Categotry Archives: kyriarchy

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The Varieties of Transphobic Experience

Categories: kyriarchy, the transsexual empire strikes back, Your RDA of Outrage

Let’s wade once again, ducks (good thing you can float!) into the wonderful world of…transphobia.

Let us consider the case of Lily McBeth.*

In 2006, after her transition, she beat back protests and bigotry to keep her job as a substitute teacher in New Jersey. It was widely and rightfully hailed as an important victory for tolerance.

That, of course, was then.

Recently she announced that she was retiring, frustrated at not getting many assignments. There is the appearance of transphobia, although the article cites other possible explanations. Explanations that make perfect sense.

The thing is, they always do. There’s always some excuse when a disprivileged person tries to call people out on their privilege.

There was a nice column about the situation by Joseph Wardy that concludes with this uplifting paragraph:

What is the reason for the opposition of transsexuals in the workplace or in society? A person born black has no choice. Neither is a transsexual who was also born that way. The range of bias from rejection to physical violence is punishing these people for their condition and not their behavior. A transsexual is a person equal to the rest of society who happened through no fault of their own to be born in the wrong body. What don’t we get about this reality?

Of course, the comments are something else entirely.

I have to tell you, in my 60 plus years, I have never heard a transsexual being bashed. It just never happened in my presence. Is this really a serious societal issue or a one in 100 million type problem? I feel sorry for anyone that is born so far out of the mainstream that it requires surgery, but there is a fix apparently, so why can’t we leave it at that?

This stuff makes me want to puke. Transgender is a made up word about nothing. You are a man or a woman. You either have a penis or a vagina. There is NO other option. If you have a penis, then you are a man. If you have a vagina, then you are a women. THAT’S IT. This I am a man, but feel like a women crap is disgusting. What the eff is wrong with these people. My kids are not going anywhere near these perverts. Forget having them be my kid’s teacher.

Cutting off your wang voluntarily is just wrong. And no, I don’t want that freak teaching my children.

So far, your garden-variety hate. But then there’s this:

You have done a great job of differentiating between homosexuality and transsexuality, so now would be a great opportunity to differentiate between classic transsexuality and trangenderism; there is a huge, huge difference.

Most transsexuals abhor the term transgender…

Well, now, whoa there. Most? Is there a survey on that? I personally know a bunch of transsexual women who gladly use the name transgendered.

..When Mara Keisling says:

“A survey her group helped to conduct this year of 6,500 transgendered Americans found 91 percent had faced bias at work.”

I don’t doubt it, but most transgendered are crossdressers, transvestites, gender queer, and every other conceivable form of gender variance on the planet…transsexuals are simply female, nothing more or less. The vast majority of that group transition, have their surgery, and then blend into the mainstream leading exceedingly normal lives, suffering no more discrimination than the next person.

Which, you know, can be quite a bit: that’s why there’s such things as feminism, the civil rights movement, gay pride…

The truth of the matter is that though there have been some attacks on gender variant people under the scenario you allude to, history has revealed that is an extremely small percentage of them. A review of the Transgender Day of Remembrance stie, which tracks deaths of anyone transgendered, (you can Google it if interested) shows that most of the attacks are on sex workers and others who put themselves at extreme risk. Most are not transsexual, but transgender. There is no excuse for murder or violence in society, regardless of who it is, where they are, or what the circumstances…nonetheless, it is prudent that one takes responsibility for their own safety and not put themselves in situations in which puts that safety at risk…many on the DOR site didn’t heed that warning.

“You see your honor, the bitch was asking for it!”

Now that’s a feminist defense! No privilege showing there, nope!

Of course, many people on the DOR website did identify as transsexual, or would have. If they’d only had time. (It’s tragic to see so many young faces there.)

