It’s nice that the discussion is so reasonable, so nuanced, so careful and thoughtful and temperate.
That person has 90 thousand followers.
This president has dumbed down the idea of morality
Dec 19th, 2019 5:27 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere’s much buzz about the fact that Billy Graham’s mag Christianity Today says Trump must go.
Much of what it says about why is wrong, of course, but not all of it.
We want CT to be a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and reminds everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being. We take pride in the fact, for instance, that politics does not dominate our homepage.
That said, we do feel it necessary from time to time to make our own opinions on political matters clear—always, as Graham encouraged us, doing so with both conviction and love. We love and pray for our president, as we love and pray for leaders (as well as ordinary citizens) on both sides of the political aisle.
Let’s grant this to the president: The Democrats have had it out for him from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion.
Wait. Why have the Democrats had it out for him from day one? It’s because he’s a bad mean cruel malicious bully. Yes it’s also about policy, but the Dems were and are not wrong to have opposed him from day one: he’s a very bad man and has been from the beginning. Since that’s their point you’d think they could admit that the Dems have said that all along.
But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.
The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.
Indeed, also its insults, taunts, mean “jokes,” rages, rants, boasts, and muffled cries from the inferno within.
They quote themselves on Clinton from twenty years ago and then comment:
Unfortunately, the words that we applied to Mr. Clinton 20 years ago apply almost perfectly to our current president. Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.
Oh but hang on – the 10 commandments say nothing about Trump’s most horrendous behaviors. There is no commandment against cruelty, or bullying, or sadism. The creator of the big ten left most of the important stuff out, while wasting a lot of space on groveling to god and not groveling to any other god besides god.
Anyway, it’s interesting that they’re cutting him loose. Expect fireworks.
Melania at the Year End Sales Event
Dec 19th, 2019 12:21 pm | By Ophelia BensonDavid Roth on what the Trump aesthetic tells us about the Trump:
As with most things about Trump, there’s not a lot to unpack here. Unrelenting artlessness has been Trump’s signature for as long as he has been a public figure, and that is something that cannot and will not change. The man himself cultivates and inhabits a world of luxury that’s frozen in the 1980s, and he’s spent most of his life doing the same things over and over again. They’re things that, as a friend once put it to me, are what a child thinks a rich person would do, like take a limo to McDonald’s or wear a suit to a baseball game.
Or have a living room FULL OF GOLDY STUFF. We learned that about him three years ago, while bracing ourselves for the start of the real horror.
Trump’s version of Citizen Kane’s Rosebud would not be a child’s sled—it would be a tufted settee that somehow has shoulder pads, or a photo of himself with two Cincinnati Bengals cheerleaders taken at Joe Piscopo’s 40th birthday party…
I love this guy. Love him.
Melania did another Xmas video.
Melania strides through the White House’s halls in an overcoat and high heels, unaccompanied but observed at a respectful distance by various staffers. Meanwhile, the sort of music that usually plays in television commercials under the words Toyota’s Year End Sales Event twinkles determinedly on the soundtrack. At the end of this year’s, she personally seasons some ornaments with fake snow…
Even though Melania is also a cipher whose relationship to her powerful husband has for years seemed tragicomically ceremonial, her Christmas video delivers an insight into a crucial mystery of the Trump aesthetic: Why is all this always so shitty? How is it possible for something so fancified to feel so repellent and cheap?…
The blank and baffling overstatement of it—the First Lady personally sifting plastic dandruff onto a spruce, as one does, the simultaneous clutter and emptiness, the combination of voluminousness and absence—might be poignant under other circumstances. There’s no fun in it, of course, because Trump and his family are not people who are into fun. What’s spooky about it goes beyond Melania’s personal uncanniness or Trump’s world-historic tastelessness or the built-in stiltedness of White House ritual. The pure anhedonic cheerlessness of it all points back to a deeper psychic deficit: an inability to understand what any of this might even be for, if not to spite or defeat someone else. Of course there’s too much of it. They don’t know when to stop—they never have known when to stop, they do not know how to stop—because they have never really understood why they got started in the first place.
