Tiger Hill (Suzhou, China)

Here are more pictures from Suzhou. These ones are from Tiger Hill (虎丘).

This tower is sometimes called "the leaning tower of Suzhou" because it leans.

Besides the statues in this photo, there was also a line of huge gold buddha statues, with bowls of fruit in front of them, and pillows on the ground, where people would come and bow down. But I don't know if we're allowed to take pictures of that.

This is 试剑石, the sword-testing rock. Apparently some king used to test his swords on it, I guess.

Bamboo forest

The weather was great and all the scenery was so beautiful~

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More Suzhou pictures:
Shantong Street, Xuanmiao Temple, river cruise
Humble Administrator's Garden

Humble Administrator's Garden (Suzhou, China)

Here are more pictures from my trip to Suzhou. These are all photos from the Humble Administrator's Garden (拙政园), which people in Suzhou told me is one of the 4 most famous gardens in China.

The day we went there, the weather was AMAZING. And it was really crowded.

Really old buildings in China have these super-high thresholds at the doorway. And you're not supposed to step on it. You have to step OVER. I don't know why...

This place was so stunningly beautiful. Definitely worth seeing. More pictures to be posted tomorrow. ^_^

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More Suzhou pictures:
Shantong Street, Xuanmiao Temple, river cruise
Tiger Hill

Suzhou, China (photos)

Hi everyone! I went to Suzhou (苏州 pronounced sort of like "sue joe"), a city very close to Shanghai, and it was beautiful. Suzhou is famous for its canals and gardens.

First, I went to Shantang Street (山塘街), a touristy pedestrian street by a canal. It had a lot of street food and souvenir shops.

Next I saw Xuanmiao Temple (玄妙观), a Taoist temple. We got there pretty late in the afternoon and the main temple part was already closed. Here is some stuff around the area outside the temple:

And in the evening, Hendrix and I went on a cruise on the canals:

It was beautiful!

We saw a bunch of other cool stuff in Suzhou too~ I will post more pictures later.

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More Suzhou pictures:
Humble Administrator's Garden
Tiger Hill

Blogaround

A very happy dog, with 2 tiny flowers perched behind its ears. Image source.

1. Abigail and the Courage to Take Charge (posted May 19) "Of course in modern times, a good complementarian wife would have given gentle input before simply submitting to her husband even if she disagreed with his choice. But not Abigail."

2. Josh Harris Apologizes (posted May 11) I don't hold anything against him- he was only 21. I publicly advocated a lot of super-Christian stuff when I was 21, stuff that I now recognize as really messed-up.

3. Bill Gothard and the Dynamics of Abuse (posted May 11) "In fact, abusers typically choose their victims carefully while acting in an upstanding way toward those they are not victimizing. This helps hide their abuse by ensuring that no one will believe their victim if they speak out."

4. Did God Give Me Cancer? (posted May 18) "And yet, this is the very dogma folks like John Piper seem to relish in. In fact, he’s written an entire book entitled – and I’m sad to say I’m not making this up – Don’t Waste Your Cancer."

5. “Do I look like a boy, or a girl?” (posted May 16) "Ensuring that people always read my children’s gender correctly would require ensuring that each conforms to very specific societal norms of dress for both hair and clothing. In other words, it would require a sort of forced uniformity."

6. How North Carolina’s HB2 Affects Parents (posted May 17) "Every parent or other caregiver who has ever had to retrieve an escaped toddler from the opposite-gender changing room at the gym understands these feelings."

(Lots of good posts from Libby Anne this week!)

7. Love > tolerance; but (love – tolerance – subsidiarity) < love (posted May 16) "That means you don’t have to help a homeless person unless it’s your own sister. And it means that no one else has to help your sister, or to help you help your sister. So you’re all on your own, and we’re all screwed."

8. sinful hearts: the consequences of Inherited Sin (posted May 13) [content note: abusive theology] "So if our partner spends a lot of time telling us how untrustworthy we are, how terrible we are, how we deserve having our possessions destroyed, our body beaten, our souls violated, where is the space to call this abuse in the context of Inherited Sin?"

9. I saw "Captain America: Civil War" and I think it was pretty good. I really liked the beginning, when there was discussion on whether the Avengers should be under some kind of regulation and be held accountable for the destruction they cause and innocent people who die because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Totally agree with Ironman on this. Actually, this is why I don't like action movies in general- people are always fighting, destroying buildings, destroying cars- like, don't they care? Who's going to pay for that? And what about the innocent people in those cars or buildings, who probably just died off-screen? Yes, definitely a big issue for superhero movies, this definitely needs to be addressed.

