DEFEND TRANS WOMEN

A living archive of trans women's words & herstories.

[defendtranswomen]

Hot Allostatic Load

Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build insi…

HI

I am too sick to write this article. The act of writing about my injuries is like performing an interpretative dance after breaking nearly every bone in my body. When I sit down to edit this doc, my head starts aching like a capsule full of some corrosive fluid has dissolved and is leaking its contents. The mental haze builds until it becomes difficult to see the text, to form a thesis, to connect parts. They drop onto the page in fragments. This is the difficulty of writing about brain damage.

The last time I was in the New Inquiry, several years ago, I was being interviewed. I was visibly sick. I was in an abusive “community” that had destroyed my health with regular, sustained emotional abuse and neglect. Sleep-deprived, unable to take care of myself, my body was tearing itself apart. I was suicidal from the abuse, and I had an infected jaw that needed treatment.

Years later, I’m talking to my therapist. I told her, when you have PTSD, everything you make is about PTSD. After a few minutes I slid down and curled up on the couch like the shed husk of a cicada. I go to therapy specifically because of the harassment and ostracism from within my field.

This is about disposability from a trans feminine perspective, through the lens of an artistic career. It’s about being human trash.

This is in defense of the hyper-marginalized among the marginalized, the Omelas kids, the marked for death, those who came looking for safety and found something worse than anything they’d experienced before.

For years, queer/trans/feminist scenes have been processing an influx of trans fems, often impoverished, disabled, and/or from traumatic backgrounds. These scenes have been abusing them, using them as free labor, and sexually exploiting them. The leaders of these scenes exert undue influence over tastemaking, jobs, finance, access to conferences, access to spaces. If someone resists, they are disappeared, in the mundane, boring, horrible way that many trans people are susceptible to, through a trapdoor that can be activated at any time. Housing, community, reputation—gone. No one mourns them, no one asks questions. Everyone agrees that they must have been crazy and problematic and that is why they were gone.

I was one of these people.

They controlled my housing and access to nearly every resource. I was sexually harassed, had my bathroom use monitored, my crumbling health ignored or used as a tool of control, was constantly yelled at, and was pressured to hurt other trans people and punished severely when I refused.

The cycle of trans kids being used up and then smeared is a systemic, institutionalized practice. It happens in the shelters, in the radical organizations, in the artistic scenes—everywhere they might have a chance of gaining a foothold. It’s like an abusive foster household that constantly kicks kids out then uses their tears and anger at being raped and abused to justify why they had to be kicked out—look at these problem kids. Look at these problematic kids.

Trans fems are especially vulnerable to abuse for the following reasons:

— A lot of us encounter concepts for the first time and have no idea what is “normal” or not.

— We have nowhere else to go. Abuse thrives on scarcity.

— No one cares what happens to us.

This foster cycle relies on amnesia. A lot of people who enter spaces for the first time don’t know those spaces’ history. They may not know that leaders regularly exploit and make sexual advances on new members, or that those members who resisted are no longer around. Spaces self-select for people who will play the game, until the empathic people have been drained out and the only ones who remain are those who have perfectly identified with the agendas and survival of the Space—the pyramid scheme of believers who bring capital and victims to those on top.

My first puberty was a nightmare—faced with the opportunity to make my second one a healthy, healing experience, I was instead abused and broken. The community practiced compulsory BDSM sexuality, which was deeply inappropriate considering it was one of the only visible spaces for trans people interested in making games. I didn’t need that coercion in my life; I needed safety and mentorship.

I spent those years of my early twenties not making connections or gaining valuable socialization that I had missed in my youth, but being exploited and brainwashed in nightmarish isolation. I was scared away from the “inclusive” coding spaces, the “inclusive” conferences and their orbiting alt events, and everything else that people like to pretend is available for trans fems.

Things escalated at the Allied Media Conference of 2013. Unfortunately I was traveling alone. People from the abusive community overheard me asking about safe-space resources in Oakland and became angry that I was seeking to escape their community. I was intimidated in person by someone who had a great deal of social power over me. I had a panic attack and went to the bathroom to dry heave and cry. Shortly afterward, threatening messages began bombarding my Twitter and my phone, and the community began to develop a coordinated political response to my desire to leave. People suddenly stopped talking to me, and I felt the icy net of isolation drawing tight.

This was the only time a conference responded appropriately. AMC apologized, notified their security team to check up on me, and encouraged me to submit a talk next year. I came back and ran a workshop (with two friends for security) and a small amount of healing was possible.

This reintegration was not made anywhere else. I was excluded from the vast majority of game spaces because of what happened to me. Of course, the multimedia nature of AMC meant it had the least stake in preserving the reputation of games and other things that matter more than people.

When I got back home, I was kicked out of my housing. I later learned that the community had been contacting my landlord for months prior to the actual eviction, as well as spreading rumors throughout my field. These seed rumors are a common tactic in those spaces, cultivating a brittle structure around people that can be shattered when necessary.

Living was my sole attempt at innocence.

ATTACK

One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked.

Anyone else getting that award would have been able to just … get that award. But people like me aren’t allowed to just have careers. Feminist culture saw fit to give a pass to every man and every cis woman who got that award, but when a trans fem from a disadvantaged background stepped up, she somehow happened to be the worst. The culture was fine with me as long as I was window-dressing, but daring to excel got me kneecapped.

They spread rumors that I was sending harassing messages to people, even as the messages streamed one-way toward me. They said I controlled a misogynistic mob and was using it to attack people. (I had never been more alone.) I was called a pedophile, a rapist, an abuser (the typical dog whistles used in feminist spaces to evoke the dangerous tranny stereotype invading ur bathrooms.) Even when the rumors were debunked, even with a history of co-habitating respectfully with partners and a history of being a respectful tenant, the damage was never repaired. The purpose was to keep firing until I was gone, until every possible bad thing had been said about me.

The reputation game was used to paint a vulnerable, isolated trans girl, too scared to leave her room most days, as having power which she did not have—power which my abusers, veterans of queer and artistic scenes with decades of institutional privilege, did have.

It happened without warning or recourse, without a single attempt at conciliation. Multiple times I had noticed tension building and had asked explicitly for mediation. Each time this was refused. When you’re exiling someone for petty political reasons, it works best when they can’t tell their own story. By privately vocalizing concerns that I was being abused, I became a public target—presenting a false chronology to observers.

Previously their ostracism had been silent, made simple by the fact that no one cared about what happened to trans fems who made games. The fact that my games had inadvertently made me visible meant that the attack had to be devastatingly public, my fake crimes commensurate to the amount of disgust required to repel me. This is the danger of the token system—it elevated me to a level of violent politics I was unprepared for.

Very few people want to defend a target of disposability. I was told by one person that she couldn’t risk losing her job, another that she didn’t want to become a target too.

I was threatened into not defending myself, gaslit into silence, told that people knew “things” about me that were never explained. When I asked how I could do accountability, when I said I would do whatever they wanted, they said that I was “incapable” of accountability, that my crime was unknown and my sentence was permanent. That is the point where the body starts to die.

My attackers were expert pathological liars who had been getting away with it for years—entire fictional realities playing out on their social-media accounts like soap opera. Escaping from abuse is the most certain way to become painted as an abuser, and being an abuser is the most sure way to be believed. You know how movies are realer than reality? How the sound effects and physics become so normalized to us that reality seems flat and fake? Talking about abuse is kind of like that. Abusers know what sounds “real.” They are like expert movie-effects artists. Victims are stuck with boring fake reality.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND HEALTH

Social media is significant to my story because for a long time it was my only outlet as a disabled individual barred from many physical spaces, and a way to express myself artistically when traditional outlets were closed to me. However, it came with its own set of problems.

When I told another trans person that I had been abused, I was told in response that my follower count on Twitter was higher than hers.

I tried talking to people about my poor health, how I needed to withdraw and have space. After unfollowing most people related to games, a subject which was quickly becoming a trigger, I was told that I was “manipulative” for unfollowing, and my following list on Twitter was scrutinized and brought up as evidence that I still followed certain games people and that I was doing this to hurt people.

I was pressured not to post about certain things I cared about (“crystals,” ”slime”) and not to use my favorite emoticons. I was pressured to join in social-media smearings of other trans people (which I frequently rebelled against, to my detriment) and to RT things I didn’t want to RT.

My twitter was incompatible with the rest of the network because I mainly posted poetry-style tweets that had no connection to anything else. I would be accused of subtweeting or encoding hidden messages into my tweets. People would associate random words in my tweets with some random thing going on in their life that I surely must be commenting on.

Social media became a scientific metric for my abusers, a set of numbers and behaviors to obsess over and divine hidden messages. The games network constantly abraded against my nonparticipation—my desire for a safe, therapeutic online space, not a competitive one.

Feminist practice of declaring privilege and marginalization became a way to collect information about victims: Look at someone’s profile bar for their elemental weaknesses. Being frank about my health problems was never an advantage for me in feminist spaces, only something to be used against me. I was an object, an invalid on a bed that could be infinitely manipulated and extruded through social media to fit the agendas of a thousand bored strangers.

The ethereal potential of the net had become rigidly hierarchized and numbered to the point where I could be managed and controlled as efficiently as if I were in 3-D space.

MOBBING

CALL-OUT CULTURE AS RITUAL DISPOSABILITY

Feminist/queer spaces are more willing to criticize people than abusive systems because they want to reserve the right to use those systems for their own purposes. At least attacking people can be politically viable, especially in a token system where you benefit directly by their absence, or where your status as a good feminist is dependent on constantly rooting out evil.

When the bounty system calls for the ears of evil people, well, most people have a fucking ear.

When I used to curate games, I was approached by people in that abusive community who pressured me not to cover a game by a trans woman. Their reasoning was blatant jealousy, disguised under the thin, nauseating film of pretext that covers nearly everything people say about trans people.

When I rejected their reasoning and covered the game, the targeting reticule of disposability turned toward me. What can we learn from this? Besides “lofty processes in queer/feminist spaces are nearly always about some embarrassingly petty shit,” it’s about the ritual nature of disposability, which has nothing to do with “deserving” it. Disposability has to happen on a regular basis, like forest fires keeping nature in balance.