I keep calling him empty; I think Roth is talking about the same thing. Trump is the emptiest person I’ve ever seen. He all but rattles.
That turning of the tide has been slow
Dec 19th, 2019 11:35 am | By Ophelia BensonJames Kirkup points out that many people have been staying quiet despite concerns, some even despite having plenty of money and clout.
Yet slowly, slowly, things are starting to change. More people are starting to talk, calmly and sensibly, about a matter of policy and culture that needs more discussion. Bit by bit, more people are starting to see that this is an issue that can and should be talked about.
That turning of the tide has been slow and modest, but today the pace quickened, a lot. The gender debate has seen an event that many people have been waiting for. JK Rowling has spoken.
In a single tweet, the woman who gave us Harry Potter, has quite deliberately entered a debate that many people have avoided for too long.
And she did so why? Because of the outrageous ruling in Maya Forstater’s case, that we are required to refer to other people by their special chosen reality-contradicting pronouns, or risk losing our jobs.
In narrow terms, the judgment might well have a chilling effect on that debate. But the broader effect of the Forstater case is that issues of sex and gender, the implications of transgenderism for society and individuals, are now going to be talked about by more people.
Because JK Rowling, lovely JK Rowling, is involved. JK Rowling who has 14 million followers on Twitter and a good claim to being one of the most popular and even beloved women in the world today. And as a result, people are going to talk about this, and about her.
I do not underestimate the courage it has taken for Rowling to do this. It’s easy to say ‘well, she’s got billions and a huge platform – what took her so long?’ but I think that’s unfair. With that fame comes pressure and scrutiny that the rest of us cannot imagine. By entering this arena, she is exposing herself to significant risks, volumes of criticism beyond anything most of humanity will ever experience. I applaud her.
Words matter, and with just a few words, JK Rowling has changed the gender debate for the better. The tide is turning, the waves are getting bigger. Thank you, JK.
Words matter, and truth matters.
6
Dec 19th, 2019 10:48 am | By Ophelia BensonHuman rights are human rights. What are “trans rights” exactly? If they mean trans people should be free from persecution and oppression, then sure, of course trans rights are human rights, just as other branches-of-human rights are. But if they mean special “rights” crafted specifically for trans people, then it depends. The right not to be bullied for wearing “the wrong” clothes? Sure. The right to force everyone to agree you are the other sex? No.
Well, Amnesty UK? Are you?
H/t KB Player
Riffing shmiffing
Dec 19th, 2019 10:20 am | By Ophelia BensonNo. Absolutely not. No.
There’s my “absolutist belief” for you, if you want one.
No, Trump was not “just riffing.” They don’t get to brush off disgusting sadistic contemptuous cruelty that way, least of all coming from the president of the US.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Thursday on ABC’s Good Morning America that she did not know why Trump decided to suggest that Dingell was in hell. “You’d have to talk to the president about that,” she said.
But Grisham added that Trump is a “counter-puncher,” and suggested Trump was venting his frustration after being impeached by the House. “It was a very, very supportive and wild crowd and he was just riffing on some of the things that had been happening the past few days.”
No. You don’t get to shrug off Trump’s foul sadism with “just riffing.” You don’t get to excuse it because he was “venting his frustration.” Trump is not six, he’s a grown man, and he’s not a random guy shouting at clouds, he’s the president of the US. No.
This is Trump, it’s always been Trump. He’s a bully; he enjoys sticking the verbal knife in people. He enjoys hurting people. It’s one of his favorite activities. He’s a very bad man.
Debbie Dingell tweeted her response, telling Trump: “Mr President, let’s set politics aside. My husband earned all his accolades after a lifetime of service. I’m preparing for the first holiday season without the man I love. You brought me down in a way you can never imagine and your hurtful words just made my healing much harder.”
He’ll be pleased about that. It’s what he intended. It’s what he wanted. He likes hurting people; that’s what he is.
Her opinions were deemed to be “absolutist”
Dec 19th, 2019 10:03 am | By Ophelia BensonEven The Guardian doesn’t seem entirely convinced by the judge’s ruling in Maya Forstater’s case.
A researcher who lost her job at a thinktank after tweeting that transgender women cannot change their biological sex has lost a test case because her opinions were deemed to be “absolutist”.
