make and remake themselves for the better.”

Read the full review at the Guardian