So you'll recall I was very pleased with this story, right? Particularly because it suggested that, in a world filled with idiots like Blanchard and Bindel, it showed that some people were behaving like decent humans and accepting the fact that we live in the future?
Well, fucking guess what.
Legally recognising that someone can have a gender outside the limited binary male/female division imperialist culture recognises would seem to be too hard for some people in Australia. Evidently it makes them choke on their Vegemite sarnies. How nice of John Hatzistergos and his ridiculous chin to make sure Norrie May Welby doesn't have the freedom to go about interfering with these people and their dull suburban lives drinking XXXX, watching Aussie Rules Football and quietly wishing for an end to the slow, lingering, inceremental brain-death which is all they've known since birth. What a fine use of his public office. It isn't as if his time could be better used prosecuting, say, actual criminals. Yes, John, you and your chin spend your time going after gender outlaws instead, it's easier than taking on cases which might get you shot. You big-chinned prick.
The future is coming. There is no point standing in the way of a world of greater freedom and diversity for the sake of a few votes from the kind of rat-faced, barely-literate scum who can't count beyond the number two or think beyond the notion of 'us and them.' Some day, politicians will realise that, and we will all be able to breathe a deep sigh of relief. Until then, we just have to keep doing what we can in our own small way to widen peoples' understanding of issues like this, even in the face of obstacles like Kevin Rudd's uniformly appalling taste in ties, or John Hatzistergos's walking solar eclipse of a jawbone.
Showing posts with label genderqueer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genderqueer. Show all posts
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
'The sniper's bullet is an extension of his eye: he kills with injurious vision.'
As a genderqueer person it always annoys me when some cis gay men engage in transmisogynistic (and indeed just plain old misogynistic) behaviour in a pathetic attempt to shore up their own self-esteem by kicking down at another marginalised group. Prolonged observation of one such specimen in the field led to the writing of this poem. I'm honestly not usually this vicious (I'm actually quite the sensitive little flower), but if I catch you doing something ignorant, bigoted and just plain wrong, then I will watch everything you do, note it down, and then create a portrait which shows your ugly side in such detail that it will ruin you. Or to put it another way: do not fuck with the bard.
Friday, 5 March 2010
You've Got Ray Blanchard In A Whirl...
My last post, about my dissatisfaction with the inclusion of 'Autogynephilia' as a diagnostic category in DSM-V has caused some controversy on Twitter, which I feel I should address here. What I specifically want to address is the accusation that I don't believe Autogynephilia is 'real'.
The reality, of course, is more complex than that. The thing about psychiatric diagnoses is that they are harder to arrive at than biological ones. Klinefelter's Syndrome is comparatively easy to diagnose: either your karyotype indicates you have an extra X chromosome or it doesn't. Gender Identity Disorder - soon, gods and goddesses willing, to be reclassified as Gender Incongruence - is a more nuanced diagnosis to make, depends on a lot of factors, and can be experienced differently by different people.
The reason for this is that psychiatrists and psychologists, in classifying mental disorders, are dealing not so much with specific viruses or bacteria, but more nebulous collections of symptoms. Many of the symptoms occur together and often react well to certain forms of clinical intervention. Where this happens it is usual to apply a diagnostic label to the collection of symptoms in order to aid the treatment of individuals who present with them in the future. But the labels we apply to these collections of symptoms are always subject to change, as are the symptoms which fall under a certain label. For example, schizophrenia as we know it has developed over a curious course of diagnostic evolution from its original classification as 'dementia praecox' to the clinical definition we know today. Currently, moves are afoot to eliminate Asperger's Syndrome as a separate condition and merge it with the other Autism Spectrum Disorders, on the grounds that it fits in better on that spectrum than as a separate entity. All this is as it should be: research modifies our understanding of a condition, which in turn modifies the way we categorise it, which in turn leads to improvements in the ways we treat or help people deal with these conditions.
In a perfect world this is how it would always work, but this world is far from perfect, and, despite vast efforts to build in a system of checks, balances and controls, psychologists and psychiatrists are at least as likely as people in the general population to have prejudices and biases, and these biases can and do creep into the disciplines themselves. This is one reason why periodic revision of the DSM is a good idea: it allows for reevaluation of the previously accepted psychological norms.
'The normal' itself is, of course, one of the biggest biases that can creep into diagnosis. I mentioned in my previous piece that, for a long time, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric 'disorder' because it was regarded as 'abnormal.' Thankfully, these days it is accepted that this isn't the case. But psychiatry persists in categorising some sexualities as normal and others as not so. The device used for this purpose is the idea of 'paraphilia' or, in layman's terms, sexual fetishism.
Paraphilia, as a diagnosis, has its uses, in that it provides a useful framework for considering the sexual desires of people whose behaviour is genuinely harmful, such as paedophiles and sex murderers. You'll note that the DSM-IV definition talks of non-normative sexual behaviours which 'may cause distress or serious problems for the paraphiliac or other persons associated with him or her'. But, notice the may. Something doesn't have to be causing anyone harm to be considered a paraphilia. Your kink might be pretty innocuous - maybe you have a thing for being shagged on formica tables, or you like to masturbate while listening to Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. You're not harming anyone (unless you go to a concert hall to pleasure yourself), but it doesn't matter. You have a paraphilia. You have a disorder. You are, as they say, in the system.
Look: I've known some kinky people. Hell, I'm pretty kinky myself (you don't want to know what I want Girl Obelix to do to me), and none of the kinky people I've met seemed mentally ill. Some had other mental illnesses, such as depression, but no more than in the general population, by my reckoning. And where there did seem to be a link between their particular pastime and some level of, say, depression or alcoholism, this could always be understood as a reaction to their marginalised status, and the prejudice they suffered from people with more privileged 'normal' sexualities.
I'm coming to understand that the social construction of mental disorders, which seemed like a purely theoretical idea when I first studied psychology, is a reality. To say disorders are socially constructed does not mean they aren't 'real.' Rather, it's the case that when people fall outside social norms, the response of people in society to their behaviour actively constructs their disorder. Consider the paradigm that has recently emerged in the field of disability activism: people are not disabled in themselves, they are disabled by a society which creates obstacles to their effective functioning, to the benefit of the privileged. Without wanting to come across as entirely RD Laing, I don't think it's too much of a leap to say that many people we class as 'disordered' actually reflect the disordered state of society.
Gender Incongruence is a real thing which people experience, and which can be treated with a variety of methods, up to and including gender reassignment surgery. But it only becomes a disorder because it conflicts with the social expectations a society places on someone because of their birth gender, and failing to meet those expectations causes feelings of trauma and guilt. Most sexual fetishes only become disorders when the treatment of people who happen to enjoy such fetishes leads to their experiencing feelings of marginalisation and low self-worth.
This applies even to those disorders considered to have a strong physiological basis. Depression seems to be the result of chemical imbalances in the brain (given that it often responds to treatment using chemicals which correct said imbalances). However, depression as a disorder, rather than a normal, acceptable and managable part of human diversity, is constructed by a society which unduly rewards self-confidence and bonhomie over actual achievement (there'll be more on this in my next post, which will consider the issue of privilege and self-esteem in greater depth).
So, to return to Autogynephilia, here we have a definition of something which could easily be classed as Gender Incongruence, but isn't because some cis male psychologists have decided that the only real gender incongruence is heterosexual in nature. If you're a trans woman and you want to fuck men, Roberta's your auntie. But if you're male assigned at birth, feel gender incongruence, but want to get it on with other ladies...that's not real Gender Incongruence. That's just a paraphilia. That's just sexual deviancy (don't worry if you're a trans man who wants to fuck other fellas, though. Ray Blanchard doesn't consider gay trans men in his definition of Autogynephilia. Perhaps, like Queen Victoria on lesbians, he doesn't think they really exist).
I cannot see the logic in this distinction. As far as I can work it out, Gender Incongruence is the same regardless of who you want to bump uglies with, because, well, Gender Congruence is the same, regardless of who you want to bump uglies with. So 'Autogynephilia' can only be a socially constructed 'disorder' based on the heteronormative, cissupremacist prejudices of our society. But it isn't just a bad diagnosis. It's actively harmful.
Many transphobes today persist in regarding being trans as a 'lifestyle choice'. By creating a false division which says one type of Gender Incongruence is real, but one is just a 'perversion', the deployment of Autogynephilia as a diagnostic category legitimises this perception. It makes psychologists and psychiatrists complicit in the marginalisation of people who are already heavily marginalised by society. This is a deep betrayal of psychology's basis as a science, and psychiatry's basis as a branch of medicine. The purpose of science is to describe reality objectively, free from the biases and prejudice of phenomenologically lazier forms of discourse. The purpose of medicine is to heal those who are hurting, without harming them further.
'Autogynephilia' does not meet either of these requirements. It is scientifically unnecessary: everything it involves could easily be described in terms of Gender Incongruence. And it is medically abhorrent, as it leaves people who form a normal, healthy part of the gender spectrum with the idea that they are somehow 'wrong', with no possibility of cure, and causes them further harm by legitimising the prejudiced views that they're all just perverts.
None of this means that there are not birth-gendered men who identify as female in a primarily sexual context. For some of these people it is just a fetish, either cross-dressing or enforced feminization. That's fine. For some it goes deeper. There are also, of course, trans women who aren't very sexual. And there are trans women who are very sexual, and trans men of all kinds too. The gender spectrum is just that, a spectrum, on which there are many varieties of experience. This is a concept bourne out by the experiences of people in the trans community and their cis allies every day, but it's a concept which still meets with resistance from the more bigoted sectors of the population. The job of psychologists is to break down this bigotry by revealing the truth about the human psyche. The job of psychiatrists is to help those who are harmed by such bigotry. So the message to the people compiling the DSM-V should be clear: focus on a more inclusive, but still robust, definition of Gender Incongruence, chuck 'Autogynephilia' on the scrap heap with dementia praecox and sexual inversion, and do your bloody jobs. It's what you're there for.
