Burning Words

It may surprise you, but women of colour, disabled women and queer women are in fact still women.

It’s a long thread, so I’ll quote her comments here:

Although thanks very much for illustrating so goddamned perfectly why this post is necessary. Because with nearly FOUR YEARS of archives in which I have done my fucking best to be a regular champion on behalf of LGBTQ rights and racial equality, have tried to be sensitive to differently-abled Shakers, have invited all different kinds of people to contribute and guest post, and have tried to make amends when I’ve failed to be sensitive to the needs of any marginalized (or majority) population, I STILL CAN’T WRITE ONE POST JUST ABOUT WOMEN WITHOUT SOME FUCKING ASSHOLE WHINING THAT I’M BEING EXCLUSIVE.

and

I was making a point about women’s equality.

Sometimes I write posts about LGBTQ equality.

Sometimes I write posts about racial equality.

Sometimes I write posts about all three.

Sometimes I write posts about all the things you mentioned, individually or as a group.

But this post is not about those things.

That doesn’t mean I suddenly stopped caring about those things.

It means I want to give particular attention to women’s equality in this post, and, no, you may not revise it.

Because of course queer issues, racial issues, these things never affect women, right? These are never women’s issues? And completely makes sense to talk about equality for women when you’re only really talking about equality for white, straight, able-bodied women? Oh, fuck you.

We don’t need you to be our glorious champion, but it would be nice if you’d at least refrain from being a fucking asshole.

Tags: assholes, feminism, privilege

Finally, tonight, I need to rant. I have the course from utter hell this semester, and it just keeps getting worse and worse with every passing week. It’s the ultimate in ignorant, entitled white middle-class feminism mixed with quite a bit of plain there-are-no-words crazy, and after a string of “OH NO YOU DID NOT JUST SAY THAT” moments for the half semester that’s now passed, I am badly wishing I’d dropped it early, or better yet never taken it at all.

When I went to the first lecture for this course, I was really impressed with the lecturer - an amusing feminist with little time for critical theory, to boot, and I even briefly considered asking her to be my honours supervisor. I am incredibly glad in hindsight that I did not.

It started about three weeks in. We had a lecture covering trans issues. I’ve had plenty of lecturers over the years that were ignorant about trans issues, but this was really special - it was as if she’d never read a book on us, let alone met one of us, and was teaching on the basis of something she’d seen on Oprah once. She’d sound generally lucid for a while, and then randomly drop in some comment that was so breathtakingly ignorant and offensive that my jaw literally dropped. The tutorial was worse. She started espousing something completely wrong, and I called her on it, and amongst other things, she asked me to my face something along the lines of “well, don’t transpeople just transition because they really want to do girl stuff?” - and several other things in the same vein. I left that tutorial thinking - dear god, if you don’t actually know anything at all about the subject, how in the hell can you feel so entitled as to think it’s okay for you to teach it?

We had a couple of average lectures, then, two weeks ago, while I was away sick, she did it again. Worse. Really, really worse. As I wasn’t there, I can’t relay all of what she said, but I heard plenty about it from my outraged friends: essentially, she argued that intellectually disabled foetuses should be aborted. Yes, she said that. At that point, a few of us considered dropping the course en masse, but decided against it because we were quite a way into the semester. Bad move.

It’s not really possible to top that effort for sheer offensiveness, but she’s certainly trying. Today’s fun topic was sex work. She went on this absolute batshit rant, literally screaming at the class about how sex worker rights arguments were bullshit (in those words), and pulling statistics out of her arse about sex trafficking going through the roof anywhere that prostitution was legalised. I can’t even argue the point in my coursework because I’m absolutely sure I’d be marked down for disagreeing, but it’s just…WHAT IS THE FUCKING PLAN? REALLY? Because forcing it underground has worked so very well so far to either improve the lives of sex workers OR help them to get out of it if they so choose. It’s worked oh so well to stop violence against sex workers, hasn’t it? Jesus. Perhaps if people like this woman dared pull their heads out of their collective arses for a bare moment, they might gain the opportunity to consider how, y’know, it might actually be helpful to the women actually affected to do something besides dumping sex workers in the shit for the rest of time while having a yayfun “war on prostitution”.

This is the worst course I’ve ever had the misfortune of taking, and god help the impression it’s leaving on other people in that class if this is the idea of “feminism” they’re receiving.

Tags: academia, assholes, disability, feminism, sex work, trans

I’m unsurprised in many ways at the media saga that has surrounded the pregnancy of Thomas Beattie. What’s really saddened me, though, is some of the pretty appalling comments I’ve seen made about him from within the trans community.

