May 6, 2012

The “Purchase Bubble,” as students and faculty affectionately call their New York state college, rests peacefully in the Westchester County shade. Purchase is a reserve of liberal and fine arts, with a flair for the ...]]> By James Cersonsky

May 6, 2012

The “Purchase Bubble,” as students and faculty affectionately call their New York state college, rests peacefully in the Westchester County shade. Purchase is a reserve of liberal and fine arts, with a flair for the bohemian and a history of left-wing activism. “When we step outside, we realize that we’re pretty progressive,” says Christina Vitolo, a senior studying journalism and gender studies. “We have things like gender-neutral housing and gender-neutral bathrooms. We have professors who are openly gay or have trans partners.”

Vitolo is a co-director of what was, until February, Purchase’s proudest pocket of fresh air: the alternative clinic for women and female-bodied people.

The alt clinic provided gynecological services and counseling for some 150 to 200 students. For two days a week, from 6 to 9 p.m., students could come in for pelvic exams, pregnancy tests, STD tests, dental dams, condoms, peer counseling, and the comfort of tea and conversation with fellow students. Female-bodied people could opt for gynecological care at Purchase Student Health Services, but many found the alt clinic more conscious and accepting of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, and hence a safer environment.

A nurse practitioner administered medical services. Otherwise, the clinic was, as Vitolo says, “completely student run.” Two co-directors were charged with selecting the nurse practitioner, overseeing the clinic’s budget and operations, and leading a team of student interns who received class credit for clerical work, educational outreach, and training around issues of sexuality, gender identity, relationships, and intimate-partner abuse. All funding came from the Purchase Student Government Association and student activity fees.

The women’s liberation movement spawned the alt clinic in 1978. By then the fight for abortion rights, riding older waves of struggle for legalized contraception and federally funded family planning, had galvanized women around a panoply of issues centering on the right to one’s own body: the safety of reproductive and maternity-related drugs; the overuse of invasive surgeries; gender balance among doctors; and communicative, preventive, positive care. Alternative clinics provided autonomous spaces for such “women-centered” health care.

Faced with increased competition for service provision, the medical establishment didn’t exactly cheer on the movement. But mainstream hospitals craftily channeled its energies, internalizing reproductive health care, childbirth education, and patient support groups.

REPRESENTATIVES FROM Purchase Student Health Services met with the student directors, nurse practitioner, and faculty adviser Karen Baird throughout the fall to review the clinic’s practices. The process seemed routine—maybe the student interns would have to get more specific training, or paperwork would have to be re-formalized. Meanwhile, the co-directors were on the lookout for a new nurse practitioner for the coming year.

Come February, they were told they didn’t need one. The clinic’s services were to be shut down. Purchase’s legal counsel decided that student involvement in service provision, from filling out paperwork to answering patient calls, was too great a financial burden given students’ lack of liability and malpractice insurance. Shutting down clinical services wasn’t a recommendation, but a mandate.

A week and a half after the decision, forty students assembled to speak out and chart a course of action. An unofficial taskforce was formed. In March, the clinic’s leaders and school administrators held a panel discussion, followed by an open question and answer session with Ernie Palmieri, Interim Vice President for Student Affairs. Maybe, the administration said, Purchase Health Services could stay open longer to accommodate the clinic’s services. On the basis of Title IX, the extra hours would have to be equally, if nominally, open to men.

“At first I was really upset, and I got even more upset when I thought about how important a service this was,” Vitolo says.

For many, the clinic’s closing resonated with the more visible attack on Planned Parenthood and Title IX funding going on across the country. As Baird put it, “That struggle that happened in the sixties and seventies of non-MD people providing services for women—that’s still the struggle.”

But Rush Limbaugh was nowhere to be seen at Purchase. The decision there was less ideological and much simpler. Though Baird hadn’t been told this until I informed her in our phone conversation, the alternative clinic was investigated because Purchase Student Health Services was seeking accreditation with the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC). According to Palmieri, Purchase’s pursuit of accreditation is a “general maneuver…to have top quality care for our students” following several years of rehabbing health service facilities. Though Palmieri couldn’t cite any direct benefits of accreditation when we spoke, his word on the clinic was clear. If students were sued—for the first time in the clinic’s thirty-three years—“SUNY would not protect the College, and the College would have to pay. A lawsuit would kind of put us out of business.”

Many students weren’t convinced—if they were even aware of what was going on. Vitolo and fellow co-director Erica Basco were the first to inform the student body of the clinic’s closing. “It wasn’t until all of us on campus bombarded the president and other administrators with emails that they started talking to us,” says Melanie Mac Caskie, a student activist and taskforce member. “We never got any statement of support from anyone publicly.”

This lack of communication dovetails with concerns over Purchase’s status, and identity, as a safe space for female-bodied people. “When people talk about the progressiveness of our campus, that’s not exactly true,” says Gabriella Ibacache, a sophomore studying sociology and gender studies and co-president of Feminists Organizing Real Transformation Here (FORTH). “When I think about the group of activists there are and feminists there are, I think the environment is great, but it’s not, because sexual assault is still a huge problem.” Before FORTH was founded last year, the alt clinic was Purchase’s “closest thing to a specifically feminist space.”

In a confusing twist, the Purchase administration doesn’t necessarily support the clinic any less than students do. “The alternative clinic really has come to represent the unique nature of the Purchase College student body,” says Jason Alt, the amiable director of the Office of Student Life and Community Partnerships. “When the liability issues came up, I can assure you that the administration wasn’t just saying, let’s get rid of it.” Instead, Alt claims, shutting down the clinic’s services, and re-envisioning its institutional mission, is a realistic and proactive choice.

