Lordamighty: PZ’s e-mailer’s errors

Back in the day men who wished to dress as women regarded themselves as being cross-dressers, or transvestites. What they never claimed to be was a ‘woman.’

This is fantastically wrong, and as the saying goes, fractally so. There are errors on a literal reading, errors the become apparent in context, errors implicit hidden in the spaces between words, errors with the steelmanned version of the statement, and errors with an interpretation that allows for nonliteral readings that translate farcically nonsensical and internally inconsistent cissexist approaches to writing about trans lives into meaningful assertions. Shall we have a go?

Let’s address the second sentence first. While its clear from context that the writer is wishing to make a point about the ontology of trans people (whether or not trans folk exist and what “being” trans means), it is correct on neither a literal level nor on the more generous interpretation abstracted from the words used. There is an implicit premise here that trans people are masculine or male trending toward feminine or female (commonly abbreviated “MtF”). But of course there have been many men who claimed to be women. Not trans people who claimed to be women, actual cis men. To escape a police warrant or a military draft, to play a joke, or for any of a million reasons, men have claimed to be women.

If we allow the very stupid and bigoted writing to take on another meaning less facially absurd we must understand that “men claiming to be women” is the author’s description of trans women. Qualified by the previous sentences “back in the day” this is an assertion that prior to some uncertain date trans women did not exist. If you’ve got the spoons and are seeking giggles, go ahead and ask them to name that date. It’s hilarious.

Unlike the second sentence which was wrong both literally and in context and abstracted (or steelmanned), on its face the first sentence is true, “men who wished to dress as woman” did sometimes in some places use terms like “cross-dresser” and “transvestite”. Of course the saving grace here is that “men who x did y” does not logically require that ALL men who x did y. If any two men who x did y, even if they never knew each other and lived in completely different eras, then “men who x did y” is technically true. So kudos there, I guess? But in its context this isn’t a claim that “at least 2 men” called themselves either cross-dresser or transvestite. In its context this is a claim that all men who desired to cross-dress called themselves by one or both of those terms. And that’s just laughably untrue.

Moreover, trans women are not a group of “men who wished to dress as women”. There is a vast category error here. The existence of oranges does not disprove apples. In their determination to cling to hateful, reductionist, and dismissive language, they’ve failed to properly state a claim about trans women at all. Clearly they would like us to believe that trans women did not exist until recently, but they are too staggeringly ignorant to make the claim in a way that even presents as true.

Let’s mention again that the writer dismisses the existence of FtM people implicitly: it does not even occur to them at any point in what they wrote to PZ that people society assigned to the role of girlhood might at any point in their lives lay claim to the roles of boyhood or manhood. That’s important because it is revealing of their cissexism, what many would call transphobia. Other assumptions in this bit of nonsense are as well, but we should not lose sight of the fact that in addition to the explicit claim that trans women never existed before some recent moment, there remains the parallel but implicit claim that trans men never existed before some recent moment. To think that the author is more hatefully contemptuous of MtF people than FtM people would be a mistake.

Having disposed of that, let’s examine “back in the day”. That period includes an awful lot of time to claim no black swans existed in, and we have quite a lot of evidence for black swans going back continuously for quite some time (and discontinuously for many centuries before that). Medical transition with modern, sterile surgical intervention is testified to for more than 100 years. This includes a subsequent identification with a gender not assigned at birth by both the surgical recipient and their society.

Prior to modern sterile surgical techniques, there were also similar cases in many societies. Some are not (permit me to be metaphorical) homologous, but merely analogous — persons who during life shift to a gendered role their society did not previously consider them to occupy, but which isn’t considered opposite to their previous genders in the way that woman and man are frequently considered opposites. (Wrongly and stupidly, of course, but still popularly so considered.) This included societies in which a person transitioned into a separate, sacred gender reserved for rare individuals. But there were also many societies in which a transition to an “opposite” gender occurred, which we can consider homologous (in our metaphorical way) to the category our delightfully cissexist writer asserts does not exist in the past.