The reality, of course, is more complex than that. The thing about psychiatric diagnoses is that they are harder to arrive at than biological ones. Klinefelter's Syndrome is comparatively easy to diagnose: either your karyotype indicates you have an extra X chromosome or it doesn't. Gender Identity Disorder - soon, gods and goddesses willing, to be reclassified as Gender Incongruence - is a more nuanced diagnosis to make, depends on a lot of factors, and can be experienced differently by different people.
The reason for this is that psychiatrists and psychologists, in classifying mental disorders, are dealing not so much with specific viruses or bacteria, but more nebulous collections of symptoms. Many of the symptoms occur together and often react well to certain forms of clinical intervention. Where this happens it is usual to apply a diagnostic label to the collection of symptoms in order to aid the treatment of individuals who present with them in the future. But the labels we apply to these collections of symptoms are always subject to change, as are the symptoms which fall under a certain label. For example, schizophrenia as we know it has developed over a curious course of diagnostic evolution from its original classification as 'dementia praecox' to the clinical definition we know today. Currently, moves are afoot to eliminate Asperger's Syndrome as a separate condition and merge it with the other Autism Spectrum Disorders, on the grounds that it fits in better on that spectrum than as a separate entity. All this is as it should be: research modifies our understanding of a condition, which in turn modifies the way we categorise it, which in turn leads to improvements in the ways we treat or help people deal with these conditions.
In a perfect world this is how it would always work, but this world is far from perfect, and, despite vast efforts to build in a system of checks, balances and controls, psychologists and psychiatrists are at least as likely as people in the general population to have prejudices and biases, and these biases can and do creep into the disciplines themselves. This is one reason why periodic revision of the DSM is a good idea: it allows for reevaluation of the previously accepted psychological norms.
'The normal' itself is, of course, one of the biggest biases that can creep into diagnosis. I mentioned in my previous piece that, for a long time, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric 'disorder' because it was regarded as 'abnormal.' Thankfully, these days it is accepted that this isn't the case. But psychiatry persists in categorising some sexualities as normal and others as not so. The device used for this purpose is the idea of 'paraphilia' or, in layman's terms, sexual fetishism.
Paraphilia, as a diagnosis, has its uses, in that it provides a useful framework for considering the sexual desires of people whose behaviour is genuinely harmful, such as paedophiles and sex murderers. You'll note that the DSM-IV definition talks of non-normative sexual behaviours which 'may cause distress or serious problems for the paraphiliac or other persons associated with him or her'. But, notice the may. Something doesn't have to be causing anyone harm to be considered a paraphilia. Your kink might be pretty innocuous - maybe you have a thing for being shagged on formica tables, or you like to masturbate while listening to Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. You're not harming anyone (unless you go to a concert hall to pleasure yourself), but it doesn't matter. You have a paraphilia. You have a disorder. You are, as they say, in the system.
Look: I've known some kinky people. Hell, I'm pretty kinky myself (you don't want to know what I want Girl Obelix to do to me), and none of the kinky people I've met seemed mentally ill. Some had other mental illnesses, such as depression, but no more than in the general population, by my reckoning. And where there did seem to be a link between their particular pastime and some level of, say, depression or alcoholism, this could always be understood as a reaction to their marginalised status, and the prejudice they suffered from people with more privileged 'normal' sexualities.
I'm coming to understand that the social construction of mental disorders, which seemed like a purely theoretical idea when I first studied psychology, is a reality. To say disorders are socially constructed does not mean they aren't 'real.' Rather, it's the case that when people fall outside social norms, the response of people in society to their behaviour actively constructs their disorder. Consider the paradigm that has recently emerged in the field of disability activism: people are not disabled in themselves, they are disabled by a society which creates obstacles to their effective functioning, to the benefit of the privileged. Without wanting to come across as entirely RD Laing, I don't think it's too much of a leap to say that many people we class as 'disordered' actually reflect the disordered state of society.
Gender Incongruence is a real thing which people experience, and which can be treated with a variety of methods, up to and including gender reassignment surgery. But it only becomes a disorder because it conflicts with the social expectations a society places on someone because of their birth gender, and failing to meet those expectations causes feelings of trauma and guilt. Most sexual fetishes only become disorders when the treatment of people who happen to enjoy such fetishes leads to their experiencing feelings of marginalisation and low self-worth.
This applies even to those disorders considered to have a strong physiological basis. Depression seems to be the result of chemical imbalances in the brain (given that it often responds to treatment using chemicals which correct said imbalances). However, depression as a disorder, rather than a normal, acceptable and managable part of human diversity, is constructed by a society which unduly rewards self-confidence and bonhomie over actual achievement (there'll be more on this in my next post, which will consider the issue of privilege and self-esteem in greater depth).
So, to return to Autogynephilia, here we have a definition of something which could easily be classed as Gender Incongruence, but isn't because some cis male psychologists have decided that the only real gender incongruence is heterosexual in nature. If you're a trans woman and you want to fuck men, Roberta's your auntie. But if you're male assigned at birth, feel gender incongruence, but want to get it on with other ladies...that's not real Gender Incongruence. That's just a paraphilia. That's just sexual deviancy (don't worry if you're a trans man who wants to fuck other fellas, though. Ray Blanchard doesn't consider gay trans men in his definition of Autogynephilia. Perhaps, like Queen Victoria on lesbians, he doesn't think they really exist).
I cannot see the logic in this distinction. As far as I can work it out, Gender Incongruence is the same regardless of who you want to bump uglies with, because, well, Gender Congruence is the same, regardless of who you want to bump uglies with. So 'Autogynephilia' can only be a socially constructed 'disorder' based on the heteronormative, cissupremacist prejudices of our society. But it isn't just a bad diagnosis. It's actively harmful.
Many transphobes today persist in regarding being trans as a 'lifestyle choice'. By creating a false division which says one type of Gender Incongruence is real, but one is just a 'perversion', the deployment of Autogynephilia as a diagnostic category legitimises this perception. It makes psychologists and psychiatrists complicit in the marginalisation of people who are already heavily marginalised by society. This is a deep betrayal of psychology's basis as a science, and psychiatry's basis as a branch of medicine. The purpose of science is to describe reality objectively, free from the biases and prejudice of phenomenologically lazier forms of discourse. The purpose of medicine is to heal those who are hurting, without harming them further.
'Autogynephilia' does not meet either of these requirements. It is scientifically unnecessary: everything it involves could easily be described in terms of Gender Incongruence. And it is medically abhorrent, as it leaves people who form a normal, healthy part of the gender spectrum with the idea that they are somehow 'wrong', with no possibility of cure, and causes them further harm by legitimising the prejudiced views that they're all just perverts.
None of this means that there are not birth-gendered men who identify as female in a primarily sexual context. For some of these people it is just a fetish, either cross-dressing or enforced feminization. That's fine. For some it goes deeper. There are also, of course, trans women who aren't very sexual. And there are trans women who are very sexual, and trans men of all kinds too. The gender spectrum is just that, a spectrum, on which there are many varieties of experience. This is a concept bourne out by the experiences of people in the trans community and their cis allies every day, but it's a concept which still meets with resistance from the more bigoted sectors of the population. The job of psychologists is to break down this bigotry by revealing the truth about the human psyche. The job of psychiatrists is to help those who are harmed by such bigotry. So the message to the people compiling the DSM-V should be clear: focus on a more inclusive, but still robust, definition of Gender Incongruence, chuck 'Autogynephilia' on the scrap heap with dementia praecox and sexual inversion, and do your bloody jobs. It's what you're there for.
Monday, 1 March 2010
Another Invented Disease
'Girls can cut their hair short...wear shirts and things...because it's okay to look like a boy. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think being a girl is degrading.' - Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden (by way, I freely admit, of Madonna's 'What It Feels Like For a Girl')
We haven't talked about Psychology on here in a while; I mean Psychology as a science, rather than the areas in which other posts might trespass on ideas from the discipline. Which is something I really ought to rectify, because all the big beasts of the Psych world are currently getting together, emitting a series of low bass rumbles and high-pitched yammers at each other, and in the process secreting a new edition of the Psychologists' 'Bible', the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, 5th Edition or, to give it it's catchy and ever so slightly fetishy acronym, DSM-V.
I have a copy of DSM-IV on my bookshelf at home, acquired when I was studying Psychology at Sunderland University. It's an interesting book. It has a chequered history. For a long time, Psychologists listed 'homosexuality' as a disease in previous editions of the Manual - DSM-IV is, I think, the first edition which didn't, after a long and protracted campaign. Shamefully, one of the people involved in that campaign was Ron Gold, who, though he did good work on that issue, later ossified into yet another trans-hating cisgay man, spewing crap about how trans people don't really exist on sites like the Bilerico project (I'm not linking to Gold; hateful, cowardly betrayers of liberty will get no through-traffic from this site. Instead, because ze's sound, intelligent, thoughtful and, let's face it, quite the looker, have a gander at Tobi Hill-Meyer's Bilerico columns instead).