I’ve run into this kind of transsexual separatism around the Net, and it always seems to be about division: I’m not like them, those awful crossdressers/transgenders/folks who don’t pass/whatever–I was born differently, I’m intersexed, I’m a classic transsexual, I have Harry Benjamin Syndrome. It’s a kind of sandcastling, building yourself up at the cost of others who are more or less like yourself: of stressing division instead of unity, of accomplishing the tasks of the kyriarchy, not resisting it.

Maybe it’s because I spent so much time as a crossdresser, but I just don’t get it; I’ve talked to a lot of different trans people in my life, and most of them were gender dysphoric, whether or not they were transsexual. And I’m not really convinced how pushing some people under the bus is going to help anyone–HRC did that to trans people in general (yeah, including you classic transsexuals) last year in the ENDA debacle, and look how well that worked out.

Plus it seems to me that the transsexual separatists seem perfectly content to let the umbrella-definition (i.e., transgender includes transsexuals, crossdressers, genderqueers, people who transition socially but not surgically, etc.) trangender people go out and do a lot of the activism, win rights for trans people (almost invariably favoring transsexuals, at least at first) without doing much activism of their own. (There are some exceptions.) And I think that’s ultimately what I don’t get about them: it’s this need to retrench privilege, rather than letting it go, to come through the crucible of transition and only want to build kyriachies-in-miniature.

But there’s one thing I know: separating yourself from people on the basis of accidents of birth has never really done a damn thing to help make people free.

*Here at TSA we will not mention the birth name of a trans person unless it is of vital interest to the story

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Letter to a Young Commentor, Part II

Categories: kyriarchy, mailbag, oh no not teh menz, vive le feminisme

Greetings, Ducks! Sorry I fell off the face of the earth for a bit. But while I was away, reader Tamogochi was kind enough to respond to my reply to his previous comments.

I would like to answer you on why I’m not outraged.

That is because I see mistreatment as universal problem in our world: it happens in families, at workplaces, due to gender, race, social status, religious differences and ultimately between nations. It begins when one side expresses some kind of want/need towards the other. For example some people of the white race wanted to have free labor and had enforced slavery on another race. Similarly some men had been oppressing towards individual or all women. For them it didn’t seem like a problem at all because they felt entitled to that (I think your term “privilege” might fit here). The other side wanted quite a different thing – not to be oppressed and equal rights. That seemed quite reasonable and fair to them but presented a real problem to the oppressors. And thus a conflict was born.

How can it be resolved? The easiest and the most popular way throughout the history has been by the use of force. The predator eats the prey and the strong enforces the weak. Men had been doing it for ages and they enjoyed the privilege they granted themselves even if they did not admit to having it. But there’s also another and a much better way – cooperation/symbiosis. It happens when parties peacefully agree: you provide us what we want and we provide you what you want. That way rights and responsibilities are born.

So far, I’m with you. I myself tend to believe that a more communalist society would probably work better than our current system that places so much emphasis on the individual, and specifically tends to value people by how much dominance they have acheived; it’s often quite subtle, but it’s a nearly-universal part of our society. Take, for example, how people who are highly talented and skilled at some kind of operation–programming computers, analyzing budgets, designing ad campaigns–are pressured to enter management (tellingly, to have people under them), where they will direct other people to do the things that they do instead of doing them themselves; and if they don’t go into management, they ultimately lack the respect and/or compensation of people who do go into management. Dominance, not necessarily talent, it what commands respect; the recent fiscal crisis has exposed just how little talent some of these people had.

And now we come to the issues of feminism. The way that I understand it is this: it’s an organization that focuses on the problems of women and tries to solve them. Whether actively standing for women rights when necessary or trying to encourage them to reach more and to realize their full potential. And here I see a fundamental problem: if you focus your attention only on one side of the conflict you become subjective and might start to mistreat others. Then it’s very easy to slip into a mode: you give us (women) what we want (rights, respect, power) and we don’t care about your (men) problems. And they can get away with it because now they have a real power of an organization at their side that no single man can oppose. The way of enforcement of privileges in other words and the very thing feminism swore to fight.

