Categotry Archives: invasive kyriarchy

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A Room of One’s Own: ID Required For Admission

Categories: don't get your panties in a bunch, gender oh eff me, Humorless Tranny™, invasive kyriarchy, teh tranz

Well, ducks! It’s been a week since I did my little UK stomp and kicked over a fair-sized, even by Guardian standards, ant hill! Such fun!

Let me be serious. For a change. A surprise! A first! C.L. serious on her own blog!

I want to talk about one of those very tricky things that come up when trans folks, and most especially trans women, get talked about. Pretty universally, I should hasten to add, when cis folks talk about trans folks; but then I said people, and don’t we all know that people means cis people? Silly ducks.

The bugbear in the room is, of course, “women-only spaces.” In its most extreme form, this resolves to the old “bathroom libel“: the idea that, say, allowing trans people to use the rest rooms that match their gender presentation will open a flood of rapists donning drag in order to rape unsuspecting women. That no trans person has ever done this, and that women get raped in women’s rooms by men not wearing dresses, never seems to make a dent in this argument; but then it’s held by only the most set in their way anti-trans folks.

Sadly, this includes a large number of otherwise noteworthy feminists. Google it; I’ll wait.

A less extreme version of the “women’s spaces exclusion” doesn’t have a problem with trans folk in the ladies’, (perhaps because being booted from your stall for looking too masculine can happen to cis women too), but still make an exception for other spaces: women’s spiritual circles, social groups, and, most–notoriously isn’t the right word, but bear with me for a second–rape crisis centers.

Yes, that’s right–I’m bringing Kimberley Nixon into this again.

For those of you who don’t know, a precis: Ms. Nixon is a trans woman who lived in Vancouver. She applied for a volunteer counseling position at Vancouver Rape Relief, and passed their initial phone interview. When she showed up for training, however, she was read as trans and told that she could not be a counselor because of VRR’s woman-only policy. Ms. Nixon eventually sued the center, won one trial, but the decision was overturned on appeal.

That’s the basics. VRR claimed that the legal fees put them in danger of closing. Julie Bindel and many other trans-exclusionary feminists castigated Ms. Nixon.

But when you go deeper, it gets a whole lot more complicated.

For starters, Ms. Nixon herself had been raped and battered by her male partner. After receiving help from a different group for battered women, she entered their counseling training course, and did very well; she would later be described as a “superior” counselor. But the first group wanted her to wait a year to heal before she became a counselor, which led her to VRR.

Now hearken with me to the little lower layer. Above, I linked to an article about a butch cis woman who was unceremoniously tossed from a restaurant bathroom for looking too masculine. This is precisely what happened to Ms. Nixon. Yet Ms. Farmer would be allowed to counsel for VRR, and Ms. Nixon wouldn’t. Even though they both looked “masculine.”

Ponder that one in light of feminist principles, if you will.

Dig even deeper: it is a misconception that Ms. Nixon was demanding a spot as a counselor for VRR; what she wanted was the chance to prove herself on her own merits, and not be judged by her appearance. Furthermore, VRR claimed that her presence might traumatize other women, who might harbor fear or resentment or hatred towards men. Fair enough, I suppose, though one would think that this could apply to very butch cis women as well. But the thing is, we’ll never know if Ms. Nixon would traumatize people; we’ll never know if she could have fit in, if she could have provided healing services to women. We’ll never know, because she never got the chance.

And neither did any of the women who might use the shelter; VRR made the decision for them.

I don’t think there’s any way to slice this that doesn’t come up as prejudice. They could have done any number of things; had her help in the office and get training from the counselors, so that even if she didn’t work out there, she would gain experience; have her act as a liaison to the trans community (one would assume that VRR would also turn away trans women who were the victims of rape as well); any number of things.

But instead they said, you look like a man. You are a man. You cannot come here.

Now, it may surprise you to know that I am ambivalent–very–about these situations. I can see many sides to these issues, and they’re always tricky. And I do not dispute for a second that there is a very real difference in the background of trans and cis women, especially trans women who transition after, say, their twenties (present company included.) We, I, don’t have the experience of growing up female; we don’t have the same bodily experiences as the majority of cis women. (This is why I will never be teaching a class on Your Period and You.)

