Before you ask, here’s a article in the New Statesman today where a cis woman complained that she was being asked to be aware of privilege when approaching feminism (horrors, I know) and complained specifically about the word ‘cis.’ Others have done a better job than I responding to that article. But I want to put my oar in.
This reminds me about some previous and ongoing conflicts in feminism and society. One has to do with LGB issues. A lot of straight people didn’t like the word ‘straight’ at all. Nobody asked them if they wanted the name. Gay people just foisted it off on them and then told them to check their privilege when they complained. ‘We’re not monolithic!’ they said. ‘We all have differing and subtle approaches to our sexuality and deserve to be taken as individuals!’ Which is funny, because a lot of gay people feel the same way about themselves!
No group is monolithic. There are as many ways to be gay as there are gay people and as many ways to be straight as there are straight people. The word ‘straight’ actually was meant as a value judgement, wherein heterosexuals were being called uptight and boring. Speaking as a straight person, I think that’s a bit unfair, but then given that straight people then were insisting that they be called ‘normal,’ I’m not overly excited about a minor slight in return.
Trans people are also not monolithic. There are a lot of ways to be trans – despite medical gatekeeping insisting on a standard narrative, we still have a huge amount of variation. And, indeed, there are as many ways to be cis as there are cis people.
Maybe you’re a cis person who doesn’t like the word ‘cis.’ You weren’t consulted on this. You’re not a carbon copy of your gender ideal. How dare people imply that there should be category for non-trans people! You should just be called ‘normal.’
I would like to urge you to examine your privilege. Which is another way of telling you to get over yourself. There’s billions of cis women and cis men on the planet. Nobody is alleging that you’re all carbon copies of each other. You say you’re more complex than just that. Well, so is everybody.
Another monolithic grouping is ‘white’ as in ‘white people.’ Past arguments and current about privilege in feminism often revolve around race. White feminists didn’t want to have to deal with their dual status as both members of a victim class and members of an oppressor class. Some meant well. Some were all for their own liberation, but still wanted people of other races to know their place. Many found it jarring to think about themselves as privileged.
And indeed, cis women who are fairly gender non-conforming don’t tend to think of themselves as having privilege. And in many ways, they certainly don’t. Yet, they still aren’t compelled to tell their life stories to psychiatrists in order to access appropriate medical treatment, but even aside from that something else came up in the news today.
A primary school teacher named Lucy Meadows killed herself. She had transitioned over winter break. The UK is a small country, so this was national news. The media was swarming around her home and her work. Richard Littlejohn (the UK’s equivalent of Rush Limbaugh) wrote a column attacking her. She was just trying to live her life and the media decided, during a vulnerable time, to turn her life into a spectacle and showcase her as a freak.
So no, gender-nonconforming cis people don’t live lives of amazing luxury, but they don’t need to worry about being attacked in the Daily Mail, misgendered even in death. Effeminate, straight cis men don’t need to worry about facing jail time for having relationships, but this has happened twice recently to young trans men in the UK.
But hey, nobody forces cis people to hang out in the feminist haunts of tumblr or other corners of the internet. If they don’t like the word ‘cis,’ they don’t have to engage it. Nor pay attention. Nor let it define their lives at all. And trust me, that’s a privilege trans people don’t get.
The purpose of talking about privilege is not a contest to give an award to the least privileged person on earth. It’s to be respectful in dialogue and to prevent furthering of injustice – something that can easily happen by accident. And really – I’m not overly impressed with somebody taking to a newspaper column to complain about being made aware of their privilege. Especially not given the role of newspapers in Lucy Meadows death.
If you’re feeling despondent over this and are in danger, please contact your doctor or GP (Americans can google to find free clinics in their area). There is also help over the phone. In the UK, LGBT people can call the LGBT switchboard (before 11:00 pm) 0300 330 0630, call the samaritans: 08457 90 90 90 or ring 999. In the US, LGBT people can call 1-866-488-7386 or anyone can ring 1-800-suicide. In an emergency you can got to a hospital emergency room or call 911. You are not alone and there is help available.