So when people write all those apologist articles about call-out culture and other instruments of violence in feminism, I don’t think they understand that the people who most deserve those things can usually shrug off the effects, and the normalization of that violence inevitably trickles down and affects the weak. It is predictable as water. Criminal justice applies punishment under the conceit of blind justice, but we see the results: Prisons are flooded with the most vulnerable, and the rich can buy their way out of any problem. In activist communities, these processes follow a similar pragmatism.

Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales.

If a man does something fucked up, all he has to do is apologize, if that, for feminists to re-embrace him. If a trans fem talks about something fucked up that happened to her, she is told to leave and never come back.

MOBBING

A common punishment for infanticide in the Middle Ages was living burial. This was a feminine-coded punishment, often reserved for women, one that allowed execution without having to actually be there at the moment of death. This line of thought pervades feminine punishment to this day.

One of the most common tools of exclusion is through mobbing, which is rarely talked about because unlike rape, murder, etc, it’s not easy to pin it on a single person (or scapegoat).  Mobbing is emotional abuse practiced by a group of people, usually peers, over a period of time, through methods such as gaslighting, rumor-mongering, and ostracism. It’s most documented in workplace or academic environments (i.e. key points of capitalist tension) but is thoroughly institutionalized into feminist, queer, and radical spaces as well. Here is why it is horrible:

1) It has an unusually strong power to damage the victim’s relationship to society, because it can’t be written off as an outlier, as some singular monster. It reveals a fundamental truth about people that makes it difficult to trust ever again. People become like aliens, like a pack of animals that can turn on you as soon as some mysterious pheromone shift marks you for death.

2) The insidious nature of emotional abuse: How do you fight ostracism and rumors? They leave no bruises, they just starve you.

3) Mobbing typically occurs in places where the victim is trapped by some need or obligation: work, school, circles of friends. This can prolong exposure to damaging extremes.

For these reasons, PTSD is an almost inevitable outcome of any protracted mobbing case.

In ideological spaces, this damage is exacerbated by the fact that the victims are often earnest people who take the ideals to heart and can’t understand why the culture is going contrary to its own messages. They appease, self-incriminate, blame themselves—anything to be a Good Person. They don’t want to fight. Fighting sickens them.

From a report by the Australian House of Representatives Education and Employment Committee: “90 percent of people being bullied make the comment: ‘I just want it to stop.’ They don’t want to go down a formal path, but just want the behaviour to stop.”

Those who participate, even unwittingly, feel compelled to invest in the narrative of victims as monsters in order to protect their self-conception as a good person—group violence creates group culpability. For their ego they trade the career, health, community (and sometimes life) of the victim.

MOBBING AS WITCH HUNTS

One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity.

—Silvia Federici

The term witch hunt is thrown around a lot, but let’s look at what it really means. Witch hunts, as discussed by Silvia Federici, were responses to shifts in capital accumulation, as is slavery. To jury-rig the perpetually self-destructing machine of capitalism, huge amounts of violence are required to obtain captive labor (fem and non-white). The effect is to devalue our labor as much as possible, and to destroy the bonds between marginalized people.

You see this in games and tech spaces where the intense amounts of competition and capital accumulation, both physical and social, are a breeding ground for mobbing. But the popular two-sided discussion of mobbing as carried out in numerous clickbait articles ignores the fact that mobbing goes all the way down—even as white cis women struggle for safety, they participate in the exclusion of others, creating a hierarchy of labor and competition. Because mobbing is a form of capitalist violence, the popular discussion (conducted by those who are intricately entwined with the flow of capital) must omit the nuances of mobbing in favor of a narrative that is about replacing uncool regressive masculine consumerism with liberal feminist consumerism.

When the people who are scapegoated happen to be from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, the culture calls it coincidence, clutching our respectable counterparts to their chest like pearls, a talisman of tokens to ward away reality.

SEXUAL MENACE

I saw a queer black woman, struggling to survive by her art, falsely accused of rape by a white queer. The call-out post was extremely vague and loaded with strong words designed to elicit vigilante justice. Immediately, hundreds of other white queers jumped on the bandwagon. Many of them likely didn’t know either of the people involved.

Accusations of sexual menace are a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act—the threat of black skin on innocent white, of trans bone structures on ethereal cis skeletons. It’s as common for many of us as cat-calling or any other form of ubiquitous harassment that cis feminists talk about, except no one wants to talk about it. It’s a way for the dominant people in the group to take us aside and say, you are not welcome here, or do this thing you don’t want to do or I’ll ruin your life. But frequently it happens without any particular thesis, just as a general tool to keep us destabilized and vulnerable. Don’t forget who you really are in the unspoken hierarchy.

Mobbing uses these rumors to trade a vague suspicion for the actual reality of violence. It’s like turning the corner and watching someone on the street having their teeth kicked in by a mob who assures you that just before you appeared, this person had committed some mysterious act which justifies limitless brutality.

DAMAGE

PTSD AS DISPOSABILITY ALCHEMY

I was, in effect, beaten until I had brain damage, over a long period of time. Unlike some other survivors of trauma, I was unable to heal because I was never separated from the source of the danger. I was never given the chance to vent, to express myself, to tell my side of the story—but I had to keep working, harder than ever, while being constantly exposed to violence.

The pressure on me was not merely to survive but to display no signs of the incredible amounts of damage pouring into me daily. To never display the slightest hint of anger, to never cry, to not argue with people telling me horrible things. Every hint of damage was an excuse to further isolate and demonize me.

The cost of resisting disposability was PTSD. It was catching a lethal amount of negative energy with my body and becoming a poison-processing factory.

My job is wired to give me electric shocks. What do you do when your alternative is homelessness?

“The allostatic load is ‘the wear and tear on the body’ which grows over time when the individual is exposed to repeated or chronic stress.”

“Stress hormones such as epinephrine and cortisol in combination with other stress-mediating physiological agents such as increased myocardial workload, decreased smooth muscle tone in the gastrointestinal tract, and increased coagulation effects have protective and adaptive benefits in the short term, yet can accelerate pathophysiology when they are overproduced or mismanaged; this kind of stress can cause hypertension and lead to heart disease. Constant or even irregular exposure to these hormones can eventually induce illnesses and weaken the body’s immune system.”

To cover up the abuse and protect the “reputation” of the games industry, it was deemed worthwhile to lower my lifespan, weaken my immune system, and permanently damage my body.

Even if I drink multiple cups of water before bed I wake up with severe dehydration. An interesting side effect of being a trans fem on hormones is that spironolactone (an  antiandrogen) is a diuretic, so the dehydrating effects of stress are added to the dehydration of my gender, tipping it over to agonizing extremes, the unspoken tax of pursuing both gender and a career. The amount of water in my body is political.

I wake up feeling burnt. Damaged. Corroded. I crawl up from an insane, nauseating, unreal pit and slowly come back to the world. I have constant headaches.

By the end of the day my neck and left arm are aching from nervous tics.

I forget things rapidly. Triggers leave me exhausted or panicking at inconvenient times, sometimes for days or weeks.

My hair fell out in handfuls. I still have a nervous tic of running my hands through my hair to pull out loose strands.

Having PTSD is like breaking a limb and never being able to rely on it as strongly. The sudden weakness of standing on it wrong, suddenly being unable to hold something, a fatigue and spasm of nerves.

It became difficult to diagnose other medical problems because of the all-consuming nature of the symptoms. It became difficult to talk about what happened to my body in general. When my hairdresser asked, the only way to explain the damage was by saying I had been in a car accident.

Attacks on marginalized artists go beyond merely denying them access to networks; they also damage a person’s faculties of expression.

For a long time, PTSD deprived me of the privilege of being a multitemporal being. The space of time I was able to safely think about shrunk to about a minute. Larger projects, the kind most tied to commercial value and to the media coverage apparatus, were difficult for me due to the traumatic potential of expanding my aperture of time.

The diversity-centric system expects more jobs to fix the problem, ignoring how long we’ve been damaged and made unfit for their jobs. They encourage the Strong Woman stereotype because it means taking the damage onto ourselves. We need more than jobs; we need social reintegration.

COMMUNICATION

INABILITY TO SHARE STIGMA

Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon feeling a connection to others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma de-humanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.

—Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

The worst thing is not having other survivors to commiserate with. I can think of people who went through similar situations and were defended, re-integrated. Their stories are paraded through feminist spaces, saturated through social media, and every time I’m exposed to them, I feel less safe, not more. This enhances my feelings of dehumanization: “Why was I not worth protecting in the exact same situation? I must not be human like them”.

I often have the overwhelming physical sensation of having a dead person in my life, someone as close as an identical twin. The sensation is of me being the only one still alive after a terrible accident, lingering like an unshriven thing. The inability to share stigma is even worse than the original act of violation. The greater part of a wound is its inability to heal.

INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #1

The typical narrative of abuse on social media doesn’t include the problems of the most vulnerable, like how public verbal harassment may only be an ultimately minor part of a trans fem’s exile.

The most skilled abusers know that a good exile is done with pure silence, through the whisper network, by having the person wake up one day and have every second or third person she knows or who practices her profession block her and/or stop talking to her. No one tells her why. She has to painstakingly talk to every friend, every contact, every person she would normally have a cheerful conversation with. The electric shocks of knowing that every simple human interaction you have with a friend or stranger could turn into a nightmare of victim blaming or worse, a cold iciness where they pretend nothing is wrong. Imagine repeating that experience hundreds and hundreds of times, with no way to end it. After the noise, the long years of silence are what kill us.

The backchannels that should be used to protect people from abusers and rapists are instead used to protect abusers and rapists. Any usefulness these channels have is reserved for Real Women. No one warned me about any of the comically large number of predators in my professions. I was considered unrapeable, unabuseable, not worthy of protection. A trans fem can try to talk about her experiences of abuse for years and have no one listen, but the instant one of her abusers smears her, everyone is alert and awake.

One reason it took me so long to talk about my experiences was that I associated being able to speak against abuse with being an abuser. Because every abuser throughout my life was so good at being believed, I thought that being believed was the exclusive domain of abusers.

This is why my first months in therapy were spent convincing me that I wasn’t a sociopath, crazy, abusive, or any of the other terms I had been brainwashed with. Abusers don’t spend years disabled by those thoughts because they don’t care if they hurt other people.

INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #2

And when verbal harassment does occur, it’s often cloaked in feminist language, making it impossible to fight.

