Katherine Cross is a pizza loving feminist sociologist, trans Latina, and amateur slug herder, working on her PhD at the CUNY Graduate Centre. When she’s not studying or gaming she can be found at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Her blog can be found at quinnae.com and her writing has also appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Bitch Magazine, Questioning Transphobia, and Kotaku. She is a co-editor of the Border House.
Despite the testimonies of many who have been personally targeted by these individuals, a number of white leftist men have queued up to say that the whole situation is an exaggerated ploy manufactured by journalists in the pocket of Hillary Clinton.
Our society has long needed a comprehensive and up-to-the-nanosecond book-length treatment of online harassment as both a civil rights issue and a sociological phenomenon. Unfortunately, Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral, by scholar Karla Mantilla, is not quite that book—but for the moment, it will have to do.
It comes as no surprise to us when we hear that many trans people suffer from depression even after full medical transition. But for some cisgender people, such as Richard A. Friedman writing for the New York Times, this fact can only be resolved by calling into question our very right to self-determine our genders.
In truth, because trans people are often forced to remain silent out of fear, any attempt to stand up for ourselves and counter conventional wisdom is seen by some members of the public as the so-called mob descending.
An outgrowth of the latest abuse hurled at critic Anita Sarkeesian and developer Zoë Quinn, GamerGate was apparently a deliberate effort to purge women and people of color from the fledgling world of independent gaming criticism through harassment and accusations of fraudulence.
There can be no reproductive justice for all until the state-sanctioned murder of Black youth in this country is addressed.
Amid the anguish over the Hobby Lobby ruling Monday was a note of optimism among some liberals, suggesting that the ruling was constructed with a narrowness that specifically prohibits use of its legal reasoning to protect religiously inspired discrimination against LGBT people. If only that was in fact the case.
The question that must be asked, in plain language, is: Do imperfect people deserve death for their imperfection?
Rodger’s actions have a chilling rationality to them in the terms of our gendered society, which makes objects and possessions of women, and rapacious, status-conscious animals of men. Whatever else Rodger’s crimes are, they are not unintelligible; they merely wrote in blood what too many of us hear, see, and say every day.
In a recent ruling by the Supreme Court, which paved the way for similar state-level legislation, five justices voted in favor of weakening the separation of church and state; but the implications of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s libertarian jurisprudence are the most dangerous and far-reaching.
The central argument in Lean In is that one can strategize their way through the patterns of structural sexism. But Abramson’s firing provides a powerful case study for the fact that we cannot win a game we are rigged to lose.
What conservatives really mean when they talk about "religious freedom" has been revealed already by their longstanding crusade against the birth control benefit afforded by the Affordable Care Act. For them, having religious freedom requires the right to discriminate—against specific people, and in a specific way.
Victories in the realm of trans health care occasion so much celebration because of what health-care access can do; so many of the trans community’s immediate concerns are quite literally matters of life and death.
A new report from the American Jewish World Service and Global Action for Trans Equality looks at the funding landscape for trans and intersex activism. “As we’re T-specific,” said one interviewee, “it is difficult to access LGBT funding.” The irony of this should be lost on no one.
The realities of trans women’s experience with social media remind us that a discussion about "toxicity" online cannot be contained by the artificial boundaries of “Twitter feminism.” The problem is much larger than Twitter or any number of internal activist flare-ups. It encompasses the entire online world.
