Welcome to the future...

Even the middle-of-the-road Gray Lady recognised the danger of the Bush administration's Military Commissions Act of 2006.

From yesterday's editorial:

...Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

The editorial compares the bill to the Alien and Sedition Acts. Personally, I think this legislation is worse.

And while I'm glad I live outside the US, that doesn't make me safe.

This law gives the president power to name anyone an "illegal enemy combatant," subjecting both legal residents of the United States and foreign citizens living abroad to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal.

Irrestible....

This little guy is my current favourite at The Daily Kitten. (Though there are so many to chose from!)

(David Scull for The New York Times)

Death knell of a republic....

When I visit the US next week for the first time in more than two years, I'll be entering a country which no longer recognises a Constitutional guarantee of the writ of habeas corpus.

I’ll be entering a country which has legally codified the right to torture.

I’ll be entering a country which four years ago, granted Bush the power, formerly vested only in Congress, to declare war.

In other words, I’ll be entering a dictatorship: “an autocratic form of absolute rule by leadership unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other social and political factors within the state.” (Wikipedia.)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Senate approved a measure on Thursday on the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects, establishing far-reaching rules to deal with what President Bush has called the most dangerous combatants in a different type of war.

The bill would set up rules for the military commissions that will allow the government to proceed with the prosecutions of high-level detainees including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

It would make illegal several broadly defined abuses of detainees, while leaving it to the president to establish specific permissible interrogation techniques. And it would strip detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court. [emphasis mine]

The bill is the same as one that the House passed, eliminating the need for a conference between the two chambers. The House is expected to approve the Senate bill Friday, sending it to the president to be signed.

To say this makes me more than a bit nervous, is a huge understatement.

Chris Floyd has a few, more succinct words on the subject here.

And the NYT story is here.

Small victory...?

From today's Salon:

...At a time when substantive victories in Washington are rare, the failure of Congress to enact legislation authorizing warrantless eavesdropping -- thereby ensuring the continuation of the National Security Agency scandal, enabling various lawsuits challenging the legality of the president's actions to proceed, and virtually assuring full-scale investigations if Democrats take over one or both houses -- is significant.

According to Glenn Greewald in a later post in War Room the delay and probable victory for rule of law has nothing to do with Democrats' opposition (big surprise!) but rather Republican disarray.

If Friday sees no passage of a bill, however, the chance that the FISA issue will stay alive for the mid-term elections and--if Democrats regain control of Congress--lead to criminal indictments for members of the Bush administration is to be fervently hoped for.

(Salon requires subscription or ad viewing.)

Not with a bang, but a whimper....

Ok, if Congress passes the McCain-Warner (misnamed) compromise bill, I think we can agree that America as we knew it will be officially kaput.

The new America will be a nation without habeas corpus. A country which imprisons indefinitely without charges, trial or the chance to repudiate "evidence" against oneself. A homeland whose government sanctions and openly employs torture.

Or, as Glenn Greewald over at Salon puts it:

...Put another way, this bill would give the Bush administration the power to imprison people for their entire lives, literally, without so much as charging them with any wrongdoing or giving them any forum in which to contest the accusations against them. It thus vests in the administration the singularly most tyrannical power that exists -- namely, the power unilaterally to decree someone guilty of a crime and to condemn the accused to eternal imprisonment without having even to charge him with a crime, let alone defend the validity of those accusations. Just to look at one ramification, does one even need to debate whether this newly vested power of indefinite imprisonment would affect the willingness of foreign journalists to report on the activities of the Bush administration? Do Americans really want our government to have this power?

The changes that the administration reportedly secured over the weekend for this "compromise" legislation make an already dangerous bill much worse. Specifically, the changes expand the definition of who can be declared an "enemy combatant" (and therefore permanently detained and tortured) from someone who has "engaged in hostilities against the United States" (meaning actually participated in war on a battlefield) to someone who has merely "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States."

Expanding the definition in that way would authorize, as Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies points out, the administration's "seizure and indefinite detention of people far from the battlefield." The administration would be able to abduct anyone, anywhere in the world, whom George W. Bush secretly decrees has "supported" hostilities against the United States. And then they could imprison any such persons at Guantánamo -- even torture them -- forever, without ever having to prove anything to any tribunal or commission. (The Post story also asserts that the newly worded legislation "does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant," although the Supreme Court ruled [in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld] that there are constitutional limits on the government's ability to detain U.S. citizens without due process.)

[Salon requires subscription of ad-viewing.]

(Catherine Opie for The New York Times)

The kids are alright....

When Brian Sullivan — the baby who would before age 2 become Bonnie Sullivan and 36 years later become Cheryl Chase — was born in New Jersey on Aug. 14, 1956, doctors kept his mother, a Catholic housewife, sedated for three days until they could decide what to tell her. Sullivan was born with ambiguous genitals, or as Chase now describes them, with genitals that looked “like a little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward.” Sullivan lived as a boy for 18 months, until doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan performed exploratory surgery, found a uterus and ovotestes (gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue) and told the Sullivans they’d made a mistake: Brian, a true hermaphrodite in the medical terminology of the day, was actually a girl. Brian was renamed Bonnie, her “nubbin” (which was either a small penis or a large clitoris) was entirely removed and doctors counseled the family to throw away all pictures of Brian, move to a new town and get on with their lives. The Sullivans did that as best they could. They eventually relocated, had three more children and didn’t speak of the circumstances around their eldest child’s birth for many years. As Chase told me recently, “The doctors promised my parents if they did that” — shielded her from her medical history — “that I’d grow up normal, happy, heterosexual and give them grandchildren.”

