The Serpent's Wisdom

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

Transfascism (n) (related to BiFascism; both being subsets of QueerFascism)(def) hysterical whining tantrums accompanied by maniacal shouts of ‘Oppressors’ or ‘Hitler” while calling for the banning/shunning/hitting/hating of any gay man or lesbian (LG) who does NOT embrace forced “inclusivity” of everything BTQ. source

Oh, yes, bi people, transfolk; fascists. Now that you point it out, i totally see the connection. Silly that i missed it before, especially after we took over the government, rounded up dissidents, and silenced the journalists. And we look smashing in tall leather boots. Yes, it’s plain as day.

This week has been very instructive. Watching events unfold regarding the Dyke March, and seeing the aftermath, observing what is said and what is not said… oh yes, very instructive indeed.

Let’s start with a basic truth: you can’t force anyone to include you. Unless you have a gun, ha ha.

But men and women of color and white women could not have simply barged into polling stations and cast votes, and thereby solved the problem of disenfranchisement. Women cannot simply barge into the boardroom and start voting on corporate decisions and thereby shatter the glass ceiling. When you have been excluded, disenfranchised, written out, all you can do is stand outside and talk about how wrong it is that you have been excluded.

So, when the fifteenth and nineteenth amendments were added to the US Constitution, it was not just a victory for men and women of color and white women — it was also a victory for the white men who saw the wrongness of exclusion and acted to change it. (Not that this is worthy of a medal or a cookie, since the exclusion should not have happened in the first place. But it is never too late, as they say, to do the right thing.)

For better or worse, though, it is the excluded Others who get the credit, and the blame. The excluded Others are perpetually salient; they are the ones who get the scrutiny. The dispute was “about them;” funny how it was never seen to be “about” the ones doing the excluding.

Now, it is a different story when we are talking about the machinery of society on one hand, and small private groups or gatherings on the other. You can’t make a convincing case for exclusion in the first case. In the second case, it may be warranted. For example, gay men might want to have one hotel, one lousy little hotel, where they can… you know, do gay male bonding things without having others come and watch. And women might want to have one festival, one lousy little festival, where they can gather and camp for a week with no men around.

It’s not the same as being excluded from the right to vote or the economic infrastructure of society. It’s not necessarily wrong or inappropriate either.

So. Here is the popular conception of how the inclusion of excluded Others happens:

1. Excluded Others perform “hysterical whining tantrums accompanied by maniacal shouts of ‘Oppressors’ or ‘Hitler’”
2. Excluding in-group gets fed up and lets the hysterical whining protesters in.
3. World goes to shit.

And this version is probably a bit closer to reality:

1. Excluded Others express disdain at having been excluded. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they demonstrate, sometimes they wear tape over their mouth, sometimes they whine or shout.
2. Increasing numbers among the excluding in-group come to understand the wrongness of what they are doing and push for inclusion of Others until it happens.
3. Life goes on.

Let’s look at 1. “Hysterical whining tantrums accompanied by maniacal shouts” is the perception the in-group frequently has of protests by Others. Others are supposed to remain silent; so even when they speak they are already out of line. Let any anger creep in and suddenly they are whining, screaming, being shrill, and so on.

Feminists are “shrill.” Sound familiar? It’s because whenever a feminist speaks, she is by definition speaking out of turn.

Part 2, and this is really what i’ve been building up towards during this whole post. I opened with the basic truth that Others cannot make the in-group include them, except maybe by violent force.

What i saw unfold before my eyes, here in Boston, was an action largely by members of the in-group (mostly women-born-women) expressing their solidarity with transgender Others. It appears to have been a woman-born-woman who initiated the call to remove Bitch from the performing line up; it was mostly women-born-women on the committee making the decision to do so; it was mostly women-born-women who i saw in the crowd cheering when a committee member read the announcement.

Why would they do so? Maybe they have transgender friends or lovers they hoped would feel more comfortable about going to the March with them. Maybe they just think in principle that transfolk should feel welcome at the March. I’m sure there’s as many reasons as there are folks who participated. I’m sure there are also just as many different levels of comfort with the decision as well.

And yet, this is how the world sees what happened:

lesbian rocker Bitch was removed from last Friday’s performance roster at the Boston Dyke March, due to complaints by transgender activists. source

For better or worse, we transfolk got the credit. We transfolk got the “credit” for pulling the film “The Gendercator” from the lineup at Frameline, even though this decision was also made by non-trans-people.

Does it seem, i don’t know, histrionic of me to point this out? I know it’s inconvenient and people want to pretend that it’s all being done by transpeople, that it has nothing to do with any women-born-women who have expressed solidarity with us.

It’s remarkable that no matter how many times i’ve pointed out this week that this was an action largely performed by people who are not trans — it is pointedly ignored. It is not convenient. It is easier to say we Others are being divisive, whiny, pushy than to acknowledge how many in the in-group agree with us and want us in there with them. Never forget that the in-group is invisible.

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.)

akaiyume

Sometimes I think maybe highly gendered people don't really get the in betweens. And this could be a bit of a stretch maybe, but I'm thinking to go through all the troubles and risks associated with transistioning a person has to be pretty highly gendered. By the same token, maybe inbetweens don't get gendered people.

akaiyume

Things are getting very strange for women these days. More and more often we see young heterosexual women carving their bodies into porno Barbie dolls and lesbian women altering themselves into transmen. Our distorted cultural norms are making women feel compelled to use medical advances to change themselves, instead of working to change the world. This is one story, showing one possible scary future. I am hopeful that this story will foster discussion about female body modification and medical ethics.

• GenderPAC's "50 under 30" project assembles data on the murders of young transpeople, a statistic the FBI can't be bothered to track, and demonstrates that the rate of hate-motivated murder of transpeople rivals that of racist murder.
• It is not known what percentage of the transgender population is homeless and/or prostituted, but it is disproportionately, even shockingly, high. Advocates around the country argue that 35% to 42% of all homeless youth are GLBT -- from a segment which makes up about 4-5% of the general population. Homeless shelters are particularly unsafe for transpeople, who are typically segregated into shelters by birth gender, and some cities are finally, finally responding to this with special shelters for transfolk.
• Employment discrimination against transwomen continues even in parts of the world where people "should know better."

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