feminism

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that a county school district in Maryland has implemented a controversial—even illegal—new policy that ‘directs Howard County school officials to notify parents when students reveal they are pregnant’. Way to go, Howard County, to ensure that more girls who need medical help will be even less willing to seek it out.

Howard’s policy “really pushes the issue of informing the parents, when state law says minors have the right to make decisions independent of the parents,” said Deborah Chilcoat, an education and training specialist for Planned Parenthood of Maryland and co-chair of a county coalition on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health. “It’s not going to be in the best interests of young people in Howard County,” she said.

Ugly, gross, crazy, and stupid. The way to help pregnant high schoolers is to provide them with medical assistance and the love and support of their community, not to sic their parents, their school officials, and the full weight of The Law on them.

Tip of the hat to Cara at The Curvature, via Ann at Feministing.

One of the most hateful things disguised as righteousness I know of is the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which since its inception in 1975 has considered itself a ‘women-born-women only space’. That is to say, it is their policy to deny access to anybody who has changed their gender, is in the process of changing their gender, intends to change their gender, or does not meet whatever are the narrow criteria du jour for ‘womanhood’. It’s not enough to identify as a woman—you have to have been born female to ‘count’—and the definition of ‘born female’ is a tricky enough issue that transgender people are simply excluded. Much of the rationale behind this exclusion comes from the belief that transwomen (that is, people who are genetically male but who identify as female, at whatever stage of transitioning) are really expressions of the patriarchy, men trying to deny a women-only space to women who have been oppressed for thousands of years, and that allowing women-not-born-women (whatever that means) into the festival would destroy the sanctity of the space for the participants.

Of course, this goes much deeper than mere desire for their own space on the part of those who support this policy. Transphobia is one of the root causes here, and among lesbian, gay, and bisexual cisgender types (cis- is the opposite of trans-), there can be some pretty nasty transphobia. One of its most instructive manifestations is in the so-called ‘radical feminists’, my (least) favourite example being the noxious blogger Heart of Women’s Space, which I won’t link to, but you can find pretty easily if you really want to. Once upon a time she accused the really excellent blogger who goes by the pseudonym ‘little light’ of plagiarizing sentiments from the feminist author Robin Morgan without giving credit, but the discussion thread very quickly degenerated into bashing of transpeople, beliefs that transwomen were really men trying to ‘colonize’ women in yet another way, claims that ‘men think they can be better women than women’, and so forth. All little light had said was that ‘It is time to create a feminism of the monstrous’, and for expressing a thought that I’m sure Heart and her commenters agreed with, she got a whole heap of transphobic abuse dropped down on her. (She responds to these claims here, in one of the most delightfully snarky bits of prose it has ever been my pleasure to read.) The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has message boards where, I’m told, many similar sentiments about transgender people can be found. I haven’t checked it out myself because I have far better things to do with my time.

The reason I bring this up right now is not simply because this issue has been remaining latent in the LGB community for far too long, and whatever exposure of it I can provide to the dozen or so people who actually read my blog has been judged necessary for me to try to give this morning. Demanding more immediate attention is an essay by Cicely, reposted on Questioning Transphobia and originally posted on the aforementioned Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival message boards, detailing how she changed her mind on women-born-women-only spaces. It is truly wonderful to see such a thought-out and detailed consideration of this issue—worlds away from ‘transwomen are men colonizing women’. I also recommend Holly’s reaction to it over at Feministe.

The conclusion of the essay says it all:

It’s my opinion that if you accept that trans women are women, it’s not good enough to say trans women are too different, they make you uncomfortable, so you don’t want them in any particular women’s space. Anti-discrimination legislation isn’t designed to pander to people’s feelings of comfort. It’s designed precisely to challenge and even override them when they deny other people their equal rights. Asking or expecting individual trans women or all trans women as a group to agree to participate in discrimination against themselves (or agree that what they experience as discrimination actually isn’t), is not a reasonable request, and one which can never in practice be satisfied. Either this conflict will go on indefinitely, or it will be resolved by removal of the boundary.

