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By unequivocal • 13 years ago

Something Awful and Trans/Intersex/Gender Presentation Issues

For those of you not already aware, somethingawful.com is a humor website populated by self-professed “goons” inclined toward mockery, online pranking and similar 4chan-ish buffoonery.  Something Awful is a great place to go to get your daily dose of funny, but it isn’t exactly the place for progressive social commentary.

Imagine my surprise then when I stumbled upon this thread in the Everything/Nothing forum, where Something Awful poster Marauderthirty explains that he just found out that the girl he is dating was born intersex, originally assigned male gender, and underwent corrective surgery several years ago:

The responses from other forum members are not utterly without problems, but it gives me hope for society when within the first page, the overwhelming majority of responses are devoted to correcting the OP’s insensitive language, educating him on intersex and trans issues and debunking the myth of the deceptive transsexual.

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking in the commentary, but it does my heart good on a Monday morning to see a website whose primary demographic is 25-year old guys treat this matter in such a relatively enlightened fashion.  I think it speaks to an overall coming sea-change in society’s treatment of gender, and that’s happy news.

(Posted to Transgender Issues because there’s no specific “intersex” category.)
By unequivocal • 15 years ago

Women’s Self Defense/Rape Prevention Course: Soliciting Feminist Input

Potential trigger warning: This post asks for reader input on practical self defense; as such the post and subsequent comments could be triggering for some readers.

I run a martial arts studio in a college town in the south.  The instructor who previously headed up our quarterly women’s self defense course (a wonderful and inspirational 70 year old woman) recently had to relocate out of state.  This has left me and my wife in the position of restructuring and implementing a new program.

I have a great deal of experience in teaching self defense and in running women’s self defense courses, however all of this experience dates back to a time before I became fully invested in feminist philosophy.  ...

Potential trigger warning: This post asks for reader input on practical self defense; as such the post and subsequent comments could be triggering for some readers.

I run a martial arts studio in a college town in the ...