Somebody Is Fucking Up Here... Badly

EDIT:  This is, in fact, a transgender woman who was sexually assaulted.  Doesn't that just make the "MAN, MAN, MAN" emphasis on that video even more disgusting?

Remember that last post I put up?  The video where the reporters were all "OMG this cop raped a MAN!  A MAN I tell you!"  Okay, so that wasn't a direct quote, but did anybody else notice the annoying emphasis they used on the word "man" in that video?  Cringeworthy.  Well, perhaps on my side we're all just too trusting of the media at times, but my "crew" so to speak were thinking they were talking about a trans man.  I mean, in high profile cases like this I don't generally see people making that big of a mistake.

My San Antonio, however, has reminded me of just how asinine media reporting can be sometimes.

A San Antonio police officer was arrested Thursday night after a transgendered man accused him of rape while the officer was on duty, authorities said.

Alright, so we have a trans man then.  Right?  Right?  And then I read further...

While police identified the alleged victim as transgendered, a spokeswoman could not confirm if the complainant had undergone male-to-female sex reassignment.

 So ummm... okay, there are... at the very least... two things wrong with this article.  First and foremost, no matter what gender identity the person in question is, My San Antonio got it Wrong with a capital and bold.  It's clear that the person who wrote this article is envisioning the subject as a trans woman, in which case he is obligated to use female pronouns and refer to her as a trans woman and not, as he has done, a trans man.  Although he apparently hasn't actually paid attention to it, there are journalistic standards which dictate how you are supposed to refer to trans people, and it's not like this.

Next, what the fuck makes anybody think they have the right to know if this person has had any surgery whatsoever?  What bearing does that have on the story, really?  A cop assaulted a trans individual.  Man, woman, surgery, no surgery, it doesn't matter.  It's another classic case of turning the issue into one of the victim rather than the fuck who did the crime.

San Antonio Police Officer Rapes Transgender Woman

EDIT:  I've now come to realize that this is a case of SEVERE misgendering.  The person in question is actually a transgender woman, not a man as they stress throughout the entire video.

I don't have much information on this, but I got it in my Twitter feed just now:

How Ethical Consumerism Helps Corporations

First, allow me to apologize for not writing here as much as I wish I could... I have been working on an ethnography about therianthropes as well as editing some fiction books of mine and a bunch of other stuff.  Not to mention, my website (website website, not this blog) has been spirited away from existence and that's gotten me a bit depressed (my host has been "trying to fix the problem" for two months now, still nothing, and Queer Subversion wasn't the only website I had there... sigh).  But for now, at least I've been... well, inspired I guess.

Part of it is because over half of my family is now on food stamps, and in the larger matrix of things knowing that my family has it damned good compared to many others, but then, of course, this concept of "ethical consumerism."

Ethical consumerism is buying things from sources one finds as ethical as possible.  People who buy fair trade and/or organic foods, people who boycott companies who do things they dislike, ethical vegetarians, and many others are practicing ethical consumerism.  Basically you are running on the assumption that, because corporations fundamentally care only about revenues, depriving them of revenue will force them to either change or be destroyed.

And these are connected, because of the politics of food stamps.  I didn't know until recently that what qualifies as "food" under our food stamps is... well, a fairly loose definition.  In fact, excepting medicine and alcohol, pretty much anything you can swallow is counted.  Soda, candy, and other cheap junk food as well as expensive luxury foods like caviar can all be bought on food stamps.  And there are a lot of people who don't want it to be that way... who want to make meat, soda, dairy, candy, and other foods ineligible for food stamps.  This is a phenomenon I will call forced ethical consumerism... in other words, the belief that people will not do the right thing on there own and therefore must be forced to do so.

I'm not going to say there's anything inherently wrong with ethical consumerism, because I don't think there is. I'm a vegetarian, after all.  I'll deal with the forced version at the end because it's a special case, but in the case of voluntary ethical consumerism, there is an issue that goes beyond simply airing grievances to a company.