I live in hope that the festival will go on, and become welcoming of trans women.

I have nothing to add beyond a heartfelt (as it were) ‘amen’.

Today marks twenty years since the Morgentaler decision in Canada, affirming a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. As usual, Jill at Feministe has the whole story more eloquently and comprehensively than I could do.

Canada is very progressive in many ways, but, like most countries, it still has a long way to go when it comes to abortion rights. To all the Canadians out there, I wish you a very happy anniversary — and best of luck in making next year even better.

A heartfelt amen to that. Feministe is also linking to this article from the Globe and Mail, highlighting the problems in the Canadian ‘choice’ system—specifically, that there often is no choice, or at least that alternatives are scarce and treatment options are few, for hundreds of thousands of women: drug-induced abortion (think RU-486) isn’t even available in this country! This just blows my mind—you can buy Allegra and codeine over the counter here, but you can’t even get something a hundred times as essential by a doctor’s prescription. I can’t wait to see the web-based Canadian pharmacy companies illegally importing drugs from America to fill this void in the system.

So yeah. Both countries have a long way to go, it would appear. We are making progress, slowly, on the legal, ethical, and medical fronts, but it’s going to be a while before we can put this issue to bed, especially given how out of the spotlight abortion is in Canada, as compared to in the States.

The Shalom Hartman Institue in Jerusalem is going to begin ordaining women as rabbis, reports the Jerusalem Post, in an article which would have you believe that this is the biggest development in Orthodox Judaism’s relationship to its women since the banning of Indian sheitels. ‘A major change in gender roles within modern Orthodoxy,’ the article prints in the first sentence. Big news! Stop the presses! Women can learn, become scholars, and impart their knowledge to others! And they can now style themselves ‘rabbis’ with the permission of an Orthodox institution!

Except it’s not really a big deal, of course. Slate’s Samantha Shapiro has an excellent article in which she explains several crucial things that, in their breathless desire to sensationalize this event, the Jerusalem Post either buried or omitted:

• The Shalom Hartman Institute isn’t really Orthodox, or even Modern Orthodox. Even the original article subliminally acknowledges this, in a quote from the founder, Rabbi David Hartman, himself: ‘[The Shalom] Hartman [Institue] has been multi-denominational for the last 12 years. We make no distinctions between men and women here. Our latest decision is a natural evolution of our existing policy.’ Now, Rabbi Hartman was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi, but the institution itself does not ‘belong’ to the Orthodox ‘movement’, insofar as such a movement exists.
• Orthodox women have been ordained before. An excellent example is Mimi Feigelson, who was granted semicha (ordination) by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Feigelson somewhat enigmatically uses the title Reb, which in Yiddish has the connotation of ‘Mister’—nothing specifically rabbinic, but everything specifically masculine—and kept her ordination secret for many years until it was revealed in a newspaper. She’s just one example: there are several other women who have been ordained in the Orthodox tradition as Orthodox rabbis, so the Hartman Institute’s decision to start doing this isn’t exactly new.
• All denominations of Judaism except for the Orthodox flavour have ordained women for at least twenty-five years.
• There have been other Orthodox institutions that educate women to be spiritual and religious consultants on various matters, such as family law and ritual purity. Nishmat is one such institution; yet it does not call its graduates ‘rabbis’ and tacitly seems to acknowledge that any religious opinion or ruling rendered by a woman will always need a nod from a qualified male to render it fully valid and worthwhile.
• This development isn’t going to have, in my estimation, any significant impact on either Orthodoxy in general or women’s roles within Orthodox Judaism in particular. Even if we count the Hartman Institute within the boundaries of Modern Orthodoxy, it was already quite far to the ‘left’ of that label, and this decision may well push it beyond the pale for other M.O.s, to say nothing of farther-right-wingers in the Orthodox ‘movement’ or the Haredi world. Also, many of the kinds of people that the Hartman Institute already reaches, in religious and dogmatic terms, are already likely to accept women as rabbis and therefore put themselves out of this ‘movement’ as well, thus effectively (a) making Hartman’s decision to do this essentially preaching to the choir, and (b) causing Hartman to secede even further from Orthodoxy.