If they call a woman a bitch, people comprehend that as misogyny. But they call trans fems things that are harder to respond to. Rapist, pedophile, male conditioning, etc. They call us things so bad that even denying them is destructive. Who wants to stand up in public and say they aren’t those things? Who has the privilege to not get called those things in the first place?

When I look at a cis woman these days, the first thing I think is, I bet no one ever casually called her a rapist.

TRASH ART

When it was really bad, I wrote: “Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms. Move a single inch and call it a victory. Mold my sexuality toward immobility. Lie here leaking water from my eyes like a statue covered in melting frost. Zero affect. Build like moss grows. Build like crystals harden. Give up. Make your art the merest displacement of molecules at your slightest quiver. Don’t build in spite of the body and fail on their terms, build with the body. Immaculate is boring and impossible. Health based aesthetic.”

Twine, trashzines made of wadded up torn paper because we don’t have the energy to do binding, street recordings done from our bed where we lie immobilized.

Laziness is not laziness, it is many things: avoiding encountering one’s own body, avoiding triggers, avoiding thinking about the future because it’s proven to be unbearable. Slashing the Gordian Knot isn’t a sign of strength; it’s a sign of exhaustion.

Although I’ve fashioned this reflection in a manner that some may find legible, it is not a fair representation of my sickness. Writing these paragraphs has taken constant doses of medicine, fevered breaks, a few existential timeouts, and a complete neglect of my other responsibilities. When I tried in true form to write – in my realest moments of sickness – all that emerged were endless ellipses and countless semi-coherent revelations.

—Alli Yates

With the trashzine, I tore up the pages because I didn’t have the time or energy to bind them. I put them in ziploc bags—trash binding. In this new form they were resistant to the elements and could go interesting places. I hid one in Oakland under a bridge, and posted coordinates online. Someone found it.

When read, they come out of the bag like my thoughts—fragmented, random, nonlinear. If dropped they become part of the trash.

SOCIAL DYNAMICS

COMMUNITY IS DISPOSABILITY

There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let’s not kid ourselves: we don’t have communities.

—The Broken Teapot, Anonymous

People crave community so badly that it constitutes a kind of linguistic virus. Everything in this world apparently has a community attached to it, no matter how fragmented or varied the reality is. This feels like both wishful thinking in an extremely lonely world (trans fems often have a community-shaped wound a mile wide) and also the necessary lens to convert everything to profit. Queerness is a marketplace. Alt is a marketplace. Buy my feminist butt plugs.

The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one’s role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside.

—Stephen Murphy

These idealized communities require disposability to maintain the illusion—violence and ostracism against the black/brown/trans/trash bodies that serve as safety valves for the inevitable anxiety and disillusionment of those who wish “total identification”.

Feminism/queerness takes a vague disposability and makes it a specific one. The vague ambient hate that I felt my whole life became intensely focused—the difference between being soaked in noxious, irritating gasoline and having someone throw a match at you. Normal hate means someone and their friends being shitty toward you; radical hate places a moral dimension onto hate, requiring your exclusion from every possible space—a true social death.

CURATING QUEERNESS

An entire industry of curation has sprung up to rigidly and sometimes violently police the hierarchy of who is allowed to express themselves as a trans or queer person. The LGBT and queer spheres find it upon themselves to create compilations of the “best” art by trans people, to define what a trans story is and to omit the rest. Endless projects to curate, list, own, publish, control, but so few to offer support and mentorship.

The stories that reflect poorly on alt culture are buried in favor of utopianism that everyone aspires toward but where few live. People feed desperately on this aspiration, creating the ever more elaborate hollow structures of brittle chitin that comprise feminist/queer culture.

To find the things I wanted in queerness, I had to find those who had been exiled from it, those who the name had been torn from.

COMPLAINT AND PURITY

there is nothing “wrong” with a politics of complaint but there are several risks like developing a dependent relationship with “the enemy” politically neutralizing oneself by dumping all of one’s subversive energies into meaningless channels or reifying one’s powerlessness by identifying with it because it makes one virtuous complaint becomes a form of subcultural capital a way to morally purify oneself —Jackie Wang, the tumblrization of everyday life

Popular feminism encodes pain into its regular complaint/click cycle, keeping everyone on the rim of emotional survival. Constant attack, constant strength, constant purity.

Lacking true community, the energy spent is not restored. Those with more stability in their life can keep up the cycle of complaint, and those with lower amounts of energy are filtered out, creating culture that glorifies a “strength” not everyone can access.

There is immense pressure on trans people to engage in this form of complaint if they want access to spaces—but we, with our higher rates of homelessness, joblessness, lifelessness, lovelessness, are the most fragile. We are the glass fems of an already delicate genderscape.

Purification is meaningless because anyone can perform these rituals—an effigy burnt in digital. And their inflexibility provides a place where abuse can thrive—a set of rules which abusers can hold over their victims.

Deleuze wrote, “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.”

>>

ENDING

People talk about feminism and queerness the way you’d apologize for an abusive relationship.

This isn’t for the people who are benefiting from these spaces and have no reason to change. This is for the people who were exiled, the people essays aren’t supposed to be written for. This is to say, you didn’t deserve that. That even tens or hundreds or thousands of people can be wrong, and they often are, no matter how much our socially constructed brains take that as a message to lie down and die. That nothing is too bad, too ridiculous, too bizarre to be real when it comes to making marginalized people disappear.

Ideology is a sick fetish.

RESISTING DISPOSABILITY

— Let marginalized people be flawed. Let them fuck up like the Real Humans who get to fuck up all the time.

— Fight criminal-justice thinking. Disposability runs on the innocence/guilt binary, another category that applies dynamically to certain bodies and not others. The mob trials used to run trans people out of communities are inherently abusive, favor predators, and must be rejected as a process unequivocally. There is no kind of justice that resembles hundreds of people ganging up on one person, or tangible lifelong damage being inflicted on someone for failing the rituals of purification that have no connection to real life.

— Pay attention when people disappear. Like drowning, it’s frequently silent. They might be blackmailed, threatened, and/or in shock.

— Even if the victim doesn’t want to fight (which is deeply understandable—often moving on is the only response), private support is huge. This is the time to make sure the wound doesn’t become infected, that the PTSD they acquire is as minimized as possible. This is the difference between a broken leg healing to the point where they can run again, or walking with a limp for the rest of their life. They’ve just been victim-blamed by a huge number of people, and as a social organism, their body is telling them to die. They need social reintegration, messages of support, and space to heal.

— Be extremely critical about what people say about trans people, especially things said in vagueness. The rumor mill that keeps trans people out of spaces isn’t even so much about people believing what is said, it’s about people choosing the safest option—a staining that plays on the average person’s risk aversion.

— Ask yourself if the same thing would be happening if they were white/cis/able-bodied.

— “Radical inclusivity recognizes harm done in the name of God.” —Yvette Flunder

Marginalized spaces can’t form healthy community purely from rejection of the mainstream. There has to be an acknowledgment of how people have been hurt by feminist spaces and their models.

— A common enemy isn’t the same as loving each other.

— Don’t be part of spaces that place an ideal or “community leader” above people.

DREAM

On January 18, 2015, I woke up from a dream. It was early morning, still dark. I felt very sad that the dream wasn’t real. I wrote it down, like I’ve written down all my dreams for the last eight years.

“She was my abuser. She came to my house on the island. I begged her to stop what she had done, to clear my name. She would not. It had been two years of being abused like a child because of her. I turned to walk deeper into the house. I looked back. She had a knife. She stabbed me. It was the happiest dream of my life. Because finally an abuser had done something to me that people would pay attention to. When I woke up my entire spirit was crushed because I had not been stabbed. I felt the weight of all these years of abuse. I wished so badly I had been stabbed.

I pulled the knife out. I wrestled the knife away. I called my friend to come over and help me.

I walked along the beach of the island and saw for the first time how PTSD had numbed and corroded every perception I’d had since that August, this debilitating disease. I finally felt the brightness of the air in my lungs, the color of the sand and the waves. It was so beautiful. I just wanted to experience all the things that had been stolen from me.”

[mxbees]

why the HRC is being defeated by trans bathroom panic

The HRC hates trans women too

Buzzfeed just put out this article about why the HRC is being defeated by trans bathroom panic. The overall point of the article is that the HRC has yet to find any real response to the trans bathroom panic issue, much less a good one. And while it does include some historical context:

But the larger problem, it appears, is that the modern LGBT rights movement was built around opposing anti-gay efforts — at the ballot and within government — and eventually winning on gay issues, particularly marriage equality.

During that time, though, the big national groups invested comparatively little infrastructure or expertise into nurturing transgender issues. Moreover, they conducted less organization-building and education within conservative states — where marriage equality prevailed due to court rulings more than grassroots activism — even though those states lacked anti-discrimination laws.

The problem? This is too kind. One only needs to look at Monica Robert’s classic post, “Why the Transgender Community Hates HRC” to get a better grasp of the real historical and political issues at play here. This attempt to contextualize the problem the HRC is having dealing with trans woman-related issues is far too neutral. I encourage everyone to read Monica Robert’s post which concludes:

In conclusion, the drama between the transgender community and HRC (which sadly flared up last week after Rep. Frank introduced a non-inclusive ENDA) is a forty-year-old stew flavored with historical hatred, arrogance, political miscalculations, communication failures, misunderstandings, mistrust, and Machiavellian duplicity.

The history of problems between the HRC (and similar orgs) has literally been going on since trans women of colour started the fucking movement in the first place. Mere years after starting it, those very same leaders where pushed out and had their/our movement coopted.

It isn’t that the HRC and other gay rights orgs neglected trans issues or didn’t make them a priority, it is that they have been working against us for decades. They cannot address the issue of trans bathroom panic and transmisogyny precisely because they agree. It has been part of their organizing strategy to sweep us under the rug so that they can appear more respectable and more assimilatable.

That’s what a lot of people really don’t get. Is that the gay strategy wasn’t just about demystifying the whole gay thing and making teh gays human in hetero eyes, but it was a purposeful contrastive thing to show that they weren’t deviants like trans women of colour. That they were normal and we are not. They they aren’t predators but we very well could be. They deserve rights and protections because we don’t. This juxtaposition has been intentional in their organizing efforts for the past fifty-ish years.

