It’s the ERA or the Gender Nazis: You Can’t Have Both

Wonkette has a new article up about a trans person who was banned from giving a lecture on the history of unconventional genders and the people who express them. It happened in Montana just a few day ago, and was justified by the county officials who nixed the lecture by a recently passed anti-drag ban.

Weirdly, I said this would happen, oh, 27 years ago when there were no anti-drag bans. And I said non trans people, especially cis women, would be targeted for harassment in bathrooms and other gender segregated spaces under laws both then-extant and also laws proposed by some who wanted to address the need for trans access to sanitary facilities while continuing to write legal limits on gendered bathroom access into the criminal code.

And lo, and behold! There’s not only this lecture banned, but 22 or 23 years ago I was blocked from entering a building to deliver my own lecture, on the basis that I was a “feminazi” and “kiddie rapist”, and don’t forget the armed proud boys showing up to drag story hours. And we must remember not only the recent incident with cops on video harassing and removing a queer tomboy/skater type from a women’s restroom, but also too many incidents to name with people I know, cis and trans and others, being thrown out of restrooms on the basis of gender. People you know, likely too.

I say this to point out that the gender nazi is going to gender nazi, and while we have a hope of getting this law thrown out, these laws were never a prerequisite for hatred and harassment.

I’ve seen many, many years of complacency on these issues when I thought more effort and more argument were required. I get it, not everyone’s priorities are my priorities. And not everyone believed the apocalyptic trans girl b/c how could things really get this bad?

But we’re here and we’re fighting now. I simply want to make the point that it can’t just be about arguing the 1st or the 14th in court. Our response has to be everywhere, unrestricted by time, place and manner.

As I have said before,

If we win the right to speak, or to vote, or to employment, or to public access, or to equality, or to life, but only so long as we agree to be sufficiently conventional in our gender, not one of us, cis or trans, has won a single damn thing.

That life is life in Gilead, with different numbers of people happy on different days based on the ever-shifting gender norms of whoever holds power. Too many people have been content to live in Gilead because for much of the last 35 years the people with power have had slowly but continuously expanding definitions of acceptable femininity and masculinity.

I hope we are not too late in realizing that accepting gendered limits to our rights, even if we are comfortable with the current application of those limits to ourselves, is the acceptance of a governmental right to police out clothing, our language, our professions, our families, our lives.

We have never been safe from this policing, even if many of us have felt safe. It is stunning when one considers the number and breadth of the rights we have accepted as conditioned on acceptable gender. At its core, the issue is this: any right that may be frustrated or denied or revoked based on gender is a fundamentally insecure right. Since at the moment in the United States there is no right that is secure in this way, everyone living, working, or visiting the US exists under a very robust, manly sword hanging by a very dainty, feminine thread.

Nothing less than passage and ratification and public acceptance of the ERA can secure our rights. The power of government to police gender must be removed from its hands entirely, because it has proved it cannot use that power safely.

I want each and every one of us to see how trans people are treated and to think, “Yep, that’s how they would treat me.” Because they will. Because they can. Yes, I and other trans people are at the focal point of the gender nazi’s lens of hatred. But just because you’re not trans doesn’t make you remotely safe. They are fighting for the right to make anyone an untermensch  if they do not like your gender, but not because they want to gain it. Rather because they still have it and feel it slipping away. They do not want to lose this power. They do not want equality with the untermenschen.

And if their reactionary project is successful, if they reinscribe a government right to police gender for unacceptable deviance, there will be nothing left to do but kneel with a young pastor Niemoller, pray, and wait your turn.

 

 

Juvenile Justice in Texas: Done in our name

All the goddamned warnings for child abuse bordering on state sponsored terrorism, but if you’re in a place where you can read this, go ahead and give it a try.

So, Texas takes 11 year old Joshua Beasley Jr. from his family because it’s in his best interests to be housed in a so-called Texas Juvenile Justice Division institution.