You can read that as straight-up reporting, but you can also think there may be a hint of skepticism that it’s really “absolutist” to think that people can’t literally change sex any more than they can change age or species.
In a keenly anticipated judgment that will stir up fresh debate over transgender issues, Judge James Tayler, an employment judge, ruled that Maya Forstater’s views did “not have the protected characteristic of philosophical belief”.
Is that because it’s too obvious to be a philosophical belief? Or is it because it’s (in the judge’s view) too wrong to be a philosophical belief?
[I]n a 26-page judgment released late on Wednesday, Tayler dismissed her claim. “I conclude from … the totality of the evidence, that [Forstater] is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”
But how do we know that referring to people by their actual physical sex (not, as the judge tendentiously puts it, “by the sex she considered appropriate”) violates anyone’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment?
Also, is there any possibility that it violates people’s dignity and creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment when bosses force employees to call other employees something they are not?
There certainly are ways of referring to other people that violate their dignity and create a hostile degrading environment – I could sum them up with the single word “trump.” Sexist epithets, racist epithets, generalized epithets like “ugly,” “fat,” “stupid,” “old,” “worthless,” – you can see there’s a large supply. Some of them can refer to true or plausible facts, and still be hostile and degrading – the aforementioned “trump” gives many examples.
But does pronoun use fit in that category? I’m not convinced.
Louise Rea, a solicitor at the law firm Bates Wells which advised the CGD in the case, said: “Judge Tayler held that ‘the claimant’s view, in its absolutist nature, is incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others’. He observed that the claimant was not entitled to ignore the legal rights of a person who has transitioned from male to female or vice versa and the ‘enormous pain that can be caused by misgendering a person’.
But what fundamental right is that, exactly? How fundamental can it really be when no one had ever heard of it fifteen years ago? How was it overlooked so long if it’s really fundamental?
I don’t think there is such a thing as a fundamental right to be called the sex you are not. It may be a courtesy, a kindness, an agreement among friends, a generosity – but not a fundamental right.
Mock the widow
Dec 19th, 2019 9:11 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump’s latest befoulment.
The “maybe he’s looking up” is bad enough, but my disgust was already on Full from his sarcastic contemptuous mimicry of Debbie Dingell talking to him on the phone, in a breathy soft weak beseeching voice. It’s disgusting in its contempt for women, and it’s also disgusting in that what he was trying to convey and mock was her emotion over the, you know, death of her husband.
He says she called him but that’s a lie, he called her.
Also he didn’t “give” John Dingell anything; it wasn’t his call. He doesn’t decide such things, Congress does.
The man is evil.
Justified
Dec 18th, 2019 3:53 pm | By Ophelia BensonHow does this work in actual life?
Requiring women to call men women “is justified to avoid harassment” of men who call themselves women. The harassment of women who are just women, and who just are women, comes in a very distant second to the harassment of men who say they are women.
This is a judge telling women we have to call men women if the men claim they are women. Not should, not could if we want to be especially kind, but have to.
It feels very churchy, very 16th century churchy, very swear the oath or we light the fires.
Incompatible with human dignity
Dec 18th, 2019 3:35 pm | By Ophelia BensonKathleen Stock on the judge’s ruling in Maya Forstater’s case:
Today, an UK employment tribunal judge ruled that the belief that biological sex is immutable, and that it is impossible to change one’s sex, is “incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others”.
He writes: “I do not accept the Claimant’s contention that the Gender Recognition Act produces a mere legal fiction. It provides a right, based on the assessment of the various interrelated convention rights, for a person to transition, in certain circumstances, and thereafter to be treated for all purposes as the being of the sex to which they have transitioned.” Please note: all purposes. The judge has therefore apparently ruled that there are no contexts whatsoever in which it may be permissibly denied that a person with a gender recognition certificate is the sex they say they are.
In other words in the UK people are required by law to agree that men are women if they say they are.
This judge has concluded that nothing illegal happened when Maya Forstater lost employment at the Centre for Global Development for stating these beliefs. The precedent is now set, and a message sent to UK employees: don’t express the view that people can’t change sex. Your job will not be protected if you do.