One of the awkward issues that many of us who are trans are going to face, whether we’re transwomen or transmen, is what to do about having children. The law in most jurisdictions in essence forestalls a choice on our part by requiring that we forego any reproductive capacity before being granted a legal change of sex, apart from the options of storing biological material for later conception. It’s certainly not something we’d all choose - as much as I would love to have children (I’ve always been really maternal), I could never in a million years father a child, because the cognitive dissonance would, well, break my brain. This doesn’t mean in the slightest that I’d begrudge anyone with the physical capacity to have children - and who doesn’t have the same objection - the right to do so.

With that in mind, I’ve got so much respect for Thomas Beattie. He’s come out and taken the media flak, and despite barrages of awful reporting, has taken the chance to make people think, and put a human face to others in his situation. It’ll be a thorny issue with the press and the essentialists for a long time to come, but I don’t think the concept of a pregnant man will ever carry quite the same shock value ever again. Furthermore, considering some of the things I’ve heard about his hometown of Bend, Oregon, I just think that he’s incredibly brave. And as such, I’m frustrated at some of the essentialist crap coming out of my own community.

I’ve seen a few really insensitive comments in LiveJournal communities and the like, but what really spurred me to comment on it was an awful email that went out on a national trans list yesterday from a relatively well-known figure in the Australian transmale community. It spouted a bunch of rotten half-truths about Beattie and pregnancy among transmen, calling him “unstable”, declaring that “all the children born to these folks, have developed autism spectrum disorders and/or severe adhd”, and flat-out arguing for the law to be changed so that Beattie would have to be legally considered a woman while he had any capacity to actually become pregnant. I was gobsmacked.

Thomas Beattie - and the numerous others who have preceded him - provide a fundamental challenge to essentialist notions of sex. However, I see no justifiable reason why a man shouldn’t be able to become pregnant if he has the physical capacity to do so - without threatening his legal status as a man. The sheer anger, even hatred, that I’ve seen from some corners of my own community because he dared challenge our notions really boggles the mind, especially against the backdrop of our own experiences with being seen to challenge sex and gender. It also strikes me in a sense as peculiarly self-eugenicist - as if many of us have internalised the notion that our bodies are so different that something as basic as having children should be beyond us. While I personally would never feel comfortable with biologically fathering a child as a transwoman, I see no good reason to begrudge anyone who lacks that same level of dissonance from doing so, and I’m pretty disappointed at many members of my community for doing otherwise.

As a final note, my friend Ryan has a great post up in response to the same incident, and while I couldn’t work it into the above post, I wanted to give it a plug.

Tags: assholes, health, trans

I was reading threads at Bilerico yesterday, and read to my surprise of the support of The Butchies - a band I’ve always really liked - for Michfest’s trans exclusion policy. It’s almost ancient history now, as it was seven years ago, and they’ve broken up in the intervening years, but their public statement at the time is still pretty outrageous.

They try to perform the interesting semantic dance of professing to be greatly in favour of the rights of transwomen, and expressing their support for us as an integral part of the queer community, all the while actively defending our exclusion from women’s spaces. It’s a pretty bizarre effort.

Let me get this straight - if you’re against our right to access gender-appropriate shelters when we’re victims of domestic violence or are homeless, if you’re against our right to access rape crisis services when we’re assaulted, if you’re against our right to access campus safe spaces when we’re threatened at night, you’re no fucking ally of mine. Moreover, I take serious offence at the notion that people possessing cissexual privilege could have the sheer gall to turn around and claim ally status after doing so.

It makes me very glad in hindsight that I never paid a cent for any of their material, because I’ll be damned if any of my money will ever go to any groups who support discrimination against me on the basis of a fundamental part of my being.

Tags: assholes, michfest, trans

Mr McClelland is in discussions with the ACT Government to remove clauses in its civil partnerships bill that would allow gay couples to hold a public ceremony marking their union.Mr McClelland has told the ACT that the Rudd Government would not allow civil unions, and is pushing for a system of state-based relationship registers.It is understood that the ACT is redrafting its bill after being warned by the federal Government that it will intervene to override civil unions.

I don’t like the sound of this. The ACT government gave us a commitment last month that they wouldn’t throw us under the bus amidst federal pressure. If they go ahead and do it anyway, I’ll be disappointed with them beyond words.

And fuck you, Robert McClelland. How can you say with a straight face that you want to eliminate discrimination and then in the same breath reaffirm support for your attempt to strongarm the ACT government into forcing the most obvious display of second-class citizenship on our community?

