Can Japan Deny Entry To a “Pickup Artist” with a History of Racialized Sexual Violence?

Yesterday, the Australian immigration services announced that it had revoked the immigration visa of an American named Julien Blanc who was hosting a series of ‘pickup artists’ seminars that aim to teach men how to manipulate women into sexual intercourse through psychological, emotional and physical violence. Blanc, who openly brags about his violent history that includes placing women in chokeholds, was deported from Australia overnight.

The movement to deport Blanc was spearheaded by feminist activist Jennifer Li, who started the twitter hashtag #takedownjulienblanc over which much of the organizing was conducted that led to a series of hotels and other venues canceling his scheduled appearances. It was also over this hashtag that activists shared information about the Blanc’s violent history as well as the misogynistic company he represents, Real Social Dynamics (RSD), which bills itself as a “dating coach company.”

However, Blanc reportedly has further RSD events scheduled in Tokyo for Nov. 15-17 of this month (though I have also heard reports that the events are scheduled for Nov. 25-27, so there is still some uncertainty on the specifics).

When we discuss this man’s history here in Japan, it becomes difficult to overstate what a truly disgusting individual Julien Blanc is. In video footage of one of his previous seminars, Blanc talks about the “happiest [he has] ever been,” when he was celebrating his chickenshit pickup artist culture at Tokyo nightclubs by grabbing Japanese women and forcefully shoving their faces into his crotch. And no he isn’t just talking about it, video footage exists not only of him engaging in this behavior, but also of him grabbing a convenience store clerk over the counter in what appears to be a forced sexual embrace.

In his seminar, Blanc advocates that a violent white male misogynist like himself should yell, “Pikachu!” when he grabs a Japanese woman to shove her face into his crotch.

While it remains unclear whether Blanc’s deportation from Australia will affect his November schedule for Japan, the issue has begun to attract local attention and a bilingual petition has been raised demanding that the Japan Department of Immigration deny him entry to the country. The petition has already received over 22,000 signatures (please add your own signature here). A widely shared video has also been created by popular vlogger Rachel of Rachel and Jun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA-SG1jMGZg

I also note from the schedule on their website that RSD has three further events scheduled for Tokyo during the dates Jan. 15-17 of 2015, including one of their pickup artist “bootcamps” designed for idiot heterosexual males who feel the need to psychologically degrade women because those men have no redeeming qualities for which any woman would ever genuinely be attracted to them.

In the meantime, I hope that feminist activists and allies here in Japan can begin trying to find the scheduled locations for these events and attempt to have the venues canceled. Here I think we can take courage from the example set by Jennifer Li and activists in Australia who experienced phenomenal success at pushing not only Julien Blanc but also another RSD employee out of Australia.

Indeed, the organizing conducted on #takedownjulienblanc ultimately led to a dramatic real life standoff on Thursday evening, when Blanc was planning to give one of his pickup seminars to a group of men on a boat (apparently as an alternate location after one of the original venues had canceled). Blanc himself didn’t show (maybe he was already in custody at that point, or maybe he had just chickened out), but his RSD buddy showed up to give the presentation in his place. Protestors surrounded the boat and some attempted to board it in order to disrupt the event; eventually police and the operators of the boat came to an agreement such that the male participants were led off the boat as protestors chanted “Walk of shame!” at them.

Let’s hope the only walk of shame happening in Japan will be the violent misogynist Julien Blanc being walked back onto the plane.

And by the way Julien, as a proud American expat in Japan, I have it on good authority that Pikachu despises everything about you.

Trans Teen Stabbed on D.C. Metro, Follows String of Violence Against Trans Women

Feature image via Shutterstock

Following a recent string of violence against trans women of color in the D.C. area, a 15 year-old trans girl was stabbed in the back this Wednesday while she was riding a Metro train with some of her teenage friends.

One of her friends related the story  that the man came up to her on the train and began making fun of her appearance and asking questions like, “Are you a man? Are you a man?” He then stabbed her in the back with a 3.5 inch folding knife.

The suspect, reported as a 24 year-old man named Reginald Anthony Klaiber, has been taken into custody and charged with assault with a deadly weapon, with the possibility of being additionally charged with a hate crime. Passengers aboard the Metro train who witnessed the incident identified the man to the police.

The attack on the 15 year-old girl in D.C. is reminiscent of another attack against two black trans women that occurred in May aboard an Atlanta MARTA train, in which one of the women was forcibly stripped naked during the encounter. The confrontation in Atlanta was again initiated when the men in question began asking inappropriate questions about the two women’s bodies and attempted to publicly shame them. However, in that case the witnesses aboard the train did nothing to interfere in the situation and did not report the incident. In fact, one passenger recorded the attack and then posted a video online in an attempt to further publicly humiliate the victims of the attack.

These incidents fit within a wider pattern of verbal and physical violence against trans women, in which the perpetrators of such aggression seem to believe that trans women’s bodies are public domain and that they should have no expectation of privacy.

“Science” Magazine Runs Transmisogynistic Cover, Editor Tweets ‘Deception’ Tropes When Challenged

One of the best known and most respected publications in science and technology chose to run a sexualized, transmisogynistic photo for its cover this week, and when the editor was challenged on twitter for pandering to the male gaze, he responded that he thought it would be interesting what would happen when those males “find out.”

While the focus of Science magazine’s July 11 issue on combating HIV and AIDS worldwide is laudable, the editors unfortunately chose the route of crude sensationalism to present that story to the public. The magazine cover features a dehumanizing image of trans women sex workers in Jakarta that focuses on their bodies, crops out their faces and primarily centers on their exposed thighs. The text accompanying that picture says, “Staying a step ahead of HIV/AIDS,” as if trans sex workers are somehow an image that is naturally synonymous with this disease.

And while, yes, trans women globally, on average, do face significantly elevated risks, could you imagine the outraged response if the same cover text accompanied an image of two men in a sexual embrace, and further only showed them from the neck down?

It has also been pointed out that apparently Science has never run any similar cover image that focuses on sexualizing parts of human bodies before. What’s more, the online text that appears below the cover image states:

This “key affected population” has high HIV prevalence but is largely ignored by government efforts.

Yet, when you click on the linked cover story, it doesn’t actually mention trans people at all.

However, when one of the Science editors was challenged on twitter over this image, the situation worsened quickly. When several people challenged Jim Austin, Science Careers Editor, about the blatant sexism on the cover, Austin responded by saying, “You realize they are transgender? Does it matter? That at least colors things, no?” as if crudely sexualizing women suddenly becomes okay as long as they’re trans.

https://twitter.com/LSU_FISH/status/489505604218933248

https://twitter.com/JacquelynGill/status/489519288626077697

@JacquelynGill @LSU_FISH @AAASmember You realize they are transgender? Does it matter? That at least colors things, no?

— Jim Austin (@_JimAustin) July 16, 2014

When @JacquelynGill challenged the idea that sexually dehumanizing trans women is okay by saying the image was just another “male gazey image,” Austin responded, “Interesting to consider how those gazey males will feel when they find out.”

https://twitter.com/JacquelynGill/status/489520079126548481

@JacquelynGill @LSU_FISH @AAASmember To me it defies the obvious stereotypes, problemetizes responses in interesting ways.

— Jim Austin (@_JimAustin) July 16, 2014

https://twitter.com/JacquelynGill/status/489522077632708612

https://twitter.com/SciCareerEditor/status/489522658455715842

Here Austin has gone far beyond the line and is starting to play into violently anti-trans woman ‘deception’ tropes. The fact is that this type of rhetoric has been used for years to promote victim-blaming myths against trans women, and has even been used in court cases to reduce sentences or free cis men from culpability for murdering trans women (even in cases where the men in question actually knew the woman was trans all along). These statements, particularly when taken in conjunction with an image catering to the male gaze, also buy into the idea that trans women’s bodies are somehow public domain. And above all, they buy into the utterly stupid, unscientific idea that cis males somehow have some kind of “right” to not be attracted to trans women.

If a man is uncomfortable with his own sexual attractions, that is not a public issue; that is his own problem that he needs to sort out for himself. And the recent spate of often brutal murders against trans women of color across the U.S. emphasize that the priority in this conversation must be the safety of women, not the hand-wringing of men who lack the personal integrity to make sense of their own sexual desires in a healthy, reasonable way.

SF Weekly Laces Its 2014 Pride Cover Story With Transmisogyny

This year, San Francisco Pride gave Grand Marshal honors to trans woman author and advocate Janet Mock as well as Jewlyes Gutierrez, a young Latina trans woman who was initially given a misdemeanor battery charge for defending herself against ongoing bullying from three cis girls at her Bay Area high school. While those charges were later dropped as she entered a court-ordered restorative justice program, the incident still speaks to systemic violence trans women of color face and the victim blaming our society often employs in support of it. San Francisco Pride also named Chelsea Manning as an Honorary Grand Marshal.

