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.

Some People Died. You Didn't Hear.

Via Helen at Bird of Paradox, disturbing news of the death of Myra Ical in Houston, Texas. Disturbing not just because she had to 'go down fighting for her life' but because every news report has (a) characterised her as a cross-dressing man and (b) they've pointed out the area where she died was 'known for drugs and prostitution'. This despite the fact that the detective in charge of the case (and the US police aren't known for being friends of trans people) said there is no evidence that drugs or prostitution had anything to do with her death.

Not that that's news, of course. As Anton Vowl at Enemies of Reason has pointed out, the media have form for distorting reality to fit an agenda. So reports of aid distribution in Haiti talk about machete-wielding mobs even if no-one on the ground has seen a machete. Similarly, a trans woman has been murdered? Has to be about drugs or prostitution. Because, y'know, trans people, they're all druggies and perverts. Sure.

This thought process has a long history though. It's called dehumanisation. It invariably lets the worst kind of privileged people, who only see themselves as fully human, off the hook. So vulnerable people in Haiti become machete-wielding savages and suddenly we don't have to care if they're dying of hunger and lack of proper medical treatment. Marginalised trans women become drug-crazed cross-dressing perverts, and suddenly we don't have to care that they spent their last few minutes on earth kicking and scratching to try and fight off some sick, evil piece of shit that wanted to kill them just because of who they were.

More than that, though, it enables a climate where those killings can flourish. In Honduras, a year ago this month, trans human rights activist Cynthia Nicole was murdered. Disturbingly, she seems to be one of many. There are reports that there has been an ongoing trend of violent harassment of trans people in Honduras of late. Why is this?

Undoubtedly it's because some people lack a properly-nuanced understanding of gender issues. Undoubtedly it's because some guys don't like to find out that the hot chick they've been making eyes at all night was born with, and may still have, a set of genitalia different from what they were expecting. But it's more than that.

People kill women like Cynthia Nicole and Myra Ical because the media dehumanises those women. Because it encourages the view that they're 'not real', that they're 'deceptive', that they're 'perverts', that they're not like us. They kill them because the culture tells them it's okay.

This is why, when I get angry at pricks like Letterman or even generally stand-up guys like Stephen Fry repackaging transphobic bullshit for an audience of millions, it matters. It matters because that sort of attitude fosters a climate in which some people feel it's alright to kill trans women. And that, it shouldn't need saying, is wrong. And, as Recursive Paradox points out at Genderbitch, it doesn't matter if that wasn't intended.   It still causes harm. It still kills people.

A woman died this week. Her death wasn't widely reported, because it didn't fit a pre-existing mainstream media narrative, and because the media knew a lot of people wouldn't care that she had died. But her death matters. Her life matters. And we cannot, and should not, connive with a culture that says that that isn't the case.