Let's Not Celebrate TERF Week

Hurray for TERF Week!  Another celebration of rhetoric over compassion.  For those of you in the real world, TERFs are Trans Excluding Radical Feminists.

I know.  In the day-to-day, what’s the purpose of excluding trans folk?  Well, let me tell you, more than you’d ever expect.  Thank God for TERFs who are fast overtaking Anne Coulter in The Big Crazed One category.

Okay, here’s the story.  Let’s take Kellie Maloney, a recent celebrity transition.  In hir sixties, Frank Maloney was a patriarch of an incredibly macho field.  Pugilism, for fecksake!  Which brought hir happiness, right?  Nope.  Frank Maloney had one more goal to accomplish in life. 

The rape of feminism.

Yes, what you read is what I wrote.  Kellie Maloney, a figure in the public eye, a person of privilege and substance tossed all that away, underwent nasty medical procedures and risked ostracisation by not only family, but the Daily Mail in order to what?  Rape feminism.

Rape.

Feminism.

Trans-advocacy aside, isn’t that a big fuck-you to any and all survivors of sexual assault? 

So what about trans-men, you say.  Totally crushed by the patriarchy.  A case of, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  

Right.

(For more hilarity, Google Cathy Brennan or TERF.)

Have any of these TERFS ever sat beside a trans-person before, during and after a transition?  Not saying a word, mind you, but actually experienced what is required?  Actually witnessed the utter misery that comes with being trans in western society?  The rejection.  The violence.  The hindrance to employment.  The banjaxed sex life.  The emotional zap of having two sets of hormones doing the jerk in your system until some medical person somewhere decides to fix all that with a very painful surgery.

Trans-folk are commando humanists. 

So many trans-women go stealth into male lives, become boxers, bomber pilots, racing drivers, non-paediatric doctors, mechanics, bronco busters, infantry.  They knock everyone’s socks off in these fields and then say casually, Oh by the way, I’m a woman. 

How cool is that?

So many trans-men do the same thing disguised as women, go into professions usually restricted to penis holders, survive an uphill battle filled with tomato-throwing spectators to prove they’re better than cis male peers.  When they say, Oh by the way, I’m a guy, they’re told, forget how shitty you were treated; being male’s the real reason you succeeded.  And while you’re at it, stop emoting.  Toughen up, dude. (Can I see your penis?)

Trans lives show us that the arbitrary and artificial definitions we put on people, whether for gender or race or their favourite cigar, these definitions are false.  By choosing to live, whether stealth or fully transitioned, trans folk lead us to a more genuine society where each and every person stands a better chance of reaching their potential, contributing to the greater whole. 

Stop throwing ill-informed rhetoric at other human beings and learn from these acts of heroism. 

Radicalised

I learned a new word this fortnight.  Radicalise.  I haven’t looked the word up, but from its usage in news reports, the definition is, to become scary to us.  It implies a metamorphosis from human to monster by a force beyond our comprehension.  Sorcery.  I don’t mean to trivialise what’s happened in Boston, Newtown, Columbine, Utoya.  Rather, I fear that being blind to our participation in these incidents is dangerous to everyone.

El Punko getting radical

Not that we’re to blame for Boston, Newtown, Columbine, and Utoya.  No.  The perpetrators are to blame for the choices they made.  But terrorism is a complex phenomenon and we’re giving it a simple solution – Get a bigger gun.  We may still need that gun.  I’m not going to argue with that.  But you don’t teach a child not to hit by hitting her.  When a 19 year old boy kills an 8 year old, there has to be something more than the big gun in our solution. 

How did he become radicalised?  He’s as American as I am. 

I’ve introduced you to Diana Afanador’s monsters before.  Here’s another one with two heads.  A two spirit, in a way.  Something which has been subjected to several forms of sorcery and has divided itself in order to survive.  It’s these two heads which enable people to say in confusion, but he’s as American as I am, when in truth, he simply didn’t feel he could show the part of himself that wasn’t like you.  While we all have persona we drag out in different situations, managing two heads is quite a feat and I would postulate, damaging to the monster in question. 