Tag: transphobia
Microagressions: ‘Brazilian Transsexuals’
This has been a bad week for trans people (especially trans women) in the UK media. Here is a fairly neutral summary of the latest thing in a long week of things.
A friend asked me on facebook, why people were upset about Moore’s original phrasing: “The cliché is that female anger is always turned inwards rather than outwards into despair. We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.” The tl;dr answer to this question is that no minority group wants to be used as a metaphor for otherness.
The long answer is somewhat more complex. I don’t want to pick on the writer, just to discuss the issues raised, so let’s first note this is not a big deal – by itself. This is a microaggression. I’m sure everyone has been in situations where they were given little, frequent reminders that they didn’t belong or were disapproved of. Alas, this is routine in some interpersonal relationships. It gets you down, but it’s such small things that you can’t ever bring it up. Over time, so many small things turns into kind of a big thing. For people who are members of a minority group, they get this more often than just from dysfunctional family. Some people have to deal with microaggressions whenever they engage the public sphere. As you can imagine, it gets them down. This is why it’s a good deed to say something if you see a microaggression against somebody else. They might not want to say anything because it’s a single small event (in a long stream of events) that might lead to an awkward conversation, that they would need to have every single time they decided to engage.
My friend wanted to know if the problem was the phrasing. Indeed, using the word ‘transsexual’ as a noun is a bit like saying ‘the gays.’ It’s best avoided. Also, using the word ‘transsexual’ as a synonym for trans women erases trans men. Again, not cool. But the problem here is not just the phrasing but also, more importantly, the idea. She has a stereotype of a particular body shape in mind. Alas, she is referencing porn. I googled the phrase, ‘Brazilian Transsexuals,’ and all but two of the first page of results link to porn. One links to a question about porn on a general discussion forum. And one links to the news story that triggered this post.
I would strongly suspect that the reason this phrase is so linked to porn has to do with a lot of factors. Obviously, it’s now a self-perpetuating meme, but how it got there probably involves racialised stereotypes about South American women, sexualised stereotypes of trans women, and, indeed, a pornified view of women in general. Porn is not IMO intrinsically bad, but seeing a group of real, diverse humans as synonymous with porn actors is bad. Nobody wants to be seen that way.
This particular stereotype is also troubling because of the actual, real-life situation of trans women in Brazil. Last year, more than a third of trans people murdered in hate crimes were Brazilian trans women. A trans woman is murdered there more often than once every three days. They face horrific levels of violence. Many trans women flee for their lives to other countries. Even though they face a reduced chance of being killed, they still face discrimination based on being women, based on being trans, based on being an immigrant, based on being a refugee and possibly undocumented, sometimes based on language. (Yes, some get into sex work in order to survive.) Their situation is so dire, that some commenters have compared Moore’s statement to saying that (please pardon the next phrase, it’s fairly offensive) women desire to look as thin as refugees of a Nazi concentration camp.
Alas, this phrase has wider implications than just Brazilian women. There’s also the problem of gender-based othering. In Moore’s formulation, women are disappointed they don’t look like ‘Brazilian transsexuals.’ Of course, one group of women that look like Brazilian trans women are Brazilian trans women. However, in Moore’s formulation, Brazilian trans women are other – they are not women. Thus, by extension, trans women are not women. This is the central tenent of transphobia.
This was not said deliberately. Like many microaggressions, it was a thoughtless expression of unexamined biases. By itself, it’s a very small thing, but it’s part of a much bigger context where this idea is repeated over and over again in tiny ways.
If you’re a writer, or especially a journalist who might be called upon to write on a variety of topics, this may all seem alarming, as it is definitely possible to cause unintentional offence, and, indeed, nearly everyone does from time to time. However, fear not! If you do get something wrong, do NOT follow Moore’s example! Apologise and say that you did not mean to offend.
Of course, it would be better to avoid this kind of slip up in the first place. The rule of thumb is mentioned at the top of this post – don’t use any group of people as a metaphor for otherness. If you’re not sure about a turn of phrase, try substituting other minority groups and see if it sounds bad. Or ask a friend.
Sometimes we do need to reference otherness. The original quote could have said ‘femmebots’ and gotten the point across without causing any offence. They’re more widely known than the stereotype she did invoke and, even more importantly, they’re not real. They are fictional constructs, designed to represent exactly what she means. How perfectly convenient it would have been to use them.
