#the man grew up in conservative spaces in 80s and 90s America

[dreamytfw]

"Dean Winchester is a feminist!"

I can almost guarantee you that man thinks feminists burn bras and can't get laid.

[bulldogedition]

Hold the cue cards! The Eagle has landed!

As America quietly--and we mean quietly--marked the 50th anniversary of the moon landing this week, TIME magazine decided to use nostalgia for its cover story on the topic.. Back when the moon was the hot location to get to, when John Kennedy's promise of landing a man  on the moon during the 60s ended with Richard Nixon's Administration celebrating it, and back when they were relevant as a weekly, they featured a 'race to the moon!' article a few months prior to the famed event..

This year on the 50th, they are placed a "next space race" re-do with SPACE X as the main racer.. Business taking over!!

Things have changed since then, obviously.. The ole-timers who lived through this event tell me that the world stopped in its tracks to watch coverage on TV of the moon landing.. The wiser elders of today inform me of the emotions of that time, the amazement and bewilderment so many had as they watched history being made in real time.. on TV sets--a new medium for so many in that era..

Even the  Brits did it their way across the pond.

BBC mounted programming to celebrate the great event. One of the shows featured a live jam by Pink Floyd. The program was a one-hour BBC1 TV Omnibus special with the whimsical title of So What If It’s Just Green Cheese?. It was broadcast on July 20, 1969, at 10 p.m.. The Floyd session eventually came to be called “Moonhead.”

TV GUIDE issued a cover story at the time cementing history: As major a worldwide television event as you can get.. Broadcast live not from our planet but from a satellite of it, the moon..

Children across America watched one small step for man became the giant leap for mankind, and turned to space .. they wanted to be astronauts when they grew up. Neil Armstrong became an American hero--looked up to by countless around the planet..

It was America's moment, the shining example of how WE could make it.. how WE could strive for more.. how WE could get to the moon and maybe one day beyond.

MALAISE DAYS

That brief but albeit amazing American moment of being the first to plant an earthly flag on a desolate space dwelling wore off quickly.

About 50,000+ deaths in Vietnam, Watergate, the Manson murders in Cali, high gas prices, inflation, and other world wide events suddenly forced people into a corner where pride and patriotism was not as evident.. Where we lost our focus on leaving this planet.

Instead, we decided to stay, and fight.. and argue.. Burn bras and protest war!

There was economic turmoil and other vastly amazing and historic moments of political upheaval.. whether it was Richard Nixon resigning before impeachment, or a sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter telling the nation to conserve its energy, it all led to the Reagan Revolution.

He indeed paid for that microphone and he intended on using it..

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd_KaF3-Bcw&w=935&h=701]

 PATRIOTISM UP IN SMOKE

President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation on January 28, 1986, hours after classrooms and media across the nation watched the Challenger explode on LIVE TV..

He called it a national loss.. He said during that broadcast, "I want to say something to the school children of America... I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the faint hearted. It belongs to the brave."

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa7icmqgsow&w=935&h=701]

There seemingly something about this moment that killed the dreams of space.. The malaise 70s turned into roaring decade of greed in the 80s, and somehow we trashed the notion that space mattered.

By the 1990s, a decade when miraculous and amazing discoveries were being found on Mars and other moons of Saturn, we continued just finding ourselves finding space to be the frontier not worth mentioning..

George W. Bush had a similar moment when he addressed the nation in 2003 when the Columbia exploded after mission control lost contact.. Debris fell from the skies above Texas as the Columbia was lost without survivors..

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT5ecjjXdqw&w=1218&h=685]

And now, 50 years after the moon landing moment, even the business SpaceX cannot get attention unless one of its rockets blows up on the way to the Van Allen Belt.

TAPES AND LEGACIES DESTROYED

I mentioned before the ole' timers.. those who lived through the decade of revolution.. As an 80s child, I only can contemplate the death of space exploration. .When I was just 5, I may or may not have known of the Challenger horror.. when I was growing up in the 90s, my love of space was not because of NASA exploration but instead because of my healthy diet nightly of staying awake late to listen to Art Bell expose and expand on potential alien life and UFO sightings around the world..  But my interviews of those who lived through the live stream -- the true live stream during the 60s of the event -- produce another interesting side effect of the moon landing: I am told the youth of that day were glued to TV sets, but the older Americans had disbelief in what they were seeing..