But he doesn’t actually get better in an institutional setting. It seems certain aspects of the experience did not tend to mitigate his mental illness. Blake Crenshaw, an older kid in his mid-to-late teens, got to know Joshua when the two ended up in the same facility not long after Joshua’s 13th birthday. Crenshaw described their environment this way:

“[The staff] are constantly beating you down, beating you down, telling you you’re nothing. You’re nothing but a criminal. You’re never going to get out of there,” Crenshaw said. “And with someone like Joshua, he’s so young. He doesn’t have the maturity level to process everything that’s going on in his head. All he’s thinking is, ‘Mad, mad, mad, mad, mad!’”

Such bullying was common, and Joshua wasn’t the only one to react badly to it:

Crenshaw said the youths in the facility often acted out because of the way they were treated by staff.

One might think that if that strategy isn’t working for the kids, since the ENTIRE JUSTIFICATION of taking Joshua and others away is that it was in his or their best interest, Texas officials responsible for the care of these children would look at how they were responding and, if they weren’t getting better, try something different. As for Joshua, Crenshaw knew what to try:

He said the trick was to speak to Joshua gently rather than yelling at him. He would tell Joshua to think about his little brother and to focus on staying calm so that he could go home.

But the TJJD had a different idea. They decided to prosecute Joshua as an adult for one of the times he fought back against the guards.

Crenshaw said that the taunting [by staff] would often lead Joshua to react by mouthing off, spitting or throwing an object. …

“[Staff] would give him like two warnings. Then they’d just be through with him. Multiple staff would take him, slam him on the ground, pepper spray him, handcuff him, shackle him and they would take him to the security pod.”

It’s hard to believe that that strategy didn’t work to improve Joshua’s mental health, social skills, and relationships with staff. Still, there was always adult prison for a child who had spent, at this point, FIVE YEARS in TJJD institutions getting worse instead of better. Joshua had persistently self-harmed in what could be seen as either cries for a different kind of attention or as actual attempts at suicide. (From my own experience I doubt that he himself could always distinguish between the two motivations.) Records show that he strangled or hung himself via ligature quite frequently, sometimes more than once a week, but especially often during holidays and around his birthday each year. He pleaded to be sent home, or at least to be allowed more time visiting with his mother and little brother.

His mother, Amnisty Freelen, was of course devastated that he continued to get worse and that there seemed to be no end in sight. When Texas decided to charge him as an adult for spitting on a guard inside the system that had him for 5 years and only taught him that adults were there to hurt not help, Freelen wanted a full trial to show that her son was responding to abuse. The goal was to prove that moving him to an adult prison with less care (if you can imagine) and more violence would not be in Joshua’s best interest. Joshua’s own attorney refused to allow her input, saying he was taking his orders from the 16 year old who was years behind in his education and seemingly had zero adult coping skills, much less long-term planning faculties that would enable him to consider the risks and benefits of differing legal strategies. The lawyer insisted that he hoped that in a system with fixed terms of confinement, Joshua could go home sooner than in a system with the power to detain Joshua nearly indefinitely so long as TJJD determined it was in his best interests to be confined.

Of course, after transfer Joshua received less supervision. While this may have resulted in fewer fights with corrections officers, it also meant that his only known strategy for accessing care — tight or hanging ligatures — would deprive him of oxygen longer before guards could find him.

He died at the age of 16. The warden who supervised the prison where he died, abused and alone, unable to regularly speak to his mother (as he had while in TJJD facilities) because of his time in solitary confinement (for his own protection) retired with full honours, his record unblemished. Five of the most junior corrections officers plus one sergeant and one lieutenant at Joshua’s prison are under investigation and may be disciplined for failing to check on his condition with sufficient frequency. Reports do not include any official concerns about systemic problems, only a failure to monitor in this one particular case.