As such, it isn’t surprising that they cannot turn on a dime and suddenly be able to provide meaningful support to trans women. Especially not when their own internal report found that they are a gay, white men’s club. Mind you, this isn’t just a problem of the fact that they exclude trans women from the leadership (or really any meaningful roll within the organization), it is that this is literally how their entire organization has been structured from the beginning. They cannot effectivley mobilize against a position that they themselves hold and have been enforcing for the entire time their org (and its predeccesors) have existed.

Trans bathroom panic is about trans women

Its amusing that both this article and the reported responses for the HRC and ACLU engage in precisely the same kind of transmisogyny that is killing non-discrimination ordinances all over the US. The ACLU is reported as saying:

“We will do so by educating voters and helping them understand who transgender people are (i.e., NOT ‘men dressing up as women’), that they are not sexual predators…

Who is this ‘they’? ‘Men in dresses’ is trans women and has pretty much nothing to do with trans men. The opposition organizing under a banner of ‘keep men out of women’s restrooms’ is organizing agaisnt trans women. This has very little (if anything) to do with trans men or ‘trans people’ in general1. The fact that they cannot grasp even this most basic of facts about the situation is why, by and large, they’ll continue to fail at finding any meaningful counter-strategies. How could they if they don’t even understand the problem?

A note on the suggested strategies for disarming trans (woman) bathroom panic

On the ‘it hasn’t happened yet’ argument

The first suggested strategy was showing the facts that, in the US, there are zero examples of male predators using trans protections as a way to assault women. Of course, I’ve written before about how this isn’t true of Canada. And that this case has already been used as a way to prevent a trans rights bill from passing in Canada. This is an extremely perilous and flimsy counter-argument to the whole ‘men in dresses in women’s restrooms’ issue.

Because what happens when this fact can no longer be asserted (as in Canada)? It isn’t enough to point out that the accussed in the Canadian case wasn’t, in fact, a trans woman. But the shelter’s permissive policy about allowing self-identification is exactly what allowed him access to women. His actual gender identity is irrelevant. And since I wrote that post, I still haven’t seen many (any tbh) responses for how this should be handled.

On the ‘do ads to humanize trans women’ argument

The next major strategy proposed in the buzzfeed article (via ‘grassroots’ activists) is this:

Another defense: In TV ads, campaigns could feature transgender women who familiarize themselves to voters, show they’re not men, and explain that they use the bathroom to pee, not to prey.

Okay. They try to make parallels to effective strategies about focusing happy, loving gay couples as a way to show that we are all fluffy puppies who’ll assimilate directly into the existing power structure. At the very end of the article an activist is quoted talking about having a ‘trans face’, a ‘poster child’.

While some of the problems with this approach are shared by the gay marriage one (ie, a focus on 'normalizing’ deviant behaviour via demonstrating a willingness to assimilate and not rock the boat), it again shows that most of these people are considering trans women to be another comparible class instance to cis gays or lesbians. But we aren’t. And the strategies that worked before will not work for addressing transmisogyny and trans bathroom panic.

Why? Because cis gay and cis lesbian respectability was established using transmisogyny in the first place. Again, read Monica Robert’s blog post. The cis gay and cis lesbian community has spent too much fucking time shoring up the belief that trans women are deviant and incapable of assimilation to backtrack on this now (even if this were a desirable strategy – which it isn’t).

Beyond this, there’s the problem of who gets to be the poster child. Obviously, if the goal is to show that we aren’t 'men in dresses’ the poster child will likely have to be the exact kind of trans woman that feminists accuse us all of being and hating us for it. Which will only serve to encourage people on the left to mobilize more forcefully against us too.

On this account, this also demonstrates how very little these gay orgs actually understand of the current political/ideological climate of opposition to trans women. All these things that are being said by conservatives? Have been said by feminists and other people on the left for decades too. Transmisogyny is one of the few things that both the left and the right absolutely agree on. And, again, these orgs will fail unless they understand that the 'enemy’ isn’t just the religious right. The reason why opposition to trans women is so much more than 'expected’ is because it isn’t just conservatives who are willing to organize against us. And it isn’t conservatives who’ve actively been working against us for decades. They are literally new entrants to this.

I could get into how an assimilationist strategy will fail to address the actual issues facing trans women. But… this was also true of the gay assimilationist strategy, as this approach throws a lot of peole under the bus and should really be abandoned since it just defers and pushes this fight onto another more vulnerable group, rather than actually stopping the fight entirely.

But of course, transbr0 MRAs will be more than happy to claim that this hypervisibility is actually a 'privilege’ and that they are being 'erased’ from this all. To all of you? Go fuck yourselves. ↩

[evolvingmatter-deactivated20170]

Transgender sex worker faces Perth court on HIV transmission charge

A decision is yet to be made on whether a transgender sex worker accused of knowingly transmitting HIV and who identifies as a woman will be placed in a male or female prison in Perth while on remand.

The first story has come out after this morning’s hearing, and thankfully, they’ve heeded a lot of what we said.

Her birth name is referred to (ugh) because it’s the name she’s being tried under, but otherwise they’ve stuck to “Ms Fox” and gendered her correctly.

This is way more balanced than anything previously published in the mainstream media on her arrest, thank fuck.

Advocates concerned fair trial unlikely

Representatives from the advocacy group People for Sex Worker Rights in Western Australia (PSWRWA) were in court to support Ms Fox.

“We are here to support a fellow sex worker who is being vilified in the press,” PSWRWA president Rebecca Davies said.

“We are concerned that the person is not going to be given a fair trial … safer sex is the responsibility of everyone engaging in a sexual activity, not just one party.”

Ms Davies said she was worried about where Ms Fox would be imprisoned, given she was a trans-woman but her birth name was used in court.

“It’s my view that she shouldn’t be put in prison at all, however if that happens it should be a female prison because she is woman,” she said.

Ms Davies also feared the case would reinforce the stigma against people living with HIV, saying the release of Ms Fox’s personal health information was inappropriate.

“When we criminalise HIV, people stop getting tested. This is a public health issue, not a criminal one. WA needs to get with the times,” she said.

Interestingly, after we expressed serious concern about where she was going to be detained, the ABC went and grilled the authorities about it.

The ABC understands Ms Fox will undergo an assessment to determine if she will be sent to a male or female prison while on remand.

The Department of Corrective Services has been contacted for comment.

(That’s more than they, or we, knew two hours ago.)

[isoxys]

denying or dismissing coercive birth assignment is vicious transmisogyny

you should know this.

coercively assigning genders to babies is a form of global-scale child sexual abuse that directly enables and maintains the genocide of trans girls and women

telling a trans child that she is, and also revealingly “must be” a boy, solely because of the appearance of her genitalia of which she is regularly and ritually reminded by her entire world, is gaslighting - a form of psychological manipulation and abuse

calling children who are coercively assigned male at birth “boys” without acknowledging the trans girls you are utterly throwing to the wolves is genocide

telling trans women to use literally genocidal language to talk about our experiences is at best, harassment

acting as if trans women owe it to anyone to debate or dismiss our own most basic boundaries around who we choose to give our extremely precious time to is fucking —creepy—

and if you practice, defend, tolerate, or otherwise participate in these extremely commonplace, extremely normalized, extremely violent traditions then you should know that you’re literally, tangibly, directly killing us

[cimalle]

Monument for the Excluded Conceptualizing the performative power of transgender rage

2016 Camille Auer

“I live daily with the consequences of medicine’s definition of my identity as an emotional disorder. Through the filter of this official pathologization, the sounds that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed as the confused ranting of a diseased mind.”

“Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against my survival. But there is yet another rage within.” (1)

A broken television is at the beginning of this intervention into the medical realm of transgender bureaucracy. An intact television is where we start from, to find its transformation to brokenness, and its rebirth as another identical television in the exact same spot. For a person who wouldn’t know what happened in between, there would be just a continuous existence of a television without the disruption of it being broken and replaced. For the broken television, there is no future as a coherent whole, there is only destruction and disassemblage. But the illusion of the undisrupted existence of the television in the fourth floor waiting room of building Z3 of Tampere University Central Hospital remains intact to anyone who hasn’t witnessed or heard of the happenings of february 11th 2015.

A spontaneous act of outrage can be a powerful opposition to structural power and violence. It can destabilize the hierarchy of decision-making and give its perpetrator their subjectivity back. This is what happened to me when i was faced with the pathologization of my identity.

Long story short, i had subjected myself to the investigation of the transgender authorities of finland, namely the Gender Identity Research Institute (this is my english name for it, i don’t care what its official name is in english) at the Tampere University Central Hospital, one of two places in finland that have the legal right to administer gender affirming medical care for transgender individuals. I was already ordering hormones online and taking care of my transition like any good transgender person would, but in order to get legal recognition and your passport’s gender marker changed, you need to undergo the official process of cross-disciplinary research by a nurse, a social worker, a psychologist and a psychiatrist that can take from six months to a few years.

Since being referred to them, i had waited for my first appointment for six months, then met a nurse twice in intervals of a couple months, then after a few months a social worker, another month or two till i met the psychologist, another month till i met her again, another two months till i met the psychiatrist and one more month till meeting her again and then a few months before my final meeting with all of them where my destiny would unfold to me. Through all this time i had no idea what was going to be their decision. And they make decisions about wether someone is transgender or not. They say it themselves: they have no way of knowing the gender experience of another person. So they concentrate on their patient’s psychological well being to determine wether the person is capable of going through the demanding process of medical gender affirmation.

Needless to say, withholding information about the most important decision in a person’s life, a decision the person has no part in making, constitutes an act of psychological violence. Withholding medical care from a person who might die without it constitutes structural violence.

Based on the Rorschach test i had taken in one of my meetings with the psychologist, she made the assumption that i had an unconscious sexual trauma. I hadn’t said anything that would suggest anything like that. She was directly trying to offer me a false memory. She said that i was sexually perverted, because i had seen a lot of vaginas in the inkblots. I told her that if you pour ink on paper and fold the paper, you most likely get a shape that at least in some parts looks like a vagina, that it was purely technical. She insisted i was hyper sexual even after i told her i wasn’t interested in sex. On top of everything she said i probably have borderline personality disorder, a serious mental illness i later learned should only be diagnosed together with the patient when it helps the patient. For me, it made me paranoid. I started seeing everything i do as symptoms of the disorder rather than my own actions. I also had to go through the possibility of childhood sexual trauma, which seems extremely unlikely.

