Originally a post by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.

As a part of my ongoing efforts to study the rise of authoritarianism I recently finished reading This Is Not Propaganda by Peter Pomerantsev. Here are what I take to be some of the main points.

Where the totalitarian movements of the 20th century used to peddle some official story (an ideology, a philosophy, a world view etc.) that purported to be true and back it up with appeals to supposedly objective facts and rational arguments, the new authoritarians have adopted a more “postmodern” approach. Rather than claiming the truth for themselves, the likes of Trump, Putin, and Erdoğan are content to put so much conflicting information out there that people finally just give up trying to understand what’s going on. Apart from creating general confusion, the idea is to sow as much doubt, distrust, suspicion, cynicism, and paranoia as possible in order to convince people that nothing is what it claims to be and everything they hear – including any criticism of the authoritarians themselves – is all just part of somebody else’s hidden agenda or nefarious plot. If everyone is always lying, you might as well go with the lies that are most favorable to your own tribe. If everyone is a crook, you might as well support the crook who claims to be on your side.

Even back in the “pre-post-truth” era politicians, commercial interests, and ideological pressure groups of every kind did, of course, employ the whole arsenal of outright lies, subtle lies, bullshit, bending the truth, half-truths, spin, and a practically endless store of disingenuous and self-serving “framings”. But even if people often failed to live up to the established norms and standards of honesty and truthfulness, at least it used to be implicitly understood that there were such norms and standards, which is why even liars (at least the clever ones) would usually make some effort to cover their tracks, make sure there was “plausible deniability” etc. Being caught telling obvious, outright, shameless lies used to be embarrassing pretty much no matter who you were, and hardly anyone ever walked away from such an exposure without being at least temporarily weakened. The logic of the post truth era has turned this situation on its head. As Pomerantsev puts it:

…what seems novel is that they seem to be making a thing out of showing that they don’t care about whether they tell the truth or not. When Vladimir Putin went on international television during his army’s annexation of Crimea and asserted, with a smirk, that there were no Russian soldiers in Crimea, when everyone knew there were, and later, just as casually, admitted that they had been there, he wasn’t so much lying in the sense of trying to replace one reality with another as saying that facts don’t matter. Similarly the president of the United States, Donald Trump, is famous for having no discernible notion of what truth or facts are, yet this has in no way been a barrier to his success. According to the fact-checking agency PolitiFact, 76 per cent of his statements in the 2016 presidential election were ‘mostly false’ or down-right untrue, compared to 27 per cent for his rival. He still won.

Paradoxically, in a world of collective distrust and suspicion, the person who lies most openly and “blatantly” may end up being perceived as more “honest” than those who “pretend” to be telling the truth.

The libertarian trope that the truth always prevails in a free “marketplace of ideas” was, of course, always on shaky ground. The idea that new media – simply by making all kinds of information more readily available – would inevitably lead to a new enlightenment was only ever a Utopian dream. The same technologies that have made it easier than ever to spread true information and good ideas have also made it easier than ever to spread false information and bad ideas. Still, it used to be a common perception that free speech, as well as more information in general, favored the side of truth and democracy while censorship was the tool of oppressive regimes who were afraid of the truth and could only survive in a climate of forced orthodoxy. With the rise of social media authoritarians have managed to co-opt many of the tools of pro-democratic movements, including free speech, e.g. by framing organized disinformation campaigns by thousands of trolls and bots as “concerned citizens exercising their right to free speech”. Meanwhile, faced with this sudden onslaught of disinformation and fake news, some of the people on the pro-democracy side do indeed start calling for censorship, thus enabling the authoritarians to claim that their opponents are the ones who are afraid of the truth and have no choice but to silence their critics because they don’t have any counter-arguments.

