The Ballad of CeCe McDonald

Trigger warning: this poem discusses a transphobic attack and its aftermath. Certain verses also refer to prison rape. If either of these things are likely to trigger you, feel free not to read.

CeCe McDonald copped a plea.

Guilty. Manslaughter. Second degree.
She had to. There’d be no fair trial.
Forty-one more months in jail

the best she could expect from them,

the white, cisgendered, Minnesota men
whose prejudice would seal her fate,
ruling ‘inadmissible’ the hate

inscribed on the so-called victim’s flesh,

but saying that her one bounced cheque
would be allowed to testify
against her virtue. Cheques don’t lie,

but swastika tattoos may prove

mere relics of a misspent youth.
That Schmitz said go back to Africa
was, the whites said, neither here nor there:

a man was stabbed, and CeCe’s race

made Freeman think he had a case.
Freeman, who’d tried anti-fascists
but let Darrell Evanovich’s

killer walk, had CeCe bound

in custody. The facial wound
that she’d received that night turned septic,
left untreated, grew and festered,

as CeCe festered in their jail,

each day eroding CeCe’s will
to fight, and making Freeman bold.
He’d show the press how he controlled

those elements – the blacks, the queers –

Tea Party voters tend to fear:
pandering to fears like these
keeps Blue Dog Freeman in his seat

and hapless CeCe in her cell,

while the Caucasian thugs who yelled
abuse and chased her through the streets
are free to party, laugh and eat,

drink beer and cheer at Vikings games

while CeCe languishes in chains
for standing ground that wasn’t hers
in the eyes of pallid jurors.

Meanwhile, Robert Zimmerman

– the dodgy judge, not Bob Dylan –
tells Fox News that his son George
had probable defensive cause

to shoot a black boy in the chest

at point-blank range, then flee arrest:
but George’s victim wasn’t white,
so George posed no risk of flight

(though he’d lain low for one whole month,

while press and police went on the hunt).
So Zimmerman was granted bail:
paid 15K and walked from jail,

where CeCe sits awaiting sentence,

hoping to serve out her penance
for the crime of keeping her friends safe
in a prison where she won’t be raped

by cis male guards and prisoners

with shivs or barks of ‘strip for search’,
a decency that isn’t certain
in the realm of men like Freeman,

governed only for some people,

who are not considered equal,
whatever patriotic lies
its blue-eyed children may imbibe

when they chant their morning pledge,

where millions teeter on the edge
of losing homes to bailed-out banks
while Mormon millionaire mountebanks

pledge to protect blastocysts

and cuff a quarter of the wrists
on Planet Earth, and shackle more:
oh, Amnesty are keeping score,

but who cares? We’re the Great Exception!

For rich white men we’ll make exemptions!
But if you’re not, well – just forget it.
Cop the plea. You’ll get no credit

from the local Fox affiliate.

Justice for all? You’re delirious!
The fact is that America
still operates a colour bar.

See CeCe, in her prison rack?
Her wrists, like most we cuff, are black.

                        *          *          *

CeCe McDonald has been sent to prison for the 'crime' of defening herself and her friends from a racist and transphobic attack. No attempt has been made to punish her attackers. Please sign the petition asking the Minnesota State Governor, Mark Dayton, to pardon her.

'There's so much projection it's in cinemascope...'

Still alive. No thanks to the Scum publishing transphobic crap about trans people being treated with respect in prison. But in a way I should thank Britain's favourite semi-pornographic chip-wrapper, because thinking about the ridiculous, chip-on-the-shoulder way this story has been reported threw something into relief for me about privilege, and how easy it is to tell what the privileged secretly think about themselves.

To sum the story up: new prison search guidelines mean that trans women - like cis women - will now be exempt from humiliating 'squat' searches, and trans men and women will have the right to request a search be carried out by a warden of their experiential gender, rather than that assigned to them at birth. Sensible, fair, and wholly in line with the progressive view of trans equality: treat trans people as members of the gender they feel themselves to be. Not a big ask, not a hard position to live up to. You'd think.

