information addict

"The best thing on the internet"
- Purple Primate

elsewhere:
books for fifteen-year-olds
my neuroses, let me show you them
where everybody knows my name
pitchers
powdered instant sophie
sophie dot sensation at gmail

Male Tortoiseshell Cat Defies the Laws of Biology

purpleprimate:

libertyavenue:

A gender-bending kitten in England is grabbing headlines for its unusual markings — and more notably, his sex. Eddie, a black and orange tortoiseshell kitten, was born male — a “genetic impossibility,” his owner, veterinarian Karen Horne, told the Daily Mail. Horne adopted the unusual male kitten after it arrived — along with his three tortoiseshell sisters — at her veterinary practice via a local cat rescue group.

The Daily Mail writes that the cat “overturns the normal laws of biology,” and that’s somewhat true. Tortoiseshell cats are nearly always female because two X chromosomes are required to produce the brindled black and orange coat coloring. Male cats have only one X and one Y chromosome, so it is “technically impossible” for them to inherit the tortoiseshell coloring, the Daily Mail writes. However, in extremely rare instances, a male kitten is born with tortoiseshell markings because it has an extra X chromosome (making it an “XXY”), according to VeterinaryPartner.com.

Just how rare is a male tortoiseshell cat? “Of eight million pet cats in Britain only a couple a year are born male tortoiseshells,” reports the Daily Mail. At VeterinaryPartner.com, they estimate the odds at 1 in 3,000.

Eddie the kitten, named for the famed cross-dressing British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard, may be a “boy dressed in girls’ clothing,” his owner told the Daily Mail, but “so far, there are no signs of any gender confusion and he seems to be all there.”

Click here for source.

(Bolding by me.)

Also, how is an XXY cat “Def[ying] the Laws of Biology”?

And how do you tell if a kitten is behaving in a gender-normative way?

I think that last part was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

This IS a gendered issue. But it’s not a matter of the sex of the victim or perpetrator; it is a matter of gendered constructions of violence. We need to work to reduce all violence — men are certainly the greater victims of non-sexual/non-domestic violence, at the hands of other men, and even though women largely don’t come into the picture there it is still a gendered issue because it is fed by the construction of masculinity as violent and of this violence as a good thing which reinforces one’s identity as a man.

amandaw
thedailywhat:

Daniela Comani: “Neuerscheinungen hrsg. von Daniela Comani”
Comani bends the genders of the protagonists in several classic novels.
[via.]

Gender-bendy! I love stuff like this.

thedailywhat:

Daniela Comani:Neuerscheinungen hrsg. von Daniela Comani

Comani bends the genders of the protagonists in several classic novels.

[via.]

Gender-bendy! I love stuff like this.

gauntlet: claudia:

Why Can’t There Be More Ads Like This Today?
“This vintage Lego ad features a young girl wearing plain play clothes and smiling proudly at her Lego creation. No princesses, no pink Legos, no glittery sparkles, just a girl and her toys, having a blast. Beautiful, indeed.”

gauntlet: claudia:

Why Can’t There Be More Ads Like This Today?

“This vintage Lego ad features a young girl wearing plain play clothes and smiling proudly at her Lego creation. No princesses, no pink Legos, no glittery sparkles, just a girl and her toys, having a blast. Beautiful, indeed.”
All too often, the compromise of “go hide in a bathroom where nobody will encounter you” has been promoted even by trans people. Transgender awareness trainings for workplaces and organizations, many of them given by trans people who train as a profession, hold out that option as a compromise solution to help “uncomfortable” employees deal with having to work with a trans person. Of course, companies and other organizations are happy to seize on any kind of compromise that will help them avoid the more difficult work of dealing with, educating, standing up against employees who don’t want to be in a stall next a trans person.
katharinec:

Sacha Baron Cohen’s GQ Cover is “Pornography” in NYC | Carnal Nation
In NYC, the newsstand chain Hudson News recently declared that the issue would be treated as pornography, and would be sold with the lower half concealed.  But, as both Gawker and Shakesville point out, this month’s issue of Esquire with Israeli model Bar Refaeli, above right, is not being sold “as pornography” by Hudson News, and you can easily find the two resting next to one another on Hudson’s shelves, Refaeli proudly flaunting it all to the passerby in Grand Central Station while Sacha is discreetly covered up.