Meanwhile on the other side of the country, actress Laverne Cox, who was recently the first out trans woman to appear on the cover of Time magazine, was named Grand Marshal for NYC Pride.

It was in this context that SF Weekly’s Pride Week issue ran a feature from Rachel Swan on income inequality between women and men in queer communities, and how that has played into forces that are compelling women in traditional queer neighborhoods in the Mission District and Castro to move across the Bay for Oakland and elsewhere. While the feature itself speaks to an important and often overlooked issue facing the lesbian community, the choice for the accompanying cover art was in incredibly poor taste, featuring two crossed arrow signs, one labeled “chicks” and the other labeled “dicks.”

Even just at a glance, the image comes across as blatantly trans-misogynistic given that the words “chicks” and “dicks” are mostly commonly associated through the phrase “chicks with dicks,” one of numerous slurs commonly employed to degrade trans women and essentialize them according to genitalia. The phrase is also commonly used in a dehumanizing manner in porn.

Beyond this obvious association, even taking the image at face value is still gross and essentializes human beings according to genitalia. This is only emphasized by an unfortunate phrase appearing in the first paragraph of the article itself, which refers to a trans man who previously ran a bar in the Mission back when he was a “biological woman.” This ridiculous, out-dated phrase as it is traditionally employed points to a supposed one-to-one correspondence between chromosomal normative XX bodies and womanhood that doesn’t exist and has never existed. And given how often transphobes use this type of phrasing to paint their bigotry with a false “scientific” veneer, seeing this casually employed in a supposedly queer-positive context is incredibly disappointing. (For a recent example of how these types of narratives are used to degrade trans woman, consider Kevin D. Williamson’s disgusting hit piece on Laverne Cox for the right wing National Review.)

As a woman with a penis, when I see these signs with “chicks” and “dicks” pointing in perpendicular directions, it feels like this falls into the tired narrative in which trans men’s stories are featured (albeit imperfectly) in the lesbian community, while trans women are ignored at best, or even outright belittled and shown the door.

To make a much more general point, given that we would almost certainly never (at least one hopes) see the “opposite” phraseology of referring to men as “studs” while referring to women according to any number of slang terms for a vagina, maybe that’s an indication that this particular way of classifying human beings isn’t really doing anybody any good, no matter how playfully it might have been intended.

Given the reality in which last November a trans teen in Oakland was hospitalized after being casually set on fire aboard a bus by another teen (while laughing!), getting this stuff right is important, and introducing a bunch of transphobic nonsense in an otherwise decent and important article is just a disgrace to us all in the end.

Asking the Question: When Public Interrogation of Trans Women’s Bodies Turns into Open Sexualized Violence

While the media has a long history of sensationalizing stories involving trans people, in the last few months a number of debates have erupted in response to mainstream media figures asking prominent trans women invasive and inappropriate questions about their bodies during interviews. While the response from those media figures to criticism over this line of questioning has varied from equivocation to petulant outrage, what is often lost in the discussion is that one reason trans women object so strongly to this is that we are so accustomed to receiving questions like these in our private lives (or at least, what should be our private lives).

Beyond being merely invasive, there are situations in which trans women can detect a seed of violence in these kinds of questions, which in numerous cases has manifested in actual violence. Last week in Atlanta just such a situation led to an extreme and violent incident in which two trans women were attacked, and one was beaten and forcibly stripped naked in public, evidently as a form of punishment for resisting such interrogation.

Last Tuesday, two trans women, Janell Crosby and Tyra Woods, were walking to a MARTA transit station when a group of cis men approached and starting yelling inappropriate questions at them. Not content with publicly gawking at these two women in public, they began following them, even taking pictures of them on the subway platform without permission.

Janell Crosby later told Atlanta’s WSB-TV News, “[They] just kept of asking us was we real… Like really trying to get us. ‘Are you real?’ ‘Are y’all this or that?’ Just trying to embarrass us.”

“They were trying to find out if we are men or women,” said Tyra Woods. “I shouldn’t have to disclose who I am to [someone] I’m not even interested in talking to.”

However, the situation dramatically worsened when both of these women and the male harassers boarded the train. During transit, Crosby resisted their harassing behavior by telling the men off, to which one of them responded by kicking her. A melee ensued in which one of the men violently ripped the clothes off of Woods while beating her, exposing her breasts and genitalia. She ended up defending herself while completely naked.

An intensely disturbing video of the incident has been posted online that makes the intentions of the men who attacked them abundantly clear: submission and humiliation. In particular, the man who ripped off Tyra Woods’ clothes is clearly attempting to shame her about her body, as a kind of answer to the question: “What are you?”

These events are only more disturbing considering that while there were apparently dozens of onlookers, not a single one attempted to intervene at any point, nor did any of them bother to call 911 or alert MARTA authorities, during or after the fight.

Indeed, one observer filmed the graphic video mentioned earlier and then posted it online in order to continue gawking and further humiliate the two women, which is made clear by the tagline on the page, “2 Trannies Get Into A Fight With 2 Guys On ATL MARTA!” [The page with the video can be seen here]. The video has gone viral, with a large number of commenters chiming in with similar transphobic language and expressing disgust at these women’s bodies, as well as some pushing victim-blaming narratives regarding the violence they experienced.

The voyeuristic element of this incident is reminiscent of an event from April 2011 in which trans woman Chrissy Lee Polis was brutally attacked and beaten by two young cis women (one of them only 14 years-old) in a McDonald’s bathroom in Maryland.

In her own words, Polis stated in the aftermath of the incident, “They said, ‘That’s a dude, that’s a dude and she’s in the female bathroom,’ … They spit in my face.” The two attackers were so brutal that they ended up dragging Polis across the floor of the restaurant by her hair and she eventually fell into a seizure.

Meanwhile, an employee of the restaurant (who was later fired) filmed the incident while some onlookers laughed, and later warned the attackers to run as police were on their way. The video was again posted online with the intention of gawking and humiliating the trans woman victimized in the attack.

“I knew they were taping me; I told the guy to stop,” Polis said afterwards. “They didn’t help me. They didn’t do nothing for me.”

Of course, not every time someone asks a trans woman an invasive question does this necessarily come from a place of violence; however, while plenty of shades of grey exist between Katie Couric asking Carmen Carrera, “your private parts are different now, aren’t they?” and some guy yelling out, “Bitch, are you a man?!” on the streets, the fact is that all questions along this spectrum are rooted in voyeurism, and usually misogyny as well. The latter point is evidenced in part by the fact that these questions are most often directed at trans women and trans-feminine individuals, especially on the streets where we are most vulnerable.

A further important point that is often lost in discussions on this issue is that when media figures force these invasive questions into the conversation, they are implicitly setting examples for real-world social interactions, and that includes people watching at home that may have never even (knowingly) met a trans person before. Casually asking trans women inappropriate questions about their bodies mirrors a society that views interrogation of trans bodies so casually that a man could violently strip a woman naked in pubic, almost certainly well aware that he was being filmed in the act, and show no care or concern for any potential consequences whatsoever.

Indeed, this belief is borne out in the subtle fact that in their news report, WSB-TV News made the unfortunate decision to blur out the faces of the men who attacked Janell Crosby and Tyra Woods on a MARTA train — for some reason choosing to protect the identities of men engaged in a public act of sexualized trans-misogynistic violence.

And while of course many trans people have been generous enough to share intimate details of their stories in books, interviews, and elsewhere, it is partly with this important point about modeling real-life interactions in mind that I have previously proposed that if media figures insist on asking trans people these kinds of questions, the very least they could do is to frame those questions by acknowledging the fact that they would never ask similar questions of a cis person.

Along these lines, one trans woman who has kindly shared her story with the public, author and advocate Janet Mock, recently beautifully exposed the invasiveness of these types of media questions when she flipped the script in an interview with journalist Alicia Menendez. Mock, who had previously had her own experience with gross, misgendering questions on Piers Morgan‘s now defunct CNN primetime show, asked Menendez about her history as a cisgender woman with questions like, “When did your breasts start budding” and “Do you have a vagina?” Even though Menendez graciously agreed to go along with the scenario from the beginning, as soon as the interview ended she instinctively cringed, acknowledging, “That was awful!”

Once it is acknowledged that we would never ask similar questions of a cis person, I think it becomes quite difficult to justify asking them of a trans person, especially when they have no relationship to the ostensible topic at hand. And again I emphasize that part of the reason trans women object so strongly is because these are similar to issues we deal with in our own personal lives, and that oftentimes these questions form a component of badgering or intimidation we face in the real world. From my own perspective as a trans woman who has moved around a lot, I have myself experienced variations on this type of public interrogation in many different places and cultural contexts.

