Tag Archive | rants

Radical Right Wing Crazies

Sep16

Texas attorney general Greg Abbott (who is now running for governor since Rick Perry announced he will not seek another term) is planning to sue the entire state of Texas to impose his religious views on everyone.

Now note that this line of argument was already tried in the 1950s and 1960s as the basis for continuing to discriminate against blacks and to ban interracial marriage and we know how that turned out in the end. But here in Texas he might win, which will mean Texas will have to be spanked, publicly yet again, by the federal court system for violating basic civil rights. (Texas has this ugly history in that regard, unfortunately.)

What really gets Abbott’s cockles all bunched up in a frenzy is that every major city in Texas, from Dallas to Austin to Houston and most recently San Antonio have all approved GLBT protection laws within the city limits. Further, the vast majority of major corporations operating in Texas have strong pro-GLBT rights corporate policies.

So what is driving this? Abbott’s classic appeal, using the standard GOP “Southern Strategy“, to try to reach bigoted white voters. It’s that simple.

Now Abbott just had his head handed to him by the federal court system in a lawsuit initiated by Wendy Davis, the progressive woman who famously filibustered that heinous anti-abortion travesty for nearly 12 hours. As retribution, the GOP controlled state senate tried to draw her district out of existence. And they lost, not just for her district but the entire redrawn state map was tossed out as blatantly biased.

So that’s the framework under which Abbott is proceeding. And before you think this might not touch you as a trans person, Abbott is of the opinion that gender can never be changed, meaning he is seeking to legally de-transition every single transitioned transsexual in the state of Texas.

This is what transphobia looks like, people. It wears a business suit and claims to be “mainstream Republican”. If you are trans and you vote Republican, you are supporting John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and that entire crew who have openly declared war on you and your right to live.

What boggles my mind is that there are trans people who actually think that this is acceptable. I can tell you that if the radical right wing extremists win and you lose all your rights as a trans person, I won’t be shedding any tears for you if you helped make it happen.

Bradley Manning’s Gender Dysphoria is a Distraction

Aug1

The Bradley Manning case is complicated. His gender dysphoria is almost a sideshow used to help paint him as “other” and therefore worthy of torture and excessive punishment. I was going to write about this in more depth at a TG forum where I post but it’s not really appropriate for there so I’ll discuss what I know here.

First, what actually happened? A crime was committed by others (which involved murder and still has not even been prosecuted let alone punished). Bradley Manning attempted to report said crime to his chain of command. His chain of command actively tried to cover up that crime. And finally, UCMJ Article 78 states:

“Any person subject to this chapter who, knowing that an offense punishable by this chapter has been committed, receives, comforts, or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial, or punishment shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

So Manning tried to report it as required by the military code of justice, saw further crimes in the coverup, and therefore went public with the information since he felt he had no other recourse. None of these facts are disputed by the Marine Corps. Other military vets who have watched the video have the same conclusion – the first group of people killed? That’s war. The attack on the van of civilians who were trying to move a wounded person to treatment? That’s a war crime by definition under Article 12 of the Geneva Convention:

“…Members of the armed forces and other persons (…) who are wounded or sick, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances. They shall be treated humanely and cared for by the Party to the conflict…Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited; in particular, they shall not be murdered or exterminated…”.

I highlighted the relevant part.

None of this is disputed by the Marine Corps or the prosecution. Now, having established that Manning tried to report a war crime and was rebuffed for it and that he was dragged into the coverup, he legally had one of two choices – report it by other means (since the chain of command had demonstrated it was corrupt) or become an accessory after the fact and subject to punishment if this incident came to light via other means.

After all of this is when Manning then began also releasing other information via Wikileaks about other potential war crimes.

John Stuart Mill once said: “‎Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” Bradley Manning tried to do something and for that he will go to jail for up to 130 years. While he may deserve some punishment for what he did, I cannot see how anyone can claim that he deserves 130 years in prison while the murderers and officers who covered up these murders get promotions and continue with their careers and that Manning was effectively tortured, again in violation of the UCMJ as well as the international Convention on Torture while no action is taken against those who tortured him.