So what the hell are the Sun getting at with this attack? I was musing on this this morning, half-awake and without the benefit of my first coffee, and somehow the whole issue got mixed-up in my head with the general tone of reporting on prison issues - something much in the press lately, as one of the few Tories I like, beer-drinking jazz-afficionado Ken Clarke, has dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, locking up increasing swathes of our population might not be the way to go. And something about the way the right-wing press report on prisons occurred to me: they always, always, go on about how 'soft' and 'easy' it is in prison. Endless articles, editorials and columns sermonize on what a cushy life lags have inside, how they get Nintendo consoles and food and colour TV in their cells etc, and how prisons are like holiday camps these days and what's the deterrent eh, I ask you...

But it seems perfectly obvious to me what the deterrent is. The deterrent is being in prison. Being deprived of liberty. Anyone with a modicum of nous can get this. Look: I'm sitting at a computer right now typing this blog. But, if I wished, right now, I could leave the table, switch off the computer (and the radio on the sideboard), and go haring off to the local pub, where I could sit skolling back neat bourbon until my fucking face fell off. I'm not going to, but I could.

Whereas if I were in prison, I couldn't do this. I probably couldn't even type this right now - access to computers is restricted in prisons. Sure, maybe I would have a Wii in my cell, but if I'm cooped up in that cell twenty-something hours a day, that doesn't look like as much of a home comfort (though on the plus side I could probably get enough practice in that I might finally be able to beat that ginger bitch Kathryn who keeps whupping my ass at Wii Boxing. But I digress).

Prison sucks because you lose your freedom, and no amount of trinkets can make up for that. Now multiply that suckage by being trans, and you can see how horrific being trans and in prison could be. Imagine you're a cis woman and the law says you have to squat down and submit to being searched, humiliatingly, by a man. Now imagine you're a trans woman in the same situation. There's no difference - except that as a trans woman you have to deal with this crap on top of all the other prejudice and systemic failure you deal with every day. Insults. Violence. Threatened or actual sexual assault. And on top of this the systemically sanctioned violation of being examined by someone not of your gender. It's a horrific situation, and fair play to the prison authorities for recognising that in at least this small way.

The Sun doesn't see it like that, though. Because to the Sun, the trans women are getting away with something. They're getting special treatment.

We see this a lot in right-wing scare stories, don't we? This idea that minorities receive 'special treatment'. It lies behind the never-ending 'Winterval' bollocks, clinicaly dissected by Kevin Arscott, that Christmas is being 'banned' because it offends Muslims - who get special treatment because we don't try to ban their festivals, do we? It's the idea behind the war on benefit claimants - disabled people get special treatment because they don't have to work (even though many can't), single mothers get special treatment because they get housing (when what would we rather do? Throw women with children on the street?). And it's the idea behind the similar war on trans people - the idea that being able to use a shower or washroom that minimises your chance of being raped or beaten is somehow a special privilege.

In reality the only special privileges are those of the white, able-bodied, cis majority. But the mindset of the privileged can never accept that this is privilege, and bought unfairly. So any attempt to put things right - affirmative action programmes, diversity policies, new search guidelines - is sneered at as being an attempt to grant privileges to groups rather than an attempt to redress the effects of an already-extant privilege which disadvantages said groups. And the reason for this is that the privileged person knows on some level that they are privileged, and they fear the removal of this privilege. So they project it onto the Other. The Others are the privileged ones. And us? We're the real victims mate, yerrr, victims of all this 'politically correct' bollocks, innit...

In Freudian psychology (which is mostly just a load of old shite but did bequeath one or two useful ideas) this is called projection. You dissociate from something distasteful about yourself and project it onto someone else. They're doing it. Not you. Them.

You see this with a lot of other things privileged people say about marginalised folks too.

To hear many able-bodied people say it, you'd think disabled people are dishonest and lazy. But what's lazier - battling every day against a condition which makes it near-impossible to function, or not bothering to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people because you can't be arsed? What's more dishonest - hoping that you'll look disabled enough to convince some ignorant, vile little ATOS inquisitor that you deserve the benefits that keep you alive, or deliberately lying about how disabled someone is to get them off benefits and into low-paid 'workfare' schemes which deprive genuinely able-bodied people of minimum-wage employment?