That is, for stating beliefs that contravene the judge’s ruling.
As I say, I am a professor of philosophy and I share Maya’s belief. I think it is perfectly true. My grounds are summarised in this short article. I have also written about why this belief qualifies as a philosophical belief.
I too share the belief that biological sex is immutable and that it is impossible to change it. In addition I believe that humans can’t become giraffes or geckos or hummingbirds. Go ahead, fire me.
Over the past year and a half, I have encountered many academics and public figures who have scornfully dismissed my and others’ claims that women, in particular, are losing their legal capacity to discuss what they see as their distinctive nature and interests, in certain important political contexts. This is happening because of well-funded lobbying groups like Stonewall, and their incredible reach on institutions and employers (including Universities).
We all know it’s the mantra, the mandatory imposed enforced mantra: trans women are women, trans women are women, trans women are women. It’s forbidden to deny or question that, and punishment for doing so is instant and harsh. This is ironic because women have never enjoyed that kind of swift and forceful solidarity, but for men who decide they are women it’s there at the flip of a switch. It’s almost as if men get better treatment than women do, and that remains true even after they decide they are women, it remains true even as they bully women for not agreeing that they are women just as the women they are bullying are, only better. Can you say “entitlement”?
Stonewall explicitly yet tendentiously interpret the Equality Act as saying that organisations should allow transwomen into every single space where women are present, and into every single resource already specially devoted to women.
Because trans women are women, trans women are women, trans women are women. Now do you understand?
Kathleen calls on philosophers to stand up.
I therefore call upon the British Philosophical Association, all learned Philosophical societies in the UK, and all British academic philosophers working in UK departments, to stand up and say out loud — or better, write it down where members of the public can read it: people should be legally permitted to believe that biological sex is immutable and cannot be changed, without fear of losing their jobs. You are philosophers. This is your moment. If not now, then when?
Deeply aggrieved
Dec 18th, 2019 11:06 am | By Ophelia BensonIt seems Trump is not in a good mood.
Deeply aggrieved by the proceedings and mindful of how they will stain his legacy, Trump spent the 24 hours before the vote on the phone with top officials and Republican lawmakers, according to multiple people familiar with his calls, expressing outrage at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and looking ahead to what his trial in the Senate will look like.
As he watched conservative pundits on television bolster his views, Trump called for religious intervention.
“Send god to help!”
“This shoild never happen to another President again,” he wrote, the misspelling of “should” hardly masking his outrage. “Say a prayer!”
Ok. “Dear god, please let Trump be impeached and convicted, and then arrested the minute he leaves office.”
Impeachment has consumed much of Trump’s days and nights this month, between dictating an irate letter to Pelosi, phoning his associates to vent into the wee hours and plotting his defense in a Senate trial.
He has been ranting about impeachment in phone calls with Republican members of Congress over the last several days and nights, according to multiple GOP sources.
I hope he’s calling them at 3 a.m. All of them.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement the President would be “working all day” but “could catch some of the proceedings between meetings.”
Ten minutes later, he was decrying “SUCH ATROCIOUS LIES BY THE RADICAL LEFT, DO NOTHING DEMOCRATS” on Twitter, his message written in capital letters.
But he’s totally working all day. Work work workity work.
Last week, Trump and his aides — including speechwriter Stephen Miller — began drafting the scathing letter to Pelosi that was delivered on Tuesday, according to officials familiar with the matter, keeping the plan and text closely held within the West Wing until its public release.
Some White House officials who were not involved in the letter’s preparation said they were surprised when they saw the six-page document, which was indignant in tone and cited the Salem Witch Trials as a precedent to his situation.
Happy HOLIDAYS Donnie.
In search of facts and evidence
Dec 18th, 2019 10:29 am | By Ophelia BensonVirginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger issued a fine statement:
“As a former federal agent and CIA officer, I have spent my professional career in search of facts and evidence—the facts and evidence necessary to uphold the rule of law and protect our national security. Today, I am driven by facts and evidence to protect the integrity of our democracy.