Apples vs Oranges
In general, I try to avoid intra-feminst disputes because, although I still consider myself a feminist, it doesn’t really directly effect me and generally it’s not good when allies wade into stuff like that. I also doubly avoid annoying fights. (Frankly, being able to ignore stupid pseudo-feminist bullshit is an example of male privilege, but anyway.)
There is a constant, long-running fight between some bigoted radical feminists (called TERFs for some reason) and trans women. Obviously bigots are in the wrong, but arguing with them is like arguing with my kitchen table, so I mostly ignore this except when it becomes relevant. (It used to be that TERFs wanted to save me from being trans . . in the same way the Fred Phelps wants to save people from being gay.) It’s really much more fun to ignore them. However, they’re planning a conference in London that actively excludes trans women and this is discrimination. I don’t want to see this kind of event pass without comment, lest anyone get the idea that this kind of discrimination is ok. I doubt very many trans women would want to spend a weekend hanging around TERFs, but they should still face criticism for their bigotry.
Meanwhile, one of them wrote a blog post defending their London event as being better than a trans health conference being held in the US. Astute readers will note that a health conference in the US and a political conference in the UK are really not the same thing, but let’s pretend this argument is worth examining (as my other planned activity for this evening is putting everything I own into boxes).
BugBrennan specifically attacks the sponsors of the health conference for including pharmaceutical companies, government and religious organizations. I will admit that I also find the participation by pharmaceutical corporations to be problematic, but this is a consequence of the how the US chooses (not) to organise it’s health care system. The participation of for-profit entities in anything health-related is morally suspect, but, alas, that is the entire basis of the US health system. And, indeed, it makes sense to have health providers involved in a health conference. If there were a trans health conference in the UK, I would expect to see NHS sponsorship and involvement. If it were a large, mainstream conference like the one up for discussion, I would be concerned if the NHS were not involved. Trans people who take hormones do rely on pharmaceutical products and it’s better that our health needs are taken into account by the manufacturers of these products.
If this were a political conference, the participation by companies such as Johnson and Johnson would be much more suspect. But it is not.
And, in the same way, government involvement seems appropriate as trans health is a public health issue. Because of systemic transphobia, many trans people in the US are reliant upon government services to provide health care as they are unable to afford private care. A social worker in the city of San Francisco once told me that it is a cost-saving measure for them to provide free transition-related health care to poor trans people. I would expect this to be true in other places as well.
So what about religious groups? I speculate that they wanted to participate because they wanted to show that they are open communities and because they perceive trans people to be a vulnerable community. If there were a gay men’s health conference, I would also expect to see health, government and religious groups involved. Lest that be construed as supporting the patriarchy, if there were a lesbian health conference, I would also expect to see those same groups involved. Also, being trans is not a spiritual identity, any more than being cis is a spiritual identity. Some cis women are religious. Some are atheists. Some trans women are religious. Some are atheists.
Of course, a political conference probably wouldn’t have church support or government support or big pharma support, but if you look at the very long list of supporting organisations, some of them are the kind of thing you might expect at both a health conference and a political conference. Let’s look at some of them:
- Trans Masculine Advocacy Network (TMAN) which continues to provide leadership towards making PTHC better able to serve communities of color.
- The William Way Community Center which will be hosting this year’s opening reception
- The Attic Youth Center which will be helping to host this year’s Teen Space
GenderReel which will be hosting a mini-film fest on Thursday evening at the conference - Philadelphia Family Pride
- GenderQueer Revolution (GQR)
- Female to Male International (FTMi)
- Transgender People of Color Coalition (TPOCC)
There we have families, teens, community centres and non-white people! Now, I don’t know who or if anybody is sponsoring the radfem debacle coming soon to London and maybe they don’t have affinity groups for, say, people of colour. Maybe they think they don’t need them for some reason. Maybe they have a very good reason to sneer at gatherings that try to be visibly and openly inclusive to a racially and age diverse group of participants. I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions.
