#LikeAGirl

I'd been semi-avoiding watching this because I'd heard that it was an ad.

Now I wish I hadn't waited. An ad it may be. But damn! it's inspiring. I teared up.

Facebook and the Hobby Lobby Decsion

So, Monday, I came in and wrote this, while completely pissed off. I've had time since then to both cool down and see what people I know are saying, mostly primarily Facebook, both pro and con. I won't be going into the details of the ruling here. Others much more qualified than me have been addressing the legal issues since the ruling was given.

Rather, I want and hope for this post to be something you can show your roommate, you parents, your boy/girlfriend.

I am going to address the two views I've seen the most that are for this ruling, that is, those who support Hobby Lobby in their decision to not fund certain contraceptives.

The first is, "Why do you (people against the decision) care? It doesn't affect you, you don't work for Hobby Lobby."

The second is, "Good! No company should have to pay for abortions or abortion-causing contraceptives."

I'm addressing these arguments in this order because for me, this is the easiest way to explain. The first leads into the second.

So, why do I care? After all, it's true that I don't work for Hobby Lobby.

The answer to that is twofold. The foremost and primary one is that I do use one of those newly-not-required-to-be-funded birth controls.

Specifically I use Paragard, the copper intra-uterine device (IUD). As for why I use this method of birth control, it's primarily because my husband and I (mostly I) are not currently ready to have any children, as a result of where we are in our lives. Husband and I just started two new careers. We've moved three states in the last year. We have a small apartment. We plan to move states again in about two years. None of which is particularly conducive to wanting a small human running around.

My other reason is medical. Conventional hormonal pill birth control was causing debilitating migraines for me. This was seriously affecting my quality of life and my ability to perform my job.
So my doctor and I, with no needed input from my then-employer decided that the 10 year lifespan and non-hormonal copper IUD was the best choice for me.

So, yes, I care because this option that is needed for women who know they don't want children in the near future, or who cannot take hormonal birth controls just had one of their best, if not one of their only options removed from them.

Now, I know what you're probably thinking. "But what about condoms?"

Well, condoms might be a great choice for some people. But believe it or not, you are making several assumptions. Amoung them that a womans partner is willing and capable of wearing a condom. In this case, willing means a partner who will take the time every time to put a condom on correctly. Willing means a partner who isn't abusive. It also assumes that both people are not allergic or sensitive to latex.

And this is another issue I've dealt with. I have latex sensitivity. I won't break out if I handle it or touch it, but condoms can range from uncomfortable to downright painful for me.

And yes while female and latex-free condoms do exist, they are often considerably more expensive, or in the case of female condoms, more expensive and quite rare. This means they are impractical for frequent use for many people.

Now, on to the second point I've been seeing, that companies with religious leanings should not be required to pay for abortions. This use of abortion includes contraceptives which are generally accepted to function by causing abortions, which include various IUDs and pills like Plan B.

The trouble with this common knowledge is that it simply isn't true. IUDs and Plan B do not cause abortions.

Now, different IUDs function by different methods, and I'm going to deal with the two most common.

1. Paragard -- These are copper wire wrapped around a plastic "T"--They function as a spermicide via the copper. This is no different from the sponges, foams, or jellys that are apparently perfectly OK to use. This IUD is effective up to 10 years.
2. Mirena -- These are a plastic "T" with hormones in them. These function the same as a low-hormone dose pill. It even still uses levonorgestrel, like a many kinds of "the Pill." This IUD is effective for up to 5 years.

Both Paragard and Mirena use some mechanical means as well. By that I mean that the T shape naturally inhibits a sperm from reaching eggs, further preventing chance of pregnancy. It is this mechanical shape-based inhibition that is often referred to as 'abortion.'

Next we have Plan B. Plan B is either a single dose or a two-dose system of levonorgestrel, just like Mirena, and just like many contraceptive pills. The difference is that the dosage is much higher than a daily pill would be. The window in which Plan B is effective is 72 hours. This window exists because all this pill does is trick a womans body into thinking it is already pregnant, which prevents conception by preventing the release of an egg from the ovary. HOWEVER, if you are already pregnant, it will do nothing. It will not harm you, it will not harm the fetus.

Repeating myself for emphasis, Plan B does not and cannot end a pregnancy.

It is a safety back up for when primary birth control "fails."

I have used it twice. Both were when my husband and I were still relying solely on male condoms for our contraception. Twice while I was working a minimum wage job and he was in grad school, we had concern that a condom had broken or otherwise leaked. Rather than risk a pregnancy at that time, I took Plan B to ensure that I would not get pregnant.