When I spoke with Suzanne Kessler, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Vice Provost, gender studies scholar, and women’s lib vet, she pulled out a flyer for a “Forum on Health Care Needs” from 1982, convened by the alt clinic and women’s health advocates in the region and attended by state senators and medical professionals. Admission: $5. Lunch: $3. By now, says Kessler, “women’s safety, women’s rights—it’s all pretty much a no-brainer.” Kessler feels bad about what’s happening to the alt clinic—“for sentimental reasons”—but remains confident that “the students involved keep the advocacy piece of it around women’s health.”

HOW COULD the grassroots and grasstops alike be so easily bulldozed?

The alt clinic’s shutdown is the offspring of a broader movement to make universities run more like corporations—patriarchy dressed in genderless neoliberal garb. Christopher Newfield, an English professor at UC Santa Barbara and author of the popular “Remaking the University” blog, wrote in an email that under neoliberal restructuring, “financial factors come to drive every service decision, and can dominate health outcome objectives as easily as they have been dominating educational goals. In the latter case, budget control can keep educational goals from being articulated in the first place.” There lies the structural violence behind the war on women’s health.

At Purchase, the battle is over which standards to prioritize in austere times. Purchase College’s “Strategic Plan, 2010-2015” advocates “allocat[ing] resources to priority areas as effectively as possible in an uncertain financial landscape” and “streamlining and clarifying administrative policies.” The AAAHC judges institutions according to uncontroversial standards like the rights of patients, quality of care, and facilities, all in the name of ensuring “the highest achievable level of care for recipients in the most efficient and economically sound manner.”

The problem is that proponents of “streamlining” and “economic soundness” tend to reject, by default, a positive commitment to bodily autonomy for female-bodied people. This commitment can be, and has been, articulated as its own set of standards. A 1993 conference run by the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health, for example, declared these core principles: (1) mutual respect between women and health professionals, (2) comprehensive care with a focus on prevention and wellness, (3) a multidisciplinary team approach crossing the boundaries of body systems and medical specialties, (4) education as an integral part of women’s health, and (5) quality control based on clinical outcomes and professional standards.

This war between standards is carried out on a decidedly slanted playing field. Movement forces don’t have the capital leverage of hospital systems and health maintenance organizations—for-profit or not. The issue isn’t that Rupert Murdoch or Charlie Koch owns all these mega-providers, but that they run on a neoliberal logic that deprioritizes feminist and queer standards of care. This puts women’s clinics, especially those that are not part of a larger hospital system, into a difficult position.

Autonomy makes a difference. In Women’s Health Care: Activist Institutions and Institutional Change, Carol Weisman reports that women’s clinics not sponsored by hospitals are more likely than hospital-sponsored centers to be committed to gender balance among doctors on staff (56 versus 37 percent) as well as to feminist ideology (43 versus 14 percent). But competition with large providers makes the benefits of autonomy hard to sustain. Since the explosion of “managed care” under the aegis of HMOs in the early 1990s, women’s health centers have confronted a range of challenges in procuring contracts, in some cases because of operational issues (like having to rewrite medical protocols), in others because managed care standards put centers’ missions at risk (reducing visit times and patient communication, establishing credentialing roadblocks for non-MD staff like nurse practitioners). Among women’s health centers, the for-profit ones are more likely to get these contracts, but less likely to serve underprivileged women, provide educational services for their clients, or involve surrounding communities in center governance.

THE AFFORDABLE Care Act represents hard-fought gains for women’s health. Health plans must now cover certain preventive services and screenings, and obstetrical and gynecological care no longer require prior approval. But the fight against sexism in service delivery, perverse financial incentives among doctors, and the Act’s wanton discrimination against immigrants continues.

Similarly, the movement undergirding the alt clinic’s existence lives on, even without an autonomous space for service provision. The clinic’s services will likely be transferred to Purchase’s newly rehabbed student health facilities sometime after this year, at which point the clinic’s leaders will help select a new nurse practitioner. Meanwhile, the clinic’s interns will ramp up campus outreach, giving presentations on different women’s health issues, hosting political candidates for panels on reproductive rights, running “STI jeopardy,” and more.

The post-shutdown taskforce spreads its tentacles as far as Albany—when the SUNY central administration picks up the phone—and among potential allies in the gender studies faculty and student body. It works in collaboration with alt clinic leadership so that the push to restore what there is to be restored from the clinic doesn’t fall solely on the co-directors. “A lot of it is not letting it go,” Mac Caskie says, “not getting to the end of the school year and leaving it to the administration and student leadership.”

Though the uniqueness of the clinic within the SUNY system has been a bargaining handicap for its advocates, it doubles as a charge to organize at dozens of other campuses across the state. “We’ve gotten a lot more interest now that we’ve been shut down,” Vitolo says. “Now we have an opportunity to reach out to other students on campus and at other schools. Sometimes an artist doesn’t get famous until they die.”

James Cersonsky, YC ’11, is a contributing writer for Broad Recognition. He is a writer and activist based in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared at the Nation, AlterNet, Dissent, and elsewhere. Contact him at cersonsky@aya.yale.edu or follow him on Twitter @cersonsky.

The text of this article first appeared in Dissent Magazine (May 4, 2012) and is reprinted with permission.