Hogwash! Man on the moon!? No way!

Perhaps this is where conspiracy theories were formed.. This could be the beginning times when people just could not believe their eyes..  It was all too perfect a story. Kennedy promised men on the moon before the end of the decade. And suddenly at the end of the decade we were going to the moon, safely on LIVE TV for the world to watch, land then leaving the moon without incident, arriving back at home.. all without injury. All without a situation. Without a disaster...

Also destroyed.. a legacy? This was reported last year:

US astronaut Buzz Aldrin is suing two of his children and his former business manager alleging they stole money from him and are slandering his legacy.

The lawsuit, which also claims they are stopping him from getting married, was filed after his children petitioned to take control of his finances.

They asked a judge to name them as his legal guardians because he is suffering from memory loss and confusion.

 HOAX OR NO

There is still a large amount of people (and actually growing if you see popular opinion polls and compare throughout time) that do not think we actually were on the moon. Some real events may not have helped the NASA defenders over the years..

Back in 2009, media reports told us that Nasa taped over its only high-resolution images of the first moon walk with electronic data from a satellite or a later manned space mission, officials said today  So the most historic event in the agency ever, and someone they managed to record something else over it to save money.. huh!?

Stories like that don't help...

Rumors like this don't help either: Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining' was released 11 years after the first landing on the moon. In that movie, Danny Torrance - played by child actor Danny Lloyd - is seen wearing a knitted jumper with an Apollo 11 rocket on its front. In the scene where Danny first encounters Room 237, he is seen playing on carpet that it is said to resemble an aerial photograph of the launchpad of Apollo 11.. When Danny picks up the tennis ball, which is supposed to represent the hoax itself, he then enters Room 237 and comes out of it attacked and bruised. Later, in the climax of the movie, Jack Torrance - played by Jack Nicholson - screams and raves about the responsibility that's been placed on him, and that he has signed a contract to maintain the hotel and that he is responsible for holding its secrets.

The interpretation asserts that 'The Shining' was, in part, Kubrick trying to confess his role in the moon landing, from the carpets up to Jack Nicholson's crazed rants acting as Kubrick's vented frustrations.

Stanley Kubrick's daughter was forced to push back against this in 2016..

Also this.. There was a viral video that was released on the internet where Buzz Aldrin was attending the National Book Fest in Washington DC and was being interviewed by an eight-year-old girl named Zoey.

Zoey asked the astronaut: “Why has nobody been to the Moon in such a long time?”

Aldrin’s eyes grow wide in the video and he says to the little girl:

“We didn’t go there, and that’s the way it happened. And if it didn’t happen, it would be nice to know why it didn’t happen.”

Some have even claimed to see NASA being sloppy and forgetting to censor buildings appearing in moon footage..

And just on Friday night, Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis featured this as the topic for the program.. and also included a strange clip of the astronauts joking to mission control about cue cards and stage hands!!

Mission Control to Neil Armstrong: Is Buzz Holding the cue cards for you… over?

Neil Armstrong: Cue cards have a no. We have no intention of competing with the professionals believe me.

Unidentified voice: yea Ron’s getting to be known as the silent CAPCOM. (unintelligible) OK.

Buzz Aldrin: The only problem Charlie, these TV stagehands don’t know where they stand.

Mission Control: Well he doesn’t really have a union card there we really can’t complain too much I guess.

Neil Armstrong: Hey the restraints here are doing a great job of pulling my pants down.

x x x

NAZI CONNECTION

There are tons of questions that people will constantly ask about whether the moon landing REALLY happened in space or in front of TV cameraman somewhere on some elaborate set directed by Stanley Kubrick..

If you side with the conspiracy theory that the landing was a hoax, suspend your disbelief for a moment and believe.. because there is a whole other conspiracy theory/fact for your enjoyment..

