There’s much to say about this ugly time, the vicious, bitterly vicious, unrelenting backlash that since the Bush years has been ever more shameless in its naked hatred for women’s independence and, still worse, their sexuality. The truly fascist and deeply dishonest legislative assaults that have erupted in so many states over the past two years are as shocking as they are disheartening. And the creepy and untiring campaign to undermine, by every devious and indirect means, women’s access not only to abortion services, but contraception and all reproductive healthcare, including even breast cancer screenings, is both revelatory and repulsive.

But aside from the infuriating and burdensome details of this multi-front war on women and their bodies, what particularly strikes me is the pervasive bad faith that drives it. Abortion rights have always been threatened by attempts to undermine the laws which make it possible for women to exercise their inherent rights to control their own bodies and lives. But the new face of the war against them is not one of wrong-headed but above-board legislative controversy. It is a persistent and thoroughgoing attempt to turn the law itself against the majority of the citizens it governs – to use the law to make it impossible for law-abiding citizens to exercise the rights guaranteed them by that law.

Bans on funding for non-abortion related services, bans on the provision of factual information about abortion by healthcare providers to their own patients, prohibitions on the provision of abortion and reproductive health services through government programs relied on by women who have no other source of care, disingenuous regulations intended to make it impossible for women’s clinics to function for reasons unrelated to the quality of their services, and so many other restrictive and intrusive regulations, all are uses of the democratic process to make it a practical impossibility for women to exercise their own rights. And all of these are thoroughly and deliberately dishonest: they block factual information, and in some cases even stipulate falsehoods, to women seeking to make an informed choice about their own healthcare; they erect barriers and regulations addressing questions of funding, safety, or other ordinarily-reasonable aspects of healthcare provision for reasons entirely unrelated to their ostensible purposes and with the deliberate intention of making service to patients impossible; they malignantly distort the bedrock principle of medical ethics – informed consent – to harass, intimidate, and manipulate women seeking to make a free and informed choice about their own care, and drive them to a choice dictated by political and religious ideologues motivated by a deep-seated and gnawing hostility to those women themselves.

The enemies of women, having seen that orderly debate, under the framework of rights guaranteed by law, was not their friend in their war to take women’s lives into their own hands against those women’s wills, have adopted falsehood and bad faith as their weapons of choice. Nothing is now what it seems in this fight: informed consent is deception and manipulation; safety regulations are intended to prevent safe access to the services sought (and consequently drive women to seek unsafe alternatives, the rate of which is rising in the United States for the first time in decades); funds for services unrelated to abortion are banned out of nothing more than a virulent hostility to the organizations that provide the funded services because they also support women’s rights to abortion.

So much is at stake in the war against women. But the perversion of this war into a distortion of democracy itself, and the twisting of the law to undermine the law in the lives of one specific, hated, targeted sub-group of the population (the majority of that population, no less, but ever a despised and insecure majority) has broadened its scope, even beyond the lives, dreams, and freedom of more than half the country’s citizens. It has allowed a rabid and unhinged minority of religious berserkers, and the politicians they hold captive, to turn the nation against its own citizens.

It is said “when one is not free, none are free,” but that is truer than ever in the latest total-war assault on women by the religious right. They have adopted scorched-earth tactics against civilization itself – against the law that guarantees the freedom to live under the law, using the law’s defenses as weapons against those whom they defend. No nation can claim to be civilized which terrorizes and enslaves its female population. But the right wing has abandoned civilization even in form, not merely in substance, willingly gutting law itself when its guarantees of freedom thwarted their plans for domination.

What other rights remain, when the right to exercise one’s rights is denied?

Szasz made a career as the gadfly of psychiatry, excoriating its role as enforcer of political and social orthodoxy and questioning mental illness as a category of disease. He was driven by both a lacerating exactitude of mind regarding the theories of disease and healthcare, and by the libertarian political ideology which caused him to see all forms of behavior modification as an encroachment on freedom. By tireless effort he established a solid, but not popular, beachhead position against mainstream psychiatry and its role in the legal/medical complex.

I was not a close student of Szasz, but, though I did not admire his politics, I greatly admired his insistence on clear thinking and on holding medicine accountable for what it does to people. His death is a loss to a profession that needed his intelligence and keen critical eye.

A short overview of his career and ideology can be found here; a more detailed, and fascinating, report of Szasz’s early experiences in psychiatry and the development of his ideology is here. My own review of one of his books can be found here.

I’ve just deleted a couple of dozen comment spams of this type, and presumably the problem will only get worse. At some point I may have to implement Captcha or another form of verification. Sorry for the inconvenience, but sleaze rises to the top, and never slows down.

Yesterday, the Susan G. Komen Foundation  – the “pink ribbon” breast-cancer research and treatment organization – announced it was ending its long-standing annual grants to Planned Parenthood clinics to perform breast-cancer screenings and referrals for low-income women. The given reasons are as disingenuous as they are shameful: in short, SGK hired a new Vice President who, in a recent losing bid for the governorship of Georgia, had explicitly pledged to defund healthcare services at Planned Parenthood in that state. Within months of her hiring at SGK, SGK just happened to create an internal rule declaring that it would not fund any programs at organizations that were under Congressional investigation; that policy just happened to apply only to Planned Parenthood, which just happens to be the target of a fishing-expedition investigation by a virulently anti-choice member of Congress. So: the right wing has been demonizing and targeting PP for years; one jackass Congressmember creates an investigation simply to grandstand; SGK hires an avowed anti-choice opponent of PP; SGK then creates a new rule about “investigations” that applies only to PP; SGK then abandons its own PP-mediated cancer screening programs and claims it had no choice because of the bogus investigation. Well played, but hardly subtle.