Arizona women face another assault on reproductive rights, in the form of a bill advancing in the State Legislation. The unprecedented House Bill 2625 would jeopardize health insurance coverage and even job security. ...]]> By A. GRACE STEIG
March 20, 2012

Arizona women face another assault on reproductive rights, in the form of a bill advancing in the State Legislation. The unprecedented House Bill 2625 would jeopardize health insurance coverage and even job security. Nationally, the Obama administration’s contraception mandate, requiring employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception, includes a wide exemption for faith-based employers, but not wide enough to placate Arizona’s raging lawmakers. No longer content to limit the denial of women’s health coverage to churches, State Representative Debbie Lesko (R-Glendale) has sponsored a bill to allow for-profit businesses and corporations to do the same. The pending bill would allow any employer with a religious or moral objection to refuse insurance coverage for birth control, except in cases where the employee proves she needs it for a medical condition apart from pregnancy prevention. The potential scope of the bill is staggering. An owner of any Arizona company, from a branch of a fast-food chain to a large corporation, would be empowered to insure – or not – based on personal beliefs.

One of the liberties severely deligitimized by the bill is a woman’s right to privacy. In the case of non-contraceptive contraception needs, an employee would be required to reveal her medical condition to her employer. Governor Jan Brewer conceded that she could imagine the forced disclosure to be “a little bit uncomfortable for women.” A more compelling reaction came in one testimony before the Senate committee, by mental health worker Liza Love. She disclosed that she takes birth control to treat endemetriosis, a painful disorder in which cells from the uterus grow excessively in other areas. Though Love revealed her condition, she stressed that sharing or not sharing medical history remains a personal, private choice: “That’s nothing that you as my employer … have a right to know.” To force a woman employee to justify her medical treatment undermines the workplace and personally shames and degrades her before her employer.

The bill proves even more degrading. Women employees may find themselves unceremoniously removed from their workplaces for taking birth control, even if they fund it themselves. As the ACLU shares, the bill will allow employers with a moral objection to birth control to fire an employee who procures contraception by means other than the company’s medical insurance. Paying medical costs out of pocket becomes that much more difficult when you lose your job because of it.

The bill’s sponsor, Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, resorts to nostalgic (read: bafflingly outdated) hyperbole when addressing its premise: “I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union. So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom-and-pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.” Moving past the illogic of declaring contraceptive freedom to be Soviet, we should read in Lesko’s words a frightening redefinition of liberty and personhood. In her statement, she endows “organizations and mom-and-pop employers” with certain personal rights, rights that are not guaranteed the women who work for them. In effect, she holds (in answer to the oft-debated question) that businesses are people, but their employees are – not. By invoking America she bars all debate as unpatriotic and frames the bill as a national, not a state, imperative. Furthermore, by placing “America” first in her statement, she implies that what follows is a fulfillment the country’s values. The bill’s denial of women’s rights is now held to be a feature present – nay, necessary – in American life.

The bill has, rightly, been viewed as another link in a chain of state legislation seeking to divide voters over issues of women’s health. Catholics and social conservatives have mobilized in support of the Republican-sponsored bill. Gov. Brewer, perplexingly, suspects a “Democratic ploy” in the controversy surrounding the bill, which might unjustly alienate Arizona women from the Republican Party. If women are alienated, however, there is nothing unjust about their reaction. In a quest for partisan backing on a federal level, certain Republicans are willing to submit women to this humiliating denial of health coverage and privacy. Anjali Abraham, Public Policy Director for the ACLU, urges lawmakers to consider the local effects of this national debate: “If they’re looking for some sort of tussle with the federal government, I just wish they would keep in mind the consequences for Arizona women and families because they’re the ones that are ultimately hurt by this bill.”

Perhaps ironically, it is this intentionally brewed controversy that could doom the bill. As reported in The Huffington Post, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) stated in an interview on Sunday that he is “confident” that the bill will not be passed, or that if it reached the governor’s desk “it would be vetoed.” As for what the bill’s existence implies for women’s rights, he nodded to a suspected Republican focus on social issues as an election-year tool. When faced with a direct question about a potential “war on women” by Republicans he replied, “I think we need to fix that.” He echoed the certitude of many members of the Democratic and Republican Parties that “We need to get off of that issue [of contraception],” in favor of a return to a discussion on “jobs and the economy.” The bill is another partisan attack in a heated election year, another example of the collateral damage caused to women’s medical rights.

Despite McCain’s certainty of the Lesko bill’s defeat, it has already passed approval from the Arizona House and a Senate committee. It next faces a vote in the Republican-led Senate. Ultimately, if it passes the Senate vote, Gov. Brewer may choose to veto it or sign it into effect. The governor has refused to give her position on the bill.

A. Grace Steig is a freshman in Yale College.  She is the Copy Editor for Broad Recognition.

March 19, 2012

After Betty Dodson spoke to the Yale Political Union, she was kind enough to agree to an interview before heading back home. Broad Recognition caught up with her at her hotel. She was as frank ...]]> By NATHANAEL DERANEY

March 19, 2012

After Betty Dodson spoke to the Yale Political Union, she was kind enough to agree to an interview before heading back home. Broad Recognition caught up with her at her hotel. She was as frank as ever, and the martini she sipped as we talk was for pleasure, not fortification. “I had no idea college students are this conservative,” she says, referring to those on the Right who had spoken against her the previous night. “For an old revolutionary, that was a lot of conservative shit.” But she worries that’s what the country is coming to—we’re all becoming “uptight assholes” about sex, and now is “the worst [she’s] ever experienced.” She describes the Forties and Fifties, when she was growing up, as a free and open time: sex wasn’t mentioned, so it wasn’t moralized about. She grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where, she claims, the fundamentalists who made up half the town prayed for the other half—but in private. They were “praying to save us,” she chuckles, “but we weren’t savable.” “No Fox News then,” her partner, Carlin Ross, adds.

