Another excellent post from Diana at Neopythia.

I want to talk about something I find offensive and morally repugnant.  It is the notion that trans women, who have arrived at a gender critical position, or simply accept certain realities are self hating.  I know this is a popular meme.  It’s an easy rationalization for those who hold certain political ideologies, or those too consumed by irrational fear to think.  It is completely without merit and harmful [to] women and trans women alike.

I think I know what political ideologies she means, and I think I know of several people who hold them.

Literally nobody identifies as a terf*. It is a term which has moved far beyond whatever usefulness it once had, if it ever had any.  It is a slur thrown about indiscriminately to silence those certain people disagree with.  I wish it was just a twitter thing, confined to largely meaningless internet squabbling, but increasingly there are real world consequences. Mostly it is women who pay the price, but isn’t that usually the case? Anyway, I don’t even label myself a feminist. I wouldn’t presume to, though I ally myself with women to the extent I am able.

*Going forward where others would use “terf,” I will use “women” to illustrate just how ridiculous this is.

That’s something I’ve been wondering about a lot, especially over the past few weeks – the fact that mostly it’s women who pay the price. Why is that? Why is it women, and specifically feminist women, who get trashed and shunned and demonized over this issue? Why is so much fire and brimstone called down on women while men are left alone? Why is feminism the enemy? Why do so many women join in with this pattern? Why do so many feminist women join in with it? Why don’t they notice the gender imbalance and the bad effects on feminism?

The self hatred meme goes something like this: a trans woman regrets her transition and is consumed by self hatred. Devious women, always preying on the weak and disillusioned, pounce, exploiting this self hatred to turn them into token women. The newly minted tokens parrot all of the hateful rhetoric and work from the inside to bring down transwomen.  What the token gets out of this, I don’t know.

Aside from sounding like something out of a horror story, I hate all of the implications of this. It is puerile, delusional thinking.  It removes any personal agency from any individual transwoman and lays the blame squarely at the feet of women.

And laying the blame squarely at the feet of women is just the same old shit – the same old misogynist patriarchal shit. Why would trans women want to perpetuate that? It’s sort of like wanting to join a club so desperately that you fight with every single member before you join.

Nobody lured me.  Nobody preyed upon my weakness or insecurity.  I made the decision on my own. I chose to listen to women, really listen.  I read their words and witnessed their testimonials.  I read books and blogs that challenged the way I think, not just those that reinforced it.  I read these with a critical, but not defensive mind. I started to look honestly at who I am, about my past, and how the world shaped me.  For the first time I talked honestly with others, and myself. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes the truth is painful to confront.  But the truth is this: I was born male. I transitioned to live as a woman. I am legally and socially accepted even if I am still learning what that means and still struggling to bury my male socialization.

It’s supposed to be the height of terrible to say that trans women have had some male socialization…and yet in all other contexts we agree that gender socialization is pervasive and unavoidable, even for people who reject it at a conscious level. If that’s true…how can it be anything but true that trans women have had some male socialization?

If you listen to transwomen, you’ll hear how dangerous and poisonous testosterone is.  What you won’t hear is how dangerous masculinity is, except in purely descriptive terms such as dress.  Gender is insidious.  It shapes us from birth in unseen ways.  It can be toxic to the way we think, especially in how we view women.  Socialization is very difficult to unlearn. We are unaware the extent to which it permeates us. To believe [that because] we have transitioned, started to transition, or “feel like a woman” we are immune to our male socialized thinking is dangerous and delusional. While not immutable, it will forever be part of our experience.

Right? How could that not be true? Nobody is immune to socialization (unless raised by wolves).

Trans women share a venn diagram of experience with women. Our experiences overlap, but are not universal.  To use a poor analogy: Even if you live in another country for decades, you will never experience it in the same way as someone who is from there. You can learn the customs and the language, even pass as a native, but there remains a level of experiential knowledge which is unobtainable, and that’s ok.

I know this. I’ve spent a lot of time in the UK, I’ve lived there for extended periods, I’ve learned a lot of customs and idioms, but that’s not at all the same as being born and growing up there.