“This week, the House of Representatives will vote on two articles of impeachment. In advance of casting my vote, I have read the articles and studied the evidence—including the majority and minority reports, deposition transcripts, and public testimony.
“The facts are not in dispute; witnesses, including those called by both parties, affirm these facts. The President has abused his power by soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election and leveraging U.S. security assistance dollars paid for by taxpayers and appropriated by both parties in Congress to compel a close ally—at war and dependent on our aid—to malign his political rival. When these actions became known, the President endeavored to hide the truth, and he obstructed Congress’ constitutional duty to investigate by withholding documents, evidence, and fact witnesses.
“The President’s actions violate his oath of office, endanger our national security, and betray the public trust. Because of the oath I swore to support and defend the Constitution, I will be voting in favor of both articles of impeachment. This vote is about more than one man’s abuse of power; it is about the power of the presidency and whether we, as citizens, can expect that our elected officials, and most powerfully, our President, will fulfill their obligation to uphold the Constitution. The framers foresaw the risks to our republic that could come with a President willing to put self-interest before national interest, and they gave Congress the sole power of impeachment as a remedy.
“It is with a heavy heart, a solemn devotion to our Constitution, and a deep belief in our country that I believe we must pursue this remedy. The world, and our children, are watching as the foundation of the world’s longest-standing democracy is tested. Through this trying time, nothing is more important than fulfilling our obligation to defend the Constitution and protect our republic.”
I think the former federal agent and CIA officer bit helps. She knows from facts and evidence.
Tragically, the Republicans in the Senate appear to be wholly indifferent to the facts and evidence, but it’s still good to have people who aren’t.
Grownups v clown
Dec 18th, 2019 9:26 am | By Ophelia BensonReading The Letter again. Much of it is reworked by the grownups in an attempt to disguise quite how infantile and incapable Trumpbaby is, but he pops up like a jack in the box despite them. Like here:
President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure.
The grownups would not have said No Pressure. The grownups know that we don’t use capital letters for emphasis in formal writing.
You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016.
The great Election of 2016? What was so great about it? Given the whole Russian interference problem, and the discrepancy between the popular vote and the electoral college vote problem, and the Comey’s last minute intervention problem, and the vote suppression in the wake of Shelby problem? Oh yes, of course: Trump calls it that because he won. Narcissism guides the hand that holds the sharpie.
House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration, for what will be regarded as one of our country’s best decisions, the firing of James Comey (see Inspector General Reports)—who the world now knows is one of the dirtiest cops our Nation has ever seen.
The grownups lost that round. Grownups wouldn’t make such a ludicrously exaggerated absolutist claim, nor would they say “dirtiest cops” in a formal letter to Congress.
A ranting and raving Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, declared…
Lost that round, too – to the ranting and raving “president.”
As you know very well, this impeachment drive has nothing to do with Ukraine, or the totally appropriate conversation I had with its new president.
Another eruption. The grownups wouldn’t say “As you know very well,” nor would they say “the totally appropriate conversation.” It’s not appropriate to rant and rave about a totally appropriate conversation.
Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress as though it were said by me. His shameless lies and deceptions, dating all the way back to the Russia Hoax, is one of the main reasons we are here today.
All Trump, that bit, except a grownup must have done “as though it were.”
You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.
No YOU are! No grownups on that one.
O what an ignoble mind is here o’erthrown.
Feet have gender too you know
Dec 17th, 2019 5:15 pm | By Ophelia BensonThey are BOYS’ socks, dammit. They are masculine socks. They are woven from the finest grass-fed testosterone. They are in BOY COLORS.
They are in STRONG COLORS. Not a pastel among them. Those are MANLY colors. Girls can’t wear colors like that, they can’t carry the weight.
Besides, they have dinosaurs on them. Duh. Girls can’t wear dinosaur socks! What rock do you live under? Girls can wear flower socks, birdy socks, baby bunny socks – not dinosaur socks. Only boys can wear dinosaur socks, because boys can stand up to dinosaurs but girls get squashed by them.
Girls’ socks:
Boys’ socks:
I hope we’ve got all that clear now.
Rhetorical fusillades in all directions
Dec 17th, 2019 4:58 pm | By Ophelia BensonTrump has sent an idiotic “letter” to Speaker Pelosi, to underline how stupid and uncomprehending he really is.
