Tell me again about those ‘good apples’?

Jesus H Christ is it ever WTFland in the news today.

Content Notice: Human trafficking and corrupt police.

Oakland Police are caught up in a $66-million dollar lawsuit alleging 30+ officers perpetuated a minor’s human trafficking for two years:

The teenager had been selling herself for money since she was 12. She had been “exploited by pimps,” she says, and was in the act of running away from one when she met Brendan O’Brien, a police officer in Oakland, Calif.

But instead of helping the then-17-year-old prostitute, O’Brien and more than 30 other law enforcement officers “continued to traffic, rape, victimize and exploit a teenage girl who needed to be rescued,” according to a legal claim filed with the Oakland city attorney’s office. “Instead of helping [the teen] find a way out of exploitation, they furthered and deepened her spiral down into the sex trade,” the claim adds.

Now 19, the teen is seeking $66 million in damages from the city, its police force, its former chief and multiple officers — the latest twist in an astonishing sex scandal that has swept up several police departments in the San Francisco Bay area.

The scandal led to the resignation of Oakland’s police chief, as well as the two people appointed to replace him, neither of whom lasted a week. It also led to other firings and suspensions, numerous criminal charges — and an apology from Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.

“I am deeply sorry for the harm that this scandal has caused, particularly to community trust, which for many was already so tenuous,” Schaaf (D) said earlier this month.

The teen’s claim, filed Friday, implicates not just O’Brien and the officers accused of having sex with the teen, but also supervisors who “stood by with a blind eye” as the teen became a sex slave for the officers, her attorneys said.

O’Brien committed suicide in the midst of a growing internal investigation. A note he left behind named other officers who he said had sex with the teen.  

Investigators have moved ahead with their case against 10 officers — seven were charged last month, another three this week. Prosecutors say more charges are coming.

And leaders in Oakland and other municipalities have said they are cleaning house. “I am here to run a police department, not a frat house,” Schaaf said in June, according to the Los Angeles Times. She vowed to “root out what is clearly a toxic, macho, culture,” the Times reported. Schaaf did not respond to messages seeking comment this week.

What in the actual fuck is wrong with these police?

-Shiv

Out Magazine glorifies fountain of shit-spewing, Milo Yiannopoulos

ThinkProgress has an open letter addressed to Out Magazine over its soft-ball profile of the alt right’s deep-fried-awful-battered-in-bullshit posterboy, Milo Yiannopoulos.

We are all painfully aware that gay, white, cisgender male narratives have too-long dominated queer media, including those of us who are ourselves gay, white, cisgender men. Just this week, we saw our sisters at AfterEllen.com have to cease editorial operations because a company decided that lesbians were not profitable enough — oblivious to how many bi and lesbian women found important community there. The excess of this narrow branding of the queer community results in erasure of all those who are not highlighted, an erasure that allows stereotypes, discrimination, and abuse to continue unabated against those invisible intersections.

The Out profile of Yiannopoulos represents the peak of this harm. Here is awhite supremacist whose entire career has been built on the attention he can get for himself through provocation. His attacks against women, people of color, Muslims,transgender people, and basically anybody who doesn’t like him are as malicious as they come, and he catalyzes his many “alt-right” followers to turn on any target he deems worthy of abuse. This puff piece — complete with a cutesy clown photoshoot — makes light of Yiannopoulos’s trolling while simultaneously providing him a pedestal to further extend his brand of hatred. Indeed, he does so in the profile itself, openly slurring the transgender community, which Out published without any apparent concern.

As members of the LGBT media, we believe we all must hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. Many of us are members of the LGBT community ourselves, and we all develop content that serves the LGBT community either directly as an audience, or on its behalf by educating broader audiences about our politics and our cultures. We thus have an obligation, at a minimum, to ensure that what we publish — no matter how crass or sensationalized it may be — avoids fostering harm to queer people. Out failed in this regard.

Add my name to the list of signatories. Fucker couldn’t lose access to his internet fast enough. May every microphone he bloviate into break before he gets the chance to speak.

-Shiv

It’s Bisexual+ Awareness Week!

It’s bisexual+ awareness week! Woooo. If you like technical terms, GLAAD started this idea as a celebration as well as awareness-raising for the polysexuality umbrella, which includes pansexuality, bisexuality, fluid sexual identities and also queer identities.

Co-founded by GLAAD, Bisexual Awareness Week seeks to accelerate acceptance of the bi+ community. #BiWeek draws attention to the public policy concerns, while also celebrating the resiliency of, the bisexual community.

Throughout #BiWeek, allies and bi+ people learn about the history, culture, community and current policy priorities of bi+ communities. You can view this information in Spanish, too.