DSM-IV also, of course, includes the controversial condition 'Gender Identity Disorder'. Controversial not only because pricks like Gold think it doesn't exist (and even bigger oxygen-thieves like Julie Bindel apparently genuinely believe it was invented as a conspiracy by evil Psychlons to try and trap us all in some Mad Men 50s fantasy world), but also because many trans people resent the idea that they have a 'disorder'. In that respect some good work is being done in the new DSM, in that GID will be replaced with the much more open category of 'Gender Incongruence' which will, quite importantly, be regarded as a curable condition: people who suffer gender incongruence will be considered cured when they have SRS to realign their physical gender with their felt gender. Fair enough.
Of course, as the saying goes, nothing truly brilliant was ever designed by committee and so, of course, the inevitable academic horse-trading on these things means that, in order to satisfy crawling half-humans like Ray Blanchard, - a man so fucking anal that he decided the condition of wanting to have sex with adult humans needed to be technically codified in the same way as a paraphilia, for Satan's sake - we're also getting some rather hateful new syndromes tagged in on the back of Gender Incongruence, specifically 'Transvestic Fetishism' and 'Autogynephilia'. Here's Cheryl Morgan with more on this ugly little bit of theorizing.
There is an awful lot about all this that really incenses me. One thing is the way in which, as a discursive psychologist, I find it repugnant for privileged cis males to define psychological categories which write marginalised people out of their own narratives. But one of the other really annoying things is that, as Morgan points out, 'Transvestic Fetishism' and 'Autogynephilia' are parsed as applying only to 'men' who wear 'women's' clothing or 'imagine' themselves to be women.
Because, of course, it's obvious that girls would want to dress up like boys because, you know, when you're a boy, you'll get your favourite things, other boys check you out etc etc (of course, under Blanchard's categories, Bowie would probably be considered mentally ill for dressing up as a girl in the video for 'Boys Keep Swinging', which shows how medieval Blanchard's thinking really is - it being a truth universally acknowledged that if you think Bowie's wrong, you fail at life), whereas being a boy and wanting to be an icky, yucky, girl is, as any fule kno, clearly a sign of mental illness.
Well, I'm sorry, but if that's the case, then hullo clouds, hullo sky, and colour me fucking crazy. Because if Ray Blanchard is what passes for a supposedly sane human being these days, you can book me a one-way ticket to Arkham Asylum and throw away the key. But then again, it's worth remembering that one of the most disturbed villains in the Batman canon, Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow was...a psychiatrist.
It's a good thing the Scarecrow's fictional, really. If he existed, they'd probably get him in to chair the DSM-V subgroup on costumed vigilantes.
We haven't talked about Psychology on here in a while; I mean Psychology as a science, rather than the areas in which other posts might trespass on ideas from the discipline. Which is something I really ought to rectify, because all the big beasts of the Psych world are currently getting together, emitting a series of low bass rumbles and high-pitched yammers at each other, and in the process secreting a new edition of the Psychologists' 'Bible', the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, 5th Edition or, to give it it's catchy and ever so slightly fetishy acronym, DSM-V.
I have a copy of DSM-IV on my bookshelf at home, acquired when I was studying Psychology at Sunderland University. It's an interesting book. It has a chequered history. For a long time, Psychologists listed 'homosexuality' as a disease in previous editions of the Manual - DSM-IV is, I think, the first edition which didn't, after a long and protracted campaign. Shamefully, one of the people involved in that campaign was Ron Gold, who, though he did good work on that issue, later ossified into yet another trans-hating cisgay man, spewing crap about how trans people don't really exist on sites like the Bilerico project (I'm not linking to Gold; hateful, cowardly betrayers of liberty will get no through-traffic from this site. Instead, because ze's sound, intelligent, thoughtful and, let's face it, quite the looker, have a gander at Tobi Hill-Meyer's Bilerico columns instead).
DSM-IV also, of course, includes the controversial condition 'Gender Identity Disorder'. Controversial not only because pricks like Gold think it doesn't exist (and even bigger oxygen-thieves like Julie Bindel apparently genuinely believe it was invented as a conspiracy by evil Psychlons to try and trap us all in some Mad Men 50s fantasy world), but also because many trans people resent the idea that they have a 'disorder'. In that respect some good work is being done in the new DSM, in that GID will be replaced with the much more open category of 'Gender Incongruence' which will, quite importantly, be regarded as a curable condition: people who suffer gender incongruence will be considered cured when they have SRS to realign their physical gender with their felt gender. Fair enough.
Of course, as the saying goes, nothing truly brilliant was ever designed by committee and so, of course, the inevitable academic horse-trading on these things means that, in order to satisfy crawling half-humans like Ray Blanchard, - a man so fucking anal that he decided the condition of wanting to have sex with adult humans needed to be technically codified in the same way as a paraphilia, for Satan's sake - we're also getting some rather hateful new syndromes tagged in on the back of Gender Incongruence, specifically 'Transvestic Fetishism' and 'Autogynephilia'. Here's Cheryl Morgan with more on this ugly little bit of theorizing.
There is an awful lot about all this that really incenses me. One thing is the way in which, as a discursive psychologist, I find it repugnant for privileged cis males to define psychological categories which write marginalised people out of their own narratives. But one of the other really annoying things is that, as Morgan points out, 'Transvestic Fetishism' and 'Autogynephilia' are parsed as applying only to 'men' who wear 'women's' clothing or 'imagine' themselves to be women.
Because, of course, it's obvious that girls would want to dress up like boys because, you know, when you're a boy, you'll get your favourite things, other boys check you out etc etc (of course, under Blanchard's categories, Bowie would probably be considered mentally ill for dressing up as a girl in the video for 'Boys Keep Swinging', which shows how medieval Blanchard's thinking really is - it being a truth universally acknowledged that if you think Bowie's wrong, you fail at life), whereas being a boy and wanting to be an icky, yucky, girl is, as any fule kno, clearly a sign of mental illness.
Well, I'm sorry, but if that's the case, then hullo clouds, hullo sky, and colour me fucking crazy. Because if Ray Blanchard is what passes for a supposedly sane human being these days, you can book me a one-way ticket to Arkham Asylum and throw away the key. But then again, it's worth remembering that one of the most disturbed villains in the Batman canon, Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow was...a psychiatrist.
It's a good thing the Scarecrow's fictional, really. If he existed, they'd probably get him in to chair the DSM-V subgroup on costumed vigilantes.
Thursday, 11 February 2010
That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
Realpolitik
I go stone in the chair I was safe in a second ago,
cringing inside at the joke you just told,
the one they all roared at. I watch you bask
in your cheaply-won laugh. Every high-five, each back-
slap when I want to punch you, reminds me
that I am alone in this room. Alone, and outnumbered,
so I keep my silence. Care must be taken,
boats left unrocked. I’m new here: no sense
in risking my neck,
so I bite my tongue, and watch
each creasing face, and tell myself
this is not cowardice.
This poem represents almost my total writing output for this week. The remainder of said output is a page and a half of, oddly enough, a short story which I started fooling around with on Sunday night and which, it became clear, will be absolute filth. Seriously, it's going to turn out to be full-on porn. A very odd story to run into but it seems very insistent on being written so I'm going along with it for the time being. My working title for the piece is currently 'What's so amazing about really deep thoughts?' but that's inevitably subject to change.
The poem above refers to two incidents I've seen in different places this week where I was pretty much a newbie, and so felt too socially awkward to cause a scene, but where I witnessed people using the idea of a female character 'really being a man' as a cheap pop to spice up their attempts at humour. The annoying thing is that both were actually funny enough not to have to resort to this shit. My reactions to all this were somewhat complex: anger, disappointment, sadness, fear, and a nice big helping of guilt about the fact I didn't have the guts to openly confront the transphobia inherent in the 'jokes'. The poem doesn't make up for that failure. But I hope that it does something. If nothing else, next time I'm ever at a gig and someone finishes with this kind of cheap gag, I'll know what poem to start my set with.
There isn't really time for a smart, witty sign-off. It's past eleven pm here, and I have to get up at six am for work tomorrow. I'll finish with this point: you remember, at school, how your teachers told you that if the other guy wasn't laughing it wasn't a joke? That still applies. If you've told a joke and most of the people in the room are laughing, but one person in the room isn't and is in fact looking extremely uncomfortable suddenly, you did not tell a very good joke, and you need to own that, and you need to try harder next time. And that isn't censorship, and that isn't 'people not having a sense of humour anymore', and it definitely isn't 'Political Correctness' gone mad. It's called growing up , and being better. Own it, people.
I go stone in the chair I was safe in a second ago,
cringing inside at the joke you just told,
the one they all roared at. I watch you bask
in your cheaply-won laugh. Every high-five, each back-
slap when I want to punch you, reminds me
that I am alone in this room. Alone, and outnumbered,
so I keep my silence. Care must be taken,
boats left unrocked. I’m new here: no sense
in risking my neck,
so I bite my tongue, and watch
each creasing face, and tell myself
this is not cowardice.
This poem represents almost my total writing output for this week. The remainder of said output is a page and a half of, oddly enough, a short story which I started fooling around with on Sunday night and which, it became clear, will be absolute filth. Seriously, it's going to turn out to be full-on porn. A very odd story to run into but it seems very insistent on being written so I'm going along with it for the time being. My working title for the piece is currently 'What's so amazing about really deep thoughts?' but that's inevitably subject to change.
The poem above refers to two incidents I've seen in different places this week where I was pretty much a newbie, and so felt too socially awkward to cause a scene, but where I witnessed people using the idea of a female character 'really being a man' as a cheap pop to spice up their attempts at humour. The annoying thing is that both were actually funny enough not to have to resort to this shit. My reactions to all this were somewhat complex: anger, disappointment, sadness, fear, and a nice big helping of guilt about the fact I didn't have the guts to openly confront the transphobia inherent in the 'jokes'. The poem doesn't make up for that failure. But I hope that it does something. If nothing else, next time I'm ever at a gig and someone finishes with this kind of cheap gag, I'll know what poem to start my set with.