To hear many cis people say it, trans people are 'confused' or 'dishonest' about their gender. But what's more confused - knowing that you're a girl, and dressing, looking and acting in a way that fits with that identity - or releasing ridiculous 'surveys' which equate 'manliness' with the consumption of grilled-cheese snackage  (trigger warning: I think Mark Simpson's article, linked to there, veers dangerously close to body-policing at points, but I still think he makes an excellent general observation that manliness has became equated too much with consumption in our society)? What's more dishonest - accepting who you are in spite of pain and prejudice, or creating a bully culture in which young men (and women) learn to repress their emotions and any expression of gender-variance is policed with violence, because you don't feel comfortable with who you are?

And of course, to hear a lot of white people say it, black people are criminals - but what's a bigger crime, possession of marijuana or...well, you could take your pick, really. Slave trade? Imperialist colonisation of indigenous peoples throughout the world? The British 'famine relief' camps in India which served a smaller calorific ration to inmates than Dachau? Or my personal favourite, the absolutely criminal punishment which Haiti has had to suffer - and continues to suffer - for being the only country to demonstrate what Noam Chomsky calls 'successful defiance' against the European (and later American) colonising powers through history's most successful slave revolt?

It's all projection, pure and simple. The next time you hear some privileged person telling you exactly what's wrong with 'scroungers', 'muzzies', 'trannies', 'queers', 'darkies', or whatever, take a moment - before you rip their face off and shove it down their arrogant throats - to listen between the lines of what they say. They aren't telling you what other people are like. They're telling you their deepest darkest secrets. They're telling you what keeps them awake, sweating with guilt, through the night.

They're telling you about themselves.

Hello, you! Let's talk about privilege, shall we?

It seems, from reading my blog stats and other news that's came to my attention, as if this blog may recently have enjoyed something of an increase in reader numbers. Of course, in the great ocean of blogging these are little more than tiny droplets, but it's still nice to know how many of you lovely people are out there reading. Still, an increase in readers brings with it the responsibility of bringing said readers up to speed on what's going down.

It occurred to me that it might be worth doing a few introductory posts to allow these fresh and fragrant darlings the chance to understand exactly why I do go on so about the things I talk about herein. So settle in new readers, because today we're going to talk about the big one, the issue without which Wrestling Emily would be nothing more than a chronicle of the adventures of a slightly socially inept poet with a fondness for mascara and the films of Patrick Keiller. I speak, of course, of that most important issue in modern activism, privilege.

Privilege is one of those words which often gets misunderstood by the average, non-ofay cat when one describes another person - or even said cat themselves - as 'privileged', because the average person assumes that when I say 'person x is privileged' what I mean is 'person x lives in a giant castle made of Aztec gold and commands an army of zombie servants who constantly do their bidding.' This is, of course, a category error. Being wealthy is a form of privilege - and certainly, in a society as economically unequal as ours, an important one - but it isn't the only form of privilege by a long shot.

Privilege literally translates as 'private law' (you see, new readers? Not only do you get the ranting of a marginalised person, you get fascinating Latin trivia too! I'm too good to you, really I am.). A privileged group is a group which operates by a different set of laws to the rest of society - a law that exists for their benefit and to others' disadvantage. Of course, as a supposedly democratic society we theoretically no longer have laws which operate to advantage one group over another - though if you actually believe that, dear reader, I suggest that you pay a visit to an impoverished, largely black inner city area of London and ask some of the young men how they feel when they see a policeman. You may well be astonished to find that, unlike you, they do not immediately wonder whether they should ask him the time.

The fact is that there are shedloads of privileges which make it easier for some groups in our society to succeed than others. The classic work on privilege is 'Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack' by Peggy Mcintosh, which explores White Privilege - the vast and invisible network of privileges which accrue to caucasian people purely by virtue of our pallid complexion. And I say 'our' because I will willingly cop to the fact that I have caucasian privilege. I may lose out on the axes in a lot of other areas, but I do have the Great White Advantage. This even modifies how badly I feel the effects of other areas in which I'm not privileged: as a nonbinary trans person, I lose out in a lot of ways - but as a Caucasian trans person rather than a trans woman of colour, I have a much lower risk of being murdered or being forced to engage in survival sex work. White Privilege is one of the reasons I get really annoyed when white people accuse people from other races of 'playing the race card' - because white people, without realising it, play the race card every single day and get away with it.