Another tool that authoritarians have taken from the playbook of their opponents is to assemble a mass-movement by uniting widely disparate groups behind a lowest common denominator that should be so vague and nonspecific (disaffection with the “elite” or the “establishment”, wanting “change” etc.) that everyone can find an interpretation they can get behind. Indeed, another advantage of not being committed to a coherent ideology is that you are free to selectively target different groups with different messages especially tailored to their tribal prejudices and biases. The algorithms of social media platforms like Facebook have made it easier than ever to identify people’s predispositions, and frame your message in terms of what they are already afraid of or angry about. If you’re on the far left, say, you might find your timeline flooded with messages portraying Ukrainian protesters as nazis;. If you’re on the far right they’ll be portrayed as representatives of the international Jewish conspiracy. If you’re part of the BLM movement you’ll be targeted by messages portraying Hillary Clinton as a racist; If you are a racist, you’ll be told that she loves black people and is in favor of wide-open borders. The fact that these messages can hardly be true at the same time doesn’t matter as long as the people on both sides live in separate information bubbles and never compare notes.

Not only are people especially susceptible to information that confirms their pre-held views, but hardly anyone is immune to group conformity and tribalism. Bots, trolls and cyborgs exploit this by disguising themselves as ordinary citizens and members of the same tribe as their targets, thus creating the impression that certain views are both immensely popular and widely accepted among those you consider part of your ingroup:

Today bots, trolls and cyborgs could create the simulation of a climate of opinion, of support or hate, which was more insidious, more all-enveloping than the old broadcast media. And this simulation would then become reinforced as people modified their behaviour to fall in line with what they thought was reality. In their analysis of the role of bots, researchers at the University of Oxford called this process ‘manufacturing consensus’. It is not the case that one online account changes someone’s mind; it’s that en masse they create an ersatz normality.

Once this “climate of opinion” or “manufactured consensus” or “ersatz normality” has been established, you hardly even need the trolls and bots anymore. People will eagerly and enthusiastically keep spreading the disinformation all by themselves.

A space for women and children:

There are few things I find more calming than being near water. Drawing a hot bath or driving to the beach early in the morning feels a bit like turning the volume down in my head, like cutting off anxiety’s dripping tap at its source.

When a friend first took me to McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney I was scared of being denied entry, but quickly became enchanted with the place, returning over and over. Known simply as the “women’s baths” among friends, the ocean pool just south of Coogee beach has operated for over a century, providing a space for women and children to swim and spend time, sheltered from both stronger sea currents and the unwanted attention of men.

Why scared of being denied entry though?

As a trans woman, the place has held a particular importance as somewhere I have felt able to swim not just away from the male gaze but outside of a gaze at all. 

Ohhhhh I see – this is a man talking. This is a man talking about how calming and enchanting it is to have a swimming place just for women, away from unwanted male attention and the male gaze. This is a man talking about that while blithely ignoring the fact that by going there he is taking that pleasure away from all the women who are there at the same time. The entitlement is breathtaking.

Trans existences are constantly under scrutiny, from the bodies we exist within, to the rights we hope to one day hold. Spaces where I’ve felt able to just exist, especially spaces designated for women, are rare, and I hold onto those that I find dearly.

And fuck the actual women who feel the same way, because they just don’t matter.

This week, I was disappointed to learn that the McIver’s website contained a definition of women that included only “transgender women who’ve undergone gender reassignment surgery”. After an immediate backlash, this was amended to remove the note about genital surgery, and instead note that their “definition for transgender is as per the NSW Discrimination Act”, passing the buck onto anti-discrimination law that is unclear at best.

This isn’t an uncommon disappointment for trans people: to invest in a place as hopefully somewhere that’s for us, only to have it shown to be explicitly otherwise. If you’re not trans you may not notice, but transphobia isn’t a marginalised, scared, or silenced perspective, it’s woven through the fabric of society. This phenomenon is known as cissexism, a structural belief of gender determined at birth, and trans lives as fiction. This allows the creation of myths about us, that if we are not women we must be men, if we are not truthful we must be hiding something, and must be predators, and that their womanhood must remain safe and separate.

He sneers at women for wanting to be safe and separate while swimming, just a couple of paragraphs after talking about the joy of being in a swimming place intended for women. He gets to enjoy being safe and separate, but women don’t. He gets to exclude men, but women don’t get to exclude him.

