Why we’re so damn prickly

Katelyn Burns penned a piece last year reviewing why the trans community tends to be prickly and persnickety. It’s not exactly rocket science–being anti-trans is a prolific industry, filling the airwaves and distorting people’s perception of you. Asshats spreading misinformation are paid ludicrous sums of money, even as the trans community struggles to scrape enough money together to fund a queer youth crisis shelter. Of course we’re mad. Cis people can’t stop showering asshats with accolades and hundred-dollar bills, meanwhile we’re lucky if we can keep our dead end job.

Content Notice for transphobic slurs.

Now take a step back for a second and imagine the majority of people you run into every day denying you this basic descriptor of yourself. Every day the media runs a fresh story that denies your existence down to your most basic level of being. Every day some white knight actor is claiming credit for all the hard work and advocacy that you and your peers are doing. Imagine that any time someone tries to go on television to defend your most basic self definition, the producers grab the most hateful person available to sit opposite and argue against your existence “to be fair and balanced.” Think of this happening every day. Imagine you had to defend yourself from Twitter trolls every day who seek to deny you the right to describe yourself in your most basic terms. Pretend for a second that every online newspaper article has a comment section filled with the most hateful words thrown at you that you could ever imagine.

I wrote a piece on my experience as a closeted trans woman who grew up playing sports that ran recently on The Cauldron by Sports Illustrated, a site with thousands of regular readers. The next day, someone wrote a fifteen hundred word WordPress blog post calling me a “tranny” (it was in the headline), repeatedly called me a man and suggested that I’m mentally ill and should be locked away. One of the author’s followers suggested he deserves a Pulitzer for it. I felt sick. Here was maybe my proudest professional achievement of my life, and trolls decided that I deserved to be erased from society. I was upset, you would be too. How would you feel running into that every day of your life?

And, of course, if I were to express any frustration or upset at this state of affairs, it would be screencapped by TERFs and hailed as evidence that trans women are inherently violent creatures.

-Shiv

Fact check: Deaths of despair and “white working class”

The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity published a report about its findings on so-called “deaths of despair”–overdose, suicide, and other sort of high-risk activities taken up by those with an inclination to self harm due to severe depression. This report divided the subjects by their racial demographics and found that it was the “white working class” who was actually dying the most, proportionately, from these deaths of despair. The news followed suit. But I had spotted a sleight of hand shortly after opening the report that made me suspicious of the methodology: White people were divided by whether or not they had attained a high school diploma, yet all other racial demographics were generalized into a single measurement.

[Read more…]

My recommendations for Trans Day of Visibility

Today you’re supposed to signal boost your favourite trans writers, artists, creators, etc. in celebration of Trans Day of Visibility. So here’s my list, and please feel free to add to it in the comments:

  • Life of Bria Comics: A serial with witticisms on current events.
  • Assigned Male Comics: A semi-serial cast of surprisingly cogent children navigate societal prejudice.
  • Katelyn Burns: Parent, writer, and professional shade-thrower at allegedly liberal transphobes.
  • Sam Hope: A transmasculine enby who is my portal to UK trans issues. Organizer and counselor.
  • Chase Ross: Transmasculine YouTuber who discusses the sociology of gender (albeit in an informal way)
  • Ania and Alyssa ‘Splain You a Thing: Joint blog by Alyssa and Ania, covers LGBT, immigrant, racial & oft-overlooked disability issues, as well as the intersections between any and all of these. Oh, and really tastey recipes.
  • Trans and Godless: Exactly what it says on the tin.
  • Safe Accommodations for Queer Edmonton Youth (SAFQEY): A queer/trans-specific youth homeless shelter on the cusp of launching. It needs donations. (hint hint)

Who would you like to signal boost?

-Shiv

We’re gonna talk about those missing black girls, right?

The mainstream media has either been silent or only mentioned it as an afterthought, but 14–fourteen–black girls went missing in a very short period of time in Washington D.C. Since the pastey-white-ass media and police seems to be sitting on its thumbs, the black community has been relying on almost entirely social media and smaller outlets. Protect and serve my ass.

So here’s my part: Ezinne Ukoha has summarized the situation. Your part: Signal boost and keep your ears to the ground. The police are apparently taking it easy over coffee, so twat at them, or call their feedback lines. If they don’t have feedback lines, join up with a local BLM. If you’re white, follow their direction.

The Root.

The Mary Sue.

TMZ.

-Shiv

“Yes, we are brainwashing you.”

Hey, remember the last time I posted about the “Troubled Teen” Industry? The Establishment just recently published some fantastic investigative journalism by Aaron Kappel over the Shepherd Hill Academy, another “Christian counselling” wilderness torture camp designed to obliterate the personality and well being of teens under the yoke of wealthy, shithole parents.

Check this out (or don’t, I don’t blame you):

The survivor also claims in his statement to have interrupted a Bible lesson taught by Embry. “[He] raised [his] hand and said, ‘You are brainwashing us.’ Embry smiled and replied, ‘Yes we are! We are brainwashing you in the blood of the lamb!’”

If you have the stomach, read the rest here and here, content warning all the things again. And try not to type anything into the comments that will get you on a watch list, no matter how badly Embry deserves it.

