Questioning Transphobia

The LGBT Domestic Abuse Project and the Scottish Transgender Alliance have now published their research document surveying the levels and forms of domestic abuse to which transgender people are subjected, and it makes for grim reading.

The 36-page document, called Out of sight, out of mind? – Transgender People’s Experiences of Domestic Abuse, is available from as a 1.1MB PDF file which may be downloaded directly from the Scottish Transgender Alliance website by following this link.

The report reveals extremely high levels of prejudice and abuse in transgender people’s relationships and home lives, coupled with unacceptable negative experiences of accessing fundamental services and support during the times when they are most needed.

The significance of this document is that it is the first published research focused solely on transgender people’s experiences of domestic abuse in the UK. It is hoped that, in addition to documenting the ways in which transgender people experience domestic abuse, the information will help in determining the specific needs of the community when accessing services which provide support and advice to those experiencing domestic abuse. Additionally, the research explores some of the barriers faced by transgender people experiencing domestic abuse when trying to access mainstream domestic abuse services. Key findings include:

• 80% of respondents stated that they had experienced emotionally, sexually, or physically abusive behaviour by a partner or ex-partner – although only 60% of respondents recognised the behaviour as domestic abuse.
• The type of domestic abuse most frequently experienced by the respondents was transphobic emotional abuse, with 73% of the respondents experiencing at least one type of transphobic emotionally abusive behaviour from a partner or ex-partner.
• 60% of respondents had experienced controlling behaviour from a partner or ex-partner.
• 45% of respondents had experienced physically abusive behaviour from a partner
  or ex-partner.
• 47% of respondents had experienced some form of sexual abuse from a partner
  or ex-partner.
• 37% of respondents said that someone had forced, or tried to force them to have
  sex when they were under the age of 16.
• 46% of respondents said that someone had forced, or tried to force them to
  engage in some other form of sexual activity when under the age of 16.
• 10% of respondents stated that someone had forced, or tried to force them to
  engage in sexual activity for money.

As regards the impact that domestic abuse has on trans people’s wellbeing:

• 98% identified at least one negative impact upon their wellbeing as a result of their experiences of domestic abuse.
• 76% identified having experienced psychological or emotional problems as a consequence of the abuse.
• 15% said that they had attempted suicide as a consequence of the abuse.
• 24% told no one about the domestic abuse that they had experienced.
• 18% felt that the most recent domestic abuse that they had experienced was “just something that happened”.
• 51% thought that the most recent domestic abuse they had experienced was “wrong but not a crime”.

Those last two remarks – that DA is “just something that happened” and that it was “wrong but not a crime” – are particularly telling. They point to not only an internalisation of cis society’s busted idea that it’s okay to abuse trans people in every way, but also to a depressing resignation that it’s to be expected because we’re trans. Transitioning should be a positive experience, a connecting with one’s body and finding oneself in the world. No human being should be someone else’s punchbag, simply for being who we are.

The violence against us, in all its myriad forms, has to stop. If we didn’t know the extent of it before, even anecdotally, this document provides damning evidence of a society where transphobic abuse is the norm for 80% of us. It cannot be allowed to continue; things have to change for the better, and soon. Unfortunately, it is not we who have the power to bring about these improvements in our lives. The changes have to start with those who abuse us – and those who condone those abuses by their silence. I only wish I knew how to make it happen.

—————

With thanks to Amy Roch, Domestic Abuse Development Officer at LGBT Youth Scotland, for her help and encouragement.

So the other day, I talked about calling out, and bfp posted about calling out yesterday and asked:

the question is: where is there *any* room in the social justice swarm style calling out to respect “triggers”? When the very justification of social justice swarm style is the swarm has been triggered? also, admitting to being triggered requires you to be fairly vulnerable—something I’m not very inclined to do in front of people telling me to fuck off and accusing me of triggering just because I exist (just happened recently). I did say I’m triggered, and for whatever reason, the group backed off—but it about killed me to admit it.

I quoted as much as I needed for this post, but you really should read everything at Flipfloppingjoy before reacting to that excerpt.

