Dyssonance

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May 17th, 2012 by Dyssonance

Tit for Tat

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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May 16th, 2012 by Dyssonance

Dyssonance on Tumblr

So, yeah, um, er, well…

I sorta signed up for tumbler sometime ago. And then promptly never used the damn thing.

Then I find out there are all these young trans folks going through a serious pile of crap, most of it coming from other folks, and a large chunk of it merrily stirred up by some of the people I’ve been critiquing.

And I’ve been sorta stressed out of late, and need a way to relax, to calm my mind, which is usually best done by thinking about stuff. And I’m frustrated often these days (there is a dearth of people willing to help, which is ok, I understand, but man, it means I can’t take advantage of opportunies when they arise), so I need an outlet of sorts.

Presto. I remembered the email addy and the password and *everything* and boom, I was on tumblr.  And I posted a few of the things I’ve done here (which is long form, I know, blah blah blah). Then I started to do the whole “reblog” thing.

For those not on tumbler, I’ve c/p’d the recent exchanges below.  ”cause some of this stuff should be, well, shared widely.

For those on tumblr, who don’t feel like waiting for a once a week update, well, the tumblr is: http://tonidorsay.tumblr.com/

Natch.  Now to the recent stuff:

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May 15th, 2012 by Dyssonance

Using Existing Stigma to Attack Trans people

So, it shouldn’t shock long time readers that I have an ongoing and pervasive interest in the way that stigma, shame, and related forms of readily internalized oppression are used against trans people to ensure that they do not exist openly, publicly, or widely.

There are many people, however, who are willing to claim that they are not interested in harming trans people that nevertheless engagte in such an action openly and with intent.

Shame and stigma are intertwined — shame is “there is something wrong with me” and it is often reflected in attacks which rely on the premise of there is something wrong with trans people.  I have been engaging in some discussion of this regarding a specific group of people who are doing so, but I haven’t actually approached it from this angle in specific.

And part of the reason is that it is not merely them involved in this, and, for the most part, they are using standard and long practiced attacks that have a history of supporting the oppression.

Part of the reason for my wanting to post this particular post was that recently the “F-Word” blog published excerpts from their show and some commentary regarding it, where they interviewed Sheila Jeffries.  Another part of the reason for this is the persistent annoyance in the back of my head that was caused by the recent commercials shown during the efforts relating to stopping the Anchorage laws from passing.

In both of those two causes, and in the general efforts overall, there is a constant and ongoing perpetuation of the shame and stigma that is afflicted on trans people in society at large.

And it infects all of the discourse — the reason the interview was held was they felt it was necessary to get “both sides”, without being aware that one sides’ primary motivation is inherently based in the need to stigmatize and shame trans people.

Perhaps the most egregious and easiest at this moment for me to use examples are from the rapidly created “memes” of Cathy Brennans “radfem Meme” site, and the particular commercials regarding the Anchorage fight.  They give me easily accessed resources, although there is of course, always the opportunity to actually change the sources byu changing them, since I’m merely going to link them

First off, a few of the meme’s.  The whole collection, growing even as I write this, is based on the premise that there is something wrong with transness and specifically trans women. For example:

Example of stigma used against Trans people

Here, the stigma being used is that trans women are not women, they are men, and since they are men who are not women, there must be something wrong with them. This kind of stigma is rampant in our society, and while it is easy to dress it up in arguments surrounding gender identity and gender and sex and all the rest, in the end, the purpose and goal of making this assewrtion is to erase and invalidate the lives of trans people.

It is important to note that stigma here is meant very much to stop people from doing something, to silence them, to make them feel bad, and that the above in particular carries with it a strong sense that there is something wrong with a trans person (in this case, the notion that they are subject to a false consciousness and basically messed up in the head).

Contrast that with Brennan’s blatantly false assertion that she accepts trans women as women.  If she did, in truth, actually accept such, then the above meme that she created would never have been because there would be no stigma attached to such in her mind, that is, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with a trans person’s “thinking” because she would know that they do think like other women (which is to say, really, now she has to restrict thinking to a gender specific thing?)

In the case of the Anchorage efforts:

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Here, they combine several instances of stigma against trans people (and in a separate one, they rely on the stigma of trans people as really gay men who seek to abuse children, something that Brennan also does, relying on a forced and false correlation of transness is somehow related to pedophilia) — the “restroom” (you aren’t really a woman, there is something wrong with you), the locker room (there is something wrong with them so they scare us), and a visual representation that is meant entirely to invoke stereotypes of trans people for negative impact (stigma relating to appearance which is how we come to the whole issue of passing, which is entirely structured around shame and stigma, and which informs the discourse of Brennan and others such as GallusMag and gaynotqueer).

The goal with these efforts is to present trans people as being “wrong”, and it relies, in no small part, on the presentation of them as Mentally ill, “sick in the head”, thus capitalizing on a deep and lasting stigma relating to the presence of whatever thing it is for the moment that is going to be “sick”.

Restless legs syndrome, for example, is an actual problem that limits the ability of people to engage in their lives.  IBS is as well.  Transness is also classified as such, but even before it was classified as such, this stigma was used against it.

Such efforts have a long and ongoing history — indeed, lesbians who are butch have had to deal with this very same kind of shame for decades.  The term Dyke is still well known for having long been a favored way of saying that they are not women, and that they are misbehaving, and there is something wrong with them.

