Padaviya

Canadians may soon be able to apply for passports that do not reveal their gender.

“Passport Canada policy in relation to the gender indicated on passports is the subject of a review,” reads a briefing note obtained by La Presse newspaper in an Access to Information request.

On Tuesday, Passport Canada spokeswoman Béatrice Fénelon confirmed that “the policy regarding transgender people is still under review.”

Although the details of the change are not yet known, Canada may follow the Australian example and allow Canadians to mark their sex as “X” rather than “M” or “F.” Or the agency may simply streamline the process for transgendered people to obtain a passport denoting their new sex.

Under current requirements, Canadians can change the sex on their passport only if they provide medical proof of having undergone gender-reassignment surgery. If they are still in transition they can obtain a temporary two-year passport by furnishing medical documents showing the surgery is scheduled for sometime in the next 12 months.

Critics note the policy effectively excludes a minority of transgendered people who identify with a different gender, yet are unwilling or unable to undergo genital surgery.

“As physically transitioning can be an extremely expensive process, including access to surgery and hormones, it can be untenable for many trans and gender diverse individuals,” reads a 2011 policy paper on gender-neutral passports by Canadian LGBT advocate Egale Canada.

Intersex people, who are born with ambiguous chromosomes or genitalia, are forced to choose a gender when applying for a passport.

“There are people in transition from one sex to another. In my view I don’t see why passports shouldn’t reflect reality,” said Karen Selick with the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

While the passport issue has long been a nuisance for Canada’s transgendered community, it was not until recently that it threatened to become a barrier to travel. Under a series of changes to the Aeronautics Act last July, airlines are not allowed to seat a passenger if “the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents.”

“I don’t know why passports should have gender markers in the first place,” said Mercedes Allen, a writer on trans issues based in the Calgary area.

In September, Australia changed its passport policy to allow citizens to mark their gender as “indeterminate.” Then-minister for foreign affairs Kevin Rudd pegged the change as a way to remove the “administrative burden” on transgendered people.

“While it’s expected this change will only affect a handful of Australians, it’s an important step in removing discrimination for sex and gender diverse people,” he said.

In the wake of the Australian move, a spokeswoman with the U.K.’s Identity and Passport Service said the agency was exploring “the security implications of gender not being displayed in the passport.”

In December 2010, to accommodate same-sex parents the U.S. State Department removed the category for “mother” and “father” on its passport applications, opting instead for “parent 1” and “parent 2.”

Last year, the Bangladeshi Hijra, a long-established community of men living as women, obtained approval from the Bangladeshi government to denote their gender as “other” on passport applications. In neighbouring India, the Hijra have been able to list their gender as “E” for eunuch since 2005.

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. a state of exhaustion with how shitty people can be to each other, typically causing a countervailing sense of affection for things that are sincere but not judgmental, are unabashedly joyful, or just are.

(Sadly, this seems very appropriate for the feminist community.)

Sociologists have observed that employment in the U.S. is largely structured around an assumption that the worker has no family responsibilities.  The ideas that an employee should be able to work during non-school hours, stay late when needed, take off time for their own illness but never anyone else’s, for example, all presume that the workers have either no children or someone else taking care of children for them.

Most jobs, then, are not designed to be compatible with family responsibilities.  Since most people doing primary child care are women, this hurts mothers disproportionately.  Mothers have a more difficult time being the “perfect employee” and also face discrimination from employers.  This translates into some telling numbers.  Women make about 69% of what men make (not controlling for type of occupation), but most of this disadvantage is related to parental status, not sex. Women without children make 90% of what men make, while mothers make 66%.  Ann Crittenden’s book, The Price of Motherhood, lays out these numbers starkly.

These issues are at the heart of this well-crafted Ampersand cartoon by B. Deutsch, which prompted this post in anticipation of Mother’s Day in the U.S.:

We called ourselves the Dead Mothers Support Group or DMSG for short. If there was a touch of the macabre in the name, that was okay with us. Losing our moms as kids had been devastating. Why sugarcoat it? We were Harvard grad students who came together inside a dingy lecture hall to swap stories and cry. When it was my turn, I talked about who my mother had been–a painter with a sharp eye for beauty.

As a semi-tomboy, I sat cross-legged at her feet before school, watching her go through her makeup routine. It was an exhaustive process that began with an eye stick, incorporated a scary eyelash curling device and ended with tiny silver tweezers. She was particularly careful with her brows, always following their natural line, tweezing only what was necessary. Sometimes she noticed me and our eyes met. It was as if we were from foreign countries, me in my sloppy pony tail, she with every hair in place.

I lost my painter mother when I was 16. She had had a mastectomy six years before and the cancer had gone into remission. But several years later it resurfaced. By the time I was in high school, she was battling exhaustive treatments and endless medications. Too sick to paint by then, her makeup routine became her only creative outlet.

Sharing stories with the women of the DMSG was cathartic. This was just before Hope Edelman’s landmark book Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss opened the discussion, so the opportunity to talk to other women who understood was rare and profound. In addition to loss, we spent a lot of time talking about how to mother ourselves. While some women had managed to power through their grief, at 26 I still felt stuck in mine. My primary goal back then, via yoga, therapy and daily journaling, was to manage my sadness. Every day I asked my journal the same question: When will I be through with these tears?

The answer seemed to be “Never.”

No matter how hard I worked, the tears kept coming. Whenever they arrived, I retreated to an empty room at my office or holed up in my apartment. As I let the tears roll through me, I hated the heavy, cumbersome feelings of loss. I wanted to be someone else, the kind of person who could stuff it all down and make it disappear. I was angry at grief for taking so long to complete itself. “Screw emotional health,” I told my therapist. I didn’t want that; I wanted sweet, serene denial. I longed to be the kind of person who had small, tidy feelings–so small I could lose track of them altogether.

