Rosie DiManno: Anti-trans garbage chute

I wish I got paid as much as anti-trans pundits to discredit them as they get paid to invent shit to get outraged over. Sadly it seems Canada’s corporate media has identified that anti-trans sentiment sells better, and those of us who insist on high standards of evidence are relegated to “alternative media.”

The next hit piece to grace my feed is Rosie DiManno’s fabulously victim blaming article, “End of binary gender proves to be a passport confusion.” Insert usual disclaimer for all your predictable anti-trans codswallop.

Earlier this month, Tracy Ayre took her 16-year-old son to renew his passport at the Toronto office. She brought with her his birth certificate, health card with photo, student ID card, bank statement, expired passport and her obviously boy teenager.

I have to interrupt this story already as there is an important detail here. “She brought with her his birth certificate.” According to Service Ontario, the administration responsible for government ID, the birth certificate contains: (emphasis mine)

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Thoughts on the ethics of disclosure and gender identity

Brynn Tannehill penned a piece for lgbtqnation on the ethics of disclosure for trans folk in dating, as in whether or not it meets some criteria of right or wrong to disclose (or not disclose) our status as transgender or our “gender history.” For the most part I agree with her arguments, and wanted to offer some additional thoughts.

By far the most predictable piece of white noise injected into the discourse is the claim of a cis person asserting they couldn’t date a trans person or find us attractive. The problem is… well, yes you could.

To clarify, there isn’t any consistent way to spot a trans person, because there isn’t any variance in our bodily characteristics that cisgender people don’t also have. Some women have hair loss. Some men have breasts. Some women are tall. Some men are short. The belief that trans people as a demographic can be identified upon sight is predicated in the belief that there is a certain way to “look trans.” This is how trans people have been using the washroom with you long before trans panic gained traction in 2014. Most of you never knew most of us were ever there, so we minded our business and left the loo like everyone else.

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“Act female”

I’m kinda tired of being the flashpoint for this particular revelation but prescriptive codes of behaviour based on gender norms suck. To put it bluntly, they suck a lot.

Just last week, a transgender man in Louisiana won his discrimination complaint against his employer through arbitration. Tristan Broussard involuntarily resigned from the financial services company he worked for when he was intolerably forced to “act and dress only as a female.” He was awarded more than a year’s salary as well as additional damages for emotional distress.

Okay, so there’s a lot being tangled up in gender codes. For starters, there’s no distinction made between gender identity, gender expression, and gender role. This would clarify a great deal of where these employers are going wrong–and why, thankfully, judges are ruling on an interpretation of Title VII that indicates “sex stereotyping” as a form of sex-based discrimination.

For my part, I look forward to any and all attempts to elucidate whatever the flaming fuck “act female” means. Mostly because it demonstrates that the very principle of gender differentiated codes is inherently sexist and impossible to rationalize without falling back on unsubstantiated claims about the nature of gender. It’s like getting someone to explain a rape joke–they’ll figure it out, what a flaming turd they’ve stepped on, usually. Because here’s the critical thing, dear readers: The liberty of your gender expression is at stake too.

Even without taking into account gender identity and trans employees, employers are pushing to create a precedent where it is legal to dictate an acceptable range of gender expression that they can impose on you based on your assigned sex. That means even if you’re cis, the employer’s success in the courts would indicate that the same imposition will affect you. This exists to some degree already, but employers are narrowing that range ever further, ensuring “proper womanhood” looks a certain way (I anticipate makeup, long hair, pencil skirts, regardless of whether or not you want them).

If experience has taught me nothing else, it’s that nothing will get the support of cis people on trans issues faster than pointing out how it affects cis people. (Yes, that’s my bitter cynic talking). But it’s true. Even if courts side with the employers (and reading the above article seems to indicate they aren’t), there’s a decent chance an issue like this could gain mainstream support and see much bigger protests than if it were marketed as a “trans issue.”

Transmisogyny is just a more specific manifestation of misogyny. Just tell the next cis person that when they dismiss these discrimination cases–the rulings will affect them too.

-Shiv

Peter Boghossian: “Critical thinking” apparently means “pretend this field of study doesn’t exist”

Hands up:  Who thought atheism needed another arrogant atheist douchebro who cloaks himself in rationality and then proceeds in a spit-flecked rant rife with fallacious reasoning to tell us we are irrational about stuff?

Peter Boghossian raves about “Gender studies professors” who “are pumping out complete bullshit” in Areo Magazine, producing something resembling less of an argument and more of a rancid onion. And for some fucking reason, I’m feeling masochistic enough to peel back the layers of entitled manbaby whinging. Tears to ensue.