When transphobes talk about womanhood as exclusive, they have to come up with reasons for this false distinction: this group has an attribute (genitals, physical attributes, life experiences, take your pick) which makes them women, so this other group without that attribute cannot be women. They reduce womanhood to a series of boxes to be ticked, like women are a monolith of experience, rather than accept that some women might look or be a bit different from them, and in the process miss out on the joy that comes from knowing and loving women of all different kinds.

So how does he know the women at the women’s swimming pool are women? Why does he like it precisely because it excludes men, when he argues that men can be women too if we just “accept that some women might look or be a bit different,” i.e. might be men? Why is it that the “accept men as women” rule applies to women but not to him? Why does he get to prefer a women-only swimming pool while women don’t?

Another “expert” lecturing us from a great height:

It never was. There was never a mythic world where “womanhood” was not “afforded to” people (or “bodies” but how can a “body” be “wealthy”?) who were white or rich or the rest of it to the exclusion of others. That’s just blather.

Mind you, it is true that bullies use that as one way to bully women, saying “you’re too ugly/fat/skinny/butch/black” to be female, but that doesn’t mean it was what all people really thought about women.

And of course it has nothing to do with saying that men are not women. It’s not “oppressive” to say that men are not women and vice versa, it’s just what the words mean.

Contemptible to the bitter end.

For now, Trump is undecided on whether he will pen a letter to Biden to leave in the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Some of his advisers have encouraged him to think about continuing the tradition. Early in his presidency, Trump liked to show off to visitors the letter he received from President Barack Obama…

Tradition shmadition. Other people have to pay him all the respect, but he does not have to reciprocate.

Initially, Trump had planned to depart the White House a day early. But he now plans to leave on the morning of January 20. His departure aboard Marine One from the White House South Lawn will likely be visible and audible to the Bidens, who will spend the night before the inauguration at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the executive mansion. Its use was offered to them by the State Department rather than the Trumps, who refuse to make contact with the incoming president and first lady.

Isn’t that nice. Isn’t that just absolutely charming. Remember how polite and warm the Obamas were? Remember how Donald walked away from Melania when they got out of the car, leaving her to make her way alone, and how Obama went to greet her?

But they are refusing to make contact with their successors. Ugly horrible people to the last.

Trump likes to brag about grabbing them, but he doesn’t like men he compares to them.

Mike Pence, Trump’s fanatically loyal vice-president, appears to have borne much of Trump’s fury. Trump had been badgering Pence to refuse to certify Biden as president – something which is almost certainly illegal.

Pence, having stood by Trump as the president bragged about sexually assaulting women, defended white supremacists, paid off women who said they had had affairs with him, strong-armed a foreign government to interfere with the presidential election and had hundreds of children locked in cages at the US-Mexico border as a result of his hardline immigration policies, defied Trump at the last.

“You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Trump is said to have told Pence on Wednesday morning 6 January – before the president, according to the House article of impeachment, incited an insurrection at the Capitol.

“Or you can go down in history as a pussy.”

And there is nothing worse than that, amirite? Nothing more disgusting, weak, contemptible, cowardly, and did I mention disgusting?

I love these people who document their insurrectionist activity on social media.

A Texas real estate agent who took a private jet to the Capitol last week and called it “one best days of my life” was charged Friday for participating in the violent insurrection.

Jenna Ryan, a Frisco, Texas real estate broker and life coach, has been charged with knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building without lawful authority and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds after documenting her two-day excursion to D.C. on social media.

So kind of a mediocre life coach then. I think I won’t be seeking her out for coaching.

Ryan went on a PR offensive after the riot, telling Spectrum News that she “answered the call of my president” and proudly stormed the Capitol because the election was rigged. “It’s not necessarily about taking over the Capitol, it’s about, ‘We the people own this building,’” she said.

Landlords own the buildings they rent to tenants, but that doesn’t mean they get to make a forced entry just for the fun of it, or even to make a point.