But–and this is so important that in needs to be said, again and again–the question remains: is that condition unredemediable? Is it so impossible to think that a trans woman who has spent 25 years living as a woman might have insight into women’s lives approaching that of a 25-year old cis woman? Think on this: you could transition as soon as you were of age, have been on hormone blockers so you never experienced male puberty, spent your teens and twenties living as a woman, majored in women’s studies, gone on to become a social worker specializing in the problems of battered women and rape victims, worked for ten years in public health–and you will be less qualified, in the eyes of VRR, than a high school drop out who happens to be cis.

That is to say, that not judging a person on her merits is discriminatory. Unless, of course, you’re trans. Then it’s totes feminist.

Next: I’ll take this to Tiger Beatdown and do some feminism and gender analysis.

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The Patriarchy Doesn’t Exist And Other Comforting Fictions For Hard Times

Categories: double bound, i heart oppression, invasive kyriarchy, privilege stories, supremely sexist

It’s comforting to tell ourselves that a lot of the battles that feminists have fought are finally over, and we’re in the mop up stage. It seems undeniable that attitudes have indeed improved since the days of the pre-Second Wave; one sees more and more female executives, attorneys, and doctors (though not nearly enough) than ever nowadays, and even my D&D book uses the female pronoun as often as the male pronoun in the text.

When D&D hops the equality train, that’s progress.

So we can tell ourselves that women are finally (at least in the West) moving out of the shadow of men, begin to truly have autonomy: that what Elizabeth Gilbert says below is indeed happening, and more than that, is being successful:

…Gilbert says, we’re still in the midst of a radical new social experiment.
“And the radical, unprecedented new social experiment is: What happens if we give women autonomy, education, finances, you know, control over their sexual biology?” she says. “What happens if we give you all this freedom? What are you going to do with it? … And we’re all still sort of puzzling it out in a very intense way.”

 And then you open your browser or flip through a newspaper and all that comes crashing down around you, and you see it for the papier-mâché construct it truly is. Like when you read this:

Before the first juror is selected or witness called, a decision allowing a confessed killer to argue he believes the slaying of one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers was a justified act aimed at saving unborn children has upended what most expected to be an open-and-shut case.

Some abortion opponents are pleasantly stunned and eager to watch Scott Roeder tell a jury his slaying of Wichita doctor George Tiller was voluntary manslaughter. Tiller’s colleagues and abortion rights advocates are outraged and fear the court’s actions give a more than tacit approval to further acts of violence.

”This judge has basically announced a death sentence for all of us who help women,” said Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder, Colo., a longtime friend of Tiller who also performs late-term abortions. ”That is the effect of the ruling.”

Just so that we’re really clear on this, just so that everybody gets on the same footing, just so we can skip past the language issues of calling fetuses “unborn children,” understand this: Roeder’s defense, basically, is that he had the right to kill someone based on his right to control what another human being does with her body.

He had the right to control you. And if you asserted that control (which is due to you, one would hope, as a member of the human race–at least the male half is supposed to have bodily autonomy) and enlisted the help of a medical professional, he had the right to kill that professional in order to remove your autonomy.

Of course, “yours” only if you’re female. Which still seems to be a quasi-legal status.

Think of other cases where bodily autonomy might be involved, and wonder to yourselves if they would be able to be entered as legal justifications: But your Honor, I had to kill that abolitionist, she was helping my slave to escape.

If somebody had killed Dr. Kevorkian, would the court allow a justification defense? Even though it would be a lot more warranted than one in the case of the murder of a physician, a man who helped save the lives of many women?

Jill at Feministe has a good explanation of what’s happening, though it hasn’t quite gotten me off the ledge:

I will write more about this later as time allows, but the judge in the Scott Roeder case — Roeder is the man who shot abortion provider George Tiller at Tiller’s church — has ruled that Roeder may present a case for voluntary manslaughter instead of murder. Voluntary manslaughter is a less serious crime than murder, and subject to softer penalties. This doesn’t mean that Roeder is only being charged with voluntary manslaughter; my best guess based on the judge’s comments here is that he doesn’t want this case to be overturned on appeal, and so he’s allowing the jury to consider voluntary manslaughter as a lesser-included offense. Which makes sense.