On September 23, GLAAD, BiNet USA, and other LGBT and bisexual advocacy organizations invite you to participate in the 18th annual Celebrate Bisexuality Day, an event promoting bi+ visibility.

The Good!

GLAAD has this super detailed page for how to participate. Here’s the nice part! The objective is awareness, meaning the bare minimum is what you’re doing right now–reading. Hurray.

The Bad :(

Even most LGBT activists and sexual assault activists are unaware of the statistics that while straight women have a 17 percent chance of being raped and lesbians have a 13 percent chance, bisexual women have a 46 percent chance of being raped. In other words, bisexual women are approximately three times more likely to be raped. Bisexual women also have higher rates of sexual assault, intimate partner abuse, and stalking, compared to both straight and lesbian women. In addition to this, bisexual women survivors have the lowest rates of social support when disclosing trauma, the highest rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder after rape, and the most negative experiences when seeking help from formal support resources such as rape crisis centers, therapists, police, and medical professionals.

There are many complex reasons for this huge disparity in rates of violence, but the simplest reason is that bisexual women are hypersexualized, fetishized, and sexually objectified in our culture and media. Bisexual women are stereotyped as slutty, pretending to be bi for sexual attention, and always interested in sex (particularly threesomes). Basically, we are not viewed as people but as sexual objects, always eager to fulfill pornographic fantasies. Our consent doesn’t matter, because our bisexual identity is perceived as automatic consent to anyone and everyone who might be interested in us.

Additionally, bisexual women can be victims of “corrective” rape, a hate crime in which someone is raped because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, usually in an attempt to “fix” them. Bi women are also more likely to end up in abusive relationships, in part because abusers are good at targeting vulnerable people who have poor social support, and also because abusers can use biphobia to threaten their partner, lower their self-esteem, or pressure them into sex against their will.

Biphobia also presents a huge barrier to receiving help in the aftermath of an assault — the stereotype that bi women are slutty and untrustworthy, for example, may lead to friends and family doubting a bi woman survivor when she comes forward. Biphobia also leads to social isolation and causes resources intended to support survivors to be unsafe for bi women. Biphobia within the LGBT community itself is particularly harmful, leaving bi women survivors with very little support. Bi women survivors who are marginalized in other ways face even further barriers to help — trans bi women, bi women of color, and disabled bi women survivors are some of the most vulnerable in our community.

This is kind of what I’ve been alluding to at my dissatisfaction with a lot of contemporary models of abuse. While it’s great cis feminists have been empowering cishet women, and will continue to do so, there’s a tendency to be dismissive when it comes to other permutations of abuse–especially if it’s female perpetrated. Proponents of the Duluth model outright state that women cannot be perpetrators of abuse, and that if violence occurs where they aren’t the victim, it was self defence. Jaw-droppingly victim blamey. The model is starting to fall out of fashion, but still has its die-hards who go on erasing queer DV as well as male victims.
And yeah, like the Advocate says–bi+ and trans doesn’t make for a fun time in most women’s violence resources.

Signal boost and spread the word.

-Shiv

When asking questions isn’t JAQing off

Any of the FTB veterans have seen it: Someone poses as a newbie, feigns ignorance and sincerity, and asks leading questions to derail a conversation about discrimination. The tactic is so common it has its own snappy moniker–JAQing off, or “Just Asking Questions.” They’re quite aggravating, almost always bad faith commentators with enough brain cells to rub together that they know how to deliberately mislead and waste everyone’s time. They’re not asking a question because they don’t know the answer, they’re asking because they already have their answer and want to pull your chain.

Perhaps one of the more annoying side effects of JAQing off tactics is that people who are genuinely good faith participants ask questions out of ignorance, and are falsely flagged as trolls by wearied activists.

Most of the pages I follow for activist or activist-adjacent news follow an intersectional model, so one of my pages on Latinx feminist issues posted about the violence inherent in casting cis men actors as trans women characters. A commentator asked a question, opened by saying they were ignorant and didn’t understand, and that they weren’t sure how it constituted violence.

I simply explained the “deceptive trans” trope and how it was reinforced by casting cis men as trans women and she… apologized for receiving my answer.

No really. Her response was to the effect of “Oh, that makes sense. Sorry.”

Sorry? For what? You asked. You didn’t do what JAQ trolls do, which is use good faith assumptions to jerk people around. You asked and were given an answer and you said “That makes sense.” That’s the literal function of asking a question. So why was the apology necessary?

The answer is to distance herself from JAQ trolls. It was a bit disappointing. In this particular space, I am taking on the role of educator, and don’t mind people asking questions having acknowledged they don’t know the answer. It would be a different kettle of fish if you bumped into me at a cocktail party and started bombarding me with questions on gender variance–in which case I’d just give you a snippy retort to the effect of “go read my blag.” But here, as long as the question isn’t a rhetorical opening for you to soapbox your already settled-upon opinion, you are welcome to ask questions.

