Intersectional Activism

A blog that addresses a variety of oppressions

[transfeministactivist]

The infuriating reality of different perspectives

In 2013, I was sexually assaulted by a stranger on a bus who initiated sexual contact with me over my protest. This isn’t uncommon. One survey found 43.9% of women have experienced non-rape sexual assault. (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6308a1.htm?s_cid=ss6308a1_e) 21.1% of those incidents are from strangers. (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6308a1.htm?s_cid=ss6308a1_e#Table3) To be clear, the reason for the terminology rape is defined as requiring penetration. Sexual assault merely requires unwanted sexual contact. There’s at least some evidence that this distinction is based more on heteronormative assumptions about sexuality than on how those of us who are assaulted experience it. For example, at least one study found that PTSD symptoms in those who experienced penetrative sexual assault were no worse than those who experienced other forms of unwelcome sexual contact (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6308a1.htm?s_cid=ss6308a1_e). I personally had PTSD before I had been assaulted. I’d been raped by an intimate partner. This too is not uncommon for women like me. Transgender people experience around a 50% rate of having experienced sexual violence, and many of us having experienced repeated sexual violence. (http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rebecca_Stotzer/publication/222055542_Violence_against_transgender_people_A_review_of_United_States_data/links/0deec52578acf33ed7000000.pdf). For me, in many ways being assaulted by a stranger in public was worse than being raped by my ex-boyfriend. Before, my primary fears had been of violence in private, something I had at least some control over. I could not date, or not date men. Both could reduce my risk. But after, it seemed like anyone who found me attractive could just walk up and assault me.  I dropped out of public society for months. I was scared. When I would try to go out, sometimes I would find myself shaking uncontrollably. Anytime I was startled, a dog barked, a siren went off, whatever, my fight or flight response would be triggered and I would be sent scurrying for some place to breathe deeply for a few minutes or where I could swallow a Xanax. I dropped out of most public activities, dropped out of work, and hid. I couldn’t handle the fear that any man on a whim could hurt me like that again. Eventually, I found ways to reassure myself enough to get out in public again. I started carrying pepper spray and a stun gun. I got a tattoo of a rose growing through my arm that I hoped would send the signal that I was a badass lady not to be fucked with. I wore stud bracelets on my arms with pointy spikes so that I would literally stab people if they got too close. Instead of smiling at men, I learned to glare at them so they would stay away and not assume I was somehow flirting with them. During this process, this process of learning to stay safe, the most infuriating part was dealing with the men who did not get these signals. I still, as I had been got complimented on my ass, breasts, tattoo, whatever caught their fancy. I still got asked out. Each incident was yet another fight or flight moment for me. Each time I had to face the question of what would happen if they didn’t take no for an answer, just like the guy who had assaulted me before hadn’t. Each sent me home to breathe, enjoy some Xanax, and hermit for a few days to gather my energy for the trip outside once more. I cursed these men. What made them think that just because I walked out the door I might be interested in them? What made them think this is how I would even want to meet men? In an era of OKCupid where I can get dates exclusively with 90%+ matches, why would I take random dude off the street? If they wanted to date women, why not go to a bar, a speed dating event, Tinder, Craigslist, Fetlife, OKCupid, or any of the number of other venues where women are fine being approached and sexualized? Why make my life harder? I didn’t have a good answer to these questions and as I became more confident in my safety and reemerged from hiding, they became less and less a part of my thoughts. Until last Tuesday. After a few months struggle I’d found a group in public where I wasn’t being hit on, and where I didn’t have to deal with dumb remarks about women making up sexual harassment claims. It was at this group the issue reemerged. C. an 18 year old, talked about how decided one day to walk up and ask out every woman he came across on a college campus. He had decided this was a good idea to build up his tolerance to rejection. 

C. and I quickly got into and argument over this, my viewpoint to the effect that this constituted unwelcome harassment of women and he should never do it again, his that “of course he would stop” when they said no and that it “wouldn’t bother him” if a woman approached him and did that.  The conversation reached it’s climax with him saying something like “So what, if I fell down the stairs as a kid everyone should be prohibited from talking about stairs around me?”