The problem comes when people make ethical consumerism in itself the issue.  This is very common, also.  You can see it whenever you see Netflix consumers blamed for the fall of small video rental stores, Wal-Mart consumers blamed for the fall of local business and loss of jobs, Pfizer consumers blamed for unethical pharmaceutical practices, Tyson consumers blamed for animal welfare crimes, and the list goes on.

But why is this a problem?  Not because I think you should get a free pass and shop anywhere you damned well please, certainly not!  Of course I think you should stop shopping at Wal-Mart and drinking Coca-Cola and supporting Nestlé... Rather, I think it takes too much of the focus off of what these unethical corporations are actually doing and blaming instead those who--for whatever reason--buy their products.  Instead of putting the blame on Coca-Cola for ruining third world water supplies or murdering its employees, people flake out and blame people who drink Coke.  We skip right over the real crimes done by these corporations and blame people who want cheap soft drinks... and hell, many of them may even have an addiction to the stuff.  We, in essence, give them a free pass by turning ethics into a consumer choice issue instead of one of curtailing corporate crime.

The fact is, these major corporations have more than enough customers to keep them rich.  Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola, and try as we might, we just aren't going to get the numbers we need by boycotting them.  It's too ubiquitous.  So when we try to fight Coca-Cola by blaming and shaming people who drink it, I'm willing to bet there are Coke executives metaphorically jerking off to it.  To them, that's just another sign that their own "personal choice" mantra is working and they'll never get a real, serious challenge.

Which brings me to food stamps.  Here there is another level... that of wages, capital.  When somebody proposes restrictions on what can be bought on food stamps, they are placing that responsibility on people who are literally the least to blame for the situation, and also saying in no uncertain terms that poor people have no right to make choices for themselves.  I make no pretense that I think any of us should be making those choices, but this thinking is just one more way to make those who aren't in poverty think they're freaking-sweet for being able to afford cage-free fair-trade organic-whatever.  I mean, we aren't talking about fucking Ferraris here, we're talking about food, something all of us need to survive.  I swear to God, it isn't poor people who are ruining the world here, but all too often it's like people assume that they are!

I'm not making an action statement, here.  Primarily because, well, I don't have one which wouldn't get me blacklisted on the McDonalds shitlist for life and I'd rather stay off that until I'm at least thirty.  My request here is simple:  Place the blame where it really belongs.

Trans Men And Women's Space

It took me a very long time to formulate an opinion on this issue, but until something else "inspirational" comes along I think I have my position.

The subject is trans men in women's space.

Short answer: We need to get the hell out of women's space.

I almost wish this didn't take me so long to really conceptualize because the answer seems so obvious to me right away, but really it's just... not that obvious.  The difference between a trans man and a cis man is that many of us have female history... some of us have been in and even helped create women's spaces.  There are trans men who have helped create lesbian groups, who have gone to women's festivals for years, been in women's covens, and many of those trans men have a strong affinity with those places because of it.  I don't doubt that that's true.  I try very hard not to judge people too much who still remain involved with them.  I do remain critical, however.

The line is crossed beyond the point of reason when a group or space that blocks cis men and, more importantly, trans women from their events allows trans men... and those trans men accept.  I've heard a lot of arguments about why this is "okay" from upbringing to "trans women talk over everyone" to "trans men are different" and other stuff... some of which I'll go over to help me get to the basic entitlement lecture.

Every shred of truth you find in those arguments is overshadowed by the reality of female diversity and the reality of privilege.  Recently I read an "anti-trans-misogyny" blog (quotes are not meant to imply sarcasm) which railed against the idea that trans women should be kept out of women's space based on their alleged "chattiness" and difficulty restraining themselves from talking over other women in a circle.  Her response was that this is unfair because feminism should be "encouraging the growth of assertive women," and that her assertiveness should disqualify her or be restrained to avoid doing so is anti-feminist.