There isn't really time for a smart, witty sign-off. It's past eleven pm here, and I have to get up at six am for work tomorrow. I'll finish with this point: you remember, at school, how your teachers told you that if the other guy wasn't laughing it wasn't a joke? That still applies. If you've told a joke and most of the people in the room are laughing, but one person in the room isn't and is in fact looking extremely uncomfortable suddenly, you did not tell a very good joke, and you need to own that, and you need to try harder next time. And that isn't censorship, and that isn't 'people not having a sense of humour anymore', and it definitely isn't 'Political Correctness' gone mad. It's called growing up , and being better. Own it, people.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
It Pays To Increase Your Word Power
...according to that well-known CIA-front the Reader's Digest, anyway. Myself, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that most of the people I've seen in high-paying positions had laughably deficient vocabularies, especially when you struck out all the phatic cant about 'pushing the envelope' and 'thinking outside the box'. Language is a vicious mistress: to get the best out of her, you have to love her for her own sake, not just as a means to financial advancement.
On the other hand there are ways in which language pays immense dividends. Language can limit your world, but it can also open it up quite dramatically. When I first came across 'genderqueer' as a term, I felt liberated. Here was a word I could use to describe my own sense of identity, and not have to couch it in other peoples' terms of reference. It's a word I've come to love. So much so, in fact, that I've stuck a permanent link to a definition down the right-hand side of this blog so I don't have to link to a definition of the word every time I mention it in a post.
I've learned a lot of new words this past year. Cis is definitely another favourite, because, again, it does what words ought to by describing something we didn't have a word for, or for which we had words but those words didn't work. Now that we can describe men and women as cis as well as trans gender, there really is no excuse beyond intellectual laziness for referring to trans people and 'normal' or 'real' people. There's no excuse for the casual dehumanisation that phrasing endorses. And yeah, for some people, that's a headfuck. But some headfucks are good. They help you learn. They help your mind to grow. They expand your conception of what's 'normal'.
Dash it all. I sound like a 60s drug guru there. But it's true. Language, when used right, is the greatest mind-expanding drug there is. But, let's face it. People don't just use drugs to expand their minds. They use them because they're fun. Because they bring pleasure.
A word that brought me pleasure recently is Mx. Mx is a genderqueer variant of Mr, Mrs or Ms. It's an honorific, a nominal title, but it isn't one which places you on any specific part of the gender binary. I found out about it when Kate Bornstein retweeted a comment by Justin Bond, who uses Mx as hir honorific, and I thought, hmm, what's that about, went looking, and found my new preferred form of address. This is how we often find our words, because we live in, at best, the margins of the dictionary. And, for us, the Reader's Digest truism is true - because when we find new words we find new ways to describe the truth of our identity.
Recently, people have began referring to me as 'Mx Fish'. I even had an email the other day from an official body which used the form. Sure, they were probably cutting and pasting what I'd written, but there is an outside chance someone there thought 'Mx? Eh?', looked it up, and learned. Either way, seeing that form being used was a hit. Language can be a drug when you use it; it can also be a drug when people use it to describe you.
Thing is, though, like all people who've taken their first hits of a drug, I'm getting greedy. I want more. Specifically, I want more words. Us genderqueer folk have 'Mx' as an honorific, and we have 'hir' and 'ze' in place of 'him/his/her' and 'he/she', but what else do we have? What's our version of 'Sir' or 'Madam'? 'Mirr'? 'Za'am'? What about 'boy' or 'girl'? What if I want to say, as I will shortly, 'this ___'_ goin' to bed' but 'boy' doesn't sound quite right and 'girl' seems to be going too far (though actually, rather like Eve Ensler, I quite like the idea that boys can be girls too)? 'Goy' is out for obvious reasons, so - what? 'Birl'? 'Borl'? 'Brrrl?' Still don't quite seem right, do they?
Which is where I throw the floor open to you, dear readers. What words do we need to subject to a radical genderqueering so we can claim them as our own?
On the other hand there are ways in which language pays immense dividends. Language can limit your world, but it can also open it up quite dramatically. When I first came across 'genderqueer' as a term, I felt liberated. Here was a word I could use to describe my own sense of identity, and not have to couch it in other peoples' terms of reference. It's a word I've come to love. So much so, in fact, that I've stuck a permanent link to a definition down the right-hand side of this blog so I don't have to link to a definition of the word every time I mention it in a post.
I've learned a lot of new words this past year. Cis is definitely another favourite, because, again, it does what words ought to by describing something we didn't have a word for, or for which we had words but those words didn't work. Now that we can describe men and women as cis as well as trans gender, there really is no excuse beyond intellectual laziness for referring to trans people and 'normal' or 'real' people. There's no excuse for the casual dehumanisation that phrasing endorses. And yeah, for some people, that's a headfuck. But some headfucks are good. They help you learn. They help your mind to grow. They expand your conception of what's 'normal'.
Dash it all. I sound like a 60s drug guru there. But it's true. Language, when used right, is the greatest mind-expanding drug there is. But, let's face it. People don't just use drugs to expand their minds. They use them because they're fun. Because they bring pleasure.
A word that brought me pleasure recently is Mx. Mx is a genderqueer variant of Mr, Mrs or Ms. It's an honorific, a nominal title, but it isn't one which places you on any specific part of the gender binary. I found out about it when Kate Bornstein retweeted a comment by Justin Bond, who uses Mx as hir honorific, and I thought, hmm, what's that about, went looking, and found my new preferred form of address. This is how we often find our words, because we live in, at best, the margins of the dictionary. And, for us, the Reader's Digest truism is true - because when we find new words we find new ways to describe the truth of our identity.
Recently, people have began referring to me as 'Mx Fish'. I even had an email the other day from an official body which used the form. Sure, they were probably cutting and pasting what I'd written, but there is an outside chance someone there thought 'Mx? Eh?', looked it up, and learned. Either way, seeing that form being used was a hit. Language can be a drug when you use it; it can also be a drug when people use it to describe you.
Thing is, though, like all people who've taken their first hits of a drug, I'm getting greedy. I want more. Specifically, I want more words. Us genderqueer folk have 'Mx' as an honorific, and we have 'hir' and 'ze' in place of 'him/his/her' and 'he/she', but what else do we have? What's our version of 'Sir' or 'Madam'? 'Mirr'? 'Za'am'? What about 'boy' or 'girl'? What if I want to say, as I will shortly, 'this ___'_ goin' to bed' but 'boy' doesn't sound quite right and 'girl' seems to be going too far (though actually, rather like Eve Ensler, I quite like the idea that boys can be girls too)? 'Goy' is out for obvious reasons, so - what? 'Birl'? 'Borl'? 'Brrrl?' Still don't quite seem right, do they?
Which is where I throw the floor open to you, dear readers. What words do we need to subject to a radical genderqueering so we can claim them as our own?
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.
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.
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Third floor: shoes, boots and haberdashery
I have never actually worn high heels. Obviously, being MAAB, I was never really socialised to wear 'em and what frightens me away from the things now is the absolute certainty that were I ever to wear a pair I would injure myself halfway through my first step. Last year I tore a ligament in my ankle trying to mount the smallest step in the world, and on that day I was wearing very sensible shoes. Heels would, literally, kill me.
However. Observe, if you will, the sheer awesomeness of the heels produced by the people at Iron Fist. Specifically, the one at the top right.
It's got a frakkin' zombie on it.
If I was going to overcome my lifelong fear of having my ankle further off the ground than my toes, a shoe like that would do it. And I can't be the only biologically-male-bodied person who thinks that. I mean, come on, zombies. And the one next to it has a feckin' werewolf. If Iron Fist were to make those in larger sizes, maybe not in massive quantities, it's a niche market admittedly, but the point is, they'd be coining it in. I don't hang out in fetish clubs anywhere near as much as I used to* these days, but pretty much every body I knew back in the day who wore heels, male or female, would have literally killed for one with, I say again, a muthafrickin' zombie on it.
Now. I'm not the fastest learner in the world, but I've picked up a few bits of useful knowledge here and there, and one thing I've found is that a good heuristic for converting men's shoe sizes to women's shoe sizes is to add two - i.e. a male size 8 is about equal to a female size ten. Guys with size 12 feet are statistically quite rare (and this is where I open myself up to a torrent of abuse from the hitherto silent yet vast following my blog weirdly enjoys in the tall persons' community, no doubt), so let's assume most MAAB feet are a median 9-10. I'm a bit smaller, clocking in at about an 8.5, though it varies from shop to shop and make of shoe to make of shoe (the Airwalk sneakers I wear currently, for example, are actually an 8). But let's assume a 9-10 median to be the average. So, if Iron Fist were to unlock the profit-making potential of selling shoes with frelling zombies on them to people with larger feet than the average girl, they'd have to sell them in a size 11 or 12, rather than...
Seven? They only go up to about a size seven? Wow. There are cis girls those shoes won't fit. Astonishing.
There are a lot of things, readers, for which I fight. And this issue, cool as it is, has to be somewhat low on the list. But consider this, if you will, the equivalent of a manifesto pledge on my part: I will not consider my work on this earth done, I will not cease from mental fight nor, indeed, shall my sword sleep in my hand, until it is enshrined as a basic right that there should be shoes with zombies on them for all. And frickin' werewolves too. Because, in a very real way, until such a state attains, none of us is truly free.