In one incident, during a visit to Dresden I was riding a tram home from work late at night when I gradually realized two men talking loudly behind me in German were attempting to draw other passengers’ attention to my presence. While I couldn’t understand precisely what they were saying, the basic meaning was certainly made clear a couple of stops later; as they passed my seat while exiting the tram one of these men tapped his finger sharply on my upper wrist — where I have a bit more hair than the average woman — and stated loudly for everyone on board to hear, “Ja, it’s a man,” suddenly finding it useful to employ English.

Other experiences I have had with these kinds of interactions have varied from misguided curiosity from strangers to acts of intimidation even more outright than the incident in Dresden. Keep in mind, these are my experiences as a white trans woman from a middle class background who is not nearly as vulnerable on the streets as trans women of color like Janell Crosby and Tyra Woods, or trans women who need to rely on sex work to get by.

To their credit, MARTA spokesperson Lyle Harris has stated that MARTA is investigating the attack that occurred on board their train and has pledged to take action (although I notice they still have not even issued a press release about the incident on their website). From this point, the LGBT community and allies should all remain vigilant of the issue in order to ensure they follow through.

That having been said, this incident should also serve as a wake up call to some allies within the community itself who have all too often been dismissive of the issues trans women face and how media shapes public perception of our lives.

And finally, this is also a moment to push the news media — which so far seems to have basically ignored this story — to do better. Considering the media’s long history of sensationalizing trans women’s lives, sensationalizing trans womens’ deaths, and in some cases almost certainly contributing to their deaths, having them extend some basic sensitivity in how they present our stories is long overdue.

Loretta Saunders Found Dead; Epidemic of Violence Against Canada’s Indigenous Women Continues

Communities across Canada gather every year on October 4th for “Sisters in Spirit” vigil, an event to commemorate the lives of missing and murdered Aboriginal women of Canada and to demand justice in the face of stubborn indifference from both government and police. This indifference appears despite a very clear pattern of racist-misogynist violence under which Indigenous women in Canada are five to seven times more vulnerable than non-Indigenous women according to the government’s own statistics; however, Amnesty International speculates that even this may be understating the problem as a result of deficiencies in state reporting.

Loretta Saunders, a 26-year old Inuk woman who was studying Criminology at St. Mary’s University, turned in her 28-page thesis proposal in late January of this year in which she intended to detail the cruel violence faced by Canada’s Indigenous women. Yesterday, her body was found in a wooded median along a New Brunswick highway. She was pregnant before her murder.

Viat theglobeandmail.com

Her roommates, 25-year old Blake Leggette and 28-year old Victoria Henneberry, had already been arrested by police on charges related to her Feb. 13 disappearance. On Feb. 18 the pair were arrested on charges of fraud and possession of stolen goods — Loretta’s car.

Police have stated that they have identified suspects in the homicide case and that they are not presently seeking any further suspects.

Her thesis advisor Darryl Leroux had given her glowing remarks in response to her thesis proposal (detailed in his own words here), which sadly she will never be able to complete.

Cheryl Maloney
Via cbc.ca

At a press conference held within hours of the discovery of Loretta’s body, Cheryl Maloney, President of the Nova Scotia Women’s Association, stated

“I’m never going to let Stephen Harper or Canadians forget about Loretta and all the other missing or murdered aboriginal people.”

and further,

“She wasn’t what society expected for a missing aboriginal girl. Canadian society, and especially our prime minister, has been able to ignore the reality of the statistics that are against aboriginal girls… This is not what everyone expects, but she is at risk. Every aboriginal girl in this country is vulnerable. For Canada to be ignoring it for so long, it’s disheartening. How many more families does this have to happen to before they take seriously the problem?”

Loretta joins a staggering number of other Indigenous women whose families are left grieving and wondering if they’ll ever see change or accountability. We can only hope that her tragic death will serve as a wake-up call to the Canadian government and police forces to take action to prevent violence against vulnerable women in Canada, but as the content of Loretta’s thesis proposal demonstrates, the wait’s already been a long one.

Jewlyes Gutierrez Enters Conflict Resolution Program, But Systemic Violence Against Trans Women of Color Remains

Most people would hope that when extreme bullying occurs and is brought to the attention of authorities, the bullies in question will be punished. The opposite happened to Jewlyes Gutierrez; when she was “tormented and harassed” by other students because of her trans status, she was charged with misdemeanor battery for defending herself.

Given that the incident arose in response to intense, ongoing bullying, observers had already widely questioned the decision by Contra Costa County District Attorney Dan Cabral to charge a 16-year old transgender high school student with a misdemeanor count of battery following a schoolyard altercation between her and three other students. However, it now appears that trans teen Jewlyes Gutierrez may be able to avoid charges after all, as she enters restorative justice, a court-ordered conflict resolution program.

Jewlyes, a Hercules High School student and a young trans woman of color, had been facing ongoing harassment and bullying at school from a group of cisgender girls; when she went to the school administration to report the situation was becoming intolerable, nothing happened. Finally, one day one of these girls assaulted Jewlyes by throwing used chewing gum in her face; Jewlyes had had it, she fought back, although she ended up being ganged up on by three other girls in the fight.

“I was just sticking up for myself,” she told NBC Bay Area News, “Because you’re different, you’ll get picked on, you’ll get name calling, bullied, taunted, harassed — all those.”

In the end, no one was seriously injured, but bizarrely, the District Attorney’s office chose to press misdemeanor battery charges against Jewlyes. This seems to be quite unusual, and I can’t help but doubt whether a white, cisgender child would have been charged under similar circumstances; it seems quite unlikely. Further, why would the D.A. charge Jewlyes for battery but not, at the least, charge the two other girls who jumped in on the fight and ganged up against her?

Indeed, West Contra Costa School Board President Charles Ramsey said of the incident that it should have been a teachable moment, rather than something that went to D.A.’s office. Jewlyes’s public defender Kaylie Simon expressed a similar sentiment, stating, “When I initially received this case, I was shocked that the district attorney’s office decided to charge [her].” She elaborated by saying, “I think by charging her, it sends a message to bullies that you can bully individuals, and that adults will then further victimize the person that you’ve been tormenting,”

A petition started by Jewlyes’s sister calling for the charges to be dropped eventually reached over 200,000 signatures. However, as a result of a plea agreement between her public defender and the juvenile court judge overseeing her case, Jewlyes will now enter the restorative justice program with the aim of resolving the issue outside of the court system itself.

Jewlyes described the program herself saying, “It’s like conflict resolution to talk it out… Then, after it is over, [the charge] will hopefully be dismissed.”

In a prepared statement, Kimberly Aceves of the Contra Costa County-based RYSE Center said, “Jewlyes’ honesty, courage, and commitment to reconnecting and healing with her peers is a compelling and inspiring call for RYSE and our partners to continue to shed light on and shift the current conditions of unwelcoming and unsafe school environments that cause harm for all students, including transgender youth and youth of color.”

While the charges against Jewlyes have not yet been formally dropped, this development unquestionably represents a big step in the right direction. Meanwhile, the fact that this situation even occurred in the first place speaks to a much larger issue about the bullying that LGBT youth face in school and elsewhere, which falls particularly hard on trans youth, especially trans women of color. Indeed, according to an extensive 2011 survey from GLSEN, a full 80% of transgender youth reported feeling unsafe in their school environment.

And while it happened outside of a school context, Jewlyes’s situation is also reminiscent of the ordeal faced by trans woman of color CeCe McDonald (and many other trans women of color), which again illustrates the racist and transphobic biases that are apparent in our legal system. CeCe spent 19 months in prison for defending herself from a violently racist and transmisogynistic attack before finally being released in January.

As most of us are familiar, in June 2011 CeCe and her friends, all people of color, were walking past a bar in Minnesota when Dean Schmitz, a white man, and two white women friends of his began shouting bigoted comments. When CeCe and her friends verbally resisted this bigotry, one of the white women responded by smashing a bar glass against CeCe’s face and a fight broke out. When CeCe exited the fight, Dean Schmitz aggressively pursued her and she pulled out a pair of scissors from her purse and later stabbed him in self-defense. Schmitz later died, and CeCe was eventually charged with second-degree murder, although this was later reduced to manslaughter as part of a plea deal.

CeCe and her legal team decided to accept this deal in the aftermath of the judge’s ruling that neither Dean Schmitz’s violent criminal history nor the fact that the he had a swastika tattooed on his body could be admitted as evidence in court; however, the fact that CeCe had once written a bad check could be used to impeach her own testimony during the trial. (The prosecutor had argued that the swastika was not visible when Schmitz was chasing CeCe down; but of course a swastika clearly speaks to the motivations for the racist abuse Schmitz and his friends had used to initiate the confrontation, and it speaks to what was likely in his mind as he chased CeCe down).