I think that's an extremely ignorant way of thinking of it, because we all need to check our behavior at group events (asserting your "right" to assert yourself in a group of people who have been trained their whole lives not to be assertive is a dick move), but don't think I'm saying that trans women don't belong in women's space.  They do, but they are--like all women--a part of a tapestry of diversity, and each part of that tapestry is faced with its own entitlement issues.  To boot trans women because of something like that, you'd have to boot every group of women who has ever had entitlement issues.  You'd have, like, no women left after that!  White women would be gone, educated women of course, women above the poverty line, straight women, "uppity*" women, hell, cis women would be out too, just look at all the cis-written bile out there talking about trans women as if they're Frankenstein's monsters.

But what does this have to do with trans men?  Three things:  One, we have bad entitlement issues, in my opinion worse than those trans women allegedly have.  Two, we are harming trans women.  Three, we're perpetuating the myth that trans men are by nature non-sexist.

What I mean is that trans men who continue to go to women's space, excepting those few places which are used out of a clear need for safety (gynecologist's offices, restrooms, etc.), we are saying "I am a man now and have the right to do everything men have the right to do... but I also have the right to your space."  That's the main difference between trans men's entitlement and trans women's entitlement:  Trans women do not routinely have male privilege beyond transition, even if that transition is non-surgical, even if they are more assertive than others (assertive women are "bitches" to the patriarchy, remember?).  If we want to be taken seriously as non-sexist men, it is our duty to duck out of women's space, because it just plain isn't ours anymore.

Furthermore, it lends false credence to the myth that trans women don't belong there and gives an implicit "tranny thumbs up" to the practice, as if we agree with it.  Short-put, if trans men are allowed in women's space, it only makes sense that trans women aren't.  Which is in itself a senseless idea, but every time you go to a women's music festival, as a trans man, you are reinforcing it.  We have the ability to get around the "rules" because many of us don't have penises.  You may snicker at the loophole on a personal level, but when you take that ticket you are the one reinforcing to cis women that womanhood is about not having a penis, and you are aggravating capitalist transphobia, which doles out "womanhood" and "manhood" only to those people affluent enough to afford surgery.

Finally, the part that tears the shreds into my heart a bit.  I said in an older post (I might not have actually posted it, I have a lot of drafts lately) that I was missing my trans male community, so I went to go hook it up a bit because, as much as I love my female friends, I wanted to talk with people who understood trans male issues.  Of course, as soon as I went there I mostly regretted it.  A lot of trans male communities have an open distaste for sexism, many of us weren't feminists until we became men, we have a unique opportunity to see sexism from two angles.  So why am I saying words like "bitch" and "chick" thrown around like they were pronouns by trans men?  Let's not give ourselves too much credit for being "the good guys," because being a trans man is not mutually inclusive to being a feminist.  Remember that upbringing thing I was talking about?  How we're products of our upbringing?  Being called a woman most of your life when you know you aren't has been known on far-too-many occasions to spark an intense sense of self-entitlement.  I know you probably won't see these guys in a lesbian coven, but that they are allowed because they have or once had vaginas is a ludicrous assertion.  Those of us who consider ourselves "the good guys," whether we're right or not, can't lead people into that sort of false pretense.


* As I am talking from the perspective of the people doing the booting, I figured "uppity" worked well here.

Mind-Boggling Stupid From The Reich... I Mean Right

Round-up of stuff I learned today!  Because the opportunity to write a bunch of crap into a survey selling frozen meat products wasn't cathartic enough...

1.  The National Organization "for" Marriage is still pulling that arcane slander out of their asses that queer people are more likely to abuse children than opposite-sex people... while citing a study that clearly says a child's biological parents are responsible for the vast majority of abuse.

2.  CBS gave the green light to a commercial spot during the Super Bowl from Focus on the Family which promises to totally patronize women everywhere while rejecting "controversial" ads from gay dating sites, animal rights organizations, and tolerant churches.  Of course, ads bashing gay people like that Snickers commercial are totally cool, too.