I’d not call feminism an organization. (It reminds me of Will Rogers’ famous line: “I don’t belong to an organized party; I’m a Democrat.”) Feminism is (or ought to be) a movement, but as part of that movement there will be many organizations, and many different points of view.

I think you are building a strawfeminist here. Somehow we are to suppose that by advocating for the rights of a specific oppressed majority (sorry, here in the US women are 51% of the population), you must ignore or even oppress another group: as if equality was a zero-sum game where you can only win if everybody loses.

I don’t believe that; I think that equality and freedom are things that can be shared with all people, and that taking away a privilege is not the same as oppressing people.

I also have a few issues with how you frame this paragraph. First, you have women asking to be given rights. Which isn’t the case at all, at least how I see it: women are demanding that their rights be respected. That is, the rights already belong to us; they can’t be given–only respected.

Second, isn’t telling that in a discussion of women’s rights you immediately start talking about how this affects men? I mean, for real? It’s so frustrating to time and time again bring up the troubles of an oppressed group, troubles that get ignored because the dominant group marginalizes all issues that don’t directly affect themselves, and then have the dominant group show up to make it all about themselves! (In the feminist blogosphere, this argument is called but what about teh menz?)

“But we don’t oppress men and only want to have certain rights and responsibilities for women” you might say. Is it too much to ask after all we do for them? We want to cooperate but men sometimes are not willing to participate and we have no other option than to fight.

There must have been a less sexist way to phrase that, don’t you think? Again: women aren’t asking for rights because we serve some social role well; we demand the rights that belong to us as human beings.

Let’s look at an example of what’s really happening: a problem of verbal abuse at the workplace. The conflict is obvious: men want to use certain sexually loaded words towards the other gender and women don’t want that happening (or to be more specific they want respect and equality for themselves). And the solution for it? Feminist movement gathers enough political strength and a law is passed that prohibits that kind of discrimination. A great victory for the human race. But is it really?

What most tend to overlook is that it has really solved the problem only for one side of the conflict. Men did not have a problem of verbal abuse from women so the law solves nothing for them. And did anyone care to listen to what they really wanted? What has caused them to be sexually abusive in the first place? Nobody was interested in that. It was much easier to put a label “animals”, “primates” and not to care at all. What took place afterwards is that men pushed their unsolved problems deeper and it has resulted in a more sophisticated and undetectable ways to discriminate women. The women once again retaliated. And now I, as a man, am viewed as a potential abuser everywhere I go – like I am responsible for what others of my gender had done in the past. I constantly hear things “men are pigs, aggressive, insensitive, uncaring, unemotional, bloodthirsty” and so on. This passive form of discrimination hurts me and makes me feel like a second rate human even if I’ve never done an abusive thing towards women. Come to think of it I too might easily become outraged because of this. I might even go as far as join a movement of masculinists who fight feminists. But what another senseless war would ever accomplish?

There really must have been a less sexist way to put that. Sigh. Let’s start from the beginning.

I’d love to have some real sympathy for how you feel. And in fact, I do: I don’t like it when anyone is called names, or anyone has assumptions made about them because of how they look. But. In the specific case you cite–give me a break. If you think it’s hard to be called a predator, try actually being the prey. You forget, perhaps, who you are talking to. I am a trans woman. I’ve walked down dark streets as a man, as a cross-dresser, and as a woman. I’ve been called a faggot, whistled at, had lewd suggestions made to me on the street. I’m a double target: first for being a woman, and then for being trans; for many women like me, rape is only the starting point.

You clearly don’t understand that. I won’t say can’t, because I think you can–I think anyone with a conscience and the willingness to listen to other peoples’ stories can gain an understanding of what it is like to feel constantly targeted.

And I have to ask the question: why are you angry at me, at feminists, at women for demanding that predatory behavior–even things as seemingly trivial as being called names–be punished? Why are you angry at us, instead of them–the predatory guys, the jerks, the ones who benefit from the threat of violence and violation that constantly surrounds women in this society? Don’t act like you don’t have a stake in this fight; you’ve already shown that you do, because you’re complaining about the results.