Naturally, this has been gathering some significant responses in the Jewish word, much of which I believe has to do with the ’sales’ of this event as hugely significant both for women and for Orthodox Judaism. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, for instance, was quoted extensively in the Jerusalem Post article to the effect that the Hartman Institute is already beyond the pale because Orthodox Jews are studying together with non-Orthodox Jews, who ‘do not have a fear of God’, to say nothing of women studying together with men. He also takes the (somewhat baffling) position that women should not have the title ‘rabbi’ yet still ought to be respected by the hoi polloi, just as male rabbis are:

“I think it is degrading to tell a woman that she won’t be respected and appreciated unless she adopts a man’s title,” Aviner said. “Throughout the generations there were always scholarly women who were highly respected. Jewish law dictates that a man must stand before a learned woman just as he must stand out of respect for a learned man.”

Though I personally welcome this news, I have to doubt its general effect, just as Shapiro does in her article. If Aviner’s reaction is any indication, those women who do receive their ordination from the Shalom Hartman Institute will be shunned in the Orthodox world, and this ‘big news’ will end up striking no blows for the acceptance of women in that world, which is a real shanda in today’s world.

His most royal majesty King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, absolute ruler of Saudi Arabia, has most graciously pardoned a woman, the so-called Qatif Girl, who was found guilty of being in the same car as a man she was not married to. Both the woman and the man were gang-raped by a group of seven men, but the two of them received penalties for being together and unmarried. Both ‘participants’ received sentences of ninety lashes, but in the woman’s case this was increased to two hundred lashes, plus six months in jail, when she appealed her sentence. Commentary, by and large, on this issue has highlighted the backwardness of this aspect of the Saudi justice system—a point echoed, if somewhat undercut, by the White House—but has also focussed a little on the gender inequality inherent in a system that sentences the man and the woman to different penalties for the same ‘offence’. But it’s still funny, at least to my mind, that we didn’t observe the same kind of reaction to the Sudanese teddy bear named Muhammad incident, which provoked genuine worldwide outrage, in this case in Saudi Arabia.

Today, the Saudi King Abdullah has generously pardoned and set free the woman. No doubt this is being done as something of a goodwill gesture at the beginning of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. There is of course plenty of reason for the Saudi government to want to appease various elements in the Western world, especially at this time (which was, in fact, the actual justification—’serving the public interest’—offered by the king as his reason for the pardon). Yet the king is still being criticized, apparently, by the religious-conservative elements in the Muslim world:

The BBC’s Heba Saleh says the king’s decision to pardon the woman victim is already arousing controversy with some contributors to conservative websites, who say he has breached the rules of religion in order to appease critics in the West. (from the article cited above)

Of course, the U.S.-Saudi relationship is one of the most important in the international community, what with the extensive trading (read oil trading) relationship between the two nations. And of course, who can forget Bush’s hand-holding incident with then-Crown Prince Abdullah?

So Abdullah finally made the right decision, but with a thinly veiled motivation, fearing some sort of recrimination by the West. But—and this is a more general question—what leverage can the West really exert on these oil-producing nations? Do they even really want to? Can the West risk their vital oil supply going ever upward in price, not to mention the threat of it being cut off? Of course not. (History has proven, however, that rising oil prices are not deterring oil purchasing and use, contrary to general economic rules. But this is a different topic.) As long as the relationship between the oil exporters and importers continues the way it currently does, there will be very little possibility in the future to prevent the next Qatif Girl from being sentenced for a ‘crime’ of this nature. We got lucky this time; next time may be very different.