The scholarship of persons such as  Ifi Amadiume and Will Roscoe (but don’t stop at just those two) convincingly demonstrate a variety of social understandings of gender that have included the possibility of transition to the opposite for at least several hundred years. Moreover, there is no reason to think that these phenomena popped into being the moment Western writers showed up in a location to record them.

Any argument you have with someone asserting that transition to the opposite (a term of art for the phenomenology, not an ontological concession that opposite is a factually correct description) did not exist until recently is certain to be with someone who was born not only long after transition to the opposite with associated modern medical intervention had become Western reality, but also someone who makes up facts rather than studies the science. Anthropology is clear: gender is multifaceted; gender roles are not generally binary (though they might be in specific, constrained local use cases) and gender expression, identification, and attribution are never so; and transition to the opposite is a long-attested fact.

 

Let me make myself clear

I’m seeing mixed reactions to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine’s veto of an anti-trans bill that would have prohibited medically indicated and often medically necessary health care, as well as trans children’s participation in children’s intramural sports.

Some people are saying this is not particularly good news, since there are enough Republicans in the state lege to override the veto. Others are noting that this move might be entirely political, with DeWine seeking an undeserved reputation for sympathy towards trans children and adults.

I wish to go on record saying this:

Fuck that shit. Fuck all of it. Fuck it off the planet. Fuck it in an Elon Musk rocket. Fuck it all the way to Mars where it can up and fucking die.

[Read more…]

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Yeah, it’s hard to think of anything to add, so I’m just leaving the floor to Nebraska State Senator Hunt:

Abortion is a trans rights issue, and trans rights are reproductive rights

So memorably (to me anyway) I once gave a speech at a small but influential gathering in defense of the Lovejoy Surgicenter clinic in Portland, Oregon. The so-called “Lovejoy clinic” provided abortions to women and others in need for fifty goddamn years, starting before Roe guaranteed abortion rights at the federal level. It was not a Planned Parenthood clinic, though it did frequently work closely with Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette. This did not happen without attacks and certainly not without protest. So you can imagine that supportive rallies were needed there on many occasions.

At the rally I attended, and where I spoke, a number of people from the board of PP-CW and the Lovejoy clinic and Oregon NARAL also attended, and they were listening. I briefly spoke about the state of trans freedom and trans health care and the political attacks on both. Few people if anyone seemed aware of any of this, but that was kinda my point. I said that the attempt to assert public control over individuals’ genitals and health care and especially health care having anything to do with genitals was all of a piece. For that reason, I argued, trans people must stand up and count themselves among the fighters for abortion rights whether or not we are people who are able to become pregnant. After the rally I was approached by a number of heavy hitters in Oregon’s reproductive rights community and we spoke for maybe an hour, certainly much longer than I had planned to be at the rally. I remember being quite late to get home.

Within two years support for abortion rights among trans people in Portland had increased and PPCW had begun providing a small amount of trans health care. Now, I have no idea whether or not showing up that day had anything to do with the beginning of PPCW’s slow shift into providing more and more care to trans patients. And if I affected the trans community’s willingness to take on abortion access as a trans issue it was more from general haranguing over years in personal conversations than it was that rally where few if any other trans people joined up and no others spoke. But it’s clear that something was happening around then, and that I was a part of it, and that a community was opening up that had felt besieged and often had little time for issues like anti-domestic violence or reproductive rights work that didn’t seem to fit into the narrow definition of trans issues that then existed.

And look, if you don’t know what it’s like to be besieged, just try being an out trans person thirty years ago, whoo, sibling.

The point of all this is that there’s a right way and a wrong way to expand your issues. When you see your issues linked with issues that are historically not your issues a good approach to this might be to say, “Hey, I notice this link, and because I care about my issues, I care about yours.” This is not only good ally work, but it also can be the start of something special, as in Portland 25 years ago where we went further. As trans people and people fighting for reproductive rights, we held hands like Marcie and goddamned Peppermint Patty and told each other, “Because I care about my issues, your issues are my issues.” Trans people gave more money to reproductive rights organizations than they had previously and out trans people began working in reproductive rights organizations. At the same time reproductive rights organizations started offering care to trans people right there in their clinics.