I mean, why be angry about the last century of slow, very incremental female empowerment and not pissed off about the hundreds of centuries of female oppression? Why not take on the assholes who are ruining it for the rest of you?

I don’t think it’s fair that people are calling you names and making unfounded accusations. I also don’t think it’s fair that you’re comparing what’s happening to you to the kind of toxic environments that harrassing speech such as the kind that is prohibited by law, because that can be much, much worse. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the “outrage” you might feel about your treatment to the outrageous way that women continue to be treated throughout the world. As if because you don’t get outraged over name-calling, I shouldn’t be outraged over how one in four women in South Africa is raped before she even turns 16.

I don’t get outraged because of name-calling; I get outraged about hate speech that damages men by making them think that it’s okay to denigrate women, that it’s okay to look upon women as things or objects, that it’s okay to continue the fundamental inequality of the human race.

It could have been a much different outcome if both sides listened – men and women cooperated towards solving their shared problems. Maybe what was best in
the situation was not to punish the abusers but to provide them help in dealing with their emotional problems? Maybe what needs to be done is to change how women treat men (in removing that passive discrimination I spoke about) and how are they up-brought by their mothers by teaching them a value of empathy and compassion? If we really thought about it we would have probably came to even better ideas than that.

How was what happened not cooperation? I mean, the last time I checked, there’s not a legislative body anywhere in the United States that isn’t majority male, so somebody cooperated to write the laws. And why shouldn’t we punish people for breaking the law? You won’t get an argument from me that many laws (drug violations, for example) might benefit from alternatives to incarceration, but people don’t generally go to jail for sexual harrassment. Instead, the company and individuals have to pay a person for causing her damage; it’s a matter of civil, not criminal law.

I think you’re the first person I’ve encountered who feels that girls aren’t brought up to feel empathy. I mean, isn’t that the stereotype? Guys aren’t allowed to have feelings, but girls are supposed to be so good at them?

And again, seriously: if these are shared problems (they are), then why do so few dudes care about them?

That’s why I feel being outraged is not good – it hinders our ability to listen and see the situation clearly and invites us to mistreat other people just as we have been mistreated ourselves. I don’t consider myself feminist or masculinist – I would rather be humanist.

Well, I disagree–I think the natural response to seeing people being oppressed should be outrage, and that my outrage helps me, inspires me, keeps me working on helping people.

And I’m a humanist as well; I don’t think there’s a need to be either a feminist or a humanist. My advocacy for one part of the human race doesn’t diminish my advocacy for the rest of it; it just shows where my main interest lies.

Thank you again for responding–I know English isn’t your first language. I do hope you continue to think about these things.

Very best,

C.L. Minou

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Bastille Day

Categories: Allusions, kyriarchy, vive le feminisme

1. At the Porte Saint-Antoine, 14 July 1789

Independence Day celebrates a revolution–however important its future would prove–that was inaugurated to protect the rights of the entitled. I prefer Bastille Day, the start of the French Revolution, the first struggle to try to break the shackles of the Agricultural Revolution, to radically reshape the human destiny. It is the French, not the American, Revolution that haunts the Western consciousness, a bloody ghost shrieking of ways not taken and tyrannies unfought.

The starving and enraged sans-coulottes who gathered near the Porte St. Antoine that hot July afternoon knew nothing of the finer points of either revolution or democracy. They knew not whether they were Rousseau’s ennobled primitives or Hobbes’ mindless mob. Nor did they care. They gave not a sou for the National Assembly’s parliamentary debate on the proper techniques to constitutionally cage a monarch: they knew only that they were oppressed, and sick of it, and incapable of letting it stand any longer.