According to a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Ryan diligently documented her participation in the mob—starting from her flight on a “small private aircraft” on Jan. 5.

When it comes to private aircraft, “small” doesn’t mean “cheap” or humble modest everyday Murrikan. It’s only rich people who can take private flights from Texas to DC.

The next day, she posted a bathroom mirror selfie on Facebook with the caption: “We’re gonna go down and storm the capitol. They’re down there right now and that’s why we came and so that’s what we are going to do. So wish me luck.” She added: “This is a prelude going to war.”

War about we the people own this building.

In a since-deleted video, she filmed herself going into the Capitol through the Rotunda. She walked past broken windows, up some stairs, and said, “We are going to fucking go in here. Life or death, it doesn’t matter. Here we go.”

Then, she turned to the camera and added, “Y’all know who to hire for your realtor. Jenna Ryan for your realtor.”

Nicely trumpian touch.

She also took a photo of herself in front of a broken window with the caption, “Window at The capital [sic]. And if the news doesn’t stop lying about us we’re going to come after their studios next…’”

Hours later, Ryan posted on Twitter: “We just stormed the Capital. It was one of the best days of my life.”

But, as backlash to her antics grew in the Lone Star State, she gave multiple interviews and flooded her social media with posts defending herself and saying she was “truly heartbroken for the people who have lost their lives.”

Truly.

What Trump can expect starting next Wednesday:

[N]ow, finally, the end is at hand. Trump is suffering a series of wounds that, in combination, are likely to be fatal after Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20. Trump is obviously going to surrender his office. Beyond that looming defeat, he is undergoing a cascading sequence of political, financial, and legal setbacks that cumulatively spell utter ruin. Trump is not only losing his job but quite possibly everything else.

… Many of his sources of income are drying up, either owing to the coronavirus pandemic or, more often, his toxic public image. The Washington Post has toted up the setbacks facing the Trump Organization, which include cancellations of partnerships with New York City government, three banks, the PGA Championship, and a real-estate firm that handled many of his leasing agreements. Meanwhile, he faces the closure of many of his hotels. And he is staring down two defamation lawsuits. Oh, and Trump has to repay, over the next four years, more than $300 million in outstanding loans he personally guaranteed.

Lots of expenses, not much income.

If this were still 2015, Trump could fall back on his tried-and-true income generators: money laundering and tax fraud. The problem is that his business model relied on chronically lax enforcement of those financial crimes. And now he is under investigation by two different prosecutors in New York State for what appear to be black-letter violations of tax law. At minimum, these probes will make it impossible for him to stay afloat by stealing more money. At maximum, he faces the serious risk of millions of dollars in fines or a criminal prosecution that could send him to prison.

Chronically lax enforcement of financial crimes will continue, just not for him.

The assumption until now has always been that Trump wouldn’t really be convicted of crimes or sentenced to prison, despite the fairly clear evidence of his criminality. American ex-presidents don’t go to jail; they go on book tours.

That supposition wasn’t wrong, exactly. It rested on the understanding of a broad norm of legal deference to powerful public officials and an understanding of the dangers of criminalizing political disagreement. But what has happened to Trump in the weeks since the election, and especially since the insurrection, is that he has been stripped of his elite impunity. The displays of renunciation by corporate donors and Republican officials, even if they lack concrete authority, have sent a clear message about Donald Trump’s place in American society.

…

At noon on January 20, Trump will be in desperate shape. His business is floundering, his partners are fleeing, his loans are delinquent, prosecutors will be coming after him, and the legal impunity he enjoyed through his office will be gone. He will be walking naked into a cold and friendless world. What appeared to be a brilliant strategy for escaping consequences was merely a tactic for putting them off. The bill is coming due.

Here’s hoping.

Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker talked to Eric Foner about the attempted insurrection.

These events have drawn comparisons to coup attempts around the world, but also to the Reconstruction era, when white mobs inflicted violence on citizens and legislators throughout the South.

To better understand the lessons of Reconstruction for our times, I recently spoke by phone with Eric Foner, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia, and one of the country’s leading experts on Reconstruction.

