– Quentin Tarantino to GQ

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So says Matthew Crawford, author of the new book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.  Five months into his career at conservative Washington, D.C., think tank the Marshall Institute, he abandoned it in favor of starting his own motorcycle restoration business.

Educated in philosophy and political thought at the University of Chicago, Crawford “takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual labor. Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, financially and intellectually satisfying than the white-collar information-processing jobs for which schools and colleges typically educate their students.”

“Skilled labor has been part of Crawford’s life since he started doing electrical work at age 14 in the Northern California community where he grew up. As an undergraduate physics major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he did electrical work to support himself through the summers.  Crawford was an indifferent student until his senior year, when he happened on his roommate’s copy of The Closing of the American Mind. Written by University of Chicago classics professor Allan Bloom, the 1987 polemic was an angry, unapologetic defense of high culture….  It’s a book Crawford is now wary of associating himself with, given the extreme reactions it often provokes.

“”It blew me away,’ he admits, after some hesitation. ‘Bloom offered a convincing diagnosis of contemporary life by tracing our intellectual genealogy, showing the sources of our confused, taken-for-granted opinions in the works of serious thinkers. It was incredibly liberating and exciting.’”

This spurred him to pursue a Ph.D. at UChicago, which he completed in 2000.  Afterward, he got the job at the Marshall Institute, which sent him “rushing toward work that was genuinely rational (fixing motorcycles), rather than work that was guided by the need to perform some weird pretense of rationality.”

“Coming up with the best arguments money could buy,” says Crawford, “wasn’t work befitting a free man.”  His book, reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, calls for a return to the kind of work that gives people a sense of passion and agency–things he says a white-collar job can’t provide.

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The Rumpus: First of all, congratulations–this film is a great accomplishment, and an excellent look at the issue of gender identity as appropriated by the psychiatric community.

Annalise Ophelian

When did “Gender Identity Disorder” first appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)? How does the definition of this “disorder” overlap or contrast with the way you would define “transgendered”?

Annalise Ophelian: GID first appears in the DSM in the third edition, which came out in 1980. It actually went through several permutations between DSM III, the revision in 1987, and the DSM IV in 2000, but all of the diagnostic categories were really seeking to categorize what psychiatrists and physicians were labeling “disorders” in gender conformity.

What’s interesting is that these diagnoses also emerged as American psychiatry asserted itself as a mechanism for social control, and in response to anxiety about sex and gender that was raised by the gay rights movement and second wave feminism of the 1970s.

I think the main goal of these diagnoses was to create a system of classification through which medical and mental health care professionals could understand this “problem” of people who identified or behaved as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.

The term “transsexual” was coined in the mid-20th century, there’s a bit of debate about whether its first use should be credited to American psychiatrist David O. Cauldwell or German-born endocrinologist Harry Benjamin. The term “transgender” really emerged in the 1990s as a part of a growing movement that was informed by reactions to second wave feminism and the gay rights movement of the 1970s.

Transgender is generally accepted as an umbrella term that describes any number of people who identify with or express a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. I think of the term as a push back to the terms and categories that were imposed on gender variant people by medicine and psychology, and an attempt to de-categorize gender.

Rumpus: Do you think there is a commonly held misconception–either in the transgender community or the larger population–that someone who identifies as transgendered must go through reassignment surgery and/or other medical procedures to “qualify” as transgender? Are people’s expectations of how the transgendered “should” express their gender identity harmful to those grappling with it?

Ophelian: In my own experience as a mental health provider, I’ve definitely seen a wide-spread misconception on the part of non-trans people that the way you really know someone is trans is that they’ve undergone some form of “sex change”. I think it speaks to the general lack of knowledge about trans lives and to the entitlement non-trans people often demonstrate.

Christine Jorgensen

In the 1950s, starting with Christine Jorgensen in the United States, there was this interesting relationship between media and medicine in which the transsexual narrative included “being a woman trapped in man’s body.” The historical legacy of the sex change operation is that it created a prescribed path that trans people were expected to follow, which has had a tremendous impact on the ways laws are written. In the film, Dean Spade, who is a professor of law at Seattle University and one of the founders of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in New York, talks about the damage caused by rules that govern trans lives based on “have you had surgery or not?”

I think the emphasis on sex reassignment surgery (SRS) also sets up medical and mental health care professionals to be ill-prepared to deal with the health care needs of trans people, which may include surgery but on a daily basis are much more likely to focus on a myriad of other issues.

