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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When festering pustules pop up on campus

Content Notice: White Supremacy

It’s no secret to woke Edmontonians that we have our own dregs from the bottom of the alt right barrel. Between PUAs scheduling meet ups to MRAs following women around who have the audacity to ignore them, with redneck hillbillies shouting racial epithets on a daily basis, it’s no surprise that we would eventually find signs of White Supremacy, especially since Trump’s bold campaign has been emboldening them.

white-supremacy

Photo credit: Brett L.

They chose my university, the University of Alberta. Posted on the corkboard of Student’s Union announcements, a fellow local activist took a pic before the poster was taken down.

It probably tells you everything you need to know when a racist jumps to the conclusion that anti-racism efforts are inherently anti-white, as if PoCs are just waiting for the chance to leap into power and reignite the engine of discrimination. What exactly are they afraid of? Being treated as poorly as they treat black people?

So hey, I guess I just wanted a crystal clear example of how Edmonton’s got its own cancerous alt right growths.

The poster is anonymous, of course. Probably doesn’t want to be labelled a social pariah for being a shitstain of a human being.

-Shiv

Canadian news coverage of racism “unpopular”

In news that I’m sure will absolutely and completely take you by surprise, a CBC Editor shared openly that the reason Indigenous issues aren’t often represented in the mainstream media is because white people don’t read/listen to it:

This is not a guess. Whereas news organizations in the past relied mostly on gut instinct to gauge the importance of any particular subject to the audience, they now have hellishly accurate online tools that can measure precisely how many people are reading any story at any moment.

Big numbers are the prize, and editors and columnists know beyond a doubt that when they select certain topics for coverage, the audience will probably tank.

I’ve learned that one guaranteed way to shrink my numbers is to write about Israel/Palestine, or, to an even greater extent, Indigenous issues.

In that vein I’ll remind FtB readers that Caine is at the actual Standing Rock Camp doing bonafide journalism. You can see the first post of their series here.

It is important for you to know. Better if you can help in some way and choose to. Money can be sent here or here. Signal boost the campaigns, Caine’s work, or those few media outlets that are reporting on the camp fairly. Or even attend the camp! Anything but “meh” is helpful.

-Shiv

Open letter to Alberta, on fundagelicals

Inspired by the recent announcement of a Baptist school board in which they stated they would refuse to affirm Queer students, an Albertan penned an anonymous open letter about her experiences with publicly funded Christian schooling in the province:

This morning I woke up and read the most unsurprising news of my life. In a world where water is wet and blue mixed with red makes purple, the chair of two Christian schools announced that they would not comply with guidelines designed to protect the human rights and dignity of LGBTQA2S+ students. The only thing shocking to me about this news is that it took until the thirtieth of August for media to hear about it, because in the world that I grew up in, this one is just a no-brainer.

I was raised in a lifestyle that I like to refer to as “fundagelical”: fundamentalist evangelical. The intricate subtleties of fundagelical culture would fill tomes, and we just don’t have that kind of time here. What I do have time to tell you is this: fundagelicals speak a different language than everyone else. The reason you’ve never noticed this is because this language is entirely comprised of words that also exist in English. So when I say something like, “I want what’s best for my children”, what I mean is exactly what you think I mean, that my intentions and actions are guided by a desire to see my children benefit from having their emotional, mental, and physical well being prioritized. When a fundagelical says, “I want what’s best for my children”, they mean something slightly different.

You see, in their culture “what’s best for children” can be summed up this way: to be raised in, devoted to, and reflective of the glory of their god, and eventually saved by his grace in order to enter the kingdom of heaven; henceforth referred to as “The Prime Directive”. Now, just to clarify, I am not suggesting that fundagelical parents do not care about the physical, emotional, and mental health of their children. What I am saying is that those things don’t fall under the category of what they mean when they say “what is best for my children”. The bottom line is that, given a conflict between those things and the Prime Directive, the Prime Directive will win. Almost every time. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and check out the mission statements on one of the aforementioned schools, and the one I attended as a child:

http://www.meadowsbaptist.ca/#!about-us/c1se

http://rockychristian.wrsd.ca/

When I was five years old, my mother helped me pack a lunch and drove me to my first day of Kindergarten. I remember the blocks stacked against the wall by the entrance and the circle corner on the opposite side of the room. I remember my teacher Miss P. (that’s a whole other letter). We prayed to start the day. We heard Bible stories and memorized Bible verses. We prayed to end the day. None of this was odd to me; I grew up in this culture after all. In truth, I can’t recall when it was I finally figured out that our school wasn’t like other schools. Maybe around grade five is when we started whispering behind our hands to each other about the other kids on our busses who had to go to schools where they learnedEvolution. What was Evolution? The EVIL idea that we all came from monkeys. We all knew this was ridiculous of course. Anyone with half a brain knew that God made man from dirt and woman from his rib.