Finally, he has already been held in excessively punitive circumstances for 3 years already. In my opinion, his sentence needs to be commuted to time already served.

When I review these facts, I can only conclude that Bradley Manning’s gender dysphoria is raised by the prosecution as a means to make the public less sympathetic to him and therefore deserving of the actual torture he received. And that says a lot about how our society still views trans folk despite progress made thus far.

As a community, we can’t go back

Jul20

Recently, a transgender child in Maryland was profiled in a few news stories, showing the positive aspects of affirming a child’s gender identity. And shortly after these stories appeared,  a hate group (the American Family Association) began publicly urging that Tyler’s parents be prosecuted for “child abuse” by allowing their child to confirm his gender identity.

Generally, people are accepting but the small yet loud groups like AFA cause problems for those parents who are simply trying to allow their child to figure themselves out. Yet there are some people who, as trans themselves, believe that we don’t need to be publicly visible or politically active. Yet these small minorities have successfully, for years, denied equal human rights to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals as well. And now that we’re more publicly visible, we have become the latest bogeyman of the radical right.

Further, that genie can’t be put back into the bottle. The old way of doing things, sliding under the radar, whether we think it was better or worse, does not matter any more. We can’t go back. More and more health professionals are dealing with more and more transgender individuals who are not choosing to live lives of depression, fear, and mental anguish. And this means that more and more of us will be visible. So the argument that people should have done this or that or gotten this step done before that step (none of which is consistent with advice from medical professionals) is simply an attempt to walk backwards to a time when trans folk were just less visible. And that is not going to succeed. We’ve been noticed by the haters.

We now have two choices – allow them to strip us of rights, to prosecute us for daring to be ourselves, or we fight back. If your position is one that says we should not fight back, legally, politically, and socially, then your position has become one of passively allowing them to try to strip us of our rights, and you are exhibiting signs of internalized transphobia. You’re afraid of who you are, of being seen for who you are, and so you side with those who would dehumanize you.

I’ve met trans folk who identify as right wing Republicans. They mouth and say the same things as these “social conservatives” about everything, including GLB people, except themselves. Somehow, they’ve convinced themselves that they are different, special, and won’t be targeted, dehumanized, and attacked by the radical right. Yet the evidence is right there, in all its public glory, that the radical right is now very aware of those of us who are trans. They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to give up. They are going to keep pushing now until we win these legal battles clearly and authoritatively.

Some trans folks can pine for the “good ole days” when we were mostly not noticed. But we cannot go back. It’s not going to happen. So choose and choose wisely. Either fight for the rights of all trans people, including yourself or be prepared to see yourself ultimately outlawed and criminalized. Because, as the evidence above demonstrates, that is exactly what these people want to do to us.

A Rant, at Transphobic Transgender People

Jun24

Elsewhere on the internet I recently saw the following loaded question:

I have been told by numerous people and have read even more comments from those who object to the terms Cis, cisgender, cismale and cisfemale.

My question for those who use the terms, why should someone be allowed to ID another group without their consent, and not care if the terms may be offensive to the person or many in a group, then turn around and expect that offensive terms towards them never be used and demand the right to self-ID?

Given that cisgender, cismale, and cisfemale originated as completely clinical terms, I failed to see how these could be offensive. Further, the original question is a strawman, because self-identification is not the only way people get identified. However, in the spirit of participating, I went looking.

First, as to origins, I found this:

Cisgender has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis-, meaning “on this side of,” which is antonymous with the Latin-derived prefix trans-. This usage can be seen in the cis-trans distinction in chemistry, or in the ancient Roman term Cisalpine Gaul (i.e., “Gaul on this side of the Alps”). In the case of gender, however, cis- refers to the alignment of gender identity with assigned sex. The terms “cis” and “trans” were used by Seymour Benzer in genetics,in his analysis of different senses of the word “””gene” in 1955-7[9] to represent two forms of mutations, when both on same chromosome or on separate chromosomes or DNA strands. Benzer distinguished the muton (smallest unit of mutation) from the codon (smallest unit of coding), and the recon (smallest unit of recombination), from the cistron, or gene analyzed by crossover.