It was a beautiful thing to witness (and none of my doing, since I did not work in those organizations and I have never provided abortions or trans health care or health care of any kind besides bandaids and such for kids) and I will always love Portland for it.

More often though, we fall short of that. Humans gonna human, right? I have limits on my expertise and I can’t always talk about Black women, chemical hair straighteners, racism, and cancer (though that’s an article I’ve been wanting to write for two weeks now) because white MtF person touching on Black women’s hair? That can get tangled and uncomfortable real quick, and as necessary as it is that white people talk about how racism is giving Black women cancer, it’s not entirely unreasonable to be afraid of fucking up on the topic and that can make writing about it a little more fraught, a little more draining, and a little more time consuming than writing about other topics. We’re human, and this is mostly okay.

But mostly okay is not ALL okay. When we get complacent, or when we seem to get complacent, it becomes necessary for one asshole to speak up and ask if we’re really doing our best here. It doesn’t feel great, usually, but it’s often necessary for the overall effort of getting better over time.

It is in this spirit that I’m gonna take some shots at Christina Cauterucci’s recent Slate article Abortion Is So Popular Republicans Are Inventing Conspiracy Theories to Trick Americans Into Voting Against It. Since this article appeared on Slate and was linked in the Wonkette TABS! roundup, I am sure all good liberals have read it. And if you know it then you know that a huge part of it is summed up here:

Abortion bans are unpopular. So unpopular that Republican extremists seem to have to invent conspiracy theories to trick Americans into voting for them.

That’s the major takeaway from recent political battles in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In all three states, abortion-related ballot initiatives and elections were framed by right-wing groups as the only thing standing between parents and “trans ideology” in the classroom. …

This is the new playbook. Using the specter of child corruption and social contagion, Republicans are attempting to manipulate parents, scapegoat trans and queer people, and erode multiple axes of bodily autonomy, all in one fell swoop.

Cauterucci brings the receipts. The article is, indeed a great summation of “the new playbook”.

What it is not, however, is any kind of call for trans advocates and feminist reproductive rights advocates to work together. The existence of trans people is portrayed as a chink in abortion defenders’ armour:

These groups believe that by agitating conservatives and uniting voters against a trans boogeyman, they can get people to ignore their own support for (or indifference to) abortion rights and eagerly line up to give those rights away.

And sure, we are that I guess. Cauterucci quotes a Republican scare-ad saying that we are

Malicious entities from out of state [that] are arriving in sheep’s clothing to “encourage sex changes for kids” and sneak “trans ideology” into schoolrooms

Fortunately Cauterucci has a more reassuring message. In her telling, cissexist scaremongering and the demonization of trans people is bad, but it’s also nothing to worry about:

It’s no surprise that GOP operatives are trying to divert the focus to literally any other issue where they perceive themselves to have the upper hand, though it is horrifying to see that they believe virulent transphobia is a winning enough position that it may convince voters to sign away their access to legal abortion. The only silver lining, in Ohio as in Wisconsin as in Michigan, is that the bait-and-switch doesn’t seem to be working.

In this article trans people aren’t the enemy. Instead, trans people are the helpless tools of the enemy. But we can be hopeful because trans people’s issues aren’t our issues, they are “other issues” and no one thinks that they’re protecting trans people when they vote for reproductive freedom.

And again, because I’m about to be THAT ASSHOLE, this is an article written by Cauterucci, not Cauterucci’s whole life and philosophy. For all I know, Cauterucci is trans. And lord knows I’ve had a piece or two of my own edited to say something that I didn’t want the piece to say, so let’s get together and agree here that no one is interested in demonizing Cauterucci.

And also, too, there’s room in the wide world for some articles that are single-issue. It’s popular to say in trendy living rooms within a ten foot radius of my fat ass that my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit, but sometimes the question for the day really is nothing more than, “What is the current GOP strategy?” with no room for any sidetracks into whether it’s good or bad or how best to fight it.