Filmmaker  Aron Ranen got a grant for $65,000.. He got this grant in order to travel across the USA to interview former astronauts, mission controllers, scientists and others, in an attempt to prove that NASA actually sent men to the moon in 1969.

But instead of proving it was real, he was left with countless questions over whether it really happened.. His movie, MOONHOAX, is available for free download on YouTube and other platforms..

Along with the questions that persist whether it was real or not, Ranen asked some other question. If it was real, the set of facts that presents itself may be much more discomforting..

In the documentary, one of the Apollo mission’s few black employees reveals that the Ku Klux Klan operated openly at the Kennedy Space Center during the ’60s.

And more: A retired tracking engineer said that Nazi scientists helped the U.S. test hydrogen bombs in the South Pacific during the ’50s. This was a claim substantiated by recently declassified documents.

A former slave laborer recalls esteemed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun overseeing huge forced-labor camps in Germany during World War II (true).

And, finally, it turns out that all the basic data taped during the Apollo 11 mission has been misplaced--something confirmed in 2009 by NASA itself as we talked about earlier.

For your discernment, all the uploaded segments of MOONHOAX featuring some of the hard to stomach facts that Nazis helped the United States get to the moon, with one allegation that Neil Armstrong was the first to walk on the moon because he was a German, and Nazis assisting the US get there wanted it that way..

PUNCH DRUNK

50 years on... 50 years later. We have not really been back since....

We have been stalled here on this planet. A planet filled with war and mayhem. Instead of reaching for the stars we are just forced to continue grasping at straws that something will change..

If the moon landing really even happened to begin with.

And on that note, we will end with Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. When he was approached about the factual matters of the moon landing several years ago, he had an interesting response..

Back in 2002, Buzz was approached by a moon landing denier.. Aldrin decided to take action..

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_YM9cCtwz4&w=1218&h=685]

It would have been the punch heard around the world.. but after decades since 1969, everyone stopped listening.

[loveforinfoworld-blog]

A Tourist Guide to New Hampshire's Western White Mountains

Franconia Notch State Park, located in the deep rift formed between the craggy cliffs of the Kinsman and Franconia mountains, is sliced by an eight-mile section of Interstate 93, whose three brown-colored sub-exits of 34A, B, and C, access different attractions, from the Flume Gorge in the south to Echo Lake Beach in the north Omaha Roofing.

The Gilman Visitor Center, located at the first exit and framed by mounts Liberty and Flume, offers a good introduction.

Developing into a social and recreational destination because of its Old Man in the Mountain rock formation, the park itself had sported two different "Profile House" hotels in order to accommodate the influx of tourists who had initially arrived by horse-drawn stage coach. This transportation method was changed after the 1870s when a spur track from Bethlehem linked the Profile House's own railroad station.

Demand created by wealthy tourists, most of whom would travel with their servants and spend at least a summer month at the resort, necessitated the demolishing of the original hostelry in 1905 and the replacement of it with what became New England's largest hotel.

A Concord Coach is displayed in the Gilman Visitor Center. Built in Concord, New Hampshire, by Abbott, Downing, and Company between 1828 and 1900, the type became the country's most famous stage, which ultimately saw worldwide service. A single shipment, entailing 30 coaches and 60 four-horse harnesses, was made to Omaha, Nebraska.

The Visitor Center's elaborately-painted example, coach #431, was assembled in 1874 and features two padded, forward-facing, roof-installed benches and two internal facing ones, having carried passengers and mail between Plymouth, New Hampshire, and the Profile House in Franconia Notch until 1911. Discovered in Vermont 22 years later, it was returned to the area and restored.

Aside from the center's gift shop and cafeteria, the continuously run "Franconia Notch" film provides an excellent introduction to the park.

A shuttle transports sightseers from the Gilman Visitor Center to a point 500 yards from one of Franconia Notch State Park's most impressive attractions, the Flume Gorge, and a boardwalk path leads to it Omaha Storm Damage Repair.

Discovered in 1808 by 93-year-old Jess Guernsey, the gorge itself, a natural, 800-foot-long chasm at the base of Mount Liberty, features narrow walls of Conway granite which rise to heights of 70 to 90 feet and are spaced 12 to 20 feet apart. A ten-foot-high by 12-foot-long, egg-shaped boulder had once hung between its walls, but was swept away in 1883 by a rainstorm-created landslide.

