Doctors…

Luckily since I’ve started school I have been able to get a new family doctor because I no longer live in the same area as my old family doctor.

She was a piece of work. Her skills when it came to me telling her I was cutting was to tell me to “stop it” like it was just that simple. I often questioned her ablity to be a doctor (not because she was female.

The thing that I disliked most about her was the fact that she used to have a sign in her office basically saying in a round about way that she did not support abortion.

I was just informed by my younger sister today that this doctor now has a more direct sign which tells people not to ask her about abortion or viagara or cialis if you are an unmarried man.

To me not even giving information about a legal procedure should be illegal. I respect the fact that she does not wish to carry out the procedure but she should be legally bound to give *all* available options to a patient whether they conflict with her sensibilities or not.

It is doctors like her that lead to women being so desprite that they will do *anything* to get rid of a baby.

And the whole no erection help for the unmarried thing… I’m pretty sure that they are big boys now and they can make their own decisions. Who is she to dictate who can or cannot have sex?

Now this probably wouldn’t matter as much except that because of the shortage of doctors here the only way for anyone to switch doctors is by moving. That means if you are a pregnant woman or an unmarried man you are stuck with this woman imposing her morals on you.

This just really bugs me and I wish that there was something that I could do about it…..

The Pervasiveness of Gender

I had kind of a strange experience today.

I was at the little food shop run by the Student Union today. I was busy using my debit card and the cashier (a female) who was helping me told the next customer “It will be quicker to go to the next cashier because I am still helping him (pointing at me).”

I thought this was weird but brushed it off. Then the debit machine was being weird, just took a long time. When it finally went through I mentioned that I was worried and the 2nd cashier (a male), not the one who was helping me, told me that it was their fault not mine. Then the woman standing beside me said “Oh ok, so we can yell at you (pointing to the cashier) and not him (pointing to me)”.

Now let me just say this, I don’t blame them for this slip up of gender pronouns. I am wearing a tie and my fedora today (yay for Necktie Tuesday). Also I had a pea coat and a scarf on generally obstructing the shape of my chest. My voice was also a little more hoarse than usual as I have a bit of a cold. Overall I might seem more male than I usually would.

I did find it strange that they were both talking about me in 3rd person and that neither of them would look me in the eye. Almost as though I was different and separate, only the guy would look at me and talk to me. I’m not sure it was because everyone thought I was a man or that it was because everyone thought that I was trying to be a man.

More than anything this incident makes me mad because it just shows the pervasiveness of gender in our culture, right down to our very language. There are no pronouns for those of us who don’t “perform” gender “properly”, to use one of Judith Butler’s ideas (though not her wording). One must either be male or female or else you just end up sounding pretentious using words like ‘one’. I believe that our culture (and others) needs an actual unisex pronoun, instead of just using the masculine as such. By using ‘he’ as unisex it erases the femaleness of an object making it completely male.

This can be seen with adrogenous things, my favourite being the trickster Loki ‘he’ actually has both masculine and feminine aspect but by labling ‘him’ ‘him’ the maleness overcomes the femaleness. Thus ‘he’ loses an important aspect of ‘his’ character.

We need something more than he and she.

Paragraph 175

I recently watched a movie called Paragraph 175. It is a documentary about the Nazis’ treatment of homosexuals in the holocaust. Everyone knows about the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the holocaust. Not many know about the 10-15000 gay men who were sent to concentration camps. Fewer than 10 of those men were still alive at the time of this movie.

Oddly enough there are only 5 cases of lesbians in concentration camps. This was because to the Nazis saw lesbianism as temporary and curable and that lesbians could still procreate for the Aryan cause. Basically it was easy to force procreative sex on lesbians.

Gay men mostly escaped the gas chambers because they were gay Christians. But they were the lowest of the low in the hierarchy of the concentration camps. They were marked with the Pink Triangle.

Here’s an excerpt from The Pink Triangle.com:

“Triangles of various colors were used to identify each category of “undesirable”: yellow for Jews, brown of Gypsies, red for political prisoners, green for criminals, black for anti-socials, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, blue for immigrants, and pink for homosexuals.

The pink triangles were slightly larger than the other colored triangles so that guards could identify them from a distance. It is said that those who wore the pink triangles were singled out by the guards to receive the harshest treatment, and when the guards were finished with them, some of the other inmates would harm them as well.”

