The Power of Naming Bigotry

Here’s an epistemological headache for you: Define the term “call out culture.” Mr. Ahmad’s piece, the one I just linked to, often overlooks this critical puzzle piece in the discourse of minorities demanding equity and justice–they simply plow on through having taken for granted that the term is understood. Everyday Feminism also has no shortage of articles on the topic, generally advising “calling in” rather than calling out.

Maybe it’s just taking me some extra time to catch up to these arguments, and a few months from now I’ll finish scratching my head and “get it.” But from where I stand as a trans woman, I feel like the biggest barrier to getting people to understand is entirely unrelated to how I deliver my message, which is the subject broached in these discussions. So I am confused when I see feminists from the same social movement that once condemned respectability politics attempt to reify respectability politics as a legitimate means of discourse. Mr. Ahmad even compares what he calls call out culture to the Prison Industrial Complex:

Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories.

As if pointing out, without apology, that one’s ignorance can advocate for harm–regardless of its intentions–somehow constitutes a “disposal,” the way harsh prison sentences do for crimes of apparent desperation. It is hard not to look on this conversation and see the same hints that the privileged classes have used to discredit out of hand the concerns of minorities: If they are rude, or loud, or angry, they are unreliable and can be dismissed.

Allow me to back track and perform the manoeuvre I asked of Ahmad and Everyday Feminism.

Respectability politics is the tendency of the privileged class to view differences from its way of life as being inherently uncivilized. It likes to lay claim to the lofty ideal of permitting others to speak their minds–as long as they do so in a way that does not require the privileged class to actually listen. Proponents of respectability politics are perfectly willing to extend the microphone to minorities and then immediately turn their attention to the latest cat video, or change the channel, or even just space out and plunder the depths of their imagination. In other words, the politeness and calmness one must use to represent your opinion under respectability politics are not actually related to the merit of the argument itself, but rather serve to make the argument optional, something witnesses can choose to think about.

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Take a Break from the US Election: Laugh at Albertans instead

I figure my American readers need someone to laugh at given the nauseating campaign they’re enduring right now. So, here, laugh at some Canadian political theatre. At least this clown isn’t calling for the extermination of Mexicans.

Or, at least, that’s my best attempt to describe this surreal chain of events, which David Climenhaga describes as “political performance art.” And honestly, it’s kind of difficult to disentangle the timeline here, because Conservative lobbies–ranging from the Wildrose Party to various far right-wing media outlets–all uncritically dove in face first to a character that represented the anxieties of Alberta’s shiny new progressive government. The corresponding mess ought to leave any reasonable person with at least a mild headache, and no janitor is paid enough to clean it up.

What is this political performance Climenhaga refers to? Why, it is none other than the lovechild of confirmation bias and political opportunism: Bernard the Roughneck.

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Terrorist. The word you’re looking for is terrorist.

On July 14, the world asked ourselves what kind of monster could possibly drive a truck into a crowd of people. The media promptly mentioned Tunisian within the opening paragraphs of summaries of that evening–the ever-so-slightly more credible outlets pointed out he was a Tunisian-French dual national. The ethnicity was front and centre. He had a Muslim name. Terrorist this, terrorist that.

So now we have an example of another truck driver, one who had been hurling ethnic slurs at Indigenous environmental protesters prior to his attack where he deliberately accelerated his vehicle through a crowd.

“What kind of monster” we should ask. If we are so quick to draw a pattern between lone wolf terrorists when they’re brown and black, one wonders where this patterned analysis disappears to when the perpetrator is, time and time again, white.

RENO, Nev. — Detectives are reviewing witness accounts and “horrifying” cellphone video while they consider filing a criminal complaint after a pickup truck plowed into a crowd of people during a Native American rights demonstration in downtown Reno, the police chief said Tuesday.

…

A Facebook Live video of the protest shows a pickup truck revving its engine in front of the crowd that had spilled onto the street in Reno’s downtown. Several protesters confronted the driver and the passenger before the truck drives through the crowd, tires squealing, at about 6:40 p.m. Monday.

One of the witnesses who posted video on Facebook Live said the two men in the pickup had been “stalking the protest” at the original site where the activists had gathered two blocks away.

