I went on holiday by mistake - or at least on the spur of the moment - this week, hopping up to the Lake District town of Staveley with a friend to spend a night in the unique surroundings of the Eagle and Child Inn, then have a wander around Ambleside. So far, so not exactly Withnail and I, but I hadn't figured on one thing that would cause a problem: tha lack of a decent mobile signal in the wilds of the Lakes, particularly on a stormy night like Friday.
Stranded in the pub, twitterless, I would have been stuck for something to read in the quiet moments while I waited for my friend to return from the toilet or the bar. Fortunately I had just subscribed to the Kindle edition of the Guardian this week and still had an issue backed up on the machine to work through. This would do, I figured, until I got to somewhere I could connect to wi-fi and download the weekend edition. And so it was that I wound up reading and agreeing with - up to a point, anyway - an article by Julie Bindel. (trigger warning: graphic descriptions of sexual abuse in pornography)
There are a lot of things I don't like about Bindel: her transphobia, her islamophobia, and her selective amnesia and special pleading when called out about both; her inability to take criticism, to the extent of siccing her good buddy, disgraced journo Johann Hari, on people as a kind of big fluffy attack dog; or the fact that I know, from personal experience, that she searches Twitter for her own name on a regular basis and chides people if they're not positive about her. But I think what we would both agree on is that the activities of the sleazebag 'Max Hardcore' are an affront to any notion of decent behaviour. Where we differ is on the inferences we draw from this privileged, cosseted little man's antics. Bindel sees this case as an inherent problem with pornography itself, comparing pornography as a medium to great human rights abuses of history:
'Other human rights campaigners rely on disturbing imagery to add strength to their arguments: footage of animals being caged and tortured; images of men being lynched in the American south by the Ku Klux Klan; pictures of mass graves in conflict zones.'
But there's a problem with this analogy. While what Max WankyNickname does to the women in his films is wrong, and while I for one would love to see him punished for it (at length, in a steel cage, by people wearing sap gloves - but then we all have our fetishes, don't we, Max), the fact remains that the porn industry is not the equivalent of the genocide against black people carried out by the KKK in the American south, or the genocide of other groups carried out by the millitias in Bosnia or Rwanda. I find this comparison both ludicrous and offensive. Porn - whatever problems you may have with it - is not the moral equivalent of genocide.
I do think Bindel is on to something with her analogy between the porn industry and the meat and animal research industries. Though I reject the dehumanising comparison between porn industry workers and livestock implicit in this analogy, it holds inasmuch as both industries are guilty of low standards of welfare, both represent the ugliest side of capitalism, both need tighter and better regulation, and both produce a homogenised, low-quality product which is a cheap perversion of the natural and desirable aspect of life - whether husbandry or, ahem, husbandry - which they distort to create factory-produced crap.
Prior to arriving in Staveley, I had been reading my friend another new Kindle acquisition of mine - Caitlin Moran's most excellent new book How to be a Woman. Moran takes a different attitude to porn, arguing that we need 'free range' porn and 'a 100 per cent increase in the variety of pornography available'. What Moran means by this is more than just the shallow 'variety' offered by the sexual Woolworth's pick-n-mix of DVDAs, hot grannies and interracial creampies, but a variety of approaches, of styles, of genres and ideologies underpinning the stuff people fap to.
This is an attitude to porn I can support, because to me the behaviour of someone like Max MyDaddyNeverLovedMeEnough is an industry issue, a workers' rights issue, and a rightness of content issue rather than an issue which suggests the entire genre in which he works should be banned. By way of a more fitting analogy, consider the action film, particularly the martial arts action film as popularised by Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude van Damme et al in the late eighties, early 90s. This genre of film has many similarities to pornography (many heterosexual women and gay men could argue with some justice that in the case of the early van Damme ouevre the distinction between the films' ostensible genre and pornography collapses completely) in that the 'plot', such as it is, exists primarily as a frame on which to hang a number of fight scenes of increasingly graphic character, in much the same way that the 'plot' of a porn film exists as a frame on which to hang a number of fucking scenes of an increasingly graphic character.
So far so good. But now imagine that someone decides to start making 'hardcore' action films, which contain only the fights - and make them real and basic, rather than choreographed and balletic, at that; which show no regard for the health of the participants, and in fact seem to delight in injury or trauma being inflicted upon them; and which dispense with any semblance of a plot, a moral, or an emotional core beyond vapid, dead-eyed ultraviolence. Would we allow someone to continue making such films? Would we accept it? No. We would not.
And this is where, despite my disagreements with Bindel, I part company with the extreme free speech advocates on the pornography issue, because I do not believe all porn is justified under the 1st Amendment or the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Pornography in which workers are abused by pathetic, petty tyrants who style themselves 'stars', in which audiences are abused by being pandered to with substandard content, needs to be regulated out of existence. Like the food industry, pornography is capitalism at its ugliest; and, like the food industry, it needs to be regulated more strongly and more aggressively, because the products of an UNregulated porn industry are bad for us all.
Showing posts with label Julie Bindel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Julie Bindel. Show all posts
Sunday, 17 July 2011
Sunday, 13 March 2011
...because the bad things never went away
Microaggressions. A word I mentioned on here the other night, which led me to looking up the brilliant microaggressions blog on tumblr, which in turn led me to this brilliant blog about the kind of microaggressions trans people encounter on a pretty much daily basis. It's a concept - like cisgender, and kyriarchy - with which I think people should be much more familiar.
Which makes it more galling that today has been another day of having to deal with aggression and othering from a very familiar source.