So at this point, I've established that Plan B and IUDs are often good choices or the best choice for various women in various circumstances. Circumstances you can't know just by looking at her. And I've shown that none of them are abortion-causing drugs.

Rather, they are simply another contraception option. Some women use them. Some do not. Either way, it is not the business of the business she works for.

I should also point out that this won't just affect the women who work for Hobby Lobby, but also any employees with spouses or daughters who are also covered by the company insurance plan.

Contraceptives, in all their forms are not the same thing as abortions.

And you know what? Even If they were, it still wouldn't be the business of anyone but the woman and her doctor. Not her boss, not your boss, not her Pastor, not your Pastor, not her company, not your company.

Your right to do stuff around me ends at my nose. And my uterus is well behind my nose.

SCOTUS and Women's Health

I'm going to say upfront this is a reactionary piece. The below opinions are mine and mine only. Sarcasm, bitterness and emotional assertions may follow.

Page break because cursing. A lot. Probably results in NSFW.

I've Been the Lucky One

We have another report of harassment in the skeptic-atheist-sphere. Link Here.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but honestly, I'm just not anymore.

I wish I could say I was disapointed, but honestly? I'm just not anymore.

I wish I could say I wanted to go to skeptic or atheist conferences. But I don't anymore.

The pattern of harassment has become the pattern I expect. 

I've often heard it said that the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Yet women are regularly expected to roll with, walk past, and accept standards of treatment that are unethical, unacceptable and downright frustrating.

I want to be outraged, to have something witty and brilliant to say. I want to add something to this conversation.

But all I can manage is sadness, and a lingering feeling of being a poseur.

I haven't dealt with the career-altering levels of harassment we keep seeing again and again and again. Maybe it's because I'm not in organized skepticism/atheism. Maybe it's because I only just started blogging and talking about these things.

Probably? I've just been damned lucky.

I wrote several days ago about a co-worker of mine who we had to set up an escape plan for since she occasionally rides the train with a harasser. I've never had to do that.

I haven't written about my friend in high school who couldn't go anywhere alone--at school or public--because the school and police didn't take her ex-boyfriends threats of killing her seriously. But it wasn't me.

I've never been turned down for a job to my knowledge because I'm a woman. And at previous jobs, a lack of perceived authority was more likely to come from my age and height, although I'm sure being a woman was also a subconscious factor.

I've only been cat-called to my awareness once.

I've slept over at male friends houses and gotten drunk with them, yet I've never been raped.

I've been the lucky one.

On Mental Health, the Santa Barbara Shooting & #YesAllWomen

The conversation over at Pharyngula with regard to the Santa Barbara shooting really drove home a couple of things to me.

First that the habitual knee-jerk reaction of equating horrific violence to mental illness needs to stop.

And that second, that I need to write and document my travels through mental health care.

Regarding the first point, several commenters brought up that having a mental illness makes it more likely that you will be a *victim* of violence, not more likely to perpetuate it. Further, othering mental illness as default violent doesn't do anyone any good. It just inhibits our ability to have a conversation about the cultural issues that trigger a situation like the Santa Barbara shooting.

I have mild to occasionally severe anxiety. My triggers are often work or stress related. For example, at its worst, needing to perform a telephone call resulted in a debilitating panic attack. That three month period prior to getting a diagnoses I was having one or more debilitating panics a week.

My attacks consisted of shaking, crying and an infi-loop of "I can't do X" where X was whatever task was my trigger. I remember the first one I had (that I realized what it was), I was alone in a hotel room on a business trip. I think that was quite possibly the loneliest night of my life.

I'm lucky. Most of the time my anxiety is not that level crippling. Even luckier, Prozac is able to keep it under enough control that I still occasionally get the brain loops of "I can't do that," but I don't get debilitating attacks anymore.

I'll repeat that. To be able to function "normally" I have to be on an anti-anxiety medication. 

So when you paint this kind of behavior as "crazy" or "insane" you are tarring all of us on the wide spectrum of human experience who don't fall in your little nook of normal with the same brush as a mass-murderer. I don't fuckin' appreciate that.

The guy who did that shooting wrote a manifesto. Was a member of known MRA and PUA websites. No. I will not provide links to those corners of the internet. You go there at your own risk. For certain misogynistic values of "normal" what Rodgers did was the logical conclusion. Because it was never his own fault he couldn't get a date or laid or what-the-fuck-ever his goal was. It was the woman's fault. It was all women's fault.

