Questioning Transphobia

Debi Crow, Belledame, Hoyden About Town, Caroline, Renegade Evolution, and Queen of Thorns have all posted responses to radfem concern trolling – whether it’s Polly Styrene’s tantrum that The F Word didn’t approve her usual anti-trans misogyny, Jo22′s concern that trans women like sex workers because we transition so we can be sexually empowerful prostitutes, or mAndrea’s deficient and morally bankrupt logic, the responses are pretty clear: These particular radical feminists clearly do not speak for all radical feminists, all feminists nor all women when it comes to trans hatred.

I don’t really like giving any of them direct attention, as there are real issues that trans women are dealing with right now. Issues that I wish could see more exposure. The vile things that these media personalities are saying about Isis and Angie Zapata are well beyond the pale and we really need to respond to that – especially since these jokes are exactly the same as Andrade’s dehumanizing description of Angie Zapata as he killed her.

But, to be fair, as much as I’d like radfem views to receive less oxygen, Hoyden About Town makes the point about how mAndrea and her commenters talk about trans women:

Isn’t that sort of contempt and disgust exactly what led to Allen Andrade beating Angie Zapata to death when he found out (through an act of sexual assault) that she wasn’t a born-woman?

This, right here. The radfems right now – not just Polly, mAndrea, and Jo22, but many many others – are having a collective – for lack of a better word – tantrum about trans women right now. They’re creating spurious blogs (“eatingblueberriesistransphobic.wordpress.com), organizing letter-writing campaigns to The F Word’s owner because transphobic hate speech wasn’t being approved.

But let them fulminate. Let them explode. Let them reveal their hatred in all its gory ugliness. Why? Before I started blogging, I looked back through the various trans wars that had occurred in the feminist blogosphere, and what I saw, as Emily pointed out:

I have complained numerous times that the feminist blogosphere, such as it is, has one main conversation about trans people, one that is returned to again and again and again – the political implications of our transitioning. Click here if you want yet another example of pointless bloody “analysis.”

I don’t CARE about whatever horrible thing some feminist has said anymore. I care that these discussions centre on cis concerns, even (maybe especially) allies respond mostly to the slurs, but rarely address the real issues.

But this particular outbreak feels different – part of it is, no doubt, that Angie Zapata’s death received a lot of attention from cis feminists. But part of it is also that this hasn’t really been a blog war – the vast majority of it is happening in radfem echo chambers, where they’re exposing all that aforementioned ugliness. And what if the radfems hold their own blogwar, and we don’t come, and the next person who pages through the trans wars finds this mess – finds mAndrea’s series of “why we should all hate trans women” articles, or Polly’s “Gender Delusion” blog, her “How dare the F Word not approve my insightful post!” when her own attitudes toward trans issues are plastered over half the trans conversations in blogdonia already? What if they have cis and trans bloggers talking about actual, real issues that affect trans women (whose concerns, as women, are feminism’s concerns) while the radfems pitch themselves into a fevered frenzy of bigoted, misogynist, hatred?

And there’s real issues that trans people are facing beyond America’s Next Top Model. For example:

Trannies! Send backup!

… was the call from a steward, at a gay pride parade, when transwomen got somewhat pissed off at being told they weren’t allowed to use the women’s toilets. A transwoman was later sexually assaulted because she was given no choice but to use the men’s toilets.

This still hasn’t been resolved, and it shouldn’t have happened at all. It is yet another instance of trans women’s safety sacrificed for cis women’s comfort.

So, while I’m not specifically asking that no one call out their bigoted assholishness, I am asking that this other stuff – stuff in the real world, that affects trans women, gets mentioned too.