Unfortunately, a bunch of other emergencies came up and the Avengers all got involved in various fights, including fighting each other, and never really returned to that discussion. Ahh man. (I'm aware that this is probably when everyone else thought the movie finally got exciting.)

Anyway, I hope Ant Man has to pay for that airplane.

10. 7 Ways Social Justice Language Can Become Abusive in Intimate Relationships (posted February 17) This is really important- but this article is just a start. There is a lot more that has to be said about this topic, and I'm not even sure of my opinion on it.

As an example: I'm not totally on board with the whole "tone-policing is bad" thing. (I'm defining "tone-policing" as "criticizing a person's 'tone' [perhaps by saying they sound angry or impolite] as an excuse to avoid considering the actual point they're trying to make," which is more or less how it seems to be defined in feminist stuff I've read.) Yes, definitely it's a problem when someone is like "well you should try to say it in a nicer way, then people might listen to you" when the person they are criticizing has every right to be angry, and they are suffering injustice that MUST be addressed, without first having to be burdened with explaining it in a way that privileged people deem as acceptable.

BUT. Does "tone-policing is not okay" mean "any time anybody says anything racist, sexist, anti-LGB, anti-trans, etc etc etc [and all of these terms are VERY broadly defined to include all tiny microaggressions, like asking a woman "and how does your boyfriend feel about you cutting your hair that short?" which implies that if a woman is in a relationship, then her body is not her own, she has to get permission from her male partner before she cuts her hair] then you can totally yell at them. You don't have to think about how they feel, you don't have to try to be nice, you don't have to care about if they're even able to understand why you're yelling at them"? Because, I'm not really comfortable with that. I think there is something to be said for being nice to people who unintentionally perpetuate the harmful ideas that are native to our society.

I don't believe this concern about fighting against tone-policing is a question of "taking it to the extreme"- instead, I think if we define "tone-policing" more clearly, then such situations will be automatically excluded. There must be some better and more clear definition, which does not lead to "tone-policing is bad, and therefore you can be as yelly and mean as you want when someone says or does something that feminism disapproves of."

11. Leaked Documents Reveal Studio Executives Knew About ‘Gods Of Egypt’ Before It Released Onto Public (posted May 25) From The Onion (fake news).

12. Beware the Jelly Creationists (posted May 25) "Hardcore young-Earth creationism is rigid and inflexible, and easy to disprove. It’s not easy to get its adherents to admit you’ve disproved it, because they engage in all kinds of ad hoc rationalisations, but eventually many young-Earth creationists run out of these rationalisations and are forced to change their minds. Jelly Creationism, by contrast, is compatible with almost anything short of evolution by natural processes, and so almost nothing you say will change its adherents’ minds."

Feminism 101: Cisgender

Two happy babies. One is wearing a striped shirt and laying on a blue background, and one is wearing a pink frilly shirt and laying on a pink background. Image source.

Feminism 101 is a series in which I define some of the terms that feminists like to throw around. My goal is to help those who are totally new to feminism understand what it's all about.

Today's entry: cisgender

Gender Wiki defines "cisgender" in this way: "Cisgender is a term for someone who has a gender identity that aligns with what they were assigned at birth. The term was created for referring to "non-transgender" people without alienating transgender people. For example, if the doctor announces a baby as being a girl, and she is fine with being a girl, then she is cisgender."

In other words, cisgender (or just "cis") is the opposite of transgender. (So really, to understand cisgender, you need to know what transgender means. See this post for a list of resouces I gathered on transgender issues.) If you're cis, that means when you were born, the doctor said "it's a girl", and society has always labelled you as a girl, and you believe that yes, you are a girl. (Or, the doctor said "it's a boy" and yes, you are a boy.) The majority of people are cis.

Some people might ask, why do we need a word like "cisgender"? Well, if you don't have a word like that, then what do you call a person who is not transgender? What do you call them? "Normal"? Wow, not okay with that- that makes it sound like trans people are freaks who barely even get included in the category of "people." And also, when you're talking about issues like sex or pregnancy- topics where people's specific configuration of genitals is very important- it's not really right to say things like "men shouldn't be the ones making decisions about abortion, because they can't get pregnant"- that's not true, some men can get pregnant. For example, some transgender men. So this is why we need the term "cis", just say "cis men" instead of "men" and you're good. (Or say "people who can't get pregnant" or something.) Otherwise you're treating trans men as if they don't even exist.

Okay now that we know the definition, let me tell you a little story.