Except that there are, of course, bigger issues at play. The judge at least rejected Roeder’s proposed “necessity” defense, but a jury will still have the option of giving Roeder a lighter sentence if the defense makes the case that Roeder had an “unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force.” If the jury does buy that defense — and you can bet that Roeder’s team will make the trial about Dr. Tiller and abortion — it lessens the disincentives for other would-be terrorists to take out abortion providers.

Indeed.

So there is no patriarchy, and justice is for all. Just not the all that includes you.

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Cahiers Parisiens: ce qui vous tenez, ça c’est ce que je prends

Categories: invasive kyriarchy, paris notebook, privilege stories, travels with CL

I’ve finally escaped my Catcave the last several days, making my way out to a few museums I hadn’t visited before. First was the Musée Carnavalet on Friday, down in the Marais. Carnavalet focuses on the history of Paris itself, and has dioramas, objects d’art, paintings, etc. from various time periods. They also had a special exhibition on the French Revolution, which engaged the military historiophile and the Francophile in me: the Revolution is one of my favorite time periods, and they had a wealth of stuff. Including some of the commemorative models of the Bastille that were actually carved from the stones of the Bastille itself.

Plus I discovered that I could read the Declaration of the Rights of Man in French. Score one for me.

I’ve been eating lunch rather than dinner the last several days, since lunch is cheaper, so I had my traditional, once a trip croque monsieur at a nearby cafe, washed down with some Haut-Médoc and a cup of strong French espresso. I’ve taken to drinking coffee in the French style after meals–espresso, with some sugar to cut the bitterness. It makes me feel all expatriate and such. Though I suppose I’d really need to drink some Pernods in a bar with a zinc counter top, and scribble furiously away in my notebooks about running the bulls at Pamplona and other homoerotic displays of masculinity.

Wait. That’s not me. That was Hemmingway. Maybe I’ve been drinking too much wine.

Saturday I had a real treat…well, not an unproblematic treat. But you’ve probably come to expect that of me. I went to the Musée Guimet, over by the Trocadero. This is the main Asian art museum in Paris. I didn’t go straight there, acutally: I had a large lunch nearby first, which included a desert of profiteroles–cream puffs stuffed with vanilla ice cream and drenched in chocolate sause–my favorite desert in the world, and something that it is almost impossible to get (at least, impossible to get done right) back in the states:


Anyway, the museum really has an excellent collection, from all parts of Asia. The India collection was quite good; and as someone that has been interested in Shiva since my days researching Indian mythology, I was happy to see this marvelous bronze of Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance:

They have an excellent Cambodian section. As I’ve been to Cambodia this year, it was quite pleasant at first to reacquaint myself with the amazing and monumental Khmer art–to see one of the gently smiling, inexplicable faces of the Bayon silently contemplating me again, to look at a marvelously preserved naga, to see a beautiful bas-relief apsara.

But something began to bother me. When I would read the labels to see where these things came from, I began to feel…uncomfortable. That’s because I’ve actually been to those places; I’ve seen the elephant terrace, the royal palace, the Bayon of Angkor Thom. And given that Cambodia was a French colony for ninety years, I thought it was a pretty good bet that they didn’t ask if they could take any of those things.

This isn’t a new issue, of course: the Louvre has the best egyptology collection outside of Egypt, because of Napoleon’s conquests there; the British plundered the Greek world to build their amazing collections; even within Europe itself museum collections are often the plunder of war.

Still, the enormous gap of wealth, privilege and power between the colonial nations of the nineteenth century and the countries they subjugated seems to lend an air of disquietude that doesn’t linger over the internecine push and shove of Europe’s long shabby history of warfare. Because they essentially stole these things from people who found it difficult or impossible to resist. Stole, and left no recompense, and often no regrets. Even the great humanist Andre Malraux got into the act, trying to steal artifacts and whole bas-reliefs from the newly-rediscovered and beautifully-preserved Banteay Srei in Cambodia.