(* this is a way of saying I never hang out in fetish clubs at all these days which nevertheless suggests that I may do, thus allowing me to look all cool and interesting. But you guessed that.)
However. Observe, if you will, the sheer awesomeness of the heels produced by the people at Iron Fist. Specifically, the one at the top right.
It's got a frakkin' zombie on it.
If I was going to overcome my lifelong fear of having my ankle further off the ground than my toes, a shoe like that would do it. And I can't be the only biologically-male-bodied person who thinks that. I mean, come on, zombies. And the one next to it has a feckin' werewolf. If Iron Fist were to make those in larger sizes, maybe not in massive quantities, it's a niche market admittedly, but the point is, they'd be coining it in. I don't hang out in fetish clubs anywhere near as much as I used to* these days, but pretty much every body I knew back in the day who wore heels, male or female, would have literally killed for one with, I say again, a muthafrickin' zombie on it.
Now. I'm not the fastest learner in the world, but I've picked up a few bits of useful knowledge here and there, and one thing I've found is that a good heuristic for converting men's shoe sizes to women's shoe sizes is to add two - i.e. a male size 8 is about equal to a female size ten. Guys with size 12 feet are statistically quite rare (and this is where I open myself up to a torrent of abuse from the hitherto silent yet vast following my blog weirdly enjoys in the tall persons' community, no doubt), so let's assume most MAAB feet are a median 9-10. I'm a bit smaller, clocking in at about an 8.5, though it varies from shop to shop and make of shoe to make of shoe (the Airwalk sneakers I wear currently, for example, are actually an 8). But let's assume a 9-10 median to be the average. So, if Iron Fist were to unlock the profit-making potential of selling shoes with frelling zombies on them to people with larger feet than the average girl, they'd have to sell them in a size 11 or 12, rather than...
Seven? They only go up to about a size seven? Wow. There are cis girls those shoes won't fit. Astonishing.
There are a lot of things, readers, for which I fight. And this issue, cool as it is, has to be somewhat low on the list. But consider this, if you will, the equivalent of a manifesto pledge on my part: I will not consider my work on this earth done, I will not cease from mental fight nor, indeed, shall my sword sleep in my hand, until it is enshrined as a basic right that there should be shoes with zombies on them for all. And frickin' werewolves too. Because, in a very real way, until such a state attains, none of us is truly free.
(* this is a way of saying I never hang out in fetish clubs at all these days which nevertheless suggests that I may do, thus allowing me to look all cool and interesting. But you guessed that.)
Saturday, 23 January 2010
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.
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.
Monday, 28 December 2009
More Elizabethan Musings
So I've been researching the sequence I'm toying with about Elizabeth by listening to the audiobook of David Starkey's Elizabeth, which is read excellently by Patricia Hodge (it's a performance which is, what I call, quite good).
One thing I've learned from this is that the final line of yesterday's poem will need changing. Elizabeth wouldn't have regarded Henry as a 'fiend' - if anything she seems to have been something of a daddy's girl, at least after Henry welcomed her back to court - which is a shame because I quite like that line. But there are two interestingly juicy points which will be worked into the sequence. First of all, Elizabeth was meant to be a boy: all the major astrologers Henry had consulted had predicted she would be male, the letters announcing the birth of 'a young prince' had already been written, and Henry's biggest problem was whether to call the lad Edward or Henry. The second interesting fact, while not strictly gender-related, is that Anne Boleyn supplied Elizabeth with loads of expensive clothes after the young prince(ss) was installed at her own private court in Hatfield House. Unsurprisingly, this supply dried up after Anne's execution, and there was a period during Elizabeth's childhood when she literally had nothing to wear. Later in life, she apparently made sure the royal wardrobes were stocked with hundreds of dresses...
I'm not sure at this point what form the Elizabeth sequence is going to take, but it'll definitely include something about these.
One thing I've learned from this is that the final line of yesterday's poem will need changing. Elizabeth wouldn't have regarded Henry as a 'fiend' - if anything she seems to have been something of a daddy's girl, at least after Henry welcomed her back to court - which is a shame because I quite like that line. But there are two interestingly juicy points which will be worked into the sequence. First of all, Elizabeth was meant to be a boy: all the major astrologers Henry had consulted had predicted she would be male, the letters announcing the birth of 'a young prince' had already been written, and Henry's biggest problem was whether to call the lad Edward or Henry. The second interesting fact, while not strictly gender-related, is that Anne Boleyn supplied Elizabeth with loads of expensive clothes after the young prince(ss) was installed at her own private court in Hatfield House. Unsurprisingly, this supply dried up after Anne's execution, and there was a period during Elizabeth's childhood when she literally had nothing to wear. Later in life, she apparently made sure the royal wardrobes were stocked with hundreds of dresses...
I'm not sure at this point what form the Elizabeth sequence is going to take, but it'll definitely include something about these.
Sunday, 27 December 2009
Elizabeth, the Woman King
Beneath the swagger portrait
she stands, legs wide, arms angled,
hands, raised to harp or dance,
to be plighted, an enchanting gift,
their pallor and their dainty size
a toy for kings to stroke
with their rough fists,
and marvel at, returning
from campaign, or from the lists,
turned in, and resting on the skirts
which flare from where her hips must be:
thick cloth, stiffed with willow-bent,
so she may echo, in her shape,
the man whose pose she imitates,
the absent lion, England’s finest monster:
this brawling, warring, whoring fiend her father.
she stands, legs wide, arms angled,
hands, raised to harp or dance,
to be plighted, an enchanting gift,
their pallor and their dainty size
a toy for kings to stroke
with their rough fists,
and marvel at, returning
from campaign, or from the lists,
turned in, and resting on the skirts
which flare from where her hips must be:
thick cloth, stiffed with willow-bent,
so she may echo, in her shape,
the man whose pose she imitates,
the absent lion, England’s finest monster:
this brawling, warring, whoring fiend her father.
* * *
I've became fascinated with Queen Elizabeth I recently, and particularly her odd position as a woman forced to follow in the thundering footsteps of her father, Henry VIII, a king who set a benchmark for an over-the-top, brawling, angry, I-want-it-all image of masculinity which looms large over the English collective psyche. As Simon at Obsessed with Film has pointed out, King 'Enery is a role which just about every major English actor with a certain heft has had a crack at at one time or other, and Elizabeth seems to occupy a similar position for Britain's female actors: in recent years alone we've had Helen Mirren, Anne-Marie Duff, and Cate Blanchett try their hand at playing the 'Virgin Queen', and it's fair to say she occupies a position in English culture just as important as that of her wife-decapitating, pork-chop-munching, church-establishing father.
I think a lot of the interest in Elizabeth and Henry derives from the fact that we imagine a contrast between them: Henry is a sexually rampant monster, a pre-embodiment of 'lad culture', while Elizabeth is an eternally unsullied national matriarch, the Ice Queen Gloriana of an England which forever stands alone. But this is the complexion we've put on things after the facts, and it ignores a key reality of gender politics in the Tudor era, specifically that Henry could get away with it; Elizabeth couldn't. Can you imagine what would have been done to a female ruler if she'd carried on in the same way as Henry? How people of her own time, and future generations, would perceive her? Well, you don't have to imagine very far: consider Catherine the Great. Catherine wasn't by any measure as much of a monster as Henry - but Henry makes it into the history books as a lovable, bumbling, Falstaffian figure, while Catherine is eternally remembered as a crazed sex-vampire who met her end trying to be pleasured by a horse (an urban legend which is, in fact, entirely without foundation). And Catherine's reign took place centuries after that of Elizabeth! Clearly, Elizabeth was never going to be able to get away with acting like Henry in matters of the flesh even if she wanted to jump the bones of every hot courtier she saw (a view hereafter to be known as the 'Sexy Tudors' school of history).
The odd thing is that in some ways, Elizabeth tried to act a lot like Henry. The poem above is about something my ex-wife, Michelle - a major Elizabeth-nerd - once told me. Elizabeth had a copy of Holbein's famous 'swagger portrait' of her father hanging up in her chambers and, when giving important people an audience, she would stand underneath the picture and place her hands on her hips in imitation of Henry's pose.
The implied meaning of this, of course, is that she was reminding people who her dad had been, and that they'd better watch out, but it's an image I find interesting for other reasons. Here we have a woman who's became an icon of a particular kind of feminine power (Margaret Thatcher's self-presentation during her reign as British PM can almost be regarded as a kind of Elizabeth tribute act), and one of the ways in which she herself asserts power is by trying to alter her gender presentation so she comes across as more masculine. What if Elizabeth saw herself, not as a Queen, but as a woman who had to act like a King?
It's not as far-fetched as it might seem. The discourse of power at the time was entirely male, diplomacy and nation-management described in terms of what 'a prince' should do. Elizabeth had seen how her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, had come unstuck by being a good girl and relying on her husbands to take care of her: maybe she decided to forget about getting a man in and deal with the King business herself. She even pretty much said as much, in the famous Armada speech - 'I have the heart and stomach of a King', remember?
Entirely predictably, I find this aspect of Elizabeth - the way in which she deliberately confounded expectations of how she, as a woman, should behave - extremely interesting, and I suspect the poem above is probably going to be the start of a sequence. We'll see how it goes. This is all very much W-i-P, though, so I value your thoughts.
The Honest Scrap Blogger Award
Kristen Mchugh at Carnival of the Random has conferred on me something called the Honest Scrap Blogger Award, for which much thanks. Under the terms of the award, though, I have to do two things: first, I have to tell you ten true things about myself which no-one knows, second, I have to confer the award on ten more bloggers to spur them to further acts of embarrassing self-disclosure.
