Categotry Archives: why i blog

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Duck, Duck, Silly Goose

Categories: why i blog

OK, so some of you may wonder where the hell I’ve been, assuming anyone still reads me given my recent vanishing act.

The answer is–well, I’ve been through the wringer. Not quite. Rather, I’ve been in California, which was quite pleasant, though I did miss the Great American Metropolis.

I also lost my major client and so I’ve been looking for work rather more actively than I’ve been writing.

And I had a bit of a case of burnout, something I think is going to be my perpetual inheritance as long as I insist on being the on the Radical side of the fence.

And a lot of other not so great excuses. There you are.

I have been thinking about just how I want to continue in my writing on these subjects. For one thing, I think at least on this blog I may open up just a little bit and do some more personal pieces, or at least personal experience pieces.

My vision for The Second Awakening was always to be an analysis site–there are plenty of places on Ye Olde Blogosphereee where you can get up to date info on how badly the world sucks. I never planned to break news. So I see what I do as catching up on stories and bringing my own view to things.

But one thing I’ve learned in writing these last–sheesh, seven months?–is that I need, or want, or have to if I want the whole analysis thing to work, tie stories and outrages to a larger theoretical framework. This is what Sady at Tiger Beatdown does so seemingly effortlessly, and it’s what I want to learn how to do. (And speaking of the Ol’ Tiger Beatdown, it looks like I’m going to be a semi-demi-occasionally-regular contributor there–yay!)

And also maybe do stuff at Op-Ed length (600-800 words for you aspiring writers) which is not only easier on the brain and fingers, but something that writing for Below the Belt has really trained me how to do.

So…so what, Cat? So this. I do plan to do more writing, here and at other venues. There will be posts! It may take a while to gear back up, but this is what I do. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do (well, that and get paid for it…I’m working on that one.) I’m not giving up anytime soon.

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Bloggity Blogity Blog Blog Blog Note

Categories: why i blog

O HAI! Like, remember me? I used to post–sometimes more than once a week–on this here blog!

Sorry, ducks, I know I promised you more vitriol–I did try to deliver with tonight’s offering–but getting caught up with things out here on the west coast has been demanding. Also, my main client is playing the “we’re not going to pay you, nyah nyah nyah” game, which is awful fun–nothing like being far from home with two months income being held in hock.

HOWEVER, I am slowly regaining equilibrium–or, since this blog is about anything but that–massive amounts of rage, and will be writing more and more often. I promise–and I’ve never let you down before, except for all those other times. Ahem.

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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.

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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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Why I Blog, Part Wev

Categories: oh no not teh menz, why i blog, Your RDA of Outrage

Howdy, ducks! In today’s exciting installment of The Second Awakening, we learn that I learned how to set up Google news alerts! Fabulous–or is it? See below for the exciting answer.

Starting a blog is an odd thing to do: you have to believe that a) you have something to say, and b) other people will actually give a good god-damn about what you have to say. If you’re starting a feminist blog, you have to add c) that you understand feminism well enough to say something about it, and d) that what you’re saying hasn’t been pummeled to death like a very unlucky horse. But Ghu help you if you’re trans and starting a feminist blog: then you have to worry about e-z) who the hell do you think you are to talk about being a woman, let alone feminism.

So I’m quite happy to have several wonderful blogs out there that have helped me learn enough to launch this endeavor, and keep teaching me every day.

For example, Sady over at Tiger Beatdown has this provocative post about Andrea Dworkin and radical feminism that’s sparked an excellent discussion–to which, Maude save me, I’ve actually contributed. (I’ll note in passing–for it truly requires a longer post to discuss fully–that I tend to cringe at the words “radical feminism,” and probably unfairly; but given that some very, very vocal people who describe them that way have gone out of their way to let people like me know we’re not really women.)

Then there’s Liss, at Shakesville who offers up this post which might as well be another mission statement for what I want to do here:

Masculinity has defined itself exclusively in contradistinction to the feminine for so long that a serious challenge to the idea of inherent male superiority has left millions of American men floundering—and the best answer most of them have found for the question “What is my role if not a keeper of women?” is “I am a victim of oppression by women.” Femininity has become the center-pin around which masculinity pivots—on one side there is dominion; on the other side, subjugation.

What American men are lacking is a vision of equality.

Women had to change the rules, because we were told “You can’t,” because we had seemingly unnavigable barriers put in our way by people who didn’t want us to succeed, because, if we had played by The Rules (as dictated by The Patriarchy), we never would have gotten where are—because The Rules were designed so that we fail. For many of us, the odds have been against us our whole lives; everything we’ve ever done has been in defiance of the distinct likelihood—and expectation—that we would settle for less than we wanted.

The whole post is really good and a wonderful takedown of yet another Dooood’s carping “what about teh menz?’

