The Serpent's Wisdom

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

At Boston Pride i tabled for the Network La Red for a couple of hours. A Latino fellow came by at one point and said he’s against domestic violence too — and hinted (i don’t remember his exact words) that he was obliquely referring to INS raids and similar anti-Latino actions of the US Government.

But it’s all connected, really. Oppression of a minority by a government is much the same thing on a bigger scale. The mechanisms in prevailing ideologies and institutions which make it easier for someone to get away with battering their partner also enable and justify official racist violence. These webs of abuse interweave, for example when a woman is brought into the United States as a domestic worker and then turned into a sex slave; the people holding her threaten to reveal her undocumented status to the INS as a way to keep her compliant.

Personal, first-hand experience can be unreliable; but it’s also the only thing we have that cannot be taken away from us. The messiness of our lives under oppression, the various survival strategies which “coincidentally” do not fit on religious moralistic laundry lists, make it more difficult for anyone to sympathize with us. That we live in a society that teaches us to compare other peoples’ lives to ideological checklists makes it easier for us to stay divided as well.

Understanding the way the world works, the way our laws and doctrines and “common sense” and logic and language have been constructed in order to maintain privilege for those who have it, is an important part of working for justice. But, just as “upholding the law” is taught to us as the way we know justice has been done, upholding ideology is taught to us as the way we know we’re right.

Which is why it’s significant and subversive to say “the personal is political.” Those of us who live, inconveniently and untidily enough, outside the lines like a stray crayon mark can give direct personal testimony to the wrongness (or at least incompleteness) of an ideology. This is true even when the ideology is radical; and the results can be disastrous for the unity of the radical community.

For example, during the 1970’s and 1980’s a prevailing ideology throughout much of the feminist movement was that “women are good and nurturing while men are bad and abusive.” (For the record, it’s worth noting as an aside that Andrea Dworkin, often cited as a gender essentialist, took a lot of grief for taking a vocal public position opposed to the idea of “natural female superiority”.)

In that climate, women who came forward seeking shelter because they were being abused by their lesbian partners were quite often silenced. Battered women’s shelters had been set up on a “female victim, male abuser” model and women who had been beaten by women were inconvenient and unwelcome.  When they did gain admittance to shelters they had to deal with homophobia from staff and other survivors.

Lesbian abusers, like battering husbands, used prevailing misogyny to frighten their partners. But they could use the threat of outing to keep their victim in line. They could use their partner’s lack of knowledge about lesbianism to keep them in the dark about the abusive nature of their relationship (”This is what lesbian love is like,” etc.) They knew, too, that their partners would not find sympathy within the women’s shelter network. Ideology, institution, and abuse woven together in a web keeping women down — and the experience from the survivor’s point of view is quite similar whether their batterer is a man or a woman.

Lesbian (and gay) abuse survivors were also silenced by the gay and lesbian activist community, seeking to establish an image of our community as “clean and upright.” They were afraid that seeing us discuss things like gay or lesbian partner abuse would place ammo in the hands of homophobes. Abuse survivors would just have to “take one for the team.”

Now, fortunately, there is some recognition of the issue, and movement in some areas, even though it is still largely uphill.

The thing is, anyone who silences another person on the basis of a prevailing ideology is doing the work of domination. Why is not as important as what. That is a part of what we are saying when we say the personal is political.

I think we should make it a kind of radical oath that we must resolve to hear what people say about their experience before ideology. It’s hard — it’s very hard. I see myself violating this all the time.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

I just came back from the Dyke March. My clothes had to be peeled off (it was a warm and rather muggy evening) and so i am sitting here naked trying to cool off. Whoo, naked tranny-girl flesh!

Ahem. Anyways. The Dyke March is a living embodiment of the affinity politics i wrote about a while ago. “Dyke,” at least as it manifests here in Boston, is a term of affinity and not of identity. Tonight, a “dyke” was anyone reasonably woman-centered who showed up and participated in this vibrant community. (Except for one guy who was there to pass out Jesus tracts.)

My girlfriend Cowgrrl was with me, and she explained that she had been in Dyke Marches over 20 years ago. Things were, of course, much different back then: then, there was big controversy over whether to invite bisexual women along. She wasn’t even sure when the Dyke March had become trans-friendly; it was after the last time she’d been.

How had things changed so much? We had only to look around to see the answer. These kids! These kids today. Let me tell you. They’re freakin’ awesome, and they have worked out all this stuff that we oldsters are still tripping over. So i am preparing myself for the switch to being one of the “community elders,” which basically means standing back and watching while these amazing young people do things we never dreamed of doing when we were that young.