It’s hard to recall, exactly, when I first heard about gay people (that’s when boys marry boys and girls marry girls). “Ewwwwwwww” we all said, as if we actually understood why the adults around us would find it gross. Transgender people were not even on our radar, although to this day, I am convinced there was at least one very close in age to me. Occasionally, I’ll think of them, and hope so fervently that they made it.

I’m a little ways into adulthood now. The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that I truly do not understand the scope of my own lack of knowledge. But I’d like to think that I’ve gained a relatively good perspective about my time spent in fundagelical culture. After all, few things are more humbling than realizing that you’re wrong about almost everything.

Looking back on myself as a young teenager, I’ve no doubt I was an unpleasant one. A strong, stubborn personality combined with a childhood focused on holiness instead of personal development, topped off with an environment steeped in authoritarianism and indoctrination. Mix all that up with the raging hormones of puberty and the fact I’d been surrounded by the same thirty odd peers for eight years, it’s no surprise I was friendless at school. And believe me when I tell you, in an institution like that, there is no better target than the smart-mouthed loner. When the other students don’t like you and the teachers think you need to be put in your place, the only place you can turn is your parents……except when you can’t………because……..Prime Directive.

If you hadn’t told me this person was real, I’d say you were reading off a Lovecraftian horror novel.

Read the rest here.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: Seeing myself in Trump

When the statues mocking Donald Trump were raised, they had unfortunate implications. Instead of arguing that Trump was a monster because of his actions (of which there are many to plunder), it made him a symbol of ridicule by representing a non-normative body. An old body, a cellulite body, an intersex body. Many people, myself included, weren’t particularly comfortable with the comparison. Trump is monstrous because he’s an asshole, a xenophobe, a racist, a rapist–not because an intersex body is in any way objectively immoral.

Chris Hall agrees with me.

At first, it was easy to laugh at the statues, because Donald Trump’s entire image is based on a blustering, ferocious masculinity that crumbles under the most superficial examination. Trump is, to my knowledge, the first serious presidential candidate who’s explicitly bragged about the size of his cock while on the campaign trail. I’ve seen other politicians do it symbolically by waving missiles, flagpoles, and rifles around, but Trump has been so brazen that it seems like an act of restraint on his part that he hasn’t actually suggested that the voters might like to go down on him. Maybe that comes later. Maybe he plans to include public fellatio as part of his presidential inauguration. Which, to be honest, might actually be an improvement on the traditional swearing in on the Bible. I can clearly say that I’ve always found oral sex a lot more enjoyable, enlightening, and genuinely moving than reading the Bible. On the other hand, none of my oral sex experiences have involved Donald Trump, a man who has raped at least one of his wives. I for one would like to keep it that way.So, at first glance, the statues, collectively titled “The Emperor Has No Balls,” seem to strike at the very heart of Trump’s brand.

But here’s the thing: Like I said before, there’s too much of me in that statue for me to laugh very long. There’s too much in that statue of too many people that I know or care about for the joke not to taste bitter and cruel after more than a few moments. While social justice movements have been working to build intersectional organizations and solutions, INDECLINE managed to come up with a perfect storm of intersectional cruelty.

Please consider this next time you mock Trump. It’s not like there’s a shortage of material there.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: Mom won’t let me borrow “My Chacha is Gay”

My Chacha is Gay is a radical and controversial text that has the audacity to state such terrible things as “love is love” and “you can’t control who you love.” Rather unsurprisingly, given that the context is Pakistan and the symbolism directly addresses common homophobic interpretations of Islam in Pakistan, the author has received… well. You know. I probably don’t have to tell you how well received apostates are in heavily religious Republics, nor that homophobes of any stripe jumped on too.

But rather upsettingly the author has also stated she’s received flak from Western liberals accusing her of Islamophobia, which is a rather strange accusation to be made of criticisms directed at a country that literally institutionalizes homophobia. It is not xenophobic to say the Pakistani government is draconian especially with respects to gay rights–certainly Eiynah, a Pakistani woman herself, would not argue that all Pakistani citizens are in agreement with her government’s policy. But she does observe that enough people do agree that there is a structural problem to redress, which is an argument that sticks to the facts and makes a very conservative assessment thereof.

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Signal Boosting: Lesbian Etiquette Guide for Stealing Farms

As we all know, lesbians stealing farms is a very… er… devastating social issue that the Republican swine party brought to light recently. Apparently intimidated by this incredible insight into the gay agenda, Autostraddle fesses up:

Truthfully, though, this is not what I saw being chosen for The Gay Agenda’s next phase of implementation. I was hoping if anything was going to be vetted by POTUS it was going to be the Lesbian Takeover of America’s Got Talent (Article Twelve, Section One of The Gay Agenda) because I think it’s fair to estimate three billion people watch it and quite frankly I’d love to be a judge, but it’s important to remember that rural farms are the heart of America and therefore their destruction is the most strategic, if boring, choice.

All has been revealed.

-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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