Wait! Like I said, I finally set up some news readers–basic stuff, one for “feminism” and the other for “transgender.” (Understand that this is a work in progress.) And guess what popped up in the transgender feed? Have you guessed? Did you say–transphobia? Because Google sure did! (warning: links are triggery)

Now, do you see why people don’t want to see transsexuals and the transgendered covered in laws against discrimination?

Some discrimination needs to happen, if you’re business is going to survive. Discrimination at clubs goes on every single day, when pretty girls and celebrities go to the beginning of the line and right into the club, while others wait in line outside. Discrimination and the exclusion of freaks is the club way of life. And there’s nothing illegal about it. It’s business.

No-one wants a freak poisoning their establishment. No-one sinks their life savings into a business for the sake of social and contra-biological experimentation.

I know! What’s better is, I know about this case! helen boyd blogged about it a few months ago–she teaches up in Appleton, Wisconsin; the incident occurred right after she arrived in January.

And just when I thought I’d heard enough–and trust me, that was enough–of this Debbie Schlussel person….you know what’s funny? In a hate-filled, oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-it way? She wrote her own post on the article Liss blogged about:

Still, the facts and figures he cites are telling. As America continues its push toward a matriarchy, pushing men out of the way in favor of artificial insemination, single mother households, etc., it is one more step in the way of America’s demise and our continuing quest to emulate Europe. As we honor Governors who abandon their families to Mr. Moms, while they pursue political careers and while their own daughters father babies out of wedlock and shut the fathers of their babies out of their kids’ lives, we must ask ourselves what are the benefits of that. Why are we applauding those who behave this way?

As men are cast off to the wayside as obsolete, ask yourself if you want America to be the international equivalent of the WNBA or a NOW meeting?

Oh Zbornak! I should have stuck with the New York Post.

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Except I Am

Categories: all about me, bitterness, teh tranz, vive le feminisme, why i blog

Reasons I Am Told I Cannot Be A Feminist
Culled from Books, Message Boards, Web Pages and Conversations by, for, and against feminists

  1. Because I shave my legs.
  2. Because I color my hair.
  3. Because I wear skirts.
  4. Because I wear dresses.
  5. Because I wear high heels.
  6. Because I had plastic surgery.
  7. Because I had breast implants.
  8. Because I had vaginoplasty.
  9. Because I am attracted to men.
  10. Because I still am attracted to women.
  11. Because I’ve read a few books on feminism.
  12. Because I’ve only read a few books on feminism.
  13. Because I have a vagina–now.
  14. Because I didn’t have a vagina–then.
  15. Because I don’t have a cervix.
  16. Because I had a penis.
  17. Because I had male privilege.
  18. Because I had white, male, middle-class privilege.
  19. Because I still have white, middle-class privilege.
  20. Because I wasn’t raised as a girl.
  21. Because I look like a dude.
  22. Because I look like a woman.
  23. Because of who I was.
  24. Because of who I am.
  25. Because I dare call myself a woman.

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31 Days Later….

Categories: all about me, milestones, teh tranz, why i blog

Greetings, Ducks! Today, it turns out, is the one-monthery (strictly speaking, an anniversary refers to a year. Yes, I took Latin! Yes, I am a shameless pedant!) of this blog. Which I seem to have celebrated by taking the day off (well, to be fair, that proposal I wrote the other day blossomed into further proposals and some discussions with the potential client, so I was busy.)

I want to thank all of you who have dropped by, and especially all of you who left such nice comments here. Starting a blog again was something that I did with some trepidation, and your encouragement has really been so lovely.

I had trepidation because part of my “process” (no, thank you, Anonymous!) is figuring out exactly how much my transness is going to be integrated with the rest of my life, and starting a blog where I was so open about it (albeit with personal details obscured) seemed to have the potential to swallow my life up again. After so, so many years where my transness was a constant, overriding distraction to my life, I really wanted to just try being a woman for a while.

But it’s clear that I have things to say about transness, and especially about how transness intersects with feminism. So I say them here, and so far it hasn’t consumed me–in fact, it’s acted as a safety valve, letting me work on living a life not always dominated by where I’ve come from, but by where I’m going.

So thank you all for dropping by, for your encouragement and support, for giving me a reason to write every day–something I thought I might never do again. And here’s to the start of our second month!

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Vessels

Categories: the great woman theory of history, why i blog, your rda of misogyny

My friend Viola is a talented ceramacist. Not, I should mention, a potter–she doesn’t use a wheel. Her art is unique and organic (not to mention wonderful), but she hasn’t thrown a pot in years.

The other day she met a new member of the studio where she makes her art. They got to talking, and he mentioned that he had a dealer and was doing very well. (She later verified that via Google.) Now, like many artists (and bloggers), Viola is ambitious about her art and was immediately intrigued–and interested in how she might be able to network with this guy.