As bfp and Amandaw both point out, calling out has become central to online social justice activism. It is like, the entire goal. Find someone who said something busted, lay into them, link them on your blog, your friends show up, people you don’t see all that often otherwise show up, the targeted person (or blog) gets a bad reputation because of that incident, and then what? Is there social justice in this process?

Bfp’s intended conclusion in her above question? There is no room for respecting triggers. And I agree with that. And really, is there room in social justice for calling out in the first place? I don’t think so. Maybe at one time, it worked, and people were willing to talk to each other and respect each other’s voices and accept that when one of us said “What you said was offensive and harmful” another would accept that, apologize, and try to do better.

But I think it’s evolved into several different things. It’s like an absolution, you make a mistake and you get called out, and you make absolution for that mistake. It’s so ritualized and I think that it doesn’t really make room for sincerity, not that the people who do apologize are not sincere?  And not that the people calling out are not sincere.

So, for people who are sincere about this: What do we want? Do we want to watch each other for that moment of weakness when we make a mistake and dive in? Is this what we want to do? Do we want to engage in triggering behavior just to get a pound of flesh from someone because they said something harmful? As bfp also said:

I just have a gut feeling that “calling out” especially in the context of “within a community that are more often than not survivors,” it should just be *assumed* that that the person(s) being called out is a survivor, and may have had to deal with any number of (potentially) violent situations under the guise of being “held responsible” and should be “confronted” (or called out) in a way that is respectful of that. there is a difference between being “held responsible” and “being accountable,” I think—I was held responsible for the entirety of [abusive persons] life, including the fact that this person was abused. I didn’t have a choice in it. when this person was “triggered,” my entire life came to a halt, because I was the person responsible for managing this person’s triggers.

Is this how we want to talk to each other? Is this what healthy communication is? Do conversations spring from this? What happens if someone on a blog somewhere says something that’s not quite right? And so we head back to our blogs before or after commenting on theirs and write this post that says “So-and-so at such-and-such blog just said X.” And now your readership picks that up, and maybe some of them boost the signal, and suddenly we have a handful of blogs saying “So said something busted!” and now there’s this massive response, and as Amandaw says:

for a long time, I have been creeped out by a certain type of person in the blogosphere.

for a while now, I’ve been hating and fearing the times I know I’ve played that type.

it’s the person who is there for every fight. there for every drama.

the person who’s got the gossip on all the parties and can report on the game.

the person who has to take every drama and analyze it to death. has to give the play-by-play and offer commentary on every little move. where so-and-so went wrong here, said a Bad Word there, broke The Rules(TM) over there. where so-and-so followed The Rules(TM) well here and you all should observe so-and-so’s example.

the person who can always fit an incident into a convenient narrative mold, shove it in as tight as you can and pop! out comes the pre-shaped narrative. the person who can always find a way to create two clearly defined and opposite sides, and set up the argument in such a way that the Right Side and the Wrong Side are easy to deduce if you know The Rules(TM).

the person who hangs around like a vulture, waiting for someone to slip up, trip up, fuck up — so they can pounce, and pop them in the mold, and serve up the resulting conveniently-shaped thing for the public to devour.

consume.

the person who knows the right words to repeat, and the right people to suck up to.

the person who knows how to network. how to build a following.

the person whose interactions in the community always seem to come down to winning. being the best activist. the most perfectest. the best “ally.”

and it just feels weird because they sau all the right words along the way, but ultimately it feels like … they aren’t in it because they care about the issues they’re talking about. they’re talking about those issues so that they can be in it.

and seem to get so excited when something new erupts. because it’s not a clear sign that there is some pretty tough pain going on. it’s a clear sign that there’s a new drama to reputationally profit off of.

And I don’t even think I can add to that.

This is what I wanted to do with Social Justice, even before I realized the words fit together like that: I created Questioning Transphobia because of the rampant transphobia in the feminist blogosphere, because of a website called Questioning Transgender Politics that was filled with unanswered transphobic rants that demonized the hell out of trans women and treated trans men as victims of patriarchy who lacked the agency to define themselves. I saw a handful of trans people and cis people who do get it responding to them even as many bloggers let the really transphobic commenters hijack every post about trans people into trans 101 and demands to justify why transsexual people should transition and how transsexual people get away with supporting the gender binary and while speaking out against the gender binary attacking non-binary trans people for “creating more gender” rather than destroying it entirely, and basically being a bunch of prats to trans people who are simply trying to live our lives and cope with a world that really doesn’t try very hard to accommodate us.

