http://www.ebar.com/common/inc/article_print.php?sec=news&article=4458

Oh please. Geekdom is the highest honor the internets can bestow on someone! :D Having other geeks call you a geek means you’re *in* and it’s always nice for me (as a female geek) to hear women getting their public geek cred on. Go scientists!

The director of NCTE basically said it herself: the important thing here is that positions like this suffer when employers concentrate on background rather than skills and qualifications, so WHY THE HELL is the mainstream media/general populace concentrating on her personal life so hard?

How sad is it that I’m more glad about the fact that a trans woman was appointed than I am angry that (yet another) missile scientist gets to make decisions about how our government does things?”

I don’t mean to derail the thread, but
1. The overlooking of the backgrounds of German rocket scientists was Truman’s deal, not other scientists’. Many American rocket scientists, EVEN during WWII and the Cold War, were very politically progressive in terms of foreign policy. Scientific background does and should not make someone morally and politically suspect.
2. A lot of the Germans who were recruited to work for the US govt. post-WWII weren’t just working on missiles. They also contributed greatly to the development of satellite technology and the Saturn V rocket, which was essential for the moon landing and other awesome nonlethal stuff.
3. Since Amanda Simpson is not and has presumably never been a Nazi war criminal, can we please focus on her achievement as a tech expert, a scientist, and a trans woman and not waste our time uselessly denigrating an entire valuable profession?

Thanks.

Yes, news stories about transwomen involving their assigned birth names, genital status, medical procedures and personal details of their transitions, much less blind speculation on their “male socialization” are all crude attempts to strip them of their womenhood and would classify as a form of trans repression.

It’s essentially standard in any mainstream media article about a trans woman to make a point of mentioning our assigned-at-birth names, to mention whatever medical treatments we’ve had and random irrelevant bits about clothing and wigs (bonus points if there’s a picture putting make-up on, sadly they missed that).

All of these are fairly objectifying, no? I mean, is surgery and reference to your genitals something particularly relevant to your employment?

More perniciously, this focus on the accoutrements of trans women’s femininity encourages the general perception of trans women as illusory, manufactured, fake, artificial–which segues rapidly into deceptive and deluded..