Dyssonance

So in the space of a few hours, I managed to demonstrate that this Gaynotqueer individual is incapable of discourse on a civil plane, that bugbrennan really does freak out when you say she’s cute or a coward, that I like words way more than either of them, and that I’m generally more capable of discourse than they are.

Brennan would be infinitely happier if everyone just ignored her and let her contentedly say hurtful things from a distance.

GNQ will go out of his way to offend — and has no clue what to do about people who aren’t offended when he says something.  This is why he apparently tends towards holding coffee cups upside down (and also drinking room temperature coffee). Give him an actual statement that isn’t insulting, and he sorta freezes up and decides he best not be there because he finds actual rational thought threatening.

Brennan likes to call other people crazy when they don’t agree with her, but finds that if other people disagree with her without calling her crazy, she cannto do anything more than calling them crazy — actually having a discussion with them online is improbable.

The same can be said for several other individuals of likemindedness.  They are engaging trans people on tumblr for the sole and direct purpose of creating an emotional reaction to their stuff, and then feeding that emotional reaction with more fuel until they get the individual to say something they can use as a moral lever to broad brush all trans people.

Now that I’ve managed to establish this, here the methods of dealing with and handling them:

Let them get you pissed off as all hell.  Just never write anything that indicates you are pissed off.  Remember these people are actually rather funny in terms of the wider world, where both of them are simply acting as the agents of the repressed fuckwits too damn afraid to say this stuff in public.  All my posts regarding them are semi-serious instances of my laughing at them.  They are ghosts who’s ideas and thoughts have 50 years of discredited history — there is nothing they say that hasn’t been said before by other people, and they are just the last of the laggards — the few poeple who will never accept that the world has moved beyond them.

Like the folks who still only have a landline phone and use dial up, but live in a large metropolitan area.

Or the people who still say the same stuff folks said in the 1850’s about persons of color.

They aren’t even in the majority of the haters — and I don’t say that just to make you feel better.  I am saying it because on a day to day basis, they represent less than 5% of the entire public.

People get paid to say what they say. As actors. That’s how hard it is to find someone who actually believes this stuff.

They are going after these things because, my dear trans friends, they know that you react poorly when people do that.  THey know it touches nerves and it sets you off and they want you to be angry about it and do really stupid things like say “dis cis scum” so they feel *justified* in doing it more.

Because it isn’t about us.  It isn’t about you. It is about them, and their feelings, and their hostility and in terms of social psychology, that means that they have some serious issue that you are not capable of qualified to help them with and they decidedly aren’t seeking help with it so what the hell are you doing wasting your energy and time on them?

There is an idea that you must counter every instance of anti-trans sentiment out there.  That is a false idea.  It is also an idea fomented and created by people who have a vested interest in doing the same thing they are doing — attempting to make all trans people look bad to make themselves feel better.

It is, quite literally, my job to deal with these people.  Every day I spend at least some time helping people to handle this stuff — and I don’t mean the trans population.  I mean the cis population as a whole.

Stop for a moment and realize this — under EEOC guidelines that are in place, the stuff they write is reason enough to file a hostile work environement and sex stereotyping case, if they were to do it in their own places of employment (this is for those that are employed — the rest just have to deal with school issues or are disabled.  I suppose more than a few are unemployed, but hey, its still socially acceptable to ignore the unemployed bigots).

That is, they already lost their fight. The stuff they write is already known to be hostile.  Yes, there are regular people who might say the same stuff in private, but for the most part, the people who actually have any sort of reasonable pull in the world are either paying a lot of attention and see the failures of their kinds of thought, or are trying to learn stuff and they do not go to people like them for that.

Some might raise the SPLC article — well, Brennan’s position as a columnist does indeed still have some power to it, but she tends to make a point of keeping most of her more vile stuff out of that article because it wouldn’t pass editorial muster or it would cause such a controversy that she would probably be fired.

Let her.  Remember that the most difficult thing about being someone who believes in civil rights and equality for all, is that people are indeed allowed to be stupid fucking asswipes.

It would be a breach of their civil right to *make them stop*.

So you don’t.  Especially if you favor the ideals of Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez and  GHandi — all that non violence stuff.  Under those rules, if you are going to follow that idea, you do not get to cuss back at them.  You do not get to tell them to die in a fire. You do not get tell them to shut the fuck up.

That kind of effort relies on you doing nothing like that — which is why it is so hard to follow, and also why the whole thing isn’t something you can do part way.