Rumpus: This may seem like a no-brainer, but would you mind commenting on why people are protesting the inclusion of this disorder in the DSM?

Ophelian: Actually, I don’t think it’s a no-brainer at all–I think the issue of Gender Identity Disorder in the DSM is incredibly complicated, and as a non-trans person, I’d actually prefer to see this question answered by someone who is more directly impacted by the diagnosis than I am.

As a mental health care provider, I would like to see GID removed from the DSM because it incorrectly labels healthy variation in gender identity or expression as an Axis I mental disorder, and because it shifts the burden of responsibility away from a society with rigid gender rules and onto those who are being oppressed by those rules.

But the GID diagnosis has also become entwined with receiving medical benefits, and for many many low income people or people dependent on state or federal insurance it’s a gateway to receiving medical treatment like hormone therapy.

Rumpus: How does GID as a diagnosis benefit the transgendered? Or, rather, how would access to care change if this were no longer considered a psychological disorder? Are there many people who argue that GID should remain in the DSM for this reason?

Ophelian: Again, this is a very complex issue, and one I hope we’re able to begin to address in the film. I’ve read accounts of folks who feel validated and explained by the diagnosis, I’ve read accounts of folks for whom the diagnosis was an entry way to services. There’s some reason to think that the diagnosis could be used to keep transwomen from being incarcerated in men’s prisons. There are legal cases in which the diagnostic category could be used to offer protection against a variety of harms.

I can’t say how many people are arguing for or against–I know in San Francisco, my community tends to be much more critical of the diagnosis than supportive of its continued inclusion. What I will say is that at this point, 29 years after the diagnosis was introduced into the DSM, I think it’s time for non-trans psychiatrists and physicians to step back and start listening to what trans people are saying they want and need with regard to the diagnosis in particular and competent medical and mental health care in general. I’d like to see full trans inclusion, participation, and leadership on the DSM workgroup that authors the GID diagnosis.

Rumpus: When did you decide to make the film Diagnosis Difference, and what did you hope to accomplish with it? How did you recruit people to interview? How have people responded to the film thus far?

Ophelian: I decided to make the film about two years ago, primarily as a teaching tool for medical and mental health care professionals. I was so frustrated by hearing non-trans folks talk with expertise about what trans folks experienced, and it made me want a project that showcased experiential experts describing the issues in their own words and images. I sought out participants who had experience using their personal stories as a teaching tool. I also sought out folks who were community leaders, activists, artists–people who I had heard speak or perform, who had taught or inspired me. I also recruited folks using an anti-oppression framework, purposefully seeking out diversity across experiences of oppression and constantly examining my own role as a white, non-trans filmmaker on the process of documenting the participants’ stories.

StormMiguel Florez

Imani Henry, an amazing activist and artist in New York, consulted with me very early on in the project, as did Lydia Sauza at the UCSF Center of Excellence for Transgender HIV Prevention. And my partner StormMiguel Florez, who plays the music over the end credits, was involved in countless conversations about how the film was being approached, crafted, and edited.

Rumpus: What did you or the participants do during the recent American Psychiatric Association conference in San Francisco? I read that there were protests outside the conference facility. Did you all participate in these?

Ophelian: I didn’t participate in the recent protests, in large part because I was in the final round of editing when they happened. One point I would like to make about the way I see GID protests often being organized is that there’s this banner of “We’re Not Crazy” that’s often flown by folks who want to see GID out of the DSM. And I think that’s a bit problematic, because there’s nothing wrong with being crazy, with living with mental illness, which is a challenge that millions of Americans meet and deal with every day. And in queer and trans communities, I think there is an especial stigma about living with mental illness–Dylan Scholinski talks very elegantly about this in the film, that for so long we’ve been told we have to be perfect, like everyone else, and that we can’t be crazy because that would mean being gay or trans is crazy. I think it’s important to be able to critique the categorization of gender variance as a mental illness as inappropriate and oppressive while also acknowledging that people who live with anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia are full and complete humans who deserve respect for their experience.

**

Diagnosing Difference Facebook page

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Kevin Gift is a classical pianist. In some circles, however, he’s known as electronic musician Wendel Patrick. This is no ordinary stage name, however.

