Transition Reactions p6: Compliments & Microaggression

Over on Death to Squirrels, Iris discussed the complex interaction that leads supposed “compliments” to become problems, even though the issuer of the compliment means well. This prompted me to think about another context in which a similar argument can be made about the types of compliments I’ve received as a trans woman that have made me superbly uncomfortable.

Usual disclaimer: This series represents my experience of gender variance and does not represent a monolithic commentary on the trans community as a whole.

Roughly 330 days out of the year, I choose to express my gender in a deliberately calculated way such that I cause the look in cis people. They tilt their heads and squint their eyes and the question I know they’re asking is “is that a boy or a girl?” I derive no shortage of sadistic glee of making people question their normative conceptions of sexuality–but being deliberately androgynous has the bonus of generally filtering out queerphobes and self-selecting my flirtatious interactions with other queer people.

I also do this because I just plain like being androgynous. Most of the time, I feel very confident expressing androgynously. I don’t really need to justify it more than that, and I shouldn’t have to. I’m not hurting anyone and it brings me joy.

Enter the uncomfortable compliment.

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Alberta Health: “Indigenous populations exhibit startlingly low life expectancy”

Alberta Health has released its annual report on life statistics in the province. It also collects demographic data on its participants because sometimes (usually) trends appear in specific populations, identifying these can help with creating policy to redress certain health problems. An outcome as general as “life expectancy” has a lot of contributing factors to it, and investigating those trends can lead to identifying health care gaps.

In a refreshingly honest report, Alberta Health has identified one of its gaps–Indigenous communities: (emphasis added; spacing added to make it more readable)

There is a large difference in life expectancy for Alberta’s First Nations population in comparison to Alberta’s total provincial population. Life expectancy at birth in 2015 was 70.36 years for First Nations people – about 12 years shorter than 81.87 years for the total provincial population.

In comparison to Alberta’s total population, the First Nations population experiences an infant mortality rate that is more than one and a half times higher, a suicide rate that is five to seven times higher, a higher rate of diabetes, and significantly higher rates of arthritis, asthma, heart disease, and high blood pressure.

This is consistent with national results which indicate the health of Indigenous peoples is much worse than for Canadians as a whole. To improve the health status of a population, a broad range of factors need to be considered including health services, personal health practices and coping skills, and social factors such as housing and education.

Bearing in mind that the Liberal government has also admitted the RCMP has a racism problem, it would appear that our left-wing governments are starting to take steps to honouring their “government accountability” platform planks, something the Albertan NDP and the Canadian Liberals both campaigned on. Whereas the Conservatives were very much “nothing to see here folks,” we’ve now had two levels of government admit there are racialized gaps in at least two government systems. In this case, federal police and provincial healthcare.

Perhaps most impressively, the Albertan NDP stated in this report that the primary way to improve health outcomes isn’t just to expand healthcare, but also to expand social programs and infrastructure that urban or white rural populations enjoy. This costs money, which is probably why our Conservatives never wanted to admit we had a problem.

This report was brought to my attention by a business blog for Drawing Board Design, who stated in their post:

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At least 80 peaceful Shiite protesters killed in Kabul bombing

During a peaceful protest in Kabul demanding the expansion of Aghanistan’s power grid to rural communities, Sunni fighters claimed by the Islamic State detonated suicide vests, murdering at least 80 Shiite protesters and injuring at least 230 more:

At least 80 people were killed and more than 230 wounded Saturday when attackers detonated explosives amid a huge crowd of peaceful protesters in the Afghan capital, most of them from the country’s Shiite ethnic Hazara minority, Afghan officials said.

Spokesmen for the Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for the attack at a traffic circle jammed with demonstrators, according to Afghan media. The group’s media office said two Islamic State fighters detonated suicide belts among the crowd, in two separate bombings.

The death toll was the highest for any terrorist attack in the capital after more than a decade of fighting between Taliban militants and Afghan and NATO forces. If indeed carried out by the Islamic State, known as Daesh in Afghanistan, it would be the first major urban attack in the country by the radical Sunni terrorist group and could signal its first deliberate effort to target Afghanistan’s Shiite minority, which it views as infidels.

Please signal boost. Pay your respects to the victims in your preferred methods. These were lives like any other exercising their tenuous democratic rights.

-Shiv

Ghostbusters was pretty good

A bit of background: I fucking hate Hollywood. For the past 6 ish years or so, very few films or TV series have come out of Hollywood that don’t have at least one moment that made me want to stand up and leave the theatre. In the past 6 years, I have come out in support of Frozen as a painfully obvious coming out metaphor, and that’s about it. I haven’t seen everything else but I’m confident I would have no shortage of reasons to shake my head and mutter “garbage” most of the time. Lately I keep to books.

So, with that bias in mind, “pretty good” is a damn high bar to leap over. The 2016 Ghostbusters reboot did alright.