When the pain finally began to lessen in my early 30s, I was tentatively overjoyed. I thought maybe it was a result of acupuncture, lying for a half hour minutes with carefully placed needles in my skin. Or maybe it was the blue-green algae–nature’s superfood, with a complete list of amino acids that promised to alter the body’s chemistry on a cellular level. That’s what I wanted: to obliterate each grieving cell and replace it with a fully recovered one. Ideally one that had never experienced sadness in the first place.

Who knows what was helping, but eventually my mornings spent crying diminished. I found a steady job, formed a strong circle of friends and bought a house. When I was 33 I met my partner, a woman I had fallen for in college but had been too consumed with grief to pursue  as a lover. I moved to California and settled into her house on the side of a hill, beneath leaning Monterey pines. The exquisite feeling of being in love bloomed inside me. It was a fierce and powerful thing, and slowly, year by year, my grief became smaller and smaller.

Ten years later, when I was 44, I thoughtmaybe, just maybe, I had gotten past it. As the annual anniversary of my mother’s death approached, a time when I normally felt a heightened sense of sadness, I felt lighter. But this wasn’t just any anniversary: I was now the age my mother had been when she died, an age I wasn’t convinced I’d reach. I was now poised to outlive her. To soothe myself, I made an appointment for a massage. At the last minute, unaccountably, I added an eyebrow waxing. I had never altered my eyebrows before or, for that matter, even taken a good look at them. And when I did, what I saw were two unkempt and overgrown strips.

When I arrived for my brow waxing, I got cold feet. I warned the aesthetician that I had never done this before. “Please don’t change much,” I begged, explaining that I liked my eyebrows thick. While she smoothed on a warm solution of wax and then a second later yanked it off, I imagined pruned little trails, the kind that looked great above many women’s eyes but that I couldn’t imagine above mine.

When she was done, she handed me the mirror. I took a breath and peered at my reflection. My brows were still there, thick and dark, but something was different. That’s when it hit me: In just twenty minutes, the wax had unearthed the arc of my mother’s brow. That was her line, her slight curve.

I touched the pink, stinging skin. It wasn’t until I lay on the massage table several minutes later that the tears began to fall. The massage therapist said nothing as I sniffed and asked for a tissue.

Since the 2010 elections, states across the country have proposed literally hundreds of  restrictive new laws in an attempt to eliminate access to safe abortion care through various means. But the ongoing assault on women’s rights to decide whether and when to have a child, the general public’s attitude on abortion has remained virtually unchanged.

Via The Center for American Progress:

[A] steady majority supports women’s reproductive rights. The same [Pew Research Center] poll found 53 percent saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to 39 percent who thought it should be illegal in all or most cases. This is very close to the average split over the last couple of years, which, in turn, is very close to the split back in 2007-08.

Interestingly, only 16 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be illegal in all situations, yet it seems to be that 16 percent that is trying to make most of the new abortion laws in the country, foregoing even the most basic of exceptions like rape, incest or mother’s health.

While there has been considerable attention in the United States to political moves intended to reduce access to women’s health services, our neighbors to the north are also experiencing conservative-led cuts that affect women’s health. Six Canadian organizations focused on research and communication in women’s health have been told that their funding will be cut off next spring.

The six organizations forming the Women’s Health Contribution Program focus on issues including: the women’s health implications of the federal government’s regulation of toxic chemicals; the hyper-sexualization of girls; the inter-generational legacy of residential schools on Aboriginal women and their families; the need for trauma-informed counselling for women with addictions; a working guide for conducting sex and gender-based analysis in health research; and a critical analysis of funding for the HPV vaccine. The Program’s work has also focused broadly on how to best deliver prevention and health care programs to women and their children.

A press release from the Canadian Women’s Health Network describes dissatisfaction with and potential impacts of the cuts:

Staff and directors managing the centres and networks add their voices to the growing body of Canadians who are shocked and outraged by the short-sightedness of the federal government cuts to programs, services and the federal civil service. These cuts are in direct contradiction to the pledges regarding gender equality that Canada has made both in international commitments and to Canadians. Women are being hit particularly hard with these cuts, and, because the research being eliminated generated proactive, preventative strategies for health promotion, these cuts will cost everyone in the long term. The end of this work will be most strongly felt by the disadvantaged and the disempowered.

A spokesperson for Canada’s Health Minister has said that the organizations should compete for funding for individual projects via the $33 million budgeted for “gender health research” through the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR). Critics of the cut have suggested that the move is one more sign that the current administration, led by Conservative Party leader and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is not interested in receiving the groups’ policy advice on women’s health (the non-CIHR groups being cut had a mandate to advise the federal government on policy).

An opinion writer in the Vancouver Sun calls the cuts “penny wise and pound foolish,” writing that:

Set adrift will be researchers and staff with specific expertise; lost will be the opportunity for better and more-effective care and prevention programs for two of the poorest and most vulnerable groups in Canada – elderly women and children growing up in poverty.

Federal budget cuts are also directly affecting programs targeting the health of Aboriginal women in Canada. The Native Women’s Association of Canada points out tremendous health disparities faced by Aboriginal women, calls on the government to rethink its decision, and directly addresses how the move further hurts a vulnerable population:

…more is needed to help local communities struggling with health disparities, but cutting the head off the national voice for Aboriginal women’s health shows a lack of commitment to address the issues that affect the most marginalized population in this country — a country that is envied by many other nations across the globe for its ‘great’ health care system and quality of life