One would think that an example of critical thinking would explicitly identify the premises of a presented argument, compare peer-reviewed literature to see whether the premises are accurate, and use formal logic to determine if the conclusion is sound. But Boghossian’s rant is devoid of any particular specifics–aside from quoting one of Jordan Peterson’s critics–and on top of that he has the gall to represent himself as some kind of model freethinker. The problem is that the sort of freethought that lacks any resemblance to reality is the sort of “freethought” we’d expect to see from mushroom-tripping hippies reacting to psychedelic phantoms rather than what’s in front of them.

Compare, for instance, how Boghossian opens up his interview with some pontificating on critical thinking:

Malhar Mali: What in your opinion is the best way of fostering critical thinking when it comes to religious and supernatural beliefs?

Peter Boghossian: I think the whole way we’ve taught critical thinking is wrong from day one. We’ve taught, “Formulate your beliefs on the basis of evidence.” But the problem with that is people already believe they’ve formulated their beliefs on evidence — that’s why they believe what they believe. Instead, what we should focus on is teaching people to seek out and identify defeaters.

What is a defeater? A defeater is:

IF A, THEN B, UNLESS C.

All of which is sound epistemology…

Then, minutes later, Boghossian expels this adorable piece of absolute claptrap:

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The Advocate, milquetoast liberals, and wearing many hats

Content Notice: Racism, white supremacist apology, minimization, gaslighting, general clueless white assholery

When we last saw Apologist-for-White-Supremacy Amanda Kerri, she was attempting to delicately explain “economic anxiety” coming from the United States’ least troubled demographic within the working class. Now it seems Kerri is joining what will soon be a tradition of milquetoast liberals falling in line to give jackbooted authoritarianism a chance.

I try to ration my criticisms of other trans women carefully. Belonging to a badly-maligned group often makes visible activists a lightning rod for bad faith criticism, but nonetheless there’s only so much bullshit I can take before I switch from “maybe you just had limited opportunities in education because of prejudice” to “okay, you’re an asshole.”

Kerri begins:

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The significance of political misogynistic violence on the anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre

27 years ago, a shooter entered a Montreal STEM school lecture hall with a loaded gun and held a class at gunpoint. He ordered the class to divide itself into men and women. They didn’t comply until he shot the ceiling.

Once separated, he turned his gun on the women. 14 women were murdered and another 20 injured before the shooter would turn the gun on himself. We would dub this the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre.

As with all atrocities, promises were made to never forget–certainly many Canadian feminists, myself included, observe the day of mourning. Yet it would seem that many in Alberta’s political landscape have a selective memory indeed, given that mere days ago an entire crowd worked itself into a frenzy to speak of our female Premier, “Lock her up!”

It certainly puts Alberta’s conservative leadership in an awkward position. Their previous big tent success has always worked only with the cooperation of their snarling, reactionary dickhead vote, in which virulent misogynists have had their home for decades. Now they are tasked with keeping this vote whilst condemning violence spun in the same cloth that occurred on this day, 27 years ago.

Of course this isn’t the first time Brian Jean, leader of Alberta’s right-wing Wildrose Party, has had to contain this feral portion of the conservative voting bloc. He has gone on record to condemn them multiple times, yet they don’t seem particularly convinced by his ineffectual bleating. Maybe it’s because he’ll turn around in 3 months to start courting their vote again, but only before issuing another disingenuous apology about how wrong violence against women is. You’re not fooling your drooling bloodhounds, Jean, and neither are you fooling me.

How fundamentally perverse it is that the authoritarian jackboots can make their proclamations that the Premier ought to be jailed, simply because they dislike her, mere days before an occasion which reminds us all of the cost of patriarchal entitlement. If that’s a “joke,” you’ll have to explain it to me.

-Shiv

Rebel Media spokespuppet throws shoes at Legislature

I’m only laughing to numb the pain. Content Notice: Homophobia.

Despite claiming he’s not a lobbyist, Neal Hancock–perhaps better known by his character “Bernard the Roughneck”–sure collects a lot of money from oil lobbyists to talk about oil. The Quebecois theatre student and political science graduate would have you believe he’s the voice of Alberta’s average joe. Because, you know, the hotbed of ill-advised Western separatism is just teeming in abundance with French Canadian drama and political science?

Of course, no reality-denying quackery is complete without the chronically libelous Rebel Media. In a rally where “the Roughneck” went on record to suggest foreign agents should hack the NDP databases (man, where have I heard that one before), the average joe spokesman decided the best way to make his political statement about the NDP’s carbon tax was to throw his shoes at the Legislature. Seconds later after Hancock’s impassioned (and possibly treasonous) speech, Ezra “Not a Journalist” Levant said without the slightest hint of irony to the frothy-mouthed crowd:

As Hancock wandered away from the podium to retrieve his shoes, Levant reminded the crowd to “obey the law,” adding that “our side does, but the other side does not.”