And, of course, we’re human beings with limited space in a brains and in our hearts for all the issues that matter. If you’re doing your best and you just don’t get trans issues and don’t have room in your whatever for trans people or trans advocacy, I would much rather you embrace and create positive momentum towards resolution on issues you do have the time and energy to address, whether that’s climate change or voting rights or abortion, than give up on everything because it’s not in you to do something intersectionally.

But there is a problem if pieces like’s Cauterucci’s work for Slate become common, and in my opinion they have become common enough to reach this threshold. However much you would like to give zero points to the theocratic right on any and every question, they’re not actually wrong to think that trans rights and reproductive rights are related. In many cases this is direct and explicit: governments often have and often still do require proof of sterilization before changes to legal sex can be made. FtM people can and do get pregnant, can and do access abortion. Trans people of all flavours use condoms and lube and antibiotics for our STDs. In other cases, it is more indirect. Indeed whether you believe (as I do and any reasonable person does) that the political right’s attacks on trans people during recent reproductive rights ballot campaigns have been deceptive to mendacious red herrings and demonization, it is certainly true that the theocrats are creating ever more links between the issues.

I said 25 years ago in that after-demo discussion that the desire to control others’ reproductive systems is related in the theocrats’ own minds, and if I tolerate fascistic reproductive control so long as there’s a special exception for me, I am tolerating the existence of an ideology that would destroy me the moment it had the chance. This is equally true for trans people who tolerate anti-abortion attacks and for reproductive rights advocates who tolerate anti-trans attacks.

I said at the time that I fight for reproductive rights for many reasons, but not least because it is in my enlightened self-interest. And so it is for people whose primary issue is reproductive rights: if the general lefty public went all in on fighting for trans rights thirty years ago, could the theocrats use trans people as a wedge to split (or threaten to split) support for abortion rights today? Well, of course not.

So it pains me to see the mistakes born of near-universal ignorance repeated in a time of near-universal access to information about trans lives. Take the passage in Cauterucci’s article that addresses the 2022 campaign for a reproductive rights amendment in Michigan. The amendment found in Michigan Proposal 3 read, in part:

Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.

The right wing opponents were going to try to make this about trans people, and the most convenient portion of the amendment for their purposes was the right to make decisions related to “sterilization”. Cauterucci explains:

Conservatives spent the months before the election trying to convince voters that the inclusion of the term “sterilization” was a sneaky admission, by Democrats, that they would be legalizing secret gender-affirming surgeries for children.

Now, Proposal 3 was not a secret effort to hack up children’s bodies, much less an admission of our dastardly plan to do so. Cauterucci goes on to explain that at some length, citing the fact that puberty blockers do not cause sterilization and that

[l]egal analysts who responded in the Detroit Free Press said the abortion rights amendment in Michigan was not written to legalize clandestine procedures for children, nor could it be reasonably interpreted as such by a judge.

None of this is wrong, of course, but there’s a really odd element to all this. Cauterucci quotes a theocratic opponent of human rights thus:

“A constitutional right to ‘sterilization’ surely includes a right to be sterilized to align one’s sex and gender identity,” wrote a spokesperson for Citizens to Support MI Women & Children, the PAC that funded the ads, in an email to the Detroit Free Press. “The majority of voters do not support a 12-year-old girl’s right to sterilization without her parent’s notice or consent.”

And while she does an admirable job attacking scaremongering about trans kids getting access to surgery without parental notice or consent, never once does her piece even acknowledge, much less find importance in, the fact that the first part of this terrible statement is actually correct: sterilization is a normal and expected result for most gender confirmation surgeries that alter the reproductive organs. Thus Michigan’s Proposal 3 is a constitutional amendment with provisions of special importance to trans people.