Monster
by Diana Afanador

I was raised Catholic in Appalachia, the Bible Belt.  The Mecca of the Born Again Protestant, for my non-American readers.  Some children in our small rural community weren’t allowed to play with me because of my religion.  A classmate once asked the teacher about the Catholic practice of killing babies.  There was even a social studies teacher who wouldn’t give Catholic students a grade higher than C.  We were the one true faith, however, so I considered these people misguided. 

I moved north for tertiary education, where being Catholic wasn’t such a big deal.  But in the north, coming from below the Mason-Dixon meant I was a whole crate load of negative things, mostly amoral and some even criminal.  I noticed that the bad and the stupid on TV were people with my accent even when they lived in California.  There was no One-True category to protect me from feeling Less-Than.

Then I emigrated.  Having an American accent in Galway equated to wearing a bulls-eye and carrying a sign that said, Toss all your shit here.  I loved Irish trad music but learned quickly that my accent brought out the worst in the Galwegians, so in order to hear the music, I’d sit in my local and not speak.  At work, the Yank bashing was pervasive and when I complained, I was told by the director that I was a super power.  Our agency had a diversity audit and met in discussion groups with the auditors to share our experiences.  I shocked my colleagues by repeating the things they’d said to me.  But, but, but, it was a joke!  What a begrudger! 

Or had I become radicalised? 

In my next stop, Glasgow, I was pretty much allowed to be American and Appalachian as long as I didn’t admit to being raised Catholic.  Here, however, I was warned to watch myself around my Asian colleagues who were uber sensitive to racial slurs.  To be honest, after a lifetime of being Other-ed, to be told about people who weren’t going to take it any longer, that was like waving bacon in front of the Big Nosed Dog. 

It’s natural to hide what you value when other people want to destroy it.

Don’t misunderstand.  I had friends, good friends, in all those locations.  And, I was still myself– a self I liked – but part of me stayed on the inside.  I’d learned not to show my true face or use my true voice – I even toned down that accent of mine.  Although I still have a distinctively American twang, my friends think it’s a great party trick if I slip into Appalachian.  Do it again, Lora, as if being myself isn’t real, but a form of entertainment.

I’ve not included what being a woman is like nor the fact I’m mixed race – most people don’t look past my Welsh grandfather’s nose and the henna to see my Leni Lenape eyes and cheeks bones.  Even including those experiences, the bigotry I’ve endured, though uncomfortable, is small fry.  Let’s try getting cosy with the big cheese.  Let’s say that you’re blond with a London accent, C of E, and enjoy Morris dancing.  The latter might bring a bit of ribbing in the UK, but the rest is pretty much acceptable here.  So pack your bags.  I’m moving you to another dimension. 

London’s been taken over by the Westboro Baptist Church and you’ve left for political asylum.  You now live in a world where every villain or bigot on telly has a London accent.  The non-villain fictional Londoners don’t so much live in family groups as cesspools of sexism and domestic abuse.  There are protests whenever Anglicans want to build a place of worship, and existing churches are subjected to vandalism; the police can’t seem to help.  You’re routinely pulled out of boarding queues by homeland security for cavity searches until your name appears on a no-fly list.  Your vicar sister-in-law has been detained for six years and you don’t know where.  People in public places stare at your blond hair suspiciously, mothers edge their children away from you, old men cross to the other side of the street.  Your Morris dancing costume has been made illegal and all blond London Anglicans are accused of uniformly sexualising your male children.  You endure daily verbal abuse and periodic physical abuse from complete strangers; the police still can’t help you.  Super powers want to attack London to liberate your men from misandry.  And every single time some act of violence occurs, brown eyes look suspiciously toward the Archbishop of Canterbury.

If you think this is amusing, it isn’t meant to be.  This is reality for certain groups of people.  They live in a cage of being hated and feared without cause.  So damaging is this, in fact, that there may come a time when they say, fuck it.  And fuck you as well. 

Anger is a normal response to being treated like crap.

When American as I am people become violent, we look for the OTHER that RADICALISED the begrudger, who, by the way, is a LOSER whom we took under our wing and offered great opportunities to, and look at him bite the hand that fed him.  Radicalised.  By extremists who hate us, hate humanity, do vile things in the name of sorcery and call it religion.  Inbred BABY KILLERS who can’t take a joke. 

We never look at ourselves and say, you know what?  We could have done better.  Not ‘we’ being social services, immigration, the FBI.  We, being the social studies teacher.  My boss in Galway.  Myself, when the Asian guy on the train drops his backpack in the seat next to me and walks away.

