Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

What I did this last weekend

Oi, I’m knackered. (Gosh, I’m tired.) I just want to list what I did over the last few days.

Thursday

Protested outside of the Stonewall awards because they nominated somebody transphobic. Stonewall is an LGB advocacy group who does not advocate for trans people and, indeed, forgets that the majority trans people are LGB themselves. I recorded a bit of the demo

Friday

Did tech setup for the London Transgender Film Festival Party.
Made a master disk of the FOSSBOX Free / Opsen Source Software disk for Mac. You can get a copy if you follow the link and then ask nicely.
Went to a film about a transgender choir in San Francisco. Before the film, the organizers talk about how the Obama victory meant positive change for people around the world.
Ran tech at the party that I set up for. It was my first time running sound at a party, which is very different than doing a concert. People trying to get into each other’s pants absorb a lot more sound than quiet, seated people. And the gear is flaky. And feedback. And yikes. I need more practice at this.
Watched a lot of Scarface at my next door neighbor’s flat whilst drinking a beer at three in the morning.

Saturday

Went to a film called Still Black, in which African American FTMs talked about their transition.
Went to a club where there was, um, nakedness and um, more. Londoners are properly debauched when they want to be.
Looked at iPhone capabilities.

Sunday

Went to see a whole mess of short films and panel discussions. One of the films I want to get a copy of for my dad. It was a MTF’s father talking about her transition. The dad was sad, but I think it might be good for my dad to watch it. I know he’s been talking to other parents of trans people.
Came home and felt exhausted and had tea with my neighbor.
Decided to officially come out as bi. The term “bi” is much too binary, so I prefer “queer,” but what I mean is that I fancy folks both masculine/male-spectrum and female-spectrum. I’ve been hinting at this for several weeks. I don’t think this is just some effect of testosterone, but rather a result of how I’m positioned in the queer community. Or maybe it also has something to do with T. I don’t know. I kind of thought gay boys were cute before too. Anyway.

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Expatriotism

I read your blog and forgot you weren’t talking to me.

I wanted to ask you something about home,
about what you saw in Oakland the night Obama won.

The hardest part about being away is missing things like this,
holidays, tragedies and sudden defining moments,
where all at once, everything changes forever,
again.
You said it was like we’d won the World Cup.
A foreign metaphor.

What I want to know is: Did you think of me?
But what I want to ask is: Tell me who you saw and what they did.
But what I want to say is: I miss you.

Why we lost on Prop 8

The SF Chronicle wrote a bit about campaign strategy:

That allowed Prop. 8 opponents, worried that many voters were not enamored with the idea of same-sex marriage, to run a TV campaign that almost never mentioned gays or lesbians or showed them in an ad. Instead, the ads charged that Prop. 8 supporters wanted to take away rights from a single, unnamed group of people, which just wasn’t fair.

If we’re not even willing to name ourselves as citizens, why on earth would anybody want to support us? If we’re ashamed of being LGBT, then why are our rights valuable? If this strategy NEVER WORKS, why do the mainstream campaigns keep using it?!
If we want rights, then we have to be gay and proud, not weirdly lurking and hiding. Same sex couples deserve the right to marry! Stand up and say it!
In other news, holy cow, Obama won. oh my god.

The Transsexual Industry

In the UK, the largest LGB* rights organization is called Stonewall. You’ll note I didn’t say “LGBT.”** They don’t say it either. They’re a lot like the HRC in the States.
They’re about to have an awards banquet where they’re going to recognize various people who they feel are good for the LGB community. One of the people nominated is a journalist named Julie Bindel, who is a Radical Feminist*** lesbian who writes for the Guardian. Like most radfems, her writings on trans issues are often transphobic. She has written transphobic things in her column in a major newspaper. Trans activists are displeased that Stonewall wants to honor this writing.
Alas, I am not talking about subtle differences in opinion. She has used slurs and thinks that trans people shouldn’t have access to hormones or surgery, saying, “Sex change surgery is unnecessary mutilation.” While she’s apologized for past slurs, the other stuff she hasn’t. She recently issued a statement about the controversy, which does not back away from those positions. (Indeed, the quote above is from it.) Instead, she says, “I am the victim of an organised group of bullies who seek to discredit me and silence any radical feminist debate around the issue of GID**** and of the transsexual industry.”
The transsexual industry? Does she imagine that trans people are some kind of profit center for the NHS? That’s as mad as making claims about the “abortion industry” in the US! In fact, it’s almost exactly identical.
Earlier in her statement, she talks a lot about Claudia, somebody who had SRS and then regretted it. She writes,