Yes, because the man found guilty of libel is the sort of reliable law-abiding figure whose even-handed judgement you can trust. Like bringing in an arsonist to lecture you about safety.

Oh look, more libel!

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Labels as relational

Something struck me last week when I was doing my Trans Sex Ed presentation for ASPECC. In order to make sure everyone was on the same page I had to start by making sure the word “transgender” was clear. Ultimately I think this is one area that could turn into an entire presentation itself, because the more I thought about it the more I realized this was a topic that could run deep.

I’ll illustrate with some other identity labels of mine: atheist. I mean, that’s a given on a freethought network, right? But I also live in this progressive little urban bubble where people are largely indifferent to religion. My coworkers, my boss, my previous landlord. Nobody cared. If I had been “outed” as an atheist, I think fuck all would have happened. People would’ve shrugged and moved on. People have shrugged and moved on.

In terms of importance or relevance to me, personally, that makes my relationship with atheism weak at best. I don’t often do posts about the epistemology of the Christian god, mostly because I consider the matter settled, and so do enough people in my life that it’s just not an important question anymore. So I mean, sure, I’m an atheist. And yes, I’ll accept that label because it’s accurate. But no, it isn’t the sort of thing that actually gets the people around me to respond differently, so its relevance is negligible, as long as I do my homework and steer clear of traveling to, say, Iran.

Being trans, on the other hand. Well, every asshole on the internet has a strong opinion. No PhD in gender variance, mind, or even a passing attempt to actually read the research they claim supports their position, but hot-damn does being transgender carry a significant gravity to it, drawing in dickheads and assholes in orbit like some kind of black hole hurdling through a solar system. If were talking about labels in terms of their importance to other people, then hells yes, “transgender” is a heavy and influential label indeed.

So I arrive to a different use of labels altogether, one that doesn’t involve describing my relationship with myself, but one that describes the world’s relationship to me. Framed like that, it contextualizes things like how my personal, morally neutral choices such as my clothing or grooming is suddenly subject to public debate on whether I’m reinforcing feminine stereotypes or just doing the trans thing for attention. Now it makes sense to take up the label transgender, not because I may or may not want to grow my hair long, but because a choice of such minimal relevance to other people’s lives is somehow granted importance through some invasive and kindy creepy entitlement to know every detail about my body. An entitlement that is present because of the world’s relationship with being “transgender.”

If I lived in a post transphobia society, I imagine I would feel about my gender identity the same way I do about my religious identity: Meh. Something to be acknowledged and make a few changes to make things comfy, but not the sort of sordid public spectacle that it is now.

The only reason trans issues ranks so highly is because of the damage these hamfisted attempts at policy writing cause, ensuing upon discovery of our existence. That’s a relationship I don’t want denied, how I’m some kind of walking-talking time-bomb for all the comfortable assumptions people make about gender. I may not particularly care about being trans, personally, but I think you’d have an incomplete picture of what it’s like as a cis person to be a trans person if you didn’t comprehend how much mutually contradictory bullshit we’re put through.

Thus, even if you personally don’t have a strong relationship with your gender identity–which is only natural, because nobody reacts to it–you could accept cisgender as a label for those circumstances and that relationship, the same way I accept the label atheist despite living in a peaceful bubble of religious irrelevance. It’s not any kind of commentary on you. It’s more of a commentary on your circumstances. Less of an identity unto itself and more taking stock on the relational behaviour of those around you. How, for instance, nobody has asked you about your genitals, or what your “real name” is. Or, perhaps the most salient to our current political climate, sex-segregated spaces are a no-brainer for you where they reliably get a trans person to start sweating under the collar.

This sidesteps the entire issue of trying to communicate what you do or do not feel, not that the people dismissing gender dysphoria as “just” feelings are the sorts of good-faith commentators who’d actually listen to my alternative (hey, there’s another relationship to describe between trans people and our environments: We’re “just” feeling a certain way, but you? You’re taken for-granted). I don’t have to share any kind of deeply personal struggle with my body. In fact, I can point out that the curiosity for said struggle perhaps better defines my existence as a trans woman than does the struggle itself!

Food for thought. What do you think?

-Shiv

All the little power games

Content notice: Trans-antagonism.

It was in December 2015 when Alberta passed Bill 7, a law that added gender identity and expression to the protected classes under the provincial criminal code. For the most part the law passed with little more than the usual humming and hawing from radio talk show hosts. Perhaps it was the weather that discouraged protesting, but it wasn’t until summer 2016, around the same time that Bill C-16 was finally proposed (a similar law, but federally), that I witnessed in person the sorts of power games that cisgender opponents to trans rights would engage in.