“They drove by once as we were walking toward the arch, yelling obscenities,” said Taylor Wayman, 27, who said he was not an official member of the sponsoring groups but decided to attend the rally.

“I heard the driver ask one of the protesters, ‘Do you want me to kill your homies?’ and that really set everybody off,” Wayman told AP on Tuesday.

So he circles around the protest hurling ethnic slurs, and we’re supposed to believe he had no intentions of deliberately manoeuvring to position the protest in front of his vehicle, threaten to run them over–which rightly pissed the protesters off–and then use their anger as a pretext to do exactly that?

Here’s the word you’re missing, mainstream media: White Supremacy Terrorist. Stop excusing this behaviour. Even a hate crime obfuscates what is happening here. That man threatened the protesters. That man is trying to make Indigenous Americans afraid to protest the ghettos, the segregation, the police brutality. That man is sending a message to people across the country: Your white skin is worth more than their red skin.

That driver is using fear to control.

That driver threatened the protesters with death on multiple occasions.

That driver is a terrorist motivated by white supremacy.

That’s the kind of monster. Now don’t be fucking shy to name it.

-Shiv

Some thoughts on coming out

We have a lot of odd ideas about coming out of the closet.

For one, it’s not always clear when we begin being in the closet. Certainly many of the QUILTBAG people I know reported some subtle hints, the tiniest whispers of self awareness, long before they had learned about the concepts of gay or bi or trans. So is it the first time you learn the word, and realize “this is me”? Is it the point at which you identify with the term internally, but don’t necessarily express it? Was I in the closet when, at age six, I asked my daycare worker when it would be my turn to be a girl–only to be told that this was a “silly fantasy”? Was I in the closet at age 14, when I said I was tired of being a boy? Or did I only begin being in the closet between my “eureka!” and my first announcement that I would be transitioning, which would be winter 2013, to the friend who had made me confront the possibility during one of my TERF episodes?

Two: We’re always in the closet. Being QUILTBAG isn’t always visible. When I meet new people, I’ll sometimes get polite smalltalk about whether I’ve met any boys (nevermind that as an adult, I would be dating men), or someone will unknowingly probe into a part of my past prior to my transition, which can make things real awkward real fast. One time, a cis woman who was a new acquaintance at a function had expressed dismay that she forgot her pads and asked to borrow some from me, which probably took me a few extra seconds to parse out as to why I was being asked to begin with (she’s assuming I have a uterus). These things happen because we still tend to assume heterosexuality and cisgender identity, and also tend to erase the broad range of human intersex development in general.

In other words, we never stop being in the closet, because we have to constantly come back out of it to contradict the assumptions every time we meet someone new. Sometimes, if we’re bi+, we have to remind observers that a relationship can be heterosexual-passing but that doesn’t invalidate our polysexuality or result in us no longer being “gay.” (The difficulty in acknowledging what bi+ sexualities actually are is prevalent)

Three: Hardline prejudice against a minority is reduced by knowing a member of said minority. When people in positions of institutional power legislate against the QUILTBAG community, one of the strategies attempted by advocates is to put a face to the concept. It is easy to debate on gender variance or sexual orientation as if it were a theoretical, something abstract–harder (though not impossible) to advocate for its restriction through force or coercion when you are speaking directly to a QUILTBAG person. On the one hand, this produces a moral imperative to be out of the closet, because it results in fewer prejudiced people. …On the other, some of those prejudiced people will be prejudiced either way, and might murder you if they know you’re Queer-spectrum, which certainly punches holes in said moral imperative.

I liken it to a classic exercise in morality & ethics. You pass by a lake and see a drowning child. Are you morally obligated to save the child? The answer is contextual: Weak swimmers would likely only get themselves killed without saving the child, so the moral imperative shifts to finding help. If you happened to have rescue training, and were a strong swimmer, it is much harder to justify ignoring the drowning child. The only calculus considered there should be whether to attempt the rescue yourself or to find help.