German sexologist Volkmar Sigusch may have been the first to use the term cissexual (zissexuell in German) in a peer-reviewed publication: in his 1998 essay “The Neosexual Revolution,” he cites his two-part 1991 article “Die Transsexuellen und unser nosomorpher Blick” (“Transsexuals and our nosomorphic view”) as the origin of the term.[14] He also used the term in the title of a 1995 article, “Transsexueller Wunsch und zissexuelle Abwehr” (or: “Transsexual desire and cissexual defense”).

So it is immediately obvious that cisgender/cismale/cisfemale are terms not developed as social taunts or insults. They were coined by social researchers seeking to distinguish non-transgender people from transgender people in an attempt to understand gender identity. It is also easier to say than many of the alternatives. Given that it has never had a negative intent that I can find, this word is nothing like “tranny” or the n-word applied to people of color, both of which are intended to be offensive, insulting, and demeaning.

Also consider the following thought: “the most useful thing about the word cisgender is that it *avoids* value judgments like calling people whose physical and psychological gender are the same ‘normal’.” This avoids automatically painting transgender people as ‘abnormal’. This is brilliant and a good thing because it removes value judgments from whether a person is trans or cis. They simply are biological conditions and neither one is “wrong” at all.

I found this comment at Transgriot and I liked what it said:

“If we’re going to make the point that being transgender is an everyday biological/medical/social condition, we had to have some word in the vocabulary that describes most of the people walking Planet Earth who are not trans.

It’s the same concept that underpins why gay people call non-gays ‘straight’.”

Hence I kept looking for the evidence of it being “offensive”. And lo and behold, I began to find who finds “cisgender” to be offensive.

In a discussion of the term cisgender, I found this comment:

“…to identify the term as a neologism coined by radical homosexual activists.”

Radical homosexual activists? Who uses language like that? Radical right wing extremists, that’s who!

And this comment:

“I’ve ONLY ever heard it used as an insult. I’m very surprised the article doesn’t touch on the subject, I’m sure many other normal people (sorry, ‘cis’ people) have only ever heard it as an insult too. Most of the time with the reaction of “what the shit is ‘cis’? You hate normal people so much you have to invent new terminology??”

Note the automatic assumption that a clinical definition of gender normative individuals must be because of “hate”. Note the automatic assumption of privilege in that only the cisgender community gets to name “others”.

So who posts narrow minded crap like this? Radical right wing extremists who want to deny that transgender people even exist and who want to legislate us out of their reality. The same people who don’t want transgender anti-discrimination laws passed. The same people who constantly try to pass absurd bathroom laws hoping to force a transgender woman into the men’s room (where one prominent Tennessee politician promised to “stomp a mudhole” in such a person).

There is one other group that loudly objects to the term cisgender. That group are the radical feminists who, just like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, insist that transwomen don’t really exist. They are often referred to as “RadFems” and they call themselves that so it’s not a term we are inventing for them. These people object to anything that attempts to recognize or legitimize transgender people. Some of them have even petitioned the United Nations demanding that anything related to discussion of transgender persons be stricken from UN debates.

These are the kind of people who object to cis as “offensive”. Am I going to give a damn about such people? Only insofar as how I can muster good and honest people into silencing their bigotry and removing the enactment of their hate from our public lives. This also suggest to me a bit about the kinds of people that the original questioner seems to try to associate with and find acceptance from – radical right wingers or RadFems. Good luck with that as a transwoman!

Finally there’s been a lot of additional discussion at the forums where this originated. There’s been some wild leaping to conclusions too, that anyone who argues in favor of the term cisgender is “trying to redefine trans as normal”, something I disagree with completely. What the cis/trans discussion does, as stated above, is remove value judgments from the discussion.

And that is the center of all this, isn’t it? Oh, by the way, please read Zinnia Jones (I love Zinnia’s writings!) take on this: “Cisgender is not a slur, John Aravosis.” She says so much more and so much more eloquently.