For over 5 years, about a third of his life, he was imprisoned with little and lessening contact with family because Texas insisted through the mouths of its officers and prosecutors and judges and even its public defenders that isolating and bullying a suicidal preteen was in his best interest, and then month after month, year after year, refused to admit their mistake.

Joshua Keith Beaseley Jr., you were loved by your family and friends, if not by the state of Texas, and many, many of us will miss you.

The Conscience of Conservatives Is Unconscious

Brett Stephens, writing in the NYTimes:

Fox was always about influence, as much as money, for Murdoch. But, executed well, it could have elevated conservatism in the direction of Burke, Hamilton and Lincoln, rather than debase it in the direction of Andrew Jackson, Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan. …

The shame of Rupert Murdoch is that he wasn’t the man to do it. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

The shame of conservatives is that not a single one of them is the man or woman to do it.

That Rupert Murdoch failed doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

That the GOP as a whole has no interest in denouncing insurrection and open invitation to sedition means it can’t be done.

When you have zero congressional Republicans moving to expel MTG for her “soft secession” plan, or any of the other Republicans for their various secession plans (:cough: Texit :cough:) it should be obvious to everyone that there is no conservative voice that is not an echo of Father Coughlin: all the rest have gone silent.

We are told that this is a mere case of laryngitis among the ethical and reasonable Republicans — told again and again by people like Bret Stephens.

But this is not that. Whatever the conservatives who consider themselves ethical and rational tell themselves to comfort each other in the night, they have traded their voices to Orange Ursula and are desperately afraid of even attempting to get them back.

There will be no conservative voice of reason, much less intelligence, until the left destroys the new movement for secession and/or fascism.

At that point, voices freed from their magical confinement, Stephens will swoop in and declare victory on behalf of conservative values and lament that trans people don’t pay more honour to the heroes who can hate us even while not quite taking to the streets to murder in the cause of installing a government who would shatter our souls, end our lives, and then blame us — using our deadnames over our dead bodies — for our own genocidal victimization.

Lamenting the imperfections of Murdoch does not make you the man of principle you wish the world to see. Hell, it doesn’t even cause us to see a fragment, a shadow of that man in you.

Go home, Stephens. Hide beside the lintel of your door, one hand on a shotgun, never certain until the conflict is over whom you would shoot if you emerged, but too terrified ever to place yourself in the position where you might have to make that choice. Demonstrate all the bravery and heroism of the white Citizens’ Councils of 1963’s Mississippi, before Newt Gingrich could destroy the party you seek to praise, but we seek to bury.

Ben Shapiro Defends Harlan Crow

Let’s have a conversation about Shapiro’s defence of Harlan Crow:

 

Well, but you kind of miss the point there, Shapiro, dear boy, don’t you? It’s certainly unusual for people to surround themselves with reminders of the things that they hate, but it’s also something that a human being could do. So far, you’re not wrong.

But here’s the thing: If you surround yourself with things that evoke hatred in you, then your feelings are feelings of hatred and your thoughts are thoughts of hatred. And your hateful thoughts will inevitably spawn hateful ideas. Those hateful ideas will become hateful policies that you invent or support or even adopt because of your hatred.

And that’s the ball game.

If your thoughts are thoughts of hatred and your policies are policies of hatred, then your government is a government of hatred and at that point you can call your movement whatever it is you like. You can even name yourselves the IZANs for all the good it will do. A government of hatred, acting against the people it hates, is a government indistinguishable from Stalin’s or Hitler’s.

Even under your theory, Ben, Harlan Crow is a Nazi.

 

 

Marina Zolotova: The Revolution

So the Belarussian journalist who edited Tut.by and just got sent to jail for a decade+ for the crime of telling the truth when the people in Belarussian power didn’t want her to? Sure as hell looks like a dyke to me.

