Kye Allums: NCAA Div. 1 Basketball's 1st Transgender Player

Kye Allums, is getting a lot of mainstream press coverage about his transition from female to male while continuing to play on the George Washington University female NCAA Division 1 Basketball team.

Official statements from GWU and Allums follow:

Statement from Robert Chernak, Senior Vice Provost and Senior Vice President for Student Academic and Support Services:

“Student-athlete Kye Allums has decided to live as a male student and be referred to as a male. The George Washington University supports Kye and his right to make this decision. Kye has informed the university that he will not begin any medical or drug protocols while a student-athlete. The University consulted the NCAA regarding his competitive status. Kye will continue to be a member of the women’s basketball team. Kye has informed his teammates, and the university, with Kye’s consent, has informed athletics staff and others, as appropriate.”

Statement from junior Kye Allums, male member of George Washington’s women’s basketball team:

“GW has been supportive during this transition. This means a lot. I didn’t choose to be born in this body and feel the way I do. I decided to transition, that is change my name and pronouns because it bothered me to hide who I am, and I am trying to help myself and others to be who they are. I told my teammates first, and they, including my coaches, have supported me. My teammates have embraced me as the big brother of the team. They have been my family, and I love them all.”

Thoughts about this modern example of gender expression and sports? For example, do you think that Kye should be unable to play on the men's team when he completes his transition from female to male? If that should happen then, then why not now?

I know why I never get off the computer now

(can someone else please blog so I can stop feeling like our CSP's degenerated into reading maeve's diary time?)
Regardless, I've found an article about ME, this is amazing. Double the amazing, it's about me and it's short. Mercy of mercies, I'm sure.

The Conflation of Asexual and Sexless

"One of the more interesting but less notorious stereotypes/misconceptions about asexuality is that of the conflation of being asexual, in not experiencing sexual attraction, and being sexless or somehow neuter. I’ve never encountered this directly, but I have seen others note it, particularly one user on AVEN who identifies as a (cis)woman and is (rightfully) frustrated when people assume that she must identity as somehow agender or neutrois upon hearing that she is asexual, as if lacking sexual attraction makes having a gender identity redundant or superfluous."

Okay I dont know how to analyze this properly without it just being a really personal diary entry, because this is me. As part of my school's GSA, GLAM (which stood for Gay, Lesbian, And More), every spring we taught a class for sixth graders on the basic terms surrounding LGBTQ issues. We brought them hand outs and information and links and generally all the things we could find that a sixth grader questioning their sexuality or gender could want but not want to ask about. Part of our presentation, in the name of the unabashed honesty GLAM promotes, was telling the class about our own sexuality or gender expression.
Personally, I usually classify myself as bisexual. I dont classify myself as pansexual because gender does actually play a big role in my attraction to others (many pansexuals claim to be gender-blind or otherwise disregarding of gender and, while I'm not entirely sure that's the true heart of pansexuality, I'd rather just stick with bisexuality and not muddy waters already stagnant and oxygen deprived from over expansion of the terms), even if I find attraction in any gender, and the term has never really spoken to me.
Yes. I did just shamelessly indulge in that massive run-on.
Still, I've always wanted to call myself asexual but haven't for exactly the reasons outlined in the article. When I say asexual, people automatically assume that means I have no attraction to anything. Quite the contrary, I have quite a lot of attraction to people in a way that has nothing to do with sexual contact (in my paper, I wrote that 'bodies are temples to be worshiped uninhabited', to which Professor Buckmire asked 'but dont bodies have souls in them?'. To me, that is rather important. Physical bodies and spiritual minds are two different things, and I appreciate them in two very different ways). While agoraphobia and misanthropy definitely play a role in my sexuality, asexuality is definitely a separate concept. I find myself associating with all three.

Upon rereading this article, I've realized it might actually have nothing at all to do with what I've been blathering about for this whole article. Still, on it's own it has some interesting points. Read it anyways, maybe don't bother thinking of it while you read this blog (or the other way around).