He literally Wrote the Book on the subject.

Foner: I guess the sight of people storming the Capitol and carrying Confederate flags with them makes it impossible not to think about American history. That was an unprecedented display. But in a larger sense, yes, the events we saw reminded me very much of the Reconstruction era and the overthrow of Reconstruction, which was often accompanied, or accomplished, I should say, by violent assaults on elected officials. There were incidents then where elected, biracial governments were overthrown by mobs, by coups d’états, by various forms of violent terrorism.

There was the Colfax Massacre, in 1873, in Louisiana, where armed whites murdered dozens of members of a Black militia and took control of Grant Parish. Or you can go further into the nineteenth century, to the Wilmington riot of 1898, in North Carolina. Again, a democratically elected, biracial local government was ousted by a violent assault by armed whites. They took over the city. It also reminded me of what they call the Battle of Liberty Place, which took place in New Orleans, in 1874, when the White League—they had the courage of their convictions then, they called themselves what they wanted people to know—had an uprising against the biracial government of Louisiana that was eventually put down by federal forces. So it’s not unprecedented that violent racists try to overturn democratic elections.

One big difference, he goes on to say, is that they just straight up said it was white supremacy.

Let the white man rule, this is a white Republic. I mean, racism was totally blatant back then. Today, they talk about dog whistles or other circumlocutions, but back then, no, it was just that armed whites in the South could not accept the idea of African-Americans as fellow-citizens or their votes as being legitimate.

Chotiner asks, cautiously, about the absurdity of the whole thing.

Chotiner: But you see some of these guys, you see some of the things they’re wearing, you see them taking photos with statues, you see them with their feet up on desks. You see the fact that it was obviously not going to work. And I think some people say, “There’s something ridiculous about this”—as indeed there’s been something ridiculous, as well as awful in many ways, about the last four years. And I’m curious if that has any precedent in the Confederacy, too.

Foner: I think these people are living in a world of fantasy. That’s why it seems absurd. They thought, honestly, that they would be able to overturn the election. They thought that by seizing the Capitol, they would somehow get President Trump reëlected. I mean, President Trump has been living in a world of fantasy for the past couple of months, as we know, insisting that he won the election in a landslide and that the result was not fixed and could be overturned. And these are his followers, who have been soaking up his lies and fantasies for four years. So it looks ridiculous to us.

Trump has been living in a world of fantasy the whole time. He was playacting throughout. He was like a child wearing a parent’s work clothes, but not cute.

His “right”?

Transgender footballer Hannah Mouncey has slammed the AFL’s gender diversity policy and is preparing to take the league to court to fight for the right to play in Canberra’s first-grade women’s competition.

Above that lede is the familiar photo of Mouncey in action, twice the size of the woman next to him.

Mouncey, who was prevented from entering the AFLW draft in 2017 based on her “strength, stamina or physique”, is now unable to play in the ACT’s top female comp unless she meets certain criteria outlined in a new AFL policy released in October last year.

The 31-year-old said she had met with the AFL’s legal department since the release of the policy but has been left unsatisfied, prompting her to consider legal action.

“This is not a step I take lightly and not one which I have had any desire to take if it could be avoided, however I believe at this point I have no other option if I want to play football in the AFL Canberra First Grade Competition in 2021,” Mouncey wrote in a lengthy statement she posted to social media.

But he does have another option: he could seek to play on a men’s team instead of a women’s. He might not be good enough but that applies to a lot of people, and it’s not something a lawsuit can change. Trying to play against people who are significantly smaller than he is, with smaller bones that break more easily, is not really a justifiable way to guarantee he’ll be good enough to be chosen for the team.

That doesn’t get enough attention in these reports that focus on purported rights and their denial: men who are determined to compete against women are trying to give themselves a massive physical advantage, and it’s not at all certain that that’s not why they’re doing it. It’s framed as a matter of trans rights but it may be just a straight up cheat. My view is that that’s more likely than not, because if it were just a matter of “rights” or validation, they would surely be put off by the obvious unfairness, and decide to defend their rights in other ways.

