Trans guys share stories of mistreatment from medical professionals

Over on the You’re So Brave podcast, two trans men share stories of how nearly every time they try to access medical treatment for something unrelated to transitioning, the topic is inevitably changed to transitioning. This can be a particularly harmful practice since it often involves leaving the problem as originally described untreated. In some cases, it can even exacerbate the problem by throwing in invasive trauma on top of whatever the trans person was trying to get help for:

You can also find them on SoundCloud at @youre-so-brave-podcast

-Shiv

Dudebro Atheists Ask Clueless Questions; Receive Clueless Answers

My teachers insisted during my education that there was no such thing as a “stupid question.” YouTube atheist dudebros have proven me wrong, 27 times.

I can only conclude that the acid-fueled unintelligible nonsense produced by a collaboration of YouTube’s–as PZ so aptly puts it–“atheist assweasels” was the result of 27 questions rammed through Google Translate from English to Douchebro, back into English, again into Douchebro and back again into English. I suppose they expect their critics to respond with reasonable answers. I took mine and performed the same Google Translate procedure, just to ameliorate any concerns of unfairness, bias, or prejudice, and also to assist in helping them understand.

1. Why do you claim to speak for LGBT people, women, and ethnic minorities but when lgbt people, women, and ethnic minorities disagree with you, you harass them?

Make sure your straw SJWs are stored properly or else they can be a fire hazard.

2. Do you realize that your war on language through political correctness has made you bedfellows with true rape culture?
In other words, Islam, the world’s most misogynistic ideology?

I like to think of misogyny as a toolbox. Islam’s the buzzsaw, Christianity’s the hammer, and atheist dudebros are the drill (loud and whiny)

3. Do you want women to be equal or do you want women to be a protected class?
You can’t have both.
If you expect society to be treat women as equal with men, why don’t women have to take responsibility for their own safety?

I’ll take False Dichotomies for 500 please.

4. What are you afraid will happen when you leave your “safe space”?

Your video.

[Read more…]

Kimberlé Crenshaw on anti-black police brutality

Kimberlé Crenshaw, perhaps best known for her work responding to second-wave white feminism with work we now recognize as intersectionality (a term she is credited with coining), throws her hat in the ring on anti-black police brutality:

When she speaks at public meetings, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw has a trick. She asks everyone to stand up until they hear an unfamiliar name. She then reads the names of unarmed black men and boys whose deaths ignited the Black Lives Matter movement; names such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin. Her audience are informed and interested in civil rights so “virtually no one will sit down”, Crenshaw says approvingly. “Then I say the names of Natasha McKenna, Tanisha Anderson, Michelle Cusseaux, Aura Rosser, Maya Hall. By the time I get to the third name, almost everyone has sat down. By the fifth, the only people standing are those working on our campaign.”

The campaign, #SayHerName, was created to raise awareness about the number of women and girls that are killed by law enforcement officers. For Crenshaw – who coined the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s to describe the way different forms of discrimination overlap and compound each other – it is a brutal illustration of how racism and sexism play out on black women’s bodies.

…

Anderson is far from alone. Yvette Smith was killed in her own home after the police arrived to investigate a domestic disturbance complaint between two men. Smith, a single mother of two, was shot in the head when she opened the door for the officers. The police first alleged that Smith had a gun, then retracted the claim. The former Texas police deputy who killed Smith was cleared of her murder.

A year ago, Crenshaw, along with lawyer Andrea Ritchie,released a report looking at almost 70 such cases, many taking place in the past three years. But there could be many more. Until recently – when the Guardian launched its database, the Counted – the US had no comprehensive record of those killed by police officers. “More black people [in total] are killed – disproportionately to their rate in the population – and although the numbers are hard to assess, the reality is that black women are vulnerable to the same justifications used for killing black men,” says Crenshaw

…

One case that did catch the media and the public’s attention was the death of Sandra Bland. Bland was pulled over for failing to use her indicator when she changed lanes. A video showed her being pinned to the ground and surrounded by officers after being charged with assault. She can be heard asking why her head is slammed on to the pavement. Three days later, she was found dead in a police cell.

However, unless the way women are killed is taken into account, says Crenshaw, we can’t “broaden our understanding of vulnerability to state violence and what do we need to do about it”. There are many cases, for instance, where women are killed by police who arrive as first responders to emergency calls for mental health crises. “Disability – emotional, physical and mental – is one of the biggest risk factors for being killed by the police, but it is relatively suppressed in the conversation about police violence,” she points out.