Fuck that noise. #YesAllWomen have had to deal with smaller slices of that shit on a daily basis. No it's not nearly as much of an outlier as wiping it away with a simple "he was insane" implies. So stop trying to claim it is.

That "Creepy Guy"

UPDATE: I wrote this prior to gphearing about the shooting in Santa Barbara. I don't have a coherent  opinion on that incident. Surprise, sorrow, and anger are all I manage right now. My heart goes out to those with friends and family who were hurt and killed.

---

You know the one I'm talking about. That somewhat friendly guy at work who is ok to have a short chat with in the hall, but has a tendency to insert himself into conversations and then over stay his welcome?

Or if he sees you on the train, he will sit as close as possible and talk over or around other people in order to engage you in conversation?

The same guy has done the former to me and a friend of mine regularly, and recently escalated to the latter with my friend.

This pisses me off because it's a classic case of a WASP not taking women's socially allowed "no's" as the final answer.

She has mentioned several times that she is married, as that is generally the most accepted way to tell someone to back off. I'm taken. I have a boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband. She has tried not being around him, though through sharing a workplace and a public transit method, this isn't really practical.

I'm pissed off because those approaches to 'leave me alone' rarely work. Quelle surprise, it didn't work this time.

I'm pissed off because I had to sit down with her and plan an escape route for the next time he manages to corner her on the train. She couldn't think of a way out because he gets off after her, so he knows where her stop is. Luckily(?) there is a mall only a few stops away from work and before her final stop where we've agreed she can get off if he does it again.

But this means she has to actively change her behavior due to this guys 'social awkwardness'. 

I'm pissed off because her first instinct was to give him the 'socially awkward' pass. As discussions of harassment in the atheist community have evolved over the last few years, I've found that I don't buy this as an excuse.

I am not the most socially savvy person, I have friends some male, some female, some inbetween, who are not the most savvy. We are terrified of violating boundaries the way this guy has on a regular basis. The instant we suspect we've violated a boundary, we're falling over ourselves trying to apologize and make it right.

To be fair, the guy in question has not said to us, "I'm socially awkward, therefore you have to give me a pass." Rather, I think he is either consciously or subconsciously depending on our ingrained  habit of passing off creepy behavior has simply 'socially awkward' to keep us from being able to act or react in the manner we would like, which would be telling him to fuck off.

I want to know why this is the goddamn expectation. Why am I supposed to give him an automatic pass when he's freaking one of my friends out. 

-----
For further reading on socially awkward vs. creepy, here is a great article that is quite probably more eloquent than I.

Texas' New Voting Law

This one strikes close to home for me as I was raised in Texas and only recently left to follow work opportunities. 

From Texas' own website which is an FAQ on the new law:

When a voter arrives at a polling location, the voter will be asked to present one of the seven (7) acceptable forms of photo ID. Election officials will now be required by State law to determine whether the voter’s name on the identification provided matches the name on the official list of registered voters (“OLRV”). After a voter presents their ID, the election worker will compare it to the OLRV. If the name on the ID matches the name on the list of registered voters, the voter will follow the regular procedures for voting.If the name does not match exactly but is “substantially similar” to the name on the OLRV, the voter will be permitted to vote as long as the voter signs an affidavit stating that the voter is the same person on the list of registered voters.If a voter does not have proper identification, the voter will still be permitted to vote provisionally. The voter will have (six) 6 days to present proper identification to the county voter registrar, or the voter’s ballot will be rejected.

So. Breakdown. 7 acceptable form of ID. Ok, lets see what those are:

• Texas driver license issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS)

• Texas Election Identification Certificate issued by DPS

• Texas personal identification card issued by DPS

• Texas concealed handgun license issued by DPS

• United States military identification card containing the person’s photograph

• United States citizenship certificate containing the person’s photograph

• United States passport

Doesn't look too bad, right? Well, lets do a run down of cost of each of those:

• Drivers License : $25
• Texas Election Identification Card: $Free BUT you have to have Original or Certified copies of various documents--I'll get into that in a bit
• Personal Identification Card: $16
• Texas Conceled Carry: $140
• Military ID: N/A
• Citizenship certificate: $345
• US Passport: $165

So the cost of the proper documentation runs the gambit. The two main issues here are that the "Election Identification Card" requires substantial secondary documents to obtain. From Documentation Requirements, two of the following are required, because the only two accepted Primary identification are...a drivers license or a personal identification card, which invalidate you from getting an Election Identification card.
Secondary identity documents include:

1. Original or certified copy of a birth certificate issued by the appropriate State Bureau of Vital Statistics or equivalent agency;
2. Original or certified copy of United States Department of State Certification of Birth (issued to United States citizens born abroad); 
3. Original or certified copy of court order with name and date of birth (DOB) indicating an official change of name and/or gender; or
4. U.S. citizenship or naturalization papers without identifiable photo. 