But, since mAndrea wants this spread around to many blogs, I will link and quote a couple comments:

K. A.:

Basically, fetishist MtF collude with every other misogynist man and choose to participate in the dynamic in an alternate way. They spin it as a handicap when it’s really a male-entitled sexual fantasy that actively oppresses women just as any other pornsick man does. It’s the rape and total control over a synthetic female body, giving him and any other man he includes full access to treating women the way they both love to fetishize treating women. They then strengthen the conditioned response to female parts with their misogynist sex. That’s why you see so many misogynists patronizing MtF prostitutes, and MtF prostitutes happy to do it.
Sexist men look out for each other and will cooperate to control women’s bodies in any novel way they can think of.

mAndrea’s response:

K.A., that was a most brillant analysis, and needs a wider audience then what is available here. Hopefully other readers will carry your idea to other blogs, because it was perfect.

There is your radical feminist trans hatred. Rape apologism. Victim blaming. Slut shaming. Does anyone really need any more at this point?

via Autumn Sandeen at Pam’s House Blend.

Update: Donna Rose got on the air with Rover during his morning show, and she has posts up on her conversation here and here. Read freeper style comments by Rover listeners here. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~As I’m writing this piece early August 15th, there are two stories of really dehumanizing comments by large, corporate media outlets towards trans people in the news. The more recent of the stories is from August 14th on the Fox News Channel, in which Fox aired a crude and obnoxious segment concerning the recent announcement of America’s Next Top Model: there’s going to be a transgender contestant on the show. The earlier piece is from August 13th, in which a syndicated Clear Channel Communication morning radio show referred to the recently murdered transgender teen Angie Zapata as a “man,” a “he,” a “he/she,” a “thing,” and an “it.” From GLAAD’s press release on the story from the Fox News Channel: Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett and Us Weekly Editor-at-Large Ian Drew spent the segment gratuitously insulting the America’s Next Top Model contestant, using dehumanizing terminology, inaccurate and inappropriate pronouns and offensive references to her anatomy.While laughing and joking, Jarrett mocked Isis’ description of herself as a woman whose “cards were dealt differently,” and said, “That’s an understatement!”  Drew referred to recent instances of transgender visibility on reality television as “The Crying Game ’08,” going on to call the show “America’s Next Top Tranny.”  Drew then said that she doesn’t look any different from other contestants because “they are not exactly the most high-class group of women.”  Throughout the segment, Jarrett switched back and forth between male and female pronouns, and both Jarrett and Drew suggested that Isis “fooled” people by “blending in.”  They went on to make crude remarks about her genitalia and the pitch of her voice. Here’s the segment: [Below the fold: Fox News Channel Contact Info ; "Rover's Morning Glory" uses defamatory language to refer to hate crime murder victim Angie Zapata.]

Autumn Sandeen :: Dehumanizing Transgender Human Beings

Want to contact Fox News about this? From the GLAAD press release again: Please contact Fox News Channel and call on them to apologize for these obnoxious, insulting and dehumanizing comments.Fox News Channel Gregg Jarrett  - Anchor (212) 301-3000 gregg.jarrett@foxnews.com Jay Wallace – Executive Producer (212) 301-5168 jay.wallace@foxnews.com Tom Lowell – Senior Producer (212) 301-3000  (outlet) tom.lowell@foxnews.com Over at Donna Rose’s Donna Blog, she reports on what she heard on the radio going into work on the 13th: When I got into the car this morning to drive to work the radio was set to the local “rock” station.  There was some sort of syndicated show on – the typical schtik with 3 crass, ignorant guys and one woman who generally disagrees with the idiots.  I really didn’t think much of it until the ring leader of this little troupe decided that he wanted to talk about Angie Zapata.  That got my attention.This crew is called “Rover’s Morning Glory” and, as you might guess, the main star is Rover.  Others of his crew include Dumb, Dieter, and Chocolate Charlie. …The reason I waste my energy on these people at all is that they spent a good 15 minutes saying things that they need to be held accountable for.  They explained the Angie Zapata story in the most disgusting, vile way possible – making sure to refer to Angie as a “man”, a “he”, a “he/she”, a “thing”, and an “it”.  They explained that her murderer was justified in being angry and in killing Angie.  In fact, Rover said, if he were on the jury he’d vote to acquit.  They implied that others would be justified in similar actions, and that Angie deserved it.  It was disgusting, irresponsible, and crossed any boundary of decency. The defamatory language really would be on par with having DJ’s referring to a Matthew Sheppard as a “faggot” or a “fairy” on air, and saying they’d let his killers go if they were jurrors…It’s really as abhorant as that. The relevant contact info: WMMS– Clear Channel Cleveland 6200 Oak Tree Blvd. 4th Floor Cleveland, Ohio 44131-2510 (216) 520-2600Wanna complain? or give props? e-mail programming: Bo Matthews buzzard@wmms.com Clear Channel Corporate Phone #: Clear Channel 200 East Basse Road San Antonio, TX 78209 Phone 1-210-822-2828 By the way, if you contact Fox or Clear Channel, you probably would want to reference what the Associated Press Styleguide says in their entry on transgender, and the GLAAD Media Reference Guide’s Transgender Glossary on Defamatory Terminology.