The dirty secret is that, far from hating myself, I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.  By accepting certain basic, biological truths, and accepting how much about “being a woman” I don’t know, and can never know, I’ve found peace.  I cannot tell you how liberating this is.  I never realized how much energy I spent maintaing the delusion until it was gone. I look back and am able to reconcile the person I was with the person I am.  I don’t have to pretend. I haven’t always been a woman.  I’m a transwoman, and I’m fine with that.

I hope soon things can shake out so that that will be the usual and available way of thinking about it.

A trans woman wrote a post about Caitlyn Jenner back at the beginning of June, when the Vanity Fair cover was all over the place.

The post says many things I thought at the time (and continue to think when I catch a few minutes of “Meet Cait” on cable tv) but didn’t dare say – things about how odd it is to treat a rich privileged self-absorbed conservative as an icon of both trans rights and feminism.

Friends sent me notes of congratulations as if I’d done something, as if I cared. An aging reality star spent more money than I will see in my lifetime to make himself into a pin-up queen and this is cause for celebration? I didn’t respond to any of them. I watched my progressive male friends police the words of others.  “It’s She not He!” “It’s Caitlyn not Bruce!” I suppose they think they’re helping, but I’ve never asked for it. All of them are more concerned about their progressive bona fides over my actual feelings.

I see that a lot – progressive male types policing words to demonstrate their progressive bona fides at the expense of…so many, many things.

I couldn’t get away. Every twitter refresh, every website, every television commercial, there she was. I sought refuge with my friends. Their words supported me even as the ground shook beneath me. I felt as if piece of me was torn out, stomped on, and left bleeding on the ground. I could not comprehend why, and then a friend, a friend who has taught me so much about what it means to be a transwoman, wrote this:

I want to be able to have my own story, to be who I am. To be a person, but what becomes more and more clear each day is that I will not have this small, small privilege. I cannot be a bird. I must be the kite on a string, defined by the wind…am I an object? Am I a human? I will forever after today be described to people as “Like Bruce Jenner.” I am no more.

I broke.

Tears streamed down my face as I read and re-read her words. I couldn’t read any longer.  I turned off the computer, picked up my headphones and crawled into bed.

This is part of what I was thinking about that cover all along. Why on earth set the bar there? Why make it look as if that’s what transition is supposed to be? Why make it a beauty contest?

Everything we are. Everything we were.  Everything we struggled for, fought for, and hurt for is gone. We are eclipsed by our own shadow. Whatever we were, we are no more. We are all reflections of an aged wealthy conservative living out his own personal gender passion play. Like a perfumed Pontius Pilate, he has condemned us all.

Did I misgender Caitlyn? Honestly, I don’t care anymore.  None of it matters. I have spent the last twenty years in transition. Jenner has enough money and fame as to be insulated from everything. Jenner will never experience what it is like to live as a woman in society, or even what it’s like for most to transition. Yet Caitlyn is now our queen; the standard all transwomen will be measured against henceforth. I feel as if my life and struggle has been ripped from beneath me, tarted up, and paraded about for the world to gawk at. It is the Real Housewives version of the transgender experience.

Brilliantly put. I loathe the whole “Real Housewives” whatever-that-is for the way it defines the female experience, so why should I think the trans version is any better? Both are insulting.

The whole spread is an exercise in wealth, privilege, styling, and photo shop. This is what every young transwoman now has to strive for. Only after you have visited the facial feminization doctor will you be complete. Assimilation? Who cares! it’s all about the photo shoot.  It is the transformation salon fantasy played out across our media, with a societal stamp of authenticity; Narcissistic indulgence as political act.

And yet there are many who feel the Vanity Fair cover is empowering, that it “increases awareness” of trans people. To that I say, Fuck you. Come to the city and we’ll visit young transwomen, mostly transwomen of color, homeless on the streets because their families cast them out for living their “true authentic selves.”  They did not wait to amass personal and financial security, nor have millions of dollars of plastic surgery. Such a thing is impossible and yet I’m supposed to view Caitlyn’s actions as brave? Here’s bravery for you: For the past fifteen years, Bruce Jenner has been the member of a male only golf club.  So brave. So feminist.

Bam.