Not-So-Secret-Self

An Irish friend of mine once said that I find blue in a Galway sky.  I do hide behind optimism.  In the southern American states, women of my generation were taught to smile smile smile!  I suspect that the end goal was to raise compliant and congenial young women.  A lot of the Southern women I know, including myself, smile for reasons other than compliance.  Watch any episode of the Closer and you’ll know what I mean. 

I’m not about to start a campaign against the Smile Oppression of Southern women.  The smile is a particular tool from a particular sub-culture.  We all choose our battles and in those battles, we choose our weapons.  Every culture and sub-culture hands out disguises to hide our secret selves.  Mine apparently has great legs.

In a dream, my husband drops me off at the Success Station.  That’s something like the train station, but the only destination is Success.  Actually, it isn’t a station at all, but a building ledge.  I look down.  Rather than the height impressing (terrifying, paralysing) me, I notice my legs coming out of a pair of black Bermuda shorts.  They’re male legs, all toned and hairy, quite attractive if they weren’t on a woman.  I point them out to my husband with the concern they’ll be noticed in Success.  Perhaps I should go back and put on trousers.  My husband says people aren’t going to notice.  I look at my legs and think, should I care if they notice?  Perhaps I’ll go with these legs to Success and hope that people do.

Why is our first reaction to hide our secret self?

I read an article today by Lidia Yuknavitch that starts with a story about being in a bar with friends and a man she respects tells women to stop with the ‘sob stories’, aka The Sad Shit That Happened.  No need to go on and on until male eyes roll back into male heads.  The word is out.  Men get it.  Sad Shit won’t happen again.  In other words, will you shut the fuck up so I can have a pint in peace?  People laughed at what he said.

http://therumpus.net/2012/08/explicit-violence/

We hide our secret selves because people react badly when we don’t.

When my husband and I married a little over five years ago, his ex-wife started an harassment campaign.  It’s really difficult to get protection from that type thing.  The victim has to show he’s reasonable in his attempts to stop the harassment before the courts will step in.  What anyone who’s worked with domestic abuse will tell you is this period of reasonable behaviour is On The Job training for the perpetrator who learns how to manipulate the system.  We eventually had to move, my husband giving up a job he’d held for twelve years.  The harassment continues but at a distance.  My husband’s friends were more embarrassed than supportive.  Their reactions went from not wanting to be involved to saying she did this because he was too soft.  He learned to not talk about the most distressing thing in his life to the people who could have acted as support. 

Why is it that normal, respectable people who contribute to society don’t want to know?  A friend of mine who’d been raised in a Irish industrial school, went back as an adult and talked to a man who’d lived next to the school.  The man said he could hear the boys screaming but thought the Brothers knew what they were doing.  Are we that deaf, that children screaming in fear and pain on a daily basis, aren’t heard?  Or is it a case of Sad Shit overload? 

The mentor for my recent writing project said that my theme of alienation and isolation got in the way of what she thought the play was about.  I thought the play was about alienation and isolation.  While the mentor is probably addressing my technical ability, what if she’s not?  What if we as a species have begun to say, please don’t tell me anything more?  Yet if we can’t listen, then we're reduced to a group of secret selves sharing the same space. 

When I lived in Ireland, there was a small group of American ex-pats that hung together for social survival.  There was one particularly arrogant man who undoubtedly would have preferred all women have their tongues removed and perhaps a mandatory lobotomy as well.  He once called me stupid for not agreeing with him.  Having an enemy in a group as small as ours was like having a serial killer in a life boat.  I pulled out my best Southern smile and said, then you should be kind to me.  I had let go of the rope in his tug of war.  For as long as we knew each other afterwards, he treated me with respect.

Life isn’t black and white.  Look for the colour.  In my Irish example, I could be a little smarter and the man could be a little less arrogant.  My husband’s friends could see him (and themselves) as intelligent, skilled and successful but also able to be victimised.  The men in Yuknavitch’s bar can and do treat women as objects and yes, the women there can and do use their dis-empowerment as assault weapons.  Just like my Southern smile. 

We are capable of doing and experiencing horrific things.  Let’s make our secret selves not so secret.