Eliminationism Starts With Language

25 years ago at the annual meeting of Portland’s Lesbian Community Project, there was a motion on the floor to adopt a statement recognizing trans people as partners in liberation and trans women who joined LCP as full members with rights indistinguishable from other members.

During the discussion from the floor the people who objected to the proposal also rejected all the language necessary to talk about the proposal. They insisted that they were not cis, not “not trans”, and not “non-trans”. There was no language acceptable to them which would even allow the debate to be had. Woman, lesbian, and normal were all terms to be used exclusively for them and those these opponents personally validated.

Cis objections to the word “cis” as well as phrases like “non-trans” are 100% about who controls “normal”, but the effort to control “normal” is not an end of it’s own. Controlling language or normality and other words and phrases central to discussing the social realities of sex and gender are also about whether or not we are even allowed to have conversations. If opponents of gender liberation sufficiently control the language, then certain ideas cannot be effectively communicated, and meaningful understandings of trans lives cannot even be articulated. Without those understandings, that information about who trans people are, what the trans experience is, and even what is meant by the word trans, there can be no such thing as trans advocacy.

And that is the world they wish to occupy: a world in which they are not merely centred as “normal”, but a world in which no one can say transness exists, and no argument could ever be articulated in favour of trans humanity. Imagine a world in which sex and gender discrimination is banned, but so is deviation from sex and gender norms. It sounds weirdly dystopian, but it’s exactly the world we’ve occupied for much of my life.

For the cis supremacists, rebutting the arguments that trans people are people and that trans rights are human rights is tiring, and places them on the defensive. It even, occasionally, causes them to appear gauche.Their response to the debilitating possibility that they might feel awkward is, obviously, that language must be constructed such that those arguments cannot exist in the first place. Likewise books that make such arguments must be banned. They aren’t resistant to a particular position on the best way to construct a just world. Like the racists with whom John Venn would be happy to show their extensive overlap, they object to any effort to create a just world.

Their answer (book banning, language control) is also, not incidentally, the answer arrived at by IngSoc, who did not defend their positions so much as obviate defense by eliminating critique: first by linguistic control, later by thought control, and in the last resort, by death.

While some people have resisted labeling the massive, coordinated attack on trans people as genocide because individual trans persons aren’t being killed in sufficient numbers, this belies the definition of genocide itself. Genocide is not about killing individuals, though that can be one tactic of those committing this greatest of crimes. Rather genocide is the effort to destroy a people as a people.

Imagine an invasion of Belgium that was followed by a ban on referring to Belgium as a separate country from its invader, let’s say Ireland because we know how evil those Irish are. Now imagine this invasion is followed by rewriting textbooks to declare great artists and writers of Belgium’s past to be Irish and teaching only English and Irish languages in schools. Imagine Ireland holding birthday celebrations the “Irish” artists they have claimed. Imagine Leopold the II portrayed as a corrupt rebel, with Belgians who reject the usurper and embrace Irish identity absolved of any need to make reparations to the large number of people who have been harmed by Belgian slavery and exploitation in the Congo region. Imagine an ongoing campaign to abolish the very idea that there is or ever was a legitimate “Belgium”. Those who, in the past, used the word to describe Ireland’s continental territory are acknowledged, but only in the sense that the newly Irish population admits that criminals in the past attempted — and failed — to create a Belgium out of evil and dreams.

There is no doubt that this would be recognized as. a campaign of genocide. The intent is not to kill individuals, true, but it is still an intent to end the Belgian people as a distinct people.

Fortunately, these depraved Irish instincts are being restrained, for now, by what I must presume are truly heroic Irish activists. The same cannot be said for the cissexist campaign to colonize gender. They wish to own all the perspectives, to control which ones are acceptable, which ones normal, which ones even speakable. They do not wish to have a discussion about the true nature of Irishness gender or historical definitions of Ireland woman or Irish feminine. They wish to eliminate such discussions entirely.

But the eliminationist response to threats to default status, the eliminationist response to questioning what is normal, is not separate from the public calls to end transness in public life. It may be that the book GenderQueer raises a challenge to hegemonic notions of gender. But when the books are gone, when the word is forbidden, how we choose to act or dress, the names on our drivers’ licenses, the brash insistence that we own our own bodies will wordlessly raise these same questions. Only then the cis supremacists will only be more frustrated: with the language of transness banned, how will they even articulate our crimes?

Ultimately the logic of language control, the imperative to colonize and control “normal” extends to the control of bodies, as we have seen with bans on health care. And what is to be done with a body that cannot be made to comply?

There is no reason to believe that those working to control language and to deny trans people the right to articulate a liberatory advocacy will be able to stop its eliminationist core from eliminating people once its disciples’ attacks on language and thought and argument prove less than 100% effective.

