Category Archives: Gender

Breast Cancer Awareness Isn’t Just for Women

Posted in Gender, Health by

This piece is a follow-up of sorts to a post I wrote awhile back for Not Your Average Feminism, on a similar topic, called It’s About People, Not Breasts.

Showing off my tie-dyed bra after a few hours of tabling!

This past weekend I helped to bring Octoberbreast to my college’s Octoberfest celebrations. For three hours I stood behind a table with some friends, in a black dress and a bright tie-dyed sports bra, encouraging other women to tie-dye their own bras while we spoke with them about the various Breast Cancer Awareness Month events we had coming up around campus. The table was met with a great deal of enthusiasm and excitement… we ran out of bras long before the event ran out of time!

In executing this table we did A LOT of things right. The idea was fun and catchy. We had a range of sizes wide enough that we did not have to tell anyone that we didn’t have a bra big enough for them (though we did run out of smaller sizes much quicker than anticipated.) We managed to educate a number of people through conversations and pamphlets given out alongside their bras – sharing information about breast cancer in general as well as the events we have less to come.

Still, there was one thing about this event that made me feel just a bit disappointed in us: we had forgotten the men.

Breast cancer awareness is important, yes, but with “I <3 Boobies” bracelets on so many arms, and NEW! pink products coming out all the time… most people are pretty aware of breast cancer, well, at least the 51% of them that identify as female are. The other half of the population is still at risk because somewhere along the line the conversation about men & breast cancer often seems to get lost. In fact, I have to wonder if all of these campaigns that focus so much on boobs make men even less aware of breast cancer, since they are trained to associate it with “boobies” and women in general.

If this is true, as I suspect, then these campaigns actually could be costing male breast-cancer patients valuable time as they are less likely to be on the lookout for breast cancer symptoms.That time could be the difference between life and death.

In August many media outlets were reporting on a South Carolina man, Raymond Johnson, who was denied  coverage for his breast cancer… simply because he was not born female. Johnson makes too much money to be considered for Medicaid, but not enough to afford insurance that would cover his treatments, as a result of this his doctors encouraged him to apply for help under The Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention and Treatment Act. Johnson met all of the requirements for coverage under this act except for one: he wasn’t a woman. Johnson isn’t the only man who has been denied by this fund for the same reasons.

Equally horrifying (at least to me) is the fact that Johnson didn’t even know he could GET breast cancer. For all of the awareness campaigns out there he, like many men, was left in the dark until his diagnosis was brought to light:

“I didn’t even know men could get breast cancer,” says Johnson, who was diagnosed after he went to a local emergency room for chest pain treatment. “I’m young. I didn’t think anything bad could really happen to me.” [Source]

While it is true that breast cancer is MUCH more rare in men [there are just under 2,000 new cases of breast cancer in men in the U.S. per year, and just under 400 deaths, while almost 40,000 women die of breast cancer each year] that does not mean that raising awareness in men is not important. Like all cancers, a patient’s chances of survival are MUCH higher

For an event like ours, I would suggest providing white tank tops for men (and women who don’t want sports-bras) to tie-dye in order to help draw in a more mixed crowd. Overall, when it comes to Breast Cancer Awareness, I continue to advocate for a less “boobies”-centric view… what I mean by this, is that campaigns should focus more on the people who are fighting this disease, and less on the “boobies” themselves.

The bottom line is that breast cancer doesn’t discriminate based on sex, and neither should breast cancer awareness programs or treatment funds.

To end this on a positive note, is one awesome Breast Cancer Awareness campaign that speaks to men as well as women:

“Peter Criss, drummer and founding member of the rock band KISS, recently went public with his battle against breast cancer. People don’t associate men with the disease, but men have breast tissue, too, and they are susceptible to breast cancer. Keep reading and then encourage your loved ones — male and female — to get screened for the potentially deadly disease. “ Read more here!

What do you think? Do you know of any effective awareness campaigns that target women AND men? As always, feel free to share in the comments!

Does the Wage Gap Matter Anymore?

Posted in Feminism, Gender by

This editorial posted recently in the Wall Street Journal made me wonder, along with many other bloggers.

Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.

Upon reading this I didn’t know how to feel. Part of me was hopeful that this really was true because that would mean one less battle left for the feminist movement.

That hope was quickly dashed, however, as I remembered the chart that I had helped to make for the last Pay for your Privilege Bake Sale I had helped to run at my college: the wage gap doesn’t just exist across gender lines, its also firmly in place across lines of race, sexuality, and gender expression. Even if Carrie Lukas was right, and there was no longer a gap between men and women’s earnings, what were the chances that the wage-gap in regards to race/sexuality/gender expression had also gone away? (Not very high apparently.)

So there is still a problem but maybe, just maybe, there really isn’t a male/female wage gap anymore and that fight can at least be dropped. I was hopeful, yes, but another, bigger, part of me was doubtful… so I did what any good critical thinker would do: I went looking for that data myself.

Lukas’s first claim is as follows…

The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

I trust this analysis more than Lukas’ because this one actually includes a chart so that I can see the data, instead of making claims. The New York Times piece reveals that time actually does play into the wage gap, but not in the way Carrie Lukas claims…

As you can see, among workers who work at least 40 hours a week, men still significantly out-earn women.

But as soon as you drop below that 40-hour-a-week mark, the reverse happens: Most women make more than men who work equivalent hours, with the exception of workers who put in fewer than five hours a week.

Now this data is also flawed, as it does not control for the type of job worked nor does it have an even number of data points per category, only the number of hours, but it still casts some doubt onto the WSJ article in my mind. The NYT author hypothesizes that, since men are more likely to work full-time jobs it would make sense that they would be more likely to out-earn women when the hours were longer.