Four years old when he started learning to read music, Gift got serious about piano at an early age. He burnt out early, too, taking a four-year hiatus until taking up the instrument again in college. After majoring in music at Emory University, he made a career for himself as a working concert pianist and music professor in Maryland.

After playing classical music and jazz all day long, though, he began to experiment with “computers and Chaos Pads, digital turntables and MIDI processors” after dark. He became an electronic DJ–or, rather, his musical alter ego Wendel Patrick did. Wendel Patrick was the name given to Gift’s twin brother, who died within a few days of their birth. He didn’t learn about Wendel’s existence until later in life, after feeling for so long that there might be someone else out there.

Gift continues to enjoy these two distinct musical identities, producing and performing both types of music. Some people know him as Kevin Gift, but others only know him by his dead brother’s name. Eerie.

(This story comes from the radio program The Signal, and pretty much everything they do is interesting, so much so that it was difficult to choose just one story to write about.)

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A graduate student in mathematics wrote in to ask what to say to strangers or acquaintances who seem to boast that her area of study is “beyond them” or something they’d “never be able to grasp.”

The columnist gave some quasi-helpful advice (I guess), but then another reader wrote in to say that this is, in fact, a deeper problem:

“The point really is this: there is a cultural pride in innumeracy that doesn’t exist for illiteracy—no one will brag about not being able to read, yet [people] feel free to essentially brag about not being good at math. This is not people being candid about their abilities. It actually is a way of dismissing the importance of the field of study by implying that it has no cultural necessity or meaning.”

Confession:  I am one of those people.  Further research, however, has propelled me into a shame spiral about my condition.

Back in 1990 (when I was just learning to count), John Allen Paulos published a book on the subject of Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, and it became a New York Times bestseller.  A 1997 essay on this “New Literacy” still holds water today:

“Instead of enhancing Jeffersonian democracy, limited numeracy can easily shift the balance to a technocracy.

“Innumeracy hurts in other ways as well.  For example, public policy issues may increasingly move beyond the intellectual grasp of citizens who lack appropriate skills in quantitative reasoning.  Innumeracy encourages the view that all opinions are equally valid, that whenever there is disagreement the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  Innumeracy thus becomes another means of disenfranchisement: by reinforcing the idea that truth is relative and unknowable, people with the least defenses against charlatans will be most vulnerable.

“Innumeracy also perpetuates welfare, harms health, and weakens families.  Without requisite quantitative skills, individuals will find it very difficult to make a transition from welfare to work.  Without critical skills to assess medical claims, individuals will often fall victim to false claims and questionable treatments.  Without the skills to manage a household budget, many become victims of easy credit or consumer fraud.  In short an innumerate citizen today is as vulnerable as the illiterate peasant of Gutenberg’s time.”

So the bottom line is that I have been a fool.  As the Washington Post warned back in 2001, “Math Illiteracy Spells Trouble.”

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Perhaps more interesting than the book itself is the debate that emerges over Ms. Brown’s role in the history of feminism. The New York Times remains neutral, simply reporting Scanlon’s claim that “Ms. Brown belongs alongside figures like Betty Friedan in histories of second-wave feminism … and was a precursor of the third-wave, ‘Sex and the City’ feminism.” The Washington Post, however, printed a review of the book in which Naomi Wolf, author of Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, argues that “[i]n the long battle between the two styles of feminism, Brown, for now, has won.”

“Friedan’s second wave feminism, loosely described, was sincere in its emotional tone, reformist (though many would say radical) in its goals and middle-class or upper-middle-class and overwhelmingly white in terms of its most visible spokeswomen. Its great strength lay in analyzing entrenched gender-based power and challenging it politically, ushering in the great triumphs that made women’s lives today possible — from reproductive rights to Title IX to laws against sexual assault and domestic violence.

“Its shortcomings grew more visible with wear: Second wave theory and practice tended toward humorlessness. The movement often saw men and women in opposition (rather than seeing sex discrimination as the enemy). It sometimes viewed domesticity and family life as a trap rather than a potential source of joy for both sexes. It could be puritanical about sexuality, and it often cast a skeptical eye on what it saw as women’s frivolous pursuit of romance, fun and fashion.

“Then third wave feminism came along, critiquing its staid mothers and reinvigorating — while simultaneously giving some political heft to — the kind of gestures Brown had set out in her 1962 manifesto. Third wave feminism is pluralistic, strives to be multiethnic, is pro-sex and tolerant of other women’s choices. It has led to an embrace of what was once so politically suspect — the notion that you can be a ‘lipstick lesbian’ or a ‘riot grrrl’ if you want to be, that you can choose your persona and your freedom for yourself.