Julie Bindel, like the trans toilets topic, seems to be an issue that one has to deal with on a regular basis as a trans activist. However much we make clear, again and again, how much of a transphobic bigot she is, people keep inviting her to give out with her views on trans people as if she's some kind of expert - whether it's the Guardian, Standpoint magazine, Queer Question Time or, most recently, The Royal College of Psychiatrists, who have invited Bindel along as the only non-psychologist to attend a conference on, allegedly, 'the most recent academic, clinical and contemporary thinking on transgender issues'.
Quite why Bindel has been invited, given this brief, is something of a mystery. She isn't an academic. She isn't a clinician. And, far from being 'contemporary', her views on trans issues are rooted in an outmoded, second-wave feminism with which fewer and fewer women - cis or trans - identify today.
Bindel has in the past written a fawning obituary for Mary Daly, calling her 'the world's first feminist philosopher' (take that, Mary Wollstonecraft!) but glossing over her racism, and her genocidal views that we should leave only ten per cent of the men on earth alive. That is quite some evil. Reducing a population by ten per cent is called decimation. I don't even know what the word for reducing a population to ten per cent is, besides genocide. Even the Nazis only managed to kill about 67% of Europe's Jewish population. Daly dreamed about genocide on a scale beyond even Hitler. But, to Bindel, she's a stand-up gal.
When it came to cis men, Daly's genocidal dreams were on a hiding to nothing. When it came to trans women, however, Daly was much more successful, as her apt pupil, Janice Raymond, with her views about 'morally mandating [trans people] out of existence', was able to influence US policy to ensure that federal and state governments would not fund surgeries for indigent and imprisoned trans people. I referred in my last post to the suffering of Rebekah Brewis, who is not receiving adequate help with her transition from the Oregon authorities, in whose mental health system she is currently incarcerated. Janice Raymond is a big part of the reason why; and Mary Daly is a big part of why Janice Raymond thought the way she did.
And now we have Bindel trying to carry on Daly and Raymond's work by addressing the Royal College of Psychiatrists about trans issues - issues she has no experience of. Issues she has, in fact, been dismissive of. And yet of all the people outside psychology they could ask, the Royal College of Psychiatrists has asked her to be the one who lectures to them on trans issues. Would the RCP ask Fred Phelps to be the only non-psychiatrist to lecture them on gay issues? Would they listen calmly to a lecture on Islam by Geert Wilders? Or would they rightly refuse to give a platform of academic respectability to bigotry?
It is exactly that kind of respectability which allowing Bindel to speak at this conference confers on her views. And by bestowing such respectability on her, the Royal College of Psychiatrists are delivering a clear message that they do not care about trans people. They are legitimising the transphobic views that drive the kind of aggression described by Asher Bauer in his blog above. They are conferring legitimacy on discrimination against trans people in healthcare, in housing, in employment, and in the streets where, year after year, trans people lose their lives to the violence bigots like Bindel enable.
As clinicians, the RCP are subject to the medical principle of primum non nocere - 'first do no harm'. By giving their imprimatur to Bindel, they cause harm to one of the most vulnerable groups in society. It's fortunate for them, I suppose, that they can prescribe tranquilisers - because if I was doing what they're doing, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
Which makes it more galling that today has been another day of having to deal with aggression and othering from a very familiar source.
Julie Bindel, like the trans toilets topic, seems to be an issue that one has to deal with on a regular basis as a trans activist. However much we make clear, again and again, how much of a transphobic bigot she is, people keep inviting her to give out with her views on trans people as if she's some kind of expert - whether it's the Guardian, Standpoint magazine, Queer Question Time or, most recently, The Royal College of Psychiatrists, who have invited Bindel along as the only non-psychologist to attend a conference on, allegedly, 'the most recent academic, clinical and contemporary thinking on transgender issues'.
Quite why Bindel has been invited, given this brief, is something of a mystery. She isn't an academic. She isn't a clinician. And, far from being 'contemporary', her views on trans issues are rooted in an outmoded, second-wave feminism with which fewer and fewer women - cis or trans - identify today.
Bindel has in the past written a fawning obituary for Mary Daly, calling her 'the world's first feminist philosopher' (take that, Mary Wollstonecraft!) but glossing over her racism, and her genocidal views that we should leave only ten per cent of the men on earth alive. That is quite some evil. Reducing a population by ten per cent is called decimation. I don't even know what the word for reducing a population to ten per cent is, besides genocide. Even the Nazis only managed to kill about 67% of Europe's Jewish population. Daly dreamed about genocide on a scale beyond even Hitler. But, to Bindel, she's a stand-up gal.
When it came to cis men, Daly's genocidal dreams were on a hiding to nothing. When it came to trans women, however, Daly was much more successful, as her apt pupil, Janice Raymond, with her views about 'morally mandating [trans people] out of existence', was able to influence US policy to ensure that federal and state governments would not fund surgeries for indigent and imprisoned trans people. I referred in my last post to the suffering of Rebekah Brewis, who is not receiving adequate help with her transition from the Oregon authorities, in whose mental health system she is currently incarcerated. Janice Raymond is a big part of the reason why; and Mary Daly is a big part of why Janice Raymond thought the way she did.
And now we have Bindel trying to carry on Daly and Raymond's work by addressing the Royal College of Psychiatrists about trans issues - issues she has no experience of. Issues she has, in fact, been dismissive of. And yet of all the people outside psychology they could ask, the Royal College of Psychiatrists has asked her to be the one who lectures to them on trans issues. Would the RCP ask Fred Phelps to be the only non-psychiatrist to lecture them on gay issues? Would they listen calmly to a lecture on Islam by Geert Wilders? Or would they rightly refuse to give a platform of academic respectability to bigotry?