I'm going to interpret the first commandment fairly loosely, as ten things which people reading this blog probably won't know about me. There are probably one or two people irl who'll know these things, but for the most part, I hope, they'll be new for you.
1) It doesn't always show up in photos, but I have two different coloured eyes. This is actually a source of mild irritation to me because, when you have different coloured eyes, people always mention David Bowie to you, and Bowie doesn't have different coloured eyes. I'm a massive Bowie fan, and one of the many teeny bits of trivia which Bowie fans accumulate at the expensive of remembering more useful information like, say, which bit of the periodic table tells you the atomic weight of an element, is that the Dame's eyes appear to be different colours because one of his pupils is larger than the other as a result of having a brick thrown at him as a kid, an accident which also distorted his depth perception permanently. I have normal depth perception and normal-size pupils, so my eyes really are different colours...
2) When I was much younger I saw something one night which at the time I thought of as a ghost, but which I'm now inclined to regard as a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation. At the time I was terrified of seeing ghosts or, more accurately, being seen by them, and decided the best way to deal with this was to stay up all night and keep watch for the feckers. Unsurprisingly, I eventually saw something, in this case, a bearded head floating above the bottom of my bed. After that experience I figured that it was definitely more frightening to see something that shouldn't be there than to be watched by such a thing, so I made sure I always got plenty of sleep thereafter.
3) Despite having enjoyed David Tennant and Patrick Stewart's performance in it yesterday, I actually think Hamlet is a bit of a mess as a play. To me, it lacks the sense of inevitability that characterises Macbeth, the sense that every action the protagonist takes leads inexorably to their doom, and that doom has been set in motion from their first wrong decision.
4) I'm genderqueer rather than trans, so, while I don't entirely conform to the rules for male gender expression I don't devote massive amounts of effort to 'passing' as female. Despite this, on three separate occassions in the past few months I've been casually assumed to be a girl by people with whom I've interacted. Two of these people were women, all of them were cis (i.e. non-trans). I find this interesting because, if someone like me can screw peoples' perceptions so effectively, it suggests that the widely-held idea that there are tell-tale signs which mean you can always tell trans women from cis women is, well, a load of old (untucked) bollocks.
5) I've always regretted the fact that I never kept up the piano lessons I took when I was young. Having an instrument to hide behind when performing would give me a much greater feeling of security than having to stand up in front of people with just a microphone, the poems I've memorised, and my back-up portfolio.
6) While I'm always open and confident in my writing, I'm actually painfully shy in a personal context. At most gigs I tend to spend most of my non-performing time floating around, desperately wishing I had the gumption to talk to people, and constantly thinking that I must look a tool.
7) I have very long toes: the second toe on each of my feet is only slightly shorter than my little finger. As a result of this I'm actually pretty good at picking things up with my feet. A jiu-jitsu instructor once described my toes as 'elegant' and I still class this as one of the ten nicest things anyone's ever said to me.
8) I once saw Ant McPartlin (of Ant 'n' Dec, Geordie TV presenting duo) while out walking around Newcastle, and said 'hello' to him, because I vaguely recognised him as someone I knew. It only occurred to me a few feet later, when I realised who he was, that I only 'knew' him from watching television, and had never met him in real life. I imagine this probably happens to celebrities all the time, and must be one of the more bizarre things about being famous.
9) When I was younger and trying far too hard to be interesting, I used to be something of a hanger-on in the local fetish scene (I never got that heavily into it, I might add, I just liked the clothes - though I did, once, let someone run an electric current through my nipples, to see how it felt. Tingly, since you ask.) and there exists, somewhere, a sketch of me attempting to open a wine bottle with a high-heeled shoe I borrowed from a drag queen because I'd forgot to bring a corkscrew. It's one of my biggest regrets that I never bought this sketch from the guy who did it, because it would make a great illustration if I ever decide to write an autobiography.
10) I share a bathroom at the moment with my parents, and my mum has a skin condition which makes me paranoid to use bath bombs, foam, salts etc when taking a bath because I'm worried their residue might cause her to suffer a reaction. As a consequence of this I have genuinely considered staying the night in a hotel simply because I could marinade myself in a variety of Lush products guilt-free. The fact that I would almost certainly do this if I had the money is one of the few things that makes me think my being poor is a good thing.
Phew! That was hard work. Now, the nominations:
I confer the Honest Scrap Blogger Award upon the following people:
Kevin
Alison
Matt
Lisy Babe
Thomas Moronic
The Redhead
Nikki Dudley
Jessica Johnson
Robbie Hurst
and Kate Fox, why not, eh?
God, that took bloody ages. I hope to god some of you lot I've tagged here do your own answers. Otherwise I'll feel a right tool. Right. Off now.
I'm going to interpret the first commandment fairly loosely, as ten things which people reading this blog probably won't know about me. There are probably one or two people irl who'll know these things, but for the most part, I hope, they'll be new for you.
1) It doesn't always show up in photos, but I have two different coloured eyes. This is actually a source of mild irritation to me because, when you have different coloured eyes, people always mention David Bowie to you, and Bowie doesn't have different coloured eyes. I'm a massive Bowie fan, and one of the many teeny bits of trivia which Bowie fans accumulate at the expensive of remembering more useful information like, say, which bit of the periodic table tells you the atomic weight of an element, is that the Dame's eyes appear to be different colours because one of his pupils is larger than the other as a result of having a brick thrown at him as a kid, an accident which also distorted his depth perception permanently. I have normal depth perception and normal-size pupils, so my eyes really are different colours...
2) When I was much younger I saw something one night which at the time I thought of as a ghost, but which I'm now inclined to regard as a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation. At the time I was terrified of seeing ghosts or, more accurately, being seen by them, and decided the best way to deal with this was to stay up all night and keep watch for the feckers. Unsurprisingly, I eventually saw something, in this case, a bearded head floating above the bottom of my bed. After that experience I figured that it was definitely more frightening to see something that shouldn't be there than to be watched by such a thing, so I made sure I always got plenty of sleep thereafter.
3) Despite having enjoyed David Tennant and Patrick Stewart's performance in it yesterday, I actually think Hamlet is a bit of a mess as a play. To me, it lacks the sense of inevitability that characterises Macbeth, the sense that every action the protagonist takes leads inexorably to their doom, and that doom has been set in motion from their first wrong decision.
4) I'm genderqueer rather than trans, so, while I don't entirely conform to the rules for male gender expression I don't devote massive amounts of effort to 'passing' as female. Despite this, on three separate occassions in the past few months I've been casually assumed to be a girl by people with whom I've interacted. Two of these people were women, all of them were cis (i.e. non-trans). I find this interesting because, if someone like me can screw peoples' perceptions so effectively, it suggests that the widely-held idea that there are tell-tale signs which mean you can always tell trans women from cis women is, well, a load of old (untucked) bollocks.
5) I've always regretted the fact that I never kept up the piano lessons I took when I was young. Having an instrument to hide behind when performing would give me a much greater feeling of security than having to stand up in front of people with just a microphone, the poems I've memorised, and my back-up portfolio.
6) While I'm always open and confident in my writing, I'm actually painfully shy in a personal context. At most gigs I tend to spend most of my non-performing time floating around, desperately wishing I had the gumption to talk to people, and constantly thinking that I must look a tool.
7) I have very long toes: the second toe on each of my feet is only slightly shorter than my little finger. As a result of this I'm actually pretty good at picking things up with my feet. A jiu-jitsu instructor once described my toes as 'elegant' and I still class this as one of the ten nicest things anyone's ever said to me.
8) I once saw Ant McPartlin (of Ant 'n' Dec, Geordie TV presenting duo) while out walking around Newcastle, and said 'hello' to him, because I vaguely recognised him as someone I knew. It only occurred to me a few feet later, when I realised who he was, that I only 'knew' him from watching television, and had never met him in real life. I imagine this probably happens to celebrities all the time, and must be one of the more bizarre things about being famous.
9) When I was younger and trying far too hard to be interesting, I used to be something of a hanger-on in the local fetish scene (I never got that heavily into it, I might add, I just liked the clothes - though I did, once, let someone run an electric current through my nipples, to see how it felt. Tingly, since you ask.) and there exists, somewhere, a sketch of me attempting to open a wine bottle with a high-heeled shoe I borrowed from a drag queen because I'd forgot to bring a corkscrew. It's one of my biggest regrets that I never bought this sketch from the guy who did it, because it would make a great illustration if I ever decide to write an autobiography.
10) I share a bathroom at the moment with my parents, and my mum has a skin condition which makes me paranoid to use bath bombs, foam, salts etc when taking a bath because I'm worried their residue might cause her to suffer a reaction. As a consequence of this I have genuinely considered staying the night in a hotel simply because I could marinade myself in a variety of Lush products guilt-free. The fact that I would almost certainly do this if I had the money is one of the few things that makes me think my being poor is a good thing.
Phew! That was hard work. Now, the nominations:
I confer the Honest Scrap Blogger Award upon the following people:
Kevin
Alison
Matt
Lisy Babe
Thomas Moronic
The Redhead
Nikki Dudley
Jessica Johnson
Robbie Hurst
and Kate Fox, why not, eh?
God, that took bloody ages. I hope to god some of you lot I've tagged here do your own answers. Otherwise I'll feel a right tool. Right. Off now.