So because of my alleged mental illness, i was denied recognition as a transgender person. And with that came the denial of legal recognition and public health care.

I kicked in the flatscreen TV in the waiting room.

They made me pay for it.

A crowd funding was organized and it was payed for collectively.

That’s the long story short. That’s not only my personal history, it’s also the history of many transgender people before and after me, who failed to present themselves as mentally and emotionally stable enough. Who failed to present them as trans enough in front of a jury consisting wholly of transphobic cisgender professionals that have the job of upholding the heterosexual matrix. Maybe they didn’t kick in a TV, but i’m sure they experienced the same frustration, rage and disappointment of being faced with absolute bureaucratic power that denies their existence.

I was applauded for my act of spontaneous rebellion. Many transgender peers said they wished more people would vandalize the Institute.

The western history of transgenderism is a history of exclusion, pathologization, invisibility, ridicule, incarceration and violence. Continuing today. That is the history dealt to us from the outside, from the cisgender community, from the heteropatriarchal knowledge machine, the media, the education system, religion and plain old familial values. But that’s the history of how we’re seen, it is not a history of our own. We have our own history, and it’s a history of fierce resilience in front of what seems like an impossible adversary: the whole world. As Susan Stryker writes in My Words to Victor Frankenstein, we are at war with nature itself. Nevertheless, our existence and our identities are real.

For the people whose TV i broke, it was only further proof of my mental disorder. For me, it was an act of reclaiming my subjectivity after being robbed of it. They decided i didn’t deserve my identity, a decision that should have been mine to make, so i decided they didn’t deserve their TV. Even-steven, motherfuckers.

Mentally ill women have been denied their subjectivity all through history. Transgender people have been denied their subjectivity. I took mine back in an act of vengeance. They claimed it was violent, but i say it was vandalism. You can only be violent toward animals, including humans.

A year after the incidence i returned to the place to rename it. I saw the new television, slightly tilted to one side. Perhaps someone had tried to break it, or perhaps it was just poorly attached to the wall. I posted a sign next to the television, renaming it as Monument for the Excluded.

A week later i receive a phone call from the Institute. It’s the psychiatrist i had to see there. She is sorry she has to make the call, explains that she was assigned to make the call and couldn’t refuse. Some people at the Institute have perceived my sign as a security threat. The psychiatrist doesn’t agree with that. I find it amusing and also i’m rather flattered that my art is a security threat to a violent state organization. But the phone call goes on and we talk about what happened a year before. I tell her to tell the psychologist how unprofessional she had been in offering me a false memory and suggesting a major mental illness based on two meetings and a rorschach test. To my surprise, she agrees and promises to tell my greetings to the psychologist. We go on to discuss my situation, she promises to send me instructions on getting all the information they have written about me and also encourages me to start the process again.

notes:

1. Stryker, Susan. 1994. My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

[pinkgengar-deactivated20161118]

“Autogynephilia” and Robert Blanchard

Let’s take a fun little trip down memory lane. The year is…fuck it. Robert Blanchard straight up lied about trans women and made up some bullshit “science” about us in order to justify our exile and subsequent extermination. Autogynephilia is nothing more than pseudo-”science” from a man who had a bone to pick with anyone expressing interest in something other than rigid gender roles. Now, let’s go through this particular “theory’s” supporters shall we? Sure.

Anne Lawrence, cis white woman who self-identifies as an “autogynephilic transsexual”, whatever the fuck that means. Has somehow, some way, published a book grossly entitled, “Men Trapped In Men’s Bodies”. She wholeheartedly supports this theory/practice and has just as much blood on her hands as Blanchard does but I digress. Just read this snippet from her paper entitled “Autogynephilia: A Paraphilic Model of Gender Identity Disorder”: 

Blanchard’s autogynephilia theory helps explain why transvestism and transsexualism are often associated with other unusual erotic interests. Sexual scientists have observed for decades that unusual sexual interests— sadomasochism, bondage, autoerotic asphyxia, interest in leather and rubber, exhibitionism, voyeurism, infantilism, pedophilia—frequently do not occur in isolation, but instead tend to co-occur. Males who have one unusual sexual interest are far more likely to have one or more other unusual sexual interests than would be expected simply by chance.

J. Michael Bailey, cis white man, studied under noted eugenicist Lee Willerman. According to the, while slightly shitty website, tsroadmap.com, Willerman studied twins and took Bailey under his wing in 1974 at the University of Texas. Bailey apparently took to Willerman/eugenics and the study of sexual orientation/arousal like flies on shit. This son of a bitch wrote the horrendously bad “pop”science”” book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen:  The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism” (2003). Anyway, the book is garbage and you should burn every copy of it. Also, he was accused of promising several trans women letters of recommendation for SRS in exchange for oral interviews for said book. 

James Cantor, cis man. Note his biggest claim to fame, “The Foremost Living Expert on Paraphilias”. Yeah…anyway. Pardon me while I puke that this guy actually simply believes that the cure for CSA and the like is the creation, well the continuation rather, of online support groups for offenders/non-offenders of CSA to interact with one another stating that “it could end child abuse.” (2012).

Also, this shit, 

“Before a person can have a sex change, he or she must pass a series of psychiatric tests at one of Canada’s two gender identity clinics, located in Vancouver and Toronto. [James Cantor] says that of the 45 new patients that come to his centre every year, 10 to 15 are approved for surgery. The rest are judged to be suffering from a lesser form of gender variance.” (2002).

I’ll conclude here. But you get the fucking idea. These are just three of the countless “psychologist's” and “sexologists” who think they fucking get it. If I fucking see one more mother fucker write the word “autogynephilia” in even the SLIGHTEST neutral to positive manner, I’m out of here. Seriously, I didn’t spend an hour fucking writing this shit and reading all the disgusting crap the sources had to offer. Fucking reblog this and knife anyone who quotes these hacks, including terf’s.

[marcitlali]

ruby corado, founder of casa ruby, was born in san salvador, el salvador but fled to the u.s. as a teen to avoid the civil war in her home country. she has devoted the past 20 years of her life in washington, d.c. as an advocate for the transgender community. her hard work has helped gain legal protection in d.c. while fighting for lgbt human rights, trans liberation, immigration equality + access to healthcare and the many other disparities and issues the communities she represents face. casa ruby was born to address the needs of some of the most vulnerable in the lgbt community - latina trans women + lgbt immigrants. today casa ruby is the only grassroots multicultural lgbt center in washington, d.c., offering a drop in center + safe space 6 days a week providing hot meals, clothing exchange, career development, and social services to trans / queer / gender non conforming people. casa ruby received 501c3 irs status in 2006. donate here

[birlinterrupted]

The irony is that when a trans man says something about gender, people have this “Oh well, he must have personal insight, having been both” (lots of times the dude specifically says this) whereas when trans women say things about gender, the idea is that she isn’t allowed to have opinions on women, men, or gender at all, having failed to belong to either gender.

[spiroandthelacktones]

Holy shit this is so true

[audscratprophetlilith]

she isn’t allowed to have opinions on women, men, or gender at all, having failed to belong to either gender.

[ericainchoate]

Ah, but it goes even deeper. 

See, trans men have by and large succeeded in invading women’s queer spaces with the selling point that birth gender assignment means they have a right to invade. (The unspoken addition to this is that trans women don’t belong there.)

And now many women’s queer spaces and orgs are increasingly run by dudes who are jars of mayo from the suburbs. This is then used to make what had been women’s queer concerns *their* concerns, and their expertise is then used to say that this is what queer women think, because a white man told you so. 

So not only are white trans men given this credence, they’re also given the ability to “speak for” queer women. This leads to deleterious effects for queer women generally, especially trans women who are queer and queer women of color, but it also leads to another way that the garden variety trans man’s invasion of queer women’s spaces (spaces no man belongs in because men are not women and all) is so insidious. 

[posttraumaticspacelesbian-blog]

sex is biological??????????????? go open a biology textbook?????????????????? its not a social construct ur thinking of gender????????????

i hope the superabundance of question marks is an indication that you’re aware on some level of how utterly wrong you are.

[trigger warning: discussion of genitalia and internal organs]

first of all, when you say “sex” i assume you’re talking about what is called “biological sex”, “sexual dimorphism”, or “sexual difference.”  specifically what you are trying to state or imply here is the material existence of two categories of bodies: male and female.  i’m gonna guess you’re starting with chromosomes since that’s been considered the ‘most fundamental’ basis of sex by transmisogynists since at least 1979.

a sex chromosome is a particular-appearing blob that shows up on a karyotype, or a test involving dyeing and microscopically viewing chromosomes.  chromosomes are little blobs of folded up goop that if you spooled it out long enough you would find to be a chain of DNA—which is to say a chain of base pairs (guanine and cytosine, adenine and thymine).  what you’re also gonna find in there are histones that the chromatin (the material of somewhat spooled DNA) is wrapped around.  In addition, you’re gonna find methylation, and all other sorts of little chemicals and particles in there because guess what?  DNA is not a linear coding system.  DNA codes in chunks—usually triplets that are usually read as certain amino acids, which then come together to form the building blocks of proteins.  but the thing about triplet coding is that it can be very complex.  so

AGGCTTATTAGGCTCTA

can for example simultaneously code as

AGG CTT ATT AGG CTC ta

and

a GGC TTA TTA GGC TCT a

and

ag GCT TAT TAG GCT CTA

like just to give you an example.  now there are signals indicating how that coding should start, but those signals can move around, or be turned on or off.  that’s one of the things methylation is for—it can turn on or off the signals of where to start the coding chain.  methylation for any given part of a DNA strand can be triggered by all sorts of things.  one study found a linkage between rates of diabetes and levels of stress in the grandmothers of those with diabetes—i.e. the stress was linked to diabetes in the grandchildren.  that’s just to give you some idea of the level of complexity of coding.