Walking trails lead to the Pool and the Sentinel Pine Bridge, as well as to waterfalls.

Another of Franconia Notch State Park's glittering jewels is Cannon Mountain. Rising to 4,180 feet, it offers 72 trails and glades totaling 23 miles and 264 acres, with a 2,180-foot vertical drop. Its ten lifts range from the 600-foot Huckerbrook Handle Tow to the 5,139-foot aerial tramway.

The mountain itself played a significant role in New Hampshire's skiing history. Joan Hannah of Franconia, for example, grew up skiing here and became a member of the US Olympic Team in 1960 and 1964, winning the bronze medal in the Grand Slalom event in the FIS World Championships held in Chamonix, France, in 1962.

Jean Claude Killy won all three men's events in the 1967 World Cup here while on his way to prevailing as the overall champion in the first year of the World Cup Competition.

Visitors can ride the two enclosed, 80-assenger (70 skier) Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway gondolas, traversing the 2,022-foot vertical rise to the 4,180-foot summit in eight minutes, enjoying views of Echo Lake, Artists Bluff, Bald Knob, and Mount Lafayette, the highest peak in the Franconia Range.

Its predecessor, North America's first aerial tramway, had commenced operations in 1938 with its 27-passenger wooden cars and had elevated Cannon to the top of its class within the northeastern ski resort system, carrying 6.5 million passengers by the time it had been retired 42 years later. The current version, dedicated on May 24, 1980, elevated it even higher--in this case, to European resort standards.

The Summit Café, a bar, the Cannon Mountain Rim Trail, and an observation platform enable visitors to enjoy the ride, the view, a drink, a meal, and a hike.

One of the original, 1938 tram cars, along with a Mount Cranmore skimobile, are displayed outside of the New England Ski Museum, located at the base of Cannon Mountain.

Established for the purpose of collecting, conserving, and exhibiting elements from a broad spectrum of ski history, the museum itself houses the most extensive collection of vintage equipment, clothing, historical files, photographs, literature, posters, and artwork in the country.

The earliest evidence of human ski use, according to the museum, was unearthed from a Russian bog in the form of 8,000-year-old ski fragments. Initial Asian and European examples were handmade, utilitarian, and principally used for traveling, hunting, and fighting. Today's counterparts are contrastively employed for competition and recreational purposes.

Modern machinery sparked the ski boom during the 1930s. Rope tows, tramways, and ski lifts facilitated the ascents of winter sports enthusiasts, who traveled to New England slopes from Boston by snow trains.

A path leads from the base of Cannon Mountain to the Old Man of the Mountain Historic Site.

Geologically formed some two million years ago, the 40.5-foot profile itself, comprised of five granite ledges located 1,200 feet about Profile Lake in the mountainside and appearing like the silhouette of a man's face, was a massive, natural sculpture. The forehead boulder alone, for example, measured 20 by four by four feet and weighed 20 tons. The forehead ledge measured 45 by ten feet and weighed 30 tons, while the remainder of its components included the 11-foot brow, ten-foot nose, seven-foot upper lip, and 12-foot chin.

But even a seemingly permanent rock formation such as this proved impermanent when slow, silent erosion finally weakened the rock ledges and caused them to collapse during the night of May 3, 2003. Although subsequent support for its reconstruction was strong, the mountainside's support was not, according to State of New Hampshire geologist analyses and a government-appointed task force decreed that the profile, like so much in the physical world, would be forced to retreat into memory.

The image, however, was restored in 2011 when the granite Old Man of the Mountain Profiler Plaza, located on the shore of Profile Lake, was dedicated, enabling viewers to peer through a device whose steel rods, or "profiles," reproduced the image when pointed at the cliff where the original had taken root.

A small, Old Man of the Mountain Museum was recently relocated to the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway base lodge and features displays pertaining to its Profile House hotel era.