I press her on this point—isn’t it an advance that it’s at least an acceptable subject of conversation? Silence is death and all? No, she says—it just gives the “fundies” airspace. Besides, without TV, “we were doing it, not watching it.” She returns to fundamentalism again, saying, “Religion is a nasty business…ought to outlaw all organized religion. Throw them in the lion’s den again.” These “rabid Christians” will be coming for your bowels next—“every morning, every night, such and such a time. They’ll inspect your product.”

We move on to sex education. “It’s meant to be scary now,” she says, more fruit of the Religious Right. Well, what should it be about? I ask. She comes out with her motto: “Masturbation is the foundation of human sexuality.” With it, people own their bodies. She relates how she got started on her career: she began life as an artist, and in 1970 put on an exhibition of masturbating nudes. “People freaked out,” she says, with a twinkle. She was blackballed and kicked out of the gallery, but she was thrilled to have “found [her] calling—gotta liberate masturbation.” She’s been doing it ever since, braving controversy and loving it.

Her relationship with feminism(s), however, has been stormy. She recounts her first run in with Ms. Magazine. At first they wanted her to write a big article on masturbation, then held it for two and a half years and cut it to two pages. But it generated five thousand letters in response. She’s charitable now. “In some ways I understand,” she says, “They were concerned they’d lose subscriptions. But the whole point is to push the envelope.”

Then she relates another bit of envelope-pushing—and pushback. This was the Eighties, the height of the Porn Wars, Catharine MacKinnon and Ed Meese. “The Eighties were bad for everyone” she disclaims, but that was a feminism she wanted nothing to do with. She walked in on one feminist anti-porn meeting, with a friend from the kink community, and they knew something was up. Too fancy. The CIA, she said; the Religious Right, her friend demurred. Both, they agreed darkly.

That whole fight killed feminism, she says, polarized things and made feminism seem anti-sex. (She is not a Dworkin fan, and refuses to speak kindly of the dead in that case.) “I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder with feminism. In the Seventies they were my enemy,” she relates, let alone the Eighties. Today? “The feminist movement is still very divided [between] the ones who want to embrace sexuality, and the ones who are…not comfortable with it.” But she has nothing but love for Yale feminists. The three folks from SWAY who sat in front at the debate? “Fabulous!” Those kind of feminists are “the hope for the future.”

Things are drawing to a close, so I ask for last words. I get lots, but first I get her bywords: “Orgasm! Orgasmic energy is the creative energy. If you want a good, full life—incorporate that into it!” And again, “masturbation is the foundation for all human sexual activity. It’s the way a baby first discovers its genitals…and it’s all positive energy, all good. If you block that, and repress it, and control it, you’re setting up the next war.” Bottom line? “We have to honor pleasure. And we have to have more fun.”

You can visit Dodson and Ross at their website, dodsonandross.com — and you can also view their take on their Yale experience here.

Nathanael Deraney is a junior in Berkeley College. He is a contributing writer for Broad Recognition.

March 14, 2012

Dear Dilemma Emma,

Recently, my girlfriend asked to borrow my computer, only to find several porn links in my browser history–nothing particularly raunchy, but still–and asked me for an explanation. It was clear to me ...]]> By DILEMMA EMMA

March 14, 2012

Dear Dilemma Emma,

Recently, my girlfriend asked to borrow my computer, only to find several porn links in my browser history–nothing particularly raunchy, but still–and asked me for an explanation. It was clear to me that she was upset, and not wanting to make things worse I lied and said that I didn’t know how they got there. Obviously, this was a flimsy excuse, and I don’t believe she bought it, but the matter dropped pretty quickly.

What bothered me about the situation was less that my girlfriend disapproved of my porn habit–certainly within her rights–but that I felt compelled to lie about something so trivial in the first place, and in such a silly and unconvincing way. If the action or idea of watching porn doesn’t make me feel especially ashamed, why when confronted with the links did I feel it necessary to disavow any knowledge of how they got there? My GF and I are pretty open in discussing almost all other facets of our sexuality, and so I find it a bit puzzling why porn, exclusively, made me feel it necessary to be dishonest.

Sincerely,
Pants on Fire

Dear PoF,

Ah porn prowling– the path to many a flimsy lie.  Why?  Because our interactions with porn are a part of sexuality that we don’t discuss.  It’s easy to ask a friend or partner about sex they’ve had with real, live people.  Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I get pretty intimate details about my friends’ sex lives.  For example, “She actually growled a little bit, like an animal, and then I came.”  Or even, “He rubbed his sweaty feet on my vagina.  It was fucking gross.”  In the right context, many of us offer these intimate details of our sex lives without much provocation.  We do this because it feels good for loved ones to know about and acknowledge these experiences.  We are reassured when people we care about don’t reject the sexual experiences we have had.

Once it comes to seeking out prepackaged, manufactured stuff of arousal (PORN), we shut up.  But why do we do this?  What’s so embarrassing about porn?  The problem isn’t porn, per se, but rather our relationship to porn.  A browser history full of porn is a record, an instant replay, of a poor approximation of what turned us on once in the social vacuum of masturbation.  Porn allows for zero evolution or interplay.  Porn is not a plastic, passionate, journey.  Enjoying porn is one of the only static sexual experiences we can have.  It requires our nebulous desires to become concrete and limited.