During her imprisonment, CeCe was held in a men’s prison and further spent long-term periods in solitary confinement, a practice that is commonly imposed on trans women and in my view should be classified as torture.

Taken as a whole, we see from these events how trans youth, particularly trans women of color, are vulnerable to bullying and how the legal system often acts to reinforce and support this type of social poison rather than to eliminate it. For this reason, we see the need to continue supporting anti-bullying policies and legislation for schools all across the nation, as well as legislation that codifies trans-inclusion such as California’s AB-1266, and the need to stand up for vulnerable trans children who may be targeted by reactionary forces. And further we should continue supporting institutions such as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project that support vulnerable trans people who may be dismissed or even targeted by the legal system that should be structured to support them.

Anti-Trans Radical Feminists Team Up With Conservatives to Harass Colorado Trans Teen

feature image via shizzledizzlemagic.com

On October 10, the California-based right-wing law firm Pacific Justice Institute issued a press release on its website titled “Nightmare: Teen Boy Harasses Girls in Their Bathroom, Colo. School Tells Girls They Have No Rights.”

Like a page out of the right-wing playbook on trans issues, the press release read, in part:

Attorneys with Pacific Justice Institute (PJI) sent a strongly-worded letter this afternoon to school officials at Florence High School, warning them against squelching student privacy and speech rights in order to cater to the wishes of a teenage boy who has been entering girls’ bathrooms on campus…

Parents at the school, located near Colorado Springs, became irate when they learned that a teenage boy was entering girls’ bathrooms and, according to some students, even making sexually harassing comments toward girls he was encountering. When the parents confronted school officials, they were stunned to be told the boy’s rights as a self-proclaimed transgender trumped their daughters’ privacy rights. As the controversy grew, some students were threatened by school authorities with being kicked off school athletic teams or charged with hate crimes if they continued to voice concerns. The parents became aware of PJI’s Notice of Reasonable Expectation of Privacy and contacted PJI for help.

Brad Dacus, President of PJI, was quoted as saying:

“We’re not going to stand by and let 99.7% of our students lose their privacy and free speech rights just because .3% of the population are gender-confused. LGBT activists are sacrificing the safety and sanity of our schools to push an extreme political agenda. This battle is no longer confined to California or Colorado; it is spreading to every part of the nation. It is crucial that we act now to prevent a crippling blow to our constitutional freedoms.”

From here, the situation quickly exploded over the next few days as the story began to appear in local news before breaking in several high-profile tabloids and right-wing news sites, including the UK’s Daily Mail.

The problem with all this, of course, is that the story is largely fabricated. This fact is strongly hinted in the press release itself, in fact. Notice that not a single parent or student of Florence High School is quoted in the text, and no description is given whatsoever of the supposed “harassment” that a trans teen committed in the washroom.

There is, however, a very real young trans girl (we’ll refer to her as Jane Doe) who was the target of the PJI press release; she found out that she was supposedly guilty of “harassment” when the news media showed up one day outside of her school.

From here, I’m afraid, the story goes quickly from ugly to uglier. The good news is that, thanks to some tough reporting from Cristan William’s over at the TransAdvocate, the truth about the issue came to light very quickly. She contacted the school’s Superintendent Rhonda Vendetti, who reported that,

“We do have a transgender student at the high school, and she has been using the women’s restrooms. There has not been a situation. All the students of these parents who say they feel uncomfortable just about the fact that the student is allowed to go into the restrooms at the high school, into the stalls – they don’t believe that that’s appropriate, so that’s where it stems from. There has not been an incident of harassment, or anything that would cause any additional concern.”

Hence what we apparently have is another incidence of adults needlessly sexualizing a child’s visitation to the washroom, reminiscent of the previous media storm over six-year old Coy Mathis, another Colorado trans girl.

As a result of Cristan’s reporting and her pushing hard on the news outlets that ran those stories, several of them retracted their pieces, including the Daily Mail and Examiner.com (the latter of whom issued an apology). The story of course still appears almost as originally published over at FOX News (once the Daily Mail story it originally sourced was deleted, FOX quietly changed the link to a right-wing Christian site).

In response to the pushback, PJI was compelled to reveal the nature of the harassment that had supposedly occurred. While their initial press release clearly insinuated that specific incidents of sexual harassment had occurred, PJI later changed their story and claimed that a trans teen using the women’s washroom itself constituted harassment.

While that revelation largely kept the fabricated story from spreading further in major media, the damage was done, and continued to spread in other ways. The comments that immediately appeared underneath virtually all of the “news” pieces in Conservative media were simply vile and murderous. And while PJI has vaguely pretended that it would never have outed the trans kid in question by name (and at least acknowledged that doing so would be morally reprehensible), the fact of the matter is that for a small town in Colorado, there is in reality no doubt about who is being singled out in international media and on what basis (apparently Jane Doe is the only out trans child in her school).

And in any case, it doesn’t matter because PJI and their conservative allies managed to attract support from someone with even lower standards: anti-trans radical feminists.

Keep in mind that the Pacific Justice Institute is a far right organization that publicly supports anti-gay “reparative therapy” and has in the past conflated support for gay and lesbian rights with pedophilia and incest. Given that many radical feminists claim to speak universally on behalf of lesbian cis women, there is certainly irony in the fact that they are parroting the same kind of sexualized smear rhetoric that so many in the LGBT community have been fighting from the right-wing for decades.

There is further irony noting that Jane Doe herself is being raised by lesbian parents. One of her mom’s recently spoke out against the tremendous pressure that outside forces are pushing onto her family, and spoke of the anxiety attacks that her daughter has been experiencing since the anti-trans harassment campaign broke out.

“My wife and I were visiting my sister who was in the hospital while my daughter was in school. The principal called to inform me that a newscaster was at the school and wanted to interview me about my daughter’s ‘bathroom rights’ – this was the first I’d heard about any of this. From what I understand, the school didn’t even know. …I know my daughter. She’s a shy and timid person. It was upsetting. As a matter of fact, before we moved to this town, she was afraid that she would be bullied at school. She had a fear that if she went to this new school, something would happen and she wouldn’t be safe. I reassured her. I told her that everything was going to be fine and to not worry… We’re going through a lot.”

She also stated:

“My daughter was the one who learned about the Pacific Justice Institute. She saw it online. She was upset. It made her panic. She saw where their story had become international news and she saw what people were saying. It gave her anxiety attacks.”

Her mother also unequivocally denies that Jane Doe has harassed anybody.

For years, many in the feminist movement have accused transphobic radfems of professing ideas that closely mirror conservative ideology; however, not until this recent incident have I actually seen their actions align in such a clear manner.

I’ll make an honest comment that in the past I have sometimes thought some (not all) of the reaction to the anti-trans radfem campaigns has been a bit overblown. They’re hateful people who do really inappropriate things, but I don’t think their tactics very effective with the outside world (and I am saying that as someone whom they have publicly targeted in the past). I think many of the anti-trans activists who claim to be feminists fail to effectively make connections in feminist communities because of their misanthropic principles before you even take their transgender (or sex work) politics into account, and I think even a lot of cis people pick up on that. In my view, the anti-trans radfems generally aren’t worthy adversaries for us (and more than a few of their campaigns are just hilariously incompetent anyways).

However, the situation at hand is very stark. How to respond to that takes some thought, in my view, and is probably a long-term question. Personally, I do not think the answer is to engage in endless Twitter wars or to blast phrases like “die cis scum” all over the internet. I don’t think this does anything to empower us as a community over our opponents. For one thing, it just energizes the opposition by giving them more things to yell at us about. That might be fine if they at least only yelled at the trans activists who also joined in with the yelling, but they don’t; they take it out on everybody. For another thing, when we continually raise the red alert over every ridiculous thing a radfem troll says or does on the Internet, it just makes it harder to draw attention to the really important stuff, like the situation Jane Doe is facing in Colorado.

I don’t think the goal of anti-trans radfems is to actually win arguments with us anyways. On the contrary, I think their goal is just to reduce the entire conversation to the lowest common denominator possible. Then outside observers are left with the impression of two warring factions, both of whom are utterly unrelatable, and hence they just give up entirely on trying to make sense of it. That helps anti-trans activists maintain the status quo in which cissexism and trans-misogyny are considered socially acceptable.

I think part of the long-term goal for us is to expose the hateful ideology that all anti-trans activists represent, but doing so in a way that relies more so on direct appeal to the hearts and minds of the masses and steps back from direct confrontations with anti-trans activists (unless necessary or in circumstances that clearly benefit our side of the debate).

