This children’s bookstore needs a makeover!

Nnedi won a BEST NOVEL World Fantasy Award for Who Fears Death!

Andrea Hairston is WisCon Guest of Honor AND a Tiptree Award winner!

Nisi Shawl has several short stories and articles out that are available online. These are:

• “Honorary Earthling” at Expanded Horizons
• “Black Betty” at Crossed Genres
• “The Pragmatical Princess” at Fantasy Magazine
• “Race, Again, Still” at Strange Horizons

I Got Your Book: REVENGE OF THE BOOK -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Ahem!

Delux_Vivens linked to Inside the Favelas

Linda Addison has a new collection out, entitled How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend

Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop continues to wow 

Nisi Shawl gets interviewed

Amal El-Mohtar has both an interview and a story up. 

Clockwork Fairies stars a woman of color character in a steampunk-y universe. 

Here’s a review of Samuel R. Delany’s On Writing

Nalo Hopkinson will be GOH of Darkovercon 2012

Nick Wood wrote an article on a 1970s South African comic book hero 

An Alice Walker documentary?? Sign me up!

Plus: THIS BOOKSTORE NEEDS YOUR HELP TO ROCK!

I Got Your Book: Signal Boosts -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Tobias Buckell is looking for help to fund Apocalypse Ocean, a Sly Mongoose novel.

Ephemere is nearly done with Kandila 

An excerpt from the horror collection Let’s Play White

A series of SF short films 

Lisa Suhair Majaj has been featured on Split This Rock 

 Next time? We’ll have a review of Moondancer’s Drake’s Natural Magic. 

I GOT YOUR BOOK: Post the First -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Sister Song website

Reproductive Justice: 101

Loretta Ross of SisterSong on “Reproductive Justice 101″ Part 1

Loretta Ross of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, gives a lecture on “Reproductive Justice 101″ in Miami during June of 2008, sponsored by Women’s Fund of Miami and Mi Lola. Check out their website at http://sistersong.net/

Loretta Ross of SisterSong on “Reproductive Justice 101″ Part 2

Loretta Ross of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, gives a lecture on “Reproductive Justice 101″ in Miami during June of 2008, sponsored by Women’s Fund of Miami and Mi Lola. Check out their website at http://sistersong.net/

Reproductive Justice: Abortion

Loretta Ross: The Economic and Racial Dynamics of Abortion

Loretta Ross, reproductive justice and human rights activist, talks about the racial and economic dynamics of abortion, STDs, teen pregnancy and health care.

The 2010 Documentary “The Abortion Conspiracy

Abortion Conspiracy Part 1: The Billboard Campaign

Part 2

Episode Two of a five part series looking at a right wing conspiracy theory that abortion in communities of color is genocide. This video covers Pro Life Freedom Rides staged by Priests for Life in the summer of 2010.

Part 3

Abortion Conspiracy Episode 3: This video examines a right wing documentary which alleges that abortion in the African American community is genocide. Through fear mongoring and guilt by association, it tires to make the case that this is a conspiracy led by Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

Abortion Conspiracy Part 4: Racial Uplift

Part 4 of a five part series on the right wing effort to portray abortion as genocide in communities of color. This episode profiles several African Americans who work in the field of reproductive health: an abortion provider, a volunteer at a hotline which offers counseling and two escorts at an abortion clinic in the south.

Abortion Conspiracy Part 5 The Mid Term Elections

One of the strategies of the right wing conspiracy theory that abortion amounts to genocide in the African American community is to try to fragment the Democratic base in the 2010 mid term elections. This episode asks if this strategy will have any effect.

2010: Are Black Children an ‘Endangered Species’? (The shorter version)

Reproductive Rights: Birth

Atlanta: The Doula Story

This video profiles Perez Ridley, a Doula in Atlanta, GA, who counsels pregnant teens on behalf of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention.

Northwest Doula Conference 2010

Shafia M. Monroe – Certified Midwife, founder and president of International Center for Traditional Childbearing – presenter on Full Circle Birth Traditions

The Legacy of the Black Midwife Part 1/6

The Legacy of the Black Midwife Part 2/6

The Legacy of the Black Midwife Part 3/6

The Legacy of the Black Midwife Part 4/6

The Legacy of the Black Midwife Part 5/6

The Legacy of the Black Midwife Part 6/6(end)

Reproductive Justice part 2: Reproductive 101, Deconstructing the current anti-abortion efforts targeting Black women; also, doulas and midwives. -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Hey you all. Been a while eh? Work and school have pulled me under, so I am a bit busy. However, have a few links:

via: jhameia poor people aren’t supposed to want nice things

I don’t know if you guys received the memo; but poor people aren’t supposed to want nice things.