Another problem with porn is that we seek it out, accept it, or reject it for reasons we wouldn’t seek, accept, or reject sex with others.  That is, we choose porn based on a moan, a uniform, a piercing, or a kink that may be attractive on the screen, but not with other humans.  Very possibly, we might like to watch fucked up fucking (something “particularly raunchy,” however you define that).  I’ve written before about politically problematic sexual interests.  If you feel unsettled by some of your own sexual desires, chances are that their bastardized manifestations in porn trouble you even more.  Perhaps you lied because you feared your girlfriend would assume that this is the extent of your desires.  Perhaps you feared she would question its departure from your living, breathing sex life.  How scary to think that our fantasies could be reduced to a browsing history.  If anything, we would need an annotated bibliography of porn sites, explaining the function of each text within a masturbatory foray and contextualizing them within ever changing lust.

At the end of the day, your girlfriend didn’t find an annotated bibliography.  She found a misleading window into your masturbation that was finite and lackluster and maybe a little disturbing.  You didn’t say where you want to go from here.  Do you want to come clean about the lie?  Do you want to rally for greater honesty in the future?  In either case, my advice is to put porn in its place.  Remind yourself (and possibly your girlfriend) that porn does not represent  the full complexity of your arousal.  Allow yourself to move on from whatever interaction you have with a certain pornographic image, story, or video as you move through your desires.

You are more than your browsing history, kid.  You’re a sexual snowflake that the internet can’t hold down.

Love,
Emma

Dilemma Emma wants to hear from you! Anonymously voice your concerns or questions. Questions will be answered every week and will remain completely anonymous. Send them over to yalebroads@gmail.com.

March 13, 2012

On February 2, Jezebel reported that on January 12, Temmie Breslauer, a transgender woman living in New York City, was arrested for illegally using a discount subway card that belonged to her father. ...]]> By CHAMONIX ADAMS PORTER

March 13, 2012

On February 2, Jezebel reported that on January 12, Temmie Breslauer, a transgender woman living in New York City, was arrested for illegally using a discount subway card that belonged to her father. Breslauer was taken into custody by the police, and asked “whether she had a penis or a vagina.” Despite the fact that she responded that she is trans, and produced medical documents indicating that she is in transition, she was chained to a fence with one arm raised above her head. Breslauer was left chained to the fence for twenty-eight hours.

During her detainment the police repeatedly called Breslauer  derogatory names and maliciously mislabeled her gender identity: “he-she,” “faggot,” “Lady Gaga,” and “transvestite.” Police repeatedly used the pronouns “he” and “him” to refer to her. They refused her requests to be moved to a women’s or private cell or let her go to the bathroom.

The police also deliberately subjected Breslauer to sexual harassment. The fence to which she was chained was six feet away from a men’s holding pen. She was repeatedly propositioned, taunted, and hit with crumpled paper and soda cans.

Although other prisoners who had been arrested for the same behavior as Breslauer were quickly processed, she was left to wait for 28 hours. She was then taken to Central Booking, where she was informed there was not a place for her. She returned to the police station and was chained to the same wall for another eight hours. Finally, she was taken before a judge and sentenced to two days of community service for her minor crime.

Breslauer is suing the New York Police Department for her treatment, which triggered severe posttraumatic stress disorder and caused her to consider suicide. In her complaint, Breslauer notes that the New York Human Rights Law explicitly protects transgender people from such treatment.

Jezebel goes on to report that this incident was and is not isolated. Justin Adkins, the director of the Multicultural Project at Williams College, was arrested for chaining himself to the Brooklyn Bridge with Occupy Wall Street, and received nearly identical treatment. He, too, was left chained to a fence, taunted for his gender identity, and harassed. As he noted, the NYPD has no polices detailing the correct treatment of transgender people.

It is undeniably wrong that Breslauer was subjected to inhuman treatment because of her gender identity.  However, it is gross simplification to think that this is the only problem with the situation. That the police chain anyone to a fence for 28 hours is unacceptable in and of itself—this is only compounded by the fact that in Breslauer’s case the brutality was bias-motivated. The discussion needs to move beyond the sole issue of treatment of trans identities, or else it will not truly question the limits of police power and violence.

Breslauer’s experience is not unique by any means. As previously reported on Broad Recognition, violence against trans people is endemic in prisons in the United States. Not only are trans people subject to violence at the hands of other prisoners as well as prison employees, gender segregation, routine denial of transition-related heath care, and lack of privacy is in and of itself transphobic. However, this police brutality runs rampant across the system: against women, people of color, disabled people, undocumented immigrants, and the poor.

Breslauer’s case serves to illustrate the flimsiness of legal protections for all oppressed minorities. As the complainants noted, the New York Human Rights Law explicitly disallows trans people to be treated in the way that Breslauer was. What would have happened, though, had she been treated “correctly” by the police? She would have been subjected to an inhumane prison system, and sentenced not just to time in prison, but to sexual violence, long-term personal, emotional, and economic harm, and the state-sanctioned violence of a bigoted prison system.

It is also unlikely that such outcry would have come were Breslauer participating in a more heavily criminalized activity. Her use of the discount card was clearly not immensely harmful to anyone. Adkins was respectfully protesting. If either, though, had been involved in the trade of sex or drugs—which, because of employment discrimination and poverty, many trans people do—then their arrests, and even the brutality, would widely be seen as warranted.