3.  A Virginia school has decided to stop assigning a version of "The Diary of Anne Frank" because it has "homosexual themes."  My favorite part is the Freeper comment... as if adding Anne Frank's diary to the classroom curriculum was just a way for people to indoctrinate their kids into homosexuality.  More proof:  Freepers are stupid.

4.  This one isn't a "right-wing stupidity" round-up, but in Nepal the number one cause of death for women is suicide.  Yes, suicide.

5.  Oh, and according to some of my (white) Twitter buzz, saying that you forgot Obama was black during his speech as a compliment is so totally not a racist thing to say.  *Snrrrrk*

In Honor Of Blogging For Choice Day...

This is an old post of mine which I am reposting in honor of Blogging for Choice Day.  It is called Why Abortion Is A Queer Issue.  It is an unchanged article that came from a couple years ago, therefore some of the language is problematically ableist and therefore different than I would have used today.  My belief that abortion is a queer issue, however, remains the same.




You'd be surprised how much oppression in the world is based on misogyny (hatred of women). In fact, Queer oppression, not only oppression against gays and lesbians but against transgenders and all sorts of others, is fundamentally based on the oppression of women. Men and women who do not "act their gender," in other words, who have sex with their own sex, are not following the world order of man dominating woman (look at any theological argument for homophobia and you will see this theme).

So how come there are so many gays out there who blatantly ignore misogyny, even enter into it when it seems to benefit them? And that's exactly what this essay is about: The commitment of many gays to misogyny.

This is not new. Back in ancient times, when we like to think it was a grand old time for homosexuality, being homosexual was connected to gender roles. You were expected to play the role of either a man or a woman. A young man could be the "wife" of a much older man, but the roles had to retain a certain amount of heteronormativity. For two older, masculine men to have sex was viewed as really kind of weird.

In later times, gender roles were viewed as more rigid in that they began to be even more connected with your biological sex. Men had to act as men, women as women, and to go against that was going against God. No longer could you necessarily get away with becoming a top or power bottom, although those roles still existed, mainstream society didn't accept that so much anymore.

Why? Because with women's roles and men's roles changing, we as a society needed to ensure that there were men to do the dominating and women to be the dominated. If you were the aforementioned power bottom/wife, you were violating your duty to overpower a woman by being overpowered. And if you chose said "wife" over a woman, you were leaving a woman undominated. For shame! And if you were a woman who loved women, you weren't being dominated by a man at all, how DARE you, sister of Lilith!

Why do I choose to focus on abortion? Because no sane Queer is going to try pulling off the "women need to stay in the kitchen" bullshit. We (metaphoric "we") need something that, in our (creepy) vision of a perfect world, shouldn't do anything to destroy our vision of our man/man or woman/woman household with a white picket fence and 2.5 kids. I choose to talk about abortion specifically because out of all the women's issues out there, it is probably the most in danger of being stripped of its title as an important women's issue, which is a damned shame. Not because I have some dead foetus fetish, which I certainly do not, but because if I can connect abortion rights to Queer liberation, what can't I connect to it? It's controversial. It gets under peoples' skin. But regardless of this, it is a Queer issue and that's what I'm going to demonstrate.

Now, I've already gone into a sliver of the history of gaiety in which being Queer in places like ancient Greece wasn't nearly the fun fuck-fest we picture it to be (unless you're a power-bottom, in which case, more power to you, pun unintended), but the history of the anti-abortion movement is just as obscured. See, for a very long time nobody gave a shit about abortion. It was considered an issue between a woman and her midwife. There were sexist issues at play here, of course, such as the whole obligation-to-bear-a-son bull, but when talking specifically about abortion, there really wasn't much of an obligation to keep conceiving, especially if you already had kids to look after. Abortion was tricky. It consisted of things like abdominal pressure, poisoning yourself, and witchcraft. But it wasn't a moral issue for most people until quickening, that is, when the woman can actually feel her unborn moving about inside her belly. That was when the unborn was considered to have a soul. Before then? Not a baby, not a problem.