Back when I was a little girl, I didn't really do things "like a girl." I didn't see the point of brushing my hair, I didn't care what kind of clothes I wore or if they "matched"- to me, the whole "matching" thing was an arbitrary set of rules society was forcing on me, and I hated it. When I was in high school, I didn't wear makeup, and I hated shaving my legs. I felt like I had to, otherwise everyone would judge me- but it was just such a huge amount of effort and it didn't matter to me at all. I also used to wear a lot of big t-shirts, and bought jeans from the boys' section because the pockets were ACTUALLY BIG ENOUGH TO BE USEFUL and the sizes made sense. [Y'all. If you've never bought clothes for yourself from the boys'/men's section, you MUST go try sometime. It is MIND-BLOWING how the sizing follows ACTUAL LOGIC. Wow. Completely different from women's clothes.]

When I was little, I had Barbies, but I didn't brush their hair or care what clothes they wore- instead I had them go on all kinds of dangerous adventures. I liked books about science and math and logic problems- stuff that's not really seen as "girly."

I hated when we used to play competitive games at school or at church, and they made the teams "boys vs girls." I felt like I fit in more with the boys. And whatever the result, there would be some people loudly claiming that it proved one gender was superior. I hated if the boys won, because they would say boys are better, they would just lump me in with all the "inferior" girls, even though I hadn't wanted to be on the girls' team anyway. I hated if the girls won, because they would say girls were better, and then the boys would be angry, and I felt like I didn't belong on either side.

In high school I finally realized I was a math nerd. I participated in so many math competitions, both in school and outside of school. Finally I had found people who thought the same way I did. I really fit in with the nerd herd (fun fact: a group of nerds is called a nerd herd). The overwhelming majority of them were boys.

When I was little, sometimes when I played with my sisters, and we pretended to be secret agents or something, we would choose boy names for ourselves. In video games, I often chose the male-looking avatar (usually they didn't have good options for female avatars anyway). Online, I typically picked a gender-neutral-sounding username. But if someone replied to a post I made, and they called me "he", I corrected them. I was not okay with that. Should be "she."

As a nerd, I didn't want to look feminine. Girls who dress more feminine don't "look like" they're good at math. [Wow that is a horribly sexist thing to believe.] But in college I figured, we're all here studying engineering, everyone knows we are all nerds, I can be myself more without worrying about not looking nerdy enough. Then I started wearing more cute stuff, pink stuff, and I really liked it. Still, as a girl I was in the minority in my math and engineering classes. And I felt like I fit in better with boys.

(Some internalized sexism in this story- that's generally a big factor in the whole "I'm not like other girls" thing. But analyzing that would be a whole other post.)

Anyway, I'm cisgender, and I'm writing this story to tell cis people what NOT to do. Don't talk about how you don't fit gender stereotypes, and then conclude your story with "but I never, like, thought I was a MAN or anything." I've heard cis people say things like that, talking about their personal experiences not conforming to society's gender expectations, and then trying to argue that trans people are clearly confused, clearly they just had those same sorts of experiences you had, but they foolishly believe that actually means they're a different gender.

Yeah, not okay.

Guess what? If you're cis, if you're confident that your gender is, in fact, the gender that society assigned you based on your arrangement of genitals, then your experience is NOT the same as that of a trans person. If you've never thought "I wonder if I could be transgender..." then congratulations, you have absolutely no insight on the question of how someone knows they're transgender. (And, having said that, I'll point out that I have no insight into that either. The point of this post is to tell cis people to quit judging trans people, to quit thinking they know a trans person's identity better than the trans person knows themself. If you're in the "I wonder if I could be trans..." camp, I really can't help you at all with that question, you have to go ask someone else. Here is a list of resources.)

What's the difference between being a trans man (or being non-binary) and being a cis woman who doesn't follow a lot of the gender stereotypes? Well... in terms of definitions, it's about how gender identity is a separate thing from gender expression, but... what does that really mean? What does it feel like? How would you know? I guarantee you that there ARE answers to these questions. There IS a difference between being trans and being a cis person who doesn't conform to stereotypes. But because I'm cis, because I've never thought "actually, I'm not a girl", it's impossible for me to really *get* those answers.

But I totally believe trans people are correct about their own identity.

And really, do you think there is any trans person out there who is going to realize "OH!!!! I can just be a GIRL who LIKES SPORTS! I don't have to tell everyone I'm a man! WOW I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT!"

I always thought I wasn't really "like a girl." But I've always known I am a girl, and I'm happy with that. I'm not transgender, so it doesn't matter how many gender stereotypes I break, I will never know how it feels to be trans. I will never understand why gender identity is so important that it's worth all the risks and costs associated with coming out, transitioning, and existing as a trans person in a society that doesn't understand.

So if you're cis, don't say that trans people are "confused" or that they probably just had the same experiences as you did with not meeting society's expectations of what a boy or girl should be like. Because, no, they didn't. Being trans is something different from that. I'm not sure exactly what it's like or how it's different, but I know it is because I believe trans people know their own identity better than anyone else.