My biggest criticism: No plot twist. It was all fairly predictable. If you want a sophisticated exercise in plotting, the 2016 Ghostbusters ain’t it. Any time horror tropes are invoked, they are also easy to anticipate. A few horror tropes are subverted in a humorous way, but not necessarily surprising ways.

However, there were a few things that swing this movie out of the garbage pile:

  • Humour: Anyone who thinks women can’t be funny clearly needs to see this. More importantly, the humour usually doesn’t need any minority to be the butt of its jokes–just cishet white men, the most privileged demographic in the West. It’s a “punching up” film through and through.
  • Queer gaze: The film makes one character–Holtzmann–ping gaydar so hard for queer women, but her queerness is signaled in ways that don’t cater to the male gaze. There’s no romantic subplot (just bit of oggling over the attractive-but-dense receptionist, Kevin) and no kiss between women to fetishize. But Queer women noticed even without signals that are obvious to cishets. Holtzmann uses all the same Queer-coded cues that actual Queer women use.
  • Competent action heroines: I’m still recovering from the shock of proper action heroines that can do something.
  • Allegory: The villain is a white nerd boy who feels disenfranchised because he has been bullied. This is demonstrated on screen briefly, in a cartoonish and almost exaggerated fashion. When he delivers his villainous diatribe to the protagonists, he sounds like he’s reading off a Reddit forum, claiming the protagonists must have been treated with dignity if they don’t want to burn society to the ground. They promptly point out that no, people have been and continue to be assholes to them, but they don’t see that as a reason for mass murder.

All in all, the movie would be spared from Shiv’s hypothetical tyrannical purge of Hollywood materials.

-Shiv

Self care Saturday, July 23

This is going to be a regular thing in case that wasn’t already obvious. I will generally avoid publishing anything on Saturdays, or indeed, even visiting the website, to make sure I’m setting aside time for me to cool down and take care of myself. Most Self care Saturday posts will be written in advance and scheduled to release on Saturday without requiring me to visit the site. I’ll post things that entertain me, and hopefully you. Self care Saturday is a “feel good” space about celebrating our victories and expressing appreciation for ourselves.

Today I’m appreciating my kinks. I have a thing for combat boots. I found this delightful image from an event occurring during the Vancouver Dyke March and practically imploded with glee.

Photography Credit: Belle Ancell; Graphic Credit: Kyra Soko

Photography Credit: Belle Ancell; Graphic Credit: Kyra Soko

#ILoveBoots

The detail that really tickles me pink is that the combat boot-wearer is standing on their tippy toes. I’m barely five feet tall and I have to do that a lot.

So I feel all warm fuzzy for being represented in a kinky dyke image.

-Shiv, tiny combat boot wearer

School district apparently forgets how the Nazis operated by ordering trans students to ID selves with green bracelets

I’ve officially popped my casket. (emphasis mine)

The Wisconsin lawsuit notes other problems with how the school treated Whitaker. He was repeatedly called by his birth name and referred to with female pronouns by school staff, wasn’t allowed to run for prom king (until the school received a petition and media scrutiny), and wasn’t allowed to lodge with boys during school trips. The district also requires staff to make Whitaker and other transgender students wear green bracelets identifying them as transgender to staff — which caused Whitaker to worry about stigmatization and harassment, according to his lawyers. The school eventually instructed security guards to ensure Whitaker didn’t use the boys restroom.

I have no words.

Sue this district into fucking oblivion, please.

-Shiv

Transition Reactions p5: Feelings

Starting with the usual disclaimer: Transition Reactions is a mostly anecdotal series covering the weird shit people say to me when they find out I’m trans, please do not take this as a monolithic commentary on gender variance in general.

There are a few tropes that are quite stubborn in the trans community, and perhaps the most determined of these is the notion of being overwhelmed with emotions when transfeminine folks start estrogen or get a boost in their estrogen dose.

Sigh.

Hormones occasionally take an almost religious role in parts of the trans community. It’s difficult to dispute their effects on physiology. For transfems, skin becomes softer, hair becomes lighter, beards grow a lot slower, fat moves from your tummy to your hips, muscle doesn’t bulk as quickly, your breasts grow, your skeleton over decades will tweak your profile, etc. These changes are easy to observe, and in many cases are even theoretically measurable. These changes are sometimes enough to alleviate dysphoria in some trans women. They’re important changes.

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AFA continues to push blatant falsehoods when trans people are involved

The American Shitstain Family Association has had a thing for trans women for a while (and let’s be real, it’s trans women they’re freaking out about). In order to push the narrative that Target’s trans inclusive policy facilitated the entrance of men into women’s washrooms, they sent cis men into the women’s bathrooms to prove how predatory trans women are.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, bitches.

Now in their next dishonest bigoted smear, they’re framing the criminal voyeurism incident that occurred at a Target as having been facilitated by Target’s policy, because the perp was allegedly a trans women:

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