Really, the TERF conference is going to be much much smaller, so it probably needs a lot less support and it’s not really fair to compare things that are so unlike. But given that their intended venue threw them out for being bigots and they are keeping the new location secret, I think it was strategically wise of them not to try to get community support.
Now does this one health conference mean, as BugBrennan suggests, that trans people are now fully integrated into power structures in America? Well, one can only hope that this is a step towards the end of systematic discrimination, but I’m afraid post-conference statistics on trans unemployment, hate crimes, etc are not yet available, so we’ll have to wait and see. Unfortunately, I suspect we still have a while to go.
Some of you may be wondering how it is feminist to discriminate against some women based on sex/gender? I will admit I don’t get it, but if any of you understand it, feel free to explain in the comments.
Letters
Dear Editor,
I am writing in regards to your recent headline, HEARD THE ONE ABOUT A SEX SWAP MAN WHO REPLACED A FEMALE COMIC?.
The transgender comic involved in the story is not a man, but a woman, something which you seemed to be aware of when writing the story. Also using the term “sex swap” is derogatory. A better headline would have read, “Have you heard the one about the transgender woman who replaced another female comic?”
The rest of your article seem to be fine and it’s a shame that it had this headline attached. If you have any questions or are in need of advice when writing about transgender people in future, the website for Trans Media Watch has a section in order to advise journalists and editors. http://www.transmediawatch.org/guidance_for_media.html
Thank you for your time.
Ha ha, trans people sure are funny
John Oswald:
Pretender (based on ‘The Great Pretender’ written by Buck Ram) features the opportunity for a dramatic gender change, suggesting a hypothesis concerning the singer, Ms.Parton, perhaps worthy of headlines in the National Enquirer. The first inklings of this story came from fans of Ms.Parton’s earlier hit single ‘Jolene’. As many consumers have inadvertently discovered, especially since the reemergence of 12′ 45rpm records of which this present disc is a peculiar subset, it is not uncommon to find oneself playing 45rpm sides at the LP standard speed of 331/3. In this transposed tempo ‘Jolene’ reveals the singer to be a handsome tenor. Additional layers of homosexual longing , convoluted mŽnages ˆ trois and double identities are revealed in a vortex of androgyny as one switches, verse to verse, between the two standard playback speeds.
Pretender takes a leisurely tour of the intermediate areas of Ms. Parton’s masculinity. This decelerando reveals, complete with suggestive lyrics, an unaltered transition between the ‘Dolly Parton’ the public usually hears and the normally hidden voice, pitched a fourth lower. To many ears this supposed trick effect reveals the mellifluous male voice to be the more natural sounding of the two. Astute star gazers have perceived the physical transformation, via plastic surgery, hair transplants and such, that make many of today’s media figures into narrow/bosomy, blemish-free caricatures and super-real ideals. Is it possible that Ms. Parton’s remarkable voice is actually the Alvinized* result of some unsung virile ghost lieder crooning these songs at elegiac tempos which are then gender polarized to fit the tits? Speed and sex are again revealed as components intrinsic to the business of music.
*chipmunked
From http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xnotes.html, which is associated with his tune Pretender, which you can download in a zip, from here. Click through to see his awesome, edgy and totally not race-baiting or queerphobic take on Michael Jackson.
I want to be on his side because he fought for fair use, but this stuff is really assholish. It’s like wanting to side with Larry Flint. I was trying to find out if he was gay or not, because that might sort of his explain his gender stuff or least make it possibly deeper than a cheap laugh,. All I could find was that his official bio claims he did sound for a Bruce la Bruce film, Hustler White, which he claims is a gay pron film. Wikipedia and IMDB imply otherwise (the latter doesn’t tend to cover porn films, for example Deep Throat has no entry) and neither mentions Oswald.
The Dolly Parton track, by the way, is really, really good (as is the Michael Jackson one). It’s just the liner notes that suck. And usually, changing the speed of a recording of somebody’s voice just sounds weird. But her voice slowed down gets a James Brown-like tenor quality which is quite remarkable. So he’s on to something, but then he went for the cheap laugh.
ha.
ha.