All rags-to-riches (or rags-to-bitches, if you want to get all Boondocks about it) stories start with people who are poor but industrious. Tales of kids eating cigarette ash sandwiches to survive. Tales of people saving mustard packets so they have food that stretches through the whole year. Bonus points if your parent proudly refuses government help, or if you suffer through and survive a vitamin deficiency. You’re a rock star if you live many years out on the streets and still pull down a 4.0+ GPA. You have done poverty correctly.MORE

nonstressed thoughts about eminem and rihanna

make what you will of the following.

* if you are going to say that the video “glamorizes” abuse/violence, you better have a better reason for saying that than the two lead actors are hot. news flash: workingclass/poor people can be and are hot.

* people in violent relationships have sex. and it is often really really fucking amazingly hot.MORE

What ghetto really means

A look at Urban Dictionary reveals the most popular definitions of “ghetto” invoke not only predominately black, poor, urban areas, but also ideas of “inferior quality.” (Or, specifically, the inferior quality of the culture of poor, black, urban folk.) One definition suggests the word means “jury-rigged” or “half-assed.” Another reads like a hackneyed bit from BET’s Comic View, describing “ghetto” as “Yelling at your boo in the middle of the street…Dressing for work like you are going to the club…Wearing house slippers outside the house…Flashing money you don’t have instead of making your money last…Running from the cops for no reseaon just to see if they can catch you” Some synonyms offered for “ghetto,” based on reader-submitted definitions: hood, black, gangsta, nigger, poor, nigga, rap, slang, cool, urban, thug, drugs, cheap, stupid, bitch, pimp, dirty, slut, ugly…

You get the picture, yes?

When Paris Hilton proclaimed a rusty, old truck “so ghetto” on an episode of The Simple Life, she was using language loaded with race and class-related meaning. So, too, was Mary Mitchell, an African American columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, who sparked controversy last month when she debuted a new term for bad parenting: “ghetto parenting.”MORE

New York and California back Jim Crow Era Farm Worker Laws

Two bills that would have given farmworkers the most basic of labor protections — overtime pay and one day of rest a week — were recently defeated in New York and California.

It was a disappointing series of events, and unfortunately, only the latest episode in over a century of our country’s shameful treatment of farmworkers.

Farmworker regulations have stayed stubbornly mired in the racism of the Jim Crow era for generations — decades in which black and brown farmworkers have toiled in the most backbreaking, low-paying jobs in America imaginable. Meanwhile, white farmers and politicians have consistently fought to keep those workers sweating in the fields seven days a week — for pay that would be illegally low for any other workers in this country.

This is history that’s rarely taught, so here’s a quick primer: In the 1930s, Southern politicians pushed President Roosevelt to modify New Deal legislation to exclude black farmworkers from basic wage and hour laws. Southern congressmen hoped to preserve the race-based plantation system while netting profits for their farm-owning friends. Accordingly, since 1938, farmworkers have been exempt from the overtime pay and days off that are enjoyed by literally every other worker in America.MORE

Sympathy Grifting, the intersection of race, gender and fraud

Kirilow is young, thin, sweet-faced and white: over the year that she convinced people to donate money to her cancer cause, she was given trips to Disneyworld and took a paradise trip to Australia; she is alternately described as an angel and a princess.

When I first saw this news case, I thought to myself (yes, rather cynically): there is no way that anyone other than a young, attractive, normative person could have pulled this off. If Kirilow had been—for example—fat, in her 30s, plain-looking and homeless, few would’ve given her the time of day. Much of Kirilow’s success seems attributed to the fact that she easily roused pity with her little lost girl story and her brave smile. Kirilow embodied a version of white womanhood that we want to believe in (or at least we’ve been socially conditioned to embrace it): pretty, plucky, determined, and in need of rescue.

Kirilow is a prime example of a sympathy grifter: a grifter who uses racist/sexist/classist/etc beliefs in their favor, to get money, affection and attention, or to (literally) get away with murder.MORE

The Right’s long racist history of calling Moms criminals (I am having trouble accessing this site, so can’t give a preview.)