The reclamation of Dyke is important to help counter that sense of shame and deny the value of that stigma against them.

Again, the purpose of shame is to discredit, silence, erase, and otherwise make unseen things which are deemed improper or without merit and potentially harmful to society as a whole.  The arguments around it often lead to things such as the double bind that affects trans people or similar tropes.

This is important, because shame, and how it is perceived and how it affects us and also how it is used, is all in gendered ways, and as a result, trans people are often at the most horrible and damaging crossroads of how it strikes us.  THis, in turn, is internalized, creating situations where you have tremendous anger and rage, or wide spread substance abuse, or similar torubles that complicate the engaging society on a level of strength and awareness that let’s you live a life authentically.

And these actions by these people — be they self proclaimed radfems, religious righteous christianists, well meaning but clueless people trying to save the world, or whatever — have persistent and ongoing consequences that last long past the moment they engage trans people directly, especially in an age where once something is on the internet, it is there forever.

And nearly every single one of the attacks that they use, the shaming, the silencing, the erasing attacks that all depend on the idea that there is something wrong with being trans, and that there is something “not real” about trans people, are all based in *old* things that have long been discredited or relegated to bin of “well, that shit stinks” by people who actually do understand this stuff (and here I am referring to cis folk).

In the gaynotqueer and & brennan types, I see the slavish terror filled devotion to Blanchard style theory — 30 years old and still unproven, despite a lot of effort to do so.  There is the horror of the possibility that that gal that someone found so cute and awesome might not actually have been such — and look at the response when that is brought up:

“oh, like we can’t tell by looking!”

There is the victim blaming and the reliance on the stigma against the mentally ill to drive home a point.

When I say they are being incompetent, I mean that precisely — they are doing all of this without having any understanding or capability to talk about what they are talking about.

You may as well as be arguing with a teenager.

But I also see trans folk doing really stupid shit that feeds into it, and they do it automatically — and that, in the end, is really why this series of posts has come out.  To show that there are better ways — ways that they know perfectly well they cannot do anything about, and ways that they do not want to engage trans people because not only is there no “fun” in bullying people who actually think a bit, there’s no winning for them, since all they have is their own anxiety, their irrationality, their hopeless awareness that they have already lost the battle, and they do not want to go quietly into that good night like other bigots have before them, to only appear on the fringes.

If what they say stings, it is because there is an ongoing struggle within us regarding our own internalized transphobia, and we need to deal with it.

Because when we give them the satisfaction of seeing us bleed — and we do bleed when we do things like “die cis scum” and related horseshit that serves as a failed comeback, or we forget that this shit is real, not pretend, and that while it happens online, it has impact offline

 

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May 15th, 2012 by Dyssonance

More on Threats

The current push going on within the pretend radical feminist group holds that in the fight between trans activists (typically written as a single word by them) and the self described (but missing key centrality and adhering to old and outdated ideas) radical feminist camps it is only the Trans persons who make threats of violence and death against radical feminists, not the other way around.

Indeed, they even justify their assertions here through concepts like “The Myth of Trans-Exterminationism” and related things.  Yet, here’s the thing:

Trans people *are* making death threats.  They are being fuckwits when they do so.  They are justifying, however, because these so called radical feminists are *also* making death threats.  They just have them buried and “use their words” more carefully and creatively.

I’m going to talk about the way in which this current crop is engaging in death threats and threats of violence against trans women, specifically, but also against trans men.  And I’m going to do so using their own words and a concept that I’m very good at called “pragmatics”, which is a subset of sociolinguistics.  The general methodology here is I look at what they say, and then from that I deduce what it is they had to think in order to make that statement.

This is going to be a long post.

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May 14th, 2012 by Dyssonance

Credible threats and online violence

(note: I wrote this post a while back, and, as I noted in the original opening below, I still wasn’t sure that I should actually post it. So I didn’t. Instead, I left it to rot int he vat of “unfinished drafts” that I have had stewing for a long time (there are more drafts here than there are actual posts, and every six months or so I go through and clean them up). That whole thing changed when I saw a post by the incredibly aversion, anxiety, and animus bound GallusMag on the F-Word blog in a comment, where she says that she has never seen a feminist death threat.  Since I do get such things, I found her assertion horribly wrong, and, as a result and in the spirit of seeing people wrong on the internet, I decided to publish this post. — AED)

Ok, you know, there had to be a point where I posted on this subject, but I do have to wonder, given my predilection for violent metaphor, if I’m really the best person for this.

I am not a Non-Violence kind of woman.  I was raised to see violence as having a place and a time, and usually that place is where you are that time is something you want to stay away from at all costs. I understand the basis of using moral superiority, but I also understand that such can only happen when you have a common moral base on which to stand, and that’s something that far too many people have managed to fracture over the last 30 years — almost all of them in the name of supporting “family Values”.

Almost all. Some of the hypocrites are opposed by the Family Values bunch. In the end, its all a wash.

But mostly, I’d like to talk about that tendency for violent metaphor, and the  nature of what a threat is, and why credibility is important.  And I have good reason — I reside in the State of Arizona.  Making an online verbal attack against me is now a state crime that can be pursued across state lines.

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