As they talked, he told her that he was putting together a group of artists and wondered if she might want to join? Of course she was interested, but–being a person of fierce integrity–she made sure to show him her work first. They talked for a while and agreed that her work really wouldn’t work with the rest of the show–but, the guy asked, could she throw some vessels for him? And it gradually dawned on Viola that all he wanted was her to make a lot of vessels for him to paint.

I find it strangely apt that this–let’s be fair–clueless tool would want her to make vessels for him. (Presumably narrow-necked for maximum–never mind.) I won’t belabor the obvious: that for centuries women have been seen as nothing but vessels for men–convenient receptacles for them to empty their important, creative work into–a holding pen for their serious ideas to gestate.

You don’t have to be a radical feminist to see that the idea of women being the non-creative side of birth as being a bit skewed.

Viola turned him down, for reasons both practical–she’s far too out of practice to make pots quickly with the quality she’d want–and personal: the guy was being completely exploitative of her. Because she’s quite capable of making her own art, thanks, and has no desire to be this guy’s vessel.

But hearing the story from her made me think about art, and my art (if that’s what I’m doing here is), and women in art. My favorite painting in the entire world is Manet’s Le dejeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass):

It hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and I always make a point of visiting it whenever I’m there; the canvas is enormous, and the vibrancy of the light–it never comes through in prints–is astonishing and always makes me smile.

But as much as I love this painting, being who I have become I can’t help but notice that it sums up attitudes towards women that sadly weren’t abandoned to the 19th century. That is, the only two roles available were the the object of the artist’s gaze–the nude woman in the foreground–or supporter, like the woman who is bathing in the background. Both fundamentally passive roles; how few of the works of the great masters show women doing anything other than, perhaps, resisting the rape of an overly amorous Olympian?

Of course, you can go another layer. The nude woman in Le dejeuner sur l’herbe is Manet’s longtime model, Victorine Meurent (though in an early example of Photoshopping, that’s her head on a more voluptuous model’s body.) Meurent was the model for Manet’s notorious Olympia, and that painting’s shocking subject–it certainly seems to depict a courtesan–led people to conclude, wrongly, that she herself must have been a prostitute.

In fact, she was an artist, and a successful one at that–she exhibited several times at the Salon des Artistes–although only one painting of hers is conclusively known to survive. In later life she was inducted into Societé des Artistes Françaises. She called herself an artist until she died.

I think of Victorine Meurent–the famous half smile, head tilted up in disdain or arch condescension–knowing that the gaze of the Great Man was falling on her and not demuring; bold, passionate yet tempered, willing to fight for her art and even sacrifice her own image in order to get the training she needed. I think of this Object who dared to be her own Subject, a woman born too early, perhaps, and yet still remaining as an enigmatic reminder that history is not always what They tell us it is. I think of her, and Viola, and vessels and painters, models and sculptors. And I write.

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The Second Awakening: A Moral History

Categories: let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz, This Was My Life, tiger beatdown rocks, vive le feminisme, why i blog

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”

–George Orwell, “Why I Write”

I want to thank everyone who dropped by in the last day or so–it is a remarkable experience to see your page views jump 9,500%, even if it is humbling to consider how few visits you got beforehand. (Especial thanks, of course, to Sady of Tiger Beatdown who gave this blog a rave review.)

I am still figuring out not only what this blog’s subject matter will be but also how to live a feminist life. I’ve talked before about how I slowly awakened into a feminist consciousness, and then found myself roused a second time as a result of my transition. But I don’t think I’ve conveyed the profoundness of the changes I’ve experienced in the last–can it be so short?–16 months.

I think I was always some sort of weak-valence feminist. My mother may not have used the term for herself, for some reason, but she definitely believed women should have all the rights of men. She’s told me over the years how she prefers the conversation of men of her generation, because she dislikes the domestic subjects most women of her age engage in–perhaps an over broad generalization on her part, but there is no question that she felt she had the right to engage in the traditionally male spheres of politics, religion, social policy, etc. Certainly my father was like-minded; neither of them gave their children any hogwash about “proper” gender roles.

So I grew up about as gender-blind as a boy in the 1970s could be, or at least a boy in the 1970s who was conscious of wanting to be a girl, or at least wearing girls’ clothing–I wasn’t always sure of the difference, early on. (When I was maybe four or five, I sometimes would run up to the mirror in my bedroom in the morning hoping I’d been changed into a girl overnight. Sometimes–sometimes I would delay getting out of bed, hiding under the covers in order to hold myself in some sort of Schrödingian state of not-maleness, trying to hold on to the desperate possibility of transformation. That there was a way to collapse the waveform without using a mirror never occurred to me; so you can see that the distinction between being a girl and dressing like one wasn’t particularly clear to me yet. And that I was a very weird little boy. But you’d probably gathered that already.)

