Trans rights passed in BC with dissent from… the LIBERALS?

Okay, okay, I’ve said before that I mock political incompetence and openly roast authoritarian assholes, and that the right-wing happens to attract the largest degrees of those. Today I make good on my promise and mock some bonafide British Columbian Liberal fucktardery, and not even of the hippie “mraaah chemicals bad” variety.

BC has (finally) amended its human rights code to include gender identity & expression. The proposed amendment passed with unanimous approval–all, except, for one:

Laurie Throness, the Liberal MLA for Chilliwack-Hope, said his religious beliefs prevented him from supporting legislation to specifically enshrine protection for transgender people in the human rights law. He said he believes in a fixed-gender, which is decided at birth, and described the LGBTQ community as a powerful lobby group intolerant of himself and others who disagree that the law would add necessary protections.

Why, yes Laurie, I am intolerant of you. Your religious convictions do not belong in Legislature, and unless you think the wannabe theocracy that is America is a model country, you should remember that we operate under separation of church and state. Further, your right to put your religious conviction into a fist ends where my face begins. What you refuse to acknowledge is that relying on case law and implicit protections results in delightful court rulings like this:

A transphobic court case decided that if the organization offering the service is a non-profit organization whose primary purpose is to serve women, it is allowed to discriminate against trans women.

I have every right to be intolerant of you because you insist on perpetuating an actively harmful status quo. Your inaction is not you taking the high road. Your inaction continues to endorse an environment where trans women are routinely pushed to the fringe and criminalized–an environment you are empowered to fix, but choose not to.

I question what kind of moral conviction you must have to refuse to help when you are equipped to do so safely. Good thing you have a priest to pat you on the head every Sunday and assure you that the babble says you’re a good person. Maybe a mature person can develop a more sophisticated ethical code but it seems expecting sophistication from Throness is a bit like expecting coherency from dudebro atheists.

-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

Jason Kenney receives endorsement from another garbage fire

Jason “I don’t get caught up in the details” Kenney receives another endorsement from a gold star asshat conservative pundit, Sheila Gunn Reid. But this endorsement is a bit… erm, shall we say roundabout?

If you don’t support Jason Kenney’s bid to lead Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives, some of Kenney’s allies might launch gender-based attacks on you.

Just ask former Alberta PC MLA David Quest who expressed concerns about Kenney’s leadership bid on Ezra Levant’s right-wing Rebel Media website last week.

Shortly after, fellow Rebel personality Sheila Gunn Reid took to her YouTube soapbox to tar-and-feather Quest, denouncing him as a Liberal and even taunting the former MLA for losing to a “gender-queer Colombian immigrant” during the last election.

…Sure. Roundabout. 

Basically, David Quest criticized Kenney’s bid for the “Progressive” Conservative leadership, citing Kenney’s history of being the political equivalent of cucumbers pickled in gasoline. So one of Kenney’s biggest fans, suspected garbage fire Sheila Gunn Reid, decided the best way to discredit Quest was by pointing out he lost his election to a, quote, “genderqueer Colombian immigrant.”

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“Sex and gender are dials,” offers Psychology Today, citing multiple discredited researchers

Psychology Today attempted to step into the complex world of sex & gender diversity and it’s a flaming hot mess. It’s a pretty lengthy read (although it at least has citations), and it will take me quite a few writing sessions to get through it all.

So I’ll probably do another series, the same way I’m doing with CBS right now. Because it’s a lengthy read, I wanted to introduce folks to the article and get them reading along with me in bite size chunks.

The author, Dr. David P Schmitt, makes his foray into GSD with an okay start.

It has become more and more common for young people around the world to describe themselves not as a “man” or a “woman,” but as “something else.” One term for this something else is transgender. Transgender is an umbrella term for a wide variety of different identities (e.g., genderqueer, gender variant, gender fluid, gender non-conforming, hyper-feminine gay man, asexual, etc.). The common core of transgender identities is they don’t fit within traditional cisgender binaries of men versus women (“cisgender” refers to people whose sexual and gendered identities align in typical ways).