These kids have a friend who is an Asian-American lesbian who does boy-drag and reads erotic poetry for GenderCrash; they have another friend who’s a lanky gay boy with bleached-blonde hair, who’s dating someone who just came out as a transman; they have another friend who’s dating a boy and a girl at the same time and who wears size 20 but dresses in a bellydance costume to dance on stage with Big Moves; and they have another friend who is a Latina transgirl who had to change schools when she transitioned.

And you know what? When they go to an event, they want all of their friends to be welcome there. They don’t want to see any lousy racism, they don’t want to see any lousy sexism, they don’t want to see any lousy sizeism, they don’t want to see any lousy homophobia, and they don’t want to see any lousy transphobia. It’s even better if things are handicapped-accessible, environmentally friendly, not too corporate, and generally pro-peace.

Before the March started i spoke with Gunner Scott of MassTPC to, you know, say hi, and find out what he knew about the decision to pull Bitch from the artistic programming.

For those who don’t know, Bitch was controversial because of statements like this about the policy of galla-exclusion at MWMF:

[I]t’s not trans people being marginalized. It’s people who were born as men. The festival is for people who suffered a girlhood. That’s all it is. They’re not trying to redefine what women are. … I’m so over it. I think it’s totally the patriarchy and it’s complete ageism. … If my elders want to say for these six days only these kinds of women can come, then I need to respect that. It is so against our nature to respect women for having boundaries. I think that’s exactly what’s happening.

Gunner told me the decision was made at the last minute because of considerable agitation in the community — but none of it had been started or directed by transactivists. MassTPC, he said, specifically stayed out of it. Transfolk had been involved of course; but Gunner didn’t know who started it. The person he’d first heard about it from was a woman-born-woman. At first it was just a call of attention to the incongruence between the Dyke March’s policies and Bitch’s politics. The movement to ask the committee to disinvite Bitch appears to have been basically spontaneous.

Once it started, though, it picked up momentum; MassTPC was going to pull out of the event; so was The Network La Red; probably others as well; it sounds like things became very intense in just a few hours. Finally the committee pulled the invitation to Bitch.

But iiiiiiii know who it was. Not specifically, i mean, but figuratively.

At the Dyke March i saw something i’d never seen before: most of the people there doing volunteer work to support trans rights (we have a bill before the Massachusetts legislature right now) were non-trans.

That’s big, folks. Big. These were kids who were tired of seeing their transgender friends being messed with and having their options limited for no good reason.

And they were the ones behind the withdrawal of the committee’s invitation to Bitch. Not Teh Evul Transfolk.

(Gunner was also pretty sure that my vision of Bitch “leav[ing] here talking about having had a great experience in a community that welcomes and includes gallae” was a pipe dream. I maintain that it would be better if things could go that way. I know. I’m a freakin’ hippie. It’s my nature.)

I don't normally engage in online debates anymore. Especially in my journal, which at times in the past has more resembled a battleground than a place for private reflection. I've explained why i've made this shift at length -- whatever objection anyone could come up with i've already heard and answered a dozen times, and the rancorous tone often intimidates people into silence who might otherwise offer input. These days, i'd much rather hear from the quiet reflective types.

I've always been afraid that unless i actively encourage dissent, i'll curl in on myself into a world of self-important navel-gazing and intellectual auto-eroticism.

But, if anything, my ability to analyze and understand and see the bigger picture has only increased since i stopped seeking out any form of online debate. The thing is, online debate tends towards cavil. Cavil: this is a good word. Look it up, study it. There are times when a discussion is enhanced by drawing down from generalities into specifics. Other times a discussion is not, especially when the "specifics" being focused on are aside from the original point being made.

So, i will tend to avoid engaging in the sorts of arguments that i just know from experience are going to devolve into cavil orgies. OTOH there are things that once said cannot be left unchallenged, even if i've given the same reply a dozen times to the same overworked talking points. So there are times i will participate even though i know in advance what is going to happen -- particularly when opponents of women's or GLBT rights come to advocacy blogs to argue against us.

And sometimes i'm glad i do, because even with the hoary crust and battle-fatigue weighing down my weary soul a glimmer of insight from what opponents are saying sometimes sneaks in, despite my carefully-nurtured protective cynicism. In this case it had to hit me on the head, because it's something i've seen in three different comments in the last two days.

And that insight is this: the people we're arguing against really, truly do feel threatened and bullied by us.