Okay, yeah, I’m stereotyping, but if she is a dyke, I’m not at all surprised. Why? Well, here’s what I want to say about that:

This is why they’re afraid of us. The dykes, the trannies, the Black preachers from Georgia. We’ve seen shit at it’s pretty damn bad (even if many of us haven’t seen it at its absolute worst), and we responded by speaking up about what was important to us anyway.

When a Black preacher looks a white supremacist in the eye and says, “You don’t know Jesus,” or when a dyke looks a man in the eye and says, “Fuck off, no one here cares about your penis,” or when a trans person says, “No, you don’t get to know what’s in my pants before we start dating. Prove to me you’re kind, trustworthy and attractive and maybe you’ll find out,” we turn entire worlds upside down. White people don’t own Black folk OR Christianity, straight men don’t own women, and trans people aren’t desperately lying to get our ‘nads off, you cis folk are just begging to get in our shorts.

And when we’re willing to tell the truth even when it counters such cherished myths, what else might we contradict? What other lies might we disprove? And how will our masters keep us under control when we’re so obviously persisting in the face of existing mountains of pressure, of intimidation, of outright threat?

What more can they threaten us with? Jail? You think that’s going to stop Marina Zolotova? You think that’s going to stop me?

No, they are desperate and afraid, the right wing, desperate and afraid of change, but even more desperate and more afraid of the people like us. The people who simply won’t shut up when ordered, who won’t even shut up when attacked, when jailed, when brutalized.

They are terrified. And they say that they’re terrified of injustice. Of unjust prison sentences. Of the government being weaponized. But they’re not. They revel in these things. They depend upon these things.

No, in the end, for all their screaming about cancel culture, their most paralyzing fear is that we simply will not shut up.

Sure, they sentenced Zolotova today, but there are a ton more outsiders who don’t depend on the system’s approval for our worth.

And we simply will not shut up.

Finally, A True Justification for Outlawing Drag

Well, I have to admit it. I don’t like it, but facts are facts and I like to think that I am strong enough to admit that I’m wrong when confronted with unwelcome information.

The Santa Rosa Drag Coalition, made up of dozens of performance spaces with hundreds of performers and raking in tens of millions of dollars per year, has had to declare bankruptcy because of hundreds of cases of sexual abuse, many of which (though not all) targeted children, over several decades. The Drag Coalition’s deliberate concealment of risks and assistance to predators has made them liable for damages far exceeding their assets.

It’s horrifying to me that this real risk had to come to light this way, and I’m truly embarrassed at ever having portrayed drag as a harmless activity that does not groom children for sexual abuse and might even have some ancillary benefits to the society of Santa Rosa and the larger United States but…

I’m sorry? What’s that you’re saying?

It’s the Santa Rosa Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church and all the activities that exposed children to risk were religious activities and/or so-called “enrichment” activities hosted by the church and overseen by church employees?

It didn’t have anything to do with drag at all, just Christians doing Christian sexual abuse to children and others?

Oh, very sorry then. Didn’t mean to pass along bad information. I’m sure that we’ll be outlawing the exposure of children to Roman Catholicism before long as the US and its subsidiary governments are famously very evidence-based in their decision making.

Continue dragging it up as you were, kings, queens, and rogues. I’m sure that now that this is cleared up no Republicans will be coming after you.

 

 

Dr. Oz and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Glass of Piss

So. Unless you are from New Jersey and idolize your home state heroes who are also quacks, you have probably not heard about this new thing called, “Dr. Oz, actual Republican nominee for a seat in the Senate, just went on TV and said that he drank his own urine because he’s been fascinated by urine since he was a kid, but actually it wasn’t that, it was that medical school made him taste his own urine because that’s what medical schools do these days, and that’s fine so long as they aren’t teaching critical race theory or anything.”

This is a very interesting statement for a Senate candidate to make and your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke has some thoughts about this!

To begin with, let me say that I am definitely pro-kink, and if someone does the informed consent thing with themselves and decides to drink their own pee while everyone else is out of the house, that’s fine. (But get your consent in writing!) It can be for curiosity or because it helps you wank or for whatever reason. You do you, okay?