Lukas’ second claim is as follows:

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Now this I found suspect, for a few reasons. First of all: to claim that women” gravitate” towards jobs that are more comfortable/less risky/etc. is at least a little bit disingenuous. Sure, plenty of women purposefully choose jobs that have these qualities, but there are also plenty of women who want to be lawyers, or doctors, or contractors, or other less convenient more stereotypically “masculine” jobs who face an incredibly tough road simply based off of their sex. If you’re constantly facing the assumption that you are less fit for your job, based solely off of the reproductive organs you posses, it stands to reason that you’d be more likely to give up and choose a career path with less struggle involved. Simply put: women (and men) don’t make decisions in a vacuum – since gendered expectations are a part of our every day lives, it stands to reason that this particular piece of social conditioning would play some role in the options that we perceive available to us and, thus, pursue.

Beyond that though, I have no idea where she is getting these numbers because she didn’t cite a single source.

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Read This Now: Transmisogyny is Misogyny Against All Women

Posted in Gender, Links by

This post over at Transgression is simply amazing.

Need some proof before you click? Check out an excerpt:

If you hate, dislike, or mistrust trans women, you’re misogynistic. Trans women are included in the big ol’ group known as women. Want proof? Well look at their name, silly. We call ‘em trans women, not trans chia pets, not trans beach towels, not trans schmeggeggies. Remember high school algebra? Oh hush, yes you do. Let me remind you of this lovely little mathematical rule:

If a=b and b=c, then a=c

If trans women= women and hating, disliking, or mistrusting women= misogyny then…then what? Solve for c.

Ok technically that would be trans women= misogyny but you know perfectly well what I mean and I hate that you even questioned my math.

But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “But Gus, I think trans women=/= women so therefore it’s totally not misogynistic to hate, dislike, or mistrust trans women.” And I understand that. Really, I do. But here’s the thing. Now listen carefully, my little chickadee, cuz I’m about to blow your mind.

You’re wrong.

Not only are you wrong, but even thinking that silly, silly, thing is unbelievably, incredibly, fantastically MISOGYNISTIC. And it offends me as a woman. Yes, yes it does. And here’s why.

Now, go read the whole thing!

Avoiding Trans Erasure

Posted in Gender, Queer Issues by

I find this video pretty funny & I was excited to post it up here to keep the Planned Parenthood conversation going… but then, it made me sad.

“You can tell [I am a woman] because of the whole vagina-having thing.”

Except… not all women have vaginas, and not all vagina-having people are women because sex (your anatomy) and gender (your identity ie. “woman”) are two totally different things!

This line is problematic, because it conflates sex and gender and ignores the existence of the trans community. Yet, at the same time, I still think this is a fairly effective video… and I have no idea how I’d want them to rewrite that line (“You can tell by the whole… shit, there is no universal marker of a woman now is there?“)

So what the heck am I even trying to say here?

I guess, what I am trying to say, is that being inclusive of all people is important.

I want to take a moment to make it clear that I am not saying that this video or the people who made it are somehow wrong or bad. How could I be saying that when if you comb through this very blog long enough I guarentee you would find posts that engage in erasure because there was a time where I honestly wasn’t aware that making statements like “all women have vaginas” left many trans women out of the picture.

Its somewhat ironic that this post was sparked by a video in support of Planned Parenthood, because Planned Parenthood as an organization has a reputation for being inclusive (as far as I’ve been informed)!

No one is perfect, but I think that the important take away, for me and for you, is that we should be trying to minimize if not totally do away with the amount of erasure that we engage in.

That’s not always easy though. I have several blog posts that honestly may never see the light of day because the writing in them has gotten so clunky and weighed down with qualifying statements intended to make sure I am not leaving anyone out (or including anyone in a statement that doesn’t really apply to them.) It’s not always pretty and its not always eloquent but at this point in my blogging career I’d rather sit on a fully written article until the right words fall into place than publish something that has the potential to make someone feel unwelcome here.

Inclusion isn’t always natural and easy and eloquent because society has not trained us from birth to be aware of the existence of people who fall outside the gender binary. We haven’t been given a language or a frame of understanding for many things… which is why we have to seek them out from the communities in question, and start using the words that they claim.

It isn’t always easy, but it is important to be mindfully inclusive because this is honestly the only way we can change the tides and make it so that future generations are just naturally inclusive. This means a lot of things: it means not leaving trans women/men out when you are talking about all women/men but it also means not including trans people when you are only talking about issues as they effect cis people. (For instance: when talking about DADT I would not call it a victory for the LGBT community so much as the LGB community… because trans people still aren’t protected, so it would be inaccurate for me to claim this as a victory for that group.)

Learning to use inclusive language is a small but important part of being an ally. I like how Renee, of Womanist Musings, puts it best…

Part of being an ally is making a conscious decision to learn about the issues of the community that you are trying to advocate on behalf of.  This takes a conscious effort, as society will continue to affirm various isms thus ensuring that those of us that have undeserved privilege seldom consider the true cost of the social hierarchy that we have naturalized.

Being an Ally to the Trans Community 101

To help that mindful inclusion along I’ve done my best job to compile some of the most common trans* related foot-in-mouth situations here as sort of an etiquette guide for the uninformed. A small disclaimer: I am a cisgender woman (meaning my gender identity is congruent with what society would expect, based on my sex.)  I am coming at this as an ally to the trans community; a person who has trans friends and acquaintances, but (obviously) no experience living as a trans person. This means I am not immune to fucking up and if I have done so I would ask my more knowledgeable readers to please drop a comment or an e-mail correcting me so I can amend the post. That said, I see this as one small way that I can help as an ally… by educating other allies to the movement, and making a small dent in the frustrating erasure and ignorance that trans* people have to deal with. So, here we go!

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