DSM

Goodmorning Bitch readers! Here's some feminist news to kick start your day.

• Today’s the last day to tune into the Homonationalism Conference happening right now at the The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York! What’s homonationalism you say? Watch the live stream video to find out! [The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at CUNY]
• A note to white girls who didn’t get into the college of their dreams. [Racialicious]
• Political correctness gone mad! Jezebel straightens things up for those who are completely mystified about when it’s appropriate to compliment a woman.[Jezebel]
• Will immigration reform really exclude newly legalized immigrants from Obamacare? Seriously? [Colorlines]
• Doesn’t look like FEMEN consulted the very women they are advocating for. On Islamophobic practices in feminist movements. [Huffington Post]
• So the DSM recognizes both gender identity disorder and schizophrenia as mental illnesses, but if you have both at the same time, your access to hormones might be compromised. [Autostraddle]

Check out more news tomorrow!

We’re elaborately taught how to relate to ourselves as gendered beings. It’s been a long time that people have been building on the critical observation that there’s no natural connection between pink/girl or boy/blue, yet kids continue to be the targets of aggressive marketing that creates profitable niche interests—a collection of stereotypes from which gender binarized consumers are “free” to choose—and of subtler gender conditioning (as my friend Ember is finding out, swaddled babies, though indistinguishable, are praised as pretty or strong depending on how parents advertise their sex). I’ve mentioned how a lot of kids are skipping the closet and, consequently, finding themselves at the forefront of advocating respect toward sexual difference. What about trans youth? There’s been increasing attention to “gender creative” or “gender independent” kids as social space opens up in which to discuss, rather than repress, their behavior. Could these terms reflect a reluctance to apply the concept of transgender to youth of a certain age because of its association with sexual identity (I am thinking specifically here of the historical, medical roots of trans-related descriptors in the West that have stemmed from the word "transsexualism" coined as "transsexualismus" in the early 1900s by Magnus Hirschfeld and later "trans-sexual" by Harry Benjamin in the 1960s)? Conversely, does the usage of the trans label problematically continue to lump the T in with the LGB? (Not that the B gets much visibility, either).