But here’s the thing. Whilst I, personally, am all in favour of kinksters being kinksters, I am aware of some truths about the outside world. One is that drinking pee is not actually good for you. Sure there’s always some bullshit on the internet about some supposed value to the body in drinking your own urine, but that’s all just rationalization. You just wanna drink pee, ya filthy fucker. And that’s okay, once you’ve recorded your consent in triplicate for yourself. But let’s acknowledge facts, eh?

And speaking of those facts, another fact is that despite your local Crip Dyke’s generous attitude for doing your own kink in the privacy of your own local rent-a-dungeon, in addition to being not so good, actually for your health, drinking pee is not so good, actually for your chances of being elected to high offices that require multiple hundreds of thousands of votes to achieve.

I mean, sure, if going on TV and saying, “I totes drank my own pee, doesn’t everybody?” gives you better orgasms, then go ahead. Do your best to get booked on TV shows as many times as you can between now and whenever Maury Povich airs his last, “This DNA test proves they were drinking the wrong pee out of the lunchroom fridge!” episode.

But just as I encourage people to admit that pouring urine in your ear won’t permanently defeat tinnitus and that the real reason they drink pee isn’t because it cures cancer or because med school required piss guzzling in the 1970s & 80s, I also encourage people to get in touch with their outer reality with respect to whether or not going on TV and saying, “Wow, I’m just fascinated with my own peepee and have been since I started using the big potty!” is a valuable contribution to a winning communication strategy for Senate nominees.

So, that said and to sum up: Doc Oz, I encourage you to stay home in New Jersey, drink all the piss you want, and forget about the Senate because the thousand votes you just gained from Pennsylvania piss drinkers is gonna be swamped by the many thousands who are not as generous towards people trying to express their kink into a champagne flute and/or microphone.

This has been my TED talk. Thank you for coming. Or not coming. Or collecting fetish material for later potential coming. Whatever, you perv.

 

 

Wow.

I am not one to post un nuanced approval of any mass media work, but all I have to say about this interview excerpt is “Wow”.

 

 

Guy Fawkes: Feminism and the Putative Fourth Wave

From a comment I wrote on WHTM, lightly edited for clarity absent its original context:

So many people have announced the beginning of 4th wave feminism. It’s not here.

The only way to begin a new wave is to make new ethical claims. The “first wave” feminists were actually acting on a relatively diverse mix of ethical philosophies, but the ones who’ve come to define 1W are the Susan B. Anthonys, and those were contractarians. Their claims were primarily about how women are treated by the government and the reforms they demanded were largely designed to make women equal participants in the social contract — which in a democracy is significantly defined by voting and participation in government.

Socialist feminism ran concurrently with contractarian feminism (and a smaller movement of not-well-defined sexually libertarian feminism), but since “wave theory” didn’t exist until relatively recently, it got lumped in with the 1W contractarian feminism in the earlier period and outright ignored during the period after the recognized end of contractarian feminism in the 1920s (leaving the appearance of a gap in feminist activism, though that appearance was deceptive).

2W feminism is largely existentialist in nature, and made claims about how women were treated socially, separate from the treatment of women by the government. This is a substantially different feminism that tries to justify negative ethical judgements of sexist behaviors on entirely different ethical grounds of an essential and universal quality of “womanhood”, and focuses on relationships women have with large institutions that are not the government and with whom we have no direct social contract and which have their own freedoms against which the claims of 2W feminism must compete. The language and form of analysis is completely different from 1W feminism.

3W feminism incorporates critiques of how women themselves are a heterogenous group. Though intersectionality comes to us through honest-to-goodness (not buzzword bullshit) critical race theory written by one of the two women of color who first introduced the term critical race theory (Kimerlé Crenshaw), feminism that acknowledges divides between groups of women and the need for a feminism that creates ethical demands on individual women towards other individual women has its roots so long ago that it actually is contemporaneous with 1W. (Remember Sojourner Truth’s “Aren’t I a woman?”) It further ran concurrently with 2W (Maxine Hong Kingston, the Combahee River Collective, Pat Parker, Shulamit Firestone etc., etc.).

