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.

 

Just less.

I’m not linking the story, but there’s a lawsuit out of NYS that a school bus driver used zip ties to restrain a non-verbal kid, and when that kid acted out, the bus driver beat him WHILE HE WAS RESTRAINED.

I bring it up because we’re really worried about queer rights and BLM and a few other things that seem like they’re super-immediate issues b/c of how they’re in play in the media. But there’s a reason that you don’t see politicians defending the right of adults to hurt kids with disabilities: it’s because that right is still largely unchallenged. Wait! you say. WHAT? you say. But wait for it.

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The Firing Squad

While not real yet, I’m not speaking of a metaphorical one. Prominent Mississippi Republican Robert Foster has called for the shooting deaths of anyone who “grooms” teenagers by encouraging them to believe that they can wear the clothing of the “opposite sex” and/or change sex. He has also called for the death penalty for anyone who tells others that “men can become women” or that locker rooms can be inclusive of both trans people and cis people at the same time.

He denies that he wants to kill trans people for being trans, he just wants to kill anyone who says a nice thing about trans people, ever. But this isn’t an attack on free speech rights, heavens no!

Foster … calls himself a “Man of Faith,” and a “Constitutional Conservative,”

He’s a constitutional conservative! Certainly the constitution says something about the government shooting people to death if you don’t like what they have to say!

Will any of the FREEZE PEACH squad show up to contest this assault on the First Amendment? Of course not. The First Amendment only applies when people criticize other people on twitter. Governments killing people because of their speech isn’t an idea to get alarmed about!

Lest you think I’m being alarmist, from the Mississippi Free Press:

“I said what I said,” he wrote, adding to what he had tweeted. “The law should be changed so that anyone trying to sexually groom children and/or advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad.”

And all of this is from the last 36 hours. Expect more from Foster. And, of course, expect a lone wolf to kill some trans people or PFLAG members or random folks out for brunch at a queer-owned breakfast spot, because that’s how this works.

I’ve lived with a target on me since I was bashed in Portland in 1992, but now if you’ve ever said something nice about trans people you’re wearing the target as well.

Look out for each other. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

 

 

Quality of TERF-Adjacent Discourse

If you’re curious about the quality of the comments I do not let through, well, know that as a minnow in the giant blogging ocean, I don’t get too many bad ones. (Save for last summer when blogging about Portland. Hoo, boy! Got an increase in douchegabbers that month.)

Still, once a month or so, I get comments like this from an asshat who named his commenting account “robert paulson“:

tired of all the faggotry goin on these days

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Privilege, Deference, and Moral Certainty

GG has been discussing in other threads the concept of epistemic deference, focused on epistemic deference of members of empowered majorities with respect to members of disempowered minorities. As it happens, I’ve lectured on just this topic at Portland State University, the University of Vermont, and a couple other places. (University of Minnesota I think… but I’m not entirely sure, and it would have been my visit to the Minneapolis campus, if you’re wondering PZ: I’ve never been to Morris). I even spoke to it when speaking to a North American conference of human rights officials and boards. So I’ve been thinking about this problem for a LONG time. More than 20 years, certainly. As a result, I have at hand things I’ve written right here on FtB available to quote.

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Dispatches from the Heat Front 4: Apocalypse NOW

I tried to write about how extreme the weather has been in the PNW. I wrote at Wonkette & here on my blog. I tried to keep track of high temps, excessively high low temps, fires, and other important aspects of this heat wave. But I wasn’t willing to state that it was the most extreme heat wave event in the history of meteorology. I just don’t have the knowledge necessary to make such a judgement.

So don’t take it from me. Take it from climate scientists (source: Common Dreams):

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A sin to remember

All the criminal defense attorneys in the world would tell me to shut up now and not say another word, but I have to confess to a crime.