It is exactly that kind of respectability which allowing Bindel to speak at this conference confers on her views. And by bestowing such respectability on her, the Royal College of Psychiatrists are delivering a clear message that they do not care about trans people. They are legitimising the transphobic views that drive the kind of aggression described by Asher Bauer in his blog above. They are conferring legitimacy on discrimination against trans people in healthcare, in housing, in employment, and in the streets where, year after year, trans people lose their lives to the violence bigots like Bindel enable.
As clinicians, the RCP are subject to the medical principle of primum non nocere - 'first do no harm'. By giving their imprimatur to Bindel, they cause harm to one of the most vulnerable groups in society. It's fortunate for them, I suppose, that they can prescribe tranquilisers - because if I was doing what they're doing, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
Sunday, 1 August 2010
'...from the skyscraper, the world turns out of sight.'
Having ragged on the papers a little in my last post, I suppose in the interests of fairness I ought to highlight a more worthwhile journalistic endeavour, already mentioned in passing below: namely, the Independent on Sunday's latest annual Pink List, the list of the most influential LGB (no T sadly, which we'll get to very shortly) people in British life.
Generally I support the idea of the Pink List. I think it could stand to have, well, some trans people in it somewhere; but I could be persuaded that, if we're talking about influence, it's a sad fact that trans people in British life don't have a lot of that (if it were otherwise, then maybe David Cameron would have said more about the ongoing campaign of murder and harassment against trans people in Turkey during his recent visit to that country). And I'm very happy to see Gareth Thomas topped the list, along with Mary Portas: I think it's important for young gay men to have strong role models, and I wish more sportsmen (and women) in general would come out of the closet (actually I'm also really pleased Mary Portas came in first as well, though this is mainly just due to wishing I was her girlfriend). I think a list like this highlights the increasing visibility of LGB people in society, and that's a good thing. But. There is always, always, a but with these things. So I'm just going to come out and say it:
Why in the name of all that is holy is Julie fucking Bindel on the list? Admittedly she came in at 98, a mere hop-skip-n-jump away from X-Factor warbler Joe McElderry and expenses-fiddler David Laws, but I contend that her being on the list at all is an insult and actually undermines all the good work the list does.
Gareth Thomas himself has written eloquently on his Twitter feed that he would like his being awarded the top spot to stand as an example to other people like him that they can feel comfortable in their own skin. Julie Bindel, who is allowed to share the same list with him, has written articles which are almost deliberately designed to make trans people as far from comfortable in their own skin as possible. From her contention that all trans women are just gay men in denial (because we all know lesbian trans women don't exist, right?) to her sick joke that a world populated entirely by trans men and women would be like a remake of Grease, Bindel has engaged in the kind of prejudice and distortion that legitimises negative attitudes to trans people in exactly the same way the homophobic language discussed below legitimises anti-gay prejudice (you could argue that Bindel's ilk actually contribute more to anti-gay violence, as an awful lot of homophobic violence is directed at gay men who don't conform to standard male gender norms).
In that sense, perhaps, you might say that she does have influence, though it's a malign kind of power, and far from the positivity the Pink List aims to celebrate. But even if they were absolutely desperate to put Bindel in their supplement, the perfect chance was there in the attached 'Rogue's Gallery', a list of gay men and women who, while out of the closet, aren't exactly putting the hours in as ambassadors for tolerance. The Rogue's Gallery rightly includes people like nemesis of reason David 'women can't write history' Starkey, and Elton John (for accepting rather more than thirty pieces of silver to play Rush Limbaugh's wedding)...and also has a go at Sam Fox, because...well, because Sam Fox's last record was a little bad.
So, yeah. I set out to write a positive post about the Pink List here because, in general terms, I think it's a good thing. But, as happy as I am for Gareth and Mary, I really can't stand by and allow people to compile a list in which they apparently believe that making a shit record is a crime, but helping to legitimise a climate in which one of the most vulnerable minorities in society face violence and intimidation on a daily basis is no bar to inclusion.
Generally I support the idea of the Pink List. I think it could stand to have, well, some trans people in it somewhere; but I could be persuaded that, if we're talking about influence, it's a sad fact that trans people in British life don't have a lot of that (if it were otherwise, then maybe David Cameron would have said more about the ongoing campaign of murder and harassment against trans people in Turkey during his recent visit to that country). And I'm very happy to see Gareth Thomas topped the list, along with Mary Portas: I think it's important for young gay men to have strong role models, and I wish more sportsmen (and women) in general would come out of the closet (actually I'm also really pleased Mary Portas came in first as well, though this is mainly just due to wishing I was her girlfriend). I think a list like this highlights the increasing visibility of LGB people in society, and that's a good thing. But. There is always, always, a but with these things. So I'm just going to come out and say it:
Why in the name of all that is holy is Julie fucking Bindel on the list? Admittedly she came in at 98, a mere hop-skip-n-jump away from X-Factor warbler Joe McElderry and expenses-fiddler David Laws, but I contend that her being on the list at all is an insult and actually undermines all the good work the list does.
Gareth Thomas himself has written eloquently on his Twitter feed that he would like his being awarded the top spot to stand as an example to other people like him that they can feel comfortable in their own skin. Julie Bindel, who is allowed to share the same list with him, has written articles which are almost deliberately designed to make trans people as far from comfortable in their own skin as possible. From her contention that all trans women are just gay men in denial (because we all know lesbian trans women don't exist, right?) to her sick joke that a world populated entirely by trans men and women would be like a remake of Grease, Bindel has engaged in the kind of prejudice and distortion that legitimises negative attitudes to trans people in exactly the same way the homophobic language discussed below legitimises anti-gay prejudice (you could argue that Bindel's ilk actually contribute more to anti-gay violence, as an awful lot of homophobic violence is directed at gay men who don't conform to standard male gender norms).