In 1985, after a consultation with Reid that lasted only 45 minutes, Claudia was diagnosed as transsexual and referred for surgery. . .. In May 2007 after a case lasting three years, the General Medical Council’s disciplinary committee ruled that Reid had prescribed hormones to five of his patients too soon, and referred them for genital surgery without properly assessing their mental and physical suitability. . . .. [G]etting to know Claudia was the catalyst for me in deciding to research the hidden side of sex change surgery, namely the validity of the original diagnosis of GID, and the stories of those who regret taking the hormones and having the surgery.

In the States, anti-choice activists claim that there is an abortion industry, where woman-hating male doctors cajole their patients into having abortions which leave them mentally and physically scarred for life. They mention the cases of some unhappy women who wish they hadn’t done it. They bring up some doctors who have faced discipline for unethical acts. Based on this, they argue that abortion is harming women and ought to be made illegal.
Bindel is using the same argument. And this betrays a fundamental truth about her perspective. Anti-choicers want to remove agency from women, so they imagine that somebody else has already done so. They see themselves as guardians of a helpless and contemptible class of people. Similarly, Bindel imagines that trans people have no agency and should not be allowed control over their own bodies. Like anti-choicers, she imagines a sinister “industry,” eager to prey upon weak victims who fall into their clutches.
And yet, in both cases, most of the people who utilize these “industries” don’t see themselves as victims at all, but as agents empowered to take advantage of what was a hard-won right. I would like to imagine that the parallels in argument would give any feminist pause, but as right wingers have happily co-opted language from the left to paint themselves as victims, I can’t imagine anyone of any political stripe would be above borrowing language and arguments form their ideological enemies. If painting others as victims works for your cause, then you would use it. I’d hope that the agency-denying aspect of the argument would give leftists pause, but, alas, this gets into a larger critique of radical feminism.
If seeing trans people as full adults won’t work, maybe she’ll note that medical malpractice is a real issue, but when somebody has their spleen unnecessarily removed, we don’t condemn all spleen surgery as a result. But if logic doesn’t work for anti-choice activists, it won’t work on their ideological twin. After all, there’s a sinister industry afoot.
* Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual.
** T is for transgender or transsexual or other gender minorities.
*** Not the fun kind
**** Gender Identity Disorder is the diagnosis used to give hormones and whatnot to trans people want them.

Old Men

The sort of charm of pipes and shaving kits and things made of leather.
The charm of men who drink Jenever
and fought in the war.

They are old men.
Our fathers or grandfathers.
Charming with their tweed and antique handguns and easy masculinity.

They wish they spoke like Hemingway,
so they chop their feelings instead of their sentences,
show their affection by talking about your car.

“You dress like an old man,” my last girlfriend said about my hat.
I want to skip straight to old, missing awkward and gawky and this second puberty.
I envy them their beards,
their unquestioned assumptions,
their bodies which, at least once, matched
before they needed doctors to make things work.
We have that much in common.

Crap Poetry

The hospice volunteer read from a book of poems about death.

