#gallus mag

[rayless-reblogs]

I'm innocently researching Greco-Roman poets, just seeing the isolated named "Gallus" in my notes and going to Wiki to see what on earth his full name was. And instead of a dusty Roman, I find Gallus Mag, the terrifying lady bouncer of Lower Manhattan:

Photographer unknown, but most likely in the public domain.

A glimpse:

It was her custom, after she'd felled an obstreperous customer with her club, to clutch his ear between her teeth and so drag him to the door, amid the frenzied cheers of the onlookers. If her victim protested she bit his ear off, and having cast the fellow into the street she carefully deposited the detached member in a jar of alcohol behind the bar…. She was one of the most feared denizens on the waterfront and the police of the period shudderingly described her as the most savage female they'd ever encountered.

[infinitemonkeytheory]

Gallus Mag - Wikipedia

Gallus Mag - Wikipedia

Was looking for something else and found this instead.

"It was her custom, after she'd felled an obstreperous customer with her club, to clutch his ear between her teeth and so drag him to the door, amid the frenzied cheers of the onlookers. If her victim protested she bit his ear off, and having cast the fellow into the street she carefully deposited the detached member in a jar of alcohol behind the bar…. She was one of the most feared denizens on the waterfront and the police of the period shudderingly described her as the most savage female they'd ever encountered."

[bpdpenguin]

gangs of new WOKE

[valkyries-things]

GALLUS MAG // BOUNCER

“She was a six-foot-plus tall bouncer at a 19th-century New York City bar called The Hole in the Wall. She figures prominently in New York City folklore. She was one of Charley Monnell's "trusted lieutenants," along with Kate Flannery. It was her custom, after she'd felled an obstreperous customer with her club, to clutch his ear between her teeth and so drag him to the door, amid the frenzied cheers of the onlookers. If her victim protested she bit his ear off, and having cast the fellow into the street she carefully deposited the detached member in a jar of alcohol behind the bar…. She was one of the most feared denizens on the waterfront and the police of the period shudderingly described her as the most savage female they'd ever encountered.”

[vuvaliniterf]

Gallus is back!

[robothyenawasteland]

“A famous Water street resort was the Hole-in-the-Wall, at the corner of Dover street, run by One-Armed Charley Monell and his trusted lieutenants, Gallus Mag and Kate Flannery. Gallus Mag was one of the notorious characters of the Fourth Ward, a giant Englishwoman well over six feet tall, who was so called because she kept her skirt up with suspenders, or galluses. She was bouncer and general factotum of the Hole-in-the-Wall, and stalked fiercely about the dive with a pistol stuck in her belt and a huge bludgeon strapped to her wrist. She was an expert in the use of both weapons, and like the celebrated Hell-Cat Maggie of the Five Points, was an extraordinary virtuoso in the art of mayhem. It was her custom, after she had felled an obstreperous customer with her club, to clutch his ear between her teeth and so drag him to the door, amid the frenzied cheers of the onlookers. If her victim protested and struggled, she bit his ear off, and having cast the fellow into the street she carefully deposited the detached member in a jar of alcohol behind the bar, in which she kept her trophies in pickle. She was one of the most feared denizens of the water front, and the police of the period shudderingly described her as the most savage female they had ever encountered.”

-  The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, by Herbert Asbury

(I like this book.)

[notcisjustwoman]

I’m on mobile right now and not gonna bother with screen caps or links or anything, I’ll try to do that later.

You should all know that Cathy Brennan, who is a wealthy corporate lawyer for skeezy businesses like payday loan companies, has been harassing Gallus Mag with legal threats over certain blog posts written by other radical feminists that Gallus has reprinted (with permission) on her site.

Gallus Mag is a working class lesbian radical feminist, and even if you don’t like her (I love her, for the record) I would hope that everyone can see what a massive problem it is for a wealthy lawyer who has no actual legal claim over the words and work of other women to go around threatening working class feminists with costly lawsuits and other measures over reprinting articles… which is, after all, how the majority of online radical feminist spaces have operated over the 10 years I have been involved with them.

You can find further information about this on Gender Trender.

I know it’s hard to just write her off because of the amount of hate that she gets from…certain demographics…but Cathy Brennan is a fuckin cancer on this movement and has been since she entered the scene just a few short years ago. I’ve been around for 10 years and never heard of her until she popped up out of nowhere and suddenly became the MOST well known online radical feminist.

So please, just take a minute to consider WHY a wealthy white lawyer is so capable of inserting herself at the center of a movement that should be prioritizing women of color and poor women, and to consider the consequences of this person being able to use her considerable class and educational privilege as a beat stick against other women in the movement.

[snowflakeespecial]

What do you think of the website gendertrender? I find it hard to believe you can stomach some of the comments on there.

I know it shocks people but Gendertrender is my favorite blog about trans issues. See my GT appreciation post, and some other posts answering questions similar to yours. In case you don't read those: certainly some of the language and comments are shocking, but in my mind the importance of what's being said outweighs personal feels.

Even though I'm a reformist and I believe that trans politics can be realigned in a way that isn't anti-female, and that the paradigms of transition can be modified so that they cause less harm to gender-variant people, I think we're going to need a huge change - basically from the ground up.

Every single one of the trans writers who has published a book about trans issues for the last 15 years has made the situation worse. Clearly, more of the same isn't going to help. And unfortunately, there are very few trans women who have anything reasonable to say about trans issues at this point. Everyone is very deeply caught up in this female penis trans delusion.

While Gallus has been very clear that her blog is primarily for women who are effected by trans politics, gt has also served a very important secondary function as a wake-up call to trans women who aren't 100% caught up in the trans delusion. That's the purpose it served for me, anyway!

From within the trans community, it's exceedingly difficult to name reality - you don't want to "throw your sisters under the bus", since "there but for the grace of god go I" - but we've reached the point where trans women routinely make death and rape threats against women, call women they don't like "transmisogynistic cunts" while proclaiming they're "more feminist" than the women they're slurring, and trans women universally support other trans women who murder women born female over the female victims. (Kosilek, anyone?) Not to mention, all this "I'm a woman if I say I am even if I'm living my life as a man" bullshit.

Fuck that. Trans politics has literally been taken over by a bunch of male-entitled, male-supremacist assholes. Gallus is 100% on point that transgender activism is a men's sexual rights movement. It wasn't always that way, but it is now. Thanks Gallus for naming reality. And thanks to everyone who is involved in the conversation about trying to change this.