What transitioned between 1980 and 2000 is that the critiques of feminism’s outsiders demanding an approach that acknowledge power differences, power abuses, and systematic privileges between women, falling on racial and other highly contested lines, finally reached the center of feminist activism and gender studies courses. Part of this is that even the relatively privileged white feminists of the 80s went through the so-called “Sex Wars”. In the Sex Wars, the Lavender Purge and other intrafeminist conflicts white feminists treated each other badly. This made them reflect on who was hurting whom, and why some people with bad ideas and harmful behaviors nonetheless maintained a respected and visible place within the movement. White, mainstream feminists suddenly had a number of people who reached to women of color feminisms to make sense of their contested, divided experience.

So now we have intersectional feminisms, which are quite old but are named for the metaphor that was coined right in the middle of this crucial period. And while old in philosophical tradition, it is new to the dominant position in feminist theory. Intersectional feminisms make different ethical claims than 2W feminism, though it does not reject the causes and claims of 2W feminism wholesale (much as 1W feminism was largely accepted by 2W feminists).

But ever since 2000 I keep hearing about people saying we have a 4th wave of feminism and every time I hear this I ask, “What is the new philosophy, not just the same ethical and philosophical approach applied to a new issue (like internet-based social media), but actual new method of analysis and new ethical claim being made by this proposed 4W feminism?”

There’s never a good answer.

I’ve heard 4W feminism is feminism informed by religion for religious women. But previous generations of feminists have been religious, often quite fiercely so. The 1848 Seneca Falls convention was held in a church by church-going women for church-going women.

I’ve heard 4W feminism is feminism that addresses behavior on the internet performed by feminists who use the internet. But that’s facile. We didn’t start a new wave of feminism when the radio was invented. Or the TV. It’s the same feminism addressing a new issue, as far as I can tell.

I’ve heard 4W feminism described as feminism done by people born (or coming of age) after 3W feminism had already been established. However if a mere passage of a couple decades required a new wave designation, then the 1W name for a period spanning 7-8 decades immediately fails. And if the 1W name is taken to be coherent, than the mere passage of 20 or 25 years can’t define a novel “wave” of feminism.

I’d be delighted for a genuinely new feminist methodology to arise that grounds genuinely novel ethical claims. But if we’re simply dealing with dehumanization over twitter instead of face to face or in the newspaper, then sorry. That’s still 2W feminism, focussed on the existentialist feminist priority of the struggle to place transcendent value on the authentic human experience. Dehumanization is a 2W concept. Addressing dehumanization that occurs in 280 characters or less isn’t suddenly no longer 2W.

So what is 4W feminism? What does it claim? On what body of thought does it rest its ethical claims about what is wrong with the world and what does it prescribe we should do about those wrongs? How is the logic by which it persuades fundamentally different from what came before? How is its vision of justice incompatible with that of the 3W?

Someday there will be a 4W feminism. It will be exciting and I’ll learn a ton from it and I can’t wait to read it.

But no one has been able to show me anything yet that’s not just a previously established school of feminism writing about a new issue — which is just as novel as a movie reviewer writing about this years’ movies instead of last. It’s not a whole new wave of movie reviews. It’s just the ongoing work you would expect the same movie reviewers to keep doing, so long as all movie reviewers don’t just up and die. If one movie reviewer retires and is replaced by a younger movie reviewer with different tastes, we still do not have a whole new “wave” of film studies.

Please educate me if I’m wrong and there really is a novel form of feminism out there that I should read. Until you do though, count me skeptical. Too many have announced a 4W before now for me to trust such claims without investigation.