But even should organized, large-scale, train-car loading attacks on trans people never arrive, this is still an attempt to control more than language. It is an attempt to render invisible and inconsequential, to render irrelevant and unnoticeable, the trans individuals near them. But as both they and we are everywhere, it is also an attempt to render invisible, inconsequential, irrelevant and even non-existent trans communities as trans communities. It is an attempt to eliminate not trans persons per se, but to eliminate the trans people as a people.

Of course this is an attempted genocide. The world may choose not to recognize it for its lack of machetes or smallpox-infested blankets or poison gas or forced marches.

But just as trans rights are human rights, and trans individuals have the right to freely associate together for our common education friendship and support, the fight of cissexists to end trans people as a people is an attempted trans genocide.

We refuse to call it such at great peril.

 

This comment is not about the murders of MtF trans people

But I think you cissies can learn something from our experience.

The murders of MtF trans folk are very often rage-filled, with multiple stab wounds or gunshots, and these assaults preferentially target our breasts and our genitals. Our murderers wanted, as it were, to erase our transness along with our lives. They wanted to rid the world of transness. It’s a genocidal impulse made viscerally personal.

It is, of course, hideous enough that trans people have been subjected to such murders, but historically the media outlets reporting on those murders would deadname victims, would call us men in women’s clothing when our names weren’t to hand, and in other ways would work to portray us as anything but ourselves.

In short, our murderers attempted to erase us, and the media chose to complete the erasure. This wasn’t neutral reporting, news outlets were choosing to assist our murderers, even to the point of completing their genocidal work.

The United States and a number of other “Western democracies” are in crisis because would-be fascists are attacking democratic governance itself. To say, as Biden has, that such people are anti-democratic is to tell an obvious truth that the fascist-leaning themselves tell each other every day. The more outrageous and ambitious among them then pass that on to the rest of the US:

We do not trust elections

they say.

We will not tolerate the general rule of law, but we will use the law to attack our political opponents,

they say.

And in the face of these things, the media chooses to admonish the anti-fascists, the leftists, even the Democrats and other institutionalists for language that the media insists will sow distrust and spark violence.

Do not accept this narrative. Do not tolerate this narrative to be spread in your presence. The fascist and fascist leaning are working with vigor to blame their own division, hatred, and violence on anyone but themselves, and this media narrative does not report on fascist violence: it completes the fascists’ task of delegitimizing government and justifying its overthrow by any means necessary.

Apparent neutrality is not the same as actual neutrality, and the media have a particularly shameful history of adopting a guise of neutrality while forwarding the cause of violence.

When the authoritarian, anti-democratic mob assaulted the US seat of government on 6 January, 2021, it was with the intent of preventing democratic rule. When two thirds of House Republicans voted to oppose certification of the 2020 presidential election this seemingly separate event was another effort with the same goal: to end democratic rule. They may make noises of protest to dissociate themselves from the insurrection, but their own actions show them attempting to complete it.

Even now our media treat McCarthy and the other House Republicans who voted to oppose democracy as if they are correct to be offended when Biden calls out “extreme MAGA republicans” as anti-democratic and semi-fascist. Like the House Republicans on the night of 6 January, the reporters and commentators who accept and repeat this framing are not neutral: they are working to complete the fascists’ goal of delegitimizing the Democratic Party and of democracy itself.

What will you do to call the media to account? Will you be as outraged and as active as the trans people who protested the coverage of our murders? You should be.

Time is short. Choose to act.

Yes, it’s an argument for nuclear power

While I actively campaigned to get rid of a nuclear power plant in the PNW that had been offered an extended license, and while nuclear power advocates can sometimes annoy me (much like militant vegans can annoy me despite my vegan diet) when they repeat fossil-fuel industries’ talking points bashing renewable power, there is sure as hell an argument for nuclear power being incorporated into our modern energy mixture, and it’s this:

While much of the criticism surrounding the burning of fossil fuels focuses on the long term impacts to the health of the planet, it can also have devastating short-term effects on the health of the human population. A new study led by Harvard scientists has shed new light on the extent of this problem, finding air pollution arising from fossil fuels to be responsible for more than eight million deaths around the world in 2018.

While I’m all for passive energy projects such as tidal, wave, solar, and wind, and while it’s quite obvious we could do more than we’re doing, quicker than we’re doing it, nuclear power, for all its risks, isn’t nearly as damaging as the fossil fuel industry. There have been deaths in uranium mining and during disasters such as Chernobyl, and, yes, Chernobyl even contaminated many square kilometers, forcing the evacuation of humans and creating demographically certain suffering for many animals, the harms simply do not compare to the scale of harms created by fossil fuel extraction and transportation. And, of course, the use of fossil fuels is another matter entirely: the burning of fossil fuels threatens global climate systems with massive change, which in turn leaves living things in changed environments, environments to which they are not adapted and because of which they might go extinct.

