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

[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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Running at 0.5 Marvins

Content Notice: Depression and discussion of suicidal ideation.

I’d like Chris Hall’s unit of measurement for depression to be A Thing, a scale from -1 to 1 measured in Marvins, referencing the comically depressed robot from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Marvins are bad to have, meaning 1 would be suicidal.

I think the best I’ve ever been was 0.1 Marvins. Well into my transition, with a loving and supportive partner with a good sense of humour and just the right amount of mean streak to satisfy my kink, a job I enjoyed that paid the bills and then some. Even then, a distant dread, a little devil whispering in my ear that I would lose it all. (Which turned out to be right). It doesn’t help that my metaphorical devil gets help from outside my brain. No shortage of people penning lengthy diatribes about how monstrous I am because I’m queer or trans or poly or kinky. Might as well hand my devil a megaphone and name it after a fake goth.

My childhood was 0.25 Marvins at best. Even during times of happiness, there would be a cloud, a fog that surrounded me at all times. The sun wouldn’t be quite as bright, the colours would not radiate quite as vibrantly, laughter was always short lived. It was pervasive, as if the entirety of my wardrobe had been freshly rained on, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week.

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Insults so common they become meaningless

It’s quite easy to take the piss out of a supposed insult like Social Justice Warrior because it is so loosely used that, by now, it pretty much means “a woman I don’t like.” It has been used on men, but those men are typically minorities in other ways. Cishet white men are typically called “White Knights” or some variant thereof by the neo-Nazi alt right or by people who are just antagonistic in general to the idea of social equity. But SJW and its associated spinoffs are essentially shorthand ways of signalling dismissal to anyone from “moderates who want the opportunity to avoid discomfort in conversations about discrimination” to “fascist apologists who can’t wait to dox and harass someone into oblivion.” It’s a literal ad hominem–no engaging with the substance of the argument provided, just shout SJW and any conversation about structural, institutional, or individual discrimination can be safely ignored or dismissed as frivolous.

Enter Philip DeFranco. :/

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Why casting cis men as trans women in film is a bad idea

Content notice: Transmisogyny and more clueless cissexism.

I hate Hollywood. Have I mentioned that? 90 minutes has never in the history of cinema adequately captured the nuance of literally fucking anything, and Hollywood is often the only source of education gazillions of people get because educating yourself is hard, and the consequence of this is a gullible-as-shit public.

So, let’s talk about one more of Hollywood’s vapid stunts, casting Matt Bomer to play a prostitute trans woman in the film Anything.

In the movie, which is based on a play by Timothy McNeil, Lynch plays a man named Early Landry who is suicidal over the death of his wife. Early moves from Mississippi to Los Angeles, where he can be under the watchful eye of his protective sister, Laurette (Tierney). However, when Early begins an intense new friendship with Freda (Bomer), a transgender sex worker, the unlikely new couple must reconcile their vastly different backgrounds as they fill the void in each other’s lives.

Nope-Can-Cooler-by-SUPERKOLDIE-03 nope

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOPE.

Okay, so. Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

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The “Clueless Moderate” Gap

There’s a gap in the data, see. And I want to give this gap a name. Maybe the Clueless Moderate Gap?

I’ve written before on two topics: The tendency of Moderates to advocate for something in the abstract but oppose it in practice; and how Canadians supported affirmation of trans rights in the abstract but oppose them in practice.

 

CBC posts a rather optimistic article that perfectly demonstrates this gap.

Eighty-four per cent of people surveyed by the Angus Reid Institute said they would support adding gender identity as a prohibited ground for discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act — one of several questions in a poll on transgender issues where a firm majority said Canadians should “accept, accommodate, and move on.”

Then, not half a screen later…

Asked about a trans girl or trans boy using the washroom that corresponded with their gender identity, approximately 67 per cent said it was acceptable.