See writing letters DOES help
today, I wrote this:
In your story, “Seattle man charged in 2nd hate-crime
case,” you have identified the victim as “a man who
was dressed as a woman.” In fact, the victim is transgender and
identifies as a woman. According to both the AP Style Guide and the New
York Times Style Guide, she should therefore by identified as a woman by
the press and female pronouns should be used. To call her a man is
incorrect and offensive and is using the same logic that her attacker
likely used.I hope you can correct this article and avoid making this mistake again
in the future.
And I got a reply:
Your message regarding the story about the bus shelter assault was
forwarded to me because I wrote the item. I used the language that was
in the charging papers without realizing it would be hurtful or
offensive. Thanks for raising my awareness. Had you not written in, I
might have made the same mistake in the future.
Oh, man, that totally helped!
See, so writing to newspapers is not just spinning your wheels! So carry forth! We will make this a better world, one reporter at a time!
Do you feel like writing a letter?
I sure do miss the old days of composing reasoned missives off to other folks. But hey, there’s a veritable cornucopia of letter-writing opportunities today!
See, a few days ago, a few MTF women were sunbathing topless. Shocking, I know. Fortunately, the police were there to get involved. They told the women to please cover their boobs. [source] Think of the children! (If a child sees a breast, they perish. It’s amazing any of us survive to the age of solid food. Anyway.) Then, cue the news media.
Where should we start? The AP, which seems to have forgotten that it has a style guide, goes with the headline, “Transgender men go topless at Delaware beach“. Or there’s USA Today, with , “Topless ban at beach doesn’t apply to transgendered men with enhanced breasts.” Or literally hundreds more, because women sunbathing topless is the most exciting thing to have happened on the east coast this summer. But, I mean, if you were going to use the phrase, “transgendered men with enhanced breasts,” well, you really shouldn’t use that phrase, but if you were in a parallell universe where that phrase was remotely acceptable, you could misguidedly direct it at me. Directing it at women? Wrong wrong wrong!
So rather than go into a long post about how this is essentially an appeal for forced sterilisation for trans women and an appalling example of genital-essentialism, I’m going to ask you to write a letter. Pick one of the news outlets at random and politely correct them. (Don’t call them fucknecks, for example.) Here’s my letter to the AP:
To: info@ap.org
Dear Sir or Madam,I recently came across your article, “Transgender men go topless at Delaware beach” ( http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hwg8Mfyg6HGmXI6s1QycLqxGAU8wD9G3VVO80 ). The people in question were MTF transgender women. Referring to them as “men” violates your own style guide on dealing with transgender people and is also deeply offensive.
In the future, please consider remembering that you have a style guide that deals with these issues.
Thank you for your time,
Charles Céleste Hutchins
Ok, maybe that’s a bit snarky. But this is where you come in, Cis ally! You’re against transphobia? Write one letter! Pick one news outlet and write them a short little note! Cut and paste from this note or write your own. Then leave a comment here saying who you wrote to. You can share your note too, if you want. It doesn’t take much time and maybe the editor who gets it will realise he or she has made a mistake and might even do the right thing in the future. Or maybe it will be ignored. But it’s better to write the letter than not.
Everybody, now!
On Suffering and Bravery
Bravery
Back when I was an undergrad, in my 3rd of 4th year, I grew a benign tumor in the bone of the index finger of my dominant hand. It didn’t hurt as it grew, but it made my finger swell up, so I went to a doctor, who figured out what it was. He told me I should get it fixed within the next 6 months. For the next 5.5 months, it continued to swell and got kind of bendy – in a bad way. Finally, during the winter break, I went to see a hand surgeon. He told me that he would take bone from either my wrist or my hip to repair the bone in my finger. So I went in for an operation, not knowing if I was going to be able to walk properly at the end of it.
Fortunately, my wrist had enough extra bone. Although I couldn’t move my hand at all and my finger had shattered during the operation. It hurt like a mofo. I couldn’t write for the first few weeks of the spring term. And I had to switch to playing the trombone, because I couldn’t push a valve or actuate a string. I was also off my head on pain killers for a few weeks, and behaving in an odd way, and I had a gigantic bandage. When people asked me what happened, I would invent stories about heroics or accidents involving heavy machinery. People called me a lot of things during that time, some of which I was not pleased with.