…

Crenshaw points out that #SayHerName also serves to highlight other forms of state violence that impact women. Crenshaw cites the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma police officer convicted of 18 of 36 charges of sexual assault against black women. Despite the number of women involved, the case was barely covered in the media. There is little public discussion of sexual abuse by police officers, Crenshaw says, although “according to some reports, they are the second most-common report of police abuse”.

The conversation around authoritarian behaviour patterns has started to reveal correlations between domestic violence and racist violence. Crenshaw’s work appears to corroborate this. In other words, if someone is willing to engage in dehumanizing tactics to justify violence against one particular demographic, it appears to be justified in assuming they will not stop with their first target.

The numbers are still being investigated in this idea of linking violent acts against one group and prejudice against another group but the idea has been around for a few years, decades even, with the core sentiment present in “First they came…”

Perhaps better history lessons are needed.

-Shiv

Edit: Oops! Forgot to actually link Crenshaw’s interview. Fixed.

Breaking news: RCMP admits it’s racist

The RCMP, Canada’s federal police force, has a rather nasty reputation for antagonizing and brutalizing Indigenous communities. Discrimination against other PoCs usually (usually) tends to stay in the realm of antagonism. Regardless, the RCMP’s Commissioner (that’s fancy Canadian speak for “boss”) has admitted there is racism in the RCMP:

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police will find new ways to strengthen relations with Indigenous communities, the force’s chief vowed on Tuesday, but he faces an uphill climb.

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson and Assembly of First Nations’ National Chief Perry Bellegarde signed a memorandum of understanding as part of the Indigenous group’s three-day general assembly.

Paulson, months ago, admitted “there are racists” within the national police force — Bellegarde underscored that when he introduced the chief on Tuesday.

 

Admission’s not a bad start, I guess.

The face you’re probably making right now

Paulson used the opportunity to acknowledge the police force’s role in the residential school system — the program whereby the Canadian government arrested Indigenous youth and took them to boarding schools designed to discourage and assimilate their cultural identity.

“As a father I can’t imagine strangers, much less representatives of the state, taking away my children to live somewhere else where their culture is repressed,” Paulson said, adding, “as a police force we have to own up to the roles we played in those dark times.”

The aforementioned residential schools weren’t 100% closed until 1996, meaning there are still many people, young Indigenous adults especially, dealing with the Complex PTSD from their state-sanctioned abuse.

Again: Admission is progress…

Paulson says he recognizes that the signed agreement are just “words on a page,” and are meaningless unless the force pledges to put serious action toward achieving them, though he noted he was proud of the progress made in improving relations with Indigenous communities thus far.

At least he admits they are, so far, empty promises. Need a little bit more than “oops my bad.”

Hopefully this represents the first of many steps.

-Shiv

“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:

[Read more…]

Meanwhile in Canada…

A Siksika First Nation man’s home was invaded by RCMP officers in the wee hours of the morning. Having been roused from his sleep rather rudely, Christian Duck Chief thought his home was being robbed and initially resisted. After the “you’re under arrest”s started he understood what was happening. He was beaten by the arresting officer even after he stopped freaking out:

RCMP making an arrest are alleged to have battered an Alberta First Nation man, hauled him naked from his home and brought him to a detachment before realizing he needed an ambulance, says his family who are accusing the police of racism and brutality.

Christian Duck Chief, 23, is recovering from a broken eye socket, fractured cheek bone, fracture to the back of his head and a broken nose.

Duck Chief and his wife say they were sleeping in their home on the Siksika First Nation southeast of Calgary Friday when RCMP from the Gleichen detachment entered their home around 6 a.m. to arrest him.

“I can hear him screaming for me, and I can hear him saying ‘Stop, honey help me,'” said Duck Chief’s wife, Chantel Stonechild, who said she was taken out of the home as her husband was still being beaten.

They acknowledge Duck Chief struggled at first, saying he was on his stomach when woken and didn’t know it was police. But they allege an RCMP officer hit him at least 20 times after he stopped struggling and shouted that he wasn’t resisting, even as he lay handcuffed on the floor.

Duck Chief — who has been charged in connection with the incident — and his lawyer said the force used by the officer was excessive.