It is an apt metaphor for being out. If you’re privileged in other ways, it can be less risky to be out of the closet, just as someone with both strength and training might be able to attempt a rescue. Of course the risk is difficult to quantify, and in general we should allow for any given Queer person to decide for themselves whether to be out. And it is definitely worth emphasizing that the risk-calculus only has to be taken to begin with because of the prejudices against Queer folk. In essence, the closet only exists because cishet folk build it, either through erasure or violence. Although we ought to concern ourselves with children drowning, imagine if there also existed a serial child-thrower who was continuously throwing children into lakes, and we focused all of our energy on the rhetorics surrounding the rescuers and none of our energy on the child-thrower. I think we could all agree that as necessary as the rescues are, there too exists a need to address the root of the problem: In this example, the asshole throwing children into lakes.

I’m all in favour of Queer folk finding empowerment in our coming out narratives. I will, however, still remind my cishet readers that each story is its own risk calculus, and advise that you separate one’s status as out or not from any kind of moral stance. In reality, whether or not one is out is largely a product of their environment, more an indication of dumb luck than anything else.

Above all else, remember this: You are part of that environment.

-Shiv

Worldwide chess championship to be hosted in Iran, women competing told they “must” wear hijabs

If the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) has any intention of shedding old boy’s clubs attitudes from competitive chess, they ought to reconsider where they’re hosting the 2017 World Championship: Tehran, Iran–where women are legally obligated under penalty of fine, jail time, and lashes to adhere to a modesty code which includes wearing the hijab.

Here’s the good ish news: Grandmasters are threatening to boycott if the women competing are forced into a hijab. I’ll argue in a moment that it’s not enough to give competitors an exemption from Iran’s modesty code.

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There is no “compromise”

I wanted to elaborate on my Best Friend Jason Kenney’s “poor counsel,” in which he advised the Albertan government to reach a “compromise” with the two Baptist schools that refuse to adhere to Bill 10, a law signed in by the previous conservative administration that obligated all schools to form a Gay-Straight Alliance or Queer-Straight Alliance should the students request one.

Shortly after these comments made the news, David Climenhaga of Alberta Politics pointed out that as a human rights issue, there is no reasonable way to compromise between Queer lobby groups who largely wish to enjoy the same privileges as anyone else and religious lobby groups who want to continue bludgeoning us out of existence.

Just to elaborate: the “Gay Agenda” has largely been about accessing the same civil sectors as anyone else, and enjoying the privileges that we are supposedly afforded by virtue of being a Western democracy. But religious reactionaries campaign from legal exemptions to treat Queer folks equitably in the name of their faith, thereby re-ifying the nature of cishetero privileges by making them, well, privileges rather than rights.

So I would like to see Climenhaga’s question repeated until it’s mainstream: “Where, exactly, do you plan to compromise?”

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Drinking from the well of poisoned waters

This popped into my head while reading a ThinkProgress post on Michigan’s trans affirmation policy. My idea is a bit dramatic, and click-baity, and campy, and I love it nonetheless. While reading a comment we will discuss in a moment, it came to me in some kind of mock interview where I’m asked what it’s like to be a trans feminist, and I reply:

“It’s like drinking from the well of poisoned waters, only everybody’s throwing different poison in.”

What I’m getting at is that the opposition to much of my work exhibits unconscionable degrees of rhetorical nastiness–rhetorical used in the Aristotelian sense of “persuasive.” Note that persuasive does not mean correct, and certainly attacking gender variance in a society that considers the very concept to be perverse or dangerous is something of a low hanging fruit. Even without the rhetorical guttersniping we’re about to examine, it would be a difficult prospect to be the opponent in this scenario.

I present Exhibit A by a “Penny White,” a wonderful demonstration of the multi-faceted and fractal wrongness that informs some of the more virulent strains of transphobia. So I’ll put a hypothesis to the test over the next few months: Refuting transphobic statements takes a 15:1 word ratio.

Content notice, transphobic nastiness:

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Health Canada dun good

Ask any expert in public health what the medical consensus is on treating addiction, and the term “harm reduction” is bound to come up at some point. Some substances have fatal or otherwise extremely harmful withdrawal effects, so you have to ween off them; others, injected drugs in particular, can be flashpoints for HIV contraction, so harm reduction can involve needle exchanges to move addicts away from HIV risks. Historically, Conservatives oppose these measures, characterizing them as enabling addiction. In reality, those public health officials whose concern is to end the addiction problem understand that many addicts would simply die under a “tough love” policy, which is not the sort of solution that passes any reasonable ethical criteria. So when Health Canada announced that it would provide prescription heroin to recovering addicts who have already built a resistance to methodone, the Conservative response was–as usual–contrary to all evidence that this is the solution for heavy addicts.