Over six pages, on White House letterhead, the president piles adjectives like cords of wood, fires rhetorical fusillades in all directions and invokes the judgement of the American people, the nation’s founding fathers and history itself.
As if we hadn’t been judging him all along. He’s given us bales of evidence, and we’ve made our judgement: he’s a disaster in almost every category one can think of. (Possible exceptions: he’s probably not a literal pollutant; he hasn’t so far burned down the White House.)
Here are five choice lines from a president whose capacity for the extraordinary and unprecedented is ever-expanding.
“You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!”
Heh, yes, that’s a good one. Here is this very ugly word, and you have cheapened it! He forgot what he was saying four words in, and apparently nobody around him feels safe enough to fix it.
“Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying ‘I pray for the president’, when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in the negative sense.”
And my rattle. You broke my rattle!!!
“You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offence – it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for lawful exercise of legislative power.”
Obviously someone else wrote that bit, but it’s still bullshit. It’s in no sense national “policy” to try to bribe and extort vulnerable allies to do the president personal favors related to the next election. Nope. That is not anyone’s policy, it’s just straight-up Mafia behavior but from the seat of government.
“I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record. One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another president again.”
He wants to put his thoughts on an indelible record. What thoughts? He doesn’t have any thoughts. He has reactions, rages, eruptions – thoughts don’t come into it.
Politicizing history is it?
Dec 17th, 2019 11:56 am | By Ophelia BensonThe Trump administration has said it does not consider the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 to be a genocide, contradicting a unanimous vote by the US Senate.
That is, Trump has, and his pathetic slaves are echoing him.
The historic vote last week incensed Turkey, which has always denied that the killings amounted to a genocide.
Turkey’s foreign ministry on Friday summoned the US ambassador to express its anger over the vote, accusing the US of “politicising history”.
Because saying it was a genocide is political while saying it wasn’t is totally not political.
There is general agreement that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died when the Ottoman Turks deported them en masse from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian desert and elsewhere in 1915-16. They were killed or died from starvation or disease.
Hmmm I think I detect a possible additional reason Trump says it wasn’t genocide, additional to his perverse desire to suck up to Erdoğan. Something to do with not wanting brutal deportations under life-threatening conditions to be called by harsh names.
Mr Trump gave a warm welcome to Mr Erdogan in Washington DC last month, despite a recent invasion by Turkey of north-east Syria that targeted the Kurds – formerly US allies in the region. The invasion infuriated many US politicians and military officials and led to calls on the president to impose sanctions on Turkey.
During a meeting in Washington last month, Mr Trump said he was a “big fan” of Mr Erdogan, ignoring widespread criticism over the Turkish president’s poor human rights record.
Bad. Bad human rights record. Not “poor,” bad. Don’t euphemize.
Something tragic
Dec 17th, 2019 10:52 am | By Ophelia BensonI’m not seeing the source of the puzzlement.
In other words, some women are not having children. And?
Having children is like almost everything else (the exceptions being things like breathing, drinking, eating): some people like it and some don’t; some people want to and some don’t. Isn’t that fairly easy to understand?
Until extremely recently this fact (if I’m right that it’s a fact) was largely concealed by the immense pressure there was on women to marry combined with the near-total absence of birth control. Most women had children because most women married (whether they wanted to or not) and marriage brought procreation with it, whatever either parent or both parents wanted.
But why is it tragic? Why can’t it just be how some people decided to live?
Also it seems a little odd to ignore the looming climate change issue.
We teach ourselves techniques of dress
Dec 17th, 2019 10:22 am | By Ophelia BensonIt was all a mistake about the proletariat and the means of production and all that. It turns out it’s trans people who are the true proletariat and cis people who live off their exploited labor.
Transition is work. Transition is the labour that continually gives birth to gender, that produces liveably gendered lives under intolerable conditions. And the workplace of gender, like any workplace, cannot be borne except through self-abnegation, exhaustion, lies, glimpses of satisfaction strung out along the working week, alienation, and endless work.