Are you white, new readers? My sympathies. I am too. And I know how hard it can be to acknowledge the privilege you get just because you have a lack of melanin pigmentation. Deal with it. I do. Robert Jensen did too. Let his example school you.

We touched above on another form of privilege - cis privilege. Sorry. Am I going too fast for you? I forget how hard it can be to come to grips with all these strange new words. Of course that itself is another aspect of many forms of privilege - you assume you already know everything and thus resent it when marginalised people start talking about things about which you have never heard. But anyway: cis is essentially the opposite of trans, when it comes to gender. A cis person is someone whose gender identity is in accordance with the gender assigned to them at birth. And while it may not be immediately obvious to you - it often isn't - the fact is that being comfortable in your assigned gender identity brings with it a whole load of privileges. Check them out.

Hopefully you're getting the point at this stage. There are, as the Native American character in Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josie Wales might put it, 'all kindsa privileges' (and if you're a quick study you'll have twigged that there's a problem with the Native American character in that film, in that he is the creation of a writer with white privilege - the character is never given an inner life, he only exists to explain the mystical significance of Eastwood's character to Sondra Locke. And if you're a really, really quick study you'll also realise that the fact that a Mystical Native American is required to explained the mysteries of Outlaw Manhood to Sondra is an equally problematic example of male privilege - this is called mansplaining, and is a topic to which we shall return in later blogs which cater to you, the new reader).

White people have privilege over black people, men have privilege over women, straight people have privilege over gay people, cis people have privilege over trans people, abled people have privilege over disabled people - there are, indeed, many kinds of privilege and they all intersect. The new reader may at this point be suspicious that this blog is moving in the direction of political correctness - and I would not disabuse said reader of this opinion, because I don't think there is anything wrong with political correctness. As Stewart Lee has pointed out, all political correctness consists of is 'treating people fairly'. What a sickening idea.

The vast and interlocking tapestry of privilege is called the Kyriarchy by those of us who strive to dismantle it and create a world in which its toxic effects will not ruin life for generations the way it has so far. Kyriarchy is a word invented by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, who realised that the traditional feminist characterisation of society as a patriarchy simplified things too much by reducing things to a (cis) male/female binary.

You should care about kyriarchy because it's a web in which all of us are caught. Unless I've badly misjudged my new readers and this blog is now being followed by Donald Trump, I'm going to assume that you, like me, benefit from some axes of privilege while losing out on others. So what's the right thing to do about this kind of tapestry of evil?

That depends. It depends on whether all you care about is your own advancement or you genuinely want to make a fairer world. If all you're interested in is advancing your own shallow interests, then you'd follow the 'kiss up, kick down' strategy: kowtow to people above you in the kyriarchal pyramid, while ruthlessly suppressing those below you to curry favour with your superiors and show off your aggressive, dominant kyrio-cojones. But that way doesn't work in the long run.  The annals of Greek tragedy and the crime columns of tabloid newspapers are full of people who have licked the ass above and kicked the ass below until they reached some supposedly comfortable point in the hierarchy, only to have it brutally taken out from under them by someone who lacked their advantages. Remember the end of Carlito's Way, where Al Pacino survives the climactic shootout only to be murdered out of the blue by John Leguizamo's character?  That's the logical end-point of that strategy. But there is another way.

The path to making a fairer world is no less risky and a lot less comfortable than the path of mud-wrestling the marginalised for relative advantage. You'll face bigger obstacles, greater hardship, more humiliating losses and ultimately run a greater risk of dying early than the kiss-up, kick-down scum. But you have one advantage. And that is that, because you yourself are opposing the web in which everyone else is trapped, you show that, in the ancient activist proverb, another world is possible. You show that we don't have to buy in to a never-ending battle royale in which no-one ever ultimately wins. You show that it's possible to imagine a world where, pace Marcus Aurelius, life is more like dancing than wrestling. And, even if the worst happens, if you lose out on your position in a hierarchy - if you die - then you don't lose or die like Al P in Carlito's Way; you lose or die like Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: if your enemies kill you, they make you more powerful than they can possibly imagine; because the fact they've had to kill you shows that the one thing they fear more than anything else is someone who doesn't fit into their sad little world. And that example, and that reminder of what they truly fear, serves as an inspiration to the rebels who'll come after you; and eventually, through your taking a stand, a better world might be created and, in the immortal words of Bill Hicks, something like heaven might dawn.