Even in typing this out, i feel an urge to respond with mockery. My first response is, "Isn't it patently ridiculous that they should feel threatened and bullied by us, when they have far more resources on their side? They have law, tradition, religion behind them; churches as old as the Roman Empire; they've thoroughly dominated the Congress, the presidency, the courts since 1980; they have foundations with yearly budgets in the hundreds of millions to advocate against us; they've long had their own networks and universities and tax exemptions... and there they are, on every street corner; there they are picketing us at every turn, there they are outnumbering us and browbeating us and coming to our blogs even, dammit, don't we get to have something to ourselves?"

I do not understand how they can possibly feel bullied and threatened by us. But that is genuinely how they feel. I do have theories about that, but i still just viscerally don't get it. If i could get it i think i could mount a more appropriate, effective, and even compassionate response.

Besides, i think the reality is that they actually are being bullied, but they don't have the courage and awareness to stand up against the people who actually are bullying them.

The first response that comes to mind wouldn't work. To point out how scapegoating of minorities works would require a primer in class consciousness, and consciousness raising requires willingness and time. Besides, it doesn't address the basic fear -- it comes across as patronizing intellectualism.

The second response -- to supplicate ourselves to appear less threatening and different -- won't work either. It doesn't matter how mainstream or kind or gentle we appear, how polite we are when engaging in yet another round of 'dialogue,' they will still be bullied, and we will still be scapegoated.

I'm stumped, but i guess this insight will lead me somewhere eventually.

A while ago brownfemipower commented on the fact that her post in December on the blogosphere controversy between (white) radical feminists and (white) transactivists received widespread attention and fostered a huge number of replies -- but when she sought to explore the racial dimensions of the debate she encountered an eerie silence. She realized that her comments on the topic had become merely another part of an ongoing white dialogue.

Now i see, via pandagon, that Garrison Keillor has apologized for his recent essay which drew considerable ire -- notably from Dan Savage.  I note, with a considerable uneasiness in my gut, that all of the controversy surrounds "two sentences" worth of homophobia and completely overlooks the racist overtones of half his essay.  (Read the comments for further clarification.)

These are examples of fundamentally the same issue: the blogosphere has become an echo chamber in which certain issues gain traction and grab attention, while other issues are shouted down.  And what i'm seeing here disturbs me: a fundamental unwillingness to explore more than one dimension of an issue at any time.  If race is not the primary aspect of an issue being discussed, IOW if it is not the "topic under discussion" from the very beginning, any attempts to raise it as a concern are ignored and shouted down.

Add this to my list of concerns about the viability of the blogosphere as genuine discourse.

So, Mitt Romney is running for president. I have few words to express how bitterly and visceraly i hate this man. In the last year alone, he twice went out of his way to block funding for GLBT domestic violence programs (despite the demonstrated need of GLBT people for assistance in escaping from sometimes life-threatening situations) and did his utmost to kill the Commission for LGBT Youth (despite the very high prevalence of suicide and depression among young queer people). He has tried repeatedly to kill people like me when they are at their most vulnerable, and i can't forgive him for that.

I'm sure a fair number of you know who Twisty is: radical feminist and proud resident of Austin, Texas. I've read her blog for some time, and, like several other transpeople i know, was horrified to witness an explosion of transphobic vitriol in the comments to a post she wrote on December 15 [warning: may be upsetting!] which originally had nothing to do with transgenderism. It hurt so much because (1) of the rawness of it and (2) because it was a surprise to see the topic come up there: Twisty, by self-admission, doesn't bring up trans issues because it is not something she knows a great deal about.

As happens in the blogosphere there have been numerous echoes and responses and retrenchments and un-blogrollings and such. Even though Twisty herself has made it clear she is not transphobic and has been deeply shaken and disappointed by the conduct she witnessed in her own comment page (something with which i can comisserate), i still don't feel comfortable reading her blog. The self-preservation instinct has kicked in and is still overriding my willingness to risk being stung a second time.

The silver lining is that some truly inspired bloggery has come out of this, such as Winter's response: "I did not come to feminism for this."

But on the whole i have a bad taste in my mouth over what i saw happen in the feminist and transfeminist blogosphere in the last couple of weeks. Division between feminists always pains my heart and makes me feel like i'm dying a little. Humanity needs feminism to succeed -- possibly for its very survival.

Feminism is not a revelatory religion with a high priesthood who makes proclamations and writes scripture. There is no "perfect feminist" who is without flaw and whose utterances can be taken as inerrant gospel. There is no easy answer, no laundry list of dos and don'ts that guarantee you're on the straight and narrow. It's an ongoing process of discourse and learning and introspection, and even someone who's been walking this path for decades has room to learn and grow.