This is as sickening as it is tragic. The results will be, literally, death for a predictable number of women who would have been referred for mammography and received a positive cancer diagnosis, and appropriate treatment, following examination at Planned Parenthood, but who will now go undiagnosed after those screening programs are shut down (assuming adequate replacement funding is not obtained).

I’d like to encourage SGK to reverse their decision – to consider all the benefits that come from these screening programs, and the need there is in the community for the irreplaceable medical resources they provide. I’d like to remind them that Komen Affiliates have funded breast health services through Planned Parenthood programs that have provided breast health education and breast screenings for hundreds of thousands of low-income, uninsured or medically under-served women, and that, in some areas, Planned Parenthood may be the only local source of breast health care. I’d like to point out that women served at Planned Parenthood may receive a clinical breast exam, and when further screening is needed, a referral to either a state program or a private mammogram provider. It would be useful to consider that because SGK only works with non-profit organizations, these women’s  mammograms may be paid for by the Komen-Planned Parenthood grant, since many mammography providers are for-profit but Planned Parenthood works on an entirely non-profit basis for all its services.  Surely they recall that during the past five years up to 2011, Komen Affiliate grants to Planned Parenthood paid for:

• Breast cancer and breast health education for nearly 160,000 women
• 139,000 clinical breast exams
• 4,866 mammograms
• Detection of 177 breast cancers

But I may not need to tell them all that. They already know it. I’m sure of that because every bit of the above information comes from a letter SGK itself posted, on their pink-ribboned letterhead, on their own website, back when the religious right was pressuring them to cut off cancer screening to low-income women as part of their misogynist anti-sex witch hunt.

In that letter – aimed at deflecting criticism from anti-Planned-Parenthood crusaders, and written before SGK hired its own anti-choice crusader as VP – SGK extols its work with Planned Parenthood, and rightly notes not only that the screening programs it funds serve hundreds of thousands of women, and identify thousands of previously undetected potential cancers, but that these programs are carried out in many cases by the only provider willing or available to do them, and thus are literally irreplaceable. In publishing that letter, SGK took a strong stand in defense of women, and of those who provide the vital – in the most literal sense – services that no one else will or can do. It openly and forthrightly documented the need women – almost exclusively low-income women, and disproportionately women of color – have for Planned Parenthood, and the great benefits they got from the Planned Parenthood programs made possible by SGK’s funding. The letter expresses a clear and unambiguous commitment to serving women (even while mush-mouthing on the issue of abortion), and takes a bold stance in the face of harassment and misogynist bullying.

That letter is no longer available on the Susan G. Komen website.

In fact, as of this writing there is no news whatsoever on SGK’s on website regarding its abandonment of the cancer screening programs it once supported Planned Parenthood in providing, and a search for “Planned Parenthood” on that site returns only a single, obscure, broken link. That link turns out to be the page that once held the letter mentioned above. It’s not accessible or advertised. Some careful Googling, however, locates the letter in an unlinked section of SGK’s site. The letter defending Planned Parenthood, its patients, and SGK’s support for them, still exists – but they won’t let you see it.

Here it is, in its original full-color form: Susan G. Komen letter describing benefits from Planned Parenthood cancer screenings.

I’d like to think that “as long as there is a need for health care for vulnerable populations, Komen Affiliates will continue to fund the facilities that meet that need.” After all, they said so – barely 8 months ago. But obviously they’re no longer willing to stand by their word. In fact, they’re no long willing to admit they ever gave their word. They’ve shown us what courage and fidelity to women truly amount to – for them.

I would not have written about it all, since the things that have been written in so many places, by people with much more authentic activist credentials than mine, and more skin in the game (i.e., feminist women), have covered so much of the territory and with such great insight, passion, and theoretical power.  But one thing kept coming back to me as I watched the situation unfold. It was this: my first, surface-level reaction to the situation was to feel that it had been somewhat overblown, that people were using it as an opportunity to grind axes or work out resentments, and that Schwyzer was so evidently a decent and well-intentioned guy that, whatever his past, the current outrage roiling around him was not only counterproductive but indicative of emotions or resentments for which the facts of the situation were only a convenient release.

I didn’t know that much about that Schwyzer, but had read some of his writing, including some of his confessions of his wilder, younger days. My impressions were that he was a skilled writer with a tendency toward romantic over-dramatization, he had a somewhat off-putting tendency to dwell on himself and his own experiences, he had a kind of clammy bourgeois perspective that he seemed ready to acknowledge but not to rise above, and that he was an insightful, well-intentioned, sincere feminist with a lot of good things to say. The slight bragging I heard in his confessions of past misbehavior was not attractive, but I also believed that he had come to terms with his past and put it behind him. It was unsettling that such confessions seemed to surface so often, and their impact never seemed to reach a final cumulative value. The “sinner’s testimony” so beloved of born-again Christians and recovering addicts (of which he is both) never seemed to end, in Schwyzer’s case, and that raised questions, but by and large he seemed to me as he seemed to many others, then and now: someone who was both knowledgeable about and deeply committed to feminism, and was also honestly grappling with its implications for himself as a man of privilege. As a feminist man with much less history of either writing or activism (or sleeping with my students, or murder), I thought of Schwyzer as being in (only) some ways what I felt I should be.