Feminist commentary has the potential to create real change in such instances of violence. First, though, feminists need to change the ways in which we talk about and represent violence against women, trans women in particular. A white woman’s feet, in sparkly high heels, wrapped in chains, precedes the Jezebel article. The image is sexually charged, kinky, and provocative. This is deeply problematic in a number of ways. Firstly, this sensationalizes the sexuality of the woman involved, which is double inappropriate as Breslauer’s arrest, though fraught with sexual violence, had nothing to do with actual sexual acts. The image also serves to sensationalize trans bodies by emphasizing their sexuality, and very possibly amplifying the femininity of Breslauer’s clothing. The chain serves to romanticize the police state and its systemic violence by conflating it with sexual imagery of both consensual sadomasochism and the fantasy of reluctance. The image incorrectly frames Jezebel’s argument, and minimizes the gravity of the experience for all involved.

Temmie Breslauer was treated brutally because she is trans. The violence that she faced, though, indicates far more than the transphobia of the NYPD. Breslauer was the victim of a criminal punishment system that further disadvantages all marginalized people. To critique her punishment only in the context of transphobia is to miss an opportunity to revise the ways in which policing happens in the United States. Feminist and other progressive news sources must engage in an ongoing process of self-reflection and improvement to ensure that their representations of these issues are clear, unsensationalized, and accurate. By reframing the discussion of Breslauer’s shocking story, activists can work towards a more just future.

Chamonix Adams Porter is a freshman in Yale College.  She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

Rush Limbaugh is wrong, Rush Limbaugh is wrong, Rush Limbaugh is wrong. Rush Limbaugh is wrong—we’re all tired of saying it. He’s wrong not only in his hypocrisy and his misogyny but also his facts. ...]]> By JULIA CALAGIOVANNI
March 7, 2012

Rush Limbaugh is wrong, Rush Limbaugh is wrong, Rush Limbaugh is wrong. Rush Limbaugh is wrong—we’re all tired of saying it. He’s wrong not only in his hypocrisy and his misogyny but also his facts. Some simple questions—How does insurance work? How does birth control work? How much does it cost? Why do people take it?—would do wonders here. Rush Limbaugh is wrong—but he doesn’t care. When you can slut-shame a woman gleefully, unabashedly, widely, what use are facts? He’s obviously not interested in logic, or fact, or reality. Luckily, Broad Recognition is.

It was bad enough when Fluke was denied the right to speak about women’s health at an all-male Congressional hearing in February. Then Limbaugh took to the air last week calling her a “slut,” a “prostitute,” and “round-heeled,” and suggesting that she post sex videos online since taxpayers were “paying” for her sexual activity. Then came the half-hearted “apology:” “my choice of words was not the best.”

Indeed. Not only were they misogynistic and crude, they were wrong.

Fluke is not “having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception;” one’s need for contraception (of the kind Fluke is fighting for) does not depend on how much sex one is having. Funnily enough, contraception does not work like another medication Limbaugh is presumably more familiar with: Viagra.  Its quantity, and thus its cost, is not dependent on the actual frequency of sex; it’s one Pill per day or IUD for the lifetime of the device.

But another issue lies beyond Limbaugh’s misunderstanding of “how contraception works:” his apparent belief that a woman having “too much sex” does not deserve to have her basic health needs met. While, unfortunately, Fluke’s sex life has been a topic of fascination in the conservative media, feminists can agree that her sexual choices have no bearing on whether or not she (or her friend, on whose behalf she had planned to testify) gets the health services she needs. Limbaugh’s view is clear: a woman having too much sex deserves to be shamed and punished.

The conservative pundit has added another layer of unfounded panic by suggesting that taxpayers would have to pay for the health services in question. Taxpayers would not (not, not, not) be covering these costs. Neither would Georgetown, a Catholic university. Under the Obama administration’s proposal, a religious employer or university will not have to “provide, pay for or refer for” contraception, but the insurer must provide it free of charge.

Rush has done some math. He divided the $3000 Fluke cites as the amount a Georgetown student will spend to have safe sex over the three years she is a student by the cost of a single condom to arrive at the conclusion that an individual would have to have sex five times a day for three years to total that cost. Basic division—good work. Basic knowledge of women’s health needs? Not so much.

Condoms are, of course, a form of contraception, but not the only form. Birth control is not one-size-fits-all; the cheapest form may not be the most suitable. Side effects may be intolerable; a generic may be unavailable; a certain kind of medication may be necessary for a particular medical condition. Because contraceptives are just that—medication. Pharmaceutical substances for biological conditions.

In many cases, like that of the friend whose experience Fluke had planned to share at the hearing, it doesn’t have anything to do with sex at all, but debilitating and potentially deadly conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, or severely heavy periods.
And even when it does have to do with sex, it’s still none of Limbaugh’s business. Comprehensive health care is a necessity—not a privilege, and not one to be denied to someone because someone else has decided that their sexual choices are somehow objectionable.  While the debate wears on, the burden is real: 40% of those Fluke surveyed said that the costs they paid out of pocket for reproductive healthcare had been a hardship.

The fallout from Limbaugh’s most recent rants has been swift—many advertisers have pulled their ads from Limbaugh’s show. But plenty of people agree with Limbaugh. Plenty of people would like to see women shamed for daring to say that they have a right to comprehensive healthcare, to live their lives without the fear of unintended pregnancy or preventable illness. Rush Limbaugh is their loudest voice—but here’s to hoping reason will prevail.