So I saw this, and I wanted to answer it. I wasn’t the first, and I’m not the most powerful writer, and I’m not the most prolific. But I wanted to take these things on directly, answer their claims, create a counter to their transphobic politics, a place where trans people could see how their arguments are flawed and dangerous and not internalize them and not feel powerless to respond because that is exactly how I felt when I found these things the first time, and so many other trans people have told me they felt the same and were grateful for Questioning Transphobia when they found it.

So I had to be prompted by Belledame and a few others to start blogging. And when I started QT, so many other social justice bloggers gave me a signal boost right off the bat. I can’t even remember how many, or who they all were, but from the start I had support and links and people being kind enough to help me get started, to get an audience, to be heard. And I think, in this regard, QT has succeeded beyond my own wildest expectations. I have amazing co-bloggers whom I love beyond the telling of it, and readers that I am so grateful have stayed around for a long time, and new readers all the time. And I’ve noticed as many commenters dropped off over time, I do miss them. I think that QT is almost a community, or at least a network where we can talk about how society hurts us and create our answers in opposition to that pain.

I also think that QT has occasionally failed at this. And we’ve failed individual cis and trans people here. I mean, there have been times when cis people have come here looking to understand, and we’ve treated them rather poorly. I mean, these are cis people who have trans people in their lives? And while they don’t experience transphobia it can still impact them when the trans people they love suffer from it? And is it really good for us to pile on them when they make a mistake? I mean, if they’re here, I would like to believe they’re here in good faith, and I think a lot of the time they’re not really up on anti-oppression language and concepts and just want to support the trans people in their lives, and I think to some extent QT should be supportive of that. It’s what I want, I want to help cis people learn to not be transphobic. I don’t want to chase them off if they’re not perfectly up to standards I try to set for myself.

This is not to say that when cis people are transphobic we just let that slide, but I think we really need to think about how we engage this, what kind of place we engage this from. As I quoted bfp in my post about empathy and kyriarchy,

The very political choice to ally herself with all oppressed people. The very political choice to prioritize a radical love that recognizes the humanity in another, even if that person can and did and does hurt you.

And I think we’ve failed other trans people, trans people who do not 100% agree with what’s said here, who have their own takes, who approach gender and bodies differently than us. And I think, sometimes, say things that challenge our own assumptions. It’s pretty tempting to think we’re always right and reject all conflicting worldviews. Sometimes those worldviews are painful, and it’s hard to just admit that because admitting that makes us vulnerable, and we don’t trust the people we’re talking to or the people who are reading with that vulnerability. But we have to be able to engage disagreement without scorched earth tactics, and I’m not sure what suggest here, but I think that QT has failed at this in the past, that I have failed at this in the past.

I think QT has also failed at intersectionality, at acknowledging the full complexity of people’s lives. It’s too easy to reduce everything to transphobia and sexism and maybe some homophobia. It’s too easy to look at another oppressed cis person and elide all the oppression they do experience and treat them as privileged over us in all ways because they are cis and we are trans. It is also, and I think this is even more critical, easy to elide the fact that trans people have to deal with racism, ableism, fatphobia, economic hardship, and other issues that do not directly relate to gender as concepts but are not separable from gender in real lives. And these are not taken into account as thoroughly as they could be – and then people come here and find they have to leave race or disability or class at the door. Now I will say, I do try to account for intersectionality, but I do not always succeed. Based on what Jane LaPlain said the other day, QT fails at this a lot more than I realized, and I want to turn that around. I can’t guarantee that I will be perfect, but I will do my best.

And really, this is what I wanted from QT, and I think QT is a social justice site. And I think, that more broadly defined, this is the kind of thing that lots of people probably want from social justice in general – not trans issues, but every issue. I think, failures or not, that if we tried harder to do this kind of thing – to actually work on our failures and in general emphasize trying to build networks and relationships with people who share similar goals with us. I don’t think that the point is to push people away or mark them as enemies when they make one mistake, to call down the thunder upon them or their blogs. Because, seriously, these people? Are generally speaking not your enemies. They may not be perfect every time they discuss matters that affect you personally, but if somethings happens? They would often have your back.