Triggered, shaky once more, I made a speedy exit. C. was a smart, likable guy, and it was frustrating. The basic issue was a difference in life experiences. To me, rape and sexual assault was a very real thing that might repeat itself. 50% of my trans community has faced it, along with many women I know. A guy asking me out of a whim would immediately send me into an adrenaline rushed state of wondering if my “no” would be followed by force from him.

To C. it seemed a remote possibility, akin to the idea that some child would be traumatized by stairs. Not only was it not serious enough for him to change his behavior, it wasn’t serious enough for him to know, or care, that that comparison might be wildly offensive to me.

There isn’t necessarily much of a point to this story, other than that it sucks to be a transgender rape survivor in a culture dominated by social norms constructed by men. C.’s behavior is well-within the bounds of what our culture allows for, and there’s no rule that the culture has to know, or care, about my fear, pain, and struggle to reconnect to a world where my reality can be turned upside down by getting on the wrong bus, at the wrong time, and sitting next to the wrong man. Writing about it won’t necessarily change anything. But not writing about it definitely won’t, so here we are. Guys like C. can only remain clueless if women like me refuse to talk.   

[transfeministactivist]

Effectiveness

I don’t write much on here. But every once in a while I have a desire to collect my thoughts. 

Over the past couple weeks the idea of how to be effective in dealing with oppression has come up in a couple different ways in my life, through a couple different partners. It also comes up a lot online, on Facebook I see a lot of anger out there, often justified anger, but anger that to me feels directed in suboptimal ways.

I think it’s natural to feel a sense of powerlessness in this world. To take myself as an example, I care a lot about species extinction. The ongoing mass extinction caused by global climate change and other environmental disasters is a huge problem, and one that is largely outside of my control. Realistically, how many bottles I recycle or eating less meat isn’t going to be outcome determinative on this one. A lot of problems are like this, where the individual action of one person is insufficient to change a system that’s causing problems.

So what’s left for a person to do?

One answer might be nothing. Accept that you can’t change the world, and just try to enjoy yourself while it crumbles. But while I think this is a logically coherent answer, I think for a lot of people it’s infeasible. It’s impossible to just turn off the part of yourself that cares about these things.

The alternative I feel like is working towards building movements. Interacting with people who interact with people, and so on, that create change on a larger scale.

And for me, it seems like the first place to work on movement building is oneself. A lot of people come into activism with problems. Because many of us have suffered, we have empathy for those who suffer, and that can be a great strength. But the pain we’ve gone through can also be a weakness. Pain can leave people irritable, easily triggered by people that disagree with them, and prone to black and white thinking. I’ve dealt with all of these problems myself.

It can also be easy to develop a negatively biased world view, because often the world is pretty terrible. That makes it all the more important to not see it as worse than it really is.

The self in relation to others though is a particularly important nexus of change though, because people place more weight on actions that cause them to feel negative emotions than positive ones. If I snap at a man and call him as an oppressor, or dismiss his ideas by telling him to “check his privilege” that’s damage that’s not easily undone. Fairly or not, he will often judge me for that one moment of weakness and judge the issue I’m talking about similarly. He won’t necessarily understand that comes from a place of pain from repeated abuse from a subset of men.

So I feel like the importance of building love, tolerance, and understanding, not just for other oppressed members, but also for people who may not immediately understand our cause is undervalued. 

After the self, building relationships seems next most important. Building strong bonds that help insulate ourselves from individual stressors, triggers etc. and build our ability to effectively share ideas, and help others build themselves up and their capacity to influence others in a positive way.

It may sound really sappy, but I think building love is the ultimate way to build a movement, to change the world, and it’s something that is so fundamental that it’s often not talked about or thought about as much as it should be.

[smiliu-deactivated20150419]

People with psych labels suffer discrimination: Mental health professionals are often guilty of such prejudice By Monica Cassani, Beyond Meds

People with psychiatric labels suffer discrimination that is not only demeaning but can also be dangerous.