This is what I’ve been saying – trans activism is not the same thing as feminism, and not all trans women are feminists. I support trans rights, no question, but that does not mean I can’t disagree with particular trans women on particular subjects, including feminism.

Updating to add: The Independent reporting wasn’t very thorough. Tim Roberts seems to be pretty much on a level with the fans who trolled him.

Good grief.

The Independent reports:

A veteran stage technician, who worked in the West End for more than three decades, has quit his job after a social media row with fans of actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

Tim Roberts walked away from his position as a light technician for The Phantom of the Opera last week after a seemingly harmless tweet he posted on his own account escalated into a row with self-styled “Cumberbitches”.

His messages prompted Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatres (RUT), which runs Her Majesty’s Theatre where Phantom is staged, to threaten him with disciplinary measures.

Mr Roberts criticised the company for “suppressing freedom of speech” among employees and he now fears he is unemployable in the West End.

Guest post by Tigger the Wing.

I would be very upset if people as intelligent, thoughtful and educated as Josh and Ophelia were to stop discussing this extremely important topic because a tiny minority of people are loudly bullying anyone who dares to broach it.

This is happening in meatspace, too, and it is the older people who are being silenced yet again. Just one person can ruin an entire organisation by making it just too uncomfortable for anyone else to say anything.

And they are ruining things for trans people.

Just as we had been making headway, getting laws changes so that we didn’t have to conform to the gender stereotypes of a particular psych gatekeeper in order to be allowed to transition, because wider society is slowly coming around to the idea that gender expressions and restrictions are largely societal constructs (whereas being drawn to a particular gender performance, or repelled by it, seems to be a matter of personality) they decide that we can’t be allowed to discuss the very gender norms that we are trying to subvert.

Honestly, if I look at a crowded street, the most common clothing is a variation of T-shirt-and-jeans. Make up is more likely to be seen on apparently female people than male, but over here it’s not particularly prevalent. Hair length doesn’t map very well to gender, nor does jewelry. Perhaps that is at least partly why Ireland passed the gender recognition bill shortly after the marriage equality referendum.

We don’t want to go back to the mindset of the late 1940s, when governments realised that telling women to leave the workforce and become housewives was likely to create less of a violence problem than not having jobs for millions of returning soldiers. That, to my mind, is how recent the gender barriers were erected. Up until then, women worked.

In the 1950s, my mother had to fight to stay in work when she married, but did indeed give up when she had me and didn’t do paid work again until we had all grown and left home. She’s probably the only one of my maternal ancestors who didn’t work while raising children. Fragile femininity seems to have been if not exactly invented then certainly raised to a ridiculous level during the 1950s and 60s.

Why can’t we discuss this? Is it because the people raised in an era when many of the equality battles seem to have been won can’t see how vulnerable those gains are? Are they so blinded by the recent pinkification of everything that they cannot see what is lying behind it?

Don’t they see that questioning the premise of gendering of presentation and performance is NOT rejecting the rights of people to perform and present however they like, rather the opposite?

People have apparently become so used to living in boxes that they cannot see that what is important is the place that the box occupies; remove the boxes, the walls, and we don’t remove the places; we make it so that people can freely wander into any place they desire.

Alice Dreger has resigned from Northwestern.

Dreger, a noted researcher and author, submitted a resignation letter to Northwestern Provost Daniel Linzer on Monday. She said she’s stepping down because the university censored faculty magazine Atrium, forcing editors to take the digital issue offline after they published an article last March about a consensual blowjob involving a nurse in 1978.

In the wake of intense criticism, the medical school allowed the magazine to resume publication and to repost its online digital issues 14 months later, but it also imposed a new editorial committee that includes a public relations staffer and would have say over future issues.

A public relations staffer! That doesn’t sound very academic, or legitimate.

Dreger is the second faculty member to call it quits at Northwestern over the Atrium dispute. She went public about the conflict in June, after receiving the backing of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free speech watchdog group.

The university’s lack of response to her concerns is partly why she decided to resign, Dreger said.

“It’s quite disappointing,” she told HuffPost. “Negative publicity around freedom of scholarship doesn’t matter to them as much as publicity about the hospital — I can only imagine that’s the calculation they’ve done.”

Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s president and CEO, said he is “sad to see that Northwestern’s heavy-handedness led to them losing a champion of academic freedom.”

That’s how that works. Be too heavy-handed with a dissenter, and she just might walk out on you.

“The plain and simple fact is that Dean Neilson acted impulsively and wrongly in this situation,” Dreger wrote in her letter. “We all make mistakes, but this was a profound mistake that cut to the very heart of academic freedom. It should have been acknowledged and corrected immediately. That is most definitely not what happened. Instead, what happened was denial, avoidance, blame-shifting, and evasion. To this day, the university has not admitted its mistake, and it has not affirmed its commitment to academic freedom in a way that makes clear that similar incidents will not occur in the future. This failure should be embarrassing to an otherwise great university.”

Dreger conceded she was able to resign in protest because she’s lucky enough to have financial support from her book, scheduled appearances and other writing, but she said other faculty wouldn’t be so lucky.

It’s great to be able to resign.

It’s been a bad week for refugees trying to get to Europe.

In Austria, 71 people — including four children, the youngest just a year old — suffocated after being locked in the back of a truck, authorities said Friday. It remained unclear why the migrants, at least some of whom were believed to have been fleeing the war in Syria, were left to die. Hungarian authorities arrested four suspected smugglers, but a police official in Austria acknowledged they were likely low-level operatives and said the ringleaders remained at large.

Meanwhile, some 2,000 miles away, at least 80 people drowned overnight Thursday when a boat, unprepared for the rigors of a trans-Mediterranean voyage, capsized soon after it departed from the Libyan coast.

The deaths added to a toll of at least 2,500 people who have lost their lives this year while seeking sanctuary in Europe.

Life is shit where the refugees live, and it’s less shit in Europe. You do the math.

Until now, much of the focus among European policymakers has been on halting the flows, either by destroying smugglers’ boats or building fences to keep would-be migrants out of Europe.

But the deadly incidents this week reflect the lengths to which people are willing to go to flee their home countries and arrive on a continent that is seen as an oasis of stability and prosperity.

You want to talk about privilege – never mind being born in the “right” body, what about being born in one of the right countries? That’s privilege for real. Syria is not the right country to have been born in right now, and neither is Libya.

Once in Libya, the migrants are desperate to leave. The country has been torn apart by civil war, with multiple factions controlling various patches of territory. Underlining the confused situation, there were conflicting reports Friday as to whether one boat had sank or two. The reported death toll ranged from 80 to 200.

The peril doesn’t end after migrants arrive in Europe, as the deaths of 71 people in the back of the truck abandoned on the main highway between Budapest and Vienna attest. The badly decomposed bodies were discovered Thursday, and police were uncertain until Friday exactly how many were inside.

What privilege we have, those of us who don’t have to risk journeys like that.

It’s not just IS destroying ancient heritage sites.

One such site in Yemen was obliterated in early June, reportedly by the Saudis.

A protected 2,500-year-old cultural heritage site in Yemen’s capital, Sana, was obliterated in an explosion early Friday, and witnesses and news reports said the cause was a missile or bomb from a Saudi warplane. The Saudi military denied responsibility.

The top antiquities-safeguarding official at the United Nations angrily condemned the destruction of ancient multistory homes, towers and gardens, which also killed an unspecified number of residents in Al Qasimi, a neighborhood in Sana’s Old City area.

…

Photographs from the scene and witness accounts posted on social media said the attack destroyed at least five houses and caused irreparable damage to the area, registered as a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Hisham Al-Omeisy‏@omeisy
Before & after pics of KSA airstrikes on Old City Sana’a #Yemen UNESCO Heritage site via @alexkpotter @hamedalbukhiti

The source is contested, but it wasn’t IS.

Hours after the destruction in Sana’s Old City, there were conflicting accounts of the precise cause. Saba asserted without attribution that a “Saudi bombing raid” had been responsible and that at least six people had been killed. A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, Brig. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying that the coalition did not carry out an attack and suggested that a rebel ammunition storehouse might have exploded. Houthi fighters quoted in local news outlets denied having anything to do with the destruction.