Trans Equality Society of Alberta (TESA) organized a rally to express support for the legislation. Scheduled after the rally was the reactionary response. But the rally in favour of trans rights, upon its conclusion, asked if any of its members would stay to counter-protest the anti-rights rally.

So we did.

Physical violence was thankfully avoided, but that doesn’t mean the cisgender anti-trans rights protesters didn’t have their little power games to put us on the back foot.

If you’re trans and you catch the attention of the a particularly unhinged trans-antagonist, your doxxing doesn’t stop merely at the location of your legal identity–they always, always dig up your prior name (aka birth name or dead name) and insist on using it to refer to you, or at the very least implying you’re suspect by publishing it alongside your legal name. And if you’re a public figure, it’s usually not difficult to locate your previous name because all legal name changes might be published where you live.

So now, in order to meet the demands of the anti-rights camp and have a, quote unquote, “civil” conversation, you have to engage whilst being called the wrong name, the wrong pronoun, and the wrong titles.

I kid you not–the woman leading the trans counter-protest was referred to as “Sir” the entire time. Their twisted idea of respect was itself a cheap tactic, a kidney shot. So we either proceed to ignore this behaviour in order to talk about the logistics of trans rights and how literally zero cis men have been excused from criminal behaviour because they were cross dressing when they did it; or, instead of refuting these myths and misconceptions, we spend the entire time trying to get our opponents to stop fucking calling us by a name that isn’t ours.

The excuses for this tactic are flimsy. Trans-antagonists don’t go around calling every Bill William, or every Dan Daniel, or every Ted Theodore or every Jan Janice or every Sam Samantha or every Liz Elizabeth. We already have a culture that permits cis people to change their names, their given names and their family names and their titles, for any reason. There is no reason other than prejudice I can think of to deny the legitimacy of trans people using the exact same machinery that everyone else has for decades.

So the anti-rights protesters set up the expectation that trans folk ought to act “civil” during a discussion in which our opponents engage in cheap shots and dirty tactics that we either have to ignore or change the topic to redress, while defaming us as predators and rapists.

Right.

-Shiv

We need to talk about tolerance

All throughout Dr. Peterson’s extended temper tantrum his defenders characterized his critics as “The Intolerant Left.” Not only does this reduce his critics to a monolithic, unified entity, but it misapprehends the implications of what tolerance is to begin with.

The first snare here is to address the “argument by definition” problem. It’s a weak strategy because if a word has many meanings (as tolerance does), then it leaves a theoretical opponent an opening to dismiss it out of hand by pointing out the alternate uses of said word. I have done this myself. If an argument is easy to make, it’s typically easy to refute. Despite the temptation to set a definition from which to argue, I am reluctant to engage in the tactic at all. So I figure that my solution is actually to go on the offence: Rather than dispute that The Left™ is intolerant, I am going to accept that premise and argue how intolerance is an entirely ordinary consequence of being alive. After all, if The Right were perfectly tolerant, there would be no disagreement between them and The Left.

We’re all intolerant of something, the question is merely what those “somethings” are.

Ever walk past a homeless man despite having disposable income that month? You tolerated homelessness.

Ever watch a guy meticulously plan his entire stay at the bar getting a woman loaded on alcohol, and did nothing about it? You tolerated sexual predation.

Ever watch yet another video of a black person being assaulted by police, then carried on to do nothing about it? You tolerated anti-black police brutality.

Now pointing this out doesn’t really net someone a lot of friends. I do not mean to guilt trip anyone into feeling bad because they have finite spoons. We all have finite spoons. It’s in our nature to tolerate stuff because we cannot possibly fix everything. We tolerate broken shower heads or smelly apartments or limping cars or noisy roommates. Simply because there is more to fix than can possibly be fixed in 24 hours, we must out of necessity pick and choose things to tolerate. That’s why we might let things slide even when they’re arguably important.

Now I have a lot of complex thoughts about the nature of human apathy but I think it’s safe to say that it is universal regardless of our origin or beliefs. To accuse someone of therefore being occasionally intolerant of something is a bit like accusing someone of having skin. The probability that someone well and truly cares about nothing is so staggeringly low that surely a vast majority of humanity is intolerant at least some of the time about some of the things.

Maybe we can recognize that this is yet another rhetorical pool noodle designed to detract from, rather than contribute to, a discussion. Maybe we can instead concern ourselves with what someone doesn’t tolerate instead of filling the air with vacuous bullshit.

-Shiv