and the complexities continue at every level.  the proteins that are formed by those DNA sequences may come together in different ways depending on the chemical composition of their environment.  the DNA itself—a three-dimensional object in the same environment—may physically interact with the proteins or with itself.  but also remember that we are talking about chemical goop subject to environmental conditions, which include all sorts of mutagens.  sometimes shit just goes weird (not gonna say ‘wrong’ because that presumes that mutations are ‘bad’ which is bullshit given the necessity of mutation for genetic adaptability—also it means applying anthropocentric notions of functionality, of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior, to goop) and AGG CTT ATT loses a letter and becomes AGC TTA tt (this is what’s called a frameshift mutation—you can also have other stuff like point mutations).  also, things can just go weird when the DNA is being replicated—it’s not a perfect reading process, it’s a bunch of chemical reactions floating in goop.  and it’s happening millions of times, so the likelihood that things will go wrong in various ways is high.

but even above the level of the DNA coding, on the level of the chromosomes, things are confusing.  because the chromosomes come together out of more loosely distributed goop when the cell is splitting, and things can go wrong in that process—get misplaced, get shuffled over to the other side, etc.  likewise, there’s a process called crossing-over that occurs at cell replication during metaphase (while the chromosomes are paired at the center of the cell prior to the nucleus dividing) where chromosomes just swap shit around for the heck of it.  and it’s pretty random where this happens too, which can mean that important codes just get cut in half, or new codes get created.

all of which is leading to say that it’s incredibly unlikely to expect any sort of meaningful fifty-fifty split between “XX chromosomes” and “XY chromosomes”.  which works with reality, because in reality we observe all kinds of variations, exactly as we would expect.  now, what happens when there’s variation?  for the most part, things just happen.  it’s all just cells.  they do their thing, make little organs, replicate so the organs get bigger and more specific, etc.  so maybe now you can begin to see why expecting them to neatly behave in two sets of patterns is completely inaccurate?  or why it is that in the real world we observe a wide range of human bodies rather than just XX Barbies and XY Kens?  but even looking beyond that, what’s actually going on with the so-called reproductive system?  well, some of these cells have the ability to generate gametes—sorta like half-cells—which can get together with other gametes to grow into another big blob of organs.  that’s what fertilization and pregnancy is.  that’s all that’s involved.  generally speaking, one type of gametes will appear in the bodies of people whose cells tend to have goop that shows up a certain way on a karyotype, while another type of gametes will appear in the bodies of people whose cells tend to have goop that shows up a different way in a karyotype, with a whole lot of variation and possibilities for things to be disrupted.  so why does that even matter to us?  why am I sitting here at 4am on christmas night with a box of cheezits and a glass of wine answering shitty anons about this? [note: i wrote this a couple days ago and am only now posting it]  because out of those general tendencies of bodies, people have constructed the notion of sex.

patriarchy, at its basis, is a system of economic exploitation that consists of one group of people being assigned to do work which is valued, and another group of people being assigned to do work which is not valued.  this was mapped onto two general groupings of people, those who tended to have one type of gamete and those who tended to have another, and the ones who pushed the idea that their own work was valuable were ‘males’, ‘men’, etc, while those who were forced to be the object of exploitation and violence were ‘females’, ‘women’, etc.  as part of the process of valuing male work, men constructed an explanation for the inequality that they claimed derived from the nature of physical reality.  specifically, the notion of ‘sexual difference’, or the tendencies of people to produce different sorts of gametes.  in order to better justify and value their exploitation of women, men constructed a whole notion of selfhood around this, an ideal which for them happened to be contained in the organ that most of them used to distribute the gametes.  and in order to justify the violence that they were doing, they argued that there were naturally only two categories of people, grouped based on labor done/positions during sex/gamete production/etc (all these things were conflated and differently emphasized over time, helping to mystify the falsity of the distinction).

the notion that certain types of organs map to certain types of behavior, certain economic patterns, etc, is a product of a social system of oppression.  it is NOT founded in any sort of ‘biological fact’ because first and foremost ‘biological fact’ does not exist.  an organ is not a signifier except in the context of a socially constructed ‘biology’ which is specifically constructed as a justification of patriarchy.  quite literally.  i’ve worked with biologists (yeah, anon, turns out i may have in fact opened a biology textbook a few times in my life) and one thing i can say definitively is that like most scientists they don’t tend to think deeply about how the sorts of questions they ask and the ways they interpret data are structured by the world.  at best they’ve taken a required bioethics class or two while an undergrad.  so when they’re going to interpret mathematical data, they’re doing it in a way that already presumes the real question as answered.  they find sexual dimorphism not because it’s in the results of their data but because it was assumed by the way they asked their questions—if you ask ‘which sex is better at math?’ you’re never going to find evidence that ‘sex’ is a meaningless construct.  this is what a lot of ‘scientific truth’ is, in fact—the things that were already accepted when people went to ask more complicated questions, and which were only torn down, if ever, when all the answers to all the complicated questions continually revealed something which undermined the previous model (which, by the way, is happening right now with the notion of sex—that’s right, even patriarchal scientists are coming to an awareness of how utterly bullshit it is, albeit by the most roundabout way possible and still doing as much harm as they can on the way).

But what we can see from all this is that gender precedes sex.  gender is a way of organizing the social sphere, and biological data is organized off of that.  gender, in other words, is the fundamental category of sex under patriarchy.  now, one might say that we live in a social world, that our subjectivities are socially constructed, and thus for us an organ is a signifier.  this is of course true, but one has to recognize the socially constructed nature in order to realize first and foremost that we are not looking at a rigid system here.  it is not simply a matter of saying that under biological reality a certain chromosome or a certain organ leads to a certain place within patriarchy, and likewise it is not simply a matter of saying that under social construction a certain chromosome or a certain organ leads to a certain place within patriarchy.  if one is aware of the complexity involved in socially constituting what is basically a blob of goo (cells) that does or does not more goo (babies, people, etc) as belonging to a somehow binary and rigid category, one can more easily see how that social construction may at times slip, and result in a person who, for example, has one sort of organ, and yet has had their identity socially constructed within the category for a person with a “different” (within patriarchal notions of ‘sexual difference’) type of organ.  in fact, one can only fail to recognize this if one begins from the disingenuous place of assuming a priori that the person in question is being deceptive or being deceived, rather than reporting reality as closely as it can be reported in this language.  and the use of inversions of this language to report closer realities is an effort to redirect and gain control of biopower as it has enacted itself on us.  it is no more or less legitimate than the language of patriarchy, except if one finds legitimacy either in supporting patriarchy (arguing for sex as ‘real’) or disrupting patriarchy.

what, then, is sex?  it’s the way people talk about blobs of goop, and specifically the way that blobs of goop have been categorized into two types, in broad defiance of reality, for the express purpose of perpetuating the patriarchy.

so yes, sex is biological, in the sense that the terms of sex are coded into the discourse of ‘biology’, which is itself socially constructed by patriarchy.

sex is a social construct.  this is my final fucking word on this shit.

do NOT bring this ignorant shit into my inbox again.

[laundryandtaxes]

It is totally possible to acknowledge that trans women’s experiences are important and that they are subject to the same violence as cis women, and that in fact it can be proven they are often more susceptible to violence than cis women merely because…

[orangeslime-deactivated20160813]

okay, but you’re completely missing my points…

a) identity isn’t a thing you carry around or take on and off, its a process of internalizing your Self in relation to everything around you. how you relate to others, how you respond to others, what messages you receive and internalize. i didn’t ONCE talk about identity in that way. i talked about identification-with which is a wholly different theoretical concept. identity as a carry-around is a liberal concept which does NOTHING for understanding capital and gender.

b) this isn’t about people knowing or not knowing that they are trans. this is about how people project their gender into the social. men, regardless of assignment, at all ages, will project themselves as men. they will project entitlement, force, dominance, and this amorphous “male energy” thing. this is part of the phallus as a concept. other people pick up on those projections and adjust their behavior accordingly. a trans man would NOT be treated the same as his sisters. want evidence? just ask some cis women out there with trans brothers. ask the trans men out there who are honest about their upbringing. cis girls are treated MUCH worse than trans boys, regardless of whether their gender is known. a trans woman or man does not have to cognitively be aware of their transness to project their gender, and an outsider does not have to be cognitively aware of a trans child’s transness to pick up on and react to the child’s gendered Self. if you deny that, then you deny ALL the experiences that trans girls face throughout their pre-out years and your analysis rapidly falls into the category of “TWEF” whether or not you tag a shout out to trans women onto your posts.

c) yes, its true that some women do not internalize “proper” womanhood, and instead are less likely to take on misogynist understandings of themselves as easily or are more likely to be combative or less affected. what this does, is sends the message to men that these women need MORE punishment for their lack of reactivity to it. of course women will internalize womanhood in deeply complex and variant ways, but its not about who is most affected by “misogyny” so much as how one relates individually to the messages they see. for example, a situation presented to an audience in which a man takes power over a woman in a subtle fashion, that is completely normalized, will imbue to men that they are allowed to do so and that is their right, and to women that they must put up with this, that they deserve it, or that they are not allowed to push back. same situation, different internalizations. within women, then, there are as many potential reactions as their are women - some will not be bothered, some will be deeply angry, some will feel defeated. variance is not exclusive to this theory i am presenting.

d) there is literally no way to say “we can respect trans women’s experience with misogyny” and also say “misogyny = violence against female assignment”. if you equate those two, you will end up with numerable logical fallacies that fail to account for trans women, that do not actually define maleness or male violence in a way that’s meaningful to women, and that don’t actually fit into any theoretical framework of capital as it plays out in gender. men do not experience misogyny, period. gender is a process of indentification of self within a machine that informs our enitre internal and external relation to labor-power, period. the social placement of trans woman is the foundation for how all patriarchy will function, period. these are all theoretically undeniable, and they all pull together to indicate that gendered violence is NOT dependent on assignment, but on the process of identification, and assignment is only relevant as a means of control to WOMEN, and can only be applied once it is established that one IS a woman (not ‘identifies as’, but IS). i mean, even the most acclaimed cis female theorists who discuss materialist feminism are forced to acknowledge this in their writings because otherwise their theories of reproductive labor and gendered power would not actually fit together.