In that sense, perhaps, you might say that she does have influence, though it's a malign kind of power, and far from the positivity the Pink List aims to celebrate. But even if they were absolutely desperate to put Bindel in their supplement, the perfect chance was there in the attached 'Rogue's Gallery', a list of gay men and women who, while out of the closet, aren't exactly putting the hours in as ambassadors for tolerance. The Rogue's Gallery rightly includes people like nemesis of reason David 'women can't write history' Starkey, and Elton John (for accepting rather more than thirty pieces of silver to play Rush Limbaugh's wedding)...and also has a go at Sam Fox, because...well, because Sam Fox's last record was a little bad.
So, yeah. I set out to write a positive post about the Pink List here because, in general terms, I think it's a good thing. But, as happy as I am for Gareth and Mary, I really can't stand by and allow people to compile a list in which they apparently believe that making a shit record is a crime, but helping to legitimise a climate in which one of the most vulnerable minorities in society face violence and intimidation on a daily basis is no bar to inclusion.
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Who's Afraid of Beatrix Campbell?
Here's an interesting idea from sci-fi author Justine Larbalestier: mansplaining. Mansplaining is when men explain things to women which women actually understand better than men. Very often this is men explaining to women why sexist comments aren't actually sexist. Larbalestier points out there are other variants of this, such as whitesplaining, where white people explain to black people why something isn't racist.
It struck me - and this can't be an original thought, I'm sure others have had it before me - that you could also have cisplaining, wherein cis people explain to trans people how something isn't really transphobic. Hmm, I thought, I wonder where I could find a good example of cisplaining to illustrate the point?
Why, in the Guardian, of course! For it would seem that Bea Campbell has decided to bravely leap to Julie Bindel's defense and protect her from those mean people who protested against her on Friday.
Weirdly, I'm actually okay with this. The reason for this is, from perusing her wikipedia entry, I've found that Campbell has a pretty interesting record when it comes to defending people.
She endorsed the Newcastle City Council report into allegations of child abuse at Shieldfield Nursery in 1993. The two alleged perpetrators of this abuse had already been found innocent in a criminal trial, but Campbell believed the Council report was 'stringent' and had uncovered 'persuasive evidence of sadistic and sexual abuse'.
The two nursery workers accused of this abuse successfully sued the 'independent review team' who produced the report, and were awarded the maximum possible damages, with the judge admitting that the report 'included...claims...which they must have known to be untrue' and that the only likely explanation for this was 'malice.'
Campbell also defended the prosecution of Sally Clark, who was imprisoned for the alleged murder of two of her sons. Campbell based her belief in Clark's guilt on the most stringent of scientific grounds, arguing that 'motherhood...can make some women lose their minds.'
Sally Clark was found not guilty on appeal, and released, after the 'scientific' evidence against her was found to be faulty. (This is not a happy ending, though. Clark emerged from prison a broken woman, by all accounts, and died of acute alcohol intoxication at the tragically young age of forty-two. I would like to think Campbell loses sleep over the thought that her words contributed to the demonisation and eventual suicide of an innocent woman. I would like to think that, but I would like to think I will be awarded the TS Eliot prize on the same weekend I win the lottery and find out Katee Sackhoff really, really likes me.)
They say God loves a tryer though, in which case ze must be quite fond of Campbell. Unchastened by these past experiences of failure, she went to the mat for paediatrician David Southall, who had testified against Clark and had also been involved in some ethically and scientfically dodgy medical research on Munchausen's by Proxy. With the same level of high-minded scientific reasoning she had displayed in her examination of the Clark case and the Newcastle Council report, Campbell declared that Southall 'established a gold standard in the detection of lethal child abuse.'
In 2007, Southall was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council for 'professional misconduct.' The judgement specifically referred to his role in the Clark case and other legal proceedings involving child abuse, with Justice Blake saying that Southall 'had speculated on non-medical matters in an offensive manner entirely inconsistent with the status of an independent expert.'
So you'll excuse me if I don't quake in my New Rocks at the thought that Beatrix Campbell has decided to go into battle for Julie Bindel, armed with the sword of wonky science and the shield of blinkered ideology. Based on Campbell's past record at championing other peoples' causes, if I was Bindel I'd get the next plane to Tuscany - and not bother booking a return flight.
It struck me - and this can't be an original thought, I'm sure others have had it before me - that you could also have cisplaining, wherein cis people explain to trans people how something isn't really transphobic. Hmm, I thought, I wonder where I could find a good example of cisplaining to illustrate the point?
Why, in the Guardian, of course! For it would seem that Bea Campbell has decided to bravely leap to Julie Bindel's defense and protect her from those mean people who protested against her on Friday.
Weirdly, I'm actually okay with this. The reason for this is, from perusing her wikipedia entry, I've found that Campbell has a pretty interesting record when it comes to defending people.
She endorsed the Newcastle City Council report into allegations of child abuse at Shieldfield Nursery in 1993. The two alleged perpetrators of this abuse had already been found innocent in a criminal trial, but Campbell believed the Council report was 'stringent' and had uncovered 'persuasive evidence of sadistic and sexual abuse'.
The two nursery workers accused of this abuse successfully sued the 'independent review team' who produced the report, and were awarded the maximum possible damages, with the judge admitting that the report 'included...claims...which they must have known to be untrue' and that the only likely explanation for this was 'malice.'