It contained rainbows.
And also wolves, bald eagles, spotted owls, blue whales,
a veritable who’s who of the endangered species list.
All of them welcoming a freed spirit

Maybe they didn’t know my mom had let her membership to Greenpeace lapse.
Or maybe they did, but also that when that quack came around saying shark cartilage was a magic cure,
I’d said no.
Not just because it wouldn’t work
but for the sharks

Or maybe, as the poem implied, they were just overjoyed at the death of a human.
Any human.
Thinking, “Thank gods. If enough of them die, we might get to live after all.”

Six Years

Six years ago today, I went to the opera to see Messiaen’s St Francis of Assisi, because it was the last night and I had a ticket and all the critics were raving about it.
Some people might think that I’m too willing to sacrifice them for the sake of music. My mother died alone because I was at the opera. And if I’ll do that, what could anybody else matter in comparison?
We buried mom with some things of hers. My dad tried to give them to the mortician ahead of time. But he said to bring them back later.
We had a rosary at the funeral home. Her casket was in the room. We said ten Hail Marys and went home.
My dad had in his hands some things of hers to put with her. So the mortician opened up the casket in the front of the room, so Dad could put them in.
My dad who wanted a closed casket. My dad who had to call somebody to take her body away the morning after she went.
He put in there her teddy bear that she’d held for the last few weeks and her volunteer badge for the historical museum and a few other things. I forget what.
One of my mother’s friends saw the lid lifted and approached. Wanting to view the corpse. My mom had wished for a closed casket funeral. So her friend was disappointed. Palpably so.
But it didn’t matter because none of it could actually possible be happening.
This is not how she would want to be remembered. This isn’t the story she would want me to tell. It’s what’s on my mind, crowding out other memories.

Write Letters

Dear Senator Feinstein,

I am writing to ask that congress investigate whether the president has violated Posse Comitatus. I’ve just read, in the Army Times, that an infantry brigade has been deployed domestically on a permanent mission. This would seem to be in direct violation of H.R. 4986, Section 1068, signed into law on 28 January 2008, which restored the Posse Comitatus to it’s original wording. I believe strongly that the army should not be used domestically and that the president should obey the law. I hope that congress will take action on this issue.

The Army Times article is here: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/

Thank you for your time,
Céleste Hutchins

Posse Comitatus was a law passed in 1878 which prohibited using the Army for domestic law enforcement. There’s a lot of reasons that this is a good idea. Police Officers, for all their short comings, are employed by the area that they police and are subject to review by several layers of government. The National Guard is under the control of the governor of their home state and generally only deployed in emergencies. They are under review by the national government in addition to the state government. And really, they only ever should be mobilized during emergencies.
Police Officers, ideally, are trained in doing police work. Recently, they’ve been toying with becoming a military force, but their job is supposed to be public safety, which means that they use force only as a last resort and use non-lethal force whenever possible. The army’s job is to kill people. They are trained to be an occupying force. In the army, to “pacify” a situation means to kill everybody who is upset about it. People who have been doing a lot of killing overseas are not really the best folks to do police work at home or anywhere. Furthermore, the army’s chain of command goes up to the Commander in Chief. George Bush. They are loyal to the president.
Deploying the Army domestically is a violation of an important law. This is a blatantly illegal act. Their mission is contrary to our democracy. Action must be taken.

Perhaps the Greatest

Perhaps the greatest composer of his generation Céleste Hutchins draws his inspiration for the music of the spheres, something he’s been attuned to since beings from Betelgeuse implanted sensors in his cerebral cortex in 2001. Since that time, he has won the Prix Noveau de la Musique Mental on Auron (2002), the Young Composer Constrained Prize on Cygnus Alpha (2003), the Timely Arts Prize on Gallifrey (1250), the Destructive Process Award on Skaro (2006), and the Musical Answers Prize on Magrathea (2007).
Hutchins’ music has been played on radio throughout the galaxy, including Colonial Wireless, Radio Free Abelmouth, and Live 34. He has been interviewed in London Metropolitan and Global Weekly. He is currently a fellow at Jordan College, Oxford and is at work on an opera commissioned by the Vogon Royal Opera with a libretto by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, tentatively titled Midsummer Green Putty.
His music cures some forms of cancer.