Nobody called me brave. In fact, nobody called my dad brave when, after 50 years of wearing glasses, he got his eyeballs lasered. He had laser beams shot at his eyeballs, people! And when some of my well-endowed friends decided that their backs would hurt a lot less if they got breast reductions, I never heard anybody call them brave.
People have me called me brave, however, when I came out as queer at a Catholic high school. Well, not at first. First there was harassment. Then there was just being sort of a mini-celebrity whose friends got harassed. (Alas for them.) Then, suddenly, about the time I turned 18, the same people who had been giving me grief for the last four years wanted to tell me about how they respected me. As if I still cared what they thought!
Suffering
Life is suffering. – according to the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism. I find that a bit dark (at least without any context). I mean, life is also joyous and fascinating and boring and everything else. Suffering is certainly unavoidable, though. It’s like death and taxes. Everybody’s life has rough spots.
There are some social groups that are widely perceived as having extra suffering. For example, in America, biracial people, especially those with one black parent and one white parent. There’s a whole genre of fictional representation of this – called the tragic mulato. Writers imagined this person would feel at home in neither race and live a life of misery and sorrow, accepted by nobody and unable to achieve anything of note. Shockingly, this mythology still persists and is believed as truth. You’d think the president of the US would be a good enough counter-argument, but people believe what they want to believe.
Then, gay people were also perceived to suffer terribly. Again, all that ‘outside of society,’ ‘accepted by nobody’ crap. And, I mean, life probably does suck a lot for Ted Haggard and George Reekers. But it doesn’t suck because they’re gay. It sucks because they’re too cowardly to come out of the closet and so they build a giant web of lies and denial around themselves, that ultimately doesn’t just hurt them, it also harms their wives, children and, in the case of those two, society as a whole. Because it’s not brave to come out. Even in Catholic school. It’s a survival strategy. Life in the closet is too hard; it makes you act in strange ways.
Note that in both examples of suffering, there’s nothing fundamentally painful about either state, it’s just that some other people are bigots and might conspire to make your life difficult. And the whole social propaganda model of suffering was not to discourage bigotry, but in fact, to shore it up. None of this was ever framed as, “they suffer so, because of us. We should pack it in.” It was always framed as pity, which is just a hair away from hatred. And also as a warning to try to prevent people from turning gay in the first place or from biracial people from ever being born. This notion of suffering then, served the purpose of strengthening a binary opposition in terms of race and re-enforcing compulsory heterosexuality.
People who advocate for you to get a bunch of pity are not your allies. They deny your agency. They erase anything positive about your experiences. The prescribe social abuse even as they pretend to abhor it. Anybody who describes you as “brave” for existing is tapping in to this same idea. It’s as if they’re saying: “It’s so exceptional that you dare to let us know who you are and where you live, because some of us *wink* *wink* might come after you!” It seems like the more fruitful conversation should be with their peers in privilege, reminding people that sexual orientation or mixed race parentage is a natural occurring human event.
What’s worse is that people who use words like “brave” really do mean well. They don’t stop to think about what they’re saying, because who wants to think about their privilege? If you tell a mixed-race couple that they’re brave for having kids, you’re certainly expressing racism, even as you think you’re fighting it. It’s tough out there for well-meaning, but ignorant would-be allies. Alas, they’re not brave for charging forth and putting their foot in it.
Trans People
Much like it’s uncomfortable and awful pretending to be the wrong sexual orientation, it is similarly unfun pretending to be a gender that doesn’t work for you. Discrimination and violence also suck a lot, and there’s an unfortunate amount of that about. Fortunately, at least, dysphoria is something that can be dealt with. The process of transition is something of a journey, but it’s towards a happier goal. I feel good about it and I don’t think I’m alone in that. When I see trans people talk about the steps their taking along this path, they mostly are happy and excited, if sometimes also nervous.
Some of us have had a rough time getting to where we are now. Some haven’t. Some phrases about suffering do get repeated a lot, though, even by trans people. This could be because the speaker did have a hard journey. It could be out of a misguided confusion where they imagine the road to acceptance has pity as a way point. In some cases, it’s gotten in to the public discourse because shrinks mandated it in the script that trans people had to recite to get access to treatment. Everybody learned their lines. We say what they want us to say, they give us our HRT. It’s annoying and unhelpful, but you do what you have to do.