As part of exposing the opposition forces for who they really are, let’s briefly return to the Pacific Justice Institute, and their press release that was one of the first pieces in all of this, as the last paragraph of that release reveals their cynicism:

“Earlier this year, PJI led the opposition in California to AB 1266, the most sweeping legislation yet to assert transgender rights in schools. That law, which is set to take effect January 1, 2014, is currently being targeted by a citizen referendum drive. Californians who have not yet signed a petition should visit www.privacyforallstudents.com to get involved.”

Here the organization reveals an ulterior motive, and suddenly it makes perfect sense why PJI went straight to the press instead of making a serious attempt to take the issue up with the school in private. Ultimately, PJI targeted a trans teen in Colorado at least in part to fuel its referendum campaign attempting to derail California’s recently-passed Transgender equality law AB 1266.

While this does expose how desperate they must be in their challenge to trans equality, it also reveals how cynical they are in their attempts to publicly malign a trans child and to interfere in the affairs of her school, her town, and her family. This is why I refer to the Pacific Justice Institute as what they are: an anti-family organization that has no problem disrupting the lives of any family with whom they cannot or choose not to identify. And similarly I think it’s also time to recognize their radfem allies for the anti-woman “feminists” they really are.

Fortunately, many of Jane Doe’s schoolmates and fellow Florence citizens have spoken out in her defense, in defiance of Brad Dacus’s false claim that “99.7% of … students lose their privacy and free speech rights” when trans equality is recognized.

Savannah is a queer trans woman and physicist originally from the great state of Carolina (that alone should tell you which one).  She also writes on trans feminism and other social justice issues on her blog leftytgirl, preferably while listening to metal.  Savannah presently lives in Tokyo where her principle hobbies include singing at karaoke clubs and getting lost on the subway.

Lucy Meadows’ Coroner Says Press Deserves Shame for Her Death

feature image via The Guardian

“To the members of the press, I say shame. Shame on all of you.”

These were the words of Michael Singleton, the coroner assigned to the case of Lucy Meadows, the British school teacher who took her own life shortly after her gender transition made national gossip headlines in the UK earlier this year.

As previously recounted here at Autostraddle, in late 2012, St. Mary Magdalen’s School informed Lucy’s students that Lucy, who had previously lived outwardly as a man, would return after the winter break as a woman. And although this story is something that has virtually no news value whatsoever for people who aren’t directly connected to Lucy’s classroom, for some reason a series of sensationalized stories on the subject appeared in the British press; this started with a story in the local Accrington Observer, featuring a scowling picture of the parents of one of Lucy’s students, and then spiraled up to the UK national press, including two articles that appeared in the Daily Mail tabloid.

The most over the top of these was an opinion column from shock jock commentator Richard Littlejohn titled “[S]he’s not only in the wrong body… [s]he’s in the wrong job” that implied Lucy should be fired or moved to another school. The article also included pre-transition pictures of Lucy with her then-wife; in clear breach of any kind of journalistic standards, these pictures were directly lifted from Facebook.

Richard Littlejohn [via the Guardian]

While we can never be certain exactly what role the harassment she faced from the press played in that decision, it is clear that Lucy bitterly resented the press intrusion into her life, and it is clear that the behavior was entirely inappropriate. Lucy did file a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) about the Littlejohn column; it took two months for the process to be resolved and in the end the Daily Mail offered nothing more than to simply take the story down from its website. That was about a week before Lucy’s death.

The coroner Singleton described the gesture as merely tokenistic, stating, “It seems to be that nothing has been learned from the Leveson inquiry.” It was during the Trans Media Watch presentation to the Leveson inquiry that it became widely public that the British press has gone so far as open up the lives of trans children for public ridicule and abuse.

It is heartening to see that Singleton was willing to come out and make such a strong statement to the UK press (and elsewhere, by extension) that the harassment and abuse of trans people’s lives and stories needs to end. Let us all remember Lucy’s story as we demand that the press starts to listen.

Savannah is a queer trans woman and physicist originally from the great state of Carolina (that alone should tell you which one).  She also writes on trans feminism and other social justice issues on her blog leftytgirl, preferably while listening to metal.  Savannah presently lives in Tokyo where her principle hobbies include singing at karaoke clubs and getting lost on the subway.

I’m Not A Gender Zombie and Neither Are You: Rejecting Anti-Trans Bigotry From Rachel Ivey and Deep Green Resistance

Word has quickly spread on the web in the last week or so that Rachel Ivey, a member of the Deep Green Resistance environmentalist movement that holds openly transphobic views as “core” principles, is putting together a speaking tour consisting of a few relatively high profile events in June and July. This speaking tour supposedly includes events at City College of NYC as well as the University of Toronto.

Of course, in their own words, Deep Green Resistance (DGR) is not transphobic, they are merely “Critic[al] of the politics raised by the transgender movement.” They like to couch this ‘criticism,’ for example, in terms of simple-minded race-gender analogies that are not only non-sensical but probably a bit racist.

You can see the webpage for Rachel Ivey’s online fundraiser for her speaking tour here. Up until recently, several planned dates and speaking venues appeared on the page, including two events scheduled for NYC and a July 4 engagement at the University of Toronto. However, the list of dates and venues were recently removed from the page, apparently because some of those venues have been persuaded to cancel Ms. Ivey’s appearance (such as NYC’s Bluestockings Bookstore).

As a trans woman with strong ties to Toronto, it disturbs me to consider who or what organization might be so misguided as to invite this woman to speak at the University of Toronto. I’m also guessing that it’s no coincidence that the July 4 event occurs right before the radical feminist RadFem Rise Up conference, which is scheduled for Toronto on July 5-7. My guess is that Ms. Ivey will be be speaking at the conference as well (and indeed, her fundraiser page had until recently stated that further events would be announced in Ontario).

It’s worth pointing out that while ‘trans politics’ (i.e. the existence of trans people) will almost certainly be questioned at RadFem Rise Up, all trans people are banned from attendance. Indeed, Ms. Ivey has stated herself that she’s “…not presenting this topic for debate. Not in the slightest.”

From my own perspective as a trans woman, however, I will say that I don’t necessarily think that calling for these events to be canceled is the best course of action. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not calling for meaningless ‘dialogue’ with someone who quite openly (and proudly) expresses transphobia as some ‘radical’ principle, but what I am talking about is what is the most effective response. And I tend to consider that question not only from a trans perspective but also as a feminist. It could be that attending the event (for those allowed to attend, of course) and challenging the speaker’s views in front of an audience would be a better way to go.

In that scenario, it’s not about changing the speaker’s mind, but about providing a counterpoint for those that might be undecided in the audience.

If anyone has the time or patience to listen, there is a video that DGR produced in which Rachel Ivey details her sentiments that she rejects trans people’s identities, that she rejects trans people’s struggles against coercive gender norms, and that she refuses to acknowledge that cis privilege exists. She states that she is unwilling to listen to contrary views on these issues (that much of what she says is believable). The arguments that she makes in the video are based on standard anti-trans strains of radical feminist ideology. The statements she makes are not that sophisticated, and while all of these issues around gender contain subtleties, I think someone who is reasonably educated on trans issues could hear her out and easily challenge her during a Q&A session.

For example, she claims that cis privilege does not exist on the basis that, as she was assigned female at birth, she has faced gendered oppression as a woman her entire life. Of course, that’s true that she has faced gendered oppression her entire life living as a woman in a patriarchal society, it’s just that acknowledging cis privilege is largely a separate issue from the start.

Obviously, for me as a white trans woman to acknowledge that I have white privilege does nothing to obscure the oppression that I have faced as a woman, such as street harassment, or the oppressions that I have faced specifically as a trans woman (e.g. street harassment taking the form of an outright death threat). And, after all, trans women are a tiny fraction of the overall population who are extremely vulnerable to gendered and sexual violence.

Further, acknowledging that gendered oppression takes on specific dynamics for trans women does not erase the gendered oppression that cis women face. More generally, acknowledging that patriarchy’s assigned binary gender roles are coercive and damaging to many trans people does nothing to erase the fact that one of those gender roles is widely privileged over the other.

As mentioned previously, Ms. Ivey also makes a lot of bizarre-sounding analogies between race and gender, and she also quotes her DGR colleague Lierre Keith making similar statements. Of course such analogies are useful in certain circumstances, but when taken too far they tend to quickly get stuck in problematic terrain.

Around the 13:35 min mark in her video, Ms. Ivey claims “I do want to be really clear here that I don’t really care how somebody dresses. I don’t really care how they cut their hair or whether they wear make-up. Personally, I don’t really… it doesn’t really affect me, I don’t really think it’s political.” (She goes on to say she has a problem when such is postulated as an act of political resistance, which in all fairness is a bit over-done sometimes).