At face value, there’s nothing overly contentious concerning Dr. Schmitt’s representation of GSD theory. Of course, the first citation for transgender leads to an article with a number of follow-up readings. One of those readings performs the faux pas of using “transgenderism,” rather than something less gross like “gender variance,” to describe the concept of  non-normative genders.

This is a particularly uncomfortable phrasing of the concept, because it frames gender variance as an ideology, an -ism, when it simply broadly represents personal narratives that are mostly contrary to normative gender. In other words, I feel it can contribute to this notion that a personal decision to transition somehow has political implications for other people in the way that identifying as a feminist or capitalist does. This belief of gender variance as an ideology mischaracterizes gender variance as something besides a purely personal experience. It would be like arguing that contraction of cancer is a political statement and calling cancer survivors cancerists.

The second citation is the American Psychiatric Association, which has a less bad page, I guess.

Schmitt moves on:

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I used to be a TERF

I had a phase in the midst of my college education, where my gender dysphoria and my opposition to toxic masculinity combined into an ugly ruinous cocktail that’s still left me with some mental scars. I had a few advantages over contemporary “gender critical” writers: I had no online platform, so my assholery wasn’t being recorded; and I was sharing my opinion with woke feminists who were, still are to the best of my knowledge, cisgender. They were not directly impacted by my odious beliefs, how I wanted the entire establishment burned to the ground. All it took was for one of them to sit me down and say,

“Dude*, have you considered the possibility you’re trans?”

(*not misgendering at the time)

I blustered and immediately answered no. This was because I had three explicit memories of expressing gender dysphoria without actually having the word “gender dysphoria,” when I was 8, 14, and 19 years-old. Two of three incidents ended in violence; the third time it was still made clear that I didn’t want to transition, or so sayeth the person who wasn’t trans. Cornered by a psychological condition and the external pressures of toxic masculinity, I went through college thinking the only recourse was to burn the whole system to the ground. I was suicidal, depressed, and most of all, I felt like I couldn’t trust my own judgement because of the violence I experienced every time I admitted I had this feeling.

I owe my life to that friend who sat me down and asked me point blank if I considered I was trans. That it is an option to assert a different gender than the one thrust upon me. Transitioning didn’t have to involve adopting heterosexism. I could do it for myself. I could continue my activism against gender-as-tool-for-social-coercion, which I would later call a gender role, while asserting an authentic meaning in my own identity for myself. I finally “had permission” to explore that feeling.

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Your definition of gender should include reality

Content Notice: Yet more clueless cissexist codswallop.

Author Rebecca Reilly-Cooper penned an article called, “Gender is not a spectrum,” with the tag line, “The idea that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is supposed to set us free. But it is both illogical and politically troubling.”

In this article, Reilly-Cooper partakes in a number of common mistakes made by cis people when they attempt to discuss gender variance. Let’s untwist the pretzel that is her argument (spoiler alert: it’s a circle).

Saran wrap your screens, you may vomit.

What is gender?

Please, cis person, please instruct me.

In everyday conversation, the word ‘gender’ is a synonym for what would more accurately be referred to as ‘sex’. Perhaps due to a vague squeamishness about uttering a word that also describes sexual intercourse, the word ‘gender’ is now euphemistically used to refer to the biological fact of whether a person is female or male, saving us all the mild embarrassment of having to invoke, however indirectly, the bodily organs and processes that this bifurcation entails.

Do not represent the concept of bio sex as a “fact” unless you are about to refute the accuracy of that statement.

For the umpteenth mother fucking time I swear to dog I am so tired of having to repeat this: Human sex determination is not binary. It is, in fact, thousands of “facts.”

In addition I’ll note, sex squeamishness is specifically an American phenomenon. If we can stop assuming what happens in America describes the entire world, that’d be great.

The word ‘gender’ originally had a purely grammatical meaning in languages that classify their nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter.

Correct…

But since at least the 1960s, the word has taken on another meaning, allowing us to make a distinction between sex and gender. For feminists, this distinction has been important, because it enables us to acknowledge that some of the differences between women and men are traceable to biology, while others have their roots in environment, culture, upbringing and education – what feminists call ‘gendered socialisation’.