Needless to say, doctors' predictions proved far from the mark. I met Bonnie/Cheryl at a party in San Francisco just around the time she was starting ISNA (and I was eager to begin transition). She is an absolutely brilliant person and has accomplished so much in the short period of time since then. I remain ever in awe of her.

Bravo to her and the other brave people who have come out publicly in their fight to end the barbarous practice of non-essential surgery on babies!

Chase’s position — that cosmetic genital operations on intersex children should be stopped and that children should be made to feel loved and accepted in their unusual bodies — is still considered radical. Most people believe, reflexively, that irregular-looking genitals would be extremely difficult to live with — for a child on a sports team, for an adult seeking love and sex — so why not try to make them look more normal? Katrina Karkazis, a medical anthropologist at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford, interviewed 19 clinicians and researchers of various specialties who treat intersex individuals, 15 intersex adults and 15 parents of intersex children, and she found that a majority of the doctors and parents felt surgery was a good idea. “We chose surgery for my daughter mainly because we did not want her to grow up questioning her sexual identity,” one mother explained about her baby, who was born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a genetic defect of the adrenal glands that causes girls’ genitals to appear masculinized at birth. “We felt that she should look like a female, so we chose the clitoroplasty and the vaginoplasty. We felt that she would have a better self-image if she did not have a ‘phallic structure’ and ‘scrotum.’ ”

Within the medical community, Chase has been successful in tempering the explicitness with which people publicly make this argument. As Chase has explained innumerable times, intersex babies are not having difficulty with sexual identity or self-image. The parents are, and parental anxiety about the appearance of a child’s genitals should be treated with counseling, not with surgery to the child. [emphasis mine]

The article goes on to detail the discomfort some parents feel when their little "girl" starts to play with her enlarged clitoris around age two.

In other words, parents would rather subject a toddler to the physical pain and emotional trauma of surgery and risk destroying nerve sensation and their child's sexual functioning later in life, than deal with the reality that their child is a sexual being who may not fit into the neat little box the parent has constructed.

As for the prospect of children or adults living normal lives with “unusual” bodies, one of the most widely read articles I ever wrote was at Cheryl’s invitation for a special issue of Chrysalis focused on intersexuality.

In it, I explained a technique to shower in an open (male) gym setting when one lacks a penis. At the time I wrote it, I thought it would be read by all of 12 people. Instead, it is (to date) the sole piece I’ve written to be cited in a couple of professional books, journal articles and to have influenced (very slightly) a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Much to my chagrin (due to a playfully chosen title) it’s often the first link to come up when I’m googled

Chase's long-term goal is the eradication of infant genital surgery conducted for the sole purpose of altering appearance, a goal that the NYT article describes as "outlandish to many medical professionals and to most of the general public as well."

All I can ask is, "Why?!"

Go get 'em, Bill...!

Damn! This is one of the most satisfying news clips I've watched in years! Bill Clinton nails Fox News! Fantastic!

(H/T to Crooks & Liars, where you can view the complete clip. This is the longest clip I could find on You Tube.)

Must see...!

As usual, the trailer doesn't do this movie justice. I saw it today, and it's one of the most powerful movies I've ever seen. Absolutely incredible. GO SEE IT!

New music...!

My ex, Michael, turned me on to Iron and Wine today.



We were IM-ing, he in San Francisco, me in Dublin. How would I manage without the internet? Living as I do as many as 8 time zones away from so many of the people I love.

I've experienced many deaths in my life, from an early age. Lost my beloved nana when I was 14. My mom at 17. One of my first loves, in fact the man who set my feet on the path to eventually healing from my mom's death, at 22. Another first love, many years later at 44, when he crashed his airplane into the Pacific. Many friends passed away to AIDS when I was in my 30's. And others died from various causes throughout the years.

Breaking up can feel like death. Especially when the breakup is bitter, leaving no possibility of a gentle re-connecting after the initial searing pain dissipates. In those cases, the separation feels nonnegotiable, like death.

Blessedly, I'm still close to my sweetest, most extraordinary exes, Michael and Nicole. I was with each of them as a guy, Michael shortly after transition when manhood felt like a gift to be opened each morning as if it were Christmas; Nicole years later, after I'd settled more into my masculinity.

They are both much younger than me, although ftms tend to experience puberty and young adulthood at whatever age we find ourselves when we first start testosterone. Many of us look a good 15 or more years younger than we are, too. I got carded when I was 43: the waitress refused to sell me a beer because I didn’t have my id. Thus, my age difference with Michael and Nicole wasn’t an obstacle in the usual sense of shared interests, excitement for life, first times, and mismatched egos.

Where it did pose problems had to do with larger developmental issues. There simply are certain adventures and misdeeds a person needs to be footloose and fancy free enough to take on, else resentment and frustration sets in. No amount of love and longing can bridge that gap, believe me.

In each case, the breakup was extremely amicable, though far from painless. With Nicole, it required three attempts and me to remove myself to the other side of the Atlantic to finally make it happen. And yet, we still manage to think so much on the same wave length that out of the blue we’ll email each other simultaneously after a silence of weeks. And Michael still makes me smile like no other person in the world.

I will love them both as long as I live.