However, she later reads a quote from Lierre Keith as follows:

“…how about this. I am really Native American. How do I know? I’ve always felt a special connection to animals, and started building tee pees in the backyard as soon as I was old enough. I insisted on wearing moccasins to school even though the other kids made fun of me and my parents punished me for it. I read everything I could on native people, started going to pow wows and sweat lodges as soon as I was old enough, and I knew that was the real me. And if you bio-Indians don’t accept us trans-Indians, then you are just as genocidal and oppressive as the Europeans.”

Ms. Ivey proceeds to supplement this with similar analogies, claiming that being a trans woman has equal validity as being “trans black,” stating that one would then supposedly wear clothing associated with African American cultures.

Okay, first of all it must be acknowledged that the sentiment expressed in these comments clearly contradicts the previous statement that Ms. Ivey doesn’t care what somebody wears. If a white person with no meaningful connection to Native American culture wearing moccasins (clearly inappropriate) is analogous to someone born with a penis wearing woman-typical clothing, then that clearly insinuates that that behavior should be considered inappropriate. So I think Ms. Ivey is being at best a bit disingenuous here.

Of course the reality is that these things are not analogous because cultural specificities have to do with a group of people forming, over time, a local context and traditions. There is innumerable evidence that undermining such cultural specificities (through colonization, globalization, etc.) leads to mass-scale human suffering, and is in fact virtually always a component of genocide.

Neither woman-typical nor man-typical clothing resides in the same realm as such local cultural specificities. A person with a penis wearing woman-typical clothing does nothing to undermine “woman culture” nor vice-versa. For example, when women began wearing trousers more commonly in the latter half of the 20th century, they did not do so as a result of male cultural coercion or colonization. Instead they did it out of a component of liberation: it’s called, given your local context, wear whatever the hell you want. Likewise, if men in North America began wearing skirts en masse in the near future, this would not represent a colonization of “woman culture.” In fact, it’s difficult to believe that such a shift would even be all that important.

In fact, if we carry it to completion, we find that the analogy is actually not even consistent with the internal logic of the anti-trans elements of radfem ideology. Because the argument that is virtually always given is that for someone born with a penis to wear a skirt is problematic because it supposedly reifies patriarchal gender norms. (This claim is not true, but we’ll get back to that point in just a moment.)

However, if some ignorant white person were to go around wearing a traditional Native headdress, no one (not even transphobic radfems… at least, one hopes…) would condemn their actions on the basis that by dressing in such a manner they were supposedly “reifying problematic cultural norms.” Such a claim would probably be just as offensive and degrading as the original cultural appropriation itself.

Regarding the claim itself (that trans people wearing clothes they feel most comfortable with supposedly reifies patriarchal gender norms), I would simply ask that the people who profess this idea please offer some concrete, non-ideological verification of this claim. Seriously, what does this even mean? Do these particular radical feminists believe, for example, that when an ordinance is passed providing people with social and legal protections based on gender identity and gender expression, that young girls in the affected area are more likely to be coerced into traditional female social roles as a result of this? When trans people are accepted in society, does it become suddenly more difficult to step outside the boundaries of the traditional gender binary roles?

I’ve heard this claim about reifying patriarchy over and over ad nauseum in various articles from a radical feminist perspective, but I’ve never once heard even a single example of how accepting trans people’s identities supposedly resulted in narrower gender roles for others.

It’s when I hear these claims repeated over and over without any evidence that I suspect that many of these arguments, when it comes down to it, have less to do with the professed ideology, and more to do with the fact that trans lives and trans identities simply offend that individual’s sensibilities.

Moving on, around the 29:13 mark, Ms. Ivey states her belief that trans women who might have some form of male privilege earlier in life, carry that privilege with them no matter what for the rest of their lives. This is a point where Ms. Ivey’s statements cross from ideological nonsense into deeply offensive and damaging. Now I do not deny for a moment that I myself did in many ways have access to male privilege growing up; I was encouraged in school particularly and that probably played a role in my endeavors in science.

However, these days when I’m walking home at night and I get abuse and sexual innuendo hurled at me by strange men, having it ring in my ears that I supposedly have access to male privilege to just snap my fingers and escape that moment is cruelly ironic. I don’t have access to male privilege on the streets. I don’t have access to male privilege in the workplace, where I have previously faced harassment. I do have a history of male privilege and I would never deny that, but attempting to erase my very real present from that picture does nothing to benefit any of us involved in this conversation.

I think this gets at one of the main problems that this type of ideology feeds: somehow anti-trans radical feminists seem to be incapable of acknowledging the violence and discrimination that trans people, and particularly trans women of color, face on a constant basis. I think it’s very difficult to have a productive discussion on those terms, because honestly it feels like my humanity is being questioned when simply acknowledging my very real history of oppression is somehow equated with solidifying patriarchy’s grasp. (At one particularly disconcerting moment in Ms. Ivey’s comments on this issue, she implies that trans women are lucky because the court system supposedly considers us fully human; for some examples of how ‘human’ the court system views trans women, consider the systematic victim-blaming that occurred in the aftermath of the brutal murder of Gwen Araujo or the prosecution of CeCe McDonald for fighting back against the white supremacist trans-misogynists who attacked her.)

And you know, in a patriarchal world, the fact that it is most certainly trans women who face much of the blunt oppression in the trans community is not exactly a random coincidence. Rather than denying trans women’s struggles, one would think the fact that cis and trans woman are both victimized most heavily by gendered oppression would be a point for us to come together and push back against the oppression facing all women.

However, transphobic strains of radical feminism provide a counterpoint to solidarity by instead insisting that patriarchal socialization (for everyone, no matter birth genitalia) is like having a permanent magnet in someone’s brain that can never be undone— short, perhaps, of unquestionably adopting those tenants of radical feminism. Ms. Ivey herself encapsulates this idea when she states regarding trans women that “I’m not afraid of your penis, but I’m terrified of your socialization.”

Although Ms. Ivey doesn’t say much about this directly, this comment speaks to the wider narrative commonly pushed in these types of ideologies: that trans women are actually just men who have been programmed by patriarchy to invade women’s spaces; that deep down the true goal of a trans woman who may likely experience social isolation, discrimination, loss of employment, rejection by family members when they come out, and many of whom will experience permanent body changes and possibly painful, irreversible surgery, is really just to gain access to the women’s washroom or locker room and try to sneak a peek of a cis woman while she’s changing clothes.

At a certain a point, its almost like transphobic radical feminists view trans women as little more than walking gender zombies; those of us who are attracted to men transitioned to escape being seen as gay males, those of us who are attracted to women did it to enter the women’s bathroom, more generally, trans women supposedly transitioned because male socialization prevented us from expressing our emotions when we were viewed as boys, and the only way to escape being seen as a ‘weak, emotional man was’ of course to become a woman. None of us could have possibly transitioned out of a genuine sense of our own personhood.

And I can’t help but notice these tired narratives resonate with the endless radical feminist obsessions against sex-positivity and sex work, in which they have gone so far in speaking over the voices of actual sex workers as to propose dehumanizing ideas such as ‘false consciousness,’ which basically states that if a sex working woman says that she enjoys her work then she doesn’t actually mean what she’s saying; deep down she’s actually miserable and she’s only expressing a contrary view because she’s been brainwashed by the patriarchy into believing she could be happy in her occupation.

So here’s the reality: attempting to create a world in which every single gendered behavior someone might exhibit is interpreted as a reflection of an irreversible pathological socialization does nothing to reduce patriarchy’s influence on society; on the contrary, viewing human beings as fundamentally incapable of making decisions about their own bodies and their own lives would only and could only act as an affirmation of patriarchy.

However, to make a blunt statement, at a certain point I have to think that Ivey’s claim that she and her colleagues are working to eliminate gender from society entirely is not all that serious in the first place. After all, despite the fact that she repeatedly dismisses Judith Butler’s gender theories as “liberal feminism,” I can’t help but notice that she herself perfectly well fits within Butler’s concept of gender performativity: Rachel Ivey is immediately recognizable as a woman according to her gender presentation and mannerisms. She wears a skirt, she refers to herself using a woman-typical gendered name, and her colleagues consistently refer to her with female gender pronouns.

And what exactly are Ivey and the rest of DGR doing to supposedly eliminate gender from society? As I mentioned, these individuals use gendered pronouns pretty much in the manner that the rest of society does. The use of gendered pronouns of course plays a role in socialization from the earliest stages of human development. If Ms. Ivey and the rest of DGR really seek to dismantle the concept of gender entirely (or at least lessen its imprint on society), why don’t they at least take the simplest imaginable step by eliminating gender pronouns in their own language?

Of course, I doubt DGR would ever take such a simple step, because it’s always much easier selectively criticizing the gender expressions of a tiny portion of the population, just as much of patriarchal society already does.

One is almost tempted to question if they even authentically believe their own ideology.