You lose the whole point if you scream back at people who step on your toes.  IT doesn’t matter how justified the response is, it doesn’t matter how much you need to let it out. If they step on your otes, they do so.

The power of nonviolence comes from letting them do that.  From not getting back up in their face. Because then others will see that you didn’t do anything, because doing something simply makes both sides look bad, when you do nothing back, all it does is make them look bad.

The methods I used in responding to them are based on this model in part — and anyone who has read my blog for any length of time will know that I am not an advocate for non violence, yet I see a lot of trans people here on tumblr who say they are and then still scream back at people who misgender them or otherwise inflict pain on them.

In my responses, I did indeed get in jabs and pointed commentary, but I used the principle concept of politeness.  I can, indeed, be very polite about someone who has just stepped on my toe (or, to use a more real example from past expereince, I can be polite when I have been shot) and still get in my pointed jabs and my barbed comments.

I don’t need to use sarcasm to do it, either.  I find that questions, asked simply and directly, are far more threatening to such people than anything else, and so I ask questions.

I will ask a question three times.  That’s probably more than I should, but I stay on task — and if they don’t answer it after being asked three times, then I know, already, that they are solely focused on saying whatever they can that causes pain and hurt and makes you do what they want you to do.

Resisting oppression is about not doing what they want you to do — no matter what it is.  THey want us to be angry, so to resist oppression we must not be angry. That doesn’t mean we do not deserve to be angry, it simply means we will not be angry because they want us to be.

THey want us to be quiet. So we will not be quiet.  THey want us to shout horrible things at the sky and at them and at those around us — so we will speak directly, without rancor and without vengeance and we will be specific.

They want us to defend our gender and our sex — so when they say we are males, or dudes, or whatever, we will not argue with them, we will simply allow them the ability to have an opinion no matter how flawed we see it as being.

That is how you resist oppression.  That is how you subvert their goals into your own.  And while I am aware that a great many of you who read this — and I hope that a great many of you will pass this on to others and spread this by reblogging it to everyone — will not like this or disagree with it, keep in mind that this is how you get that power back.

It is the only way to do it.  You cannot allow those who oppress you to get away with doing it, and they do it by making you do what they want.

They want you to think there is something wrong with being trans.  They want you to be so focused on passing, they want you to disclose and accept that you are somehow deceiving them.

They want you to go stealth or to blend or to woodwork.  THey want you to panic over your first day at a new job or to have to consider sex work because you no other options.

They want you to do that. I’ve seen people ragging on RuPaul — he wants you to be mad that he used the word tranny.  He doesn’t identify or claim to be trans.  He hates that idea.

By doing that, he gains the ability to oppress you, to make you do what he wants you to do.

This principle is incredibly simple, very easy, but doing it is incredibly hard. It requires you to allow those slings and arrows, those fiery words and those heartbreaking miseries, to come at you and do something different from what you want to do, so very much.

I know that most of those who read this will probably not take this advice.  Most of you are too invested in the anger, the rage, the sense of injustice, to pause long enough to look beyond the confines our emotional response.

We have been taught our whole lives that we are not what we are, and we are having to fight for that, so it seems almost a given that we need to fight everything in that way, through sheer force of will.

I loathe the use of “I identify as”.  Aside from being a zero sum game that can be used to dive us, it is, to me, yet one more of the tools that is used to oppress us.  Someday I’ll get into the details of why, but you will never hear me say I identify as trans, or as a woman or anything other than my name.

Because I am trans, always have been, always will be, and I am glad of that, because they don’t want me to be. They want me to think there is something wrong with me, something bad about me, and there isn’t.

Well, except for that whole series of filled in holes in the desert, but that’s another story.

I cannot fix all the problems of all the trans people in the world.  I might wish I could, every day, but I treid wishing and I know where that gets one.

I don’t need to identify or defend or any of those things — I am, in the end, just me, and people are free to take that as it comes and as it is offered, or not. Like all of us, I am flawed — my ego is enormous, my anger readily sparked, my sense of righteousness overweaning — and I am also someone worthwhile.

I don’t need to prove those things, or mark those things, or say it over and over again.  I am better than that, and I will not do what they want me to do.

You cannot oppress that which will not allow you to.  This is the secret that is passed from one effort to the next.  Women did not do what they were told to, people of color did not do what they were told to, our cisLGB allies (and there are far more allies than fuckwits who give us shit in the cisLGB community) did not do what they were told to do.

Time for us to stop.  Time for us to step forward, and smile when they want a frown, drop flowers down the barrel when they want us to back down, laugh when they want us enraged.

Tit for tat does not civil liberty make.

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