Of course, it’s nice that people in other places in the world can see these things, and it’s good to have some of them safe in a museum–the Angkor artifacts suffered during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. But that still doesn’t make up for the crime of taking them in the first place. I mean…they could have just asked.

In any case, maybe it’s appropriate that this guy, donated by the women of the United States in the memory of Lafayette, should be right outside the museum:

(Yeah, that’s good ol’ George himself.)

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How To Lose Your Sense Of Humor

Categories: all about me, invasive kyriarchy, Your RDA of Outrage

Greetings, Ducks! So I had a super bad day yesterday–one of my depressive episodes, just didn’t want to do anything–which explains why there wasn’t a post. (Also: why I still haven’t touched some work for one of my clients, yikes.) I slept late and blew off most of my responsibilities besides feeding the cats, and watched some TV.

One of the things I watched was an old movie–I shudder to think how old, because I remember when it came out: Uncommon Valor. In case you never heard the name before, it was a Reagan-era film about a mission to rescue POWs still being held by the Vietnamese.

As a movie, it’s not bad: it has a decent cast (Gene Hackman, Fred Ward, a pre-Dirty Dancing Patrick Swayze among others) and gives the idea an above-average treatment. I won’t comment too much on the circumstances of the era the movie was made–Reagan-era macho posturing, the very real question about whether there were any POWs still in Indochina, and the overall wish-fulfillment the whole back-to-Vietnam genre invoked.

What was interesting to me, watching the movie for the first time in, hmm, over 20 years, was my reaction to it now as opposed to how I might have viewed the movie at different points in my life.

I first saw Uncommon Valor when I was in a, a, um, Scouting organization. Okay? Nuff said. So it was a decidedly masculine environment, we were all kids–I was 11, there were some teenagers–and we probably grooved off the well-done action sequences. (And the foul language–it was an R-rated film.) The film became a favorite of mine, and my brother and I borrowed it several times from the local library.

Since then, many things have changed, of course: I’ve grown up, I’ve changed genders, I’ve lost a lot of my taste for war movies. But maybe most important of all, I’ve become politically awakened. And that has radically changed how I see–everything.

Now, I know I’m caught up in the first flush of all this activism, that there’s nothing so zealous as a new convert, and that I could be a bit of a prig under the best of circumstances. But at the same time, having begun to look at the world in terms of dominance and oppression, privilege and denial–well, it’s like eating one potato chip: you just can’t stop yourself.

So, watching Uncommon Valor brought up a lot of thoughts that frankly might not have occurred to me even after I transitioned, but do occur to me now, such as (spoilers follow):

Is it really true that men have to fight each other to resolve their issues? Early on in the film, Patrick Swayze–a skilled soldier with no combat experience–ends up fighting Randall “Tex” Cobb, the toughest of the Vietnam vets on the team. The vets resent Swayze for treating them like recruits while he trains them; he feels he has to prove to them he won’t fail in combat. So they fight, as custom, law, and generic Hollywood screenwriting all demand.

But seriously? Is that the only way he could have proved himself to them? Why do we just assume so? Why do men think that’s so? Isn’t that a poisonous thing to indoctrinate our children with? Aren’t there alternatives?

Wait a minute, you’re the good guys?: When Hackman’s outfit arrives in Thailand to pick up their weapons, they are seized by the CIA and the Thai police. Hackman, obsessed with rescuing his son (whom he believes is held in the prison camp that is their target) decides to continue on anyway, buying weapons in the Golden Triangle. He sends out some of his men to get a vehicle, instructing them to “Steal it!”

So they come back with a truck that is clearly owned by a Thai–it’s decorated with Buddha imagery. And clearly not a rich Thai, because the back of the truck is covered with plastic, not the tarpulin it comes with. So WTF? They just stole some local poor guy’s livlihood? Presumably, somebody used that truck to feed their family, earn a living, escape from poverty. Yet we’re supposed to overlook this, because our “heros” are on a noble mission…that will involve killing some more poor people. Nice.