Savannah is a queer trans woman and physicist originally from the great state of Carolina (that alone should tell you which one).  She also writes on trans feminism and other social justice issues on her blog leftytgirl, preferably while listening to metal.  Savannah presently lives in Tokyo where her principle hobbies include singing at karaoke clubs and getting lost on the subway.

Sadism Masquerading As Journalism: The Press And Lucy Meadows

feature image via the guardian

Last Monday, March 25, about three hundred people gathered outside of the offices of the Daily Mail in Kensington, London to hold a vigil in honor of Lucy Meadows, a British school teacher who was found dead at her home about a week earlier. The vigil was held at the Daily Mail headquarters in silent protest of how the UK tabloid (and other elements of the British press) had strewn details of a small-town teacher’s personal life across national headlines – likely playing a role in her apparent suicide. Many of those same members of the press hardly flinched as they continued disrespecting Meadows, even in reporting her death.

On December 19, 2012, the story appeared in the local Accrington Observer that Lucy Meadows, who had formerly lived as a man, would be returning to her teaching duties at St. Mary Magdalen’s School after Christmas break now living as a woman. The story incorrectly gendered Meadows as male throughout and featured a scowling picture of Wayne Cowie, a parent of one Meadow’s pupils, holding a copy of a letter to parents informing them of Meadows gender transition. Mr. Cowie was quoted speaking about his son, “He has had this teacher for three years. All of a sudden [she] is going to be coming to school after Christmas as a woman.” He added, “They are too young to be dealing with that.”

I would argue that children are perfectly capable of dealing with the issue of gender transition; my experience is that beyond perhaps vague curiosity, they usually don’t care very much (if at all). This naturally leads us to a more immediate question: why would anyone, unless perhaps they are directly connected to the school, care about this story? I have difficulty seeing how this story is worthy of any news coverage, even at the local level.

via socialist worker

Of course, the press has every right to ask questions when it has some kind of (even broadly-defined) relation to the public interest. Usually that would mean asking questions of public figures or focusing on issues that affect a significant number of people. Lucy Meadows is not a public figure and her gender transition had a direct impact on very few people.

The manner in which the press was obviously bottom-feeding to dig up dirt in this case was a bit unreal. For example, quoting anonymous sources is usually something that is done when there is no other way to move forward on an important story. The present story has virtually no journalistic importance whatsoever, and yet the Daily Mail and others relied on such sources for comment when they piled on shortly after the local story broke. In their significantly more aggressive piece, the Daily Mail featured not only more creative comments from Mr. Cowie, but anonymous comments from other parents, including one who was quoted as saying:

“At first we thought [she] was just borrowing [her] wife’s headbands to hold [her] hair back,”

And another:

“This is totally inappropriate… Any teacher who is going to change gender should also change schools.”

They also trolled Facebook for personal photos and badgered individuals involved in the story for information. The original Daily Mail story included four photos of Meadows before her transition; three of these were taken from her wedding three years previous and two of them featured her recently-divorced wife. Apparently these pictures were lifted directly from the Facebook page of one of Meadows family members in clear breach of both Britain’s Press Complaints Commission (PCC) Code of Practice and common decency.

It’s this kind of treatment that pushes us to ask what, exactly, constitutes harassment. A day after professional diver Tom Daley and his partner suffered a disappointing loss for Britain at the 2012 London Games last year, a 17 year-old boy was arrested for sending Daley a tirade of harassing messages on twitter. To use another example, late last year Gregory Alan Elliot was arrested for months of alleged twitter harassment of a feminist activist in Toronto. He is alleged to have disrupted much of her campaigning activities online; the sheer  volume of the messages resulted in police involvement. What is it that differentiates these cases from how the press treated Lucy? While the former are unquestionably inappropriate (and illegal), the latter is considered… quality journalism?

The media’s intrusion into Meadows’s life wasn’t limited to the Internet; in December when the story broke, the press camped out both outside the school and outside her home. In an email to a friend, Meadows complained the lengths she had to take in order to avoid being photographed by the press. She used a backdoor to avoid them in front of her house, left for work early and stayed at the school until late. She also said that, “many parents have been quite annoyed with the press, too, especially those that were trying to give positive comments but were turned away,” and even more damningly, “I know the press offered parents money if they could get a picture of me.”

While these actions point to a manufactured hunger for these stories among the press corps, the media attempt to paint themselves as asking “essential” questions that we’ve all heard before: how will this affect children. This tired narrative that uses rhetorical questions of “what’s best for the children involved” as a way to deflect criticism of transphobia, homophobia or any other number of social prejudices is pushed on full volume in a second column that appeared in the Daily Mail a day after the first. This column, written by well-known tabloid trash shock jock Richard Littlejohn, expresses blasé rhetorical support for trans people and goes on to ask if “anyone stopped for a moment to think of the devastating effect all this is having on those who really matter? Children as young as seven aren’t equipped to compute this kind of information.”

via the guardian

Many people have responded to Lucy’s death by demanding that Richard Littlejohn being fired (including myself), and there is even a petition to this effect out there with over 200,000 signatures. However, having some time to reflect on the situation and read over  some opinions that have questioned this demand,, I’ve decided that calling for Littlejohn to be fired might feel good but it may actually be overlooking the bigger picture: after all it was the supposed “news” press that hounded Meadows outside her school and her home. If they had never done that, Littlejohn would have never had the opportunity to pile on top of it all in his commentary piece.

The harder truth is that this thing started at the local news level, with a story by Stuart Pike in the Accrington Observer and spread outwards from there. The problem is with the media itself, not one figurehead who happens to pretty openly despise lots of vulnerable people. And it’s very clear that the British media itself has refined this type of public abuse of trans people to almost the level of a twisted art form (see here for details on how the British press and others actually open up trans children’s lives for public abuse; also see here).

It’s not necessarily clear what role her ordeal with the press played in Lucy’s decision to end her life; perhaps some clues to her state of mind at that time may emerge in the future, or perhaps they will not. However, it is clear that these types of stories focusing on the private details of trans people’s lives and bodies serve absolutely no public interest. They only serve to provide trash tabloids, and even supposedly reputable newspapers, massive page hits and advertising revenue. The hounding of Lucy Meadows and other trans people by the press should be viewed for what it is: self-interest and ruthless sensationalism; in short, it is journalistic sadism.

In looking back at the unraveling of the story, we note that the Headteacher of the school stated that Meadows had the full support of the school staff. Meadows was also quoted as saying that her decision had been a difficult one to make; she further requested that her privacy be respected. If only that simple, reasonable request could have been respected from the start.

About the author: Savannah is a queer trans woman and physicist originally from the great state of Carolina (that alone should tell you which one).  She also writes on trans feminism and other social justice issues on her blog leftytgirl, preferably while listening to metal.  Savannah presently lives in Tokyo where her principle hobbies include singing at karaoke clubs and getting lost on the subway.

Getting With Girls Like Us: A Radical Guide to Dating Trans* Women for Cis Women

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trans*scribe illustration © rosa middleton, 2013

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Recently, I went on a dinner date with a cis woman that ended a bit awkwardly. Some of the conversation we shared was nice, we talked about film (fyi – an easy topic to hold my interest, ladies!), our common roots back in the States, and her background in performance art. At one point she shared with me her frustrations over a performance meant to showcase artists from our region in the U.S. The thing is, whoever put together this particular exhibition had invited a number of men from her theatre program to participate — meanwhile she and several of the other women who graduated from the program found out about the event later when one of the guys posted it on facebook.

It’s pretty easy to feel anger over such blatant sexism, and it immediately reminded me of some of my own experiences of feeling ignored at times in my own workplace. But then she said something that struck a really odd chord:

“Yeah, it’s supposed to represent artists from the South, but it turns out it’s just a total sausage fest.”

Okay, we all get the basic intended meaning here. But is she really implying that the men who were invited to exhibit their work were asked to do so on the basis of their genitalia? As a woman I have to say that having a penis never got me special treatment in the academic world. And given that she was aware of my body configuration I have to think that is a strange comment to make to me on a date.

Sadly, the situation only further deteriorated with the appearance of the word “ladyboy,” and the fact that somehow the subject kept getting changed when I tried to discuss these things. After the point that she referred to me as a “trans woman” as opposed to a “woman woman,” I found it difficult to bring myself to even say much for the last few minutes of our little disaster date.

Okay ladies, let’s stop right here and get our game together. One point is that this isn’t just a matter of grossing out a trans woman over dinner; it’s also a matter of a cis woman making herself look like kind of an ass. And beyond that, this kind of ignorant cissexism just gets in the way of us getting closer and having fun together.