There are several other natural sights in Franconia Notch State Park. The Basin, for instance, is a 15-foot-deep, 30-foot-diameter pothole in the Pemigewasset River that was created 25,000 years ago when melting glacial waters eroded its bedrock, while the river itself flows from Profile Lake at a 1,900-foot elevation and drains the notch. Boise rock, a glacial erratic, once served as overnight protection for Thomas Boise, who had been caught in a fierce snowstorm while sledding and was forced to seek refuge beneath its overhang. Boise Woods represents the low-elevation forest environment typical of Franconia Notch. And 1,500-foot-high Eagle Cliff often serves as a Peregrine falcon nesting spot.

Emphasizing the man-made, as opposed to the natural, Clark Trading Post, another family-oriented theme park accessed by Route 3 and open from May to October, features live Black Bear shows, as well as rides on its steam-powered White Mountain Central Railroad. Rounding out the attractions are the Old Man of the Mountain Climbing Tower, Old Mill Pond Water Blaster Boats, Segway rides, and the American Museum and 1884 Fire Station. Meals and snacks can be eaten in the Whistle Stop Snack Bar, Pullman's Pizza and Subs, and the Peppermint Saloon, and gifts can be purchased in the Candle Shop and the Maple Cabin.

B. On Route 112:

Both a road and a sight in and of itself, 34.5-mile-long Route 112, also known as the Kancamagus Highway National Scenic Byway, provides southern White Mountain access from Lincoln, where it reaches its highest, 3,000-foot elevation, and Conway. The northeast's first designated National Scenic Byway, which reflects the namesaked Mount Kancamagus it crosses, it traces its origins to the Passaconaway-destined town road of 1837, which had subsequently been extended eastward from that point and westward from Lincoln, mostly as a result of Civilian Conservation Corps construction work and, after the Second World War, the State Highway Department. When the two sections were linked in 1959, it opened to traffic.

A White Mountains Visitor Center is located on the road's west side, beyond Lincoln.

Because of the narrow cleft worn in the solid rock over the millennia by the Swift River, there are numerous scenic areas along it, including Falls Pond, Sawyer Pond, Greeley Ponds, and Lower Falls. Rustic campgrounds facilitate those wishing to combine an overnight stay with one or more area activities, such as picnicking, hiking, swimming, fishing, kayaking, or snow shoeing.

The area's natural scenery can also be explored at the Lost River Gorge and Boulder Caves, located six miles west of North Woodstock on Route 112 in Kinsman Notch.

Formed 300 million years ago, the notch itself was sculpted by a more than mile thick glacier during the Ice Age, creating the present-day mountains and passes that provide access through them. The only remaining glacial aspect is the pace with which erosion continues to exert its effects on Lost River Gorge, whose "intricate, (lantern-lit) boardwalks twist, turn, rise, and descend," according to the attraction, leading to granite rock walls, "gigantic boulders stacked like blocks," glacial caves, and waterfalls.

Visible from Route 112 further east in North Woodstock, just before the Interstate 93 overpass, is the Café Lafayette Dinner Train.

Ceded the dream of operating a dinner train, of which there are only a handful in the country, by an ailing friend, owners Lance Burak and Leslie Holloway virtually adopted his hands, restoring three Pullman cars to bygone-era splendor, before initiating their New Hampshire version of the concept in 1989. Promising five courses served in the Grand European manner, and artfully prepared by Chef Doug Trulson, the two-hour, 20-minute round trip from and to North Woodstock is toted as the "restaurant with the constantly changing view," and diners/riders can reserve either main or dome level tables (for four).

Of its three coaches, the blue and white "Granite Eagle" was the first such dome car to enter the state in 1995 after its transport from Kansas and was restored the following year in the Engine House of the Hobo Railroad, itself located only a stone's throw in Lincoln. A Pullman Planetarium car first built in 1952, it sports a unique, tri-level arrangement with a dome, a sunken lounge below it, and main level, fore and aft accommodation.

The "Algonquin," a Canadian National Railroad café coach from 1953, and the "Indian Waters," a 1924 Pullman Standard Victorian coach replete with era-indicative brass, stained glass, and polished woods, completes the fleet.