Or they would have your back if you didn’t post about how they wrote a sentence wrong and and a dozen people swarmed their blog to tell them how much they failed, or if your post about how their mistake is so hard to forgive didn’t encourage people to send them toxic, abusive e-mails. if your call out itself wasn’t triggering or abusive or intimidating or silencing. If your call out hadn’t left them alone under a pile on wondering what the hell just happened. If your call out didn’t actually include outright lies about things they’ve said and done. Wondering why if you didn’t personally do these things you stood aside and let it happen.

And I do not mean that they abandon your particular cause, I mean they will have nothing to do with you personally. This is not about a tone argument, as I said in my post on calling out. This is about hurting people. Silencing them. Isolating them.

I say this having been guilty of most of these.

God willing, I do not believe I have ever lied about anyone, but the rest? Absolutely. I’ve done it. I have caused by (mostly) my own inaction real harm to other people. People who are sincere, who are among the strongest allies we (trans people) have. Who do important work by blogging – the same kind of work that I want to do with QT. And my inaction, my silence, let them get hurt so badly. I am not responsible for the abusers who attacked them, who lied about them, who “called them out” and refused to let go even after they apologized. I did not make their choices, I simply didn’t act to stop it. This has happened multiple times on QT. So when you read this and think this might be about you? It’s also about me.

And if you have strong objections to this, please think them over before immediately responding. I don’t want to have a fight in the comments. It’s okay to be angry, I’m angry about all this. I am upset about all of this. I cannot say that I just started being angry and upset, but I have just started talking about it. And I think we, not just as a community, but I mean online social justice activists and bloggers, we need to talk about this and stop hiding it. Stop enabling it. Stop doing it.

Edit: I suspect this post may sound like it has more answers than I wanted to put in it. I don’t really know what to do beyond stopping the abuse. We need to talk about what kind of community anti-oppression can be, we need to talk about how to engage each other. I should have included what bfp said in her comments:

so i just wonder what would happen if “calling out” became less of a focus. and how that would happen and what the effect might be of that. if say…there was a different intention behind engaging with other people. does that make sense? like–if instead of “doing our part” by asking people to call us out, we “do our part” by making space for a thousand, a million stories to be told. and when we engage with each other, we think: how will this engagement make space for others to tell their stories?
I mean, the thing is, and I saw your comment at your place about this same thing—i’m NOT saying (and I don’t think *any* of us are) to NOT engage–but to think of *how* to engage in a way that is productive and might lead to some bigger goal. And for me–the first step in that is recognize that to engage in good faith requires a sense of vulnerability. and I am not willing and I don’t think ANYBODY should willingly be vulnerable with everybody and anybody. I think that maybe a part of the movement (for whatever it is) is recognizing that our bodies and minds are precious, and not everybody is entitled to them. So–I will engage with people I trust, people *I* have decided that I trust, and I will trust myself in deciding if I trust that person or not. And I will talk with that person in a good faith way and in a way that respectfully lovingly critical–because i think trust comes through *mutual work*–it is something done together. But i’m not going to engage with somebody i *don’t* trust. I’m not going to be vulnerable with that person in that way.

Because again, I can not say this better than she has.

Emily in the comments:

I think that blogging encourages us into fantasies of omnipotence, of heroic individuals showing us how to break down whole, powerful systems. But Working on real material change isn’t as easy as writing a righteous post. It’s messy, and painful, and sometimes it means working with people who don’t get every issues of yours perfectly because your liberation is bound up in theirs. And we need to get beyond internet politics of purity and learn this, because otherwise we are fucked.

Further to Queen Emily’s post last November about two trans men in Western Australia who won the right to change the sex marker on their birth certificates without having had hysterectomies, it seems that their battle isn’t over yet. Via ABC News:

However, the state Attorney-General appealed the decision, arguing it could have unforseen effects on WA law because it would mean a person could be legally male and yet still bear children.

Now in a majority decision, the Court of Appeal upheld the Attorney-General’s challenge, ruling that because the two people still had all the reproductive characteristics of a woman, they would not be identified according to community standards as members of the male gender.