Campbell also defended the prosecution of Sally Clark, who was imprisoned for the alleged murder of two of her sons. Campbell based her belief in Clark's guilt on the most stringent of scientific grounds, arguing that 'motherhood...can make some women lose their minds.'
Sally Clark was found not guilty on appeal, and released, after the 'scientific' evidence against her was found to be faulty. (This is not a happy ending, though. Clark emerged from prison a broken woman, by all accounts, and died of acute alcohol intoxication at the tragically young age of forty-two. I would like to think Campbell loses sleep over the thought that her words contributed to the demonisation and eventual suicide of an innocent woman. I would like to think that, but I would like to think I will be awarded the TS Eliot prize on the same weekend I win the lottery and find out Katee Sackhoff really, really likes me.)
They say God loves a tryer though, in which case ze must be quite fond of Campbell. Unchastened by these past experiences of failure, she went to the mat for paediatrician David Southall, who had testified against Clark and had also been involved in some ethically and scientfically dodgy medical research on Munchausen's by Proxy. With the same level of high-minded scientific reasoning she had displayed in her examination of the Clark case and the Newcastle Council report, Campbell declared that Southall 'established a gold standard in the detection of lethal child abuse.'
In 2007, Southall was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council for 'professional misconduct.' The judgement specifically referred to his role in the Clark case and other legal proceedings involving child abuse, with Justice Blake saying that Southall 'had speculated on non-medical matters in an offensive manner entirely inconsistent with the status of an independent expert.'
So you'll excuse me if I don't quake in my New Rocks at the thought that Beatrix Campbell has decided to go into battle for Julie Bindel, armed with the sword of wonky science and the shield of blinkered ideology. Based on Campbell's past record at championing other peoples' causes, if I was Bindel I'd get the next plane to Tuscany - and not bother booking a return flight.
Thursday, 28 January 2010
She Does it to Wind Us Up
A few weeks ago, somebody died. Usually when I write about people dying, it's because I think their deaths were a tragic loss. But in the case of Mary Daly, I couldn't give a gnat's chuff. If Mary Daly wasn't the inspiration for Viz comic's 'Millie Tant' character, then she undoubtedly inspired whoever was. Among other examples of her greatest hits, Daly is responsible for making the pagan movement a laughing stock by starting up the 'never again the burning times!' nonsense that the witch-burnings of early modern Europe were a holocaust-level genocide. This has been roundly trashed by scholars of witchcraft like Ronald Hutton, who've actually done the research, but then Hutton wouldn't count in Daly's view because he has a penis. 'Cause, y'see, despite her outrage at the 'gynocide' (geddit?) in Europe, Daly also said, with, as the Discordians put it, her bare face hanging out, that 'if life is to survive on this planet there must be...a drastic reduction of the population of males.'
Yes - out of one side of her face she wept for a genocide which never frakkin' happened, and out of the other side she advocated genocide against 49% of the world's population. And people wonder why radical feminists of her ilk aren't taken seriously?
Weirdly for a radfem, though, Daly was somewhat coy about advocating genocide against trans women. Oh, she was happy enough to call trans women 'Frankensteinian' (which shows, I suppose, that her ignorance of history was matched by her ignorance of literature - altogether now, Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster...) but she employed a cat's paw to actually argue that they ought to be 'morally mandated out of existence.' This was Janice Raymond, whose PhD dissertation, supervised by Daly, became the anti-trans hate screed The Transsexual Empire. Well, if Master Yoda taught us nothing else it's that there are 'always two - the master and the apprentice.' Sadly for us all, Darth Raymond is still with us.
I haven't even touched on Daly's exclusion of the voices of women of colour, which Audre Lorde called her out on publicly, without receiving an adequate response.
Mary Daly, then: a historical charlatan, an apalling writer, a transphobic bigot, a racist, and an advocate of genocide. You would have to be the vilest kind of pointless opinion troll to write up a glowing obituary for someone like that, wouldn't you?
Well, guess who's done just that?
She does it to wind us up, I'm sure. It's almost laughable. Except that it's not, because allowing people like Bindel to get away with this crap allows things like this to happen.
I've spent an hour trying to come up with a nice, well-written tie-up for this post. And I can't. No words I write will be equal to the horror of what happened to Angelina Mavilia, and what happened to Myra Ical in Texas last week, and what happens to trans women all over the world. I can only write a certain amount of words per day and however many I wrote, they could never compare to that suffering. But at least I don't waste those words praising someone who would have supported their violation and murder. Julie Bindel does. And for that reason alone, she should not be given a platform, whether at Queer Question Time tomorrow, or in the Guardian.
Yes - out of one side of her face she wept for a genocide which never frakkin' happened, and out of the other side she advocated genocide against 49% of the world's population. And people wonder why radical feminists of her ilk aren't taken seriously?
Weirdly for a radfem, though, Daly was somewhat coy about advocating genocide against trans women. Oh, she was happy enough to call trans women 'Frankensteinian' (which shows, I suppose, that her ignorance of history was matched by her ignorance of literature - altogether now, Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster...) but she employed a cat's paw to actually argue that they ought to be 'morally mandated out of existence.' This was Janice Raymond, whose PhD dissertation, supervised by Daly, became the anti-trans hate screed The Transsexual Empire. Well, if Master Yoda taught us nothing else it's that there are 'always two - the master and the apprentice.' Sadly for us all, Darth Raymond is still with us.
I haven't even touched on Daly's exclusion of the voices of women of colour, which Audre Lorde called her out on publicly, without receiving an adequate response.
Mary Daly, then: a historical charlatan, an apalling writer, a transphobic bigot, a racist, and an advocate of genocide. You would have to be the vilest kind of pointless opinion troll to write up a glowing obituary for someone like that, wouldn't you?