I can't actually focus on the screen anymore, I think this is a bad sign.
Maeve's sleep deprived diary entry out.

Urinary Segregation

I'm starting to sense a trend....is my brain just constantly in the toilet? Oh gracious, let's not think about it, shall we?
Slightly different take on gendered bathrooms:

Urinary Segregation

"When I was 25 years old I was in New York’s Guggenheim Museum. As I started walking into the women’s bathroom, a security officer put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Hold on there a minute, you (expletive) pervert, you can’t go in there' ...I literally had to go to the security office to convince him not to throw me out of the museum.
This sort of gender policing is extreme, but at a daily level, many people find going to the bathroom a similar ordeal....public bathrooms, a product of modern technologies and anxieties, are no longer built to withstand our postmodern blurring of binaries.
We should remember that urinary segregation is not just a site of oppression, but a site of privilege and people with privilege will fight to keep it. If we look at urinary segregation as symbolic violence, we can see that it will take a lot more than legal arguments to take it away. By insisting that all bodies must divide into “Men” or “Women,” “Gentlemen” or “Ladies,” or even “Dudes” and Dudettes,” public toilets are able to erase the messiness of bodies and gender.
Whenever I bring up urinary segregation in my gender class, white women will say “rape.” When I point out that their bathrooms at home are not segregated by gender and that sexual violence is far more likely to be committed by people we know, they resort to “but men are gross.”"

All my life, I've used the bathrooms of both genders with impunity (hey, it's more efficient) and that, combined with being both biologically and personally female, has resulted in me never even thinking about the choices people have to make when they choose bathrooms, or the reactions they receive.

The section about the female reaction to mixed gender bathrooms, however, was fascinating. Relating back to my earlier bathroom-related post (why can I even claim authorship of two), there is a view expressed (mostly by heterosexual women, as far as I can tell) that male is equivalent to violence, and violence equivalent to rape, and when males are in bathrooms they get violent and rape is the outcome. In no way do I want to discount the very real danger of rape in public restrooms, it's a risk and one everyone should be mindful of, but there is also the danger of associating all men with danger all the time.

The coffee shop down the street from my high school wins points, not only for being awesome, but for their gender neutral bathrooms. I couldn't find a picture online, but but their bathroom signs feature Ken and Barbie dolls with a twist: Kenneth is wearing an extravagantly lacy red tank top, offset by his fabulous turquoise man-purse and floral jeans. Barb has a black tux and hot pink sneakers. Anyone can go into any bathroom. I don't know how either of my bathroom-writers would react to these signs (I'm sure you could have another year long discussion about how the exaggerated differences are non-representative of the behavior of actual gender-neutral people), but I personally love them.

I'll leave you with the lovely Andrea Gibson and her piece, Swing Set:

"Then of course there’s always the somehow not-quite-bright enough fluorescent light of the public restroom, “Sir! Sir, do you realize this is the ladies’ room?” “Yes, ma’am, I do, it’s just that I didn’t feel comfortable sticking this tampon up my penis in the men’s room.”"

On suffixes, and considering the term Transsexed

I posted this really briefly on my twitter before, but since I thought it was particularly pertinent to our latest discussions, here we go again:

On suffixes, and considering the term Transsexed:

"Now, I’m not as much of a linguist as I wish I were, but I’ve noticed a linguistic pattern, which is that the words that end in sex or gender are nouns describing an identity or condition or medical (or gender) history not belonging to a specific person or group of people: ”I read up on intersex and found out that there are many different types of intersex.” OR “When trying to describe transgender to people, I often have to battle their internalized binaries.” Not everyone is offended when these words are used as nouns describing specific people or groups of people (“My girlfriend is a transgender”), but I am. It icks me out.

Words that end in sexed or gendered are adjectives used for people and groups of people...t’s just a good way of recognizing that people are people first, and have many identities inscribed onto them.