BP dumping oil waste in communities of color, study finds I am having trouble accessing this site, so can’t give a preview)

HUD housing policy conference includes no affordable housing advocates

The Obama administration will prove that they have a plan to do something about the housing crisis by holding a housing conference next week, in DC. The event, called the “Conference on the Future of Housing Finance,” has been organized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Treasury Department. Panelists include… well, a bunch of economists, finance industry representatives, bank officials, think tankers, and an academic or two. Not included: Any actual consumer advocates or community group representatives.

We’ve got PIMCO, Wells Fargo, the goddamn American Enterprise Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, Moody’s, and Bank of America. But:

 

“Apparently being a community organizer qualifies you to be president, but it’s not good enough to be part of HUD and Treasury’s think tank on housing,” said [National Community Reinvestment Coalition] chief executive John Taylor, whose group works with hundreds of community organizations to promote access to financial services for low- and middle-income people.

MORE

Birthright citizenship is a thinly veiled attack on Immigrant mothers

This is also an ugly strategy fueled by sexism and racism. It taps into a long history of population control—government efforts to curb growth among disfavored populations. During slavery, the children slaveowners sired with their slaves were deemed slaves themselves who could be sold as chattel, thereby increasing the wealth of the owner rather than the size of his family. Chinese women in the 1800s were labeled prostitutes and denied visas to join their husbands who labored on our railroads. And black women, Native American women, and Latinas were routinely sterilized either without their knowledge or without their consent as recently as the 1970s.MORE

Women of color and welfare

Books.

Storming Ceasars Palace: How black mothers fought their own war on poverty

Thinking Class: Sketches from a cultural worker

Policing Race, Policing Gender, Policing Sex

Detroit: I do mind dying

Highway Robbery: Transportation racism and routes to equity

Some links on race and class -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

There is an astonishing amount to read at these links, so there won’t be a lot:

Blogging against Disabilism Day 2010 Just read everything. No really. Read everything.

And then the BP Spill pulls up news about how Western thirst for oil plays out in one country in the Global South. First there was this:

A spill of our own

THE history of American oil spills is the history of the environmental movement. The 1969 blowout of an oil platform off Santa Barbara, Calif., gave rise to Earth Day as well as President Richard Nixon’s National Environmental Policy Act, and led to a moratorium on new drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. Twenty years later, the spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker near Alaska quashed the first Bush administration’s ambitions for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and ushered in the laws that made oil shippers liable for damage caused by their cargo.

….

Oil, however, is too complicated for simple solutions. Whether this spill turns out to be the result of a freakish accident or a cascade of negligence, the likely political outcome will be a moratorium on offshore drilling. Emotionally, I love this idea. Who wants an oil drill in his park or on his coastline? Who doesn’t want to punish Big Oil on behalf of the birds?

Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.

Kazakhstan, for one, had no comprehensive environmental laws until 2007, and Nigeria has suffered spills equivalent to that of the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969. (As of last year, Nigeria had 2,000 active spills.) Since the Santa Barbara spill of 1969, and the more than 40 Earth Days that have followed, Americans have increased by two-thirds the amount of petroleum we consume in our cars, while nearly quadrupling the quantity we import. Effectively, we’ve been importing oil and exporting spills to villages and waterways all over the world.

The Deepwater Horizon spill illustrates that every gallon of gas is a gallon of risks — risks of spills in production and transport, of worker deaths, of asthma-inducing air pollution and of climate change, to name a few. We should print these risks on every gasoline receipt, just as we label smoking’s risks on cigarette packs. And we should throw our newfound political will behind a sweeping commitment to use less gas — build cars that use less oil (or none at all) and figure out better ways to transport Americans. MORE

Which leads to this:

Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty in the Niger Delta PDF The  report is long, 143 pgs. But read it just the same. It is comprehensive, dealing with the tribes that have been affected, the history of the region, pollution and human rights, pollution and its impact on the environment, the complicity of the government and how the problem can be fixed.

The NYPD Tapes: Inside Bed-Stuy’s 81st Precinct

Two years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.

He recorded precinct roll calls. He recorded his precinct commander and other supervisors. He recorded street encounters. He recorded small talk and stationhouse banter. In all, he surreptitiously collected hundreds of hours of cops talking about their jobs.

Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant and obtained exclusively by the Voice—provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city.MORE

Basically, if you thought the NYPD was crooked and corrupt, well. It might be worse than you thought.  Or it might confirm what you thought. Gotta read to find out!

When I saw this I practically danced with glee.  I am SO SICK and SO TIRED of the OMG YOU NEED TO GET MARRIED !!!!! drumbeat.

Quoted: Dani McClain on Fierce Single Black Women and Activism

That panic is rooted in the sense that too many professional women (of any race) not getting married means too many people pushing back on sex-based pay disparities in the workplace. It means too many people questioning the logic of tying health care benefits, property rights, hospital visitation rights, etc. to marriage. To me, these articles and “news” programs are being published and broadcast in an effort to stem this coming tide. And those of us black women who feel offended and mischaracterized by the media onslaught should take this as our cue to claim our rights and our rightful place as trailblazers in the 21st century reconfiguration of family and adulthood. Rather than take the bait and feel terrible about ourselves when some media outlet tells us we’re both cause and victim of an “epidemic” or “crisis” in the black community, let’s assert that we are grown-ass human beings, and thus deserving of the same social, economic, civil and political rights that married people can access.

A vocal segment of the LGBTQ activist community has been making this argument for a while now. People like Kenyon Farrow, Jasmyne Cannick and Yasmin Nair have long been arguing that rather than making marriage the be all end all, we should be supporting each other in creating custom-made families that work for us. They’ve pointed out the folly of fighting to mimic and reproduce the patriarchal, nuclear families that continue to be held up as the only legitimate model in this country. These writers argue – and straight, unmarried black women would be smart to join the chorus — that rather than focusing on getting more people married, we should be de-linking human rights from marriage and creating space for a broader acceptance of the cobbled together, nontraditional families that many of us came up in.MORE

And to close off:

Earl Greyhound Shotgun

Linkspam : Short and Sweet -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Sorry guys. I accidentally deleted the disabled women athletes’ post twice tonight and I am so frustrated and angry at myself right now that its probably best for me to step away from the computer, before I lose my temper and throw the contraption outside.

So while I’m recovering my equilibrium, PBS has got a series called The National Parks: America’s Best Idea Their history is absolutely fascinating.

And I’d like to congratulate Rio on winning the bid for the 2018 Olympics. May they not be saddled with cost overruns, boondoggles and debt.

…

Um. On the subject of media? Did anyone watch Surrogates? What did you think about it?

EDIT on the subject of the National Parks.

So my rec was based on watching one episode of the miniseries. Which situation has boomeranged on me. Cause I started watching others over the weekend. And as my commenters here have pointed out, it is a VERY whitewashed series. Its all about the doings of rich white people. Not a word about Native American land, a lot of which was expropriated for the parks. Not a word about any agreements which may have been made between the US gov’t and the tribes. It is not surprising, therefore that a certain Christian-centric tone pervades the documentary. This is gods country, a miracle of god, these vistas are like cathedrals etc etc. And, well I just found this:Indian Country, God’s Country :Native Americans And The National Parks

The mythology of “gifted land” is strong in the Park Service, but some of our greatest parks were “gifted” by people who had little if any choice in the matter. Places like the Grand Canyon’s south rim and Glacier had to be bought, finagled, borrowed – or taken by force – when Indian occupants and owners resisted the call to contribute to the public welfare. The story of national parks and Indians is, depending on perspective, a costly triumph of the public interest, or a bitter betrayal of America’s native people.

In Indian Country, God’s Country historian Philip Burnham traces the complex relationship between Native Americans and the national parks, relating how Indians were removed, relocated, or otherwise kept at arm’s length from lands that became some of our nation’s most hallowed ground. MORE

*sigh* Yeah. So therefore, take that as a dis-recomendation of Ken Burn’s whitewashed series.

National Parks: America’s Best Idea. -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

So I have the headache from hell, and I wasn’t able to finish the disabled women athletes post. I’ll try to get it up on Monday. In the meantime, environmentally friendly housing has been on my mind. These links are from two old posts I did last year:

Cob Houses
Pic from:Welsh Youth Forum on Sustainable Development

Cob houses are made with a mixture of clay, straw, sand, earth and water. The ingredients are similar to an adobe brick home, but, unlike adobe homes, cob houses can be built in wet areas and areas prone to earthquakes. Because the earth walls of a cob home are typically more than 2ft thick, they are naturally energy-efficient. Meaning cob homes stay cool in the summer, and warm in the winter.