-Shiv

How to write about lies

Judith Donath has some sage advice about how to write and debunk falsehoods. She notes on the tendency for falsehoods to be believed if they are repeated often enough, something which short-circuits the more cautious and structured thinking of explicit rationalism. In attempting to debunk something, one must avoid this by first stating the truth, then stating the lie, then stating the truth again. Instead, most outlets put the lie in their headline, the lie at the start of the article, and a video (if spoken) repeating the lie a third time, long before the author gets around to fact checking.

But there is one big drawback to fact-checking and lie-correcting. The more often a lie is repeated, even in the context of debunking it, the more believable it becomes.Familiarity provides the impression of truth. Furthermore, false statements, even when we know they are false, influence our emotional response to people and events.

So, we need to be judicious in our zeal to correct.

One simple and effective, yet often overlooked, action is to be smarter about how we present corrections.

· State the truth in the headline (or tweet), rather than repeating the falsehood.

· Use vivid graphics that depict reality

· If the key point is that someone is lying — say that. Then state the truth. Don’t restate the lie in the headline.

This advice is not only for journalists, but for all of us who post stories on Twitter, Facebook etc. Multiple exposures to an “alternative fact” gives it credence. Remember to make the truth, not the falsehood, the most vivid take-away.

Let’s look at an example.

Read more here. I will certainly be following this advice.

-Shiv

Oh joy! More cults!

Disclaimer: This isn’t a new cult, just a particular cult I hadn’t previously been aware of. As with all ultra-conservative religious sects, content notice for the usual strains of intense and inhumane abuse.

This time it’s Hasidic Judaism. Batya Ungar-Sargon details with stomach-churning precision some of the communal practices that lead to appalling human rights abuses. And the worst part? They’ve found psychiatrists to help in the job.

But two Hasidim married to other people don’t just get a divorce and start a new life together. The community got involved. A rabbi and what’s known as an askan, a person of influence in the Hasidic community, were given Joseph’s “case.” The role of an askan — collectively called askanim — is part politician, part good Samaritan, and part busybody. Together, Joseph’s rabbi and the askan appointed by the community to his case staged an intervention. Joseph says they got involved in every level of his life, in order to prevent him from leaving his family and starting a new one. They took away Joseph’s BlackBerry. The askan started monitoring Joseph’s computer, a mirror image of Joseph’s screen under surveillance at all times. Joseph’s brother-in-law started tracking Joseph’s car, where he went and whom he saw.

Joseph was faced with a choice: surrender to the will of his community’s leaders, or risk public shaming, and worse — losing his children and friends. He capitulated, and promised never to see Dini again. But that was not enough. The askan chose a psychologist to provide Joseph with talk therapy, and then a psychiatrist for medication, who started Joseph on a course of chemical treatment for sex addiction.

It’s some pretty grizzly reading, but if you’re up to it, there’s more on Hasidic Judaism here.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: Trans people shouldn’t have to be perfect

Alex DiFrancesco touches upon the observation that trans women with high visibility are held to ludicrous standards, and that these standards stifle perceptions of us as just ordinary flawed human beings:

None of this made it into the final piece. I am shaking just writing these things now. Because I know, as a trans person, as someone writing about trans people, as an ally to trans women, that I am never ever supposed to publicly suggest something that could make any trans person look bad. I am never supposed to write that I was abused by a trans woman, because this is exactly what the people who want to see all trans people disappear off the face of the earth want everyone else to think is true of all trans women. I am never to suggest that a vulnerable population (which I am part of) could be anything less than perfect.

For the record, the idea that a relationship with one abusive trans woman validates all the horrible things trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and others say about trans women is absurd. Were a cis person, male or female, to be abusive in a relationship, no one would ever take that to mean all cis people are abusive.

My ex-wife is one person out of the large community of trans people I know and love. The wonderful people I know among this community, most of them transgender women, have taken me into their homes when I was homeless, supported me mentally and emotionally when I was at my worst, helped me find jobs, and fed me when I was hungry and broke. They are people I turn to when I am unsure about my own often imperfect politics, or the many issues I myself have as a person. And yet the fear instilled by TERFs is so real that many trans writers, when telling their stories, feel we are not supposed to talk about anything that questions any trans person beyond the confines of our own community. Certainly not in venues for public or cis consumption.

You can read more about it and the silencing effect of TERF-perpetrated oppression has here.

-Shiv

Man, Earth is fucking weird

Every so often somebody writes about the wildlife on Earth I have yet to encounter. Typically it’s the deep sea animals that get a resounding “wtf” from me, but today I learned about another weirdo endangered mammal called the pangolin.

Like an armadillo’s shell, a pangolin’s scales are made of keratin, the same material that comprises mammal horns and fingernails. In a real sense, pangolin scales are made of densely fused hair, and they can be lifted and moved to, for example, crush ants defending their nest by getting between them to bite the underlying skin. Combining this highly unusual protective coat with the pangolin’s specialized tongue, which is disconnected from the hyoid bone in the throat to allow it to be up to a third of the animal’s total length, and their tiny, narrow heads provides an alien visage that no other creature on Earth can match.

Read more about these adorable weirdos here. Warning: It’s a story of frauds exploiting mystical myths and as is often the case with animals targeted for these practices, the harvesting methods are gruesome.

-Shiv