Julia Calagiovanni is a freshman in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

March 7, 2012

College, for many, is a place and time when one realizes and grows into his or her identity. For a variety of communities, Yale, while not perfect, has been a comfortable and safe environment in ...]]> By JORDAN SMITH

March 7, 2012

College, for many, is a place and time when one realizes and grows into his or her identity. For a variety of communities, Yale, while not perfect, has been a comfortable and safe environment in which to define and understand oneself. Following last week’s “exciting” announcement concerning the extension of gender-neutral housing to the rising junior class, people were led to conclude that Yale was once again embracing its progressive history and championing the rights of all students to a happy and healthy living environment. While this decision is indeed significant, it is important to be mindful its shortcomings.

We as students are those most impacted by this decision, yet our influence was not commensurate in the process of decision making. A committee was formed to investigate both how the two years of the option had proceeded and how much interest in the extension of the policy existed. A report of the committee’s findings was compiled on our behalf by the Yale College Council, and we then were forced to wait for the outcome of a debate held in relative secret. I will not delve too deeply into the issue of the shadowy power structure the Yale Corporation represents, as it has already been done in a commendable fashion by another writer for Broad Recognition, but the group’s role in the process must at the very least be acknowledged and questioned.

In essence, the final decision was never ours to make, something that should leave none of us feeling entirely optimistic or comfortable regarding the future status of gender-neutral housing. It is not enough to be thankful that the appropriate decision was eventually reached. We must assert our right as those most affected to have the most seats at the proverbial table. It is far too easy to view this decision as expediency on the part of the Yale Corporation. Denying the option of gender-neutral housing to everyone would have doubtlessly led to more backlash than the corporation deemed worth facing. Accordingly, the option was granted to us, but once again, on a temporary basis and to a small subset of the student body. Why should this satisfy us? At what point does gender-neutral housing transition from a tenuous privilege to an enumerated right? Why is that consideration left to a group of men and women few of us know, fewer of us have met, and none of whom are answerable to us for at least fifty years, when the minutes of these meetings come to light?

In the face of overwhelmingly positive feedback, it is rather troubling that Yale is so reluctant to make gender-neutral housing a permanent policy. The interviews conducted by the Yale College Council found that members of gender-neutral suites deemed them to be their best living experiences at Yale. Melanie Boyd, in her post as Special Advisor to the Dean on Gender Issues, posited that extending the option of gender-neutral housing would go a long way towards taming the dangerous and harmful sexual climate at Yale. Does it not therefore stand to reason that giving this option to a greater percentage of the student body (namely, all of it) would foster a more tolerant and aware community? Ms. Boyd also dispelled the misconception that men and women living together would lead to greater occurrences of sexual misconduct, a concern voiced by the few students opposed to the idea of gender-neutral housing and the primary worry that has been attributed to the university in its silent, former opposition to the extension of the option. If the specialist appointed by Yale does not believe that the risk of sexual harassment or violence is inherently greater in mixed gender living arrangements, it is hard to believe that this is truly the Yale Corporation’s primary hesitation in a permanent commitment to this option. If my assumption is incorrect, and that risk is indeed their greatest concern, why did they hire an expert they did not plan on listening to? If the post was created purely to appease students or the Department of Education in the wake of escalating numbers of sexually charged incidents, we should not be appeased. We do not need more administrative appointments; we need administrative action.

Most critically, in framing this issue, it should be noted that we should be more concerned for those students most in need of this option. While it is comforting to know that half of the undergraduate body now has the option of gender-neutral housing, that is simply not enough. We should only be satisfied when one hundred percent of people are able to live in situations that promote their respective safety and happiness. The provision of rights to this minority does not impact the majority. We must think of the freshmen transgender students, who are forced to indicate whether they are male or female, and are assigned to a room accordingly. We must think of the sophomores, who are unable to live off-campus in order to avoid dealing with the lack of gender-neutral housing. We must recognize above all that this heteronormative conception of housing is incredibly backwards at an institution that prides itself on being forward-thinking. Thus far, the university has done only the minimum in order to allay our frustrations. In extending this option only to juniors and seniors, the university has only shown their growing cognizance of the difficulties facing these marginalized students, not their commitment to solving them.

Jordan Smith is a Yale student. He is a contributing writer for Broad Recognition.

March 5, 2012

Elspeth Brown is a historian, but the ongoing project she presented for the first time in WLH last Tuesday relates to an issue currently affecting her life. As she explains in the ...]]> By A. GRACE STEIG

March 5, 2012

Elspeth Brown is a historian, but the ongoing project she presented for the first time in WLH last Tuesday relates to an issue currently affecting her life. As she explains in the WGSS-department talk “Transpartners: Gender, Sexuality, and Media in the U.S. and Canada”, her active project is to gather the untold oral histories of cisgender female partners of trans men. It is the result of interviews with friends-of-friends in a burgeoning field of research. The Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, as well as the school’s director of the Center for the Study of the United States and its American Studies Program, Brown explains that the topic of transpartners has an unprecedented personal bent among her other research projects. As her partner of 14 years transitioned this year, she sought guidance and comfort through online searches but “couldn’t find anything.” Cis female partners are a shockingly silenced group in the queer community, explains Brown. Through her project, Brown seeks to sing the unsung stories, give voice to the muted tales.

So why is it that cis partners are marginalized? Brown’s pessimistic answer, and the framework for this talk, is their portrayed and internalized failure. Partners are subject to a threefold failure: failure as lesbians, failure as queers, and failure of representation in the media. Grounding her discussion in queer theory and the 1990s trans scholarship of Judith Jack Halberstam, Brown shares compelling passages of the 20 interviews that she has conducted so far, highlighting the pain of the transition process to the partners who remain women.