Speaking of the locals: Depsite spending the last half of the movie in Thailand and Indochina, the only people of color our heros have any interaction with is a porter/guide, Mr. Chang, and his two daughters. Purpose: to die (two of them are killed in the mission), and serve as a sex interest for one of the white characters. No other people of color have any major interactions with the main characters except to get shot or provide a service–even the arms dealer they meet in the Golden Triangle is French. (And a poorly-done stereotype he is as well.)

And speaking of people of color, who are we rescuing?: In the end, the mission succeeds, and four American POWs are rescued. All of whom are white.

Say what?

It’s not exactly a secret that the Vietnam War was proportionally worse on African-American than on white soldiers:

African Americans often did supply a disproportionate number of combat troops, a high percentage of whom had voluntarily enlisted. Although they made up less than 10 percent of American men in arms and about 13 percent of the U.S. population between 1961 and 1966, they accounted for almost 20 percent of all combat-related deaths in Vietnam during that period. In 1965 alone African Americans represented almost one-fourth of the Army’s killed in action. In 1968 African Americans, who made up roughly 12 percent of Army and Marine total strengths, frequently contributed half the men in front-line combat units, especially in rifle squads and fire teams. Under heavy criticism, Army and Marine commanders worked to lessen black casualties after 1966, and by the end of the conflict, African American combat deaths amounted to approximately 12 percent—more in line with national population figures. Final casualty estimates do not support the assertion that African Americans suffered disproportionate losses in Vietnam, but this in no way diminishes the fact that they bore a heavy share of the fighting burden, especially early in the conflict.

So the odds are that at least one of those POWs should have been black, unless there was some Vietcong/NVA policy to not capture black soldiers. (There may have been, perhaps motivated by both Vietnamese and American racism–white prisoners would have been more valuable, sigh.) But somehow I don’t think a movie to go in and rescue black, Latino, or even Asian-descended POWs would have sold as well, especially not in Reagan-era America. Instead, a bunch of white guys (plus one African-American, who to give the film its due, is a highly decorated helicopter pilot and an officer) recuse some other white guys, and kill a bunch of brown people along the way.

This isn’t to come down too hard on Uncommon Valor, which is what it is and is very much a movie of its times. Rather, I wanted to show you what my thought processes look like now–how becoming more engaged keeps me from just letting things slide; how learning about my own privilege makes it difficult for me to just ignore it and go with the flow.

Maybe this has made me “humorless” or “shrill” or “a pain in the ass.” Actually, it probably has. And that makes me sad; I don’t want to be those things, I don’t want to alienate people or always be harping about things.

But we live in a violence soaked world, filled with oppressions and petty tyrannies, and they drive me to distraction. How can I not be outraged? How can I not feel sympathy with the downtrodden? How can I not acknowledge how I am complicit with these horrors?

I don’t know. But it seems to have cost me my sense of humor. If that’s what it was.

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It’s a Crime

Categories: invasive kyriarchy, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all, Your RDA of Outrage

Richard Cohen, writing on Tuesday, had this to say about James von Brunn, the man who attacked the Holocaust museum earlier this year:

He also proves the stupidity of hate-crime laws. A prime justification for such laws is that some crimes really affect a class of people. The hate-crimes bill recently passed by the Senate puts it this way: “A prominent characteristic of a violent crime motivated by bias is that it devastates not just the actual victim . . . but frequently savages the community sharing the traits that caused the victim to be selected.” No doubt. But how is this crime different from most other crimes?

First, let us consider the question of which “community” von Brunn was allegedly attempting to devastate. He rushed the Holocaust museum, which memorializes the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis and their enablers. There could be no more poignant symbol for the Jewish community. Yet von Brunn killed not a Jew but an African American — security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns.

So which community was affected by this weird, virtually suicidal act? Was it the Jewish community or the black community? Since von Brunn hated both, you could argue that it does not matter. But since I would guess that neither community now gives the incident much thought, the answer might well be “neither one.” So what is the point of piling on hate crimes to what von Brunn has allegedly done? Beats me. He already faces — at age 89, remember — a life sentence and, possibly, the death penalty.