“But that very individualism, which has been great for feminism’s rebranding, is also its weakness: It can be fun and frisky, but too often, it’s ahistorical and apolitical. As many older feminists justly point out, the world isn’t going to change because a lot of young women feel confident and personally empowered, if they don’t have grass-roots groups or lobbies to advance woman-friendly policies, help women break through the glass ceiling, develop decent work-family support structures or solidify real political clout.

“Feminism had to reinvent itself — there was no way to sustain the uber-seriousness and sometimes judgmental tone of the second wave. But feminists are in danger if we don’t know our history, and a saucy tattoo and a condom do not a revolution make.”

Wolf concludes the review with a call to action: “The fact is, we know the answers to Western women’s problems: The way is mapped out, the time for theory is pretty much over. We know the laws and the policies we need to achieve full equality. What we lack is a grass-roots movement that will drive the political will. ‘Lipstick’ or lifestyle feminism won’t produce that movement alone.”

But is the battle really over, the way clear, and the time for theory passed? How can Wolf be so sure?

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Weirder still, “early on in their partnership, Masters (who was married) persuaded Ms Johnson (a twice-divorced mother of two) to sleep with him. He argued that this would help to avoid the worse sin of becoming sexually involved with their patients.” They later married, although he would subsequently divorce her for another woman. (“If there is a moral to this tale, it is perhaps that the human heart remains as much of a mystery as the sex organs once used to be.”)

However unorthodox their techniques, Masters and Johnson contributed much to their field. “The researches of Masters and Johnson demolished Freudian ideas of female sexuality: there was nothing inferior about a clitorally induced orgasm. And women, unlike men, were naturally multi-orgasmic–given the right techniques.” Further, “today’s talking and touching therapies for couple’s sexual problems are largely based on [Johnson's] ideas, just as the development of Viagra and its ilk owe much to the physiological research of Masters.”

So, on the occasion of a forthcoming biography of the pair, we take the opportunity to express gratitude for their work–I leave it to the reader to determine the best way to do so.

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Author Linda Hirshman argues that while the Jezebel writers look “a lot like the natural heirs of feminism,” and “are clearly familiar with the rhetoric of feminism,” the behavior they chronicle in their posts is dangerous to the movement, and the message:

“How can women supposedly acting freely and powerfully keep turning up tales of vulnerability—repulsive sexual partners, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, even rape? Conservatives have long argued against feminism by saying women are vulnerable, and we need to take care of them. Liberals say there’s no justification for repressing sexual behavior.

“As a generation of young women is discovering, and as polemicists from Camille Paglia to Ariel Levy have pointed out, there’s something missing in both points of view. Women can pretend they’re female chauvinist pigs, but it’s still women who are more sexually vulnerable to stronger men, due to the possibilities of physical abuse and pregnancy. These Jezebel writers are a symptom of the weaknesses in the model of perfect egalitarian sexual freedom; in fact, it’s the supposed concern with feminism that makes the site so problematic.”

In sum, she says of the site: “It’s incoherent.”

(Update: Jezebel responds with “Who You Calling A Bad Feminist?”)

(Update #2: Feministing gives Double X a bad review, dismisses its criticisms of Jezebel.   I am swimming in ladyblogs.)

Related Posts:

• “No, I’m the Narrator”
• The Rumpus Interview with Momus
• The Bloggers
• The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
• Portrait of the Music Blogger as a Young Man: The Rumpus Interview with Aaron Wolfe

More on the exhibit: “What started out as a mutual affinity for kitschy Jewish album covers—think Neil Diamond baring his chest hair on the cover of Hot August Night or Barbra Streisand in hot pants on the cover of Streisand Superman–soon became a quest for identity, history, and culture between the grooves of LPs.”

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In her art, Ariana Page Russell uses her skin in ways previously unimaginable: she makes wallpaper with it; she creates temporary tattoos with it, that she then affixes back onto her skin; and, most provocatively, she photographs welts and scratches on it that she herself creates. She has an auto-immune condition called dermatographia, meaning that these seemingly dramatic contusions are both temporary and painless, but the images are striking nevertheless.

(via Jezebel)

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