Cob homes also give home-owners more control over design and construction. They are owner-built, and the unique nature of the material gives the owner-builder the ability to create nearly any kind of design. With a little help from your friends and a few free weekends, you can build your own cob home for next to nothing, often from materials that are already on site.

Useful links

1.How to build a Cob House (with loads of pictures)

2.How to build a cob house, (another website)

3.The Hand-Sculpted House, A Practical and Philosophical Guide

4.Building with Cob, a step-by-step guide

5.Cob Works: Company that helps you build one

6. Advantages and Disadvantages of Building With Cob

7.Green Home Buildings:Cob Houses

8.Building in a cold climate

9.Tons. Of. Pics. Seriously. Its a HELL of a gallery

Earthships (GLEE!!!!! I want one of these!)

More Earthship Informational Videos on Youtube

Advantages and Disadvanatages of Earthships

Article in Wired that breaks down the concept

Books, Videos, History, Facts

Earthship.net

Buy an Earthship

More books

Where they’ve been

dirt cheap builder: books, dvds available to teach you how to build homes cheaply and sustainably

Real estate listing of available earthships

Informative article in The Guardian:What a load of rubbish

Scotland’s first Earthship

Earthship Architectural Plans

Earthship:Brighton

John Kejr’s Earthship blog-get listings, ask questions find out how to make glass bottle bricks…

Container Homes

Container Homes in London

SG Blocks Container Homes in the US

SG Blocks Website

Informative Article with cool pics

Alternative Housing: Otherwise known as “I want an Earthship!” -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I’ve had a little project in mind for a few weeks but I’ll need some help bringing it to fruition. As many of you know, when engaging in discussions about contentious topics such as race, gender, politics, oppression, etc., there are always clueless and/or privileged people who whip out arguments so often used and so stock that they end up on a BINGO card somewhere. Veterans of such discussions often comment on this and sometimes even link to specific cards. And the more patient amongst us will explain to the clueless/privileged person why their argument is a cliche.

While rolling my eyes at some of the drive-bys over on Alaya’s Supernatural thread I thought that it would be useful to not only be able to point to BINGO cards and say: “Look, what you just said is on here, this is how clueless you are,” but also have that square link to a post or comment thread wherein the statement is taken apart and shredded to pieces. It’s similar to the way I tell people to read the Required Reading or simply point to coffeeandink’s excellent How To Suppress Discussions of Race. We’ve all had these debates so many times that at this point all we really should have to do is say: “Go here and click on I/3.”

First step is to find the existing BINGO cards. Liz Henry has an awesome Flickr pool with the ones she’s found here. Are there any more we should add to the list? Let me know in comments.

Next, I suggest we go one card at a time and find a link or multiple links for each square. As I said, it can be a comment or thread or a whole post wherein the statement/question is debunked or someone has taken the time to explain why it’s wrong/stupid/prejudiced/not worthy of addressing.

I think this was the first BINGO card I ever saw:

So I would like to start with that one. You can suggest links (your own or someone else’s) in the comments, just be sure to indicate which square the link is for. If you want to take part in the project by posting a card to your blog and compiling links, go right ahead. Just tag your post bingo-project in Delicious and ping me here or on another BINGO Project post so others won’t replicate your efforts.

The BINGO Project -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Before we head on the the subject of Trans women athletes, lets go back for an update on Caster Semanya.

At the beginning of this controversy, Tami asked the question What do women look like?

You magazine answered Dressed Up. Madeup. Heels. Wearing stereotypically feminine clothes. Softened. Muscles carefully hidden under stereotypically feminine clothes. And flowing hair. Don’t worry guys! Now she looks just the way society expects! Calm down now! Hair or no hair, however, even if makeup and all the other effort, her strong facial features were not “feminine enough” for some commenters. Many people tried to insult her by saying that she looked like a trans woman. News flash, trans women ARE women, and for the 10000th time, women have a wide variety of features, and there is no right way to look like a woman! I saw way too much of that piece of ignorance, so I’d like to link Transgriots piece I Repeat-Quit Using ‘Tranny’ To Insult Cisgender Women from Tami’s blog post to deal with that nonsense straight up.