Ducking into the tunnel of forest green, the gently moving train follows track laid by the Pemigewasset Valley Railroad in the late-1800s to serve the area's once-grand hotels, crossing the shallow, rocky mosaic of the Pemigewasset River by means of the rust-red, dual-spanned trestle bridge. Enroute to the Jack O' Lantern resort, the train's turn-around point, diners enjoy a five-course dinner at formally set tables of appetizers, organically grown salads, palette cleansing sorbets, entrees, desserts, and coffee or tea. Separately priced alcoholic beverages are available.

Stressing scenery instead of cuisine, the Hobo Railroad, located a short distance east in Lincoln, uses the same Pemigewasset River track to the Jack O' Lantern Resort on its 80-minute round-trip runs from Hobo Junction Train Station between May and October, with up to three daily frequencies during the peak summer months.

Tracing its roots to the 1986 Plymouth and Lincoln Railroad, which had operated seven-mile excursions to Woodstock with three Also diesel-electric locomotives, it also operated the route and subsequently secured trackage rights from the State of New Hampshire, paving the 54-mile way for the establishment of its Lake Winnipesaukee Scenic Railroad division and Meredith-Weirs Beach-Laconia service.

In Lincoln, passengers can purchase drinks and snacks on board or pre-order a Hobo lunch of sandwiches, chips, cookies, beverages, and a hobo stick or pouch. Fall foliage and Polar Express theme runs are offered on weekends at the end of the year.

Loon Mountain, just east of Lincoln on Route 112, is another of the White Mountains' many ski resorts. Comprised of three peaks-North, South, and Loon itself-it offers 12 lifts, 370 skiable acres, and 61 trails. Its summit elevation is 3,050 feet.

With three peaks, there are numerous dining options, including Camp III at the base of the North Peak, The Octagon Lodge and the Governor Adams Lodge at the base of Loon Peak, the Pemigewasset Base Camp at the South Peak, and the Summit Café at the top of Loon Mountain.

Like other area resorts, Loon offers several summer activities, such as scenic gondola skyrides, horseback riding, mountain biking, a climbing wall, a bungee trampoline, Segway tours, and a zipline, with individual and combination tickets.

[nandinisniche]

What Sarees Can Teach Cis Feminists About Trans* Solidarity

(This article was originally published on Medium on June 11, 2015.)

Stop Saying Caitlyn Jenner Is Doing Femininity Wrong

In the midst of America’s earnest “trans moment”, a strong call for opposition is making itself heard even in progressive — and feminist — media.

It’s coming from inside the house

Trans* acceptance was never going to be a slam dunk, not even with the stupendous combined charm of Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner, nor with the help of that old reliable — airbrushed sex appeal — thrust at us from magazine covers to proclaim their inauguration into True American Womanhood™. Nothing about upending gender expectations is ever that easy.

So this is where we are. The more we publicly the celebrate transgender acceptance, the more anti-trans worms continue to crawl out of the patriarchal woodwork. This is no surprise. To do my bit as a cis ally to trans people, I was ready to write to, reason with, and educate the haters. What is surprising is that so many of the haters are fellow feminists.

Meet the TERFs

Like many Tumblr-toting Roxane-Gay-quoting internet feminists, I had been under the impression that the old guard Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists — TERFs — were a dying breed. The internet circles I lurk in are trans-friendly spaces, at least in name. My Twitter feed was full of trans-positive articles even before Laverne Cox hit the front pages of American media. My favorite reddit communities ban on sight anyone who suggests that trans men aren’t really men, or that it would be dangerous to allow trans women into ladies’ toilets.

But about a week ago, I began to see some startlingly transphobic articles being shared on my carefully culled Facebook feed. Several feminists that I admired were openly disparaging the manner and style and details of Caitlyn Jenner’s public transition.

Some of them went the unabashedly bigoted route, linking to articles like Matt Walsh’s screed, “Calling Bruce Jenner A Woman Is An insult To Women”. Such hatefulness and incoherence is easy to refute (though not defeat). It’s difficult for progressives to take a christian conservative cis white man seriously when he says Caitlyn Jenner is “Disgusting, frankly.” Chalk it up to yet another thing Matt Walsh is wrong about today, and move on.