How is this not biological determinism – essentialism – being enshrined in law? The Court of Appeal seems to be using one of the oldest tropes against these two men despite the medical profession’s recognition half-a-century or more ago that sex and gender are different (if related) things.

To my mind, the fundamental, underlying issue is the social/cultural pressure on each and every one of us to conform to binary “norms” of sex and gender which are used as big sticks with which to beat anyone who falls outside of those narrow and inaccurate categories. Fixing that problem, though, requires a paradigm shift in attitudes of mainstream society and until/unless that happens, then I fear these injustices, these breaches of human rights, will continue unchecked and uncontrolled.

Jane LaPlain has agreed to guest blog here. If you want to see an example of her writing, I linked to a magnificent post she’s written about “cisgender” in the Trans 101 links.

I added a text resizer – you can see it as three As of increasing size in the top right margin. The left A decreases text size, the middle A resets it to default, and the right A increases it.

This is a temporary measure until I can get WP-chgFontSize to work. Unfortunately, I can’t get the widget to display, and I’ll be asking the person who helped me set this site up if there’s something we can do, but this is a (late) temporary measure

And I apologize for procrastinating on adding this. I got started on working on it weeks ago, but you know, see previous post.

Edit: Thanks to Emily S. it’s working and now I have two font resizers. There is no possible way this could go wrong.

So people keep telling me I’m on a roll and my posts these past several days have been really amazing, and I’m glad everyone loves them, but unfortunately, I know that this – like many other endeavors – won’t necessarily last. One reason I’ve been able to be so productive is that I’ve got a fairly good supply of frappucino mix, and give me enough caffeine (or other stimulants) and I am amazingly functional. Self-medication for the win – and cheaper and more effective than soda. Such is the life of not having actual medication.

Okay, first? ADHD is real. If you have a problem with that, I don’t care. You’re already wrong and I’m not going to debate this with you. ADHD is not overdiagnosed – it is severely undiagnosed. I’m sure a lot of people have anecdotes about children who were misdiagnosed with ADHD, but I don’t think these are the rule. I could be wrong and there could be overdiagnosis in children, but a scary number of adults have gone undiagnosed their entire lives. Probably 10% of those who were undiagnosed as children have been diagnosed as adults.

Oh, and a lot of neurotypicals learn about ADHD symptoms, and they think “I lose my keys sometimes? I lose my train of thought! I miss deadlines!” And you know, it’s true. Everyone does these things occasionally. But the difference is that you do not do them every. single. day. This isn’t what your life is like, this is when you have a bad moment – you’re tired, overwhelmed, in a hurry, and bam, a thing happens. This is what life is like every day for ADHDers, and when we’re tired, overwhelmed, in a hurry, then it’s that much worse for us. So, I can understand if you relate to these symptoms? I’m sure most people do. But don’t generalize how you experience them (as not-symptoms, assuming you do not have some other condition that causes similar symptoms – or you’re not an undiagnosed ADHDer yourself) to how I experience them (as symptoms). For me, they are a daily impairment.

Second, check out these posts:

Where are my keys, I lost my phone

ADD is:

This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult

I am NOT a Drug Addict So Stop Thinking That if You Were and Don’t Start Thinking it if You Weren’t Already, Okay?

Hi, I’m Energetic Today!

Expectations vs. Reality

Third, videos here – they’re long, and don’t bother with them if you don’t want to be weighed down with the science and the time it takes, but I think there is a lot of good information in there. Barkley’s videos are very information dense  - the Executive Functioning videos as well as Impairments and Treatments. The last set by Gena Pera, Is It You, Me, or Adult ADHD talks about relationships between neurotypicals and ADHDers. If you want to understand this from the perspective of living with it and the actual research done over a period of decades, these videos are a good place to start. There is also a 40-page transcript of Barkley’s usual notes located here. Again dense. But there, education. Have at if you want to know.