Behind the walls of the ancient fortress were only seven prisoners–but they were the symbols of an entire regime. Never extensively used as a prison, the Bastille remained nonetheless the notorious symbol of absolute monarchy, the place those who dared speak against the Crown were warehoused. It was against this symbol, more than anything else, that the mob struck; but they had a more immediate goal. The Bastille was also a gigantic gunpowder depot.

By 5:30 in the afternoon, after four hours of fighting, it was all over. The commander of the garrison–mostly disabled veterans and a small contingent of Swiss mercenaries–had surrendered, and then intentionally provoked his own lynching, apparently unable to live with the dishonor. The powder was seized, muskets were charged, and the Royal Army abandoned Paris to the sans-coulottes. In time, those muskets would carry the Revolution (and more, the Revolutionary spirit) across the Rhine and into the rest of Europe. Nor would the vintage laid down that day ever completely fail, even after the force of revolution was channeled into a new tyranny and the blood of patriots was wastefully spent in defence of Empire. As much as Bonaparte and his successors might try, the power unleashed that July afternoon could never fully serve autocrats.

I wonder, though: what did the garrison see that day, as the mob burst into the outer courtyard of the fort, as the air grew opaque with gunpowder smoke–what flashed accross the sky for them that day? Portents of the ceaseless wars France would plunge into? Of the civil unrest and the great Terror to come? Or a presentiment that the world would never again be the same, that from now on the voice of the oppressed would never be stilled, try as they might to suppress it?

Today I choose to make my witness.

2. The Patriarchy Is Not Enough

For feminists, for people who struggle against sexist oppression, that set of privileges and oppressions we call patriarchy looms like the Bastille over the landscape of our lives. The comparison is apt: because patriarchy is both more and less than it seems.

Patriarchy is claimed as the father of all oppressions, the most common prejudice, the heaviest burden, the source of all tyrannies. Patriarchy must be nearly transhistorical–it certainly must go back as least as far as the Agricultural Revolution–and like a dark star, it bends all other forms of oppression towards it, warping them into its own mold. But like the Bastille, its symbolic presence is greater than its actual oppression, vast as that may be.

This is not to minimize the pervasive and insidious force it exerts: nothing I say could alter that, because it is an inescapable fact of every society extant on the earth. But. Patriarchy is only one of the oppressions. Others exist, and still would exist even without it.

Imagine, if you will, that we could wake up tomorrow in a world where sexism had finally been eliminated and true equality of the sexes reigned. Certainly many other oppressions would be greatly mitigated, because in eradicating sexism, fundamental inequalities of privilege and access would have to be extirpated.

But would the world change all that much? Would not the great mass of people on the planet still be mired in poverty, disease, starvation, and near-slavery? Is it really patriarchy that keeps women and children bent over the clothing mills of Indonesia and Vietnam to satiate the developed world’s lust for cheap clothing? Or is it not still the case that colonialism, racism, imperialism, classism, militarism and a host of other oppressions would stalk the earth even without sexism, their staunchest ally?

I think that they would.

This is not to diminish the importance of the struggle against sexism; as bell hooks says:

Sexist oppression is of primary importance not because it is the basis of all other oppression, but because it is the practice of domination most people experience, whether their role be that of the discriminator or discriminated against, exploiter or exploited. It is the practice of domination most people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms of group oppression exist. This does not mean that eradicating sexist oppression would eliminate other forms of oppression. Since all forms of oppression are linked in our society because they are all supported by similar institutional and social structures, one system cannot be eradicated while the others remain intact. Challenging sexist oppression is a crucial step in the struggle to eliminate all forms of oppression. (Feminist Theory, pp. 36-7)

The struggle against patriarchy will necessarily be a struggle against other forms of oppression. But that does not mean that it is sufficient in of itself to struggle only against patriarchy, or that all forms of oppression can be reduced to questions of sexism. Oppression is not something that has a simple binary, top-down nature; oppression takes many forms and has many axes of attack. To force all analysis of privilege to that of patriarchy is to engage in a privileged behavior: the privilege to ignore the effects of other oppressions. It is not accidental that much work in this vein has been done by people who are white, Western, and middle-classed, for that very reason.