The revelation that finally touched off the current controversy – that, acting on a drug-addled emotional impulse, he had once actually made a considered effort to kill himself and his ex-girlfriend that was in fact the equivalent of an attempted murder – broke his previous record for confessions of irresponsibility, but, in light of his self-advertised past, in some way seemed just more of the same. The outrage it provoked, quickly rising to the level of personal vendetta, seemed unnecessary in response to an event thirteen years in the past, committed by someone whose current bona fides seemed believable and even admirable. I found myself taking Schweitzer’s part in some of these arguments, either in thought or even to a small degree online.

That reaction, one of sympathy and even protectiveness toward Schwyzer – was what began nagging at me in regard to this situation.  I had to ask myself why I felt so sympathetic to someone so clearly open to well-deserved criticism.  You can argue that Schwyzer had rehabilitated himself, that he had done extensive work on his own behavior and beliefs, that his current professed attitudes and his history of teaching and activism were authentic and creditable. He has many supporters who do make such arguments, and they are not unreasonable on their face. You could also argue that he still bears responsibility for his many transgressions, and some of them are of such magnitude that it will be impossible for anyone to have done sufficient penance whether or not he had truly changed the attitudes that had prompted that behavior in the past. There are also questions of the role of individuals of such great privilege in movements targeting the oppression of underprivileged groups; in that light, Schwyzer’s reprehensible past makes him particularly suspect as a figure of respect or prominence even, again, if it were acknowledged that he had rehabilitated himself. These arguments are also reasonable. It is partly a question of values or priorities which perspective – condemning acknowledged transgressions, or praising apparent enlightenment – one takes on the situation.

So I don’t think it’s impossible to believe in Schwyzer’s redemption, or to support him as a prominent or influential figure in the feminist movement. But why would anyone choose to take that perspective on the issue, in distinction to the opposite one? What should determine the degree of one’s willingness to accept professed penance as authentic or sufficient?

I began thinking about other transgressors, ones I would be much slower to forgive or to accept as peers, let alone role models. I began thinking about the terrible crimes of so many right-wing figures: their embrace of death squads, torture, and concentration camps; their economic rapaciousness, and the vast suffering it causes; their unremitting assault on personal autonomy, most especially of women and their reproductive autonomy; and on and on. I think of the names of figures associated with these campaigns of oppression and terror: Falwell, Robertson, Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, so many criminal lackeys of the Reagan and Bush administrations, and so many more. I would find it impossible to credit the redemption of any of these figures, even were they to espouse more reasonable attitudes and policies today. I would find it impossible to overcome the revulsion they generate in me. Even though they all are guilty of far more destruction and misery, fully reckoned, than Schwyzer, none of them to my knowledge has made a direct and deliberate attempt to kill another person by their own hand. Yet it seems natural to me to accept Schwyzer on his own terms, when I find it unimaginable to believe in the (hypothetical) redemption of any of these other figures.

Partly, I think it’s because Schwyzer was first established in my mind as a positive figure.  I first knew about his feminist work, and read some of his writings on the issues, before I learned of his shady past, and long before the most recent revelations.  The newest controversies work against an established impression that I had already developed which perhaps makes it harder to weigh the two sides of the issue in a perfectly even balance.  In contrast, the murderers, torturers, and perverts of the right wing have always been perfectly visible to me in their true colors.

However, I think there may be a more personal process at work here. Although Schwyzer and I are not very much alike in personality, history, or career trajectory, there’s an obvious basis of fellow-feeling toward him. We’re both educated white men from at least moderately affluent backgrounds, with connections to academia. We both self-identify as feminists and sympathizers with the oppressed, but both obviously came to that perspective from positions of considerable privilege which we cannot renounce. We both – like almost all male feminists – had to work our way toward feminism from anti-feminist backgrounds which we had to acknowledge and overcome.  Like all feminists, we have particular perspectives on the various internal divisions and conflicts of the feminist movement, and like all male feminists must defend the particular positions we take against other (mostly female) feminists who may see our stances as not merely collegial disagreement but another form of privilege.

And so, when I see Schwyzer attacked for aspects of his pre-feminist or proto-feminist life, I can’t help feeling that those attacks are to some degree aimed at me, or could be. I wonder how other feminists would view me if I confessed all the (far less lurid) details of my past, or the things I’ve done wrong, particularly involving or against women. I want to think that the feminist movement can be not merely welcoming but in some ways forgiving of men and their imperfect pasts. And, in a way that surprises even me, when I regard Schwyzer and his difficulties, I feel a bit of the same defensiveness that I feel when my own shortcomings are called to account: I want to put it behind me; I want to say “yes, yes, I’ll do better” and let the matter drop; I hope my accusers will let me slide as long as I promise to do better, and not keep probing and publicizing my faults.

Schwyzer, whatever his guilt for his past behavior, has been admirably open in the face of the current controversy, and has indicated he will consider and likely accept the many calls for his retreat to a less prominent position within the feminist movement. I don’t know how I would behave in a similar situation (I take comfort in thinking that I will never have to explain away the kinds of behavior that Schwyzer does). And I think some of the sympathy that the situation evokes in me is in part an unexplored sense of a need to atone for myself – the fabled “liberal guilt” – and the hope that my own failures could if necessary be absolved and overlooked. I want this cup to pass away from Schwyzer because I hope that, if such a fateful day were to come, it would pass away from me as well.