Other feminists have taken the more subtly transphobic path, criticizing Ms Jenner for playing up stereotypes about femininity. Today an NYT op-ed by Elinor Burkett, for example, is outraged at Chelsea Manning for saying she feels more emotionally sensitive since transitioning, and takes Ms Jenner to task for looking forward to wearing nail polish openly in public after her transition. These attacks are so much harder to deal with because they grow from a germ of truth. Most women alive today grew up battling these stereotypical, insulting assumptions about femininity by the world at large: that women are “too emotional”, that women are obsessed with superficialities like make-up and nail polish, that women are biologically hardwired this way and therefore calling women silly or superficial is not sexism!When we see these insults being given new life by the statements of transgender women in the public eye, we wince.

Yes, I admit it. I winced too.

But then I remembered the sarees.

The story of the sarees

This is where I tell you a little about my roots. I am from India. I grew up in Bengaluru in the ‘80s and ‘90s, back when it was still Bangalore and quite a lot more socially conservative than it is today, though much more liberal than many other parts of India. 

One of the fiercest battles I waged then was against the dress code imposed on me: traditionalism first, modesty a close second, to hell with my personal choice, and don’t even dare breathe the word ‘fashion’ for fear of being branded whorish[1]. Even after my family moved overseas, this dress code persisted, made me choke, made me seethe. My parents and I had screaming fights over my tight jeans. My underwear was scrutinized for possible covert sluttiness[2]. I wasn’t allowed to wear spaghetti strap tops even in my 20s.

I became quite the expert in the art of secret outfit changes when away at school and college. I also grew to hate the traditional Indian clothes that were constantly held up to me as markers of good virtue. Enforced modesty taught me to see every saree as a symbol of oppression[3].

Can you imagine my state of mind when I saw my peers both in real life and in the media embrace sarees as liberating fashion statements? I saw many South Asian women ‘reclaiming’ the saree as sensual, religious, feminine, traditional, and kickass all at once (and I doubt they had ever collectively lost their claim to begin with). Many desi girls and women overseas embraced sarees as defiant, joyous expressions of their minority cultural identity. I saw my school friends wear their sarees happily and stylishly, and I got thoroughly pissed off at them.

I thought they were stupid for welcoming their own oppression. I thought they were betraying me, betraying all the battles that I and every other Indian feminist had fought to escape our compulsory-desi-outfit shackles. I raged at them for giving ammunition to all the people who pressured me to dress traditionally: now they were able to point to all these other girls and say, See? See how happy they are in traditional clothes? Why can’t you be like that?

But most diasporan desi girls and women never fought the battles I fought, and don’t have the same associations with sarees that I do. Their life experiences allowed them to take a pleasure in sarees that will probably always be alien to me. For some of them, donning a saree was even something of a defiance. 

I had a dance instructor in junior college who was called to the Bar in London, and at one of the formal ceremonies that followed, instead of wearing the expected black robes, she wore a lace-edged black saree. She said she was telling the British to stuff it. I was stunned. I believe that was the first time I allowed that maybe, just maybe, sarees are not oppression for everyone all the time.

Not just sarees

No doubt other ethnic and religious groups have experienced a similar dissnoance. I have an Iranian friend who chafes under the laws that impose headscarves on her whenever she goes back home, and her journey has been toward understanding why American hijabis exist: to understand that for some American muslimahs, wearing the hijab is as radical an act as it is for my Iranian friend to take hers off.[4]

The moral of the story

What the saree can teach cis feminists is this: context matters. Our life experiences matter. The symbols and methods we choose for self-expression have particular meanings for ourselves, and we should not insist that our meaning is THE universal meaning.

For some women, nail polish is a symbol of all the dreary, expensive, time-consuming hoops women are expected to jump through to adequately perform our femininity. For other women, especially those who have spent their entire lives longing for and being forcibly denied any expression of femininity, nail polish may be a powerful and triumphant symbol of self expression.

How can the former among us take offence at the latter? It is well within our rights to interrogate the patriarchal rules surrounding nail polish from a critical perspective, but how can we justify interrogating trans women like that?