Quoted in its completeness, with apologies to Autumn Sandeen. I don’t have the energy today to write out yet more descriptions of how people think it’s okay to dehumanize trans women, to describe us in these ways.

But if you give a damn, please please please contact the above and make complaints. This behavior should be unacceptable.

Update: See Natalia Antonova’s entry for more information. The article below is not entirely accurate (and I admit I didn’t catch the “100% of women are sexually harassed” line.

Per Natalia’s findings, the judge is female, but still unnamed. Many of the numbers in the below article are inaccurately reported or misleading.

I’m still seeing shades of Judge Deni.

Or so says a Russian Judge:

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia’s history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

“He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word,” she earlier told the court. “I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.

This is right up there with judging rape as theft of services.

But this isn’t just about a pithy quote: The article says that the woman hoped to become the third woman in Russian history to successfully bring a sexual harassment case to trial. This is institutionalized thoroughly as the way things are:

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

As Natalia Antonova writes on GlobalComment:

For many women, the post-Soviet reality is one were opportunities are scarce. Anti-discrimination laws may be on the books, but are rarely enforced, especially wherein women are concerned. Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko, much beloved by many Westerners, delivered a sexist and ridiculous speech about the “magic” of women on March 8th, International Women’s Day, this year, and only the truly committed among us called him out on it. Alla Dovlatova, a popular TV figure, recently spoke about how a woman’s best self-defense is either “a disarming smile, or a man.”

When I read that, I remembered the day that Olympian Lilia Podkopaeva, Ukraine’s pride and joy, was robbed and beaten up in in the center of Kiev. Should have the diminutive gymnast greeted her attackers with “a disarming smile”? Was she asking for it because she was not accompanied by a man? I understand Dovlatova’s position, armed defense against a group of thugs can make things much worse for a woman, but the way in which it was stated felt deceptive.

It’s my belief that Dovlatova knows full well the dangers of being female in the post-Soviet landscape, but in public, even an independently successful woman must pretend that men will protect her, that her looks will protect her, because otherwise her feminine magic will dissipate like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight.

Thanks to The Hedonistic Pleasureseeker for pointing this story out on IBTP.

When gay people think they can write trans humor. I wish I had a racist, misogynist, transphobic combination bingo card for that video. I’d get a blackout, I swear to god. Since we’re on the topic of racism and misogyny, I’d also like to point out Shirley Q. Liquor, who really is a drag queen and minstrel show.

I’m looking for something good to fisk to get back into the swing of things. Something by Julie Bindel, perhaps? I also want a more serious post about the GLBT movement and why we should be seeking out more allies. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has a great article I need to dig back up that discusses how the GLBT movement focuses on the needs of white, middle-class, able to pass for straight gay and lesbian people at the expense of the rest of us.

Do I think that trans people don’t belong in the GLBT movement? No, I think we do. But we could use some basic human respect from our so-called allies.