Questioning Transphobia

I can’t believe I forgot to link this when I read it. I’m going to blame a silly digression on Julia’s LJ for forgetting. Helen G has quoted a particularly relevant section in her post about the article about cissexism and sexism and how it affects trans women, which makes the above digression particularly ridiculous.

I don’t have any particular sections to quote from the article – please read the whole thing (or at least Helen G’s excerpt).

Jon Justice, the shock jock who simulated an act of rape on an effigy of activist Isabel Garcia on video is now trying to have Isabel disbarred. Meanwhile, he’s still at work.

As WoC PhD posts:

While Jon Justice continues to enjoy full privileges as a radio host after posting mock rape videos in which he made racist comments about Latinas and immigrants while assaulting a piñata with public defender Isabel Garcia’s face pasted to it (see my original post for more), his efforts to have Garcia dismissed from her job as a public defender in Arizona have gone forward. Garcia is currently under investigation by the AZ state bar for participating in a protest against a book signing for a book that supports active discrimination against immigrants and subversion of their rights. “Justice” and others, have misrepresented the events to say that Garcia’s “toting of a severed piñata head of a police officer” constitutes violation of the bar’s code of conduct. Garcia was actually picking up the head after protesters split the piñata open in traditional form. She and others actively protested the incitement of anti-immigrant sentiment and abuse of immigrants and the Latin@ community in AZ which they felt were being exacerbated by the event and the author. Should the review board decide that Garcia is guilty of violating codes of conduct, she could lose her license to practice law in the state of Arizona and would also lose her job as a public defender.

Coalición de Derechos Humanos asks for help defending Isabel Garcia.

Also, WoC PhD writes:

Anyone who is concerned about sexual violence, racism, and/or the place where these two things intersects needs to take action to support women’s rights in Arizona. You can make your voice heard by joining the write in campaign I mentioned in the previous post AND by doing the following:

1. Contact Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckleberry in support of Isabel Garcia. 520.740.8661 or e-mail: chh@pima.govThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
2. Contact the Journal Broadcast Group, expressing your opinion of Jon Justice and the tactics of 104.1FM, and your concern that local KGUN 9 would be associated with an outlet that is so obviously NOT an objective media source. Contact Julie Brinks: 520.290.7600 or e-mail: jbrinks@journalbroadcastinggroup.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
3. Contact the Board of Supervisors, voicing your support of Isabel Garcia, who has broken no rule or regulation as a Pima County employee.

Pima County Board of Supervisors
30 West Congress Street, 11th Floor
Tucson, Arizona 85701
Receptionist – (520) 740-8126
Fax – (520) 884-1152

Ann Day, District 1
Ann.Day@pima.govThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
(520) 740-2738

Ramón Valadez, District 2
district2@pima.govThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
(520) 740-8126

Sharon Bronson, District 3
district3@pima.govThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
(520) 740-8051

Ray Carroll, District 4
district4@pima.govThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
(520) 740-8094

Richard Elías, Chairman, District 5
district5@pima.govThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
(520) 740-8126

It is beyond outrageous that Jon Justice is able to attack Isabel Garcia personally in such a misogynist and racist manner, but that he is able to do so with impunity while he also tries to destroy her career. Don’t let this happen.

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.

Brownfemipower points to a video of “Jon Justice” being downright slimy and nasty about Isabel Garcia:

Isabel Garcia recently pissed off local nativists because of the work she is doing. I am purposefully not going into any detail about the work she does, because I don’t want anybody to think that this clip is vile and disgusting because the woman does amazing work. I want people to see this for what it is–a white man feeling like he can control, humiliate, and imply sexual violence against a brown woman–all while be recorded for public broadcast. It’s about a white man controlling a woman who pissed him off, by mocking her race, by implying sexual control over her through the use of racist imagery and language.

She is being attacked, mocked, ridiculed, and sexually humiliated because she is brown and she is a woman.

Click here to find out how you can stand up to sexual violence on public airwaves. If you want to know more about Isabel Garcia and the amazing work she does, see the previous link and click here.

The video itself is horrible and potentially triggering, so Ilyka’s posted a transcript for those who don’t want to watch it.

WoC PhD, Nezua, and Kai also cover this.

Sudy of A Womyn’s Ecdysis has posted a vlog providing a sampling of the really questionable comments from the feminist blogosphere:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8UEGMvuxGc&rel=1]

This barely scratches the surface, but some of what she quotes is surprisingly outrageous. I’m looking forward to further installments – not just the outrageous stuff, but positive stuff as well.