[unobject]

Serious question here. I am a butch trans woman. I feel like saying that masculinity cannot be attributed to me erases part of my ability to describe myself. How am I supposed to describe my style and presentation without referring to masculinity?

there is a difference between having notions of us being part of a power structure that abuses and destroys us being applied to us, and needing to offer a coherent explanation of our existence to our self and others in a social order where we are not supposed to exist. 

i think its ultimately self-destructive to imagine “masculinity” and “femininity” as being just presentation or behavior or originating within ourselves and not out of a power dynamic- both of which are destructive for women and lesbians- and attempts to liberate the two ultimately find ways to replicate that division, but that’s totally not the same as having to explain our existence.

so, like, that question implies the two are the same, but they aren’t.

 my problem is with how notions of what masculinity is for men/ in reference to men being applied to butch women- which is a super common discourse of understanding butches (that, honestly, i think has its origin in the lesbian community in trans men trying to make themselves seem just like butches which is repulsive). how someone chooses to navigate having to explain themselves (which i think is an issue for both femme and butch lesbians and lesbians which fit neither), is really their call because its not really something determind by or orriginating from us.

[julianahuxtable]

LOVE LESS: SOME DAYS TRANSITIONING CAN BE SUCH A CRASH COURSE IN PUBLIC SCRUTINY. ITS AS IF THE GENERAL PUBLIC FORGOT THE BASIC IDEA THAT ITS RUDE TO STARE. ITS GETTING ON A TRAIN FILLED WITH EYES DETERMINED TO DECIPHER MY BODY AND ITS COVERINGS WITH CODES AND SEMIOTIC SYSTEMS THAT CAN’T EVEN RECOGNIZE MY FACE. ITS CIS MEN, OLD AND YOUNG, FLUCTUATING BETWEEN DISGUST, SEXUAL INTEREST AND/OR A REFUSAL TO ENGAGE EITHER OF THE TWO. ITS CIS WOMEN, YOUNG AND OLD, SPITTING ON MY FACE WITH THEIR EYES, SHAMING ME WITH GLARES. ITS A WORLD OF PEOPLE HURRYING TO GET TO THEIR 9 TO 5 AND TRUCK IT BACK HOME BEFORE THEY HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE SPACE I’M PRESUMED TO NATURALLY INHABIT - THE UNREGULATED LAISSEZ-FAIRE MARKET OF DESIRE SYMBOLIZED BY THE NIGHT. I AM AN UNWELCOME REMINDER THAT THEIR WORLD IS AN ILLUSION. A VIRUS INCARNATE

julianahuxtable (via love-less)

[ciscritical-not-cisphobic]

I’m starting to doubt whether the “trans women have experienced/haven’t experienced male privilege” question (which is only ever used to bully trans women, whether by non-trans-women or by their collaborators) can be engaged with on any useful grounds, quite honestly.

This isn’t giving up. This is saying that we need to challenge that the question is being asked in the first place. Because it feels to me that this question is predicated on a fundamentally liberal, individualist logic (this struck me when I was contemplating the irony of someone defending her accusation by accusing everyone claiming otherwise of being liberal individualists and not seeing how her own side was founded on the same liberal individualist assumptions she saw her targets)

I’m thinking about this particularly in the context of the confession dynamic described by Andrea Smith in The Problem with “Privilege”. This confession dynamic is inherently upholding of the structures of power even while granting a form of social capital to the oppressed, which she examines in depth for whiteness and specifically settlement in the post. If you haven’t read it already, go read it. If you’ve only read the quote that people were passing around describing the confession dynamic, or the other one criticizing the concept of safe space, go read it.

Interpreted in terms of this confession dynamic, what the statement that trans women have experienced male privilege (or the more extreme version that trans women have “residual” male privilege) amounts to is a demand for trans women to participate in this confession dynamic as men.

This is a very different dynamic than people who are actually members of oppressor classes confessing (or even of white trans women confessing white privilege. I know b8l has written about how transmisogyny intensifies the harm that dynamic does to TWoC).

Making confession a requirement for trans women obviously benefits non-trans-women; it allows cis women and trans men and sometimes even cis men to situate themselves as judges, as the hearer of the confession. It prevents acknowledgement of transmisogyny, upholding the benefits that accrue from that and maintaining the comfort that comes with not acknowledging it. It allows trans men to deflect any mention of the benefits they receive from patriarchy. It gives anyone whatever thrill they get out of bullying trans women (a thrill too many people love, and violence everyone else turns a blind eye to).

Conversely, this focus on trans women’s (sometimes imagined) past hurts trans women, for a lot of the same reasons. When it doesn’t silence any talk about trans women’s (or any individual trans woman’s) present situation, and about parts of trans women’s pasts that don’t fit the narrative it’s trying to push, it requires that a trans woman speak about that from a position where she’s/they’re being judged by whomever she is speaking to and where her/their issues are less urgent than they actually are. More banally, it demands necessary, often limited, energy be given to this confession as a continual drain.

Even the way it allows collaborator trans women to situate themselves as hearers of the confession the way cis women and trans men often are, and as the “good trans woman” who checks her “male privilege” is harmful to trans women as a whole for these reasons.

Cis men aren’t targeted in the same way as trans women, aren’t bullied into confession processes, because they are actual oppressors, for three reasons. First, as Smith makes clear, oppressed people do not actually benefit from hearing these confessions. Second, because it is phenomenally hard to bully someone who holds actual oppressive power over you, and feminist social-justice-oriented spaces often go out of their way to try to hold on to male “allies”; trans women are targeted precisely because we are vulnerable, precisely because we need feminism. Third, because confession offers men the benefit of being seen as redeemed, as good men, as feminist men, as men who have grown (without, necessarily, having to undergo any actual growth or change of habits, as Smith describes), which is not offered to trans women.

Outside of the framework of “privilege”, things can be said more clearly. Anyone trying to tell trans women that their quality of life while closeted was improved because they lived in a patriarchy (a patriarchy which actively tried to destroy them and remake them in its image), for instance, is making a sick and violent joke.

In the end, the accusation of having male privilege made against trans women only functions in the context of a liberal, individualist, white-supremacy-reproducing, heteropatriarchy-reproducing, capitalism-reproducing confession dynamic, and within that dynamic serves as a form of bullying. Arguing that trans women don’t hold male privilege, engaging with that statement on its own level, also functions in that dynamic and implicitly agrees to most of the terms the bully sets.

[infiniteglitterfall]

SYLVIA RIVERA WAS INTO POKEMON

HER GIRLFRIEND AT THE TIME BOUGHT HER A STUFFED PIKACHU

WHAT AM I WATCHING

[baeddel-of-color-deactivated202]

I actually get mad when I see that one picture of her in bed looking all cozy and they crop out the Pikachu slippers she had.  Like, it takes away both the fact that she was an actual person, not just some movement icon, and it makes her death seem way less recent since it’s in black and white.

Um, I think @lunamerbruja has a lot to say about this.

[tgirlinterrupted]

yeah, Sylvia’s favorite Pokémon was Pikachu and she died in February of 2002, which really is not as long ago as people may think. Because she was involved with the Gay Liberation Front and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (later changed “Transvestite” to “Transgender”), people think she lived & died with the movements in the 60′s and 70′s because of the “outdated language” she’s often associated with.

She did step away from organizing work for a decade because of transmisogyny and transphobia, specifically this incident where she was fighting for the stage to speak. here is the video Reina Gossett uploaded to Vimeo that documented this moment.

but yeah, i recently wrote a piece on the 5 facts lesser known about Sylvia Rivera a few weeks ago. She definitely survived lots of trauma, but it’s the little things - like her favorite Pokemon being Pikachu - that i really valued learning about her in my research.

also, the video on this post is actually a piece of a much longer documentary on Sylvia Rivera (almost 2 hours) made by Randy Wickerman, just FYI. i prefer the full version because this above segment is mostly interviews of other people’s thoughts/opinions on Sylvia when she actually talks herself about her life & work, as well as the death of her close friend Marsha P. Johnson.

[defendtranswomen]

Bebe Scarpi Discusses Sylvia Rivera and STAR House

The mainstream groups thought of them as an embarrassment and criminals, and, you know, not going anywhere to begin with, so why throw good after bad? ...because it was sponsored by drag queens themselves, the mainstream gays, looking down at the drag queens, couldn't see any good coming from that.

[defendtranswomen]

Nancy Burkholder recalls her expulsion from the 1991 Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

In August, 1991 I attended my second Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) with Laura Ervin. Laura and I drove 1,050 miles nonstop in her vehicle… and arrived at the festival, car #33, at about 9:00 am Monday morning. We walked and talked with women waiting with us on the road, bought raffle tickets from a festival promoter, and joined women in joyous enthusiasm, camaraderie and expectation while we awaited the start of the festival at 2:00 pm. When we got onto the land Laura volunteered the use of her vehicle to help with shuttle service. Laura and I split the work shift. I worked the first two hours while Laura moved our gear to the campsite and set up her tent. She worked the next two hours while I set up my tent.

After going through an orientation run with a shuttle coordinator I began the process of loading women’s gear and driving them to their desired destinations. I felt a sense of pride in my work; welcoming the women, helping them with their gear, and answering their questions. At the completion of my shuttle shift I set up my [campsite], took a much welcomed shower and went for a long walk in the woods. I met Laura at our campsite and she invited me to walk with her to the main gate to meet a friend who was arriving on a chartered bus from Grand Rapids at 10:00 pm.

We arrived at the main gate at about 9:30 pm and sat down around the fire pit with several other women. We chatted with the women and enjoyed the warmth of the fire. At about 10:00 pm we received word that the bus was delayed and would arrive around 11:00. Laura and I decided to remain at the main gate until the bus arrived. We continued to socialize with the women who come and went from the area of the fire pit. The bus arrived at about 11:00 pm and Laura went over to the bus. A woman requested that I stay away from the bus to avoid congestion. I stopped at the edge of the road about 20 feet from the fire pit.

While I waited for Laura to return I was approached by two women, Chris Coyote and Del Kelleher. Chris said that she needed to speak with me regarding a serious and difficult matter. Sensing her urgency I suggested we move away from the women near the fire pit in order to talk privately. Chris said that the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was a woman-only event and she wanted to know if I was a man. I replied that I was a woman and I showed her my NH picture ID driver’s license. Then she asked me if I was a transsexual. I asked her what was the point of her questioning and she replied that transsexuals were not permitted to attend the festival. She said that MWMF policy was that the festival was open to “natural, women-born-women” only. I replied that nowhere, in any festival literature or the program guide was that policy stated. I asked Chris to please verify that policy and she went to the office to contact the festival producers, Lisa Vogel and Boo Price. Sometime during this conversation I waved Laura to come over and she witnessed much of what transpired.