From a community football standpoint, the new policy states that “transgender women may play in women‘s competitions, transgender men can play in men’s competitions and non-binary people can choose which competition to play in.”

Also at community level, the statement notes that “Gender diverse players may not be excluded for reasons of relevant competitive advantage over cisgender players in the competition.”

In other words “tough shit women, you lose.” Thanks a lot.

H/t Roj Blake

Still struggling.

The Independent has more:

One of Donald Trump’s fiercest supporters, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, went to a meeting at the White House with notes suggesting “martial law if necessary”.

That’s the ticket. Just throw caution to the winds and get the military to lock us all up. During a pandemic: bonus points.

The notes, captured by a photographer as Mr Lindell entered the Oval Office on Friday, come after Mr Lindell tweeted then deleted calls for the president to “impost martial law” in the seven battleground states that won the election for Joe Biden.

• Impose martial law
• ???
• Profit!

The page is curved and not fully visible, but the heading is titled something like “[illegible] taken immediately to save the [illegible] constitution.

It references a “cyber” attorney and “Kraken” attorney Sidney Powell, while recommending “Kash Patel to acting CIA”.

“Insurrection Act now as a result of the assault on the… martial law if necessary upon the first hint of any…”, it read.

“… foreign interference in the election trigger [ineligible] powers. Make clear this is China/Iran.”

Sounds promising, but who is going to join in? The reporters are telling us the building has emptied out, and Trump is in there alone throwing ice cream at the walls. Nobody is going to execute his cunning plan.

Yikes.

Play the clip. It’s quite astonishing.

They’re talking about dilation, by the way, not “dialation.”

Wednesday’s news but still worth noticing.

A man who wore a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt during last week’s insurrection at the Capitol was arrested by US Marshals in Virginia on Wednesday.

Robert Keith Packer, 56, was booked into Western Tidewater Regional Jail in Suffolk on federal felony charges.

Multiple internet sleuths — including former colleagues and neighbors — had identified Packer in recent days after photos of him wearing the white supremacist sweatshirt went viral.

He wore it around town too, so lots of those neighbors were able to recognize him.

What it was like:

A Washington DC police officer who tried to stop Trump-supporting insurrectionists from attacking the Capitol on 6 January has revealed that some rioters shouted “‘Kill him with his own gun!” as he lay injured on the ground.

…

The police officer, who has spent almost 20 years on the force, endured several Taser shocks in the back of his neck before things got worse. “Some guys started getting a hold of my gun and they were screaming out, ‘Kill him with his own gun,” he said.

…

Fanone, who works as a plainclothes narcotics detective, put on his uniform and rushed to the Capitol with his partner. He was among the dozens of officers injured while trying to keep insurrectionists, many of whom were armed, from storming the building.

…

“We were getting chemical irritants sprayed. They had pipes and different metal objects, batons, some of which I think they had taken from law enforcement personnel. They had been striking us with those,” Fanone said. “And then it was just the sheer number of rioters. The force that was coming from that side … It was difficult to offer any resistance when you’re only about 30 guys going up against 15,000.”

Another Metropolitan police officer, Christina Laury ,told CNN she arrived at the Capitol around 12.30pm and tried to keep anyone from breaking through the line.

“The individuals were pushing officers, hitting officers. They were spraying us with what we were calling, essentially, bear Mace, because you use it on bears,” Laury said.

“Unfortunately, it shuts you down for a while. It’s way worse than pepper spray … It seals your eyes shut … You’ve got to spray and douse yourself with water. And in those moments it’s scary because you can’t see anything and have people that are fighting to get through.”

“They were getting hit with metal objects. Metal poles. I remember seeing pitchforks. They’re getting sprayed, knocked down,” recalled Laury, who luckily was not hit with anything.

Officer Daniel Hodges, who was seen in video getting crushed in a doorway while fighting back rioters, told CNN: “There’s a guy ripping my mask off, he was able to rip away the baton and beat me with it.”