Now as I said, not every piece of journalism needs be intersectional, but Cauterucci in this piece does everything possible to convince readers that trans lives have nothing at all to do with reproductive rights and there is nothing related to trans persons or trans health care on the ballot in the measures the article analyzes. Sure, the focus is on countering myths about trans health care for children, but when the quotes an author brings in explicitly raise a valid connection (trans people have a health care interest in a right to sterilization), it is up to the author to address that. By remaining silent on the issue Cauterucci gives the impression of believing that not only is the connection to trans children scare mongering that should not (and did not) prevent people from voting for reproductive rights, but also that any connection to trans adults is illusory. As a result, trans people are being given the impression (rightly or wrongly) that we are unimportant to Cauterucci and her fellow travellers, at least in a reproductive rights context, beyond the extent to which we are useful weapons of the Right.

This is, of course, wrong. I was denied health care in the early 90s specifically because the treatment path I sought included surgical removal of the gonads, and doctors wanted to prevent me from “suffering” sterilization. Nor was I alone in that experience. Other trans people around the world in cultures as disparate as Iran and Sweden have been forced or coerced into sterilization by government law or policy. The trans struggle for the right to self-determination on health care which includes sterilization (even when that is not the primary goal) has been waged for decades.

The inclusion of sterilization in Michigan’s Proposal 3 was therefore a huge win for trans people who had been both denied sterilizing procedures and forcibly sterilized. (It was also, by the by, a huge win for black women, women with certain disabilities, and poor women on government assistance because all of these are groups that have been targeted for sterilization without consent throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.) While the Proposal 3 vote had concluded before Cauterucci began writing the article, it is an odd choice to omit any notion that the much-contested sterilization right might have been a point of attack for the theocrats, but it also served as an opportunity for diversifying and expanding support among people with disabilities, poor people, trans people, and Black women.

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that trans people and trans advocates being spoken of as if an irrelevant distraction to issues of reproductive rights rather than a vital constituency and natural coalition partners was not accidental. This was almost certainly an intentional framing for this article (possibly by Cauterucci, possibly by an editor). And to my dismay, this is far from the only article to be written in such a way. Cauterucci’s piece is not uniquely guilty, but it was reading it that it become clear that now is time to push back.

If you are a reproductive rights advocate, I want to first say thank you. But then I want to tell you that it’s fucking time you stood up (if you haven’t been already and for years the way Planned Parenthood Columiba Willamette has been) and interrupted the framing that portrays trans rights and abortion rights as separate issues unfortunately and erroneously connected only by the actions of a mendacious and theocratic right wing.

If nothing else, do it for your own fucking self-interest. If trans people weren’t societies’ demons, then the existence of trans people and the protection of trans rights could not be used against the efforts to protect reproductive rights. If our demonic status didn’t make letters about us such good fundraising material, the enemies of reproductive rights would have less cash on hand with which to work mischief. And while trans people are society’s demons, we are also natural allies you should be targeting for recruitment. You should be aware of how the fight for the right to self-determine access to sterilizing or potentially sterilizing health care gives racial justice advocates, disability rights advocates, economic justice advocates and, yes, trans advocates a huge stake in this fight. It motivates us. It causes us to join with people that have not been historically welcoming of us prior to the 1990s and in many areas are still not. You should know how to rally your allies, to bring people together, to forge a movement. You should know this even if you don’t actually give a fuck about trans people or Black women or folks with Down Syndrome. You should know this because it will make you more successful in fighting for the cause you hold most dear to your own heart.

But I’m hoping that at least some of you will challenge articles like this one in Slate because my issues are your issues. I would like you to see that Cauterucci’s attempt to divorce trans rights from reproductive rights bisects actual human beings, people you care about, people you might even love if you got to know them.

Abortion is a trans rights issue. Trans rights are reproductive rights. Just because people who lie about adolescent trans health care say that our issues are linked doesn’t actually mean that they aren’t. Nor do we suddenly have to avert our eyes from our common interests.

So when you’re speaking or writing about reproductive rights, don’t use the framing that trans rights aren’t reproductive rights. Don’t let the trans people unafraid to be associated with baby killers be braver than reproductive rights advocates that risk being associated with child molesting mutilators. We can counter the harmful myths about child predation without throwing each other out of our purer organizations.