I think by the time I knew what a feminist was I had no problem describing myself as one–at least as far as my understanding of what a “feminist” was anyway; I had heard it meant that you believed in women’s rights–I was ignorant of the larger controversies. Perhaps that was a good thing; I was generally incredulous of people who didn’t call themselves feminists–it seemed ludicrous to deny that women were people just as good as men, as outdated as racial prejudice, which my parents had strenuously sanitized from our upbringing.

That is not to say that I was some Kwisatz Haderach of gender-studies, the result of some cabalistic breeding program perhaps founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Dr. Blackwell. Like most men of my position–and I’ll call myself that for the purposes of this post, even though there are some issues in applying without qualification the label of “man” for what I was–I was largely unconscious of my privilege, and I picked up the usual assortment of stereotypes, falsities, foolishnesses and outright idiocies. Some were survival tactics–if you walk amidst the world of men without the courage to show your real self, you learn how to camoflouge yourself–some were simple artifacts of my time and gender, and some were just stupid blindspots. I didn’t believe in any of the idiocies I sometimes mouthed–the occasional misogynistic/homophobic/even, god help me, racist joke–but neither did I believe particularly strongly in the opposite positions, at least not strongly enough to protest very loud. I had no courage of my convictions; being all-in was terrifying to me; I was, in short, your garden-variety fauxgressive.

I am deeply ashamed of all that today.

The first signs of any changes happened during my marriage, which I know I have not talked about before. My wife and I had suffered through a few years of tearful impasse about my transness–this was back when I still identified as a crossdresser–only to come to a fairly reasonable accomodation. She sometimes would come with me to dinners and social events with other trans people, and in turn I was experimenting with metrosexuality and ways to enjoy my masculinity. During this time I met helen boyd and began to learn about feminism beyond my lukewarm “women’s rights” position.

It was the beginning of the 21st century, Bush was in office, political oppression was in the air, and I was reading Backlash and The Beauty Myth and for the first time really waking up to the misogyny all around me. Yet my motivation was complex…part of it was the realization that as a crossdresser, a person who sympathized with women, who saw myself at least in part as a woman, I needed to go beyond the trappings of feminity and learn about the real experiences of women; part of it was meeting bold, feminist women and listening to their stories; and part of it was the progressiveness and liberalism that I found myself taking up now that they were threatened. Even so, while my passion for feminism grew to a white-hot passion, it was still an intellectual passion–at root, I could always take solace in my disconnection from it on an everyday level.

A young trans woman of my acquaintance once asked me about life as a woman. She had been reading my diatribes against transphobia and misogyny on a message board we both belonged to, and wanted to know, was it really so bad? Was she really going to feel constantly oppressed?

No, I said, it wasn’t so bad–but the thing is, once I had transitioned, I never had to seek out misogyny again. Before transition, I could ignore it, I needed people to point it out to me–but after transition, I see it constantly. And that changed everything; I was shorn of my detatchment; the political became truly personal, and awoke my outrage.

And that is the essence of the second awakening. I cannot claim to know, to feel what it is like to have been the target of misogyny my whole life; I’m not sure I can even claim to know what it’s like to feel transphobia my whole life–it is difficult to make evaluations like that when you’re in the closet. I have no doubt that I will make a lot of mistakes in the future as I continue my mission to discover what a feminist life will look like for me. Which is why I am so glad for the women I’ve found in the feminist blogosphere, for Liss and her Shakers, for Pam and her Blenders, and especially for Sady and her Beatdowns–because it was Sady who gave me the template for the kind of blog I wanted to write, one that was mostly impersonal (I am anonymous, after all) but still came from a deeply personal place of passion and outrage, to create something that wasn’t just reportage or even opinion, but my own work of art, a monument to my implacable fury.

I’m still learning. But I’m thankful to have you along for the ride.

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QFT

Categories: tiger beatdown rocks, vive le feminisme, why i blog

From Sady of the incredible Tiger Beatdown:

Tiger Beatdown: Who Takes Responsibility for the Responsibility-Takers? Hint: Not Linda Hirshman

Because feminists – whether or not they have been victims of crimes – are engaged in continual acts of strength. To be a feminist is to be, on one level or another, an activist: actively engaged in confronting the problems of the world and seeking to change them. They confront injustices. They speak up. They refuse to shut up. They cause trouble. They take responsibility, not just for their own happiness, but for the betterment of the world around them. They also (especially if they are lady feminists) continually make the point that they are not weak, they are not passive, and they are not incapable of independence or self-determination. They are, in short, about as far from being victims as possible.

That will work as the mission statement of this blog.

And this has been another episode of What Sady Said.