When I was a teen, I was a hardened troublemaker. I would tell my mom I was going to stay the night at one friend’s house but actually I’d go stay the night at another’s, a friend she didn’t approve of as much, and whose parents weren’t going to be home. Sometimes I would say I was going to ride my bike to Beaverton to go to the mall for roller skating and the comic shop on the way home, but actually I’d go to a convenience store and buy 30 pounds of sugary crap, then bicycle out to the Coast Range and picnic (while eating not one damn bit of healthy food) on top of a mountain so that I could look at the ocean without riding all the way down there. Not that the beach had no power to draw me, but even that small bit further would take an extra 20 minutes on the way out AND would guarantee that I would have to ride back up the damn mountain on the way home, with just that extra homeward stretch easily adding another hour and a lot of fatigue.

Oh, and it got so much worse.

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Dee Farmer, this Juneteenth, every Juneteenth, until we learn its lessons

Last summer during the BLM protests a lot of folk wrote in to say that they not only appreciated my work, but some of those were worried that they wouldn’t be able to head into the gas the way I had. It’s not an irrational question. Portland has well over a million people in the metro area and BLM was getting only a thousand people on monday nights, and not always much over 5000 on weekend nights. As far as I know, the crowds never hit 15k at any time when I was there. We’re talking about numbers between one third of a percent and one percent of the metro population coming downtown, with another tenth of one percent showing up for simultaneous actions at Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct (there were also some protests out at East Precinct, but they weren’t every night and probably no larger than the ones at North). More than 99% of people weren’t coming out on a nightly basis, and it’s likely that more than 95% of people never showed up for even a single night. So, yes, some people sympathetic to BLM weren’t showing up for BLM.

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From Minneapolis to Salem, from 2021 to 1992: An unsettled, unsettling journey

Now THIS is an unpleasant shock. From the Minneapolis StarTribune:

The FBI arrested three more men Friday in connection with the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, two in Minnesota and one in Iowa.

Brian Christopher Mock of Minneapolis was charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers; entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds without authority; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted place; obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, and acts of physical violence on Capitol grounds.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m more or less from Oregon. Certainly I’m more from Oregon than I could be said to be from anyplace else, even Los Angeles, where I was born. I moved away from LA when I was 10 months old (ask me about my experience driving the U Haul, it was hellish without power steering) and landed in Oregon when I was 4. From then on, I grew up in a relentlessly white section of that relentlessly white state about 20 miles from Portland. Not much farther from Portland is the state capital, Salem. I’ve been there many times, both because I’ve had friends live in the area and because of activism I’ve done. This article brings up something that happened in Salem 38 years and 8 months ago that everyone should learn or remember.

In 1992, the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance, a theocratic group originally known for misogynistic attacks on women’s reproductive rights (most obviously in an anti abortion ballot measure which was their first success in placing new state laws before voters) had become better known for hating queers.

For that year’s election they had drafted a ballot measure and collected sufficient signatures to put it on the ballot so that if passed it would be illegal for the state to spend money in any way and on any person’s salary if doing so would contribute to portraying queerness as anything other than “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse”. Conflict was ramping up like crazy around the state. Many people who hadn’t been out, came out that year. Others who had been out retreated to the closet.

This was a defining year for me as I, too, came out of the closet in 1992, and immediately began engaging in activism to fight the OCA. Anxiety was high for queers, but it was also high for the bigots. While in Colorado Amendment 1 was written to have a similar legal effect, it was written in dry prose, without the phrase “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse”. In Colorado the fight was mostly about whether or not the state should “support” queers. (which I guess just means should allow queers to use state services without discrimination?) Amendment 1 passed. In Oregon the hostile language became a reason for moderates to oppose the OCA and their Measure 9. With so much attention focussed on not the legislative effect but the apparent ill will communicated by the OCA’s language, a huge number of people were feeling reflected hostility. While in the past their bigotry would go unchallenged as simply “normal”, now anti queer hatred was (modestly) condemned.