Friday, 25 December 2009
A Very Merry Cismas
It was a good christmas, on the whole. Sure, the shop where I work closed and I lost my job, and, sure, I still have a massive wodge of glue on my head from having to have a gash in it patched up after I decided to fight a metal fire escape last week, but on the whole things are good. I found out I've lost four inches off my waist. I found this out because my parents bought me new jeans which actually fit. My ex-wife got me a bottle of Jack Daniels and a Dylan Moran DVD which I'm watching now; I had enough money to buy myself a bottle of Barolo which I'm drinking now; and my folks went to the trouble of getting in nachos and dip which I'm munching my way through now. I shouldn't be, really: my gran came over and we all had a ridiculously massive dinner, with turkey and pork and sausagemeat and stuffing and parsnips and yorkshire puddings and carrots and pigs in blankets (oh my!), and really I probably ought not to eat for a week, but fuck it, it's christmas! If you can't enjoy yourself at this time of year, when can you?
Of course, there are people who find it hard to enjoy themselves at this time of year.
One of the major advances in my writing this year came when I had to prepare for the Plinth in Trafalgar Square, and I realised the frequency and intensity with which gender issues come up in my work. Practically all the time in what I write I find myself obsessing with issues of what it means to be a man, or a woman, what behaviour marks you out as such, and why I just plain prefer doing things the gender binary says I shouldn't. I like wearing make-up, I like acting femme, and I'm attracted, usually, to girls who don't. It comes up again and again in my work, it's something I think about a lot; but because I'm so frakking dense, I never realised how damn genderqueer I was until the facts were there in front of me, when I looked at everything I'd written up to this October and thought, wow, I kinda think about this shit a lot.
And so, because I'm a regular Willow Rosenberg, I began researching. I mined the internet for facts. I read whatever I could find in the local library which seemed, to me, to be relevant (which wasn't much, to be honest, in a hick town in the North East of England). Through the agency of the fine authors and twitterers Poppy Z Brite and Caitlin R Kiernan (who really are two of the best writers on the planet, and whose work you ought to read whatever you think you may be), I began to become acquainted with the trans community on Twitter, in the course of which I temporarily became a satirist , but, more importantly, I learned a fucking lot. And one of the things I learned is that I'm a fucking lucky bastard.
And I'm lucky because, as queer as I am, I'm not trans and, more specifically, I'm not a trans woman. I've written before about the disgraceful murder statistics for trans women, and I want to draw your attention - your and my privileged attention - to the fact that while we're all basking in the love of our families and material bounty which would, a century ago, have marked us out as some kind of tribal potentate, for many women who had the misfortune to be born into the wrong kind of body, and the courage to do something about that, Christmas is anything but a happy time. And rather than get on my guilty white liberal high horse and preach, I'd prefer it if you followed, and read, these links to important, informative, and moving posts from the blogs of gudbuytjane and Helen at Bird of Paradise.
I'm lucky and, if you're reading this blog, the chances are that you're lucky too. And that's fine. We won't change the world by wearing a hair shirt and flagellating ourselves (you might have fun if you do that but, y'know, your thing is your thing...), but we might change just a little bit if we remain conscious of the fact that we are so lucky, and that our 'luck' in fact represents a widespread system of kyriarchal prejudice which functions to keep certain people at the bottom of the heap, and that we might create a world in which those people can have the same 'luck' we have if we change our own attitudes to those people and give them space to speak...give them space to speak? No. That's not right. Respect their goddam right to speak and help spread and publicise the things they have to say so that the people who would deny them their rights feel like the shamefaced idiots they are and step aside.
Helen, and Jane, and every other trans woman who has been rejected by their family and friends, deserve to not feel sad and traumatised at a time when the rest of us are stuffing our faces with doritos and drinking Italian wine. The fact that they can't experience the same happy winter festival as the rest of us is what is wrong with our society, and it is wrong because of people like us. And we can change that, and we should. So. Y'know. Let's.
And yes, it is Joshua ben Joseph's alleged birthday and here I am blogging about gender issues and the kyriarchy. I do indeed have no life. But I do have Barolo, doritos, DVDs, the freedom to express who and what I am, family that loves me and a safe roof over my head. And I'm off to enjoy those things now, because I'm privileged enough to have them. Good night.
Of course, there are people who find it hard to enjoy themselves at this time of year.
One of the major advances in my writing this year came when I had to prepare for the Plinth in Trafalgar Square, and I realised the frequency and intensity with which gender issues come up in my work. Practically all the time in what I write I find myself obsessing with issues of what it means to be a man, or a woman, what behaviour marks you out as such, and why I just plain prefer doing things the gender binary says I shouldn't. I like wearing make-up, I like acting femme, and I'm attracted, usually, to girls who don't. It comes up again and again in my work, it's something I think about a lot; but because I'm so frakking dense, I never realised how damn genderqueer I was until the facts were there in front of me, when I looked at everything I'd written up to this October and thought, wow, I kinda think about this shit a lot.
And so, because I'm a regular Willow Rosenberg, I began researching. I mined the internet for facts. I read whatever I could find in the local library which seemed, to me, to be relevant (which wasn't much, to be honest, in a hick town in the North East of England). Through the agency of the fine authors and twitterers Poppy Z Brite and Caitlin R Kiernan (who really are two of the best writers on the planet, and whose work you ought to read whatever you think you may be), I began to become acquainted with the trans community on Twitter, in the course of which I temporarily became a satirist , but, more importantly, I learned a fucking lot. And one of the things I learned is that I'm a fucking lucky bastard.
And I'm lucky because, as queer as I am, I'm not trans and, more specifically, I'm not a trans woman. I've written before about the disgraceful murder statistics for trans women, and I want to draw your attention - your and my privileged attention - to the fact that while we're all basking in the love of our families and material bounty which would, a century ago, have marked us out as some kind of tribal potentate, for many women who had the misfortune to be born into the wrong kind of body, and the courage to do something about that, Christmas is anything but a happy time. And rather than get on my guilty white liberal high horse and preach, I'd prefer it if you followed, and read, these links to important, informative, and moving posts from the blogs of gudbuytjane and Helen at Bird of Paradise.
I'm lucky and, if you're reading this blog, the chances are that you're lucky too. And that's fine. We won't change the world by wearing a hair shirt and flagellating ourselves (you might have fun if you do that but, y'know, your thing is your thing...), but we might change just a little bit if we remain conscious of the fact that we are so lucky, and that our 'luck' in fact represents a widespread system of kyriarchal prejudice which functions to keep certain people at the bottom of the heap, and that we might create a world in which those people can have the same 'luck' we have if we change our own attitudes to those people and give them space to speak...give them space to speak? No. That's not right. Respect their goddam right to speak and help spread and publicise the things they have to say so that the people who would deny them their rights feel like the shamefaced idiots they are and step aside.
Helen, and Jane, and every other trans woman who has been rejected by their family and friends, deserve to not feel sad and traumatised at a time when the rest of us are stuffing our faces with doritos and drinking Italian wine. The fact that they can't experience the same happy winter festival as the rest of us is what is wrong with our society, and it is wrong because of people like us. And we can change that, and we should. So. Y'know. Let's.
And yes, it is Joshua ben Joseph's alleged birthday and here I am blogging about gender issues and the kyriarchy. I do indeed have no life. But I do have Barolo, doritos, DVDs, the freedom to express who and what I am, family that loves me and a safe roof over my head. And I'm off to enjoy those things now, because I'm privileged enough to have them. Good night.
Saturday, 21 November 2009
More TDOR
Some more links to blogs discussing the Transgender Day of Remembrance on 20th November 09.
Cheryl Morgan muses on, among other things, the prevalence of transphobic violence in Brazil, and a commenter discloses a tragic story from Italy about yet another way in which the Catholic church seems, to this reader at least, to be on an ongoing quest to make itself as least like Christ as it can possibly get.
The wonderful people at The Angels paint it black in remembrance, providing a list of the fallen.
And Lucy from Catspaw makes the important point that when we talk about the murder of trans people, we're overwhelmingly talking about the murder of trans women, and particularly trans women of colour. Oppressions, as she says, do intersect, and if we're ever going to undo the kyriarchy , as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza calls it (though in my sci-fi geek heart I still call it the Matrix), then we have to be aware of those intersection points of oppression, and not try to co-opt them to play the I'm-the-most-oppressed game.
Lucy also provides another important service, in providing links to further blogs dealing with TDOR, all of which I urge you to check out.
It isn't November 20th on the Greenwich Meridian anymore, but it's still that day somewhere, and somewhere on this planet, men and women are being oppressed, harassed, and murdered for being themselves. And whatever day of the year it is, that has to stop.
Cheryl Morgan muses on, among other things, the prevalence of transphobic violence in Brazil, and a commenter discloses a tragic story from Italy about yet another way in which the Catholic church seems, to this reader at least, to be on an ongoing quest to make itself as least like Christ as it can possibly get.
The wonderful people at The Angels paint it black in remembrance, providing a list of the fallen.
And Lucy from Catspaw makes the important point that when we talk about the murder of trans people, we're overwhelmingly talking about the murder of trans women, and particularly trans women of colour. Oppressions, as she says, do intersect, and if we're ever going to undo the kyriarchy , as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza calls it (though in my sci-fi geek heart I still call it the Matrix), then we have to be aware of those intersection points of oppression, and not try to co-opt them to play the I'm-the-most-oppressed game.
Lucy also provides another important service, in providing links to further blogs dealing with TDOR, all of which I urge you to check out.
It isn't November 20th on the Greenwich Meridian anymore, but it's still that day somewhere, and somewhere on this planet, men and women are being oppressed, harassed, and murdered for being themselves. And whatever day of the year it is, that has to stop.