Then something started to happen. Women started to get rights. No longer were all women automatically going to be mothers at an early age. And those people I was talking about... the ones who want man-dominates-woman to be our primary social structure... freaked-the-fuck-out. Wait, did I say man-dominates-woman? I meant man-dominates-woman and white-dominates-black. That's more like it. See, part of the issue here was that suddenly white women started giving birth to fewer children. Black women and other women of colour didn't. People started freaking out, not JUST because women were choosing not to be babymakers, but because they were irrationally afraid those uppity white women were going to destroy the white race.

So they do what any white-God-fearing-idiot would do. They start issuing religious proclamations which institute motherhood as a woman's primary duty. Suddenly, any woman who doesn't have a ton of babies is unChristian and destroying white society. Abortion and many other forms of family planning are outlawed, and no Christian woman would be caught using some sort of birth control, even the ones invented to prevent abortion. Because in today's Christian world, every shot of sperm should be done specifically to keep your woman pregnant.

Note my obvious omission of the whole idea of the personhood of a foetus. See, the thing is, that was never really the issue when this shit started going down. The issues were, clearly, racism and misogyny. We needed to propagate more good white Christians. We needed to keep women having more babies. The idea that it was a life issue, that we were trying to protect babies, that came much later. In fact, modern pro-lifers try to distance themselves from this by trying to make abortion advocates look like we were trying to exterminate black people. However, neither abortion advocates nor opponents were free of such racist tendencies.

Every shot of sperm should make a woman pregnant. Everything that gives a woman pleasure should get her pregnant (ahh, just kidding, women shouldn't be having pleasure). These were the underlying reasons for the sudden crazed addiction to anti-abortion legislation and thought. So wait, this is a Queer issue?

Of course it is! Anti-abortion advocates as a whole have never been interested in preventing pregnancy, they have been interested in preventing abortion. The whole dead-baby thing has always been a coverup. Now, you'll get the odd baby lover, and those types are increasing because of the mythology surrounding abortion, but the basic issue which makes abortion a problem for them is that they believe women should be getting pregnant and men should be making them that way.

That's not how Queer society works. In the Queer world, people are not the sum of their baby-making capacity. Queers can and do have children, and we make damned good parents, but that's not the function of our relationships. Our relationships are, in theory, based on love and mutual understanding and sexual pleasure. That's what the white straight society was heading for, and the anti-abortion movement came out of it.

Queer people need abortion rights because many of us can get pregnant without wanting to be. I mean, look at me. I am a pre-T FtM. By the definition of really conservative anti-abortionists, I've already had an abortion which I do not regret (it wasn't an abortion, but like I said, dead babies have never been the issue anyway). Still, the fact that many of us need abortions and procedures demonized in the same way as abortion is not the issue. The insistence that our bodies are mere breeding stock is, and because of it, abortion is and always will be a Queer issue.

On Outside Observations of Trans Men

I try to avoid making assumptions about the MtF side of the trans community.  It isn't because I don't have them (I'm human, humans make assumptions, assumptions are often mistakes), but because I just know I would make statements that look as bad to trans women as the statements Rachel Dunn makes in this essay, "Transmisogyny" & "Faggots", which as a trans man make me extremely uncomfortable.

Is it any wonder why many F2M transmen remain connected and accepted by the lesbian community, and seem more accepted by the larger gay community? They are not viewed as interlopers by the women, because many F2M's were once 'one of them,' and this is further reinforced by the butch/fem paradigm pervasive in the lesbian community - which emulates heteronormative behavior, so I suspect F2M transition is not a stretch for many.

Unfortunately, the relationship between trans men and lesbians is not necessarily "acceptance."  I have never been a lesbian.  My journey was from masculine straight woman to gay trans man to bisexual trans man.  When lesbians consider me a part of their community as lesbians, it makes me excruciatingly uncomfortable, and I know I am not the only one who feels this way... including many of us who were lesbians at some point.  And lesbians who identify as FtM chasers and FtM-loving andromimetophiliacs are not accepting me, they are fetishizing me.