The turn of events shocked the bigots, what with how other people were questioning the morals of the bigots as much as (sometimes more than!) people were questioning the morals of people who liked boobies or occasionally gave a blowjob to someone they loved. Anxiety and anger among the bigots rose as well.

Over the course of that summer, 39 years ago, some young skinheads (ages 19 to 22) living in Salem were engaging in a long running campaign of harassment against two queer roommates a couple doors away. The roommates were one black lesbian in her twenties with a Jewish surname and one white gay man in his early 40s. Perhaps because it was a single theme that allowed them to condemn both roommates at once, their friends made it clear that insults targeting sexual orientation were at the heart of this campaign of harassment. But racism and antisemitism were present too, as you could expect from a group of racist skinhead asshats.

One day in late September, well into the campaign season, there was a physical confrontation between houseguests of the two queers and the racists, heterosexist jackholes. We’re not sure of the details of the confrontation, but the houseguests felt that they were sticking up for their hosts when they heard the skinheads being racist, as racists will do, and the racists felt that the houseguests had invaded their apartment and attacked them (and, hell, maybe they did).

In any case, after a confrontation over racism in the context of this ongoing campaign of heterosexist harassment, the racist, heterosexist bigots decided that the right way to reclaim their power was to fill bottles with gasoline, stuff the ends with rags, light them on fire, and throw these Molotov cocktails into the apartment of the hosts & houseguests.

Because of the layout of the apartment, the houseguests made it out. The hosts burned to death.

The hosts’ names were Hattie Mae Cohen & Brian Mock. They were clear victims of a campaign of racist, heterosexist terror for months and became martyrs to hatred’s white, Oregonian avatars.

While Measure 9 consistently polled badly, the margins were never huge, and there was a great deal of concern that some people would not want to admit to supporting a measure that had become associated with bigotry, but would happily vote yes in a private voting booth. Every queer I knew was tense right up to the day after the election.

I am acutely aware that the coverage of the murders of Cohen & Mock may very well have tipped the vote decisively against Measure 9. My freedom and my employment may have been affected by their deaths. For that reason, I consider it a duty to remember them, and I have ever since. I’ve never forgotten their names, nor am I ever likely too.

That’s why it was so shocking to see the name Brian Christopher Mock in a news story as a man arrested for acting out bigotry and hatred and paranoia. To be honest, it was a relief that they included the middle name, and made me wonder if someone at the Star Tribune was familiar with the events of September 26, 1992 in Salem, Oregon.

If you were not familiar with these murders and the effect they had on queer freedom in Washington, California, and especially Oregon, you can read more, or listen to a podcast about them, here.

In the meantime, I will take this coincidence as another reminder of the capacity of fascists to befoul everything that they touch, and as more motivation to prevent the spread of fascism’s stain.

May we always remember those who came before. May we always consider those who will come after.

 

 

Live Coverage of MN Protests for BLM Mon April 12: Shots fired

I’m obviously not in MN, but there’s quite a lot to see in the live coverage provided by Unicorn Riot.

Less than 5 minutes ago there was audible gunfire. The reporter was speculating that it was coming from protesters shooting bullets into the air. Obviously that’s very dangerous, since the bullets won’t reach escape velocity. I’m not entirely clear why the reporter thought it was protesters, but I’m assuming it’s because they have a general sense of distance and direction. Here’s hoping this shit doesn’t escalate further.

ETA: I thought I might add multiple updates to this as more info came in, but the protests were almost over when this happened. Everyone has gone home for the night and from where Unicorn Riot was filming there was simply no way to get any more info about the shooter, not even whether or not they were arrested. Because things ended so quickly after I wrote this post (maybe 10-15 minutes, tops) there’s simply nothing of substance to add, but I thought I had to at least write “nothing else happened” here lest the dangerous cliffhanger become needlessly alarming over the long hours of the night.

I’m not going to head to Minnesota like I went to Portland, but I’ll keep an eye on Unicorn Riot’s channel & make posts if I notice something important.