As I learned a couple of months ago, I have ADHD. Now, I know a lot of people hear “ADHD” and they think of kids (usually boys) tearing around a classroom and bouncing off the walls, but it’s a lot more than that. That’s how it looks in some (not all) children – I certainly wasn’t tearing around as a child, although I had my moments. But it’s not a childhood condition that fades over time – it simply changes as your brain develops and matures – children might run around and bounce off the walls, but adults are more likely to fidget with things or pace, and perhaps be a bit talkative. A very small percentage of people who have ADHD grow out of it by the time they’re 30, but most of us have it our entire lives.

And it’s not an easy thing to live with. It can wreak havoc on your life, your relationships, your career, your education. Many of your life goals may end up out of reach because of the impact ADHD can have, especially if it goes undiagnosed into later in life, as it has with me. Whether or not you have a diagnosis, most neurotypicals will assume that your symptoms are a moral failure – that things don’t get done because you don’t care enough to get them done. That you forget things because you don’t care to remember them. That you get distracted from doing something because you don’t care to apply yourself to it. But these are all far from the truth. ADHDers do care, but wishing won’t change neurology. We can develop coping skills, but those only work so far.

It’s not just hyperactivity, it’s impulsivity, forgetfulness, distractibility, difficulty prioritizing what you need to do, difficulty focusing your attention where you need to focus it. The name is such a misnomer, it’s not an attention deficit. I am always paying attention to something, but it’s not always what I want to pay attention to. It’s also trouble with something called working memory –  your brain holds information related to whatever you’re doing right now. For neurotypicals, you can be interrupted and go back to what you’re doing. For ADHDers, it’s a bit different. The interruption can immediately replace whatever is in your working memory and if you do not have a prompt to get you back on track? It’s gone until something or someone (maybe) reminds you later. So distraction can and often does mean not getting back to what you were doing. I have been repeatedly distracted from this post, but it’s easy to get back to because so much is written I can get back on track. But by the same token? I have a pill I take every day, I shouldn’t take two (as normal), and right now I cannot remember if I took that pill or not.

Often, it means no matter how much I want to do something, that I can’t really do it. It’s not that I won’t do it, or that if I try hard enough it will happen, but that I can’t, or that at best I can only get maybe a few sentences out before completely losing the thread of what I want to write. There are ways to get around this – strict deadlines are often a pretty strong motivator, although I still miss them more often than not. Blogging has no deadlines, and even when I set one for myself – Monday Open Posts, they stopped for awhile, and then came back, and then became Tuesday Open Posts. Even though they’re still supposed to be Monday, I am never on time with them. Usually, I am more likely to do whatever has immediate consequences (good or bad) than I am to do anything that has a long term consequence. Unfortunately, this is how my brain is wired, and only really functions differently with the help of some stimulants (like caffeine  - hence my ability to write every day this week).

It was rather sobering after I learned about this to process this and realize all the way it made entire swaths of my life make sense. I don’t really want to go into specific details, but the intersection of being trans and having ADHD can do a real number on things like your employability – and my 12 years of unemployment kind of testifies to that. Oh, I’ve done freelance work and probably will again, but if I don’t find a way to employ myself or keep that up (and I don’t have any freelance work right now), then it’s not really likely anyone’s going to hire me, because, you know 12 years of unemployment in this economy? Without a college degree? Yeah.

Despite all that, I found that learning about it was positive and empowering. It was good, after all these years, to have an explanation for the havoc in my life. To put a name on the things that have been plaguing me every time I try to take my life in a more constructive direction. My own inability to consistently commit to a course of action and follow it through to its conclusion.

So, just so you know, I can’t promise my posting will remain this consistent. But I do want you all to know that I appreciate you all as readers, and I appreciate your words about what I write, and I will try to write as often and as powerfully as I can.

I started writing this three hours ago, but spent too much of that time trying to figure out how to add a new plugin to my sidebar. And e-mailing people. And doing a meme on livejournal. I write every post like this, and it amazes me when I find a coherent post at the end.

I didn’t have the heart to just delete the blog because it would take away the domain name, and for some reason that annoyed me.

So it’s private and effectively gone forever. I hope people will finally stop linking to it instead of here.

Okay, I want to talk about calling out. Or rather, what happens when calling out goes horribly wrong. I am not the first to say this, and I hope I am not the last.