Can we even imagine how it must feel to be ‘officially’ allowed to wear nail polish after 65 years of being denied it? I want to throw Caitlyn Jenner the glitteriest mani-pedi party when I think about it, and I’m the kind of person that’s owned exactly four bottles of nail polish ever in all my life. (So… I guess we will be hiring professional manicurists for the party because I would paint her knuckles as likely as nails.)

Beyond the cis perspective

So far I’ve only considered trans women’s choices from a resolutely cis lens. But what if we tried looking at the performance of femininity from the perspective of trans women themselves? Would we see merely choice and triumph? Or would we see something more nuanced, and decidedly darker?

Consider: violence against transgender women is an epidemic. Even though trans women are only 10% of all LGBTQ people who report incidents of hate directed at them, they are 45% of murder victims in the same group. Passing as female can be a matter of life or death for trans women. In light of this, is there any way to see cis feminists’ criticism of trans women for “trying to hard” to be feminine as anything other than terrifying, hateful, or at least deeply misguided? I don’t think so.

Consider: trans people are more deeply and thoroughly scrutinized for their performance of gender than cis people like myself can ever fathom. The pressure on trans people to surgically feminize their appearance in order to “pass”, or in order to be more acceptable as romantic partners, is extremely strong even when they personally would rather not get surgery. (Yes, that’s right, not all trans people want surgery.) This pressure and scrutiny has extremely damaging effects on trans people — for example, over 40% of transgender people attempt suicide, compared to 4.6% in the general population and around 15% among LGB people. Should cis feminists really be piling on trans people for supposedly “over”performing gender, thus adding to the toxic culture of overscrutinizing trans people? I definitely don’t think so.

A better way to fight

Here’s what I think cis feminists should be doing instead:

#1 (for the Meets Minimum Standards of Human Decency badge) Unequivocally support and encourage trans people’s chosen manner of gender expression. It’s a battle they have fought long and hard for, and feminists of all people should not be in the business of yelling them for somehow “doing it wrong”. They are doing it right, because they get to decide what’s right for them. Period.

#2 (for the Feminist 101 badge) Support the efforts of trans activists who want to build a safer and more equal world for transgender people. This means reading trans feminist writing (good places to start include Laverne Cox, Zinnia Jones, Model View Culture, and if you’re feeling academic, Radical TransFeminist). This means educating ourselves on the specific obstacles to equality faced by the trans community: safety, access to healthcare, equal opportunity in employment, equal access to public toilets, etc.

#3 (for the Intersectional Feminist badge) Recognize that if there is a reason why media portrayals of famous trans people is problematic, it is because of the way this affects THE TRANS COMMUNITY, not cis women! The inimitable Laverne Cox says:

A year ago when my Time magazine cover came out I saw posts from many trans folks saying that I am “drop dead gorgeous” and that that doesn’t represent most trans people. (It was news to be that I am drop dead gorgeous but I’ll certainly take it). But what I think they meant is that in certain lighting, at certain angles I am able to embody certain cisnormative beauty standards. Now, there are many trans folks because of genetics and/or lack of material access who will never be able to embody these standards. More importantly many trans folks don’t want to embody them and we shouldn’t have to to be seen as ourselves and respected as ourselves . It is important to note that these standards are also infomed by race, class and ability among other intersections.

In the spirit of #3, I highly recommend browsing the amazing Twitter hashtag, #MyVanityFairCover, where ordinary non-celebrity transgender people are creating their own “Call Me Caitlyn” style cover shots.

And finally, every time we feel anger or outrage stirring in response to something a trans woman says or does about her femininity, we need to remember the story of the sarees.

[1] & [2]: These were the terms used at me, and yes, they are extremely disparaging to sex workers.

[3]: Make no mistake: for hundreds of thousands of Indian girls and women, these clothes are indeed an oppression. Traditional dress codes are commonly imposed on Indian women to this day. I personally know far too many married women living in urban, upper class, highly educated joint families who do not have ‘permission’ from their in-laws to wear jeans.

[4]: Note that I am not suggesting that any choice whatsoever is feminist/radical just because it is a choice. Choice feminism is deeply flawed. What I am saying is, any symbol or act can be radical or oppressive depending upon personal and social context.