“He was practically foaming at the mouth so just, these people were true believers in the worst way,” said Hodges, who like Fanone and Laury rushed to help defend the Capitol.

All for the cause of…Donald Trump?

What was the plan?

Capitol rioters intended “to capture and assassinate elected officials”, federal prosecutors have claimed in a court filing. Prosecutors were asking for one of the rioters, Jacob Chansley, to be detained, stating that he left a note for the vice-president, Mike Pence, warning that “it’s only a matter of time, justice is coming”. Prosecutors and federal agents have started to bring more serious charges against the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol, including charging a retired firefighter with throwing a fire extinguisher at a police officer’s head, and another with beating an officer with the pole of an American flag.

They will probably pay a higher price than the guy who told them to do it ever will.

Republicans who voted with the Democrats to impeach Trump are reportedly hiring armed escorts and buying body armour. “Our expectation is that somebody may try to kill us,” said Peter Meijer,a Michigan Republican who was one of 10 from his party to vote to impeach Trump on Wednesday.

All normal.

Kathleen got my attention.

So I had to read the explainer to see if it’s all that bad. It’s all that bad and worse. It doesn’t read like grown-up university policy writing at all, it reads like homework.

How it’s filed:

Home > Equality, Diversity and Inclusion > Student EDI Learning Resources > Learn More > Trans and/or non-binary > What is Transphobia?

The definition:

Transphobia is the hatred, fear, disbelief, or mistrust of trans and gender non-conforming people.

Key word there – disbelief. If we don’t believe every single thing a self-declared trans person tells us about xirself, we are transphobic.

That’s telling, because it’s not generally part of the definition of misogyny or sexism or racism or homophobia or contempt for the working class. Belief doesn’t generally come into it, because it’s all a matter of “you are a woman / a person of color / not straight / a worker and therefore you are beneath me and deserving of persecution.” In this context trans is radically different, because it’s not about “beneath me,” it’s about truth. We’re required to believe, and if we can’t we are branded as “transphobic” and thus beneath everyone and deserving of persecution.

To the explaining part:

Trans and non-binary people have always existed within all societies and there are documented instances from at least 4500 years ago. 

Nonsense. People have messed around with gender in various ways probably forever, but being what is called “trans” or “non-binary” is a new invention.

In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of transphobia in the mainstream and social media, which has fuelled increased transphobic hate incidents in society…This increased transphobia been particularly severe for trans women, who have been the target of high-profile, celebrity campaigns that deny the trans experience and deliberately suggest trans women pose a threat to cis women by distorting statistics of male violence to imply it is a characteristic of trans women.

Nobody “denies the trans experience.” That’s fatuous. We don’t know what goes on in other people’s heads, and that’s the end of it. What we deny (or question or doubt or analyze) is the claim that people can be literally the other sex because that’s what they feel like in their heads. I, for one, don’t believe that feelings in the head can change one’s body to the other sex. I can’t believe it. I can mouth the words (but I refuse to), but I can’t actually believe it. That’s not denying anyone’s experience, it’s being aware that there’s a material world outside people’s heads and that thoughts aren’t magic.

And we don’t “deliberately suggest” that trans women pose a threat to women, we say very clearly that we can’t know which trans women will be violent toward us and which won’t. We don’t “distort statistics of male violence to imply it is a characteristic of trans women,” we say very clearly that male violence is male violence and we can’t tell in advance which males will indulge in it.

There’s more, but you get the idea.

In related news –

Police in the United States are three times more likely to use force against leftwing protesters than rightwing protesters, according to new data from a non-profit that monitors political violence around the world.

In the past 10 months, US law enforcement agencies have used teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and beatings at a much higher percentage at Black Lives Matter demonstrations than at pro-Trump or other rightwing protests.

As we saw just last week.

The statistics, based on law enforcement responses to more than 13,000 protests across the United States since April 2020, show a clear disparity in how agencies have responded to the historic wave of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, compared with demonstrations organized by Trump supporters.

