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. 

Bootleg Shame

Whitney Thore

Whitney Thore is a dancer who, in her late teens, inexplicably gained a lot of weight.  By the time she received a medical explanation, the emotional damage had been done.  She did overcome it, though.  Still obese, she puts videos of herself on You Tube and does street dancing to promote positive body image.  In this interview, she said she didn’t know loving oneself could be so subversive for a fat person. 

http://uk.screen.yahoo.com/video/playlist/barcroft-media-videos/fat-dancer-campaigning-body-positivity-105804392.html?vp=1

I postulate that society considers self love subversive for all of us.

I thought myself clever, giving up self doubt for Lent, even concluded in my last post that it made me a better person.  As the Lent Prohibition progresses, however, shame speak-easies crop up all over my psyche, remind me of how many times I fell flat on my face.  It’s actually shocking, the negative messages contained in one human skull, and how few come from actual Bad Things I Have Done. 

F’rinstance. 

After a party we gave, a guest apologised for not spending more time with me.  I smiled that sweet smile Appalachians give when someone says something stupid.  Although he’d spent most of the party in another room, he’d managed to criticise my weight three times. 

His rude comments, exhaled breath that I inhaled. 

Speak not of Tuilleries

I run into a friend after spending my birthday in Paris.  She pushes my trip aside so she can talk about her life.  Not particularly interesting aspects of her life.  The same old, same old.  Whether she considers me a bore or is a crap friend, her message is clear. 

Shut up, Lora.

I am silenced.  I am erased. 

Then there’s the mother of three special needs children that folk around here say mollycoddles her kids.  They also call a man weak because his mentally ill ex-wife keeps taking him to court.  This mother and ex-husband, victims of circumstance yet unable to evoke sympathy from their neighbours.

Why?

We’re not weak.  We don’t molly coddle.  Who cares if you went to Paris when I had a nice ramble across the moors? 

Too fatolduglyskinny

The unfortunate consequence is that some people stop talking because we can’t be bothered to listen.  Other people won’t be in family photos because they’ve been told too many times how fatolduglyskinny they are.  Folk in dire circumstances stop asking for help because they’ve come to realise it was their fault anyway.

This has been one of my most difficult Lents, trying to fight the demon Self Doubt.  I’m not able to say what is true about myself and what is protective salt thrown over someone’s shoulder to land in my open wound.  For the moment, I feel displaced from my life, from my Self. 

Silenced.

  

St Nick, Suicide, Lord Mayors

Today is the Feast of St Nicholas.  In our house, St Nick fills newly polished shoes with treats and puts them up somewhere high so the Big Nose Dog can’t plunder them before we do.  My parents’ explanation for this tradition was quite jolly, fit for young children.  Recently, the Butler and I came across a slightly less festive version at Mt Grace Priory, told by historian John White in the character of Mr Meakin. 

Mr Meakin

 According to Meakin, Nikólaos was a wealthy Greek who lived during the 4^th century in what is now Turkey.  Among his extended family were three sisters in poor circumstances.  The common solution for young women without a dowry was to put them to work as prostitutes.  To save his kinswomen, Nikólaos dropped coins down the chimney and into their stockings hung by the fire to dry.  An odd way to deliver the goods, but it got the desired results.

A few of John White's characters
 http://www.tutburycastle.com/?page_id=4021

More recently, there was a woman in Florida, Gretchen Molannens who suffered Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder and couldn’t work.  She exhausted her appeals for a denied disability claim, was refused Medicare because she’d inherited her parents’ house, and was dependent on her boyfriend to pay her bills.  Gretchen felt too embarrassed to discuss her condition with family and friends, and as a result, became isolated by their criticism of her lifestyle.

http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/gretchen-molannens-legacy-suffering-suicide-and-a-journalists/2154587

Gretchen Molannens

A Tampa Bay Times journalist, Lenora LaPeter Anton, wrote an article about Gretchen which prompted offers of free medical and legal help.  However, a few days before that article went on line, Gretchen killed herself.  Her boyfriend didn’t find Gretchen for two days and Anton didn’t hear of the suicide until after the article was published.

My last story is about a priest who, during a funeral mass, asked the congregation to pray for Cork’s former lord mayor.  A non sequitur at a funeral, you might think, but not a bizarre request unless you know that the former lord mayor was on trial for sexually assaulting a teenage girl, starting when she was thirteen. 

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/colette-browne/would-you-walk-out-of-mass-if-a-priest-prayed-for-a-sex-attacker-29787078.html

The article referenced above asked if we would have walked out of Mass, had we been there.  Probably most of us wouldn’t because of social constraints, respect for the primary mourners or because we were mourners ourselves.  Which is why this was such a perfect situation for doing what that priest did, the sly bastard.  

Here’s the cognitive dissonance for me:  those 4th century sisters, Gretchen, and that teenage sexual abuse victim lived in cultures that devalued them, yet individual members of those cultures were moved to help them.  So, who made up these barbaric societal rules and why are they allowed to continue?

This week in the UK, we’ve had the Autumn Report.  Essentially, fiscal mumbo jumbo which says austerity's working, even though households are worse off than they were in 2010.  Labour says this government is a group of wealthy people out of touch with the population they’re meant to serve.  One of the people they’re meant to serve who was canvassed by the media, said that there’s not going to be a revolution and we have to endure. 

I’m troubled by this statement, this bovine acceptance that we should deny medical care to a woman with a debilitating condition while the Prime Minister puts on his white tie finery and tells the rest of us that we need to be permanently austere.  Yet I feel as helpless as the man who said it. 

It’s hard to have a revolution when you’re working your ass off for austerity.  But perhaps we can have mini-revolutions in our own lives, be the person who offers Rosa Parks a seat next to us on the bus or sets a place at dinner for the trans-woman down the street rejected by her family.  It’s those mini-revolts that can give us the courage to stand up and say respectfully, ‘I don’t think so, Father.  Lord Mayor.  Prime Minister.’