This makes me want to do an experiment where we put naked people of various sizes, shapes, ethnicities, genders, ages, etc. on magazine covers and see which of them get labeled “pornographic.”

katharinec:

Sacha Baron Cohen’s GQ Cover is “Pornography” in NYC | Carnal Nation

In NYC, the newsstand chain Hudson News recently declared that the issue would be treated as pornography, and would be sold with the lower half concealed.

But, as both Gawker and Shakesville point out, this month’s issue of Esquire with Israeli model Bar Refaeli, above right, is not being sold “as pornography” by Hudson News, and you can easily find the two resting next to one another on Hudson’s shelves, Refaeli proudly flaunting it all to the passerby in Grand Central Station while Sacha is discreetly covered up.

This makes me want to do an experiment where we put naked people of various sizes, shapes, ethnicities, genders, ages, etc. on magazine covers and see which of them get labeled “pornographic.”

A few weeks ago, two despicable radio hosts in Sacramento spent 30 minutes advocating child abuse against transgender kids. Rob Williams and Arnie States railed against ”allowing transgenders to exist,” urged parents of gender dysphoric children to beat it out of them, and used cruel, dehumanizing language calling for their demise: “I look forward to when they go out into society and society beats them down. And they end up in therapy.
Miles Wilcox, a sophomore at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, is an avid Facebook user, but he’s disgruntled with the website’s design. “I have serious issues with how Facebook is so heterosexist,” he says. Wilcox, who identifies as a queer transman, objects to the very first field in the Facebook profile: a drop-down box asking users to select a sex from the options “male” and “female.

CampusProgress.org | Choose One

Alma mater represent!

igather, chuffedlittlemuffin, wannablessedbe, tigerbeatdown

sexartandpolitics:

I’m kind of on the side of this whole discussion and out of my depth when it comes to dropping names so I’m going to start with where I’m most comfortable, queers and sex:

I really wish I had a copy of Patrick Califia’s Public Sex lying around, because he’s a much better writer than I am, but he describes his experience (pre-transition) as a butch lesbian at a gay male fisting party. He uses this story as a jumping off point to talk about how they were technically having heterosexual sex, though what was happening was definitely not straight. I would love for somebody more versed than myself in MacKinnon and radical feminism to interpret that for me. I would also like to hear a way to incorporate trans-folk into a radical feminist framework. Hell, even queer theorists had some trouble with that. It’s hard to say that all gender is fluid and that you choose your performance when there’s somebody standing next to you saying, “no, I did not choose this performance and I can’t just gender-swish my way on over to a less depression inducing form.”

I think that we’re nearing an impossible mass of identifiers for ourselves, “white (Italian, Irish, and German) male-bodied queer middle-class able-bodied mentally ill college educated thin” and the list goes on. It is at this point a series of merit badges, “look what I’ve examined.” Leaving one off is a sign that you’re not aware. We are all very complicated egos in fleshy packaging and the political language of identity is a means for collective action and mainstream visibility. (back to that coalition vs. alliance thing: I told you it stuck with me, igather). These identifiers (and the theories that gave rise to them) came about to define problems faced by people who have been deemed to have something in common.

Those in power, let’s take white people for this example, take offense to being lumped in with the rest of their group by people of color. They cry, “wait, race is a made up concept like you’ve been saying all along so why don’t you leave us out of it.” But white people need to be racialized so that we participate in the breaking down of race. This is the same process being sought by the use of the terms cisgender, able-bodied, etc. Of course we’re on a sliding scale for all these things, but the point is to demonstrate where we all stand on the fixed points so we can realize how stifling fixed points are.

That really shouldn’t have taken me an hour and a half to write but that’s some of what i’ve been reading has made me think.

I haven’t been following this conversation, but I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot lately. Bolded the parts I found most interesting.