When the Nazi regime fell almost all others were released homosexuals were branded criminals and sent to prison. East Germany’s version of Paragraph 175 lasted until 1968. West Germany kept the Nazi version of the law until 1969.

If you wish to hear some very moving stories about the experiences of homosexuals during the Nazi Regime Paragraph 175 is an amazing movie.

Remember Remember The Fifth of November

And not just because of Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up the Parliament Houses.

Also not just that we all woke up (or stayed up) to find out that the first African American president elect is Barrack Obama.

But also that while the Democrats were celebrating their push for change millions of Americans voted to amend their state constitutions to include the “Traditional Marriage”.

This is wrong.

Unlike I have seen so many people say THIS IS DISCRIMINATION.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines to discriminate against: to make an adverse distinction with regard to; to distinguish unfavourably from others.

This is what the voters in Florida, California, Arizona and Arkansas have seen fit to do. They have decided that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness only applies to certain groups of people. Again.

It seems like we are always looking for someone to blame. Whether they are Jewish, Black, Muslim, or Homosexual they are different and hence the source of all the world’s problems.

Bigotry is Bigotry.

Or else would someone explain to me why it is not? Oh wait! I know! Black people don’t “choose” to be black but gay people “choose” to be gay.

Yeah. Right.

And another thing. Domestic Partnership is NOT the same as marriage.

What this video does not mentions is that domestic partnerships costs way more.

See a particularly moving video against Prop 8 here.

I am not saying that other forms of discrimination don’t exist or that they are less important than homophobia. Just because Obama is president doesn’t mean that racism will just disappear.

This was just what was on my mind.

Yes I am gay. I say that as proudly as ever before. I had felt as though I had been slapped in the face by millions. Now I’m going to turn the other cheek and work to accept and tolerate others. Even if they don’t accept or even tolerate me.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

That’s All Well and Good … But What About the Rest of Us?

So that last post is an example of the generally excepted history of the vote for women. What I didn’t acknowledge was that the Dominion Elections Act only allowed white women to vote.

In fact many of the suffragettes were upper class, white women who felt that their morals would help to uphold the country.

So being my white self I assumed (wrongly) that I should go and find out when the African Canadians got the vote. So I went searching and searching and searching. And I didn’t find anything. But I did find out about Indo-Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians as well as some certain European Canadians.

But wait? you say. Is this really feminist? In my opinion, and in the opinion of other feminists (though not all), yes. Race is intertwined with gender.

So here is a history of enfranchisement in Canada.

1900 – The Dominion Elections Act sets rules for voting. It sets it up so that the requirements to vote federally are the same as the provincial requirements. This bars minorities from voting. This included visible minorities, women and aboriginals.

1917 – The War Time Elections Act opened up the vote to some women, mostly those who had relatives fighting the Great War. Unfortunately this act also took away vote rights from “enemy aliens” naturalized after 1902. This include German Canadians and Ukcranian Canadians.

1920 – The Dominion Elections Act is amended to include “all Canadians over 21″. This does not include Aboriginals or anyone else that is excluded from provincial elections. This means that Asians and Hindus (what they called Indo-Canadians back in the day).

1938 – The Dominion Elections Act is revised but still retains the portion that those barred from voting provincially are barred federally as well as that Aboriginals are barred from voting.

1947 – In BC an act allows ”every” Canadian to vote except Japanese and Aboriginal peoples. It also stripped Doukhobors, Hutterites, and Mennonites of their right to vote unless they had served in the armed forces.

1948 -  Part of the Dominion Elections Act is repealed and Japanese Canadians are finally allowed to vote.

1955 – The Federal government allows the Doukhobors to vote. As of 1955 only Aboriginals were still barred from voting.

1960 – Aboriginals are allowed to vote without having to give up their treaty or renounce their status.

The CBC has some very interesting videos documenting enfranchisement in Canada (Click here).

Even now that I have included this time line of when minorities got to vote I still feel like that it really doesn’t cover the whole big idea. Just because these people are now allowed to vote does not mean that discrimination against them stopped. It wasn’t even stopped after Canada tried to become a multicultural society.  In fact multiculturalism has its own problems.

Just because we have a view of ourselves as accepting does not mean we have always been so, nor are we always that way now.