A 2007 UK study by the Royal College of Psychiatrists revealed that prejudicial treatment of mentally ill patients extends to physical medical care; they receive poorer quality of care and doctors spend less time with them possibly leading to higher rates of death and preventable disease. Though tragic, the more scandalous aspect of the phenomena is the fact that mental health professionals apply the same prejudices to those whom they attempt to treat. The worst thing someone in mental distress can experience is dehumanizing treatment from other human beings who are supposed to be caring for them. I suppose as long as we continue to label people as ill and abnormal due to mental distress this will continue. We create a class of people who aren’t quite like everyone else.

I’ve written about my experience, as a mental health professional and as a person labeled with a serious mental illness quite often on Beyond Meds. I can attest to the fact that depending on how I choose to identify myself with other professionals, I am treated radically different. Generally speaking, when I identify as a social worker, rather than the author of Beyond Meds, – which is identified commonly as a “patient” blog, – I am received with respect by mainstream and alternative professionals both. I am also engaged more deeply and with more interest. On the other hand, when I identify primarily as the author of the blog but also a mental health professional, I am more likely to be treated dismissively. Because those professionals who profess to share my interest in radically changing the system or using alternatives to psychiatry exhibit this bigotry as well, it only reinforces how deeply entrenched these prejudices are across all sectors of society. Clearly what professionals across the board remember once it’s disclosed is that I was a user of psychiatry: a mentally ill person. I don’t consider myself as such — not anymore, but that doesn’t seem to matter even, quite often, among those professionals who profess not to believe in mental illness!

My online experience of identifying as patient vs. social worker, therefore, offers me a unique perspective. The sad fact is that the majority of those in mental distress are subject to the care of mental health professionals who consider them inherently less than equal. This is not generally recognized because on a conscious level people believe they really care. But well-meaning and acting with prejudice are unfortunately not mutually exclusive. I don’t know how one extracts this insidious form of bigotry. People don’t see it in themselves. How do we help them see? One way, of course, is to begin to courageously find and root out our own bigotries. All human beings have them.

Peer counseling, too, is a concept that may help bridge the divide between clinician and patient. When we meet those we are helping from a place of vulnerability and equality, we can bring about healing. I’ve noted that once I publicly acknowledged my frailty, my humanity, the healing relationship often became much stronger. Some of the connections and healing relationships I’ve made via my work at Beyond Meds have been astonishingly deeper and more honest than any work I ever did as a social worker when I relegated parts of myself as off limits to my clients. I was taught to separate myself this way as a professional.

Authenticity is trained right out of mental health professionals and instead a vague and subtle superiority replaces it. How do I know this? Because I too was tainted and saw it in myself, as a professional, even as I saw it in my colleagues around me. I also experienced it as a patient/client, I was actively made ‘other’ by the people I saw professionally. These parts – that of the knowing superior vs the ignorant inferior – are in all of us too, regardless of training! I suggest those in mental health circles who have taken up the mantle of helper become acutely conscious of this so that they might minimize the harm it can cause in relationship with others.

Also, I think that the concept of being a peer can be embraced by professionals. As human beings we are all peers. We are all, every one of us, in this wonderful and mysterious thing called life. And all of us are struggling in various ways to make sense of it. Is there really such a difference between someone trained as a clinician and a client? I think not!  If those trained to help were also trained to remember that their role as helper was because they have much more in common with their patients/clients than not, then we will start to see a flattening of hierarchy.

The fact is, we all have incredible capacities and learn very particular things in our own individual idiosyncratic ways. Most of it is not learned in school or training regardless of level of education.

This begs the question: Is it possible that identifying with a client might actually be a good thing? This is surely exactly why ”peer counselors” are effective.

Clinicians are trained to never, ever identify with the client. Why? What is wrong with recognizing shared humanity, even a weakness or flaw, and bonding in that? In providing a safe container from that understanding? The mere instruction to avoid such intimacy at all costs seems like a violent denial of oneself and clients both. It seems indicative of a deep fear of ones own dark parts. How do we help others find their way out of the dark if we hide from our own darkness? Such identification may not always be appropriate to share, no doubt, it may also not be present with many clients. But when it is present and appropriate to share from such a place, with adequate boundaries in place, it can be an incredibly healing experience for both parties. I believe that all our psyches contain a full spectrum of the content of the human psyche within it… Some people experience more or less of this or that, but we’ve all got it in there. Healing ourselves and others both require deep familiarity with all its parts. This is not understood particularly well among most mental health professionals, in my opinion.