Yesterday, unfortunately, Ms. Semanya’s day got worse. Delux brought this pair of stories to my attention:

Report claims 800m world champion Caster Semenya is a hermaphrodite: The results of a controversial gender test on the South African athlete Caster Semenya have been received by international athletics officials but will only be made public after they have been analysed by experts and Semenya has been informed, according to reports.

Semenya has male and female organs: Extensive physical examinations of Semenya, 18, had shown the athlete “is technically a hermaphrodite”. According to medical reports she has no ovaries, but rather internal male testes producing “large amounts of testosterone”.

Now, the first thing that smack one right between the eyes is the use of the word “hermaphrodite” to describe her. Almost all the articles use it, and I heard a BBC reporter using it today. This word is inaccuarate, outdated and offensive. Its is a definition that sprang from a medicalizing mindset from the 19th century that basically saw intersex people as deformed and in need to fixing so that they could adhere to the “proper” gender binary. And this stuff is not arcane knowledge either. These reporters have access to the same damn google that I used. Hell they could have looked at some of their peer newspapers, who were using the correct terminology. And ANY amount of googling on the issue would have brought you sooner or later to the Organization Intersex International which has websites in a good number of the world’s most popular languages. But nooooooo. Make it scandalous! Sell papers! Everyone loves a good sensational story! And to hell with making her a freak in the eyes of society! Who cares we got advertising to sell!

And then there was the second thing that shot me straight into RAGE territory.

See the Guardian had quite an interesting sentence here:

The results of a controversial gender test on the South African athlete Caster Semenya have been received by international athletics officials but will only be made public after they have been analysed by experts and Semenya has been informed, according to reports.

…

but will only be made public after they have been analysed by experts and Semenya has been informed, according to reports.

Hold, WHAT? Who the HELL was that IAAF employee/Medical doctor that carried out the test, whoever it was that leaked this info BEFORE SEMENYA WAS INFORMED ABOUT THE RESULTS?!!?!?!?! What the HELL??? What the … is the excuse this time? I mean, last time it was, “oh I sent he email to the wrong person, silly me”. And this time? What the fuck is it this time?AT least the IAAF’s president seems to wanting an investigation into the leaks that lets the entire world weigh in on her medical info before she even gets to be informed about this herself! But damn it, I LOVE the whole, it ain’t my fault tone in this article

But sports lawyers said that it would be difficult for the South African authorities to mount a case against the IAAF. “There is a general duty of care from a governing body or international federation to the athletes they represent. She could argue that they have broken that duty of care,” said Mike Morgan, a solicitor in the sports law practice at Hammonds. “But you’re talking about a South African athlete, an organization based in Monaco and leaks that occurred in Berlin and Australia. Once the dust has settled, I think they will realize it would be difficult to bring a case.”

Yeah. Yeah. See, somehow I have this nasty feeling. If this athletes were a white European or American? I just have this nasty feeling that these countries would be leaning on the IAAF to be just a bit more successful than that in making sure that heads rolled for the utter disrespect and cruel, inhumane manner in which Ms. Semanya has been treated. For daring to run fast.

An Intersex Perspective on Caster Semenya points out, among other things:

One depressing sideline of this insistence that Caster must have a definitive dyadic sex is the regularity with which the term “pseudohermaphrodite” is raised by detractors. I’ve posted on how this term emerged in Western medical science to try to define away the existence of intersexuality ( see here.) Basically, in trying to erase the challenge intersex people place to the medical ideology of sex dyadism, doctors in the 20th century decided to call all intersex individuals who did not have ovotestes as their gonads “pseudohermaphrodites,” no matter what their anatomy or experience. Somebody can be raised female, with average-looking genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts, living a typical valorized heterosexual life, femme as can be (housewife, reader of romance novels, cookie-baker), yet all unaware, have internal testes and androgen insensitivity syndrome. If she goes to a doctor for treatment of infertility, suddenly she’ll find herself labeled a “male pseudohermaphrodite.” The medical term defines her as “really a man,” not even intersex, let alone a woman. Anyone with testes is “really a man” according to this scheme of classification–which reveals the sex politics and semantics in supposedly “objective” science.

Those same politics emerge from the mouths of Caster’s detractors. She is a “pseudohermaphrodite,” they claim–not a woman, not even intersex, but a man trying to cheat honest female competitors.