Well, guess who's done just that?
She does it to wind us up, I'm sure. It's almost laughable. Except that it's not, because allowing people like Bindel to get away with this crap allows things like this to happen.
I've spent an hour trying to come up with a nice, well-written tie-up for this post. And I can't. No words I write will be equal to the horror of what happened to Angelina Mavilia, and what happened to Myra Ical in Texas last week, and what happens to trans women all over the world. I can only write a certain amount of words per day and however many I wrote, they could never compare to that suffering. But at least I don't waste those words praising someone who would have supported their violation and murder. Julie Bindel does. And for that reason alone, she should not be given a platform, whether at Queer Question Time tomorrow, or in the Guardian.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
More on the Bindel
Roz Kaveney has posted a link at her LJ blog showing exactly how Julie Bindel's view of the world deviates from that of the reality-based community. I also recommend reading the comments thread, because there are some good points made there about how the essentially sex-negative attitudes of Bindel and many other feminists of her ilk actively made life more difficult not just for trans or queer people, but even for the cis lesbians who they supposedly represented.
The thing I find most gob-smacking about Bindel, though, is that the usually reasonable newspaper The Guardian employs her. Sometimes she does actually have something interesting to say - she was almost a lone voice in UK newspapers against the treatment of Meredith 'Foxy Knoxy' Knox (though I suspect Bindel would have been a lot less bothered about the case if Knox were trans rather than cis, what with it being a well-known fact in Bindel-land that trans women are really just rape-crazed males going into deep cover to unleash their penises when the Transsexual Empire reactivates them with the secret codeword*) and she has an interesting article up on the Guardian at the moment about research on 'why men use prostitutes' though again I suspect that in her head she's already answered this question with because they're men! They're evil! They have penises!
But then you come across something like this , which is basically 'What I Did on my Holidays by Julie Bindel.' And what did Bindel do on her holidays, you ask? Well, you or I would probably catch some rays, read a good book, eat and drink a bit too much, maybe visit a gallery, that kind of thing. But Bindel isn't like us. When she goes on holiday, she brings the hate.
I suppose we ought to be grateful that her vitriol here was directed at children rather than trans women, but then again I don't imagine many trans women enjoy the middle class privilege of being able to take holidays in Tuscany in the first place, so there isn't much chance of Bindel being bothered by their presence. Still, deprived of her favourite punching bag, Bindel nevertheless bravely goes into print to lather reams of abuse on, again, a bunch of kids. She dehumanises them, referring to them as 'like locusts swarming on an oasis' and bemoans their terrible, thuggish habit of having fun in a swimming pool. What monsters!
There's also a nice bit of 'I'm not middle class even though I live in a middle class area and holiday in Tuscany' which, frankly, isn't fooling anybody, and, hilariously, Bindel bemoans people 'raising their children without teaching them manners or a sense of consideration'.
That's right. Julie Bindel, who believes 'a world inhabited just by transsexuals...would look like the set of Grease', Julie Bindel, who considers queer-identifying people to be akin to devil-worshippers and who believes that how gay men have sex with each other is somehow part of an evil conspiracy to oppress women, and who uses a column in a national newspaper to rip the piss out of families of people enjoying a little relaxation while on their holidays, thinks people should have more manners and consideration.
I think we can all see, at this point, that Bindel is just another paid troll used by the papers to fill column inches with some 'controversial' opinions. Whatever her opinion of herself as a political activist, she's wound up filling the same niche as Liz Jones, Rod Liddle, Tanya Gold and even - the daddy of the Vile Opinion Troll Squad - Richard Littlejohn. And so we shouldn't be surprised if people from her milieu defend her - after all, people are defending Liddle even after it was revealed that he spent time on Milwall FC's website making racist comments that, as far as I can tell, amount to hate speech. These people have a good thing going: they get paid to troll, essentially, and like all people running a racket - especially one increasingly under threat from a bunch of new, more clued-up and genuinely idealistic operators - however much they may dislike each other, there's a tacit principle of protecting their own.
At the risk of flaunting my middle class privilege in the same way as Bindel, I should mention here that I have a Blackberry. And I use the Guardian's Blackberry app to read the only two pieces of that paper I never want to miss - Charlie Brooker's TV review on Saturdays, and his G2 column on Mondays. And, since I started doing that, I've stopped buying the paper, and felt a little bit guilty about it. After all, by reading those bits of the paper free online, I was robbing the paper itself of money. I felt a little bad about that.
Then again, now that I know that some of that money goes towards paying for Julie Bindel to go on holiday in Tuscany, I find I don't feel guilty at all. Not even one little bit.
(also - it's a long shot, but just in case any of the kids who annoy Bindel so much do happen to be reading this - next time she's out there, don't bomb into the pool. Gather 'round her and do that humming thing, you know the one where you hum at the same time so she doesn't know who it is. That'll piss her off right good an' proper.)
*The secret codeword is, of course, 'Execute Case Orange.' They're massive Battlestar Galactica fans.
The thing I find most gob-smacking about Bindel, though, is that the usually reasonable newspaper The Guardian employs her. Sometimes she does actually have something interesting to say - she was almost a lone voice in UK newspapers against the treatment of Meredith 'Foxy Knoxy' Knox (though I suspect Bindel would have been a lot less bothered about the case if Knox were trans rather than cis, what with it being a well-known fact in Bindel-land that trans women are really just rape-crazed males going into deep cover to unleash their penises when the Transsexual Empire reactivates them with the secret codeword*) and she has an interesting article up on the Guardian at the moment about research on 'why men use prostitutes' though again I suspect that in her head she's already answered this question with because they're men! They're evil! They have penises!
But then you come across something like this , which is basically 'What I Did on my Holidays by Julie Bindel.' And what did Bindel do on her holidays, you ask? Well, you or I would probably catch some rays, read a good book, eat and drink a bit too much, maybe visit a gallery, that kind of thing. But Bindel isn't like us. When she goes on holiday, she brings the hate.
I suppose we ought to be grateful that her vitriol here was directed at children rather than trans women, but then again I don't imagine many trans women enjoy the middle class privilege of being able to take holidays in Tuscany in the first place, so there isn't much chance of Bindel being bothered by their presence. Still, deprived of her favourite punching bag, Bindel nevertheless bravely goes into print to lather reams of abuse on, again, a bunch of kids. She dehumanises them, referring to them as 'like locusts swarming on an oasis' and bemoans their terrible, thuggish habit of having fun in a swimming pool. What monsters!
There's also a nice bit of 'I'm not middle class even though I live in a middle class area and holiday in Tuscany' which, frankly, isn't fooling anybody, and, hilariously, Bindel bemoans people 'raising their children without teaching them manners or a sense of consideration'.
That's right. Julie Bindel, who believes 'a world inhabited just by transsexuals...would look like the set of Grease', Julie Bindel, who considers queer-identifying people to be akin to devil-worshippers and who believes that how gay men have sex with each other is somehow part of an evil conspiracy to oppress women, and who uses a column in a national newspaper to rip the piss out of families of people enjoying a little relaxation while on their holidays, thinks people should have more manners and consideration.
I think we can all see, at this point, that Bindel is just another paid troll used by the papers to fill column inches with some 'controversial' opinions. Whatever her opinion of herself as a political activist, she's wound up filling the same niche as Liz Jones, Rod Liddle, Tanya Gold and even - the daddy of the Vile Opinion Troll Squad - Richard Littlejohn. And so we shouldn't be surprised if people from her milieu defend her - after all, people are defending Liddle even after it was revealed that he spent time on Milwall FC's website making racist comments that, as far as I can tell, amount to hate speech. These people have a good thing going: they get paid to troll, essentially, and like all people running a racket - especially one increasingly under threat from a bunch of new, more clued-up and genuinely idealistic operators - however much they may dislike each other, there's a tacit principle of protecting their own.
At the risk of flaunting my middle class privilege in the same way as Bindel, I should mention here that I have a Blackberry. And I use the Guardian's Blackberry app to read the only two pieces of that paper I never want to miss - Charlie Brooker's TV review on Saturdays, and his G2 column on Mondays. And, since I started doing that, I've stopped buying the paper, and felt a little bit guilty about it. After all, by reading those bits of the paper free online, I was robbing the paper itself of money. I felt a little bad about that.
Then again, now that I know that some of that money goes towards paying for Julie Bindel to go on holiday in Tuscany, I find I don't feel guilty at all. Not even one little bit.
(also - it's a long shot, but just in case any of the kids who annoy Bindel so much do happen to be reading this - next time she's out there, don't bomb into the pool. Gather 'round her and do that humming thing, you know the one where you hum at the same time so she doesn't know who it is. That'll piss her off right good an' proper.)
*The secret codeword is, of course, 'Execute Case Orange.' They're massive Battlestar Galactica fans.
Monday, 25 January 2010
Are we the baddies?
An update from Bird of Paradox about the Queer Question Time event featuring everyone's favourite bigot, Bindel.
It would appear the organisers are playing the victim card, and arguing that people protesting the inclusion of Bindel - who really has no business whatsoever being on a panel of this sort (aside from anything else, she's said she regards queer-identifying people as akin to devil-worshippers and that she wants nothing more to do with them, so why go on a panel for them?) are the evil forces of censorship which is evil.
Bindel herself has advanced a similar line about those who 'persecute' her, of course, a line which I deconstructed here. But this line of thinking is actually more widespread than Bindel, and probably needs a more serious debunking than my snark-heavy efforts. Fortunately, there's an excellent critique of that mindset to be found here.
There are people who think that when we protest giving a platform to people like Bindel, it's because we're offended. And it's true that we are offended. And, undoubtedly, they are equally offended by what they see as us trying to 'censor' them. But that's not the reason for the protests. The reason for the protests is that giving Bindel a platform where she can spout her bigoted BS causes harm. I explain below how media attitudes help to create a climate in which, where some women are concerned, people can get away with murder, and that's a climate which Bindel, with her dehumanising remarks about trans women, has helped to enforce again and again.
It's very hard for people like Bindel to understand this, of course. One of the reasons it's so hard is that they haven't really grown up and got used to the world we now inhabit. As an old-style feminist, Bindel hasn't got used to the degree to which the struggle's moved on. She's stayed behind on the curve and, as often happens, has gone from radical to conservative without apparently changing. But more than that, as an old-style newspaper columnist, she's not used to the degree to which the web makes it easier for her opinions to be challenged. Anton Vowl at the Enemies of Reason has a good post on that here.
What this all comes down to in the end is Bindel taking offence at the fact that her spurious authority as a 'leader' is being challenged by people who can bring attention to the harm done by her words. We live in a world now where it isn't enough to inveigle yourself into a safe position at the Guardian and rest safe in the knowledge that any critical opinion of you will be thrown in the bin and never make it into the letter column. We live in a world where, if you fuck up, if you act badly, if you write words that get people killed, you will be called out on it, and, if you fail to properly apologise and make amends for what you've done, those bad deeds will follow you no matter what you do. And when people take the chance to remind others of what you've done, and why it was wrong? Those people are not the aggressors and you, no matter how aggrieved you feel, are not the victim.
