NY Times Article on gay labeling, opinions?

[h2wwww]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/world/americas/07mexico.html?em

[Ben]

Interesting article.

[Belgie]

I thought the article was hilarious. I know it probably shouldn't have been, but it was.

[BrendaQG]

Interesting. I have been on Wikipedia trying to improve it's article on MSM's for the last week. The term MSM is even a bit foggy. Because at least the way it was originally used refered to anyone born male who had sex with anyone else so born. No matter how they self identified. This means that it inadvertently labels TS women as "male".

Which when looking at a fully realized TS woman seems obviously wrong. On the other hand they did not start out that way. So perhaps reducing everything to biology and just saying "males who have sex with males" makes a certain kind of sense. Especially if we are only talking about the epidemiology of HIV and G, B and MTF all have the same risk of infection. (Which seems to be the case.)

It's a very interesting article indeed.

[Tomfurbs]

Everyone is bi, to a lesser or greater degree.


There. I said it.

[SarahG]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/world/americas/07mexico.html?em

The times seems to have a bad record in recent years when it comes to talking about lgbt issues, at least that tends to be my impression.

The the article is, at the least, interesting because the times bought into Bailey's "there is no such thing as bisexuality" study. If the Times still views this "study" as being valid science, I suppose we're supposed to believe that all of the people talked about in the article are gay guys, even when they have no problem having sex & ltrs with GGs.

The article talks about transvestites, it doesn't mention transsexuals... this could be intentional spin trying to make all ts's look like gay guys who merely crossdress during/for sex, or it could just be a journalist that doesn't know the two terms are used for describing separate medical conditions. In any case, the times does say this about Yessica in the article: "the other [cell phone] is for his occasional lover, who is physically male but feels trapped inside a body that is not his own." [emphasis added by me, not the article].

There is no way to tell from the brief article if Yessica is transitioning, or fulltime or anything along those lines, if neither are the case that would probably make it (if anything) easier for a journalist to incorrectly view Yessica as a tv. The cynical side of me thinks the article would have been written no differently if Yessica were an attractive, passing postop.

I found this part of the article the most troubling:


"Long ago, AIDS specialists the world over essentially shelved the terms “gay” and “homosexual” in connection with the epidemic and began referring instead to “men who have sex with men.” No matter what label such men apply to themselves — gay, bisexual, transvestite or a heterosexual who experimented for a night or was forced into it — they remain an extremely high-risk group when it comes to H.I.V."

The NY Times apparently views all these people, and in all likeliness transsexuals as well (given the Yessica example they put in the article) as "gay guys" since "they're men having sex with men"

The article disregards trans individuals who are not attracted to guys at all, thus the blanket statements about "tvs" (and by implications ts's) "being gay guys" is at the least misleading, if not intentionally incorrect.

It is unfortunate that so much, even from mainstream mass media, has to make aids out to be a gay issue. Aids is not a gay issue, it never was- aids is a global plague and although aids certainly was a crisis among the gay population in the US in the 80s, at that same time it was hardly a "gay man's disease" in Africa. Aids is a global, humanitarian crisis that is killing millions of people, and the available stats show that on the world stage half of those with aids are non-trans females. Instead of writing an article about how "making aids out to be a gay issue has caused so-called gay guys to use different labels to avoid stigmatization" the Times could have just as easily devoted their time & effort to showing how aids is not a gay man's disease exclusively and education efforts aimed at helping the aids crisis need to be aimed at every person on the entire planet, indifferent to orientation, sex, gender, or age.