I continued speaking with Del. Del stated that the reason the policy was not in any literature was because the issue of transsexuals had never come up as a problem before. Del added that the policy was for the benefit of the transsexuals’ safety and the safety of the women attending the festival. When I pointed out that there were other transsexuals on the land she acknowledged that this was true. Then she added, ‘We haven’t caught them yet, but we did catch you.”

At around midnight Chris returned and told me that she had talked to the producers and that they had indeed verified that transsexuals were not allowed at the festival. I asked to speak with the producers directly. Chris stated that the producers would not speak with me and that she was the designated contact for the producers. Chris asked me if I had had a sex change operation. I replied that was none of her business. I said that I was willing to submit to genital examination in order to satisfy her concerns about my sex. She replied that she would not feel comfortable doing this. I said that was a rather odd reaction since public nudity was quite common at festival. How would viewing my cunt be different from any other woman’s? I told her to please produce her proof to her insinuations that I was a transsexual. She looked at me for a  few seconds, saying nothing. Then she said that the festival producers had empowered her to expel any woman at any time, at her discretion. She told that I had I had to leave the festival and that I would not even be allowed to return to my campsite to retrieve my equipment. I realized that Chris and Del were expelling me in spite of all the irrefutable legal and anatomical proof that I was a women. I knew there was nothing more I could say to these women. I resigned myself to the fact that these women were expelling me from the festival.

Laura and Chris departed to pick up a few of my personal belongings while Del stayed with me. Del facilitated some arrangements for a room at a motel in Walhalla, about 10 miles distant. For some moments I stood outside the circle of women at the fire pit at the place where out conversation transpired. The night was clear and the air had a chill to it. Suddenly I realized I was cold. I was wearing only nylon shorts, a flannel shirt and sandals. I hadn’t dressed for extended night-time exposure. Del invited me to return to the fire pit. I sat at the edge of the pit for a long time, I’m not sure how long. My mind was blank, my body absolutely still as I became aware of the emotional devastation that I felt inside. The events that were going down seemed totally unreal. Nevertheless I found a place of calm inside myself. I found acceptance for my situation, and I could feel the emotional devastation without the devastation overwhelming me. I stared into the fire. The heat from the glowing embers warmed my legs and face. Del stayed close by. From the time Del and Chris first approached me until I left the land, I was guarded and forbidden from leaving the area around the fire pit.

After some time Del met with a woman from the office and she called me to come over to her. I got up and went over. I turned on my flashlight and she handed me a printed receipt stamped with an MWMF logo. I signed the receipt and she gave me a cash refund for my ticket. I held my flashlight up and pointed its beam at my right wrist as Del cut the wrist ticket free. Then I returned to the fire pit to await Laura’s return. During this time not one of the half-dozen women who sat with me at the fire pit spoke or looked at me. I no longer tried to keep secret the nature of the events that were going down. I asked Del if someone was going to protect my personal belongings from theft or vandalism. She replied that Chris and my friend had probably gone back to the site to retrieve all of my belongings.

At about 12:50a.m. Laura returned with all of my equipment and her car. We departed the land. In less than two hours and under the cover of darkness, the festival personnel had expelled me from the land. Their actions were facilitated by our closeness to the main gate and the lateness of the hour. There were no witnesses to the events except for Laura, Chris and Del. I don t know the women present at the fire pit knew of the events that had transpired.

Laura and I arrived at the motel at about 1:20 am Tuesday morning. We were both emotionally and physically exhausted. Neither of us had slept more than a few hours in the past 42 hours. The motel room was a small, cinder block room. We were greeted by the smell of wet, moldy carpet. The stillness of the night was interrupted by the loud roar of trucks passing by our open window facing Route 10. I still could not believe this was really happening.

I slept very little that night. I was exhausted from our 20 hours of travel and in shock from the emotional trauma perpetrated by the festival women. I eventually slept for a few hours and when I awoke it was light outside. The mattress bed had duplicated the effect of sleeping outside on the hard ground. My hips and thighs ached.

I showered, repacked my gear and we departed for Grand Rapids. When we stopped for breakfast at Muskegon I called to make reservations for a plane flight home. The flight cost $382 and I was grateful for having a credit card. I did not have the cash. I departed Grand Rapids at 12:40p.m. and arrived at Worchester, MA at about 6:25p.m. Laura called ahead and made arrangements for transportation from the airport to me car which me an additional $50. I drove home, arriving at about 9:15 pm.

(Source: theterfs.com)

[thespiritwas]

Sylvia Rivera & NYPD Reflect on Stonewall Rebellion

Today is the fifth day of my ten day memorial for Sylvia Rivera.  During the early 1970s Sylvia Rivera was involved in the Gay Activist Alliance, co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and organized with the Black Panthers and Young Lords.  But before all that Sylvia Rivera took part in the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.  In 1989 Sound Portraits recorded Sylvia Rivera and other people who took part in the Stonewall Rebellion and played it on National Public Radio (NPR).  I went thru the transcript and pulled out Sylvia Rivera’s, NYPD officer Seymour Pine’s and Village Voice reporter Howard Smith’s reflection of the Stonewall Rebellion and pasted it below.  To hear the entire show click here

SYLVIA RIVERA: My name is Sylvia Rivera. My name before that was Ray Rivera, until I started dressing in drag in 1961.

The era before Stonewall was a hard era. There was always the gay bashings on the drag queens by heterosexual men, women, and the police. We learned to live with it because it was part of the lifestyle at that time, I guess, but none of us were very happy about it.

SEYMOUR PINE: My name is Seymour Pine. In 1968, I was assigned as Deputy Inspector in charge of public morals in the first division in the police department, which covered the Greenwich Village area. It was the duty of Public Morals to enforce all laws concerning vice and gambling, including prostitution, narcotics, and laws and regulations concerning homosexuality. The part of the penal code which applied to drag queens was Section 240.35, section 4: “Being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration; loiters, remains, or congregates in a public place with other persons so masked …”

(Pine continues reading under Rivera’s voice and then fades out.)

RIVERA: At that time we lived at the Arista Hotel. We used to sit around, just try to figure out when this harassment would come to an end. And we would always dream that one day it would come to an end. And we prayed and we looked for it. We wanted to be human beings.

PINE: You felt, well, two guys — and that’s very often all we sent in would be two men — could handle two hundred people. I mean, you tell them to leave and they leave, and you say show me your identification and they all take out their identification and file out and that’s it. And you say, okay, you’re not a man, you’re a woman, or you’re vice versa and you wait over there. I mean, this was a kind of power that you have and you never gave it a second thought.

RIVERA: The drag queens took a lot of oppression and we had to … we were at a point where I guess nothing would have stopped us. I guess, as they say, or as Shakespeare says, we were ladies in waiting, just waiting for the thing to happen. And when it did happen, we were there.

PINE: There was never any reason to feel that anything of any unusual situation would occur that night.

RIVERA: You could actually feel it in the air. You really could. I guess Judy Garland’s death just really helped us really hit the fan.

PINE: For some reason, things were different this night. As we were bringing the prisoners out, they were resisting.

(Riot sounds in the background.)

RIVERA: People started gathering in front of the Sheridan Square Park right across the street from Stonewall. People were upset — “No, we’re not going to go!” and people started screaming and hollering.

PINE: One drag queen, as we put her in the car, opened the door on the other side and jumped out. At which time we had to chase that person and he was caught, put back into the car, he made another attempt to get out the same door, the other door, and at that point we had to handcuff the person. From this point on, things really began to get crazy.

PINE: Well that’s when all hell broke loose at that point. And then we had to get back into Stonewall.

HOWARD SMITH: My name is Howard Smith. On the night of the Stonewall riots I was a reporter for the Village Voice, locked inside with the police, covering it for my column. It really did appear that that crowd – because we could look through little peepholes in the plywood windows, we could look out and we could see that the crowd – well, my guess was within five, ten minutes it was probably several thousand people. Two thousand easy. And they were yelling “Kill the cops! Police brutality! Let’s get ‘em! We’re not going to take this anymore! Let’s get ‘em!”

PINE: We noticed a group of persons attempting to uproot one of the parking meters, at which they did succeed. And they then used that parking meter as a battering ram to break down the door. And they did in fact open the door — they crashed it in — and at that point was when they began throwing Molotov cocktails into the place. It was a situation that we didn’t know how we were going to be able control.

RIVERA: I remember someone throwing a Molotov cocktail. I don’t know who the person was, but I mean I saw that and I just said to myself in Spanish, I said. oh my God, the revolution is finally here! And I just like started screaming “Freedom! We’re free at last!” You know. It felt really good.

PINE: Remember these were pros, but everybody was frightened. There’s no question about that. I know I was frightened, and I’d been in combat situations, and there was never any time that I felt more scared than I felt that night. And, I mean, you know there was no place to run.

RIVERA: Once the tactical police force showed up, I think that really incited us a little bit more.

RIVERA: Here this queen is going completely bananas, you know jumping on, hitting the windshield. The next thing you know, the taxicab was being turned over. The cars were being turned over, windows were shattering all over the place, fires were burning around the place. It was beautiful, it really was. It was really beautiful.

RIVERA: I wanted to do every destructive thing that I could think of at that time to hurt anyone that had hurt us through the years.

RIVERA: A lot of heads were bashed. But it didn’t hurt their true feelings — they all came back for more and more. Nothing — that’s when you could tell that nothing could stop us at that time or any time in the future.

PINE: For those of us in Public Morals, after the Stonewall incident things were completely changed from what they had previously been. They suddenly were not submissive anymore. They now suddenly had gained a new type of courage. And it seemed as if they didn’t care anymore about whether their identities were made known. We were now dealing with human beings.

PINE: Well, I retired from the police department in 1976. Twenty years have passed. I’m going to be 70 in a few months. I still don’t know the answers. I would still like to know the answers. I would like to know whether I was wrong or whether I was right in ever thinking that there was a difference, in ever thinking that maybe you shouldn’t trust a homosexual because something is missing in his personality.

RIVERA: Today I’m a 38-year-old drag queen. I can keep my long hair, I can pluck my eyebrows, and I can work wherever the hell I want. And I’m not going to change for anybody. If I changed, then I feel that I’m losing what 1969 brought into my life, and that was to be totally free.