The real purpose of hate-crime laws is to reassure politically significant groups — blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, etc. — that someone cares about them and takes their fears seriously. That’s nice. It does not change the fact, though, that what’s being punished is thought or speech.

Actually, the real purpose of hate crime laws is to punish terrorism.

Yes, I used the t-word. A hate crime is one where the victim was a target only because of membership in some group (frequently a disprivileged or discriminated against group.) Hate crimes have the effect (even if the intention is not always so far-reaching) of terrorizing that group; of reminding them that they are in danger by virtue of who they are; of reminding them that violence remains the prerogative of the powerful.

Cohen sarcastically asks, “which group was terrorized?” which seems so disingenuous coming from a Jewish person. Can he not see that one of the effects of von Brunn’s attack was to remind people that just being at a Jewish cultural institution is dangerous? If even one person decides not to go to the Holocaust Museum because of von Brunn’s actions, doesn’t that make what he did terrorism?

People forget, I think, what the purpose of terrorism is: it’s not to kill people. September 11th remains the worst terrorist act in history, and the casualty count would barely make the list of interesting battles of the American Civil War. No. The point of terrorism is terror: the use of asymnetric violence to break the morale of a militarily superior society; to make all people, not just soldiers in combat, afraid of violent death; to cause people to change they way they live, to bring the battle home to them.

Cohen understands this, even if he doesn’t seem to appreciate it–maybe because he doesn’t think his example affects him:

If there’s a murder in a park, I’ll stay out of it for months. If there’s a rape, women will stay out of the park. If there’s another and another, women will know that a real hater is loose. Rape, though, is not a hate crime. Why not?

Indeed, why not? as Liss at Shakesville ponders. Especially in light of a story like this:

Four people are confirmed dead and nine others were wounded when a gunman opened fire inside the L.A. Fitness in Collier Township Tuesday night.

The shooting happened shortly after 8 p.m.

The county coroner’s office has identified the gunman as 48-year-old George Sodini from Scott Township. […] Sodini was keeping an online diary where it appears as if he was planning the shooting for about nine months. He also detailed on the site how he attempted to carry out the shooting once before, but backed out.

Right now, there’s at least one woman worried about going to the gym because she might be cornered there and shot simply because she’s a woman. (I know that for sure, because she is me.) This isn’t a random crime, or an act of desperation by a criminal: this is a cold-blooded act of mass murder, an act of “revenge” for a mythical wrong, a crime designed to make a whole group of people feel afraid.

It’s terrorism. And we shouldn’t stand for it.

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And the Lightbulb Goes On

Categories: all about me, don't get your panties in a bunch, invasive kyriarchy, privilege stories

So I’m reading this post at Shakesville about a full-of-FAIL article by Satoshi Kanazawa about how feminism is evil and unneccesary because women are HAWT and only need shoes (or something; his logic is hard to follow, mostly because there doesn’t seem to be any.) And there’s a comments thread that is in the best tradition of Shakesville comments threads. Which means, among other things, that there’s a discussion of why a common epithet turns out to be far nastier than you thought.*

In this case, it turns out the word “maroon” really is a racist term**, even though I (and the original commentator) seem to have always associated it with Bugs Bunny’s joking mispronunciation of “moron.” (Which is also not cool, because it makes fun of people with mental disabilities.)

Now, being what I am–a human being caught in the invisible web of the kyriarchy–I couldn’t help for a second thinking, “great, another word I’ll have to be careful about using.” (Just for a second, ducks, we take checking privilege seriously around here.) And then it occurred to me: oh yes, how terrible it would be to end up living in a world where a person’s thoughts would have to be actually addressed, instead of just dismissed by a senseless epithet that lets you turn off your brain. How truly awful that would be for everyone.

But I never claimed to be quick on the uptake.

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*That’s not snark; one of the great things about Shakesville is that you continually get your assumptions challenged there.