It is easy for me to consign right-wing criminals to permanent condemnation. I feel nothing in common with them, and can’t imagine I would even if they repented. Hugo Schwyzer, in his best parts, is the kind of person I want to be, inescapably privileged but using the tools of privilege – intellect and learning – for good. I know that I, in my worst parts, fall short of that. If he – who has done more overt work for feminism than I have – has no place in the movement, perhaps I have none, too.

But Schwyzer’s place in the movement ought to be determined on the basis of the needs and dynamics of that movement, and his own nature and history (hopefully, if not probably, considered objectively). My reflexive willingness to absolve him is more about my needs than his, and thus less about the needs of the movement than either of those. Which is another form of distraction for male feminists (or, at least, for me), and another stumbling block to seeing clearly and acting forthrightly and effectively.

That’s the lesson I take for myself from this, and, like so many lessons learned in growth as a feminist and humanist, particularly as a man of privilege, it is not an easy one to recognize, still less absorb.

This video is great in so many ways: Taylor’s discussion of the ways society makes her life with an impairment harder or easier; her description of the psychological burden in going into a coffee shop and ordering coffee, and then having to deal with the difficulties of either trying to carry it herself or asking for help – “it’s a political protest for me to go in”; the simple and lovely depiction of two affectionate people being out together, while not pretending the issue of disability doesn’t affect them; the segment in which they go into a used-clothing store (which charges by the pound! – I love San Francisco!) and buy Taylor a warm sweater, which is both a perfectly simple and normal act, and complicated by the ways impairment affects her ability to try it on and the process of payment – ending with the store clerk’s matter-of-factly accommodating reaction. Taylor works in a useful bit of disability-theory: the distinction between “impairment” (physical limitations) and “disability” (difficulties in living caused by social context or discrimination), and the video underscores that point again and again as Taylor goes about her day and talks about how disability affects her. (I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that she has “what the medical world has labeled as arthrogryphosis”. I’m very much sympathetic to the notion of individualized definitions of disease and health, but I don’t think that means there’s no such thing as a diagnosible condition. I see no reason to say that she doesn’t really have arthrogryphosis if she meets the diagnostic criteria for it – as, by her own description, she seems to do. Pointedly repudiating her own use of that name, as she does in the video, doesn’t seem to me to gain anything; whether she wants to call it a “disease” is another matter.) There are also brilliant moments of reflection on the nature of embodiment and what it means to live an embodied life in a social context.

Just a beautiful, sweet film with surprisingly profound content, visually and verbally. I can’t wait to see the rest of this series.

Taylor:     When do you still count as a human?

Butler:     My sense is that what’s at stake here is really rethinking the human as a site of interdependency.

. . .

Butler:     [When] you ask for the coffee, or indeed even ask for some assistance with the coffee, you’re basically posing the question “Do we or do we not help each other with basic needs?”

HT: sexgenderbody

Jill righteously calls him out for it (as did many others):

The deflecting from legitimate concerns, and the fact that the OWS “public” includes a lot of men who think it’s ok to treat women at a protest like we’re there for their visual fulfillment, troubles me. No one is saying, “Don’t find women attractive.” . . . No one is objecting to the fact that straight men are attracted to some women (fun fact: straight women are also attracted to some men! So really, no one is pissed about attraction, I promise). What people are pissed about is what Rebecca Traister says:

“The larger, simpler argument, outside of consent or permission, is: This video is sexist. It’s an example of women participating in public life — political, professional, social — and having their participation reduced to sexual objectification. That’s what happened here, nothing more, nothing less.” . . .

Emphasis mine. . . . [C]reating a blog and a video dedicated to showing women at a protest with the sole purpose of reminding dudes that women at the protest are hot? That does reduce women to objects of male attention. It’s another reminder, for women, that how seriously we’re taken and how valuable we are depends on how sexually attractive we’re deemed.

Read the whole thing; she’s got good things to say. But the part that really triggered something for me was this:

Frankly, the kinds of dudes who would come to the OWS protests because they heard there are hot chicks there? Are not the kinds of dudes I want to be protesting with. I would hope they’re not the kinds of dudes that most progressives would want to be protesting with — but judging by the lefty-dude reaction to Steven Greenstreet (hi Matt Zoller Seitz, looking at you!), that’s not the case. It’s disappointing.

To say the least. And far too common, from way back. It’s no secret that supposedly “progressive” groups have always been rife with sexism and sexual pressuring, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Progressives have never been immune to human failings, including stereotyping and bigotry of the kind that they supposedly abhor but sometimes don’t recognize in themselves; the long fight for acceptance in progressive movements of gays and transexuals is one case in point, and the difficulty many white (and especially male heterosexual) liberals have in recognizing and acknowledging their own privilege is another. But the LGBTQ community, people of color, and other marginalized groups, though still embattled, have by now to a considerable degree been granted by progressives the one thing many persist in denying to women: recognition of the fact that they have real interests, problems, and worth that must be taken seriously. The situation is far from perfect, and not everybody agrees on how the tensions between different progressive constituencies should be resolved, but in most cases they are acknowledged, and the human pain and human interests that lie at their heart are given due deference. Except in the case of women.