To me, when I really looked at the process of calling out, I saw it as telling something that something they did or said was harmful. It was a way to deal with oppressive actions that would at least give the person who committed those oppressive actions a graceful way to back off and admit their mistake. Obviously, a lot of people don’t take well to this, get defensive, deny everything, try to make it your fault, accuse you of being oppressive for hearing oppression in their words or seeing it in their actions, but the setup was there specifically to give them room to be a decent human being and give us room to assert ourselves as fully human and worthy of respect.

Often, the call out may not even actually be about the person you’re calling out – after all, they may not show any sign of really caring that they caused harm and are almost certain to flail defensively rather than respond constructively. It may instead be for others’ benefit, to see that the oppressive action didn’t go unnoticed and that at least someone disapproved.

In both cases, it may open a dialogue with the person you called out or someone else, and productive conversation could grow from that point forward. What it was never meant to be was a means of reproducing oppressive tactics.

And by that I mean, silencing, intimidating, bullying, even outright abuse.  It’s no longer a tool for opening dialogues, but for preventing them. It is about establishing a Manichean order where everyone on this side is good and awesome and amazing and everyone on that side is evil and mediocre and annoying. There’s no middle ground, no room for any nuance. No room for dealing with people you know mean well but make mistakes. And every one of us makes mistakes.

And there’s no room, none, for any of us to present ourselves as paragons who are always perfect and proper and never say or do anything busted because as I said the other day, there is no outside. We’re all socialized into white supremacy, male supremacy, cis supremacy, hetero supremacy, economic supremacy, thin supremacy, TAB supremacy. We are all taught that being a person of color, of being a woman, of being of non-binary gender, of being bisexual or gay or lesbian, of being working class, being poor, being fat, having a disability makes people less than. Makes people inferior. Makes people vulnerable. Makes people deserving of the terrible things that happen to them. And we all, every single one of us, have perpetrated these attitudes on someone else, or more likely a lot of other people all at once.

We can sit down all day and tabulate the oppressions that affect us: I am a fat queer white working class (unemployed for over a decade) trans woman with disabilities and I have no college degree. This does not mean I am immune to fatphobia, to homophobia, to classism, to transphobia, to ableism, or to any kind of academic elitism. I have engaged in all of these in some point of my life. They’re not a free pass out of being busted. And they especially do not grant me an ounce of moral authority to call down thundering condemnation from the heavens on someone else who is being busted.

And all of that sounds a bit clinical, a bit theoretical, so let’s also talk about how this behavior hurts us. How it silences us. How it intimidates us. How we start to feel like we can’t talk about certain things or can’t really engage outside of our own blogs and maybe a few friends because someone might have decided – on a Manichean level – that we are bad people and what we have to say is worthless, because we fucked up once, somewhere. Or because we were perceived as fucking up, or someone presented a distorted series of events that made it look like we had not only fucked up, but did so as maliciously as possible and refused to be held accountable for it. I’m not going to name names, but I’m sure many readers can think of examples that have actually happened.

And really, it only takes a small handful to really disrupt a community with this kind of behavior. To engage in a pattern of intimidation and abuse that drives wedges between us and labels some as acceptable and others as enemies. That breaks up potential or actual coalitions and teaches us to distrust one another because we’re not seeing the behavior for what it is, instead treating it as a valid calling out. Called blogswarms on each other. Not even conversations, but what can be – and often is – borderline, if not actual, trolling and again abuse.

And you know, I’m complicit in this. When I saw it happening, I didn’t stop and say anything then. I haven’t stopped and said anything until now. Even while women I love and respect were being raked over the coals for things they had not said and done, I sat it out because of my own anxieties and fears. And while I am not alone in this, I certainly acknowledge my own responsibility in not speaking out against this.  I let people get attacked and chased off of my own blog, and it got so bad that at one point I was seriously considering putting an end to Questioning Transphobia. I actually hated checking my comments queue because I dreaded what I would see, but I still didn’t say anything then.

I’ve also participated in these toxic call outs. I’ve backed them up, boosted the signal on them with my blog, got them more attention. I probably originated a few.  So I do not say I am blameless or that I am speaking from any position of moral authority. I am saying that I see something that has damaged not just our community (the trans community) but impacted other communities as well, and I think that we really need to rethink how we approach these things.