Nationalize, Not Bailout

With 700 billion dollars at hand at any time, Wall Street’s party isn’t over, it’s just getting started.
There’s a plan afoot to take our tax dollars and give them away to huge companies that have made poor choices. We buy off their bad assets, sell them at a huge loss and then sit around waiting for them to have more bad assets. It’s a $700 BILLION pool of money, that never goes dry. We can’t have national health care, because that’s too expensive, but any hedge fund in trouble can have cash when they need it.
We infuse huge amounts of tax dollars, what will turn out out be trillions, over time, and in the end, have nothing. The uber-rich, however, have a huge safety net. They can make no wrong choice. If they bet on prices going up, and they go up, big win for them. If they bet on prices going up, and they go down, our taxes make up the difference. It’s a hell of a party when you don’t have to pay for it.
The idea is that some businesses are too big to fail and too important to our economy and therefore, it’s in our shared, public interest to help them out. And this could well be true. Large banks are an essential part of any modern, market economy and having tax payer backup for them is an important tool. But if we’re paying for them, we should own them. Companies that are so important to our well-being that they need public support, should belong to the public. If they’re central to the government’s mission, they should be part of the government. If we pay when they lose, we should profit when they profit. Things like health insurance, banks, and public utilities are too important to be run like a card game. If we need them, then the people in charge should be answerable to the public who relies on them, not on shareholders who place bets as if it’s poker.
Companies that are not vital to our interests, but so big that they can’t fail are too big. Break them up! Don’t just hand over our money. This is class warfare. they want to squeeze every drop of cash out of the middle class and the poor and use it to buy themselves third, fourth and fifth houses, while leaving the federal government to foreclose on our sole homes. Don’t forget that these “bad assets” are our homes! Professional bankers and mortgage brokers advised private individuals to take poor risks. These professionals committed fraud. They lied to us. They lied to their superiors, who were only too happy to look the other way. A whole lot of deception went into this mess. Nobody in the banking industry was shocked when their loans starting going bad. They knew they had been making bad loans. They also knew they still got to keep the huge bonuses that they paid themselves. And they knew they could count on tax payers to bail them out. The same tax payers who are now also facing foreclosure and are suffering generally under the credit crunch.
The people who made this mess should be the ones to pay for it. The rich made money off of this. Tax them! They can spare it. Tax the war profiteering corporations who have been making billions off of our tax dollars by not rebuilding Iraq. Tax the oil companies. Tax the profiteers!
I think safety nets are an entirely reasonable part of an economy. But they should be there for people who need them. If I get sick and get laid off, I lose my house. If we can afford to help out robber barons, we can certainly afford to help out people who are having a rough time. How many people could get healthcare for $700 billion? How many kids could go to college? How many unemployed people could have an extra month of breathing room while they look for a job in a crap economy?

We’re in the credit crunch because of fraud, certainly. But we’re also here because of deregulation. Regulations are there to prevent things like this. They need to be re-instated. Our houses, our jobs, our economy are not playthings for speculation. Banks and insurance companies need to be kept separate. Our currency is not a toy for speculators. Our manufacturing sector hasn’t gone offshore because of the magical free hand of the marketplace, it’s gone offshore because of changes in tax laws. We have the power to control how we allocate our money, who gets and how resources are managed. We could re-instate the tariffs that used to protect our manufacturing sector and thus create jobs and reduce the carbon footprint of global shipping. We could start enforcing the laws that are supposed to protect unions and make safer, better workplaces. We could stop government outsourcing, so that people who provide public services are loyal to the public and when disaster strikes, we’re not at the mercy of private firms, Blackwater and mercenaries. The government could actually govern! It could provide services. It could stabilize the economy. It could use our resources to help us, not the rich friends of corrupt officials. Things do not have to be like this.
The bailout is the wrong answer. If we have to save a company, we should own it. Nationalize, not bailout!