**The people the term applied to were actually pretty amazing–fleeing slavery to forge an existence out of almost nothing.

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Kapo

Categories: failings, invasive kyriarchy, why i blog

I am a racist.

That declaration is the sort of thing that usually brings friends sputtering to your defense. “But Cat, you’ve dated people of color, some of your best friends, and you voted for Obama!” Which is true, but doesn’t do a whole lot to defeat my original point.

Which is that, I am a racist.

I’m also an imperialist. A colonialist. Certainly a classist and probably a capitalist.

I’m not generally cognizant of any of this. But occasionally an incident throws this into focus. For me, it was this comment I wrote. You can go follow the link to find it; I have just enough vanity to not put it on the front page.

But the fact is, I wrote something that was racist and imperialist and I need to own up to that, and to own the privilege that let me think something like that was in any way appropriate. And own up to the fact that the only reason I’ve become chagrined enough to write about this incident is that I pissed off somebody who’d had this blog recommended to her. Only to be completely and finally turned away by what I wrote.

In other words, I was so blind to my privilege that it took that kind of embarrassment to make me notice it.

It seems useless to deny the fact of my racism. Every day I walk through the streets of the Great American Metropolis and I see the color of the skin of the people in suits heading downtown and the color of the skin of the people who are making deliveries or running deli counters, and I can see the relative worth placed on each. And every day I accept that, buy my paper at the deli, and move on to more important things, like who won the baseball game.

Likewise it is useless to deny the fact of my imperialism, not when I wear clothes made halfway around the world by impoverished people, people who had their wealth and resources stripped away by the wealthier countries, people locked into a cycle of poverty and slavery in all but name by the continued exploitation of them by those nations. I see this every day but am content to pay $8 for my tee shirts and move on to the comics section.

Sure, I try to be a good progressive. I try to speak out against open expressions of racism. I have been fortunate enough to know many people of color in my life, which leaves me less sheltered than most people of my (suburban, white, middle-class) background. I believe in all the Right Causes and critique all sorts of forms of oppression.

None of that changes the fact that I am part of a vast web of privileges that systematically elevates me by virtue of a few accidents of birth while at the same time debasing billions who don’t share those features.

That I am trapped in the system as much as they are does not change one whit the fact that I have much the better position.

I write a lot here about feminism and sexism, and transness and transphobia. This is because these are the things that are important to me; sexism and transphobia are the prejudices that single me out. So it’s fitting that I should be loudest in my opposition to them.

But what I have learned as I’ve been writing this blog, as I have grappled with the issues raised both here and in my life, as I’ve struggled to learn and understand more about feminism and how I can live a life that is concordant with it, is that my personal oppressions are not enough. That it is the whole system of oppressions that needs to be fought against.

There is a reason I prefer to use the term kyriarchy over patriarchy, cisarchy, or any number of other dominations. That’s because I see them all as part of the same system: that kyriarchy describes the multivalent oppressive nature of human society. We are locked into it by the relative comfort of our privileges over others, which palliates our own lack of privilege compared to some. To confront real liberation would mean to seek to destroy the whole system of privilege itself, to voluntarily renounce and repudiate one’s own privilege–to rip down the whole structure of oppression that has dominated human society since the Agricultural Revolution.

Too much to ask? Maybe. But it would seem to me that at the very least this process can begin with digging into my own privileges, to expose them to the light so that they stop being the invisible shackles that keep me tied to the ediface of oppression; that by recognizing them, I can find a way to be less invested in the struggle to maintain my own place. Because make no mistake: ultimately this system leads only to tyranny, the constant struggle of all against all that maintains the majority of the human race in suffering.

And it’s a small thing, oh such a small and insignificant thing to do. If I weren’t such a coward, if I weren’t so deeply co-opted by kyriarchy, I could do more. I have to trust that it might help, though. I have to trust that in time greater things can become available to me.

But what I can’t do is not keep pressing forward. Because anything is better than remaining a racist.