Most mental health professionals not only know next to nothing about the deepest part of the psyche, they are terrified of it, adding another layer of obfuscation to the problem. When people in mental distress are terrified the last thing they need is to be met by a “healer” who is equally terrified of the clients thoughts and behavior.

Changing our system of care for those in mental distress requires deactivating the knee-jerk response of professionals and non-professionals alike towards those in psychic pain. Where we start with this is not always clear. I suppose I’m doing my bit here and all those conscious of these issues do what makes sense in their lives. There are schools of psychology that are very adept at thinking about these issues, but most training dwells on “abnormal psychology” thus the sense of “other” becomes a conditioned process as students learn about what is not normal in the human psyche. There are other ways of understanding unusual behaviors without considering it grossly pathological. For example in cases of trauma and abuse unusual behaviors may be highly adaptive. Then healing involves coming to understand how these behaviors or thinking patterns might have once served someone and how one might let them go now that they do not.

Needless to say, I’ve made some sweeping generalizations here and thus must add that there are indeed many wonderful healing people in the world. Ultimately what is at stake here is becoming conscious of the nature of our humanity. I am blessed to know many such people, lay and professional both, who are conscious of these issues. Still, it’s very hard for people lost in mental distress to find resources that include deeply healing professionals and so the people who need healing the most often do not find them. How do we change that? I suppose it starts with us going ever deeper into ourselves and lovingly, with compassion, helping others do the same.

Right now our system of psychiatric care is very toxic. Educating people by example is where we must start.

For more mental health news, Click Here to access the Serious Mental Illness Blog

[smiliu-deactivated20150419]

Shooting Unfairly Links Violence with Mental Illness — Again By Joseph Shapiro, Shots: Health News from NPR

Experts in mental health say (even as more facts about Lopez emerge) that it’s highly unlikely the violence could have been predicted. Just raising that question, psychologists and psychiatrists say, shows how much Americans misunderstand the link between mental illness and violence.

With the Army’s disclosure that Army Spc. Ivan Lopez was being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder before he went on a shooting rampage Wednesday, there were once again questions about whether the Army could have prevented the violence at Fort Hood.

Experts in mental health say (even as more facts about Lopez emerge) that it’s highly unlikely the violence could have been predicted. Just raising that question, psychologists and psychiatrists say, shows how much Americans misunderstand the link between mental illness and violence.

One national survey in 2006 found that most Americans — 60 percent — believed people with schizophrenia were likely to be violent. But the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders are not violent. In fact, another study found they are far more likely to be the victims of violence, and that 1 in 4 experience violence every year.

Dr. Carl Bell, a psychiatrist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says being able to predict who will be violent in advance “is impossible.”

"The reality," Bell says, "is that prediction of violence is only useful in an immediate clinical situation: Someone comes in and says, ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ Then you take their word for it, and can predict violence in the short term. But you cannot use that to predict violence in the long term."

Army officials said Thursday that Lopez had seen a psychiatrist in the past month, but there were no indications that he was suicidal.

Dr. Thomas Grieger, a clinical and forensic psychiatrist who worked in military hospitals for three decades, says that one reason violence is so hard to predict is because it is so rare. “Acts of extreme violence and acts against yourself — suicide attempts — are so infrequent that it really becomes almost impossible to predict when any individual or situation is going to escalate to that,” Grieger says. “So many factors come to play: interpersonal relationships, difficulty in the workplace, issues at home, career issues and true mental health issues like depression, bipolar disorder or psychosis.”

Medications are another complicating factor — which ones and whether a soldier was taking them. For many troops back from deployment, multiple medications are prescribed to deal with pain, mental health issues and other problems. Army officials say Lopez had been prescribed Ambien, a drug to help him sleep, and other medications to treat anxiety and depression.