I am not arguing that people have to be nice, or that anyone needs to hold anyone’s hand, or provide to the injuring party as Delux_Vivens said about what people expect when called out,

Triage, citations, a refreshing beverage, books, articles, a warm blankie, a mixtape…

just so they can feel good about themselves after saying or doing something oppressive. I’m not saying any of these things. I am not talking about tone. But I no longer want to be party to or enable any further silencing, intimidation, or abuse.

Edit: I was ambivalent about linking the other posts on this subject – not because I wanted to take credit for everything I said here, but because I did not want to trigger a blogswarm or create bad blood. But I think that decision was pretty wrongheaded, for plenty of reasons, not the least of which is that I am sick to my stomach of shoving all talk about the problems described in these posts under the carpet. Plus, it’s just a huge fucking breach of etiquette to not give credit. So, here:

s. e. smith: Internet. It’s Time to Talk. I read this months ago, and it triggered a lot of the thoughts I had here. Ou’s post was timely but not disseminated openly, IIRC. I think a lot of us were gun shy at the time, and were trying to avoid triggering any more blogswarms and outright attacks.

Flipfloppingjoy: Untitled. This is much more recent, and talks a bit about the mess that exploded all over Mai’a's posts at Feministe as well as something that happened with an LJ feminism community (ontd_feminism) and BFP’s post about the new Eminem/Rihanna video.

Nix Williams responds to this post.

This conversation needs to be had, we need to talk about this stuff.

And I apologize for not linking properly from the start. I’m still a bit gun shy.

Unlike Queen Emily, I post the videos at the bottom. That’s how I roll.

Gallup: GOP take unprecedented 10 point lead in polls.

NY Times: Border sweeps in North reach miles into US:

ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

Shakesville: Police State Newz:

At some point I may have mentioned that while my family was riding the train between Chicago and New York last December, we were rudely awakened by armed government agents on the hunt for foreign looking people that may have boarded at South Bend, Toledo, Cleveland, Erie, or any number of totally not Canadian stations. They really didn’t pay us much mind. Mostly they were interested in the folks seated in front of us speaking a foreign language (Russian, FWIW). That and yelling at the deaf woman in the next row.

Yeah, this is beyond out of hand. Can we start talking about police states yet?

Miami Herald: Should a parent seek therapy for a child who crosses the gender divide?

Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality for your class and oppression analysis needs. I really recommend reading this if you’re interesting in intersectional and kyriarchal viewpoints.

And of course, a music video! Emily in Love, Sow the Seeds:

A couple of months ago I reported on the Irish Government’s decision to drop its challenge to a High Court declaration that Irish law on transgender rights is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The challenge had originally been brought as long ago as 1997 by Dr Lydia Foy and in June 2010 she finally won her battle for legal recognition as a woman, and for a birth certificate that reflects that reality.

Now the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammarberg, has published a Human Rights comment on the final settlement of the case in Ireland, welcoming the decision of the Irish Government to introduce legislation recognising transgender persons in their preferred gender, including the provision of new birth certificates

Commissioner Hammarberg goes on to highlight issues of concern for many transgender people in Europe, such as the need to be diagnosed with an mental disorder, or being forced to be steriliszed and divorced in order to obtain official recognition of their legal status.

Ireland is not the only country where transgender persons have faced obstacles in obtaining legal recognition of their preferred gender. Some Council of Europe member states still have no provision at all for official recognition, leaving transgender people in a legal limbo. Most member states still use medical classifications which impose the diagnosis of mental disorder on transgender persons.

Even more common are provisions which demand impossible choices, such as the “forced divorce” and the “forced sterilisation” requirements. This means that only unmarried or divorced transgender persons who have undergone surgery and become irreversibly infertile have the right to change their entry in the birth register. In reality, this means that the state prescribes medical treatment for legal purposes, a requirement which clearly runs against the principles of human rights and human dignity.

[...]

All countries need to develop expeditious and transparent procedures for changing the name and gender of a transgender person on official documents, in accordance with the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights.

The full text of Commissioner Hammarberg’s comment may be found at this link

—————

Curtsey to Richard at TGEU for the heads-up.