Of course, not all Canadians believe that treating addiction with heroin is a move in the right direction. Ambrose told GlobalNews.ca in 2013 that giving addicts heroin is “not to treat an underlying medical condition, but simply to allow them to continue to have access to heroin for their addiction even though other safe treatments for heroin addiction, such as methadone, are available.”

According to Oviedo-Joekes, “methadone doesn’t work all the time for everybody. Methadone works very well as a first-line treatment.” Addiction, “like any other illness,” may require second-line or even third-line treatments.
Prescribing heroin to severe addicts who don’t respond to other treatments may not cure them of their habit, according to Oviedo-Joekes and her colleagues, but it can lessen their exposure to life-threatening health risks, such as drug overdoses, blood-borne viral infections and endocarditis, an inflammation of the chambers of the heart. Studies indicate thatprescription heroin reduces illicit drug use and so decreases criminal activity and health care costs, so the greater societal toll is lessened.

That last bit there is one of the reasons I would think Conservatives–who claim to be tough on crime–would support this measure. Gangs often use drug dealing as an income stream, and nothing undermines their market quite like government grade drugs, which users can be confident aren’t laced with something unexpected.

Then again, Conservatives rarely care about the things they claim to care about unless they’re talking about taxes, so.

-Shiv

Cuttlefishian Ode to Trump

The media will dance
give credence to both sides
But one of them’s got nothing
just air and empty minds

He’ll send the tanks, bomb the bad guys,
use a stick to beat a bush
She’ll catch pneumonia, miss an email,
add some weight on her tush

Trump cares, you see,
about the issues of import
Just sign here, dotted line,
to pledge away support

Don’t read the fine print,
that text will send you reeling
Don’t name him deplorable,
or you’ll hurt his fucking feelings

It was 1932,
When we hoped the Reich was wise,
Let’s hope the world don’t burn
because of witless white guys

 

I’m no expert poet like Cuttlefish, nonetheless I feel compelled to make light of Literal Hitler because comprehending the possibility of being his neighbour sends me into the cusp of a catatonic state.

Source: Adam Ellis Comics

Source: Adam Ellis Comics

-Shiv

When asking questions isn’t JAQing off

Any of the FTB veterans have seen it: Someone poses as a newbie, feigns ignorance and sincerity, and asks leading questions to derail a conversation about discrimination. The tactic is so common it has its own snappy moniker–JAQing off, or “Just Asking Questions.” They’re quite aggravating, almost always bad faith commentators with enough brain cells to rub together that they know how to deliberately mislead and waste everyone’s time. They’re not asking a question because they don’t know the answer, they’re asking because they already have their answer and want to pull your chain.

Perhaps one of the more annoying side effects of JAQing off tactics is that people who are genuinely good faith participants ask questions out of ignorance, and are falsely flagged as trolls by wearied activists.

Most of the pages I follow for activist or activist-adjacent news follow an intersectional model, so one of my pages on Latinx feminist issues posted about the violence inherent in casting cis men actors as trans women characters. A commentator asked a question, opened by saying they were ignorant and didn’t understand, and that they weren’t sure how it constituted violence.

I simply explained the “deceptive trans” trope and how it was reinforced by casting cis men as trans women and she… apologized for receiving my answer.

No really. Her response was to the effect of “Oh, that makes sense. Sorry.”

Sorry? For what? You asked. You didn’t do what JAQ trolls do, which is use good faith assumptions to jerk people around. You asked and were given an answer and you said “That makes sense.” That’s the literal function of asking a question. So why was the apology necessary?

The answer is to distance herself from JAQ trolls. It was a bit disappointing. In this particular space, I am taking on the role of educator, and don’t mind people asking questions having acknowledged they don’t know the answer. It would be a different kettle of fish if you bumped into me at a cocktail party and started bombarding me with questions on gender variance–in which case I’d just give you a snippy retort to the effect of “go read my blag.” But here, as long as the question isn’t a rhetorical opening for you to soapbox your already settled-upon opinion, you are welcome to ask questions.

-Shiv