Problem is, our society is not tolerant of this kind of process. We expect illumination to come in a flash, to be able to flick a switch and go from hellbound sinner to born again saint. Admitting you might be mistaken, and then forgiving yourself for having a lapse in your insight, are hard. It takes years, and honesty, and humility. It requires that we are capable of admitting, "Oh, okay, i misunderstood, i did the wrong thing, and now i know better and will act differently in the future" -- without excoriating ourselves afterwards.

This is what discourse is: growth and evolution, not standing in a trench of static, unchanging, presumably perfect doctrine exchanging pot-shots with someone in an opposing trench clasping an opposing presumption of perfect doctrine.

But in this society, true discourse is not allowed. It is subversive; it might start off as harmless-enough navel-gazing, but eventually it means questioning the current distribution of power -- and those who have power do not think it's in their interest to encourage that. And so the baby of personal and cultural growth is thrown out with the bathwater of discourse. Discourse becomes "rational dialogue" (so-called because any first-hand accounts of trauma or experience are generally considered off-limits) in which talking points are spat back and forth with no real exchange of meaning at all. Meaning is not abstract, it requires perspective, understanding, and personal experience. "Rational dialogue" is a hamster wheel: radicals are sentenced to an eternity of having the same draining conversations with status-quo defenders over and over and over, like Sisyphus in Tartarus pushing a rock up hill all day every day and watching it roll downhill in the evening.

The internet causes discourse to lose whole dimensions of understanding and communication which are present when you're talking face to face. It encourages a "gotcha!" mindset, and Google makes it possible to dredge up any kind of dirt you need to find on someone to nail someone just that much more thoroughly. Never mind if you have matured and evolved beyond a certain point of view, if you wrote it down it can and will be dredged up to discredit you today. The internet encourages immediate gratification, and so in the blogosphere people often write things without reflection. (I've taken to avoiding posts on current issues, in part because of my concern about this.)

Interacting in the comments page of a blog can feel deceptively conversational, but all too often it is not really conversation.
Let me be plain: for fostering understanding, there just is no substitute for speaking face-to-face.

In any other mode of communication, meaning is lost. For many kinds of mundane interaction this may make no difference, but when the topic at hand is difficult and requires very deep introspection and sometimes even gazing into the soul of the person with whom you are conversing, the internet is not necessarily a boon.

As an aside, to establish the bigger picture i'm pondering: this is a big part of why walls are evil. They block off whole populations from having any contact with one another. Walls do not bring peace, they bring misunderstanding and discord. Peace does not come at the point of a law enforcement officer's gun (this is the myth the government wants you to believe), it comes from face-to-face interaction; it comes from standing beside the infidel at the market watching them haggle over the price of a toy for their kid.

I've lost sleep over flame wars, i've had migraines because of them, gotten sick because of them, and did not feel that my growth was really fostered in any meaningful way. I challenge any of the people who posted transphobic comments in Twisty's blog to spend an hour or two with me, seeing my pain and sharing her pain with me, to see if they can still afterwards make the same comments they made then. (I'd challenge myself to see if i retained the same harsh opinion i have of them, too.)

I don't mean to imply that we should stop having blogs, because on the whole it is still better to have internet communication than not, but i don't know how, really, to address this concern.

I've been kind of confused as to why opponents of same-sex marriage continually insinuate that "bestiality marriages will be next." But now it makes perfect sense. They already don't think that queer people are human, so same-sex marriage is in their mind already bestial. The progression from gay marriage to bestial marriage therefore is entirely logical.

In the last week there has been a storm in the mass media about controversy over some comments Pope Benedict made about Islam.

You can read a translated text of the lecture at the heart of the controversy here.

Reading this text, it is quite immediately obvious that the mass media -- surprise, surprise! -- is mis-portraying the essence of the controversy. Muslims are not just 'overly sensitive' and protesting the Pope's obscure quotation of a medieval emperor -- though certainly that quotation doesn't help.

This entire lecture is a diatribe about the superiority of Catholic "reason" over the explicit irrationality of Islam and the godlessness of secularism. And this came from the Pope.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

The violent actions of some Muslim protesters -- possibly including the assassination of a nun in Somalia (the perps gave no explicit motive) -- doesn't make it any easier for Muslim scholars to rebut Benedict's comments. (Nor, for that matter, does reality.)

But it would be nice to see the Pope demonstrate in what universe the Catholic Church has adhered to this lofty idea of Catholicism as a non-violent marriage of faith and reason. Not this universe, to be sure.

Catholics have been saying this about themselves since Thomas Aquinas. I've yet to see how it really works. Instead, what i see is an abundance of irrationality which is defended very eloquently.

Eloquence is not reason.

One more time: eloquence is not reason.