Here’s an irony for you. According to Western medical practice, the majority of infants discovered to be intersex are assigned female. This is done for surgical convenience (it being considered easier to remove an “inappropriate” penis than create an “appropriate” one), and due to a covert assumption about gender psychology, that women can deal better with gender ambiguity than can men. So we’re assigned female, told we are “really women,” subjected to mutilating infant surgery, expected to identify as female, not intersex, told to keep our medical history, if we know it, a secret, and sent out to live dyadic female lives. Many of us carefully live by the rules. But it turns out that if we do as we are told, we are still subject to being outed, discredited, mocked, and returned unceremoniously to the status of intersex oddity, as Caster’s life illustrates–accused of breaking the rules.

What Caster’s situation illustrates, from an intersex perspective, is that we exist. Dyadic sex is a myth–sex is a spectrum. Hormones, chromosomes, genitals, gonads–they are all arranged in many complex ways, and imposing a binary onto them is arbitrary. It’s as arbitrary as saying all fruit is either sweet or sour. Sure, ripe cherries are sweet and ripe limes are sour, but most fruit gets its savor from both tastes, and some fruits balance at the tangy sweet-and-sour midpoint. You can measure all the fructose and ascorbic acid you want, scientifically. You can create a rule that divides all fruit into sweet and sour categories using precise measurements of sugars and acids. But that will not eliminate the fact that the experience of tasting fruit is complex, and that this complexity is what makes eating fruit delicious.
MORE

By the way, a commenter last week asked me if gender testing in the Olympics is over. The answer as the below essay makes clear, is, for the most part.

The Rise and Fall of Gender Testing: How the Cold War and Two “Masculine” Soviet Sisters Led to a Propaganda Campaign

Myron Genel, MD, was one expert who became convinced that gender testing was a joke. In 1990 he and others accepted an IAAF invitation to get together for a workshop on “femininity verification.” Later Genel wrote in Medscape Women’s Health: “Our group concluded that laboratory-based sex determination should be discontinued…The purported rationale is to detect male imposters who would have an unfair competitive advantage. In point-of-fact, genuine imposters have not been uncovered; however, gender verification procedures have resulted in substantial harm to a number of unassailable women athletes born with relatively rare genetic abnormalities that affect development of the gonads or the expression of secondary sexual characteristics.”

In 1992, as a result of this study, the IAAF defied the IOC and stopped gender testing. The Commonwealth Games and various sports federations followed suit, as did the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and other medical bodies. But the testing juggernaut rumbled heedlessly on. At the 1996 summer games in Atlanta, there was a cumbersome DNA screening process for 3,387 women athletes, that proved to be vastly expensive for the Games. Eight women were red-flagged, then further scrutinized and discussed — and allowed to compete.

Finally, in 1999, even the IOC’s own Athletic Commission went to the executive board and demanded that testing stop. Testing was suspended on a trial basis for the Sydney and Salt Lake City Games. But the IOC hasn’t abandoned the old ideology. It reserves the right to re-apply the much-discredited test in any individual case that is brought to their attention. Meanwhile, on the U.S. political front, gender realities continue to be ignored by many conservatives — as in Texas, where the 4th Court of Appeals ruled in 1999 that only couples with standard XY and XX chromosomes could be married.

But at the latest Olympics Beijing Officials To Test Female Olympic Hopefuls For Sex Abnormalities And this is after they cause a scandal at the Atlanta Games They disqualified 8 women, who appealed and were reinstated. Seven of them were intersexed. Also, The Confederation of African Football (CAF) Initiating Gender Testing Before 2010 Africa Women’s Cup

The Women’s Sport Foundation Gender Testing – Gender Verification at Elite Sports Competitions: The Foundation Position

And dutchmarbel over at Alas a Blog has one more intersex athlete to add to our list: Dutch sprinter Foekje Dillema

Finally, because I keep seeing this. The news stories state that she has three times the normal amount of testosterone in her body. Please note that this does not necessarily mean that she has any advantage over other athletes. Many intersex athletes that have that amount of testosterone also have. This does not necessarily mean she has an advantage. Many intersex athletes with extra testosterone also have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which makes them unable to use it. She wasn’t winning in world record time. Non-intersexed people have and can beat her. With that in mind, can we PLEASE remember that we are talking about a human being, an 18 year old athletes and not social monster?

Next wek, we will finally get around to trans women athletes. Laters!

Caster Semenya: Part 2b of the Women Athletes series -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman