...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.

So what happened at that Bindel thing, Adam?

I don't know, love, I wasn't actually there, as I was unable to pay a Queen's ransom for an East Coast Rail Ticket.
Fortunately, Helen from Bird of Paradox was, and you'll find her report on it here.

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.

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.

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.