I’m not clear on where we go to buy the gender that they produce with the labour of transition, but I’m deeply sympathetic about the endless work. (Most of that work is shouting at women on Twitter, I guess?)
We teach ourselves techniques of dress from online tutorials and whispered conversations. We write dissertation-length posts on support forums detailing self-medication hormone regimes. We order multiple binders and gaffs from exploitative internet retailers and submit the return labels before anyone notices. We labour for hours before the mirror to bring to the inclusive workplace a gender which can be named, respected, spoken with pronouns, paraded in front of diversity working groups.
Hm. I thought there already was a gender or two in the workplace. Is the idea that trans genders were needed for the sake of keeping diversity working groups occupied? But isn’t that a tiny bit…circular?
We teach doctors our medical pathways and pretend to be attentive when they repeat our knowledge back to us. We tweet messages in support of the liberal recognition schemes cooked up by our middle-managers to ensure our compliant participation in the workplace, the household, the nuclear family. We perform reason and tolerance, we absorb the hate and shame of our antagonists, we are the dump for all the sexual anxiety and gender horror of a society sickened by its own creations. We are sex workers. (Decrim now!) We make your entertainment, your food, your computers, your care packages, your websites, your education system, your knowledge, your play, your city.
Really? As such? That is, trans people alone make our entertainment, our food, our computers, our care packages, our websites, our education system, our knowledge, our play, our city?
Interesting if true, because I thought it was trans people as part of the larger body known as people, as opposed to trans people only. If the point is that it’s trans people as part of the larger body known as people, then…ok? And? What new thing have we learned here?
Marked by capitalism as those with too much gender and too little, we work a second shift, a third shift, a fourth, to acquire the resources necessary to produce our genders, to produce genders survivable under capitalism, at least for another year. And further, as those whom capitalism has produced through its cisheteropatriarchal division of sex classes and gendered labour, whom capitalism has spat out as the uncosted externality of gender, we labour to produce the very gender on which capitalism depends. You live in our work.
So…there’s an invisible army of trans people laboring (underground is it?) to produce gender, which the rest of us simply put on and wear unthinkingly, heedless of the millions of tormented peasants toiling away at their…lathes? Drills? Coal faces?…to produce that which we wear in all our arrogance and cissitude.
Our care work is unpaid. Our medical expertise is unpaid. Our gender production is unpaid. Our advocacy is unpaid. Our training is unpaid. Our support work is unpaid. Our teaching is unpaid. Our writing is unpaid.
Well…lots of things are unpaid. Lots of activities are unpaid, because lots of activities are not transactional in the first place, and because some potentially payable activities aren’t performed well enough to be paid. I would put the “medical expertise” of random trans activists in the latter category.
Everywhere there are trans people, there are people communally producing transitions. In trans communities, we teach each other the skills of dress, voice, deportment, body modification and self-imagining which are essential to liveable trans lives.
Ohhhh, that’s what the labour is. Not toiling underground at a workbench but telling each other how to Talk Like a Gurl. What’s the going rate for that? $500 an hour?
There’s miles and miles more of it. There’s a list of Acknowledgements at the end, one paragraph of which especially caught my attention:
I learned the term “sur-thrivance” from a group exhibition by Indigenous artists, Two-Spirit Sur-Thrivance and the Art of Interrupting Narratives, at the gallery Never Apart in unceded Kahnawake Mohawk Territory on the island of Tiohtiake.
Mmhmm. Always appropriate something from someone indigenous; that’ll fetch’em or I don’t know Arkansas.
Canals and bridges
Dec 16th, 2019 5:38 pm | By Ophelia BensonI did an errand this afternoon and then did some urban exploring after – not real exploring, but walking around places I don’t get to every day, so close enough. I walked along the canal in Fremont then under the beautiful Fremont Bridge.
A minute after I crossed under it the bell rang that means it’s about to go up, so I stopped to watch because it’s always fun to watch a bridge go up from below, especially a deep blue one with orange trim. Then I got to watch the Rachel Carson chug through.
Then I walked on a hundred yards or so to under the Aurora Bridge to look up at the engineering marvel.
Exploring is good, even (or perhaps especially) on a grey winter afternoon.