=========================

In the spirit of making some feeble amends, some links Google Reader served up to me on some uplifiting things happening in India recently:

Duniyalive.com » Gay community stages rally in Bhubaneswar

Riot of colours at Delhi’s second gay pride march

India’s transgender strive for rights | GlobalPost

Chennai turns up to support gay march

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I Feel Pretty, I Feel…Coerced Into Being Co-Opted By the Patriarchalist Beauty Myth

Categories: beauty mythology, invasive kyriarchy, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all

I wear makeup. Almost everyday. In fact, I’m writing this from a nail salon, where some nice ladies are tackling my feet with a belt sander.

Now, when I say makeup, I mean just any old cosmetic. Most days, it’s just some lipstick, and long-wear stuff at that, so I don’t have to touch it up during the day; when I have to do a client visit, or am going out on the town, I’ll add some blush and eye makeup. The whole deal takes about five minutes.

I wasn’t always so minimalist. When I first began to present as female outside of my apartment, I wore a lot of makeup. Some of it was by necessity: beard shadow is tough to hide, so heavy foundation was usually called for. Some of it, of course, was just wanting to wear makeup, because most of the time I didn’t allow myself to.

Since those days, I’ve done various things (like electrolysis) to make my life easier. Yet I still wear makeup, and as I am an introspective feminist, I wonder about what it says about me that I do.

Part of the reason is definitely to avoid any “OMGITSADOOODLOLZ”. The last time I went out of the house without wearing lipstick (about a year ago) I got “clocked” (picked out as trans) rather nastily. At six a.m. Before I’d had any coffee.

Such trouble, I don’t need.

Another reason is that I actually like to wear makeup, at least some of the time. I like the way it makes me look. I like the way that liking the way I look makes me feel, just as I like how I feel when I think I’m wearing a nice-looking outfit.

This is obviously a bit more problematic.

Because there’s no doubt that doing so feeds into negative stereotypes of how a woman is supposed to look, dress, and act. There’s little doubt in my mind that most of these are patriarchalist; that many are demeaning to women; that they constitute an ongoing backlash against women who dared be more than adjuncts to male sexuality.

I mean, hey, I’ve read Naomi Wolfe, I get all that.

But in my case it’s even more complicated. Because, you see, I never had a girlhood; I didn’t spend my childhood having lessons about what is proper or popular drummed into my head; and because of that, my relationship to fashion and cosmetics is a lot less complicated than most women my age.

I’m a bit like my friend Joanna. (Not that it matters, but she’s not trans.) She didn’t spend her high school or even early-adult years worrying that much about the latest clothes, the hippest trends. But around the time that I began to become interested in finding clothes I thought made me look good, instead of clothes that just made me look like a woman, she became interested in fashion. And she’s now one of the most fashionable people I know, though not trendy or consumed with a passion for the next unattainable fashion accessory.

For both of us, our clothes, our makeup, our appearance is a lot more about the pleasure we get from it than a pressure to fit in. I won’t deny that pressure exists–of course it does; but we both feel a lot more comfortable resisting it.

Or like I said before, we dress the way we do because of how it makes us feel, not because of how we feel we have to.

Ariel Levy said something in Female Chauvinist Pigs that I think gets at what I’m saying:

Monitoring her appearance and measuring the response to it have been her focal point. If her looks were a kind of hobby–if dressing and grooming and working out were things she did for pleasure–then the process would be its own reward. But she spoke of her pursuit as a kind of Sisyphean duty, one that many of her friends had charged themselves with as well.

I guess what I’m saying is that I definitely don’t feel the Sisyphean duty part of that equation.

But by the same token, I can’t help thinking about exactly how much I’m co-opted with the use of standards of beauty to repress women, that I can’t help but think that while I may feel good for wearing certain clothes, that’s only because the patriarchal culture around me tells me that I should, that these shoes/skirts/jeans make you feel good, and those (comfortable) shoes/(not-tight) skirts/(loose enough to breathe in) jeans won’t. It’s hard to sort out and the only thing that comforts me is that a lot of other women my age struggle to sort it out too.

But I’m still going to wear lipstick. Because more than one “LOLZURAGUYYYY” is too much. Hell, one was already too much.