Still, there are a few factors that are more likely than others to be present among people who do become violent. The best predictor of future violence is whether a person with a psychiatric illness has been arrested or acted violently in the past. And people with substance abuse problems, on top of mental illness, are also at a greater risk of committing violence.

Bell says there’s growing study of “mass murder preceding suicide.” In these cases, someone who goes on a shooting spree wants to die, but wants to do so in a way that gets a lot of attention.

"There’s a huge dynamic in suicide where people get angry because they’re hurt," Bell says. "They say, ‘I’ll fix you. I will kill myself and I’ll get even with you.’ What better way to get even (and make a big splash) than to kill a bunch of people before you kill yourself?" It’s been reported that Lopez shot himself, bringing his shooting spree to an end, after he was confronted by a police officer.

This was the second mass shooting at Fort Hood in less than five years. Last year, Maj. Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was sentenced to death for killing 13 people and wounding 32 others in the November 2009 shooting that remains the worst mass murder at a military installation.

It’s more reasonable to question whether the Army could have prevented Hasan’s violence — but not because of mental illness. The FBI had seen email that Hasan had sent to the website of terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, expressing his own sympathy toward suicide bombers.

And, as my NPR colleague Daniel Zwerdling reported, Hasan’s supervisor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was so concerned about Hasan’s “pattern of poor judgment and a lack of professionalism” that he wrote a memo sharply criticizing the doctor. That kind of document could have ended a military career.

But instead, the Army — with a shortage of psychiatrists and a flood of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health problems — kept Hasan working.

After the 2009 shootings, the Pentagon commissioned a report on how to prevent a repeat of the shootings. The report made 47 recommendations for how to improve security. One was to improve training so that military personnel could better “identify contributing factors and behavioral indicators of potentially violent actors.” Another was simply to realize that its own soldiers could be a threat. Another was to find ways to restrict the carrying of personal firearms on military bases. Lopez, it’s been reported, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound from a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol. The gun, according to media reports, was purchased at the same Killeen, Texas, store where Hasan bought his pistol.

For more mental health news, Click Here to access the Serious Mental Illness Blog

[anarcho-queer]

[assangistan-deactivated20200803]

via anarcho-queer:

WikiLeaks: Obama Administration Pressured Haiti’s President To Lower Minimum Wage

A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour.

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable:

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).

Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year … As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year.

Thanks to U.S. intervention, the minimum was raised only to 31 cents.

The revelation of US support for low wages in Haiti’s assembly zones was in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by the transparency group WikiLeaks. As part of a collaboration with Haïti Liberté, The Nation is publishing English-language articles based on those cables.

[stlacroix]

I’m not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody’s boot on my neck

Kathleen Hanna (via ohioshapedheart)

[marslipstick-deactivated2014081]

Thus, we grow up longing for male approval because men are the ones in power. Many women compete over things they think men value, such as looking sexy. On the other hand, according to the stereotypes of masculinity, a man can be self-assured whether or not women value him.

Catfight by Leora Tanenbaum (via marslipstick)

[transfeministactivist]

Intersectionality and Social Movements

An underrated and often avoided issue in social and activist movements is the issue of intersectionality. Intersectionality is a concept involving respecting that multiple forms of oppression exist, and respecting the oppression others go through.

This is a very important issue for activist groups representing oppressed minorities for many reasons, but one of the biggest is this: oppressed minorities need allies to affect social change. If a movement wants allies, a useful place to find them is by getting involved in the causes of others, or at least exercising a modicum of sensitivity towards others with different experiences.

In my experience, I have seen or heard of several oppressed groups attack each other. I have seen trans people, feminists, and gun control activists attack the mental disability community. I have seen trans people attack sex workers. I have seen gay people attack trans and polyamorous people. I have seen mentally disabled persons attack asexuals.

As someone who lies at the intersection of multiple oppressed groups, this kind of fighting starts to turn me off of the endeavor of social change entirely.

When I was doing death penalty work in North Carolina, the head of my organization told me something simple. "If you want other people to care about your cause, care about theirs."   

I think a very basic lesson that many groups could learn is simply this: If you don't want to be oppressed, don't oppress others.