-Shiv

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA No

One day I might have a reasoned response to this, but for now I mostly plan on mocking it mercilessly:

Minnesotans are the face of a new campaign by a national network of anti-LGBTQ organizations. The campaign, #askmefirst, features Christians imploring schools, businesses, and “transgender activists” to ask them for permission before allowing transgender people to use the bathroom.

Hey Christians:

#AskMeFirst before you start proselytizing.

#AskMeFirst before you open your Bible.

#AskMeFirst before you open your mouth.

#AskMeFirst before one of your priests goes to the washroom.

#AskMeFirst before you leave church. I’d rather you just stay there. 24/7.

#AskMeFirst before you broadcast the Pope.

Motherfucker, I don’t need your god damn permission fulfill basic bodily functions, you arrogant, sanctimonious self-righteous sacks of shit.

-Shiv

Transition Reactions p9: Liar liar

Content Notice: Transmisogyny and the “deceptive trans” trope, invocation of t-word slur, detailed description of the murders of trans women.

Standard disclaimer: My Transition Reactions series is a mostly anecdotal recount of fucked up ways people respond my gender variance.

Guys, wanna hear a joke?

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Isn’t the point of an initialism to be snappy?

I got into another disagreement over the Alphabet Soup, at this point an unwieldy initialism that sometimes looks like this: LGBTQQIIAA2S+.

Like, seriously. The whole point of acronyms and initialisms is that they’re snappy and memorable. Look at that smorgasbord! It’s a mess!

I get that even within the non-cis, non-het, non-allo community, whatever we call it, that some identities face even more marginalization than others. That’s why I read ace and intersex folks on the regular, it’s an experience different from mine that I cannot possibly share. That’s why it’s important to signal boost their works. But if someone’s talking intersex issues, isn’t it better to just say “intersex”? There’s a much more logical etymology there that someone can follow over “elg-bit-qwee-aahs-plus.”

Either way, any given argument is about occupying specific intersections. At this point it’s starting to become clearer to me that the non-cis non-het non-allo community is not subject to universal or transferable prejudice such that it justifies grouping all those intersections under a single umbrella. After all, the misconception that trans folk don’t have it so bad in the West because gays can marry is precisely fuelled by this idea that we’re all “one kind” of minority. Some trans folk are gay, and marriage rights affected those of us who are. But even some gay advocacy arguments fall flat when a given gay person is also something else like intersex or trans.

All in all, grouping us under an umbrella term doesn’t seem to do us much service. Or at least that’s my experience once all the marriage activists vanished in a puff of smoke despite the ever growing list of trans murders. So even if you rescramble elg-bit-qwee-aahs-plus into something pronouncable like QUILTBAG, you still have the basic issue that any given letter in the Soup is not subject to the same prejudice as anyone else in the umbrella, and vice versa. So why group us like that? Why not specify intersections when arguing about them in order to capture those unique challenges?

-Shiv

Signal boosting: Everybody’s against rape as long as we’re not proposing to do anything about it

Content Notice: Abuse and sexual assault.

Yes Means Yes is a delightful blog, in part because it discusses the sort of 300-level feminist analyses that I don’t often get outside of school. As a whole, it covers a wide range of topics. Unsurprisingly, I found their BDSM posts and immediately exploded with glee–feminist kinksters write amazing stuff. I certainly wasn’t disappointed in Thomas’ series on the intersection of kink and rape culture.

It is a long read, but my gosh it is detailed and sharp and to the point. Check out some of these select quotes:

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[NSFW] The Applicability of BDSM Risk Profiles

Content Notice:  NSFW photos below the fold, rope bondage, women bound in rope.

“Risk” is probably a conversation that ranks #2 in the BDSM community, second only to “consent.” Like consent, there are a contingent of folks in the kink community who will talk a lot of talk, fuck up in practice, and then go back to talking the talk. Someone will come forward with a conduct violation and no matter how obviously egregious the behaviour is, there’ll be a lot of hand-wringing and deflection and victim-blaming and humming and hawing that proceeds for weeks until someone invents a snappy new initialism or acronym which everybody totally agrees to adhere to, bygones be bygones, we totally don’t have to do something about the predator in our midst.

Yeah, I’m not cynical. /s

Setting aside the fucksticks who turn these conversations into smokescreens into abusers, the rest of the kink community does have a lot of valuable insights on risk in general, just as it does for consent. Most of what I’ve learned in kink can be taken outside of kink. I would even say my lessons learned from BDSM, and from the Leather community in particular, have formed the bedrock of my personal ethics.

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