Atheism and Privilege (Cont.)

I keep feeling like I’m really struggling here, trying to explain a fairly complex concept in a concise way. I don’t think that I’m completely off-base, since there are other people who understood immediately what I was trying to convey, but I’m also (obviously) not being as clear as I would like.

After much discussion with my partner on the topic of atheism and privilege dynamics, I’ve realized that maybe I’ve been going about explaining it all wrong, so I’ll try to explain again in the way that helped him to understand what the heck I was talking about.

In Which I am Disappointed in Hemant Mehta

Last week, I made a possibly ill-advised statement on my Tumblr, which led to quite a bit of further explanation on my part (here, here, and here) when several people misunderstood what I intended (admittedly, I worded things poorly).

After the original Tumblr discussions, I never expected to hear anything more about it, honestly, but a few days ago I woke up to find that someone had sent this screenshot of the original post to Hemant Mehta over at Friendly Atheist. After reading Hemant’s man-splaining of the sexism situation in general, I read through the comments on his post and basically hated everything far too much to be able to respond right away. I’m finally feeling at least somewhat up to that challenge.

Skeptical Sexist Bingo

So, I was planning on writing a post tonight about skepticism and home birth, but then Hemant Mehta mansplained all over something I posted on Tumblr last week and I was going to respond to his post.

Instead, after I popped over to Friendly Atheist and read the comments, I made this. It’s like regular sexist bingo, but with SCIENCE!

My response to Hemant will be incoming tomorrow, but this is all I’ve got tonight.

Queereka and Myths About Trans Women

Skepchick has a new sister site, Queereka, which looks like it’s going to be exciting. From their About page:

Queereka is a place for skeptics and nonbelievers who are interested in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues. We seek to promote the inclusion of LGBTQ topics, voices and individuals in the skeptic and secular community and movement, promote rational and evidence-based approaches to LGBTQ topics, encourage critical thinking about gender and sexuality, and combat misinformation and mistaken pseudoscientific, superstitious, biased, religious, irrational, unsubstantiated or bigoted beliefs about LGBTQ topics, lives, individuals and experiences.

I highly recommend checking it out; although there isn’t a whole lot to see just yet, you can sign up for their RSS feed, follow them on Twitter, and like them on Facebook.

I’m particularly interested in reading the Perspectives column, which plans to examine queer genders and sexualities from an anthropological/historical/cross-cultural standpoint, but I’ve already learned some things from a pair of posts on 13 Myths and Misconceptions About Trans Women. Part One was posted at Skepchick, and Part Two is over at Queereka. Both seem worth a read, and there is some interesting discussion going on in the comments as well.

It’s good to see a space like Queereka being built in the skeptic community, which so often fails to address these sorts of issues, and I’m looking forward to seeing it grow.

New Year’s Resolution: Writing in 2012

So, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to write something every day. I haven’t done that yet today, and I sort of did a half-assed job yesterday.

The good news is that I’m not horribly disappointed in myself or discouraged yet. The bad news is that I don’t have a plan of how exactly to make this resolution happen.

My thought right now is that I need to have a project. Something I can do every day and that will, preferably, take around an hour of my time (maybe less). I have a few ideas, but I’m not sure exactly what I want to do.