It would appear the organisers are playing the victim card, and arguing that people protesting the inclusion of Bindel - who really has no business whatsoever being on a panel of this sort (aside from anything else, she's said she regards queer-identifying people as akin to devil-worshippers and that she wants nothing more to do with them, so why go on a panel for them?) are the evil forces of censorship which is evil.
Bindel herself has advanced a similar line about those who 'persecute' her, of course, a line which I deconstructed here. But this line of thinking is actually more widespread than Bindel, and probably needs a more serious debunking than my snark-heavy efforts. Fortunately, there's an excellent critique of that mindset to be found here.
There are people who think that when we protest giving a platform to people like Bindel, it's because we're offended. And it's true that we are offended. And, undoubtedly, they are equally offended by what they see as us trying to 'censor' them. But that's not the reason for the protests. The reason for the protests is that giving Bindel a platform where she can spout her bigoted BS causes harm. I explain below how media attitudes help to create a climate in which, where some women are concerned, people can get away with murder, and that's a climate which Bindel, with her dehumanising remarks about trans women, has helped to enforce again and again.
It's very hard for people like Bindel to understand this, of course. One of the reasons it's so hard is that they haven't really grown up and got used to the world we now inhabit. As an old-style feminist, Bindel hasn't got used to the degree to which the struggle's moved on. She's stayed behind on the curve and, as often happens, has gone from radical to conservative without apparently changing. But more than that, as an old-style newspaper columnist, she's not used to the degree to which the web makes it easier for her opinions to be challenged. Anton Vowl at the Enemies of Reason has a good post on that here.
What this all comes down to in the end is Bindel taking offence at the fact that her spurious authority as a 'leader' is being challenged by people who can bring attention to the harm done by her words. We live in a world now where it isn't enough to inveigle yourself into a safe position at the Guardian and rest safe in the knowledge that any critical opinion of you will be thrown in the bin and never make it into the letter column. We live in a world where, if you fuck up, if you act badly, if you write words that get people killed, you will be called out on it, and, if you fail to properly apologise and make amends for what you've done, those bad deeds will follow you no matter what you do. And when people take the chance to remind others of what you've done, and why it was wrong? Those people are not the aggressors and you, no matter how aggrieved you feel, are not the victim.
Linkage
Good golly gosh, I really am all about the bloggage tonight. Just a quick links thread before we go.
First of all, it would seem that Julie Bindel, whose thoughts on trans folk and indeed queer folk in general tend toward exclusion if not outright genocide, has, perhaps because drug use has become endemic in society, been invited onto a 'Queer Question Time' panel in London. I cannot imagine which god alone would know who thought this a good idea, but, fortunately and quite rightly, people are protesting. More on this at Bird of Paradox.
Fortunately there are places which take a less bigoted view of gender identity. I'm heartened to see that a zine called 'Femme Means Attack' are calling for submissions from all people who identify as radical femmes, whatever their gender. This information - which I heard of, again, at Bird of Paradox - is the kind of thing that gives you hope. Because the people promoting Bindel are mainstream media like the Guardian and Standpoint magazine, and the mainstream media are falling ever more behind in the race to adapt to the realities of the new media age (one noteworthy thing about the Rod Liddle affair is that all the running on this has been made by bloggers and Twitter activists, while 'old-school' journalists have cravenly defended Liddle's crass, thuggish behaviour). The people promoting Bindel and her ilk are the past. The people organising things like Femme Means Attack are the future, and that future is inclusive, welcoming and, in the words of Louis Macneice, 'incorrigibly plural' and full of 'the drunkenness of things being various.'
The abolitionist Theodore Parker said that 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' I believe that. And I believe that that arc will continue to bend toward justice in spite of the bigotry of people like Bindel, and the ignorance of those who promote her.
And now, before I turn in, I have submissions to prepare.
First of all, it would seem that Julie Bindel, whose thoughts on trans folk and indeed queer folk in general tend toward exclusion if not outright genocide, has, perhaps because drug use has become endemic in society, been invited onto a 'Queer Question Time' panel in London. I cannot imagine which god alone would know who thought this a good idea, but, fortunately and quite rightly, people are protesting. More on this at Bird of Paradox.
Fortunately there are places which take a less bigoted view of gender identity. I'm heartened to see that a zine called 'Femme Means Attack' are calling for submissions from all people who identify as radical femmes, whatever their gender. This information - which I heard of, again, at Bird of Paradox - is the kind of thing that gives you hope. Because the people promoting Bindel are mainstream media like the Guardian and Standpoint magazine, and the mainstream media are falling ever more behind in the race to adapt to the realities of the new media age (one noteworthy thing about the Rod Liddle affair is that all the running on this has been made by bloggers and Twitter activists, while 'old-school' journalists have cravenly defended Liddle's crass, thuggish behaviour). The people promoting Bindel and her ilk are the past. The people organising things like Femme Means Attack are the future, and that future is inclusive, welcoming and, in the words of Louis Macneice, 'incorrigibly plural' and full of 'the drunkenness of things being various.'
The abolitionist Theodore Parker said that 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' I believe that. And I believe that that arc will continue to bend toward justice in spite of the bigotry of people like Bindel, and the ignorance of those who promote her.
And now, before I turn in, I have submissions to prepare.
Saturday, 31 October 2009
Bindel PWNED
The Daily Quail have published my parody of Julie Bindel's recent transphobic brainfart from everyone's favourite right-wing reality-denial journal Standpoint. Have a read of it and, if you aren't doing so already, add the Quail to your blogroll. They do a fine job of parodying the fearmongers of our right-wing press -and, humour being the best weapon against fear there is, that's worth doing.
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