Okay we’re pinging like 2/10 on my TERFdar, because when cis people start talking biology when the topic is gender, it’s usually to justify associating trans folk with something they’re not. I’m side-eyeing the socialization piece. Men and women are socialized in Da Rules of both binary genders*; fathers are perfectly capable of teaching their daughters arbitrary shit about modesty and chastity just as mothers can tell their sons to “man up.”

At least, that is the role that the word gender traditionally performed in feminist theory. It used to be a basic, fundamental feminist idea that while sex referred to what is biological, and so perhaps in some sense ‘natural’, gender referred to what is socially constructed. On this view, which for simplicity we can call the radical feminist view, gender refers to the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary characteristics.

Well gee, when you define gender as oppressive, of course your argument follows that gender is oppressive. Allow me to demonstrate the weakness of this particular rhetorical technique:

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Black Lives Matter protests Toronto Pride

Toronto Pride has developed a reputation for being overwhelmingly white and cis. The criticism could likely be levied against any Pride, with its shift towards cis gay men and corporations downplaying the original intent of Pride: a protest. It was never meant to be a movement towards white cisheterosexist assimilation.

Black Lives Matter reminds us of that:

Members of the Black Lives Matter Toronto group briefly halted the Pride parade today, holding up the marching for about 30 minutes.

The parade didn’t re-start until after Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois signed a document agreeing to the group’s demands.

…

“It’s always the appropriate time to make sure folks know about the marginalization of black people, of black queer youth, black trans youth, of black trans people,” [Williams] said. “We are not taking any space away from any folks. When we talk about homophobia, transphobia, we go through that too … It should be a cohesive unit, not one against the other. Anti-blackness needs to be addressed and they can be addressed at the same time, in the same spaces,” she said.

In a news release, the group said Pride Toronto “has shown little honour to black queer/trans communities, and other marginalized communities. Over the years, Pride has threatened the existence of black spaces at Pride that have existed for years.”

The group released a list of demands, including a commitment to increase representation among Pride Toronto staff, and to prioritize the hiring of black transgender women and indigenous people.

One of the other demands also called for the exclusion of police floats, although not necessarily police members, from participating:

But Khan told CBC News her group is not looking to exclude officers who identify as LGBT from participating in Pride events, but it opposes floats accompanied by uniformed, armed officers — calling them a stark reminder of the history of brutality faced by the LGBT community and visible minorities.

“To be clear, we said, ‘No floats. No police floats,'” Khan said. “But we have no desire to police the police in terms of whether they should actually be there or not when they’re LGBTQ-identified.”

Khan said her group’s actions are in keeping with “histories of resistance” that have long been a part of the tradition of Pride.

“If we think about the dyke march that happened 20 years ago, gay men were saying, ‘Why should you have your own Pride?’ … Twenty years later it’s an integral part of what Pride is all over the world. We’re saying, should we wait 20 years before black lives are also considered an integral part?”

Canada has a “less bad” record of police brutality than America, sure. But it’s certainly worth reminding the overwhelmingly white Pride Parade that black folks, and black queer folks, still deal with a lot of antagonism and prejudice even if it’s not outright brutality, and that police brutality still happens even if less often.

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She’s still a rich Republican

Caitlyn Jenner has said and done no shortage of odious things in defence of the Republican party, but now is an excellent time to remind everyone that her transition is not one of them. In this latest spat, Jenner asserts that Trump would be “good for women and the LGBT community:”

“I’m on the conservative Republican side. I’m not excited with what Obama has done to the economy, to our Constitution, all that kind of stuff. But as far as the transgender community, they’ve actually been very good,” Caitlyn told Stat. “Everybody looks at the Democrats as being better with these issues. But Trump seems to be very much for women. He seems very much behind the LGBT community because of what happened in North Carolina with the bathroom issue. He backed the LGBT community. But in Trump’s case, there’s a lot more unknowns. With Hillary, you pretty much know what you’re gonna get with the LGBT community.”

I’ll make my point short and simple:

I’m not excited with what Obama has done to the economy, to our Constitution, all that kind of stuff.

You’re not excited that Title IX was extended to trans folk? Okay then…

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