Original or Certified copies of a birth certificate are $23 through Dallas county, and the statewide system doesn't say on their website what the cost is. An Original or Certified  copy of a US State Department Certificate of Birth is $50.An Original or Certified copy of a name and/or gender change will run you $230 for the original filing, plus $10 for the first certificate, plus any extra fees that I can find referenced, but not values for. (Sorry those of you who are Trans, I had no fucking idea that a simple name change was so goddamn expensive. It was a hassle just getting sorted out for the $25 that cis-women have to pay to get their drivers license fixed.)My google-fu failed and I can't find the cost of citizenship documentation with no photo referenced.

So the "free" option actually runs a realistic minimum of $23, and that's if you have easy access to originals of the 20-odd items in the 'Supporting Identification' category.

So if you're in college, and don't drive, have fun getting this all together, or if you don't live anywhere near one of DMV locations, you're completely out of luck. By the way around 80 of the 254 counties in Texas don't have DMV locations. 

That's just the cost tip of the iceberg.

Lets go back and look at these three sentences from the FAQ. 

Election officials will now be required by State law to determine whether the voter’s name on the identification provided matches the name on the official list of registered voters (“OLRV”). After a voter presents their ID, the election worker will compare it to the OLRV. If the name on the ID matches the name on the list of registered voters, the voter will follow the regular procedures for voting.If the name does not match exactly but is “substantially similar” to the name on the OLRV, the voter will be permitted to vote as long as the voter signs an affidavit stating that the voter is the same person on the list of registered voters.

By these requirements I would not have gotten to vote in last years Presidential election. Why? Even though I'd updated my voter registration card and information, when I went to the polls, they still had my maiden name on the rolls, not my married name that had been in effect for over two years. My Drivers License had my married name, but the because the polls showed my maiden, even with an "acceptable form of ID" I would have had to cast at best a provisional ballot. Provisional ballots aren't even counted until after the fact, and often aren't counted toward the final vote. 

And lets have a lovely illustration out of Corpus Christie where a District Court Judge felt  the effects of this law. Her Voter Registration had her first name, her middle name and her last name. Her drivers license had her first name, maiden name and her last name. This failed the "substantially similar" test required by the new law. She had to sign an affidavit confirming her identity, which by the way, is the exact same thing as a provisional ballot!

So, ladies, trans-women and men, and poor people, it looks like Texas has finally figured out ways to make our votes quite literally not count.

Is anyone else feeling that this timing is not coincidental to Wendy Davis announcing her plans to run for governor?

Really Moffat?

So I'm scrolling through my Facebook feed this morning and one of the posts I come across is "Women Don't Want Female Doctor -- Moffat." This was the headline for a news article posted on 3news.co.nz.

So I clicked on it to see the actual quote. This is what I got:

"It's absolutely narratively possible (that the Doctor could be a woman) and when it's the right decision, maybe we'll do it. It didn't feel right to me, right now. I didn't feel enough people wanted it. Oddly enough most people who said they were dead against it - and I know I'll get into trouble for saying this - were women. (They were) saying, 'No, no, don't make him a woman!'"

So line by line my reaction was, "Sweet, they formalized that into canon!" followed by, "oh, ok, I guess that makes sense" then, "Wait, really? Since when is the Doctor a popularity contest?"

And then came the kicker, repeated to refresh the impact, "Oddly enough most people who said they were dead against it - and I know I'll get into trouble for saying this - were women."

Wait...What? "I know I'll get in trouble for saying this" Protip, if that's your reaction, don't say it.
Also, sure I can believe there is a decent swath of the Whovian community who would flip their shit if there was a female Doctor. Fuck knows I've seen too much of the same attitudes in the Sci-Fi community at large, as well as the atheist/skeptical communities over the last several years. Hell, I would be more surprised if there wasn't a segment of the fanbase who flipped their shit.

But seriously, Moffat, you already gave a valid reason for not selecting a different actor or actress for the Doctor--it didn't meet what you wanted to do with the storyline. Why not just leave it at that?