Tags: assholes, canberra, Civil Partnerships Bill, queer issues, relationship recognition

It seems it just isn’t the week for scumbag police officers who think they can get off on abusing women.

Senior Constable David Mits, an officer based out of Knox in Melbourne, plead guilty to demanding a bribe in the County Court of Victoria this morning. He tried to demand sex from a woman he had pulled over for traffic offences in exchange for not arresting her. From the excerpts from the conversation in the article, it sounds like he’d tried to pull that sort of thing before, too. Unfortunately for Mits, this time, the woman recorded the conversation and went straight to the police herself, and I guess it’s a bit hard to try and deny something like this when you’ve been caught in the act on tape. He’s due to be sentenced in May - I hope he goes down for a while, but at least he’ll be out of the force for good.

Good on the motorist for having the quick thinking to get him on tape and the guts to take him down for it.

Tags: assholes, misogyny, police abuses

God, some people are entitled assholes. Via Ren and Kim, meet Steve Gower, harasser of Atlanta sex workers, transphobe, and general repulsive creep.

In short, Gower is a middle-aged man who gets his jollies by going around his Atlanta neighbourhood with a video camera, harassing sex workers - and especially transgendered sex workers - in the vicinity. He first tries to scare customers away with his truck lights, and if that fails, videotapes the client and puts the video on YouTube, thus publicly revealing the identity and location of the sex worker, putting their safety in danger. After all, it’s not like she’s human or anything, is it? Which brings me to this charming quote to an Atlanta website: “What’s really fun is catching [the prostitute] getting in the car with a john,” he says. “You flip on the light and most of the time the john dumps the prostitute. I’m hitting prostitutes in the pocketbook.”

What sort of psychopath thinks that robbing the destitute of even the proceeds of having to have sex with people to survive is “really fun”? Apparently, Steve Gower. Never mind that the money that sex workers don’t get when he chases off clients and has them thrown out of cars into the street might be to, oh, pay for food, housing, nothing really important of course. Kim put it pretty damned well in her post:

Sittin‘ there in his car with his expensive camera and going home to comfortable house, feelin‘ all … smug.
What does he know about homeless?
Or hungry?
Or addiction?

Gower seems to have a particular obsession with transgendered sex workers, who he oh-so-charmingly terms “transvestitutes”. The article reports him randomly stalking transfolk who he suspects might be prostitutes in his truck, to the point where one transwoman, after being repeatedly followed, got so scared of him that she pepper-sprayed him, and is now up on charges. He then has the sheer gall to complain that he gets cursed at, spat at and has things thrown at him. Gee, maybe it just might have something to do him randomly stalking them, mightn’t it? Here’s a hint: if anyone started stalking me in a truck for having the gall to walk around my neighbourhood in a short skirt, you can bet that I’d be fucking pepper spraying them too.

Rusty did a bit more digging on this creep and finds that Gower has some more charming habits, such as “sightseeing” after homicides and natural disasters, and turns up a lovely little photo of him dressed as an East German police officer, and looking every little bit like the creepy scumbag he is.

God, this sort of creep makes me angry. The entitlement, the sheer lack of empathy, just…fuck you, creep, fuck you.

Tags: assholes, sex work, trans

From today’s Age comes the latest example of male members of the judiciary who can simply not be trusted to hear sexual assault cases:

Victorian County Court Judge Michael Kelly was accused of making insensitive comments during a case against Dean Woodbridge, whom he sentenced last December to two years and nine months’ jail, wholly suspended for three years.

Judge Kelly reportedly described the victim’s impact statement as “a waste of time” and said the victim would not have coped well in a British public school in the 1930s.

Woodbridge was convicted of the rape of a boy nine years his junior.

It’s a disgrace to the legal profession that we still have judges here who just don’t get the message on sexual assault. Judge Kelly has been publicly called out on his comments by Director of Public Prosecutions Jeremy Rapke and Premier John Brumby, but it isn’t good enough that the matter ends there, with Brumby’s response being to mumble something about educating the judiciary.

Quite simply, Judge Kelly should be removed from office, or at an absolute minimum be prevented for hearing any sexual assault cases. This would send a clear precedent to the judiciary both here and interstate (I called out the late Justice Terry Connolly of the ACT Supreme Court for similarly repulsive comments last year) that this nonsense would not be tolerated. Allowing judges to go on their merry way with mumblings about educating them when they’ve shown no sign that they understand or can fairly adjudicate sexual assault proceedings is nothing short of disgraceful.

Tags: assholes, law, sexual assault