The Director General of UNESCO made a statement:

In the early hours of 12 June 2015, the Old City of Sana’a, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was hit by a bombing raid. Several houses and historic buildings were destroyed, causing human casualties. Among the buildings destroyed was the magnificent complex of traditional houses in the Al-Qasimi neighborhood, bordering an urban garden (Miqshama), near the Sailah water channel.

“I am profoundly distressed by the loss of human lives as well as by the damage inflicted on one of the world’s oldest jewels of Islamic urban landscape. I am shocked by the images of these magnificent many-storeyed tower-houses and serene gardens reduced to rubble. This destruction will only exacerbate the humanitarian situation and I reiterate my call to all parties to respect and protect cultural heritage in Yemen. This heritage bears the soul of the Yemeni people, it is a symbol of a millennial history of knowledge and it belongs to all humankind” declared the Director General.

A horror out of a village in India. Amnesty International UK broke the story, and I tried to read their account first but it has drawn so much attention that the site wouldn’t load so I got the Independent’s version.

Two sisters who have been told they will be repeatedly gang-raped as a “punishment” for the crimes committed by their brother have pleaded with the Supreme Court to be protected.

The pair fled their village after an all-male council “ruled” that they should be raped, have their faces blackened and then be paraded naked because the brother eloped with a married woman from a higher caste.

From a public post by Mary Scully on Facebook:

The Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970 in NYC was the first protest of the women’s liberation movement, now called the second wave of feminism. It was called on the day which marked the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Bill of Rights giving women the right to vote. The demands of the march were: Equal pay for equal work; Free 24-hour childcare; & Free abortion on demand, No forced sterilization. There had been many abortion actions for a few years but this was the first protest that proclaimed all of our demands.

There have been for a long while serious attacks on the women’s movement. Some belittle the movement because they have not sufficiently studied the history & have relied on media misrepresentations. From the very first emergence of feminism, media lied, distorted, vilified feminists. Some of the media lies & distortions include that the movement was white, middle-class, racist, “sex-negative,” homophobic, exclusionary, & pro-war. When the movement first began, media portrayed it as lesbians, man-haters, & spinsters too ugly to get a man.

Others deride the movement to support their opposition to identity politics–that is, because they resent when the oppressed stand up with independent power against their oppressor. Political power that is not controlled or shamed terrifies many people. A political analog is the vilification of Black Lives Matter.

Many just want to destroy feminism, however they can do that, because their hatred of women & women’s political & social power intimidates them. Now the feminist pioneers are belittled as TERFs & SWERFs & blue-nosed lily-white haters. That’s misogyny & ignorance talking–not the historic record. And what’s most offensive about it is that it completely eliminates Black, Latina, & lesbian women from the history of feminism–of which they were a central part.

For anyone who was part of that movement from the late 1960s to its decline in the mid-1970s, it was a glorious experience of women learning from each other about our oppression, of overcoming the competitive we were indoctrinated with toward each other, of standing together in a political anthem of defiance.

In 1970 I moved from Minneapolis to NYC to become part of the women’s movement & was publicity coordinator on the August 26th march. We were arrested twice, once while wall-papering the Playboy club with posters advertising the march.

These are two brief recordings of an interview done with me during an organizing meeting. It was a proud moment in my political life & I’m reposting on the 45th anniversary of that march which set off the women’s liberation movement.

Photo is front line of march.

The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU law school has a resource page on the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to ensure state and local governments do not pass laws or policies that deny American citizens the equal right to vote based on race. As the leading democracy of the world, the U.S. should work to keep voting free, fair, and accessible. That’s why the Voting Rights Act is so important. It makes sure every citizen, regardless of their race, has an equal opportunity to have a say and participate in our great democracy.

On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, removing a critical tool to combat racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 5 of the landmark civil rights law, jurisdictions with a history of discrimination must seek pre-approval of changes in voting rules that could affect minorities. This process, known as “preclearance,” blocks discrimination before it occurs. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Court invalidated Section 4 — which determines the states and localities covered by Section 5 — arguing that current conditions require a new coverage formula.

Because 1965 was such a long time ago, and since then we have totally achieved racial equality across the board, so there is no longer any reason at all to look with a particularly beady eye at laws passed by states that had Jim Crow laws for a century and more after Reconstruction. Oh heavens no.