In short: be my goddamned Peppermint Patty and I will be your Marcie and the world can be a whole lot better than if we each ignore the other’s issues as irrelevant distractions from our own, at best worthy but unrelated causes wrongfully conflated by the Right and at worst frustrating vulnerabilities which we must disavow, even excise from our movement.

We’re in this together. Let’s act like it.

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.

 

It’s the ERA or the Gender Nazis: You Can’t Have Both

Wonkette has a new article up about a trans person who was banned from giving a lecture on the history of unconventional genders and the people who express them. It happened in Montana just a few day ago, and was justified by the county officials who nixed the lecture by a recently passed anti-drag ban.

Weirdly, I said this would happen, oh, 27 years ago when there were no anti-drag bans. And I said non trans people, especially cis women, would be targeted for harassment in bathrooms and other gender segregated spaces under laws both then-extant and also laws proposed by some who wanted to address the need for trans access to sanitary facilities while continuing to write legal limits on gendered bathroom access into the criminal code.

And lo, and behold! There’s not only this lecture banned, but 22 or 23 years ago I was blocked from entering a building to deliver my own lecture, on the basis that I was a “feminazi” and “kiddie rapist”, and don’t forget the armed proud boys showing up to drag story hours. And we must remember not only the recent incident with cops on video harassing and removing a queer tomboy/skater type from a women’s restroom, but also too many incidents to name with people I know, cis and trans and others, being thrown out of restrooms on the basis of gender. People you know, likely too.

I say this to point out that the gender nazi is going to gender nazi, and while we have a hope of getting this law thrown out, these laws were never a prerequisite for hatred and harassment.

I’ve seen many, many years of complacency on these issues when I thought more effort and more argument were required. I get it, not everyone’s priorities are my priorities. And not everyone believed the apocalyptic trans girl b/c how could things really get this bad?

But we’re here and we’re fighting now. I simply want to make the point that it can’t just be about arguing the 1st or the 14th in court. Our response has to be everywhere, unrestricted by time, place and manner.

As I have said before,

If we win the right to speak, or to vote, or to employment, or to public access, or to equality, or to life, but only so long as we agree to be sufficiently conventional in our gender, not one of us, cis or trans, has won a single damn thing.

That life is life in Gilead, with different numbers of people happy on different days based on the ever-shifting gender norms of whoever holds power. Too many people have been content to live in Gilead because for much of the last 35 years the people with power have had slowly but continuously expanding definitions of acceptable femininity and masculinity.

I hope we are not too late in realizing that accepting gendered limits to our rights, even if we are comfortable with the current application of those limits to ourselves, is the acceptance of a governmental right to police out clothing, our language, our professions, our families, our lives.

We have never been safe from this policing, even if many of us have felt safe. It is stunning when one considers the number and breadth of the rights we have accepted as conditioned on acceptable gender. At its core, the issue is this: any right that may be frustrated or denied or revoked based on gender is a fundamentally insecure right. Since at the moment in the United States there is no right that is secure in this way, everyone living, working, or visiting the US exists under a very robust, manly sword hanging by a very dainty, feminine thread.

Nothing less than passage and ratification and public acceptance of the ERA can secure our rights. The power of government to police gender must be removed from its hands entirely, because it has proved it cannot use that power safely.

I want each and every one of us to see how trans people are treated and to think, “Yep, that’s how they would treat me.” Because they will. Because they can. Yes, I and other trans people are at the focal point of the gender nazi’s lens of hatred. But just because you’re not trans doesn’t make you remotely safe. They are fighting for the right to make anyone an untermensch  if they do not like your gender, but not because they want to gain it. Rather because they still have it and feel it slipping away. They do not want to lose this power. They do not want equality with the untermenschen.

And if their reactionary project is successful, if they reinscribe a government right to police gender for unacceptable deviance, there will be nothing left to do but kneel with a young pastor Niemoller, pray, and wait your turn.

 

 

Finally, A True Justification for Outlawing Drag

Well, I have to admit it. I don’t like it, but facts are facts and I like to think that I am strong enough to admit that I’m wrong when confronted with unwelcome information.