Right there. 84% saying they’re cool with trans rights, 67% saying they’re cool with trans bathroom access–and somehow, at least some people claiming to occupy one position but not the other despite the contradiction inherent thereof.

This is why I’m frustrated by this kind of reporting. 84% of respondents did not support trans rights, because some of those respondents still want to restrict our access to gendered facilities. That is the opposite of support. That’s throwing your weight behind the bathroom bill reactionaries. That’s eliminating our ability to go out in public. That’s putting us in danger. That is the fucking harmful status quo trans activists are trying to change.

Here’s what I want the next poll to do: Don’t ask people if they support explicit protections for trans folk. Instead, ask questions like “would you support a coworker or employee’s transition at the workplace?” “would you agree with letting trans folk share your facilities?” or “should trans women be imprisoned in men’s prisons [and vice versa]?” Then, instead of asking point blank whether trans people should be protected–which most people aren’t heartless enough to say “no” to–define “trans affirmation” as the logically consistent set of answers that actually supports us. 

I suspect you’ll take care of that Clueless Moderate Gap and paint a much clearer picture on the prevalence of transphobia, rather than shrugging and posting a useless feel good post about how accepting Canadians are–when they aren’t!

-Shiv

Courts aren’t there to serve you

They’re there to serve the oligarchy.

Content Notice: Aurora mass shooting and soul crushingly sociopathic lawyers.

The entire shtick of lone wolves is that the phenomenon itself is entirely predictable–an aggrieved cishet man, usually white, will, somewhere at some point in time, commit another mass shooting. But is impossible to actually predict which aggrieved cishet man will do this, when they will do it, or where.

So when victims of the Aurora shooting tried to sue Cinemax for damages, I thought it was absurd. The courts–not unfairly–argued there was no way the theatre could anticipate the attack, and so the lawsuit was defeated.

But the multi billion dollar company, instead of moving the fuck on, decided it was going to get the victims–half of whom are paralyzed–to recover their legal costs, around $700k in total. And the courts ruled in favour of Cinemax.

Let that sink in. A multi billion dollar company is going to milk shooting victims to recover legal costs which are chump change to the company’s assets, a debt which would devastate any single working class person, never mind someone disabled.

Cinemax and their lawyers were right to challenge the first lawsuit, but they have sailed way past any moral high ground. The relative worth of the legal costs to Cinemax is a drop in the bucket, but they feel justified in trying to kick shooting victims while they’re down. Cinemax’s legal counsel don’t even deserve to be considered human. They won their case, they should’ve just fucking dropped it.

*spit*

-Shiv

 

Now that’s a bit more compelling

I’ve always given the side-eye to proponents of Brain Sex theory (“neurosexism”), the idea that brains can not only be sexed but that those sex states are binary, on the grounds that their methods for measuring brain sex aren’t particularly good: MRIs. I haven’t found a brain scan study that had made me rethink this opinion. They’re still extremely weak for making any argument, even if I appreciate that most Brain Sex proponents tend to be affirmative of trans lives vis-a-vis “born this way” rhetoric.

It’s still a theory ripe for exploitation by sexists, and I still don’t find interpretation from brain scans convincing. There’s too much space between the observation and the interpretation thereof, space filled with magical thinking and after-the-fact justification.

What I have found–and for some reason, didn’t think to look for–is something a fair bit more compelling as evidence for the “gender variance as biological event” hypothesis. It’s a twin study Franksteined together from other twin studies.

Often the difficulty of trans twin studies is a lack of data. So the researchers just sewed together hundreds of twin studies, many of which reported at least one twin in at least one twin pair who was transgender and thus transitioned. Most of these studies weren’t investigating gender variance so it didn’t factor into the analysis, though they were obviously mentioned in the observations.

The findings have interesting implications: (Content Notice–like most cis researchers, the interpretation of results can be belittling or riddled with problems discussed in trans feminist discourse. Emphasis mine.)