Friday, 20 November 2009
TDOR 09
Here is a link. Please read it, and think about it. And think about this:
Risk of being murdered for most people? 1 in 18,000.
Risk of being murdered for transwomen? Between 1 in 8 (for transwomen of colour) and 1 in 12 (for those transwomen lucky enough to have been born caucasian).
I know it can seem wearing for some of you, when I get on my high horse and start having a go at the Mr T Snickers ads, or Julie Bindel's transphobic magazine wankery, but there's a reason why I do it. And that reason is right there, in black and white, in those numbers.
Risk of being murdered for most people? 1 in 18,000.
Risk of being murdered for transwomen? Between 1 in 8 (for transwomen of colour) and 1 in 12 (for those transwomen lucky enough to have been born caucasian).
I know it can seem wearing for some of you, when I get on my high horse and start having a go at the Mr T Snickers ads, or Julie Bindel's transphobic magazine wankery, but there's a reason why I do it. And that reason is right there, in black and white, in those numbers.
Wednesday, 11 November 2009
Operation: Sex Change
...is the title of a game I proposed to MB that would, I swear, have made them a cool billion, but did they go for it? No. They thought a game in which the player has to carry out a perfect vaginoplasty (link NSFW, BTW) on a ruddy-nosed cartoon man might be, and I quote 'pushing the envelope in a direction we, as a family games manufacturer, really don't want to go, and if you keep calling our office high on drugs in the middle of the night we'll have you bludgeoned', and instead went with a Simpsons tie-in edition of the old Operation! franchise. Pussies.
Not really of course. What Operation:Sex Change is, in fact, is a Facebook Campaign set up by people from Bekhsoos, a queer arab magazine, to draw attention to the problems faced by transgendered people around the world, and in particular to draw attention to the International Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20th. It's a pretty simple idea: you go on Facebook, you change your gender identity on your profile, publish the change to your profile and, when people ask why, you tell them about the campaign.
Readers of this blog will know that as someone who self-identifies as genderqueer I often explore related issues on this blog and in my work, and will not be wholly surprised to note that on my FB profile I now appear to be one of those HOT LOCAL GIRLS facebook ads are always telling us we should meet up with RIGHT NOW. But I'd also like to encourage you to do the same. As Cheryl Morgan points out, it doesn't hurt, and it's only temporary. Go on, live dangerously.
Not really of course. What Operation:Sex Change is, in fact, is a Facebook Campaign set up by people from Bekhsoos, a queer arab magazine, to draw attention to the problems faced by transgendered people around the world, and in particular to draw attention to the International Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20th. It's a pretty simple idea: you go on Facebook, you change your gender identity on your profile, publish the change to your profile and, when people ask why, you tell them about the campaign.
Readers of this blog will know that as someone who self-identifies as genderqueer I often explore related issues on this blog and in my work, and will not be wholly surprised to note that on my FB profile I now appear to be one of those HOT LOCAL GIRLS facebook ads are always telling us we should meet up with RIGHT NOW. But I'd also like to encourage you to do the same. As Cheryl Morgan points out, it doesn't hurt, and it's only temporary. Go on, live dangerously.
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Well I always preferred Murdoch anyway...
I think we've established here that I'm a reasonably genderqueer kind of person. I don't see myself as particularly masculine, certainly, and there are a lot of reasonably feminine things I like to do - adopting an effeminate vocal style, wearing make-up, being the non-dominant partner in my relationships etc. Having said that I don't really have any burning desire to have a man in surgical gear do a quick-change act on my winkie because, well, I kinda like it. It's brought pleasure to me, and many other people. Essentially, I may be a femme in a bear's body, but to be honest I like things that way.
What I don't like is being harassed by heteronormative fuckwittery on Facebook, as happened earlier. Vada, if you will, this page.
It's not necessarily the 'Mr T as Ubermensch' meme that I don't like here. It isn't even the 'Get some nuts' campaign itself. At first I found it kind of amusing because, (a) it was targeting people not so much not being men as men being cowardly or ridiculous, and (b) it's Mr T goddammit! I still have fond memories of Mr T telling kids to stay off the drugs, palling around with Hulk Hogan, and showing he was man enough to not be threatened by Boy George. I like the T. Hell, he even kicked cancer's ass. I'm down with the man with the mohawk.
So I have no problem with the man who played BA Baracus. I want that out there right now. What I do have a problem with is the crawling half-human scum who decided to graft this hateful little meme onto the Mr T Snickers campaign:
'Have you got a friend who needs to get some nuts? Either click on the "Snickers Mr T" tab to get Mr T to send that fool a message, or Shop Your Mate at http: www.getsomenuts.tv for the chance to win £1K!' (and yes, that hyperlink HAS been deliberately disabled)
Hey, fellas! Do you know someone who fails to conform to rigid notions of masculinity? You do? Then why not dob them in for a chance to receive a financial reward? Inform on your friends and family, that's a cool thing to do!
Look, I know what you're going to say. I'm not getting it. I'm just another humourless Guardian-reading spider and I ought to lighten up. But the thing is, look: kids with gender and sexuality issues already feel as if they're trapped in hostile territory where any transgression of some imagined code of masculinity could expose them to retribution, and in which they learn to police themselves carefully to avoid blowing their cover. Us all being adults, let's not encourage such a climate for the sake of a cheap advertising pop, eh?
Now that would really be showing some nuts.
What I don't like is being harassed by heteronormative fuckwittery on Facebook, as happened earlier. Vada, if you will, this page.
It's not necessarily the 'Mr T as Ubermensch' meme that I don't like here. It isn't even the 'Get some nuts' campaign itself. At first I found it kind of amusing because, (a) it was targeting people not so much not being men as men being cowardly or ridiculous, and (b) it's Mr T goddammit! I still have fond memories of Mr T telling kids to stay off the drugs, palling around with Hulk Hogan, and showing he was man enough to not be threatened by Boy George. I like the T. Hell, he even kicked cancer's ass. I'm down with the man with the mohawk.
So I have no problem with the man who played BA Baracus. I want that out there right now. What I do have a problem with is the crawling half-human scum who decided to graft this hateful little meme onto the Mr T Snickers campaign:
'Have you got a friend who needs to get some nuts? Either click on the "Snickers Mr T" tab to get Mr T to send that fool a message, or Shop Your Mate at http: www.getsomenuts.tv for the chance to win £1K!' (and yes, that hyperlink HAS been deliberately disabled)
Hey, fellas! Do you know someone who fails to conform to rigid notions of masculinity? You do? Then why not dob them in for a chance to receive a financial reward? Inform on your friends and family, that's a cool thing to do!
Look, I know what you're going to say. I'm not getting it. I'm just another humourless Guardian-reading spider and I ought to lighten up. But the thing is, look: kids with gender and sexuality issues already feel as if they're trapped in hostile territory where any transgression of some imagined code of masculinity could expose them to retribution, and in which they learn to police themselves carefully to avoid blowing their cover. Us all being adults, let's not encourage such a climate for the sake of a cheap advertising pop, eh?
Now that would really be showing some nuts.
Wednesday, 7 October 2009
Well, if the Royal Mail and the Book Depository come through, tomorrow your humble scribe will be voraciously reading this. It's a book that came up during a random googling of 'transgressive fiction' on the laptop and which piqued my interest. Not because I'm a dirty stinking pervert - I'm assuming, at this point, that we're taking that as read - but because it's an exploration of the psychological drives which lead someone, particularly a male someone, to be attracted to masochistic sexual behaviour. It's a topic I think is relevant to the transgressive poetry project, and one which crops up a lot in my own poetry - how can you remain a quote-unquote real man while labouring under a libido which constantly orients you towards girls who could kick the living crap out of you? Can you, indeed, remain a homo verus in such circumstances, or do you have to redefine your self-concept as something other? And, in that case - what is it?
Nothing's to say it won't be a shit book, of course, and if it is, I'll excoriate like the guys wielding the apple corer in the final scenes of Exquisite Corpse. But here's a line from an extract I found at nerve.com which suggests it might not be: 'I sleep on the inside of the spoon. She's my abusive boyfriend and I feel safe, her arms wrapped around me.'
Hmm. The sadomasochistic relationship as willingly-entered, if gender-reversed, wife-beater and wife dialectic? A huge amount to unpack there (and not all of it good) in terms of gender, power relations, and sexual assumptions. A fine piece of literary meat in which to sink one's teeth; a meal I look forward to. If you'd like to recommend some future deviant dishes, please do: remember though that unless I've already read a book or have been lent it, I do have to pay for the books I review here myself. But do make recommendations. The more we understand of the scope of transgressive poetry, the more room we have to maneuver. And the more room we have in which to move, the greater the damage that we can inflict.
Nothing's to say it won't be a shit book, of course, and if it is, I'll excoriate like the guys wielding the apple corer in the final scenes of Exquisite Corpse. But here's a line from an extract I found at nerve.com which suggests it might not be: 'I sleep on the inside of the spoon. She's my abusive boyfriend and I feel safe, her arms wrapped around me.'
Hmm. The sadomasochistic relationship as willingly-entered, if gender-reversed, wife-beater and wife dialectic? A huge amount to unpack there (and not all of it good) in terms of gender, power relations, and sexual assumptions. A fine piece of literary meat in which to sink one's teeth; a meal I look forward to. If you'd like to recommend some future deviant dishes, please do: remember though that unless I've already read a book or have been lent it, I do have to pay for the books I review here myself. But do make recommendations. The more we understand of the scope of transgressive poetry, the more room we have to maneuver. And the more room we have in which to move, the greater the damage that we can inflict.
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