Barack Obama highlighted an earlier version of these statistics on 8 January, arguing that they provided a “useful frame of reference” for understanding Americans’ outrage over the failure of Capitol police to stop a mob of thousands of white Trump supporters from invading and looting the Capitol on 6 January, a response that prompted renewed scrutiny of the level of violence and aggression American police forces use against Black versus white Americans.

Not a pretty story.

Surprise surprise, there’s a surge in trumpish ideologies in the US military.

The Pentagon is confronting a resurgence of white supremacy and other right-wing ideologies in the ranks and is scrambling to track how acute the problem has become in the Trump era.

It’s an issue that has simmered in the military for years, but is now front and center following signs that former military personnel played a role in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol last week.

…

In another sign of the challenge, the Army on Monday announced it was ousting a junior officer who was investigated for posting a video to his 3 million TikTok followers joking about Jews being exterminated in Nazi concentration camps.

These are the people with the weapons.

Giuliani did his bit to rile up the insurrectionists.

Donald Trump has fallen out with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and is refusing to pay the former New York mayor’s legal bills, it was reported, with the president feeling abandoned and frustrated during his last days in office.

Giuliani played a key role in Trump’s failed attempts to overturn the results of November’s presidential election through the courts. The lawyer mounted numerous spurious legal challenges, travelling to swing states won by Joe Biden, and spread false claims the vote was rigged.

Claims he has to have known were false.

Trump’s refusal to pay Giuliani’s bills is another blow to the former federal prosecutor. Giuliani is already under fire for his own alleged role in inciting Trump supporters to storm the Capitol building.

Addressing Trump’s Save America rally in Washington last week, Giuliani said: “I’m willing to stake my reputation, the president is willing to stake his reputation, on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there.” He pointedly added: “Let’s have trial by combat.”

Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney for Washington DC, is investigating the riot. He has said he is looking at numerous participants. They include those who instigated the Capitol invasion, a category that might implicate Trump and Giuliani.

Ya think?

They’ve found the guy with the treason flag.

A man who carried the Confederate battle flag into the U.S. Capitol as part of an invasion by a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump surrendered with his son Thursday after arrest warrants were issued for their roles in the riot, the FBI said.

Kevin Seefried, who was carrying the flag that he later told authorities had been displayed outside his Delaware home, and his son Hunter Seefried are expected to be arraigned later Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

They helped with the breaking and entering part.

The document also says that video footage on Twitter shows Hunter Seefried punching out glass in a window at the Capitol after it was smashed by others with a wooden two-by-four.

“Kevin Seefried confirmed to law enforcement agents that Hunter was asked by an individual unknown to the Seefrieds to assist with clearing the window because Hunter Seefried was wearing gloves,” the document said. “After Hunter Seefried complied, people from the crowd outside, to include the Seefrieds, were able to access the interior of the Capitol building.”

I wonder what they were thinking. That this was all just high spirits, and no one would punish them for it? That everybody was doing it, so everybody would be let off with a mild rebuke?

The princess and prince don’t let underlings use their toilets. So what do underlings do? Hold it, of course. Yes for eight hours! What are you, some kind of bleeding heart do-gooder?

In a multi-bylined article one of America’s top investigative news outlets has chronicled in leg-crossing detail the apparently extreme difficulty that the Secret Service detail assigned to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have had in finding a place to go to the bathroom.

According to the Washington Post the president’s daughter and her top White House adviser spouse have apparently exiled the squad of men and women assigned to keep them from harm’s way from using the toilets in their sprawling Washington DC mansion.

“Instructed not to use any of the half-dozen bathrooms inside the couple’s house, the Secret Service detail assigned to President Trump’s daughter and son-in-law spent months searching for a reliable restroom to use on the job,” the paper reported, citing neighbors and law enforcement official.

Cry me a river; you can’t expect royalty to let just anyone use their toilets!

It added that Secret Service members in the couple’s detail who were desperate to relieve themselves had resorted to a porta-potty, as well as bathrooms at the homes of Barack Obama and Vice-President Mike Pence.

I’d be tempted to pee in a bucket and then pour it somewhere they wouldn’t want it poured.