To be sure, progressives are not right-wingers. They don’t overtly hate women. They don’t gleefully consign them to death by deliberate neglect at the hands of sniffy sex-negative religious bigots. They don’t dishonestly and cynically strain moral concepts – often ones introduced and championed by progressives – such as “informed consent” to create barriers to the very autonomy they are intended to protect. They don’t penalize the fact of women’s having sexual natures – just the opposite! But in too many cases they don’t grant them the respect and freedom needed to act on their own natures and seek their own good. Just as with conservatives, women exist for far too many progressive men for the purpose of their gratification – an impersonal usage that erases those women as persons themselves.

Which leads me, finally, to the question that came up for me on surveying this latest stupid and distasteful incident: how, exactly, are these dipshit “progressive” men progressives? What goes through their heads, what process takes place in their heads, such that they wind up thinking things like “let’s go to the OWS protest and photograph women’s breasts!”? How, when they are called out for that, do they expend so much energy defending their childishness and sexism? Why do they not care about offending or humiliating their supposed fellow activists – about derailing or undermining the movement they claim to support – about embarrassing that movement by acting in a regressive manner and then elevating their own bad behavior into the limelight? More particularly, what is it that allows progressives to empathize with everyone but women, even women in their own movement? What allows them to hear everyone else’s protests at mistreatment, and dismiss those of women out of hand?

In a way, I suppose it has something in common with the denial and self-absorption that allowed Southern slave-holders to rationalize their own crimes. Patriarchy is its own form of slavery, more complex and less overt, but very real, and it is very hard to acknowledge you are doing wrong when your entire lifestyle, all its comforts and conveniences and pleasures, derives so much from others’ service to your needs. It is easy to protest obvious wrongs that don’t require you to change your own life to amend. But progressive men, in many cases, are no better than the privileged classes of the Confederacy, of apartheid South Africa, of Wall Street itself, at admitting that their own satisfaction depends on bending others to their desires, against their will and at the denial of their basic human personhood.

You can’t be progressive just for causes you aren’t invested in, at the expense of people you don’t like. Being progressive means wanting to live in a better world – not just wanting to take down the most guilty in this one and then carry on regardless. Being progressive means checking your privilege, living the dream you envision, being part of the solution – all slogans that have at their heart the basic truth that you have to be as critical of yourself as you are of others, or more so, since you can only really change yourself.

You aren’t a progressive if you mistreat women. You aren’t a progressive if you think progressivism is defined as rallies, protests, and events, rather than a mindset that is grounded on a world in which people are treated with respect, by everyone, starting with yourself. You aren’t a progressive if you go to events but don’t treat the people there with regard. You aren’t a progressive if you revel in your own privileges at the expense of the pain and diminishment of others, then feel hurt because you’ve decided that whatever superficial support you feel for “the cause” entitles you to use others for your pleasure and then resent it when they object.

If you’re not a progressive for any of these reasons, you’re little better than a reactionary even if you vote the right way. You’re pro-choice? Great. You don’t think being pro-choice encompasses the choice to control, and present, your own sexuality on your own terms? You’re not a progressive, and you’re a pain and an embarrassment to those who sincerely try to be.

What got me onto this is that there’s just so much cool stuff in this post and the comments thread. I don’t have anything to say about the basic question of natural transitioning, but I want to point out several things that come up in the discussion.

First, it’s interesting that this post arose on a skeptic (i.e., atheist, anti-paranormal) site in the first place. Transexuality isn’t inherently an issue for skeptics, but the questioner identified as a skeptic and was apparently feeling vulnerable as both a transexual and a skeptic, so sought out a welcoming community. He found the right place: DebGod happens to be gender-queer, and is knowledgeable about transexuality and a former bodybuilder, and the community of readers was supportive. From some of the comments, it appears that many perceive the skeptical community as not uniformly welcoming for LGBTQ people – something I hadn’t known or expected. This post included some interesting discussion of LGBTQ issues among skeptics, and raises questions that – especially in light of the recent conflict over misogyny among skeptics (notably involving another prominent Skepchick poster) – I hope the skeptical community will take the opportunity to address.

More importantly, DebGod’s response is a model of careful and helpful analysis. She gives her own background, with appropriate disclaimers, then lays out the issues clearly and concisely. She notes red flags with the claims being made (no professional credentials, buzzwords, trademarked terminology, skeptical responses from people directly affected). She then reviews the suggested procedure, notes that it relies heavily on biochemical supplements, comments intelligently on their purity and efficacy, and discusses the vague distinction between “natural” and “non-natural” that the promoters take advantage of. She seeks information from a more knowledgeable source. Shen then concludes by running down all the issues this analysis raises, categorically, giving pros and cons for each and pointing out dangers. This is a really well-done, intelligent, well-argued analysis, at least as good as that commonly seen from Quackwatch or prominent skeptics like PZ Myers.

What I really like about DebGod’s analysis is that she is carefully value-neutral in all of this. Though it’s clear that there is much to be worried about in this suggested regimen, she never takes it on herself to make other people’s decisions for them. Her final statement is a clear and balanced sketch of the relationship between all the competing factors – health, personal goals, available support, and insurance or income – that influence a decision among the many different options for transitioning; she doesn’t declare any of them right or wrong for any individual, but makes it clear that each may be better or worse under different conditions. She includes just a single sentence offering her opinion that the “natural” process is too risky and low-benefit, but clearly identifies it as her own perspective and doesn’t insist that anyone else has to adopt it. She really gets her role as guide and analyst, as opposed to parent, judge, or dictator – something that so many culture-critic blowhards, and even many licensed professionals, can’t accept.