The Santa Rosa Drag Coalition, made up of dozens of performance spaces with hundreds of performers and raking in tens of millions of dollars per year, has had to declare bankruptcy because of hundreds of cases of sexual abuse, many of which (though not all) targeted children, over several decades. The Drag Coalition’s deliberate concealment of risks and assistance to predators has made them liable for damages far exceeding their assets.

It’s horrifying to me that this real risk had to come to light this way, and I’m truly embarrassed at ever having portrayed drag as a harmless activity that does not groom children for sexual abuse and might even have some ancillary benefits to the society of Santa Rosa and the larger United States but…

I’m sorry? What’s that you’re saying?

It’s the Santa Rosa Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church and all the activities that exposed children to risk were religious activities and/or so-called “enrichment” activities hosted by the church and overseen by church employees?

It didn’t have anything to do with drag at all, just Christians doing Christian sexual abuse to children and others?

Oh, very sorry then. Didn’t mean to pass along bad information. I’m sure that we’ll be outlawing the exposure of children to Roman Catholicism before long as the US and its subsidiary governments are famously very evidence-based in their decision making.

Continue dragging it up as you were, kings, queens, and rogues. I’m sure that now that this is cleared up no Republicans will be coming after you.

 

 

Wow.

I am not one to post un nuanced approval of any mass media work, but all I have to say about this interview excerpt is “Wow”.

 

 

This comment is not about the murders of MtF trans people

But I think you cissies can learn something from our experience.

The murders of MtF trans folk are very often rage-filled, with multiple stab wounds or gunshots, and these assaults preferentially target our breasts and our genitals. Our murderers wanted, as it were, to erase our transness along with our lives. They wanted to rid the world of transness. It’s a genocidal impulse made viscerally personal.

It is, of course, hideous enough that trans people have been subjected to such murders, but historically the media outlets reporting on those murders would deadname victims, would call us men in women’s clothing when our names weren’t to hand, and in other ways would work to portray us as anything but ourselves.

In short, our murderers attempted to erase us, and the media chose to complete the erasure. This wasn’t neutral reporting, news outlets were choosing to assist our murderers, even to the point of completing their genocidal work.

The United States and a number of other “Western democracies” are in crisis because would-be fascists are attacking democratic governance itself. To say, as Biden has, that such people are anti-democratic is to tell an obvious truth that the fascist-leaning themselves tell each other every day. The more outrageous and ambitious among them then pass that on to the rest of the US:

We do not trust elections

they say.

We will not tolerate the general rule of law, but we will use the law to attack our political opponents,

they say.

And in the face of these things, the media chooses to admonish the anti-fascists, the leftists, even the Democrats and other institutionalists for language that the media insists will sow distrust and spark violence.

Do not accept this narrative. Do not tolerate this narrative to be spread in your presence. The fascist and fascist leaning are working with vigor to blame their own division, hatred, and violence on anyone but themselves, and this media narrative does not report on fascist violence: it completes the fascists’ task of delegitimizing government and justifying its overthrow by any means necessary.

Apparent neutrality is not the same as actual neutrality, and the media have a particularly shameful history of adopting a guise of neutrality while forwarding the cause of violence.

When the authoritarian, anti-democratic mob assaulted the US seat of government on 6 January, 2021, it was with the intent of preventing democratic rule. When two thirds of House Republicans voted to oppose certification of the 2020 presidential election this seemingly separate event was another effort with the same goal: to end democratic rule. They may make noises of protest to dissociate themselves from the insurrection, but their own actions show them attempting to complete it.

Even now our media treat McCarthy and the other House Republicans who voted to oppose democracy as if they are correct to be offended when Biden calls out “extreme MAGA republicans” as anti-democratic and semi-fascist. Like the House Republicans on the night of 6 January, the reporters and commentators who accept and repeat this framing are not neutral: they are working to complete the fascists’ goal of delegitimizing the Democratic Party and of democracy itself.

What will you do to call the media to account? Will you be as outraged and as active as the trans people who protested the coverage of our murders? You should be.

Time is short. Choose to act.