Now, if your response is to start worrying over having to figure out all this ‘complicated trans stuff,’ then I would emphasize a lot of this boils down to respecting us as women just as much as you would want to be respected yourself. And the fact is that trans women are a component of queer women’s communities, so a lack of respect amongst us just means more devaluing of women, when society dishes out plenty of that for all of us already.

Not to mention that this results in some probably well-intentioned cis women missing out on connecting with lots of beautiful, amazing trans women. So with that in mind, I have put together some suggestions for cis women on thinking through some basic trans issues, including ideas on approaching trans women in a romantic or intimate context. And I want to be clear that working through this stuff applies the same in the context of a casual hookup as it does a romantic date.

I also want to be clear that the following represents only my own perspectives; I don’t speak for all trans women. Most importantly, whether you agree with every single point or not, the main thing is if you just think through some of these issues a bit you’ll probably be in a better place to come off as a well-intentioned friend rather than a jerk who doesn’t know any better. And you’ll be in a better place to have more fun.

Community Inclusion

In the last few years this situation has improved in some respects at least in some parts of the U.S. and Canada. But the fact is that there are still parties held in some places in which admittance is “women OR trans” only, meaning in this case that one should be either woman or trans, but not both. But even at parties, clubs or women’s spaces where we are included, many trans women have at times expressed feeling more tolerated than accepted.

As a further point, our inclusion in much of queer women’s culture is still nominal at best. As a nearby example, I’ve gotten some laughs out of some of the serial lesbian content on the sidebar here at Autostraddle, but I’m still waiting for a woman like me to show up on screen and join in the fun. Also, it’s rather cliché at this point that mainstream lesbian-oriented content tends to show more interest in trans men’s stories (who are, after all, not women) than ours (The L Word being the most obvious example).

Look, I get that it takes some time to work some of these things out, but part of my point is just that making it clear you believe trans women should be included is a good step towards developing meaningful friendship with us. On the contrary, referring to a bunch of dudes as a “sausage fest” might not be such a cool/sexy/romantic thing to do (regardless of anyone’s actual genital status… after all, some men have a vagina).

Recognize Our Perspectives

I realize there are a wide variety of trans narratives out there, and maybe it could seem like a lot to work through. But the basic script isn’t that difficult: respect our identities and our bodily autonomy, and when you’re not sure, find a gentle way to ask that doesn’t put anybody on the spot. (And if it’s just not your business to know something in the first place, then don’t ask.)

Another good idea is to understand that many trans people (including a number of trans-feminists) have come up with language to describe the cissexist world they see around them, and to challenge society to do better. Please respect our way of describing the world.

Sadly, a small group of aggressive anti-trans activists have gone far out of their way to introduce a lot of confusion about words like “cis,” claiming that it has some type of anti-woman meaning. This is completely false (and it makes no sense considering the word describes cis men just as it does cis women).

The word “cis” means “not trans” and it has no other meaning in this context. The point of using the word is to acknowledge that trans identities are equally valid and that cis privilege exists in our world and should be challenged.

It also conveniently provides you with the opportunity to refer to a “cis woman” instead of a “woman woman” and avoid wrecking our hang out session.

Please adopt this language, even when trans people are not around.

Cut Out Trans-misogynistic Language

This should go without saying, but referring to trans women as “trannies” or “shemales” is not only ignorant, it’s adopting language that is associated with social stigmatization and even violence against trans women. And having one of those words appear in the middle of our dinner-date is, um, anti-climatic in just about every sense of the word.

And from a trans-feminist perspective, I would emphasize that what underlies trans-misogyny is nothing more than misogyny itself. Remember ladies; you can’t buy into hateful language specifically directed against trans women without chipping in on hatred against women in general.

Dating Us On The Side

There are lots of wonderful, workable approaches to relationships out there, and different things work for different people. One of the awesome things about the queer women’s communities is that I think we tend to be much more open about possibilities for intimate relationships. Some women are poly, some are looking for an exclusive partnership, and there’s everything in between. Personally, I don’t even know if I have a strong preference; I think I’m more open to just working out the dynamics between individuals when the time comes.

I happen to have had a couple of awesome relationships with cis women who were already in long-term, (explicitly) non-monogamous relationships. That said, I can’t help but notice there seems to be a pattern in which I am invited to be someone’s “thing on the side.” While I can’t know for a fact if this is because I’m trans, I have heard other trans women relate similar things. In principle, I have no problem entering into such relationships with someone I trust and with whom I feel genuinely close. I’m just saying I know I’m not the only trans woman who feels a bit frustrated when this kind of thing seems to be on constant replay.

Fetishizing Trans Women

Again I’d like to think this goes without saying, but sadly I see it happen plenty. Look, I get that drawing the boundary between healthy, affectionate sexual curiosity and fetishization might not always be an exact science (and it might be a little different with different women). Personally I think I’m pretty relaxed and I can work with you as long as it doesn’t all reduce down to one thing (*cough*). However, if you’re on a date with a trans woman and your thoughts about her body are constantly distracting you from the conversation, just stop yourself and think: what if I was interacting with a guy and he kept having these kinds of thoughts about my body instead of listening to what I was saying? Would I feel comfortable around him?

Don’t reduce us to our genitals

(1)
Obviously this follows pretty strongly from the don’t-fetishize-us thing. A big part of this is what should be a pretty obvious hard rule: don’t put us on the spot with questions about our genitals.

Personally, I happen to be pretty open about this stuff (you might even notice a subtle dick joke appears in the previous sentence), but even if you know something about my body from reading one of my articles, that doesn’t make it cool to randomly bring my junk into the conversation if you meet me in real life.

Just the same, if you meet a trans woman who is a sex worker or if you’ve seen pornography in which a trans woman appears, that doesn’t give you some special right to ask her questions about her body anymore than it would if you met a cis woman who was involved in sex work.

(2)
Then there is the other side of the coin: some cis women might have an issue or feel uncertain about hooking up with a woman who has different genitalia than her own. First of all, you should never feel pressured to do anything you don’t want to do or that you’re even unsure about. If you aren’t comfortable or you just aren’t into it, say no.

That having been said, if genitalia is the one and only reason for not being into someone, I do think it is worth thinking through that. The result of your thinking could very well be “no, that’s not for me,” and that’s fine! We definitely don’t want to be with anybody who doesn’t want to be with us. But responding to one of the claims that some have made, I would emphatically state that nobody’s physical body is a representation of patriarchy. Such a statement is not only somewhat cruel to inflict on someone who herself is oppressed by patriarchy, it is also pretty defeatist from a feminist perspective (if we were really to buy into the idea that penises are the source of patriarchy, rather than socially constructed male privilege, aren’t we pretty much saying that patriarchy is a permanent fixture of human society? Eek).

Talk With Us

Beyond all these more detailed considerations, another key point is simply communication. Of course there are a myriad of situations that could arise that I’ve never even thought of, but if two people really care about developing a positive friendship or intimate relationship (whether for one evening or a committed partnership) then they will be willing to sit down together and talk through these things.

I have written previously about some of the alienation I have experienced as a trans woman dating in the queer women’s community. Now, I want to emphasize here again that no one is obligated to touch a woman’s penis if they aren’t into that. However it’s also important to emphasize:

1) Not every trans woman has a penis.
2) No general means exist to distinguish trans women from cis women.

The implications of these two points together are that statements such as “I am attracted to cis women but not trans women” simply do not make sense and are rooted in social prejudice.

(As a side comment, before moving on let me briefly address something that appears in the previous piece that I linked above. My article from about a year ago contains a reference to the concept of the so-called “cotton ceiling,” which deserves a brief comment here. While several trans woman-hating “radical feminists” have intentionally misconstrued this concept in rather bizarre ways, there are also a few trans people who have made statements in relation to this idea that I think are problematic. Hence, after having some time to reflect on the previous debates about this I have come to the conclusion that the “cotton ceiling” should be considered an unhelpful concept for this type of discussion and should be set aside by trans activists moving forward.)

Hooking Up

Awesome! Glad we made it this far. I would say, “now comes the fun part,” but actually the whole process of getting to know one another should be fun. And the fact is that respecting your potential partner and vice versa is really sexy, and it’s actually not that hard… err, difficult, to do.

At this point, again, the key is communication. There are trans women who like being touched in certain places or in certain ways, but not in others, just as a similar statement applies for many cis women. Those boundaries must be respected throughout by everyone involved. The key is to keep the channels of communication open throughout, and to rely on active consent as the model for sexual intimacy at every moment.

Underlining all of this of course is the opportunity for new experiences of friendship, solidarity and more.

About the author: Savannah is a queer trans woman and physicist originally from the great state of Carolina (that alone should tell you which one).  She also writes on trans feminism and other social justice issues on her blog leftytgirl, preferably while listening to metal.  Savannah presently lives in Tokyo where her principle hobbies include singing at karaoke clubs and getting lost on the subway.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.