As she notes:

When it comes to gender identity and transsexualism, where you want to go, who you want to be, and how you want to do it is up to you, of course.

- a message that needs to be heard more widely, and not just regarding transexualism.

That leads to another issue that comes up obliquely, but importantly, in the comments. The medical community’s response to transexualism has been mixed, in ways that have generated a lot of resentment in the T/Q community even when the doctors and psychologists thought they were being helpful. For many years, transexuals seeking medical treatment in the US were commonly required to conform to the so-called “Harry Benjamin Standards of Care” (now the “World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care”), requiring extensive counseling and explicit authorization from multiple psychologists, and a set period of pre-treatment life in the transitioned gender, before professionals would agree to provide the requested treatment. Those standards have been eased but still exist. Many critics have pointed out that this is not only paternalistic but unnecessary – transexual patients have a higher level of success and satisfaction with their treatment than patients of many other conditions, including cosmetic procedures, that do not involve such heavy-handed gatekeeping. The professional societies – starting in the 1950s, when this work was extremely controversial – saw themselves as protecting patients and preventing harmful mistakes, while also going to lengths to provide treatments that more conservative caregivers would have prohibited in the first place. Patients, however, saw it as condescending, offensive, and wasteful of time and money. (Note that in other parts of the world, clinical standards for transexual therapy are much looser or non-existent; there is no known epidemic of regretful genderflippers.)

There are some very interesting comments from “natalie1984″ noting that the sex-reassignment gatekeeping system has been eroded in recent years, and along with it the stereotyped view of what it means to “really” be transexual or gender-dysphoric in the first place. Not only has therapy become more accessible, but what kind of therapy and what therapeutic endpoint the patient seeks have also been thrown open. As she notes: “Now we’re all able to simply work out for ourselves who we are and what we want from transition, and what will make us feel happiest”. She speaks with understanding of why many healthcare professionals are not current on T/Q issues, and simply encourages patients to find caregivers they are comfortable with. There’s also an interesting exchange further down the thread between her and one of the promoters of the natural therapy. She comes across as uncompromising but smart, thoughtful, and understanding.

There’s more, including the politics of gendered pronouns, but even just this adds up to a rich and complex discussion, with intersections between skepticism, healthcare autonomy, gender issues, and, vaguely, perhaps some philosophy-of-science stuff. What this post brings up for me is the deeply connected ways in which such issues always do surface in any similar debates over the proper application of facts to values – that is, the use of science or medicine to achieve chosen goals in human lives, and the conflicts that arise between those who control the science and those whose goals are at stake. It is common in ethics and philosophy of science to emphasize the “fact/value distinction”, but real cases often dredge up facts – and perceived facts – from many aspects of our lives, and competing values that arise from very different lived perspectives.

In this one issue, the skeptical community provides a useful mindset for analyzing clinical claims, but has also been charged with hostility to the LGBTQ community in whose interests those questions are asked. The “natural health” community offers the autonomy and self-direction that many patients want, but also harbors liars and scammers. The doctors who invented the sex-assignment gatekeeping system that so many transexual people hate did so as a way to make it possible for those patients to get care than had never previously been available. It is impossible for anyone to assert an exclusive claim to the moral or epistemological high ground here.

This stuff is hard, and, like so many progressive programs, requires a dedication to working through all the implications of a given position, and to striving to make one’s positions more defensible, more responsive, and more accepting. Every one of these communities – the skeptics, the healthcare professionals, the alternative-health promoters, and to some degree the LGBTQ population as well – have work to do in that way. Some of it has been done, though, and some of it is being done now, over at Skepchick. Good start.

He’s been in the news lately for making bizarre comparisons of gay marriage to beer, a cup of tea, and a paper napkin – all predicated upon the rather obvious but undeniable point that “it is what it is. Right? You can call it whatever you want, but it doesn’t change the character of what it is”. This is a claim on which Santorum congratulates himself by describing it as “sort of metaphysical”, but might otherwise be categorized as “sort of idiotic”. Apparently it means something to him, though, because he keeps saying it – most recently in a just-posted interview on the Iowa Independent Website: “It’s like going out and saying, ‘That tree is a car.’ Well, the tree’s not a car. A tree’s a tree. Marriage is marriage.” He goes on to spew a frothy mixture of crazy in a wide arc: gay marriage “minimizes what that bond means to society” (by letting people . . . form that bond . . .); “you’re gonna undermine religious liberty in this country” (his examples consist exclusively of the liberty to prevent other people from doing things); “we’ve created something that is not what it is” (so much for the tautological metaphysics).

But there’s a particular moment in the interview I want to highlight, because it captures so perfectly the ideological dishonesty, and complete divorce from reality, of the right-wing, and particularly the anti-choice movement.

If your position on abortion prevails and abortion is prohibited, Senator, what should the penalty be for a woman who obtains an abortion or a doctor who performs one?