The struggle against sexism is a vital step in liberating the human race; but it is not the only one or even always the most important one. The patriarchy is not enough.

3. A Wrinkle In Privilege

I use the term kyriarchy somewhat differently than most people.

Kyriarchy–“a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and derived from the Greek words for “lord” or “master” (kyrios) and “to rule or dominate” (archein)”–is usually defined like this, (courtesy of Sudy at A Woman’s Ecdysis ):

When people talk about patriarchy and then it divulges into a complex conversation about the shifting circles of privilege, power, and domination — they’re talking about kyriarchy. When you talk about power assertion of a White woman over a Brown man, that’s kyriarchy. When you talk about a Black man dominating a Brown womyn, that’s kyriarchy. It’s about the human tendency for everyone trying to take the role of lord/master within a pyramid. At it best heights, studying kyriarchy displays that it’s more than just rich, white Christian men at the tip top and, personally, they’re not the ones I find most dangerous. There’s a helluva lot more people a few levels down the pyramid who are more interested in keeping their place in the structure than to turning the pyramid upside down.

Most people tend to visualize this as intersecting pyramids of power, which certainly follows the meaning of the word. But I tend to think of a different geometric form: the tesseract or hypercube, a four-dimensional cube.

Take a line in space; that’s one dimension. Draw a square; now you have two dimensions. Now make it a cube; that’s three dimensions. Add another dimension, and you have a tesseract:

Even though it is a difficult image to grasp, I like to use it–not the least because it is a difficult image, and our privileges often are just a difficult to analyze. I like it too because it exists, like we do, in four-dimensional space–and forgetting about our fourth dimension, time, often leads to mistakes in analyses of privilege. And maybe most of all, I like it because it is impossible to accurately visualize in three-dimensional space–and I think the same about privilege.

That is, it is possible to draw a tesseract or even make a three-dimensional model of it–but that will only be one way of looking at it. Likewise, we can analyze a person’s relative oppression in terms of all sorts of axes: racism, sexism, religous bigotry, etc. But that will only be one way of looking at it, one way of rotating the tesseract; for another person, in another time, it will look completely different. All forms of oppression are linked.

And that is the essence of kyriarchy: we are all emeshed in it, all trapped not only by our oppressions but our privileges as well. If oppression is the negative force, pushing us down, privilege is the positive force, raising us up; both of them keep us tied to the system itself. The only escape is to break free of it all: to fight oppression and to abjure privilege. To break the fierce equilibrium and experiment for the first time in radical freedom.

Some feel that the way to do this is homogeneity: to end sexism by abolishing gender, to end religious bigotry by abolishing religion, etc. I disagree. I think that diversity is an essential element not only in the biological success of all species, but an important component of human creativity. I think the world is heightened by distinctions–as Hopkins says:

All things counter, original spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim…

What I want is a world where those differences are as about important as the music you prefer to listen to: something you might get passionate about, something that might inspire you or help you find other like-minded people to form a community with, but never something that you would kill or die for, or use to oppress other people.

I’m not sure that a human society truly free of hierarchy is possible or even desirable (even I think there is a place for some kind of privilege, just not unearned privilege.) But my fervent hope for the human species is a radical restructuring of how we organize ourselves, and soon too: because we’ve gone so far to destroy ourselves and now our planet with us.

4. Bastille Day

Two hundred twenty years ago, after the spasm of violence, order improbably returned. The National Assembly resumed its deliberations, and wisely stood by while the people of Paris dismantled the fallen prison, stone by stone and brick by brick, until nothing remained except a few foundation stones that lay buried for more than a hundred years.

Reached at Versailles a few days later, the King reacted to the news with a start. “Is it a revolt?” he asked.

“No, Sire,” was the response. “It is a revolution.”

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