If we can save lives and reduce damage to the environment by building new nuclear power plants we should. Eight million deaths so that we can fill our cars in minutes instead of hours is cruelest indifference.

 

Lynching: An Alternate Interpretation of 1/6/2021

Professional historian of lynching and mob violence Guy Lancaster has an article up at HistoryNewsNetwork.org that interprets the mob violence of 1/6/2021 not through the lens of rebellion, insurrection, sedition, and treason, but through the lens of lynching. I think it’s a great read, although I would caution that I don’t think it’s appropriate to ignore the currently-dominant interpretive framework of 1/6/2021 as an insurrection. Lancaster’s work (at least according to me) should be additive rather than substitutive.

Why does Lancaster see lynching in the events of 1/6? Well, some aspects are easy: they were looking for people to publicly execute, AOC, Nancy Pelosi, and (not least!) Mike Pence to name just three. They had set up a makeshift gallows (which may not have been sturdy enough for actual executions, though the mob clearly had effective means for murdering others at their disposal). They were white as fuck. But there’s much more than that.

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Vice-Presidential Precedent

Mike Pence has ruled out invocation of the 25th Amendment. I could try to analyze his entire statement, and I’ll post it below, but right now I just want to focus on one sentence:

Invoking the 25th Amendment in such a manner would set a terrible precedent.

Let’s be clear here, Pence is claiming that it would be wrong to communicate to future presidents who aspire to tyranny and the violent overthrow of our constitutional order that such a betrayal of our nation and our constitution renders one, by definition, unfit to hold the power of the presidency.

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Seth Abramson Makes the Case For Charging Trump With Sedition

Seth Abramson analyzes Trump’s January 6th rhetoric in a thread that deserves wider exposure. As does his subsequent thread analyzing the speeches at Trump’s rally that immediately preceded his. Here’s the link to his analysis of Trump’s own words:

 

And here’s the link to the analysis of the speakers before him and the context that they create for understanding Trump’s speech:

 

This next quote is a particularly telling bit, but all of it is worthwhile. (I just wish he’d written the thing outside of twitter & linked it.) Read this:

 

There’s lots more. I’m not sure that 100k people actually attended the rally (others put the number at 30k or thereabouts), but besides using the larger end of crowd estimates, what he’s saying makes a reasonable case that this was knowing, willful incitement on the part of multiple speakers, including both Trump and is son.

Must Read Piece from NBC News: Republicans Predicted This in 2016, Then Got On Board Anyway

Liberals & progressives & general lefties have been screaming for years that Trump is unfit for office and that he has openly said and done things for years that should have disqualified him from serious consideration in 2016, much less the presidency over the last 4 years. Sometimes we feel like Cassandras, doomed to be disbelieved even as we tell the truth about our country’s inevitable fate.

But Republicans, too, warned the country. Nearly unanimously when Trump first entered the race the people in power in the GOP denounced him. They even compared Trump and his base to the No-Nothings of the 1850s who rioted in the capital and destroyed marble meant to finish the Washington Monument. Lindsey Graham famously declared that the GOP “will be destroyed” if they nominated Trump. “And we will deserve it,” he concluded.

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It isn’t up to us to win

I first became politically active when the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance put a citizen’s initiative on the ballot to declare in law that “homosexuality” was “abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse”. Measure 9 was itself an abomination, one that treated anti-discrimination laws as if they were discrimination against bigots, which was somehow supposed to be an unconscionable thing, what with how unfair that would be to the bigots.

Measure 9 lost. The OCA (which then featured Scott Lively as its highly visible 2nd in command) lost. But that doesn’t mean that queers “won”. We spent money and energy and made ourselves visible, made ourselves targets, so we could be attacked intensely for an election season in the hopes that sacrifice would make us safer after the election season. That isn’t victory. Honestly, it was a lot like being in abusive relationship, something I knew a lot about, and provoking abuse as the “walking on eggshells” phase of the relationship grated horribly on one’s nerves. Sometimes one’s fears of what abuse comes next are worse than the actual abuse when it occurs. I had to reasonably fear being killed by my abusive partner, but as it turns out, I was never murdered.

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Lynching Without Punishment

Jesus fuck.

Other people will say that I should be fucking heartened by this:

On May 7th, 2020, the GBI arrested Gregory McMichael, age 64, and Travis McMichael, age 34, for the death of Ahmaud Arbery. They were both charged with murder and aggravated assault. The McMichaels were taken into custody and will be booked into the Glynn County Jail.
But I’m not. Read further:

I am not heartened.

Yes, I read what it said. I understand what it said. But I also read further:

On May 5th, 2020, District Attorney Tom Durden formally requested the GBI investigate the death of Ahmaud Arbery. The Kingsland Office initiated an investigation on May 6th, 2020.

and I am not heartened.

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