That is not to say that there aren't FtMs who are still involved with the lesbian community or who even consider themselves dykes, lesbians, butches, or some other label, but the fact of the matter is, when a non-FtM lesbian considers me a part of her community and is uncomfortable with MtFs, she is saying that I am not a man and is erasing my identity.  It isn't that I cringe with misogynistic fear when people call me "ma'am" at the supermarket or that my parents still can't bring themselves to call me "he" after six years, but when somebody who really proclaims to know my identity and respect my identity decides for me that I am a part of a female community, that is woefully cissexist even if it does show they want to claim me as "one of them."

This is not just a personal thing, though.  There are FtMs who want that community, and I don't feel it's my right to take it from them.  But the co-opting of FtM stories into lesbian contexts is a ruthless form of non-acceptance.  The book "All She Wanted" by Aphrodite Jones, about the trans man known popularly as "Brandon Teena," is a sore example of this which refers to Brandon using female pronouns throughout the whole book.  That is not acceptance.  The story of Dr. Alan Hart was used as a namesake for an award given out by the Right to Privacy PAC using his birth name.  That is not acceptance.  When Diane Middlebrook refused in her book "Suits Me" to acknowledge Billy Tipton was a trans man and not a lesbian, that was not acceptance.

And that's just assuming that she is automatically right that FtMs meet acceptance in female contexts.  Sometimes we do, but sometimes we are met with malice.  An essay I quoted when I talked about the exclusion of trans women from Dianic rituals referred to us as "women who self-identify as men" and, although their focus was on excluding trans women, it was only because trans men would not--according to the essay--join an all-female coven to begin with.  We have been painted as all manner of patriarchal concept, from reject lesbians who gave up on being women to a female version of a "House Negro" to traitors against the cause.

Although many F2M's may not be viewed as 'real men' by the gay male community, perhaps the glimmer of heteronormativity offered by such a relationship might serve to further sublimate a gay man's distress at his own gender transgression - despite the masculine appearance of their transman partner. (Because I want to concentrate on our common gender issue, I'm not even going to attempt to address the quagmire of who's got the privilege in a patriarchal society - and why M2F's are considered "downwardly mobile.") (Emphasis hers)

This is one of those theories that sounds great on paper if it's not about you.  "Maybe the reason [insert observation here] is true is because [insert random theory here]."  The problem is, her observations about what gay FtMs go through are just not accurate.

I have met men who want to experiment with me because they're bicurious and "not ready" for a "real man," but gay men who want trans men as some weird sort of secret heteronormativity (remember that after hormones nobody's going to know but the two of them in most situations) are apparently so rare that I have yet to hear of one.

I get more of this:  "I would never be able to date you, because I am gay."  Which is even worse considering I have yet to ask a question that would prompt this response.  My existence simply appears to prompt the response from gay men that they would not date me... just in case, I guess.  And when I mention my former partner, who is gay, he is erased from their minds as well in a fit of cissexist gay confusion because according to them no real gay guy would ever want to date me.  These aren't random people I've met, these are friends and people I have organized with and people I have gone to parties with.  As far as acceptance goes, though, it's only superficial... not because they have no interest in me, but because by their very language they have dismissed me as a man.  None of them have tried getting in my pants to make momma proud or put away some of their shame, and if they did, it would still not be acceptance, it would be exploitation.

You know what has been more common for me?  Gay guys who get crushes on me and then go through a whole load of terror and awkward self-discovery because they didn't know they could be attracted to a trans man, much less a pre-T one.  They're horrified of their attraction to me.  A few get a hold of themselves later, but until then it's certainly not acceptance.

I must reiterate that I'm not saying her experiences about herself are wrong, and I am not saying that trans women aren't getting the brunt of anti-trans sentiment put out by queer people, but trans men just aren't as accepted in the communities as she seems to imply we are.