So now we get to words that end in sexual, which is where the anomalies lie. Did you catch them yet? Words like homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, pansexual, and asexual (and many more) describe a person’s sexual attractions...But then there’s transsexual and intersexual, which do not refer to attractions at all. I’ll start with the latter. The word intersexual makes no sense. Just don’t use it when talking about intersexed people; everyone will get really uncomfortable because it’s nonsensical. I love nonsense, but not when it’s being used to refer to people whose experience you do not hold. If you meet an intersexed person who calls him/her/hirself intersexual, ask them about it, but don’t use it unless they do."

This is a really interesting article on semantics which, being neither transgender or intersex, I'm sort of on the outside of. As such, I don't have much I can bring to the debate. Any thoughts? Think this idea is crazy? Think this idea is awesome?

"Fag Bashing & Slut Shaming"

Fag Bashing & Slut Shaming: It’s About Policing Gender Roles

"I’m not going to argue that there aren’t any general trends in gender differences, although I do think that many things that we usually consider masculine or feminine are culturally based. Even for the things that show a statistically-significant difference between men and women, there are still plenty of people who have characteristics that are less common for people of their sex. People are not bell curves.

This is why we need to make room for gender diversity. Not only isn’t gender an either/or, it’s not even on a spectrum. The spectrum model, while allowing for more possibilities, still presents it as a zero-sum experience. It makes it seem as if, the more you have of one, the less you must have of the other. That approach reifies and reinforces the idea that there’s an opposition."

This is a view of an old issue - the ever present slut/sexy double standard for women - with a new twist that includes gender identities. I've heard a lot of people arguing over the issue, or simply grumbling about it, but mostly the conversation was about sex and not gender.

Thinking of it now, the topic of gender identity has always been lurking under the surface. It's integral to the debate of how we view and label the sexuality of others based on their sex and, now that I realize it, their gender identity.

The article also has some pictures along the way which I think are books dealing with similar topics, so if you're absolutely captivated you'll know where to go.

What we take for granted

The internet moves to fast, make it stop.
Cross posted from my other blog, because I'm still trying to catch up from the two days when I didnt check my email. Does anyone even breathe without tweeting anymore?


Go read this article:
Guest Post: Go Where? Sex, Gender, and Toilets

"The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced...washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex."

A pithy deconstruction of the way bathroom signs express both current societal norms and deeper historical interpretations of male and female. The author makes some interesting points about the assumptions and connections we draw overlook between gender identity and graphical representations of such.
The author explains, with examples, several key aspects of washroom signage:

1. Underlying assumptions of Male/Female
   
2. The diametric opposites of Sex
3. The expected actions of Gender
4. The assumptions of Sexuality
5. The way in which all four of these elements are confused, combined, and constructed

An interesting read for those interested in semantics and graphics design, or if this was just a topic you had never considered before (I find myself in all three categories)

The Gender Spectrum

Today I decided to start working on our first writing assignment about gender, mostly just thinking of different expressions of gender and trying to determine where in the spectrum I fell, and how I wanted to identify myself. Feeling a little overwhelmed by the choices I could make and the different ways this assignment could go, I called a friend, and we had a discussion about gender that quickly turned into a debate about the differences between sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation. After our conversation, I came away having tried to communicate the following things:

• Sex is what you are biologically: male, female, or intersex.
• Gender is how you identify in terms of sex. Most people who are biologically female identify as female, and same for males. However, if you choose to identify outside of the gender binary ( i.e. a man or boy expressing their gender as female), that is your gender identity.
• Gender expression is how you choose to communicate your gender.
• The way that you express your gender is not indicative of your sexual orientation (i,e. a man can choose to express their gender as female and still be heterosexual).

I looked up "gender expression" on Google to try to find a simple website that would help explain my point of view to my friend, and this was the simplest one that I could find: http://www.gendersanity.com/diagram.shtml. It's not extremely thorough, but it makes the same points as I was trying to.

I didn't really have the questions that I had answered at the end of the conversation, but it was still a conversation well-spent.