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“No way under heaven,” says Baptist school after being told to respect Queer youth

Two Baptist schools which are financed by public money have decided they are not going to draft a Queer-inclusive policy for their students, despite it being required by Bill 7, Bill 10, and the Education Minister: (emphasis mine)

A Spruce Grove pastor who oversees two Christian private schools has accused Alberta’s education minister of wielding “dictatorial power” on the issue of LGBTQ rights, and says his board has no intention of complying with the government’s new policy.

“I have a duty as a pastor to protect the flock of God,” said pastor Brian Coldwell, chair of the Independent Baptist Christian Education Society, which runs two schools in rural Parkland County with a total of 200 students. “And there is no way under heaven I’m going to allow gay activists to come in here and basically undermine our ministries and our religious freedoms or confuse and corrupt our children.”

Okay, so, essentially he’s complaining because the government, which pays his salary, is saying he has to treat Queer students with respect, as mandated by law, because his “flock” needs to be “protected” from “gay activists” who “confuse and corrupt” children. That’s a funny story coming from the same institution that routinely protects pedophiles and brainwashes them into thinking Queer people are broken, perverted, or otherwise dangerous.

Here’s an unsettling revelation: The St. Albert Catholic School Board has in writing that its “guiding policy” for Queer youth is to preach “chastity.”

(6) Imposes no special requirements/additional constraints  Calls students with same-sex attractions to a life of prayer, self-control, and chastity.  Procedure explicitly requires a staff advisor of any student group to impose the “Church’s definition of chastity as a basis for advising students within their work” (Procedure 4.6 & 4.7).  Requires any student group (such as a GSA or QSA) the additional burden to follow the “CCSSA Life Framework” (See Procedure 3 and Appendix 1).

These abusive mother fuckers are receiving my tax money to install god damn fucking conversion therapy-lite in god damn fucking public school. This religious indoctrination is precisely why the suicide rate is so high for Queer youth. And this shit is being taught in publicly funded schools!

David Swann, the leader of the Alberta Liberal Party (yes, they still exist) has also called on David Eggen to not only dismantle antagonistic school boards, but to ban conversion therapy.

“The legislation, supported by every provincial party, and the policies set forth by the government, were created to provide kids with the right to be who they are,” said Swann. “No organization, especially a school, should have the ability to take those rights away.”

…

“This is precisely the situation where LGBTQ protections are most needed,” Swann said in a statement. “There is an antagonistic school board and a strong bias against the LGBTQ community.”

Swann also called on Eggen to ban the practice of conversion therapy throughout the education system, after Coldwell said Christian counseling would be used to help LGBTQ students.

“This type of ‘therapy’ is widely opposed by experts in psychology, psychiatry and social work,” said Swann. “There is no place for it in Alberta’s schools.”

A petition has been started to lobby for the pulling of these school’s public funding. Please sign it here.

If schools that receive Albertan education funding dollars do not want to follow the law – they should not continue to be funded by the taxpayer, obviously. Tax money is not meant to subsidize spaces that make LGBTQ2+ students unsafe. Every student has a right to attend school in a safespace, Brian Coldwell has repeatedly demonstrated in public he is incapable of providing that – including during a bizarre interview on Ryan Jespersen’s radio show a few weeks ago where he discussed ex-gay “Pray the Gay away” conversion techniques which can cause irreversible psychological damage and amounts to child abuse.

Your signature and signal boosting are hugely appreciated. Call on the NDP to take action instead of grandstanding. I am sick to my stomach just thinking about “Christian counselling” and “chastity” advice.

-Shiv

 

August 30: Earlier version of this article said the two schools were Catholic. I’ll own up to it–I just assume every time religious dickheads do dickhead things in Alberta, it’s the god damn Catholics. In fairness, St. Albert’s Queer policy is still rancid.

Priorities

A football athlete stands up against institutionalized racism and his fans burn jerseys, he loses his job, and white people everywhere freak out.

A football athlete is caught on film assaulting his wife or raping teenage girls, and…

-Shiv