Santorum: I don’t think there should be criminal penalties for a woman who obtains an abortion. I see women in this case as a victim. I see the person who is performing the abortion as doing the illegal act

This is a common, but relatively recent, dodge for anti-choicers. Throughout history, in the US and many other countries, when abortion was illegal (and it was not always or universally, or even commonly, so), women who sought abortion were held guilty of a crime; a woman who successfully obtained an abortion was often jailed, and women who were injured in illegal abortions were arrested when they sought medical treatment. This was a major contributor to the death rate from illegal abortion: not only could women not find safe providers, but they were fearful of seeking treatment when their unsafe abortions went wrong. This was never, for the anti-choicers, a reason not to make abortion illegal. But it was viciously cruel, and that cruelty became part of the justification for legalizing abortion. The deadly legacy of the lack of choice has likewise been part of the motivation to keep abortion safe and women out of jail, against the misogynistic war to reverse both those developments.

Yet, there is a logic (if not a “metaphysics”) to the war on women who procure abortion: if abortion really is the horrible crime the right wing claims, it’s hard to grant impunity to people who plan, solicit, and participate in that crime. If abortion is murder, surely the one who knowingly seeks, requests, pays for, and submits to an abortion, deliberately, by choice and preference, knowing its meaning and consequences, must be a murderer, at least as much so as the medical professionals who perform the procedure (and surely more so in the case of medical abortion, in which the professional’s only role is to write or fill a prescription, but the woman’s intentional agency is just as extensive as in a surgical procedure). And the idea that someone who solicits, hires out, and participates in a serious crime – let alone “murder” – is not guilty would be a travesty of the law in the case of any real crime.

The willingness to absolve women of initiating, paying for, and participating in a crime for which the person they paid, who acted on that woman’s own body at her request, will be punished under law reflects no sensible understanding of criminal guilt. It is a purely political move intended to head off a backlash against the anti-choice movement for victimizing women legally as well as medically. It is an attempt to evade the public’s revulsion at the right wing’s treating uppity women as the criminals the wingers say that they are – and to prevent the spectacle of women languishing in jail for simply claiming their own fertility through an act that one out of three women in the US has undertaken in her lifetime. It is a deliberate decision to void their own moral judgments for political expediency – to let a category of so-called “crimes” go unprosecuted to avoid drawing scrutiny to the ways the criminalization of healthcare affects women in general, and thus maintain that oppression in broader effect. It is an all-but-explicit declaration that the ideology that they claim justifies their persecution of women is itself expendable if it would get in the way of persecuting women – that making women suffer is more important than consistently and honestly applying the ideological framework that they use to rationalize that suffering.

But beyond the craven dishonesty and political expedience of the misogynist anti-choice crowd, there is a deep contempt for reality itself. To rationalize their insistence that abortion is a crime, and simultaneous refusal to hold women accountable for their choice to commit that “crime”, they have to characterize the act as criminal but the deliberate commission of it not. Who commits criminal acts but is not a criminal? People who are mentally incompetent, or coerced. Thus: “I see women in this case as a victim”.

This is another popular trope of the misogynist right: women are incapable of agency in their own disapproved choices. The idea that women are commonly “pressured” into abortion is a staple of anti-choice activism, as is the idea that they don’t really know what they are doing. This, of course, makes no sense legally: whether or not you are “pressured”, you can’t plan, schedule, show up for, pay for, and participate in a crime – after extensive discussion, preparation, and informed consent! – and claim you were acting under duress. (It didn’t work for Patty Hearst, and she was truly coerced.) Nor can you claim, after all that, that you didn’t know what you were doing, nor – the legally important part – does that claim matter as a defense to a criminal charge. (“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”) For women to be exculpable of crime for a crime they planned and participated in, they have to be not just unknowing, or a “victim”, but actually mentally incompetent – a mental child, lacking legal autonomy, unable to give consent for her own choices.

That is the characterization the right wing puts on women – any woman having, or even seeking, an abortion – as their out for criminalizing the act but not the actor. That is how Rick Santorum – and all his Wingnut Woman Hater’s Club fellows – describe every woman who makes a choice they disapprove of: incompetent, non-autonomous, “victimized” by choices they themselves have freely considered, endorsed, and enacted.

But these are not simply more of the crazy opinions and perverse perspectives on women and the world that the right wing wallows in. They are claims of fact – claims about what it is actually like to be a woman who wants an abortion, or simply be a woman who believes abortion is one of the tools she can use to control her own life, take care of her own body, and achieve her own goals. To be a “victim” of one’s own choices and goals, it must be true in fact that you are mentally deficient, not capable of decision-making about yourself as the owner and inhabitant of your own life and body, oppressed by circumstances to the point that you cannot, in literal fact, think straight about yourself. These are claims of psychological fact – claims about the actual mental states of women attempting to assert sexual autonomy – claims about all such women (since the get-out-of-abortion-free card is made available to all women on these grounds).

It is simply impossible that such a claim could be true. It is patently obvious that it is not, in fact, true even about most or very many of the women who choose abortion. (All such women undergo intake counseling and an informed consent discussion. Repeated studies have shown again and again that they are at least as mentally healthy after the fact as are women who have not had an abortion.) The actual facts are clear: women who choose abortion are not mentally deficient, mis-informed, or incapable of making their own decisions. The claim Santorum and his ilk rely on to absolve themselves of the consequences in public opinion of their own misogyny is simply not true. But since it was never intended to be true – only to sound like something that would help them if it were true – that has no effect on their willingness to keep saying it.

