I wish this was easy to answer

Content Notice: Discussing bi erasure, intersex erasure, street harassment

*twitch twitch*

This is a splendid example of why trans feminists often struggle to be succinct. There are layers to this question and follow-up statement. I’m not really interested in razzing on trans women who aren’t academic or more generally feminists, simply because we as a demographic are a lot less able to access academia. But I am going to make an honest attempt to address the question and statement, because there’s a lot that makes my eyebrow twitch here.

1) Nobody calls gay people “straight to gay”

…Except that they do. Any time a bi+ individual engages in a hetero-passing relationship after having been in a same gender relationship, it is often assumed–even by other stripes in the rainbow–that the person has “gone straight,” the assumption being they were “gay.” People really do suck at wrapping their head around polysexual identities. It is worth noting that fixed notions of sexual orientation have certainly contributed to the discourse around gay rights by framing it as an immutable human characteristic, but in so doing the same discourse refuses to acknowledge the fluidity of other identities. Someone like me specifically identifies as Queer in part because of its political association with fluidity.

This is also to say nothing of the fact that the reason closets exist is because people assume you’re straight until you tell them otherwise. In a sense, coming out is going from straight to gay, at least in the perception of others. So, you know, this is a thing.

2) So why do people call trans females “male to female”?

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Small sigh of relief

You probably heard of the 15 year-old girl who was manhandled, handcuffed and then pepper-sprayed by Police in Maryland, after she had sustained a concussion from a collision. It was a sickening example contributing to a long demonstration that police are unwilling to de-escalate when it comes to black people. For being assaulted, she was charged with assault, putting the future of this girl at risk all because she didn’t lick the boots of the police just so. 

Thankfully, the charges have been dropped. Frustratingly, she apologized, even though it was the police who assaulted her. The cops, of course, walk away with no consequences.

But, at the very least, this is one person who gets to live another day without being railroaded into prison…

Small victories.

-Shiv

#TrumpDrSeuss

I do not like this howling man

I do not like his fake orange tan

I do not think his facts are straight

I do not think his speech is great

 

Angry, shouting, screeching too

I think I’m tired of his flinging poo

I think he’s empty in his head

I think he’s creepy in his bed

 

I don’t get it, how he stands

Roaring, waving, with tiny hands

I think he’s spoken, far too long

About the content of his schlong

 

#TrumpDrSeuss

-Shiv

 

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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Look at all the tears I shed for you, McCrory

National Class Act Governor McCrory tells us some personal details concerning the way people reacted to his passing of HB2:

“It’s almost like the George Orwell book ‘1984’,” he said. “If you disagree with Big Brother or you go against the thought police, you will be purged. And you will disappear.”

No, McCrory, being fired by your boss–the electorate–is not the same thing as being disappeared by secret police.

“My wife, for example, in Charlotte – she primarily stays in Charlotte,” he said. “She’s been disinvited to charity events. Basically, they call her up and say, ‘You better not come. You better not come.…

Ohhhh, mon petit chou-fleur. Want me to kiss it better?

“My wife and I … we’re being shunned for a political disagreement, a values disagreement.”

Wow, McCrory, that sounds so difficult! I mean it’s not like your law strips trans people of human rights or anything.

“I listen to the other side … And I say, ‘I respectfully disagree with you’,” he said. “They do not say that to me, I wave to them with five fingers. They wave back with one.

I can’t ever imagine why.

And it’s personal. It’s death threats. Last week, I was verbally assaulted by a 21-year-old drunk student. She was arrested.”

[serious mode] Death threats are not okay. I will grant you that. Anger, yes, spite, absolutely, but I draw the line at advocating for violence.

As with respects to the student, that is actually quite chilling. What happened to freeze peach? My Google-fu could not confirm this incident occurred but if anyone can find word of whether this actually happened and who it happened to, please let me know. I want to contribute to their defence fund. [/serious mode]

“It was the liberals that became the bathroom police, not conservatives,” he said. “They passed an ordinance on private sector employers that said, if you don’t recognize gender identity and gender expression – two issues which I had never heard of – we will fine you.”

I’d ask what kind of fucking duncecap thinks they should legislate on issues they’ve never heard of, but we already have the answer.

McCrory said he’s been called a bigot. “I’m the farthest thing from a bigot,” he said. “I love everyone and I’m going to treat everyone equally. I want to treat people who are transgender – I want to hug ’em and say I love ’em. But I don’t agree with the concept of redefining gender. That is a major societal change.”

I have a rape whistle for those kinds of hugs. No thanks.

Please see below for my extensive tears:

-Shiv

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

Reminder: Sweet Cakes by Melissa wasn’t merely sued for discrimination

They also doxxed the lesbian couple lodging the complaint:

But that was not all the couple suffered.

Laurel Bowman-Cryer filed a complaint in January 2013, but because she filed it online on her smartphone she was not shown the disclaimer informing her that the complaint, including her name and address, would be sent to the individual against whom it was being made. When Aaron Klein received the complaint, he immediately published it on his Facebook page in full, with Laurel’s name and address included.

That’s right, the Kleins doxxed the Bowman-Cryers.

In testimony Tuesday, Rachel Bowman-Cryer said she and her wife received death threats as media attention and criticism from strangers escalated in the months after the story went national in January 2013.

She said the threats were part of a stream of “hateful, hurtful things” that came after the couple’s contact information (home address, phone and email) was posted on Aaron Klein’s personal Facebook page. She said she feared for her life and her wife’s life.

And it’s worse even than that, because the couple had foster children.

Also on Tuesday, Rachel Bowman-Cryer disclosed that she and Laurel felt an even greater level of stress because they were foster parents for two young girls and feared they might lose the children.

She said they spoke to state adoption officials who told them it was the couple’s responsibility to protect the children and keep privileged information confidential, even as their own privacy was threatened by news coverage of the case.

…

The next time you see someone upset about that nice baker couple Oregon ordered to pay $135,000 to that spiteful thin-skinned lesbian couple, let them know that that nice baker couple doxxed the lesbian couple and very nearly cost them custody of their two children as a result. And then send them a copy of the court’s final ruling.

I signal boost this reminder from Libby over on Patheos because Sweet Cakes by Melissa returned to the news when they announced their closure, blaming the “gay mafia” for their loss of business–despite the fact that bigots raised an extra $300,000 over the damages they lost–all of which they pocketed. It seems that the coverage doesn’t adequately remind its readers that the plaintiffs were doxxed for having the audacity to challenge Christian entitlement.

Regardless, losing all your business sounds like a response from the Free Market. Here I thought Conservatives trusted the Invisible Hand. Or is that only when the Invisible Hand is directed by Invisible Backers?

Hmm.

-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