Iris had long felt alienated from her Croatian family for coming out as lesbian, she introduced them to her trans partner Jim, as an effort tofurther open up about her sexual identity: “I only wanted them to know, no, I’m really fucking queer.” To her surprise, they immediately embraced the couple; but their reasons for acceptance hurt her, as they embraced an identity that was not Iris’ own: heterosexuality. For Iris and other cis females, a partner’s transition can represent the painful, incomplete reintegration into heteronormativity, unwelcome because they still identify as queer. Simultaneously, they face a disassociation from the queer community. Brown quotes a transpartner named Nina, who describes the emotional challenge of “feeling not queer enough.” Another partner, Marika, explains how her social life changed as a result of transition: “My presence at places was policed, like, ‘You’re a straight girl now. Oh, don’t ever call me back.’” These women face the experience of failure as members of the queer community; and, as they are seen with presumed straight guys, failure as lesbians. The newly complex nature of their desire frequently causes these women identity crises, and they internalize their communities’ messages about these failures.

The media tend to exaggerate these perceived failures by neglecting to represent transpartners. The L Word achieved mainstream success by portraying (superhumanly attractive) femme cis females with a consistent sexual preference for other femme cis women.  Transpartners’ identities are also flattened, or not portrayed at all.  Their stories are even absent from queer media. Documentaries such as A Boy Called Sue slip into the cliché of the hero’s journey, zeroing in men’s transitions while neglecting partners’ experiences. Brown also critiques the Family Matters issue of Original Plumbing, an otherwise positive magazine about trans men, which features numerous profiles of parents, children, friends, and even trans-guy partners of trans guys, but not one of a cis female partner.

Despite the failure of most mainstream and queer media to represent transpartners, there exist promising cultural projects. Brown shared some of the nude photography of Sara Davidmann, whose art depicts both partners in real relationships. She also lauds Chase Ryan Joynt’s documentary Every Day to Stay, in which the filmmaker features blunt interviews of himself, his cis female partner, and a stealth couple (the guy is not openly trans). Feminist scholars such as Jane Ward and Carla Pfeffer have also published recent works on the transpartner’s experience. Into this important field of study, Brown would like to offer her own contribution, a “kind of equipment for living – for the people who need it at a certain moment.”

Brown’s project is very much active, and you may be able to help. The silence and invisibility of these women, particularly that of the women whose partners “pass” as cis guys, has complicated Brown’s project. She learns of partners by way of mouth, and as a result has up to this point interviewed women predominantly within the narrow ethnic and socioeconomic category of the Caucasian middle-class. She would love to broaden the scope of her project and seeks to conduct more interviews. Please contact her if you are or know any cis female who has been with a trans man during the process of transition – “however you define that.” By raising the conversation, widening the narrow range of options for “lesbian” and “queer,” these voices may turn future transitions into stories of success – for both partners.

A. Grace Steig is a freshman in Yale College.  She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

March 1, 2012

It seems that while the Obama administration can’t mess with Texas, Texas can mess with Texas—Texan women, that is.  On Feb. 23, the Texas Health and Human Services commissioner signed into law a rule that ...]]> By ANISHA SUTERWALA

March 1, 2012

It seems that while the Obama administration can’t mess with Texas, Texas can mess with Texas—Texan women, that is.  On Feb. 23, the Texas Health and Human Services commissioner signed into law a rule that formally bans Planned Parenthood clinics and its affiliate abortion providers from participating in the Texas Women’s Health Program, a Medicaid funded program that provides low-income women with family planning exams, related health screenings, and birth control through Texas Medicaid.  While this does not amount to a full closing down of Planned Parenthood services, it does endanger the entire Texas Women’s Health Program.

The Obama administration has stated that the ruling violates the federal Social Security Act and, should it go into effect, will revoke federal funding from the state-federal Medicaid program that supports the Texas Women’s Health Program. The law is set to take effect on March 14, and unless the state and the Obama administration come to some sort of compromise, the Texas Women’s Health Program could be dismantled.  If the administration follows through with its threat, it could be devastating for the more than 100,000 women who receive medical care through the Texas Women’s Health Program.

But the ensuing fight over the ruling has not been about this vital program and the potential termination it faces. It has been about Texas. “The Obama administration is trying to force Texas to violate our own state laws or they will end a program that provides preventative health care to more than 100,000 Texas women,” Allison Castle, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry said in the Texas Tribune.  “This boils down to the rule of law—which the state of Texas respects and the Obama administration does not.”

Reponses to the ruling have devolved into a back-and-forth between Planned Parenthood, the Texas legislature, and Republican and Democratic organizations in Texas, with each side arguing that the other seeks only political advancement with no regard for the women it will hurt.  Kyleen Wright, president of the Texans for Life coalition, has said that if Planned Parenthood actually cared about health care for women, it would “get out of the way so that the [Texas Women’s Health Program] could continue.”  Texas Democrats accused the Republican state government of throwing “the most vulnerable Texans under the bus to pick a fight with the federal government.”  The Planned Parenthood Action Center has initiated a petition addressed to Texas governor Rick Perry in response to ruling, with the slogan, “Don’t Mess with Texas Women.”

This ruling has shown that it is politics, not public interest, fueling policymaking today. This is a blatant, political attack on Planned Parenthood and its affiliates. Clinics receiving taxpayer money for women’s health services can only provide abortions with outside funds, and so state funds are not used for abortions regardless.  That the Texas government would risk the health of the state’s women to make some sort of twisted statement is outright ridiculous, as is the notion that Planned Parenthood should “get out of the way.”  Women’s health is too high a price to pay for political games.

Anisha Suterwala is a contributing writer for Broad Recognition.