What this cashes out as, for me, is the absolute necessity to put women and women’s needs at the center of any discussion about abortion. A third of all women in this country will have an abortion in their lifetime – and that’s with the grinding barriers and hurdles the right wing has put in their way. Tens of millions of them have already had abortions – women from every part of the country, every ethnic and religious group, almost certainly every extended family. In the same way that the “I had an abortion” T-shirt makes that army of normal, everyday, free and independent women visible, and forces the misogynists to question how far they are willing to go in targeting their own friends and family members, we need to make it clear also that those women are not “victims”, nor criminals.

Unless you are willing to call some vast percentage of women in the country – family members, co-workers, the women who raised all those children, taught all those classes, earned all those college degrees, held down all those jobs, accomplished all that they have accomplished and are still doing, and in the course of it knowingly and deliberately and self-affirmingly chose to abort an unwanted pregnancy and were better off for it – mentally ill, mentally incompetent, not in control of their own lives or choices, unable to control their own lives and choices, then you cannot claim their are victims for having made those deliberate and conscious choices. You will have to confront the reality that the women who choose abortion are, in largest part, strong, self-aware, competent, autonomous, and fully responsible for their own lives, values, goals, choices, and actions. And that being anti-choice is an assault on those women and their status as independent and autonomous persons.

Alaska

• Pauline’s Abortion Loan Fund

Arizona

• It’s Your Choice: The Abortion Fund

California

• Reproductive Rights Network of Santa Cruz County
• ACCESS Women’s Health Justice
• Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project (WRRAP)
• Make a Difference Fund

Colorado

• Reproductive Equality Fund of the Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center
• Freedom Fund (Colorado)

District Of Columbia

• DC Abortion Fund
• Justice Fund (DC)

Delaware

• Delaware Pro-Choice Medical Fund

Distrito Federal (Mexico City)

• MARIA Abortion Fund for Social Justice

Florida

• W.O.M.E.N.
• Roe Fund
• North Florida Justice Fund
• Emergency Medical Assistance Inc.
• Women’s Emergency Network
• Broward Women’s Emergency Fund
• Central Florida Women’s Emergency Fund

Georgia

• Women in Need Fund
• Atlanta Pro-Choice Action Committee

Iowa

• deProsse Access Fund of the Emma Goldman Clinic
• Iowa Abortion Access Fund
• Heartland Justice Fund

Illinois

• Illinois Reproductive Justice Fund
• Planned Parenthood of Illinois Reproductive Justice Fund
• Chicago Abortion Fund

Kansas

• Peggy Bowman Second Chance Fund
• Women in Need Fund

Kentucky

• A Fund, Inc.

Massachusetts

• Eastern Massachusetts Abortion Fund
• Abortion Rights Fund of Western Massachusetts
• Jane Fund of Central Massachusetts

Maryland

• June Coleman Reproductive Justice Fund

Maine

• Safe Abortions For Everyone (SAFE)

Michigan

• Fountain Street Church Choice Fund
• Jane Doe Loan Fund
• Jane Doe Fund

Minnesota

• HOTDISH Militia
• Hersey Abortion Assistance Fund

Montana

• Trust Women Fund
• Sarah’s Circle
• Blue Mountain Clinic Access Fund

North Dakota

• North Dakota Women in Need Fund

Nebraska

• Abortion Access Fund

New Hampshire

• New Hampshire Fund for Choice
• Joan Fund

New Jersey

• Justice Fund of Passaic County

New Mexico

• Abortion Assistance Fund of Planned Parenthood New Mexico
• New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice

Nevada

• Justice Fund

New York

• Abortion Fund of Planned Parenthood of NYC
• Joan Bechhofer Fund
• New York Abortion Access Fund
• Access Fund of Aphrodite Medical
• Haven Coalition
• Third Wave Foundation Emergency Abortion Fund

Ohio

• Preterm Cleveland
• Women Have Options
• Cleveland Abortion Network
• Agnes Reynolds Jackson Fund

Oklahoma

• Roe Fund

Ontario

• Canadians for Choice Norma Scarborough Emergency Fund

Oregon

• Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette Abortion Fund
• Network for Reproductive Options

Pennsylvania

• Women’s Medical Fund
• Vivian Campbell Fund
• Margaret C. Rubin Freedom Fund
• Planned Parenthood of Northeast and Mid-Penn Fund for Choice
• Western Pennsylvania Fund for Choice

Rhode Island

• Women’s Health and Education Fund
• Hope Fund

South Carolina

• South Carolina Women’s Choice Fund

South Dakota

• South Dakota Access for Every Woman

Tennessee

• J. Paschall Davis Fund

Texas

• Stigma Relief Fund
• Texas Equal Access Fund
• Lilith Fund
• Jim Wimberly Fund

Virginia

• Richmond Reproductive Freedom Project
• Women in Need Fund
• Blue Ridge Abortion Assistance Fund

Vermont

• Vermont Access to Reproductive Freedom

Washington

• North Idaho Fund
• Women in Need Fund—Renton
• Women in Need Fund—Tacoma
• Abortion Access Network
• Community Abortion Information and Resources Project (CAIR Project)

Wisconsin

• Freedom Fund
• Options Fund
• Women’s Medical Fund

West Virginia

• WV FREE Choice Fund

Wyoming

• Women for Women

I can’t vouch for any of those links or the organizations, but this service is desperately needed. Check them out, make them known, and throw them some bucks. “Because women’s lives matter”, as the NNAF so rightly and tragically puts it.