Reason demands full openness of discourse, inside and outside the organization. The Catholic Church does not have this. There is no recourse for dissenters or even, in some cases, for innovators; they are censured, cajoled by superiors to 'humbly reconsider' or to 'respect tradition,' forcibly silenced, denied participation in sacraments, defrocked, excommunicated. In previous eras, they were also tortured or executed.

Coersion of dissidents is defended with eloquent expositions, which are then described as "reason" because they are moderate and intellectual in tone.

If 'Truth' will truly prevail, then there is no reason to fear any line of inquiry. So why does the Church suppress any critique of doctrine? This is not a marriage of reason and faith. What kind of faith turns away from the truly difficult questions?

The Catholic Church is guilty of the same charge Benedict makes of Islam.

This Pope is fond of warning about dangers he perceives in secularism -- and i think he perceives the same danger i do, of meaning being driven out of our cultural discourse. I am an atheist and i can see the same dangers, but i do not think the solution is for humanity to seek refuge in the deafening echo chambers of religion or tradition.

In the interview with Tom Ashbrook i discussed on Wednesday, Pat Buchanan claimed that he was describing a historical pattern whereby nations have been infiltrated, culturally weakened, and finally destroyed, by large influxes of immigrants who are not assimilated into the existing culture. To 'prove' that he wasn't being racist, he cited two examples of this which had been perpetrated by Caucasians: Texas and Kosovo.

In the 1820s and 1830s, a relatively empty portion of Mexico called Tejas was settled by a community of Americans ("Texians") who retained their identity as Americans rather than immigrant Mexicans. Tensions ensued and in 1836 the Texians declared independence and, after a successful war against the Mexican president, proclaimed the Republic of Texas.

Some argue that something similar has happened in Kosovo, which during the Yugoslav regime saw its ethnic proportions change drastically in just a few decades. Perhaps a better example would have been northern Ireland.

This argument does not apply to the United States, though. Historically, immigrant populations have retained their identities and yet still become American citizens, and have given us noted contributers to our culture and history. This is because the United States was not created on the basis of a defining ethnic or religious identity.

(Well, other than exclusion of Indians, but if the US was true to its principles we would negate that exclusion.)

... As i was saying, in principle the government of the United States draws its power and authority from the consent of the governed. Which means that the US is not run by "rulers" but by civil servants - people whose purpose is not to tell us how to live our lives but to facilitate our needs.

Put another way, it is not the place of the United States government to tell people what language to speak, what religion to practice, what lifestyles to lead. The United States is a nation of laws, not a nation defined by ethnicity, religion, or culture.

That means that whoever lives here and makes up the citizenry defines what it means to be American. If in 50 years the majority of American citizens speak Spanish, this will not destroy the United States, because the nation of laws will adapt to the cultural shift, just as it has adapted to numerous cultural shifts in the past.

In actuality, we started out pretty far from that ideal and still have a long ways to go, but it is a good ideal and, furthermore, it is the way of the future. It is the only way to have a fair and just multicultural society, and the multinational corporations, the UN, and many NGOs operate on similar principles. They could not succeed otherwise.

The reactionaries whose agenda means pushing every white person into mandatory heterosexual marriage and mandatory child-rearing are hereby exposed as counter to the essence of America. Their vision is of an empire populated by white Christians, not a land of opportunity.

This essay about "New Age Bullying" has been making the rounds on my friend's list for a couple of days now.

I think the author of this list left out the most significant form of new age bullying i've seen: where people tell you to "not let your pain control you."

There's a point in the healing process where you can finally do this. I've experienced it myself -- one day, the pain just doesn't overwhelm you anymore and you wonder how it could ever have controlled you the way it did.

Well, it happens that way because there is so separation between body and mind. An emotional or psychological injury affects the way your nerve cells communicate with one another and the ways your nerve cells react to neuropeptides and neurotransmitters. It takes time to fix this. Recovering from trauma is very much like healing a physical cut. And some injuries of this sort are too deep and big to heal in the space of a single lifetime.

So, while some people find they suddenly have the ability to own their hurt and not be controlled by it anymore, it is wrong for them to then turn around to people who haven't healed yet and demand they snap out of it. To do so is more injurious than simply listening and offering compassion while someone is still healing.

But the article also made me realize i can't hide anymore how much contempt i have developed for almost all spirituality. Every now and then i come across something which is genuinely healing, but most commonly what i see is emotional manipulation, collections of platitudes meant to make us feel better about injustice.

What if people stopped believing there was a big daddy-figure in the sky who was going to punish all the bad guys after they die, a Santa Claus type figure watching everything that happens and keeping a list of everyone who's good and everyone who's bad? Maybe people shouldn't find comfort in this idea. Even if it's true. Because maybe then they would be more moved to seek justice in this life.