It's up to you really, readers. Maybe, as my analytics tell me, you googled this site using the disturbing phrase 'women pee after wrestling' and stuck around because you were trying to work out if I could possibly be for real; maybe you saw me at a gig, explaining why I apparently switch genders in poems describing my adolescent years, and were intrigued enough to look me up; maybe you encountered me in some other, more everyday context, and something about me intrigued you enough that you decided to go looking for my online presence. Who knows? All I know is you're reading this, you haven't been here since the get-go and, like those who have, it's time for you to make the choice. Do you want your actions to drive the world further to the brink; or do you want to join me in trying, in our fumbling and ineffective way, to make a better world?

The choice is yours. I hope you make the right one.

Littlejohn in total lies non-shock

My day at work today was, as usual, rendered a little less bearable by the constant procession of Daily Mail purchasers making their way to the tills. But today it was made even worse by the smug face of Richard Littlejohn being emblazoned across the top of the front page.

I hate Littlejohn, because he and his ilk are poisoning British politics by pumping it full of lies. I was going to post a long post here eviscerating Littlejohn for his bullshit, but it's late and I'm tired.

Besides, the blogosphere's beaten me to it: here's a link to an excellent Tabloid Watch post doing a bumper Fisk of Littlejohn's most recent brainfart. Enjoy.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Covers

As I may have mentioned on here a couple of times, I work in a bookshop. In the course of my job, I see a lot of book covers. I notice a lot of things about these covers. I notice that a lot of ordinary romance novels feature male characters on covers, but the cover figures on paranormal romance books tend to be female. I can spot the difference between a US and an English edition spine-on at fifteen paces. I can often tell, from the font used on the cover, whether a given book belongs in psychology, self-help or mind, body and spirit.

A while ago I noted that there seemed to be a two-tier thing going on with the black writing section. On one level you have the likes of Ellison, Walker, Morrison and Baldwin - literary fiction written by people who happen to be black. On the other hand, you have a tier of books which tend to be either gangsta-fiction (a surprising number of which are allegedly written by 50 Cent) or chick-lit of the girl-meets-playa variety. Now, here's a fun quiz to try: which of these tiers of the 'black writing' section are more likely to have cover images that feature black people, and which are more likely to have more, shall we say, 'abstract' covers?

If you said the literary fiction would be more abstract, and that the lower-tier material would be more likely to have covers showing actual black people, give yourself a pat on the back. If you've worked out the reason for this, then pat yourself on the back and give yourself a handshake, because you're obviously smarter than I (who only twigged this about five minutes ago when I had to see it basically stated in a blog to which I link below).

The reason, of course, is that a lot of people in publishing are worried that white people may be put off reading a novel with a non-caucasian character on the cover. This is not only really patronising, but it can actually be harmful to books which do feature black characters, as outlined here by Justine Larbalestier. Larbalestier's book, Liar, is a novel about a woman who may or may not be a pathological liar, and her struggle to stop lying. Larbalestier worked hard to create a believable background for her character, Micah, who happens to be black and to have what Larbalestier describes as 'nappy' hair.

The publishers - acting on the assumption that to feature a black character on the cover might frighten the white folk - decided, not to even go with an abstract cover, but to illustrate the cover with an image of a very pale white woman with incredibly long, straight hair. Juxtaposed with the title of the book, of course, this suggests that Micah is actually lying about being black, too.

Say what you like about the death of the author, the fact remains that fiction relies on a careful dance between belief and incredulity. If you're writing a novel about someone who lies pathologically, it's even more important that there be some bedrock of truth for the lies to play off. Deciding to write a book with an unreliable narrator is one thing; having the narrator become unreliable because of the decisions of your cover designer is another thing entirely. And when that decision is based on the patronising and racist assumption that a pasty-assed mofo like myself will only read books which have picture of white people on the cover, it's downright bloody dangerous.