…

Duck Chief said he struggled at first because he thought someone had broken into their home and was attacking them, and initially bit the officer’s finger.

That’s when the beating began, according to Stonechild. She said that as soon as the officer said “stop resisting arrest” her husband realized what was happening and complied.

“Christian said, ‘I’m not resisting, I’m not resisting,’ and the cop started elbowing him in the face,” said Stonechild. “More than 20 times that cop hit him on the face while he was on the ground.”

Even while he was on the ground, handcuffed and not resisting, the elbows to the face continued, said Stonechild.

Well gee, if someone entered my home completely unannounced I’d probably assume the worst, too. Is this standard operating protocol?

Oh, and of course, it couldn’t be a mistake by the cops. Duck Chief must have some overdue book fees or something to warrant getting elbowed in the face twenty fucking times, after being handcuffed. But he’s the one being penalized with “resisting arrest”?

I say we break into the cop’s home, sneak into his bedroom, and start our protest at six in the morning by shaking him awake, then pressing him with assault charges when he freaks out. That’s apparently how law enforcement works now.

-Shiv

Free thought doesn’t mean every asshat is entitled to a platform

I haven’t written or even signal boosted the heightened violence occurring in Amerikkka right now, in part because my colleagues are doing a fantastic job of covering it themselves and in part because these tragedies are coming in so fast that paying attention to all of them is emotionally overwhelming.

I can’t necessarily verify that the racists hurling racist abuse in the comments of these articles are from the Slymepit, but a lot of them have a whiff of freeze peach about them which leads me to believe they’re of the same breed. They argue they should be permitted to hurl their racist abuse in our comments, that it’s not free thought if we curate the participants on our blag and cut out the noxious weeds.

What they don’t realize is that the PoCs on this network have been talking shop for a lot longer than your pastey racist ass has. The writers that live race relations, not just discuss them, could make a bingo card for your predictable bullshit. You’re peddling your ideas like you’re the Mr. Clean of original thought when in reality we can dig into the post history of PoCs and find lengthy refutations of your predictable bullshit. Your ideas are old hat. We pay them no more credence than we do creationist arguments, because they’re the same shit, over and over, and we’re tired of trying to explain to you why you’re wrong through a never ending game of racist whackamole.

Listen, I don’t debate quantum mechanics with physicists because I know very little about physics. Take my advice: You white? Your job in race relations is to shut the fuck up and listen.

-Shiv

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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HIV+ Trans women speak out

We are Greater Than AIDS has released a campaign sharing the stories of HIV+ trans women. The videos are only a couple minutes a piece, and I strongly encourage you to check them out. Also give them a quick like on YouTube, because haters gonna hate:

As Caine has pointed out before in their post Face Time Works, hardline prejudice against trans women by complete strangers drops significantly after having an ordinary, every day conversation with one of us. So please, share these videos and put faces to the concept.

-Shiv

Edited a couple typos.

Indigenous women protest misogyny in Indian Act

Joan Jack, a lawyer and indigenous woman, takes to the road on her Harley to partake in the Road to Niagara campaign:

A Manitoba Ojibway activist is hitting the road on her Harley to bring awareness to misogyny in the Indian Act and to inspire Indigenous women to be political leaders.

Joan Jack travelled from her home in British Columbia to her home province of Manitoba to take part in Road to Niagara.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs is leading a ride that starts in Winnipeg on Thursday. It aims to raise awareness of the spirit and intent of treaties as First Nations seek to return to a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government.

Jack said she will stop in communities along the way and try to empower women to be leaders.

“Many of the communities are still stuck in chauvinistic views of a woman’s place and a woman’s role and I’m just here to say that’s just BS,” she said.

Jack, a retired lawyer who ran for the leadership of the Assembly of First Nations in 2012, said part of the problem is the Indian Act. She calls the act one of the original sources of misogyny against Indigenous women in Canada.

“It’s legalized misogyny,” she said.

…

“Most First Nations reserves have no resources to deal with male violence against women. There are no safe houses, there are no trained people.… We need to have human rights training. Most oppression is born out of ignorance, not intent,” she said.

I don’t have a motorbike, and I’m also really broke so I wouldn’t be able to take time off work–nonetheless, I hope the campaign goes well and many a woke Indigenous feminist is made.

Joan Jack, smashin’ the kyriarchy.

-Shiv