Some trans activism really is brave. People who fought the police at Stonewall, for example. But just going to the clinic? It could be a personal milestone in the life of that person. You know, and you could congratulate them, like you would a gay person coming out. Or like you would somebody at a baby shower. Give them support appropriate to the amount of closeness you have with them. But don’t assume we suffer. Don’t call going to the doctor brave.
Writing Letters
Ok, so this arrested couple in Malawi has been in the news lately. To quote the New York Times, “A gay couple in Malawi sentenced to 14 years in prison for ‘unnatural acts’ . . ..” The good news: they were pardoned! Yay!
The bad news? From the same article, “Late Saturday, Mr. Chimbalanga, who has said he considers himself a woman in a man’s body, and Mr. Monjeza were released from custody.” What the fuck is this? I don’t even . . .
The AP Stylebook has fucking rules about how you talk about trans people. They do not include referring to women as “Mr.” nor “he.” Nor do they involve referring to man/woman couples as “gay.” That sentence above is the most ungendering piece of shit they’ve yet to turn out this century. Yes, he might consider himself a woman, but here in New York, we certainly know better! Because, apparently, Africans are not worthy of having their identities recovered? Or is the NYT just looking for any excuse to be transphobic in general?
Alas, the Times is not alone in this shit. I highly encourage you to write letters to any newspaper you see that disregards the gender identity of Ms. Chimbalanga.
Seriously, we in the first would want to be all moral high ground about this, but our newspapers can’t seem to manage to respect her either.
To: letters@nytimes.com
Subject: AP Stylebook Guidelines for referring to transgender people
Dear Sir or Madam,
In your article, “Malawi President Pardons Gay Couple” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/world/africa/30malawi.html?partner=rss&emc=rss), you mention that one of the people arrested, Ms. Chimbalanga, identifies as a woman. The AP Stylebook has guidelines for how to refer to transgender people. It does not include referring to transgender women as “he” or “Mr” nor does it include referring to man/woman couples as “gay.” I have no idea what your motivation is to entirely disregard and disrespect this woman’s identity. It is entirely inappropriate and you should know better.
Thank you for your time,
Charles Celeste Hutchins
IDAHO
Why is the International Day Against HOmophobia and transphobia abbreviated to IDAHO and not IDAHOT? The whole “hahaha the T is silent” thing is supposed to be a joke. If they’re serious about the leading ‘I’, then it’s surely not important that it shares a name with a state that few people have heard of outside of the US.
The big action in my town was a kiss-in. I planned to go, but then I didn’t. I mean, if I go and kiss a woman, then I’m a straight guy kissing a girl, which is just such a massive show of privilege. If I go and kiss a boy, it reminds of me of being in high school and wishing I were a straight girl and the uncomfortable kisses that resulted from that. meh. I don’t want to pretent to be a cis gay guy.
This might be unfair. Maybe it wasn’t like that. I can’t say for sure, as I didn’t go. But still, I don’t think a kiss-in makes a lot of sense in the context of fighting transphobia.
I like cis LGB people (some of my best friends are . . .) but I’m increasingly against hitching my wagon to their quest for rights. Like, absolutely, they should have full civil rights, and trans people should stand in solidarity with that. Heck, a lot of trans people are LGBQ. But when all trans people stand as a subgroup of LGB people, we’re totally invisible.
On the other hand, if we just had an IDAT, how many cis LGB people would even notice or mention it? It’s not like many of them go to TDOR, although most trans people I know go to the vigils that result when a cis gay man is killed – vigils which also say they’re against transphobic violence, but then only have cis speakers.
I don’t want to be a hater about this. Homophobia is bad and I’m against it. Transphobia is also bad, but if you don’t really want to talk about it, then just don’t mention it at all. Most twitterers have completely neglected the silent, invisible T. So, if transphobia is totally beside the point, then don’t bother bringing it up in the first place. I’m tired of being disappointed and invisible.